Days turn to weeks, and weeks turn to months, and then a year has passed and August has arrived once more, with Sweeney Todd staring out his window trying to clutch his razor and his dreams in his fist, with Nellie Lovett pacing in her bakehouse trying to rid the image of Lucy hanging onto the doorframe from her mind.
A year.
Everything is different and nothing has changed. The barber and the baker grow tired. Weary. Desperate for changes and yet clinging to stability. So their lives – or their living deaths, or their dances through hell, or whatever the existences of demon humans are called – go on.
"I don't know why I let her get to me tonight. God knows it's not the first time she's come hobbling around my shop, chattering and screaming away at me."
She whacks her butcher's knife into the flesh of the man's arm and tosses the bits of fat to the side. Thankfully, there isn't much on this fellow; he was a well-built piece of stock. A little bit of fat is necessary, of course, for flavor, but every once in a while Sweeney sends down a bloke that's nearly all blubber and no actual brawn. Largely useless supplies, those are – but it'd be a waste to throw the entire carcass out without searching for the meaty bits.
"I don't get it," she continues, stripping away at the chest now, cleaving the tender meat around the rib cage. "Something inside me just – snapped. It's been almost a year now since Todd showed up in my shop . . ."
Nellie often talks to the corpses like this. Who else will listen to her, after all? Well, certainly Sweeney would – the man fears the sound of his own voice, but would happily drown himself in hers if he could – but she can't confide in him. He's already too attached to her. She needs his attachment, certainly – she needs him to string along if she ever wants vengeance to be hers – but he's become more fond of her than she ever thought he would. Than she ever should have allowed. What she once thought to be a foolish and naïve lust has turned darker, deeper, steadier. If she told him to, he'd walk to the ends of the Earth, even if only to bring the shade of a smile to her wasted face.
No, the very last thing he needs is further encouragement by she saying aloud the thoughts she never reveals. The last thing he needs is to feel her tangible pulse beneath his palm when in truth her heart beats only from rote, from memory . . . not because it needs to keep her alive.
"Mr. T's been back a year," she prattles on, "a whole bleeding year, and what've I to show for it? A better establishment, sure, and some damn good pies – don't worry, dear, I'll never lay my mouth on you," she assures the man with something like tenderness, peeling away a layer of fat over his belly and throwing it to the oven. "I don't eat my wares, I just sell them.
"But what," she demands of the corpse, "apart from a better business, have I got, hmm?"
He does not answer, only stares at her with glassy eyes and a slack mouth.
"Nothing," she informs him. "I've got nothing. Absolutely fucking nothing." She plunges her hands into the man's middle until she's up to her elbows – literally – in offal. She throws these into the oven; they're no good. "The judge is still alive and well – the bloody – and I'll never get to him, I'll never get my hands on him, not after Todd ruined it all . . ."
She fists her fingers into the refuse and says on a choked cry, "But I ruined it too. I ruined it too, years ago when Turpin stopped trusting me . . . I had him right in my hand so many times – right in my damn bed – and every time something went wrong. . . ."
She feels as though she's being torn into pieces: the words might be leaving her mouth, but they still pound within her body, systematically and brutally shredding her to pieces. Like her skin is sewn together and the seamstress has decided that the pattern is no good. Like the seamstress now claws at her with a seam ripper, pricking apart her outsides inch by inch and leaving her with nothing to cloak herself within, nothing to hide inside of, all her guts and blood and guilt and misery and facades spilt on the bakehouse floor –
A shudder runs the length of her body and she hunches her shoulders to her ears, fingers digging deeper into the man's belly, in an effort to keep what's left of herself stitched together.
"I can throw as many blaming looks at Sweeney as I want," she says, coughing up the words from her throat, "and he'll gladly take my blame and try to heal my pain every time – " a broken, bitter laugh " – as if that's possible . . . but it's not his fault, it's mine, and we both know it – all my fault that that bastard's alive and breathing and fucking around and getting away with what he did all those years ago – "
And her last stitches fall away.
She vaults to her feet and hurdles the offal dripping from her hands against the bakehouse walls and lets out a keen from the very bottom of her own intestines.
She's done all this before she knows what she's done. There's a bedlam of silence in her ears and a haze of red in front of her eyes, and the both of them prevent her from comprehending anything until she blinks, swimming back to herself. Only then does she hear the echoes of her wail sounding within the room, see the viscera smeared on the walls and the floor.
Shame washes over her. Hands shaking, she strides towards the wall to pick up the mess of entrails.
