Chapter Text
Johnny fucks him in the storage room of the pub, the barrels rattling and sploshing half-filled with beer; Mark grips the wooden shelves with his aching fingers, and the splinters spike through his skin with every thrust, and he loves it, in a sick manner that thwarts a hole through the pit of his stomach. Every touch of Johnny’s lips on the back of his neck, every bruise on his hips, every pant that washes over his shoulders in hot fractured waves — it stains Mark with the betrayal unknown, sinks as a brand through his skin and fuses into his bones.
Tonight, Johnny will find out. Tonight, Mark will break Johnny’s heart. Tonight, Johnny will hate him. He will send the boys after him, to chase him through the dirty Birmingham alleys until they corner him and put him down like a dog that misbehaved one too many times. Tonight, it will all end.
But now, Johnny is his; and now, Mark loves him.
Johnny’s hand wraps around his throat, raising his chin with gentleness nobody would ever expect from his rough fingers. Mark throws his head back, on Johnny’s shoulder, and he closes his eyes against the kiss to his cheekbone; and Mark remembers it all.
/1/
The mouldy streets of the Garrison Courts are awake only barely as he travels through them, the hooves of Tennie’s Boy clanking on the pavement with an echo that reverberates through the alleys and small nooks where the little boys hide. Johnny watches them from under the cover of his flat cap, making sure it’s the dirty little faces that he needs. They’re useful when they’re fed, and the Peaky Blinders feed them well.
It’s light enough already to see the desolation of the dumps but still not too late as to attract more attention than he needs. Johnny sniffs against the stench and brushes his fingers over linen hanging out to dry as he approaches the market, staying just close enough to let the smell of spices reach him but far enough for them not to overwhelm him. He’s not superstitious, not like Jongin is, but he has his own religion. To be noticed but not seen is just one of the dogmas.
The old man Wong rushes toward him, breaking through the red curtains of the market with a young girl in tow, her face hidden in the green veil ripped at the corners. Johnny sees the fear in her dark eyes and ponders on whether this is really that smart, but then again, nobody had a better idea. Irene won’t like this. He wonders if that’s part of the reason he’s doing this.
“This her?” He asks once he’s close enough to see her greasy hair from his elevation on the horse. “The girl that tells fortunes?”
“Yes, sir,” Wong nods rapidly, eyes downcast to the muddy pavement.
Johnny sighs under his breath and reaches for a coin in his pocket before throwing it at the girl. Then, he nods at her and pulls the bridle to keep the horse in place as the girl retrieves a red pouch from her robes. He ought to be reverent, he supposes, as she gets a fistful of the powder from there with theatricality to it that is almost religious, but all he wants is to light up a cigarette. He waits.
The girl puts her palm in front of Tennie’s Boy’s muzzle and chants foreign words into it as she blows into her palm, and the powder paints the misty air with crimson. The horse neighs unhappily but Johnny holds it back as he trains his ear for the whispers around them, hidden in the alcoves and feeding on the stunk-up air like barn flies.
“They’re doing a magic spell to make it win a race,” they whisper, and it will carry through the town like a plague and spread through bloated tongues and reach the blistering ears that Johnny needs.
The deed done, Johnny nods at Wong and lets him lead the girl away as he turns the horse around and casts a somber glance around all the eyes shining from the dark corners of the street. He makes sure they hear him as he raises his chin.
“The horse’s name is Tennie’s Boy,” he announces loudly. “Kempton, 3 o’clock, Monday. You make a bet, but don’t tell anyone else.”
A murmur of exaltation carries through the dirt, and he doesn’t smile as he leads the horse away, through the melting cesspool of Birmingham and back to the nicer part, cleaner part, the outwardly good part, the part that smiles with pink powdered lips and hides behind that smile a row of teeth just as rotten as everything has been ever since they came back from France. He passes the port of the Cut and tips his cap to Jongin on the other side of the river, and he travels past the BSA factory, its booming pipes sowing even more needles of headache into his already-tormented head, and he rides out through the back alleys and toward the stables, to drop off the horse and check up on the others, and the whinnying is peaceful music to his ears.
Birmingham breathes around him, its crusted lungs wheezing with the smoke of the factory, with the dirt of the river flowing through town like a dying poisonous snake, with the acid of the rain that falls on his face in his dreams, with the unfinished gasp of a man dying on the tracks, with the pain of a lover left behind in a battlefield. It breathes, and Johnny travels through it, and in the midst of this churning, beating, simmering hell, Johnny travels alone.
/2/
Johnny knows Taeyong isn’t happy even before he walks into the house, so he stops before the door to shake a Sweet Afton’s from the carton pack and light it up with a match that he discards into the puddle. On the other side of the street, Jeremiah the preacher looms over the beggars and warns of the oncoming end. Jeremiah is a good one. They fought in the garrison together, and they both had to leave something in that trench mud. Jeremiah left some of his mind, Johnny left his best friend. He wonders if Jeremiah ever figured out that the end has passed, and they’ve left it behind. He lets his throat feel the burn of the cigarette and opens the front door into the house.
He’s met with the chatter and booming laughter, the bookies taking bets and the poor bastards hoping for a little cut of the fortune dislodging their last coins onto the low wooden tables. Johnny glances around, checking that everything is in order—all the little scraps of paper carrying the bets, all the keeping books marked with green, every piece of the machine his family has shed blood and tears for—and looks up at the blackboard, where Yuta is hastily but surely marking down the odds, the chalk in his palm flying with the years of ease behind it.
It’s these sounds, these familiar echoes—the clinking of the coins, the scuffle of pencil on paper, the beat of the chalk on the board—that he loves and seeks out when the thumps of the shovels follow him into the day.
Yuta turns around just in time to see him and lights up with a happy smile, a sight welcomed and haunted, before running down the steps and grabbing one of the books to show to Johnny, his hair wild and unkempt.
“Look,” he breathes out, dragging his finger down the rows and rows of exactly what Johnny wants to see. “All on Tennie’s Boy.”
“Good job, Yuta,” Johnny commends.
He allows himself a small smirk as he slaps Yuta on the shoulder, but it falls quickly when he sees the door to the office open. He knows Taeyong’s eyes will be burning even before he looks up to meet them and arch his eyebrow. Taeyong jerks his head to call him into the room, and Johnny sighs, accepting a sympathetic wink before he follows his brother inside.
