A/N: Surprise! Another Peaky Blinders story, because I can't seem to leave those characters well enough alone. Writing has always been calming for me, and at a time like this, I have been writing for fun and pulled together a small story about Arthur. Lord knows he deserved a happier love story than he got. How often I will update, I don't know, but I'm gonna do my best, because I like to think we could all do with a bit of escapism lately (even it's my miserable characters lumped with other miserable characters who sometimes have sweet moments despite the misery). But I do love Arthur and, as I said, I wanted better for him. So, here goes :) I hope you're all staying safe.

one

The splintered pipes that lined the houses sputtered water into that narrow gully which ran behind the backyards and made the cobbled stones turn black, like a shimmering ocean. The droplets dampened the downy fluff from the pigeons' hutch and washed them away in gentle ripples toward the flimsy door which marked our backyard from all the others. I fed them in the mornings and stroked feathers in the afternoons.

The birds were naturally skittish and startled at the sound of children rushing through the gully with little shoes smacking against the wet ground. They trembled from the clatter of the neighbours' doors slammed shut at night. They scattered around the hutch if their bowls were tipped over. Bill had soothed them with his low rumbling tones. He used to cup them between his palms, stroking glittering purple feathers dripping into glossy green shades.

I remembered watching him and thinking that he had never held anything in his life as gently as he held those birds.

x

Bill had wanted us quiet, in the house. He had warned us not to disturb the birds, to let them settle in their sawdust with small bowls of grain tucked alongside them. He had taken his belt and lashed the backs of my legs and he had slapped Jamie around the house to teach us not to slam doors or run down those creaking stairs in the house. He had convinced himself that the birds would hear it.

So, there was never much noise in the house.

x

On the Tuesday that Finn Shelby first came to tell me that his oldest brother had almost murdered Jamie in a match, there was more noise than there had ever been. I heard it from the backyard while I straightened the mesh-wire fencing that surrounded the loft, that dull thumping against the door and distant shouts. I wondered if Jamie had locked himself out somehow, even though I knew in my heart that he would have come through the backyard instead. I closed the latch and walked through the house, cracking open the front door until the chain caught.

There was Finn, his cap pulled from his head to wrench between his hands. I noticed that he had started to part his hair much like Jamie did, split at the scalp in a neat parting. I thought, oh God, Jamie is dead. It was so fleeting and quick that I hardly felt it. Finn straightened out his coat which crackled in whitish foam from droplets of rain overhead. Alongside him, his closest friend Isaiah stood with his cap dipped low against his brow.

I remembered that I used to feed them sandwiches, before, just after matches between Jamie and the other little boys around our neighbourhood. The mud had tracked the floorboards and their chatter had filled the house. But it had been all right, because Bill had not been around. Jamie had known it and it had softened the usual tension in his shoulders. Even as a boy, there had always been tension in his shoulders.

"Arthur had a boxing match with Jamie," Finn said. "He hurt him bad, Ms Callaghan. But all the lads helped pull him off and he – he should be in the hospital, now. Arthur wanted to apologise, he – he's sorry, Ms Callaghan."

While he spoke, I remembered how Finn Shelby had once clung to my skirts after he had tumbled and scraped his knees whilst running with the older boys. I had cleaned his shredded skin, kissed all that lumpy swelling which flowered around his kneecap, then sent him off to Ada or Polly. Both Finn and Isaiah tipped their caps, stepping backward. Isaiah mentioned that they had put aside his gym clothes – the clothes that belonged to my little brother, who had been put in a hospital by Arthur Shelby.

"Pull him off," I repeated distantly.

I had spoken to myself, because both boys had rushed off into the great, thundering sheets of rain that fell against the cobbled street. The greyish tones of the houses left the world colourless and bland, apart from the orange outline around the curtains of those who had not yet retired to bed. I stood there as if the boys still spoke to me, because the words that they had spoken swirled and swirled like shreds of newspapers and cigarette butts in the gully behind the house. Then I turned back inside.

The door was still ajar and gusts of wind licked at the tablecloth and ruffled my coat on its stand. I found whiskey in the cabinet and took a quick shot. It burned my throat and scorched my eyes, but my arms soon warmed from their cold stiffness and I cracked them into place, pulling on my scarf and my boots soon after. I had almost forgotten my coat but grabbed it just before I closed the door.

