AN: Back by popular demand. :P I highly recommend reading Indelible Ink first, if you've somehow stumbled across this without doing so.

He climbed into the ambulance and lowered himself onto the bench next to her, stiff-limbed and weary. She wondered when he'd last slept.

He'd saved her life at the expense of someone else's twice now. (That she knew of.) She wanted to call him a monster for what he did, but she remembered the sensation of his hot blood running between her fingers, of metal puncturing skin and muscle and sinew, and she bit her tongue, swallowed the bile rising in her throat. Maybe he wasn't any better than Kornish, but she wasn't any better than him.

Without a word, he slipped his jacket from his shoulders and wrapped it around her. She hesitated only a moment before sliding her arms into the sleeves, grateful for the length of them as much as the warmth. The jacket did a much better job hiding the words on her forearm than the blanket the EMTs gave her.

They sat straight-backed and rigid as the ambulance started its bumpy trek out of the woods. For some reason, his presence grounded her; she knew if she allowed herself to unbend at all, she might end up resting her head on his shoulder and that was a line she wasn't sure she could cross and come back from.

The words of Kornish's tattoo would haunt her for days, she was sure of it. She had no choice but to see them; if his modus operandi hadn't involved stripping nude she might have been spared. She saw them now on the backs of her eyelids in negative, like a flashbulb going off, every time she closed her eyes—No, please don't! The connotation was horrific. She was suddenly grateful that even though she was fated to have a criminal for a soulmate, she ended up with one more likely to save her life than end it.

She shook herself and tried to focus on the conversation happening around her, one that she was supposed to be an active participant in if her mind would just stop wandering. She'd been poked and prodded and given a clean bill of health. Now Ressler and Meera were taking the opportunity to question/debrief her while she was still a captive audience.

"I've hunted Reddington for five years and I've never seen him like that. I thought he was going to eat Lorca if he didn't tell us how to contact Kornish. Whatever he plans to use you for, Keen, good luck. It must be pretty goddamn important to him."

Liz hugged Red's jacket around herself and nodded, fighting the obsessive need to keep checking that her tattoo was still covered.

He was waiting for her when they released her a half hour later.

He looked cold, but he wouldn't ask for his jacket back and she certainly wouldn't offer it until she was far away from anyone who was there the day he spoke the words it covered.

"Do you mind if I catch a ride with you?"

A brief flicker of surprise crossed his face and she almost smiled.

"Lizzy, my car won't exactly pass for an FBI carpool," he said, even as he tucked his hand into the crook of her elbow and started walking over to the vehicle in question.

"I'm not asking you to drive me home, Red. I can't go home. Not now. Tom's gonna to want an explanation and I can't handle going from one interrogation to another. I need to just… be."

"And you want to just be, with me? You've come a long way from attempted murder."

"You've come a long way from trying to kill my husband."

You make me feel safe. A side effect of repeatedly saving my life, who would have guessed? she thought. That's what I need right now. Tom isn't safe anymore.

She wouldn't tell him any of that.

He held a mug out to her and waited for her to wrap her hands around the heated ceramic before he sat down next to her and did the same with his own.

"Warm milk?" she asked, with an eyebrow raised. He shrugged.

"Old habit from childhood. At this point, I think I get more comfort from the nostalgia of it than anything in the milk itself, but if it works, it works."

She took a cautious sip, not wishing to add burnt taste buds to her list of aches and pains. What a strange turn her life had taken in the last day or so. She went from being kidnapped, tortured, and nearly dissolved in a vat of chemicals, to sitting in a hotel room next to The Concierge of Crime, sipping warm milk.

Her thoughts ran a mile a minute, her emotions both familiar and foreign. It seemed like she was borrowing someone else's unease and worry on top of her own lingering fear and the almost overwhelming dread she felt at having to convince Tom she didn't want to quit her job even though she almost died.

She shot a furtive glance at Red only to find him shooting one back at her. His gaze skittered away from hers and his pinched expression twisted into an attempt at a smile. Next to the brilliant, reassuring smile he'd given her when Kornish's drugs started to wear off, it was hardly even a grimace.

"I can feel your anxiety from here, Lizzy."

"I don't understand what's wrong with me," she said. "By rights, I should be exhausted, but I feel like I just drank an entire pot of coffee with a Red Bull chaser and the only time I can relax at all is when—" He reached out and took her hand; the relief was complete and immediate and she choked back a sob when she met his watery eyes.

"You feel it, too."

"I do," he said. "Touch… it helps somehow."

He set their empty mugs on the coffee table and turned to her, taking both of her hands in his this time.

"You're alive," he said, rubbing his thumbs back and forth. "You'll be fine." He sounded like he was reminding himself as much as her, but a tiny piece of the knot in her chest loosened with every movement of his thumbs all the same.

"I meant what I said. I can feel your anxiety. When you were taken, I…" His voice broke and he swallowed hard, struggling for words. "I could feel your fear. It took me a while to realize what was happening because the emotions would ebb and flow, but once I did… I was afraid each time they faded that they wouldn't come back. I don't know what I would have done if I didn't find you in time."

"But you did," she said, squeezing his hands in hers. His smile came a little easier and some of the tension in his shoulders eased.

He pushed the loose sleeve of his jacket up her arm and traced his fingers along her tattoo.

"I want you to know," he said, his voice serious, solemn. "I would have done the same even without this."

She nodded and, before she could talk herself out of it, she leaned up and pressed a kiss to his stubbled cheek; she tucked herself into his side and pulled his arm around her.

His hand found its way inside the jacket and under the hem of her shirt. It was warm and dry against her skin, the touch soothing and intimate; not sexual, but certainly far from appropriate. Logically, she knew she should protest, but every fiber of her being sang at the contact; it felt too pleasant—too right—to shy away from. She worked her fingers between the buttons on his dress shirt to touch his skin in return.

The last wisps of stress evaporated as her thoughts finally began to quiet, soon to be drowned out by the steady beating of his heart under her ear as she drifted off to sleep.

Life was too short for arbitrary boundaries.