Thud, thud, thud, thud, scuff, thud-thud-thud, thud . . .

Pacing. It's a ritual. Hearing her footsteps against the ground, the way the cadence changes as her boots come in contact with smooth pavement or wooden boards or cobbled stones or bakehouse stairs or matted carpet; feeling the muscles in her thighs and calves strain then untense, the joint of her knee swinging out then in; letting the rhythmic vibrations in her feet travel up her spine and attempt to numb her aching, spinning, twisting mind.

Pacing is a metronome of comfort, one that she has no plans of relinquishing anytime soon.

Often a symphony of instruments joins the metronome, keeping time with it, each contributing a different melody. The concerts vary from day to day, differing based on her location, manner, and mood. The assortment of musical apparatuses and notes in her ears keeps things different enough for continued interest and similar enough for continued reassurance.

Today her philharmonic takes place in her pie shop. It's a Sunday morning, atypical for work, but Nellie has certainly never gotten this far in life by being typical. Besides, she hates being still and without a metronome of movements to tame the dissonant, unending screeches of her mind.

Swish-thud, swish-swish-thud-thud, swish-swish-swish-thud, the syncopation of her hands alternatively kneading and pounding against the dough.

Ffffsh, fffsh, fffsh, fffsssssh, the refrain of her rolling pin flattening dough.

Slop slop, slop slop, slop, the chant of the meat as it meets the unbaked crust.

Scuff, scuff, scuff, eeeeeek, slam, the tune of her feet striding over to her small stove-oven, forcing its old hinges to wheeze open and allow her to reheat pies, then shutting the door again.

Swish-swish-thud . . . swish-thud-thud-thud, slop slop slop . . . slop . . . fffssssh, fsssh, swish-thud, swish-thud-thud, slop slop . . . ffsssh, ffssssh, fsssssh . . . scuff, scuff, eeeeeeeek, slam . . .

All that exists is her song. Because if she permits herself to entertain thoughts of last night – because if she allows herself to hear even a strain of another melody – her metronome will break. And everything else will follow.

So conscious of her tune, of fitting each instrument into the rhythm of her metronome, she instantly becomes aware of the discordant boom, boom, boom, boom, the notes his feet always create. Then comes the telltale area of creak creak creak, the ditty of the stairs leading to his shop; wheeeek-eeek-eeek, twinkle-twinkle, the chords of her rusty door and irksomely cheerful bell; boom, boom, the overtone of his feet again, resonating like thunder no matter what surface they strike against, so unlike her own feet, continually adapting with their musical partner that is the ground to innovate new melodies . . .

"Nellie?"

"G'morning, love," she twitters, never ceasing her song. Swish-thud, swish-swish-thud. "You're up early for a Sunday." Fssssssh, fsh, fsh. "Well, I guess you'll be wanting your breakfast, eh?" Slop slop slop, fsssssssh, scuff, scuff. "How's porridge sound?" Eeeeeeeek slam.

"Nellie," says Sweeney. His song is silent.

It only makes her more determined to drown him out.

Swish-swish-thud swish-thud-thud-thud slop slop slop slop fffssssh fsssh swish-thud swish-thud-thud slop slop ffsssh, ffssssh, fsssssh scuff scuff eeeeeeeek slam.

"You just going to stand there saying my name all day, love?" Nellie asks with a hack of a giggle. Swish-thud swish-swish-thud fsssssssssssh fsh fsh. "Or are you planning on starting an actual conversation sometime?" Slop slop slop scuff scuff eeeek slam. "Mind you, we could just play a name game and go back and forth like so, but that'd get real tedious right quick – "

"Nellie."

Knowing what he wants and that he will persist until he gets it, hating herself for bending to his wishes, she forces her eyes to his. Everything she cannot confront – Lucy, the judge, his feelings for her that have grown far further than she should have ever permitted, blood, death, murder, last night – stares back at her through twin dark mirrors.

So Sweeney throws her completely off-balance when he grunts, "Have you had breakfast yet?"

"Wh-what? Oh – erm, no, I haven't – "

"We should have breakfast," says Sweeney.

"Right – yes, yes, of course, it's past eight, I s'pose we should – well, I'm not really hungry myself, perhaps I'll just have a spot of tea, but what would you like, love? Can I fix you up some of that porridge? Or, if you'd prefer – "

"You should have breakfast," says Sweeney.

