fandomweekly | [#001] run with the devil (The Secret History)

Theme Prompt: #001 - Second Chances
Title: run with the devil
Fandom: The Secret History
Rating/Warnings: T - alcohol, drugs mentioned, vague spoilers
Bonus: Yes
Word Count: 939
Summary: Another bacchanal, this time with Richard.

We had not been out to the country house since Bunny’s body was found, so it was with some alarm that I found myself there one Friday evening in late spring. I had no idea how I’d got there. I was lying on the back porch with a faceted crystal champagne flute between my fingers, arm slung out over the edge and a few drops of light rain diluting the rose madder wine.

I turned my head and saw Henry crouching by me. He was in his suit, but he had taken off the jacket and tie, and was unbuttoning his shirt. Flushed, I thought for sure I would panic; then, he put a finger to his lips, and like magic I relaxed. I asked him, “What are you doing? How did we get here?”

“Oh, good,” he said. His voice was insubstantial and far away. “It’s working.”

My memory of the afternoon reconstructed itself piece by piece. I remembered the four of us—four?—piling into Francis’ car, Camilla sliding into the backseat with me, Henry passing around an enamelled pillbox, Francis driving with one hand on the steering wheel and a green glass bottle in the other. I turned away from Henry. Francis was out on the grass, barefoot, an apparition dressed in a bedsheet chiton and his hair wreathed with garden herbs and wildflowers. He was singing a song I had never heard before.

I swallowed, tasting bile. “Where’s Charles?”

“He couldn’t make it,” Henry said. He paused a moment, his next words whirling around that incomprehensible head of his: “We are not on the best of terms at the minute.”

I sat up. I was going to ask why, but then I saw Camilla, sitting on a wicker chair and wearing Henry’s jacket over her chiton. She was by no means slight, but she seemed to be drowning in the fabric, waves of it crashing over her arms and pooling by her thighs. I started to understand. Strangely, I didn’t feel any jealousy. Camilla and Henry. It made more sense than any of this: the wine, the weather, the risk of holding another bacchanal—a risk we had probably reasoned our way around, rationale forgotten in the alcoholic haze in favour of letting go.

“Besides,” Henry continued, “we have already found four to be the perfect number for these activities. Why change the formula? You wanted to come to the first one. Now’s your chance.”

“I never said—”

“No,” Camilla said, “but it’s obvious you wish you’d been there.”

“What with all those questions you’re always asking us,” Henry said, amused.

I relented, but I was still unsettled that we were four instead of five. The purpose of this was, ostensibly, to give us a night off from our consciences. To get out of our minds, to forget. In my view, Charles needed that more than any of us, though perhaps it would be less than advisable to let him near alcohol in such an uncontrolled setting.

“Charles thinks—” Stumbling over my words, I pulled myself so that I was sitting up on the damp wood. “Charles thinks you’re setting him up to take the fall, if all this goes wrong.”

Henry put a hand to his chest. His shirt was now entirely discarded. “That was not,” he said slowly, “my intention.”

We were silent. Francis was still singing out on the grass; he twirled in a circle and then caught sight of us, coming to a stop. Had he driven here, this drunk? He pointed a dramatic finger at me and said, “Get dressed, Richard, you useless inebriate.”

“You’re one to talk,” I said, and he laughed brilliantly.

The sunset turned the sky the colour of sweet wine as we prepared for the ritual. I don’t know what I drank, what I took; my memories were beginning to unravel at the hemlines, even then. I remember being the last to take off my clothes—“All of them,” Henry said, solemn but unusually insistent—and draping myself in a bedsheet with the help of Francis’ deft fingers. I thought of all those times I’d asked the lot of them what happened at the first bacchanal, and receiving no answers that hinted at the level of intimacy they’d experienced. I wondered if Francis would kiss me again.

Dressed, drunk, we stood in a sloppy sort of square with an ornamental vase held between us. Camilla held it, directly opposite me, and drank first. Red wine dripped from the corner of her mouth against her pale skin, her sky blue eyes, yellow gold hair.

“Mondrian,” I said.

“Klimt,” Henry said. The Theatre in Taormina.

Francis said, “Tacky. Poussin. Arcadia.”

Camilla looked at me with a smile in her eyes. With that smile, my heart still clung to a last vestige of hope, though I would never have what Henry had. I couldn’t be a brother to her, either. I didn’t want to take Charles’ place.

I wasn’t thinking about Charles, whether Henry had tried to set him up, whether I’d be next. It didn’t bother me to know that, if they had discarded Charles so easily, I might be disposable too. As we were, so close our shoulders touched, the picture felt complete. Henry was right to say four was a good number for a group. An easy shape for drawing lines between each corner. I was so certain it would stay this way.

After Camilla, Francis drank from the vase, then me, then Henry. We spoke some words. The sun set, the grass beneath us became the same colour as the sky above.

I don’t remember what happened next.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

That was very evocative. I don't know if 'frenetic' is the right word, but the main character seems under enough stress that it doesn't quite seem wrong, either.

I like the writing style you employed, quite a lot! The content was stressful but I think it hit really good notes for what you were aiming for. That feeling of using substances to escape for a little while, knowing it could just as well be futile but doing it anyways... painful to read but, again, not wrong.