To Bolivar, it didn't take very long for New York City to piece itself back into working order. Comparatively, anyway. Buildings went up, legislation was passed, Evolved discovered, scapegoats maimed, before he could even walk across a street without having to sit down for half an hour. The doctor recommended he move to warmer climes. He reciprocated with recommendations of an unkind nature, and proceeded onward with bovine stubbornness. He did, however, get better. Permanently uncomfortable and every ordinary risk exaggerated a dozen times around him, but better.
Wonderfully, he got good enough that the government declared he had to go and get a job again because they were no longer paying him enough money to sit on his ass and hate everything by himself. He had two dogs by then, a German Shepherd and a Spaniel, former police dogs who made sure he would not hit his head on the corners of furniture if he seized, whom he loaned to the local precinct for breeding purposes. Thusly inspired, and vaguely acknowledged by former co-workers who could barely look him in the eye anymore, he joined the K-9 Unit and adopted an overgrown pup to start and train as a narcotics hound, once his health was determined as adequate for walking patrols.
At the dawn of the Second American Civil War, Bolivar was an unpowered cop living with an Evolved man, his children, and his dogs. Though Bolivar had spent much of his life heretofore loving no one and nothing better than he did his canine companions, who had comforted him through his time in recovery from grievous burns and self-loathing, that had completely changed. His life with Raquelle was a microcosm of possibility, a rose-tinted mirror of the violent political reality taking place around them.
And then one day he came home, and they had taken Raquelle. The girls, too. All that was left was a ring— an engagement ring— fitted to the collar of one dog.
Bolivar descended into a place he had not been for some time. Less cautiously than he probably should have, he roused contacts in the Evolved community and learned that Raquelle and the girls were being held in Eltingville. As the United States descended into chaos, he joined the war against his own people— or for his own people, as the case may be.
In the years that followed, Bolivar accumulated a sordid amount of blood on his hands. Certainly, as a police sniper, he had been no stranger to that in the first place. But war was hard, the separation from the family he had chosen to fight for, as well as the gradual deaths of his dogs, one in combat and one from the simple processes of disease, accelerated no doubt by the fact that veterinary care was hard to come by. Nor had Bolivar ever been characterized by the kind of resilience that sprang hope and sweetness and unebbing light. He thought he would die. He only wanted to do it before Raquelle perished in Eltingville. And he wanted to do it with the ring on his finger.
When at last the war was won, he'd aged 15 years in half the number that had passed. But he wrapped his arms around Raquelle's waist, and it was unmistakably worth it.
As the country recovered, so did Bolivar. It was rocky adjustment at first. In addition to his charming curmudgeonly tendencies that he'd always had, the war had given him brittle paranoia and flashpaper temper, and it didn't suit being a father. Things were strained. But he worked on it. He went out into crowded family events that made his heart jump, and sat with his back turned toward the doors of restaurants until the prickle in his spine went away and he could hear Diana's voice instead of the pounding in his own head. He saw Raquelle get better too. Less the haunted look. Fewer flinches at loud noises.
As of 2018, Bolivar has joined the Safe Zone Cooperative as a volunteer. He hands out supplies and goods, drives the occasional large vehicle, and provides some freelance animal control in conjunction with a couple of other interested and well-meaning people, including a couple of individuals who were veterinarians in their past lives. He has a new dog, too. Trained properly as a support animal, this time— a decision that he and Raquelle had arrived at jointly, after Raquelle shot down a couple of half-joking jokey jokes about their household really needing a guard dog prepared to rip intruding bigots to ribbons.
He's planning a wedding.
Things are looking up.
