Author's Note: Smut warning! Also, thanks to ofautumnleaves for a major plot point.

Music drifted out from Clara's room, a soft sound almost drowned out by the cacophony of the party going on beyond the hall door. The fact no one realized he still had the key to Clara's hall made Richard worry about how lax security had become in the suite.

He was there because Jimmy had told him, when they were done with the job, that Clara had been frantically looking for him all day. 'I told you about hurting her, Rich' Jimmy had said in a sardonic voice, but at the same time Richard heard an edge. He'd asked Jimmy how. He meant, how could do the things he did and then go to her? Jimmy understood and pointed out he was going home to Angela and Tommy.

Richard didn't have an answer. He just didn't know how he could do these things and then go to Clara.

'Clara loves you, at least in part, because she thinks you actually see her and not the Princess of the Ritz. If nothing else, you should go talk to her. You're a soldier, but you don't have to be just a soldier. And Clara? Behind that princess facade? She's a bruiser.'

Richard stood outside her door for as long as he dared before he knocked. He didn't like the idea of her being frantic with worry over him. He wasn't worth it.

"Yes?" Clara asked sleepily from behind the door, suspicion evident in her voice.

"It's. Richard. Harrow."

"Richard!" Clara had the door open and her arms around him before he could react. She pressed in for a tight hug. His head fell to her shoulder, and he smelled the ocean salt and orange smell of her. He didn't think he'd ever feel Clara's weight pressed against him or smell her again. His hands lifted, but he couldn't make them go around her.

Clara realized he wasn't responding and leaned back to look at him. He looked...gone. His mask had marks all over it. His good eye looked less lively than the painted one. His head hung on his shoulders like his neck could no longer bear the weight.

"Richard?" she asked, notes of fear creeping into her voice. He lifted his head to look at her, but she could see that it took effort. "What's wrong?"

She was wearing the pajamas she'd been wearing almost a year ago when Jimmy sent him to her room to make sure she was okay after the d'Allessios tried to kill Nucky on the Boardwalk, he noticed. Just like that night, the right strap had fallen off her shoulder. But now he could just reach over and use his fingertips to push the strap back up onto her shoulder. He could put his hand on her face and she'd lean up and kiss him. He could tell her that everything felt impossibly dark and the nightmares kept playing behind his eyes even when he was awake and he knew she would pour herself over him and try and share her warmth and light with his cold and shadowed soul.

Beyond her hall, rich men were having women. Women whose names they probably didn't know, that they certainly didn't care about, whom they would never think about again, and that they only appreciated in the same way Richard appreciated a piece of cheese when he was hungry.

Anger flamed inside him. He loved Clara. The fact that a few months ago she stood in front of him and kissed him still felt unreal. That first night, when her feet were on top of his and he fell asleep with her breath on his cheek, was one of the best things that had ever happened to him. So why must he give up what he held dear?

It was because he loved her, he knew. He couldn't bear to poison her with his darkness.

"I don't know," he responded with a click.

He stared at her, she thought, like he was waiting for her to understand what he wasn't saying. She stared back. The emptiness in his face terrified her. She looked again at the bitten mask, at his less than perfectly pressed clothing. He looked like he had tramped through the woods. A sudden fear clenched her heart.

She herded him into her room, and then shut the door. One hand reached out and touched the back his head, feeling the way the silky strands dropped over the back of his collar. "Your hair, Richard," she said in a voice that was soft and scared and horrified all at the same time. "Jimmy's hair is always a mess, but yours... yours is always so neat. But it's so long. When did you last visit the barber?"

He didn't answer. He looked at her clean hand laying against his chest. Suddenly, he was afraid that evidence of what he did, of what he is, remained on his hands. "I need. To. Wash my hands."

Clara gestured towards her bathroom and walked out to the balcony. It was a perfect May night, and she breathed in the warm salty air. Summer, she thought, she could smell the beginning of summer. Even at this late hour she could still hear the first summer visitors enjoying the Boardwalk. She heard Richard's footfall behind her. "You promised you'd see me at the Dedication. I was worried when you didn't come because you aren't a person who breaks his promises."

