Author's Note: There was no way Jimmy and Angela go to New York to get married and the New York Baby Gangsters weren't going to make an appearance. In the show, Jimmy makes a deal with Luciano and Meyer in February of 1921; I've knocked that back to Jimmy making the deal in December.

Friday, December 31st, 1920-New York City

As consciousness slowly returned, the first sensation Clara was aware of was being completely warm all over, but especially her back. Slowly she realized her back was warm because Richard's hand was pressed against it under her pajama top, and the rest of her was pressed pretty firmly against him. Her arm was damp from where the injured side of Richard's face rested on it. She closed her eyes and tried to memorize the moment. Since the morning in Margaret's living room, she knew she was, on some level, attracted to Richard. She had long known his friendship was essential to her. Since the day he saved her on the street, she knew their connection went deep. The day she kissed his cheek the day he went on the job in Philadelphia, she knew she cared about him. It wasn't until yesterday, though, when she saw him teaching Tommy to ice skate that she had any clue how deep her feelings went.

Loving people was dangerous. Everyone you loved left you vulnerable. They were all hostages to a fortune out of your control. Clara knew that loving people didn't ensure that they loved you back, or that they thought you were reason enough to stay.

The sound of an obviously fake cough made her turn her head. Jimmy stared straight at her with his mouth twitching. Damn Jimmy. Why wasn't he happily entwined with Angela and letting her enjoy a few minutes of pretending to still be asleep? She carefully slipped from the sofa and motioned for Jimmy to follow her out to the balcony, stopping only to retrieve her coat from the chair.

"Uh, what the hell, Clara?"

"Uh, none of your business, Jimmy!" Clara responded.

Jimmy lit a cigarette, took a drag, and tried to hand it off to Clara, but she shook her head.

"It's not fair to toy with him."

Clara's eyes narrowed. "Is that what you think I'm doing?"

Jimmy rolled his tongue along his bottom teeth while he thought about his answer. "I don't have any fucking clue what you're doing. To be fair, I don't think you do, either."

Clara bit her lip and looked away. Jimmy laughed. "Oh hell, I always thought your biggest fear was being actually human. That's what is going on here-Richard makes you feel human, and it terrifies you."

"I'm so glad your semester at Princeton included studying Freud," Clara snapped.

Jimmy smirked at her again, and she was suddenly very sorry she was too old to pinch him. "It's not a semester of studying Freud. It's a lifetime of knowing you. I've never seen someone knock you sideways like this."

Clara gestures for the cigarette and takes a long, long drag. "It's your wedding day. Shouldn't we be talking about your romantic life?"

Jimmy takes back the cigarette and stares out into the skyline. "I'm marrying the mother of my child. What is else is there to say?"

"Maybe you could say you can't live another day without her? That you realized you need her in your life?"

Jimmy rolled his eyes. "Jesus, discovering you have feelings is going to turn you into a romantic. Where's cynical Clara?"

"It's not funny, Jimmy. This your life. It's Angela's life. Don't you love her?"

Jimmy laughs, but it's a cold, bitter laugh that makes Clara flinch. "Did you know she was bedding a woman and tried to run away to Paris with her?"

Richard adjusts his mask and watches Jimmy and Clara on the balcony. They were both waving their arms around and passing a cigarette back and forth. He was often confused by their relationship, and had been since Clara had shown up at the brothel, befriended him, and yelled at Jimmy in a remarkably short period of time.

"Do you know why they share cigarettes?" Angela asked from behind him.

Richard shook his head, not quite ready to speak, still trying to decide if the interlude with Clara last night actually happened or was part of his dream. He's reasonably sure he can smell the orange blossom perfume she wears on his arm, which spent most of the night wrapped around her.

"When they were teenagers, Nucky said Clara was 'not allowed to touch cigarettes.' So Jimmy would hold the cigarette, and she would smoke them. Clara told me once it was so they followed the letter, if not the spirit of the law. I don't even think she likes smoking. I only ever see her do it with Jimmy, it's just..."

"It's just. How they display their closeness," Richard croaks out, his throat still scratchy from sleep.

Angela looks down at Richard in surprise. "Yes, that's it."

