His body shook as if the devil had come to claim his soul. For he shook with such a force running beneath the clammy sheen of his shivering flesh, that you feared his shattered bones might just rattle around like loose change at the bottom of a coat pocket. You'd never witnessed Thomas Shelby's being so overcome with something that was not his own, something so far out of his control that it was as if the mere presence of his soul that persisted within his chest, was insignificant.

You'd known over the years, the ownership of his brilliant but undeniably delicate mind, had certainly slipped through fingertips of his own and those belonging to the strong clutches of long-ago finished war. Hands swiftly sweeping one beneath the other, to catch the falling remnants that he'd simply piece back together with a shaky hand and whiskey fueled breath. But never had you seen his body, a pillar of strength and unbreakable composure, utterly stripped and shattered as if the universe had come along and broken down every tangible evidence of might that had kept Tommy alive all this time.

The inexplicable tanned hue vanished from his flesh, as if the sweat that soaked his skin and soddened the loose clothing he adorned with the evidence of his bloodshed, simply washed away any trace of the warm tone he once possessed. For in its place, resided a ghastly hue of sickened grey and pale white. Tommy looked like someone had come along and stolen the life straight from his lungs, draining him of the color that every living and breathing man had the right to possess, making him appear like he was simply on borrowed time.

The flesh that had always been a mesmerizing and bewildering breath of warmth, amongst a city where the sun emerged so infrequently one would have surely believed that Birmingham resided in a perpetual winter, disappeared. Leaving behind the mere traces of his softly sprinkled freckles and accentuating the structure of his cheekbones, by the exceedingly sunken nature of his cheeks as if along with the color of his flesh, the skin coating his bones was also beginning to slowly wither away into nothing. He looked nothing like himself and yet, in the very same shallow breath you inhaled softly into your own aching lungs, he still looked exactly like your Tommy.

The water, lukewarm at best, trickled through the cracks between your fingers and drizzled back down into the metal bowl resting in your lap. The sensation echoing faintly as if it were the tender fall of rain upon a roof, a melancholy pour dripping effortlessly and without a breath of malice within its harmless droplets. The space was far from silent, as there would forever be a noise that accompanied the traveling of the canal and yet, the shallow bowl of water made more sound than it truly possessed. Even as you withdrew the sodden cloth, torn from an extra linen laying around and listened to the way the droplets poured back down into the bowl, as you rung out the excess water, it sounded boisterous in the cramped atmosphere you shared.

You couldn't tell if it was the heat of your own body, cradling the bowl firm in your lap, that had cooled down the water. If it were in part to the humidity that consumed the air, heat of two bodies in a small space with one burning a fire all his own not a feet away, or if perhaps, it was simply because you'd lost track of time. For you no longer had the slightest notion as to how long you'd sat beside the cramped and uncomfortable cot Tommy laid upon, knelt on your knees that could very well feel the worn floorboards beneath your frame digging into your flesh with a vengeance.

Maybe it was the gentle ebb and flow of the canal, lulling and rousing all at once, that made time seem like a futile prospect as the shadows of night seeped through the tainted window glass. Maybe it was due to the fact that the day had melded together as if there had never been a definitive shift before day and night, finding you'd been awake since the moment Tommy turned up in the hospital beaten within an inch of his life. Or maybe, it was simply that the notion of time had no rightful place here upon The January.

For as much as Tommy denied admitting that the pocket watch he wore did not in fact control the turning of the rest of the world and the possession of time itself, he needed time and he needed rest.

You couldn't put a number of days on how quickly the abundance of bones shattered beneath his paled flesh would heal, you couldn't put a number of hours on how long it would be until Tommy would stop these painful shakes that overwhelmed his body, and he could perhaps take in a sip of tea without vomiting it back up into the metal basin you'd hold to his lips. You couldn't rush what neither of you could control, and as much as he believed the notion, you couldn't willingly put all of your stock and all of your hope into the black powder or the gypsy ability to heal without the aid of rightful medicine and medical professionals.

In this little room, upon a canal that carried the heavy barge down its path slowly and with careful ease, time simply ceased to exist. It faded and it appeared non-existent, like the thin breaths continuing to seep in and out of Tommy's parted lips.

He looked like a ghost, the body of a man clinging to the very last tethered string of life hanging down for him to grasp, if he even had the strength left inside of himself to hold it. The only color that toned his flesh beyond the sickening off-white hue that consumed his complexion, was blisteringly crimson and hauntingly black and blue.