I forgot to lock it properly, but the cobbled streets moved like the waves of that same black ocean I had imagined while feeding the birds, and I was mesmerised. There was laughter from the pubs, silence from the alleyways, and the contrast affected me. The coat felt too heavy and the rain only worsened it. I walked through the streets. I walked to the hospital.

x

It was quiet in the hospital, just like in the house. I had imagined pale, stretched-out faces floating from those void spaces behind the doors that lined the halls, wailing and moaning their agony aloud. Instead, there was silence apart from the scuff of shoes against tiles; my shoes and those of the nurse who walked a few feet ahead of me. I touched her arm and said, please – James Callaghan?

Perhaps it was worse that she knew the name already, without any more prompting.

x

His room was on the second floor, tucked at the end of the hall, beyond all the new-born babes. I had held him, when he was a baby. I wanted him to be a babe again, tucked into the cradle of my arms and taken from that bleached odour which soaked the walls of the hospital. I wished I had brought him his own pyjamas, suddenly. I wished I had brought him his slippers. I had made him his supper; soup with soda bread on the side, though it had grown cold on the windowsill while it waited for him, while I had waited for him. It had curdled and hardened around the edges and the bread had never been that fresh, anyway, but it had been all that I could afford, that morning.

I touched his hand and found it clammy. His hair had been shorn on the left side, cleaned and dressed from his stitches. He was not himself, with those stitches. It had left his forehead swollen, distorted. It ruined his handsome features. I wished I had brought him pyjamas and wished I had brought him his slippers. He would never have told the other boys that he liked his comfort, liked a cuddle, liked to be soft without them mocking him for it.

His hand was clammy.

x

He made awful sounds in his throat, almost like he wanted to speak. His foot twitched if the light in the hall flickered. He responded to words like purple and blue better than green and red. I told him about his room and its off-white walls. I told him that his curtains were sheer and sunlight touched the floorboards like I touched his hand. He used to kick out his legs and clench his fists, in that bed.

Like he was still fighting Arthur Shelby.

x

"Most people do that," one nurse said. She tilted her head toward him and his fingers gnarled into balls. "Take little movements and think it means more than it does. I see it time and time again in this place. But he suffered a lot of trauma, Ms Callaghan. He needs some time."

x

Flowers arrived on Friday and wilted within the week, never touched. The petals shrivelled, rotted in black edges that slowly crept inward. Arthur Shelby was like those petals. He strutted alongside his brothers, all the while with blackness seeping into him, festering in him; made him unwell, made him hurt and hurt others. I had known him, as a little child; loved him, as a girl.

He had given me flowers, he had pecked my lips in a field nearby while we played with the other children and he had beaten another little boy from another street after he pushed me in the mud.

He had asked if I would marry him even if he had Gypsy blood, because he had been called names by other kids for that, but he had never retaliated until they started to call his brothers the same names that they had called him for his heritage, and then he had battered them, and I figured that that fighting had simply never stopped, in him.

x

I had brought Jamie to his boxing matches, those first few weeks that we had come back to our old home in Birmingham, even though he grumbled and said he was not a child. I had spotted Arthur behind the ropes, punching and hitting and still doing what he had been doing when I had known him as a boy.

His ribcage had been stark against his flesh speckled in bruises, hard lines protruding as if all his ribs flexed like wires while he moved. He was thin, he was tall. He never looked like he could take as many punches as he did, but he always took one hit and then swung harder.

Sometimes, he looked at me for longer than he wanted to, because I could see what he wanted and I could see what he wished had happened, and I knew that he remembered all those little moments as children between us, before he had been a soldier, before he had been to France, before Tommy had ridden on his fucking black horse. Instead of saying it, he looked down at the shredded skin around his knuckles and spat blood onto the mat beneath him.

Instead of me saying it for him, I left Jamie to tie his gloves and walked out into the streets with the hard scent of copper in my nostrils, like I bled in his place.

x

Left some parts in France, like Bill, Jamie had once said about Arthur. But he can be kind.

x

There had been a card tucked into the petals. I never read it. I let it sink into the dirt. I imagined it was Arthur buried beneath the dirt, but somehow his face morphed into that of my little brother, and my spine seemed to coil and shift like a serpent, the tailbone its slithering tongue, the nape of my neck its tail flicking back and forth. The hatred had slithered between my organs and settled there, wound tight around them like a sentient being, curling even tighter if I dwelled on the Shelbys for a moment too long.

I had dark thoughts while I fixed his pillows and dabbed his mouth and brushed his hair from his face. It poisoned all motion in me, seeped into my hands and made my nails scrape against my palms to cure the needling itch which gnawed at me from beneath the skin.

x

I wondered if I could find a gun in Birmingham before the Shelbys heard about it and dreamt of marching into The Garrison with the pistol cocked in my hand, raised to Arthur. It was merciful for a man like Arthur to be put down like a sick dog that had bitten one too many children in our street.

