The skies opened up, a tear in the dense indigo tapestry of midnight. Seams frayed at the edges, as if the night's delicate stars had fallen from the loose strands, lost to oblivion. For torrents of a cold and unforgiving rain spilled out over the cobblestone, dousing Small Heath in a punishing downpour. Like the vengeful heavens could cleanse the mistakes that cloaked the memory of yesterday from the Earth, making way for tomorrow to pave a new path in the shadowed lane of a damned city.
It was too cold for the rains that fell to aid in the growth of new life, but just warm enough that they tumbled to the Earth in the form of droplets instead of iced flakes.
His breath froze in front of his line of sight, however. A dense plume of smoke exhaled off of a tongue numbed with nicotine and the familiar sting of a slow poured Irish Whiskey. Fingers bitten by the blistery air, pulling the cigarette from the precarious balance between his lips. The futile ember that had spread warmth through the rolled stick, was unidentifiable to the hands that held it. For the skin had long ago grown cold and calloused. Not even a shake rumbled through his body from the rains that saturated the dark wool of his long black coat.
Thomas Shelby's hands didn't shake anymore. Whether they were bathed in the blood of a man he'd stolen life from or numbed by the chilling elements of a vengeful midnight hour. His steadiness was a sign of something severed, something disguised in the sight of composure. The calm after a storm that had ravaged a city until its rubble was no longer familiar.
Nerves snipped from the blades he adorned along his cap of tweed, blood slipping through his veins as if it were merely the breath in his lungs. Adapted to the sensation of suffocating on his very being, like the ghostly bones of a clawing corpse had its decaying hands wrapped like a noose around his neck. Waiting for the day, waiting for the moment when they'd drag him down below the surface and lay him to eternity in the dirt beneath his heavy feet.
It was the way she'd found him that night, haunted and lost. Like he'd been roaming the Earth looking for an exit, looking for a path that didn't end in his damnation.
Thomas had shown up on her doorstep in the pouring rain, looking as if the edges of his soul were already ablaze. She could nearly see the way the smoke whispered at his shoulders, emanating from his flesh like he was slowly burning alive. Like the corner of a page licked by a live flame, spreading until it began to curl in on itself, into a fluttering of nothing more than ash and regrets.
The cold nipped at her flesh, poorly concealed by the pale cream of her dressing gown, silk suddenly frosted by the breath of the chilled midnight hour. The embroidered flowers that had been delicately stitched along the seam of her sleeves, felt like they were about to wilt from the frigid air that Thomas had brought with him. The sensitive prickle of a thousand tiny goosebumps erupting across her flesh, any semblance of sleep suddenly shaken from her being as her eyes steadied on the sight of the Peaky Blinder darkening her doorstep.
"Tommy?"
His piercing orbs of a damning blue, an azure so deep that it often had the ability to knock the breath straight out of her lungs, were downcast. Shielded by the brim of his charcoal tweed cap that he'd pulled low over his crown, always hidden beneath that shadow as if he could simply slip into the darkness and disappear.
One last glow of citrine punctured the night, as Thomas brought his cigarette up for one final drag. Tossing it beneath his shoe with a simple twist, as his breath exhaled on a steady plume of smoke.
It laced her next inhale with a heady scent of the past. The intoxicating notes danced along the part of her senses that had never forgotten the way his Sweet Aftons felt inside her own lungs. Burning in a way that she welcomed.
