His heart beat strong beneath the soft resting of your ear against his chest, thumping like the clicking of horseshoes upon the cobbles, a lulling effect as you felt your own breaths tentatively begin to match his own. As his chest rose beneath your head, you found you took in a soft breath, exhaling just as his own inhale blew warmly down upon the top of your fly-away strands.

The heat of his breath, slowed by the sleep that had grasped tightly to his consciousness, soaked into the curls messed across his bare flesh. Expanding over your scalp, until not a single strand was left unscathed by the warmth that exuded from the man whose arm was loosely coiled around your waist. Holding you close, even through slumber, as if he feared that when he awoke to the new morning's light, you might not be there waiting for him.

The twilight hour that lingered beyond the windowpane, concealed by the sheer coverage of ivory lace and linen, fell silent. For not a howl of wind echoed down Watery Lane, nor did a single patter of rain fall upon the shingles above, resounding within the tightly closed walls that encompassed your entwined frames. The breath of autumn present and undeniable, as the threat of a winter's harsh frost lingered within the atmosphere like fighting words, hovering until the moment they clashed into reality and coated the Birmingham streets in the unrelenting clutch of December.

The chill enveloped the atmosphere without warning and without mercy, for it seeped through the cracks in the foundation and felt as if it radiated like rays of the once burning sun, through the window's thin glass. It crawled along the wooden paneling, meeting the bare touch of your toes when morning woke you, with a cruel bite. But in spite of the way autumn's bold presence descended down upon the souls of Small Heath's streets and melded its way into your bedroom, there was a warmth that exuded from Tommy Shelby that nearly had the strength to banish it all.

For the sheets, that cocooned your body like the tender morphing of a caterpillar to a butterfly in the wake of spring, were thinning and futile in its attempts to completely eradicate any trace of the changing seasons. The cotton worn and the threads hanging onto the little life left within their woven filaments. The once deep and rich toned teal sheets, now a lighter hue of blue, resembling that of a cloudless afternoon in the countryside. Even the quilt, handed down from your mother from her own, stitched from the fingertips of generations of kin layered on top of the faded sheets, provided only a breath of extra warmth.

It was only when a body, cramped beside your own within the nestling of a twin sized iron framed bed, resided beneath the aged sheets, that true warmth was felt.

It was unlike any fire that could ever flicker from waning candlelight or blister in a crackling hearth, for it spread its heat throughout your body from the inside out. It did not burn through the exterior of your flesh until you could feel it beaming through the pit of your chest, but rather it seeped out of the beating strings of your heart. With each pump of blood, with each inhale of oxygen, it spread warmth throughout your very soul until it was left palpable to your flesh.

You should've felt cold that evening. As the temperature beyond the obscured windowpane dipped down closer to the line separating the two seasons apart, as your body laid bare and exposed to the chilled evening's air, beneath a pitiful attempt for warm layers covering the bed, but you weren't. Even as the cold crawled its presence over your shoulders, peeking out from beneath the coverage of the sheets, until they only covered the flesh just above your chest, you didn't feel the sensitized sensation of goosebumps appearing on the skin of your shoulder blades.

You were aware of the lack of sensation in the very tips of your toes, that pressed their frozen pads flat against the warmth of the soft hair that covered his legs, and you could sense the way the cold revealed itself across your naked body. Firming and accentuating parts of yourself hidden away beneath the coverage of light blue and pressed safely against the warm tan of Tommy's own bare flesh. But as your head rested upon the muscle concealing his beating heart, with your left hand spread flat along the swell of his defined chest, you only felt Tommy and his inexplicable warmth.

Tommy's heat was like the sun. For when it was upon your frame, whether it be in the form of his cerulean gaze or the touch of his skin, it was felt with every fiber of your being. It was missed in the very same fashion. For when it was missing, the bed cold and abandoned by his body or the way his eyes couldn't always quite meet your own these days, it was like the bold burning sun falling behind a dense coverage of clouds that appeared impenetrable.

It was incomprehensible, just like the rays that burned bright upon a new summer's day, for the sun simply shone. From the very beginning of time, it was never questioned but rather known, by each and every soul that felt the heat of its dependable presence. The warmth that Tommy exuded, couldn't be explained, it just simply was.

It was bewildering at times, moments when his arms were coiled tightly around your delicate frame or the moment you stood beneath the cast of his gaze on that train platform, feeling like you might just combust. All the while, the man who possessed such blatant power, appeared like he hadn't a single notion of the heat he radiated. As if he couldn't feel it for himself, like it was there just for you.

