Disclaimer: Sorry, they're not mine.
A/N: Another piece I wrote at midnight. Hope you enjoy :)
It was New Year's Eve at the Roberts' suburban home. As usual, Harriet had outdone herself. The impossibly spotless rooms she had cleared to act as gathering spaces were free of all but the most charming traces of their youngest occupants. A framed finger painting on the wall or collectible toy displayed on the mantelpiece were all that belied the existence of the rowdy - though beautiful - boys who slept next door. Fairy lights greeted guests at the gate and hung brightly from the rafters, casting shimmering shadows around the neatly kept garden.
The cheeky accompaniment of mistletoe made the place feel like a sparkling wonderland in which the normally rigid and precise attendees could chat with quiet informality. Everyone gasped at the table settings, blue and silver with beautifully lettered name cards in a sloping hand, and again at the richly-smelling dinner which was so delicious even the Admiral had thirds. Mac could feel her stomach bloating by the end of the long and wonderful meal in which her conversation topics varied from Tiner's new love interest to the state of operations at the Pentagon. Throughout it all Harriet flitted round plying her guests with food and water, exchanging pleasantries, and denying offers of help from each of them in turn - the endlessly capable hostess. Once again, Mac wondered how she did it.
No-one was in a hurry to leave after dinner, and an unusual sense of relaxed companionship pervaded the room. The alluring pull of holidays and freedom twisted lightly around each occupant, but was inevitably soured by loves lost and hearts scorned. This house, with its shimmering Walmart lights and plethora of memories, was in its own way a safety bubble for those who had made safety their life's work. There is strength in numbers for the herd who have all lost something, and so it was that the JAG clan had always helped each other along.
Just as Harriet was the embodiment of the many and varied lives they led, her house represented the family they formed - a family that always rallied around for the big moments, if some of the littler ones might be lost in translation. Waxing sentimental for a moment, Harm pictured the steady flash of the cool white lights as a heartbeat. That was all of them - strung in a row, beating in time. And if one might break for a moment, the chain did not.
The beat itself continued, not diminished except to the fastidious observer, as if pulling the weight of the light lost just for now. And like bulbs and fuses and connecting wires, the broken parts of people could be fixed or replaced. Sometimes - when people were truly alone, no matter how many friends they claimed or associated with - only they remembered they were broken. At JAG, there was that collective memory like a pulsing heartbeat - never oppressive or insistent on defining by the past, but always remembering. Where there is light, Harm thought, it never forgets the shadows. The shadows are what give it strength.
That flash of a thought was disrupted by a smooth male voice saying "five minutes and counting." His eyes moved to the mantelpiece, where Harriet had set up the radio to count in the new year, and then nesciently turned inward. By the time he realised what he was quietly locating in that mind-inside-a-mind he'd already felt it - the flicker of Mac at the edge of his consciousness. Her presence was a lighthouse in the treacherous landscape of his mind, and he only had to steady himself for a moment to locate its searching beam. He fancied his brain like an unfamiliar bedroom at night - all oily black and hidden objects rising out of the gloom, except Mac, like the light that slipped through the crack of the bathroom door and reminded him all was not lost. There was no need to stumble around in the dark if he had her.
He turned slightly, only his head and his shivery blue eyes changing position. He found her looking back at him for her spot across the room, and then both spun like preschoolers caught with their hands in the cookie jar. There was only just time for an internal curse for the over corrective movement before the radio was shocking him again with its mirthful "2 minutes and counting."
Big steps across the room, in Mac's direction. The thud of heels hitting the floor, as if in haste. A spinning whorl of colours and faces and Walmart lights. Who was moving? Oh, it was him, he thought as he landed at her side. One side of her face was shadowed, the other in creamy white relief with the accompanying curve of a smile. Perhaps he had made a strange picture, all vociferous haste with his body and a mind just trying to catch up.
"Mac," he muttered, not quite sure what he was going to say but sure there was something.
"Harm," she returned, her smile curving larger and sparkling ever-so-slightly.
"This whole thing…" He gestured around, seeming to have recovered himself at least slightly (even if that involved a subtle change of subject) "it makes me think of the Academy."
"Did you have big NYE parties there?" She seemed genuinely interested.
"No, but we always had plenty of lights. And plenty of traditions." That smile. The smile that meant he was planning something she probably wouldn't like.
"Go on," she sighed slightly, almost in the tone of a mother with a badly-behaved child.
