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Chapter Text

• John didn’t come out as gay to his dad until he was in college on full scholarship because he was scared of getting thrown out of the house

• his dad didn’t disown him for being gay, but only because he’s a big-time politician in South Carolina and it would have looked bad

• John nevertheless internalized a shit-ton of homophobic beliefs that really, really messed with his mental health all throughout childhood/ teenage years. He finally went to a therapist after one of his friends begged him to because he threw a casual reference to suicide into their conversation

• the first time he went to a therapist was a disaster, but he tried a different one and really clicked with her. Together they worked on the internalized-homophobia/ emotionally-manipulative-and-controlling-dad problems

• eventually he was doing so well that he started volunteering at an LGBT youth suicide-prevention hotline

• ...was kind of sad the Occupy movement ended before he was old enough to go to protests.

• … but went to all the Black Lives Matter rallies. Had to get schooled on the finer points of Not Being A White Savior (after some unfortunate behavior) but read tons of articles, figured out what he was doing wrong, and worked hard on fixing it (and not stealing the spotlight from the people he was trying to help)

• dated a few guys casually in college, still on good terms with all of them except one. there’s always one

• played all the intramural sports. was a savant at inner tube water polo, decent to good at most other things. always really good at setting the worse players at their ease. passed the ball on the basis of “who hasn’t had it in a while?” because of this, was not popular with his more competitive teammates, did not give a single fuck.

• studied super hard to get into law school, only to realize he was living his dad’s dream, not his own. dropped out, felt super guilty about it (the long, passive-aggressive email containing the sentence, “at least I can console myself that once I had a son” did not help matters)

• in fact, the only good thing about law school was this guy Alex he ended up sharing an apartment with

• despite the manifold joys of Alex, was beginning to fall back into serious depression when one of his friends at the LGBT hotline said, “hey, have you ever thought of being a paramedic?”

• he had not.

• but he liked the idea because a) he had always been a bit of an adrenaline junkie, b) he thought he might like science/medicine– at least, he always loved Animal Planet as a kid? that counts, right?, c) helping people! being a hero!

• so he took EMT training and studied like there was no tomorrow

• Alex always quizzed him on things and John was always like, “how do you already know this? do you just know evERYTHIGN?!?!”

• Turns out Alex went to college on a scholarship that stipulated he had to take all the premed courses and then go to med school. But he double majored in politics and legal studies on top of that, read the find print of his scholarship, realized it wasn’t legally binding, and went to law school instead.

• So anyway within eight months of being in utter despair and without a direction in life John was riding along in the ambulance for some of the most dangerous calls they got

• because a) he’s pretty physically intimidating, or at least difficult to physically intimidate

• but also b) by this point he’s really good at talking people down off ledges (literal and figurative) and also really good at calming down people who are sick and frightened and don’t know what to do.

• (it’s a skill he developed as a child, back when he and his dad were still friends, and they had this big country house with horses, and John could always bring them back after they spooked)

• and also c) he’s not afraid of people with knives/ guns, and in the neighborhood where they are, that is sadly a necessary quality in an EMT

• because of c), John has been hurt twice on the job: once, stabbed in the left shoulder by a 55-year-old woman having a full break from reality who sincerely thought he was a CIA operative coming to abduct her; and less than a year later, shot through the very same shoulder while trying to save the victim of a would-be gang assassination

• the first time Alex freaked the fuck out, ran out of his law school class, barely held it together on the bus to the hospital, and broke down crying in the waiting room, only to be shown in to see a John who was fine, really, just a little sleepy from the drugs, and Alex are you okay? why are you sad? is someone sick?

• and when John got better they had a super fun conversation about how Alex was listed as John’s next-of-kin / in-case-of-emergency contact

• and John thought Alex was going to be mad, but actually Alex got all embarrassed and eventually admitted that John was also his emergency contact

• not that he was going to get stabbed in law school, oh my God, John

• the second time John was hurt Alex also freaked the fuck out, but in a slightly more contained manner, because John talked one of his co-workers into texting Alex a heavily-edited version of events in which it was barely a scratch, hardly worth fussing over, really

• … which meant that Alex nearly had a heart attack when he got to the hospital expecting barely a scratch and instead got John being prepped for surgery for a nicked brachial artery

• … which meant he was not at his best when he first encountered John’s dad, who had made his displeasure with the hospital over not being contacted in the first incident known

• (he’d seen it on the local news and been terrified and sad and a little angry that he didn’t get to take credit for raising a hero son because he was still busy pretending he didn’t exist)

• … which meant Henry Laurens got a faceful of vengeful screaming law student threatening to sue for breach of privacy laws and take out a restraining order against him

• but eventually after John had recovered a little (still off work with his arm in a sling, but no longer at the hospital) and was in a position to consent to his dad’s presence, he and Henry got coffee together in a public location

• and Henry said, “I don’t agree with a lot of your choices, but I want to be a part of your life. Your job gives you fulfillment, and your boyfriend seems very… protective, and–”

• And John said, “no, you don’t understand, Alex and I–”

• (and then he thought, well, why not?)

• and didn’t correct him

• and went home to the apartment and asked, “Hey, Alex, are you single right now?”

• “Yep!”

