Meaningless drabble I wrote in like an hour during study hall, when I should have been doing English homework. It's pretty much Sweeney angsting about life in general.
Time had little meaning for a man like Sweeney Todd. Days melted into each other, the flow of endless empty hours broken only by the brief periods of restless sleep the barber might obtain when he was too exhausted even to maintain his otherwise constant vigil by the window. Thoughts of revenge were second nature to him now, an unconscious habit he used to fill all that endless, meaningless time. Even the constant ticking of the grandfather clock in the corner was not enough to anchor him to reality, or give him a sense of the hours as they passed. He drifted from day to day on a sea of blood, only semi-aware of the world around him. He couldn't say whether it had been weeks, months, or even years since that fateful day when he had stepped back into Mrs Lovett's pie shop, back into his old life. He could only say how many men he had sent sputtering to their deaths since then.
As he pondered those men- his victims, he supposed- it occurred to him that Benjamin Barker would have been horrified at this new version of himself- a murderer, completely numb to the pain of the people whose throats he had grown so used to slashing. But Sweeney Todd felt none of this revulsion. To him, his customers were nothing but shells, vessels of blood waiting to be spilled. Now that he thought about it, he couldn't even really see their faces. This realization shook Mr Todd, startled him a little. No matter how hard he concentrated, he couldn't remember any of their faces. He could recall other details- a folded collar, stringy grey hair, the impatient tapping of a foot as Sweeney would pause, gazing adoringly at his shimmering friend, but when he got to their faces, the barber's mind would go blank. It was as though they had never even had faces to begin with.
Now that he came to it, Mr Todd thought, he didn't know if he could remember what anyone's face looked like anymore. The judge, sitting smugly in that wretched courthouse, was a faceless black smudge of hate in his memory. The sailor boy, Anthony, was young, hopeful figure, but his features reflected none of this, for in Mr Todd's mind, he had none. Even Johanna, a swaddled babe, had nothing but a blur where her face should be. And Lucy… he must remember Lucy… He saw the yellow hair, the petal-pink dress, but, like a photograph that had been gone over with loving fingers too many times, her face was entirely worn away.
No! In a panic, Mr Todd rushed to the mantle where he knew the portrait of his beloved wife and daughter would be. He stared at it as hard as he could, trying to memorize that image from his past. And though he could see Lucy's features, he calm smile, her innocent eyes, they didn't seem to make a complete face, like puzzle pieces that didn't fit together. They were empty.
Horrified, Mr Todd sank into his barber's chair, his eyes no longer seeing anything at all. The world was a black pit, filled with all the people he love, and those he hated, and those he didn't know- all of them reduced to faceless monsters. Mr Todd closed his eyes. He couldn't see any of them anymore, except-
"Mr T?"
Mrs Lovett. Almost afraid of what her might see, Todd looked up, looked at her face. Her eyes, large and dark, looked even bigger ringed with makeup and circles of exhaustion; her pale skin almost glowed in the gloom, surrounded by tangled dark brown curls. Her plum-coloured mouth curved into a smile of tentative bemusement. Sweeney smiled back, and was delighted to see his expression of joy and relief mirrored on his accomplice's face. Her face. Yes, Mr Todd thought, Mrs Lovett had a face.