He appeared younger as he slept, as if the hand on time's clock had been kinder to him. But even as his youth, that you so often forget still lingered beneath the lines of his expression that aged him beyond his rightful years, became a ghost hovering above the softly freckled tones of his flesh, as slumber discovered his being in the late turn of twilight, Thomas Shelby had still yet to find peace.
For the world had left him irrevocably scathed, inflicting wounds upon his mind and his very soul, that even the clutches of sleep could not evade it's crushing grasp. Even as his flesh appeared softer in the delicate sway of the flickering candlelight, not even the hours of tainted rest could eradicate the scars that punctured the smooth surface, nor could it truly fade the lines that etched their very presence along his expression, telling of his life in ways that made him seem as if he'd lived a hundred lives prior to this day.
Tommy's head rested comfortably against his pillow, the silken material cradling his head with a smoothness that still held onto the night's sudden chill. He laid facing the opposite side of the room, with his back bare and left open to your sight, as the linen sheets fell beneath the form of his muscles. That even in the void of slumber, when stress ought to evaporate as if it were merely raindrops falling down from the open heavens, still tightened his muscles and made them rigid and firm against the sheets.
For even his fingers, softly calloused with the faintest tinge of your sweet perfume lingering against the pads, clutched the sheets that fell around his frame as if it were the neck of a predator he'd all but managed to subdue. To the eye of one who didn't know the man, they'd say that Tommy slept as a man slept, with certain ease and cautious guard. But you knew him better than to believe such a notion, for even as his lashes of deep fluttering raven laid long over the flesh of his chiseled cheekbones and soft breaths filtered through the slight part between his full and luscious lips, Tommy hardly received the sleep he so desperately needed.
For it was like water running through the cracks of his fingers, attainable as he felt the rush of cool ripples flooding over the soft pads of his flesh, but flowing straight through as he hadn't the single strength inside of himself to grasp the droplets his body craved. Perhaps it was simply that when night fell over the land, shrouding the Earth and Warwickshire in its formidable and practically palpable presence, Tommy no longer had the control over his own body, his own mind.
For he was left up to the daunting power of his subconscious, that soon overtook the controls of his foundation when his eyes flickered shut in the late hours of the evening. He couldn't predict what might just haunt his dreams that night, he couldn't control the outcome or if the sun might just beat the shovels picking relentlessly against the wall, he couldn't outsmart his own mind as if it were just another advisory. For he was battling himself and perhaps, Tommy had always been the single man that he knew in the end, he could never defeat.
You wanted to reach your hand out, as you sat up against the headboard gazing down at his slumbering frame, touch the soft pads of your fingertips delicately against the map of his warm flesh, but you restrained yourself. For even as you'd woken him times before, when the clutches of a nightmare so cruel and so tortuous left him shaking the very bed in which you laid, you couldn't bring yourself this time to wake the man who dozed.
For even as you knew the sleep he gained here in the dark shadows of a persisting twilight, was bound to be futile come the first pierce of new morning light, you couldn't bring yourself to wake him. Even if it wasn't peace that he was finding, behind the closed lids of his eyes, that felt as if it had drained the very light of the world along with the concealing of such powerful orbs, and even as his muscles still remained as tense as they were during the daylight hours, he looked rather comfortable. Maybe it wasn't the right word to describe a man stalked and tortured by demons and memories never bound to fade, but maybe there were simply no more words left to describe a man like Thomas Shelby.
