New York City — July 1985

It was about to happen again.

Henry knew it was coming, but there was little he could do to stop it. The man sitting three stools down stood up, swayed slightly, walked behind him, and stopped. Henry heard the clink and tick of metal parts in motion, but he didn't bother turning. It wouldn't help. There was a moment of silence, and then the expected noise. Why was it always the same?

"If you love somebody…if you loooooove somebody…set them free..."

The swaying man sang the chorus with feeling and very little talent as he swerved his way from the jukebox back to his stool.

This was the fifth time in the last two hours he had paid a quarter to hear that wretched song. Henry barely had to glance up from his glass to read the man's story like a very predictable book. Male, mid-thirties, recently single after a long-term relationship, and not by choice. Not his choice, anyway. But enough about me, Henry thought.

As soon as the words formed in his head, disgust at his own self-pity was enough to propel him off his stool and out the door, leather bag in hand, a bill tossed on the bar to cover his tab.

He stepped onto the sidewalk and breathed in the warm air of a mid-July evening. The early twilight sky was glowing between the buildings of New York, and Henry sighed. Tomorrow was a work day; might as well call it a night and go home. He was usually willing to have one more drink, work week or no, but not tonight. Tonight the memories were too close to the surface, and wallowing there would leave him exposed. Tonight he was the last person who wanted a glimpse at the sorry state of his own life.

He took a moment to get oriented. This bar wasn't a regular haunt for him. His current job with a low-income clinic included occasional house calls, and his last call of the day had brought him to this neighborhood, then afterwards to the corner bar. It was just as well he was going home; the neighborhood was not the safest in the city, and his tailored suit and dangling watch fob would stick out like flashing neon to potential muggers. Doesn't belong! Doesn't belong! Doesn't belong!

He didn't need small-time felons to tell him that. He already knew.

Set them free…

A couple passed him on their way inside, eyeing the stranger loitering on the sidewalk. He heard strains of the swaying man's anthem continuing to echo through the half-empty space inside. Henry shook off his inertia, mentally located the nearest subway station, and started walking.

At last, that bloody song faded behind him entirely. If only he could outrun his ghosts so easily.

New York City — Four years earlier

"You are here for a reason, Henry—I have never stopped believing that. Do you think you'll find your true purpose by spending the next twenty years nursing me through old age, then twenty more crying over my grave? Do you think I want to spend the rest of my life playing the part of your aging grandmother? No. I couldn't bear it."

Henry shook his head like he was trying to shake off her words. Her too-familiar argument felt different this time, less like emotion and more like decision, and it terrified him. "Don't talk that way! You are perfectly healthy. Besides, I promised you 'in sickness and in health,' and I meant it. I thought you did as well. Till death us do part." His eyes were pleading, almost desperate. "Abigail, please don't do this."

She reached for his restless hands and held them. "I will always love you, Henry. Always. But darling, don't you see? Death began parting us years ago."

They were standing in front of the living room mantelpiece and the mirror above it. She turned to look at their reflections, and so did he. For a moment, he allowed himself to set aside the memory of youth and beauty he still saw when he looked at his wife, and he perceived what Abigail—and the rest of the world—saw: a woman who was aging. Aging gracefully, but aging nonetheless. Her skin was loosening and wrinkling; her movements were more careful and less effortless than before; her hair had already traded the last of its glowing blonde for stately grey.

Standing next to her he saw a young man with grey painted into his brown hair, and grey painted into a close-trimmed beard designed to obscure his young skin. His advancing years were nothing but stage dressing to anyone paying close attention, and his own carefully-designed façade suddenly struck Henry as garish and ridiculous.

It didn't matter that he was nearly 150 years older than his wife; as far as the world could see, he would never quite reach 35. And yet their son had just turned 36.

He dropped her hands and turned away, unable to face the mirror any longer. His family was slipping away from him, and he was powerless to stop it.

Henry was startled back to the present by a quick, shuffling sound coming from the alley he was about to walk past. He had seen the fortunes of New York City wax and wane over the decades, but here in 1985 the crime rate was nearly the worst in the country, and it paid to be aware of noises in alleyways.

He stopped abruptly at the corner of the building and waited, listening. He heard traffic behind him, a boom box blasting its rhythms from the next corner, and…breathing. Small, quick breathing echoed from just out of sight. Henry relaxed. He was not a large man or a fighter, but the creature in the alley was no threat to him.

He stepped into the gap between buildings and squinted into the darkening space. "Don't be afraid, I won't hurt you. See? I'm a doctor." He held up his leather bag. If he was wrong about the inhabitant of the alley, he was about to lose a good set of instruments.

He wasn't wrong. From behind a dumpster a small child stepped into view, and Henry caught his breath.

It was her.

"Would you still be saying this if we'd had another child?"

"Don't change the subject. This is not about our past, it's about your future!"

"How could it not be about the past?" he pressed. "Do you think I didn't hear you crying in your sleep years ago, and know it was my fault you never carried a child of your own?"

