30 Kisses #20 The Road Home
Title: Come What May
Fandom: Sweeney Todd
Characters: Sweeney Todd, Nellie Lovett
Prompt: #20 the road home
Word Count: 2530
Rating: PG-13/T
Summary: An alternate ending.
Disclaimer: All I own is a computer.
Come what may, time and the hour runs through the roughest day. - William Shakespeare
xxx
He loved fishing. There was no better way to dispose of a body than to use it as bait one piece at a time. Fish, as it turned out, devoured one another just as greedily as humans. He cast his line into the water and smiled: It would be lovely to have a piece of cod or herring on the dinner table tonight - perhaps even salmon.
"Haven't given up your old ways, I see."
He did not look at her as she approached. He merely watched from his peripheral vision as she seated herself upon a neighboring rock, tucking her arms around her legs and resting her chin against her knees.
"I never went fishing in London," he replied, lowering his line further into the choppy depths of the Pacific Ocean.
"Oh, don't act thick with me, Mr. Todd," she said. There was no anger to her tone, merely blithe resignation. "You know that never worked - and you know exactly what I'm talking about."
He raised an eyebrow at the water. "I don't, actually."
"Mmm. Perhaps I should've said, 'Haven't given up your old ways, I smell.'"
"You - you still remember the smell?" was all he could articulate.
She snorted. "'Course I still remember the smell. Had it rubbed into my skin like perfume for a year of my life, didn't I? I think I should know bloody well the stench of cooked human flesh - "
"Kindly keep your voice down," he implored mildly, watching the ocean waves bob beneath him. "I was merely expressing surprise. It was many years ago. Memory fades with age - as do many things."
"Clearly not that many," she said with an eye roll in the direction of his fishing line. "Not long ago enough for you to've forgotten your usual bloodthirsty habits."
"My barbershop in this town is quite reputable, Mrs. Lovett. Only the occasional miscreant receives - ahh - a bit too close of a shave."
"The 'occasional miscreant,' eh? How occasional is occasional?"
"Occasional enough for no one to bat an eyelid when someone does go missing," he returned matter-of-factly. "They are never people who will be missed - murderers, rapists, abusive husbands, men who had desecrated the privileges society'd granted them . . . this fellow was my first in three years . . ."
His fishing pole jerked forward: a fish had caught hold of the bait. Without hesitation, he began to reel in the line, pressing his jaws together to suppress a groan as the muscles in his arms grumbled: old age had stolen much of his strength.
And his speed too, apparently.
"Lovely," she proclaimed as the hook emerged from the water, empty of both fish and bait. "Absolutely marvelous."
He fitted a new bit of bait upon the hook. "I did not ask for a commentary, Mrs. Lovett."
"You never asked for anything much, love, but that's certainly never stopped me."
Her eyes roasted against the side of his face as he dipped his fishing line beneath the waves again, but he kept his gaze upon his task. The pair fell into a cradle of quiet. Never one to enjoy silence for long, however, she soon shattered it. For some reason, he found himself holding back at the familiarity of her chattering habit:
Come what may, time and the hour runs through the roughest day . . .
"You don't seem surprised to see me," she said.
"I saw you arrive in this town several days ago."
"And you didn't come and greet me like a proper neighbor? My goodness, Mr. T, where're your manners?"
When this jesting didn't earn any sort of reaction, she sobered again and said quietly, "You also don't seem angry to see me."
He twisted his lips into a smile. "Would you like me to be angry?"
"'Course not." He could practically hear the skin of her forehead wrinkling as she studied his profile. "I just don't understand why you're not. Mind you, I didn't come here with the intention of finding you - "
"Why did you come?"
"For God's sake, Mr. Todd - why d'you think?"
At an honest lose for an answer - and for once, desiring to hear one from her - he looked at her. It was the first time he had looked at her since she had perched upon the rock beside his. It was the first time he had looked at her in decades.
Age hasn't done her already-haggard appearance any favors: the pale flesh was now dashed with senile freckles and wrinkles; the angular bones sharp beneath the sagging skin; the undomesticated, rosewood-colored curls daubed with white. Yet there was a gleam in the smirking brown eyes, a light - life - that he had never seen before. It added youth to the wearied countenance; it revealed a glimmer of the vibrant spirit that lurked just beneath the timeworn body.
