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bossymarmalade) wrote2019-12-06 02:02 pm
bossymarmalade) wrote2019-12-06 02:02 pm
Entry tags:
a hearty cherub of a man
I've been glutting myself with work and fandom, because both of these things quell the anxiety which has been cropping up lately! Nothing serious, heh, and I'm at the end of my extra shifts which means I'm about to happily fling myself wholly into fandom stuff.
For anybody who likes this sort of jazz, I signed up for a Peaky Blinders Alfie/Tommy prompt fic thing and filled a prompt for the two of them except in Taboo, with Tommy in Zilpha's place. Which suited me fine because the show did Zilpha dirty imo.
AO3 link: i am but dust and ashes (the world was created for me) - The two of them are finding each other again: capricious, dishonest, possessive, and desperate to affect the other.
or
-- -- --
Looking at it from the outside, anybody would say that it's Alfie who took advantage of close quarters and easy access. Alfie who was the corruptor, who was the viper in the branches, who was the forbidden fruit of knowledge. Looking at it from the inside, Alfie just might say the same things himself.
Tommy knows better.
"That brother of yours--"
"Half brother."
Grace's mouth pinches for just a moment and then she sweeps on with her statement, determined to have her say before Tommy switches his focus to something else. The opium makes him tangential at the best of times and Grace knows, by now, to take advantage of anything in his eyes that approaches lucidity. "Half brother," she spits, and Tommy's lips twitch as he considers tutting at her, pointing out how unladylike her vitriol is. He doesn't do it. He raises his eyebrows and slowly tilts his head from one side to the other with exaggerated interest in what she's saying and Grace looks furious but she continues.
"Your half brother may intend to keep you from what you should have rightfully inherited but we are not without means through which to strike at him, Thomas, we are not as helpless as he would have you believe, with his solicitor and his evil looks and the way that he uses those rumors about what he did in the godless West Indies as his cloak and shield." Grace crosses herself and Tommy follows the motions of it in the air with the tip of his nose, kittenlike. It amuses him to give his more pixilated impulses their head when Grace is being avaricious, or pious, which tend to go hand in hand more often than not. Religion and money share a sacrament in her soul.
"You, Grace, would have made an extremely effective Popess."
She makes a frustrated sound, one slender hand clenching along with it. "You want him to rob us, then?" Grace demands, nostrils flaring. "Is that what you want from him, Tommy? Or is it something else."
Calling him tommy is a signifier of how angry she is; Grace stopped calling him Tommy two days before their wedding, switching without reason, explanation, or discussion to only calling him Thomas. He'd almost not known who she was fucking on their wedding night when she kept telling this Thomas person to bloody well choke her properly.
His skin's suddenly crawling and Tommy stands abruptly, chair scraping across the flagstone floor as he's dropping the last inch of his still-lit cigarette into his cold tea. "I'll pay him a visit, then, shall I?" he says as though it's just that easy to bring all of this to a satisfying resolution, as though all you need is to be Tommy Shelby and to ask, and Grace feels the dismissal. She doesn't show it, though; she reminds Tommy of who she is by answering with a small, marble-hard smile and says,
"--kiss your half brother hello for me, Thomas. Once you've done greeting him for you ."
Polly's the one who greets Tommy at the door, all folded arms and raised eyebrows, and Tommy holds back a sigh as he sweeps off his hat and attempts -- vainly -- to peer past her into the house where he'd grown up.
"He's not in," Polly says, making absolutely no attempt to sell the boldfaced lie. Tommy can take it or shove it, but he chooses a third option:
it used to be
The attic was where they'd played as children for hours and hours, making every nook and cranny of the space their own. Tommy liked to wriggle beneath the window bench and with a thick lead pencil would draw star people (the five-pointed kind, head and limbs) to represent himself and Alfie and Aunt Pol and Father on the underside of the wooden seat, with one different star (the six-pointed kind, like Alfie wears on a chain around his neck) stuck into corners to represent Alfie's mother, The Mad Jewess. That was how she was referred to and Tommy never questioned it. He never used any star, ordinary or otherwise, to stand in for his own mother; she'd died as he arrived in the world and that was the last business he'd had with her in this life.
Alfie didn't bother to find out what his brother was doing those times, content to let Tommy be strange all on his own while Alfie pondered over new schemes and plans and games to entertain them both. His games were byzantine, daring, ritualistic, and even when they'd bothered to try and include other children, none of them had ever caught on. Only Tommy could be relied upon to fully commit to Alfie's wild cult of unfettered and hedonistic play.
And (to perhaps be expected), the games had evolved as they'd grown and their attic space became even more sacrosanct, Polly banished from it entirely with promises that they wouldn't let mildew fester and rats congregate. Because when they were teenagers and Alfie lay on his back on the floor, gazing up at the underside of the window seat and the dark strokes of Tommy's constellation of family while Tommy's dark hair drew strokes in the air as he bobbed his wet mouth onto Alfie's cock, the world belonged to the two of them and nobody else.
"There's five of you, Tommy," Alfie said, his voice dragging and drowsy even as he kicked one heel along the floor to raise a hip, angling his prick against the inside of Tommy's cheek until his younger brother firmly shoved him back down again. "I've counted, yeah, five of you of these star-people, and there's only three of me. Why is that, love?" He reached down with one hand -- the other still tracing along the galaxy that Tommy'd illustrated -- and wrapped his thumb into strands of straight black hair until Tommy tugged off, smacking his lips, annoyed to be stopped.
