ST Kisses #6 Space Between Dream and Reality
Title: You Win
Author: hlfbldprincess
Pairing: Sweeney Todd/Nellie Lovett
Rating: T
Fandom: Sweeney Todd
Prompt 30 Kisses #6: space between dream and reality.
Word Count: 2,580
Disclaimer: All I own is a computer.
"Ain't you going to come up here and get me, Mr. T?"
Sweeney jerked his head upward. His breath stuck in his throat and he had to push it in and out sharply before he could utter a word: "Mrs. Lovett - what the hell're you - "
"Well, either you come up here," she said, giggling as she swung her legs back and forth, "or you catch me when I jump. It's a simple choice, really."
Sweeney stood at the base of a willow tree. The willow sat upon the edge of a cliff that plunged off into nothing, nothing but the ocean waves miles and miles below.
And Nellie Lovett perched atop one of the tree's tallest branches.
"But I really don't think the second choice - you catching me, I mean - is a good idea," she continued with the air of a diplomat, coolly collected about the subject at hand, as if it had no personal impact upon her.
Her legs swung like pendulums over the water and her pale skin glowed beneath sun rays made silver by scheming storm clouds. She placed her hands on the bough she sat upon and leaned backwards leisurely, her chin tipping down to allow her eyes to meet his, red curls dangling across her face with the same haphazard insistency as her willow.
He shoved another breath through his nose.
"Not that I don't fancy you strong and capable enough to catch me, love." Lovett's words floated through the airs like bubbles, light and easy, a maddening paradox to the barrage in his head. "Only it's a pretty far fall and such a distance'd add a lot of strain - y'know, gravity and acceleration and whatever."
Her left leg, still swinging alongside its companion, began to twist around, ankle rolling, toes churning, until the shoe was set free. It fell into the ocean, rotating like a pinwheel in its descent.
He would not show emotion. He would remain indifferent. She wasn't serious. She was only doing this to get a reaction from him - and if there was anything Sweeney Todd hated in this world, it was giving Nellie Lovett what she wanted.
"What are you doing up there?" he asked without inflection.
"Isn't it obvious?" Her left leg resumed its normal swinging pace; her right leg began to wiggle, gyrating in her hip socket. "I'm taking a plunge."
"The fall will kill you," said Sweeney matter-of-factly.
She slanted further back, curls dancing like flames over her eyes. "Yes," she agreed, observing the space between she and the ocean, "yes, it would."
He forced his clenched fingers to relax. She was horsing around, he reminded himself, she wouldn't actually jump, she only wanted him to get riled.
Besides, even if she were serious - why should he care what she did with her life? It wa her ife, after all, not his.
"Do you want to die, Mrs. Lovett?"
"Oh, I want to live, love, rest assured of that."
"So climb down."
"God, no!"
He tightened his jaw and squinted against the metallic rays of the sun into her face. She inclined back even further, body nearly parallel to the ground; he forcibly slammed air through his nostrils.
"If you fall," he said, "you'll die."
"See, I don't like your narrow-minded viewpoint there," said Lovett. She swerved backwards until her body no longer lay parallel to the ground but perpendicular, her skull reaching towards the ocean, her weeping willow tresses fanning over her beloved briny, and his mouth opened to shout despite that he could no longer breathe much less shout - but she didn't fall. She stayed put, head pointing to the water, hands and feet wrapped around her branch like a monkey.
"After all, whose to say I won't be any less alive after I die, hmm?" she queried buoyantly.
"There's no coming back from death."
"Never said there was, love."
Logic had abandoned the conversation, Sweeney concluded, lips a tight line across his face. "Mrs. Lovett, if you want to remain alive, climb down."
"Climb up here and get me."
"You obviously got up there - you can get down."
"Well, yeah, certainly can ndash; but I won't. Either you come get me, or . . ." She freed one hand momentarily to let a fingerless black glove plummet into the sea.
A cold panic settled over Sweeney like snow. She would not sacrifice one of her gloves only for show. This wasn't just her usual theatrical performance with no reality behind the staging. She was serious. She was going to kill herself.
