Work Text:
If I’d at least, before you ran off, conceived from our closeness
Some child fathered by you, if there just were a baby Aeneas
Playing inside my halls, whose face might in some way recall you,
I would not feel so wholly trapped yet wholly deserted.
—Virgil, The Aeneid IV
He had researched for almost six years, and he had finished writing over a year before, yet to this day Alfred still spent his free time reading everything all over again—he looked through new articles, he went to the archives he now knew like the back of his hand to see if he had missed something, but he was never able to find anything, only a luring sensation of failure and helplessness, constantly unable to understand what was holding him back.
The cup of tea that aided his recently flared up stomach burned his hand pleasantly as he reached for it without looking away from his papers. The liquid equally tingled his throat, soothing the pain it left on its path, one he envisioned alongside the flow of the words before him.
The paper he had found in the early hours of the morning made no sense to him. The only useful thing it provided was the challenge it offered against the arguments that he himself had been defending in his own thesis, for in the wrongdoings of others he believed that perhaps he could understand what his work lacked, actively finding all the points he had left unmarked with too much overlooking from his part.
There had to be something, somewhere. But there was nothing, he knew that, but in spite of it all, he still allowed himself to be distracted in the most important of things, his job now a latent concern that could wait, and his own health an issue that could be fixed with a tea that only allowed the fleeting pleasure that was doomed to disappear in hours.
If he rationalised his thoughts, he could admit that he had not been the best version of himself lately, yet when his mind couldn't hold the stress of his academic work any longer, it tortured him instead with all the things it evaded—the affairs he kept at bay by his own need of research—and thus any escaping in itself was not an alternative worth of consideration, ever. But, what really stung his bowels was the awareness of not only losing the respect of others in these actions, but also the one he held of himself, and that could be seen everywhere in his daily existence of late.
Particularly today his class had been quite restless, and his own headache took over him in a way that made him snap brusquely at the pupils who had once looked up to him in a manner that had always felt as undeserved—certainly now more than ever—but more than that, it was a sign of a temper that was getting out of hand.
Old patterns bending to his own free will.
He sighed as the pen fell on thin wasted paper, the source of its ink rolling down until it clicked against the cup of tea he had left untouched after the comfort of a burn he persistently yearned for, one that could have perhaps forgiven him—though, as the sinner he was, he refused to look at the sight of what his acts were leading to, and ignoring every single sign, his eyes closed as he leaned back to his chair, neck stretching upwards to the heavens, desperately asking for advice that could be reached past the school's ceiling—silently praying that he was not beyond salvation.
"If you have that usual neck pain of yours, you could just ask father for help, you know?"
His eyes snapped open as the voice hit his ears, and there it was: the sight of the earthly personification of both the devil and the angel on his shoulder appearing right by the door, as in answering his question on whether he was forever damned or not.
A door he always thought to have closed, but somehow seemingly always seemed to be without a definitive lock.
"Shouldn't you be in class?" he sighed, and in response Stiorra only shrugged and walked in to sit right on the top of the desk in front of his—wholly disregarding the decency the school was supposed to demand and require.
Just like her father.
"I'm on a break," she told him easily.
"One you have decided upon?"
"Clearly."
Despite everything, he shook his head fondly, and in the silence that followed, his eyes fell once more on the words beneath. At once his veins started to pulsate in worry once again.
"Are you still looking at that thing you are writing?" she asked him, her body now dangerously leaning way too forward so that she could see better from her spot, and he tried his best to refrain from warning her to be careful, something he had done way too many times since she first came to this world, both to the amusement and irritation of her father who never missed the chance of chiding what he defined as the perfect man who never made a mistake—sarcastically so, of course.
"If you constantly tell her to be careful, she will be afraid of everything in the future."
"That doesn't mean you can just let her risk death every other hour, Uhtred!"
At the memory, Alfred did his utmost to ignore the sound of laughter that echoed in his mind more often than he would have liked to.
Calmly putting the pages away, he reached to take a sip of his tea, and after he took his sweet time with it, he set the cup down. At last, his warm hands clasped together, calling for strength.
He looked up at the girl who had the same eyes of who he had always secretly called his best friend.
"Did you need anything, Stiorra?"
At the sound of his solemn tone, a small laughter escaped her.
"Look at you. Acting all graceful, as if thirty minutes ago you weren't shouting all your frustrations at the lot of us."
"I did not shout my frustrations—"
"Poor Cynlaef won't probably come to school for days," Stiorra continued ignoring him.
Alfred sighed.
He did take it out a bit too much on Cynlaef, but the boy had also behaved unreasonably for a whole hour before he finally snapped. His showing off behaviour was clear for everyone to see, and, especially, it was a useless disturbance to his lesson—one that had already been difficult enough to start with, for the topic of Anglo-Saxon poetry certainly was not the most favoured by his students. He had tried his best to make them feel even just a little of interest, but it had been a miserable attempt to say the least. His exhaustion made his mind wander on the edge of the worthiness of actually bothering to go through all the trouble, something that would never have occurred in his head in the first place when there was still passion left in his heart, one that was now unable to be reached upon, in spite of every try.
