Chapter Text
At 2.37AM, the residence library smelled like paper cuts and bad decisions.
Alex Claremont-Diaz had barricaded himself behind an advancing line of empty mugs, sticky notes, and the glowing trench warfare of four open laptops. His hair, in its usual state of calculated chaos, had given up entirely and was holding a small secessionist rally above his left eyebrow. A digital clock muttered numbers at him from the corner, smug about the hour in the way only clocks and cats can be.
On the nearest screen, a draft of a youth-vote memo blinked with the patience of a saint. On the second, polling cross tabs scrolled like a slot machine that paid out only anxiety. On the third, a calendar reminder pulsed: Ellen HQ debate prep - 10AM. On the fourth, a blank email to his mother sat open, subject line: Messaging pivots - URGENT and then nothing. Classic.
His phone buzzed, hurling itself across a stack of Federalist Papers (his, ironically, paperback).
JUNE: U Up
JUNE: Plz do not write strategy emails after midnight you turn into a feral gremlin
JUNE: hydrate
Another buzz. This time a photo from June: an unflattering screenshot of him from a morning show in which his eyebrows looked like two political parties in a deadlock.
JUNE: See? Ongoing crisis. Drink water.
Alex smiled despite the creeping throb behind his eyes. He took a sip of coffee, immediately remembered that coffee was not water, and took a sip of water like a child being watched.
Across the room, the portrait lights were off, leaving the shelves in a rich, museum-dark glow. The presidents in their gilded frames kept their opinions to themselves. The only noise was the HVAC’s bureaucratic sighing and the tiny, frantic pings of the White House Wi-Fi trying to push him one more notification, just one more, baby.
His phone vibrated again, this time with a message from Henry: Landed. Customs was an opera. I’m in the guest room. Sleep, love. Please. A second late: Also you left your tie on a lampshade. Criminal.
Alex glanced toward the hallway. The guest suite felt a mile away in this quiet. Henry was here - London to D.C., soft hoodie and softer voice, promises of tea and judgmental eyebrows. He had a thing at dawn with a palace committee of conservation funds; he’d flown in anyway, unreasonably romantic, to spend forty-eight hours of borrowed time with Alex and his filing cabinets.
Alex types back: I’m five minutes from bed, promise. An absolute lie, and Henry would know it, but it kept the peace.
He returned to the memo. “Messaging to counter youth apathy must be - “ He stopped, rubbed at his eyes. Somewhere, downstairs, a security radio crackled and hushed. Somewhere, above him, the Residence creaked the way old buildings do, benign and companionable.
A floorboard popped behind him.
“June,” he said without looking up. “If you brought Gatorade as a peace offering I will consider forgiving your investigative journalism on my eyebrows.”
Silence. Then: the sound of a throat clearing. Not a soft ahem, but the kind of theatrical clearing performed by someone who had never once entered a room without announcing himself to the concept of history.
Alex turned.
A man stood three steps in from the stacks, where American biography gave way to British history like a cautious border. He wore a dark, close-fitted coat with too many buttons and a while linen shirt; his hair was pulled back in a tie, his posture ramrod straight. His face was younger than the paintings and older than the country: sharp cheekbones, keener eyes, the look of someone who had already written his rebuttal to your argument and the rebuttal to your rebuttal, and also your eulogy, just in case. His left hand held a quill. His right hand - because God has a sense of humour - held a microphone, the classic silver kind you’d see under a spotlight.
“I will accept Gatorade,” the main said, “if it is offered with a due appreciation for electrolyte balance and the rigors of night labour, sir.”
Alex blinked. He was too tired for ghosts. He was also, unfortunately, awake enough to know that what he was looking at was not a Secret Service agent with a flair for cosplay. “Nope,” he said, to the room in general. “Absolutely not.”
The man’s mouth twitched. “Alexander Claremont-Diaz,” he intoned, and the name rolled out like it was being engraved. “At last.”
