"I don't know," Matthew says, "I don't think you need anything else, really. Food, an occasional beer, someone or something to share it with. Oh, oh, a roof, too, that's important." He laughs then, tucking a loose curl behind his ear. His teeth are white, straight--the kind of perfectly filed, North American smile that comes from years of orthodontics, that speaks of awkward teenagers with metal brackets on every tooth.
"No?" Arthur says again, clearing his throat. His thoughts wander around Matthew. He feels, at once, both profoundly old when confronted with the light of Matthew's youth, so glaringly apparent, and young.
An awkward teenage boy with braces, falling in love for the first time.
"I mean--I mean, no? What about money? Power? All the vices of man, a thousand young virgins in a harem, so on and so forth. You would settle for a roof, a beer, and a dog?" Arthur stutters, picking up the loose trail of his thoughts.
Matthew laughs again. He presses forward, across the checkered surface of the small coffee table in between them. He isn't overly large, save for in Arthur's imagination. Adonis. Tragic Greek heroes. Arthur's life is a tragedy.
(and his imagination is a terrible thing)
"No," Matthew insists, sounding so earnest. The curl slips in front of his eyes and that's--terrible, really, isn't it. Arthur should move it.
He does.
And the moment shatters, like the fragile thing it is. Arthur knew that. He could sense it--Greek tragedies are tragic because the hero has a flaw. Achilles and his heel. Arthur and his Matthew.
Matthew's expression is what shatters. He ducks away from Arthur's hand, the curl falling stubbornly back into place. He smiles, but it's a little tighter than before, a little more controlled.
"We should work," Arthur says, to fill the silence that's fallen between them. "You came here about your paper, after all."
"Yeah--yes, we should, thank you, Professor Kirkland. I'm sorry about that--it was unprofessional."
"No, no," he gives a brittle laugh. "I apologize, Mr. Williams. So, your paper?"
(Arthur dreams of teeth that night, and of handsome young boys; he dreams of leaving a mark, like ink spilled out on a page, an irreversible stain on the canvas of skin--he dreams of touching and being touched, of wanting and being wanted)
Arthur thinks it would be preferable if she did. If she would beat her hands against his chest, tireless like the waves against the rocky shore, if she would scream, kick, bite--if she would ask him, accusing, if love made him both mad and a fool, because what kind of love grows from this?
But she doesn't fight.
--
There's sentimentality in a name, he tells her. His is Arthur--King of the Britons, he laughs, while she looks up at him with the same pallid, expressionless eyes.
"No," he muses after, when her eyes have dropped back to the ground, "you wouldn't know what a Briton is, would you? Or an Arthur, or a king, or even a name. A name is something you call someone," and here, he pulls her up, to stand unsteady on her legs.
Her eyes are still on the ground and he thinks, no, that won't do, so he draws her chin up as well, and holds it there, so she's forced to look into his eyes. There's a tightening around her lips, like they're ready to draw back into a snarl, and a part of Arthur longs to see her teeth.
"Your name can be Madeleine," he tells her instead of snarl. "It's lovely to meet you, Madeleine."
She doesn't appear to feel the same, but, Arthur thinks, sighing, that's the way of love.
--
She sings on the nights when the moon is fullest. It sounds like nothing and it sounds like everything--like seabirds and like the ocean and like the dark storms that tear apart men and ships. She sings, and Arthur wants to break open her breastbone and crawl inside her like a hermit crab, to make his home there, in the emptiness where no heart lays.
To wear her on his back, so that they're intrinsically linked. If she's hollow, he'll fill her.
And fill her, and fill her, and fill her.
Grunting, the sound of skin slapping, but she never makes a sound, not even to cry out.
But, oh, she sings.
--
"The singing will drive me to madness," he tells her fondly.
Her hand tightens around the silver handle of her brush. For a moment, Arthur worries she plans to toss it at him. He'd deserve it, he can admit that.
But she doesn't. She sets it gently on her vanity, and turns to him. She smiles.
And there are fangs in it, he can see, even though he thought he had pulled them all.
--
Madeleine snaps the neck of the child she bears him. Arthur finds him--Alfred, he had decided only just that morning, Alfred, with his pudgy little fists and his gusty first wail into the world--Arthur finds him tucked into his bassinet, his sheets pulled around him.
They push his body out to sea, cradled in a tiny basket.
Madeleine sings, and Arthur thinks of fangs.
--
"I'd kill you too," she sighs. "Oh, you'd be first, if I could."
--
It's the second son, and a second funeral, and a second tiny body tossed to the waves.
Arthur feels old.
Madeleine tucks her tiny hand into his on the way home, winds their fingers together.
He thinks of their hands after, and to which pair the blood rightfully belongs to.
--
"Go," he tells her, giving her the heavy iron key he's kept hidden all these years. "It's yours, just--go."
He's tired. She scrambles furiously around his house, to the large chest tucked away in his closet. He's tired. She slides the key in, turns it.
He's tired.
She rips out his throat, in the end. "I told you," Madeleine says, covered in his blood. Beautiful, he thinks, unbidden, terrifying.
Like the ocean, really. He'd laugh but--his throat is gone. He croaks, instead, makes some raspy noise that's more painful than it's worth. There's no mercy to her.
"Madeleine," he struggles to call her, though the name comes out much more wetly than he intends. Blood pools under him.
There's a hazy warmth lapping at his toes. An undertow, a current, to drag him away. Death feels sweet.
She kneels at his side, cradles his head in her lap, as he had forced her to do so many times. "Shh," she says, stroking through his hair with her fingers covered in his gore, unexpectedly gentle in these final moments. "Shh. Sleep, Arthur, King of the Britons,"
And then, she begins to sing.
--
He remembers the spray of a wave breaking, and the first tentative rays of the sun.
How she had looked, naked on a rock, like something beautiful and free and not for mortal man.
But a slip of silver had caught his eye as well, cast off and forgotten about for the moment. He had reached for it--and the brushing of his fingers against it and induced a wail in her and oh, Arthur's heart had panged, but not with pity, but with want--
But. But. Shh, she says, sleep.
So Arthur does, and dreams of a girl laughing as the ocean breaks itself on the rocks around her.
