A/N: Sorry for being MIA for so long. Finishing OoM took a lot out of me, and then real life butted in - as it always does.
As for this fic - I can't say I saw myself getting inspired to write fanfic again, let alone by a fledgling TV show with characters I barely know... but Forever has real potential, I think, and most of it lies in the relationship between Henry and Abe. That dynamic, wow. What's it like to have a son who's getting older than you ever will? What kind of relationship does that make?
This is me, briefly (and hastily) exploring that. Apologies for the title, as well as the indulgent premise, but it's been a while and I just wanted to get into the heart of what I wanted to say. Let me know what you think.
It didn't matter where he slept, whether at home or in a tent or in a chair. The harsh light did not disturb or enter his dreams, and neither did its eventual disappearance. The rhythmic percussion of a four note tonic scale was like a irritating musical fly, buzzing in his ear, but it mattered not a whit.
He dreamed of Abigail, as he always did.
"Henry."
He came to abruptly, blinking the sleep out of his eyes.
"Present," he answered automatically, straightening in his chair - the ghost of 1945 startled out of him as it often seemed to, these days.
The man in the bed smirked. "For me?" he asked wryly.
Henry's breath caught. "Abe!" he cried, bursting out of his seat and crossing over to the bedside at once, though his courage faltered before he could bring the other man into a full embrace. Instead his hand only reached for Abe's arm, fingers clenching in what was first a hesitant, then a tight (and surely painful) grip. "Are you – how do you –" he only barely managed, just before his throat seemed to render speech impossible.
"Here, sit down before you choke to death," Abe said, incredibly tactlessly considering the situation. "You need a drink? No booze, but I think they give you free water bottles here. See if you can find one, I'll yell for the nurse otherwise. Got them running at my beck and call, might as well take advantage of it."
Henry shot him a disapproving glare, even as he sat. "Abe."
"What? I'm serious," Abe said. His oxygen saturation was at an even 97, his ECG on the monitor reassuringly steady. The events of twelve hours ago might have been merely an unpleasant dream but for the nearly-inaudible thrum of electronic monitors and the paper-thin hospital gown, the latter which always seemed to reduce its wearers to fragile and pale shadows of themselves. "You look like crap."
Oh, if it could only be a dream.
He tried a smile. "No worse than you, I'm sure."
"Wow, that's low. Kick a man while he's down, will you?"
He froze, then swallowed and shook his head wordlessly.
"...Right, okay. Let's quit it with the sap here, huh?" Abe cut into Henry's silence, as uncomfortable with emotion as ever. "I'm fine, Henry. Everything's fine. Copacetic, even. Fantastic."
Henry blinked.
"What? What's that look for?"
"...He's definitely your son."
"Why is he my son when he refuses a kiss from his mother? I know I never have."
"Don't you start. This is what I mean, Henry. This exactly. He's learning this from you."
"I don't believe I understand."
"Don't you? Oh, my love. One day you will become very tired of this game men play to hide what they feel."
Right as always, Henry thought.
For once, it was a small comfort that she wasn't here to see it.
"Hey, you listening to me? I said you can relax. Everything's fine."
Fine. If he heard the word but one more time -
Henry felt his plastered smile begin to quiver and so immediately ceased the attempt. He removed his hand from Abe's arm.
"Certainly," he replied.
"Oh, don't be like that. What did the doc call it, a wakeup call? That's all it was. Just gotta eat my celery, no need to cry about it. Well, unless you hate celery, which I really really do –"
"It was a heart attack," Henry said, quietly. "A myocardial infarction as a result of ischemia in your left anterior descending artery. Your left ventricle was deprived of oxygen and so nearly stopped your heart from working."
Abe squinted at him for a moment, then rolled his eyes towards the ceiling. His fingers fiddled with the blanket, restless as ever. "I know what a heart attack is. Lived with a doctor all my life, you realize."
"And yet," Henry bit tightly, "somehow the implications of this event appear to escape you."
"What do you want me to do?" Abe shrugged. "Like I said, it's a wakeup call. Guess I've gone a little overboard with my cooking the past couple of years." He glanced at Henry. "I'd let you do it instead… except wait, no, I actually want to live."
Henry exhaled through his mouth. "Not funny."
Abe smirked. "Isn't it?"
Henry clutched the bedspread and clenched his teeth as though he were naught but an upset child. He fully realized this, and could not care less at the moment, but he did keep his hands well out of sight (and thus far from ridicule) and do his best to maintain a proper stiff upper lip, which strangely could only be accomplished by avoiding the other man's eyes.
"I am glad you're all right," he said, very stiffly.
Abe looked at him, then winced at whatever he found. "Oh come on –"
"I am," he repeated, louder, voice so close to shaking. "You nearly died, and unlike me you would not have returned to joke of it afterwards. I am glad." His voice softened. "…I am so very glad."
"Me too." Abe sighed. "Look, Henry –"
"Don't," he snapped, then took a deep breath, then swallowed. "Not now. Don't call me that now, I can't –" he shook his head a little. "Not now, Abe. Please."
Bemusedly. "But that's your name, Henry –"
"No," Henry said. "It's not. Not for you."
Abe said nothing for a long moment. His fingers were still in the corner of Henry's eye.
"I thought we agreed that was done with," the man said at last. "A long time ago."
(A young man, saying "look, it just doesn't make sense -")
"We agreed it was wise." Henry stared straight ahead, expressionless. "Yet while you might have outgrown it, I assure you I did not."
He felt Abe's sharp gaze on him, yet he did not return the look. Did not allow himself to blink.
"Dad."
He would not blink.
"Dad. I'm sorry."
He closed his eyes.