She looked back at him, exasperated.
"Why d'you think I came here?" she repeated, and then, realizing he could not answer, told him: "The sea, Mr. Todd."
Of course.
That's the life I covet . . .
His mouth creased in thought. Yes, he did indeed now live her coveted life by the sea - although why she coveted it so, he couldn't fathom. The ocean's waves were choppy and cold, far too cold for even dipping one's toes in; the sand so rough one could feel blisters suppurating from the moment their feet grazed the ground; and the smell - by God, the smell - he did not even want to begin to discuss the smell: that disgusting, fermenting odor of salted seaweed and decayed sea creatures that smeared itself on the skin like a disease and was just as difficult to eradicate from the flesh.
"Knew I'd make it out here eventually," Nellie continued, oblivious to his disdain, her eyes shinning with what he could not see. "Was only a matter of time, really. Been in Colorado for some time - bone-dry as a place could be, it is. Anyway, this seemed like as good a time as any to finally live my old fantasy, since the grandkids liked the idea of being on the coast - "
"The grandkids?" he found himself repeating foolishly. "Your grandkids?"
"Well, not mine by birth," she muttered.
"Toby's children?"
"No," she said, voice flat, punctuating her sentence much sooner than her long-winded babble usually permitted, and he knew not to question further on this particular subject.
"How long have you been in America?" he asked instead.
"Long as you have, love." At his questioning look: "I trailed the ship you boarded that night."
He knew 'that night' referred to the evening in the bakehouse; the evening of bloodied hands and unclothed secrets and murder upon body and soul; the evening of pain, raw and throbbing, pain, too much pain, so much pain it had seemed at the time as though it would never end or even lessen . . .
"I took the boat leaving for America the very next day," she went on. "I don't know how I was thinking I'd find you once I got here - who I'd ask or what documents I'd search - then again, I don't think I was thinking much at all when I boarded. . . . Anyway, when I arrived with vague designs to trail after you, I'd no clue where you'd went. So I had to make my own path."
Her lips, more cracked than they once were but still thin and pink and - probably still very warm, he found himself thinking, but stopped that thought cold - warped into a congealed smile. "And somehow, decades later, that same damned path's led me right back where I started."
The fishing line jerked; he snapped to attention and pulled it in as fast as he could, but his efforts, yet again, were for naught: the fish had stolen his bait and fled. Aged face pleating into a frown, he fitted a new piece of human meat upon the hook and cast it into the water.
"What about you?" Nellie asked. "How'd you wind up here? And why?"
He shrugged. "I knew I needed to leave London before the police cottoned on to our joint businesses - which they were bound to do very soon, considering the evidence strewn about the place after that night. I boarded the first ship I could find, and it happened to be bound for America - New York, to be precise."
"But why come to Oregon?" she persisted.
"Why not?" he said. "It was merely where people with nothing but the clothes on their back and a burning need for a new life were going at the time."
She seemed to measure out her next words before she said them, weighing and calculating their value, the potential reactions they might receive: "And how is your new life here?"
How is your life after what I did to you? her aching silence whispered. How is your life after what you did to yourself?
"I have no complaints, Mrs. Lovett," he said, and she gave him a hard, swift look, searching for the lie in his face, but there was none to be found.
"You never answered my other question," she accused, after clearing her throat.
"I apologize, my dear, I didn't intend to not answer. My memory is not what it once was."
Her chin lifted, thrusting her stubborn jaw into the air. "I see no need for mockery, Mr. Todd."
"This isn't mockery. What was the question?"
"Why aren't you angry with me?"
He danced his fingers along his fishing pole, ran them along the smooth wood. It wasn't one of his razors, and certainly never would be. Nonetheless, it had proven a good friend over the years, and had remained strong, sturdy. Loyal.
"Mr. Todd?" she prompted, a dash of impatience in her tone. "You listening to me? Why aren't you angry? Don't tell me you've forgotten and forgiven everything that happened all those years ago?"
