makeitcount | For Letty

He appreciates it: not that it helps with his own dreams, or the way he sometimes sits bolt upright like he thinks they're under attack, but it's good to tell someone.

That way, if he dies, if Freddie does, someone will still know. He sips his water and only then meets her eyes, shoulders hunched slightly. "Not with his body. It's his 'ead. He sees things, Krauts when there aren't any to be seen, bombs when the sky is clear of 'em."

She wasn't far off, then, not that she's surprised. She makes an impatient noise in the back of her throat, tinged with disgust, but it's not aimed at either soldier.

"But he'll still be handed a gun when we've got him on his feet, and sent back down to fight things that aren't there as well as things that are." She swears - and like him, finds it feels unexpectedly good to do so in Romani and know that they'll fall on ears that understand them - and has to twist her fingers into the hem of her top to keep from reaching for the cigarette butt again. She wouldn't light it anyway, not this close to a man with more than air in his lungs.

Instead: "You boys are from one of those small units, aren't you? All local boys run off to take up arms."

"I started in the yeomanry," he nods, and looks up at her at that: she must understand why he went with that at first. Her curse still rings in his ear, and he feels oddly comforted by it.

"But we went into the tunneling company after that. We all grew up in the same neighborhood in Birmingham."

For the first time when he looks up at her, she smiles; not a broad or a bright one, in fact it barely qualifies at all except in the way the dry twist of one side of her mouth softens her expression just a little. She doe understand.

She also understands why clumps of neighbors stay together in this kind of a setting; the way they can draw bravery out of nothing, and comfort out of even less.

"Well at least you have the company of friends, and of brothers. Of always knowing the name of the man next to you." She doesn't speak on any of the knowledge between the lines: that at least one will make it home, then, and bear with him the fates of the rest if there's nothing else to bear.

"What should I call you, soldier?"

"Shelby," he says, and he holds out one slightly trembling hand, smiling at her. It's tight and pained, like he forgot how to, but it's there.

"Sergeant Major Thomas Shelby. And you, sister?"

Letty's hand, when she extends it to accept his, is steady as a rail, and there is a decisive, deceptive kind of strength in the grip of her fingers.

"Corporal Leticia Ortiz," she answers, her faint Spanish accent blooming around the syllables of it, disappearing again when she continues. "It's very nice to get the chance to meet you, Shelby."

This is not manners. This is honesty, unvarnished and simple.

He's never met kin from outside Britain or Ireland, and it's fascinating to finally do so. He takes in her accent and smiles, squeezing her hand.

"And you, Ortiz. You've been good to me and my men. We'd be nowhere without you and your company."

She tolerates it for a moment, then pulls back to herself to reach for the water again, to keep his cup at least half filled; it's good for him, if he can keep drinking while he can.

And also lets her tip him a dryly amused look. "You would be somewhere, just nowhere good. We find -"

But then she stops, her breath held, her eyes going wide as she listens with every ounce of her attention, going so far as to wave him quiet if he tries to move or prompt her; she's been listening to the ambient noises around them, mostly for another patient that needs her, but also for something else that has her pulse already speeding though she can't, yet, put her finger on what.

And then she has it, and she snaps from resting into action before the fear that tries to grip her throat can get a full hold on her. "Everybody down!" she snaps, shoving at the nearest part of him to force him to the edge of the bed just in case he doesn't respond fast enough, and already twisting to grab hold of the soldier on the bed behind her to do the same.

Only seconds later, similar shouts to her own going up nearby, the first explosion rips through the opposite side of the medical tent.

He looks at her when she stops speaking, intent on her expression and then listening himself. He knows that look, he knows why urses and soldiers go silent in the middle of sentences- only the blasts from Schwaben Hoge have left him with a slight ringing in his ear and he can't quite hear it himself.

Not until Letty yells and pushes him down, and then he's frighteningly sure. He's too much of a leader not to grab the men nearest to him, pulling them off the bed if they don't do it themselves--

And then there's a blast, and there's sand and shrapnel whizzing over his head, over Letty's, over the beds surrounding them. It always takes a few seconds before pain and terror set in, but after that there's the frantic yelling he's come to know too well.

