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“I’m not Suffolk and you’re not Margaret,” Kit says. His hands are soft against Will’s ribs in the places where his words have burrowed themselves, clawed and steep. “We don’t get the heartbreaking farewell, we aren’t the stuff of legends. We are timorous rats in the shadows of the great men.”
“Kit,” Will says, again, because the pain is too much, the pain of Kit lying gasping on the floor a few hours from now, a dagger lodged, pain that Kit is paying Will forward, with interest, not a lamb going to slaughter so much as a wolf ripping out pieces of flesh in his last throes, bloodied teeth to haunt Will’s nights forever. “Kit.”
Kit’s fingers move over Will’s shoulder a last time, as he finishes the sentence, another gentle twist of the knife, before he pulls it out. “Just the jumped-up son of a shoemaker who had a good run of it.”
He watches Will crumble. Holds his hand and watches him bleed.
“Don’t go to Deptford,” Will says, though he knows it will do nothing, hasn’t done anything when he said it before, but he needs to let Kit know that he wants his life, has never wanted his death, not even after Kit has put dagger after dagger to his throat.
Kit’s hand falls away. It’s colder, much colder without his touch. It will be colder for years to come.
“Write about it, Will,” he says. It sounds almost kind. “Turn your tears to something useful.”
Will shakes his head, mute, and Kit rises from where he has been kneeling on the ground next to him, turns away towards the door. Doesn’t walk, not quite yet.
A moment passes.
Another.
And Will forces the words out, because this is the last time he’ll get to say them.
“Why art thou yet so fair? Shall I believe that unsubstantial death is amorous and that the lean abhorred monster keeps thee here in dark to be his paramour? For fear of that I still will stay with thee – And never from this palace of dim night depart again; here, here will I remain.”
Kit turns back.
“Quite good,” he says. “Your latest?”
Will swallows. He is still on the floor. He doesn’t think his feet would carry him, were he to stand.
“Parchment’s barely dried.” His voice splinters around the sentence.
“It will pay you well,” Kit says. The words, desolately, lack bite. A year ago, a month ago, he would have made them sting.
“I mean it,” Will gives back. “Every word.”
“Oh, Will, I know. There is not an insincere bone in your body. Even your betrayal was honest.”
“I came here to help you,” Will says, his voice rising. “Not to set the noose around your neck, to cut it through. If you’d let me, if you’d only let me. But you won’t. You’ll just go and carry the piece of me I’ve given you to the pyre, and burn us both to cinders.”
There is a pause. Kit is stepping closer again, sitting back on his haunches, his brows furrowing, eyes sharpening against Will’s.
“You are giving yourself too much credit, Will. The noose was mine. I wove it, thread by thread, over years. There is no blade in the world that can cut through it now, I made sure of that.”
Will shakes his head. He’s angry now, angry like he used to be when he looked at Kit, all his lies and false bravado. It is an invigorating feeling. Familiar.
“You are giving yourself too much credit, Kit, thinking your handiwork perfect. There is always a place to cut. Always.”
Kit scoffs.
“A very easy place, yes. Down, into the flesh.“
Will looks at him for a long moment.
“You fool,” he says, quietly. “There is a carriage around the corner in two hours. You go in my fancy dress. It‘s the plague out there, everyone is masked, and a hundred men died just yesterday. I looked at some in the mortuary, their bodies are yet warm. One of them’s not the spitting image of you, but close enough. Put a dagger through his eye, the difference will shrink to nothing. The coroner a county over will not ask too many questions; and even if the ruse comes out, you will long be on your way to France. A captain’s been bribed – his ship will sail around the time your body shows up.” Will surveys Kit, sees the first cracks in his expression, light through brickwork. He’s playing it out in his head, Will can tell, and he knows it will work. If Will has his back, if Will keeps his word, he has a solid shot at getting out of this alive.