"What?" he demanded loudly, but then answered anyhow since he'd heard the question. "Five of me because I was the one drawing it, wasn't I? And as the autobiographer and artist, I got to represent myself as many times as I wanted." Tommy pinched one of Alfie's thighs, drawing a laughing rumble from his remorseless victim. "Three of you because even one is too much. One is more than enough."
"Three because neither maths nor diplomacy is your strong suit." Alfie shoved out from under the windowseat, sitting up, his thick rosy cock curving damply into the crease of his thigh as Tommy kneeled back to rest against his heels. "Come here, sweetheart. Let me teach you your numbers."
Alfie's eyes, a sharper yet more shadowy blue than Tommy's, were stream-clear in the sunshine coming in through the big round window, his smile spreading the thick dark red of his lips across his face like raspberry jam. Tommy licked his own lips and moved forward on his knees, one hand wrapping around the length of Alfie's cock as he leaned in, wanting kisses; but Alfie grabbed Tommy's face in both hands and ... spat on him.
"Ah--" Tommy gasped, but then another hot gobbet of spit hit his face. And one more, against his open, suddenly ravenous mouth, before Alfie pressed his tongue against the frothing wetness and kissed Tommy, deep and hard, sucking and biting at him before pulling panting back. Still holding Tommy's face, Alfie groaned,
"--three times, to keep you safe from the evil eye, remember that, Tommy.The magical properties of spittle and doing something three times over, which you already know somewhere in that flashing minnow brain of yours, because you drew me three times over, eh? Now --" Alfie let go and sprawled back onto the bare wooden floor, propped on his elbows as he parted his thighs, "--be a good boy, go on, and fuck me."
Alfie was in a mood to push that day, because he growled and groaned and shouted as Tommy climbed onto him and drove his cock into his half brother's arse over and over, whipcord muscles shaking with exertion and youthful arousal, desperate to come and at the same time wanting to hold out, draw it out for Alfie's sake.
(And, oh, and his own; because Alfie was a sight to stir the senses when he was being fucked and filled, his succulent fat lips dark and swollen as he moaned, eyelashes spiked damp with sweat and salt, the column of his throat thick and strained, and no lover who Tommy Shelby was ever destined to have in his grown life would compare quite favourably to that.)
At the dinner table that night Polly's dark gaze travelled between them while she held her cup of tea in both hands, and said with waxen-heavy portentousness to Alfie, "--We've all noticed, Alfie, just how well you take care of your little brother. If you're not careful, others will start to remark on it. Hmmm?"
She didn't look at Tommy, only at Solomons Junior, and Alfie's throat worked soundlessly for a moment before he said, "Let them remark on whatever it is they think they know. I guarantee, Pol," Alfie cut with renewed vigor into his chop, smearing it lavishly with enough horseradish to make Tommy cough at the thought, "that the truth is somewhere far beyond their comprehension."
The braggadocio of this comment made Polly smile along the edge of her cup. But her expression went fixed, static, when Tommy tossed the last crust of his bread down on his plate and stood, saying with a casual coldness, "I'm the one takes care of him , only I never get any credit because I'm a second son. And it's thankless work. Let them mention that , when they talk."
Alfie's silverware clinked down against his plate in Tommy's wake, and Polly's cup provided counter-harmony tinking down against her saucer, and Tommy smiled, flatly, as he mounted the stairs to his room and left them behind. He couldn't say why it felt so good to leave Alfie stranded on the shoals of ignominy alone, or why he kept right on screwing Alfie, opening his own legs for Alfie, only to then repudiate him afterwards and refuse to acknowledge their fevered sampling of each others' bodies. But Tommy did. He crashed into Alfie to begin with and then once it was over and their blood was cooling he retreated further every time, until one day -- it was Alfie who retreated.
All the way across the fathomless oceans to the other side of the world.
"There's your tea," Polly says, pouring the cup full to the brim where it sits in its saucer on the kitchen table. If she thinks that's going to wrongfoot Tommy Shelby, then she's assumed too much; he's not that far different from the strange child he'd been, especially when he has some of the poppy in his blood to ease the way and null social convention that might keep his instincts in check.
He leans forward with his hat still in his hands and, stare fixed on Pol as hers is stuck on him, noisily slurps scalding-hot tea from the cup until it's not lapping at the rim anymore. And then Tommy points at the cone of sugar on the counter behind Pol and says, "Sugar, please, Aunt Pol, and milk if you've got it."
She goes still and her mouth purses, eyes flashing in indignation. "If we've got it! Yes, even here at the other end of the city and all society from their Highnesses Tommy and Grace Shelby, we do have milk in, now and again."
"Only not at the moment."
Both of them turn their heads towards the stairs as Alfie comes down them, his head leaned back so Tommy can see the grey of his eyes, almost rolling beneath the broad brim of Alfie's black hat. He looks … Tommy can't say he looks good. He looks ploughed through and harrowed, thick bottom lip carrying the entire freight of all of Alfie's display of emotion, a long scar drawn over his left eye like a permanent tearstain. The thought is laughable. This man descending the stairs in a rolling heavy gait is a stranger to weeping, Tommy can tell that much.
"We've not got milk in, at the moment," Alfie repeats, walking over to stand at Tommy's shoulder -- or against Tommy's shoulder, is more it, and the knuckles of one hand drag a shiver down Tommy's spine. If Tommy just turned his head the right way, he'd be able to slant his mouth over the crest of Alfie's hip, through his camphor-smelling shirt. "Not for you, Tommy. Nor sugar, neither. You get enough of those things at home, don't you?"