• “How’d you like to not be?” which was basically the awkwardest way to ask out your roommate of 2+ years, but was sufficient for Alex, who proceeded to (very gently) jump his bones

Chapter Text

• Lafayette’s mother was one of many younger cousins of the sheikh of a small Middle Eastern country that is definitely not Qatar because I don’t want to turn this into Qatar royal family RPF because honestly I wouldn’t know where to start

• Let’s call it Gatar

• Because there were many cousins older and maler than her in line for the throne, she was allowed to go to France for her education. While she was there she decided she wanted to be a doctor. This was greeted with a shrug from the folks back home because there were literally so many other people in line for the throne before her, really there was no harm in letting her do what she wanted

• She married a French man without permission from her family, which was a big no-no, but his family had moved from Algeria to France in the early 1900s and he was a devout Muslim, so they weren’t too angry. (His family’s surname was originally al-Fayed, but they’d changed it to blend in better in the ‘30s).

• … except he was killed in a car crash when she was pregnant with their kid

• But she was determined to make a life for herself and become a doctor, so she hired a nanny for the kid while putting in huge, huge hours at med school and later in the hospital

• And the nanny never quite got around to mentioning to his mom that her kid liked dresses just as much as he liked pants, and liked to wear his hair in braids, and pretended to be the princess just as often as he pretended to be the knight who saved her

• … and then his mother dropped dead of an aneurysm when he was twelve

• Luckily there was a trust set up, and the extended family back in Gatar was perfectly happy to let the nanny raise the kid for a while

• … until a large chunk of the royal family was killed in a plane crash and suddenly the kid was a) filthy rich and b) like, eighth or ninth in line for the throne

• … and suddenly they were like GET HIS ASS BACK HERE NOW

• This poor child did Not Fit In

• But he did okay in school and he excelled at horseback riding, which he’d never tried before, and he was pretty good at target practice, so they were like, “hey, maybe he can join the army or something!”

• And they actually married him off to the daughter of a really powerful and rich family

• And the newlyweds genuinely liked each other, which was a plus

• But he also refused to grow his beard out (because he hated, hated, hated the way it looked, like he didn’t recognize his own face in the mirror) which was a big no-no, and he had some seriously weird views about all the migrant workers and domestic servants that made the country work

• Like that they should have rights, and be paid better, and housed better, and generally better respected, and allowed holidays to visit their families at home, and be eligible for citizenship after a certain amount of time

• And he started saying things like this to reporters and it was incredibly embarrassing

• So then one day he met an American business developer who happened to also be the trustee of a university in D.C. (at this point he was eighteen, tall and gangly as only a teenager can be, with a sharp, kinda beaky nose and a smile that won him friends very, very quickly)

• And this American business developer, whose name as Silas Deane, took a shine to him and particularly his views on human rights, and also may have had dollar signs in his eyes at the prospect of an incredibly wealthy alum when he said, “You know, my university is looking for international students just like you! We have a special program for students interested in social justice and you would be a perfect fit.”

• And Lafayette was like, “Is it true that they’re much less strict about gender and sexuality norms there?”

• And Silas Deane was like, “Trust me, tons of girls will want to sleep with you!”

• (Which was totally not the answer Lafayette was looking for, but he decided that he would probably be a little more free to be himself thousands of miles away from the eyes of all his relatives. And anyway, social justice sounded awesome.)

• And Lafayette was like, “SAY NO MORE! SIGN ME UP! Also I don’t speak English.”

• And Silas Deane was like, “Eh, you’ll manage!”

• All that summer Lafayette listened to nothing but American pop music and watched nothing but American movies and got pretty good at English

• And at the end of it he asked permission from his various relatives and in-laws to go study abroad

• But they were like, no, this kid is weird enough as it is, and also likely to embarrass us further

• So they didn’t give him permission to go

• (At this point, with some covert help from Deane, he had already applied, been accepted, and paid his deposit, and was only waiting on his family’s private jet to fly him to D.C. It had honestly not occurred to him that they would say no.)

• So he decided it was all a big misunderstanding and they would come around to his point of view eventually

• He flew to Tokyo  on the pretense of some diplomatic meeting or another, then bought a ticket to San Francisco on his own personal credit card

• It was in SFO that he first learned the meaning of the words Random Search

• “Haha, they have mistaken me for a terrorist! How silly of them!”

• (It’s a little less funny the 30th time it happens, but there’s nothing he can do. He learns very quickly that putting his hands up and saying, sarcastically, “Yep, ya caught me” is a Very Bad Idea because the TSA has No Sense of Humor)

• He arrived in D.C. and had dinner that night with George and Martha Washington, whom Silas Deane had told him to look for

• He was instantly 100% part of the family in his own mind (and Martha’s)

• George needed a whole hour before he was like, yep, this kid’s my son

• He starts taking classes during the week and volunteering with a new organization every weekend

• And it’s hard, because it turns out having conversations in English is a lot harder than just understanding it as it was spoken on TV, and writing in English is even harder. But he gets himself a tutor and works his butt off and does decently well on his own merit

• He has never yet volunteered with an organization he did then turn around and donate scads of money to

• Initially his relatives back home are outraged and considered cutting off his credit card

• But then they realize how much good press he’s getting for them

• Like being named one of the 30 Under 30 in Forbes magazine

• And getting an interview on 60 Minutes with the title “The Good Prince”

• And getting the phone numbers of every powerful politician in D.C. practically thrown at him

• And going on a late night talk show and being asked to show the host how he gels his hair because apparently it is iconic (?)

