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Sergeant Major Thomas Shelby was about to die.
He knew it—the five soldiers huddled beside him in the mud knew it too.
The narrow ditch they were in, lined up shoulder-to-shoulder, provided the only cover in an otherwise open field. There was nowhere to run. Cut off from the retreat, no bullets left, all they could do was wait for the thundering hoofbeats of the Prussian cavalry. The sharp bite of bullets and bayonets.
“We’re fucked, Tom,” Arthur said quietly from his left.
Tommy didn’t answer. There was no need to.
On his right, Jeremiah muttered a prayer.
John swore in Romany.
Freddie’s hands slid through the mud by his boots as if he might find bullets there. He gave up after a moment, settling back and clutching his empty, useless rifle along with the rest of them.
Danny was quiet, watching Tommy with dull, barely blinking eyes.
And then Jeremiah stopped praying to declare, abruptly, “We should sing.”
There was a pause—like everyone was waiting for someone else to laugh, so no one actually did.
“Sing what?” rasped Arthur.
“‘In the Bleak Midwinter.’”
Slowly, inevitably, all heads turned to Tommy. He took a long look at those faces—those haggard faces covered in mud and blood just like his own—and said, “Why the hell not?”
And sing they did.
For a while, it looked like the Prussians wouldn’t come. There were no hoofbeats. No enemies emerging from over that muddied ridge.
Until there were.
Danny straightened, peeking over the side of the ditch.
“They’re coming, Sergeant Major!” he shouted, ducking back down again.
Tommy could hear them, hear the horses. The hoofbeats.
“I bet I can take one of them bastards down with me, Tom,” said John, reaching for his knife. “Gun or no gun.”
Tommy nodded with a calmness he didn’t feel. “We will go out,” he agreed, “and we will go out fighting. The Small Heath Rifles don’t go down easy, eh?”
“That’s right, Tom!” exclaimed Arthur.
We volunteered for this, Tommy thought, fingers tight around his useless gun. We fucking volunteered.
Those hoofbeats were approaching, getting closer and closer, and…
Tommy had no words to describe what happened next. It made no godly sense.
One second, John was by his side.
The next, he was off past Danny, yelping in shock as he slipped in the mud.
John hadn’t moved. Tommy hadn’t blinked. There had been nothing between, just…here and then gone.
“Holy fuckin’ Jesus,” Jeremiah gasped.
Another moment—John was back at Tommy’s side. Just suddenly, impossibly there.
Everyone exchanged a wary glance, asking, silently, if they all just saw what they thought they saw. If it really happened.
“Tommy…am I dead?” John’s voice was shaking. “Did we die already?”
And Tommy said nothing—not because the situation didn’t warrant it, but because he didn’t have the fucking words.
Hoofbeats. The Prussians were nearly on them.
“Whatever just happened to you,” Freddie managed to get out, his eyes blown wide, “make it their problem.”
John paused, looking thoughtful. His head raised up over the side of the ditch. He smirked.
And then he was gone.
Tommy watched. Arthur watched. Jeremiah and Freddie and Danny watched as horses tripped and riders fell. John was seemingly everywhere, hopping from one place to the next faster than the blink of an eye.
“Tom,” Arthur said suddenly. His voice was strange. “Tommy. Something…something’s happening.” Dangerously, suicidally, he stood up. “Something’s…”
Tommy tried to grab him. Arthur shook him off. His eyes were wild as he staggered out onto the open field, and Tommy could only gape, hand still hanging in the air, as his brother’s body was engulfed in flames.
Fire. Actual, literal fire came into existence from nowhere at all, and while Arthur’s uniform burned away to ashes right off his skin, the flames left him unharmed.
The burning figure paused.
“COME AND GET ME, YOU PRUSSIAN BASTARDS!” Arthur bellowed, charging into the fray.
The screams of the Prussian cavalry as their horses spooked and bucked them off required no translation. Nor did their gurgles as John picked them off one by one, appearing behind them with just a glance and slitting their throats with his knife.
The world had gone mad, Tommy decided. Absolutely and utterly mad.
Arthur punched one of the enemy soldiers with a fiery fist—the man shouted as the flames spread and began to eat him alive, harming him where they hadn’t harmed Arthur.
The soldier dropped down into the mud, frantically trying to put out the flames.
Arthur knelt before him, the wet ground hissing and sizzling upon contact with his knees, and drove a knife whose blade glowed white-hot into the Prussian’s chest.
