timebethine | [Closed Post: A Shared Meal]

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[Closed Post: A Shared Meal]

Laertes has spent all day bent over a cookbook, preparing a meal that he hopes a prince will have no cause to criticize. He's made flaky little apple and brie pastries with their crusts twisted in whorls, roast carrots swimming in honey sauce and garnished with walnuts; for the main course, he's been stewing a pot roast for hours. The entire kitchen smells of beef and and onions, celery and parsley and rosemary.

Now, as he arranges his bounty on the table in his rooms, there is just enough space for anxiety to score a touch. He knows full well that, if this night goes as he expects, he'll be taking Claudius to bed--and that will be a choice that he can never take back, if this long dream ends and he finds himself in Elsinore again. He knows that if there is a way that Claudius can use this tryst to his advantage, he will, even here in what might as well be Arcadia.

He shakes his head as he works free the cork of a wine bottle--sweet and red, of no vintage he can recognize. What will come, will come. He has no reputation here to protect, and that's perhaps the most freeing thought he can imagine.

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"Thou art grieving," says Laertes simply. "If he remembers, I can hope that he will remember how he loves thee, and find his way to thee again. And I can hope that one day, he'll dance with me again--bright and shameless as he was, I wished that he should be spared every sorrow." His voice cracks just a little. "I wanted so badly to be his friend."

"It made me think better of thee," Claudius says, soft. "That thou couldst be his friend, hearing his secrets and fears, and entreat me to be gentle with his heart."

"What would you have of me?" Laertes asks, softer. "How can I help?"

"All I need is thy company," Claudius says. And his fingers tremor a little around Laertes's, so he's tempted to pull it back, to hide his weaknesses. But all he does is gaze down at their hands, and continue tracing his fingers along the sides of them "It's enough to be talking over dinner like this ... and I'd like to talk a while after, if you'll allow me here with you. And if thou wouldst have me in thy bed, I would be thine. Wilt thou have me?"

This is not the Claudius whom Laertes first met, when he came here--a schemer towering with indignation, trying to aim Laertes like a cannon and make him fire of his own accord. There is no angle that Laertes can divine here, no advantage to be seized.

Claudius looks defeated. He looks as though, for the first time since he was a child, he has met a weight that pretty words cannot lighten.

He is not asking for much, and he is asking it as directly as Laertes could wish. He wants only the comfort of something steady and predictable--a shared meal, pleasant company, someone he can touch. Normalcy, amidst the wrack of grief.

Laertes traces his thumb over Claudius's knuckles. "I will," he says.

It's a strange relief, to have made himself vulnerable again and not hurt by it. He laughs a little with it, before leaning back. "We can talk about other things, if you like. But ... I would still like to hear thy ideas of God, and what good a God should be to men. And I suspect one thing will have me thinking of the other."

"Please understand, I have no theses to nail to a door," says Laertes. "My thoughts begin to take shape, the longer I spend here, but they are as yet ill-formed as fresh-dug clay."

He sits back, sipping his wine, considering how best to frame his convictions. "If the world is a prison," he says, "if it is some grey promontory from which we behold damnation, and despair--then of course there is no hope for us but to beg for salvation. But instead, God hath given us a world of incomparable sweetnesses. What kind of God would lay before us a banquet, and require that we never taste it so that we might earn the great feast hereafter? What kind of God would make us with a love for pleasure, and then ask that we absent ourselves from it?" Another slow, considered sip. "What kind of God would see His people, mired in all the urgent duties of the mortal world, and say, 'Turn thee from it; thou hast a higher charge'?"

The wine tastes sweeter now, Claudius thinks -- when he first reached for it, he didn't pause to taste it, and it's lusher and fuller of the flavors of fruit than the dryer reds Claudius tends to prefer. He savors it as Laertes frames his thoughts, and it's more satisfying than he'd imagine it would be. He could've gently steered the conversation towards what he wanted to hear, but he asked, and Laertes answered. He's still a surprising young man, but perhaps that says more about Claudius's capacity to be surprised.

The blasphemies are as sweet to his soul as he hoped they'd be. "The only God I know," he says, "is a God who gave us every pleasure, and a list of sins that come from passion and the desire to taste the world's sweetness. A God more like a pagan Zeus, tormenting Tantalus for the presumption of tasting ambrosia, and trying to steal it for mankind. I've never been able to live with God peaceably, to believe and trust His plans have a purpose that any of us could understand. I can't reason myself into thinking God wouldn't be cruel enough to create me with desires and punish me for them. Perhaps, in the fullness of God's perspective, His cruelty has a purpose, too. Perhaps He is cruel to be kind, and a world of greater kindness awaits after we've denied ourselves the pleasures of this one. But I can't deny myself and, whenever it comes to it, I can't repent of any sin I've committed. Particularly the lighter sins." He laughs wryly. "The sin of meeting a sweet, shy boy with hair like gold and silver and eyes that look through me, of seeing him blush and desiring to give him every joy of the flesh -- it isn't a sin like murder. Perhaps more akin to adultery, swaying someone to break an oath. Sins like that won't trouble my sleep, and the joys are well worth it. But I don't expect to win an argument with God, or see any absolution for my worser sins."

He turned absolution away. It was a choice he made.

"We weave our moral world of strands of sin," says Laertes wryly, releasing Claudius's hand to serve a slice of roast beef onto his plate. "What, then of the sacraments? What of extreme unction, of marriage and baptism, of holy communion? The business of this world matters to God, or there would be no sacraments. I cannot think that God would appoint us to care for each other, and then despise us when that care begets pleasure. Surely a glad wedding is as pleasing to God as a solemn one--and there is something holy in coupling, which is written not in scripture but on my bones."

