*crashes through window* hi hamilton fandom its me
for elle. happy birthday sunflower princess!
(lots of love to tehreem for editing, sorry my sentences are like 3 ft long)
stay away from this if you are triggered by vomiting, panic attacks, internalized/period-typical homophobia (it's pretty brief but still), or mentions of character death. thanks
Dear Mr. Hamilton,
On Tuesday the 27th, my son was killed in a gunfight against British troops retreating from South Carolina. The war was already over. As you know, John dreamed of emancipating and recruiting 3000 men for the first all-black military regiment.
His dream of freedom for these men dies with him.
Alexander cannot breathe.
He has lost count of how many times he has read the letter; he has lost count of how many minutes he has been sitting here, body furled in on itself like a flower at dusk, quivering like a violin string as soundless tears decorate his cheeks. The hand which is not occupied with the letter clutches at the sheets as though they were a lifeline; perhaps, as he strikes a precarious balance on the cusp of panic, the fabric in his fist is the closest thing to an anchor he has.
The candle at his bedside – for he had lit one when he first retreated to the bedchamber, after rising from the dinner table on trembling legs with a glib It's all right, Eliza, I just need a moment – presently resembles little more than a waxen stump, flame weak and faltering, throwing an erratic yellow glow across the expanse of the page. The handwriting is delicate, fluctuating between thick and thin with each stroke, the ink a stark contrast to the pale hue of the parchment; a whip cracks against his skin with each word that meet his eyes, and he feels his heart may never again resume its wonted pace, every staccato flutter of the muscle shooting blood through his veins and ringing in his eardrums like a tolling church bell.
His knuckles are still white on the letter; the paper has creased where it is trapped between his fingers, the ink beginning to bleed beneath his sweat-sheened skin. He squeezes his eyes shut and forces himself to suck in a breath, but despite the imminent nightfall, the room has not yet evaded the smothering late-August warmth which plagues the city; it is stifling, airless, and his tentative breath is quick to dissolve into strenuous hacking. The fit settles within the minute, thank God, but it is just as soon replaced by an uncomfortable dryness in his throat – it strikes him that he does not remember the last time he had something to drink – exacerbated by the cramp building in his balled fist and the insistent migraine rearing its head between his eyes–
A choked gasp wrenches its way past his lips, his clenched muscles slackening, and the letter slides from his feeble grasp. It flutters to the floor, delicate, like a lace doily; he watches it fall, too insubstantial an object for the heavy news it bears.
He cannot tear his gaze from it as it stills on the floorboards. His eye catches on John's name – the defiant swoop of the J, the tail of the n where it steals into the blank space between words. The loop of the h, too, hooks into line above it, thin strokes tangled together where they intersect like links on a chain. Remarkably sloppy penmanship, for a man of such relevance as Mr. Henry Laurens, and seeing it floods Alexander with a fresh wave of anguish: it is precisely this sort of carelessness that John would always chide him for, leaning over Alexander's shoulder as he scratched away at letter after letter for General Washington, the close proximity of their bodies enough to make a blush rise in Alexander's cheeks. Too close, too close, not nearly close enough.
(He found the messiness bothersome in its own right, of course, but he hated to admit so to John; Alexander values the spark of the argument over any other form of conversation, and quiet submission is always less entertaining regardless of his personal beliefs. It hardly matters, in hindsight. Alexander would write a thousand slapdash letters if it meant he could hear John's voice again.)
He does not feel the sob swelling in his throat until it is too late: it leaps out of his chest like a lion from its cage, a helpless, childlike yelp which he surely did not sanction, but he is too inundated by his foggy, jumbled thoughts and the letter on the floor to find any shame in it.
Footsteps thunder down the hall, the distinct clack of each shoe slamming into the wooden floors bouncing off the walls in a hollow echo. Eliza – he realizes his cry of distress must have carried to the next room, and suddenly he cannot think to do anything but pray that he did not wake Phillip from his restless slumber, for the poor child has not taken well to the recent heat–
There is the click of the knob, and slim silhouette appears in the doorway.