• But it turns out that his hair looks good that way with the help of a lot of natural curl that the host, sadly, cannot match, which only increases the mystique

• So anyway his relatives back off a little

• The constant press coverage is also helpful in that people stop glaring at him stonily in public for being conspicuously Arab and start asking for his autograph instead

• But unhelpful in that he can no longer anonymously make out with strangers at parties without worrying they’re going to sell the story to the press or worse, just put it on the Internet for free

• Doubly so for acting too feminine in front of a camera

• So he treads very carefully as far as that side of himself is concerned. George and Martha know, but he tells them to call him “he” even though he wonders if “they” might feel better. He doesn’t want to take the risk of one of them slipping up in public. He doesn’t want to take the risk of liking “they” so much that he can’t bear to go back to “he.” He has to be able to go back to Gatar and make change from the inside one day. He can’t do that if he disgraces himself in their eyes

• And he wonders a lot if his friends are just acting friendly because they want something from him, until George introduces him to Alex

• Alex, who so smart his brain outruns his (very fast) mouth, and so passionate you can see it in the way he fucking moves, and quirky and quick-witted and trying to put together the best freaking summer camp in the universe for disadvantaged kids

• Alex, who talks about his “roommate” John the way most people talk about, like, the sun in the sky

• John, who has apparently been kidnapped by his U.S. Senator dad (?!?!) and needs rescuing

• Lafayette knows the feeling of being held hostage by powerful family members, so he jumps at the chance to help

• And okay, so Alex and John don’t invite him up to their apartment with them after he ferries them home, which in his opinion would have been the ideal outcome for the night

• But as he drives away he’s thinking, this will turn into something good

Chapter Text

• Raquel was born in rural Nicaragua in 1970. When she was twelve years old the contras ransacked her town and burned down her school. When she was fifteen her parents were murdered. When she was sixteen she met a man, got pregnant, got married, had his child. When he was drunk, which was often, he hit her.

• When Raquel was eighteen her husband hit her so hard it knocked a tooth out. She left her husband and her baby in the middle of the night and never went back.

• At first she had no plans, but once she got out she realized that she could go anywhere she wanted. She hitchhiked north, working odd jobs as she went. She was stunningly beautiful, and even though she’d only had a grade school education, she was brilliant in conversation– people found themselves wanting to help her. Most of all, she never took no for an answer.

• Still, it took her almost a year to make the journey. She was raped twice along the way, once by a man who refused to take money as payment for giving her a ride to the next city, once by a priest in the church she spent the night at.

• When she arrived in California she spoke no English, had no contacts. She walked into an employment agency in East L.A. and said, “What work do you have for me?”

• She started cleaning houses for minimum wage. The Hamiltons were an upper middle class couple in Sherman Oaks, well into their sixties, with a wannabe screenwriter son who liked to flirt with Raquel as she scrubbed their floors. By this point her English was getting good; she listened to NPR as she worked and probably knew the ins and outs of U.S. politics better than any of the people whose houses she cleaned.

• Eventually the wannabe screenwriter, James, asked Raquel out for dinner. She was charmed by his laid-back approach to courtship, and by the fact that he was more than happy to have her boss him around. He had rich parents, so she figured it didn’t really matter that at twenty-eight he had never held down a job for more than a month.

• Raquel got pregnant in 1992, about the same time James’ parents finally got fed up that he never paid rent and kicked him out of the house.

• It was also about the same time Raquel’s work placement agency got busted by immigration authorities. If she hadn’t been out at the convenience store when they raided her apartment she would have been deported. As it was, they got very bemused James, who showed them his U.S. Passport and chatted good-naturedly with the officers about the Dodgers until they went way.

• So then Raquel had to go looking for work again. After she had the baby (whom they called Jimmy, for his charming if worthless dad) they moved north, near Bakersfield, in search of cheap rent and jobs.

• James became a clerk at a video rental store and watched a lot of movies in his off time, but he also took care of little Jimmy, which was not nothing.

• Raquel didn’t have papers, so she went to work in the fields of California’s Central Valley picking every plant under the sun: onions, strawberries, oranges, you name it. The labor was backbreaking, but she had big plans for herself. She wasn’t going to pick crops her whole life. She enrolled in night classes in finance and started working on her associate’s degree.

• Getting pregnant again (in 1994) was kind of annoying, and certainly not what she’d intended.

• James mentioned the word abortion and was promptly smacked with a rolled-up newspaper. Raquel wasn’t the best Catholic in the world, but she wasn’t about to do that.

• Raquel went into labor four weeks early in the middle of the night, and the baby came so fast and howled so loud that all her worries about how early he was melted away. He had her dark hair and her dark eyes and a scream like an air raid siren, but when she held him he went quiet and serious, like he was waiting for instructions.

• “Hey, James,” she asked, “What’s a name for a baby that’s gonna conquer the world someday?”

• James, good for a classical allusion if nothing else, replied, “Alexander.”

