Like a Horse Made of Air

Something on My Mind (Always in My Headspace)

Potentially triggering graphic imagery--nothing happens he's just think about the what ifs--that can be found between ~~ symbols. It's a small section and easy to skip if you need to. Look after yourselves!

Chapter Text

He wakes up slowly; an experience so rare he lingers just to enjoy the novelty.

He's warm and his body loose in a way he's more used to associating with a good fuck. This is better even without the sex, he thinks, as he tightens his arm around Wren's waist.

He doesn't sleep next to the whores he buys; a rule to keep the boundaries tidy. It's a rule he's never broken, even in instances he's been so high on opium he feels completely out of his head. It might leave him to face his demons every night on his own, but he has no desire to share so much of himself with someone who can be bought.

He hadn't known how much he needed someone he could trust until the day he realized he's come to trust Wren.

Before that night, if someone had told him Wren MacLeod had it in her to shoot a man in cold blood, Tommy would've scoffed. He hadn't thought she had enough spine to hold her own head up, never mind to take such initiative. In some ways he'd been right, Wren MacLeod wouldn't have. He'd mistaken her obedience as stemming from her own weakness. He hadn't accounted for Wren Ashby, the woman who lived behind the mask.

Tommy knows better now, sees her clearer.

He's in awe of the way she broke apart the shackles of her life and rose from the ashes like some phoenix of legend. Humbled by the drive that saw to her getting four fucking licenses the honest way in a matter of months. Inspired by the way that, when life served her a betrayal that would have broken most people, she didn't crumble.

Oh no, she lifted her head, stiffened that spine, and stood tall.

Covered in blood after her fist kill, corpse cooling at her feet, and she never wavered. Those hands steady as stone around that gun. Refused to let him take that burden off her. Refused the name of the man who betrayed her. Refused to walk out of that alley with anything less than her freedom even if it meant putting a bullet in everything that stood in her way.

She is the kind of woman that will walk through hell with him. No doubt, no hesitation. Tommy wants that—wants her—with a desperate ferocity that sometimes unnerves him.

When Blakely, the man he posted at her house for a night shift, told him she hadn't noticed a damned break in cause she was up in her bed fucking some man...

He's never pushed her. Never commanded or suggested or anything of the sort. She's been pushed too damn much in her life. He never wanted her to feel like he was something she had to free herself from; like he was something she had to escape. He didn't want to be another name beside MacLeod and Langley.

He wants to keep her—wants her to choose to be his—and so he settled in for the long game.

He had thought, while he issued orders and dealt with the rat they'd caught, that he'd miscalculated. As he tracked her down, he'd been furious with himself for missing her attention shifting to someone else. Nobody so much as takes a shit in Birmingham without Tommy Shelby knowing, people say.

That little tidbit that her lover was someone named Tommy felt like the world fucking mocking him and his hubris.

He'd found her in Molly's—a little tea shop frequented by looser women—just in time to watch her fiddle with a little tin and pop two tablets. His mind instantly went to the tin in the nightstand by his bed, the tablets she makes and the purpose they're for. When that tin skids across the floor he doesn't hesitate to snatch it up.