"Time heals all wounds," he replied buoyantly. "And a good deal of time has gone by since we resided on Fleet Street."
She shot to her feet so fast that his head snapped up in shock: how did such a frail little body manage to move so quickly?
"Haven't changed a bit," she snapped. "Still the same stupid habits, the same stupid ways - if you aren't listening to me, then you're just ignoring me, and if you aren't ignoring me, you're just playing little word and mind games . . . well, I'm sick of it, Todd. I'm sick of it and I don't have to put up with it anymore. I've made myself stronger than this, I've got a life that's not tangled up in yours any longer - and, living in the same town now or not, I don't see why I should change that."
With that, she lifted her foot and made to stalk away, but he caught her hand.
Her fingers threaded with his at once - seemingly on reflex, for next second she was attempting to pull away.
"Let go of me, you great useless - "
"What would be the point in anger?" he murmured.
She stopped flailing. He met her eyes and waited.
"I - well, I don't know, love," she said. "But you very nearly tossed me into a sodding oven God knows how many years ago 'cause of that anger of yours, and if you hadn't been distracted by Toby lifting the sewer grate, I think you would've gone ahead and done the deed, so I just don't see what's caused the sudden attitude shift - "
"Thank you," he interrupted her.
Her jumbled words halted as her brow furrowed and, for a long moment, she could only stare at him in silence.
He studied her hand in his: her skin was far more crinkled than it used to be, and it meshed with his own wrinkles as he pressed their hands together. Her touch, though, was the same: callused palms, long nails, spindly fingers; her grip, as always, an ambiguity: firm, careful, warm.
Frowning, she sank back onto the rock, their hands still folded together.
"Thank you - for what?" she asked.
Without knowing why, he bent his head and kissed each of her knuckles, one by one. Her natural fragrance, too, was the same: flour, coriander, smoke, cinnamon, a hint of blood beneath it all. Her hand quivered in his.
"For all that you taught me," he said. "To have the patience to wait. Not to overindulge. Wasting nothing I have. How life is for the alive." He paused. "And that it always goes on."
The fishing pole, still held firm in his left hand, quaked. At once he dropped her hand and clasped the pole, reeling in the line, fingers working faster than any man his age should have been able, and then -
"Sweet Jesus!" she yelped as a writhing fish appeared suddenly in the air before them and was thrown upon a net. It wriggled about, heaving and flopping, gills beating furiously, until it ceased altogether all at once like the grand, final note to a symphony.
Triumphant, he smiled at his catch.
The smile faded as his eyes stumbled into hers: Her expression was one of grave intensity again, and her lips were parted in the beginning of a question - but he did not want to hear whatever it might be. So, rare though it was for Sweeney Todd, he asked a question of his own:
"I can't eat this fish by myself. Care to join me for dinner tonight?"
Her lips puckered then opened in a different shape, the shape of either a fresh inquiry of her own, or an answer to his. He never found out which, for at that moment a new voice made itself heard:
"Nellie!"
Both of them turned their heads towards the holler: an elderly man with salt-and-pepper hair and a matching mustache stood some miles off in a low doorway, one arm waving in their direction. Sweeney could not tell from this distance, but from his cheerful, loving inflection, he guessed the man was smiling.
"I should go," she said, and, at his lifted brow, explained, "that's my husband."
His lips swerved into a smile. "And here I've been calling you Mrs. Lovett all this time. You should have told me you'd wed and changed your name, my dear."
"Oh, but I haven't changed my name, love," she replied with the devilish grin he remembered all too well.
He rolled his eyes. "You, a Lucy Stoner. I should have known."
"You should've," she agreed, still grinning, but as she got to her feet their eyes met and her grin fell away in a sudden fit of nameless uncertainties. "Well - I'm sure we'll see each other now and again, being neighbors and all - "
"I'm sure we will."
"But for now - g'bye, Mr. Todd."
"Good-bye, Mrs. Lovett."
She wiggled her fingers in farewell and flashed him a genuine grin before turning around and beginning the slow, unsteady dawdle of the elderly who should be using a cane and yet stoutly refuse to. Smiling, Sweeney gathered his fishing materials and his day's catch in his hands, then started towards home.
