A/N: for the prompt 'frosting' from the march prompt list! alternately, a continuation of number 49 in this collection, cupcakes. You don't necessarily need to read that one to get this, but they go hand in hand.

In the light of the morning, Elizabeth's freshly baked chocolate cupcakes were resting on a wire baking rack that sat perched on the otherwise clean countertop. Henry had cleaned the dishes leftover from his wife's early morning baking endeavors, and left the cupcakes on the counter to cool.

"I'm going to take her up for a nap," Elizabeth said, crossing through the kitchen with a newly one-year-old Stevie in her arms. The baby cooed happily and reached out with her little hands for Henry as they passed by him in the space between the counter and the kitchen island. He chuckled lightly and caught up her baby fingers in his own, bringing them to his lips to kiss the dimpled knuckles.

"Go to sleep nicely for Mama, okay?" he cooed to her as she watched him with her big blue eyes. "You gotta be all rested up for your first birthday party, right?"

"Ha," Elizabeth scoffed. "There's not much chance of that, is there?"

She looked down at the baby as she spoke, her voice softening. She was right, though it held no malice; Stevie was not any bit a better sleeper now than she had been a year ago, when they had naively assumed the newborn phase of poor sleep would pass. Today, they were pretty much resigned to a lifetime of interrupted sleep and naptime struggling. Other than that, Stevie was mostly a very content baby, so they mostly considered themselves lucky that sleep was the one big obstacle.

"Good luck," he laughed as he turned his eyes back to Elizabeth, leaning in to kiss her cheek. "I'll be down here if you need anything."

"We got it," she said. "You're on frosting duty." She smiled, quick but warm, and then she and Stevie disappeared into the hallway and up the stairs, leaving Henry alone again.

He looked back at the cupcakes and thought of what Elizabeth had told him that morning, when the kitchen had been lit in the hazy light of daybreak. She didn't often speak about her parents or her childhood, and when she did it was usually a little passing tidbit which Henry clung to as a glimpse into the deepest parts of her that even he usually didn't see. When she was willing to reveal something more to him, something like what she had said this morning about her childhood birthday cakes, it always made him feel like he had experienced something sacred.

He reached out now and pressed his fingertips to the spongy top of one of the cupcakes. Finding it cooled under the pad of his fingers, he started to gather the ingredients for the frosting. Butter, sugar, pink food coloring. Henry was good in the kitchen, and he had taken up the mantle of making the birthday cakes in their house since his and Elizabeth's first year together, so the motions were practiced now. It was a good thing, too, because his thoughts were elsewhere this morning.

Primarily, they were with his daughter. It was hard to wrap his head around the thought that it had already been an entire year since she had come into the world, changing his life forever. Every day of this year had been something new, a challenge or experience that he had never considered or encountered before. Stevie, and fatherhood, had changed and stretched him. He was not and would never be the man he'd been before her.

Henry thought he was all the better for it.

As he creamed butter and sugar in the stand mixer and the whirring sound filled the otherwise quiet kitchen, Henry fought back the feeling of sadness that threatened in his chest. Elizabeth had spoken of her mother, who had made the birthday cakes in her house growing up, and Henry had seen in that a little sliver of himself. He thought of Stevie's little hand in his own, and could not imagine the pain it would be to leave her.

The family that they were building was spectacular, and Henry was boundlessly in love with his wife and daughter. But the reality of their jobs and their lives was that it could all disappear in an instant. Stevie- and any siblings she might have in the future- could all too easily end up right where Elizabeth was now, navigating grief through the haze of half-lit memories of the parents who were no longer here. Henry dripped three little drops of food coloring into the frosting that was coming together in his bowl, and his heart ached as he spun the paddle and watched it turn baby pink.

A year ago today, an impossibly small bundle of tiny fingers and toes had been handed delicately over to him, wrapped snugly in a baby pink blanket. Today, she was babbling and crawling and this evening she would smash this frosting into her face and their friends and family would laugh. He and Elizabeth would give her a bath together afterward, when it was just the three of them again.

Fatherhood and the lingering haze of grief were more intertwined than Henry quite cared to admit.

Elizabeth emerged from the hallway just as Henry was preparing to transfer the newly-made pink frosting into a bag so that he could pipe it onto the cupcakes. He looked up as she entered, pulled from his thoughts, and would swear that as soon as she stepped foot into the room, the air became somehow lighter.

"Hey," he said with a smile that he hoped was convincingly light. "Is she asleep already?"

"Yeah," Elizabeth answered. "We got lucky today."

"Nice of her to give us a gift on her birthday," he joked, and Elizabeth laughed, but she was watching him carefully anyway.

"Something on your mind?" she asked as she lifted herself onto the countertop and leaned forward; she swiped her finger lightly through the frosting in the bowl and grinned mischievously at him as she licked it off of her skin.

He smiled, and then sighed. As he gathered his thoughts, he started working on the cupcakes.

"I think I need to give up the Marines," he said.

The silence rang around them for a long moment. He glanced up at her, and found her looking thoughtful, but not entirely surprised.

"What makes you say that?" she asked quietly.

Henry watched as the frosting formed a top for another cupcake.

"I want to be sure that I'm here for her," he said softly. "As sure as I can be."

Elizabeth nodded her head, and Henry was struck with the knowledge that perhaps she had already reached this conclusion- that she was one step ahead of him, that she knew him so deeply and intimately that she had gotten there before he did.

"Okay," she said.

Henry finished the cupcakes, and stepped back next to Elizabeth, both of them looking at the array of desserts.

"Want to do the honors?" he asked, looking up at her and holding out a container of rainbow sprinkles. Elizabeth smiled, something warm and knowing in her eyes.

"Let's do it together," she said. She dumped a handful of the sprinkles into her palm, and then handed him the container. A moment of quiet later, each of them had decorated six cupcakes, and the round dozen sat perfectly on the countertop- a perfectly balanced team effort.