#crazy!oph

He was... familiar somehow. Ophelia knew not how, but knew enough for her brow to furrow in confusion. Amaryllis. Yes. That was for him. But how? How did she know? She offered him the vibrant red flower, asking, "Know you my father? Under the green bank he lies, but not under the violets, oh, no."

His face. He was familiar, somehow. Out of the remnants of her shattered brain, Ophelia could tell that much. But his face seemed to waver and turn away until Ophelia knew nothing of who he was; he was just another face that was sure to float away. So she smiled dreamily at him before diverting her attention to the white lilac at her feet. It fit, she knew, somehow.

Ophelia turned, and a smile lit up her face, one that illuminated her already too-bright eyes. There was a young girl in front of her, but she didn't know it, and she called out to the figure as one calls out to a friend after a long separation. "Father? Father!"

But Laertes was not here, and Ophelia didn't know why he wasn't here. He was gone, gone, yes, but she had been gone under running water and willows. But where was he?  A figure was walking in the hall, but it was not right, it was all wrong. It was not her brother.

Ophelia didn't realise she was huddled, trapped as she was within stone halls of a Danish castle, the harder still walls of the past. She didn't realise she was sobbing, and strangled names were falling from her throat, that of a brother and a father and a prince.

She did not understand all of the words, for her focus drifted in and out as a leaf on a river floats from darkness to light. But she understood the roses that seemed to her clouded eyes to burst from it, and she understood the signature of the giver. That much, she knew. And it made her smile, brighter than she had in too long of a time.

*looks up with a bright yet still slightly uncanny smile* Have you dahlias? It seems you do, all around your hair.

Ophelia did not notice the grey-faced figure at first, but when she dreamily turned to face it, it spoke then faded away. “Love? It creeps along even where it cannot go, as do jonquils and violets. But the violets are dead, they withered when my father died. They say he made a good end —” She sang a song then, because the fancy took her, half-hummed and half-sung aloud. “They bore him barefaced on the brier, hey non nonny, nonny, hey nonny,” Ophelia looked up again, prodded by some unseen thing to give another answer to a question she understood not. “My father’s grave lies on the green bank, not the brier, but they lie’st, for my brother is not with him… He shall know of it. I shall tell him so.”