Title: think only this
Fandom: Peaky Blinders
Rating: Unrated, not explicit
Length: 562 words
Content notes: Choose not to warn.
Author notes: … I am not sure where this came from. I'm really not. I think it's probably the seed of something a lot bigger, but I don't know exactly what yet.
Summary: So then listen.



So then listen.

I'll tell you something they don't know in any church, unless it's down in the depths where the dark men are, where the rabble don't go. Something they don't know in any Communist Party of Great Britain, either, and something any copper would crush your head in to keep you from hearing. You ready to hear it? I'm speaking.

There's nothing in the wide, wide world — nothing in the whole arse-fucked bloody circus — that you yourself can't have, if you can find the price. Don't you look away from me. I'm not speaking of cash. If you can pay cash on the nail and be done with it, what you've got isn't much worth having. Not in the blood and guts of it, not where it counts. Money and what money brings, it's the cup on your mantel and the ribbon they pin to your chest, but who said those things are the winning? Who said that's what any man wants?

Any woman, either. I see you cross your arms back there. Don't waste your own time in quibbling.

So this is how it is. For the real things, for the blood in your red veins, for the silence in a room when you walk in, for the love of a woman who doesn't look away — for those things and the others, you pay yourself out in kind.

There's a story, right? A rich girl told me this, so it must be true.

Back in the old days, back in the bone, when they made you king, it was to kill you a summer later. It was to water the corn with your blood and make the sun turn right round the earth. But until they got the knives out, there was nothing in the world that wasn't yours. Nothing in this world or any other. Miracles, they did then.

Now you tell me what roots we fed in Flanders. You tell me what we bought then, because sure as hell it wasn't what the old fat men in Whitehall sent us out to bring home.

You want to know what I know — I say what we bought was the future. I say it's our age now. Age of the Blinder, age of the blind and the gassed and the shellshock case, age of any man who'll reach out and take it, for all the price isn't yet full paid.

Oh, no. I won't own the world until I'm down beneath the mud for the last time. Not until they've wrung out my blood and my bloodline, taken brother and sister and child unto the last generation — because what I want, what I want, you're never through paying for while there's anything left of you to give.

I want England. I want the red world in pieces round my feet. I want the bloody century for me and mine, if it costs every one of our lives to get it. It's our turn now. It's our time.

And, hell — a man claws himself up through the mud enough, he starts to get a taste for it. He starts to get so there's not a hole dug can hold him unless he lies down and breathes wet earth of his own free will. You think about that in your bed tonight.

That's what I'd call a glorious resurrection, hey?