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When it comes to parenting, Alex has always been the one to take her outside and run around in the yard. He throws the baseball with her (because girls can like sports too, and she does actually… she’s been playing since tee ball). They play tag, and wrestle, and he can throw her so high that Henry nearly faints while yelling for him to knock it off. She loves it though.
Henry is by all means and purposes the ‘gentle parent’. He talks to her gently, he disciplines her gently, he even has a gentle, calming way of putting her to bed. For Alex, when it’s his night for bedtime, he usually just tires her out with playing so that by the time she’s out of the tub and in her pajamas she’s practically falling asleep already. With Henry he has a whole — meticulous — routine. She loves it though.
Both ways end the day with a happy, sleeping child, and that’s all that really matters anyway.
Like with every part of their lives they balance each other out.
Then King James fell, and broke his hip. He needed a replacement and it was going to be a pretty extensive surgery. Henry’s mom was being called back home from whatever corner of the world she had run off too, and Bea begged Henry to come at least for a little while so she didn’t have to deal with their mother’s antics alone.
They went back and forth on whether they should all go, but ultimately decided Henry would go by himself. School had just started, and she is not the best with big change, and they felt like having to get her readjusted to school again would be a bigger nightmare than Henry not being there for a week.
Henry suggested Alex try his routine on the days he would have been putting her to sleep, to keep her nights as close to normal as possible. But Alex’s eyes went crossed trying to understand which concoctions (and the correct amounts) Henry uses for bath time. He knew he wouldn’t be able to sit still long enough to brush through her hair more than just the amount of times it took to detangle it. Most importantly though, he absolutely sucks at bedtime stories… which have always been her favorite part of Henry’s routine.
The first few nights went by without a hitch. Alex’s back might have been killing him, and his calves burned worse than even the most intense leg day workout he’s ever done, but each night she would tire out and fall right to sleep like normal.
Until the fourth night.
Alex knew something was up when she began picking at her food; moving it around the plate more than into her mouth. “We had spaghetti at school, and Sara gave me hers because she doesn’t like spaghetti,” was her excuse for not being hungry.
“Well… alright…” Alex had said.
Henry called shortly after dinner. “When will you be home?” She asked sadly.
“Just a couple more nights, love,” Henry replied, and Alex’s heart ached as he watched his daughter deflate at the news.
💕
“What if we switch it up tonight,” Alex suggests.
“How so?” She asks, curiously.
“Well,” Alex says, lifting her up onto the counter beside the Cornetto’s box he bribed her with if they didn’t have to play tag. (Only after she had secured one did she let him in on the fact she wasn’t wanting to play anyway.) “I know I probably can’t do it quite like Daddy does, but how about we try bedtime his way this time.”
Her eyes light up. “Alright! Don’t worry, I can show you exactly how he does it!” She says excitedly bouncing in place and trying to finish off her ice cream as quickly as possible without a brain freeze.
Her idea of how Henry does it involves way too many bubbles in the bath, and Alex can only hope the amount of bath salts she added won’t dry out her skin.
Whatever she put on their faces hurt like hell being peeled off, but she insisted it’s because he was just being a baby about it.
A (near) panic attack nearly took him out when the round brush she told him that Henry used to define her curls… got momentarily stuck in them.
He felt more tired than all the nights he has been in charge of bedtime combined; but, as she snuggles herself into her bed, she looks satisfied with how everything went, so he supposes it was not a failed attempt.
He pulls the light robin's egg blue duvet up around her and kisses the top of her head. “But…what about my story?” She says softly, when he switches her lamp off.
The night had not been a failed attempt… yet.
“Wha— well— er, about that…”
“Oh, come on, you can’t be that bad at telling stories,” she says.
“Who said I was bad at telling stories?” Alex asks.
She bats those long lashes at him innocently; “No one.”
“Mhmm…” Alex turns his head so she doesn’t see his eyes roll as he sits back down on her bed. “Can we just do a story book?” He asks, hopeful she’ll agree. She only sighs. “Ok, ok, fine! ”
He thinks. It’s not that he has no imagination. It’s just coming up with something new on the spot that he struggles with; since he knows Henry has already gone through all the classics. And for Henry… it’s like he can just pull a story out of thin air— and then a thought comes to him.
“How about the Prince and the Peasant Boy?”
She scrunched up her face in thought. “Hmm, nope… I don’t think we’ve done that one.”
“Wait seriously!?” Alex is honestly a little shocked. “Ok. Then buckle-up, buttercup ‘cause this is a good one.” She grins up at him and settles more into her pillow resting her head against Alex’s side.
💕
“With every tug the boy made a space between the prince's armor and his heart, and in that space the prince's heart could beat freely once again.”
Alex looks down and her eyes are closed. He smiles, because not only can he not believe it actually worked… he can’t believe he remembered that whole story. He carefully unwraps her arm from around his and lays her down onto her pillow, pressing one last goodnight kiss into her dark curls.
