amrev_intrigues | This is Fine Alternative Denouement

First, there is the sight of him -- Hamilton sees his husband, clothes hanging off his body, wrinkled, unkempt in an impossible way, a way that Burr would ordinarily find utterly unacceptable -- and then, as Hamilton approaches, going immediately cold with concern and fear, the wave of smell hits him.

It is a cliche, of course, but it can only be a wave. It can only be explained as that, a wall of water, a swell to sweep him under. He physically sways, reaches his hand out to the wall, and absorbs it in utter shock.

Jefferson? Jefferson? And the rage is soon after: rage that would be at Burr, too, if not for his tearstained eyes, if not for the way he hunches in on himself as though Hamilton would ever raise a hand against him. No; with Burr like this, the smell of heat, and the smell of Jefferson, Hamilton knows just what happened, and his rage has only one target.

He steps forward swiftly, seizing Burr and pinning him hard against the wall. Pressing him flat. Growling, though Burr isn't the one he's growling at -- it's just a possessive instinct, an incessant drumbeat like a call to battle. He goes immediately for Burr's throat, the seat of his sweet omega smell, and bites.

Mine.

Burr's legs, shaking, give out. He is no fainting Omega. He is strong. Was strong, all those years ago. But Hamilton is--Hamilton melts something in him. Wears away something that he desperately needs and--

Maybe it is the growl, that shoots straight through Burr's body, that enacts that primal, irresistible instinct to cow: the whimper and bare his throat, sending those smells of submission and good and yours. Maybe it is the way Hamilton shoves his, that makes him go cold all over, the icy drench of terror tightening every muscle past usefulness till they must give out, limp.

But Hamilton doesn't--he's not screaming at Burr. He's not throwing things, striking him, sending him away. His instinct is not to reject, but to claim, to make Burr his.

"Alexander," he says, and he expects himself to whimper, but there is a core of stone there. A core he didn't know was in him. There is some disconnect between his body and his mind, his self. For all his voice is steady and he is Burr his body reacts. He is limp. The way an omega in heat does when too stressed to fight anymore. So that--so that it might be over sooner, and they might be less hurt.

He is limp, pressed against the wall, but his fingers are clutching desperate, for all his grip is weak. Clutching at Hamilton. And he's shivering then, harder than he has in a long time. "You can smell it?" He asks. He doesn't want to know the answer.

Edited 2022-11-03 03:02 (UTC)

Smell it? Of course he can smell it. He could smell it on Burr when he hardly knew Burr at all, when the only thing there was to smell was a pregnancy that wasn't even showing. Hamilton's nose is sensitive and keen, especially when it comes to his mate. His husband. Beloved. Perhaps his nose is so acute because what it conveys is beyond words: for all his frantic scratchings, all that he can write, he cannot capture scent. He cannot pin the looming-rainstorm smell of his mate's darker moods to a bit of parchment. He cannot sketch out what it is to catch a hint of invitation, a soft, clever sway to Burr's hips and a scent like a question -- and he could never describe what it is to smell the presence-aftermath of terror and anguish and desire, all at once.

He knows Jefferson's smells, too. His recognition is immediate and visceral and full of disgust.

"You are mine."

He tears away in a fit of rage, half-feral. "My pistols!" he shouts at a servant, and flings the door open. The wind is wild tonight, and it lashes at him, tongues and whips. He is in his shirt-sleeves. He does not notice.

Burr couldn't go after him of he tried. The moment Hamilton steps away, eyes promising violence, Burr crumples. There is nothing to hold him up, and moreover--

Moreover Burr needs to hide himself. He's thick, still. Slow and sluggish with heat and panic. Hamilton is calling for his pistols, intending to draw blood, but Burr feels like something far away. No, not far away, because then these sensations would be muted, as opposed to the total over proximity of things. Carved out, gutted. He needs to hide himself. To get away from the racket, before the children wake and come to see what is going on.

"Don't die," he says, a hoarse insistent thing threatening more tears. "Don't do anything that will take you from me. I'll kill myself if they hang you."