I dreamt of his shocked features soon stilled and motionless once the bullet ran through him, and then turned, in my own dream, to face the gun cocked at me by Tommy Shelby. I would have smiled at him. It would have been worth it.

Put down like sick dogs, the pair of us. There was something cathartic in the thought of it. There was something to be said for a death like that, without anything drawn out, without anything painful. But Jamie still breathed, and until that stopped, there was little time to think about my own death.

It could only come for me if he had gone ahead of me.

x

I worried that all my hatred would affect Jamie, somehow, like it could reach him even in his faraway world. It made me look away from him and look away from the furniture in his hospital room and look away and away until I felt I had to stand in the hall for a moment to steady myself while a nurse drew the curtain around his bed and sealed him away from me.

The halls on his ward were large and let in great waves of light, though there was little sun. There was some sublime calmness to be found in that hall, stood with arms crossed and head tipped back. It was the only time that all that darkness dripped from me and let me breathe.

x

Behind the curtain, there was a silhouette which seemed much taller than the nurse had been, and the words spoken were gruff and low and apologetic. Like he recited a prayer learned in childhood, his cadence stuttered and his phrasing unsure. He held his hands together, fingers laced, his cap tucked behind them, cradled against his chest. He tilted his head back like I had done in the hall, but there was no softening of his features against light.

Finally, he turned and looked at me and I awaited a malicious thrill to fill my stomach from his shame, which forced him to tear his stare from mine just as soon as he had found it. But I never felt anything more than shame in myself for having wanted him to suffer more, because Jamie had spoken of him in a better light than what shone on him there before me; that light had been left in the hall.

"I thought 'e were alone," Arthur said. "When I came in, there weren't no-one in 'ere but your Jamie and the nurse. She left, and I thought I could just – I could talk to 'im and tell 'im –…"

There was not enough space in the room, though he kept to his own side and never approached, and his limbs hung uselessly at his sides until he seemed to recall the cap held in his left hand, which he then turned and turned in his grip while he looked at the floorboards. I stepped forward, because I sensed that he would not.

In some small way, it meant more that he had stayed away. He watched me warily, like he waited for me to scream and claw at him. But I was tired. I had cried enough, alone, in a room where my brother breathed yet never spoke. I found that all my dreaming had done nothing for me. Faced with him in reality, I saw him as that sick dog. I saw myself as the same.

"Sit with me," I said. "He'll hear you better, like that."

The cap drooped in his hands, forgotten. "What?"

Strands of hair curled against Arthur's forehead lined in wrinkled confusion. Still, he reached for that chair which had been mine for days once he saw that I pushed it toward him. He placed it near Jamie, whose pale face remained focused on the pock-marked ceiling overhead, reddish eyelids safely shut from this world.

Arthur folded into that seat, his cap still scrunched in his fists as he leaned forward to rest his elbows on his thighs. I pulled a chair alongside him and it seemed to draw him up from his stupor, his hand rubbing harshly at his nose with a snort.

"I don't want to intrude," he said.

"He should hear other voices," I replied quietly. "He hardly reacts to me anymore. Just like when he was awake and ignored all my nagging at him. Never listens."

His laugh was humourless and guilty. "All lads are like that, at his age. Think they know it all. I thought I knew the world, once."

"And now?"

He stared at Jamie. "Now I don't think nothin'. Nothin' touches me but sound and colour. Nothin' goes in, like it did before. And nothin' good ever comes out."

Jamie breathed in gentle ripples, his lips parted. His skin had lost that shininess and dulled into low browns and yellows; those were shades of healing, the nurses said, but why then had he not woken up to tell me that for himself?

Arthur never sat still. He shifted and shifted like he wanted to peel off his own skin because it bothered him so much and had done for a long time, now. But he found that he could not peel it off, and his hands dropped flat against his thighs, rubbing the heels of his palms against the scratchy fabric for relief.

"Tommy told me it were a bad idea to come 'ere," he said softly. "Said you would want to batter me like – like…"

There was a wet sound in his throat that reminded me of the noises that came from Jamie in those mornings when the nurses turned him and wiped his crusted lips with cloth. It sounded like trauma, its rawness muffled by the hands that he clamped against his face. He rocked in his chair, back and forth, back and forth. It was nothing but pure agony gnarled within him, like he had whipped and burnt and slapped and pinched every inch of himself even before he had stepped into that ring with Jamie – like he had hurt himself more than I could have hurt him.

"Why did you come?" It came out unkind, it came out spiteful.

He drew back, inhaling sharply through nostrils which seemed blocked. "It were Ada what told me to come 'ere – if you're sorry enough, Arthur, take the first step, and see that boy in his bed."

