Chapter Text
I am gone, sir, and anon, sir, I’ll be with you again. In a trice, like to the old vice, your need to sustain. Who with dagger of lath in his rage and in his wrath, cries ‘a-ha’ to the Devil…. The words of the fool’s song rang in Malvolio’s ears long after the cellar door had slammed shut: teasing him, haunting him. A trickster’s promise of liberty-- for how could he be freed from nothing , that most fatal and final of prisons?
His wrists burned where the splintered rope bit into tender skin; his arms, lashed behind his back, had long since gone numb, but beyond those physical hurts there was nothing in this place save the constant, oppressive darkness. The song in his mind was faint, a mere whisper threading its way through the silence. A small part of him whose fancy grew evermore inclined to roam with the unmarked passage of time wondered if this was what Purgatory felt like: this stillness, the total absence of movement, sound, life. This blackness, so complete that only the phantom figures of one’s fevered imagination could be made out within. Nothing to fill the interminable seconds, minutes, hours, but thought: too much of it, until the charge of madness he’d been so painfully branded with seemed not only deserved, but welcome, if the madman’s mind was the blank his outward seeming hinted at. Like a mad lad, pare thy nails, Dad-- adieu, goodman Devil….
“And the Lord said….” The creak of the door startled him more than it had any right to, but no matter how strongly he berated himself for it, his heart raced, brought forcibly back to life by hope too sudden and too strong. “Let there be light. Or some such thing. I dare not speak for you, sir, but I care little for particulars when the end result is so...illuminating. Shall we say.”
“We shan’t.” Malvolio exhaled shakily, letting his head fall to his knees and refusing to acknowledge the relief coursing through his veins upon hearing the fool’s voice. “I should have to stoop far lower than I am now before I deigned to acquiesce to a fool’s mockery of sense.”
“ Acquiesce to his mockery of sense ?” Trust him to place more stock in wordplay than in action. “Quite the wordsmith you are, sir, when you put your mind to it.”
Quiet footsteps approached the windowless chamber, paused before the door. Though he knew it to be a fruitless effort while he was thus bound, he still twisted, craned his neck, hungering after the promised light with the desperation of a man starved. The oppressive hope burning in his chest was a more painful burden than any rope or shackle.
The key screeched against the rusted lock, the sound a grating agony against ears too long accustomed to silence. Malvolio waited with bated breath as the heavy door groaned open; he felt as though he were being liberated from a tomb-- wondered, for one delirious moment, whether the poor fool would enter the cell to be met with a corpse, the soul of the living man within fled long ago to some other where bright and mad...but of course, that was ridiculous. Surely.
XXX
And then. Light . A restless, solitary flame pricking at his eyes: teasing, blinding even as it blessed. He felt weak with even this small assault on his senses; gold pervaded black, and the world retaking form before him seemed both beautiful and monstrous to behold. Even the fool fell prey to the paradox-- at a first glance the small, disheveled vagabond of truth; at a second Apollo, harbinger of music and light, a figure grand enough for legend. He knew it to be senseless, mere delusion, but he felt overwhelmed, torn as he was from the deprivation that had been his whole world these long hours past, and he could not help but cower-- undignified, skulking, like some filthy cave-dwelling animal-- against the chilled stone wall.
“Are you come indeed?” he rasped. “I will abide no more tricks from you, cur--”
“Do I not stand before you, sir, plain as anything?” The fool moved about the cell with a studied fecklessness that the tension in his narrow shoulders belied, setting the candle in one corner before moving toward Malvolio, pen, inkwell, and a scrap of parchment clasped loosely in one hand. “I made you a promise. A fool’s golden honor, if you like. That’s not so lightly done.”
“And next, I avow, you will tell me to place greater trust in those obliged to obey me when you yourself have given me the most reason to doubt such blind faith.”
“A promise,” he said peaceably, “of compassion. Not of servitude. The two are as much alike as we-- which is to say, diametrically opposed.”
