Rough Winds Do Shake
Full Summary: She was summer sin in skin, and he all winter woes, and maybe it was his Shelby blood or her Potter luck, but together they might just be able to have everything. When Hemlock Potter rolls into Thomas Shelby's life like a storm, nothing is left untouched, intact or unscathed. Especially not their hearts. Told in Drabbles. Fem!Harry/Thomas Shelby. Strong M.
Drabble Set One:
Small Mercies.
I.
Thomas Shelby shoots the horse dead the night it rains. It was a fast thing, a pretty thing, a sick thing. The bullet had been a mercy. The pain minimal. The sound of the gunshot haunting. Tommy felt the rattle and ring of it in his bones long after he walked out the stable and into the heavy downpour of the moonlight.
She was walking down the muck sogged lane when Tommy first saw her, travelling the opposite way of him, up stream as he went down, and he had never seen anything so… her.
It was her hair that first catches his gaze, as bright as a blaze, a spur from a flint, the amber heart of a setting sun. Those curls glowed in the night, even under the umbrella. The eyes, green, green eyes that catch and take his own, as well as his breath, as well as his sleepless shattered mind, she trudges on passed but those eyes are worst, or better, or simply more still.
Endless summers stolen away to shelter in a high arched socket.
Her gloved hand wound tighter on the handle of her umbrella, scuffed boots splashing in the filth and the rain, and she walks on by, and blinks, and dips a chin, and she brought with her the smell of honeysuckle and sweet pea, and she smiles. It was small, and it was dimpled, and in the night, in the rain, with gunpowder on his fingers from killing that poor, sick horse, it was warm.
Too warm.
Burning.
A Bonfire in midwinter.
She, this red-reared stranger, says nothing to him, only smiles, only walks, and she does not turn around to glance back at him.
Tommy knows.
Tommy stopped and watched her disappear down the lane, and he thinks some part of himself goes with her, with her amber hair and those green eyes and that sense of being warm.
Maybe, after all, as Tommy turned back around and left, nothing went with her at all, and the rain was heavy, the smog of Birmingham thicker, the gun in his pocket harder, and perhaps three nights of sleepless work had left him listless and fanciful.
He still sees that smile when he finally, finally, puts his head to a pillow, however, and for once, just once, his blanket feels warm and not like the field on the Somme.
II.
The second time Thomas Shelby sees the girl she does not see him at all. He was with his brothers that morning, raucous and rowdy as they were, on their way to the Garrison for brandy and bloodshed, and she comes down from Watery Lane, wicker basket in hand and men's work boots on her feet and sunset for hair flowing in loose pinned locks about her delicate shoulders.
He spots her immediately in the crowd. It seemed, to Tommy, almost impossible not to find his gaze robbed by the girl when she slunk within its reach, like sunrise after a long, dark night, there was a sense of… Shelter, safety, home to be found in her silhouette that Tommy did not want to recognize or verbalize.
She was a tiny thing he could see as she walked down by the brick bolted road across the way, barely up to his collar bone if they were to stand arm to arm, pale too, dappled in gilt freckles, lithe under her shapeless blouse and skirts.
Her hair was just as bright underneath morning sun as it had been under fogged-frost starlight.
Her eyes even more so.
Tommy saw the scar too. A glimpse of it under a spiced curl, a jagged, pink, screw down her forehead as if a storm had kissed its anger at her brow.
Tommy was moving before he truly new he was, feet on pulley strings, shifting course and goal and purpose-
She walked right on passed him, Thomas Shelby, Thomas Shelby with his Shelby brothers and his Peaky Blinder cap, as if he was just another face in the street, just another man, just another lost soul in a sea of misplaced dreams, swinging her basket full of bread as she went, humming some old, Celtic lilting tune.
John knocks his shoulder when he catches up, grin light but frown deep.
"Where you off to? Turned around and you were half way across the road already-"
"Nowhere."
Tommy cut in, sharply, strikingly, the only way Thomas Shelby ever speaks. And, because he knows John, knows Arthur too when the eldest brother came up to the pair, Tommy shook his head.
"Thought I saw someone I knew."
Tommy turned and headed back the way he came, back the way his feet had carried him, leather gloves groaning as his hands clenched in his coat pockets.
"I was mistaken."
John doesn't say anything more, neither does Arthur, and Tommy was thankful for small mercies.
Mercies like bullets for a sick horse.
The girl, that morning, that feeling of… Indiscernibility, it was an effect that lasts with Tommy for days, the impression of leaving no impression at all.
Tommy wasn't used to that. People saw Thomas Shelby when he walked down a street. People felt things when his shadow crosses theirs. Fear, yes. Respect, definitely. Anger, sometimes. Nothing? Never.
Even when the girl was long gone humming that lullaby tune, even as he settles into the warm-worn leathers of his private booth at the Garrison, even when he lays down that night and stares up to the crack in his ceiling, she was not far from his thoughts.
It looked like her scar, that crack.
A storm kissed fury.
Tommy has no name for this feeling, no name for the storm, but, three days later, he does have a name for the girl.
Hemlock Potter.
It sounds like a gun shot.
Woo or Boo?
A.N: This is actually a fic that I have joint written with a friend of mine on here called AlwaysEatTheRude21, so a big thank you to her too for putting up with my nonsense! This fic is going to be told in 500-or-so word drabbles, be relatively short (but not too short), a very strong M eventually, contain smut, and will hopefully be a good ride for all!
Once again, and as always, thank you all for reading, and I hope you guys like the first two drabbles and are looking forward to more. If you can, please drop a review! I love hearing from you all, and I will hopefully see you all soon!