The Good Samaritan

Alfie Solomons P.O.V

The suggestion Alfie Solomons hates most is the idea that everything starts off wonderful, yeah, and then it gets worse. Alfie knows that to be demonstrably not fuckin' true. Some things, he knows personally, are just born bad. Some people, most people, are innate with no intention to do anything good on this earth. They carry out their plan to deceive and cheat and rob and de-sanctify all that is holy just because that is the way that they were born. That's how they are. That's is what they do. It's relentless. Relentlessly. Their creed runs thus: If I can, I will rob you. If I must, I will kill you. If you let me, I will fuck you. When I've fucked you, I will leave you.

Willpower and wishes on a spoked wheel spiralling away down a hill on a one-way ticket straight to fuckin' hell.

Take Alfie's father for example, Alfred Solomons Sr. He was one such man with one such creed. He was a dispenser, a purveyor of semen to the gullible and the bewildered. A maker of bastards on a scale unseen since Genghis fuckin' Khan. A barbarian for whom every empty womb was Rome to pillage and burn up and to leave with his salt smeared across their towers.

He planted the seeds but he did not tend the gardens. He stayed only long enough to piss on the compost and behead the roses to sell in summer's turn in the market air. With his stolen roses in his pockets, he would leap the garden gate leaving behind only the scent of rum, marzipan, tobacco, and Portugal water, which he sold out of his suitcase, right, at 6 pence a bottle.

At least that is what Alfie's been told. So he's fuckin' told 'cause all he ever saw of his father was his fuckin' hat. It was hanging on a wall on a nail above the sink where his immigrant Russian Jewish mother washed other people's laundry. That hat was a holy relic. Was size 8 and a half. Made in Luton where the hat makers go insane on the fumes of their trade and leave little messages sewn onto the hatbands. The message in Alfie's father's hat was this: "This hat is a kettle in which to boil up your wicked dreams and make a soup of your soul." It is a hat that Alfie still wears to this day. It still smells of Portugal water. When he wears it the schemes and proposals come out of the darkness as if seeping out of the felt and the leather that is stained with his father's suggestive sweat.

Alfie's mother washed bedsheets for a living. His father was a fuckin' hat.

Was it any surprise he was the man he was?

No kisses. No bedtime stories. Just parcels of sheets to deliver to the hotels and the brothels of Camden Town for nothing more than black bread and a pinch from the priest who would then open up his robes when he passed. And from that, Alfie drew his dark and accurate conclusions on religion, and Alfie Solomons Jr grew untended and wild and a beast of a boy who became a bastard of a man.

A stem with hardly a root sticking up so every nasty little Christian kid walking by their nasty little Christian school with their gropy old Christian masters could kick it down and stomp on it and shout "It was you lot who killed Jesus so have that in your belly and have that in your face and see it as charity. We're not nailing you up like you did our Lord."

But every time Alfie got stomped down he fuckin' stomped back again, mate. He survived out of spite, and instead of learning how to fight he learned how to put right to wrongs done unto him tenfold, hundredfold, a bloody thousandfold. Yeah, unto the fucking stars, right. By using the bit of his body that God had cleverly put inside a strong bone box so the kicks and the digs could not reach it. The bit of him that is his brain. With the help of the alchemy of his Portugal water hat and the strong bone box, Alfie processed the schemes and solutions the mad hatters of Luton and his father had sweated into the felt. His brain, a factory producing systems and solutions, sidesteps and speculations, ways around, ways to undermine.

A trickle at night and flood in the day and when he unlocks his bakery and smells the aroma of secrets and sin he begins his own process of accumulation.

He is the chairman of Alfie Solomons Aerated Bread Company, Bonny Street, Camden Town, to be precise. His two vice-chairmen are Mr. Threat and Mr. Violence and the former he prefers but… but the latter is necessary to support the former because without violence there is no threat and without threat, there is no accumulation.

Get it yet, treacle?

Without accumulation well there's just no fucking point, mate.

As a baker, Alfie does, actually, occasionally sell bread. As a bookmaker, he sporadically lets the fastest horse win. As a landlord, he rarely has a roof fixed, but mostly Alfie finds it is quicker and easier to deal with the complainant, right, rather than deal with the complaint.