He didn't answer, so she turned to face him. Worry was etched on her face. "Richard, please. I don't understand what's wrong. I thought things were lovely between us. I missed you while I was gone. I looked forward to seeing you from the moment I got off the train. What happened?"

Watching him try and form the words was painful. "I'll poison you."

Clara took a ragged breath and closed her eyes. She'd always known this conversation had to be part of their story, but she still wasn't sure how to handle it. "Richard, that's not true."

There was poison, she thought. It was infecting everything in her world. I will not let destroy Richard, she thought furiously. I will not let it destroy us.

"Mmm. You don't know. What I am." He still wouldn't look at her, and Clara's fury, which ebbed and flowed all day, began to rise once more.

"You are the one person I never expected to treat me like some little dumb Dora. I told you the day you went to Philadelphia. I am the daughter of this house. I know what you were told to do. You killed that...boy." Clara almost had to turn away from the look of pain on Richard's face when she said it, but she knew the way forward was through.

"His brother. But Richard, it was on my father's order. Jimmy slit the throat of another brother; I'm not which of you or if someone else killed the fourth d'Alessio. Jimmy asked you to kill the man who cut that girl in Chicago he cared..."

"Ask me. What I did. Tonight." Richard said in a voice much harsher than his typical voice. He looked straight at her. She could see fear and pain in his good eye.

"Okay," Clara asked, afraid but unwilling to show it."What did you do tonight?"

Richard forced himself to look her in the face as he said it, although he knew it would be the last time Clara ever looked at him without revulsion.

"I scalped. An. Old man."

Clara flinched. "Did you rob a stagecoach as well? Why in God's..." Before she could finish the thought, her own voice saying 'This one old man-I always thought he was horrid-he started talking about how much money he made off the war, and I swear I considered sliding my steak knife between his ribs' as she stood in the Natural History Museum with Richard came back to her. No, she thought, no. And then, she cracked.

"Please, please tell me that Jimmy didn't have you scalp Jackson Parkhurst."

He heard the panic and despair in her voice. "He did."

Her face fell, and Richard hung his head.

Was Jimmy trying to lose to her father? Was he fucking determined to take Richard down with him? Clara's mind raced so quickly she couldn't control the words coming out of her mouth.

"Are you both fucking idiots? The man's a canker sore on the soul of humanity, but what the hell is Jimmy thinking? Those Yacht Club men, he needs their political clout and, more importantly, he needs their money if he has any hope of pulling off his precious coup against my father."

She wasn't understanding, it was too much, he thought. The pain of having to tell her again was almost unbearable. "Clara. I scalped. Him."

"Yes, thank you, I understood the first time. What I don't understand is why the hell Jimmy would think was a good play. Is he incapable of thinking more than one step ahead at a time? I'd say he's playing checkers while my father is playing chess, but at this point, he's apparently playing hopscotch! And I swear to god I'm going over and confiscating Tommy's cowboy and Indian toys first thing tomorrow. Obviously they don't have a good impact on the male psyche."

She still doesn't understand what I mean, Richard thought. "Parkhurst." He had to swallow several times. "Died."

"My God, you think me so unintelligent that I can't decipher that an old man will die if you cut off his scalp?"

Richard stared at her, unable to answer.

Clara's fury boiled over.

"What? You think me some doe-eyed innocent? That I'm a paper doll from your book who will crumble when confronted by the reality of Atlantic City? This is my world, Wisconsin. You just joined up; I was born into this quagmire. My father was a corrupt lying bastard before he decided that the onset of Prohibition was the perfect time to play criminal kingpin. And why the passage of the Volstead Act made Jimmy think he was the second coming of the Dolan Brothers is beyond my understanding.

"But do you know want to know what actually horrifies me? My father is playing this game like a fucking adult-I spent the morning under strict orders to charm the Attorney General-while you and Jimmy are acting like two little boys playing Indians in the woods. Do you know what happened to the Sioux when they encountered corrupt bastards with shaky moral codes? Well, Jackson Parkhurst would have told us in horrifying detail if you hadn't scalped him earlier tonight."

