We Could Get By

xxxvii.

Eleanor rolled onto her side and flung her arm over her tired eyes. Lindy had been a fairly well-mannered baby those first few days. Nellie thought perhaps she would not end up one of those unfortunate mothers constantly being awakened in the dead of the night by a colicky baby. She thought wrong. She could practically see Lindy's chubby cheeks blotched red, her sweet little face screwed up tight as she wailed.  Ordinarily, the baby looked quite like a painting of an angel, all soft curls and big, curious eyes. 

Mrs. Lovett stared through the gloom at what she could make of the ceiling. She waited, breath held, for some begrudging stirring beside her, but Sweeney Todd made no move to assist his wife. He did not even open his eyes, did not fold his eyebrows together in annoyance. Surely, he must have heard. Their neighbors could probably hear the baby over the sounds of the ocean. Funny, Mrs. Lovett thought, that the gentle rolling of the waves beyond their picture window did nothing to soothe her child back into peaceful sleep.

Nellie sat up and clutched the lumpy form of her pillow in her fist. Sweeney snorted, almost the strange hrk-ing sound that he made when he laughed at something- the rare, few-and-far-between moments that caught him particularly off guard.

"'S ya turn," she mumbled, words slurring together in a lethargic clump. He was almost too lovely, carefully arranged just in such a way that she would feel terribly guilty about disturbing him. Nellie felt even more badly than the time Socks had taken to scratching at a pair of Sweeney's nice leather shoes. He had gone red in the face, the vein in his temple looking about ready to burst.

"Sweeney, I said it's ya turn to get up. Ya can't let me run meself ragged at all god forsaken hours of the day jus' 'cause ya can't be arsed to give me a bloody 'and."

She had been having a particularly lovely dream involving his head resting uncharacteristically lovingly between the slight bumps of her hip bones, her fingers laced through his wild hair. They had been older in the dream, his black hair greying just slightly at the temples, her eyes stamped with the slight beginnings of crow's feet at the corners. They were dignified, floating gently through a pervasive air of calm that she could not seem to grasp in her waking life. It only made being awake even more difficult. 

Nellie took a final longing glance at the smooth white of his skin, the slight furrow of his eyebrows, the relaxed line of his thin lips. And to think she had been considering rolling over and kissing behind his ears the way he liked but would never admit. In another not-too-distant life, he would have rolled onto his side and let her cradle the sharp angles of his face in her hands. Nellie lamented the loss of what she could have made of the night, and she sat up. She raised her arm and brought the pillow down on his head.

"Jesus!" He jumped awake and squinted at her, his face pinched and scratched with angry lines. Lindy howled pitifully from her cradle, and Nellie swatted her husband with the pillow again. He shielded his head with his arms, scowling, but it was too late.

"Look what ya did now, she's all upset!" She gave him one final whack and heaved herself out of bed. Lindy felt even heavier than usual in Nellie's arms, a brick resting warm against her chest and the delicate crook of her neck. She turned her head as if it might ease the earsplitting sharpness of the baby's cries. It did not. Sweeney had lit the lamp beside the bed, and she no longer had to squint and struggle to catch snatches of him through the late night gloom.

He rubbed his hands over his face, stretching his displeased expression as long as it would grow. Nellie could make out the bumps of his vertebrae poking out like tiny mountain peaks all along his spine and the naked back of his neck. He looked to be floating on his own, adrift on an island far away and untouchable. But he was looking at her, dark gaze unreadable. Nellie turned away from him, away from the feeling that he could see straight through her, all the way down to her hollow bird-bones.

Lindy's tiny dimpled hands were curled into fists, hard and angry against the softness of Nellie's chest. Her slippered feet were silent as she paced the room, bouncing Lindy in her arms. Nellie's throat was dry and every thick swallow tasted salty, wide and dark and stinging as if she had submerged her head beneath the white-capped waves and filled her emptiness with the sea.

"What is it, love?" She asked, heart cracking against the small body that, only a week before, had been tucked inside her like some secret. Lindy's only answer is another pitiful cry, only slightly quieter than the ones that had come ringing through the bedroom before. "And why should you weep, then, my-" Mrs. Lovett started up the warbling beginnings of a song that had wedged its way into her brain from God-knows-where. It came out stammering and dry, and she remembered halfway through the first sentence where she had heard it, floating sad and teary down the stairs and into her shop unbidden at all hours of the day.

Sweeney was still looking at her, the tired lines crossing his gloomy visage doing nothing to give away whether or not he had recognized it as well. Nellie supposed there was no reason that it should have been at all familiar to him, and she felt her joints loosen in her nightgown. Her breath rushed from her lungs and escaped through her cracked lips. He held his hands out to her, palms raised towards the ceiling in what might have been some fatigued gesture of giving in to his better judgment. Instead of surrendering the baby, Nellie climbed carefully back into the softness of the bed and collapsed heavily against him. His body relaxed after a moment, wordlessly permitting her to wind herself around the ridges of the bones that darted beneath his skin like a school of thin little fish. It was oddly reminiscent of how, once when Nellie had been doubled over and vomiting up the contents of her stomach, he had crouched on the ground beside her and placed the warmth of his palm flat against her curved back. The feeling had fizzled through her veins and spread to her whole body then, and that was how she felt in that present moment, too.

Lindy's cries were barely sniffles, tiny sad hiccups that brought tears rushing to the pink corners of Nellie's eyes. She pulled back just slightly to look at the small bundle, to see that the baby had fixed her gaze securely on Sweeney, to see that the dark shape of her husband was staring right back, the soft wisps of a smile hanging low on his face. 

A/N:

god this is so short im sorry work is kicking my ass. might be winding this one down soon but i'll have a bunch of oneshots up as a seperate work !