❦Rose x James❦

Eva could send Bridget to handle his needs, but the witch said he was her burden and no one else’s. She said it with affection, with a small smile as she cleaned and cooked and made sure he hadn’t killed himself with his neglect of everything.

This time things had been worse, Johnny Dogs had to go see his elder children because one of them had had a baby and he, unlike his employer, was a present father. This had led to Tommy’s worst week yet, everything was filthy, the opium pipe somewhere lost on the floor with the books he hadn’t bothered to pick up, he couldn’t remember when he last ate and by the time his wife was done cleaning both the house and him it was evening and the rain their old injuries predicted had come.

“Where will you sleep?” he asks on freshly washed sheets and smelling of soap still. It’s a stupid question, he has only Johnny’s room that is fit for human use and they’ve been married for almost sixteen years, so he knew the answer to his question before he even asked it.

“With you, obviously.” The woman slipped out of the now soiled clothes and in the absence of her silky and enticing nightgowns, she simply kept the thin slip she always wore over her undergarments. She joined him under the covers and for a moment he could shut his eyes and pretend the last year had not happened. She turns on her side because the bare windows trigger her paranoia and remind her of the war that took everything from her, Tommy’s relieved she looks at them instead of him because he can only think of how he’s ruined everything.

They had finally gotten to the finish line; they had gotten everything they could hope for despite it all and then it all came crashing down with the death of Gabriel in their arms that afternoon. Gabriel, then John and finally, Arthur. The last one was the one loss that finished breaking the dam in his head let his madness take over. It was the first, and he prays the last, time he took the life of someone with his own blood.

Tommy has lost most of his old desires, the last time they had fucked had been months ago before the opium became a regular habit once more. Was it on the kitchen floor where his shattered psyche thought being in her could shut the door in his head or did he imagine it and they haven’t fucked since her birthday two days before Arthur lost his mind with the booze and drugs and Tommy’s life ended when he took Arthur’s life?

She has a perpetual smell of incense that even the cleaning products and plain soap he bathes with couldn’t get rid of. Much like the first time he craved her, it is his hand that reaches out tentatively as if the woman would disappear or die because he touched her. and just like then, his hand finds soft warm flesh. He savors the feeling of her skin, the life they lived together as his fingertips graze her arm as he has always done after a nightmare, marveling she’s still there with him.

Its an old dance, first the arm, then up her shoulder, her neck and down again tracing the map of her freckles until he reaches the slip’s thin strap on her shoulder once more. Just as it did that first time, and all the times when things were good, it brings an all too familiar hunger and heat the opium had practically killed when he came back from the war and had done the same these past months.

He knew the next steps, he always pressed himself close and kissed every freckle he’d traced while sliding that strap down and pulling the slip off her. There was a time she wore nothing to bed and neither did he, why bother with clothes when all they wanted was to be so entwined even the sharpest knives couldn’t pry them off each other? Then the children came and they had to wear clothes to bed, but still he knew how to love her and she him.

He wants that again. To be a living man with a home and a family instead of the husk left of the man who died with Arthur in that fucking bridge.

“It’s fine if you don’t.” she says when the next part of the dance does not come no matter how much he wanted it to and his hand freezes with the strap in between fingers and the gooseflesh he left in his wake just under it.

Tommy knows how often she relieves herself of his neglect. He can see the lights flicker in the witch’s parlor when she masturbates with that blasted toy that once short-circuited the entire house and he can hear and see her work herself into a frenzy while he lays alone in his cold bed about a mile away from his old life. He could go to her, he could go inside the house, sleep in his old bed, kiss his children before they went to school each day like he used to, but each time he thinks he’s ready to return, Arthur’s ghost returns asking him why he killed him that night.

For a brief moment he sees his brother’s blood on his hand and when he retracts it, the blood is gone. He’s mad, worse than before. That was why he cannot come back, that is why he is better off dead and that is why Eva should let him kill himself.

“You should find someone else; you shouldn’t waste yourself on me.” He hadn’t spoken a word in weeks and while rusty with disuse, his voice is still his and the words have all the meaning they need to have.

“Maybe I don’t want to.” She counters and pulls the strap back in place in a huff. “Besides we had a longer dry spell when Polly died. Once you stop with the opium like I keep telling you, everything will be better, mi vida.”

Mi vida, my life. Words he loved hearing from her and now feel as mocking as the flaccid cock that led him into more trouble than his head did now refusing to rise for the one woman who loves him. He is her death, hers and Gabriel’s and Arthur’s and Polly’s and the list never ends, it just grows like his agony.

