AN: This is more proof of concept than a serious attempt at, well… anything. It's crack fic—as cracky as I get, at least—borne of a discussion after Berlin Pt 2 about the most outlandish possibilities for who Lizzy's father was and why it would be dangerous for her to know even if he's supposed to be dead. I threw this option out there as a joke, but gosh darn it, it stuck and I had to do something with it, no matter how silly. So… enjoy the ride, I guess?

Liz Keen's life was complicated. It always had been, if she was in the mood to be honest with herself. In the past year, her life had also become overwhelmingly confusing, the type of confusion that shook the very foundation of everything she ever knew. Whatever certainty she might have had about her life died a swift and painful death the day Raymond Reddington turned himself in to the FBI.

She didn't know who her husband was. She didn't know who her father was. She didn't even really know what her own name was.

Right now, she was one-hundred percent sure of one thing and one thing only—she hated the internet. She especially hated whoever had the bright idea to submit a grainy, cellphone video of Red on his knees in front of her, surrendering that day in the park. The video went viral in the days after Berlin's plane crash while the media was searching for anything with even a whiff of a connection to it.

She and Red had been thrust into the spotlight as the true crime obsession of the moment. There was frame by frame analysis of that damned video on every news and gossip site, speculation about who she was, her connection to Red, their possible link to the plane crash. Hell, people even read volumes of subtext into the way Red's fingers slid against her own.

They settled into a strange sort of domesticity waiting for the media's obsessive but fickle attention to die down. That meant evenings spent in front of the fireplace in Red's latest hideaway, sharing breakfast and the paper in the mornings—a rare glimpse at Raymond Reddington on what basically amounted to a vacation. After all, they couldn't be very effective in the hunt for Berlin if they couldn't go out in public without running the risk of any idiot with a cellphone broadcasting their location to the world.

It was on one of those laid back mornings when everything changed between them yet again. It started when Liz plucked the pen from Red's hand and leaned over his shoulder to fill in one of the words he hadn't figured out yet. Apparently, 90s teen heartthrobs weren't his strong suit. He stared up at her with an odd look on his face.

"What?" She tried not to feel self-conscious under his scrutiny. The last time she'd taken a pen from him while he was working on a crossword puzzle, he ended up in the hospital. She handed it back, but he didn't stop staring. She took a seat across the table from him.

"You're ambidextrous."

"Yeah. I was always the first to pass the trigger exercises at the academy because of it. Why?"

"It's nothing, I just…" He shrugged, purposely nonchalant. "I've never noticed. I assumed you were right-handed."

"You mean to tell me there are things about Elizabeth Keen that Raymond Reddington doesn't know?" Liz slid her tablet across the table next to his breakfast, the headline "Who is Elizabeth Keen?" emblazoned in large block letters at the top of a webpage over a pixelated, blown up image of her own face. "How much do you think I could get from the tabloids for that shocking revelation?"

"'Raymond 'Red' Reddington and Special Agent Elizabeth Keen—the second coming of Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling?'" he read. "Jesus."

"Tattle-crime was able to obtain these exclusive images from a security feed off 11th and Lincoln, of Reddington and Keen taken days before his surrender and subsequent disappearance. There is an obvious familiarity between the two that the official story does not even begin to explain. Neighbors say they haven't seen Keen's husband in weeks and recently witnessed a swarm of agents confiscating a large number of boxes from the property. Keen's residence now appears to be unoccupied. There is definitely more to this story than meets the eye.

"Be sure to subscribe to tattle-crime to have the latest news on the Reddington/Keen scandal delivered right to your inbox."

He pushed the tablet away from him. "When I told you I was going to make you famous, this isn't exactly what I had in mind."

"Do you know they used to snicker about the Lecter thing at the academy? The instructors used it as the cautionary tale to end all cautionary tales," she said. "Believe me, as a young, pretty profiler-in-training, I got the brunt of it. As far as my classmates were concerned, I was just one obsessive criminal shy of being Clarice Starling; they even used to give me a hard time because they thought I looked like her. I bet they're all laughing their asses off now."

Red looked vaguely green. "I'm sorry."

"Of all the things that have happened to me because of you since you came into my life, this is the one you apologize for?"

"I care about what it's done to your reputation."

"My reputation's been shot since you turned yourself in and said my name. This isn't the first time people have jumped to the conclusion we're star-crossed lovers. Or did you forget the code they chose for that damn box?"

"Of course I haven't forgotten. That code nearly cost you your life."

