Chapter Text
It’s astonishing, yeah? The things a man learns about himself after being shot in the fucking face, and left for dead. Recalibrates things a bit, it certainly fucking does.
Alfie Solomons had never been a vain man. He wasn’t a good man, not even close, engaging in the seven deadlies – avarice, wrath, lust, the whole bloody lot – regularly and with enthusiasm.
But he wasn’t vain. He hardly paid a whit of attention to his own appearance, perpetually rumpled and often bloody or sooty or flour-dusty due to his line of work. Wealth and power and territory and mastery over his domain were the only things that mattered; he’d never given a tinker’s dam what he looked like, aside from making sure he was properly attired and decked out in gelt.
Until now.
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Alfie’s first glimpse of his own face, after the shooting on the beach at Margate, had come as a shock.
He’d been in hospital, at Ramsgate Infirmary, for quite some time. For weeks he’d been confined to bed, heavily bandaged and drugged into a stupor, while surgeons wired bits of his skull back together and tried, with limited success, to reassemble the scraps that had once been the left side of his face.
Alfie had drifted in and out of consciousness, talking to people that weren’t there. Sometimes he grew restless and insisted on getting up – claiming he had work to do, or that the kettle was boiling, or any number of other delusional things that required his immediate attention. And sometimes combative, which eventually necessitated restraints – wrists and ankles manacled to the bedrails – after he decked an orderly while in the throes of a hallucination.
And he'd written letters, apparently. Or, more accurately, dictated them to Ollie, his longtime aide-de-camp and the only one permitted to visit. Some were to Rivka, some were to his deceased mother, some were to business associates. Some were to Tommy Shelby. Some were to Ollie himself, dictated to him as he sat right there at the bedside.
The letters were complete nonsense, of course – wild, morphine-addled ramblings, interspersed with occasional instructions about how his affairs were to be handled and inquiries about his dog. A few were sprinkled with things so racy or inflammatory that Ollie – exercising the discretion his fallen boss wasn’t currently capable of – made the executive decision to burn them rather than carry them to the post.
Nearly a month passed before the surgeons declared they had done all they could do. Another week went by before the bandages came off, and yet another before Alfie was lucid enough to carry on a coherent conversation, or feed himself, or do much of anything else. Finally, to his great relief, he was allowed out of bed for short spells. Restless, he walked the halls, still a little hazy with laudanum. And always flanked by either Ollie or an orderly or a nurse, to ensure he didn’t fall or injure himself, since he no longer had any depth perception.
It was during one of these brief constitutionals that he first spied his own reflection, as they passed the plate-glass window of the Infirmary's pharmacy. He flinched, purely out of reflex. The image wasn’t very clear – indistinct, wavery and shifting with the light, as reflections in glass often are – but it was enough. “Oy gotenyu,” he muttered, blinking. "Fucking hell." And demanded to be taken to the lavatory for a closer look, insisting when the nurse demurred.
In the lavatory mirror, he studied himself carefully, in silent, mesmerized horror, big hands braced on the porcelain sink. He swallowed hard, mouth suddenly bone-dry.
Alfie had never considered himself any great beauty – unrefined, and neither elegant nor fine-featured. He was broad and bearlike, plagued by psoriasis and prone to scowling. Still, he’d been told he was somewhat handsome in a rough-edged sort of way, relatively pleasant to look at. But now -- well.
What stared back Alfie him was monstrous. Intolerable. The right half of his face was unchanged, still the same Alfred Solomons, Jr. he'd seen in the mirror every day for the past forty years. The left was unrecognizable -- ravaged, mottled, the flesh gnarled and twisted and laddered with stitches. The surgical incisions, not yet fully healed, were an angry, raw red, painful to look at. His left eye, once the same clear gray-green as the right, gazed blindly back at him, a sightless milky blue marble, half-buried in livid, swollen flesh.
“Go fetch Ollie, please,” he told the nurse without turning around, good eye still fixed on the ruins of his face. “Now.”
When Ollie arrived, Alfie demanded his pistol, intent on finishing the job Tommy had botched, putting the wretch in the mirror out of its misery. And when Ollie refused – shaky, knees turned to water, but steadfast – Alfie roared at everyone to get the fuck out. And then went on a rampage that left the room in a shambles. And left Alfie himself in a breathless, spent heap on the floor, the outburst having entirely sapped what limited strength he'd regained.
He’d immediately been drugged back into oblivion, and shackled to the bedrails once more. And there he’d stayed, until he had healed sufficiently, and was declared once again calm and sane and civil enough, to safely be sent home.