This story is written around and throughout William Shakespeare's play Hamlet, and clearly the characters are not mine (at least to start with). My interpretation of the play is largely inspired by Kenneth Branagh's excellent, unabridged film version of Hamlet. (That means it's set in the 18th century, not Shakespeare's time.) This story (not the film) is slash, a dire blasphemy, I'm sure, pairing Hamlet and Horatio. Sex between men is described in relatively explicit (but not, I do hope, tasteless) detail. It should be possible to follow the story without having read Hamlet, but it would really be a help, and some things the reader will miss without that background.
Good and Faithful Servant
Kat M.
"And if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death."
— Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Hamlet, prince of Denmark, is sweet. Sweet like sugared ice, cold enough to make the teeth ache and still caress the tongue with a watery honey. He is a sweet far-off wintry wonder, his pale hair, tan face, sharping blue eyes. He flickers and flights like a white-winged bird, spinning and dancing in the hungry joy of his own youth and power and intelligence. Even beset by the squat grimy shapes of the demons Grief, Treachery and Disgust, his hair is too white, his figure too tall and straight, his eyes too clear for their lecherous fingers to mar him. His wit is cruel to the deserving, as whipping and efficient as the rapier's narrow blade, and yet, even that tastes sweet to some of those it stings.
Horatio was a Dane, a liegeman to the king. His family was common, and he was not wealthy, but he was a man of some little learning, and he sometimes acted informally as Denmark's ambassador to the university in Wittenberg. It was not a position that conferred great responsibility or prestige; he had only to stand at the elbows of significant men within the university, to offer them quiet suggestions, and occasionally, when granted the authority by default, to represent Denmark's interests in whatever matter of policy stood in question. Otherwise he was a student; he felt himself fortunate to be able to study in relative peace, among the intellectual life of Wittenberg. It was in this capacity, as fellow student rather than official, that he became acquainted with the prince of Denmark.
Horatio saw him first in a dry, warm room at the university in Wittenberg, standing by the fireplace in conversation with another young man, both in overcoats gently steaming as the cold and moisture of the street left them. Hamlet's arm was flung up over the mantel, his shoulder against the rough stone of the wall, his hands fluttering like white handkerchiefs in an inconstant wind. Was it Aeschylus or Aristotle that cracked like a whip in the rough hands of Hamlet's intellect, flicking the hat off the other fellow's head and sending him running crouching after it in the stiff breeze that followed? Horatio watched for a little while, out of earshot but following with his eyes the casual give and take, bite and snap of the conversation. It was like a fencing match, all darts and feints and words jabbing like blades. Both were quick, but Horatio's eyes returned again and again to the cold glow of the prince. If he had a crown, it would be spears of ice.
The two men finally broke away from each other, laughing. Hamlet walked to the window and stood looking out at the grey cobblestoned street, while the other man melted into the stacks in search of a reference. Horatio stood there a little longer, leaning over the table, with the heels of his hands braced against the coarse wood of its surface. His eyes followed the prince and lingered on him a moment, rested on the pale head leaning against the glass, slid to the patch of mist his breath left on the pane. He wondered, for an instant and without words, how the breath of something that cold could fog a window. He would find, eventually, that it was because Hamlet only looks cold from a distance.
His back nearly creaked as it unbowed; he took his hands away from the table and straightened the lapels of his coat, ran a hand through his collar-length autumn-leaves hair and strode across the room to Hamlet's window. "Good afternoon, my lord."
Hamlet's eyes leapt from the street outside to Horatio's face, the unconscious relaxation of his figure drawing into agile tenseness again. "Be it so?" he asked, with a touchy satisfaction in his inscrutability.
Horatio's bony hands folded dryly together behind him, his head bowed a little and a little more as he nodded deeply, solemnly. "Aye, my lord." Straight man to a twirling, dizzying jester with a killing wit: Horatio felt himself fitting into this role with the familiarity of a strange key encountering a strange lock and turning in it as though oiled.
"Whose lord am I, then?" Hamlet essayed, the bright tip of his foil flickering in mind.