The small dim room stinks of rum and smoke and just a touch of the rose perfume, and it tugs at his gut like the old bullet that should’ve come his way. That shouldn’t have come his way. He leans near the window and casts a glance around the cluttered backyard while he waits for Taeyong to speak, the chant of the beads on Ten’s old rosary thumping in Taeyong’s palm.
“You were seen doing the powder trick down at the Garrison Courts,” Taeyong says, his voice low and raspy through the musty air.
“Times are hard,” Johnny drawls. “People need a reason to place a bet.”
“You went to the Chinese,” Taeyong says.
“The washerwomen say she’s a witch,” Johnny reasons. “It helps them believe.”
“We don’t mess with the Chinese,” Taeyong reminds counterproductively. “They have their own cutters.”
Johnny suppresses a sigh and takes a drag out of his cigarette, listening to the crinkle of the burning paper as he meets Taeyong’s eyes over the thick smoke. There used to be something else in those eyes, he thinks, but it’s hard to remember. Those memories hide behind the wall erected from the stench of gunpowder and the slick of Ten’s blood on his fingers.
“We agreed, Taeyong.” He clicks his tongue. “I take care of drumming up new money. You run the books and look pretty.”
Which isn’t that full of truth either, because Irene still checks the books after him, but Johnny didn’t lie about the pretty thing. Taeyong glares at him, some of that old fire coming back, but it’s not a good sight. It usually just burns him down ever so, crusting away yet another piece of the soul that never really came back with him from France.
“What if the horse wins, Johnny?” Taeyong wonders, head tilted. “You fixing races now?”
He doesn’t say the horse’s name, even though he insisted on calling it Tennie’s Boy. He never says his name these days, but he wears it branded on his gun and carved into his open chest.
“We don’t have permission,” Taeyong continues, eyes hooded, “from Billy Kimber to be fixing the races, Johnny.”
Johnny drags his tongue over his lower lip and continues smoking. Taeyong’s eyes flash with irritation as he walks around the table to lean into him, catch his eye and twist his mouth. There is a new cut on it, and Johnny wonders what kinds of trouble he got into this time to let the sick hit of the punch to his jaw try and beat the memories out of him.
“What’s gotten into you?” Taeyong whispers, and his breath stinks of rum. “You think we can take on the Chinese and Billy Kimber?”
Johnny thinks they can take on the whole fucking world, but he doesn’t tell Taeyong that. He doesn’t tell Taeyong a lot of things these days, for a very simple reason that shows its ugly face to him every time Taeyong spirals just a bit further down the drain.
“I think,” Johnny points out. “That’s what I do. I think, Taeyong, so that you don’t have to.”
It’s a cheap and old excuse, but there’s a reason they still run with it. Taeyong sways a little, and Johnny walks around him to put his cigarette out on the windowsill and throw it outside through the crack. He can feel Taeyong’s eyes on the back of his head.
“There’s news from Belfast,” Taeyong says, grim.
Johnny nods as he fixes his jacket and walks out of the room, back into the bookie room, back to the chatter and the noise. It’s better than the oppressing silence of Taeyong’s grief. Johnny loves him, loves him too much to bear sometimes, and he would lay down his life for both his brothers in a heartbeat, but there arises an issue with that when he looks into their eyes and knows that their hearts don’t beat anymore, not for their own sakes.
“I’m calling a family council today at eight!” Taeyong shouts after him, his grip white-knuckled on the door. “I want all of us there, you hear me? Trouble’s coming!”
Yuta looks up from his table curiously, but Johnny walks past him and through the back exit into the living quarters, through the quiet den where Karina is reading by the fireplace, and back into the street. A new cigarette is in his chapped lips before the fresh air stained with smogue hits him, and he inhales, deeply and ardently. It’s still not as deep as to burn the residue of the powder and trench dirt out of his lungs, but it’s enough. It’s gotta be enough.
It’s not enough.
/3/
Yuta shouldn’t be here; he knows it with the echoes of every warning ever spoken and every shot ever taken, and he knows it with the memory of his feet slipping in the thick blood mixed with the gunpowdered mud. The grass was brown and mouldy and rotten that day, and Ten wanted for them to sing after the battle. They don’t sing anymore.
He tugs the cap further down his eyes and sneaks behind a column, pressing his palms to the rusty panel of the booming machine, its labor vibrating through his skin with heat and a steady thump thump thump. Nobody will see him here, he knows it, because they’re all gathered at the end of the pavilion, their greedy desperate eyes turned to the man speaking to them from the fourth rung of the ladder, his fist raised in a victory that he will never get. Yuta just wishes he understood it too.
Doyoung is beautiful in his frenzied elevation, his eyes burning with his purpose under the sharp hat, his body thin and lanky in the long coat. Yuta wonders if he eats enough these days; then he recalls that he shouldn’t care.
“Comrades,” Doyoung starts as the crowd quiets down and he smiles upon them like a merciful god, and his voice spikes through Yuta’s veins like opium, “we are here today to take a vote on strike action.” The crowd of workers cheers with agreement, and Doyoung nods at them, satisfied and proud. Yuta feels sick. “But before we have a show of hands for that, let’s have a show of hands from all those who fought in France. All those of you who stood side by side with your comrades and watched them fall. Raise your hands.”
God, he really went there, didn’t he? Yuta’s mouth twists with irrational disgust as he watches everyone in the crowd raise their hands, dirtied with oil and smudged with hasty bandages. It would be funny now, he reckons, if he raised his hand too, but he doubts he’s exactly the type of fresh blood Doyoung is looking to recruit.
“The blood shed on Flanders Fields,” Doyoung says pompously, his face constricted with appropriate indignation, “the sweat of your brows. Who reaps the rewards? Is it you?”
The workers respond with a chorus of subdued no’s, so desperate in their outrage but yet too terrified to be louder, bolder. Pathetic.
“Is it your wives?” Doyoung continues, just to hear another denial, stronger this time. “Who, then? Do they stand among us? Or do they sit at home, comfortable with a full belly, while you scrape to find enough to put shoes on your children’s feet?!”
It’s a hypocrisy of the highest caliber because Doyoung doesn’t have a wife or children to come home to. His mistress is his faith, and his past is his Yuta.
