Fanfic 100, 027. Parents.
Sep. 6th, 2006 12:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolevalanTitle: Homecoming
Fandom: Sweeney Todd
Characters: Johanna, Anthony, Beggar Woman, Turpin, Sweeney
Prompt: 027, Parents
Word Count: 2441
Rating: PG-13 for violence
Summary: Johanna sees more than she bargained for.
Author's Notes: Well, after almost 2 months of nothing, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised when this fic ran away with me, length-wise. I usually try not to just straight-out novelize bits of the musical, as I think it's really not the most interesting place to go in most cases, but I'd been wanting to do this point-of-view piece for a long while and seeing the revival made me finally sit down and write it. Note that, as with most of my fanfic, I did't attempt to make it particularly revival or original, stealing bits from both. The dialogue isn't mine, as I lifted it from the libretto.
The streets were on fire. Little patches of refuse were burning here and there, throwing shadows in odd and unexpected places, and even streets which should have been familiar…no, that wasn’t right, they were in a strange part of London. Or were they? He was taking her to the docks to be married. That was it. But there was no water, only flame. She clutched his hand tighter. Married on Sunday. He spared half a moment to smile reassuringly at her, but the look was twisted and warped by shadows, more a grimace than anything else. She bit down the urge to shriek.
There was yelling, and the sound of people running, but it was far away, behind them. She looked back, half expecting to turn to salt, but saw nothing but more flames and the imposing hulk of the buildings that looked poised on the edge of crumbling, crushing the two sailors running below. She was a sailor. No. He was a sailor, she was hiding. Hidden away, safe in a cage…
They stopped and slipped up a side staircase. Johanna breathed deeply, trying to clear her mind, to think in a straight line. But to smell the free, cool night air, even hidden in shadows, it made a part of her almost giddy. It was almost Sunday. Sunday…
The sailor (Anthony, she angrily chided herself. Anthony.) gave her a hand as he led her into the darkened chambers, though the lights from below filtered up through slats, half-lighting the empty space. She could feel more than see Anthony…her Anthony…frown beside her. “Mr. Todd?”
“No one here.” She tried to keep panic out of her voice, but if his plan didn’t work, they’d send her back to the cage and she couldn’t couldn’t couldn’t needed to sing she… “Where is this Mr. Todd?” Think, Johanna. Words. She was shaking under Anthony’s hand, like a bird with a broken wing, and she needed to make herself stop. She wrapped her arms around herself, hugging his coat.
He shook his head. “No matter.” He managed a reassuring smile, dim but no longer twisted. “He’ll be back in a moment, for I trust him as I trust my right arm.” The aforementioned arm gave her shoulder a squeeze, and for a moment, she almost panicked. He was going to lock her up too. New cage. Didn’t matter. The light from below sliced her pretty features, distorting them as she swallowed hard. “Now wait for him here. I’ll return with a coach in less than half an hour.”
Half an hour, crouching in the dark. Or worse, alone with this strange man who she only had Anthony’s word was good and kind. Anthony, who had come for her with a gun he couldn’t fire. She clenched her hands so they didn’t shake. “But they’re after us still, what if they trace us here?” What if? She knew what – back to the cage and snip snip to her hair and away with light and air and space and oh god… “Oh, Anthony, please let me come with you.” She turned into his chest, clutching him like the last plank of wood in a shipwreck as the world lurched around her.
His voice was gentle, but his words terrified her, even as his hand stroked her hair. “No, my darling, there’s no safety for you on the street.” She mutely shook her head. She couldn’t stay here by herself. If they came…she couldn’t shoot them all, and she could never fly that fast. “But dressed in these sailor’s clothes, who’s to know it is I?” At his side, at least she was less likely to be questioned. To be snared.
“No, the risk is too great.” He pulled back long enough to meet her eyes, his own glinting softly in the half-light. “Ah, miss…” He kissed her forehead, then gently her lips. Despite everything, she returned it, the relief of a touch, any touch, with nothing behind it making her relax a little, smiling despite herself as she remembered the sweet words he’d said when they met. Married on Sunday… “And I’ll be back before those lips have time to loose that smile.” He smiled widely, reassuringly, and slipped out of her arms, back through the door. And she was shut in.
