The night was silent, or at least it was for those who did not know how to listen to it. Every little thing seemed to be abuzz with the sounds of life, of those going about their days as if they were bound to go on forever and a day. The hushed chatter of lovers sneaking home by the light of the flickering gaslamps, a lonely cry of a nightbird singing out to the moon, a bark of ill-timed laughter coming from a foolhardy young man revealing to all who cared that he had decided the streets were his own for the time.
For the man who gazed down into the streets with listless disconnect, there had been a time he had found comfort in the ebb and flow of life around him, then there had been a time he had forgotten what it sounded like, what it felt like to be a part of the patchwork tapestries of life. Now the sound brought him no relief, no solace to be housed in the lives of others. Now it felt like the cruelest of mockeries.
The man who had once been a part of the throng had died, and died more deaths than were his due. Benjamin Barker had died first when he was hauled off the streets under false claimed. He died a second time when he was sent off to some terrible little colony far enough away to not really exist in the world with false charges hanging over his head like a hangman's rope. Then he died at sea, desperation sending him to flee with not even a name to carry with him in the pitiful little raft he managed to take off with. Then he died with the final fragments of hope that he held in his heart, the belief that he could lose his sorrow in the love of his family, the life he had been forced to leave behind, the hope that was then promptly buried in a grave he was not even given the privilege of leaving flowers on.
Benjamin Barker had died an innocent man and, like a phoenix fair and foul, Sweeney Todd rose from the ashes, so wretchedly alive as the sinner they had been so ready to falsely accuse him to be.
The barber hissed displeasure through his teeth. Beneath the window a pair staggered, giggling at something that was surely more amusing for themselves than for anyone else, the woman's hair a finespun gold - not the blond that had so charmingly framed Lucy's delicate features - the man's heavy coat tossed about her shoulders to keep back the chill of the night air. How pitiful a man must be for such a sight, the sort of scene that played out countless times day in and day out in every corner of the earth, to send such a barb of icy sorrow to pierce the stubbornly lingering fragments of his heart.
Sleep, he knew long before he settled himself upon the windowsill to watch the night before him, would alude him that night. The midnight hour had visited on rapid shadowy heels and left him there to his private misery. But he had not set himself there to wallow in his misery. No, instead he was to prepare himself for his work.
The moonlight, which shone far brighter than the artificial light dared to be, danced and played across the blades of his busy razors. So clean were they, pristine and perfect, and yet the set about polishing them all the same. The fragile little things, so powerful that they served as held the power of life and death, had taken the role of his tether to the world. They were the only thing he knew with utter certainty that they were real.
And through them he was real.
His dazed passed in a blur, a corpse with a pulse, and yet as he drew his razors, he and they together to their purpose he knew he was alive, the world coming to a perfect clarity. It was not just the spilling of blood that grounded him to the world, even when the completion of his task left a customer whistling as he meandered down the stairs and back into the streets he was left with a sense of life that had otherwise been denied to him.
But then what would come of him when the day comes and he was done? His revenge comes to its end and the damnable Judge breathed his last breath by his hand? What life was there left for him?
The man he had once been had died, the man he was no longer human. A monster. A demon. Some terrible spirit possessing the corpse of what had once been a good man. It was not as if he could simply stop what had been set in motion, go back to the shadows and live some ordinary life again. Even when the Judge was dead, how many other people like him walked the streets? How many people were forced to suffer the same injustices that had robbed him of the life he and his family deserved?
Perhaps, in those hours where the shadows of the mind stretched out longer and darker than those of the physical world, he had wondered if that would be the day he, too, would die for the final time. If the only way to truly bring the whole horrid tale to a close would be to remove the final player, himself, with an artful flick of the razor against his throat, the only friends who truly cared for him - he knew his interactions with Mrs. Lovett were transactional, insincere. He knew his were, and so it was this certainty that meant hers would have surely been much the same - by his side and his blood seeped steadily into the wooden flooring, dying it a rich burgundy as he -
No. What good would it serve him to die? What would his work be for if he was not there to see it beyond his epilogue?
No, he would not die, it would not be the death of him. Perhaps it would be a death, the death of the man he was now so that he could once more reform himself into something else - a good man, a husband, a father, a criminal, a prisoner, a monster, a demon, what then? - but it would not be the true and final death of him. Goodness only knew what sort of life it might be but it would be his own.
For a good several moments, moments that grew into minutes, he gazed transfixed upon the blade of his razor, the last to be cleaned from a day's work. It was such a simple little thing, and yet it held such a beauty. Whether it shone a sterile silver or wore the finest rubies, he found the beauty in the thing. The ease it tore flesh or shaved a face to perfection at a whim, dual lives entwined in a single object. A single decision on his end towards whether a life would continue on after a person passed through his door.
What a power it was, to chose who lived and who died. To play the executioner to follow the wicked choices of a cruel and heartless judge. What a dreadful irony it was to play at judge, jury and executioner! To regain the life that had been stolen from him by the act of depriving others of their own lives! And with nothing more than a flick of his wrist the deed was done and he was more alive than he ever could have dreamed to be before. To die so that he might truly get the chance to live, how horribly, awfully marvellous it all was!
With a click, the razors were hidden away from the world within their case again, waiting for their purpose with the deadly efficiency and patience of a viper. So, too, would the demon barber of Fleet Street lie in wait for the next man who settled into his chair. One man's misfortune was another's splendor and there was always work to be done, always mouths to feed in a world left hungry while the rich got richer and those privileged enough to get fat got fatter.
The world was cruel and it made monsters of good people, he could not be blamed for his work, for his duty. It was one of the most sincere necessities that mankind could imagine. Their deaths were not in vain, there was nothing to be wasted and there would surely be more free to benefit from the loss of one man than they might if he continued to live, continued to spread his filth over a dirty, cruel world.
Bathed both in the half-light that crept in through the window and the shadows of the barbershop, a smile graced the features of Sweeney Todd and he was alive.