From all of this, you are drawing your conclusions: Alfie Solomons begat from a bad man, beguiled by a hatband, became a bad man, inspires bad men to do bad things in bad ways to good people who have had bad luck but is considerate enough to admit he is a fuckin' bad bad man.

But consider this, Alfie would argue. In all his years, yeah, as a baker in Camden Town, he has overseen and organized or otherwise been responsible for the deaths of thirty-five fuckin' men. All of whom, he'd have you know, attend his dreams each night in various disguises in irregular order with no pattern or logic to it, but with the consequence that he wakes up each morning in sheets that have be rung out from Portugal-water-sweat by his maid Edna. Yeah, who, should be noted, Alfie has never had an evil thought about in 15 years because when she washes his sweat from the sheets she reminds him of his poor broken-backed mother now residing in hell and washing the robes of Satan himself for bringing a man like him into the world.

Thirty-five men.

Thirty-five times Alfie Solomons was a bad, bad man.

However, here is where mathematics comes to Alfie's rescue. Logic rides in like an accountant on a penny-farthing just in time to waive proof of mitigation before moral bankruptcy is officially declared, yeah. Here is what logic puts forward in his defence.

In France, Passchendaele, for example, take one day, one hour, one fuckin' second. He's standing, right, in the uncultivated mud, a stem with hardly a root. In his hands he has an artillery shell. It is the size and weight of a newborn baby. A little bastard made in Birmingham. Sharped-nosed, the colour of the morning sky. And in that one second, right, one fuckin' second of one day, of one month, of four years in the life of Captain Alfred Solomons Jr., in that one tick of a clock he feeds that baby to the upturned mortar barrel arse first. He turns, ducks, puts his fingers in his ears and-

BOOM!

Alfie sends his bastard baby into the sunrise to do the only job it was ever, ever intended to do. Two seconds later another bang and there in the mud over the trenches lie thirty-six men.

Brown bread for the crows to pick apart.

The thirty-six killed by the soldier, right, are just as dead as the thirty-five killed by the baker, but the thirty-six do not attend Alfie's dreams and are not there in God's ledger counting the good against the bad.

Alfie was given a medal for the thirty-six.

What does it mean, then?

There is no good and there's no bad that is categorical in this world beyond the calculations of powerful men who shift the definition according to their own selfish schemes of accumulation. The only things that are categorical are life and death. And for argument's sake, say life is good and death is bad, purely, purely for argument's sake, which means Alfie's father was fucking right, mate.

You dispense your semen, you piss on the compost, you dead-head the fuckin' roses, leap the garden gate, take what you've stolen to market and you sell it at a reasonable price leaving behind only your hat and the scent of your fuckin' wares.

That is the creed of Alfie Solomons. A lame shepherd among nimble goats who nevertheless at the stable door shall be counted and accumulated as lambs to his gentle slaughter.

Because never forget this, yeah?

Alfie Solomons is always waiting with a Birmingham bastard aimed right at the sun, and one day, if the winds is just and his aim is true, it might just reach your camp.

Alfie Solomons P.O.V

"Fuckin' gypsies, mate. Fuckin' Shelby's. You give them an inch and they take the bloody isle."

Alfie Solomons shook his head, cane in hand thudding gospel on the cobblestone street of Billingsgate market, the largest fish fair in London that reeked like it was too. Many parables in the Torah connect fish with the Jewish people. A symbol of fertility and luck. Sephardi Jews use the fish symbol to ward off the Evil Eye, and although Alfie Solomons is Ashkenazi, he has the petty but pretty notion of buying one just to smack it across the face of Tommy fuckin' Shelby like a duelling glove the next time the Brummie is in his office.

Ollie, Alfie's right-hand man, who was buying mackerel for Sabbath because there was nothing else to fuckin' do, hummed and erred, knowing when and how to let his boss rant and rave after ten years of service.