The second blast is inevitable: as an explosives man, Tommy knows how this works, even if he's never thrown them from the sky. One blast first, and then when people make their ways over to help the first victims, they become the next round. The pain in his shoulder is suddenly just a pinprick, and he manages to start crawling, to heave himself up to shout:

"Don't move! Stay down, stay down!"

Letty ends up thrown over the second soldier she pulled down, her body covering his chest and her arms over his face and hers, and she stays where she is as the debris from the first explosion settle; only when the rest starts fading in does she look up from where she is, and her face is pale but determined, reaching for her anger over her fear.

She moves at the same time Tommy does, hauling a more able-bodied patient's hand over to the arm of the man she was shielding, and then her feet are under her - her ears are ringing, but she's not hurt, not yet - and she's staying low between the upturned rows of beds that are left, headed not for the door, not for where the tent is collapsed, but for her gear.

She makes it back, a small revolver in her hand, just in time for another explosion that sends her to her knees halfway between the man she'd protected before, and where Tommy ends up, and this time she looks stunned.

Tommy's closer to the blast, despite the fact that he'd been warning others to stay away, to move, fucking move already. He gets thrown back, cracking his head against one of the field cots when he falls. He's moaning in pain but still tries to move, to yank on people, to help them.

He sees her doing the same, but he can't quite focus, can't quite think to say anything to her-

This is the moment that separates people into fools and soldiers; Letty can see everything Tommy can see, and maybe she's never chased Germans through the walls of a tunnel, maybe she's never charged an enemy front line with a rifle and her brothers at her shoulders, but she's been in and out of these battlefields nonetheless. She's been around them, through them, in them during the messiest part of the war: after it's ravaged its way through.

And she sees Tommy looking at her, she sees the man beside her looking at her, and she closes her eyes for a moment, swallows, and then shoves herself up off the ground to lurch the last few feet to Tommy.

The gun hits the ground next to her as she hits her knees, her hands framing his face, shaking but still strong, still steady enough. "Look at me," she orders him, and it's as much to know how much damage has been done as it is to make him focus. There's not much time so a moment later her fingers are exploring the place where his head hit the cot, making sure of it, that the bump and the split in his scalp aren't actually a bullet or something worse. Making sure he's still with her.

"We have to move these men," she's shouting. Every single one of them, as an official soldier of one country's army or another, outranks her but her shoulders are square, her jaw is set, and she's shouting over the crack of rifles outside the tent. "There's another camp, two miles to the south! We have to get there!"

He's bleeding copiously, but it appears to be just that-- a head wound, but not a bullet, not something that goes much deeper. He's rattled, his shoulder having started bleeding again from the blast, but if he can focus he'll probably be okay.

He frowns in concentration as he looks at her, how she looks as she shouts, even as the actual words haven't really sunk in yet. His hands clench on her arms to show her he understands, eventually.

"Ortiz," he groans, as he tries pushing himself up. "I need to... Freddie and Danny-"

Her fingers come away bloody, but Tommy is responding, he's looking at her, and it will have to be good enough for now. She can't do anything about any of it, not here in the middle of a fight that's come to them.

The moment he starts pushing up, she transfers her grip down to his shoulders, half-steadies and half-pulls him right again. They don't have time for this.

"I'll find them," she tells him; she knows exactly where their beds were, and she needs to take a headcount anyway, needs to get other soldiers with relatively minor wounds moving to help the ones with more severe wounds, if they're not already. They need to move. "You - take this." She presses the gun into his hand. "We need to go."

He nods once, determined through the pain, and he wraps his hand around the pistol. It's good to have something, at least, something he could use in case a Kraut actually dares to make his way into this fucking tent.

"Go," he tells her, steadying himself on an upturned bed. "Go, I'll follow."

