timebethine

Somewhere around midnight, a migraine descended on Laertes like a thunderhead, and he still hasn't come out from beneath its anvil. He's spent most of the day hiding in bed with the curtains drawn, feeling as though he's about to be sick--and that feeling's only grown worse as the sun has drifted sluggishly to a low apex in the sky.

It isn't until mid-afternoon that he feels well enough to make progress on all his plans. He needs to speak to SecUnit about its drones, to Dionysus about whether Avernus (that is her name, isn't it?) is a goddess, and to Nightingale about whether he can offer magical support in case their confrontation goes sour. He needs to talk with Claudius about what to say when he does speak to her.

So it is that he starts making his rounds through the mansion and its grounds, seeking out friends old and new, clinging grimly to the thermos of coffee that smells sickeningly strong but also helps drive back the pain. His face is wan, his eyes shadowed. He would rather be doing anything but this.

Laertes doesn't do anything unusual after he encounters the fallen sheet of paper. He goes about his business; he shapes coil pots, he takes lunch with Sagramore, he does fencing drills until he's sweating and sore. All the while, his copy of the paper feels heavy and mordant, boring a hole through his clothes to burn his skin.

He has a date with Claudius to run through a few chemical experiments, and thus, he can be found waiting in their alchemy laboratory with his eyes trained on the door.

Laertes knows that he should be working on some useful thing--processing the clay earth he'd dug up from the water's edge, or learning a new recipe, or drilling with a blade. But today, he can't muster up the slightest will to do any of them, and so he sits curled up in the corner of a couch with some torrid romance novel open to a place a third of the way through.

Even in moments of passion, the lovers call each other you, as though in their love they are conscious of the estates and properties and souls attendant upon one another. Unnatural though it feels, Laertes commits the convention to memory. It's only the logical evolution of the language, when his little fist of a Paris becomes Enjolras's sprawling city; cities breed strangers, and when one meets more strangers than friends, one must learn to hold others at a distance.

He does not want to hold others at a distance. He does not know how to hold them close without wounding them.


[Mostly looking for Truthsgiving fallout here, but anyone who wants to come flop on Laertes's couch to talk through Truthsgiving fallout is welcome.]

Today, Laertes is looking for books of music. When he'd been a boy in Elsinore, he'd learned to play the recorder at the jester Yorick's knee, and in the flower of his youth he'd taken up the flute and the viol with all the zeal of a young man with no other expression for his passions. In France, he'd played less--only now and then, when conversation lapsed, to delight and ease his friends or to impress a pretty girl whom he had no intention of courting--but there was a kind of quiet joy in doing something well that he now recognizes as the hallmark of his soul.

Speaking with Sagramore has quickened that long-sleeping hunger for music, and now he runs his thumb over the books in the library, searching for songs.

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.