They stared at each other. Clara's eyes were bright and wild, Richard's was overwhelmed.

Clara ran her hands along the railing behind her, trying to calm down. "Since you haven't bothered to ask, let me tell you how my trip was. I loved being with Rose and Dorothy. I loved seeing their parents. But it struck me how different our lives are now. I lie awake at night and think about how my father won the Commodore's patronage. I worried about my father going to prison, but today I got a glimpse of just how angry my father is, and now I'm terrified that Jimmy will lose this stupid war. There are worse things than prison." Clara closed her eyes. I didn't love, she thought, Rose's incessant need to talk about the final days of the war. She had finally made her peace and was moving forward; ripping off the still healing scabs was painful and seemed pointless, but it gave her additional resolve to fix this tonight.

"That's why. I can't. Be with you," he growled softly, looking at the ground.

"You haven't listened to anything I've said." Clara walked towards him. "If you don't want me, if you don't want to be with me, okay. If you want to go back to Wisconsin and leave us all to our craziness, that's okay, too. Sometimes I think that's what you should do." It would break my heart, she thinks.

"But I'm in this, Richard. This is my father, this is my family, this is my history, and at the moment it's my reality. So it's not a matter of your saving me if you end things with me. It's a matter of if I go through this alone, or if I go through this with the man I love."

He looked up at her, then.

Her voice was unsteady, and she twirled the end of her braid nervously. "I love you, you idiot. You aren't hiding any deep dark secrets from me. I worked for the War Department. I know what you did. I know..."

Richard took her hand and ran his thumb across the top. He thought of the pink-cheeked girl scared to realize she was in a bordello. Almost a year ago, he thought. She seemed like a daydream come to life, and now she stood in front of him and declared her love. She thought she knew him.

He took a deep breath. He couldn't let Clara declare her love thinking she knew him when she didn't. "Not just the war. Or on your father's order. Or Jimmy's. I've done other things. Mmm. I was in Chicago. I needed money. I had been at. A veteran's meeting..."

Dear god, Clara thought. For a moment she wanted to just run. Run away from all of it. Then she was sorry she couldn't go back in time, to that day in Chicago, and take Richard by the hand and just go. You tried that, a voice in her head whispered. You weren't enough to make him leave. You'll never be enough for him, either.

"I did it. I prayed it. Was the right thing. But it probably wasn't."

Clara put her hands against his face, warm flesh under her left hand and flesh and cold metal under her right. He looked so vulnerable that it twisted her heart; she knew that no matter what happened that to her he'd always be a boy broken by the war, the man who saved her life, the only person who saw her as a whole person. The War Department, some random bastard, her father, Jimmy, in the end, they were all the same by her reckoning. "So another corrupt bastard found out about what you did in the war and you used you for their own ends. That doesn't change anything, not for me, anyway."

"Then why. Did you. Make fun of me?" He asked, and again she heard the pain in his voice.

"What?" Clara looked at him, completely lost. "Oh, your book. I wasn't making fun of you, Richard. Just....pointing out I'm not picture perfect. I'm real, I love you in part because you always treated me like a complex person."

"How did. You know."

Clara sighed and moved her hands to his shoulders. "The night after you left when...well, to go to Philadelphia. I missed you. I was worried about you. I went in your room-I just meant to sit on your bed for a minute, I just wanted to feel close to you-and something struck my leg. It was a book. I didn't understand what it was, at first. I thought you were just being ridiculously neat."

He's silent, and he won't look at her again.

"It's beautiful, you know that, right? It was like looking at one of Angela's paintings."

"No one was. Supposed to see." He paused, thinking about all the things she probably saw. "Did you see. Me?"

"Yes. You were very handsome, but I knew that already, didn't I?"

