The rain refused to cease in its relentless downpour that night. For it hammered the cobblestone of Watery Lane with such a fury, it was as though the heavens that sent the droplets streaming down like the fall of angels' tears, reminded the souls below that their presence was finite and could be wiped from the face of the Earth just as surely as the hand of God could dip down.

The night consumed the sky in an impenetrable blanket of ebony, one that not even the lasting sliver of the moon endeavored to pierce, while the stars had all but hidden themselves amongst the abyss. The cracks in the cobblestone seemed to absorb the shade of the shadows, as if the darkness that coated the city might just dip down into the open crevices, and heal something that could never be remedied.

Thomas Shelby knew better than any one soul left on this Earth, that no amount of darkness the night had to lend, could eradicate damage so deeply embedded into the very foundation of a place or being. If it could, perhaps the shadows that followed him like a ghost of the past, would've healed him instead of ripping him to shreds.

She was soaked to the very bone, shivering in the wind that blew silently but with remarkable strength against her sodden frame, like the cold that permeated the newly acquired spring breeze, bled through the surface of her dampened flesh and coated her very bones like a sheen of winter blown ice.

Her dress was futile, the woolen skirt of soft evergreen soppy and weighing heavily down upon her legs, until the weight was bound to leave her sore and weak come morning. For it seemed to drag her down to the cobbles, as she stood frozen in place on the other side of the door. But there was a flicker of strength that sparked within her weary stance, like popping embers inside of her chest, that willed her to stand and endure the blistering winds and torrential rain.

Her porcelain skin glistened with the slickened nature of the rain that engulfed her, droplets running races down her cheeks and battering down from the fluttering ends of her saturated lashes, and the longer Tommy stared at the sight of her face, the more he began to wonder just how many of those droplets belonged to her.

Her hair, a fiery contrast to the abyss of ebony that immersed her, had lost all sense of its soft twirls. For the strands that once bounded down against her shoulder blades with her each and every step, were now matted and stuck to the flesh of her neck. Coiling around her skin like a noose of her own making.

It took everything inside of Tommy to resist stepping down off of the final step and reaching out his hands to free her neck from the pressure, as though by lifting the rain-soaked strands that almost seemed to strangle her where she stood, he could save her. But there was something in the way she looked at him, something in the very fact that she'd ventured out into this bloody rainstorm just to see him, that halted his actions.

For her doe-eyed gaze, wide and soft like she hadn't a single trace of harshness or sin lingering anywhere inside of her soul, peered up at him through the blustering spit of rain. Tommy stood on the very threshold of the doorway, his hand tightly gripping the edge of the door as he stared down at her in incredulous curiosity to her sudden appearance, whereas she stood a few paces away. Illuminated only by the soft glow emanating from behind Tommy from inside of the Shelby home, casting the faintest ray of gentle citrine down upon her drowning posture, as if it could be enough to drag her out of the ceaseless darkness that consumed the Watery Lane cobbles.

He should've spoken a word, anything to break through the void that seemed to embrace them both in the same crushing grasp of boisterous silence. He should've implored why she was out in this bloody rainstorm, why she'd traveled all this way under a cloak of darkness that a woman like herself should've never been traveling alone in. He should've stepped down that single step and strode the few paces towards her, gently wrapping his hands over her arms and brought her into the warm and dry house.

He should've done anything in that moment, but the way she looked at him, like something inside of herself was breaking in front of his eyes or rather, that the broken pieces she'd always had were finally being put back together again, froze him in place.

The night was silent in spite of the rain that felt like it aimed to flood humanity from the very streets. For the sky was still and shook not a single fraction with a wide vibrato of crashing thunder and it was a stark canvas of black as not a single crack of lightening tore through its unscathed abyss. But there was something within the torrential fall of the vengeful rain, that felt as though not a single voice called out and yet, a symphony blared in the background with the building base of a snare drum.