"Your humble servant's, my lord."
"Give me that name and take mine."
"Your pardon, I have yours already, my lord Hamlet."
"Then thou'lt have mine and give me nothing back?"
"Forgive me, my lord."
"Ay, and I'll not, not while you've my name and I have none. Come, sir."
Horatio laughed silently down at the floorboards, threw his head back and grinned unabashedly at the ruffled prince of Denmark, held out his hand and spoke through a full smile that refused to go away, "Horatio, my good lord."
In mock-anger Hamlet seized Horatio's hand and clasped it in both of his, leaning forward to growl some genteel insult in his face. His snapping blue eyes were startlingly close. A minor sort of high-spirited youthful scuffle ensued: Horatio, laughing, clapping Hamlet's shoulder; Hamlet shoving back; Horatio catching himself on the window sill, his back against the wall, feeling the length of Hamlet's thigh press against his for a clear moment before Horatio's knee dug into the side of Hamlet's thigh and the younger man fell back, breathlessly chuckling, leaning against the wall beside him. Horatio glanced over with a quiet smirk and caught Hamlet staring at him with a sharp, strange wildness in his eyes. He felt it dart into him and tangle with his own core of solid patience, and he held his eyes with Hamlet's for a long time before he looked away.
Horatio was no mystery, not to himself and not to his intimates. If there was one aspect of his nature that spoke for the rest of him, he was a faithful friend of the deepest loyalty. Although his regard for the Bible did not extend much past literary appreciation and a decent man's observation of its basic tenets, he once read the line "Well done, thou good and faithful servant," and it leapt inside him and lay there densely. Good and faithful. Horatio was good, and he was faithful, and over time Hamlet came to silently appreciate those qualities. Always silently, for Horatio was Job to Hamlet's Yahweh, and faith is strong when unacknowledged, and stronger when tested. But the test was not to come for some time.
A letter had come, of course; letters often did. Horatio saw the prince only once after the letter must have arrived. As a roiling midday crowd bore Horatio inexorably along the wet gray sidewalk, he caught a flicker of white hair amid the gray mass and saw him, just his pale head and his unnaturally straight shoulders, flickering into view between passing, undifferentiated forms. Hamlet was hard-faced and cold, his blue eyes large and watery and unfocused, and to Horatio, who knew him, his was the face of a deep, dissolving grief. Then he was gone.
And gone for good and all, Horatio found. The rumor mill was enough to tell Horatio what had happened, but he listened to the breathlessly whispered secrets of gossip-mongers with a muffled jealous tinge, hurt that he had not heard it from the prince's own mouth. There was a deeper ache at the news that the king of Denmark was dead, because Horatio loved his country and his king. Worry and frustration for Denmark's plight troubled him too, with Norway making noises of war, and no great military leader left to stand at the head of Denmark's armies. But it was the memory of Hamlet's face in that moment that drove Horatio to Denmark to attend the king's funeral. While my lord aches from cold or hunger or grief, can I be content?
So Horatio stood in the snow with his head bared as King Hamlet's decorated casket passed him on the shoulders of six captains. Every head on the field was bowed except for one: Hamlet's head was bare, thrown back as if in exultation, but tears brimmed in the corners of his eyes and his stillness was too complete to be mere respectful attention. Horatio looked down and found his hands twisting and wringing his hat with an excruciating fierceness, and he forced breath into paralyzed lungs with a soft hitching gasp. He did not look up again, until the words were said, the coffin lowered, the crowd given the benediction and dismissed. As he turned to trudge away in the snow, he looked back, like Lot's wife, and saw the prince alone by the fresh grave, down on one knee, his wrists crossed over his knee and his head bent upon his wrists. Horatio looked for a moment, hesitated, and then turned quickly and walked away, smoothing the creases in his hat.
Horatio did not attend the wedding of Gertrude and Hamlet's uncle, but he could not avoid the knowledge of it. The city, which two months before had decked its streets in funeral black, now assumed a dutifully joyous air. It seemed to Horatio, walking through the streets on an errand, that the celebration was overdone: in the streets, people looked up quickly and smiled, tight-lipped, at one another, and after the too-bright glare of the sun on the snow, the interior of the pub at which he was to meet Marcellus was as dark as ever.
