Chapter Content Warning: canon-typical content, reference to sexual content, sibling teasing.
Alliances
1919
Arthur sat beside his sister, an ankle crossed over his knee as he rested both arms splayed over the back of the couch. The pair were in the front sitting room and Arthur had lost track of how long he had been listening to Clara read her stories and prattle on about whatever it was that filled an eleven-year-old girl's days.
Right at the moment, it was some tale she had written for a school assignment, something about a young horse born for racing, though the only thing the young foal ever wanted was to live on a farm in the country. Clara turned to him as she finished, gulping as she awaited his assessment. Arthur beamed, leaning forward to cup her cheeks and place a kiss on her forehead.
"Brilliant, Clara, just brilliant."
She had lost him somewhere in the story, his mind occupied with other things, but he knew it was likely true. His sister was brilliant and Arthur wouldn't hear anything to the contrary.
Arthur stole another glance at his pocket watch. It was the very thing that had distracted him in the first place. He had afternoon plans with the two youngest Vale sisters and if things went well, those plans would easily span into the evening, and possibly into the morning.
With everything going on with the family business, Arthur had needed the calm morning with his little sister, but now it was getting late for him to still be sitting around the house. He had whiled away the morning with a leisurely breakfast, followed by hours of stories, painting, and sketches. There wasn't a piece of art or a story of Clara's that Arthur hadn't proclaimed to be a stroke of genius. Clara had yet to reach the age where she felt that the praise wasn't fully deserved.
"You really think so? Tommy thought it needed work. In the middle, he sa—"
"Don't you know our brother isn't right about everything?"
Clara bit her bottom lip and Arthur gave her a sad smile.
"You don't have to answer that, sweetheart."
Arthur shifted in his seat before clapping his hands over his knees. He stood up and shrugged into the jacket he had tossed to the side upon sitting down with her. "Alright there, Clara. Wish me luck. Got me an appointment."
"What appointment?"
Tommy was usually the one setting appointments and meetings, readily using the excuse to get out of one more story or a trip to the bookshop.
"Taking a few nice girls to the pictures," Arthur answered, straightening his jacket.
"Can you take me to the pictures?" Clara looked up to Arthur and pushed her hair behind her ears, the corners of her lips pulling down slightly to form a pout. "I haven't been to the pictures in ages. Ada never lets me come."
Arthur sighed. Part of him knew his little sister wouldn't be asking to do things with him for much longer. Ada had grown out of wanting to follow her brothers around the age Clara was reaching now. It would only be a few more years and Clara would be sneaking off to the pictures with boys her brothers didn't approve of, just like Ada was probably doing these days.
"I don't think you'd want to be going to the pictures with Arthur. Might see things you can never un-see." John leaned in the doorway, a toothpick sticking out of his mouth as he smirked.
The comment was a bit lost on Clara, the furrowing of her brow as she looked to him bringing John to choke on a laugh. But while Clara was working to put it all together, Arthur had already done so. He stood up quickly, closing the distance between himself and John as he shoved him hard against the wall.
"Shut it, John-boy. Don't be sour because you don't have a girl keeping you warm at night."
"I've been keeping plenty warm," John answered, shaking out the arm which had been slammed against the wall.
"'Atta boy," Arthur shouted, followed by a hearty laugh. He clapped John on the shoulder before looking back to Clara. "Next time, sweetheart. Next time, you'll be my date to the pictures, alright?"
Clara nodded, a smile on her face as she tucked the promise away in her mind for later. As long as he hadn't been drinking, Arthur was pretty good for his word and even if he had been drinking, he usually obliged to keep the promise though he may not have remembered making it. Arthur pulled his hat off the arm of the couch, tapping Clara's head with it in the process before she swatted it away.
"You be good, kids," Arthur said, smirking at John as he made his way towards the door.
There was an almost instant quiet that settled over the room after Arthur shut the front door. John looked down at his sister and shortly after she got back to focusing on her things which were strewn across the coffee table, he took Arthur's vacated seat.
