Y'all didn't think I'd leave you like that?

Well, I guess I can see why you did.

But I am back with what you might call an alternate ending of sorts.

I'm calling it an apology for the MANY people that have been requesting a slightly less angsty ending and the MANY people yelling at me for making them cry.

Please know that fluff is not my strong suit, and this chapter was written fairly quickly, so please forgive any mistakes.

And let's do the Sadie-finished-a-fic celebratory dance!

Also, to Smiley101, thank you so much for skipping the tactic of murder and going straight to involving the law. Sorry I wasn't home at 3, I had yoga. Left a note on the door for the boys in blue.

He makes sense of all of my chaos

In ways I can never explain

He turns all of my sadness into a smile

He's helping me live life again

It's the light in the eyes of my children

It's the sound of their laughter once more

It's a glimpse of a life I dared only to dream,

And a dream only life could restore

"Love," his voice breaks and he knows exactly how hard this will be.

"The doctor said…he said we have a choice. You have a choice."

He takes a shuddering breath in, and feels her hand come to rest lightly on his.

Even now, as he is talking her through what may be the last decision she will make, she is comforting him.

"He said there is one more thing we can try. A clinical trial, I guess. It's had good luck with lung cancer so far. But….but it'll be hard. And if it doesn't work, there's…" he breaks off in a sob.

"There's nothing he can do after that."

Her hand lightly strokes his. His eyes rest gently on her.

"Or…" he can barely bring himself to say it. He still can barely think of a world without Eliza.

"Or he can switch to palliative care. He said."

He supposes he has a bar for chemo now.

He's sort of seen it all.

But this stuff…Eliza's skin breaks out in raw sores, her body drops down to below 100 pounds, she has to be fed intravenously because the mouth sores make it impossible for her to eat.

Sometimes when she's awake, she screams in pain.

He sits by her bed, holds her hand and apologizes over and over.

She didn't want this. You made her do this.

He knows, he knows.

She's in pain because of you.

He's a selfish bastard but he's a selfish bastard who needs his wife.

Needs her like he's never needed anything, is only able to function because he has her.

He can't let her go.

On the days where she is not in so much pain, he takes her frail body into his lap and rocks her back and forth.

These are the moments he needs.

These are the only moments worth living for, now.

- sometimes I feel like I've never been nothing but tired -

He doesn't allow the children to the hospital.

What Alex Jr. saw that day so long ago still haunts him.

He still wakes up shouting at an invisible enemy to get away from his mom.

He still clings to her when he's allowed to see her, which is only during the brief periods they let her go home to visit her children, and only because she is so drugged she barely registers his presence.

He doesn't care.

He and the other boys curl up in their mother's lap like small children, rub their mother's back, and whisper to her in soft voices.

"Mama, you're home."

"We missed you."

"Can we get something for you?"

"Mama, look what I made for you."

It warms and breaks Alex's heart at the same time.

He tells himself he is doing the right thing.

His children need their mother, even if she's not the mother they remember.

-what came from the heart can never be wrong-

He hates himself.

(What else is new?)

He hates himself for putting her through this.

She's being tortured, she's in pain, and she's stretched to the very limits of what her broken body can take.

On a particularly bad day, Eliza grabs his shirt and pulls him down to her level.

"Please, Alexander," she sobs. "Please let me die. I can't live like this anymore, please."

He's a selfish bastard who needs his wife.

And he would go through this instead, would take this from her without a moment's hesitation. Sometimes he prays for it to be him instead.

But god never listened to him, never in his life.

So for now, he can only grab her hand and whisper the same thing over and over.

I'm sorry. I love you. I'm sorry. I love you.

- tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow, may be too late -

There is chemo.

There is radiation.

There is surgery.

Somehow the house keeps running. People show up. Cooks and drivers and maids that he doesn't remember hiring.

(he'll later find out he didn't)

- I will learn to survive -

Angelica stays in the treatment center.

He can't deal with her illness too.

He's pretty sure that makes him a terrible father, but he has no more left to give.

(as it turns out, her doctors don't think she'll be stable enough to be released anytime soon)

And the hellish cycle that has been life for the past year continues.

He comes home when he can.

(he still sees Eliza when he sleeps. She is reaching for him. Calling out for him. Through hundreds of calls to the hospital, he is assured that she is sedated and has not woken, but he can't shake the feeling.)

She needs him.

But his children need him too.

And he promised her he would take care of them.

And then one day, when he goes to see her, she is sitting up.

