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basilone · 4 months

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I am summoning another fic from the groupchat vault today while I work on the prompts left in my inbox. 😊It's a little look at what the war has been like for Soviet captain Tatiana Petrova, only told through the lens of my god-chosen AU instead of the main fic this time. My fellow Speirs fans might enjoy the very clear nods to him here. 😉 As always, the AU is written in such a way that you do not need to know more beyond "certain gods choose certain soldiers, Speirs is chosen by War" — I strive to make my fics as accessible as possible! Warnings: mentions of graphic violence and death. (We're in Stalingrad for this one, after all.)

She’s losing the city.

It’s a knowledge that has sat in her chest for at least two barely-dark nights now. She’s felt the rush of it pound through her skull with every thunderclap of a bomb strike. There’s not a lot left in this rubble – skeletons of houses that harbor the decaying and the newly dead alike, gaping maws of craters where roads should never have ended – save for that feeling that it’s still a city, sprawled out from where she stands, stone and dirt as far as the eye can see.

And it isn’t hers to lose. Cities don’t do that. They don’t belong to anyone. It doesn’t matter that she knows every street of this section she’s been allotted. Doesn’t matter that she knows exactly how many steps she needs to take every time to move past the tallest skeleton house where death tends to loom in windowseats. (It’s forty-three steps, just like the year she thinks they’re in now, and every time she tries she knows that she’s only safe on step twenty-five when she can duck behind the remains of a bench.)

This city isn’t hers, but it might as well be. Who else remains here but she, allowing the rats to swarm her feet without screeching about it the way she might’ve done in some other life? (Where the sun was not a traitor and Sasha’s smile was not a photograph.) Who else draws breath in this city between one shelling and the next, between one shot and the other, between the tank that cannot move its turret and the carcasses of good intentions? (She’s not alone. There are others here. Sometimes, the streets ring out with song before the silence comes and chokes the air from her lungs.)

It doesn’t feel like it’s hers to keep. They fight for every room in every house. They fight for every street corner. For every alleyway. For every access point below the city, for every vantage point above it, for every route to the water that does not end with blood. They’re losing, they must be, because she’s in new rooms every time she blinks and she’s forgotten the taste of crystal clear water by now. (And they’re not losing, they’re not, because Katya’s exhale is sharp in the morning air and not a single bullet goes to waste. They’re not losing, they can’t, because Sergey moves rock and root to clear their path and then obstructs the way for those who’re following them. They are not losing this city, not while they are here, not while they share whatever food they find and rig the remains to be a trap for the hungry that come after they’ve gone.)

Lately, she’s been functioning on a breath and a prayer.

She’s tried to curb the latter. Tried to stomp it out, to quench its finicky flame, because there’s not a whole lot that gets done with prayer at all. Whatever she’s doing to it – protect us, she snarls, let us live – probably would be classified as demand instead of prayer. She bares her teeth the way wolves do, snap and lock around the panic of inhale-exhale, and offers her throat to the unseen and unheard. May you take me if you think me coward, she seethes, opening her enemy from sternum to throat just like the rabbits Kolya used to skin, but you owe me this fucking city and its fucking peace at this point.

She does not believe in bargaining chips. Does not buy into a truce, or a standoff, or any of the other things they call when they’re all too exhausted and night comes with too swift a foot. She doesn’t think she can cut a deal with a god at all, but there’s only so many breaths she’s got before the panic hits. (She knows it’s that. Can feel the fear of it tremble in her fingertips as she wrenches her knife free. Can feel the huff and puff of it in her lungs, too quick, too constricting. She doesn’t look at the glazed-over eyes of the dead and dying. Can’t meet them, not with the wellspring in the back of her mind that dares her to look and see come and see hear the squalling babe’s cry thunk boom splash –)

She’s alone now, or as alone as someone can be when they know exactly where their allies are and the crudely-drawn map before her tells her more of the story than she’d cared to know. There’s just her in this room, in this fucking cavern the enemy created for itself from the rubble of her houses in her city, and her throat’s parched with a scream that renders her belly full to bursting. (There have been rats here, too, and they’ve eaten and eaten and feasted long before her boots crushed the bones underfoot.)

She’s alone and her breath won’t leave her lungs.

Her hand bleeds around the rock she used to break through the glass casings. (Who puts glass casings in a war? Who makes the glass survive the shatter-bang of bullets?) There’s red drip-dropping onto the parchment, onto the paper and vellum and all the other things they used to tell stories on. Some of her strength is bleeding out of her as she stares at lines she does not understand, as a language she only knows to speak in garbled wartongue glares up at her from note after note.

There’s her tongue here, too, older than their scraps of paper. And thus it came to pass, she squints in the dim light, that the ancients revealed themselves from sea and mountain, hungering in the passageways…

“Fuck that,” she rasps out, recognizing the myth for what it is. Tucks the offending parchment in the same pouch where she keeps her gunpowder. If it survives, it will pass to Kolya who alone knows the chaos that resides within such matter. “Ghost stories. Fairytales. Sad lies to tell our children.”

There’s anger in her belly, coarse and seething, which twists in her lap like a viper’s pit and gleams darkly whenever she allows it to meet a semblance of light. Where will they reveal themselves now that this city is about to fall?

She blinks at the dark that sweeps into her space. Stares at the night that unfolds from the corners of the room, where the dead have met the living earth, and scatters all the light away from itself. There’s dirt in its scent, heavy with muck and grime and something utterly deathless that makes her drop her stone onto the floor. There are shards of dust in her wound that begin to bite and snap at her skin like the embers of a wildfire. Like termites eating their own. There’s ash on her tongue.

She blinks at the dark. The dark blinks back.

“Here,” it says. They say, for they are many. He says, for he is just one man. “Here will I reveal myself.”

