Work Text:
(1)
I go back to Wittenberg.
My room is the same as it ever was – the frayed curtains with black trim, the imperceptibly uneven bedposts, the ink stains on the desk, the crack in the window pane, the scuffs by the door, the wardrobe that never quite shut. I think I was expecting everything to look foreign to me now, but no. I wish I didn’t recognise any of it, but I guess that’s my fault for so adamantly making here my home.
I set my trunk on the table and immediately realise my mistake: I’m sliced through by the stinging memory of last autumn, the autumn before that, and that, all the times I did this so full of ease and excitement. It leaves me reeling, short of breath, and I fling my arm out to get the trunk away from me. It clatters onto the floor with the force of my adrenaline and carves a dent in the wood.
I stare at this new imperfection, and I find myself comforted by it. I kneel beside it and press my thumb into the splintering crater, and think, Here’s something you never touched.
(2)
The air is cold, and the company not unlike the air. Those I considered my favourite professors avoid my eye at dismissal, stacking paper and looking busy. My peers give me a wide berth, wider than the three empty seats beside me, so I spend a lot of time in the libraries. The enforced quiet takes away some of the offence, and it meant I didn’t go mad up in my room alone. I don’t spend much time in there at all. (I could have changed it; I could have rented one of the nicer rooms for older students, the ones with better views and mattresses. It was offered to me. I don’t understand why I can’t look at the scuffs by the door but I can’t stomach the idea of giving them up.)
Consequently, my studies flourish. I watch my essays astound and amaze and I hate them. It all seems awfully trivial now. All this time jumping through hoops, laying out who said what and why they’re wrong, pretending to know more about fields than their pioneers–
But I write and I write and I write and fear the day my hand grinds to halt and I’m left with just the hum in my brain and nothing left to say.
(3)
It is worse, somehow, when my treatment is reversed. A fortnight into the old ways, I start being jostled in corridors, crowded on the grass, ignored to the point of being forgotten. The ordinary are not left alone. I have no princely shadow now to turn people away.
(4)
“Come with me,” he had said easily. “Elsinore looms, as do the dull hours with dull company.”
“Guildenstern and Rosencrantz would hardly take kindly to that,” I replied just as easily, not raising my eyes from the page before me.
“They are busy men, more the King’s than mine at home,” he said, quill rolling lazily in his palm, not having touched paper in half an hour. His feet are kicked up on the table in a manner only the most prized and adored students can get away with. “So, will you come?”
(5)
The priest who officiated Ophelia’s funeral cannot justify officiating the others. They get a quiet spot in the cemetery, by the oak tree, and little else. I haven’t enough hands to carry all the flowers I would need.
(6)
The days get shorter, and soon I can barely recall what I've done the past week.
One fog-ridden morning I receive a card of a tree, sketched roughly but with great skill; I recognise the artistry instantly as the best kept secret of the Danish royal family. On the underside, official cursive proclaims summer to live on within us.
"Who sent this?" I demand of the messenger, a boy of perhaps sixteen.
"Instructions were to send it the first time the sun set before five o'clock, sir," he recites dutifully.
"Instructions from who?"
"A Master Hamlet, sir. Back in June."
It's so typical, so unthinkingly flamboyant, such a sugary little thing to set up, and for a few moments I can't even smile.
The card ends up in the mirror frame of my dresser.
(7)
It plagues me for days, and then I realise the implications of such advance planning, and I don't sleep that night for imagining how it must feel to know you are going to die.
(8)
Sometimes, I think about how easy it would’ve been. In my memories, everything seems so close, all the potential right in arm’s reach. I could’ve said, You’re okay, aren’t you? I could’ve said, I’ve still got that wine from before. I could’ve said anything. Even worse, he could’ve replied.
(9)
"There's yet some liquor left," I'd said.