The tension in Abigail's face loosened slightly, and her gaze turned distant. "I still dream about her sometimes," she said wistfully. "Not because I blame you—I never blamed you—but she would have been so beautiful. So loved."

He picked up their fond old argument. "She? We might have had a boy."

Abigail smiled back sadly. "No. It would have been a little girl."

It's not her, he thought, and released the breath he was unconsciously holding. This wasn't the child who haunted him. On closer inspection, the girl staring up at him looked nearly as different from he and Abigail's unrealized daughter as she could be. She was four years old, five at the most, with straight dark hair, a thin face and skinned tomboy knees. Yet something reminded him of Abigail. Maybe it was the girl's bright, intelligent eyes, or the unflinching way she held his gaze, refusing to back down.

Then again, the resemblance probably had nothing to do with this child. Most things reminded him of Abigail these days.

His wife had not left on the night of their final argument, but it hadn't been long in coming. In her note she had asked him not to look for her, but of course he had anyway. Nine months of searching all over the world and not a trace, until halfway through his search of Eastern Europe he had finally admitted to himself that she didn't want to be found; not by him. She really was gone.

"Are you really a doctor?"

He blinked at the child's question and mentally kicked himself. Was it so hard to keep his mind in the present for five minutes? He knelt down to face her eye-to-eye. "Yes, I really am."

"Why do you sound like Channel 13?"

Henry smiled. God save public television. "Because I grew up in England. We all sound like this, more or less."

The child considered, then seemed to accept his explanation. Either that, or she decided to let the lie slide; with her inscrutable look, Henry wasn't sure.

He returned to her original question. "Why do you ask if I'm a doctor? Do you need help?" She didn't say anything, but he assessed her condition out of habit and found his answer. The skinned knees he had noticed in the shadows were in fact very freshly skinned. Patches on both legs were red and raw, tiny droplets of blood forming in some places, bits of gravel imbedded in others. Any thought he still harbored that she was a ghost sent to torment him vanished at the sight of her very flesh and blood problem.

"Oh dear, I see that you do require my services," he said, and he set down his bag to open it and reach inside.

The girl took an alarmed step back.

"Don't worry," Henry reassured. "No needles, no stitches. Just some anti-bacterial cream and bandages." He held up the materials as proof. "We'll have you patched up in no time."

She tentatively stepped forward again.

"What's your name?" he asked. She stared silently back. "I suppose your parents taught you not to give your name to strangers in alleys." More staring. "Quite right, too. Very well, I'll have to guess. I imagine you hurt your knees in a fight with a dragon, so I'd better call you George."

She gave him the age-old look of a child suffering a ridiculous adult. "That's silly."

He nodded. "True, but it's all I've got. It's a pleasure to meet you, George. You may call me Henry."

She didn't call him anything, but her suspicion had mostly turned to curiosity at this strange man from a strange place who talked about fighting dragons. Did they have dragons where he came from?

"If it wasn't dragons, then what happened?" he asked as he gently began to clean the tender skin of one knee.

"I fell."

"I see."

"I didn't cry," she added quickly, and the set of her mouth challenged him to claim otherwise.

"No, of course not," he confirmed. After a pause he added, "but would it be so bad if you did?"

"I bet you don't cry when you fall."

"Don't be so sure," he said.

He continued to patch her up in silence, each of them lost in their separate thoughts.

New York City — 1985, earlier that year

"Henry, are you all right?" His son asked him over dinner at their favorite Italian restaurant.

"What a question, Abraham. You know I'm always all right."

"No, you're always not dead. There's a difference."

Henry's pause acknowledged the point. "I'm fine."

Abe scrutinized him. "I know you're lying to me, but how much are you lying? Maureen and I are planning a trip to the continent, and I need to know whether I should pack for the weather in Budapest."

"Very funny."

Once Henry had admitted to himself that Abigail was gone, despair and loneliness had come crashing in and stopped him in his tracks—literally—halfway across the world. After a few months Abraham had finally come to retrieve his father, whom he had found in Budapest, pickling himself in Hungarian wine, and dragged him back to New York. It had taken Henry another six months to sober up. Although, who was he kidding; four years after she left and he still wasn't sober. But at least he was functional.

He tried to redirect the dinner conversation. "How are things with Maureen?"

"Oh, you know how it is with us. Things are fantastic, except when they're not."

Henry's tone turned more parental. "Don't take this the wrong way, but I'm still a bit surprised you two got married."

Abe chuckled. "Sometimes, you just go with the moment. Besides, at my age it was starting to feel like now or never."

Henry still couldn't quite believe it: Abe was forty. Not only was his son older than he was (or at least appeared to be), he had entered an entirely new decade of life. Abigail, wherever she was, was 65 and would always be 25 years older than their son.