"Eliza," Alexander tries to say, but his breath catches in the back of his throat and the word jumps out in a strangled hiccup. He drags the back of his hand across one cheek — a habitual gesture, as it does little to conceal the incontestable fact that he's been crying, nor does the undignified mixture of mucus and tears pooling in his philtrum. He clears his throat. Even in this hour of reckless grief, he thinks to himself, you are still too proud.
Eliza watches him in silence for two, three seconds more. He cannot read her expression; their chamber is too dimly lit, the golden glow of the candle by his bedside dancing across the smooth ridge of her cheekbones. Then she is surging across the room in a flurry of skirts and loose hair, her arms encircling his shaking body as she drops beside him on the bed and draws him tight against her. He allows himself to go utterly lax, the ache of tension rolling out of his clenched muscles, his body collapsing against her frame like a sack of potatoes.
"Alexander," she whispers, and she rests her head on his. "Alexander, you cannot apologize to me when you have not wronged me. Laurens was your dearest friend. You loved him with all of you, did you not, with the same passion that you do anything?"
It pains him to nod, but he does. It pains him to lie about what he feels for a dead man, but he does.
What else is he to say? Eliza, dear, perhaps I ought to mention that I was also helplessly in love with him and that we engaged in highly illegal sexual intercourse on multiple occasions? He is so delirious with exhaustion that he nearly imagines himself saying it, can picture the words flooding his tongue as he admits to sodomy and paves the path to his own execution–
And yet. He feels suddenly compelled to confess, to admit the true extent of his feelings for John Laurens. Perhaps it is his fragile mental state speaking, or the weight of the secret pressing on his heart, but somehow it does not seem like an entirely ill-conceived notion; Eliza is the best and only person he can think to tell, the only person who would never dare betray his secret, and he nearly smiles as he considers it: she loves him far too much, he believes, or perhaps she is simply too kind a soul. Regardless, he trusts her. Could she hate him for sharing his heart with someone else? Would she hate him for giving it to another man?
He cannot imagine it. If anything, she will sympathize.
Then he draws his head away from her shoulder and meets her eyes, and his heart becomes a stone sinking to the pit of his stomach. Her face is bright, hopeful, shining with compassion and empathy and all the other kind qualities that make her so endearing. The words — "I am in love with him and he was in love with me" — dissipate on his tongue, and suddenly he cannot bear to consider hurting this woman in any way. She would forgive him, he knows, but he would never forgive himself. Perhaps he is not in love with Eliza, but he refuses to wound her.
Instead he draws in a broken breath as his consciousness begins to blur into panic. He tries to focus on Eliza's face, tries to keep the world from tilting and his pulse from sliding into overdrive. It leaps in his throat, an insistent patter against his flesh like a hyperactive bird in a cage, sealing off his windpipe and swamping his chest with hysteria and oh, God, there comes his last meal. He manages to throw his upper body over the side of the bed before he begins retching, the pain and the sadness and the three bites of supper he took hurtling up his throat and spilling out onto the floor and he loses track of where the vomiting ends and the dry convulsing of his throat begins. It is only after the retching stops and the world slides back into view that he becomes aware of Eliza's hand at the nape of his neck, touching and stroking and rubbing soothing circles into his skin as her fingers tangle in his hair, and he is suddenly so grateful for her presence that he begins to cry.
He is so helpless. Suddenly he is twelve years old again, feverish and pressed against his mother's sweat-soaked body as he clings to the last threads of his fading lifeline. He is seventeen and drowning, the wind merciless and the sky blacker than coal. He is twenty-three and on the battlefield, wading into a sea of blood and bodies with reckless abandon, deeper and deeper into the melee they call a war, thinking that just perhaps his death is hiding somewhere inside the chaos and counting down the seconds until it can finally welcome him with open arms.
And he is in someone's arms. Eliza's. She holds him close, tender.
He tries to ground himself, to focus on nothing but her hands where they are touching him, but he feels as though he is floating – drifting on the tide at the lip of a bay, caught in a state of suspension between consciousness and comatose.
