Thomas Shelby's P.O.V
It was not a surprise to anyone that Thomas Shelby was a clever man. He doesn't try to hide it. It's one small part of the armoury of his fierce repute. Half a war was won in the mind, and if he could cause hesitancy in the thoughts of his enemy before even stepping out onto the battlefield himself, than that was what needed to be done.
His reputation is a breastplate, and he wears it as well as a tailored three-piece suit.
Nevertheless, a clever man is often times a lonely man.
He sees things other people don't he knows and has understood this since he was a young boy. Forecasts of conduct and behaviour that plot out in front of him like constellation maps that he can chart across. It came from being a quiet boy, a boy who watched. Now that he's older it's a skill that has become deadly sharp.
A sword that went both ways.
When you know what people can do, how far a man would be willing to go if given the right incentive, how low or high a woman might rise or fall, friends and lovers were hard to come by and harder yet to keep.
Grace. The half malformed attempt at regularity and stability. The one who got away, or the one Tommy let slip through. He still isn't too sure which one she was. He supposed it didn't really matter. She'd gone to London, then to who knows where, Tommy had burned his letter and stayed exactly where he was on a flip of a coin. Tommy makes do to some extent because he doesn't concern himself with friends or lovers outside what it could mean for his ambition.
Grace had been… Different.
He thinks she might have been different. She'd seen him, hadn't she? At least a little, which was more than most. Peeked below the carefully crafted exterior of a razor-bladed cap and pocket watch to see the caged animal below, and she hadn't shirked him off, hadn't run.
Perhaps some damaged part in her had peeked at some damaged part in him, and like two canaries across a mine they had tweeted hellos in the dark. Maybe that was simply what love was. Damaged people with the same hurts meeting in the dark places.
Maybe it was all in his fuckin' head, but their affair had been short, sweet, and spent.
Grace wasn't coming back, Tommy wasn't leaving, and perhaps that was for the best. She'd glimpsed him, yes, but she hadn't seen him.
Occasionally, lying in bed at night and trying to outthink the tunnelling clatter in his mind, trying to pretend there isn't blood rusting underneath his nails that won't come out no matter how hard he scrubs, or men slumbering in their own beds outside his window in need of putting down like a lame horse, he sees the world as a tartan chess board with its black squares and its white.
Tommy's always been good at chess. The best in the family. Never lost a game.
People are like chess pieces, Queens with their Polly shaped bases or Knights who smiled like Arthur or Bishops with John's shadow. The trick was knowing when or how to move them. And he does move them. He pushes them forward, moves them back, sends them marching into rival states. He hates himself for it, loathes the very marrow in his bones, but that doesn't stop Tommy Shelby.
Thomas Shelby was a clever, lonely man, not a good one.
It becomes second nature, this chess-board Charleston he does. And then he gets into a car on a long drive to London with his long-missing daughter, and Tommy Shelby doesn't know what will come, what pieces he should push, where the constellations are taking him.
Sitting in the cab, hands at two and six, he takes to glancing at the girl beside him periodically. She has the window down, wind in her hair, and she's bold as she sits there, bold like a bulldog with a bone, watching as trees and fields slowly spun to outhouses and homes.
It feels like there's a trench separating the two, stuck in dead-man's land with his foot half-pressed on a mine, and spotting another soldier across the ditch with a grenade pin in hand wondering who was going to blow first.
He looked at her and sees himself. They both look like his mother, the only two in the family that do, black curls and straight noses and the god-forsaken eyes that Polly says sees dead things in the night. Yet, it's more than that. More than physical similarities that only go skin deep.
Whatever souls are made of, he thinks, theirs are hewn from the same stuff.
"Lizzie Stark… My mother-… Is she doing… Well?"
It was stilted, this question, the three second saving grace of a grenade about to go. Tommy keeps his gaze dead ahead, peeping in the rear-view to see Pol napping in the back.
"She's… Good. She's doing a correspondence course. I think she wants to work as a secretary."
He feels a little terrible for this, Tommy thought but would never say. Using the information Lizzie had given him, her lacklustre attempt at keeping his attention, to keep the moment going for just a little while longer, using it to paint himself as a better man, a man who knew how Harriet's mother was.
Yet, what was the other option? Telling her that Lizzie was a prostitute who harked her wares in a back-alley barkeep? That they hardly spoke anymore beyond transaction of sweat-stained relief for money? That he could hardly look at her most days, and she could only see the quiet teen boy she had fallen in love with so long ago when she looked at him?
No. Not yet anyway.
"You're not together anymore?"
His finger's flex on the wheel.
"No."
Harrietta hums, the noise drifting along with the breeze blowing through the window, swirling it around the cab like her voice was waltzing with the world.
She doesn't seem particularly upset or irritated of the answer.