His stomach knotted. Nellie Lovett, annoy him though she might, wasn't a dime a dozen; not many women would happily comply with a cannibalistic business partnership. Who would bake the pies to conceal his victims? Who would chop the men into little pieces and grind them up until they were tender and juicy? Who would toil up and down steep steps and slave over a boiling oven andlook at a monster like me with love in her eyes ndash;
"Don't be ridiculous," said Sweeney. "If I come up there and have to carry you down, I'll likely fall - and then we'll both kill ourselves."
"C'mon up, love - can't wait here all day," she said in a sing-song voice, as though she hadn't heard him, wavering back and forth from her upside-down position giddily, an exhilarated crimson flushing her cheeks.
"What difference does it make if I come get you or if you climb down yourself?" he demanded.
"All the difference," said Lovett, suddenly serious, blood and life pounding in her cheeks. "The difference of if you care enough to stop me from killing myself and forcing me to survive - or if you couldn't give a shit if I live or die."
He inhaled, slow and deep, letting the steady flow of oxygen calm him.
"Of course I'd give a shit if you killed yourself," he growled, carefully.
Her other glove dropped into the sea. "Prove it."
"Mrs. Lovett," houted Sweeney "we'd both die if I do."
Not that he valued his own life all that greatly - but he could not allow Lucy to go unavenged and Turpin to continue to walk free.
"Well, either way," said Lovett, swinging side to side, the moment of solemnity dissipated into insouciant nonchalance again, "I win."
"What - "
"You try and catch me, or climb up to get me, then we both die - that proves you care. And then we both wind up in hell - together."
The wor togethe slid like chocolate from her lips, blissful, something to be savored. He shuddered.
"You don't try to catch me or come up this here tree," she continued, "then that proves you don't care - which I already know, of course . . . but even then, we still get to dwell in hell together - because there's no chance you'll ever join Lucy and her little angels in heaven."
Blood flooded his head and hammered against his temples, forging a sheen of red in front of his vision "How dare you - "
"How dare I what? Speak the truth?" She craned her neck backwards and threw him a grin: from where he stood, looking at her upside-down, her grin looked like a frown, corners stretching towards the sea. "So what'll it be, love?" She drummed her gloveless hands upon the branch. "Last call."
Sweeney curled his fingers into fists, nails stabbing into his palms, and shoved them inside his pockets. "The call is yours, Lovett. Not mine."
She shrugged. "As you say."
Her hands and her feet unpeeled from the branch and she fell - and despite his words, despite his vindictive joy at crushing her last hopes of he loving her, despite his immobile stance and his rigid demeanor and hi those eyes dammit those eyes please fuck no don't Jesus Christ don't let those eyes close for the last time ndash; despite all that, his legs surged forward to peer over the edge -
She was nowhere in sight.
He leaped off the cliff without pausing to consider how far away it was to the water, or how such a tumble would likely break his neck, or how he did not care what happened to her.
For a breathless moment, his body was airborne, his arms and legs outstretched like a bird, immobile, suspended in time and space -
Then he plummeted, the ocean rushing up to meet him, and slammed into the water.
The plunge knocked the breath out of him; he lay there for a long moment, sinking, gasping - but he could not simply lie there gasping, there was nothing to breathe with his nostrils and his mouth submerged in water - he needed to contain what little air he had, not search for more where none was to be found -
He held his remaining breath inside his lungs and squinted his eyes against the salty liquid. Fifteen feet away, a dark mass sank. Even in the murky depths, her willow tree tresses glowed like fire.
He dove for her, arms and legs fighting through the dense ocean water, airways aching, and grabbed her around the waist. She in his arms somehow made him airy, lighter: they floated upwards and broke the surface within moments. Swallowing large amounts of oxygen, he dragged both of their bodies to the shore.
"Alright, Lovett," he growled, throwing he and she upon the ground, shivering and shuddering, face pressed into the sand, wheezing into the grains, "I hope you're satisfied."
No answer.
He lifted his head to look at the form sprawled next to him:
Her body did not move. Her eyes did not open.
"Mrs. Lovett. Mrs. Lovett. Mrs. Lovett." Each call of her name aided a tap to the arm, a shake of the shoulder.
Each call went unheeded.
"Mrs. Lovett."
His air passages constricted as though they had again been submerged in water. His limbs felt heavy, bloated, water-logged, dead. Defeated.
"Mrs. Lovett!"