Her peace was gone as soon as he was, and she looked around the spare room, noticing a door that probably led to a closet of some sort, a table with barber’s implements laid out, a chest, a fancy barber’s chair…she named things to herself to ignore the shadows, but in her heart, she knew that she would run out of things to name before Anthony returned.
“Beadle…” The voice was frail, shaking, but insistent. A woman, below. Johanna trembled. They were already here. Too soon. She looked around the room frantically, knowing the disguise alone would not save her, clever or otherwise. The closet. Her eyes lingered on the door for an instant. No escape…but then again, as her father had been so fond of reminding her, a cage could also be a fortress.
She had barely closed the door when the outer door swung, protestingly, open and a loud “ssh” indicated that a woman had entered the room. Johanna, crouched in the dark, could hear her voice grow a little tentative, though she still called the beadle. Why should she be calling him up here? The voice trailed off into a soft, sing-song cadence, and then a hum. Johanna could hear the woman moving outside, but she seemed alone.
The woman started singing a lullaby, and Johanna risked cracking the door the barest sliver. The woman’s back was to her, but her voice gained confidence as she sang softly, looking down at her arms. Johanna would have almost smiled if she wasn’t so frightened. The song was calming, and she hungrily devoured the music, hearing the first song that hadn’t come from her own throat in weeks. It seemed to clear her mind, somehow.
Johanna and the woman both jumped as the door to the parlor slammed open. The man who entered was imposing and very slightly-wild eyed, though his voice was even as he barked, “You? What are you doing here, woman?” He put down the lamp he was carrying, its flickering light filling the small room from the side table, casting odd shadows. Johanna’s heart stopped until she realized that he was addressing the shabby street woman. Neither of them had seen her, but even so, she curled back into the darkness a little, not daring to pull the door closed for fear of motion attracting their attention.
The woman’s eyes were wide, and she cried as if she’d been struck, but managed earnestly “Ah, evil’s here, sir, evil. The stink of evil from below. From her.” She wrung her hands, clearly beside herself.
The man, on the other hand, had turned to his table, arranging his tools hurriedly but precisely. He didn’t look up as he growled, “Out of here, woman. Out, I say.”
She ignored him, being so bold as to touch his arm. “She’s the devil’s wife, sir, beware her.” Though Johanna couldn’t see the tears, they were apparent in the woman’s shattered voice. “She…with no pity in her heart…”
Whoever the woman was talking about, the barber wasn’t truly listening. “Out! I said out!” He was half-yelling, clearly in a massive hurry. He turned around to grab her arm, ready to haul her out physically; even Johanna could see that the frail, half-starved woman would be no trouble for a man of his build. Even so, she pulled against his hold for just a moment before saying, voice thick as if she had just woken from a dream; “Hey…don’t I…know you…mister?”
The barber might have paused, but there was the unmistakable sound of footsteps on the outer stair. His eyes widened. “The judge! I have no time!” And before Johanna could, for herself, guess what he was going to do, the man had grabbed a razor with his other hand, spun the woman around and drew the blade, smooth as silk, over her throat. From the closet, Johanna could see it drip…drip…dripdripdripdrip….
The slam drew her eyes back up, and the barber had dragged the beggar to the chair, where she somehow disappeared, leaving only a small blackish smudge and a small pool by the table, almost hidden in shadow. Fear froze Johanna into stone. Anthony’s friend…their hope of safety…was it Anthony who had been deceived, or was it only herself? She closed her eyes, imaging Anthony’s face. It was impossible he had known. Impossible. It was…
“Where is she? Where is the girl?” Her eyes snapped open. Her father, here? How? Impossible as well, but there he was, looking wide eyed and expectant, as if he’d run all the way from Tierney’s Lane. She could have sworn, for a moment, that as he looked around the room, his eyes rested on her, and the hunger she saw there made her recoil. How could he have known?
