Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Really, he couldn’t see what all this fuss was about. Gambling had never driven men to murder-- not in his recent memory, at least, though that seemed more full of holes than he’d have liked. Taking that unfortunate fact into consideration, however, changed nothing about their current situation; a man with a sieve for a brain could still say with utmost certainty that spinning coins was now, and had always been a simple game . No worthy matter for rage, or even philosophical debate...though Guildenstern could probably find matter for debate, philosophical or polemic or any other sort, at the bottom of a burlap sack. Which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. On the other hand, it wasn’t as though this passage of funds between them was significant in any way. Sure, Rosencrantz was now eighty-five crowns richer, but he would share if his friend greatly needed the money. At the moment he could revel, however guiltily, in the pleasure of having bested said friend at something : a pleasure too often denied him (though he could call to mind no evidence, anecdotal or otherwise, to support that assertion).

So he reveled. Gloated, perhaps. Or else merely expressed a sentiment of honest shock, because really, the only noteworthy thing about this whole affair was the sheer amount he had won. “Eighty-five in a row-- beaten the record!” Which was astonishing. In his mind, at least.

Not, it seemed, in Guildenstern’s. “Don’t be absurd,” he muttered, voice dropping to the familiar tired monotone it adopted when he’d reached the limits of his (admittedly, far from infinite) patience.

Which meant, of course, that Rosencrantz would engage in his own private game of seeing how far beyond those limits he could push his volatile companion without getting punched. Or strangled. Or kissed. Thus far only the last had yet to happen.

“Easily!” he retorted brightly, moving to sit beside the shorter man. Nudging him lightly with his shoulder. Taking care not to jingle the eighty-five glimmering additions to his purse too loudly.

Abruptly Guildenstern heaved himself to his feet, pacing as though the boundless energy ever coursing through his veins was coming to a boil, liquid fire burning beneath freckled skin. “Is that it , then?” he bit out, teeth clenched, a snarl tearing raggedly at the edges of the words. “Is that all?”

“ What ?” This from the man so quick to call him absurd?

“A new record? Is that as far as you are prepared to go?”

“Well--”

“No questions? Not even a pause?”

“You spun them yourself!” And he had done. Eighty-five times. He could have stopped at three, twenty-nine, thirty-two, but no, he’d chosen to keep going. To blast the record, which had been eighty-four the last time Rosencrantz had thought to contemplate it, and eighty-three the time before that , stretching back to the lonely one-- but that was beside the point. The point was , Guildenstern was working himself into a frenzy over something he’d brought entirely on himself. Granted, that was nothing new, but he didn’t even the decency to give in to a normal man’s proclivity for self-pity under trying circumstances. How was injury to one’s own pride less of a bother than the incongruity of probability?

XXX

Guildenstern was watching him intently, a nearly predatory gleam sharpening the dull sage of his eyes. “Not a flicker of doubt?” he asked quietly, taking one slow step towards Rosencrantz. Like a hunter holding his prey in thrall, playing with it for no greater reason than pure instinct.

“Well, I won, didn’t I?” he shot back, feeling a prickle of nervousness lodge itself in his throat: aggressive, insistent, so like anger that his conscious mind refused to deem it anything less.

A step. “And if you’d lost?” Another step, a kind of manic desperation thrumming through the words like the staccato’d beats of a war drum. “If they’d come down against you, eighty-five times, one after another, just like that?”

“Well….” It was a fair question. Not one he’d cared to think on overmuch in the wake of his streak of victory, but a fair question nevertheless. And, thankfully, one with a laughably simple answer. “Well, I’d have a good look at your coins for a start!”

“I’m relieved.” The other man backed away as though tugged by an invisible string, thin lips curling into a bitter facsimile of a smile. “At least we can still count on self-interest as a predictable factor. I suppose it’s the last to go.” Shaking his head slightly, he breathed out a long sigh, barely louder than the whisper of a breeze. “Your capacity for trust made me wonder if perhaps...you, alone….” As suddenly as he’d retired, so too did he turn back, lips parted and damp, hands trembling, eyes wild. “Touch.”

And Rosencrantz obliged, realizing worriedly that he’d pushed his friend too far, forgetting that realization the moment skin met skin. Guildenstern’s palm was rough and fever-hot against his own, the pulse in his wrist fluttering frantically like the wings of a bird trapped in a prison of glass. It was with a child’s fascination that he stared down at their joined hands: his own pale and smooth, long and elegant like a nobleman’s; his friend’s square and strong, calloused skin and ginger hairs burnt golden by the sun. One spinning and losing, the other casually picking up the pieces like they meant nothing, which couldn’t be further from the truth-- and in that moment Rosencrantz thought he’d like nothing better than to pull Guildenstern to him, to join lips as they did hands. But he couldn’t. Because he was eighty-five crowns richer. Because he burned under the weight of a madman’s gaze, pinned in place by eyes too hell-bent on seeking answers to embrace the question before him. Because he couldn’t remember why he was here, why he clasped his friend’s hand as tightly as if he were pulling him back from a cliff’s edge, why he WAS , and when the strength of a sinewy arm thrust against his own and sent him sprawling, he knew without knowing why that they were doomed to orbit each other in limbo, touching hands but never more, dancing back from the edge but never leaving it behind, for eternity.

Chapter Text

“ Adoremus in aeternum sanctissimum Sacramentum. Laudate Dominum omnes gentes: laudate eum omnes populi. Quoniam confirmata est super nos misericordia ejus: et veritas Domini manet in aeternum. Adoremus…. ”

The words of the old hymn came to her ears on the wings of angels and the birds of sunrise: bass, tenor, and treble, one voice leaping like quicksilver to give voice to Heaven’s full chorus. Her fool, surely; it could be no other, though she had never thought him a religious man. The part of her soul that, in the wake of her father’s and brother’s deaths, had found such impossible comfort in the house of God yearned to join the man in song-- and she would have, were it not for Sebastian’s arm about her waist, holding her against his chest as though he feared she would desert him if he let his grip go slack.

Rolling gingerly over to face him, Olivia marveled at the ease with which her new husband slept. Well did her uncle name him Sebastian-born-of-stones; she thought that nothing save a stone thrown at his head would sway him from the path of dreams. Almost unconsciously, she brought a hand up to feel for the strong, unmetered heartbeat pulsing beneath skin warmed from summer sun and soft linen. In repose his features were relaxed, their sharpness rendered soft like worn marble by the dawn’s honeyed light. A mere three years her junior, and he possessed the body of a youth still: the shoulders narrower, the muscles less defined than they would be on a man’s body. For a moment she could convince herself that he was Cesario, the boy she had so cherished...but...no. Cesario was no more and had never been , it was Sebastian who embraced her now, Sebastian whose gentle heat she sought as the plaintive notes of the hymn twined themselves around their recumbent forms.

There could be no mistaking the man for the mirage. But could she love the man? Adore him, even, as the fool’s hymn bid her adore God? Not all love sprung from a moment’s infatuation...and in the sanctuary of the morning’s near-silence, she could believe it. Could believe in the power of time, to forge passion and the impetuous boldness of youth into a love less like the flash of fire and more like the glint of steel, enduring to cleave hardship and calamity in twain. A holy blade, a holy melody, woven from light and heat, breaths and bodies intertwined, the ghost of a song calling them to glory.

“ Gloria Patri et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto: Sicut erat in principio, et nunc et semper, et in saecula saeculorum. Adoremus…. ”

Chapter Text

“No.”

“But--”

“I said no .”

“But it’s a good movie !”

“ Roderigo . You want t’ talk good movies, show me Prisoner of the Mountains. Show me Death and the Compass , show me fuckin’ Blade Runner . Do not show me--”

“I’ve never heard of any of those.”

“...’Course you haven’t. Fucking Philistine.”

“Is that a bad thing?”

“It is when your idea of high art is the fuckin’ Room .”

“You swear too much.”

“Never tell a soldier he swears too much.”

“Why not?”

“‘Cos he’ll point yer wee moralizin’ self in the direction of his sergeant an’ tell ya “no, laddie, that bloke o’er there does one better ‘n I do, talk ‘t him ‘bout swearin’.” And the sergeant’ll whup your yellow arse flat an’ cuss a blue streak fit t’ kill yer oul mammy while doin’ it.”

“...But I thought you were a sergeant...or...something.”

“Exactly.”

“...”

“...”

“WHY DID I INVITE YOU HERE I KNEW YOU WERE GONNA SCARE ME!”

“Why’re you cryin’ like a little bitch?!”

“I can still kick you out, you know!”

“Wouldn’t do.”

“Would!”

“I don’ think so, puppy. You’d feel guilty ‘bout sendin’ yer mate out t’ sleep on a park bench ‘cos he’d get a steak knife up the arse if he went home before next day’s noon and without dark chocolate caramels.”

XXX

“‘Ow the fuck d’you not recognize your “favorite customer” when he’s got fuckin’ sunglasses on?!”

“There, see, I told you it was good! You wouldn’t be insulting it if you didn’t like it at least a little bit. And you get more Irish when you’re into stuff.”

“...Anyone ever told you you’re smarter than y’look?”

“Uh...nope.”

“Probably ‘cos you’re not.”

“Hey!”

“Oi, hush now. Thought ya liked this movie. Don’ wanna be missin’ it, now, do ya?”

XXX

“Takin’ drugs is a-- oh, Christ.”
“Have you ever taken drugs by mistake, Iago?”

“No, I bloody well haven’t. I knew exactly what they were when I took ‘em.”

XXX

“This guy’s accent is shite, this acting’s shite, Mark’s fuckin’ Lisa, an’ Johnny Boy’s a reg’lar amadan gone Bedlam way. ‘S all anyone needs t’ know.”

“Wait, Mark’s doing what ?! Since when?! ’

“Who’s seen this fifteen times, you or me, lad?!”

XXX

“ If a lotta people love each other, the world would be a better place to live! ”

“This guy is so deep, though! Tell me he’s not right about that.”

“Amadan gone Bedlam way. I’m standin’ by that.”

“You’re a heartless, cruel bacterial organism. No wonder your wife kicks you out into the street on a monthly basis.”

“...Say that again.”

“...Heartless, cruel bacterial organism…?”

“ ‘Ow’d y’ like this heartless fuckin’ organism up your fuckin’ ARSE, right--?! ”

“AHH NO PLEASE I DIDN’T MEAN IT I WANT TO HAVE CHILDREN AHH HELP I NEED THAT REMOTE!”

XXX

“ You’re tearing me APART, Lisa! ”

“ Why are you so hysterical ? ”

“Why’re you so willing to indulge this guy’s crap acting and fuckin’ flat affect?”

XXX

“You can come out now. She’s gone.”

“In a few minutes, bitch.”

“Who are you calling a bitch?”

“You and your stupid mother.”

“HAHAHAHA THAT PART IS SO GOOD.”

“...”

“Why aren’t you laughing?”

“...Wasn’t funny.”

“...Emilia would kill you if you talked to her like that, wouldn’t she?”

“Doubt it--”

“She totally would.”

“...”

“Is that why she kicked you out this time?”

“...No. No, it’s not.”

“...Do you wanna talk about it?”

“No.”

“Talking helps.”

“Helps a sod like you, maybe. Prefer t’ drown me sorrows.”

“...Is that why?”

“No reasonin’ with her when she’s on her--”

“EW GROSS NO DON’T SAY THE P-WORD OH GOD MY VIRGIN EARS.”

“...This is why you’re single.”

Chapter Text

Her hair drew Romeo’s eye first: not for its color (an unremarkable brown), but for its length. Rosaline Galinarion wore her hair cropped like a man’s, the gentle waves brushing the sides of her throat but stopping shy of her rounded shoulders, and though Romeo knew that could have meant any number of things, her mind remained fixed on the disparate images of soft white skin, wide hips, generous curves, a man’s hair and arrogant eyes-- and insisted, over and over till she felt the refrain would drive her mad, here, at last, is a woman of my kind .

What a joyous thing ‘twas, to espy a kindred spirit! Though the young men she held so dear as friends were more than suitably tolerant of her propersnity (or proclivity) for pursuing women, she was not made for masculine company, not constantly. In these hot days, when the fighters and banterers had worn themselves to quietude, she found herself longing for more...delicate companionship. Rosaline’s companionship.

“ Mio cuore , you gaze as though your spirit took the form of Leander, fixing all hope upon a point too far beyond hellish waves t’attain without peril.” Mercutio’s lilting voice wound itself firmly about her ear as his hands came to rest on her shoulders; despite herself, Romeo jumped. She had thought him by the fountain still, carousing as was his wont. “Whatever else she be, this nymph that hath ensnared your eye, let her at least be my equal or better in height. I will not have the bow-boy’s butt-shaft pin you so low to th’ ground that love passes you by to leave you trampled beneath its trailing, pitiless wings.”

“Talk sense, I prithee,” she retorted, habitual cheerfulness dimming as the passing Rosaline threw a contemptuous glance their way.

“What amusement ever came of sense?” But surely Mercutio, too, must have sensed her lady’s coollness, for his hands on her shoulders tightened; she felt the pique of his interest like a knife against her neck. “Is it she, then? Your Hero?”

“Ay,” she sighed. She could only pray she sounded not so dreamy as she felt. Wondered briefly why it had to have been Mercutio, ever the cynic, to find her in the throes of longing when she had given him such great fodder for mockery. “Methinks she is the fairest creature yet to grace my eye--”

“So say you of them all--”

“Do you not think so?”

The weight of his skepticism lay heavily across her back, like some living thing breathing censure with its sighs. “Nay, lass, I have seen the cold and distant stars look more favorably upon man than your lady fair, stars who winked back not with daggers of ice but with a firm and tender regard.” Silence. Something she knew (or thought she knew) he could not abide. “Woo her, then, an you desire it so.” His voice dropped to a whisper, bitter and grim. “If she prove cruel, lay not the blame on me.”

XXX

Rosaline had stopped at the cloth merchant’s stall, resolutely ignoring the plump woman’s ramblings as she ran her fingers over bolts of velvet, linen, wool. Romeo quickly ran her tongue over dry lips, trying to muster up the courage to approach her. To place a hand over hers, charm her with a jest or a smile. Lead her to the fountain, while the daylight hours away in conversation, take her by the hand and hair beneath the setting sun’s fire, let lips do what hands do and join-- nay. Enough . What use was dreaming when the lady herself stood there, primed for the fulfilment of desire?

“Have your feet grown roots, that you stand by so dizzy-eyed? Or is such oddity a custom of yours?”

It was a strong voice, and clear, the sort that belonged upon a stage. The step of Romeo’s heart quickened immediately, yearning to beat time to the melody of that wondrous voice. “Only when mine eyes light upon beauty such as yours, lady, will my feet hold fast to please them.”

“Clever words,” she said, a small smile curling over her lips. “And you speak them without fear? To one of your own sex? God will not look kindly upon such a transgression.”

“Let me burn, then!” Romeo threw her arms wide, trying desperately to imitate Mercutio’s expansive physicality, his wide, self-effacing grin that charmed man and maid alike. “I am in torment already, lady, to be within arms’ length of a kinder divinity. For eyes to see what hands may not hold is a Hell unto itself.”

Rosaline laughed, equal parts startled and pleased. “And by whose decree has the holding of hands been forbidden? Our prince decries war, not love. You have proven already your lack of regard for public censure and Hellfire both. Shall you deny so mean a desire on so much proof ?”

“I think not--”

“Then be forward, I pray; your heart obviously wills it so. I would see it done.”

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.

Chapter Text

“Sebastian, c’mon, it’ll be so funny.”

“No, I really don’t think it will be!” The younger twin launched himself off the bed with an indignant huff, raking both hands through his hair as he shot his sister and her idiot musician friend a baleful glare. “You’re telling me my girlfriend-- whom I adore , by the way-- is a-- a--”

“Politically incorrect selective lesbian?” Feste didn’t look up from the strings of Viola’s guitar, but Sebastian could practically sense the smirk dancing over his lips. Infuriating twat. “Sorry, mate, but she doesn’t exactly keep it secret. Can’t tell you how many times she’s come whinging to me going ‘I want a man , or no man at all!’” The imitation was more disconcerting for its content than its uncanny accuracy.

“What the hell is that supposed to mean,” Sebastian growled.

Viola, head buried in her closet, leaned out to eye him up appraisingly. “No offense, Seb, but you’re not exactly the poster child for raw masculinity. My muscles are as good as yours and I only had to work three months to get them.”

“She’s right, you are a bit scrawny.”

“You-- shut up!” Defeated, he flopped to the floor, throwing an arm over his eyes and groaning loudly. And fine , maybe he was being melodramatic, but here were his sister and her best friend telling him that his girlfriend harbored poorly hidden lesbian fantasies of said identical twin sister , fuck you very much. He had more than a meager right to mope.  “I just don’t see what I’d be getting out of this.”

“Your one shot at being a drag queen and the best gay sex of your life,” Feste quipped cheekily, ducking to avoid the tennis shoe Viola hurled at his head. “OI. Am I wrong?”

“I mean, no, but you’re not helping.” With a quiet sigh, she moved to sit beside her brother, idly doodling vines onto his arm with one of the many colored pens she kept in her jacket pocket. “Look, you have to admit that what we pulled over Christmas was the best prank of our lives. Messing about with a little leeway won’t kill Orsino and Olivia, we all know they’ve got their, ah--”

“Proclivities?”

“What did I say about not helping?”

“That I was a fair hand at--”

“Right, exactly. So shut your gob.”

“Right.”

“What does it matter if it was a good prank, Vi, it’s not like any of it was my idea!” Sebastian groused. “It still changes nothing. Olivia will think you’re me, well, that’s not going to make her fall in love with me. ”

Viola had enough decency to look uncomfortable. “At least you’ll know. It can be your last big ‘fuck you’ to her.”

“I’m not breaking up with her!”

“Why not? Because you love her? Because you’re still holding out hope that after three months she’ll suddenly change her mind and love you back?” She shook her head, exasperated. “You two are impossible.”

“Did you forget she only went for me because she thought I was you-- well, Cesario-you? Some fucking gorgeous university girl fucking throws herself at me, I’m not exactly going to say no! It’s not my fault I don’t measure up to some...unknown fucking standard , or am packing the wrong equipment !” Feeling weariness wash over him like the numbing cold of January waves, he pulled himself off the ground, pushing Viola’s concerned hand off of his arm as he buried his face in his arms.

“If I may interject.” Feste set the guitar aside, letting his hands dangle loosely between his knees. He met Sebastian’s angry gaze unflinchingly. “Say you do this switch, say-- speaking purely in the hypothetical, ‘course-- Olivia does sleep with Viola. Has a fantastic time, proves herself to be the bitch (not butch) everyone’s suspected her of being for years, whatever. No matter what happens you’ll have the higher moral ground. That gay sex lark? I was takin’ the piss. Forget it. Orsino wouldn’t cheat on Viola with you; he’ll strip you down, take one look below the belt, start laughin’.”

“Look, if you’re gonna insult me, you can just shut your goddamn mouth--”

“Hear me out. All I’m saying is, for once in his life he’s on a streak of faith.” Aggrieved, he dropped his chin onto his hands. Biting one ragged thumbnail, he raised an eyebrow at Viola with exaggerated slowness. “Back me up, yeah?”

“Yeah,” she murmured, eyes lighting up. “Orsino wouldn’t dare, but if Olivia would --”

“You’ve got yourself an answer. Test of her love, innit? She comes up short? ‘Sorry, luv, out the bin bag wi’ yer trash act.’” Feste grinned roguishly, the gap in his white teeth seeming to wink as he tapped his fingers restlessly on his knees. “Ring up that Antonio bloke wot’s always hanging ‘round like your bloody shadow. Make his day, get your ego back. Not the worst reason to dissemble in the dress.”

On the one hand, none of that was expressly wrong . Mending his best friend’s potentially broken heart and finally feeling both desired and desirable after three months of being weighed, measured, and found wanting sounded more like Heaven than he’d care to admit. On the other hand, he truly did love Olivia-- she was beautiful, graceful, whip-smart, thrillingly dominant, not to mention beautiful...vain. Proud. Cold. Better at making him feel like a child worthy of scolding than his own mother, and that had stopped being kinky the third time he’d jokingly called her “hot mama” and she’d slapped him for it. And he had to admit he was bloody sick of the blue balls her constant moods and school-related (or repressed-homosexual-desire-related) stress left him with. Maybe...maybe it was time for a change.