"Do you think. They have. Feelings," Richard tries to ask the question he's wondered since that first day he met Clara in Chicago.

"No," Angela shakes her head. "I think they both had complicated childhoods, and their relationship with each other was the only untarnished human connection they had. In their minds, they are siblings, and almost like...shipwreck survivors."

Neither Jimmy nor Clara noticed they had attracted an audience as they continued their fight on the balcony.

"But you were an angel, right? There weren't any women in Chicago, or France, or hell, Atlantic City?" Clara retorted.

Jimmy glared at her. "You know that's different."

"It's always different when a man does it."

That's when he tells her about Pearl. When he's done, when he's staring out at the skyline, and she's rubbing his shoulder like she would when they were little, and he would cry, Clara wonders if they all, still in their early twenties, barely older than the century itself, have already baked so many mistakes into their lives that there is no making it better.

*************************

Angela and Clara take over the master bedroom again.

"I forgot how awful corsets are," Angela said as the bones of the blasted thing cut into her side while Clara finished tightening the one needed for her wedding dress around her waist.

"I must admit that I don't miss them. There," Clara said. They finished the arduous process of applying Angela's wedding finery. The finishing touch was tying the Brain Binder headpiece into place.

"You are absolutely beautiful," Clara said and meant it. "You and Jimmy are going to be very happy," Clara said and wished it.

When Clara left the room, she saw Richard focused on tying Tommy's tiny bowtie. "You both look very handsome," she said, smiling from the doorway.

"I'm the ring bearer!" Tommy told her. Clara looked quizzically in Richard's direction.

"I have. The rings. Until we get there."

"Excellent idea. She's ready if you'll ask the doorman to hold a car for us?" The only tradition Angela insisted on was Jimmy not seeing her until she came down the aisle, so they'd be traveling to the wedding chapel in two separate cars.

When they arrive at the wedding venue, the flowers are waiting for them in the vestibule. Clara's are modest; Angela's looks like a several plants and ribbons gave their lives for her to transport them down the aisle.

"I let Jimmy pick the flowers," Angela said.

"He wanted you to have lovely ones," Clara answered, a little overwhelmed at the bouquet.

Angela ran her fingertips over the blossoms. "He wanted everyone to know that he can buy the most expensive flowers around. It's not quite the same thing."

Clara briefly wondered how many other maids of honor went down the aisle trying not to cry.

When the music started Clara, who had been asked to be in many weddings simply so that the society page write up would read "Clara Thompson, daughter of County Treasurer Enoch Thompson and the late Mabel Thompson, served as a bridesmaid" knew how to walk down the aisle like she was participating in the social event of the season, instead of being part of a wedding consisting of five people. She took the time to study the three men at the top of the aisle as she made her way down. Jimmy looked incredibly serious and somber, which meant he was nervous as hell. Tommy looked like he had been threatened with what would happen if he didn't behave. And Richard...Richard was looking straight at her. Her heart suddenly beat with a little more furor against her rib cage. That was when Tommy started waving wildly at her and ran past to hug his mother.

Once they were all standing on the dais Richard wasn't sure where to look. Looking directly at Jimmy and Angela felt intrusive. Clara smiled at him when she caught his eye. He looked back down. Standing across the aisle from Clara, smiling at him in a pretty peach dress holding flowers, felt cruel. The world was mocking him by letting him get so close to the things he would never have.

*************************

"Do me a favor?" Jimmy asked after the last picture was taken. "Keep Tommy and Clara away from the hotel for a while?"

Richard nodded, and then went to tell Clara they were babysitting. "Mmm. What should. We do with him?"

Clara thought for a moment. "Tommy's going to get grouchy if we don't feed him. Ever been to the Automat?"

The large marble building with the huge letters stood out even among the visual noise of Times Square. Tommy openly gawked at the marble edifice, the dolphins that served as coffee faucets, and the other marvels of the restaurant, but Richard privately thought the restaurant looked like something out of an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel set on Mars. Richard exchanged dollar bills for nickels while Clara toured Tommy around. The child was fascinated by the idea that he could choose anything he wanted behind the glass doors. Richard had to pick him up several times so he could pick the exact ham sandwich, piece of egg custard pie, and a glass of milk he wanted and feed the nickels in himself to open the windows and retrieve the dishes. Then Tommy insisted on feeding the coins into the slots to retrieve Clara's and finally Richard's choices.

