A/N: First part of the final chapter. Some emotional smut, and lots of thinking about Mabel...

"I smell like that place," Clara whispered, still wrapped in his jacket as they went up the stairs even though the house, to him, was stifling.

"Do you want. A bath?"

Clara shook her head adamantly, almost losing her precarious balance. "No!"

He reached out to steady her as they stepped into the second floor. Richard tried to keep from staring at the red and purple ring of raw flesh around her neck. Something had been said about water treatment, and now he wished he'd asked Rose what that meant. The dark bruises around her wrists and ankles could have only come from restraints. They tied her down, and she'd fought against them. The discoloration was worse on her right arm, the bruising fading to green around her forearm. For a moment, he saw broken yellow blisters instead of fresh bruises and closed his eyes to push away the delusion and focus on his wife.

Turning the shower on as hot as it would go he turned back to help her as she clumsily attempted to undress.

Yes, Clara thought as her blouse fell to the floor, now Richard was the last person who undressed her, instead of some nurse preparing her for the next horror. It could all be washed away, she determined, and then they could go to bed, and then she would sleep and it would fade into something that happened to her once.

Stumbling into the shower Clara let the hot water pour over her. She braced against the tile wall in an attempt to stay upright, fighting to keep her legs going out from underneath her. She closed her eyes and stepped into the spray, hoping the hot water would drive away the cold. Drive away the smell. It felt like the antiseptic stench of the sanitarium was embedded in her flesh.

The shower curtain opened and she felt Richard slide in behind her. That was quick, she thought, but she was aware time was still vague in her mind. His fingertip trailed slightly down the inside of her arm, making her shiver in a different way. Then she heard the twist of the metal cap of her shampoo bottle before his hands descended into her hair. She closed her eyes and leaned back a little. Much better than washing her own, she thought dreamily as his fingertips worked across her scalp, and then he guided her head under the water. Wooziness hit her again, and he caught her and wrapped an arm around her ribs.

"Mmm. Are you okay?" he whispered into her ear.

Clara nodded. She wasn't sure how he managed to get her bar of orange soap in his hand, but he was slowly bringing it up her arm and across her clavicle and the sensation sent shivers down her spine. She leaned back against him fully and felt him against her. Suddenly he stepped back.

"What's wrong?" she asked, her hand reaching out for the wall to steady herself as she turned around.

Richard wouldn't look up at her.

"It's not the. Time," he answered.

"Stop acting like I'm made of glass!" Clara snapped as she realized why he moved away. The exhaustion, the drugs, the fear, all of it overwhelmed her reticence. "Why are you afraid to want me?"

He shook his head. "Clara. I..."

Still braced against the wall Clara clumsily lowered herself to her knees. Things were going to be normal, she thought. They had to be normal, and she'd do what she must to find normalcy.

The element of surprise worked in her favor. She ran her tongue along the underside of his cock, feeling it jerk against her face before opening her mouth and slowly sliding her mouth over the crown. Hearing him gasp, she put her hand on the back of his leg and pulled him more firmly into her mouth.

It wasn't something she would say to anyone-not even Rose (who explained to her what French style was, one night in a tent erected behind a Belgian field hospital), not even Richard-but she quite enjoyed it. She liked the idea that she could push him past his inhibitions until he made quite delectable noises and would start moving without realizing it. The first time he'd spent at least a minute telling her she didn't have to do it, and then unconsciously thrust into her mouth and bumped against the back of her throat, making her gag.

Clara had to suppress a giggle when she remembered the five minutes he'd spent apologizing. Now she could feel his hands hovering over the top of her head like he was fighting an urge to push her head down further.

Well, she had no such scruples holding her back. She repositioned her tongue along the underside of his cock and breathed out through her nose. The water beating down on her back was cooling and for a moment she lost her bearings as the coldness came back. Leaning forward, she breathed the smell of him and tried to stay in the moment as she pulled him closer.

"Mmm. Stop," Richard managed to get out as he put his hands under her arms. "I, mmm..."

He pulled them back under the water, but the cold was settling back over her and her teeth started to chatter in the now lukewarm water. He helped her over the lip of the tub and wrapped a towel around her.

She wanted to yell at him to stop. Stop being nice. Stop taking care of her before all the tenderness brought out all the feelings she was trying to suppress. There was no reason to cry, she reminded herself, everything was fine. Her father was a fucking liar who stole from her and told her Richard was dead, but that was then and now she was standing here with him and everything was fine. Fine.

But if he treated her like she was fragile, she would shatter.

Clara was drawn to the mirror over the dresser when she stumbled back into their room, her finger going around her neck, feeling the damaged flesh, and then she saw the marks on her wrist reflected in the mirror.

The memory came unbidden, and with such force, it left her dizzy. Her mother's wrists ripped open and bright red as she lay on the bathroom floor. Her mother's face, pale and still.

Clara stared hard at her reflection.

She never admitted all the parts of her that were her mother, because she refused to accept there was enough of her mother in her to determine her fate. It was a Pandora's box whose lid she resisted opening.

