She was an impossible beauty that Thomas Shelby had never known. A mystical legend of the afterlife, a blessed being donned with wings woven from thread of impenetrable gold and adorned in the shining light of redemption, like her hands hadn't a single trace of sin lacing the lines that curved along her palms.

She was folklore. Tales told to the children whose hands were already dusted with the soot of the cursed Birmingham streets, their lungs stained by the smoke and the smog that coated them in a glaze of suffocating grey. Whose lives were already tainted the moment they drew a breath in the damned city where God had yet to lay a hand, in an attempt to mystify them with the idea that there was such a thing as salvation for their poor souls that were already slated against the odds.

She was the whispers of what could become of a soul when immaculate and cleansed of sin and trouble, in a city that churned out such things like smoke passing through an old Watery Lane chimney. She was the tall tale of peace in a time when such a notion had been shattered to a million lost pieces, buried in oblivion beneath the death laden soil back in France.

She was the little white lie told as a soul readied to cross that threshold into the next life, a beautiful mosaic painted across their demising minds of what might be awaiting them past their last weary breath. When the reality was nothing more than a bleached white cloth draped over the eyes of those desperate enough to believe such an eternity was there. Where their names were written in stone and their souls were welcomed beyond gates of pearl toned gold and glistening lights brighter than the sun had ever shone.

She was the angel that Thomas Shelby had never known. For a man like him, he'd only ever known devils in this life, and he knew without a shred of doubt residing in his mind, that those were all that awaited him when they finally returned to claim the soul he'd long ago sold off.

He was a dead man walking, a mere ghost wading through this life. For he wore death like shackles, coiled tightly around his ankles with the sharp bite of metal piercing against his flesh with each stride he took. The chains of his forsaken soul clattering together in the echoing silence, as the devils owned the other end and clutched them tightly in their grasps. Pulling on them every so often, just enough to tease Tommy with the notion of death, but never delivering the final blow of mercy a man like him so hopelessly craved.

He was a man out of time and yet, the devils kept the thin hands of his brushed gold pocket watch ticking. He had purpose on this Earth, uses for his hands that delivered the bloodshed the spirits beyond could not. Uses for his mind that was far too intelligent and methodical for his own good, a burden carried on the bones of his body that carried on with each and every battering he took.

Tommy was immortal to the world, a man who'd stared death in the eyes and tasted the very blood of his demise on the tip of his tongue but walked away with his life still hanging on by a precarious thread inside of his chest. Tommy was mortal to the devils that lingered beyond however, for they owned him... and when they were ready and he'd accomplished all that was left to be done, they'd sever that thread with a simple snip of a shear.

The cathedral was an oasis on the outskirts of Birmingham, an establishment that withstood the harshness the city ensued and when Tommy Shelby proceeded to step past its tall wooden doors, he felt why it had stood for so very long in this cursed city.

It was a breath unlike any found in the nature of the countryside or even the air that saturated the finest of establishments. For the atmosphere that awaited him, felt as if it had been lift untouched by man. Even as it was the calloused palms of workers that laid the glistening-stained glass windows, the sweat coated muscles of the men who placed the aisles of endless oak pews, the lives that decorated the alter with all the evidence of a faith manufactured to answer a single question, it felt cleansed in a way that the city Tommy knew inside and out, had never felt before.

His presence was a trespasser in its own right, for he hadn't a single right to lay a foot, that was burdened with the evidence of bloodshed and sin and cynicism beneath the strong conviction of his worn soles, upon the tiles of a building so pure and sacred. But Tommy Shelby proceeded, until his steps nearly echoed in the silence that engulfed him in a void of suffocating depth, for there was not an inch of this Earth where he couldn't step if he so desired to stand there.

The space smelled of pine needles dampened with fresh linen, with the faintest taint of sulfur from the extinguished flames that ignited the candles illuminating the alter. It was a clean aroma that enveloped the entire church, until not an aisle, not a pew, not a crevice in the walls was left untouched by the purity that seemed to ooze as if it were the presence of the Lord Almighty raining down. But as Tommy walked further into the building that objected to his each and every step, he brought with him the sensations of Small Heath and the fiery notions of hell on his heels.

For he strode in with the devils. The chains coiled around his ankles scraping against the hardwood panels that reflected in the delicate light bathing through the crystalized windowpanes. Smoke wafted up from the way Tommy's long black coat swayed with his each and every bound, as if his heels carried in the popping embers of the fire awaiting below in the burning rivers of hell, but the steps of the cathedral extinguished them like a harsh blow of cold water. Dousing the trace of his damned impending soul, smoke sizzling up from the ashes that marked his footprints behind him.