Then, Kit looks directly at him, and once again, Will is unsure where he stands. Anything is possible, from a dagger at his throat to a kiss on the mouth, to Kit walking out of the door towards his death, without hope and without protection.
The last possibility is the only one that truly scares him.
“Are you that terrified of the haunting I promised?” Kit asks, finally.
Will exhales. Close enough to an I’ll let you help me, closer than he had hoped.
“Oh, you’ll haunt me, Kit. Every thought of you in a different country. I know you too well. You‘ll make a new noose for yourself sooner or later.”
“…but you‘ll have nothing to do with it?” Kit asks, a half-smile on his lips, burrowing, still, for Will’s motives. Will can’t fault him.
“I‘ll have everything to do with it, Kit, cutting you loose from this one,” he gives back.
He feels the urge to get up, off the dusty tavern floor, and once he’s confident his legs will finally carry him again, he does, walks over to the bench by the table and sits down there instead. They’ve written so many words here, had so many spats, threatened and insulted each other. Looked at each other. Kissed each other.
Kit stands as well, his eyes following Will. Careful, guarded, ready to jump at anything.
“Reckless of you, Will. I might betray you, still, from here to the port. Something goes wrong. I’m stopped, searched, recognised. Under duress, I might yet scream your name. Dead, I am so much safer for you.”
Will shakes his head.
„You are never safe for me, Kit, least of all dead.”
The truth. Nothing to say now but the truth. The game is up, one way or another. Will can’t profess he’s ever really understood the rules, anyway.
“I will take that as a compliment,” Kit remarks, because of course he would.
Will sighs. “An admission of defeat, maybe.”
“Better yet.” A pause. A step in Will’s direction. A long, slow examination of his body, mind and soul through a pair of dark eyes. “You haven‘t answered my question. Why cut me loose?”
Will leans forward, elbows on knees, chin in hands. For all the haste, gratifying haste he has come here with, all the turmoil and upheaval and fear that Kit would just walk out of that door and refuse to listen, he is calm now. There’s nothing to hide behind anymore, and within these last two hours that remain, they can finally talk like people – not spies, not playwrights, not royal subjects with everything to lose.
People.
“Well, I think,” Will says “- I think you ought to write, Kit. I told you that a while ago. The part where I‘d gone wrong was the one thinking you‘d do it on my terms, but the part about the writing, that holds true. This is no fitting end for you. An anonymous dagger in a pub in Deptford - come on.”
Kit gives him another look, before he sits down on the bench next to him. Close. “I am not a play you write, Will.”
Will laughs. “And I am not an actor, playing his part in yours, Kit. This role you cast me in, the ingenue struggling along before she loses her footing in a world that is not hers and betrays the man she holds dear as she weeps over him. It doesn‘t suit me.”
Kit makes a tutting sound with his mouth that is not meant to be taken entirely seriously.
“I think it‘s a perfectly lovely role. A romantic like you should appreciate it more.”
“Well, I don’t.”
A pause.
Kit’s voice is quieter when he speaks again, like he doesn’t want the rest of the empty room to hear.
“Do you hold me dear, then? Is that the truth in the lie?”
Will looks at him.
“I never lied to you, Kit.“
Another truth. He’s stalled, avoided, slipped out of questions and asked instead of giving answers. He’s never lied.
“So you do?” Kit says. Uncertain, still.
“Oh, for Heaven‘s sake, is me trying to save your life from yourself not proof enough?” Will asks, throwing his hands up in frustration. “Just as much proof as your failing to put a blade in me on every occasion you had?”
Another pause, longer this time. Will is still looking at Kit, and there is a boil in his blood now, one he knows too well, one he has tried to push down many, many times. He doesn’t try it now. The game is up, after all.
“Do you wish I had put my blade in you when I had the occasion?” Kit asks, warmly, and Will laughs.
He looks at Kit’s answering smile. The space between them has shrunken.
