Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/5215367.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Underage
  Category:
      Other
  Fandom:
      The_Blacklist_(TV)
  Relationship:
      Elizabeth_Keen/Raymond_Reddington
  Character:
      Elizabeth_Keen, Raymond_Reddington, Dembe_Zuma
  Additional Tags:
      Red_as_white_hat, Human_Trafficking, Childhood_Sexual_Abuse
  Stats:
      Published: 2015-11-15 Words: 1947
****** Elizabeth ******
by Catherine_Medici
Summary
     Elizabeth tells a story. AU. PLEASE READ TAGS FOR TRIGGER WARNINGS.
     Unbeta'd
===============================================================================
 
What do you remember when you were four?
Some people say the earlier memories can be exceptionally vivid due to small
traumas.
The memory of a hard smack on the back of the legs as punishment for your
ingenious two year old plot to relieve the sugar bowl of its contents while
mama is in the other room, distracted momentarily by the telephone.
Perhaps the memory of the family cat turning and marking you with sharp claws,
yowling its displeasure at your little hands around its tail.
Pain.
Loss.
Fear.
These things can create deep grooves, can underlay your very first memory.
Memories that float, disconnected to anything else. You never forget them. And
sometimes, if you've no one to help make sense of them, you never stop wanting
to.
You learn to live with them. To ignore the nagging feeling that there is more
to the story, if you could just remember what came before or what came after.
I remember a fire and a gun. The faces of my parents in candlelight. The loud
voices, the fear in both of them as they fought desperately for governance of
the gun.
I remember picking it up and I remember the smell of gunpowder.
I don't remember how I became damaged. My scar must have been as a result of
that fire. Where else could it have come from? But it was only the first of
many scars. The rest of them were just all on the inside.
I learned not to ask for things very quickly in my new home. If you called
attention to yourself, you were punished. If you irritated the adults, you were
punished. It seemed easier really, to just take what you needed, silently,
hoping no one would notice you there, pouring that glass of milk by the
ghoulish light of the open refrigerator at a lonely hour of the night.
I was eleven when I learned that the silence could help me to endure so much
more than just hunger and loneliness.
Be silent now, be empty, was the mantra I sang to myself over and over inside
my own head, my face pushed into the dirty bedclothes so that I could barely
breathe. Be nothing. Float like a soap bubble in a hot bath.
And then he came crashing in.
I shouldn't say he crashed. He was like a crocodile in the water. Silent and
smooth, and only when he had his prey between his teeth would he thrash about a
little. Shredding lesser men.
He did kick the door down. Ten points for style.
He came striding into the little hellhole that was my current existence like he
thought he was King David in his chariot. He had a tall, serious looking man
with him. A young man. Red wasn't a young man, not like the youthful Dembe by
his side. Less still, like me, in my eleven year old shell.
Oh yes, he wore a cream colored hat. Close enough.
He grabbed my chin, saying nothing, looking intently into my eyes, turning my
face from side to side in the dilapidated kitchen of the smelly, old apartment
I lived in at the time.
“What's your name,” he asked, not unkindly, his eyes flicking from me to the
doorway and back to me. “Is anyone else here?”
I shivered and said nothing. If I'd not already learned that it was best to be
silent I could have told him that I was alone that night save for a drug
addicted male in the front room who had been given the task of guarding me. We
weren't sent out often. The clients we catered to had very...particular tastes.
And they were few and far between.
I stood in the middle of the kitchen watching them as they cased the house,
both on high alert. I listened as they found the male in the other room. I
heard his cry of outrage as he was woken from his drugged stupor and a sound I
would later understand to be of a bullet finding flesh to sink into, dulled by
a silencer.
I remember fear. Here was a new thing. I had been passed from place to place
before, some were almost actual foster homes, if a bit violent and neglectful,
others were more open about their trade. I'd always been bought and sold. Never
stolen before.
The two men returned to the kitchen to find me still standing there in my
nightie, a puddle of piss on the linoleum floor between my legs.
I closed my eyes as he darted toward me, expecting a backhand for my disgusting
behavior. Fear had seized me though. I couldn't have helped the mess.
I recall the sick horror that trembled through me as I waited for the blow. I
didn't know him, didn't know what he was capable of and experience had taught
me up until that point that it was far better the devil you know.
Up until that point.
The blow never came. I opened my eyes. He knelt in front of me, an expression
of fury on his face. It frightened me then. I couldn't have understood that his
fury was for himself. For leaving me even for a minute.
“Lizzie? Masha?” He asked.
Unfamiliar names. I stared in dull eyed terror.
He turned to the other man. “It's got to be her,” he said scooping me up in his
arms, looking into my face again. “Those eyes are the spitting image. And they
said she was here. Only sold three months ago.”
