Im Just Gonna Leave This Here

I’m just gonna leave this here

Fuck it. If you guys want to send in The Man From U.N.C.L.E requests, I will absolutely write them.

Writing Motivations

Spite

Inspiration

Hungry for Validation

Make readers go “Wow!”

Make readers go “Oh!”

Make readers go :’((

Horny

Dragons

Whom else is going to write this if not me??

They Gave Me a Keyboard and Cannot Take it Away Now

I Invented Several Languages and Must Use Them Somewhere

These characters are REAL and have things to do

I Like to Suffer

I like to be gay and unhinged but in a productive way

I care about my OCs and so must you now

I have issues I need to project on SOMETHING

Love is not fake and here is why, an entire book

Words Pretty

The Anya-Margaret (Thomas Shelby) - Chapter 4

“I’ll kick my legs in fit of fear, and know not north from south or my arse from my mouth just as I roll about in the deep water.”

Masterlist

The now worryingly intelligent girl sat crosslegged in the grass with the latest edition of ‘Pudd’nhead Wilson’. She stole the book from her mothers bedside and was now reading it in the cold morning sun while her bum got wet from the dewy grass.

Her hair no longer fell in front of her face or itched her shoulders. Now it sat jagged and pinned back by the nanny who desperately tried to fix the choppy mane.

——

Six months had passed since that night at the train station and since then, Florence made an agreement with the Shelby’s and dealt with their corpses.

It was safe to say that everyone was pleased with the arrangement.

Thomas and Florence never really conversed much, aside from when Thomas needed to fling a body into her cold room. Though their chats were cold and kurt, they appeared to be able to at least stand each other for the sake of business.

——

1

“Orright, Mr Shelby, let’s see what you’ve gifted me today.” Florence rubbed her hands together in her regular slouched posture. She had a cigarette in between her lips and by the state of the floor, she’d had seven already that morning.

Thomas entered with two other men who heaved a pale woman on the table.

The woman had reached full rigor mortis so it had been dead for a while. This was going to be a juicy one.

“Tell me about ‘er. ‘Ow’d she die?” Florence poked at the face and peeled open the eyes to get a good look.

The other men shuffled out, seemingly disturbed by the body.

“Her name’s-“

“I don’t care about ‘er name. Gimme ‘er death admission.”

Thomas sighed and lit a cigarette, it was going to be a long day. “I don’t know how she died. She was actually just dropped at our door. No note, no clear signs of threat or who dropped her there.” He rested against the stone wall on the opposite side of the room and tried not to watch as Florence stuck her WHOLE HAND down the lady’s THROAT.

Charming.

Thomas instinctively swallowed and blinked away the nausea.

“Oh now that’s a good fucking story. Are you sure she didn’t just ‘ave wee too many drinks?” Florence crooked her arm and plunged her other one underneath her elbow as her hand tried to find equipment on the table.

“Mind handing me those pluckers?”

Thomas only raised a brow she didn’t see and continued to lean against the wall.

Florence sighed and rolled her eyes, “puh-lease, can you hand me those them there pluckers?”

Thomas, being the stubborn bastard that he was, didn’t move an inch.

“I’ll give you her silver tooth, eh? Is that good?” Florence dipped her head. “Would you like that?”

Thomas straightened up and approached the high table cautiously.

For being such a hardened man, he did not do well with the kind of work this woman did.

He took the ‘pluckers’, which he was fairly sure weren’t called pluckers, and tried to just hold them by the ends, afraid he’ll catch something if he gets caught in the snippy parts.

“Oh just give them here, you ninny.” She shook her open palm and Thomas quickly and silently placed the instrument into her hands but surprisingly didn’t move at all.

He leaned over slightly and tried to watch through the flurry of arms and worrying creaking sounds.

He didn’t actually see anything inside the mouth, but what he did see was that the neck and chin was kind of turning a blueish, greenish colour.

Thomas’ throat made an inhumane noise as he tried to grab onto the table, but in the process, one of his hands actually clutched the dead woman’s feet and he let out a strange ‘yelp’.

