xXx

Ever since he was a boy people had said Tommy Shelby had something unlike the rest. He was one of those kids who walked around so fearless and silent behind sleepy lids. He never made a sound he didn't mean for you to hear, like a stare from behind when you turn and it's there. He'd play games as a child, games with a stick, not to rob you, he'd come out of the fog, not to rob you, just to scare you and make you laugh. Not like those boys from his street in their charity boots, he'd walk barefoot on his own smoking passing clouds and he'd say something softly and you'd think, they'd all think:

"This lad, this kid, what's in there? That stare? What's he waiting for? This Tommy boy?"

Once, that sleepy-eyed kid had used that stick to save a horse from a drunk, and Arthur and John had to pull him away in the end or the man would have been dead. The violence isn't anything new, how Tommy uses it is.

It was 1915 and he enlisted with his brothers and went where he was told, as all good British boys did or so the posters would tell you. The boy who had something unlike the rest, the boy with the stare and the sleepy lids who went away in a ship to fight a million other kids with a million other stares, and they all drew short straws to see who would eventually die, and that kid came home knowing everyone but the fuckin' horses had lied. So Tommy Shelby had done the only logical thing.

He cut the fuckin' reins and he let the horse out the stable because nothing he had seen in the war had made him believe in anything. He gathered up his brothers and they gambled away their souls. They burned their bridges and burned the past along with them, and they start a new day with a new dawn with red right hands.

The poor sent-back soldier who didn't give up his gun, turned it on the Father, the Ghost, and the Son because not one of his prayers had made it out the mustard gas.

It was nothing different than the war, Birmingham streets and the tunnels of the Somme, they're both bent, brown, narrow things that eat men whole Tommy thinks most days. He was already underground, had never come up. He sees beneath the waves of mud, fishing for what's up, and the first and last thing he knew was the sound of rockets from a truck. The earth above him shaking like bone marrow of a soon-to-be amputee getting their twisted limb broken from a land mine sawn off at the joint.

Up becomes down, left becomes right, alive. Dead. Fuck.

And no one digs you out just to bury you back.

Polly had written letters; letters Tommy had read at night in his trenches and taciturn temper. He had tried to remember the sleepy-eyed kid with the stare, remember a time when horses had little souls and weren't now dancing in the mud and the waterlogged holes, jaw to jaw nailed by noise.

No one survives this.

Say farewell to the Shelby boys.

Say goodbye to the stare.

In the bleak midwinter.

Then, by some miracle, Tommy got sailed back home to the place he used to be, and he remembers the barman of the Garrison spotting him across the counter, Somme soil still caking his hands and boots, and he had said:

"Tommy, I heard you died. Well, anyway, what is it you want?"

Tommy had wanted to say a fuckin' explanation, but, of course, he doesn't. Instead the stare seeps out.

"Just a whiskey shot."

It wasn't about what Tommy Shelby deserved; you see. It's about what he got. And he got out of the hole and into a Mercedes-Benz, and he drove straight to a place where morality ends.

Tommy doesn't want to be forgiven for the rest of what he did, what he will do, what he must. He went into the fog a sleepy-eyed kid and came out a something else.

xXx

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, Tommy 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 pits in his bones, but that doesn't stop Tommy Shelby.

Thomas Shelby was a clever man, not a good man.

It becomes second nature, this chess-board Charleston he does. So much so that when Polly refuses to come to work at the Bookies for the second day running because she's wondering the streets looking for the girl on the black horse again, he thinks he'll have it sorted in three moves or less.

He finds Michael's address.

Tracks the girl down.

Waits for both to come his way as the spider waits for the fly on the web.

Only… Only he's not quite sure that will be how it goes. He suspects it the first time he saw her standing across the camp-fire barefoot and bold. It was like standing on opposite sides of a trench, stuck in dead-man's land with a foot half-pressed on a mine, and spotting another soldier across the ditch with a grenade pin in hand wondering what the bloody 'ell they were doing there in the first place.