The sheets beneath you and bunched around your bare frame, absorbed the shed heat of your bodies like it were a cloth soaking up a leak. For your legs could feel the way the cotton seemed to radiate the warmth of your bodies, straight back into your flesh as if seeped beneath your surface. It felt as if it hadn't been hours that separated the time that the sparks of such palpable heat, were truly ignited. The sensation of tingling warmth, continuing to flood through your veins as if the very thing keeping you alive, were embers in a flickering flame.

While your shallow breaths had surely eased, and your racing heart began to slow, the tangible remnants of Tommy's touch and the way your body had surely known his own like the back of your very own hand, remained.

For the evidence of your entanglement was evident in the quaint bedroom, from the messed sheets that struggled to completely conceal your naked frames, to the humidity that lingered above your bodies that had no right when the autumn night threatened to chill your bones. The distinct scent clinging to the threads of thinning fabric, the warming spice from his well-worn cologne, the touch of sweetness from the rosehip lotion moisturizing your flesh late into the evening's hours, the salt and the heat and the shed beads of glistening sweat, a bewildering blend of aromas that should have never filled your chest with the sense of contentment that it did. But there was something in the atmosphere that hovered above your body, that was comforting and familiar.

Sex had never been a matter in which the two of you had ever struggled, from the very first night you'd given Tommy Shelby a part of yourself you knew you could never get back, it was like finding the last two missing pieces to an unsolvable puzzle. For you fit together like the universe had chiseled by hand, your curves and your outlines and all of the pieces of yourself that made you who you were, clicking instantly with his own.

You'd been seventeen at the time, Tommy only two years older, but you'd discovered something within each other that half of the population in Birmingham, never found in a single lifetime. You'd discovered it young and without even trying, for you had never envisioned falling for the second eldest Shelby brother, but like the certain rise and fall of the sun, it was inevitable. Perhaps, you should have known. From the moment you met him, running into him and his brothers when you were twelve years old, maybe you should have known that one day that Watery Lane gypsy boy, with blue eyes that could drown your soul and save it within the same span of a breath, would be the one to steal your heart and refuse to give it back.

Intimacy with Tommy had never been a hurdle you'd ever had to overcome, for his passion was a tangible force to be reckoned with.

He loved you with a fierce conviction, feeling convinced that every time you found yourself within his embrace, pushed to the very brink, that you would surely shatter. But with the very same hands that pressed their prints firm into the bare flesh of your back and intertwined their calloused pads into your messed tendrils when he hovered above you, Tommy took care of you in a way that left you to believe that you would be alright if you broke. That if you were left bloody and irrevocable shards at his feet, when the sun broke through the cast of the heightened moon, that he would surely piece you back together, never once complaining of the cuts along his palms as he tried.

Tommy loved you in a way that made you feel every ounce of love he possessed within his own beating heart for you, in every single inch of yourself. From the tips of your toes that curled beneath his dominating yet tender embrace, to the depths of your chest that swelled with the knowledge that even as he whispered the words in a breathless spell of euphoria and lust, that his love stretched further than that of what his fingertips could touch.

He'd marked your body over the years, in a hundred different ways in a hundred different places, but you knew each other in ways that went beyond that of flesh and bones. You could very well peel the skin from your skeleton and still, he'd know every inch of you in ways that made you question how well you even knew yourself.

The intimacy you experienced with Tommy, when your clothes littered the floorboards to be retrieved in the guide of fresh morning light and the physical space between your bodies reached a pinnacle, hadn't disappeared when he came home from France.

You remembered that day, when the rain washed down from the heavens, as if the fallen droplets were a futile attempt to wash the loss and the bloodshed that the past years had spread over the souls of those below. When you'd waited on that train platform before anyone else had shown, when the very whisper of dawn echoed across the horizon and the prospect of your husband returning home drove your will to carry on.

The night he came home, the rain of the morning had slowed to a mere trickle and the sheets that had been void of his frame for far too long, became blisteringly warm with the collision of your bodies deep into the twilight hours. The act of sex itself hadn't vanished from your marriage when Tommy returned home, but it had changed.

