Like a beast in the night, the sky churned. A vast oblivion ceased only by the illuminating barrage of gunfire firing in the distance. The blanket of darkness punctured by the sharp flares of war, sparking like embers in a hearth. Flames painting the abyss of black that swallowed the land whole, as if they were matches drawn along the abrasive trail of suffering and ignited in the perpetual shadows that controlled the godforsaken place.

But through the eyes of a man teetering on the precarious line between life and death, they looked like the tails of fireflies. Fluttering around in the open English countryside, with a degree of freedom that not even the strongest men knew. Mere flickers of light, sharp orange but dwindling in sight, like peering through a kaleidoscope and witnessing the world lit ablaze.

The sky rumbled fiercely above him, like thunder rattling the heavens until each and every mighty golden gate came tumbling down. Soil sprayed the Earth like heavy torrents streaming down from the long-lost salvation above, raining down a top the mud saturated by the moisture seeping into the dirt. Droplets in free fall, bathing Flanders Fields in a downpour of crimson not soon to be washed away and forgotten.

It wasn't bound to dry out in the first evidence of light to grace the war-torn land, disappearing like the rains had never flooded the country and soddened their steps. It lingered beyond its rightful time, clinging to the surface until all sights were altered by its harsh crimson shade, stained by a red that made sure what was once there would never be the same again.

For even the umber Earth, toiled and formed into trenches above their heads, looked different when the blood of the fallen glazed the walls and collected in the treads of their worn boots.

The battlefield in front of them, looked as though the moon shining high above had been glazed in the blood of the fallen. A reddened hue altering the vision of each and every man that stormed past disjointed limbs and bodies limp with bullet holes ripping apart their flesh, until nothing more than bone lay visible in the grass.

Memories were bathed in the shades of an all-consuming scarlet, like the very letters that would never be sent by those sprawled with their last breath over the fields of France.

It gripped to the weary minds that were holding on by a fragile thread, tugging the rope with every body they dragged back with their own two hands, the sights of the innocent cementing in carmine on their conscience. Comrades, whose presence would fade with the settling smoke, and boys disguised in the flesh of men they hadn't a chance to be.

But it was the blood coating the flesh of the living that could never be cleansed. The basins of rainwater dyed by those looking to erase the evidence of bloodshed seeping into the lines of their palms, fingernails caked, and cuticles torn. Knuckles stained until they could no longer discern whether it be the blood of a soldier or the bruises yet to heal from their fists.

The weight of the blood, warm as it oozed from the bodies plunged with their bullets and blades, but numbingly cold when it set and dried, never became alleviated. It loitered long after the last trace of red had been wiped off from dirty rags and smudged on uniforms no longer the color they were when they'd started.

For it clung to the bones beneath the surface of scarred flesh and torn tissue, like rust eating away at metal pipes, it buried itself within the foundation and eroded away what resided.

The rains could surely wash away the fallen tears, shed deep in the darkness, but it could never touch the blood branded onto the souls of the men who fought.

Beneath tired eyes and lids that weighed down upon them like they were laden with pure lead, the world slowly seeped back to Thomas Shelby.

A gradual immersion back into the reality that had abandoned him, creeping back through the blood in his veins and slowly drawing the sound of his surroundings back to his senses.

A sensation drew his attention, clouded and lost as if the tethers of his mind had been let adrift across a mighty sea, something faint to a straying man but just enough to clasp onto his floating ankle and endeavor to drag him to the shrinking shoreline.

It pierced his skin with a stinging prick, delving beneath the flesh of his shoulder, tightening and pulling with a burn that felt like a simple blaze had lingered there on the surface.

The sharp nip of antiseptic bit through the familiar stench of rot that enveloped his surroundings in a cloud of death, a pungent scent tingling his senses that had long ago burned out. But reignited them like the alcohol rubbed onto skin might just strike the match.

