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Aaron Burr would have traded his soul to be anywhere but there. The golden-hour sun glinted off his pistol and he squinted. Even if he could trade it, his soul would not be worth much. Certainly not enough to get a wish big enough to escape the current situation. No, it was too tarnished for that. He fiddled with the trigger and stared out across the field.
Burr was not a saint, but neither was the man staring at him across the rippling expanse, cradling his own pistol almost tenderly, as though it were a fragile thing needing his protection. He almost laughed to himself. Alexander Hamilton held himself proudly—the bastard—still green in the shade beneath sycamore trees, yet untouched by the sun’s first fire. There was a sinner if there ever was one. Both men knew they were imperfect as the other; their imperfect actions intertwining in a lifetime of events that led them to a lonely field in New York, dawn peeking over the edge of the city.
Burr knew he was far from holy, but Hamilton was marked a sinner by the very virtue of his birth. The bastard orphan sinner had clawed his way to the top because he was unafraid to cheat and sin and fight to get there. There was no legacy to uphold, no standard to meet. Burr fiddled with his gun. If Hamilton was a sinner, what was he? Perhaps life (or death, or love, or what have you) didn’t discriminate between sinners and saints, but if he was neither, how would he fare?
Few things in life were holy. Fewer people were saints. Burr thought briefly of the Theodosias, his wife ripped away from him and his daughter on the verge of orphanhood. Had her death been a punishment for his ways? He closed his eyes, visions of her replacing Hamilton’s expressionless face and the expanse of field between them. Theodosia had been radiant in life, orange and golden and burning, like the saints of old. She was not unlike the light setting the field before him ablaze.
Burr opened his eyes again. If Theodosia was orange, what did that make him? He touched the trigger of his pistol.
Crimson, soon, if he wasn’t careful.
It was unclear in his mind how life (or death, or love) would discriminate against him if he survived this. He reflected briefly on others he had known. There were those who were a politician first and a man second. Burr harbored the fear in his heart that he would be classified the same way—more ambition than human; fatherhood and feelings secondary to political scandal and failure to ascend. How a man so grey in morals beget a saint such as Theodosia was beyond him. If she was his legacy, surely he would die holy.
Life may not have known how to deal with Burr, but Hamilton, still green in the shade of trees across the field, was another matter. He had enthusiastically leapt into his label of sinner since the beginning, and life (and death, and love) dealt with him accordingly. Burr, lukewarm until the end, a neutral politician with neutral beliefs and the interests of himself only, was not a saint. He was also not a sinner. He was purgatory personified. He was characterized by years of waiting, waiting, waiting, only to wait again as he stared down his once-lover on a battlefield with a gun in one hand and his own beating heart in the other.
Burr knew he was spineless. His grey morals are washed in the orange of the rising dawn—Burr is not sure if the glow is a halo or the fires of hell that await him if he does not wash his hands of this too-green, too-brave man.
Somehow this brave sinner was treated better by life than a coward in brave man’s clothing.
He shoots.