gasp What is Ogehsim doing, writing a Sweeney Todd fic and straying from her KP roots? No worry to any KP fans, I have a story in the works, see my profile. For the rest of you, I present my first Sweeney Todd fic. When Mrs. Lovett sang "Men'd think it was a treat, Findin' poor animals, Wot are dyin' in the street!" it made me think of the scene in a Tale of Two Cities when a wine cask breaks, and this is the result. Obviously a bit of an AU, esp. because the time periods don't quite align, but this is fanfiction, no? Also much of the first part is paraphrased from Dickens, so no flames about plagarism alright? Those bits aren't mine, neither are any of the characters. Thanks to MST3KguruK10 for beta-ing!
A cart, carrying its load of large carcasses and smaller live animals, had broken in the street. The accident had happened in turning a corner; a cobblestone had protruded more than usual from the street and the cart had lost a wheel and crashed into a wall, the wooden slats shattering, and the meat lay on the stones just outside the door of the pie-shop.
All the people within reach had suspended their business, or their idleness, to run to the spot and tear off pieces of the raw flesh. Some men kneeled down and tore the chunks off with their fingers, or tried to help women who bent over their shoulders. Others, men and women, dipped handkerchiefs from the women's heads into the puddling blood, which were then squeezed dry into infants' mouths. Others, directed by lookers-on at high windows, darted here and there, to catch the running chickens and other small fowl that ran off in new directions; others devoted themselves to the blood-sodden slats and cheap paper used to wrap the meat, licking, and even champing the moister fragments with eager relish. Even the bones were cracked and sucked until dry of their marrow. Not only did it all get taken up, but so much mud got taken up along with it that there might have been a scavenger in the street, if anybody acquainted with it could have believed in such a miraculous presence.
A shrill sound of laughter and of amused voices--voices of men, women, and children--resounded in the street while this meat-game lasted. There was little roughness in the sport, and much playfulness. There was a special companionship in it, an observable inclination on the part of every one to join some other one, which led, especially among the luckier or lighter-hearted, to frolicsome embraces, shaking of hands, and even joining of hands and dancing, a dozen together. When the meat was gone these demonstrations ceased as suddenly as they had broken out. The man who had left his saw sticking in the firewood he had been cutting set it in motion again; the women who had left on a door-step the little pot of hot ashes, at which she had been trying to soften the pain in her own starved fingers and toes, or in those of her child, returned to it. Men with bare arms, matted locks, and cadaverous faces, who had emerged into the winter light from cellars, moved away to descend again, and a gloom gathered on the scene that appeared more natural to it than sunshine.
The meat's blood had stained the ground of the narrow Fleet Street in London, where it was spilled. It had stained many hands too, and many faces, and many naked feet, and many wooden shoes. The hands of the man who sawed the wood left red marks on the billets; and the forehead of the woman who nursed her baby was stained with the stain of the old rag she wound about her head again. Those who had been greedy with the slats had acquired a tigerish smear about the mouth; and one tall joker so besmirched, his head more out of a long squalid bag of a nightcap than in it, scrawled upon a wall with his finger dipped in muddy blood-lees: BLOOD.
The time was to come, when that would be even more abundantly spilled, and when the taste of it would be upon the tongues of many there.
And now that the cloud settled on Fleet Street, which a momentary gleam had driven from its countenance, the darkness of it was heavy--cold, dirt, sickness, ignorance, and want, were the lords in waiting on its presence--nobles of great power all of them; but, most especially the last. Samples of a people that had undergone a terrible grinding and regrinding in the mill, and certainly not in the fabulous mill which ground old people young. The mill which had worked them down was the mill that grinds young people old; the children had ancient faces and grave voices; and upon them, and ploughed into every furrow of age, was the sigh: Hunger. It was prevalent everywhere. Hunger was pushed out of the tall houses, in the wretched clothing that hung upon poles and lines; Hunger was patched into them with straw and rag and wood and paper. Hunger was repeated in every fragment of the small modicum of firewood that the man sawed off. Hunger stared down from the smokeless chimneys, and started up from the filthy street that had no offal among its refuse of anything to eat. Hunger was the inscription on the baker's shelves, written in every small loaf of his scanty stock of bad bread; at the sausage-shop, in every dead-pussy preparation that was offered for sale.