And he does: he manages to focus long enough to nudge other fallen, confused men into walking, especially those who the blasts had put in a catatonic state. He nudges them, tells them in a gently authoritative voice to march, soldier, and he stumbles along himself.

In the chaos that follows, he loses her. He assumes she makes it to the next camp over, but now that the medics there are handling double the load he takes some bandages and something for the pain and makes himself scarce. He tries finding her, but it's a futile effort. She's unharmed and strong, and needed until the trucks come to cart half the men off to another hospice, miles away.

Which is how he's still in possession of her pistol, three years later. He'd tried looking her up through army directories, tried finding an address. But there's nothing- and so he keeps the weapon in a box underneath his bed, as a reminder of kindness, strength and kin during war.

She is strong, which doesn't always mean much when it comes to war, but it gives her a fighting chance; and Letty Ortiz always takes a fighting chance when it's presented to her. She finds Shelby's friends, sends them along with another member of her unit, but she herself goes back for more once she finds her horse, finds her gear.

By the time she makes it to the camp she directed the others to, Sergeant Major Thomas Shelby is long gone, and then she has other concerns, as each member of the wartime effort always seems to. She's a little annoyed about the pistol, but comforts herself that he'll put it to good use and she'll get another.

She's still strong, three years later when she washes up in Birmingham; a lot else about her changes, but not that. The war ends and with it, for now, the use her volunteer organization - her charity - has for her. It's uncharitable of her, she knows, but she doesn't care. She volunteered for it at all for a reason, and she lost that reason somewhere in Epehy, and she's not sure she'll ever recover. She's still here, so she must, but that doesn't mean it's any easier either figuratively or literally.

Because the literal is this: she ends up a long ways from home, and her horse stayed with the FANY, as did her uniform and her rank. Now she's a dark-skinned woman with no family and no job, with no right to be in a saddle and no right to bear arms, by popular opinion. Barely any rights at all, which would make her angrier, but she's already as angry as she thinks she'll ever be.

So she's dressed in a plain dress that was once blue, and she's wearing a heavy coat that was once a slightly lighter shade of the same, and her dark curls are knotted up tightly but haphazardly behind her neck; she's smoking again, and her black eyes are as hard as the coal-dusted cobbles in the street, and there's a day old split in one of her lips, but her back is straight and her shoulders are square.

She's followed a name down to Watery Lane, and maybe she never meant to follow him home like a lost puppy, but she never meant for a lot of things. Anyway, he owes her a cup of water and a pistol, and this is where she was told Thomas Shelby would ride by if he rode in Small Heath today at all.

The men in Small Heath are not so good that they will leave a hard-eyed angry woman alone-- but they leave her alone when they see the split in her lip, the way she looks like she would spit each and everyone in half if they came near her.

And then there's the reaction that Tommy's name gets. It's half contempt, a spitted that Peaky Blinder devil? God help if you if you're looking for him; the other half is deferential, and those are the ones that lead her to him.

He comes in the early afternoon, riding a white horse down from the washerwomen's quarter. There's no saddle, no bridle, just Tommy and the horse. He looks harder, more like the working class man he is now than the Sergeant Major he was back the; he's still wearing his army boots, still carrying a pistol, but the suit and the haircut makes him look like a different man entirely.

Still, she'll recognize him. After all, despite the years he still recognizes her. He stops his trot down watery lane to look at her from atop his horse. "Corporal Ortiz," he says, sounding, for once, stunned.

Once she knows she's in the right place - she doesn't comment on the opinions she gets of Tommy, though she notes them, because one conversation in a medical tent that started with a language few enough speak does not a peacetime picture make - she doesn't speak with anyone further; the men she stares at until they keep walking past her, the cigarette butt between two of her fingers ready to bring to bear as more than something to calm her nerves with if they get too close to her. She's strong, but she's small, and she's alone, and this is the kind of neighborhood that can provide an army with an entire unit of its strapping young men.

She recognizes him, standing in the shelter of an alcove between two of the buildings, carefully not in anyone's porch and not below anyone's window. She flicks ash from her cigarette, and she looks at him, and she doesn't smile.

