So apparently this went from 'sex in every room' to 'touching in every room'. There'll be more sex later, I promise. It wouldn't be me if I didn't bring some angst to the table eventually, now would it?

I've always loved this song, and I feel like it's particularly apt for Bishop.

Enjoy!

Half Of My Heart

You think I like lying to you? It's my job Liz, and you know that. You knew that the second you signed your name on the dotted line.

He's not wrong, of course, but even hours later the words still sting in the back of her throat. She does know that his job involves lying, and that some of the deals he takes remain the purview of Martin Bishop, the man from Canada with no true history. She knew when they first started dating that the boys had a set of fake IDs ready to use at a moment's notice, and she knew this time that Mother's truck was still unregistered. She suspects, though he wouldn't tell her for certain, that Crease maintains a small safehouse in case things ever get nasty like they did with that Cosmo business.

She knows all that, in theory, like imaginary numbers.

But the stark reminder still hurts. Even more than it did the first time.

The exact moment she finds out just how dangerous – how illegal – his work can be, she is standing in her front doorway with a gun in her face.

It's October of 1986, and she's just taken a part-time tutoring job at the conservatory while she finishes her latest CalTech post-doctoral work on the mathematical properties of Mozart's symphonies. She just bought her first proper flat in San Francisco, and she and Martin have been dating for a little over four months. She even bought an indoor plant, determined to break her unfortunate habit of killing them.

Given what her life looks like, the gun is a bit of a surprise.

The men followed the wrong car from the loft and Bishop resolves the whole deal swiftly and with great sheepishness. They ended up closing their deal in her sunken living room, the whole gang there and raring for a fight. She corners Whistler and demands an answer, once she's had a cup of tea to calm her nerves.

Bishop asks them all to leave, and then sits down with her and explains what a 'security technician and adviser' really does when he's living under an assumed identity.

She doesn't sleep a wink that night, and they take a ten day break while she decides if she cares that her boyfriend – the man she's rapidly falling in love with – is a criminal and a fugitive.

The young naïve Liz makes the choice that she doesn't care, which in and of itself was always a lie.

She walks into his study, still distraught and too overwhelmed to head back upstairs to the main house, where their brand new kitchen floor tiles mock her with their shininess. (It took them two whole months to choose them. She wonders now if it was time wasted; if it really matters that they're a colour called 'Ontario' and not simply 'white'.)

On Bishop's desk there is only one personal item; a picture of the two of them taken out the front of their brand new derelict home, matching grins shining in the sun, arms around each other as the sold sign hangs proudly behind them. (Mother had taken the picture, she remembers).

She traces the frame with her finger.

The rest of the desk is littered with schematics and plans, notes and print-outs, and though she can guess well enough at what it would mean, her eyes don't linger on any one thing long enough. She sees a list of names and positions – shorthand for various manoeuvres known in the business, much like a card shark bluffing a Las Vegas table. It's enough to bring emotions to the surface, and so she leaves the office and instead stops out in the recreation room; the 'club house, mark 2' as Whistler calls it, complete with Bishop's pool table and a big boxy television in the corner.

A selection of Old Hollywood tapes is stacked next to the couch, probably the work of Carl. It makes her smile to think of her boys all huddled down here watching To Have and Have Not.

Carl isn't on this job with the rest of them, because his relationship with that NSA girl is still going well, and that should tell her all she needs to know about how legal this contractor's business is. She trusted Bishop; trusted that the many talks they had and the many years she's held him in her heart would be enough to make him act responsibly.

But he's not wrong, either. She did know when they closed on this house and combined their various pieces of furniture that this was his life. And not totally an assumed identity either; Martin Brice was as much a criminal as Bishop, cracking firewalls and going on the run. This life has been in his DNA since he was a boy, and she was foolish enough to think she would be enough – this would be enough – to dissuade him from living for the thrill.

The thrill is fun, she knows. She's been with them long enough to know that. But it's also dangerous and uncertain, and when a dead bird gets left in a box on their front step like some James Bond film, it's downright terrifying.

It's just a warning, he says, calm and unworried.

A warning about what? she replies, eyes wide and afraid, voice shrill. She remembers warnings. Warnings are guns in faces and hands in the air. Warnings are manic ultimatums from men long-dead.

Don't stress about it, he tries again, waving her off. Which was the completely wrong thing to say, because of course she was going to stress about dead birds getting left on the doorstep of her home.

Do you forget I run a school? There are children here, for goodness sake!

She had always known there were two sides to him; the man she fell in love with, who read books at the fireside and helped her with her coat and laughed easily; and then the man with a haunted look in his eye and a family long dead without a goodbye, and a life lived with one eye open at all times. She had resolved when they got back together the second time to accept it all, not knowing what that fully meant. She had promised again, only a few short months ago, to honour the divide within him. She though she knew what that compromise meant.

Sitting in their basement, on the rugged old couch from the loft, the hum of a computer whirring on the other side of the room, she knows that until a few hours ago she was still that foolish little girl, hoping to be enough for him. Hoping that when she makes him choose, he chooses her.

When you walk out that door, Bishop, you make the decision; you pick that work over me. And I'm not going to tell you to stay if you don't want to, but I am saying that after that, we are not getting back together.

And then he'd told her he loves her one last time, and closed the door softly behind him. It was three years before she saw him again.

