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

[timebethine]

In time, though, Ophelia will begin to hear the steady, rhythmic thunk of wood being split, and dry logs clattering against one another. Laertes is out preparing firewood for the winter, sweat soaking his collar and underarms; he's lost in the work of woodcutting, his world narrowed to the axe and the log and the growing pile of split pieces against the side of the house.

He pauses for a breath, wipes his brow, and takes a long drink of water. His gaze drifts, as it always does, to the edge of the forest.

--and his glass shatters on the ground as he runs to sweep up his sister in his arms. "Ophelia!"

[quote_gentle_unquote]

By this point in the morning, Susan has returned her bow and quiver to her rooms and is out again, this time in search of three things: a sense of how the orchards are coming to fruit, and when she might need to arrange time to preserve their splendor; clarification on whether the grasshoppers she spotted yesterday are a new species or whether a familiar one has simply migrated; and some flowers for her rooms.

She's just easing a grasshopper specimen into a well-ventilated jar when she spots the newcomer and rises slowly from her crouch. "Good morning."

[aflashbastard]

"--and that's exactly when Blanche says to Dorothy that--" A long patrol in the woods with Sagramore calls for a long tale about the Golden Girls. Yet another newcomer? Really? As Crowley takes her in, there's a touch of something genuine in his question. "...Are you alright?"

[sagramore]

Sagramore stares. There's something about the woman's curls and the freckles just barely visible over the bridge of her nose that seems familiar, so familiar that he forgets to be gruff and confrontational.

[papadopoulos]

Apollo wakes early, as usual --it's before he has run into a certain someone on the beach, of course, but he is not usually accustomed to finding unfamiliar faces out here in the woods, so early. The woods are more his sister's domain than his, he always feels some uneasiness in them after his experiences with the grove of Dodona and nymphs that will, for our purposes, go unnamed at the present. But this person seems lost and upset, so he might as well try to help.

"Hello," he calls, warming the air around them just a little to make it more comfortable. "Did you just end up here?"

[ninth_cavalier]

Gideon's kind of been thinking about the concept of knighthood, lately, ever since baby Lancelot was here calling her sir and accompanying her on quests and shit. She'd liked it, is the thing, liked the implications of it, all the stupid crap about bravery and chivalry and seeking glory for your Lady (or Lord, but like, fuck that). So when she's walking in the woods and comes across a beautiful stranger with tear tracks on her cheeks, wandering as if lost, she thinks, score, and then she thinks, wow, I'm an asshole, and then she says, "Hey, uh, you good?"

[chariestmaid]

The hug threatens to crush all the feelings back in her. She laughs — nothing’s funny, but she laughs. Her brother — “Laertes,” she gasps. She clasps him close, a child again clutching at her brother’s hand because she had no mother to cling to, no one’s skirts to hide behind. Her father’s jacket isn’t enough.

She weeps anew, and this time isn’t sadness, either. She’s so, so glad to hold her brother again, she doesn’t question why he’s here, how he came back from France.

[chariestmaid]

“Is it?” asks Ophelia, flat and free of affect. Yes, she must have wept the whole night long, burning with bitterness and anger, and burnt herself out. She’s only ashes now.

[quote_gentle_unquote]

Susan gives her a sharper look, assessing. At her feet, the grasshopper leaps from the jar; she leaves both behind and moves a step or two closer. "It needn't be," she says, once she's close enough to see the tear-tracks on this woman's cheeks; there have been any number of times that Susan has bitten the proverbial head off anyone who's tried to placate her in her grief. "What's wrong?"

[timebethine]

"Ophelia, first star of my heart, I've hoped so long for thee to be here--" begins Laertes--but then she begins to weep, and he draws back enough to stroke the tears from her cheek with his thumb. "Why dost thou weep, Ophelia?"

[lightbearinglord]

Lan Wangji flies often above these woods, trees flashing by beneath the glassiness of Bichen's blade and the sturdy soles of his clean white boots. If his patrol has become routine, and it has, its motions engraved into the habits of each day deeply and cleanly, his attention to any possible disruption is no duller than it was at the outset, when he first arrived and dedicated himself to protecting this place.

Disruption may be an unkind word for a young woman with fresh tears glistening in her eyes. Nonetheless, Lan Wangji's sword stills, and he drifts downward. When he descends to the ground from that thin blade, it is with a soft footstep. "Young mistress."

[chariestmaid]

"We were children," she laughs through the tears, laying her hand on his, "when you last called me thou."