It was a harsh contrast to the soft woodsy nature that emanated the tall space, a sharp burn of tobacco that punctured the clean environment, like he'd placed the end of his cigarette against its flesh, leaving behind a sear bound to pucker and scar. He carried with him the distinct smoke of Small Heath, the coal and the soot tainted with the stench of misery and misfortune.

Thomas Shelby smelled of what this place would never embrace. A man laden with sin as if his veins pumped more guilt than blood, a man who'd come from nothing and made something of himself in any way he possibly could, a man who smelled of horses and whiskey and his opium pipe. He was the example of exceptions when it came to faith, he was the reason the doors would close and the beliefs they taught would suddenly fail to pertain to him.

She, however, was the example of what it was to see the most perfect of God's angels fall from grace and come crashing down in a fiery spiral of sin and disappointment. She might've ended up being the Lord's mistake but to Tommy, she might've just been his miracle.

The night whispered his name like the call of a prayer, as dusk faded beyond the rigid curve of the faintly illuminated horizon. The darkness of the impending evening hour slowly crawling in across the atmosphere, seeking out Tommy's presence like the hand of a familiar foe, until the sharp talons of its impenetrable indigo touch descended down upon his black bathed shoulder tips.

The last remnants of daylight bled in through the surrounding stain glass, glazing the hardwood panels beneath Tommy's deathly silent steps in a thin breath of kaleidoscopic color. But no matter how loudly the night called out, she couldn't hear its voice. And even as Tommy grew closer to the alter where she resided, she didn't hear his steps.

Knelt on knees that had never known the harsh scrape of pavement against raw flesh or the stinging burn of clay-soaked soil seeping into open wounds, she prayed upon that alter. Illuminated by the twinkling light of a few ignited candles and the glossy sheen the windows had to give, the light touched her clothing as if she hadn't even known that the very promise of night lingered so closely in the distance.

A juxtaposition that Tommy knew all too well when it came to her, that she would always know the light, she would feel the warmth of the sun and the generosity of day. Whereas Tommy would always know the darkness, he would always feel the cold cavity where that black abyss resided and the torturous grasp that the density of night had to offer him.

Light and darkness, two ends never meant to meet and never destined to mix and yet... she wore them both effortlessly.

For she adorned satin as she always appeared to wear, something sleek and ethereal as it glided down her delicate frame in the most breathless of fashions. A cream toned dress today, that flowed over her calves as she knelt underneath the weight of the Lord's scrutiny. But today, as the nip in the air promised the certain arrival of winter, she was cloaked in indigo. A deep, nearly black bled shade of wool, draped over her shoulder and swimming down her arms in a coat that seemed far too dark for a woman like her to adorn. But something about the sight, stirred something inside of Tommy.

She wore the light fabrics of an angel, delicate satin clinging softly to her frame like a gentle hug, but she paired it with the darkness that Tommy knew like it was his own backyard. Perhaps, it was symbolic in that way. Like the cloak of coal rich indigo, was the evidence of his touch. The proof that he'd laid his hand upon something so tender and so innocent, all the while, leaving his trace of darkness and sin lingering behind. The confirmation that he had indeed tainted something that could never be undone, that his touch was like a brand to her soul and God knew each and every inch of where he'd been when it came to her.

The soles of his steps sounded for the first time since entering the holy establishment, as he took those final three stairs up to the alter where she knelt on unshakable knees. It was still not enough to break her from her prayer, but it alerted her to Tommy's presence, and he could almost feel the shift in the air as he took up the snug space beside her and the other end of the railing.

It was an intangible shift, something not met by the eye or even the logic of reality, but rather a feeling inside the base of his chest. Like an exhale released into the air as soon as she knew he was near, a breath of relief, a sigh of peace perhaps. A warmth, bleeding into the atmosphere until Tommy swore he could nearly feel it dancing along his own flesh. But the faint flush of pink to the tint of her cheeks, that he managed to see with his own two eyes.

Tommy Shelby didn't pray. He could hardly recall the last time he'd let one pass through his lips or at the very least, teetering on the very edge of his mind. Perhaps, he hadn't prayed since that very first month in France. When his sense of humanity was still hanging on by a precarious thread, not yet in shambles and left behind in the tunnels he'd dug with tired and blood-soaked hands. Maybe he'd prayed down in those shadows when he'd first ventured down into the darkness and the suffocating Earth, like hope still lied in the crevices of the war-torn world.

Had he prayed for his own life? When the tunnel came crumbling down around him or had he prayed for mercy? Death in the sweetest of reliefs that a solider could know.

