[Open Post: A Flower That Blooms but Once]

[mobled_queen]

There's a woman walking slowly through the gardens of the Mansion: red-haired and beautiful, even in her fifties; the sun strikes fire from the emerald necklace at her throat and the flyaway strands of her hair. There's a warmth in her eyes that invites you in, that says she could be a confidante and a friend--and, too, a shrewdness that seems to see through you as though you were a clear lake. She touches each late bloom and spray of tawny grass with careful hands.

A part of her knows that this is only a temporary visitation, more than a dream and less than a miracle. She wears a queer little pocketwatch on a chain around her neck, and it ticks down the hours until she must depart again.

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[mobled_queen]

"But did they?" she asks, gently prompting.

[wickedwit]

"They might've," he says, as though it's the first time he's ever considered it. As though he isn't holding his breath every time, waiting. "There are parts I don't like, when I tell them. And some I've had no choice but to tell. Once, I picked up a book I thought I recognized, and as if by magic -- which of course it was -- I was a child in body and mind again. Terrified to be lost, and even more terrified I'd be found." With a short breath of laugh, "You know I wasn't the most talkative of children. But even so, I'd forgotten how I used to feel. I thought I was sullen, suspicious. I didn't like anyone more than they liked me, I didn't try to make them like me. I only cared about myself. I'd heard it so often I think it became true. But it wasn't yet. The moment anyone was kind to me, I'd follow them the way some flowers follow the sun. I can't believe I was that guileless. One of my friends said I was sweet afterward."

[mobled_queen]

"You were," says Gertrude, tugging him close enough that she can give him another sideways hug. "Sweet and shy. And you never expected kindness, so when you found it on your plate, you gobbled it all up as fast as you could. I worried about you so much, Claudius. I think I've spent most of my life worrying about you."

She opens the door to the greenhouse, to the little paradise that Claudius has crafted with his friends. Warm, wet air turns to misty furls as it escapes, carrying with it the mossy perfume of life. "Here ... I don't worry about you. I think you're going to be all right."

[wickedwit]

"I love you."

He was going to be decorous. He was going to be come to it carefully. The warmth of the greenhouse, the warmth that's stealing over him now, over his face and his heart and his hand in hers -- how can be cool and calm? She knows him. She's always known him, always found him, and here she's found him again.

And he's going to weep, like a child. A child crushed by the first kindness, and the last, never expecting it, never expecting to keep it. Anything he cares for -- he can't.

"I've always loved you."

[mobled_queen]

"Claudius," she says, gentle as morning. She aches in a place deeper than her heart; she aches in her core, in her marrow, as though all her body is crumbling to dust and her skin is a thin shell of porcelain around it. She folds her hands around both of his on the threshold. "I love you, too. But I know I'll be leaving you in good hands when I go."

[wickedwit]

"Don't," he says. He's begging. He's weeping. He should argue -- you can't. He should say I've been here, I know. There's no way out. I love you, too. I love you. I love you. It's echoing in him like a heartbeat. It's all he wanted to hear, but he couldn't, not while his brother was alive, not while the same blood ran in them both, and he didn't deserve it even if he longed for it. No one wants to hear that story. No one wants to hear the story of a man born to a line of tyrants who became a tyrant himself because he couldn't be anything else, because no one taught him to be kind, except for one woman. "Do you have to?"

[mobled_queen]

Gertrude touches the watch ticking at her breastbone, slower than her heartbeat. Then she draws the slim chain over her head and presses it into Claudius's palm. "I have to," she says, and he's known her long enough that surely he can hear how much of the resolve in her voice is feigned. "And even if I didn't, I would. Denmark needs a hand at the helm--and whoever her captain is, you and I both know that I've been steering that ship a long time."

[wickedwit]

"It's my fault." It's honest. True as the ticking in his palm. Everyone lies in Elsinore -- whatever sins he has to confess, lying will never be the worse of it. But he meant to lie to Gertrude his whole life, and what can he do now, but tell her the truth? "I'm the one who left it rudderless. I made a choice -- I made it for you, when it wasn't mine to make. I love you. I wanted the world for you. You gave a life to me -- I'd never have lived without you -- and what did I give you in return?"

[mobled_queen]

She raises her hand to his chin, tilting it up so that he can't help but meet her eyes. Her gaze is clear and certain. "You gave me my freedom," she says, and--she may never have the chance again--she presses her lips to his.