Maybe it was the way it hit the cobbles with such force it was a wonder it didn't leave marks like bullet wounds for the morning light to uncover, blowing into the worn and tired brick like it could be the very thing to finally crumble the aged foundation. Maybe it was the way the darkness accentuated the eeriness of its incessant descent. For in the shadows that engulfed the city as though God had finally extinguished the light that had kept this place a blaze, it was easier to question if the rain would ever cease. Or if it would rather drown the lost souls below. But perhaps, beyond the rain and beyond the harsh abyss of the formidable night, it was the deep beating of Tommy's heart.

For he felt it beneath the coverage of flesh and bones, underneath thin cream-colored cotton becoming sprayed by the blowing precipitation, its pace precariously growing quicker and deeper as though his entire body knew something was a brew. That something hovered over the horizon, like a hidden thunderstorm about to break. Tommy could feel it in the base of his throat, as he swallowed the steadiest breath he could muster. He could feel it on the tip of his tongue and in the core of his ears, until it threatened to drain all semblance of sound from his senses.

It was a gradual build, with each passing second, the beats came harsher, and the impending detonation of a bomb Tommy couldn't see, came closer to fruition.

"You won medals."

Her voice was nearly washed away in the rainstorm, like the wind might just weave itself around her words and carry them down the unrelenting current of cold and perpetual misery.

For Tommy was only a few paces away from her, so close that he swore he could almost smell the tinge of amber from her perfume and the soap that embedded its scent into the woven fabric she adorned. But the way her voice hit the atmosphere, watching her lips that were tainted a shade of blue from the chill that consumed her form the words, they felt far and submerged as though the rain that blew around them had already crashed ashore. Sweeping her beneath its trying tide, leaving her voice to feel distant to where she stood before him.

"You were a sergeant who received gallantry medals and fought on Flanders Fields."

The words broke when they met the open night air, as if once they left her full lips in an incredulously soft breath, they shattered. For her voice had always been sweet honey and irresistible velvet and yet, what Tommy had always loved most, was that no matter how docile she sounded, her words were always perfectly sharp and quick witted. Like she'd managed to prick the tip of his finger with the edge of a blade. Her tone always managing to balance on a fragile line, for she didn't fear him as most in these parts did, but still she continued to tiptoe with grace and the utmost decorum.

But in this very moment, as her words reached his ear with the same comforting cocoon of a gentle melody, something about the crack in her voice, made her sound rather hollow.

"You were in a tunnel collapse."

Tommy swallowed a large lump beginning to form in the base of his throat, feeling as it threatened to suppress the air that desperately clawed its way past, seeping into his lungs in shallow streaks of a breath.

She stared at him, giving not a single care to the way the rain streamed down her face like all the tears she could ever cry in a single lifetime, came pouring down in that very instant. She blinked furiously as the wind battered against her saturated lashes, like if she didn't let them flutter like the wings of a wounded butterfly, they might just freeze to brittle bone and crumble where they sat.

She could hardly see him clearly, through the rain that pelted the cobbles sideways, blurring the definition in which he stood in the doorway. But she withstood the elements that assaulted her with every mighty fury the sky beheld that evening, and never once stole her gaze away from Tommy's.

She met his cerulean scrutiny with a bravery all her own, she always had, and Tommy knew she always would.

For there was something in the tide of his eyes, the churning current of azure that blazed brighter when she was near in his presence, that called out to her. As though it were a tidal wave capsizing her body, dragging her underneath its surface, until she found herself flailing in the embrace of his formidable gaze time after time, without a single semblance of rescue in sight.

But tonight, as Tommy kept steady with her wide yet weary gaze, there was something in the way he could almost clearly perceive the puzzle pieces being pieced together in her head, that forced him into the heavy current of her sweet and tender embrace.

For Tommy observed the way she looked at him, like with each sentence she spoke, she plucked something from her subconscious and paired it to something from her reality. A perfect match until things began to form a crystal-clear picture before her own eyes. It wasn't until the very next set of words slipped past her trembling lips, that Tommy Shelby was finally able to witness the very same completed frame.

"You nearly died on my cot."

