This Mortal Coil

.-.

He always liked Laertes the best.

I mean, out of all those dead Danish people in that goddamn play, Laertes was the only one he could relate to. He was a pawn, something that the Dane used and threw away. His whole story eerily relates to another story that he knows quite well, and Laertes probably would've turned out a lot like the star of that certain story if he had managed to, you know, live. Not that life had all that much use to it, anyway.

He ended up doing the right thing, though. Granted, the right thing was to get the king killed, but hey. All's fair in love in war, right?

He keeps reminding himself of that.

Marie keeps looking at him, keeps shooting him worried glances from across the room. He rolls her eyes and tries his very best to ignore her. She can be so melodramatic sometimes.

He waits until he doesn't feel her eyes on him anymore, then he looks back over at her. He would look at her for hours, if he could. Just become invisible, and follow her around, watch her eat, and sleep, and work, and joke around with friends in the break room. Be her ghost. Sometimes he thinks he might be in love with her, but then again, he's thought that he's been in love before, and well, he remembers how that all turned out. Get thee to a nunnery.

For now, he's just content to look at her. Brown hair, reflected in the firelight. Soft green eyes. Pale skin. Long legs. Long neck. Small hips. He stops himself before he starts thinking about how she would feel, how warm she would be. How sweet, and pure, and just fucking right...

He's spent a lot of time thinking about not thinking about her. He's honed it to an art form. Not just about Marie, either, about lots of other things. There's the Ex-Best Friend that he doesn't think about. The Dark Lord that he doesn't think about. The Ex-Girlfriend that he doesn't think about. The Dead People that he doesn't think about. It can be exhausting, all that not thinking.

Marie looks back over, and catches him staring. She stares right back. He likes that about her--she never looks away, even when she wants to. And you know she does.

"What are you thinking?" The question rolls out of his mouth like honey. Drifts over to her, surrounds her. She averts her eyes, finally.

She takes a swig of her beer, the brown glass glinting in the light from the fire. The condensation on the bottle makes a ring on the stone when she sets it down.

"I'm thinking about you, actually." Marie brings her eyes back up to stare at him. Ouch.

This time, he's the one that looks away, looks down at her bare feet. The hem of her skirt barely brushes the top of them, and she taps one of them against the stone floor as she waits for his reply.

"Really." Brilliant, Potter, his inner-Snape sneers. Maybe he is insane. Snapes in his head, ghosts on the rampart, hey nonny-nonny...

"Yup." She tilts her head to the left and studies him, her tongue peeking out of the corner of her mouth. He tries not to think about that, so he looks up at her forehead instead.

"Have you ever read Hamlet?" he asks. Might as well.

She looks slightly puzzled, for a moment. "The play?"

"No, the Nancy Drew novel." He rolls his eyes. Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, but it's better than no wit at all, right?

She makes a little huffing sound, then waves her hand, as if to shoo away all his sarcasm and defense mechanisms. Damn, and he worked so hard on those, too. "Yeah. In high school, I think."

"The parts you went to, you mean." He forgets that she's technically a muggle, sometimes. He takes a drink from his own beer, wishing he had something stronger.

"Pfft. Like they would've taught me anything I didn't already know." She leans her head back against the wall, and tucks her knees under her chin. For a moment, she looks about twenty years younger. She sighs, and says, "so what about Hamlet?"

"Nothing. I was...just thinking about it. The play, I mean."

She looks at him intensely, she's always doing that, and speaks. "That's the one with the Danish king, right? Where his uncle kills his father and marries his brother?"

"Danish prince, actually. But yeah." And there goes the not thinking again, when she stretches her neck to the left and her neckline falls, and now that he's Not. Thinking. About. Marie. He's reminded of the other things that he's Not. Thinking. About. And bloody hell, why can't memory be an escape instead of a prison? Icarus was allowed to fly before he fell into the ocean. His own sea of troubles comes from without as well as within, and oh, there are moments when he'd (die/kill/cry/lie) for a bare bodkin and the right to use it.

"Harry?" She's talking again. "You don't have to talk if you don't want to. I get it." She looks almost sad, and he remembers that everyone has their demons. Bodkins. Bugger that.

