Actually STPD. Can have problems expressing myself because of that. A bit shy. Simple OC's enjoyer. Adult content warning. DNI: minors, fans of gr*ce burgess. I also think the immortal man was suicide-romantising utter shit that should never have existed, and original ending plans were better.
Warnings: SPOILERS FOR THE MOVIE!! Violence. Mental Illness. Smut. Big Age Gap (Everyone are adults). Angst. Albeism. Alcohol/Smoking/Drug Abuse. Suicidal Characters. Suicide Attempts Reference. Grey Morality. Crime and Criminals. My terrible cringe knowledge. Swearing. To be added.
Summary: After years in a coma, Thomas Shelby awakens to find himself still alive, far from home and under the control of strange people who saved him from certain death. How and why? Good questions. If he has to live, why not find out?
Soundtrack: The Dark Motivation - Ashes of a gentleman.
Summary: Grace is dead. His family curses his name, and Tommy is alone in the world.
He mends his newly broken heart with whiskey, cigarettes, and, of course, prostitutes. On one such evening, he makes his usual trip to a rented house, expecting a night of sex and oblivion. Instead of the woman he came for, he finds a stranger in a black dress.
She shoots him in the shoulder and disappears into the night without explanation.
Not that one is needed. Tommy soon finds the landlady's body in the house — and, more importantly, a letter suggesting that the murdered woman had been digging into both him and his late wife...
Chapter Warnings: Assault! Violence!
AO3: Here
Wattpad: Here
<-Previous Chapter. Masterlist. Next Chapter->
The godawful murk stretching all around you was getting on your nerves.
You hadn’t expected three streetlamps in a row to be out, and it was only your knowledge of the area that helped you find the damn signpost where you usually waited for the double-decker.
But, as luck would have it, the bloody thing was late.
There wasn’t a soul around. Just you and the dark.
For the sake of complete misery, all you needed now was rain.
You shifted from one foot to the other, listening to your own breathing.
The occasional passer-by made you tense. Yet they all hurried past, apparently feeling the same unease in the darkness and eager to find some light somewhere ahead.
There was light, of course. Distant light spilling from houses and flats where the luckier people were already tucked away. Light from cars passing by indifferently, their headlights washing over you for no more than a couple of fleeting moments.
You were already considering going in search of a telephone box, some bright, pretty K2 you could step inside and catch your breath, without letting paranoia convince you that someone was listening to you breathe.
The car that stopped at the corner of the crossroads made you more uneasy than the darkness itself.
You couldn’t tear your eyes away from it, no matter how hard you tried. Your gaze, searching for some sign of the long-awaited bus, kept drifting back to its black silhouette.
When a man stepped out of it a minute later, you stopped looking for anything else.
The driver leaned against the car and, fumbling with something, lit a cigarette. His head was turned towards you.
Fuck the bus.
Why was he staring at you?
Fuck the bus stop.
You were certain he was looking at you. His gaze crawling over your figure felt like a swarm of quick-legged spiders you couldn’t brush away, no matter how hard you tried.
Fuck the darkness.
You turned and hurried off in the opposite direction from the stranger. You didn’t know where you were going, didn’t know where to find another bus stop, didn’t know how else you were going to get home, but every instinct in you was telling you to put as much distance between yourself and him as possible.
At first, everything was quiet.
Then the engine roared.
You tried to convince yourself it was another car, just another bloody car passing by on its way somewhere.
Even though there was no mistaking the sound of an engine starting.
Then its low growl began to draw closer.
Louder and louder. Closer and closer.
You nearly broke into a run, with only the last scraps of doubt keeping you from sprinting down the road.
But even if you had, even if you had found somewhere to turn off the main road, the car would still have caught up with you.
“Want a lift?”
The driver’s voice was as guttural as the growl of his engine.
“N-no, thank you. I’m not far anyway…”
You were ready to kick yourself for such a stupid lie.