He poked and slapped and screamed through lungs that had withered long ago. She stayed stagnant, silent, the way he had so often wished she would be - ceasing to bother him, ceasing to press against him, touch him, kiss him, talk to him, insist he feed himself, try to make him human -
" - Mrs. Love - Lah - Lovett - !"
He couldn't breathe. He gasped, choked, pawed at the air. Breath wouldn't come. Or, if breath came, it refused to stay.
"Nellie . . ."
He bent his head and pressed his lips to hers, inhaling, slow and deep, gluttonous for any bit of oxygen left in her deceased lungs -
He reeled back, spluttering, as Lovett's eyes and mouth opened wide, cheerfully crooked teeth on display in a grotesque travesty of a smile.
"I win," she told him as he knelt there, shaking, gasping, uncomprehending.
Then she began to cackle, the laughter horrible and piercing and continuous. Her laughter reverberated in the grains of sand, in his limbs. He covered his ears and tightened his muscles but still the volume increased, the reverberating increased, the echoin "I win" nd the grinning mouth and the eyes wide open but dead forever, her eyes dead forever, those eyes that dared to look at the beauty inside him that not even he could see dead forever -
Sweeney's eyes bolted open and his body bolted upright.
His barbershop ceiling hung above him. His bedcovers lay puddled on the floor. His pillow rested atop the heap of blankets. His clothes clung to his physique with sweat.
He did not sleep the rest of the night. Not for lack of trying. He couldn't.
He should have known it was a dream from the start: the lack of explanation for how either of them had ended up at such a place, or why a tree would sit upon the edge of a cliff, or how scrawny little Mrs. Lovett had climbed that high in the first place; the disregard for reality in terms of neither of their necks breaking in the plunge, or his lungs not bursting from lack of oxygen within the ocean.
The dream shouldn't disturb him. He knew that. He knew that, because he knew he wouldn't care if Lovett died; she was as dispensable as the rest. Yet each time he again closed his eyes, there was her mouth, grinning, as wide as a jack-o-lantern's, as painfully bright as the sun's.
He felt like a fool. No, he was a fool. What but a fool would allow himself to be so agitated by a mere dream? What but a fool would not have recognized that such ridiculous scenery, such a ridiculous situation, and most of all such ridiculous emotions, were not real?
He did not receive any customers the next day. He did not accept any food from Lovett and she did not allow him to drink any ale or gin if he refused to eat, so he went without nourishment for well over twelve hours.
Finally, as the moon began to rise into the dark sky, he could stand it no longer, and clomped down his stairs into her shop.
From where she stood at the sink with Toby, she yelped, "I win!"
In the doorway, Sweeney's body became paralyzed.
Her eyes swung towards the door, pupils dancing with mischievous glee and curls of fire dancing with vitality. A smile appeared on her face when she saw her tenant. Toby, looking once at Sweeney and then at Lovett, frowned, then left the room in annoyance.
"Why, hello there, love," said Nellie Lovett as he approached. "Nice to see you again. I'm guessing you've finally relented and're wanting something to eat - "
His fingers seizing her wrist cut her words short with a gasp. Her dancing eyes stilled and darkened; her dancing curls became arrested in place, in disarray all about her head, one lock apprehended upon the bridge of her nose, just between her two eyes.
He leaned towards her, their noses less than an inch apart, close enough for a kiss.
"You win what?" he hissed.
"Just . . ." Her eyes resumed dancing, but not with glee. "Just me and Toby playing a game - we always play little games while we clean up for the night and he didn't - I finished washing my stack of dishes before he did, is all - that's all I won . . ."
Her mouth pulled into a grin, tentative but firm, lips parted slightly to reveal the edges of cheerfully crooked teeth, yearning for him to grin with her, be happy with her.
"Well, actually," she told him, "I always win."
Sweeney threw her arm from him but kept his face near hers, near enough for her to feel the whispered words on her lips louder than she could hear them:
"You wil never in."
Then he jerked back from her - face twisting to the side, spine twisting like a snake so his torso hovered perpendicular to his hips rather than parallel, everything twisting away from her as though slapped by the words she had not spoken - and bolted from her shop.
His feet thundered on the steps as he raced against no one back to his shop, pounding through his body and within the walls of the room where he had left her, where she still stood.
Her face remained turned towards where he no longer stood; her lips remained parted in the forgotten remembrance of a grin.
