Trigger Warning: Violence
As this fic slides into the end of Season One, there's a streetside shootout, Harrow making a fantastic shot, hurt/comfort, and lots of other goodness. Comments are appreciated, and thank you for reading!
"I'm not sitting in the back seat."
Richard wanted to argue with her, but she was the other Clara that afternoon. Other Clara terrified him. Other Clara wore expensive clothes. She went to hotels for luncheons and stood in groups of women dressed just like her, and they laughed in a way that didn't seem quite real. She looked like someone from a moving picture. She stood differently. She talked differently.
"I'm your driver. You should. Sit in the back."
"You are driving me. You are not a driver. There's a difference. If I were driving, would you sit in the backseat?"
He knew there was a logical fallacy in her reasoning, but it seemed altogether safer to get her in the car and off the street. He helped her into the car and flinched slightly at the feel of her hand against his fingers. When she moved her hand, he missed it.
"That was a complete waste of my afternoon. Real things are happening in the world, women getting the vote, a presidential election, European refugees. Still, I'm supposed to spend my afternoon listening to people complain about the servant problem? I could have spent the afternoon writing."
"Mmm, why. Do you. Do it?"
"Well, it was my bridal luncheon, so I rather had to show up." Richard's hands tightened on the wheel as the vision of red finger marks on her arm swam in front of his eye. "Of course, I didn't have one real friend there. Just a lot of people currying favor with my father."
If someone asked Clara to explain how Richard would maneuver them into the house, she wouldn't be able to. It was something akin to participating in a square dance, but there was no music, your partner had a gun, rarely touched you, and seemed to think assassins were hiding in the azalea bushes. Once he decided the azalea bushes weren't up to anything nefarious he opened the door and let her in. However, he pushed her back behind him as soon as they crossed the threshold. She knew why in a flash. The house was deathly silent and still. No one could be in it. Clara looked into the living room. No toys, no blankets, no sign anyone lived there at all, except for a letter propped on the mantle.
They stared at each other. "I think this moment of domestic bliss has concluded. Do you want to tell my father, or should I?" Clara asked.
Within two hours, they were moved back into the Ritz-Carlton. Eddie assigned Richard the small box room next to Clara's room, and the men moved in the bed Clara bought for Margaret's house.
Clara laid in her bed that night, trying to read This Side of Paradise, but her mind wandered to the fact Richard was on the other side of the wall. She still tried to focus before realizing reading was a lost cause at the moment. She got up, sat on the floor, and started tapping on the wall.
Richard was lying on his bed, enjoying the freedom of removing his mask when he heard tapping on the wall separating his makeshift room from Clara's. He bounded out of bed, thinking she was calling for help, but then he recognized the pattern. It sounded like Morse code. It took him a second to realize she was tapping out hello over and over again on the wall. He didn't know what to do at first. Then he had to think about how to tap out his answer.
'I am here' is what he finally decided on.
There was silence from her side for a moment, and then the tapping began again.
'I am glad.' Long after the tapping stopped and he imagined Clara is asleep in her bed, he looked at the square of plaster and wondered why.
"Hey, you," Jimmy said as he walked into the drawing-room.
"Hey, you." Clara answered. Jimmy handed her his cigarette after she responded, and she took a long drag. "How are Angela and Tommy? I haven't seen them since I've been under Ritz-arrest."
"Tommy's great." Clara worried about the gap in the answer. She also worried about the fact Jimmy's eyes looked like blue glass, like a doll's eyes. There was nothing behind them.
"Could they come here for a visit?" she asked.
"Okay, sure," he answered distractedly. Clara sighed because it's clear he'd lost interest in speaking with her. She wondered when Jimmy started treating her like a nuisance.
"Richard, you and I are on Nucky this afternoon. Ted O'Bryan is going to cover Clara."
