**This work is meant to be a tribute, not a replacement, to William Shakespeare, his son, Hamnet, and the "Hamlet" masterpiece. Some of the characters and their actions/scene directions were taken or inspired by two movie versions of "Hamlet": the one directed by Gregory Doran, starring David Tennant, and the one directed by, and starring, Kenneth Branagh. I own nothing except my own words. Enjoy!

But first, some plot recap. This fanfic will begin in the middle of act 5, scene 1, and will contain Shakespeare's words from line 220 to line 302. The Bard's words from "Hamlet" will be in italics, and mine will be kept in the normal font. I will be attempting to write all of my lines of dialogue in iambic pentameter (but we'll see how long that lasts, now won't we?). Before this, Hamlet returns to Denmark from what would have been an ill-fated journey to London. He comes prepared to finish what he started and avenge his father by killing Claudius. Along the way, Hamlet and his friend, Horatio, pass by a gravedigger digging an unknown grave. They converse, and Hamlet has a moment with the skull of Yorick, King Hamlet's old jester, before he is interrupted by a funeral procession. It is Laertes, Claudius, and Gertrude bringing the dead body of Ophelia. By the end of this chapter, the story will enter "alternate ending" territory.**

Hamlet sighed and rolled poor Yorick's skull in his palm. How was it that a rotted chunk of bone had the ability to bring back so many fond memories? For a prince of Denmark, Yorick had been Hamlet's only childhood friend. The jester had entertained young Hamlet many times with nothing more than his words, his expressions, and a bucket of water. And now here he was, another skull scattered among the dirt. Now is he surely knocking the dead souls' pates, Hamlet mused, the thought making him smile.

All things come to dust. It was a fact Hamlet had known, but not completely comprehended, even before leaving Wittenberg. After all the events that had transpired since, he thought he'd have greater understanding of it. But now, seeing Yorick's bones littered among those of poor cobblers and wealthy land owners, Hamlet finally understood. It wasn't just the body that decomposed into dust, but honor and wealth and even love as well. Death was truly final. What did it matter how good a man's morals were, or how beauteous a woman made herself to be? According to the gravedigger, all it took was eight or nine years for a man like Alexander the Great to turn into a man like…him.

"Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay, might stop a hole to keep the wind away," Hamlet muttered aloud. "O, that that earth which kept the world in awe should patch a wall t' expel the winter's flaw!"

Horatio opened his mouth to comment, when suddenly Hamlet spotted a group of people coming towards them.

"But soft, but soft awhile!" He whispered, pulling himself and his friend behind a patch of hydrangeas. "Here comes the King, the Queen, the courtiers."

Indeed, that was who the group appeared to be. They were slowly walking along the side of the church, all dressed in black with their necks bent, as if in sadness. Four men carried a wooden casket above them, its wood uncharacteristically misshapen and the lid missing.

Hamlet's narrowed his eyes. "Who is this they follow?" he murmured, "And with such maimed rites?" It appeared to be a funeral procession, but most events involving royalty, even events as mournful as this, involved enormous presentations of wealth and regality. More than just a Doctor of Divinity and a dirt grave. A shameful death, perhaps?

"This doth betoken the corse they follow did with desp'rate hand fordo its own life," Hamlet whispered to Horatio. "'Twas of some estate."

His friend didn't reply. As the king and his entourage approached, Hamlet pushed aside his musings and pulled Horatio with him behind a bush. "Crouch we awhile and mark."

The grave digger, meanwhile, had forgotten their presence, and continued to dig and sing under his breath.

One of the richly-adorned men detached himself from the group to stand beside the Doctor of Divinity. "What ceremony else?" The man asked him.

Hamlet's eyes widened. "That is Laertes, a very noble youth. Mark." He ignored his friends shushing movements.

Horatio sat back on his heels and blew out a silent puff of air. Both Hamlet and he had been away from Denmark for quite some time. Who knew who could be that casket? If it proved to be someone who'd been dear to the prince, Horatio had to be read to keep Hamlet from launching himself at the procession like a mad man. The loyal friend tried to see who was missing from the group, but too many wore indiscernible black hoods.

"What ceremony else?" Laertes repeated.

The Doctor adjusted the collar of his black robe as if it was stifling him. "Her obsequies have been as far enlarged as we have warranty," he answered. "Her death was doubtful and, but that great command o'ersways the order, she should be in ground unsanctified been lodged till the last trumpet. For charitable prayers shards, flints, and pebbles should be thrown on her."

