Chapter Text
“Why do I have to learn this?” Lizzie’s voice is petulant and whinny, her lower lip is sticking out and chewed red from concentration as much as pouting. They’ve been at this for hours, but Sam won’t let her fail at it. He can’t. She might need to know this someday, to survive, if what’s coming for her ever finds her – and he’s more sure now than ever that one day it will. Ray is doing what he can to shield her, to shield all of them, but eventually the past always catches up and he wants her ready.
“Sweet cheeks,” he says fondly, setting the wallet back into the dummies pocket and doing it just right so that the bells in the suit never jingle. “I know it’s hard, but someday you might need to know this. It could be important.”
Lizzie crosses her arms and glares around the old auto-shop they are currently living over. It’s abandoned, off the grid, and she’s not happy about missing her tv shows or having to leave her last school. Sam’s not happy about it either, if truth be told, but that guy in the black sedan wasn’t one of Ray’s and he’s not taking chances. While Ray tracks the guy down they are hiding out, and that too is a skill he wants her to learn. So much to teach her and he’s not sure if they have the time. “Come on honey, give it another try- for daddy.”
That makes her roll her eyes and Sam has a pang at how fast she’s growing. It’s all unicorns and cartoon ponies now, but soon it will be boy bands and dances and he may have to kill the first bastard that touches her.
But for now she flicks her pig tails back behind her shoulders, squares them up, and eyes the dummy with a reluctant determination that is her hallmark. She’ll get this – Sam can feel it. She’ll get this like she got all the other things he’s taught her. She can pick a lock, con a cop, and shop lift with the best of them. Right now that’s what she’d need if she had to run without him, survive until Ray could get to her. Right now those are the important skills to learn and she can catch up on her school work when it’s safe to come back out into the real world.
She takes a deep breath and starts her walk and this time when she does the lift not a single bell jingles.
He sweeps her up and twirls her in the air, knocking the dummy over in a cascade of bells and they laugh, and whoop, and he hugs as tight as he can. His little Lizzie, his most precious job, and one he’ll gladly die for. He kisses the top of her head before she runs over to set the dummy back upright to go again – because that’s also Lizzie, even when she whines she can’t stop till she knows she’s got it – and he watches her practice again and again and again.
He hopes she never needs the things he’s teaching her, the things he’s got others lined up to teach her when he’s passed on all he knows. He hopes she never understands why he insists on all this, on why it’s so important. He hopes all she ever uses it for is cheap lipstick and a good laugh like his sister. He hopes – he prays – that she gets to be that lady cop she wants to be, like that pair on the tv. What a gas that would be, the thief’s daughter a cop. Maybe, if Ray’s plan works, and he lives long enough, he can see her become whatever she wants to be. God how he wants that. But for now he’’ll take this while he can, her chewing her lip and lining up against nothing more sinister than a thrift store suit with some bells in the lining. Because the things that are out there, the things that want his little girl, they won’t know what hits them if he has anything to say about it.
Lizzie will be ready, Sam vows, he’ll make damn sure of it.
Liz has never been good at self-restraint when there is something she covets at stake and a decent chance at not getting caught. Especially if there doesn’t seem to be much to gain in denying herself. Her father’s the same way, and Liz has often wondered if it was his influence, the criminal influence, that made her that way or if she was just born to it – which could be the same thing for all she knows.
Oh she’s good at controlling herself when she needs to – she can sit still for hours hiding, she can control her breathing and regulate her heartbeat, she can move silently through any room or any terrain, and she can improvise about any emotion she needs to at the drop of a hat. But that’s not her personal life, that’s the job, and off the job Liz wants what she wants. She’s lucky it isn’t material things she craves, that she covets things more hard to come by. The rush of a chase, the thrill of a con, the feeling of getting one over on somebody – that’s her downfall and she knows it.
She lost her virginity at the ridiculously young age of 12 to a simply gorgeous if clueless high school football player in the back of a truck and never really looked back. While other girls worried about their reputations, Liz had quietly gone about her business. Any partner that spread gossip quickly found out what a bad idea that was, and after a while she had a small but reliable network of tension relief. It didn’t affect her grades, didn’t cost her any friends, and it didn’t do more than get her a few calculating looks from the football coach, and the rewards were well worth that. It helped that they moved around a lot until the cancer came, so she never had to juggle any one group for too long. If Sam ever guessed what she was up to, he apparently didn’t find it necessary to comment, and since Liz was smart enough to use protection, there was never a need for things to get complicated.
