A/N: I'm currently experimenting with a style of writing called a "50 Sentences" challenge – you are given a table of fifty prompts and have to write one sentence to go with each prompt. Naturally, sometimes the grammar gets a bit flimsy, but it's a fun exercise. For 2011, I am writing a series of 50 Sentences challenges (four per month) covering many different fandoms and characters. Since I couldn't find a decent category to put the series in (this really isn't a crossover, so the crossover options are out), I am posting each entry separately in its own fandom. This is the eighth ficlet in the series, and if you'd like to keep track of them, there's an index in my profile listing the titles and fandoms of them all.
This story is in the same canon as my other Hamlet stories – To Thine Own Self, In My Memory Locked, Moment and That Which Love Compels.
Thanks for reading!
Providence
1. Measure
Only once he was crowned did Claudius' mind wander to the question his impulses had denied in the days before the bloody deed was enacted – was there ever a faultless reason to kill a king?
2. Midnight
They met in the dead of night, stealing moments otherwise denied to them, treading the well-worn footsteps of a hundred lovers whose romances were forbidden.
3. Mild
Horatio was keen to step aside and observe rather than enter a fray himself – there was much more to be learned from listening than acting on impulse.
4. Message
Ophelia folded the letter in half and pressed it between the covers of a dusty volume where no one but he would think to look.
5. Mock
Polonius was a fool, an old fool with a mind bent to the disease of time; however, he was still an incredibly amusing and easy target for the pointed articulations of glibly-worded fire.
6. Mischief
There was once a time when he caused an infinite amount of trouble by running through the city unwatched and unchecked; now he was a grown man and caused trouble of a much more dire sort – evidence that some traits remained the same, but intensified in their colouring over time.
7. Murder
Though Gertrude did not hold the knife herself, she may as well have performed the deed that took her husband's life – her honey-soaked words to her lover, her husband's brother, lay at the beginning of a cycle of bloody actions that refused to come to a halt.
8. Mull
The question of the after-life had long entranced him – the idea of a peaceful destination at the end of this highway of sorrows would be calming if not for the uncertainty surrounding its existence.
9. Minion
As the axe fell, Rosencrantz wondered whether death would have veered away had they run from the king's summons – then, there were no more thoughts.
10. Malevolence
He began to see his father's spirit appear ghostly, like mist, in the castle halls, red with the fires of purgatory, and he wondered whether he had truly gone mad.
11. Melancholy
Elsinore bred despair – it was ingrained in the stone, in the land, in the sea – why else did he so strongly desire to return to Wittenberg?
12. Moniker
His brother had barely breathed his last when the thought came upon him – he was no longer prince… he was king.
13. Maintain
Every time Ophelia swore to her father that the prince's affections meant nothing, she was surprised at her black-faced ability to live and breathe a lie to her own family.
14. Muse
She sat still on the bed, her loose hair tumbling past her shoulders, captivated by the sound of his voice as he read aloud from the ink-stained parchment.
15. Malady
As Marcellus watched his country slide from the monarchy's grasp, he wondered how such rottenness had come to seed in the first place… perhaps the danger was closer to home than anyone suspected.
16. Mettle
The brave man was not the one who valiantly plunged into battle head-first – sometimes, waiting and watching, bound to silence and stealth, was much more difficult and required much more courage than confronting evident dangers.
17. Mortuary
The English ambassador gingerly stood in the hall, observing the remains of the royal massacre with grim irony from the knowledge of further death he must now pronounce to this shattered Danish court.
18. Malice
There was a cold loathing in his nephew's eyes, one that bit at him like the shrill, persistent sea wind – and he knew Hamlet did not wish him well.
19. Mess
The moment he passed the king's letter to the Englishman and he and Rosencrantz were seized, Guildenstern cursed Hamlet for his craftiness and utter betrayal.
20. Mediocrity
Laertes loved France – to him it was more of a home than his native Denmark – but he never revealed his reason to anyone: in France, his father could not follow him and beat him with harsh words and brutal frankness conveying nothing but sheer disappointment.
21. Mimicry
Claudius' stood, and all went silent under the king's angered brow; the players ceased to play, confused and unaware as to how their small action could bring out such wrath, but there was one man in the audience – one with a curled lip and a keen eye – who understood all that had come to pass that night.
22. Majesty
Had he been there to witness his own funeral, he would have scoffed – but Horatio saw, as his dear friend and prince's body was quietly interred in the cold ground, that Hamlet was more a king in death than his uncle had been in life.
23. Mecca
Many came to Elsinore and many more left it – for reasons that could be thought, but never voiced.
