#Tempus Edax Rerum | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

froguemorgue · 3 months

Text

writing again now that i'm mostly done with moving stuff. ummmmm check out this amrev hamilton/laurens time travel (inter-dimensional travel, really?) thing ive been writing and actually updating weekly (wow) on ao3 in which we genuinely go from "cogito ergo sum. How could one deny that these hands and that my whole body exist?" to "Alex my man what's up you look like shit lmao" ummm excerpt of chapter 1 below the cut:

1782

Sweating and tired of pacing, Alexander dug out his clothes from the luggage. He inspected the uniform with a sigh. He didn't fully understand how this worked and it had been a while since he found himself in his version of America. He had three vials of the doses of herbs, he had his military coat, and he had his map. He was as prepared as he could be.

The dressing process was more of a chore than he remembered. Shirt, socks, britches, cravat, boots, waistcoat, belt, sword, revolver, coat, cloak. He'd discovered that it was much less time consuming to wear jeans, boots, a shirt, a belt, and jacket, all without those pesky buttons, irritating queue in his hair, the powdering process, so on and so forth. When he finished, he grabbed the bitters from the bedside table. He downed a dose, held his breath and backed up against the motel bed, felt himself become dizzier until he passed out.

He never knew how much time had passed when he awoke. The air was sticky, hot. He wasn't sure of his surroundings - he was outside. Like a madman he wandered until he found where he was supposed to be.

Well, until he found a horse.

Then he was on his way. In the twentieth century, he'd traveled as close as he could to the battlefield where Laurens met his death. Apparently the motel he was staying in was merely woods about two hundred years prior. No matter; the navigation, a more difficult task, was now completed. He had made a map for himself before departure on his journey to Combahee River.

????

Alexander had awoken by himself in an unfamiliar room and it took nearly a week of solving that mystery before he accepted the change. He remembered what had happened to him before he came to in this world, but the details were murky. He had been meeting one of his spies in enemy territory. The contact had slipped him a vial with a paper pasted on, and in handwriting so small they had to use a glass lens to magnify it: "Tempus Edax Rerum | A taste to Me | a Halt to Cruelty | Pro Permutavi." He had found it in the coat of a British captain, stating he had no clue what it was and joked that they each dab their fingers then dose their tongues. Alexander called him stupid and confiscated the vial. He'd take it to camp, see if any of the doctors or herbalists might recognize the bitter scent. Likely poison, he'd chided his spy. Don't be foolish.

He asked for more information and about whether a murder plot might have to do with the corked glass, but his informant knew nothing.

That night, he drank a little more to warm himself on his brisk ride back to camp. Snow had begun to fall lightly at night but so far they'd been lucky enough to avoid a storm. The ground was frozen and in the midday it'd be slick with cold mud, but nothing his horse couldn't handle.

Alexander kept that poison as a souvenir when McHenry and Laurens couldn't identify it. A month later, his spy indicated in an encrypted letter that the Captain from whom he'd lifted the poison searched ardently for it, but quietly. It was unsure whether it was poison, medicine, or some recreational bitter. It didn't appear to be opium, McHenry had said, but perhaps something akin to it. Regardless, they wouldn't put it to the test, not even on an animal. Any meat they could get a hold of as winter came upon their heads should not risk contamination.

Alexander had married Elizabeth a year prior, losing Laurens in the process, as far as he could tell. He wondered on occasion whether that mysterious vial could cure him better than marrying a woman. It had a pull to it. It had a strong, indescribable power. He tried to ignore it. He even considered dumping it the river or shattering it upon a rock. It seemed to control him, enticing him every time his hand moved through the leather bag he kept it in.

He had gotten to the point he'd written down the script about a hundred times: Time eats all. A taste is a halt to cruelty. For change.

He'd take it out on occasion and let its scent waft into his nose. He had Eliza, but Laurens was gone so often he worried for his safety. He had his son, but that bundle of joy couldn't yet speak.

