A Gemini sky hovered with haunting depths over Arrow House, but the constellations were amiss. Lost as though they refused to shimmer that night, leaving behind a thick blanket of ebony tinted indigo in their absence. The moon lingered somewhere beyond the clouds that seemed mere invisible whisps of a forgotten breath. A sliver of a silver crescent somewhere amongst the vast and lonely universe, but it's pale glow never showed.

A balmy embrace captured the Warwickshire countryside, as the softest evening breeze drifted through the dense tree line of luscious evergreens and fresh oaks that finally finished blooming for the summer season. A warmth that made the Earth erupt in the scent of the soil rich beneath the blades of deep jade grass. The wind even seeped through the open corridors of the wide stables on the grounds of Arrow House, dancing through on a breath scented with sweet hay and familiar contentment of horses kept safely in their fine paddocks.

The grounds were illuminated by the flickering sway of raw flames leading up the steps to the grand house, a vision to the unknowledgeable eye but a haunting monument to unspoken grief and unfathomable pain. Bricks of gothic grey cemented in place with the tarnishing stain of crimson blood, while not a stone of gravel was left unturned by the harsh hand of death creeping over the premises.

Fallen tears saturated this cursed house, the salt eroding the interior like a cancer in the very walls, waiting for the day when the structure came crumbling down in a pile of shattered rubble and broken hearts.

But for tonight, the mansion whispered sweetness in the absence of the secrets it craved to spill over the carpet like a cabernet wine. Like a sheet thrown over the evidence of bodies and mourning, the house that echoed with the ghosts of the past and the present, wore a mask that concealed the true nature of its turmoil. Just as its rightful owner did.

His footsteps fell in a strong stride, as Thomas Shelby made his way through the shadowed stable. Deep onyx clothed him, fabric tailored to the utmost perfection as it draped down his imposing frame, in a breath of the shade that matched the darkness hidden within his aching chest. The suit accentuated everything his physique had to offer, allowing the deception of a society man to peer through the flesh of a Birmingham gangster and gypsy boy through and through.

Abandoning the cap once rimmed with razor blades, long ago turned solid black from the Small Heath textile of tweed, leaving the loose fringe of his deep raven locks brushing over the bridge of his forehead. The breeze danced through the stray strands, like timid fingertips weaving between thin threads of filament.

Feeling warmth against his chiseled cheekbones, tainted with the faintest tinge of a chill that moved in with the falling night, but Thomas breathed in the fresh air like it could cleanse the smoke and the smog out of his scarred lungs.

He was not naive enough to truly believe there was healing instore for a man like him. One whose very soul was well battered in the lashes thrown by the sharp whip of life and disfigured by scars never bound to fade with the ticking hands of the universe's clock.

Thomas knew far too well the condition in which the strings of his heart pulled, frayed chords threatening to snap in half with the weight of his pulsing bloodstream, prepared to send the useless organ shattering through his chest in a heap of endless suffering and broken bones. He knew there was no such notion as peace for a man like him, but he appreciated the way the crisp air still endeavored to meet his senses like in some other world, it could be the cooling balm to his aching wounds.

A few paces lingered between Thomas and the threshold to the stables, but it wasn't the sight of the open space coming fully into view that captured his attention all this time, but rather the sight of her leaning against the wooden post as a cloud of cigarette smoke twirled up into the air in front of her.

The indigo abyss nearly threatened to swallow her frame, but she endured like a northern star in the midnight sky. A beacon of light, reflecting the moon's rare and frosty glow, like a lighthouse through a misty gaze amongst a darkened sea. Golden, she stood a petite figure of soft curves and elegant lace, sleek silk adorned by intricate beading of a shimmering champagne bodice.

She was something the night had never seen, a worthy adversary in its attempts to shroud her in the shadows, instead withstanding and emerging brighter than the light the night had since previously stolen.

She was pure beauty in the flesh. A mesmerizing mirage of a woman, like the foundation of her was far too good to be true and the slightest graze to her skin, and she might simply fizzle away into thin air. She nearly matched his height, perhaps an inch just short, as she balanced on heels that timidly peered their tips out beneath the sprawl of her train. She felt small to Thomas, a whisp of a woman and yet, there was something strong about the air that swirled around her like the exhaled smoke. Like her body was bathed in the appearance of elegant innocence, but her soul had witnessed the world for what it truly was.

