A/N: A rollercoaster, truly.

Hope you enjoy!

February 3, 2024 | Henry

He stares at her for a few moments longer before finally setting his book on the table beside him, folding the glasses that had been in his hands. He'd been playing with the arms for long enough, he was now afraid he'd break them—somewhere in his subconscious, at least, he was afraid of breaking them. It's certainly not in the forefront of his mind. He sets them down on top of the book, Hell and Other Destinations by Madeleine Albright, and sits up straighter.

She's watching his every move, following his hand down to his fingertips when he releases the glasses silently on the hard cover. His fingers feel naked without the warmth of the arms of the glasses between them to play with, pinching and wriggling them in a way of exuding his nervous energy. Why is he nervous?

He knew this conversation was a long time coming, that's why, probably. He had this conversation in his head a hundred times, but he never hoped for it to actually have to happen. Part of him hoped that things would just go back to normal, that they wouldn't have to address the way she ignores his touches, the way he shrugs his hands off her shoulders, or the way they have slept apart more than together for much of the past two years. He hoped that would all melt away into a category they labelled "Weird Times of Life" to look back on in their lives. Instead, he's staring at her, and she's floundering.

Her mouth opens, and he feels his body tense up even more. Suddenly aware of how tense he was prior to this tensing, he feels his mind tense up, too, if that's even possible. He scraps his tongue across his lips, trying to gauge when a good time to inhale might be. He doesn't want to interrupt her if she's going to ever talk; he doesn't want her to think he has something to say. He doesn't, he thinks. He's pretty sure he doesn't have things to say. How could he not have things to say if he's had this conversation in his head a hundred times? His head hurts.

"Say something, will you?" He finally blurt out, not of his own doing. It couldn't possibly be of his own doing, he's sure, because he'd never talk to her in that way. He'd never purposefully sound so cruel to her, and this sounded cruel. He didn't possibly feel this way toward her, right? No, he couldn't have snapped like that at his own will. Some outer force, something that he hasn't studied for years upon years, has pushed him into snapping at her hard enough to make her jump. He'd never scare her on purpose. He'd never.

But the way she was looking at him through her own glasses made him sad. She'd been sitting up now, her hands tucked within each other and tucked further into her lap. Her shoulders rested—well, rested isn't the right word—somewhere around her ears. Her hair surpassed her shoulders by far, and he knows by that measurement that her shoulders are probably touching her ears for her hair to come that far down on her arms.

Her mouth hangs open just slightly, and the expression on her face looks similar to that of a puppy who has been scolded for the first time. He's sprayed water on her from the bottle, he's patted her a little too hard on the bum with the shoe she's chewed up, he's snapped his fingers in her face and done his own version of growling to scold her for jumping up on him with all her paws. She's slinking away further and further while sitting there, yet also growing a heartier distrust and dislike for the hand that swatted at her.

"Henry…" she finally breathes, her lips not moving at all. He's been staring at them much too long, he'd know if her lips moved.

The sound makes him bring his eyes to hers, and they lock for a few moments. He's tired. She's tired. He sees the bags underneath her eyes, the way her left eye closes just slightly more than her right. A sure sign she's tired, too. His mind is brought back to September 13th, 2001, and when he noticed her left eye was barely open while her right was also drooping. He took note, then, that after eleven years of marriage, he'd never noticed how much more tired her left eye gets than her right. But after spending the last 52 hours of her life at Langley (with what he was sure was absolutely no sleep, and maybe not even any food), he finally noticed. Another note to store away in the "Elizabeth's Body" folder that's always fuller than the one labelled "Henry's Body." The latter folder looked starved compared to the fatness of the former folder. Every little thing over the past—at that point—eleven years had been stored in there. Now after thirty-four years of filing into that folder, he's made subcategories.

