All right, I’m HOPING that the birdie in question was the tags on this post: so if you wanted hamilton fic now would be EXACTLY the time to request it i was considering doing one of those ongoing tumblr au things where people could ask for specific scenes because i want to write a reincarnation au for hamilton (probably one of those universes where reincarnation is a little peculiar but not out of the ordinary) and i also wanted to write a college au and i figured i could do both at once but also i don’t know if anyone would be interested in that. Regardless, that is WHAT YOU ARE GETTING. The way this is basically going to work is that if there’s a scene you particularly want to see or a character you particularly want to have me include, just send me an ask and I’ll write more, I guess. Because this is something I very much want to write, and it’s also something I very much don’t have the time/motivation to do on my own. So y’all can do me a solid by sending requests.
Circumstances tend to be the same, in each lifetime—relationships between parents, number of siblings, sometimes even place of birth. No one’s sure why. A pretty woman fallen from lofty social status, a wandered-off man, an older brother. If that’s the lot you drew at your first birth, it’s likely to be the one you land the second-third-fourth time around.
The illness hits Christiansted earlier, this time. Andre Westen is seven, his brother and father already gone. Last time, his mother got the worst of it—this time, it’s Andre who’s shaking and sick for two weeks, his gaunt and recovering mother clinging to his hand. He lives, though, and when he opens his eyes after the fever breaks, the first thing out of his mouth is, “I’m going to need to change my name.” There are conditions in place, laws and qualifiers that allow people to claim their past selves if they prefer and can prove it. And Andre does prefer, and can prove it. He’s young for such a powerful revelation—he can recite the names of teachers and colleagues, list details down to the minute, and with so little under his belt of this life, that one seems just as immediate—and it unnerves people to hear him wander from speaking like a child to speaking like a grown man when he’s distracted, but they give him his name.
He’s forgetting to answer to Andre anyway. His mother isn’t Rachel Fawcett, but she transitions to calling him Alex gracefully anyway. Within a year or two, no one really remembers a time when he wasn’t a strangely well-spoken child named Alexander Hamilton.
It’s the hurricane that kills her, this time, and he almost can’t believe what an idiot he was to imagine that she was safe, that she had lived through the sickness and was safe.
“My boy,” she says faintly, reaching up to stroke a bloody hand along his cheek. This is backwards, from last time—she’s half in his lap, he’s holding her instead of the other way around, but it’s too similar and he doesn’t want to do this again. They’re out of the way of the flood waters, on a roof waiting for a helicopter or a boat to find them, but she’s bleeding and he can’t breathe. “How much time did we have, before?”
“She wasn’t you, maman,” Alex says, and she makes a dismissive sound. “Nine years,” he says reluctantly.
“Six more years isn’t so bad,” she says, but she looks sad, distant. “Écoutez-moi, Alexander. You go to New York, like you said you would. I would have liked to meet your friends.”
“You will,” he tells her, because he might have been a grown man and a soldier, but right now he’s a scared fifteen-year-old whose mother is dying in his lap. “You will, maman, you’ll like them so much, you–”
“You promise me, Alex,” she says, reaching up and gripping his chin firmly. “You promise me to live a good life. Again.”
“I promise, maman,” he whispers.
She smiles, faint and wan, and gives him a light slap on the cheek. “And no duels this time.”
He manages to smile back through the tears starting to spill from his eyes. “I can’t promise that.” She laughs, an exhausted huff that makes more blood spill from the gash in her side, and closes her eyes.
“That boy,” she mumbles, and he has to lean in to catch it. “You loved Eliza, but you lived for that boy.”
There’s a completely ill-timed kick of panic in his chest, two and a half centuries outdated, the kick of dear Lord please don’t let me be hanged, and he knows it shows in his voice when he says, “I don’t even know if Laurens came back.”
She opens her eyes and they’re glassy, out of it. “It’s a better world, Alexander,” she breathes, and her eyes drift shut again. “Don’t forget to live in it.”
She doesn’t speak again.
Alexander Hamilton is collected from the roof with his mother’s body three hours later. They ask if he has any family. No, he doesn’t. His father is in the wind, his brother might not even be alive. Does he have any friends? None that weren’t on the island, and none of them would have taken him in. Does he have anyone at all? No. For a moment he wishes that it was still the 1700’s, when fifteen would have been plenty old enough to get a job and resolve this concern once and for all.
They are uncooperative when he announces that he’s going to America, but they concede when he agrees to be placed in the foster system.
It takes three years, a quartet of foster homes—apparently he’s ‘hot tempered and prone to trouble,’ but he also thinks they just find him odd—and a very unsubtle letter to Columbia University—to the tune of Please consider that I am one of your first alumni and it would behoove you to bring me back at no charge to myself—but he gets a scholarship and housing in New York.
