Her tears hit the pavement as if they were droplets falling down from the open heavens above. They were streaked with a crimson that tarnished the sanctity of their purity, burdening her flesh with a stain that no matter how hard the water flowed, could never eradicate the depth in which their trace lingered. For the hue of unforgiving red, dark and bold as if its beating pulse was a tangible thing, splattered her flesh like paint on a canvas. Staining where it sat as if it might just turn her soft tone to crimson.
Thomas Shelby was no stranger to bloodshed, for it seemed more than any other man who walked the Earth, his hands carried half the burden in the very lines that screamed out the haunting memory of blood that had flowed across the cracks.
His eyes had acclimated to witnessing such a shade, an overwhelming hue of red that no sight could ever compare. Not the poppies that spread across Flanders Fields, no shade of lipstick adorned on her lips, not even that of a freshly poured tumbler of wine, seemed to meet the shade in which blood settled. Blood no longer turned his stomach quite like it used to, it no longer burned his nose with its metallic spillage, it no longer made him want to scrub the very surface of his flesh raw until he could no longer feel its heat, each and every time some was poured over his body.
But tonight, as the evidence of a once warmed summer afternoon surely parted and made way for the imposing and all-consuming cast of indigo to overtake the skies above, Thomas discovered the bloodshed he witnessed, managed to shake him at his very core.
Arrow House fell upon a crashing wave of utter silence, for every motion Tommy made throughout the house and into the private surroundings of the warm bedroom, seemed to echo with a boisterous presence. Shattering the atmosphere like it were glass to be held, jolting himself every once and a while when a once imperceptible sensation, resounded harsher as though the sound of the world had all been drained.
The night was crisp, as autumn began to slowly breathe its inevitably looming descent into the clutches of the late twilight hour. For warmth had flooded the countryside that day, a break of sunlight peering through the dense cloud coverage as though to grace the souls that walked below it, relishing in the sensation of warmth in its purist form resting gently over their shoulders.
The bedroom whispered the memory of such heat, with the slightest tinge of humidity capturing the scents of mingling fragrances and stale cigarette smoke, as if a blanket of haze forcing the aromas to blend into the very fabric of the atmosphere itself. But with the large set of windows cracked open, letting a cool current of wind seep in and bathe the floorboards, a chill pierced through the room. The curtains of a deep sapphire blue, twirled like fabric of an ever-flowing gown, as they remained drawn over the now open windowpane, allowing the twilight's breeze to simply sweep them away and spin them around until the blue appeared a living and breathing article of life.
The bedroom began to slowly cool down, the wind stealing away the traces of day, trading it in for the presence of night bleeding into the crevices of the open room. But as Tommy's hand delicately turned the door handle to the bathroom where he knew she resided, he found his first breath to be that of what one might find at the welcoming gates of hell itself.
For the steam rising upwards from the running shower, fogged up the small space like Tommy stood out amongst the pastures at dawn. Right as the breath of a fresh new morning rises with the sun, coating the land in a gentle exhale of chilled dew and pale haze that obstructs the far view of the ascending light. For it engulfed the small bathroom, until not a single tile beneath Tommy's hesitant steps was left uncoated by the dense and highly visible vapor that stretched out across the floor. Flooding over the cracks and the crevices, as if water ready to drown the souls that stood within it alive.
It concealed the mirror until not even Tommy's own reflection was identifiable. Seeping along the tiles until it permeated each and every divot left vulnerable to the air around him, clouding the atmosphere above his head like exhales collected in the form of an unrelenting fog. It's hard to breathe the steam hangs so thickly in the room, like Tommy's own breath could become trapped within its clutches like it might just stick there forever. If not only from the density that consumes the bathroom walls, as if it's holding all the air within that tiled space captive, then certainly from the heat that follows.
