Chapter Text
Thomas Jefferson is half-asleep, shirtless, and smugly spooning his husband in the aftermath of what can only be described as a biblical-level dicking. He’s not even trying to pretend he’s tired. No, he’s basking. Luxuriating. His smile is the slow, satisfied curve of a man who knows—on a spiritual level—that he just rearranged his husband’s vertebrae and probably shaved a decade off both their lifespans in the process.
Alexander Hamilton, for his part, is limp and wrecked in the most dignified way a man can be limp and wrecked. His body lies sprawled across the sheets like the glorious, semi-conscious aftermath of a war crime. His thighs are trembling. His curls are damp with sweat. There’s a faint, almost imperceptible tremor in his right calf that suggests his soul has briefly left the building.
One of his arms is pinned awkwardly beneath a pillow. The other is draped across his chest like he started to shield his dignity and then gave up halfway through. There’s a smear of coconut oil across the curve of his lower back, shining faintly in the moonlight. He hasn’t moved in at least twenty minutes.
He probably won’t for ten more.
He makes a sound—soft, involuntary, somewhere between a sigh and a whimper—and Jefferson, still drowsy and victorious, catalogs it immediately. Like a rare bird call. Like a soundbite from God.
That inhale? The sharp one, when he drags his fingers slowly through sweat-damp curls?
That’s new.
The exhale, low and shaky, when he presses a soft kiss to the back of Hamilton’s neck?
Familiar. Documented. Filed neatly in the growing internal archive titled My Husband’s Ruined Post-Orgasm Sounds: A Reference Compendium, Vol. 7 . Indexed, timestamped, cross-referenced.
Jefferson smiles into the curve of Hamilton’s shoulder. He nudges closer until their bodies are flush, letting bare skin glide against slick skin. The smell of sex and coconut oil lingers heavy in the air, clinging to the sheets like confession. One of the restraints is still lazily hanging from the headboard, a twisted red ribbon of sin and achievement.
Hamilton lets out another little noise. Something soft and wrecked and furious about how good he feels.
“You’re a menace,” he mumbles, voice hoarse and frayed at the edges. Like he’s been yelling for hours and now can barely summon vowels.
“Mmm,” Jefferson hums lazily, his lips brushing warm skin. “But your menace.”
Hamilton groans. Not entirely in protest. “Regretfully.”
It’s quiet for a long moment. The good kind of quiet. The kind that feels earned. There’s city noise drifting through the half-open window—car horns, faint shouting, the occasional drunk person shouting about cryptocurrency—but it doesn’t reach them here.
Here, there is only warmth. And sweat. And breath. And the low thrum of the overhead fan rattling like it’s seen things.
Jefferson shifts slightly, rolls his hips with smug laziness, and kisses the hinge of Hamilton’s jaw.
“I should’ve done this sooner,” he says, almost to himself.
Hamilton doesn’t move, but his brows twitch faintly. “Done what?”
Jefferson’s voice is low. “Loved you like this. Back when we were idiots.”
There’s a pause. A small, tight pause. Hamilton makes a wounded noise, something that might’ve been a scoff if it hadn’t landed closer to a sob. But he doesn’t argue. Doesn’t tease. He just exhales. Shaky. Long. And lets himself melt.
Jefferson watches him settle. Watches the little twitches of exhaustion ease into stillness. And for a moment—for a long, quiet moment—everything is perfect.
Which is, of course, when it all goes straight to hell.
Because without warning—without fanfare, without warning signs, without even the dignity of a magical ripple in the air—Thomas Jefferson is yanked violently out of bed and flung through what feels like a collapsing orgasm and a collapsing star at the same time.
There is no gentle transition. No fade to white. No mystical shimmer.
There is just—
SLAM.
Linoleum.
Pain.
Darkness.
And the overwhelming smell of lemon cleaner and generational trauma.
Jefferson groans.
“Fuck,” he chokes out, blinking up at a flickering ceiling light with all the betrayal of a man who was mid-afterglow and very much planning round two.
He tries to sit up. His spine screams. His shoulder blades stick to the floor. His nipples are cold. His soul is colder.
Shirt: Wine-red satin. Unbuttoned. A war crime on campus.
Slacks: Somehow fine, but rumpled in a way that screams I time-traveled out of a threesome .
Shoes: Gone. Obviously.
Mental state: Somewhere between “post-nut clarity” and “existential horror.”
He pats his chest. Finds the velvet pouch still there. Groans again.
“Did I fall asleep mid-afterglow and get cursed by a witch?” he mutters. “Was this a punishment orgasm? Did I just nut my way through the space-time continuum?”
He unzips the pouch with resigned dread.
Inside:
- One travel-size bottle of massage oil (coconut, TSA-approved)
- One black silk blindfold
- Two used restraints (still warm, disturbing)
- Three nipple clamps (he does not want to talk about it)
He pushes himself upright, every joint in his body protesting like a union on strike, and shoves at the janitor closet door. It sticks. Of course it does. Because of course this isn’t just time travel. It’s metaphorical time travel. With symbolism. And shame.