He might have offered platitudes. He didn't hurt me, it wasn't his fault, it just--it just felt so good. But it doesn't matter. Hamilton will want blood regardless of the why or how. And it is his right.

He'll pull himself into the study when Hamilton goes. Sit with his back against the door, listening to the footsteps of the servants. Uncork the potion and drink, drink, drink.

"Better I die than leave this unanswered." He is insensible to his husband's plea; he is only conscious of his honor, and Burr's, and their family's, which will be dealt a severe blow indeed if this attack goes without revenge.

He saddles the horse, and loads his guns. Hoofbeats break the quiet, early morning like gunshots.

Hamilton does not return that night.

No, he does not return; he gallops hard to Jefferson's home, and once there, he does not gain entry. He will recall later that he attacked the door -- that a light-skinned Negro servant told him he must leave -- that he threatened with a pistol -- discharged the pistol at the lock? He will recall that he beat his hands bloody against the unyielding oak. Shouted himself hoarse. Called Jefferson every slur, every name.

"What is the meaning of this?"

Hamilton pays no mind to this intruder, not until he is held, restrained, and then he fights with all his viciousness and his fury to be released. Not until he is thrown against the ground hard enough to knock the breath from him, and held there with an unyielding grip on the scruff of his neck.

"He defiled my husband!" accuses Hamilton. "I -- demand -- satisfaction!" As he thrashes, against the restraint of President George Washington.

It is too easy to fall into despair. Burr is shocked silent, when Hamilton brushes him aside. As though Burr is nothing, a child, and what right does Burr have to be taken aback, after what has happened? What he allowed to happen.

In the study, stomach churning, he sits through long convulsions, hurling up that burning poison into a basin near the fire. Someone is knocking at the door, lightly, and he is shaking too much, heart beating too fast, a feral thrum-rush of fear and sickness, to hear them.

Hamilton is--he's going to get himself killed. And he doesn't--Alexander, his husband, doesn't care if it should mean Burr lives or dies. And their children--

He can feel their family splintering, a deeper, more pervasive terror taking root, which truly has been there since--

He can't make it to the writing desk. He has to crawl, and pull himself into the chair, and what he writes is shaky and uneven and hardly legible. A short note, to Ned and Washington. One to save who can be, if it is too late. One to talk them out of it, if it is not.

The large coin purse in the lock box in the desk, for an emergency urgent express. The rider will pound on their doors until he is received, regardless of the hour. And it is another matter for Burr to make it to the door, to force only some modicum of composure to face Theo there, leaning against the opposite wall with her face a knot of worry.

She doesn't question the letters. She has always know when urgency is required, trained in practicality and reason. Moreso than most young men he knows. Than he himself was, at her age.

Dispatched, he returns to the study, locks the door again.

Edited 2022-11-05 04:46 (UTC)

"--cannot have my Secretary of the Treasury murder my Secretary of State--"

Hamilton pays no heed to Washington's words, empty as they are. Before he is the Secretary of the Treasury, he is a man, and a mate, and an alpha, and his civilized polish must be destroyed in the wake of such things. Being gripped by the scruff of the neck makes him want to submit, and so does the scent of Washington, the pure-alpha in-charge I-am-your-superior reek, drowning him, the helpless urge to bare his throat and cower --

But he does not want to bare his throat, and he does not want to cower.

And he does not bare his throat. And he does not cower.

When Jefferson shows his face at the door, Hamilton fights with inhuman strength and reaches for the pistol and shoots.

It is not long after that the laudanum is forced upon him -- for there isn't any other way to subdue an alpha in that kind of frenzy.

The note that reaches Burr's home later that day is in Ned's handwriting.

He is alive - alpha frenzy - J. wounded. H at Presidential home. Come if you can. Yr Svt, Edward

Burr sits on the floor of the study for a long while, wracked by terror and anxiety. He continues to vomit, but as daylight breaks he becomes sure this is not the work of the potion at all, but of morning sickness, or worse. Some deeper thing at work, premonition of his husband's doom.

He is exhausted, when the letter comes. A light doze more like nightmare, disorientation clinging. Not a dream. Hard wood, aching spine. Then the letter, slipped under the door by Theodosia, no doubt.