The crowd’s anger grows louder, and Yuta looks around to see if there are any coppers in the corners. There won’t be, of course, because his family protects this factory, but that wasn’t enough for Doyoung, was it? Yuta wasn’t enough. It was never fucking enough.
“And what is the reward they offer you for your sacrifices?!” Doyoung bellows angrily. “A fucking cut in your wages! That is your reward!”
He looks like a vengeful god from one of those oil paintings Ten loved so much, and it’s mesmerizing in its fateful descent to watch his eyes burn and his lips spew words of hatred and inspiration, and Yuta knows it’s wrong but his heart reveres before him now. It’s a bloody waste, truth be told, because Yuta loved him when he was nothing but a scrappy kid running around the block and grinning up from the river, his teeth chattering and his heart on his sleeve. He doesn’t wonder where the kid disappeared to — he knows for a fact; he was there when the fire rained upon them from the sky and buried the kid under the ashes.
“Raise a hand,” Doyoung urges, “those of you who want to strike!”
As expected, everybody throws their fists into the air, their angry no’s turning into bloodthirsty yes’s, and Yuta watches in wonder as their faces turn into ashen graves right before his mind’s eye. They will be dead, all of them, before they can even get an inch of their patched-up boots onto the promised land; because the land doesn’t exist.
Yuta doesn’t want to watch anymore. It hurts enough as it is, and he’s heard and seen enough for a good report if Johnny asks why he was here. Because it wasn’t a job explicitly given to him. It was just one of those things Johnny allows, because Johnny, on a level deep in his charred heart of hearts, understands it. He doesn’t turn around as he walks out, sneaks away from the chatter of the doomed crowd. It’s been enough, and he doesn’t want to risk watching Doyoung’s face anymore, seeing the life and joy in it, recalling the taste of the lips now raising an army that will inevitably fall, feeling the burn of the touch that now exists in another world.
Doyoung used to look at him like that, worship him and lie with him, but now his only lover is his purpose. There would be an irony to it, Yuta reckons, because perhaps Doyoung truly prefers them broken and barreling into ruin, but that wouldn’t make any sense. Because Yuta wasn’t broken when they loved each other, when they fought side by side, when they fucked with his mouth stuffed with bleached rags that tasted like gasoline and blood. No, Yuta became broken after.
Doyoung loved him as he was, and he left him as he is. Doyoung chose to be a commie, and Yuta chose to survive him. How fucked up was that?
/4/
“I’ve called this family meeting because I’ve got some very important news.”
Johnny leans back in his chair as he listens to Taeyong, watching him stand there at the head of the table with his fingers trembling as they point at the two boat boys wringing their hands at his side; but Taeyong’s posture is straight and unyielding, and he seems to be sober enough to pretend and lead the meeting. That’s good. Every morning as Johnny walks into the den, he wonders if this will be the day he will pack Taeyong up into their new shiny car and send him off to heal somewhere that’s not full of memories. Today isn’t that day, and it won’t be tomorrow, and with how their lives at the edge of a blade are, that’s enough for now.
“Scudboat and Lock got back from Belfast last night,” Taeyong relays. “They were buying a stallion to cover their mares. They were in a pub on the Shank Hill Road yesterday, and in that pub, there was a copper, handing out these.”
He picks up a few sheets of paper from the place next to him and hands them out, dispersing them through the family. Irene grabs one before he can reach her, and Johnny suppresses a sigh as he watches Karina follow her lead and snatch a leaflet with that same importance faux-painted all over her young features. Johnny doesn’t take anything. He waits until Yuta grabs one and reads it out, his fingers brushed with oil that he could’ve gotten in only one place in this town. Once again, Johnny holds back a sigh and instead takes a drag.
“If you’re over five feet and can fight,” Yuta reads, “come to Birmingham.”
“They’re recruiting Protestant Irishmen to come over here as Specials,” Taeyong translates.
“To do what?” Karina frowns, her wide eyes round and innocent.
“To clean up the city, Karina,” Johnny drawls. He clicks his tongue. “The copper’s the Chief Inspector. The last four years, he’s been clearing the IRA out of Belfast.”
Taeyong looks up at him, dark. “How do you know so much?”
There they go again. Johnny holds his gaze.
“Cause I asked the coppers on our payroll.”
Which is what you should have done; only you didn’t, and that’s precisely why we work the way we work.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Taeyong asks.
Refer to the previous reason. Johnny sighs after all, and it comes away with the stink of his exhaustion that clings to the back of his tongue.
“I’m telling you now,” he decides in the end.
Taeyong doesn’t reply, just takes a grim swing from his flask; the rosary beats against the metal and resonates in the glint of his eyes.
Irene turns to him, her back straight and her hand steady on the back of her chair.
“So why is he in Birmingham?”
Johnny doesn’t pause before his reply, but he still thinks Irene sees something in his eyes that nobody else ever does.
“There’s been all those bloody strikes at the BSA,” he says slowly; pretends not to notice Yuta flinching. “Now the papers are talking about sedition. Revolution. I reckon it’s the communists he’s after.”
Which is good enough of a reason for Irene—should be, at least, because they’re not commies and they don’t associate with commies; and it’s one of her unspoken responsibilities to make sure those commies don’t get to his brother and sharp-tongue him into loving them again now that they’re a whore for the red flag.
“So they’ll leave us alone?” Karina asks, hopeful.
It would be useful to calm her mind, lie to her, but she’s restless, has been ever since they came back, and just this once, Johnny decides to indulge that.
“There are Irishmen in Green Lanes who left Belfast to get away from him,” Johnny says with a shrug. “Catholic men who disappear after crossing him.”
“Well, we ain’t the IRA,” Yuta speaks up as Karina looks down, her chest flushed. “We bloody fought for the King.”
Gah. Johnny looks away to admire the wonderful dirty view from the window through the yellow-stained glass as he sucks on his cigarette and waits for Yuta to fire up and die down so that he can continue with his bloody day.
“And besides, we’re not some common dogs,” Yuta says, “we’re the bloody Peaky Blinders. If those coppers decide to come for us, we’ll cut them a smile each.”
