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The sunlight casts its lazy glow into the room, gilding the dark table, the piles of paper, the ink bottles and abandoned pens. Through the diamond panes fall the beams, and the light glitters and dances in a slow, afternoon radiance. A branch from one of the trees in the quad taps hesitatingly against the glass, and Horatio wakes from his catnap, groggy, with his hair sticking up at odd angles and a smear of ink across one cheek.
Across the table, Hamlet is still working as diligently as before, though as his roommate, Horatio knows Hamlet’s slept even less than Horatio has these past few weeks. Hamlet, being Hamlet, has lately been waking Horatio in the middle of the night to press him, half-asleep and barely conscious, to answer philosophical questions of the most complicated sort. They are both bone-weary, but the duty of study calls, and Horatio is nothing if not a diligent student. He sits up.
“Nice of you to come back to the world,” Hamlet says. “I’d’ve given you up for dead if you slept much longer, friend.”
Friend. The word delights and torments Horatio through all his waking hours. He is friend to a prince, and he cannot quite believe it. In fact, he often refuses to. They share their rooms, and they study together, but he will always be Hamlet’s inferior in status and wealth. Can he ever truly be his friend?
And under all those words of friendship, what is he to do with the other quiet pangs that steal upon him in his loneliest late-night hours, those times near midnight when he cannot sleep and the owl in the woods calls out in lonely trills across the frozen ground? Horatio wakes up from dreams of dark hair and eyes full of mischief, painfully hard and sunk deep in shame. Hamlet wishes you to be his friend. Not anything else, he tells himself in those late nights and early mornings, and waits miserably for the dawn to come.
But those infatuated longings are dreams for winter nights and frosty spring mornings, and today is a brilliant autumn day, the leaves just turning, Horatio and Hamlet entering their second year at Wittenberg, kings of the world (though Hamlet is not yet king of the Danes). Horatio smiles at Hamlet, and turns quickly back to his studying. He is a friend of Hamlet’s, he tells himself. Be content with that, and all will be well.
“I wouldn’t have fallen asleep here if you hadn’t woken me before dawn to argue about Plato,” Horatio says. “There are times and places, my lord, for discussions of philosophy, and all of them occur after sunrise.”
“But what if one should want to discuss Plato at, for example, midnight, after a bit of wine, when the candle is burning low?” Hamlet protests. “And you really needn’t call me ‘lord.’ Here, I am just Hamlet; you are just Horatio.”
Horatio smiles at that.
“Provided you don’t keep me up until three when we’ve a lecture at eight, I'll gladly discuss Plato at midnight.”
He does not address the problem of addresses, but familiarity makes Horatio uncomfortable, as if it is worming its way into his emotions, coaxing him to let down his guard. But he can’t. He won’t. Horatio knows that such relations as he desires in his heart of hearts happen, upon occasion, at university, but they do not occur between princes and their common friends.
“Very well,” says Hamlet, shuffling at his papers. “I shan’t.”
He stacks his notes neatly, Horatio watching, then shoves them in his bag. A few burst out, small scraps of paper fluttering to the floor, and immediately Horatio scrambles to grab the papers, to help. But before he can, Hamlet is whisking them all up off the floor, replacing them before Horatio catches more than a glimpse of line breaks and spidery, crooked script.
“Are you writing poetry again?” he asks.
Hamlet has the decency to blush.
“Not on a day like this. What are we doing inside, when there’s a breeze in the trees? Summer’s nearly gone! The snows are nearly here! We should be out enjoying our youth before it’s all gone to rot!”
Horatio only saw a few words before the poems were scooped up, words like “love” and “eternity” and "soul's choice", and he supposes that Hamlet must be writing to the girl back in Denmark who he sometimes talks about. She’s another child of the same court, another of high birth and status. She could be Hamlet’s companion, even his equal, in a way that low-born Horatio never could, and in this moment, he is jealous of distant Ophelia, whom he has never met. He chides himself for that.
Hamlet turns away from his own bag and begins to fill Horatio’s. Horatio cringes, mourning the loss of his tidy organization. But he thanks Hamlet all the same, and soon they’re dashing out from the library and into the quad, and then out of the quad and towards the river. seeking shade trees and green grass, the quiet sound of wind and lapping water.
And so they pass each day of summer’s last blush this way, leaving their studies to linger at the river or beneath trees in the quad, ensconced in quiet corners, arguing frenetically over points from lectures. Youth is theirs, and if something in Horatio sparks every time he and Hamlet touch in casual, friendly ways, well, he can do his best to ignore it, to turn his mind towards friendship instead.
Despite his promises of more regular evening hours, Hamlet still sometimes wakes Horatio before dawn, for dawn comes later and later as the seasons turn to autumn, and Hamlet’s questions cannot wait. One night, in late October, when an early frost rimes the windows and the owl’s hoots sound lonelier than ever, Horatio wakes to Hamlet sitting on the end of his bed, holding the stubby end of a candle, and peering intently at the flame. Outside, the church bells toll the hour. Two solitary chimes ring out, and then the sounds are swallowed by the night.
