It was the warmest evening Warwickshire had seen in some time. Where the chill still pierced through the atmosphere with it's rightful September claim, as summer bled into autumn just the week prior, but there was a balminess that engulfed the air. A gentle essence that descended over the rolling landscape, you watched with absentminded eyes through the glass of the tall and imposing bedroom windows.
It wasn't yet cold enough that your body erupted in goosebumps, altering the smooth glide of your flesh, standing in the tranquil environment of the bedroom in that of pure silk. For it cascaded down your frame in a breathless lavender hue, as though it wasn't the season of changing leaves that was upon the land, but that of dawning spring. The tones of flowers blooming with life in a world that so desperately needed it, a color of softness, tampering the edges of a world harsh and ruthless as it did all it could to tear away traces of such genteel and purity.
Your skin was nearly completely bare to the air around you, feeling as it flowed around the coverage of silk and threatened to dip beneath the thin fabric, but you weren't the slightest bit cold. Whether in part to the warmer evening that engulfed the Earth in comforting shadows, pierced through by the heavenly glow of the full moon that enveloped the land in a pearl toned light, or the fact that a fire still crackled in the bedroom fireplace, you couldn't help but wonder if there was another reason entirely for your discovery of sudden and all-consuming warmth.
For it was strong, overwhelming your body in nothing but a sense of warmth that not only touched upon your bare flesh, but beamed upwards throughout your chest as though it might just heat you from the inside out. It was calming, in a way the flickering embers that twirled within the fireplace like the flames were entwined in a waltz, could never exude. For it washed over you like a tide, gentle but forceful enough that it cast away the heaviness that settled upon your chest and you inhaled deeply for the first time since you retreated to the bedroom for the night.
Perhaps, it had always been Thomas Shelby who exuded such fervent heat, all the while, harboring the true extent of the world's cold. For his orbs were ice, chiseled like that of his immaculate bone structure, into glistening irises that burned beneath the chill of frozen cerulean that consumed them. His mind, torn apart and sewn back together with shaky hands, remained in the clutches of a trench, cold and exposed to the harsh realities that revisited him all these years later. Despite having his feet back on solid ground, despite making it home from France with his life intact, it was an abyss in which his brilliant mind resided, one in which not a single soul but his own could touch. And his heart, strings pulling and beating to keep the man, who somedays wished against it, alive.
There were undeniable flickers of warmth that flashed from the aching organ, for you'd seen it, you'd felt it, you rather believed your name was etched upon that single part of his heart. But what once consumed the entirety of that beating muscle, had been drained and rather ripped from the very seams, leaving the other parts of Thomas's heart a bloodied and chilling mass of tunnels, cavities within left cold and abandoned. Leaving his heart no choice but to close off and harden the parts no longer in use, the parts no longer salvageable after what the war and life as a blinder left behind.
It was bewildering with that notion, that Thomas could be such a source of exponential heat, that could permeate each and every pore and exposed section of flesh upon your frame and yet, he couldn't feel even an ounce of the very same warmth in which he shed upon you. There were days, as you watched the dead set expression within his blistering eyes, that you wondered if maybe he'd made some kind of deal with the devil. One that allowed him to bestow all of the overwhelming warmth he could upon you, giving him the strength to calm you and comfort you in ways he'd never be able to feel, all for the single price of never feeling his own sense of warmth.