[wickedwit]

I love you. I love you. That's what his heartbeat is saying. His first love, pounding in his chest. His first kiss -- he hardly remembers it. A woman who pitied him more than she loved him, who saw him desperate to be liked, chasing someone older. They'll call this incest, back at court. A pathetic boy who wants his sister. He'd have to spend his whole life proving them wrong, and he wouldn't ever get it. He'd die at the end of his play, with some stirring last words he'll never get to know.

Not here. Not here in a glass house sweeter than Eden, not here with the first person who wanted him to be happy, and it's the first kiss he never had with her. Like he'd never kissed before, but she'd never ask him to save it, and it might be better for it. I love you. I'd give my life and my soul for you. That's his heart, speaking for him, speaking what he couldn't say. I love you. And his heart says don't leave me, but the next beat says please, be free.

[mobled_queen]

Tears gather in the corners of her eyes. It hurts that she gave more than thirty years of her life to a brute when this sweet boy was waiting for her all along--it hurts that, when at last they can kiss, it's for a moment as fleeting as a lily's bloom. She wishes she could savor the taste of him forever, savor the solid warmth of him and the scent of his hair and the way he raises himself a little on his toes to meet her mouth. She wishes she could put all of this in a pomander and clutch it to her face on lonely winter nights, breathing in the memory of this transient sweetness.

When they break, she rests her cheek against his. "Hold onto this," she says softly. Her voice is thick. "I know I will."

[wickedwit]

His cheek is wet on Gertrude, but even with his tears, he's smiling. He runs his fingers through hers, in the hand he's still holding; the other clutches that ticking clock like he could keep time still with it. He can't. "Always," he swears to her, the word full of heartache and wonder -- and the smile, the smile's in it, too. "As long as I love you. I always will."

[mobled_queen]

"Just sit with me a while," she says, pulling him toward the bench where she'd sat with Galahad not long before. "Tell me about all of your adventures here--all your new friends. Give me every joy you've had here, until ... well." She lays her head against his shoulder, wrapping her arm comfortably around his and threading their hands together around the ticking heartbeat of the watch. "I've missed your stories so much."

[wickedwit]

He wishes he could sit like this and grow old with her, wishes he could have her here when he does grow old and his knees and back ache and he has to rest from bending in the garden. He wishes he could hold her hand, watching what he's grown, on a day when he looks back on his life and wonders whether it was enough. He wishes. But this is the moment they have.

"I left a great deal out of my stories, you know," he says with a helpless laugh, looking up at the glass ceiling and the sky beyond it. "But you read between the lines every time. You must have, if you can tease me about my tastes in bleeding men. Speaking of, did you know young Laertes is here?"

[mobled_queen]

"I heard you danced with him," she laughs, delighted to have all their secrets out in the open at last. "Is he a lover, too? You always were bold with married men."

[wickedwit]

"His husband was the first thing we had in common. When Laertes and I re-met, he was respectful and obedient, in the way of an attendant who follows his orders to the letter to avoid being asked to do anything more. Between you and me, it put me off using my title. When it's the only thing you have to compel someone to follow you, you realize how hollow it feels. Then he told me he'd taken up with Sagramore, and -- well, where else but here could I talk to someone like him about such shared interests?" What he means by someone like him is left to Gertrude's interpretation: someone as guarded as fiercely as the chamberlain's son, someone so reserved and circumspect in court, or simply someone that good-looking. Not that Claudius didn't have his share of good-looking company, but it's still useful having an excuse to talk. "He also wished to learn alchemy from me. But we didn't become lovers for some time, always dancing around each other, never to the same tune. The first time we shared a proper dance was in the outside garden, making up the steps as we went."

[mobled_queen]

"A friend, then." She unlaces her fingers to stroke the concavity of his palm; it may feel, in some way, like how Galahad says go on. "Tell me more about your friends. Lan Wangji had some particularly nice things to say about you."

[wickedwit]

Claudius smiles with fond memory, curling his fingers under Gertrude's touch. "Master Lan Wangji was one of the first men I met, back when there were no more than five of us. The first thing I noticed in him was his composure. Being in a new place without a common etiquette, afraid to share too much of myself, I envied him and wished to copy him -- the way I would copy any courtier versed in the manners of court, when I was younger and hoping to look like I belonged. You know I envy men like that, who seem to float through life with grace and certainty, always knowing how to behave. But such men don't give their secrets easily. So I played the host. I offered him a drink. And ..."

