Vaguely inspired by Asta Nielsen's Hamlet. Featuring a genderqueer Hamlet, a rambling Ophelia, and Horatio's peephole perspective.

Quintessence of Dust

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Hamlet in and of itself is a concept, a dream thought up in the mind of a king and a queen thirty years past, though likely not so long ago. It's hard to keep numbers straight in the strife that has presented itself in the rotted core of Denmark.

"Hamlet is the crown prince. Hamlet is not a petulant child," Hamlet complains to Horatio, who made haste to observe a funeral and witnessed a wedding in its stead. "Hamlet is not a victim of melancholy. Hamlet is not this indecisive wreck. "

"If I may, sweet lord, Hamlet is a person still," Horatio supplies.

"No. No, it's not," is all Hamlet can say, staring out the window at the night, hair unruly and eyes glassy. Hamlet has seen an apparition, has spoken to a ghost, and has made a deal with the devil in these past few hours. Hamlet looks like one of the dead, pale and wiry and young with too many thoughts in that head, too many deliberations and philosophies warring in that noble skull. It all amounts to nothing.

Horatio fears for his lord. He cannot help but see the future, see the inevitable. One does not simply make a pact with the deceased. One day, one day this will end poorly.

•

Hamlet hides away in little nooks and crannies of the castle. Horatio has memorized them over these few months, just as he had memorized all the hiding places in Wittenberg. These are by far more creative, but predictable nonetheless to anyone who is familiar with Hamlet's antics and preference for high and dry locations. One such area is the east tower, where Horatio finds his prince an odd twenty meters off the ground. How that body got up there is a mystery perhaps best left unsolved.

"My lord," he calls. "His Majesty, the King, would like your counsel."

"Who's there?"

"I beg your pardon, my lord?"

"What are you?" Hamlet spits. "A courtier, now?"

Horatio stumbles at that. "Never, my lord. I haven't the wealth, nor the land. Nor, perhaps, the right stomach to grovel so."

"Tell me, then, what you think of me, fellow student."

He hesitates. He chooses his words deliberately, as he always does. "I think you are a brooding pigeon, my lord."

Hamlet barks out a laugh at that. "Pigeon!" his prince shouts. It echoes, bounces against the stones, ghosts of the phrase whispering throughout the castle.

"Pigeon-liver'd, perhaps."

"Pigeon-livered!"

"Lacking gall."

"Gall!"

"An ass."

"An ass!" Hamlet giggles shrilly. "Why, dearest Horatio, might I not be a whore, a scullion, at that?"

"Very much so, my lord."

Hamlet turns from a crevice Horatio must crane his neck to observe, finally revealing a head and a scrawny neck. "I find myself quite taken with thy rhetoric, good Horatio."

Horatio is flustered by the change in address, feeling his face heat up. He coughs nervously. "Hardly poetic, my lord."

"But honest," Hamlet says, eyes with a strange light. "Tell me, oh fellow student. Dost thou know of Ophelia, the advisor's daughter?"

"I am familiar."

"She has barred me from contact of any sort. I am forbidden from her closet."

"Her closet!" The rumors were surely true, then. Horatio doesn't judge-he is in no state to judge anyone for anything, if his philosophy tutors were anything to go by-but it does surprise him somewhat. Hamlet has always expressed an almost phobic distaste for the fairer sex.

Hamlet scowls. "Not like that."

"My apologies, my lord."

"Do not bother. I much prefer it when thou callest me an ass, instead."

Horatio's lips quirk up in spite of himself.

•

"I never loved her," Hamlet spits out, jaw clenched and eyes wild, arms rising and dropping with passionate intent, voice fluctuating and cracking. "Never."

Horatio says nothing. Horatio can only think of Ophelia, Ophelia and her tight smiles and her pinched waist, and he questions nothing. Horatio sees Hamlet's eyes rove the room incessantly, darting here and there, waiting for invisible phantoms shaped like hourglasses to peek their heads out so that the prince may have the opportunity beat them down again. Horatio knows not the life of women, nor that of princes. Terrible business, all in all.

•

"He hath murdered the advisor, Polonius," Rosencrantz tells him.

"Murdered!"

"Aye, murdered, and in a fashion most foul, too."

"How so?"

"Stabbed through the arras, though where we know not. Her Majesty witnessed th'occurrence."

"Oh, my prophetic soul," Horatio groans.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern can only shrug. They have given up on understanding. Horatio envies them for it.

"Princes," is all Guildenstern can offer.

"Princes," Horatio echoes.

It actually explains everything, though not as thoroughly as Horatio would have wished.

