In The Dark Beside You (Sweeney Todd, Sweeney/Nellie, #4)
Title: In The Dark Beside You
Author: hlfbldprincess
Fandom: Sweeney Todd
Pairing: Sweeney Todd/Nellie Lovett
Prompt: Fanfic50 #15 Temperature; 30 Kisses #4 Our Distance and That Person
Word Count: 2,303
Rating: T
Summary: Sweeney tries to find Lucy's grave.
Disclaimer: All I own is a computer.
His hands sink into the ground, clawing at mud, ripping chunks of the earth from their rightful home as he crawls beneath the blackened sky. Clothes plaster to his skin, hair flattens to his face, dripping, sopping, cold, but he cannot feel any of it. Eyes roam, scouring gravestones, searching, searching for what he cannot find, what is not there . . .
"Mr. Todd!"
Then she is there, kneeling beside him, grasping his shoulders, yet he ignores her presence: she is not why he is here.
But she does not let go.
"You fool, Mr. Todd, what the hell d'you think you're doing? You'll catch your death out here - or did you not notice that it's raining hard enough to shake the heavens?"
He turns his gaze to her, pale-faced, shaking. Raising his hands from the earth -fingers still poised like talons to rip through dirt or grass or life itself if they have to, mud oozing from his fingertips - he is a demon rising from the pits of hell, searching for a salvation that he both craves and mocks.
Something in her eyes recoils, but she remains next to him, fingers piercing his shoulders, dress clinging soddenly to her body in a second skin.
"Where is she?" Sweeney croaks.
"What?" she cries out, bewildered. "Who? What're you on about? Mr. Todd, we really must get back home, you're obviously not well - "
He can no longer keep himself upright and pitches forward, body rigid and still, a once-mighty carotid of Athens toppling steadily and softly towards the earth, and only manages to catch himself by clutching Nellie's shoulders, dirtying the black silk and ivory skin with crude, earthen shades. He's heavier than her, so the force of his fall sends her reeling, flying backwards and sprawling into the mud, only just managing to prevent herself from landing on her back by throwing her hands from his shoulders and to the ground.
"Mr. Todd!"
It's a scream this time, a wild call to reach what she cannot hold, echoing and fading into the moonless night like another shooting, falling, dying star.
"Goddammit, Sweeney, talk to me!"
"Lucy." The word seeps from his mouth like sludge. "Lucy's grave. I can't find it and - "
And he's never thought to look until now.
Her eyes are as dark as the moonless sky; her eyes are as wide as the moon would be should it dare show its garish, jeering face at this hour.
"You ran out - in the fucking middle of the night - 'cause you wanted to find where Lucy's grave was?" she pants. Her dark moons wane into flaming crescents. "You couldn't have waited until morning for this? You couldn't have waited until it wouldn't be impossible to see three feet in front of you, you couldn't have waited to just ask me rather than tearing apart the cemetery - "
"She needs me," he whispers, broken, crumpling, knees sinking deeper into mud and fingers sinking deeper into her shoulders. It's she that he breathes for, she that his every action is dedicated to, and yet he has never visited her, never paid tribute to his reason and source of life. How could he have betrayed her for so long? She needs him to avenge her. But she also needs him to visit her - to validate, repent the pathetic life he gave her. "She needs me and - "
"Lucy," says Nellie, leaning up towards him, her words a deadly, animalistic snarl, "is gone. She needs nothing you can give her."
The instant she says it, she winces and cringes away from him, muscles balling with tension beneath his grip, preparing for a violent outlash - but it does not come.
He is still. He is numb.
She is right.
He is losing control over his mind, his body, his breath, and he finds that the world is teetering, slipping away in slanting colors and breezing lights like ghosts slipping through mortal fingers - or perhaps the world is steady, anchored in place by the absent moon, and it is he that is slipping away -
Claws stab into the soft skin of his cheeks and catch him, reawaken him - and she stares into his eyes, tethering him to the world, letting the colors and lights slip away because she is keeping him steady, because she is steady -
Then he's on his feet, a dancer glissading with graceless feet upon a sludge-covered earth - but her arms are around his chest, supporting, guiding, making sense of his feet's graceless movements, turning them into real maneuvers, or at least able to keep them from tumbling and collapsing beneath him completely . . .
"But - her grave . . ." he protests without any real weight to the syllables as they trudge through the night.
"She doesn't have one," Nellie snaps, not ceasing their walk, jerking him perhaps a little harder than necessary to keep him moving forward.