Here he laughs, hiding his smile behind the fist of his other hand. "I learned straight away there were exceptions to his composure. Lan Wangji has a remarkable reaction to alcohol. A single drink, and he sleeps. Then he wakes moments later, in the most suggestible and … adorable of states. I'm afraid I took advantage of his suggestibility, saying I was his new friend. He’d told me about his husband, Wei Wuxian, asked for him first thing, and -- Gertrude. He asked it so sweetly. Like a lost and lonely child. I compelled him to tell him more, assured him they wouldn’t be separated for long — lying through my teeth, I thought — and he played me a song from their past. Far from being a man of placid, untroubled composure, he’s a man of composure and also deep feeling, a man who’s known loss and longing, and who has a loyal heart. He’s a loyal friend, even if I may have tricked him into it.”

[mobled_queen]

You saw yourself in him, thinks Gertrude, and it warms her to her toes to know that her brave, sweet, lonely man has found his mirror here. "You know, I think he doesn't give a fig for how you behave, or whether you're composed or mannerly. I think he likes you just as you are, the way you like him just as he is."

"So," she goes on, with a gleam in her eye and an older sister's bossy, provocative tone. "That's two sets of men I've heard of here who are married. When exactly are you and Galahad going to be wed?"

[wickedwit]

Claudius blushes red as roses in one of those cliché poems he told Galahad about. "Lan Wangji, Laertes, and their respective spouses," he says at length, "all eloped. They had no witnesses in attendance, no priest to bless their union, no family. Family and friends planned wedding celebrations well afterward. I don't mean to suggest they aren't romantic stories -- they are. Only ..." Only what? Only it isn't what Claudius wants. He doesn't want a secret wedding no one attends or celebrates or acknowledges until afterward. And however he feels about God as an absent father, a demanding mother, he wants a holy sacrament with Galahad. Even if it's holiness without God, holiness redefined for the two of them, in the way Galahad speaks scripture and transmutes the words to sweet blasphemies.

The only family he'd want to bless him is by his side. All the same, Claudius never thought he'd see her again.

[mobled_queen]

"Only you wish I could've timed this better," she says, answering the unspoken part instead of what he says aloud. "Rude of me to show up before you'd even had a chance to plan the wedding. Or ask the other groom, from the sound of it."

[wickedwit]

And that's another thing. "Before I met him, Gertrude, Galahad was committed to living a life of bodily purity. It was part of the prophecy, I believe. He had never kissed, or been kissed, and even when he wanted to, he wouldn't let himself want. Marriage must have been the most remote thing from his mind. And he's young. There's so much he's yet to decide for himself, and for me to ask him to even begin to think about it -- Gertrude, to time this better, you would have to wait at least another year." Sighing, he adds, "I'm rather glad you didn't. I think I needed to see you ... I'd convinced myself I never could, for your well-being and happiness." And seeing her happy was the only thing that could convince him otherwise, or confirm that he wasn't a slow poison for everyone he loved.

[mobled_queen]

"Well, you have time," she says, and pulls his hand up to kiss the back of it. "You're younger than you know, Claudius--you're so young. You have such a long life ahead of you, and so many wonderful people to share it with." She nestles her cheek against his knuckles, rubbing a little there like a cat. "I needed to see you, too. I ... I needed to talk with you like this. No veiled words, no innuendos, no pretending we're not what we are. I like what you are. I like what we are."

[wickedwit]

Claudius loves Gertrude more than he ever did, more than he believed was possible. For a moment he'd wanted to say, without believing it, that Galahad will outgrow him, that men his age always do -- but Claudius hasn't outgrown his first love, and for the first time in a long time, it feels like it's grown with him. It feels like hope kindling in his chest, like warmth in the coldest part of the year, not just a private grief to pain him during everyone else's summer. But that's what it was in the beginning, wasn't it? He met Gertrude and she changed him, brought light to his dark and lonely days. He touches his forehead to hers, fingers brushing over her cheek. "What are we?" he asks, wanting to hear it in her words.

[mobled_queen]

She laughs, bright and golden. "What aren't we? Friends--brother and sister. Survivors of the same family. But if I had to choose: we're people who love each other."