History painted these walls, as if the wallpaper was woven from pieces of the past, intangible emotions suddenly palpable like they might just wipe off on the brush of your fingertips. They'd surely whisper the tales of your pain when you were gone, like ghosts of your past self hidden behind stained brick and tear-soaked sheets, calling out with the recollections of the love you were leaving behind.

The rain pattered the roof in a melancholy drizzle, like a sadness loomed throughout the atmosphere and the density of its grasp exhausted the very droplets that hadn't wished to fall. It was a rag wrung out, dripping down with whatever it had left to spare, seeping into the cracks and crevices of cobblestone lined with the sins of the day. It painted the windowpane in the teardrops that had yet to escape from your very own eyes. Ducts stalled, but the heavens open wide. Streaks of shed moisture racing down to oblivion, as their trails made the glass distorted and glossy, pathways to be forgotten as soon as the afternoon dried up.

It was not a vengeful rain, as the heavens ceased to shake, and it was not a boisterous rainstorm that blew down Watery Lane, as an all-consuming silence echoed in the void. It whimpered in the absence of mid-morning light, but the rain drummed against the aged brick and pavement below without a single effort made to be heard.

It was a silent cry, the slipping of teardrops down the moistened cheeks of the angels above, turning cold in mid-fall as they collected the chill of the autumn's nipping air. But it was a soft rain, a solemn misting of lost droplets with no home to go to, as they glazed a city enveloped in smog and an intangible sensation of sorrow that seeped from its pores.

The daylight was scarce, as it endeavored to illuminate the bedroom with all of the brightness it had to offer, but its futile efforts merely cast a dim shadow over the space. An exhale of morning light clouding over the hardwood panels, like the faint fogging of dew over a rolling countryside at the first sign of dawn.

It wasn't enough to shed warmth through the captivating bite that radiated within the four tight walls, the late autumn weather finding peace within the cavities of worn brick and peeling paint, of loose screws and rickety windowpanes. Creeping in through an open current and saturating the atmosphere in the turning tide of chilling temperatures.

It wasn't enough to eradicate the years of pain that lingered in this place, a degree of cold that the winter season would never quite know, as it resided beneath the very foundation that this bedroom had to offer. The failing light would never be enough to breathe warmth into this space and make it feel as whole as it had been once before. No amount of light in the world, even if the burning sun itself shone through the glossy window glass with all of its might, could never thaw away what truly froze this place.

For the memories were cemented in amber crystals, like frozen icicles that were never bound to melt, they were time capsules encased in a beautifully deceptive tomb.

The only thing the faint signs of daylight managed to illuminate, was the dancing flecks of particles that always lingered in the air. Scarcely seen in the darkness, but alive and wild when the bright glow of a marigold sun or a citrine flame flickered upon them. They spun within the space as though they were intwined in a waltz, dust and evidence of life and the very essence of your presence left behind within these walls, dancing freely through the stale air.

Cigarette smoke and strong cologne, melding with jasmine and the crisp scent of the falling rain, saturated the merry particles. Oxygen turning rich with the unmistakable aroma of two beings weaving together, their scents blending in a fashion that should've clashed against the senses, but rather enriched and awakened them with each and every inhale.

You wore the bite of his smoky Sweet Aftons in the lace of your dresses and he'd surely carried the sultry notes of your perfume along the collar of his woolen black coat. The spice of his cologne, worn and transferred to the sheets cocooning your frame from a fitful night of sleep, met you in the morning as surely as the clinking of sheet metal and the rise of the evasive sun. The sweet shea in your soap calming his senses after a long night, stumbling into the bedroom to discover frothy bubbles soaking your flesh for comfort in the bathtub, rather than the need to cleanse bloodshed harshly like he was used to.

You couldn't help but wonder, as you paused from where you stood beside the small twin sized bed, if your scent would remain after you were gone.

Would it persist even when the spray of your glass perfume bottle no longer puffed through the air, or when the sheets were no longer there to hold onto your bare frame and absorb the scent of your flesh? Would it be strong enough to withstand the cigarette smoke that clouded the bedroom like a churning chimney fire, or the stagnant breath of opium exhaled into the haunting twilight hour?

