*emerges from cave, shamefaced* Right, so, does anyone remember that this AU exists? Because I swear to God I didn’t forget, I just only now have had the time. I actually have a bunch of prompts for it, not all of them are going to get written based on…like…my inspiration level, but also this series is alive again, so like. Yep. Here is some Jefferson. Full disclosure, I dislike Jefferson and think his economic plan was some racist bullshit, so…that is evident.
To all you newcomers, I do recommend reading the other stuff, even if you could probably figure it out.
So, the academic affairs office holds out longer than their predecessor. Not by much, but by a little. It takes two full weeks for Alex to hammer through his petition to be allowed to take more than max credits—and it’s quite a petition. Angelica takes one look at the twenty-page, double-sided, single-spaced letter to the dean of academics and disavows any involvement, and John grins fondly, remarking that the dean has no idea what he’s gotten into.
The dean, incidentally, has lived his life with pleasantly dim memories of Philedelphia with cobblestone streets and a vague impression that he knows the unfortunate teacher annually strong-armed into teaching History of the American Revolution. He recalls very little else of his time in the Continental Congress—indeed, at gunpoint he couldn’t have identified what exactly he was doing, back then.
He has a blindingly vivid flashback upon looking at the first page of the letter—the pamphlet, really—and immediately feeds the entire thing through his shredder.
“Jake,” he says, sticking his head out of his office to look at his secretary.
“Yes, sir?”
“Approve whatever Hamilton’s request was before he sends anymore letters. I’ve seen enough for several lifetimes.”
“You got it, boss,” says Jake, whose past life was a blissfully unremarkable farmer in the Italian countryside and who therefore has no idea that his boss is sparing them all a lot of trouble.
Now, the reason this matters is because Alex walks into his Econ 101 class for the first time two weeks into the semester, takes one look at the lesson outline the grad student wrote on the board, and makes a sound of absolute incoherent horror.
“Oh my god,” Alex says faintly, frozen in place two steps inside the door. He was never an especially religious person, but he’s wondering if maybe the universe is punishing him for past crimes. He’s not saying one way or the other if he deserves it, but this seems excessive. “Jefferson is haunting me from beyond the grave.”
“Listen, kid,” sighs the grad student. She wears her hair buzzed short on one side and is clutching her coffee almost as fiercely as Alex is, and he thinks this is maybe not her first class today from the also, I don’t care look on her face. “We’re doing a review of some basic socioeconomic structures, and the Jeffersonian/Hamiltonian debate is, like, critical. So could you–”
“But it’s bullshit,” Alex bursts out before he can even try to hold his tongue. “It was bullshit when Jefferson first came up with it, and it’s bullshit now.”
“Jesus Christ,” a voice from somewhere in the front third of the lecture hall mutters. A tall figure unfolds itself from a chair and says, “Have you ever taken an economics class in your life?”
Alex can actually taste the way his blood pressure skyrockets. It occurs to him, briefly, that someone—possibly Eliza, also possibly the General—might kill him if he starts a fight right now, but. On the other hand. He’s going to start a fight. He’s got no choice, basically.
“Have you?” he demands rudely, turning to stare up the lecture hall at the young man—maybe a sophomore, he’s too angry to be sure, but he’s wearing a very questionable magenta hoodie and his hair is even fluffier than Lafayette’s and honestly he has a very punchable face, in Alex’s humble opinion—and narrowing his eyes. “I mean, do you have a single legitimate argument for why Jefferson’s bullshit plan would work? Because let me just say, plenty of Southerners loved to sit around and talk about how the country was being railroaded by the big cities in the North but–”
“If the North can’t balance their own needs with the supply they can generate, why should the South–”
Fine, if that’s how he wants to play it. Alex raises his voice to try to drown the other guy out. “If the South wants to call itself a part of a country, it needs to support–”
“State-by-state trade–”
“—what, you expect landowners to share their profits freely enough to keep a country alive, God you’re naïve–”
“—freedom from the chokehold of a national bank–”
“—so the country can be held hostage by the South?”
