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(Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice)
There is no world in which Alexander Hamilton thought he might live long. He shoulders this weight of expected short life throughout childhood, watches his mother, his friends, his cousin, as they cough and anguish and fade.
Though life seems to hold some element of impossibility, he finds it is that impossibility he clings to, that he fights for, claws for, sinks teeth and talons into, pulls himself up with bleeding fingernails, dirt encrusted underneath. He is determined to make something of himself, be something, be someone, be anything at all, so long as that anything should prove his existence, prove the possibility in his impossibility.
Force his name into remembrance.
First, an education. That seems the way forward, for he has no money, no name, no recognition by any party when he should introduce himself. An education ought change that, for where he has nothing else, he has words, and words create knowledge, create power, create worlds.
Hamilton learns very quickly the power of words, of description. Words, when woven skillfully, find emotion, channel it. Words can fan a raging fire, douse a heightened flame. They are to be his kindling, and he knows well how to strike a match.
He describes a tragedy, and finds himself rewarded, finds himself pitied and envied in equal measure. These are not words he enjoys, are not words he wishes to have ascribed to him. Pity. Envy. He would take one without the other, and yet he finds, more often than not, that the two cannot be separated from him.
Still, the words of his tragedy create promise, and then he is in a different world, a different place, has his bloodied dirtied nails digging into the stonework of privileged halls, echoes of monied men taunting on the shivering air, and he feels a fraud.
He should never have want for such a feeling again, and so grasps yet another determination: first education, then status. Then belonging. Walking amongst those that would have once spat at his feet, blending in until he in return may spit on those whose company he once would have shared.
For belonging, and status, Hamilton finds war. War, a state he has wished for since he were old enough to understand the inequality of status climbing: withheld from any no matter their education, unless they born into its gilded and grasping arms.
In war, he will burn bright, courage and deeds leveling the field, providing wide open space for his fire to hungrily consume, lit by the heady fumes of ambition, fed with the kindling of words.
There, as he stands in uniform, shares space with the Commander-in-Chief, Alexander Hamilton thinks himself a man who finally knows himself. He believes he understands his ambitions, his wants, his drives. He knows the sort of man he is, the sort of man he hopes to one day be. To rise, to be remembered, to have his name marked in the pages of the history books, the intricate weaving that will one day represent the struggles, the pain, the triumph, of creating a new nation such as they stand on the precipice of.
He feels all these things, he knows all these things, and he wants.
By God, he wants.
Flames flicker outside his vision, threatening to become all he may see.
And then he meets John Laurens.
(From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favour fire)
Before, Alexander Hamilton thought he knew desire. Thought he knew despair. But the desire that courses through his veins when John Laurens’ lips first meet his, when his fingers trace shapes against fever hot skin, when his whispered moans seem as shouted prayers, though they both sinners damned to Hell—well, that be entirely something else.
The despair that rises up after—blackened-swelling-fear chasing pleasured-flowing-gold—that feeling he has known before, and he despises it with his entire being.
Though John Laurens, by virtue of his name, claims all things Hamilton has so long sought—education, money, status, respect—Hamilton thinks he also burns. Knows so. Sees it in John Laurens’ determined, steady gaze, where a curtain hides the self-destructive flames from view, until their eyes meet, and John Laurens witnesses the same twisting flames in Alexander’s eyes, curtains scorched to flayed pieces.
Their fires are made of vastly different matter, flare at vastly different temperatures, and yet slot together somehow; the desperate, terrified want of Hamilton’s flames swallowing the self-consuming hatred of Laurens’ own.
But war—it is not the place for such fires to combine, where a stray musket ball, a stray cannon, a whispered, searing word, a suspicious, flinty look, might set a spark, ignite, burn the entire world within those eyes to dust.
And they do ignite. Often. Far too often. Murmured words of cooling love, hissing water over embers—it turns sour, heated, reignited; pulls softened, scraped-raw skin over painfully glowing coals. Exposes cuts, scabs, rubs salt into half-healed wounds, drawing blood that has been dyed and diluted by that same desire and despair.
Hamilton finds that fire can only feed fire; it cannot extinguish it, by virtue of its sameness. And so they burn hotter, and brighter, flames ruinous and glorious, forgetting, or perhaps remembering, that once a fire has burnt everything it can, all that will remain is the ashes, which cannot contain anything but sorrow, will leave only residue flakes behind, soft and deafening in their greying end.