Florence didn’t make a comment but she did pause for a second to furrow her brows and truly reconsider where this man stood in the Birmingham hierarchy.

She dove back into the woman’s mouth and dislodged the silver tooth from her gums with a sickening squelch.

“Hand.” She demanded.

Thomas, considering what he was going to get out of this, held his hand out to the waiting woman. She carefully placed the silver tooth with blood on it, into his hand, making him recoil slightly.

Florence then jammed her ‘pluckers” back into the woman’s mouth, but this time it was a gold tooth.

She held it up to the light and nodded when she was satisfied.

She looked over to Thomas who stood there with a highly unamused look on his face. “Well off you pop then. Unless you want to sit here and watch me bleed her, then I don’t know what you want.

He pocketed the tooth without another word and went on his way.

——

2

“Hello there, Beastie!” Florence cheered as the door to her cold room opened. In stepped the usual attendees as they dumped the body on to her table.

Thomas had gotten used to seeing the hunched woman with a cigarette in her mouth, but for some reason or another, she didn’t today. Instead she looked out of it, like she was high or dying, Thomas didn’t know.

She did her usual routine of scanning the figure; checking inside their mouths; cutting their clothes to prepare for the medical procedures.

Thomas never knew why he stayed around for a while, the whole ordeal was sickening and the woman wasn’t exactly fun to be around.

She sighed when she found nothing, instead she took the wrist of the corpse and waved it about. “Cooey!” She played around with the limbs, using them to wave at Thomas who stood unamused in the corner.

She heaved the body into sitting position and made it do a little jig. Thomas always thought the woman to be clinically insane, but this really drove the point home.

“You’re a sick fuck, you know that right?” He lit a cigarette and stared on at the woman who was having a bit too much fun.

She dropped the limbs so they fell heavily on the table again, resting her hands on her hips, “and you’re a killer. We all have our quirks. Isn’t that right beastie?” She turned to face the body again, but this time she actually got to work. This was Thomas’ cue to leave.

——

3

“Hello Beastie!” Florence chimed, cigarette already between her lips, along with the cloud that always loomed across the ceiling.

Thomas shuffled into the room with a body behind him, a regular sight by now.

As the men plonked the body on the table Thomas scurried to the edge of the room to lean in his dibbed spot.

This time though, instead of a cold wall that sent shivers down his neck, there was a chair. It was small and breakable with no real speciality to it. But it was a chair.

It made him pause for a moment. It was a chair. It wasn’t there last time. Why now?

He didn’t say anything though. He just sat down and lit his cigarette.

Florence wondered why the man stuck around for as long as he did. Unless all he was waiting for was the potential gold tooth or earrings, he really had no reason to stay.

She understood the absorbing life of being a leader like Thomas. Florence figured that maybe, despite the vile climate, the mortuary was almost like a getaway for him. The chance to have a smoke and just deflate.

Florence sat against the table legs, also looking tired and deflated.

She held a cigarette between her index and middle finger with her knees up to her chest, the crook of her elbow on her knee.

Thomas watched her for a moment, both of them unmoving.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost?” Thomas piped up quietly.

Florence jerked her head back from her stare at the floor, hitting the table leg with a thud, but it didn’t seem like she minded.

“Heh, sounds about right.”

The silence resumed, Florence didn’t even start to move to examine the body, only sitting on the floor, cigarette in hand.

“Does anyone live here with you?” Thomas inspected.

“What? No, no one but me and me buddies.” She flung her hand up onto the table, and patted the dead mans hand, as if it were a loving partner.

“You seem awfully dedicated to your work?”

Florence was silent for a moment, “‘ow you mean, Shelby?”

“Well you seem to only ever leave this house once a week and even then, it seems like there’s no activity in the house.” He observed.

Florence pushed the cigarette end into the floor and got up, stamping on the fuse. “Is that why I’ve seen your men outside me ‘ouse?”

She strutted out of the room, and Thomas didn’t move from his spot, only staring at the crushed cigarette on the floor.

