xXx

Thomas Shelby is a man untouchable by death. He knows this from a very young age, as soon as he is old enough to read the name from the mark sitting innocently on his left wrist. He uses it to his advantage the older he gets, uses it like armour, like an invisible shield, even as his brother's use it as the butt of a joke. It's not like that for everyone, he knows.

Everybody had names on their wrist, embedded in their skin like a tattoo, stagnant like noxious alchemy that promised to turn lead to gold but only ever created poisonous vapours. None of them were quite like Tommy's however. Arthur had a Linda on his right, as John had an Esme, and Polly an Aberama in cursive on the left. The problem, Tommy comes to know, is they're quite common names, possibly people they've passed in a street unwittingly who would eventually come orbiting back around into their lives.

With no last names attached to the marks, it's hard to tell which one is who and who is which one. The only certainty to the marks, the foregone conclusion, was that these were names of people who would inevitably become entangled in your life for the good and the worse. Often times it was impossible to tell which was which until it was too late, until the deed was done, until that name with a face attached came up and called you by the name on their own wrist and you called them the one on your matching set.

And there was Tommy Shelby's greatest strength, his protection, his bloody Queen's gambit. Written in his skin, bone deep, was the name of a person he was destined to meet, and that fuckin' name was Horseradish.

Tommy's gone and done what centuries worth of snake-oil salesmen and court sorcerers could not. He'd turned lead to fuckin' gold because what were the odds he'd meet such an individual? What parent in their right mind would name a child that? Who would truly walk these sad streets with such a first name Tommy would one day say?

No one Tommy has ever met, and until then, until he meets such a person, Tommy can't die before that happens. Do you see? An impossible name has given Tommy what his siblings, his brothers and sister with their ordinary Esme's and their common place Freddie's and their standard Linda's, didn't have. Indemnity.

He's invulnerable.

It doesn't matter about the name on his right, Oswald, because even if he had met two Oswald's already, one when he was three and another when he was ten, both of which he had been quick to distrust, they couldn't do much too him until he met a Horseradish, and that, Tommy supposes, was very unlikely to happen soon.

It was the Shelby blood his grandmother used to say. Hapless in love as they were unlucky in death, both of which a Shelby was perpetually late to the game. It's the stubbornness, she'd moan. Not even fate could tell a Shelby when or where to be. Tommy and his siblings only prove the point further. John's never met an Esme, and the one Linda Arthur found in primary school had a Luke on her wrist instead, Finn was much too young to be worrying about an Elizabeth, and though Ada had her Freddie, Tommy's old friend that he still had trouble swallowing the idea of, one out of five was not great chances.

Polly herself had never met an Aberama and she was heading into her forties, had married an Edward Gray instead when it appeared dubious an Aberama would ever come knocking on her door, had two children and lost two children to the parish, and rules were never something a Shelby lived by. Grandfather Conway had met his soulmate, Ethel, in his seventies, widow twice over, and if Tommy followed the pattern he had decades of immunity left.

So Tommy uses it to his advantage, this promise of a future with a person called Horseradish, and he only ever once, just once, resents that strange name on his wrist. The time when Greta Jurossi, sixteen and sweet, had a Tommy on hers but he had no match, and when she died in her bed coughing up blood it became clear why. She might not have been his soulmate, but he had been hers, for she would stay sixteen and sweet forever.

Then the world went to hell, and Tommy Shelby went to war, and of course the mark comes along with him. Those were years Tommy doesn't speak about, hellish days of tunnelling and mud and waking up next to corpses staring blankly in the dark. Where the smell of mustard gas turned grass brown, where toes were eaten to gangrene, where boys left home and came back wrecks.

Freddie panicked in the tunnels one night, erupts and rages when the bombs above shake roots loose above their heads, tries to claw his way out through the slop and nearly hits a mine. Tommy yanked him back, wrenched up his own sodden sleeve, and flashes that mark not many have seen before his old friend could blow them all sky high.

"Look, Freddie! Look!"