And there it was. The detonation, the bomb eclipsed by the sweetness of her being, shattering the ground once steady beneath Tommy's feet. For he swore he could feel the Earth shake, trembling like it too had just been thrown off its axis, reality and the truth settling in like it aimed to rip each and every root of foundation out from under Tommy, to leave him standing on shaky ground.

She remembered.

Tommy's eyes gave not a single thing away, his expression stoic and still as though the chiseled nature of his bone structure, had also formed the straight lines of his motionless countenance. The drastic scathe of her words upon his startled conscious, became evident in only that of the way his knuckles tightened their grip against the door frame, and the unmistakable increase of his pulse, feeling like even his very own heart ached to flee from him.

But Tommy's breathing remained unnervingly calm, for high pressure was not a stranger to the man who'd rather been thrust into such an environment from the day he first drew breath. Tommy spoke not a word, he moved not an inch and he blinked only once.

She remembered.

Tommy wasn't sure why he'd looked her up, tried searching for her. For she was in his past, and he had rather hoped to wipe France from his hands the moment he made it back to Birmingham and set foot on home soil. But like every tormenting, agonizing and brutal memory and aspect of the war, Tommy found it was simply impossible to forget about the young nurse who had saved his life.

There were some days however, that Tommy wished she hadn't. But somedays, when the sun pierced through the linen of old and futile curtains, panning along the peeling paper of his far bedroom wall, it was with the sun and the sight of her face behind his eyelids, that silenced the shovels in his head. It wasn't often, but every once in a blue moon, she invaded his nightmares for a rare moment of slumber. Saving him all over again, one more time.

Tommy knew he should've left her in the past, he knew he should have never greased hands and dug up her files, locating her just hours away living safe and alive in London. Tommy Shelby knew better, but perhaps it was his selfishness, his brazen ambition, or perhaps, it was the fact that something about that young and unbearably beautiful nurse who reminded him of home in a land of war, made him weak in ways he loathed to admit even to himself, that made Tommy Shelby abandon his common sense.

He should've left it only paper deep, reading about her life, about who she was and how she was now that France was behind her. But being the selfish and curious bastard that he is, Tommy approached her one night at a club in London.

She'd remained the same, after all these years and after the war. He didn't know how she'd done it, couldn't begin to comprehend, but she still had the same spitfire personality and underappreciated beauty that she'd had when the world was blowing to hell. She knew of him, Tommy learned, unsurprised that she'd heard of the Peaky Blinder making waves down in London. She knew of him, but she didn't know him. Not in the way that he knew her. But it was better that way.

She didn't remember meeting him in the infirmary, she didn't recall the way she'd made him shed a mere semblance of a smile for the first time since leaving England. She didn't know that it had been Tommy, whose standing of authority and respect, had aided in getting her transferred out of the front lines. She didn't remember Sergeant Major Thomas Shelby and he didn't dare remind her. For it ought to stay that way. With the war left in the past, France a muddled memory to her these days, a man who was no longer around, a mere dream.

They'd saved each other's lives back then; in ways the other hadn't even known.

But here she was, after months of getting to know Tommy as the man he was now, slowly falling in love with the Tommy Shelby who walked these streets with his past-self buried in the mud back in France, telling him in no uncertain terms, that she finally remembered exactly who he was.

"You didn't say a word," Her brows knitted together as the look in her eyes deepened, but never once moved from their stable hold of Tommy's unwavering own. Her breath, incredulous and nearly lost in the rainstorm swirling around her, but Tommy heard the unmistakable break that consumed her tone. "All this time, you never said a word about the fact that it was you, you, who saved my life."

Just in the very same way she'd surprised Tommy when he'd opened his eyes and been graced with the sight of a young woman far more beautiful than a war zone ever deserved to bear witness to, the way he'd been taken aback by just how much her soft demeanor but undeniably strong will, reminded him of home and the slightest sliver of contentment during his painful recovery, the way Tommy Shelby had thought it would be easy to forget about the nurse he hardly knew, her words surprise him now.