Fandom: Sweeney Todd
Characters: Sweeney Todd, Nellie Lovett
Prompt: #20 the road home
Word Count: 2530
Rating: PG-13/T
Summary: An alternate ending.
Disclaimer: All I own is a computer.
Come what may, time and the hour runs through the roughest day. - William Shakespeare
xxx
He loved fishing. There was no better way to dispose of a body than to use it as bait one piece at a time. Fish, as it turned out, devoured one another just as greedily as humans. He cast his line into the water and smiled: It would be lovely to have a piece of cod or herring on the dinner table tonight - perhaps even salmon.
"Haven't given up your old ways, I see."
He did not look at her as she approached. He merely watched from his peripheral vision as she seated herself upon a neighboring rock, tucking her arms around her legs and resting her chin against her knees.
"I never went fishing in London," he replied, lowering his line further into the choppy depths of the Pacific Ocean.
"Oh, don't act thick with me, Mr. Todd," she said. There was no anger to her tone, merely blithe resignation. "You know that never worked - and you know exactly what I'm talking about."
He raised an eyebrow at the water. "I don't, actually."
"Mmm. Perhaps I should've said, 'Haven't given up your old ways, I smell.'"
"You - you still remember the smell?" was all he could articulate.
She snorted. "'Course I still remember the smell. Had it rubbed into my skin like perfume for a year of my life, didn't I? I think I should know bloody well the stench of cooked human flesh - "
"Kindly keep your voice down," he implored mildly, watching the ocean waves bob beneath him. "I was merely expressing surprise. It was many years ago. Memory fades with age - as do many things."
"Clearly not that many," she said with an eye roll in the direction of his fishing line. "Not long ago enough for you to've forgotten your usual bloodthirsty habits."
"My barbershop in this town is quite reputable, Mrs. Lovett. Only the occasional miscreant receives - ahh - a bit too close of a shave."
"The 'occasional miscreant,' eh? How occasional is occasional?"
"Occasional enough for no one to bat an eyelid when someone does go missing," he returned matter-of-factly. "They are never people who will be missed - murderers, rapists, abusive husbands, men who had desecrated the privileges society'd granted them . . . this fellow was my first in three years . . ."
His fishing pole jerked forward: a fish had caught hold of the bait. Without hesitation, he began to reel in the line, pressing his jaws together to suppress a groan as the muscles in his arms grumbled: old age had stolen much of his strength.
And his speed too, apparently.
"Lovely," she proclaimed as the hook emerged from the water, empty of both fish and bait. "Absolutely marvelous."
He fitted a new bit of bait upon the hook. "I did not ask for a commentary, Mrs. Lovett."
"You never asked for anything much, love, but that's certainly never stopped me."
Her eyes roasted against the side of his face as he dipped his fishing line beneath the waves again, but he kept his gaze upon his task. The pair fell into a cradle of quiet. Never one to enjoy silence for long, however, she soon shattered it. For some reason, he found himself holding back at the familiarity of her chattering habit:
Come what may, time and the hour runs through the roughest day . . .
"You don't seem surprised to see me," she said.
"I saw you arrive in this town several days ago."
"And you didn't come and greet me like a proper neighbor? My goodness, Mr. T, where're your manners?"
When this jesting didn't earn any sort of reaction, she sobered again and said quietly, "You also don't seem angry to see me."
He twisted his lips into a smile. "Would you like me to be angry?"
"'Course not." He could practically hear the skin of her forehead wrinkling as she studied his profile. "I just don't understand why you're not. Mind you, I didn't come here with the intention of finding you - "
"Why did you come?"
"For God's sake, Mr. Todd - why d'you think?"
At an honest lose for an answer - and for once, desiring to hear one from her - he looked at her. It was the first time he had looked at her since she had perched upon the rock beside his. It was the first time he had looked at her in decades.
Age hasn't done her already-haggard appearance any favors: the pale flesh was now dashed with senile freckles and wrinkles; the angular bones sharp beneath the sagging skin; the undomesticated, rosewood-colored curls daubed with white. Yet there was a gleam in the smirking brown eyes, a light - life - that he had never seen before. It added youth to the wearied countenance; it revealed a glimmer of the vibrant spirit that lurked just beneath the timeworn body.