Tommy Shelby couldn't remember the last time he'd prayed but he knew that he'd never do so again. A futile notion he believed, a cry out to oblivion where not a soul resided to hear it.

Tommy might not pray, but he respected her enough to allow her to do the very thing he'd long since abandoned.

Her lashes swept through the clutter of freckles dusting her cheekbones, tiptoeing along the blush that warmed the hue of her supple flesh, but they moved not a single flutter. For unlike the nights when he'd stay awake, plagued by the endless pursuit of a past that threatened to torture his present until his future was shattered to a thousand shards of lost dreams, when her lashes would beat in soft breaths against her cheekbones, as she swam amongst an abyss laden with the peace of her slumber, they were still as she prayed.

There was something about watching her in this position, with her knees pressed delicately against the polished wood, hands folded into a steeple of flesh and bones in front of her chest, as the bright cast of her sight was obscured from the world, that reminded Tommy of her youth.

For she was young, far too young for his own good and far too young to have ever gotten swept up into the life of a man like him. Young as her independent life was just beginning, young as she'd yet to know the world in all of the ways that Tommy had been cursed to know it in. But the years that separated them was both a constant temptation of her youthful innocence that called out to Tommy in a way that he never should've listened to, and a daily reminder of the life he was tainting just by letting her share a sliver of his own.

Her loose tendrils, thin strands resembling pale gold threads, as if the very value of its worth had been drained and only a few measly stones tinted with the glistening honey shine remained, were woven into a plait that cascaded down her left shoulder. It was the style she'd worn when he'd first set his eyes upon the young woman, that the heavens had dangled in front of him like a low hanging branch of forbidden fruit. It was the way she'd worn it every day since.

But in the sanctity of his bedroom walls, that captured the sound of her voice in a way not another soul in the whole world had ever witnessed, the thick pads of his calloused and rough fingers would run over the band that tied the braid in place and pull ever so gently. Tugging until her curls were released and they flowed down her spine in a rippling tide of shimmering light, a sight that only Tommy's eyes alone had ever seen.

She was a temptress shrouded in abstention but no matter how pure her soul and how strong her belief in her Lord above, she relished in the freedoms that came with listening to the temptations her faith tried to silence.

Tommy leaned forward the few inches remaining between their frames, letting his left-hand lift gently without even having to shift his elbow that balanced with ease upon his thigh, and brushed his index finger along the band that held her plait in place. She didn't move as his touch descended upon her strands that always smelled of intoxicating amber and the crispness of fresh rain, but she swallowed at his close proximity. His eyes watching as the skin of her throat tightened and gulped a breath that her lungs had yet to capture, as his thumb begin to slowly loosen the band.

Her flesh was warm, as his knuckles grazed it on the way down, capturing the fabric in his palm as it fell free and let his touch linger on her neck a second or two longer, all because Tommy craved the way the simplest of sensations seemed to ignite her like embers were lift popping beneath her flesh.

Tommy Shelby was a man who certainly felt guilt. Whether it be from the war that had shelled out parts of himself and simply replaced it with the burden of lives he'd taken that he could never eradicate, or by the choices he'd made that had been at the sacrifice of others, he was not immune to the notion. And when it came to her, he felt guilt when he kept coming around just to see her face and feel her warmth. But as damned as he was, there were some days when it came to her and the way she responded to his touch, that Tommy felt guilty because he didn't feel guilt over his selfishness at all.

Slipping the band into his coat pocket, replacing the smooth fabric in his hand with the worn box of Sweet Aftons and a match box, he watched as she shifted. Parting her hands as she proceeded to make the sign of the cross, blessing herself as her prayer came to an end and just as Tommy pulled a cigarette from the half-empty carton, her eyes opened.

"I can't say I was convinced you would have stopped at just my hair band," Her head had yet to turn to face Tommy Shelby, but he swore he could feel the mischievous twinkle in her innocent look, like its contradicting warmth and tantalizing beauty settled against his flesh. "But I suppose even a gangster has enough of a gentleman inside him, to refrain from undoing my buttons whilst I'm mid prayer."

"Ey," Tommy smirked ever so softly, as he swept the stick along his bottom lip once, twice, three swift times, before letting it hang there securely in place. "Is that so?"

She turned to face him then, letting the loose tangles of her thin strands now waved by the long-plaited style, shift and fall back over her shoulder blades. Her facial features were delicate as was everything else about her, but when it came to her eyes, there was something firm and strong and undeniably weathered about them, like her soul had been through another life already and although she was young in this one, she'd lived a full one before.

They were glazed in the ethereal light of an innocent youth that had yet to fade, but the color that lingered beyond was deepened with dark waves of emerald and sage.