"It's all right, Abe," he said hoarsely, the words coming as easily as they once did six decades ago. The patient on the bed might as well have been a boy but ten years old, clad in striped pajamas while clutching a ragged stuffed dog, the furrows between his eyebrows still easily banished with a smile. "I know. And there's… there's nothing to be sorry for."
"No," Abe argued, defiant as always, and God help him, Henry could no longer see the man for the child he'd loved and raised. The hands plucking at the thin sleeves of the gown were suddenly a child's hands, small and soft and warm, never clammy from shock or grasped tightly in utter terror(please, please, you can't leave, don't leave). "You had to go through that."
His throat closed up. "No, Abe -"
"Had to - had to see me like that."
The strangely vulnerable note in his son's voice immediately had Henry whip his head around and cast aside all he knew about propriety and self-possession. Both his hands shot out to reach for Abe's own. "You have no reason to be ashamed," he said fiercely. "Least of all because of what I witnessed." He attempted to force Abe's gaze, to no avail. "It terrified me, yes. It tore at my soul. But you survived, Abe. Don't you dare be ashamed."
Abe said nothing.
Henry tried again, desperate to get through to his son. "Please understand, Abe. Nothing you do, nothing you go through can ever change my opinion of you, can ever change the way I look at you. You know that, don't you?"
"But I failed you," Abe said.
Henry's eyes widened.
"What?" he said, stunned.
"I've failed you. I've been - I've been selfish. Not taking care of myself like I should."
"Don't say that," Henry said ferociously. "It's not true."
"But it is." Abe looked off, scowling at the window. His frown had always seemed nearly too big for his face, Henry remembered. "I was joking before, but I – I gotta get in shape if I want to make it past eighty, right, I can get in maybe two more decades if I'm careful –"
"Abe –"
"Someone's gotta take care of you, and I mean, what's a diet? Can't be that hard, the Cohen brothers are on one, and if those bozos can do it then I definitely can –"
"Abe," Henry said again, a part of him breaking as the boy on the bed vanished and left behind an older and far too noble man in his place. "You don't have to do a thing."
Abe looked at him like he was an idiot. "Of course I do, what are you talking about."
He cleared his throat. "Listen to me. I… I have not been fair to you, all these years. Because of me, you have sacrificed…" anything approaching a normal life. Anything approaching normal choices. "I can't ask you to do that anymore."
His son threw up his hands and turned to the ceiling as if praying for sanity. "Of course you can't ask me," he exclaimed grumpily. "You've never asked me. I just did it."
I just did it.
Such simple words to define a lifetime.
He is your son, he thought at his dead wife. In his selflessness, he has always been your son.
"And now I am asking you," Henry told him gravely, even while reflecting that this was in fact something he should have done long, long ago. "I am asking you to stop."
Abe stared at him.
"Wow," he finally marveled, shaking his head. "It's like you don't even know me."
He glared. "Don't be an arse."
Abe rolled his eyes. "Well, what do you want me to say? Right-oh, old chap, after almost seventy years of following you around the globe and cleaning up after you, guess I'll just leave you to it!"
"Sixty years," he corrected. "I did the cleaning up the first ten, thank you."
"Right, whatever you want to believe. I'm just saying, you're a real basket case if you think I'm ditching you now."
"I never said anything about 'ditching.'" He knew better than to suggest the idea, and truth be told, he himself could never have gone through with such a thing - no matter how much better off the two of them would have been for it.
His son's boundless kindness and generosity were not traits Henry shared, despite all his good intentions.
Abe raised his eyebrows dubiously. "Oh?"
"I only…" Henry shut his eyes for a brief moment. "I only want you to live your life to the fullest. Without… without letting me get in the way."
Abe considered him for a minute, and then, as though reading his mind, said, "If you think you're the only thing that ever stood between me and a life with two kids and a white picket fence, buddy, have I got news for you."
And certainly that was true, in its own way. Abe was by his nature a loner, and had never seemed to mind overmuch living life on the run, abandoning home after home and city after city. But there are always exceptions to every rule, and so Henry thought of 1965 and a Dolores Budher and a smitten young man telling him, mere days after they first left New York – oh, Dad, if you could've only seen her. He thought of 1988 France, and two lonely orphans Abe had gruffly taken under his wing, just months before he and Henry had to flee back to America.
He knew his son would never admit to remembering any of them.
He tried to smile. "You can't deny it wouldn't have been easier without your old man around."
Abe tilted his head to the side, as if pondering hard. "It would be nice if you stopped constantly interrupting all my dates," he finally mused.
"What -"
"Because you do."
"I don't -"
"Constantly."
"Abe," he said in exasperation.
A smug expression flickered across Abe's face before seriousness took its place. "I made my choices, Dad. I stand by them. Got no regrets about any of it."
Henry swallowed. "None?"
Abe looked out the window again – for only a moment – then smiled at him.
"None, you old geezer."
Henry looked back at his son, pale and tired and wrinkled under the blue hospital gown.
And despite it all, despite the pain and fear and all the hardship lying in store, at that moment in a nearly-empty hospital ward everything was fine. They were both fine. It wasn't the end of Henry's world.
Not just yet.
"Well then," he said, and smiled down at his hands. "I guess that's all right."
"…Of course," Abe said later, "if that 'live life to the fullest' crap was your way of dissuading me from dieting , let me just say – consider me dissuaded."
"Come on, Abe. That resolution cannot have lasted more than two minutes."
"Please, like you wouldn't have begged me to cook again after the first lettuce wrap. Admit it, you've been getting spoiled on my fine cuisine."
"I have not. And what on earth's a lettuce wrap, pray tell?"
"See? Thanks to me, you'll never have to know."