“Little girl,” said the tall man politely. “This is Raymond,” he gestured to
the older man, “and I am Dembe,” gesturing now to himself. “Can you tell us
your name?”
“Blue,” I whispered. The most I'd said to anyone for a long while outside of
the time with my clients.
They looked at each other across the room, seemingly telegraphing information
with just their eyes.
“It doesn't matter, Raymond,” said Dembe. “You know you won't leave her here
anyway, no matter who she is. Let's go.”
We went. He held me like a small bride in his arms, as we descended down, down,
down the stairs the whole way. No elevator. Rushing as though we had enemies
close on our heels. Hurrying into a hulking, black armored SUV.
He sat me down beside him in the back seat. I watched curiously as Dembe took
the driver's seat, starting the car swiftly and driving away into the night at
speed.
He looked at me, the lines on his face easing as we made our escape. I remember
his tentative interest now that he had the space to inquire further. “Have you
ever been called Lizzie?” He asked me gently.
I smiled. Here was something I knew. Here was familiar territory.
I crawled into his lap, throwing my arms around his neck, I sensed his surprise
but he didn't stop me. Perhaps this was his first time. Some of them liked to
pretend that it was, that they couldn't help it, the girl just wants it so
much, you see? I knew how that fantasy went, and I knew how to cater to it.
“I can be Lizzie,” I said, rubbing my soft cheek against his rough one. “How
old do you want Lizzie to be?”
He pushed me from him, revulsion twisting his face, but this was only part of
the game that I knew so well. He wanted the little girl to chase him, to
absolve him of the guilt and self loathing he felt, that they all invariably
felt. I could do that for him. Make him think I wanted him, that he had
heroically struggled against the temptation but these eyes after all, so big,
so blue. My eyes are what they named me for. The most striking part of me,
piercing their defences, they are helpless in the face of my assault.
Not this time.
I wound my little body back around him, my hands reaching deftly for his belt.
He panicked, flailed, trying to push me away but still I thought this must be
just part of the game. I clung to him, rubbing myself on him. They liked that,
liked the idea that I couldn't contain myself, that I must have my
gratification.
He hurled me from him, shouting, angry, his voice deep and cavernous, rage
whistling through it, hitting me like a physical force.
I remember how I trembled, how my body sought to escape before my mind caught
up, my hands reaching for the door handle, opening the car door, heedless of
the speed we travelled at. He barked a horrified command to his friend to stop
the car.
I clung, breathless and so afraid, to the car door, my mind catching up with
me, reminding me of my song.
You are nothing, an empty vessel, silence stretching, nothing, nothing,
nothing, chanted the helpful voice in my head.
I barely felt his hands around my wrist, gentle once again, how he folded me in
his arms, careful to pull my arms around his neck, allowing them no where near
his groin. He held me so tightly to him that I couldn't move, I could barely
grind myself against him but I tried, just in case this was still part of the
game, I tried.
“Stop it,” he said. “I want you to stop that right now,” he was so stern, I
quailed at his voice. I lay against him, my little heartbeat thrumming against
his, squashed up as I was against his chest.
Oh, how I quivered with sick anticipation. The sliver of warmth making its way
into my heart in that moment was far more fearsome to me than any physical
violence could have been. After all, becoming and staying disconnected from all
things was my strength, a hidden trick and this terrifying predator had
snatched me up and in one moment, fastened a string to my heart.
So strange, the inconsequential things that stick in our mind as we grow older
and the bad things start to happen to us. I remember his long, finely woven
scarf, the maroon, diamond pattern etched into my memory now. His smell, fine
cigars and pine trees. I remember Dembe’s eyes as he handed me over to him. I
remember myself, a cold, huddled little body carried into the isolated country
house they had chosen to bring me to.
I remember being set down at the entrance of an austere hallway. I remember the
contents of my stomach coming up. Bits of brown and grey, the foul, acrid taste
bubbling up in my mouth, the hand at my back, stroking, seeking to soothe. The
glass of water brought to my lips.
And I wasn't an empty vessel anymore. I was sloshing about with unnamed and
confusing emotion. I tell him sometimes, each time explaining it differently. I
don't think he really understands what it was like, to go from nothing to
everything so quickly and all at once.
He looks at me now with so much pride in his eyes, I could die.
I know that he collects people but they are like family to him, treasured
beyond words. He would give his life for his family.
Perhaps he will never see me as a woman in love with him. Dembe says to be
patient. But I am twenty nine this year, haven't I been patient? Sometimes I
wonder what life would have held for me if he'd been there that night, that
Christmas Eve I can barely remember.
Still, I have now. And I will make him see me.
One day.
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