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bitchy-marvel-dude · 4 years

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Future’s Past

TW for: Health issues, foster care, minor descriptions of child abuse (not graphic)

This is a reincarnation au i’ve been thinking about for a while. Hope you enjoy. More to come soon.

AO3 link here

Alejandro was born on the last day of June and boy was he mad. He was an angry individual even from the beginning, letting out gut wrenching wails as he was forced from his warm, safe home into a cold, unforgiving operating room. There were blurs of light all around him, smears of gray and white and black, faces not yet focused.

They had shoved something up his nose, down his throat, taped large pads to his little chest, and stuck him in a large plastic tube. Later, Alejandro would find out that the purpose of all of this was because he was born too early - two months early, to be exact. He would find out that his lungs were underdeveloped, something that would affect him into his adult years. He’d find out that there had been a hole in his heart and that, later, they’d had to split his chest open to fix it, which kept him from doing any activity that was too strenuous for the rest of his life. And, perhaps worst of all, he’d learned he had been born half-deaf, and that he had to use hearing aids.

Because of his many health issues, it surprised none of the doctors when the mother declared she didn’t want Alejandro. The baby was placed in foster care, but was bounced around a lot due to no one being able to accommodate for his needs.

No one seemed to want to take the boy to his speech therapist or one of his many doctor’s appointments to make sure his heart and lungs were okay. No one wanted to learn sign language, but no one seemed to want to buy the boy hearing aids so he could understand what they were saying either. He ran through at least six homes a year, his carers not able to handle the boy’s excess energy or his odd fixations.

Alejandro finally learned how to communicate when he was five years old, after his foster family rushed for someone to teach him before school started. The boy could hear, he just couldn’t hear very well - the voices around him were like a swirl of jumbled, faint words and sounds. It was really quite irritating.

But, fortunately, Alejandro took to sign language like a duck to water. He was fluent in ASL by the end of Kindergarten. It didn’t do him much good since his foster parents never seemed to put in the effort to learn themselves, and not even the teacher in his special class knew it, but it was an accomplishment for the boy nonetheless.

It was when his latest foster family dumped him onto a new pair of inexperienced parents and the bruises started appearing on his arms and legs, however minor the injuries were, when his memories were triggered.

It had been when his foster mother slapped him for the first time that his past life came rushing back. Snippets, at first. A tall, broad man with fiery red hair, smelling of booze and with stumbling steps. The slap hadn’t hurt, not that much anyway, not with how wasted the man was, but it was obviously an important memory if it was the first one to come back to him…

He had rubbed a hand against his stinging cheek and contemplated the memory in his small bedroom.

There was a notebook in his backpack. Brand new, meant to be for reading class, though Alejandro knew nothing would be put in it besides a few cut out pieces of paper. He took one of his new pencils in a chubby, uncoordinated hand, writing down the memory on a page of notebook paper, trying to get down as many details as possible.

Long, red hair pulled back into a ponytail… booze, probably whiskey… a sharp sting on his cheek that faded quickly…

He was missing something. A blank. He had everything else, but there was one key piece he needed to know why this memory was so special….

He thought about the feeling that had washed over him when his foster mother had hit him.

Confusion, fear, shock, betrayal…

But that doesn’t make sense, Alejandro thought. I’ve known her for less than a day… unless the feelings came from the memory.

Fear. The fear obviously came from the man. From the booze on his breath and the mean look in his violet-blue eyes.

Confusion… it was obvious that that had never happened before, if he had been confused… perhaps it was the first time his past-self had been hit?

The shock obviously came from the slap itself, but the betrayal… had he been close to the man that had hit him? An uncle, perhaps? Or a brother?

But the memory was triggered by my foster mother hitting me, his brain reminded him. So it was probably a parental figure of some sort. Maybe my father…?

Well. He would find out soon enough.

Once the first memory was triggered, it was only a matter of time before the rest came flooding in.

Most people got their first memory when they were twelve to thirteen years old. Usually triggered around the time the child hit puberty. Of course, that wasn’t the only time a person could get their first memory, it was just the most common.

For example, those who were born farther into the past - say, the 1600s - were more likely to start remembering things in their twenties, or even their thirties. Memories are triggered by similar situations occurring to an especially strong memory from one’s past life. Because of this, and because the world is so vastly different now than it was in the 1600s, it takes a while for people to experience that.

Getting your memories before the age of ten was incredibly rare, though not unheard of. It usually happened if your past life had died less than twenty years before you were born, especially if, in your past life, you died young.