He orders, and Freddie does slowly, cautiously, normally the only people shown a mark is a match or family members, but this is war and they are desperate, and there it is, Horseradish.

"What does that say, eh?"

Freddie calmed for a moment, confused.

"Fuckin' Horseradish?"

"And have I met a lass with such a name?"

"No?"

Freddie's breathing had evened out then, his cheeks flushed but his eyes less wild.

"No, Freddie… Which means I will one day, and until then I am guaranteed every second until that mark is paid. I am not dying here in France. Not today. Not fuckin' tomorrow. Not until I say that name to a face that fits. Do you get it? Stick with me, and we'll make it home."

Freddie does stick with him, and so do John and Arthur and the rest of their garrison. They pull their cots in the tunnel over, line them up around him, and they use him as an umbrella against the artillery exploding above, against the bullets and the mines and the demons in the dark.

Of course it doesn't save everyone. Life isn't that fair, and Tommy can't be in all places at once. A tunnel he leaves collapses moments later, and six men behind him die. The cold and the fever take another two in their sleep. The west side of their system floods, and though Tommy tries to swim to free the men trapped under the rocks of the shifting field, he can't pull them free in time, and just like that another three are gone.

Perhaps, in the end, Tommy's presence offered no protection but in belief, yet it was the belief that kept them moving, kept them going, kept them fighting. Perhaps it was the other way around. Maybe belief made Tommy's presence easier.

When Freddie takes a bullet meant for Tommy, people begin to whisper that the reason he survives to meet a Horseradish is because other men died in his place. Freddie doesn't die from the wound, but it does leave Tommy wondering if the rumours might be right, if the six in the tunnel and the two to the fever and the three to the Somme river were his doing. If he lived was it because his price was paid by the pound of flesh not his own?

So comes the night, that awful night where Tommy and his brother's and his friends huddle in the dark and Tommy loses his faith in the mark on his wrist. Because they're in winter, the bleakest kind, frost wind made moan, earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone, snow had fallen, snow on snow on snow, in the bleak mid-winter long ago.

There's no hope that night, only the troop of Prussian cavalrymen coming for them in the morning, and Tommy spends the night hours hunched in on himself, staring at his mark, his impossible Horseradish, and he thinks he may have talked himself into it, into immortality like Icarus had talked himself into flying to the sun, made it up because he had nothing else, only death and the cold iron shoes upon a pale horse.

Somewhere in his mind, the final trumpet sounds and the gates of hell have opened-

But no cavalrymen come, Prussian or otherwise. The sun rises, and the clouds clear, or is it the gas, and Tommy Shelby lives with an impossible mark upon his wrist. He survives the next day too, and the week after that, and another infernal year.

Tommy Shelby survives, and when he comes back from the war not the sleepy-eyed boy who left but something else, something worse most would say, he has a secret up his sleeve, an ace masquerading as a fool, a witness, a knife to cut the noose hanging over his head.

A name.

Just a name.

An impossible name.

Horseradish.

War couldn't kill him, gangs could not shoot him, Alfie Solomons and Sabini and Darby couldn't chop him loose. Tommy Shelby is a dead man promised life until a name is spoken, and no one was speaking it.

For the years after the war, when he's back to Birmingham and the back-to-back houses and the factory smog rolling from the Cut, Thomas Shelby is a man untouchable by death. He knows this from a very young age, as soon as he is old enough to read the name from the mark sitting innocently on his left wrist and has lived through hell to see its force. He uses it to his advantage, uses it like armour, like an invisible shield, even as his brother's use it as the butt of a joke. It's not like that for everyone, he knows.

His mark is extraordinary, and like all extraordinary things, as time itself tended to do, it ran out. He's twenty-nine when the face that fits comes quite literally exploding into his life, a face of a girl who's as impossible as her name.

And maybe he's own name has had an impact on her life, like the crater left after a shell explodes, a ditch in a gully that leaves a scar for years more, because the first real thing she ever says to him, bruised and scarred and covered in another man's blood, is Please tell me you're not called Tom?

