devil's backbone 🗝 tommy shelby

chapter 27

n// im back againnnnnn i couldn't keep y'all waiting now come on!!

this chapter was really interesting for me to write for a number of reasons and once again i am changing things from the show ever so slightly because it's my story and i do what i want! anyways i hope u enjoy <3

Grace never realised how much she enjoyed to sing until she gained attention from it. Truly, she didn't. It scared her, at first, standing up in a bar where there hadn't been singing since before the war, baring herself to drunken men and saddened soldiers, but then... then Thomas Shelby gave her permission. He saw her, heard her, at her rawest and truest form. When she sang in the Garrison, she wasn't an undercover operative working for the crown; she was her truest self.

She loved the loud choruses of the patrons, the laughing and volume of the men when she sang a song they remembered from their youth. She relished in the way they all stared into their drinks when she sang something sad. But eventually, as those highs began to wear off, she began singing for one person, and one person only.

The man whose approval she never quite received.

That's what all of this was about, wasn't it? Approval? Acceptance? Making the people in her life proud of her? She'd been doing so well before he came along. Why didn't he like her the same way everyone else did? What made her so acceptable to everyone else except him?

Grace thought she knew the answer. In fact, Grace thought she knew everything. She knew the only reason why Thomas Shelby didn't have the same fancy for her the way she did for him was because he was already infatuated with another.

The first time Grace Burgess laid eyes on Sybil Day, she didn't see anything special. She saw a girl with messy hair, eyes like coal, and a dress that looked like it'd been worn a million times at the very least. She saw ink stained fingertips and worn out expression. She saw someone that depended on a man to fix everything for her, with the way she came running into the Garrison upon their first encounter.

But that wasn't what Thomas Shelby saw.

She watched him as he dealt with her, how he handled her like she was glass. How she leaned into his touch and hung on every word. And for the first time in her sheltered life, Grace felt jealousy. True envy. She'd finally found the one thing she could never have, and it killed her.

Or so she thought.

As she sang in the Garrison, she watched the door as she always did, waiting for the man she craved to walk through the door, and ignore her very existence. For her, that was enough. Just being in his presence where the schoolteacher wasn't. In those moments, she had something that Sybil Day didn't. And like he always did, he opened the door, and walked in like the king he was in a past life. But this time... this time he stayed. He watched her.

Had she been wrong all this time?

Maybe she didn't know everything, after all.

She watched him as he took off his hat, leaning against the wall, watching her with the same fascination in which she watched him. He was seeing her again. Seeing the real her, just as she was seeing the real him. But this time, there were guns, no IRA members trying to kill them, no policemen failing to do their jobs. It was them, in the place where they first met, with her singing a song she knew he would love, and him smiling at her from across the room. If it weren't for the ground beneath her feet, she would have sworn she was dreaming.