“All right. Let’s do it.”

XXX

“You’re lucky your sister kept her hair short. Or you grew yours long, whichever; I don’t really know and I don’t really care. Makes my job a hell of a lot easier either way.” Olivia’s friend Maria pursed her lips as she stepped back to scrutinize Sebastian’s half-made-up face. He sighed, more than a little disgruntled. He would never admit aloud that he was starting to regret his decision, but the regret process was already well underway. The various brushes and pencils attacking his face probably had something to do with it, to say nothing of the freshly waxed everything . The sports bra stuffed with fuzzy socks didn’t even bear thinking about.

“Remind me why I’m doing this again.”

“Because your sister, God love her, is adorably insane, and Olivia, though I love her , is adorably a bitch. To you, anyway. Can’t say you’re the greatest catch, myself--”

“Hey!”

“But she could at least have the decency to admit she made a mistake ‘stead of carrying on about how she’s trying so damn hard to make it work when we both know that isn’t true.” Maria tutted at his pout, putting some finishing touch only she could see to his contouring before nodding, permitting herself a satisfied grin. The reflection of her gleaming eyes in the hand mirror beckoned, a pint-sized Scots siren. “There. What do you think?”

He looked like Viola, was what he thought. Seeing someone else’s face gazing back at you in a mirror was incredibly disconcerting. With his sister’s makeup, his hair styled in her signature braided half-ponytail, and the corset and bra distorting his figure into a half-assed hourglass, he could scarcely recognize himself. All misgivings aside, he couldn’t deny that Maria had done an impressive job; telling her so, she beamed, a blush staining her round cheeks as she ducked into Viola’s closet, tossing out a lace dress of seafoam green, a braided leather belt, cowboy boots.

“Right, on with those. You’re gonna look so cute. Your sister’s got style.”

“Rude. My style is great.”

“Your style , boyo, is schoolboy dress shorts with those fucking weird printed button-downs. That’s bloody all I’ve ever seen you wear, you look like a stereotypical Tumblr hipster. Feste’s probably having a field day right now.” She pulled out her phone; opened her messages, giggled in a manner both sadistic and undignified. Viola, in the photo, was sitting on Sebastian’s desk with her legs spread wide, leveling a brooding glower at the camera. Feste had put her in a black shirt with white polka dots, scarlet shorts, black socks patterned with tacos and chilis, white Converse, a gray beanie: scruffed her hair, removed her makeup, bound her chest. She looked ridiculous. And exactly like Sebastian.

“Hm.”

“Told ya. Now be a good little hipster and go change .”

He had long since resigned himself to the fact that Viola would always be the more attractive of the two of them, in personality as well as looks. In a way it was gratifying to be wearing her face and clothes, to be the looker for once in their shared eighteen years. Even a little exhilarating-- weird, but exhilarating nevertheless. Maria, bright with laughter, made him pose in the windowsill: legs crossed, hands clasped on his lap, smiling serenely into the afternoon sun. She laughed harder a minute after she’d sent the photo, when Viola stole Feste’s phone to say he looked like a country album cover and pronounced phase one a rousing success.

XXX

The triple date had been Toby’s idea; all of the more questionable ideas generally were. Maria moonlighted as a hostess at the restaurant they’d chosen, and Feste’s band was providing the live entertainment. Frankly, Sebastian wasn’t sure he wanted to know who’d finagled that dubious stroke of luck. At least they got discounts.

“A toast!” Toby had been drinking since God-knew-when in the afternoon and walked in happily plastered, one arm slung around Maria’s shoulders, the other waving a half-empty can of lager over his head. The band immediately launched into a lively cover of “Seven Drunken Nights,” garnering some whoops and mocking applause from the other patrons. Olivia buried her face in her hands; Viola-as-Sebastian looked about as embarrassed and irritated as the real Sebastian felt. He knew she was travailing not to laugh. Her good humor was more difficult to emulate than to deduce. “A toast, to this unseasonably warm April Fools’ Day on which it was supposed to snow, to the band of fools calling themselves No Man’s Fool-- you’re welcome , by the way, ‘cos I know you’re playing that for me, sodding sots -- and to...eh...AH, to the most beautiful girlfriend I’ve ever had--”

“The only girlfriend you’ve ever had,” Maria muttered slapping his arse affectionately. Or maliciously. It was hard to tell with her.

Toby’s frown nearly brought him cross-eyed. “... Yes. That’s true.” The gloom disappeared from his features as quickly as it had overtaken them; shrugging, he swung Maria in a circle that nearly toppled them both. “ However. A toast to her nevertheless, ladies and gentlemen, and to my even more beautiful cousin! May the gracious gods above grant her happiness with one crazy twin, this rich bastard happiness with the other one, my girl happiness with me, and me another damn beer!” The can was flung into the air amidst raucous laughter; the drummer, Touchstone, caught it with a cheer. When Toby dipped Maria into a kiss, the applause ringing out was genuine.

Hell with this. If he was going to be Viola for the night, by God, he would do her justice-- and that meant impulsivity. Exuberance. Abandon. It meant laughing her high, carefree laugh, head tossed back in glee; it meant quirking an ironic eyebrow at Orsino and pulling him down by the collar for an impromptu snog. The taller man’s brown eyes sparkled; Sebastian could feel his wide grin against his own lips, an unfamiliar and not altogether unpleasant sensation. Viola stared at them for a long moment, shocked, before moving to give Olivia the same treatment, rather more spontaneously than Sebastian himself might’ve done. If the look of raw hunger on her face was anything to go by, she was enjoying it immensely.

Dinner went surprisingly well, considering the oddity of the whole scheme. Neither Orsino nor Olivia seemed aware that anything was amiss (which was, of course, the important thing), and his sister’s boyfriend was a far more tolerable date than Sebastian had ever given him credit for. He didn’t focus on him to the exclusion of everyone else: something Sebastian knew he himself was guilty of but despised in others. He simply kept a warm hand on his knee as he deftly conversed with the entire party, a casual and unspoken protection. Spontaneous kisses on the cheek or lips were common. So were the jokes-- some stupid, some offensive, some genuinely funny, all delivered with a bravado that was somehow cocky and self-effacingly charming all at once. Sebastian knew his own wit was no match for Viola’s, but it was far easier to play at being clever when one’s partner was so willing to reciprocate the attempted levity. He was pulled onto the dance floor the moment the band switched into a series of slower songs. Love songs, mostly, equal parts sweetly romantic and darkly tragicomic in Feste’s signature style; Sebastian was certain he saw the man wink at him as Orsino let his broad hands glide over his waist, settling reverently at his hips. Granted, he had every right to be cheeky; he wasn’t the one with long fingers ghosting over his arse, head thrown back and lips parted like some bloody sex-starved chav. Which Viola certainly wasn’t, but he was , dammit-- sex-starved, not a chav-- and the disguise was liberation incarnate. Viola herself was making Olivia the sole object of her considerable flirting prowess, apparently to great effect. It was embarrassing, really: how much better she was than he at Things Romantic. More so that she could charm his girlfriend effortlessly in a way he’d tried and failed time and again to do. Surely Olivia would have noticed that her boyfriend, without warning, had gained ten levels in charisma; surely she should have expressed more shock, at least initially. She wasn’t that oblivious.

He couldn’t bear to think that she had seen through the ruse and simply didn’t care.

XXX

Touchstone prided himself on knowing a great many things. Ask anyone but Feste, Hamo, and Iacopo and they’d tell you his musical skill was unparalleled, his insight into human nature fit to rival a psychologist’s, his jokes superb. And that he was a salacious pervert with no respect for boundaries and an unfortunate proclivity for saying whatever the hell popped into his head whenever the fancy took him, but...well. He couldn’t be perfect. He had enough of an ego problem as it was.

What he did not know, however, was the story behind the lovely farce playing itself out on the dance floor below them. All he knew was that the skinny girl grinding against the tall bloke like he was the best and last shag of her life was no true girl. Which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. He had no problem with twinks-- was one, when the mood took him. But he did have a problem when said twink looked exactly like young Mr. Broody with the blonde, who had become Mr. Sexy Salsa, and in any case was actually a Miss. Was actually Viola , the plucky bint with the sweet voice Feste had brought round to their practices once or twice, and wasn’t that just a devil of a conundrum. Because she was taken. And straight. Or so he’d assumed, and his sense of these things was usually pretty good, thanks very much. So whatever the hell she was doing dressed as a boy, and the boy stunt double doing dressed as her, he couldn’t begin to say.

Feste knew. Of that he had no doubt. It was written in the greenish glint to his chameleon eyes, the slight upward cant to his lips that bespoke mischief, a scheme coming to fruition. And whatever scheme this was, the buxom Maria, his favorite saucy wench save the one he himself had boarded, was in on it, too-- cheeky thing kept sneaking hungry glances at the couples in question, paying only half a mind to the likely lovely things her Toby was doing to her tits and other bits. Shame. For both her sexual pleasure and his own amusement. He so enjoyed being in on things.

Though when Mr. Tall and the double disappeared into the bathroom five minutes later, and said Tall came stumbling back out howling, tears of laughter streaming down his face as he struggled to do up his flies with the double, now titless and clutching a crumpled pair of socks in his hands, following abashedly behind, he thought he could make a pretty good guess.

Chapter Text

FADE IN:

EXT. NIGHT: COURTYARD OF LEONATO’S ESTATE

The large courtyard, ringed with torches that flicker proudly in defiance of the shadows of the surrounding fields and hills, houses a riotous frolic. The gaily swirling figures are splendidly gowned, robed, and masked-- master and man together converse and dance to the lively music.

A man and a woman, hands clasped, break away from the ring of Volta dancers and make their way quickly to the forefront of the scene. The man, masked as a Pantalone ,  wears a short black cloak in the Spanish style, hood up. This is BENEDICK , disguised. The woman, BEATRICE , wears the mask of Columbina , but a thick shock of auburn curls, arranged with mock artfulness over one bare shoulder, makes her identity plain. Her lips, visible beneath the gilded mask, are curled into a wide grin.

BEATRICE

(Laughingly)

Will you not tell me you told you so?

BENEDICK

(In a deep, warm voice, with an untraceable (feigned) foreign accent)

No, you shall pardon me.

BEATRICE

Nor will you not tell me who you are?

BENEDICK

(Shakes his head; a smirk is evident in his voice)

Not now.

BEATRICE releases her grip on Benedick’s arm to place her hands on her hips, shaking her head slowly, bemusedly. A note of affront creeps into her voice.

BEATRICE

That I was disdainful, and that I had my good wit out of the ‘Hundred Merry Tales’-- (blows out a gusty sigh) well this was Signior Benedick that said so!

BENEDICK

(Fighting to remain casual)

What’s he?

BEATRICE

(A little surprised)

I am sure you know him well enough.

BENEDICK

Not I, believe me.

BEATRICE

Did he never make you laugh?

BENEDICK

(With a trace of fond impatience)

I pray you, what is he?

BEATRICE

(Airily, drawing BENEDICK close to her in a confiding manner)

Why, he is the Prince’s jester: a very dull fool; only his gift is in devising impossible slanders. None but libertines delight in him, and the commendation is not in his wit, but in his villainy, for he both pleases men and angers them, and then they laugh at him and beat him. (Scans the crowd) I am sure he is in the fleet… (chuckles lowly, nudging BENEDICK with no small salaciousness) I would he had boarded me.

BENEDICK

(Choking slightly, making a concentrated effort to cover it with a cough)

W-when I know the gentleman, I’ll-- tell him what you saw.

BEATRICE

(Leaning against BENEDICK’S side, laughing; BENEDICK stiffens almost imperceptibly)

Do, do! He’ll but break a comparison or two on me-- which, peradventure not marked nor laughed at strikes him into melancholy, and then there’s a partridge wing saved, for the fool will eat no supper that night.

The Volta, which has been continuing in the scene’s background, ends with raucous applause. The MUSICIANS begin a Pavane, which Beatrice listens to longingly for a moment before grabbing BENEDICK’S hand and tugging him back towards the ring .

BEATRICE

We must follow the leaders.

BENEDICK

(Subdued, disconsolate)

In every good thing.

FADE TO BLACK

Chapter Text

The gathered crowd drew her eye first. She’d found that the markets of Illyria were never silent, but on a day so dreary as this, when even the great masts of the moored battleships bowed to the frosted sea-breeze, to see more than the odd bundled fishwife was a rare thing indeed. To see small children, scampering excitedly about the loose circle or perched upon the shoulders of fathers or elder brothers, was rarer still.

But the man at the circle’ center took each anachronistic sight in stride: ribbing the men, flirting with the girls and women, laughing with the children as he swung two narrow, braided cords, their ends weighted, wicked, and capped with tin, almost lazily about his body. The movement of them was graceful, but not nearly so captivating as to draw her full attention from the woman who was endeavoring, valiantly, to show off her every egg to its best advantage that “‘is Lordship’s table might be graced with ‘em of only me finest hens.”

She did not see him pause, tossing one rope high into the air to bring a hand to his lips and bid the crowd be silent. Did not see the faint spark fly out from his snapped fingers as the thing came twirling down.

The sudden rush of flame drew screams from the audience’s weaker-willed; even seeing it in the periphery of her vision as she did, Viola could scarce forbear from jumping. Ignoring the eggseller’s indignant squawk, she whipped around, staring wide-eyed as the twin flames, chasing each other in a wild, hypnotic dance, cleaved the midmorning dark.

Hastily she grabbed the dozen the old woman had been boxing the while and paid her gat-toothed young granddaughter, stowing the eggs haphazardly in her basket as she strode towards the circle. All were packed close, as much for warmth as prime viewing, but Viola was small, and nimble-- a blessing of her disguised sex-- and shrugged unapologetically through what meager gaps there were until she could gaze upon the performer unobstructed. He was neither old nor precisely young, shorter even than herself and very thin. Despite the day’s cold he had stripped to the waist-- scarlet hose and black boots, the colors of no noble house she’d yet met with in this strange land. Old whip marks marred the skin of his back, and he wore a leather cord about his neck, with a cloudy green stone set in an intricately braided iron pendant. Long, thick curls the dark auburn of autumn acorns had been tied back from his face-- a necessarily welcome precaution, she thought, for she feared several times that one blink of the eye or slip of the hand would set the man alight.

Perhaps he sensed her scrutiny, for he winked at her as he called, “I’ve been at this for a fair while, haven’t I?” He had a strange, lilting accent, one her ears, far from well-traveled, could not place.

“Ay, verily, have you,” she replied, of a sudden emboldened by more than her man’s garb.

Now the fellow turned to face her fully, a wide smile beginning to steal across his lips. “And how, pray tell, would you know? You’ve come so new upon your patch of ground you’d cool your heels upon it yet.”

There was some laughter at that. “Pushed right past me, he did!” a stout man with lively eyes declared, and those about him jeered, jostled, snickered. Viola only shrugged, unable to keep from smiling despite the slight. She felt strangely at ease with this banter she’d kindled. It was the first such sport she’d had the pleasure of partaking in since her arrival, the Duke her master being too lovelorn for laughter, and his men too familiar with each other, yet too unaccustomed to her to grant her the benefit of aught but plain speech. But the performer and she were strangers to each other, and she enjoyed the boon of anonymity more than she’d had cause to expect.

“If you had only just started, sirrah, you need not have asked such a question at all.”

“Clever lad!” he said, chuckling. “‘S why they call me fool, see, and not a man who juggles wits as well as fire-- speaking of, hold these, will ye?”

Later she would begrudgingly admit to yelping like a dog whose tail had been trod upon when he swallowed the flames and handed her the cords. Thankfully, she was far from the only one. The fool laughed his husky baritone laugh as he made her a genteel bow and sauntered back to the battered wooden box that occupied the open space with him. He pulled several tall iron baskets from within, seven of them, and arranged them in in a circle about himself, whistling a merry tune the while. Seven torches came next-- piled comically in his arms, under his chin, atop his head-- until he staggered beneath the awkward load. Peals of laughter from all assembled sounded forth when he fell with a great clatter and much tangling of limbs.

“Death of my arse ,” he groaned, making Viola snort. He heaved himself to his feet, shaking himself out so that he resembled nothing so much as a man of straw flapping in the wind. “The trouble, I should think,” he mused, moving to pick up the torches, “is that I’ve only two hands to me. So if you’ll be so obliging, sir--” handing one torch to a stocky, liveried youth-- “sir--” to a father, whose two young sons whooped in delight-- “madam--” to the eggseller’s granddaughter, having snuck from her formidable mother’s side to watch the spectacle-- “you’ll bear these safely awhile.” Holding two torches in one hand and the last two betwixt his legs, he rummaged in his pocket for another match. And came up empty. “Hm.” The other pocket, and his boots, were similarly bereft. The crowd’s amusement mounted with his aggrievement. “Tullio!”

A small boy who clutched a red cap too large for his own head scrambled to his feet, stood at a soldier’s full attention. “Ay, sir?”

“I entrusted thee with a mission of grave import ere we began here, did I not?”

“Ay, sir.”

“Pray, tell the good people what that was.”

“To take your two matches and grant them as...uh... asylum within your pockets,” the child reported proudly.

The fool raised both eyebrows. “So that I might waste no time in fetching them for use?”

“Ay.”

“And didst thou do as I asked?”

“I--”

“Say thou ‘I’ and I do espy some tale of woe in thine eyes; say ‘ay’ and thou dost lie in thine own throat. For,” he said, adopting the low drawl of an exasperated parent, “no matches have I.”

Tullio put one hand to his mouth in thought, then pointed to a mongrel pup lying at his feet. “Dove ate it, sir.”

The fool, with the torches between his knees still, crouched to glare at the dog, which met his gaze with eyes entirely too wide and innocent. His sharp features slowly contorted into a grotesque mask of betrayal that had the crowd roaring. “ Blast your eyes, you damned bitch.” So saying, he straightened, and with an irritable toss of his head flipped backwards to his box, pulled a match from it and struck it against the dark wood. “No matter! I mustn’t tarry any longer, else I’ll have yon plump cabbages lobbed at me head soon enough!” As he spoke, he began juggling the two torches with one hand, eyeing their trajectories with a practiced eye. “Though I would beg a boon of you; that when these catch, you shall give them a good cheer, with force enough to blow them out again. Usher the show in proper!”

“Show’s not started yet!” shouted a gruff voice from the back.

“Will do!” he retorted cheerfully. One torch caught with a hiss, garnering a murmur of approval. The second followed suit, and he flung both high into the air. The two in locked legs’ embrace he swiftly grabbed and lit, so when their fellows came down he simply juggled them all with as much ease as though he’d been at it for hours.

He was more a master of his art than he made himself out to be. Viola applauded as loudly as anyone as the patterns grew increasingly complex, the torches sailing through the air as though they lived and breathed it, had been born to it, spirits of mirth and merriment. Tullio had produced another match from the box to light the three remaining torches; when the fool called for them to be thrown at him-- when he caught them, keeping up the bizarre weaving pattern while letting neither flames nor manic grin slip, her gasps were drowned among the multitude. She had seen fire-eaters before, of course, in Messaline-- Cathay pirates and the occasional roving band of Roma-- but none quite so skillful, nor so gleeful, as this.

All seven torches circled higher, faster. The crowd watched with bated breath as the fool leaned back, painfully slowly, until his back was parallel with the ground. Viola flinched when the first torch fell, landing with a ringing clang in one of the baskets. To her astonishment, the rest followed suit, all coming to rest in a ring about the man, now empty-handed. With a triumphant shout, he swung his bent body into a handspring, a flourish, a bow, to deafening applause. His whip-thin body gleamed with sweat, his face was flushed from the lingering heat of the flames, but he smiled brightly as ever as he collected his props. Tullio ran about brandishing cap for coin, giggling a little when it grew heavy. Viola placed a few of her own coins, given her by the ever-gracious and never-lacking-for-funds Orsino, into the boy’s hand with a conspiratorial smile.

The bounty was well-earned. Mightily so. Watching the fellow slip into a frayed black and red tunic, chase Tullio down to retrieve the cap, send the boy on his way with a smack on the rump and a brace of crowns, Viola felt, faintly, a sense of kinship with that solitary, roguish figure. They were both anomalies; as she was neither man nor maid, so was he neither man nor lord. They were fools together: she the fool of Fortune, he of his own devising. Here was one with whom she could bandy words, match wits, but where she might have felt desire in her woman’s weeds, she now could feel only the pleasant thrum of mingled excitement and admiration. For a fleeting moment she longed to seek him out, tell him so-- but the fool was gone, the market subdued and sluggish once more, as though it had never been waylaid, never been enchanted, for too short a time to be remembered.