For they are the very last expression he had expected to hear, he was certain she would have implored why in fact he'd hidden the knowledge that she'd tended to him during the war, that he knew her from the moment he laid eyes on her that evening in the club, but no. Here she was, utterly stunned not by the fact that he'd known who she was all this time, but rather that Tommy had never told her how he helped get her out of there.

Her life? She had saved his life. When his blood pooled through her fingertips, staining her porcelain flesh in an unforgiving hue of crimson, bathing her hands in the warmth of a man who ought to die. When she'd hovered above him, her doe-eyed gaze the very first sight of light to grace his vision, eradicating the darkness that consumed the tunnels running crumbled beneath them. When she'd reassured him, when she'd whispered out to him that she would not let him die, and for a split second, Tommy found himself actually believing her.

But here she was, addressing the simple paperwork he'd signed that aided in her transfer. It seemed a juxtaposition of services that could never be compared, no matter how hard one person tried to make them appear equal, Tommy knew the debt he owed her was far more than any she could ever wish to owe him.

"They told me commanding officers filed those papers, after a man of great gallantry and admirable rank brought the matter to their attention, requesting that I be transferred somewhere safer. Somewhere that you couldn't nearly feel the heat of bullets spraying your skin."

Tommy couldn't ignore the way he could hear clearly the tinge of pain in her recollections, the scathing effects of a war that never went away. It didn't matter that she'd gotten out, that he'd gotten her out, she still carried with her the memories.

For there were nights, when she'd awaken before Tommy had even found the slightest semblance of slumber himself, startled and shaking by a nightmare that rattled her recollections like bombs erupting around her. Her shoulder adorned a badge of honor, Tommy called it one night, a jagged scar running down her shoulder blade from shrapnel tearing through. They spoke of their memories from time to time, and Tommy knew that even though she'd been spared, she wasn't completely untouched by the lasting effects. The war left an irrevocable mark on those that it touched.

"They never told me it was you," Perhaps, she'd taken a step forward in the rare moment when Tommy's eyes finally blinked, or maybe, it was simply the emotion that saturated her voice more so than the rain around them could ever hope to, that made Tommy nearly feel the intensity of her tone break through the void of unrelenting rain. "They never told me that a man, who should've been more concerned about his own life, stopped to help save mine."

The way she speaks of him, Tommy swears she tells the tale of a knight in shining armor, a hero from a children's story book, a man whose heart is made purely of goodness and gold. For she'd gotten a piece of the old Tommy Shelby. She'd met him just as the fractures began to tear his foundation apart, and it was never more evident than in this very moment, that Tommy wished he could give her back that man. That gallant gentleman who'd been selfless and worthy. The man he was now, after she'd left, and the war had torn what was left of his familiar self to a thousand pieces, was no hero. He was no knight trotting in on a white horse.

Swallowing a breath, as Tommy shuffles to the very edge of the doorway, feeling the harsh spray of the rain against his face, he addresses her for the very first time since she showed up at nearly midnight at his doorstep. "Seems I'm not the only one who's done their thorough research then, ey?"

Her lips are parted slightly, as she pants for a breath amidst the blistering rainstorm, but there's something in the core of her gaze that is nearly breathless in nature. Maybe, it's in regard to the apathy that seeps into his tone. A mechanism, Tommy knows. A defense put in place to guard himself and preserve whatever is left inside his hollow chest to save, but it makes her brows furrow ever the same.

Perhaps, his tone is too harsh, too evasive as to not give more away than she does, but when she speaks up again, her own tone does not endeavor to match his own. In fact, it's the exact opposite. For she stares at him incredulously, and when her words finally fall, it's like the simplest of secrets slips through her parted lips.

"I remembered your eyes." The four words ease over the bridge of her bottom lips, as though the molten honey cascades through the rain and threatens to dissolve all traces of animosity from the sky itself.

For the way she whispers them, softly like she's tending to a wounded animal, and the way her eyes stare into his own so deeply, he swears he can feel them touch upon the beating pulse of his aching heart, they land in the atmosphere like it is the simplest explanation the world has ever known.