And then Laurens died. The joy left his body in a sudden cold rush and he couldn't stand it. He wasn't a coward, did not intend to die now for he had a child he wanted to see grow up. He wouldn't be like Laurens, who left behind his own kin. He would do what he had to in order to let the love and the loss pass through him as he always did. A night of alcohol, a week of work, a weekend with his family, a week of work, another night, another day, over and over as the bottle he'd stashed in the trunk made his ears ring and his vision go blurry. It was the silence, maybe. The hours of staring at paper by candlelight. The sleepless nights. Maybe it was the letters he couldn't seem to bring himself to burn. Maybe it was the scent of Laurens on them, intangible and faded but could have been true once.

Maybe it was the devil in that liquid he should have smashed to pieces over a year ago when his spy slipped it to him, or the alcohol sluggishly pulling him from his work and instead to his knees in front of the fireplace, clutching his own uniform, pulling the jacket on as if he could relish, for a second more, being the boy who'd once worn it. He'd beg for more time. He reread the label of that bottle too many times for it to make sense now, but he didn't care whether it did. Alexander felt the urge to drink it regardless.

He'd awake early the next morning, disappointed by its lack of effect on his worried mind but pleased he was blessed to live another day. He'd collect his papers, stash the letters, hang up his uniform, and for once, snuff the candles that had burnt down to the table and lay beside his wife and son before the morning broke, not caring that he no longer had the mystery vial and forgetting about it to the extent that if he was reminded, he might have laughed and said he tossed it ages ago, or that drinking it had been a dream.

Well, somebody would feel glad enough to do that, anyway. Somebody would sleep next to Betsey and carry the weight of his lost love for the next twenty-two years. Alexander, the one who remembered the details of that night, the one who still clutched the bottle, would awake changed in a place time had not yet devoured him.

Alexander would then spend the next two years wasting the second chance he'd been so blessed to have. The first mystery he intended to solve when he awoke was whose room he was in.

1977

The brick felt familiar, the large eight-paned glass was not unlike his time. This room was eerily like the one he'd lived in back in college, shared with Troup, but arranged completely differently. There were machines he was unfamiliar with, two rooms more than he recalled. He aimlessly searched everything. The brain fog was surreal. The sink had a faucet, something he was not yet acquainted with. He messed with it until water spouted and he stuck his head under, stripping the military coat first. He drank so much it forced a coughing fit. With the faucet off but still too hot despite the season, he loosened his cravat and pressed his face to the window that was as tall as he. It was a relief. There was snow and no fireplace, yet he was sweltering. He pressed his hands to the cool glass, breathing heavily, then his mind caught up with what he saw below him. How he vaguely recalled and correctly identified the machines on the street as cars, he didn't know. Alexander unlatched the window and pushed it above his head to get a better look.

Cars. What the fuck are cars? It was so strange and wonderful that he was captivated for much longer than any normal person should be captivated by cars. He watched the people below in their strange outfits, leashed dogs of many different breeds, the honking, the yelling. Skinny trees lined the pavement but they were startlingly scarce. He looked up at the sky as it began to snow lightly, much like the night he had acquired the vial.

Pro permutavi. Was it he who had been altered or was it the world around him?

Alexander slammed the window shut and turned from it feverishly. He began to search through his bedroom - was it his? It must be, there were pictures of himself on the dresser. He recognized the people in them clear as day, far better than painted portraits. In one, he found his face among classmates he recognized, Troup included. In another, his mother. He grabbed it and his hand squeezed the frame. So many years had passed since she went that he hardly remembered what she looked like, but that was her. If this was his room, it was unlike him to have displayed her, to recall the pain every time he was forced to see it.

The clothes he donned now did not fit the world around him. Though he couldn’t articulate why, he undressed, folded them up, stuffed them in the bottom drawer, and searched for something new. Underwear as this world knew it did not exist in his world, yet he knew to pull them onto his body before he found socks thicker and shorter than he was used to, the material more pliant and fitted. There were slacks in his dresser that were pleated in the front and were cut at his ankles. He found a loose linen shirt, tucked it in, and searched the room until he could find a belt and shoes to match. His hair was shorter in these photos, shorter at the top and the sides, curly and unkempt. His own was still long, he observed of himself in the mirror. He wandered through the apartment again until he found the bathroom.

