Chapter 2 - Alive
"Mmmm." If there was anything more exquisite than Mac's lips on his, Harm would be remiss to find it. He wasn't sure if she was just that good a kisser, if he'd been with lackluster women in the past or if they were just meant to be together. But, it felt damned good, made his heart race faster than going Mach 3 ever could. She tasted of strawberries, so sweet and he was incapable of pulling away from her.
In fact, he pulled her closer although his efforts couldn't get them close enough. "I love you." She said, lips now moving down his jawline and stopping just at the end by his ear. "I love you so very much." Mac's voice was breathy and it wasn't a means of seduction, her words were spoken from the depths of her soul.
She wrapped her arms around him, shifted onto his lap so that their bodies were only a fraction away and then her lips took his again stealing the breath right out of him.
In his body he felt an odd sensation specifically flowing through his veins, a cold that spread and spread and spread despite the warm body caressing his. "Harm, I love you." Mac said again and this time the feeling in his veins turned into fire. Liquid lava swept through his body and there was a faint voice calling him by his rank and telling him to wake up.
He laughed at the absurdity of it all, maybe he was losing his mind? Maybe being with Mac was making him hear and feel things? No matter, he fused his lips to hers, kissed her deeper and then it stopped. "Mac? What is it?"
Wide eyes stared back at him but where there had been a look of love moments earlier all he could see was sadness and fear. One hand held onto his shoulder, the other cupped his cheek. "You need to wake up."
Wake up? No. Because if this was just a dream, he wanted to live in it forever. Because, deep inside he knew that this wasn't real. That Mac wasn't real. That kissing her wasn't real. They weren't together in the outside World because something terribly tragic had happened. In this world he had her but, if he woke there was nothing but blood and pain… So. Much. Pain.
A shocking sensation made his body buckle and Mac's arms wrapped around him tighter. Her lips came back to his ear and he could faintly hear her proclamation of love. The other voices - there were more of them this time, some familiar, many not - began to sound off louder and louder. The woman in his arms began to disappear. "Mac, no."
"You need to find me or we'll never be together." Find her? Hadn't he already done that? He had found her! She was alive and he was… he was… "You have to wake up, my love. Wake up… live for me."
"I don't want to!" He said and the arms around her began to hold on to less and less of Mac's body as more of her disappeared. "Sarah, no."
"You have to. You can't be here...I love you."
Another jolt ran through his body, making it shake uncontrollably and then the darkness took him under again and Mac was gone.
Four Months Later
Bethesda Naval Hospital
Maryland
Time was skipping.
Time and random sounds, voices both familiar and not echoed in the recesses of his mind. Harm wanted to open his eyes but something held him back from doing so, a deep and disturbing lethargy that only sank him back under again. He could feel his body being moved, poked and prodded, jostled around and turned from side to side as if he were a rag doll. It made him feel sick so it was easier to just sink into the dark soothing warmth.
He was keenly aware of this limbo that he lived in but, there was no pain there, not the kind that he felt whenever his body was trying to wake. She was also there every time he needed comforting.
This time they were walking casually on the beach, a random place he'd never been to but was devoid of any other souls but them. Harm held Mac's hand, pulled her down to him, rolled through the grains which felt like soft talcum until he was on top. He kissed her then, slow and lovingly, feeling the soft curves of her body melt into him. Mac was safe and alive and so very beautiful - her belly slightly swollen from the child they'd conceived.
It was the place he went to when his body began to ache, a search that would lead him to the happiest he would ever feel. Until one day when the dream was torn away from him. She was always taken away from him. The voices scared her away.
The skipping of time had stopped and Harm was aware of the acrid smell he couldn't quite pinpoint. He forced his eyes to open and the hazy view began to clear until he realized where he was - a hospital suite.
There were balloons hanging from a chair in the corner likely full of 'Get Well Soon!' sentiments. Flowers adorned the top of some of the hard surfaces and as his hearing began to clear as well, the soft murmuring of some movie playing on the TV in the corner caught his attention.
He tried to sit up but the ache in his chest forced him to take an uneasy breath and also made the machines he was tied up to spike in loud shrils. It woke the person laid out on the recliner next to him. Whoever it was frantically hit the call button on the side of the bed. "Commander! Stay still, sir!" Bud hovered over and pressed a gentle hand into his shoulder which managed to calm Harm slightly.
