NEW REIGN || Tommy Shelby

EPILOGUE

 - EPILOGUE - 

Through the door, everyone was waiting. Even on her own side of it, she was waiting, too. She had spent  so many years of her life waiting for this moment, and so many more years thinking it would never come. All those years that she had spent in medical tents, frozen to the bone, covered inside and out with so much blood and gore, the thought of this moment hadn't even passed her mind, but in those lonely, frozen months afterwards, long before Tommy had burst into her life, she had never imagined she would be here.

Maybe burst was not the right word to describe the way Tommy Shelby had come into her life. He had not run or thrown himself at her. Instead, they had passed like ships in the night, sailing on their own currents of pain and sorrow and loneliness until one day they realized that the tides that pulled them were one in the same. They had not burst into love with each other- Tommy had not crashed into her like she had heard in the stories of falling and leaping into love- but they had instead slowly ebbed and flowed like the gentle wash of stones on a shore. The waves were always meant to crash on the shore, anyways.

As she stood on one side of the large door, though, something felt wrong. She went to adjust the white veil draped over her face, but the shoulder seam of the dress caught the movement and stopped her halfway. Her other hand was holding a thick bouquet of white lilies and some other greenery she couldn't name, so she settled for trying to flick the veil into place with juts of her chin. Standing there in the morning light seeping through the stained glass windows, she might have looked like an anxious horse, twitching and fidgeting.

The months that followed Tommy's proposal had been long. So endlessly long and hard. Her recovery had taken the rest of the summer and most of the fall, and when winter had reared its cold, ugly head along the dreary lanes of Small Heath, she had finally been able to go back to work, if only a few hours a day. Muscles had been torn and bones had been shattered in nearly irreparable ways that day in that dark basement. The internal bleeding had been miraculously stanched by that woman who had found them, but the rest of her healing had been impossibly arduous. Tommy had even driven her to London, to stay in their home there to get care from a doctor who made house calls daily during their month-long stint in the city.

After the muscles of her abdomen knit themselves back together and her bones followed suit, the joy of her work slowly found her again. She tidied the clinic after three seasons of disuse. The people of Small Heath had found another nurse for their care, and the hospital had seen an uptick of patients since her closure, but once she pulled back the blinds and threw open the shutters (with the help of Arthur, who still wouldn't let her lift anything heavy), the injured and needy of the city began their steady flow back towards the small clinic and her eager care.

Ada had taken on the wedding planning in stride. It wasn't that Rose hadn't wanted to plan the special day, but being back in her clinic had begun to consume her in that way she craved, even after a full day of work. Her and Tommy had both thrown themselves back so fully into their lives after the tumultuous events of the summer before, that even as the next summer emerged and then fell upon them, both of them had decided to enjoy every moment of heat and sun it provided, designing their new home and some semblance of their new life.

That was where she stood now, her back against the oak doors that lead to their back garden, ripe with summer blooms and the fruit of the rare, summer, midlands sun. She was going to be sick, she thought, standing there waiting. Bile burned her throat, and even as she listened to the excited chatter of friends and family on the other side of the wooden doors, she couldn't seem to quell that rising fear in her chest.

She had always thought her father would walk her down the aisle. After he had died, there hadn't been a moment's thought as to who would do the honour, but she supposed it might have been Edward. Now, though, both of them cold and dead in the French countryside, buried with the marks of war on their bodies, neither they nor her mother would be witness to this day.