Wow, the muse for this story just vanished. I'm so sorry for the late update. I was re-reading my first chapter, and I realized some discrepancies in the information, and THEN I realized that I had written this before the Mako Tanida episode, so you'll notice that Tom's secret hideout is actually Lucy Brooks/Jolene Parker's secret hideout, because that's what I had originally surmised from the promos, I guess haha

It's been fifteen minutes since she called Kaplan for the drop.

Fifteen minutes since she'd darted across the hall and into the bathroom.

Fifteen minutes of tension and fear and arguing.

Two minutes over the amount of time Red said Kaplan would take to get back to her.

A thirteen minute grace period

Liz glances at her phone again as if the minute has ticked by faster than it should have. A handful of tiny details were buzzing around her in head. The blood on the wall. The worry that Red would just amble down the stairs any moment, gun in hand, dandy and chipper and bleeding. How long she'd have to leave Tom and Red alone to retrieve the medical supplies she requested. Whether Tom would listen to her if she told him he wasn't allowed in that room. The inevitable reveal of an injured person in their home when she had to clean up the damn blood on the-

"Liz, are you even listening to me?" She can practically see all the times they've been threatened flash before his eyes. Zamani, Tom's recovery, nights she came home bruised and bloodied, Garrick answering her phone… "I mean, there's some person in our baby's room." She flinches a little at the mention of the baby, and their eyes meet; washed in exasperation, defeat, and regret.

"Tom-" She tries to take a step towards him, but he folds his arms, and she stops.

"Liz, this can't be safe." She knows he's freaking out, and while she would love nothing more than to reassure him, her mind is upstairs where Red sits bleeding in her almost-child's closet and she just can't muster the energy to lie to him about security when she doesn't know anything about why one of the most notorious men in the world has chosen to come to her in the state that he's in. Last time he was injured, he didn't even want to see me. "Do you even know how long this person is going to be here?"

"Not long. Just until a transfer can-"

"And I'm not allowed to know who it is?" If he interrupts her one more time, she's gonna lose it. This is exactly how their last argument had gone, and he'd done the one thing they swore never to do: he walked out on her. So far, it seemed that he was allowed to act as he pleased in this marriage, while she got criticized for everything just because her job demanded a little more than a school teacher's. Is that unfair?

"Tom, if you're not okay with this, I can find a place for you to stay." Liz watches her distressed husband pace back and forth across the kitchen like he did when he discovered the box under the floorboards. She didn't want this discussion to turn out like that one had.

When he turns away from her again, Liz wonders if she could actually keep Tom out of that room if he decided not to listen to her. How far are you willing to go? If things went south, she would have to choose between Tom and Red; her family and her job. A month ago, you wouldn't even be thinking about this. The answer would have been easy.

"It's not about me being okay with it, Liz." He turns and waves his arm towards the stairs. "I - I came home to talk about us, and you bring a government witness here!" She does her best to appear sympathetic as he looks at her again. He has this way of turning into a complete puppy when he's pleading, and it makes everything about him seem so much softer than what she faces in the real world.

It's one of the things that drew her to him. A safety net of normal. It's not just that there's blatant adoration in his eyes when he tries to convince her to do the safe thing, but it's the sense that he's asking her to choose them over everything else. But that trait of his hadn't worked since he asked her to move to Nebraska, and all she feels at the moment is a numb indifference to the way he's acting. "People could come after us, Liz."

"Tom," She tries to get closer to him again, and ends up grabbing his forearm to make him stop pacing. "I was ordered to do this, okay? This person is my responsibility." She forces her tone to be soft. It's easier to be calm when the other is excited. It's easier to be quieter when the other is loud. "I know it's a risk, but there's nothing we can do about it." He's turned to face her, and that gives her a little more confidence in his state of mind. She knows Tom. She knows her husband. She does. "I have to." It's at those words that his eyes seem to freeze over.

"That's exactly what I'm saying," He wrenches his arm out of her grasp, and she tries to follow, but her phone starts to vibrate on the table. "You have to do this, you have to do that, what if-" She grabs her phone as he goes on about how, "Classified" her life is, and how "he doesn't even know her anymore." But she's barely paying attention because the number on her phone is unavailable, and she knows that it's Kaplan.