Alfie took a deep breath, the rancid smell of half-gone fish doing nothing to sooth the thrashing in his temple. The fish didn't start the headache, but they were sure stoking its fires. No, the privilege of causing Alfie's latest migraine went to, of course, Thomas fuckin' Shelby. The reason his head feels like it's being caved in and how tired he is has gypsy fuckin' fingerprints all over it.

"Bloody gypsies, Ollie. Don't get in bed with 'em, yeah? They're liable to set the fuckin' sheets on fire with you still in 'em."

The deal had been simple. Easy, Alfie had thought. So straightforward even a Birmingham bastard could follow it. The Shelby's and the Camden Jews were in the middle of a provisional seize-fire on the warrant of a dead Sabini with his head on a pike. It was beneficial for them both. Tommy got a cut of their racing-racket, got a step into a London, a single step Alfie would watch very, very fuckin' carefully to make sure he didn't try and steal another when this was said and done, and Alfie got the competition out his back fuckin' yard, got his men back onto the Epsom circuit, and when they shook hands at the end of the day across the Passover goat, they could skip off into the fuckin' rainbow their separate ways.

That was the plan.

Alfie, however, was quickly learning that plans mean jack shit when a Shelby was involved.

Sabini had extensive police and political connections including judges, politicians and police officials in London. There wasn't a hotel, race track, or market place from Queenhithe to Cripplegate that didn't have beady Italian eyes watching. If Alfie took a piss before noon, you could be sure some dog-eyed bastard would be noting it down for Sabini to read later over his lunches limoncello.

Hence his little trip around a bloody fish market this fine fuckin' morning.

Alfie needed to be spotted outside and far away from the Eden Club, the jazz spot Sabini owned off fifth, where Thomas Shelby and his Peaky Blinders were supposedly going to show face that day. No point, right, in giving Sabini the heads-up that the Jews and the Gypsies were unified on their singular hatred of him.

So, yeah, Tommy and his lot were supposed to swan into town, rough the place up a little, make their presence known. Alfie was supposed to be far away from the action, giving credence to the illusion that the two still fuckin' hated each other's guts, Sabini would feel boxed in, might make him feel desperate, right, desperate enough to come to Alfie with a proposal of letting his horses and men back into Epsom in return for solidarity against those encroaching Birmingham bastards. Alfie would play his part, shake Darby's hand, and behind closed doors give Tommy three spots on Epsom along with his own men.

Everybody fuckin' wins, innit.

Tommy, however, Tommy fuckin' Shelby, had gone bloody rogue. All Sodom and Gomorrah, old school testament with ungodly wits. From what Noah had come and told him a half hour ago, red-faced and nervous from a long run across London, Tommy and his brothers had gone to Eden, ruffled the feathers of a few patrons to show Sabini's protection didn't mean nothin' no more, just as planned-

And declared This place is under new management. By order of the Peaky Blinders.

That wasn't part of the plan.

That wasn't supposed to happen.

Eden was one of Sabini's biggest laundry operations, washing his money clean in the glasses of gin and whisky for the young bourgeoisie of London where it could sit neatly folded in his bank safe in his penthouse, only to be taken out when Sabini wanted a limp-limbed prostitute or poppy pipe to warm his nights.

He wouldn't take Tommy's speech softly.

Sabini would be less likely to entreat with Alfie now, and more likely to hail down retribution on Tommy to save face in London. He'd make it big. Make it loud. Make it so no other, brummies' or otherwise, would think they could come in on their horses and raid his village. The Huns had crossed the great fuckin' wall, yeah, and Emperor Sabini was going to torch the golden palace.

Instead of a squabble, Tommy had kicked off a war.

That was the type of man Darby Sabini was, and if Tommy had listened to a single fuckin' word Alfie had told him, just one yeah, he would have understood that. Now, right, now, whatever bombs got shelled down on Tommy and his men, Alfie, in fuckin' bed with the Peakys with his pants around his ankles, would be caught in the crossfire.

In a joint enterprise, it was only polite to keep the other party involved and informed. They may be murderers, thieves and fuckin' vagabonds, but they still should have good manners.

"Eden wasn't part of the deal, was it, Ollie?"

"No boss."