"After your visits to the sugar cane fields of Barbados and Trinidad," Tommy says, turning his face up so he doesn't need to think about his tongue against the ridge of Alfie's hip, "I'd think that you'd be absolutely running with the stuff, Alfie. Hasn't it made you any sweeter?"
Polly gets up with her cigarette trembling between her fingers and leaves the room without another word, although Tommy can hear doors opening and shutting, retreating further and further into the house. Alfie hasn't moved, hasn't barely breathed, hasn't taken his seawater stare from Tommy.
"If you came here for … cream," Alfie says, rolling the word around his mouth before lacquering it further, "...and for sugar," he pauses to let weight and innuendo settle, toffeelike, "then I can offer them to you only if you ask, Tommy. Nicely."
Tommy hrrrms in his throat and then opens his mouth, and Alfie puts his thumb against Tommy's lips to stop him. "On your knees, pet," Alfie says, "just like you used to."
"I'm a married man, Alfie," Tommy tries, just so he can say that he did. And perhaps so he can see the look of contempt snarl across Alfie's face briefly as he takes his hand back, there and gone, coiling into the hinge of one jaw where Tommy stares at that tension in fascination as he continues, "I've come to talk about this proper. Civilized."
"I lost all my civility somewhere in the kala pani," Alfie says, and if Tommy doesn't understand the unfamiliar words he does understand the deep ocean depths of Alfie's eyes, the haunting that floats to the surface to bob there, circling his irises. "Along with a great deal more. You don't want to know, Tommy. How dark and black it is down there. Enough to make all the stars you've ever seen disappear, forever."
"Alfie," Tommy says, and reaches up before he can help himself, to put one fingertip at the very corner of Alfie's lower lip and press, pull, disfigure. "What happened to you out there on the ocean? In those foreign lands? Why've you come back like this?"
Alfie's eyes map Tommy's face as Tommy says, very very quietly: "...why did you come back at all ?"
Everything goes dead still between, around them, and Alfie says, "That, dear brother, is a very strange way indeed to entreat me for the inheritance you believe you are owed." He steps back. "It was Grace, yeah, who bade you come? Who spun you tales of terrible Alfie, wicked Alfie, sailing back from the gold-washed shores of tropical islands with riches lining his pockets and an eye to cheat you of what our father left to support you in this life, which is nothing, Tommy. He left you nothing. And my riches are not of the sort your Grace would welcome."
Alfie shoves his hands into his pockets and plucks at them like he's tearing feathers from a dead fowl, turning them inside out one after the other, and Tommy watches with his lip curling in a shudder as salt pours out of every one. Alfie used to carefully heap little piles of salt into the corners of rooms, warning Tommy not to disturb them, so that they could ward off demons and evil spirits. When Alfie had left on the tall ship that took him to his damned equatorial destination, Tommy had discovered some of those piles still remaining in secret corners where Polly hadn't found and swept them gone. He'd sprinkled bits of that salt into his food for three and a half months before it had run out. Some of the salt falling out of Alfie's waistcoat pocket showers along the table and into Tommy's tea and his mouth waters, instantly.
He stands up and gathers the folds of his long black coat around him, swallowing his saliva and the taste of acrid dust, nostrils pink-rimmed and flaring rabbitlike. "We're not without means through which to strike at you," he says, the parroting of Grace's words lending his voice a sing-song quality that causes Alfie's lips to curl in derision. He knows those aren't Tommy's words. He knows the inside of Tommy's mouth like nobody else ever has.
"Then strike, Thomas," Alfie murmurs, the taunt sensual and subterranean, and his fingers move much faster to unbutton the only two that are holding his waistcoat closed, to spread open the shirt below to expose his chest, where Tommy can almost see the thumping of his heart. Before he knows what he's doing Tommy reaches forward and gathers the cambric in his hands, bunching it, ripping it, leaving it hanging like old lace from Alfie's heavy shoulders.
"The next time I see you," Tommy says as he quicksteps away, circumnavigating Alfie's unmoving figure, "I'll be collecting my inheritance. All of what's owed me. You know what that is."
The shirt slips further down Alfie's shoulders and Tommy catches a glimpse of a strange scarred mark on his muscled back: a hand, fingers together, the thumb and pinkie curled stylistically. Blue ink casting it ghostly, frozen.
"I will see you before that," Alfie says. Ghostly. Frozen. Tommy tastes salt riming the sides of his tongue as he shuts the door.
The attic room is where Alfie's lived since his return, and Pol ventures up when she damn well feels like, now. It scarcely matters. If Alfie wants sex he gets it by his own hand, and Polly has a seventh sense for that sort of depravity (her sixth having been entirely used up and burned down by what her two charges had gotten up to in all their growing years, Alfie knows).
Alfie curls his freezing-cold toes as he leans closer to the fire, baring his charcoal-stained teeth at the flames as they leap blue-white, eating the treats of camphor that he flings into them. Half naked, he feels the tightness of cobalt jab molassie paint dried on his skin and lets a mouthful of thick sweet wine flood his mouth before spitting it out in a spray.
His mother's face looms at the back of the fire, her posy lips reddened with the syrupy wine, her eyebrows dark wings over searching grey eyes. The blue in Alfie's eyes, the short wedged nose, the muscled set of his shoulders and hips, those come from the long lost Solomons Senior; far more than Alfie ever wanted to inherit from his father, and worth far less than what he'd rightfully expected.