He tried to speak but the tube down his throat prevented him from doing so and a desperation almost had him yanking it out until a nurse appeared at his side. "It's okay, Commander. Take it easy. You're alright."
And then he was out again, slipping back into his dreams.
The following days were confusing, his body was exhausted from fighting to stay alive despite the months he spent in a coma. The medical team was content with his progress and the wounds that had healed enough so that Harm would be allowed to begin an intense regiment of rehab. Friends visited and he found out that his family - Trish and Frank - were staying at his apartment throughout this whole ordeal.
There was someone who was missing and when he was finally coherent enough Harm noticed her absence which did not bode well. Mac hadn't visited, not once and the only time he ever saw her was in dreams. His heart clenched in fear of the unknown as memories began to flash back of what had happened to him - to them. He'd been shot multiple times, enough to force his body to shut down. Mac had been at his side and then… blackness.Had she been shot too?
"Mac?" Harm asked when Chegwidden entered his room with Clayton Webb in tow. He noticed Clay was walking with a cane, a clear indication that the torure he'd received was far worse than anything they could have imagined. "Where's Mac? Everyone has been here but her...Is she? Was she hurt? Tell me."
Both men traded sad glances and Chegwidden folded his arms across his chest. When they didn't answer immediately, Harms' distress could only grow. "I shouldn't tell you this given your condition but...We don't know where she is, Harm." Clay finally admitted. "Victor says they took her and left you for dead. The agency followed lead after lead for a while but then the trail went cold. It's been months. No one knows a thing."
"They? Who's they?"
"Sadik's men." Clay slumped into the guest chair an extreme look of exhaustion and remorse shadowing his eyes. "I swear to God we're doing everything to find her."
"How could you let them take her?"
"We had no choice, Harm.I was in no shape to fight and Gunny, he tried...We'd all be dead if... Look, we had leads everything points to her being alive."
"Alive? With them? Fuck Webb!" Despite giving everything up and almost his life, Mac was gone. He failed her. "Find her...You have to...You have to!" He yelled at the spy casting an enraged glare at both men. "This is your fault… she shouldn't have been there and you shouldn't have let her go! You shouldn't have…"
The outburst made his body shake and his brain began to squeeze in the most painful ways.
It forced the medical team to intervene putting him under with some medication that had been plunged into his IV. "Find...her… have to...find her."
When he managed to stay awake long enough Harm got the rundown of his injuries from the various doctors. He'd been shot in the right thigh, the bullet narrowly missing his femoral artery but nevertheless causing damage to muscles and ligaments. It required physical therapy to get the limb working properly again. The wound had become horribly infected and dead skin needed to be removed along with a skin graft to repair damaged tissue.
The shot to his abdomen had been the least problematic, a through and through which missed all major organs and was mostly healed inside and out.
He'd run his fingers over his chest where a bullet had done the most damage and perforated his lung causing it to collapse. The length of time it had taken Gunny to find help had made it a precarious situation. All in all Harm was lucky but he knew all of that luck was no thanks to his personal angel in Heaven.
Another two weeks had passed until Victor managed to rotate back to this corner of the Earth. He helped get Harm out of the room, wheeling him out to the gardens. Gunny glanced at the senior officer and held his breath. The man should have died, he knew but that unwavering resilience had kept him alive. "You're looking good, Sir."
"I look like shit and drop the formalities, Vic. Out of uniform call me Harm." The first thing Harm noticed was the crisp Fall air that hadn't been there when he'd left for Paraguay. Spring had turn into summer and with it began the humid Washington days that he'd spent in a cell waiting to figure out his sentence over Loren Singer's murder.
That was when it all started, that shift that began to separate him from Mac - his deception even if it meant to protect her from the state of despair he'd been thrust into. Christ, he'd been a complete fool, erratic and yes, obsessive and all it did was destroy his life.
Time really had been suspended for him, his mind had only registered the dreams that he longed to be buried into. Wide awake there was discomfort, pain and this unseasonable cold. There was also no Mac and he was trying to figure out how it went wrong.