Her eyes had always been the land as Tommy's own had been the roaring seas, and only hers alone had stood firmly enough not to become swept up into the crashing waves of his bold cerulean.

Her lashes blinked, dragging through the freckles that were far deeper than his own, as a smile toyed at the edges of her rather thin but naturally peony tinted lips. "Do you want to prove me wrong?"

Drawing a match from the pack, Tommy twists it between the pads of his thumb and index finger, before mumbling in a low Birmingham rumble around his unlit cigarette. "Tempting a man like that in a place like this, you might just end up in one of these pews in a way you'd hate for your God to see you in."

Her laugh could make the clouds clear. Like a hymn from the heavens raining down, until a light seeped into each and every dark and desolate crevice. Bathing both the cobbles she hopped along and the battered heart of a gangster, in a warming hue of redemption neither had ever known.

For it sounded around him, nearly echoing in the strong space that captured every little sensation that entered its sacred walls, the breathless melody that flooded with ease past her lips. She smiled at him in a way no one had ever smiled at Tommy Shelby before in this life, like he made her feel something men like him never made women like her want to feel.

She smiled at him, with that soft, slightly uneven twist of her beautiful lips, letting the happiness that seeped into the creases of the thin and delicate flesh, meet her eyes in a glittering twinkle of deep saturated light. She smiled at him like she might just love the dead man who walked in his shoes, or perhaps even worse, loved the man who inhabited the empty shell of the war-hero who'd long ago left it behind.

Letting her tongue brush along her lower lips, threatening to erase the trace of her small smile as it fades softly from view, she leans forward and reaches for the carton of cigarettes resting in his lap. Fingertips clean and untouched by even the faintest shade of polish, slid a single white stick from the package and brought it to her own lips.

The flame blazed bright for a moment, as Tommy ignited the match in his fingers against the small box in his other hand, letting the single citrine light burn between their eyes before lifting his hand up to meet the end of her cigarette. Singing the paper until smoke arises, he soon lights his own and extinguishes the charred match with a single flick of his wrist.

Tommy watched as she smoked in comfortable silence beside him, realizing her bare feet as she slowly turned her body and crossed them one over another, shoes discarded beside her.

He could always remember the first night she'd taken a cigarette from his pack, the night he'd first met her in fact, she'd timidly asked him for a cigarette she didn't smoke and a light she didn't have. He'd obliged, realizing the slight entertainment in the sight of a young woman trying a smoke for the first time, when he'd long since lost count of the number of cigarettes he'd brushed against his own nicotine-stained lips.

It was a moment of pure levity, unexpected and out of the blue, for such a notion was scarcely experienced in the streets of Small Heath after Tommy had returned from war. Like the echoing ghost of his past laugh haunted him in that place, where the cobblestone and the well-worn brick of the home he'd grown up in, remembered the boy he used to be and yearned for a trace of him to return.

He'd smirked softly behind the rim of his whiskey glass, as his cerulean beam gazed through the heavy sheath of this dark raven lashes, observing the coughs that rumbled her lungs as the smoke tore through her immaculate flesh.

He could have patronized her in that moment, let a blunt comment pass his lips in a cloud of his own smoke. But he realized as he watched this bewilderingly beautiful being, who'd so suddenly appeared in the midst of these cobblestone streets and the rowdy crowd of the Garrison that evening, that he had no desire to make her shrink in her seat or cower in embarrassment before Small Heath's self-appointed prince.

Tommy had simply offered her a sip of his whiskey, followed by a glass of water when he nearly chuckled at the sight of her pinched brows formed from the burn of the amber drink, and let her indulge in the very things she'd been searching for. Letting her run from whatever ailed her past, whatever tainted the prospect of her future, and allowed her to find it in him if she so desired.

Tommy had long ago corrupted her soul, but all the while, she might've just come along and managed to save what was left of his.

The silence that consumed them was comfortable and still, like it was the closest Tommy Shelby had come to a breath of peace since his feet had returned home on solid, Birmingham soil. For it didn't need words to fill its void, the feeling of her company filled the cavities far better than any polite banter ever could. They both relished in the silence of each other's comforting presence.

For her, it was a moment of unscathed comfort after she'd been praying for forgiveness. When she'd pleaded with the Lord to forgive her fall from grace but turning back into the arms of the man who'd brought on those very sins, not a second after her last breath entered those heavenly gates.

For Tommy, it was merely a moment to breathe in this life. The one that kept him feeling like he hadn't a second to spare for a deep breath necessary for his lungs and his burning soul. There was little comfort to be discovered in this establishment, a large structure glistening with saturated light and objects void of significance to a man like him, there was no peace in the Lord's house for a man who didn't believe.