For it was as if splotches of paint merely trickled down upon a once perfectly blank canvas, left to dry where it sat, staining the material beneath. The cloth in your hand had since taken on hues of the very same that tainted Tommy's beautiful flesh, tarnished with the unforgiving tone of an uncleansable red. The ivory shade turning darker with each dunk beneath the surface of warmed water, dabbing the saturated cloth against the inflamed skin that screamed the pain Tommy's lips couldn't quite form.

His cheekbone, chiseled and standing bold within the surrounding shadows, adorned a sharp slash that was sure to leave behind a scar bound never to fully fade. His eyes, closed off to the world, as the guard of fluttering raven lashes concealed the extent of exquisite cerulean blue. But his right eye, appearing as the left as he rested on that same side, hadn't even needed the strong sweep of his lashes to obscure the sight of his beautiful orbs.

For it was nearly swollen entirely shut, the flesh around that had once only sunken down from the bags weighed below, now seemed to engulf the sight of his poor eye. As if it swallowed it whole, encasing it in an angry roar of red and inflamed flesh, that produced a low rumbling moan should your fingertip ever graze against the wound.

But his lips, the ones that trembled with a strength all their own, were split so badly they could barely close. Puffed to an extent that even for Tommy, whose lips were naturally full and plump on a day when he hadn't been beaten black and blue, was extreme. He could barely balance his cigarettes, resisting the urge to sweep them along his busted bottom lip as he'd never been much for masochism, but still he let them tremble over the edge, as his exhales of twirling smoke coated the raw and clotted flesh.

The soft sound of a rumbling moan growing from the base of Tommy's throat draws you out of your thoughts, blinking your lashes furiously as if you'd been caught up in a daze. It'd been hours since Tommy recklessly and infuriatingly discharged himself from the hospital he'd been placed up in, most of them spent here on this narrow boat headed for Camden Town, and in that time, there'd been more noises sounding softly in the air than even Tommy himself knew left his body.

For moans escaped him without even having to flow past the unsealed part in his busted lips, groans stemming from even the slightest movement that rustled the bones shattered beneath his flesh, the sharp clattering of his teeth from the shakes that overtook him, filling the space like you'd never known the sensation could.

"Hey," You whispered softly, listening to the delicate crack in your own voice, a strain as you hadn't spoken a word since Tommy begrudgingly let you accompany him and tend to his wounds on his journey. "I'm right here, you're alright."

The phrase was relative, you knew it the moment the words funneled past your own slightly shaky lips, but as your fingers reached forward and tenderly brushed the strands of his sweat sodden raven locks away from where they'd fallen across forehead, you couldn't stop the fall of words filled with more sugar than that of the truth. But even if the words pricked Tommy with a sense of irritation or rather the urge to correct your observation with a dry wit to his tone, he didn't say a thing.

Maybe he hadn't the energy, maybe he hadn't truly cared enough to waste the breath, but perhaps, Tommy let your soft tenor and comforting reassurances hang in the atmosphere, because a small part of himself did in fact find a slight sense of contentment and comfort in the way they flowed over his aching being.

"Talk about something," His voice startles you, as silence had consumed the boat for far longer than the memory of his gruff and pained words at the dock had lingered in your memory. Tommy's eyes remained closed, something you realized, made any room he occupied suddenly seem two times darker than it already was. But he addressed you as if his eyes were as wide as the open sky and staring straight at you.

"What?" Your fingers dropped from the locks of his hair that appeared darker, like that of sharp onyx ink, as sweat soaked each and every strand. Your right hand lifted in its place however, pressing the cloth wrapped around your fingers against the clammy flesh of his cheek, carefully avoiding the slash swollen and beating away with its own haunting heartbeat beneath the surface.

Dabbing the cloth tenderly against his fever stricken and shivering skin, you feel the constriction of his muscles as Tommy endeavors to speak again. "Talk about something."

It was bewildering, the way Tommy laid there mere centimeters away from you, on an uncomfortable cot that was surely doing no good for his bones, chilled by the drench of his own sweat that soaked through the thin material of ivory cotton clothing his chest, draped in the blankets you'd placed around him in an attempt to warm him, all the while, trying desperately to cool him with the tender touch of the cloth in your hand and still feel as if he drained the strength from the room.

For he was in a condition that would have rendered most men incapacitated and weakened the might they so feverishly prided themselves on, but not Tommy. For even as his eye remained swollen shut, his lips bursting at the seams, his bones crushed in more places than one would allow a horse to continue on with, his exuding manner continued. It never seemed to abandon him, the intensity of his presence, the way he could drain the oxygen from the room with a single inhale or flash of his eyes. You'd thought it'd surely fade, as Tommy laid beside you more vulnerable than you'd ever seen him, but it persisted just the same.