It was late spring already, summer would come soon yet it was a bleak midwinter inside him. Still, she was right and while he knows better than to argue with a mind reader, one of them needed to put their foot down and stop her from wasting the rest of her life over a man who killed his own brother.

“It’s different this time. I didn’t kill Polly with my bare hands.” Because that was the truth of it, the door swung open and the madness came forth like a deluge because he had never taken the life of his own blood. He spared Michael just as Polly’s ghost asked only for Arthur’s madness to force him into something he never wanted to do. “Evie, you need to move on from us and let me go before I drag you down with me.”

“In sickness and in health, Tommy. I can’t let you kill yourself like this when I know I can help you.” She turns to look him in the eyes knowing he goes weak when her brown eyes bore into his because she’s the only person left that doesn’t back down when they disagree.

“I will leave and never come back, I will spare you my suffering and set you free in the only way you’re willing to accept if you come back here next week.” She was stubborn, but so was her. Besides he’s been planning how to end their marriage and save her from himself for the past two months.

“I hate you.” She says and turns once again to give him her back so he cannot see her cry. He was the one who gave her back her tears and now he had lost the right to see her shed them.

Its barely dusk when she walks the muddy mile back home and leaves the wedding band they chose together sixteen years ago on the nightstand. Tommy knows already his vindictive witch is going to make him eat his words.

Part of him hopes she does while the sane part of him tells him she shouldn’t. Either way, Tommy Shelby will regret he said those words no matter what the result is.

By the time Johnny returns, the whole of England seems to be buzzing with the news of his death and Eva’s return to the marriage market. Somehow the jealousy and possessiveness he always had can’t penetrate the dense fog of numb he’s lost in.

Eva stops coming, Johnny is forced to serve as the intermediary between them and Tommy loses count of the days even with the children coming and going each day. His life is now a bleak endless fog that never fucking ends.

Exactly as he wished it could be, he thinks to himself bitterly.

----

She cried over him, not those dry tears that just give her a headache that’s plagued her since she was twenty, but real tears like when she buried their youngest boy.

It was over, her marriage and life with Tommy had come to an end because he willed it so.

Then there’s that anger at having realized that her husband could not have the same capacity of enduring as her and would throw everything away instead of fighting like she’s supposed to do without fucking complaint. Made her wonder who decided women were the weaker sex when they have to have spines of iron to endure in this fucking life.

“So, its over?” Ada asks after Bridget comes and delivers a full report of the former Master of Arrow House while they went over the company and the problem Duke could become if left unchecked.

“Yes. If I had known this was how it ended, I would’ve saved myself the heartache and taken the first boat to Calais.” The witch lies as if the past sixteen years had not been worth all the heartache while wearing black for the love that didn’t die just because her ‘late’ husband said so. “Now its too late to start all over again.”

“Don’t say that, Polly was hitting fifty when she got with Aberama, and remember how happy she was for that time they were together.” Her former sister-in-law reminds her drinking her wine and pretending that she didn’t swear off love because the men who love her die.

But sure enough, Eva is forty years old when she meets him. The American Trade Envoy who will be the Nelson’s proxy in England after Jack Nelson was made to apologize for his antisemitism and dealing with the Nazis and removed from the cushy job his friend and namesake has taken to like a fish to water.

“Doesn’t it get confusing between the two of you?” Eva leans over to the blue eyed ginormous Yankee who made her feel small and dainty like she never could with Tommy.

“Only when we fuck the same people, but I don’t have to worry about that with you, do I?” he flirts shamelessly as they enjoy the bounty of contraband and her stash of champagne.

“No, I don’t fuck married men.” Her red smile comes naturally, it took a long time to get it back and strangely Jack O’Neil has an uncanny ability to make her forget her woe and yearn for a man. She’d sworn off men after Tommy, found a beautiful and young secretary to fill the emptiness and yet, here she was aching for a man she’s only known for a week.

“Well, good thing I’m divorced.” He whispers as if she didn’t know that already when she vetted him and discovered his extensive history as a lover…which led to the witch becoming inflamed with the desire of good cock less than a year after Tommy gave her that ultimatum.

The London townhouse somehow survives a long weekend of its mistress finding the relief in the company of her newly acquired lover. Neither person had any idea this would become something far more serious than a fling between two business partners.

“How dead is your husband?” he asks when he suggests meeting up in the country with the excuse of work.