Author: ColieMacKenzie
Subject: Winter Solstice (HBX Challenge November 2007)

Winter Solstice

Disclaimer: JAG and its characters belong to Bellisarius Productions. I’m just borrowing them for my, and hopefully other people’s entertainment.

AN: This is my answer to the HBX November 2007 Challenge. Yes, really – 2007! That’s when I started writing it too. But I got stuck and it’s been in need of an end. Now I finally found it.
The story is set December 21st, 2004 – this means season 10, before Mac’s car accident on Christmas Eve, but logically after her session with Commander McCool.

December 21st is winter solstice (in the northern hemisphere), with the shortest day and the longest night of the year. Numerous superstitions, beliefs, and traditions center around this day – and that’s all I’m going to reveal. :-) Just dive into the magic, and enjoy!

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Winter Solstice

December 21, 2004
Apartment of Sarah MacKenzie, Georgetown
2353 EST

Most of the time, reading a women’s magazine was simply a diversion. Light reading to pass the time in a doctor’s waiting room, on your lunch break, or for lying in bed and falling asleep in the midst of an article. No thinking required. Sometimes you could pick up a great new trick on how to make your lashes not look like lumpy black twigs, or how to get your hair shinier and less frizzy. Or read a fascinating sex technique three times to memorize how it worked, then find you had nobody in your life that you could try it out with.

And then there were the times when you’d read something stupid, ridiculous, just plain silly, yet you’d find yourself thinking about it constantly. She wanted to forget about it, she really did. It was, after all, just a childish superstition, and if there was one thing in her life she didn’t believe in, it was superstition. Granted, she had experienced her share of, shall we say, inexplicable occurrences, but she usually chalked them up to fortunate coincidences. Much easier than to overhaul her entire belief system that saw her as the sole architect of her destiny, and not some outside force she had no control over.

This idea was a different caliber. It kept revolving around in her head, mocking her with the thought to just try it out. What did she have to lose anyway? In light of what recent years had brought her, all the pain, terror, sadness and heartbreak, a part of her wanted to cling to anything, even remote and superstitious possibilities.

Sighing indulgently over her gullibility, she reached for the magazine article again.


December 21, 2004
Apartment of Harmon Rabb Jr., North of Union Station
2355 EST

Harm was lying in bed. Wide awake. Upside down. Just like he had been doing for years during this longest night of the year. Feet propped on his pillow. Head where his feet normally would be, pillowed in the cradle formed by his hands, which he had propped up underneath it. He no longer felt like a superstitious idiot doing this. It had become his own little tradition. And it wasn’t like he ever let anybody see it.

He thought back to his seven-year-old self that had first gone to bed upside down, wishing with all his might and in desperate hope. A wish born of sadness and disbelief and desperation. It had been his best friend Tommy that first suggested the idea. With all the world wisdom a seven year old believed he held, he had nodded earnestly while explaining that you only had to go to bed lying upside down during the longest night of the year and whatever you wished for that night would come true.

It hadn’t worked, of course. Yet year upon year, Harm had gone to bed with his feet on his pillow, wishing for his daddy to come home. Years passed, and while the wish didn’t grow any weaker, his capability of believing did. He no longer expected anything to come true, no longer dreamt of his dad magically reappearing, and yet he couldn’t bring himself to break with the tradition.

It was years ago, after finally having discovered his father’s destiny, that he found himself upside down in his bed with a completely different wish. It was somewhat unexpected and quite disconcerting at the time. He hadn’t consciously thought about her like this before. She was his partner, his best friend, a wonderful person. He was drawn to her sweetness and her strength, craved her closeness, yet was caught completely by surprise when he found himself wishing for her in a capacity that had nothing innocent and everything life-altering.


December 21, 2004
Apartment of Sarah MacKenzie, Georgetown
2358 EST

Hopelessness permeated her life these days. Seemed to have permeated it for a long time. And she was so sick of it. So tired of feeling like this. Somehow detached from everything, everybody. Lonely. Overwhelmingly sad. So much had happened and she knew that it was normal to need some time to work through it all. But she also knew that life had to go on. Her session with Commander McCool had brought her a long way, and ever so slowly she felt herself climbing up that steep hill.