And that--Hamilton is alive, but not that Hamilton is unharmed. Jefferson wounded. For Burr. Over Burr.

He should have gone after him. But--he can hardly stand, when he pushes up on legs that wobble. His whole body aches, his cheek bruised and swelling. The smell--stale heat. Working out of his pores.

Will Hamilton even want to see him? He had allowed Burr to drop like nothing more than--

But it is Burr's duty. And if there is even the slightest chance Hamilton needs him--and even then, what right does Hamilton have to refuse him? A little artificial flash of their old animosity.

He likes Ned. Letters short and to the point. He has to go.

Theodosia is sleeping, when he opens the door, so Burr slips around her up the stairs. Bathes and dresses carefully, and the scent reducers have done their work.

He grabs one of Hamilton's books on the way out, calls for a carriage where normally he would walk, and is knocking on Ned's door before the hour is up. The picture of composure, but for bruised skin.

Edited 2022-11-06 20:12 (UTC)

Hamilton awakens in pain, all sorts of pain. There is not a part of his body that isn't sore; his tongue is dry and parched. His head thuds, not with a sharp war-beat but with dull, sickening beats like cannon blasts.

He opens his eyes.

Ned slumps beside him.

There are blood-stains on his coat. Hamilton is, as far as he can tell, not bleeding -- and neither is Ned.

So...?

The room smells of Washington. It is the President's house, Hamilton thinks -- the whole damnable place smells of Washington, that oppressive alpha-of-alphas that he always gives off.

Hamilton stirs, and so does Ned.

"Alexander." Ned is wary.

Hamilton sits up, the room spinning. Laudanum, he thinks. But he isn't injured, he isn't ill. He looks down at his hands, and thinks of the weight of a pistol.

"Oh," he says.

Ned's hand touches his forehead. "I thought you might go into a fever," he says. "But I think you've dodged it."

Hamilton does not know what to feel. He is simply exhausted, as though all the emotions in him have been spent and spent and spent again, leaving nothing left in his various glands and secreting organs. He is sore, and he is tired.

"Aaron." Half-statement, half-question, but it takes on the tenor of a prediction as there are footsteps approaching in the hallway, as the door opens, as Aaron appears. Hamilton feels as though he is cast in iron and lead as he rests his eyes on his mate. It takes strange strength to reach out his hand -- but if Aaron places his hand in Hamilton's, it takes no strength at all to lift it to Hamilton's lips and place a kiss on the back, press that hand to his cheek.

Burr isn't sure, when the housekeeper brings him upstairs, that Hamilton will want to see him. Or moreover, that Hamilton will be unable to see him, for fear of further frenzy.

So he stalls in the door, unsure in a way he hasn't been but a handful of times in their twenty years together. Ned has only just shaken awake from a doze besides him, and Hamilton looks--

He looks sick. Stretched thin and limp, from being overdrawn. Skin sallow, hair and clothing wild. Vaguely muddied from street filth. No time for such superficiality from his caretakers, evidently. Burr's stomach tugs--a deep, far back thing, that sends little vibrations through him.

Burr did this to him. And now--they'll be lucky if Hamilton escapes hanging. They're ruined regardless. If not from unprovoked violence then from--well. There weren't many things that could cause an alpha to go feral like that. And people talk.

But Hamilton turns his eyes on him, and Burr is across the room without himself. Holding out his hand, cupping Hamilton's cheek with the other.

"I didn't know you would live," Burr says. "Or if you would want to see me." And maybe--maybe he doesn't remember. Or--Burr should like to pretend they don't.

"You owe a good deal to Ned, it would seem," a little acknowledgement, for one who has done so much for them.

"I always want to see you," says Hamilton, a little dreamily. His head hurts. He presses Burr's hand against it, as though this will solve the hurting problem. Burr smells wrong, and Hamilton can't pin down why. He makes a soft, sad sound. Why is this happening? What did he do wrong?

"He took a great deal of laudanum to subdue," Ned murmurs, to Burr. "He may still be suffering the effects."