“Below, your honor, with my neighbor, Mrs. Lovett.” The barber’s eyes were bright, almost glowing in the lamplight, though her father’s face was in shadow. The words were fast but not nervous, and the fact that he had just committed murder didn’t seem to be bothering the man in the least. “Thank heavens the sailor did not molest her. Thank heavens too she has seen the error of her ways.”
Sailor? They knew! Impossible, but they knew. Johanna willed herself not to shake, afraid she would upset something in the darkened closet and be sent back to a cage worse than the asylum. Oh, Anthony, where are you?
“She has?”
“Ah, yes sir, she speaks only of you. Longing for…forgiveness.” The lies came out smooth as honey; Johanna half-believed it herself, even though she knew she had never spoken to the man before in her life. Had he been using Anthony all along?
Her father rubbed his hands together. “And she shall have it. She’ll be here soon, you say?” He looked out the window, flames from the street below giving a strange, phantasmagoric motion to his features.
“I think I hear her now…” The barber approached her father’s shoulder, and Johanna almost wanted to cry out and warn him. No matter what had happened, after all, he was her father. Could she just leave him to the monster’s mercy to save her own skin? “Is that her dainty footstep on the stair?”
But the expression on the man she had called father’s face killed the cry on her lips. He was half wild-eyed with anticipation, and even her inexperienced eye could pick out no thread of good intention in his grin. He hurried the barber to the chair, exhorting him to quickly help him freshen up. And, like a horrible streetcar accident, Johanna could see what was going to happen. The glint of lamplight off the blade dazzled her for a moment, and when she next looked, the barber was behind her father, as if to shave him.
He was saying something about a barber…a prisoner…and the terror in her father’s eyes was suddenly there, devouring everything else. Not a terror borne of blind fear, but a horrible sense of recognition. Somehow, her father knew this man. This Benjamin Barker. And because his eyes never changed, it took Johanna a moment to notice that he was dead.
She stuffed a hand in her mouth to hold back the cry. Delivered from a monster she knew to a worse one she did not. The barber smiled to himself, and the sense of peace, of relief, was so great it was almost crushing, made terrible by the event that created it. He pressed a lever, and her father’s corpse disappeared. Then, the barber lovingly put the razors away, wiping them clean one by one.
Suddenly, something seemed to occur to him. “Tobias.” He muttered, turning for the door. The moment he was out, she slipped from the closet, taking deep, fairly steady breaths as she tried not to trip in the semi-darkness that had once again descended.
She was in the middle of the room, impossible to hide, as he came barging back in for something he’d forgotten. “You!” Rage flashed through the large man’s eyes. “What are you doing here?”
Her brain shut down, and her voice was barely a peep. “Oh, excuse me sir. I saw the barber’s sign and I…I thought I would ask for a shave…” She was trying not to sob, trembling hard enough that he could surely see her shake from across the room. He’d wring her neck, oh, he’d wring her neck and throw her away in the dustbin…
“When did you come in? When!” She could see the barber’s mind flying past all that she could have seen, and saw her death lingering there in his eyes.
Now she was practically in tears. He had to know she was a woman, but as he’d already proven, that would not stay his hand. “Oh sir, I beg of you…what I have seen no man will ever know, I swear it-” She had spread her hands in front of her, as if she could ward him off with a holy sign.
He grinned and she bit back a scream. “A shave, eh? At your service.” He half-bowed, before advancing on her, backing her towards the chair that was still warm with her father’s life. “Whatever you may have seen, your cheeks are as much in need of the razor now as before!” She shrieked as she tripped back into it. The barber almost cackled. “Sit, sir, sit!”
Suddenly, a frustrated yell, a woman’s, flew up from below their feet. The barber glanced down, frowning, and Johanna knew the slim chance would be her only. She flew, as fast as her feet would carry her, past him and out the door. She didn’t know where she was running to, only what she was running from, and she didn’t let the pain in her protesting legs or the shortness of breath in her lungs stop her. Nothing did until chance led her straight back into Anthony’s arms, and she realized that she had outrun the barber.
But his eyes. She buried her face in Anthony’s chest and knew, with a dread certainty, that his eyes were the cage she would be locked into for all time. Eyes filled with calculation and triumph and, perhaps most horribly of all…eyes that seemed, in spite of their ferocity, somehow familiar. She would never fly far enough; not from them.
