This idea hit me with 100 miles per hour around Thursday evening and, oh my god, prepare for angst. I think my writing is getting closer to Alexander's level.

Concerning word counts, I mean. Speaking of, this one has one of 2,371 words.

i couldn't seem to die

The thing is, Alexander Hamilton lives, no matter what life or the universe decides to throw at him.

It has always been that way and it will always be the case.

Always, oh how he despises that word. It is one of those that accurately sum up the hell he is living in. Always. Constant. Unchanging. Immortal.

It isn't half as great as it sounds like. Trust him, if there is anyone who knows about this, it's him.

Sure, when he had first found out that, no matter what, he didn't die, he had been ecstatic—he knew how much death could hurt both the victims and those who stayed behind—but that enthusiasm died quickly once he understood what it really meant.

The constant pain of losing people he had known and loved. The loneliness that settled in after his friends and family had started to die around him.

This pain is probably the thing he is most familiar with in his life. There is no possible way to avoid it when living as long as Alexander had done.

And that is a long, long time.

The first breath Alexander had ever taken wasn't on or even close to the island of Nevis. And even if it had been there, it would have had a different name, if a name at all.

He isn't completely sure if people had even been there at that point in history. Probably, if one considers that humans had spread practically all over the globe by then, but he doesn't really know for sure and it wasn't like there was anyone around he could ask.

No one else has survived as long as him. Oh, he knew a couple of people, not even a dozen, that suffered in the same way for a century or two. Nevertheless, they all died, sooner or later, leaving him alone and unable to follow them, no matter what he tried.

He has wanted to die for the majority of his existence. This was no life and it hasn't been for quite a while.

It all started when he had been young and stupid. Not even five years old, an age that seems so surreal now, since it is less than point one percent of the time he had spent on this planet.

Yes, Alexander is that old.

He had wandered into the river and stayed there for a while, observing the fish that swam around and the colors. Despite all the time that has passed, the memory is still clear in his mind. The swirling colours and the sounds of the sea.

He doesn't remember how he got underwater—surely people knew even then not to let curious young children near water, especially not without supervision—and he has long since forgotten how long he sat down there. It had to have been hours, maybe even a day or two—even back then Alex hadn't really slept and only partly since he didn't feel the need to—but, eventually, he got out of the river and went back to his family.

The thing is, the town they lived in, Nippur, it had classified as a small town at that time. When his family hadn't been able to find him, they had asked around and it wasn't long until he had been—for all intents and purposes—declared dead. That was what had happened when someone was missing more often than not, after all, so it was an understandable choice.

But Alexander—had that been his name back then? He doesn't remember. He knows he had been going by that name as often as possible since his first time in Greece, but before that? He has no idea, not really.

Anyways, Alexander? He had lived, as he always does. He had simply turned up at his house, expecting everything to be normal, except perhaps for a few worried faces and a scolding—plus a punishment, of course—but that was not what actually happened.

What happened was that everyone—his father, uncles, and brothers, his mother, aunts, and sisters—they had all looked at him oddly.

Some had seemed terrified of him, some in awe, but no one had ever looked at him quite the same way after he returned from his small adventure. They had seemed like they hadn't been able to agree if he was a god or a monster, but everyone agreed that he couldn't possibly be human.

To this day, he still doesn't know if they had been correct. Because, on the one hand, he looks like humans do, he feels like them, laughs like them, and cries like them, but at the other hand? How could he be a human when he doesn't require sleep or food? When he hasn't aged a day since he had been eighteen-ish? When he can't die, no matter how hard he tried—and he had tried and tired and tried over the years. Nothing has worked so far and he has long since given up hope that anything ever will.

Giving a complete overview of his life is literally impossible. Too much had happened and too much had been forgotten and destroyed over time. Some of that happened by accident and some of it on purpose.

The Library of Alexandria was one such time. He hadn't burned it down, how could he? He had simply placed an illusion, sealed the door, and spread the rumor it had burned down.

He likes his books, alright. They give him something to do, a way to escape his reality for just a moment.

Whether fact or fiction, he doesn't care. The lines of those blend over time. Some things that used to be the one become the other over time and vice versa. That is just the way things are. It's one of the things he had learned. Things change, nothing is constant. Nothing, except for him.

And Alexander has quite the collection of books, scrolls, and, texts, written in all sorts of languages, some of which were lost in time. There was no one around who spoke them. No one, but him.

Logically, Alexander knows that it's probably not good for him to focus on things like that, but he can't stop. His thoughts drift there in the end, no matter how much he tries not to let that happen.

The only way it works is to keep himself busy, so that's what he does. He isn't quite sure when he had realized that and put his plan into motion, but he knew that a long, long time had passed since then. It had been before the Library Incident, likely before Alexandria had even been founded, since that still left him with two or three thousand years left over.

Quite frankly, he has no idea how old he even is. It is easy to lose track and difficult to count, difficult to measure and easy to stop caring.

