For Disclaimer, see chapter one. Okay guys! Here we go. I was having a hard time making it shorter and I didn't want to dump a huge chapter on you, so this is going to be a two-part ending. Sorry to have kept you all waiting! And thank you for sticking with this story. I have to say I struggled with it because the dialogue just wouldn't come out right, and I didn't want it to be crappy haha.

Anything would have been better than the raw honestly with which he answers her. Having half expected him to grumble an "I'm fine, Lizzie." Or a "nothing I haven't experienced before." Or even that sad smile he sometimes hides behind, it takes her a moment to realize he isn't going to say anything else.

"No."

It's as if she were slowly breaching the top of a roller coaster, the pull of the plunge coming at any moment. His quiet admission, coupled with these fragile hours of morning, flushes her stomach with that sudden, dropping sensation. No, everything is not alright. No, I'm not going to tell you why. No. No. No. Was it worth asking him why? Was it a gamble when she figured he'd dodge the question? Shaking herself from her current train of thought, unwilling to fall into the dark pit that is her eternal frustration over his inability to give a straight answer for more specific questions, she reaches for his right elbow through the blanket.

"Let's get you back in bed, okay?" She tugs lightly and he stiffens, a reaction that has her tensing as though he's about to swat her away. "What?" Through the dark, he fixes her with a tired expression and his lips turn down into a scowl.

"I can't remember," He licks his lips and his eyes shift to squint into the dark beyond the window. There's a shakiness to his right hand as he carefully reaches to bring the IV stand around so that he can clutch the cold metal. Caught by the motion, Liz watches the tendons on the back of his hand flex as he grips it tightly.

"Can't remember what?" Her question seems lost on him long enough for her to feel another splash of anxiety in her stomach, the sensation stealing her breath away. Her days and nights have been filled with fear, but it was a remote reaction to the events of the last few months; a catalyst that allowed her to keep moving forward. This fear was something else. It froze her. It brought on a helplessness she wasn't accustomed to feeling when the tools to help him were all around her.

"The reason." His low voice accompanies a sudden wave of fatigue on his part, and she barely catches the look in his eyes; the glossy expression of someone trying to stay awake against all odds. In this light, at this hour, with all the measures they've taken to ensure he survived what had been done to him...Liz can't be sure he's lucid enough to have this conversation. If it's real. If he knows he's speaking to her. She could keep asking him questions, drag him down the tracks of this train of thought, but she doesn't think he'll recall this in the morning.

"Red," She moves around to face him, squeezes past him and the IV pole, her back brushing against the chair opposite of the one she'd been using the day before. The chill coming in through the glass of the window whispers against her right arm, the side of her face, her neck, and it sends a small shiver down her spine. The cold wakes her up, and she finds that he seems to be paying attention to her now. "You with me?" You're scaring me.

He blinks at her, subdued and troubled, and then drops his gaze to the floor; making a noncommittal movement with his head. Shifting a little, Red moves to sit on the window sill and makes a feeble attempt to use his left arm to brace himself. Liz is already reaching for his forearm by the time the aforementioned limb gives out on him. There aren't many places she can touch without causing him some kind of pain. Her grip is gentle, but firm, and he's using the IV pole to steady himself, drawing the thing closer to him as he falls into a seated position with a soft exhalation of air. She leans her hip against the sill and watches him breathe, watches a sweat break out across his face, watches him wince, watches him close his eyes and lean into the frame where the window meets the wall.

"You can't pass out here." Quiet and worried, her voice resonates in him, and pulls him from wherever his wandering thoughts and concentration had led him. Liz knows he's in pain, knows that the tiny struggle of sitting down just now cost him valuable energy, and she knows that he might not make it back to the bed without some major assistance. Assistance I can't give him. A shiver disturbs his figure, and Liz slides a little closer so that she can adjust the blanket around him, her eyes falling to the partially opened hoodie he's wearing.

At this angle, and the way he's positioned himself, she can just make out the stark white of the bandages that cover the electrical burns on his side, and she doesn't have to imagine the bruising that's deepened around the area. It wasn't like she'd made herself scarce when they checked him over earlier in the day, nor had anyone kicked her out.

