A/N: All right, all right, I am quite aware that this is completely out of the question and so not true. I don't actually know what came over me, I was searching for an idea for a CIC story, and then poof! out comes this little fic. Apologies in advance.
Disclaimer: Okay, I don't own CIC, I don't own any characters in this fic at all. The plotline is all mine, at least to what extent there is one. All mistakes are my own as well.
A Past Love
Mackenzie stared across at Nathan Templeton, not quite believing her ears. His words reverberated in her mind. What had happened to the reasonably pleasant, if a bit ambitious and manipulating, man she'd known in her youth? What had turned him into this cold, calculating bastard that he was now? As she stared across her desk at him, her mind flashed back into the distant past.
Nathan frowned when he saw that the President had zoned out on him.
"Ma'am?" he tried. Mackenzie Allen came back to herself, pulling herself out of her memories. What had happened to the man she'd loved for a brief time?
"What happened, Nate?" she asked him softly. His face showed his confusion briefly.
"What happened to you?" Mac pressed, "What happened to the you that I knew so many years ago?" Nathan looked startled, at the fact she'd brought it up or the fact she remembered Mac wasn't quite sure.
"That man died a long time ago, Madame President," Nathan said gravely, "when a woman he loved left him for another." The way he said it made Mac take a closer look at him, and what she read in his eyes made her own widen. The silence lingered in the Oval Office as the Speaker inclined his head in tacit acknowledgement of her unspoken realization.
Mac felt horror rising up in her, she was responsible for turning the man in her past into the very same bastard who now sought to block her at every turn! She didn't know how to handle this, certainly not with him sitting opposite her, still looking at her.
"You love me?" she broke the silence at last. Slowly Nathan shook his head,
"No," his words confused her until he continued, "I loved you. I no longer love you." Mac didn't know what to feel, what to say.
"But why? Why did you love me?" Mac whispered. She'd thought their relationship was a fling, nothing meaningful to either of them. She'd been between boyfriends, recently dumped and not feeling at her best. She'd met the older man, about ten or twelve years her senior and within a week they were in a relationship. It had last only a couple of months, and then she'd dismissed it from her mind. Clearly it had had a much more long lasting effect on him.
Nathan shook his head,
"It no longer matters why, ma'am." Mac winced; this conversation was so much harder when he insisted on using her formal title.
"If you loved me, why do fight against me at every turn?" she demanded.
"I do not fight you, ma'am," Nathan shrugged. Mac fixed him with her trademark stare and a brief smile flickered over his lips,
"Memories, Madame President. Memories of you that will haunt me till the day I die. I will never love another the way I loved you." Before Mac could say another word he rose,
"By your leave, ma'am?" Mac had no time to respond, though what she'd say she didn't know, before he'd left the office. Mac remained in her chair, stunned.
A/N: Again, major major apologies. The actual thought, come to think of it, that sparked this thing was in the pilot, where Mac makes that remark about her monthly courses, and Templeton responds with the jibe about her not having to worry about it in a few years. It hit me that those two remarks could be said to be a bit too personal for simply colleagues. Anyway, I don't know where this came from and frankly I don't want to know. I never want to write one of these again.