"Tom, I have to take this." She doesn't wait for him to answer her as she walks towards the front door. She feels better putting herself where she can see her husband, and block him from the stairs if necessary. She glances back at Tom, watches him grip the back of a chair at the dining table, when she answers, "Keen."

"Where we met for the first time."

"What-" But her phone beeps twice in her ear, and she pulls away to stare at it. Kaplan didn't waste any time. She better still be there. Liz didn't just want to know the drop location. She wanted to know what to do and how. Liz's eyes trail from her phone to the window, where she stares at a point she can picture perfectly. She'd been standing in almost this exact spot when Aram had told her the address to the surveillance team across the street. No way… "Tom, I gotta get something from the car," She pockets her phone, and looks down to find her jacket and her keys where she dropped them when she got home.

"Everything alright?" He's appeared around the wall separating the dining room from the sitting room, and she tries to take comfort in the fact that he looks more concerned than angry.

"Yeah, just," She can't help glancing up the stairs as she reaches for the doorknob. "Just don't go up there, okay? I'll be right back." She doesn't give him time to answer her, as she races out of the house, down the steps, and bolts across the street.

The house is still dark, and she wonders how many more times she's going to have to break into this place. Or…she goes to the back door where she let Mr. Kaplan in the first time, grabs the knob, and finds it open.

"Thank you," she mutters under her breath. She takes out her phone for light, and her gun as a precaution, before she starts up the stairs towards the room where she killed that guy. The wood floors are a hundred times louder than when she had tried to sneak through the place that day. As she reaches the landing, she flashes her phone light right before sweeping it left and lets out a sigh of relief when she pushes the door open to the room and finds a medium-sized duffle bag in the middle of the floor. Easing her way into the room, Liz watches the small screen of a burner phone light up on top of the bag. Putting her own phone in her back pocket, she flips open the burner.

Everything you need is inside. Let him do what you can't. Work efficiently. Call this number as soon as it's safe.

Liz didn't know when safe would be, or why it wasn't safe now, and she didn't think keeping Red in her home for very long was a good idea. It was one of the least secure locations she could think of. Her eyes trail out the windows and towards the lit façade of her house. Through the curtain she can see Tom pacing through the foyer window. As she thinks about how big of a mess this could be, she slings the duffle over her shoulder and makes her way out of the room and down the stairs. Things could always be worse.

It's the blood on the wall at the top of the stairs that makes this little world he's protected for two years implode.

It's the blood on the wall that makes him stop breathing for half a second.

It's the blood on the wall that has him moving towards the kitchen.

He feels like his heart is going to jump out of his chest. After that mess with Jolene, he'd decided to go through with her initial mission because he thought he could pin her ill-conceived plans on her, kill Reddington, and get on with this life he cultivated. Cultivated. As though he hadn't planned on living it forever. As though he hadn't made deliberate choices to land himself in this position. Made the choice to want kids. Part of him did. Which part. You lied. You lied. You lied every day from the minute you met her. Someday, the gig would have been up. Berlin would take care of Reddington, and he and Liz could go on living this life. Not anymore. He loved her but he was trapped by what he wasn't.

And Reddington was making things worse.

He reaches into the fridge for a beer, eyes the bolts on the inside of the door, and debates how fast he could retrieve his extra stash of weapons. He'd hidden them in there when Liz had to leave early one morning after he was cleared by the Bureau. But that idea gets shelved when the front door opens again.

"Tom?" She sounds nervous and a bit of something else. Suspicious. She should be. It's hard not to be proud of your wife when really, you should subdue her and finish what you started. Kill Reddington. He's not stupid. Of course, the man would come and try to convince her to flee their home. Hideaway with him. It wasn't safe here. He had the evidence, obviously. A bullet through his shoulder courtesy of her fake husband. I'm not the bad guy. Not to Liz. Not this time.

"Everything alright?" He plasters a concerned expression on his face when he rounds the wall to the hallway alongside the staircase and takes in the bag she has over her shoulder and her setting her gun on the table just inside the door. A go-bag or something with supplies. I can't let him leave. And I don't want Liz to believe him. Bets had to be placed on how much she still trusted him, and if she trusted him more than his previous employer.

"I have to check on the witness," she wavers from her position near the door and the bottom of the stairs as he steps closer. Her features harden slightly, her stance widens. A chill lances through his body at the thought of her defensiveness. The spy in him knew the odds were against him. Christ, this could get bad.