Karina looks at him with a little indulgent and proud smile, and he flicks her nose in affection. In a painful tug to his gut, it reminds Johnny of when she was just a little kid with pigtails and dirty-hemmed dresses running after them through the streets, begging for her brothers to play with her because she was surrounded by boys and was never taught to be a lady. It’s not a bother, Johnny reckons, because she grew up to be better and stronger than any of them fair-handed little girls who played with dolls instead of knives.
“Is that it, then?” Johnny sighs, looking at Taeyong, growing weary of this farce.
“Irene?” Taeyong says, looking down on their older sister. “What do you think?”
She brushes a hand through her long hair and drags a lungful of smoke from her cigar before she speaks, her elbows on the table as she looks up at Johnny through her eyelashes.
“This family does everything out in the open,” she says in that light tone of hers that hides the depths of her own brand of darkness. “You have nothing more to say to his meeting, John?”
A phantom slash of the knife to his gut, a friendly pinch to his ass that comes with the memory of that name. Ten loved to say it, that cheeky smirk on him as he dared Johnny to take offense and contradict. You could never outtalk Ten. What a pity it was that death wasn’t one for conversation.
“No,” Johnny says curtly. “Nothing that’s women’s business.”
“This whole bloody enterprise was women’s business while you boys were away at war,” Irene says, doing a good job at keeping her anger contained. Taeyong should get a tip or two from her. “What’s changed?”
Johnny pushes away from the doorframe and walks over to the table, his boots thumping over the wooden floors in the silence that baits its breath for his response. It’s a contradiction that drives him mad at night—he loves the command he has over the room yet he cannot bear to remain in the quietude. It burns and thumps like shovels against the earth. He puts his cigarette out in her ashtray and meets her eyes.
“We came back,” Johnny says simply.
Irene’s jaw hardens, and he sees their mother in her beauty and her irritation. With the last glance over the room, Johnny leaves the house. He has matters to attend to.
/5/
When Johnny enters the Garrison, slow and measured, he sees Doyoung right away; hears him, more precisely, his high voice unmistakable as it bellows with laughter in the corner booth and preaches his red bullshit to his comrades. It’s a good enough pub, spacious and comfortable, with a private snug room for Johnny and the boys and a very agreeable owner who serves drink that almost doesn’t taste like piss, and it would be perfect if James learned how not to let in the fucking commies.
Johnny knows he’s noticed as he walks up to the bar, not just by Doyoung and his dogs but by everybody else, their chins bowed and their cap’s touched in respect. He doesn’t react or turn around, instead leaning his elbows on the shiny stand—James always keeps this dingy joint clean—and exhaling deeply. James is already rushing toward him with the bottle of whiskey, a friendly and just a tad scared smile on his wrinkled face.
“On the house, Mr Suh,” he blurts, clinking a glass on the stand and pouring his drink.
With a sigh, Johnny drops two shillings on the bar. James’s eyes darken with anxiety, as they always do, but Johnny doesn’t pay attention to that. He looks down on the glistening surface and meets his own eyes in the mirky reflection; he wonders if he’s always looked like this. Tired and fucking spent, like he crawled out of those trenches five minutes ago and not almost a year.
He lets the chatter of the patrons and the stench of the tobacco cloud his mind, and yet he still hears the opening creak of the door to the storage room that keeps the jags and barrels of beer and old dusty boxes of contraband. Johnny doesn’t know why he looks up, but he does, startled by the sound that doesn’t fit into the pattern, and that is how Johnny sees him for the first time.
It’s barely a moment that passes as the boy walks from the storage room and through the bar and toward the back of the pub to disappear into the service rooms, but it stretches on with the crispness and black dust of the silent pictures. It’s his eyes, Johnny reckons, that get him for some reason when they look up to meet his for barely a second, only to dart to the floor and disappear under the mop of dark slightly-curled hair. He’s not that tall to be intimidating but still carries a grace with him that only men who’ve used guns are wont to do, and Johnny follows him out; his hearing is foggy until the boy disappears in the back and the chatter filters back in.
“You got a new helper?” Johnny asks slowly, looking up at James.
The bartender halts with his hand still clutching the rug he’s been using to clean the surface, and there is that old, familiar, disgusting fear in his eyes when he answers.
“Yeah,” James breathes out, “just some kid wandered in and begged for a job. Said he was from Galway, used to work in Dublin.”
Johnny’s eyebrows fly up. “He’s a long way from home.”
“No kin,” James shrugs, as if that explains everything, and perhaps it does. People drift when there is nothing tethering them to their home. “Never knew his mother, father died in the War.”
“Did he fight?” Johnny asks, because the boy looked young but not young enough to escape the clutches of the King’s reach.
“Dunno.” James shrugs. “I can find out?”
“No need.” Johnny finishes his drink and pushes away from the bar. “Just make sure he doesn’t poke his nose where it don’t belong.”
The kid looks innocent enough but it’s the pretty ones that get into the darkest corners. Ten was the prettiest of them all, and he was an excellent spy precisely because of that, charming both German scum and French innkeepers alike into giving him exactly what he needed. Johnny doesn’t need an Irish boy poking around, not with that Qian copper in town.
James nods at him in confirmation and opens his mouth to undoubtedly barrel out an obligatory yes, sir, but he doesn’t get to — the door crashes open, and Johnny whips his head around just in time to see Danny fall into the pub, his eyes crazed in harrowing delusion and his mouth bellowing with spit and curses for the ghosts that only he can see.
He doesn’t think twice about it as he dashes forward and catches Danny just as he finishes flipping a table over. Johnny grabs one of his strong hands, straining against the man’s muscles, and looks up to see Doyoung silently rush to their side and grab Danny’s other hand. Danny thrashes and screams, tears of anger and terror streaming down his red face.
“They’re going to get me!” He screams, shrieks, and that loud sound drums into Johnny’s ears and brings him back to that hell, and his heart fills with ice.
He looks up at Doyoung. “On three.”
Doyoung nods, his lips pinched together as he struggles to keep Danny, the man roughly twice their size, in place. Johnny counts down, and they grunt as they pick Danny up and slam him to the floor. Doyoung presses his knee to Danny’s shoulder blades as Johnny leans down and brushes the hair away from Danny’s sweaty forehead with the care that none of them ever got.
“Breathe,” he says urgently. “Danny, just breathe. You’re safe. You’re home. We’re all back home, we’re not in France. You’re not there, Danny.”