The driver noticed it too.
“Doesn’t look like it. Why were you waiting at the bus stop, then?”
You bit your lip and said nothing, hoping he’d get bored and leave you alone.
He didn’t.
“Listen, it’s dangerous around here at this time of night.”
You abruptly turned onto another crossroads.
And immediately regretted it.
The streetlamps here barely worked. It was empty. Completely empty. The place stank of rot.
And, worse still, the engine of the car following you fell utterly silent.
Then its door opened behind you and slammed shut.
That was when, no longer doubting what was happening, you ran.
The blood pounding in your ears was louder than the footsteps rapidly gaining on you.
Unfortunately, your escape didn’t last long.
You had barely managed to cry out when strong fingers clamped painfully around your shoulder. The world spun before your eyes, and you lost your balance as you were violently yanked around and slammed against a wall.
Pain shot up your spine, bursting sparks and tears across your vision.
When your sight cleared, you realised his hand was clamped over your mouth.
The heavy reek of cigarettes soaked into his fingers burned into your nostrils.
“Where d’you think you’re going, eh?”
The man was an inch from your face, but even in such close proximity you could barely make him out in the darkness. The smell of his sweat overpowered his cologne. His tall, bulky frame blocked out everything around you.
Your head was throbbing, your vision swimming with tears. You tried to push your attacker away, striking him in the chest, but you might as well have tried to move a rock or one of the roadside trees.
A pounding in your temples. A pounding in your constricted throat.
Your pulse was racing faster and faster through every part of your body.
The man laughed mockingly. He didn’t even bother trying to restrain your hands properly.
“What’ve we got here?”
He hooked one finger beneath your diamond pendant, his other hand keeping you pinned against the wall.
“Pretty.”
You felt the chain biting into your neck. Painful. Merciless. Driving you to struggle harder against his grip.
Useless.
The chain snapped, cutting into your skin and drawing blood. The man quickly slipped the pendant into his pocket.
What would happen now? Would he rob you and kill you? Worse?..
Cold sweat broke out along your neck.
Only one thought managed to force its way through the terror locking your body in place.
Taking advantage of the moment, you managed to wrench your clammy hands free from his grip. One of his hands held both of yours, but it failed to stop your final attempt.
And before he could realise what you were doing, you drove your nails into his eyes, tearing a raw, animal scream from him.
But your triumph never came.
Instead of the confusion and weakness you had expected, his body only tensed harder. His hands seized yours and twisted your wrists painfully.
You cried out, trying to wrench yourself free.
“BITCH!”
His knee slammed into your stomach.
You doubled over, and that was all the time he needed to blink the tears from his eyes before driving his fist into your ear with all his strength.
You collapsed to the ground, pain exploding through your skull, your body and your bones. You could barely move, but every shift brought on a wild wave of nausea — you were certain you would choke on your own vomit if it finally forced its way out of you.
Sharp pain. Crack.
Your entire body had turned into agony, the taste of blood in your throat, thick saliva on your lips, stinging tears in your eyes, and a thin, cutting noise in your ears. You could see nothing, the sounds tangled into a cacophony inside your head.
Silence. Emptiness.
But…
Nothing…?
You retreated deeper into yourself, trying to escape the nightmare unfolding around you. Time moved differently inside your head.
After a few moments, you realised that nothing was happening. No one was touching you.
Had the world stopped? One moment before the end…?
He would grab you now. You had to gather your courage in time, had to gather enough strength to accept the final, deadly pain, and then no one would touch you again. The pain would stop, it would stop forever and never come back. Just one moment and…
…Nothing…
When reality finally managed to overcome your daze, you understood why nothing was happening.
Sensation returned like a film released from pause.
You felt as though you had surfaced from underwater, catching the changes you had missed when pain and suffering had swept over you.
Your eyes burned just like the skin on your arms where the attacker had recently twisted them. Your tears had dried, and you could see that there was no one in front of you.