The fire spits back at him and Alfie leans into the sparks, letting them kiss searing against his skin. "I think I have your heart as well, Mother," he tells the flames and her face, her searching eyes that take him in and weigh him and find him wanting. "I have your heart but no soul to speak of, for He had none to give me, not before Bedlam and not after it."
Cackling, the fire dances against the back of the hearth and Alfie picks up his bowl and cradles it in both hands, turning it as his lips murmur aloud the Aramaic script that circles its wide mouth. The names of angels that he can only believe in if he thinks of them as magic rather than faith, the taste of clay and shockwaves of horror, an old old craft that his mother interred to his flesh before she died. "Be you bound, sealed," Alfie mumbles, "countersealed, yes, exorcised, hobbled, silenced...."
His voice is an ugly croak like this, and Alfie can swear he feels hundreds of shedim climbing into his mouth past teeth and tongue to rasp at the insides of his throat to claw their way down through his entrails to make their homes there, searing little demons all seething and scrambling over each other, yes, scrambling and rattling their chains, crying out in foreign tongues, waiting in his belly to be vomited onto unfamiliar shores.
"I left you," Alfie says, doubling over so far that his forehead hovers only a few inches above the floor, heat of the fire making rings at the top of his scalp. "In Port-of-Spain, I left you, and I drank your chenopodium and I swallowed your semen and I wore your jumbie beads and your red thread around my throat and around my wrists, and that is where you belong, all you monsters and mazikim, that is where I left you. Buried below the tamarind trees with blue glass to keep you from rising again. You don't belong here ."
His voice has ascended to a roar on the last sentence, reverberating through the attic rafters and back down and then the sound all sucks into the fireplace, rippling through the flames and turning them white-blue as the breath catches in Alfie's chest; the moment stretches, pulling out like ropes and ropes of intestine never-ending and gory and miasmic, and then oxygen hits him in the lungs and he wheezes, lips pale.
The fire is only a fire.
It is England.
He is himself. Motherless, fatherless, beset in every cell of his body by the gibbering of demons, but himself.
Alfie rubs his hand over his mouth and chin a few times, letting his beard and moustache prickle his palm. He makes sure his bowl is set aside safely, and then he begins a different ritual, separate from the one to quieten shedim. This one is even more personal than that.
The strokes of Tommy's pen are firm and sure as he writes his letter, at his desk, the cold sunlight filtering through the air against his paper. Their whole house is cold and everything that enters it turns chilled. Grace has decorated it in grey and blue-grey and lavender-grey and Tommy, bird bones to begin with, feels the grey in each one of them. The coals heaped in the indigo-grey tiled fireplace must still be giving off heat, though, because Tommy feels it against his hip. And slowly creeping up his side, and down along his leg, and then, he clenches his fingers on his pen because that heat is circling around his cock like a mouth.
"Alfie," Tommy groans.
Tommy falls forward against his desk half-risen out of his chair, hands splayed out on the wood with his fingers in stiff claws, eyes wide and darting as if Alfie's form will materialize if he can only focus his vision properly. And he moans, sluttish protest, as his hips push closer to the edge of the desk and he spreads himself out, face pressed against the varnish as his legs spread wider. Tommy would pray, but he doesn't believe in Grace's God and has none of his own to petition.
--Tommy gives a hoarse yowling cry, bucking against the desk as he feels himself filled, pinned down, unable to do anything but take it. Hard and precise strikes that hit deep inside him, his own cock thick and needy; the whole desk rattles from the phantom force of it and the inkwell topples over, streaming down, the peacock blue that Tommy favours (so frivolous! So strange , for a man, Grace had bemoaned) streaking into the crow-black of his hair and painting along the side of his face, and
heat and wetness as Tommy clenches down and shouts, open mouth dragging over blotting paper as it soaks up the damp, as his cock gives up its milk as well and Tommy can see that the coals in the fireplace are dead cold and dark, and he laughs once, sharply, before screwing his lips shut tight and doing the same with his eyes as he shudders out his completion. The heat retreats. The sunlight keeps touching him. It's still cold.
The next morning a letter arrives at the Shelby house from Alfie, borne to the breakfast table on a silver platter by the servant that Grace insists they maintain. Grace had declined to come down to breakfast.
"I can't look at you," she'd said to Tommy the night before. "All I see is damnation. And you courting it with open arms."
Tommy puts down his egg-spoon and the morning newspaper and opens the letter. It reads in its entirety:
cream and sugar.
He throws it uncrumpled into the cold fireplace and carries on with his egg, dripping molten-soft yolk down the ball of his thumb as he eats. The side of Tommy's face is traced with the curled blue inkstain; stylized, frozen, ghostly. He sprinkles salt like stars into the ocean black of his tea.
For anybody who likes this sort of jazz, I signed up for a Peaky Blinders Alfie/Tommy prompt fic thing and filled a prompt for the two of them except in Taboo, with Tommy in Zilpha's place. Which suited me fine because the show did Zilpha dirty imo.
AO3 link: i am but dust and ashes (the world was created for me) - The two of them are finding each other again: capricious, dishonest, possessive, and desperate to affect the other.
or
content warning: half-sibling incest.
I took some liberties with the Tabooniverse, namely: Alfie's mother was Jewish instead of First Nations, and Alfie travelled to the West Indies instead of to Africa. I'm of West Indian heritage but I'm not Jewish, so hopefully I haven't messed up there. Part of Alfie's ritual drawn from The Encyclopedia of Judaism. Summary lifted from the script of Taboo, Episode 2.