He stamped the snow from his boots and hung his cloak, and Marcellus rose up from his table to meet him. "Horatio, well met."
"I am glad to see you well, Marcellus," Horatio answered, peeling off his gloves and sliding into a seat at the other man's table. It was oppressively dim in the sullen little tavern, and Horatio glanced about before lifting a rusty eyebrow quizzically at Marcellus. "What business have you?"
Marcellus, uncomfortable, busied himself straightening the cuffs of his jacket and getting the attention of a barmaid to fetch Horatio a beer he didn't want, and finally he leant forward over the table, folded his hands, and regarded Horatio with troubled eyes. "The king is dead, Horatio."
Horatio shifted. "The king is Claudius," he answered steadily.
"Yes, yes. But the old king, King Hamlet--is dead."
"He is. What of it?"
"I saw him."
But for Marcellus' hoarse whisper and deadly seriousness, Horatio would have taken the words to mean the rational, plausible thing: Marcellus had seen the king while he was alive; and what interest was there in that? Most of Denmark had. "When?" Horatio prodded, unconsciously slipping into a mimicry of Marcellus' conspiratorial whisper.
"Yesternight, on guard. Truly, Horatio, I saw him."
Horatio let a long moment, heavy with skepticism, pass. "The king, who is dead and in his grave these two months."
"Yes, the same." Marcellus' eyes were steady and earnest, with no sign of jest. "His spirit, Horatio, his ghost, his soul, only God knows. The king walks."
Horatio threw up his hands in befuddled frustration, picked up his beer, glared at it, and put it down again, then shook back his hair and regarded Marcellus. "Will he walk again?"
"Come with me tonight, Horatio, and see," the other man urged, and Horatio was so exasperated he only promised he would and then stood, tossed money on the table, and left quickly.
But it was true. Horatio had never had the imagination for superstition, but there was no imagining the looming pale figure that menaced silently from a distance; the very winds screamed around that immaterial form, and seeing it was not a matter of belief, but of knowledge. Horatio knew it was the king, and so it was with complete confidence that, with Marcellus and Bernardo, he went to see the prince.
The half-whispered, confidential conversation that followed had him face to face with the prince, speaking with all the sincere earnestness he could dredge up from his honest soul. The prince was dizzying to watch from a distance; close up, hearing every timbre of his young, rich voice and feeling the piercing of his cold blue eyes, Horatio felt light-headed and struggled for his calm steadiness. Hamlet's voice trembled with disgust, speaking of his uncle's marriage to his mother, and Horatio could only quietly affirm, truth-telling; the prince's voice rose to an incredulous tone, roughened with desperate hope, at Horatio's revelation, and trailed away in breathless interrogation. In leave-taking, Hamlet brushed aside their professions of duty and claimed their mutual loves instead, then left them to murmur in awed satisfaction among themselves.
The storm descended full force then. Hamlet followed his father's ghost into the woods and returned hollow-eyed and shaking, a stranger. Then he disappeared into Elsinore and Horatio did not see him again until the night of the play. And that night, before the deception began, Hamlet knelt before him in his lovely black finery, a white bird dressed in black, clasped his hands over Horatio's and whispered sweet, aching sincerities that caught in Horatio's throat and made him want to weep or catch the prince in his arms or shout in frustration, but he only flushed and looked down, murmuring self-deprecation.
After the play, after the grim confirmation of all Hamlet's suspicion, Horatio stood in a doorway, hesitating, watching Hamlet play with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, seeing him hurt even as he jousted at them with his killing tongue, driving them back with scorn. The prince whirled to snap at Polonius and send him running, and then stalked away in a brittle seething agony, and once more Horatio let him go, and went alone to his room in the castle.