His mind balks, struggles to comprehend this, but then he realizes - of course not . . . she would not be buried in a church cemetery, not if Judge Turpin had anything to say about it - which he no doubt had - not she who had been violated and then committed suicide. It would not bode well for the judge's image. Certainly, then, she had been burned, cremated, her ashes thrown into the filthy river - or, fates having been merciful for once, cast into the heavens where they belonged . . .
A tinkling bell and a swing of a door - he's back home, her hands pushing him inside . . . but no, he does not truly have a home anymore - his source of life has no home, no place to rest, not even a pathetic stone in the ground, so how can he have a home? . . .
He's in the washroom now. There's the sound of water being decanted, and then his clothes are being peeled off, slicking and snicking against his skin as the soused fabric reluctantly strips away from skin, long fingers grazing his newly naked flesh.
He doesn't think to tell her that this is highly inappropriate, or that he can give himself a bath, or that she should bloody well leave him alone for once, because he isn't capable of thoughts anymore - or if he is, he doesn't comprehend what the thoughts mean. The world is a dense vacuum, and he doesn't comprehend anything but the warm fingers trailing across his skin like protective wildfire, shedding the drenched clothes from his form, burning and murdering and saving him all at once.
When he next becomes aware of reality, he's shivering and sitting submerged to his shoulders in water. Why is he shivering? The freezing clothes are gone, and the water is warm, and -
And her fingers are no longer on his skin.
This is what cold is. This is what hell is, this place of freezing heat. This place where his blood glaciates hot and solid in his veins, this place where nothing's real but his sluggishly churning mind. He sits and shivers and struggles to understand why he needs something he despises, something he would be far better off without - but of course, is this not the case with all humans? he fights to reason to himself. What we need is what is worst for us, what we need is what quietly destroys us . . .
Skin lights against skin, fingers light against forehead, and he shivers at the contact even though it sends a fresh blaze across his physique. She's returned, unsoiled clothes tucked under her arm, an ambiguity of twisted lips and drawn eyebrows on her face.
"You fool," she says, hand flying from his forehead and seizing his wrist, pulling him out of the bath, "you've caught yourself a fever. Well, I hope you're satisfied, I hope you're bloody well content with what you've gone and done . . ."
Her streaming words scratch gently at his ears, fuzzing around him in a temperate mist. Like a child, she towels him dry and dresses him in clean garments, then ushers him out and into her bedroom. Shoving him on her bed, she declares, "And don't you even think about sneaking upstairs to your room tonight. If you think I'm going to let you be up in that cold, drafty air all night with a temperature like what you've got - well, think again, love."
But she must realize he cannot think at all. She must realize that he can barely comprehend what is happening in this moment, nevermind think of the past or the future. He's drifting, floating, wandering, lulled by a river of incomprehension, of half-recalled shadows of bloodied beauty, and he grasps to see more than the shadows yet cannot see anything but, cannot envision anything more than the revenant of his wife's face, cannot even see her gravestone and affirm that this shadow he adores and loves and forgets really did breathe once -
"Drink it."
The command is accompanied by a tumbler being thrust into his grip. He blinks.
"I said drink it." She kneels down so they're on eye-level, face pinched with irritation. "Don't tell me you've gone deaf too."
Hardly knowing what he's doing, he brings the cup to his lips and lets the gin scald his tongue: at least this he can still feel.
A blanket is thrown over his shoulders, followed by another, and then another, until he is covered in layer upon layer of cottons and fleeces and wools, swaddled in a cocoon of hand-stitched affection.
As she stands behind him, smoothing the folds of the blankets, he hears a choked sniffling noise. It's an unusual enough sound to draw him from his vacuum and mutter, "Are you crying?"
"No," she says, a syllable flat and unfeeling and devoid of tears, and when she walks back around to face him, he can see that she isn't. He must have imagined the noise.
Frowning, she begins to fuss over him like a nanny, pressing down the blankets, stretching out his legs, coaxing him to lie down on the mattress. When he is arranged to her satisfaction, she lies down beside him, curling against his tightly blanketed body.
"G'night, Mr. T," she murmurs into his shoulder as her eyes close, twitching strangely beneath their lids as though suppressing some passion. "Sleep well."
But the gin has revitalized him, awoken the fragments of the soul into something that might pass for life's phantom. Freezing, shivering despite the swathe of blankets, he stares down at her prone form.
"You're still wearing your clothes, Mrs. Lovett" he says.
"I know that, love," she grouses without opening her eyes. "Please stop talking. It's bad enough you drew me out in the middle of the night with your shenanigans - I'd quite like to get at least a wink of sleep tonight - "
"Your clothes," he interrupts. "They're sopping and muddy."