Chapter Text

By day Verona was a city of multitudes: men, women, and children thronging the streets in all their splendor and squalor, noise and tempers riotous, to wax high, wane ill, at inconstant Nature’s behest. But the day was three-quarters gone, and all vigor with it, leaving peace as the coming night’s sole companion when those multitudes retreated behind locked doors and shutters.

There stood as the final bastion of midsummer merriment but one gentle house: that of Capulet, whose great hall (with its greater oaken doors thrown wide like a gaping maw) disgorged its myriad costumed revelers. They bore every noble name save Montague, but Montague would not rest idly this night. Greater lovers of the galliard than the glaive were the youth of that house; Lord Capulet having neglected to bar maskers from his gates, they fancied the sultry air ripe for their sport. Not Montague alone, but Giarola, Levi, Crispo, Pindemonte, Nogarola, Alighieri-- seven merry men and one morose maid donned cape and cowl to cavort gaily through the piazza toward the woad manor.

Mercutio strode at the head of their party as though he’d been born Lord of Misrule, and none contested his right to the place. Without compunction he jested, gesticulated, bolted away from their company every ten-odd paces to leap upon the numerous overturned crates and high walls littering the piazza, much to the others’ amusement. Benvolio, paying less heed to Romeo’s mournful sighs and dragging feet than his cousin might have liked, could not tear his eyes from that short, swaggering figure. He was a striking man, though not precisely a handsome one, everything about him dark and strong and just a bit wry. There was a sort of feckless grace to each movement he made, a confidence Benvolio could not help but envy. But then, envy had become a familiar, if unwelcome companion in the two months he had known the Prince’s kinsman. It burned deep in his gut when he watched Mercutio charm maid and man alike with his bawdy jibes and mordant wit, seemingly unaware of how easily one could grow besotted with him-- unaware, or uncaring, which Benvolio preferred not to consider. He felt it now, like an ember in his throat as the other man threw an arm about Zanobi’s narrow shoulders, leaned over to plant a rough kiss upon Emiliano’s plump cheek. But when he turned his head to grin wildly at Benvolio, the left side of his mouth curling higher than the right as was its wont, that envy, infected by his energy, his glee, could remain no longer to haunt him, the sting giving way to a pleasant warmth from the one look.

XXX

So lost in thought of feeling was he that he did not much mark how his steps had slowed until Romeo stumbled into him. Pitiful as ever in the throes of love, she merely sighed, something almost akin to contempt shadowing her hazel eyes as she regarded the others’ merriment.

“What,” she exclaimed, “shall this speech be spoke for our excuse? Or shall we on without apology?”

“The date is out of such prolixity,” Benvolio pointed out, resting a hand on his cousin’s back even as he tried-- with no great degree of success-- to curb the twinge of impatience her habitual melancholy wrought. “But let them measure us by what they will; we’ll measure them a measure and be gone.”

At the dim periphery of his vision, he could see Mercutio loping away from the others, pausing to watch the cousins, head canted in curiosity, expression inscrutable.

“An we mean well in going to this masque,” Romeo pressed, trepidation buried beneath the sting of condescension, “but ‘tis no wit to go.”

“Why, may one ask?” Mercutio hooked both thumbs into the pockets of his black coat as he sauntered forward to nudge Romeo’s arm with his shoulder. The smooth lilt of his voice betrayed no hint of the challenge honing fever-bright eyes, daggerlike, to a keen point.

Romeo crossed her arms defensively beneath her bosom. “I dreamt a dream tonight.”

A brief upward flicker of thick brows, a faint twitch of that plastic left side of the mouth. Mercutio’s genuine sentiments never made themselves plain upon his face with any great fanfare. “And so did I.”

“Well, what was yours?”

“That dreamers often lie,” he drawled, grinning lazily as the others snickered. Benvolio, as always relegated to the observer’s distance when Romeo and Mercutio fell to their battles of wit, simply shook his head in fond exasperation at the folly of his two most beloved.

“In bed asleep, where they do dream things true!” Romeo insisted, with enough fervor to have all but welcomed Mercutio’s inevitable mockery.

And mock he did. “ Oh , then I see Queen Mab hath been with you!” A vicious smirk stole over his lips. Behind them, Scolaio whistled, low and leering.

“Queen Mab?” Benvolio could not resist asking, permitting himself a private chuckle (and his friends a rather more public variation). “What’s she?”

Mercutio turned to face them, stout-ale eyes gleaming as though a candle had been lit behind them. Now those expressive brows were raised fully, the head wagging as if to say a Philistine, are you, that you know not?

“She,” he said in his showman’s voice, grand and dripping irony, promising wonder and terror together in a single breath, “is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes in state no bigger than an agate stone on the forefinger of an alderman, drawn with a team of little atomi o’er mens’ noses as they lie asleep.”

XXX

Thus he spoke, and spoke, the inexorable tide of words less picturesque stream than flood. The minstrel weaving song from story, the trickster plucking art from artifice to hold them spellbound, bind the threads of his sordid tale into a tapestry of dreams as Mercutio stalked, bowed, danced his untethered way through the flames of his fervid imagination. But Benvolio cared not for spells, nor dreams, but for the man beneath their masks. He wondered if he alone could see the ragged places where that tapestry had begun to unravel: the light in his eyes dying, giving way to something sinister and wary; the pitch of his voice dropping low, dark, grating harshly against fear and madness intertwined. The increasing erraticism of his movements, spending just a moment too long at Romeo’s side, on his knees, apart from the rest, hands shaking, body taut as if braced to ward off a blow.

Their ensemble had long since been cowed into silence when Romeo impatiently, desperately bid him hold his peace. Thou talkst of nothing , she said. As though he’d spoken so much, so long, only to spite her; as though she were blind to the way he had lost himself in the words, set adrift in a labyrinth of his own devising with no proffered light to draw him out. Manic energy spent, Mercutio slumped where he stood, like a puppet that had ceased to amuse his master and whose strings, too tightly wound, had been brutally cut.

“True,” he murmured, wearily dry. “I talk of dreams, which are the children of an idle brain, begot of nothing but-- vain fantasy , which is as thin of substance as the air and more inconstant than the wind, who woos even now the frozen bosom of the North and, being angered, puffs away from thence, turning his face to the dew-dropping South.”

He looked so...small. Subdued where he should have been grandiose, solitary where he should have been warmly ensconced within their company. It pained Benvolio to see him so misplaced from himself. For a moment he longed to take the other by the shoulders, coax back his vigor with a gentle embrace-- but years of coupling caution and diffidence railed at the thought, bade him stay his roving eyes and eager hands. Keep, as always , the observer’s wretched distance. He was not so naive as Romeo, to bandy his affections about where they may have been unwelcome; nor so foolhardy as Mercutio himself, to make them known where law and church conspired to beat them into silence.

So aloof he stayed: ashamed of his own cowardice, hating still more the way Mercutio-- unmoving, unmoved-- seemed to expect it. “This wind you talk of blows us from ourselves,” he said gently, motioning the others onward. “Supper is done, and we shall come too late.”

“I fear, too early, for my mind misgives some consequence yet hanging in the stars,” Romeo sighed, but she mourned too little to be marked, walking peaceably enough by when she realized they had all become too inured to her prophesying, speechifying, fatalizing, to heed her grave pronouncements. “But he that hath the steerage of my course direct my sail. On, lusty gentlemen!”

“Strike, drum,” Benvolio said, resolutely refusing to look upon Mercutio as he stood still as Death, lost to benighted abstractions, a dreamer weary of his somnolent prison yet unable to free himself from it as he trudged through the shadow of their contentment.

Chapter Text

A Spaniard and an eagle should not have been so damnably difficult to find.

Michael Cassio, though a young man, was too much a learned man and a gentleman not to think himself just a bit ill-used. As a learned man, he held in high esteem his general ability to divine the answer to any pressing inquiry with alacrity; as a gentleman he was accustomed to, and expectant of, being made to wait upon no man’s pleasure but his own. Besides the which, he had assumed his consultancy would afford him some modicum of status upon his arrival to the fort: that he would present himself to the cadets (little more than boys) guarding the gates and be welcomed, or (preferably) brought to the general post-haste to better conduct their business. Not asked who the devil he was, nor told rudely that conscripts should report to the roll office, which was likely unmanned, given that said conscripts were slated to have arrived three days ago, sir .

Conscript , indeed. How dare they.  

When he had explained to them, more reasonably than they deserved, that he was the tactician from Castelvecchio whom General Othello had contracted to assist with the planning of the defense of Cyprus, the younger of the two guards had laughed in his face. The elder, despite being unable to fully conceal a smirk, had rapped his counterpart smartly upon the sallet with the hilt of his dirk and confessed to Cassio that the general was occupied; he’d do better to seek out ensign Iago Mendivíl, get himself “sorted proper.” He’ll be in the bear pit with Aquila and the grunts, he had said, foregoing forbearance and indulging his amusement with a crooked grin. Can’t miss ‘em .

XXX

Having neglected to ask where this so-called “bear pit” actually was, Cassio had resorted to wandering the fort with a look of officiousness, only partially feigned, whilst praying for even the smallest stroke of luck. He dared not ask either the drilling cadets or their glowering officers for assistance, he had been humiliated enough as it was. God’s blood, but he was a man of means, a man of the world, not some cowering stripling! He could make his own way. Would . Make his own damned way.

After what seemed like hours of searching in the sickening midday heat, he came upon a flight of stairs, not so much carved as crudely hacked into the stone. The air flowing down the drunken spiral, marginally cooler for being sheltered from the overzealous sun, came as much a welcome relief as the thing itself, more apt to be this bear pit than aught else he had encountered afore. Someone was speaking in the space below, too low for individual words to be discerned, but the dull thump of flesh striking packed earth, the whoops and gleeful laughter that followed, were convincing enough to send Cassio tripping down towards the commotion.

A disconcertingly sizable assemblage of shirtless men turned to watch him approach, expressions ranging from bemused to amused to thoroughly unimpressed. New recruits, he assumed; most looked to be of an age with himself or a few years younger, but there was a hardness to their bodies and eyes that made him feel a veritable fop in comparison. The sensation discomfited him tremendously. Casual superiority was so much less taxing to one’s sense of self.

In the center of the circular pit, a hulking beast of a man with a cruelly hooked nose heaved himself from the ground, stooped to whisper something to his short, lean companion. The latter, face hidden from Cassio’s sight, nodded and clapped the colossus on the shoulder before winding his ungainly way through the ranks. He walked with a curious loping drag, as though his right knee would not bend. As he approached Cassio began to make out, and could scarce forbear from gaping at, the myriad time-whitened scars scoring his sun-browned flesh. Scattered across his arms, torso, back, and two marring the left side of his face-- s’blood, but they did draw the eye. So, too, did the eye itself: the keen, cold gray of a mist-shrouded sea, starly pale against the swarthy complexion, the close dark beard, the wild thatch of nut-brown curls. He met Cassio’s stare with disarming, almost confrontational frankness, sharp and strong like his blades of features, carved into a face worn beyond its years: a soldier born, bred, tried, and triumphant.

He was not quite a handsome man. But it was plain to Cassio’s practiced discernment that he was a proud man-- yea, and an honest one, the way the jagged sea-cliffs were honest: neither merciful nor subtle, but dependable unto death. Certainly there could be worse stranger with whom one could entrust one’s fate.

“Pair up, lads!” he shouted, smirking a little conspiratorially when the youths scrambled to obey the barked command. Stopping before Cassio with booted feet planted in a fistfighter’s wide stance, he raised both brows appraisingly and proffered and square, sword-worn hand. “You look lost.”

“Just a bit.” He knew full well his answering smile more closely resembled a grimace. How far within his control that was, he couldn’t have said. “I arrived some time ago and have been shunted off to find an ensign. Iago….” Of course the man’s name escaped him. Blast it all, as he hadn’t made enough of an ass of himself this day, Man of the Devil, some such blasted foreign thing with the--

“Mendivíl?”

“Aye.”

The man’s smirk widened into a crooked grin, and he spread his hands with a bluff sort of congeniality that almost instantly set Cassio at ease. “You’re in luck, ‘s it happens, need look no further.” The husky baritone suited him, though Cassio would have been harder pressed than he’d prefer to place his accent. Spanish, no doubt, the name gave him away, but it had been overlaid by traces of other tongues he’d evidently adopted long enough to bear their marks. As though he were more mercenary than a homeland’s proud defender. “Though I think I’ve not been granted the same courtesy’s you have, mate, an’ told who it is comes seeking me. ‘Specially not one so grand ’s you. So.” Taking Cassio by the shoulder, he gestured sharply with his free hand, an invitation that brooked no argument. “No secrets.”

“Michael Cassio.” After his native Florentine custom he bowed, kissed the three large fingers of his right hand, touched them briefly to Iago’s wrist. “You may have heard the general talk of me of late if you are near to him in counsel.” Though there was no reason to suppose a mere ensign would be.

“Ay, ay,” Iago said, thick brows drawing close in contemplation. “From Castelvecchio, ay, the...student-- nay.” He shook his head briskly, huffing out what might have been a laugh or a sigh, or neither, or both. “Something more than that, I’m sure.”

“I’m a recent graduate, ‘tis no slight to think me a student still,” Cassio explained ruefully, wanting (somewhat uncharacteristically) to ease the sudden tension. Embarrassment became the older man ill, but he regained his vigor with admirable alacrity, dipping his head to his chest with a hearty chuckle.

“You’re but a boy yet, Master Cassio, and I mean you no slight.” Iago jerked his chin back toward the training ground as he motioned for Cassio to follow him up the steps. “So you’ve a few years on these pups: a few courses, graces. You stand beside them with your rapier or rifle, half the enemy camp no older than you, and any difference you see between yourselves becomes obsolete. Don’t matter how much you think you know, how much you’ve read, or how skilled you think you are. You’ll march behind Othello an’ myself with his flag same’s any other.” As he spoke, quiet passion carrying the words despite the noise of the general camp, he led Cassio up hills, steps, battlements, to the watchtower at the mouth of the lagoon, where the lion of Venice flapped feebly in the indolent breeze. From so high a vantage point Sant’Andrea unfolded below them like a child’s toy model of war: armored guards pacing the walls, infantrymen with swords and bucklers locked in the endless dance of thrust and parry, men at the embankment repairing ships, men upon the ships loading cannons, artillery ranks drilling aim, fire, retreat, a constantly advancing cycle. The destructive order of it all was humbling, silenced any and all protests his pride could have mustered. Iago set a hand upon the back of his neck, directing his gaze to the banner with a gentleness that seemed fraught, strained, with the strength of that iron grasp, that taut predator’s frame. “In the field that flag is your scripture, Master Cassio,” he murmured, simple words uttered with the reverence of a prayer. “We are all equals under the eyes of God.”

Chapter Text

“ ...Why .”

“Uh...the light’s better over here?”

“That is not what I asked.”

“Aw, come on, Tranio, don’t you think it’s cute?”

“You are wearing a dog onesie--”

“It’s called a kigurumi, actually--”

“ Dog. Onesie. ”

“...”

“Mind telling me why you just happen to have that thing lying around?”

“They were selling them at that anime convention, you know, last week? And, uh, this really really cute girl I kept seeing, she and her friends saw them and were freaking out, like, super excited--”

“Adorable, yeah.”

“You are so rude .”

“ Thanks .”

“You wanna hear the rest of the story or not, dude?! As I was saying , they were at the booth with these things, and they each bought one and just put them on , right there, and asked the chick selling them to take their picture. And the cute one saw me and just winked , like straight up winked at me, who the heck does that? And she had bought a puppy one, but it was white, it looked amazing on her--”

“Maybe tone down the romance novel hero impression, yeah?”

“Ex- cuse you, I wasn’t done .”

“Yes, you were, you were going to tell me how you bought the onesie--”

“Kigurumi--”

“Bought the onesie so the two of you could match, and now you’re tagging the con in the selfie you’re gonna post to your Instagram with the story so you can find her and make sweet puppy love.”

“...Did you really just say puppy love.”

“That pun was absolutely intended.”

“It was not. ”

“Hey, it was that or nerd love. Or some weird hentai thing. You should be grateful.”

“Remind me why we’re still roommates?”

“Because you’re useless on your own and would come crying back within a day when you inevitably forgot how to work the microwave.”

“...I hate you.”

“Love you too. Puppy.”

Chapter Text

Over hill and over dale; thorough bush, thorough briar; over park, over pale; thorough flood, thorough fire: I do wander everywhere, swifter than the moon’s sphere. So sang Robin Goodfellow as he paced the grassy knoll where once the king was wont to lie in distempered yearning. Now he stayed evermore beside his queen, to remedy what havoc their year’s malice had wrought: his rages as tempests lashing stone, sea, and sky; her wicked abandon a drought, a frost, a sickness to ravage the land. But the madness of midwinter loss and midsummer love had come and gone, and there would be no more of strife. Titania danced again to Oberon’s murmured melody, and all was made well in fairy land.

All but for the knavish sprite sequestered still in the king’s bower, consigned to pacing, pacing, until he was sent for-- needed, wanted, he cared not which, the wait alone was a torment. What good was a trickster to anyone when harmony, not discord, was one’s intended purpose? Not that he expected the peace to last; his lord was too passionate and his lady too fickle for that, but at present, the wretched present, merry Puck was naught but an afterthought. No more to share Oberon’s bed, when nubile Titania could warm him; no more to coax forth and revel in his rare laugh of shattered clay and lion’s roar, when he reserved the sound for the pleasure of his queen.

Around him there was only silence. The weight of abandonment pressed heavy on the mists, shrouding pine and frost where Lady Summer dared not tread, which the Winter King, in wait of temperate spring, cast from remembered sight.

XXX

Where the bee sucks, there suck I; in a cowslip’s bell I lie: there I couch when owls do cry. On the bat’s back I do fly after summer merrily: merrily, merrily shall I live now. Ariel’s song was the summer gale and the winter chill, the howling lament of autumn and the gentle mirth of spring. He flitted unseen and unheard along the world’s winds, drunk on the sweet breath of liberty after thirty years’ choking confinement. At last he was master of the eternity of his fate: no more to serve, to grovel on his knees in reluctant obeisance, to wear his soul out at another’s behest. The sheer joy alone ought to have been intoxicating unto oblivion. Yet no matter how fast, how far he flew, the island haunted him, nipped and caught at the edges of his conscious thought like the half-remembered shadow of a dream.

Miranda crawling, climbing, running, swimming; Miranda laughing, sobbing, singing, staring. Prospero, staff in hand, subduing fierce nature to the whims of his mortal magic. Caliban’s cowardly stirrings of bestial defiance; Ariel his tormentor, or else a mere spectator, as the creature writhed cramping and boiling upon lichen-scraped stone, barely repentant. Games of chess half abandoned, bowls of food half abandoned; days of servitude, nights of solitude.

The ancient pine an unbearable weight upon his formless soul: its sap his blood, a cloying poison; its bark his skin, cracked and rotted where insects had bored through to grow fat off his once-sweet flesh. The tempests he raised, caressing and battering the earth to suit his mood; winds raging, floods carving death into each rocky hollow and wooded rise as his brothers and sisters, mad with grief, struggled to free him. Years of labor blending into an unrelenting sickness as Sycorax poisoned the earth to which she’s bound him.

The silence of the dark hours before dawn, stretched to strained and sobbing eternity, with none to hear it broken by his screams.

XXX

Not all roads led to Rome. Those that did, however, tended to pay the least heed to any of the myriad oddities passing along them. From south and east, from north and west; from the shadow of the wood, from the whisper of the wind, they met at a crossroads in a torrent of midsummer rain. Eyes of cypress green gazed into blank mirrors pale as quartz; hands clasped, the dusky gold of Mediterranean soil and the bloodless pallor of sea salt and frost; curling hair twined and tangled together, the olive bark’s mottled black and brown threading inky darkness through the silver and white of a calm day’s cloud. Strangers in these bodies thought they were, they had known each other since the dawn of time: prayed to, cursed, laughed with, laughed at each other through the endless song of wind and rain.