Normally, she maintained control over the forbidden areas of her mind. But not now, when every thought and feeling was a jumble that moved like a fast-flowing stream, circumventing all her means of control.

Her eyes, they were from her father. Her coloring, Grandmother Eleanor. But the rest...

Clara, for a very long time, refused to see it. Not in the way her ears were shaped. Not in the way her mouth thinned out towards the corners. Not in the curve of her cheek. Not in the way her eyebrows knitted together when she worried. Not in the way her hand twisted her skirt when she was nervous. Not in the way she smoothed Tommy's hair back from his forehead.

Richard's movements were reflected in the mirror and caught her gaze. Who knew, she considered, that she was capable of loving someone so much? The people she loved she loved as best she could, but she knew her love was never quite enough. Uncle Eli's disappointment that affection for her cousins didn't flow naturally. Her father's annoyance that she couldn't just accept Margaret and her children as family.

She hadn't loved her mother enough.

Your grandfather, he didn't want your mother to marry your father, Eli had told her the night of the ball.

Goodness but your mother fought her father so she could have Nucky, Leander told her after Angela died.

Of course, she had known that she had some of her mother's personality, her intellect, her interests. But Clara had always thought that it was she, that it was all her doomed siblings who never quite grasped onto life, had destroyed her mother's spirit. All that grief for the lost ones. All the not-enoughness of Clara. That's what had doomed her mother. That's what the rhythm to which her mind had beat since she was eight years old.

But once, this woman whose mouth smiled in the same way hers did, was as determined as Clara. Because once, her mother had loved her father fiercely. So fiercely she battled with Grandpa Jeffries over him. Clara had loved her grandfather, but that didn't mean that even as a child she hadn't sensed that he was not a man to cross.

A wave of grief cascaded over her for her mother. Different from all the grieving, both experienced fully and buried deeply, Clara had done over the last fifteen years. It wasn't even the lonely longing she'd experienced so often.

It was a fully formed adult grief, singed with anger both for her mother's abandonment and what led up to it as memories from throughout Clara's life ricocheted off this new emotional reckoning in no particular order, but leaving the feeling that Clara wasn't quite seeing something right in front of her.

The familiar sound of tin against wood followed by the lighter sound of the metal of the dog tags being placed on the side table knocked her from her reverie. Clara shivered at the sound and turned to stare.

He felt the weight of her stare and automatically turned back to check on her. Her look of barely suppressed horror made him instinctively reach for the mask. She's scared and medicated, he reasoned, his face was more than she could deal with now, and he should have realized.

Clara saw his hand reach for the mask. "No, please don't. It's...my father. He had your dog tags, when he..." she swallowed around the words she couldn't bring herself to say. "And I didn't believe him, not exactly, but I couldn't keep my mind from picturing what he was saying. That you were in a ditch."

Her fingers were twisting into the damp strands of her hair, knitting them into knots. Her skin was still bright with red splotches from the hot water of the shower, but even though their bedroom was warm she shivered like it was January instead of August.

Not even in the moments after the d'Alessio attack, not even when she thought he had known about the attempt on her father's life, had he seen her look like this.

Like she was absolutely coming undone from the inside. He knew he needed to fix her, but he didn't know how to take that look from her eyes.

If Nucky Thompson had appeared in front of him at that moment he could have ripped the man limb from limb.

The idea of twisting her hair bothered her so much it kept her from bobbing her hair for ages. He picked up the scarf she wore to bed and carefully tied it so that her hair was back from her face, and her hand fell to her side.

It was the least he could do since he had failed her.

He looked down at her shoulder. "I didn't. Know where you were. Mmm. I thought. The Butcher had. You. I didn't know what he would. Do."

"I'm fine," she whispered.

"It's my job. To protect you."

Clara lifted her head, for the first time considering what her disappearance had inflicted on him. There was nothing about this that didn't hurt, but the look on Richard's face inflicted new agony. His eye was unnaturally bright. His mouth usually relaxed when he took off the mask, but the right side quivered and curled like it did when he was upset. Her father hurt Richard, Clara realized. Beyond whatever horrid plan her father had attempted, just the taking of her was enough to hurt Richard.

Her fingertip traced the side of his mouth. So familiar, she thought, that exact blend of skin and mustache and stubble, like her fingers had brushed against his face for years. Blindfolded, in a life filled with countless others, she could find him by the sound of his breathing, the echo of his footsteps, the weight of his touch on her arm, or the smell of his skin. It's why she hadn't believed her father. If he wasn't here on Earth with her, there's no way she wouldn't feel his absence. Clara laughed at this but of ridiculous romanticism, but then decided they'd been married less than a month. She was supposed to indulge in romantic thoughts. Like the idea he was a part of her she had known and lost and never expected to find again, the smell and sense of him so familiar even though he was a stranger, like in Chicago when he felt so comfortable from the beginning.

She forced herself back into the moment.

"You do. You will. But you can't protect me from the things that made up my life before I ever met you."

"You know. That I want. You," he said against her hair so he didn't have to meet her gaze. "It why. I stopped you."