Thomas knew her name and her societal standing. He knew the fact that she was a widow now, her husband slain in the battle of the Somme. A brutal death by all accounts he'd heard, like the horrors Tommy had witnessed with his own two eyes all those years ago but avoiding the same fate within an inch of his life. Last breaths spared in agony as his soul nearly hung limp in his hands like the rest of him, dirty washing draped over bloodied limbs.

She'd never remarried, of that he was certain. As her hand that plucked the cigarette from between her lips, letting a cascading breath of smoke fall freely into evening's brisk air like a whisp of a hazy breath, remained bare. Her nails adorned the deep shade of desire, burgundy red that resembled the staining hues of bloodshed but the rich tones of velvety wine and intoxicating lust just the same.

"You throw quite the party, Mr. Shelby."

Her voice was that of silken honey, gliding smooth over the senses until the sweetness of her tenor threatened to seep into his bloody pores. But the strength he'd noticed in the air that she carried, surely met in the way she spoke as well. For her tone was tender and gentle, but there was a depth to it that assured Tommy it wasn't bound to break.

Tommy's brow bends in a faint furrow, as he takes one last long drag from his Sweet Afton, before extracting it with the curious words teetering on the tip of his smoke-tinged tongue. Letting them spill over in an effortless exhale, as he peers down at the cigarette cradled between his thumb and middle finger.

"Yet you're out here by yourself, while it continues on inside."

He'd watched her disappear from the party left in full swing back at the house. A blur of shimmering gold and tousled waves cascading over honey-soaked crystals, slipping through a sea of thick pockets and glittering diamonds. She'd held his attention from the very moment her heels crossed over the threshold of Arrow House, like her presence punctured the void that consumed the haunted grounds with a sharp blade and although she spoke not a word from across the room and far from his gaze, she enchanted him in every way a man could be intrigued.

She looked lonely tonight.

It reflected not in the tears that never fell from her eyes or in the solemn line of her lips that never appeared, it was something far deeper. Something intangible, palpable in the atmosphere like Tommy could recognize the very scent of its lingering presence. It beat along the rhythm of her heart, as though he could hear it underneath the heavy bass and chatter of voices. A sound he'd grown accustomed to, as his own severed strings churned with an unnerving tune in the base of his conscious since that fateful night.

It wasn't evident in the eyes of those around, but Tommy knew better than anyone what it was to be lonesome and even more so, what it was to be lonely in a room full of people.

Like one lonely being reaching out to another, tethered heart strings and broken souls intertwining with scarred flesh and a perpetual ache, Tommy thought perhaps they could be lonely together for a night. One single night that might allow them to forget about the way the world had hurt them. Forget the pain and the heartache and the loss, the way the universe had stolen something from them both, something that they could never get back.

For just one night, perhaps they could feel again what it was like to be whole.

Pursed pout of soft peony, wrapped tightly around the sleek white stick beginning to turn a brandished citrine hue, as the fire inside burned away at the tobacco that flooded its way into her lungs. Before extracting with a swipe of her crimson nails, as her own response trailed along a matching breath of spared smoke.

"Well," Her fingers gently flicked the budding ashes off onto the pavement beneath her heels, as she glanced over at the Shelby man out of the corner of her eye. "I was out here by myself, now I seem to have attracted unwarranted company."

Thomas Shelby wasn't taken aback by much in this world, but the sharpness in which her tongue cut through the balmy evening air made his once furrowed brow arch in a much-amused surprise. A slight huff passed beneath his breath, a cross between a laugh cut far too short in the core of his chest and a scoff of disbelief melding together.

She was an enigma, seemingly smooth and refined on the exterior, but beneath the surface resided a diamond unshaped and left rough around the edges. Her display of clear disdain for his very presence, didn't dissuade him or offend the man spoken to far more respectful than this, rather the opposite.

For there was something about the hidden fire burning beneath the sight of something gentle and easy, that made him work a little harder as not to scald the flesh of his fingertips, that aroused parts of his mind with a slight tug of a smirk working at the edges of his lips.

