peaky blinders imagines

on life when your soul is ripped away from you; michael gray

It'd never been easy for him to sleep through the night. Not since he was young, lying in his bed in his country home, staring at the vaulted ceilings and wondering why his mother didn't want him. Not when he was first brought to Birmingham, listening to the sounds of the men at the docks well into the morning and wondering if it has taken his mother this long to find him, how much could she possibly care? Even years in, when he'd established his place with Shelby Limited and had full control over the books, he averaged maybe three hours of sleep a night, choosing to utilize cocaine and pure adrenaline to keep himself awake. Even after he had met her, wooed her and moved her into his home, he still barely rested, laying in bed only until she fell asleep and then getting up again, either pacing the kitchen floor or staring out the large window in the entrance, watching the moon carve a slow trail across the sky. He was well aware it worried her, aware she'd send him nervous glances every morning when he struggled to keep his eyes open and had already begun smoking for the day. She was too understanding and too gentle to ever really chastise him, letting him rest his head on her shoulder and complain of exhaustion even though she was well aware he barely ever made an attempt at sleeping through the night.
Despite these astoundingly unhealthy habits, he'd never even come close to three days without a single moment of rest before. He'd also had on the same dress shirt and black pants for that period, once pressed crisp but now wrinkled and slightly stained with beer. He'd elected to spend his days perched on the stairs directly facing the door to enter his home, the ones she and he had walked up hundreds of times to access the rest of the building.
They met when he was eighteen and she two weeks shy of the same mark. He had waltzed up to her several drinks past intoxicated and declared that she was the most beautiful woman he'd ever encountered, and he'd sworn up and down to her a thousand times in the years since that his opinion wouldn't have changed even if he was stone cold sober. Their relationship had progressed faster than any he could remember, and it was mostly by his own volition, because he'd never met someone so easy to talk to before. A week to the day after Grace had been shot, he loved her into his townhouse on the north end of Birmingham, citing that
"I respect your independence, I really do, but if I have to spend another day wondering if you'll die before I see you next I think they might have to commit me to an institution."
She'd hurdled over her intimidation of his work so she could be there for him when he came home late and irritated, ranting for half an hour about Tommy and whatever idiotic and homicidal thing he'd done that day. It made her a bit queasy, he'd heard from Esme (she was loath to tell him directly when he'd done wrong), to hear him speaks so casually of heads bashed in and fingernails pulled for cash. It wracked him with guilt, then, that it was all but unavoidable that she'd have to deal with him bruised and bloody multiple nights a week. The first time he came home in that state, head spinning, nose fractured, with a black eye and a bleeding cheek, she'd had to grip the kitchen counter where she'd been worriedly pacing for several seconds before she could get her breathing under control and begin to help him. After half a year she'd become numb, calling "What'd you shatter this time?" through the air to where he'd opened the door late at night, and pretending her hands no longer shook when she had to pull bullets out of him with tweezers.
(They really rarely shook, he had to grant her that. The only time he could remember was very early on a Sunday morning, when the lead cylinder had pierced dangerously close to his heart, and she nearly collapsed after she'd sewn him up, calling him a fool and overly reckless as she cried into his shoulder.)
She'd changed him just as much as he'd changed her. He was an adult in name the day he turned eighteen, to be sure, but the first time he fully felt like an adult was coming to the realization that the woman-not a girl, a woman-sitting next to him at the kitchen table, reading through the newspaper and highlighting sections of the column she had written for improvement, and realizing he had found his life partner. He promised her to be home for dinner at least two nights a week, something other women would scoff at, but knowing him like she did, caused his girl to smile wide and promise in return a home cooked meal.
He asked her to marry him two Septembers after they had met. The proposal was planned meticulously, with help from Polly and unsolicited advice from Linda. He'd taken her for dinner, something they rarely, if ever, had the time for, and then walked eight blocks with her to the small garden behind the chapel where Isaiah's father preached. He'd held both her hands in his as he sank to one knee, and watched carefully as her expression changed from confusion to delight as she realized what his intent was.
"Michael Gray, are you asking me what I think you are?"
"Would you like me to get it out before you pounce on me, woman?"
She'd regarded him with a rare, mischievous, smirk, and gestured for him to continue.
"Listen," he'd bowed his head and rested it against their clasped hands for a moment, "you are the single greatest thing in my life. And the only person who spins worse at expressing their emotions than me might be you, but it terrifies me to think about what my life would be like without you by my side. Please marry me?"
