you are haunted like every other holy thing.
what tried to destroy you didn't have the strength.
still you stand,
sturdy and smelling of smoke.
- little bird, clementine von radics
༒
in which tommy shelby finds his asylum
in the ver...
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Through the fog, a lone man screamed, his eyes burning with the hot pinpricks of tears. The barrel of a gun pressed to his temple, his finger poised on the trigger. One push down on that tiny piece of metal and he would be gone, gone from this world, gone to the next.
May you be in heaven a full half hour before the devil knows you're dead.
Everything hovered in that terrible half-second, one thousand thoughts flashing through his head in the space between heartbeats. In his periphery, fogged by the opium haze, he could see her: golden hair, past her shoulders the way it had been when they first met, dressed in the clothes she had worn behind the bar. She had once soiled that mundane apron with the blood of two Irish men, crying in his hands in the wreckage of what they had done together.
She had once spoken her vows through the curl of her smile, never taking her eyes from him from beneath her veil. She had come towards him in a dress the colour of lavender and lilacs, taken his bloodstained hands in her own, and seen him for what he was rather than what anyone wanted him to be. Like no one else, she saw him, and he saw her.
She had once laughed and tipped forward her head as he fastened a chain of silver around her neck, weighted on its end by a gleaming sapphire the size of an egg. She had once leaned forward into him, infinitely warm, folding into his arms like she was made for them, as she always had. No one else had filled that space since, though he had tried to fill it. Lord, had he tried to fill it.
In his dreams, waking and asleep, he could still hear it—the crack of the gun which had torn her from him, the screams of the guests in the ballroom. His own scream came to him as if detached from his body, everything slowing to a halting blur. She had collapsed into his arms, murmuring his name and clutching his arm with a satin glove as though he might somehow still save her, as though he hadn't brought her death himself through his own foolish happiness. He had been too quick to act, too quick to trust.
He had lost her because of it. A Changretta had fired the gun, but Thomas Shelby had nobody to blame for the loss of his wife but himself. The demons in his head were so quick to remind him of the fact, whispering at the corners of his skull and curling their claws into his memories. His thoughts were barbed, his sleep fitful and broken by nightmares.
There were so many bodies. So, so many bodies, a river of blood stretching out at his back, reaching towards the horizon. Grace, John, Barney, Ben Younger, Danny Whizzbang, Freddie Thorne, Greta Jurossi, Bonnie and Aberama Gold. So many bodies.
And while all those bodies piled up around him, while death shadowed each of his footsteps, Mosley still stood alive and well, untouched by the blood which had doused the night in red. The event had taken its course without outward interruption, the exhibition hall flooded by screams of hatred and rallying cries. Mosley was alive, and Aberama was dead, and Barney was dead, and everything had fallen to pieces.
Without the opium, Tommy could hardly keep his hands from shaking.
If he turned his head, would he see Death standing there, holding out her hand? If he finally looked back, would she take him with her into the stillness?
