So, I continued this. Yay! This is essentially just Sweeney's pov on chapter one, with a bit more added on. It's very dark and creepy, and not much happens, but I can promise that there will (maybe) be actual action in the next chapter. Shocking, isn't it? Anyway, thanks very much to my new beta, Obscure Bird, for helping me with this chapter. (Insert smug grin here.)
Benjamin Barker used to be afraid of the dark. It was embarrassing for a grown man to leap immediately into bed the instant the lamps were doused, but his wife didn't mind. Lucy was his other incentive for sliding so quickly under the covers. Her adoration chased away the darkness, glowing like pale gold, and he wasn't afraid when she was near. In Australia, though, the perception of dark had changed for Mr Barker. The sun was blinding, and hellishly hot, but his cell, although tiny and stinking of human filth, had at least been shadowy and cool. He soon learned that even this was preferable to the blazing desert outside, and so the dark had become his friend. Fifteen years later, it still was.
Sweeney Todd felt perfectly comfortable as he walked almost leisurely through the shadow-infested park, a place no respectable Londoner would dare tread through at night, not with the people who came out after dark. The demon barber, however, was himself one of those undesirable nightwalkers that all the normal citizens avoided, and he knew he had nothing to fear from his fellow criminals.
The dark was preferable to him now. It softened the edges of things, hid those less than pleasant facets of London that the pale grey daylight illuminated with such horrifying detail. Not only that, he thought, but it graced the things it did leave exposed with a kind of macabre beauty.
The bare branches of a spreading oak tree were stark and crooked against the moon, like broken fingers reaching up in supplication, and the few stars that burned faintly through the city's smog were as beautiful and chilly as ice, as silver, even. Mr Todd reached down and drew one of his ever-present friends from the holster at his hip and unfolded it, letting it smile in the weak starlight. Night made everything beautiful, he mused, noting how it gilded even the ice-dusted steps to his shop with shimmering silver. As he preferred dark to light, Sweeney Todd now found cold silver more beautiful than glowing gold. Yet another difference between him and Benjamin Barker.
Grimacing slightly at the memory of that man—so innocent, so mild-mannered, so foolish—Todd moved slowly and deliberately up the rickety staircase, his practiced footsteps hardly making a sound on the old wood. At the second to top step, though, he stiffened, black eyes catching on a sudden flutter of movement outside his shop door. What new horror was this? A thief, trying to break into his shop? It had to be; no one out at this hour could have anything less than sinister intentions. Mr Todd bristled. There wasn't a thing in that entire building he would care about losing, except—his hand flew to his belt. One of them was here, yes, but the others… The thought of some common criminal defiling the precious silver with his filthy hands nearly turned the barber's stomach.
Heartbeat pounding mercilessly in his temples, he took another step up the staircase. He knew so well the position of the razor at his hip that he didn't have to even glance down as he reached for it, and unconscious hiss of breath escaping through his teeth.
The thief turned, her bone-white skin the only pale thing in all that lovely darkness.
'Mr Todd!'
Her! He had to admit he was surprised to find it was Mrs Lovett, of all people, who was trying to break into his shop and steal his friends in the dead of night. He faltered for a moment, wanting to find some confirmation of her bad intent before her condemned her completely. 'What are you doing here?'
If he had doubted his landlady's guilt, however, that uncertainty was erased when he saw the look in her eyes: mingled panic, surprise, and apprehension. Of course she had wanted his razors. Thinking back, he remembered her covetous glances when she'd first given them back to him, her insistence on following him wherever he went with them. Who wouldn't want something so beautiful? Sweeney Todd realized that he was in the possession of a great treasure. He must guard it with even more fervor than before.
He ignored Lovett's stammered excuses as he advanced on her, sliding a cold hand over her pretty porcelain neck. Her skin was so pale it almost glowed in the moonlight. His mouth twitched in what might have been a smile. The dark really did make everything more beautiful…
Mr Todd killed this thought so quickly it was almost as though it had never entered his mind—a tiny sip of spat-out sin that left nothing behind but the faint taste of revulsion at his momentary betrayal of Lucy's memory.
…But still, he let the baker go. He regretted the decision immediately afterwards, though he knew it would be irrational and even downright foolish to kill Mrs Lovett, not when he needed her for so much. Still, Todd thought, he would have liked to watch the cascade of rubies, startled up from her throat, stain that white skin scarlet. He placed his formerly holstered razor back into the smooth wooden box with its fellows. Thank heavens he had arrived in time—she hadn't touched his silver treasures.
She'd wanted to, though; Sweeney had seen it in her dark eyes, the way they'd darted one more desperate time to the door before she'd answered him. She never was a good liar. Turning back to his patient friends—(they were used to his errant mind by now, and had learned to wait while his eyes glazed over, staring out into space as he was gripped by some memory)—the barber snapped the box shut. His fingers lingered on the lid, though, jealously caressing the polished wood. There were too many greedy people in the world that would pay dearly for a taste of the beauty he guarded.
Unable to be away from the cold, smooth silver for too long, Mr Todd opened the box again and removed one of his deadly friends from its cradle, flicking it open gently. He lost himself in the mirror-like surface, whispering comfort to the metal. 'Don't worry, my friend, she won't have you. There now, nothing's going to harm you… not while I'm around.'