"Not anymore," she tells him, and the bitterness is there, too, but she blows it out with a short breath of smoke. So many people became completely different when the war spat them back out: Letty had been calm then, purpose well in hand, a place in the world. Now she's coiled tight and ready, wary and aloof but for the steady directness of her gaze. She looks the horse over - unsurprised, really, to note that it's a fine animal - but ultimately looks back up at him. "You remember, Sergeant Major Shelby."

Tommy, of course, still does answer to the title. Even if he is no longer on active duty, so many of the men here see him as the Sergeant Major that he's kept answering to it. He runs a hand through the horse's mane to calm it, and then gracefully dismounts.

"I remember kindness and strength in the middle of pandemonium," he says, slowly, looking at her. Yes, she's changed, but not in a way that anyone would find surprising. She has made it all the way to Birmingham, and for a woman alone to think that trip is worth it she must have seen things far worse.

"If someone took that rank from you, they didn't deserve to. Have you come for your gun, Corporal?"

If there is anything in the world Tommy respects, it's a man who did his duty, who served. That courtesy certainly extends to women.

That almost does make her smile, or at least makes her less willing to scowl at him, but the truth is she resents it only because she will always resent anything that has been taken from her by any stretch of the imagination. She willingly announced her departure from the company. They placed their exit demands upon her, of which that was one.

"Letty," she offers instead, to set aside the conversation. Then a deeper breath, and more firmly still: "And yes, I have. Although I admit to doubting it would be that simple." She straightens off the wall, scraping the lit end of the cigarette off behind her, tucking it away into her pocket.

"Would it, brother?" All but the last word is English. His treatment of the horse and the few words he's given her so far speak to a man she might not need to threaten to keep away from her, but she has ever been the kind of woman that makes certain others know exactly where she expects them to stand in relation to her.

"You've travelled too far to meet resistance now, sister." His hand is still resting on the horse's neck, keeping it quiet and still next to him as he looks at her. Yes, he decides: he'd pegged her right in the war, and she still deserves the respect he'd given her then.

"Though I hope you'd let us receive you as a guest in our home before you left with what you came for." He keeps his distance, says our so she knows he doesn't wish to lure her into his home.

She doesn't need calming like the horse does, although she doesn't miss that at all; neither does she miss returning the title here, too. She nods after a moment, stepping forward to hold her hand out to the horse, letting it decide whether to draw back from her or investigate by standing absolutely still for him.

And then our, which makes Letty's glance go quickly to Tommy's hands for something she'd missed before, raising an eyebrow. "Us?" A pause and, utterly straight-faced and without softening at all: "You don't mean the horse."

"Well, the rumors have to come from a place of truth," he deadpans, while he looks at the horse investigating her hand.

"I mean my family- brothers, sister, aunt," he continues, now twitching a smile.

He twitches a small smile; the one she'd been considering as the horse brushes its tough, coarse upper lip over her palm sets under her skin where it had started to form. His family. Of course. Most people have that, after all.

She's just proud and just spiteful enough that she drops her hand and clears her throat to decline out of hand; but the horse pulls against Tommy's steadying grip to stretch its neck after her and she hesitates.

Finally, weighing how very tired and alone she is against how far pride can get a woman in life - especially misused as an excuse to be contrary - she nods.

"Of course. If it's no trouble."

"If it was trouble I wouldn't have extended the invitation in the first place," he says, jerking his head slightly to indicate the direction they'll be going. He's not a man hangs tightly onto courtesy.

It's a short walk from where he'd seen her, and he leaves the horse tied down to a ring in the wall. "We'll be right back for you, girl, don't you worry," he murmurs, before patting her and opening the door.

He's taking them through the office, and so she walks right into the chaos of betting, of John calling out the races, the times, the horses that are up to be betted on; Scudboat taking and cashing out, Arthur in his office. She's welcome to look, but if she doesn't want to he'll go through the green doors in the back, into the kitchen.

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