They met so near with their lips that their breaths embraced together, half mad with lust and reveling in every second of shared abandon. One kiss holding all the world’s pain and pleasure, a lifetime lived and breathed in a moment’s connection. One kiss drowning out the roar of silence, the scream of sorrow plaguing feckless minds and lonely hearts. One kiss mending what liberty had rent asunder. Lips locked, melting into each other, the world fell away to darkness and they healed as one.

Chapter Text

The September sun beat down hot on the top of her head, waves of sticky heat lapping against her skin as though she’d run an hour without stopping through a sealed, steam-laden tunnel. Not that she’d ever had occasion to run through a steamy tunnel, or through any tunnel, but she thought that if she had done, it would’ve felt something like this. She could feel sweat gathering under her armpits, behind her knees, even at the inner corners of her eyes; it had already begun its slow crawl down her skin, which was disgusting , because if it carried on like that it was going to drip into her ice cream. Her special ice cream. A brownie sundae with extra chocolate sauce and a waffle cone on top: all of which was slowly becoming soup, because Daddy and William had left her , and only stupid little girls stood in one spot waiting to get kidnapped when they were thus abandoned.

Olivia was not a stupid little girl. So she kept walking through the fair in trapezoids, rhombuses, ovals, hexagons, and all of the other weird -gons she had learned in school, eyes flitting over countless shoppers’ and tourists’ heads in search of a tall and short blond one. Eating, looking, and walking all at the same time was hard work. Hot work. Lonely work. But she refused to cry. She was seven and twenty days, which meant she was a Big Girl. And Big Girls never cried.

“Are you lost?” A clown’s face loomed behind her, painted laughter contorted in a curious frown. For a moment, a long, terrible moment, every limb in her body and every thought in her head froze.

Choking back a scream, Olivia lobbed the cup of ice cream at the clown’s head. He yelped; ducked; threw one arm up to shield his face; stuck the other out to catch the cup. Only when he straightened did she realize just how small he was: barely taller than she was, and skinny like the starving kittens the groundskeeper sometimes found in the rubbish bins behind the mansion. His clothes were several sizes too big, stained a faded brown from dirt and sand; his jeans looked like they had been savaged by a hungry animal, sewn back together in the dark, and savaged again. He wore a top hat so big it covered his eyes, but unruly curls begging for a wash poked out every which way from beneath the brim. Fraying laces flopped over battered black sneakers, trailing their limp, pathetic selves across the dusty ground.

A kid. This stupid, scary clown was just a dumb kid . The embarrassment, sidling up her throat and clawing at her tongue, burned.

“You scared me!” Olivia crossed her arms and glared at the boy, willing her lip not to quiver when he said nothing. “And you stole my ice cream! I want it back, meanie, didn’t your mommy and daddy ever teach you that stealing is bad?”

“Nope,” he said, shrugging. And taking a bite of her ice cream . A massive one. “‘S good, this.”

Olivia stamped her foot, mouth falling open in shock. “You can’t do that!”

“Yes I can. You threw it at me, how was I supposed to know you still wanted it?”

“Because it was mine ?”

“Mine now.” Tipping the cup back to drink the remaining ice cream soup, he grinned, bright and wide and twinkle-eyed like the naughty boys in school who pulled pranks and made dirty jokes and silly faces behind the teacher’s back. Olivia let her frown deepen, not for a second admitting to herself that his stubborn refusal to be good was just a little funny. “Oi, c’mon, don’t give me that. I made forty-two dollars already today, I can buy you a new one. Or I might buy you one anyway.” His grin widening, he bowed a little, tipping the top hat like a gentleman in the black-and-white movies her nanny loved to watch. Two small purple balls fell out; he caught them with a faint hum of triumph and began juggling them with his free hand. The gap where his canine tooth should have been seemed to wink at her. “You’re very pretty.”

This time, the heat in Olivia’s cheeks had almost nothing to do with the sun. Daddy had forbidden William from ever talking to a girl the way some of his friends sometimes did, the way this boy was talking to her, threatening to skin him if he caught him at it. If Daddy happened to find her here with this boy, who for all his smallness had to be nearer William’s age than her own, he’d surely do worse than skin him. Then he’d drag her away by the ear with a muttered tirade about the nerve of this estate trash and bloody punks and not my bloody daughter .

“My daddy will kill you if he catches you saying things like that to me,” she said, unable to stop blushing now matter how hard she tried.

The boy’s black-ringed eyes grew comically wide. She wondered if he knew how much he looked like a deranged Alice Cooper. “Good thing you lost him, then, I’m too young to die.”

Olivia rolled her eyes. “I didn’t lose him.”

“Then he lost you,” he shot back: frowning again, but the seriousness was no more genuine than the fright of moments before. “That’s worse.”

She tried not to let the words hurt, she did. Big Girls didn’t cry, blah blah and bloody blah, but it was just plain cruel of him to remind her of what she no longer had when she’d managed to forget about it for such a blissfully short time. Daddy had to have been looking for her, had to have been sick with worry, but it had been so long; it felt like she’d been wandering through the park for hours, slowly melting beneath the unforgiving autumn sun. Alone. Abandoned. Forgotten. She didn’t even have her ice cream anymore, that final link to her family.

Amidst the confusion of her other thoughts, the knowledge that she was about to cry came almost as a relief: the terrible, draining sort of relief that came with throwing up, or falling into bed in the throes of fever. When the ache atop her eyeballs and the pressure in her nose grew too much to bear, she barely had time to turn around before tears were spilling from her eyes: down her cheeks, along her nose, into her mouth, hot and salty and altogether unpleasant.

“ Ohh , no,” the boy exclaimed, sounding properly panicked. “ No , no-no-no-no-no, why are you crying? You’re not supposed to cry!”

“You-you made me cry!” Olivia wailed, as indignantly as she could manage while choking on her own breath. “My daddy did not lose me. You take that back right now!”

“It’ll be alright, my parents lost me and I turned out fine--”

“ Take. It. Back. ”

“Okay, okay, I take it back, I’m sorry .” Scowling at the ground, the boy crumpled the ice cream cup into a ball and threw it at the nearest rubbish bin. It hit the side with a dull clunk and bounced off, rolling into the exposed bottom of a fat woman’s sandal. Olivia couldn’t see that, but the boy could, and he smirked; she briefly contemplated slapping the expression off  him, but such violence was beneath her, so everyone told her. The boy stuck his hands into the pockets of his oversized vest, black and embroidered with the town crest like that of every other stall owner, staff member, and entertainer working the fair. He pulled out a shimmery red silk scarf and handed it to her, refusing to meet her eyes. Olivia scrubbed the slippery fabric over her face for a few minutes, silently begging her eyes and nose to stop running before she soaked the pretty thing through and ruined it.

“Thanks,” she whispered. Balling the scarf up against her eyes, she caught a few stray tears before handing it back to the boy.

Smiling more softly now, he handed it back. “Keep it, you probably need it more than I do. Besides, then you’ll have summat to remember me by. A present from the world’s worst clown.”

Despite everything, she couldn’t keep back a little snorted giggle. “Maybe not the worst .”

“Close enough.”

“You shouldn’t sound so proud of that, my daddy says close enough is never good enough.”

“Your daddy’s a pretty smart guy.” The boy curled the spindly fingers of his left hand around his right wrist, twitching rapidly between different positions. Though the crooked smile never left his face, he still wouldn’t look at her.

Olivia hugged herself lightly, lightly dragging her nails along her shoulders. Well-trimmed nails, painted the delicate pink of gift shop seashells. Nothing like the boy’s, grimy and scratched and bitten to ragged nubs. “Did your parents really lose you?”

The boy just shrugged. “Must’ve done, I guess. I dunno. Don’t remember it.”

“That’s horrible,” she mumbled, biting her lip. She wondered what would be worse: losing a family you knew you had, or losing a family you’d never even had a chance to know, let alone love.

“Hm.” The boy sighed heavily through his nose, flung his arms outward like a puppet whose limbs were yanked around by strings. “Their loss. ‘S what Hayk says, anyway.” The big bright grin was back, but now there was something forced, almost manic in it that made her uneasy. His eyes were empty. Looking into them made her skin crawl and her stomach burn: the feeling of looking into a pitch-black room, trying to find something she’d lost so long ago that she’d forgotten what, exactly, had been lost at all. Questions strung themselves together in her head-- who’s Hayk, where did you get your money, why are you a clown, can you help me find my family, what’s your name -- but she couldn’t bring herself to ask any of them. She could only stare at him as her ears filled with the half-forgotten voices of her father and brother, curiosity warring with fear in the heat of shared tension clinging to the last vestiges of summer.

Chapter Text

The mellow warmth of the azure-crowned day had made a whimpering retreat into the hollows of the world, leaving in its wake a restless wind that soured the chill evening air and tore asunder the clouds striving to mask what few clouds dared cast their twinking eyes upon Verona’s streets. Neither the hired musicians’ overzealous strumming nor the chatter of a hundred guests could quite drown out the plaintive howling of the midsummer wind. 

The maskers tumbled through the doors as if blown by it, whooping and gamboling about like they’d been plucked straight from Carnivale to festoon the Capulet hall. The shortest of them gaily saluted Lord Capulet’s welcome, dipped the first woman he could caress with a hand outstretched (Juliet’s own nurse, who fairly squawked with indignation) into a rough kiss, and made haste towards Peter and his trays of country liquor. His fellows dispersed, laughing, and Juliet found her eyes inexplicably drawn to the other extreme. Left alone at the door, cloaked in starlight and shadow, the tallest and most slender stood slightly slouched, like the sunflower whose delicate stem could scarce bear the weight of its proud, heavy head. No man was this singular flower, but a maid. In every aspect she resembled fire-- the curiously scarlet arlecchino , the silk skirt of dawn’s mottled crimson and orange, the auburn curls, elaborately braided, that fell over her shoulders and framed her pert bosom. (Immediately, Juliet flushed, almost ashamed that her mind, young as it yet was, had such audacity as to even silently conjure such a phrase.) 

The musicians, having paused to confer and tune, now began a gentle almain, and the whole assemblage paired off to dance. Nurse, Juliet noted with no small amount of glee, had wound up with that delightfully roguish short fellow, and she looked none too pleased with the fact. Juliet cast her eyes about for the masked maiden, but she was curtsying, reluctantly, to Lord Capulet’s English trade contact, a monstrously tall, dark fellow whom everyone called Carpio. Her family and the esteemed guests clasped hands with spouses, cousins, close acquaintances; the remaining maskers pulled the servants into the fray, heedless of the thinly veiled stares they received. Which left only the County Paris, whose broad, trembling hand, stiff posture, and imploring brown eyes, mournful as an old hound’s, evoked in her naught but pity. The thought cavorting with a man she pitied, never mind marrying him, was a cold cross to bear. But for her father’s sake, and for the County’s ill-begotten pride, she forced a smile to grace her lips and took the proferred hand. 

XXX

She was a rose among thorns, a lily in a field of weeds: a thousand storied superlatives, yet none did justice to that delicate beauty Romeo’s suddenly stricken heart yearned to sing its praises to. Perfectly straight hair of summer sunlight’s gold fell to her narrow waist, unhindered by meddlesome frippery. A gown of ebony and lavender taffeta, its wide girdle embroidered with twisting threads of green, white, and red, became her ivory complexion capitally. And though she could hardly be called the most graceful dancer in the room, there was still something captivating in the way she tilted her head, the soft candlelight throwing her angular features into stark relief, and the way her hips swayed with even the most restrained movements. 

“O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!” Romeo murmured, the pang of Cupid’s arrow so sharp upon her heart that she collapsed against a garlanded column, her eyes irretrievably fixed upon the girl who pulled her wooden partner through the galliard like a back-alley puppeteer.. “It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night like a rich jewel in an Ethiop's ear; beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear! So shows a snowy dove trooping with crows, as yonder lady o'er her fellows shows. The measure done, I'll watch her place of stand, and, touching hers, make blessed my rude hand. Did my heart love till now? forswear it, sight! For I ne'er saw true beauty till this night.”

XXX

Extricating herself from the County’s solicitous attention seemed a monumental task, so Juliet could scarce forebear from sighing with relief  when he disappeared (at her behest) in search of drinks for them both. Stepping back into the shadow of the musicians’ balcony, she reached up to smooth a lock of hair behind her ear. 

The touch to her free hand sent a shudder down her spine. Whirling about, breath caught in her throat, all planned admonitions died on her lips when she met the greenish-brown cat’s eyes of the maiden on whom she’d kept half an eye the whole evening past. The maiden who now, with a blush upon her freckled cheeks, took up Juliet’s hand and brought it to her lips. 

“If I profane with my unworthiest hand this holy shrine,” she said, her voice husky and warm, her hands shaking, “the gentle fine is this. My lips, two blushing pilgrims ready stand, to smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.”

Her nearly clumsy earnestness was hardly what Juliet would have expected of a maid who cavorted with men. The effort spent to refrain from grinning outright was nearly painful. “Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much, which mannerly devotion shows in this. For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch, and palm to palm--” and she turned her captive hand over so that their palms did, indeed, touch, gently trailing her thumb along the precious unknown’s lips the while-- “is holy palmer’s kiss.”

She drew in an unsteady breath. “Have not saints lips, and holy palmers, too?”

“Ay, pilgrim,” Juliet said archly. “Lips that they must use in prayer.”

“O then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do!” The maid brought one hand up to the lock of hair Juliet had toyed with a moment and a lifetime before, threading her long fingers through it. “They pray, grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.”

“Saints do not move, though grant for prayer’s sake.”

“Then move not, while my prayer’s effect I take,” she said, thin lips curling into a smirk as she stepped in close: close enough that Juliet’s retreating back brushed the smooth, chill marble of the column; close enough that her breath, redolent of candied hazelnuts and port wine, warmed Juliet’s cheek. As though she were a statue in a wonder tale, stone set upon by the wind and the rain, nine lifetimes’ worth, insensible to the creeping cold of her woebegone fate until true love’s kiss could usher life back into her. Their hearts beat in tandem, a stuttering staccato of anticipation poorly hidden. “Thus, from my lips, by yours--” the words whispered against Juliet’s lips, the faintest promise of a kiss, yet she burned, near begging for deliverance-- “my sin is purged.”

“Then have my lips the sin that they have took,” she breathed, eyes drifting shut.

“Sin from my lips?” A smothered laugh shook the maid’s lanky frame, each vibration its own small caress of Juliet’s bosom. “O, trespass sweetly urged, give me my sin again!” And as the great clock struck midnight, their lips fell together, the spark fading to something soft and warm and indescribably right, and the silence of bliss ineffable reigned proud between them. 

“ You kiss by the book .”

Chapter Text

The day began a quarter of an hour late, as most bad days did. Valentine ought not to have been surprised that Curio had kept such diligent track of the time, but time, quite frankly, was the last bloody thing on his mind at that protracted moment of waking. Not that there seemed to be much upon his mind at all. Sense impressions, merely. A prickling heaviness in dully aching limbs, down drifting about his head, a ring of fire lodged deep within his throat. Oppressive heat, all over, as though he’d slept too long beneath a woolen quilt while the summer sun beat down upon his face. A pain in his head, some buggering demon of thought who’d filled his brow with head and was gleefully dancing upon that hateful monument. And Curio’s deep, honeyed voice, strangely muffled: whispering, then pleading, then shouting for him to wake up, for Heaven’s sake, the alarm had gone off fifteen minutes ago. Sorry, sixteen, now. 

“I am doing,” he mumbled--or rather, he tried to. His voice shivered and scratched and shriveled , a pitiful thing so unlike his customary commanding tone that he forced his eyes open for the sole purpose of closing them again in embarrassment.

“Are you?” Curio sounded more amused now than concerned, damn him. The smug smile threatening to oust the sobriety from his lips was audible, and Valentine thought he was perfectly justified in not wanting to look at it. So he kept his eyes closed. Purely out of spite, of course, rather than the increasingly clamant desire to return to sleep. Though even in this spiteful humour, he felt rather hard-pressed to refrain from moaning aloud at the nearly blinding pleasure of Curio’s cool hand upon his heated brow. “You’re ill.”

Valentine groaned. “Don’t be absurd.” Rolling over, away from the solicitous and ashamedly welcome hand, took tremendous effort. Far, far more than such a trivial action warranted. The flattened pillow into which he pressed his face seemed a meagre reward for such an expenditure of effort.

“Your denial is a matter of principle,” Curio said, gingerly perching his lanky arse on the edge of the bed. “A matter of principle, which, I needn’t remind you, has little bearing on reality. If any at all.”

“You’re the one who thinks I’m ill, man, who in hell gave you leave to spout logic at me?”

“Get up, then, if you’re not ill.”

The challenge, thinly veiled behind a veneer of vexingly saccharine placidity, was unmistakable. And Valentine would rue the day he ever balked at a challenged, whether he was ill or not (for within the privacy of his own sorry head, he could admit without compunction that Curio probably was, as he usually was, right). 

Item primus. Eyes. ...Eyes. He had opened them mere moments ago, surely he could do it again. Though that was rather a difficult thing to simply do when one’s eyelids seemed weighted into immobility. Curio’s silent judgement, however, proved a more effective counterweight than his uninspired will could ever hope to be. The left eye opened first into a world of dim white, marred by the fringe of lashes and the blunt shadow of his own nose. Bless Curio, he had kept the drapes and shutters closed. Thus, the buggering coward of a right eye, assured of a relatively painless awakening, followed in the footsteps of its fellow. 

Item secundus: arms, which were growing rather too comfortable in their recumbent position by his face. Some joint or other in his neck cracked loudly as he slowly pushed himself up, seal-like, on his hands. Curio, who had since extricated himself from the bedside in favor of standing, half-patiently, by the door, winced in sympathy, but Valentine welcomed any distraction, painful or no, from the way his arms shook. 

“Bearing up?” Curio asked, an infuriatingly serene and knowing warmth in his voice.

“Not your job to be clever,” Valentine groused, waiting for the lazily tilting world to right itself before daring to move again.”

“Oh, it’s yours, is it?” Curio leaned his back against the door, raised an eyebrow, delicately adjusted his spectacles. With frankly maddening grace he brought one hand up to his mouth and began chewing on a thumbnail, an uncharacteristic show of indolence. “I’ll remember that once you are standing .” 

“Curio--” 

“Quick march, now, you’ve not got all morning.”

Bastard. Incorrigible, milk-tempered, utterly heartless bastard .

“I know, love, you tell me at least thrice a week. Though ‘milk-tempered’ is a new one, I must say.” 

“...Bastard.”

“ Up .”

XXX

“Item tertius, was it? Rather long in coming for that.”

“You told me to get up. You did not tell me how long I ought to have been about it.”

Curio laughed, loping across the room to drape a long arm over Valentine’s shoulders. Gently, cheekily, he pressed a kiss to the shorter man’s temple, and this time Valentine felt just weary enough, just bereft enough of pride to lean into the embrace. “That I did. And now I tell you that you may return to our bed and sleep to your heart’s content. Or until evening, whichever comes first.”

Valentine stared at Curio. Curio stared back. Valentine opened his mouth to speak, closed it abruptly. Curio said nothing.

“... You told me . To get up .”

“Yes. And before I put you through that admittedly amusing ordeal, I told the Duke that you would be indisposed until suppertime. I was merely putting your stubbornness to the test.”

Head reeling, in both the physical and the metaphorical sense, Valentine collapsed facefirst into his pillow with a growl. “Well, I hope I bloody passed. Bastard.”

“Oh, I think so,” Curio said airily, bending to kiss him again. Drifting off, he barely felt the warm brush of Curio’s chapped lips on his own. “I do think so.”

Chapter Text

In the grey before dawn, there stood an inn: half-faceless among an uncounted myriad. On the first floor of the inn, in the third room down the unlit corridor, lay two men in a single bed, locked in their mutual orbit by the ease of a thousand nights’ practice. The taller of them sprawled, long limbs flopping artlessly about his body as though he’d been dropped from a great height. The shorter lay curled in a tight ball, with his knees drawn to his chest and his bent arms cradling his head. The taller had one foot wedged between his bedfellow’s knees, one hand striving to brush his closely cropped hair. All as it had been a thousand nights prior, all as it would be for a thousand nights to come. 

Or so they thought. 

