Disclaimer: Well, well, where to begin? Oh, yes...David P.Bellisario owns JAG, and all characters. Thanks to the inspiration of Boomerang, and his wonderful ideas, I never would have done this.
She moved back and forth in front of the mirror, trying to imagine herself in a set of dress whites, hair pulled back, walking beneath an austrailian sunset of orange and purple. Walking...beside her husband.
Husband. Had an odd ring to it. Perhaps because she hadn't been married in so long. That last one...hardly like a marriage at all.
Colonel Sarah Brumby. No, she would keep her name, although in spirit she would no longer be the same Sarah MacKenzie she had always been. Now she would be entwined in a lifelong commitment with someone she loved dearly. Mic.
Glancing down at her right hand, she noticed that the inset of diamond in her engagement ring were sparkling noticibly in the overhead lighting of her tiny apartment. Mic had called only yesterday to check up on her-- she'd told him that the decision hadn't yet been made, that she needed more time to think about it. Think about what she was facing up to if she did say yes. Or no.
A picture sat on her television, visible only out of the corner of her eye, and turning to it, she picked it up with a smile. A little girl- surely not so little now- smiled back at her, childish grace and beauty captured within a single shot during a day at the beach. She'd always wanted a little girl, and time with Chloe was the closest she had ever come to having one. Would Mic want children? Certainly, if they looked like her, he'd say. She wanted to have a child so badly sometimes, and Harm- Harm had once made that joke that if they, in so many years from now, were to still be unattached, they would get together and have one. A joke...could it have been more than that? Likely, but not after this. If she accepted this proposal from Mic...she wasn't expecting to get any more, and it had been a while since Chris had proposed....at this rate, if she didn't do this, marriage was less and less sure to happen to her.
As she gazed into the mirror, she tried to imagine dress whites, gold braid, and her belly noticeably swollen with pregnancy. She could see a child, two...no, three years old, with her eyes and the father's handsome smile.
Yet the father wasn't Mic. It was Harm.
But Brumby had been the one to propose. It was evident that he loved her, having proven such by offering the ring that now adorned her finger, and the farewell kiss at the airport. Harm was in love, but with the wrong woman. He loved the memory of a woman years ago, a woman who looked, even sounded like his present partner...yet it wasn't her. If he couldn't let go, she'd let herself go...instead of waiting him out as she'd once thought she would.
Staring at her reflection and without concious thought, Sarah MacKenzie saw herself moving the sparkling diamond ring, without reaction or ceremony, to a trembling left hand.
Reversing the ring.
And thusly taking the first step.
Into an uncertain future.