A/N: Thanks for being patient ~ I've been busy lately so forgive the late update. And yes, the kettle scores a mention =)
lindzxhatter: I like your theory on the kettle. But there's no stove to boil anything?? Maybe the kettle whistling was in his head =DD
Weasly the emo kid: WOAH Please don't destroy me!! *Surrenders update timidly* Lol, I have put you through torture. Hopefully this will satisfy you. =)
AngelofDarkness1605: Well as for the word count I don't think it will, seeing as the story is going to end soon! He he I still can't get over the clown kettle/Sweeney comment.
iheartmoony7: Thanks for the kind review, yeah, death/mourning seems to be Sweeney's only driving force. Until now =D
LavenderShadow: Lol I love your review! 30 Chaps indeed. I thought you were aussie for a moment because you said "bloke" but then I checked and saw you're Canadian =D
F8WUZL8: LMAO at the Bunsen burner/Mad-scientist comment. There must be one, coz I don't see a stove. I tried to answer your request as best as possible with this chap =D
linalove: He he don't you just love cliffies??
Evanescent Wishes: 28 chapters lol it is appalling but when you think about it that's nearly a year - I imagine that's a short time in Sweeney years to adjust to new love.
Crystal-Fey: Lol you are welcome to pic favourites (Taming is my favourite too =D) You wrote it down? *Wow is immensely flattered* Thanks for your patience!
IheartJohnnyD: I almost thought she died too =D But there's no way I could write this many chaps and kill her off. Enjoy!
~Ascension~
That night was the night she spoke fewer words in all the time he had known her.
He found himself speaking for them. "Are you hurt?"
The silver moon beamed atop her matted hair. She shook her head. When he held the door open, she moved quietly past him.
Her presence was enough to stir the air and brush strange smells and senses against his vest. She had brought the very wonders of the night inside, Sweeney mused, inhaling the unsual scent. A heady mix of flowers, perhaps, and the briny wind. Cinnamon from a bakehouse somewhere? (Although he knew no bake-houses open at such a late hour).
He shut the door, and the jarring sound brought his eyes winding round to her again – the weathered eyes and torn dress.
"How did it –" His gaze lingered briefly on the line of her leg gleaming through the fabric threads. "Did someone –"
She shook her head again. "Tore it trippin' down a lane," she said sheepishly, and even to Sweeney it did not sound convincing.
He sat her down by the kitchen table. He found himself offering her his spare jacket, setting a warm cup of tea on the table. It was so unlike him, the barber wondered if perhaps he was possessed by some good spirit. It was against his very philosophy – to care for things. To mend them. It was not his way. And yet his hands moved of their own accord; stirring the tea, adding a few drops of gin to restore her health. All the while, she did not question him. Her eyes remained fixed on his darting hands, as if she were unable to believe they belonged to Sweeney Todd.
"Slow down love," she heard herself say at one point. "I won't drop dead." She laughed throatily. "Not yet."
He looked up at her. Smiled wanly. But he did not slow. There was a delicious irony in her words – after all, there were so many times when the baker had been close to death. She simply had not known it.
"Make yerself one," she suggested, fidgeting beneath his jacket. "Lord knows you need it Mr T. You is shakin' like a leaf."
He got up heavily from the table. Scraped the chair. He had salvaged the black kettle from London, and poured his own tea. "The whole village thought you were dead." He slammed the kettle down, and his eyes glittered despite the composure with which he gripped the kettle.
"Was it done in jest, Mrs – " he stopped himself short. Eleanor.
It was on the tip of her tongue.
Everything wanted to spill out of her. Lucy being the beggar woman. Telling Lucy to poison herself, and being disappointed that the poison hadn't kill her, just addled her brain And now, running off into the night. Nellie had almost left for good. She'd almost tempted fate and gone to the artist's house. Dreamt of asking him to comfort her. And he would have obliged her, too. It would have been very easy – much easier than coming home to the cold and dark rooms, and Mr T's every stormy face. Just before the path to the artist's house, she had turned and walked back up the cemetery path back instead. She'd stood by the sea cliff and listened to the roar of the ocean, remembering the picnic in the sun when she'd persuaded the barber to place his lips upon her own.