"Mmm." It wasn't often she saw her flyboy in such a pensive mood. "Sturgis taught me one that first NYE, and we did it as long as we were there…"
It had been a big night. The grassed oval was littered with red cups and beer spills, and the scent of spirits hung heavy in the air. The sky seemed to have opened up and swallowed them whole in its blackness, leaving only the spotted lights of illuminated phone screens where people sat in circles on the lawn. Harm, Diane, Sturgis and his current love interest had ditched their usual work-hard play-hard crowd because of said love interest's weak stomach, and formed one of those steady circles with its pinpoints of light. "60…" they heard the countdown start, floating from inside the crowded hall with its sprung wooden floor and strobe lighting.
"Listen," Sturgis said with the urgency of the drunk, addressing his whim to their whole little group. "After you kiss on the stroke of midnight, you have to say something true."
"What, like the sky is blue?" Someone had to say it, Harm would reflect later, and it was right that it should have been Diane. Their designated "clever-clogs," she had a mind as sharp as a whip and a mouth to match. Just like Mac.
"No," Sturgis had responded, and Harm remembered the fiery earnestness in those eyes - preacher's eyes which seemed to bore into his soul. "Something big, something important, something…" His breath came out in a long, white puff in the cool air… "something no-one in this group has heard before."
Harm started to protest. "Hey," he said, "she knows all my secrets."
"So I should," Diane had responded, elbowing him gently in the ribs.
"Uh-uh," Sturgis had said with the certainty of a best friend. "There are things neither of us know. Tell us one. Kiss and tell, flyboy." Then he started to echo the countdown in an eerie, ghostly voice - "10…9….8…7…6,"
Harm had found himself leaning towards Diane so his lips would touch hers just as midnight turned. The kiss was wonderful, and with the giddiness of youth it felt somehow momentous. She tasted of strawberries, he remembered, and chewing gum. And then as they withdrew, their eyes flicking open, he said slowly "I haven't forgiven my mum for marrying Frank."
Diane, he knew, must have internalised her gasp. She and his mum had always been close - Trish could see in her some potential which Harm, at the time, had missed - and to have not forgiven her for something within her rights, which happened so long ago, would have seemed cruel. But Diane was not one to be righteous, and she had echoed back a secret stored in the depths of her memory - one his modern mind flicked to and he found stung too much to dwell on.
So that had been their tradition. Every year at the Academy he and Sturgis found their way onto the lawn to wait out midnight, red crunchy cups in hand and significant others in tow. There they sat, splitting blades of grass and writing letters to the universe, until the hour struck - until they kissed whoever there was to kiss and shared the depths of their hearts. In a way, Harm began to look forward to it - a midnight confessional that built his maturity one year at a time. Secrets became no more than gifts to the universe, and each admission lifted a weight of his chest. As each other's constants, he and Sturgis surely knew more about each other by graduation than anyone else. And now he had Mac, with whom he could start the tradition anew.
It was she who jogged his arm and deliberately said "30." He realised they were half-a-minute to midnight and explained the rules so quickly he barely got stuck at the "kissing" part - "after the kiss you have to say something true about yourself that the other person doesn't know." He could tell Mac was intrigued by the fact that she didn't tell him off for that massive assumption, merely raising an eyebrow as she counted down from ten. "9…8….7….6….5…4"…
And he was leaning towards her, just as he had with Diane so many times. A weight fell off his chest when he saw she was leaning too, eyes closed - foolish as it might be, she hadn't thought better of this. The space between them shrank until her perfume was like a second skin and he could feel the warmth of her body. Then their lips touched… and he lost all words. One derisive part of his mind threw him into a courtroom in that moment. He was standing, open-mouthed, in front of a witness, gesticulating wildly but unable to form a single intelligible syllable. A sense of panic gripped him as the judge quickly lost all patience, and when the hammer was lifted he imagined it coming down on his head.
All these thoughts must have passed through in less than a second, because he had a good two or three to focus on the feeling of Mac's mouth against his. Her lips were impossibly soft and tasted of (non-alcoholic) ginger beer and spiced spring rolls. It wasn't a romance-novel taste, but it was better, in a way…this was real, and it was Mac. There were fireworks and sunsets like you'd never believe, but the picture that remained in his mind was one of a stormy beach at night, thunder alarmingly close and threatening rain. The water was cold and a high wind sent spitfire-stripes of salt lashing across his cheeks. Mac was in a thin white sundress, soaking up the feeling, as they walked, hand-in-hand, into the sea. Perhaps that was more them, a stripe of thought ran across his mind. A beach in Barbados was a bit two tame for the two illustrious lawyers, and this seemed - appropriate. Real. Beautiful.
She was pulling away and he echoed her movement, easing apart in the space between heartbeats like something of him broke with the separation. He gave himself one quick breath before he said a word, but not enough time to think. Thinking, he knew, would thwart this before it began. And so.."Mac," he said, "I love you."
She blinked, smiled, and echoed his words. "If we're in the market for truths, flyboy, I love you too."