[timebethine]

He bends his head to rest his brow against hers. "This place has stripped me of ceremony, along with every care but thy happiness. Tell me, Ophelia, wherefore thy tears?"

[chariestmaid]

“When we were children,” she continues, as if he had said nothing, “the other maids would mock me by telling me lies, because I was too credulous. Do you remember? Father would not let you confront them, since they were ladies, and you had to be a gentleman.”

For a flickering moment, she fears her brother won’t understand her, he’ll doubt her like Hamlet did, Hamlet who’d always understood. Hamlet who knew how much she hated to be tricked, that hot flush of shame going back to her childhood.

She shuts her eyes, and says, “I didn’t care. I just wanted my brother with me.” Not to shout at silly girls who found her manners funny, but to stand by her side, so she wasn’t alone. How long has she felt so alone?

[timebethine]

Quietly, "I'm here now. I would I had been beside thee then."

[chariestmaid]

The sound emerging from Ophelia's throat is all animal pain -- it feels like something separate from her, some wild creature clutched to her breast so no one can take it from her. Like the kittens she kept hidden under her bed as a child. (They never would have stayed hidden, without her brother’s help, because she was too young and foolish to hide when she cared about something.)

She coughs through the sound, and beats at her heart. She bites down what she wants say, the words of an old tune she heard when she first thought she might be in love. By gis, and by Saint Charity, alack, and fie, for shame … She doesn’t want to say something girlish and foolish, the kind of thing her father would chastise her for saying, like, “Prince Hamlet does not love me.” It doesn’t capture half of why her heart is breaking, but it’s what spills out of her mouth nonetheless.

[chariestmaid]

Ophelia laughs, then claps her hand over her mouth. She should not laugh. She knows that much. She’s failed at every level she can imagine failing, failed what seemed like a holy mission when her own queen said so shall I hope your virtues will bring him to his wonted way again. It hurts, to think how self-involved she was, how she ever imagined someone could love her that much. She’s being self-involved now, barely looking at the two men who have greeted her.

Scrubbing at her eyes, she says, “Ay, sirs,” because that’s safe. “God give you good evening.”

[chariestmaid]

“Ay,” Ophelia says, quiet, safe. Perhaps she’s somewhere she ought not to be, but at least if she admits it, someone can guide her back to where she belongs again. She lifts her eyes, meeting Apollo’s. “Where is here, my lord?”

[quote_gentle_unquote]

Prince Hamlet. Susan's heart leaps, then sinks. All too clearly she remembers the visit of a different sister, one whose bright-shining torch also got snuffed far too early. There are others here today, and so Ophelia surely cannot stay. Laertes will be beside himself. She shall need to apprise Lancelot of the situation tonight, and together they will need to devise a way to comfort Laertes tomorrow. If he was miserable when he first learned of Ophelia's death, surely that misery will be trebled to have been able to hold her for one day only. Her default solution - familiar pastries for a sweets-loving Dane - shan't work; she imagines they'll turn ashen in his mouth. Lancelot will surely have ideas though; she'll only have to press a little for him to remember that his ideas are good.

She sets these thoughts aside for the time being. Even if Ophelia shan't be around for very long, it won't do to focus on the looming pain Laertes shall feel tomorrow when Ophelia's pain is right in front of her. The other sounds Ophelia is making, the animal sounds of grief, are ones Susan knows well. Susan feels them in her heart. "How perfectly dreadful," she says, crossing over to stand closer. "Is he being jolly horrible about it? So many men often are."

[aflashbastard]

Crowley looks over at Sagramore's uncharacteristic silence with mild confusion and concern. Sagramore loves a bit. He never lapses from his part in a bit unless something's wrong. Well, it's up to him to greet this newcomer. "Evening," he echoes Ophelia. "Look, if you need anything, I'm Crowley and this is Sagramore--"

[papadopoulos]

"No one's entirely certain," he says apologetically. "A different world than your own, I think? Unless your world has two moons, of course. There are people here with more than that, though."

[sagramore]

"Crowley," Sagramore says, as her speech makes the connection click. "Leave her alone. This is my sister."

[chariestmaid]

Ophelia laughs, hollow, hopeless, then flushes when she realizes there’s nothing here to laugh at. At the guttering flash of hope she felt in her chest, she supposes, at the word sister. “What means your lordship?”

[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.

[aflashbastard]

Crowley looks between Sagramore and Ophelia. He might, like the general population, not know the plot of Hamlet -- but he does know that it's time for him to leave. He nods. "Ciao." And he's gone.