A/N: I don't usually do this, but I'm adding an high-level angst warning for this.

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Family Gathering

(November 24, 2011)

She doesn't even realize its Thanksgiving until nine o'clock at night. Like everyone else in London she got up this morning and went to work without a second thought. Would have gone to sleep in the same state of peaceful oblivion, were it not for the damn message on the answering machine—Harm's mother wishing them a Happy Thanksgiving, though of course she doesn't use those words. 'Happy' has been taken out of the lexicon of their interactions. No, it's done in the same soft, nebulous words, everyone else uses these days, words that dance around the truth, so when it somehow inadvertently slips through, she feels it anew every time, until she just wants to scream, wants people to say it repeatedly, until she's scarred over, until she stops feeling like a freshly picked scab.

"We just wanted you to know our thoughts are with you today." It's obvious Patricia expects her to know exactly what today is, but she doesn't, not immediately. She actually has to think about it, has to sit down and mentally click through her calendar, think what about today would prompt a phone-call, and when she finally hits upon it, it hurts more for the protracted journey than it would have if Patricia had just said it. Until now, it was just a day like every other day, gray and cold and wet, completely unremarkable . . . if you didn't count the fact she got up this morning.

These days that alone should be cause for celebration.

Yet she doesn't feel like celebrating much of anything. And despite the United States' decree to the contrary, she certainly doesn't have anything to be thankful for. These past few months she's lived in a state of suspended animation, going through the motions of being alive because there's nothing else she can do. Since Harm left, since he got on that goddammed plane and left her alone with their daughter in a foreign land where they don't celebrate Thanksgiving, she doesn't know how to do anything other than get up and go to work and be angry.

And she has to be angry with Harm, has to maybe even hate him a little, because if she doesn't, if she ever stops being furious with him for giving Vincenze the time off to go to his sister's wedding and getting on that military transport to the Watertown himself, if she ever forgives him for dying on her, she'll start crying and never stop.

But she's never been good at staying mad at Harm. And tonight when Kiley curls up against her, wraps her small brown arms around her neck, and asks, 'Why did Daddy leave us?' she can't lie anymore, not even to herself. So she does the only thing she can, pulls her daughter close and lulls her to sleep with stories about Harm, telling her how much he loved her, how he fought so hard for them to have her, how he'd never wanted to leave them behind.

It soothes Kiley, but nearly ends her, and the message comes precariously close to finishing the job. She fed her daughter food out of a microwave tonight. On Thanksgiving! Thanksgiving day, and their daughter doesn't know it because she didn't have Harm's black bean and sweet potato chili or the butternut squash he used to joke made him fall in love, just a hot dog and violently orange macaroni. Fake food for this fake family.

It is so incredibly good Harm never kept alcohol in the house because she desperately wants a drink, and then they'd take Kiley away and she can't lose her, too. So she paces the small square footage of their flat, just paces, over and over, trying to figure out where she goes from here.

Maybe she should have followed the Admiral's suggestion, taken Harriet and Bud up on their offer, and moved back to the states. Maybe staying here in London in this space that has always been their home just makes it worse, but her life, Kiley's life, is here. Her daughter's only steps on American soil were centered around a grave site at Arlington, and she calls a sidewalk a pavement, and she doesn't need more change right now. And here is strangely where Sarah's been happiest, where for six, too-brief years she seemed to finally be doing things right—laughing with Harm and fighting with him and loving him; carving a place for herself, an identity that had nothing to do with the rank on her shoulder, or past sins which forever sit on a file somewhere in the Pentagon.

Here, no one but her husband calls (called) her Mac. Kiley calls her Mommy, and the other women working at the watch group call her Sarah (except the sixty-eight year old receptionist who somehow gets away with calling her dear). And that's always been fine, been right somehow, as she built this new life, became this new woman who smiles so much she actually has the start of laugh-lines. Mac became Harm's alone, a side of her only he was privy to, only he could claim.

Now though as she trails her fingers along the glass of the big picture window, tracing the outline of her reflection, telling herself that she isn't really crying, that she's mistaking the raindrops outside for tears, she doesn't feel like she'll ever smile again, and the lines don't make her look anything other than tired. She doesn't know this woman, this woman who forgot Thanksgiving, who fed Harm's daughter food out of a box. This never would have happened if it had been Harm here instead of her. He loves this holiday too much, loves gathering their beautiful patchwork family around the table, and sharing what he's thankful for ("You. I'm so thankful for you"). It seems wrong that Mac forgot something so important to Harm, to her.