John spent what little free time he had leftover when work and play were done at home looking after his four kids. They drove him nuts and exhausted him beyond what he thought to be possible, but he loved the lot of them anyhow. The last thing he should have wanted after spending all night and morning with them was to spend time with more children, yet he felt content sitting beside his quiet little sister.
Despite being only a few years older than his own children, there was something that felt different to John about being with the twins. Maybe it was the fact that when it came down to it, there were a few people ahead of him in the line of responsibility, but Finn and Clara just didn't ever seem to him that they were very much work. John often found that his youngest brother and sister simply weren't so tiresome as far as children went.
He left the business of parenting them to just about anyone else in the household, so there was that. And John also supposed that his own kids took after him to the point of it almost feeling like a punishment while the twins were a product of the entire Shelby household. They often had a more adult-like grasp on things and if John was being honest about it, Clara and Finn didn't often feel much like children these days.
"What're you up to?" he asked.
Clara shrugged. "Nothing," she answered, piling up her papers into a neat stack.
"Where's your brother?"
Clara was pretty certain that John was referring to Finn. The two were pretty close these days. John had taken to pushing for the boy to become more involved in Blinder business, letting it slide when Finn made his way into the shop, talking freely about jobs in front of him. John had been waiting a long time to not be the youngest Shelby in the business.
"He's out," she answered.
"You didn't want to go with him?"
She shrugged. "I want to finish this today."
Clara held out the book in her hands towards him. John could see it was one of the new ones Tommy had gotten her for her birthday, a scrap of paper marking her spot already more than halfway through.
"I think you and Tommy are the only Shelbys who like reading," he said, looking the book over as he turned it in his hands. "Haven't picked up a book since school myself."
"Aunt Polly reads," Clara said defensively.
"Yeah, the Bible, maybe. It's not the same. She's just doing it to keep God from smiting down the whole lot of us."
As mature as Clara was, most of John's humor was lost on her, probably because most of it was overtly racy and casually dipped in innuendo, but she wanted to laugh with her brother, so she usually smiled whether she understood it all or not. Anything to be like a Shelby girl, to fit in with her brothers and sister.
Clara was fond of being on John's team in the same way she savored sharing secrets with Tommy, telling her stories to Arthur, communicating through a nearly nonverbal language with Finn, and unconditionally aligning herself with Ada.
For most of Clara's childhood, she remembered Ada and John being united, likely because of their closeness in age, a pair of relentlessly trying adolescents when Clara was still a small child. Though it was now a thing of the past, John and Ada had been something close to ruthless in the youthful teasing of their youngest sibling. Their tormenting settled as Clara's light blonde hair darkened to a shade closer to that of butterscotch, something less strikingly different from the others. And it settled a bit more because Tommy and Polly had expressly forbidden the teasing from continuing. After a time, John and Ada mostly moved on but not before the running joke that the youngest Shelby wasn't really a Shelby had become a true problem. It had been right around the time Clara turned four.
1912
"Hmm..."
John made the noise as he sat with Ada at the other end of the table, eating their lunch.
"What is it, John?" Ada let out a slight giggle.
They had rehearsed, so Ada knew precisely the words that were due to come out of her brother's mouth, her anticipation doing little to improve her shoddy acting.
"Just, have you ever, in all your time on this earth, ever seen a blonde-headed Shelby, Ada? A real, legitimate Shelby kid with blonde hair?"
Clara looked up from her soup, her pale waves falling around her face before she pushed them behind her ears. Clara's hair was blonder than normal on account of all the summer afternoons spent in the yard while she worked with Tommy and the horses.
John took a sloppy bite off his piece of bread, staring at Clara, a smirk on his lips though his baby sister couldn't tell that he was playing.
"No, John, I do not believe I have."
"But I have blonde hair," Clara finally spoke up, setting down her spoon.