“Did he ever get it off?” He hears through the darkness just as he is sneaking out of her room.
Dammit. He thinks. “What’s that?” He asks.
“The peasant boy,” she clarifies. “Did he ever get the last piece of armor off?”
“Oh. Well, yeah, eventually…”
“What happened when he got it off?”
Alex sighs. He thinks he really should have just insisted on a book. She’s already sitting up when he crosses the room and sits back on the side of her bed. He thinks back to the day after Henry told him that story. “The Prince panicked. He quickly covered his exposed heart with his hand, and he ran away.”
“Oh no!” She gasps, sitting up more and looking at Alex with her big doe eyes, waiting for him to continue. “Did the boy go after him?”
“Uhh… yeah. He called— I- I mean he sent him tons of letters. But the Prince was convinced that unless he did as the King had said and kept his heart hidden away he wouldn’t be safe, and he ignored them all. So… the boy stormed the Prince’s castle.”
Her eyes widen and she gasps. “He did?!”
“He did!”
“Did anyone try to stop him? Did he have to fight the King's knights?”
“Uh, sure, ” Alex says thinking of Shaan. While he’s never actually seen him in a fight… he wouldn’t doubt that he would likely have gotten his ass beat by the equerry if they had actually come to blows that night. “Anyway, he got into the castle and he marched up to the Prince’s room; and the Prince had already put his whole suit of armor back together, determined to keep himself fully guarded from even the boy this time. The only part that was missing was the piece to cover his heart; which the boy still had. The boy tried to tell the Prince they could find a way to show the people of the kingdom there was nothing wrong with the Prince’s exposed heart, but the Prince was too scared and asked the boy to give him back the piece. The boy refused. He said… uh— if the Prince wanted the piece he’d have to come and take it from him.”
“The Prince didn’t though, right?”
“The boy was afraid he might,” Alex admits. He was terrified when he told Henry to tell him to leave that he actually might. “The Prince looked at the piece of armor in the boy's hands for a long time. He looked down to the opening in his armor, knowing what was left unprotected inside. Then he walked over to the boy and he said he wanted to show him something.”
“What did he show him?!” She asks, seeming less tired with each second that passes.
“Slowly, piece by piece, he began taking off the armor. And when he removed the chest plate with the missing piece, the boy was able to fully see the Prince — heart and all — for the first time. The Prince was afraid even the boy wouldn’t care for him anymore after seeing how different he was, but the boy thought it only made him even more beautiful.”
“Then what happened…” she asks.
“Uh— And then they danced among the statues—”
“What statues?”
“I mean the trees…”
“They weren’t outside,” she laughs.
“They danced in the Prince's bedroom!” She giggles and doesn’t argue anymore. “The Prince said he’d try to be brave and show the people the real him, and when the boy tried to give him the piece of armor back before he left to travel back to his far away village, the Prince told him to keep it.”
“But then how will he protect his heart until—”
“Use your imagination Bug, cause mine is running out!” Alex sighs.
“Hmm, perhaps the boy gave him something of his to use to cover the spot.” A voice says from the door.
“Daddy?!” She gasps.
“Henry?!” Alex says at the same time. They both jump up and run to him.
She leaps into Henry’s waiting arms and he hugs her tight. “I missed you both so much I couldn’t possibly wait another night,” he explains. “Sorry for interrupting story time,” he adds with a grin.
Alex rolls his eyes, and laughs. “Papa was telling me about the Prince and the peasant boy,” she tells Henry, then she leans in and whispers, “but I think the story is really about you and him.”
“What?!” Alex gasps. “And you just let me struggle through all those analogies anyway…”
She shrugs and smiles innocently. “It was still a good story,”
“Well in that case I think we should finish it,” Henry says, adjusting her in his arms so he can carry her back to her bed.
💕
“So the Prince realized that the people of his Kingdom loved and accepted him just the way he was; no suit of armor needed to hide his heart,” Alex reaches over their just about asleep daughter to where Henry is laying on the other side of her, and laces their fingers together. “And since his heart could now beat freely he was finally able to confess his love for the devastatingly handsome peasant boy, who had waited so patiently for him to be able to do so.” Henry laughs. Between them there’s the softest of snores. “And they both lived happily ever after.”
💕
“I thought your bedtime story was beautiful,” Henry says once they successfully sneak out of her room and into their own.
“Yeah, well…” Alex scoots across the mattress until he is settled on Henry’s side, and has his Prince pulled into his arms. “I’m just so grateful it had a happy ending.” Henry smiles and brings a hand up to rest on Alex’s cheek. Alex covers Henry’s hand with his own and looks him deep in the eye to say; “And I’m so grateful you’re home, because I am never doing that routine again.”