I'd love to hear about the WIP titled Celia 👀 (this is a reaction to the post you reblogged recently hihi)
-------------------------------------------------------------
Alexander loved him like he was already gone.
John caught his stares in his peripheral vision. The ones where his brows are slightly narrowed, and a little frown tilts his lips. It is the same way he looks at the last page of a well-loved book. The ones he chews through like he’ll never get another. Rushing. That look is the way his brows knit together when he flips to the last blank page, as if confused that it ended.
John never told him that he hated that look. How he hated the weight of it.
He flips through each one, traces each letter and burns candlelight. Fondly, he notices the mistakes, the smudges where the ink blooms from a pen held still for too long and the prints where his fingers, always stained, left their permanent impression.
He imagines Hamilton, distracted by the creak of a floorboard, a rustle of the leaves or simply by his own mind. He imagines him cursing. The furrow of his brow. The way his tongue would stick out, wetting his upper lip as he tries to fix his mistake. He imagines his failure in doing just that. He imagines the sigh, chest inflating with disappointment and breath coming low under his breath. He imagines the sound of tearing, the sound of rustling parchment, the way he would, inevitably, start again.
Then turning round, with a Celestial Air
Look’d in my heart and left her likeness there
Always the reader, never the writer, Hamilton had said once, a tease in his ear, another scolding he didn’t truly mean. Except he was right then, and he is now. John reads and Hamilton writes. Receiving and giving. The lover and the beloved.
The candle is so low that the wick curls into itself, dips into the pooling wax at the base and stills until its embers no longer flicker. John sits by the window. The moon is bright. He likes to think it may shine just for him.
When he finishes, the chest gutted, John watches the empty room.
It’s remarkably devoid of anything. Not just people, but the evidence of them.
There is no dip in the mattress, no clothes hanging lazily from a chair, no tracks from muddy boots that the housekeepers will scrub off the floor.
John could leave this room. There will be no indication that he had even entered.
stormborns
pixelskylines
ellievsbear
gummygunk
titsay
baratheonpilled
origamiaround
tangentwithtanner