-- -- --
Looking at it from the outside, anybody would say that it's Alfie who took advantage of close quarters and easy access. Alfie who was the corruptor, who was the viper in the branches, who was the forbidden fruit of knowledge. Looking at it from the inside, Alfie just might say the same things himself.
Tommy knows better.
"That brother of yours--"
"Half brother."
Grace's mouth pinches for just a moment and then she sweeps on with her statement, determined to have her say before Tommy switches his focus to something else. The opium makes him tangential at the best of times and Grace knows, by now, to take advantage of anything in his eyes that approaches lucidity. "Half brother," she spits, and Tommy's lips twitch as he considers tutting at her, pointing out how unladylike her vitriol is. He doesn't do it. He raises his eyebrows and slowly tilts his head from one side to the other with exaggerated interest in what she's saying and Grace looks furious but she continues.
"Your half brother may intend to keep you from what you should have rightfully inherited but we are not without means through which to strike at him, Thomas, we are not as helpless as he would have you believe, with his solicitor and his evil looks and the way that he uses those rumors about what he did in the godless West Indies as his cloak and shield." Grace crosses herself and Tommy follows the motions of it in the air with the tip of his nose, kittenlike. It amuses him to give his more pixilated impulses their head when Grace is being avaricious, or pious, which tend to go hand in hand more often than not. Religion and money share a sacrament in her soul.
"You, Grace, would have made an extremely effective Popess."
She makes a frustrated sound, one slender hand clenching along with it. "You want him to rob us, then?" Grace demands, nostrils flaring. "Is that what you want from him, Tommy? Or is it something else."
Calling him tommy is a signifier of how angry she is; Grace stopped calling him Tommy two days before their wedding, switching without reason, explanation, or discussion to only calling him Thomas. He'd almost not known who she was fucking on their wedding night when she kept telling this Thomas person to bloody well choke her properly.
His skin's suddenly crawling and Tommy stands abruptly, chair scraping across the flagstone floor as he's dropping the last inch of his still-lit cigarette into his cold tea. "I'll pay him a visit, then, shall I?" he says as though it's just that easy to bring all of this to a satisfying resolution, as though all you need is to be Tommy Shelby and to ask, and Grace feels the dismissal. She doesn't show it, though; she reminds Tommy of who she is by answering with a small, marble-hard smile and says,
"--kiss your half brother hello for me, Thomas. Once you've done greeting him for you ."
---
Polly's the one who greets Tommy at the door, all folded arms and raised eyebrows, and Tommy holds back a sigh as he sweeps off his hat and attempts -- vainly -- to peer past her into the house where he'd grown up.
"He's not in," Polly says, making absolutely no attempt to sell the boldfaced lie. Tommy can take it or shove it, but he chooses a third option:
"I've got nowhere else to be at today, Pol, ay, come on, Polly. At least give us a cup of tea to get the chill out, before you send me packing. I'll catch my fucking death out here."
--Tommy pushes it.
Because if there was anything that he and Alfie had learned, growing up with Aunt Polly, it was that she had a soft spot for the audacious, the bold, for those who took chances and even if they got caught or fell flat on their faces, still put on a brave front and tossed their heads, holding them high. Tommy holds his chin up as he steps forward and Polly swings open like a door to let him inside.
Back into the house of Alfie Solomons Senior: who is now buried in a grave as shallow as a butter dish, and Tommy feels the past engulf him whole.
===
it used to be
The attic was where they'd played as children for hours and hours, making every nook and cranny of the space their own. Tommy liked to wriggle beneath the window bench and with a thick lead pencil would draw star people (the five-pointed kind, head and limbs) to represent himself and Alfie and Aunt Pol and Father on the underside of the wooden seat, with one different star (the six-pointed kind, like Alfie wears on a chain around his neck) stuck into corners to represent Alfie's mother, The Mad Jewess. That was how she was referred to and Tommy never questioned it. He never used any star, ordinary or otherwise, to stand in for his own mother; she'd died as he arrived in the world and that was the last business he'd had with her in this life.
Alfie didn't bother to find out what his brother was doing those times, content to let Tommy be strange all on his own while Alfie pondered over new schemes and plans and games to entertain them both. His games were byzantine, daring, ritualistic, and even when they'd bothered to try and include other children, none of them had ever caught on. Only Tommy could be relied upon to fully commit to Alfie's wild cult of unfettered and hedonistic play.
And (to perhaps be expected), the games had evolved as they'd grown and their attic space became even more sacrosanct, Polly banished from it entirely with promises that they wouldn't let mildew fester and rats congregate. Because when they were teenagers and Alfie lay on his back on the floor, gazing up at the underside of the window seat and the dark strokes of Tommy's constellation of family while Tommy's dark hair drew strokes in the air as he bobbed his wet mouth onto Alfie's cock, the world belonged to the two of them and nobody else.
"There's five of you, Tommy," Alfie said, his voice dragging and drowsy even as he kicked one heel along the floor to raise a hip, angling his prick against the inside of Tommy's cheek until his younger brother firmly shoved him back down again. "I've counted, yeah, five of you of these star-people, and there's only three of me. Why is that, love?" He reached down with one hand -- the other still tracing along the galaxy that Tommy'd illustrated -- and wrapped his thumb into strands of straight black hair until Tommy tugged off, smacking his lips, annoyed to be stopped.