On her own.

And she doesn't cough the whole visit.

He knows how small it seems.

But that lights something inside of him, something he hasn't felt in a long time.

Hope.

And it's one visit and it's such a small thing and maybe it's silly to hope (certainly most of his internal monologue would say so) but he so wants that light at the end of the tunnel.

(wants that light not to be an oncoming train).

- I won't cry for yesterday, there's an ordinary world -

His children are the bright spots in the darkness.

The principal calls him twice more to the school, both times for his boys fighting.

He tells her not to call again.

If they were defending their family, he will not punish them.

Elizabeth and William fall asleep with him every night.

Once, a shadowy figure he knows was James joins them, but the fourteen year old refuses to talk about it the next day.

They beg to see their mother more.

He refuses.

Until one day he finds John and William sneaking into the backseat of his car as he heads to the hospital, when they think he's not looking.

- come find your way, come lay your wreath at the altar of change -

And in the hurricane, there is light.

Light in the form of a doctor who brings Eliza's latest scans in.

A specialist, Alex knew. He'd seen the way the nurses looked at him with reverence.

The man introduces himself as Doctor Washington, no not that Dr. Washington of the Washington Hospital.

That was his father.

He is a cancer specialist.

He is retired.

And someone had put in a call, asked for a favor, so he had taken Eliza's case, and enrolled her in the trial.

Alexander Google's him and is amazed. He is a pioneer in cancer research, so it seems. He takes cases nobody else will touch, the hopeless cases, and he cures.

That small light of hope rises in him again, even before he sees the man's face.

His face carries an expression he hasn't seen in what feels like decades.

He is smiling.

His face carries hope.

Hope.

Alex had forgotten such an emotion existed, but it does.

Because the tumors are shrinking.

Because her blood counts are up.

Because the treatment is fucking working.

Eliza sits up on her own two days in a row.

She drinks a cup of water.

She manages a few bites of food.

The sores begin to heal.

And then one day, one glorious, miraculous day, he comes in and she is standing.

She is fucking standing.

He is not even sure what to feel.

Happy, grateful, overjoyed, they seem so pitiful compared to what he's feeling.

And then his better angel wobbles with a few shaky steps over to him and he catches her in his arms and buries his face in her neck and sobs.

- I'll always be there, as frightened as you -

Eliza is getting better.

She's actually getting better.

He lets the children visit.

They mob her with hugs, and the entire Hamilton family piles together on one bed.

It gives a groan, just like the gurney before her first surgery, what feels like years ago.

Two months later, they say goodbye to the hospital.

The nurses smile, hug them with tears in their eyes, tell them never to come back here.

The doctor smiles when they thank him and tells them no thanks are necessary, that it was a privilege. He catches Alexander's arm as he leaves and speaks to him in a conspirational whisper. Alexander wants to leave here, really wants to leave, but the man has done so much for them.

"This case was worth it. Tell Thomas I was glad to help."

Well, that stops him.

"Who?"

Surely there were many Thomas' in the world. Surely it couldn't be…

"Senator Jefferson. He called me, asked me for a favor. Said he had a family who needed help, and they deserved a break."

- how long will I love you? As long as stars are above you -

Hope.

Alex discovered it had a look.

It was the blush on his wife's cheeks, absent for so long. It was her smile as she gazed at their children.

It was the fine dark strands that grew long again, curling at the end, soft to the touch as Alex ran his hand through them.

It had a sound.

Eliza's laugh, his children's laugh, the gentle gasps she would make when he kissed that spot on her neck.

It had a color.

Several actually. Hope was bright and soft and the same time, vivid shades of green as his youngest chased her brothers around the lawn they were "watering", soft white like the snow his youngest drags him out to make snow angels in.

It had a taste.

Sweet, gentle. Like the taste left in his mouth when his Eliza was baking bread and laid her flour-soaked hands to his cheek and pressed her lips firmly to his.

And it had a feel.

The feel of his youngest, asleep against his chest. The feel of the tickling sensation that was Eliza's long strands of raven hair on his chin.

The feel of a baby's kick against taut skin.

The tears on his cheeks as he held his wife's hand, before new life was brought into the world.

And the fine hair dusting the skull of their newest child.

Philip.

Little Phil.

Hope.

How lucky we are to be alive right now.

- that's what living is for -

This whole world is spinning crazy
And I can't quite keep up
It's the one thing around here
That we don't have quite enough of
So I just wanna look a little more like love