"Elizabeth's Body – Eyes"

"Elizabeth's Body – Fingers"

"Elizabeth's Body – Ears"

"Elizabeth's Body – Unmentionables"

"Elizabeth's Body – Sicknesses"

"Elizabeth's Body – Births and Pregnancies"

"Elizabeth's Body – Movements"

His just has "Henry's Body" and all the things stuffed in haphazardly, the corners crushed and some pages folded in half from the rush of it all. Hers are meticulously curated, carefully placed within the safety of the imaginary manilla paper.

Somewhere in his mind, little cells are working silently to pull out the "Movements" subfolder. It's sifting through and finding that the way she's opening her mouth and closing it means she's probably unsure of herself or that she doesn't know what to say. Maybe a little of both, the data says. The way her hands are tucked into her lap means she feels a little too small—he rarely sees her in this position. And when she is in this position, the remedy is to take her out of it by wrapping her in his arms.

But he doesn't feel like wrapping her in his arms.

And that revelation makes him feel sick to his stomach.

"I don't know what to say," she whispers.

I know, he thinks to himself. His eyes drop down to look at her knees protruding, her legs tucked up underneath the rest of her.

"What do you want me to say?"

The question surprises him. He looks up at her, studying her face—it looks the same as before. He's never told her what to say in her life unless she's asked for help, for guidance. Even then, she says her own thing.

Those few words confuse him to the point of making him want to tilt his head like a dog would, but he avoids it and avoids frowning, too. He's pretty sure he's kept his expression the same as it had been. "What do you mean, Elizabeth?" He asks. "You're never at a loss for words."

She lets out a breath that almost sounds like a laugh, or at least it would if it didn't also break his heart when she did it. "Out of all the important words I've had to think of—the Iran deal, the protocols for the War on Terror, the global trade agreements—I've never had as much on the line as I do right now." She whispers.

His eyes squint at her as she's talking, and he realizes she's about to cry, so he looks away from her. Instead of wrapping her in his arms, he rises to his feet and walks over to the bedroom door.

"Henry, where are you going?" She asks.

"Elizabeth," he snaps again, then softens when he hears how bristled that answer was. He leans against the frame of the door with his back facing her, his head droops down just slightly. "Why did you let it get to this?" He asks, "Why didn't you just…" He licks his lips for a moment and looks straight forward into the hall—the long, winding hall of the President's quarters in this daunting, overwhelming house with so much history. History that she's adding to in more than just the typical presidential ways—she's the first female to grace these halls as something more than FLOTUS. The first woman who isn't in charge of the Christmas trees that are installed each year, the first woman who isn't in charge of the meals for dinners, or the first woman who isn't in charge of the décor for the interior of their living room. He's in charge of it all. She's in charge of negotiating trade between China and The United States, monitoring wars between Russia and Ukraine, and weighing the heavy ethical decisions being made between Israel and Palestine.

Maybe he shouldn't have put her in charge of saving their marriage, too, but how could he take all the weight from it either?

February 3, 2024 | Elizabeth

If she had lasers coming from her eyes, they very well might put a hole through his body and straight into the walls in front of him as he is resting against the doorframe. Her upper body is cramping from being turned so awkwardly to look at him, but her lower half is in some sort of paralysis.

"Why didn't I just what, Henry?" She asks, no longer sounding quite as desperate, and instead a twinge of anger dripped from her voice. Is he accusing her of their marriage falling apart? Is he accusing her of not loving him? Is he accusing her of being the sole reason she can't remember when they had sex, and why that couple in her thoughts is haunting her and maybe only her?

She wonders: Is he being haunted by them, too? Over the years, she's wanted to be inside of his head so often. She's wanted to see how it works, how it functions in different circumstances. Is he always as steady as he looks on the outside? Is he actually buzzing like she is most of the time, and he just plays it cooler than she feels she does? After this long of being married to him, she thinks sometimes she can see inside his head a little, but nothing is concrete. It's never a clear vision in there, it's always hazy and sometimes a bit murky. Right now, though, whenever she tries to see inside his mind, she feels like she's running into a brick wall. And you can't see through a brick wall, either.