“Vyyti, uyti,” she snarls back, voice cracking on the demand of get out, leave. Her eyes widen in a refusal to close for the encroaching dark. “You are not welcome.”

His head tilts. His eyes carry pinpricks of light that should not be warm, except they are and he must think her stupid if he thinks she will follow that. (There is no safety in the light. The light gets you killed. Fire murders, hope dies, the flicker of a flame is only good when attached to something that can raze the enemy to the ground. These things she knows. These things she has learned. She will not follow.)

“You called for me.”

He makes it sound simple. She doesn’t think it is. She huffs. Rolls her eyes for good measure. Tastes the iron twang of blood on her tongue when her head meets the stone wall behind her and she bites down on her lip to stop the dark from changing the colors around her to endless black.

“Any god, any relief,” she spits out, aiming the blood at him despite the gap between them. “Anything that lets me live.” Her laughter is sharp, biting, barking like that of the rabid dogs that have overtaken the river’s second bank. “You must be something desperate, nyet?”

“Not quite.”

Her eyebrow raises. “Everyone here is.”

“I am not everyone.”

“You are here, also,” she points out, rising to her feet soon after. The bones snap and crunch beneath her heel. “Desperate,” she hisses, viper’s venom coating her tongue in earnest now, “tricky, false. Preying on dead and dying, look at you, shadow to hopelessness. What kind of god is that, hm? What are you?”

“I thought you do not believe in gods, Tatiana Ilyinichna.”

“So did I.”

(And she doesn’t, still, though she’s seen the shining ones amid the enemy. She doesn’t, still, though this creature before her speaks her name like a caress and she has not given him such privilege. She doesn’t, still, because to believe is to know the war is lost.)

“I am here,” he says again.

“Congratulations. Now leave.”

“Not…”

“Not…?”

She stares him down, this man with darkness flitting around him, this creature with eyes like midnight, this abomination dressed in a soldier’s garb. Her blood drips from her hand. She’s certain at least one other wound reopened. The burns she sustained from that ill-fated run-in with that tank itch and scrape against her uniform. The hair on the back of her neck stands upright the longer she looks at him. Raises against her as though she were a cat being stroked wrong, as though it means to warn her.

Her sense of danger fled this city long ago. There is just fear now, stark in this room, stark everywhere she walks, and there’s the act of doing.

She walks up to this one, whom all the vellums around her call a god, and aims for its throat.

“There you are,” he says, from beside her this time, because her fist meets air and he moves the way shadows do before the midday sun eats them whole. “There is your fight.”

There’s hunger there, ravenous in the familiar syllables that flood his tongue and coat her language with something utterly foreign, and something that she thinks would’ve sounded like pride if Kolya or Sasha had spoken it. (Kolya never speaks these days. Sasha cannot speak, though she thinks she used to hear his voice in the trees before they burned too.)

“Fuck you,” she replies conversationally, turning and balling her fist anew. “I am not yours to judge.”

“No, you are not. You are mine to want.”

She steps back. Snaps like an animal that knows it is about to be wounded. “Gods don’t want. They take.”

“So let me,” he responds, smile gleaming like hers did in the mirror before she watched herself kill five grown men and a sniveling boy. “Let me take.”

“I do not even know what you are.”

“Don’t you? You, who sung me to life the moment you could speak? You, who took three pills every day to be rid of me?”

“I will eat them as soon as I find them,” she promises. Her voice does not waver, though of course she knows. She knows him. Knows this dark as well as she knows the sound of her own pulse. “You will fall back into shadow. You will not be in me.”

“I expect no less from you, Tatusha.”

“Do not speak that name!”

“Tatiana,” he corrects, so smoothly it is as though he has never uttered Sasha’s name for her at all. “I know your choices. It will only be for this time. For this battle, such as it is.”

“We are losing. I am losing my city.”

He inclines his head. “For now.”

“And you can change it?”

“No.” A beat. An offered hand. “You can. If you are, ah, something desperate.”

He sings in her blood. The dark swallows her, drapes itself around her shoulders like a second coat, turns and enters her wounds until she gasps and her hand jerks upward of its own volition. There’s nothing else to be in this world but desperate. There’s nothing else that remains of her, such as the fear is, such as her heart is also.

Something desperate.

Her hand closes around his. Around theirs. Around hers.

“Good,” says the dark-eyed woman with a voice that sounds like the rush of wings. “Let us begin.”

(Two years and some time to this day, she finally meets the man. He is tall like most of these Americans are, though far more unsmiling than those he is surrounded by, and he fills the room before she turns to greet him. His too-dark eyes barely linger on the patches of blood that still coat her uniform, nor does he seem surprised by the state of her boots or the absence of most of her hair. There’s something of her in the grace of his movements.

She’s alive through them. And she, being who she is, summons her desperation one more time and gives him war.)

#band of brothers #oc: tatiana #ronald speirs #formvoidseries #basilonefic

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hazelwest1980 · 4 years

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#beforeandafter #bench #windowseat #looksbetter #improvements #littlebitatatime #home #decore #decorate #itsreallyforthecats https://www.instagram.com/p/CDSKYscjl_H/?igshid=1f7trt4yvupnx

#beforeandafter #bench #windowseat #looksbetter #improvements #littlebitatatime #home #decore #decorate #itsreallyforthecats

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diy-and-crafts-awesomenes · 4 years

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DIY built-in bookshelves with a bench seat tutorial printable step-by-step instructions with measurements worksheet. #buildingplans #builtins #windowseat | Like My Facebook Page >> https://ift.tt/2jty87z ... Saved from - https://ift.tt/3ejlYbr

#DIY #CRAFTS #diy projects #recipes #beauty #tips #followME

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tommyplum · 4 years

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- i am but dust and ashes (the world was created for me) | tommy/alfie, taboo au for @boundinshallows’ sholomons prompt fest 2019

The two of them are finding each other again, capricious, dishonest, possessive and desperate to affect the other.

notes: the prompt was for a taboo au, with tommy shelby in place of zilpha as the half-sibling. my changes are that alfie’s mother is jewish and not first nations, and he went to the west indies instead of africa. content warning for half-sibling incest. - maggie

Looking at it from the outside, anybody would say that it's Alfie who took advantage of close quarters and easy access. Alfie who was the corruptor, who was the viper in the branches, who was the forbidden fruit of knowledge. Looking at it from the inside, Alfie just might say the same things himself.