Would he miss the way this place smelled of you, like the way you knew without a shadow of a doubt you were to miss his? You hoped, by some small flicker of an ember inside of your mourning heart, that he just might.

Silk felt crisp in the cold, as your fingertips folded the negligee that felt like frozen satin in your grasp. Placing it in your suitcase beside soft rows of cotton cardigans, that couldn't resist the chill that wove itself into the very threads of soft fabric. Of all the years you'd spent in this room, in this house, in this home here on Watery Lane, it was the very first time you found yourself feeling like you hadn't much to take with you.

For all these years, you felt cramped and cluttered and overwhelmed with the lack of space, feeling like you had more than these walls would ever surely fit. But somehow, now, as you emptied drawers and left half of the tightly packed half-closet free, you realized that you could pack all of your things into two measly bags.

It was like witnessing a facade of the life you thought you'd known, suddenly slipping down and revealing the reality you'd never allowed your eyes to truly see. Perhaps, when you'd felt you had too much for the space that you had, it was due to fact that your heart was full and everything you truly needed in this life... wasn't items or garments or objects at all. And now, as you readied yourself to give up what had sustained you for all of those years, you discovered just how very empty a hole it was leaving behind.

Fingertips grazing down the soft woolen fabric next to be folded in your hands, your eyes slowly lift and peer at the old and outdated wallpaper that lines the wall. You never imagined you'd miss such a pattern. You never thought it would be possible to miss the slightly crooked picture frames that hung against it, landscapes drawn of a place far brighter and far more promising than these grey and somber Small Heath streets.

You never knew how much you were going to miss the slight scratch of the worn sheets that made up the bed, the tight twin sized frame that always felt too small for two bodies, but still managed to comfort you each and every night. Even the patchwork quilt and the way he always wrapped it around your shoulders when he woke before the sun, making sure to keep the frosty morning's bite from meeting your flesh just yet.

Of all the things you'd complained about over the years, of all the things your lack of money could never afford to buy, of all the things you never gave a second thought to, it was startling to realize just how much you were to miss this place.

The wooden door that peeled with green paint, sat open in the threshold, as your back faced its entrance. The staircase down the hallway, keeping his presence a secret, like an arrangement they've had all these years. Because for a man who carried the weight of the world on his shoulders, the torturous burdens of a lifetime lived in the span of only a few years that sat heavy on his conscious, Tommy Shelby strode upon cat's feet.

Like the soles of his soot dusted black boots, were bound never to leave a single footprint behind. He moved like a ghost wading through this life, residing in the interlude between the living and the dead. Silent and with effortless ease.

He carried himself with composure and conviction, but he strode with the very thing men pined for in this life. The absence of fear. It weighed not on his mind nor on his bones, for death was a notion he'd survived and now, it was a promise that whispered its voice out to him in the darkness that sought out his soul. Tommy lived the rest of his days without care and without hesitation, because any of them could be his last and he knew when the time came, he'd be ready.

His scent approached your senses far before the sound of his footsteps entered the air. A current bathed in the tones of deep cedar and sharp tobacco, mellowed by the warming spice that could still make your body feel rightfully warmer than a flickering flame. You couldn't see him, but every fiber of your being felt him. Even in the absence of viable light, Tommy still cast a shadow over the room that crept up your spine, notch by notch, until it seemed as if the cold tips of his calloused fingers themselves pattered up the bone.

It was an all-consuming sensation, one that enveloped your frame as if it were his arms suddenly locked around your waist, but it was merely the air that he carried with him that spoke volumes in the silence.

Everything sharpened when Tommy was near, like his presence alone could hone the edges of your senses that had previously grown blunt.

He wasn't supposed to be here. Off to London they'd told you, a few days' time without his imperial presence looming over Small Heath like a King on his throne. But like such a ruler, donned in tweed and a crown rimmed with blades of striking silver, Tommy knew everything that took place in his kingdom. Even here, in the snug Watery Lane house you'd once made a home, he knew you would be here long before you knew he would be too.

"Need a hand with anything?"

Like the razor blades sewn into his cap, his words slice through the atmosphere, cutting the air like the parting of the red sea.