“Christ on the cross, we have never done that, have we? It feels like we have, a thousand times over, just by words, but there was only the kiss, and another one, and now we‘re here.“
Kit raises an eyebrow. “I did touch you a few times in between.“
“Against my will.“
Kit‘s smile turns indecent. “Indeed.“
Will makes an undignified noise, and then the words come, unstoppably so. He doesn’t have it in him to be sorry for them.
“Oh, for Heaven‘s…shut up, Kit. I‘ll have you, any way you want me, before that bleeding carriage comes and takes you away, and I‘ll never see you again, only think of you, think of you and write you down as you were, as you are right now, reinvent you over and over until I can breathe you like air each time I close my eyes, until I can hear you whisper and shout and laugh from every page.“
Will closes his eyes, breathes. Opens them again.
Kit is still looking at him.
Will has never seen him so unguarded.
“Will.“
“Kit.“
“I thought you were terrified of being consumed,“ Kit says. His voice is small. His mouth is very, very close to Will’s.
Will smiles, can’t help it. Truth. “That‘s just the thing, Kit. I have been consumed all this time. It‘s no use fencing in an ocean. Tell me you feel the same.“
“From the very first moment I laid my eyes upon you, William.”
“Liar,” Will accuses, feels Kit’s breath ghost across his lips with a chuckle, and it doesn’t feel like danger, or dishonesty now. Something constant, something true. Something he has come back to, not something he needs to run away from anymore.
“The second one, then.”
“I’ll take it,” Will says, and the next moment they’re kissing, without desperation, mouths and hands moving steadily, slowly. They don’t have to be anywhere for two hours, and when those two hours are up, Kit will go down to the harbour, and Will will get the body of a young man to Deptford and plunge a dagger in his eye. But that’s for later. This, this is for now.
The kisses get more desperate, after all, and Kit pulls a blanket from God-knows-where, and Will might have objected to Love over a table under different circumstances, but other parts of him are desperate as well, and Kit is beautiful, and this is the only thing they’ll get for the rest of their lives, so it really, really doesn’t matter.
“Christ,” Will says, when Kit is inside him, finally, and the world has shrunken down to his face in Will’s hands.
“I’ve been called that,” Kit remarks and murders Will‘s clever retort between his lips with a long kiss.
“You’re an impossible blasphemer,” Will says, when his mouth is freed. “And a madman.”
Kit takes this as his cue to angle his hips a certain way, and Will really tries to stop the sound that comes out of his mouth after that, but it’s no use.
“I’ll miss you,” he says. “I’ll miss you, Kit.”
Another truth, and Kit’s mouth descends, and kisses Will’s again, and again, and again, and at a point, long after that one, once seed has been spent and sweat has cooled, once they are in each other’s arms, Will thinks about the time they won’t have. Kit is saved, and so, he has to leave. This is a much better ending than any other Will could think of, but it is an ending, nonetheless.
“You know,” Will says, his cheek on Kit’s chest, Kit’s hand in his hair, Kit’s breath filling his lungs in deep, sated drags. “I was worried for a moment, earlier, that you would simply go. That you would just decide to get yourself killed after all, despite my best-laid plans, even after you’d heard them.”
It took a while until Kit answered. “Why would I do that?”
“Well, for the simple reason that you are Christopher Marlowe, and no mortal man will ever tell you what to do. For all your so-called masters, you’ve never been a slave. Not really. Not like me, who likes to claim he has none.”
“You’re not a slave, Will. A rat, yes, like me. A scared one. But a free one, by nature.”
“How can one be free by nature, Kit?”
Kit’s hand rests in Will’s hair, soft, strong. Will will never forget what this feels like, not for the rest of his life, not in Anne’s bed or in anyone else’s, not even in his own, when he dies in it. This will be the last thing he remembers. Kit’s hand in his hair, and Kit’s breath at his ear, and Kit’s voice saying things that don’t have to be true.
“By reinventing the world, Will. While nobody is noticing.”