Tommy knows better.

"That brother of yours--"

"Half brother."

Grace's mouth pinches for just a moment and then she sweeps on with her statement, determined to have her say before Tommy switches his focus to something else. The opium makes him tangential at the best of times and Grace knows, by now, to take advantage of anything in his eyes that approaches lucidity. "Half brother," she spits, and Tommy's lips twitch as he considers tutting at her, pointing out how unladylike her vitriol is. He doesn't do it. He raises his eyebrows and slowly tilts his head from one side to the other with exaggerated interest in what she's saying and Grace looks furious but she continues.

"Your half brother may intend to keep you from what you should have rightfully inherited but we are not without means through which to strike at him, Thomas, we are not as helpless as he would have you believe, with his solicitor and his evil looks and the way that he uses those rumors about what he did in the godless West Indies as his cloak and shield." Grace crosses herself and Tommy follows the motions of it in the air with the tip of his nose, kittenlike. It amuses him to give his more pixilated impulses their head when Grace is being avaricious, or pious, which tend to go hand in hand more often than not. Religion and money share a sacrament in her soul.

"You, Grace, would have made an extremely effective Popess."

She makes a frustrated sound, one slender hand clenching along with it. "You want him to rob us, then?" Grace demands, nostrils flaring. "Is that what you want from him, Tommy? Or is it something else."

Calling him tommy is a signifier of how angry she is; Grace stopped calling him Tommy two days before their wedding, switching without reason, explanation, or discussion to only calling him Thomas. He'd almost not known who she was fucking on their wedding night when she kept telling this Thomas person to bloody well choke her properly.

His skin's suddenly crawling and Tommy stands abruptly, chair scraping across the flagstone floor as he's dropping the last inch of his still-lit cigarette into his cold tea. "I'll pay him a visit, then, shall I?" he says as though it's just that easy to bring all of this to a satisfying resolution, as though all you need is to be Tommy Shelby and to ask, and Grace feels the dismissal. She doesn't show it, though; she reminds Tommy of who she is by answering with a small, marble-hard smile and says,

"--kiss your half brother hello for me, Thomas. Once you've done greeting him for you."

---

Polly's the one who greets Tommy at the door, all folded arms and raised eyebrows, and Tommy holds back a sigh as he sweeps off his hat and attempts -- vainly -- to peer past her into the house where he'd grown up.

"He's not in," Polly says, making absolutely no attempt to sell the boldfaced lie. Tommy can take it or shove it, but he chooses a third option:

"I've got nowhere else to be at today, Pol, ay, come on, Polly. At least give us a cup of tea to get the chill out, before you send me packing. I'll catch my fucking death out here."

--Tommy pushes it.

Because if there was anything that he and Alfie had learned, growing up with Aunt Polly, it was that she had a soft spot for the audacious, the bold, for those who took chances and even if they got caught or fell flat on their faces, still put on a brave front and tossed their heads, holding them high. Tommy holds his chin up as he steps forward and Polly swings open like a door to let him inside.

Back into the house of Alfie Solomons Senior: who is now buried in a grave as shallow as a butter dish, and Tommy feels the past engulf him whole.

===

it used to be

The attic was where they'd played as children for hours and hours, making every nook and cranny of the space their own. Tommy liked to wriggle beneath the window bench and with a thick lead pencil would draw star people (the five-pointed kind, head and limbs) to represent himself and Alfie and Aunt Pol and Father on the underside of the wooden seat, with one different star (the six-pointed kind, like Alfie wears on a chain around his neck) stuck into corners to represent Alfie's mother, The Mad Jewess. That was how she was referred to and Tommy never questioned it. He never used any star, ordinary or otherwise, to stand in for his own mother; she'd died as he arrived in the world and that was the last business he'd had with her in this life.

Alfie didn't bother to find out what his brother was doing those times, content to let Tommy be strange all on his own while Alfie pondered over new schemes and plans and games to entertain them both. His games were byzantine, daring, ritualistic, and even when they'd bothered to try and include other children, none of them had ever caught on. Only Tommy could be relied upon to fully commit to Alfie's wild cult of unfettered and hedonistic play.

And (to perhaps be expected), the games had evolved as they'd grown and their attic space became even more sacrosanct, Polly banished from it entirely with promises that they wouldn't let mildew fester and rats congregate. Because when they were teenagers and Alfie lay on his back on the floor, gazing up at the underside of the window seat and the dark strokes of Tommy's constellation of family while Tommy's dark hair drew strokes in the air as he bobbed his wet mouth onto Alfie's cock, the world belonged to the two of them and nobody else.

"There's five of you, Tommy," Alfie said, his voice dragging and drowsy even as he kicked one heel along the floor to raise a hip, angling his prick against the inside of Tommy's cheek until his younger brother firmly shoved him back down again. "I've counted, yeah, five of you of these star-people, and there's only three of me. Why is that, love?" He reached down with one hand -- the other still tracing along the galaxy that Tommy'd illustrated -- and wrapped his thumb into strands of straight black hair until Tommy tugged off, smacking his lips, annoyed to be stopped.