Fandom: Sweeney Todd
Characters: Johanna, Anthony, Beggar Woman, Turpin, Sweeney
Prompt: 027, Parents
Word Count: 2441
Rating: PG-13 for violence
Summary: Johanna sees more than she bargained for.
Author's Notes: Well, after almost 2 months of nothing, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised when this fic ran away with me, length-wise. I usually try not to just straight-out novelize bits of the musical, as I think it's really not the most interesting place to go in most cases, but I'd been wanting to do this point-of-view piece for a long while and seeing the revival made me finally sit down and write it. Note that, as with most of my fanfic, I did't attempt to make it particularly revival or original, stealing bits from both. The dialogue isn't mine, as I lifted it from the libretto.
The streets were on fire. Little patches of refuse were burning here and there, throwing shadows in odd and unexpected places, and even streets which should have been familiar…no, that wasn’t right, they were in a strange part of London. Or were they? He was taking her to the docks to be married. That was it. But there was no water, only flame. She clutched his hand tighter. Married on Sunday. He spared half a moment to smile reassuringly at her, but the look was twisted and warped by shadows, more a grimace than anything else. She bit down the urge to shriek.
There was yelling, and the sound of people running, but it was far away, behind them. She looked back, half expecting to turn to salt, but saw nothing but more flames and the imposing hulk of the buildings that looked poised on the edge of crumbling, crushing the two sailors running below. She was a sailor. No. He was a sailor, she was hiding. Hidden away, safe in a cage…
They stopped and slipped up a side staircase. Johanna breathed deeply, trying to clear her mind, to think in a straight line. But to smell the free, cool night air, even hidden in shadows, it made a part of her almost giddy. It was almost Sunday. Sunday…
The sailor (Anthony, she angrily chided herself. Anthony.) gave her a hand as he led her into the darkened chambers, though the lights from below filtered up through slats, half-lighting the empty space. She could feel more than see Anthony…her Anthony…frown beside her. “Mr. Todd?”
“No one here.” She tried to keep panic out of her voice, but if his plan didn’t work, they’d send her back to the cage and she couldn’t couldn’t couldn’t needed to sing she… “Where is this Mr. Todd?” Think, Johanna. Words. She was shaking under Anthony’s hand, like a bird with a broken wing, and she needed to make herself stop. She wrapped her arms around herself, hugging his coat.
He shook his head. “No matter.” He managed a reassuring smile, dim but no longer twisted. “He’ll be back in a moment, for I trust him as I trust my right arm.” The aforementioned arm gave her shoulder a squeeze, and for a moment, she almost panicked. He was going to lock her up too. New cage. Didn’t matter. The light from below sliced her pretty features, distorting them as she swallowed hard. “Now wait for him here. I’ll return with a coach in less than half an hour.”
Half an hour, crouching in the dark. Or worse, alone with this strange man who she only had Anthony’s word was good and kind. Anthony, who had come for her with a gun he couldn’t fire. She clenched her hands so they didn’t shake. “But they’re after us still, what if they trace us here?” What if? She knew what – back to the cage and snip snip to her hair and away with light and air and space and oh god… “Oh, Anthony, please let me come with you.” She turned into his chest, clutching him like the last plank of wood in a shipwreck as the world lurched around her.
His voice was gentle, but his words terrified her, even as his hand stroked her hair. “No, my darling, there’s no safety for you on the street.” She mutely shook her head. She couldn’t stay here by herself. If they came…she couldn’t shoot them all, and she could never fly that fast. “But dressed in these sailor’s clothes, who’s to know it is I?” At his side, at least she was less likely to be questioned. To be snared.
“No, the risk is too great.” He pulled back long enough to meet her eyes, his own glinting softly in the half-light. “Ah, miss…” He kissed her forehead, then gently her lips. Despite everything, she returned it, the relief of a touch, any touch, with nothing behind it making her relax a little, smiling despite herself as she remembered the sweet words he’d said when they met. Married on Sunday… “And I’ll be back before those lips have time to loose that smile.” He smiled widely, reassuringly, and slipped out of her arms, back through the door. And she was shut in.