There was no point in hiding anything from her anymore.

"I feel like I'm underwater." She startles a little when she looks up to find his eyes resting on her own, his expression pinched. His comment could mean a lot of things, but mostly it reminds her of sitting beside him in the park, her hand in his, and she marvels at how life has flipped their prospective roles this time around. She reaches to grab his hand, turns it over, and smoothly applies a light pressure to his pulse. It takes a moment to find it under the bandage around his wrist, but it's there; strong, but just a little fast for her liking.

"You've had a helluva week." She knows her smile is sad when it graces her face, and knows that the small, startled frown he exhibits isn't only because of his discomfort. He stares at her with apologies trying to breach the silence in the room; the words neither forming or being said. But the look doesn't disappear, and after a few, unsteady breaths, he looks as lost as ever. "Can you take a deep breath for me?" She watches him swallow and she wonders if he's heard her before she hears him attempt to draw in a big breath through his nose. It was going well until his entire body tensed and the hand she was holding disappeared from her grip to wrap around his middle. His body is jostled by barely contained coughs, and there's pain written across his face as he tries to regulate his breathing again. "I'm going for help."

"No, no," His voice is strangled by his lack of breath, but he has enough strength to unwrap his arm from around his torso to grab at her arm as she stands. A movement that leaves him wincing and panicked. "No, Lizzie, just...give me a moment." She hates this. She hates seeing him hurt and in pain. Hates seeing him in peril. It undoes her in all the ways she remembers from when she couldn't get to him after Garrick took him, from when she'd found him unconscious and not breathing, from when he'd almost died at the King auction, from when he'd been shot. That unending fear at war with her anger, the desperation trying to claw its way out of her chest.

"You were tortured for almost three days by the Cabal," Though her voice is measured, she feels anything but calm as he looks at her through pained-filled eyes. "So either I get help or you get back in bed." No matter what he chose, he was going to end up lying down like he should be. He needed to be resting, to be getting well. I need him to be resting and getting well.

"I don't want-" He means to shift so that he's a little more upright, but by the tightening grip he has on her arm, he's in too much pain to do anything else but prop his shoulder up against the window frame. "ah- I don't want to sleep anymore, Lizzie." It's hard to tell, but she thinks there's anxiety in his voice, in his eyes, in the way he quietly implores her to do something, anything, for him but that.

"You don't have to sleep, you just have to lie down." He wasn't going to win this, no matter how distraught he appeared and no matter how much it killed her to deny him whatever it was he wanted. He can't just stay here. "If you don't rest, you could overdo it, and you could-" Her voice breaks at the end, and it appears to strike him; stilling the wildness in his eyes, the labored breathing, the determination that kept him trying to remain where he was.

"That bad?" Resigned and curious, Red gentles his grip on her arm.

"Yeah," She says with a sigh, settling herself beside him on the window sill once more. "That bad." This fragility that surrounds him, for how human it makes him, sitting there in the proximity of it, letting her knee fall against his, it's almost too much. When things fall away and the veil is torn down, all she can see is someone desperately vulnerable, and she can't rid herself of the love she feels. It's not a decision, she just knows, and there isn't anything she can do about it. In the hurricane that is her life, somehow, Raymond Reddington is the eye of the storm.

"Help me," He stands with an uncoordinated balance and weak legs. The blanket she'd placed around his shoulders falls away and lands on the sill behind them. Liz moves under his left arm so he can wrap it around her shoulders as soon as he starts to move. Careful of every part of him, Liz grips his waistband with her right hand so that she doesn't have to hold him up by his abdomen, and then helps him right himself. It's not something she would call standing, but it's enough to get him back in bed. He's careful with the IV pole as they round the bed, and by the amount of exertion he's displaying in this short walk, it's a marvel he made it to the window by himself the first time.

The ten or so feet until he's lying down again have completely sapped him of energy. Liz gently grasps his right elbow and bicep once he's sitting down, moving the IV pole with her foot so that the lines don't pull. A rough sigh peters out of his nose and she watches his body tense. Familiar with that form of exhaustion herself, she moves his legs under the blankets on the bed, pulling them up to his waist, and then frets over the position of the pillows; asking him mundane questions about his comfort as he tries to breathe around the way his body is settling, and receives only a few, terse confirmations that she's helping.