He felt...stripped bare, he thought. He never expected to see the stars shining over the night, nor have every one from random hunters to Jimmy tell him he had to actually live. He never expected to go to Clara and tell her what he did, and for her concern to be over the ramifications of the act, instead of the horror of it. He worried all the time that no one was protecting Clara, and now he knew he was one of the people failing to protect her from the world they lived in.

Clara knew all of it, and she had seen his book. She had seen it back in November. She was still here.

The emotional upheaval of the day finally broke him. He reached for her, almost without thinking, and slid along the wall of her balcony until he was on the floor and she was sitting sideways in his lap.

Clara's warmth came through the fabric of his shirt as she nestled against him, the silk and lace of her pajama top loosely rubbing against his forearm. The sound of the surf relentlessly beating against the shore beneath them obliterated almost all other sounds, but he could hear the soft sound of her breathing underneath it. He let his head fall against hers. Oranges. Always oranges. And underneath the smell of oranges and oceans, he could smell the slight sweetness of her skin. His arm tightened against her unconsciously. Everyone told him to live, to want. Suddenly he felt his ever-present longing for Clara shift to something more elemental, to sheer hunger.

The fog lifted, the darkness receded, and he wanted.

Some instinct made Clara raise her head. He cupped her head in one hand and traced the soft planes of her face with the other. Soon his hand was drifting down her neck, and his other hand was tracing down her side, stopping only to knead the outside of her hip. Clara's emotions had been running at a fever pitch all day, and now she felt herself balancing on a precipice.

It took all his restraint not to pull her top off as they sat on the balcony. Suddenly the reality of his day crashed back over him. He wanted her, but not with every sin and every darkness of the day still on him.

It was a difficult question to ask. "Can I. Mm. Use your shower?" He didn't make eye contact.

Clara blinked, trying to decipher what was behind the question and what it meant. "Of course. There's a clean towel hanging on the door."

Richard extracted his various limbs and made his way to her bathroom. Clara waited until she heard the water run for a moment, and then dashed into her bedroom. She went straight for the hollowed-out book where she hid her dutch cap when she took it out a couple of hours earlier after she failed to find Richard. She cast a nervous look at the bathroom door, but the water was still running. Sliding her pajama pants down, she tried to be as efficient as possible. She pulled them back up, and quickly realized she had no way to wash her hands. Finally, she settled for taking her carafe of water to the balcony and pouring some over her hands.

The warm water was beating down on his shoulders, and he tried to imagine it carrying away all the dirt and darkness from the day. Clara had a plethora of products balanced around the edge of the tub. A safety razor was balanced precariously on top of the soap dish (he moved it because he could see it falling and her stepping on it). Mulsified Cocoanut Oil Shampoo sat next to a bar of orange soap and another bar of Ponds soap. He didn't know why she needed two bars, or which he should use. The orange soap would make him smell like Clara, so he started to reach for the other. He realized that if the rest of the night went as planned, he was going to smell more like Clara than just her soap. The realization made him knock the razor to the floor, where he promptly stepped on it.

His next decision was what the hell to leave the bathroom wearing. His choices were his own clothes, Clara's kimono, or a towel. He couldn't bear to put his clothes back on, he couldn't even imagine how ridiculous he would look in her robe, so he wrapped the towel around his hips and put his mask on.

Clara was standing by her bed. Her eyes automatically went to him when he opened the door, and her breath hitched. In their times together before, when they'd done 'other things' as she termed it, they'd been in the car or under a blanket. She'd never actually seen him undressed; they'd unbuttoned what needed to be unbuttoned and slid hands under clothing, mostly. Now she could see the muscles that ran from his shoulders down his arms, the long slim planes of his chest and stomach, and the line of hair that started at his naval and ran under the towel. She swallowed.

"I wasn't sure if I should get in bed, and if I did if I should get under the covers, or if since we are in an actual bed the covers will just get in our way..." She didn't tell him that she'd been standing there for at least five minutes trying to decide.

Although he was still standing a little way away he reached forward and curled her hands into his. "Mmm. Are you. Scared?"

Clara shook her head. They stood there until she couldn't take it anymore. "Can you take off the mask?"