A/N: hello! some of you might remember this story, given that I started it back in 2018 but gave it up. this re-publication of it has been edited and some parts have been rewritten, in addition to continuing where I left off, so I'm starting over with chapter 1. It will span from Henry and Elizabeth's first meeting all the way through at least the duration of the canon material, and possibly past that, in chronological order. Some parts are brand-new writing, and others are pulled from my series of one-shots, Collections From The McCord Files- so if something is familiar to you, it's probably an edited version of a previous one-shot! It's long been on my mind that I wanted to finish this fic, so I'm very happy to be bringing it back :) please let me know what you think, here as well as on tumblr (cassandramccord)
Elizabeth Adams drew her jacket a little bit more closely around herself. She glanced up at the October Virginia sky above her, an expanse of grey clouds and swirling mist in the mid-morning air, frosty with the bite of autumn, and she smiled slightly. She wrapped her slender fingers around the strap of her backpack as she walked, her worn white tennis shoes beating a steady pattern against the sidewalk as she took a deep breath. Elizabeth loved this time of year, when the air was cooling and the leaves on the trees had turned various shades of red and orange. She reveled in the way the cool air filled her lungs and lent a slight burning sensation to her chest, filling her with the scent of moss and wet leaves. This was the first truly cold morning of the season, and it was a little early for it, much to Elizabeth's delight. She was in a good mood- mostly thanks to the weather, she thought, but also thanks to the fact that her morning class had been canceled, leaving Elizabeth with time to get coffee. Reluctant to leave the cool air, but driven by thoughts of the coffee she was about to indulge in, Elizabeth ducked into the campus coffee shop. It was frequented by many members of the student body, and this morning was no different. Elizabeth smiled slightly at the scent of coffee and stale pastry. It was more or less the only place to get a good cup of coffee on campus, but the size didn't reflect the demand. The crammed booths were outfitted with cheap material and the grimy tile floor was often sticky, though with what Elizabeth was never sure. She didn't care, though. It felt homey to her, with the beaten wooden counter and the warm lighting.
She rarely got the chance to do this. Elizabeth was driven, and her course schedule was hefty. She could handle it, easily even, but she had to admit that sometimes it was nice to get away from it all. She looked down at the cheap, waterproof wristwatch that was peeking out from underneath the sleeve of her jacket, happy to find that there was still plenty of time before her next class. She ordered her coffee politely- just with cream- and leaned against the counter while she was waiting.
Unbeknownst to Elizabeth, a young man with thick, dark brown curls and hazel eyes that sparkled in the light was sitting in the corner booth, books spread out on the surface before him. A religion studies major, Henry McCord hated cold weather and had taken refuge in the coffee shop. A mug of black coffee that had already gone mostly cold was sitting in front of him, safely out of the way of his scribbling. He was doing a paper on the effect of the protestant reformation on the generations that had come after it, a topic that Henry was particularly passionate about. He was so busy making notes and flipping pages that he had failed to notice the pretty blonde when she first walked in; now, she was standing, waiting, right next to his booth.
The first thing that Henry noticed about Elizabeth was the way she carried herself- with confidence in her ragged boyfriend jeans and light sweatshirt underneath her warm-looking baseball jacket. The second thing that Henry noticed about Elizabeth was her eyes, which were ocean blue and warm, an incredible combination that made him want to look at them for as long as she'd let him.
The first thing that Elizabeth noticed about Henry was that he was taking up most of the only table that had any space at it in the entire shop, which also happened to be the table she sat at every time she went there.
"Hi," she said when the guy at the table just looked at her.
"Hi," Henry answered, sounding vaguely confused.
"Can I sit here?" she asked. Henry looked around instinctively at the other booths and the counter. Finding every other seat in the place full, he put two and two together and nodded, gesturing to the seat across from him. He realized suddenly that his stuff was spread all across the table and hastily started to collect the books, his movements almost frantic and a little uncoordinated. Just as Elizabeth sat down, she caught a glimpse of his hand, headed right for his coffee cup. She snatched it up with her own hand, and his narrowly missed it.
