(no subject)
They had kissed in that library, sneakily, away from the watchful eye of the librarian. Horatio studying, pouring over a text whilst Hamlet did make jests and placed fingers over his own, bold in his affection. Stolen moments. Warm quiet. Twas in the library that Hamlet had explained, voice tight with tears he would not shed, that his father was dead and he must return to Elsinore immediately. They had been schoolboys and naïve, and Horatio had embraced him against the welling tide of grief.
And after twas madness, and blood, and now twas all of it gone, any record of such a place seared away. The evidence of his lord’s sweet, sane affections gone amongst ash and fire and blood. And if twas no evidence, Horatio realized suddenly, thoughts tripping gainst each other in the whirling chaos of his aching loss, if twas nothing to tell the tale it might have happened naught at all, might be the long fingers of his madness reaching into the tender parts of memory and destroying it as a fishmonger guts his dinner.
Hamlet had known this, knew there must be a telling, twas why he took the goblet, someone must present evidence less the events happened not, twas why Horatio was not allowed to die--
he did wish to die--
less the happenings and treachery be erased from men’s minds and the prince sink into shamed obscurity. Horatio did have his duty, and the telling of it, and it had thus happened, but Wittenberg was burned and gone and there was nothing but him, and he was mad. Did the mad remember truly? O, God.
Cesario was speaking quietly, tone gentle, and he must think him mad, which twas the truth, and yet Horatio shook his head, clinging hard to the other man’s sleeve as he tried to abandon him in the tent. If they did think him mad they would lock him away, less he wander off and fall in a river and drown amongst the flowers. And then the story would die and they would never been, never ate warm pies Hamlet wheedled from the kitchen over thick pages.
“Soft, Horatio, thou needst sleep, tis only grief making fast with surprise. I pray, sleep,” the voice was sweet and quiet, but too low to be Cesario, who had left him most cruelly, and Horatio stared in utter despair at the ghostly form of his hallucination, come to drive him further into nothingness.
“Speak not to me,” he muttered back, collapsing forward against his knees with his hands over his ears. It moved closer, reaching out, and when Horatio felt the cold brush over his neck he shrieked and jerked up and knocked it down, pinning its shoulders against the ground with hands that burned from the cold and ashy, splintery burns.
“Speak to me not!” he whined, jerking the shoulders, “speak to me not, touch me not, be any place but here! I hate thee, I hate this and thee and my mind and thou hadst no rights of affection to ask me of such, to absent me from felicity? Draw my breath in pain?!”
It stared at him with huge silvery eyes, and Horatio pressed on, no longer giving care to what its true nature may be, caring only that he was alone and it did hurt and twas a useful quintain. “Thou hadst no rights to it, nor to this, to appear as him and taunt me further when the rest of the world does care not for any of it, that none want to hear the story that is only mine when I am mad! Devil, madness, illusion, an unkind liege, I charge thee to leave me!”
It disappeared then, so sudden as to drop him onto his elbows roughly. Horatio blinked at the ground, taking a shaking breath, and with a sudden wail burst into sobs.