A low moan rumbled deep in the confines of Thomas's throat, a vibration rattling against fractured bones and weakened flesh, feeling immediately as the reverberations forced the pain overwhelming his body to return full force.

It was an all-consuming ache, one that he couldn't quite place the genesis of, but knew that every inch of him was burdened with a deeply rooted soreness, like his entire being had been battered black and blue.

His eyes were weak to open, trapped beneath the weight of a thousand men pressing down upon the lids buried harshly against the cerulean abyss of his gaze, holding him in a perpetual shade of oblivion.

The darkness beyond his sight didn't frighten or faze him, it was a familiarity of where he'd been. Minus the soil obscuring the sights of sunlight, and with the slight addition of open air, the blanket of black behind his eyelids wasn't all that different from the darkness down in the tunnels.

Instead of being imprisoned beneath the surface of the Earth, Thomas was merely locked in the confines of his own mind. And nowadays, who was to say which battle was more dangerous?

"Take your time there, Sergent Major."

A voice called out to him through the abyss, like a timid lantern light glossing over the canal's calm tide.

"Your body's been through a shock."

Breathless in nature, it traveled through Thomas's darkened sights like an exhale dancing through the open midnight air. Intangible in the way it hovered somewhere beyond the shadows, just out of reach, but vivid as the first creeping sound of humanity spilled back into the basis of his conscience.

Feminine and soft, her accent lulled into a peaceful melody that cradled her gentle words. Although the letters had surely dissipated from the atmosphere like a cloud of smoke, only the remnants left behind on the surface of his memories, Thomas could still make out the calmness in her tone.

There wasn't a shake in her throat, making her words teeter on the uneven ground or a lump growing with the thick formation of emotion, that threatened to block her voice altogether. Her light tone was still and composed, even as the Earth rained down in a blistering blaze somewhere in the distance, her voice stood like it didn't quake in its stance.

Thomas's deep raven brows bunched as another sharp sting burned its way across his shoulder blade, slowly beginning to feel the pattering pulse of his lashes fluttering open underneath the crushing weight of his soreness. Nudged by the burn radiating through his flesh and the sudden urge to witness his surroundings, Thomas's eyes peeled open.

Cerulean waves darkened by a night's deep indigo presence, the currents fell silent and still. The white surrounding the gem hued irises, stung with a sharp drying ache, the red that consumed them threatening to seep into the calm waters of his gaze, until the azure abyss was stained with deep crimson.

A blur coated his sight, a haze of smoke and grit distorting the images blinking like snapshots in front of his tired eyes, light smudging and smearing across his gaze.

But she appeared in his sights like a shadowy beacon, a silhouette shrouded in the darkness but illuminated by a distant light.

Locks of burnt brandy reflected in the low waning hours of the night, pale exhales of a citrine hue enveloping the waves that tumbled down like scorched umber Earth. Loose waves cradled the shape of her face, fallen tendrils since relaxed and freed from the twist of a haphazard knot keeping the rest of her curls in place, accentuating the slope of her strong jawline.

They appeared darker than the rest of her scalp, as the futile light of the burning lantern shone a lackluster sheen across the surface. Saturated as if she'd been caught up in a hailing rainstorm, they were moistened by the collection of her sweat and the grease that they'd all built up in the days since a measly wash.

Tommy's eyes blinked against the burn, sandpaper coating the inside of his eyelids, as he stared up at the woman who hovered slightly above him.

Her features were sharp, like the exasperated light illuminated the bone structure protruding beneath thinned flesh. Sunken and hollow, the stress ate away at her skin with little mercy to be found. Leaving a sheath of her once honeyed complexion, now paled like winter had washed away the warmth from her being, with only the faint splattering of freckles to prove the sun had graced her in a lifetime long before France.

She was beautiful though, Tommy observed through tired eyes and a muddled mind. Her beauty was a timid one, a whisper of dark locks, deeper toned eyes and skin irrevocably changed by the war.

