This is the first oneshot based on a song I've written titled exactly like the song. The song is "Alone With The Sea" by Hurt, and it makes you ache. I thought it seemed rather fitting when it came up, so I wrote this.
Just to clarify...this is Sweenett. After Mrs. Lovett is dead. Yeah. So they don't make out or anything, if you were expecting that.
Warnings: Um, not much horrible stuff. Prostitution references, as if the original isn't rife with them. A word or two that you might not say around your grandmother, but nothing you couldn't say on TV. Sweeney shaving his head. Angst.
Alone With The Sea
Mr. Todd Barker, the rested, lives without breathing.
The cities all face London like it's a beacon, try to build it from their own sins, and he can't bear to watch them succeed. The countryside is too much a work camp, and a lone barber is suspicious anyway.
Therefore he wanders. There are a few months in this haze of alcohol and herbs, sleep and suicide attempts, he can't pick them out. A quiet farming town that pretends it isn't as sick as the rest of them finds him passed out somewhere. He's thrown in a barn with countless other vagrants/insanes/debters.
He makes walls in the madhouse. Finds the scraps of him left between death, the stragglers, clings to them. He watches the filth and is able to go back to Australia. Hell that it is he had control of himself there.
Mr. Todd Barker is quiet and polite, good boy good boy, but when his previously shaved hair grows out (they always want wigs, you can take anything from those who have nothing) it still has the white streak. He's recognized.
Anthony comes for him before the law does.
Anthony is angry at him for some reason, keeps asking him why, why, little chirping bird mouth, thinks he understands now. Todd tells the story of the Judge, his Lucy, his revenge.
Anthony's face crumples like paper. He sobs. Johanna isn't right anymore, he won't ever be able to steal her away. She doesn't sleep, says things sometimes, but he can't put her back in the asylum, not his darling, never.
Mr. Todd Barker holds Johanna. She is still and tiny in his arms, she says she forgives him. But then she asks to be taken back to the inn, and he knows it will be the last time he sees her.
Anthony says the boy they had in the shop is crazy now, yells things about cooking human flesh in the pies and his mum's hair becoming yellow in the flames. "But you didn't do that, Mr. Todd, I know, it's so evil, and yet there are all these…please tell me you didn't."
Mr. Todd Barker looks him in the eye and tells him he didn't.
"But I did kill her," he says.
Anthony steps back. "What?"
"I killed her. Mrs. Lovett."
"I know, I…" Anthony shakes his head. "Mister…Barker, I am arranging for your release from this institution. A friend of mine got me all the necessary papers to give you a new identity and such. Please accept them."
"I'm a murderer, boy," he says.
"I know."
Anthony turns tail and marches out.
He drifts around again, and keeping sober is torture. For a moment there he'd almost thought he triumphed, found things Lucy and Johanna lost, but the images find ways of cutting into him, even when he stops sleeping. If he was to die he'd have died long ago, and this is his punishment.
He will endure.
Mr. Todd Barker picks up a boy from a workhouse, a chatty little thing that has deep cuts on his arms and walks odd. The papers Anthony created are strong enough to let him travel around under the same name, shaving folk and moving on.
There is a pulse under his fingers, the razors are acquaintances but sometimes he remembers they could be so much more, he presses hard enough to see the skin bow to its edge.
He shaves and lets go.
The boy starts to annoy him, cheery "What ye say, sir," for every order. No, he isn't dragging Todd around or holding him without permission, but it makes him miss her.
And there is nothing that he hates more in the world than missing her.
Oh, she deserved it, arms around him eyes shining with such trust after she'd killed his only, telling him she is his until the very end and after. He'd been delirious happy, just like with the Judge, here is his revenge and he will have it, he will smile as he damns her.
He'd closed the oven, watched the fire consume her. Things consume each other, that's what they'd proved these past few months, and she is fire, she has burned him so many times he can't connect to himself anymore.
Then all he feels is loss.
That wasn't supposed to happen. He'd liked some of his customers, on good days their pleasant chat seemed less than forced, and still he'd let the razor sing for them because it was right. Is right.
And Lucy, Lucy, dear bright smile his wife, the mother of his child, she was the only one that should have lived. It is that demon's fault Lucy lies decomposing on the floor of the bake-house with her head barely connected to her body.
But the asylum taught him things. Pretty sweet women jerked their necks and laughed like they were hacking their tragedies up through their mouths and raised their skirts asking for half his rations feel good sir, both of us, yes?
No matter how good or kind or virtuous Lucy was, will always be, the woman he killed could never be his wife. Probably suffered more than if the arsenic had done its duty.
