#no beta read i die like tommy in lava

[angelaiswriting]

Shelbys | Tommy Shelby & sister!reader

[Photo by Henry & Co. from Pexels]

✏️ Pairing: none/Tommy Shelby and sister!reader

✏️ Summary: Sometimes, having a sister is hard. (Requested by Anonymous)

✏️ A/N: look at me using a cliché summary bc I don’t know how else to word it :) jokes aside, I truly hope you’ll enjoy this 💛 Requests close tonight (Sept. 30) at 23:59 UTC+2!

✏️ Beta-read by @sweetvengeancee

✏️ Warnings: kinda angsty ?

✏️ Word-count: 1,866

Sometimes the mere thought felt foreign even to Tommy’s mind and yet, it was true: there were far more dangerous things than his baby sister. There had been Kimber and his men, Sabini and his wops right after, and he had just got out half-defeated, if so one wanted to see John’s death, from a vendetta with Luca Changretta – those were dangerous people. Criminals of the worst sort, with bloodied hands and rotten souls – or that’s what they were, to put it with Linda’s words.

Y/N was… nothing compared to them, and yet, at the threshold of her eighteenth birthday, she managed to make her older brother want to reconsider his list of priorities.

To the untrained eye, she could pass just as Finn’s sister and not his twin, but those that had grown up with her knew what she was capable of. Pissing her two oldest brothers off – one of the points in the manual that should have come with her – was just the tip of the iceberg.

“D’you want to tell me what happened?” he groaned. If he looked at her – if he looked at her even just for one second – in the eye, he knew he wouldn’t get out of his office with the winning hand.

Instead, he focused on her trousers stained by mud and on her bloodied white striped shirt – both items she had more than likely stolen from Finn’s wardrobe. And the more his brows furrowed, the more he wondered how in hell she and Ada were sisters. How one had ended up in a nice Londoner house, with tailored clothes and high morals, and the other had remained trapped in Small Heath’s quicksands, with her teeth bared and her hands wrapped in tight fists.

Sometimes he thought he and Arthur had failed her upbringing, sometimes he thought that had just been her – and their – fate, for not even feared aunt Polly had managed to tame her while her brothers had been losing their sanity in France. She was a wilder spirit than the one all of theirs combined could form – untamable, temerarious, always fighting for what she deemed right – or what she deemed right in a particular moment – without fear of the consequences.

“Oi.” The syllable came out fainter than he had intended it to, but still sterner than he had thought himself capable of when it came to her – and to the fact that he had lost all hopes of turning her into the lady he had always thought she could one day be. “Y/N.”

The smirk that had already been plastered on her face forced a shiver to crawl down his spine the moment his eyes met it. Cold, almost crazy, with one corner of her mouth set higher than the other, she appeared scarier than any of his enemies. And her eyes… It was like staring at some demonic beast – sparkling, lively eyes, the pupil as tight as a pinhead in the office drowning in the daylight.

Tommy found himself unable to look away.

“I asked you a question, young lady.”

Her cackle seemed to ring in the air as it chilled the atmosphere of the room. It seemed to scratch at his eardrums like a cat and when she settled better against the back of the armchair she was sitting in, he wondered why the fuck Arthur had sent her to him and not to Pol.

“You haven’t called me ‘young lady’ in forever, Tom,” she laughed, voice as sweet as honey as all the rebellion boiling in her veins seemed to evaporate. “It never worked back then, what makes you think it’ll work now?” A pause, and then those much-hated words, for she knew nothing about their dick of a father: “You’re not dad.”

She always said those words with defiance in her eyes and in the tone of her voice. Her head always tilted up higher, her shoulders squared, and her grin opened wider to show her teeth. Bloodied, he noticed, but refrained himself from asking why, exactly, she had blood in her mouth.

“I might not be him,” he started slowly, voice low and deep, eyes burning as they remained trained on hers, “but I can still bend you over my knee and spank you like we did when you were a kid.”

She seemed to freeze for a moment as his words registered in her mind. Her gaze seemed to narrow, focusing on his eyes and his face to try and understand whether his were empty threats, and when she only found stoic determination, Tommy saw her swallow hard.

A smile stretched on his tired face when he realized she wasn’t going to bite back again and he allowed himself to relax against the seatback of his own office chair. “Good, let’s try again, then.” He took a drag from his cigarette and drew out the silence a little longer in the hopes that his sister would pick up on his serious mood. “What happened?”