They'd made love only two nights prior, when he'd spent his final day of his short London visit with her, and Tommy could have never known that the first time with her, would be more revealing than any time before. Because it wasn't until he was hovering above her, as she teetered on the very edge of a place both frighteningly overwhelming and gloriously euphoric, that it clicked for her. That the man who's weaved his way into her life over these past few weeks, was one she'd met before. One she knew... one she'd helped save.

"I remembered the way you grasped my hand, but there wasn't an ounce of fear in your gaze."

Her hand was warm that day, a stark contrast to his own that he could barely feel. Her skin soft but calloused from the constant work. A lifeline, one Tommy hadn't realized he'd grasped onto so tightly that it had left a mark on her memory. The night she'd entangled herself with Thomas, she'd entangled herself with his ghost. She remembered; he'd sparked the recollections he believed she didn't have, but they were there and blindingly bright.

"You nearly died in that tunnel collapse, you should have really, but you didn't. You didn't and the first thing you did when you were strong again, was try to get me as far away from the front lines as possible."

Tommy watched her take clear strides towards him now, cutting down their distance in sharp paces, until she teetered on the very step of the threshold, peering up at his looming frame.

"You saved my life Thomas Shelby, and you didn't say a bloody word."

Her tone was one of disbelief, as if he'd betrayed her somehow and the look in her eyes, made him feel like she was trying to gage just where her trust for him resided inside of herself. Her brows had arched, and her eyes had softened, but the expression panned against her rain sodden face, was pained. And just like the crack in her voice, bending beneath the sheer weight of the emotion that riddled her bones, Tommy felt the truth of the past chipping away at the reality of the present.

"It was in the past."

Tommy half expected her to let an incredulous breath pass through her lips, or for her head to shake in disbelief. But she simply remained as she was, unwavering in her gaze and still in her shivering stance.

"It was, but I have a present and I have a future, all thanks to you. Isn't that worth something? An acknowledgement, something at all?" She implored until the pain and desperation in her disbelieving tone nearly broke her voice in two.

Tommy gazed down at her rain ridden face, the way he knew with fair certainty now, that not all of the droplets that ran their paths down her cheeks came from the open heavens. Her hair was matted to the sides of her face, the deep shade almost appearing as though it might just bleed onto her flesh like spilled ink, and it took everything inside of Tommy not to take one last pace forward and brush the sodden strands from out of her eyeline.

"I got you a future so that one day, you wouldn't be looking back on the fucking past. You wouldn't think of France as anything more than a fucking nightmare. If I told you, if I--" Tommy's words caught in the base of his throat, as if all of a sudden, the nagging regret in his decision not to let her fade into the past and the unrelenting emotion he'd thought he'd buried deep enough never to unearth again, came crawling back up to the surface and coiled itself around his voice like a thick vine of ivy.

"If I said anything, you'd be revisiting the past."

She stared at him with an expression he'd never witnessed the core of her enthralling gaze hold before. One that formed along the current of a breath that carried his strong conviction and honest words her way, but one that made the very hair on the back of his neck stand straight up, as it was one of the few times in this lifetime, that Tommy Shelby had no idea what was to come next.

For he anticipated her anger, he awaited her incredulous vexation, he predicted her tears and the hurt that might just stain her flesh, like not even the most violent torrent of rain could ever hope to wash away the evidence. Tommy knew that the truth would most likely fracture what had begun to build between them, perhaps, he'd always known the secrets he kept would eventually come to light and break what he had come to hold close.

He watched the way she swallowed a breath, the edges of her lips twitching with the most imperceptible of twists, before her tongue swept swiftly against her lower lip and absorbed the cold of the rain droplets that moistened the edge.

She was beautiful in the rain, a perplexing notion Tommy discovered. But even now, as the beating pulse of their impending doom hung in the atmosphere like the building collision of a symphony in the background, Tommy couldn't help the way his eyes found her utterly breathtaking. Even as she stood soddened on his doorstep, not an inch of her porcelain flesh or once warm clothing left unscathed by the downpour that nearly threatened to wash the mere trace of herself from the cobblestone, she was beautiful.