"You'll notice I'm unmarried," Claudius says, his only ring the signet ring he spins around his finger. For now he puts his hands to and fork, and returns to the feast that Laertes created for him -- never mind God. "I've never had a love recognized in a holy sacrament. But I admit," taking a more teasing tone, but sincere, "I look forward to whatever holiness thou hast seen in coupling. What moves thee, when thou art with a lover who inspires thee to scriptures?"

"That, I couldn't answer," says Laertes. "I could count my assignations on one hand, and have fingers to spare. I only know that, when I'm with him, I feel a love that touches everything--I feel a part of the world, involved in its happiness, when I have set myself so long apart from it."

"Thou know'st he wishes to give the world to thee." And Claudius is starting to see why. Love, of course, is as transformative as a philosopher's stone, and it's plain that Sagramore is besotted with Laertes -- but it's hardly that Sagramore has made gold of base metals. Laertes is beautiful when talks about the world's happiness, and joining the world after being apart from it, in a way that Claudius want to touch him and teach him every pleasure his body can give him. But also, he thinks, he could learn from Laertes. Sagramore called him weightless, without his family expectations. When they danced, Claudius nearly felt weightless with him.

(Like sharing a bed with Laurel, and leaving the window open so light streams in the morning and catches in his hair like a halo of flame. And holding Laurel, with hierarchies between them and no fear of being burned. That kind of weightlessness.)

"He said he would have forsaken all others for me," says Laertes, looking down at his plate with a distant fondness. "But the man I love asked me to bed after we had spoken not a hundred words to each other, and I have never repented answering him ay. To ask him to be anything other than what he is would be to diminish him."

Claudius laughs over his meal, and his wine, which he lifts to sip from. "Ay, and when I met him I was tongue-tied and foolish, and still he offered to spoil me and take me to bed without dissembling. I've grown very fond of his way of doing things."

"Has he told thee? We mean to invite thee to bed with us," Laertes says, and only colors a little to say it. The vivid images of debauchery that Sagramore had laid out for him still come all too readily to mind. "It need not be now, or soon. Thou hast suffered a great blow."

Oh, that blush on his cheeks is a gift, and Claudius has to smile at it. "And to think, I imagined you weren't interested. I suppose Sagramore stoked thy interest?"

"I knew not that such things could be done," Laertes admits. "He ... illuminated the possibilities."

"Thou didst not catch my meaning," Claudius realizes aloud, and if he laughs, it's not unkindly. It's half at himself. "Thou wert more innocent than I imagined ... though thou hast in Sagramore a learned instructor. What possibilities were most illuminating to thee?"

The blush on his cheeks only deepens. But if he demands plain speech from Claudius, he can ask no less of himself. "He said that he might hold me in his lap, and thou couldst fuck me," Laertes says, low. It feels almost humiliating to speak it, when hearing it from Sagramore had felt wild and giddy and freeing--as though Laertes's voice has made the act small and coarse and filthy. "Or I could take thee in my mouth, while he fucked me. Or we could take him both at once. And all of those thoughts put such a flame in me that I could have had him right there on the grass."

"Thou hadst the right of it when thou didst say Sagramore is a man admirable in any occupation," Claudius says, with clear admiration for this litany of pleasing filth. "But he rarely lets himself be driven to distraction. For all his charming directness, he's too giving a lover to be overwhelmed for long. Thee and I might work to overwhelm him, if we shared him between us. Is that a thought thou wouldst enjoy?" His eyes are bright, speaking possible debaucheries over a civilized meal, gazing intently at Laertes across the table. "Or wouldst thou prefer to be the one overwhelmed by us?"

A part of him recognizes that this is only Claudius attempting to distract himself from a grief that would devour him--but the rest of him feels as hot and fragile and ductile as new-blown glass. "I have no greater charge than his pleasure," Laertes manages. "And ... I think it would please him, to be overwhelmed."

"It would please him to have thee pleased," Claudius says, believing it -- there's truth in men's cups and Sagramore is already so generous, it's easy to imagine him devoted entirely to Laertes and fulfilling his desires. Claudius enjoys imagining it (and it's a distraction, yes, from imagining anyone else, but enjoyable in itself). "We may make our own rules, as thou saidst."

"What dost thou want of me?" Laertes asks. "A brief pleasure? A fashion, and a toy in blood? Or something lasting?"

"A promise of something lasting is a promise too easily broken, in a place where circumstances change as frequently as they do here. But so is a promise I will never feel anything for thee." Galahad might've been a passing flirtation, and even after it grew to fondness and caring, Claudius still might've turned away and preserved his heart. It doesn't soothe the aching at all to think of it that way. But it's proof enough Claudius can never predict what will happen. "I like thee well. I enjoy thy conversation, thy dancing, thy unashamed joy in thy skills and the learning of them ... as in the dinner thou hast sincerely made to share what thou hast learned from thy books, with the gift of time to read them. I think thou wouldst be sweet to teach and praise in anything. But as thou hast a tutor, I confess myself charmed by how thou wouldst train me to honesty with kisses."

"Fellow-students, then, each of us perfecting our art," Laertes offers. He takes a bite of the roast and finds it flavorful, juicy and infused with the richness of wine, and for a moment his relief is so enormous that it nearly swallows him. It would be the worst thing, to be found wanting when he had tried so sincerely to do well. "I do like thee. There's a great love of knowledge in thee that wells over like water in a fountain, and nourishes all that it falls upon." He smiles, swift and flickering, a fishscale smile. "And thou art a swordsman par excellence with words. There's pleasure to be had in finding the gaps in thy guard."

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