"Oh," he said, and she smiled slightly at the blush in his cheeks. Elizabeth laughed and handed it back to him, noting that it was cold. "Sorry about that."
Elizabeth shook her head, still smiling.
"I'm Elizabeth Adams," she said, holding out her hand to him. He looked up, met her gaze, and smiled at her in a way that lit up his warm hazel eyes.
"Henry," he said, taking her hand to shake it. "Henry McCord."
"Henry McCord," she repeated. "Sorry to crash what I assume is studying?"
"Yeah, it is," he confirmed. "But it's fine- that you crashed, I mean. Not that you were really crashing exactly, since there are…" Henry sighed, shaking his head at his own stumbling words. Elizabeth, to his relief, laughed good-naturedly.
"I get the gist," she said kindly.
"I'm usually not this bad," he laughed. "Typically a little more capable of human speech."
Elizabeth laughed, tilting her head slightly as she watched him. There was something interesting about this guy. She was drawn to him, somehow, in a way that surprised her. She'd had a boyfriend in high school and another the summer before starting college, but since she'd started at UVA, Elizabeth had gone on a grand total of one date, which had been lackluster to say the least. Already, five minutes after meeting him, Elizabeth could feel more of a spark with Henry than she had with that guy- although she thought perhaps that said more about the other guy than Henry.
"Want to prove it?" she asked before she could talk herself out of it.
"What?" Henry asked, sounding more than a little surprised. Elizabeth grinned and gestured to his cold coffee.
"Maybe if you get some fresh coffee and sit here with me for a while, you could prove you're typically more capable of human speech," she replied, and Henry, after a beat of silence in which he wondered whether she was actually asking him to stay and talk with her, nodded his head.
"Unless you have to study," Elizabeth amended, but Henry shook his head, smiling brightly at her.
"It can wait," he replied, and then he was sliding out of the booth, reaching across the table for his coffee cup. "I'll be right back," he told her, and Elizabeth nodded, turning her head to watch him walk away. When Henry had gone, she leaned over the table and looked at the materials that Henry had piled messily on his side of the table in his haste to make room for her. A quick look over the titles told her that it was a religion paper, one that looked interesting. She read Henry's scrawled notes and smiled to herself- he certainly seemed much more eloquent on paper than he'd been face-to-face with her just then. No sooner had she settled back in her seat had Henry returned, his coffee mug now steaming with fresh, dark coffee. He smiled at her again and it made Elizabeth smile too, reflexive and unthinking.
"Looks interesting," Elizabeth remarked, nodding her head at the papers she'd just been looking at. Henry nodded as he sat down.
"I think so," he agreed. "But I'm a religious studies major, so I think I'm required to think that."
"Only if you like your major," Elizabeth replied with a wry smile. Henry laughed.
"I love it," he replied, and Elizabeth met his eyes across the table, her own sparkling knowingly.
"The things we love tell us what we are," she recited. "That's-"
"Aquinas," they finished at the same time. And in that moment, with the pretty blonde named Elizabeth quoting Aquinas at him in the coffee shop, Henry McCord knew that he'd already started to fall.
"No, sir, I really think you've made a mistake."
Henry McCord was sitting in his too-small desk at the back of a large lecture, watching the exchange happening at the front of the classroom with both interest and amusement. Elizabeth Adams had gotten into it for the third time this week with the guest lecturer of the advanced mathematics course he was taking, and if his predictions were correct, she would be winning for the third time this week. Their usual professor was very good, but she had taken vacation and left them in the somewhat more clumsy hands of a colleague.