She must have fallen asleep on the couch, dreaming about the last time they broke up, because she wakes with cotton in her mouth and Bishop crouched beside her, running a hand gently over her hair to wake her.

"I was calling for you and you didn't answer" he whispers, worry reflected in his eyes. "What're you doing down here?"

She sits up and looks around. The computer still whirs and there's a sense of late night in the air. She's not sure how long she slept for, but it must have been a while for him to have left and come back again in a better mood. (He does that – retreats when it's all too much and he's afraid of what he'll say. She wishes he wouldn't.)

"I was trying to understand" she says, voice husky.

He seems to understand what she means. Lifting himself up, he spins into the sofa next to her, not touching but not far away either as he settles into the cushions. They look out to the recreation room together, the pool table strewn with board games and takeout fliers. He sighs, but he doesn't apologise.

"I'm never going to be enough, am I?" she asks lowly.

He sags in resignation, letting out a breath. "Liz-"

"I don't mean it like that" she continues, eyes fixated in a stare somewhere on the floor across the room, unseeing. "I mean, if it was a 'one-or-the-other', you'd never be able to… it's not… there is no choice, as such, is there?"

He thinks he understands what she means. His life is not a series of parts that he can pick and choose as he likes; his sum is greater than that, and to love one piece is to love the puzzle. He wonders what conclusions she has come to while he was out cooling his head. Her tone sounds resigned, but to what he can't be sure. (He hopes she doesn't ask him to leave again. He's not sure his heart could take it again. He wants to be here, he does; he just wants to keep doing his work as well, for as long as he's able.)

"There's only so much of your heart in this" she whispers. Her gaze flickers briefly around the room, up to the roof where the rest of the house lies. Her hand reaches across the couch between them and takes his, fingers lacing together.

"Whatever part of me is in this" he says, continuing with her thought, sure now that he sees what she's saying, or at least has a fair idea. "I'm in all the way"

She hums and nods. She always knew that much; that he adored her, even if she wasn't his only priority.

"You're right, Liz, I can't give you everything. But whatever I can give, it's yours"

And she can hear what he's saying – he loves her more than he's ever loved anything, or will ever love anything. Half of his heart is wholly invested. And it hurts to think it won't ever be more than that, but the truth is there's only so much up for grabs, and she has the lot.

(Her mind briefly wanders to Phillip, the physicist she studied with at MIT in the mid-70s. For a year Phillip followed her around like a puppy, taking the same classes and joining a mentoring program with her under Stig Lundgvist, not because he was interested in that area of study, but because he was interested in her. They dated, and for a time she was his whole world; more important than science, or study, or any other person. Aside from being overwhelming, she quickly found him boring. Unoriginal. The shine wore off before he could ask her to move in with him, and she never looked back on that period of her life with anything more than disinterested fondness.

She loved being with Bishop exactly because he was the antithesis of Phillip.

So in reality, she brought this on herself. Naïve little Liz with all her big dreams of happily ever after.)

It was foolish to think a simple staircase up or down could separate two halves of a human whole. She should have known better.

"I will try to be more understanding", she says, knowing full well that he only left earlier because she set off his bad temper with vicious words. "I'll do my best to love all of you, even the parts you keep from me"

His fingers squeeze around hers, his body mournful and thankful in the same breath.

"But I don't think I will ever be alright with dead poultry on my front stoop"

And despite the lingering sadness in the air, he laughs, prompting her face to break out into a mirthful grin. He pulls her into his side, his arm around her shoulders, and she lets him. He plants a kiss in her hair, and she shuffles closer and turns her body into him.

"I promise I'll try and keep the birds to a minimum" he says, and she knows that he will try and keep the trouble away from the house, if only for her kids.

"Thank you" she says. "And I'm sorry for snapping so badly"

"I did kind of deserve it" he concedes, shrugging one shoulder. "I guess we have to get used to that kind of thing"

"What, the birds?"

"No" he says, chuckling, pulling her closer still. "Not the birds, dummy"

She pinches his side with a look, but settles back down with him a moment later. "I don't like fighting" she says.

"Me neither. But I'd rather fight with you than not have you in my life at all"

She has to fight a sudden wave of tears at his sincerity. She reminds herself that she may not have all of him, but that doesn't make this any less significant; doesn't mean he isn't the great love of her life, as she is his. And she hopes she can remind herself of that the next time they argue – as they will – rather than berate him for being exactly the man she chose.

"I love you just the way you are, Bishop. I know it doesn't seem it today, but I do"

"Warts and all?"

She doesn't respond, just snuggles against him and sighs when his arms come just as tightly around her. She thinks he may be just as conflicted about this as her, is some ways, and she's not far wrong. (Some nights he lies awake and wonders if it's fair to expect her to stay; wonders if he should just give up the covert stuff in order to keep her. And then another part of him feels resentful of that, arguing that he can do far better without her at all, and around the spiral goes, the battle over which side is strongest.

In truth they are equal, which is precisely the problem to begin with.)

But as long as they're here, talking, and dedicated, they can make it work. She knows they can. And not because 'love conquers all' or whatever saccharine crap her mother would love to spin, but because she knew going in what this would be like, and she did it anyway – loved him anyway. And he is dedicated to his life with her, even if he loves his work as well.

They want to be here, and so she will treasure each little piece of his heart that she is given, and give hers freely.