of ladies most deject and wretched

[chariestmaid]

The first feeling is fury. When Ophelia wakes from a warbling, uncertain dream like the reedy call of a recorder, there are tears in her eyes, but she can tell they're tears of anger. Ophelia would always cry, whenever she tried to argue on her own behalf, always broke down and bit her tongue before she got another word in. But if something saddened her, she could never summon tears. Her father didn't believe her because of it — she doubted her own feelings, doubted they counted if she couldn't express them appropriately. Hamlet could, he could swear his love with all the holy vows of heaven, before he ripped up his own words and threw them back at her.

And now her father’s left her, to weep herself to sleep. All propriety, all decorum left with him, not that it was been enough to cover her. He put his jacket on her shoulders instead of his arm, and turned his back to her, to go with the king.

Fury fades, and what remains is a drowsy numbness, a sense of wrongness as she sees herself as if from the outside: a missing cog in a breaking-down machine. What should she be feeling now? Ophelia doesn't know.

Hamlet was right, she thinks. She wasn't made to live in a court. She should have been a convent girl. She should have worn a veil, so no man could ever see her face, nor smear the paintings from it.  The chariest maid, her brother once said, is prodigal enough if she unmask her beauty to the moon. She keeps her eyes down, lest the moon catch her crying, or her angry tears unmask her.

When she looks up again, she's still clutching her father's jacket, thinking of the shame she'll bring when she's found out of doors. How did she come to be in these woods? It’s a quiet relief, after the stone walls of Elsinore, to see so much green.

Comments

[chariestmaid]

Ophelia laughs at her first, bitter thought, which is to say, flatly and without humor, “That depends on who you ask, and whose idea of goodness.” Oh. She said it. Almost stubbornly, she looks away and scrubs at her face.

[ninth_cavalier]

Ah. "Didn't mean it like that," Gideon says. "That shit's none of my business. You can be bad as hell if you want, I like a bad girl." She peers at her a little. "I meant are you, like. Okay. Uh, well? Unhurt?" She adds this last after a bit of a pause, because well seems pretty obviously out of reach.

[chariestmaid]

I like a bad girl shudders through her, down to her core. She looks at Gideon, truly looks at her, with that direct stare she’s long been told was unmannerly. The skull paint, the shorn red hair, the eyes as bright as moonlight. Brighter. Ophelia doesn’t know what to say to a girl like that. “I am whole,” she says, and even that feels like a lie. But she is. She touches her own throat, which her lover did not snap, even when he held her tight enough to choke her.

[ninth_cavalier]

"Great," says Gideon. "Cool. Uh, not everyone is, when they first get here." She dithers a little, shifting from foot to foot, then—drawing on the tactics of the nicest people here—asks, "You hungry?"

[chariestmaid]

"I have not eaten," she says, "some while." Which is not precisely an answer, but precisely as true as she can make it. "Pray pardon me ... where is this?"

[ninth_cavalier]

"Nobody's named it yet," says Gideon. "It's—well, right now we're in the woods, but there's a big ass house, too, and then a littler house that some other people built. And then there's gardens, and a cove, and a lake. And that's pretty much it. Bubble world—can't get out." She takes another assessing look at Ophelia. "On the bright side, though, nobody can get in after you, either."

[chariestmaid]

She clutches her father's coat anew, clutching the lapels, gathering them in beneath her throat. "Is't e'en so?" She laughs, hollow. "Then perhaps this is where I am meant to be."

[ninth_cavalier]

"Yeah, uh, a lotta people end up feeling that way," says Gideon. "Where you from, anyway? Narnia? Space? Dinosaur times?"

[chariestmaid]

"Denmark," she says flatly. She thinks again of how she would explain her place and time, the uncertain future she and her lover have found themselves in, Hamlet writing letters of discoveries abroad and she, held apart in a court unchanging. Doubt thou the stars are fire -- but what else could the stars be? "Where are you from?"

[ninth_cavalier]

"Pluto," says Gideon. "Um—the planet."

[chariestmaid]

Ophelia's brow lightly furrows, with a delicate frown. Her father forbade her from spending her chilled nights alone under the stars -- for her health, he said, and if she protested but my brother he would interrupt at once with you are not your brother. But Ophelia would pore in private over star maps and mathematical models, recent re-orderings of the heavens with the sun at the center, or the earth and sun circling in tandem. If Pluto is a planet, it's a planet farther than any map has gone. "Named," she asks, "for the Roman god of the underworld?"

[ninth_cavalier]

Gideon's brow furrows. "Uh," she says. "Maybe? We didn't call it Pluto, when I lived there, that's just what the angel told me it was called."

[chariestmaid]

“It would explain your paintings,” Ophelia remarks, in a floating, factual tone. She must be too tired of sobbing and screaming to express the slightest shock at this woman hailing from some planet beyond stars. “Pluto is also the lord of the dead.”

[ninth_cavalier]

"Oh, shit, really?" Gideon asks, surprised. "I didn't know that. We're definitely the spookiest of the Nine Houses. Kinda take pride in it. Keepers of the Tomb, and everything."