Spring tide: a tide just after a new or full moon, when there is the greatest difference between high and low water. (Google)

Enigmatic crime lords, it appeared, were better at taking bullets than at taking morphine.

Liz watched him half-sleep, his good arm restless and his other unnaturally still, the muscles splinting to immobilize the wound. The FBI's most wanted, with a hole in his chest on a hospital bed at midnight, in the shabby dive apartment of a man he hated, hooked to a morphine pump with a display that said he hadn't taken a dose in hours.

He was still pale from the blood loss, lips pressed together, the lines around his eyes deep in the lamplight. She made herself keep watching. There was a difference, she knew now, between humble everyday guilt and the cold grip in her gut at that moment. It was the difference between the guilt that was part of one's self-image and the guilt that changed it.

The morphine controller was wound by its cord around the bedrail. Liz took it and pondered absurdly, as if everything depended on it, whether to press the button for a dose, despite how put out he'd be about it.

This wasn't the decision she was there to make. She pushed it once, a quarter of a milligram, good for maybe a quarter hour of better sleep. She watched as his face smoothed, and she gave in and let memory come.

Weeks of arguing about the Fulcrum, obsessing over knowing her past as if it could put the unhinged present back in order, with a sick growing feeling that the wrong Liz had been holding the reins. The same Liz who kept a man in chains on a boat. Red's evasive, determined jollity wearing thinner by the day, not giving an inch on his secrets but telling her more and more plainly that what he was asking for in the Fulcrum was his life.

And then his enemies concluded he didn't have it; a daylight ambush in the open street; and there they were.

At some point in her reverie she realized that, though his body hadn't moved, his breathing had changed.

"I know you're up," she said, and realized it took focus to keep it from coming out as angry. When had that become the default? More gently, trying for a bit of teasing – "Did the lack of pain wake you?"

Red opened his eyes and looked back at her wryly. It would have gotten a chuckle, absent the hole in his chest. Or before she'd lashed out in guilty, exhausted anger afterward, at his half-explanation of Tom Keen's presence in her life.

"It nearly made me forget what happened altogether." That was the type of lead-in that would usually have launched him into a mad, questionable story, about a man he'd once known who'd forgotten something ridiculous and possibly fatal; and by the middle of it, he would own the room. Now he didn't try; he stopped and watched her silently.

First things first. Liz held up the syringe in her other hand, and let him watch her twist it into the other port on the pump, in the blinking light of the display. "Naloxone, from your private shadow healthcare system. If trouble comes tonight, I will personally push this. You'll be awake and in plenty of pain to defend yourself in no time." He blinked, and she held out the morphine controller to him. "So can we use the morphine?"

Red raised his good hand in surrender, and took it from her outstretched hand. "But I warn you, Agent Keen, morphine makes me lie uncontrollably. You wouldn't believe some of the nonsense I could wind up saying. But it is important to be willing to be made a fool."

She laughed a bit. Reddington, back on the job, being charming and dropping quotes. Offering a sally to start up one of their usual skirmishes. Or, it occurred to her oddly, perhaps more another invitation to dance.

Either way, just now, after everything, it would be easy to forget his lethality and his murky plans behind plans, and the guilt eviscerating her now would make it even easier. An even different Liz, one she could just stretch herself to imagine, could have decided to start leaning on his always-offered arm, overlooked the things he'd done without facing the rough work of forgiving them, and grown to align herself fully with him. Whatever new illicit empires he would have used that latitude to build, he would not have used it to hurt her. It would be easy. It would mean some rest.

But she wasn't that Liz either, and there was so much she needed to do instead. Start feeling out a way to live after Tom. Find some kind of peace with the years they'd had together. Find her way back to becoming the agent she'd planned to be. Knowing herself, seeing herself the past months, her more likely path to all that was putting up walls and mines between herself and the man in front of her, treating every incursion as an act of war.

She needed a middle path. A way to hold Red back without bristling at everything he said, without getting so fixated on pushing back that she couldn't hear when he was desperate.

She needed five more years of field experience. She needed sleep.

Liz took a breath, and dropped the bedrail nearest the door. "Can you make some space?"

It took him a beat to look over her worn sweat suit and realize she was serious. But he rewarded her with a look of shock that would have done credit even to a man who didn't wear dissipation like a piece of his tailored suits. On him, it was priceless, and she laughed aloud for what felt like the first time in months.

"Come on. Drop the horrified 'indecent proposition' look. Where else can I sleep and have a clean shot to the doorway?"

She was trying for teasing without sting - it was a peace offering - but it came out more tentatively than she'd intended. This was too jarring a shift from jabbing at him a few hours ago. He didn't understand; he would still be waiting for another blow. One could do any amount of repentant soul-searching, but there was still a hard talk to have at the end of it.

So she added, more softly, aware she was stalling for time, "I'm not here to hurt you."

He opened his mouth to say something Reddingtonian. Possibly, how absurd this was with Dembe and a private army just outside. Or, for all she knew, how much better the hospital beds were in the Seychelles. Then he shut it again, no doubt grimly calculating that after today, her fleabag motel room was no safer tonight than here.

He watched her for a long moment, his blue-green eyes at once unreadable and disconcertingly mild in the lamplight. That face could be stunningly expressive or close like a trap; he seemed for a moment to be choosing between them. Finally he said, "Head to foot. Let's minimize our chances of friendly fire, shall we?"

She raised her eyebrows and glanced at his piece on the table. "You think you can still shoot?"

Red made one of his spare, efficient facial gestures as he worked himself over toward the far side of the bed. "Right-handed. Expect me to waste two shots per cartridge."

"Just two, in the dark? That's confidence." He did chuckle a little at that, and then winced, visibly regretting it.

