still, with eyes meeting (Tommy/Grace Fic)

[turquoisetumult]

Title: still, with eyes meeting
Author: turquoisetumult
Rating: R (for mild sexual content; cursing)
Word Count: 3,381
Characters/Pairings: Tommy Shelby, Grace Burgess, Tommy/Grace, Charlie Shelby
Genre: Angst, Romance, Character studies?
Disclaimer: I don't own Peaky Blinders or its characters.
Prompt: Written for: By Order of the Peaky Blinders Fic Exchange 2019 on Ao3
Summary: Tommy was being literal when he said Grace was by his side. / OR: canon moments in series 3 and 4, where Grace visits Tommy.

***

“She’s here. By my side.”

***

 

“Da!”

In his groggy state, it takes Tommy a moment to register the grubby hand of his toddler thumping uncontrollably on his bare chest. The corners of Charlie’s block dig into his skin and he groans quietly.

He rolls his head toward his son and squints open his eyes.        

Beside Charlie is a woman glancing down at him, a warm smile hidden behind waves of wheat blonde hair that frame her face.

Grace.

 

Tommy jolts up in bed, the motion so unexpectedly impulsive that Charlie laughs, believing his father’s reaction only a performance for his amusement.  The boy’s shrill squeal is trailed by a jubilant, melodic, giggle.

“Well-done, Tommy,” she says, Irish brogue intact, voice as soft and dulcet as he remembered it. “You’ve made him laugh. You see,” she flashes him a smile. “I told you he’d warm up to you.”

Tommy’s determined eyes dart over her, his mouth vaguely agape in astonishment. He studies her methodologically, tracing every feature with his eyes. (And if his heartbeat picks up ever so slightly in anticipation of Grace really being here, not just echoed voices of the past like before, his body does not betray it. [Does it ever? He’s Thomas Fucking Stoic Shelby, for better or worse, after all.])

He’s committing her to memory - every lock of silky hair (shoulder-length, like she had it when they first met), every dimple (right side’s pinch slightly more pronounced), every scar left from childhood pox and from wild gunfire.

“Grace,” he breathes, reaching for her, when their (once) bedroom door opens abruptly and she disappears from sight.

Peeking in from the door stands Mary. “I was wondering if you’d like me to take little Charles off your hands, sir, while you readied yourself for the day.”

For moments on end, Tommy can’t seem to formulate words and so he croaks out, “Yes, Mary,” clears his throat and adds: “Yes. Thank you.”

Mary gathers the toddler into her arms and shuffles him out of the room. Inhaling deeply, Tommy sinks his head back down onto his pillow, his fingers gliding over the pink still-healing wound on his scalp. The morphine bottle on the nightstand is the last thing his eyes settle on before he shuts them tight, inevitably envisioning the ghost of his wife.

Later, when Ada asks about the liquid drug as he presses his palms flush against his head in hopes of staving off a headache, long after he’s poured the morphine into the sink (drip, drip, drip, in streams and swirls), he tells her of Mary’s nightly bare-skinned Bible-preaching hallucinations and leaves it at that.

 

***

“You still love her, don’t you? You want her?”

***

 

After the first time, it’s like the air can’t fill his lungs fast enough.

Tatiana, half-naked from the waist-up, sprawled beside him, her fingers caressing his cheek. And Tommy, panting, like he had just wrestled a muscled Jerry’s uniformed arm from around his neck, instead of a Russian Duchess’s manicured hands (uncompromising; iron-clad grip); (and later, an unrelenting knot, taut like hangman’s noose. [Tommy is too dazed and too drunk to wonder if that signifies something.])

He recalls few things from that night. (He does remember, however, making it a point not to look at the dark-haired royal beside him. Remembers lying on his back, and pretending not to hear Tatiana’s accent, heavy clipping on the consonants. Sings Irish ballads in his head and paints a picture on the decorated ceiling above him of a near-empty Garrison on a rainy night.)

After the act, he comes away with a feeling he can’t quite identify. A feeling of – wrong. disgust. guilt. Maybe a hundred more. He doesn’t know.

He does know it’s fucking mad, even by his standards.

It doesn’t stop him from guiding Tatiana’s hands to his throat, weeks later.

Tommy’s a practical man.

All the booze in all of Warwickshire and Birmingham doesn’t help. Nor do his piss poor efforts at vengeance. Nor his visit to an old Gypsy woman in Wales’ woods.

But much like the opium, this works.  Regardless of anything else, it’s a (semi-) practical solution for a practical man.

Tatiana now no longer questions or comments on Tommy’s desires. She unwraps the satin sash from around the waist of dress. Tommy takes one final, long swig of whiskey before she wraps it around his neck and pulls.

