i don't hate thomas, but i'm not sure i like him either. despite my mixed emotions regarding our cunning little friend (or perhaps because of them), he's a character intriguing to write.
XXX
When I was one-and-twenty
I heard a wise man say,
"Give crowns and pounds and guineas
But not your heart away;
Give pearls away and rubies
But keep your fancy free."
But I was one-and-twenty,
No use to talk to me.
When I was one-and-twenty
I heard him say again,
"The heart out of the bosom
Was never given in vain;'
Tis paid with sighs a plenty
And sold for endless rue."
And I am two-and-twenty,
And oh, 'tis true, 'tis true.
He wants. He wants so much that it hurts, that it twists in him like some screw, pinning his heart to his ribs. He wants satisfaction, surety. He wants to feel contentedness. He wants, he wants. Something in him is always niggling, aching, ranging for revenge for some long forgotten grievance. He should be more. Why isn't he more?
He thinks, sometimes, of a summer when he had almost felt…at rest. Not at peace, but a lull certainly, a moment where some gear in his chest loosened and ran a bit more smoothly than before. Then it had all been snatched away, torn cruelly from his grasp and thrown carelessly into the fire to be consumed as if none of it had meant anything at all.
Thomas had loved.
At first it was quiet, stifled - he had never met anyone so like himself, like a mirror image or like some missing part of him that had gone unnoticed until then. His grace, his sly smile; how Thomas had scorned William with his puppy eyes and his pathetic subservience to his attraction, his mooning over Daisy's eyes, her tiny, quick hands. But now - his heart pounded. His palms sweated. His breath hitched in his chest. Everything the man did made Thomas feel as though he were being pummeled by wave after wave of sudden and primal want. Not his usual longings; this was another league entirely. Something headier. Something almost…giddy.
The letters. The stolen kisses. It had been forbidden, fleeting, but infinitely delicious. To be wanted, instead of always being the want-er - how startling, how novel. He'd hardly dared to believe it, but eventually the newness had settled into something comfortable, something lazy. He was loved. He had obtained that much; soon everything else would fall into place.
But it hadn't, and now Thomas sits in the ruins of what he had been so certain would be his recompense at last. And he can't help but laugh through his tears, because even covered in dust disguised as flour, he thinks of his first and only love and how differently things might have turned out.
The letters are gone. So is his Duke. Gone up in ashes like everything else Thomas wants.
XXX
poem by a. e. housman