peaky blinders imagines

purple hydrangeas; tommy shelby

When Tommy Shelby had left you to fight in the war four years ago, he'd given you a purple hydrangea he'd plucked from the garden of an unsuspecting neighbor and tucked it behind your ear, asking you to "keep it in a vase for me please, love." He'd then held your hands in both of his and leaned down to press a kiss to your forehead.
You knew better than to ask your reserved-at-best Tommy to kiss you in public, so you squeezed his hands tightly and waved to him and his brothers as they boarded a train to take them to dirty, disease-ridden trenches to fight a war that was between kings, not men.
You had kept the hydrangea in a vase for a while, putting it by a window in direct sunlight and smiling bitterly as it bloomed in the direction of the Garrison, the pub your Tommy loved so much that seemed so empty without him.
The flower started to die after a week and a half, and so you took it from its wooden perch upon the windowsill and pressed it in between the pages of a heavy tome of Whitman's poems Tommy had given you for your seventeenth birthday.
At first, seeing the book sitting on your nightstand made you smile, but as the years worn on, it hurt to look at, a little pang in your chest that lasted only for a half-second but which affected your mood for the rest of the day, so you tucked it under your bed and resolved not to take it out until you could kiss your Tommy again.
The period Tommy was gone passed like how you'd imagine someone throwing a grenade felt; anxious for the wait to be over, yet terrified of what would be left behind for you to see.
You kept up the Garrison with Polly, keeping the books in order as best you could and serving up Scottish whiskey and a smile to the too-young boys and too-old men who came in for a drink. You let the stray cats in and gave them scraps of chicken and metal bowls filled with water, something Tommy had always frowned upon, just because you could.
And he wrote-of course he wrote. He told you of life on the front line, of the dreary weeks of nothing but rain, and he told you about how often he nearly died by a German bomb with a nearly jovial tone.
And he told you he missed you. Your Tommy was abysmal at expressing himself, always had been, but he made attempts. He told you he loved you, and that your smile was what kept him going.
Likewise, you thought but never said, because he didn't need to feel guilty. You were still in England. Nobody was gunning for you every waking moment. Your feelings were unimportant when the fact that your husband could die any day was a reality.

The day you got your Tommy back was uncharacteristically cold. The wind was there, too-not biting, but nipping in a way that reminded you of John's little ones, how they tumbled out their words and then ran along with their days.
You waited at the train station with the rest of the Shelby family, letting Polly clutch your arm a bit too tight as you toyed absentmindedly with your wedding ring. You tensed up as the train pulled in, not relaxing until you could see your Tommy.
Arthur got to you first, coincidentally, pulling you in to a cheerful hug, shouting "How's it, then, Mrs. Shelby?" as you laughed into his coat. He opened his mouth to launch into a war story, one of undoubtedly thousands you'd hear in the following weeks, when a hand grasped Arthur's arm lightly and said "I'd like to say hello to my wife, if you don't mind," and you made eye contact with your Tommy for the first time in four years.
He smiled at you, rare and genuine, and you saw a light in his eyes that was brighter than if he had left. The smile dropped quickly, but you didn't mind, because he replaced it with a tight embrace, coupled with him kissing the side of your head.
"I missed you so fucking much," he muttered nearly silently, as if he was anxious that the hundreds of other enthusiastically reuniting families nearby would care to overhear.
"I love you, Tommy Shelby," you told him, and he kept his eyes on yours the whole time.
"Come on, my love," he took hold of your hand, "let's go home."

You barely got half an hour to have tea with your Tommy before you both were being whisked out of the house to the Garrison for a welcome-back party.
You danced a bit with Tommy until he retired to properly say hello to his sister, so you gaily whisked around the floor with Arthur and John until your stomach hurt from laughing.  You watched and cheered as Polly downed drink after drink, caught up in the color and excitement of it all, until your gaze happened to slip to the door, where Tommy was hovering.
He met your eyes and gestured outside, so you excused yourself to follow him.
He walked with tensed shoulders, no longer the trusting man he had been before the war. Your husband pulled you into a short alley to the left of the Garrison, closed his eyes in a gesture that seemed to pain him, took a deep, rattling breath, and dropped his forehead to your collarbone.
"It's fucking ridiculous, all of this," he told you. "We've just come back from a bloody war, we've seen damn well thousands of men die, and we're dancing and getting drunk like it never fucking happened."
There was nothing you could really say to that, so you stroked his hair and waited until he was ready to continue.
"I used to pretend you were there, you know. I'd-I'd wake up in the mornings, and I'd keep my eyes shut, and sometimes it was warm out, and I'd tell myself that if I just rolled over, you'd be next to me, smiling, and the whole goddamn war wouldn't be real and I'd be able to bloody kiss you again."
His hands were shaking a bit where they lightly grasped your waist, and when you covered them with your own, he lifted his head from its rest against your collar, avoiding eye contact, embarrassed, somehow, that his wife had seen him actually feel something.
You pulled him out of the alley and let him stride slightly in front of you on the walk home, as if the Germans had really followed him home and were prepared to target his wife.
He opened the door and held it for you, locking and double bolting the door. He shrugged off his coat and left it on the floor, looking for all the world as if he hadn't slept since the night before he'd left you. You traced under his eyes, where the bags were so embedded you'd think he was born with them, and wondered how you hadn't noticed how fatigued he was earlier. He turned his head to kiss your palm, hesitated a bit as if he wanted to say something, and shrugged it off, walking upstairs. After carefully hanging up his and yours coats, you joined him in your bedroom, and noticed he was staring at an oblong something under your bed.
Your Whitman book, you realized with a pang. He crouched slowly and pulled it out, opening it up just to see a purple hydrangea fall out. Your Tommy looked at you and smiled, the second, short moment of joy in the day, and you knew that though his body was in England and his mind was in France, he had come back to you intact, and he still loved you as fiercely as he had before.