"What?" he demanded loudly, but then answered anyhow since he'd heard the question. "Five of me because I was the one drawing it, wasn't I? And as the autobiographer and artist, I got to represent myself as many times as I wanted." Tommy pinched one of Alfie's thighs, drawing a laughing rumble from his remorseless victim. "Three of you because even one is too much. One is more than enough."

"Three because neither maths nor diplomacy is your strong suit." Alfie shoved out from under the windowseat, sitting up, his thick rosy cock curving damply into the crease of his thigh as Tommy kneeled back to rest against his heels. "Come here, sweetheart. Let me teach you your numbers."

Alfie's eyes, a sharper yet more shadowy blue than Tommy's, were stream-clear in the sunshine coming in through the big round window, his smile spreading the thick dark red of his lips across his face like raspberry jam. Tommy licked his own lips and moved forward on his knees, one hand wrapping around the length of Alfie's cock as he leaned in, wanting kisses; but Alfie grabbed Tommy's face in both hands and ... spat on him.

"Ah--" Tommy gasped, but then another hot gobbet of spit hit his face. And one more, against his open, suddenly ravenous mouth, before Alfie pressed his tongue against the frothing wetness and kissed Tommy, deep and hard, sucking and biting at him before pulling panting back. Still holding Tommy's face, Alfie groaned,

"--three times, to keep you safe from the evil eye, remember that, Tommy.The magical properties of spittle and doing something three times over, which you already know somewhere in that flashing minnow brain of yours, because you drew me three times over, eh? Now --" Alfie let go and sprawled back onto the bare wooden floor, propped on his elbows as he parted his thighs, "--be a good boy, go on, and fuck me."

Alfie was in a mood to push that day, because he growled and groaned and shouted as Tommy climbed onto him and drove his cock into his half brother's arse over and over, whipcord muscles shaking with exertion and youthful arousal, desperate to come and at the same time wanting to hold out, draw it out for Alfie's sake.

(And, oh, and his own; because Alfie was a sight to stir the senses when he was being fucked and filled, his succulent fat lips dark and swollen as he moaned, eyelashes spiked damp with sweat and salt, the column of his throat thick and strained, and no lover who Tommy Shelby was ever destined to have in his grown life would compare quite favourably to that.)

At the dinner table that night Polly's dark gaze travelled between them while she held her cup of tea in both hands, and said with waxen-heavy portentousness to Alfie, "--We've all noticed, Alfie, just how well you take care of your little brother. If you're not careful, others will start to remark on it. Hmmm?"

She didn't look at Tommy, only at Solomons Junior, and Alfie's throat worked soundlessly for a moment before he said, "Let them remark on whatever it is they think they know. I guarantee, Pol," Alfie cut with renewed vigor into his chop, smearing it lavishly with enough horseradish to make Tommy cough at the thought, "that the truth is somewhere far beyond their comprehension."

The braggadocio of this comment made Polly smile along the edge of her cup. But her expression went fixed, static, when Tommy tossed the last crust of his bread down on his plate and stood, saying with a casual coldness, "I'm the one takes care of him, only I never get any credit because I'm a second son. And it's thankless work. Let them mention that, when they talk."

Alfie's silverware clinked down against his plate in Tommy's wake, and Polly's cup provided counter-harmony tinking down against her saucer, and Tommy smiled, flatly, as he mounted the stairs to his room and left them behind. He couldn't say why it felt so good to leave Alfie stranded on the shoals of ignominy alone, or why he kept right on screwing Alfie, opening his own legs for Alfie, only to then repudiate him afterwards and refuse to acknowledge their fevered sampling of each others' bodies. But Tommy did. He crashed into Alfie to begin with and then once it was over and their blood was cooling he retreated further every time, until one day -- it was Alfie who retreated.

All the way across the fathomless oceans to the other side of the world.

===

"There's your tea," Polly says, pouring the cup full to the brim where it sits in its saucer on the kitchen table. If she thinks that's going to wrongfoot Tommy Shelby, then she's assumed too much; he's not that far different from the strange child he'd been, especially when he has some of the poppy in his blood to ease the way and null social convention that might keep his instincts in check.

He leans forward with his hat still in his hands and, stare fixed on Pol as hers is stuck on him, noisily slurps scalding-hot tea from the cup until it's not lapping at the rim anymore. And then Tommy points at the cone of sugar on the counter behind Pol and says, "Sugar, please, Aunt Pol, and milk if you've got it."

She goes still and her mouth purses, eyes flashing in indignation. "If we've got it! Yes, even here at the other end of the city and all society from their Highnesses Tommy and Grace Shelby, we do have milk in, now and again."

"Only not at the moment."

Both of them turn their heads towards the stairs as Alfie comes down them, his head leaned back so Tommy can see the grey of his eyes, almost rolling beneath the broad brim of Alfie's black hat. He looks … Tommy can't say he looks good. He looks ploughed through and harrowed, thick bottom lip carrying the entire freight of all of Alfie's display of emotion, a long scar drawn over his left eye like a permanent tearstain. The thought is laughable. This man descending the stairs in a rolling heavy gait is a stranger to weeping, Tommy can tell that much.

"We've not got milk in, at the moment," Alfie repeats, walking over to stand at Tommy's shoulder -- or against Tommy's shoulder, is more it, and the knuckles of one hand drag a shiver down Tommy's spine. If Tommy just turned his head the right way, he'd be able to slant his mouth over the crest of Alfie's hip, through his camphor-smelling shirt. "Not for you, Tommy. Nor sugar, neither. You get enough of those things at home, don't you?"

"After your visits to the sugar cane fields of Barbados and Trinidad," Tommy says, turning his face up so he doesn't need to think about his tongue against the ridge of Alfie's hip, "I'd think that you'd be absolutely running with the stuff, Alfie. Hasn't it made you any sweeter?"

