Disclaimer: Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is owned by Christopher Bond, Stephen Sondheim, Hugh Wheeler, Dreamworks, Tim Burton, et al. I'm just a poor college student playing with these characters for my own amusement. Used without permission and not for profit.
Even You, Mrs. Lovett,
Even I
by
misaoshiru
He would not, could not admit that he loved her. Not even – Hell, least of all – to himself.
If this even was love. It was so different from how he'd felt for his Lucy. So different from anything.
Maybe because he was so different from how he'd been back when Lucy was around. He had changed. Drastically and painfully, dangerously, and so very wonderfully changed.
And yet he didn't know his own mind anymore. He wanted his Lucy back, of course. He wanted vengeance. He wanted death's release. He wanted to believe that Mrs. Lovett's fantasies of living by the sea were possibilities rather than simple, wild fancies of a naïve baker, if only for her sake. And he wanted to kill anyone and everyone, because there was no man in London who deserved to live - no man in the entire human race.
So why was she filed in one of the deepest corners of his ravaged mind as perhaps the one human worth saving?
The betrayal hurt. No, it did more than that. It stole from him what little happiness he had left, the hard-earned glee at having rid the world of that bastard Turpin once and for all. Lucy had been alive all along.
Lucy had been alive.
Lucy – his Lucy – had been alive.
Lucy had been alive. Now, no more.
And that bitch – that bitch, lied to him. A lie by omission was as bad as any. She sinned. She deserved death, just like the rest. Just like him.
It took almost more control than he had to lock away his emotions and pretend he forgave her and was willing to let things be. There were more emotions than he knew – grief and sorrow for Lucy, and wrath that burned at him like the flames of Hell, to be sure, were feelings he knew quite well, but also that obnoxious emotion called guilt that he thought he'd surpassed long ago, even before he killed that idiot Pirelli.
He felt no joy in watching her burn, even if he smiled grimly. He felt many other emotions, but they were ignored as he went back to hold Lucy, waiting, ever waiting, for death's embrace.
We all deserve to die. No one – no, no one – more than I.
"There was a barber and his wife..."