There was a certain strength to her looks that contrasted the softness one often equated with undeniable beauty, a stiffness in her jawline and a tightness of her thin but shapely brows. The bags beneath her eyes peeled under the weight of sleepless nights gone by, a shadowy depth sinking heavy.

Tommy couldn't quite make out the shade occupying her irises, as they steadied their gaze downward at her fingers as they worked, but beyond the thin sprawl of lashes that appeared stark black in the low funneling futile light, Tommy wondered if they weren't the first glimpse of a true green shade he'd seen in weeks.

"How long have I been asleep?"

His voice is that of a hazy coherent slur, as if it isn't the exhaustion on his bones and the trauma on his body but rather whiskey on his tongue that lulls his words. His throat feels as though the very edges of the letters climbing their way to freedom, scrape against the dried flesh and threaten to tear straight through the surface, leaving an oozing stream of blood pooling back down into his chest. Like he hasn't spoken in days, Tommy's voice feels strangely foreign to him.

He watches through scrutinous eyes, blurred only by that of the grit continuing to burn away at his retinas, as the woman slowly peers up from her work. Although she doesn't lift her chin or turn her head to face his wandering gaze, she looks up through the curtain of her dark lashes and finds him in the shadowy haze. The lantern's citrine hue shines across the first true glimpse of her eyes, light reflecting like flames on a riverfront.

"A couple of hours." She hums in a soft murmur, her contradictive gaze taking in the sight of the soldier awakening.

For her eyes looked at Tommy with a softness beyond the surface, a calming lull in the saturated greenery that made a home in her orbs. Reminiscent of an indigo blanket of night unfurling across an open countryside, dousing the evergreen in a breath of darkness that only emboldened the emerald.

But within the gentle ease in which the pines swayed, there was something reserved along the perimeter. As if the guards had been placed and although her bedside manner was kind and warming, her defenses distrusted the world she found herself in.

"You woke up momentarily, when I was digging the shrapnel out of your back. But you passed out again shortly afterwards, a shock to your system."

Her tone of voice and the words that spilled from it, felt as though they didn't quite match. For the candor was startling and blunt, solemn and weighed down by the reality slowly beginning to seep back into his being. But her accent cocooned the words in a breath of compassion and comfort that felt entirely out of place.

"What happened?"

Her eyes swept the length of the soldier's stoic expression, the lines creased but still beneath the layers of filth shadowing his rightful hue.

For the Earth had encased his flesh in the depths of its mud and its loose soil, clinging to each and every crevice it could find until he appeared nothing more than a corpse shoveled out from his grave. But beneath the blood that sullied his skin, beneath the dirt and the clay that caked a thick layer of its own onto his weary being, even beneath the bloody burden of war, he was beautiful. Utterly breathtaking, in a way she'd never known a human to be before.

For it were the eyes, blinding orbs of a chilling blue, as though the fresh waters that lay far beyond this land, had funneled into his possession and froze in their place. Not even that of chiseled sapphires seemed to compare to the shade of blue that consumed his gaze, a fury of depth burning behind a sheen of impenetrable ice, doused in the stagnant current of a frigid sea.

His eyes shone beyond the shades of deep umber turning black against his complexion, seeping into his pores and cloaking each strand of the soft raven fringe that hovered over the crown of his forehead, in a clumpy mess of clay. As though they had dug themselves out from beneath the Earth, emerging unscathed as the man who owned them was left ragged by the fallen tunnel.

For they broke through the dirt that covered every inch of his body, staring up at her with a strength that could very well knock the breath right out of her lungs.

She had tried to cleanse his skin from the soil that made him appear burnt or battered, rags stained with the sharp scarlet of his seeping blood, but she hadn't the time to scrub the layers and clumps of mud sticking to his face, not when his wounds needed more attention.

But even coated like the embrace of the Earth was still locked around him, his eyes hadn't needed any trace of the dirt to be washed from his face. For they stood boldly, the brightest sight for a hundred miles to come, staring up at her with a sharpness that had failed to burn out.