“You’re not an artillery shell, Danny,” Doyoung pants desperately. “You’re a man, and you’re safe, aye?”
Johnny bites his tongue against an insult, because this isn’t the time; this is, perhaps, the only time when there are no walls of bitterness and resentment between them. It’s this hell that broke them apart, and it’s in this hell that they can come together, if only for a moment.
“You’re not a whizz-bang,” Johnny picks up. “You’re a human being, and you’re safe. You’re alright.”
Slowly, as Johnny continues murmuring encouragement, Danny calms down, his body going slack under his arms. It’s only when his wails of a wounded animal slowly melt away into the hurt, tearful whines, that they can stand back. Johnny eases his grip on Danny to test the waters and sees that the man is not thrashing anymore, and so he feels safe enough to let him go and sit back, his chest heaving.
He helps Danny up and clutches his shoulder, leaning down to meet his watery eyes, just to see if he’s back — and it’s redundant because none of them are really ever back—but at least Danny looks lucid enough. Not sane, never sane, but present.
“Did I do it again?” Danny whispers, broken and pathetic.
Bile rises in Johnny’s throat as he nods, his own heart breaking, and presses their foreheads together, his grip on Danny’s neck strong and unyielding against Danny’s shoulders shaking with his sobs. Johnny wishes he could whistle and banish everybody from the pub to give the man his privacy, but that would be useless — Danny’s never alone in his head.
“You gotta stop doing this, man,” Johnny breathes out, hoping his voice is warm enough even if he doesn’t feel it.
“I’m so sorry, Johnny,” Danny whines, “I’m so sorry.”
Johnny slaps his shoulder and slowly leads him away, outside, to the fresh air and the stark light of their reality. Danny clings to him as they walk, and he sees Doyoung hovering on the other side, and he wants to snap at the man — just to have someone to scream at; but it’s not about him. It’s never about him, and he must never break composure.
“It’s alright, Danny,” Johnny placates. “You go on home. Try to get all the smoke and mud out of your head, eh?”
“Yes, Johnny,” Danny nods desperately. “I’m so sorry.”
Johnny waves it off as he watches Danny stumble away and leans tiredly on the wall of the pub, shaking off a cigarette and lighting up, his fingers still trembling. He closes his eyes as he inhales, and when he opens them, he sees the boy again, fearful on the steps of the pub with a waste bin clutched in his fingers. Dainty and clean, with just an ash of dirt over them.
“What’s your name?” Johnny barks out.
He flinches when the boy staggers backward, but the kid must have more gut on him than it seems, as he straightens up quickly and raises his chin.
“Mark,” he says, and then adds, as a deliberate afterthought, “sir.”
Johnny rolls the name on his tongue and spits it to the side.
“Tell James to put all the damage on my tab,” he instructs.
There’s a peculiar frown on Mark as he looks him up and down, which is somehow intriguing, and Johnny holds his gaze until the boy looks away and nods, his cheeks blushed. He rushes into the pub just as Doyoung walks out of it, looking around him with a frown. It clears when he notices Johnny, to give place to that infuriating smirk that used to mean fun and trouble and came to become one of the sights Johnny despises most.
Mostly, perhaps, because he doesn’t understand how Doyoung still has the strength to smile. The gut to smile.
“And here I thought the Peaky Blinders protected their investments,” Doyoung says slowly, walking down the steps and leaning on the wall next to Johnny. “But of course, you’re just gonna throw some money at it and make it go away, I bet.”
“You don’t bet,” Johnny reminds grimly, even though he really shouldn’t indulge the fucker.
“No, I don’t.” Doyoung pulls out a hand-rolled cigarette and puffs out a smoke before speaking again. “But these last few days I’ve been speculating.”
Johnny doesn’t reply, doesn’t want to fucking continue this non-conversation; what he really wants is to put a bullet through Doyoung’s head, feed him to the fish in the Cut, and never fucking think about him again. But those are dark thoughts, insincere thoughts, the ones that he wants to have but can never bring himself to. More than one heart would be broken if Doyoung was to die from Johnny’s hand; even if all those hearts are way too bruised to be affected anymore.
“One of my Union comrades has a sister who works in the telegraph office at the BSA factory,” Doyoung says, unfazed by his animosity as usual. “She says, over the past week they’ve had messages coming up from London to the brass, from Winston Churchill himself.” He turns to prop his shoulder next to Johnny and leans his head closer, to whisper into his ear, “Something about a robbery.”
He has a lot of bravado to be standing this close to Johnny, but he knows why he’s doing this — to gauge his reaction, see his pulse spike; because it does. Because if Doyoung knows, it puts him on the list as just another name under the magnifying glass, and Johnny really doesn’t fucking want to have to protect the commie bastard too. The days he could afford to care about Doyoung are long gone, and the calendar of them ended when Doyoung walked out on him and his brother and joined the ranks of hopeful fools.
“A robbery of national significance, it said,” Doyoung drawls. “She found a list of names left on the telegraph machine. And on that list was your name and my name together.”
Johnny raises his eyebrows and puckers his lips in the pretense of a surprise. This can’t fool Doyoung, because once upon a time, it was him who taught Johnny this trick. Still, he perseveres.
“Now tell me,” Doyoung says, louder this time, finally looking away from Johnny’s face and toward the workers dragging coal on the other end of the street, “what kind of list would have the name of a communist and the name of a bookmaker side by side?”
A fucking obituary, Johnny wants to say. The yellow letter to send home. A list of casualties.
It should've been their names on Ten’s grave.
“Perhaps it’s the list of men who give people false hope,” Johnny finally replies, lips around his cigarette. “The only difference between you and me, Doie, though, is that sometimes, my horses stand a chance of winning.”
He sees Doyoung grit his teeth together, that poisonous tongue of his perhaps ready with rebuttal, but he doesn’t get to hear that little piece of commie poetry. The door to the pub opens again, and Mark comes stumbling out, and his rosy cheeks are definitely a sight more welcomed than Doyoung’s sour mug.
“You forgot—” Mark swallows nervously and extends his hand, Johnny’s flat cap in his palm.
Johnny takes it silently and flips it over his head, while Doyoung sighs and spits under his feet before returning to his cigarette. Mark stands there hovering, and Johnny looks at him tiredly, silently asking if there’s anything else.