"And didn't I tell that gypsy bastard that he should keep it down low? Make Sabini nervous, not murderous?"

"Yes boss."

"And, fuckin' and right, did I know any of this? Did he think to tell me? Has he not gone behind my back like a naughty school boy and taken an extra slice of cake?"

"He has boss."

"And what do we do to greedy boys this side of the Thames, Ollie? We get two ounces of black powder. We get a funnel and a bucket and a rat from the gutter. A fat fuckin' grey one. We strap 'em down, right, and-"

"Excuse me?"

The new-found voice came from behind Ollie, Ollie still near the bloody stall full of fish on ice and barrels of fresh shrimp and crab, unkosher swine these Londoners, and it was a bright thing, a sharp thing, a thing serrated with a Scottish accent, and it cuts right through Alfie's tirade like a knife through butter.

It also makes Ollie jump and spin like a Russian ballerina in his panic and surprise, chest tight, elbows out.

It happens fast then.

The voice, who must have belonged to a woman, a woman who must have been standing too close behind Ollie, oomph's. There's a clatter and a clang, and a splash of fuckin' water. It doesn't take Alfie Solomons more than three seconds to realize what's happened by Ollie's rather undignified yelp.

He'd gone and clocked the person trying to squeeze through with his bloody elbow, sent her sailing into an open top barrel.

"Bloody 'ell, Ollie."

Alfie grunts as he shoulders past the fright-frozen man, shoving him out of the way of the drowned voice, and he gets to the barrel just as the water breaks and-

Out comes, flopping and flailing and falling to the cobble, a tiny, tiny thing.

A tiny, tiny, drenched thing, hacking and cursing and hissing a storm.

"Fuck! I think there's a prawn up my nose!"

The market stall owner has heard the commotion at this point, thinks to insert himself right until he turns the corner, spots Ollie and Alfie already there lurking underneath the gas lamp, and of course he knows who Alfie is, hardly a soul in London who didn't, of course he thinks better of it, thinks to save his own skin and skedaddle back around and away.

You see a bad, bad man, you turn tail and run.

The girl on the cobble hacks some more, and Alfie thinks she gets the prawn out by the sound of something bouncing off stone, and then she looks up and up and up, and she's fuckin' glaring.

Sitting in a puddle of freshwater, sodden and soaked and saturated, saturated yeah, that's the word Alfie was looking for. Like God had gone to town himself on this one, got all his paints out and fuckin' hacked them at a canvas. Black so dark it was almost blue, skin blistered pink in the frost of a London winter, green that would put a Tsarist emerald to shame. She's a multicoloured flecked sunrise in a city that never sleeps.

It clashes rather unusually with her monochrome clothing and the grim sepia of a London market. As if someone had come along and snatched off the sunglasses Alfie hadn't known he was wearing.

Her monochrome clothing that is dripping through.

The girl winces and scrabbles to get the coat off, letting it fall beside her with a plop and a slap where, between the drenched folds of wool and fur a fat red bellied crab comes skittering out running for it's fuckin' life down the road of Billingsgate fair.

"I am so sorry-"

The girl ignores Ollie completely, ignores his stuttered apology and the offered hand, and heaves herself up on her own two legs. She had to be young, a teen, a young bright thing five-foot fuck all and weighing less than Cyril after a Sunday lunch, dripping water to her feet and trying desperately to ring the salt out her hair as she gets the heaving curtain of it out her face.

It was curly, certainly kinky, even as drenched as it was.

Something tickles in Alfie's hindbrain when her face comes into full view, that little voice that pokes and says remember, remember. Something about the slope of her jaw, or the turn of her nose, or the brows over cattish eyes that ring a bell of familiarity that bring to mind, for the hundredth time that day, Tommy Shelby.

He brushes it off.

The girl clearly had a Scottish accent not a Birmingham one, and given the clothes, tatty and worn, yes, but not stripes of scarfs and gold banded tassels, she wasn't a gypsy.

"It's fine."

The girl huffed, giving up on the futile task of twisting her hair out, a shiver beginning to dance along her shoulders as her breath clouded in the air, coming out the fog as a sleepy-eyed kid.

