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Their fights had always been a dance. There existed no words to articulate the silent push and pull, the sharp blades and sharper grins, the minds that couldn’t bear their own cumbersome flesh but knew the truest extent of the other’s. To Mercutio, steel tasted like the drink that he couldn’t indulge himself in. That bitter poison had taken his father and now ate with the penetration of a dozen worms at the space where his uncle’s heart should be. For Tybalt, their dance was the only time where he could trust that his body would not betray him.
After his third fit had left him seizing in an alleyway in plain view of his uncle’s men, he’d known that the news would spread insidiously. Verona was a city of whispers, as much as those who romanticized her liked to claim she spoke in flowers. The city would know within a day. Within a week, the Capulets would be sharpening their tongues rather than their blades; they no longer needed steel to bring him to his knees.
Though he would admit it to none but himself, his steps were tentative when he emerged from his uncle’s residence again. He always moved gently after a fit, uncertain whether or when his body would turn on him again and stunned anew by the sheer violence his own muscles could enact against him. That day, though, the world itself seemed to have changed. The streets were unfamiliar in the watery autumn dawn; he was no longer the prince of the alley cats, but a mere scraggly feline who slunk in the shadows.
He’d never felt more terror as when he heard the hiss of a blade unsheathing. Laying aching and alone, he’d never indulged in the thought that there would still be someone willing to draw on him. This would be no mere scrape; anyone threatening him now meant business. He drew his own blade and clutched it in a hand that refused to tremble.
“The streets have been peaceful this week. I was beginning to fear that I was doomed to a life of idleness.”
Tybalt prayed that the dip in his step as he turned could be passed off as a flourish and not his very bones sagging in relief. “Mercutio. Did you miss me?”
“Achingly,” Mercutio taunted. “Oh, my dearest Prince of Cats, how I yearned for you.” He maintained a precious pout on his pale lips for a moment longer and then broke the mask with a cackle.
“So eager to taste my blade again?”
Mercutio responded with a wink and a tentative lunge. It wasn’t gentleness; it was control, pure and simple. Mercutio had crafted himself too perfectly to strike by accident, and while Tybalt had become even more of a wildcard than before, his truest rival would only take it as a challenge to his own skill.
Tybalt parried easily.
They whirled together beneath auburn leaves and a yellow sky. By the time the sun reached its zenith, all that remained to even hint at their presence was a spatter of ruby red on the cobbles. It might have been Mercutio’s—it might have been Tybalt’s. Tybalt couldn’t remember anymore; it rarely mattered who won a duel if they were to be locked in battle until the end of time.
He had never been as good of a swordsman as Mercutio. He could account for his own unpredictabilites, and he could parry whatever Mercutio offered if the other man was in his right mind, but there came nights when Tybalt’s role in their dance was to slip away without drawing. He’d watched Mercutio from the mouth of alleyways as the man’s golden curls fell in a waterfall down his back and he laughed, feigned and uproarious. He’d seen the stars turn slowly in their sphere above as Mercutio’s moves grew more artificial with every drink he took. Mercutio forced every vice upon himself as though enough exposure could numb him to the pain of each.
Those nights, Tybalt didn’t loathe or fear the shadows. He moved as a creature of them, a few dozen paces behind Mercutio, a flash of steel ready for any knave who tried to halt the man’s stumbling journey homeward.
Mercutio wondered, sometimes, what would become of their dance as they aged. He knew the Escalus bitterness ran in his veins and feared Montague ferocity was slowly overtaking all ration and sense. Youth was impermanent. Their battles would cease to beautify the theater of the street as they aged and weakened. Verona’s winters began to rest heavy on him. They still danced in the winter rain, but it took Mercutio longer each time to draw that teasing grin to his lips once more.
His smile hadn’t always been false, not between the two of them, but now it began to sit like a mask, weighty and unyielding.
Years beyond that fight beneath the rufous trees, the feud of which their dance was but an epiphyte began to spread and grow again. The clashes between their men became more violent. Young Romeo Montague began to take love as his sword and sow more chaos that way than he ever had before. The older generations watched the youth with devilish grins, each pretending sorrow but grateful that the fight of their blood would be resumed.
