A/N: thank you to everyone who has come back to reading my writing for this fandom after a long time away! I appreciate all of the reviews here and on collections from the mccord files so, so much. thank you thank you thank you!

The weekend was difficult.

Elizabeth had little to do other than wait. On Saturday evening, with no word from Henry, she reluctantly called his parents' house in Pittsburgh, hoping she might be able to suss out his location but knowing it could be a delicate balance. She couldn't outright ask his parents if they'd heard from him without making them aware that she didn't know where he was.

In the end, all of her strategizing was for nothing, because Henry himself answered the phone.

"Henry?" she asked.

"Elizabeth."

The sound of his voice hit her harder than she anticipated.

"Where have you been?" she asked, the words out of her mouth before she could even think.

"Uh, just at my parents' house," he answered. "Listen-"

"No, Henry, I-"

"Elizabeth, please," Henry insisted, and she fell silent. "I just- I'm sorry to have walked out like that, I just needed-"

He exhaled sharply.

"I just needed the weekend to get my thoughts straight," he told her. "I'll be back tomorrow evening."

Elizabeth's instinct was to argue, to insist that he explain, but there was something in his voice that stopped her. It was something soft, almost pleading. Elizabeth just didn't have the heart to argue with him when he sounded like that. She sighed.

"Okay," she breathed.

"Will you meet me at four in the park?" Henry asked.

"Four tomorrow?" Elizabeth asked.

"Yes." He hesitated, and then added, "Please."

Elizabeth paused, wrapping the phone cord around her fingers as she leaned against the wall and briefly closed her eyes. Henry was asking a lot of her- but she knew Henry, and trusted him implicitly, even now. Almost without her even noticing, Henry had cemented her trust in him to a virtually unshakeable point.

"Okay," she agreed again. "Henry, I-"

"Yeah?" he asked softly.

"I don't know what this is about, but I just…are you okay?"

On the other end of the phone, Henry closed his eyes, too.

"Yes," he answered. He didn't trust himself to say anything more.

"I'll see you tomorrow," Elizabeth said quietly. And then, before she could say anything else, she hung up the phone and leaned against the wall again.

It was just one more day, after all- or so she was trying to remind herself.

"Henry?"

Elizabeth had approached from the opposite direction, catching him off guard. He whirled around and his breath caught. In all of the chaos of the weekend, and the subsequent frantic planning and regret at his actions, he had almost failed to consider what he was actually doing.

Proposing marriage to Elizabeth Adams.

She looked beautiful, he thought a little bit wildly, with her hair down like that and the way her eyes somehow managed to be the exactly the color of the sky that served as a backdrop for- wait. The sky. Right. Henry checked his watch nervously, and Elizabeth raised her eyebrows in question as she drew even with him.

"Elizabeth," Henry breathed.

"Hi," she said. She watched him for a moment, and then, an echo of her words the day before: "Are you okay?"

Henry let out a breath and flashed her a nervous smile.

"I'm okay," he answered. "Listen, I'm really sorry for walking out like I did. I just- I needed to clear my head and I went about it all the wrong way, and I'm just-"

But Elizabeth's gaze was no longer on Henry, and she was squinting at something behind him, and Henry's heart leapt in his chest when he turned slowly to find that the skywriting- his grand gesture- seemed to be starting early.

"Is that a skywriter?" Elizabeth asked, and Henry was seized by a bizarre urge to either laugh or throw up; he wasn't sure which. Perhaps both.

"Yeah," he breathed. As they watched, Elizabeth in blatant, distracted curiosity and Henry in abject horror, letters appeared one after another in the sky.

"Mar?" Elizabeth asked. Henry took a risky glance at her, head tilted quizzically to the side as she tried to make sense of the message.

"Mar me," she read slowly. "Is someone trying to-" but she broke off as the plane continued to misspell the final word in the trifecta, leaving the message Mar Me, Elibet suspended in the sky.

"Elibet," she whispered, and Henry could practically hear the gears turning in her head as she whirled to face him. Henry looked hopelessly between Elizabeth and the total failure of a grand gesture that mocked him from its place in the sky.

"Henry," Elizabeth said slowly. "What's going on?"

"I hired a discount skywriter," Henry heard himself say as if from somewhere far away. Very quickly, this whole ordeal had spiraled from something only vaguely promising to a complete disaster. There was a moment of silence in which Henry assessed his options; at this juncture, everything was already falling apart and he couldn't see any other option, so he sunk slowly to one knee and pulled a blue velvet ring box from his pocket.

It was silent for another long, agonizing moment that had Henry seeing white. And then, like sunshine bursting through the clouds after a particularly fierce storm, Elizabeth began to laugh. She looked between Henry, on one knee in front of her, and the letters in the sky, and she laughed- openly, feely, because the whole situation couldn't have been more ridiculous or, despite everything, endearing, if it had tried.

"On our second date," Henry began through his fear and dry mouth, "you said that people weren't lining up to hire skywriters for you and I said- I said that they should be, and then we never said anything about it again but I always thought so. I always thought that you deserved to have your name written in the sky and- well-" he faltered, looking between her and the slowly fading, pathetic attempt at Elizabeth in the blue sky, but she had stopped laughing and when he looked back at her, he found that there was unabashed affection on her face and in her gaze. Heartened by that softness, he took a deep breath and continued.

"I think you deserve the world," he said. "And the skywriter may have been a complete disaster," he continued with a nod. "And," he admitted, "I really screwed up leaving you for even a minute, regardless of the reason but-" he paused, and took a breath. "But I am just hopelessly in love with you, Elizabeth Adams. I'm so crazy about you, and I want to spend the rest of my life ruining grand gestures and making you laugh like that. So...will you marry me?"

Elizabeth's breath caught at the words and she took another glance at the fading white letters in the sky, then looked back at the earnest, warm gaze of the man on one knee in front of her, and right then she remembered the conversation that Henry was talking about. The fleeting moment in the middle of conversation when she'd wondered to herself, is it worth it? And just then, looking at him looking at her, with the backdrop of what she was sure was the best thing anyone had ever done for her based on the sheer intention of it, Elizabeth knew the answer to both questions.

"Yes," she said aloud and watched the brilliant smile break over Henry's face. As he wrapped her up in his arms, Elizabeth decided then and there that she would never doubt the worth of a life with Henry McCord again.