Before he could reply though, Florence huddled back in with her signature waddle of sorts. She had a bottle of rum and two glasses. She sat back down again, leaning against the table leg with the remains of the cigarette still next to her.

She placed the two glasses on the floor loudly, taking the cork off of the bottle with her teeth and lazily pouring the contents into the two glasses.

She leaned back against the table leg again and sighed when she drank the liquor.

Thomas watched the other glass and assumed that was his. He crouched down to the floor and scooted over to the glass and where Florence sat. Instead of going back to his chair though, he sat his arse onto the cold stone floor with her.

She only crooked an eyebrow but didn’t say anything more.

“So what about you’re family? What about them?” Thomas leaned forward.

Florence stared at him blankly, only chugging the rest of her glass then proceeding to bite the cork off of the rum bottle again, then spitting it out an impressive distance.

“I’m gonna need to be a lot more drunk for this conversation.” She took a large swig and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “I would question you why you’re asking me these questions, but you’re probably just gonna give me some bullshit answer anyway.”

Thomas shrugged and didn’t say anything, only watching her switch from cigarette to rum with splendid rhythm.

She topped up his glass one final time before she took one last big gulp and downed the rest of the bottle. She peered through the bottle head as if there was a flaw in the design like there was a hole in the bottom.

She sat for a moment before she coughed out “what was your question again?” She rubbed her eyes.

“What about you’re family, I don’t think they live round here do they?”

Florence belched loudly before answering, “dead. All dead. But ‘‘tis life, no?”

“So no friends or family? Surely you must’ve had someone?” He inquired more and more.

“Questions like that can get you killed where I’m from, love.”

“And where are you from?”

Florence got very close to his face. He could smell the stench of rum and cigarettes on her breath. “I’m from a place where the ocean does not apologise for its depth, nor the mountains make excuses for the space they fill. I went there, I went there to learn from them. You. You with your small mindedness arrogance could not fathom those hills nor those lakes.”

She leaned back again, reaching for another cigarette to get her through the conversation.

“Besides. I’ve got the dead. They don’t speak too loud or ask for presents on their birthdays.” she shrugged.

“Do you usually drink like this?” Thomas gestured with his free hand to the everything in the room.

“Yeah, just you came in early today. I’m not about to let that stop me from my day drinking.” She took a drag from her cigarette, “if I’m not drunk by noon then the day’s wasted.”

“Have I ever talked to you sober then?” Thomas recounted all their meetings in his head.

“Nope. You wouldn’t like me sober, anyway.” She grinned. “When you’re sober, you start to notice just how depressing all this really is.”

“Your job or just life in general?” Thomas chuckled humourlessly.

Florence cleared her throat, “I’m sure you already know the answer to that question, Beastie.”

——

4

Thomas entered the private mortuary, the air was more smoky and thick than usual, which wasn’t worrying, more just confusing.

He stepped into the cold room and made space for the men to put the body on the table.

“Miss. Kent?” Thomas called.

“In here, Beastie.” He heard her voice from behind a door he never really noticed before, it just matched the body cabinets.

He opened the cold door and a gust of hot wind blew in his face.

“Welcome to the cremation zone. Keep your arms and legs to yourself, lest you want me to confuse your limbs for someone else’s.”

Thomas peered at the giant stone furnace that stood proud and tall in the middle of the room with a roaring fire inside its walls.

It had four pillars around the edge, disconnecting the slab to the chimney.

He looked through to the other side of the room through the stone pillars and saw Florence staring intently at the fire.

“Mind the-“ Florence started, but Thomas had already tripped over the arm of a carcass on the floor.

“Why the FUCK do you just leave bodies on the floor? Isn’t there regulations for that shit?” Thomas nearly screeched.

“Yeah, but I seriously can’t be arsed to read them. I did my school years, what’re they gonna do, take away my other non-existent medical license? I don’t think so, Beastie.”

Thomas came round to her side and followed her stare into the fire, finding the way it licked the air to be mesmerising.

“Beastie? Who’s Beastie? Why’d you keep saying that?” Thomas stuffed his hands into his pockets.

“You, you ninny. I thought it was rather fitting, really.” Florence quipped.

