Night Walk By Franz Wright

night walk by Franz Wright

Congrats on 3k, Flor!! @raincoffeeandfandoms - I absolutely love this idea for the theme! I decided to go the snack route here. I hope you like it - I’m sorry it took me a little bit to post it. Enjoy! :)

I’D LOVE TO KNOW WHAT YOU THINK! - YOUR COMMENTS & REBLOGS HELP ME WRITE!

When The Kids Are Away…

John Shelby x Reader

Warnings: mentions of drinking, language

Word Count: 1038

Summary: John and (Y/N) Shelby very rarely get a night off, so they were going to make the most of it tonight.

The couple’s giggles could be heard all throughout the empty first floor of their home. It was rare that this Shelby family household was so quiet. John and (Y/N) very rarely got a night off, so they were going to make the most of it.

They were in the living room, sitting on the couch in front of the fireplace. Two glasses of wine sat on the coffee table, and a bowl of grapes rested in (Y/N)’s lap.

“Ok, ready? Your turn!” (Y/N) exclaimed as she plucked one of the grapes from its vine. John relaxed back against the arm of the couch and got himself ready for his wife to throw the grape his way. “You better catch it!” she said to him, a wide grin gracing her face as she held it up; ready to throw.

“Just throw it!” John egged her on in a lighthearted manner, his eyes wide and mouth open as he prepared to catch the piece of fruit. He didn’t want to wait any longer.

“Ready? Three, two…”

“Throw it!” John cut her off. His impatience back-fired on him greatly when (Y/N) threw the grape his way the second he interjected into her countdown. It missed its mark and hit him square in the eye. “What the fuck, (Y/N)…I wasn’t ready!” he exclaimed, holding his palm to the eye that had just been struck by the fruit.

“You said throw it, so I threw it,” she responded, trying so hard, and failing, to contain her giggles.

“And you missed my mouth by a longshot,” he pointed out, removing his hand and blinking a few times before opening his eye wide to make sure that he was able to see. (Y/N) rolled her eyes at his dramatic actions.

“Here, let me try again,” she said before grabbing another grape and holding it up in her ready position. John only nodded before he also got ready, opening his mouth and focusing on the piece of fruit. “This time don’t try and rush me,” she warned him, waiting a moment before she bit on her bottom lip and focused on the task at hand.

The exchange was quiet this time, but (Y/N) still missed, even with John nearly falling off of the couch to try and catch the grape. He gave her a wide-eyed look and she merely shrugged her shoulders before bending her elbows and raising her palms to the roof in an ‘I don’t know’ gesture.

“Lemme show you how it’s done, darling,” John told her, a confident grin on his face as he swiped the bowl from her lap. (Y/N) let him take it, shaking her head at his confidence.

“Just don’t hit me in the eye, ok?” she told him, her eyebrows raised for added effect.

“Do I ever miss?” he asked, cocking an eyebrow.

“Considering we have five kids, I’d say no,” she quipped with a grin, her suggestive statement making him laugh.

“Let’s get serious,” John then insisted, even though he was the one who was laughing. (Y/N) only nodded, watching as he plucked a grape from the vine and held it up. “Ready?” he questioned, watching as she nodded once again. After steadying his aim, John threw the grape and (Y/N) successfully caught it in her mouth.

“Yes!” she exclaimed after she chewed the piece of fruit.

“See? That’s how you do it!” John matched her excitement as he lowered his arms; finished with his celebration. “Told you I don’t miss,” he then added with a smug grin, one that (Y/N) rolled her eyes at.

“Let me try again,” she said then, grabbing the bowl back from her husband, “I promise I won’t miss this time.”

“Alright…let’s see what you’ve got,” John grinned, getting ready to catch the grape.

(Y/N) held it steady in between her fingers, her tounge sticking out slightly as she concentrated on her target. After a few intense moments, she threw it…and it successfully hit John’s right cheek. The couple stared at each other afterwards, neither of the two saying anything until they both cracked up in laughter.