Alexander Hamilton thinks John Laurens chases those ashes, those remembrances of something once glorious, now gone, and is determined they should stand in that falling silence together, or not at all.
But those flames at the edges of his vision, beat back by the heat of Laurens’ own, are only kept at bay when they two burn with matched intensity.
And suddenly, somehow, though the exact moment unclear, there is frost gathering beneath Hamilton’s fingernails, fire and dirt cast out and away, by realisations of truth behind the man he thought he loved, the man he thought he knew, and those sparks of sure ambition begin to meet cooled reality, acceptances of icy sacrifice and required respectability shifting beneath his skin, extinguishing.
The blackened smoke of doused flame hides the heightened roar of his love’s own burning, nothing left to contain it, as sacrificial licks of fire gather at the edges of Laurens’ bones, burn upwards, and outwards, fanned by the hot winds of honour, and the suddenly realised knowledge that the end of the war should remove the kindling linking their souls.
Hamilton lifts the fuel from his fire and reads sacrifice, but Laurens reads sacrificial, and by the time Hamilton realises that they have both misread, that he ought to have read sacrifice nothing, and Laurens ought to have listened, John Laurens is already dead.
And there, the power of words once more unfolds, for as Hamilton reads such words, feels their impact as sharpened knives beneath the cracks of his soul, the world crumples and burns and dissolves around him, is melted and moulded and forged anew. But it is poorer, and colder, and greyer, and sadder, for the loss of a love that burned itself up and exploded with the radiant heat of a distant star.
The fire, now doused, smokes softly, sadly, and ends, as the ash of a ruined letter hangs heavy in the air.
(But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great)
There are no flames in Hamilton’s vision, as he rises and rises and rises. He fits ill into the society that once spat at his feet, like one might drown in a coat of incorrect size. And yet, even when one wears a coat of incorrect size, it is worn nonetheless; in the same way Hamilton forces shape into the elite, spits at the feet of those who he once were.
He is in government, he has power, and status, and a family, and a life that stretches longer than his twenties, an impossibility made possible through words, and war, and flames, long gone.
Sometimes, he thinks he smells smoke, remembers fever hot hands, charred lips, smouldering skin. But this is soon replaced with the pained ache of icy satisfaction, and if Hamilton of the war were one man, Hamilton after the war is his success story.
John Laurens is buried in the ground, and Hamilton wonders if he scorches the heavy earth that now chokes his bones.
He despairs at such a thought, and yet desires it, for he does not think even death might extinguish such a blazing soul.
Desire and despair, and a fear of a short life, these things Hamilton once knew well. Hatred too, that he thought he knew well, as it burnt fiery and hot, through venomous spat words, and desperation to prove himself worthy of more than he were given.
He did not know hatred may also burn cold, biting, like ice spreading carefully over chilled water, cracking and creeping with eerie choking ease.
Iced emotions, far more dangerous that those of fire, for he knew when the flames were at his vision, could feel them singe his skin, promising freedom, and violence, and rage. But ice, it creeps slowly, devours softer, and crueller, and lingers, where flames should have long starved of air.
It is hatred that eventually fuels him onwards, and grief, hatred and grief for others, for himself, for his stupidity, his suppositions, his arrogance. His self-destruction.
There is a bone deep chill spreading through his veins, and he thinks John Laurens laughs at him, laughs at him or screams, though he cannot hope to decipher a ghost’s cries.
He wonders whether this life were not meant to be short lived after all, a possible impossibility suddenly disproven.
As fire calls to fire, burns hotter, brighter, better, so too does ice attract the chill, and there Hamilton stands, face blank, eyes cold, watches the man shifting his feet across the duelling ground.
When Hamilton pulls the trigger on his pistol, and misses, when the pistol facing him aims true, he realises the ice beneath his nails returned to dirt, returned to blood, and wonders if it the dirt and blood of the grave, burnt and then frozen away by sheer determined will, now allowed once more to thrive, the same dirtied nails of his childhood returned with promise of an ended life.
It seems he escaped it not at all, flames burnt to ash and ice seared to steam, winding their taunting ways through the crisp morning air.
(And would suffice)