"I know, love," she whispered. "Neither of us can win. But we're both still playing."
Author: hlfbldprincess
Pairing: Sweeney Todd/Nellie Lovett
Rating: T
Fandom: Sweeney Todd
Prompt 30 Kisses #6: space between dream and reality.
Word Count: 2,580
Disclaimer: All I own is a computer.
"Ain't you going to come up here and get me, Mr. T?"
Sweeney jerked his head upward. His breath stuck in his throat and he had to push it in and out sharply before he could utter a word: "Mrs. Lovett - what the hell're you - "
"Well, either you come up here," she said, giggling as she swung her legs back and forth, "or you catch me when I jump. It's a simple choice, really."
Sweeney stood at the base of a willow tree. The willow sat upon the edge of a cliff that plunged off into nothing, nothing but the ocean waves miles and miles below.
And Nellie Lovett perched atop one of the tree's tallest branches.
"But I really don't think the second choice - you catching me, I mean - is a good idea," she continued with the air of a diplomat, coolly collected about the subject at hand, as if it had no personal impact upon her.
Her legs swung like pendulums over the water and her pale skin glowed beneath sun rays made silver by scheming storm clouds. She placed her hands on the bough she sat upon and leaned backwards leisurely, her chin tipping down to allow her eyes to meet his, red curls dangling across her face with the same haphazard insistency as her willow.
He shoved another breath through his nose.
"Not that I don't fancy you strong and capable enough to catch me, love." Lovett's words floated through the airs like bubbles, light and easy, a maddening paradox to the barrage in his head. "Only it's a pretty far fall and such a distance'd add a lot of strain - y'know, gravity and acceleration and whatever."
Her left leg, still swinging alongside its companion, began to twist around, ankle rolling, toes churning, until the shoe was set free. It fell into the ocean, rotating like a pinwheel in its descent.
He would not show emotion. He would remain indifferent. She wasn't serious. She was only doing this to get a reaction from him - and if there was anything Sweeney Todd hated in this world, it was giving Nellie Lovett what she wanted.
"What are you doing up there?" he asked without inflection.
"Isn't it obvious?" Her left leg resumed its normal swinging pace; her right leg began to wiggle, gyrating in her hip socket. "I'm taking a plunge."
"The fall will kill you," said Sweeney matter-of-factly.
She slanted further back, curls dancing like flames over her eyes. "Yes," she agreed, observing the space between she and the ocean, "yes, it would."
He forced his clenched fingers to relax. She was horsing around, he reminded himself, she wouldn't actually jump, she only wanted him to get riled.
Besides, even if she were serious - why should he care what she did with her life? It wa her ife, after all, not his.
"Do you want to die, Mrs. Lovett?"
"Oh, I want to live, love, rest assured of that."
"So climb down."
"God, no!"
He tightened his jaw and squinted against the metallic rays of the sun into her face. She inclined back even further, body nearly parallel to the ground; he forcibly slammed air through his nostrils.
"If you fall," he said, "you'll die."
"See, I don't like your narrow-minded viewpoint there," said Lovett. She swerved backwards until her body no longer lay parallel to the ground but perpendicular, her skull reaching towards the ocean, her weeping willow tresses fanning over her beloved briny, and his mouth opened to shout despite that he could no longer breathe much less shout - but she didn't fall. She stayed put, head pointing to the water, hands and feet wrapped around her branch like a monkey.
"After all, whose to say I won't be any less alive after I die, hmm?" she queried buoyantly.
"There's no coming back from death."
"Never said there was, love."
Logic had abandoned the conversation, Sweeney concluded, lips a tight line across his face. "Mrs. Lovett, if you want to remain alive, climb down."
"Climb up here and get me."
"You obviously got up there - you can get down."
"Well, yeah, certainly can ndash; but I won't. Either you come get me, or . . ." She freed one hand momentarily to let a fingerless black glove plummet into the sea.
A cold panic settled over Sweeney like snow. She would not sacrifice one of her gloves only for show. This wasn't just her usual theatrical performance with no reality behind the staging. She was serious. She was going to kill herself.
His stomach knotted. Nellie Lovett, annoy him though she might, wasn't a dime a dozen; not many women would happily comply with a cannibalistic business partnership. Who would bake the pies to conceal his victims? Who would chop the men into little pieces and grind them up until they were tender and juicy? Who would toil up and down steep steps and slave over a boiling oven andlook at a monster like me with love in her eyes ndash;
"Don't be ridiculous," said Sweeney. "If I come up there and have to carry you down, I'll likely fall - and then we'll both kill ourselves."