The pie-shop was a corner shop, no better than any other, and possibly worse, in its appearance and degree, and the mistress of the pie-shop had stood outside it, in a dark black and red dress that revealed perhaps a bit too much, looking on at the struggle for the lost meat. "It ain't me concern," said she, with a final shrug of the shoulders. "Them from the market di' it."
There, her eyes happening to catch the tall joker writing up his joke, she called to him across the way: "Say then, wot do ya do there? Do ya wan' ta go ta Bedlam?" said the pie-shop keeper, crossing the road, and obliterating the jest with a handful of mud, picked up for the purpose, and smeared over it. "Do ya wan' the Beadle and the Judge ta come down on our 'eads? Is there nowhere else ta write such words?"
She wiped her soiled hand upon the joker's clothes, such as they were--quite deliberately, as having dirtied the hand on his account; and then recrossed the road and entered the pie-shop. "Times is hard indeed," she murmured to the slumped sacks of coarse flour. Still, it would soon get better, it had to, now that Benjamin Barker had returned; returned no less as the hate-driven Sweeney Todd. Not a few hours earlier had they concocted their devious plot to turn the filth of the black pit that was London into pies. After all, desperate times called for desperate measures.
"Letter for a Missus Lovett." The call was issued loudly over the chattering heads that filled the small shop.
The woman in question plunked two pies and a hearty beaker of ale down on a table, and called to a young boy, "Toby, be a dear and grab the letter from 'im."
"Right m'um." He dutifully retrieved the letter and set it on the counter where it could be retrieved later. Then he had to hurry to fill the raucous demand for another round of ale.
The letter taunted Nellie Lovett all day; it was rare that she ever received a letter, seeing as she had no living relations nor any friends who'd bother. However, she was kept constantly busy as when there were no customers to serve, there were pies to be prepared for the next rush and the shop to be tidied.
Finally the sign was flipped to "closed" with a sigh of relief, and ignoring the dirty plates left on the tables, Nellie rushed to the letter and tore open it's plain envelope. She read it's contents quickly before turning to Toby.
"Toby, I'm gonna go see if Mr. T needs anything. Can ya sweep up the shop? I'll get dinner when I come down."
"Righty-o m'um." The flour-covered floor found itself under attack by broom.
Sweeney Todd had been rather enjoying the silence of his brooding when he found it rudely interrupted, yet again, by Mrs. Lovett. The woman insisted on doing it several times daily. However, it dawned on him that this was not her usual inane babble; instead of her usual light hearted tone she was acting serious. Was it possible that she was actually trying to tell him something?" "What?"
"Didja not hear me, Mr. T? I just told you. My sister wrote to me and asked--Well, actually, she's not me sister. Parents adopted her actually, she musta been 'bout 9 or 10, I was 'bout 8-"
Sweeney Todd growled. "Get to the point."
"Oh well, you know. She came from France, hadda bit of a tragic chil'hood, family was killed by twin aristocrats or something; her sister was raped by one after 'er husband was harnessed to a cart and starved, father died o' a broken heart. 'Er brother sent 'er away to protect 'er, then went to go duel the-"
"The point, Mrs. Lovett!"
"She's a bit revenge-obsessed. Sorta like another I could mention. Wants to wipe ou' the last o' the family who destroyed hers an' I used ta help 'er plan, jus' for fun ya know. She's askin' me if I can' somehow get hold of a Charles Darnay and ge' 'im to her, or finish him off me-self."
Sweeney Todd caressed his razor as he turned to the large window, overlooking the scurrying, dirty masses. "In that case, Mrs. Lovett. Tell your 'sister' we would be more than happy to oblige."