Prompt: Patrick gets in Henry's head about his son's parenting, and Elizabeth is livid.

"Do we have the-"

Elizabeth held up the diaper bag.

"Yes," she answered, before Henry could get all of the words out of his mouth. He hesitated.

"What about-"

"The extra bottles? In the suitcase," Elizabeth answered promptly.

"But I think we forgot-" Henry started. Elizabeth shook her head, exhaling on a half-exasperated laugh as she shook her hair out of her face and looked up at her husband.

"We didn't," she said. She took a step toward him, and put her hand on his chest, her fingers spread out against his shirt, her palm over his heart.

"Henry," she said, her voice low and understanding with a soothing tone to it. He'd noticed it sneaking its way into her vernacular, one of a vast number of little ways in which Elizabeth had evolved as she became a mother. Sometimes, Henry felt as if she were an almost entirely new woman, and each time he noticed it, he felt a flutter of joy kindling in his chest at his good fortune to be witnessing this growth.

"What's this about?" she asked quietly, though she thought she already knew.

Henry shrugged his shoulders.

"I'm just nervous about traveling with her," he said. It was not an untruth, but he and Elizabeth both knew that it also wasn't quite the entirety of it, which definitely had more to do with the destination than the traveling itself.

Elizabeth looked over at their three-month-old daughter, who was sleeping peacefully in her car seat, her little fist wrapped around the blanket Henry had so carefully tucked in around her after buckling her in.

"She's fine," Elizabeth said. "Seems to me her dad is the one who's got a problem. Possibly," she added as she took another step closer to him, "because a five hour drive is the only thing standing between him and his dad?"

Henry sighed, and swept up Elizabeth's hand from his chest to kiss her knuckles. He smiled at her, tense but warm.

"You're too smart for your own good, Adams," he teased.

"You really gotta stop calling me that," she said brightly as she stepped away and reached for the diaper bag again. "You're going to confuse the baby about her mother's name. Give her a complex."

Henry laughed, and the tension that gnawed in his chest eased off a little bit, if only for a moment.

"Let's get going, then, McCord," he said, and they were on their way.

At the McCord house in Pittsburgh, everything went well at first.

Henry and Elizabeth, with baby Stevie in tow, arrived around lunchtime after a blissfully uneventful drive to Pennsylvania. Henry's parents were home, but his siblings were all out, leaving them time to settle in for Stevie's first visit to her grandparents' house.

"Oh, my goodness, let me see this beautiful granddaughter," Alice McCord cooed as Henry carried Stevie's car seat up the red-brick front steps into his childhood home and Elizabeth followed with the diaper bag over her shoulder. Henry's mother had been to Virginia to visit in the days after Stevie's birth, but it had been a whirlwind of activity and lots of visitors that did not allow for true family time. Plus, three months was plenty of change for a newborn, and there was a lot more to fawn over now.

Henry's mother, at least, was clearly intending to take every opportunity to do so. Henry left Stevie with Elizabeth in the living room and went back outside to bring in their other bags. In the meantime, Elizabeth unbuckled Stevie from her car seat and lifted her out, where she looked around curiously.

"Do you mind?" Alice asked, gesturing to the baby and clearly desperate to hold her granddaughter. Elizabeth smiled.

"Of course not, here," she said, and Alice took little Stevie into her arms, looking back at her husband who was hovering nearby.

"Patrick, isn't she beautiful?" she asked. Henry's father nodded his head, looking down at the baby in his wife's arms, and then back up at Elizabeth.

"Looks like her mother," he grunted.

"Thank you," Elizabeth said, and held back the accompanying I think that rose to her lips. It had been long enough now that she knew when to hold her tongue around Henry's family- or, more accurately, which members required it.

"She does," Alice agreed, and looked up with a smile for her daughter-in-law. "Beautiful, just like her mother."

"Thank you," Elizabeth said again, this time with more certainty and sincerity. For all of the gruffness that Henry's father radiated, his wife had exactly none of it. She was warm and kind and Elizabeth had always adored her just as much as Henry did.

Watching her with Stevie, she was sure their daughter would grow up to feel the same way.

The McCord house was filled up by dinnertime; Erin was the only McCord child still living in the house while she attended community college, but Shane lived nearby, as did Maureen and her husband. Seeing as Henry was the only McCord to move out of town, it was an event worth attending that he had brought his wife and new baby home to Pittsburgh, and all of them had shown up for a big, old-fashioned McCord family dinner- little Stevie's very first.

"Pretty soon, we're going to have to set a bigger table for these things," Henry's mother said cheerfully as she took her place at the table and smiled at Elizabeth, who was sitting to her left. Everyone else had already taken their seats, so the prayer was said and now they were digging in earnestly.