She'd said yes ecstatically, pulling him up to her level to place an enthusiastic kiss on his lips, and wasting no time in the coming days in showing off her ring to anyone who'd asked. It was more than earned, that childish glee, he'd mused. She had already sacrificed any chance or semblance at a normal relationship and life in order to be with him, and any way he could make her happy, small or large, was the least he could do.
The wedding itself had been fairly small, only his family and a few of her closest friends, but somewhere in the back of his mind while he whirled her around the dance floor, it had occurred to him it was the longest night he'd spent with her in a long while. She'd been radiant, of course, willfully ignoring the pistol tucked into the waistband of every male there and Finn's more than occasional glances towards the front door in favor of winding her arms around his neck and kissing him in a way that reminded him of the first summer they'd spent together, eating strawberries and kissing away the tangy taste.
She'd made him a man, but he'd made her a verifiable force of nature, newly armed with a wedding ring and willing to tell Tommy Shelby himself to fuck off, fiercely protective of everything in her life, from her hard fought position at the local newspaper to the man she'd given her heart to. The first six months of marriage saw Michael biting his tongue so as not to exclaim at realizations he should have made long ago, chief among them that his wife was easily stronger than he could ever pray to be.
Children were barely even a discussion. She wanted to be a mother just as strongly as he wanted to be a father, and they'd spent evenings discussing names and future homes in the country, where they'd be safer and where their children would have space to breathe. Then came the miscarriages, two in the span of a year, and Michael Gray felt as if his heart had been torn up into shreds where it lay in his chest, leaving behind a pathetic, shriveled muscle capable only of praying his wife would forgive him and herself for their losses one day. Rose and Will, the prized jewels of their lives, were hard fought for, born three years apart and each making their mother violently ill and rail-thin, so that her baby bump protruded bulbously like an overly ripe pumpkin on its vine. Like everything else in the years since she'd met him, pregnancy was a labor of love, suffering willfully undertaken for an eventual positive result. He wondered in his darker moments if she'd have had this perspective had she married a more normal man.
Their lives had finally begun to plateau, to pretend at some semblance of normalcy. He had a wife fully capable of holding her own, and two children who were nearly prodigiously intelligent, swallowing up information in a way he never desired at their age. Then, abruptly, like ink dashing across a page when the writer is rudely interrupted, the light and center of his life was shot dead by a belligerent, highly intoxicated Russian. He'd learn much, much later that her death was the culmination of Tommy Shelby's illegal maneuvering of legally earned Russian money, and that her death would not be the only gang related fatality in a twelve hour span, but none of that mattered in the first three days after his wife had gone.
He was incapable of escaping his Molotov cocktail of emotions, of deep, undefinable rage and an equally powerful paralyzing grief. Michael had barely moved, refusing food for himself and making sizable effort only towards ensuring his children were as well taken care of as they could be. They'd buried her early that day, the third day since she'd-fuck-since she'd died. It was pleasantly warm, a breeze winding through the air and tossing the hair of his Will, barely two years old and not able to fully comprehend that his mother was never coming back, giggling as his hat flighted away with the warnings of spring soon to come.
The funeral had been unusually early in the morning, his wife's coffin in the ground before the clock struck noon, so there he had sat for the past three hours, sitting on the stairs directly facing the door to enter his home, the ones she and he had walked up hundreds of times to access the rest of the building. The past half-week had seen him in a tide of extreme loneliness and lack of ability to function, but now, struck with the finality of it all, Michael Gray couldn't move.
He simply sat, fingers gripping the edge of the stair he was perched on so hard they were white, as his mother opened the door and closed it quietly behind her. She came and sat next to him, taking his left hand in her own and prying his other off its hold.
"You are still a father," she told him in a voice that was at once sharp and empathetic. "You still have young children who are dependent on what you do for them."
"I know," he spat, anger faltering at the thought of his Rosie, just old enough to understand, and the blank stare she'd carried ever since Mama had left.
"You need to pull yourself together," Polly Gray told her son. "She's not coming back, and you will only suffer if that is the lone thought you entertain for the rest of your life."
"Fuck," Michael Gray, husband, father, widower, spat, and finally allowed himself to cry. They were heaving sobs, directed at the wood of the stairwell, and the steady hand of the mother who took seventeen years to find him only made his back buckle more. He cried for what felt like an eternity and no time at all, before swallowing hard and standing up.
"I don't remember how to function without her."
"So learn. She'd want you to."
He nodded, turned, and ascended the rest of the staircase to access the rest of the building, tracing his hand only briefly over the hook where she always hung her coat. Learning to live without half his soul would be a hard fought battle, but the most beautiful woman he'd ever encountered deserved that much.