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The first time he kisses her, they’re in a church. It isn’t her God; it isn’t her church, but something inside of her twists at the thought anyway.
Sacrilege.
In the dark spaces, the low light of the candles flickering at the altar, his hand is a whisper touch against her cheek, his mouth soft and gentle over hers. A man like Tommy Shelby doesn’t ask, except—
Except for the moments when he does.
Here, his mouth asks. The altar glows with light, the movement of her head drenching him back into shadow, and he asks, his touch gentle and light, his kiss hesitating.
There’s a reason why he wants her here. Counterpoint: there’s a reason why she’s here.
Business, business, business—it’s the only thing to keep her mind busy, the only thing lingering on the tips of men’s tongues, the only reason why she leaves the house. Except it's funny--when she glances up at his face, the words that he’s saying don’t seem to sound like that at all.
Her heart gives a heavy thudding beat inside of her chest, and she tries to remember her parents, tries to feel the punishing pace of the clock ticking down her opportunities for revenge, for justice, for her chance to make right.
His face is open, his eyes warm, and he looks at her right back. Their eyes meet—level, steady.
She doesn’t expect to wait for him so long in London. She doesn’t expect to spend so much time in London at all. Her head spins with the options of where to go, how to run, and it’s all new terrain, slippery beneath the heels of her shoes. Grace Burgess is not a girl that leaves places, that leaves people. People leave her first. People die, shot up or bludgeoned, their bodies left in sticky messes of blood and lead, and they expect her to stand there and watch them. To clean them up and bury them and move on with her life.
She said no to it once.
The girl named Grace, born again on Easter Sunday. With a fresh hair cut, a new dress, and the bodies of her family burned into her memory. It flashes in front of her eyes every time she thinks of it, every time she shuts them. She isn’t the only one who’s had to reckon with tragedy in her life—she isn’t quite so naïve as to expect that she is—but she’s only ever learned one thing from it: you pick up, you move on, you try to leave it behind.
(Try.
To leave it behind is impossible. The past is nothing more than a pulled thread of a sweater, slowly unspooling the further away you get from it, endless and thin.
She doesn't forget. She doesn't try to.
She tries to live, to leave it apart; these are all separate things.)
The Grace that arrives in London after Birmingham is not the Grace who worked with the Peaky Blinders is not the Grace who signed up to work with the Crown. They are all different girls, different Graces.
The room she stays in is small, the walls already creeping with black mold. A tiny place meant for temporary stays and secret trysts. She stays there and waits. Waits for word or a wire or a stray bullet. Waits and waits, her heart drumming its hopes against the cage of her ribs, hoping for news. Hoping for a turn of something good.
When she closes her eyes, she sees the flicker of candlelight against the walls in the church, sees the fan of his eyelashes like a dusting of ash against the tops of his cheeks, feels the soft question of his mouth on hers again.
The first time they brought her in towards the bodies, a band of policemen arched around her like a horseshoe, whispering to her in their weak attempts at giving comfort. Quiet, all of them, whispering just how brave she was to be doing this, just what a brave girl she was being, and how courageous to be able to do this so soon after and did she know that they all appreciated her effort?
Brave, she thinks, with a scoff. Be brave.
The second time there were bodies, his weight was swaying against her, his arms twined around her gently. He smelled of sweat, the iron air of blood thick on the tongue in the room. She couldn't breathe, couldn't see past the body, the empty void of the face.
She could feel the phantom weight of the gun in her hand, its metal hot in her palm.
Her body shook with the force of it.
In the middle of the floor, it sat and waited, silent as a judge. The face, an angry red howl.
The future stretches out in front of her now, empty of anger and opportunity, empty of him, full of time and negative space. Her hands and feet tremble as if they could just shake it all off and begin over again, as if there's a new Grace to be carved out of all of this, if she wanted it.
(She doesn't know if she wants.
What she wants.
She just wants.)
There’s no other option now: she’s going to run.
She just knows who she wants to run alongside her.
Please, she thinks. Just this one.
It doesn’t matter if she doesn’t know him. She’s seen him, and that’s something. Everything else is just a story.
She's seen his file. Just the once.
A thick mass of manila and plain paper, full of handwritten notes and smudged reports, all of them telling her what she had already known in the pit of her stomach. Where they were heading to track down the guns was going to be nowhere safer than where they were leaving.
She doesn’t remember any of the notes now, doesn’t remember anything other than the square of his war photo in the corner. The light stark on the front of his face, the weariness etched into the bone, the dark circles beneath the eyes.
