A/N: Written for English class. I love being able to do stuff like this and call it work... please read, enjoy, and review!

Through the Wall

She was bent over the book, shoulders hunched and eyebrows drawn together in concentration. She had been reading for some time now, so focused on the words that the world around her had taken a backseat to the world in her hands. She turned the page, eyes scanning the lines. Act 4, Scene 6: Horatio, some gentleman, Horatio again… then some sailor… the threads suspending her disbelief began to fray as she smelled a plot device. Predictably, there it was. "Pirates?!" she muttered to herself, "like that would happen. What are the odds of them being attacked by a pirate ship, of Hamlet getting on the ship, and then the pirates just going merrily away with the Prince of Denmark without doing anything else to attack a ship they've just grappled with… why?!"

There was a sudden sound of something shattering. Before she knew what was going on, she found herself facedown on the floor, glasses knocked askew, book only half in her hand. Groaning as she rolled over and tried to push herself up, she wondered why her carpet was so cold and hard and—

Covered in broken glass?

"He that thou knowest thine, Ham—"

She looked up to see Horatio, precisely as she had pictured him during her reading, stopping midphrase to stare at her. He blinked profusely, as the other characters in the room stood frozen, with blank expressions. He looked at her, at the glass around her, and then gave an exasperated sigh. "Oh, bother."

She straightened her glasses. "You're Horatio."

He rolled his eyes. "Congratulations, you've stated the obvious." He reached over to pull her to her feet. "There you go."

She cocked her head. "That doesn't sound like iambic pentameter."

He threw up his hands, one of which held the letter from Hamlet which he had been reading. "You broke the fourth wall with wanton disregard for timing, you interrupted an important scene, and you have the gall to criticize me for not talking in iambs? I don't see you speaking in verse."

She held up an index finger. "Wait a second. I have no idea what's going on. How did I get here? Last thing I knew, I was reading this book—" She held up her somewhat abused copy of Hamlet in demonstration, and couldn't help but interrupt herself at the look on Horatio's face. "Ah—are you alright?"

He shook his head. "I… I don't believe it. You… you actually brought the play into the play." His forehead furrowed, but he promptly shook his head. "No… mustn't think about it too hard. This scene always gives me a headache as it is."

"Why is that?" she interjected, and he sighed.

"Probably for the same reasons that you've ended up here." He sighed again, rubbing his forehead. "Most literary works depend upon the separation of the work and the reader—or the listener, in the case of things like this. However, every time someone interrupts the reading of the work to ask a question about it—like why Hamlet is thirty years old and still attending Wittenberg—that wall," he gestured to the gaping blackness framed by broken glass, "gets a little… funny. Mostly we just don't notice it, but in a scene like this…" he gestured to the bit players around him, and to the letter in his hand. "Well, let's just say we figured this out a while ago." He shrugged. "The rest of them aren't around for long, but I'm a main character, as far as I can tell."

"As far as you can tell?" she asked, and he sighed.

"That's the thing—I know I'm in a play. I can hear the audience chatting. But I don't know how it ends! Every time I hit this scene, I realize what's going on, I know that I've done this before, but I just can't remember how the story ends! I don't know whether or not trying to change something would make things better or worse, so I just keep going along the same path…" He smiled. "But you have the book! Now I'll finally be able to know whether or not to change what I'm doing!"

She groaned as it sank in. "Oooh no. I am not going to be a party to this! I'm sorry I broke your wall, but I am not going to let you change the ending of one of the greatest tragedies in the canon!" She finished the declaration, then planted her palm on her forehead. "I just said it's a tragedy, didn't I?"

He narrowed his eyes. "You know how it ends."

She bit her lip, speaking reluctantly. "I… may or may not have skipped to the ending when I bought the book. And I may or may not have then skipped through and read all the scenes with Laertes in them." He continued to glare at her, and finally she threw up her hands. "Okay, okay, you got me. I know the ending. But still, I don't think this is something that should be tampered with. Who knows how changing any given event will alter the story? I just don't think it's a good idea."

Horatio's expression softened. "Please… put yourself in my position. Would you want to be me through the rest of this play?" At her expression, he nodded. "I thought as much."

She clung to the book, eyes flicking back and forth. Finally she sighed. "Alright. Finish this scene, and then I'll let you read the book."

As she hovered off in the corner of the scene, she found herself wondering how much she was going to end up regretting this.

She found herself rather surprised when Horatio spoke mere minutes after opening the book. "Wait—Ophelia drowns?! Hamlet loves her—I can't let that happen!"

Before she could let out so much as a "wait", he was dashing off through the secret-passage-ridden castle, and it was all she could do just to keep up with him.

They reached the brook… only to see a large man wrestling Ophelia towards the water. Several seconds later, after a rapid blur and several oddly loud noises, the mystery man was stowed behind a bush as Ophelia shook her head. "I thought I was pulling the crazy act pretty well… I suppose having two people who were a threat to him go crazy in such close sequence made King Claudius a little suspicious."

