#death week

The envelope is delivered to Alex two days after the funeral, by a solemn young man in an expensive suit from the office of John’s lawyer. There are only two things behind brown paper and the bright red sticker that says DO NOT BEND, THANK YOU. 

The first is the deed to the building, signed over by power of attorney to one Alexander Hamilton. 

The second is a burned DVD. And when Alex sits down in front of his laptop and puts it in the tray, the screen will be filled with John, sitting on the same couch that Alex was sitting on right now. Smiling. Still strong, before the chemo started eating away at him. Before curls gave way to a shaved head. 

This was John as he wanted to be remembered. 

“Hey baby.” The video jumps there after a second, obviously edited. John’s smile is still as soft as it was at the start. “I started to do the whole, if you’ve gotten this video thing and…” He shakes his head, looking down at his hands. John was never good at this shit, he was never good at words. Not like Alex. But he needed to be. Just one time. “You know why you got this video. I don’t have to tell you.”

John forces hazel eyes back up to the screen, so that he could look at Alex. Or, so Alex could look at him. This really wouldn’t be worth it if he kept his eyes down the whole time. Alex deserved better than that. 

“We got the diagnosis last week. I’m pretty sure you’re downstairs between prep stuff trying to google new treatments on your phone.” John’s eyes crinkle with his smile, but there’s no hiding the moisture there. “You’re a fighter, Alex. You always have been. But there are some fights we can’t win, man.”

John pulls a notebook into his lap, laughing under his breath. Yeah, he took notes for this. “I went and saw my attorney this morning. We started working on my will. I think he’s not going to give this to you until after it’s been enacted, so you probably know what I’m going to say. The building is yours. I can’t stay, but I can at least make sure no one can take Post, or the apartment from you.”

God, he fucking wishes he could stay. John looks away from the screen for a moment, blinking rapidly as he tries to collect himself. “I know you wouldn’t want any of my money, so I didn’t even try. I split my net worth between the New York state conservation fund, and a charity in Washington Heights that helps foster kids transition into their new homes. I made that one in your name, so don’t be surprised if you go down into the Heights and see your name plastered on the side of a building.”

John drums his fingers against the notebook. He’s trying to take care of business before he says what he wants to say. “Most of my clothes are at your place anyway. Keep what you want, donate the rest. I won’t make you deal with the shit in my apartment. But if you want anything out of there, you can call my lawyer and he’ll grab it for you.” He doesn’t want Alex to have to risk crossing paths with his parents.

“I uh...called and got the arrangements set up today.” John’s stomach twists sickly at the word. Arrangements. His funeral arrangements. “I googled it, there’s a place outside of Ithaca. A green cemetery. No boxes, no fake grass. I can help things grow.” He doesn’t want Alex to come see some stone slab in an overly manicured cemetery. John wants plants and flowers and trees and life to remind Alex of him.

John rubs his fingers over his mouth, and makes eye contact again. “I love you, Alex. More than I ever thought I could love anybody. You make me so happy, man. This time with you...it’s been the best of my life. Easy. And not just because of the food.” The joke falls a little flat, but John doesn’t let it derail him. 

“If the choice was another sixty years without you or the time we had together, I’d choose you. Every single time. You gave my life meaning. You taught me how to be more than I was. And I can never repay that. But I’m gonna try. So listen up.”

His shoulders shift up and back, blatantly ready for an argument they can’t have. “I don’t want you to spend the rest of your life alone, you hear me? Take your time. Grieve. Do what you have to do to heal your heart. And then you get back out there, Alex. You get back out there and you fall in love again. Because you deserve to be happy. And if it can’t be with me, then goddamnit you find who it is going to be with.”

John has an odd, low feeling in his gut about Eliza. He isn’t going to think too hard about it. What matters is Alex being happy. 

“So this is it.” John bites down on the side of his tongue until the tears recede. He’s not going to make Alex watch him cry. “My dying wish. I want you, Alexander Hamilton, to live a full life. Be happy. Grow old.” His throat tightens dangerously on him. 