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.

He imagines he sees her march right across the imaginary chessboard knocking over pieces, sticking her head right through his battlements where she says hello there. It's unsettling in a way Tommy hadn't predicted being seen would feel. Unsettling and exhilarating in a heady mix that leave him feeling off kilter.

She doesn't have sleepy eyes. Hers' are wide, wide awake.

That Tommy doesn't like. Feeling unbalanced. Having the wind knocked out of him. Realizing, without meaning to, that the King wasn't as untouchable behind the board as he thought.

He's a busy man and he can't afford it. So, again, he tosses his coin as he had with every important decision in his life since he was a teen. He gives her the addresses, he leaves, and he waits.

For once unsure how it all might end.

Of course she doesn't leave him waiting for long.

xXx

"Are we sure this is the place?"

Michael asked as he stood beside Hettie on the dirt strewn street. They'd camped at Hettie's caravan last night having rode into Birmingham in the early hours of the morning capable of only sleep after such a hard ride. They'd ended up sharing a bed, top-and-tailing Hettie had called it, because the only other bed in the wagon-

Vardo had belonged to a woman called Nadja and a man called Django, and although Michael had a crick in his neck from where Hettie had turned in her sleep and booted him, borrowed clothes from a man called Willy on his back that didn't fit quite as they should, and the distinct smell of horses still lingering on his skin, the smile on his face almost hurt from the permanence of it.

They'd had wild-hare stew around a campfire full of chatter, he'd been clapped on the back by strangers and handed sheets to put up for drying on a washing line as if he'd always been there to do chores, had grass-stained kids jumping on his back and tugging at his tweed clothes for any sweets he might have in his pockets, and-

And it might have been one of the best nights of Michael Gray's life. Hettie had only needed to say this is my brother, Michael, and they'd opened the gates like they'd opened they're arms.

Standing side by side now, however, his smile was waning in the encroaching nerves.

Hettie, nevertheless, didn't seem all that perturbed by the brick house opposite them and all that which it might contain, eyeing the horse-shoe sign that said Shelby Betting Shop swinging above the door. Nor was she bothered by the side-ways glances she was gaining by her dress.

She'd swapped out her skirts that morning for a pair of taupe knickerbocker trousers, the kind used for horse-riding, woollen socks tight to her knees, men's beige boots laced around her small feet. Her linen blouse was missing its vest, replaced by suspenders that hung around her shoulders tightly, around her neck her red and gold scarf wrapped snuggly around. The tartan Tam O'Shanter hat held back most of her curls from her face, but the braid her long hair was wrangled into kept the rest at bay, leaving it to dangle down her back in a thick black rope.

She looked like she'd just stepped out a Scottish highland, and, clearly, the Birmingham folk didn't quite know how to take her by the older passers-by crossing the street.

Pulling out a small rectangle of card from her pocket, Hettie hummed and handed it over to him.

"This is the address. It's got Shelby on the door. That's what that Tommy man said his name was."

Shelby Betting's Limited.

32 Watery Lane.

Michael lowered the card, running a thumb over the embossed address, eying the small crowd he could see through the window, formless in the shadow and distance, with more men coming and going through the door, the bell above jingling their arrival and departure.

There'd never been a betting shop in his Village. Neither had there been knickerbocker trousers, or Tam O'Shanter hats or Vardos and wild Hare stew.

Hettie's elbow knocked against his own, and the grin on her face was toothy, wild, and a little bit mad.

"Even if it's not, want to see how long before they kick us out? I say…"

She seemingly debated with herself, head cocking, eyes lost in thought.

"Fifteen minutes?"

The smile came bolting back onto his face with renewed vigour. This was… Easier, Michael thought. Making a game of it. And maybe Hettie knew that. Maybe that's why she did this, make fool of the heavy. Not only for Michaels sake but for her own. He hadn't missed the way her gloved hand trembled as she had handed the card over.

"At least twenty."

