Blue-Eyed Devil | T. Shelby Imagines

➥ Nothing Good Ever Comes Easy

Parings: Tommy Shelby x Lizzie Stark, Tommy Shelby x Grace Burgess
Word Count: 572
Warnings: Canon typical drug, alcohol, and gun mentions. Cursing.
SUMMARY: All his life, Tommy's struggled... but he made a change after the war. A change that soon bit him in the arse.

         "Nothing good ever comes easy," Thomas Shelby has known this his whole life. A good father never came, a meal every day was far and few in between, finishing school was a daydream... being respected, unthought of! The Shelby family has had their fair share of struggles, may it be being as poor as dirt or being called slurs, it wasn't easy being a Shelby for a long while.

Then the war came and turned the sweet Shelby boys into shells of their former selves. No one who didn't see it first hand could understand what hell they experienced. Each of them were far from okay, but for Tommy... he seemed the most detached. As though the trauma he endured caused his mind to shut himself out of it.

There was no lively glow behind his Shelby blue eyes, no dimple in his smile... only hollow cheekbones and tired eye bags.

Each of them held scars both physically and mentally, they all coped differently. John had more children than he could ever hope to care for, Arthur became married to the bottle and turned into a ticking bomb... Thomas, however, turned to bettering their family name.

Making something out of the family, making their name respectable again... Tommy Shelby did what seemed to be impossible, he made the Shelby name powerful.

His hunger for more was both his rise and fall. He fell for the enemy despite it being obvious but Tommy knew he was untouchable (or so he thought). Maybe he knew Grace Burgess was a snake in his garden all along... maybe he just didn't give a fuck... either way, she'd be his demise in the end.

A broken mind without proper care can only last so long, Tommy was lucky to have lasted as long as he had. Ten years of chain smoking, alcohol guzzling, and murder catches up with a man. Especially a man like Thomas Shelby. He wasn't born posh, he'd never be posh... what ever convinced him he could be posh anyway? Oh, Grace did... she was quite fit, he loved her; that's true.

But God did he feel the repercussions now. Depression and paranoia don't take long to turn an already broken mind to dust. Add anxiety and long-term stress and you've got a recipe for disaster. And what a disaster it was, a screaming Tommy found lying unconscious in a field... a gun lying a few feet away-- his gun --a picture painted in hell for any loved one of his.

His family may hate him, but losing him would be a difficult burden to bear. Too many lives have been lost by then. And Lizzie Stark refused to raise her daughter without a father, may he be a dickhead or not. She'd been the one to find Tommy and bring him home.

The one to... once again nurse him back to health even if Tommy's never been healthy. He'd never noticed how stunning Lizzie was before, he knew of her beauty but Tommy wasn't sure he liked her for her physical attraction. In one moment, his entire perspective shifted.

"Nothing good ever comes easy," That was still partially true... but how had Thomas been able to keep Lizzie by his side for so damn long then? It wasn't hard, they liked each other's company even with their fights... something good had been with him all along and it took Thomas years to notice.