Her peace was gone as soon as he was, and she looked around the spare room, noticing a door that probably led to a closet of some sort, a table with barber’s implements laid out, a chest, a fancy barber’s chair…she named things to herself to ignore the shadows, but in her heart, she knew that she would run out of things to name before Anthony returned.
“Beadle…” The voice was frail, shaking, but insistent. A woman, below. Johanna trembled. They were already here. Too soon. She looked around the room frantically, knowing the disguise alone would not save her, clever or otherwise. The closet. Her eyes lingered on the door for an instant. No escape…but then again, as her father had been so fond of reminding her, a cage could also be a fortress.
She had barely closed the door when the outer door swung, protestingly, open and a loud “ssh” indicated that a woman had entered the room. Johanna, crouched in the dark, could hear her voice grow a little tentative, though she still called the beadle. Why should she be calling him up here? The voice trailed off into a soft, sing-song cadence, and then a hum. Johanna could hear the woman moving outside, but she seemed alone.
The woman started singing a lullaby, and Johanna risked cracking the door the barest sliver. The woman’s back was to her, but her voice gained confidence as she sang softly, looking down at her arms. Johanna would have almost smiled if she wasn’t so frightened. The song was calming, and she hungrily devoured the music, hearing the first song that hadn’t come from her own throat in weeks. It seemed to clear her mind, somehow.
Johanna and the woman both jumped as the door to the parlor slammed open. The man who entered was imposing and very slightly-wild eyed, though his voice was even as he barked, “You? What are you doing here, woman?” He put down the lamp he was carrying, its flickering light filling the small room from the side table, casting odd shadows. Johanna’s heart stopped until she realized that he was addressing the shabby street woman. Neither of them had seen her, but even so, she curled back into the darkness a little, not daring to pull the door closed for fear of motion attracting their attention.
The woman’s eyes were wide, and she cried as if she’d been struck, but managed earnestly “Ah, evil’s here, sir, evil. The stink of evil from below. From her.” She wrung her hands, clearly beside herself.
The man, on the other hand, had turned to his table, arranging his tools hurriedly but precisely. He didn’t look up as he growled, “Out of here, woman. Out, I say.”
She ignored him, being so bold as to touch his arm. “She’s the devil’s wife, sir, beware her.” Though Johanna couldn’t see the tears, they were apparent in the woman’s shattered voice. “She…with no pity in her heart…”
Whoever the woman was talking about, the barber wasn’t truly listening. “Out! I said out!” He was half-yelling, clearly in a massive hurry. He turned around to grab her arm, ready to haul her out physically; even Johanna could see that the frail, half-starved woman would be no trouble for a man of his build. Even so, she pulled against his hold for just a moment before saying, voice thick as if she had just woken from a dream; “Hey…don’t I…know you…mister?”
The barber might have paused, but there was the unmistakable sound of footsteps on the outer stair. His eyes widened. “The judge! I have no time!” And before Johanna could, for herself, guess what he was going to do, the man had grabbed a razor with his other hand, spun the woman around and drew the blade, smooth as silk, over her throat. From the closet, Johanna could see it drip…drip…dripdripdripdrip….
The slam drew her eyes back up, and the barber had dragged the beggar to the chair, where she somehow disappeared, leaving only a small blackish smudge and a small pool by the table, almost hidden in shadow. Fear froze Johanna into stone. Anthony’s friend…their hope of safety…was it Anthony who had been deceived, or was it only herself? She closed her eyes, imaging Anthony’s face. It was impossible he had known. Impossible. It was…
“Where is she? Where is the girl?” Her eyes snapped open. Her father, here? How? Impossible as well, but there he was, looking wide eyed and expectant, as if he’d run all the way from Tierney’s Lane. She could have sworn, for a moment, that as he looked around the room, his eyes rested on her, and the hunger she saw there made her recoil. How could he have known?
“Below, your honor, with my neighbor, Mrs. Lovett.” The barber’s eyes were bright, almost glowing in the lamplight, though her father’s face was in shadow. The words were fast but not nervous, and the fact that he had just committed murder didn’t seem to be bothering the man in the least. “Thank heavens the sailor did not molest her. Thank heavens too she has seen the error of her ways.”