He gets it later, realizes that while her name had gifted Tommy life, his had only ever brought her death.

xXx

The Garrison pub is not a pretty place. The grained woodwork has scuffs and grooves against the bar and the booths, the leather tacks are burnished, the ornamental mirrors cloudy in their corners as the silver backs flake off, the cast-iron fireplaced thick with black soot, and the florid ceiling stained a dark yellow by tobacco-smoke. It's not pretty, but it was home and comfortably hideous like most of Birmingham, and it reminds Tommy of himself, of the boy before the war, stops the sound of shovels tunnelling in the dark for an hour or two as he smokes and drinks himself to sleep.

Harry Fenton leaves him the keys to lock up, the patrons have already cleared for the night, and it's nothing new for Tommy. He stays up late most nights, at the Garrison or the Shelby Bookies, and it matters very little to him where he spends those wakeful hours in the end. His thoughts always follow him anyway.

Tommy is not alone.

Arthur stays with him for the drink, and John for the quiet of a house not holding four loud children, and Polly's there with her ledger, filling in the last page of the keepings they were taking from the races that day. The flash of gold light and thud through the back-rooms door comes just after Tommy lights his cigarette. He's the first out the door, the first with a gun in his hand, and he's the first to find the Thing standing in the middle of the pub with the gas lamps above their heads burst and glass raining to the floor.

It's not a man, though it stands like one, and Tommy can see him through the dark. Pale skin, a chalk-white, it's face was skull like, gaunt and thin with no bloody nose, just horrible slits where the feature should have been with red eyes peering out in slits, stretched and slender with cruel hands peeking out a black robe. It fuckin' sneers at him, and Tommy thinks he's dreaming, thinks the gin might have been off, poisoned perhaps.

The sight of it standing and staring stalls Tommy just long enough for the Thing in front of him to wave his hand as if it were batting away a fly.

Tommy goes sailing backwards as he drops his gun, hits the wall behind him hard enough to have the wind knocked out his lungs, for his head to ring and his mind to reel. He thinks he might have fell to his knees, delirious, if not for the suddenly sickening notion that he couldn't move at all.

Not an inch or an edge.

There he stood, back to wall, feet off ground, against the brick seemingly held up by fuckin' magic.

The Thing hadn't moved a step.

He thinks he hears Polly yell before it gets cut off sharply, or perhaps Arthur curse, it's hard to tell over the clanging in his ears and the spinning room, but Tommy finds himself not alone pinned to the wall, finds Polly clawing at her neck as if she was being held up by it, see's Arthur dangling, tendons in throat popping as he tried to peel himself off, perceives John to his left dazed, head hit and eyes rolling as they tried to get the room to stop revolving like the barrel of a gun.

The Thing still stands where it had been before, between the empty table and chairs, hand raised and snarling.

"Come out, come out, come out!"

It jeers in the night, rustling and hissing like a snake, and Tommy still can't move no matter how hard he tries, and he does try, he heaves and he lurches and he throws and he stays exactly where he's trapped.

"I know you're here, Potter! Whatever spell you've used won't save you for long! Come out and face me!"

A floorboard creaks somewhere in the dark, and the monster whirls, keeps whirling, keeps trying to tack the noise.

"You have three seconds before I turn these filthy Muggles to meat. One-"

The force pinning Tommy to the wall grows impossibly heavy, crushes in, squeezes like coils, and his ribs ache at the pressure, creak like the floorboard, and the surprise he felt, the disorientations and uncertainties, are replaced with the desperate need for air as it's sucked from his lungs and throat-

"Two-"

His stomach impacts as the force grows thicker, a joint popping as it nearly springs free from its socket, and Tommy's going to implode, collapse-

"Thr-"

A blur of red tackles the Thing from the left, taking them both down to the ground with a thud and a bang. Unexpectedly Tommy can breathe but he's still stuck, still lightheaded and dazed, and the table and chairs make it hard to see-

Until the Thing comes sailing over one, crashes, breaking the wood, goes careening across the floor as a shot of red light sparks against its chest like bonfire embers.

