THE WILDEST OF THEM ALL - a Peaky Blinders fanfiction
-IN WHICH all sorts of things happen, at home and outside, every day, but Darcy doesn't recall having ever thought that in the life she had there was particularly bad. Life was like that, that's...
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Darcy was many things; English, Italian, Irish, Gypsy, Neapolitan, Shelby, and yet — she had no idea who she really was. There was nothing she could grasp, not even herself, and she was terrified of losing her margins, like her brother, Arthur lost his.
But he gave her a new purpose; Richard. He was intriguing as he was infuriating and Darcy loved intriguing things. He came back to the city a few times after the Garrison reopening, and she told him to piss off every time.
It had gone usually the same
The Sabini boy drove into the city looking for the "The wild Shelby girl who doesn't look like a Shelby" — and they'd instantly knew. And at times, when he found her, he hadn't driven up alongside her, he hadn't called to her from the window. He'd left the car in the middle of the street, with the door open—a brave thing to do in Small Heath—and approached her. Darcy had kept walking, and he followed. He'd pleaded with her to forgive him for his behavior in the past, he admitted she would have been absolutely right to kill him that night. He also had reminded her, with emotion, how they had danced so well together at the Eden Club, a sign of how well-matched they might be.
She wasn't interested, not until he started speaking of the thing before them. Things that happened in the dark ages. Darby Sabini had supposedly revealed himself in all his monstrous nature before they were born. Before. Darcy, too, often used that formulation. But she didn't seem to care as much about what had happened before her—events that were in general obscure, and about which the adults either were silent or spoke with great reticence—as about the fact that there really had been a before. It was this which at the time left her puzzled and occasionally even made her nervous.
When Darcy and Winnie became friends Darcy spoke so much of that absurd thing—before them—that she ended up passing on her nervousness to Winnie. It was the long, very long, period when they didn't exist, that period when all the city gods had shown themselves to everyone for what they were: an evil being of uncertain animal mineral physiognomy, who—it seemed—sucked blood from others while never losing any himself, maybe it wasn't even possible to scratch him. Her brother, Tommy Shelby, was becoming this. A shadow of before.
Darcy at first seemed in a daze, as if she had forgotten where she was, the streets, the neighborhood, the betting shop.
That's how it happened one day, when Winnie Moore opened her door, her best friend was standing in front of her. The blonde girl looked past Darcy's shoulder, where she saw a shiny Bently, with a handsome man sitting inside.
"What's happening?" Winnie asked her, confused.
"I don't know," Darcy said, and meant that she didn't know exactly what she was getting into.
She looked the way she did when she had to do a difficult calculation in her head, but without her usual impudent expression; she was visibly preoccupied, as if she were attempting an experiment with an uncertain result.