He crumples to the floor and within seconds, Grace is there.

Her skin, silky and smooth as his nose nuzzles her neck. Her breasts, warm and tender, flattened against his chest; the space between her thighs, wet and sticky as his supple fingers stroke in measures.

You’re here, he announces, needing to say it aloud to ensure its validity. Grace. A wet kiss on the collarbone. It’s you. Thumb deftly rubbing hardened nipples.

Tommy pauses abruptly. He pulls back and stares into ocean-blue eyes. It’s always you, Grace.

Her pink lips tug upward for a mere moment, pleased but sad. Yes, it’s me, she vows. Her moistened lips meet Tommy’s in an almost chaste nature. Once more on his jaw line. His eyes flutter closed and he savors the feeling of her against him. Again and again, she plants fleeting kisses, traveling upward toward his ear, when she suddenly stops and whispers, her impossibly cold breath tickling his ear: We’re both masters of deception. Isn’t it time you stop lying to yourself?

When he widens his eyes to find Tatiana atop him, he is surprised to find remnants of salty tears on his cheeks.

 

***

“You hear that, Grace?”

***

 

“Fuck!” is what Tommy means to scream out into the cruel and vicious world.

Instead, it’s bellowed out as a guttural cry of anguish, as his arms flail wildly, shoving his various pens, photographs, and papers off his office desk.

They crash onto the floor, at the poised feet of a brown-heeled woman.

“I know we agreed I wouldn’t interfere with the state in which you kept your study, Thomas, but this is a little excessive, wouldn’t you say?”

He is still staring at the mess of items on the ground, not daring to raise his head and meet her eyes.

“Look at me, Thomas,” soft and gentle, but an imperative, all the same.

Clasping his hands over his eyes, and sighing deeply, Tommy shakes his head vigorously. He doesn’t trust that his voice will behave with the near unwavering steadiness he is so known for.

“Tommy…”

“What?!” he explodes, eyes locking with Grace’s. “What do you want me to say, eh?! That I fucked up? That I thought myself untouchable and it cost me.”

Hand running through short hair, he uses his other to gesture between the both of them. “That it cost us our boy! That I can’t even bear looking at you because fuck knows I’ve let you down. That’s what I should say, yeah? Because I know it. I fucking know it, Grace!”

“He’s not yet gone,” she assures.

“No. You’re right. Those bastards have him in their clutches. And Hughes…” He trails off, swallowing bile at the thought of what might be happening to Charlie, even at this very moment.

“You need to meet with Alfie Solomons.” His wife’s disturbingly calm tone joggles his mind from dreadful daydreams. “He knows about the Faberge eggs and he’s betrayed you in the past. Ask him to give you a list of all the men who might want the eggs. Cross-check it with the lists of your other sources.”

It takes only a moment of speedy processing before realization and relief wash over Tommy and an exhale rushes out of him. Eyes clenched, he mumbles toward the ceiling, “Of course. Fuck. Of course.”

Grace takes a slow step toward him, eyes comforting, and a hesitant, but trustworthy smile.

He feels a crackle of electricity over his chest, warm and tingling. Glancing down, he sees Grace’s hand inches away from his heart. “You all underestimate me. Still.”

Tommy goes to clasp her hand, but only feels the cotton of his shirt. “Thank you.”

He gazes at Grace, newly-revived and resolute, as she implores, “Bring him home, Tommy. Bring our baby home.”

A brief nod of his head and Tommy’s already got his jacket over his shoulder and a foot out the door.

There’s work to be done.

 

***

“Where's John, do you think, Tom?”
//
“It's like with Grace. They're just gone. Just fucking gone.”

***

 

With a sad smile, she mutters, “He’s grown. So very much.” Then, with a flash of curiosity – (of misguided hope) – “Do you think he senses I’m here?”

Tommy draws his attention away from the just-risen dawn peering through the window of his old room in Small Heath and faces the twin-sized bed.

“Eh?”

Grace lies on her side, opposite a slumbering Charlie, fingers hovering over her son’s cheek. “Charlie. He’s thrashing about. He seems restless.” She studies her son for a quiet moment, a sense of unnamed mourning in her features. “Something is bothering him and he can’t say what it is.”

Tommy pauses a moment, giving her words some thought. He wonders if anyone else would be able to see her. If he ambled over to the bed and shook his son awake, would he notice his ethereal mother beside him?

Maybe, he decides. But he leaves his boy in a fitful sleep anyway. (He’s starting to find that it’s better to dream of devils who disappear in the daylight than to cross paths with angels in the waking world who will never again walk beside you.)