It seemed a long time Horatio was alone, only a few hours by the clock, but he had nothing to do, and the clock's pendulum swung with mocking deliberation in its wood and glass confines. He found paper and began a letter to his sister, but put down the pen in mild frustration when after several minutes he could think of nothing to set down after the salutation, and instead he got up and paced impatiently, as though he were waiting for something. He was only waiting until he was sleepy enough to retire, he told himself, but when the rap of peremptory knuckles came on his door, he whirled to greet it with a vindicated satisfaction.
Hamlet was pale and drawn, and he brushed past Horatio at the opening of the door before Horatio could draw breath to invite him in. He was thrumming with pent-up frustrated energy, and there was a streak of blood in his white hair, like a blaze. Horatio made him sit down and poured him brandy. "How goes it, my lord?" he asked quietly. Hamlet shot him a look of fierce reproach, and Horatio's mouth twisted in ironic surrender. Hamlet answered anyway.
"My mother..." Hamlet trailed away, his legs stretched out under the table, arms above his head, tucked behind his neck. Horatio's eyes flicked to the bright streak of red among the prince's white hair, reproaching himself for conceiving of it, even as he laced his fingers together and leaned forward, regarding the prince in silent worry. "My mother may redeem herself," Hamlet finished thoughtfully, his tone grave, but falling short of sanctimony. He uncurled suddenly, coming out of his chair like a loosed spring, and stalked back and forth in a short oval, constrained by the smallness of the room, with a whipping turn at either end. He lifted one hand and ran it through his hair in agitation, and when he brought his hand down to fold it with the other at the small of his back, his hair stood up in feathery spikes, tipped scarlet.
"My lord—"
Hamlet stopped dead and faced Horatio, turning on his heel with a precision worthy of the military, except that Hamlet had never been in the army. "Horatio," he said gently, "tomorrow I will be gone." He stepped closer and showed Horatio his hand, the palm smeared with blood. "There is one less fool in the world," the prince murmured, folded his fingers over his palm and clenched his fist lightly, glanced down and lilted in a sweet soft whisper, "And tomorrow there shall be two less."
He looked up, and Horatio had never seen his cold blue eyes so warm. Wet with passionate tears, sparking with anger or scorn, but never so warm. Horatio's jaw tightened painfully. He reached blindly, his hands closing around Hamlet's; the prince's trapped hands twisted, freed themselves and grasped Horatio's forearms instead, then flew up to clasp his shoulders, and either Horatio was on his feet or Hamlet was on his knees, because the prince's palms were sliding roughly over his stubble-rasped cheeks, his fingertips digging into Horatio's scalp, his face very near. Horatio's hands rose of their own accord and settled on Hamlet's hips, and then he forgot entirely what his hands were doing, because Hamlet had kissed him.
And it was neither tentative and tender as those first courting kisses were supposed to be, nor rough and violent, with clashing teeth and dueling tongues; instead, it was as firm and natural as Horatio's hands on Hamlet's waistline. It was only a warm pressing together of lips, with a gentle suggestion of rhythmic motion and occasionally a soft rasp from two unshaven chins brushing as angles changed.
Hamlet's hands were still in his hair, his thick, collar-length Irish-setter hair, and the prince's fingers were stroking it, combing through it over and over, feeling its texture and the way it lay, and then his hands fell away from Horatio's head and his left hand lay along Horatio's cheek, his fingertips stroking the hair back from Horatio's temple gently. His right hand slid over Horatio's collarbone and down his chest, his palm resting against the flat hardness of his breastbone for a moment before his fingers trailed lightly across Horatio's chest to his side under his coat, and at that point the fairly dignified and chaste decorum that had prevailed between them gave way to grasping, clinging demanding. Horatio's coat was rumpled, pushed back off his shoulders, and finally struggled out of; Hamlet's shirt came untucked from his trousers, and Horatio's long hands ventured beneath it.
Hamlet's hands were splayed over Horatio's sides, high on his ribcage, and at some point their intent altered and he was pushing him back—not away, just back, one hesitant blind step and then another, until the backs of Horatio's knees encountered the edge of the bed and he knew why.