Michael jibbed as he took that final step off the curb and began heading for the door, Hettie following suit.

"With how tiny you are, and if you really buck circles in there, it'll take them a while to truly grab you to cart you out."

Hettie reached the door before him, the fast small thing she was, grinning over her shoulder, the morning soft panting pale skin golden.

"Five shillings say they can't get me down from swinging on the light fixture."

The bell chimed with their laughter.

xXx

"Wow."

Michael blew on the end of a long breath as he peered curiously around himself. Even in the early hours of the morning, barely at a decent time, the shop was filled with men and smoke and the sound of coin changing hands. The smell of whisky and gin were sharp in the walls, so sharp it stings Michaels nose, so clear it makes the dust in the air glitter like steel.

There's long tables with piles of notes and lofty towered pennies in corners, people stationed at ends before large ledgers they were quickly filling with the sound of sketching pencils. Blackboards hung at the back with numbers and names Michael couldn't place, times and places etched below ticking clocks. The men hover and hum in here like bees in a nest, buzzing between the gold and the chalk with babble and prattle and the odd slosh of a drink in a cup.

Hettie nodded over the crowded room, between the passing of two plodding drunks with their arms slung over each other's shoulder.

"Look, one of us."

Michael tries to follow her line of sight, unsure what one of us means exactly, but whatever Hettie had spotted didn't show through the bodies near his end, all he saw was caps and smoke and purses both won and lost waved in the air, and she was already moving, dipping and skimming through the crowd like a swan swam through a lake. Michael was less elegant as he tried to follow, bumping and bouncing through, earning glares, muttering apologies as he fought to catch up.

xXx

One of use turned out to be a woman sitting at a far table in the turn, hunched over her own ledger with pencil in hand, a woman in a plain dress with dark eyes and dark hair perhaps as curly as Hettie's. The thick kohl around her eyes was similar to how Nadja wore her own. Slapdash and silkily.

Gypsy.

One of us.

Michael caught up to his sister just in time to see her abruptly sit down across the desk from the woman with nary an invitation.

"Hello. I'm here to see Tommy Shelby or an Elizabeth Gray? They around?"

The woman looked up, nubbed pencil stalled in hand, and must have seen Hettie, Hettie with her Tam O'Shanter hat and her strange accent and her brusque interruption, and the woman slapped the book closed, pages fluttering before a slam.

"The Shelby's have no business with the Scots. Leave."

Michael smiled as politely as he could, edging to the chair his sister sat in, cap in hand and coyness in his eye.

"Excuse me, Miss, but I'm not Scottish. We're here-"

And Hettie cut him off sharply, steeply, as steely as the dust in the air.

"They here or not?"

The woman across the desk huffed.

"No. Tommy's in a… Meeting. If you would like to speak to him or one of the Shelby brothers you'll have to make an appointment-"

The woman reached for her book again, clearly a dismissal-

The thud of Hettie's boots striking table crashed through anything the pretty woman was going to say or do as she kicked her feet up onto the desk, slinging one leg over the other nearly kicking off the telephone perched on the end, hands coming to rest behind her head, striking her chair backwards to balance on its hind legs, settling comfortably in her chair like a man would rest in a beach hammock.

The message was clear.

I'm not going anywhere anytime soon.

"I'll wait."

The woman blinked at her. Blinked some more. Blinked and rolled her jaw, ringed hand rising to wave over some unseen force.

"Luke! Nick!"

She called over the din of the buzzing bees of the nest.

"Come and escort these two-"

Hettie's chair hitting the floorboards brokered the order.

"I really wouldn't do that if I were you. I can have this place up in a riot in fifteen words if I say them loud enough."

The woman's hand froze in the air, a beat, a knock, and whatever, whoever she was calling over, that Luke and Nick that were likely to snatch Michael and Hettie by the cuff of their collars and haul them back out the door they had only just answered, all Hettie did was grin.

"Want to know what they are?"

