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"We were meant to land at a star. Never to live like this, nomads and thieves," Hamlet said.
Horatio hadn't believed him at the time. They hadn't seemed adrift--Denmark was the greatest crumbling empire a man could imagine.
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"Stay," Fortinbras ordered. "I know you. You keep getting things done. Where'd you spring from?"
"Denmark, captain."
Fortinbras rested her gloved hands against a control panel and waited. "I was in the ballroom," Horatio added.
Horatio recalled how on the first day, Fortinbras had stayed in the grand ballroom, grease-blue sword in hand, and paced like a penned thing. Horatio had slumped over his knees on the floor beneath her, not daring to touch Hamlet, but not willing to back away from the body. Over his head, Fortinbras had tossed orders and questions in equal measure, and received only obedience. Claudius and the others had been cleared away, but some reason of her own, Fortinbras left Hamlet and Horatio lie. Horatio didn't cry. He just couldn't breathe. When Fortinbras had crouched in front of him and asked pointed questions about control rooms and access codes, Horatio had given the answers blankly, because it couldn't get worse.
"That explains it," she said, and there was a quiet click as the door to the bridge locked, on remote control. "It has been very difficult for me, learning what happened."
She wasn't going to let him leave. She had given him doors and in payment, a story. It was cruel but fair and Horatio was struck again by the newness of this ruler who had invaded Denmark.
Horatio opened his mouth to relate the bleak list of who poisoned whom and started instead, "I had a friend, a friend from school. He was brilliant and mad, and he cared about Denmark, knew every door and frozen cargo bay...it wasn't his fault. I showed him a piece of a file that Ophelia had decoded, and it said the captain--Claudius--his uncle, a murderer--in the ballroom everything got wrong. Before that too. Ophelia's programmer died, and she is as she is now. He could have waited and been captain one day, taken Denmark and made it better, but..."
"It is better when everyone has a job to do," Fortinbras said, when the silence grew too long.
"Yes," Horatio said.
Fortinbras's expression shifted, and suddenly Horatio felt like an asset, like he'd been picked up and placed onto Fortinbras's chessboard, when he had been sitting idle in the box of pieces before. It felt like being useful again, like being pulled back into the swing of politics. It felt uncomfortably like regaining something he'd lost.
This time when he backed away, Fortinbras unlocked the doors and let him go.
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i'm not sure when i started crying and now i can't stop