But your hearing caught the crack of breaking bones and a revolting wet squelch.
And the voices of fighting men.
Gathering all your strength, you turned your head. Even that small movement sent a slicing pain through your temples and eyes.
The alley spun again, pressing down on your stomach and making you curl up tighter.
The nausea churned inside you.
Held.
The light from distant headlights barely reached the scene of the beating. But even so, you could now see an even blacker mound against the bluish shadow.
From the movement, you realised it was another man, pinning your attacker to the ground with his knee. Hunched over his victim, he punched him in the face again and again.
Crack!
Sharp. Merciless. Loud.
Squelch! A groan!
He pulled his elbow back farther to put more force behind every blow.
But not for long.
Only a moment later, you saw the glint of a blade in the air, and another moment after that, an inhuman scream tore through the air and your ears.
The body beneath your protector convulsed.
You listened to a dirty sole scraping against the ground beneath the twitching legs.
And then the victor rose to his feet, in no hurry to straighten his back. He turned towards you and, forgetting everything else, rushed in your direction.
Tommy.
Covered in blood from head to toe.
His eyes burned with fury. Every muscle in his gaunt face was frozen in a monstrous, empty mask.
His dishevelled hair was matted with blood. In places, the skin on his face had split — the only wounds he had sustained in the struggle.
His blood-soaked cap was crumpled in his fist, the blades inside it completely red.
“Tell me where it hurts?” he demanded. His voice was far too shaken to sound gentle.
One trembling palm opened above you, as though he wanted to touch you but was afraid of hurting you even more.
You wanted to force out at least one word, but at that very moment the nausea overwhelmed you.
Pain drove into your brain as you instinctively turned away to empty your stomach.
Thick liquid on the stone.
Tommy carefully held you, having first freed his hands from the blood-soaked cap.
“Come on, I’ve got you! I’ve got you!” he kept saying, trying to keep his voice under control.
Something inside you was clearly broken.
“Breathe.”
When the contents of your stomach finally left your body, you drew in a breath at last.
Bloody metal on your tongue.
Sounds. Voices. Breaths. Yours. Someone else’s. Far away and close. They roared like sirens.
Everything that had been crashing over you in waves, without a pause, began to turn into abrupt tremors inside your mind.
The panic refused to retreat.
And you clung to the three words ringing right beside your ears, drowning out everything else.
Anything to keep from falling into its abyss.
Like a drowning woman hanging from the cables of a ship being dragged into a black, merciless whirlpool.
“I’VE GOT YOU!”
***
“She’s asleep.”
Mary, standing opposite Tommy’s desk in his office, folded her hands over her stomach. She looked gloomier than a graveyard statue, and the shadows of the night in the barely lit room only added to her bleak appearance.
Tommy wasn’t looking at her. He was studying his battered knuckles thoughtfully. In the light of the single lamp, they looked like ploughed earth.
Blown apart by mortars.
“Don’t leave her, Mary. She’ll wake up soon,” he ordered.
The maid looked at him uncertainly.
“I gave her opium…”
“She’ll wake up soon,” Thomas repeated. “Just trust me.”
The woman nodded.
Tommy hadn’t checked on you since the moment he left you in the guest bedroom.
He couldn’t.
His mind had tangled itself into a chaotic knot of terror, rage, denial and bewilderment.
When he had seen you in that darkness, fighting with everything you had to break free, to survive, to defend yourself, his brain had simply stopped working.
Now, he more or less understood what that sight had awakened in him.
He could have left you to die. You had told him that if anything happened to you, all his secrets would come spilling out before the world.
And yet that wasn’t what it had been about.
Grace.
He hadn’t been able to save her.
That night at the charity event, he had held his hand over her heart, pushing her out of the way, away from the line of fire, and still he hadn’t been able to save her.
That loss and that guilt had howled inside him when he saw you fall to the ground.
After that, all he could see was a bloody haze and the searing fire of violence.