“If you were truly compassionate ,” Malvolio hissed, “you would cut these infernal bonds post-haste rather than prattling on as is your wont! I’ve neither payment nor gratitude for wit--”
“As is your wont.” But the fool stayed mercifully silent thereafter, pulling a small, vicious-looking dagger from his trouser pocket and sawing clumsily at the tightly wound ropes. The moment they gave way Malvolio felt all breath leave his body; he slumped forward bonelessly, and only the other man’s wiry arms about his body kept him from striking the floor face-first. “Steady, sir. The pain will pass.”
If it would, it certainly did not seem willing to do so with any semblance of alacrity. Blood rushed back down his arms with a vengeance, and he found himself fighting to stave off tears at the sensation of a thousand burning needles attempting to bore through his skin from the inside out. Bereft now of the fool’s rough embrace, he writhed upon the grimy floor ungrounded, like a pitiful dying thing.
His hands, he realized dimly, would be useless to him; he could scarcely move them, let alone write. Had he waited so long for his pass to salvation, to be so cruelly denied?
“Fool,” he growled, teeth clenched as nerves and pride together rebelled. Whatever ill he spoke of the man’s character and profession, that he was learned was indisputable. And, therefore, indispensable. “If you have a fair hand to write, you will do me one more service. You’ve delayed my lady’s learning of the injustice she has incurred upon me long enough.”
“‘Twas not my intent to dally. Believe me or no.” He had the decency, at least, to appear contrite. “There were others needed placating.”
“I care not for others .”
“Your eternal misfortune, I presume--”
“You presume too much, surely they could have waited till morning.” For the moment Malvolio chose to ignore the jibe. A simple enough thing when the message had more than once been directed his way by others whose opinions he valued far more. In any case he knew, or could hazard a well-aimed guess, that Toby had been the one to keep the fool from his purpose, but he could not make his displeasure known to the drunken lout when said lout was safely ensconced within his bottle, his unholy virgin Mary, or his bed, blissfully free of remorse. The thought rankled.
“Yet our lady, sir, must also wait till morning; she of us all in this house has sense enough to sleep at night.” The fool dragged one hand briskly over his eyes as he sat, dipped the pen into the ink, scratched faint lines onto the paper. For a moment he seemed years older than he was, pale and frayed in the flickering light.
This dalliance was not to be tolerated, he was sure. Yet Malvolio could not quite bring himself to summon the necessary vitriol to make that known. They were both weary. Only reconciliation could arise from that deplorable state, and in his suffering he relished in even this small companionship. “Your wit is somewhat lacking this night.”
“I put it up by night, that it may better favor the ill-favored when the light be favorable enough to see them by.”
He snorted, almost amused despite himself. “A lame jest, sirrah. Nearly as lame as your golden honor .”
“You are a man of means and matter, sir, surely you must know fool’s gold is worthless,” he said, all false innocence, but his eyes flitted restlessly between the steward and the paper, the glow of mirth in them slowly dimming. “I confess, I did not think you so patient as to bandy words with your missive still unwritten.”
There was that. Frankly, his anachronistic indulgence surprised him just as much, but for all the fool’s talk of worthless honor, he had done more than was required of him already; he might bandy words into oblivion, but he would not break them. Was it so wrong of him, to protract his return to solitude, to silence, for as long as he could?
“Then write,” Malvolio sighed, dropping his chin to his chest in defeat and trying, gingerly, to massage feeling back into his hands.
A faint nod. Another series of lines etched into the parchment. “What say?”
What say, indeed. Malvolio closed his eyes, reaching through the fog of pain and humiliation to the ubiquitous lingering image of Olivia’s face: the gentle fall of her wheat-colored hair, her porcelain pallor, the anxious arch of her brows. Her rose-red lips, parted in consternation; her cool slate eyes, bright with grief and the vague fear of a madman in yellow stockings, prancing like a demon before her wretched innocence.
