Chapter Text
It's dark and it's cold. His fingers especially are sore, he is worried about frostbite, he is worried about the heavy manacles digging into his wrists. It's loud, just him and his thoughts as hes lost his voice from screaming obscenities at his captors.
If he had known, he would have picked better last words.
His captors, red coat scrum of the earth, snuck behind him while delivering a message to some of Hercules’s spies. They drug him behind, the handcuffs digging in, his dehydrated body flailing along. He grimaced at the thought. At least he was still now. He wants to laugh, though morbidly, he thought he had lost all semblance of dignity through that winter at valley forge.
Again, if he had known, he'd know he had spoken to soon.
Vaguely, he regrets being good at math. He has no access to light, so his days pass by meals. He has no idea if they are regular, but he knows hunger well, and figures on average he gets two meals a day. (Meals being a generous word, he imagines his presence is starving the pigs.)
Which means he's been there two weeks.
He almost wishes they'd get on with it, the torture that is. He realizes this is taking so long because they know who he is.
He was targeted. They don't want continental information, they want Colonel Hamilton's information. It chills him to the bone. If he is to view it in the worst possible light, he will not be getting out of this alive (though he doubts this). The best possible outcome: his excellency never lets him out of his sight.
He'd take it. He feels as though he is rotting, along with the wet cold stones of his cell and the stale bread he is feed.
It is the third week when a red coat walks in. The look on the new man's face tell him one thing: whatever is next is going to suck.
(John is an awful influence on his vocabulary.)
Three other men come into the cell. One carries a bag, metal jangling within it.
He has a bad feeling about it.
The second man to enter is the highest rank, judging from his medal. He has a cold glint in his eyes.
“Good evening, Colonel Hamilton,” says the man. He is barely repressing a smile.
He has a very bad feeling about this.
He does not talk. He stands by it, as if there was never moments of doubt, of regretting that decision born of pride and stubbornness, after the event, anyways. During it though, well.
He cannot actually remember a consecutive chain of events. He has those events that repeat in his mind, looping on themselves, late at night, in his dreams, while he stares into space. They are interspersed with long swatches of blank area.
(They comes back, sometimes, unexpectedly, later)
Two men hold him. He cannot move, his legs are the size of their arms, he is hopeless overpowered, he is endlessly out matched.
One man beats him. He switches locations, surprising him. He wants to stop flinching.
The highest ranking man asks the questions. No red blood on his red coat. (His hands are still covered in blood, metaphorically, though the hands are deadly pale.)
He does not speak a word.
The one man starts breaking fingers.
To distance himself from it all, he thinks of the papers unfinished in his desk. He imagines Eliza’s eyes, kind hearted and warm in the darkness. Lauren’s freckles, hair, whose base figure should be happy but isn’t always. His Excellency, when the candles are nearly burned away, when he shelves his mask for the night. Lafayette’s elfish grin, Hercules’s solid presence and clever hands. Angelica’s paradoxical patience and sharp wit. And Peggy! For a moment, he even thinks fondly of Burr, fondly of the stubborn man’s exasperation.
It is so dark, the nights so long (he can tell because it feels colder and darker, though he may actually just be losing his mind), he can barely remember the shape of words. The shapes they make on other people’s tongues. He hopes he will get to write again. His finger still hurt, those he still possesses them all. He imagined locking all he knows in deep vaults, locked away, forgotten.
He cries out loudly each time a finger makes a sickly noise. Breaking internally, no blood means no infections, says a voice he hopes is an echo of John.
So then he starts lying. His head is usually swimming, but he tells the British to walk right into the trap he hopes his people are continuing. He prays.
It is quiet for another three weeks. His hands are healing, he thinks, he hopes. The bread is still awful, the cell dark and cold. He worries he is going mad, with the blank spots in his memories.
He does not speak, as there is no one to talk to. His lips hurt, he is parched and his mouth tastes rank.
But yet his dreams are vivid, full of colours and lights he is not sure he has seen. The worst are the dreams where he lives a day in his life, with Laurens or Eliza, and then he wakes again in hell.
(That hurts in deeper ways than the beatings ever could.)
He hopes, even in his position here, he has helped win their war.
Then the high ranking red coat comes back. His face has taken a bright red colouring, highlighting the barely healed cut and bruise on the man's face. He doesn’t need the man to tell him what has happened. The British fell for the trap, and he will never leave this cell, he probably won’t live to taste the god awful bread they bring him.
“You lying bastard,” says the man.
(Burr calls him worse.)
Three new men, one with the same bag, accompany him. Again, he is held down. Again, the third man sorts through the bag of torture implements. He can’t imagine why though, they will never believe another word he speaks. Oddly, this is satisfying.
His voice is rusty from disuse: “Do your worst, fuck-bucket.” (Peggy has been an even worse influence on his vocabulary.)
The high ranking man says, “We simply have to insure this will never happen again.”
All of it he remember, and none of it. There are long shadows, as the men bring in lanterns with them. Rationally, it is uncomfortable longer than it is painful. For moments or for years, it it sharp pain. There is blood on the floor, there is blood that dries on his face, he looks rabid, he looks savage. (He does not remember if these are words supplied by the redcoats or by his mind, but there are no good options.)
Then there is burning. (Later he is told that it was good, stopped bleeding, prevented infection, but he becomes ill on their shoes.) That is the worst of it. The pain is light, the light is pain and it is concentrated.
His mouth aches, when they are done with it. The redcoat is smiling, his face distorted from the poor light. They have taken his tongue. Dimly, he is aware of other pains, in his arms and legs, in the front of his neck.
He will never speak again.
There are tears on his face, and it seems his eyes are not his own, continuing to well up and overflow. He’s been crying for a while now.
“I suppose that deals with it, doesn’t it, Colonel Hamilton?” says the man. He is suddenly struck by the thought he cannot ask for this mans name. The redcoats leave him.
He sleeps, he weeps, he looses track of the days, alone in his now quiet cell, now quiet mind.