“Nope!” Alex repeated, louder. “I’m closing my eyes now and when I open them you will be a moderately priced hallucination, like a raccoon in a top hat, or a motivational poster.”
He closed his eyes. He counted to five. He opened them.
The man was leaning on a bust of Jefferson like they were in a bar. The quill had become a pointer. The microphone remained, glowing faintly. “I am relieved to see you possess humour. It will serve you,” he said. “I am Alexander Hamilton.”
“Of course you ae.” The world wobbled and then righted itself with the groan of a tired elevator. Alex reached for his water and took a steadying gulp. “Okay. Alright. You’re a ghost.”
“An apparition,” the man corrected, pleased with himself. “The embodiment of legacy. The cumulative echo of -“
“A ghost,” Alex said. “With props.”
Hamilton glanced at the microphone as if surprised to find it there, then gave it a little shake. “I find modern amplification…invigorating.”
“Cool,” Alex said weakly. “Great. Just what I needed. An invigorated founding father.”
Hamilton stepped closer. The temperature in the room shifted, a thread of cold sliding up Alex’s spine like the draft from under an old door. The ghost smelled faintly of iron and ink, of paper pressed hard by a furious hand. “You carry my name,” Hamilton said. “You carry my hunger. You will not waste your -“
“If you say ‘shot,’” Alex warned, pointing a pen at him, “I swear to God I will have Zahra tase you.”
A short knock tapped on the door. Because the universe was a comedian, Zahra open it without waiting. She surveyed the room - four laptops, Alex pointing a pen at apparently nothing, the entire vibe of a raccoon raid - and lifted a single, terrifying eyebrow.
“First Son,” she said. “It is approaching 3AM. Do I need to superglue you to a mattress?”
Alex lowered the pen, tried to arrange his face into the benign innocence of a boy not being haunted by the loudest Founding Father. “Hi, Zahra. Funny story.”
Zahra’s gaze narrowed. “You’re about to say something inadvisable.”
“I -” He cut a glance toward Hamilton, who had gone very still, watching Zahra with keen interest. “I’m fine.”
Hamilton drifted - no other word for it, really - closer to Zahra and peered at her with the speculative fascination of a scientist meeting a new species. “Formidable,” he said approvingly. “Is she a general?”
“She’s my —” Alex flapped a hand. “Friend. Bodyguard. Wrathful angel.”
Zahra planted her hands on her hips. “If this is about you drafting strategy emails unsupervised, we’ve talked about this. After midnight you switch from commas to unholy rants. We cannot risk the campaigns’ Slack seeing your ‘brainstorms’ again.”
“Noted.” Alex said. “My brain is a bad neighbourhood after midnight.”
Zahra tilted her head, studying him. “Are you…arguing with a chair?”
“No,” Alex said too quickly. “I’m arguing with a—uh—” He caught Hamilton’s expression: equal parts offense and delight. “—an outline. That’s shaped like a person.”
“Uh-huh.” Zahra sighed, then reached into her blazer and produced a little travel-sized spray bottle, which she set on the desk with reverence. The label read Mister in a cheery font. “If you are, hypothetically, being haunted by something, tell it I have a spray bottle and the will to use it.”
Hamilton, affronted, recoiled. “She would threaten water upon me?”
Alex stared at the bottle, then at Zahra, and decided not to unpack it. “Thank you?”
“Bed. Hour ago,” Zahra said. “I’m going to pretend I didn’t see… this situation. If you’re not horizontal in fifteen minutes, I will return with a priest, a rabbi, and a yoga instructor. One of them will fix you.”
When she left, the room exhaled.
Hamilton drifted back to the shelves, eyeing the spray bottle warily. “She has the bearing of an artillery commander,” he murmured. “I like her.”
Alex slumped into his chair. “Good. She doesn’t like you. Nobody likes you. I don’t like you.”