• Raquel had intended to go back to work within days of giving birth, but every time she stood up she got dizzy. She took a whole week off, cursing herself for laziness.

• After a month back at work, still bone-tired all the time, she developed a chest cold she couldn’t shake. She didn’t have health insurance through her job, and she didn’t have Medicaid because she was in the country illegally, but when she started coughing up blood James got so alarmed he drove her to the nearest ER.

• She had tuberculosis.

• She had H.I.V.

• They tested James: positive. Jimmy: negative. Alex: positive. Raquel hadn’t cried since she left her first baby back in Nicaragua, but she cried then.

• They all got on AZT, the only antiretroviral available back in those days, through a charity. James wasn’t even sick yet, and Raquel was put on powerful antibiotics for the TB. But H.I.V. was a death sentence then, and James and Raquel both knew it. They were going to die, leaving Jimmy an orphan. If Alex made it to ten years old it would be a miracle.

• But in the meantime here was this bright-eyed inquisitive child who seemed hell-bent on growing up.

• All the local preschools turned him down; nobody wanted to send their kids to a school with an infection.

• All the local preschools, that is, except a little private Jewish daycare called Temple Beth Zion. The principal loved little Alex so much that she later arranged him to get a scholarship for his elementary school years.

• So that was why Jimmy took the bus to public school while Alex was learning Hebrew for the bar mitzvah he was never going to have and tearing through chapter books from the public library.

• When James started to get sick, he attempted to contact his parents and appeal for their help, if only for their grandchildrens’ sake.

• It was at this point he learned that his parents had died in a house fire and that he had been written out of their will.

• So there he was, at home alone with the boys (Raquel was working—she did accounting for a small business that had just opened up, and was actually making pretty good money), with no hope left for himself or anyone else in his life and no accomplishments to his name but a half-written screenplay, and suddenly he couldn’t stand it.

• He left, drifted to San Francisco and then just kept on drifting. Raquel lost contact with him, and he certainly never called. At this point Jim was eight and Alex had just turned six.

• Within a year Raquel and Alex both got really sick: their HIV had figured out a way around their medication and was multiplying out of control. Alex wound up in the hospital with meningitis. He almost died, burning up with fever, delirious, crying from the splitting pain in his head.  Raquel stayed by him even though she was seriously ill herself—cradled him in her arms and told him it was going to be okay, that she was right here, that mama would keep him safe.

• Maybe she caught meningitis from Alex; maybe they both caught it from the same person. She was dead within a day. Jim never said it, but he never forgave Alex for surviving what their mother had not.

• It was a whole week before Alex was even well enough to understand his mother was dead. A social worker came into his hospital room with Jim and stood by his bed and told him, very gently, that the State of California was going to be looking after him now.

• The doctors got Alex on a brand new medication, one that his virus wasn’t resistant to. They cautioned him to take it every day, no matter what, or the virus would figure out a way around it like it had for the AZT.

• The social worker’s name was Ms. Stevens. She was tall and black, with a slow and gentle way of speaking, and Alex trusted her instantly. There weren’t any families willing to take both Jim and Alex (Jim was too old, Alex too sick) so she placed them in a group home.

• Jim was broad and tall and had a look that said don’t fuck with me. Alex was small for his age, bookish, and often sick, his immune system still recovering. Every day the home would dispense medications and he would have to go up to the front of the table to be handed his pills.

• That would have been fine, except one day Jim “let slip” what the pills were for. (He felt bad about it afterwards, but of course it was too late at that point.)

• “You’ve got AAAIIDS?” the kids would howl. And since they all went to the same school, there was no escape from it.

• One of the more aggressively stupid kids joked about how he was going to beat Alex up.

• Alex calmly said, “If you do that, I might bleed on you.”

• That put an end to that.

• But the verbal bullying was still relentless. In fact, the only kid who wasn’t mean to him was Ned Stevens, Ms. Stevens’ son. Ned wanted to be a doctor and spent all his free time in the biology teacher’s classroom. Alex and Ned started eating lunch there just to get away from Alex being harassed all the time.

• Meanwhile Jim was getting really into woodshop. He was actually fantastic at it. He made Alex a box for his birthday and Alex embarrassed him by treasuring it, putting all his most prized possessions inside.

• The biology teacher noticed how crazy smart and motivated Alex was and realized that all that raw talent was going to wither and die if she didn’t do something about it. So she contacted Ms. Stevens about summer enrichment.

• And Ms. Stevens said, “Oh, wait, I just got a brochure in the mail…”

• And that is how Alexander Hamilton found himself on an airplane for the very first time, flying to the east coast for Summer Break, a two-month long free program for disadvantaged, gifted youths.

• (Ms. Stevens told he’d received an anonymous scholarship to cover the cost of the flights. And it was anonymous, in the sense that Ms. Stevens never told him the money was from her.)

• He still had to take his pills every day–the Director was very strict about that, which was good, because Alex woke up every morning blazing to go, and probably would have forgotten– but none of the other kids knew what they were for. And his immune system was slowly recovering, so he was up for long hikes and generally just running around in nature and being a kid. Four days a week they had classes–geology, ecology, calculus, debate, creative writing, you name it–and he loved all of them. He prayed summer would never end.

