The rain refused to cease in its relentless downpour that night. For it hammered the cobblestone of Watery Lane with such a fury, it was as though the heavens that sent the droplets streaming down like the fall of angels' tears, reminded the souls below that their presence was finite and could be wiped from the face of the Earth just as surely as the hand of God could dip down.
The night consumed the sky in an impenetrable blanket of ebony, one that not even the lasting sliver of the moon endeavored to pierce, while the stars had all but hidden themselves amongst the abyss. The cracks in the cobblestone seemed to absorb the shade of the shadows, as if the darkness that coated the city might just dip down into the open crevices, and heal something that could never be remedied.
Thomas Shelby knew better than any one soul left on this Earth, that no amount of darkness the night had to lend, could eradicate damage so deeply embedded into the very foundation of a place or being. If it could, perhaps the shadows that followed him like a ghost of the past, would've healed him instead of ripping him to shreds.
She was soaked to the very bone, shivering in the wind that blew silently but with remarkable strength against her sodden frame, like the cold that permeated the newly acquired spring breeze, bled through the surface of her dampened flesh and coated her very bones like a sheen of winter blown ice.
Her dress was futile, the woolen skirt of soft evergreen soppy and weighing heavily down upon her legs, until the weight was bound to leave her sore and weak come morning. For it seemed to drag her down to the cobbles, as she stood frozen in place on the other side of the door. But there was a flicker of strength that sparked within her weary stance, like popping embers inside of her chest, that willed her to stand and endure the blistering winds and torrential rain.
Her porcelain skin glistened with the slickened nature of the rain that engulfed her, droplets running races down her cheeks and battering down from the fluttering ends of her saturated lashes, and the longer Tommy stared at the sight of her face, the more he began to wonder just how many of those droplets belonged to her.
Her hair, a fiery contrast to the abyss of ebony that immersed her, had lost all sense of its soft twirls. For the strands that once bounded down against her shoulder blades with her each and every step, were now matted and stuck to the flesh of her neck. Coiling around her skin like a noose of her own making.
It took everything inside of Tommy to resist stepping down off of the final step and reaching out his hands to free her neck from the pressure, as though by lifting the rain-soaked strands that almost seemed to strangle her where she stood, he could save her. But there was something in the way she looked at him, something in the very fact that she'd ventured out into this bloody rainstorm just to see him, that halted his actions.
For her doe-eyed gaze, wide and soft like she hadn't a single trace of harshness or sin lingering anywhere inside of her soul, peered up at him through the blustering spit of rain. Tommy stood on the very threshold of the doorway, his hand tightly gripping the edge of the door as he stared down at her in incredulous curiosity to her sudden appearance, whereas she stood a few paces away. Illuminated only by the soft glow emanating from behind Tommy from inside of the Shelby home, casting the faintest ray of gentle citrine down upon her drowning posture, as if it could be enough to drag her out of the ceaseless darkness that consumed the Watery Lane cobbles.
He should've spoken a word, anything to break through the void that seemed to embrace them both in the same crushing grasp of boisterous silence. He should've implored why she was out in this bloody rainstorm, why she'd traveled all this way under a cloak of darkness that a woman like herself should've never been traveling alone in. He should've stepped down that single step and strode the few paces towards her, gently wrapping his hands over her arms and brought her into the warm and dry house.