He slams into it with the desperate force of a man who once tried to copyright his own thesis formatting. The door creaks open.
And Jefferson stumbles out into—
Hell.
No.
Worse.
College.
Specifically: The East Wing of the political theory building.
The cursed hallway.
The place where God went to die and left debate flyers behind as a warning to future generations.
It looks the same.
The same sickly overhead lighting, flickering like the dying hope of a poli-sci major. The same scuffed linoleum, eternally damp from unknown sources. The same faint smell of espresso, cheap weed, and broken dreams.
Jefferson exhales slowly. He knows where he is.
But he walks anyway.
Each step forward is like sinking deeper into a thesis he doesn’t remember writing but knows will ruin him by page five.
There’s the vending machine.
The vending machine that owes him exactly $1.50 and a decade of emotional closure. He once punched it after a midterm and nearly dislocated a knuckle over a packet of stale peanut M&Ms.
Still here. Still humming ominously. Still mocking him.
Next to it: the corkboard.
Covered in announcements, activism, and academic despair. Color-coded pushpins stab like tiny pastel knives. The flyers are fresh and familiar and chronically overwritten. “Existentialism & Bagels – Friday Morning Discussion.” “Consent Is Hot.” “Eco-Marxist Potluck.” “Join Debate Club (We Know You’re Lonely).”
And then—
Center stage.
Dead in the middle, like a sniper round to the heart:
“Feminist Hegelian Reading Group – Thursdays @ 8PM – Free Pizza (maybe)”
His entire body stills.
A muscle under his eye twitches.
“No,” he whispers.
He spins in place, already dreading what he knows he’ll see.
There. Across the hall.
The dented plaque: Department of Philosophy .
The peeling sticker on the lounge door: “Do Not Microwave Fish.”
The couch: tragic. Unwashed. Possibly cursed.
The lights: clinically depressing.
“This is the east wing,” Jefferson says, with the hollow realization of a man watching his past materialize like a bad Yelp review. “This is my undergrad building.”
He stumbles back half a step like it might help.
It doesn’t.
His gaze lands on the last nail in the coffin.
Bright yellow. Too glossy. Poor font choice. Unholy graphic design.
STUDENT SENATE ELECTIONS – SPRING 2015
Vote Jefferson for President!
“Because Rational Discourse Is Sexy.”
He makes a noise. A soft, sharp, wounded thing. Half laugh, half sob, fully betrayed by Helvetica Bold Italic.
“Oh no,” he breathes. “I remember this flyer. I printed this flyer. I— wrote that tagline.”
He stares at it like it might bite him. Like it already has.
And then it hits.
All of it.
Not just the building. Not just the year. Not just the campus, the smell, the flyers, the ghost of a thousand unpaid library fines.
But the semester .
The semester he ruined everything.
The semester he turned a student election into an ideological war zone. The semester he tried to debate Hamilton into submission. The semester he snarked his way through their tension instead of addressing it. The semester he mistook dominance for love and competition for connection.
The semester he chose winning over wanting .
He feels it all land on him like bricks. Heavy. Familiar. Inevitable.
He closes his eyes. Breathes in deep.
Disinfectant. Dry-erase marker. Coconut oil still lingering faintly on his skin like a memory.
Old heartbreak. New mission.
When he opens them again, he’s already smoothing his shirt. Already drawing himself taller. Already calculating like a man who just realized the exam isn’t over and the question was never multiple choice—it was how do you fix a timeline you broke by being a petty bitch with trust issues?
He pulls the velvet pouch from his jacket pocket.
Fingers curl around the restraint like a rosary.
“Okay,” he says aloud, to God or fate or the weird janitor closet that flung him through time. “New mission.”
“We are not doing the Cold War again.”
“We are fixing this.”
He buttons exactly one button of his shirt. Just one. Just enough to frame the tender mark Hamilton bit into his collarbone not eight hours ago. The rest stay open—deliberate. Theatrical. A calculated choice in slutty time travel aesthetics.
He slips the restraint into his back pocket like a promise.
Stares down the hallway.
And smiles.
“Time to stage the gayest controlled emotional implosion the universe has ever seen.”
And with the grace of a barefoot prophet in slutty silk and spite, he starts walking.
“Let’s get my husband.”
---
Location: Seminar Room, Department of Political Theory
Inside, the air was heavy with the scent of despair, burnt espresso, and collapsing boundaries.
The seminar had officially lost all contact with the syllabus thirty minutes ago. At some point, the discussion had derailed so catastrophically that it left the station, reversed through time, and punched Plato in the face. The whiteboard was still cursed. The TA was mentally elsewhere—specifically, in a lavender field in southern France where none of this was happening.
In the physical world, however, there were only two gravitational bodies, and everyone else in the room was helplessly caught in their orbit.
