AN: Chapter 29 was "something sweet." The inspiration behind this chapter was "night shift Tam taking a bunch of weird traumatic backstory headcanons for a weird Russian TV show she will probably never allow herself to actually write fanfic for projecting onto Hamlet's power villain couple." As usual, I debated writing for several couples before settling on this one, and while I was perusing other works for this pairing to re-familiarise myself with their dynamic (since it's been years since I read Hamlet), I found one of the best fanfics I've ever read. Which was a delightful plus.
Gertrude wakes screaming.
Her dreams are a menagerie of voices and faces, choices and places; desires spoken in swirls of muted colour and bodies intertwined in flowering bursts of pain. She sees the daughter that never was: full-bodied and grown, gazing at her with accusing eyes, reaching for her skirts with bloodied hands. She sees the son that never wanted to be: battered and broken, writhing upon the jagged rocks of his own despair. She wanders the shadowed halls of her childhood home in trailing furs and tattered rags, running spindle-pricked fingers over the dust of memories unkempt, bridges unburned. She loses herself in the maze of the palace, rooms close and dark, twisting and fading and falling into each other as the mirrors of her mind shatter and stitch themselves together anew.
Her dreams are felt, in the hidden folds of womanly virtue. The press of hateful, heated flesh against skin cold with fear: unwelcome, meet unwilling; unrelenting, meet unresisting. The grinding ache of phantom hands crushing the bird bones of her wrists. The tearing burn of unholy communion, deep within, where she ought only to be her unsullied self. The sting of slaps raining one memory's impression after another upon cheeks too long accustomed to turning the other way. Coarse fingers an unrepentant noose about her throat, cutting off what little breath she would fain waste on amends unheard. Condemning her to wretched silence.
All her life she'd failed to keep to silence. Even when it was forced upon her. All her life she'd bourne pain for want of peace; all her life she'd screamed for want of speech.
But now, when she screams, it is peace, not pain, into which she wakes. A whispered plea, a gentle caress. Heavy arms love-light about her trembling body, leery of shattering what already lies broken, and chapped lips softly pressed to eyelids wet with tears she still fears to shed. A voice, the deep rush of wind through lonely chasms, that holds a warped mirror to the echoing memories of jeering scorn and roaring rage, whittles them down to a kindness better than bare nothing. His voice, her mettle and melody. His voice, which tells her she need no longer fear.
X X X
Claudius wakes fighting.
His dreams are the shadows of the dungeons of the palace and the bottom of the well, the stench of mould and rot and his piss and blood fear-sharp. He sees the baby, floating facedown in the stagnant water, limbs rotted and half-eaten by damp and drowning rats, its head hanging by a string of gummy skin. The story passed through the walls in whispers: the mad peasant girl, who had wandered singing to the well and drowned her newborn child. No one believed it fully: not the palace servants, nor the villagers who had known her. They didn't believe him, either. But then, no one ever did.
No one would ever admit that they remembered.
How, when Hamlet and those few guards willing to risk the king his father's ire in aiding the rescue had pulled him out, he had been clutching the dead baby as though it were his own. How he had been half out of his mind with fever, dysentery, the pain of broken bones left untended for days-insensible, oblivious to all. Until they tried to take the baby from him. Hamlet tried to take the baby from him. Hamlet, who had already taken so much.
He dug his fingers so tightly into the pitted flesh that they had burst through to splintered bone. He screamed, sobbed, kicked out like a wild thing. The baby's beleaguered head fell off in the fray, rolled along the stony ground: stopped at the feet of a horse, who crushed it beneath a muddy hoof. A life scarcely lived, a life he had in desperation stretched beyond the natural, snuffed out like a promise.
Years later, Hamlet told him they'd buried the baby beside the well. He had never gone back to learn whether or not he spoke true.
He never dreams of the beatings, the battles-never dreams the pain pressed into his marrow like a brand. Instead he dreams of the solitude.
Endless nights locked in his draughty corner room: learning to ignore the hunger, to embrace the pain. To forgive those who trespassed against him: to repent helpless hatred of father and brother, who could not help being so much better, so much stronger than he. Who could not be blamed, for trying to make him strong. Learning to despise himself.
Endless days spent cowering in that brother's shadow, cursing the darkness that thwarted him even as he craved refuge in obscurity. In mediocrity.
The chill of the dead mens' cell.
The whistle of wind through the ever-damp stocks.
And the well. Always the well.
In dreams he fights as he never could in life. Strangles the demons that dog him, night after night, and prays by day that they won't rise to plague another. But they always rise. God spits on him and bids them rise, so on and on and on he fights, weary unto death of hoping for the dawn.
The first time he laid hands on her in sleep she ran from him. Hid herself away, for three nights and days, as the bruises about her throat and beneath her eyes grew a livid mauve. But then she came back to him. Came back for him. She came back, and took his hand in hers, and swore to fight alongside him for as many nights as he would have her.
How light the burden of dreams, when upon two backs it is bourne.