Polly gets up with her cigarette trembling between her fingers and leaves the room without another word, although Tommy can hear doors opening and shutting, retreating further and further into the house. Alfie hasn't moved, hasn't barely breathed, hasn't taken his seawater stare from Tommy.

"If you came here for … cream," Alfie says, rolling the word around his mouth before lacquering it further, "...and for sugar," he pauses to let weight and innuendo settle, toffeelike, "then I can offer them to you only if you ask, Tommy. Nicely."

Tommy hrrrms in his throat and then opens his mouth, and Alfie puts his thumb against Tommy's lips to stop him. "On your knees, pet," Alfie says, "just like you used to."

"I'm a married man, Alfie," Tommy tries, just so he can say that he did. And perhaps so he can see the look of contempt snarl across Alfie's face briefly as he takes his hand back, there and gone, coiling into the hinge of one jaw where Tommy stares at that tension in fascination as he continues, "I've come to talk about this proper. Civilized."

"I lost all my civility somewhere in the kala pani," Alfie says, and if Tommy doesn't understand the unfamiliar words he does understand the deep ocean depths of Alfie's eyes, the haunting that floats to the surface to bob there, circling his irises. "Along with a great deal more. You don't want to know, Tommy. How dark and black it is down there. Enough to make all the stars you've ever seen disappear, forever."

"Alfie," Tommy says, and reaches up before he can help himself, to put one fingertip at the very corner of Alfie's lower lip and press, pull, disfigure. "What happened to you out there on the ocean? In those foreign lands? Why've you come back like this?"

Alfie's eyes map Tommy's face as Tommy says, very very quietly: "...why did you come back at all?"

Everything goes dead still between, around them, and Alfie says, "That, dear brother, is a very strange way indeed to entreat me for the inheritance you believe you are owed." He steps back. "It was Grace, yeah, who bade you come? Who spun you tales of terrible Alfie, wicked Alfie, sailing back from the gold-washed shores of tropical islands with riches lining his pockets and an eye to cheat you of what our father left to support you in this life, which is nothing, Tommy. He left you nothing. And my riches are not of the sort your Grace would welcome."

Alfie shoves his hands into his pockets and plucks at them like he's tearing feathers from a dead fowl, turning them inside out one after the other, and Tommy watches with his lip curling in a shudder as salt pours out of every one. Alfie used to carefully heap little piles of salt into the corners of rooms, warning Tommy not to disturb them, so that they could ward off demons and evil spirits. When Alfie had left on the tall ship that took him to his damned equatorial destination, Tommy had discovered some of those piles still remaining in secret corners where Polly hadn't found and swept them gone. He'd sprinkled bits of that salt into his food for three and a half months before it had run out. Some of the salt falling out of Alfie's waistcoat pocket showers along the table and into Tommy's tea and his mouth waters, instantly.

He stands up and gathers the folds of his long black coat around him, swallowing his saliva and the taste of acrid dust, nostrils pink-rimmed and flaring rabbitlike. "We're not without means through which to strike at you," he says, the parroting of Grace's words lending his voice a sing-song quality that causes Alfie's lips to curl in derision. He knows those aren't Tommy's words. He knows the inside of Tommy's mouth like nobody else ever has.

"Then strike, Thomas," Alfie murmurs, the taunt sensual and subterranean, and his fingers move much faster to unbutton the only two that are holding his waistcoat closed, to spread open the shirt below to expose his chest, where Tommy can almost see the thumping of his heart. Before he knows what he's doing Tommy reaches forward and gathers the cambric in his hands, bunching it, ripping it, leaving it hanging like old lace from Alfie's heavy shoulders.

"The next time I see you," Tommy says as he quicksteps away, circumnavigating Alfie's unmoving figure, "I'll be collecting my inheritance. All of what's owed me. You know what that is."

The shirt slips further down Alfie's shoulders and Tommy catches a glimpse of a strange scarred mark on his muscled back: a hand, fingers together, the thumb and pinkie curled stylistically. Blue ink casting it ghostly, frozen.

"I will see you before that," Alfie says. Ghostly. Frozen. Tommy tastes salt riming the sides of his tongue as he shuts the door.

---

The attic room is where Alfie's lived since his return, and Pol ventures up when she damn well feels like, now. It scarcely matters. If Alfie wants sex he gets it by his own hand, and Polly has a seventh sense for that sort of depravity (her sixth having been entirely used up and burned down by what her two charges had gotten up to in all their growing years, Alfie knows).

Alfie curls his freezing-cold toes as he leans closer to the fire, baring his charcoal-stained teeth at the flames as they leap blue-white, eating the treats of camphor that he flings into them. Half naked, he feels the tightness of cobalt jab molassie paint dried on his skin and lets a mouthful of thick sweet wine flood his mouth before spitting it out in a spray.

His mother's face looms at the back of the fire, her posy lips reddened with the syrupy wine, her eyebrows dark wings over searching grey eyes. The blue in Alfie's eyes, the short wedged nose, the muscled set of his shoulders and hips, those come from the long lost Solomons Senior; far more than Alfie ever wanted to inherit from his father, and worth far less than what he'd rightfully expected.

The fire spits back at him and Alfie leans into the sparks, letting them kiss searing against his skin. "I think I have your heart as well, Mother," he tells the flames and her face, her searching eyes that take him in and weigh him and find him wanting. "I have your heart but no soul to speak of, for He had none to give me, not before Bedlam and not after it."

Cackling, the fire dances against the back of the hearth and Alfie picks up his bowl and cradles it in both hands, turning it as his lips murmur aloud the Aramaic script that circles its wide mouth. The names of angels that he can only believe in if he thinks of them as magic rather than faith, the taste of clay and shockwaves of horror, an old old craft that his mother interred to his flesh before she died. "Be you bound, sealed," Alfie mumbles, "countersealed, yes, exorcised, hobbled, silenced…."

