METHOD OF MADNESS ━ 𝐓𝐡𝐨𝐦𝐚𝐬 𝐒𝐡𝐞𝐥𝐛𝐲 ¹ (Under editing)

𝒾. 𝒯𝒽𝓇𝑒𝑒: news from belfast

ᴺᴼᵂ ᴾᴸᴬᵞᴵᴺᴳ : anything - catfish and the bottleman

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i. three: ❝news from belfast❞

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Small Heath, Birmingham

HARRY'S GRUMBLING STILL CLUNG to the air when Marianna gathered the scattered remnants of her day—the ledger, her shawl, her bag that never seemed to hold enough for the weight she carried. He had muttered on about blood and broken chairs, about the danger of a barmaid with too much cleverness in her eyes, but she answered him with the same softness she always did, that practiced kindness she rationed carefully like sugar in wartime.

"Don't worry, Harry," she said, her voice steady, her smile faint but warm enough to pacify. "I'll make sure the cost of our overtime finds its way into Thomas Shelby's pocket. We'll be kissing his shillings soon enough."

Harry chuckled, though there was more weariness than mirth in it, and hurried her out the door with a wag of his hand, as though shooing a spirit. "That's why I keep you about, love. You think sharper than most men I know."

She stepped into the streets, the heavy door shutting behind her with a groan that echoed like the exhale of the dead. The night air smelled of coal smoke and damp stone, thick and familiar, the kind of scent that clung to a woman's hair until morning. With practiced ease, she lit a cigarette, the flame flickering briefly against her straw-blonde hair, before drawing the smoke into her lungs. It slid down like medicine, like sin—soothing, poisonous, necessary.

The city stretched before her in all its fractured glory. Drunken men staggered in the gutters, bellowing at one another in that coarse Brummie tongue that had shaped her own lips since girlhood. Children shrieked with laughter, their bare feet slapping against the cobblestones, their games a fragile hymn against the grinding of factory machines in the distance.

Marianna inhaled again, the whispers in her head buzzing like bees against glass. She had long ago learned how to hush them, to smother their insistence beneath smoke and silence. Her grandmother had called it a gift; her mother, a curse. To Marianna, it was both—an inheritance she could never return. When they spoke, the voices were insistent, warning, reminding, sometimes cruel. But now, as the night pressed in around her, they quieted, leaving her alone with questions too heavy to carry.

What would it have been like if she had borne her own child, carried flesh of her flesh into a world already rotten? Would she have passed the whispers on, condemning another innocent soul to a life half-lived between shadows? Did her brother hear them too, in the quiet moments when the world fell away? Or was she the only one left cursed to carry the madness of their line, the ghost-song of ancestors who never learned how to rest?

She trudged on, her heels clicking softly against the uneven pavement as the narrow alleys bent towards Watery Lane. The betting shop loomed ahead, its doorway lit faintly like the mouth of a den, and Marianna let the cigarette burn low between her fingers before she flicked it away. Sparks scattered across the stones like tiny omens.