She thinks he's drifted off when she stops getting a reply from him, but his jaw is clenched and, although his breathing is a bit steadier, the way his left hand is fisted tells her that he's awake still. She looks to the heart monitor and at the leads that should be plugged into the pads on his chest, and is bothered by the fact that she didn't hear him when he'd gotten up earlier. At all. Something horrible could have happened to him if she hadn't fallen asleep in this uncomfortable chair.

He could have fallen. He could have hit his head. He could have injured his side more. He could have torn the scabs open on his wrists and ankles. The slight movement of his eyes sliding back open makes her look to him again, and she knows that she should move to hook the lines back up to the pads on his chest, but she reaches for his right hand instead, holding it between both of hers and rubbing her thumb over his knuckles.

"Why don't you want to sleep?" The question breaches all sorts of boundaries and seems moot, because she's pretty sure she knows why. It's the same reason she has during difficult nights. It's the same one that kept both of them up after the harrowing events of Arioch Cane's hit on her and making sure Dembe would survive. It's the same one that kept them driving through the night after she shot that undercover cop. His eyes shift over to her, and she sees him fight unconsciousness with the heavy way he blinks.

"Dreams," He says, swallowing thickly as he shifts a little on the bed; his left hand coming to rest on his stomach. "Nightmares." It's a stark thing, this sharp laugh that coughs its way into the room from the back of his throat; a scoff with all its intended ironies. "Is it Christmas?"

"Morning of," Clipped and matter of fact, she finds herself nodding, a sudden wave of nervousness washing through her. How was she ever going to bring up what she's seen? How she feels or what it means for them? She's starting to drift into dangerous territory with her train of thought when she feels his hand between hers tighten. Anchored, her eyes meet his through the growing daylight coming into the room, and she squeezes back.

"Merry Christmas, Elizabeth." It makes her laugh because all of this is so ridiculous, and she can see that it confuses him, but somehow it pulls a smile onto his lips as well. She thinks he looks oddly relieved, as if there's some sort of spell that's been broken, that there's no duplicity in the moment.

"Merry Christmas, Red."

By evening, his fever has spiked again.

His coughing worsens.

It's three days of fear and pneumonia before he starts to show signs of getting better. Three days of intermittent delirium and lucidity, being nervous about his heart rate and his ribs. Three days of rotating ice packs and holding silver basins for him to cough up mucus into. Three days of her, Dembe, Baz, and Kaplan discussing ways in which they'll be able to pull off staying here for a month, at the least. Three days of vigilant and worried people taking turns sleeping and staying up to monitor him.

And then those three days give birth to a week and a half of fatigue, and Dembe leading a grumbling and winded Red around the house, out onto the the patio for a few minutes only because the cold isn't the best remedy for pneumonia. It's long days of snowfall and playing rummy with Kaplan even though Liz always wins, and the cleaner is almost always sure that she's cheated in some way because no one beats Katherine Kaplan that many times in a row.

It's going out into the back of the property with Dembe on New Years to have conversations with Aram via a satellite phone about where they are on exposing the Cabal. It's news that some of the journalists Red sent to sniff out the trail have disappeared or been killed, but not enough of them to raise any red flags in the community. It's a quiet and surprising,

"Happy New Year, Liz." From Samar once Aram hands over the phone, because of course they'd be in on this as a team. It's, not for the first time, wondering why they haven't included Ressler or why they feel they can't trust him.

More pressingly, that week and a half takes Liz by the hand, and by the heart, and suddenly her future does an about-face.

Her fidelity, her bravery, her integrity can never rest in the life she used to want.

Those three things...she has them in spite of that.

He knows that she knows.

That there is something he won't talk about. And while that's not a new revelation between them, he knows that she knows it pertains to his most recent abduction. He's quieter. His laughter falls into thoughtful moments where his eyes grow dark and his mouth twists. He catches her staring at him as if there's a secret way into that head of his; some door she hasn't tried, some lock she left unchecked. But it's more than that. He remembered.