•

Hamlet grabs his hands, clutches them tightly, says, "I didn't know, I didn't know. Oh, that arrant knave! That fool! Moron! What did he think such secrecy would achieve? What did he…"

Horatio lets him trail off. Horatio lets young Hamlet breath heavily on him with manic eyes. Horatio is stone. Horatio is that passionless man that Hamlet so needs. But oh, how his heart trembles.

"I must to England shortly, thou knowest."

"I do, my lord. I wish you safe passage." And a cure for your not-madness, at that.

"My uncle, he knows not of this." Hamlet gestures around the air. Horatio is relieved to be released. Further gesticulation proves some sort of a point Hamlet is loathe to admit aloud. Horatio understands.

"The queen has not told him?"

Hamlet scowls. "The one thing that wretch has kept clean from that villain."

And the prince turns away in a vicious motion, hands reaching out and clenching, ready to wring an invisible king's neck. "Pernicious," Horatio hears ever so faintly. "Women. Pernicious, lusty women."

Horatio will not question any of it. He shan't.

•

Ophelia's father's death has awakened her. It seems that before all these rotten occurrences, she merely haunted Elsinore.

It all frightens Horatio terribly. She frightens everyone in Elsinore, but Horatio especially, for he knows the cause of her presumed madness. She runs past him, giggling, with her top undone and pooling around her waist and Horatio knows. He knows Ophelia has found out.

She cries and sings and rubs her face against the stone floors, groaning about tricks in the world and men who fuck and leave. She tramps through the castle and runs out at people from where she hides behind arrases, shrieking. She pulls weeds out of the garden with a certain ferocity generally reserved for rescuing a loved one.

Ophelia sings. Ophelia sings incessantly. "My lady," Horatio has tried to say, tried to ask, tried to plead. "My lady, whatever troubles thee?" But to no avail. No answer, only cryptic smiles, and sweetly, so sweetly the nymph Ophelia pouts her lips, she says:

" T'would not trouble thee so, good sir. 'Tis my concern, 'tis not? Aye, methinks so. Methinks so indeed. But see here, good sir, good lover. See here, see these magnolias? For you, perhaps. Though, forgive my imprudence, p'rhaps orchids? Not to offend, sweet lord, not to offend. Thou lookest so nice, all done up in thy leather boots, worn, aye? Worn quite well."

"I beg thy pardon, my lady?"

"No," Ophelia whispers. Her fingers trail over his brow and he has to liken them to hands of the dead, cold, clammy, and pale. So pale. Delicate blue veins run up the fair Ophelia's arms, disappearing up her torn sleeves. "Pansies," she croaks. "Pansies," she spits. "Pansies are what thou needest, friend. Pansies, pansies, they are for thoughts. And a snapdragon for me, dear poet, a snapdragon and rue and thousand fistfuls of lavender."

Ophelia speaks another language in her months of unhinged antics. Horatio fears her, though, for Hamlet's sake if not his own. She hisses the prince's name in her sleep, in her fits, in her waking terrors. It's like a curse on her lips. It echoes down the halls, creeps into every crevice and curls up in every lung. It feeds on everyone's breath, soon enough.

"No lilacs," she says. "Too many begonias. Throw rhododendron on my lord lady's grave, when 'e come to't, which I guarantee swiftly following the cock's crow. 'Tis very brave for such a crock to follow, by Cock. Thorn-apple for the bastard; 'tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.

"Oh, it goes like the song goes, the treachery 'e hath committed 'gainst me and thee and every one on this forsaken prison. He is dead and gone, lady, he is dead and gone! He is dead! He is gone! He, he, he, he up and rose and donn'd his clothes, and dupp'd the chamber-door; let in the maid, that out a maid never departed more. No maids, no martyrs. The clothes make the man, they say. They cover the lady! 'E leaves me only with flowers and soil crusted under my fingernails, but by gardening or grave-making, who knows? Surely, the gallows. Perhaps the flowers. Oh, and what flowers! What flowers, indeed, friend!

" 'E hath narcissus to give to thee, and I to 'e, and mint and bellflowers to line my dear father's coffin. Yellow roses upon columbines for thee also, and some for her beauteous Majesty. Daisies! Daisies for us all. And yet," she says with a wobbling lip, "I tremble to wonder who hath spared some rosemary for poor, poor Ophelia?"

•

Hamlet returns from England changed. A new concept, a new creature. Taking his prince's hat after it is thrust into his arms, Horatio hears chilling decisions masquerading as frenzied logic. "Lovers with deceit," Hamlet spits. "Bedfellows with dishonor. Had her 'gainst the wall, groans and all."

"My lord," Horatio cautions, "please, you should not speak so."