“What was wrong with that man?” Mark asks, high-pitched and laced with false bravery. “Danny?”
“What happened to us all,” Doyoung snorts. “War.”
Mark purses his lips, a guilty shine in his eyes that answers Johnny’s earlier question. He didn’t fight. Either by choice or by force, and he guesses that it’s the latter. He can see the story spread out on Mark’s unblemished skin and in his shiny eyes that still have that light that’s been snuffed out of the rest of them. Probably was in some fucking boarding school somewhere in America, just like many of the kids born into the cream of the crop and not into the shit and the mud like him and his family.
Clearly not getting anything else, Mark nods and escapes back into the pub, and Johnny exhales in a long pillar of smoke.
“Do you ever think it was easier back there?” Doyoung asks quietly, and for the first time in forever, his voice is familiar. “In the trenches? We had rules, at least.”
“There are still rules, Doie,” Johnny says, subdued. “You just chose another game.”
Doyoung tsks his tongue and chuckles darkly before pressing his hand to the wall near Johnny’s head and leaning his face closer, that same old hatred back in his eyes now, the vengeful anger of a boy who was one of their own in their home since he was a child and always turned the other side until he decided that side was more appealing to him and his new morals that sprouted overnight.
“You know, I hear about all the cuttings and the beatings,” he seethes, his eyes darting toward the razor blades hidden in Johnny’s cap, “and I wish you took that bullet instead of him.”
Oh, that’s a low fucking blow, and it burns in Johnny’s gut like flaming coal, but as always in times like these, he recalls the faces of the people who would fall if he was to lose his composure; and he thinks about the face of the man who did.
“And I,” he says slowly, meeting Doyoung’s eyes, “wish that bullet found the one it was coming for.”
Doyoung’s eyes splash with hurt, and it’s fucking detrimental, the things they keep doing to each other, because what would change, Johnny wonders? If Ten hadn’t taken that bullet for Doyoung, they would still lose a friend, and one of his brothers would still leave his soul on that battlefield, and he would still have to pick up the pieces, and it would still be him, alone, against the ghosts in his family’s eyes, both those buried six feet under and those yet walking the earth under their red flags.
“Well,” Doyoung exhales, “maybe one day you will get to finish what it started.”
Johnny doesn’t reply. He just shakes his head and throws his cigarette into the ground, and he stomps on it before storming off through the mist and the drizzle of the rain, and he leaves Doyoung behind.
One thing, he reckons, would be different if it was Doyoung they brought back home in a wooden box. If Ten had survived, he would do a lot of things with his freedom; but he would most fucking definitely not join the goddamn communists.
/6/
It’s Karina who tells Johnny that Irene is expecting him as soon as he walks through the door. She jumps up from the armchair near the fireplace, those cheeky eyes bright and joyful with purpose, and she rattles out the message that was entrusted to her to give her a sense of being something more than just a seventeen-year-old girl stuck with a gang for a family. Johnny smiles at her and gives her a cheek kiss before he turns around and leaves the house barely two minutes after he’s returned.
His feet are heavy as they thump through the low wooden doors of the church. He doesn’t look up at the crucifixes or the icons, doesn’t wish the temptation of guilt. He left his faith on the battlefield, next to Ten’s body. It’s empty inside, with just a lonely figure draped in black praying softly in the fifth row. Johnny sighs as he walks through and sits behind her. All of them don’t lack in theatricality, but he wishes Irene wouldn’t hold meetings with him in places she still wishes he would come to willingly.
“I have ten minutes,” he says softly, his palms propped on his knees. “What do you want?”
Irene doesn’t reply at first. She finishes her prayer and drags her lips along her rosary before turning her head ever so slightly to him, her profile alight with the sickly yellow of the candles on the altar.
“An explanation,” she says grimly. “I’ve always been able to tell when you’re hiding something, you know that.”
He knew. He knew very well, he was just foolishly hoping she wouldn’t ask. Or maybe he hoped for the opposite, because it weighs on his chest and crashes his ribs dead in the night, and he misses the trust he’s put in his sister when they were just two toddlers in an empty dark den of a house and she would rock him to sleep after another nightmare.
“People round here talk,” Irene continues, her voice softer now as she leans back on the bench and glances at him, her dark eyes hooded with her reverence before the God that abandoned him. “Some of them work at the BSA. I’ve been talking to the wives of factory hands. Detectives have been asking questions in the proofing shops. Nothing happens at that factory without you knowing about it.” She finally turns to him, her slender hand wrapped in their mother’s old burgundy dress lacing over the bench. “Speak. God and your big sister are listening.”
He almost smiles as he meets her eyes, crinkled at the edges with age that came too soon and the kindness that she tries to channel, if only to show him that she’s still here as his sister and his childhood best friend, not just a woman that led his business and continues to do it from the shadows when he gets too wrapped up in his nightmares.
It would be such a relief to confide in her. It would be useful, too. Irene has hands in all the places he can’t reach, either out of his standing or because he simply has a cock, and she is his right hand when Taeyong isn’t listening. Johnny drags his tongue along his lower lip and tastes tobacco. Then, he speaks.
“It was meant to be routine.” He looks down and focuses on the notch carved into the bench before him, probably by some bored kid at mass. Perhaps even by him a long time ago. “I had a buyer in London for some motorcycles. I asked my men to steal me four bikes with petrol engines. I’m guessing my men were drunk.” His lips twist with irritation, almost with disbelief as to what happened; it’s still fresh in his mind, that minute horror and lasting exhilaration. “There’s a still inside the factory that makes tram line gin. They picked up the wrong fucking crate. The boys dropped it to Jongin’s yard, as agreed. They must’ve taken it from the proofing bay instead of the export bay.” He feels it now as it was that night, the drizzle pattering on his face as they pried open the crate and saw rows upon rows of long wooden boxes instead of the bloody bikes. It was dark in the yard, and they only had a few lanterns, but they saw what was in those crates with painful clarity stained with the fog of the night. “Inside, we found twenty-five Lewis machine guns, ten thousand rounds of ammunition, fifty semi-automatic rifles, two hundred pistols—with shells.”
He doesn’t look up at Irene but he can feel her eyes widening, her mouth opening into a slight o of horror and apprehension as she clutches her rosary to her chest.