Thomas only nodded and shifted his gaze to the body still on the floor, “you gonna put them in or do you just have the room for the view?”

“Oh yes! I forgot!” She scurried around and heaved the legs up the best she could.

The carcass, though dead, was quite a large carcass. “Mind helping me here, Beastie?”

Thomas swallowed his bile and took the figure in his arms to heave up onto the stone slab. Florence then rolled the body into the fire. The body didn’t land in a flattering position as it turned face down in the flames.

“They’re very needy the dead.” Florence mumbled, “and they rarely give back—unless you’re delusional or religious.”

Thomas, for the first time in the company with Florence, actually laughed. It was broad and loud and even made Florence chuckle a bit.

——

Thanks for the love.

Feedback and comments are wanted.

See ya next time!

Underrated PB Quotes Post

Happy and/or sad. Please piggyback/add on. Underrated, being the key

“This is a respectable fucking neighborhood!”

“Two bob for your picture of the king.”

“You sound like one of those rich girls that comes over from Dublin, for the races.”

“Slow her up nice and easy, John.”  > “Story of your fucking life, Arthur.” (EASILY NUMBER ONE IMO I have yet to see it discussed and it is hands down the funniest fucking thing the brothers have ever said to each other) 

“Yes sir, sergeant major”

“You’ll want to have that brother of yours put down” > “Oh I tried that, he bit the vet”

“Timbuktu. You ever been?”

“A prescription for iron tablets for Ada fucking Shelby.”

“When’s the last time you rode a horse, Tom?”

“John boy” - in any context

“Freddie fucking Thorne. Yeah. Your best mate since school.” See also > “Rudolph Valentino.”

“Says Tommy and his parliament of one?” See also > “I’ll deal with it. You’re too busy taking over the world.”

“We’re a close family. Always within punching distance.” 

“I’m the oldest.” > “Clearly.” 

THIS IS IT. You made the words go! THANK YOU

Why I hate Grace.

I was giving my thoughts on Peaky Blinders a few weeks ago and I danced around the subject of my dislike for this character but didn’t have time/room to get it all out. So here it is! Grace fans, you probably want to look away now. So to me, Grace is kind of symbolic of the bad writing on Peaky Blinders, which is especially egregious because usually the writing of the show is good. But right off the bat, her arrival creates a number of plotholes that don’t resonate with Tommy’s character. Just for a start, nobody seems to find it suspicious that an apparently attractive woman (seriously, people go on and on about how pretty Grace is and while it’s not as though she’s ugly at all, you can’t help but wonder if the Peaky boys merely think so because she’s the only woman of significance not related to them) is so determined to be a barmaid in The Garrison, where Tommy, upon seeing her, immediately asks her if she’s a whore. Grace is understandably offended by the question, which again makes you wonder why she’d want to work somewhere where such a question isn’t just an assumption, but the first thing Tommy asks - we know she’s a spy, but the other characters don’t.

Then, Tommy corners Grace and starts asking why she keeps being so nosy about the Blinders and their business. They go for a walk and Tommy asks Grace if she’s a Catholic. She says she is, but when Tommy points out that no good Catholic girl would walk into a church without making the cross, he immediately exposes her as a liar and points out he also knows that she lied to him about what town she was from, because he asked around and nobody had ever heard of her. So what does he do? He…promotes her to being his secretary? What?

Okay, so you might argue that Tommy puts her in said position to keep an eye on her, or thinks she might be useful if she has the balls to lie to him, but she tells such an easy-to-unravel lie and her excuse is because she wants to “fit in”. Again, he lets her off the hook but she covers up a lie with an even more obvious one  - if Grace cared about fitting in, she’d make more of an effort to do so, but she keeps demanding Tommy let her sing in the pub and asks questions above her station to Arthur, which got reported back to Tommy. Sure, it’s her job to spy on the Peaky boys, but she’s so transparent about it that it’s honestly ridiculous that Tommy would ever put her in a position that close to his personal affairs. Not to mention, Grace is so inexplicably haughty towards Tommy, telling him, “You disappoint me” when he kisses her. You’d think if she was good at her job, she’d learn to shut her mouth and keep her head down like a decent spy, but she always acts as if she’s better than Tommy because, like Polly points out, she’s a spoiled little rich girl at heart and she does think herself above the Shelby’s.