24. Moral
He stood in the shadows, sword in hand, ready to fall on the kneeling usurper like a vengeful archangel – but no… Claudius was at prayer… could he kill a man, murderer though he might be, even as he made peace with God?
25. Morale
It had been a month since the ghost's visitation; his duty weighed heavily on his mind, but he had found the perfect solution – or so he thought as he downed another ale.
26. Misfortune
Polonius' body lay on the floor, quietly seeping blood without care.
27. Medusa
As he rode out the gate, he caught sight of Ophelia standing at the window; and he thought her silent tears and empty eyes would indeed turn him to stone.
28. Middleman
There was little that occurred in Elsinore without Polonius' knowledge, and he always had more than one finger in every metaphorical pie; he did not think himself paranoid or greedy, but rather cautious and thrifty – one did not climb the aristocratic ladder and keep one's position without good judgement.
29. Manifestation
The ghost appeared, wandering the night cloaked in mist, a floating spectre devoid of all want or desire save to escape the fiery pits that scorched his mind.
30. Monitor
They had been commanded to watch and question, but Guildenstern wondered whether he and Rosencrantz were even worthy of that role when the blasted Prince of Denmark had escaped them and any query yet again.
31. Martyr
"I will, my lord; I pray you pardon me," Gertrude said, and without any trembling of her hands, she lifted the dreaded cup to her lips and drank.
32. Mastermind
At Wittenberg, he had put much faith and boasting in his brilliant mind (and indeed, many lauded his intelligence), but all such brilliance fell dead in Elsinore; every plan had all but failed him – Polonius, slain by his own accidental hand; him, shipped to England, a distance away from his target; and the king, his uncle, still walking alive and well where he could not be reached.
33. Might
There had been a time when she had prayed her lover would return to her, but now she wished he had never come – what might have remained of the life she held dear had Prince Hamlet stayed in Wittenberg!
34. Mollify
Gertrude took her husband in her arms and kissed him gently, but even her touch could not placate his towering rage after the offense he had taken at the play that night.
35. Meant
After witnessing how men's manipulations could spiral out of control, Horatio had lost faith in fate – there was nothing that was meant to happen, as every action was merely the result of another man's deeds.
36. Margins
Marcellus had been there at the beginning – it had been he who had first witnessed the coming of that devilish spectre – and he had been there at the end – when the monarchy had fallen in less than half an hour, churned and torn by bloody deeds and poisonous treason.
37. Minx
Ophelia ran and hid in an alcove, smiling with feverish mirth as her attendants rushed about searching for her, calling to her as one might a lost child.
38. Memento
The portrait was all Gertrude had to remember her first husband by; she kept it in a locket hung about her neck, the exact place her second husband expected to find his own image.
39. Miasma
When the wind howled to the depths of the night, Elsinore seemed haunted to Claudius' woeful mind – as if spirits gathered in the halls to shake the guilty-minded from pleasurable rest.
40. Mania
The line between the act of madness and the true thing was thinner than a knife's edge; though he questioned his own madness, surely it was a sign he was sane – or perhaps all sanity was, in truth, mad.
41. Medley
Put the sword in the hand of a man of action and the deed would have been accomplished that night; however, he was not as trusting of the supernatural and for many days he sought asylum from the ghost's demand in his own intellect.
42. Malt
His depression now felt only like an act, a mask to hide the seething anger and rage that had for so long been contained deep within.
43. Manila
One night she found herself at her father's silent grave and she tore through the dirt with bared fingers, finding nothing but a crusted finger-bone, which she cleaned and gently wrapped in her kerchief for safe-keeping.
44. Missing
He had expected Ophelia when he returned to Elsinore, but even as he kissed those soft, familiar lips and accepted her embrace, he felt no warmth – there was something missing in his heart, and he had not the desire to search for it.
45. Motive
Even in her aging days, Gertrude was still a beauty – and he would willingly kill for her, if she but said the word.
46. Meaning
He thought surprisingly clearly for one with unstoppable poison burning through his veins, though his final thoughts, as he looked for a last time into Horatio's eyes, were not invigorating ideas nor provoking philosophies – instead, they were the cold, dull realisation that the end had come, and despite all his wishes and curses, he, like so many others, was not ready for it.
47. Machination
Hamlet's death was more troublesome than his namesake father's had proved – the prince was evermore wily than his dear departed father, but Claudius had murdered before and a path once walked was easily retraced.
48. Mine
She swore that she would be his forever, come what may – he was her first and only, and he belonged to her as much as she belonged to him.
49. Minacious
The vial that had contained the poison which killed his brother still sat on display at a table in his private rooms, its significance lost on anyone but himself.
50. Masterpiece
As chaos descended upon Elsinore's great hall, the ghost whispered its pleased approval to the winds.
fin