He would be weeping, he thinks, but his eyes are rasping-dry. "I should have broken down a window and gone in and killed him."

"No, Alexander," says Ned. "You have a defense, as it is. He came out, after you challenged him, and you were in a fever of the brain."

"I want him dead." He looks up to Burr. "He hurt you and I want him dead."

I always want to see you, words that should sooth him, but instead flow over him like nothing. Well. Perhaps a distant warmth, far away. He's not sure Hamilton really knows. Has processed yet. This is temporary. It will change.

"You can't give him a small amount more, to ease him down?" Because Burr is familiar with that--taking laudanum each morning following birth, and then having to ease himself off.

And then Hamilton says he wants Jefferson dead. Well. Burr doesn't know if he has the power to address that, right now. It's such a--what had happened, really? And Hamilton--

He sits down on the edge of the bed, strokes cool palms back over Hamilton's brow, the wrinkles there.

"Jefferson--he will live?" He asks, because there are small mercies, aren't there? Hamilton can't go away. They could be ruined but happy, so long as Hamilton was not away.

"I could--" Ned starts.

"No," says Hamilton, unequivocally. "I don't want any more." He hadn't wanted it in the first place. His eyes are closed, as he sighs, yields to Burr's touch.

"Unless the wound turns putrid," Ned tells him. "It's frankly astonishing that he hit Mr. Jefferson at all -- he was being pinned to the ground by George Washington at the time, and he hadn't time to aim. As it is, it caught Mr. Jefferson in the upper arm. Any shallower and it would only have been a graze."

Hamilton becomes aware of a low growl, rising in his own throat. He swallows, silences it. At long last, Ned hands him a glass of watered wine, and he drinks, to moisten his palate.

He pushes the glass away, then, and pulls at Burr. He wants Burr to be on top of him, weighty and warm. He wants to hold Burr close.

"It will be less a hindrance to your senses to have it," Burr says, "than to suffer through without." He knows the kinds of arguments that work on Hamilton. Should, after twenty years.

He wonders if part of this difficulty is not for wounded pride. From Jefferson, of course, but from Washington too. That old tension between them, a spot of rust on something polished. If Hamilton won't resent him that, as well. Once he knows who summoned him. Stopped him from ruining himself.

He thanks God, when Ned says Jefferson will live.

He is far away again, when Hamilton growls, and when he smooths his thumbs over cheekbones it is again like something done outside himself. Watching from further back. Eyes crossed.

He should comfort his husband. He should, but he rankles at the tug, a cat arching it's spine. He feels--he doesn't want to, and he can't say why.

"Hamilton," he says, softly, a little gentle censure. We have company, implied. We are intruding on someone else's kindness.

He stands, away from the bed. Space between them. Ignores heavy eyes from Ned, if there are any. Pulls up a chair and settles there, offers his hand again, little book of poetry balanced on one leg.

Hamilton is bereft, and wishes he did not know why. How can he proceed but to accept the punishment of a mate, wronged twice? Once, unspeakably, by a filthy traitor; again, by his husband taking revenge.

"Perhaps I deserve the suffering, the hindrance," he says, "for did I not go, without your leave? This should not be hidden; you have no cause for shame. He has every cause for shame. If I should forbear from challenging him, it is only because he is a renowned coward already." The words pour out of him, pain suffusing his voice. "How could I have left you to his brutality? How could I not have been there? Darling -- my love."

(Hamilton doesn't notice, but Ned, awkwardly, turns his back, as though this will provide the two with the privacy they so clearly lack.)

"Hamilton," Burr says, a harsher bite than then first. He drops Hamilton's hand and stands. "I will not speak of this," and his face is red, and really he would not flee if Ned were not there, but he is, and Burr doesn't want to--he hates this. This feeling that they're playing at a game. That Hamilton should feel--but is is Hamilton's pain, isn't it? To defraud something his own property.

