~Mending the Portrait~
A/N: It's confirmed – I'm not dead! Yes, this is so late I ought to be hung. Better late than never!
"Send me anywhere – Fogg's asylum, if yer like – but not this."
The baker jammed her foot in the front door, and clung to the architrave like a child trying to avoid a whipping.
"Now, now, don't you be wreckin' the paintwork, miss," scolded the young maid, kicking the baker's foot expertly away from the door.
The Judge nodded at the maid appreciatively. "Thank you."
Nellie Lovett caught the fever in his eye – and it struck her as deeply as one of Sweeney Todd's looks. As she was far from innocent herself, she had an inkling of what he had planned for her. Was she mad to trust such a man? Blame hardly mattered now – she needed all her focus on surviving this…ordeal. Septimus, she knew better than most, could be merciless.
"Let go o' me," she repeated, tugging fiercely on the silk sleeve of his shirt.
Violet, she noted, with the daze of someone nearly suffocated to death. Foul thing, 'e wears violet. Great powerful man o' the law, an' yet still a fool for soft, pretty colours. Just like his little ward, an' weak old Lucy. Well, I won't let 'im pawn me off cos o' wot sick thoughts he's got churnin' round in his 'ead. Thinkin' some quack can cut me up an' fix me up somehow. Make me pretty again? It won't be. I wosn't a pretty bird before the fire, an' I won't be improvin' much now. I can twist his thoughts yet. Give me an hour, she thought to herself. One hour o' talkin' an' flirtin' an' false longin' an' eye-lash battin', and I can convince him to drop this madman's idea. Let me go, even.
Beneath her stewing, Mrs Lovett was mad. The fury and fear and desperation bubbled up inside her like the ingredients of one of her disgusting pies. All that slow-grown trust between her and the Judge – those little snippets of sweetness and affection, was rapidly crumbling. Wot wos he tryin' to do to 'er, operate her into some sorta Frankenstein bride?
"Don't struggle, my dear," said Judge Turpin with a smirk and sprightly step. He even sifted his hands gently through her curls, as if he somehow sought pleasure in her discomfort.
"Septimus," she protested, turning herself toward him with a face stripped bare of all pretence. It might be her last chance at salvation – lord knows the worst they could do. "You care for me, you liar. Wipe off that sanctimonious face, an' speak the truth!"
"I'd rather not," he said darkly, frowning briefly. "I've a patient here," he insisted, pushing past the maid and propelling Nellie straight through.
Poor Lucy. Poor, poor, poor Lucy. Silly git, didn't deserve the half-of-it. So this is wot it feels to be chopped up an' put in a pie?
The hallway darkened, and then lightened.
A man stepped through a half-open door, his methuselah beard draping over his waist coat. He was wearing surgical gloves, Nellie noticed, and there was a blue, rotting hue to the skin beneath his eyes. Just as if he'd spent half his life entombed in the darkness, turning his house into world of surgical night.
"What should I do with her?" he asked the Judge.
Judge Turpin turned to her with surprising tenderness, and lifted the back of her hand to kiss it. He let it linger against his chin, and half-closed his eyes, as if this were the last moment he had to savour her skin against his.
And who's to say it wasn't? Nellie thought miserably, clutching her skirts with her free hand. The terror of not knowing was greater than the knowing. And with the eyes of both men on her, like swollen fish in the sickening candlelight – she thought of Sweeney in the dark somewhere, seeking out the same thing – her face chief in his imagination – the thought of escaping the constant drowning tide of London night and the hierarchy of torture and entrapment that accompanied it. Surely this moment, they were both thinkin' the same thing – when was it their turn? When would she have relief? When would spring arrive, and bring long nights, fresh air, night sun-sets and ease to the people of this festering city? When would love have its turn to bloom through the mire of tar and blood and bad feeling here? Would the old wounds ever be shred?
Not now, clearly.
"Mend the portrait," the Judge instructed, jerking Mrs Lovett's face toward the candlelight for the doctor to inspect. "Here," he said, drawing a line down her face where faint scars briefly interrupted the rose-smooth surface of her skin. "Change it. Make her…unlike herself. I want it fixed…so that when I look upon her again, no man on the street will recognise her face."
"You are asking me to disfigure this beautiful creature?" Tingles and sparks of something infused the surgeon's hollow expression. "They come begging, so many rich ladies, asking for me to make them look a tenth of what she possesses! You will have to pay me much, much more for this operation!"
"Whatever for?" The Judge didn't break gaze from Nellie. He still had her hand pressed against her lips, and was staring intently into the pale curve of the back of her neck. To mess with perfection…
"To cover my own guilt! You want me to undo this." The surgeon shook his head and disappeared with the candlelight into the operating room.
"Will you speak?" The Judge said eventually, as they stood in the cold bridge between freedom and a path that neither of them would recover from.
"You're tryin' to scare me," Nellie said raggedly, suddenly grasping his other hand. "I know you won't do it. You wouldn't do it…"
"Think of it this way, my dear," he said reasonably, drawing her into a warped embrace. She could smell the moth-eaten holes in his neck-tie, and the old tinge of spice and oil against his weathered skin. "I can't expel that demon from your head – but I can erase you from London. I can make you a memory to everyone, and still have you mine. Didn't we both agree – I'm a cruel man. I did warn you."
So it was fixed. The fates always seemed to be against them - she and Sweeney.
When they were free to do what they pleased, neither Mrs Lovett nor Mr T wanted each other. All those months in the pie shop, he had avoided her like the plague. And when he'd finally seen the error of his ways, when he'd come to rescue her from the Judge's grasp - she no longer wanted it.
Yet now. Nellie almost choked on the air. The thought of it was suffocating.
Now, when their hands were tied, and their necks were bent to the guillotine, they had never longed for each other more.
And so she did more intensely this moment than almost any that had come to pass. The nightmare was before her – and she was longing for another, very different kind of nightmare. One she could never shake.
"Mr T," she breathed, as the Judge led her toward the torture chamber.