Along a slow-moving current of hazy smoke, Tommy words travel. Encased in a warm breath of Irish Whiskey and a fresh cigarette, the essence of his voice drips with the notion of oozing honey and something deceptively comforting, but his tone falls upon the shoreline of his never ceasing wave of apathy. A low burr in the base of his chest, his voice slowly seeping into the room, instead of echoing off the walls haunted by all the pain they have seen. A deep Birmingham rumble that speaks so calmly and softly, that it nearly contradicts the richness of his accent.

Tommy could obscure emotion from his tone, like it was simply plucking a leaf from the canal's streaming surface. He didn't raise his voice or let anger bleed into the words he spoke, he kept his composure like it was his greatest asset. And perhaps, it was. For you couldn't decipher what lingered beneath the surface of his words this time, if there resided something he wished for you never to find or perhaps, it was simply that there was nothing there to find at all.

Bewilderment laces your breath as it falls in a sharp scoff, a frosty exhale puffing quietly into the bedroom air. Pressing your lips together until you can feel the indentation of your bite lingering on the other side, withholding the exasperated curl of your lips and willing the ignition of something deep within your chest to surely simmer, you breathe out a steady breath before responding in your own guarded tone.

"Enacting the gentleman? After all these years? I can't say it suits you, Thomas."

Not Tommy. Not even Tom. Just Thomas.

His name coats your tongue in a contradicting sensation, warmth beads over the buds that create the letters of his well-known name, the feeling that they fit perfectly on the tip of your tongue and expel from your tired breath like there isn't a single name that could better suit it, returns.

But something pierces the flesh that cradles his name, like suddenly the letters are edged with serrated blades, and through your softly spoken exhale, blood begins to drip into the void. A comforting weight against your lips, now bathed in the pungent taste of metal that makes the name you'd whispered more times than your own, feel almost foreign as it hangs weakly in the air.

Tommy's eyes nearly burn holes into your back, like peppering bullets that shred through layers of woven threads and goosebump ridden flesh, an icy pierce that falls from his cerulean orbs but burns against your skin like the tip of a match.

"Where will you go?"

Aloof, the chill that encases his breath meets the open holes in your back with a blistering gust. The absence of emotion from his tone and the lack of anything scratching more than the very surface of his words was not something new, it hadn't been since the moment Tommy's feet returned home onto solid Birmingham soil, something for which you would forever be grateful.

But something about the detachment in his voice today, something in the way he speaks as if you were a stranger rather than the person who'd known him in all of the intimate ways one could know another soul, threatens to drag a match against the already raw and delicate surface of your thundering heart.

"Do you really care?"

Closing the small suitcase, sealing off the remnants of your life within a tight space you could manage with just one hand, you find that you fear the answer. Perhaps, when the inquiry had spilled from your lips and the words had been tinged rhetorically, your heart betrayed you.

For you found, as you listened to the way your heartbeat sounded a pound or two louder in the base of your mind, that you yearned to hear his answer. To hear if Tommy was capable of the words. To hear anything more than the distance that made him feel a thousand miles away from the man you'd prepared to love until the world stopped turning.

You stood out on a ledge, as the silence encompassing the room threatened to swallow you whole. It was a weak branch that swayed with the winds and bended beneath the weight of your timid heart. It was made not of wood or a splintered surface beneath your bare feet, but something far more fleeting and dangerous to the human soul.

Hope.

You stood upon a thin beam of hope in that very moment, as you waited on bated breath for Tommy's response. Peering down at the drop below you, the crashing waves clashing over boulders and hard land, that echoed your name as his silence grew deeper.

"I just want to know you'll be safe."

You aren't sure if it's the words, that spill over the full pout of his bottom lip in a breath of whiskey infused smoke, that makes everything inside of your body still, or if it's the nature of his tone that coats them as they fall. So matter of fact. Tommy's rationality and intelligence bleeding into his words even now. His intellect a burden amongst those who felt more than they knew, forcing him to the outskirts with a shrewd mind but a lonely heart.

For you feel yourself searching the words that linger in the air, still and stale like cigarette smoke that has remained a breath too long. Searching for the roots that dangle down from the letters with the evidence of where he'd plucked them.