"Do you want green beans?" Elizabeth asked Henry, who nodded his head as she spooned them onto her own plate and turned toward his- currently, he was holding Stevie against his chest and Elizabeth was plating food for both of them, which had swiftly become part of their mealtime routine.

"Might have to start now on those chairs," Henry's father grumbled from the head of the table.

"What's that?" Alice asked him, unable to hear his low voice over the overlapping conversations and calls to pass the salt and pepper that were taking place around the table.

"I said," Patrick started again, louder, "that we might have to start now on extra chairs."

As he spoke, he jerked his head in Henry's direction. His raised voice had caught everyone's attention, and the lively chatter had died down, leaving only unsettling quiet as most of the table glanced between Patrick and Henry.

"What do you mean, Dad?" Henry asked. He sounded casual enough, to the untrained ear. But to Elizabeth, he sounded very strained.

"You haven't put that baby down all day is all," Patrick replied, not looking at Henry as he spoke. "Gonna ruin her before she's even crawling."

Quite suddenly, Elizabeth felt like her ears were ringing.

"Ruin her?" Henry repeated incredulously. The tension in his voice was not hidden from anyone now, and it spread across the table, rippling like tangible fabric over the whole room.

Patrick shrugged.

"I'm just saying," he said.

"Saying what, exactly?" Henry asked sharply.

"Kid needs a strong father, Hank," Patrick said with a half-shrug that spoke volumes.

The ringing in Elizabeth's ears was rising to a fever pitch, and Henry was looking at the floor like it was all he could stand to cast his eyes on.

"Okay," Henry said quietly. "Elizabeth, will you hand me a roll?"

"No," Elizabeth answered, surprising everyone, including herself.

"What?" Henry asked, finally breaking his long eye contact with the shag carpeting to look up at her.

"No," she repeated, but she was not looking at Henry. Her eyes were fixed on Patrick, blazing with something that Henry could not quite identify.

"What do you mean when you say strong father?" she asked. Her voice was very even, and that was perhaps what scared Henry about it the most.

Patrick scoffed, shaking his head.

"Some nerve questioning me like that in my own damn house," he grumbled, but Elizabeth was shaking her head before he had even finished.

"Some nerve accusing us of…coddling a three month old," she shot back. "She's a baby. She needs to be held."

Patrick just shrugged, and everyone else was looking very uncomfortable, but now that Elizabeth had started, she could not find it in her to stop.

"If you want to talk about strong fathers," she started, bracing her hand on Henry's leg as she pivoted to speak directly to Patrick, "Henry is spectacular at being a dad to Stevie. Up half the night with her, reads all the books, changing more than his share of the diapers only because he likes the time with her. Hell," she added, shaking her head, "Henry knows more about monthly milestones and- and feeding charts than I do."

Her eyes had not left her father-in-law, even though he was not looking back at her.

"Henry is all in on parenting," she said, gesturing to her husband and the baby nestled on his chest. "It doesn't get any stronger than this."

Elizabeth had not realized, but her voice had been rising as she spoke, and now reached a volume loud enough to disturb her daughter, who had perhaps never heard a raised voice in her young life.

Now, she began to cry and flail against Henry's chest, and snapped Elizabeth out of her anger-induced trance.

But she didn't even have a chance to reach for the baby.

"It's okay," Henry was murmuring against Stevie's soft tufts of blonde hair. "You're okay, shh. Daddy's got you."

And just like that, Stevie was calm again; as usual, all she'd needed was Henry's reassurance.

Elizabeth didn't call him the Stevie Whisperer for nothing.

"Patrick," Alice's warning tone came from the other end of the table, and they all looked over to find her dark eyes on him, serious and insistent.

"Sorry, Hank," Patrick said. "And you, Elizabeth."

A moment passed in tense silence, and then the chatter slowly picked up again as everyone tried to gloss over the whole thing.

But Henry was not interested in glossing over it entirely; he leaned in toward Elizabeth, and pressed his lips to her cheek in a kind of quiet gratitude that she understood innately. She smiled slightly at him and reached out, offering to take the baby.

"You should eat," she said. "I can take her."

Henry glanced down at his daughter, where she was looking curiously up at him, and smiled back at Elizabeth.

"You go ahead," he said quietly. "Think I'll stick with her a few more minutes."

Elizabeth nodded, and leaned in until she was face to face with her baby.

"See, Stevie?" she whispered. "There is never, ever a dull moment with the McCords. That's baptism by fire, kid."

Henry laughed, not caring that he was the only one who could hear her, and just like that, the tension ebbed away and, for another moment, everything was okay again.