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."
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.
"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.
She follows, pulling her coat tight around her and waiting as he tethers the horse. Letty doesn't know what it is she's expecting when they walk through the door but it certainly isn't what she's confronted with, and her eyes go wide in the splitsecond before she catches herself.
Look she does, once she notes that Tommy doesn't bustle her on through; she's seen war and she's been far from home but she's not worldly enough to have the first clue what she's looking at, at first. Her eyes narrow as she tries to follow the current of it, watching where the money goes, trying to match it up with why, with the numbers and the names the men are calling. She glances at the cards with their numbers, and the men counting the cash.
Most of all, she notes that no one so much as looks twice at her, and the only time she has to push her way through is when there physically isn't enough space for her to pass.
By the time ages followed Tommy into the kitchen, her cheeks are ever so slightly flushed and she's forgotten all about being acerbic for the moment.
"Family business," he says, twitching a smile at her as he closes the
doors- it's immediately quiet, leaving them with the fire in the hearth,
the tiles, the china cabinet and the personal photographs.
"We're bookmakers. Horse racing." And there's a subtle undertone of is
that going to be a problem? Because it has been, too often.
She's still too focused back where they came from to really note their current surroundings, which is good; it lets her acclimate to being in what is clearly the private portion of someone's home - a stranger's home - before she has to actually deal with it.
She just looks at him for a moment at the question, hearing the unspoken one loud and clear, before she shakes her head just once. "No," she adds, just in case. Then: "Was that a test?"
He rubs his mouth, once, and raises his eyebrows. "No," he says, slowly, as
he walks to the stove, to boil some water. "But you passed it either way.
What would the test have been, in your opinion?"
He begins making preparations. She watches him, her hands folded around her elbows.
"I haven't the first idea. What I do know is the way some people reacted when I said your name, and the fact that licensed businesses have signs outside of their buildings so they can be found."
Obviously, not something that unlicensed businesses would want.
"So either we trust our customers to find us, or we are unlicensed," he posits, turning back to her. He looks a little harder, like he still expects her to walk right out the door.
She doesn't look as though she's about to walk anywhere; indeed, she has always had a particularly solid way about her when she refuses to budge, despite her size. Much larger men than she have backed down from trying to go through her when she sets her jaw just so and pins them with her eyes.
This is the much milder version: still immobile, but nodding, agreeing. "Or both."
"Not like you mean," she allows, rolling her shoulders back a bit, dropping her arms. "Country races, boys in the field on their prize horses trying to prove them better than the other. Higher prices, not much more, and the bets are for chores or for a piece of jewelry, spending money."
Nothing like this. "It does well for your family, this business. Bookmaking."
His eyes crinkle slightly at the corners when he smiles at that description-- he remembers those as well. He remembers participating in those, as a boy.
"It does. It has done, for a long time. It isn't easy, but it's good."
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He sees her doing the same, but he can't quite focus, can't quite think to say anything to her-
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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!"
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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-"
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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."
no subject
"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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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."
no subject
"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.
no subject
"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.
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"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.
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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."
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"I mean my family- brothers, sister, aunt," he continues, now twitching a smile.
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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."
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"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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Look she does, once she notes that Tommy doesn't bustle her on through; she's seen war and she's been far from home but she's not worldly enough to have the first clue what she's looking at, at first. Her eyes narrow as she tries to follow the current of it, watching where the money goes, trying to match it up with why, with the numbers and the names the men are calling. She glances at the cards with their numbers, and the men counting the cash.
Most of all, she notes that no one so much as looks twice at her, and the only time she has to push her way through is when there physically isn't enough space for her to pass.
By the time ages followed Tommy into the kitchen, her cheeks are ever so slightly flushed and she's forgotten all about being acerbic for the moment.
"What was that?"
no subject
"Family business," he says, twitching a smile at her as he closes the doors- it's immediately quiet, leaving them with the fire in the hearth, the tiles, the china cabinet and the personal photographs.
"We're bookmakers. Horse racing." And there's a subtle undertone of is that going to be a problem? Because it has been, too often.
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She just looks at him for a moment at the question, hearing the unspoken one loud and clear, before she shakes her head just once. "No," she adds, just in case. Then: "Was that a test?"
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He rubs his mouth, once, and raises his eyebrows. "No," he says, slowly, as he walks to the stove, to boil some water. "But you passed it either way. What would the test have been, in your opinion?"
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"I haven't the first idea. What I do know is the way some people reacted when I said your name, and the fact that licensed businesses have signs outside of their buildings so they can be found."
Obviously, not something that unlicensed businesses would want.
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"Or both."
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This is the much milder version: still immobile, but nodding, agreeing. "Or both."
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"We've done this for three generations, now. We've been here a long time, keeping things in order."
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Nothing like this. "It does well for your family, this business. Bookmaking."
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"It does. It has done, for a long time. It isn't easy, but it's good."
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