Shakespeare one shots

A global apocalypse and a piano

This is quite possibly the darkest piece I've ever written. Fueled by personal emotional turmoil and Lucas King piano. Just... here. It's been a long time.

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Hamlet was a nihilist.

Not even an optimistic one. He was the human embodiment of plain, depressed nihilism. He threw his arms wide and cheered with no feeling for every new declaration of Earth's destruction.

When he was with Horatio, this was not an issue.

Horatio grounded him. Horatio was his rock in the storm, the metaphorical Persephone to Hamlet's Hades. And Hamlet was Hades, indeed.

Have you ever wondered what Hades would be like without a Persephone?

Hamlet cried. He cried and he cried and he wrote and he cried. He slept, woke up screaming, and cried.

The world had crumbled. In some cases, literally. Earthquakes and hurricanes and tsunamis ravaged the surface of the planet, reducing once-great cities back to the dust from which they sprouted.

And Horatio was gone.

Hamlet cried only for him. No one else deserved a moment's thought in comparison.

It had been a Tuesday, Horatio's least favorite day of the week. At exactly seven twenty-two AM, Hamlet and Horatio hunkered in the lowest level of someone else's barn to nervously wait out the tornado above them. Six minutes and twelve seconds later, Horatio swung open the trapdoor to let in a little girl who had been separated from her traveling party somehow.

Hamlet never did get to learn exactly how. The tornado shredded the barn roof four and a half seconds later and dropped a pile of debris on the girl. Who was being held by Horatio at the time.

Hamlet refused to blame her.

Instead, he blamed the world. The sliding tectonic plates, the gunked atmosphere, the shifting magnetic field. The photons from the sun and the ground that hummed beneath his feet.

He felt it now, walking up the dashed yellow line toward the remains of a city. He hardly took in the lack of life anymore; this was reality now.

There was no wind. Everything was still, silent. Hamlet's footsteps echoed in his ears alongside his thoughts. He opened his mouth to scream. He shut it again.

(He'd given up screaming into the silence four days, nine hours, and twenty-five minutes before. It reminded him of how Horatio had screamed and so he immediately stopped. Then again, everything reminded him of Horatio.)

The grass was greenish grey. The road was darkish grey. The sky was foggish grey. Hamlet's silver eyes had long since gone silverish grey. His clothes were coated in the grey dust that coated the rest of his world.

The shell of a building came into view as he walked. The wood remaining upright had obviously been there for a long while, and had most likely suffered worse in its time.

Hamlet lifted his silverish eyes from the ground as he entered. The pews of the abandoned church were coated in the same fine, grey dust as his clothes. He crept up the center aisle, careful not to disturb a body who had presumably been praying when they died of either lung blockage or a sickness of some kind. It didn't particularly matter now.

There was a large piano behind the podium. He traced the keys, feather-light touches that barely made a mark in the dust. He closed his eyes.

"An umplayed instrument is a lonely one," Horatio had once said to him, frowning sadly at the closed door of Wittenberg's silent music hall.

"Shall we keep them company, then?" Hamlet had responded. They spent the rest of the afternoon taking turns each choosing sheet music for the other to attempt on the pristine, enormous piano.

There was sheet music on this piano. He considered it.

The sound rang through the emptiness of the church, bouncing off walls and bleeding out between boards, down the road, and into the ears of the only three people still around to hear it.

Titania smiled, but did not look up from her book.

"Is that supposed to be Moonlight Sonata?" Oberon scoffed.

"Must be," Puck sighed in response.

They did not move to search for the source.

(Two days later, Hamlet died of dehydration half a mile away from an untainted lake.)

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So. Um.

I'm okay, I swear. Blame Lucas King. He's amazing.

Updates will be few and far between for a while. School and such.

I bid you farewell, my faeries. May you never fade to grey.