• One night after dinner the realization came crashing over him that summer was going to end, and he curled up under a tree and cried until he felt a hand on his shoulder.

• It was Director Washington, who wanted to know if he was homesick.

• And all Alex could say, through convulsive sobs, was, “please don’t make me go back.”

• Now, if Washington had offered money to every disadvantaged youth who pulled his heartstrings he’d have been living in a box. And if he’d offered to take in all those disadvantaged youths, the box would have been very crowded.

• But he could handle airfare.  

• So he said, “You have to go home for the school year, but I will personally make sure that you can come back every summer from now until when you go to college.”

• And, at the look of pure misery on Alex’s face, he said, “And I will personally call your high school principal and see if you can’t test out of courses that you took here, so you can graduate early and get to college where you belong.”

• It was the first time anyone had mentioned the word college to Alex, and Washington had just done it twice. “Sir, you really think I can–I mean…”

• “Son, you’re the kind of kid they made college for.”

• So that is how Alex graduated high school at sixteen and got a full ride to one of the most selective universities in the country.

• Washington was a professor at the law school there. He had written a damn good letter of recommendation, which made up for the one from Alex’s high school English teacher that said, “Alex is argumentative, defensive, and needlessly intense. Overall, he is too smart for his own good.”

• Washington was helpful in other areas, too, though Alex didn’t know it. Alex was one of the only first years who got his own single instead of being assigned a roommate. It was the first time in his life he’d ever had a bedroom to himself, and it was amazing.

• Another plus of the single: he didn’t have to stress about whether to tell his roommate he was H.I.V.-positive.

• Of course, by this point his viral load was undetectable and his immune system was as good as it would ever be, so the chances of him transmitting the HIV were very, very low.

• Even then, he was extraordinarily scrupulous, since he was used to thinking of himself as deeply contaminated, a hazard to others. For most of freshman year he stuck to activities with basically no risk. This, plus the single, made him extremely popular with a large number of ladies. The kid ate pussy like he was getting a degree in it.

• (Technically he was getting a degree in biochemistry while taking all the premed courses at that point. But that would change.)

• Guys were… intriguing, too, and he had a couple encounters that never quite went anywhere, because he never felt entirely comfortable. Women were just so much easier to talk to, and Alex was a babbler.

• (When he was a little more secure, and began to look for a serious relationship, he told a girl about his status. She broke up with him on the spot. He eventually found someone with significantly more chill and knowledge of how HIV is and is not transmitted (i.e. not through condoms), and they were together for a while before things fell apart. All in all, he seriously dated three women in college, fell madly in love with each of them, and got over them just as quickly when they broke up.)

• Seventeen at the end of freshman year, he technically could have gone back to the group home in California.

• Yeah, that was never going to happen.

• He got a job making phone calls for Beekman & Cruger, a law firm that specialized in repossessing houses and cars of poor people who defaulted on payday loans

• It was the worst job ever but it paid for an incredibly shitty sublet and his food over the summer.

• He swore to himself that he would get insider knowledge of the payday loan industry and destroy it from the inside, and that was how he switched from biochemistry to a double major in econ and political philosophy.

• Washington pseudo-casually emailed him asking if he was interested in law school and his reply was “Yes, obviously.” Hamilton didn’t know it, of course, but Washington teared up when he got the email, remembering the kid who’d looked so confused at the word “college.”

• He worked every summer at Beekman & Cruger, advancing through the ranks, taking home better and better pay, hating every moment, promising himself he was going to dismantle this system as soon as he could. He couldn’t do that if he couldn’t afford to go to law school.

• He invited his brother Jim (now restoring furniture, still living in Fresno) to his graduation. In the end, Jim didn’t come. His old RA, Herc, took his picture when he walked down the aisle with “Pomp and Circumstance” playing. That night, when everyone was going out to dinner with their families, he and Herc sat in his dorm room and drank and made fun of the commencement speaker.  

• Alex had to take out killer loans for law school, even with the first generation student grant he got.

• And he lost the housing lotto, so he ended up emailing another incoming first-year and asking if he’d like to split rent on an apartment.

• That was John Laurens, and yes, he was interested.

Chapter Text

• When Marta was growing up in the middle of São Paulo, Brazil, there was nothing she loved more than arts and crafts. If there was a spare scrap of paper around the house, she’d be drawing on it. If there was an empty cardboard box you can bet she’d have it turned into a diorama in less than a day.

• Her parents are both Brazilian executives of a company that does a lot of exporting to South Carolina, which is how she got dragged to America age 10. She hated it, especially at first. She was one of those girls who hit puberty early, and had to deal with a lot of really awful guys. It didn’t help that she was Brazilian and all the guys at her school hit on her for being “exotic”–- which struck her as bizarre, because in South Carolina black skin is not exactly unusual. She wasn’t particularly interested in dating any of them, although she assumed it was just because they were a) immature and b) creeps.

• Speaking of school, she and John had been going to the same exclusive, private high school since they were fifteen, but they didn’t meet until they had AP Studio Art together.

• John was dating another girl at the time, and Marta assumed that was why he never looked at her the same way the other guys did. When it came time to pick partners for assignments, she always made sure to pick him.