Hettie's voice dropped as her feet slid from the table, her hand rising in turn to count a finger with each word passed like Michael imagined one would load the barrel of a gun, bullet by bullet.

"What. Do. You. Mean. Let-"

She glances at the horses named on the board behind the woman's head.

"Midnight. Tumble. On. The. Second? We. Agreed. On. The. Third."

Hettie shrugged; head cocked at the woman, all bright eyes and sharper smiles, hand falling to brace on her knee.

"How well do you think the men in here will take to loosing a weeks' wage on the prospect of a rigged race, aye? I think they'd take it hard enough for me and my brother to get out of here long before your men could drag us out."

Nick and Luke, forever to be faceless and formless abstracts in the realm of what if, were waved off by the woman promptly.

"Never mind! Get back to work!"

Hettie crossed her arms over her chest, kicked her feet up anew, and glibly gestured to the phone with a tilt of her chin.

"Why don't you give Tommy or Elizabeth a ring, yeah? Save us all the trouble of a neighbour calling the police when someone puts a chair through a window."

xXx

Michael's still not sure how Hettie had done it, gotten her way in a single sentence without raising her voice or raising a fist, but she had as the woman was on the phone waiting for the line to pick up on the other end, and when it does, when she sighs into the receiver-

"It's Esme-"

Hettie tilts from her seat in a snap of an eye, right over the desk and the ledger and any sense of propriety, and snatches the phone right out the woman, Esme's, hand.

"'Ello chuckles-… You're not Tommy... Arthur? Who's Arthur?-… Doesn't matter, tell Tommy me and my brother are at the bookies waiting and either to come over or send Elizabeth pronto. The lighting is shite in here and it's giving me a headache. Ta-ta now."

Hettie swiftly, rudely, hung-up, the receiver slamming into port with a resolutely click. Michael watches as Esme, pale faced, suddenly and rather strangely he thinks, laughs. It's a loud noise, almost shocked into existence, incredulous in the presence as it hangs heavy around them.

"Did you just hang up on a Shelby?"

Hettie, nevertheless, is already standing, tugging on her suspenders to straighten them out, nodding over Esme and down a darkened hall.

"I'm guessing this place has backrooms? Me and Michael will wait in there. Send through whoever bloody comes first. Cheers, love."

Hettie doesn't wait for an answer, hasn't since she'd sat down at the desk, and instead loops and arm through Michaels lax one and begins dragging him the way she had spotted to the splutter of Esme at a desk.

xXx

"How did you do that?"

Michael inquired as the pair broached a door at the end of the murky corridor and entered what appeared to be a small, shabby living room. The wallpaper was peeling in places, the table propped by a book, the hearth at the end in need of a good clean from the soot.

Michael stays hovering in the corners of it, a mayfly at a poolside unsure of its lifespan, unsure of its welcome, even as Hettie slams the door shut behind them, walks right on in and goes to the nearest window, flinging the curtains open.

Michael doesn't think she likes being inside. He thinks she'd prefer to be out there, where the sky was her ceiling and the ocean coast her walls.

"Do what precisely?"

Michael gestured back through the closed door with a tip of his head.

"That?"

Hettie grinned over her shoulder, bending down to heave the window up, the quiet din of the outside world fluttering the nets and the breeze.

"Michael… When people see me I know what they see. They see my size. They see my age or supposed lack there-of. They see my tatty clothes and my wide grin and the bloody bobble on my hat or the tassels on my scarf, and they make a snap judgement. The judgement is often fuckin' wrong, mind you-"

She laughs, and it bounces in the room, somehow makes it brighter, lighter, summer sun breaking through a raincloud.

"But they do it anyway, and they use that judgement to try and bully or push their way through or around me because they think they can. Because they underestimate me. Michael, when people think they can take an inch, they'll try and take a mile. What they don't know is that they're underestimation of me is my favour."

Michael marvels at the room, at the light, at the Birmingham breeze that smells like dirt, oil and factory smoke. He marvels at the girl in front of him too, realizing far too late that perhaps he had been one such person. The snap-judgement short-sighted.