Something about the way Tommy carried himself, could make you feel small and insignificant in his company, no matter the ways he showed you otherwise. It was perplexing, the notion that even here, as death circled like it might just finally claim the infamous Thomas Shelby, the imposing air that followed him around on the heels of his each and every step continued.

"Like what?"

Sweeping the cloth over his brow that glistened with beaded perspiration, in the low streaking light that flooded over his dampened flesh, you regarded him with a softly arched brow and curious tone. Ever since Tommy returned home from France, the man spoke increasingly less and less about things that held no rhyme or reason, no true merit or weight in the world. Gone was the man that could talk for hours down by the bank of the canal or voice soft nothings and visions of a dream of a life as you laid tangled in that cramped bedroom on Watery Lane.

You knew Tommy still confided things in you that he'd never trust with another soul, but since France, it was a book once open with the pages freely blowing for the eyes to see, now slammed shut. And so, his inquiry, whether brought on by the haziness of a fever burned mind or perhaps, a request buried in the core of his heart that hadn't been realized until this moment in time, took you aback.

You watched his expression, deeply concealed by the surrounding shadows and the hues painting his flesh, but still able to see the faint twitch of his swollen lips. As if the words he wanted to say were right there upon the very tip of his tongue, aching to be freed. The way his lashes of deep raven fluttered ever so faintly along the bruised skin of his sharp cheekbones, wanting nothing more than to open them wide to the darkness around him, but unable to peer through them for even a moment.

Tommy was teetering on the very edge of sleep, you knew. For it was evident in the way his tone dipped to a husky and low rumble that coated the atmosphere, the way his words seemed slow as if they trudged their way through dense mud, his tongue suddenly weighed down like it were made of lead. But you observed the faint trace of determination looming on his face, resisting the urge to become hidden away within the tightly scrunched lines caused by the shooting pain and overwhelming shakes, endeavoring for his words whispered on the very trail of an unstable breath, to be heard by your listening ear.

"If things were different," His speech was slurred and heavy as if all of the whiskey in the world, weighed down upon his fragile bones. A mere mumble tipping over the edge of his swollen lips, a slight tremor shaking his voice as the words meet the humid air. Your hand tenderly dabs the cloth down the trail of his temple, absorbing the path of running sweat trickling down his skin as if he'd been drenched in a downpour from the open heavens, while you watch his bloody and bruised lips fumble around the grasp of his own thoughts. "what would our life be? What would you see for us?"

You wondered, as you gazed upon the man you loved who could do nothing more than lay there in excruciating pain, if he'd even known the words he spoke. For they sounded like the inquiries from a man hovering upon the line dividing the living and the dead, looking back upon the years he'd been given with a wistful eye, regarding the end with a tone of repentance and regret.

They weren't the kind of words Thomas Shelby typically asked or even pondered for that matter. They were the words spoken by a man stricken by fever, a man with more broken bones than you could possibly count, a man whose mind was simply muddled by extensive pain and exhaustion as if booze and blood drained his thoughts.

But the longer you swept the damp cloth along Tommy's clammy and fever-stricken face, you realized that perhaps he'd known exactly the words he'd voiced aloud. Making sure that the last lingering conscious thought he had, was made known to you before sleep overcame him. For there was something in the way the request fell from his lips, painfully but just as delicately as the soft decent of a fluttering feather, that made you feel like he'd asked you because he'd simply needed to hear your answer.

Maybe he'd needed to hear your voice, echoing around him as if it might just curl around the collection of his shattered bones and mend them back together. Shard by shard, piece by piece, until not a crack was left lingering behind. Maybe he'd needed something to help him drift into the sweet release of slumber, as the pain and violent trembles that wracked his body did all it could to keep him awake. But maybe, Tommy simply needed something to dream of and if he ever had a choice in the matter, it would always be of you.

Retracting the cloth from his flesh, you slip it back below the surface of the warming water. Feeling it fill with the sudden weight in your palm, before slowly moving to ring the excess back into the metal basin.

"Well," You muse softly, listening to the pinging droplets falling into the bowl like falling rain, before placing it back against the bridge of his forehead. His flesh was burning even beneath that of the saturated cloth, as if the heat he radiated bled through the material and touched upon the bare flesh of your fingertips. But his body shook beneath your tender touch as if winter had struck his very bones. You'd wrapped him in woolen blankets, unbuttoning his ivory long sleeve as far as you could, doing your best to balance the contradicting temperatures torturing him.