There was a sinking down to the cold bed, and a kicking off of shoes, while the kissing continued slowly and their hands became freer on each other's shoulders, chests, backs and sides. Horatio's resolve to be patient crumbled slowly, like soft sandstone under running water, and in a while, when both their shirts had come off and Hamlet's hands were playing over his hipbones with a blind fascination, he pressed himself up by his elbows and turned over in a swift reversal, pinning the prince's hips down and gathering his shoulders up in his bigger arms.
He bent down and kissed him, his brown-red autumn-leaves hair in disarray. He held Hamlet's pale head between his square-knuckled hands and looked steadily into the blue eyes. Horatio the calm and patient, who had never demanded anything of his lord, held the wild bird trapped beneath the weight of his long, rangy body until the prince's quick breathing slowed and his hands stilled. "My lord," Horatio murmured, his face still hovering just above Hamlet's, their noses bumping occasionally, Horatio's hair trailing along Hamlet's jaw.
Hamlet did not answer, but he slid his hands into Horatio's hair and pulled his head down, pressed his lips fiercely to the other man's forehead and then trailed his mouth down the bridge of his nose, over his cheek and under his jaw, and Horatio's head went back helplessly, his back arching. Hamlet's hands were at his waist, slipping under the fabric of his trousers, cold fingers warming quickly against his skin. After an awkward few moments of shoving and twisting, Horatio was free of the trousers, and the air was cool on his back and legs.
Then Horatio's hands were running down the outsides of Hamlet's thighs, feeling the contour of the long muscles there and finally plucking, discontented, at the coarse cloth covering that skin. His hands moved up, felt a warm tumescence, unfastened buttons and rucked cloth down over Hamlet's slim hips, let the prince squirm out of the trousers and kick them off, out of the way.
And then, with the weight of Horatio's dense bones pressing them together, there was unadulterated heat and pressure, a small cacophony of breath and gasps and groans. At one point Hamlet gritted his teeth and gave a sharp bucking upward twist of his hips, altering prospects considerably; Horatio shifted and slid, and Hamlet bit his neck, hard. An unbearably slow rhythm followed, breathless syncopated motion separated by occasional moments of agonizing stillness. After a time Hamlet turned his face into Horatio's neck and shuddered silently, and an instant later Horatio stiffened, caught and strangled a gasp from his own throat, bit his own lip to stifle the groan rising in his chest, and then eased into complete motionlessness, not breathing. A slow, silent moment passed, and then one pale, languid hand drifted up to brush Horatio's loose hair back from his face. He sighed and relaxed slowly, withdrew gingerly and then sank back to the bed, one long leg lying over Hamlet's, one arm across the prince's chest, one hand caressing white, scarlet-streaked hair, his mouth open against his neck, tasting the sweat cooling there. The lamp had gone out. Horatio was asleep soon, his russet head resting on Hamlet's shoulder, but the prince, staring up into the darkness, did not sleep for some time.
In the morning Hamlet was gone, and by afternoon he was bound for England—so, not killed for Polonius' murder, but sent away. In weeks he was back, tight-lipped and without his two schoolfellows, but if the prince of Denmark who came out of the woods with a wild light in his eyes after speaking with his dead father's ghost seemed a stranger to Horatio, this Hamlet was stranger still. He was nihilistic, morose and jovial by turns, possessed by a morbid wit, and it was as inconceivable to approach him it had been before the night of the play.
Horatio could only watch him from afar, so he watched, patient and passive and calm, as Hamlet wept and raged at Ophelia's grey, barren funeral, as he told without any feeling but scorn of the deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and as he gently mocked the foolish Osric. The prince was as cold and hard as ice, but he glowed with Horatio's memory of his warmth, if only for a little while before the white-winged bird fell.
Hamlet died like a saint, martyred, that day as Horatio watched. In that desperate hopeless moment, Horatio would have followed his prince into death, but that was not the loyalty Hamlet wanted from him. So Horatio absented himself from felicity awhile, to do his lord's last bidding. At Hamlet's death, his dearest and most loyal friend stood over him on the cold marble with the charge of truth-telling weighing on his shoulders, and his tears were sweet.
Well done, thou good and faithful servant.