"Hamlet was an idiot. Had to care about what was right, and he had to hate, as well. If he'd been sane or smart, he'd have killed Claudius in the first act." Vengeance, justice, mercy, and an ending there. No need to complicate things with dead girlfriends and venomous swords and flights of angels to sing thee to thy rest. Such men are dangerous. They think too much.

"Well, he made it exciting, you gotta give him that." She grins, and it's wry and sad and dark and light. Ophelia drowning. Hail Mary, full of grace... "Besides, if you think about it, it was the ghost's fault for being difficult. The dead are always trouble."

They really are -- the only ones who don't answer back when he screams at them, the only ones who don't tell him what they want when he asks. Dead is dead and what do the dead want with him? You can't ever teach them manners, either. Rude, rude, all the way. The afterworld must be an appalling place.

She keeps talking. That's all right, he doesn't mind.

"...I always found Claudius's character kind of interesting, though."

"How so?" He tilts his head. Marie is talking. Ophelia. Crusade and cause. She pulls a cigarette out of an old pack on the ground and lights it in the fireplace. Smoke curls around her head. Tragic. Deadly, this woman.

She gestures with her cigarette as she speaks. "The sorry truth about Claudius is that he killed a man because he could. An unknown, unnamed king stood in his way, he killed him, end of story. The rest was the inevitability of character, and how could he not marry and destroy the lonely queen?"

Right. How could he not? Run from your fate, and the bastard speeds up and kills your godfather. Face your fate, call him names, tell him you're not afraid, and he...not thinking about it. No. Fuck.

Marie stands up, the sweater that's wrapped around her shoulders falling to the ground in a bundle of wool and blue. She walks over to the bar and grabs another beer. She looks up at him through her long lashes.

"Want one?" God yes.

"Nah, I'm good." She shrugs and walks back over to her former perch. It'd probably be a good idea to say something, like now. "So you tend to find cold blooded incestuous kings fascinating?"

The corners of her lips turn up slightly. "Not fascinating. Interesting. There's a difference, Harry," she says in a slightly chastising tone, and he's suddenly reminded--powerfully, goddammit--of Hermione.

Not. Thinking.

"So did you ever read it?"

Look back. She's talking, prat.

Nursery rhyme. Look back, look back, there's blood on the track! Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her mother forty whacks.

"Read what?"

And when she'd seen what she had done, she gave her father forty-one!

"Hamlet, stupid."

"Oh, yeah." Sigh. "A long time ago."

"Must've stuck with you. You remember it pretty well."

"Uh-huh." Lot of good it did him. Lucidity and sanity mean nothing when scourges and ministers crowd into your dreams. Does it matter? The beast is no more, but his hawk is his handsaw and his north-north-west madness no longer has a method.

The not thinking is getting really hard, and things start creeping in like the dawn in that fucking russet mantle, and memories of bitter business and accidental judgments. There's tricks in the world, and he wears his rue with a difference.

Marie is humming, some indistinct tune with no words. This nothing's more than matter. He knew Yorick (and Osric) well, those two fellows of infinite jest. And his red-headed Horatio, his Gertrude (sister/lover/mother). His Claudius. Ah, Claudius, you manipulative old man. He wonders if he ever learned that he wasn't the divinity that shaped our ends.

Marie (and/or/is/will be) Ophelia. (Minus the drowning inane part. You know, hopefully.) To be or not to be? Well let be, duh.

"Harry."

He looks over at Marie, who's stopped humming, he realizes. She looks at him intently and he sees in her gaze all the things he missed. Misses. Salvation? Love? She walks over to him and holds out her hand. What the hell.

"You hungry?" He knows not 'seems.'

"Sure." He grabs her hand and exeunt, and gives Icarus a final thought, of his pathetically perfect wings of wax. The play's the thing, and he's still Fate's bitch, and love/lust/friendship still royally sucks. No escaping the truth, thank you Yorick, Benedick.

The bright light burns his eyes and his scar (that fucking scar...), and he thinks that maybe Icarus had a point. He got burned, and he drowned, and he died, but at least he got to touch the sun.

-fin-