"What?" he demanded loudly, but then answered anyhow since he'd heard the question. "Five of me because I was the one drawing it, wasn't I? And as the autobiographer and artist, I got to represent myself as many times as I wanted." Tommy pinched one of Alfie's thighs, drawing a laughing rumble from his remorseless victim. "Three of you because even one is too much. One is more than enough."
"Three because neither maths nor diplomacy is your strong suit." Alfie shoved out from under the windowseat, sitting up, his thick rosy cock curving damply into the crease of his thigh as Tommy kneeled back to rest against his heels. "Come here, sweetheart. Let me teach you your numbers."
Alfie's eyes, a sharper yet more shadowy blue than Tommy's, were stream-clear in the sunshine coming in through the big round window, his smile spreading the thick dark red of his lips across his face like raspberry jam. Tommy licked his own lips and moved forward on his knees, one hand wrapping around the length of Alfie's cock as he leaned in, wanting kisses; but Alfie grabbed Tommy's face in both hands and ... spat on him.
"Ah--" Tommy gasped, but then another hot gobbet of spit hit his face. And one more, against his open, suddenly ravenous mouth, before Alfie pressed his tongue against the frothing wetness and kissed Tommy, deep and hard, sucking and biting at him before pulling panting back. Still holding Tommy's face, Alfie groaned,
"--three times, to keep you safe from the evil eye, remember that, Tommy.The magical properties of spittle and doing something three times over, which you already know somewhere in that flashing minnow brain of yours, because you drew me three times over, eh? Now --" Alfie let go and sprawled back onto the bare wooden floor, propped on his elbows as he parted his thighs, "--be a good boy, go on, and fuck me."
Alfie was in a mood to push that day, because he growled and groaned and shouted as Tommy climbed onto him and drove his cock into his half brother's arse over and over, whipcord muscles shaking with exertion and youthful arousal, desperate to come and at the same time wanting to hold out, draw it out for Alfie's sake.
(And, oh, and his own; because Alfie was a sight to stir the senses when he was being fucked and filled, his succulent fat lips dark and swollen as he moaned, eyelashes spiked damp with sweat and salt, the column of his throat thick and strained, and no lover who Tommy Shelby was ever destined to have in his grown life would compare quite favourably to that.)
At the dinner table that night Polly's dark gaze travelled between them while she held her cup of tea in both hands, and said with waxen-heavy portentousness to Alfie, "--We've all noticed, Alfie, just how well you take care of your little brother. If you're not careful, others will start to remark on it. Hmmm?"
She didn't look at Tommy, only at Solomons Junior, and Alfie's throat worked soundlessly for a moment before he said, "Let them remark on whatever it is they think they know. I guarantee, Pol," Alfie cut with renewed vigor into his chop, smearing it lavishly with enough horseradish to make Tommy cough at the thought, "that the truth is somewhere far beyond their comprehension."
The braggadocio of this comment made Polly smile along the edge of her cup. But her expression went fixed, static, when Tommy tossed the last crust of his bread down on his plate and stood, saying with a casual coldness, "I'm the one takes care of him , only I never get any credit because I'm a second son. And it's thankless work. Let them mention that , when they talk."
Alfie's silverware clinked down against his plate in Tommy's wake, and Polly's cup provided counter-harmony tinking down against her saucer, and Tommy smiled, flatly, as he mounted the stairs to his room and left them behind. He couldn't say why it felt so good to leave Alfie stranded on the shoals of ignominy alone, or why he kept right on screwing Alfie, opening his own legs for Alfie, only to then repudiate him afterwards and refuse to acknowledge their fevered sampling of each others' bodies. But Tommy did. He crashed into Alfie to begin with and then once it was over and their blood was cooling he retreated further every time, until one day -- it was Alfie who retreated.
All the way across the fathomless oceans to the other side of the world.
===
"There's your tea," Polly says, pouring the cup full to the brim where it sits in its saucer on the kitchen table. If she thinks that's going to wrongfoot Tommy Shelby, then she's assumed too much; he's not that far different from the strange child he'd been, especially when he has some of the poppy in his blood to ease the way and null social convention that might keep his instincts in check.
He leans forward with his hat still in his hands and, stare fixed on Pol as hers is stuck on him, noisily slurps scalding-hot tea from the cup until it's not lapping at the rim anymore. And then Tommy points at the cone of sugar on the counter behind Pol and says, "Sugar, please, Aunt Pol, and milk if you've got it."
She goes still and her mouth purses, eyes flashing in indignation. "If we've got it! Yes, even here at the other end of the city and all society from their Highnesses Tommy and Grace Shelby, we do have milk in, now and again."
"Only not at the moment."
Both of them turn their heads towards the stairs as Alfie comes down them, his head leaned back so Tommy can see the grey of his eyes, almost rolling beneath the broad brim of Alfie's black hat. He looks … Tommy can't say he looks good. He looks ploughed through and harrowed, thick bottom lip carrying the entire freight of all of Alfie's display of emotion, a long scar drawn over his left eye like a permanent tearstain. The thought is laughable. This man descending the stairs in a rolling heavy gait is a stranger to weeping, Tommy can tell that much.
"We've not got milk in, at the moment," Alfie repeats, walking over to stand at Tommy's shoulder -- or against Tommy's shoulder, is more it, and the knuckles of one hand drag a shiver down Tommy's spine. If Tommy just turned his head the right way, he'd be able to slant his mouth over the crest of Alfie's hip, through his camphor-smelling shirt. "Not for you, Tommy. Nor sugar, neither. You get enough of those things at home, don't you?"