But the needlework once holding her together is gone, now and forever, thread and cloth both crumpled in a heap somewhere she'll never find. Leaving only this – only whatever's left of her mangled soul – raw and naked and impure. Unable to manipulate or pretend with a whirl of smiles and chatter as she usually does. Entirely at the mercy of whatever aborigine lies beneath.
So her feet swerve her away from the innards, leaving them puddled on the ground, and direct her up the bakehouse stairs. Her feet pound through her parlor, into the pie shop, out among the night, up the stairs to his quarters –
He stands by his bureau, polishing a blade, but looks up when the door slams open. The corners of his lips curl upward when she enters. It is a hesitant smile, but it a true one. It is the smile created for and given to only her.
She doesn't notice. She wouldn't care even if she did notice. But she can't notice, not tonight. She's unclothed and out of control – she's unwillingly surrendered command and given it to this base creature within her – and she can no longer notice what she normally simply wouldn't care about.
Nellie stalks towards the barber, seizes him by his lapels, and cudgels her lips against the smile she can't see.
His arms surround her at once, contouring her body to his own, as she traps one arm around his neck and fists his lapels tighter in her fingers, smearing the dead bloke's innards over his clothes and skin. He tastes of gin and sweat, his natural cologne of blood mingling with it; she slants her mouth more firmly against his, smothering herself in him.
His hands tremble with an ecstasy of disbelief as they run down her body. Never before has this happened – never before has she come to him like this, kissing him with such need, imprisoning him in her grip as though she fears his escape – it's the way he normally imprisons her for the few moments she dares to become his – not that he ever could escape her, not that he ever would . . .
Is she at last choosing to live beyond the faded memories she clings to? Is she at last letting go of her vendetta of fifteen years and gripping reality, the present, instead?
Is she at last realizing she is alive?
Both her arms are snared around his neck now, his personal noose that he never wants to be cut free from. Hands quivering still more violently, he trails them both up the length of her sides, along her shoulders and neck, to cup her face in his palms. His fingertips play like those of a newborn babe's – shyly curious, full of overwhelming wonder – across her face.
"Nellie," he murmurs when she pulls away to gasp for breath. He presses his lips against her hairline, again and again and again, a man in the desert suffering from a parched throat that can never be slaked even after living for years among civilization. "Nellie –Nellie – Nellie . . ."
A growl rumbles within her chest and resonates within his own, smashed together as they are. She shoots up on her tiptoes to again crush her mouth to his, but he pulls back before she can. He holds her face in his fingers, keeping them apart, so he can look into her eyes.
"You're different tonight," he says.
She snorts and rolls her eyes. Her hands tug impatiently at his cravat. "You bothered by that, love?"
"No," he breathes, swallowing. The irises and pupils of his eyes are invisible in this black hour of night, but the whites gleam purer than the moon. "I just want to know what's changed."
What's changed? She snorts again but doesn't answer. There is no answer. Not one that satisfies the unclothed animal within her; not one that sounds rational when ascribed actual words. Because not even with all the words in the English language can this thing burning her from the inside out make sense:
Because she needs to feel something real and warm beneath her hands that isn't from the middle of a dead bloke's stomach:
Because nothing can drive away the fury and purpose and pain that always dwells within her veins and turns her into this beast that is both predator and prey – and she doesn't want to drive this beast away, because she can't forget the reason she's still here – but some days she longs to forget, even if just for a moment, even if she never can:
Because even if her heart pulses only from perfunctory memory, she still needs to hear it thunder in her ears. Just to hear thunder one last time. Just to make sure she can still hear in this dead world.
"Nellie?" Sweeney whispers to her, reminding her of his presence, stroking his thumbs across her cheekbones.
She growls again. She cannot answer him; why can't he ever just accept things as they are and not question everything? Why must he insist on making her alive again when she died long ago? Isn't it enough to have her in his bed, isn't that what he wanted more than anything for nearly two bloody decades?
Breathing hard and angry, she grips the crotch of his pants.
The whites of his eyes disappear in a blink and he gives a choked whimper.
"Y'know, Mr. Todd, you don't talk all that often," she hisses, striding forward, forcing him to backpedal his steps until his back hits his bureau, grinding into its edges.
His eyes open again and gleam at her in the darkness.
"But when you do, love," she spits, "you really just don't know when it's time to end the conversation."
Another choked whimper escapes from his lips. She doesn't know if it's the beginning of a reply to her words or not, but decides not to take her chances: her mouth sears his with another kiss, one of her hands pushing more firmly against his groin as her other snakes up his neck to seize his hair.
For a moment, he does not move. Then – her fingers dancing against him, her wild locks caressing his skin, her perfume of spices and blood kissing his nostrils, her mouth biting and stroking and tasting his skin – he finds his arms enveloping her once more, his lips grasping against hers.
