This is perhaps the darkest story I've ever written.  It's based on Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, which is my third favorite musical of all time.

I do not own any Kim Possible characters, nor do I own Sweeney Todd.  That play is owned by Stephen Sondheim, and while we have the same first name, I am not Stephen Sondheim.

Chapter 1

            The trans-county bus rolled through central Colorado towards its last stop: Middleton.  The driver was looking forward to finishing, so he could go home and enjoy the weekend with his wife and children.  He wasn't sure why Middleton was even still on his route.  There was nothing to see there.  There hadn't been for the last fifteen years.

            He looked in his mirror at the two remaining passengers on the bus.  One was a young man, about seventeen, who had a confident air about him.  He had dark brown hair, so dark that one would be excused for thinking it was black.  He was the kind of guy who one might expect to say; "Hello, world.  Show me what you've got."

            The man sitting across the aisle from him couldn't have been more different.  He was a middle-aged man, with blonde hair streaked with grey.  He was the kind of guy who one might expect to say; "I will rip out your intestines and force you to eat them if you piss me off."  The lines on his face, along with his sunken eyes, made him seem much older than he really was.  He had the air of a person who had once been carefree and happy, but had not seen a reason to smile in a good many years.  Perhaps the strangest thing about him was the chain he wore about his neck.  It had the skull of some sort of rodent with huge teeth attached to it.

            The bus finally screeched to a halt at the run-down Middleton depot.  "Last stop: Middleton!" the driver called.

            The young man stood up and grabbed a suitcase.  "This is my stop."

            The older man gave him an eerie sideways glance.  "Seeing as it's the last stop on the route, I kinda expected that."

            The two stepped off the bus.  The young man inhaled deeply, and let it out, a look of happiness on his face.  "It's good to be home again.  I have seen the world, but there's no place like Middleton!"

            "I'll say," the old man replied, darkly.

            The young man turned around.  "Is there something wrong, Mr. Kropp?"

            The old man looked his younger acquaintance straight in the eye.  "You are young.  Life has been kind to you.  You will learn."

            Kropp slowly stepped back, as the younger man raised his eyebrow in confusion.  What sort of torment has he known he thought, as he looked Kropp over, his eyes resting briefly on the rodent skull he wore about his neck.

            "So, Paul," Kropp said, "this is where we go our separate ways.  I shall not soon forget the young man who saved my life."

            "What sort of person would I be if I had left a decrepit, starving man on the side of the road like that?  It was no big."

            The last two words echoed in Kropp's head.  He quickly shook them out.  "I can think of a few men who would've not only left me, but made sure I wouldn't get picked up."

            His rant was cut short by the arrival of an elderly beggar woman.  She sobbed and clutched at their shirts, begging for any amount of money they had.  When Kropp refused, she cocked her head and said "Hey, don't I know you…?"

            Kropp violently drove her off.  As she ran away in panic, he couldn't help thinking that there was something familiar about her…something about her grey hair, tinged with red…

            No, he told himself.  It's just shadows of your past, come back to haunt you.

            "Don't mind her," Paul said, reassuringly.  "She's just a half-crazed beggar.  Middleton's full of them."

            "Middleton's full of something, all right."  Kropp kneeled down and began to draw in the freshly fallen snow with his finger.  He drew a picture of a stick figure man and a stick figure woman, with a little heart between them.  "There was a tailor and his wife.  And she was beautiful.  A foolish tailor and his wife.  She was his reason and his life.  And she was beautiful.  And she was virtuous." He drew a halo over the stick woman's head.  "And he was…naïve."

            Kropp looked at the snow, before drawing another stick man.  He explained that another man, one who was in a position of power, and one who, based on the way he drew him, had horns, bat wings, a pointed tail, and a pitchfork, had seen that the tailor's wife was beautiful.  In his lust, he had the tailor exiled somehow, which left his wife open and vulnerable.

            "Did she succumb?" Paul asked

            Kropp slowly looked at Paul, before getting to his feet and brushing the snow from his pants.  "Oh, that was many years ago.  I doubt that anyone would know."

            With a final word of farewell, Kropp and Paul went their separate ways.  Kropp began thinking to himself.  He thought back to the good old days, when he could be happy, before he had to change his name to James Kropp.  He needed many things.  He needed somewhere to stay.  He needed to find a way to make things normal again.  But above all, he needed answers.  He needed to find someone who could tell him what he needed to know: What really happened all those years ago?  What happened since then?  Where were the people responsible for what had happened?  And, one that he doubted anyone would know the answer to…of all the professions in the world, why the hell had he chosen a tailor?

            "Somewhere," he said to himself, "in this god-forsaken city, there has to be someone who remembers."

            Yes, a lot of the lines were taken directly from Sweeney Todd.  That's why it says "parody" under the genre heading.  I would enjoy reviews.