Clara, seeing Richard picked meatloaf and mashed potatoes, chose a table in the far corner of the restaurant, before settling Tommy in a chair facing out into the Automat and herself next to him, leaving Richard .the chair facing into the corner.

"I need to eat," Richard said haltingly.

"I as well, or I'll be as grouchy as Tommy," Clara said as she cut up Tommy's sandwich into quarters.

"You don't have. To sit. With me," he said, as he picked up his plate from their tray.

"Richard, where else are we going to sit? It's fine. Please eat," Clara said, before opening up her silverware so she could eat her lunch. As much as she wanted to, she didn't let herself lookup.

Eating in the mask was awful. He usually skipped eating if he couldn't be alone and take his mask off, but sharing a hotel suite with four other people made this difficult, so he was going to have to try. Each bite tasted of tin, and it was a struggle to keep the food from getting caught on the side of the mask, and he feared that food would slide out the edge of the mask without him noticing. Eating in a restaurant full of people and in front of Clara and Tommy was torture. He cut the meatloaf into the smallest bites possible that he could try and swallow without making to much of a scene. Tommy was busy with his lunch and repeated debates with Clara about when he could start eating his pie, and Clara pretended to be fascinated by her clam chowder. She bartered with whatever entity might be out there that Tommy wouldn't ask any questions about Richard eating. From the corner of her eye, she could see he struggled to swallow. She stared harder at her clam chowder, worried that her face would betray the pity she felt. Pity she swore she would never let him see.

Tommy used the moment where both adults were distracted to grab for his pie, sending the rest of his milk across the table and onto the skirt of Clara's new dress. Clara grabbed her napkin and Tommy's, but the milk was still everywhere and spreading fast. Richard stood quickly to avoid Clara's fate.

"I'll. Get more napkins."

The lady overseeing the condiment table looked for clean napkins. When he looked back at the table, he saw Clara holding both of Tommy's hands by the wrists in an attempt, he supposed, to save her dress from having pie stains added to the milk stains. The woman saw him look over, and said: "you have a lovely family." Clara saw him then and made a face as she tried to corral Tommy, and he thought it was somehow better and worse to long for something when you knew what it would feel like to have it.

****************************************************

Once more, everyone piled into their finery. Except for this time, it was their very best. Jimmy had planned this night since the first week in December. For Christmas, he had asked Clara to take Angela to La Belle Femme to get her a real evening gown. He had bought dinner suits for him and Richard.

"I'm telling you, we're going to get a lot of wear out of these," Jimmy told Richard. Richard wondered when. On bootlegging runs? When there was a job to be done?

They all crowded into the taxi (except for Tommy, who was tucked in at the hotel with a sitter), with Richard in the front, which pulled through Central Park in front of Beaux-Arts style building with a brightly lit semi-circle addition whose light beckoned into the darkness of the park. Well dressed people milled around the outside of the building.

"It's called the Casino, and it's the best place in New York. The party tonight is going to be swell," Jimmy told them. Clara thought this must be how her father had been in his early twenties. Nucky loved the good life and everything that went with it. It's why she grew up on the eighth floor of the Ritz, its why his yearly Nucky's Nocturne party for the state government ensured that the Ritz 's catering department turned a profit each year, it's why she had stood impatiently while her father browbeat the Chicago hotel into giving them the best suite instead of the second-best suite.

When the car stopped, a handsome man with large dark eyes opened the door and helped Clara out of the car. "Miss Thompson, how ya' doin?"

Clara tilted her head and thought about it for a moment. "Ah, Mr. Luciano."

Richard didn't like how Luciano was looking at Clara, who looked the like the Fancy Social Clara he found difficult to reconcile with everyday Clara. She was wearing a blue dress that came down to her ankles and was heavily decorated with gold from the shoulders down past her knees. The material was thin, and the light played on the thin material in such a way that you weren't sure when you were looking at fabric versus her skin. She had topped it with some sort of gold headband and matching earrings.