It didn't matter. It was the last volley Liz had in her, anyway. She swung her legs up and lay her head back alongside his legs, pulled the thin hospital cover over her, and tried to summon up who she'd been until the last year of her life. It would be easy to let them both fall asleep – well, she corrected herself, squirming up against the bedrail to keep from crowding him, not easy, exactly - and he would be cheerfully evasive in the morning and bring her another case next week, and never say another word about what led them to today.

And she could still feel the familiar call of the obsession with finding her own story, that inviting whisper that maybe another few well-placed retorts tomorrow would make him relent and tell all. It was still unreasonable as hell of him to withhold it. She had just never realized how far off the cliff of unreasonable she would jump herself in pursuit.

But Sam had raised her on the story of a man who could climb any fence. He tossed his hat over it first, because then he had to get over the fence to get his hat.

"Red," she said, staring at stains best left unidentified on the pitted ceiling, "I'm sorry."

Whether it was the morphine or not, his voice was softened when he spoke. She'd seen that fluid tenor both seduce and terrify, sometimes simultaneously. Just this once, she decided that whether he was using it to conscious effect now was his own business. "Lizzy. Why?"

She could still remember when his use of that nickname had seemed sinister. It was oddly cheering now. It was time. She took a breath.

"I gave you a reason for withholding the Fulcrum. Fear that you'd misuse it. A good, honorable reason. And then I tried to bargain it to you for my own secrets, and so clearly that was my reason after all."

The sick weight of that hit her again, and she gave up on being calm and reflective about it, and popped back up to sitting. His eyes were open, watching her, with the stillness of a man who felt the earth turning under him. Watching him made it harder; she looked down at the bedclothes instead to focus, to get it out.

"I didn't believe you that that thing was your life. I wasn't willing to. I think a part of me believes you're immortal."

"Strictly speaking, Agent Keen," he replied cheerfully after a moment, "we haven't proven I'm not." She looked up - the tone was so at odds with his look a moment ago – and there was an incongruous depth of pity in his eyes. He was giving her an out to move on.

That was what decided her. Liz took hold of the bedrail to remind herself to stay in place and meet his eyes. "The person who did that is gone," she said simply. "I mean, she still sickens me." That desperate scrabbling after the past, as if the present were worth nothing without it. "But she's gone."

He cocked his head, his close-shorn hair catching the light, weaving slightly in that curious way he had. It had seemed snakelike to her once. At some point, she had realized he did it when he was almost literally trying to study a problem from every angle at once.

She took another breath. "And I'll show you, with time, if you let me, that you won't need to fear her again." That was murky, not exactly what she'd meant to say – he should have plenty to fear from Agent Keen. Just not from the version who'd held the reins the past few months.

And she couldn't quite leave it there anyway. "Even if you are being paternalistic and unreasonable as hell. Dangerous to know the truth. Ridiculous." She sighed. "But I believe you believe it."

At least it had begun as a good apology before going off the rails. But Red was staring at her, either affected or perhaps taking on another hit of the good stuff. He blinked quickly a few times. After a long moment he spoke, almost tentatively, like he was reaching for his normal blithe charm but catching it somehow sideways. "Trusting a proxy to…befriend you was, as you so earthily put it, unreasonable as hell. If and when you'll let me, I'll show you, etcetera, that I know that. But a bit of fear is usually healthy, Agent Keen."

She laughed, not sure where he was going with that. There was no total absolution here; he still had a hole in him thanks to her temporary madness, and she had the wreckage of a life around her thanks to his arrogant best intentions. But something that had gone wrong was starting to come right again.

Red dropped his head back on the pillow. After a moment he reached his good arm over to flip off the lamp, and she sat looking down at him in the trickle of streetlamp light through the window. A muscle in his face was working, the way it did before each of his rare moments of piercing honesty. "That feeling, not recognizing yourself. Words don't capture it, do they? You're fortunate, and I'm glad, if this is the first time you've felt it." His lips quirked. "Or the last."

Liz laughed once, wryly. He shifted, trying out a new position, scrupulously avoiding letting their bodies touch, though their heats were starting to mingle. It was going to be a long night.

After a moment he spoke again. "I've spent thirty-four years driven mostly by anger."

And the constant present absence of a wife and child.

"If I could tell you how to prevent that," he went on, "I would. I can only tell you that the regrets last even longer."

She lay back, and her own voice sounded louder in the darkness. "How do you control it?"

Another wry chuckle. He must be feeling better. "Jokes that make people uncomfortable. Stories, sometimes." He sighed. "Occasionally, a brief stay in a bulletproof containment box."

Liz took that in, and felt the world turn a bit herself.

Of all his reasons for coming, in all his many-layered plans, she was suddenly sure that that was one. He had wanted to sometimes be stopped.

She pulled that thread – it was time to get her profiling skills back into gear - and felt something come together, some dim outline of that middle way she needed. Their normal give-and-take of trust and disbelief, push and pushback – there was nothing really wrong with it, at its core. Just no need to always be planning attacks and tensing for blows; his never really landed. All this time, Reddington wasn't sparring with her at all. He was dancing. He needed someone to push back, sometimes, to stay on his feet.

None of which made his insufferable, Red-knows-best fixation on keeping her ignorant about her own story any less absurd. No one was ever made safer by knowing less. That was some Superman, Lois Lane secret-identity comic book bullshit. But he believed it.

"Still going to fight you, Reddington," she murmured. But maybe not to hurt you. "Ulterior motives and comic-book bullshit. Definitely be afraid." Maybe, it occurred to her absurdly, she should learn one or two quotes to throw back at him when he became insufferably literary.

"Go to sleep, Agent Keen." In that silky voice there was an undertone of relief. "You can interrogate me further in the morning." He shifted his feet to give her room. "I just hope you're not a kicker."