Horatio and the young woman spoke almost simultaneously. "You're not crazy?"

Ophelia started at their sudden interjection. "Wait, who's she? But no, I'm not crazy. I was just pretending to be crazy."

Horatio rolled his eyes. "Why were you pretending to be crazy, then?"

She glanced around. "I was taking a walk in the garden when old King Hamlet died. I have a feeling you know why Claudius wants me quietly killed."

They heard someone approaching. Ophelia and Horatio both broke out into nervousness. Horatio wrung his hands. "It must be Gertrude! What should I tell her? In the original plot she finds Ophelia drowned!"

Ophelia looked a bit confused at his phrasing, but she began to think intensely. "If she doesn't find me dead, Claudius will be even more suspicious… I know! Horatio—tell her that you saw me drown, but that I floated off down the brook before you could get me out." She waved her hands. "Tell her… oh, tell her I was making flower chains, or something. That fits with the crazy act I've been putting on."

The young woman watched from the background as the altered play went on. The graveyard scene was a bit strange, to say the least. Much of it was a garble of mumbling, as the characters realized mid-word that their lines made absolutely no sense. It was especially complicated due to the lack of an actual body—Laertes went to jump in the grave after the symbolic bundle of flowers, before stopping himself rather confusedly. When the scene finally wound down, the young woman managed to talk a rather flustered Laertes into following her into the forest.

Once they arrived at their destination, he descended into even more bewildered spluttering upon finding Ophelia alive, well, and not the least bit crazy. After Ophelia managed to calm him down long enough to explain the basics of what was going on, he responded by sighing and rubbing his forehead. "I should have stayed in France."

Ophelia bit her lip. "What do we do now?"

Laertes ran a hand through his hair. "I don't know." He paced for a moment, and then turned back to his sister. "He killed our father, Ophelia!"

She took his arm. "And it was only because of Claudius's actions that the situation ever presented itself. Hamlet must have thought it was Claudius. Who else would he expect to be hidden in the Queen's bedchamber? And it was Claudius who tried to have me killed because I too knew what he had done. Our father's murder requires vengeance, brother, I agree with you on that, but the blame does not lie with Hamlet, but with the man who put him in the position from which he murdered our father."

Laertes stared at her for a moment before sighing. "You really are in love with him."

She nodded. "And he's never touched me."

Laertes paced a while longer before he turned back to them. "I… entered into an agreement with Claudius to kill Hamlet." At Ophelia's expression, he raised a hand. "The evidence I had on the matter has changed significantly. I… I'll have to think about this."

The next day, the fated duel came. The young woman had managed to take back her copy of Hamlet from Horatio while he wasn't looking, and she found herself stroking it nervously. She had absolutely no idea how this scene was going to go…

She was almost too nervous to pay attention. She snapped back to the present only when Hamlet's foil struck Laertes. Laertes protested, but Osric's judgement stood, and Claudius raised the cup of wine.

"Stay, give me drink—Hamlet, this pearl is thine. Here's to thy health." He drank, then dropped the pearl in the cup… then dropped the cup, and promptly keeled over dead.

Everyone stared somewhat bewilderedly at Claudius. It took Hamlet nearly a minute to break in with a dramatic speech about Claudius's treachery returning to bite him. Meanwhile, the young woman was running the logic in her head. How on earth…

Suddenly it came to her, and she looked over to find Laertes looking rather pleased with himself.

When Fortinbras arrived to find the castle considerably less undermined that he had thought, he wisely turned around and got back to his previous campaign.

Claudius's treachery was thoroughly revealed, although no-one could figure out quite why Claudius had poisoned the wine he had meant to kill Hamlet with before drinking it.

Hamlet was, after some mental examination, crowned as King of Denmark. When, the next morning, the King appeared at breakfast with a black eye, those in the know were able to explain why Laertes once more wore a very pleased expression.

As Ophelia's body had never been found, it was not met with a great deal of questioning when she reappeared, alive and well. While some paused to think about why two people in the castle had gone so crazy so quickly, and then gone back to normal just as fast, it was dismissed as just another facet of "that time at Elsinore."

Hamlet and Ophelia were eventually married. The union came along with vague references from Laertes to the fact that he still had a little bit of that unction he'd bought from a mountebank. Hamlet took the hint.

In the midst of a rapid falling action, the young woman turned to Horatio. He smiled at her sadly. "It's just going to reset, isn't it? Back to the way it was…"

She smiled sadly. "I don't know."

He returned the same sad smile. "I guess I'd better go enjoy the happy ending while it lasts, then."

As she watched Horatio walk away, she felt her eyes tearing up. It was supposed to be a tragedy… but did it always have to be?

As the world dissolved around them, as two sentinels took their place at the beginning of Act 1, Scene 1, a well-read book sat for the first time on a shelf in Elsinore Castle. In a few acts, Horatio would stand in this room and read of pirates… and, perhaps, look up from the letter to see a paperback copy of Hamlet tucked up among the tomes.