But he wondered if he were sitting on the very edge of a fiery lake, while lost souls screamed out into the tortured oblivion as hell burned around his surroundings, if she were right there beside him, if he'd breathe just as deeply as he did here immersed in a place devoid of devils and withering lives claimed by such.

He was damning her past the point of redemption, with each moment of hers he took, with each kiss he let taint her lips and every inch of her flesh that he'd run his touch down in the shadows the evenings had to offer, with every shade of darkness he adorned on his soul that she allowed herself to try and heal by taking a sliver of it upon herself, he knew he was destroying her.

But Tommy couldn't seem to let her go, like an addiction coursing through his veins. As if she were stronger than the opium he smoked when she wasn't around or more potent than any cocaine he could ever come across. He knew he should quit her, while it was Tommy that was detrimental to her, but the more of a taste he got, the more he discovered he just couldn't kick that all-consuming craving for the young woman who sat close beside him.

For a man destined for hell and a woman pining her way back into the good graces of the glittering eternity above, the juxtaposition of their temperatures did not evade Tommy. As his flesh ran warm, always heated like lost fires were left flickering like half-stomped out embers in his veins, she ran cold. Like the deep blue lines along her skin that resembled that of slow-moving canals, represented the ice that surely coated her blood.

Even on the warmest of days, when the rare break of sunshine shone down upon her shoulders, she'd coil her touch around his bicep as they walked in silence, and he'd swear she carried the prick of winter beneath the patter of her fingertips.

This moment was no different, as Tommy felt the familiar pitter patter of her fingertips. Climbing up the inside of his wrist like ivy winding around his limbs like it might just plant its root right there beyond his flesh, divided only by that of the fabric he adorned, the chill of her touch was still a slight nip against his skin when she found the flesh of his hand. Gliding her soft pads that were unscathed by a single droplet of bloodshed or creased by a callous, across the lines etching their way along his palm, like she let her touch travel along them as if they were rivers running thinly on a map.

It was the way her hand fit so delicately in his own, like it simply did not belong and yet, when she intertwined her fingers with his as she did now, there was something about the tingling sensation of her blistering cold flesh firm against his fiery nature, that seemed right.

Tommy peered down as she clasped his hand tightly in her own. Her head didn't turn to look at her actions, but rather continued to gaze out ahead at the aisle running deep into the cathedral and continued to smoke silently. She didn't look to him for anything in return, Tommy found. She didn't wait to see his reaction, yearning to uncover a flicker of emotion hidden beneath the crashing waves of his impenetrable orbs, craving a bit of affection from him just as easily as she could provide. She simply held his hand because she wanted to and expected nothing in return.

She was different than Thomas in so many ways, that it must've been a clear and blatant sign from the universe beyond. Just the contrast of their hands, the way hers was soft and unburdened with the weight of a thousand lives etched across flesh in the ink of their blood, was enough to tell Tommy that her hand didn't belong in his. It was small and delicate and bound to be stained by the touch of his own, like the sins of his past and the irrefutable sins of his present were to wipe off and smear against her immaculate surface. Perhaps, it already had.

The way she spoke, the levity in her voice that Tommy had lost long before his youth was over, had never known what it was to choke on the words of truth that threatened to sink a soul like a burdened corpse. She didn't have the age and the life experience that could roughen the edges of a tone, she'd never had the very essence of her voice stolen from her character when it shifted in the midst of gunfire and screams of death.

Her tongue was free from the weight of a language used by men like him, but oh how it had tasted the sweet, tainting temptation of sin when she kissed him. She'd never let her voice coil around the Lord's name in vain, but she'd screamed Tommy's own until the letters threatened to unravel and tear her very voice apart. She never let a filthy thought muddle the sweet nature of her delicate tone, but she showed them off in the dimly lit bedroom of his, as though each and every sinful urge she had locked away deep inside of herself, was slowly eating her alive.

Perhaps, in the eyes of the God Almighty, she was far from purity. But to Thomas Shelby, in the eyes of a man who'd seen the horrors very few had ever known, she was as close to perfection as one soul could ever get. She was no longer the face of innocence; Tommy had stripped her of that long ago. But still, her touch nearly parted the stains from his flesh like the red sea breaking in two. The bewildering chill beneath her fingertips feeling as if it might just be enough to cleanse the sin from his soul. But when his hands found her frame, rough callouses and red stained fingerprints grazing porcelain rich flesh, he wondered just how much he tainted her innocence that remained.