He's finally turning around, and the velocity in which he walks toward her simultaneously makes her want to cower and yet bow up and fight him. If it's a physical fight he wants, she'll fight. They've never been the physical fight-type except once, and they were young and stupid. This time, they have experience. They know better. And if she ends up with a bruised arm, she'll wear a long-sleeve shirt tomorrow so no one notices. He'll do the same. They won't air out their dirty laundry, even if things do take this turn for the worst and get physical.

But when he walks toward her, she instead cowers. He looks angry, but the worst part of it is that he looks angry at her. So she doesn't bow up, she tucks her hands further between her thighs until they're pressed deep into the mattress below her.

"Why didn't you just talk to me, Elizabeth?" He asks finally, standing at the foot of the bed, his thighs resting against the edge of it as his upper body leans over just slightly.

She rarely feels intimidated. She rarely even feels small. She remembers a time in grade school before her parents died, and there was a boy in her class who constantly bullied her. They were in the first grade—awfully young to already be bullied by anyone, let alone a boy who had no front teeth. When she'd gone home and told her dad about it, her dad told her to stand up for herself and fight back.

So she did.

"Little Lizzy!" Jeff bellowed at her from the slide.

She was at the bottom of the slide, and she knew he was going to hurl himself down that slippery metal thing to try to knock her feet out from under her. And without another moment to think about it, that's what he did. Soon she was laying on top of him and he was laughing, and so were the rest of the kids.

She felt a bubbling in her chest and jumped to her feet, waiting for him to stand up. When he got to both feet, brushing his knees off, that was when she decked him.

Her right hand reared back and with the force of a rocket, her knuckles met his shoulder. She knew she'd get in a lot of trouble if she went for his nose or his chin, but she figured maybe a shoulder wouldn't be so bad. But when he let out that blood-curdling wail, she knew she was going to be in big trouble no matter what. Especially when she saw the teachers running toward them.

But she just stood there, her fist still balled up and aching. "What happened?" Mrs. Trench asked, and Elizabeth huffed.

"Jeff threw himself down the slide at me again and tried to hurt me, so I punched him." She answered nonchalantly.

The way her teacher stared at her that day made her feel empowered somehow, at least until her teacher started belittling her about how girls should act.

"Elizabeth," Mrs. Trench had said in the bathroom, watching as Elizabeth cleaned her knees off. She'd gotten dirt all over them from when Jeff knocked her down. "Ladies are not supposed to act like that. Jeff just likes you, that's all. He wants to be your boyfriend, and that's how he shows how he likes you."

Elizabeth thought, then, that it was weird, too.

"You acted way out of line by punching him. Now he's not going to like you. If you don't lighten up and learn how to like boys back, you'll never find anyone, sweetie."

Elizabeth rubbed gently at her knee and felt as though she were hiding within herself. She didn't want to fight back with Mrs. Trench and let her know that her dad had told her to hit him, she didn't want her dad to get in trouble, too. So she just nodded, staying silent and never speaking about Jeff again, even though he consistently pulled her hair for the rest of the year. He did, however, stop trying to wipe her out on the playground, and she supposed that was good enough.

But then another time in the fifth grade, she and Will's class had the same recess times. The time she saw a boy picking on him, pushing his chest and trying to get him to fight, she decked another boy. This time, though, it was a third-grade boy, and she got in a lot of trouble. Her parents had to come to the school, her dad had to reprimand her at home, and her mom had just stayed silent through the whole thing. Later that week, her dad had told her how proud he was of her for sticking up for her brother, and Will even had thanked her by bringing her his cookie from dinner. They split it on her bed.

That day, she didn't feel small. She felt big and powerful and threatening. But here, right now, she feels like her Mrs. Trench had just gotten through telling her how ladies should act.