And she fought for it every day. Not a day passed by that she didn’t start her mornings with staring at herself in the mirror. ,i>‘Damn it, Colonel,’ she would urge her reflection, ‘You’re a Marine. Fight like one!’ But it could take only a sound, an image, a smell, for it all to rush back. To drown her in a flood of self-doubt and hurt, anger and sadness.

She was so tired of it all. And she was most tired of missing him so much when he was only an office, a phone call, a glance away.

She wanted, craved a sign. Four percent were such slim odds. Her internal clock chimed in, alerting her to the fact that it was almost time. She took the magazine with her and, as per instruction, positioned herself in front of her bathroom mirror. She suppressed the thought how ridiculous she felt believing in an ‘oracle of love,’ while she listened for the midnight chimes of Georgetown Church to start.

Right at the turn to midnight, she heard the first chime and concentrated on looking in the mirror. Her tummy fluttered, and she took deep breaths. Practically seeing through her own image as she waited. Waited for the twelve midnight chimes to pass that were to show her ‘the love of her life’ on this longest night of the year. Waited desperately to see him. Harm. Only Harm, always Harm. The seemingly unattainable love of her life.

At the sixth chime, she anxiously started nibbling her bottom lip. By chime nine her eyes welled up, but she suppressed the tears. Yet the mirror remained stubbornly void of Harm’s image, appearance, or whatever else she was supposed to see.

“Oh Harm,” she whispered when the twelfth chime had passed, and the silly ‘love oracle’ hadn’t revealed him as the love of her life like it was supposed to. Sad and yearning, she called out for him, desperately pleaded for him in her empty apartment, on this longest night of the year. “Harm… Harm… Harm…”


December 22, 2004
Apartment of Harmon Rabb Jr., North of Union Station
0002 EST

It had been Mac on his mind ever since. For reasons he could no longer explain or care to think about, he had ignored this ache for her at almost all times. But he wished for her every year, upside down in his bed. Years had passed, life had gone on. Had pulled them apart, thrown back close together. Almost destroyed them, and yet in whatever capacity, they always found their way back to each other.

Only once had he wished for something else. Last year, at their lowest point with each other, he had instead wished for a young girl that needed his help to be put in his care. It was the only wish that had ever come true, and ironically, it was only due to Mac’s help.

This year, they were closer again. They had mellowed, were calmer, softer around the edges. Seemed to bob along in the storm-tossed waves of their lives, close but never quite able to reach each other. Life had not been kind lately, especially not to her.

He understood that, understood her pain, her heartbreak, her need for solitude. But his heart was beating only for her these days. He was waiting for her, infused by a yearning that seemed to grow just a little stronger every day.

And there in his bed, upside down, feet on his pillow, his heartbeat picked up its pace. Stumbled, thumped harder. Then into his thoughts of her, his visions of her sad smile and the remembered happier, brilliant ones, floated her voice. Far away and yet he clearly understood. Whispery, sad, yearning.

“Harm,” her voice called out to him, “Harm… Harm… Harm…”

He remained stock-still. All his muscles frozen in shock. It couldn’t be… could it?


December 22, 2004
Apartment of Sarah MacKenzie, Georgetown
0022 EST

She knew it was him before the knocking started.

She had stumbled to bed right after midnight, angrily wiping the tears off her face. Tossing and turning, she had first chided herself on her stupidity in believing something so silly printed in Cosmo, despite the magazine’s claim that the belief was centuries old. Then embarrassed for letting the result, or non-result as it was, upset her so. Until the anger came, anger at herself. For letting outside forces control her life for so long. For not finally going for what she truly wanted. She punched her pillow a few times for good measure.

She had just resolved to let Harm know that she was ready – Christmas seemed like a good time for that, she thought – when her heart skipped a beat. Then jump-started again, thudded in her throat, her belly, even her fingertips. Her tummy fluttered. The signature unmistakable. Harm.

There were three knocks, in rapid succession. She held her breath, lying stock-still.

Until she heard Harm’s voice.