He remembered kneeling there in the grass with a monstrous part of himself talking about destruction and atom bombs, and how his dedication to her, to his plans, to his vengeance, led to his name on a gravestone and Lizzie crying against it. He remembers Sam, and Lizzie talking to Tom on the floor of the bathroom that he knows exists just down the hall from his room. He remembers the memories of his girls and of Lizzie screaming at him through the flames. He remembers figuring out that he doesn't deserve these people in his life that love and care for him. He remembers figuring out that someone, somewhere, something, pulled a string and delivered him back to them. To her.

But it's what he knows that keeps him up at night.

That he would choose that future a thousand times over if it meant she was alive to grieve him in the end.

It has never been whether or not he gets to live or die. He's come to so many terms over the course of his life with what he thinks he deserves and what he knows he surely doesn't, that life and death are antiquated terms overshadowed by his survival and his existence. So, like all the times before, when the water was churned and the depths returned to a murkiness that satisfied his guilt, sadness creeps in. Late at night. Early in the morning. There's a stirring in his chest, in his gut, that shakes him into restless places: the chair at the table, the corner of the couch, the wall near the window where the light comes in.

It's there, in those hours, that she finds him. His hands are unsteady. His breathing is shallow; lungs constricted by whispers of years passed. The veneer is washed away with those trembling fingers that fidget where they lay. His eyes are glass. His lips are sketched into lines between racing thoughts and the tremulous shadows of regret. It's in those moments where she finds herself bending down before him, a hand out to steady him.

He's tried to hide the emotions drudged up over the past weeks. He's tried to play it off. And usually she buys it, but something urges him forward tonight, as though borrowed time were actually a thing. He gently takes her wrist in his hand, brow furrowing as he draws a thumb over her scar. The moment builds, the dream playing over again in his mind, the memory so far away and so present that, like this burn that's mottled her skin, he can't ignore it. Love demands something of us.

"I should have watched you better that night. I-" Always so immediate and unexpected, she takes his hands to still them. To warm them. To quiet the emotional tempest within him that feels as though it's trying to break out and infiltrate the room. He's frustrated, for half a second, because this is what she's wanted from the beginning: answers. At least some of them. But he's captured by her nervousness and he can't tell which of them is more unsteady.

"Shh, stop." She swallows, licks her suddenly dry lips, and watches his hand brush along her scar. "Just, shush, okay?" Was now the time? He'd brought it up and here she was trying to make him be quite. Though, she reasons, that maybe it's not so much to make him stop talking as to calm the waters a bit. His eyes seek hers and she's looking at his forehead, the slight sheen she sees gathering there.

She knows he's looking at her, but she avoids him and makes her eyes travel down the side of his face to the faded scar shed given him the day they met. Her gaze travels down to his chest, rising and falling heavily as if she were sitting on it. Beneath the rumpled button-down shirt lies that scar from when he'd caught that bullet, a scar that was now accompanied by healing electrical burns. More scars to add to his already damaged body.

Finally, finally, she lets her eyes hold his; a rush and a sense of peace colliding within her. He turns his head a little, and she becomes aware that their hands have not been idle, thumbs drifting quietly across one another's knuckles in a comforting gesture. A silent question is posed to her through the dark, the tilt of his head beckoning her response. Her lips draw into a thin line, a smile that begets tears and just the smallest bit of guilt. It's the smile of a secret keeper.

And, true to form, with her eyes listing towards the space where his skin disappears behind the shirt he's wearing, he draws in a big breath. The way he's looking at her, reacting to her, that slight movement away from her proximity, to lean back into the sofa, reminds her too much of the day she asked him if he killed Sam.

"When did you find out?" She can tell that he's aiming for calm, but his voice falls into that steeled reticence of one who doesn't want to discuss a difficult truth. She's heard that tone far too often in the last few years. Surprisingly, or not surprisingly, she finds it's just as hard to speak as he does. "When, Lizzie?"

Alright! The first part of the last chapter is done. Thanks again for reading! I hope to have the last part up soon! I have half of it done, so it shouldn't be long. Sorry if this chapter is kinda slow, it's a bit of a filler. Red had to get better haha somewhat.