Decades and Mysteries

[ernest]

Title: Decades and Mysteries
Fandom: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
Characters/Pairings: Guildenstern
Summary: He winds the permanent blur through his fingers
Word Count: 234

All your life you live so close to the truth… Guildenstern is not a religious or spiritual man, and only barely a humanist, but he winds the permanent blur through his fingers like it’s a rosary. The truth must remain in constant circulation, not only for something to focus on, but because he must never be allowed to grasp it.
 

They’re in the wrong genre, he thinks with a jolt. They should have been a comedy duo on Vaudeville, or flinty-eyed detectives in an adaptation of Agatha Christie, maybe even theater of the absurd. But this? This is tragedy dripping into every crevice, hiding around every corner, and gone as soon as they’ve followed it down the eerily blank hallways. The whole world is a stage thrust into disaster, and they’re it. Not the bumbling sidekicks, not the cronies too ineffective to even be sinister, not the only ones left at the end whose job is to mourn and to remember, but the focus of all this woe. And they’re not any good at dying, either!
 

His train of thought slips away from him, and he tries to retrace his steps and reel it back in, but no, it’s too late. The beads are already on the move again, decades and mysteries rolling over his palm, under his tongue, through his mind. No way forward but forward, and he’ll know better next time.