#i always give bell some months to a year between the airstrip and the rest of the game so they don’t have to brainwash them in like 2 weeks

[xappetites]

idk why i keep thinking that Frank Woods would have a ranch somewhere? like there’s no animals or anything it’s just land and a comfortable little house dead in the middle of it

so of course he tells himself that it’s logical that afab Bell shows up at his doorstep like a beaten dog two months after the last time he saw her in Solovetsky, with less than ideally healed gunshot wounds from her second assassination attempt. Of course, it’s just that here’s a lot less likely that anyone would find her

And he takes her in, because it might’ve been fake for Adler but she’s fucking tore through hell right at Frank’s side with ample opportunity to either kill him herself or just let him get turned into mincemeat by the reds. She’s ended up under him more than once too, shaking and clumsy and laughing against his mouth in the residual adrenaline rush. More chances to off him, or to try and leverage his attraction to her, that she didn’t take. That Frank’s now convinced she wouldn’t take, not because she isn’t capable of it, she just likes sex too much to use it as a weapon.

She likes Frank too much for it, he realizes in the couple days it takes for her to stop looking over her shoulder with every creaking floorboard. When she asks him to drive her into town to exchange the small fortune in Swiss francs she smuggled into the country all the way from Zurich. He can’t fucking help it, the question that stumbles out of him without more than a second’s thought: ‘Why didn’t you go back to Perseus?’

Bell shifts, looks from Frank to the copy of John Hersey’s Hiroshima he’d given to her after a comment on nuclear armament even he thought was tasteless, the same book he caught her crying over months later and now sits in her bag, half buried in foreign bills.

‘I couldn’t,’ she says, then a minute later, as if it just occurred to her, ‘he’d kill me anyway, after Solovetsky’.

It takes a few more weeks for her to end up in his bed again, and she still smiles as soon as he nudges his dick inside her, still laughs at the burn of his beard on her neck. She still comes clutching onto him like he’ll disappear or leave, discard her as soon as he fills her. Bell mumbles out his name and Frank feels his heart caught between her fingers as much as his hair is at the moment, because for her that’s the most reasonable fear to have.

So he doesn’t. It’s not like he was gonna leave his own fucking house, which in a way feels like the only thing he’s ever really owned, but he won’t kick her out either. And he doesn’t mention her to a single soul who knows her, not even Mason. Especially not when she starts going out, more fearless each time; when she starts to teach a self defense class in town on Fridays or taking drives to the next county over whenever she has a nightmare, just to convince herself that she’s not in a fake town, and she comes back with a cheeseburger for him each time.

Cause then she starts to become his Bell again. The one capable of dead devotion, who chose to do the right thing in the end. The Bell that died twice and came back better every time, that saw an old worn fuck like him and called it home.

Bell, who he accidentally wakes one night when he comes sweating out of his own bad dreams and offers to join him for a cigarette out in the front porch, who convinces him to put on a sweater and settles on his lap in silence, blowing little smoke rings into the gold light of dawn.

The woman who cries against his shoulder when he lets spill that he loves her like horrible word vomit, and tells him she loves him too.