"I think you'd buy us a grand ole house," Your voice fluttered along his flesh on the current of a whisper, tone tender and careful not to rouse him, but just loud enough that Tommy could hear your response. Your left arm balanced on the very edge of the cot, feeling his shallow exhales blow along your bare skin left exposed by your rolled up sleeves, as your right continued to tend to the cooling cloth along his face. "One with so many rooms and so much space we wouldn't have a bloody idea what to do with it all."

"It'd be away from here, that's for sure." You muse softly, never once abandoning your sight that lingers on the soft flutters of his closed eyes. "Away from Small Heath and Watery Lane. Away from London and Birmingham, all the smoke and the smog. Somewhere in the country perhaps, where we'd wake to the call of the blackbirds, and we might just get to see the sun rise over the horizon."

The vision was so clear in the depths of your thoughts, that it felt as if you reached out far enough, you might just graze your fingertips across its fabrication. For you could nearly smell the sweetness of the pasture along your senses, the soft seep of dew beading along the rolling blades of emerald land. The sky vast and never ending above you, getting to witness the sunsets as they should be, erupting hues you'd never seen amidst such smoke and dense bleakness back home. You could see the structure of a house, one that towered on the rolling estate of land that seemed to stretch for more miles than the eye could see. You could hear the rustling of a breeze drifting through the branches of surrounding foliage and the soft singing of blackbirds calling out just as night bled into the early break of dawn.

It was a beautiful vision, one you could feel in the beating depths of your heart.

"What else you see, ey?" Perhaps, your daydream of a life that you could nearly feel in the grips of your fingers, all the while, appearing a thousand miles away from reality, had kept you silent for far longer than you realized. For it was only as Tommy's voice broke through your continuous thoughts, that your clarity was pulled back down towards his shadowed expression. Abandoning the life you'd painted as if it were a mural of reality rolled out in front of you, for the aching actuality that you found yourself immersed within.

His eyes were still shut tightly, as if he hadn't a shred of strength within his weary being to open them. But something in the way his voice, with its slight tremor and nearly breathless tone, floated through the short space to your sense of sound, told you he was still right there with you.

"Horses." You whisper, the warmth of your breath fanning along the damp flesh of his cheek. Unable to restrain yourself, your left arm that rested close to his shaking frame on the cot, lifts and you find your fingertips brushing through the soaked strands of his raven locks. Tenderly sweeping along the curve of his forehead, feeling the way the strands saturated with sweat and sickness were still as bewilderingly soft as if they'd been dry and resting comfortably in bed back home. "I think you'd surely do something with horses. A peaceful work, one you love, one you've always loved. Right, Tom?"

It hadn't been asked in a manner that expected a response to fall from his wounded lips, but as you sat there in a gentle quiet, feeling the ebb and flow of the canal beneath you, he speaks up one last time. Tommy's voice even more delicate than it was when he'd first posed his inquiry, for he was hovering the line between consciousness and sleep, his words nearly slipping into the darkness that consumed the boat and disappearing like dust particles into the night. But you heard them. "What about us?"

You stared down at him, eyes washing over his beautiful but marred flesh like the roll of a cooling tide. He was battered black and blue, succumbing to a state of vulnerability you knew wounded him deeply to let your very eyes witness, but he was still your Tommy.

He was still the man you hadn't asked to fall in love with, but ultimately had no say in that matter, falling harder than you knew what was good for you. He was still the man whose beauty outshone the moon, even on its brightest night as it cast its pearled hues against the waves of the churning sea, he was beautiful in a way that stole the very semblance of your breath. He was still the man who'd been broken by war, tortured by its haunting ghosts and the scars that plagued his flesh and the surface of his mind.

Tommy Shelby had grown over the years, not just in age and not just in the way all men grow, but in ways you hadn't ever known when you'd met him young and rather starry-eyed. His ambitions, his fearlessness, his trauma shaping him into the man he was now. But beneath it all, all the beatings--whether his own or those conducted by the hands of blinders-- all the aspirations that were far too dangerous for his own good, all the pain that kept his mind in shambles, beneath it all, he was still your Tommy.

Smiling softly, not caring whether or not Tommy could witness the tender expression, you whispered in a gentle tone. "I like to think there'd be a gold band around my finger and I ought to say we'd have a few children running around through the pastures and down the long corridors, maybe even another brewing to come into the world."

