I've been meaning to write this for a while, and free time in English gave me the chance. So, here it is - a drabble set near the end of 2.01. Kind of possibly spoilers, I guess, maybe.
She walked down the stairs, her footsteps echoing in the nearly empty subway station. They sounded loud in her ears even though she was stepping as quietly as possible. The soft vibrations that ran up her legs only made her heart beat faster.
When she reached the bottom, she glanced around – the place jumped out at her instantly, and she went towards the darkness with blood swirling in her ears.
Pressing her body against the wall, she felt cold, sharp metal against her spine and shivered. She didn't have to look around the corner to know what was there.
"Have you thought about what we discussed?" Francis was hidden far out of sight, somewhere in the shadows, and even though she knew she wouldn't be able to see him, she tried to sneak a look anyway.
"I think you're right," she replied. "We should start with a clean slate."
"What about the text messages?" he asked. She pulled her phone from the pocket of her green army jacket and flicked through the screen. Angling it so he could just see, she deleted the message history.
"And the contact? Are we good?"
She did the same, and his contact vanished from the screen, from her phone, forever.
"Yeah," she said.
"We can put all this other nonsense behind us, and trust one another and continue to help one another? I'd like that," he said from the shadows.
She shifted and put her phone back into her pocket. "Consider the slate clean."
There was a beat of silence, and then she spoke again.
"Answer me one thing," she said.
Francis sighed and moved. She could hear the rustle of his clothes, no doubt thick enough to survive a Russian winter. Or hide a Congressman from the US public. She paused for a long time.
"Actually, it's nothing," she said, listening to her gut shouting at her to turn and run. "Clean slate."
"Good," Francis said.
She waited a moment and then pushed herself off the wall and walked away. She crossed the platform and paused at the bottom of the stairs, biting her nail. Breathing in deeply, she took the first step and forced herself upwards, shoving her hands in her pockets as she went.
By the time she got to the top, she could hear a train as it thundered past.
Zoe Barnes stepped out into Washington DC's filtered sunshine, alive, breathing, and nowhere near as trapped as she'd felt when she had walked in.