Chapter Text
"I'll be right here at home, drinking a beer, if you need me." The small, dark haired woman gives Red and Liz a sardonic grin. "Call if you think of any more questions. But call early."
Red responds with a little dip of his head, and the woman steps back from the car window and straightens, then gives them a lazy little salute.
"Drive, Lizzie," he advises his companion.
Liz backs the squad car down the woman's long, overgrown driveway and out into the street, then heads back into town.
She and Red are dressed in real police uniforms belonging to the woman and her sergeant.
And they have a twelve hour shift in which to locate one of Red's contacts, recently gone to ground at a most inconvenient time. Hopefully one shift will be sufficient.
Ahead of them, the light changes yellow, then red. As Liz slows, a brown car ahead of them charges ahead through the intersection, narrowly missing a delivery truck that has just begun to edge out from the intersecting boulevard.
"Hang on."
Liz flips switches and the sirens begin to wail, their emergency lights pulsing in flashes of electric blue and white.
"Lizzie, what in the world?"
Red turns to stare at her in disbelief as she maneuvers among the cars that are pulling slowly out of her way, then takes off after the brown car.
"Real officers wouldn't ignore that," she responds, her eyes on the car ahead, who is finally pulling to the side and slowing to a stop. "I've always wanted to be the one writing the ticket."
Liz grins at him, then hops out of the car with the leather folder containing her ticket book. Red sighs and watches her carefully as she approaches the brown car. She is correct that the easiest way to get caught would be to behave uncharacteristically. But nobody really looks at the face of a man or woman in uniform.
Everyone just looks at the uniform.
And he has to admit that Liz looks good in hers.
Tightly fitted to her small frame, it accentuates her erect shoulders and the proud set of her head, almost swallowed beneath her uniform hat.
He himself feels hot and a little uncomfortable in his own uniform, the bullet proof vest heavy beneath his blue shirt, but he has to admit he looks younger and very ordinary.
Just another middle-aged cop earning some overtime.
Liz comes back to the car and slides in with a disgruntled sniff, shutting off the lights.
"Just a kid who was late to work."
Red lets his eyes slant to the laptop on the bench seat between them.
"You didn't even run him for warrants?" he asks skeptically, as the brown car pulls slowly forward, then back out into traffic.
She shakes her head slowly.
"No. I just gave him a verbal warning."
Red eyes her curiously as they begin driving again. That doesn't seem at all like her. And she's very silent now, no longer quite so cheerful.
This disguise is excellent for several reasons; it allows them to move freely about the city, without fear of being recognized, it allows them to be armed, with the corresponding authority of the uniform as an edge in any confrontation, and lastly, he believes that wearing the same uniform may draw him and Liz closer together.
She needs to remember that she's now on his team. No longer a member of the FBI.
It may seem ironic, even to him, that pretending to be police officers together will help remind Liz that she's a criminal now, but he knows the power of a common uniform all too well. They counted on it in the Navy.
The message will be reinforced when she looks at his stripes, and when they spend time in the public eye, where they will automatically be classed together as law enforcement, beware, and most especially in any dangerous situation they encounter in their search.
He's always been on her team, no matter what she might think. He adores her with a passion he knows to be unhealthy, rooted in the long years he watched over her from afar, inflamed by their growing closeness as he edged delicately closer, then away, from her and from the FBI. Testing, but not fully trusting.
When he told her she must never risk her life for him again, her refusal to assent terrified him. It was not until the following morning, lying sleepless in his cold, lonely bed, that he acknowledged the truth. He had wanted to die, there on his knees, her name on his lips. To finally end this helpless longing, this quixotic quest.
But that doesn't serve her. And he lives to serve.
Red rubs the already shiny badge on his chest with his shirtsleeve. Comrades in arms. For the next twelve hours, at least, he can pretend that she belongs to him. And always will.