His voice is an ugly croak like this, and Alfie can swear he feels hundreds of shedim climbing into his mouth past teeth and tongue to rasp at the insides of his throat to claw their way down through his entrails to make their homes there, searing little demons all seething and scrambling over each other, yes, scrambling and rattling their chains, crying out in foreign tongues, waiting in his belly to be vomited onto unfamiliar shores.

"I left you," Alfie says, doubling over so far that his forehead hovers only a few inches above the floor, heat of the fire making rings at the top of his scalp. "In Port-of-Spain, I left you, and I drank your chenopodium and I swallowed your semen and I wore your jumbie beads and your red thread around my throat and around my wrists, and that is where you belong, all you monsters and mazikim, that is where I left you. Buried below the tamarind trees with blue glass to keep you from rising again. You don't belong here."

His voice has ascended to a roar on the last sentence, reverberating through the attic rafters and back down and then the sound all sucks into the fireplace, rippling through the flames and turning them white-blue as the breath catches in Alfie's chest; the moment stretches, pulling out like ropes and ropes of intestine never-ending and gory and miasmic, and then oxygen hits him in the lungs and he wheezes, lips pale.

The fire is only a fire.

It is England.

He is himself. Motherless, fatherless, beset in every cell of his body by the gibbering of demons, but himself.

Alfie rubs his hand over his mouth and chin a few times, letting his beard and moustache prickle his palm. He makes sure his bowl is set aside safely, and then he begins a different ritual, separate from the one to quieten shedim. This one is even more personal than that.

---

The strokes of Tommy's pen are firm and sure as he writes his letter, at his desk, the cold sunlight filtering through the air against his paper. Their whole house is cold and everything that enters it turns chilled. Grace has decorated it in grey and blue-grey and lavender-grey and Tommy, bird bones to begin with, feels the grey in each one of them. The coals heaped in the indigo-grey tiled fireplace must still be giving off heat, though, because Tommy feels it against his hip. And slowly creeping up his side, and down along his leg, and then, he clenches his fingers on his pen because that heat is circling around his cock like a mouth.

"Alfie," Tommy groans.

"Tommy," Alfie mutters.

He curls both hands into loose fists, stacked on each other, and rotates them like he's pulling on a rope or something else, something better, dipping his head to waggle his tongue into the tight circle of his fist. Licking and lapping, pushing and widening, tasting the heated skin, fucking his hand with his tongue.

Tommy falls forward against his desk half-risen out of his chair, hands splayed out on the wood with his fingers in stiff claws, eyes wide and darting as if Alfie's form will materialize if he can only focus his vision properly. And he moans, sluttish protest, as his hips push closer to the edge of the desk and he spreads himself out, face pressed against the varnish as his legs spread wider. Tommy would pray, but he doesn't believe in Grace's God and has none of his own to petition.

Finished with his work, Alfie squeezes his fists tight and then opens his arms, twisting them as he holds them out to his sides, muscles swelling and strained as he leans back, and back, hips canting forward--

--Tommy gives a hoarse yowling cry, bucking against the desk as he feels himself filled, pinned down, unable to do anything but take it. Hard and precise strikes that hit deep inside him, his own cock thick and needy; the whole desk rattles from the phantom force of it and the inkwell topples over, streaming down, the peacock blue that Tommy favours (so frivolous! So strange, for a man, Grace had bemoaned) streaking into the crow-black of his hair and painting along the side of his face, and

and Alfie grunts as the small of his back screams from the pressure of his posture on his knees on the floor, bent so far back that all he can see is the starlings in the rafters of his attic, heat corseting his hips as his prick slaps against his belly and he bites his lip, tasting blood as he baptizes himself in come and feels the

heat and wetness as Tommy clenches down and shouts, open mouth dragging over blotting paper as it soaks up the damp, as his cock gives up its milk as well and Tommy can see that the coals in the fireplace are dead cold and dark, and he laughs once, sharply, before screwing his lips shut tight and doing the same with his eyes as he shudders out his completion. The heat retreats. The sunlight keeps touching him. It's still cold.

---

The next morning a letter arrives at the Shelby house from Alfie, borne to the breakfast table on a silver platter by the servant that Grace insists they maintain. Grace had declined to come down to breakfast.

"I can't look at you," she'd said to Tommy the night before. "All I see is damnation. And you courting it with open arms."

Tommy puts down his egg-spoon and the morning newspaper and opens the letter. It reads in its entirety:

cream and sugar.

He throws it uncrumpled into the cold fireplace and carries on with his egg, dripping molten-soft yolk down the ball of his thumb as he eats. The side of Tommy's face is traced with the curled blue inkstain; stylized, frozen, ghostly. He sprinkles salt like stars into the ocean black of his tea.

/end

#peaky blinders fic #tommy shelby #alfie solomons #incest cw #sholomonsfest2019 #posting here bc ao3 is glitchy at the moment

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enchantedxrose · 5 years

Text

Eye of the Beholder

When Belle contracts an illness that leaves her badly disfigured, the Beast is the only one who really understands how she feels. One-shot, 2.5k words.

The illness came on suddenly.

One afternoon, while Belle was perched in one of the windowseats in her library, reading a swashbuckling romance in a patch of winter sunlight, she began to feel a headache and chills coming on. She tried to brush it off as just a cold, but by evening she was feverish, and a crimson rash spread across her arms and neck.

By the next morning, the staff began to truly worry. They exchanged grim looks and discussed her condition in hushed voices.

