WRITTEN FOR ME ( thomas shelby )

007 ━ The Great Storm ..

━━━━━━ ༻ 007 ༺ ━━━━━━
" The Great Storm "

          WHEN THE RAIN POURED DOWN, time ceased making any sense at all.

Like having been tossed a bucket of water over their heads, both Jackie and Tommy were drenched to their very skin within seconds, the many layers of their clothing be damned. These buckets, however, just kept on being poured on top of them, as heavy as raining could go in these parts. Lightning and thunder cosmetically adjusted the pseudo-night of the dark clouds into a menace unleashing above and in this environment of darkness, Tommy witnessed something truly unexpected: Jackie being afraid.

After plucking a tooth out of a crying man's mouth, after destroying him utterly with the usage of his own employees... Jackie Alloways was shrinking with each loud thunder closer to the ground turned to ashen mud beneath their feet.

It was then, while his mind recalled her car had no roof, that he looked into the distance, at the hill whose climb must have gotten tougher due to the rain, a hill whose outline he could no longer even distinguish, and remembered a part of himself that no longer wished to hesitate, but knew to act fast.

When he looked back at Jackie, bowed over her knees, with her eyes closed and her palms pressed to her ears, he waited for no word of warning to place his coat over her head and take her hand into his. Planning on saving his breath for a run through the rain, through the devastated stands fuming in the aftermath of the fire's purge, he said nothing before taking lead.

With mud everywhere, the place looked like a warzone, so truly, it took no genius to know exactly what Jackie was seeing each time thunder made her flinch and forced her to cower herself into someone smaller and smaller still.

Tommy heard his own heart thundering in his chest, drumming into his temple on the begs of his own lungs burning up between heaved breaths. And though his mind threatened him with slipping into the same mirages of the past that had knelt Jackie before he helped her stand and urged her to run with him away from this cold shower from above raining upon them bad memories and even worse omens, should they care enough to be pious, he kept all the thoughts of barricades and shelling at bay with a single allegory: no one wanted to be trapped on no man's land.

So he ran.

Knees painted themselves in mud in no time. On the slippery climb, his hand gripped hard enough to leave a bruise on Jackie's, whose own hand held as tightly as she could as well, though in all honesty, the frailty of her clinging was an alarming encouragement for Tommy to keep on dragging their climb to the only shelther from the rain in sight. There were treelines much clothes but between making Jacqueline Alloways hide in the mud beneath trees or amongst chicken's hay, the latter sounded much more favorable indeed.

Time was having a laugh with them, but despite the rain dragging them down into infinite seconds, breathless as he was, Thomas had pulled through and help them both reach the shed on the hill side. Met with no resistance from the door, they stumbled in the empty shed filled with hay. A long, pitched ringing lingered in their ears, from the sudden escape out of the loudness of the raindrops that had attacked their skin with thousands upon thousands of taps by then. Almost unconsciously, Thomas released her hand and turned around to slam the door shut behind them, allowing the full extent of the cold not to break through and chill their skin into a display of goosebumps they already had become a canvas to.

Flattened at first across the surface of the door, a conduit for him to rest, lean and catch his breath back to something more stable than the ravaged thing it currently was, Tommy slid his hands down ever so slowly.