"You don't remember?"

She blinked softly as her dry lips pursed together in a faint motion, her fingers still but unmoved from their previous spot, hovering just above his shoulder with the draw of the thread still hanging down from the needle in her hand.

"Would I be asking if I did?"

Tommy knew his tongue was sharp, a honed blade extracted in the citrine burned night. He'd unfurled it from his lips without a hesitant breath, rather bringing it to the edge of her neck, until the sharp edge of silver nearly dug into her flesh with the first bite of blood.

He knew she didn't deserve the rigidness in his tone, the harsh bite in his words. She was an innocent here, thrown into the perilous abyss of war and suffering, doing all she could to save the men who only came to her to die.

If his tone affected her, she didn't let it show. She merely blinked at him one more time, before turning her attention back to his shoulder.

"You were in a tunnel collapse."

She didn't say more than that, perhaps she felt she didn't need to, knowing that might be enough for his own mind to fill in the darkened gaps in his recollection.

For the moment her words dawned, Tommy swore he could hear the familiar crackle in the Earth. A resounding shatter breaking through the timber built up around him, the kicking of the clay folding in around his head, the haunting screams of his comrades buried somewhere beneath the rubble. The world had caved in around him, like a black hole draining life from the godforsaken shaft low beneath the battlefields, men having built their very own soil sunken graves.

"How many?"

His voice cracks faintly, like the two words are heavy boulders pressing down on his larynx. The weight of his recollections loitering in the air around him, until each and every particle of rotting and antiseptically stung oxygen feels too thick to breathe.

"Three." She whispers in a gentle breath, eyes flickering over to meet the icy chill his own exude, before letting them drift back to her handywork.

"You dug yourselves out."

She had given him the number of men who had managed to survive. Dragging themselves out of the fallen Earth like he had, instead of listing the number of casualties, those who'd been buried far below the surface without a prayer of escape, as he'd inquired.

Tommy couldn't help but look at the nurse, in this low framing light of a rather dying lantern glow and wonder if it was significant.

The familiar burn radiating through his upper shoulder made his lip twitch with a slight grimace, a sharpness digging into his flesh and pulling harshly with the same amount of pressure. Tommy's eyes peered over through his peripheral, catching a glimpse of a glint of light bouncing off of a thin silver needle diving into his skin and emerging with a dark saturated line of thread left in its place.

"You're still patching me up."

It wasn't a question, and it hardly begged a response from the woman who made sure his wound was sutured completely, rather a mused observation falling from his tired lips. But her eyes flickered up yet again, deep evergreen clashing with the falling tide of a frigid azure.

"You're one of the lucky ones." She spoke with a heaviness in her tone, a softness imparted only by that of a breath of solemnness on her tongue.

"A needle and thread aren't all that bad compared to the men back there."

Although they were deeply shrouded by the night's dense abyss and the lack of sufficient light in the infirmary courters, obscured from Tommy's wandering eyeline, he could surely hear them. Even as the war rained down in thunderous vibrations in the not so far off distance, and his own sense of hearing still seemed muddled and distorted, moans of the fallen echoed like ghosts haunting the ground in which they laid.

They were noises not unbeknownst to the battlefields and tunnels alike, the cries of the wounded screaming out in agony, the incoherent murmurs dripping from their wobbling lips like the blood oozing from their wounds.

Even the prayers, whether whispered out for the good Lord's ears or that of a grown man yearning for the comforting embrace of his mother back home. This tortured land had heard them all.

Swallowing down a lump building in the base of his aching throat, Tommy's eyes abandon the invisible sight of the soldiers laid up a few cots away from him, in worse shape than he was, looking up towards the rickety slope of the weakened roof above him.

"Scars ain't nothing but a thing."

His words fall from his dried-up lips in a murmur so low, it's a wonder she could even hear them. Tommy didn't care about the lingering evidence left behind on his body, puckered scars of punctured flesh never bound to fade meant nothing to him. Not when some men woke up with their bodies no longer left intact, missing limbs and pieces of themselves never to be recovered. Not when some men didn't wake up at all.