"My lord," Hamlet cries, "my lord, my most dear lord, thou shouldst not speak so."

Horatio lets his jaw close. He is tired. He cannot win this. Never with Hamlet. Hamlet's spirit is strong, and now it feels wounded. It lashes out against its imagined enemies. "But what of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern?"

"Dead."

"…Pardon, my lord?"

"Dead, my lord," Hamlet says. "Most dead. Dead, dead, dead. Aye, 'tis dead as dead can be-dead as my father, I venture-and by mine own hand, at that."

Horatio's blood runs cold. "What have you done, my lord?"

"A letter," the prince says idly. "Writ by Claudius with my pen, my lord."

"What have you done?"

"I have cleaned out a spot in the linen, such as it were."

"What have you done?" Oh Everlasting! His Hamlet, his sweet lord, an intent murderer!

"What wouldst thou have done?" Hamlet snaps, and Horatio steps away quickly, fiddling with the hat in his hands.

"Not this, my lord," he says quietly. "Never this."

"We can't all be patient martyrs like thee, Horatio. I have been wronged; I will correct this wrongdoing. My lord."

"Your uncle, my lord-"

"What of my uncle, my lord?"

"He… He has made ready to write treaties to Norway. I fear, my lord, for Denmark."

"And what of me, Horatio, my lord? Hast thou any fear to spare for me?"

"Plenty," Horatio says. "Enough to fill all of the North Sea, I wager."

"Though thou wouldst never wager."

"No, my lord."

"Because wagering is a vice. Thou hast no vices, my lord."

"Oh, I am no such holy figure, my lord. You blaspheme."

"Compared to me, my lord?" Hamlet laughs. It is a shrill, high sound. "Compared to me, my lord? All of Elsinore! Denmark, the exquisite prison that it is! Horatio, thou art Job to deal with our trials."

"My lord, please-"

"My lord, please, thou art the second coming of Christ to this pagan cess pool of a country, ready to wipe us-"

"Do not speak so of the Lord!" Horatio cries. "My lord, I beg you! Speak not so of the Lord! You are impetuous! It must stop."

Hamlet looks at him. Horatio doesn't know what it means; he just knows he doesn't like it.

"My lord. You are quite impassioned," he says instead.

"I am in upheaval," Hamlet replies.

•

Ophelia's death sinks like a stone in Horatio's gut, sinks and swims and wavers and sloshes about. There is nothing beautiful about drowning. Ophelia's flesh is bloated and just as pale in death as it was in life. They closed her eyes, but what of it? Her accusatory looks merely discomfited them. That is all. Her first and final act of power is stripped from her as easily as the life from her weary bones.

And Hamlet, Hamlet is all "mark"s and wide eyes suddenly-his prince's eyes are large and so horrible. Horatio sees the Devil in them, he thinks. Perhaps. Or an infinite well. An infinite well of despair and melancholy, where the Devil hides beneath it all.

Either way, it is so terrible. Horatio trembles for his lord, but he trembles more for the fair Ophelia. He sees Hamlet's lips move, useless and flopping, mute for once in their adventurous lives. "My lord," he hisses. "My lord! My lord, please."

But Hamlet slips through his fingers like a minnow, serpentine and indignant, advancing on Laertes. Poor Laertes, noble Laertes, clutching his sister's corpse to his bosom in anguish. A showy action, jumping in the grave-a matter of pride, likely- but oh, it is so pathetic that it is beautiful.

And sweet Hamlet, Hamlet who is a good four inches shorter than the weeping Laertes, slides across the graveyard with a stormy face. Hamlet is still ready to fight. Horatio fears for his lord.

Hamlet screams, screams so loud and it is like a crow, grating and high-pitched, and Horatio sees the Queen's eyes bulge, as though she has choked. Horatio sees the Queen stumble back onto her King. She looks ill.

"Forty-thousand brothers could not, with all their quantity of love, make up my sum!" Hamlet screeches, raucous and pained and weirdly territorial. There is a wildness in his prince's eyes. "I loved Ophelia!"

And it goes on and on like that: "I loved Ophelia!" Over and over until it dies in the mouth it flew out of so viciously before. One would think Hamlet had loved Ophelia since the Lord had made the Heavens and the Earth below were it not for how adamantly it was expressed.

If anything, it only further insinuates in Horatio's mind that Hamlet is truly incapable of love at all.

Laertes yells as he tackles Hamlet's diminutive body to the ground. He wraps his fingers around his lord's throat and Horatio cannot help the way his heart leaps up his gullet to reside behind his tongue. He grapples Laertes around the shoulders. If he has to kill Laertes to save Hamlet, he will. That reality shakes Horatio horribly.