Richard said nothing but he didn't like this change in procedure. Ted O'Bryan wasn't careful. The man didn't think (although, sometimes, Richard wondered if Jimmy thought before working a job even though he felt a stab of disloyalty when he considered it). Richard needed this job, though, so he didn't argue.
He, Jimmy, and Nucky left the hotel by the door to South Iowa Street, where Thompson's limo was parked. In the lobby, Richard watched Clara and O'Bryan go out of the main street door to Pacific Avenue. She had said earlier in the day that she needed to go to the library. It was a twenty-minute walk, but she inevitably would want to stop at Woolworth's or the bookstore as well.
Richard's eye never stopped moving. Something bothered him. O'Bryan let Clara walk to his left, which meant she was on the street side. Not safe. Not what his mind was telling him he was missing, though.
Clara stepped onto Pacific Avenue thinking about what she needed from the library. She was also out of paper, she remembered, so she needed to stop at Woolworth's. The one on Ocean Avenue near the library, she decided, because the one on the Boardwalk carried more tourist things, and wouldn't necessarily have all the things on her list.
A car drove into the curb facing the wrong way. Clara saw the face of a boy, just a kid, really, in the window. Then O'Bryan, who was walking slightly ahead of her, no longer had a head. She blinked as a fine red mist settled on her face.
Before she could scream, a thick hand clamped down on her mouth and nose. Another arm snaked around her waist and tried to lift her off the ground. She slammed her heel down on the top of his foot (a trick Jimmy taught her when they wrestled as kids), which caused him to loosen his grasp enough that she could bite his fingers.
"Richard?" Jimmy asked, confused as to why the man was staring down the street towards the intersection with Pacific Avenue.
"Cover Thompson," Richard growled as loudly as he could as he pulled out his Colt and started running towards Pacific. He knew that sound. He knew what he heard.
Clara drew in every bit of breath she could. Richard had been in the lobby; she could then only pray he was still around the corner and not already in the car. She screamed his name as loudly as she could, terror evident in her voice. The man was trying to get her to the car. She kicked wildly, pushing off against the car with one leg. The kid she saw in the window grabbed her other leg.
Jimmy and Nucky, not already aware that something seemed amiss, started running at the sound of Clara screaming for Harrow.
When Richard turned the corner, his mind put together a field map. O'Bryan's body. A large man holding Clara with a gun in his hand, but not at her head. Her leg held by someone standing behind the car door.
Clara saw him, but he forced himself to ignore the terrified look on her face. She was just another form. She had to be. He only let himself see when she stopped flailing
Richard stopped running and crouched while he raised the gun. He wanted the bullet to go straight through the man's eye. He couldn't risk a cheek shot, because he was already shooting to close to Clara's head. Must be a kill shot, he thought, because it lessened the chance the man could pull the trigger on the gun held at Clara's side.
The sound of this one-shot rang through the sunny afternoon. It was a clean shot. Unfortunately, Clara freezing when she saw Richard's gun meant she was off-balance, so when the man fell and the person in the car didn't let go of her leg she hit the ground hard. The car took off, and she was being pulled across the sidewalk. Richard prepared to shoot again to stop the vehicle, but there was no clear to shot to take. As he neared, the person in the car let go of her ankle. Clara was trying to push herself up when he got to her, but something was wrong with her left arm and she couldn't push up.
He recognized the look in Clara's eyes and on her face. Trauma, terror he thought, recognizing she was going into shock. At first, she stared blankly at him when he got to her, but when he leaned down over her and whispered "Trust me," and looked her straight in the eye, she nodded and threw her uninjured arm around his neck. Richard lifted her and ran for the side door. He watched everyone but saw no apparent threat. He knew he would have to utilize the elevator. Eight floors was too much to carry Clara, which took both arms. The first part of his mission accomplished, neutralizing the immediate threat, his next stage was to get her to safety. Jimmy would have to see to Nucky.
Nucky and Jimmy rounded the corner of the block just in time to see Richard lifting Clara. Jimmy took careful aim at the speeding car, but only succeeded in destroying the back window.
