Work Text:
There was a moment. A moment when everything was still and silent. The dead speak no words and the survivors rarely speak twice that. There is blood on the ground and spilled wine, thrown from nobility's hands, unsure if it too was tainted. Red stains his hands and he can’t help but think he failed her, as he stares at her brother’s unseeing eyes. Ophelia was entrusted to his care and now she is drowned, and her brother follows. He opens his mouth as if to apologize but the words get stuck in his throat. Ophelia had pressed a pink rose into his hand as they parted, her eyes bright and her face streaked with tears.
“For gratitude,” she had said.
There was a moment of silence while the ghost of the pink roses thorns bit into his stained hands and then he saw Hamlet stumble, and the world was loud again.
He’s at his side in a moment, stepping over the queen with barely a glance as his hands find Hamlet’s shirt, gripping it to keep which of them uprite, he doesn’t know. Hamlet looks at him, blinking like he can’t see clearly. He smiles as he settles his hands over Horatio’s, like this is ordinary, like nothing is the matter..
“Horatio,” he says, and then his smile falls. “I am dead.”
Panic sets into his chest and without thinking Horatio pulls his hands away, trailing down his side until they find the wound and then his hands are stained all over again-- or maybe it was only in his head before. He shakes his head, looking up to meet Hamlet’s eyes, to tell him no, he is not dying, he is far from dead. But Hamlet isn’t looking at him anymore.
His eyes are glazed over as he looks at the queen, his voice soft, breaking on the vowels, “Wretched queen, adieu. You that look pale and tremble at this chance, that are but mutes or audience to this act, had I but time--”
Hamlet meets Horatio’s gaze then, and his hand lifts shakily to tug at Horatio’s neckerchief. There is humor in his eyes, in the way they used to light when writing poetry, before his life was surrounded by death. He leans in, like he’s sharing a secret, “As this fell sergeant, Death,
Is strict in his arrest.”
Sticking to the script, Horatio chokes out a huffed laugh, and Hamlet’s grip on his neckerchief tightens. “Had I but time…”
“My lord--”
“Oh, I could tell you--” Hamlet starts in a voice that Horatio would have moved mountains to hear under different circumstances, he stops and shakes his head, “but let it be. Horatio, I am dead.”
“No--”
“Thou livest,” Hamlet tells him desperately, yanking him forward as if they are not already toe to toe. Hamlet swallows, “Report me and my cause aright to the unsatisfied.”
It’s an order. The last order. Horatio’s already quivering hands shake from Hamlet’s clothes and he stumbles back, eyes widening as he stares at his friend, his best friend, his--
“Never believe it.” Horatio matches Hamlet’s smile from earlier, shrugging as he trips to Claudius’s still body. “I am a more antique Roman than a Dane.”
He can see it, the moment Hamlet realizes what he’s doing. He knows Hamlet’s face and expression better than he knows science and the inner workings of a mind. He sees Hamlet move forward just as he picks up the not yet emptied poison gauntlet. Just enough for one more death, only one left alive in the room.
“Here’s yet some liquor left,” He says, as he thinks that it’s fitting, and brings the cup to his lips.
He isn’t fast enough, Hamlet gets to him first, but trips over Claudius’s leg, grabbing at Horatio’s arm as he falls. “As thou'rt a man, give me the cup. Let go!”
They wrestle with it, over the king's dead body and for a moment Horatio almost laughs at the sight but then Hamlet is tackling him to the floor, pulling the cup from his grasp, throwing it across the room as he growls, “By heaven, I’ll have ’t.”
They sit on the floor, and Hamlet pulls them away from Claudius’s body before he collapses with gasping breaths against Horatio. He reaches up to hold his cheek, turmoil in his eyes.
“No,” Is all Horatio manages to grit out.
“O God, Horatio, what a wounded name,” Hamlet whispers, and he’s talking about both of them. Then he huffs in his stubborn and familiar way and the blood on Horatio’s hands burns . “Things standing thus unknown, shall live behind me!”
Horatio would usually roll his eyes. Instead he pulls Hamlet further against him, eyes frantically searching for the poisoned cup, searching for a chance, that just maybe--
“If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,” Hamlet tells him, and Horatio yanks his eyes away so fast it makes him dizzy. His jaw unhinged as he stares down at Hamlet, who only smiles as his lips quiver, “absent thee from felicity a while? And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain to tell my story.”
Reading in a field while the sun is high in the sky, scribbled poems on his science notations and sketched flowers in journals. Hamlet’s laugh that used to come so easily and his hand warm on Horatio’s shoulder. He’d told him once that in the end they are all stories, he’d told him once that theirs were intertwined. Horatio wants to say no. With every bit of his being he wants to scream to god that he cannot do this, but he recognizes the tremor in Hamlet’s tone.
He almost asks if the request is only a way to make him stay, to keep alive. He doesn’t, he knows the answer. Slowly, he nods. Hamlet shifts his hand to swipe a tear off his cheek before settling it back on his face.
“Oh, I die, Horatio,” He says like an apology. “The potent poison quite o'ercrows my spirit. I cannot live to hear the news from England. But I do prophesy the election lights on Fortinbras. He has my dying voice. So tell him, with th' occurrents, more and less, which have solicited.”
He waits until Horatio nods again, then his hand all but drops, his pointer finger brushes across Horatio’s lips as he says, “The rest is silence.”
Horatio feels the last breath leave the prince of Denmark, and with it, his love.
The walls around him shake or perhaps it’s only his body, wrapped around Hamlet like a shield come too late. He feels the prince’s curls against his nose as he presses his lips to his forehead.
There was a moment of quiet, but Hamlet took it with him with his last words.
The sound of marching soldiers drowns out Horatio’s wail, a scream to the heavens and that damned ghost and the inescapable fate that comes from revenge and the dare it had to take Ophelia and Rozencratz and Guildenstern and Laertes and Hamlet from him. His throat aches as waves of tears fall across his face and he wonders if he could drown in them, and how much of the water in lovely Ophelia’s lungs were the salt from her wide eyes. After what feels to be hours but can’t have been, his breath shudders to a quieter racket, and he sends a prayer to his friends who are, all of them, dead.
He’s left alone in an empty room with the man he loves in his arms and there are too many words for him to say, but Hamlet was always the writer.
“Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince,” Horatio says finally, and closes Hamlet’s eyes against the tragedy surrounding them as he says his final goodbye, “and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.”