Title: Line Reading
Fandoms: Slings & Arrows
Characters: Geoffrey Tennant
Rating: Teen
Length: 1020 words
Disclaimer: I didn't create these characters, I don't own them, I derive no profit from their use.
Summary: Geoffrey's interior monologue while he's introducing his class to a monologue from Macbeth



The text is new and old every time he hears it or speaks it, like that stupid saying about how you can never step in the same river twice, because the water is always different although it’s also always the same.


To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;


And God, yes, he knows how that feels now: Geoffrey is intimately familiar with just how slowly the minutes can drag.  On the psych ward, where time is reckoned by the regularity of meals and pills and (for those who can stand it) the relentless progression of indistinguishable TV shows.  Where an age can pass between one heartbeat and the next; between one thought and the next.  Especially when every other thought is gone.

And even since his life resumed something resembling a normal pace—a pace most sane people would call frenetic, actually—Geoffrey knows, when he allows himself a moment or two to think, that what he’s really been doing for the past seven years, what he’s still doing, is waiting.  For the other shoe to drop.  For the next thing to happen.  For something to change.  For a miracle that will turn back the clock and set everything back to the way it was before the curtain went up.

But the arrow of time only runs in one direction, and if Geoffrey finds himself past the end of the tragedy and wandering around in some sort of postmodernist limbo, it’s no one’s fault that he had the bad luck to be born centuries too late, in an era where classical structure counts for nothing.


And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.

Out, out, brief candle!


Ah, yes, there is always an out, of course.  The easy way out.  A little pain, or a little sleep, and then, the rest is silence.

It surprises him, sometimes, how little appeal suicide has ever held for him.

In the moment of crisis, when all he wanted was to make it stop, it never occurred to him that he had the power to make it stop forever.  The knife was never meant for him.

Whether it was meant for her, well. . .honestly, he can’t decide.  He stood outside her window, and it felt like rage, and it felt like dying, but maybe it wasn’t either, because he’s still alive and he turned away, losing the knife somewhere as he ran.  And when his hands closed tight around the swan’s throat, it was only because he wanted to know whether it was true that swans sang as they died.  He wanted to hear it call him fool in a voice too beautiful to be heard more than once.


Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,


But even if Geoffrey isn’t, after all, ready for his final exit, still, his hour on this particular stage was done seven years ago, when his heart broke and his reason snapped and he descended into the pit and then ended up in purgatory after throttling a swan.  For God’s sake, you couldn’t ask for a more dramatic exit, or a more final one.  And Geoffrey always swore the one thing he wouldn’t be is the sort of actor who doesn’t know when it’s time to take his final bow, get off the stage, and let the audience go home.

And yet.

And yet, here is somehow is, back in the hell that was once heaven.  Back at New Burbage, though what in God’s name he’s doing here, Geoffrey has no clue.


And then is heard no more.


He may be back, but he doesn’t have anything to say to anyone at New Burbage nor they to him.  New Burbage where the air is thick with unspoken words and curdled emotions and far too much history.  With the whispers people think he doesn’t hear and the looks they throw him.

He keeps his head down and his mouth shut because when he opens it things come out, often the truth, and he didn’t come here to tear it all down around their ears, whatever he says or feels sometimes.  He’s here. . .he doesn’t know what he’s here for.  Only that Mae called him and he should have said no, but he didn’t.  (Actor’s training getting the better of him, maybe.  One of the first things they teach you: whatever your scene partner throws at you, never say No; No leads nowhere, find a way to say Yes, and. . . even when the character is resisting with all his force.)  Or maybe—a less flattering but far more plausible explanation—he was just pathetically flattered and grateful to feel that someone, anyone, actually wanted him for something.

So here he is: the ghost at the banquet, silent but unavoidable, ruining the party.  Unable to leave, but unable to actually arrive, to pull up a chair, have a drink, chat about politics.  Definitely unable to think about Hamlet in any way, except for the back-of-the-mind awareness of the desecration Darren’s wreaking in there, which nags at Geoffrey like a toothache.

Only they won’t let him just keep quiet.  No one wants to hear the poisonous truth that spills out of his mouth, they shun him and shut him down like he’s the reincarnation of Cassandra.  And then they turn around and tell him to talk.  To teach.  As though Geoffrey could possibly have anything to say that would help or even interest these poor corporate drones in any way.  As though words ever helped anyone, even poor damned souls like himself who are incapable of living without them.

Ultimately, what does Geoffrey or anyone have but his own story, his own garland of trailing ghosts and dried tears, of no possible interest to anyone but himself and sometimes not even to him.  What is there to say?  As usual, Shakespeare’s already had the final word:


It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.