She looked she was drowning, amongst waves of Birmingham rain and salty seas formed from her very own tears, with the weight of the truth seeping into her lungs like stones ready to sink her weary body, and all Tommy wanted to do was be the one to save her.

She blinked steadily, as though the rain that teetered on the very edge of her lashes, were droplets of ink ready to stream down her cheeks and paint the flesh a hue of blistering pink. "What about you though, Tommy?"

Her voice was delicate, breathless yet possessing a strength that he feared might just pain her. But it rang out clearly through the blowing mess of rain and Birmingham cold. For Tommy watched the way her lips twitched one last time, as if they were trying their hardest not to curl into the faintest evidence of a melancholy smile.

For the edges of her doe-eyed gaze creases, furrowing as if she can't quite understand the very words that teeter on the tip of her own tongue. And the hands that have been hidden away at her sides, nearly disappearing into the shadows of the all-consuming night, lift in the slightest fraction. An involuntary motion, one prompted by the emotion that courses through her veins far stronger than any blood left lingering to keep her alive.

"Hasn't this," Her freezing fingers lift and gesture between their close frames. "Hasn't all of this, from the very beginning, kept your own head in the past?"

And it was in that very inquiry, fallen from her lips in a breath of pure softness that lands with the impact of a thousand knives, that Tommy realizes what it is that resides within her gaze. The very thing he couldn't distinguish, the bold emotion he couldn't name, the notion he knew he didn't hold within himself.

Pity.

Whether she was aware of it or not, there was something in the softness and compassionate note of her stare, that spoke of the pity she felt in her beaming base of her soul for this man. Pity in the way she'd been able to see everything from the very beginning, everything that Tommy couldn't. Pity in the way that now, as the truth of their lives filled the void with an immeasurable weight, she was still able to see things for what they were and perhaps, had been all along.

Her words cut him to the core, for all this time, he'd been so desperate to keep her from revisiting the past, that he hadn't ever stopped to realize that perhaps, he'd simply been living in it. She was right, all along she'd been right and it burdened Tommy like stones weighing down his floating body, that he'd been blind to something so clearly in front of his own eyes. And there in that rain splattered doorway, Thomas Shelby found himself feeling like something he'd never felt in this life before... like a damned fool.

"I like the man that you are Tommy." Her voice pulled him back from the brink of self-destruction, just as the flares of exasperation at his own obliviousness began to spark inside of his chest. "I like how you are with me and I quite like who I am when I'm with you."

"I could see myself loving you, Tommy."

To the naked eye of any soul that could see, it would seem as though she appeared weak in this setting. Standing out on the cobblestone, a step down from where Tommy himself stood illuminated softly in the threshold of the doorway. Immersed in the downpour that threatened to soak every last particle of her being, until she was merely washed away in the flooding puddles that gathered like streams in the streets.

With tears cascading down her cheeks, right alongside rain droplets that only seemed to make way for the salty angst, crying for the man who stood silently before her, in the dead of the night. Anyone who looked at this moment objectively could argue the weakness portrayed, but Thomas Shelby knew better.

He knew that in this moment, she held a level of strength that he simply hadn't in the bones of his being, his soul or his heart. She carried a strength that mesmerized him in the way it was blinding and burning and yet, never once threatened to set herself ablaze.

"But I rather think," She swallowed a deep breath, as though the tears lodged in the back of her throat began to coat the letters climbing their way to freedom. "that you might need to get as far away from the reminders of France as one can possibly get. And as long as I'm here, around you, with you, I'll always be that reminder. I'll always be your reminder."

"I owe you my life." Her voice cracked, like the words she spoke broke into a thousand pieces and littered shattered shards of her heart at her feet. But remarkably, her lips curled the faintest hint of a soft smile that Tommy felt beam through the aching strings of his own severed heart.

