Fic: The Third Time (Richard/Henry)
Title: The Third Time
Author: speak_me_fair
Fandom: Richard II
Characters: Henry Bolingbroke, Richard II
Warnings: Blasphemous religious references. Tormented Kings. Lack of wet Hotspur. Being mean to Aumerle. Craiglockhart!AU (Esperance)
Summary: What I tell you three times is true....
Notes: Written for angevin2. Don't hate me... (oh, and I used Coming In The Air Tonight *G* I'll assume you approve!)
ETA: Now with bonus Aumerle POV outtake....
The oil they put on his forehead smells faintly sour - rancid, he later thinks, as though its lack of sweetness will confer sanctity. Mortification of the flesh from the moment of his long slow death's beginning, so that he will be only the hollow in the crown, Webster's skull beneath the skin from now on, and no more.
Your death starts here. Look upon my works, ye mighty -
When he conceals a yawn, they all see it, leap upon it, remark in hidden and not so hidden ways about it.
Woe to the kingdom...
The boredom is, of course, already there, just as his death is.
As I am now, so shall you be...
He wants to laugh at how appropriate it is. But the yawn was bad enough. The idea of him laughing as young Henry Bolingbroke kisses his hand is unimaginable in its stupidity. So he permits the kiss, and does not laugh, but does not quite stifle the amusement, either, and when Henry's eyes meet his, it is a surprisingly solemn moment of dark mirth that catches between them.
*
The next time they have a chance to speak in any kind of relative privacy, it is amidst acknowledged frustration with Church and Parliament and strangling grief alike, a thick fogged miasma of apologies in place of anything more substantial that can be offered. They are already on different sides of the river.
Richard wonders, with bleak incredulity, who that makes Charon. But he has the same dark grief to meet Henry's with, as once he met that acidic, too-old mirth.
You wallow in your grief like a hog in dirt.
You clean yours from you as though it were London mud.
They never have to speak those words aloud. They are too obvious, hang too heavily.
Henry's kiss is on his lips that time, and it is not a request he can refuse, just as the demands they make of each other, later, are not.
The marks they bear are undeniable, later, and Aumerle the only one brave enough to say what must be spoken by someone.
"He won't forgive you."
"No," Richard murmurs dimly, letting the bath smooth out his well-earned hurts, bring balms to his pricked conscience and his aching arse both. "I wouldn't let him kiss me again. After. You know."
"But - God's sake, Richard, why?"
"Third time pays for all," Richard says to a room of bewildered, steam-fogged incomprehension that swirls around Aumerle like smoke in an alleyway. "I'm not ready to be paid."
*
The third time has been coming for years.
The third time is the Judas kiss.
And the third time it is Richard who delivers it, slow and mocking, to Henry's hand, after he has placed the ring on Henry's finger with his own gibed travesty of a blessing.
"God give you joy of it," he says softly, and smiles.
There is nothing left to share between them, now. It has passed all one to the other.
All that is left, now, is for Richard to wait for those other promises to deliver up their entirety.
Third time pays for all.
He wonders if, even with his death, it truly will have.
*
Richard naked, Aumerle often thinks, is an invitation to stare, like some flawed and yet too-perfect work from the Hellenic period. Cool and untouchable and only for looking, and not too much of that in case the viewer becomes obvious.
But ah - Richard with any part of him concealed, there one - there he, for all truth and all love - can look and have his fill of looking at no cost.
He can look at fair hair darkened and curled into ridiculous loveknots at the nape of Richard's neck, at the way the soap-clouded bathwater conceals what he has seen in unthinking and sometimes intended exposition. He can look his fill at desire, and still know the full truth of his King's noli mi tangere, trace the one drop that carves a light-shadowed path from wrist to bent and downward-curving palm, and long to mark that descent with mouth and tongue and tip of a daring finger.
Long, and never try to fulfil that longing, for his own path has been marked more clearly than ever water could, has been written in darker ink than India holds.
Henry's marks lie upon throat and swollen lips and half-appearing thigh, in every laughing wince of Richard's moving body.
Aumerle has never been given that unspoken invitation to do as he will. He must always wait, and trace his own bruises when they appear.
Caesar's I am.