• When John’s girlfriend broke up with him for “not being invested enough in this relationship” (”whatever the fuck that means” he’d moaned to Marta afterwards) he was left very suddenly without a date for the winter formal.

• Marta, at that point, had a guy who just kept asking her and asking her and refused to take no for an answer. He would crowd her at her locker after school and follow her to drama rehearsals (she was painting the sets) and was generally making her life a living hell.

• So, she asked John to the formal.

• Once he got over his surprise that she was interested, he said yes.

• One catch: before the formal she had to go over to dinner at his family’s giant house and meet his parents. His mom and dad were both extremely hospitable, almost overbearingly so, and his little brother cracked up the whole table by presenting Marta with a corsage that could squirt water (it had, apparently, been part of his Halloween costume that year).

• John and Marta spent the winter formal making fun of how other people looked slowdancing and squirting all of John’s friends who gave him shit about his hot new girlfriend.

• After that, they were basically inseparable. Once they got their drivers’ licenses they would drive to the mall or the beach together and hang out. Neither of them really wanted to spend much time at home. For Marta, her parents fought all the time, and it stressed her out. And although Henry, John’s dad, had been perfectly civil to Marta, John always seemed anxious at the thought of interacting with him.

• (Her parents didn’t say it, but Marta knew they were quite pleased she was dating a Senator’s son. Personal connections with powerful government officials were a huge plus in their line of work.)

• Another reason Marta loved hanging out with John: they hardly ever kissed. John was down for holding hands and very rarely wanted to take it farther than that. All the boys at school knew she had a boyfriend and left her alone, and then on top of that her boyfriend left her alone. It was ideal.

• But then, about a year after they started dating, John’s mom and little brother were both killed in a car accident. John told Marta that he could barely focus in class; his grades plummeted. And then, on top of that all, his dad started belittling him for every little thing he did. John started coming to school at five in the morning to swim, just to get out of his house, and after school he’d go over to Marta’s and just sleep in her bed for hours while Marta did her homework.

• It was around that time that John suddenly decided that kissing was something he wanted to do. It was the strangest thing-– he seemed simultaneously terrified and determined (like I’m a bridge he’s trying to jump off, Marta thought, before locking that alarming thought away) and Marta didn’t particularly enjoy it herself. But she pitied John for his nerves and for his grief, and she couldn’t bear to hurt his feelings.

• And then came junior prom.

• They’d been dating a year and a half. John’s dad was letting him have their beach house an afterparty. Everyone–-everyone-–expected them to have sex. So… they did.

• John got so drunk Marta was almost offended, although the feeling was muted by the fact that she was also quite drunk herself. Neither of them were quite sure if the condom was on exactly right, but she suspected they were both eager to get it over with so they could say they’d done it.

• And then afterwards John kept drinking, and drinking, and drinking, until it was Marta and a couple of his friends holding his head while he puked in the bathroom. She panicked and–- not wanting to let the authorities know they’d been drinking underage–- called John’s dad.

• It was a good thing she did, too, because the first thing John did after Henry arrived was puke on his shoes, and the second thing he did was pass out.

• So Marta spent the morning after junior prom in the hospital with an unconscious John and a very rumpled Henry. She was still a little drunk, wearing her dress and her makeup and her high heels, and her hair was still styled, and she hated the way people looked at her. Henry treated her with exaggerated, sheepish civility, the so you fucked my son kind of civility, and she couldn’t have been more mortified.

• … except actually she could, because after John woke up Henry gave him a high five.
  

• It was a couple months before she was terrified enough to actually walk into a drugstore and buy a pregnancy test, but she was pretty sure she’d never missed her period two times in a row before.

• The first people she told were her parents. Her mom cried and asked what she’d done wrong as a mother. Marta and her whole family are Catholic–- she’d never thought anyone would have to know.

• The second person she told was John, who’d been avoiding her ever since prom. He’d stared blankly at her (like I’m an oncoming train, Marta thought, and pushed it away) for a moment–- she’d wondered if he was going to cry too. And then he’d silently clasped her hands between his and gotten down on one knee (like I’m a guillotine), and drawn her fingers to his lips (like I’m a loaded gun) and “No,” she’d cried, before he opened his mouth, “no, no, no, not in a million years, no, we are not getting married, in fact, we’re not dating anymore, please, don’t pretend to kiss me ever again.”

• Her parents didn’t exactly throw her out of the house, but they somehow decided to blame one another for her pregnancy-– if you weren’t so lax with her -– if you didn’t dress like such a slut –- and so, bizarrely, she found herself spending a lot of time at John’s house, where Henry Laurens was showering her with prenatal vitamins and making his secretary find her a place that did maternity massage and threatening to never give their high  school another penny if they tried to expel the mother of his future grandchild for being pregnant.

• Which wasn’t to say the Laurens family home was a refuge for her–- for one, her interactions with John were so hideously awkward that she almost regretted breaking up with him. Then again, it had been such a relief. And getting pregnant had certainly changed her mindset. She was in this for herself and her baby girl now. If the rest of the world was uncomfortable they could suck it up.

• John started applying to colleges.

