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You are eight years old when the ague takes your father. You let the tears flow at his funeral because you know not yet this is unbecoming of a Montague.
You are but four weeks older when the same fever steals your mother, she who nursed your father and took this parting gift from him.
You aren't sure if you're allowed to be this angry at God, but you rage anyway. You discover you can't show this anger in front of your aunt, whose wiry fingers leave your cheek stinging and raw.
You look to your uncle, to confirm this is the injustice your young, unformed mind believes it to be. Apparently it is not, as he merely looks disappointed at your display.
You wonder if this is punishment, if you've done wrong somehow, when your small trunk is brought to the great Montague house and unceremoniously dropped in the corridor with a thud. It, like you, is abandoned for some time while the household staff bothers with more important tasks.
It is Romeo who finds you, who hefts one end of the trunk with his tiny hands while you grasp the other. It is you who finds hope, for the first time in weeks, when he puts those same small hands over yours in your new room and squeezes, that though you have lost a father and a mother, you have at least gained a brother.
_______
You are twelve years old when Friar Laurence calls you 'my son' and you wish with all your heart it were true.
The friar is kind, and caring, and speaks of your accomplishments and skills with pride. His eyes and voice are soft, and you are not used to soft, not anymore. Everything at House Montague is hard as the stone walls, and you miss… you miss being a son instead of a burden.
If the friar were your father, if he let you live with him here at his church, if he would save you from being a Montague, the unneeded Montague… You almost ask him one afternoon, after your lessons with Romeo and Mercutio, you walk up to him and call him 'Father,' and say 'Would you ever consider—' before the look in his eyes, a cousin to the disappointment so often directed at you from your uncle, cuts you off quicker than a blade through grass, and you finish, lamely, 'teaching us Greek as well as Latin?'
The replacing relief in his eyes stings you more than your aunt's hand ever did.
_______
You are sixteen years old when Mercutio brings you and Romeo to the bawdy house for the first time. You are sixteen and skinny and much too serious compared to your moony-eyed cousin and your quick-laughing friend.
You are stood in front of these girls in naught but their shifts, yet you feel the more unclothed under their assessing stares, their steel-hard eyes much too old for the youth of their pink-tinged cheeks.
But against all odds one of them steps forward and picks you, you first, before dreamy Romeo and charming Mercutio. Her name is Stella and you think she is the most beautiful angel you have ever seen.
_______
You are eighteen years old the first time you ask Stella to run away with you. Her laughter rings through the room like the tinkling of silver bells and you pretend it was a joke all along.
_______
She finds a sheet of drawings in your pocket and you wait for laughter that doesn't come. Her mouth is open, curling just slightly into a smile. You hesitate to ask, but she tells you anyway. 'It's beautiful,' she says, and then, 'Draw me?' and you can't look away, are mesmerized by her eyes, the genuine admiration in them.
You say yes, but only if she'll run away with you.
This time when she laughs you do too, for you realize that this is happiness and it is finally yours.
_______
You are twenty years old when your uncle tells you you are to marry. Tells you it's finally time to be useful to your family, your benefactors.
You think it is courageous to tell him 'No,' to thwart the plan by playing the cad and being so undesirable to the girl's family that the whole proposal dissolves as salt into water. It is courageous, you tell yourself, when your uncle finds you later and grabs you by the ear and throws you to the floor and slaps you down again as you try to get up. It is courageous, you tell yourself, to lie on the floor where he put you so he has no reason to strike you again.
You wait until his anger fades and try to explain to him, as if he were a child, about the concept of love. That you do not love this girl, and cannot marry her without it. He doesn't hit you this time.
He laughs at you instead.
You are twenty years old and you wonder if he's right. If love is a game for children, if you need to grow up and stop hoping it will surround you from all sides instead of staying at arm's length, plucked in small morsels out of the air and placed in your heart like pieces of an unfinished mosaic.
_______
You toughen up. You start to practice more with the blade than with your charcoal. You speak smugly of visiting the new girls at the brothels. You pretend to believe Romeo and Mercutio when they pretend to believe you.
_______
You try not to believe in love when Romeo comes up with a specious scheme to elope with a Capulet of all people, after weeks of mooning over an entirely different Capulet. You try to be the voice of reason, the serious cousin with the calm head who keeps his foolish friends out of trouble.
You try, but not that hard.
_______
You are twenty-one years old and your friends, your brothers, are dead.
You are twenty-one years old and hollowed out from the inside.
You shed no tears at the funeral. You hold back an angry cousin when the families threaten all out war over the still-cooling bodies of the dead. You say nothing and feel nothing and eat nothing.
The rage you once felt bubbles, but you hold it in. Friar Laurence is there and you feel a hint of that other old pull, the wish to throw yourself in his fatherly arms and beg for protection from this cruel world. He meets your gaze and shakes his head sadly, as if he knows, as if he's reading your mind.