And it makes her feel angry, too, even though she feels small and not big enough to intimidate him, too, like he's doing to her. And the tears coming to her eyes aren't from being upset, they're hot tears, they're going to burn her face like boiling water as they stream down. They're going to be a sign of weakness when they should be taken as a sign to run.

But Henry knows her, too. He knows these aren't sad tears. So he stands up a little straighter, and she appreciates him no longer hovering over her. She untucks her feet from underneath her and slides to stand up off the bed, pulling the waistband of her pants up even though they hadn't slid down in the first place. A nervous habit, maybe.

"I've been a little busy, Henry, in case you haven't noticed." She says.

She hasn't bowed up, she hasn't hit him, but she's not going to be intimidated by him in the same way she was always intimidated by Mrs. Trench.

"Right," he huffs, trying to dismiss her words by turning around and heading to the door again.

She grabs his arm forcefully, tugging so that he turns around. He winces, and she glances down to see a bright red scratch on his arm. Though she knows it burns, she's glad, in a way, that he's feeling the burn like she's feeling in her cheeks. If she's going to burn from the inside out, he should also have to burn in some way. He looks like he needs to feel something anyway.

"Don't dismiss me, Henry." She seethes.

His head is tilted down from looking at her hand on his arm, but his eyes scan her body upward and meet her eyes, too. She wants him to say something. She wants him, even, to fight her. Punch me, she thinks wildly, just do it. Throw the first punch so I can do it, too.

But he doesn't.

And she won't make the mistake of throwing the first one—she's above that now. She has to be, after all, because she's the President of the United States. She remembers the remarks her own kids made about punching President Andrada as Secretary of State. She can only imagine what the press would say about it if they got their hands on this kind of story.

"You've dismissed me for the past—God," he pauses and laughs for a moment, shaking his head, "Two years? Let's just go with that number."

She swallows hard, relaxing her grip on his arm and sliding her fingers off. The breath feels like it's been vacuumed from her lungs, so she just tucks her arms around her body and walks over to the bathroom, wondering if she would need to throw up any second now. The way her stomach feels, she would. She isn't a vomiter, though, typically.

Two years? How could he have been feeling this way for this long? How could he have not said anything to her before now? He must've really cared a lot if he hadn't said anything this long, apparently. Apparently their relationship wasn't worth this talk anymore to him. The ache weighs on her chest so heavy that she physically gasps for air as she stands beside the sink, turned away completely from him and crumbling in on herself.

Two years. Two years is a long time.

"Happy birthday, Stevie girl!" Elizabeth cooed at her daughter, putting the tray on the high chair. Stevie was enamored with the balloon tied to her seat, though, and not at all with Elizabeth.

She'd twisted her lips at her daughter, and Henry had come up laughing behind her and scratching her shoulder with his fingers, "She's only two, babe." He whispered, "Balloons are way more exciting than mom right now."

"Only two?" She asked, thinking about how long these two years had been. "Only" didn't feel like the right word for it. But at the same time, these two years flew by. It seemed like just yesterday, cliché as it may sound, that she had found out and been terrified out of her mind about having a baby. Alone, of course, because Henry had been shipped off overseas, and she was sure his parting gift to her had been this baby. Now, this baby was two, and though the years dragged by, it seemed like it was going so fast that she couldn't grasp it all.

That anger bubbles back up inside of her, though, and as she stands in the bathroom, she begins to shake. A new feeling rises in her, too, and she rushes to the toilet and drops down painfully to her knees on the hard, cold tile, feeling the shocks of pain go through her knees to her femur to her hips, radiating through the rest of her body as she hurls into the bowl.

She can't see. These aren't the boiling hot tears, though, they are not burning her eyes as they bid their farewell to her. The contents in the bowl are blurry, but she knows there's some cereal in there—the smell is enough to tell her. A disgusting sugar smell that should be illegal to have to smell, truly. Milk, too, is mixed in. A curdled smell.

The olfactory sense makes her hurl again.