“You missed again, love,” John stated the obvious after he got ahold of his laughter.

“Well I promise I won’t miss with this,” she responded, quickly moving the bowl to sit beside the wine glasses before she leaned forward. She then placed both of her hands on John’s thighs to steady herself before her lips found his.

She only intended to give him a quick kiss, but she should have known that quick kisses were never enough for John Shelby. He grabbed hold of her cheeks with both hands, holding her lips against his to prolong the kiss. Their lips stayed connected until he pulled away and began peppering her lips and the surrounding skin with kisses. She let him do this until she was giggling so much that she needed to pull back and catch her breath.

“See?” she said once her eyes had found his again, “I never miss with those.”

John couldn’t help but chuckle at her statement, taking a moment to bask in her beauty as a sweet smile graced her lips. “You don’t…and I’m damn glad of it,” he grinned before he grabbed hold of her waist and pulled her body into his, making her shriek at the sudden movment.

It didn’t take long for (Y/N) to settle. She happily curled up in his arms as they laid on the couch.

“We should let the kids go to their aunt Ada’s more often,” he suggested as he rested his chin on the top of her head. (Y/N) was only able to hum as she closed her eyes and rested her head back against his chest.

“All this quiet is nice, isn’t it?” although she asked a question, the matter really wasn’t up for debate.

“It is,” John was agreeing with her in seconds.

The two sat like that on the couch until they couldn’t go a few minutes without a yawn. They then moved their cuddle fest into the bedroom, where sleep came over the both of them very quickly.

Tagged: @the-anxious-youth @mystcldydrms @look-at-the-soul @mrsalwayswrite @julkaamazing @evita-shelby @lilyrachelcassidy @shelbydelrey @theshelbyslimited @peakyswritings @watercolorskyy @strayrockette @peakyduchesss @alexxavicry @stevie75 @dark-academia-slut @zablife @cillmequick @letal-y-poetica @depxiety @shelundeadxxxx @areyenotfondofmelobster @padfootdaredmetoo @crabat-the-queen @sebastianstangirl01 @everythingelseisextra @kmc1989 @papichulo120627 @brummiereader @adaydreamaway08 @kissforvoid @raincoffeeandfandoms @peakyltd @johannelis2302nely @wildheartsalwaysburn @dragons-are-my-favorite @jessimay89 @slaymybreathaway

MASTERLIST

Full Hunter's Moon 2023 l Rami Ammoun

Peaky textposts because im on break from editing the third chapter (gimme like four hours and it's upppp)

Kings of Spades got some too:

This is such good work, beautifully done!💛

Hi darling, I have a request for a drabble if you feel inspired. ❛ people like us don’t get to decide when we’re done. ❜ from the prompt list with Arthur Shelby.

People Like Us

Pairing: Arthur Shelby x F!Reader

Fandom: Peaky Blinders

Warnings: graphic depiction of suicide attempts, blood and cutting, angst, comfort

WC: 1848

Definitely not just a drabble, got a bit carried away with this one. I'm sorry this is so late, Lee! Getting back on track with writing.

You’d thought everyone had left. But Arthur had remained; he always did, for at least a few minutes after, to make sure you were safe. He stood outside your door, watching the coppers stationed in the darkened alleys, occasionally knocking one’s teeth out when he didn’t think they were taking their watch over you seriously. Sometimes, when the night was most quiet, and the voices of those he’d damned did not plague his mind, he thought about admitting things to you – feelings, that you likely did not reciprocate.

Tonight, your bathroom light had been on, and your screeching pierced the walls of the residence and filled the night air of Birmingham like some sort of banshee.

Your eyes were foggy when the door swung open and the man nearly slipped making his way to you, a bruised hand clasping around the porcelain of the tub and a few locks of hair wisping over his eyes before the same hand was wrapping around you, pulling you up. Crimson streaked your vision as it dribbled down your wrist, pooling around you, staining the bathwater a pale, sickening shade of red. For one dreadful moment, you feared you might never escape it, that you would drown with the tang of bitter iron on your tongue and the blood-water would swallow your eyes, your throat, your ears.

