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Forgive my general and exceptless rashness,
You perpetual-sober gods! I do proclaim
One honest man-- mistake me not-- but one;
No more, I pray-- and he's a steward.
-- Timon of Athens, IV.iii.
It seems on occasion to Horatio that Hamlet stands on a precipice only he sees—that all it would take is the smallest pressure at his back to force him over the edge and shatter him on the ground. Perhaps that is why Horatio finds himself so often following at the prince's side, as if to shield him from the unseen foes behind him.
The immediate impression made by the Prince of Denmark is ‘intelligent, almost to the point of self-inhibition’. When he attempts to explicate philosophical theory in their mutual lecture he often cannot find the words, reduced to gesturing wildly, as though he believes he can communicate his opinions with only his hands. (He cannot, to the endless frustration of their lecture peers.) And though those opinions often directly oppose Horatio's own, he can't help but smile privately at Hamlet's intensity.
The two of them find themselves side by side on the way out of one particularly robust discussion and Hamlet turns on him suddenly.
"What is it, specifically, that you find so utterly amusing in my theories?"
He says it with such vehemence that Horatio inwardly blanches. He succeeds, somewhat, in hiding it from his face.
"I meant no offense, my lord," he says, slowly, aware that the encounter is precarious. "It's only that you're very passionate." He thinks, for a split second, about ending the conversation there, and then decides, well, he's already made a fool of himself. "It's... endearing."
"Endearing!" Hamlet responds, as if Horatio had said he had four heads, or did not care for the Republic. There is a moment's uncomfortable pause. Then he grins, suddenly, guilelessly. "Truly?"
Hamlet has never done anything by half-measure-- which would seem to include friendship, for within the week Horatio is spending his nights in Hamlet's spacious rooms, drinking more than he should and acting as sounding board for Hamlet’s whirling, intricate thoughts. Often he offers up his own postulations, which the prince, rapturous, will elaborate on or shoot down entirely. A few times in the following months they have full-on rows, a particularly aggressive one regarding the nature and immediacy of providence and fueled by a remarkable amount of drink ending in Hamlet slamming his glass so hard onto the table that it shatters. They freeze, watching the froth slowly trickle onto the table and drip onto the floor, and after a moment Hamlet looks up at him sheepishly.
"I suppose it was providence that had it so my glass broke, and left you still with ale?" He cracks an apologetic grin, both for the terrible joke and his previous anger, and Horatio can't help but laugh. His laughter sets off Hamlet, and the drink propels them both, and minutes later they are both lost in helpless giggles, sitting on the floor with their backs against the table, the prince's head fallen on Horatio's shoulder and ale dripping onto his shirt.
In a year they are so fast that Horatio notices before even Hamlet's own servants that he has been three days out of lecture. It will not be the first time Horatio has had to drag him by the hair out of some book or other, and he bangs open the door into Hamlet's rooms with a long-suffering look, ready for a long argument over the modern validity of traditional schooling. But Hamlet is not at his desk (not likely), or sprawled at his table (more likely), or lying prone on the floor holding a book over his head as if to shake the knowledge into his eyes (annoyingly likely). It is only after making sure that Hamlet has not wedged himself behind a piece of furniture (not likely, not unlikely) that Horatio softly pushes aside the door to the bedroom.
The sun has only just begun to set, but Hamlet is asleep, face half into his pillow, linens tangled around his body as though-- Horatio thinks at first-- the restlessness that filled him in waking hours has followed him into unconsciousness. A closer inspection finds, however, that his breathing is ragged, and when Horatio touches his friend's skin, he burns.
Horatio sits with Hamlet until he wakes a day and a half later. His fever doesn't climb high enough for Horatio to fear for his life, but he tosses with frightening conviction, further tangling the sheets, as if the infection were a yoke he wished desperately to throw off. At one point, Horatio reaches across to cool his forehead with a damp cloth and Hamlet grabs his arm like a drowning man, hard enough to bruise. He thinks of the three days Hamlet-- the Prince of Denmark , for all the good it did him-- was alone with his illness, and with Herculean effort does not bite through the inside of his cheek.
Horatio has only just succumbed to his own exhaustion, head on arm on bedside cabinet, when a rough voice wakes him.
"Horatio?" Hamlet croaks, confused.