“Mr. Gray is waiting for you outside,” the maid reminded him when the silence stretched on too long.
“Send him in.”
Mary left, and Tommy, still lounging lazily in his chair, sat upright and folded his injured hands on the desk.
Let Mary go to you.
He didn’t know she had given you opium.
But he knew it wouldn’t help you.
Michael entered, no less grim than Mary. Though, as far as Thomas was concerned, the boy always put on that sort of face to make himself seem more serious in his eyes.
His face was far too young to carry any truly imposing severity.
“Hello, Michael. How’s Polly?”
Tommy gestured towards the chair opposite his desk and quickly lit a cigarette, wanting the bitterness of tobacco to drown out the bitterness on his tongue that filled his mouth every time he asked about his aunt.
She was free. They were free.
Somewhere out there, far away from him and his curse.
He longed for them, missed them, and refused to admit it.
But the acrid bitterness in his mouth and the weight of those simple questions about them, which he practically had to force out of his throat, reminded him that he wouldn’t be able to lie to himself forever.
Still, self-deception helped him keep his greed and vanity on a tight leash, because otherwise they would make him bring his family back by force.
Find a way. Devise a lie.
They deserved their freedom.
And the fact that they were somewhere out there, rather than here, in all this shit, in all this blood, gave him a measure of absolution.
He closed his eyes and told himself that they were safe there, that somewhere far away they had found everything he would never have.
“As usual.”
Michael lowered his eyes.
It meant neither good nor bad.
In other words, she wouldn’t come home even at the threat of death.
And she still talked to herself when she thought no one could hear her.
But Michael was holding something back. So it seemed to Tommy.
Tommy nodded.
Today, he didn’t have it in him to continue the conversation.
“I’ve got a job for you, Michael,” he said.
The boy raised his eyes. His shoulders straightened slightly as he listened intently.
“There are… documents I want you to find.”
Tommy stood, slowly exhaling the bluish smoke that stung his eyes as it drifted towards the ceiling.
Michael stood too.
“I’ll give you the address of a house where they may be hidden. You need to be as discreet and careful as possible.”
Thomas walked towards the enormous window, pretending to stare into the darkness of the night.
“Listen carefully.”
What had happened to you tonight had forced him to see the fear that had been holding him back until now.
Fear for Grace’s name. Fear for Charlie’s future.
Things that mattered more than his reputation. More than his own safety.
Tommy Shelby is a deeply complicated character. How did you want his story to end?
I always imagine that before Episode 1 of Season 1, he put a gun to his head and decided, “Well, I’m not going to kill myself, I’m just going to do whatever I want.” There’s a great Francis Bacon quote about how, since life is so meaningless, we might as well be extraordinary. Tommy doesn’t think there’s a point, he doesn’t think there’s a goal, he doesn’t think there’s a destination, he just does these things.
Warnings: SPOILERS FOR THE MOVIE!! Violence. Mental Illness. Smut. Big Age Gap (Everyone are adults). Angst. Albeism. Alcohol/Smoking/Drug Abuse. Suicidal Characters. Suicide Attempts Reference. Grey Morality. Crime and Criminals. My terrible cringe knowledge. Swearing.
Summary: After years in a coma, Thomas Shelby awakens to find himself still alive, far from home and under the control of strange people who saved him from certain death. How and why? Good questions. If he has to live, why not find out?
I had to break new chapter in two.
My lord and savior: @boggubozakatochnihmashinok (Thank you for helping me with this all!!)
Snowdrifts towered around the group like walls as they painstakingly made their way along the snow-covered path back to the “Lame Horse.”
The walls of snow rose higher than a man, while the narrow white track beneath their feet had long since buried the streets beneath it.
Walter Maugham brought up the rear.
Right behind Thomas and Caroline.
Tommy could feel the muscle standing out in his taut jaw, which he could not seem to relax.