You want to discover the tangled knots of his very nerves wrapped around the words, anchoring them to the heart that beats with a fraction of emotion you feel on this day, inside of that hidden chest of his. You want to see them attached to something that allows you to know that what Tommy says, comes from somewhere beyond the clever mind that knows what you want to hear and what might soothe your pain. But all you can find, is the oblivion in which he's plucked them out of thin air.

The warmth of your blood spreading through your veins, brings feeling back to your body, as you slowly begin to turn on your heel to face the man in the doorway. You'd been bracing yourself for this moment, the sight you'd been dreading since you realized you weren't to have an easy getaway, but rather one last face to face as he appeared in this dusky bedroom instead of the smokey streets of London.

He stood a pilar, as he always was. A strong presence, before the world even whispered his name. His well-tailored coat hung long on his frame, swallowing his shadow in the abyss of an onyx wool that nearly made the invisible bloodshed that laced the lines of his palms, and the sins of his soul meld into the dark enriched fabric. It draped over tweed of soft grey, resembling the tones of the murky Small Heath sky as smoke and ashes churned through the city. But beneath the collar, peers a flicker of a pale toned blue. A softened shade, one that made the nature of his matching orbs nearly burst with the pressure of the sea that resided within the waves.

His right hand lifted the cigarette he smoked with slow and swift motions, but his left gripped tightly to the cap rimmed with his signal of a Small Heath King. Glinting in the miniscule light that bled like a slow oozing wound into the bedroom. Droplets of rain soaked the floorboards, as he'd taken his cap and shaken the loose droplets as he'd passed through the threshold.

Tommy Shelby commanded every room he was in, even managing the strength to nearly cause the oxygen to cease from flowing, but as you stared at him for the first time since your mind decided upon the thing your heart never would, you didn't see a Peaky Blinder. You didn't see the man who ruled these streets or the businessman venturing to move up in this cursed world.

In this room, in this place, you just saw him. Your Tommy. And perhaps, that was the reason the pain that you expected to feel like a slash across your wrist, felt more like a hurdling bullet tearing deeply through your chest.

"But you won't ask me to stay?"

Your voice feels like an intrusion to the atmosphere, the way it pierces the void like your words are a blade plucking effortlessly at the seams. They seem to echo within these walls, when in reality they slip past your lips in nothing more than an exasperated whisper. A tone fragile and raw, vulnerability seeping into the air, until you know Tommy's next breath will be laced with the scent.

His face remains stoic. His expression even and calm. For there isn't a hint of anger or disdain painted in any crevice or scar on his face, but there isn't any trace of softening or a bend of a sentimental brow either. Tommy simply stands there, his back pressed against the far wall beside the set of drawers, smoking his cigarette like a lifeline, absorbing your words without a single viable notion to what thoughts rumble through his head or what possible trace of emotion lingers in his sealed off heart.

Withdrawing his smoke, letting his hand hang back down at his side as a cloud of ashen haze muddies the dense atmosphere, Tommy spares not a blink as he speaks his next words as if there isn't a heart in shambles in this very room.

"Should I?"

The room fell upon a deathly wave of silence, pressure of its current seizing your chest and collecting the many shards of your broken heart, taking them with it on its way. Watching as they reflected the faintest glimmer of light as they ebbed and flowed down that bank, never to be seen as they emptied somewhere off in the horizon that your eyes would never be privy to see.

It isn't his response that makes the familiar return of tears threaten to burn in the corners of your sight or cause the lump to grow in the base of your throat, but rather the absence of words. The void where words left unvoiced and thoughts remaining unexpressed, shouts in the vacancy.

You stared at him in the all-consuming silence, the quiet embracing your frame like a blanket wrapped around your shoulders and enveloping you in a suffocating grasp. You watch his eyes, the ones that haven't abandoned the sight of you since they'd discovered you in that doorway.

A contradiction they sat in his possession. For his eyes were frozen and fluid all at once. Feeling as the waves of cerulean, stained by the sea, washed over you. Steady currents of salt infused waters pulling you from shore, abandoning what kept you safe and secure, as you felt entangled in the whirlpool of his irises. They flowed with a familiarity that whispered sweet little lies along its surface, all the while, the chill beginning to capture your flesh and the frozen nature of its abyss encased you beneath the ice, thrashing amongst artic waters that left you gasping for a single breath.

"You act like letting me go is the easiest thing in the world for you, like a weight is being alleviated and suddenly you can breathe again."