"And what do you do? That place back there… There were betting boards up."
Tommy sucked on his teeth behind his lips. He's not used to this, not used to small-talk, idle curious chatter, conversation where he cares where the discussion goes, and Harrietta, she knows how to hit with the hard questions.
Tommy doesn't lie.
"It's a betting shop. We work on horse races, some of them our own. I also own some… Property. We rent it out."
But he doesn't tell the whole truth either.
"You own horses?"
There's genuine excitement in her voice, and there's a corresponding genuine smile etching across his face.
"Oh, aye. You like horses?"
Harrietta turned away from the window, towards him, and Tommy spots the dimples that match.
"I like things that make me go fast. Bikes, cars, horses, flying-"
She cuts herself off, and Tommy cocked a brow.
"You fly planes?"
Harrietta shifted in her seat, the creak of leather giving her away.
"Something like that."
Not a lie. Not a whole truth either. Same stuff, indeed.
Tommy changed gear and brought the car down a right lane. It wouldn't be long to Ada's now.
"You should speak to your uncle John. He enjoys fast things."
Fast women, quick drugs and high-speed drink too, but Harrietta didn't need to know that. Harrietta didn't need to know a lot of things. John's speed would come in handy that afternoon, with any luck. The sooner they dumped the body, the sooner Tommy could get back to Ada's, back to Harrietta, and get back to Birmingham the better.
"High-stakes, horses, and houses. Is that what it means to be a Shelby?"
Not at all. Being a Shelby was living somewhere between life and death, waiting to move on. Being a Shelby was accepting that. To shake hands with the devils, and walk past them.
Harrietta may have had their name but Tommy hoped she didn't share the curse. Hoped she had just enough Lizzie in her to stave off Tommy's bad-blood.
She wouldn't end up like them.
Tommy would make sure of it.
"Being a Shelby, I think, means being loudmouthed and reckless. You'll see what I mean when you watch your aunts and uncles around an open bottle of gin."
Harrietta chuckled, head lolling back towards the window, back to the outside world she watched whirl by.
"I'll fit right in then."
"You like gin?"
Harrietta shook her head, and from the corner of Tommy's eye he watches the locks glint almost blue underneath the pale sunlight.
"I prefer rum, actually."
He knows another who favours rum. Another who would tell you to your face that it was bread before beating the teeth out a man's face for calling him a liar.
Harrietta wouldn't know about him, either.
"Horrible drink. Makes fools out of men."
A tick, a chuckle.
"But can make men out of fools."
Alfie Solomons' had told him just the same once. Get a man sozzled on rum, Tommy, right? Yeah, get him in the rum, and you'll see who he really is. Cuts the chaff from the wheat, innit. Let's you see just who you're shaking hands with. Rum is for fun and fuckin', yeah, but it's also for filtering out the fools from the fighters.
Tommy rolled the car to the curb, cutting the engine, slinging an arm over the back of the seat to glance behind.
"Hey, Pol, time to wake up."
The dark eyed woman blinked awake, coughing, rolling her neck, voice still surly with sleep.
"Sorry, didn't mean to doze off. We here?"
Tommy nodded.
"You and Harrietta should head in. I'm heading to the meeting."
And if he wasn't standing on the stoop Ada was less likely to slam the door in their faces. Pol, thankfully, understood this, reaching for the car door and slipping out onto the street. She'd play interference for the siblings, and hopefully soften Ada up before Tommy came back later.
"You're not coming?"
Tommy glanced over to Harrietta, grip tightening on the leather underneath his hand. Here it was again, another half-truth, needed, sure, but no less sickly feeling.
"I'm already running late. It shouldn't take long. I'll be back by the time the lamps come on."
Not long at all if everything goes to plan.
He doesn't like it any more than he did before, however. Running off so soon, going, leaving Harietta-
It wouldn't be the same as last time, he told himself though it did little to calm him. He wouldn't get back to find social services at his door, papers in hands, Lizzie in hysterics on the step-
It wouldn't be the same.
Polly flung open Harrietta's door, nodding for her to follow along with a tilt of her chin.
"Come on, let's get you inside and warmed up. I don't know about you but I could do with a cuppa."
Harrietta slipped from the car but didn't leave the side. She hesitated, wavered, hand on handle, and so did Tommy.
What was he meant to say? Not goodbye. Not again. Farewell seemed to flimsy, fragile.
Harrietta, nevertheless, found her footing, head still ducked in the cab, and grinned.
"You dent my car and I'll dent your head."
Tommy chuckles. Easy, effortless. Content.
Tommy felt content for the first time in years.
"Can't have that now, aye?"
Harrietta slams the door closed and follows Pol over the road, up the garden path, and Tommy stays on the curb in the car, watching them go, waits until he sees them inside before he starts the engine again, peeling off down the winding road.