Maugham had no eyes, yet Tommy could almost feel them crawling over his back like a swarm of biting ants, while the blind man’s ears caught every heavy breath Tommy quietly released into his scarf.
Rufus and Tilly walked ahead without the slightest concern for the cripple trailing behind. Not once did either of them look back to see whether he was keeping up.
Caroline kept pace with Tommy.
The second back between Maugham and the road ahead.
This time, everyone was silent. Yet from the corner of his eye, Tommy noticed Caroline growing restless, as though she wanted to say something.
Apparently, the silence was holding her back. Perhaps she did not want everyone to hear?..
“We’ll take the bridge, aye?” Tilly called out suddenly. As before, he was leading the way.
“The bridge?” Rufus echoed.
Caroline seized the opening.
“Any trouble to expect?” she asked, her false voice losing a single note of its masculine roughness.
“Definitely,” Thomas answered at once.
He did not want to explain anything with Maugham behind them. Not even in a whisper.
Especially not in a whisper.
But Caroline raised her eyebrows meaningfully, puffed out her cheeks and let out a nervous breath, leaving the conversation at that. The exaggerated reaction told him she understood perfectly well the full extent of the shit that was coming their way, even without the details.
Still, Tommy was certain she would return to the subject.
Meanwhile, Tilly explained to Rufus that there was less snow on the bridge and that Mr. Maugham would have an easier time reaching their pub if he avoided a fall or two — while they, his escorts, would be spared the additional trouble of hauling him back up should he take one.
Day opened his mouth to ask Maugham himself what he thought of the idea, but the man answered before he could.
“Take the bridge. Don’t care.”
The exchange between the two men far ahead carried clearly enough for him to hear.
Thomas clenched his jaw again, barely managing to ease it.
Silence descended once more, and Tommy tried to fill it with strained attempts to remember anything at all about Walter Maugham.
He did not remember him.
Not his face. Not his voice. Not the moment he had ordered him blinded.
If, of course, he had not done it himself.
Maugham had recognized his voice immediately.
How many years had passed since Tommy had taken up the blade? Or since he had given the order to use it?..
Christ, the years had blurred into one endless, freezing winter. The book. The losses. The loneliness. The ghosts. Despair giving way to apathy, then back again. The long-awaited death that never came. The redemption that had meant nothing.
John had been right.
He was running in circles. He was neck-deep in crime again.
And now he was completely alone.
Long ago, when the war had only just ended, another nightmare had driven him to press a pistol against his temple. He had been no more than the briefest movement of a finger away from pulling the trigger.
But his mind, forcing its way through every taut muscle in his body, had arrived at one final decision:
Why not see what happened next?
If life was no longer something he needed, then he could do anything, so long as he was no longer afraid to lose it.
Had he known that it would bring him here, to this very moment, he would have told his own mind to go fuck itself.
Yet thinking it all through finally loosened something inside him again, and the silent shadow of Maugham ceased to trouble him with its uncertainty.
They stepped onto the bridge.
There was a little more room here.
The canal below was frozen over, though the ice did not look thick enough to trust, judging by its colour.
They all looked down through the thin railing, assessing it.
It was a long way down.
Maugham seemed to sense it with his sixth sense. Through the wind or through his feet, Tommy could not tell, but he noticeably slowed, suddenly wary, as though he feared that at any moment he might stumble and go tumbling over the edge despite the railing.
“How much time has passed?” he rasped, irritation and nervousness colouring his voice. “Mr. Ditcher will be tearing his hair out.”
Tilly, who had suggested taking this route, seemed to quicken his pace at that.
Caroline grunted and burrowed deeper into her coat. After rummaging around for a moment, she pulled out the same faded old pocket watch Tommy had seen before.
But as she struggled to turn it over in her thick glove, her foot came down awkwardly on the slick ice.
She slipped at once, her hand instinctively shooting out for the railing.
The watch went flying.
Down into the whiteness of the frozen, snow-covered water.