"Hamlet! Hamlet!" Gertrude cries.

Laertes rolls off of Hamlet, who gingerly stands back up, leaning heavily on Horatio, gulping down air. Horatio sees Laertes's eyes, sees a fury and a pain so intense Horatio wouldn't be surprised if Laertes would be willing to cut Hamlet's throat in a church.

•

When Horatio says he doesn't know Osric, it is a lie. Horatio had met Osric before. Horatio had met Osric when the players had arrived on the heels of the clueless Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. To call Osric sycophantic would be an understatement. They watched those players practice before his lord and Osric positively gushed. "Our sweet lord is quite talented," he said.

"Indeed," Horatio had agreed.

"I can think of no other better place to suit…him, than the theatre, in all honesty. He simply thrives in such an environment. A natural actor, I say. They can't teach that."

Horatio never tells Osric how correct he was. At the time, it hadn't seemed to matter. Now it takes a grave context. It makes Horatio's face draw thin and strained with the irony, with the foreshadowing.

"Thou and I," Osric had said, cocking his head, hat sliding to the side, "we are a lot alike."

Horatio had spluttered and coughed and apologized until he could excuse himself. He felt unclean, after that, to some degree.

" 'Tis a virtue not to know him," Hamlet spits with such vitriol, such hatred for the buffoon that Horatio is moved not to pity, but sympathy.

Maybe we are alike, Horatio has to think as he sees Osric dash out the door with his hat half-on, sweating and shivering all at once. We can't please everybody, he wants to call out after foolish Osric. We can't. Most certainly not Hamlet. Hamlet is insatiable.

Hamlet watches him for a moment with searching eyes before snorting.

•

"You will lose this wager, my lord."

"I do not think so, my lord," Hamlet says and Horatio watches his lord stretch with a self-assuredness that only serves to make Horatio sicker. "Laertes is out of practice. Now, I know thou wouldst worry and groan o'er my 'fever,' but it is no matter."

"Nay, good my lord-"

"It is but foolery," Hamlet snaps at him, "but it is such a kind of gain-giving as would perhaps trouble a woman, my lord."

Horatio does not take offense to such statements. It only makes him think of Ophelia's bloated skin. He shivers. No, raging misogyny is Hamlet's department, and rightfully so. He has such a horrible feeling about this duel. He cannot place his anxiety on anything other than the constant fear he has always had for his lord, but something is wrong. Something is terribly wrong. "If you mind dislike anything, obey it."

Hamlet grips Horatio's shoulders with fine fingers that don't quite wrap around the bone. "Not a whit. We defy augury."

Perhaps we should stop doing that, Horatio thinks dully.

•

When Gertrude collapses, Horatio knows. He just knows.

•

"As thou'rt a man, give me the cup!"

Hamlet screams at him, screams and screams until Horatio drops the cup with a wet sob just to make it stop. At least that. Antique Roman or no, Horatio certainly isn't a Dane, this he knows.

•

"My lord, my lord," he croaks around the ball in his throat, clutching at the meat of Hamlet's torso.

"My lord," Hamlet parrots back.

"Fuck you."

Hamlet laughs. Hamlet laughs high and light and airy, more beautiful than any swan song. "I am dead, Horatio. Thou livest."

Oh, but Horatio holds Hamlet deep in his heart, in a secret place, and he cannot fight those words, cannot hate Hamlet. He is absent from felicity, has given away his ticket to board a ship to an unknown country. Any country. Any country is better than the prison that is Denmark. He must listen to Hamlet's death throes. It is what scholars do. It is what Horace would have done.

Hamlet still smiles in spite of serious intentions. Horatio lets his prince touch his face with shaking fingers. "Horatio," Hamlet says.

"Yes, my… Yes?"

"Horatio, thou art e'en as just a man as… I have said these words, have I not?"

"Aye, my… Aye," he grits out, past the unraveling in his chest.

"I meant them," Hamlet says, eyes far away and cloudy. "I meant them. Thou hast been one that, in suffering all, suffers nothing. Thou shalt suffer more, and for my sake."

"I will gladly go to't."

"No. No, for it is not something to go gladly to and thou art much too somber in the even highest of times, noble Horatio. I am sorry."

"Don't. Hamlet is never sorry."

"Well, Hamlet is changed. Hamlet is now sorry. Hamlet has wronged so many in these awful three years. Hamlet has lied. Hamlet has died."

"Not yet," he says. "Not yet."

" 'Tis yet to come," Hamlet says, eyes fluttering, rolling around in their sockets. It's sickening. It's fascinating. Horatio doesn't know. "It all happens, Horatio. It all will always happen. The sparrow, dost thou recall? I am the sparrow."