"After your visits to the sugar cane fields of Barbados and Trinidad," Tommy says, turning his face up so he doesn't need to think about his tongue against the ridge of Alfie's hip, "I'd think that you'd be absolutely running with the stuff, Alfie. Hasn't it made you any sweeter?"
Polly gets up with her cigarette trembling between her fingers and leaves the room without another word, although Tommy can hear doors opening and shutting, retreating further and further into the house. Alfie hasn't moved, hasn't barely breathed, hasn't taken his seawater stare from Tommy.
"If you came here for … cream," Alfie says, rolling the word around his mouth before lacquering it further, "...and for sugar," he pauses to let weight and innuendo settle, toffeelike, "then I can offer them to you only if you ask, Tommy. Nicely."
Tommy hrrrms in his throat and then opens his mouth, and Alfie puts his thumb against Tommy's lips to stop him. "On your knees, pet," Alfie says, "just like you used to."
"I'm a married man, Alfie," Tommy tries, just so he can say that he did. And perhaps so he can see the look of contempt snarl across Alfie's face briefly as he takes his hand back, there and gone, coiling into the hinge of one jaw where Tommy stares at that tension in fascination as he continues, "I've come to talk about this proper. Civilized."
"I lost all my civility somewhere in the kala pani," Alfie says, and if Tommy doesn't understand the unfamiliar words he does understand the deep ocean depths of Alfie's eyes, the haunting that floats to the surface to bob there, circling his irises. "Along with a great deal more. You don't want to know, Tommy. How dark and black it is down there. Enough to make all the stars you've ever seen disappear, forever."
"Alfie," Tommy says, and reaches up before he can help himself, to put one fingertip at the very corner of Alfie's lower lip and press, pull, disfigure. "What happened to you out there on the ocean? In those foreign lands? Why've you come back like this?"
Alfie's eyes map Tommy's face as Tommy says, very very quietly: "...why did you come back at all ?"
Everything goes dead still between, around them, and Alfie says, "That, dear brother, is a very strange way indeed to entreat me for the inheritance you believe you are owed." He steps back. "It was Grace, yeah, who bade you come? Who spun you tales of terrible Alfie, wicked Alfie, sailing back from the gold-washed shores of tropical islands with riches lining his pockets and an eye to cheat you of what our father left to support you in this life, which is nothing, Tommy. He left you nothing. And my riches are not of the sort your Grace would welcome."
Alfie shoves his hands into his pockets and plucks at them like he's tearing feathers from a dead fowl, turning them inside out one after the other, and Tommy watches with his lip curling in a shudder as salt pours out of every one. Alfie used to carefully heap little piles of salt into the corners of rooms, warning Tommy not to disturb them, so that they could ward off demons and evil spirits. When Alfie had left on the tall ship that took him to his damned equatorial destination, Tommy had discovered some of those piles still remaining in secret corners where Polly hadn't found and swept them gone. He'd sprinkled bits of that salt into his food for three and a half months before it had run out. Some of the salt falling out of Alfie's waistcoat pocket showers along the table and into Tommy's tea and his mouth waters, instantly.
He stands up and gathers the folds of his long black coat around him, swallowing his saliva and the taste of acrid dust, nostrils pink-rimmed and flaring rabbitlike. "We're not without means through which to strike at you," he says, the parroting of Grace's words lending his voice a sing-song quality that causes Alfie's lips to curl in derision. He knows those aren't Tommy's words. He knows the inside of Tommy's mouth like nobody else ever has.
"Then strike, Thomas," Alfie murmurs, the taunt sensual and subterranean, and his fingers move much faster to unbutton the only two that are holding his waistcoat closed, to spread open the shirt below to expose his chest, where Tommy can almost see the thumping of his heart. Before he knows what he's doing Tommy reaches forward and gathers the cambric in his hands, bunching it, ripping it, leaving it hanging like old lace from Alfie's heavy shoulders.
"The next time I see you," Tommy says as he quicksteps away, circumnavigating Alfie's unmoving figure, "I'll be collecting my inheritance. All of what's owed me. You know what that is."
The shirt slips further down Alfie's shoulders and Tommy catches a glimpse of a strange scarred mark on his muscled back: a hand, fingers together, the thumb and pinkie curled stylistically. Blue ink casting it ghostly, frozen.
"I will see you before that," Alfie says. Ghostly. Frozen. Tommy tastes salt riming the sides of his tongue as he shuts the door.
---
The attic room is where Alfie's lived since his return, and Pol ventures up when she damn well feels like, now. It scarcely matters. If Alfie wants sex he gets it by his own hand, and Polly has a seventh sense for that sort of depravity (her sixth having been entirely used up and burned down by what her two charges had gotten up to in all their growing years, Alfie knows).
Alfie curls his freezing-cold toes as he leans closer to the fire, baring his charcoal-stained teeth at the flames as they leap blue-white, eating the treats of camphor that he flings into them. Half naked, he feels the tightness of cobalt jab molassie paint dried on his skin and lets a mouthful of thick sweet wine flood his mouth before spitting it out in a spray.
His mother's face looms at the back of the fire, her posy lips reddened with the syrupy wine, her eyebrows dark wings over searching grey eyes. The blue in Alfie's eyes, the short wedged nose, the muscled set of his shoulders and hips, those come from the long lost Solomons Senior; far more than Alfie ever wanted to inherit from his father, and worth far less than what he'd rightfully expected.
