O Mistress Mine

even a small love ;

Sweeney Todd felt something akin to guilt fogging over the slight, unwelcome twinge of comfort that being nestled against Mrs. Lovett brought him. The patterned wallpaper looked down at him accusingly, every rose a mocking eye of God. Nellie's breath was warm on his ear, the stench of alcohol floating thickly into his nose. He shifted as much as he dared, scooting upwards and letting her head fall heavy onto his chest. Her corkscrew curls fanned out over his nightshirt and her bare shoulders like some lion's wild mane. The black fabric of her nightgown was cool and soft against his skin, a stark contrast the heat that radiated from her limp body. It amazed him that she had not awakened. It amazed him further still that he had not excused himself from the confines of her bed and her grip.

He hated that she was warm, that she was something of a bird, small and light and graceful in a way that he had shut his eyes against before. Mrs. Lovett's makeup streaked in thick black trails down her face. Her eyelashes rested on her cheeks like spider's legs. Like feathers. She was a great deal less repulsive than he had tried to make her out to be. He hated that, too.

Sweeney had left the lamp on the bedside table burning, intending to snuff it out once he had managed to get his landlady settled. He thought that perhaps if he could reach it, he could plunge the room into darkness and pretend he was alone, but it was too far away for him to do anything about it now. His eyes searched through the dim light for something, anything that might keep his eyes off the reality of the woman cast in oil-painting yellows and oranges against his chest. He could see their reflection in the mirror of Nellie's bureau, two strange, disjointed little shapes huddled together in a world they did not seem to belong to. Mrs. Lovett's bedspread was white and lace and frills, and he found himself wondering just where she had managed to snag it from. It was certainly not something she would have been able to afford, and her late husband was not the type of man given to spending money on extravagant things for his wife. It was something Lucy might have liked.

Or maybe she wouldn't have liked it at all. Her face had become a pink blur, a splotch of paint on some canvas he had looked at once and struggled to call to mind. Sometimes Sweeney might see a swish of a light-colored skirt, but it was never enough, like grasping at the wind and coming away obviously empty-handed. She had yellow hair. Yellow hair. Even standing upstairs, feet settled heavily in the grooves that Lucy had worn in the squeaking floorboards all those years ago, he could not picture her clearly. The photograph of her that he kept on the bureau did not look like her, somehow. 

Nellie made a low, strangled noise like a sigh and a snore trapped in the hollow of her throat where she had often begged him to press his lips, and he jumped just enough to consider it terribly embarrassing. Sweeney Todd was not a man who went out of his way to comfort anyone, least of all his absolutely insufferable neighbor.

But the sight of her slumped at the stiff booth in her darkened shop, empty bottle of gin tipped onto the table by her hand, had ignited some pitiful, foreign spark of understanding in him. Something deep and foreign and long-unused inside him had softened, pooled to mush in the hollow between his ribs. He had been a drunk, too. By all accounts, he was still a drunk. She could have been his shadow, her back curved and her head on the worn-smooth wood of the table. Perhaps, he mused, she had always had a tendency towards alcohol and just been better at stuffing it carefully away in the back of the wardrobe. Albert had certainly been terrible enough to warrant it.

Mrs. Lovett shifted and pinned his arm beneath her small frame. He tried to wriggle it free without waking her, but her face creased slightly and he thought better of it. She was terrible enough sober; the last thing he wanted was for her to awaken to find herself tangled beside him and get some silly notion in her head about what had transpired. About what might transpire. If Nellie awoke, she would likely press her face into his neck or try to kiss his ears. While it was true that he had come creeping into her bed once or twice, just to appease her, he had never stayed. Not once. Not even when once or twice turned into three or four or five times.

Even that had been enough to make him feel uneasy. He needed to keep her appeased, to placate her enough that she would not dream of straying from him and taking with her the grisly knowledge of all they'd done. He had needs, as did any man - perhaps even more so, fifteen years' worth of needs all piling atop each other and sitting in a hot lump in the very pit of his empty stomach - but every crack in the wallpaper, every pinprick of light in the room was Lucy watching and scolding and cursing him. She was dead, had been dead for fifteen years, but her ghost wrapped itself heavily around his stooped shoulders. Lately, Sweeney had found himself wanting to shrug it off at the door like a wet coat, to leave it outside but it lingered in a fog.

He could not deny that Nellie had been an attractive woman. She still was, dark and morose though she had grown. She was still the same woman who'd had men flocking to her flour-dusted pie counter in those early days, wolfing down pies in hopes she'd grace them with a smile. To find her shop in such a taste of absolute disrepair had been a hard shock, but seeing the woman herself after all those timeless years was a five-fingered closed fist to the bump in his hooked nose. He had pretended not to notice, but he had noticed quite a bit, even when he'd lived above her. He had noticed her curls, her lace frilled dresses, the soft curves of her filling the doorway and darkening the parlor.

The youthful spark had dwindled somewhere behind her big brown eyes, but it was not dead. She bloomed like some odd little flower when she talked, all hands and gestures and words running one into another like she could not get them out fast enough. It was terribly annoying most days, stretching his already-thin nerves dangerously close to their snapping point, though on the rare occasions she was sullen and sulking, her silence was worse than anything that might have bubbled from her lips.

"Mis'er T?" Her breath was warm against his face, reeking of sleep and alcohol. Sweeney wrinkled his nose, twisting his pointed face into a well-made disguise. He wished desperately that he had turned out the lamp. Her eyes were bleary, webbed with little red veins reaching like the bare branches of trees in winter. She regarded him suspiciously, her face poised in skeptical wait for the inevitable crush of his hands pushing her away. Sweeney seriously considered leaping from the tangle of the sheets. She did not need him here. He had no reason to stay. His heart squeezed and he cursed the fist-sized muscle. He wondered if his landlady had felt the stop-start of his pulse, the telltale quickening of his heart that he silently willed to just stop completely. 

"Go to sleep," he said, more gruffly than he had intended, but she let her eyes droop closed without another word, without a ghost of still-drunk protest. The night draped itself around them in great velvety swoops, blanketing them in stars and city smog.