Then Tommy completely inexplicably chooses to give Grace a fucking gun and tells her some men are going to come in and try to kill him and he’s relying on her to bail him out. I know the cops were meant to come in at the stroke of six and they fuck up, but WHY would you ever place that level of trust in someone you already know is a liar? Sorry, but I just don’t buy that Tommy was blinded by “love”. I can buy that maybe he was curious about Grace, possibly even fancied her a bit, but definitely not so stupid that he thinks it’s a good idea to put his fucking life in the hands of a woman he knows basically nothing about. She could have fallen out of the sky for all he knows. Tommy even continues to trust Grace after she kills an IRA guy right in front of him because she sobs, “I didn’t know I had it in me like that”, yet she disobeyed his instructions and whenever Arthur or John do that, Tommy gives them a bollocking. He lets Grace off, again, for seemingly no reason other than she played the damsel in distress role and he buys it. This doesn’t make Tommy look like a smart man blinded by love, it just makes him look like an idiot around Grace.

Also, there seems to be an uncomfortable level in Tommy/Grace of Tommy getting a kick out of using Grace to piss Campbell off. It’s pretty obvious Campbell has a creepy crush on her, and Tommy exploits that for all it’s worth when he explicitly rings Campbell to inform him that he’s going to bang Grace. (Incidentally, their sex scene made me go, “Oh, I guess they’re gonna fuck now. Yup.” It was like they did it because the screenwriter said so.) He’s basically cucking Campbell and I think it’s a big reason why even Grace fans admit that she’s “not as good” in Season Two - Grace just doesn’t work without Campbell around. At least in Season One you can argue that every shitty thing Grace does to Tommy/the Peaky Blinders is partly because of her job as a spy and Campbell is her boss. In Season Two, there are no excuses for the way Grace acts. She’s a selfish, self-righteous hypocrite. She jumps at the chance to go to Birmingham on the offchance it was Tommy who called, then acts all offended when he assumes she came to sleep with him, to the point she actually smacks him in the face. What does Tommy do about this? Nothing. When Grace complains they could have run away to New York together, all Tommy says is, “I had things to do”, instead of asking Grace why she thinks he’d abandon his family, business, friends and country all to chase after the woman who sold him out to his worst enemy. Grace honestly expected Tommy to put her first after everything she did to him. I won’t act like Tommy is a saint in this - he did nearly pimp her out to Billy Kimber - but at least he acknowledges it was wrong of him to do and he never acts like he occupies any moral highground like Grace does. When Grace admits she sold Tommy out, she sobs she “did a terrible thing,” yet never tries to actually help him out in a way that would put her at risk - she quit her position, sure, but Campbell’s creepiness had gone so far as to propose marriage to her, Grace was still looking out for herself when she left, because it got her away from Campbell. She asked Campbell to spare him, knowing full well that Campbell has wanted Tommy dead since day one. She plays the damsel in distress again and she’s pissed when Tommy doesn’t fall for it a second time. Then when she talks about her husband, she tries to rub it in Tommy’s face how he’s “a good, kind man”, but then quickly backtracks on that to fuck Tommy anyway because her husband is impotent - and Grace just can’t deal with not getting what she wants. Tommy’s rich enough to afford to buy a house for Ada and Polly by this point, he’s running Birmingham and seeking to expand into London, so Grace pulls the oldest trick in the book and gets pregnant - then Tommy has to do the responsible thing and marry her, because the baby is his and it’s literally the only piece of leverage she has over May. (May even points out that she’s been stringing Tommy along and all Grace can do is throw the fact that “Grace’s Secret” is the horse’s name at her. Again though, did Tommy call it that to piss off Campbell? This was before Grace returned to Small Heath but after Campbell had, so I think yes.)

