On the discovery of a mutual ends, they conjoined rigorously to seek by which means they might finally grasp their desires. They spoke in dire voices that excited and enticed. They planned their actions step by step, calculating each foot that landed in front of the other. They assured themselves that two minds were better than one.
Until finally, all their actions become habit.
Should Anthony find himself anywhere other than his customary seat in the Tonsorial Parlour, as he brings in the night as its shepherd, he feels utterly disarmed.
He'd be restless and shamble aimlessly through the streets of the city, jittering through the parks; his face would be dim with anguish as he gazed upon the couple who found bareness in each-other; their noses mere inches apart, their souls even closer.
Without the large, humbling window pressing against his cheek, freezing him in a mirror realm, where everything was yellow, Anthony failed to bare the weight of his grey reality.
The two men shared their evenings for nearly two months. Hardly any sort of opportunistic advantage befell their underground effort. On the top floor of the pie shop they manage to brew a poignant air of bitterness and befuddlement.
The gas lights high on the wall hissed, spitting out its meager flame. The room stood still. The wood creaked with rodent activity, as per usual to the poorer establishments.
The customary quiet blanketed the spinning worlds inside Anthony and Mr. Todd's head. Their customary hour together seeped, till the moment the first clutch of stars break through space.
The hairs rose on the back of his neck. They tell his body it's time to leave.
He stood, his lips parting immediately to chance a verbal interaction with the barber.
"Shall I tell you a story, lad?"
His voice surprised him; he wouldn't lie, it severely surprised him. Anthony paused attentively, fixing his eyes on Sweeney's, as the older man was suddenly looking at him.
"Shall I tell you a story, lad?" He asked, his words stripped raw of moisture.
A little terrified, Anthony relaxed his footing to one more conducive to active listening, and said, "What story is it, Mr. T?"
Sweeney evenly stepped around his chair and sat on the red cushions. The vanity mirror appeared to have shrunk without a body filling it.
"It's" his lungs clenched, halting its mandatory process. He forced himself to continue, "it's about a lonely widow. Who lived by herself."
Well, that was a powerful beginning... Anthony nodded his head in flowering interest and obediently sat in his seat. Yes, he did indeed want to hear Sweeney's dystopian tale.
The old barber was silent. He was seeped inside his memory, trapped within his own talons. Anthony averted his blue eyes to the dust-swept floorboards.
Beneath them Mrs. Lovett began to hum, her voice filtering through the cracks in the wood in a distant whisper. Her boots thumped a steady pentameter, and Anthony guessed after a hefty clang, that she was putting her evening pies into the oven.
Her deep melodies accentuated Mr. Todd's story chillingly.
"The widow's husband was poor."
Anthony gently closed his fists. He knew a thing or two about poverty.
And so Mr. Todd wove his story into Anthony's mind, smoothening the edges with brief, choked recounts of the smiles that never left the wife and her husband's face even when they slept. He gasped the death of her husband. He swore that he died, too soon, in the worst way imaginable.
Anthony gazed upon the slim stretch of Sweeney's face that his position allowed. The barber appeared to the impressionable sailor almost as if beneath his skin was a labyrinth of clockwork. His muscles were distinctive, tense, his jaw sporadically grinding in agitation.
"The widow is crushed like a flower, withering in the cold absence of her husband, his body no longer sleeping next to hers, his arms no longer around her, his eyes... Brown, they would never smile at her again. Can you see her face?"
Anthony nodded his head. He could. He could. He knew her face, but the sand was slipping through his fingers.
Still, Mrs. Lovett hummed.
"She was sick, deranged and blinded by these irreconcilable tears. She's helpless, a woman with no income, no one to bare her sadness with."
A man whose lusted after her for years suddenly swings down upon her, like a bird of prey. They say he lied to her. Got her to follow him into the dark. He wasted her."
He raped her."
The hairs on the back of his neck were disturbed in a shiver. The words hit him devastatingly, shredding him to pieces. It was the ugliest sentence he had ever heard.
The shop below was gravely silent.
Mr. Todd breathes in, "she shatters."
Anthony felt the world freeze as he sat, bravely processing the tale. He stared, extremely pitiful, at the barber's rigged profile.
"Sir, you're a profound story teller." He spoke solemnly. He was careful to soothe rather than aggravate his elder.
Sweeney swallowed. He flew, disoriented, through a cloud of euphoria, the weight of his story lifted off his shoulders, his pain weakened.
"An old wives tale my mother told me when I was a child." He grumbled, blinking.
Anthony exhaled a stressed laugh.
"She wasn't a very kind lady, to tell a child that fable."
The two shared a dark, light chortle.