“Farms and farm owners should be able to dictate where their finances–”
“—can’t punish the North for the sin of not having huge arable fields–”
“—your vaunted manufacturing facilities cover it?”
By now they’re bellowing at each other over the heads of the rest of the class, real anger kicking up an intellectual debate into something familiar, and so Alex isn’t really surprised by the next slip of his tongue. Old habits, new dogs—old dogs? Something like that.
Anyway.
Point is, Alex slams his textbook down onto the grad student’s table and hollers, “Goddamnit, Jefferson, I was right and history proves it, get off your fucking high horse!”
There’s a long couple seconds where Alex remembers, in the dead silence that’s settled on the lecture hall, that he was kind of planning to keep a lid on that? Oh well, any hope of secrecy was blown to shit by Washington’s class anyway and fuck it, he’s right, he was right then and he’s right now, and furthermore—
“Go fuck yourself, Hamilton,” the tall guy says, and Alex has a small heart attack.
“Jesus God, fucking Christ, what the fuck,” the grad student blurts all at once in a rush, but Alex doesn’t answer her, too busy taking a deep breath to launch his next volley.
Admittedly, it’s not a gracious one, but listen, just listen: Alex is not a gracious person and no one ever said he was, certainly never more than once, and definitely not after having an argument with him.
“Hey, look, I’m sure it’s rough to realize that all your best efforts only ended in Andrew Jackson’s racist ass closing down the federal bank and landing us all neck deep in shit a hundred and fifty years later–”
“Excuse me, I wrote–”
Alex drives over the tall guy’s protests—Jefferson’s protests, and wow, he’s going to hear about this from Washington later. “—but you really have to get over your bullshit economic plan and just admit that it depends on slavery.”
“It does not!”
“Oh my god it does, it totally does, the only way your plan works is if there’s basically no economic overhead for labor, and like, listen, buddy, I’m not sure if anyone ever told you this, but we had a whole war about the slavery thing, it was a very big deal, it killed like a million people and then we agreed that slavery was bad.” Alex pauses and very slowly arches an eyebrow at Jefferson, enjoying this…probably more than he should. “Do you agree that slavery was bad, Thomas?” he asks with a wide smile.
If Jefferson purses his lips any harder, Alex thinks they might actually fuse. “Still an asshole and an immigrant, I see.”
“Well, not all of us had such an easy karmic target on our backs as, say, just for example, a slave owner with a real bad track record getting brought back as a black guy,” Alex points out generously. “If Maria shows up, I’m more than happy to let her follow Peggy’s example and punch me, I’m doing my penance.”
“I don’t deserve this,” Jefferson tells the ceiling.
“I dunno, man,” the girl sitting next to him says. “Sounds like you might. Like, I did the reading and your plan was kind of bullshit.”
Honestly this is the greatest thing that’s ever happened to him—well, no, it’s not even the greatest thing to happen to him this month, but it’s up there, okay, it’s way up there. “I feel so, so validated,” Alex tells the grad student, who looks like she might be in shock? Her eyes are wide and her jaw is slack, so he cocks his head and asks, “Are you okay?”
She shuts her mouth with a click, closes her eyes, swallows. Pinches the bridge of her nose between her thumb and finger. It’s shockingly similar to Washington’s patented Headache Pose that always appeared during the latest cabinet battle royal.
“Can you two be trusted to not kill each other if you sit on opposite sides of the hall?”
“Come on, now, we worked together for like—most of a couple decades,” Alex says after a second of mental math.
“Yeah,” she says, opening her eyes and visibly trying not to be star struck, which Alex…appreciates, to be completely honest. “And then you, you know, mutually annihilated each other and he spent a couple more decades trying to blackball your name out of the history books.”
“It’s so rare that I feel like the bigger person,” Alex says, bouncing on his toes.
“That’s because you’re unnaturally small,” Jefferson mutters, sullenly resuming his seat.
“I am not listening to baseless insults about my height right now, thank you, Jefferson, I have the eternal trump card and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
The grad student puts her head back into her hand, and squeezes her eyes shut.