It was a fog unlike any haze you had ever witnessed, spilling out over the acreage left frozen solid by the harsh winter's embrace, the density appearing as though it was smoke rising up from the depths of hell. For it engulfed the land surrounding Arrow House's premises, nearly abolishing all visibility from eyes that ached to see, immersing the field left cold and unplanted in a breath that traveled on as if it were churning waves. Instead of deep sapphire blue and the faintest glimmer of reflective silver, the waves were made a white tainted by the most melancholy shade of grey. As if it were Thomas's cigarette smoke that funneled over the countryside, but there was a weight in these waves that overwhelmed the land, that not even the tidal waves or swirling hurricanes could compete with.
The ground beneath your feet was frozen, the tops of the dried up and lifeless soil cracking underneath the weight of your steps, as though it were the bones of lost souls that cluttered your path. For death was palpable in the atmosphere as if it had the ability to seep into each and every inhale that flooded your lungs, feeling an unnerving sensation filling the expanding organs with a sharp surge of oxygen tainted by that of the devil's breath.
For it felt as though God had all but disappeared from this place, taken with him the light of the sun to guide your tentative steps, the clarity for your eyes and the cleansing breath for your aching lungs. It wasn't often that God made his way out to Warwickshire to visit Thomas Shelby, but there was something about this moment in time as you made your way anxiously through the barren field, that you realized what it truly felt like for a place to be abandoned by the hand of the Lord.
For it felt like you were sinking, anchors tied around your ankles in metal shackles you couldn't begin to hope to unchain, drawing you towards the dark abyss that lingered beneath the disorienting waves. The waves made of thick fog, chilling and dense, crashed over you and flooded your lungs. It might not have been the burning salt of surging ocean water that engulfed your screaming lungs, but there was something about the haze that immersed the land you walked, that made the prospect of drowning in the clear and cool current of water appear pleasant.
For the haze coated your breaths as though it were lead, dripping down into the cavity of your chest, gliding over the traces of the Small Heath smog still lingering and replacing it with the unapologetic and unrelenting ooze of an iron black chemical that nearly burned senses from your body. It felt that the further you ventured out into the acreage, the further your fell. But it was in the sensation palpable in the atmosphere, filling your lungs with dread and anxiety that burned like a wildfire, that told you the effort of reaching out your hand for God to save was futile.
You'd watched the Bentley roll up the drive, Arthur's hand on the steering wheel this time, as Thomas sat in the passenger seat with fingers pressed tensely against the bridge of his brow. They'd made it back by the morning, although not a shred of light pierced through the impenetrable cloud coverage to truly prove that a new day was upon you and if not for the interruption on the radio station you'd listened to the night prior, it was the expression that consumed Thomas Shelby's demeanor that told you the night had not gone as planned.
He'd ignored the voice inside of his head, the pull against the beating organ that kept his blood pumping through his body and tried to do some good. He went against everything that his conscious told him and decided for himself, that this, killing Oswald Mosely, was the right thing to do. And for the first time in years, Thomas Shelby finally chose to do something because at the very end of the day, all there was to it was that it was the right thing. A good thing.
The young boy who'd been killed outside of his office days prior, rattled him. The death of a man who he'd pulled into reporting on more than he was ever assigned to, weighed on him. The position he repeatedly put you in, as you bared the Shelby name with a diamond to mark the title balancing on your finger, ate away at him. Thomas was a good man who did bad things, it was a notion you'd known since the moment you met him and fell in love with him, back in Small Heath when he was still a bookmaker and the hooks of power and politics had not yet sunk and torn into his flesh. But as the years went on and the blood upon his hands grew darker and seeped deeper than a bar of soap could ever cleanse away, as the money grew greater and the risks became more reckless, the line between good and bad became blurred for the man you promised forever to.
