I was pretty determined to tell this entire story from Hamilton's POV but for this chapter I change to Laurens' halfway through to keep the story entertaining? And to accelerate the plot a little. I've also been itching to get inside the head of his character a little bit more so you know where he's coming from and his motives. Okay cool thanks for reading love y'all x (This also may seem to be all over the place but don't worry it's going to piece together some smaller things - the next chapter alllll will be revealed promise x)

"I have to go to Puerto Rico," Hamilton's statement seemed to be a grounded conclusion to their talks in his view, but both Lafayette and Mulligan met the reasoning with joint disapproval.

"No, Alexander, I can't let you!" Laf tutted. "You've to work, you just published your book! Have you even looked at your emails yet? Has Jefferson called you? The world might be going crazy for Alexander Hamilton and we would never know, locker away up here in this apartment as we are."

"Laf's right that you shouldn't go," Mulligan added, always looking at Lafayette when he spoke. It would take an idiot not to notice how infatuated they were with one another, yet neither of them seemed to act on it. Noticing their love made Hamilton's heart pang with a longing for his own. It had only been a few hours without Laurens but he missed him beyond belief, he felt a certain loneliness he'd never really felt before. The sort that mocked you. Laurens wasn't gone for good, but Hamilton had no idea when he was returning, adding salt to the wound of his absence. "You have to finish what you and Laurens started. Whatever Jefferson did, he did it to not only ruin you, but Laurens too. You need to make sure you finish the project you were working on with him. And...don't you have winter exams coming up soon?"

Shit.

His work was dwarfed by the immediate importance and urgency to resolve Laurens' absence, however. There was no way Hamilton could let Laurens' photo book not go to the editors when it was due, though. He knew Laurens was trusting him to get that much done. These were testing and extreme circumstances, but the reason within Hamilton was resolute. "You're right. I have to get through to Jefferson. Sit down with him and talk this out."

Laf shifted, crossing his legs and leaning further back into the sofa, taking up what Hamilton could only describe as his 'thinking position'. The food had long since disappeared, and he wondered for an instance how such a slight man could eat such a great mountain of food.

"Well. Jefferson has it out for you. Talking face to face might be dangerous. If what he did was powerful enough to-" Lafayette's words were interrupted, as so many sentences seemed to be, by the buzzing of Hamilton's phone.

"It's... Laurens' parents?"

"Oh shit," Mulligan muttered, they'd caught him up.

"Oh...fuck," Lafayette added to the chorus.

"Do I answer? I won't speak well enough the words won't come to me what do I say I cannot think straight this is not good oh god ohgodoh." He took a deep breath and answered. "Ms. Laurens, hello again, our conversation seemed to have been cut short earlier."

The voice on the other end of the line was much more together than Hamilton knew she was. There were undertones to her voice he could recognise only because he'd had to deal with Burr's consistently passive-aggressive friendship for so long. "Alexander. Laurens told me to pass on a message before he left he said ...that he loves you, and will come back. I didn't want to tell you this earlier because his father was around and, well. He's taking his with quite the straight back. We're supportive, of course, but what you wrote, it was detestable and-" her voice was cut short by a door slammed in the background, and she instantly dropped the call, leaving Hamilton thrown into an even deeper and more perplexing confusion.

"Lafayette. Mulligan. It's been a long day, but really, really. We should get to work. We need to get him back, let's get this job done." Laf and Mulligan raised their diet cokes half-heartedly.

"No fucking clue what's really happening, but we got this," Mulligan joked, but every face in the room was shrouded with worry. They didn't know how long it would be, Hamilton felt physically weak being away from Laurens. But he'd have to get used to it, it would be weeks before they were were reunited and weeks of similar sufferings.

Laurens' POV

Puerto Rico welcomed Laurens home like a slap across the face. He loved his country; the family he had there, the streets and people and sights and smells were all at the very essence of what made him John Laurens, no doubt. He had missed those colourful flowers, the familiar old hands that welcomed him back with wrinkles that flowed ever deeper, every growing to remind him of just how long he'd been away. The new faces in the neighbourhood he'd visited all his life, the new kids who had come home for the winter, they mirrored that change. And that visit, those few weeks he spent with his Grandma, (his precious Bela had grown so old and frail, in both body and mind, that she couldn't even remember Laurens' name for the first few days, and continuously called him by his mother's name, something which both perplexed and really wounded him), those weeks were tough.

It was tough to reimagine the country you belong to. He was as much a Brooklyn kid as he was a Puerto Rican, yet this country held so much more purity and homeliness for him. And then it was gone. All the feelings he generally associated with this place were gone, swiped clean to be replaced by the absence of Hamilton. It consumed him, ate at him every moment of every day of those four and a half weeks. He would end up counting every day off like a prisoner. That first day though, was maybe the hardest. He'd cried on the plane ride, all three hours forty-five minutes of it, every part of him crumbling to a shell of the man he had been just that morning. It had taken Jefferson practically nothing to break him, and he prayed that Hamilton was stronger than he was. He knew he was, and besides he had Laf and Mulligan. Laurens had never felt so alone.

Stepping off the plane was a reality shock. This had all really happened. What had happened? Well the most fine details of that played themselves out over and over again what Laurens would come to distinguish as a recurring nightmare...