A/N: Sorry in advance for any shocking grammar you might encounter. I should wear my glasses, like Helena he he. Sweeney and Mrs Lovett finally meet face to face.
~Regret~
There were many things reasonable men liked to do in their spare time. Go window-shopping with their wives. Gamble in the men's room. Drink themselves into healthy stupors at family gatherings. Things like that.
Sweeney Todd had once been a reasonable man.
He had done some of those past times, and frequently. He and Lucy would go to dances every second Friday. Visit her mother on Tuesdays. Frequent the market on Wednesdays. When Mondays or Thursdays could be got free, Sweeney (or rather Benjamin) would take Lucy to different little boutiques, or perhaps just gaze and wander among the flowers at the local florist when money was scarce.
It had been a fine life.
And so it would be still, if he could only get his revenge.
"Your decision, Mrs Lovett?" The Judge demanded from the depths of the room.
Sweeney listened in.
Now that the Judge was inside, the barber could creep from behind the curtain and nestle outside the door.
The singing abruptly stopped. So did the giggling.
The Judge had intruded on her solitude. The silence was splitting.
"Wot the bleedin' 'ell is wrong wif you?"
At least Mrs Lovett still had her voice. Some of her, at least, had been salvaged from the flames.
"You forget, Madam, whose roof you reside under. I advise you adjust your tone when addressing me."
"Why?" she spat. The raucous quality to her voice was missing, but the edge was unmistakably Mrs Lovett. "You want me more amenable-like so you can 'ave your way wif me?"
Sweeney peered in between the hinges of the door. He could see the Judge standing over her bedside – but as yet nothing untoward had occurred.
"Believe me my dear your current state is hardly enticing me toward that course of action."
"Get Out."
"I beg your pardon Madam –"
"GET THE BLEEDIN' HELL OUT!"
"How dare you speak –"
Sweeney had barely noticed the candle at her bedside – until she had flung it.
The wasted woman looked more suited to the morgue, but the barber gave her credit where it was due.
The candle hit the Judge square in the chest.
Unfortunately, it did not set him alight. The flame was snuffed quite quickly.
The Judge strode for the door, tripped over the rug, and landed heavily on his stomach.
His head smacked the side of the door-frame, and he was quite still.
Not dead enough for Sweeney's liking, but still enough.
The barber took a fresh candle from the corridor, stepped over the body of the Judge, and went into the middle of the room.
* * *
"You have one eye, Eleanor."
When they would meet again, if they met again, when they met – Nellie Lovett had envisaged many scenes that were all a variations on the same bloodcurdling scene.
She had expected thunderstorms. Door-slams. China hurled. Violence. Shouting. Accusations. Old secrets dug afresh. Confessions.
Anything but quiet.
She had not been expecting that. "One eye?"
Mrs Lovett wondered if he knew how humiliating it felt to have weeks of waking, sleeping, dreaming and half-dead oblivion reduced to one brief dismissive sentence.
But that was Sweeney Todd.
"You never call me Eleanor."
"Under the circumstances…Mrs Lovett sounds odd."
"You got that right dearie." Nellie coughed.
In the moments that passed between them there ran a gauntlet of thoughts neither dared voice or thread into the plain mode of conversation.
Sweeney could not tell her that he had seen her hair burning like a bush in the desert every hour before he drifted into sleep, or that he still heard the sound of her voice shrieking like a new-born as it fought its way from its mother's womb. He could not slip casually into a sentence how the very lively hue of the baker's eyes had faded before him. Or that in the moments he'd watched her burn, it had seemed as if he were drinking from the elixir of hell.
He had wanted more, even as her face had pleaded with him.
It was the face of Lucy, being taken under the cloak of the Judge. It was the face of Joanna, being peered and pried at through the keyholes in the poky corners of her prison. It was the face of the fallen.
And still, he had wanted to trample it down.
How was it possible for Mrs Lovett to say, for instance, that she had seen the eyes of the devil in Sweeney's face – properly, for the first time. She knew now what all those dead men had seen. She knew how it felt to die.
"Wot you want, Sweeney? Just decide you wos in the neighbourhood, an' drop by outta friendly neighbour'odd concern?"
"You're alive."
"Disappointed you, didn't I?"
Sweeney didn't say anything. He put the candle by the bedside, and headed for the door.
"Before you go, love."
Sweeney met her gaze steadily. He was now his usual, unreadable self. "Yes?"