Thomas Shelby didn't believe in the Lord above, he didn't pray or repent for his many sins in confessional on Sundays, but with her, he worshiped her as if it were the Holy hand that might just save him.

Plucking the half-burned cigarette from between his full and slightly pouted lips, Tommy let the calloused fingers of his left-hand gently squeeze and tighten around her own, brushing the firm pad of his thumb back and forth over the curvature of her knuckles and the smooth nature of her skin.

It was a simple gesture, one that came far too long after she had first grasped hold of his hand, but an action that she appreciated because it came from him. His timing was skewed and his ability to meet her affection and terms of endearment were flawed and hideously slight in comparison, but she embraced them because she wholeheartedly accepted what it was he had to offer.

He hadn't much left after France, lost remnants cluttering the base of a beating pulse that once knew what it was to treat a woman and love with every thundering string of his heart, like he'd gone and lost the capability of such notions, but she didn't seem to mind. She seemed to know, without Tommy ever having to say as such, that whatever he could give her, was all that he had and to her, that was more than enough.

Crisp amber wafted along the current of his senses, as she swiftly rested her head against his shoulder. Honey strung strands sprawling out against the sleek black wool of his attire, as the static of the cold and the material captured her loose waves. Peering down at her through the corner of his eye, Tommy took in the sight of her much smaller frame pressed against his much broader one and mused softly at the sight.

How far had she fallen? This angel of his, fallen down from the heavens into the arms of a devil. This calamity, that shook the battlefield torn apart by both Heaven and Earth.

Withdrawing the cigarette slowly from between his lips, letting a cascade of pungent smoke roll straight past, like a waterfall of ashen grey coating his lips in an intoxicating breath of tainting nicotine, Tommy cleared his throat softly.

"Do you pray for me in this place, I wonder?"

She didn't sit up or pull her head away from his shoulder, comfortable and rather wrapped up in the warmth he exuded with ease, but he felt her straighten just an inch at his sudden inquiry.

"Should I?"

Tommy let out a low breath, a trace of a dried-out chuckle with no merit and no meaning, a lost breath tumbling forward in an exhale of dazed smoke through his full lips. "Waste of a breath, I reckon."

He couldn't see her expression, but there was something palpable in the air and the way she grasped tighter to his hand, that made it seem as if her emotions were a tangible sensation he could hold in his very hands. For he knew she smiled at his words, he could feel it shift in the air and he swore he could see it.

"Well," She mused in a light-hearted breath. "If that's so, I've certainly yet to run out."

It was a foreign sensation, one that knocked every so often at the abandoned door to his lost soul, like visiting a ghost town with a shred of hope that a human being still resided somewhere amongst the forsaken wreckage. Tommy couldn't name what it was that crawled along the empty roads of where his sense of humanity once traveled, the warmth that touched the cold that had long since captured the last few strings keeping his beating pulse alive. It was both beguiling and suffocating in the very same breath.

For there was a faint flutter, like something awakening from the ashes that had long since coated the base of his chest and cluttered the fixtures of his heart like cobwebs of a past life. Something dormant beginning to shift beneath the surface, like the lost breath of a man thought to be dead, suddenly expelling from his lips as life filled his lungs with a second chance in this world. But just as the flutter grew wings like the rhythmic beat of the blackbird's flock, Tommy swore the roots of its sudden presence coiled around his neck like a homegrown noose.

It was unnerving, the access this foreign feeling had to a man as securely guarded as Thomas Shelby. Like none of his defenses, none of his locks, none of his manmade security measures to keep the extent of the world from preying further on his mind, meant a damn thing. It didn't come barreling through like a steam train, bursting through brick and shattering his walls to the Earth's surface. It rather came in like the gentle ease of the canal's subtle flow, gliding over the armor he adorned as though it knew every key that fit every lock. It was unsettling and made Tommy feel as if control was narrowly beginning to slip between the cracks of his fingers.

Like a fire with its popping embers of blistering warmth, this sensation that sought him out only when she was near, threatened to scald his flesh alive, all the while, promising to soothe the burn in the very same whisper.

She didn't shift her head from its comfortable resting place against his sturdy shoulder, but Tommy glanced down when he felt her begin to withdraw her hand from his own. Loosening his grip, as he lifted the cigarette he'd nearly forgotten still continued to burn in his other hand to his lips, she pulled her hand upwards, but she didn't take it away.

In fact, she added her other hand. Feeling as the edge of her own cigarette, the end warmed by the damp touch of her lips, brushed against his knuckles, she delicately grasped his left hand in both of her own. Cradling it as if she held something priceless in her grip, rather than that of a tarnished hand of a condemned and sinful man.