The girl bit the nail of her thumb and for a moment – a brief moment Tommy Shelby still welcomed as a victory anyway –, she looked away. She shrugged her shoulders, then, eyes still trained on the library to his right. No shadows on her face, she looked younger than ever and for once - innocent. It was such a weird sight, for innocence boiled inside her like molten lava, fighting to become something more and yet, always failing, never solidifying.

She stuck out like a sore thumb. It had always been their thing – hers and Finn’s. Too young, too innocent, purer than he and the rest of his siblings had ever been. Even Ada had had the habit of chasing rats with a revolver in her right hand, but Y/N had never had that nature.

Too similar to their mum, or so Tommy found himself thinking of her more often than not. Even when she rebelled, it never was in a Shelby way. It was something typically hers, something he still had to understand – something he hadn’t managed to save her from. She had always looked up to them – to him and John and Arthur, a little less to Ada –, had always wanted to be their equal, to be part of the business – and it had never mattered that Pol had always tried to make a well-behaved woman out of her, for it had never worked.

“Did you dress up again?” he asked when she didn’t speak. He pointed an accusing finger to her clothes – there was no need to, though, she knew what he was talking about.

“Aye.”

“Did you catch his fists?”

She shrugged. “And he caught mine.” Fearless defiance in her eyes – Tommy knew that would be her demise one day.

“Jesus Christ, Y/N, we’ve fucking talked about this!” He regretted putting out his cigarette the moment the burning tip met the cold crystal of the ashtray.

“No, you have talked about this,” she retorted. She was calm, steady, always looking at him, never breaking eye contact. “And I listened, that day. Doesn’t mean I did what you wanted me to. Why does Finn get to cut and I have to stay behind, brewing tea with Polly and listening to whatever bat-shit crazy bullshit Linda says?”

“Because-”

“I am not John!” Her yell startled both of them and just outside the door of Tommy’s office, both heard Arthur’s muffled fuck.

They stared at each other, crazed eyes boring into crazed eyes as the air seemed to boil.

“I am not John.” She repeated those words once, voice much quieter but just as cold. “I am not dead, don’t treat me like I was.”

“You will end up dead if you don’t learn how to behave.”

She looked at him, exhaled loudly from her nose as her face contorted into a grimace. “I will end up dead if you keep on treating me like I was a child. Who did you call to snitch for you and give you intel about those boys up in the north? Who did Arthur send to London with one of your boys to keep an eye on your enemies at that soirée? If I’m not mistaken, Ada brought me to the tailor to get an evening dress to wear at that party. And now me, roughing up some fucking douche for the shit he said he’d do to me in an alley is the problem? That’s how I get killed?”

Tommy bit the bullet – even swallowed it to stop himself from making things worse.

“Eh, Tom? Tell me: is this how I die? By teaching a boy a lesson with Isaiah covering my back? Or do I have greater chances of ending up in my fucking grave the next time you send me to do your dirty job? Will Sabini or one of his men recognise me the next time you send me to London? Will they kill me?” She was leaning forward on her chair, her nails digging into the cushioned armrests as she stared at him, trying to pull an answer out of him with the sheer intensity of her gaze.

The clock on the mantelpiece ticked the seconds away as he kept silent.

He didn’t know if Arthur was still outside his office, for after that quiet fuck, he hadn’t managed to pick up any other sound. It was a split-moment thought, but he found himself wishing his brother was still out there, eavesdropping on his conversation with his sister.

“That’s different,” he eventually replied. Tense in his chair, he stared as Y/N rolled her eyes and let herself fall back against the seatback. “You’re never alone when I send you somewhere.”

“I was, in Liverpool,” she retorted. “I was alone there. You didn’t give me back-up, you didn’t have any spy other than me, there.”

“Liverpool was safe.”

“Was it, though, Tom?” she insisted. “Was it really safe?”

“You were safe in London.”

Her laughter chilled him to the bone. “You sent me there with that Eddie you took in two months before that night. And he doesn’t even know how to aim a gun to this day!”

Another bullet – another bite. Enemy fire, that’s how it felt. Enemy fire in an open field, under a burning sun – and he knew she was right.

“How did you go from skipping school and kissing boys to clobbering people?” The question came out quiet, almost shy in the silence of his office. Lost in his thoughts, Tommy probably hadn’t even meant to truly give it a voice.

“Gradually,” she answered. “And I still do that – I skip church days when Pol wants me to go with her and I still kiss boys. But it was you, Tom: you taught me how to dress up as Finn, you taught me how to shoot a gun. And Arthur showed me how to throw a punch to defend myself.”

“It was never meant to end like this.”

“We are Shelbys, Tommy. How else was it meant to end?”

I am not super proud of this, but feedback is always welcome (it’ll help me improve) ❤️

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