"You know, I don't think you really give two shits about what it's done to my reputation, I think you care about what it's done to yours. All that matters to you is that everyone thinks you're having a torrid love affair with an FBI agent."

Red didn't say anything for a long while, just continued to stare at her in a way that made the blood hum in her veins. Eventually he stood, collecting his breakfast dishes and heading for the sink. "I should be so lucky," he said, under his breath.

Liz was dumbfounded. She crossed the room in a few quick strides and took him by the arm, turned him around; he pressed his lips together, unsuccessfully hiding his annoyance at having his dishwashing interrupted. "Hey! What the hell do you mean by that?"

"Lizzy." He shook his head, huffing a disenchanted laugh, his eyes focused somewhere over her shoulder. "I'm almost surprised you didn't notice," he said softly, "but we are always more apt to overlook things we don't want to see."

"Who says I don't want to see it? Who says I haven't been trying to convince myself there wasn't anything between us, that there couldn't be, so I wouldn't put my hopes into something false again."

His eyes flashed with anger. "I've cared for you since long before that asshole even heard your name."

She shoved at him, annoyed. "You don't need to have a pissing contest with my dead husband over how long you—"

He crushed his lips to hers, pinning her threatening hands to the wall as he pressed her into it. She parted her lips immediately, kissing him back with an intensity he clearly didn't expect. He pulled away in shock, releasing her hands; he looked like he was bracing himself for a physical attack despite her returning his kiss. When she wrapped her hands around the back of his head and neck and pulled his mouth back to hers, he groaned and melted into the kiss.

On the rare occasion that Red slept, he slept like the dead. The first time Liz stumbled across him having an afternoon nap, she almost had a panic attack. She'd gotten used to it, sure, but it still wasn't a pleasant sight most of the time.

His slumber was aided in this instance by post-coital lethargy, no doubt; he lay half-curled on his side in one of his beloved, soft cotton t shirts that had ridden up over his hip bone enticingly in his sleep.

She'd been sleeping better herself since they started sleeping together, both literally and euphemistically, but she still woke up from an odd nightmare here and there. Sometimes, she shot Tom, again and again, and he refused to die. Sometimes, it was Meera bleeding out in her arms. Sometimes, it was the fire, and those fractured, scattered memories growing clearer and foggier all at once.

The sound of a man screaming in agony dominated those dreams as of late. She'd woken from the screams more than once in the past week, thankful she could roll over and cling to Red afterwards to calm her racing heart. Sometimes the man's screams became Red's screams, or perhaps they always were. Dreams were capricious and strange, dreams about barely remembered real events even more so, because it made it all the more difficult to discern actual memories from manufactured ones. She found it nearly impossible to fall back to sleep after one of those nightmares, terrified that she'd pick right up where she left off.

She'd taken to using those sleepless hours to check up on the scandal surrounding her and Red, both hoping the speculation would taper off and desperately dreading what would happen when it finally did. It was becoming something of an obsession for her; she would often pass out, bleary-eyed and exhausted, as the first rays of sunlight leaked around the curtains.

The public's fascination with drawing parallels between her story and the story of Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling was both frustrating and intriguing.

"Seen here in their respective FBI graduation photos, Keen even bears a striking resemblance to the young Starling."

Normally, Liz would brush off that sort of observation like she did at the academy—after all, it was nothing more than desperate grasping at straws tabloids often employed to make connections where there were none—but seeing the photographs laid out next to each other gave her pause. There was something around Starling's jaw, her cheekbones, that made Liz sit back in her chair and stare, trying to convince herself what she was thinking was absurd and couldn't possibly be true. It felt like a solution to a problem she'd been trying to solve her whole life, but the likelihood of it… Surely it was the most preposterous theory she had ever had.

Her leap in logic wasn't completely without supporting evidence, however. In the deepest, darkest corners of the internet, on forums and message boards and blogs full of conspiracy theories about the fate of Lecter and Starling, there was one common theme that stood out amongst all the others—fire.

Liz couldn't stop herself from gasping when she saw his back.

Maybe she should have knocked. Maybe it was better that she hadn't. Maybe it was time for the truth to come out.

Red froze as he met her eyes in the mirror, the razor stuttering to a stop on his jaw; a rivulet of blood ran down his neck from the tiny nick he'd made in his skin. She turned tail and fled the room before he had a chance to say a single word.

He found her at the kitchen table ten minutes later. He was fully dressed in one of his summer suits, all buttoned up and polished for the first time in weeks. She hoped it was to compensate for being exposed the way he had been in the bathroom and not because he was trying rebuild the wall between them.