He is old, older than anyone else on this planet has ever been or will ever be. Unless there is someone hiding from him, but he doubts that. He has no real proof, but the lack of such tales, tales of men—or women—older than everyone else is a strong point in his favour. Granted, stories like these exist, but does it count if they are tales of gods and monsters? Most of which even have a set home, and which Alexander visits, illogically hopeful every time.

He has been disappointed every single time so far. He shouldn't get his hopes up, he knows that, but he can't stop himself. He is alone in this world, is it such a wonder that he wants to have company?

Over the years, Alexander has been in many places. In fact, he's say that there aren't many places he hasn't been at one point or another.

He knows that he had left Nippur when he was fifteen, he had left for Uruk, the capital. He had needed to get away from the stares everyone in Nippur was giving him. After a decade, it became too much for him to handle and so he left.

By that point, he already knew that the River Incident wasn't a fluke. They had tested it extensively. Every way they could think of to kill someone, they did. Nothing worked, nothing left a scratch which was only logical since nothing could even hurt him!

Alexander had been young and stupid, naive and innocent, and his family—the very people that were supposed to protect him refused him food and water at times and put a knife to his chest—and many, many, other things like that.

Is it really a wonder, that it is quite a task to earn his trust? Oh, his friendship, he gives that more easily than he would like to and even his heart isn't always his own, but his trust? That is near impossible to earn.

Unless Alexander saw someone survive something they shouldn't, he never told anyone. And in their cases it was more the fact that he needed to explain why they should not act like reckless fools in the century or two they were given.

Times progressed, sure, but the instinct of humans to figure things out they didn't understand and to test the limits in a vain attempt to rectify this, that stays. It is one of the few constant things he can count on. Curiosity, bloodlust, hate, love, and fear. Those are the things he always finds.

Yes, it is depressing, but honestly, what in Alexander's life isn't?

Uruk is a fluke when he doesn't grow anymore. He is actually quite tall for his time and he does reach his prime when he guesses he was around eighteen, but he never ages past that point. He remains young.

He had fled as soon as he had realized the problem. Over the years, he had found a way to deal with it. Illusions are hard to learn, but once one has the hang of it, one can literally do it in their sleep.

Which means that Alexander isn't forced to move around every decade or so anymore. From the point where he learns it—around 2,500 BC, he would guess—but he can stay around a lifetime. Granted, for a while that means a maximum of three to five decades—the average being on the lower end of the spectrum—but it is still an improvement.

Once or twice, he poses as his own son. He stops that, because people aren't really willing to believe one can be identical to one's father in both looks and behaviour. One of the two? Yeah, sure. But no trace of the mother, a mother that is never seen at that?

People don't believe that and it's too much effort to try to make it convincing. And finding an actual wife just to inevitably lose her is rarely worth it. Sometimes, for the most exceptional women, it is, but that is rare.

Don't get him wrong, he does have sex and he's fairly sure that there are some descendants of him luring around somewhere—Leonardo Da Vinci, for example. Alexander has no proof, but he's fairly sure he remembers that man's grandmother—but that just makes everything weirder over time.

Even when he goes to a totally new place, he has no proof that none of the men and women he shares a night with are his descendants. Just because he hasn't been there doesn't mean that their families didn't travel between the times Alexander knew them, but as long as he doesn't immediately guess a face, it's fine in his book.

Plus, there are plenty of people around who do more than that. Almost everywhere he goes until at least the 1500s—AD in case that was unclear—people could name at least one couple that was brother and sister.

He doesn't know why he views it as gross when no one else really does, but it is the case nevertheless. To think that, had he been normal, had he been human, that would almost certainly been the path ahead of him, well, it kind of makes him feel sick. Whenever he thinks about that, Alexander is almost glad about his existence for a second.

Almost.

Despite everything, Alexander doesn't stop caring.

In a way, the world stays the same—someone is always fighting over something or other, people are always sick and hungry—but that doesn't mean that he should stop trying to improve the world. It doesn't mean he should simply give up and hide in a cave somewhere—he had tried that once, it had been horrible and he hadn't lasted a decade.

No, Alexander continues caring, he continues fighting for the things he believes in. He doesn't necessarily fight out of loyalty to a king or country, but on the side he thinks will be better for the people. If someone would ever suspect the truths and links his lives, they'd probably come to the conclusion that he was a traitor, a turncoat.

He doesn't care about that, though. He knows the truth and it's highly improbable that anyone else will ever find out. Alexander hasn't told anyone his entire life story—or rather those parts he still remembers—and for that to change it would require a lot of trust. Trust, he's not sure he's ready to give.

He fights for so many causes, aside so many people, that it all starts to blend together after a while. Single memories stood out and he would be able to sort through it, should he ever bother trying.

And at one point—it was after the Punic Wars, but before the battle in the "Teutoburger Wald", as it would later be called, so it had to be around a century or so BC—he actually sat down and did so. His life story took up an own shelf in his library and it doesn't look like it was going to stop growing anytime soon.

But that's not actually the point he is trying to make here, no. That point is that even now, after five thousand years, he keeps on fighting.
And this newest war somehow manages to bring something new to his life. And that, friend, is not even close to an easy task when one had lived as long as Alexander.

Please tell me what you think!