This is Now

by ScoobieD

Summary: This is the sequel to That was Then. If you
haven’t read that, it would probably be helpful if you
did.

Rating:  G

Disclaimer: Still not mine.

Feedback is always welcome at dcamp@wheelerandarey.com

************

One Friday afternoon at JAG . . .

Mac looked at her desk, proud of the progress she’d
made in cleaning it off. Not that it was exactly
*cleaned off*. Her desk never actually reached that
point. But it was better than it had been this
morning. She could actually *see* her desk in two
places, and she was relieved to know that there was a
desk under there and that all of these files weren’t
simply hovering over the floor. In another forty-two
minutes, she’d cease to care about what was on her
desk when she headed home to . . .

*To what*? Mac asked herself. *What exciting
activities have I got planned for this weekend? Well,
there’s laundry that needs to be done. I think I’ll
run the car through the car wash. That should be good
for a few laughs. I could clean out that closet I’ve
been ignoring since I moved to my apartment. That’s
it!*" she thought, still filled with the motivation
that had allowed her to get her desk as organized as
it was. *"I’ll clean that closet out! I’ll do it
tonight and get it over with!"* 

"How pathetic is that?" she asked herself out loud,
wondering about anybody who could get so excited about
cleaning out a closet.

"How pathetic is what?" a familiar voice asked from
the door. 

"Harm! I didn’t know you were standing there," Mac
said, a bit embarrassed at being caught talking to
herself. Another sign she was losing it, she guessed.

"What’s so pathetic?" he repeated.

"Me. I was just sitting here thinking about what I’m
doing this weekend."

"I’d hazard a guess and say nothing very exciting?" he
asked, coming into her office and dropping into a
chair in front of her desk.

"You’d be right on target," she confirmed. "I’ve
decided to clean out my closet."

"Maybe you should stay here and clean off your desk."

"Hey!" she said, indignant. "What do you think I’ve
been doing all day?!" 

"That would be hard to say," Harm said with a serious
face.

"Isn’t it time for you to leave early?" she asked
pointedly.

"Me? Leave early? I’d never dream of leaving early,"
he said piously. Besides, what did he have to go home
to? His weekend didn’t look any more promising than
Mac’s apparently did. Suddenly struck by inspiration,
he said, "You want any help with that closet?"

She tilted her head and looked at him questioningly.
"You want to help me clean out my closet?"

"It’s either that or clean the tile in my bathroom."

"God, you’re as pathetic as I am!" she said with a
smile.

"So what do you say? We’ll tackle it together?"

She looked at him dubiously. "I suppose so," she
agreed. "If you really want to. I’m starting tonight.
I suppose that means I’ll have to help you with the
tile in your bathroom."

"I’ll bring supper."

*************

Mac had changed into jeans and a t-shirt in
preparation for the dusty job ahead of her. She opened
her closet door and looked at the chaos within. Where
to start? That decision was interrupted by a knock on
the door. "Come on in!" she called. "It’s open!"

Instead of the door opening, she heard what sounded
like a foot kicking her door gently. Puzzled, Mac went
to the door and looked through the peephole. All she
could see was Harm’s face looking at her.

She opened the door to find Harm with his hands filled
with a large pizza box and a brown paper bag. His car
keys were in his mouth.

"Here," she said. "Let me take those." She reached up,
and he opened his mouth and dropped the car keys into
her hand. She also took the brown paper bag, then
closed the door after Harm entered.

"Did you get the biggest pizza they had?" she asked.

"I’ve seen you eat," Harm said in justification.

Harm set the pizza on the table as Mac emptied the bag
of its contents – four root beers (her favorite brand)
and a bag of potato chips. "These things cause cancer,
you know," she said, holding up the bag.

"Everything causes cancer," he told her. "Might as
well die happy."

Mac couldn’t agree more.

After dinner, Harm said, "So where do we start?"

"I was just trying to figure that out when you got
here." She led him into the bedroom, and he looked
skeptically at her closet. "I never knew you were a
pack rat, Mac."

"I’m not, really," she said. "It’s just stuff that’s
accumulated. When I moved, I didn’t even bother to
open most of those boxes. It’s probably all garbage.
Why don’t you take that trunk and start with that?" 

Harm pulled the trunk out of the closet into the
middle of her bedroom floor. Mac began to remove
smaller boxes which were piled on the shelf.

"What do you want me to do with this?" Harm asked.

"Just dump it out. I’ll have to sort through it."

"Okay," Harm said. He opened the lid of the trunk and
flipped it over, spilling its contents over the floor.

"You’re making things worse," Mac told him.