“Mac,” he called out, a curious mixture between a whisper and a yell, and she bolted out of bed so quickly that she got dizzy for a moment. Not bothering to turn on any lights, she stumbled to her front door, at once anxious, desperate to see him. She didn’t stop to wonder why he came to her door in the middle of the night. She didn’t need to.

His hand was raised to knock a fourth time – he was not going to give up tonight, or ever again – when the door swung open. His arm dropped heedlessly to his side.

There she was. Her silhouette only captured by the moonlight filtering through the blinds of her apartment windows. Yet Harm could make out every detail about her, the flannel pajamas she was wearing and her hair tussled from the pillow. Dried tear tracks on her cheeks and her eyes wide, luminous. Her look deep and dark as if she saw right into his soul. His breath caught in his throat. She was the epitome of beauty.

“Harm,” she asked, her voice throaty, broken. “What… are you doing here?”

“You…” He took a step forward, his hand reaching out to cradle her face, as he always did when she was crying, but instead it remained hanging suspended in the air. His eyes searched hers, his heart kept stumbling, beating wildly. Almost a question, yet not quite, he went on. “… you called me.”

Her breath caught in her throat while her thoughts crazily spun around in her mind. The oracle… the love of her life… not an image, he had come… it couldn’t be, could it?

“I…” she searched his eyes, his face, rationality didn’t want her to believe… and yet she did. Her heart knew. She lifted her hand and laid it flat on his chest. Felt his heartbeat thrumming under his skin, loud and desperate. There were no more questions. She nodded.

“Yes.”

The pull between them was magic, this particular brand of magic that existed only between the two of them. He took a step forward, and their hands automatically found each other. She looked down, watched in awe while she laced her fingers through his. How they, how everything fit together so perfectly. Instant warmth. Her eyes lifted back up.

So close was she now that he felt her warm breath whispering against the skin of his neck. Her eyes held him spellbound. The tug was barely noticeable, yet it was all he needed to know from her. He followed right behind as she made her way though her dark apartment, into her bedroom.

They didn’t need words. Next to her bed, she turned back to him. His eyes captured hers while she lifted her fingers and slid open the buttons of his overcoat. Once it dropped heavily to the ground, she continued on the button-down shirt he had haphazardly thrown on when he had rushed out of his apartment. She knew she needed to feel him close, needed the warmth of his skin against hers.

His eyes never wavered as he followed her example and freed the buttons of her pajama top. His fingertips trailed along her silky warm skin when he slid the top off her shoulders, and he could feel her breath catching in her throat. His heart hammered and stumbled.

Later he would never remember how his pants or shoes came off. But he would remember for the rest of his life the look on her face when he climbed into her bed and she followed him. This look, that he would never find adequate words or a description for, other than ‘pure love’. It was pure love that sparkled in the warmth of her eyes that were now the color of single-malt whisky. That reflected in her soft smile. He lay back on her pillows and opened his arms for her. For a moment she was suspended above him, her hair framing her face as she looked down at him. And there it was, that look, and the sheer beauty of it robbed him of his breath.

Then she lay down on top of him. Snuggled her face in the crook of his neck, wrapped her arm around his waist and held on. Her skin was plastered as close to his as was humanly possible without melting right into him. Still it wasn’t close enough. She made a sound almost like a whimper, and he threw one leg over her and pulled her even closer.

Finally. Her scent surrounded him, her breath whispered trails along his skin, her heartbeat thumped loud and clearly in her chest. And Harm listened, realized in awe, how his own heart hammered, thumped, stumbled a few more times… then picked up the rhythm of hers. The sigh came subconsciously, from deep within him. Finally.

She was snuggled against his broad chest, and with her ear to his skin, she listened to his heartbeat. Became conscious of the fact that she no longer felt her own. Her heart that had almost been thumping out of her chest, now was calm, beating in syncopation with his. After nine years of desperation, and a lifetime of searching, her heart was finally at peace.

“Forever?” She whispered into the darkness of the longest night of the year. Even though she knew the answer.

His voice was calm and sure. “Forever.”

They were home.

The End.