"You don't--"

"I do." She insisted, not letting Tommy's voice ring through the air with resounding authority. "I owe you my life Thomas Shelby. But I think you need to finally start looking out for yourself."

Her smile withstood the pain that glistened along the pained lines of her expression, slipping only once or twice as the bitterness that exuded her words threatened to mar the sweetness that remained. "I wish I could be the one to do it for you, but I'm too close to the pain. I'm too close to the very thing that tears your mind apart and I can't force myself to stay here just hoping for the day when it might change, all the while, just watching you suffer."

It was confirmed in her tear soaked, rain sodden, pain induced admissions. She was stronger than Tommy Shelby, in ways he didn't know he'd even lacked.

"I owe you my life."

It was a debt that he would always have, one he'd surely carry to his grave. For how did one truly repay someone for saving their life? For rescuing them? For showing them the slightest shred of humanity right in the very place it disappeared?

She didn't refute his words, she didn't try to reassure his conscious and she didn't even address the vulnerability ever so evident in his tired tone. She simply smiled at him. That soft, tender, kind hearted smile that Tommy knew years from now, he'd still see in the visions behind his eye lids.

"That's why I'm giving it back to you. You deserve to live your life Tommy. You deserve to live it as it is today." She whispered, peering up into his heavy gaze with a light glisten of waves all her own.

"We need to stop looking back, we need to get out of the mud and the haze and see what's left for us here and now."

She was right. She was more than right. She spoke the words that resided in the shadowed parts of Thomas's subconscious, the aspects of his heart that had been numbed long ago. She was truth, standing on his doorstep in the form of the beautiful nurse who'd saved his life in France. He had no right entangling himself with the past, not when she deserved to fly freely without the weight of a past keeping her stagnant.

Just when Tommy was sure she'd depart as the last of her words fizzled out, she surprised him one last time. For she reached forward, bending upwards on her tip toes soaking with rain and embraced him. Arms heavy with the way that rain soaked every filament of thread she adorned, coiling around his neck until his nose brushed along the sodden strands of hair woven and tossed around her neck. Enveloping him in an intoxicating breath of amber and fresh rain, and the slightest hint of melancholy. Her tight hug soaked his own clothing, until he could feel the cold of the night and the chill of the rain slickening his own flesh, but he didn't care.

"So long, Sergeant Major." She whispered in his ear, before pulling back just far enough to gaze into his eyes one last time. "Goodbye Thomas Shelby."

Why did it hurt to let go of something that was never Tommy's to have in the first place? Why did it feel like something slipped from his hands and shattered to a million lost and irrevocable pieces at his feet, when she had never been his to hold? Why did the past suddenly feel like an old friend, gone adrift? Why did he know that he'd miss her, now that she was gone, when she had never been his to miss?

A/N: Ahh, I'm slightly in love with this one!!❤

The creation of this piece is a bit of a story, as originally this one shot was actually a little piece of a plot I had in my head for a possible short story. It was the climatic moment in the plot that I fell in love with as soon as it came to me. But over time, I knew that the chances of actually getting around to and sitting down to write a short story became less and less. I still might one day, who knows. But I knew I had this emotional scene all pinpointed out, I had it vivid in my head and could feel it in my heart and knew that even though I might never get around to creating the short story it fits into, that I couldn't waste this idea. I couldn't let the beauty in what I wanted to do with this scene, simply sit and never be used. So, I decided to make it into a one shot.

I tried very hard to format this into a one shot that didn't feel like you were missing out on backstory or plot, just because I'd plucked it from an idea for a larger project. And I have to say, I am very very happy with how it turned out!!

I am so incredibly proud of this piece, the emotion, the descriptions, the dialogue, every aspect of this piece I absolutely love and am so proud of how it all came together! I am also very happy that I decided to write it and not let this idea go to waste, I knew it would be a beautiful, momentous scene and it was a moment I desperately wanted to craft and I am so happy that I decided to! I hope that you all enjoyed this piece and that you can feel and see all of the emotion and love I poured into this one!❤