She looked back at him, exasperated.
"Why d'you think I came here?" she repeated, and then, realizing he could not answer, told him: "The sea, Mr. Todd."
Of course.
That's the life I covet . . .
His mouth creased in thought. Yes, he did indeed now live her coveted life by the sea - although why she coveted it so, he couldn't fathom. The ocean's waves were choppy and cold, far too cold for even dipping one's toes in; the sand so rough one could feel blisters suppurating from the moment their feet grazed the ground; and the smell - by God, the smell - he did not even want to begin to discuss the smell: that disgusting, fermenting odor of salted seaweed and decayed sea creatures that smeared itself on the skin like a disease and was just as difficult to eradicate from the flesh.
"Knew I'd make it out here eventually," Nellie continued, oblivious to his disdain, her eyes shinning with what he could not see. "Was only a matter of time, really. Been in Colorado for some time - bone-dry as a place could be, it is. Anyway, this seemed like as good a time as any to finally live my old fantasy, since the grandkids liked the idea of being on the coast - "
"The grandkids?" he found himself repeating foolishly. "Your grandkids?"
"Well, not mine by birth," she muttered.
"Toby's children?"
"No," she said, voice flat, punctuating her sentence much sooner than her long-winded babble usually permitted, and he knew not to question further on this particular subject.
"How long have you been in America?" he asked instead.
"Long as you have, love." At his questioning look: "I trailed the ship you boarded that night."
He knew 'that night' referred to the evening in the bakehouse; the evening of bloodied hands and unclothed secrets and murder upon body and soul; the evening of pain, raw and throbbing, pain, too much pain, so much pain it had seemed at the time as though it would never end or even lessen . . .
"I took the boat leaving for America the very next day," she went on. "I don't know how I was thinking I'd find you once I got here - who I'd ask or what documents I'd search - then again, I don't think I was thinking much at all when I boarded. . . . Anyway, when I arrived with vague designs to trail after you, I'd no clue where you'd went. So I had to make my own path."
Her lips, more cracked than they once were but still thin and pink and - probably still very warm, he found himself thinking, but stopped that thought cold - warped into a congealed smile. "And somehow, decades later, that same damned path's led me right back where I started."
The fishing line jerked; he snapped to attention and pulled it in as fast as he could, but his efforts, yet again, were for naught: the fish had stolen his bait and fled. Aged face pleating into a frown, he fitted a new piece of human meat upon the hook and cast it into the water.
"What about you?" Nellie asked. "How'd you wind up here? And why?"
He shrugged. "I knew I needed to leave London before the police cottoned on to our joint businesses - which they were bound to do very soon, considering the evidence strewn about the place after that night. I boarded the first ship I could find, and it happened to be bound for America - New York, to be precise."
"But why come to Oregon?" she persisted.
"Why not?" he said. "It was merely where people with nothing but the clothes on their back and a burning need for a new life were going at the time."
She seemed to measure out her next words before she said them, weighing and calculating their value, the potential reactions they might receive: "And how is your new life here?"
How is your life after what I did to you? her aching silence whispered. How is your life after what you did to yourself?
"I have no complaints, Mrs. Lovett," he said, and she gave him a hard, swift look, searching for the lie in his face, but there was none to be found.
"You never answered my other question," she accused, after clearing her throat.
"I apologize, my dear, I didn't intend to not answer. My memory is not what it once was."
Her chin lifted, thrusting her stubborn jaw into the air. "I see no need for mockery, Mr. Todd."
"This isn't mockery. What was the question?"
"Why aren't you angry with me?"
He danced his fingers along his fishing pole, ran them along the smooth wood. It wasn't one of his razors, and certainly never would be. Nonetheless, it had proven a good friend over the years, and had remained strong, sturdy. Loyal.
"Mr. Todd?" she prompted, a dash of impatience in her tone. "You listening to me? Why aren't you angry? Don't tell me you've forgotten and forgiven everything that happened all those years ago?"
