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Indie Raymond "Red" Reddington from NBC's Blacklist. Private. Selective. Mun/Muse 21+. Dark Themes present. Please read rules/bio before following/interacting. Written by Erick

whcwashe:

She almost screams. She has the urge to anyway, but the sound doesn’t quite make it out. She flinches though, hands jerking up to her ears, despite the overwhelming SILENCE of it all. It’s quiet. Quick. Maybe that’s the worst part. Her head stays bowed, and she nearly curls into herself, taking a few unsteady breaths in before she looks at red again, hands shaking again, more than they had before.

She’d wanted to avoid this. She’d wanted to keep anyone else from getting hurt. She hadn’t pulled things in this direction to save herself – it was probably naive. She should have known better. She had a terrible habit of hoping for the best. Fingers curl into her hair and her eyes close. Suddenly she feels sick, but she manages to push the feeling back, biting down hard on the inside of her cheek, even as he continues to talk. And she doesn’t mean to cry, but there are tears in her eyes anyway. It feels stupid. Whoever that was, he’d been a criminal. This business had been none of her own, for all she knew he deserved it – but she couldn’t say that, not really. It wasn’t a comfort at least. No one ever seemed like they deserved it.

Maybe she should’ve been used to it now. Death. She wasn’t.

Taking a solid breath in, she dragged her gaze back up to red and furrowed her eyebrows. Retainer? Retainer –

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“I can’t – I can’t quit my job –” She paused, taking a breath as she tried to steady herself. Tried her best to ignore the body now sitting a few feet away. “My boss is basically – he’s basically my dad, I mean he’s not technically, but –” She swallowed roughly, sniffing harshly before she straightened herself out. “He’d ask too many questions, y’know? I mean, I see him every day …”

It was a funny thing, watching normal people react to what his normal had become. The way they recoiled, or curled in on themselves, it was always one of two reactions. Even the most hardened war vets, when they saw violence like this, senseless to someone who had only ever been violent for what they saw as a higher purpose, they recoiled or curled in like those potato bugs children played with. Red picked up on why quickly enough: because the threat he himself posed was enough to necessitate inaction. Their fight-or-flight went straight for the latter, because they saw him as something they could not fight, or at least could not win against. He pulled out a handkerchief and wiped a stray smattering of blood off of his cheek, then the wine glass, before he poured himself some, toasted the corpse of a man he’d known for–God, almost a decade– and took a sip. “Ave, atque, vale." 

If Raymond wanted to keep her on retainer, regardless of what her answer was when she’d unfurled from her self-imposed cocoon, he would have to treat her well. After all, that’s how most of his associates became life-long confidants. "I’m sorry you had to see that, Liv, you’ve found yourself in an awful spot of that bad luck you told me about. But you know what I say?” He mused, “sometimes bad luck is the best luck in the world. I won’t bore you with the story, I’m sure you’re barely comprehending my words right now–shock tends to do that to a person.” And even still, he crouches in front of her, his face looking deceptively gentle, his voice a low, almost calming rumble if not for the present situation. “Steve here cut off my friend’s ear, and had been keeping my friend from me simply because he believed I had slighted him in a business deal. Turns out, the truth was it was his own assistant, can you believe it? And here I sit, my friend missing, and a small group of others killed in that friend’s abduction. The only one who put that bullet between Steve’s eyes was the man himself." 

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Gently, he took the scarf he’d covered her eyes with and draped it over Steve’s face, obscuring the gruesome scene. For her comfort–not his own, of course. Basically her dad? Complicated things, but didn’t make it impossible. Taking her phone off the table, he handed it to her. "Fair enough! I want you to open your contacts and add a new one, save it as Nick’s Pizza. When you get a call, answer it. You’ll be wired compensation for your work. Oh, and you might want to invest in a series of maps, I never know where I may be in need of finding something–or someone.”

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