peaky blinders imagines

son of a preacher man; isaiah jesus

Isaiah had been in your life for what seemed like forever, but was really no time at all. You couldn't remember him before he was a Peaky Blinder, so he'd most likely answer that you hadn't really known him for very long at all, but he'd become such an inextricable part of your psyche that to you, an entire lifetime and seventeen months were interchangeable.
Eighteen months ago, in September, he'd started tagging along when his father would come to your small store, which had started as a little outpost for food and drink along the docks ten years before but was now a bustling little cafe. Reverend Jesus would order a sausage roll and then bustle off to pick out a newspaper, and his son would lean against the counter and make small talk.
You'd indulge him, so long as there were no customers or pressing matters for you to attend to. He was relatively easy to talk to, genuinely curious as to how you'd become the co-manager of a real business at nineteen years of age.
Eventually he started coming around without his father. He'd get a slice of apple pie because you swore up and down it was the best food you sold, and once he was done eating he'd ask you to take a walk with him. You'd walked all around the surrounding area with him, past the bustling dock eight that handled most of the lumber, and to the more quiet dock fourteen, which only handled night deliveries.
Dock fourteen was where he'd kissed you for the first time. You'd be laughing at something, Lord knows what, and he'd abruptly reached over and kissed you. It had been short and sweet, but it had kicked off his relative obsession with you, and he started coming around daily, being so bold as to kiss you across the counter in front of the population of your cafe.
You'd complained at first, shoved his face away jokingly, but he was easily the most important person in your life at that point. You had developed a fiercely independent mindset, most set into place by the young age at which you had to take control of your life, and Isaiah was the only one who could really reach you. He'd calmed you down more times than you could count, when a particularly rowdy sailor who had rolled into town was rude to the girl who handled the produce deliveries, when customers would get far too drunk, and when it all became a bit too much for you, a nineteen year old girl micromanaging the shit out of her own life.
The more attached to you he became, the more he concerned himself with his well-being, so in the frosty early days of the first March you knew him, he took you out to the large, untamed yard behind his home and taught you how to shoot a gun. Only for precautions, he'd reassured you, but you weren't dumb enough to believe that a man increasingly entangled in the Peaky Blinders wanted his girl to know how to defend herself just in case. He taught you other things inadvertently, like the best way to treat a black eye, how to bandage a shoulder wound, and once, in an event you didn't like talking or thinking about, how to remove a bullet with tweezers and sew up the wound.
You were already constantly under stress, paying eight people to work under you and living in a far-too small apartment where the windows didn't always entirely close, calling you to fall victim to harsh wind. Isaiah couldn't always ease your pains when he was the cause of them, always too eager for combat work within Shelby Limited, and punching every man who looked at you sideways. Somehow, though, he could always make it better, kissing you slow and whispering "Everything is all right."
"It'd be more all right if you'd take care of yourself, Isaiah."
"Combat work is worth more, love, I need the money."
"You're doing just fine with what you have."
"No, my love, I need more if I'm to buy a respectable home in which I might live with you."
You'd shake your head at him and he'd grin wildly, hugging you to him and saying, stronger, "Everything is all right."
In the end, you and him were most likely inevitable. He was everything you weren't, and the harmonious, if carefully balanced, life you'd built together was one you cherished above all others.
He'd bought you that respectable home, and so you were relatively secure with your life at twenty one, and that was all you could ever really ask.