College was in many ways more difficult. People were pairing up with serious intent and her loose and casual partners inevitably got <i>ideas</i>. It wasn’t that she was opposed to ‘real’ relationships, exactly, just that her tastes in most things ran to variety over depth and sex was no exception. She liked to have options, depending on her mood, but not to take risks. She liked to know her partners, trust them at least a little- friends with benefits over one-night stands. But a friend wasn’t a boyfriend and certainly not a love interest, and even though she was always careful to draw that line early they didn’t always listen, or remember. Her pension for bad boys didn’t help matters, and while she had no problem spending a few hours with them a lifetime seemed rather ill-advised for a want-to-be-FBI agent.
In hindsight it was all probably Sam’s fault – what with his rather loose interpretation of societal mores. He’d always professed that if it wasn’t hurting anybody, it wasn’t anybody else’s business. There’d been plenty of women in and out of his life over the years, never really serious, often family friends of a sort, and Liz hadn’t ever really considered settling down. Why should she? What good did settling down do anybody? Mortgages, car loans, screaming babies – what about that sounded like a good time?
It wasn’t until she was working on her master’s that she realized how the rest of the world really worked. How normal people did things. How much she differed from that – in nearly every way. She’d always been different, and it had always bothered her that she’d never quite fit in with the other kids growing up, but never enough to change. Her father and his friends were always there, and with them she never had to worry about fitting in. They didn’t care what clothes you wore or what band you liked. They only cared that you weren’t going to blab around town what they were up to – that you played things close to the vest. They knew they could count on her or Sam to keep their mouths shut when it mattered, and in turn they cut her father in on a few things now and again.
She’d done a few jobs, here and there, for practice her father said. To build up a nest egg, he claimed. While she loved the rush of it, she knew that not all the jobs were as well planned as the ones she went out on. Sometimes good people got hurt – sometimes the targets didn’t deserve what happened. Her father knew she wanted to ‘switch sides’ as he called it, and he thought it was just fine. “You go be whatever you want to be, LizzyBee.” He said. “Either way you go, you got the skills you need. I made sure of it. And I love you no matter what.”
As the years went on, and she saw less and less of her father and his friends, as her studies progressed, it became clear the penalties for being different. There were very real career and social ramifications of not having that car loan, of not at least pretending to look for mister right. Normalcy was what everyone else was doing, or at least trying to do, and it got harder and harder to even make small talk. Friends stopped calling as often. Classmates ignored her when they ran into each other off campus. And even the friends-with-benefits-bad-boys were getting harder to find without looking in places she didn’t really want to go.
Liz didn’t like sitting alone in the honors cafeteria. She didn’t like people looking at her funny and talking behind her back. And, even though it hurt to admit it to herself, something in her yearned to fit in just for once – to not have to worry about hiding untraceable cash just in case, to not have a bag packed with your essentials ready to bolt if you have to. To have a house and a dog and 2.5 kids. Because that’s what you are supposed to want –right? That was normal and it would be so nice, if just for a little while, she could be normal. Be just like everyone else. She started to yearn for that so badly she would dream of it at night, of just being a normal grad student, with normal grad student problems, a normal girl with normal dreams and normal plans and normal everything.
So when Tom entered the picture and offered all that up in an attractive and available package, a<i>normal</i>, package - when the recruiters for the FBI mentioned the importance of being well rounded and grounded, that they specifically looked for people that had stable home lives that could help them handle the stress – she went for it. A part of her felt guilty for using him, knowing she wasn’t really in love, not the way normal people could be in love. She wasn’t even sure she was capable of that. But she was a profiler. She knew what it looked like and she could fake it. And faking it meant she would get what she’d always wanted – a chance to be in the FBI, to make a difference. All the glory of the chase and only the bad guys would get hurt. She could be a good wife to Tom if it got her that, she could pretend, make them all believe, make herself believe….
For a long time she did.
Reddington brought it all back. The rush of that life – the joy in it. The freedom of unconventionality. All the wonderful glorious hedonistic pleasures of not being normal. He made them all okay again – like her father had.
Old itches that had never quite left her returned. And she dreamed of bells.