"That you do, Clara," John answered, considering the statement before he turned to Ada. "I suppose she must not be a real Shelby then, yeah, Ada?"
"But Finn and I were born together," Clara cut in. Her bottom lip pulled up as it began to quiver, a largely involuntary response to the teasing.
"Ah, but you two were born on different days, Clara. Who knows? Maybe you were just some Watery Lane baby we took in." John shrugged his shoulders as if the notion was nothing, dipping the bread in his soup and taking another bite.
"Oh, oh! Maybe she's Lady Lily's. That woman is always having little blonde babies she doesn't want. Sends them all to the orphanage," Ada added, giggling as she finally found her confidence in the joke they were playing, comfortably improvising their story.
Clara went quiet after that because John and Ada had finished their lunch, heading out of the dining room soon after they were finished. She wished that her Aunt Polly or Arthur or Tommy were home. Or even Finn. The twins had a special bond only twins could share and no one could deny that. He was a comfort to her, especially when John and Ada were being mean.
In any case, Polly or Arthur or Tommy could tell Clara whether or not she was a real Shelby, but they were all out. The longer Clara sat alone at the table, the more she got to thinking that Ada and John might be right. None of her brothers or sister had blonde hair like her and she didn't know her parents. Miss Lily did have blonde curls and they were just the same shade as Clara's.
Lady Lily was a nice lady from what Clara had seen and maybe she could be a nice mother, but Clara knew that the woman did bad things to get money. And in any case, Clara liked being a Shelby. She liked her family and her home. She didn't want to live in an orphanage or a tiny, one-bedroom apartment. She wanted to stay where she was.
When Tommy came home near mid-afternoon and his youngest sibling was at the table, tying up her boots, a suitcase by her side on the floor. She didn't bother looking up when he came through the door.
"And where are you off to?"
Clara looked up at Tommy's voice then, her eyes rimmed red, looking raw from tears. He took a few steps forward, but he still didn't get much by way of a response.
"What have you got that old suitcase out for?" he asked.
The case was almost as big as Clara was and Tommy couldn't imagine where the girl intended on carrying it. Wherever it was, she certainly wouldn't make it far.
"Is Lady Lily my mother?" she said quietly, barely more than a whisper.
"Who told you that?" he asked.
His voice was sharp and Clara hesitated. She didn't like to tattle and Tommy was scaring her, but aside from Finn, Tommy was Clara's best friend.
"Clara, you tell me right now," he said, his tone bringing fresh tears to her eyes.
Tommy looked at the pitiful little girl in front of him. He had been away most of the day running errands, but she had been fine when he left her playing alone in her room. He would even venture to say she had been in a good mood, not even getting upset when he hadn't allowed her to come along for the day.
Tommy recognized laughter from the front of the house and didn't wait for an answer from the crying girl in front of him, a sudden rage surging through his body, filling his limbs with restless energy.
John and Ada were more than old enough to know better, but he suspected that they had been bored. It certainly wasn't the first time they had picked on the baby, spinning tall tales of adoption, picking out some arbitrary trait that made the girl different from the rest of them and preying on it. Clara was an easy target, especially without her twin around to stick up for her.
Tommy came through the open door, knocking both of his siblings in the back of the head hard enough that they covered themselves in case he came back for a second round. Clara watched from the doorway, hidden to the side and peeking out from behind the wall.
"You leave your sister alone, both of you."
As he left them, Tommy stopped just inside the dining room, reaching down to pick Clara up with one arm and grabbing the suitcase with another. He didn't speak until he dropped the suitcase on the floor of her bedroom and shifted her in his arms so she was in front of him.
"Clara, you're a Shelby girl and if either of those two idiots or anyone else ever tries to tell you something different, I want to be the first to know about it."
"But they said there wasn't another blonde Shelby in the entire family."
"Not one that they knew, maybe. And that just means you're special. They're just jealous. Their hair's the color of mud, eh? Probably half of Birmingham wishes they had hair the color of the sun just like you."