All this time she had tended to him, she'd neglected herself . . .
"Bloody impossible, y'know that, don't you?" she replies with a drowsy air that seems far too forced. "Can hardly get you to mumble 'hello' some days, and now when I least want you chattering, you can't seem to find the will to shut your mouth - "
"Nellie."
The word hits the air like a fist upon glass, trembling, reverberating, shattering something irreversible.
Her eyes shoot open.
"Change out of your clothes," he says.
Now that her eyes are open, he sees they are as sodden as her attire. He hadn't been imagining her crying.
"Why?" she whispers.
Irritability scratches at his sides. "Isn't it self-explanatory, woman?" he growls. "Your clothes are filthy and wet. You'll become ill - or at the very least dirty your bed."
Her dark moons hang upon his face, suspended, round and dark and glistening - then she rolls onto her other side, facing away from him, and again he is within a moonless world.
He hears another choked sniffle.
"Are you crying?" he asks again, and this time she doesn't answer.
His muscles clench. The temptation to flee, to return to his own room as he always inevitably does on nights when he winds up tangled in her sheets, rises within him. And he knows that - despite her former warning not to leave - she would not be able to stop him, especially under the weight of tears she is not used to displaying.
Instead, he finds himself placing a hand upon her shoulder. Her body quails beneath his touch with muffled sobs.
"Why are you crying?" he questions softly.
Slowly, she turns over to face him, cheeks marked with damp avenues, lips trembling as they form into a smile. "'Cause you're never going to find what you're searching for, love. And it's time we both accepted that."
Enfolding her arms around his bundled, numb body, she nuzzles her face against his as a cat might, nose against nose. Her skin prickles against his, sends darts of warmth catapulting through his veins, darts hotter than his fever could ever hope to burn.
"But please don't go away looking again," she whispers against his lips.
Raising his hands from within the cocoon of blankets - fingers poised like talons to rip through dirt or grass or life itself if they have to, cold sweat oozing from his palms - he is again a demon rising from the pits of hell, searching for a salvation that he both craves and mocks.
Except this time, when his hands sink into her shoulders, clutching at muddied fabric and skin, it is not an accidental fall: it's an intentional act. She is still not why he is here, and he is still searching for what is not there, and -
And she is still warm. And she is here.
He isn't going anywhere.
Author: hlfbldprincess
Fandom: Sweeney Todd
Pairing: Sweeney Todd/Nellie Lovett
Prompt: Fanfic50 #15 Temperature; 30 Kisses #4 Our Distance and That Person
Word Count: 2,303
Rating: T
Summary: Sweeney tries to find Lucy's grave.
Disclaimer: All I own is a computer.
His hands sink into the ground, clawing at mud, ripping chunks of the earth from their rightful home as he crawls beneath the blackened sky. Clothes plaster to his skin, hair flattens to his face, dripping, sopping, cold, but he cannot feel any of it. Eyes roam, scouring gravestones, searching, searching for what he cannot find, what is not there . . .
"Mr. Todd!"
Then she is there, kneeling beside him, grasping his shoulders, yet he ignores her presence: she is not why he is here.
But she does not let go.
"You fool, Mr. Todd, what the hell d'you think you're doing? You'll catch your death out here - or did you not notice that it's raining hard enough to shake the heavens?"
He turns his gaze to her, pale-faced, shaking. Raising his hands from the earth -fingers still poised like talons to rip through dirt or grass or life itself if they have to, mud oozing from his fingertips - he is a demon rising from the pits of hell, searching for a salvation that he both craves and mocks.
Something in her eyes recoils, but she remains next to him, fingers piercing his shoulders, dress clinging soddenly to her body in a second skin.
"Where is she?" Sweeney croaks.
"What?" she cries out, bewildered. "Who? What're you on about? Mr. Todd, we really must get back home, you're obviously not well - "
He can no longer keep himself upright and pitches forward, body rigid and still, a once-mighty carotid of Athens toppling steadily and softly towards the earth, and only manages to catch himself by clutching Nellie's shoulders, dirtying the black silk and ivory skin with crude, earthen shades. He's heavier than her, so the force of his fall sends her reeling, flying backwards and sprawling into the mud, only just managing to prevent herself from landing on her back by throwing her hands from his shoulders and to the ground.
"Mr. Todd!"
It's a scream this time, a wild call to reach what she cannot hold, echoing and fading into the moonless night like another shooting, falling, dying star.
"Goddammit, Sweeney, talk to me!"