For the intimacy was deeper than it ever was before. It was raw, it was felt in the aching holes of your heart and fragile weight of your bones. For there was a certain sense of yearning when you made love. As if the harder your nails scratched up and down his back, climbing along the notches on his spine and over the scars that now marred his flesh, the closer you might be to finding the Tommy you knew once before. As if he was still in the body that you knew, just merely left buried beneath layers of a man sculpted out of mud and decay, shaped out of war and the decimation of humanity.

For the tears that slipped from the creases of your tightly shut eyes, dipping down from lashes saturated in leaked salt and hidden vulnerability, were no longer tears pricked from the pure ecstasy that threatened to break you in half. The way your arms wound their way around his broad back, clutching tightly to his flesh like you might never let him go again, wasn't because of the intensity in which your bodies collided. The gusts of heat exhaling from his altered breath, fanning along the curvature of your jawline, while the sound of his sharp exhales and overwhelmed murmurs filled your ear, no longer whispered the phrases they used to.

There was longing where there never used to be, there was wistfulness and bittersweet sensations in places where there was once only pure honey and contentment, there were memories that clouded the once clear and unscathed skies. It was like reaching for the past despite the present right there in your very hands.

Intimacy with Tommy since his return home from France, was now being as close as two people could ever be, all the while, feeling a thousand miles apart.

The delicate span of the night's frosted pearl toned hue, filtered in through the thinning cracks of the curtains, bathing the floorboards in an insignificant beam of hazy light. But the tentative glow of the night, glinted along the band of brushed gold that snugly wrapped itself around your finger. For it rested over the valley of Tommy's chest, the cold touch of sleek and promised gold, settled upon flesh of burning warmth.

Your fingertips, the very graze of your nails, frozen in their soft tracing of unidentifiable shapes upon his physique. The wisp of the thin hair over his chest, soft beneath your palm and bleeding the warmth that spread throughout his body with each pumping beat of his racing heart. The hesitant light that hadn't a prayer in illuminating the walls of the cramped bedroom, reflected ever so cautiously as it crept over the gemstone cradled within the center of your wedding band. The light dancing along the very edge of the chiseled stone and making the small gem glisten like the sparking embers of an igniting flame.

It had been your mother's gem, a ruby that you'd witnessed her wear nearly every day of her life, now crafted delicately into a ring that you'd wear for the rest of yours. It was an untraditional ring, but it had been an untraditional wedding.

For a week before the men were slated to be shipped off to France, leaving godforsaken cobblestone streets for dark tunnels that even God himself didn't dare venture, Tommy proposed not only the notion of marriage itself, but that it happen before he left.

You'd thought he'd gone mad, your beautiful laughter filled man, whose eyes still glimmered with the faint sheen of the gypsy boy that had you falling for him in the first place. But when he'd produced a ring from the worn pocket of his long back coat, holding it between his fingers like he hadn't a single fear he might just fumble the small object and drop it into the steady current of the canal, you realized that he'd thought about this longer than his proposal let on. He'd always known that he'd marry you, but with the prospect of leaving for a war that was slated only to last a few months till Christmas, he couldn't bear the thought of waiting that long to make you his.

You hadn't the money for a grand affair, but it felt like the wedding of the century. For it stretched from sunup to sundown, until the twilight bled into the makings of the very next day, and he'd swept you off your bare feet and taken you home. You'd danced barefoot on the cobbles until your soles were tired and worn. You'd laughed until you felt your throat on fire, you smiled through the pain of your jaw for the smile you adorned, simply couldn't be erased. It was a gypsy wedding, chaotic and boisterous and running wild with kin and ever flowing alcohol and music from fiddles that soared the notes strung through your very soul, but it was the happiest day of your life.

For it was an oasis, discovered in a place you believed would always be shrouded in the depressing grey and staining black of unrelenting coal and smoke. But that day, the skies were rather painted the brightest blue the Earth had ever possessed. For it felt as if the colors you'd dreamed in, the tones that weren't often seen here in Small Heath or Birmingham for that matter, erupted like flames around you. Bursting to life like the reception around you was a kaleidoscope.

Tommy promised a honeymoon the moment he returned home, painting vivid pictures late into the night, of the places he might just take you. Whisking you off to London or New York City, but you rather believed staying in Small Heath just as you were with Tommy, would be honeymoon enough. For you didn't need the tourist scene of America or the glittering display of London society, not when you had a man that you loved and loved you just the very same.

