Title: And then
Summary: What happened after the curtain fell? What would be in the future?
Warning: Sweeney Todd fanfiction so expect some blood
Disclaimer: I own nothing, nor do I make money with this.
Big thanks to Amani Hershel for beta-reading this. Once again, you're awesome!
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After every story told, happy or sad, something remains of both lies and facts.
In this case it was the insecure future of some of the protagonists, who have so willingly taken part in this tragedy, surely written and managed by the devil himself. Some of the people-sitting in the audience and following with blank stares this horrible story of love and revenge, of death and corruption, this story of the demon barber of Fleet street-wonder what happened after the curtain fell and they left a broken man bleeding to his death, holding his reason and his life in his arms. They ask themselves about a little boy who blindly loved a woman so much he felt the need for bloody revenge.
He grew up, that little boy; like every little boy, he grew up and became a man.
"What a man," the ladies said. "What a charming man he is with his perfect smile and his genteel behavior, and what a pity it was that he said he was already promised to somebody:
"A special old lady," he said; "special and forever his only true love."
"He surely speaks of the sea," some of the wiser old men knowingly said to each other. "The sadness filling his eyes every time he talked about that special lady was sure meant for the sea."
And the man would grow older and he would grow tired, and one day he looked in a mirror and noticed how old he had become, how tired he'd grown, and then he would decide to go back to that place, that place he avoided when he was a younger man and that place he still visited in his dreams in the body of a boy, a boy with a razor blade dripping rubies and the wish for revenge.
And afterward he'd wonder why he had stayed away so long-why he didn't came back earlier, when he was a young man, to wander those streets again, so familiar and known-and he hummed a little song and deep in his mind a faint memory whispered that there was no place like London and he gladly agreed, that yes, that there was no place like London. Then he saw her. She stood at a corner, thin, boney, with a pale face and she was beautiful. He was happy. For a moment he was happy. Then he noticed that she was younger, softer, fresher. Still oh so beautiful but she wasn't her. Nobody was her, nobody would be.
In his head the little boy promised once again that nothing would harm her, while a razor blade came down to stab that demon who charmed her with his smile while an older man followed that young woman, followed her to a dark and secluded place and he came nearer, smiling shyly, with hands gripped around the knife and with every step closer the need for bloody revenge growing bigger, and bigger still, until the now old boy once again stained his fingers with blood.
That little boy grew up; he grew into a man, a man who became famous, famous and feared. They whispered about him in the streets of London, in the small alleys of Whitechapel, whispered about that man with his knife and with blood on his hands.
For two other people-two who shared something precious, something fragile and delicate-for two lovers the future was an escape. They ran and they hid and then they ran again but they could never escape the dark shadows of both their pasts that lived on in the quietly stories a mother told her daughter and that haunted the lullabies a father sang to his son. It ended, like so many stories, in death, in the tragic and senseless death of a man who once stole the woman of his heart, and now laid in ashes, a man who could never run fast enough to convince himself his dream wasn't a nightmare.
He left a wife, a daughter and a son. The times were hard and sometimes they were too hard for a woman alone.
Their children laid some flowers, pretty daisies, on their graves. And again they would run.
The boy escaped, he ran and hid and ran again, far away from the haunting stories a father told and the quiet lullabies dark shadows lived in, as he ran as far as he could.
The daughter fell in a hole, a great black pit, and the vermin of the world slowly nagged her sanity away. She died, some said. Took arsenic, they said. Poor thing.
The story of two lovers who shared something special something fragile and delicate ended like so many in death. Hiding and running and running and hiding, never escaping.
There were two other lovers. A barber and his wife. They were dead. Buried in a cellar. One day the house burnt. And the way into the cellar was blocked and finally forgotten. One can doubt if anyone still knew. Nobody ever saw them. A barber and his wife, two lovers. In death complete again.