Tommy stared. He just fucking sat there and stared.
“Sergeant Major…”
He turned to look at Danny.
“I think you’ve done something to us.”
Tommy frowned. He didn’t feel any different, still half in shock, a part of him wondering if maybe John had had the right of it—that they were all dead already. But Danny and Jeremiah and Freddie…they looked calm. They looked calm. All this unexplainable chaos about, and they looked fucking calm.
Unnaturally calm.
“I…” Tommy stammered. “I’m…what?”
Freddie extended a hand, wrapped his fingers around Tommy’s wrist. Tommy let him, so utterly confused as he watched whatever tension remained on Freddie’s face drain away completely.
“Feels like a drug,” Freddie noted dispassionately. Then he barked out a short, disbelieving laugh like they weren’t in the middle of a fucking war zone—like Arthur wasn’t burning Prussians with that unholy fire that’d engulfed him, like John wasn’t…fucking appearing wherever his eyes fell like some sort of demon.
“Hey Jeremiah,” Freddie said. “Come here.”
Tommy shook his arm free, backed away.
“I’m not doing anything,” he said, and no matter how hard he tried, he failed to sound as calm as they were.
But he was, wasn’t he? Doing something. Because when that ‘something’ stopped, the unnatural calm shattered like glass.
Freddie staggered away, scrambling in the mud, his breaths uneven and fast. Danny looked much the same. So did Jeremiah.
“I haven’t done anything!” yelled Tommy. “You hear me? I haven’t…whatever that was, it wasn’t me.”
It was quiet then. Too quiet.
“Shouldn’t we be helping them, Thomas?” Jeremiah said softly, gesturing with his knife, because Arthur and John were still out there somewhere, surrounded by enemies and wielding powers no one could explain or understand.
“Right,” Tommy said, clearing his throat. “Yes.”
But when the four of them rose to their feet, it was already over. The Prussian cavalry patrol that had come for them were all dead—their bodies scattered in the mud, their horses long since galloped away down the field.
Arthur stood there in a charred ring of destruction, still engulfed by fire. It almost hurt Tommy’s eyes to look at him, it was so bright. John stood by Arthur, close but not too close, kept at bay by the heat of the flames. He was talking to him, saying things that Tommy couldn’t hear.
The sickening smell of charred meat lingered in the air with the smoke and the gunpowder, the mud and the ash and the blood.
Tommy walked over to his brothers.
Step by step, he approached, not sparing the bodies a single glance. Jeremiah, Freddie, and Danny followed cautiously behind, and their footsteps were all so loud in the absence of battle.
Tommy walked. As he got closer, the flames dimmed, and by the time he reached Arthur’s side, they guttered and died.
His brother stood there stark naked on the burnt field, covered in ash and blood, no sign of his uniform remaining—not even his boots. Arthur turned on him with an expression of surprise that was too fucking calm.
“How’d you do that, Tom?” he asked.
Do fucking what? Tommy didn’t say, just as beside him, John crossed his arms. Smiling, perfectly relaxed. Calm.
John slung an arm around his shoulders. “Looks like you’re like us now—eh, Tommy?”
Tommy just shook his head. He didn’t do anything. It wasn’t him.
“Fuckin’ Gypsies,” Freddie muttered into the silence. It shouldn’t have been funny, but somehow it was, and they all burst into laughter.
They laughed until they cried, because whatever was happening—whatever had happened…
Gypsy magic didn’t come close to explaining it.
They swore to never speak of what had happened that day. They stuck to their story, and their story was that they were lucky. That the Prussians never came.
But as the war passed on, they began to hear stories—not about them, but about others. Other soldiers. Soldiers on all sides.
People started calling them mutants, said that it sometimes ran in families. Brothers. Fathers and sons. A nurse and her brother. Unexplainable things happening in times of stress, in moments of certain death.
Arthur’s fire didn’t come again. Not with…whatever it was that Tommy could do—whatever it was that he did without even meaning to. That uncanny ability to keep people calm.
John could…do his thing. Appear places he could see with his eyes. He did it sometimes, when it was safe. When they were alone.
And Tommy…
Tommy didn’t want to believe that he was doing anything at all.
Because what he could do was invisible. He couldn’t summon fire or appear across a room. And if he was doing something…well. Then Tommy didn’t know how to stop it.