Because even when the rain fell so hard upon the roof above, that it threatened to seep through the shingles as if they weren't there to begin with, even when the smoke hazed the blue straight out of the sky and the tainting scent consuming the streets wove its essence into the very stitches of thread you adorned, there was a contentment that exuded from the beating pulse of your heart. For it stemmed from the man who held your hand, concealing the finger that brandished the newly acquired wedding band in his own. The man who vowed to love you, to cherish you, to protect you till death tore you apart, even when war whispered his name over the hidden horizon.

He was happy that week, happy in a way you'd never seen, even as the prospect of war inched closer by the passing day, it appeared as the furthest thing from his mind. It was a week you knew you'd never forget, but you never thought you'd be looking back on that week, as the last time Tommy Shelby was ever that happy.

For when he came back, the happiness he carried with him that week, had been ripped from his body and torn to shreds, discarded down in those tunnels where the clay suctioned out the souls of the men who dug them. He'd been eternally grateful to see you standing on that train platform, he'd been comforted by the soft sprawl of your curling penmanship in your letters over the years, and he'd kissed you tenderly when he returned, with all of the angst and all of the pain that filled his heart. But you knew that not a single emotion he felt since coming home, was the happiness he once possessed.

It was as if the war had gone and blown it straight out of his soul, along with the hope of God and the promise of a world beyond, Tommy had lost his sense of happiness in France. Every last shred, every last drop.

His flesh was shrouded in the shadows of the encompassing night, but your eyes saw him for all that he was. For even in the darkness that threatened to consume you both, Tommy's silhouette stood out amongst the density of the twilight's hour, as if not even the tight grip of an ebony abyss could tear him away from your sight.

Your cheek brushed along the strong muscle of his chest, abandoning the spot of soothing warmth where your ear rested along the sharp lines of tattooed ink, the sound of his strong heartbeat fading as you tilted your chin upwards. Now resting your head along the very edge of his shoulder blade, closer to that of your cold and abandoned pillowcase, you gazed up through your lashes at the man who dozed softly.

The darkness of the night should have swallowed him whole, preying on the deep raven of his lashes that flickered wildly, as his mind was far from the Birmingham streets and the bed you resided within, but you saw his every outline as if your eyes could see even behind that of closed eyelids. The faint fringe of his locks that swept messily along the crown of his forehead, raven bleeding into the indigo abyss that consumed the evening's hours, but still visible to your attentive eye as if the faintest pinch of light fell across each and every strand.

The twilight absorbed the sight of freckles sprinkled generously and ever so softly over the swells of his cheekbones and up the ridge of his nose and it obscured the evidence of life worn well along the lines of his flesh. Creases left from the bunching of furrowed brows and the bags that tugged beneath his closed but beautiful azure eyes, hidden beneath the cloak of ebony that consumed the bedroom. But as your left hand abandoned the warm flesh of his chest, reaching up cautiously until the very tips of your fingers met the faintest breath of stubble lining his jaw, you could feel each and every line scathing his flesh.

For you knew them all, you'd seen them in the depressing light of day and learned to forge them into your memory. For the scars that marred him, the creases and exasperated lines that screamed the stories Tommy would surely never share, were apart of himself now.

The youthful flesh that only wore bags from late nights or scarred over wounds from fist fights and razor blades, had been stripped in the war. Peeled from his bones and discarded, replaced with a thick sheet of impenetrable flesh that had been stamped and sealed with the marks of bullet holes and burns, of callouses so dense they felt like they were to remain on his hands for the rest of his life and puckered scars that had healed but were certain never to fade from view. The war had molded him into a solider, a good one and a brave one, but one that had traded who he once was... all so that he might just survive as the new one he became.

For it was like he'd gone and lost a part of himself. The part that smiled without hesitating, the part that laughed as if his soul demanded the melodic sound be let free. The part that could love without feeling the walls of thick sheet metal shooting up around his broken and aching heart. He'd lost the part of himself that knew what happiness could feel like, what hope could do for a man. He'd lost it all in the war, leaving in its place, a mere shell and the ghost of the man he once was.

The heat of his exhales blew along the tender flesh of your palm, as your fingertips gingerly traced the outline of his full and accentuated lips, that even in sleep, pouted as if it pained him. For there always seemed to be pain in his expression, whether it be awake and in the reality of this world, or asleep and back in the clutches of a life he wished he'd never known. Peace no longer resided inside of Tommy Shelby. And you feared, as your thumb brushed along the dipping current of bags swollen beneath his fluttering lashes, that he didn't even know the word these days. Never bound to find it again.

