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Guildenstern is the only one who knows how to work the temperamental espresso machine, which success of course pleases Hamlet to no end. "If a man isn't human before he has his coffee," he'll say over a perfectly-brewed cup, "Then yours is a humanitarian effort; a godly effort, even. You make a person of this weak clay."
"Developed a taste for casual blasphemy with your cafe au lait, my lord?" asks Guildenstern, raising an eyebrow with cool precision. "No more than with, for example, eggs benedict," answers the prince calmly. Which is probably a hint, but they're all out of hollandaise, so Hamlet will have to go without.
Guildenstern finds the prince of Denmark a truly insufferable housemate, even when he's being grateful. Rosencrantz likes to play word games with him, though, and Horatio dotes on the bastard, so Guildenstern simply makes the damned coffee and tries to hide behind his annotated edition of the Metamorphoses.
He prefers the times when he and Rosencrantz are quite alone in the house, himself curled up in his favorite wingback chair, Rosencrantz carefully crafting a paperclip castle at his feet. They have a quiet sort of understanding in those moments, he thinks, when Ros's tongue is caught at the corner of his lips in concentration, and Guildenstern's brow is furrowed at the senselessness of myth and man. At times, he will reach down to ruffle Rosencrantz's hair, roughly, as though the man is a great, eager dog.
He will sometimes think aloud, with slow-growing vehemence. Ros neither listens nor ignores him, thinks Guildenstern, which suits the both of them quite well. "Consider the story of Narcissus," Guildenstern will say, with his finger pressed between the pages to mark his line. "Echo's tragedy is unquestionable; hers is a dearth of communicative ability, or perhaps that she has simply fallen for the wrong man--what that says about harmatia, I should like to see scholars argue. Flaw, or mistake? Error of nature, or error of judgment? And resting on her little wisp of a voice is the weight of our free will.
"Which of us can say," he asks the air, "whether Echo ended unhappily because she meant to, or because the gods meant her to? Or because the gods meant her to mean to? In that, it could be argued, we cannot choose love, but rather choose how we pursue it--"
"I like that bit," puts in Rosencrantz.
"--how we pursue it; but what the gods grant or take away, our voices and our agency ... that, we can hardly choose. Is there a word for the absence of agency?"
"A what?" asks Rosencrantz.
"A word."
"Statement and repetition!" Rosencrantz cries, and for that Guildenstern flings himself out of his chair and kicks over the stupid little castle of paperclips.
"It wasn't a game!" he shouts, seizing Ros by the collar and dragging him up to his knees; his teeth are bared like a dog's, his breath hot on Ros's face, and the other man is whimpering and squirming and suddenly Guildenstern can't remember why he's suddenly so angry--
He lets Ros go, more gently. "It wasn't--" he begins, but that isn't what he means at all. "It didn't have to--" he tries again, but that's even less what he means.
Rosencrantz puts a hand on his cheek, smoothing out the lingering tension there. He brushes back Guildenstern's hair with a touch like comfort, but his eyes are very bright and very lost. Guildenstern wants to fold him close for protection against ... he can't even say what.
"Fate," says Ros, then, letting his hand fall away. "What?" says Guildenstern.
"The word you wanted."
Rosencrantz can't make the espresso machine make espresso, but he can coax it into producing xocoatl fit for an Aztec king. Leaning against the counter, Guildenstern closes his eyes and inhales the spicy scent of it. He is trying to remember something--something horrible, he thinks; something that happened a long time ago. All that remains, though, is a stink of fear and a feeling of rushing through the air.
He can't say why he's suddenly filled with dread.
*
Guildenstern watches Rosencrantz standing before the mirror, modeling the doublet that Ophelia has loaned him to wear for the play; he finds the image disturbing, and for a moment, he cannot place why. Surely they have stood before mirrors before, together--although Guildenstern cannot quite remember a specific instance, now that he thinks on it--and surely it has never been disturbing before. That is the very nature of a disturbing thing, after all; it is something which isn't usual, ergo necessitating the existence of a usual.
It can't be that Laertes's old doublet doesn't quite fit Rosencrantz (for Laertes is a slimmer man, powerful and fast and lean as a leopard in a menagerie)--nor even that there is simply something wrong about Denmark that permeates the very atmosphere, although that is perhaps a better guess.
When Rosencrantz reaches out to touch his reflection, though, Guildenstern has it. There is a faintly-visible gap between his hand and his reflection's; the mirror is one of the new sort from the south, with a sheet of thin glass over a sheet of thinner tin. Such mirrors have a depth to them to which he is unaccustomed, like the depth of a still pond. Nothing more.
Nothing more.
"Like a voice that you can almost hear," he murmurs, and doesn't realize that he is speaking until he hears his own voice echoing half-foreign in the strange room in Denmark. "Or a face that is and isn't your own, on the still water ..."
"A reflection, you mean," says Rosencrantz, turning to look away from his own.
"Not only a reflection, but an inflection," Guildenstern says. He folds his hands behind his back, paces the length of the room with his eyes on the rough flooring. "A tonal shift, a refraction--an echo only mimics the speaker without duplicating him, and the water appears to break a reed, simply by bending the light around it ..." At once he turns to face Rosencrantz, his voice resonating with a sudden, fierce clarity.
"Narcissus knew it," he snaps; "Teiresias told him. A man's better off not knowing himself. I tell you, we're better off not knowing--"
The clarity has drained out of him, though, and he cannot continue. He hasn't any idea where he's going any longer, or why he was so adamant that he arrive there.
"Rosencrantz," says Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern looks up at once.
"Guildenstern?" he tries, hopefully, looking for a spark of recognition in the other man's eyes. For those eyes to say, subtly but irrefutably, That's me.
He can't remember what he had been saying. It can't have been very important.
*
They spin coins emblazoned with a Caesar's face. Heads.
Guildenstern has heard a poem as Roman as the coin, not long ago; Roman coins and poems do make their way to the northerly reaches of Germania, and there they are lost or stolen or given away freely.
Heads.
He will say that he cares nothing for the stories of the Romans--but when he hears the wind sigh over the waves at night, he shivers at the memory of something unspeakable.
Heads.