His body shook as if the devil had come to claim his soul. For he shook with such a force running beneath the clammy sheen of his shivering flesh, that you feared his shattered bones might just rattle around like loose change at the bottom of a coat pocket. You'd never witnessed Thomas Shelby's being so overcome with something that was not his own, something so far out of his control that it was as if the mere presence of his soul that persisted within his chest, was insignificant.
You'd known over the years, the ownership of his brilliant but undeniably delicate mind, had certainly slipped through fingertips of his own and those belonging to the strong clutches of long-ago finished war. Hands swiftly sweeping one beneath the other, to catch the falling remnants that he'd simply piece back together with a shaky hand and whiskey fueled breath. But never had you seen his body, a pillar of strength and unbreakable composure, utterly stripped and shattered as if the universe had come along and broken down every tangible evidence of might that had kept Tommy alive all this time.
The inexplicable tanned hue vanished from his flesh, as if the sweat that soaked his skin and soddened the loose clothing he adorned with the evidence of his bloodshed, simply washed away any trace of the warm tone he once possessed. For in its place, resided a ghastly hue of sickened grey and pale white. Tommy looked like someone had come along and stolen the life straight from his lungs, draining him of the color that every living and breathing man had the right to possess, making him appear like he was simply on borrowed time.
The flesh that had always been a mesmerizing and bewildering breath of warmth, amongst a city where the sun emerged so infrequently one would have surely believed that Birmingham resided in a perpetual winter, disappeared. Leaving behind the mere traces of his softly sprinkled freckles and accentuating the structure of his cheekbones, by the exceedingly sunken nature of his cheeks as if along with the color of his flesh, the skin coating his bones was also beginning to slowly wither away into nothing. He looked nothing like himself and yet, in the very same shallow breath you inhaled softly into your own aching lungs, he still looked exactly like your Tommy.
The water, lukewarm at best, trickled through the cracks between your fingers and drizzled back down into the metal bowl resting in your lap. The sensation echoing faintly as if it were the tender fall of rain upon a roof, a melancholy pour dripping effortlessly and without a breath of malice within its harmless droplets. The space was far from silent, as there would forever be a noise that accompanied the traveling of the canal and yet, the shallow bowl of water made more sound than it truly possessed. Even as you withdrew the sodden cloth, torn from an extra linen laying around and listened to the way the droplets poured back down into the bowl, as you rung out the excess water, it sounded boisterous in the cramped atmosphere you shared.
You couldn't tell if it was the heat of your own body, cradling the bowl firm in your lap, that had cooled down the water. If it were in part to the humidity that consumed the air, heat of two bodies in a small space with one burning a fire all his own not a feet away, or if perhaps, it was simply because you'd lost track of time. For you no longer had the slightest notion as to how long you'd sat beside the cramped and uncomfortable cot Tommy laid upon, knelt on your knees that could very well feel the worn floorboards beneath your frame digging into your flesh with a vengeance.
Maybe it was the gentle ebb and flow of the canal, lulling and rousing all at once, that made time seem like a futile prospect as the shadows of night seeped through the tainted window glass. Maybe it was due to the fact that the day had melded together as if there had never been a definitive shift before day and night, finding you'd been awake since the moment Tommy turned up in the hospital beaten within an inch of his life. Or maybe, it was simply that the notion of time had no rightful place here upon The January.