The dance grew desperate. The rhythm sped towards a crescendo. Neither knew where it would end, but when Mercutio laughed and spun in the midst of it his hair flashed fiery in the sun and Tybalt thought he had never looked more like Icarus.
Once, in a courtyard littered with brown and crackling leaves, they’d danced for real. Their masks were mere shields, then. Each knew what visage rested beyond the other’s visor. (When you’ve practiced long enough to see through stories and skin, paper and porcelain are nothing.)
Tybalt scoffed when he heard the Prince’s decree. Who was that man to say that there would be no violence in the streets, when they all knew well enough what violence he enacted behind closed doors? Who was he to say that Mercutio couldn’t burn himself to ash if he wanted to? For an instant, and only that, Tybalt was glad. The dance had begun to chafe on him as of late, and he worried he would soon lose the control that kept him from ever truly cutting the other. Mercutio was as collected and skillful as always, as far as Tybalt’s safety was concerned, but he dodged the blows meant for himself with less alacrity. Sometimes, he almost seemed to reach his pale limbs towards the steel in hopes of getting cut.
Tybalt had always wanted to see Mercutio in Capulet red, but he refused to let this be how it happened.
Perhaps, with the Prince’s decree, they could finally stop fighting.
When he heard that his sweetest, dearest cousin loved Romeo Montague, he almost convinced himself that they could even build something better from the beautiful, aching things they’d broken here.
The summer sun sent fierce beams pounding into the earth of the square. Tybalt turned towards Romeo, but the eyes that met his weren’t those of the gentle lover. No, they were not placid pools in shaded groves, or the calm of a soft breeze blowing through the leaves. Those things were Juliet’s to love. The eyes that met his were for Tybalt alone: fierce, unyielding, and with such heart-shattering pain in them that he nearly fell to his knees. The world began to blur even as he heard the hiss of a blade being unsheathed.
He’d always known, yet somehow never considered, that their dance was Mercutio’s lifeline as much as it was his own. Without it, his beloved Icarus had slipped too close to becoming nothing more than a pretty dream.
Tybalt raised his own blade, but he couldn’t bring himself to do more than parry. This was no dance. This was a fight, pure and simple. Mercutio struck to cause pain—not to Tybalt, but to himself. Every blow left him open and was a fraction too reckless for either of them to walk away unscathed.
Tybalt felt unmoored. Their fights had always been a dance. There existed no words to articulate the silent push and pull, the sharp blades and sharper grins, the minds that couldn’t bear their own cumbersome flesh but knew the truest extent of the other’s. They’d never spoken the rules that governed this tiny slice of paradise carved out from their hellish lives. How could he be certain that Mercutio knew them as well as he did?
The first: to laugh with all the air in their chests because it was the only time they could.
The second: to give as good as they received.
The third? If one of them disengaged, the other had to respect it.
Tybalt parried Mercutio’s thrust and stepped back. The motion seemed too light for how heavily the humid air rested on his flesh. “The streets have been peaceful this week,” he said. There was no taunting in his voice—not now.
“It was but an illusion, my Prince of Cats.”
Tybalt sheathed his sword. If Mercutio chose to strike him now, that would be the end of them both. “Hasn’t it always been?”
Mercutio held his blade outstretched across the cobbles as though he feared what he would do if he brought it any closer to his own chest. Tybalt didn’t dare to breathe. Was this peace? This aching, crawling moment of stillness a hair’s breadth away from shattering? He’d always thought that it would be more robust, when it finally came.
Hoofbeats clattered on the cobbles behind him, and the world exploded into sound and pain. He’d regret it until the end of his days, but for a moment he was certain that Mercutio had struck him. Then, as the darkness, red and deep, washed over him, he realized he knew this pain. It was his oldest, truest enemy, more violent than their dance ever could be.
He’d dreamt during the fits, time and again, but he’d never seen something quite so fantastical as this. The Prince’s condemnation rang out through the square. As Tybalt’s eyes rolled back towards the war inside his own head, Mercutio stepped in front of his prone form and raised his sword in Tybalt’s defense.
“You will not touch him while he’s hurting. I led our dance this time—I will pay the price.”
This wasn’t one of a dozen duels: it would be their last, Tybalt realized, and Mercutio had won.
Darkness took him.