Title: Belief
Fandom: JAG
Characters: General (Harmon Rabb/Sarah Mackenzie)
Prompt: #34 – Not Enough
Word Count: 461
Rating: PG
Info: Harm/Mac, future drabble - angst/romance
A/N: Not really a true angst fic, but there's a little in there somewhere.

Okay, so this is my getting back into writing thing. I didn't even use one of the pieces of a story I came up with since the last time I posted a drabble, this is all new, and no, I'm not sure it's all that good, but I kinda like it.

Disclaimer: They belong to Don Bellisario and even though he's done with them, he won't share them with me pouts. Oh, and the song at the beginning is "Belief" by John Mayer from his new album, Continuum, so it's obviously not mine.

Belief is a beautiful armor
But makes for the heaviest sword
Like punching under water
You never can hit who you're trying for - John Mayer, "Belief"

He's spent most of his life believing. Believing in the truth, believing that his father was still alive, believing he would come home, believing in flight. Belief hasn't been kind to him in general. He lost two out of those beliefs in one fell swoop, on a day a few years ago that he doesn't remember clearly for feeling so adrift. Beliefs that had shaped most of his life were suddenly gone, and in a way he had felt a part of himself die along with them.

Belief has always been his quest, his Sisyphean task. And belief would nearly kill him time and again, only to pull him out at the last minute. When belief came crashing down, it's armor punctured and shattered, he would be forced to briefly admit it's futility, and yet every time he came back for more, like Don Quixote to his proverbial windmill.

And in a strange way, his beliefs got tangled up in each other. Because the cold hard truth was that his father was dead, though he hadn't died in a plane or in a prisoner of war camp, he'd died fighting for someone he believed in, even loved. Harmon Rabb, Jr. became a pilot, and then a lawyer. And the truth is everything, because belief isn't always enough.

Times like now, when, for once- all is well make him think, during the quiet in the night when moonlight falls into the room just right and he can see it washing over his young son. These are the times when he thinks about belief and how it's changed him. That belief has both knocked him to the ground and sent him to the skies is both cruel irony and comfort, because belief always is.

There had come a time when he was left with very little to believe in, and strangely enough, that's when things began to look up again. Because the one person who'd been there with him through so much became his belief. And she had believed in him, so gradually he learned to believe in himself again.

He almost doesn't hear her when she comes in, but he knows she's there anyhow. When she fits herself in the place under his arm, they both move closer, sharing warmth and strength and something they'd both been afraid of for so long. Time changes people, and gradually, so do their beliefs. So he still believes in the truth, but he also believes in her, and they believe in love.

And he realizes there's someone else he believes in now, as they watch over their son.