You and I both, Richard.
*
Author: speak_me_fair
Fandom: Richard II
Characters: Henry Bolingbroke, Richard II
Warnings: Blasphemous religious references. Tormented Kings. Lack of wet Hotspur. Being mean to Aumerle. Craiglockhart!AU (Esperance)
Summary: What I tell you three times is true....
Notes: Written for angevin2. Don't hate me... (oh, and I used Coming In The Air Tonight *G* I'll assume you approve!)
ETA: Now with bonus Aumerle POV outtake....
The oil they put on his forehead smells faintly sour - rancid, he later thinks, as though its lack of sweetness will confer sanctity. Mortification of the flesh from the moment of his long slow death's beginning, so that he will be only the hollow in the crown, Webster's skull beneath the skin from now on, and no more.
Your death starts here. Look upon my works, ye mighty -
When he conceals a yawn, they all see it, leap upon it, remark in hidden and not so hidden ways about it.
Woe to the kingdom...
The boredom is, of course, already there, just as his death is.
As I am now, so shall you be...
He wants to laugh at how appropriate it is. But the yawn was bad enough. The idea of him laughing as young Henry Bolingbroke kisses his hand is unimaginable in its stupidity. So he permits the kiss, and does not laugh, but does not quite stifle the amusement, either, and when Henry's eyes meet his, it is a surprisingly solemn moment of dark mirth that catches between them.
*
The next time they have a chance to speak in any kind of relative privacy, it is amidst acknowledged frustration with Church and Parliament and strangling grief alike, a thick fogged miasma of apologies in place of anything more substantial that can be offered. They are already on different sides of the river.
Richard wonders, with bleak incredulity, who that makes Charon. But he has the same dark grief to meet Henry's with, as once he met that acidic, too-old mirth.
You wallow in your grief like a hog in dirt.
You clean yours from you as though it were London mud.
They never have to speak those words aloud. They are too obvious, hang too heavily.
Henry's kiss is on his lips that time, and it is not a request he can refuse, just as the demands they make of each other, later, are not.
The marks they bear are undeniable, later, and Aumerle the only one brave enough to say what must be spoken by someone.
"He won't forgive you."
"No," Richard murmurs dimly, letting the bath smooth out his well-earned hurts, bring balms to his pricked conscience and his aching arse both. "I wouldn't let him kiss me again. After. You know."
"But - God's sake, Richard, why?"
"Third time pays for all," Richard says to a room of bewildered, steam-fogged incomprehension that swirls around Aumerle like smoke in an alleyway. "I'm not ready to be paid."
*
The third time has been coming for years.
The third time is the Judas kiss.
And the third time it is Richard who delivers it, slow and mocking, to Henry's hand, after he has placed the ring on Henry's finger with his own gibed travesty of a blessing.
"God give you joy of it," he says softly, and smiles.
There is nothing left to share between them, now. It has passed all one to the other.
All that is left, now, is for Richard to wait for those other promises to deliver up their entirety.
Third time pays for all.
He wonders if, even with his death, it truly will have.
*
Richard naked, Aumerle often thinks, is an invitation to stare, like some flawed and yet too-perfect work from the Hellenic period. Cool and untouchable and only for looking, and not too much of that in case the viewer becomes obvious.
But ah - Richard with any part of him concealed, there one - there he, for all truth and all love - can look and have his fill of looking at no cost.
He can look at fair hair darkened and curled into ridiculous loveknots at the nape of Richard's neck, at the way the soap-clouded bathwater conceals what he has seen in unthinking and sometimes intended exposition. He can look his fill at desire, and still know the full truth of his King's noli mi tangere, trace the one drop that carves a light-shadowed path from wrist to bent and downward-curving palm, and long to mark that descent with mouth and tongue and tip of a daring finger.
Long, and never try to fulfil that longing, for his own path has been marked more clearly than ever water could, has been written in darker ink than India holds.
Henry's marks lie upon throat and swollen lips and half-appearing thigh, in every laughing wince of Richard's moving body.
Aumerle has never been given that unspoken invitation to do as he will. He must always wait, and trace his own bruises when they appear.
Caesar's I am.
You and I both, Richard.
*