A breath of tobacco infused air tumbled past Tommy's lips, barely parting his lips but rather letting it escape in a single effortless stream through the allotted crack, as he peered down with a hint of skepticism to his cerulean glazed stare.

For he watched with silent lips but a curious mind, as she began to ever so faintly trace her fingertips along the lines carved within the flesh of his palms. Soft skin unscathed by years of hardship and the burdens of war, brushing over plateaus of calloused flesh and blisters formed over the abrasive surface of a weapon her hands had never known. Dipping down into the thin canyons that spoke of life beyond her years, of stories she'd never hear and experiences she'd never see.

She traced his palm as if she could read it, like she held in her hands the book that told the story of one Tommy Shelby. A horrid story really; depressing and graphic and beyond anything she ought to have weighing on her conscience. But she didn't stop, she didn't slow, she didn't falter once. She run her fingertips along his palms as if she were gypsy herself, reading his future while accepting all of his past as well.

"I ask him to be there for you," Her voice is nearly swept beneath the tide of silence that encapsulates the church, but it floats along Tommy's sense of sound as if only he alone in all the world, was made to hear her. "Even in the darkness, even when your soul hasn't a place for his name, I ask him not to forsake you."

She wasn't real. She couldn't be. For she had a sense of humanity that flooded her veins as if the very blood keeping her alive, that didn't exist in the world that Tommy knew. She spoke of a man who was baptized in the very sins that ravaged his soul, hell fire dousing him like the waves of holy water. And here she was, speaking of such compassion that mankind for all Tommy had ever known, had lost long ago.

She spoke in a voice that made it seem like the words that slid effortlessly over her lips, like the smoke from her sweetened and smoky tongue, didn't carry the weight they so clearly possessed as they pattered along Tommy's hearing. She said them with such passion and belief in the deepest depths of herself, that it was as if she barely realized she said the words at all, they fell so naturally from her own soul.

She was a poppy, growing up from a field of charred ashes. Something so unabashedly pure and beautiful that simply didn't belong. With petals formed from the bloodshed that tainted the Earth, grown from the lost tears that saturated the soil enough for the roots to bloom from death and decay, arose something the world had been missing all this time. Something that seemed so foreign these days, like a memory of something that only used to be.

"I don't ask him to heal you." Her voice draws him back down towards those hardwood steps he sits snugly upon. With the dying sun exhaling its very last breath in through the stain glass, letting the particles dance in the lingering light glistening a saturated blue hue. But it's the warmth of her lips that settles him back into reality, reopening his eyes as he glances back down at her frame huddled close to his, as he witnesses her lifting his hand.

As her fingers have since finished reading his story and exploring all there is to know from the blood-stained lines that mar his palms, she brings his thick and calloused fingertips to the edge of her lips. Feeling her soft breath dance along his flesh, the warmth a sharp contradiction to the cold that still captivates her gentle touch. One by one, with her cigarette extinguished and placed aside on the railing beside her, she kisses the tips of his fingers. As her words spill over his flesh like a smoke tainted breath of pure temptation.

Tommy was infatuated with her hands, but he never realized that she might just share the very same for his own.

"I don't ask that he take your suffering or even lend you some peace."

From his index to his middle to his ring finger and back again, she places chaste kisses along the very edge and even as it's barely the tips of his nails that brush along her soft flesh, Tommy fears the sin and the bloodshed will be left behind when she lets his hand go.

"I don't ask for miracles Tommy." She whispers as she glides her kiss down his fingers and over the bridge of his knuckles, to press one last kiss against the soft center on the back of his hand. Letting her warmth travel over rigid tendons and swollen veins.

"I don't ask for what I know he can't provide." She doesn't let go of his hand, but she places it back down against his own thigh, as she peers up at him. "But I ask him to watch over you. Because even the ones who don't care if he's there, those who don't have room for him in their heart, even the ones who haven't spoken his name aloud in all of their years, shouldn't be left alone in this world."

That was the thing with her. She never tried to change him. Not one single time since he'd met her, had she tried to change something about him. She didn't try to alter who he was or force her own beliefs onto a man who simply didn't have any. She didn't try to save his soul or redeem him in the eyes of the Lord. She didn't try to make him into someone he wasn't.

She accepted him as he was. All of his broken pieces, all of his tarnished parts, all of his darkness and all of his pain. She didn't go in thinking she could be the one to save poor Thomas Shelby. She just loved him as he was. With all of his scars, with all of his imperfections, with all of his demons.