The ghost smiled a little, as if it were a compliment he’d heard before and taken as a sign of doing something right. “You will, when you understand the gift I offer.”
“Is the gift an exorcism coupon?”
Hamilton ignored him. “You are squandering your talents,” he said, waving the quill over Alex’s screens like a conductor. “Pamphlets, boy. Essays that flash and burn. Take up the pen and send a thunderclap through the republic. Challenge your adversaries to a war of words they cannot—”
“War of words, check.” Alex gestured at the four open laptops and the browning legion of sticky notes. “This is, in fact, the modern equivalent of pamphlets. We call them opinion pieces and tweets. Also, we do not duel senators. Generally.”
Hamilton’s eyes lit with mischievous interest. “Generally?”
“No.”
“Pity.”
Alex scrubbed a hand over his face. “Look—why me? Why here? Why… microphone?” he asked, because some part of his soul had become resigned to addressing props. He could feel the group chat writing itself: June: Alex started seeing Broadway props. Bea: did you try unplugging him and plugging him back in?
On cue, his phone pinged with a new message from Bea.
BEA: Can’t sleep. UK insomnia. How are you?
BEA: Also Henry texted me to tell you to drink water.
Another ping, seconds later. BEA: Tell him I already know he didn’t.
Alex texted back with one thumb: haunted. promise i’ll explain later. Then, because Bea’s recovery had taught him to say things out loud even when they sounded ridiculous, he added: not metaphor.
Three dots pulsed. Then: BEA: …ok. we’ll deal. breathe. also do not duel anyone.
He smiled, small and genuine, and put the phone face down.
Hamilton was circling slowly, reading titles off the shelves with the reverence of a thief casing a museum. “Why you?” he echoed. “Because you bear my name, of course. Because you are hungry. Because history’s gaze seeks you and you have looked back, unblinking.” His voice warmed with satisfaction. “I do not attach myself to the timid.”
“Wow,” Alex said dryly. “Lucky me. I always hoped my guardian angel would be a workaholic with main-character disease.”
“‘Angel’ is inaccurate,” Hamilton said cheerfully. “I am more of a persistent argument.”
“Some people call that ‘Twitter.’” Alex pinched the bridge of his nose. “Okay. Let’s say you’re real. What do you want from me? Other than, like, to start a cover band.”
Hamilton tapped the microphone against his palm, considering. “To correct your course. You are pulled in a dozen directions—your mother’s campaign, your own studies, your—” he gestured vaguely toward the hallway “—romantic diversions—”
“You will not call Henry a diversion in this house,” Alex said, sharper than he meant to. His voice bounced in the quiet, a thrown penny.
Hamilton raised an eyebrow. “Sensitive,” he observed, not unkindly. “Good. Keep that. You will need it to survive politics without becoming a statue.”
“Is that what happened to you?” Alex shot back. “You became a statue?”
“A dozen,” Hamilton said wryly. “None of them accurate.” He moved to the window and looked out, pale against the night, a trick of reflection making it seem like the city was faintly visible through him. Washington lay quiet and slick with distant sirens, its monuments sleeping upright.
“You talk like a man who thinks he has time,” Hamilton said, not turning. “You don’t. Nobody does. The difference between immortality and oblivion is audacity. When you feel fear,”—he looked back—“you should charge.”
Alex thought of the morning show screenshot June had sent, his eyebrows mid-argument. He thought of Ellen’s calendar reminders, of the steady pressure of expectation like a hand between his shoulder blades. He thought, with a little swoop of nausea, of his own youth as a finite resource, being burned for fuel.
He also thought of Henry in the next room, asleep on his stomach, arms tucked under the pillow in a way that made him look very sixteen and very twenty-three and very something Alex didn’t have a word for yet. He thought of the way Henry kissed like a promise and made tea like a sacrament.
Alex set his pen down. The gesture felt ceremonial. “I don’t need to be immortal,” he said. “I need to be useful. And I need to not drive everyone I love insane in the process.”