She closes her eyes and moans into his mouth, drowning in his taste, his scent, his touch, his need – drowning in this moment, these sensations – hands snatching and claiming flesh, hot breath on her face, skin against skin – sensations so pure in their impurity, so perfect in their imperfection – zinging through her veins like a drug, muddling everything around her until nothing's clearly defined. Until he is all that keeps her upright.
Even the joy of having her this close, having her willing be his, cannot rain out his confusion, his pain. . . . He thought he had been so close – that she had been so close to realizing what he meant to her, realizing that they could have a future together, realizing that her heart beats on even if Lucy's doesn't – but perhaps she still is close – there is without question something different about her tonight . . .
Whatever it is, he's not about to let it go.
He wants to take his time, to enjoy whatever change has been wrought within her, deliciate in the way she's thrumming with so much life in his arms. He pulls his mouth away from hers and carefully kisses each of her eyelids, one at a time. He trails his lips up the curve of her nose until they meets her widow's peak, then continues along the arch of her forehead, her cheek, her jawbone, tracing her features, creating a halo of kisses upon her face.
A halo for what? she wonders. For protection against demons? How can he think to protect them from themselves?
She closes her eyes and seals her lips together. She tries to tolerate this slow intimacy and let him do as he pleases. She needs him to remain happy and by her side if she ever plans to extract her revenge, as there isn't many a man who'd happily do as he does each day.
But she doesn't have the patience for it. She doesn't want slow intimacy. She wants to forget. Intimacy unsettles her; intimacy makes her remember all the more. It makes her remember what she should be doing, what she should not be allowing herself to forget for even a moment –
Do you think Lucy can ever forget? What about Turpin – should you let him forget and get away with it? And you? You, you worthless slut, you think you deserve to forget just because it wasn't you who suffered?
A keen tears itself from her throat – but unlike the one in the bakehouse, this one sounds with agony rather than anger. A wounded animal rather than a starved predator.
Sweeney's face lifts from hers in horror.
"Nellie – "
"No more talking," she snarls as she again claps her mouth over his, swallowing any protests he might be about to make, dragging his leather coat down his shoulders and halfway off his arms. She fights to get the thing off, jerking at the garment with hands made clumsy by urgency. The instant she hears the leather snick against the floor she starts on his shirt, snapping open buttons and ripping fabric in her haste to feel him naked against her, to have him be just as nude outside as she feels inside, just as unable to hide.
That's pointless. He never hides from you anyway.
Pushing that thought away, she succeeds in freeing him from his shirt and cravat, and scampers her greedy hands over his bare flesh. So solid, so warm, so whole. So unlike the man in the bakehouse, whose greasy innards are still blotted and congealed to her fingers, smearing stickily against Sweeney's skin.
Now he rips off her clothes with just as much haste as she does to his. He's accepted her raw and naked creature – maybe he's even found his own. Maybe they can both be stripped of all these facades, she dares to believe without believing it for a moment, maybe they can both be liberated from all these layers of pain.
Somehow they've wound up on his bed rather than she jamming him against the bureau, her back against the mattress, he hovering a breath above her.
He's manipulated me, for once, rather than the other way around, she thinks through her fog, blinking up at him.
And then he lowers himself upon her and traces his lips along the shell of her ear and her scrambled thoughts scatter away into the sweaty, windless, August night.
As he strips each morsel of fabric from her body, his fingers brush against the newly exposed flesh, pricking wildfire across her skin. His lips blaze across her face, her neck, her shoulders, her chest, drawing noises from her mouth that make them both shudder.
She tears off his trousers, relishing the tossing away of this last bit of cloth separating them, pressing their naked forms together. Her mouth stamps against his collarbone, nipping at the skin and savoring its salt, losing herself when she breathes him in.
He's murmuring her name in her ear again, over and over, along with soft things she does not want to hear, things that make the forgetful ecstasy fade and the cold reality of thought and duty and vengeance return, slamming like a penance between her shoulder blades. When she snarls a warning into the skin of his shoulder, he falls silent at once. The whites of his eyes swim towards her, reverent and burning ivory, waiting for direction. For some reason, the expression only further shoves the penance of reality against her back.
Her eyes close and her face presses again into his shoulder, unable to stare at either him or the reflection of herself in the back of his bright black gaze. She wraps her arms around his neck and wraps her legs around his waist. Even despite the feeble resistance still balled in his muscles, he meshes to her willing and without hesitation, fits himself against her, becomes one with her. Not only willing, but so naturally, so seamlessly . . .