"It's fine. Just be careful next time."

Ollie, poor flustered Ollie, tries to take a step closer.

"Here let me-"

"That's enough of you, mate."

Alfie breaks, unexpectedly suffering a spell of silly offence that insists that all the locked and loaded waif of a woman's notice be solely on him. Alfie promptly brushes that off too. Alfie's a bad, bad man, right? But this little lamb had to be at least half his fuckin' age, and he's never been that type of bad.

He uses his cane to nudge Ollie away all the same.

"Fuck off. I'll meet you back at the bakery."

Ollie's got good enough sense, or is it bad enough sense, to do what he's told, scarpering away the same direction the renegade crab had gone with barely a glance back, paper parcel of mackerel safely stashed underneath his arm. The girls turned to trying to ring out her skirt, and the shiver's no longer left to her shoulders but to her spine and her legs too, to her pale little fingers twisting in the wool.

Alfie Solomons is a bad man. No one, ever, on this God's green earth would refute, dispute, or rebut that. Yet even he can have good moments. Moments where the hatband isn't so tight across his brow. Where he doesn't smell of Portuguese water. Where there isn't sheets to be washed and bombs to be sent.

Moments were he's just fuckin' Alfie.

"Here, take this before you keel over with frostnip, treacle."

He shirks his coat off, with its heavy collar and its heavy fleece and buttons all down the side, holds it out close enough and he finds he's hit the mark, hit it right on the head, mate.

The small thing smells of treacle, wildflowers and fuckin' sunshine on a wheatfield. The kind that turns everything it touches golden. It permeates out of her in fuckin' waves, lapping into unseen shores, straight into the sea of Alfie Solomons brain.

She scowls at the coat.

Prickly, this one.

"I don't need-"

"Fuckin' take it."

She does eventually, with a sweep and a snatch of a gloved hand. The cold's gotten to her. And it's almost comical, really, how much the coat drowns her, hands hidden in sleeves and hem to her bloody ankles.

It'll keep her warm though.

"You're lookin' lost there, little lamb."

"I'm not lost and I'm not a lamb."

She bites back, only for her scowl to soften, easing out the creases between her brows to something tender maybe as she winds herself deeper into the coat drowning her. The warmth finally seeping into her pink-blushed skin.

"I'm just a little… Misplaced. I lost my aunts in the crowd. Been wondering around here for the last half hour trying to find the bloody exit so I could try and meet them out front. How big is this place, anyway?"

Alfie snorted, fingers winding around the polished handle of his cane, rings tight against his knuckle. She might be right about not being a lamb. She looks ready to throw down with the next market stall owner she passed, ready to kick his cane out from under him if he said one wrong word, ready to try and scale the fuckin' walls to get out of here.

Alfie felt the same about this God-awful place.

"Well you're going in the wrong way, yeah. Come along."

He's already walking, thud-thud-thudding, and there's no step's following. When he glances back, she's still standing in her puddle.

"You want me to follow a strange man into the smog of a London market that I clearly don't know the arrangement of?"

Smart girl.

"Or you could stay here, treacle. Make friends with the fuckin' fishes. Become queen of the bloody ice buckets. I'll bring you pilgrimage every Sabbath, how about that?"

Alfie turned and kept walking. He knows exactly what he is, how he looks. A grizzly bear of a man with discoloured clothing, who's wilted by age and war beyond his years and has a lumbering gate.

If he spotted himself half in the gaslight of the lamp above, he wouldn't have followed him either.

Then a voice lurches at his side.

"Thank you."

He jumps a little, cursing, glancing over sharply.

The girl was right beside him.

She really was silent on her feet. Quick too. Deceptively fast for such short legs. No wonder Ollie hadn't noticed her before damage could be done. Her voice is less coal black and thorny now, more soft soot and embers. Alfie squints her way. She in turn glances down to herself pointedly.

"For the coat."

Alfie doesn't know what to say immediately. Which is strange, right, real fuckin' strange. He's always had the gift of the gab. A silver tongue in a rotten mouth. He could speak a devil into a deal before they knew the deed was struck his ma used to say. But he's not used to being thanked. Can't remember the last time it had happened, and it throws him slightly, tosses him right into a grunt and a grumble.