On this night, the taller, generally called Rosencrantz, had five monstrously itchy bed bug bites on the same leg, while the shorter, generally called Guildenstern, had fallen into bed with a throbbing ache above the eyes that had coalesced into a series of nebulous and melancholy nightmares wrought of the worst excesses of an inordinately philosophical mind. So it was that, on this night, Guildenstern could not be roused, while Rosencrantz could not sleep at all. 

Nor could Rosencrantz move to relieve each successive itch: not out of any real fear of waking his friend, but merely in deference to the fact that he could (and under normal circumstances would ). He did, however, curse the creatures he imagined had bitten him: five hungry and conniving brothers called Drumio, Grumio, Frumio, Vrumio, and Theophilus. Frumio, a wee stripling yet, had only just begun his education in the dark art of bed-buggery, and, lacking in courage, had given him but a small bite. Vrumio was the largest and most aggressive, no longer young but no less virile, and bloodthirsty as only a seasoned mercenary could be. And Theophilus, the old pervert, had bitten him so close to his prick that Rosencrantz had to wonder if the poor fool thought that “bed-buggery” meant something else entirely. 

Such spirited imaginings occupied his mind for the better part of a quarter hour, but they could not fully keep at bay either the burning itch or faint but omnipresent dread that was night’s constant companion. Most children, Rosencrantz reasoned, were at some time or other afraid of the dark, but he felt quite alone in having clung to that fear into adulthood. He couldn’t have said why: didn’t quite see the point in devoting part of an already taxed mental capacity to dissecting a fear that seemed not existential or thought-driven at all, but merely and wholly animal. Guildenstern, for whom nothing was merely anything, least of all animal, mocked him relentlessly for it, which in a bizarre way came as a great comfort. But Guildenstern could not mock in his sleep--or perhaps he could. It wouldn’t come as any great surprise if he could. But if he could, it was not in any way Rosencrantz could understand. 

It was a strange thing, being the only man in the room awake at night. Almost worse than being alone. 

XXX

In the grey before dawn, the world held its breath. Not peace, but silence fraught with the knowledge that the slightest motion, the faintest sound, could rip apart its fragile web, woven of starlight and dreams. Silence trembling, fearful, cowering in the shadow of its imminent execution. 

That man, a foreigner, he woke us up. Pale sky before dawn, a man standing on his saddle to bang on the shutters--shouts--What’s all the row about?! Clear off!

The tattoo of galloping hooves across frost-hardened earth. The rustle of a saddle, the clanking of spurs, the vexed grunting of a man pushing his mount on with far greater urgency than the early hour expected. Shadows hissing as a blade of lantern-light drove them from repose; night birds crying out in alarm. An abrupt, skidding silence, a muffled curse, and, upon the the window behind which Rosencrantz and Guildenstern lay, a sudden, merciless beating. 

Thud. Thud. Thud. 

Rosencrantz shot upright. Froze. His breath caught in his throat; his mouth opened as if to speak, but no sound dared escape. Below and beside him, Guildenstern’s rasping snores stuttered to a halt.

Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud.

“BLOODY SHUT UP!” Guildenstern roared, without even moving, making Rosencrantz yelp. Guildenstern growled into the sheets, waking into his ubiquitous irritation more easily than he would slip into a favorite coat. “Not even dawn and he’s making a racket, must be bloody drunk. Numbskull.”

Rosencrantz ran his tongue over his lips, wondered where the words to give voice to his misgivings about the man at the window and his death-knell knocks might lie, wondered why those mosgivings were taunting him at all. “Guil, I think--”

“You think what?” he snapped, still unmoving but for the hand that clenched, white-knuckled, into a fist upon Rosencrantz’s thigh.

“I think he comes--”

“Does he now?”

But then he called our names. 

“You inside!” The man at their window had a voice that ripped harshly from his throat and through the air, a voice that brooked neither argument nor hesitation. Over the pounding of his heart Rosencrantz could just make out the crackling of a scroll being unfolded. “It is herein set down that the citizens Rosencrantz and Guildenstern appear before the court of his esteemed majesty, Claudius, King of Denmark, ere the winter’s solstice.” The citizens thus summoned stared resolutely away from the messenger, into each others’ eyes: fear met vexation and cowered before the threat of combat before both subdued themselves into anticipation morose and mute. “Should you fail in this endeavour, your own heads will bear the price.”

It was urgent--a matter of extreme urgency, a royal summons, his very words--lights in the stable-yard, saddle up and off headlong and hotfoot across the land in breakneck pursuit of our duty--fearful lest we come too late.

Chapter Text

Don’t you worry yourself pitted, gattina , you’ll see it won’t hurt a bit! 

For shame, for shame, Agata, how dare you lie to her? You listen, gattina , and well, it will hurt worse than some drunken brute laying hold of that rusted disgrace your father, Lord bless him, calls a hearth poker, why he refuses to commission a new one is beyond me, simply beyond me, Lord knows he’s not wanting for the money-- 

Talk the poor girl to death, why don’t you, woman! 

Hmph. So. A drunken brute, laying hold of that poker and shoving it right up your-- 

And how would you know, Isotta, how?! Not even married, you scummy hag, and you tell this poor girl such wretched things without a mere by-your-leave! And then, then , you have the gall to mewl ‘for shame’ at me! Emilia, gattina , don’t listen to this scummy sinner. Coupling without God’s blessing will always bring you pain, but you are to be married, dear child, the union of marriage is a sacred pleasure! And so it shall be for you.

X X X 

Isotta and Agata, Emilia reflected, both talked a load of bollocks. As usual. On the one hand, the night had not been so pleasurable as to be called sacred. It had not, in point of fact, been particularly pleasurable at all, and the only satisfaction she could derive from that conclusion was that Iago had seemed no more enthused by the act than she. If not less so. Surely it was the will of the man, as much as the duty, to lust, even as it was the duty of the woman to satisfy. Were she a woman more given to self-recrimination, she might have shed bitter tears over her apparent loathsomeness, that she could not perform that sole duty. 

Praise be, she was not such a woman. And in the silence of the night, with the sort of meandering, painful lucidity wrought of being a dwelling’s sole waking soul, she could only marvel at the almost unconscionable lack of passion of their first night’s coupling.

Because it hadn’t hurt, either--at least, not in the way Isotta had so brazenly warned her it would. No hearth pokers tearing her in two. Indeed, any pain she felt in her loins tomorrow would be a miracle unto itself. Her monthly bleeding gave her more grief. 

The flesh on her upper arms, in disconcerting contrast, felt as though it had been ground into her bones. It was an ache she could feel in her fingers, in her teeth, pulsing with every too-quick beat of her stubborn heart. Iago was not a big man, but his body hid a brutish strength, one he didn’t seem fully aware he possessed. Oh, she had seen it before, it was impossible not to. But six months of courtship, even of the illicit sort, had not prepared Emilia for the day that strength might be turned against her. Only when she had cried out from the pain, tears stuttering down her face to the unpredictable, savage rhythm of his fingers digging into her skin, her own fingers raking across his back with force enough to draw blood, did he snatch his hands from her, as if she’d burnt him, and take to punishing the coarse sheets instead. 

She wondered, idly, whether he’d ripped them. Or whether his blood, or hers, had stained them. Wondered whether she would have been able to see the dimpled rings of bruises on her arms if moonlight had deigned to favour them that night. But of course it hadn’t. Gravid clouds had overtaken the sky by the time the small wedding party had arrived at the chapel. When the newlyweds had left the mess hall--or rather, had been forced out amidst a clamour of hoots and whistles by Iago’s comrades-in-arms, Emilia’s own brother, and those precious few friends of hers who had snuck out form under servants’ and parents’ thumbs to attend the ceremony and feast--all Venice was blanketed in charcoal twilight and silver mist. 

Earlier that day, Iago had picked her up and marched them from the chapel to seal whispered vows with a kiss atop the sea-cliffs. Grey all around, her new husband’s eyes had seemed the same mirrorlike shade as the roiling waves below, and Emilia had thought, as she fought half-heartedly for breath, what a pleasant thing it was to drown. But the darkness and drizzle of the evening blurred the edges of the world, turning carefree warmth to the aloof chill of apprehension, nearly dread of the events forthcoming.

And now a merciless rain beat against the heavy shutters of the small chamber’s smaller window, and she wondered whether God and his angels wept for her or for the wrong she’d done.

X X X 

Emilia glanced over her shoulder to where Iago lay, eyes straining fruitlessly to discern his form in darkness so complete she thought she could part it like water. Her hand crept across the patched woolen quilt of its own accord, traversing un piè in a lifetime until her fingers brushed Iago’s knuckles, rasped against the stubbled cheek sheltered beneath. The feverish heat of his skin, heat he had several times assured her was confoundedly but absolutely normal, seemed to burn her chilled skin. A comforting sort of pain. Almost more comforting than the kiss he’d pressed, clumsily, to her neck before curling up against the rough wall and leaving her to the mercy of endless night and endless thoughts. 

It was the memory of that kiss which sent her edging blindly backwards, until a pointed elbow jabbed her shoulder. Not quite surreptitiously, she positioned her backside above Iago’s bent knees and her back against his chest, and felt, rather than heard, the hitch in his shallow breathing. Emboldened, she pressed closer. Man and wife held their breath as one. Emilia’s eyes burned for want of sight. Or perhaps it was only the tears, anticipating their turn to fall. 

The sensation of Iago’s bent arm extricating itself from the press of bodies was amusing, somehow. Trapped in flesh, trapped in darkness, trapped in a purgatory of cautious hope. Then a hand stroking her brow. Her jaw. Another crushing itself beneath her before emerging to tug at her hip. Iago exhaled slowly, his breath warming her ear. He made no sound, but she could feel the faint movement of his lips against her hair--reveries, reverence, curses, pleas, he could have shouted any of them, all of them, shattering the night’s tenuous peace, and she would scarcely have cared. It was enough to be held, sheltered. Moored against stone-solid calm, rather than floating adrift in a sea of ceaseless wondering. And so Emilia closed her eyes, shutting away pain present and absent, shutting away the heat of skin and the insistent scratch of flax and wool, the mad seamstress stitching memories as motley in her mind, the weight of a newly usurped name. She closed her eyes, and whispered that name, and, like a babe new-born, slept.

Chapter Text

In Ephesus one day, a day fair only by meteorological metrics, one face, one voice, one habit, and two youthful persons traipsed the winding streets. Upon the sagging belt of one thumped a beleaguered purse, laden with the weight of five hundred ducats more than it had e’er been forced to bear ere now. About the slender arm of the other sat a coil of heavy rope, its splintered strands wreaking pilly havoc on the threadbare blue sleeve trapped beneath. One sang high and the other sang low, harmonizing a single melody miles apart, as they went about each other’s business in perfect ignorance of each other’s existence.

At opposite ends of the town, another face, voice, habit, and two equally youthful persons stared with poorly veiled impatience at the roads before them. One spoke to himself, not disconcerted enough by the way his voice echoed off unfamiliar walls, a clipped shadow of its habitual rough bluster, to leave off holding the silence at bay. The other spoke to the sallow-faced, drooping officer at his side, in the tense, brazen tones of a man too assured of his own importance to tolerate even the most half-hearted detention. 

XXX

“Fear me not , man, I will not break away!” snapped Antipholus of Ephesus, shrugging off his jailer’s heavy hand. Said jailer attempted, less than discreetly, to smother a yawn in his shoulder. The day had been hot, and long. Rich fools who lacked sense enough to know where they’d been gallivanting about only hours prior lay abysmally low on the list of fools whose company he’d willingly endure at present. 

“He’s drunk,” quoth the jailer to himself. “Or else he’s mad. Can’t abide the mad.”

Antipholus, ignorant still of what he’d done to merit such ill treatment, knew yet how to sway a poorer man’s heart to his purpose. “I’ll give thee, ere I leave,” he murmured into the shorter man’s ear, relishing the way his somnolent eyes snapped open, “so much money to warrant thee as I am ‘rested for.” The eyes narrowed, piqued interest slowly but certainly overpersuading suspicion. Antipholus cast his own eyes anxiously about, dreading the prospect of another misguided thump of the jailer’s baton should he fail to produce the promised pay. 

“And when I’ve spent a folly total, wey, hey, bully in the alley; off to bed, we end up cripol, bully down in Shinbone al-ley….” It was a sorry day, indeed, when Dromio’s husky whine sounded as music to Antipholus’ ears, when the sight of the blue double and bobbing red cap filled him, not with vexation, but with relief. Relief so great, in troth, that the rope sitting upon his man’s shoulder went wholly, blissfully unnoticed. 

“Here comes my man,” Antiphlous exclaimed, twisting to loosen the thin rope entrapping him. “I think he brings the money!”

“ So, help me, Bob, I’m bully in the alley, wey, hey , bully in the--”

“How now, sir?” he called. Poor Dromio jumped, the old shanty faltering on his lips. “Have you that I sent for?”

XXX

“There’s not a man I meet but doth salute me, as if I were their well-acquainted friend, and everyone doth call me by my name,” mused Antipholus of Syracuse, staring at the sandy brick walls towering above him as though they held all the secrets to that day’s blessed peculiarity. If stones could speak ...but of course they couldn’t. Any notion that they ought to at least have that option was merely the product of a mind too much distracted by discrepancy. “Some tender money to me,” he told those mute stones, growing, with each iteration of fortune, more and more perturbed. “Some invite me, some other give me thanks for kindnesses! Even now!--” stabbing a finger towards the stones, he cast wild, imploring eyes heavenwards, wondering what in Hell’s name kept the Lord so damned busy that he couldn’t deign to bestow upon Antipholus the pleasure of a sentient conversation partner-- “even now, a tailor called me into his shop and showed me silks that he had bought for me and, therewithal, took measure of my body! ”

Such fine silks they’d been, too: silks that in Syracuse, with his (dis)credit, he could scarce afford to look upon, let alone commission for purchase. Sumptuous maroon, bundled with spools of gold and russet thread for the embroidery. And the tailor had been so solicitous, asking in the most chipper of voices after his welfare and his lady wife. Thank all the powers that were and ever would be, he’d quickly turned talk to his own children and wife before Antipholus could even think of pointing out that he had no wife. The effervescent fellow had wound his serpentine way about Antipholus’ body, humming approvingly as he measured him about the arms, snickering a little as he noted the girth, frowning in something approaching horror as he took his height. Which series of events had been, if not outright humiliating, then baffling at the very least. 

“Sure,” he muttered, glaring at a hapless wall, “these are but imaginary wiles, and fiendish sorcerers inhabit here.”

“We’re open, tope to a low-light-lark-oh wey, hey , bully in the alley; dawn and rain, the cock did call, oh, bully down in Shinbone al-ley,” trilled a sweet tenor voice, the very picture of sweetness--

“Dromio!” As sweet the voice, how much sweeter the sight! For here was one just as befuddled by the day’s rarities as he; one who, in his befuddlement, could be considered naught but sane.

The young slave, smug as Antipholus had never seen him, whistled his grisly tune, patting a bulging, jangling purse in time to his self-set rhythm. “Master,” he cried, grinning wide, “here’s the gold you sent me for!”

XXX

Beat. 

On opposite ends of the town, a tableau. Mirror images, mirror sentiments splitting sides of the same cold shock. Twin green eyes widen to a degree broaching impossibility, the only fitting response to yet another in a series of impossibilities. Twin particoloured servants of redemption and of ropes, of anger and of Adam--but their words fell on slowly deafening ears. 

Goggle-eyed Syracuse, in want of answers, heard but “gold” and stayed his glutted fortune no longer to puzzle out the rest. Cowed into silence, he surged forward, clammy hands struggling for purchase upon his man’s beardless cheeks as unwary lips crashed into a bruising embrace. 

Irascible Ephesus, in want of gold, knew only too well how quickly shock could dissolve into bitter rage; nearly welcomed the familiar prickling of the skin and buzzing in the ears as he demanded to know where that gold might be. The man, more than accustomed to that capricious temper, had but to utter the dread “rope” before the master fairly flew from his bonds to rain blows upon the unfortunate head. 

Two halves of a single fraternity. An obligation to love, a proclivity to hate; a delirium of shared triumph and  a storm of gross misunderstanding. Antipholus and Dromio, searching for what they scarcely knew was lost, marvelling in the fatal brotherhood they’d found. 

Chapter Text

“You still have that?”

Extricating himself from behind the wardrobe’s heavy doors and moving to stand before their small mirror, Abhorson lazily straightened the grey fedora resting atop his head. The fedora that, merely yesterday, had disgraced Barnardine’s louse-ridden scalp. “Of course. It’s been laundered, naturally. Painted with lye and all. But I would never have discarded it.”

Pompey, heaving himself up from the mattress on the chill stone floor, snorted. “I suppose it would be a sin to forsake what’s yours by right?”

“As good as.”

Slender hands fluttered again to the hat brim, with a sort of languid thoughtlessness that belied the sharp, appraising glare the hangman was currently levelling at his blurred reflection. Privately Pompey didn’t think the thing suited him at all, not as it had its dissolute owner. A man with such trenchant pretensions to gentility as Abhorson could hardly play at a convincing rake even in the deepest throes of drunken disinhibition. Having taken up long-term residence in those throes, Barnardine, of course, had bourne the rake’s mark, always tilted at a predictably rakish angle, with enviable ease. But Abhorson in his crisp suit and carnelian tie, moulded to his lean frame by some darker magic than mere earthly tailoring (though Pompey had learned he made all the alterations to the usurped articles himself), cut such a ridiculous figure standing there adjusting that incorrigible hat, that Pompey could scarce forbear from laughing. 

“You plan on fleeing the confines of our confinement, do you?” he asked, feeling along the rumpled sheets for his own shirt. “You told me yourself we’ve the day at our leisure.”

Abhorson hummed. “No.”

“Then will you take your instruments to the walls to force them to yield up sunlight?”

“Don’t be absurd.”

“So you subject yourself willfully to the gross dignity of an evening suit, and for what purpose?” The smell of the shirt, acrid with yesterday’s fear-sweat, set even his deadened nostrils to tingling. Grimacing, Pompey balled the thing up and lobbed it towards the opposite corner of the dimly lit room. Not yet having been permitted to fetch his own things, he began to rummage through his fellow’s excellently appointed wardrobe for something of suitably egregious size. Every true man’s apparel fits your thief , it was oft said in jest and truth, and since Pompey was no thief and the men from whom Abhorson had... obtained these clothes scarcely true, he was bound to find success ere long. “For what purpose do you piddle through any of these suits? Surely they’re much too fine to taint with your mystery.”

“Undoubtedly.” Having seemingly given up on the hat, Abhorson strolled back to the wardrobe, scrutinising Pompey’s bared body with almost violating frankness. As though he were being weighed, measured, and found pitifully wanting. “But their quality is beyond my control. If they are fine, I may claim the use of them as my natural right as well as my sole vanity. So some might well call it. 

“Besides,” he continued, taking a step closer, “I’ve found it does many a condemned man valuable ill to see the garb of his fellow wretch gracing he who served him justice. Divests secrets from his soul in hopes of depriving me the satisfaction of claiming that which shields his skin. Though of course his fate can rarely change so much no matter how loose his tongue.”

He stood now with his chin at Pompey’s shoulder. The damned brim of the damned hat tickled the curls at the back of his neck as one stone-cold hand gripped his shoulder. The other reached around his bulk for a shirt of shimmering navy silk, held it up against Pompey’s body. Weighed. Measured . Found fitted . “And your mystery, sir, being what it is--”

“More art than artifice--”

“More artifice than art. So surely you of all men may appreciate an artful aesthetic, practicality or lack thereof notwithstanding.”

“Of course!” Pompey forced his sluggish tongue to wet parched lips, wondering when, precisely, his partner had so compromised his uncompromising propriety that he had so blithely brought them into so compromising a position. “Of course. But surely you of all men must acknowledge that mere appreciation for an aesthetic, however artful, cannot suffice if circumstances conspire to render that aesthetic unappreciable.”

That was not to say, of course, that Pompey didn’t appreciate it. He did. Had from the moment he’d laid eyes on the fellow and agreed to bide his sentence abiding with him. A fate not, on the whole, wholly disagreeable. His quillets may have met with little love in the prison, but Abhorson, at least, bore them more patiently; even, as the day and night wore on, shored them up against his own not inconsiderable wit. For he spoke truly enough: the bawd’s trade was one of art and artifice alike, the measure of the one or the other being measured as the client demanded. But no matter the demands, the art was essential. Painting oneself as something other, something better: presentation, pretension. How could he, in good conscience, fault a man who in a place of abject misery sought to lift himself above the squalour even to the smallest degree?

