Title: Angel
Fandom: Sweeney Todd
Author: T. Axile
Characters: Todd, Lucy
Genre: Angst
Rating: G
Summary: The living can never outshine the dead. Todd thinks about Lucy and what she means to him.
Even when she was alive she was an angel. He thinks that he's never met anyone more perfect. In the grayness around and within him she shines all the more brightly, and when he closes his eyes he can see the gleam of her yellow hair in the pale light slanting through the window. He spends his free time in front of that window, gazing blankly down into the street and at the mass of humanity that trawl along unaware and oblivious, and in her light they seem nothing more than insects to be killed with mercy.
He can't remember her face, but he knows that it was beautiful, and that she was kind and sweet and gentle, and her voice must be that like a song that the ear followed with unerring admiration. She torments him with her presence. This was where they lived together, happy and ignorant of the darkness ahead, and she is everywhere, at the mirror, brushing her fall of hair, smiling at his reflection behind hers; reading at the window; rocking the cradle in which their daughter slept; sitting at the bed. But the distance between them is fifteen years and the gray ocean, and there is nothing he can do to bridge the gap.
She's an angel, and he feels no regret as he cuts the throats of the unsuspecting men who come to him, because it's a harsh world they live in that would destroy an angel that way. Everyone died sooner or later, anyway. He lives only for his revenge. After that…in all his dreams, in all his schemes, he has never planned for an 'afterwards'.
She's an angel to his devil, and he's so changed that she would turn her face from him and deny him. He has no illusions about his fate. He'll go to Hell, but then it can't be worse than the Hell he's leaving behind. On that day they'll be finally separated, forever. He still loves her, like a plant leans towards light. But he's not her Benjamin anymore, and he is glad, almost selfishly, that she can't see him like this.
(He only wanted some color in his colorless world, and he chose red as his answer.)
Someone is coming up the stairs; he can hear the wood creaking under the weight. He turns from the window and arranges his face into an expression of affability. It is stuffy in the room, and the sunlight pouring through the window makes it worse, but there's blood on his shirt and he has to look neat for his customer.
He flicks open his razor. It catches the pale sunlight and, for a brief moment, turns it bright silver, hard and stabbing, and for that moment the light lasts, and it's enough for him.