She groans as she pushes herself up from the toilet, and she turns to see Henry standing at the cabinet, grabbing a washrag. He extends his hand, and she looks at it for a moment, deciding whether or not she wanted to even take the rag from his hand. But when she feels her own bile dripping down her chin and onto her beloved, soft Frampton shirt, she grabs at it quickly and swipes at her face, dabbing her neck for good measure.

Her feet start moving toward the sink, and she rinses the rag out before rubbing it along the shirt, aware that he's watching her in the mirror.

"Elizabeth," he starts.

"No, Henry." She says, a bite coming back to her voice now that she's hurled and cried and gotten angry and been made to feel small. "It's all my fault. All of it. Every single thing." She says, scrubbing at her shirt, though the contents were long gone. It was just a giant wet spot that she was making bigger and bigger. "It's my fault for taking this job, it's my fault for not talking to you, it's my fault for agreeing to another four years. What else is my fault, Henry?" She asks, "Please inform me, because I need to know what else I've done so wrong to make you think I don't love you anymore."

This time, "Elizabeth" comes out as a growl. It makes her ears perk up. He's ready for a fight, she thinks for a fleeting moment, still rubbing the spot and staring at the darkened splotch.

I've done it, he's going to fight.

When she feels him come up beside her, she tenses, ready to fight him as long as he'll start it. But instead, he just touches her wrist, and she slams her hand down on the countertop with the washrag in it, forcing water to squirt out from it and make that spongey noise. "Henry!" She snaps.

"My point exactly," he says, his voice quiet as he looks into her eyes, dropping his hand from where it had been frozen in the air, where her wrist had been just moments ago.

She stares at him, looking in his right eye and then his left over and over, then watching as he closes them, disallowing her the little bit of access she almost had into his mind. In that moment, someone punched her in the stomach, she was sure of it. But it couldn't have been Henry, because he'd just been walking by her, brushing her on his way by with his shoulder. She shudders when he does and is left staring at the wall in front of her, wondering who the hell had the nerve to punch her that hard and then just leave.

When she finds the strength to turn around, she looks for him, but her eyes are met with an empty room. So she walks further out of the bathroom, turning the corner to find him getting dressed.

"Where are you going?" She asks pointedly, the affair question still searing in her mind.

He stops what he's doing, throwing his clothes down angrily on the floor. "Is it not enough for you to not talk to me?" He asks, "And then when you do talk to me, you're telling me every little thing I should or shouldn't be doing? Do you need to control every single aspect of what I do?"

"What?" She breathes, "What are you talking about?" Her mind, again, feels like it's spinning. She tries to not shut her eyes, but they do it against her will, and she has to bring her hand up to her head from the pain that shoots behind her brow.

When she hears him talking, she opens them again, "You reject every little thing I say, Elizabeth, yet you send me out on the campaign tour for you to go woo a bunch of people who are already obsessed with you anyway into voting for you." He's finally exploding, she can tell. "You won't let me touch you," the moment from just a minute ago replays in her mind on repeat now.

That couple who was initiating blissful sex in the mirror is now replaced by the image of the couple fighting, the image of her yanking her wrist away and the image of him looking heartbroken before he walks away. It's the same haunting, yet a different scene.

"And when you do, it's for photos only." He adds.

She thinks for a moment to the Christmas photos—the ones the White House does every year as the Christmas portraits. It was them, first, and then they had the kids come in, and Emmie wasn't being very cooperative at all. When Henry had leaned into Elizabeth that day as they waited for Stevie to corral Emmie back in, she'd leaned the other way and jumped in to help her daughter instead. But then the official portrait, the one where she's fitted in a deep red dress and him in a tuxedo and green plaid tie, came out beautiful.

A happy couple, everyone said.

A couple who's lasted, everyone said.

A couple who loves each other, everyone said.

A couple who's seen it all and stuck together, everyone said.