You have nowhere else to go so you go to Stella. You rest your head in her lap. You say nothing still. You shed no tears still. You let her hold you and run her hands through your hair and you dream yet again of running away with her, starting somewhere new, being someone new. You do nothing that night, you don't even kiss, and when she pats you on the back with a little more force you rise, you give her a sad smile and whatever in your empty soul is left of gratitude.
She smiles back and holds out her hand to you.
You almost reach for it before you understand the familiar gesture.
You drop a few coins in her palm and slowly walk out of the room, legs stiff from kneeling at her feet for so long.
_______
There is rioting in the streets of Verona the likes of which you have never seen before. You try to break up as many skirmishes as you can. Montagues and Capulets are no longer men, but beasts.
One such beast has grabbed a young woman—familiar in a way that makes your mind jump but you can't quite place why—and you give chase.
It is almost exhilarating, the feeling of putting a beast down and reaching for a grateful hand. Until all the wind is knocked out of you when you see the hateful look on the Capulet's face.
_______
You hate the Capulet for being ungrateful. You hate her for being a Capulet. But more than anything else you hate her for being right about you.
It's your fault Romeo is dead. You could have saved him—should have saved him, should have stopped him, should have killed Tybalt and given your life instead of his. You are the unneeded Montague, the spare, the one no one would mourn. Romeo had a family, a future, a wife, and you? You have a notebook full of unfinished drawings, a woman of loose morals you pay to spend time with you, and a constant desire to run away from your own life.
You have the impulse to save young ladies in the street but not the manners to accept whatever form of gratitude they choose or choose not to give in return. She hates you, and she is right to.
_______
You are twenty-one years old and your city is on fire. Your cousin is dead. Your best friend is dead. Your uncle demands, once again, that you marry. This time, though, you believe a little bit less in love. This time, though, it is for a greater cause than filling your uncle's coffers.
You agree to marry a Capulet maid for your city, for the memory of your lost brothers, even for your uncle, who may yet come to look upon you as something like a son.
You agree to marry a Capulet maid, but that was before you knew which Capulet maid was to be your bride. This one hates you. This one is possibly the worst.
You start to look for exits, for the quickest path out of this awful city and out of your useless life. You see the stricken look on the face of your betrothed and think she might be doing the same.
_______
You are twenty-one years old and you settled into your uncle's constant disappointment years ago. It sits on your shoulders like a worn-in jacket.
Yet you can't help but feel excitement when you bring him news of the Capulet cathedral. He looks pleased and you feel a surge of pride that you wish you didn't. A stronger man wouldn't care anymore to earn such useless validation.
But you're not a stronger man and you bask in it for as long as you can.
Which turns out to be not very long before he's reminding you that your sole worth to him is your Montague name and your ability to be married off and spawn more Montagues who might better wear the mantle someday.
_______
You've never been crossbow target-practice before. This is a new and disturbing place you've come to with your uncle.
_______
You blight out your own name in the wood of the table but leave theirs intact. It is an epitaph for those who will be remembered. You do not belong with them.
You are charged somehow with saving the entire princedom of Verona, but how can you? You can't keep hold of anything. Not even that old rage anymore, and it is Truccio's face that feels it tonight.
_______
You send one would-be wife away and ask another, yet again, to run away with you.
They both in the end refuse you.
Stella's rejection is a blow, but you've lived through worse.
Capulet, though, she is a surprise. Possibly a little bit insane, though.
She didn't run, when that's all you've ever wanted to do. She, who has even less in this world than you do.
Instead she apologizes to you, and allows her hand to be bound to yours, and races after villains, and climbs walls, and uncovers dastardly plots, and mourns the death of a bad man.
She is a surprise and you think you might learn to like surprises.
_______
Capulet looks at your drawing and says you have talent. She is maybe the third person to ever do so. It is… odd. You preen a bit and feel puffed up.
Of course she takes it back almost immediately and that lovely heat of annoyance crawls up your neck again. Everything about her is maddening, even her praise, but still. It is warm. You reach out for it whenever you can. You poke and tease and get her to look at you with all that fire.
You don't examine this impulse too closely.
_______
There is something about her. You follow her to an abandoned home and you watch her cry and it is like seeing a portrait so carefully crafted, so magnificent in its detail. You see her and she is fierce and sad and brave and cruel and it's almost too beautiful to look upon.
_______
You are twenty-one years old and framed for murder. You are twenty-one years old and abandoned.
_______
You have no one, you have no one, you have no one.
Panic sets in. You crouch in an alcove hidden under a stolen cloak and struggle to breathe.
You always thought, before, when you lost people that you'd lost everything but it was never really true. You had Romeo, you had Friar Laurence, you had Stella. You needed and you had.
But now? They are dead or utterly unconcerned for you.
You have no one.
Except… No.
She wouldn't. She couldn't.