"C'mon up, love - can't wait here all day," she said in a sing-song voice, as though she hadn't heard him, wavering back and forth from her upside-down position giddily, an exhilarated crimson flushing her cheeks.
"What difference does it make if I come get you or if you climb down yourself?" he demanded.
"All the difference," said Lovett, suddenly serious, blood and life pounding in her cheeks. "The difference of if you care enough to stop me from killing myself and forcing me to survive - or if you couldn't give a shit if I live or die."
He inhaled, slow and deep, letting the steady flow of oxygen calm him.
"Of course I'd give a shit if you killed yourself," he growled, carefully.
Her other glove dropped into the sea. "Prove it."
"Mrs. Lovett," houted Sweeney "we'd both die if I do."
Not that he valued his own life all that greatly - but he could not allow Lucy to go unavenged and Turpin to continue to walk free.
"Well, either way," said Lovett, swinging side to side, the moment of solemnity dissipated into insouciant nonchalance again, "I win."
"What - "
"You try and catch me, or climb up to get me, then we both die - that proves you care. And then we both wind up in hell - together."
The wor togethe slid like chocolate from her lips, blissful, something to be savored. He shuddered.
"You don't try to catch me or come up this here tree," she continued, "then that proves you don't care - which I already know, of course . . . but even then, we still get to dwell in hell together - because there's no chance you'll ever join Lucy and her little angels in heaven."
Blood flooded his head and hammered against his temples, forging a sheen of red in front of his vision "How dare you - "
"How dare I what? Speak the truth?" She craned her neck backwards and threw him a grin: from where he stood, looking at her upside-down, her grin looked like a frown, corners stretching towards the sea. "So what'll it be, love?" She drummed her gloveless hands upon the branch. "Last call."
Sweeney curled his fingers into fists, nails stabbing into his palms, and shoved them inside his pockets. "The call is yours, Lovett. Not mine."
She shrugged. "As you say."
Her hands and her feet unpeeled from the branch and she fell - and despite his words, despite his vindictive joy at crushing her last hopes of he loving her, despite his immobile stance and his rigid demeanor and hi those eyes dammit those eyes please fuck no don't Jesus Christ don't let those eyes close for the last time ndash; despite all that, his legs surged forward to peer over the edge -
She was nowhere in sight.
He leaped off the cliff without pausing to consider how far away it was to the water, or how such a tumble would likely break his neck, or how he did not care what happened to her.
For a breathless moment, his body was airborne, his arms and legs outstretched like a bird, immobile, suspended in time and space -
Then he plummeted, the ocean rushing up to meet him, and slammed into the water.
The plunge knocked the breath out of him; he lay there for a long moment, sinking, gasping - but he could not simply lie there gasping, there was nothing to breathe with his nostrils and his mouth submerged in water - he needed to contain what little air he had, not search for more where none was to be found -
He held his remaining breath inside his lungs and squinted his eyes against the salty liquid. Fifteen feet away, a dark mass sank. Even in the murky depths, her willow tree tresses glowed like fire.
He dove for her, arms and legs fighting through the dense ocean water, airways aching, and grabbed her around the waist. She in his arms somehow made him airy, lighter: they floated upwards and broke the surface within moments. Swallowing large amounts of oxygen, he dragged both of their bodies to the shore.
"Alright, Lovett," he growled, throwing he and she upon the ground, shivering and shuddering, face pressed into the sand, wheezing into the grains, "I hope you're satisfied."
No answer.
He lifted his head to look at the form sprawled next to him:
Her body did not move. Her eyes did not open.
"Mrs. Lovett. Mrs. Lovett. Mrs. Lovett." Each call of her name aided a tap to the arm, a shake of the shoulder.
Each call went unheeded.
"Mrs. Lovett."
His air passages constricted as though they had again been submerged in water. His limbs felt heavy, bloated, water-logged, dead. Defeated.
"Mrs. Lovett!"
He poked and slapped and screamed through lungs that had withered long ago. She stayed stagnant, silent, the way he had so often wished she would be - ceasing to bother him, ceasing to press against him, touch him, kiss him, talk to him, insist he feed himself, try to make him human -
" - Mrs. Love - Lah - Lovett - !"