"You use it against them."

Hettie shrugged lopsidedly, making her way towards the table, running a finger along the edge as she went on her carrousel tour of the furniture.

"I don't use anything against anyone. I just don't show them they're wrong until I need to. If I need to. Foolish and quick people can both be underestimated, Michael, but the really clever ones? They know how to use it."

There's more to his sister to be sure, more than meets the eye, more than the scar on her forehead and the one on her forearm like a starburst. Michael didn't see it before, didn't see it until now, didn't see the fang in her smile or the burn in her eye or the shapely shade of her shadow.

There's darker edges to Hester Gray, bleaker crisper colours that are hidden in the rose bed.

"And how did you know they were fixing a race?"

Hettie heaved herself up onto the table, swinging her boots back and forth much like she had at the well back in his village.

"Spotted the woman's ledger page before she shut it."

That page must have only been on show for a thirty seconds. Michael had only garnered a glimpse himself, a show of scribbled numbers and margin notes. How could Hettie have-

When she saw his confused glance, she winked.

"The sums the woman was working through were all well and good, but none of them ended up matching the overall taking listed at the bottom. It was less than it should have been. Which means some sum somewhere in that page was skimmed, and that skimmed coin-"

"Was going somewhere not written in the books. And if they were skimming the coin, you can bet they were making sure there would be coin to skim."

Hettie slipped the hat off her head to dash onto the table by her hip, neither of the siblings speak for a long while. Michael didn't know what to make of it. This gambling den, this withered shrunken room, the scent of dirt, oil and factory smoke.

He doesn't know what it could all mean, the notion that if Hettie was right then the races were rigged, and if the races were rigged, if their mother was involved, if they were related to this Tommy Shelby-

He thinks of the stolen bedsheets and the gin distillery that had ended in his and Hettie's fostering in the first place, thinks of his mother, Rosemary, calling the Gypsies criminals, thinks-

Thinks it's all a bit too much to digest so early in the morning, and so Michael stores it away, urges it back in his mind for assimilation later, and turns the tide of the conversation to softer, kinder waters.

One's with less sharks lurking in the depths.

"You like numbers?"

Hettie hummed as the scarf around her neck joined the hat.

"I've always had a flair for them. You need to be good at mathematics and geometry to be able to fly-"

Michael frowned as she cut herself off, scowl only deepening as the silence drifted on.

"fly? You fly?"

Hettie hesitated, and it was the first time she had done so in his presence, first time she seems to be debating something before she settles and shakes her head.

"Did I say fly? I meant fish. I help fish at the docks with Willy and Django, and you need good maths for the nets and the trawling. Square feet to ocean bed and all that."

Ah, Michael imagines. It makes more sense. He'd seen an angling net hung over the roof of a Vardo near Hettie's, and fishing wire used for the clothes line. His sister, nevertheless, didn't appear like she was going to say anymore on the matter. Not when she hopped off the table, clapped, and snickered, steering, as Michael had, them both to kinder waters.

He does wonder, however, what sharks she was trying to avoid.

"Do you think they have some rum around here?"

xXx

Tommy wasn't telling Polly Shelby where he was taking her. He'd merely appeared at her entrance like the ghost of Christmas past dressed all in black, ringing the bell through her slumber and hangover, and when she had swung the cursed door open and found him on her stoop he had merely told her to get a coat on, Pol before swivelling on his heel and heading back towards his car parked out front.

Polly had cussed and spat in return, but she had, in the end, slipped into the passenger side, finding John and Arthur already in the back grinning but as silent on the matter as Tommy was. When they pulled up outside the bookies not ten minutes later, Polly saw red.

"I told you, Tommy. I ain't coming back here until I've found-"

"Just get out the car, Pol. Get out the car and head to the backrooms."