Even though his chest burned with a heaving weight, Tommy's eyes drifted over to the woman who had moved to stich a wound on his wrist, an open slash having bathed his flesh in a crimson that melded with the dark umber of mud.

"Pass me cigarette?"

She looked up from her work, deep embers of evergreen peering up from beneath her sprawl of thinned lashes and Tommy rather expected for her to decline his request. But setting the needle down, he watched as she rummaged through her pocket, withdrawing a single worn and beat-up pack of cigarettes. It housed only three lonely sticks that rolled around freely inside of the near empty box, but she slipped one out and placed it between her own lips.

The bright flurry of the match she ignited, illuminated her face in a washing glow of sharp orange, spilling into the shadowed lines of her expression and the hidden whispers of her beauty that had long ago drowned into the night's darkened embrace. Singeing the end of the cigarette, a puff of clouded smoke cradling her face as she extinguished the small blaze, she extracted the smoke from her lips and brought the cigarette down to Tommy's own.

It filled his lungs with familiarity, a burn known and remembered and rather craved by every over-sensitized nerve in his wounded being. She took it from his lips after his initial drag, keeping it between her fingers as she returned to her diligent work.

"I shouldn't be too much longer," She assured him in a calm voice, as the smoke they shared enveloped them in a softly swirling cloud.

"A few more cuts to clean out after this last stitching. Infection tends to settle fast."

The layers of soil and moistened Earth caked to his skin, sunk into the open lines of his flesh, crawling towards infection with each passing minute.

"I reckon I'm laid up for a few hours, right? You've got me 'ere till they send me back down."

He wasn't sure when they'd send him back down into those tunnels or even out onto the front lines, but he assumed he was here until morning dawned.

"Made it out of that tunnel within an inch of your life, and you're ready to go right on back." She remarks with a soft exhale, a timid twitch of her lips that signaled a slight smile threatening to unfurl itself.

"You brummie boys always did have some fight in you, yeah?"

"You're from Birmingham?"

Her head shook in a gentle motion, as she tied off the final stitch on his arm.

"London, actually. My father was born in Birmingham though, had the same accent you're carrying there."

A soft hum falls under Tommy's breath, "Posh girl, ey?"

A smirk twitches in the corner of her expression, as she douses a rag in antiseptic.

"Hardly. I could never sit still to save my own life, always had to be doing something. My hands were always dirty, drove my mother up the bloody walls. Tracking in mud from the stables, ripped tights from running through the streets and falling on the cobbles, hair knotted while the ribbon she'd tied it up with always ending up lost somewhere."

Tommy's lips turned upward in a phantom action, a blend between the sharp sting of her washing out his wounds and a pleasant image of a wild girl untamed on the streets of London society.

"A gypsy streak in you there, ey? You'd have been right at home in Small Heath."

She smiled softly at his words, moving to cleanse the mud and grime from his face.

"Is that where you're headed, when you get out of here?"

Tommy hums in response, "Me and me two brothers. Got us a sister and kid brother waiting on us, aunt too."

Her green pools of countryside tranquility peered into the darkening depths of his cerulean waves, as she washed out the cuts on his sharply chiseled cheekbones.

"I'm sure they miss you dearly, waiting every day for the news you're coming home."

Tommy peered up at her, witnessing a saddening in the core of her gaze, a looming presence darkening the skies that covered the evergreen foliage of her eyes. It was slight and imperceptible to most, but Tommy saw the change.

"Who've you got waiting for you, ey?"

She wasn't meant for this place, hell ascending on Earth. She shouldn't be hunched over a wounded soldier who had tiptoed the precarious line between this life and the next, with her fingernails and the surrounding cuticles stained by the sharp evidence of his bloodshed.

