Sweeney's Willow (Sweeney Todd)

- Chapter Ten: A Moment -

The room is silent; peaceful even, yet Cora finds herself unable to sleep, unable to relax against the softness of the mattress in which she lays upon. Her eyes burn from exhaustion whilst her mind reels with thoughts that continue to plague her from a deep and frightful place within herself. She can barely contain a frustrated groan when she lifts her pillow from behind her head to clamp it down on her face, allowing her annoyance to seep from her every pore. This was not how she had expected to be spending her nights here in London – lay in a small room on a bed far from as luxurious as her previous one back in France, plagued by the images of a murder committed by a man she finds herself captivated deeply by. A man she feels connected to from a personal place in her soul, a man she was sure she would do all she could to protect from the law – that alone was terrifying enough.

She should fear him, hate him and be disgusted by the mere thought of him, yet she does not. Instead, she wishes to ease his worries and the sadness ingrained in him from past heartbreaks and mistreating's. She wishes to help him be better, to rid him of the cloud of evil and darkness he fears he holds within himself. She wishes to teach him to love himself and grow as a man and human being.

But whether such things were possible by her hands was hard to say. She was one woman with a single heart of kindness and care to offer him, how big an impact could something so small have on a broken man such as Sweeney?

She shakes her head and slams the off-white coloured pillow against the mattress beside her head once more with a huff before sitting upright and turning to hang her bare legs off of the side of the single bed. She closes her eyes and inhales deeply to calm her raging emotions, willing her mind to silence long enough to allow her the rest she felt she deserved after a trying day such as the one she had had today. After all, it wasn't everyday a woman helped a man she had only known a few days hide the body of his murder victim.

"What are you doing here, Cora?" she asks herself in a whisper whilst peeling her eyes open with a heavy sigh before bringing her palms up to rub at her face.

She didn't know the exact answer to that question but she knew it had something to do with the dark man currently sleeping in the room above hers. She knew this because whenever her reasons for remaining in the shop arises, his face – his dark and alluring eyes form in her head, filling her with a sense of purpose and belonging that she for the life of her couldn't understand.

She once more allows a quiet sigh to slip between her lips as she rests her chin in her palm and turns her head slightly to look to her window, admiring the moonlight filtering through her tattered curtains to cast a shadow on her wooden floorboards. She smiles slightly and thinks of her brother, wondering what he would think of her now if he were to learn of her activities here in London, if he had seen the things, she had done earlier to protect Sweeney from being caught. If he were to find out miraculously of Mrs Lovett's and Sweeney's plans to use human meat in the pies to improve the shops business, the meat from the bodies of Sweeney's future murder victims.

How would he feel if she were to confess all these things to him, if she were to share with him that she was willingly assisting them in this dark scheme and had agreed to take extra shifts in the store to assist Mrs Lovett in making said pies because she really have nowhere else to go?

She had to assume that he would be disgusted by the sight of her, that he would cut all ties and forever hate her for her crimes against the men of London – not that she had intentionally involved herself in one but rather had allowed her emotions to drive her into covering a crime up. She wouldn't blame him for she had initially been revulsed by the idea of killing men and using their bodies for meat, nearly having thrown up the contents of her stomach on the spot when she had been informed by Mrs Lovett of the plan to do such a thing. She hadn't even batted an eye at the fact that Sweeney intended to kill again, to kill the men that had wronged his Lucy and forgotten his dear Johanna, having blocked it out till she could find justification for it.