The Runaway • 𝑇𝑜𝑚𝑚𝑦 𝑆ℎ𝑒𝑙𝑏𝑦

5

The Runaway
Chapter
5

"Shelby Brothers, Part 1"

♕♡︎♔

     It was early in the morning, the sun had just started rising, barely peaking through the fog and smoke, bringing light through the windows of Watery Lane. Birds were singing, starting the new day with a song, following the sounds of the manufacturing and banging that beats like a drum everyday in Birmingham. All apart of a song that Thomas Shelby loathed.

     Tommy was always up before the sun, waiting for it to rise with him in the dead of night. He welcomed the sun, the light it brought into his room, the way it seemed to beat the shovels, if even for a day. If the sun beat the shovels then he could carry on, running from the mud and blood in his head.

     Tommy is already up and dressed, smoking his second cigarette of the day when the sun starts shining through his bedroom window at Watery Lane. He's already out the door before the St. Andrews Bell strikes at seven o'clock, right as the birds start singing their song. He's already up and moving, thinking, because if he sits still for even a moment, lays in his bed any longer, than the demons from the war catch up to him.

The mud beneath his fingers, each pick of a shovel against the walls, the smell of blood, the dirt and dust in his lungs, it all overtakes his senses. The shovels break through his bedroom walls haunting him during the day as well as the night. So Tommy keeps moving, moving before the shovels and blood catch up to him and drag him into an abyss, a place he may never leave, just like the war.

     Thomas isn't the same man he once was since he came back from the war. No man came back the same, but it was as if he had changed the most out of him and his brothers. It's like aunt Polly always tells him, Arthur came back angry, John came back fighting and Tommy, well Tommy was different. Polly thought the war made him ruthless, his ambition peaked and now he couldn't stop, wouldn't stop until his family was out of the slums of Birmingham. He wouldn't stop until the Shelby name meant more than just a gypsy family backstreet razor gang. He wouldn't stop till he was more than a gypsy boy from Watery Lane.

     Tommy doesn't care what Polly thinks about him now. Doesn't care when she tells him she can barely recognize the man he is since he came back from the war. Sometimes he can't recognize himself either, but war does that to a man. It takes a piece of your heart, a piece of your soul as your putting your life on the line day after day, for years. Rips you apart from the inside out till all that's left is all the blood and mud and the shovels.

     So no Tommy wasn't the same man he once was and he didn't care. Everything after the war was extra anyway. He knew he should have died in the war, in the tunnels covered in mud with dust invading his lungs and the shovels picking away at his brain, like they did every night. Yet, somehow he lived and with his borrowed time till he inevitably met death once again, he was going to do something with that time. He was going to rise up in the world, become a legitimate businessman with legitimate money. Tommy was going to make his family respectable.

     Tommy had recently took charge of the business after a deal with Arthur, who was meant to be the head of the family. He would be in charge of drumming up new business from now on. Arthur never had the head for business anyway. He struggled after the war, seemingly worse than Tommy or John. So Tommy talked it over with Polly, the only other person in his family who had a head for business like him, convincing her it was best if he took over in place of Arthur. Polly agreed and Arthur soon followed, despite the blow to his pride of running the family business, he knew Tommy was the smart one, he lead them in the war and he would lead them now.