Prompt: Henry has a dream about his life if he and Elizabeth decided not to have children, and he wakes up feeling sick.
Henry grasped the soft sheets on his and Elizabeth's bed in his fingers. He closed his eyes, taking a slow breath in through his nose and exhaling shakily. His heart was hammering and his stomach was churning. He could barely breathe at the images that were flashing through his mind, and he took a ragged breath as he sat up, trying desperately to hold back tears. Next to him, Elizabeth had already begun to stir, pulled to consciousness by some invisible force of intuition. She'd always been able to do that, to sense when he or, later, one of their children needed her.
Now, she blinked at him sleepily, concern written all over her features.
"Henry?" she mumbled. "What's wrong?"
The sound of her voice, warm and familiar, was the final straw. He closed his eyes, tears suddenly streaming down his cheeks as he took a shuddering breath that had Elizabeth sitting up by his side in an instant.
"Hey, take it easy," she soothed. "You're okay. Just breathe. It's okay."
"Elizabeth," he choked, and she instinctively reached out to him. He all but crumbled against her, and Elizabeth ran a soothing hand up and down his back. She was utterly bewildered by this sudden, middle-of-the-night breakdown, but she hated seeing Henry so upset, and just wanted to do whatever she could to calm him.
"Shh. It's okay," she whispered. "You're okay. I've got you."
He wrapped his fingers in the fabric of her tee shirt, and Elizabeth's chest tightened in response. She wished that she knew what had gotten him so upset; if she knew, maybe she would have been able to calm him down.
Henry, however, was in no state to tell her, at least not yet. He was still sobbing, struggling for breath, completely unraveled in her arms. She held him close, rocking back and forth slightly. He gasped, and she heard her name in the ragged breath.
"I'm right here," she assured him. "I've got you, I'm right here. Everything's okay, baby."
It wasn't the first time she'd been in such a position. Over the course of their nearly-thirty-year marriage, both she and Henry had suffered their fair share of breathtaking, painfully terrifying nightmares and middle-of-the-night breakdowns. However, none of that made it any easier to stomach when they had to see the other in such a state.
Slowly, Henry's breathing evened out a little bit, and the room fell silent as he stopped crying. Elizabeth waited quietly, running what she hoped was a soothing hand up and down his back in the silence.
"Did I ever tell you that I was going to be a priest?" Henry asked suddenly. Elizabeth pulled away to look at him in the half-light. This was news to her, and surprising news at that.
"No," she said slowly. He nodded, still not looking at her.
"But then I met you," he continued in a quiet, hushed tone that greatly unnerved Elizabeth. "And everything changed."
Silence settled over them as Elizabeth took all of that in.
"You're not mad at me for not telling you, right?" Henry asked, and she decided that the hesitant uncertainty in his voice was far more unsettling than the previous tone he'd been using.
"No," she assured him quickly. "No, Henry, of course not." He nodded silently, and Elizabeth hesitated for a moment before she spoke again.
"What was the dream about?" she asked into the darkness, and her husband drew in a shaky breath. She was on the verge of apologizing for bringing it up when his voice stopped her.
"It was...well, at first it was like I was going to become a priest," he said. "But then I met you, and that was the same, but…"
"But?" she prodded gently.
"But we didn't have children," he said, and her first reaction was to be confused as to why that had him so shaken up. Yet, as she sat by his side in their dark bedroom and thought about the three young adults that were all sleeping in their beds along the hallway, she started to understand. The idea of her life without any one of them was faintly sickening, and she could see why Henry would be tortured by the idea that, by some twisted variation on his beliefs, he could have sent their lives into a direction that didn't include Stevie, Alison, or Jason.
"Come on," Elizabeth said decisively, pulling away from him to slip off of the bed on her side under Henry's confused gaze. She stood at the foot of their bed and held out her hand to him invitingly. Henry, though unsure what she was going to show him at nearly four in the morning, stood and took her hand, trusting that whatever endgame Elizabeth had in mind was a beneficial one. She led him down the dark hallway and stopped before their eldest child's bedroom door, which was cracked open. Stevie had always slept with her door slightly open, so that just a little bit of light could get in at night. When she was small, they'd left the hallway light on for her so that she could maximize the light that streamed in. Now, her mother pressed lightly on the door and the strip of light widened, falling on her cream and blue bedspread and illuminating the blonde curls that were spread out across her pillowcase.
"When she was little, she used to tell me that she wanted to marry you," Elizabeth said softly to Henry, whose eyes were locked on his daughter's face.
A moment later, Elizabeth pulled the door back to its original position, and she gently tugged her husband from where he stood to the next door, which stood wide open already. Alison kept her bedroom door closed all day, but as soon as she went to flick her lights off and crawl into bed, the door would be pushed open as wide as it would go, because Alison had always liked to fall asleep to the sounds of her parents talking softly and laughing together.
"She told me once," Elizabeth began as she and Henry looked at their sleeping middle child, curled up in a ball around one of her many pillows, "that you were her hero."
Henry blinked once and a tear found its way down his cheek. Elizabeth moved again, pulling him with her, and they came to stand before Jason's closed bedroom door. Elizabeth turned the knob with a quiet click, and then pushed open the door, flooding their only son's bedroom with faint, but warm, light. Elizabeth squeezed Henry's hand lightly.
"Jason might adore you even more than the girls do," she said softly, and when her husband glanced at her inquisitively, she laughed lightly and shook her head as she gazed lovingly at their son, sleeping with his limbs tangled in the sheets and his navy blue comforter handing mostly off the side of the bed.
"He might not say as much," Elizabeth continued in the soft voice that she knew wouldn't wake her children, "but he does. I see it in the way he looks at you, henry. Like you're his world. You think he's been my kid through and through, but...he thinks the world of you."
Tears were streaming steadily down Henry's cheeks now as he watched Jason sleep. Elizabeth silently closed Jason's door again and looked over at Henry, tender love written all over her face.
"Henry," she said quietly as she reached out to brush her fingers lightly over his cheek and draw his gaze to hers. "You are right where you were always supposed to be," she told him, and there was something striking about the certain, even tone to her voice.
Henry silently reached out and pulled her close, wrapping Elizabeth up in his arms there in the hallway just outside their children's bedrooms. In that moment, a kind of peace settled over him and Henry McCord knew that his wife was right- he was right where he was supposed to be.