“Hamlet,” Horatio groans. “Go back to your own bed.”
But Hamlet does not move. He looks back to the candle, and his face takes on a haunted cast in the moonlight and candlelight, the fractured star-beams thrown by the frost.
“What do you suppose happens,” Hamlet muses, “when we’re dead?”
Horatio, startled, sleepily turns to Sunday-school platitudes.
“The good go to heaven and the wicked to hell, I suppose.”
“Hm. I wouldn’t have expected you to say that,” Hamlet says.
Horatio’s more awake now, pushing himself to sit, to look Hamlet in his eyes, lit by the low candle’s gleam.
“I’m not sure if I truly believe that, though.” Horatio looks away from Hamlet, then back at him, and then away again. “I don’t know if there’s any person who’s all good, or all bad. So where does that put them? Asphodel? Were the ancients right, and most of us doomed to be wandering shades?”
“What if there’s nothing?” Hamlet asks. “Or what if it’s dreadful, all cliffs and wind and wild water, and foreboding castles perched on headlands like broken teeth? Or worse, what if Hell is simply Elsinore, eyes at your back wherever you turn, and no friends like you, Horatio, to make it all bearable?”
Horatio reaches out an awkward hand, then draws it back. He cannot touch Hamlet, not now. There will be time for that, later, he decides, though still half-asleep. Right now, Hamlet needs a friend, not an awkward would-be lover. Not even if his hair is silvered by the moonglow, not even if the candle makes him eerie, fey, and beautiful.
“If Hell is Elsinore, though I can’t imagine that it is,” Horatio says, “then there must be some equivalent to heaven on this earth. And if there is an afterlife, a beautiful one, it must be like Wittenberg.”
Their hands are painfully near upon the bedsheet, only an inch or so between, and Hamlet lifts his slender palm as if to place it over Horatio’s. At that moment, Horatio lifts his own hand, makes to touch, draws back. Hands hover, nearly touching, for long moments, and it is only when the candles gutter out that they allow them to meet.
Horatio does not know if this is confession or comfort, but his heart swells and beats like a hunted hare’s. They stay there long minutes, and in the silence left behind after the bells and owls and conversation, Horatio falls asleep. In the morning, when Horatio wakes to Hamlet slumped across his bed, his skin is warm and lit with something that he does not dare call desire, though he knows that is what it must be.
It is All Saints’ Day before Horatio gets his answer as to the nature of what passed between himself and Hamlet that night. On All Saints’, Hamlet comes from lecture pale and trembling, a letter clutched in his hands.
“My father,” he says to Horatio in their cold little room, “is dead.”
And he falls weeping into Horatio’s arms.
Horatio smooths Hamlet’s wild hair, and whispers gentle words to him, and hates himself for wishing he could kiss Hamlet’s brow. He cannot lose his mind with love now. So he holds Hamlet, and lets him cry on his shoulder, and he does not expect it at all when Hamlet cups his face and pulls him into a kiss.
It’s not a good kiss, all teeth and tears, salt and sadness, but it’s enough. Elation and shock war within Horatio, and his mind is too addled with emotion to decide which he feels more. So he just kisses Hamlet desperately, as though he could take away the grief and pain and bring back summer with his lips. When they separate, Hamlet is breathless, blushing, looking away.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I shouldn’t have. I was overcome. If you don’t feel the same and would never like to see me again, I understand completely.”
Horatio answers by kissing him again. Better, this time, and when once again, they pull apart, he smiles at Hamlet.
“How could I ever push you away?”
Hamlet laughs, but it still sounds hollow with grief.
“You could have told me.”
And Horatio could have. But he didn’t, until now, at the end of Hamlet’s world. And though he mourns the lazy summer days that could have been, perhaps it is better this way. He can stay by Hamlet through the long winter of grief, and be at his side when spring comes again. It is the least he can do.
“I have to go back to Denmark. For the funeral,” Hamlet says.
Horatio imagines Hamlet wandering cold palace walkways, the home of his childhood a hell indeed with his father dead.
“I’ll come with you,” Horatio offers, but Hamlet shakes his head.
“I’ll send word once I’ve arrived, and then you can come if I’ve been detained. But if this is only brief, or if it is not, we will meet again in Wittenberg. In late summer, perhaps, when the last roses are blooming, and the light is gold.”
Horatio smiles and tries to believe that Hamlet is right.
Later, when the letter comes from Denmark, he knows it is a summons before he opens it, and not a promise of return. Sighing, Horatio tucks it away. He will go to Denmark, and let love light his way. If Elsinore is Hamlet’s hell of jagged rocks and winter, then Horatio will be his lighthouse, guiding him back towards summer. And they will meet again in Wittenberg. Of this, Horatio is certain.