Chapter Text
They had spent their childhood throwing notes through their windows. Through every playground scrape, make-believe, and school boy nonsense it had always been Naib and Norton.
Then the war happened, sweeping across the land, taking every able body with it. The war had changed them both. The violence of it all dug into their flesh and lived in their bones, hollowed them out until they had to fill themselves with ideals they weren’t even sure they believed in.
Time eroded them, and in many ways Naib and Norton no longer existed.
Naib saw the harsh realities of the world, his heart sinking into the mud, buried until no one could reach it again, and Norton— ? He closed his eyes until he was floating with his heads in the clouds, desperate to smile even if it was a lie.
— And they drifted, and drifted, until one was suffocating beneath the ground and the other was suffocating in the skies.
Then somehow all those years passed and they had floated somewhere in the middle, meeting on a stage lit by candlelight.
Naib had asked to see the stage up close, weary of all the ways one could exit and enter secretly. Upon the tower prop, Norton watched his friend fondly. The detective was working on rotating a crank that moved a manual elevator from behind the scenes.
“You work too much,” Norton calls from below, clear voice projecting through with perfect acoustics. He only gets a tired grunt before Naib sticks his head out of the cut-out window.
A sly smile creeps upon the actors lips, “But, soft! What light through yonder window breaks?”
“Norton don’t you dare.”
“It is the east, and Juliet is the Sun.”
“I am NOT Juliet,” Naib drops his face into his hands.
Pointing dramatically, he steps upon the stage, “See how he leans his cheek upon his hand? O, that I were a glove upon that hand, that I might touch that cheek.”
— And if anyone asked, Naib definitely did not know the lines of Romeo and Juliet. He was not interested in soliloquies or sonnets. Who would believe Norton if he let slip that the stoic detective uttered the accompanying lines - ay me!
Norton laughs, clapping his hands, “He speaks: o speak again, bright angel!”
“Oh shut up already!”
He’s far from ready to let this go — with one leap he jumps on a moving plank, dragging a pulley rope that lifts the platform. Slowly it rises towards Naib, “Shall I compare thee to a Summer’s day?”
“No. Absolutely not.”
“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways!”
“Shut up! You can only count to like three.”
He pulls again, the platform rising higher.
“The Nymph that undoes me, is fair and unkind!” his laughter fills the auditorium, no corner untouched, echoing like the world’s laughing with them. Gleeful ghosts in the darkness, cheering for the reunion of friends.
Naib rolls his eyes but he’s smiling, smiling in that way Norton hadn’t seen for years. And oh, his heart yearns for something, something he doesn’t understand, and so instead he pulls the rope again until they’re face to face.
His confidence dies like the setting sun. Lit aglow gently by the flames, Naib’s face is flushed with embarrassment, and his own heart stutters, suffers, whispers — “Your two great eyes will slay me suddenly; Their beauty shakes me who was once serene.”
“Norton Campbell.” Naib says, voice laced with affection, “If I didn’t know any better I would think you’re trying to flirt with me.”
It’s closing night, and the curtain falls.
“Had we but world enough and time.”