A/N: Incomplete, though I'm attached to it. Tell me what you think and what you would like to see happen next. I'm picking my favorite suggestion to be the next chapter! So, R&R, ladies and gentlemen!
OF ALL THE DEAMONS...
Johanna didn't favor her that much at all, this much Nellie discovered on sight with a prick of guilty relief. How very easily she could have been hers. How very lucky she wasn't. Rippling locks of honey-suckle gold cascaded across her shoulders; that impressionable, unyielding gold of perfection...it made Nellie sick to her stomach. Pale with a demure pink in the cheeks, Ugh...essence of Lucy.
But, that aside, she was all Benjamin's. Low, sturdy cheekbones, sculpted defiantly by an unknown force darker than what they possessed. She was beautiful, dirty and reeked of Fogg's madness...but beautiful and taunting.
"Can it be ?!"
"Please...please can you help me?"
"Johanna..." The fearful cry peeled from Nellie's lips and down to Johanna, where she cringed.
"How do you know me!"
"I—I don't, I don't. It's jus' a lucky guess dear, I don't know! I don't know!" She panted feverently.
Johanna recoiled and scraped her arm on scattered glass on the pavement.
The night air was searing cold. Nellie's soul of crinkled paper softened. "Come inside dear," she breathed with the sterile trepidation of one faced with the incarnation of their sin.
She slipped into the shadows of her parlor.
Still frightened, Johanna obeyed, Half slithering, half running; reluctantly morphing into another pretty snake of Fogg's Private Asylum for Lunatics.
"You—you...you need food, yes. Food and water...and, and a new shawl, yes, you're falling to pieces, you need a new shawl."
"I...I'm afraid I cannot take such luxuries, kind as they are ma'm."
Nellie bustled around in a frenzy trying to ignore the pure musical quality of her voice. Not Lucy, Not Lucy, Not Lucy, Not Lucy, she's not Lucy! My God, Benjamin...
"Please! They'll think I've stolen something!"
Nellie's bowl crashed onto the counter.
"Wot...wot do you want...dear?"
Johanna shook wistfully and she collapsed in on herself. "I-I-I don't know!" she sobbed, "I don't know anything—"
Nellie could not think. She was at her side and the child clawed her way into Nellie's warm embrace.