"You told me to dump it out! Besides, sometimes you
have to make a mess to clean something up. Your office
is living proof of that."

"Did you come here to help me or to harass me?"

Harm toed the stuff that had fallen out of the trunk
gingerly. It looked like mostly old clothing. "What is
this stuff?"

Mac looked over from her spot in the closet. "Looks
like old clothes." The two boxes Mac was trying to get
off the shelf in the closet had become stuck, and she
gave a big tug. The top box began to slide off the
bottom one, making straight for Mac’s head.

Harm zipped over and grabbed the box before it could
do any permanent damage. "Haven’t you Marines ever
heard the word finesse?" he asked.

"Doesn’t that mean ‘you can accomplish anything with
brute force’?" Mac asked innocently.

Harm rolled his eyes at her and put the box on the
floor.

"Why don’t you put all that stuff on the bed," Mac
suggested. "I’ll go get a garbage bag and throw away
what I don’t want."

Harm picked up a large armful of clothing and dropped
it onto the bed. Something that had been on the bottom
of the trunk but was now on top of the pile caught his
attention. He picked up a dark blue, large, mens
t-shirt with a faded Dodgers emblem on it and stared
at it. 

Harm was no longer standing in Sarah Mackenzie’s
bedroom. He’d been transported back in time and clear
across the country to a beach on the west coast twenty
years ago. He’d been a student at the Academy at that
time, home on break, partying with Keeter, when he’d
met someone – someone he hadn’t thought about for
years, someone who bore a striking resemblance to
someone he already knew, someone he’d thought at the
time he’d never seen again.

How could he not have known? he asked himself. How
could he not have put the pieces together when he’d
met Mac six years ago outside the White House?
Especially after he’d learned about her past. Had he
become so accustomed to meeting women that looked
alike that he could not differentiate between them?
That seemed unlikely, but apparently it had happened.
He’d never told Diane about meeting the young woman on
the beach after he’d returned to school. It was a
special memory that he hadn’t shared with anyone. Even
he and Keeter hadn’t discussed it again.

"Harm?" he heard Mac ask him. "Is something wrong?"

He looked up at her and saw again the troubled and
vulnerable teenager that she had been once. He
remembered the passionate kiss they had shared and a
shiver went down his spine.

"Harm?" Mac repeated. "What have you got there?" She
was looking at him strangely, wondering what could
have put him into this weird trance.

Suddenly, he snapped out of it. "You have to come with
me!" he announced.

"Where?"

"My place."

"Now?" she questioned. "I know I said I’d help you
with your bathroom tile, but shouldn’t we finish one
job first?"

"We have to go now," Harm took her by the hand and led
her out the door, ignoring her mild protestations.

**********

Mac was beginning to think that Harm had lost his
mind. He had ignored her questions about what was
going on, and she finally gave up asking and just sat
back in the passenger seat. He still held in his hand
something he’d taken from the trunk in her closet. She
could tell that it was a blue shirt, but other than
that, she had no idea why it held any special
significance to him.

He didn’t speak when they climbed the stairs to his
door or after they entered his apartment. He went
straight to his bedroom, and she could hear him
opening drawers, rummaging around in them, and
shutting them again. "Where is it?" she heard him
mutter.

She wandered towards what passed for a door to his
bedroom to see what he was doing, all the time
wondering if she was going to have to make a call to
the men in the white coats. He opened a drawer, said
"Aha!" and began flinging socks onto the floor.

"Harm, I’m starting to get really worried about you,"
Mac felt the need to point out.

He took something from the drawer and turned to look
at her. Still, he didn’t say anything.

"Harm, what is going on?!" Mac asked exasperated.

"I had to find this," he said, his voice low. "I
needed to show it to you."

"What is it?"

He took one step toward her and held his hand up.
Hanging from his closed fist was a silver medallion
suspended on a silver chain. Mac wasn’t close enough
to see what it was, so she stepped closer to him. She
took the medallion into her hand, though Harm didn’t
let go of the chain.

Mac turned the medallion over, and when she realized
that it was a St. Christopher’s medal, she realized
also where it had come from and what Harm had found in
her trunk. The memory washed over her, as clear as
though it had happened last week. She’d been young,
sixteen maybe, and she’d gone with her father to
California while he served temporarily at Miramar.
She’d been partying with strangers and had somehow
ended up on a beach where she’d met a guy. She’d been
so caught in the clutches of alcohol at that point
that she would have done almost anything for her next
drink. She’d made that fact plainly obvious to the guy
she’d met, but he’d been too honorable to do anything
other than soothe her while she cried, kiss her once,
and hold her while she slept. She’d thought about that
guy a lot in the year or two after she’d met him, but
when her life had finally gotten on track, she’d been
too busy to think about him. She’d tucked him away in
a corner of her memory, not entirely convinced he
hadn’t been a dream. Apparently her dream was standing
before her now and had been in her life for the past
six years, alternately befriending her, annoying her,
challenging her, and protecting her.