But then Mac's not here right now, maybe hasn't been around for months. Her hand stills on the window-pane at that realization. Maybe even she can't have Mac anymore. Maybe the tough, feisty ninjagirl, who would so obviously know what to do right now, can't exist without her flyboy. Maybe Mac died with Harm.

It's a terrifying thought because she's not sure Sarah's strong enough to do this alone.

Because it can't be true, for Kiley's sake, for her own sanity, because she has to believe there's no such thing as an ex-Marine, and Mac's still here, she goes searching for her, moves quietly to their bedroom, opens the closet, and with trembling hands reaches past Harm's uniforms. still hanging there in precision order, past his ugly Hawaiian shirts she's worn so many times since his death, they've started to smell faintly of Chanel, rather than Irish Spring Soap and cigars, until she just touches a single box up so high only Harm could have put it there. Standing on tip-toe, her fingers scrabble at the cardboard, coaxing it closer and closer to the edge, until it reaches the tipping point, falling the short distance into her hands.

Setting it down on the bed, she opens the flaps with no little trepidation, almost afraid it won't be there, that she's imagined it all, and just at the last moment she has to close her eyes, can't open them again until her fingers touch the wool gabardine. It's there. Thank God. It's there and it's real. Releasing a breath she hadn't realized she was holding, she trails her fingers along the ribbons, the physical evidence of her achievements, her strength. Any other night she might feel silly or overly sentimental, but she needs this too much.

There's a kind of comfort in the old ritual of this. She'd been afraid it would feel like a sham, a little girl playing dress-up, but with each new layer, each adjustment, she feels pieces of herself come back to her. So that when she turns to look in the mirror, it's almost the Marine who looks back. Almost but not quite. Perhaps it's the cover, that final measurement, last imposition of order just prior to facing a messy world.

But when she goes in search it's not the cover that stills her fingers. For a second she doesn't know what it is, can't place the rough, scarred wood, which feels strange and yet familiar. When it hits her, its only sheer luck she's near the bed because her legs just won't support her anymore.

Slowly, gently, she pulls out the old recipe box and sets in her lap, draws quiet strength from the history that's inside -- Uncle Matt's Four Alarm Chili, her Grandmother's naan. There's even a recipe for the Tuna surprise her mother used to make. It was horrible and everything came out of a can, and she'd never make it, but it's somehow right that it's there. Flipping through the cards, she finds others she'd forgotten, pulls them out one by one, engaging in a dialogue with her past . . . one she'd tried to leave behind.

She'd seen no reason to take the box to London. So little space, and this was nothing more than clutter. She didn't cook from it, hadn't opened it for almost two years, and the last time she had . . . well, it wasn't exactly a pleasant memory, certainly not one she wanted to carry into her new life.

Harm didn't understand—"It's a piece of your family, Mac."—and she hadn't known how to tell him, how to explain that the only recipes she'd ever used were in a little red notebook tucked in the back, written in the hand of a man whose name they didn't say. She didn't see her family when she looked at that box, just Webb. He'd tainted it, and she hadn't wanted to carry that taint with her.

"Just leave it, Harm. It's not worth the space."

Never has she been so glad Harm rarely listens to her when he thinks he's right, and he was so very right about this. This box isn't clutter, isn't tainted. It's little pieces of her, moments of her life told in food, some happy (Aunt Trixie's icebox pie, made for her sixth birthday), some bittersweet (Mic's Beach Burgers with cooking times measured in beers for him, sodas for her), but all part of her, part of Mac. And when she reaches the notebook in the back, she feels no anger, no regret. It's right that it should be here, just as much as her Mom's Tuna Surprise.

But unlike the others, she doesn't take it out, just leaves it to sit in the box, isolated, separate. Serving out its exile, just like the man, undemanding, unobtrusive and yet impossible to ignore.

He'd come, not to Harm's funeral in D.C., but to the Memorial Service held by the London JAG office, sat in the back of the modest chapel, noticeable only for his civilian attire in a sea of military, for the way he held himself apart from all the others, trying not to intrude. To this day she doesn't know what made her look back from her seat in the front row to see him there, his face the impenetrable, unreadable mask of Webb, Harm's not-quite friend.