Polly doesn't have the fight in her, not against Tommy, not against Tommy and Arthur and John all at once. Not since the séance and the bridge with the black horse, not since her daughter had ridden away-

She goes. Slowly, sluggishly, she goes. She slips through the crowds, and she crosses the gambling floor, slinks down the hall and opens the door to the living quarters in the back of the betting shop and she-

She finds a boy standing there, near the stairs that lead up, grinning up the steps and all on his own. Sticking out like a sore thumb. He's tall for his age, must be heading towards his twenties, has a blond tinted curl on his head and a jaw she knew from another man and another time.

He spots Polly there, in her coat and her hair amess, with the smell of gin on her breath and her makeup smeared, and the smile falls. Polly thinks she hears footsteps behind her, thinks she feels the warmth at her back of Tommy and Arthur and John dragging up, thinks she-

She thinks, and she remembers, and she breaks.

"Pol, this is-"

The boy steps forward, just a little step, just one, cap in hand and voice down low, and Polly knows what he's going to say long before he says it.

"Michael. My name's Michael Gray. I… Are you Elizabeth Gray?"

"Polly."

She rumbles, words like thorns in her throat, in her chest, in her heart.

"Polly. I… I go by Polly."

She thinks of the state she is in, the utter mess with her hair uncombed and her coat hanging off one shoulder and her dress stained with yesterdays drinks. For a moment, one panic driven moment, she thinks Michael might wince, grimace in disgust, turn away-

Michaels smiles just like his father used to on his narrowboat, small and tender like an artichoke heart, shy of itself and the space it took up on his face, and-

And the walk at the top of the stairs creaks, and then there was a cascade of them, bumping steps as someone came dashing down the stairs from the floor above.

"Aye, I fuckin' told you didn't I, Michael? I knew they'd stashed the good stuff somewhere around. There's a Johnnie Walker Red up here and a Macallan."

The girl comes crashing into the living room like a storm blows into town, blows right by her brother with bottles of whisky in hand like victory trophies to crown a new king, and she too is grinning. Harsher than the boy, clever and keen and all Shelby fatality, and she sees Polly standing in the doorway, sees her shadows too, the Shelby boys, and freezes.

"Which, of course, I was not going to drink but put in a better hiding spot than laundry cupboard. You're welcome, by the way. Anybody could have nabbed these."

Michael now grimaces.

"Yes, they're really going to buy that, Hettie. I told you not to-"

"Bog off. You're the one who said the rum from the cabinet tasted like piss-"

"I did not say… that. I said it was warm. You're the one who-"

Polly's laughter was like a peek of sunlight through dappled woodland, some dazzling thing finally cracking through the dark and the dreams. She doesn't think then, doesn't need to, not with her boy who looks like his father, and the girl with the Shelby soul, and instead she moves. She moves right across the room to the bickering siblings, snatches them up right by their necks, and she pulls them in close. So close she thinks her ribs are going to crack open, create a crevasse in her chest, in her lungs and her heart where she can hold them closer still.

She hugs and holds, and Polly Shelby does not let go.

She won't let go.

Not again.

Michael is the first to dissolve, the first to return the hug, and although Hettie braces, doesn't relax fully, she wasn't far behind.

Tommy's voice drawled from the hallway, drifting along with Polly's tearful laughter.

"Seen as Hester's gone and sniffed out my Scotch you may as well bring the glasses down, Arthur. John, go get Esme. Let's have a proper welcome."

The first part of this chapter was inspired by Steven Knight's A Ballad of Thomas Shelby. I added my own spice to it, but the credit for that part goes to good ol' Knight-y boy.

I have a head cannon that the reason Harry is so good at flying is because he/she has an ungodly skill at chewing through numbers mentally. We know flying is a lot more complicated that simply whizzing about in the air, there has to be consideration of speed and angles and force used to counterbalance gravity. Number crunching basically. So it makes sense that Wizards and Witches who fly are good at mathematics, and seen as Harry/Hester is one of the best Seekers Gryffindor has seen in nearly a century, I always liked the idea that they were mathematically brilliant if completely social inept.

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. 😉