A/N This just jumped into my head, and I had to write it. Sort of a onsided Sweenett angsty-ish piece, which is a lot different from what I normally write in this fandom... so, criticism appreciated.


Dancing, untamable and always moving. Sometimes it cold be contained, but more often than not it broke loose and consumed all before it. The thoughts meant for the flames in her hearth oddly sounded like the same thoughts she had on a certain man. The barber, pacing above her head, truly did remind her of the orange flames.

Embers in the fire pulsed in and out of life, occasionally cracking and flying to the air, almost it seemed, to the same time as the pacing feet above.

Something about the soft orange and yellow glow, with its odd blue hints was inviting. How many men felt at ease when Sweeney simple nudged their shoulder towards his chair? But when one got too close to flames the homely glow turned to scorching licks on your fingers, burns on your hands if you didn't pull away fast enough. No one escaped the fire of Sweeney's razors when he decided to kill.

And yet the flames flickered merrily in their grate, held, if not truly restrained, by its brick surroundings. Though the barber hardly left his shop, it was his mind that trapped him, and not the cold peeling walls.

Mrs. Lovett supposed that was the one difference between Sweeney and the fire. Brick, material, held back the fire's aching, consuming soul. Yet terrible memories and self-pity restrained the barber's razors.

Watching the flames grow much to low, Mrs. Lovett stood to place one last log in the hearth before she moved onto bed.

As she pushed the dried branch into the consuming flames, she couldn't help but compare herself.

The log had no say on whether or not it was placed within the flames. Was it not the same with her, and the strange love that consumer her, making her love the barber? As the flames licked away the shell-like bark, she noticed how beautiful it was when the two components first came together. The flame would grow higher, and the log would glow brightly with embers. Before it weakened to gray ash, and crumbled.

When darkness finally fell into the room, she shivered; though it wasn't from cold.

It had been beautiful, her beginning with Sweeney. But she was being consumed by his desires and needs, and though she dreamed, Mrs. Lovett knew, just like the branch in the fire, nothing good was to come for her.

Mrs. Lovett knew Sweeney's own desires for revenge would hollow her out as she helped him, forced to watch him commit atrocities for a long-since dead woman.

She could only pray that when the barber's fires died away, there would be more left to her than ash.