She stared at him longer than was decent or comfortable, knowing he was aware of her scrutiny, but he never looked back. Then she supposed he wasn't there for her, knew she would have been pissed if he was. Still, she found herself thinking of him at the oddest times during the service, wondering things like why he was in London, how he'd known about the service, did he find it as strange as she did that everyone here kept referring to Captain Rabb, did it make him feel like they were talking about someone other than Harm, too?

Somewhere mid-way through, she stopped fighting it, stopped listening to the eulogies, the stories she didn't know, and just let her thoughts flow where they would, to Webb, to Harm, to Webb and Harm—to a smug smile and an unknowing promise of a $500 a plate lunch; to the constant verbal sparring over right and wrong, necessity and morality; to a dimly lit film room, an exit after a few brief words, and Harm's odd reserve instead of elation in the days following what should have been his most satisfying victory. No, Webb hadn't come for her.

But he stayed for her. Long after the others had filed out, offering heartfelt, but distant condolences to the widow of a man they all admired, Webb stayed, standing in the back looking as awkward and out of place as she thought she'd ever seen him. Strict social etiquette was made for situations like this.

"It was good of you to come."

"I'm so very sorry, Mac."

They'd just stood there separated by five rows of chairs, in an unfamiliar room, in a foreign country, uttering empty pre-prescribed phrases, and it meant more than any of the other deeply personal stories she'd hear about how Captain Rabb had touched so-and-so's life because they were mourning the same man. Because when Kiley ran back into the room with Ensign Reeves in tow, and Webb crouched down to greet her, one hand extended, with a quiet, "You must be Kiley. I knew your father," all Mac could think was Yes, yes he did.

Kiley hadn't known what to make of the strange man with quicksilver eyes and a chameleon smile, and even though everything about him at that moment was soft and inviting and genuine, her daughter had always had a nearly prescient instinct for danger. So before she knew it, Mac was across the room scooping her forty pound, six-year old daughter into her arms, explaining her shyness with strangers, and avoiding the look in Webb's eyes that said he knew a lie when he heard one.

"Of course, I understand. I shouldn't h-" He pressed his lips together and looked at Kiley's dark head buried against her neck. "She's just as beautiful as . . . as Harm always said she was." And before she had time to process the implications of that, he was extending a gold leafed business card and saying, "If you or Kiley ever need anything . . ."

The card for the Special Assistant to the American Ambassador sits in a folder beside the phone, the number's programmed into her cell. For her daughter she'll call in every favor she never wanted owed.

Kiley is her miracle. Every hardship, every 'why me' moment of her life, she'd go through it all twice over for the opportunity to feel this, to love her daughter so completely that everything, all her pride, her anger, fades in its face. Her four percent investment in hope that paid off in spades, and it doesn't matter Kiley came into the world somewhere else, in someone else's arms. They've always belonged to each other.

Harm knew that, saw it from the first. It's why he fought so hard, tilting at windmills. And they'd been such very large windmills, a foreign couple adopting in a foreign country would have been hard enough, but a transient military couple, with a history of alcoholism, adopting a child refugee in a foreign country . . . it shouldn't have happened. She's never thought about it too hard before, about the impossible odds her Don Quixote had conquered, just been too grateful to question. But now, as Webb's words come back to her --'just as beautiful as Harm always said she was' -- everything slides into place like a key in a lock, and she realizes she isn't the only one willing to call in unwanted favors for Kiley's sake.

It's so blindingly obvious, she can't help but laugh at her own stupidity. Laughter transmuting to tears and back again, until she's laughing and crying all at the same time, so much emotion it can't be contained in one simple expression. And its not until Kiley's climbing up on the bed, tangling around her in mess of too-long limbs and nonsense words that she realizes how loud she'd become.

"Shh, Mommy, shh, daddy loves you."

Oh, if only she'd known how much. She pulls her daughter closer, breathes the sweet-water scent of her in, and says her own Thanksgiving. You. I'm so thankful for you.

Over Kiley's shoulder, she looks at the little red notebook still tucked in the recipe box and thinks of the only time she ever spoke to her daughter about the man who gave it, at the memorial service when Kiley'd asked, "Who's he?" Such a simple question, and she didn't have an answer, hadn't known how to explain the man who was more than a friend and less than an acquaintance, so she'd just whispered, "Nobody, sweetie. He's nobody."

Because he's not, she takes the notebook out and puts it on the bed with the other recipes.

"Come meet your family."

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