"Lucy." The word seeps from his mouth like sludge. "Lucy's grave. I can't find it and - "
And he's never thought to look until now.
Her eyes are as dark as the moonless sky; her eyes are as wide as the moon would be should it dare show its garish, jeering face at this hour.
"You ran out - in the fucking middle of the night - 'cause you wanted to find where Lucy's grave was?" she pants. Her dark moons wane into flaming crescents. "You couldn't have waited until morning for this? You couldn't have waited until it wouldn't be impossible to see three feet in front of you, you couldn't have waited to just ask me rather than tearing apart the cemetery - "
"She needs me," he whispers, broken, crumpling, knees sinking deeper into mud and fingers sinking deeper into her shoulders. It's she that he breathes for, she that his every action is dedicated to, and yet he has never visited her, never paid tribute to his reason and source of life. How could he have betrayed her for so long? She needs him to avenge her. But she also needs him to visit her - to validate, repent the pathetic life he gave her. "She needs me and - "
"Lucy," says Nellie, leaning up towards him, her words a deadly, animalistic snarl, "is gone. She needs nothing you can give her."
The instant she says it, she winces and cringes away from him, muscles balling with tension beneath his grip, preparing for a violent outlash - but it does not come.
He is still. He is numb.
She is right.
He is losing control over his mind, his body, his breath, and he finds that the world is teetering, slipping away in slanting colors and breezing lights like ghosts slipping through mortal fingers - or perhaps the world is steady, anchored in place by the absent moon, and it is he that is slipping away -
Claws stab into the soft skin of his cheeks and catch him, reawaken him - and she stares into his eyes, tethering him to the world, letting the colors and lights slip away because she is keeping him steady, because she is steady -
Then he's on his feet, a dancer glissading with graceless feet upon a sludge-covered earth - but her arms are around his chest, supporting, guiding, making sense of his feet's graceless movements, turning them into real maneuvers, or at least able to keep them from tumbling and collapsing beneath him completely . . .
"But - her grave . . ." he protests without any real weight to the syllables as they trudge through the night.
"She doesn't have one," Nellie snaps, not ceasing their walk, jerking him perhaps a little harder than necessary to keep him moving forward.
His mind balks, struggles to comprehend this, but then he realizes - of course not . . . she would not be buried in a church cemetery, not if Judge Turpin had anything to say about it - which he no doubt had - not she who had been violated and then committed suicide. It would not bode well for the judge's image. Certainly, then, she had been burned, cremated, her ashes thrown into the filthy river - or, fates having been merciful for once, cast into the heavens where they belonged . . .
A tinkling bell and a swing of a door - he's back home, her hands pushing him inside . . . but no, he does not truly have a home anymore - his source of life has no home, no place to rest, not even a pathetic stone in the ground, so how can he have a home? . . .
He's in the washroom now. There's the sound of water being decanted, and then his clothes are being peeled off, slicking and snicking against his skin as the soused fabric reluctantly strips away from skin, long fingers grazing his newly naked flesh.
He doesn't think to tell her that this is highly inappropriate, or that he can give himself a bath, or that she should bloody well leave him alone for once, because he isn't capable of thoughts anymore - or if he is, he doesn't comprehend what the thoughts mean. The world is a dense vacuum, and he doesn't comprehend anything but the warm fingers trailing across his skin like protective wildfire, shedding the drenched clothes from his form, burning and murdering and saving him all at once.
When he next becomes aware of reality, he's shivering and sitting submerged to his shoulders in water. Why is he shivering? The freezing clothes are gone, and the water is warm, and -
And her fingers are no longer on his skin.
This is what cold is. This is what hell is, this place of freezing heat. This place where his blood glaciates hot and solid in his veins, this place where nothing's real but his sluggishly churning mind. He sits and shivers and struggles to understand why he needs something he despises, something he would be far better off without - but of course, is this not the case with all humans? he fights to reason to himself. What we need is what is worst for us, what we need is what quietly destroys us . . .
Skin lights against skin, fingers light against forehead, and he shivers at the contact even though it sends a fresh blaze across his physique. She's returned, unsoiled clothes tucked under her arm, an ambiguity of twisted lips and drawn eyebrows on her face.
"You fool," she says, hand flying from his forehead and seizing his wrist, pulling him out of the bath, "you've caught yourself a fever. Well, I hope you're satisfied, I hope you're bloody well content with what you've gone and done . . ."
Her streaming words scratch gently at his ears, fuzzing around him in a temperate mist. Like a child, she towels him dry and dresses him in clean garments, then ushers him out and into her bedroom. Shoving him on her bed, she declares, "And don't you even think about sneaking upstairs to your room tonight. If you think I'm going to let you be up in that cold, drafty air all night with a temperature like what you've got - well, think again, love."