Sailor? They knew! Impossible, but they knew. Johanna willed herself not to shake, afraid she would upset something in the darkened closet and be sent back to a cage worse than the asylum. Oh, Anthony, where are you?
“She has?”
“Ah, yes sir, she speaks only of you. Longing for…forgiveness.” The lies came out smooth as honey; Johanna half-believed it herself, even though she knew she had never spoken to the man before in her life. Had he been using Anthony all along?
Her father rubbed his hands together. “And she shall have it. She’ll be here soon, you say?” He looked out the window, flames from the street below giving a strange, phantasmagoric motion to his features.
“I think I hear her now…” The barber approached her father’s shoulder, and Johanna almost wanted to cry out and warn him. No matter what had happened, after all, he was her father. Could she just leave him to the monster’s mercy to save her own skin? “Is that her dainty footstep on the stair?”
But the expression on the man she had called father’s face killed the cry on her lips. He was half wild-eyed with anticipation, and even her inexperienced eye could pick out no thread of good intention in his grin. He hurried the barber to the chair, exhorting him to quickly help him freshen up. And, like a horrible streetcar accident, Johanna could see what was going to happen. The glint of lamplight off the blade dazzled her for a moment, and when she next looked, the barber was behind her father, as if to shave him.
He was saying something about a barber…a prisoner…and the terror in her father’s eyes was suddenly there, devouring everything else. Not a terror borne of blind fear, but a horrible sense of recognition. Somehow, her father knew this man. This Benjamin Barker. And because his eyes never changed, it took Johanna a moment to notice that he was dead.
She stuffed a hand in her mouth to hold back the cry. Delivered from a monster she knew to a worse one she did not. The barber smiled to himself, and the sense of peace, of relief, was so great it was almost crushing, made terrible by the event that created it. He pressed a lever, and her father’s corpse disappeared. Then, the barber lovingly put the razors away, wiping them clean one by one.
Suddenly, something seemed to occur to him. “Tobias.” He muttered, turning for the door. The moment he was out, she slipped from the closet, taking deep, fairly steady breaths as she tried not to trip in the semi-darkness that had once again descended.
She was in the middle of the room, impossible to hide, as he came barging back in for something he’d forgotten. “You!” Rage flashed through the large man’s eyes. “What are you doing here?”
Her brain shut down, and her voice was barely a peep. “Oh, excuse me sir. I saw the barber’s sign and I…I thought I would ask for a shave…” She was trying not to sob, trembling hard enough that he could surely see her shake from across the room. He’d wring her neck, oh, he’d wring her neck and throw her away in the dustbin…
“When did you come in? When!” She could see the barber’s mind flying past all that she could have seen, and saw her death lingering there in his eyes.
Now she was practically in tears. He had to know she was a woman, but as he’d already proven, that would not stay his hand. “Oh sir, I beg of you…what I have seen no man will ever know, I swear it-” She had spread her hands in front of her, as if she could ward him off with a holy sign.
He grinned and she bit back a scream. “A shave, eh? At your service.” He half-bowed, before advancing on her, backing her towards the chair that was still warm with her father’s life. “Whatever you may have seen, your cheeks are as much in need of the razor now as before!” She shrieked as she tripped back into it. The barber almost cackled. “Sit, sir, sit!”
Suddenly, a frustrated yell, a woman’s, flew up from below their feet. The barber glanced down, frowning, and Johanna knew the slim chance would be her only. She flew, as fast as her feet would carry her, past him and out the door. She didn’t know where she was running to, only what she was running from, and she didn’t let the pain in her protesting legs or the shortness of breath in her lungs stop her. Nothing did until chance led her straight back into Anthony’s arms, and she realized that she had outrun the barber.
But his eyes. She buried her face in Anthony’s chest and knew, with a dread certainty, that his eyes were the cage she would be locked into for all time. Eyes filled with calculation and triumph and, perhaps most horribly of all…eyes that seemed, in spite of their ferocity, somehow familiar. She would never fly far enough; not from them.