The fire spits back at him and Alfie leans into the sparks, letting them kiss searing against his skin. "I think I have your heart as well, Mother," he tells the flames and her face, her searching eyes that take him in and weigh him and find him wanting. "I have your heart but no soul to speak of, for He had none to give me, not before Bedlam and not after it."
Cackling, the fire dances against the back of the hearth and Alfie picks up his bowl and cradles it in both hands, turning it as his lips murmur aloud the Aramaic script that circles its wide mouth. The names of angels that he can only believe in if he thinks of them as magic rather than faith, the taste of clay and shockwaves of horror, an old old craft that his mother interred to his flesh before she died. "Be you bound, sealed," Alfie mumbles, "countersealed, yes, exorcised, hobbled, silenced...."
His voice is an ugly croak like this, and Alfie can swear he feels hundreds of shedim climbing into his mouth past teeth and tongue to rasp at the insides of his throat to claw their way down through his entrails to make their homes there, searing little demons all seething and scrambling over each other, yes, scrambling and rattling their chains, crying out in foreign tongues, waiting in his belly to be vomited onto unfamiliar shores.
"I left you," Alfie says, doubling over so far that his forehead hovers only a few inches above the floor, heat of the fire making rings at the top of his scalp. "In Port-of-Spain, I left you, and I drank your chenopodium and I swallowed your semen and I wore your jumbie beads and your red thread around my throat and around my wrists, and that is where you belong, all you monsters and mazikim, that is where I left you. Buried below the tamarind trees with blue glass to keep you from rising again. You don't belong here ."
His voice has ascended to a roar on the last sentence, reverberating through the attic rafters and back down and then the sound all sucks into the fireplace, rippling through the flames and turning them white-blue as the breath catches in Alfie's chest; the moment stretches, pulling out like ropes and ropes of intestine never-ending and gory and miasmic, and then oxygen hits him in the lungs and he wheezes, lips pale.
The fire is only a fire.
It is England.
He is himself. Motherless, fatherless, beset in every cell of his body by the gibbering of demons, but himself.
Alfie rubs his hand over his mouth and chin a few times, letting his beard and moustache prickle his palm. He makes sure his bowl is set aside safely, and then he begins a different ritual, separate from the one to quieten shedim. This one is even more personal than that.
---
The strokes of Tommy's pen are firm and sure as he writes his letter, at his desk, the cold sunlight filtering through the air against his paper. Their whole house is cold and everything that enters it turns chilled. Grace has decorated it in grey and blue-grey and lavender-grey and Tommy, bird bones to begin with, feels the grey in each one of them. The coals heaped in the indigo-grey tiled fireplace must still be giving off heat, though, because Tommy feels it against his hip. And slowly creeping up his side, and down along his leg, and then, he clenches his fingers on his pen because that heat is circling around his cock like a mouth.
"Alfie," Tommy groans.
"Tommy," Alfie mutters.
He curls both hands into loose fists, stacked on each other, and rotates them like he's pulling on a rope or something else, something better, dipping his head to waggle his tongue into the tight circle of his fist. Licking and lapping, pushing and widening, tasting the heated skin, fucking his hand with his tongue.
Tommy falls forward against his desk half-risen out of his chair, hands splayed out on the wood with his fingers in stiff claws, eyes wide and darting as if Alfie's form will materialize if he can only focus his vision properly. And he moans, sluttish protest, as his hips push closer to the edge of the desk and he spreads himself out, face pressed against the varnish as his legs spread wider. Tommy would pray, but he doesn't believe in Grace's God and has none of his own to petition.
Finished with his work, Alfie squeezes his fists tight and then opens his arms, twisting them as he holds them out to his sides, muscles swelling and strained as he leans back, and back, hips canting forward--
--Tommy gives a hoarse yowling cry, bucking against the desk as he feels himself filled, pinned down, unable to do anything but take it. Hard and precise strikes that hit deep inside him, his own cock thick and needy; the whole desk rattles from the phantom force of it and the inkwell topples over, streaming down, the peacock blue that Tommy favours (so frivolous! So strange , for a man, Grace had bemoaned) streaking into the crow-black of his hair and painting along the side of his face, and
and Alfie grunts as the small of his back screams from the pressure of his posture on his knees on the floor, bent so far back that all he can see is the starlings in the rafters of his attic, heat corseting his hips as his prick slaps against his belly and he bites his lip, tasting blood as he baptizes himself in come and feels the
heat and wetness as Tommy clenches down and shouts, open mouth dragging over blotting paper as it soaks up the damp, as his cock gives up its milk as well and Tommy can see that the coals in the fireplace are dead cold and dark, and he laughs once, sharply, before screwing his lips shut tight and doing the same with his eyes as he shudders out his completion. The heat retreats. The sunlight keeps touching him. It's still cold.
---
The next morning a letter arrives at the Shelby house from Alfie, borne to the breakfast table on a silver platter by the servant that Grace insists they maintain. Grace had declined to come down to breakfast.
"I can't look at you," she'd said to Tommy the night before. "All I see is damnation. And you courting it with open arms."
Tommy puts down his egg-spoon and the morning newspaper and opens the letter. It reads in its entirety:
cream and sugar.
He throws it uncrumpled into the cold fireplace and carries on with his egg, dripping molten-soft yolk down the ball of his thumb as he eats. The side of Tommy's face is traced with the curled blue inkstain; stylized, frozen, ghostly. He sprinkles salt like stars into the ocean black of his tea.
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