John still never knew where he went when he wasn't with Philip. He never knew that he'd gone at all until Philip appeared in front of him, missing both his front teeth now,
cheerfully informing him that it had been weeks, and Mama had the new baby and he was called James, and isn't that a nice name for a little brother, John? He never felt like he was doing all that much but Philip delighted in the company and sometimes John himself would get so caught up in the moment, listening to Philip's rhymes and watching him play with his little army figures. He would forget, always for an all too brief moment, the circumstances that led him to this point. Until Alexander or Eliza or one of the other children came into the room, walking right through his cross legged figure on the floor, and he'd remember again. And again and again.
At boarding school, Philip sat on the edge of his new bed, swinging his legs like he always did, long after all the other children had gone to sleep. He was nervous about starting school, so he talked and he asked questions. That, at least, was something John could help with.
"You never seem to get any older, John," he said thoughtfully.
"No?"
"No," Philip said slowly. "Do you have a birthday? You're supposed to get older every year on your birthday. I just had mine."
"I remember. You just turned nine."
"That rhymes! John, you're a poet!"
"And I didn't even know it."
Philip was a bright boy, the perfect culmination of his mother and father, and it didn't take long for him to start asking more questions, questioning everything that anyone else might have accepted as simply strange fact beyond their understanding.
"John?" He asked one day, looking up from his desk where he was supposed to be doing his school work. "Did you die?"
Death was a foreign, unimaginable concept in Philip's sheltered little life. He wasn't like his father, or John himself, in that respect.
"Why do you ask?"
Philip gestured with his pen towards the dark stain on John's jacket.
"Oh."
"Papa has a uniform like that," Philip commented. "From the war. His is clean though. He doesn't wear it anymore."
"Yes, well, the war's over."
"Did you know Papa? Before now, I mean."
"I did, yes."
Philip sat up straight, abandoning the attempt at his school work. "You did? Were you friends?'
"The best of friends," he said softly. It was the best answer he could give.
"Really?" Philip's jaw quite literally dropped and it might have looked comical under any other circumstance.
"Really."
"He never talks about you."
John smiled, a little sadly, a little nostalgically. "No, I don't imagine he would. It was a long time ago, after all."
"How did you die?" Philip asked, then immediately seemed to regret asking. "Sorry - was that rude? I didn't mean...you don't have to..." he trailed off, looking embarrassed.
"It's fine to be curious," John reassured him. "It was a war, Pip. People died for what they believed in, so children like you could grow up in a free country. That's what we were fighting for, really. Freedom."
He neglected to mention that he died after the war officially ended in a petty little skirmish that wasn't about freedom at all. That his death meant nothing. Philip didn't need to know that, at least not now.
But that one admission seemed to open the floodgates in Philip's mind and he wanted to know anything and everything about the war. He asked his father, John standing awkwardly in the doorway, and then asked John to fill in the blanks. To Philip, the war was far away and exciting, full of dashing heroes like his father, as inconsequential as the games he set up with his little army figures. John could have impressed upon him the harsh winter nights at Valley Forge, the way the sunlight hit the enemy's bayonet, the feeling of a bullet coming so close it could kill you. The feeling of a bullet piercing right through the side and having the whole world pulled out from beneath him. But he didn't.
Instead he told Philip stories about his father and his friends. His favourite was the one about John and his father challenging the outspoken General Lee over the accusations he flung at General Washington. President Washington, as Philip gently corrected.
"And you shot him?" Philip exclaimed before casting a wary look towards the door. His mother and father, of course, were under the impression that he was asleep in bed.
John nodded and when Philip nearly rolled off the bed in his excitement, he realised that perhaps he should have saved that particular anecdote for a later date. "Yes, but he made a full recovery and it was a war, Pip, and - "
"But you and Papa were in a duel!"
"Well, yes, I suppose we were," John conceded.
The summer arrived as it always did, bringing with it the ninth year since John met what he thought would be his end, and the ninth year that Alexander chose to stay cooped up in his office and let the family go on without him. John remembered the frenzied, wide eyed look well, and the perpetually ink stained hands. Eliza entreated him, and the children implored him, and if it would have made any difference, John would have joined in. The pattern continued throughout the intervening years. If he had any sort of earthly purchase, John would have taken up his familiar position standing over the desk and told Alexander exactly what he thought. He might have said that the war was over and this was precisely what they'd been fighting for all those years ago.
John envied Alexander in a lot of ways. He got to work to work on building the new nation they'd all fought for, got to act as a monumental, leading figure whereas the best John could hope for was to be a forgotten footnote in history. Alexander got to do all the things they'd talked about in camp, push their idealised agendas, build the nation exactly the way they always dreamed. Even more, though, he envied Alexander the life he'd made for himself. It wasn't a life John ever could have imagined for himself, or even achieved, but the sentiments remained. He sometimes pictured himself as a real, frequent visitor to the Hamilton household, getting to know the rest of the children, properly speaking with Eliza beyond the perfunctory ballroom small talk. Conversing with his very dearest friend and not having Alexander's eyes slide right past Sometimes he wondered if the whole point of his strange existence was just to torment him. It had been years now, and the pearly gates or fiery pit were just as elusive as they'd ever been. He was used to his lot in life, or death, but it was lonely. Lonely and frustrating and increasingly so. If it weren't for Philip and whatever loophole that permitted them to interact, John often thought he would have gone mad. Mad, itself, was a relative term of course. Perhaps this was all just some extensive illusion inside his head as he lay dying on that insignificant battleground. He might never know, but that didn't particularly matter.