Ah, Clara realized, and then thought help me chase this pain away. She turned to press her mouth against the healthy side of his. As they fell on the bed she did her best to push every thought from her mind and focus only on the sensations. On her need to have and be had, and reassure herself on her most primal level that they were alive and together.

She lost herself in the familiar push and pull of taking each other to the edge and backing off again. When he pulled away from her she whimpered from confusion until she saw him reach for the drawer of his bedside table.

Oh god, she hadn't thought to put in her Dutch cap. "Thank you for remembering," she whispered as he ripped open the french letter.

And then he was on top of her again, and she fell away from Atlantic City back through the mist of time. For one panicked moment it felt like she couldn't open her eyes, that she could feel the bandages Rose applied in a desperate attempt to save her eyesight, wrapped around her head.

She needed this, she needed this man, and through the adrenaline and fear coursing through her she didn't doubt her choice, even if she never thought her first time would be under a table in a war zone with someone incapable of kissing her because of his bandages. Even if she never expected her first time to take place in the shadow of her probable death.

A familiar hand brushed across her face, pushing the errant scarf off her face and back into her hair. Clara gasped. Just a memory just a memory just a memory she told herself. That was then, and now she was with Richard.

It was the sudden way she went still and quiet that made him lift his head from her neck. The scarf had come loose and was over her eyes and he brushed it back without thinking, but it was the bruises around her wrists that made him stop.

Of course, he thought, she'd been tied down. Being pressed into the bed by the weight of his body was restraining her, he was making it worse.

Clara wasn't certain why Richard suddenly flipped them so he was sitting up in bed and she was in his lap, but it pulled her back from her reverie.

Oh, she thought as she realized how different it felt like this, oh.

And then she stopped thinking.

Afterward she drifted back and forth between deeply asleep and semi-consciousness but was mostly suspended in drugged half-consciousness as the medicine kept working through her system. Sometimes she thought she was awake, but soon realized she was falling into another pocket of half-recalled memory or into a nightmare fueled by her deepest fears. Sometimes they blended so that her mother's body turned to Richard's or when she saw her brother's hand it wasn't the small hand of an infant but instead was Jimmy's familiar hand turned to bleached bone.

She finally stirred awake. For a moment she feared the feeling of his skin pressed against hers was just an illusion, that she was really still in that place. But no, she decided. She was laying in an odd position because she'd simply pitched forward and fallen asleep when they had finished. Even though it was vaguely uncomfortable for her and she feared miserable for him, she didn't want to move. Thirst finally drove her to seek the carafe on the bedside table. She couldn't remember how many days ago they'd filled it.

His hand reached for her hip as she leaned away.

"I'm so sorry, that couldn't have been comfortable for you," Clara said as they lay back down.

He pulled her closer. "Mmm. I've slept for. Ten minutes at a time. In a tree. Anywhere with you. Is better." They were silent, the only sound that of their breathing and the wind coming off the ocean.

"I don't think. We can stay. In Atlantic City," he said, running his fingers along her back. "I don't think. Jimmy can stay. Either."

No, Clara thought, we can not. Everyone has to decide for themselves how much sin they can live with. That's what her father always said. But suddenly Clara grasped how it was possible to think the line was one place, only to realize you'd long since crossed it. She had done things that the girl she was just a few years ago would never even conceive of. It could eat away at you, Clara thought until nothing remained.

"It's time for a new life. We all need to leave. I don't care if we end up in a boarding house, anything is better than staying here, staying in this life."

It's easy for her to say that, Richard thought. Clara had never worried where her next dollar was coming from. He didn't want to reduce her circumstances beyond what she found bearable. He wanted her happy and safe.

But there are things I have to do first, Clara realized. She had to know, and there was only one person to ask.

"I need a favor. You aren't going to like it."

Clara checked her wristwatch as the automobile slowed. It was only seven, but the sky was already darkening. Maybe, she thought, it would rain and break this awful heat. Even before, before she went away, the days had stretched on hot and oppressive.

"I don't. See. Mmm. Why you need," Richard began.

Clara squeezed his hand. "I know. But I..." she closed her eyes. "I keep my thoughts very orderly. On purpose. Sometimes, something happens, like you and they go in ways I never meant but still...I keep them orderly. I keep them orderly on purpose. But the medicine, and being in that place, my thoughts and memories are all jumbled and they are making new pictures. The jumble is making me look at things in a new way, making me reconsider what I think I know about everything. It's the difference between standing on the Boardwalk and looking down at the Boardwalk from the top of the Ferris Wheel. Standing on the Boardwalk, you see things in linear order. The Chop Suey restaurant has nothing to do with Formica Brothers. But from Ferris Wheel, you realize there's a back alley that connects them."

Richard nodded, thinking of the difference between standing on a grassy field with a rifle looking for the enemy and then the view from the tree.

A fat raindrop hit the windshield.

"And she's the only person I can ask about some of it," Clara said before leaning over the kiss his cheek and climb from the car.

He watched his wife climb the marble stairs and knock on the door of the deceased Commodore's mansion.