Spring was upon you, as you strolled in soft strides through the open pasture. Even as a relentless winter refused to relinquish it's tight grasp on the atmosphere circling around you, as it's chill was ever present in the breaths that soared through your expanding lungs, you could feel the essence of spring.
The delicate morning dew, beaded on the very edges of blades of grass that brushed along the flesh of your shin bone, replacing the bitterness of frost with a gentleness that the land so desperately needed. The countryside rolled on for farther than your eyes could see, watching as it disappeared into the tree line, beyond the horizon pierced with the sharp tinge of gold from the awakening sun. A melting pot of lifeless yellow and fresh kelly green, the grass slowly returning to it's enrichened nature, before the stomp of a heavy winter had stolen the land's very soul. A thin fog rolled itself out across the pasture, a tender blanket engulfing the atmosphere with what resembled a spared breath, frozen in mid fall by the lasting clutch of the winter season.
The sky was a sight to behold that morning, as dawn slowly crept over the horizon in blinding tones of marigold that tore through the evening's remnants. But behind you, the sky remained a stilled void of deep indigo, as though the whisper that morning was near hadn't yet reached that side of the Earth. It was not a sharp line that separated the two skies, but rather an easy blending that you'd never witnessed before.
For out in the countryside, nestled amongst forests and forever rolling land left untouched by anyone other than the man who owned it, you could see everything. In the city, the sky was obstructed by the heavy cast of smog puffed into the dense atmosphere from the always churning factories, the sight of stars nearly lost as the bright gleam of burning fires blistered brighter than twinkling orbs a million miles away. In the city, the night sky was merely a blanket of black that told you the long day had finally been put to rest. But out here, you could see every single imperfection along the stretch of the sky, you'd always believed it to turn black when evening was upon it, marveling at the truth of its rich indigo blue hue.
The bright pierce of the rising sun contrasted the tender flickers of an endless sprinkle of stars, twinkling just across the way from it's blinding burn, a mesmerizing sight as you felt your steps having stopped as you gazed up at the melding skies. The right, shrouded in the shadows of night, the stars high in their rightful place as they lent a gentle glow down upon the land that hadn't yet to be awakened by the prospect of a new day. And to your left, it was the sight of the land just beginning to rouse, as the sun cut through the horizon and slowly bled it's golden glow up into the air. Watching as it spread like an oozing wound, seeping until it began to tentatively illuminate the freshly bloomed land that awaited below for it's warming rays.
You'd never stood amongst a stretch of land that appeared to have two entirely different atmospheres hovering above your stilled frame and you couldn't help but wonder, as you stared breathlessly up at the infusion of light and dark, if this was why Thomas loved sleeping out here.
You knew he was out here, long before you'd awoken to a bed vacant and cold, for he'd never come to bed that night. His pillow left unscathed by the imprint of his restless head, the ivory sheets left bunched around your frame as he'd never needed any for himself that night, the air that you awoke to barely tinged with the scent of his cologne. Thomas Shelby had slipped away to sleep beneath the open sky as he so often did.
The occurrence becoming more and more frequent now, ever since he'd been forced into taking a few months off, and although it frightened you at first, Polly Grey assured you that for him, it was normal. She'd told you stories of how he'd sleep beneath the open sky, breathing in the cold of the night under the comforting presence of the stars, when he was a boy. Somedays having to be found by his uncle and sweet Curly, carrying him back into the house when the weather became too treacherous. Tommy distanced himself from the gypsy boy he was growing up, but no matter how far he traveled, no matter how much he tried to change himself and the very lifestyle he strived to live, Polly had told you that there was no getting rid of his gypsy blood.