But Arthur’s palm in yours was strong, and warm; it pumped a new life in your veins and sent shivers along your numb, tingling flesh, and heaved you from the waters of death in one dizzying sweep. Head rolling back, long fingers caught you, cradling you against the heat of his chest, the palpitations of his wild heart coming to you in shockwaves. Yours were frighteningly faint in comparison to his. 

You shivered in his arms – cold, suddenly, past the heat of the adrenaline – as your bare flesh met the biting air, curling in on yourself like a child. Everything took a second or two to register, maybe more – did time even exist? It must have; it must have, because you were fading fast. And Arthur was holding you, and your wet, metallic lips buried themselves in the soft fabric of his chest, desperate to hear the sound of his heartbeat drown out yours. Desperate to cling to the living.

“D – don’t let it take me,” you mumbled into his chest. He smelled like blood, bullets and sweat. He smelled like aftershave and cigarettes. He smelled like the lavender oil you’d given him to help him sleep among his demons. He smelled like home.

A thumb stroked lovingly over your drenched scalp. How could the same hands that had strangled a poor man to death last week be so gentle to you?

“No one’s takin’ you, love.” His hot breath sent another shiver through you, down the nape of your neck. But his words quivered. “Not as long as there is breath in me goddamn breast.”

The remnants of the red tide clung to your bare skin, ringlets of drenched hair clinging to your neck, threatening to choke the life from you. In the pitch black of your mind, it frothed at the seams, spilling into the void that seemed to span wider, and wider, until you were lost in the middle of an ocean.

“Arth… Ar…” Delirious, spinning – everything was spinning. Your nails dug into his skin, fabric bunching in your shaking fist, and you gasped, aftershave and blood and lavender all flooding your senses before blackness came to you in a staccato rhythm, once and twice and once and twice and twice and once and thrice…

---

Your blood was starting to dry on Arthur’s shirt when he came inside to see you. He’d injured two men when they tried taking you from him during your blood transfusion, and he’d nearly killed another as he’d been dragged to the alleyway behind the hospital. There, he kicked at brick walls ‘til the leather of shoes peeled, and punched ‘til his shoulders screamed in their sockets and his knuckles split open. Cursed that damned god of his for letting this happen to you, threatened that if he did not return you to him, he would bring Hell down on the heavens.

His neck still burned with an inflamed red mark where he’d torn the chain of the cross from his neck, the metal now stained with your blood, too. Everything, everything was painted in it, everywhere he looked, and his own bloodied knuckles clenched around the cross tightly.

“I’m so sorry, Mr. Shelby. I didn’t know – “

“Just lemme see ‘er,” Arthur told the nurse, the gruff of his voice nearly cracking from his wailing and screaming in the alley. The only reason they had let him in was because of the name he bore, and once he knew you were okay he’d personally see to it that each one of them understood the repercussions of denying a Shelby.

Like a mouse under the stare of a mad dog, the nurse scurried off, doors shutting and leaving the room quiet save for the steady beeping, and the creak of the floor beneath Arthur’s torn shoes.

Watery eyes took in your half-conscious form, curled up in the hospital bed just as you’d been curled in his arms, a light gown draped over you. You were still shivering.

While relief settled in the pit of his twisting stomach, grief still knotted his throat, and as much as he tried to hold the tears back, he tasted both salt and blood on his tongue as he lowered himself beside you, bloodied and ringed fingers ghosting across your arms, as if fearful that he would hurt you. 

A sliver of white light tore along the blackness, and your eyes squinted shut, a pain throbbing in your skull. Every thread of sinew and marrow seemed to ache, deep inside your body where you didn’t even know pain could exist, and the red tide lapped at the blurred edges of your mind as you lay flat on your little island in the middle of the sea. The rock beneath you was soft as you rolled your head over, a clean, unfamiliar scent seeming to send your mind into turmoil, shifting your reality between the light and dark, like a pendulum that swung across the white of the heavens, an eclipse that brought you pain and light one moment, darkness and cold the next.