“Jesus, Johnny,” she breathes out.
Not quite him, no, Irennie, he wants to say.
“All bound for Libya,” he drops the topper. “Sitting right there in Cousin Jongin's yard.”
Irene stares forward, undoubtedly turning to God and begging him to close his eyes on this; then, she whips around, a horrified guess in her dark eyes smudged with the black liner.
“Tell me you threw them in the Cut,” she asks urgently, desperately, and oh, it would be heartwarming how much she still believes in him if his heart was even capable of anything but ache.
“We put them in the stables out of the rain,” he says, honest with her since this is the theme for this evening. “The guns hadn’t been greased yet.”
He knows what will happen a second before she whips around and hits his arm repeatedly, her rosary beads cutting into the hardened muscle of his healthy arm. He endures it stoically and with a single grunt as her face twists with anger and barely-concealed panic, and this is why he’s the head of the family even though she’s kept it afloat while they were fighting.
“So that’s why they sent that copper from Belfast,” she seethes, leaning closer to try and catch his eyes.
Johnny licks his lips and looks up at her, arching his eyebrow ever so slightly. “Maybe. Maybe not.”
But most probably yes. They could be here for the commies, but those bastards have been whining and rioting for quite a while now, and it’s only now that he has a ticking bomb in his stables that Mr Secretary decided to sic an Irish dog on him.
“Johnathan,” Irene says, hard and mad, “you’re a bookmaker, a robber, a fighting man, but you are not a fool. You sell those guns to anyone who has use for them, you will hang.”
The door behind the altar creaks open as a priest stumbles out of it, and they wait until he passes them with a small nod before speaking again. Johnny licks the inside of his lips as he holds Irene’s gaze, tired and just a little pissed. As if he doesn't know what this could mean, as if he doesn’t see all the faces that will fall if he fucks up even an inch every time he closes his eyes. There is fear and love in Irene’s eyes, and oh, isn’t that a dangerous gunpowder mix.
“Dump them somewhere the police can find them,” Irene instructs. “Maybe if they know they haven’t fallen into the wrong hands, this might blow over.”
This is a cheap and flimsy plan, but it’s also the only one he also has that doesn’t end in their entire family strung up like rag dolls on the hanging pole. He also has another one, but it’s even worse and lousier, and he keeps it at the back of his mind as the last-resort option.
Because he’s not a gambling man; he is a man the gamblers come to for help to cheat the fortunes. But he’s also a man tired of picking up scrapes and grasping at threads, and he wants some real fucking power that extends beyond this shitty albeit loved town.
“Tell Jongin to dump them tonight,” Irene says.
“No.” Johnny clicks his tongue. “He won’t move contraband under a full moon. Three days until it wanes.”
Three days for him to try and find a way to use those guns; because if he doesn’t, he will have to let go of yet another plan that he couldn’t go through on because he didn’t have enough resources. It pisses him off, but he looks at Irene calmly, to perhaps assure her that she’s right. She needs this, and maybe he needs it too.
“Then you’ll do the right thing?” Irene demands, reaching forward to touch his shoulder.
Johnny leans away from the touch and nods, if only not to speak the words that might become a lie. Not in the house of God. He might have lost his faith but the heat of the Sunday mass yet burns on the back of his neck, under the scar left there by a German bastard.
“You have our mother’s common sense,” Irene says, seemingly placated for now; the fear is still dark deep in her eyes, “but our father’s devilment. I see them fighting.” She leans in and touches his hand after all, her small fingers on his cold ones. “Let Mom win.”
She stands up and gathers her veil, flicking it around her face as she touches his shoulder in farewell and leaves the church, and Johnny sits there, just for a moment more to look up at the dome and wonder if she’s right. If she sees more than he wants to, if she’s afraid not because of those guns still hanging around their throat like a drowning man’s stone but because she knows that he wants to gander.
Johnny closes his eyes and breathes out, and he thinks he hears the residue of the high-pitched laughter through the camp. It reaches his ear and flows into it like bittersweet music, and it balms his aching heart like honey. Ten would love this plan. Ten would come up with this plan. Ten was the best of them, the most daring.
When he opens his eyes, the laughter is nothing but an echo. Johnny pushes away from the bench and leaves the church, and he doesn’t look back.
/7/
When Johnny stumbles back into the house with the moon high and bright over the streets littered with urchins and waste, everybody is already asleep. Or at least that’s what he assumes when he walks into the den and sees the fire almost dead, with just an empty armchair in front of it. Johnny takes a step to put it out, and that’s when he sees a lifeless hand hanging off of the arm, thin pale fingers entwined with the rosary.
His heart stops, just for a moment, with the assumption that he has been darkly expecting all this time, but then Taeyong hears him coming and turns his head; his eyes are empty and drunk, but at least they’re alive. Johnny swallows around a thick lump in his throat and crouches next to his brother, brushing his fingers over Taeyong’s.
There is a pain in Taeyong’s eyes. It’s always there, never wavering, but it’s less noticeable in the light of day, when the sunlight hits them just right and they turn from two dark pits into lovely honeyed eyes of a man who stole quite a few hearts in his time. It’s the night when you can see the truth in them, the throbbing candor of their loss. There’s a new scratch right at the edge of Taeyong’s undercut, of unknown origins but of reasons easy to guess. Johnny raises his hand and brushes his fingers through Taeyong’s slicked hair, and Taeyong’s tortured eyes fall shut with the glistening tear on the edge of his eyelashes.
“I miss him, Johnny,” Taeyong says, a subdued sob curling his lips.
“I know, Taeyong.” Johnny inhales through his nose to keep his own mouth sealed from grief spilt too openly. “Me too.”
Taeyong’s face constricts with denial, because nobody misses Ten the way he does, and Johnny reckons that’s true, because nobody could. The love they shared was different, and it burned not like the love Johnny felt himself, and it scorched Taeyong with permanent marks of the bayonet and the bullets. Taeyong died that day too, his soul leaving his body and remaining with Ten, and Johnny remembers it clear as day — as Taeyong fell to his knees with a scream, as his desperate fingers tried to scoop the blood up, as his body shuddered along with Ten’s last convulsion, as the light in his eyes died just as Ten looked up and gazed up at the sky — and never looked down.