"My lord?" he replies, automatically putting a hand to his friend’s face. Cool, finally.
Hamlet rolls onto his side, piercing eyes directly looking into Horatio's own. He is already half asleep again. "Never leave me," he says, with what seems to be all the intensity he can muster in his exhaustion. Before Horatio can respond, Hamlet’s eyes flutter closed, and he sleeps true.
Many of their peers call Horatio ‘the Prince's shadow’, but Horatio is not so modestly drawn as to be a mere outline of where Hamlet shines.
"He is my rock, my rope in a storm,” Hamlet writes Ophelia in their third year at Wittenberg. “Were it not for Horatio, I think I would sleep on the table and eat on the bed." He reads this line to Horatio from a prone position on, indeed, the table, legs dangling off the head, feet on the back of a chair.
“Shall I fetch you a pillow, or are we to retire to your chamber for dinner?” Horatio asks with a raised eyebrow, seated in a chair like a civilized man. He gets a grape in the chest for his trouble.
Hamlet does not write his father or mother about Horatio, but then he barely writes his father or mother at all. Horatio asks him, once, if he thinks about becoming king, and his face so darkens that the subject is never raised again. He occasionally returns to Elsinore, to visit, or to attend matters of court. When he returns, Horatio is waiting outside his rooms with a bottle of something very strong, and he lets Hamlet shout at him about Aristotle. Neither of them as much as mentions Denmark.
It is the fall of their fourth year when Horatio is awakened at an utterly untoward hour by a knock on the door and Hamlet behind it. In all the time he has known Hamlet, the prince has only come to Horatio's rooms twice-- once, giddily, after the first time he wrote Ophelia he loved her, and the other, heavily, after a visit to Elsinore during which (from what Horatio could gather) there had been a rather charged conversation with the king. And never in their entire acquaintance has Horatio seen Hamlet look so rudderless.
"Did I wake you?" he asks distractedly. "I did... of course I did, the hour is absurd... but I couldn't be...” he drifts off as Horatio, hand steady on his shoulder, guides him into a chair. Hamlet somehow manages to maintain eye contact with a hazed, unseeing face. There is a letter, Horatio notices, crumpled in his left hand. The bottom drops out of his stomach.
"What’s happened?" he asks, as gently as he can. Hamlet wordlessly offers him the letter, and drops his head into a hand. Horatio has it halfway open when Hamlet saves him the trouble.
"My father is dead." He says the words as if they're in a language he doesn't know, as if he had to learn them phonetically. As if understanding them would cause something inside him to irreparably shatter. "I have to-- I must return home."
Horatio reaches for his free hand in an impotent gesture of comfort. Hamlet's head snaps up.
"You want to come," he says. It isn't a question. Horatio nods.
"Stay." Horatio raises his eyebrows, but Hamlet interrupts him again. "Please." His voice breaks, and Horatio can't help but pull him into a crushing hug. Hamlet collapses against him, eyes still dry, breathing heavily into Horatio's chest. "Please," he repeats. "I won't have them touch you."
Horatio holds him for a long moment, then pulls them apart, so he can look at his friend with truth in his eyes when he agrees.
Horatio keeps his promise for two months.
Hamlet writes him, not of events at Elsinore but continuations of their philosophical debates; sometimes with stilted formality, sometimes with hints of utter despondance. Horatio tries, and fails, to find some hint of what is happening in Denmark. He writes Ophelia, who answers him quickly, glad of someone else's concern for the prince, but no more able to discern his state than Horatio, even being present to it.
He looks at Hamlet's empty chair in lecture and thinks of his hands and wonders what he meant when they spoke his words.
He hears that the queen has married her former brother-in-law. Hamlet writes him tersely of the wedding. Horatio reads the letter over and over, analyzing the words, the arrangement, even the handwriting, and misses an exam.
He goes by Hamlet's rooms, thinking perhaps he had left something that Horatio might send to him. The smashed glass looks down on him from the corner of the shelf. He sees in his mind the foam trickling down the table and for a wild moment it looks like blood.
He is halfway down to the stables before he realizes he has made the decision to leave.
When he arrives at Elsinore, Hamlet has already leapt from the precipice.
But by chance or, perhaps, providence, Horatio arrives in time to break his fall.