But whenever the Beast came near, or demanded an update, they all gave him forced smiles and optimism. “You know Mademoiselle Belle, she is a determined girl! She will pull through in no time,” Lumiére assured him, a little too heartily.

They urged him to stay out of the sickroom. There was no danger for the enchanted servants, they insisted, because objects couldn’t catch a disease. But the Beast was still flesh and blood. Her illness, they feared, was very infectious.

For a few days, the Beast tried to content himself with standing guard outside Belle’s door. He needed to be near her, but he didn’t want to intrude. Their friendship—once a feeble spring seedling poking through the snow, now blossoming into something stronger—was a delicate balance of distance and closeness, and he hated the thought of disrupting that. She might not appreciate him seeing her so vulnerable, might be annoyed with him when she got better.

But she must be so bored lying in bed all day, he grumbled to himself. Does she have enough books in there to keep her company?

Tired of pacing the hall and wringing his hands, the Beast retrieved a new stack of books from the library for her.

He debated with himself for a moment, then tore off a scrap piece of paper to leave her a note between the pages of Gawain and the Green Knight. His handwriting was barely legible—his oversized paws were awkward for holding a quill—so he kept the message concise.

Belle: Sorry you are sick. I miss you. Please get well.

Staring at the wobbly letters, the Beast felt his ears flatten in shame at how inadequate they were for expressing all he wanted to say. If only he were an ordinary man, if only he had the power of eloquent language, if only he had the courage to lay his heart completely bare to her…

Those three simple sentences would have to suffice for now. He could only hope that Belle would understand the depth of feeling behind them.

“Mrs. Potts,” he said, when he reached the door with a stack of book under his arm, “I know you won’t let me into Belle’s room, but would you at least let her have these?”

Her eyes softened into something like pity, and the Beast’s stomach sank in dread.

“I know what we said to you, sir,” she said gently, “but now I think it’s best if you go to her.”

Somehow her kindly tone made him all the more anxious, for it seemed as if she were trying to prepare him for bad news. The books dropped to the floor in a heap. The Beast tore into the sickroom without another word.

Smallpox. No one had used the word aloud, but from the moment he saw the sores on her face and arms, he knew what they meant. Her fever must have been high, for her brow shone with sweat, and she tossed and turned in her uneasy sleep.

Cogsworth was perched on her bedside table amongst the bottles of herbs and tinctures, looking just as lost and useless as the Beast felt. Nevertheless, the Beast demanded, “What can I do?”

“Speak to her, Master,” Cogsworth said in a small voice. “Perhaps she can hear you.”

The Beast knelt at her bedside and held her limp hand in both of his paws. His mind was reeling. He couldn’t quite process what was happening.

“Belle, you have to keep fighting,” he whispered, his deep, gruff voice hitching. “You’re the strongest person I know. Please, you can’t give up.”

She still did not open her eyes, but the crease on her forehead smoothed a little. As if the sound of his voice brought her some comfort.

The Beast stayed by her side after that, reading aloud to her though he stumbled over unfamiliar words, laying a cool cloth over her forehead and stroking her hair to soothe her when she grew restless. He still did not know if she was truly aware of his presence, for she was still delirious with fever. Once or twice, her eyelids fluttered and she murmured under her breath.

“Papa?” she croaked.

“No, he’s…I’m sorry, he’s not here right now, Belle,” he told her, wincing in guilt. “But he’s safe at home, I promise.”

She sank back into her stupor with a sigh that seemed both disappointed and relieved.

Maybe I should try to get in contact with her father, he thought. Maybe she would feel better with him nearby.

But the Beast couldn’t exactly waltz into the village square looking for the old inventor. And why should Maurice believe anything he said, and not suspect it was some kind of trick or trap to lure him back to the dungeons?

Enchantress be damned, curse be damned, the Beast didn’t much care what happened to himself anymore. All he knew in that moment was that he could barely breathe. He wanted to see her eyes open again, those warm brown eyes that sparkled bright when she teased him, that flashed fierce when she argued with him.

“Belle,” he said, leaning closer to her so that he could almost whisper in her ear. “I’ll make another bargain with you, alright? If you get well, you’ll go home to your father again. All you have to do is get better. I give you my word.”

Belle did not give up. Her fever finally broke, and the servants assured their master that she was through the danger. By the next morning, she was well enough to sit up in bed—propped up by pillows—and drink some of the tea Mrs. Potts brought her.

“I’m sorry for causing you all so much trouble,” she said with a weak smile, for most of the servants had gathered around her bed. “I can’t thank you enough for taking such good care of me.”

“We’re just relieved to see your eyes open once again, Mademoiselle. We were afraid…” Lumiére trailed off.

Belle met the Beast’s eyes from across the room, where he sat in an armchair trying to be unobtrusive.

“Thank you,” she said again, with such feeling that the Beast suspected she did remember his presence in her sickroom. His stomach fluttered nervously.

Then she sighed and turned her attention back to Mrs. Potts on her bedside table. “It’s time I stopped putting it off. Be honest, Mrs. Potts, how bad is it?”

Lumiére cut in, “What on earth do you mean, Mademoiselle?”

She raised her eyebrows. “You know what I mean. My face. How bad is it?”

The disease had left its telltale marks on her face, neck, and arms—round red scabs that would eventually become scars. Lumiére and the others waffled for a moment, insisting that it was barely noticeable, but Belle clearly did not believe them.

Cogsworth silently dragged over a small mirror. Belle winced at the reflection it showed her, then set it facedown dismissively.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said, taking a deep, shaky breath in. “The important thing is that I’m alive.”

“That’s the spirit, child,” Mrs. Potts said.

“Just a touch of powder and you’ll never notice the difference,” Belle’s wardrobe added encouragingly.