"Okay then, you look better than when I left you. You're lucky, so is Mr. Webb. We did go out there half cocked with no plan."
Funny how that didn't seem to matter in the heat of the moment. There had been no plan other than to get them out and get them to safety. "We didn't have time for plans, Vic…. What happened? No one can seem to tell me anything."
"What do you remember?"
"Rescuing Mac. Taking fire. After that…"
Gunny frowned, so much had happened in such a short time. He'd gotten to Webb and Harm to Mac trying to move as stealthily as possible. At the truck helping Webb get inside the firefight ensued seemingly out of nowhere. "You were hunkered down behind this metal storage tank with the Colonel. I returned fire, tried to give you enough cover. Mac made it and you stayed behind." He'd given her a rifle then and the two of them shot back at the enemy hoping Harm would make it over safely.
The first shot actually shocked Gunny who had seen enough friends killed in battle and refused to let Harm die. The tall Naval Officer made an easy target and once the bullet hit his thigh, Harm fell and skidded on the rocky ground. Gunny tried to rush towards him but Mac ran off herself as Harm was shot again. "I tried to stop her but she just took off and that's when you were shot in the chest. I thought you were dead...I swore you were dead." The Marine scrubbed a hand over his face, it was an image that played in his mind over and over and kept him up at night.
"I guess I'm hard to kill."
Gunny frowned. "That's no laughing matter, sir. You shouldn't have been there. Neither should the Colonel." He trailed off without hiding the tears in his eyes. Harm had seen Gunny cry before, the love of a woman could do that to even the strongest of men. "I'm sorry...I ran after her but I was too late. It all happened so damned fast."
Harm wasn't moving anymore when Mac dropped to her knees and pressed her palms against his chest in effort to stop the bleeding. Her hands were stained crimson and she was crying, sobbing so hard Vic could still hear the anguish in her voice as she yelled Harm's name. "I don't think she really noticed them running towards her."
Maybe Mac did but ceased to care? She struggled against the men that grabbed her, injured two until they grabbed her flailing limbs and practically threw her into a dirty white van. Gunny couldn't be sure but the man in the back looked like Sadik. "She told me to go."
In fact he could still hear her voice before the van doors closed. "Go! That's an order!"
A good Marine always followed orders and so did Gunny just not for long. "I hopped in the truck and took off only I didn't get that far before my conscience began eating at me. We don't leave our men behind even if they're a squid."
"You're a good friend, Vic."
"Not that good." Some orders were meant to be broken and he was in the CIA now where rules were malleable. "I turned back around and they were gone. Somehow you were still alive."
Only now he had two badly injured men on his hands, one at the brink of death and the other suffering the effects of torture. Gunny drove through a small village that he knew held a tiny, meager hospital run by British missionaries on a humanitarian assignment. They barely had the means to care for both men and so Webb had forced the doctor and nurses to care for Harm.
Being held at gunpoint made people very receptive to orders and thankfully there had been one doctor on duty, a former British field medic.
They worked hard to make Harm stable enough for transportation to the big city where he would need multiple surgeries and would eventually be placed in a coma to help his body heal.
"How did I survive?"
"I still ask myself the same thing. They kept you alive with a hand held ventilator...You crashed more times than I can count." Gunny admitted. Things had been touch and go for so long, he lost faith that Harm would pull through. "Eventually the CIA flew you back here."
He quieted for a moment, his mind going back to that day and all of the mistakes he'd made. Webb and Mac would not have been caught if not for the need to rescue him once his cover had been blown "I Keep wondering what we could have done differently. Maybe I'm just not cut out for the agency?"
"You're too good for them. In the military everything is black and white, good or bad. The agency has no alliances, everything is murky and grey. You did what you could. I owe you my life."
"No sir. We're even...I'm sorry about the Colonel. I've been trying to find her. The trail ran cold."
"Webb told me." Harm still had faith that Mac was alive. If she were gone, really gone he would know it, he had to know it. His gut instinct told him she was somewhere waiting for him to find her. V "She isn't dead funny...no matter what anyone says I know she isn't dead."
Gunny frowned. The time he'd been on loan to the CIA he'd learned a bit, many people went missing and never appeared again. "There are worst things than death."