But Taeyong doesn’t say anything, because even in the throes of his grief, he knows he wasn’t the only one who lost Ten. And because nobody would understand just what he lost.
“Come on,” Johnny urges, patting Taeyong’s cheek and standing up.
He leans in to touch Taeyong’s waist gently and helps him up. The bottle clinks to the floor with an empty glass thump as Taeyong staggers out of the chair and into his embrace, but Johnny doesn’t mention it. Somebody will clean that up. There’s an unfinished cigarette pinched between his fingers, and Johnny takes a drag out of it before throwing it into the fireplace.
They stumble upstairs slowly and awkwardly, but it feels like it’s not because Taeyong’s too drunk to move; this man has the tolerance of a very healthy horse and could outdrink anyone aside from Doyoung back in his day. No, Johnny reckons grimly that it’s because each step is hard for Taeyong, even when he’s sober; it is just a bitter reminder that there is nobody walking by his side, that no more are the light steps of a man who walked the earth like he owned it. Johnny understands, and Johnny doesn’t rush him.
Taeyong’s room is surprisingly neat, but Johnny knows that it would take just a surface search to uncover all the little things stashed just barely out of sight but never out of mind. He helps Taeyong into the bed and pulls off his shoes and what he can of his clothes to let him curl up under the covers, his arms tight around the pillow that is a hollow parody of the body he wishes he was holding. The rosary is interlaced with his fingers, never parting from his person, and as Johnny sits next to him and waits until he drifts off, he ponders on all the small pieces that they have torn Ten’s essence into to keep for themselves.
There are many things that belonged to Ten that are now in Taeyong’s desperate, almost religious possession, but the rosary is the one thing that he always carries on his person. Johnny reckons he’s brushed his fingers over the beads enough times to smooth out the crust of blood that spilt on it when Ten fell. Johnny himself has his old hunting knife, which rests forever by his wrist, hidden by the sturdy Donegal tweed, Ten’s old pocket watch, a bronze thing he lifted off a fair when they were eleven, and a single old coin that Ten’s fingers would flip with a click of his tongue when he had a decision to make before the war. Yuta wears his jacket sometimes, on the days where seeing it doesn’t maim them as much. Fuck, even Doyoung has something, Johnny thinks, even though he can’t recall what it is. It doesn’t matter what possession it is, though, in the end, because each time Doyoung breathes, he steals it from Ten’s memory, and that’s enough. That’s enough.
Taeyong’s breathing evens out, and he falls to troubled slumber. Johnny brushes a hand through his hair and presses a lingering kiss to his temple before snuffing out the candle and leaving the room, the door creaking softly after him. He walks toward the end of the hall, to his own room, and notes that the lights are still on in Yuta’s room, the candlelight dancing in the strip under the door. He doesn’t enter. There are no things to talk about in the night that they don’t see in each other’s eyes in the day.
Finally, Johnny ends up alone in his own room. Slowly and meticulously, he undresses to his trousers and the undershirt, and the strain that eases when he takes off the tight tweed is a relief that is only temporary, because the pain never really goes away. His shoulder whines with pain and he touches the soft scar tissue gingerly, counterproductively annoying the wound even more. Then, he starts his ritual.
It’s methodical and calming in its repetition. He sits down on the bed and lights a match to put the fire tip to the opium lamp. Next comes the pipe, its long clay handle coming to sight as he unwraps it from the cloth. The tincan is rough under his fingertips as he opens the lid and gently pulls out a single piece of the brown drug, its sticky tar ripe with stench and the promise of oblivion. It’s quiet in the house, and his exhausted mind is drifting, and he can hear them behind that wall across his bed, shoveling and digging and thumping through the peeling green wallpaper. He rubs the pod between his fingers and sticks it on the needle before holding it over the fire to mellow it out. Like this, it goes into the pipe easily. The hard part done, Johnny exhales and lies down on his side, bringing the pipe into his mouth and holding the pod over the flame of the lamp.
The smoke is bitter at first but quickly becomes sweet, and almost immediately comes the bliss. Johnny takes a deep lungful and puts the pipe on the bed stand before leaning back on the pillows and exhaling in relief, the pain subsiding now and the oblivion knocking gently on his door. He lets it in, and he closes his eyes, and just like that, he’s back in the tunnels.
Ten’s face is dark and streaked with mud, and his eyes are the only parts of him that still shine with vigor, and he’s staring at Johnny with terror and exhilaration, anticipation sizzling as they listen to the shovels on the other side of the earth wall. They’re coming, they’re digging, they’re going to get them, but not unless they get there first, and they bait their breaths, their bayonets at the ready. Johnny looks at his crew and tries to remember their faces—Ten, Doyoung, Danny—in case this is the last time he sees them, and he doesn’t know yet in his youthful foolishness that he will never be able to forget. They will come for him at night like crouching wolves and sink their teeth into the soft flesh of his wounded shoulder, and they will drag him back into the dark tunnels that smell like wet earth and stinging sweat and metallic blood. They will come for him, and they will make him watch again as the soldiers from the other side break through, as Danny falls under their feet, and Johnny will be forced to watch his own hand raise and his gun go off, and it will be misty with the gunpowder and smell like death when Danny will fall to his knees forever shell-shocked, and Ten will wrap his elbow around the soldier’s throat and press and press and press until they hear a sick crunch, and their eyes will meet over the bodies, and they will join in a secret shared just by the two of them in its unique color but known by every man in those tunnels and trenches and camps by its taste.
Ten’s hand jerks. The neck breaks. Johnny gasps awake.
He jolts up and rubs his chest, its heaving waves confusing his disoriented mind. He’s fine, he reminds himself. He’s here. He’s alive. He’s a man; he’s not a digger anymore. He’s home.
Johnny lies back down and exhales, not daring to close his eyes. In the distance, he can hear the shovels. It wasn’t even the fight itself, he thinks bitterly as he listens to the thumps and slashes of metal against the earth, overrun with roots and old bones. It was the wait as they crouched there, fingers numb around the weapons, and breath held until the earth broke; and then it did, and the hell came upon them, and it never left him.
He takes another drag of the opium, a deeper one this time, deep enough to let it burn this out of his gut, cloud his mind and hearing, and let him succumb to sleep in blissful, uninterrupted silence—but it never works; the shovels always beat the sun.