"Time heals all wounds," he replied buoyantly. "And a good deal of time has gone by since we resided on Fleet Street."
She shot to her feet so fast that his head snapped up in shock: how did such a frail little body manage to move so quickly?
"Haven't changed a bit," she snapped. "Still the same stupid habits, the same stupid ways - if you aren't listening to me, then you're just ignoring me, and if you aren't ignoring me, you're just playing little word and mind games . . . well, I'm sick of it, Todd. I'm sick of it and I don't have to put up with it anymore. I've made myself stronger than this, I've got a life that's not tangled up in yours any longer - and, living in the same town now or not, I don't see why I should change that."
With that, she lifted her foot and made to stalk away, but he caught her hand.
Her fingers threaded with his at once - seemingly on reflex, for next second she was attempting to pull away.
"Let go of me, you great useless - "
"What would be the point in anger?" he murmured.
She stopped flailing. He met her eyes and waited.
"I - well, I don't know, love," she said. "But you very nearly tossed me into a sodding oven God knows how many years ago 'cause of that anger of yours, and if you hadn't been distracted by Toby lifting the sewer grate, I think you would've gone ahead and done the deed, so I just don't see what's caused the sudden attitude shift - "
"Thank you," he interrupted her.
Her jumbled words halted as her brow furrowed and, for a long moment, she could only stare at him in silence.
He studied her hand in his: her skin was far more crinkled than it used to be, and it meshed with his own wrinkles as he pressed their hands together. Her touch, though, was the same: callused palms, long nails, spindly fingers; her grip, as always, an ambiguity: firm, careful, warm.
Frowning, she sank back onto the rock, their hands still folded together.
"Thank you - for what?" she asked.
Without knowing why, he bent his head and kissed each of her knuckles, one by one. Her natural fragrance, too, was the same: flour, coriander, smoke, cinnamon, a hint of blood beneath it all. Her hand quivered in his.
"For all that you taught me," he said. "To have the patience to wait. Not to overindulge. Wasting nothing I have. How life is for the alive." He paused. "And that it always goes on."
The fishing pole, still held firm in his left hand, quaked. At once he dropped her hand and clasped the pole, reeling in the line, fingers working faster than any man his age should have been able, and then -
"Sweet Jesus!" she yelped as a writhing fish appeared suddenly in the air before them and was thrown upon a net. It wriggled about, heaving and flopping, gills beating furiously, until it ceased altogether all at once like the grand, final note to a symphony.
Triumphant, he smiled at his catch.
The smile faded as his eyes stumbled into hers: Her expression was one of grave intensity again, and her lips were parted in the beginning of a question - but he did not want to hear whatever it might be. So, rare though it was for Sweeney Todd, he asked a question of his own:
"I can't eat this fish by myself. Care to join me for dinner tonight?"
Her lips puckered then opened in a different shape, the shape of either a fresh inquiry of her own, or an answer to his. He never found out which, for at that moment a new voice made itself heard:
"Nellie!"
Both of them turned their heads towards the holler: an elderly man with salt-and-pepper hair and a matching mustache stood some miles off in a low doorway, one arm waving in their direction. Sweeney could not tell from this distance, but from his cheerful, loving inflection, he guessed the man was smiling.
"I should go," she said, and, at his lifted brow, explained, "that's my husband."
His lips swerved into a smile. "And here I've been calling you Mrs. Lovett all this time. You should have told me you'd wed and changed your name, my dear."
"Oh, but I haven't changed my name, love," she replied with the devilish grin he remembered all too well.
He rolled his eyes. "You, a Lucy Stoner. I should have known."
"You should've," she agreed, still grinning, but as she got to her feet their eyes met and her grin fell away in a sudden fit of nameless uncertainties. "Well - I'm sure we'll see each other now and again, being neighbors and all - "
"I'm sure we will."
"But for now - g'bye, Mr. Todd."
"Good-bye, Mrs. Lovett."
She wiggled her fingers in farewell and flashed him a genuine grin before turning around and beginning the slow, unsteady dawdle of the elderly who should be using a cane and yet stoutly refuse to. Smiling, Sweeney gathered his fishing materials and his day's catch in his hands, then started towards home.