Instead, he tells Grace, “That’s the bed, it is. That’s what it does. No soul that sleeps in it ever gets any real rest.” (Vivid memories of a smoky room and night sweats that soaked the sheets down to the mattress.) “It’s cursed.”

“Like the sapphire?”

“Like us Shelbys,” Tommy replies, without hesitation. “Like you. Like John.”

He’s not sure how she got there, but in seconds, she’s by his side. She motions a caress with the back of her fingers over his cheekbones and a fizzing electricity starts; he wishes so badly that he could envelop her, lay his head on her shoulder and forget, for just a few moments, how truly bleak mid-winter has been.

“I’m sorry about John, Tommy.”

“Yeah.”

A silence develops between them.

Grace side-eyes the tub filled with still water and the dwindling fire beside it. “The water’ll get cold. You should get in before you’re needed elsewhere.”

Her words go unacknowledged. “Half a dozen bullets. At least. I fucking counted them. In the mortuary. Six bullets to my baby brother’s chest.”

A lapse. Then, “John was never one to go down easily.”

Tommy sighs, shutting his eyes. “Once,” he begins. “A long time ago, John and I sat on the edge of that bed there and he told me that we’d still have to look out for one another…”

Grace starts, sympathetically, “This business, Tommy –“

“Fuck the business, Grace! It’s me! It’s the path I’ve led this family down.” Tommy grips the window ledge until his knuckles turn white. “I should’ve let Esme tear me apart. Left me in pieces next to her husband’s corpse.”

At a loss to his callous words, she can only provide an offer of solace. “Perhaps John’ll visit her… like I do you.”

Tommy snickers. “You’re not really here.”

Grace presses her lips together thoughtfully before responding. “Maybe. Maybe not. But in all these years, I haven’t seen you ask your old Gypsy woman for confirmation either,” she hums. “Now have I?”

 

***

“Everybody's a whore, Grace. We just sell different parts of ourselves.”

***

 

Throughout his exchanges and dalliances with Jessie Eden, Grace doesn’t appear to him once.

If she had come to him, he thinks she would’ve laughed. He thinks she would’ve produced a sneer, rife with wryness and disappointment (and maybe even with a hint of despair). He imagines she’d say, “You weren’t kidding about being a whore, then,” with a look he’d only ever seen when she was particularly cross.

Tommy knows what he is doing. He’s well aware that it’s a far cry from what Thomas Shelby, buyer of top hats and coconuts, would have ever fathomed of doing.

Maybe that’s why Grace no longer visits him; she doesn’t recognize Tommy anymore. (He barely recognizes himself, these days.)

It doesn’t truly matter though. Because as he sits at the makeshift dinner table in the dilapidated barn across from the petite union leader with her dark chocolate, cropped hair and mousy features, all he sees is Grace.

Miss Jessie Eden reminds him of Miss Grace Burgess in many ways.

Both women so damn perceptive, able to poke and prod at those parts him that he thought he had sealed shut – Jessie, with just a name and a photograph, and Grace, with a brazen word and a lending ear.

Not to mention, their drive and purpose for their causes.

“Will you help us, Tommy?,” Jessie asks of Tommy as they sway to the record, Marie Lloyd’s high-pitched voice carrying the melody  – (and he thinks how Grace sang it so much better, sultry and sweet, the first time he saw her).

But Tommy remembers the same plea coming from his lips, (Will you help me? With everything. The whole fucking thing. This life.) muttered in the dark of Grace’s flat, under cotton bed sheets, and doesn’t give Jessie reply.

Weeks later, after their clumsy dance in the drafty barn house, Tommy contacts Jessie and fucks her until she helps him meet the Communist members he needs.

(Polly always used to ask him how he could so easily forgive Grace of her transgressions against him and the family. He said that that’s what you do when you love somebody, but he often wondered if it was partly because he respected – even admired – her tactics and picked up some of her tricks for his own.)

So even though Grace never visits, she still haunts him. Tommy turns a blind eye to thoughts of her and thinks there’s business to be done and that Alfie Solomons was right. Big fucks small, and he is tired of being the latter. So yeah. Whether he’s deemed a whore or not, he’ll give his brains, his sweat, his blood, his heart and soul, and even his cock, as Ada so bluntly put it, if that’s what it takes to rise to the fucking top.

 

***

“I am going to make a success of this. I am going to make a success of it. I am.”

“I know. I know.”

***

 

Grace hears the count before she sees anything at all. She’s always been astute in mathematics and liked dealing with numbers in a way no one in her family before her did and yet, even she is astounded by the number she hears: 48,564 votes for the Labour Union candidate. It’s no small victory.