"Look, about before," he extends a hand between them and makes a gesture as if he were wiping it all away; feeling as desperate as his voice sounds. "I'm sorry. I just- I want us to be safe." Her shoulders sag and she tilts her head a bit. She even gives him a small smile. Bingo.

"I know, me too. We'll discuss it more after I deliver this up stairs, okay?" He can only nod and watch her ascend the staircase, averting his eyes just as she nears the stain on the wall so she doesn't think he's noticed. He heads back into the kitchen, avoiding the alarm going off in his head about the suspicion in her voice and eyes when she first returned back inside. The patient husband of Elizabeth Keen said to wait everything out. The operative in him was itching for a gun and some control in the chaos of his mission. A gun is for insurance. Safety. Back-up.

Three minutes, Jacob.
Things are over. He knows this. He knows how stupid it is to cling to any hope of it being salvaged.

Three minutes, Jacob.

It'll take less than that if he doesn't put the food back, if he leaves the inner lining hanging off after he's retrieved his weapons.
His wife has been too watchful. Too invested. Too...good at her job to ignore the warning signs forever.
She's not stupid.
Three minutes, Jacob.

The room no longer has the fresh, heady scent of new paint when she closes the door behind her. The sharp tang of blood and sweat makes her eyebrows furrow as she turns to look at Red inside the closet. Pale. Haggard. His expression is absent of that innate liveliness she's always been witness to, and it makes her stomach clench.

"I'm back." She kneels down in front of him, taking care to set the bag beside her, unconcerned for the amount of noise she's making. Wake up. Wake the hell up. His face pinches and he grunts, but his eyes remain closed as she unzips the duffle. Taking in the supplies inside, she grabs a few things to better sterilize the wound and the surrounding area, as well as gauze. Rummaging past the bags of saline, Liz pulls out the emergency surgical kit. Here we go. She places it between them and, after a moment's hesitation, reaches out and grasps his thigh; giving it a light a shake. "Reddington."

It takes a moment, and a bit more jostling than is comforting, but his eyes pry themselves open. Unfocused and drowsy, he stares at her as though dreaming. Liz says his name again, tilting her head in a gesture that is all too familiar.

"You with me?" She watches him blink slowly, an apparently gargantuan effort on his part as his eye lashes flutter stubbornly against his cheeks, fighting to keep his eyes open.

"Is Tom behaving?" She frowns at him for a moment and shrugs. "I heard you," He pauses, playing with his tongue as though schooling it to form the correct word. "Arguing."

"He's just nervous." She finds herself reluctant to talk about Tom. A feeling of embarrassment she can't place creeps into her stomach and the back of her throat. "The last time some stranger was in our home, Tom ended up on a ventilator." Her pointed and acerbic tone makes his eyebrows lift.

"I'm not going to apologize for sending Zamani after your husband, Lizzie." He shifts against the wall to sit up more, and she leans forward to grasp his good arm in order to help situate him. "You needed to know the truth."

She still wasn't sure what she felt in conclusion to learning that he'd sent that man into her home. Psychologically speaking, the certain numbness she experienced when thinking of that moment worried her. She'd always been good at suppressing trauma after it happened.

Healthy or not, she was doing so now. The rage that led to her ramming a pen into Red's neck was the build-up and fallout of the situation, but now that she'd found that box...her emotions were dulled when it came to facing the one responsible for causing her so much fear. No matter what she did, she struggled with the idea of Tom; of husband and possible impostor. He'd been cleared by the Bureau, and Red still insisted that Tom wasn't who she thought he was.

"I may not be-" He leans towards her a bit, the sudden bout of determination startles her, and she lets him examine the contents in the bag. "-very coherent in the next few minutes." It's a warning that dashes anxiety into her stomach like fire ants. Did you know your security team rotates every four hours? If he passed out on her, she would have to do this alone. While the Bureau's training included a required first aid course, she wasn't a surgeon. She wasn't taught to do what Red had done for Ressler in that box.

"I don't think I can do this by myself, Red." He looks up at her with a gentle smile, and grasps her forearm in comforting gesture.