But she must realize he cannot think at all. She must realize that he can barely comprehend what is happening in this moment, nevermind think of the past or the future. He's drifting, floating, wandering, lulled by a river of incomprehension, of half-recalled shadows of bloodied beauty, and he grasps to see more than the shadows yet cannot see anything but, cannot envision anything more than the revenant of his wife's face, cannot even see her gravestone and affirm that this shadow he adores and loves and forgets really did breathe once -
"Drink it."
The command is accompanied by a tumbler being thrust into his grip. He blinks.
"I said drink it." She kneels down so they're on eye-level, face pinched with irritation. "Don't tell me you've gone deaf too."
Hardly knowing what he's doing, he brings the cup to his lips and lets the gin scald his tongue: at least this he can still feel.
A blanket is thrown over his shoulders, followed by another, and then another, until he is covered in layer upon layer of cottons and fleeces and wools, swaddled in a cocoon of hand-stitched affection.
As she stands behind him, smoothing the folds of the blankets, he hears a choked sniffling noise. It's an unusual enough sound to draw him from his vacuum and mutter, "Are you crying?"
"No," she says, a syllable flat and unfeeling and devoid of tears, and when she walks back around to face him, he can see that she isn't. He must have imagined the noise.
Frowning, she begins to fuss over him like a nanny, pressing down the blankets, stretching out his legs, coaxing him to lie down on the mattress. When he is arranged to her satisfaction, she lies down beside him, curling against his tightly blanketed body.
"G'night, Mr. T," she murmurs into his shoulder as her eyes close, twitching strangely beneath their lids as though suppressing some passion. "Sleep well."
But the gin has revitalized him, awoken the fragments of the soul into something that might pass for life's phantom. Freezing, shivering despite the swathe of blankets, he stares down at her prone form.
"You're still wearing your clothes, Mrs. Lovett" he says.
"I know that, love," she grouses without opening her eyes. "Please stop talking. It's bad enough you drew me out in the middle of the night with your shenanigans - I'd quite like to get at least a wink of sleep tonight - "
"Your clothes," he interrupts. "They're sopping and muddy."
All this time she had tended to him, she'd neglected herself . . .
"Bloody impossible, y'know that, don't you?" she replies with a drowsy air that seems far too forced. "Can hardly get you to mumble 'hello' some days, and now when I least want you chattering, you can't seem to find the will to shut your mouth - "
"Nellie."
The word hits the air like a fist upon glass, trembling, reverberating, shattering something irreversible.
Her eyes shoot open.
"Change out of your clothes," he says.
Now that her eyes are open, he sees they are as sodden as her attire. He hadn't been imagining her crying.
"Why?" she whispers.
Irritability scratches at his sides. "Isn't it self-explanatory, woman?" he growls. "Your clothes are filthy and wet. You'll become ill - or at the very least dirty your bed."
Her dark moons hang upon his face, suspended, round and dark and glistening - then she rolls onto her other side, facing away from him, and again he is within a moonless world.
He hears another choked sniffle.
"Are you crying?" he asks again, and this time she doesn't answer.
His muscles clench. The temptation to flee, to return to his own room as he always inevitably does on nights when he winds up tangled in her sheets, rises within him. And he knows that - despite her former warning not to leave - she would not be able to stop him, especially under the weight of tears she is not used to displaying.
Instead, he finds himself placing a hand upon her shoulder. Her body quails beneath his touch with muffled sobs.
"Why are you crying?" he questions softly.
Slowly, she turns over to face him, cheeks marked with damp avenues, lips trembling as they form into a smile. "'Cause you're never going to find what you're searching for, love. And it's time we both accepted that."
Enfolding her arms around his bundled, numb body, she nuzzles her face against his as a cat might, nose against nose. Her skin prickles against his, sends darts of warmth catapulting through his veins, darts hotter than his fever could ever hope to burn.
"But please don't go away looking again," she whispers against his lips.
Raising his hands from within the cocoon of blankets - fingers poised like talons to rip through dirt or grass or life itself if they have to, cold sweat oozing from his palms - he is again a demon rising from the pits of hell, searching for a salvation that he both craves and mocks.
Except this time, when his hands sink into her shoulders, clutching at muddied fabric and skin, it is not an accidental fall: it's an intentional act. She is still not why he is here, and he is still searching for what is not there, and -
And she is still warm. And she is here.
He isn't going anywhere.