"I'm sorry for interrupting." Tommy murmured lowly around his cigarette but crossing one ankle over the other as he let his weight rest against the wooden post, he made not a single motion to leave. Instead, deepening his gaze on the woman who hadn't made eye contact with him once this evening, as if she knew far better than to get swept up with the likes of him.

Although she didn't peer over at him to meet his gaze of burning azure, that threatened to leave evidence of the cold toned embers searing against her flesh in the night, Tommy watched the edge of her lip twitch in a slight hint of mirth beneath the incredulous expression. "I doubt that very much, Mr. Shelby."

He'd been wrong about her when he caught her sights from across the crowded room. What he thought would be a simple swipe of a woman, a spared kind smile, shared cigarette and a few words dipped along the trail of her ear with a devilish breath, all melding to create a woman all too eager to melt into his bed for the night, turned out to be more of a challenge than he anticipated.

Especially for someone who lacked companionship and intimacy just as he did, a deal made without a second thought, but wrong he was about the woman who didn't step down when she met him toe for toe. Wrong he was when he thought she was all softness and innocence.

"You're different from the other women here tonight." Tommy releases his observation as a statement of fact, on another wave of smoke.

"Different." Her tone sharpens around the word, testing out its weight on the tip of her tongue, as he watched her head nod subtly. The soft purse of her peony lips returning as she looks down at the cigarette burning away between her fingers.

"Because I'm not as easily swayed by your irrefutable charm, am I?"

She was toying at him now, not out of pleasure or in a tango of erotic anticipation, but rather out of distaste for his very being. She patronized him, something not many dared to execute when it came to Thomas Shelby, but here she was. Fearless.

"You're less docile."

She snorted softly at his words, an exhaled huff beneath her breath as he studied her tense expression. "Less weak, you mean."

Tommy's own lips pursed with a shake of his head, as he let his eyes leave the spitfire of a woman and turn to gaze out at the starless evening sky. "That's your word, not mine."

The whispering drift of the balmy moon's breeze, danced along his flesh with the capturing of her scent. A rich perfume bathing her skin in an aroma of sharp jasmine and heady amber, all mellowed by the softened embrace of a sweetening rose. Her proximity intoxicating, but like the cigarette she took one final drag from, she knew just how to burn like the sting of the smoke drifting down into the depths of her lungs.

Tommy's eyes shifted to peer through his peripheral, not turning his head back to face her, but glancing at the sight of her plucking the singed stick from between her even-lined lips and dropping it down to the pavement beneath her. The peek of her heel coming out to stomp out the last remaining flickers of citrine embers burning within.

"I noticed you eyeing me this evening." She spoke with a knowing tone. An unamused recount as she surprised Tommy by turning right towards him, letting her eyes fall over his imposing frame for the first time since he'd interrupted her time alone.

"Looking me up and down from across the room like I'm a whore for the taking. Surveying your previous and future conquests in a room full of women, deciding on the easiest prey."

Releasing his own exhale of hazy smoke, while turning to face her where she stood a few feet away, Tommy's lips twitched upwards just as his raven brow began to arch. "I can assure you, I have no need to throw such a lavish event in order to find a fuck, love."

He watched the way her lips resisted the urge to part and scoff at his response, keeping her reaction close to her chest, even as Tommy could clearly make out the disdain dancing in her eyes like a vexing waltz.

"Humbleness evades you, Mr. Shelby. But it isn't the least bit surprising."

"No?" A feigned tone of coyness coated his words as easily as the nicotine that escaped them.

"A man such as yourself, all women should only be so lucky. But here I stand without a shaky knee or flutter of a butterfly's wing to be found. I wonder what that says about you."

Tommy might've found the way she met him unafraid and unable to hold her sharp tongue, rather impressive. Had her intent with her words not been to throw stones at his impenetrable armor and maim the man underneath.

"I'd reckon it says more about you." Tommy points out with a subtle shrug of his shoulder.