Could she? But you need, and when you go to her balcony Rosaline says 'yes'. You show her every soft and weak part of you, and she accepts it.
The feel of her warm body through the thick fabric of her dress as you help her down the balcony shores you up. She is solid and real and warm and good, and it is like food after starving, her warmth in your arms.
_______
You gather her warmth closer in the night. Everything about her is alight. She is the sun.
You sound like Romeo. That can't be good. You poke at her until she snarls at you.
_______
You may have given up on love but trust? Trust is still a rare thing to be coveted, feather-light and tenuous but with her it feels backed with iron.
_______
The guards creep closer as you reach for her hand, pull her into the bushes. Her hand shakes, or is it yours? You wait, and wait. The guards retreat and you both breathe, together, as if you are one.
You did not realize—you held her hand throughout. You hold it still. You see now—she holds on too.
A sensation, familiar but somehow new, climbs up your chest, clinging vines of something precious, delicate but resilient. You breathe hard, but it doesn't shake loose.
_______
She says you are kind. She calls you a friend. She who has every reason to hate you, yet doesn't. She, who maybe, just maybe, believes in you. Believes you to be good, as you do her. Believes you to be worth something. Something more than your name, more than your money, more than all those things she has every right to despise.
You don't trust yourself sometimes, can't trust the feelings that have failed you so very often, but she does. She trusts you. She is here, in this room, alone with you, and you can't let yourself feel anything like hope… or something more.
You've mistaken loneliness for love before. You pray to God you aren't doing it again.
_______
You run. You are finally running. Away from your old miserable life and into the great unknown.
But something pulls you back. Something one of the Prince's men says as they hunt you. 'Paris' they say, and they are not the Prince's men at all.
Rosaline has walked into the den of a lion and you watched her do it.
You cannot run away from that.
_______
You can see she is scared, you know it, something has happened, something terrible to put that look upon her face, and yet…
And yet with every word she utters you feel another kick to your chest. You have no air to breathe. Everything hurts. She hates you, she hates you. She was all you had.
But where there is hurt you feel an emptiness start to grow, emerging from the pit of your stomach, reaching out to every limb, making them numb and too heavy, grabbing at your heart with dark, spiny tendrils.
Your friend, your dearest—your only friend has given you up, has given up on you. She is willing to let you die after all. Which is fair, considering she hates you, and even your own uncle, your trusted teacher, your beloved confidant who knew every hope and dream you ever uttered in the secrecy of her bed—they too gave you up, called the Prince's guards on you, each of them content to watch you be dragged away to your inevitable death. Why should Rosaline, who has every right to despise you, be any different? You think maybe even God Himself forsook you, all those years ago when He took everything from you, watched you build it all up again with a new family only to take that from you too.
You keep trying, and that is your fault, not hers, nor His. You keep trying to find happiness and safety when everything that has happened in your life has been teaching you that these things simply are not meant for you.
No. You are not forsaken, merely overlooked. It is not hate the Almighty feels for you, just indifference.
Rosaline, too, does not hate you, even as she does not refute you a murderer and a kidnapper. But 'does not hate' is a long road from 'likes' and 'cares for'... or 'loves', even if that stretch felt like no far distance at all when you looked upon her.
_______
You are twenty-one years old and you will not live to see twenty-two.
_______
Rosaline comes to you in your cell and maybe you aren't so empty after all, because the first thing you feel is an urge to jump up and reach through the bars and kiss her. And kiss her, and kiss her again.
You don't.
It would be ungentlemanly, after all, to kiss a girl who feels nothing for you, not even that old passionate hate.
You stand, and you face her, and you try to feel nothing, too.
You try. But you fail.
And then she speaks. And she wants to save you, and she feels something, something, you don't know what, but it's not nothing, and that's all you need. You can work with that.
You feel. You fill up with feelings. Anger, anger and hurt and pettiness and love, so much love for this woman who fights for you still, who fights for her sister and her city and her good name and for you, for you, for you.
Rosaline is angry too. The heat of it rolls off her in glorious waves. You fight and snap and you pull at each other's frayed edges until you feel like all of you is bared before her, and then you kiss her.
You grab her waist through the bars and you crush yourself against her and the cold metal against you burns almost as much as her mouth.
Your heart cracks open when she kisses you back. She palms your cheek and promises against your lips to save you, but it doesn't matter, not really, not when you've kissed her and known her and loved her.
She rests her forehead against yours and you both breathe deep. You don't want to run away anymore. Home is in her eyes and you can rest there forever now.
_______
You are twenty-one years old and the woman you love has jumped on top of you to try to stop the axeman's blade from falling. It is the most foolhardy, most reckless, most Capulet plan there is, and it will never work.
Except, it does.
By God do you love this insane woman.
_______
You are twenty-two years old and you are alive. Maybe for the first time, you think. Rosaline Montague is by your side and you are alive.