"And you listened to her."

"I listened to 'er," he nodded, "and I walked 'ere me-self. Didn't tell no-one, mind. Not even our Polly. But she'll know. Polly always knows. She don't need words. Tommy'll know, too. Don't do no good to ignore our Ada. She'll only shout louder." He paused, and added, "What do the nurses say?"

"That he suffered a lot of trauma," I said. "If he wakes, he might not be himself anymore. They're not able to know it until he comes 'round and tells us for himself."

In his gruff, low rumble, he said, "Your boy'll always be looked after. I'll make sure o' that me-self."

I suffered his words like a heavy blow to the chest. "If he wakes and drools like an infant for the rest of his life, will you pay for him then? Pay for nurses to wipe his bottom and roll him around in a wheelchair without him ever knowing he even left his bed at all? Is that all there is to it, Arthur? Ruin a life and replace it with a sack of money?"

Arthur surprised me with his silence. He was focused on Jamie, his dark brows knitted together. He sighed again. He had sighed a lot since he sat down with me and my little brother.

"Sometimes, I think o' what I would like to say, and all the words sort themselves out in me 'ead. Then it comes time to spit 'em out, right, somethin' 'appens. Somethin' jumbles them up and when I say 'em, I 'ear 'em comin' out all wrong. Nothin' like what I 'ad planned in me 'ead. But nothin's been workin' up there for a while, y'know."

"I know. But it doesn't make it all right."

"No," he echoed. "No, it don't."

I settled into my seat and rubbed my eyes.

He tilted his head at me. "You ain't been 'ome in a while, y'know. You should sleep."

"I can't," I said. "If he wakes up and I'm not here – if he thinks he's alone –…"

Arthur was very quiet for another while. "I could stay and watch 'im."

I looked away from Jamie. "What?"

"If it were all right with ya," he said quickly. "If it ain't puttin' you out, mind. I'd stay and watch 'im and if 'e woke up, I would say you'd nipped down the shop to get 'im some sweets. Jamie loved them sweets what rot your teeth from your gums when 'e were little, didn't 'e?"

I felt adrift in a foreign sea, listening to him. It felt as if we had somehow outgrown one another in childhood like we had outgrown our coats and boots and he had gone one way while I had gone the other. He had made my cheeks flush red, when I was a little girl. I had made him laugh, when he was a little boy. I looked at him now and wondered just when that had changed, because I sat with him and started to piece him together again.

I remembered that Polly used to snip his hair whenever it grew too long and she always cropped it too close to his scalp and he had hated it. I remembered that he used to share his chalk with me and sketch silly doodles on the footpath in front of his house, though he often liked to draw obscene things that made Polly clap him around the ear if she ever caught him. I remembered that he used to love me a lot, back then. I used to love him, too. Though it had been a childish kind of love; and love all the same.

He's sorry, Ms Callaghan.

I had felt that all my hatred for him would be eternal, that the bitterness which coated my tongue would stain all my speech and sour me, that that tormenting need to see him choke on his own misery would make me bitter and flecked in mould, like old fruit. I had wanted him to suffer.

But Jamie was still here. He deserved better than that, deserved more of my devotion than could be given with hatred like that.

"No," I said softly. "No, I want to stay with him."

Arthur had resigned himself to my answer before I had even said it. He had wanted me to scream at him and batter him and send him away. He had hoped for it, for his own self-hatred and bitterness and misery to be washed away from him with whiskey and knocked clean out of him in the next brawl with another man who hit him harder than my brother had.

Arthur thought of beatings as a form of cleansing and if I let him slither away from this, his apologies would come in neat envelopes plump with money and mild allowances from the Blinders if I ever asked favours of them.

It hurt him to look at Jamie; that was his penance, that was his punishment.

"Come to see him tomorrow," I said.

He had been fiddling with his cap, but his hands stilled. "You want me to come back?"

"Jamie cannot be another boy lost to your war, Arthur – and not that war in France," I said. I held out my hand and lightly touched his temple. "That other one, up here, with all that sound and colour. Been going on too long now, hasn't it?"

His mouth trembled and his eyebrows drew together in agony. "I never meant to hurt him, Lo."

"I know." I reached out to smooth a stray hair from Jamie's pale face. "But you did, Arthur. You said you came here to talk to him. I think you want to do more than that. I don't want flowers sent by Tommy while he waits to send the pallbearers. I want nothing from you but what Jamie deserves."

Left some parts in France, like Bill, Jamie had once said about Arthur. But he can be kind. Like you said he was when you were kids.