You hate the way your voice threatens to break, like your body betrays you. While Tommy stands opposite, smoking that damned cigarette without a glimmer of anything reflecting back in his icy sheen that makes you feel less weak than you know you must appear in his eyes.

"You stand there all perfectly put together, but I'm here collecting my things, packing up my life, all the while, trying to hold the broken pieces of my heart together in an empty hand that I don't have."

His blinks are slow but swift, as he watches you without a single word slipping through his smoky exhale. Observing the matching strands of raven lashes brush through softly dusted freckles. They had always been the kind of lashes that were wasted on a man.

"I know you loved me once, but damn it if I can't look in your eyes and see any evidence of that."

He was letting everything you'd built together burn down to the ground. All of your history turning to charred ashes that littered the pavement you walked upon. All of the memories, floating through the air like flecks of ash clouding the sky. All of the love you'd shared, fizzling away like the last lonely embers of a fire that had finally run out of steam. Tommy didn't flinch, he didn't bat an eyelash at the destruction, he simply watched as it came apart.

You could see the reflection of the inferno in his eyes, the gloss of cerulean illuminated by the citrine blaze. But it was as if the blue abyss that saturated his orbs in the brightest tones of the sea, was cold enough that not even the heat of the surrounding flames could thaw through the surface and leave him burning right alongside you.

"It must be easy for you," Your whisper cracks beneath the weight of the tears that now pierce your vision with that all too familiar sting. The lump of emotion pressing down upon your vocal cords, as your chest tightens around the shape of the letters teetering on the edge of your tongue. "To stand there without a shred of anything in your eyes that tells me the truth. You've so many secrets, Thomas. You've learned to hide away the truth of your own soul, to where I think you might've just gone ahead and lost it."

"Do you feel anything Thomas? Anything at all?"

It isn't the way his eyes shift away from the sight of your face, abandoning the evidence of tears brimming the reddened lash line of your view and wobbling on that very last ledge. Dropping down to a floorboard sitting idly somewhere behind you, a place for his eyes to rest as he looks anywhere in that moment but the truth you've allowed all too vulnerably to inhabit your own eyes. It isn't the way he smokes that damned cigarette down to a stub bound to burn at his fingertips, letting the ashen haze seep into the bedroom for one last nicotine infused breath that smells of him.

It's the silence that consumes the bedroom that makes the tears drip from the ledge and glide effortlessly down your cheeks.

"Your silence is like a knife to my heart. I swear, I can feel it digging around in the cavity, just looking for the next artery to pluck that'll make me bleed out."

Thomas stands close enough to the small set of drawers to put his cigarette out in the ash tray that rests atop it, but the all-consuming silence only amplifies as he reclines back against the wall again, without a word on his lips and without a single emotion in his heart.

A heartbroken scoff falls in a soft breath from your lips, as your fingertips shake gingerly as they sweep through the trail of shattered tears that burn against your skin, salt seeping into the wounds not visible to the eye.

"Of everything we had and everything we've been through, you still don't have a damn fight left in you."

You wondered if heaven kept track of the tears you'd shed here on Earth, if the angels had it scored on a scroll somewhere, tallied with the pain staking evidence of all the times your eyes had overflowed for this one man. You wondered if those numbers were sent down to hell the very same day, if there was someone waiting amongst the restless souls below, reading out the number as he descended down to the fiery pits of the no longer living. What number would it be by now?

They were far too familiar, the sting like a memory your eyes could recover, when you closed them shut and felt the slippery mess seeping through the cracks in your lashes. The teardrops that were saturated in the heat of your heartbreak and acidic by the salt of your anguish, knew your flesh as if it were a map they'd run over more times than a single finger on a page.

For their paths were formed by recollection, invisible trails illuminated once again beneath the sleek sheen of moistened emotion. The skin that lingered beneath the tearful burn, stiffened and ached with an itch that could never quite be scratched. As though the reddened hue of your cheeks combatted the settling of such tears, like your skin rejected the notion, like your body simply wouldn't allow them to seep past the surface.