The soft touch of the angel was warm along your arms as the light shattered the black sky, and you gasped. Its touch waned, and you arched your back to sit up, hand reaching feebly for it in the unknown. “Angel…” you thought you breathed. “Angel… don’t go. Don’t leave me here.”

Don’t leave me here to be swallowed by the red tide.

Your fingers grasped something tangible, something soft and warm, a fire burning beneath softness. Flesh, hot against your palms. Lavender and iron called to you, and finally, strong hands wrapped around you to pull you close.  

“I ain’t no angel,” a familiar, lulling voice spoke as light cleaved the darkness in two and tore it, strip by strip, from your starry gaze. “But I ain’t goin’ anywhere, love.”

“Arthur.” You smiled around the name, lashes fluttering as you blinked against his blurry visage. Messy strands of hair flopped over his winter-blue eyes, and you clung to the collar of his shirt, dizzy but supported by his hands on your spine, rough and worn against your skin where the hospital gown split.

The pendulum swung against your skull, and your gut roiled with nausea. Your eyes wandered to the wrists that had been bandaged, the red tide seeping into the white. Something beside you beeped to the swing of the pendulum, but broke its rhythm suddenly. Your heart leapt to your throat.

“Shhh,” Arthur said, thumb making little circles over your spine. “We’re gonna get you home, love.”

The red tide began to seep into the corners of your vision as images hurtled towards you in the wide, never-ending ocean. The bullets strewn across your end table, each etched with a name that would haunt your dreams as those before them had. The porcelain of a bathtub, as pallid as the boy’s face who’d taken shrapnel to his chest not twenty feet before your eyes. The heat of the blood-water, like the heat of the fire that had devoured the Garrison the night your innocence had been lost.

“I don’t want to go back,” you pleaded with him, panicking as you found yourself attached to a thin, red tube.

Your fists pummeled his chest weakly and your knees kicked against his leg, and your frail body writhed beneath his grasp, but despite his heart breaking, he did not release you. The burn of the chain he’d snapped from his neck reminded him of the rope that he’d tied years ago, and he could feel a chasm opening beneath his boots as his legs had kicked from under him like yours did now.

And as you finally began to settle, wracked by soft sobs, he cupped your cheek in his bloodied hand, and he looked into the same eyes that had saved him, as he repeated your own words back to you, the words that still echoed in his mind whenever he thought of pulling the trigger on the trouble in his head or tying another noose,

“People like us don’t get to decide when we’re done.”

God damn him, damn his selfish soul for the look in those eyes that had once been so strong, for the way your jaw trembled against his hand. His lip curled, quivering, another tear streaking across his face as he tried desperately to keep the last, frayed threads of his sanity from snapping. Tried to hold himself together so that he could save you.

Because as much as it broke his heart to see you like this, and as much as he cursed his brother but mostly himself for dragging you into this life, he could not lose you.

“You hear me?” Arthur’s voice rose as his fingers dug into your jaw, his gentleness overcome by desperation as the noose tightened round his neck. The hinges of the bed creaked as the wooden stool had, and you watched as his face flushed red. He was going to break.

You shimmied forward, wading through the red tide, finding the water to be shallow here as you crawled onto his lap and buried your face in the crook of his neck. Hugging him so tight that you kept the shattered pieces of him together. That you snapped the rope on his noose and he gasped for air against the lavender and blood of your scalp.

“I hear you,” you murmured into the warmth of his neck, and when you shut your eyes, you stood ashore from the red tide. The sweat and tears against his flesh still smelled of the sea, and though these waters thrashed, they ran clear. And you knew that your angel would guide you through them.

Taglist: @emotionalcadaver @evita-shelby @minaethrym @shelbydelrey @zablife

Please let me know if you would like to be added/removed to any of my taglists and notified of new works!

by Chao Zhang