March 3, 1919. Small Heath, Birmingham.
In a cramped bedroom perched above the Shelby house, a boy jerks awake on a sagging mattress, gasping hard like someone just pulled him up from deep underwater.
His name is Finn Shelby, 14 years old, all bony elbows and knobby knees, with dark hair flopping into his eyes and a smooth pebble he's always flipping in his pocket out of habit.
But the mind stirring inside him doesn't belong to Finn, not entirely, and it's scrambling to make sense of this place.
Elliot Carter was 21, cruising along a quiet Cleveland backroad in 2023, with a half-eaten slice of pizza sliding across the dashboard of his beat-up car.
He'd spent the whole weekend glued to his couch binging Peaky Blinders Season 1 on Netflix, totally caught up in Tommy Shelby's cold and calculated plans.
He'd just finished Episode 6, his heart racing as Kimber's head snapped back from Tommy's bullet, when his phone lit up with a notification. It was a dumb X post, just some silly meme about coffee that made him snort.
Elliot laughed then glanced down at the screen, and didn't see the truck roaring around the curve until it smashed through his windshield. Lights flared, then went out.
Nothing followed, only silence. Then this moment hits of a bed creaking as if it's ready to snap, a room full with the smell of coal and stale booze, and a body that feels way too small.
Finn's hands, which are Elliot's now, clutch the thin blanket tightly, and his knuckles turn pale from the grip. "What the hell is this," he says, his voice cracking high and thick with a Birmingham accent he didn't own yesterday evening.
The sound freezes him in place, like someone else spoke through his mouth. He tries again, slower, forcing the words out carefully. "This ain't real, no way it's real." It's the same accent, the same kid's pitch, nothing at all like his 2023 drawl from Ohio that he'd used to joke with friends.
His heart hammers in his chest, so he swings his legs off the bed, his bare feet landing on icy floorboards that send a shiver up his spine. The room's tiny, barely big enough for anything, with cracked plaster walls, a wobbly chair holding a torn shirt and a window smudged black from factory smoke outside.
There's no phone charger plugged in, no laptop glowing and no hum of a fridge from downstairs. Just a silence broken only by a cart rattling along the lane and a kid yelling something in the street.
He stumbles forward to a small and foggy mirror propped up on a wooden crate in the corner. The face staring back doesn't belong to him, and it makes his stomach lurch.
It's Finn Shelby's face, with sharp cheekbones, big brown eyes, and a bruise fading on his jaw like he got into a scrap last week. "I'm really a kid?" Elliot says, Finn's voice trembling with every word.
His 2023 brain reels, spinning through flashes of yesterday of sneaking beers at a dive bar, dodging his landlord's calls and laughing at his phone.
Now he's stuck in 1919, no Wi-Fi to scroll, no pizza to grab and no way to get home. But Finn's memories creep in slowly, like a video stuck on repeat that he can't turn off. Running through Small Heath's twisting alleys, dodging punches from bigger boys who laughed and counting pennies for Aunt Polly's betting shop with careful fingers.
It's fuzzy, like watching someone else's life through a dirty window, but it's his now, wired deep into his bones and pulling him along.
Elliot, or maybe Finn, he's not sure what to call himself yet, sits back hard on the bed with hands shaking.
"Okay, take it easy," he says, Finn's accent thick but Elliot's thoughts pushing through. "I'm Finn Shelby, stuck in Season 1, right here in Birmingham." He knows the story, at least the big parts. Tommy's fixing horse races, Kimber's coming to make trouble and Black Star Day's the bloody finish line.
He'd rewind scenes on his TV to catch Tommy's clever lines, grin widely at Arthur's wild rants and cheer loudly when John lit up a pub with his cocky grin. "I've got the script in my head," he says with a voice low.
"Kimber's a loudmouth who thinks he's king and Tommy screws him over with the Lees, then shoots him dead. I can work with that, can't I?"
Something else hits him, it's warm and strange. It's not just Finn's memories or his own; he's got a trick, a power that wasn't there back in 2023. He could always learn stuff fast, like nailing a skate trick or a burger recipe off YouTube in a single day while his mates took weeks to catch up.
But this is stronger, like his brain's a sponge soaking up everything at once. To test it, he grabs a memory from Finn, one that's clear of Polly's sharp voice saying "Finn, stack 'em right" when he messed up her shop coins last month.
He tries it, speaking soft so no one hears. "Stack 'em right." It's dead-on, like he stole her voice and made it his own. He laughs loudly and recklessly, then claps a hand over his mouth quick as Finn's caution came slamming in, as Polly hears every damn thing in this house.
"Finn! Get downstairs, now!" Polly's voice resounds through the floorboards, like she's got no patience for anyone's nonsense. Finn's feet start moving like they've heard that call a thousand times, pulling him to a wardrobe that's half-broken and leaning to one side.