The tears that fell in a faster stream through your heavily saturated lashes, weighing down against your dried and raw cheekbones, slipped down in the crevice of your lips that pressed together at the unwelcome taste of your own heartbreak. The salt stinging a wound Tommy's eyes could never see but bathing your tongue in the bittersweetness of its aching presence.

Your throat felt tight with the weight of all of the words you wanted to say but couldn't find. Of all of the things you wanted to scream and all of the things you wanted to cry into the dense open void. You wanted to let every word, that battered your painfully beating heart in scars not to be healed by next morning light, free, but they simply never came.

You weren't sure of your movements, of when your feet had finally shifted from their planted spot beside the empty bed or when they had ventured the small space with sharp steps full of heavy conviction.

The only sense of awareness came crashing back like a tidal wave threatening to sweep you beneath the overwhelming tide, when your palms fell flat upon something firm and inexplicably warm. When the heel of your palm pushed against the fabric of soft wool, that forced a rush of air to ascend into the proximity, dousing it in the scent of his cologne like the spice aimed to press into the open wound of your heart. The smoke of his extinguished cigarette fresh on his flesh, clouding your lungs in a breath that smelled of him.

Awareness came only as your eyes finally peeled open, blinking through the teary sheen that had altered your world view, and you witnessed the sight of your own palms pushing against Tommy's sturdy chest. Emotions tangled themselves together like intertwining roots of two different trees inside of your chest, squeezing like they'd gone and gotten themselves wrapped up in the strings of your heart along the way.

For your palms pushed against his chest with such fury, an anger boiling in your veins that you nearly expected it to set you ablaze. All the while, feeling the way his heart beat steadily beneath your touch and all of the memories that came tumbling with it. You wanted to cling to the wool and pull him close, you wanted to curl your fingertips up and over the ridge of his shoulder blades as you had all those times before, brushing your nails into the base of his scalp, but you couldn't.

A sharp cry escaped past your trembling lips, as your open palms turned to closed fists and you found yourself beating them against Tommy's chest that hadn't moved not a fraction of an inch.

You knew it couldn't wound him, your soft beating a sharp contrast to the plethora of near life ending battles he'd been exposed to in his lifetime. It would never maim him in the way his own hands could hurt another, but even so, you wanted him to stop you, even if your fists did more for you than they ever could to him.

You wanted him to fight you back. Whether by his hands curling around your own wrist and pulling you away with ease, as he'd never lay a hand on you in a way of ill-intent, or by the sound of his voice drawing your anger fueled beating to a close, you wanted him to fight for something.

Maybe that was what fueled your anger more than anything, the way that Tommy Shelby stood like a fucking statue beneath the weak assault on his strong physique. Not doing or saying or even feeling a damn thing about it.

Even in love, Tommy stood a contradiction. Because it was easy to love Tommy Shelby, even when there was every reason in the world for a man like him to be deemed otherwise. Hatred would be easier, the severing of a thick string to your very heart would hurt far less if only you could hate the man you still irrevocably loved.

"God!" You cry out as you push against his chest with all of your might. "You stand here like a fucking statue!"

Tommy stood still beneath your beating as if he thought he deserved every hit of your fist, every push of your palm and eventually every slap searing against his cheek. "Made of fucking stone!"

The sound of skin against skin echoed in the tight Watery Lane bedroom, as your palm met his cheek once again with a resounding slap. But all Tommy's face showed, was the way he absorbed the sting and kept his eyes focused on that damned piece of floorboard somewhere off in the center of the room and away from your sobbing eye.

"You don't scream back, you don't push me away, you don't even grab my fucking wrists and pull me aside!"

He could shred your heart to pieces with his words if he wanted, he could leave bruises behind on your wrist if he wished, he could even knock you down and storm out of the room if he damn well pleased. But Tommy Shelby didn't do or say anything, like his very soul had left this place and you stood battered against the shell of someone who was no longer here and no longer cared.

"You have to say something, Thomas!" You cry out, loathing the way your voice sounds like the all-consuming hold of this man's love had swallowed you whole, desperation and weakness seeping out from your tear ducts and the nature of your pores. "Scream it at me if you want, tell me you bloody hate me if you have to! Something to let me know you give a damn!"