“I love you. Stay alive. Not just in the basic way, either. Keep on living. Promise me.”

He presses two fingers to his lips, and then presses them over the camera. 

“To the groom.” 

John raises his glass, and hears the toast echo around the room. The next line only comes smoothly because John has spent the last week making himself repeat it over and over again, until his voice doesn’t catch. “To the bride.” 

Alexander and Eliza’s wedding is a big affair. The room is overflowing with smiling faces and white roses, Angelica and Peggy sitting to their sister’s left, faces radiant with joy. But the pair of them had nothing on Eliza Schuyler. 

Eliza Hamilton. And her groom, who kept lifting their laced hands to press kisses to her knuckles. Alexander’s voice had trembled as he recited his vows. John had never heard it so full of emotion. 

Everyone in the room was watching him. John had been silent for too long. He swallows, turning a watery smile on his best friend. (That was the only word he was allowed to have for him now.) “When I met Alex, I could have never pictured him getting married.” There’s little ripples of laughter through the room. “The world was his oyster, you know?” Jesus, he didn’t even realize that innuendo when he wrote this down. 

“And I never could have pictured him marrying someone like Eliza.” A loaded truth. Because John had built up a few drunken kisses and lack of personal boundaries into a cotton candy fairy tale. That he would be the one standing across from Alex. Not the one giving him away. Reality saw fit to rain on his cotton candy until all he had left was a sticky mess that only he could see and feel.

“But these two, they defied the odds.” Eliza’s soft, kind smile burrows into his chest, another razor sharp piece in the broken chandelier mess of his heart. She was a good woman. She was sweet, and it was obvious how much she loved Alexander. 

It didn’t stop John from having to physically bite down on his tongue when the priest asked if there were any objections.

“Their love is something special. And Eliza, she’s extra special. Because she proved to be the one person in this world who would be enough for our Alexander.” John never would be. And our feels bitter and untrue on his tongue. 

John raises his glass, and avoids the worried set of Alex’s brow where he’s trying to watch him without being obvious about it. 

“To being enough.”

---

He calls his father a week after the wedding, and asks him if there’s still an opening at the firm for him. Henry Laurens is surprised, to say the least, but pleased. Even more so when John asks him if Martha Manning is still single. 

John doesn’t say anything to his friends until his final Friday in New York, over drinks. He spins a story about an ailing aunt and needing to head back home for a couple months. And how it’s not worth the expense to keep his apartment here. He could just get another one when he moved back. 

Alex watches him from across the table as Lafayette mourns the lost opportunity of a going away party. It’s obvious he knows, John can see that urge to call bullshit building behind Alex’s dark eyes, but he’s got Eliza’s hand in his and her head on his shoulder and he doesn’t say anything. 

John doesn’t know if it’s better or worse that he doesn’t say anything. 

He moves back to Charleston on a Saturday. At church on Sunday morning, Martha sits next to him. They’re engaged in the spring, a brand new start. John gets so drunk at his bachelor party that Hercules has to lift him bodily into bed while Lafayette takes off his shoes. 

John wakes the morning of his wedding day clutching Alex’s RSVP form, marked ‘no’. There’s a single line beneath in Alex’s scrawled handwriting. Can’t get out of work, sorry. Congrats. 

By the time Philip is born, all that broken glass in John’s chest has been swept up into a manageable pile. He doesn’t accidentally walk through it as much anymore. They send a dozen roses to Eliza and one of those little baskets full of baby soaps and blankets, and it’s signed with all our love, John and Martha. 

John becomes Congressman Laurens, because it’s the next step his father lays out for him, to prepare him to take his senate seat in a few years. He spends more time in Washington than he does at home, though Martha sends him ultrasound pictures and they talk every night before bed. 

Sometimes, Francis isn’t even gone from the bed before Martha calls. Sometimes John’s aide, with ambition in his eyes, will start kissing a path down John’s chest until he has to beg off from the call early. 

