Title: more than a thousand words
Fandom: Hamlet
Rating: G
Length: 270
Content notes: Spoilers for the recent RSC production
Author notes: n/a
Summary: Hamlet's complicated.



Wanting to connect with your ancestors, your heritage, was something Horatio could relate to. Just like Hamlet, he was far from home in Wittenberg, and thinking about those who had come before him, about their achievements and the hardships they had overcome, was a comfort to him.
What Hamlet had done to himself, however, sprang from motivations Horatio didn't pretend to understand. He'd been the first one to see it, of course. Old Hamlet's face, weeping angry red tears under clingfilm on Hamlet's chest.
From what little Hamlet said about his family, together with what the papers found to write about them, it was not hard to see that Hamlet's father caused his son pain in ways that went beyond a permanent scar on his skin. Horatio telephoned home at least once a week and his pain lay in the separation from his family, not in their sheer existence or deeds. Hamlet's father, apart from being a king, seemed more like a spectre – not just to the world at large, but to Hamlet himself most of all. He spoke of him as of a hero of old legends, and more than once Horatio had wondered if Hamlet had actually known his father, as a person, at all.
Horatio couldn't begin to understand why Hamlet had got his father's face permanently etched into his skin, but then again, he didn't have to ask. The picture spoke louder than a thousand words out of Hamlet's mouth could have ever done.