"Sometimes a reminder to propriety is needed," he reasoned weakly.
He was tired—really tired—and he knew that not even a good night's sleep could fix him.
"You have not been just snappy lately," she started in a voice he knew too well, one that was preparing the ground for something more. "You have been—what's the word—negligent?"
It was subtle—that change of tone, a barely noticeable one that she often used as a child, when Uhtred or Gisela had refused to buy her something, and so she came to him instead, blissfully knowing even at such a young age how he couldn't say no to her, and that was what made him stare at her with suspicious in his eyes.
Ignoring her well-placed stab, he pursued his mouth.
"What do you need, Stiorra?"
The innocent girl looked up at him with an expression worthy of a Saint painted in the Vatican itself, one that utterly betrayed the devil.
And soon, there it was.
"You have given me a 70% in my last essay."
He raised his eyebrows unbothered.
"Yes, a particularly lacking one from what I remember."
"Lacking?! I have never written better and you know it, Alfred!"
"It's Mr. Wessex here."
"Oh, sod off."
"You have decided to insult more than argue." Stiorra opened her mouth—clearly indignant to hear the words—but he swiftly raised a hand to interrupt her, his fingers rising before she even attempted to say something. "And, I have noticed that lately you have been copying your other essays. The diversity between your works is what has been missing."
"So, you are saying that we have both sucked lately."
Undeterred, Alfred matched her sarcastic smile. "Show me that you are capable of writing the way I know you can, and I will give you the mark you deserve."
Jumping off the desk, Stiorra walked to lean over his desk. Seemingly so sure to have the upper hand, the grin was still in place.
"Your 70% will make Coach Jorvik kick me out until January."
"That is not me, that was you kicking one of your mates during practice," he told her with a hint of irritation that to this day came from when he had to pursue the Headmaster himself to not suspend her from school altogether, a favour that had cost him a lot.
Not that anyone knew of that.
Well.
Hild knew of that—in fact, she had insulted the Headmaster for a long time after it.
With a gentle hand he opened his drawer to get his papers back, quickly establishing that he had work to be done. "Go back to your class," he told her without a single glance.
"Dad won't let me out for a week, Alfred."
His hands stopped, and the drawer closed with a muted thud that joined the sound of the stack of pages falling on the desk.
A smile appeared on his face as he turned to stare at her, finally understanding her.
"So this is what it is about. I see…"
"You see nothing," she snarled at him.
"Your problem is not about whether or not Jorvik will allow you on the field—"
"Jorvik knows I'm the only capable one in the football team. She needs me to be there."
"Your issue is whether you will be able to see Sigtryggr Ivarsson or not."
And for the first time in his whole life, he saw a blush appear on her cheeks, though he had to give it to her that she recovered from it rather quickly—smiling instead at him in a way too sly for his liking.
His mind turned as there was clearly another trick up her sleeve, one he had foolishly not predicted.
"You tell Father I am dating Sigtryggr, and I show him the letter you wrote to him," she told him, crossing her arms. "The one you wrote at nineteen."
"I don't know what you are talking about," he rushed to say, once again proving his foolery, and the blood in his veins stopped as the words landed.
He said it fast, too fast.
Fool, he chided himself in his own head.
I should have burned it.
His eyes followed Stiorra who, like an executioner cornering her prisoner, started walking around the classroom—never moving her gaze away from him and his anxious beating chest.
As she paced to the sound of the heart he felt in his throat, her right hand reached inside her pocket, and from the shadows of her dark jacket, what appeared to be a photocopy rose like an axe in a battlefield. "You see, Alfred… When I spent the weekend over at your house, whilst Dad was away for the night, I found this very interesting letter between your books—a really smart choice, by the way! We both know Father would never look there."
Opening the piece of paper, she dramatically cleared her voice before starting to read out loud.
"I know you will soon leave for university, Uhtred, and that is the reason why I can't keep this to myself any longer—"
Alfred snapped up to his feet. "Give me that page," he threatened rather uselessly, as she only raised her voice louder and started jumping up and down the room, his flare-up incapable of allowing him to keep up with such fast switch of movements, a skill he totally had to blame Coach Jorvik for.
"Ever since I got my diagnosis, I cannot stop thinking of how treacherous my life is, and how I constantly hold myself back from good things. Uhtred, you are a good thing—"
"How many times have I told you not to look through my things!" he barked at her, in that same frustration she previously pointed out.
He could barely stand his current thirty-seven self, let alone his nineteen-year-old version.
"I wasn't looking through your stuff, I was searching for a book! You basically live in a library!" she justified herself, her back turning towards his barely breathing body.
"And casually you happened to get a copy for yourself?!"
Stiorra laughed. "How can you know I don't have the original one as well?"
For a second he was left speechless, and it took him a beat before being able to talk again.
"You have it at home?"
