A year. A very long year. If you're still reading this, your patience is without measure.
~The Torture Chamber Part 1~
"Try to close your eyes. It'll work out for the best."
He didn't say anything more for a long time, but in the dull blue room where the sound of instruments clinked like battlefield swords, it banished some of the demons.
The surgeon bent his free hand over her face, brushed free the fuzzy re-grown hair. They weren't dazzling curls, the fury red had cooled into a gentle brown, her hair. He smiled through squinting eyes, adjusted the chair she lay in, and Mrs Lovett was reminded of the barber's chair, Sweeney breathing over her, stalking back to the window, swiping his blades at invisible enemies.
This whole world was hopeless, really. Nellie knew she must be one of those deluded types, thinking the world could get better, the people in it redeemed, when really they had already sunken down one giant pit-hole to hell.
"I don't care," she said, her voice linger in the heavy air. "Just as long as you knock me out, make me deaf and dumb through it all."
Nellie had been tortured many times in her life, in so many ways she was incapable of articulating it.
She couldn't tell the world how she felt anymore, she couldn't form thoughts in her head of how she felt – not that London cared whether its people fell down in the streets begging on their knees. It was a cruel city she'd learned how to love – but now it had truly abandoned her.
The surgeon nodded, drew the dark further in by blotting out the cracks in the curtains with old splotchy newspapers, and began sorting out his knives – Nellie knew he wasn't going to be particularly careful, or gentle, or sanitary. How could he, when the Judge's specific instruction had been to butcher her face? If she didn't die from bleeding first. Nellie knew from stories of women friends in childbirth – some she'd witnessed with her own eyes – of painful, lingering deaths from blood infections. Better someone just clobbered them over the head, like the cats in the alleys before poppin' them into pies.
"If I start slobberin' and hallucinatin' and all that horrible stuff, be sure to off me, a'right," she said sternly.
Again, the surgeon nodded. He'd closed his business for the day, just to deal with this. He'd strapped down the woman, hands and feet, with leather buckles. She was surprisingly placid. But the pounding in his own ears wouldn't stop. And Judge Turpin's instruction. Mend her. Mend her well. Then return her to me. New.