Watching Clara let Harrow help her reminded Nucky of his daughter's words from a few weeks ago ("If something happens, the children's survival could depend on their willingness to go to him," she said, standing in Margaret's bedroom wearing those ridiculous Oriental pajamas.) His ever-practical princess, she knew befriending the bodyguard could pay dividends, he thought. It just saved her life.
Meanwhile, two dead bodies laid on the sidewalk. Clara's purse lay abandoned b in a pool of blood.
Jimmy stood over the dead gangster, while he considered the placement of the bullet and the circumstances of the shot. "I could have never made that shot, Nuck. If Richard hasn't been here..." Jimmy let his voice trail off. "Look, he put the bullet in as straight of the scumbag's eye as possible to keep it away from Clara. And he couldn't shoot at the car, because Clara was within inches of going under the wheels as it was."
Nucky put his hand over his face, as the reality of the situation sank in. "My daughter, James. They went after my daughter."
"I need. To put you, hmm, down," Richard told her when they neared the elevator. Her hands were still clinging to his shirt. He gently pulled her away and propped her up against the wall, noticing she couldn't put weight on one leg. He pulled his Colt and swept the room while waiting for the staff elevator to open, terrifying the operator when it did.
"Take us. To her floor," he ordered, picking Clara back up.
The elevator operator put the required key in the eighth-floor slot and didn't speak a word. The princess of the Boardwalk covered in blood and clinging to her weird mask-wearing bodyguard was just another day at work at the Atlantic City Ritz-Carlton; he was just glad the gun wasn't pointed at him any longer.
Richard carried her into her bedroom when the elevator opened, grabbing the quilt at the foot of her bed to wrap around her as he set her on the bed. She was trembling badly. Suddenly, he had an image of Clara leaning in front of him, telling him it was going okay while rubbing his hands.
"It's going. Hmm. To be okay. I'll be right back." He dashed to the bar cart in the hallway, grabbing one of the sodas Eddie kept on the cart for a mixer. Out of habit, he grabbed a straw. When he comes back to the bedroom to hand it to her, her hands are shaking too hard to hold the bottle.
When Nucky and Jimmy walked in, they saw Richard carefully holding the bottle so Clara could drink. Nucky was horrified at her condition. Her face was covered in blood. Her blood, or O'Bryan's, he could not tell.
"Are you all right?" Jimmy asked her.
Clara nodded, not trusting herself to speak.
"She needs a doctor. She can't put. Weight. On her left leg. Mmm. Something is wrong with her shoulder. She hit her head. Mmm. Could be a concussion."
Most words he'd ever heard the masked man speak at one time, Nucky thought to himself. "Harrow, you saved my daughter today. I won't forget it. I'm sending for the doctor."
"Stay with her, please," Jimmy asked, but before he followed Nucky, he watched Harrow. Richard's actions in planning the shot, the way he retrieved Clara, the way he assessed her injuries... Clara wasn't going to be the only traumatized by today. Jimmy would bet money that mentally, Richard had returned to the battlefield.
"I can feel his blood on my face," Clara whispered when they were alone. Richard nodded, and went into her bathroom, bringing back towels and the white metal first aid kit from the shelf.
Richard gently wiped the cloth across her face. Usually, he couldn't bring himself to look at Clara directly in the face. Now, though, he had to, because he also couldn't bear for her face to be covered in gore. It was the same feeling he had when her skirt brushed the case with the dead German's sniper mask. He needed to believe there was something whole and untarnished left.
Suddenly, he had a flash of the boy he was before the war. The boy who preferred his drawing pencils to his pistol, who loved Tom Swift books, whose talent at sharpshooting was pure happenstance and only developed past raw talent because his sister, Emma, loved shooting so much. Sometimes, when Clara's treating him like a normal person, he can almost feel that boy inside him. The idea he might not be dead inside is far more terrifying than the idea that he is. The idea that this would make Clara disappear into herself was equally terrible.