"Don't mention it, treacle."

'Cause Alfie didn't want to look too close at it himself. Didn't want to look too carefully at why exactly he'd handed his coat over at all, why he hadn't just used his cane to point the waif of a girl in the right direction and dusted his hands off from the whole matter, maybe even left Ollie to sort it out as he made his way back to the bakery to ring Thomas Shelby and bark curses down the phone.

He blames all this on his headache, on the low-slung but mounting pain in his hip, he blames it on the fish stall and the dim light of the coffered market, and most of all he blames it on the smell of sunshine up his nose and down his throat until he could almost taste gold.

"Harry. My name's Harry."

Alfie snorts and parts the crowds around him like Moshe parted the red sea, and the girl at his side uses him as a slip stream to swim through. The little piranha following the wake of a shark.

"Nah. Harry don't suit you, yeah."

There's a chuckle that dances at his side, sounding like the rippling of windchime. A choir coming out from the dark of a lonely night.

"Are you… Are you really telling me what my own name is?"

"Not telling nothin'. Just don't think it's right. Doesn't sit well, does it? Falls flat. Nah. More a Seraphina I think."

The girl, the Harry, surprises him with a tut.

"Burning? Bit fuckin' rude."

She has a foul mouth for one so small, a foul mouth and a prickly temper and a fuckin' sunshine bright blaze. Not the type of person who should be in a place like this with a man like him.

"Speak Hebrew, do you?"

From the corner of his eye, he watches her curls bounce in the shake.

"Nope. But I do speak latin. Seraphinus means burning or fiery. Not much of a jump between the two. What are you then? Doyle?"

Alfie doesn't rightly know what that name means, doesn't speak a lick of Gaelic, but he does know, right, cheek when he hears it.

"Fred."

Alfie says before he can catch himself. And it makes no fuckin' sense right, not one bit, to lie and keep and fib, but he does it anyway. He does it because for one second, right, one fuckin' second of one day, of one month, of all thirty-two years of his misbegotten misguided malformed life, he doesn't have to be Alfie Solomons Jr, the man who cut other's and stomped back and had blood so far up his hands it encircled his throat.

For a moment he could be Fred. A good man who did good things for sunshine bright souls.

There won't be another time for Fred to live again. He knows that this one innocuous flash-bang is all he's going to have with her. He knows that this nice slice of goodness is ephemeral, right. Because there's the door out of Billingsgate, and there's only twenty steps left, and when she went through that door, she'd take Fred with her, and he'd be back to Alfie, the bad, bad man.

"Fred?"

She asked as she looks at him, really looks, and there's a spark of something in her eye, something deep and knowing that teases out the green and makes the pupil clear.

"Fred the good Samaritan… It suits you."

No it fuckin' doesn't, but Alfie won't call the girl on it. Finds that he quite likes, despite her being terribly wrong, being thought of by anybody, for any amount of time, as being good.

He coughs unceremoniously to clear his throat, swinging his cane out in front.

"There's the door, treacle. Off you trot."

She goes to shirk off his coat but she isn't gone yet, hasn't crossed the imaginary boundary of the door, Fred isn't dead, he still has a few moments of wonderful life yet, and so Alfie shakes his head.

"Keep it. Got plenty more. Can't have you wondering the streets in your sodden clothes now. Not with all the sodomites here."

As King of 'em, Alfie would know.

Harry slowly but surely pulls it back around her shoulders, but there's a peculiar smile on her face, lopsided as it is dimpled, and it strikes out invisibly, entangles the air itself in its snare, rooted.

"Next time?"

Again, Alfie doesn't know what the fuck he's doing when he replies.

"Next time."

She goes after that, doesn't say goodbye, and neither does Alfie. He watches her go, watches as she glances back only once, and when she's gone, out of sight, Fred is dead.

When Alfie finds himself lumbering out the west gate ten minutes later to find Ollie waiting for him, of course he was bloody waiting for him, he's back to ranting and raving and having none of the bite.

He still tastes gold.

He still feels sunshine.

