peaky blinders imagines

on making mistakes; tommy shelby

Your house was deadly silent when Tommy was gone. The maids were too skittish to hold a conversation with the lady of the household, and very rarely did anyone drop by for a visit.
When Tommy was home, you and he were nearly always talking, whether it was to pass the time while you did paperwork or to update you on the whirlwind weekend he'd had in London.
But he wasn't home currently, having gone hunting for the head of the latest poor soul to wrong him.
The absence of noise in the house made the gun shot coming from Charlie's room all the more horrifying. The sound ricocheted through the walls, reaching you all the way in Tommy's study.
You shot up in alarm, sprinting the two floors to your son's room, where he was meant to be getting ready for bed and winding down for the night.
Instead, you found him paler than the snow gracing the grounds outside, with a revolver sitting half a foot away from him on his bed and eyes trained on his left index finger, which was missing its top half.
The noise which left you at the sight was not human, and it seemed to snap Charlie out of whatever trance he was in, prompting him to start sobbing. You flirted between him and the door, screeching to the maids to call an doctor before running back to your son, cradling him and whispering over and over that it was going to be alright, as if speaking it any louder would make it untrue. Charlie didn't speak a single word, seeming to regress back into an even younger state, shaking uncontrollably and leaning into his mother as if you could fix anything with the snap of a hand.
-
The doctors came and went surprisingly quickly, bandaging Charlie up and telling you the skin would regrow.
He still hadn't spoken a word, clutching onto your sleeve desperately whenever you moved. It shattered your heart into pieces even further when he asked where his father was; you had no good answer to give him, and "probably off murdering someone brutally" wouldn't have been reassuring.
Your son finally drifted off to sleep around one in the morning, which was also the time that Tommy returned home.
When he saw you in the entranceway after hanging up his hat and coat he looked surprised but happy to see you, smiling and holding out his arms as if to embrace you. As he came closer, however, he realized that you weren't smiling, and his arms dropped inch by inch until he was standing an awkward two feet away from you, unsure what he'd done wrong.
"How," you began, "did our son get one of your guns?"
He paled, but his eyebrows furrowed, not understanding yet the gravity of the situation.
"He shouldn't be able to, love, I keep 'em locked up."
"Well he did," you interjected, trying to keep your voice and body from shaking."
Tommy rolled his eyes at you, arms raising again, this time in a gesture to the heavens, asking God himself how his wife could be so idiotic.
"I don't know what you expect from me! I'd be blind and a fool not to keep guns in the house, and if Charlie wants to learn to shoot, he's my son, he bloody ought to so we don't have to bury him when he's thirteen."
Usually a comment like this would inspire some heated response from you, but you faltered, and your eyes grew hard, an expression Tommy wasn't used to seeing.
"At least he wasn't hurt," Tommy reassured you, thumb brushing over your cheekbone.
"Oh?" You asked, and his face shattered.
You stepped ever closer to your husband, jabbing your left index finger into his chest, the same one your son had maimed.
"Shot off the tip of his finger, he did. It's gone. We'd better hope he's not left handed."
Tommy made a strangled noise, one not unlike what you'd screamed when you first found Charlie bleeding onto his bed.
"Is he-Christ, Y/N, is he alright?"
"Shell-shocked," you told him, nail digging into his shirt. "Hasn't spoken a word. Cried for me like he did when he was a baby. Asked for you, too, didn't know how to go about telling him his father was off doing much, much worse things to people than he could ever imagine."
Your husband dropped to his knees, fingers twisting into fists on the carpet and he bent over in sobs.
"Fuck," he breathed out to the floor, but you knew it was directed at you.
"What have I done?"
"What you had to do," you said firmly, dropping to the floor as well to grip him by the shoulders. "If this house wasn't armed I'd have been dead when I was pregnant with him, but if harm ever befalls our son because of you again, I'll kill you myself."
"I'd let you," he told you honestly, eyes meeting yours.
"I love you." It was an afterthought more than anything, uttered as his head dropped to your shoulder and he exhaled heavily, hands lacing with yours as he reckoned with his life in a way he hadn't done in nearly a decade.