When the doctor came, Richard stepped outside. He considered that few kills have ever given him the satisfaction of destroying the man terrorizing Clara. The rest of the d'Allessio family must die before they do any more damage. Clara was an innocent, not a soldier. Having to shoot so near her, knowing that if he miscalculated Clara died, made it hard to breathe as he thought back over the kill.
He heard her scream. At first, he thought he was just reliving the feeling of standing outside and hearing her cry for help moments after he heard the sound of a gun with a silencer. Then he realized she was screaming for him now.
She stood, wobbling, in the corner. Her ankle was wrapped, and some of the worst of the scrapes were covered in bandages. The doctor and nurse stood in front of her.
"Get back," Richard growled. They instinctively got out of his way.
Clara reached out with her right hand for his arm to steady herself. "They say my shoulder is dislocated. They tried to hold me down," her whispers were desperate.
He looked at her left arm hanging and knew they were right. He also remembered Clara being held down by the d'Allessio goon and knew why she was scared.
"I know they have to do it, but...can you do it?" She fought back the tears. "I just need it to be someone I know won't hurt me."
Richard nodded. A memory of a nurse with soft dark hair and a British accent who held his hand and told him stories about growing up in Yorkshire with her sisters every time they debrided his face floated in front of him.
"Fine," the doctor answered when Richard told him of Clara's plan, "but you can't let her move."
Richard steeled himself to touch Clara. This was different from carrying her. She stood facing him, balanced on one leg as he wrapped his left arm around her so that her right arm was trapped. She laid her head against his shoulder, and he felt her eyelashes moving against his neck. His other hand moved to hold her head still, which really meant he was cupping her head in his hand. He made sure that her face is against his good side. It feels like he was embracing the woman he's closest to.
The memory of the way her breath caught when she rubbed his hands, after his face scared little Emily Schroeder when Clara realized how close he was to her comes back to him. The way she went still, the revulsion on her face as she stood up stayed with him. No decent woman could stand to be near him for long. He still couldn't resist smoothing her hair back. She whispered, thank you. He tried to feel nothing, but the feel of her hair against his hand, her torso pressed against his, made him think of the dream of Odette on the beach. The doctor made quick work of putting her shoulder back in place; Clara screamed in real agony, but then it was over, and she slumped against him. He wasn't sure what to do, so he stood there with Clara laying against his shoulder
It's why he didn't realize what the doctor was doing until it was too late, until the needle had already pierced Clara's skin.
Morphine. Richard doubted he would have lived without it, but when he thought back to the dreams and terrors he had while medicated, he knew he would have picked death. The combination of terror and the drug is disastrous. The doctor finally left, and Richard knew he had to prepare her.
"They. Mmm. Gave you morphine. It's going to make you have. Strange dreams," he told as he helped into bed.
Clara nodded her understanding, her eyelids already growing heavy.
Suddenly, her hand reached out to grab his as her eyes cloud over. She tried to speak, to tell him, but the medicine was working to quickly. Clara was well aware of the subject matter of her upcoming nightmares.
"Stay," she whispered. "Please."
She was out within minutes. The fallout from the earlier adrenaline rush, the activity of the afternoon, the emotional upheaval caused by having her close, and then finally the pure comfort of her hand in his in the calm bedroom lulled him to sleep soon after.
When he woke up, he was first aware of the feeling of warm flesh against his hand. For so long, no one touched him. Then he heard soft cries.
"His face, Daddy, his face!" Clara cried from the bed. Richard snatched his hand back and stood up and left her room. From down the hall, he heard Jimmy on the phone. He waited until Jimmy ended the phone call.
"Hmm. Clara. Is. Having nightmares. Morphine. I'm making. Them. Worse." Each word was a struggle when he first woke up, but the effort was made worse by the confirmation that the girl who sunnily declared herself his friend minutes after seeing him without the mask found him the same nightmare fuel as everyone else did.