He still smells sweet.

"Fuck Gypsies, mate. Fuck Shelbys. They get into your head, right, and make it all puddled. Got that cursed magic, ain't they. Mind fucks, the lot of 'em."

Harrietta Shelby's P.O.V

By the time Harry makes it out front of the market, she spots Ada and Polly straight away. They're standing off to the side, huddled with the pram between them, police officer in front with notebook open and ready as Polly pointed back towards the entrance of Billingsgate market, gesturing and talking, and Ada spots Harry in turn.

"Oh, Harry! There you are! You scared the hell out of us-"

Ada, pram in hand a Karl snoring away in his blankets, stopped just shy of Harry, frowning at her when she got a good look at the bedraggled dripping state she was in.

"What happened to you?"

Harry winced helplessly.

"Got lost in the crowd. Took a tumble with the seafood. Sorry about your coat. I think it belongs to the crabs now."

She's just about to say she would buy Ada a new one, a better one, remembering rather poignantly how Petunia would be when she broke or ruined something in 4 Privet drive, when Polly, after saying goodbye to the unneeded police officer, has come to their side, staring.

Harry shuffled where she stood under the surprisingly heavy stare. There was something… Bottomless in that look. Like a night sky with no stars. A glimpse at infinity and desolation.

"What are you wearing?"

Harry glanced down to the coat she was still sporting, the coat that was ten times too big, the coat that smelled of marzipan and tobacco and something a little peppery like gunpowder. It's a nice smell.

Warm.

"A good Samaritan saw me go head first into the shrimp barrel. Didn't want me to freeze. Told me to keep it."

Polly was still looking. Polly was still staring. And Harry had the strange notion that she wasn't looking at her at all but something underneath, something below and around and unseen.

Harry had no time to yelp as Polly snatched out, yanked her arm up, shoved the sleeve away, unfurled her fingers and searched the palm of her hand, tilting it this way and that underneath the pale sun.

"What-"

"Who gave you this coat?"

Polly asked sharply as she glanced up momentary, straight at Harry like an arrow bolt. Harry frowned. She thinks of the man with the peculiar hat, tall and lumbering and as big as a fuckin' bear, about as grumpy as one too, soft somehow as well-

"I don't know. He said his name was Fred."

Polly's finger traced a crease on Harry's palm, humming along the path as she went.

"Pol?"

Ada's voice broke Polly out of whatever it was that had befallen her, her head snapping up from being hunch over her hand, and she held Harry's palm for just a moment more before smiling and letting the limb go. Harry gently took it back, a little perplexed and a little disconcerted.

The look in Polly's eye reminded Harry of Trelawny.

Never a good sign.

"Oh, don't mind me. Old gypsy superstitions for an old gypsy soul. Come on, let's head back. We've had enough excitement today and Tommy'll be done with business by now and you need to dry off proper before you catch a cold."

The smile on Polly's face didn't quite reach her eyes. Harry thinks about asking about it, questioning it, but her tongue feels fatty in her mouth, and there's marzipan and gunpowder in her nose.

She uses her thumb to trace the inside of her palm, but Polly leaves her no time to sulk or ponder much more as she loops an arm through Harry's and begins to cart her back down the road with a quickly following Ada, talk swiftly turning to tea and dinner and getting Karl a new pair of boots.

It doesn't escape her notice, however, how tightly Polly holds on to her arm.

I am nervously wringing my hands hoping I didn't murder Alfie's character. He's so complex and multifaceted, he's really been one of the most difficult but also most fun to write for so far. I hope I did him some justice lol, and I would really appreciate on hearing how you think I did with him.

I would like to note that the first part of this chapter was mostly from the Gospel of Alfie Solomons by Steven Knight and read by Tom Hardy. I, of course, added my own flavour and flair to it, but I did want to give credit where credit was due.

And on to the big matter at hand, as you can likely tell, Alfie won out in the vote for the pairing. Really, he walked away with it. So this fic is now an Alfie/Harry fic, and I've updated the summary, tags and so on to match. I'm actually rather excited about this, and I hope you are too. It's going to be one buck wild ride!

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. 😉