His face is a stoic mosaic of heartbreaking beauty. With swells of cerulean so deep, they're bound to sweep the broken shards of your heart away into its ebbing current of blue. His flesh bitten with the sharp sting of your palm, but still as remarkably smooth and dusted with the faintest sprinkle of freckles, as though the sun had kissed his skin in another life.

One last attempt to prompt Tommy to say something, do something, to urge him to fight you back on any possible level, came to your mind and with a trembling but sure hand, you swiftly pull the knife fastened to your ankle from your boot. The very weapon he'd made you carry with you all these years to protect yourself, you pulled on him in a split second. A sleek silver blade glinting ever so faintly in the insufficient lighting, pointing its sharp tip at the flesh concealing his jugular.

You'd never held this weapon against the flesh of another human being in this life, you'd never felt the warmth of someone's skin so close to it, that it seemed as if it could nearly fog up the spotless blade. You'd never pulled a knife on anyone and in all of your life, you never imagined that your Tommy would wind up being the first.

Your breathing feels sharp in the pit of your chest, shallow inhales seeping through your rapidly pumping lungs that expel heavy bursts of breathless air, like you're chasing after the breath of oxygen that evades you. But you watch as Tommy's own breathing doesn't change. It doesn't quicken, it doesn't heave sharply beneath his strong and impenetrable chest, it doesn't even cause his nostrils to flare with a deeper exhale. It remains even and calm and infuriatingly composed.

His body doesn't shift, only the faint flutter of a blink. And beneath the sweep of deep raven lashes, Tommy's eyes swivel back to look down upon your awaiting gaze. HIs eyes aren't angry however, they aren't filled with disbelief or even disdain, they're just... empty. As though the blue that has consumed his irises all these years, has finally frozen over all of the crashing waves, obscuring the emotion that once resided beneath.

"Even with a knife to your throat, you still don't fight me." You whisper with a knot in your throat, pressing against your windpipe and bewilderment floods your tone.

Tommy stares at you with a dense wave of scrutiny riding in his eyes, bathing you beneath the current, until his stilled lips pull apart with the softest pop and he swallows a breath before speaking into the void that had begun to forget the sound of his voice.

"Because I know you won't use it."

The breath your lungs had craved all this time, suddenly emanates from your lips in a sharp burst, as if you'd had the breath inside of yourself all along. Breathlessly it falls, as you stare in all-consuming silence at the man whose eyes simply blink slowly and calmly your way. Your fingers curled tightly around the handle of the blade, falters as your hand brings it away from his flesh and back down to your side, feeling as your feet shuffle back against the wooden panels beneath you.

"Is that why you don't fight me leaving? Because no matter what you say to try and make me stay, you know I'll leave anyway?"

Tommy's eyes confirm the words his lips decline to say, a seal on the realization that weighs heavily on your heart.

"All of these years of selfishness, and Tommy Shelby is suddenly too selfless to give a damn, ey? Of all the times I wished you'd stayed out of business that was bound to get you killed, I can't believe I'm wanting the gangster to come out and stop me."

Pursing your lips, as if an attempt to keep the next current of salt-soaked tears at bay, your head bobs with a resigned ache as you tear your eyes away from Tommy. Ripping your sight away as if you can feel the pain resonating deep into the cavity of your wounded heart, as you turn and make your way back to your bags sitting ready on the cold and empty bed.

You can feel his eyes on you, as your palm places the blade down against the patchwork quilt, abandoning the weapon and the life that came tethered to the edge. You can feel the blaze his azure has to offer, as it bleeds into the bullet holes they'd once previously peppered into your back when he came here today. But there's something coating the flames, something you can't bring yourself to feel by looking in his eyes, but rather feeling within the wave of his scrutiny that forces you to speak up.

"You can look at me like that if you want, like I'm crazy or pity me for being reduced to this. You can feel sorry for me, go ahead. Because the truth is Tommy, I'll always feel sorry for you."

Swallowing the lump thick and binding in the base of your throat, as a truth that had begun to root in the core of your heart begins to bloom and teeter the words on the very edge of your tongue.

"I'll always feel sorry for you, because you push everyone and anyone who might actually love you away, just because you don't deem yourself worthy of such a thing. I feel sorry that you'll end up alone. And not the kind of alone I know you're searching for, where peace might just be for your soul. But alone, where you'll be bitter and resent the world and everyone in it."

