Chapter Text
The air around him echoes with the collective hum of hundreds of voices chanting into the night around them as people, dozens upon dozens of them, march out into the streets. It’s been an age since he’d last done this, out protesting into the night like he had in his youth, but there are few causes that truly stirs his blood like this. And the murder of yet another young, unarmed and innocent black man is something that could not, and would not stand in his book - it never had back in the forties, fifties and sixties, and it sure as hell wouldn’t now.
His eyes begin to sting as the crowd moves down the block en masse, and he’s not sure if it’s from the smoke of a hundred lighters held high in the air or the pepper spray that coats his lungs and lingers in the night around him. And it’s strange, because he can hear an infant crying from somewhere behind him (or are they in front of him?) and he’s startled that he can even register the lone, tiny sound above the dim. But he’d been alive on this earth for far, far long enough to tell the sound of a baby’s cry from most anything else on this earth - and he’s sure that’s the sound that greets him now. That single noise rises to more of a shriek as the protest continues on, a huge mass of people marching, chanting, and even singing as they march down the block.
He’s just linked hands with the couple on either side of him, each bearing a raised sign in their hands, when he hears, rather than sees, a can of tear gas being thrown into the crowd. “Close your eyes, stay close to the ground!” He tries to caution those closest to him, but he’s moments too late. Then all descends into chaos as protestors are near blinded by the sting, eyes red and watering from the gas. And again, he hears an infant wailing, close to a tantrum as the smoke fills the air above the crowd. He follows the sound as best he can, eyes watering once more as he navigates the throng of people about him.
But then, he finds them at last: a mother and child, red-eyed and scared in the harsh red-blue-red-blue glare of the night. Some yards away, a police siren wails a warning call that there’s more to come, and the only thing he can think to ask is if they’ve met before, because he’s sure he knows her from somewhere before this moment. And the woman just shakes her head and asks if he’s a doctor, because she really needs a doctor. He nods his head and confirms that yes, miss, he’s been a doctor for a long, long time.
“I’m a trauma nurse and I just- I wanted to help. It’s in my blood.” She says by way of explanation, shock of it all making her ramble on as he nears closer and gingerly takes her child into his arms. “I knew it’d be rough out here, but dear God, I didn’t think they’d harm poor Abraham.”
“Abraham,” Henry echoes the name before he calls out to those nearest him, “I need a jug of milk, please! Little Abraham’s been blinded by the gas as well. Please, anyone!”
An older man with kind eyes and dark, dark skin hands him a jug of milk and says, “Mostly empty by now, but hope it’ll do” and Henry replies, “Oh, bless you!” before he attends to both mother and child.
It’s as he’s pouring the milk over said mother's red, tearing eyes that he learns her name is Abigail. Her hair is like starlight and her eyes, so much like the sea, even in the chaotic, harsh blue light of the arriving SWAT team. But some minutes later, both Abigail and Abraham’s eyes are cleared of tear-gas, and she's quick to embrace him in thank you. "Thank you, thank you, I don't know what I would've done had you not come along. I couldn't see a damned thing to help him, I would've been a mess at it."
"No, no, you don't have to thank me at all, Abigail." He says in what he hopes is a soothing tone, running a hand in circles 'round her back in an effort to calm her. Once she lets him go, he's almost surprised that he misses the contact - and he can't remember the last time someone embraced him. He says as much aloud and then adds in a bit of a deadpan attempt at humor, "Or, well, someone other than my odd, endearing assistant at the morgue, anyway."
That much earns him a smile, and it's a small but brilliant one all the same. It's some minutes more before Abe's cries and wails dwindle and soften into whimpers, and the racing beat of Henry's heart calms some knowing the boy's a bit more at ease. And although it’s been an age since Henry’s held an infant, he rocks the boy to sleep on his shoulder as easily as if he were his own. It’s almost funny, because it feels like Abraham is his own, and what a strange sense of deja-vu to have here, now, at the protested of an innocent, murdered man of all places...
“He’s not yet healed, I’m afraid, but this should do for now.” Henry says to Abigail once little Abraham's fast asleep.
“So it will, Doctor Morgan.” Abigail says in reply.
And she just smiles at Henry when he tries giving her her son back, murmuring something about how Abe’s a rather fussy thing, not one for his mother’s arms these days - or a nap, which he so desperately needs. So they walk on like that for a while together, just Henry, Abigail, and Abe, in a mess of people, pausing to help those who still need it as they walk on. When it comes time to face the SWAT team some hundred yards ahead, they do so together. They'd been but strangers some twenty minutes ago, but now they stand close as a united front, a unit. Though it's just the three of them stood together, Abigail has a fierce expression on her face that says she'd surely take the SWAT team on. And when she reaches for his hand in the harsh blue light of the night, he’s not one to turn her away.
Henry couldn’t turn her away, not even if he tried. For he thinks, these two became his family the second he saw them tonight. Or perhaps, they chose him and him alone all along, perhaps they knew he would come find them, help them. But either way, he’s theirs - Abigail’s and Abraham’s - tonight and forever after, so long as they’ll have him. And he soon finds that they will.