Emboldened by the thought, spurred from inaction by the unforgiving press of chill fingertips into heated flesh, Pompey turned, trapping Abhorson’s hands against his chest with his own. The flimsy silk crumpled, the sole beleaguered barrier between two bodies moving in tandem towards the bedframe. Pompey drove them forward, relishing the faint twitch of the hangman’s proudly set lips, the almost imperceptible widening of dim grey eyes behind his mirror-like spectacles. Like a stubborn oyster his habitual composure cracked, leaking foul juices redolent of fear half-hearted and put-upon to bare savage hunger more beautiful than any pearl. 

“I may appreciate ,” Pompey drawled, rubbing the silk over his plush expanse of flesh and tossing it away to join its soiled, forsaken fellow in the corner, “as far as circumstances allow. But now, now! To imprison the flesh--” deft fingers slicked stupid with sweat fumbled at the buttons of Abhorson’s suit jacket-- “to cloak your mystery in majesty --” off came the jacket, and next the tie, each sliding limply to the floor, eager to escape the clutches of feverishly roaming hands. “In vain to mollify your vanity, are these the purposes to which you’d chain your aesthetic ?” Too many damned buttons on the damned shirt; with a snarl he tore at it, lunged forward to sink eager teeth into the newly-bared, milk-white flesh of Abhorson’s shoulder. “The means by which you’d render it hateful?” 

“Then tell me, bawd, why it is you content to keep yourself thus chained?” Abhorson was smirking now, madly serene as ever as he groped first to undo his own trousers, then Pompey’s. One cold hand clenched, viselike, about his throbbing member. The other placed the fedora clumsily atop Pompey’s head as the two fell onto the bed, breaths shuddering in time to a o’er-hastily wedded heartbeat. “I find this ...aesthetic a far more appreciable one.”

And. Well. He could hardly argue with that.

Chapter Text

In your beloved’s embrace you seek shelter from all storms. His arms promise safety, a cage of strength surrounding your fragile frame; his warm hands stroke comfort like vitality into your skin, chilled more from the dread of threads of fate yet unwoven than the pernicious moue of winter, still glowering at the falling light. Expensive shoes, firm beneath your stockinged feet, scarcely yield to your meagre weight, shoring you up and boasting all the while of stability, security. Constancy, despite, the relentless shift of your soundless waltz. 

You step, turn, breathe as one, IN-two-three-OUT-two-three, locked in tandem as only lovers lost to time within each other can be. He is yours, and you are his, and you dance, and dance, willfully impervious to the lustre gilding your intertwined dreams cracking as the world you thought you knew falls to condemned dust.

X X X

“Why dost thou show me thus to the world? Bear me to prison, where I am committed!”

“I do it not in evil disposition, but from Lord Angelo by special charge.” For the first time since you were forced to lead this farcical parade your reviled shadow speaks, but the words pass through you as the wind, stinging and raw. In the voice of a prodded bear he mumbles, as though resentful of the charge, or perhaps the demon who put it on him. You don’t know and dare not ask, for despite his youth he is hard as stone and inexorable as the tide, and you are too footsore, too heartsick, too bitter in contemplation and too forsaken in condemnation to even play at fighting the inevitable. 

Jailer , you call him, for jailer he is, but when your second shadow, she, beloved, draws you aside to sit, cool hands an undeserved balm upon your fevered spirit and pallid brow, he lets you go with nary a narrowed eye in protest.

You watch them, and an iron fist clenches around your throat and sinks into your gut, mindlessly smothering each breath you begrudge yourself the luxury of taking. You watch them, and your swollen eyes yearn, burn, with the wretched weight of tears thirty years unshed.

Jailer , you call him, for jailer he ought to be, but when you beg for a minute more of respite--to finish the cigarette she holds to your lips in pitiful substitution of a kiss, to speak to your impetuous friend, who fair spits fire to hear your tale of woe, to wish the weight of her head upon your shoulder would drive you into the ground, into her, away from here--he turns away from you.

And so you turn from them, loathing yourself for failing in your duty, loathing yourself still more for so meekly accepting it in the first place. Duty. Burden. Devil’s work, and you the bitter deputy. The fool, who in battle would cut men down with a steeled heart and a steady hand, but would now balk at a pregnant girl’s tears, at the youth’s trembling hands and shadowed eyes. It sickens you, their love. Lily-pure. Naivety dashed to bits on the jagged coast of needless suffering. Suffering you lead them to, bound but better blind, the cruellest sort of shepherd. 

Acquiescence too easily won.

They sicken you. 

You pretend not to see the hurt glimmering sharp in flat and weary eyes. 

You sicken yourself.

There is only room in your heart for the hurt in hers, each falling tear a plea and prayer her cracked lips cannot utter as you rise to fall. 

Beside you, that gentle fop turns to speak. Mild mien and crazed eyes, thoughts flitting across his white face like shadows across the moon. He seeks answers to questions you’d damn yourself to ask, and to stay his foolish tongue you snatch the wooden cup from his tremulous hand. 

Vodka. Watered down. It barely stings as you drain it. 

Teeth clenched against a cry of rage, you fling the cup away, stride back to your damned ward and his twice-damned maid: dry-eyed, now, and clinging to him for more than she’s worth.

“Come, away,” you whisper, her small hand a dying weight in yours.

Jailer , he calls you. 

For surely she will die with you.

Damn you , his proud gait snaps. Help him , her hollow eyes plead. You wish the liquor had burned as strongly as the fire of their resignation. 

X X X

In your beloved’s embrace you seek shelter from all storms, but here the storm surrounds you always, seeps into your very marrow and lingers there like a sickness, or an uninvited guest. Stale air pregnant with voices, glutted with the bilious rage and bitter sorrow they spew day in and out. 

The cells of the ground floor house last night’s drunkards and last eternity’s mad; their rolling, leering eyes prick at your skin like so many flies as they lustily drink in the sight of those afforded greater liberty than they might ever claim, to roam the grounds freely. 

The chaotic bustle of the ground floor proves a welcome respite from the unhallowed silence two levels below, where the walls are so thick, the halls so dark, that you felt yourself to be the only living soul for miles, dropped into an infinite well of waiting and wanting. Only the hangman had paced by your cell, reptilian eyes cowering behind spectacles like dim mirrors pinning you down. As though you were some misshapen, novel inspect: unsought, but not yet unwelcome; disconcerting, but not yet so bothersome that he’d feel the need to swat at you.

But then the jailer had come, and sent the scurvy fellow skulking off with a single dour look. White kerchief a beacon of hope, poised and penitent in the unremitting dark. He said only “you may see her before her hour,” and brought you upstairs. Left you to her tender mercy. Turned back to his business before you could even think to thank him.

A thousand times an hour you thank God your beloved was afforded such liberty.

She clings so tightly to you her frail body, spent with worry, trembles. Or perhaps it is your own hands that falter as you worship her velvet skin, her tightly coiled hair, her gravid belly, with the ripened fruit of your seed kicking strongly from within. Her weight atop your feet roots you to the earth, to the waltz, as the stymied winds of morbid fantasy lash about you in vain. Her scent keeps them at bay, salt sweat and roses sweeter to you than any perfume. 

Your lips breathe no word, but your souls hum in harmony, a gentle tune weaving through the cacophony of voices and moulding their strident chords to suit sweet melody. When you dance, the world falls away; two become one in a paradise spun of purgatory. When you dance, time stops to watch, and the chided storms beat their whimpering retreat into disconsolate silence. 

When you dance, you dance to forget.

And so you dance.

You forget. 

The prison, the birth. The sentence. 

Your forget them all.

You wish only to forget forever.

To break them apart is hateful .

All but her.

Cruel.

Cherish the moment while you can. Will it to last forever.

Forever.

But you’ve your duty.

You need more time.

Forever . 

They need more time.

And yet.

And yet.

And yet.

Even fate cannot last forever.

X X X

Hot hands come to rest upon your own. Gentle. Insistent. Invasive. They are not your beloved’s hands: too large, too rough, and they pull you away from him with strength neither of you could hope to protest against. They pull you away from him, back into the world that has seen fit to spit on you for love. 

Faces swarm in the corners of your conscience. The careworn caretaker, kinder than this place of misery deserves or can bear. The hooded friar, sallow face and cultured voice and benighted eyes, a spectre drowning in the shadow of his misplaced faith. They regard you with pity, but their pity chafes as wool upon a wound, and you blind yourself to it, disgust travailing to mask despair. You reserve sight only for your beloved, who kneels to take the sacrament at the feet of your unborn child. 

Her hands card through your newly shorn hair: steady, as though her heart isn’t breaking audibly with yours. The child kicks out against your cheek, railing against you for abandoning it even as you caress it. 

Your child, who will be left fatherless before it has the chance to draw breath.

Her tears spatter your splayed, roving hands like so many drops of blood, and for one wretched moment you wonder whether it would be better to kill her alongside you, if only so she won’t be left forsaken.

The weight of the world that should be theirs presses mercilessly down upon you, until your legs can bear it no longer.

You kiss her one last time, and curse yourself a coward, that you cannot longer hold on.

Unseen, you stagger to a nearby chair. Unseeing, you stare at the blood-stained, straw-strewn floor, neck, back, and heart breaking beneath the strain. 

You let her go.

He lets you fall . 

You take up your ball and chain once more, rue the hour you allowed yourself to believe you were free of them. Free to live.

He locks himself away . 

You ought to sweep today. 

You turn and walk away.

X X X

She lets you lead her to the sick bay, a study of strength in silence though she walks doubled over in pain. When he asks, dully, what you’ve done with her, you tell him the physician will send word when her hour is come. 

As if you’ll be around to hear it. 

The pain, the pain! Splitting you open from your very core, leaching all reason from you, your innards burning as you choke on your own screams. 

You sweep, as you meant. Ought. He paces, as he cannot help, a caged animal latching onto, lashing out at, any solicitous hand. 

The foreign friar. 

That pious hack. That blessed saviour.

Who calls you caretaker , not jailer , even as the youth spurns the very sight of you. Who seems to take full measure of your prostrate soul in a single piercing glance. 

Who promises that he cannot know.

Who seems to long for some reprieve for the unfortunate lovers as strongly as you do. You’re almost sorry to see him go.

You hope he stays away.

Not so the sister, damnably virtuous she.

Oh sister, sister, hear me!

Is’t not natural for a man ill-accustomed to death to fear it as he does?

Is life so hateful to you that you would begrudge me mine?

Is’t not enough he fears for himself, but for wife and child with him?

Must I die to countenance your sin with mine own?

Must I die in senseless agony, not knowing where or when or why, but that my beloved is to die? Must I die like this, steeped in my own filth and shame, dragging sacred life into a world that seeks only to silence its cries? Must I die adrift in the storm?

Must I die?

Must he die?

X X X 

Midnight will tell, to say he must. He, and her soul with him, and the coming child with her. He must die, and he knows it, heart resigned to that which his eyes cannot accept. 

You slam the warrant into the jailer’s solid chest, praying to the Devil when God forsook you that it burn his too-mortal flesh as it did yours. 

He should have struck you harder. Stopped the foolish heart that still dares beat for him. 

His hand traps yours, one helpless soul seeking to comfort another, but the touch only burns, burns, burns. 

He wrenches himself away. Walks whistling away, to wait out the moonless night.

Alone, you whistle, that you might not weep. 

Alone, you drag yourself to the floor, that you might weep in peace. 

It doesn’t work.

It doesn’t work. 

In the lonely dark you sit and wait, that you might not waste a single second of life as the hours left to you wind down, down, down to Hell and never to return. 

But who knocks there?

You wonder. 

Go away.

You wonder how she is.

Go. Away. 

You wonder if she’s in pain.

You wonder if he lives. 

If she cries for you.

If he dares sleep.

If she holds your child and tells it not to dream of you.

If he dreams of you.

You wonder why the Devil in his wretched mercy never saw fit to harden your heart against your duty, why you must be consigned to suffer it as lead crawling through your veins, cannon fire ringing in your ears and pleas like barbs sunk deep into your skull. Why the Friar in his damned persistence comes to rouse you: praises honesty, urges action, plots calamity, promises safety, when you want nothing more than to lay by the yoke of duty and seek asylum in oblivion.

You force yourself to think of everything and nothing, anything to stave off an eternity of oblivion creeping ever closer with each passing second. To die is to forget what it is to feel, what it is to forget. To think. You cannot bear to never think again. And so you think beyond the pale of reason, if only because your life depends on it. On her.

But their lives depend on you.

Your finals hours pass softly with thoughts of her.

X X X

Dawn.

Dawn.

Dawn.

You never thought it would come.

You never thought you’d live to see it.

You pray you’ll live to see another.

And now you wait.

You wait.

And wait.

For news . 

For something, anything, to happen.

For the Duke.

You wait.

Because you must.

As much as it pains you.

You wait.

You wait.

And the world waits with you.

X X X 

And then. 

Finally.

She runs into his arms.

In his embrace you seek shelter from all storms, for now you know you can never again bear to weather them alone. You collapse into each other, more weary than you’ve ever been and yet. Overcharged with life. Precious life. 

New life. 

Your son, you tell him, your tears and his a gentle fall of rain to christen their salvation. Your son.

Your son. 

He holds you to his chest and mumbles prayers, praises, as your wrenched hearts learn anew to beat as one. He holds you lovingly, bruisingly tight, as if dreading the moment you’ll be dragged apart forever. 

But forever never comes. 

And so you kiss him. 

You kiss her. 

Your child clutched in your arms, you mount his feet and shut your eyes, trusting he’ll never again let you fall. 

And slowly. 

Slowly . 

As your hands weld themselves to her back, back to where they belong. 

As your souls take up their shared melody, now three voices strong. 

You finally.

Finally.

Dance.

Chapter Text

I. Crni rižot: Fabian

The greatest irony and tragedy of Fabian’s life was that he was employed as a gardener. Through and through he was a spirit of the sea, clinging as strongly to the battered cliffs as the samphire his family had spent centuries gathering. He and Maria and her gaggle of brothers had spent their youth clambering over jagged stone, wading through pools and shallows, throwing broken shells and errant crabs at wild-eyed gulls, and shrieking at fickle tides. They’d risen hours before dawn to fish, sat for hours after sunset braiding nets and singing snatches of old songs. He’d always carried about him the acrid tang of salt marshes and seaweed wilting in the sun, and his fingers were always scraped raw from barnacles and stained black with squid ink. 

But service paid a good deal better than scraping samphire, so when the number of hungry mouths between their orphaned households had grown too cumbersome to bear, both man and maid had turned their sights to land. Fabian’s fingers were grimed with dirt now, and Maria’s braided silken hair and fine wool instead of rough hemp line. No longer did the tide cast its shadow of perpetually imminent tempest over their souls; there was only the malingering Malvolio, who would as soon thrash any foolhardy unfortunate for an overheard insult as not but, on the whole, inspired woefully little awe. Though the harbour was only an hour’s walk from the estate, their lady could count on one hand the number of times she’d laid eyes on the sea. And the cracking marble walls had only ever been touched by indolent breezes heavy with the sweetness of fruit and heat, unrelieved by the fresh breath of salt water or rushing waves, twin sirens that beckoned always.

But no amount of waxing poetic would bring either of them back to the sea. So the only sensible course of action was to bring the sea to them.

Once a week and sometimes oftener, she scoured the market for that day’s fresh catch. Today it was cuttlefish that caught her eye, nestled among heaps of blackening fish and pallid squid, and she could nearly feel the flash of inspiration alight in her mind, like a bright dawn. She hadn’t made a proper rižot in ages. There was rice in the kitchens, already washed. And just that morning a few of the stable hands had skived off to wade for prawns, and had gifted her half their bucketful as thanks for keeping mum. It seemed as though the very fates pressed her to it. 

Only one ink sac was lost to overeager preparation. One she set aside, and the rest she burst and drained into last winter’s jelly jars for writing-ink. Her hands, too gladly accustomed to their task, moved without the slightest thought: clean, chop, boil the fish. Drain the stock. Fry onions, parsley, garlic in their vineyard’s grapeseed oil and crisp white. Add the stock, add the rice, boil them again. Now the fish, the ink spilling over the mess and seeping into each unsuspecting crack, a gluttonous shadow. Salt, pepper, lemon juice, enough paprika to humble even Sir Toby’s deadened tongue. 

The kitchen reeked, in the best way possible, of the fruits of the sea. And just before noon, when Fabian snuck in from the gardens for bread and kajmak as he was so often wont to do, the wide smile from which Maria had stolen her first kiss shone in the dim, and tears traced the lines seaming his browned face, coaxed from oblivion by the unmistakable smell of home.

II. Meze: Cesario

That new boy of the Duke’s couldn’t possibly hail from anywhere remotely near Illyria, of that Maria felt absolutely certain. Though his smooth voice carried nary a trace of an accent, there remained a strange deliberateness about his manner of speaking, every syllable of every word too carefully thought through. He was too reserved, almost leery, so she’d heard whispered abroad, still far from regarding strangers as friends yet unmet. His complexion was too fair, his features too fine for these sun-drenched, sea-worn shores. And as he sat in the drawing room now he eyed the dolma and samra on the meze platter as though they were liable to sprout legs at leap at him.

“Stuffed grape leaves,” she told him, not bothering to restrain her laughter as he twitched a little, shifted restively on the divan. “And cabbage. They won’t hurt you.”

“I can’t imagine what gave you the impression I thought they might.” He didn’t sound convinced. 

Maria topped up the boy’s nearly-untouched glass of wine and sighed. “Don’t try it yet, then, it’s not as though you’ve no other options. The lady Olivia won’t be down for some time yet,” she added, anticipating his nascent protest, “and it’s surely too early for you to have eaten prior to your coming, so you’re quite stuck with me. And with this food.”

“Housewife’s hospitality?” he quipped, grinning a little, though his slim legs still crossed and uncrossed, crossed and uncrossed. 

“You may call it so if you wish.”

Shrugging, he speared slivers of carrot and roasted pepper with a skewer, dipped both into the tirokafteri. His eyes grew wide. “Which hospitality I shall never mock again,” he exclaimed, once he had swallowed. And cut the spice with a slice of cucumber. “That’s divine.”

“And you dared doubt me,” Maria said, dryly, but as she watched his newly-eager exploration of the platter, she couldn’t help but smile.

III. English Fruitcake: Olivia

It wasn’t a matter of ingredients; she had those. Had, in fact, managed to procure them far more easily than she thought she would have in the cold isles from which her lady hailed. Nor was it a matter of the recipe, which she had found, after an hour too many spent scouring the dust-choked trunks stacked haphazardly in the cellar, in one of the many small, poorly bound traveller’s journals the late Lord Oliver’s father had spent his life scribbling in. 

No, for Maria it was a matter of principle. To judge from the recipe, whatever this so-called “fruitcake” was simply didn’t sound edible, let alone remotely appetizing; the chicken-scratch drawings accompanying the recipe only did the thing further disservice. But her lady had spoken so fondly of it. Tradition , this, every Christmastide that. My father’s favourite . Though it had been six months since lords Oliver and William had passed on, Olivia had yet to utter their names without a misting of the eyes at the very least. But. My father’s favourite , she had said this morning, and she’d smiled. Albeit a faint smile, wavering slightly at the edges, but a smile nonetheless. The first fragile bud peering through cracking winter ice. Maria hadn’t been able to muster even the slightest inclination towards reproof.

She had been graced with, or rather saddled with Sebastian’s help, on the grounds that an extra pair of “loving hands” could only sweeten the confection. She had, frankly, numerous doubts on the matter, but the boy had been so earnest in his insistence that she’d no choice but to keep them firmly to herself. Her Toby had, with comparable earnestness, volunteered himself as a taster, to which ludicrously endearing proposition she’d told him, tone dripping exasperation like syrup, to bugger right out of her kitchen. The hours wound down in a flurry of chopped raisins, currants, cherries, dates, and orange; in heaping spoonfuls of dark sugar and Turkish coffee; in a haze of flour and spices and just a bit too much rum. 

For Olivia , their rallying cry as the nuts caught fire for the fourth time. For Olivia , when Sebastian, the worst fool Frenchman, swigged the bitter coffee and coughed so hard he nearly swooned. For their dear, capricious, gentle lady, who buried a shy and lonely child behind the arch facade of Botticelli’s goddess; who grimly doffed her mourning mantle as though it were a most beloved shawl, yet cloaked herself so gracefully with the wit and warmth of a summer bride. Who had never forgotten her care for those beneath her even as she forgot herself, and who and never ceased missing a home she scarcely knew.

