Persephone (with a gun)

Disclaimer wherein I state the obvious: I do not have any claim to the Blacklist, the characters, or the concepts, and am only respectfully borrowing them.

Imagine modern day Persephone with sense of righteousness and a gun. Imagine modern day Persephone coming from a broken home (don't ask her about Zeus - or the scar he's left on her. Don't ask her about Demeter). Imagine modern day Persephone living in the sunlight, believing in justice, doing good and being true to her country.

Imagine modern day Hades leaving his Underworld, as he rarely does, after years of silent observation from afar.

(The Narcissus is not a flower but himself in a box and a list of names to destroy, instead.

It works well enough. Soon she's leaving a trail as ruddy red as a burst pomegranate while she makes her way through the names he presents to her, coming to her own conclusions as she goes.)

Persephone's descent is a slow one.

(You don't need to kidnap a woman who has been playing at the edge of the darkness - she'll find herself in your territory all on her own. When she wields pens and soda bottles with more aplomb than seasoned professionals, you know she's the one.)

Spend enough time hunting criminals down for the horrible things they do, and you'll start doing some of them yourself, and find you've been asked by those you trust to do them, too.

Spend enough time at it and your husband will claim you've grown too cold.

Spend enough time at it and it won't even surprise you when you find your ex-husband pointing a gun at you a few months later in a country halfway across the world. It won't be his fluent Russian that shocks you. It won't be the neat but lifeless body at his feet that startles you - it will be his lack of glasses.

She's spent enough time getting to this point that she recovers quickly and sets about amending the situation.

(Don't forget Persephone is also the goddess who enacts curses, particularly on those who murdered.

Don't forget there's more to the Underworld than death.)

The traumatic and graphic results of the rendez-vous condensed are this: The man who was once known as Tom Keen spends a scarred and pain-racked life so horrible he not only wishes he was dead but that he'd never taken the contract to monitor Elizabeth with her father in the first place.

"You're a winter," he's told her, sidling in the words between flip and sartorial criticism, but he's also ordered her drinks that taste like spring.

"Go to hell," she's snapped on another occasion, but she welcomes him when he returns from his business.

He offers to leave, tells her she only has to say the word.

She never does.

(The truth they've found together is that you need the moral black, white and grey. You need the dark to make the light stand out, and they serve that purpose for one another.)

Bullet casings traced to her gun at a scene where they have no business being take the place of the pomegranate seeds. By this point, he's slipped back into his Underworld, and she's been left to tie up loose ends.

There was nothing accidental about the casings - she's been too neat and tidy in all of her dealings for three years now to get caught unintentionally.

Her coworkers realize only now how different she is from the woman who first started working with them years before. She let's them think that - it's fine. It makes things easier. None of them want to ride in the SUV with her when they go to transfer her to another holding area.

Which is a bit of a comfort, really, because none of them get injured when the SUV is sideswiped and tips over.

There's broken glass and squealing tires and masked men and suddenly Elizabeth Scott is gone.

(The truth: It's more of a 'spiriting away' than a kidnapping when she's taken to the Underworld, and the myths are always fuzzy on the timeline of events, anyway).

There's no Demeter to bring winter to the world or demand her back.

(And Zeus, if you ask her now well-informed opinion, can go fuck himself.)

She returns from time to time, but there isn't a set schedule to it, and she slips away just as quickly as she appears.

With a smile on her lips, she slips the names of criminals and secrets to hunt down to government agents with one hand, and holds drinks that taste like spring in the other. She doesn't have the same panache they all suffered through with her partner, but she gets the job done on her own terms.

(Her taste in clothes is now a little more upscale, that's really the only difference.)

Ressler has given up trying to nab her.

"Are you happy?" he asks with a sigh, exasperated, on one occasion. "Can you at least tell me that? Was it worth it?"

She tosses a bill on the bar, much larger than it needs to be for the drink, collecting her coat - always that vibrant, violent red - and rising from her chair.

"Of course," is her only reply.

He almost misses sight of the glint of wintery-cool platinum on her ring finger.

(Don't forget Persephone is Hade's equal - they rule together and they rule well.)