Horatio doesn't know what to say. He chokes on his philosophy.

"Oh, I die, Horatio," Hamlet says with a sort of wonderment. "I hath pondered death for so long. Now the potent poison quite o'ercrows my spirit. But the election lights on Fortinbras. Tell him with the occurrents, more or less, which have solicited. I have faith in thee."

There is so much Horatio wishes to say. There is so much Horatio wants to scream and curse at his lord. You arrant knave! You fool! You monster! I trusted you! I loved thee more than I have loved another before! Thou madest me believe! Thee that I know is mine! Instead he gapes and stares, stricken.

Hamlet smiles, shrugs as well as one can in such a position. "The rest is silence."

•

He looks down at Hamlet in his arms, small Hamlet, delicate and fair and too young. Hamlet is porcelain in death, with glassy eyes staring unseeingly at the castle ceiling, silent. He looks at down as his friend, the greatest friend he has ever known. He holds back a wretched sob.

He looks up at Prince Fortinbras, tall and dark and imposing with stormy, impenetrable eyes. His lips flop open and closed, like dead things. He finds it ironic that he only truly did find his voice in Hamlet's presence-the royalty, they frightened him terribly. They'd always ask him to leave. It was a relief every time.

"Hamlet was a man," Horatio manages to say, slurred and horrible and something that would make his professors cringe back in Wittenberg. Wittenberg on the Elbe, Wittenberg, where things made sense and princes didn't needlessly die.

Fortinbras's eyes sweep to his prince's prone frame, so neatly bleeding out in Horatio's lap. Hamlet is so small. "Take him for all in all; none shall look upon his like again," he continues and it's as if a dam has opened and lies, lies are spilling forth from his lips, he who has never lied. Lies are safe. Lies are safest in situations where the truth hurts too much and no one would understand how beautiful it was in its imperfections.

For one shimmering moment, one glorious flicker, there was a concept called Hamlet. Hamlet was golden, carried a certain grace like Apollo and a wit like Pan. Hamlet was Hyperion to Horatio's Mnemosyne. Seeing Hamlet laid out before him, no gibes, no gambols, he knows he will never get to mourn his prince laid out on a bier. His constitution would not take it.

But Hamlet, Hamlet was never a man. Calling Hamlet a man is simplification. "Princes can't afford to be men," Hamlet once told him, in a light, conspiratorial whisper in the library of Wittenberg. "Princes need to be above men. Princes certainly need to be above women. A prince is a prince. It transcends arbitrary titles."

Horatio looks up at Fortinbras and he sees an eyebrow raise, but no words leave his lips for a long time. He simply studies Hamlet's visage in a way that spurs Horatio's protective tendencies toward his lord. It is as though he is taking apart that which is Hamlet, digesting it, coming to grips with it in a way Gertrude never could, nor old King Hamlet, nor Ophelia.

"A prince," Fortinbras says.

"A most noble prince."

"Indeed." His eyes turn to the English Ambassador before sliding back and fixating on Horatio. "Let four captains bear Hamlet like a soldier to the stage; for the prince was likely to have proved most royal, had the chance."

Horatio wants to thank him, wants to damn him, wants to cry and grip Hamlet close and throw this mortal coil away from him, scramble away, drink the wine, leap in the river, run far away and never see the likes of wretched Denmark again.

He offered his lord flights of angels for that is what he would have liked for his lord. But this? This twenty-one gun salute? What does it fix? What does it set right? Surely it must do something of the sort, else all this trouble would have not been worth anything.

•

The sounds rings through his head, deafens him, shakes his body and he can feel Hamlet's mirthful smile cut through him; he can feel Hamlet's breath on his face; he can feel Hamlet's eyes on his skin; he can feel Hamlet's fluttering ribcage in his arms; he can feel Hamlet's blood on his hands; he can feel Hamlet's warm back against his palms; he can feel Hamlet's silence climb into his skin and hijack his essence.

It frightens him so terribly. He is Hamlet in every shot and it is painful, it is consuming, it is humiliating, it is damning. He will never truly escape Hamlet, never. Pansies are for thoughts, but what use are they? How can they save him from this?

"Who's there?" he cries out but to no one, to no avail. He feels as though he is asking Hamlet, his prince, his lord, begging and straining for an explanation. Who's there? Who's there? You never answered anyone, my lord, you never told anyone. Who's there? And look what happened. Look how ruined it all is.

Horatio sobs, alone and haunted by shadows in the night air.

No angels come to greet any of them, men or women or princes, regardless.