[Closed Post: Be You and I Behind an Arras Then]

[timebethine]

The moment draws nigh. Laertes will soon speak to Aornis in the library. All is in readiness--Asmodean long since in place, invisibly veiled in saidin; SecUnit's drone watching from its customary vantage.

In the game room, SecUnit, Claudius, Sagramore, and Nightingale gather around the grainy CRT television, watching the drama unfold ...


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[timebethine]

Laertes's gaze sharpens. "So he knew--and still he told me fairy tales about lions."

[wickedwit]

Claudius sighs. A part of him wants to spin this, in one direction or another, to protect his lover's feelings and preserve the peace, to protect himself from potential upsets. He takes a seat on the bench beside Laertes, crossing his legs and linking his hands over them, fidgeting with the band of his engagement ring. "He knows the fairy tales better, for what it's worth. And the artworks inspired by our story. But it's true, he wasn't keen on telling you."

[timebethine]

"Did no one in this fucking place think I could bear it?" Laertes snaps, and slams both hands down on his knees.

[wickedwit]

Claudius flinches, on instinct, then goes very still. (Another instinct -- don't move, don't respond, and perhaps this rage will pass him by.) Deliberately, consciously, he breathes in and lets the breath move through him, reminds himself this man would never strike him, that it's only the sound of flesh being struck taking him somewhere else. From that faraway place, he asks, quiet, "Couldst thou?"

[timebethine]

"What choice do I have but to bear it? I cannot save her; I cannot die for her. If her fate is to be changed, I cannot change it." He leans back, slouching in his seat, fisting both hands in his own hair and pulling.

[wickedwit]

“I thought I could change it," Claudius says, still quiet, gaze fixed. “By staying here. I thought all the deaths — my sister’s and yours, your own and no doubt Hamlet’s, too — sprung from me and my sin, as all murders sprung from Cain’s. In truth … the men of my family are all unwell. We all have wild, whirling moods, long spells of melancholy followed by flights of mania where our fixations ride us. It’s well-known, but no one says the words — they say my brother has a war-like passion, or that my nephew is deep-feeling in his youth. Shen Yuan told me … to take his father’s vengeance on me, my nephew plays at madness. And thy sister must have borne the worst of it, when she should have been most protected. But the madness that afflicts us is no act, and it has always been women like Gertrude, like Ophelia, who have been forced to bear it. To soothe and comfort our moods while pretending all is well to the public, never showing the burden until at last something breaks. It broke thy sister’s will to live. I am sorry.” And this is the true apology. “We should have made a better kingdom for her. I believe Gertrude will … but if it comes too late, it will be because of the inheritance I and my brother have left her.”

[timebethine]

"What am I to do with this?" Laertes asks; he rises from the bench, but he turns first one way, then another, and cannot make himself go. "What boots it, to tell me that it broke her will to live? What will can I have to live, knowing that?"

[wickedwit]

"I cannot tell thee that. 'Tis why I kept it from thee, and told myself it would serve thee nothing to know. If there is anything to be done, it should have been my responsibility, and thou shouldst have lived free of fear."

[timebethine]

Laertes drops back down to the bench, stricken. He scrabbles for Claudius's hand. "I know thou hast changed," he says after a moment, "for the man I knew in Elsinore would be turning this grief into a goad."

[wickedwit]

He clasps Laertes’s hand as soon as it offered, both reassured by the contact, and offering reassurance. Ruefully he admits, “I would. I would tell thee what to think, and to trust me. Even if I had no answers, I would invent them, and twist thee to my purpose.” He hesitates, then says, “Instead I have a question.”

[timebethine]

"Say on."

[wickedwit]

“If thou couldst speak once more to thy sister,” he says, voice soft and even, “knowing what thou dost now … what wouldst thou say to her?”

It’s a question Claudius has no answer to. When he saw Gertrude start to crumple under her burden, saw her smile slip when she thought no eyes were on her, he bit his tongue and looked away. He knew she was pretending for his sake, feared it would hurt more if she knew she was failing. They were too alike.

[timebethine]

He thinks on this question for a long, long moment. It's in him to say, You deserve better than some crownéd prick who vents his spleen at you without relief--to say, Come away with me to a place where there are others who will cherish your long silences, and herbs enough to remedy every heartache.

But she loves that crownéd prick. She loves him, and if she breaks, it won't from his cruelty; it will be because all her great unswerving force of love cannot so much as chip the great wall of his unhappiness.

She doesn't need Laertes to argue with her, or distract her, or find yet another way that she's been wrong. She had the same father that he had; she can do that herself well enough.

What she needs is to know that she's not alone.

"I would tell her ... I would tell her, 'Thou art my sister, and I'm with thee,'" he says at last.

[wickedwit]

It's such a simple thing, and yet -- it moves Claudius. It moves the part of him he always wanted to be moved by prayer, and it never did. He hopes, somehow, Ophelia hears it. "I think," Claudius says, "she is with thee, too."

[timebethine]

"Would she were." He turns over Claudius's hand in his, tracing every line and crease of his palm with slow-searching fingertips. "But to work. I found the woman ... not quite evasive, nor even slippery. Her responses were like mist; they had a semblance of substance, but little graspable until we touched on her brother."

[wickedwit]

"There was true substance there," Claudius agrees. To work. "If only SecUnit had sound when her brother visited, I've no doubt we could've learned a great deal more. I believed everything she said of him. And thus I believe she isn't holding some secret way out, while deflecting Tress -- if she could be out of here and avenge her brother, she would. That was a good time to follow through on all the aborted familiarities you kept making, by the way. Was that deliberate?"

[timebethine]

"Ay--I feared it clumsily so."

[wickedwit]

"Not at all -- it was elegantly done. I feared for you for a moment, after you'd made that switch." Wryly, he says, "To be more accurate, I feared the position I'd put you in. I still hold myself responsible. I thought she might try to exploit that newfound familiarity, and that you'd be vulnerable to it, not being prepared. But I think she was surprised. You were closer than I was, you could've judged better -- from where I sat, it seemed like you startled her into real emotion."

[timebethine]

Just a touch roughly, "We had something in common."

[wickedwit]

Claudius sighs. "So you did. Seeking common ground is the first step in a negotiation."

[timebethine]

"I fear we learned little but that she has a cautious temperament and excels at replying without answering," says Laertes. "I wish I had found more for thee."

[wickedwit]

Claudius bumps his shoulder with his own. "Nay. Thou hast found enough to make me doubt she is as she appears to be. She told thee a jurisfiction agent's job consists of brute force, persuasion, and paperwork, but I know she has skills beside that, which she did not volunteer. And her awareness of the rumors about her was so pointed she could've been speaking to me directly, even using that word hypothetically, which abutted our last conversation. All the business with her brother I wouldn't have arrived at alone. That's most telling." Gently as he can, he says, "I did tell thee to adjust thy expectations. Thou wouldst not strike the heart of her. But thou hast peeled back several layers."

[timebethine]

"What will her next move be, thinkest thou? How might we be better prepared for it?"

[wickedwit]

"Her answer about Luo Binghe was interesting," Claudius muses, still on the subject but coming at it slantwise. "What did you make of it?"

[timebethine]

"Anyone with ears knows of thy strife with him," says Laertes, and quite frankly he would be surprised if Claudius hadn't tried to turn her attention toward Luo Binghe when he was still working out his angle. That's the kind of thing he does when he's in a panic; he recruits allies against whoever he fears is the biggest threat to him. He did it to Laertes immediately upon his arrival, after all. "She means to stoke that strife, the better to conceal her own ends. And much though I hate to say it--if she knows thou art set against him, it may be because he has some useful power that she fears."