For Olivia , they whispered, near spent with pride, as the cake darkened, rose, and finally emerged sticky and steaming from the brick oven, and dropped unceremoniously onto their best silver platter, to better grace their Christmas table with all its ill-worn, well-won pride.

IV. Riblja čorba: Feste

“Soon enough even you will have to admit it’s growing far too cold to spend your days dogging about the streets all day as you do,” Maria scoffed, stirring more paprika into the thick broth.

“All sense and no spice of foolhardy exploit would make Feste a very dull dog indeed,” he rejoined, grinning, though his voice had grown so hoarse with the day’s singing that even he winced to hear it. Maria could only shake her head, sighing at the fool’s obtuse obstinacy. At the far end of the kitchen the old shutters creaked, whined. A howl of frigid wind teased them open; they banged once, twice, three times before she quit the stovetop to latch them. Feste, squatting by the hearth, shifted closer to the crackling fire. A stray spark nipped at the trailing end of his scarf. “Besides, dear Mistress Mary, you seem to labour under the delusion that I alone so dare belabour the elements, to face them out so brazenly. Rest assured the dozens who passed me by today, themselves to outface the persecutions of the sky, are just as witless as I.”

“Not so witless they stopped to listen, I hope.”

“Just as, in fact. Perhaps they imagined that the sooner and oftener they paid me, the sooner I’d leave them to their peace.”

“And yet you’ve only just returned, what sort of ‘sooner’ do you think to call that?”

Feste could only shrug, wringing a little water from the hem of his ragged coat. “Bold of you to presume I thought at all.”

“So I suppose you don’t think, either, that our lady does wrong in keeping you on only for others to pay your keep?” Maria huffed. All she got in response was another shrug, this one just a shade wearier than the last. Lacking any real desire to goad him further, Maria threw a fish spine at him in lieu of pressing her inquiry onwards. Feste, ever unperturbed, simply stuck out a purple-knuckled hand to catch it and began to clean his teeth with it. So Maria threw another. “Come taste this, will you?”

“Rue the day I wouldn’t.” Heaving himself to his feet, Feste took the proffered ladle with a comically low bow. He blew only once on the steaming broth before slurping it down and swilling it about like fine wine. “And how much black pepper did you favour it with, m’dear?”

“Enough,” she said sharply, smirking a little.

“So you claim.” He took another sip and gargled it. Hacked once, a rusty sound. Maria threw her head back, barking a laugh. “No, just as I suspected. Not nearly enough.”

“Incorrigible, that’s what you are,” she said, but shook in more black pepper all the same. “Utterly incorrigible.”

Feste handed her the ladle and darted forward to peck her cheek. Snickering, he twisted out of the way of the ladle’s retaliation and skulked back to his hearthside perch. “I never claimed to be otherwise.”

“Rogue,” Maria muttered, warmed by a sudden rush of fondness for this strange fellow who had become as much as brother to her as her own flesh and blood. And only a villain would abandon a brother to the cold. She ladled the soup into a wooden bowl and set it at the rough-hewn table. With a murmur of thanks, Feste wrapped both hands around the bowl, heaved a deep, shuddering sigh. Maria threw an arm about his narrow shoulders and pressed a rough kiss to his still-damp hair. “Mind you let it cool properly this time. I want you to taste exactly how much damned pepper I put in there for your fool self.”

“I reserve nothing but hope,” he said, a faint smile tugging at cracked lips.

Maria kissed him again, right upon those lips. “Hope is enough.”

V. Sach: Sir Toby

No matter how much of a buffoon, a rogue, and a lout her Toby might be, Maria could never help loving him. For untold years it had been thus, though publicly she would have denied the sentiment until she was blue in the face. He, of course, would never manage to rouse his ale-doused brains enough to note the existence of any such sentiment at all. 

But now, ah, now! She loved him still, and now she no longer had to drown that love in wretched denial. She could love, in open ardour, every mistaken and misshapen part of him: his brash temper, his strutting bantam rages, his bellowing laughter which left him teary-eyed and wheezing. She loved the heat of his time-ravaged body, the strength stubbornly clinging to broad limbs, the swollen, reddened hands that clutched her limply in the night as though she were a jewel he knew none would dare steal. 

And she loved, sometimes most of all, how he, every inch a Bacchanal of old, relished her cooking. Whether she put before him dishes of the Illyrian isles or of his own English countryside, he would lavish praise upon her and fall to the food with gusto, knowing she loved to watch him eat as well as she loved a wine-wild coupling or a good jest. So the day she set a family’s serving of sach down at their small table, he, winking, called her his Ceres, his Venus, and vowed with solemn reverence to put away the whole mess.

Chapter Text

“Side by side, we stand like brothers; one for all and all together. We will stay united through darker days, and we’ll be unbeatable forever.”

Red skies at dawn. 

Weak rays of sunlight piercing the firmament like blades gouging out the heart of the world. Blood has been spilt this night.

But not our own.

He comes to your tent besmirched with mud, blood, and the Devil knows what else, lean body drowning in another man’s clothes. Peasant garb. Eyes shining too bright in the lingering dark, trembling like a green cavalier on the eve of his first battle. 

You fall to one knee, wince as the muscle pulls sharply over the overtaxed joint. You scarcely dare to meet his eyes, long instead to bow your head, shield yourself from the fire of his imminent censure. But more hateful than that by far is the thought that he should ever take you for a coward.

In measured tones he tells you how he and Loredan split from the night’s watch, accompanied some villagers to the well. The same well an enemy squadron had commandeered weeks ago.

They had been seething since the day they lost the thing.

Only one guard that night.

More boy than man . 

They found him sleeping. Left him sleeping.

Better to let sleeping dogs lie than rouse suspicion by...well.

And they poisoned the well.

They would have done it anyway.

So he claims. 

It was only a matter of time.

He and Loredan merely offered their protection, played no greater role. So he claims . But the wildness in his eyes claims otherwise. 

Say something, then.

You know not what to say.

Anything.

Your mouth is stopped. Your throat aches even to look upon him.

His silence more deafening than the screams of thousands . 

Kill men in the dark?

A war may be fought with honour, a siege stood out with force. But death is the ultimate victory, and only through cunning may we force Fate’s hand to grant it us.

Our troops are strong, our souls are strong!

Not strong enough to bear another six months of this. 

We. Are not. Barbarians. 

Not yet. 

Never.

We are

Lions.

“Come the day and come the hour, some will live in song and story. We were born to follow our guiding star, and to meet our destiny with glory.”

Drum. Beats. Echoing.

Left. Left. Left-right-left.

On. The. Horizon.

Left. Left. Left-right-left. 

The pounding of ten thousand hearts stirs the very air before you. Or perhaps it’s only the wretched heat. 

Chalk clumps, gritty and slick, into the creases of your palms. The waxed rags binding your hands chafe, a welcome discomfort.

You’ve grown ill-accustomed to such heat. Spoiled, by Venice’s more temperate climes. 

You will not drop this flag. If the Devil took your mother sleeping and Saint Mark himself made a back-alley bawd of you, you will not. Drop. This flag.

You wish the ice in your veins would cool the sweat on your brow.

You cannot lower yourself further in his esteem. Not when he’s turned so far from you already.

In the roar only one heart beats in time with your own. But you still cannot bring yourself to look upon him, the dawn’s rage thrust aside but not yet forgotten. Not yet forgiven. 

Surely now is not the time for petty moral quandaries!

But then the enemy crests the horizon. Marches toward you.

Straggles. 

Fewer in number than ever before, their standard limp. 

This is your shame.

This is his triumph.

Put it aside.

Put it aside.

You grit your teeth. Shift your hands. Hoist the flag aloft.

To me. 

Higher. Let Mark in Heaven reach his lion.

Forward. 

Artillery ready. Aim. 

To the flag. 

His eyes touch yours

His eyes touch yours.

Cold. Tranquil. As the night gone by never was.

Steady. Wild. With madcap glee, and something warmer you cannot, dare not name. 

A weight lifts from your shoulders.

From your heart.

Strength rushes through your limbs anew, and with a joyous shout you raise the flag higher still.

Fire.

“Hearts of steel and heads unbowing, vowing never to be broken. We will fight until we can fight no more…”

The roar never ceases. 

Rifle rounds slapping the air. Sabres, armour, metal on metal whistling, scraping, screeching. Fruitless shouts. Cannon fire the tolling of implacable bells. 

You hear it all as through a dream. Muffled. 

Choked.

Sword meets sword. Sword meets flesh.

The damned smoke makes a hell on earth.

Hot blood spurts over you, hisses as it wets the parched earth. You taste it on your lips, salty and sour. You spit, careful to avoid the twitching corpse as it falls. 

Their colour guard has scattered. Every man for himself, locked in his own desperate scrap for wretched life. But around you your men hold fast. 

You shake the blood from your blade. Someone, somewhere, screams to fall back. Fall back. 

They don’t listen. Are beyond listening. You press on. Close in. No longer lions, but wolves.

Duck. Parry. Thrust. Parry. Lunge, slash. Cut his throat, push him away. Two behind him fall, riddled with bullets. A third swings at you, made clumsy with fear. Sidestep. Off with his head. 

Hungry for blood.

Forward! The shout burns your dust-caked throat. Venezia!

His voice thunders above the din. Flag clutched tight, you and yours take up the cry.

From the corner of your eye you see the enemy standard list towards the ground.

The ensign. Alone.

The general hunched over his mount, wildly signalling retreat. 

A ripe target.

Load cannon!

Run.

In position!

RUN.

Right to the heart of the throng.

The thick of the infantry, coming at you from all sides. Idiot. You precious idiot. Bringing a staff to a sword fight. Blade chopping overhead, this freak has a green eye patch. Block. Steel grates on solid wood, sticks. Swing the end round to the one behind, catch him in the jaw. He falls; green patch staggers, thrown off the pole. You kick out, quick, crush soft flesh, where’s your groin guard, wanker? 

Ready!

Another swings high, low, block, block. Blood drips down your arm, seeps into the rags. Which son of a horse tit sucking bitch got you, which? 

Aim!

That one. That one, arms out an inch too far, ribs left open. Lunge. The staff’s spear point squelches through guts and bone, glints red poking out of his back. Kick him away, you need that back. Club the other over the head while he’s down.

Fire!

There’s more, zounds, there’s more. But he’s there, there!

The cannonball sings, flies, crashes down. Explodes. Bodies by it jerk away, fly through the shivering air. The world flashes white. You refuse to flinch.

As the world goes blank you grab his flag. Run back, quick, quick, before he realises he’s not dead.

The ringing fades; you hear your men cheering. The panicked thrum of a thousand cowed survivors fleeing blindly into the dust. Let them go, you cry, but your voice is lost amidst rising chants of the flag, the flag! And something hard strikes you.

You press the bloodstained flag into his chest. Smirk at the sword levelled at your throat. Stand down, General.

Iago.

Their parting gift to you, you tell him. There’s a sword wavering before you and blood pounding in your head, Hellfire searing your arm, whoops of relief and roars of pain tearing at the clogged air you suffer to breathe, and you find you can do nothing but laugh.

He laughs like a madman, but the sound sweetens the air, a balm upon your wrought and aching spirit. Hands trembling, you sheathe your sword.

You put up your flag.

You stride towards him and he to you, for this one blessed moment insensible of all else past and to come.

There is only now.

Only him.

You catch him in your burning arms, laughing still--

You press your lips to his and kiss the fall of silence.

“...Till our final requiem is spoken.”

Chapter Text

“What on earth are you doing?”

“Um, making a sandwich, bud, ya want one?”

“You can’t cut cheese like that!”

“What are you talking about?”

“Like-- that , you can’t--you’ve gotta cut cheese in slices , you can’t just crumble bits off and dump them in the middle of the bread like some kind of rubbish chute !”

“This is how I’ve always cut cheese!”

“You just stab at it .”

“Mm-hm.”

“And mush it up like some...insane Scotch egg.”

“Mm-hm--”

“Oh my God you did not just freaking bite into that like an apple.”

“Mm-hm.”

“You buffoon. You rampaging animal. You absolute-- piss-brained cartoon.”

“Wow, okay, way to love and support your partner.”

“I swear to God I’m gonna buy you separate cheese. ‘Cos you’re ruining my cheese.”

“I’m ruining your cheese ?!”

“Don’t you dare laugh!”

“I’m laughing with you! With future you. Wait, fine, look, see, I’ll cut off the whole...mangled...end. For ya. There. Now it’s nice. Happy?”

“Ecstatic. Thrilled. I’m crying tears of joy, now give me the friggin’ knife. No knives for you.”

“Damn, I had plans for tonight.”

“Oh HELL no with that shit. Give.”

“Fine, short stack. Kill my fun, why dontcha.”

“...”

“...”

“What. Did you just call me.”

“...Coat...rack?”

“ WHO THE HELL YOU CALLING SHORT?! ”

Chapter Text

If Achilles was blessed with the might of the gods, then so in equal measure was he cursed with their rash inconstancy. Even in times of peace his temper was as storms at sea, quick to subside and quicker still to rise. But in times of strife his tongue dripped acid more readily than his revered sword dripped blood, only too eager to deride whatever petty cause championed by whichever petty king had bid him fight. Ubiquitous, septic rage straining at the frayed edge of put-upon indolence, and a steeled word and capricious dagger flung mercilessly, unrepentantly, at any foolish enough to stray across his warpath.

Any but Patroclus, who for all his maidenly mildness neither strayed nor fled, but set siege, with all the serenity of time immortal, to the fortress of unabashed cruelty in which reckless Achilles imprisoned himself. Patroclus, who endured the lashings of whip and tongue alike with the same forgiving silence, the same stony gaze and absent smile. Who was the only man, maid, or memory living before whom Achilles would ever deign relent.

Patroclus would wait out even the wildest storm with bated breath and steady hands, poised to snuff out the flames of wrath and temper them to embers of a gentler passion. He would draw Achilles, spent and pliant, to his breast, like a mother soothing a fretful child: murmur tender comforts, not quite platitudes but sorely loved formalities, into deafening ears. With the lingering vestiges of his tyrant’s strength, Achilles would force him to his knees to better meet his eyes, hot blue fleeing to a refuge of obsidian oblivion. Lean arms would twine, serpentine, about the other’s body; fingers scratch longingly, irately, against the folds of clothing deemed not merely gratuitous but hateful in the heat of a stolen embrace. And Patroclus would swallow Achilles’ stuttered apology with a kiss, to break the fleeting storm upon the shores of errant love.

Chapter Text

I have seen your eyes before. Many places, many times before. In the rude assembly, in the wasted alleys; in pasts afeared and presents bitter, in the madhouse, in the mirror. Yes, Master Bedlam, the fool knows well these parted eyes. Searching eyes, lost eyes; pained eyes, maimed eyes. Supplicant eyes, seditious eyes. Cackling, cracking, crying eyes. Mad eyes, but not, no t a madman’s eyes--is that what you wish me not to see? Do you throw me to the ground, hound me from your hovel, so that I cannot see? Cannot scry into your crystal eye and from therein the truth espy?

For I have seen your eyes anotherwhere. You will not remember. You will not remember the chapel on St. Swithin’s day, how you squirmed in your father’s corky arms, even from birth wary of touch. You will not remember how, though you beat and kicked and writhed with fury, you never once made a sound. Not even when the water and oil sluiced your tender head, nor when your godfather, my light, my life, wiped the excess from your staring eyes. Staring, yes. Staring at me, for all to see, though I was no motley spectacle then, naught but a natural fool in a house of God. You will not remember how only in my arms you lay still and calm. 

After that, they say, you stared no more. Your eyes grew cowed and fickle, darting away, always away, to shadows. You sought shelter in the shadows from the strained auspices of your birth. And your own shadow, bastard brother loved too well, spurned your reflected light. Did you guess he tried to snuff it out? To start anew and rise amok, a phoenix tupping your dying embers?

I did not see all. But I saw enough. I see enough. I see it now in your eyes, that dull and muddled shade, the truth you hide in murky waters from your drowning self. In murky waters will not your own reflection lie, but a half-faced lie, assurance in the anonymity of Anyman. Who is Poor Tom but Anyman, Everyman? Every man you ever longed and ever failed to be? What is that Tom but a shadow, a shell: a vessel, to fill as pleases you? As befits, bests, you? Who are you ?

The question claws at you, rends your soul asunder. I think it always has. But you will not find an answer in these stinking bowels of earth, this madman’s mask; you will not find it in me. You should not look upon me and dare to dream of hope, for I am not his harbinger. I am but a shadow myself--not as you are forced to become but as you sought to make yourself, as you failed to make yourself. As I cannot help but be. Invisible, unless I will myself seen. Unremarkable, unless I will myself heard. The folly of our world given form, a motley mirror held constantly up to enjoin reflection. 

This I am. I know myself always to be. This you are not. You are not burdened to be. 

But you seek not to know what you are not. You seek what I cannot give, what on this earth naught but death will grant. 

You seek whole eyes.

Chapter Text

“Right, it’s nearing half past. They comin’ or what?”

Picture the first. Safronov’s club, all decked out. Deck the halls balls to the wall, lights down low when they cleared out all. Black stone bar polished to a mirrorlike sheen, low beams and chintzy pillars done up all lush in fairy lights and Tesco flowers. A sorry sight for precious few sore eyes. 

Iago sighs. Tugs at the camera strap cutting into the back of his sunburnt neck. “Course they’re fuckin’ coming, ‘s their own fucking wedding. Daft cunt. ‘S only that Em and Cass are playing chauffeur an’ they’re always fuckin’ late.”

“So asking them to do that was a great decision on O’s part’s what you’re saying,” Montano says, dry as dust. His fingers twitch toward the bottle of Macallan he’d nicked from behind the bar; twice, convulsively, he licks chapped lips. With a too-knowing glint in his dark eyes he adds, probing, “He could’ve asked you.”

“Could’ve done.” Didn’t do. 

Picture the second. Hands trembling muscles twitching eyes fixed on the sticky floor, some idiot demon of thought turned on the tap and broke the fucking handle can’t shut the flow off. 

Didn’t even know they was getting fucking married till Em said summat about it. Offhand. Look sharp, lad, O and Des are getting hitched down the Safron tonight, bring the good camera! There’s decorations at Montano’s and he’s officiating, can you guys maybe set everything up? How about you fucking tell me who fucking set this up. Which one of you royal sodding fucks thought yeah, you know who doesn’t need to know O’s so far gone up girl he’s marrying her until the day he does? His best mate. You know who should’ve fucking known? His fucking best mate. 

He doesn’t say any of that. Doesn’t say, either, that it should’ve been him walking O down that aisl e playing escort.  No point saying any of it. But Montano won’t leave off looking at him, won’t let him hide behind this wall of words unspoken. 

It’s too much like concern, the way he looks at him. Makes him fucking sick. 

Picture the third. Two men stand at opposite ends of the club’s curtained-off back room, strong bodies poised at perpendicular lines that would rather never intersect. Both in uniform: Royal Navy and 1st Armoured Division, the shadows of battles won and lost clinging to them like lint. Both itching for a drink, a cig; a fight, a fling. Both stubbornly ignoring the pain of new beginnings and foregone conclusions, old wounds and new bonds. Both waiting, waiting, and hating the doing. 

“Fucking mental, aye?” Montano, laughing a little, shakes his head, His dreads, hanging loose, swing about his face, casting pendulum shadows of time slipping by. “Wasn’t too long ago they met, and now this. ‘Spose O wanted to do it before you lot went out for training or took the band on tour, but, y’know….”

“It feels a little rushed?” Posing the question is just about superfluous, for Iago knows the answer ( yes, yes, yes ), but it takes some of the venom out of the shared sentiment. Benign commiseration and that. Bit of a laugh, innit--these kids and their puppy love, amirite? 

And sure enough Montano laughs again, louder this time. “Hey, man, I wasn’t gonna say it!”

“Just’s well I did, then.” Light and easy, cut the snark with a smirk. God forbid any of them actually harbour any serious objections to the object at hand. 