A fuzzy, indistinct emotion surges through her for an instant before she realizes that it’s certainly not one of surprise.

Tommy is many things, but he is rarely a liar. He speaks as if his words are priced, and so every one he utters, he means sincerely.

So many years ago, he promised her that he would turn things around.

(He’d open a club in London, he had mused, chuckling in amusement under his breath. Grace had realized, even back then, that Thomas Shelby, with Gypsy blood running through his veins, had never even truly envisioned this lifestyle of legality for himself. She remembers how she had felt a little sad for him. He had thought himself on the bottom of the ladder, [“Grace, I know you weren’t born to be with a man like me…”] and yet still, he tried, so, so hard to change it. It was then that she had seen something she didn’t think Tommy had any longer; it was then that that glimmer of hope and innocence which had been buried with his King’s uniform in France resurfaced momentarily, before she snatched it away with the truth of her duplicity.)

But as he descends the stairs now, a baby wrapped in pink, snug tightly in his arms, Grace sees no glimmer of innocence in his eyes. (Smug satisfaction, perhaps. It’s something, she thinks. Better than stone-cold apathy, than white-hot rage, than insurmountable drunken depression.)

At the corner of the bottom of the stairwell, Tommy spots her. It’s been months since he’s last seen her face or heard her voice and he can’t help but falter. His feet come to a sudden still, knees buckling slightly before he catches himself. For a split second, Grace genuinely believes he’ll drop the baby on her head of soft, blonde tufts.  

Grace scrutinizes him while all Tommy can do is stare back, unlit cigarette hanging limply from his lips.

She never really noticed how much his style improved over the years. Tommy wears a black, woolen waistcoat and trousers with a long, gray overcoat. There’s a neat royal blue tie centered between his point collar, smoothed at the edges. (Gone are the days of a tie-less, club collar propped stiffly over a pinstriped shirt.)

Lizzie Stark (Shelby, now, for all Grace knows) is draped in fine silks beside him, her pearls softly rattle as she shakes Tommy’s arm to wake him from his wordless stupor. He does nothing in reply, only cling tighter to the baby girl, as if he were nervous and ashamed about being seen with the product of his tryst with Lizzie.

Her attention is caught by the silver chain of his pocket watch, gleaming in the light of the sun that beams in through the large windows. It suddenly dawns on her that Thomas Shelby is here in this very edifice, with his clean cut hair and his pristine shoes, now a member of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. He’s no longer the man she met with the stained and overly-mended undershirt or the razor blade-stitched cap, both cautiously hidden from the world.

Hand hovering over his cheek, she feels a crackling between the gap. A gentle smile breaks through and she whispers, “I should have known you had bigger plans. You never did actually vow to just run the tracks and sell cars.”

Tommy starts to turn from her and Grace draws her other hand to him, so she’s cradling his face.

“It’s all right. I’m proud. You kept your other promise – you made a success of it, you did,” she says, wistfully.

There’s a cacophony of noises now. Polly has taken both the cigarette and the baby from Tommy’s grasp. Lizzie’s pearls rattle more audibly as she forcefully, now, shakes his arm while Finn’s orotund voice hollers his name, and Arthur multitasks between loudly swearing and dragging a heavy chair, screeching every inch it takes, from the hallway toward his catatonic brother.

And so she has to strain to hear him when he coyly retorts, lips turned upward into a slight smirk, “Still tryin’ to impress ya.”

A sound resembling something of a laugh escapes her mouth, before she averts her eyes from Tommy and looks at Charlie. He’s visibly shaken and frightened, observing the chaos before him with the clarity and logic of a four year old.

Grace inhales deeply. He’ll be all right. She knows his father would maim, kill, and die for him before anyone touched a hair on his head.

Suddenly, there’s a sensation of warmth beneath her breast, one that she hasn’t felt in ages.

She takes a gamble. Grace nears her palms toward Tommy’s cheeks and is surprised to feel flesh, slightly clammy. She runs a finger over the scar on his left cheek and is amazed when she finds it’s as rough and ragged as she remembered it.

Grace notes that Tommy’s eyes close briefly and she mimics him, as her lips approach his.

(The first time she died, the last thing she felt was the surgeon’s scalpel dig into her shoulder, pain radiating throughout her body before she slipped into unconsciousness.)

The final time she dies, the last thing she feels is her husband’s warm, moist lips against hers, pleasure pulsating through every nerve in her body.

This, she decides, is infinitely better.

 

Readers, congratulations if you made it to the end!

I'm so sorry for this mess and all the italicized blocks of texts, quotes, and brackets/parentheses. This fic got away from me and I just kept going with it.

Feedback appreciated!