He couldn't breathe. He gasped, choked, pawed at the air. Breath wouldn't come. Or, if breath came, it refused to stay.
"Nellie . . ."
He bent his head and pressed his lips to hers, inhaling, slow and deep, gluttonous for any bit of oxygen left in her deceased lungs -
He reeled back, spluttering, as Lovett's eyes and mouth opened wide, cheerfully crooked teeth on display in a grotesque travesty of a smile.
"I win," she told him as he knelt there, shaking, gasping, uncomprehending.
Then she began to cackle, the laughter horrible and piercing and continuous. Her laughter reverberated in the grains of sand, in his limbs. He covered his ears and tightened his muscles but still the volume increased, the reverberating increased, the echoin "I win" nd the grinning mouth and the eyes wide open but dead forever, her eyes dead forever, those eyes that dared to look at the beauty inside him that not even he could see dead forever -
Sweeney's eyes bolted open and his body bolted upright.
His barbershop ceiling hung above him. His bedcovers lay puddled on the floor. His pillow rested atop the heap of blankets. His clothes clung to his physique with sweat.
He did not sleep the rest of the night. Not for lack of trying. He couldn't.
He should have known it was a dream from the start: the lack of explanation for how either of them had ended up at such a place, or why a tree would sit upon the edge of a cliff, or how scrawny little Mrs. Lovett had climbed that high in the first place; the disregard for reality in terms of neither of their necks breaking in the plunge, or his lungs not bursting from lack of oxygen within the ocean.
The dream shouldn't disturb him. He knew that. He knew that, because he knew he wouldn't care if Lovett died; she was as dispensable as the rest. Yet each time he again closed his eyes, there was her mouth, grinning, as wide as a jack-o-lantern's, as painfully bright as the sun's.
He felt like a fool. No, he was a fool. What but a fool would allow himself to be so agitated by a mere dream? What but a fool would not have recognized that such ridiculous scenery, such a ridiculous situation, and most of all such ridiculous emotions, were not real?
He did not receive any customers the next day. He did not accept any food from Lovett and she did not allow him to drink any ale or gin if he refused to eat, so he went without nourishment for well over twelve hours.
Finally, as the moon began to rise into the dark sky, he could stand it no longer, and clomped down his stairs into her shop.
From where she stood at the sink with Toby, she yelped, "I win!"
In the doorway, Sweeney's body became paralyzed.
Her eyes swung towards the door, pupils dancing with mischievous glee and curls of fire dancing with vitality. A smile appeared on her face when she saw her tenant. Toby, looking once at Sweeney and then at Lovett, frowned, then left the room in annoyance.
"Why, hello there, love," said Nellie Lovett as he approached. "Nice to see you again. I'm guessing you've finally relented and're wanting something to eat - "
His fingers seizing her wrist cut her words short with a gasp. Her dancing eyes stilled and darkened; her dancing curls became arrested in place, in disarray all about her head, one lock apprehended upon the bridge of her nose, just between her two eyes.
He leaned towards her, their noses less than an inch apart, close enough for a kiss.
"You win what?" he hissed.
"Just . . ." Her eyes resumed dancing, but not with glee. "Just me and Toby playing a game - we always play little games while we clean up for the night and he didn't - I finished washing my stack of dishes before he did, is all - that's all I won . . ."
Her mouth pulled into a grin, tentative but firm, lips parted slightly to reveal the edges of cheerfully crooked teeth, yearning for him to grin with her, be happy with her.
"Well, actually," she told him, "I always win."
Sweeney threw her arm from him but kept his face near hers, near enough for her to feel the whispered words on her lips louder than she could hear them:
"You wil never in."
Then he jerked back from her - face twisting to the side, spine twisting like a snake so his torso hovered perpendicular to his hips rather than parallel, everything twisting away from her as though slapped by the words she had not spoken - and bolted from her shop.
His feet thundered on the steps as he raced against no one back to his shop, pounding through his body and within the walls of the room where he had left her, where she still stood.
Her face remained turned towards where he no longer stood; her lips remained parted in the forgotten remembrance of a grin.
"I know, love," she whispered. "Neither of us can win. But we're both still playing."