"Of course. I knew I would have needed it one day," she told him as if that were the most logical thing in the world, and while he stared at her trying to process the implications of this news, she just moved her eyes back to the page in her still hands. "Where were we? Uhm, ah, yes! Uhtred, you are a good thing, one that I cannot bear to lose—"
"You just left something like that there?" he interrupted once more, asking a question brimmed with a fear that genuinely made him more nervous than anything else ever did, his own voice barely coming out at that moment as he almost didn't even hear the words she was reading.
He knew the letter by heart, unfortunately—that and the many others he had written throughout the years, but this was his most vulnerable one, the one he wrote when he was at the lowest point of his life—a moment in which he genuinely believed he wouldn't even have had a life to look forward to, let alone a hope for his feelings to be reciprocated.
At the time, he and Uhtred had experienced a most difficult moment in their friendship, for after ten years of companionship, at eighteen—during their last year of secondary school—Alfred had stopped talking to him altogether, thoroughly avoiding him after spending many months arguing over everything and nothing.
After many contemplations, and many feelings over torturous thoughts, he had decided to disappear from his life in toto, or at least as much as he could for he could still be seen at school, but nevertheless their entire last year together was gone in a blink of an eye, just like that.
It hadn't been easy, not in the slightest, especially when after a few months Uhtred had resolved to pretend he simply did not exist. Alfred knew that he had no right to expect the friend he had abandoned to actively search for him, but he could never deny to himself how much it stung to spend his days jumping between hospital visits and school hours drained in small glances at the guy who meant so much to him, when he was actually supposed to be listening to teachers that were more clement towards him and his unknown health condition than he deserved.
His own parents had tried to talk him out of it more than once—constantly reminding him that Uhtred was his best friend and as such did not deserve such a treatment from him, and many fights were born from those conversations and the extensive discontent borne from everything happening around him.
Alfred had been impossible at the time, and Uhtred himself had all but hated him.
He deserved it and he knew it, because while he was beginning to suffer the long journey to find out what had been afflicting him all along, in the path he had hurt the most important person in his life.
And yet, when in the midst of the summer after they had graduated from high school he had finally got an answer, Uhtred was the one he had found himself calling, and he was the first person he had cried in front of at the knowledge of having an illness that he could not cure, not then nor in the future.
Uhtred had come to him just as fast as he had been ready to leave him.
"There's no need to worry. Father will never find it—that unless you change my mark, at least," Stiorra told him, smoothly interrupting his train of thoughts.
"This is not funny, Stiorra."
"Neither is trying to threaten me to tell Dad about Sigtryggr."
"I didn't even come to that."
"You were about to."
And on that he couldn't lie.
After a moment, he slowly extended a hand towards the damning page—a single palm facing all of Heaven.
"I will give you an 85%," he conceded, gracefully.
"90% and I will bring the original back to you."
They stared at each other for a long time, a challenge to back down in both of their eyes.
Soon, she grew tired and waved the page in front of him, and he snatched it from her—relenting at last. "Bring it by 8 o'clock tonight."
Instantly, she hugged him happily—loudly kissing his right cheek. "That is exactly why you are my favourite!"
Despite everything, a small smile appeared on his lips at the words—one that he made sure to replace with a scowl as soon as he knew he could be seen by her, just so that she could always remember to never threaten him again.
"Go back to class."
Stiorra nodded, and—breaking the hug—he turned around on his heels to walk back to his desk, but now that he was still very much aware of every thin change of air around him, he felt her hesitantly lingering on her spot, and when he looked at her, he noticed the rare sight of insecurity on her face.
"What is it?" he asked her, gently for the first time that day, the same tone he had used when he had comforted her the night her parents had divorced and Uhtred had disappeared for weeks, leaving him and Gisela to deal alone with a confused five years old.
And in her eyes the tranquillity came really fast at the voice, because that was not Mr. Wessex, but Alfred—a man who would always protect her.
"Will you put a good word about Sigtryggr when I finally decide to introduce him to dad? Mum has already met him during her six months."
"What does Gisela think?" he asked her.
"She likes him, and I know for a fact that you like him."
Alfred scoffed. "He certainly writes better essays than you right now."
"Oh, fuck you," she scoffed back, his poor comment confirmation enough that he would not work against her and Sigtryggr.
And as she blithely left the room, he stood alone in his empty classroom, a single piece of paper in between his hands—a long gone proof of a letter that neither him nor his heart could ever forget, his old fingers the same ones who had written those words that described a love he could never fulfil.
His phone buzzed in his pocket, entirely shaking him out of the trance he had found himself in—a lost corridor of black memories that had a single ever-present light, and that was the light that turned his screen to life with a single message soon joined by another—like lovers between sheets.
Uhtred: I'm on a break, do you want to grab a coffee?
Uhtred: Or one of your disgusting herbal teas.
Alfred smiled at his phone, completely despising how still to this day he could relate to his younger self.
Stupid fool.
And he knew his mind wasn't talking about Uhtred with that insult.
He threw the letter into the bin next to his desk, and after grabbing his coat and satchel, he locked his classroom up and left the school behind.
All to grab a disgusting herbal tea with the man he had fallen in love with all those years before—right between the same pale walls where Stiorra and Sigtryggr had found one another.