A/N: Looking back on this now, years later, I sit here thinking what the hell was I doing actually posting this. This is so embarrassingly OOC that I could die.


12. Engage

It's happened. The thing he'd never wanted. He'd let his relationship with Mrs. Lovett cross the forbidden barrier, and now he has to deal with the consequences.

He'd never thought that giving in to his body's needs could mess everything up so spectacularly. All the times he'd gone to her willingly, drunk on lust and the desperate need to let her take away his thoughts for a short while, and this situation had never sprung to his mind.

The words still spin violently in his head as he goes about his daily slaughters with a renewed vengeance, seeking the blood of men more than ever now. Four days on, and he's sure he's never going to comprehend the sentence.

I'm with child.

Nellie's face when she'd told him had been a mask of nothing, hiding eyes wide with terror. And then she'd burst into tears, sobbing desperately as she'd collapsed against his unresponsive body. She'd been almost inconsolable, and indeed Todd had given up trying, his mind frozen.

How can we bring a child into the world?

A murderer and his willing accomplice, changing a baby in their spare time. If the situation wasn't happening to him, it would be laughable.

Throughout the last four days he's gone through every emotion known to him: fury at himself for being unable to resist her; fury at her for falling pregnant. Terror at the thought of Sweeney Todd becoming a father, confusion at these muddled emotions. They've had blazing rows over the baby's future, in which Nellie has put her foot down: she won't have some dubious doctor try to remove it.

So it's lead to this. Reluctant acceptance. It does not mean that he wants this child by any stretch of the imagination—he's here for one purpose only, and this development can only be an irritating hindrance, and it makes the betrayal of his beautiful Lucy all the more concrete—but it is something he now has to deal with. Nellie has not impregnated herself, nor had she flung herself at him the times when he'd given in to her, though she'd not been opposed to it in the countless attempts before. No, this time, he had been the one who initiated the whole affair; therefore he must accept the consequences. And since Nellie can't end up in Bedlam—who would help him to get rid of his victims then?—it's led to something else too.

She stands by the door, a comical mixture of exaltation and suspicion upon her face as she holds the little box tentatively in the palm of her hand, shifting it to each side so the colours explode prettily whenever the light hits it. Then she grins joyfully, and crosses the room in two strides, grasping his rough hands in hers, pressing kisses to his knuckles, breathing yes over and over again…

A wife for Sweeney Todd.