It’s been two hundred and fifty years—give or take a few in change—since he set foot in New York City. The buildings are higher, the streets more cluttered, cars inching past at a crawl while trains rumble underfoot. Columbia looks almost nothing like King’s College, sprawling and beautiful—there’s a statue of him, and a hall bearing his name, which he quietly allows most people to take as a coincidence. Still, he feels himself let out a breath. This city is home, his place. Just breathing its air makes him feel like a new man—or an old man, maybe. More himself than he’s felt in a long while.
For the first time in three years, he feels optimistic about finding someone, anyone, from Before.
***
Jonathan makes it a grand total of seventeen years, long enough that almost everyone is starting to assume that he’s a new soul. Which, incidentally, would have been fine with everyone, himself included. Normally revelations happen between ten and fifteen, right around puberty, with a few rare outliers significantly younger or upwards of their twenties. But no, Jonathan is seventeen, the son of a conservative Republican senator who would probably have a conniption if Jonathan even considered coming out of the closet. Same old, same old. Jonathan’s therapist is of the opinion that he should go away for college and damn if he’s not going to take that advice. He’s sorry to leave his sisters and brother behind, but he needs out of that house.
He needs good enough grades to ensure a scholarship, just in case his father disowns him. Which is why he’s paying attention in AP US History when the teacher pulls up a portrait of a handsome man with narrow features and a faint smile, and Jonathan feels like all the air’s been pressed out of his chest.
“Does anyone know who this man is?” the teacher asks, and yes, yes, I do, I know him screams some part of Jonathan, but he’s too breathless to speak. There’s some muttering, vague and unhelpful, through the class, and the teacher looks utterly exhausted by them.
“Anyone at all,” she drawls.
“I do,” Jonathan hears, and it takes him a long moment of her eyes turning toward him to realize who’s spoken.
“Jonathan,” she says. It takes him another dragging moment to respond, because the voice at the back of his mind is saying no, no, that’s not right, John, my name is John and it’s hard to ignore. “Please.”
“Alexander Hamilton,” he says, feeling horribly like he doesn’t have control of his mouth. The name is strange, not one he knows except in passing with others like Greene and Knox, things anyone hears in a history class. But the syllables rest on his tongue like they belong there, warm and sweet, as if he’s said them daily all his life. “And his hair wasn’t silver, it was red.”
He gets up and leaves without another word, leaving the teacher to threaten detention at his back and mumbling something vague about needing a nurse. It’s not totally a lie—he finds the nearest flat bit of wall and sits down hard on the floor, too dizzy to stand. He’s not sure he could even make it to the medic’s tent—nurse’s office, he corrects himself.
“Hey, Jonathan, are you all right?” a voice above him says, and it takes him a second to remember that oh, hey, that’s me. He looks up to see his teacher standing over him, looking concerned. She’s not a bad teacher, just tired. “You look like you’re not feeling very well.”
“Dizzy,” he mumbles. “A little sick.”
She crouches down, a shrewd look on her face. “Do you mind if I ask if you knew him? Hamilton?” When he pauses, she adds, “I once walked into an art museum and saw a painting I modeled for five hundred years ago. Helluva way to remember. I know the look.”
John laughs a little, amused. “Yeah,” he says, still wary. “I was…a friend, I guess.” He shakes his head, slowly. “I’m gonna…actually go to the nurse,” he says. “I’m not feeling well.”
“Can you stand?” she asks. She doesn’t wait for an answer before holding out her hand and helping him up. “I’ll make sure you don’t get into trouble. Go take the rest of the day.”
“Thanks.”
He takes the rest of the day to google his own damn self on Wikipedia, and he’s instantly and fiercely grateful that he didn’t give up his name to the teacher.
John Laurens, it appears, mostly went down in history as almost certainly sleeping with Alexander Hamilton.
Which, while not untrue, is also not going to help his ongoing campaign to play straight. He should find Martha and apologize, he thinks absently. It takes John all of twenty minutes of Wikipedia to decide, immediately and fiercely, that his father can’t know. No one can. Until he’s out of this house—preferably out of the state—everyone has to keep believing that he’s new.
He traces a finger over his screen, over the transcript of a letter. I wish, my Dear Laurens, that it were within my power, by action rather than words, to convince you that I love you. Alexander was always good with words, brilliant. The twist of grief, of longing, is almost enough to make him close the computer and push it away, but he keeps staring at the letter instead. Someone redacted them—one letter is almost entirely black censor lines, and from what he recalls of that particular letter, it’s for the best—but it’s still Alexander, there and speaking to him and dear God, John wants to see him again.
The next day, he quietly pulls his teacher aside. She’s from Massachusetts, and explaining to her is the hardest thing he’s ever done in his life. He’s never admitted aloud that he’s gay before, let alone in the context of ‘please do not tell anyone that I was reincarnated, or that I knew Alexander Hamilton, because this is all my Wikipedia page has on it.’ She nods and never tells a soul.
He narrows his college search to New York State, and somehow—through a miracle—lands a place in Columbia. It’s the place to be, because if John knows anything, it’s how Alexander thinks. If Alexander is back, he’ll go home to his city, no matter how long it takes, and John Laurens is going to meet him there.