How could such a creature, a beautiful design crafted from the heavens, fall for one that was formed by the hands of the devil, forged in the fire mankind had ignited within his own mind? Did the Lord look down upon her and implore where he'd gone wrong along the way, to lose an angel to a man like Tommy? To a man who hadn't deserved a shred of redemption, an ounce of compassion, a moment of peace and yet, here she was willing to provide him with all of the things he didn't earn.

Did she know she lost her way, that heaven was the other way, and he ought to be the sharpest sign telling her to flee? Or did she know exactly what she was doing?

Snubbing his cigarette on the cathedral step, flicking it off to roll off into the distance without a single remorse for his blatant disrespect for such a sacred space, Tommy reached forward and brushed his right thumb along the stretch of flesh above her cheekbone.

He ought to let her go. He ought to walk away and out of her life and save her the damnation he knew he bestowed upon her undeserving soul. Tommy Shelby ought to do the right thing, the choice the gentlemen would make, the one the saved and the redeemed would choose. But looking at her, the way she peered up at him through her youthful eyes that left him dazed as if fresh opium soothed his veins, he knew she didn't want him to change. She fell in love with a gangster, she fell in love with a man who wasn't always selfless, a man who took what he wanted without an apology to be found.

Tommy had long ago sold his soul to the devil, the parts of himself chiseled and cold, branded for hell. But what if he sold what was left to an angel in the flesh?

"How far have you fallen, ey?" Tommy whispers in a breath that nearly dips below such a sensation, that it almost dissipates as soon as his exhale meets the open air and disappears with his words intact. "Into my lap, into my fucking hell?"

If her lips twitched at his words with the hint of a smile, Tommy didn't notice. Because it was her eyes that smiled at his whisper, absorbing his sentiment and placing it upon her heart. Like the words from a seasoned gangster was bound to heal her in some way, in some form. They glistened with their own light, as the sun was now lost to the memory that was today and the evening's indigo bled its rich hue into the skies above, not a streak of kaleidoscopic color from the stained light danced across her irises.

They shone with the illumination of her gentle expression, the soft smile that peered up at him behind the tender sweeps of her low lashes, as she almost pressed her flesh further into his warm touch.

"Even God loves a sinner."

Tommy's own lips twitched imperceptibly at her words, a faint tightening of mirth creasing the edges of his eyes. "Even a sinner like me?"

Her eyes twinkled brighter at his response, perhaps picking up on the obvious truth of the matter, the knowledge that there was very little love in the Lord's heart to be found for one Tommy Shelby. But she simply moistened her lips with a swift brush of her tongue and smiled softly up at him.

"I do."

And perhaps, that would always be enough. Thomas Shelby had come this far without the weight of God's presence on his side, the feel of his love and his grace healing his open wounds. But he was slowly coming to realize there was something in feeling her love, knowing that she loved him just as he was... sins and all... that he was starting to get used to.

Tommy kissed her then, letting his thumb brush once more over the delicate flesh of her cheek, before leaning in and sweeping her smiling lips up into his own.

He kissed her where the angels and the devils alike could watch, where the heavens would weep, and hell would rage. He kissed her like his sins didn't leave a stain behind on her flesh, like his touch didn't leave an imprint on the very surface of her soul. And she kissed him back as if he were all the goodness that she rightfully deserved. As if he were the the man who ought to own her heart, instead of the broken gangster who held it in his blood-stained hands.

Perhaps, beyond all of Tommy's doubt and his cynically perceived notions, there might still be a glimmer of faith left to be found in the lives of man. It just took a very specific soul of unearth what was thought to be lost.

A/N: To say I am so proud of this piece would be such an understatement... because I'm honestly obsessed with this one shot!!😍❤

I knew I wanted to write this piece from the moment the ideas started to come to me, just the first few little random lines that I fell in love with and as the plot began to take shape in my mind, but I never knew just how beautiful of a completed piece I would end up writing!!

I've always adored the sharp juxtaposition of an innocent character or a very opposite pairing for Tommy, it's one of my favorite dynamics to write and explore, and I knew that this piece would be exactly that. I wanted this sweet, innocent, young woman that was everything Tommy isn't, but that allowed us to see how he would slowly influence and start to taint that innocence and purity along the way. I knew I wanted this piece to have a sensual and intimate tone to it, something deep and palpable that you can feel as you're reading their interactions and how they are in each other's company, with a hint of passion that stands out in an environment like this. But it turned out so much more beautiful and poetic than I ever anticipated, and it makes me so happy!

This one poured out of me from the moment I started writing it and I continued to surprise myself along the way with what flowed from my fingertips onto the page, which is one of my favorite feelings ever! I love this piece so much and I am just so incredibly proud of what I've created here! I hope you all love it as much as I loved writing it!