He has no illusions about what this is. Francis doesn’t need money, he’s from just as old money as John is. But not as well renowned. So John puts in a good word for him where he can. Shakes hands. Fucks him bent over hotel beds and pretends like the silence doesn’t eat at him. 

Francis gets a cushy job with a Republican think tank. John’s daughter is born, and her name is Frances. Message received. Along with a dozen roses from the Hamiltons. The card is signed in Eliza’s hand. 

John gets smarter after that. He only hires escorts, and only pays in cash. He becomes the youngest senator in South Carolina history at forty years old. Alexander Hamilton becomes the youngest Secretary of the Treasury in US history. They walk the same halls sometimes. That pile of broken glass in his chest gets swept into a corner. 

When Maria Reynolds happens, John gets blindsided by the press. When they ask him for comment, the words that leave his mouth are Alexander should know better and it’s fucking awful that’s what he thinks. Not of his poor wife which has been echoed so many times in the halls it might as well be carved into the walls. Only that Alex should know better. That he should be more careful. 

When Philip Hamilton dies, John packs a bag. He’s not invited. He goes anyway. He stands in the back of the church by himself. When Eliza screams as they lower the casket into the ground, all those broken glass shards in his chest are scattered everywhere again. 

John spends a weekend trying to figure out what to do. What line to cross. In the end, he slips a letter beneath Alexander’s door, hand written. Telling him that he would always be there for him. That all Alexander had to do was call. That he loved him. 

Eliza burns the letter while Alex is out on one of his walks. 

John goes home. He spends the rest of his career fighting for equal rights and educational prospects for low income families, somehow managing to buoy up his votes on the bluer side of South Carolina when he alienates his father’s constituents. 

The headaches start not long after he gets glasses. John doesn’t think too much about it. He’s sixty five years old. Wearing magnifying glasses on your face is bound to give you headaches. He tells Martha and Frances not to worry too much. Then he wakes up in the emergency room with Martha holding his hand, her face blotchy with tears. 

A little fainting spell. No big deal. They just want to run an MRI to be sure. 

When they sit in the doctor’s office a week later, there’s no talk of options. Only of comfort. And time. Three months. When he tells his frail, eighty eight year old mother, she screams just like Eliza Hamilton did. 

Losing a child was universal. 

Getting his affairs in order is easy. He’s had a lawyer on retainer since he joined Congress. He’s only got his wife and daughter. The majority go to them, though he still kicks a decent amount to a smattering of nonprofits he’s always cared about. An arts program for inner city schools. A program that gave overnight bags to kids being thrust into the foster system. An orphanage in New York.

The lawyer asks if he wants him to hold any letters. Selfishly, there’s one name that comes to mind first. Though he still writes a three page letter to Frances, and a short, but loving page to Martha. One to his mother. And the last, to be delivered to Alexander Hamilton’s office. 

John’s handwriting hasn’t started to fail yet, thank god. He’s got a few more weeks before his motor skills go. But the letters shake on the page all the same. 

Alexander,

I’m guessing by now the news has gotten to you. If not, I’m sorry. I didn’t throw this on you, but it’s not like I have any more chances to put it off. You don’t have to go to the funeral. That’s a long flight just to sit in a room and listen to people you don’t know talk about someone you used to know. 

Somehow, I think you’d still know me. I’d like to think I’m the same person. That you are too. That maybe if we would have just sat down for drinks sometime, that things could have went back to what they were. 

Because they never changed for me. I love you as much today as I did at nineteen. 

I don’t want you to think that this is some kind of revenge, or a final fuck you. It’s nothing like that. I made my peace with not being enough a long time ago. I don’t blame you, I never hated you. You’ve always been it for me. 

I couldn’t leave without saying goodbye. Without telling you that I love you. 

He slips the letter into the breast pocket of Alexander’s coat. It was scribbled hastily, an afterthought of common protocol. It’s not for his father, and it’s surely not for Martha. 

John pats Alexander’s coat where it smooths over his breast bone and thinks nothing of it. The sun would rise, the day would go on. The letter would be burned in a fire tonight and the embers licking the night sky would carry his secrets away. 

