Arrow House was bathed in the stillness of the night. The calm in the crescent moon that hung on a hook in the sky, softening the darkness that engulfed the horizon line and every inch beyond.
The thick tree line of rich evergreens left as mere silhouettes bleeding into the evening shadows; the blanket of indigo printed with scarce stars as it unfurled over the rolling land. The traces of a dusk infused by the saturated blend of marigold and a pale lavender, a distant memory as the evening consumed Warwickshire. Banishing away the lasting evidence of daylight gone by, as the hands of time dawned on a new day.
The rains had ceased by the midnight hour, a cold torrent flooding away the remnants of the sunset, like ink spilling down an open drain until all that was left was a melancholy presence of grey clouds and dark evening skies.
The stream of tears running down gothic brick still remained, as the drying trail that told the tales of the droplets that had journeyed the aged path clung to the structure, leaving behind puddles in the gravel drive that hazed with the sediment and sin buried deep within the premises.
What had lulled the world into slumber with the rhythmic drum of a steady downpour, petered out as the hands on Thomas Shelby's brushed gold pocket watch ticked with a promising whisper of the coming dawn. A tranquil stillness settling over the Earth, accompanied by a sense of quiet that only came when the noise of the world turned down with the setting of the sun. Ceasing to be reignited until the first flicker of a light appeared far beyond the horizon line.
The silence was a peaceful cradle in the void, but to a man tormented in the shadows, the darkness felt more of a foe than a friend.
For the tenebrous abyss Tommy plunged headfirst into when night came calling, was merely a passage into the hell he'd tried all of his days to drag himself out of. Nails scraping into the soil as his hands clawed against the Earth that swallowed him whole, closing in the walls moistened by the bloodshed beginning to seep from his palms and the smell of the decaying rot that burdened the deep wounds upon his damaged conscious.
Staring up at a sight of freedom that hung like a cruel rope dangling down into the darkened hole, only for his bloody hands to reach out to grasp the frayed threads woven into the knot of a noose, swinging back and forth before his weary eyes, as not even his fingertips could touch the line.
The pain easing into the nerves battered beneath the surface of flesh torn and slashed through by claws punctured in the darkness, the devils preying on his being like an animal shrouded in the shadows of the perpetual night, until he was nothing more to that tunnel floor than a mess of blood and bones.
Even as the silken sheets cocooned their cooling filaments around Tommy's bare torso, clinging to his flesh like they aimed to draw him back down to the reality that swirled around him, it didn't change the way his heart hammered inside the depths of his aching chest as it always had.
A chasmic wounded tremor that pounded against the confines of his own sturdy bones, until the bars of his ribcage rattled with the weight of a beast bursting through to freedom.
But no matter how harshly the rhythm threatened to tear his chest apart, his lungs felt as if they were laced with chains. Heavy shackles woven around the organs pining for a breath, without a single key in sight to set them free, as Tommy felt the shallow mist of oxygen glossing over the battle ensuing inside of himself. Unable to breathe as the darkness overwhelmed him like a crashing tide pulling him underneath its blackened surface.
Her warmth called out to him however, like a lighthouse guiding him back to certain land. Tommy's lips parted with a slightly shaken breath as though he broke through the ocean's surface, gasping for the air his lungs ached with a fire for.
