Work Text:
It was four in the morning when Aaron Burr woke up, disgruntled and no longer tired. He lay awake on his bed for a few minutes before standing and taking a step towards his computer. No one could beat his computer. He couldn’t do anything to ignore it at this point. He had forgotten to feed himself, groom himself, or even sleep properly. He had forgotten everything except for the fact that Alexander Hamilton had just left that morning, four days ago.
He didn’t know why the boy had left. Just before that night, they were getting along. The summer vacations were the cruelest of them all. Burr had no family, and neither did Hamilton– or, at least, that was what Burr thought. Four days ago, Burr woke to a lonely dorm room, no one in sight, not even the person who always made coffee for the both of them. When he called, he didn’t answer his phone. There was only a letter near the door, that was all there was. It contained only four words.
Don’t look for me
But of course Burr looked for him. Of course Burr had wanted to, and of course Burr would get depressed and forget all about it.
Most of the time, he remembered the times Alexander gave him something that seemed quite special. Burr asked why, and Alexander would smile and shrug.
“I don’t know. Why?” He asked as well.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah.”
Instead of trying to search for the man, he used his will to write 400 words on a letter every time he woke up at four in the morning, and that would’ve been always if he hadn’t kept forgetting to drink coffee every night.
Uneasy to say that Burr had to extend this goal to one and a half months. Some days were left without letters to make and sometimes, he just lay awake. The forty letters sitting on his desk were a mess, he knew it. They all contained 400 words, maybe more, he didn’t know. But what he did know was the subject of the matter.
It might have been his dreary eyes as Hamilton talked, or maybe the unease in his voice as he kept talking. Maybe it was the kiss that very same night, drunk and foolish and feeling like kids on a normal Friday. He hadn’t bothered to turn on the news ever since then.
He looked at his phone yet again, but this time he had the will to take it into his hand and look through some news. Forty-four missed calls and almost four-hundred messages. He wondered what the relevance of four was in his life, but he didn’t care.
He opened his messages to his friends’ chat box. He didn’t care. He wanted Hamilton back, physically. Laurens, Lafayette and Mulligan also worried about where he had gone.
Now, the forty letters on his desk proved to be insignificant.
Hamilton always did write like he was running out of time.
He took his old typewriter and another piece of paper, then placed his hands over the keyboard. He licked his lips, since they were dry, and then took a deep breath as he began to type. His eyes glossed over as he wrote.
It’s four in the morning again. I’m writing another letter for when you get home. Get home soon, Alex.
And he kept writing. Up to 400 words, maybe he wrote until 4000, but he didn’t know. The letters were scattered in his room, some were covering his phone on the bed. It had been four days. He’d written forty letters with more than four hundred words every day he woke up at four in the morning. It felt like it had been a long time since Alexander had left. Finally, Burr had finished off his last sentence. It was five in the morning.
Every day the sun rises it breaks my heart to think it might have been my fault that you had left the world so suddenly.
Finally, he finished it. He folded it again, then threw it somewhere else again, then he sighed and put his coat on, then went outside. After all, he was running out of time.