If he was honest with himself, Henry was jealous of the way their perspective to each other stayed the same—mother and son, moving in parallel through time as they ought to—while he continued to stretch further away towards a vanishing point. Eventually his wife and son would both be gone, and he would remain unchanged. So why did it feel like he was the one who was vanishing?

This was why he had been hiding in bars and bottles, and sometimes in Budapest, for the last four years. If he was going to shrink to nothing, or watch his loved ones do the same, he would just as soon be anesthetized first.

Henry had cleaned and bandaged one knee and was starting on the other before she spoke again.

"Are you going to tell?"

He frowned as if seriously considering. "I don't know, George. Whom would I tell?"

She screwed up her face in distaste. "Tonio. He doesn't know this is my best hiding place." A thought suddenly sparked in her eyes, and he could practically see the cogs turning in her little brain. "If you don't tell Tonio where I am, I won't tell anyone that you smell like Pete's."

As he recalled, "Pete's" was the name over the bar he'd just left. Clever girl. He wouldn't fold that easily, though. "And just whom are you going to tell?" he challenged.

"Do you have a mommy?"

He assumed she meant wife. "No," he replied, then fell silent. Maybe he should elaborate for the child, assure her that mommies weren't so easily dismissed or lost. But he couldn't.

Remarkably, she didn't seem fazed. She tried again, probing for weakness. "Do you have kids?"

"Yes, I have a son."

"Then I'll tell him," she threatened. Her intensity told Henry it was not an idle threat. At least, it wouldn't be if she had any way of finding Abe and following through. George obviously had older siblings and experience with holding her own via threats, idle or otherwise. Some vague fatherly instinct gave him a twinge of pride at her resourcefulness.

Maybe that's why he was drawn to this fierce girl. Age-wise, she could be his daughter, if he were really the age he appeared to be. If Abigail were the age he appeared to be too. If she were still here. Suddenly this child was bearing the burden of his alternate life, his unreachable better life, and it wasn't fair to her. He forced the thought away.

Where were they? Ah, yes: little George was blackmailing him. He finished smoothing down the bandage just below her knee before looking up and saying, "Very well, it's a deal. We'll both forget what we've seen—or smelled—and go our separate ways." Henry held out his hand to shake on it. He half-expected the girl to spit in her palm first, but she merely returned the gesture, her grip firm.

Once the deal was sealed, she circled back in the conversation. "I don't have a mommy either." She wasn't looking for sympathy, merely stating a fact. Henry would swear that she shrugged at the admission. Did children shrug at this age? He couldn't remember.

"Who is Tonio?" he asked.

"My brother." The girl narrowed her eyes, suspicious at his sudden interest.

"Don't worry! I won't betray our deal." he assured. "But won't he be worried about you?"

The stubborn set returned to her chin. "It was my tooth. My money. Not his."

Ah, Henry realized, Tooth Fairy pay-out conflict. The United States created one fairy of its own, and of course she was a capitalist.

"It's starting to get dark," he pointed out. "Are you going to sleep in this alley? It doesn't smell very nice."

She didn't answer, but her nose crinkled. She couldn't argue with that.

"Let's face it, George," he sighed. "We both need to come out of hiding sooner or later." He pulled out his watch and flipped open the cover. She looked with curiosity at the old-fashioned timepiece, and he turned the face towards her. "See? I'm afraid it's time," he said gravely, clicking the watch closed with finality. "Are you ready to face your dragon?"

She looked at him like he was the child. "There's not a dragon. There's only my brother."

Ah, George. There's always a dragon. "Well, that is a relief. Surely you can handle a mere brother. Would you like me to walk you home?"

She shook her head. "No, I can go myself." She looked down at his medical handiwork and remembered her manners at last. "Thanks for fixing my knees."

He gave her a small gentlemanly bow. "Happy to be of service."

"Okay. Bye." With the lack of ceremony typical at her age, she turned and ran out of the alley, never looking back.

Henry watched her shrink as she ran two blocks down the sidewalk, up a set of front steps and into an apartment building. As quickly as she had appeared in his life, she vanished.

But she was no ghost, he assured himself, and she wasn't really gone. He had seen firsthand that even in a big city, it was still a small world. He might cross paths with George again in the future.

The future. A place where Abigail was absent, Abe was getting older, and he wasn't. Maybe it was time to take his own advice and face his dragons. After all, he couldn't stop his past life from gradually vanishing into history and memory, but today was still today, Abe was still here, and the next stage of his endless life was getting closer. He couldn't hide from it forever.

Maybe someday he would find that purpose that Abigail believed in so strongly. Maybe the future would offer him new people to love and trust, if he found the courage to love them back. For now, he simply stepped out of the shadows and continued on his way.

A/N: You know that thing you suspect is true about George? It is. I just decided not to say it. :)

Also, the swaying man's drunken breakup song is "If You Love Somebody Set Them Free" by Sting (1985).

Parts of this story and timeline will probably be jossed by the next episode, but oh well.

Thanks for reading! Thoughts?