A silent pause followed Tommy's words, but as he watched the way her eyes studied him in the moment that followed, he knew the quiet air that hovered above their bodies like a thick rising smoke, was not because he'd hit her where it hurt with his last remark. Because her form didn't change. Her shoulders didn't drop an inch, her body didn't sink into itself like it coiled around the blow on her character, and her eyes didn't flutter a single lash in the midst of tears she wouldn't shed. She held her strength, but she certainly declined to hold her tongue for long.

"For a man swimming in a sea of dignitaries and privilege, something in which he wasn't born or happened to stumble into, your lack of diplomacy makes the Birmingham gangster lingering beneath the surface all too apparent."

Her eyes didn't quiver beneath the stern scrutiny of Tommy's burning azure, like the blue blaze of a flickering match seared brightly in the core of his gaze, but the heat that radiated through the cracks didn't frighten her.

Her face was a mosaic of beauty, a softness spread on supple porcelain flesh, with the faintest indentation of a beauty mark in the upper corner of her still lips that broke through the perfection. But it was her eyes, he realized after finally feeling their abrasive gaze steady with his own and refuse to sway and break beneath the weight, that might've been her strongest beauty.

She had the kind of eyes that could bring a man to Jesus, if he wasn't already indebted to the Devil.

"A woman married into wealth, speaking like she has stones to throw at those barely a step below her."

A chill permeated his tone, the expression spanned across the lines of his face sharp and controlled as not to let a single flicker of light illuminate the path of truth.

He was a man swimming upstream, always a class below pining for the one above to accept that he was not the same gypsy boy the world thought he was. Wealth brought him to the table, power made it smoother, but there would forever be a disconnect between the Birmingham gangster and those who would always view him as such.

She took a single step forward, braving the orbit of Tommy's strong pull. "I don't think anyone is below me. But I know my worth, and it certainly isn't made of money or laying on my back for a stranger in the night."

When she spoke, he realized that she didn't arm her words with the sharp blades of daggers readied to slash through his flesh. She didn't look at him like he was dirt beneath her heal, the base of cobblestone she strode upon. She didn't hold him in high regard, but she didn't judge him for where he came from.

"I give my charities in the form of my time and attention and the appropriate check, Mr. Shelby. Not in that of one-night stands with men who assume it, certainly not that of a widower who uses his late wife's foundation as a hunting ground for the next notch on his bedpost."

Peering down at the stub of a cigarette left between his fingers, Tommy brings it to his lips for one last stream of smoke before tossing it off into the darkness. "You think very little of me, don't you?"

"Only because you think far too highly of yourself for the both of us."

The familiar twitch of mirth tugged at the corners of Tommy's lips. She was impressive, this woman. But as he reflected on her fearlessness, something passed through his lips before he ever had the chance to stop it, regret settling deep in his chest the moment the words escaped him.

"She'd have liked you, my wife. Would've liked that fiery spirit you've got hurdling me way."

She saw it then, as the faintest crack in the surface appeared and she witnessed a glimpse into the Thomas Shelby that no one quite knew was still there.

The once balmy breeze fizzled out like a flame at the end of its match, stilling in the night that deepened around them and came to a silence that made the ceased air thicker than it was a moment before.

He wasn't sure where the words came from, how they'd managed to sneak up his throat and slip over his lips before he had the common sense to shove them back down into their empty cavity. He wanted to shut his eyes and shake the image of her eyes from his mind, as the shade of her blue began to creep into his sights like a coming tide. But even as they tortured the flesh of his mind, like the once beautiful touch of her hands, were now scraping talons picking him apart until he was nothing more than bones and bloodied skin.

"I've seen that before," Her words escape her in a solemn breath, a mere whisper tumbling into the atmosphere for the indigo abyss to capture with ease. "The flecks of something in the eyes that grieve."

Her tone was gentle. As though the very edge of her words tiptoed cautiously in the space, like they knew they danced upon an open wound. But the more she endeavored to let her words flow free in a breath of tender melancholy, the more Thomas wondered just who's wound coated the letters in fresh blood.

"It's more than the pain that hardens them and far more precarious than the heartache that breaks them. It isn't quite mourning, and it isn't quite acceptance, it's just a lonely void tarnished with the faint flecks of something suffocating."

She spoke like a broken poet. Words battered by the turmoil that shaped them, pouring forth in a flood of pain deepened by the harsh hand of time.