"Not to worry," He reaches for the bag, and she moves it closer so he doesn't strain himself. He plucks two vials and two different syringes, and hands them to her before leaning back against the wall again. "We'll use that larger syringe for the iodine, smaller one for the local." She looks down at the two and sets to work filling both syringes with their respective liquids. After she expels the little bit of air in the anesthetic's syringe, she peers at him.

"We?" For the first time since she's arrived home, she feels an amused smile on her face.

"I may not be doing much of the work, but instruction counts for something."

By the time she's finished with the front, Red is even paler. Sweat drenches his face and neck, and his breathing is no better than before. She piles the used syringes and needles onto one of her discarded gloves, careful to set them off to set them off to the side in case she has to move him. There's no way he'll be conscious while she cleans and stitches up the exit wound, and she doesn't know how best to maneuver him so that she can get to it. They'd made quick work of the front, which now sported a small patch of gauze Red was barely keeping in place with his other hand while she tapes it in place. He's still modestly covered up, a miraculous feat after some grumbled threats about not cutting his shirt away. So she had had to work at an angle.

"You should send Tom out for a late night dinner run, and then call for Dembe to come get us." It's quiet and regretful, but it's enough to set her on edge again. She watches a shiver race through him, and he closes his eyes when his body tenses. Come get us. Us. We. She uses one of the clean bandages to dab at his face, and she checks his pulse, his temperature. Distressed at her findings, Liz turns to the burner phone in the bag, and places it in his good hand.

"I'll send him to Wing-Yee's, tell Dembe to be at the door in ten minutes." Red looks at her beyond his pain and his body's weakened state with a resounding reluctance to let her leave the room.

"And if Tom refuses?" The weirdest thrill of nerves makes her stomach drop; a sense of doubt gripping her heart. There was no reason for him to refuse to go get food. It wasn't like he wanted to cook, and Lord knows he didn't want her cooking. She wipes every last trail of blood from her hands with an antiseptic wipe, and shakes her head. This is stupid. It was Tom they were talking about.

"Why would he?" Red shifts, though the movement does him no good, and he blinks at her with a slight wince crinkling the corners of his eyes. They stare at each other, and Liz finds it in her not to back down, not to say anything else, just to let the question hang there. Red shakes his head slightly, yielding to her questioning stare, and she takes it as a small victory. "Ten minutes, okay?" She waits for him to nod, and then she's at the door, giving him and the room one last glance before she shuts him away again.

Hudson was locked in the downstairs bathroom.

The fridge was an absolute mess.

There were guns in the bag at his feet.

One in his hand on the table.

Another tucked into the back of his pants.

Extra clips in his pockets.

His wife was up in what was supposed to be their baby's room, tending to a man that probably wanted to blow his brains out.

And Tom was sitting at the head of their dining room table, contemplating whether or not retrieving the key he'd placed under their first lamp was worth it, or if he could use it to his advantage.

Using it meant sticking around, seeing things through, trying to salvage the sham marriage that turned, somewhere along the line, into something real. Using it meant incurring more wrath from Reddington, seeing as the information it kept locked away held damning evidence to the criminal's assistance in Sam's death. It's something that Liz would never forgive him for, and it seemed like such a sweet contingency to leave behind should things not go as he wanted. Liz had been up there for over twenty minutes when he heard the door open and slip closed again. Here we go. Drawing in a deep breath, adrenaline rushing through him, listening for the sound of her descending the staircase, he collects himself.

"Hey Tom?" Counting the steps she's taken, five, how many more she has until she reaches the bottom, seven, how many excuses he can come up with to bail on this plan of his, zero. "Babe, I'm starving. Do you think you could run out for Chinese? I know Wing-Yee's is probably still-" He's watching her as she appears around the corner from the sitting room. Her face had been smiling that guilty smile, that cute hopefulness she usually gets when she really wants something but is afraid he'll say no. She freezes, and it takes half a second for her to tense, to make sense of what she's seeing, of the gun in his hand, and something cold reaches through his limbs and solidifies what it is he has to do. When he points his gun at her, finger off the trigger, but his intent obvious. Stay put, babe. No need for her to go grabbing her gun.

"We need to talk."

Well shoot. Please have faith that I will finish this story if it's the last thing I do haha. And seeing as the first chapter was posted such a long time ago, this is totally AU, now. Some altered incidents and such, seeing as I finally found my notes I had for this fic. Hope you enjoyed it! Thanks for sticking with me.