Laertes opened his mouth to interrupt with anger, but the priest silenced him with a raised hand. "Yet here she is allowed her virgin crants, her maiden strewments, and the bringing home of bell and burial."

Hamlet stared at his hands, as if the wrinkles on his palms held the answers to his problems. Laertes had always seemed like a scholar to him. A bit rash at times, but a good and intelligent man at heart. Who could have died for Laertes to become this estranged? Hamlet could only think of Polonius, Laertes' father, but that funeral should have taken place months ago. And Polonius hadn't been a woman, unless Hamlet had changed more than just the old man's blood content and breathing patterns.

"Must there no more be done?" Laertes growled.

The Doctor of Divinity shook his head sadly. Though he was a holy man, taught that all victims of self-sacrifice were to be ostracized from church yards, he couldn't help but feel a pang of sadness for the woman. She was obviously loved very much by this man, so what could have prompted such a beautiful woman to take her own life? But his musings would not help to put the anxious man beside him at ease. "No more be done," he concluded. He gestured to the freshly dug grave, which the gravedigger was standing beside like a proud parent. "We should profane the service of the dead to sing a requiem and such rest to her as to peace-parted souls."

Laertes nodded to the holy man, and then to the procession behind him. At his signal the men carried the casket towards the hole. The gravedigger, sensing that his work was done, hoisted his shovel on his shoulder and went on his way, whistling a tune and tossing Yorick's skull up and down, up and down. The rest of the procession took their places, the king and queen at the foot of the grave, Laertes on the side, and the priest at the head.

"Lay her in the earth, and from her fair and unpolluted flesh may violets spring!" Laertes lifted his eyes from the coffin and openly glared at the Doctor. "I tell thee, churlish priest, a minist'ring angel shall my sister be when thou liest howling."

Hamlet felt his heart freeze and the blood drain from his face. "What, the fair Ophelia?" He breathed, and he scrambled to his knees to attempt to see for himself. Horatio finally managed to hold him back with an arm around his friend's shoulders, but not before the prince caught a glimpse of what lay in the open casket. The breath in his lungs vanished unused as he saw that it was indeed Ophelia being lowered into the earth, and not some other maid.

The queen wiped her eyes absently and went to stand on the other side of the grave. "Sweets to the sweet, farewell!" She said as she bent down to scatter flowers over Ophelia's body. "I hoped thou shouldst have been my Hamlet's wife; I thought thy bride-bed to have decked, sweet maid, and not have strewed thy grave."

Horatio glanced at his friend worriedly, but there were no emotional explosions yet. Yet the man sitting next to him didn't look like the friend he had come to know and, yes, even love. This Hamlet was as lifeless as the corpses beneath their feet, staring at the funeral with features as cold as stone. Horatio would have almost preferred a breakdown.

The group stood around the fateful hole in silence for a few moments, before Laertes broke the still ness with a voice that sounded like a snarl. "O, treble woe fall ten times on that cursèd head whose wicked deed thy most ingenious sense deprived thee of!"

Figuring that the nobleman's words were their signal, the work men started to move towards the hole with their shovels, but Laertes stopped them with a raised palm. "Hold off the earth awhile, till I have caught her once more in mind arms."

In Horatio's mind, jumping into his sister's grave was the worst thing Laertes could have done. The minute the man's feet touched the newly exposed ground Hamlet came to life. He was like a beast gone made, struggling against Horatio's grasp and practically snarling as Laertes picked up his sister's corpse. But they're embrace was anything but beautiful or poignant, not with Ophelia's arms flopping around like dead fish. The display was so full of raw desperation that the Doctor of Divinity turned deathly pale, and even the king and queen looked away.

"Now pile your dust upon the quick and dead," Laertes said tonelessly, but loud enough it seemed he was cursing the earth itself. Hamlet continued to struggle in his friend's grip as the nobleman's words fanned the flames of his rage. "Till of this flat a mountain you have made t' o'ertop old Pelion or the skyish head of blue Olympus."

Hamlet finally managed to free himself from Horatio's grasp, and he burst from the bushes fully prepared to save Ophelia from defilement. It was the least he could do for the woman he'd…no, he had no right to say that word. Not after all he'd done to her.

His rage returned to him and Hamlet shouted, "What is he whose grief bears such an emphasis, whose phrase of sorrow conjures the wand'ring stars and makes them stand like wonder-wounded hearers? This is I, Hamlet the Dane!"