She shouldn't have the ghastly odor of death on her flesh, the kind of rot that once inhaled left the lungs forever changed. She shouldn't have the horrifying images stamped behind the thin lids concealing her sight, replaying the graphic natures of war on a tortuous loop.

She shouldn't have been burdened by this place, by this life. She deserved more out of the world.

Her eyes, deepened in their stark evergreen gaze, steadied on the cusp of his own icy stare. The faintest turn of her lips shadowing a timid expression in the lines of her face, something saddened in their movement and pained in their presence.

"I'll let you know what I get there."

She straightened her stance, pulling away the rag now saturated in the dark remnants of fallen soil and dried clumps of blood, discarding it in a pile beside her. She wiped her hands on the cotton of her sweater, threads worn and frayed, dangling down like even the fabrics she adorned hadn't been left unscathed by the war's nasty hand.

Streaks of red invaded the filaments of ivory, until it appeared more scarlet than a creamy tone of white. But it didn't seem to faze her, as she gently nudged a fallen strand of her warm brandy curls from her face, doused in the sheen of her sweat laced brow.

She peered back at Thomas, eyes colliding with the ocean awaiting her solid land, and with a gentle curl of her lips, she whispered again.

"I've got you stitched up and enough cream on the cuts that really need it. I've some medication for the pain--"

Tommy let a low sound reverberate from beneath his breath,

"Save it for the men who need it."

Nodding her head softly, absorbing his words or perhaps gaging whether or not to believe them, she watched the way his lashes beat heavily against the shadowed flesh of his chiseled cheekbones.

"You ought to get some rest now. I've to go check on the others they're bringing in, tend to them."

Tommy wasn't sure what to say, he wanted to nod his head but found the soreness in his body began to grow with each passing moment of consciousness. But as she took a few paces away from his cot, he watched as she paused and turned on her heel to look at him one last time.

"I'm not sure if you made a deal with God before going down into those tunnels or if you've got yourself a guardian angel up above, but whatever the reason, you ought to be sure to thank them tonight. Someone was looking out for you today."

Tommy knew it hadn't been the Lord Almighty, who reigned on a throne high above those who suffered in the mud and the blood of their brothers. It hadn't been the one he hadn't prayed to since he was only that of a child, sitting in a pew under the scrutiny of the church. And Tommy wasn't convinced there was a guardian angel for him up above, deemed with the task of looking out for him. Perhaps, his mother peered down upon him, if that was where her soul resided. But even then, he questioned the notion.

Maybe it was fate or pure, unbridled luck, that Tommy Shelby had been one of three who'd made it out of that tunnel collapse. But as he watched the nurse begin to retreat from his bedside, he found himself speaking out before he could stop himself.

"Thank you."

Her head turned at his voice, a lulling rumble of a deep Birmingham tone. Softened by that of his pain and exhaustion hanging heavy on his bones. But even in the shadows of the suppressant night and the blurred nature of his sight, Tommy still caught sight of the way her lips turned at the sound of his words.

It might not have been God or an angel above who'd managed to save him that day, but someone had looked after him. That much Tommy knew.

A/N: I've had this idea in my list of future pieces for the longest time, knowing I wanted to try and write a one shot that took place during the war and followed this type of storyline. But every time I wanted to start writing it, I just knew all the pieces weren't yet in place. But after putting it on the shelf for some time and accumulating little ideas to add here and there, I finally felt like I had something that flowed and pieced together all I wanted to explore!

I enjoyed being able to write some different aspects than in some of my past ones, such as the reality of war in real time as opposed to having it described in mere flashbacks or nightmares. I liked walking that line of a Tommy we don't get to see in the show, still a sliver of pre-war Tommy, but hardened by the side of him we know today and feels familiar now. I pushed myself when it came to the dialogue, a stumbling point for me in my writing, finding myself writing some of it on the spot spontaneously while some I had already fallen in love with using.

Even with some moments where I struggled or found myself doubting what I'd created, I am happy with the piece I was able to write and I really hope you all enjoy it!❤