Still flushed, when he turns and makes for the door. "I will not stay to agitate you. Recover yourself and I shall return," to take the sting out. He closes the door behind h, but the hallway is its own awkward, heavy silence. A long dark hall, with carved wood panels. Stuffy air. He makes his way to one of the smaller bedrooms. Hardly made up for guests, but--good enough to be alone. To read, maybe. He doesn't want to think, either. So he finds a nearby housekeeper, requests a bit of brandy, then returns to the room and closes the door.

Hamilton feels as though his heart is being crushed -- and, as his heart is no longer his, as it beats in Aaron Burr-Hamilton's chest, perhaps it is. He cannot draw breath. When Burr chooses not to take his comfort, it is painful; when Burr leaves entirely, it is agony. He is rejected. He has fought so hard for his family, for their integrity, their honor. Perhaps (a nasty part of him thinks) Burr preferred Jefferson, perhaps he wishes he never married --

No, it is just that his heart is breaking. He feels as though his family is wounded, suddenly, and that it may not be healed, maybe not ever. And Hamilton, Hamilton is simply so, so tired. He keens, softly and sadly, to himself more than to anyone else, turning over to press his face into the pillow, to muffle it.

What gave Jefferson the right to do this to them?

Why is this happening?

He finds that he is weeping. Ned's hand rests on his back.

This time, when Ned offers the laudanum, Hamilton does not refuse.

When Hamilton is unconscious, Ned goes to find Burr. Knocks, before he steps inside.

"Are you injured?" he asks. "Perhaps my foster-brother isn't in a state for it, but I worry about your health, as well. Even if you weren't wrestled to the ground by George Washington himself."

Burr had taken laudanum himself, before he left. Just a few drops on his tongue after bathing, because he never before had been in the habit of denying himself. It is that, in combination with the total overabundance of emotional stress, that triggers that disconnect, shutters the bridge between feeling and understanding.

So he doesn't really register until he is sitting in the room alone, watching the book clasped between his hands, and then between his knees, tremble. One empty room, windowless, stuffy with dust, and shaking hands clasped on a worthless. Book. He feels like he is eight or nine, sweating through a sweating summer reciting prayers he doesn't even understand.

It hurts, to sit. A horrible deep ache. He is bleeding, maybe. From when there had been no preparation, and--he is too relive himself in either way. Rings and a rod and--

Then there is the assortment of odd aches. The dull throb where he caught a foot in the rib. The heat that doesn't flee from a swollen cheek. The ache of his jaw, and the awful twisting of his stomach, threatening again at nausea. A pounding headache. Exhausted.

But none of this is--it doesn't compare to that awful numbness. Hollowed. Playing over Hamilton's face, again and again and again. Burr is--any other mate would have done something. Known what to do. Burr's never been a good mate.

"I thank you, I am well," Burr says, when Ned enters. "I beg your pardon. I will return to him once he is settled. I thought it best not to agitate him more, given his state." Which means--I am fine, please leave.

"You thought you could not bear your own agitation, you mean," Ned corrects. "You are in pain -- physical pain, as well as nervous pain."

He takes a seat across from Burr.

"You are bruised," he says. Gestures, at his own cheek. "Are you sure there is no internal injury?"

"It is still truth, is it not? If my agitation is to be his agitation." Part of their vows. Your pain, my pain. And so what if Burr is? Agitated and in pain. The only cure for that is solitude. Perhaps if he goes away long enough--no one will remember it happened.

"Nothing worse than I have welcomed gladly in the past," Burr says. Before Hamilton. Because that is a Burrian needle--playing at things too much for polite company. A dare to wiggle his way free. And because he wants to hurt, now. Not in any obvious way. Wants to embarrass. To--to make Ned feel foolish, for asking.

"You would do well to attend to yourself than me," he says. "Or perhaps one who does not welcome or take pleasure in the pain wrought by treatment or defilement." Yes, a doctor wouldn't be squeamish about the bodily. But perhaps he would be, about that, given his relation to Hamilton. Do not touch Burr, he might like it. And what would Hamilton say?

Edited 2022-11-10 06:31 (UTC)

Ned's expression changes, goes colder and more somber.