The sooner they got out of London, the better. Home. Tommy wanted to take Harrietta home.
Finally.
He just had to get rid of a dead body and a few Italians first.
Ada Shelby's P.O.V
"I can't believe she's back."
Ada stated softly as she propped a hip against the counter at her side, cup of tea in hand, Martin Sieghart playing lightly on the radio, Polly sitting at her table with her own drink cooling in front of her. Through the open kitchen door, Ada could see Harrietta out in the hall, sitting on the tile, uncaring of creasing her skirts, playing a game of peek-a-boo with a toddling Karl who seemed more than a little obsessed with getting his tiny fingers in her curls.
Karl had taken to the young woman as soon as he had spotted her, and hadn't left her alone since. Harrietta seemed just as happy to play with the boy.
"How is Tommy taking it?"
Ada might have been on the outs with her brother ever since she had come to London and away from his sphere of influence in Birmingham, out of his reach of control, they hadn't talked in over two months, but this… Fuck, Ada wasn't petty enough to hold much against him in the light of this.
Polly used the sugar spoon to stir her tea.
"Hard to tell. It's Tommy."
That was explanation enough, Ada supposed. Tommy was a hard read even to Polly, who, perhaps, was the best at understanding the detached man her brother had become.
"He does know he could have come in, right? I might be frustrated with him, but I'm not so heartless as to shut the door in his face with news like this."
The silver spoon tinkled against the fine china.
"Tommy had a… Matter he needed to attend to."
Matter. That was Shelby speak for death.
Ada's cup slammed down onto the counter, voice hissed through teeth, mixing with the beat of a piano.
"Bloody 'ell, Pol. Are you truly telling me he's doing business when he's only just-"
Polly sighed, and Ada realized, belatedly, she was preaching to the choir.
"You don't think I told him that? Tommy said it couldn't wait, so here we are, waiting for him instead."
"Is everything alright?"
Ada jumped, spinning, coming to face Harrietta in the doorway, frowning with concern, Karl bouncing happily on her hip. She was a fast thing. A silent thing. Ada tried to smile, tried to laugh. She was sure it came out more a gnarled grimace.
"Oh, yes."
The idea comes quick, hard, and unshakable.
"I was just telling aunt Pol to get her coat on."
"Ada-"
But Ada wasn't listening to Polly's short, sharp warning. Ada was strolling over to Harrietta, gently taking her son, fighting to detangle his hand from black hair without yanking a lock from scalp.
"If Tommy, John and Arthur can go out and about, drinking and smoking in some pub meeting, so can we. You can borrow one of my coats, Harry. It'll keep you warm. London's cold this time of year."
"Ada-"
"We'll be back before dark… Unless you would rather stay here, Pol? Sitting around the kitchen table and waiting for the boys to come back as if we have nothing better to do?"
Ada knows she's hit the right nerve, the right-hand spot, by the glint in Polly's eye.
"A half hour walk."
Ada grinned.
"Brilliant."
Twenty minutes later, Karl in pram and everybody wrapped up, they left the house.
Forty-five minutes later, Harrietta vanished from a market stall street.
I took a long hiatus from writing for the last couple of years but I'm getting back into lately, it's a slow process but I'm hoping to get my head properly back into the game soon. I haven't updated this fic for a long while because inspiration sort of fizzled out for it for many reasons. I got writers block, I didn't really like the character Michael became in later seasons, and I just didn't really know how to get where I wanted to go with it all. In short I sort of psyched myself out. Yet I know people like this fic, and I hope you're still around despite the horrible wait between updates, and I really do want to finish this story as I have a few things up my sleeve that I think I'll really enjoy playing out.
I thought I would try something new for it to resuscitate this dead thing lol. Firstly, I really want to focus on the Tommy/Harry parental relationship and Harry's relationships with the rest of the Shelby's and Lizzie. This fic, above everything, is about family. I really want to keep that at the centre of it all.
Secondly, I'm thinking about changing the pairing from Michael/Harry to Alfie/Harry. I can't help myself lol. Alfie is, as you can likely tell, my favourite Peaky Blinders character, Harry's clearly my favourite Potter character, and I'm just a sucker for grumpy-big-bastards having a soft spot for feral-small things trope.
Plus giving Tommy an aneurism is too funny.
I've created a poll on my profile page to hear your thoughts on the matter as I didn't just want to change the pairing when you wonderful readers have clicked on this fic thinking this will be a Michael sotry and I just leg-sweep you with this. If you do not want to vote by poll, you can P.M me or drop it on a review too.
Sorry to everyone who's been waiting for an update for so long, I know this one is short but another update is coming soon and boy does it get spicy.
Thank you to everybody who has favourited, followed and reviewed. If you have the time, drop a review, they're the fuel to my mad muses. 😉