Birmingham never sleeps quietly.
The rain came down hard that night—hammering the rusted rooftops of factories, washing the slick cobblestones clean of the day's filth. The sound of it was relentless—a grim and monotonous symphony of water against stone, wind against iron.
In the narrow alley below, the gutters overflowed, carrying with them the black soot of industry—a fitting mirror for a city that had long forgotten what light looked like.
The only source of illumination was a single gas lamp bolted to a grimy brick wall. Its glow was faint and sickly—pale yellow, flickering—as though even it was reluctant to bear witness to what was about to unfold beneath it. The light fought a losing battle against the thin mist creeping along the ground, throwing long shadows that twisted and danced across the walls like the ghosts of old sins.
Beneath the torment of the rain and the dying light, two figures stood facing each other.
Both wore heavy black trench coats and flat caps soaked through to the bone—the unofficial uniform of those who ruled these streets under the Thompson name. In the darkness and the blinding curtain of rain, their silhouettes were nearly identical—two shadows born of the same blood, the same hunger, the same ambition.
The rain ran freely down their faces, masking whatever emotions might have been written there.
One of them stood rigid, breath heavy and misting in the frozen air. His hands—wrapped in black leather gloves—trembled violently around the grip of a revolver that gleamed wet in the flickering gaslight. The cold, deadly barrel was pressed flush against the centre of the other man's forehead.
The pressure was firm. Deliberate. As though the weight of every sin the Thompson family had ever committed had been concentrated into that single small point of contact.
The man being held at gunpoint did not flinch.
He stood perfectly still, allowing the barrel to dig into his skin without so much as a twitch of resistance. No attempt to dodge. No attempt to fight. Between the howling rain, only one thing moved—two pairs of sharp eyes, locked onto each other.
One filled with a torment that could not be quieted. The other filled with a calm so complete it was almost obscene.
The world seemed to stop turning.
The sound of rain shattering against stone. The faint ghost of gunpowder in the air. Two gazes colliding in a silence sharper than any blade. The finger on the trigger pressed down—slowly, incrementally, one fraction at a time.
Through the curtain of rain, a fragment of memory surfaced unbidden—laughter around the Thompson dinner table, a time when they still shared bread and promises never to betray one another. But the image dissolved as quickly as it came, swept away with the black water rushing through the gutters below.
"Why are you doing this," said the man with the gun to his head.
Not a question. A statement. His voice was soft—almost gentle—and there was a faint smile on his lips that had no business being there. The smile of a man who had long since made his peace with every possible outcome. It cut deeper than any accusation could have.
Upon hearing it, something inside the man holding the gun finally broke.
"You—" His voice fractured, raw with a pain that had been building for far too long. "You dare ask me why?! You're a monster. You hear me? A bloody monster!"
He drove the barrel harder into the other man's forehead, hard enough to leave a mark. The rain streaming down his face mingled with something warmer now—something he would never have allowed anyone to see under any other circumstances.
"You took everything. This family. Everything we stood for—everything we swore to each other—you buried it all just to feed that disgusting ambition of yours! You are not Thompson anymore. You are a disease."
The man being held at gunpoint did not move. His smile did not waver—if anything, it deepened into something quieter, something more settled. A peace so absolute it was far more terrifying than any rage.
"If I am a monster," he whispered, his voice barely audible beneath the rain, "then who was it that made me one?"
A beat of silence.
"After all." His eyes never left the other man's. "I only erased them." He tilted his head—just slightly. "So why are you so angry about it..."
The word that followed was barely a breath.
"...Brother?"
BANG.
The muzzle flash split the darkness for a fraction of a second—brighter than the gas lamp had ever managed. The shot rang out between the brick walls, climbed toward Birmingham's grey sky, and was swallowed whole by the rain.
And then. Silence.
Only the rain remained. The rain—and one figure still standing, arm hanging at its side, the revolver trailing a thin ribbon of smoke that the night erased almost immediately.
Who had fallen?
Only Birmingham knew.