Roaring /// Peaky Blinders

SIX.

( part one, CHAPTER SIX )

She should have known the peace would never last.

Tommy had dropped her off at her small, rented home with a light smile and cheery farewell, and Thalia took only a few breaks on the way up the stairs. All in all, it was a sign of progress—slow progress but progress nonetheless. And besides, in a world so cruel and unrelenting, the steady drum of time would continue thundering on regardless of the pain those who walked the surface dealt with. Time would never wait, so one must learn to soldier onwards beside it.

Or, in the case of Théo, one must learn to jump four paces ahead of time, itself, in a mad bid to predict everything about to happen.

He was sitting at his desk when Thalia entered their shared flat, and his face was drawn in such distraught and intense confusion that he seemed to age twenty years. Thalia swore that she could see some grey in the boyish brunet atop his head, but she chalked it up to a trick of the light. Her brother ruffled through a stack of papers atop his desk, completely oblivious to her arrival until she accidentally slammed the door behind her. He jumped, reaching for the revolver on the table and looking up at her with a wild glint in his eye before calming down at the sight of her.

"Thalia! La porte!"

Thalia sighed with a soft smile. She crossed the room to where her brother was seated, tossing her gloves on the table beside him. She planted an affectionate kiss on his forehead, before placing her hands on his shoulders as she remained standing behind him.

"C'est bon, Théo. We are not there anymore."  She soothed, hiding her concern behind a gentle expression. Théo reached up with his left hand and placed it over one of her hands on his shoulder. They remained close like that for a few moments, both remembering a similar time not too long ago but neither wishing to speak of a time in which slamming doors signaled something much more ominous than a sibling's hurried arrival.

"How was your outing?" Théo asked, finally breaking the silence, as he turned to look up at his sister, who moved to his side to lean against the table by his desk.

"The movies here are strange, but I do not have to think fast in English to watch them." She grinned, wistfully, her memories of home bleeding over the more painful recall of past dangers.

"And the Shelby you went with?" Théo asked, staring down at his haphazard stack of papers. Thalia felt her blood run cold, but she could not place exactly why the comment put her on her guard.

"What about him?"

"You have taken a liking to him, no?" Théo was not asking out of curiosity for his sister's life; Thalia already knew what was about to happen, but dread still bubbled in her stomach.

"What of it, Théo?" A challenge. She stared down at her brother, and he slowly turned to return her gaze evenly. Neither wavered. Neither backed down.

Tête à tête.

"He will betray us, eventually." He spoke first, but it was not a sign of submitting. Besides, it wasn't a bold assumption, but Thalia still hated its insinuation, nonetheless.

"He is a good man. He will not." Thalia stood straight, and she pushed off of the table to begin strutting out of the room.

"He is taking that barmaid to the horse races tomorrow, Thalia—" his words stopped her dead in her tracks— "He is using you."

Thalia kept her back to her brother, struggling to reel in her emotions as a conflict of shock and confusion rattled through her, along with a subtle bitterness that she passed off as a byproduct of surprise.

"What does that have to do with me?" Thalia replied, as nonchalantly as she could manage. She heard her brother shuffling behind her, and his steady typing on his stupid little typewriter picked back up.

"If he will so blatantly toy with you, perhaps it is time that you returned the treatment."

There it was. Of course.

Thalia had hoped to get away with being honest in this new town, to build a reputation only of being true of character, if a bit rough around the edges. She did not wish to relive her past life. She had shed that piece of herself like a second skin, but now she itched at her nakedness.

"I am not a whore, Théo!" She exclaimed, whipping around to face her brother so he would have to see just how livid his comment had made her. He seemed unperturbed by her reaction, however, which only served to piss her off more.

"I never said that you were," he stated calmly. "I am only asking that you do not let yourself be manipulated."

"No," Thalia hummed, the noise deep in her throat like a sort of growl. "You would prefer for me to do the manipulating."

Théo shrugged, as if he was simply asking her to grab him a baguette on her way home from the market, not manipulate a man she'd grown so fond of in a week's time.

"You had no problem with it back home," he pointed out. Thalia huffed, turning around once again so her brother could not see the frustration forming on her face.

"We were at war!"

"This is a war. You just do not realize it yet." Théo stopped his typing, and the room fell silent, short of Thalia's loud breathing. All this yelling was aggravating her wound.

"You are too paranoid, mon frère. He is a good man," Thalia said, but her defeated tone signaled that she no longer wanted to fight about it.

"You are too naïve, ma sœur," Théo returned easily. "He is a gangster."

Thalia wanted to scream a million things in that moment.

He was no gangster when he carried me to safety. He was no gangster when he sat with me for days. He was no gangster when he carefully led me around town with a hand in the small of my back. He was no gangster when he smiled or laughed. He was not a gangster with me.

Instead, Thalia headed to the door to her room with one last biting remark: "He was a soldier. He defended our home. You should watch your mouth."