"I've seen it before, the guilt. Like a noose wrapped around your conscious and with every jostle to your bones, it threatens to hang you where you stand."

For a man who thrived to live in the shadows, where the extent of his pain and his inner turmoil seemed non-existent in the darkness, she saw him. For all that he was and it rattled him far more than he was willing to admit.

"I can see it in your eyes as you stand here with me, and I can hear it in the way you speak of her now that she's gone."

Could she see the way Grace's blonde locks reflected in his vision like the morning light had captured thin golden strands? The way her eyes did more to ail his hurting heart than heal it, as they once had? Could she see the way he watched that fated night happen over and over again, every single time the night came in like the tide and washed the guilt and pain back up to the shoreline?

"I know what it's like to feel the burdensome weight of unrelenting guilt pressing down on a grief-stricken soul."

Tommy might never know the guilt that made up her own hurting heart, he would never know the guilt she carried like stones in her hands.

Swallowing a deep breath, Tommy stares into her eyes that have ceased to abandon his own. "Does it ever alleviate?"

Her gaze is softened and kind, a shift in the way she'd viewed him earlier in the evening's hours. Her sight lingers on his stilled expression, a mask hiding away the extent of vulnerability that breaks ever so slightly through the surface. He watches the way her lashes flutter a beat or two, before her lips part slowly and her head turns to stare out at the open sky spread like a blanket above them. An endless array of space amongst the universe, but for two burdened souls, it had a way of making them feel as small as could be.

"I've found that the sun will continue to rise over the horizon line each morning, and I'll wake and pull myself from my bed just the same as the day before. I breathe in deeply, as I've taught myself to do again, but the breath in my lungs feels different now. It just does."

It was then that Tommy realized what separated her from himself, what made her different than him despite all of their blinding similarities. She'd forgiven herself. It wasn't that she was absolved of her pain, it wasn't that she moved on completely without an ache in her heart or a weary memory stored in her mind. It wasn't even that she was past the grieving that sought her. But somewhere along the way, through the endless tears and empty void, she'd managed to the take the guilt and place it in the ground right alongside the man that she loved.

She no longer wore it like a second flesh, burned and branded onto her like an addition to her very foundation. She no longer carried the weight that settled on her bones like it might just break them in half. She could recognize it in Tommy, she could sense it in his air and see it in his eyes, but she'd been free of what attached itself to Tommy like metal shackles around his ankles.

She forgave herself and she forgave the world.

She turns to him then, abandoning the evening's starless sky for a cerulean abyss drowning in pain. "We're not broken objects, Mr. Shelby."

"We're not a fractured vase searching for a single piece of porcelain that might be of similar shape and of similar likeness, in hopes to simply replace the shattered remnant that once made us whole. Because nothing will ever be like that one piece. We can try a million different chiseled slabs, but none of them will fit as that one did when the vase was complete."

She'd decided to give the world a second chance and impart grace to a universe that had done nothing but take from her. Something Tommy had never thought possible. Maybe she wasn't fearless, maybe she wasn't bold. Maybe, through it all, she was simply strong in a way that one Thomas Shelby had never known.

A/N: I fell in love with this plot the moment it came to me and the dialogue started to flow from my fingertips. ❤

I wanted to write a piece that explored both a different dynamic, where Tommy and the woman were not in any type of relationship or was "romantic" between them in any sense, and guilt and grief. I wanted to show the different aspects of both guilt and grief, how the way it appears can change from person to person but in the same breath, be so brutally similar that it connects two people together by a single theme that can transcend something as structured as class or society boundaries. I wanted to show that sometimes the difference can be in the way one recovers from it, and two sides of the same mourning coin.

I had this plot very clear in my mind, plotted out and the dialogue strong and just how I wanted it, but I will admit that when it came to sitting down and truly writing this piece, I definitely struggled more than I anticipated. It was one of those rare instances where the dialogue felt to be the strongest part and the descriptions and moments between the lines were the hardest for me to craft the way I wanted them. I stuck with it because I loved and believed in this idea far too much just to abandon, and I know there is beauty in this piece. I hope you were able to spot it and enjoy what I was finally able to create here!❤