Alexander Hamilton was the eye of the storm. Or maybe the lightning. His curls clung to his forehead in damp, furious coils. His eyes were wild with frustration and intellectual betrayal. The bridge of his nose was slightly pink—whether from fury or shame, it was hard to say. His pen, a sad Bic soldier, tapped the desk with military precision, faster, sharper, each click like a gun cocking.
Across from him lounged Thomas Jefferson, embodied sin in a blazer. His posture was so disrespectfully casual it might’ve been considered a microaggression. One leg draped over the other, Montblanc pen twirling between fingers with aristocratic disdain, he looked every inch like a man who had won arguments just by existing and was addicted to the high.
They weren’t sitting. They weren’t discussing.
They were circling each other with words like knives, with wounds barely healed, with seven years of academic foreplay and absolutely zero emotional literacy.
“You’re completely misrepresenting Rousseau,” Hamilton said, voice tight as piano wire, one wrong note away from snapping. “Again.”
Thomas tilted his head. Slowly. Like a cat watching a bird hit a window.
“Am I misrepresenting Rousseau,” he said, mild and venomous, “or are you just projecting your daddy issues onto a critique of power structures you clearly don’t understand?”
Someone gasped.
A girl in the back audibly whispered, “Holy shit.”
The TA didn’t even look up. She took another sip from her dented Hydro Flask and scrawled “APOCALYPSE” in the attendance column.
Hamilton’s knuckles went white around his pen.
“My father is not the point, Jefferson.”
“You bring him up in every Hobbes discussion like he’s the third author.”
“My god ,” Hamilton spat, “you quote Hobbes like you’re auditioning for a gay reboot of The West Wing .”
Someone choked on a matcha latte. Another reached blindly for their vape.
Thomas smiled.
That smile. Slow. Knowing. A war crime in expression form. The smile of a man who had absolutely, irrefutably won—and was about to say something that would make Hamilton invent a new branch of law just to sue him with.
“I think,” Thomas murmured, “the text speaks for itself.”
Hamilton’s chair creaked. His shoulders rose with dangerous control.
He slammed his hand down so hard the desk rattled.
“The text doesn’t have a restraining order against context , Jefferson!”
The room erupted.
Not with noise—because no one dared—but with energy. Tension. Crackling like static off a Tesla coil. A girl pulled out her phone and recorded. Another began softly praying. The TA whispered “oh no” into her water bottle.
And outside, crouched just beyond the classroom window, hidden between overgrown hedges and the brick facade, Future Jefferson watched it all like a benevolent god and mildly disappointed ex-husband.
He adjusted the cuffs of his half-unbuttoned satin shirt, rolled his shoulders, and sighed.
“Yup,” he murmured to no one. “That’s the one.”
He reached into his coat pocket, touched the cool weight of the silk restraint still curled in his palm, and let out a small, almost fond laugh.
“Five more minutes.”
T-minus 3 minutes to abduction
Every molecule in the room screamed.
There was no noise. Only pressure. Like the aftermath of a lightning strike—hot, silent, and vibrating with the potential for irreversible destruction. A girl clutched her pearls. Someone else, entirely unironically, began reciting a Hail Mary.
Jefferson leaned forward, not an inch, just enough to let the overhead light catch the edge of his smirk.
“You always get this agitated when you’re wrong.”
Hamilton, trembling, gave a laugh that could be legally classified as a threat.
“I am not agitated.”
His voice cracked on not . He winced. His pen snapped.
Jefferson raised one finely shaped brow.
“No? Then why is your handwriting getting smaller every time I speak?”
Hamilton’s eyes dropped to his notebook.
Shit.
The last three lines were microscopic. Barely legible. His margin notes looked like the anguished cries of a man cornered by both Kant and his own emotional repression.
He stood.
No. He exploded to his feet. His chair shrieked against the floor, ricocheting backward like it too wanted out of this conversation.
“That’s it,” he snapped, voice sharp enough to puncture god. “I refuse to share a classroom with a man whose entire academic career is just I’m right because I said it sexily .”
Jefferson tilted his head. “I’m right because you’re leaving .”
Hamilton pointed at him. “I hope a pigeon eats your dissertation.”
Jefferson didn’t blink. “I hope you choke on your own rhetoric.”
The TA—finally—broke her thousand-yard stare and muttered, “I’m putting a trauma clause in the syllabus.”
The door slammed behind Hamilton with the weight of the Old Testament.
Silence.
T-minus 0 minutes to abduction
The hallway was empty, save for fury.
Hamilton stormed through it like a plague, muttering obscenities and half-finished insults under his breath.
“Fuck him. Fuck Rousseau. Fuck his stupid little annotations about nature and trees and—”
He turned the corner.
And saw red.
Literally.
A flicker of red silk. A hand.
And then—
A breath of something chemical. Sweet. Sharp.
“Wha—”
Darkness.