• She had the baby, Francisca, in February of her senior year. She took a year off, living with her parents and trying to tune out their fights. Henry Laurens stopped by every couple weeks with stuffed animals and baby clothes for his grandchild, and even managed to bury a juicy tariff exception for her parents’ company in an obscure spending bill. Maybe he was just trying to keep Marta from going negative in the press… but he seemed so genuine.

• She and John… they talked quite a bit when he first went away to college, but she decided it was hurting her more than helping, hearing about him and his normal college adventures and his normal, baby-less life. She’d been grateful that he was so terrible about texting back. Eventually they stopped talking altogether.

• (He did call her about six months into his freshman year, very agitated, and tell her that he had a boyfriend now, and she’d smacked a hand to her forehead and thought oh.)

• South Carolina was full of bad memories for Marta, and she’d had dreams of her own–- suspended for over a year–- to pursue. She moved to London with Francisca and never looked back.

• (She Skyped John about six months in to inform him that she had a girlfriend now, and he’d smacked a hand to his forehead and said, “Oh,” and she’d had to laugh.)

• Francisca’s almost six now. Marta got her master’s degree in theatre and works in set design, building whole worlds in her imagination and then building them on the stage. Being a single mom is tough, especially since London is so expensive to live in, but she has generous support from both her parents–battling for her loyalty, even now–- and Henry Laurens to help with rent, a nanny, and all those other necessary things. She loves her daughter and she loves her career. Her past is her past. She misses the friendship that she and John shared, but the older she gets the more she realizes that she was there for him at the worst part of his life, and when she’d needed him most he’d just been… lost. She doesn’t blame him for that, but that doesn’t mean he’ll see it that way. Very occasionally she wishes she could just pick up the phone and see what kind of person he’s become–- but it never seems like the right time.

Chapter Text

Part I

• Look, normally it’s not Angelica’s style to publicly eviscerate the arguments of people who disagree with her in class. At least, it hasn’t been since sophomore year, when a professor actually took her aside and said, look, you’re brilliant, everybody knows you’re brilliant, but just… please let the other students breathe. So she had, and she’d kept the peace for a long time. But there Angelica was, a senior in this upper div policy course, and a younger girl, one she had tutored last year, no less, sort of stumbled over her point, and this obnoxious know-it-all boy had pointed out her error and gone on this long speech about all the reasons why this was the better idea and Angelica. Flayed. Him. Alive.

• So when he cornered her in the dining hall the next day, she wasn’t expecting him to be actually pretty charming. And sheepish, once she’d pointed out to him that he’d been an obnoxious dick. Certainly she wasn’t expecting him to beg for more correction. He'd reread the text and refined his point. Still wrong, but wrong in an actually interesting way. They'd stayed and argued until the cafeteria closed and then returned to her dorm room and ended the encounter with his face between her thighs.

• Aaaaand he was a freshman. Whoops.

• Still, he was an adult, and he was not only talented but willing to take instruction, and as far as the sex went he seemed to prefer taking care of himself, which… maybe had some hangups, maybe he was some rare subcategory of ace, who knew. Angelica wasn’t about to look a gift fuck in the mouth, so to speak. Except Herc started giving her dirty looks everywhere and Herc got along with everyone and Angelica wasn't really used to the idea of making a faux pas without knowing it, so she'd gotten all worked up about it and asked him, except he'd said he couldn't tell her and she should ask Alex and... and well...

• Yeah, she really, really should have asked earlier, because at that point Alex accused her of pitying him (true), of not even being attracted to him (false!), of using him (... true, she supposes, although she hadn’t really known it, had she? Hadn’t he had some responsibility to communicate?). And then when she'd tried to work it out he'd picked up his wounded pride and stormed out.

• She'd written him a letter. A careful but heartfelt apology, after half a bottle of wine, with Eliza consulting by phone from an ocean away, that had boiled down to, I want to make this work. Eliza kept Angelica from veering off into either wallowing self-flagellation (her first instinct) or point-by-point rehashing and complete denial of responsibility (her second).

• He answered her long letter with his own long letter, and she’d cried reading it, how hurt this boy was, not so much by her as by the world, and they’d gotten back together and didn’t really talk about it all that much again. And they'd never were exclusive with one another, but were so mutually obsessed that the question didn't arise. Like, usually Angelica is so intense she has to spread it across multiple people, but not with Alex. She loved showing off all her ideas to him, arguing and blowing off steam until early in the morning, taking it straight into the bedroom. It was glorious, for a couple months.

• She knows deep down that what they’ve got going—good friends, nice benefits—isn’t going to be enough for him. She finds herself rereading his letter, feeling his loneliness and all his sharp edges, feeling a deep compulsion to make it better, to make him a Project. She could do that, maybe, could refine his heart the same way she’s refining his mind with every argument he comes this much closer to winning. But that’s not her strong suit—that’s Eliza’s, maybe, but now that Angelica’s had Alex, that would just feel… weird. She’s not really the type to share, and nor is Eliza, for that matter.

• Still, she might be able to grow her relationship with Alex, if she just puts in enough time, and effort, and worry, except—except she's going to law school in New York next year, damnit, she's going to need every advantage, and Alex is taking so much of her time and her worry already, this boy has already become a Project for her and that's not fair, it's not her job to be his fucking… refiner and it's not his fault he needs refining but she can't afford to be slowed down. She’s already a black woman in America, does she really want to stack the deck against herself further? Why can’t she just get back together with Church and have a slick, safe boyfriend who will look great on Christmas cards?

