I doubt many will read this but I've become obsessed with Peaky Blinders over Christmas!

This story is split into two parts: pre-War and post-War. I'm not really following any other storylines yet and just kind of running away with the characters. Updating will not be consistent after I've gotten out all the parts I've written (I've written up to Part Two for now).

I've not really read around FF on this show so I don't know if this has been done. Please do let me know if it has. On that note, enjoy!

I first met Thomas Shelby when I was nine years old.

I'd been friends with Ada since we were six and I saw her racing her brother John at the park down the road; I'd joined in before I even knew their names - no other girls wanted to race on the muddy grass for fear of ruining the dresses their mothers slaved away making. I had no mother to make my dresses and I got given the ones the other girls' mothers gave to me out of pity, the ones their children had grown out of. Sometimes I ended up in boys clothes when the mothers on our street in Birmingham could just alter their daughters' dresses instead of making new ones. The trousers got me far more stares than the too-small dresses or the skirts that were so big on me that not even rolling them up helped. So when I saw a little girl, dressed in a crisp white dress with flowers around the edges running along in the mud with another boy - and she was winning - I knew I'd have to be friends with her. Finally, I'd thought, someone to play with.

Our friendship had blossomed beautifully. We'd grown close instantly, telling each other our secrets: which girls we didn't like, which neighbours we thought were nasty and all the other secrets six year olds had. The secrets had evolved as we had. We grew taller, our hair got longer and so on and so forth, and we'd giggle at boys rather than racing them. The boys in our area weren't particularly intelligent, but they'd played with us whenever we asked to join in and they'd never treated us any differently.

That changed the day Thomas Shelby showed up at the park a few weeks after I'd turned nine.

Ada and I were playing hide and seek with our friends, Jack and Robbie, so naturally we were both covered in muck, grass stains, and I even had a twig in my hair from hiding in the undergrowth along the outskirts of the park. It was Ada's turn to seek and Robbie and I were hiding behind two trees, our arms straight at our sides, laughing quietly and shushing each other when one of us laughed too loud.

Our giggles stopped when we heard a boy's voice call out across the small field, startling us because of the deepness of it. It wasn't Jack's voice, or any of the boys we played with. I peeked around the tree to see a tall boy with dark hair striding towards Ada - who had been counting by the swing set - and my stomach dropped a little. His face told us that he was angry at her. He looked older than us by maybe five or six years and the posh suit he wore only made him look more grown up.

I slowly crept out from behind the tree, ignoring Robbie's whispered calls to go back to hiding. Ada was my best friend - nobody, not even a fifteen year old, would shout at her while I was there to back her up.

As I approached, I heard him reproaching her. "Ada, you were meant to be home over an hour ago. Pol's been worried."

"We're playing Tommy!" Ada snapped, looking the boy up and down and straightening herself to make her look taller.

"Oh yeah? Who's playin'?"

"Me, Daisy, Robbie and Jack."

The boy nodded his head slowly, and as I got closer I saw that he had a cigarette dangling from his mouth, smoke rising gently from it. It made him seem older and I started to think maybe he was more like seventeen rather than the fourteen or fifteen I'd originally thought.

"You can play all you like Ada, so long as yer back in time for dinner. And not with boys - if you wanna play with boys, John and his mates'll play with ya."

She groaned dramatically. "I don't wanna play with John and his friends, they're too boring. They just want to sit around and pretend to be you and Arthur."

I realised who this was. It was her brother Thomas, who she fondly called Tommy when she spoke about him at all. She didn't talk much of her family and I'd assumed it was because she knew how sensitive the topic was when I didn't have one. The orphanage owners and the other kids I lived with on the street down the road from Ada were the only 'family' I could ever consider to be my own. But they beat me often when I was bad, which seemed to be a lot, and Ada had told me that a proper family never intentionally hurt each other. Not even when they were bad, she said.

I slowed down my approach because I didn't want to get too close to Thomas Shelby. I'd heard stories about him, the fights he got into, the girls he chased on occasion, the way his family did something illegal but the coppers all turned a blind eye to. He was not a boy to mess with - their whole family, Ada excluded, were dangerous… or at least that's what I'd overheard from Joe, the orphanage owner.

But it was too late. He'd heard me coming and he slowly turned around to inspect me.

It was odd seeing a boy look at me like he did. I'd seen a few of the older boys leering at me, but never had someone observed me so intensely, like he could see all my secrets, all my fears, all my dreams. I didn't like it.

"You Daisy, then?" He breathed in on the cigarette, pulled it out of his mouth and blew the smoke at me. I didn't cough or flinch - living in Birmingham, you got used to the smoke everywhere. The factory kind and the cigarette kind.

I nodded, not trusting myself to speak. I'd been told my several people, Joe in particular, that I was naughty and always spoke "with no respect for me elders". If there was one person I didn't want to offend, it was Ada's brother.

"You the reason my sister's an hour late for supper?"

He didn't look mad. His face was completely blank, his bright blue eyes staring at me without blinking.

I looked over at Ada who had breathed in, probably to defend me and say it was her fault she was out so late, but I'd gotten so used to taking the blame for the things me and Ada did that I automatically said, "Yes."

He took another drag, still staring at me and ignoring the way Ada hit his arm as she told him that she was old enough now to stay out past 7pm.

He didn't seem to have anything to say so I kept talking. "We were playing, I forgot Ada had to be back by 7. Sorry."

It felt like I was always saying sorry. Sorry for not getting the right bread from the market, sorry for not knowing how to get to the butchers and getting lost, sorry that Joe's money he'd given to me had been stolen by a man twice the size of me the other week… But apologising to Thomas was different. He actually seemed to consider it.

"You'll make sure it won't happen again."

It wasn't a question.

He grabbed Ada's arm gently and started to pull her away when my mouth ran away with me before I could stop it. "I can't promise that, Sir."

He stopped, and Ada's face paled as she started at me.

"What do you mean by that Daisy?" His voice had grown a little colder as he said it.

I swallowed thickly, my heart thudding in my ears. I idly wondered where Jack and Robbie had gone. "I like playing with Ada, Sir, and if I'm hiding that good that she can't find me, and it keeps her out later, that's not something I'm gonna stop."

His eyebrow twitched as Ada quietly reprimanded me. "Dais, stop. I'll be home by 7 next time Tommy, okay?"

Even at that young age, he wasn't used to being told no. It was all I'd ever heard and I hated it. It was why I got into trouble so much. Daisy, you can't go to a school, you're too poor and too stupid. Daisy, you can't play with Ada Shelby, you're so far beneath her, you might as well be shit on her shoe. But she'd be damned if this boy was telling her she couldn't play properly with her best friend.

"What do your parents think about you being home so late?"

"Don't have none."

His face didn't change one bit, but he did finish his cigarette and throw it to the ground beside him. "Well then…" He paused, looking from Ada to me and back again. "Who am I to stop good game of hide and seek?"

He smirked as he left, taking Ada with him. Stopping a good game of hide and seek.