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So, he may have arrived a little early.
Alexander Hamilton tapped his feet on the wooden floor of the cafe, before quickly moving up a little to silence himself by putting his feet on the rug in place of it as the woman behind the counter shot him a thinly veiled glare of annoyance. He pretended to be wholly invested in the menu propped up on the small table in front of him, eyes darting more so out of nervousness than because he was actually reading.
He curses in french, voice soft and distracted, as his phone suddenly buzzes to life in his pocket, and he drops the paper like it could be hot coal in order to view the text from his lover.
You’re already there, no doubt. Wait for me.
Scowling, he flushes, partly at how well Burr thought he knew him, partly at just how right he was. But it made sense, his brain reminded him, never allowing him a moment of peace. After dating for almost ten years, you tended to know a person pretty intimately.
Hamilton locks his phone with a flourish, turns it over and shoves it into his pocket. … And then yanks it out again to check Twitter.
A few arguments set alight, two or seventeen responses or so later he hears the bell of the cafe, and Burr’s carefully cordial greeting to the owner makes his head shoot up.
“Burr!” He says, excitement overriding his self imposed instruction to be quiet. The tired teenager in the corner of the room, the businessman at the bar and his coworker look over momentarily as the woman behind the till scolds Hamilton openly this time.
“Keep your voice down, young man.” She looks him up and down with a critical eye.
Young man? He’s thirty.
He grows a little flustered under her gaze, and twice as much at Aaron’s amused expression. Aaron, true to his character, soothes her with an exasperated smile and a few charming words, and she relents. Hamilton smiles despite himself; that’s his boyfriend. Oh god, that’s his boyfriend.
Hamilton puts a hand in his pocket to double check if the item is still there. It is. He lets out a silent sigh of relief.
Burr takes the seat opposite him and the two of them fall into amicable chatter.
He keeps checking his phone, does Burr, actually. It’s subtle and, annoyingly, doesn’t really mean anything; Aaron was an overcautious bastard even when he had nothing to hide. But today he was definitely flipping his phone up to check the screen a few more times that usual. Hamilton tries not to make his curiosity blatant, but Burr shoots him a look anyway, sees right through him.
“You clearly have something to say. Out with it.” There came the rolling, amused tenor he loved so much. Burr had made a habit of drawing colour to Hamilton’s cheeks, without even meaning to. He tries to carry it off, of course, but they’ve known each other too long to dance around matters.
So, it would appear evident what he must do.
“It all started when I was born-“ he begins.
Burr collapses in on himself like he’s been knocked down. Hamilton sees his mouth open to speak and his mouth works faster than his filter. “Hey! Don’t interrupt!”
“Sorry, it’s just— ‘it all started when I was born’,” Burr paused to make quotations, “That’s just so you, isn’t it.” He chuckled. “Don’t worry, I’ll be quiet.” Hamilton flushed, but they were smiling. He takes a deep breath, and continued.
“We didn’t have much, and then the storm hit and then we had even less. But you,” he cleared his throat, pointing a sharp finger at the love of his life. “I heard about you when I was seventeen and wondering how I was meant to have gotten past seven.” Hamilton shook his head. This wasn’t a sad story. Not anymore. “I went places. Did things. Met new people. But I never forgot that mention of you, that promise of betterment.
And I did that. I matched you, even if I couldn’t go exactly where you did.” He touched the ghost of an injury, where a certain ignorant fellow had punched him back. “Yet when I achieved that, when I got where I needed to be to make a difference, it wasn’t enough. What had I done wrong, I first thought. Why am I so uneasy, why is this… This, what I have— what I have forged, from the sand and the dust, from the blood and the dark— still not enough?”
Burr’s face pinched in that sympathetic way he did when he felt sorry for someone but was too stunted to comfort them. Hamilton smiled again, this time in reassurance. He wasn’t done. “Then it hit me. It all made sense. What I mean to say is,” Showtime.
He takes the box from his jacket. The action is maybe a little too fast, but he doesn’t drop it, so hey. And he sees the moment Burr realises just what he’d been leading up to.
Then, as though Hamilton hadn’t just spilled his entire life story into some few choice words, Burr throws his head back and laughs.
That… wasn’t expected.
What? “What?”
Burr can’t seem to stop. Hamilton wonders if it was too late to leave for the east coast. His eyes dart to take his lover in, one last time.
It’s here that Burr seems to remember that it’s not actually very nice to laugh at people’s lives, because he rubs at his right eye with his thumb and gathers himself accordingly.
Burr reaches into his own pocket and for one terrible moment Hamilton thinks he’s going to shoot him down. He drops the box, grips the sides of the table and tries not to flinch as Burr does indeed brandish a small gun-
Wait, no it’s not.
It’s a small box, deep brown with gold accents. Hamilton’s touching it before he realises and suppresses a moan at the material against his fingers.
“Oh,” he says, as eloquently as a man robbed of all coherent thought can be. He scrabbles to pick up his own, green box, and places it beside Burr’s at the centre of the table. Finally, they meet eyes, and he feels sweet, sweet relief at the warmth in Burr’s.
“I suppose that’s a yes, then.”
His voice cracks. “Yeah,”
Burr smiles, pulls at the throat of Hamilton’s shirt, and kisses him. It somehow still catches him off guard despite Burr’s careful deliberacy, but he kisses back in a heartbeat. They rub their calves together under the table and this is (perhaps not at all) surprisingly enough to leave Hamilton breathless.