It was bewildering, a notion that tugged with a mighty fury in the core of your understanding, how such beauty could still take place amongst so much pain. For Tommy Shelby was beautiful, in a way that men had no right to be in this world and yet, the sculpt of his face and the arc of his physique, stretched far beyond this world. It settled in the hands of a God he once used to believe in, for there was not another single explanation of why this man, this bookmaker gangster war hero of a man, had been blessed with the immaculate features that he was.

No gangster rightfully required eyes of shimmering cerulean, as if the oceans had been drained into his orbs and frozen within waves of ever churning azure. No bookmaker truly needed the muscles, that lingered on Tommy's lean frame, beneath the structure of perfectly tailored suits. No war hero should have possessed the calm and the external composure that Tommy exuded without fail. God had crafted Tommy through the eyes of the heavens, never realizing that he was sculpting a man who would certainly be used by the hands of the Devil.

He was beautiful, your husband and it never failed to steal your breath as your eyes fell upon him late into the evening hours. For ever since his return home from France, the moments in which you could gaze upon him without hinderance or hesitation, were far and few in between.

Tommy rather hid himself away, whether by the way he wore his razor lined cap down along his forehead so that the beam of his cerulean gaze nearly faded from the view of others, or the way it seemed he couldn't stand a silent room when it was only the two of you who inhaled its oxygen. As if the guilt that tarnished his subconscious, the blood that stained his hands in an unforgiving hue, the knowledge that he hadn't returned as the man who'd made those promises to you back then, suffocated him in the void.

It was only in small moments, family meetings where you strategically sat across from your husband, all so that you might just get a few minutes to watch him. Or the nights when Tommy himself took in the sight of you, watching as his own gaze washed over you like the coming tide and now, as you rested against his slumbering frame that couldn't fight your eyes that watched him lovingly as he slept.

You missed him, you realized as your gaze traced over his lashes that batted wildly in the clutches of an ugly dream. You missed him like you'd never quite missed him before, never knowing you could long for someone, all the while, holding them tightly in your arms. It was like reacquainting yourself with someone you'd known all your life, but in the same breath, finding you didn't know him at all anymore.

The flesh between Tommy's brows, furrowed even in sleep, creased into tightly scrunched lines. Soon watching as his jaw followed suit, grimacing softly in the shadows as if pain was overwhelming his being. Propping your elbow onto the mattress beside his bare frame, you leaned up and brushed the tender trace of your thumb along the hidden freckles across the structure of his cheekbone, feeling the tensing of every muscle in his body beneath your touch.

Tommy's name spilled from your lips, a breathless tone fluttering away into the shadows, before you had any chance of stopping it. You didn't know if he could hear you, as you whispered his name cautiously into the void that enveloped the bedroom, but as you felt the rise and fall of his chest become deeper and painfully sharper with each anxious beat of his suddenly racing heart, you couldn't bear the thought of him suffering any longer.

For it pained you, physically and emotionally, in ways that you could feel all the way down in the depths of your very bones and in the strings of your own beating heart. Witnessing Tommy Shelby, a man whose hands had inflicted more pain and damage and bloodshed than either of you had ever wished to know, in pure anguish, did something to your soul. It cracked at your foundation, chipping away with each nightmare you saw him through, every moment he showed you the slightest shadow of vulnerability, with the tone that saturated his voice with a melancholy as even the deepest and most hidden parts of himself, missed the past and missed who he was before the clutches of war changed him.

When Tommy was in pain, it was as if the tears that welled in the creases of your eyes, were his own. He was so well weaved into the makings of your soul and rather tethered to the moving strings of your heart, that you felt everything he was too afraid to let himself fully feel. And it was slowly tearing you apart.

Tommy's eyes flashed open with a shaky breath, as if he'd been submerged under waves for a minute too long, lungs ablaze and aching for any last trace of oxygen to soothe the burn. You could feel the sharp rise and collapse of his chest beside your bare frame, listening to the soft whistling of deep exhales blowing through his nose as he stared blankly up at the shadowed ceiling above, slowly willing himself to catch his breath. Orbs of chiseled cerulean a beacon of light amidst the abyss of ebony tinted indigo, inexplicably glinting their strong and potent hue when not a single ray of pure light fell upon them.

You knew he was only in the mere beginning stages of a nightmare, the nails of its cruel and unrelenting grasp just starting to graze across his flesh. For you'd known the difference all these months since he'd come back from the war.