Picture the fourth. The musical hum of an Italian sports car rumbling beneath the rusty clanking of a shitbox handicapped van. Thumping, clashing beats: Big Shaq and Randhawa/Kumar, hey, man’s not hot. Abrupt silence ringing as they pull up to the kerb. From the sports car emerge two men, from the van two women: dark and fair, smiling to heal and dressed to kill. Bazin boubou, three-piece silk suit, wedding gown of tulle and lace, sparkling sari. With a whoop one man pushes the other into the deserted club before the eyes of the girls can their way stray. Wouldn’t do to kill the luck on wedding day. 

Montano jumps, sends his cue cards flying. Nearly knocks over a vase in his scramble to pick them up. “They’re here, they’re here, I hear them, are you rolling?”

“Shit. Yes. Shit.” Iago, pressing his eyes closed, powers the camera up. 

Othello and Cassio burst into the back room in a tangle of tailored limbs. Cassio clears his throat, pats gingerly at his meticulously gelled hair, and moves to stand beside Montano at the inlaid card table serving as their altar. Othello grabs Iago in a bear hug, melodious accent rolling thicker than usual in his excitement, Shit man I’m sorry it was such short notice I’m so glad you made it mate it means the world, nearly knocks him over. Pain pulls hot and sharp at his bad knee as he catches himself, drawing in a breath through gritted teeth. 

“Sorry, sorry.” Othello’s grinning far too wide for the contrition to be anything remotely resembling genuine. “Christ, you’re even filming and I just fuckin’ got right in your face, I’m sorry. I’m just--” So happy to see you? So sorry I won’t see you the same way again?

Iago shrugs his off. “Get your sorry arse over there ‘fore you give this fuckin’ cunt--” jerking an elbow towards the guffawing Montano--”the wrong idea ‘bout who he’s marrying off.”

And fuck if it doesn’t hurt to joke about. Hurts like hell. 

Picture the fifth. The women stand silhouetted at the threshold, visions of perfection in ivory and gold. The scraggly bouquets of wildflowers they hold still drip dirt from their limp roots. A few of those flowers have been hastily woven into hair they spent hours styling, free-spirited afterthoughts that complement perfectly this free-spirited afterthought of a wedding. Of a relationship. 

The captain speaks. The best friends smile, throw coins and rice. The bride and groom close their eyes to the world clamouring for their attention and kiss, lost to time within each other. And the thwarted hand behind the camera films, whispers cheeky commentary, and pretends he can’t feel the pain of his once-beloved heart breaking into pieces, the ice of tears unwanted creeping in to fill the cracks.

Chapter Text

Father never held name day celebrations for us. He didn’t believe in them; didn’t believe, particularly, in showing us any sort of regard unless some censorious motherly sort happened be around to bear witness to his reserve. Occurrences of which I could count upon the fingers of one hand. Lest I be deemed uncharitable, let it be noted that for all his neglect of the pressing and quotidian duties of fatherhood, he beat us similarly rarely--Edgar more often than I, for my brother in his mild and retiring nature, his poet’s soul which quaked like leaves of aspen at the meanest injustice and balked at the mere mention of power, bore a cheek ripe for blows. Some wretched, cowardly corner of my soul could not help but be grateful to him for that misguided chivalry, which bade him take upon himself those blows meant for me. 

But for all Edgar’s weaknesses and failings, it was he to whom Father had bestowed the deeds to the estate on the day he turned five and ten. A richer gift, in my jaded eyes, than any measure or display of love. 

The passage of a year and four months marked the day upon which I would ascend to the same age. The jovial sun, too bright and hot upon my face, mocked me with the knowledge that I, unnatural son, would receive nothing of the sort. Nothing at all, most likely. The day would pass as any other. And I would be, if not content, then at least amicably resigned to letting it so pass--if my poor puppet brother had not crept into my bed at the pert crack of dawn. As I used to creep into his when we both were still so young as to believe the nightmares of the other to be a cause for our own concern. 

“Edmund,” he whispered. His papery voice grated at the edges of my fast-fading dreams. “Edmund, wake up, I have something for you.”

I turned my face into the pillow and groaned. Damn him, did he never sleep? “Why?”

“It’s your birthday.”

“What of it?”

“Why don’t you open your eyes and see what?” He was teasing me now, the toad-born twat. Of all days he could have chosen to grow a sodding spine and speak, it had to be this one.

With a suitably put-upon sigh, I wrenched open one eye, rubbing at the grit and glaring at the twitching smile striving to mar Edgar’s habitually gloomy face. Unfathomably gloomy. Had I in my bastardy not infinitely more reason to go sullenly about than he?

“Widdershins your way, wean,” he giggled. 

“What nonsense are you speaking?” I reached over to thump him with a stray pillow. Laughing outright, he leaned out of the way. Bastard. “Get stuffed.”

“That’s your charge, I’ve asked the cooks to prepare your favourites today.”

“ Wh y?” I muttered again, letting my weary eye fall shut again. My face burned, of a sudden. How I wished I could call it the work of the wretched sun! But, in troth, I had only my foolish heart to blame. The heart that still dared yearn and beat for Edgar, blight on my soul and the only soul living to think me worthy of more than learned ignominy.

“I can’t imagine. Surely not because everyone deserves nice things on their birthday of all days.” Sarcasm dripped like chill rain from my brother’s drawled words. The tone didn’t suit him at all; the skeptic’s purview was darkling mine, not dawning his.

“And by whose measure am I of all people deserving ?” I couldn’t resist asking, praying he heard petulance, not desperation, honing my jibe to a knife’s edge. 

Edgar’s meagre weight depressed the mattress; his cold, dry palm came to rest firmly upon my bare shoulder. He who shied from any stray touch, he had never once constrained himself with like regard from reaching out to others. His most banal hypocrisy. Sometimes I hated him for it. Today was not one of those times. “By mine.” Something else settled upon the pillow, near enough to tickle my still-beardless cheek. A sheaf of papers, loosely bound. “And see, brother, I’ve another gift for you.”

I didn’t want to look. Didn’t want to imagine that this gift might be aught of more moment than a moment’s jest. But Edgar nudged the papers closer, come on then --what choice did I have? Hesitantly I opened one eye. Then the other. I picked up the papers gingerly, like they were soiled, and perhaps they were, with the dirt and sweat and blood and muddied stream water that comprised the family holdings. For I held in my bastard’s hands the very deeds which had been passed into Edgar’s a year’s lifetime ago, which had set down in ink like heart’s blood spilling onto the pages to whom all assets would be bequeathed upon time of death or mortal incapacitation of Edward, fourth Earl of Gloucester. Deeds which had been made out in Edgar’s unsullied name, now bore the stain of another. Edgar. Edmund. Sons of Gloucester. 

I raised my eyes, our father’s oaken eyes, to meet Edgar’s. Pale-fogged, like the winter sea. He blinked, once; ran a tongue still white from last week’s ague over cracked lips. His hand upon my shoulder twitched. In tandem we breathed in, out. In. Out. Watching. Waiting. Wanting. 

With one hand I cast the filthy deeds to the floor, the rasping flutter and thud warped, stretched, sounding through a sea of things unsaid. With the other I scrabbled for the back of my brother’s head. Before he could flinch away I twisted my fingers in the elf-locks of his thick curls, stark charcoal against the wan ivory of my skin. 

My eyes never left his as I surged upright; my hands never left his shivering body as my vision swirled, dimmed, until I could see only him. Edgar. Wretched, wonderful Edgar. White and black and grey, angel and demon and muddled man, from a thousand retellings removed my storied likeness. As I would touch a saint I took his hand. Bound us together, brothers in deed as much as blood. Bodies writhing together as one: who was the mirror, and who was the man? 

And I pressed my lips to his. Hard enough to bruise, to mark him. Stain him, as he had those pages. Those bone-bleached threads of my tapestry of dreams, woven through with ambition and ne’er spotted with the blood of hope. All the while my serpent’s tongue whispering I hate you, I hate you, I hate you , my martyr’s mind crying love, love, love . That vein of hope, pricked to the quick, singing mine, mine , Edgar’s spider fingers on the back of my hand and at the base of my throat tracing the sordid, sacred ours. I pressed my lips to his, and he his lips to mine, and the world dawning dark before us was ours . 

Chapter Text

The amber moon seemed to wink as it rose over the streets of Venice. It glinted merrily off the gilt edges of marble rooftops, turned the stinking canals to pearlescent veins, the city’s holy ichor. A fine mist clung to brick and shadow still damp from an afternoon storm, which left a chill taint on the heavy air. The houses crowding the piazza loomed tall, darkened windows unrelieved by friendly flame waiting, watching, like so many troubled eyes, for the slightest disturbance. All was stillness. All was silence.

Until the twang of a gittern, just slightly out of tune, shattered the fragile peace. 

“Give us a minute.” The man holding the instrument had a soldier’s stern bearing and a trickster’s smile, which sat oddly upon a face that seemed hewn from weathered stone. But for the military-issue boots he might have been any common workingman: dark trousers streaked with dust, sweat-stained shirt of coarse linen rolled nearly to powerful shoulders, baring scarred, corded arms sun-darkened to a honey hue. The gittern he painstakingly tuned was as battered and worn as its owner, but it sang with a sweetness to rival any court minstrel’s fine lute.

Diametric opposition, so beloved of that Venetian spirit of contrariness, was plain to espy in his companion. A gangling, soft-bodied peacock of mediocre man, he wore a lace ruff two years out of season which flapped energetically about his scrawny neck, and a limply curling ostrich feather in his violet cap. His torso assaulted the eye in a puffed and slashed doublet of a most unbecoming salmon shade, and wrinkled black hose sagged about his bandy legs. More whiskers numbered upon the arses of shaved rats than his milksop cheeks, and when he spoke, his voice, ever keen to overenunciate, sounded almost like a woman’s, plaintive and lisping. 

“Is it ready?”

“Nearly, babosito.” The soldier plucked a few notes. Sweet as could be. He grinned, broadly, pushing his tongue into a gap in his row of strong teeth. “You’re buying me summat bit stronger than wine for this, I tell ye.”

“Must I?” whined the nobleman. With an anxious start he cast his eyes about the deserted piazza. “Isn’t it enough to do it out of--sheer goodwill? And love for me? Or what have you?”

“What haven’t you?”

“I--what--that makes no sense?”

The soldier shrugged. “Neither does your purpose here, babosito. If you’re dragging me into your mess I’ve more than a right to eschew sense.”

“How dare you insinuate that my love for Desdemona is a mess!” The young gallant, sorely touched, drew himself up to his fully unimpressive height. Mooncalf eyes flashed pitiable fire; his plump lips quivered with righteous indignation. His clammy hands, which had never known an hour’s toil, balled into ill-formed fists. His companion laughed, heartily, which only served to inflame him further. It is only to be regretted that upon wet kindling will no spark ever catch.

“I insinuate nothing. Only button it, will you, we’re here.”

The Palazzo del Bovolo never failed to draw the eye of any entering the piazza. The intricate scrollwork and winding staircase had no equal in beauty along that tucked-away campo. Neither did the jewel residing within. Fair Desdemona Contarini, as noble in heart as in name: a maiden as sought after as wretched Helen and twice as beautiful. A maiden who knew without note the name of her every suitor, and hardly spoke more than a word to any of them--but oh, how rich a gift those few words were!

To Roderigo Viccinari those words had been the pleasure is mine, and every minute thereafter they brought him pleasure unparalleled. Every night they shivered through the cobwebs of his dreams, and every morning when he woke, aching with desire, they trembled upon his bitten lips.

Stopping below the balcony he knew to be hers, the knight-pissant drew in a deep, shuddering breath. Under his heavy breath he offered up a brief prayer to whichever gods within the welkin had not turned away laughing at the hour of his birth. His sometime-brother, whose rough nature knew little of gallantry and cared for it even less, did not bother to hide his smirk as he sequestered himself within the shadows of the balustrade. But, hidden thus, he, too, crossed himself. This gentle lady’s father was too well acquainted with his general. He hated to think of what ill might come of his part in this mischief being found out. 

But the deed was too far gone to harbour even the most nascent misgivings. So with sure fingers the soldier began to play, the lively, meandering tune taking flight in warmest colour towards the half-open window. 

“Come, Madam, come all rest my powers defy; until I labour, I in labour lie.” For all his quailing squall the quat possessed a fine voice: thin and bright, quicksilver melody flashing above the gittern’s husky thrum. 

At the window, a candle was lit. A beacon of hope. Bouncing from foot to foot, the boy sang louder. “Unlace yourself, for that harmonious chime, tells me from you that now it’s bed-time! Off with that happy busk, which I envy, that still can be, and still can stand so nigh. Your gown going off, such beauteous state reveals, as when from flowery meads th’hill’s shadow steals. Off with that wiry coronet and shew the hairy diadem--” The soldier snorted, nearly missed a chord. The affronted balladeer shot him as venomous a look as his lovestruck eyes could muster. “--which on you doth grow; now off with those shoes, and then safely tread in this love’s hallowed temple, this soft bed!”

Towards the window, a shadow stole. Roderigo, pausing to swallow, allowed himself to imagine the soft susurrus of a satin dressing gown falling to plush carpet, lily-petal skin glowing soft in the faerie light, a rich fall of hair flowing over a pert and heaving bosom and down, down, to brush the generous curve of bottom--a nubile Venus, pliant and eager beneath his unpractised touch--

“Licence my roving hands, and let them go, before, behind, between, above, below--”

He held the trembling note out long and proud. The gittern climbed a gentle scale, caressing the sound. The song. The bleeding heart in ready hand, free for the taking. 

From above, a faint whistle pierced the air. Then. Two distinct giggles. A wet splat. The slam of shutters. The reverberation of sudden silence. 

The tomato had struck true. Acrid juices and hot tears trickled unceremoniously down Roderigo’s face. The fool stood goggle-eyed, gaping, like a half-hooked fish; seeds sat heavy atop his stopped tongue. In the shadows, heedless of all threat of discovery, Iago roared with laughter, whistling appreciatively at the audacity of their unseen, unmoved audience. 

The shutters creaked gently open, scarcely wide enough for the poor fish to catch a glimpse of his siren. Like falling doves’ feathers a sweet voice sang down to them, flutelike tones dulcet in mirth: “There is no penance due to innocence.”

Chapter Text

Gertrude wakes screaming. 

Her dreams are a menagerie of voices and faces, choices and places; desires spoken in swirls of muted colour and bodies intertwined in flowering bursts of pain. She sees the daughter that never was: full-bodied and grown, gazing at her with accusing eyes, reaching for her skirts with bloodied hands. She sees the son that never wanted to be: battered and broken, writhing upon the jagged rocks of his own despair. She wanders the shadowed halls of her childhood home in trailing furs and tattered rags, running spindle-pricked fingers over the dust of memories unkempt, bridges unburned. She loses herself in the maze of the palace, rooms close and dark, twisting and fading and falling into each other as the mirrors of her mind shatter and stitch themselves together anew. 

Her dreams are felt, in the hidden folds of womanly virtue. The press of hateful, heated flesh against skin cold with fear: unwelcome, meet unwilling; unrelenting, meet unresisting. The grinding ache of phantom hands crushing the bird bones of her wrists. The tearing burn of unholy communion, deep within, where she ought only to be her unsullied self . The sting of slaps raining one memory’s impression after another upon cheeks too long accustomed to turning the other way. Coarse fingers an unrepentant noose about her throat, cutting off what little breath she would fain waste on amends unheard. Condemning her to wretched silence. 

All her life she’d failed to keep to silence. Even when it was forced upon her. All her life she’d  bourne pain for want of peace; all her life she’d screamed for want of speech. 

But now, when she screams, it is peace, not pain, into which she wakes. A whispered plea, a gentle caress. Heavy arms love-light about her trembling body, leery of shattering what already lies broken, and chapped lips softly pressed to eyelids wet with tears she still fears to shed. A voice, the deep rush of wind through lonely chasms, that holds a warped mirror to the echoing memories of jeering scorn and roaring rage, whittles them down to a kindness better than bare nothing. His voice, her mettle and melody. His voice, which tells her she need no longer fear.

X X X 

Claudius wakes fighting.

His dreams are the shadows of the dungeons of the palace and the bottom of the well, the stench of mould and rot and his piss and blood fear-sharp. He sees the baby, floating facedown in the stagnant water, limbs rotted and half-eaten by damp and drowning rats, its head hanging by a string of gummy skin. The story passed through the walls in whispers: the mad peasant girl, who had wandered singing to the well and drowned her newborn child. No one believed it fully: not the palace servants, nor the villagers who had known her. They didn’t believe him, either. But then, no one ever did. 

No one would ever admit that they remembered. 

How, when Hamlet and those few guards willing to risk the king his father’s ire in aiding the rescue had pulled him out, he had been clutching the dead baby as though it were his own. How he had been half out of his mind with fever, dysentery, the pain of broken bones left untended for days--insensible, oblivious to all. Until they tried to take the baby from him. Hamlet tried to take the baby from him. Hamlet, who had already taken so much. 

He dug his fingers so tightly into the pitted flesh that they had burst through to splintered bone. He screamed, sobbed, kicked out like a wild thing. The baby’s beleaguered head fell off in the fray, rolled along the stony ground: stopped at the feet of a horse, who crushed it beneath a muddy hoof. A life scarcely lived, a life he had in desperation stretched beyond the natural, snuffed out like a promise. 

Years later, Hamlet told him they’d buried the baby beside the well. He had never gone back to learn whether or not he spoke true. 

He never dreams of the beatings, the battles--never dreams the pain pressed into his marrow like a brand. Instead he dreams of the solitude. 

Endless nights locked in his draughty corner room: learning to ignore the hunger, to embrace the pain. To forgive those who trespassed against him: to repent helpless hatred of father and brother, who could not help being so much better, so much stronger than he. Who could not be blamed, for trying to make him strong. Learning to despise himself. 

Endless days spent cowering in that brother’s shadow, cursing the darkness that thwarted him even as he craved refuge in obscurity. In mediocrity. 

The chill of the dead mens’ cell. 

The whistle of wind through the ever-damp stocks. 

And the well. Always the well. 

In dreams he fights as he never could in life. Strangles the demons that dog him, night after night, and prays by day that they won’t rise to plague another. But they always rise. God spits on him and bids them rise, so on and on and on he fights, weary unto death of hoping for the dawn. 

The first time he laid hands on her in sleep she ran from him. Hid herself away, for three nights and days, as the bruises about her throat and beneath her eyes grew a livid mauve. But then she came back to him. Came back for him. She came back, and took his hand in hers, and swore to fight alongside him for as many nights as he would have her. 

How light the burden of dreams, when upon two backs it is bourne.

Chapter Text

“Ross, A-- ach , Ross!”

“ Ross ye whit?” growls the dark-haired Thane, grinning as his redheaded companion writhes beneath him, head thrown back to bare the jumping pulse point at the base of his freckled throat. He tightens his grip on Angus’ byous cock, gently fondles the dusky foreskin. “Ross, mak fest forrit?”

Angus moans, long and low, like the wanton whore he only is by night. “ Ay, treat ye, fuck, but Ross, A--thare a--”

“Whitten thing, jo?” Ross grazes Angus’ shoulder with his teeth, and presses a sloppy kiss to the bite. 

“Thare a wee bit o’ strae stuck up my erse.”

Ross abruptly ceases his ministrations. Angus blushes red as his flyaway hair, not quite able to meet his partner’s eye. The bereft cock, irked by the sudden loss of stimulation, twitches. 

“Y’in ettle earnest?”

“Ay.” A bead of sweat trickles down Angus’ cheek. His tongue darts out to catch it; licking his lips, he offers a coquettish wink. 

Unceremoniously, Ross grabs Angus by the hips and flips him onto his stomach. His gasp is drowned in the mumbled mantra of doaty dou, fuckin’ facie cunt, gaun skelp ye bare reid , which caresses the skin of Angus’ lush bum, paler than the risen moon. Straw, sure as shite, has worked its ignoble way into the crack.

Into that crack Ross’ clever fingers probe, slick with lantern-oil and the seed of his desire. One finger, then a second and third, plucking out the straw and scissoring, stretching Angus wide until he sobs, screams, for Ross to fimmis, please, A’m naurhand, gie’s’t awready ye blisst FUCK--!

“Cuddie-back up’t erse?” Ross snarls, slapping Angus’ quivering arse-cheek. “Ye viled hure, s’that whit ye want?”

“Ay, Dad, please, A need ye!”

And what Angus wants, what Angus needs, he gets. After all, Ross lives to serve.