A bright ring of ink around a commendation.
None of them are their histories, she thinks. All of them are their histories.
She’s heard people talk about it sometimes, the way time can slow to nothing but a single second, endless. A single fragment of time that hits you over and over again like a bit of vine tangled around your ankle that keeps jerking you back down to the ground, that you can't slip away from, no matter how hard you try. She remembers the identification of her father's body that way, remembers feeling the crushing force of air trying to leave and enter her chest, to make her heart beat the way that it always did, to make time pass again.
(It didn't.
Time couldn't ever pass again the way it used to.)
She remembers the light of that Sunday, gold cut through streaky gray window to pool against the floor like another splash of blood. She remembers the way the curtains cut the light to pieces, the way it seemed to touch her and warm her in jagged bars.
She wished it had cut her into pieces, too.
She wished it cut her so badly she couldn’t feel anything.
And the horseshoe of policemen all looked at her, their faces still and somber as if they were all waiting to exhale.
Her father's things had been set the floor, left where they stood, as if waiting to be reawakened. Her father's body--the skin pulled away like a curling piece of bark, the mouth grit together.
She closed her eyes.
Isn't that the truth?
She waited for the cut of light against the thin skin of her neck, and she closed her eyes to wait for it.
She was cut to pieces, and she closed her eyes.
With Tommy, everything is uncontainable. It isn’t the light, being severed into shards. It isn’t the air pressing in on her from all sides. Tommy is everything all at once, a gunshot just fired from the barrel of the gun, cigarette smoke and the smell of grease and lager. Everything with Tommy is moments; still, singular moments that burn their way into her mind before she even knows what’s happened; everything with Tommy is shadow and hiding.
But it’s comfortable. It’s safe.
Her eyes wide open to the darkness of it all, but it's safe.
It's safe if she can see what she's walking into; this is what she tells herself.
In the familiar corners of the dark, she knows to expect his soft smile, his quiet determination, the focus he applies to his planning and his work. The both of them have a knack for seeing what lies just around the corner, for thinking three steps ahead.
They’ve blindsided each other, and there’s a kind of knowledge to that, too, isn’t there?
(In the gray of a London morning, she sits with her cup of tea and stares out the window, desperate for something else to consider besides him, besides the (false, treacherous, grimy, lying) life she has left in Birmingham, besides the man she left broken and the other she left bleeding.
Grace has always been used to sides—choose one, play one, take one—and categories have only ever made it easier. Good and evil, legal and illegal, dark and light. Everything has its order. Everything has its place.
She has no place.
He has no order.
They only have each other—he gives her a place, a family, a set of things to ground herself in, and she can give him plans and foresight and logic—and it’s foolish, she knows that more than anyone else, but she believes that if anyone had the chance to walk away with a new chance at this, it would be them. It could be them, their eyes wide open to the bright streak of sun as it rises--)
She shot a man in cold blood in front of him. His surprise bristling into frustration as she’d missed the second.
He watched her kill a man.
She has watched him in the low morning light in her dingy apartment, his face relaxed and open as he turned to face her.
She has felt him running in his sleep, grasping for hope or a hand or some kind of faith, circling himself into his own grave in France.
She isn’t sure which is more real.
She isn’t sure which is the truth.
The truth is they are all wearing other bodies, other faces, and he is the only one she has met who has been anything close to honest about it.
What was he like, she asked, before the war?
He laughed, went the answer.
What was she like, nobody’s asked, before her family were killed?
She smiled. She trusted. Her laugh used to break silence.
She has never expected wanting anyone this much. She has never expected any kind of future that seemed ordinary. No husband, no house, no whistling kettle at the end of the day and warm pair of arms--
She has never expected one would come at the cost of good sense, at the cost of her own head, her career, everything.
Love has always meant the simple fondness of her parents. The way her father’s arms wrapped around her mother’s waist. The early breakfast rituals. The uncomfortable arrangement to submit to for secured comfort.
It has never meant mess.
Love holds together with both hands, keeps you from falling apart when you need it. For all she has ever known it, love has felt only like the thick, coarse braid of rope wound tightly round the wrists.
Her parents loved each other. She loved her parents.
All that happens is somebody gets hurt.
(His touch scalds.
His touch tracks her like a hunter toeing after game, quiet and reverent and merciless. His hands blaze their trails along the bare skin of her back, the jut of her hips, the curve of her ribs, his mouth following in its wake.