It was nearing midnight and there was still no sign of a breeze. We sat on the window sill looking at the sky, Orion and the others; my bare feet were tucked under me, his hanging into the night. He took the bottle from my outstretched fingers and swigged.
"For all that we are taught, I don't think I can believe in a Heaven," he mused, not seeming scared by his conclusion as I would have been.
"Faith doesn't require reason," I pointed out, an old argument.
"I'd argue it required an absence of reason," he picked up the thread seamlessly, eyes darting across the stars. "But that is not it."
I waited for him to continue but he did not. I extracted my foot from beneath me and nudged him inelegantly. When he finally looked over I nodded at the bottle and he laughed, returning it. At the precise moment of the exchange, as we were tethered together, he said, "What a terrible thing, to go nowhere."
"Go?" I asked, stilled by his swerve of thought, and admittedly somewhat by his intensity of gaze.
"I am undecided on the matter of Hell. I should think it would be better to go to Hell than to go nowhere."
"How," I faltered. "How can one exist without the other?"
He smiled. He released the bottle and I took it to my chest. "Perhaps there was never a way up."
"You have to believe in a way up," I said. "Even if you don't think it's true, you must believe it. For your sanity."
He relinquished his eyes to the universe again; he brought his legs up and stretched them across the sill so that his toes brushed mine.
I looked through the murky glass of the bottle and saw there was merely a drop remaining. No matter how little left or whose contribution it had been, he always let me have the last drink. It was an act of symbolism, he said.
(10)
I have... images. Moments, seared onto the backs of my eyes. Points of interest, or confusion. It's the same with faces: I remember his mouth, and the scar under his left ear, but I have trouble with the whole picture. I would have thought I'd remember. Even this, now, is fading.
(The paintings at the castle were of before I knew the family. The king looked more like his son than the boy did. Neither of us liked that about it.
And regardless, they were at the castle, and short of kidnapping I would never be going back. And who is left to kidnap me?)
So I have my moments, and that is all. There are days I have forgotten, exchanges I did not think extraordinary even at the time, and these are lost. Piece by piece, hair by hair, I start to lose him all over again.
(11)
"Horatio!" he had cried as threw his arms out towards me. "I have missed you awfully these weeks!"
I stumbled as I rested my bags on the hardened mud of the courtyard, and then I was enveloped in his strong embrace.
He laughed into my hair. "How I've mourned the loss of your dry wit and quiet cheer!"
"I too," I replied, muffled by his shoulder - ridiculous. He did not let go.
"The afternoons philosophising! The evenings in the library!"
"The mornings walking in the woods," I said. "Quite."
"Ah, Horatio," he continued, and started to spin our bodies in a helpless dance. I flushed to think the servants could see this display of affection, but was enjoying myself too much to halt it. "My dear friend, a great melancholy was settling upon me that I feel alleviated - such is your effect!
"Indeed, I was certainly becoming unenthused by conversation without you in it," I answered. This made him laugh again, and finally he let me go, dizzy a little, clutching his shoulder.
"My dearest," he said, and kissed my cheek.
In another world, I fancy I said, "My Lord," and kissed his in turn. Nothing would have come of it, I'm sure. It was just a missed opportunity of the utterly insignificant that I would give anything to be given once more.
(12)
I lose myself in this 'nother world sometimes.
I think of quips and questions to pose. I write in margins, Fascinating, but for a mind like yours? I turn to say something and catch my own tongue, but my mind is already saying the words and supplying the reply. I drink in stops and starts as though sharing the glass. I sleep with the sheets pulled away unfairly, tucked into the mattress like selfish sleepy hands. I live this half-life.
I had thought time would ease it but it becomes more unbearable as the months go by; I reach the stage where it becomes noticeably strange to not have seen him for so long, in this world where it is not how it is, (for I had summers at home before, and he had royal businesses in Sweden) and this is when it is worst.
I write imaginary letters saying, It has been too long, my friend! When do you return?
(13)
I consider how fitting it is to be losing my mind.