Your fingers curled around the handles of each tightly packed bags, dragging them off of the bed and letting them hang like weights at your sides. Your tear burned eyes shut for a moment, as the void of all-consuming silence snuck into every crevice of your being and felt like cold air dousing an open wound. But with a brave deep breath, letting it coat your lungs that still tingled with the burn of absence of fresh oxygen, you turned around and headed for the door.

Tommy didn't block the doorway, he stood beside it with the exit wide and ready for your being to pass swiftly through. But he watched you, with those eyes of blinding cerulean that could sink you right where you swam, but even as you felt the crashing pressure of waves upon your shoulders, threatening to pull you under, you strode firmly to the threshold. Pausing only as the very tips of your shoes brushed the wood of the hallway, and something unspoken pricked at your heart.

Swallowing a deep breath, as you braced yourself for the damage sure to follow as you allowed yourself to look one last time into those eyes that would surely haunt your dreams, you peered up through your lashes at Tommy.

"Maybe I don't want you to ask me to stay." You whisper, because although you know it's all your own voice can allow, it's also all that is needed in this space. "Maybe I know we'll never get back to what we once were, who we once were. Maybe all I want, is to know that you loved me enough to miss me when I'm gone. Because I do. I miss you already and I'm not even gone yet."

Blinking away the tears that bite at the corners of your eyes with a familiar sting, you continue with your fragile tone. "Maybe all I needed, was to see something from you that told me all the years we spent together, all of the hell we've gone through, all of the love and the tears and the fucking shouting matches and the apologies weren't for nothing. That they weren't all just something to me."

It didn't evade you, the striking pain of realizing you were saying goodbye in the very same doorway you'd said I love you for the first time, to the man with the blue eyes that would always have your heart.

You watched the faintest shadow of a softening expression loom over Tommy's face, his features suddenly a touch less chilled as if the first sign of spring had gone and begin to thaw out the winter freeze.

His straight-lined full lips shifted, pulling apart with a gentle pop of the soft flesh stained with nicotine and the taste of him you'd never know again. But as you pulled your sight away and began to step through the doorway, Tommy's voice seeps into the atmosphere on a low running current.

"I will miss you."

What hurt the most was perhaps the fact that Tommy was right.

For even as the words left his lips in a cloud of something you wanted to turn back around and curl your entire body within, you still walked down those stairs and out the front door. Because you'd never walk away without loving that man and you realized just as he'd said, that nothing he could say could make you stay. Because you knew you would always love Tommy, that was never bound to change, nothing would ever make you hate him the way you wished to. Instead, you loved him too much to stay, especially when you knew your love was no longer enough.

And Tommy, as he listened to the sound of your footsteps trailing down that staircase and the resounding close of the front door, sealing the fates like a carving in stone, he knew that he loved you too much to try and make you stay. So he let you go, because Tommy knew that sometimes fighting for something meant having to give it up in the end.

A/N: Whew... a little heavy on the heart this one!

This piece has been a true labor of love, I had moments while writing this one where the words flowed from my fingertips and other moments when the words simply wouldn't come. I experienced confidence at times and lots of self-doubt at others. I faced some writers block and moments when I couldn't write because of physical symptoms while creating this one. But I didn't give up on this piece and seeing it completed, makes me happy!

I wanted this piece to be filled to the brim with emotion, emotions of all sorts. I knew it was going to be a heartbreaking, goodbye set one shot, but I also wanted to explore all of the tangled and messy emotions that go along with that simple pain and angst. Especially in this one, because I liked showing that the love there was never gone, that that wasn't the reason for the heartache, but rather that it was still there and strong and that makes leaving more painful. I wanted you to be able to ride this emotional "wave" as if you were living it and that it was as believable as possible.

When I came up with this idea, I knew a part of me was nervous that some might view the "reader" as crazy or unstable or just a mess when it comes to the climactic scene with the outburst, but from my writer's perspective I liked that escalation because it shows another level of emotion that I think is completely real and understandable and the frustration and heartbreak and love that melds into something overwhelming.

I'm very proud of what I created here, even if I second guessed myself too many times, I'm proud of myself for continuing and refusing to give up on this piece! I hope you all enjoyed it and was able to feel everything that I poured into this one!