Henry watched Elizabeth shift in her seat and thought back to the coffee shop, and remembered Elizabeth standing next to his booth, and wondered how he had never really noticed her before then. That morning, Henry had left the coffee shop that morning with a warmth inside him that the cold weather had been unable to touch. After nearly an hour and a half of what could only be described as scintillating conversation with Elizabeth, she had written her phone number on the back of his hand and left with a dazzling smile. Henry had been walking on air ever since, frequently looking down at the fading ink on his hand and thinking back to the ninety minutes he'd spent across the table from Elizabeth. He'd transferred her number very carefully to a slip of paper that was still resting on the surface of his desk in his tiny apartment, with "Elizabeth Adams" printed neatly above the numbers.
He'd yet to use it, only because his classes had been packed with exams in the days since they had met, but he had lost count of the number of times he read it to himself when he should have been studying.
"Ms. Adams," the professor began now, sounding stressed, "I beg of you to just remain quiet during the lecture portion of my lessons."
"Well, I would," Elizabeth answered, "but your equation is incorrect."
"God, I wish she'd shut up," muttered the guy who sat behind Henry, clearly expecting Henry to reciprocate the same emotion. Henry looked over at him, face impassive.
"Why do you want her to shut up?" he whispered.
The answer came from a different classmate, a redheaded girl to his left.
"Because she's weird."
Henry stared at her for a moment, and then let his eyes wander back to Elizabeth, who by that point was in the heat of an impassioned debate with the professor. She impatiently brushed a strand of her hair away from her face, leaning forward over her desk. He smiled slightly to himself. Henry didn't think Elizabeth was weird at all; in fact, he thought she just might be the most interesting and delightful person he'd ever met.
"Who cares that much about math?" muttered the guy who was sitting on Henry's left. Henry smiled as he watched the professor start to question his math under Elizabeth's scrutiny.
"Only the most passionate people," he murmured in response.
"Hey, Elizabeth!"
She turned as she walked down the hallway, surprised to hear her name. To her knowledge, there was no one in this course that she knew, and probably the same number of people who liked her. But her eyes found Henry McCord weaving through the crowd to catch up to her and she smiled slightly, remembering their last meeting. In the throng of people moving from class to class, she paused to let him get there, and then started to walk again, with him falling in step beside her.
"Hi, Henry," she said, glancing back at the hall they had just left. "I didn't know you were in this class."
"I didn't know you were," he replied. "At least, until this week."
Elizabeth laughed lightly, shrugging her shoulders.
"He should know when he's wrong," she said, and somehow came across warm and not too harsh.
"Did you know people think you're weird?" Henry asked suddenly. Elizabeth paused with a short laugh.
"Yes, of course," she answered. "Kind of hard not to notice you all whispering every time I correct Professor Dumbo back there."
Henry couldn't help but laugh as they stopped, stepping aside to stand by the wall as the throng of students continued past them.
"He does have big ears," he conceded, and past the curtain of her blonde hair, he saw a dimple in her cheek as her smile widened.
"I wasn't saying you were weird," he said after a beat of silence. She glanced over at him inquisitively.
"What?"
"I wasn't saying you were weird," Henry repeated, leaning against the wall next to her. He tilted his head, meeting her blue eyes.
"No?" she asked. He shook his head.
"I'm not gonna ask you what you were saying," Elizabeth stated.
"Well, I'm gonna tell you anyway," he said.
"Of course you are." Elizabeth didn't sound surprised at all.
"I was just saying that you're passionate," he told her honestly. "I don't think you're weird at all. I think you're fascinating."
Elizabeth laughed, shaking her head slightly.
"Does that usually work for you?" she asked.
"What's that?"
"Telling girls you don't think they're weird to get them to go out with you," she retorted.
Henry shrugged, but his heart was beating fast beneath the layers of his jacket and shirt.
"Never tried it before," he said. "Is it working now?"
Elizabeth studied him for a moment, looking him quickly up and down, and flashing a quick but bright smile at him.
"You can come with me to the library if you want," she said finally, leaving a grinning Henry to push off the wall and follow her, the two of them falling once again into step side by side.