For some time, Mac was at a loss for words as she
stared at the medallion. Finally, she looked up at
Harm. "It was you," she whispered.

Harm nodded. "I wasn’t sure you’d remember. You were
pretty wasted," he said feebly, the enormity of this
discovery still hitting him hard.

"I was not," Mac protested weakly. She hadn’t been
"wasted". She’d only been drinking, and there was a
difference. She thanked God he’d never seen her
actually wasted. That embarrassing little display
after Dalton’s death had been bad enough.

They looked at each other, not quite sure what to say
now that the memory they hadn’t realized they shared
had been exhumed. They stood there, her holding the
medallion and he holding the chain, for what seemed
like minutes. Even Mac wasn’t quite sure just how long
it was. If someone on the street hadn’t honked their
horn, shattering the relative stillness of the
evening, they might be that way still.

As it was, they both started, and both let go of the
medallion. They stared at each other, wondering who
would pick it up. That seemed terribly important, as
though the person who picked it up had to begin the
conversation that apparently needed help getting
started.

Finally, Mac bent over and picked it up, but she
didn’t speak.

"Are you gonna say anything?" Harm asked softly.

"What do you want me to say? That wasn’t exactly the
time in my life I’m most proud of, Harm." She turned
away from him, uncomfortable under his intense gaze.

Harm stopped her with a hand on her should. "Please
don’t," he said. He wanted to see her face, needed to
be able to read in her eyes what she might not be
willing or able to say in words.

She looked up at him. Okay, she’d start. He always was
a chicken when it came to stuff like this. "I’d half
convinced myself that you were a dream. Guys like you
. . . well, most guys I knew then wanted something
from me. And I was pretty willing to give it. But
whenever I needed to be reminded that there were good
people in this world, I’d wear your t-shirt. I wore it
almost constantly when Uncle Matt took me up to Red
Rock Mesa."

"That mustn’t have been a pretty smell after a couple
of days," Harm said, but then was immediately sorry.
This wasn’t the time for jokes. 

"What I remember most about that night," he said,
mentally backing up. "Was how incredibly hard you were
to resist."

"You obviously managed," she pointed out.

"Not without a great deal of self-control," he told
her. "Maybe I should be thankful to you. You gave me
an early lesson on how to convince myself I didn’t
want you."

Mac looked down at her shoes. He’d just admitted that
he’d been denying to himself that he wanted her. He’d
also just admitted that he was thankful she’d taught
him how to do that well. What exactly did that mean?
Commander Ambiguity had struck again.

When Mac looked away from him, Harm knew he’d said the
wrong thing, though he wasn’t quite sure what it was.
Hadn’t he just told her he wanted her? Didn’t she
understand that he’d only been fooling himself and
pretending that he didn’t want her for a long time? It
occurred to him that perhaps, maybe, she *didn’t*
understand and that maybe he should clarify.

"Mac? Didn’t you just hear me? I said I want you."

Mac looked up again in surprise. That statement was
pretty unambiguous, but she wasn’t going to give him
any more wriggle room. "Want me for what?"

"I want you in my life," he said lamely.

"In what way?" she pressed, looking at him intently,
wondering if he’d actually be able to do it.

"In every way," he confessed. "I want you as my
partner and co-worker, and I want you as my friend."
By the look in Mac’s eyes, he knew he was digging
himself a deep hole. "And I want you as more than
that, Mac. I want to explore with you what we started
on a beach twenty years ago. That longing that I had
for you then has never gone away. It’s grown stronger
as I’ve gotten to know the real you, not the
screwed-up kid you were back then." He’d climbed about
half-way out of the hole with those statements. "But
it’s not just about wanting you in my bed, Mac.
Although that thought has kept me awake a lotta
nights, I gotta tell you. It’s about wanting you in my
*life*, as my life’s *partner*, and maybe, someday, if
I play my cards right and don’t screw this up too
badly, as my wife."

The tears in her eyes told him he’d shot up out of the
hole and hand landed on somewhat solid footing. 

"Are you sure you’re ready for this?" she asked.

He nodded. "I’ve been ready for a while. I just wasn’t
sure how to tell you."

"You know what I think?"

He shook his head in the negative.

"I think I should have cleaned that closet out a long
time ago."

THE END