Alejandro was a bit of an anomaly. So far, he didn’t know what century he had been born in. He didn’t know too many details about his past life. He only knew the basics, from brief flashes of old memories. The smell of the ocean, the feeling of hunger panging in his belly, vibrant red hair falling in his face as he ran across the beach, close to the water, a woman in long, wrinkled skirts following behind him, smiling at him fondly.

That was another important clue that Alejandro had jotted down, the memories keeping him restless until he could write down every last detail. The sight, the feeling, the smell, the taste…

Not the sound. The universe couldn’t even be merciful enough to grant him with clear sounds from over a hundred years ago.

The skirts suggested that his past life had been at least two hundred years ago, maybe a bit longer. He knew he had lived next to the ocean, perhaps somewhere on the coast? Though that made no sense, either, given the time period, and the water was far too clear, the air far too warm…

Which left the Caribbean.

He wrote down what he knew, every fact, every tiny, dismal thing. He knew he had had stringy red hair. He knew he lived on an island. He knew that he had lived centuries ago, given his mother’s clothing, and that they weren’t particularly wealthy, given the state of said clothing.

He knew his father had hit him. He knew he was drunk when he did. He didn’t know how often his father had hit him, and he didn’t know how often his father had drunk. These remained mysteries, for the time being, at least until he could figure it out…

He flexed his fingers, ran them through his thick brown hair. He was frustrated. But he was going to figure it out. It was just a mystery, a lot like the ones he saw on TV where he knew who the murderer was halfway through the film while the protagonist remained oblivious… Except, in this situation, he was the protagonist, and the universe was watching as he came undone.

He finally got his hearing aids, and most of his memories, when he was nine years old. The hearing aids were because the grouchy, middle aged man that had taken him in needed him to be able to hear if he was going to help him in his scrap yard.

The hearing aids were cheap, and they fit awkwardly on his ears. They were heavy, and they rang sometimes, and they never seemed to be in the right setting. He loathed them.

In the years since he first got his memories, he had long since stopped referring to himself as ‘Alejandro’. Alejandro was the name his birth mother had given him before abandoning him just because he couldn’t hear well. He loathed the name more than he loathed his own miserable existence.

He’d taken to calling himself Alexander, and telling others to do it as well. Alexander was the name his past life’s mother had given to him, and Alex liked her a lot more than he liked his own mother.

Alexander was currently struggling to lift up a large piece of scrap and separate it from all the other junk. His foster father, per usual, sat in the shade with a busted up radio and a class of spiked ice tea, watching him work and calling out to him unhelpfully whenever he slowed down.

And, of course, he couldn’t defend himself. His foster father didn’t know sign language, and Alexander didn’t know how to talk properly, as he’d never learned. He understood what others were saying, but whenever he talked it came out all garbly and weird.

Alex knew he wasn’t supposed to be working. Not in the heat, and certainly not with anything as heavy as metal. His doctor reminded him of it whenever his foster family bothered to take him for a checkup - your heart is too weak, Alejandro, your lungs too. You work too hard, your heart could give out and you could die, no joke.

His current foster father seemed to take it as a joke, however. Because he had Alexander working as hard as ever. From seven thirty AM to six PM, separating scrap metal, getting sunburn on his arms and neck and little shallow cuts on his hands. At least he was up to date on his tetanus shot.

He should’ve been in school, learning. But his foster father, Gabe, had insisted upon him being home schooled, only to force him to do all his work instead of teaching him. Figured.

Alex let out a sharp breath as the piece of scrap he was holding cut into his palm. The sweat only made it sting. He took in a wheezing breath. His shoulders ached. Blood was dripping down his palm. He felt like he was about to faint.

He breathed in sharply, but it still felt like it wasn’t enough. His hair was so drenched in sweat, it felt like his hearing aids were slipping and sliding. They never did fit properly.

He saw Gabe shift in his seat, looking like he was moving to stand up. He rubbed his hands up and down his jeans, drying them off. The cut burned. He picked up the scrap metal, and threw it toward the correct pile. He tried to distract himself by going through old memories - memories of John - or Jack, as he was prone to calling him -, of Gilbert, of Washington, his stern commander, of his dearest Betsey…

God, he missed them. Every day, he missed them. He even missed Jefferson, at times.

He was thinking about Jefferson, and his dumbass purple jacket, when a sharp pain lanced through his chest, and his knees buckled, the world going dark.

#Hamilton #Alexander Hamilton #Oneshot #My Fic #Hamliza #Foster Care #part of a series #there will be more

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