"even when she was lying, there was a certain truth she always told"
A pretty girl, a deal gone wrong, an ultimatum, and a death...
Another average week for the Peaky Blinders.
[T. Shelby]
[Under Editing]
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If not for the sickness that greeted her in the morning, Thalia would have run to Tommy the moment she woke up. Her brother had been asleep originally, and she could have snuck out quietly if she maneuvered well enough around the squeaky floor tile by the door. Unfortunately, a wave of nausea swept over her almost immediately following the opening of her eyes, and her sputtering gasps woke her brother and sent him rushing to her side.
She was sat on the floor over the wash bucket in her room, choking on air and bile as the cold ground bit into her bare knees. Théo havé heard the commotion and ran to her bedroom. Now, he stood beside her, hovering like a untrained governess dealing with a sick child for the first time ever. He reached to pull back her hair, but Thalia hit at his hands in attempt to keep herself safe from another greedy man's fingers. She was crying, crying from the pain and from the close proximity of her traitor brother. She was crying, crying, crying.
The vomiting, which had turned to mostly dry heaving after the initial moments, came to a stop after a few minutes, and she was left trembling with streaks down her cheeks where tears had cleaned the sweat and grime she had not yet wiped from her face after the scuffle with Kimber. She felt disgusting and dirty. She hated it. She hated herself.
"Are you well, now?" Théo asked.
Thalia had noticed that he had begun using English more with her, and his thick French accent was less prevalent, as if he was forcing it down and abandoning their roots. The thought nearly made her sick again. How dare he disregard the identity they'd had to fight to preserve.
"Oui," she spat with a gravely voice from the soreness of her throat. She would not forget their heritage. She scrambled to her feet, wiping at her mouth desperately, trying to get the taste out of her mouth, her nose, her throat. She pushed past Théo with a lifted chin, but she couldn't hide the stinging of tears pooling at the rims of her eyes as she stumbled away.
"Do not hate me for this, ma sœur." Théo's voice was almost pleading; Thalia almost cared.
"You lost the right to call me that when you bartered next off like an English whore," she spat in return, venom dripping from her lips. If her heart was a weapon and her words the ammunition, then Théo would have met a round of bullets in that moment.
Thalia trembled from what she considered mostly anger and exhaustion, but there was a small amount of fear that shook her body as well— fear for Tommy, fear for herself, fear for them. Another wave of nausea swelled and her vision began to dip and swim. Blood pounded in her ears (or was that the memory, back again?) with a steady thud, thud, thud.
She heard the drumming.
Back home, the steady pulse of a snare drum had been the eerie warning signal of an invasion of enemy troops. Those tin can men, with their steely guns and their red arm bands, bringing hate and hurt to their small town, looked no different than Théo to her anymore. They were no better.
Thalia staggered out towards the front door, a flood of memories crashing over her consciousness and drowning her in the past not long forgotten.
She saw the light of the muzzle flash, reflecting off the metal of her mother's necklace, the one with the Star of David twisted delicately in the center of the chain, which she and Théo had purchased for her in their youth. Her father fell with the next flash, slamming backwards into the table and taking their untouched dinner with them. Thalia remembered screaming, remembered her fiancé jumping in front of her, remembered Théo pulling her into an embrace, and she remembered the steady snare tapping away in the distance.
And she remembered an English soldier, coming to their rescue in the last moment, with pale blue eyes and a mouth full of clipped words she did not understand.