Queen Gertrude gasped and covered her mouth in astonishment, and the priest muttered holy words and crossed himself. If anyone had been paying attention to him, they would have seen King Claudius turn deathly pale, as if he was seeing his own death before him. But Laertes was only stunned for half a moment, before his face became red and purple from barely-suppressed loathing. He laid Ophelia back in her grave and turned to Hamlet, shouting, "The devil take thy soul!"

Hamlet paused halfway to the rave, his chest heaving. A false smile played on his lips as he cheekily replied, "Thou pray'st not well." Then, like two opposing storms, they charged one another and clashed near the foot of Ophelia's grave.

The prince might have had the element of surprise, but Laertes had the desperation of a man fighting to avenge two souls instead of one. He dodged Hamlet's first swing, and then skipped all pretense of foreplay and instead went straight for his enemy's throat.

Hamlet let out a strangled gasp as the other man's arm hooked around his neck and railed his fists against Laertes. "I prithee take thy fingers from my throat, for though I am no splentitive and rash, yet have I in me something dangerous, which let thy wisdom fear. Hold off thy hand."

He grinned as one of his blows struck Laertes squarely on the jaw, and used the reprieve to drive his ankle into his rival's knee and twist out of his hold. Then they were at each other again, arms locked in a wrestling match for Ophelia's love and honor.

All the while, the surrounding mourners cried out in shock and fear. The king turned to his men and ordered, "Pluck them asunder."

"Hamlet! Hamlet!" Queen Gertrude screamed.

The men in black advanced on the grappling men and reached for them both, crying, "Gentleman!"

Seeing that his lord was in danger of being arrested (and maybe being deported, again), Horatio overcame his initial hesitations and jumped out from behind the bushes. "Good my lord, be quiet," he hissed, pulling Hamlet away from Laertes before the king's men could get their hands on his friend.

The two men were finally separated, Laertes and the king's men on one side of Ophelia's grave, and Hamlet and Horatio on the other. The king kept himself and his wife on the edge of the proceedings, next to the still-praying Doctor of Divinity.

In the back of his mind, Hamlet knew that his actions were borderline unseemly, especially for a prince, but he was beyond caring. All it took was one glance…Ophelia. Was it strange that he was surprised to see that Laertes' words were true? She looked so peaceful, as if she were sleeping. Perhaps sudden grief was to blame for making him think such childish thoughts, but his sadness also made a new kind of determination settle within him.

Before Laertes or anyone else present could speak, Hamlet growled, "Why, I will fight with him upon this theme until my eyelids no longer wag!"

"O my son, what theme?" The queen asked desperately.

"I loved Ophelia!" Hamlet shouted. And that was the problem wasn't it? A maiden such as Ophelia deserved those words at all hours of the day, in the present tense, and a man who was not afraid to say them. But Hamlet knew that he was not that man. He lied, used those closest to him, and held vengeful murder in his soul. And he'd told her so, on that fateful day that felt like a lifetime ago. The words, "Get thee to a nunnery!", rang in his ears and made him wince.

She'd chosen to protect her father that day, and why shouldn't she? He'd pushed her away in a time when his addled brain could have used her comfort the most. And then he'd confused her with mixed signals of his love for her…what an ass he was! Was it too self-righteous of him to wonder if he was the reason she took her life? If he had been braver, or more honorable, with his love for her, would she have killed herself? As it was, Ophelia had died too soon. She would never know that although his core was blackened by revenge, his heart had always belonged to her.

He swallowed down the first of his sobs and locked eyes with Laertes. "Forty thousand brothers could not with all their quantity of love make up my sum," Hamlet told him. "What wilt thou do for her?"

"O, he is mad, Laertes!" King Claudius hissed.

"For love of God, forbear him," Queen Gertrude said quickly, but it was unclear whether she was talking to her husband or Laertes.

Mad, was he? Not so near made enough to kill my kin, Hamlet thought, but he didn't voice his bitter thoughts. His quarrel was with Laertes. His mother's, and even his uncle's, judgment would come later.

Hamlet turned back to Laertes and drew himself to his full height (or as best he could while being restrained by Horatio). "'Swounds, show me what thou't do," he barked. "Woo't weep, woo't fight, woo't fast, woo't tear thyself, woo't drink up eisel, eat a crocodile? I'll do 't." His lips curled into a sneer. "Dost thou come here to whine? To outface me with leaping in her grave? Be buried quick with her, and so will I!"