That day was now a faded dream to her. The only real truth was Mr Todd before her now in the kitchen, looking all menacin' again, as if he knew very well that she hadn't ripped her skirt trippin' down a lane, but had torn it deliberately coming up the garden path, just so she might look more dramatic. But she knew nothing about being dead and the entire village searching for her. She decided to use the knowledge to her advantage.
"Wot do you care, Mr T? I'm just the baker." She got up without touching the tea, though every fibre in her body yearned for a rush of gin down her veins. The thought of Mr T starin' her down just then made her tired of him; tired of the thought of another five years of this, the thought of it all never ending like the same bad flamin' nightmare, when all she wanted was to dissolve that horrendous darkness that dimmed the beauty she knew lay within him, and paint some fire and light across the shadowed gloom of that harrowed face.
"Sweeney my love," she murmured. Her cheeks grew hot. She had said the words out loud. To his back, true, but she knew from the way his fingers gripped the chair that he had heard her.
"I thought Lucy was a Saint."
She froze now; possessed no more thoughts of going to her bed and drinking herself into oblivion with the spare bottle of gin under the bed. She was listening intensely to him, taking a few steps back. "Wot've you done with Sweeney?" she said suddenly, marvelling at the almost Ben-like tone in his voice.
"Let me talk, Eleanor" he snapped. "Or must I tape your mouth shut?"
That might have been necessary, Nellie realised, because it was the first time she had heard him use her name. He mouth hung open as if she were Mrs Mooney with a double chin – such was her surprise. Mrs Lovett came forward then, edging round the table. She wanted to ask him why he had called her Eleanor, why he had fixed the tea, why he hadn't let her fall down and die instead of bundling her in from the cold.
"I won't forgive her one thing, pet."
"Wot?" She dared herself to draw closer to him, but for once found that her will failed her.
A chair separated them. The thought of reaching out for those arms and have him throw her off in disgust was enough to make her keep her distance.
"I will always love Lucy," he went on. "She was my first love. But how can I forgive her for abandoning Johanna?"
Nellie didn't soothe him the way she would have liked. Instead she chose words. "Go easy, love. She was a child. You wos a child. How could any o' you be prepared ter come up against the wiles o' that snarky old Judge?"
He looked up suddenly, taking in her lucid eyes, the brow, the natural worry lines. He sensed no pretension there.
"You were never a child." Sweeney's memory did not fool him. From that early memory he had of her playing cards in the bakehouse: a free-spirited, loud-mouthed woman barely a few years into her marriage – he knew intuitively. She was a thousand year old witch. And the spell was now cast too deep over and inside him to ever throw off the shackles that bound he and this unorthodox baker together.
"Yes, well, I wos never quite like your Lucy, wos I?" she said mournfully. Her eyes widened with the realisation of what she had said, waiting for the characteristic frown to cloud his face, and the maddened fire to come into his eyes and the hands reach for his razors and her throat. It did not happen. Nellie had built her life around predicting Mr Todd's behaviour, and now he completely threw her off guard.
"You are an odd woman," he said, looking down at her to find no swirling anger or regret or bewilderment bothering his vision of her.
"Do you like me for it?" she whispered, wanting him to voice the words she knew he would never say.
Predictably, he did not answer. He held only the thought of how barren his life had very nearly been without her.
She was hugging the ends of the chair now. The words were too much. His eyes loomed before her, the dark opals like twin planets absorbing her as if they encircled the dawning of a new sun.
"Don't be frightened, Eleanor."
"Wot makes you think that?"
"Because my dear, for once you are silent."
He was right. She had a hundred things she wished to say, but her mind had submitted entirely to the weight of his presence just across the chair, and she could not speak.
Her body trembled.
Sweeney did not smile. He stepped around the chair and slipped his hands over hers, interlacing their fingers.