"Alexander," Eliza begins again, her voice hardly a murmur, "do you wish to...talk to me? About…"
She does not say it, but the end of the sentence – Laurens, John Laurens, his John – hangs heavy, unspoken, in the space between Alexander's body and hers. He allows the suggestion a moment of fleeting consideration, but dismisses it without a second thought. His Eliza – he does not want to encumber her with this, does not want to pin down her featherlight heart with the weight of such a secret. This burden he will shoulder for the both of them; this pain, however excruciating, he will endure on his own. It is a small price to pay for concealing such a sin from a person who would move earth and heaven for him.
(Perhaps, though he is unwilling to admit so, it is not entirely for Eliza's sake. A part of him is unmistakably frightened to share his memories of John, terrified that they may slip from his grasp if he fails for a moment to press them close to his chest.)
For once in his life, Alexander Hamilton says nothing.
Instead he shakes his head, and the effort it takes is monumental. He does not trust himself to speak, even merely to refuse her delicate proposal, does not believe his wobbly, tear-strained voice can properly execute a sentence without fracturing. His head lolls against her shoulder again, forehead resting on the chine of her collarbone, and he is powerless to lift it.
"That's all right," she says, and he cannot help but think that it isn't, not really, not anymore–
"I...I think I would like to step outside for moment," he croaks, and he is too exhausted to find shame in the dry quaver of his voice. Eliza offers a smile – small, tight-lipped, coffee-black gaze not quite meeting his own – which he attempts to return, and he is startled to find the necessary muscles stiff and tenacious with disuse. Instead he ducks his head and allows her to help him up off their bed, gingerly, joints groaning and knees near buckling under his weight. He has not felt this weak since the hurricane; even in the heat of battle, his comrades biting the dust like flies in winter, there had been control over his body, his mind. Now there is nothing.
The small balcony adjacent to their chamber cannot be more than seven feet away from where Alexander had been seated on the bed, but the distance spans miles as he and Eliza struggle to close it. His muscles are limp beneath his skin, his joints pockets of air; every few paces she staggers, and he realizes he would be incapable of upright stance without his wisp of a wife supporting the generous portion of his weight that she is – and if that isn't a blow to his already-compromised dignity–
The knot in his throat loosens with something like relief when the first lungful of cold nighttime air rushes through his body. Eliza hovers beside him in the doorway for a moment, concern evident in the dainty hand that lingers on his shoulder, as if she does not believe he can stand alone without collapsing in on himself like a rag doll; she retreats in a rustle of fabric and a soft murmur of Going to check up on Phillip, darling, I know you'll be all right, and for all that he wishes he could believe her inspirited comment Alexander does not – John –
He braces himself on the balcony railing and sucks in a shuddering breath. The stone is cold beneath his hands, and he wills himself to focus on nothing but the chill as it seeps into the skin of his palms. The discomfort, combined with the brisk nighttime wind needling through his thin nightwear and stinging his swollen eyes, is enough to somehow clear his head; he tilts it back to gaze up at the stars, a thousand silver freckles against an endless span of sky. He thinks about John Laurens, about his freckles, and lets his eyes slide shut again, the memory burning bright against the backs of his eyelids. It startles him, how sharp the image of John's face is in his brain, all hard angles and bold colors. He wonders if it will soften over time.
Time. There is never enough of it. So much work to do.
Little use, wasting time on tears. He clenches his jaw, squares his shoulders, sculpts his drooping spine tall and ramrod-straight. Military stance. His muscles assume it without a second thought. His face – features arranged with utmost care like colors on a canvas, schooled into the blank, unassuming expression he has so often required but has never quite been able to master. He will make himself learn it, now, how to thole, how to survive, how to shut off whichever corner of his brain supplying him with these emotions. His thoughts of John Laurens need not intrude on his daily affairs, on the fragile relationship he sustains with Eliza, on the weak, rickety foundation of a country he is piecing together.
The pale spray of stars across the heavens thickens with each passing moment, and Alexander allows himself a final glance; he devours the sight like a starving man presented with a feast. I will see you on the other side, my love, he thinks, and a part of him is wholly willing to believe John will hear him. God, I can't wait to see you again.
i'm gryphoned on tumblr if you want to come yell about the founding fathers with me