"And when I try to say anything to you," he goes on, and she cringes. She wonders if she physically cringed, too, or if it was just all her internal organs preparing themselves for the impact of whatever he's about to say. "You don't listen. I tried discussing the next four years with you, Elizabeth, back when we first started talking about re-election, because I wasn't sure it was going to be good for us. And then I brought it back up after Christmas, and you know what I ended up doing? I ended up taking Emmie to her nursery and I ended up sitting in the corner, in the darkest of dark, and crying. I didn't want to be loud, so I kept myself holed up in that nursery, knowing I would never wake our precious granddaughter. Did you come and check on me? No. I went to bed, and you came in hours later."

She's holding her breath as he talks because she feels those boiling tears again, she knows that if she breathes it'll allow them to stream down her cheeks and leave burn marks all the way down. Her fists are no longer balled, though, and her hands feel like they may even be shaking. "So it is all my fault," she whispers, swiping at her eye when she feels one starting to bubble over. She moves forward, pushing his shoulder with hers as she forces her way between him and the bed, but she's stopped abruptly.

Much in the same way she stopped him earlier—grabbing her arm, tugging hard enough to know he's angry.

"You're not getting out of this," he says to her, and she shudders again, but this time from having to hold those boiling hot tears in. "If you want to fight, Elizabeth, then let's fight."

She studies his face, wondering if she should ball her fists up again. If he's going to fight her, she's going to be ready. She won't be unsuspecting. When they were young and dumb, she's the one who hit him first, and though she knows she shouldn't have, she was willing to do it again at their old and not as dumb stage.

"Remember when you became Secretary," he starts, and it confuses her. Her mind had been so focused on a fight that she was ready for whatever came next, but she hadn't expected this to be what came next. "And you asked me one night—you said, 'We used to have sex more often.'" He says, and she frowns at him, knowing the exact moment, but still confused on where he was going. "And we went through the reasons you thought it might be because of. You thought it was because your new job, the power it gave you or whatever, and I insisted it's just because we got busy."

"What's your point, Henry?" She asks, her voice too shaky for her own liking.

"It's not just because we're busy, Elizabeth." He says sternly, "Not anymore. We're busy people, yeah, we're busier than we ever have been. But we've always made time for us. For us to be intimate." He says, "At this point, we're no different than roommates who see each other every so often."

"Roommates?" She breathes half-sarcastically. "That's what you're reducing us to?"

"That's what you've reduced us to, Elizabeth. I've tried so many times. Not just sex, either. I've tried holding your hand, I've tried talking to you before bed, I've tried…" he pauses and takes a breath, shaking his head. "But none of it got through to you. You became so…"

"I'm the President, Henry, I can't just stop working because it's inconvenient sometimes."

He scoffs and shakes his head, "I knew this conversation would end up like this." He whispers, and she wonders how he could've ever known that.

"Is it sex you want, Henry?" She seethes, and she shakes her arm free of him and rips her shirt off over her head angrily. With a toss, she throws it against his chest and lets it fall down between them. "Here! Have me!" She exclaims, her voice breaking as she starts to get louder, "I'm so sorry I haven't been offering my body to you enough. Take it."

"Will you just listen to me?" He shoots back, sounding much more desperate than she had at all that night.

She stares at him and looks down at her body, "Do you not want to have sex with me?"

"Of course I do." He says, then shakes his head, "But I want you to listen to me first because we've never just had…" he's searching for words, and she wonders what adjective he's looking for. Finally, she provides one to ease the awkward silence.

"Meaningless?"

"I guess," he whispers, "Meaningless sex has never…"

"Maybe it's time." She whispers, "Meaningless, stupid…" she offers, shaking her head and laughing as she feels the boiling tears again, so frustrated with them rearing their head constantly during this conversation they've dragged out. "And we go from there. Because obviously, you're harboring something about us not having sex and—"

"It's not just about sex!" He snaps.

She looks up at him and swallows thick, and without another sound, smart thought, she smashes her lips so hard into his that it shoots a pain through her mouth.

They'll end up with bruises one way or another, whether they ever throw a punch or not.