"Sit, please." She gestured to the seat across from her and poured him a cup of coffee from the french press. Liz swore she could hear her own heartbeat as she waited for him to move and wondered, absurdly, if he could hear it, too. She let out a relieved breath when he finally sat down.

"The reason you know what happened the night of the fire is because you were there."

"Yes."

"Did you know my parents? Before the fire, did you know them?"

Red picked up the mug of coffee and took a sip, settling back in his chair and preparing himself for a long explanation. She had asked him before and he got away with avoiding the question, but he could tell that wasn't an option this time. He chewed on the inside of his lip, tapping his thumb against the mug absently. He met her eyes and offered an awkward twitch of a smile before looking away again.

"We were acquaintances of a sort," he said. "They helped me out of a rough spot years ago."

"Did you kill them?"

"God, no. There was no bad blood between me and your parents. It would have been foolish to think about trying even if there had been. Your mother would've killed me even quicker than your father would have if I had any ill intentions towards the three of you, and to say he was a dangerous man would be enough of an understatement to be an insult to his legacy."

"What happened? Why were you in the house that night?"

"I stumbled across a plot against them. They had risked their anonymity, their freedom, to help me. I couldn't just sit idly by and let them be blindsided, so I tried to warn them off, but it was too late."

"They were both criminals?"

"They were fugitives," he said, like the distinction was important. "Your parents expected a confrontation. They expected the authorities to try to apprehend them. They didn't expect their enemies to set fire to their home as they slept. Those people, they didn't know or care that there was a small child in the house when they torched it.

"I set out that night with the intention of repaying my debt to your parents by helping them escape the plot, but I ended up repaying it by saving your life instead. If I could have done more, I would have, Lizzy. I'm sorry."

She took a deep breath and let it out slowly through her mouth.

"Was my father Hannibal Lecter?" Red reacted as if she slapped him; he hadn't been betting on her asking so directly. More evidence that she was on the right track.

"Lizzy…"

"It's a yes or no question, Red. And don't give me any of your usual evasive crap, either. I want a straight answer out of you for once. Was Hannibal Lecter my father?"

He swallowed hard and lifted his chin, meeting her gaze as he answered her with a quiet, definitive, "Yes."

"That means my mother was—"

"Clarice Starling, yes."

She ran a shaky hand over her face. "That's why I'd be in danger if I knew."

He reached across the table to take one of her trembling hands into his own. "The media scrutiny alone would be unbearable. If you think it's bad now, imagine what it would be like if they knew you were really Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling's orphan daughter. At least with Sam, you were able to have some semblance of normality. Until I threw all that into a tailspin by turning myself in."

"Why were they even in the country?"

He ran his thumb over her scar. "You inherited your father's polydactyly. The doctor he trusted, the one who performed his own surgery, had immigrated to the US in the interim. It had been so long, they thought it was worth the risk. Unfortunately, they were wrong. Grudges run deep in your government and the whole Lecter debacle gave the FBI a black eye they still haven't fully recovered from." He squeezed her hand, coaxing her to meet his eyes. "You're taking this better than I expected."

"How did you expect me to react?"

"I'm not really sure. I think I expected you to be furious. I expected you to reject it. It doesn't bother you? Knowing that your parents were so… notorious?"

"I've had so many questions, Red. So many things that made me wonder about myself, things I could never make sense of, like I was trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle but most of the pieces were blank. It feels like the puzzle finally has a picture for me to work from and so many of the pieces just clicked into place all at once, I can barely think straight."

They fell into an unusually comfortable silence as the revelation sank in.

"There are rumors, Red," she said after a while. "Some of them are pretty convincing. What if Tom was right? What if he's alive? What if they both are?"

"They would be brilliant, dangerous allies to have in this fight. But, Lizzy, trust me when I tell you you shouldn't get your hopes up. It was a miracle we survived."

"What was he like?" Liz asked. "You know, behind the scenes? I'm only familiar with the myths, but there must have been more to him than that, otherwise you wouldn't have gone out of your way to help him. And my mother certainly must have seen something, I don't know… redeemable… in him?"

"His public persona was… strategic," Red explained. "He was never visibly mad when he wasn't incarcerated, he wouldn't have stayed free nearly as long if he was. He always liked to mug for the cameras. It played into his image, as much as my suits and hats play into mine. It's camouflage.

"I wouldn't say he was a good person, but he was devoted, body and soul, to you and your mother and that is something I understand."