Her strings are unraveling again and splitting her fabric apart – or maybe they had never resewn themselves – maybe she had only managed to flee by gathering the broken scraps to her chest, pretending yet again –

Either way, this ends right now. Either way, she will sew herself together right now.

"Alright, love," she says calmly, setting down her pie supplies. "I'll get started on that porridge for you, and I'll nip at it myself later on when I'm hungry. You just sit yourself down and I'll bring it to you right quick, eh?"

She procures a pan, throws some oats and water into it, then puts the mixture on the stove as she goes to root around for sugar and sea salt.

"Nice day out, ain't it?" she asks him as she stands on her tiptoes to grab these ingredients.

Stupid man, why is he still standing?

"Perhaps we'll go by the park later, what d'you say?"

Did she not explicitly tell him to sit?

"I could pack a nice picnic lunch, Toby could take along his new kite – it'd be a lovely time."

His eyes will not leave her – but she refuses to meet his gaze as she goes about sprinkling the seasonings into the porridge.

"After all, it won't much longer that we can do things like that."

His eyes.

"I mean," she says, clenching her fingers tightly around a spoon as she plunges it into the porridge and begins to stir, "y'know, what with August drawing to a close and bringing the end of summer along with it."

Those eyes.

"'Course, I do like fall too, all the changing colors and whatnot, but there's just something about sunshine that's very pleasant."

Those eyes coming nearer as the body damned enough to possess them strides toward her, closer, closer . . .

"And I know this's a stupid thing of a Londoner to say, but sometimes all that rain that we get during all the other months starts to wear on my nerves – "

His fingers close around her hand stirring porridge and arrest all her movement.

"Nellie."

Unable to accept defeat even when no other path lies ahead, she glares up at him with not a hint of weakness. "We going to just stand here all day, love?" she asks, wiggling her hand within his, eyebrows arching towards her hairline. "It might be Sunday, but that doesn't mean I like just hovering idle all day long. I've got to keep moving."

He folds his fingers more securely over the back of her palm, molding the callused, floured flesh to his own.

"Nellie," he says again, "can I ask you a question?"

She weaves her lips into a grin. "I think you just did, love."

But when he doesn't so much as flash his eyes in the remembrance of a smile, the corners of her mouth can't help but twitch.

Sweeney swallows, closes his eyes, refuses to pray to any god, inhales, parts his eyelids, looks down at her, and asks, "What did Lucy look like?"

She barks a laugh. "Shouldn't you know, love? She was your wife, after all."

"I'm not asking me," says Sweeney without inflection. "I'm asking you."

Her face crumples into perplexion, then shock, then returns to perplexion, eyebrows and lips bunching towards her nose.

"Well," she says, "I – she – well."

Of course Lucy's face is in her mind instantly – she sees the woman nearly every day, after all, what with always having to throw her out of the shop – but she can't describe that face to him. He doesn't know that face. Well, he does, technically speaking – but he doesn't connect that face with Lucy Barker, and she will keep it that way.

"Y'see, she had this – I mean – that is to say – Lucy – was . . ."

So it follows, then, that she should describe to him the face that he remembers, the face he associates with his wife. Her eyes scrunch around hazy memories, scouring over the fog of the past, to describe precisely that face to him . . .

"Can't really remember her, can you?" Sweeney murmurs.

A tongue of fury lashes through her body at the sentence – the accusation – the truth.

"Of course I remember her," she spits, wrenching her hand from his and striding to the other end of the counter. "You think I've forgotten who she was? You think I'd fight so hard for so many years to avenge a woman I didn't remember? I can see you don't believe me – you need more proof than angry words? Alright, how's this, love: she was beautiful and young and had yellow hair and why the fuck do you need me to tell you this anyhow? You're the one who keeps her picture on your bureau upstairs – "

She continues firing out her angrily scattered phrases. He stands at the opposite end of the room and lets her.

After two more minutes of this tirade, she begins to deflate, folding over herself, head slumping forward on her chest and elbows sagging against the counter, back hunching.

He approaches her like a hunter does a wild dog: intimately knowledgeable with its habits and ways, but nonetheless cautious. Her eyes trail his movements but she does not move. Taking that as a sign of acceptance – or at least not denial – he slips a hand onto her shoulder and softly caresses her skin.

Words are stuck in his throat again, as stuck as they were that first day he walked back into her shop after a decade and a half, and even all the progress he's made in the past year with talking can't help him now: he's gone as mute and dumb as a beggar.