You'd been there through the worse ones, the ones that felt like they might never end, like he'd slipped down into the trenches of hell and the Devil threatened to never give him back. You'd been beside him when he was submerged in the tunnels, surrounded by the death and the decay, engulfed in the mud and the never-ending torture of war. You'd felt the way he thrashed in the bed, rocking the mattress so harshly that it pounded against the wall with a thunderous might. You'd listened to the way he struggled for a breath, as if his dream were hands wrapped ruthlessly around his throat like a nightmare woven noose. Watching as he awoke shaking, cold sweats coating his flesh, all the while, making him feel as if he had been ignited by a flickering flame.

You'd seen him through worse nights, but watching him suffer for even a second, burdened your heart.

Perhaps, it had been the touch of your fingertips, trailing along the flesh of his face. Touching along the lines that told the horrors of war and screamed for all of the sleep he'd lost over the years. But perhaps, it had been the sound of your voice that was the thing to finally break through the barrier, puncturing his subconscious and slowly drawing him out, before he spiraled down that tunnel completely.

Tommy didn't often speak after he awoke from a nightmare, even if it had been your hands shaking his shoulders like life was draining from his body beside you, you rather believed it was because he simply couldn't. That the terrors you couldn't begin to fathom, had tied his tongue and cleared his mind of any train of thought possibly forming.

Some nights, he'd pull away from you as you reached for him. Shaking off the hand that you slid tenderly over his shoulder blade, standing from the bed and more times than not, exiting the bedroom and disappearing into the night. Finding him down by the stables the very next morning. Sometimes, he'd merely act as if it hadn't rattled him as harshly as it had, pulling you back into his embrace if sleep still trailed along your vision and he knew you were sure to fall back to sleep in seconds. But some nights, some rare nights that were far and few in between, Tommy laid there and let you see him raw and broken.

He didn't halt your hand tonight, as your fingers slowly spread back over the swell of chest, gliding over the muscle swirled with beautiful black ink on the space above his heart. Tommy didn't avert his eyes, as he felt your loving gaze remain steady on the sight of his shadowed expression. He didn't hide from you tonight and maybe, just maybe, it was as if Tommy Shelby missed you just as much as you missed him.

"You know," You paused as soon as the sound of your voice punctured the dense void of silence, startled by your whisper tone that suddenly felt like a boisterous boom of thunder, resounding amongst the four walls encompassing your frames. "you can talk to me, like you used to."

You used to talk about everything. You could talk for hours about anything, about everything, about absolutely nothing at all. You could talk about your struggles, your fears, your deepest desires and your heaviest burdens. You could share your tears and the fire that burned a rage deep inside, you could share your elations and your dreams. You could discuss the future and the present and memories of the past. But when Tommy came home, it was as if a wall had been built up. Layers of impenetrable brick layered one on top of the other, until barely a conversation could be passed through the crevices, crumbs of concrete falling out in its place. Gathering what you could in your hands but longing for the days when candor and effortlessness would fall easy from his lips.

Tommy's scrutiny remains stagnant on the ceiling looming above you, but his fingers that hover above your waist dip down the faintest inch, touching down upon your flesh and squeezing softly as if to acknowledge the sound of your breathless voice. You don't question whether or not he listens to you by the lack of movement in his expression or frozen gaze, but even if you had, Tommy hums softly below his breath as if to tell you he hears you. The sound low and nearly faded into the darkness, but you capture the soft sensation before it can disappear.

Tommy knew that he could talk to you, he knew that he could open up and spill every single detail that scared and tortured his bleeding heart to you, knowing you'd be there to listen without the slightest hint of judgement or revulsion. Tommy knew that but at the same time, Tommy knew that physically, he couldn't.

For it was that wall, built high around himself like a suit of armor he'd forgotten to shed while over there in the tunnels, following him home and closing himself off in ways he couldn't control. It shut down his capacity to believe, it hardened his heart and made what was once open and accessible, suddenly closed off and a frozen block of ice. It enhanced his cynicism and broke his ability to hope. The war had isolated parts of himself that he was forced to access and learn all over again, if there was anything left to even get back. It wasn't that he didn't want to talk to you like he used to, it was that he couldn't. He hadn't the words, he hadn't the capability, he hadn't the power.