Lee’s breaths are heaving. John can feel the rise and fall of them for a beat, their backs pressed together before the count begins. 

Ten paces. John’s mind has gone as still and silent as the water of the river this early in the morning. He counts his steps and hears the sounds of the numbers echo in the empty corridor of his mind. 

His turn is arrogant, bordering on leisurely. Lee was a coward and a blowhard. What did he have to worry about?

Everything. 

Two pistols fire at the exact same moment. One skims a rib. One finds its mark. 

John doesn’t even have time to think oh. He’s dead before he hits the ground. 

And the paper in Alexander’s pocket? Not even a proper letter. Not even signed. A single, swiftly written line. 

John sends a text that’s just a clock emoji, a couple of question marks and a coffee cup, because he’s pretty sure if he has to articulate words that he’s going to throw up. Because today is The Day. All capitals in his head, actually circled three times in red permanent marker on his calendar. 

He’s changed his shirt twice by the time Alex’s pissy ‘i agree, tiem isn’t rl and coffee is the only way to get though it’ has given itself over to ‘11, wholly grounds’ because the place had the worst name but the best brunch specials and this was something John could work with.

Today is The Day. 

Chosen one night six months ago after he spent all night in a booth in a bar with Alex pressed against his chest, laughing and boneless and beautiful. Three AM John had decided that night that he had to take his shot. Just...not the next day, because hangover. So Four AM John fanned through the little calendar he kept on the inside of the closet door and circled a date with a sloppy hand. 

He’s been planning what he was going to say since he flipped the ‘Birds of New York’ calendar over into August, rehearsing it in his head so many times that it’s probably worn grooves into his brain. 

“Alex.” He’s talking to the mirror now, reciting it under his breath to himself as he tries to wrangle his hair into something fucking manageable. “We’ve been friends for a long time, man. And I wouldn’t change that for anything. You’re my closest friend and you mean the world to me.” John gives up, and pulls his NYC cap on. 

His shirt is changed again, and his jeans too, because John can’t find the sweet spot between too tight and not tight enough. He’s hopping through his bedroom on one foot, teetering dangerously towards the door frame. “And I would never do anything to disrespect you or this friendship. But I gotta tell you something. And it’s okay. Whatever your answer is, it’s okay. It doesn’t have to change anything between us.” 

John goes with his chucks, because they look the best with the outline of the outfit, though he’s pretty sure that Alex has never looked at John’s shoes a single time in his life. (Though John does remember Three Am Alex longingly watching a dude in Heelies roll by outside of the bar one time. That was the only time he’s seen Alex noticing shoes.)

He stops just at the front door and goes through the routine. Pats his front pockets one by one, then his back pockets. Phone, wallet, keys. “Because honestly, man? Nothing is going to change for me, no matter what you say when I’m done talking. So please don’t freak out or feel like you’re cornered or some shit.”

Because Alex can get sharp when he’s cornered, and if he thinks this is some kind of ultimatum, that John is saying friendship or love and it can’t be both...Alex might get mean. So he wants to be sure that his friend knows. That nothing will ever stop him from being Alex’s friend. 

He takes the stairs two at a time, teetering for a moment at the edge of one in the middle when his lace gets stuck under his foot, but John catches himself before he goes ass over teakettle down the stairs. 

This ain’t a conversation he wants to have in the emergency room. 

John hefts the keys in his hand like a baseball, tossing it up and down and he takes a deep breath. He sends Alex a text of a car emoji and slips behind the wheel, drumming his fingers across the curve of it. 

“No matter what happens, I always want to be your friend. Like seriously...forever, Alex. I mean it.” This is probably his tenth recitation today as John pulls out into traffic, offering up a prayer that it will stay this sporadic all the way to the coffee shop. The last thing he needs right now is a goddamn gridlock. 

“But I need you to know…” The light turns green. John eases into the intersection. “I need you to know that I love you, Alex. That I’m in love with you.”