She gasps, arching up into his touch, as he bruises another kiss against her side.
There aren’t many words that pass between them. There isn’t much else except this, the feeling of his hair beneath her hands, the taste of him in her mouth, the rhythm of his hips against hers. He murmurs her name against her skin in jagged gasps, his hands pulling her closer into him, dragging her towards him until she can feel the beat of his heart against her own.
When he’s inside of her, she tries to drive him deeper, closer, holds his body against hers as if they could shelter each other from whatever comes. From whatever has been coming.
The cut of his shoulderblade presses hard against her palm and she digs her nails in hard as she comes, gasping his name.
tommy, she breathes. tommy, tommy, yes.
It feels holy, his body inside of her, the slickness of his skin beneath her hands, the soft rise and fall of his chest pressed to hers.
She knows it isn’t, but she keeps her body twined around his.
sleep, she says, pressing a kiss to his neck.
He kisses her back.)
He asks her.
In the morning, he smiles with the relief of a lightened burden, and he asks her.
Her first thought: silly boy, i would help you with just about anything.
There are only two ways this can go: he shows, or he doesn’t show. All other plans are borne out of this single choice. She’s just waiting for him to make it.
She knows she has made it difficult for him, knows she has forced a choice on him that she wishes he didn’t have to make. She knows what the odds are in a thing like this--nothing to gamble against. Nothing more than pure luck, and that's bad luck, if you're used to making your own. But if she knows Thomas Shelby—and that’s the riddle, isn’t it?—he will do nothing less than give it all of the weight it needs, think it over from all sides, and do what he’s always known he was going to do.
They’re forces of direction, she knows. He will go where he decides to go. She has only ever done the same.
It doesn’t make any of this easier.
She remembers the tight grip of his hands against hers that morning. Before the news had fallen. Before every part of her story had been blown to pieces in the wind.
She remembers the way her chest carved itself inside out, remembers the way she let slip the one thing she had wanted to tell him like she was confessing a secret.
Confession? Yes.
Let slip? No.
I love you.
Nothing more than the weight of all of the disappointments they had known, all of the losses they had carried on their shoulders for miles and miles, years and years. Sorrow tightly wound around their fingers like stringing a fiddle.
She held his face, and wanted his touch, his forgiveness, anything.
She held his face, pressed her hopes for them in a quiet admission.
The body of Thomas Shelby wedged between them, his face blank, his eyes studying her. Relentless and cold in their focus on her face.
Here it comes, she said, preparing herself.
Away it goes, he answered.
Two parts of a funny puzzle, they are.
Campbell finds her on the train platform, aims a gun at her and threatens to kill Grace Burgess.
Grace wants to tell him that it’s pointless. Grace Burgess has already shed her skin, already crept out of this body and this story like she has before. The girl is free from Grace, and there is nothing left but to start all over again.
His hand is steady as he levels the gun at her.
All beginnings are flashes of light and sound, fire and thunder echoing through the sky.
This is no different.
Darkness and silence shattered by a burst of light, and the clap of a shot. A scream, anguished. Blood, wet and fresh, staining through dark cloth.
She walks on.
She leaves it behind.
Her last morning in London, she wakes up to a bright, sunny morning. Her tickets have been checked and double-checked, the desk downstairs questioned about any mail (none), any messages (none), any telephone calls (none).
It is unseasonably warm, the light coming down bright overhead as she steps out into the street with her bags in hand. It glints brightly against her eyes, the light too harsh to look at, nearly blinding in its intensity.
Its heat warms the back of her neck, the top of her head.
She walks on.
On the gangplank, her step slows, her mouth dry with the taste of dust. She doesn't know what she expects.
Her head turns slightly, as if avoiding looking back would do anything to keep the time from ticking away. She prays that it slows. She prays that he has enough time, that he has a chance to catch up with her, that he changes his mind.
(She knows he won’t.
But she wants—
What she wants is to believe he could.)
The guard standing by the door stretches his gloved hand forward, reaching to take her ticket.
This is it, Tommy, she thinks. Here it comes.
Her eyes close for a brief second, a curious sob briefly rising and sinking inside of her chest, but it passes. It all passes. The grief, the smoke, the blood, the bodies, the aching sadness, the time—
It will all pass.
She swallows it down, and forces herself to keep moving.
It will pass.
It must pass.
“Miss?”
She extends the ticket. here it comes, here it comes—
“New York,” she says, with a half-smile.
He waves her in.
She leaves the sun behind her.
And there it goes.
Away it goes.