Toby stared at the water intently, the grayish blue waves toiling with each other, cutting into each other, killing each other like animals, like his friends.
What did you do to your friends, Toby?
He shivered, stared down, and contemplated jumping. It would be so easy, so simple, and he wouldn't be missed. Everyone he loved, after all, was gone. They were dead, corpses under the ground and in the furnace and rotting, bleeding, unseen by anyone.
A sigh, and then a puff of breath, white and smoky in the dim London twilight. He was thirteen, he was young, and he was broken. Nothing made any sense at all, and his mothers, the first and the adopted, were dead. Everyone was dead. Pirelli and Mum and the strange old hag (did he love her? Yes, he did) and even that despicable Mr. Todd, all dead, all gone, all blood and ash and shit.
There's a hole in the world, it's a great black pit.
London was not a city. It was a living, breathing organism, and Toby was scared of it. It terrified his soul, it corrupted him, it wanted to eat him, consume his being…
He started screaming, tearing at the air, and he fell, kept falling, couldn't stop—
In her last moments, Mrs. Lovett was thinking of three things, the first being that all of her money was underneath her left breast, and the second being that Toby was still lost, still not found, and would be scared when he found her.
The third was that Mr. Todd was killing her.
I can't believe it.
Could she? Could she ever believe such a horrible thing, especially after that beautiful moment of intimacy they shared prior to this terrible tragedy? She was a poet, a closet bard, and this, this evil act of…of…she found no words to describe it entirely. It was just too awful to be thought of, and she was going through it.
A scream escaped her lips, high and keening, more piercing than she could ever imagine, and her arms lost all control. It hurt, it hurt so terribly, and she could feel her most delicate parts, her eyelids, her mouth, everything that made her nice to look at in her youth, disappear into firewood.
Her own smoke rose into her lungs, and it burnt.
Another thought wormed its way into her head, just before she died.
Her rags were late.
Johanna couldn't take her eyes away from the ceiling.
Had it always been this fascinatingly drab? Were all of these cracks interwoven into its fiber, these stains the color of tea, these dead moths, marked by a dreadful smack? Or was the ceiling once white and beautiful, a canvas before Michelangelo let his brush kiss the soft surface, a work of art before its terrible birth?
Her breath caught, and her eyes came back to what was directly in front of her, on top of her, all so many pounds moving inside of her, just like they did so many times a month, a week, a day. They took turns with her, they did, never satisfied with the influx of pretty pictures and prostitutes. For some reason, Johanna with her white blond hair and faery features was all they lusted after, and they got what they want every. Single. Time.
When he finished, he stood up and washed himself. She stayed in bed, her lower lip quivering. When he left, a delicate tear trailed down her cheek. When she saw his carriage exit, she reached, trembling, for the razor on her bedside and cut deeply into her wrist.
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