He sets his jaw. He will do what he told himself he would. He will accomplish what kept him awake all night. This is his chance – this might be the last time she is so exposed to him, or anyone –

This is the moment and goddammit he will speak.

"You've – you've got to leave all this behind you now," he says, fingers stilling upon her skin, coming to a rest against the curving sinew between shoulder and neck. "She's gone."

She's not, she's not gone, Nellie's mind keens, sealing her lips together as her stomach threatens to retch up all the food she's barely eaten for the past week, she's not, oh, if you only knew, if you only could know without being blindsighted by it, she's not gone, she's never been gone –

But hasn't she? Hasn't she been since that day she swallowed the arsenic? Perhaps sooner? It had not been a lie, when she'd told him Lucy was gone. The radiant woman who'd lived above her with a hapless husband and gorgeous baby was not the same woman who sprawled in bed for days with dust accumulating in her home and tears freezing to her cheeks: all these two women shared was a name, much like the Nellie of sixteen years ago and the Nellie of now.

But what mattered of her lives on – her spirit lives on – and that deserves to be avenged, that deserves to be preserved, held up forever on a pedestal – and Nellie must never forget the wrongs that were committed against her or how pure and beautiful she was before all this –

His fingers glide up her shoulder and cup the back of her neck. They sting like a viper's fangs, scalding her skin, infusing her veins with fire, making the bile in her stomach heave upward even stronger than before . . .

His other hand settles at her elbow, pulling her up from the counter and into a standing position. One arm wraps around her back, the other around her shoulder blades, its fingers still curled against her neck. They stand chest to chest, leg to leg, eye to eye, matching breath for breath, as he supports her in a hug that feels more like a prison.

"Life is for the alive, my dear," he whispers.

She watches his lips move, the subtle way he manages to use the least amount of movement possible for every syllable.

"Maybe . . . maybe not like I dreamed . . . and maybe not like you remember . . ."

He's never believed in his dreams anyway, and she's never believed she could return to her ignorant life of before. This doesn't explain why she's shaking in his arms – or why she isn't pulling away.

His fingers close around an errant lock of her hair hovering over her left eye. He tucks it behind her ear.

"But we could get by," he says.

He ceases movement then. He does not think she has moved since she slumped over the counter. She's looking at him, but he can't tell if she heard his words, much less comprehended them. Were it not for the heartbeat thumping in a rhythm directly opposite of his against his chest, he would fear she was dead.

He refuses to count the minutes (perhaps hours) that they stand there. If he counts them, if he allows the habitual metronome of his mind to soothe him, it will only agitate him further: because he knows that she too lives by the pulse of the metronome, and the fact that she has entirely abandoned it means that her life either no longer holds a beat, or that she no longer needs one.

Her right shoulder blade shifts against the forearm he has clutched against it and he forgets to breathe, body immobilizing, eyes watching, waiting, yearning.

Her shoulder blade shifts deeper, its edge digging into his flesh, as her whole arm shifts. The movement is soft and tentative, words he never deludes himself into associating with her – but this is not delusion. Her face, too, is soft – or, at least, absent of its usual hardness – eyes big, lips parted with unformed questions and answers. Her bicep raises, elbow hinging, forearm stretching, and her splayed palm comes between their faces like rods of fleshed bones, obstructing his view just as his barred window in the colony did: all he can see of her face is her left eye and eyebrow, the arc of her nose, the right portion of her upper lip.

Her fingers curl forward into claws, towards him – then flex back, hesitating – forward again, but withdrawn once more – then the arrhythmic dance is repeated, the curve forward and the pull back –

Then her fingers light upon his lips.

They whisper like a newborn's touch across his face, shyly curious, exploring what has never been known – the way he did to her last night when she came to him – he sees her eyes narrow – but not in plotting – in considering – bewildered and adrift and burning and frightened and uncomprehending but still considering, still trying, still standing before him –

"Mr. Todd! Mr. Todd, I've found Johanna – the judge's got her locked in a madhouse – the place is a fortress, I've circled the walls a dozen times over – "

Nellie is gone from his arms before he even hears the jingle of the shop bell.

She is poised at the counter, hands engulfed in dough as she kneads and slams it repeatedly into the table, hips leaning to one side with eyes focused on her task, creating the perfect combination of leisured attention to her job, the perfect disguise. The errant lock of hair he had tucked behind her ear dances over her left eye, calmly defiant, as though it never left.