"I don't want to live at the orphanage or with Lady Lily," Clara cried, covering her face with her arms as she avoided letting him soothe her. None of what he had said was successfully sinking in.
"You're not going anywhere, my girl. You're staying right here where you belong until you get big and find someone good enough to marry and even then, you'll still be a Shelby. You'll always be a Shelby girl."
1919
John watched his sister, so attentive to whatever she was doing as she sat on the floor, her book open and a piece of paper open to the side as she wrote out a list of long words. Clara could spend hours sitting, focused intently on some self-assigned task, but John was already feeling restless after only a few moments of watching so he nudged her with his shoe.
"You wanna do something more fun than sit around reading that book?"
Clara looked up at her brother, but kept the pencil in her hand. She was in the middle of writing out the word valetudinarian, something she intended to look up in her dictionary later.
"Come on, Clara, leave your books and we'll have some fun, you and me."
"What kind of fun?" she asked.
"The kind that makes you laugh so hard you cry," he said, reaching down to tickle her side.
Clara began to giggle before she pushed his hand away.
"C'mon. What do you say?"
Clara set the pencil down and closed her book before climbing up on the couch beside him.
"Right, then," he said, nodding and glancing up the stairs before looking back to Clara. "Is our Ada still asleep?"
"Ada sleeps all day," Clara answered with a smirk. It was a household joke these days. They rarely ever saw Ada before noon.
"Yeah, 'cause… well, you never mind why," he answered, "but it's good because when we run upstairs and yell 'fire' she's gonna run right out the front door in her nightgown for all of Watery Lane to see."
John could tell by the look on Clara's face that she wasn't so certain about his plan. If he had presented the plan to Finn, the boys would've already been halfway up the stairs, but not his sister. Clara had a special stitch of loyalty to Ada, her only sister in a house full of brothers.
"She's gonna be mad."
"Not at you…" he said. "All you're gonna do is run with her when she grabs your hand to get you to safety. Let her be mad at me."
John reached out to tickle her side again. "Come on, Clara. It'll be a laugh."
"Alright, alright," Clara finally answered, bringing a smirk to John's face as she pushed his hands away from her.
"Good. It's always good to have another partner in crime around," John answered as he pulled Clara to her feet and the two of them headed up the stairs. They were just outside Ada's door sharing a whisper when they heard someone clear their throat from down the hall.
"Christ, Clara, ya didn't tell me Tom was home," John said, ruffling her hair as they both turned to face him.
Clara had been so occupied with Arthur for the morning, she hadn't been paying much attention to where Tommy was. Plus, if Tommy didn't want his whereabouts known, they wouldn't be.
"What're you up to?" Tommy asked as he leaned against the wall a few paces away from them.
"Just playing a joke on Ada. You want in, Tom?"
"Leave Clara out of it. I need you in the shop, John," he said.
John rolled his eyes before looking to Clara and laughing, the smile on his face infectious to his little sister who started laughing too. "Guess we'd better do as we're told, Clara. Wouldn't want to risk upsetting this miserable old sod, would we?"
Clara opened her mouth to agree, but Tommy cut her off.
"Careful, John. You're going to get our sister saying things that'll only get her in trouble. You've corrupted Finn enough, leave Clara be."
Clara placed her hands behind her back, leaning against the wall and away from both brothers. Tommy's icy stare wasn't focused on her and she had every intention of keeping it that way.
"Aw come off it, Tommy. We were just playing around," John answered, scoffing and shaking his head. He swiftly lifted Clara over his shoulder when the only response he received from Tommy was a continuation of that same chilly stare. John ran down the steps with the girl over his shoulder. Clara was laughing and out of breath when he dropped her on the couch.
"You know who we should play a good honest prank on? That miserable brother of ours," John mumbled to Clara, a cocky smirk on his face. "Maybe you and me, we'll get him next."