With a violent heave, Hamlet broke free of his friend's hold and sunk to his knees beside Ophelia's grave. Everyone around him took a collective gasp and Laertes' face was as red as a furnace, all of them assuming that he intended to be the second person to leap into her grave. But, while part of Hamlet yearned to do just that, he couldn't bring himself to do so. She looked so out of place among the dirt and bones, pale and white, with a body that lay askew from when Laertes had held her. Even the scattered flowers looked more wilted in the muddy hole.

All men and women might be condemned to disintegrate into dirt and dust, but Ophelia did not belong under the earth. Not yet. Hamlet growled, "And if thou prate of mountains, let them throw millions of earth on us, till our ground, singing his pate against the burning zone, make Ossa like a wart."

He wasn't sure when the tears began, but as he pulled Ophelia's empty hand on his lap he saw a drop fall onto her thumb. "Nay, an thou'lt mouth, I'll rant as well as thou."

The graveyard was as silent as the pale skulls below their feet. Laertes had escaped his captors as well, and now stood opposite Hamlet. One man kneeling and in tears, the other standing and looking at the man opposite him with more respect than before, both loving Ophelia. It was strangely poetic, in a way.

Queen Gertrude cleared her throat in an attempt to clear the awkwardness in the air. "This is mere madness," she began, but with those words, Hamlet shut his ears to her. His mother, the last family he had left, had called her only son crazy. A strange world it was when a parent wouldn't even believe their own child.

Hamlet let her voice melt into a white haze and clutched Ophelia's hand like a lifeline. He laid her palm against his cheek and closed his eyes, losing himself in the slow, steady pulse beneath her skin.

He froze.

No…it couldn't be. "Stay awhile! Hold thy tongue!" Hamlet shouted abruptly, and he felt every pair of eyes swing towards him. It didn't matter, nothing else mattered, not if he had heard correctly. He put his ear to Ophelia's wrist and held his breath, waiting…

There.

"She lives," he whispered in astonishment. Then, to Laertes, louder, "My lord, she yet lives!"

The man standing across from him stared with eyes as wide as twin moons. "Is't possible?"

Hamlet placed a chaste kiss to Ophelia's palm. "Tis faint, yet her pulse rings like yonder bells." He stepped further into the hold that was no longer a grave and put his arms under the maiden's shoulders. "Help me, Laertes, lord, brother and kin; four arms will make to pull her from Death's grip."

"And a foot as well, I'll gladly help thee," he replied, nodding. Then in one fluid motion he climbed into the grave and hooked his arms around her legs. Together the two men carried Ophelia out of the hole and laid her body on the weed-infested grass above them.

The king and queen were shouting over everyone else, demanding to know why Ophelia was being treated so roughly, but Hamlet left Laertes to explain to them what was happening. The prince only had eyes for his love. Of course, it would be a much better reunion if his love would wake up. Though her pulse continued to pound along her neck the maiden showed no signs of stirring.

"Ophelia," he whispered, "your lord has returned home." Naturally, she didn't reply.

"How came'st she to die?" Hamlet asked the group around him, who were still staring at him in confusion.

After a quick glance at the Doctor of Divinity, Laertes kneeled next to him. "Drown'd, prince, 'neath willows. They say she left singing."

Drowned? Hamlet clenched his eyes shut at the image his imagination presented him with. He wondered if her singing meant that she had been happy in the end, as if perhaps water was her natural realm.

But, yes, of course! A drowned man could still be saved, since departed souls do not travel as swiftly to Death's kingdom on muddy, bloody brooks. He'd learned much about the dangers of drowning, and how to revive someone, from the crew of the ship that had been ordered to take him to London. With skills he never had a chance to put into practice, Hamlet quickly set Ophelia down on the ground so she was on her back, and used his palms to pump against her chest. Laertes made indiscernible sounds of protest, but Hamlet's growl silenced him. Utmost focus was needed.

That didn't stop Laertes from almost knocking him over when Hamlet covered Ophelia's lips with his own in order to give oxygen to her lungs.

Breathe, he thought, the word repeating through his head in time with the pressure from his hands. Breathe, Ophelia!

And suddenly, on the fifth resuscitation attempt, she did.

**News flash! I am not CPR trained and for this reason you should not try and duplicate what Hamlet just did. I don't want my ignorance to be the cause of something…unpleasant. Anyway, the next chapters will be much shorter, and will hopefully have iambic pentameter. We're on our way!**