All The Kings Men {Peaky Blinders} (Completed)

Thirty Six

And just as Arthur was dead, there was business to be attended to. Lily separated from her family, retreating to the harsh, whistling wind through the cracks of Polly's house. She had expected Michael to be there. After all, it was quite a thing to lose a second brother to the Italian mafia. The black hand was truly being dealt to the whole family. 

She pushed the door open, hoping to feel Michael's energy, to sense his scent, to join him wherever he laid and sob while he held her. He was a perfectly built person to cry on. But the house was empty, deadly silent. More quiet than Arthur's chest. With a lacking energy in the house, and only Lily's despaired one to fill the lonely rooms, she escaped again. 

She was becoming good at running away. Too good, possibly. 

She found herself standing outside of John's house. The walls more dead than his corpse. Crawling with maggots, and the floors risen by the thousands of cockroaches that had taken cover. The sheer sadness that encased the house was overwhelming. Her livelihood was being stolen from her, taken by a force that could give as little fucks as a house rat who was so high on mouldy cheese he doesn't even feel the exterminator catch him. 

She escaped. Too good at this, she didn't even think of where her soul would lead her. 

She stoped in front of Isaiah's house. Inside, it shivered with life. The baby wailing as her mother soothed her, Isaiah by her side, singing a lullaby. The ordinariness of that life compared to hers, she thought, was too much to handle. It was overbearing. Overwhelming. And complete shit. 

Run. Her feet sounded against the dark streets in Birmingham as she ran, full speed. The sorrow buried with every step she took. The further away from Small Heath she was, the easier everything became. It was like she could breath again. She stopped, briefly, at an inn on the outskirts of Small Heath, and checked in for the night. 

Whatever issues the family had to deal with, they could deal with without her. Lily craved to be away from them, to feel the sea beneath her feet, to feel the freedom of salt water air surrounding her. To feel the sun warm her skin instead of making it crawl like it did here. The crumminess of the city, it made her itch. Her skin was easy picking. 

It always was. 

Lily woke to her neighbour fucking someone, very loudly. She could almost see them. Picture the faceless bodies moving, what position they were in, how sweaty they were, how much lust and raw passion flowed between them. It made her sick to her stomach. 

So once again, Lily ran. Not physically, now, slower. A steady walk, straight for a train station. Cornwall would never give up on her. Not like she did to her family. She pondered what might happen to them. What they would do with whatever secret weapon Alfie had mostly probably gifted to them. She wondered if they would loose. If the mafia would truly win. 

If they would catch Finn, alone while tending the Garrison. His fair hair stained an impossible red as Luca Changretta stepped over his lifeless body, pouring their most expensive whiskey across the tables, and setting the golden bar alight. The fool, dressed already in his funeral suit. 

If they would hunt down Michael, wherever he was. How would they kill Michael? They had already let him go once, twice was like asking god if he knew why he created people with the ability to feel such an emptiness that they killed themselves over it. Or would they make him run, with his bad leg and his inability to run in a straight line. A direct hit. Perfect. The bullet going in the back of his head, and out just at the corner of his eye. The world, life lived too large that the universe has already written his destiny to never see another sunrise again.

She wondered about Polly. If they would kill her quickly, mercifully, like a saint listening to a sinner. If they would do it in one shot, or three. Would she bleed slowly? Spilling all her life's secrets into the ground that she laid upon. Would Polly whisper to god, asking to take care of Lily and Michael instead of herself, because even she knew that she was not getting into heaven? The hanged woman, ready for what death brings before she was even born. 

Ada. Poor Ada. So undecided in her own future, that to have it ripped from her while Karl watched, crying, hurt, possibly also dead, was so terribly sad that Lily could feel her chest tighten and her throat swell up as her eyes blurred and they stained everything she saw. The temperance, a believer in building a new world society, ripped away before the idea even hit the pages. 

Lily thought of Tommy. His only son, dead at such a young age. "A tragedy for the ages" people would whisper. His unborn daughter, and perfect replacement for Grace, found, bled out in the open alleyway. A prayer of protection for Ruby spoken with desperation and despair. The ace of cups, and the page of wands, so much potential unseen and unspoken for the both of them, the Greek-ness of the tragedy aligning their fates before the sun even knew the moon. 

Thomas Shelby himself. A man so unafraid of death that he frequently sought council with the devils living on Earth. His lack of commitment to dying playing a factor. Would he survive a bullet to the head, like he had survived other certain death plays in his life? Death himself, already planning his next life's commitment to tearing down every mafia family known to mankind.

But Tommy wasn't the devil, because the devil remains on his course of soul stealing. He was king, they come back, stronger each time. Oh, how long had they been his pawns? Lily could almost laugh through the deadly emptiness in her chest. 

And Lily? Would they find her? Or would she escape from their clutches before the moon fades once again into nothing? Her blood relatives, her way of escape. The ultimate form of running away. A life on the seas, the eight of pentacles, so unready to keep living that her only choice is to carry on. 

It was that, she thought, or a sharp vision of following in Tommy's footsteps, and welcoming back death to her situation at hand. Less of a potential life of well lived travel, and more of an acceptance that this was her last lifetime on Earth. She knew these days, with tear soaked thoughts, and a mind so numbed by violence that has plagued her for all her lives, that she would never return to Earth in a vessel like she had been in for so many thousands of years. 

This realisation, she realised, as her breathing slowed, and her cheeks dried, that made death seem so much more drastic than it had ever been before. Lily sobbed, she cried so much she was worried this would be her last time crying. The intangible emotions in her skin, buried so deep in her soul that it felt like all her past lives where crying with her, it made it feel like the end of her current self. And the death of ones self is more devastating than anyone could believe.