Thomas Shelby hadn't heard the haunting echo of shovels, relentlessly picking their way against the adjacent wall that night. For as his eyes peered open to the fresh break of day, barely piecing it's presence in through the thin lace curtains sprawled across the clasped window, Tommy listened to the steady rhythm of his beating heart. It raced not a single pace, for it was the very first night since he'd made it back from France, that he didn't find himself awakening to his heart all but trying to flee the terrors that plagued his dreams. As though it might just pound straight out of his chest, crumbling his ribcage that confined it to dust.
Tommy found his flesh to be warm and dry, a stark contrast to the cold sweats that made his body shiver and dampened the sheets wrapped loosely around his torso. Tommy listened to the sound of the air funneling into his lungs. The most imperceptible flutter of a breath inhaling the air that lingered with the trace of her aromatic perfume and the scent of love made in the late hours, taken aback by the calm that engulfed his breathing.
For Tommy discovered that he could breathe as clear as if he were standing in the world's crispest meadow, shaking nor hitching a mere fraction of an inhale. His breaths deep and he could feel the oxygen expanding through his chest, as he never had before. Tommy woke most mornings gasping for a semblance of a breath, a sliver of air to break through the suffocating clutch that coiled it's grip around his chest, squeezing until his lungs and palpitating heart burned like a fire ensued within them. But this morning, as the faintest trickle of a new day spread it's piercing golden glow throughout the darkness engulfed sky, Tommy woke to a sensation he hadn't felt in longer than he could even recall. A foreign, unnerving and yet, unmistakably alluring feeling that found him as soon as dawn rose across the horizon.
She shifted beside him, not enough to signal that she was fully awake, but enough that it pulled Tommy's attention towards the woman curled against his side. Tilting his head down a mere fraction, resting his chin just above her forehead that rested comfortable within the crook of his arm, the cast of his blazing cerulean gaze washed over her frame. Colliding with the marigold hue that had begun to seep into the bedroom, a rare sighting of pure sunlight gracing the smog and soot coated cobblestone of Watery Lane, until the strength of an impenetrable sapphire blue melded with the beaming warmth of sharp citrine and glazed across her bare flesh as though her own personal glow from the heavens above.
For that's how she appeared. Even with her messed tendrils strewn across her pillow and Tommy's chest, strands twisting around the curl of her neck and the sheets bunched unevenly around her delicate figure, she appeared as an angel. An angel who had fallen to the depressing streets of Small Heath by some comical and utterly cruel twist of fate, perhaps, fracturing her wings in the process, keeping her tethered to this place. Anyone who looked at her, instantly knew that she didn't belong, for everyone knew that angels had no such business walking amongst devils and yet, here she was. Standing and strolling beside, as though her soul and theirs, were created of the very same foundation.
She didn't belong here in Birmingham, much less the filthy streets of Small Heath and now, in the strong arms of a Peaky Blinder. But she was here and there were some split moments, when Thomas watched her play with the poor children playing in the streets and offered her kindness to the hungover and homeless drunks that crowded the corners and began to wonder, if perhaps, God knew exactly what he was doing by sending her here.
Polly Grey had told him once that she believed she was an angel, sent here with the sole purpose of seeking him out, a part of God's greater plan to help heal the hurt that France had left upon his mangled and tormented soul. Thomas didn't know if he believed her, he didn't know what it was he believed in anymore after the war, if there was anything to believe in. But as his eyes washed over her face with the cooling hue of an icy gaze, Tommy found if he were to believe in something, it would surely be her.
