Chapter Text
“Respect! Tradition! Ceremony! Duty!” These were the words on the banners that four boys carried in, and they were the words that echoed in response throughout the cathedral halls. All of the boys returning to Wittenberg Academy had gathered there to start the upcoming new year. The gothic arches made of gray stone that loomed above would frighten any poor boy into remembering those words, instating them with the fear of God or, even worse, the Principal Tudor into his breast if he did not. Horatio, however, was not one of those boys. While he did rise to his feet instinctively when those words were called, he did not realize what for, and as his eyes flashed around him, his chapped lips mumbled vaguely along with the other boys in his pew.
A uniform shuffling sounded when they all sat down. Horatio, missing his cue, was left standing awkwardly for the briefest moment before he sat as quickly as he could. Feeling the blush creeping up his neck, he ducked his head down and pushed up his glasses when they started to slip down his nose. While this unknown boy was too unknown to the crowd for anyone to notice his bumbling display, out of the corner of his eye at the end of the row, he saw the ‘Duty’ banner rustling. It was caused by the boy who carried it, a pale blond boy about his age attempting to stifle his laughter at Horatio. When he calmed himself and stilled his body like a marble statue, his eyes peered back at Horatio for a moment, and they were made of the coldest blue Horatio had ever seen, and they seemed to pierce through Horatio’s head like a sharp icicle. Horatio, oddly exposed, looked suddenly away, and felt the blush spread to his cheeks. He gnawed on his bottom lip in shame, picking at its dry skin with his teeth. Just his luck: it started bleeding.
Horatio missed the moment when Principal Tudor had walked up to the podium, but there he stood in all of his grotesque glory, lecturing about Wittenberg’s prestige and extensive history and how the boys sitting in these halls would become men and how they had so much ahead of them and that they had to achieve and become great and great things were ahead and they had all of these expectations and they had to rise to them all or else their lives were worthless –
Horatio decided to tune him out. It was hard enough being a boy of sixteen, he thought, with facial hair coming in and the occasional random erection in the morning, but now they were supposed to achieve . It was very different from his old public school, he knew. That was where his parents threw him in and to leave him to his own devices and not care while they focused on his perfect older brother, but as soon as Horatio’s name filtered through the hallways a few too many times, his parents it was high time he followed Marcellus’s footsteps and enrolled in Wittenberg.
They never really told Horatio why they took him out of his past school and put him here. It could have been that he was excelling in his classes and just needed an extra bit of Wittenberg molding and his parents figured he could end up like Marcellus.
And yet, it could have been because of the other thing . Horatio wasn’t even sure if they knew about the other thing . He never told them, and they never talked about it.
Principal Tudor finished his speech and a roar of applause washed over the crowd. Horatio joined in, not because he liked the speech, but because he would sorely stick out again if he didn’t. That’s how it was done: you agree to things that you don’t know anything about because that was expected of you. There couldn’t be anything different. There wasn’t another way.
Horatio felt lost in the sea of strangers clapping their hands together. Anxiety curdled in the pit of his stomach thinking about the upcoming year.
Horatio stood dumbly in the middle of the courtyard with two large leather suitcases in his hands. His parents, after shaking hands with almost every faculty member they could recognize, quickly left. Horatio got a brief hug from his mother and an even briefer pat on the back from his father. They then got into their car.
Horatio rather liked being by himself, but he was left with an ever-clawing feeling of loneliness when he watched his parents drive away. He wasn’t the kind of kid who really needed his parents like some others, like the young sixth graders he saw crying and hanging onto their mother’s dresses around him, but there was still a desperate thing inside of him that urged him to chase after the car. Perhaps he was mourning the loss of the kind of parents he knew he never would have, the kind that wouldn’t ditch him.
“Horatio,” a disinterested voice called out from across the courtyard behind him. Horatio turned on his heels at the sound of his name to find the same blond from that one banner earlier. He leaned lazily on a stone column with his lanky legs stretched out in front of him. While his legs were long, Horatio found that he was not as tall as he expected him to be when he pushed himself up and began walking towards him. He stopped in front of Horatio, and he saw that they were almost the same height, but Horatio could see slightly over his head. His blank and expressionless face matched with the startling blue eyes that shot through Horatio’s soul would have been enough to creep anyone out, but Horatio saw the small quirk that played at the boy’s lips. He decided he was intrigued rather than frightened.
“Welcome,” he said in his monotone voice. “I heard we are to be roommates.”
Roommates , Horatio thought. He was a bit worried about that. He had lived in one house his whole life and had his own bedroom the entire time (except on the spare vacation, or on that one time when his room got infested by hornets and he had to sleep on Marcellus’s floor). Living in close quarters with anyone would be hard enough, but based on the other kid’s perfectly tailored black suit, complete with gold cufflinks, Horatio prayed that this wouldn’t be a problem.
“Ah,” Horatio responded. “Hi.”
He tried smiling at the boy, but it was a closed-mouth, uncomfortable kind of grimace, and its recipient decided to return it with an outstretched hand anyway. “I’m Hamlet.”
Horatio shuffled the suitcase on his right into his left until he had one hand free to clasp Hamlet’s and another occupied with gracelessly gripping the handles of two suitcases. “Horatio.”
“Yes, I know,” Hamlet rolled his eyes, and Horatio looked down at their hands.
Hamlet’s hands were long and thin, with slender fingers that Horatio could imagine playing the piano. He thought they looked rather dumb between his own wide, calloused fingers.
A cold seemed to seep through Hamlet’s hands into his, as if Horatio was touching the hand of a corpse, and soon he dropped it, afraid the cold would bore a hole through his palm.
“I hope you can make yourself at home in this prison,” Hamlet said when their hands finally dropped.
“A prison, you say,” Horatio repeated, cocking his head to the left in confusion.
“Yes, yes, Wittenberg’s a prison,” Hamlet said again. “You’ll find out soon enough why its walls are made of stone, and why every brick looks the same.”
What the hell is this kid on about? Horatio could not help but wonder.
“If you think this is a prison,” Horatio leaned in as if he was telling him a secret, “then I hate to break it to you, but the rest of the world would seem like one too.”
“There are many confines and dungeons,” he waved Horatio off, “but Wittenberg is the worst.”
“I’ll be the judge of that,” Horatio shrugged.
Hamlet sighed and looked wistfully away into the middle distance while wisps of his gelled blond blond fell into his downcast eyes. “Then it must be a prison to me.”
Horatio just stared at him blankly, void of a response.
Hamlet was broken out of his melancholic reverie and turned back to Horatio. He shoved his hands in his pockets and began to back away slowly. He flicked his head back as he spun on his heels.
“Come on, Horatio,” he said. “I’ll show you our dorm.”
Horatio, quickly sneaking out a heavy sigh once Hamlet was out of range, had no choice but to follow him.