A/N: No excuses for my absence here! Thank you for being so patient. I've missed you all and the fandom, and I can't wait to read everyone's wonderful projects! Scgirl-317 mentioned one of my stories, and possibly her own, have been stolen and posted on other websites, so I'd just like other people to be aware the same thing could be happening to their work.
Merry (Belated) Christmas to you all! I spent part of mine in hospital (after I cleverly managed to sit on my friend's hair straightener and passed out in the bathtub!)
~Pet Part 1~
"I'm your pet, Mr T, and you can't treat your pets disdainfully. The bible teached us that!"
She was mewling and hanging on his door one moment – the next, she was leaping across the room, arms wrapped around his neck like one of those pathetic cherubs you see suspended from the church thresholds.
Sweeney Todd spat. "I think I used my last copy for toilet paper, my dear. But yes, you are my pet, if you like, in a figure of speech. On one condition."
"What's that?" She said adoringly, blinking up at him with jetty orbs.
"You get off my arm. Fast."
She scrambled to the floor, the darkness thankfully masking her marble flesh.
He didn't want to see that part of her body yet. He wasn't ready, whatever part of the contact he'd signed. He hoped he'd never have to see it. Perhaps she'd fall off the stairs, or fall down them, better yet, and break her neck in a freak accident. But then he'd never get to the judge. He'd never have his revenge. Lucy would lay a faded yellow waste in some unmarked grave somewhere. The unkind angels were looking down on him, shaking their heads. He'd have to move fast, if he wanted to wipe himself and people like Turpin from the earth and leave space for kinder, better people like his darling love. And Johanna. His daughter could only have the life he dreamed if he did this – this one, foul act with Mrs Lovett. It only had to be once, surely? Wasn't that how these things worked?
It had been too long since he'd had to consider these sensitive matters. With the sheets over his legs, he passed his right hand over his left, and wondered that it was even warm. It felt like another man's hand. It didn't seem like his. None of his flesh belonged to him, really. How could he be expected to do anything possibly resembling warmth and transaction of that kind, if he couldn't even feel himself? Perhaps, he considered wisely, that was best for everyone at this point. If he felt nothing, the less he'd be betraying his Lucy. The easier it would be for him to bear. As for the baker – he wasn't even trying to convince himself. He didn't care.
He considered his options. Her lying there so desperately on the floor – it would be relatively simple. He'd observed animals, and prostitutes – which were more or less the same thing, carrying out similar activities outside the streets in alleyways and such filthy places. Why couldn't he just do the same thing - get it over and done with, as they crudely say? But something in him prevented him. It was too beneath him, he decided, ignoring the odd feeling running through the back of his head.
Now that she was on the floor, it was only a matter of picking her up, carrying her out the door, dumping her on the floor, and locking it.
"You owe me, Mr T. Don't you forget, neither!" The banging started, and went for half the night, after which he presumed she'd passed out or retreated for the next round.
Eventually, Sweeney decided it in his best interest to check on his investment. He noticed the blue butterflies fighting on the window sill – or were they moths? Either way, he saw their black spots, feelers and thin hairs, right down to the delicate coils on its lower wings. He stood over her patch-work bed.
"You won't murder me," she whimpered, groping for him blindly in the terror pit of half-wakefulness.
"No," he promised, smoothing her hair down in an odd slip of what he knew to be right, "not yet," he nodded, tucking the sheet in tightly in case she was tempting to roll over and vomit on herself in her sleep.
"My Mr T," he heard her murmur, and something inside him choked.
It all started on a Wednesday, because from now on, the barber knew Wednesdays, just like Judge Turpin, were pure evil.
Every living creature with a mind in or out the gutter knew that Wednesdays were dead days. It rained everyday in London, but particularly so on Wednesdays, and with the chimneys pumping out their lung-clogging crap in unquantifiable amounts, nobody liked to go out and about window shopping – or breathing, to be honest. It was barely worth the effort to drag yourself out of bed, wipe down the counter top, and switch the sign on the shop to "open" - though no one was really all "there" to serve anyone, at any rate.
But since the baker had the very lowest expectations when it came to regarding people – she didn't have to worry about being disappointed, did she? She'd already learnt life's very important lessons on smashed hearts and wot not from one of Fleet Street's finest and best examples of human beings – a man who'd been up fighting his demons in the wee hours of the morning. She'd heard him pacing the floorboards above her room. Sweeney Todd had the talent to turn restlessness into a mathematical equation. To his credit, he had a lot to concern himself with these days. Their little contract, for one.
"Hmm...contract," she found herself mumbling out loud. Her head slunk belligerently into the flour and meat droppings. She hadn't slept at all. She'd demanded a kiss, and a kiss she'd been delivered! "Hardly a kiss worth rememberin'," she grumbled, rubbing her neck where she was sporting a bruise. A black satin ribbon wrapped around the base hid the evidence, but it's existence was enough to put her in a foul mood. A few nights before she'd have been dancing across the kitchen at the prospect of his touch – now the thought of anything but the cool bottle of gin against her skin was giving her the creepy crawlies.
"No customers today, mum!"
"And why might that be?"
"I'm dead," she blurted, and the boy's brows shot up to the ceiling.
"Mum," he said, grasping her forehead, "you feelin' all right, I mean, all there in the head?"
When she was bored, the baker liked to amuse herself by imagining various funerals in her head – all her own, mind you. It was boring imagining other people's wake's – she only turned up for the free feed, the gin, and the lucky chance that she could nick a gentleman's cufflinks or a woman's rose-gold bracelet from the open coffins. And her funeral, with Mr T all done up nice and neat wif his hair all slicked back, an' he'd have to say his goodbyes by leaning over her coffin, she done out all perfect and red lipped...
"'Course," she said dismissively. "Wot say you have a drink with me, me dear?"
Toby looked at her wide-eyed, snatching up the bottle as sparks of rabid sun sent odd flecks through the rain-splattered windows. "You set your curlers on real tight on yer 'ead last night or somefin'?"
"No, lad. Just got some vision, wot be all. Let's drink. Health, hell and happiness, eh?" She raised her glass, and some of the feverish rays seemed to be caught there too.
Upstairs, the silence was heavier than a churchyard.
"Say," she said, when they were both bleeding drunk and they'd counted about seventeen people walk down the street by noon, and that was it, "wot you think Mr T's grave would read?" A blank look came over his mum, and Toby knew she was thinking hard. If Mr Todd had an epitah on his grave, it would read: "revenge slaked." Slaked was an interesting word. Mrs Lovett liked the harshness to it. Even if he died in the process, and never actually did enough throat-cutting to satisfy himself, she knew it would make him feel a tad better knowing someone thought of him enough to put a decent, honest epitah, instead of some rubbish about being a wonderful, loving, husband, which just couldn't be said in the past fifteen years.
"Sick-in-the-head, bleedin' old tyrant," Toby said delightfully, rolling the gin carelessly around his tongue.
"Watch your mouth, lad!" She smacked him half-heartedly on the hand, more than inclined to agree with him just then.
When the "closed" sign was finally settled snugly against the rain-smeared glass on the shop front, it was already 7 o' clock, by which time the boy was out cold on the kitchen floor, and Mrs Lovett well beyond ghoulish drunk. She clambered up the stairs fruitlessly, like a fly about to settle down to feast on the dead.
P.S. I'm aiming to update every three days in the holidays, and when school resumes every Monday, unless I have any more wrestles with hot hair equipment!