Perhaps she never needed seams, she finds herself thinking wildly, burying her face in his wiry locks. Perhaps she was supposed to have the stitches yanked out of her and leave her sewn façade in a heap on the floor long ago.
Her fingers lacerate his back with senselessly perfect designs as she bites his shoulder to prevent herself from crying out; his hands curl into her scalp as he whispers in her ear words unintelligible to the world. They move together; they tremble against each other; they crush one another tighter against their own body when they imagine the other to be slipping away – even though, in truth, they can be no closer.
Perhaps, she thinks, she was always meant to be seamless.
Then at last both of their bodies are motionless. Then at last they're both naked and raw and their lungs are breathing in tandem, hearts beating in tandem – and certainly it is just from perfunctory memory that her heart feels the need to hammer against her rib cage like this – but it's delightfully loud and hot and real and she's going to cling to it for all she's worth.
She lies on her back and sweats and quivers. She's never felt such bliss in being still.
But he is not still – even now, in the stillness of the afterwards, he's not still – fingers caressing her arm, lips brushing her jawbone, face nuzzling her face . . .
She rolls onto her side and curls into a fetal position. Can't he let her revel in her momentary paradise? Does he feel compelled to destroy everything and insist that his yanking her from the past is for her own good? Must he refuse to speak with his lips and instead do so with his eyes – those maddeningly darkly lit eyes – and say that it is only because he is determined to bring her back to life?
Can't he read the reply in her eyes just as clearly? The reply that he surely can't fancy himself Jesus and she Lazarus, not when Jesus soils his hands with a daily dosage of murders and Lazarus seeks revenge rather than love?
Sweeney curls up next to her on the mattress, contouring to her once again, his chest against her back, his legs embracing the undersides of her calves and thighs.
She closes her eyes.
He keeps his open, wide, penetrating nothing in the darkness. Her flesh is soft against his, damp and supple. But she is not supple – not to him, never to him – and when she is, it is forced, mandatory, a purposeful surrender to make him happy . . . it barely counts.
And yet almost without her volition she surrendered tonight. . . .
She's lost to him again now, entirely within control of herself. He presses against her tighter but he might as well not be there. And it is this sudden aching loss, this pain of not grasping what she so nearly gave him, that urges him to whisper the words he's never been able to speak to either her or himself before:
"Do you love her, Nellie?"
She opens her eyes and blinks at the wall. "What? Who?"
His breath on her neck tickles her skin and makes the fine hairs stir, the flesh goosebump.
"Lucy," he says.
Nellie bites her lip, but not because she doesn't know how to manipulate this truth as she is prone to. She doesn't know what the truth is.
"I . . . I don't know," she says, something in the darkness and her raw creature and his breath on her neck compelling her, for once, to honesty. "It doesn't really matter either way. 'Cause either way you look at it . . . every breath I take is for her."
But it isn't about her anymore, Sweeney's heart dares to murmur what his lips cannot. You've lost her in your search for revenge . . . and yourself.
And you, Todd? You haven't lost yourself trying to recreate a pulse in her?
He swallows. No. That is entirely different. Nellie is different. Lucy is gone and buried beneath the Earth; Nellie is only buried within herself. Nellie can still be saved.
Nellie's skin stings as a thousand needles divulge into her flesh. She digs her nails into her palms and clenches her jaw to keep herself from screaming in pain:
The seamstress has returned.
The seamstress' hands are bursting with new needles, textiles, and threads. She is busy, employing all her workers to plunge their pins into Nellie's flesh. They enfold her within compactly-woven facades, thread weaving in and out and in and out and in and out of her skin, fingers frantic with the need to repair the damage rent. Nellie grips her tongue between her teeth so hard she tastes blood, refusing to make a sound as the needles rip through her, cloths sturdier and stitches tighter than ever before –
Swallowing, fingers trembling, Sweeney threads an arm around her waist and rests his cheek upon the back of her shoulder, relaxing against her tense form. He closes his eyes and prays to no one that she will stay with him tonight.
Then his arm and cheek smack against the mattress.
He throws open his eyes to see her wrenching her clothes back on. Her shift is tossed on backwards; her pantalets are torn and consequentially do not stay on her hips; her corset strings have come out of their loops and she fights with them in the dark to set the contraption right. He half-rises from the bed to help her, but she gives up before he can.
Yanking her dress on over her tangle of undergarments, never once looking back at him, she flees his room.
He swallows again and shifts his body, coiling into her familiar imprint upon the cot, pressing his face into her indentation, strangling himself in her scent. Her hollow in this mattress isn't her and never will be – but if he can pretend, even for a moment, as he eclipses his face in the bedding . . .
A/N: . . . make a review glutton happy and drop a morsel of feedback into her collection tin?