Nellie propped herself up on the bed with an elbow, and raised what was starting to become an eyebrow again. "Why didn't you kill 'im then? That's wot you came for, wasn't it?"
She didn't think to ask him why he hadn't tried to kill her as well.
Her good eye regarded him with nothing more than cynicism, and that hard, undefinable quality of Mrs Lovett's – almost a guardedness, that had not been erased by the hand of the Judge. And why should it, Sweeney considered? She had been a widow for many years now. She knew death formidably, almost as well as he knew it.
She had dealt with it every day.
"He's unconscious," Sweeney explained, glancing back at Turpin on the floor. "I could not savour his death, unless…."
"He wos awake." Nellie finished.
He fell to silence.
The baker sitting on the bed was an all too vivid reminder of his unquenchable thirst to have the world bleed and burst.
Nellie knew her old partner too well to mince words. And she had not expected less. Still, there was something so unutterably cold in his manner of speaking, as if he might substitute any name in the human race with the Judge's for his object of revenge – Nellie did not know how she had not seen it him before. Oh, she had known him to be testy, grumpy, grouchy. And yes, a little dangerous. The odd time a little loopy.
But she had trusted him complicity. She knew his moods, his little quirks, his uncomplicated tastes. Nellie Lovett had counted on her womanly intuition to steer the poor lost barber in the direction she'd desired. She had always been able to control him – more or less.
Until this.
"I'll come back to bleed him, make no mistake," Sweeney promised.
"Do wot you like," the baker said, shifting her face to the wall.
"I wish…"
Nellie knew what he would say. Some feeble excuse about wishing for Lucy back and the Judge gone and all his worries to slip away. Sweeney's wishes were like thin glinting grains of flint in the dirt. Always beyond his reach.
"I don't care for ya wishes no more."
"You shouldn't be here."
"I should be dead, if that's wot you mean."
Sweeney found himself suggesting it before he knew what he was saying. And why was he asking her permission? Why didn't he just lift her up and carry her out the door?
"I have a hideout in the city –"
"I'll burn in hell before I set foot anywhere wif you."
And Nellie meant it. Not that she could even walk yet.
What could Sweeney possibly say to that? He could hardly convince the woman he'd tried to murder that she was better off living with him.
"Goodbye, Benjamin Barker," said Eleanor Lovett, before snuffing out the light.
Mr Todd was no longer a shadow. Just a ghost going out the room and down the stairs to clink chains and shake his shackles at a world that no longer listened or cared.
Even if she had it in her to forgive him, she could not do it.
Sweeney Todd did not want to be forgiven. He was an unsalvageable vial of bitter medicine shaken and stirred and left to sit bottled up indefinitely on a grim shelf in a dark, dark cabinent somewhere.
As for Benjamin Barker – heaven knows where he was.
The only thing Nellie Lovett regretted was not having kissed him all those months he and Lucy had lived above her pie shop.
He had seemed so ordinary then. Such a light-hearted man. Nellie could not fathom that all the while he had greeted her good morning and handed her the week's rent there'd lurked this Sweeney man somewhere deep in the unexplored caverns of Benjamin's mind.
Or perhaps not so very deep after all. For here he was, after all the carnage he'd caused – still dreaming of sticking his silver friends either side of Turpin's sallow neck.
If she had learned one thing at all from her good friend Sweeney – it was never forget.
Never forgive.
And really – to put it plain as a feather on a hen's arse – where had havin' regrets gotten her this far?
Wasting her years as a widow pining for the man who was never likely to return. Having the man of her dreams return, only to ignore her. Having the man of her dreams treat her with such regard, he thought nothing of watch her sizzle in the flames of her own oven.
And now.
Defaced. Disfigured. Pursued by the most notorious skirt-chaser in the whole of London.
Where would she end up next?
Sitting in alleyway somewhere, off her rocker like Lucy?
Clutching at the bars of Mr Fogg's Insane Asylum?
Nellie didn't like her chances.
"No more regrets," she promised herself, falling heavily asleep.
* * *
Seems there's quite a lot of Turpett fans out there!
Thanks for the advice Hayley - of course I won't be forcing Nellie either way. It's really her decision.
And let's face it - she's got the choice between a serial killing psychopath or a perverted creep. =O
Speaking of creeps, for some reason the scene where the Beadle flicks out his cane after talking to the Judge cracks me up.
Poor Beadle wishes he was all class =D