"Mr. Todd? I'm sorry, is this a bad time?"

Blinking, lowering his arms from their embrace of empty air to rest at his sides, Sweeney turns his attention away from the baker. "What is it, Anthony?"

"He has her locked in a madhouse," says Anthony. "I've circled the place a dozen times – it's a fortress. There's no way in."

"A madhouse," echoes Sweeney, falling into his pacing regime, eyes averted at all costs from his landlady: if he looks at her, he fears that he'll break. "A madhouse. A madhouse."

"Yes," says Anthony, his wide eyes tracking Sweeney's movements, "a madhouse."

Anthony looks the picture of madness himself as he stands there, Nellie thinks: teeth gnawing over his syllables, hands wringing together, purple trophies of sleepless nights dangling without triumph beneath his eyes.

She casts a look beneath her lashes towards Sweeney: he, by contrast, looks as though he has just found the Promised Land. She turns her gaze back to her pies immediately: if she meets his eyes, she fears that she'll break.

But averting her eyes does not mean she can avert her ears, and even though his words are hardly more than a breath, she hears them loud as thunder:

"I've got him."

"What?" says Anthony.

"We've got her," says Sweeney, louder.

His arms may hang at his sides, but his hands still scald with the heat of her skin, his elbows still bent to the contour of her body. He limbs shake as he paces, possessed by an inward fire burning him from the inside out – he was so close to reaching her – he was so close to reaching through all the shrouds and masks and smiles and finding the shivering, naked humanity underneath –

But he cannot dwell on it now. The moment is passed.

What's dead is dead.

"We've got her," Sweeney repeats, and on his next pacing cycle in Anthony's direction, he comes to a halt inches away from the sailor, almost nose to nose. Anthony cranes his neck away, wary, but his feet remain where they are.

"Where do you suppose all the wigmakers in London get their hair?" Sweeney inquires, barreling forward when he receives only a bewildered shake of the head as a reply: "Bedlam. They get it from the lunatics at Bedlam. We shall set you up as a wigmaker's apprentice . . ."

He babbles on. He locks his knees to keep them from hinging and settling into their familiar rote of pacing; he locks his eyes to keep them from swinging to Nellie. He feels a bubble of pride: a year ago, he never would have been able to tame his agony and yoke it for another purpose. And yet here he is, yielding his façade as naturally as his razor.

The jingle of the shop bell as Anthony leaves draws Nellie's attention upward automatically. She curses herself and forces her eyes back to her dough – but before they can, her gaze meets and locks with Sweeney's.

"Fetch the boy," Sweeney orders her.

Nellie blinks at him, speechless. She does not know what she expected him to do – return to his soliloquy about living in the present, or stare at her with his usual vacantly lost look until she barked a direction at him, or merely shuffle out of the room – but she does know that she did not expect him to issue a command. Especially not to her.

Has he already forgotten what just transpired between them? Not that she wants him to mention what just took place – God no, she'd far prefer if they never so much as grazed the subject of living and Lucy and forgetting ever again – and yet neither does she want him to forget . . .

You're pathetic, Lovett. What happened to the woman in control of herself, smilingly dependant on nothing and no one?

"I think you should just leave the poor boy alone," Nellie returns, suppressing a wince the instant the words flee her lips. I think? Damn what she thinks! Her thoughts are God's law to him and should be spoken as such, not as a wishy-washy notion of any commoner.

Sweeney's eyes, hard and merciless as flint, do not even gleam at her.

"Fetch the boy," he demands.

She can't help it: she gapes. Just what makes him think he is the one with the power in their relationship? Moreover, where has he drawn this strength from? And why? Did she merely imagine those moments before Anthony came hurtling inside her shop? – fingertips poisoning her skin, arms capturing her body, whispers stampeding her ears – because surely this cannot be the same man – surely this figure forged of cold control cannot be the fool who murmurs fantasies naively and strokes her cheeks softly as though she's something fragile, breakable, as though she's something worthy to hold . . .

Why? her mind sputters repeatedly, uncomprehendingly, stupidly, like a dying man gasping his last breaths, hazily echoing his last words again and again to anyone who will listen without any longer understanding the meaning behind his own words, or what he hopes to gain from their utterance. Why? Why?

Why?

Sweeney's lips curl into the minutest of smiles, parting to answer her unasked question, reading in her eyes what she cannot articulate with her mouth, throwing her former words back into her face:

"Because, love," he whispers, "I've got to keep moving."