"Mr. Lansky," Clara recalled as the shorter man approached her. He had understood her Frankenstein reference when that odious little man from Chicago Jimmy was so fond of thought to torment Richard.

"Miss Thompson."

"Call her Clara," Jimmy said as he came around the car. "And this is my wife, Angela. You know my associate, Richard Harrow."

Clara tried to catch Richard's eye. As far as Clara knew, Jimmy despised Luciano and hadn't wanted peace with Rothstein. So why were Luciano and Lansky joining them on Jimmy and Angela's wedding night? Richard wouldn't look at her.

"So, Meyer and..." Clara said conversationally, falling back to the lively party manners her father had drilled into her at an early age.

"You can call me Charlie," Luciano answered. Clara smiled and nodded, and moved forward toward Richard.

"Penso che la principessa stia fottendo il mostro. Le deve piacere il suo equipaggiamento, perché sicuramente non lo farà per il suo viso," Charlie said to Meyer as they started to walk into the Casino.

Angela gasped. Clara turned back to face them. Her entire body turned hot, and she could feel her heart start to race. She had only been vaguely listening at first, but she had started listening in time to understand the gist-Luciano was insinuating that she was intimate with Richard because of his equipment, not his face. Except in far harsher terms.

Meyer closed his eyes and ever so slightly shook his head sadly. Not smart, Charlie, he thought. Just because Darmody and Harrow didn't speak Italian didn't mean the women didn't. The wife even looked Italian.

"Mi piace la sua faccia meglio della tua personalità. Forse potresti provare ad aggrapparti al tuo cazzo," Clara retorted, her eyes bright with fury. Wonderful, Meyer thought. What was going to make this situation better was Nucky Thompson's daughter insulting Charlie's personality and telling him to cling to his own cock.

"And how is it you speak Italian so well, Clara?" Meyer asked, hoping to diffuse the situation.

"I went to a Catholic school in New Jersey. Since I could read and write Italian when I was hired by the War Department they made me a translator."

"Fottuta ragazza viziata,"Charlie muttered.

"Povero ragazzino che cerca di essere un vero uomo," Clara snapped back.

"Clara," Jimmy said, having no idea what Sal or Lucky or whatever the fuck his name is and Clara could be fighting about, but seeing they were making excellent progress in becoming mortal enemies in the space of minutes.

Angela whispered in Jimmy's ear, "He just called her a spoiled little girl, and she just said he's a little boy pretending to be a real man."

"Fucking fantastic." Clara, who faked perfect politeness to everyone, chose Sal-Lucky-Charlie fucking Luciano to offload on. It was exactly the complication he needed.

"Ero abbastanza uomo per Gillian Darmody," Lucky retorted. Angela gasped again. Gillian was sleeping with this man?

"Cazzo Gillian non ti rende un uomo," Clara said heatedly. Angela filed away the idea that Clara didn't believe sleeping with Gillian automatically meant someone was a man to think about a later.

Charlie took a step towards Clara, causing Richard to swiftly push between them. Meyer interceded between Charlie and Richard. Clara turned toward Richard, his reaction to Darby insulting her flashing through her mind, and grabbed his wrists.

"Charlie is very sorry, yes? Yes?" Meyer all but shouts in his friend's face.

"I took it way to far," Clara says, looking directly into Richard's gaze. "My temper got the better of me. Please." She lowers her voice. "It's not worth it, Richard. Please." Her hands are in his, and he nods finally.

"Is it odd for you to not be the one starting a random fight?" Angela asked her husband. She would have never guessed that it would be Clara who lit the match. Jimmy looked at her but didn't answer.

"Fine. I'm very sorry," Charlie says.

Clara lets go of Richard's left hand and spins around to offer Charlie her right hand. "And I as well. Friends?"

"Amici," he says in response, shaking her hand. "And what we said in Italian?"

"Stays between us." Clara confirms. Charlie nods. Good. Life was complicated enough without worrying that Metal Face was going to come after him.

Clara and Richard walk slightly ahead. "Jesus, Darmody. The broads in your life. They look like angels and swear like sailors." Charlie remembers Angela. "Except for you, ma'am. You look like an angel who doesn't regularly tell people to go fuck themselves." Angela nods, and wonders why the hell she's spending her wedding night with these people.