It was cold and dark in the field hospital. The canvas material of the tent billowed in and out with the breeze, each new draught making Louisa shiver. The thin covers over her body did little to stave out the cold; even so, she didn't think she would have been able to sleep anyway.

Not with her tommy in the other room.

It had been four days since the influx of broken men had pushed them all to their limits. Resources were thin, and nurses even thinner—it was hard to find time to eat when your work was never done. In a way, Louisa liked the hunger. It helped her stay awake, the hollowness in her stomach so empty that it hurt. It felt right, somehow, that among so much suffering, she should bear the burden too.

Mostly, she just wanted to see the tommy who slept only a few hundred feet away.

For the past four nights she had visited him in secret, cloaked by the cover of darkness as everyone around her slept. Some of the wounded soldiers were awake, though—she could hear them tossing and turning, could hear their groans of discomfort and pain—but Louisa knew her way around well enough to walk without a lamp. She was like a silent ghost passing between them, undisturbed and unnoticed.

Every night she waited, counting on her shaking hands the number of night-shifts, watching the flickering shadows of nurses who patrolled the beds by lamp-light. Eventually they would retire to bed too, the hours of the morning too small to continue, and that was when Louisa knew it was safe to move.

The best days, though, were the ones when her shift came up on the rota. During the day, she had to divide her time up equally between those men charged with her care—she was too busy fixing emergency situations to spare a second for her silent, unmoving tommy. At night, things changed.

She rose from her make-shift bed, still fully clothed, and took the lamp from the nurse whose shift had just ended. Her name was Leah, a pretty girl of nineteen with a dark bob of hair to frame her hollow-looking features. In the flickering light from the lamp, her usually beautiful cheekbones cast dark shadows down her face, matching the circles that curved beneath her eyes.

"Have a good shift," she whispered as she passed the lamp to Louisa, their cold hands touching momentarily. Both noticed the exhaustion mirrored back at them as they exchanged thin smiles.

"Get some sleep," Louisa replied softly, tilting her head in the direction of the beds behind her. "God knows we all need it."

When she was finally alone in the hospital tent, she let out a long, deep breath. As much as the prospect of seeing her tommy kept her going, the truth of her words still hung heavily on her shoulders. How long had it been since she'd had the luxury of sleep? Louisa's eyes felt heavy, swollen and flagging just like the rest of her body.

Still, she knew that her exhaustion was nothing compared to the suffering these soldiers faced. Nothing compared to their pain; the sound of men's screams was something she was sure would haunt her dreams for the rest of her life.

Louisa worked her way around the room slowly, meticulously, making sure each soldier was as comfortable as he could be. Some of them were awake, kept up by the pain of their injuries, so she sang to them softly when they asked, wiping the sweat off their foreheads with a damp cloth.

Some of them would wake horribly. They would jolt up suddenly, with a great gasp as though their lungs had been starved of air for an age. That ghastly sound wasn't what bothered Louisa the most, however. Instead, it was the look on their faces—the sheer terror of certain death, expressions mauled beyond recognition by panic. She didn't what to think about what they saw, in those dreams. She didn't want to think that for any of them—but especially her tommy—those dreams had once been reality.

Once she reached the back of the tent, Louisa could feel herself growing anxious. Her heart beat just a little faster, palms prickled with a hint of slick perspiration. She adjusted her grip on the lamp and swallowed, closing the distance between herself and the tommy she had saved four days ago.

Well, saved was an optimistic choice of words, she thought. Ninety six hours had passed since he arrived at the hospital, and not a single one of those had been spent conscious. Louisa was beginning to worry he would never wake up. Physically, he appeared fine. A little thin, perhaps, and battered, but he wasn't losing any more blood. The problem was that injuries could run deeper than outward appearances. His body might have been physically find, but his mind...

The matron's words repeated in Louisa's head. He'll never really leave the battlefield...

She knelt down by her tommy's stretcher, setting the lamp on the floor beside her so that it threw long shadows against the far wall of the tent.

"Are you warm enough?" she whispered quietly, reaching out to touch his hollow cheek with the back of her hand. Somehow it felt wrong to be touching him, when he was so far away in a dream land. It felt wrong that her heart skipped at the feel of his skin, cool and pale though it was.