Hamilton’s mouth softened. It was not quite a smile. “Those goals are sometimes at odds.”
“Yeah,” Alex said. “I noticed.”
From the hallway, a soft footfall. Then Henry’s voice, low and cautious. “Alex?”
Alex startled and half-stood. Hamilton brightened like a drama teacher smelling an ensemble number. “Ah,” he said. “The prince.”
“Do not be weird,” Alex hissed. “Do not—do not say—”
Henry stepped into the library, soft light from the corridor haloing him. He wore a White House hoodie and tartan pajama pants and the expression of a man who had crossed an ocean just to administer chamomile and common sense. His hair was mussed, his cheeks pink with sleep. He took in the scene: the mugs, the laptops, Alex with a pen gripped like a weapon, and the particular air of a room that had been arguing with itself.
“Darling,” Henry said gently. “You promised five minutes.”
“I did,” Alex admitted, guilty. “Time is a construct?”
Henry’s mouth tugged. “It is in fact a measurable phenomenon. Are you all right?”
Alex’s gaze flicked to Hamilton, who had stepped back into the shadow of the stacks, watching with bright curiosity, like a cat who had learned to read.
“You see him, right?” Alex said before he could stop himself. He hated the way his voice tucked its chin on the last word.
Henry frowned, then looked slowly around the library as if giving the room the benefit of the doubt. “See… whom?”
“Ah,” Hamilton said, not unkindly. “Not yet.”
Alex let out a tiny hysterical laugh that he tried to disguise as a cough. “No one,” he said brightly. “Just me and my extremely normal, not-haunted night.”
“Mm,” Henry said, because he was not an idiot. He came to Alex and slid a hand up to the back of his neck, rubbing gently, thumb finding the pressure point under his ear that made his shoulders drop. The relief was immediate and embarrassing. “You’re frozen,” Henry murmured. “You’re meant to live somewhere in the vicinity of ninety-eight degrees, not ninety-one.”
“Thank you for your medical expertise,” Alex said, leaning into the touch. He could feel, more than see, Hamilton watching them, head tilted like a portrait changing expression.
Henry glanced at the laptops. “You’re re-litigating the youth messaging, again. And also the debate prep. And… is that an email to your mother with no body and a terrifying subject line?”
“Allegedly,” Alex said.
“Close them,” Henry said, soft but firm. “Come to bed. We’ll wake up and do it all with breakfast, and sunlight, and less of…” He gestured to the atmosphere. “Whatever this is.”
Alex wanted to say yes. He wanted bed and Henry and the safety of a warm chest against his back and the knowledge that in the morning he could face crosstabs with a brain that did not feel like a shaken snow globe. He also wanted to turn to the ghost and say: you don’t get to come into this.
Hamilton, predictably, misread the silence as an invitation to make things worse. “Young Mr. Claremont-Díaz,” he announced, taking a step into the light with the flourish of a curtain rise, “must not squander his—”
“Don’t,” Alex snapped, and Henry jumped a little because the word ricocheted.
Henry’s hand tightened at Alex’s neck. “Who are you speaking to?”
“My conscience,” Alex said. “He’s very loud.”
“Is it wearing a cravat?” Henry inquired dryly.
Hamilton recoiled, affronted. “A stock,” he corrected, as if this was the point under debate.
Alex dropped his face into his hands. “I’m fine,” he said into his palms. He tried again, out loud. “I’m fine. I’m just—there’s a lot. And I can’t get the memo right. And I don’t want to be the reason the campaign screws up one more news cycle because I made a joke that sounded flippant about student debt, and Mom will say it’s fine and then never sleep again, and Zahra will start carrying me like a cat, and June will get out her reporter voice and ask me what the root cause is, which I think is the nation-state as a concept, but that’s not helpful.”