She sensed another fire kindling inside the barber. One that had nothing to do with sadness or revenge. He was not smiling at her. His hands remained locked around her fingers, tracing their texture and lines and blemishes, as if it was no longer her skin that he held and moved around so softly – but his own.
"Tell me, Mr T."
At last she found her courage. Now that she was completely captured by him – her hands at least – Nellie could not let the moment slip by. Who knew when it would come again? Thoughts began to stir and flurry. What if this was another game? Her hands might be Lucy's hands to him, for all she knew. She untangled her fingers from his, and met his eyes guardedly.
He knew that look.
It was Eleanor's brain ticking over intently, picking over all the intricacies of who and what and where and why. "Don't," he warned her, and before she could think of turning from him and leaving again, he took her shoulders, and drew her face against his. He felt her cheek next to his, and her flesh moulded so gently on his, he began to wonder why he had spent all his energy finding ways and means to repel her. She let him rest his cheek, but that was all. He could sense her holding back. Her body was stiff and tense – he understood her fear implicitly.
"My love," he spoke into her ear, and felt his hands betray him. They shook, as he drew her into his battered form. With all the courage he could muster, he banished the sight of yellow hair and old laughter from his head. She would always be there, of course, but he did not want her now. Not in this hour. He brushed his lips against the baker's cheek, and drew back to contemplate her face. "Or Nellie, if you prefer," he said, knowing she was fond of the nickname. He waited for her reply.
"Wotever you like, Mr T," she said eventually. She had been waiting him out, waiting to see if that expression would change. All his walls were down, and it did not appear to be Lucy related this time. After all the years of longing and dreaming, it was now possible. And it made her sick with misery and mirth and a dozen other emotions drawn up from long, long ago. It was almost too much. Now that he was staring at her with those liquid eyes, she did not think to question where this sudden tempest had blown from. She didn't care. Coming to the seaside with Mr T's empty heart had almost deadened her – all that too much feeling inside her.
"Are you certain?" He lifted her chin, and Nellie was tempted to laugh; the sudden well of joy bubbled up within her, and she was nodding now, draping her head against him as if they had never been anything else but one person holding each other at some ridiculous hour, all bird-nest haired and bedraggled.
"Yes," she said, knowing that Mr T didn't give a toss about names.
She leaned forward.
The first test.
The barber did not flinch, or remain staring at in mute incomprehension. His eyes flickered closed, inviting Nellie to smooth his eyelids and the buds of his thin lips with the tips of her fingers. He did not resist. When she brought herself against the still mouth, she felt her own eyes fluttering shut against her will. He returned her kiss, so faintly that at first it was not even a kiss. But she pretended to pull away, as if the experience had overcome her.
It was all Sweeney needed. He pulled her hands toward his chest tightly, and she sensed the first stirrings of passion within him.
"Are you certain?" he repeated, his voice closer to her mouth than before. He could see so closely into her eyes now that they stood a fraction apart, now that every movement and motion mirrored his own.
"Can't you tell, you bleedin' fool?" she challenged.
"I am slow pupil, pet," he murmured.
"That you are love," she said with a cheeky laugh.
There was no fear, because he had erased fear from himself.
She drew herself away from him, covering her mouth with a shaking hand to hide her grin.
The chair was pushed in against the table, the baker's hair and skirts smoothed down.
He watched her head down the corridors and for the stairs. It was such an ordinary action.
He did not call after her, because she was waiting for him at the bottom of the stairs.
She smiled quietly at him, and Sweeney realised then that when it came to the baker, a smile could indeed be quiet.
He waited for her to turn her back to him. He placed his hand gently against the small of her back.
They climbed the stairs together, for once not needing to speak each other's name: to call or shout or rail at his cruelty, his insensitivities, her nagging, her boisterousness.
They were not Mr or Mrs Stowe. Barker. Benjamin. Sweeney. Mr Todd. Mr T. Eleanor. Mrs Lovett. Nellie.
There was no need for names or pretensions that night.
* * *
One more chapter until the end, my friends!