• And maybe she's worried deep down, too, that if she spends all her time polishing this boy up one day he might outshine her. Alex is that brilliant. That's a mark of respect, she tells herself, that she's started to see him as a rival and not an interesting intellectual toy. That's a mark of the work that she's already put in, all those nights of long debates and subtle corrections and just-right follow-ups. This, she tells herself, as she breaks up with him, two months before the end of her senior year, is the mark of a job well-done.

• She was ready for him to be sad, but she wasn’t ready for the heartbreak that flooded into his eyes the minute she told him. He has to turn away for a moment. She doesn’t follow him, doesn’t put a hand on his shoulder. Pretends she has no idea what’s happening. It’s better that way—she doesn’t want to hurt his pride, when she’s already hurt so much else.

• “I thought—I mean, I knew… law school, but I thought we had… I thought we had another couple months, I didn’t—”

• “I need to get used to being by myself,” Angelica says, simply. “Stand on my own. Independence is really important.” Those reasons, at least, he’ll understand. All the others she’ll keep for herself.

• “Yeah,” Alex rasps. Angelica wants to take his hand, turn him around, give him a hug, but their relationship was never all that huggy, anyway, and anyway, he's not her project anymore. It's a relief, to absolve herself of responsibility for Alex's emotions. She walks away, texting Herc as she goes. Hey, if you don’t see Alex at dinner tonight you should grab him something, okay? Herc will figure out what happened from that alone. 

• After they break up Alex seems to bounce back pretty fast. The first time they do lunch it’s weird, the careful deference they have for each other, never letting fingers touch, like even that would send them flying back over the edge. But gradually they learn to be comfortable in each others’ company again. After she moves to New York they Skype every so often. Angelica still really enjoys talking to him. That spark is still there, ready to be fanned into a flame. But she leaves confident that he'll return to her circle soon enough, refined by life and his own hard work. The question is whether she's willing to wait that long—or whether she'll find someone else in the interim.

Part II

• Angelica's law firm had been getting their portraits done by Rick Cosway ever since his dad died a few years back and he inherited the business. She'd just made partner—youngest ever by about ten years, first woman, first person of color, no big deal—and she was so, so ready to have that portrait looming imposingly over everyone walking in the door. Yeah, that's Angelica Schuyler. No, she's not here to take your lunch order, she's a motherfucking partner, now show some goddamn respect.

• Rick Cosway's studio is unexpectedly hip, in this strange shared makerspace warehouse in Brooklyn. His stodgy traditional half-done portraits look really out of place compared to... well... everything else in there. Angelica steps over a lot of extension cords in her Louboutins to get to the chair for her sitting.

• Halfway through her sitting the guy gets up to take a fucking phone call. Well, that's unacceptable. Angelica had just wanted to send him a photograph anyway, but he'd insisted on her coming down to sit for the portrait and all the old white dudes at the firm had said it was a rite of passage and she'd wanted the full partner experience but whatever, this is bullshit. She gets up.

• Literally as she's in the middle of walking imperiously out in her heels she sees something that makes her gasp. Makes her come to a full stop like she’s run into a fucking wall, and just stare. It's a painting, probably twelve feet high, of a woman, and she's smirking straight down at Angelica, arms crossed over her chest. She looks like a sailor, covered in old tattoos—but her body is also painted in the tattoo style, and the tattoos continue straight off her body, and as Angelica looks it's almost like she's reading a story of all the shit this Nasty Woman has overcome to get where she is and Angelica's just fucking. Blown away. This titanic figure is on her level, this is someone who gets her—

• At the foot of the painting is a Latina woman very much covered in tattoos and Angelica realizes this is a self-portrait and feels like she's been struck by a fucking lightning bolt.

• Just then Rick Cosway comes trotting up with an apologetic smile. "Sorry," he says, "important client. You know how it is." The woman with the tats is listening, Angelica can tell.

• "First, I am an important client. Second, I don't need your services anymore," she says coldly. "I'm commissioning her."

• Something in the unhurried way the woman turns around spooks Angelica. "... if she'll have me," she finishes, suddenly self-conscious. What if she's too corporate, too alpha-bitch, too uncool for this clearly very cool very creative very strong-willed woman?

• "I dunno, Ricky, should I let her buy me a drink? Treat me real nice?" the woman asks.

• Later—at the bar, in fact—Angelica learns that the two of them are married for tax and immigration purposes. She also learns that Maria works half as a painter, mostly portraits, and half as a tattoo artist, and has been profiled on 60 Minutes and gotten a goddamn genius grant and a shitton of awards.

• Maria's not at all modest about any of these things, which is a relief because that way Angelica doesn't have to figure out a way to be subtle about working the fact that she was the first black female president of the Harvard Law Review into the conversation.

• And when Maria raises an eyebrow and asks "wasn't that Obama's job once? Are you planning on following in his footsteps?" Angelica doesn't do her usual cute laugh and change the subject routine. She doesn't turn down any of the intensity in her voice when she says, "Absolutely."