Private Storyline 2

[slowtoanger]

Things seem to stall for a month, or rather slip into a routine, a delicate balance that teters on the edge of a tension difficult to dissect.

Hamilton won't stop feeding Burr, stealing him bits of food, watching at mealtimes to ensure Burr eats some incomprehensible measure from the table.

Burr had tried to take advantage of the public nature of that tradition, to eat bare scraps while Hamilton glared, beneath Washington's gaze, but when they had been once again alone Hamilton had refused to leave until Burr embibed enough food to make his stomach ache.

His sickness eases, but does not vanish. Mornings bent low over a basin and heaving while Hamilton attempts to cover for him to an increasingly agitated Washington. Underperforming--that is what Washington says. Disgraceful. He thinks these morning spells of illness the results of intemperance with ale, no doubt.

But the nights--those are the worst. Because he cannot stop aching for them. For the moments when he can curl against Hamilton's skin, close his eyes and pretend it is another body, if only the scent were not so different.

Even if he is not Monty, Burr aches for those scraps of affection, clinging to him the way one might cling to a rock in a storming ocean. Grows terrified that Hamilton might leave as much as he tries to convince himself he does not need him. But the emotions, once allowed to be felt, cannot be easily stopped up again. It is too easy to find himself drifting towards Hamilton during the day. Wanting to touch him, be touched. Held. Perhaps even groomed, though the thought makes him blush with shame and embarrassment.

His bedroom becomes too comfortable, allows them to slip too close to intimacy. Burr had nearly cried, when Hamilton presented him that blanket. Not enough for a real nest, but enough to fuss with on the bed for long minutes, make something resembling a nest. Burr had lost everything, in the retreat from quebec--but at least now he had a blanket.

He can't look at Hamilton's face, each night he fusses with the bedding, every stereotype he every rallied against. Any inadequacy of that nest quickly erased by the warmth of Hamilton's body.

Too close to hide the swelling, the changes. Close as a lover. Burr doesn't think of what they are--can't. Takes these liberties as they are--stolen and shameful.

With all the food, the extra smuggled bits, Burr is starting to show. And his hunger isn't leaving, never sated, but he is growing ravenous, and each day the question of what to do is more and more urgent. Soon Hamilton won't let Burr put it off anymore, and what then?

For all of it, his worrying about propriety, he balks in the face of some lie. Burr's reputation matters, is vitally important, but at the same time, he cares not for manufactured conventions. Would have no problem being seen as a loose omega, if only he were established enough for such things to not ruin him.

Even so, he is nearly unable to fasten his breeches, and the skin around his stomach, stretched, begins to grow sores, from the too tight waistband, the chaffing. Built for soldiers losing weight, not gaining, and Burr has always been slight. He takes to binding his stomach, tight beneath bandages, but then he is wracked with cramps, which grow worse each day.

It doesn't occur to him that this might hurt the child, this last bit of Monty, which has grown so dear to him. Finds himself clutching his stomach unconsciously in stolen moments, on the verge of tears. Watches the rise and fall for long moments, in the morning and at night, as if at any moment the slight bump might disappear entirely.

Now he is dressing again, binding his stomach once more, to force himself into his breeches, another day of Washington's disappointment. Burr snorts--at least in this there is some bitter mercy--Washington probably thinks Burr is growing fat from drink, if he's noticed at all.

Comments

cw: passive suicidal ideation

[non_stop]

Hamilton is obsessed.

He knows it. He is absolutely unable to stop. The concerns of liberating America from the British have been shoved violently out of the foremost place in his mind, replaced by the constantly-whirling thoughts that he can't properly organize or hold down. He spends hours writing them down, always careful to cast the finished product into the fire afterwards, furtive, but it doesn't help.

To Hamilton, death is not just a specter, a distant but inexorable reality. He has met death so many times, and he dreams often of his own, whether it's in some way that didn't happen (breathing his last with his mother's arms wrapped around him, drowning in the fierce hurricane wind-and-flood, sinking on the ship to America) or in ways that could happen tomorrow (taking a shot, a bayonet, in a frantic and suicidal charge, running out of luck under the relentless shelling of a British ship). These are comfortable fantasies, for him. They are ordinary. What isn't ordinary are the fantasies that Burr's child inspires. Because, for once, these fantasies are of a living future.

Burr's child is not Hamilton's. Obviously. It just makes him think -- about children. About the endless potential of fragile, new life. About how futures don't just have to include loss after loss after loss, but can be about gaining: new heart's connections that don't replace the old but that fill the space left behind.

There has been a quiet and cold place at the center of Hamilton's heart since he was ten, and it has only grown. Once a little box just large enough to encompass bastard and the gaping absence of a father, now it holds greater emptiness: a brother gone, a past left behind, a mother dead. This is emptiness that he strives to fill by joining it.

Burr makes him not want to join it.

Burr makes him think about what it would be like not to die.

Hamilton is constantly pushing these thoughts to the side when he is with Burr, but it wakes him up, the nights when he holds close to Burr's not-warm-enough body. It wakes him up, and he finds himself placing a tentative hand on the subtle swell at Burr's abdomen, his heart beating quick and throbbing with a sort of pain he's never felt before.

And then there's the desire.

Hamilton ruthlessly suppresses it during the day, but it wakes him up, too: dreams of Burr yielding beneath him, soft and wet under Hamilton's fingers and tongue, the arch of his body, how he would feel inside. Burr's close presence is maddening and satisfying at the same time, the only thing that can keep the desire at bay and also the one thing that stokes that desire to unbearable levels.

So Hamilton's sleep has been more and more broken by the disturbances in his thoughts.

He then uses that restless time to handle Washington's correspondence before he slips out early to drill with the gunnery squad, then back again to Washington, dispatching orders, writing writing writing, and slipping out in the evening to find extra food and take it into the city. There are many widows, some omega and female both, left without anyone to care for them. Some are Loyalist. Hamilton brings them food when he can, because it provides a perfect cover for what he takes for Burr. The quartermaster and cook are both aware that he's doing this, though Washington seems to turn a careful blind eye. Perhaps Washington thinks that Hamilton has impregnated someone in the city, caring for an illegitimate child. That assumption is fine.

The longest they spend apart is when Hamilton's squadron is part of an attack on the British battery on the southern tip of Manhattan. This is several days of brutal shelling, culminating in Hamilton, along with Mulligan and several others, dragging out twenty-four British cannon and making it safely back to American lines. Hamilton is reckless and brave, and the stories of his heroics spread back to Washington's camp before Hamilton himself actually makes it back.

The night after Hamilton returns, he flatters himself in thinking that Burr holds onto him tighter than usual, noses into his scent gland with possessive greed. He wants it to be true; he wants Burr to have missed him. What is certainly true is that Hamilton starts to make that soft, rumbling purring noise that alphas sometimes make with a mate. It's as he drops off to sleep, and he doesn't even realize he's doing it.

He has tried to bring up the topic of future plans with Burr. Has pestered him to go and see a midwife or a doctor in the city, though Burr has denied this every time. Has even tentatively brought up the subject of marriage to an obliging alpha, someone who wants the legitimacy of Burr's family name. Wartime is a wonderful time to find obliging alphas -- they're practically coming out of the walls. Can't throw a rock without hitting at least one or two obliging alphas. But Burr doesn't want to hear it.

He slips inside Burr's room one morning, after the pre-dawn drills, and sees the bindings, and his eyes widen.

"Aaron!" It bursts out of him; he doesn't call Burr Aaron, except in the privacy of his own mind. "What are you -- are you binding --" And he rushes forward to take Burr's hands in his, to still him, if only for the moment.