The Beast felt his heart ache with sympathy as he listened to the others chiming in with words of comfort and encouragement. He had heard it all before, ten years ago, when they had all tried to cheer him up by saying his monstrous form wasn’t that bad, really, once you got used to it.

But the Beast did not need to get used to her. She was still Belle, still the brilliant, clever, funny, stubborn woman he adored, and to him she could never be anything but beautiful.

Several days passed, and Belle grew strong enough to get out of bed. The Beast was still dizzy with relief that she was alright, but some of his lightheaded joy was wearing off enough for him to comprehend that something was different. Belle wouldn’t quite meet his gaze properly, and even when she smiled, it didn’t reach her eyes.

Did I do something to upset her? He couldn’t help wondering. Or maybe…has she guessed that I’m in love with her, and now she feels uncomfortable around me? His heart twisted painfully at the possibility.

He suggested that they take a walk through the still-frozen castle grounds, emphasizing that the sunshine and fresh air would do her good. And at first, that seemed to be the case. The gardens were beautiful even in winter, hedges blanketed in soft snow, icicles clinging to the sculptures and fountains.

She grinned, admiring the sparkle of the snowflakes that caught the sunlight. His heart swelled a little—that was the Belle he recognized.

He slipped on a patch of ice on the path and went sprawling back into a snowbank, but the pain and indignity were completely worth it to hear her laugh again.

“You’re lucky you’ve just been sick, or else I would be burying you in snowballs right now,” he growled, dusting snow off his cloak.

“Oh, is that so?” she taunted, raising her eyebrows archly. “Are you sure it’s not because you’re scared of being defeated again?”

“Defeated? That’s definitely not how I remember it happening, Belle.”

“Whatever makes you feel better.”

They were falling back into their old playful rapport, and the Beast began to feel like maybe things were going back to normal. Yet every time there was a lull in the conversation, a sadness crept into her eyes again.

They stopped to rest for a moment on a bench near a frozen pond, Belle rubbing her hands together to warm them. But then she paused in the action, her body grew stiff, and she buried her hands in the folds of her fur-lined cloak.

She must’ve noticed the scabs on the backs of her hands, and it reminded her, the Beast realized with a pang. The same thing had happened to him countless times—whenever he started to forget the curse, forget how vicious and hideous he appeared, a glance at a mirror or down at his monstrous claws would bring it all back.

Gently, as gently as he could manage, he put a paw on her shoulder and said, “Is everything alright, Belle? Do you want to talk about anything?”

She closed her eyes and exhaled heavily. “It’s not important. I know it’s not important.”

“The scars do bother you.”

“I know they shouldn’t. I’m fortunate to be alive, and I should just be grateful for that. I guess I’m…vainer than I realized, after all.”

There was an unfamiliar weariness and self-deprecation in her tone, as if she were confessing some great weakness.

“It’s not wrong to be upset,” he said quietly. “I certainly was when I—” His sentence cut off, just as it always did when he tried to talk about the curse.

“I just feel like such a hypocrite. I’ve always said appearances aren’t important, but right now I can’t stand the sight of my own face. And I feel horrible admitting that to you, because I don’t want you to lose all respect for me—”

“Me lose respect for you?” he repeated, incredulous. “Belle, that’s not going to happen.”

Tears fell onto her cheeks in silent shame.

“Belle, we’re friends, aren’t we?”

She nodded.

“And you aren’t…terribly bothered anymore. That I am what I am.”

Her eyes widened. “No, of course not. There’s nothing wrong with the way you are.” Her voice held firm conviction, almost anger on his behalf, and it made him smile. But then she buried her face in her hands. “That must sound pretty hollow coming from me right now.”

“No, it doesn’t,” he said. He cupped a hand under her chin so that she would look up at him. “What I’m trying to say is, I think you should show the same kindness to yourself as you show toward me.”

She managed a watery smile.

“And I want you to know,” he continued, his voice quavering slightly with repressed emotion, “that to those who truly”—(love you)—“know you, the scars don’t matter. Not even a bit.”

Her eyes searched his face carefully. “You really mean it, don’t you?” she said, shaking her head in amazement.

“Yes, I do.”

The Beast had not noticed until this moment how close their faces were. He could see every tear clinging to her eyelashes. He could feel the warmth of her breath, visible like little clouds of smoke in the chilly air.

In a sudden fit of boldness, or recklessness, he reached over and carefully brushed aside a stray lock of hair that had fallen across her forehead. She didn’t flinch away from his touch.

Her voice was unexpectedly husky when she broke the silence. “You know it goes both ways, don’t you?”

“What do you mean?”

“You want me to be kinder and more accepting of myself. To admit that I still deserve love, even though I’m disfigured. But you realize that applies just as much to you.”

She reached a slender hand up to touch his cheek—hesitantly, as if unsure he would welcome it. They had never been so unguarded or so openly tender with each other, and the Beast was afraid if he opened his mouth, all the unspoken declarations of love would come tumbling out without his permission.

He closed his eyes and took a deep breath to steel himself. What he had to say, he knew wouldn’t be easy.

“Belle, I want you to go home.”

“What?”

“When you were sick, I made a deal with you. And you’ve kept your end of the promise. So it’s time to fulfill my part. Go home to your father, Belle. Go explore the world like you always wanted. You don’t belong cooped up in here like we do.”

Her eyebrows furrowed. “But I…but I gave you my word…”

“I know. I release you from your first promise, Belle.”

She didn’t look as happy as he expected her to. “Why? What’s changed?”

Everything, he couldn’t say. I have.

He turned away from her, troubled by the pleading look in her eyes.

“You’re no longer my prisoner, Belle. You haven’t been for a long time.”

“I know.”

#my fic #batb fic #beauty and the beast (1991)#sick fic #hurt/comfort #yes i'm still alive #yes i still write things sometimes #i can hardly believe it myself tbh

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