Henry pressed a kiss to his temple. “You are not a single point of failure. The republic is not balancing on your laptop hinge.”
Hamilton cleared his throat. “On the contrary—”
Alex jabbed a finger at him without looking. “You. Quiet.”
There was a beat of ridiculous, layered silence: Henry’s breath warm at his temple, the HVAC muttering to itself, the ghost of the Treasury tapping a ghostly foot.
Henry took his hand. “Come,” he said, coaxing. “We can argue with the nation-state after six hours’ sleep.”
From the hallway, a soft ding as another email landed. Alex looked over Henry’s shoulder and saw the subject line: From: Ellen. Re: Morning run-of-show. He felt the familiar, complicated knot pull tight in his stomach—the one that was love and pride and the sense of being born in a spotlight with no instructions.
He pulled his hand from Henry’s, gentle but not yes. “Give me ten,” he said. “I’ll send Mom a two-sentence reply and close everything and come to bed.”
Henry looked at him for a long moment, eyes searching his face like a map he knew by heart. “Ten,” he said at last. “By which I mean ten. Not thirty masquerading as ten.”
“Yes,” Alex said.
Henry brushed a thumb under Alex’s eye. “I’ll put the kettle on,” he said, and left with a last amused look at the spray bottle on the desk, as if deciding it was better not to ask.
When he was gone, Hamilton said, “He loves you.”
“I’m aware,” Alex said, not looking up from his mother’s email. The words swam for a second and then settled. “I am also aware that I would like to keep it that way, and the best path to doing that does not include you rap-battling at my press conferences.”
“I do not ‘rap-battle,’” Hamilton said primly. “I engage in rhetorical combat.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Also,” Hamilton added, unable to help himself, “shots should not be thrown away.”
Alex’s mouth twitched despite himself. “You get five free slogans before dawn,” he said. “After that I’m calling a priest.”
Hamilton considered this, then nodded as if terms had been reached. “I accept your conditions.”
Alex wrote the email to Ellen: Saw the run-of-show. Two notes for youth segment we can cover at breakfast. Proud of you.He stared at the last sentence for a moment, wondering if it was too sentimental for an email that would also be forwarded to four staffers, then sent it anyway. He closed the tab and the next one and the next, the ritual of it a quiet click-click-click of door after door.
On the fourth laptop, where the empty memo had been, he opened a new document. At the top he typed: The garden.
His fingers hesitated, then continued: Sunlight. Tea. The world is big, you are allowed to be small in it sometimes.
He did not know if those sentences would stay as sentences or melt into a speech or get cut to bones and pasted elsewhere. It felt good to write them anyway. It felt like writing to June, or to himself, or to Henry’s steady hands.
Hamilton drifted closer, reading upside down with infuriating competence. “Soft,” he observed. “You bury your blade in flowers.”
Alex rolled his eyes. “I bury my blade in policy. Sometimes I put flowers on top so people don’t run from the sound.”
A beat. Then, unexpectedly, approval. “Good,” Hamilton said. “Persuasion is a kind of music.”
“God,” Alex said, “you would love karaoke.”
“Kara—?”
“Never mind.”
He saved the document as garden_notes and minimized it. He double-checked that Zahra was not about to materialize in the doorway with duct tape. He glanced one last time at the clock: 2:51 a.m., unfair and real. He stood, joints popping, and the room did its slow carousel spin of relief.
“Rules,” he said to Hamilton, because if he didn’t say it now he never would. “If you’re sticking around.”
Hamilton inclined his head, amused. “Negotiate with a phantom. Bold.”
“One,” Alex said, holding up a finger. “No duels. The Secret Service will not let me borrow a pistol and I will not Google ‘how to ten paces’ on a government device.”
Hamilton looked pained but nodded. “Tragic.”
“Two,” Alex continued. “You are not allowed to speak when Henry is in the room.”
Hamilton blinked. “That seems… restrictive.”