The matron hadn't deemed Louisa's soldier worthy of a hospital bed, given the unlikelihood of his recovery, and so he had been relegated to a quiet spot in the corner of the tent where the breeze blew in beneath the canvas. Louisa had salvaged what blankets she could, even sacrificing one of her own. The soldier's skin was still cool against her touch, but as she held her fingers above his parted lips, the warmth of his slow breath spread over her palm.

She smiled in response to the sensation. "You're still fighting," she observed proudly. "You're still with us."

When another breath washed over her outstretched palm, Louisa sat back and placed her hands in her lap, watching the rise and fall of this strange man's chest. Her eyes flickered between his face and his hands, desperate for some sign that he might wake up. Desperate for some sign he could hear her whispered conversations.

All she got in response was that steady spread of warmth over her palm with each of his exhales.

"Sometimes I almost envy you your sleep," she admitted sheepishly, rearranging his blankets for something to do with her hands. She felt that she was perhaps making up for his lack of movement with her own excessive fidgeting; as if she might somehow will him to absorb some of her energy.

The soldier slept on.

The snow outside lay deeper.

Louisa would find no more god-given signs that night. She checked her watch by the light of the lamp, sighed, and replaced it in her pocket where she kept it out of harm's way. Her shift was almost over—her time with the soldier was growing short.

Suddenly gripped by a sense of urgency that choked her, she couldn't help but plead, "come back to us, tommy. Come back to me."

It was a strange thing, to feel so connected to this man with whom she had exchanged less than a word. Yet it was something she did feel. When Louisa's eyes traced his face, that sleeping expression of suspended anxiety, the youth hidden just beneath, a strange feeling of knowing gripped her.

It felt as though she had known him her whole life.

And somewhere, deep in his unconscious nightmares, Thomas Shelby felt the same tug. Her whispered voice, softer than a swathe of silk, called to him. He chased it, fought to reach it, fought against the violent explosions of blood and gunpowder and mud and human bodies in his mind. Fought against the heat of the tunnels, against the sores on his hands and feet, the ache in his back, the fear in his chest.

He just wasn't ready to reach it quite yet.

"Sleep soundly," Louisa cooed, reaching for the lamp as she stood up. "And wake soon."

She paused for a brief moment, observing his profile caught in the yellow glow. She wished and willed for some sort of change—a twitch, a blink, a flicker of life—but nothing came. The firm line of his lips didn't alter, nor the fan of lashes swept above the bone of his cheek.

"You'll get there," she promised him fiercely, nodding to herself.

"Talking to him again?" A voice startled Louisa so that she stumbled back and almost dropped the lamp. It was Marie, her closest friend, come to take over the night-shift.

She turned and held the lamp up to illuminate her best friend's face, still beautiful despite the haunting quality of the yellow light. Beautifully exhausted.

Louisa cleared her throat. "Just trying to wake him," she explained, doing her best to sound nonchalant despite the pink burn of her ice cold cheeks.

Marie's plump lips fell into a soft smile—the sort that reminded Louisa of home. "Sure," she agreed amiably, yet the teasing cadence of voice told a story of amused disbelief.

Louisa handed the lamp over. "Have a good shift." She turned to go, wishing she could sneak one last glance at her tommy, but with her best friend watching she knew it was better to retreat.

As she reached the doorway between the two sections of the tent, Marie's voice called her back.

"What is it about him, Lou?"

Louisa froze, but didn't turn around.

"About him in particular, I mean?" her friend clarified. Nothing more needed to be said; they both knew of the strange obsession she was referring to.

"I..." Louisa tried, then faltered. Slowly, she turned, so that she could see her friend like an illuminated angel a few feet away. She tried out different answers in her head, but could bring herself to say none but the truth. "I feel like I've known him," she said quietly. "Like I've known him for a very long time."

Through the dim light, she could just make out the faint curve of Marie's frown. It wasn't an angry or confused frown, just a disbelieving one. "But you haven't met him before?" she pressed.

Louisa shook her head. "Not that I can recall. And I would recall, if I had." Of this last part she was certain.

"Maybe in another life, then," Marie suggested wistfully. They were both conscious of time ticking on.

"I don't believe in past lives," Louisa admitted almost self consciously, glancing down to her worn shoes. She felt guilty, sometimes, that surrounded by constant death her beliefs were so final and unflinching.

"And I didn't believe in ghosts," Marie replied, her voice dropping by a few degrees, "it doesn't mean they don't exist. We've seen them in the eyes of these men. Ghosts walk among us on this earth every day."

When Louisa said nothing, her friend continued.

"Maybe past lives aren't a million miles away after all."