“By the Lord, madam, you have wronged me, and the world shall know it.”
XXX
On and on he spoke, more fervently with each passing word as he lent voice to the rage, terror, and doubt that had torn through him since he’d first set eyes on that damned letter. He felt drained when he’d finished. There was no feeling left in him, no life; he could scarce forbear keeping his eyes from falling shut as he attempted to regain what little composure he still possessed. In any case the fool had seen it all, in all its inglorious detail: the madly used Malvolio , he was in truth. Let Olivia read it, take pity on him, free him. Return all to the way it had been ere whatever callous gods governed Toby and his ilk turned their vengeful eyes his way. He could-- would -- remain no longer in darkness.
The fool’s silent presence left no heavy taint on the stale air, and Malvolio had nearly forgotten he remained in the chamber still until he felt the damned ropes encircle his wrists once more. He twisted violently, panicked, flailing his elbows out to strike his arms, chest, whatever he could reach, but his arms were pinned to his side in seconds. Breathing hard, he turned to glare at the smaller man, betrayal clawing up his throat like bile. Troubled gray eyes gazed back at him, dark with a storm of feeling he dared not name.
“You would love to see me whipped as my kind deserve, I’m sure,” he said quietly, “but I’m not so weary of my life that I’d see it out over you. Would to God I’d have no reason to take your liberty from you. But. Should these others come down to find you thus freed, it will not be you they elect to punish.”
He could have screamed. Cursed. But he lacked the will to do little more than beg. “Please,” Malvolio whispered, even as the ropes tightened, grated-- nothing so constricting as the first time, but the pain of renewed bondage in any form overtook any semblance of appreciation he might have dredged up.
The fool said nothing for a long while; merely studied him, sharp face shadowed and unreadable. The candle had nearly burnt itself out, and with the encroaching darkness came the weariness, the melancholy, the old despair. The sensation of suffocation it wrought was nearly familiar by now, yet the tears, so long buried, slipped from his eyes unbidden.
Only the gentle brush of chapped lips and the rasp of stubbled beard against his cheeks brought him back to himself. His eyes flew open. His mind whirled, thoughts staggering with shock as they tried to join together in something approaching a sensible manner-- yet there was no sense to be found, how could there be? How could the fool kiss him, even as he willingly condemned him, again, to the suffering he’d been so gloriously relieved of for these precious minutes? How could he feel not rage, but gratitude, desire , for the man he’d so long professed to despise, who had done him that day’s sole kindness despite it all?
Malvolio tilted his head impatiently, succumbing wholly to the irrationality of the moment, and captured the fool’s lips with his own. His bound hands flexed, yearning to bury themselves in the thick auburn curls tickling the sides of his face-- to possess, to hurt as he had been hurt, mingling pain and pleasure to match the entirety of the day and night’s madness. So he bit down instead, reveling in the metallic tang of blood as the fool’s thin fingers, tangled in his own unbound hair, tensed convulsively against his scalp. There was no affection in this kiss, no tenderness. Only the thrumming energy of their shared agitation, their longing, their tired fear.
Passion spent, they remained connected: Malvolio gasping, dazed; the fool subdued, resting his head upon the steward’s shoulder. No words passed between them. What they might have said, they instead spoke in silence, silence floating weightless and dizzy in the close dark. The scent of burnt wax surrounded them. It clung to every corner of the cell, stinking of false love and extinguished hope. Resignation and exhaustion weighed him down, beckoning him toward the unquiet sleep of the damned. The fool sighed deeply as he stood: gathering paper and candle and ink, not daring to break that tenuous silence. As Malvolio fell further into unconsciousness he felt those lips upon his brow once more. The final sense of companionship before the lonely cold of morning. A promise of compassion, perhaps, so he’d said. A kiss of deliverance. In the whispering darkness he nearly believed it.