You hadn't expected him to say anything in response to your plea, to your heartfelt admission that he could talk to you at any time on any day about anything, but you weren't dissuaded. You knew that this was Tommy's way, and you knew that Tommy knew, you would wait forever if you had to for him to be ready to open up himself to you again. And so, peering up at your husband who was in more pain than the stilled lines of his even expression let on, you said the only other thing you could say in that moment.

"I love you, Tommy." Your whisper danced along the flesh of his cheek, as you rested your head back down against his chest, the strong beat of his heart returning steadily beneath your ear. Feeling the warmth of his exhales soaking into the strands atop your head, and the comforting rise and fall of his chest pressed against your naked frame.

Tommy wanted to say the words, with every fiber of his being screaming out, he wanted to say them. But they lodged in his throat as if mud stuck them in place, oxygen curling around the letters, nearly choking him with the way they built like a pit in the base of his chest. Tommy wanted to tell you, it pained his heart in ways he hadn't ever felt in his life not being able to, but it was as if his body wouldn't let him.

For the words were there, in the corners of his mind and beating in the lasting remnants of warmth in his heart, but he couldn't get his lips to form the letters, couldn't get his voice to coat their sound, he couldn't get himself to say it to you. It broke his heart, missing the man he was, the man who could say I love you without fail, without hesitation, without a part of himself holding the words in.

For it wasn't that Tommy no longer loved you, with everything inside of himself he had left to give, he loved you still. But the war changed him, it altered the way he saw the world, the way he lived this newfound life he'd miraculously walked away with. It changed the way he could love and trust and depend on and need another human being. Tommy Shelby loved you, it was simply that he was learning how to love you as the man he was now.

Reaching down, feeling as your lashes fluttered closed against the warm flesh of his chest, Tommy took hold of your hand that rested flat along the ridges of muscle over his abdomen. Thick fingers coated in dense callouses, but still exuding a warmth that flooded your palm, coiled around your hand as he brought your fingers up off his body. Stopping only when he brought the very pads of your fingertips to his lips, feeling the breath of warmth and moisture along the curve of his full and pouted lips trail along your skin. Tommy kissed your fingers softly, tenderly and without a single rush in the world, he kissed each tip of every finger before placing your hand back down upon his chest.

Tommy couldn't say the words and he knew without a shred of ignorance that his kisses could never be enough, but he tried. He tried desperately, each and every day, not to fall into the ease of casting you completely out of his life. For it could've been easy, giving into the coldness that consumed his heart, ignoring the warmth that flickered like a match in the dark, from the corner that still whispered your name. It could've been simpler for you, walking away from a man who was no longer the man that you married all those years before. But Tommy loved you, he knew no matter what the war had made him out to be, no matter how calloused and cynical his heart became, that he would never stop loving you and so, he tried.

Because if you could still love him enough to try and love the man he came back as, then surely, Tommy could try with all of his strength, to show you he still loved you. To love you, even after France, in the way you'd deserved.

A/N: This one is raw and hurt my heart while crafting it but I am very happy with the emotion and descriptions I was able to create here!😭❤

This piece was a very spontaneous idea that came to me one night, it wasn't planned, and I didn't have any written down points of dialogue or descriptions that prompted this piece. It simply stemmed from the desire to write a piece that encapsulated the notion that war closed pieces of Thomas off, it shut him down in ways that he hadn't been before France and how that would surely influence a marriage that was in place before he even left. He couldn't trust or believe or even love the way he used to when he got home, I really wanted to explore the struggle between knowing that he still loved someone as deeply as he had before he left, but that it would undeniably be altered, and tumultuous in the sense that it was hard for Thomas to open himself back up in the way he once had. I wanted to explore the way that it couldn't be completely explained or articulated, the shift and the closing off of his heart, all the while, still knowing that love still resided somewhere inside of himself even if he couldn't quite reach it the way he once had.

I wanted to create a piece that had moments that touched upon your heart and created an almost nostalgic and bittersweet feeling, while evening it out with raw reality and heartbreaking truths of what the war had done to him. I wanted you to be able to feel the emotion, the depth that at moments, were hard for me to articulate and put into words that could truly grasp the pain and inner turmoil I was trying to display. I could feel it all as I was writing this piece and can only hope that it translated onto the page as a completed piece for you all to read!

I am very proud of the imagery, the descriptions, the writing I was able to create for this piece. Because this piece came to me so suddenly, I let it simply flow and go where it wanted to go and let it become a one shot centered around emotions and a moment rather than a growing plot. I hope you all enjoyed this piece!❤