Oops! Ang larawang ito ay hindi sumusunod sa aming mga alituntunin sa nilalaman. Upang magpatuloy sa pag-publish, subukan itong alisin o mag-upload ng bago.
"Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image." —Genesis 9:6
∘₊✧──────✧₊∘
Tommy Shelby went to the war, and something else came back. Trixie understood that, as well as one could understand the night sky while still living lightyears away from the stars. She hadn't been in France—and those who she knew, she knew in singularity. Luca was before: he had gone to war and he hadn't come back. Tommy was after, so dead now that she struggled to imagine him as having ever been a boy.
Without going to the moon, one can only know so much about what the moon is like. It shapeshifts and disappears, it rises and sets. Trixie could imagine the war as much as she pleased, but she didn't know anything until the day in the woods, and even then, she was living in terms of approximations. Trixie had left John with Birmingham that morning, same as she'd ever been, and they'd driven an hour out to the Midlands before pulling off near a clearing in the woods.
For the entirety of the drive, the gun had rested on Trixie's lap, heavy like a paperweight, wrapped in a gingham cheesecloth as if the two of them were off to the countryside for a picnic and not something inconceivably worse. Trixie had been avoiding looking at it.
It was rather silly, wasn't it? She had been the one to initiate this trip, and had done so for the express purpose of learning to shoot a gun. The rest of the Peaky Blinders handled their weapons with such ease: John and Arthur waved their guns around as carelessly as if they were pencils. But now that she was actually an hour out from the city, Trixie could suddenly think of nothing but her father.
"Be kind to the women you see today, Trixie," he'd said, every day without fail since the drafts had begun. "Their husbands and brothers and fathers and sons are off fighting, and war is a beast that devours."
Devours lives. Devours souls. Devours men, killing the lucky ones and spitting the rest out. Guns had done that, and a gun in her hand could do exactly the same. There was no war—not in the sense of treaties and kings and armies, but there were certainly soldiers, even if their uniforms were peaked caps instead of helmets, even if their empire was a racetrack and not a continent. This was her enlistment.
"Trix," John said. "Are we going or not?"
She glanced over at him, and noticed that he'd turned the car off. "We're going," she said, forcing the words out of her mouth in spite of their weight. Trixie unbuckled her seatbelt and tucked the gun gently under her arm so she could get out of the car.