"Had you welcomed these attentions," he says, "I would have to believe that a man who's my brother in law -- or as good as -- would willingly tear into my foster-brother's heart, leave it bleeding out, and rend his family apart, cast his children aside, for a moment's pleasure. I know you, Aaron. You are clever, gallant, and charming among far more than just your husband -- but you love him. I've seen you reach for his hand when you think no one is watching, just to hold it. I've seen how you look at him when he enters a room. I've seen how he looks at you. And, by God, if you are, by some touch of the Devil, not the man I know, I pray you lie to me, for I want no part in souring Alexander's devotion to you. Now, for all that is holy, tell me if you are injured."

And it is Ned's little trick: to pile one thing on top of the other so that one denial or acceptance is a reflection on all others. Direct, always, in his addresses, yet that is only to the detriment of those who do not know him. There's more there, beneath that facade, workings nearly as deep as Alexander himself, if not lessened by good humors and stability. A great deal of reason and belief in logic and science.

I did welcome it, Burr wants to say and does, nearly. But Ned doesn't want to know, and in an instant Burr is nearly hysteric, heart hammering and struggling to swallow for all his outward demeanor remains placid.

"Oh, I may lie to you," Burr says, "if that is what makes it easier. But we know ourselves, already. How easily and neatly he has worked it out. Think you not his reaction would have been so, if some part of him didn't know?" That Burr liked it, that he's thinking about it still--the way Jefferson had commanded Burr's body effortlessly, drawn out those things Burr has long ago repressed, taught himself not to want. To not dare.

Burr is stretched somewhere in there: torn and threadbare and used. The place where desire meets disgust and helplessness in the brittle wasteland of a destruction that is not just his own. And he is daring Ned. Twisting some knife, deeper and harder and--he wants to hurt. He wants to hurt.

"You think you know me so well, then? Did you know the first time I saw you, you ignited fantasies? You look like him, but the desire was that you were not him, and that we might do some harm with our bodies, together, unable to resist. But I knew you would deny me, and I did not press the matter. But I am not--I am not who you think I am, Ned. I am sexed despite myself, and I want constantly. Those things they write about me--they are not untrue. And now--Jefferson has found it. And it is out, and it will never be tucked back inside me again."

The fervor fades, subtly and almost imperceptibly, into heartbreak. It isn't what he wanted, but he is--he is broken. And there is no going back. He can't even hold his husband's hand without--and. And Ned. He will leave now, won't he? And Burr can be alone. He just needs to be alone. And if he doesn't leave--Burr is on the precipice of shattering.

Edited 2022-11-12 05:32 (UTC)

"We all have sinful thoughts," he says. "You did not act on any desire for me, and isn't that more important?"

He steps closer, projects calm in his body and his smell. "And you know as well as I do that if Alexander had any apprehension that you would leave your family for Jefferson, his rage would be towards you, and not towards his political enemy. Your betrayal would have been what mattered to him. Instead, he reacts as though you are one -- as though both of you have been wounded. So I can only think that there was a truth he glimpsed the moment you came home that shunted him into a frenzy, not towards you, but about you."

It doesn't work. Ned doesn't leave. And Burr isn't--Ned steps closer, a warm hand on Burr's shoulder, and Burr is--he can't. He can't.

He grabs Ned by the cravat and drags him down into a kiss. Sloppy and off center and knocking teeth, and before they've even connected for more than a moment Burr is shaking, pulling back, swallowing back panic, tears.

He can't. Not to Alexander. No apology. He closes his eyes, hands gripping the sides of the chair, forcing himself to be iron. His chest is heaving, and--

"I'm bleeding," he says. "I think I can feel it. I'm not--there isn't--"

Edited 2022-11-12 22:00 (UTC)

Ned freezes for several seconds, his mind heaving and heaving like a horse trying to drag a wagon out of the mud. But, then, a beta's natural instinct to comfort and help a vulnerable omega wins out, because of Burr's reaction. It seems almost as though he were trying to convince himself he was the type to commit adultery -- as though it were some unavoidable inclination within him.

He crouches, before Burr, and covers Burr's hand with his own. "Where?" he asks.

Edited 2022-11-13 02:05 (UTC)

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