Chapter Text
Ash swirls overhead as he stills and exhales long into the night. He’s not still for long, though - he never is anymore. For there’s much work to be done, and he supposes there will be for some months to come. But it’s work that needs doing and there's people who need saving. So he does it. He does it, stitching wounds and amputating limbs and soothing the dying. There are so many of them. And he envies them, the dying. The dead. Because he’s never granted that much.
Never.
He moves toward the sound of a baby’s cry as the ash swirls around him and for a moment, he thinks himself dreaming. For he’s not heard a baby, a real, living, breathing baby in days. Weeks. Because they’ve not found any. He tilts his head to the side, wondering - is he dreaming? He doesn't know. But he walks towards the sound anyway, leaving his helmet on the back of the army truck before he steps between a weathered factory’s support beams.
And he stops short, then, breath leaving him in a rush when he sees what’s before him. A nurse stands some feet away, cradling a crying infant in her arms as though they were her own. She soothes them in an instant, and he can do nothing more than stand there, wide-eyed and slack-jawed.
Then she turns towards him, and time seems to freeze and slow as their gazes meet through the ash and the harsh light of the night. The world around him is a strange, ethereal blue tonight - as it always seems to be, when they’re looking for the living. The survivors.
But when she turns towards him, his world is wiped clean of all else. And for the tiniest of moments, she looks much the same; her lips part in wordless awe and her eyes seem to ask if they’ve met before. If she knows him.
Somehow, someway, he thinks she does.
“Are you a doctor?” She has eyes that whisper of the ocean and hair that speaks of the sun, and he knows not how to speak, how to breathe.
Someone sets off a signal flare in the distance, and the resounding thunder of noise behind him is enough to bring him out of his trance. He moves towards the nurse as she explains that someone found the infant in one of the camps, and that he appears to be in perfect health.
Henry takes the boy into his arms and she smiles up at him in the strange blue light of the night. He smiles at her, too, then. It’s been a month and a day since he last did that. And his smile only grows all the wider when he looks to the child in his arms.
That’s all it takes to reshape his world: Abigail and Abraham.
So it is. So it will be.