“That’s the point,” Alex said. “Three: if you make me sing in public, I get to choose the key.”
“The what?”
“You’ll learn.”
Hamilton’s eyes shone. “I do enjoy learning.”
“Four,” Alex said, because it felt important, and because if this was insanity he might as well shape it. “If it comes down to legacy or love in an actual, real way—not just speeches and vibes—I’m choosing love. You can haunt me all you want; that one won’t move.”
Hamilton looked at him for a long moment, the joking glaze in his gaze clearing, something like gravity beneath. “You say that now,” he said softly.
“I’ll say it later, too,” Alex said. “You can quote me.”
Hamilton’s smile flickered, but he inclined his head.
Alex reached for the battered paperback of The Federalist Papers. He opened it, found a blank margin, and pressed his pen down hard:
Who tells our story? We do.
He shut the book, shoved it under a mug, and whispered: “Happy?”
Hamilton’s smile sharpened. “For now.”
At the doorway, Alex paused. “By the way,” he said over his shoulder, unable to resist. “If you try to choreograph me—hip thrusts, jazz squares, anything—I’ll tell Zahra you mocked Madison.”
Hamilton’s face rearranged itself into a look of solemn offense. “I would never mock Mr. Madison.”
Alex grinned, wicked. “I’ll tell her you did.”
Hamilton considered the spray bottle on the desk like a person contemplating mortality. “Perhaps we should keep our artistic differences private.”
“Thought so.” Alex reached to flip the library light. The room pulled a soft, final breath. “Goodnight, Hamilton.”
He lifted the microphone an inch, as if offering a benediction. “Sleep, Alexander. History will still be here when you wake.”
“So will Henry,” Alex said, and switched off the light.
In the dark, the room relaxed into old wood and older books. The portrait of Washington seemed to soften at the corners. Alex padded down the corridor toward the kitchen light and the promise of tea. Behind him, in the library, something invisible hummed a bar of a melody that had not yet learned its words.
On the kitchen island, Henry had already lined up mugs like little soldiers and was reading the instructions on a box of American chamomile as if it might bite him. He looked up and smiled, and the smile did that thing to Alex’s heart like a well-placed comma giving a sentence a place to land.
“Ten minutes,” Henry said. “Miracle.”
“Miracles are my brand,” Alex said, climbing onto a stool. “Also Zahra threatened me with a yoga instructor.”
Henry slid a mug to him. “Terrifying.”
“Truly.”
They drank in companionable silence, the kind that felt like a future. In the doorway, the hallway light painted a tidy rectangle on the floor. Alex looked at it and thought of gardens and sunlight and a line he had typed and might keep. He thought of June setting up a ridiculous Ouija board on their next call. He thought of Bea’s text: we’ll deal. He thought of Ellen, up already somewhere with her binder, and of Zahra, keeping the building upright through force of personality.
He thought of the ghost in the library, which was not a sentence he’d expected to think about his life, even given the last few years. He thought of how loudly Hamilton took up space, of how insistently the past tried to stand in the present’s doorway and demand a toll.
He reached across the island and took Henry’s hand.
“Legacy,” he said, because he couldn’t help himself, “is a rude houseguest.”
Henry’s eyes warmed. “I’ll fetch the spray bottle,” he said gravely.
Alex laughed, and the laugh put something back in his chest that had been going missing in small handfuls all day. He squeezed Henry’s hand once, hard. “Bed?”
“Bed,” Henry said.
They walked the hallway together, shoulder to shoulder, mugs abandoned, the country asleep around them and the ghosts content—for now—to let them pass.
At the threshold of the guest room, as Alex reached for the light, a voice floated very faintly down the corridor from the library, like a stage whisper getting its bearings.
“Only the beginning,” Hamilton said, pleased with himself.
“Go haunt the Federalist Papers,” Alex called back, without turning. He switched off the hall light, and the night, obliging, closed around them like a curtain.