Jimmy stares. He thinks about Clara throwing her arm around Richard. Clara, who holds herself at a complete reserve with almost everyone, but was talking to Richard about her writing minutes after meeting him. Who tracked Richard down on the Boardwalk the day they arrived from Chicago because she was afraid he would be thirsty and hungry. Who, according to Nucky, made the Schroeder family and Nucky himself accept Richard by sheer force of will. He somehow doubts Richard is influencing her morphine-induced nightmares. He remembers the meat of his morphine dreams all too well.
"Come with me," Jimmy ordered as he headed down the hallway.
The covers were thrown back, and Clara was moving around on the bed. Fucking morphine, Jimmy thought. They should have given her laudanum. He sat next to her and carefully touched her face. "Clara, wake up. It's me."
"Jimmy," she said, sounding on the edge of tears. "Where's Richard?"
Jimmy looked up at the masked man, still standing in the hallway. "Richard thinks he's scaring you."
Clara shook her head, trying to sit up. "No. Oh. Oh, Jimmy. It's because I keep seeing his face when I close my eyes. And his hand. I can't stop seeing it." There was a faint edge of hysteria in her voice.
Jimmy closed his eyes. Of course. "Rich, she's not talking about you. Clara, are you talking about Richard?"
"He said he wouldn't leave, Jimmy."
"I'm. Here." Richard said from the hallway.
"I can't stop seeing it. The blanket moves, and his hand falls out," Clara continued.
Damn it, Jimmy thought. He climbed on the bed next to her, like he did when they were children.
"Remember when we were kids, and the Boardwalk didn't go all the way out. We would build a camp. We'd take peanuts..." Jimmy hoped like hell this works to move Clara to all the times they created their own world on a quiet Atlantic City Beach, away from the horrors of their little lives.
Finally, Clara slept. Richard was still standing in the doorway. Jimmy walked back out into the hall, and motioned for Richard to follow.
"I can't tell you what she's dreaming about. It's Clara's story to tell, and I don't know that she's ever told anyone since it happened. Just know, it has nothing to do with you. It happened to her when she was just a little kid." Richard nods. Jimmy lights a cigarette. "And I'm the last one who should be giving advice about how to come back from the war, but Richard, you've got to stop seeing yourself as a friendless man. If no one else, you have me. You have Clara. We know you aren't a monster."
Later that night, when Clara slept and Eddie promised that the apartment was locked down, those words echoed in Richard's mind, along with the sound of her voice screaming his name. The look of fear on her face while she tried to wrestle with the D'Alessio soldiers came back to him. He left the apartment and sets out to find information.
The next morning, he had to track Jimmy down. Jimmy's father is apparently dying, and Jimmy is staying at the incredibly vast, vaguely terrifying mansion where his father lived. Jimmy told him he had at least two friends. He found it odd that a Wisconsin farmboy's friends are a girl who lives in the Ritz-Carlton and a guy whose father lives in Dracula's Castle.
"Chalky, Mr. White, heard back from his men in Philadelphia. Mrs. d'Allesio. The mother is there. The sisters and another brother, Adrian." Richard struggled to get the words out.
"Never heard of him," Jimmy replied.
"He's a dentist. I could go there."
"Where? To Philadelphia? There's no point."
"I would kill the mother and the sisters. And the dentist. That would make them stick their heads up," Richard explained, his nervousness making his words run together.
Jimmy took a deep breath. "Richard, we don't kill women and innocents."
"They tried. To kill Clara. She's innocent."
Jimmy clapped his hand on Richard's arm. "Yes, and they are no better than the scum who sliced Pearl. And we are going to deal with the d'Alessios, just like we dealt with those maggots. But if we go after women and innocents...we make it worse for Clara, and for Angela, and for Tommy, and any other person we love. We make their lives forfeit. We'll get these bastards, though. I promise."