“FUCK!”
The cry Caroline let out could have given her away completely. Tommy did not know how she managed not to lose herself in that moment, because the shock and horror written across her face were utterly genuine.
The men flinched in surprise. Maugham froze like a statue.
Caroline’s coat gathered around her shoulders as they drew sharply upward, the way they did when a person was overwhelmed by stress and fear.
She froze too, for a moment, her hands trembling.
Then she suddenly gripped the railing with both hands and tried to climb over it.
That snapped Rufus into action.
“Where the fuck are ye going?!” he roared, lunging forward and catching her by the scruff of her coat.
She collapsed into his arms and immediately began fighting him.
“Let go, you bastard!”
Tommy reacted then.
He approached and carefully took her face between his hands. She immediately seized his wrists, trying to pull them away, but Thomas held firm.
“Stop it, ye fucking mad man!” Day continued to roar. Tommy ignored him.
“Jim, look at me.” Tommy’s voice was loud, but steady. Not a shout — merely an attempt to cut through Caroline’s panic and reach whatever part of her was still listening. “Hey.”
She struggled weakly in their hands for another moment before finally going limp, exhausted and defeated.
Tommy kept trying to catch her eyes with his own.
“If you jump off the bridge, you’ll kill yourself. Or you’ll fall through the ice,” he explained matter-of-factly, trying to appeal to the logical part of her nature, the part that usually prevailed. “You won’t find the watch.”
“Buy yerself another one, what the fuck’re you carrying on for?!” Rufus’s voice dropped by barely a jot.
Tommy gave Day a cold look that silenced him immediately. His eyes returned to Caroline while Rufus stared at him, stunned, trying to understand how Tommy had managed to quiet him with nothing but an unspoken warning.
“Maybe…” Smarty cleared her throat, barely keeping her masculine voice under control.
She carefully freed herself and approached the railing, pulled off her obstructing, fogged glasses, and began frantically searching the emptiness below.
“Maybe we could climb down?..” she suggested weakly.
“No,” Maugham answered at once.
Tommy stepped closer to the girl and leaned slightly toward her, making sure she would not be distracted by the others and would listen only to him.
“You won’t find it down there. Even if it hasn’t broken,” he explained patiently. “Look. There’s nothing but snow.”
Caroline clenched her teeth.
“Fuck…” she whimpered, her strangled voice slipping by the tiniest note into her real, feminine one.
Tilly and Walter had remained silent throughout. One nervously shifted his eyes around, apparently at a loss for what to say; the other, having spoken only once — solely to extinguish the last of Caroline’s hope — stood and listened without a trace of emotion on his face.
“Come on.” Thomas squeezed the girl’s shoulder.
She abruptly pulled away, tore herself from the railing and, overtaking everyone at once, strode ahead as though the ground were burning beneath her feet.
I no longer go to the comments under videos or screenshots with Tommy x May, Tommy x Lizzie, Tommy x whoever, because I know that there is another Gross Burgess stan there shitting her out in the comments, as if trying to convince themselves that she is not the most cardboard character in the series, and as if they don’t have their own space to glaze her — they just have to barge into someone else’s.
Hey guys, does anyone have a transcript of Tommy's manuscript/book from the movie? I remember someone posting quotes from his notebook on X, but I can't find them now.
Here’s my drawing for the art trade with @loony-lupus! It’s my oc Anya, and their oc Caroline, having tea together🥰 I like to think they are talking about their versions of Thomas and laughing about their similarities😂
I had a lot of fun with this drawing, I love Caroline’s design, and I hope captured her personality well. Anyway hope everyone likes it!❤️
OH MY GOD, they're gorgeous!! They're simply perfect, I adore them! You captured Caroline perfectly, from her pose to her expression, everything!
And the idea was brilliant. I could just picture something like this in their conversation: "And then this gangster, the terror of Birmingham, stern and dangerous, says: 'I am a horse'" xD