You didn't know if Tommy could hear you, if he could hear the way the future appeared so crystal clear and blindingly bright in the core of your daydreams. But you hoped that it had been enough to embrace him in a comforting hold, lulling him into a moment of peace, even if only for a mere second in time, as he drifted off to sleep. "If things were different, Tommy, I think we would be happy."

The sound of your voice drifted in the silence that slowly bled back into the moment, consuming the tight interior of The January, nearly overtaking the tone of softness and love that had once settled upon the current of air from your words. But you remained exactly as you were, knelt uncomfortably on your knees at his bedside, cooling his flesh with the torn cloth and softly brushing the short fringe of his beautiful dark raven locks with your opposite hand as he rested.

You watched as sleep overtook his hurting being, seeping along the cracks and crevices of his subconscious and finally plunging him deeply into a moment free of the pain shooting through his body. You knew it was too much to believe that the sleep he found here upon the lulling rock of the canal, would surely cling to his body in the way Tommy so desperately required. And you knew without a doubt, that it was far too hopeful to ever consider that the exhaustion that overwhelmed him would ever grace him with a sincere moment of peace.

But as you swept your fingers tenderly along his forehead, careful not to allow even the faintest brush of your dampened pads to awaken him, you hoped that even if the rest Tommy finally discovered couldn't heal his broken bones or patch together his torn through flesh, that it might just begin to mend his heart.

"But you know," Your voice escapes past the slight part in your lips, exhaling in the tenderest breath of a whisper, before your mind even knows your thoughts are being spoken aloud. "with you Tommy, I'd live in the smoke and the smog, with my ring finger bare and my body barren of babies with your sparkling blue eyes, because somehow, I'm happy with you."

"No matter where we are or wherever we settle for the night, I always seem to be right happy with you Tommy Shelby," There is a tenderness to your tone that nearly breaks your words in half, for you can feel them bending in the base of your throat as they curl up and out over the tip of your tongue. The raw emotion pricking tears behind your eyes, as you stare down at Tommy in his rare sleeping frame. "so maybe I don't want things to be different, maybe not too much, because I rather think, I could be happy with you wherever you want to be."

It was bewildering to think of yourself being happy with him as you were, in this time, in this life. As he laid bloodied and bruised and damn near left for dead by Sabini's men. But it was the truth. The perplexing, rather preposterous truth, that there was something about this man, this enigmatic man from Watery Lane who was a bit too ambitious for his own good, that made you happy. That made you content, that made you complete, that made you feel whole.

Leaning up on your aching knees, before the tears could leak over your lash line and trail their way down your cheeks, you press a chaste kiss to the flesh of Tommy's forehead. Warmth seeping into your lips, tasting the salt and feeling the sheen of clamminess beneath your touch, but never quite pulling away. You kissed Tommy softly as he slept, never knowing that he'd heard what you said, every single word.

A/N: I've had this idea for the longest time now, so in love with the plot and the dialogue and the moment itself but waiting until I felt I could sit down and truly write it with the care it deserved.

I always wanted this piece to be a pull of emotions, an intimate moment grounded with a severe reality. Something to puncture through a tenderness and a soft moment, with reminders of a harsher moment and actuality. I love finding that balance between love and angst, romance and reality, happiness and pain, when I write for Tommy Shelby. No matter how soft, how raw or vulnerable or romantic a moment might become, I always try to ground it back into the reality that is Tommy Shelby and the life he lives. Shattering that notion of a perfect moment, for even as the scene in this piece was heartwarming and lovely in an intimate setting, it still had the foundation based on the fact that he was bloody and bruised and surviving a near death attack. It grounds the basis of love back into what love might look like for Tommy and the life that surrounds him.❤

I wanted this piece to be a well-balanced mixture of Tommy's suffering and a heart touching moment, I tried very hard to weave them together simultaneously and realistically and I believe as I reread it as a completed piece, that I managed to accomplish just that!

It turned out a bit shorter than I would have liked, but as I was writing, I didn't want to add just for the sake of adding for length, I wanted to keep each and every paragraph and line with a purpose and reason for being there. I definitely second guessed myself and doubted myself along the way while writing this piece, if not only because I'm too much of a perfectionist in my writing, but because I was writing this piece while struggling with chronic pain that alters my ability to think and articulate perfectly clear and concise. But as I reread it, I can say I feel very content with what I've written here and the moment I've been able to create! I would love to hear what you thought of this piece, I hope you enjoyed it!❤