The Thing yelps-

But the noise get's trapped as the blur of red follows him, leaps the wreck of the table like a horse clears a jump, fumbles on the floor with an ash tray raised above it's head as it swung it down hard on the Things face with a nauseating crack of bone breaking.

"Why-"

It's a voice, a woman's, lilting through husky harsh swings that punctuated each word.

"Wont. You. Die!"

The pair had ended up closer, towards the back-room door still open, the light from inside filtering in, haloing, the world stops swimming and Tommy finally sees the woman clearly for the first time.

It's the hair he notices first, an eruption of copper curls covered in ash and streaks of blood, half of it plastered with it to the side of her head from a blow, and she's small, incredibly small, tiny as she's hunched over the monster below, bruised and blackened from strikes between freckles, with one eye nearly swollen shut, the other impossibly green, almost too green. Her bottom lip is split, and Tommy can see, through her torn jumper stained with blood, that there's a handprint bruise across her neck-

The Thing snatches her wrist before another blow could come, and then there's a flash of purple, the sound of the girl sucking in air as she's thrown off, thrown down, has the Thing on top, hand fitting around that bruise Tommy had seen and crushing, a strange spindly stick jabbed beneath her jaw.

"This is the end, Potter. There's no one left to save you now. No mother. No father. No friends. You've failed. This is where your story finishes. Alone and lost. Not to fear though, dear girl. You'll join them soon enough."

The girl bucks and kicks, but the Thing takes the blows, keeps hold, and bears down harder. The stick beneath the jaw punches in deeper, forces her face to tilt up, away, toward the wall Tommy's fastened against.

Somehow in the madness and absurdity, the two meet eyes. Green to blue. Summer to winter. She almost looks sorry. Not for herself, Tommy thinks. There's still too much fire in those too green eyes for that, too much fight, but sorry for him, for his brothers, for his Aunt. Tommy does the only thing he can, moves the only thing he can, glances down and left, to her side, right by the door where he had stood before getting blown away in an invisible wind, and-

She spots what Tommy had glanced to, kicks harder to distract, stretches, fingers desperately reaching-

"Avada Kedav-"

The gun Tommy had dropped swings up, the trigger clicks, and the bullet fires with a deafening bang. The blood splatters across the girl as the side of the Thing's head cracks open like too ripe fruit, and there's a singular gurgle before the silence comes and the Thing drops down dead.

The girl heaves in a quaking breath, and Tommy drops to the floor, tangled and shaking, next to his brothers and Aunt. There's a thud of a gun dropped, the sound of a thump of a dead weight pushed off, and the girl sits up, trembling, breathless, and staggers to a stand where she-

She spots something in the back-room and goes for it.

By the time she comes staggering out, Tommy's up and helping Arthur to a stand, Polly trying to get John on his own two feet, and she has Tommy's open bottle of gin in her grip. She waggles it.

"I'm taking this."

She draws a hearty swig right from the bottle and she moves for the pub door, stopping briefly by a table to scan the group still trying to piece together what had just happened.

"I don't think I need to tell you not to mention this to anyone, but just in case, if you do no one will believe you anyway and you'll just end up in a mad house. Cheers for the gin and… You know, sorry for the whole… Leaving you with a body to bury, but I best be off. Bye."

She goes to push open the Garrison door, goes to slip into the night, and Tommy doesn't know what makes him do it, say it, perhaps the blow to his head or the madness he had seen, or the impossibility of everything that had been just a normal Wednesday night only minutes ago.

He takes a step forward, following, and Polly tries to hold him back, tries to snag his arm, but Tommy shirks her off.

"Horseradish?"

She freezes with her back to him, palm against the glass, her knuckles split like her lip, gin swinging in her other, and when her head snaps around her shoulder to meet his gaze once more, her one good eye is glaring.

"How did you-"

She has a set of scratches down her cheek, from temple to chin as if someone had tried to claw her face off, and that is still somehow nothing compared to the abruptly wounded expression she has that bleeds to broken laughter.

"Please tell me you're not called Tom?"

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