The bath looked different from how he thought it would. There was a pipe that ran to the top and an overhead spout. The tub was covered by a curtain. When he drew it back, he saw it was full of water that was cool to the touch. Beside it on the floor was a small bottle on its side with white pills spilled and a tall cylinder glass with traces of brown liquor sticking in the bottom. Not understanding the implication, Alexander stared uncomfortably before leaving the bathroom.

Then began the speaking aloud to himself. That part wasn’t out of character, he’d always done that to memorize or rehearse, on occasion to comb through his thoughts with an animal that couldn’t respond. “I am Alexander.”

He searched the apartment as his muttering turned to conversation volume. He opened cabinet after cabinet. “Who am I? What am I doing here? I am Alexander.” He touched his chest, shoulders, then crossed his hands over his body to hold his upper arms. “Cogito, ergo sum. ‘Perhaps the senses deceive us when it is a question of very small and distant things. Still, there are many other matters which one certainly cannot doubt, though they derive from the very same senses: that I am…’ standing here before this window,” he spoke, looking again at the people below as he forced the window open again and propped it with a short block of wood on the sill, “…wearing my… trousers and shirt… that I feel this…” he scooped a small and unsatisfying piece of snow from the outside, “ice in my hands, and so on. ‘How could one deny that these hands and that my whole body exist? Unless, perhaps, I should compare myself to insane people…’”

Alexander dropped the snow and watched it plop below, narrowly missing a person with a great big coat. She glanced upwards but only assumed the ice must have slipped itself.

He began to whisper again. “‘Right now I am certainly gazing upon this street with my eyes wide awake. I extend this hand consciously and deliberately and I feel it. And yet… I have been deceived by similar thoughts on other occasions in my dreams. That said, perhaps there are not definite signs to distinguish being awake from being asleep. This astonishment almost convinces me that I am sleeping.’ Am I asleep?” He pinched his own arm as hard as he could until the pain was unbearable. “I think I would have awoken from that. And… ‘things seen in sleep are like painted images which could have only been produced in the likeness of things, which therefore cannot be imaginary things.’ And I don’t think I could have dreamed this, then, unless I’ve seen it before, and I don’t remember seeing it before. Therefore I must be awake. I am awake.” He left the window again and the steam he’d left on the pane from his hurried speech. “Damn it, Descartes, help me out here.

Just then, a knock came upon the door. He startled and panicked for a moment. Alexander imagined something evil on the other side, a new creature unimagined by him before but evidently real in this realm. His hands trembled as they reached for the door, but when he yanked it open, the chain up top stopped it. He had to mess with it for a good twenty seconds before he figured out how to free it from its sliding lock.

No creature but Robert Troup stood at the door, wearing clothes that fit him better than the ones Alexander was used to seeing him in, with colors more bright and a coat better suited for the weather than the green cloak he’d always worn.

“Alex, man, what’s up?” he said as he entered without invitation. Alexander couldn’t help but glance upwards before he realized it must be a rhetorical question, a greeting. “Seriously, you don’t look good. Probably because it’s so drafty in here.” Rob crossed the room to close the window. “You good to go?”

“Where are we going?” asked Alexander.

“I know, I know, it’s still early, but I promised you coffee. Why are all the cabinets open?” he asked distractedly as he began to close them all. “I told you I wasn’t leaving any of my food for you. Get your coat. And a sweater. I can see your nips, the hell. I have to use the bathroom if you don’t mind. Where’s it at?” he joked. Alexander pointed. Rob made a face. “Uh-huh. Get dressed, I’ll be out in a sec.”

Alexander turned dumbly to his room to find something to put over his clothes. Sweater. Sweater. He searched until he found a brown one hanging up in a closet no deeper than his forearms. He found a coat slung over a desk chair and pulled that on, too.

When Alexander emerged, Rob was done in the bathroom and had an uneasy air about him.

first three chapters published!

#amrev #historical lams #alexander hamilton #john laurens #lams fanfiction #historical hamilton #historical john laurens #robert troup #hamilton #lams #hamilton fanfiction #amrev fic #time travel #sci fi #my writing #WTGPOT AO3

11 notes · View notes