It makes him furious that he can't blame Mrs. Lovett for what the world did to Lucy. She was still wrong and yet somehow one night he patches up the boy's arms, watches the child choke up with thank yous.
And he forgives her.
The boy talks about the sea in his sleep that night, and it's everything Todd can do not to shake him until they both wake up. His lad had mentioned before he was from the coast but now it slips across Mr. Todd Barker's throat and God he is still so raw, so ready to be hurt.
Before he hated the sea, hated water, shivered passing the Thames. Water is dirty and deep. It took nerves of steel to swim out of Botany Bay, and after he'd spent days holed up in the cabin purging everything he was given to eat, dark blue whenever he closed his eyes.
When she talked about it, though her voice was so beautiful, looking back, so calming, almost the sound of waves themselves, she is his tide bringing him in from the cold gnashing of his heart he might've really snapped if she wasn't there—when she talked about it, he thought there was no other place he longed to be in less.
The sea smells rotten and all the garbage and sewage wash up on it, the sand is cold and gluey and sticks everywhere.
Still there must be some good in it, or she wouldn't have used the same intonations when she mentioned it as when she spoke his name.
So he moves there.
The boy cries, sits down on the beach and cries. With every tear that hits the sand a strange thing comes over Mr. Todd Barker.
"Let's live here," he says.
The boy looks up, face red and puffy and snot dribbling off his chin. "Ye mean it? We can stay?"
He nods.
They find a tiny house that is lopsided with parts of the walls missing. The money she saved up, wicked money earned in blood and fat, runs down paying for the house. He goes into debt a bit to transform it into a tonsorial parlor.
Business is good. The boy is an excellent fisher and they eat well each night. Soon he will be old enough to apprentice.
Mr. Todd Barker rolls up his pants and goes walking in the water one night. His feet are numbly freezing in the sand, the water's even colder. The waves roll in, crashing again and again, smaller each time, until they wash to his feet making desperate little grabs.
He takes off his brown wig, runs a hand over his head, the fuzz beginning to grow there. The wind whips across him, bringing sea spray and cold so piercing it jostles his bones together.
He grits his teeth and looks to the sky, there is a gluttonous moon and someone taught him once to recognize the stars but they're all so tiny and it's saltwater in his eyes, the sting of the smell and the cold and the spray, damnit, nothing to do with—
Her hair was so dark, so close to red. She brought him life and calm, she loved him even as he slammed the oven door. But now she is gone, and the sea is blue foaming gray, the sky is massive and uncaring.
He is still glad he killed her. He must be. If he isn't he's lost everything.
That night he drinks himself stupid. The hot taste of liquor won't chase her down but it will allow him to be alive, for one second.
Mr. Todd Barker accepted the fact that he damned himself quite some time ago. What she's done to him is fresh. But if he is to carry her ghost in his mind, at least he can let it live here.
Life goes on. The people are nice enough that he only wants to kill them sometimes. Nasty rumors go around about him and the boy, he isn't a widower is he, it's his bastard or his lover. It is so tempting to take up his hatred, wield it again. He forces upon himself another night wading in her sea, comes away sopping wet, shaking, broken put together so careful the cracks almost vanish.
And she is there, maybe, occasionally. She spent fifteen years waiting for him. But they are together at last and he is hers or would be if he had the power to be anything at all now. And he hates it, hates it.
It is suggested to Mr. Todd Barker that he court the daughter of a man he shaves frequently, one who many assumed would be an old maid. No, she is a brunette, and it's miracle enough the boy's happy living with him, much less a woman.
Besides, he has given himself to another twice since moving here, with the wind and the driftwood as his witness.
The boy calls him father now. One day the maid's father asks him what dowry he wants. "I'm not marrying again, sir," Barker says. "I've loved two women in my life and…destroyed them both."
The man laughs and his Adam's apple jumps to where the razor is. "Don't be so hard on yourself, Todd. You're a fine man and they've probably moved on by now."
Mr. Todd Barker does not believe in heaven, not really. He used to spill vinegar words whenever asked about the almighty or his domain. But neither heaven nor hell are tangible. You can't find them in blood or saltwater. You can't cut them out of monsters and hold them high for the world to see.
Wherever this is, he is at rest in restlessness, and he suffers for the beauty he has wrought and the beauty he has snuffed. He will train the boy and try not to repeat the mistakes he made with his last helper, and maybe the boy will grow up happy.
And maybe when the wind howls and the waves crash around him he will hear her voice.