Disclaimer: Not mine
Here We Break Upon the Shore
His balcony faces the dawn, and he waits for the eastern wind each morning, waiting for his love.
He does not seem the type to pine, so it shocks his family, his companions, when it is discovered several months into Naoji's indefinite departure that he is wasting away. His family and friends send envoys to coax him into submission: Orpherus is a blaring idiosyncrasy, soon disposed of; his mother, equally so. Camus, a joint endeavor, is a little less forthright, and Ludwig is almost convinced by his soft hands and pleading eyes. But in the end even Ludwig's beloved cousin is unable to move him, so the boy announces as he steps at last from his mentor's rooms. "He is waiting for him." Camus shrugs. "He says he's going to wait as long as it takes."
"Remind him of his ambitions," Orpherus urges. "His dreams. Surely they will move him."
Camus only shakes his head. "He doesn't care about politics. Not anymore."
Gradually their entreaties fade, become further and shorter in length and sincerity. His family endows him generously with an Eurusian window and many servants to ensure in vain that he eats.
The doctors are finally called in, sometime into the seventh month. They lift his hair and check his spine and heartbeat. "We're sorry," they say, one after another, even the experts the Lichtenstein import from the old country. "We can find nothing physically wrong with him.
It is only then that someone thinks to write Ludwig's absent lover, to plead his return, if not for the sake of his own education then at least for Ludwig's life. Ludwig smiles for the first time in half a year when this is reported to him.
"If he is to return, it will be from his on convictions; no entreaty of yours will ever sway him." Then quietly from within his pillows, "I've taught him too well for that."
"He's not coming back."
"I know."
So he waits. Eight months. Ten months. A year. And several after. His hair has faded to a soft downy white, what of it is still left on his head. He no longer speaks.
"Please," Eduard, Orpherus, even Caums occasionally, come to beg him. "Please. We need you. The King needs you." Ludwig will only lower his eyes and – in a familiar expression of derision that brings his friends such sweet false hope – say nothing, and they leave again.
So they wait, so he waits. For a memory, for his love whom the world so fatefully tore away from him. For the end of the world. Whichever reaches him first.