Then in Season Three, again, Grace is pretty much a pointless character, because she has no purpose anymore outside of being “Tommy’s wife”. Campbell is dead and so the conflict of her character in Season One, as contrived as that was, is gone. People complain about Grace being stuffed into a fridge and whatnot, (and tbh, you could say that about Freddie, but Freddie also served his purpose in Season One after he buried the hatchet with Tommy), but honestly I think that it was all they could think to do with her because Charlotte Riley was unable to pick up her role as May for Season Three, so they had to work around it. It’s the only explanation I can think of about why Grace is just such a blatantly awful person in the Second Season - I’ve heard people say before that Tommy leaving the field after his assassination was prevented would have been the perfect ending to the season, but that scene at the end where he returns to The Garrison and announces he’s getting married seemed really hastily tacked-on - I feel like it was added because they were forced to rewrite the drafts for Season Three and put whatever plans for May they had on the shelf. Not to mention, Grace’s actress Annabelle Wallis has apparently stated she hates May because she’s “annoying” and “gets inbetween Tommy and Grace”. No, Grace got in the way of Tommy and Grace - she’s the one who chose to leave Birmingham after she got exposed as a Mole instead of taking the consequences! And also, how is May the annoying one? At least she doesn’t whisper all her lines. It’s just so immature of the actress to bash on the character and encourage ship wars, especially considering Grace comes out the winner of the love triangle, so what’s the bitterness about? (I’ve not heard what her opinion is on Lizzie, but I doubt it’s as hostile, because it’s made obvious in the show that Tommy doesn’t love Lizzie the same and the poor girl is constantly competing with a dead woman for her husband’s love.) Plus, in Season Three, the wedding is all about not upsetting Grace, Tommy’s family have to play nice with Grace’s family, and Polly is once again the only person who knocks Grace’s smug ass down a peg by reminding her that the family haven’t forgiven or forgotten Grace’s crimes against them - the only reason they’re putting up a pretence of tolerating her is for Tommy’s sake. Not hers. Not everybody in the world wants to accommodate Grace. Killing Grace was honestly the highlight of the entire Season, because I couldn’t stand watching her smirking over how she got everything she wanted when she didn’t pay for any of it. (Polly is also the only one who comments on how Tommy has conveniently forgotten all the shit she pulled on him and Tommy acts like she was a totally innocent bystander when she got killed and it’s like, no, Tommy, baby. Grace knew what she was getting into when she married him and he knew that - it’s pretty much common knowledge that everybody who is even tangentially associated with the Peaky Blinders gets hurt eventually, just look at how Ada was nearly gangraped even though she hadn’t been involved with the family business for two years.)

Come Season Four and Five and there’s already a problem here - there is still more to talk about with Grace, even though she’s dead and Tommy spends most of Season Three rampaging over her death. But he just inexplicably won’t let go of her. And again, this doesn’t come across as Tommy being so in love with Grace he can’t fathom a world without her, it comes off like her actress has dirt on the director or something. He constantly hallucinates the bitch, we hear her singing all the time, it’s kind of implied that Tommy prefers Charles over Ruby because Charles a boy and has a saintly dead mummy while Ruby is the daughter of a former whore (not that Tommy doesn’t love Ruby, obviously, because he absolutely does), and what really annoys me about Tommy hallucinating Grace is that she’s the only character he does this with. He doesn’t dream about Greta, his first love, he doesn’t dream of Danny or Freddie or his mother. He doesn’t even fucking dream about John! Remember John, Tommy’s little brother he knew his entire life? Apparently nobody else does! No, it’s always all about Grace, who keeps helpfully telling Tommy to hurry up and kill himself so he can be with her again. This doesn’t seem like an out-of-character, guilt-induced vision - it mimicks her attitude in Season Two, that nothing else in his life can be as important as she is.

And that’s why I hate Grace. (Please don’t send me rude or hateful messages over this post, it’s just my opinion and it’s pretty much irrelevant anyway since I doubt Stephen Knight is going to stop using Grace up as some kind of martyred dead saint anytime soon. I just wanted to get this rant out of my system.)