Prompt: It's not something that they've ever talked about, but when Henry appears to be on his deathbed, Elizabeth calls a priest for the Last Rites. (and then Henry recovers)

"Elizabeth?"

Henry had looked up from his cup of coffee and spoken her name aloud, and it had been all Elizabeth needed to know what was coming. The conversation she had been dreading for a week now, and they were right at the brink of it. She knew her husband, knew him better than she knew herself and better than she had ever known anyone else. She could tell even by this slight inclination in his voice, the caution there, the curisity, this combination of feelings, that he was about to ask her about The Incident.

She looked up at him, bracing herself, and he sighed. He knew her, too; there was as much silent communication between them right then as there was verbal, or maybe even more. He knew she didn't want to talk about it, in the same way that she knew he would have to bring it up sometime.

"You called a priest for me."

Henry's words fell over them, leaving in their wake the kind of silence Elizabeth had been dreading, and for just a moment she flashed back to those moments at his bedside.

Elizabeth held Henry's hand in hers, unconscious and still as it had been now for days. She didn't know what to do. The doctors were less hopeful every time they walked through the door, more stoic and seeming to her as if they were trying less every day. She thought she could have been imagining that part, maybe, that it was more her fear than anything else. But things were looking bleak for Henry, who had become very ill and had contracted one infection after the other since his initial admission to the hospital. Nothing was working the way it was supposed to. Nothing was treating him like it was meant to, none of the medications effective, nothing relieving the infection. He had been in so much pain earlier that week that they had needed to intubate him. There had simply been no other option. Elizabeth had stood in the hallway for that part, but watched through the blinds, a decision she regretted. It was too late to regret it now, though; it played like a horror movie against her eyelids every time she dared to close them.

She traced the lines of Henry's palm, as familiar to her as her own.

She had prayed.

This week, she had been praying. Not necessarily because she thought that it would work, but because she was so desperate. Too desperate not to at least try. Just in case it did help, somehow. Elizabeth wasn't sure what she believed, and rationally she wasn't sure that a miracle healing of her husband would even be enough to make her believe in God the way he did. But it was something. And if her prayers did help to keep Henry alive, she supposed that she might give religion a shot.

But so far, her prayers seemed to be doing nothing at all. That morning, one of the doctors had cautioned her that it might be time to make some considerations, that certain decisions could be on the horizon sooner rather than later.

And that was when it had occurred to Elizabeth to call a priest.

So she had. The priest had arrived in the evening, and Elizabeth stood in the corner feeling very alone as she watched him bend over her intubated, unconscious husband, praying and administering Last Rites. Elizabeth crossed her arms over her chest and looked closely at the way Henry's hair brushed his forehead. The priest didn't know that Henry hated having his hair like that; only Elizabeth knew. She thought, as she stood there in the corner of the room where she was sure she did not belong, how strange it was that she knew so many things about Henry, but that they had never discussed this.

Would Henry, a complicated man with a relationship to God and to religion that Elizabeth did not really understand, have wanted Last Rites administered before his death? Was she supposed to have called? Would he have wished for something else that she hadn't thought of at all?

She couldn't say.

And perhaps that was the most bitter thing about it all- that she would never know what Henry would have wanted her to do here, that she would carry these Last Rites in a way with her to her own someday grave. That she would be left to wonder.

Elizabeth was still thinking about it when alarms began to sound. She looked up and found Henry's monitors going off, his previously so still body convulsing and- for the fraction of a second before she and the priest had been pushed into the hallway- she would have sworn his eyes were open.

Now, a week later, with sunlight streaming into the McCord family kitchen, Elizabeth watched Henry brush his hair absently off of his forehead. She remembered it in the hospital, and wondered if she had actually prayed hard enough that it had something to do with his hand being there to brush his hair away once more. She'd spent the last seven days really trying not to think about it.

"I did call a priest," she admitted.

Henry studied her.

He'd come back from the brink of death somehow more in love with his wife, tasting the sweetness of a new lease on life with her.

She looked beautiful there in the morning sun, troubled blue eyes sparkling still.

"Why?" he asked her.

"Becuase..." Elizabeth trailed off, tilting her head back into the light as she gathered her thoughts.

"Because I didn't know what to do."

Henry was quiet.

"Did you want me to call a priest, Henry?" she asked after a moment of silence, dropping her had back to level, looking him in the eyes. She wondered how long it would take before the rush of utter relief went away, each time she looked at him and saw that he was alive and breathing.

"I don't know," Henry admitted.

That, Elizabeth thought, was the true irony of it all.

She got up and circled the table, drawing Henry's head against her body where he sat in the chair, and buried her fingers in the hair on the side of his head. He was warm against her, and when he brought his familiar hands up to circle one of her wrists and rest on her opposite elbow as her arms tangled around him, she could have cried at the sheer fortune of having him safe there with her. She lowered her head, and pressed a long kiss against the top of his crown. When she breathed in, it was no longer a faint sterile scent, but rather back to the long-familiar smell of his shampoo.

"I prayed for you, Henry," she whispered against him. His heart ached to free itself from the cage of his ribs but instead he leaned into her, tightening the hold he had on her arm, and closed his eyes.

"For you to wake up and come back home with me."

Her voice threatened to break.

"I love you," he breathed, and Elizabeth was struck for a moment by how much it sounded like a prayer, too.

"I love you," she said softly, her breath rustling his hair, lightened by age but still dark. And with plenty of time ahead of him to lighten.

Elizabeth ran her fingers through it and thought- her prayers might have been worth something after all.