Author's Note: I know…. I know that you are all mad… but honestly, my life has been chaos the past few months and I'm just starting to see a glimpse of the light at the end of the tunnel. It's still all crazy, but I thought that I would take a break and post this chapter that I was working on before the storm that was my life! Enjoy and review if you would like!

The painting gets done that evening and Harm took Tuesday off to wait for the furniture delivery. Mac got roped into a new case and would be in court that day, so her helping was out of the question. Kate was in the middle of finals week, so she got home early starting on Tuesday. They had a final day on Monday in which they saw all their teachers for any last minute questions and then spent the rest of the week in finals, which she wasn't too excited about. Her junior and senior year, she most likely wouldn't have to take the finals, because her grades are always pretty good and they have a rule that if you get straight As in the class all semester, you don't have to take them. However, she will have to take them as a sophomore.

"I'm home, is it here yet?" she says walking in the door and finding Harm in the kitchen putting some stuff away.

"Not yet. I went over to my place and got the boxes of kitchen stuff though. Will you help me figure out where I should put everything?"

"Are you sure that they didn't try to deliver the furniture while you were at your apartment?" she asks, after the same thing happened with the cable guy a few days before.

"They called and said that the furniture would be delivered sometime between 3 and 6 this evening."

"A three hour window?" Kate says with an eyebrow quirked much like her mother often does. The action makes Harm smile.

"Yup. Which means that if you would like, you and I can go grab the kitchen boxes from Mac's apartment before we really get this kitchen ready. That way we can donate anything that we have more than one of or whatever."

"Yeah, we can do that. Maybe we can see if we can get it all set before the furniture gets here. Then mom doesn't have to worry about really unpacking anything tonight."

"That sounds like a great idea. She will appreciate the thought."

The pair gets into the car and makes their way over to Mac's apartment pretty quickly, making small talk about the finals that Kate has this week and talking about the progress she's made in her room. The painting was coming along nicely, and it was turning out exactly the way that she wanted.

"Can you help me put the frames on the wall though? I don't really want them hanging on the wall, I kind of want them attached to the wall…. Wait does that make sense?"

"So you don't want them to come off is what you're saying, you want them flush against it?"

"Yes please."

"We can do that. Have you decided what you're going to put in their first?"

She thinks for a moment before telling him that she wanted the sketchbook page of them in one frame, one she did for art class in charcoal for another, and she was going to work on a few more things for the rest.

"I like that you decided to do it this way. It's neat that you'll be able to change things around when you want to."

"Thanks for letting me ruin the wall…." She says with a sheepish grin.

"Kate, you aren't ruining it…. You're making it your home and that is perfectly okay."

She smiles back at him from her spot and they finish the ride in silence, pulling up to Mac's apartment and filing up the stairs.

"Did she pack a bag for tonight too? I mean with her clothes and stuff?" the girl asks, walking into the apartment filled with boxes for them to take back to the apartment.

"I don't know. I know that she has an extra uniform at the house, but I don't know if she has anything beyond that."

"Oh, do you want me to grab her some stuff so we make sure she has it?"

"I think that would be a great idea, and get the stuff out of her bathroom too, just in case she didn't have enough at the house."

Kate makes her way into her mother's room, feeling both at home and awkward in the space. Little girls had the chance to play dress up in their mother's clothes, sneak makeup on while they weren't looking. She never really got that chance, so the feeling was a bit odd. She grabbed a few essentials, not taking any real time to focus on what she was grabbing from the more private drawers before moving on to getting some things for her to sleep in and a few casual outfits for when she got home.

When she went into the closet, she noticed a few things about her mother. She was a plain and simple dresser, with only a few subtle frills or prints amongst her wardrobe of "civilian clothes" as she referred to them. She was also a woman through and through…. Because one side of her closet was filled with these beautiful dresses that she couldn't imagine having an occasion to wear to. She spotted the dress uniform she had, tucked away in the back of the closet. There was a black, one-shouldered piece that was elegant in its simplicity, a red floor length gown with a draped back, and several others that were gorgeous.

"Hey, are you almost done?" Harm says, peeking in the closet as she was fingering a blue sparkling dress.

"Oh!" she nearly screams, surprised at his voice behind her.

"Sorry. I was able to get three or four of the boxes downstairs, and we only have like two left, so I thought we could get going."

"Oh, um… yeah, I just needed to get a few shirts for her and I'll be good to go." She says, turning away from that side of the closet and trying to act like she didn't get caught going through her mom's closet.

Harm picked up on it right away, the need to learn about the woman that her mother was. Mac had been totally honest with Kate and they had shared many of their tales with the young girl. He sensed though, that she still felt she had missed out on a lot.

"The blue one is from a mission. I'm surprised that she kept it… I think that it got ripped that evening."

"How?" she asks, looking at him for a moment with a blush on her cheeks before looking back at the dress.

"Do you really want to know?" he asks and she nods in response so he continues, "I believe that they were trying to find me and get me to come to them, so she fought with them and the main guy finally tripped her a bit. She ended up punching him out at the end of the night though, so she got her revenge.

"What happened?"

"Oh… yeah… we were on a CIA mission to get something from the Sudanese embassy… nothing major." He says, trying to act like it was no big deal.

She pauses for a moment then, realizing that the person who wrote the book on Sarah MacKenzie was right in front of her. She could ask him anything. "The black one?"

"NATO ball… we stopped an assassin from killing a princess before her father decided to have his country join NATO. It was the first time Mac and I ever danced now that I think about it. She made some comment about how I probably thought it was like dancing with my sister."

Kate laughs at that, knowing their history with skirting around each other for years and years. She knew he could never feel like dancing with her mom was like dancing with his sister.

"I told her it wasn't, but I don't think she believed me back then."

He tells her about all the gowns, blushing when she points out that he knows the story behind nearly every one that she points out to him. By the time they move on to him telling her what each medal of her mother's is on her dress uniform, they don't realize they have an audience.

"You know… you aren't helping the furniture people by being here at my apartment when they are there…." Mac says simply, causing the two of them to jump.

"What!?" Harm says with shock as he looks down at his phone and realizes that it is somewhere around 4:00.

"Don't worry, I sent Harriet over for a little bit after they called me wondering why they couldn't get hold of you." She says with an amused smirk.

"I left my phone in the car because I didn't think we were going to take that long. And… wait… how are you here right now?"

"I had an hour before I needed to get back and do some more at JAG, so I thought that I would come pack a bag so I didn't have to come back here tonight for anything."

"That's already done. Kate thought about that as we were coming to get your kitchen stuff."

"Why are you doing that?"

"We thought we had some time to kill and Kate only has one final because the other class she has tomorrow is P.E., so we thought we would go through all our kitchen boxes and figure out what stuff we were going to keep or donate and what else we might need."

"Well, that sounds like a great idea, but right now, I'd like you to get home and supervise the movers so we can get that done. Don't worry if you don't have any time to do the kitchen stuff tonight. We've got plenty of time to get settled into the house." She says, rubbing his shoulder in a gesture that shows her appreciation for all the thought that he was putting into their house becoming a home.

"I already got stuff for you to wear for a few days… Harm was just telling me about your dresses."

"My dresses?"

"I got distracted when I came in here… he caught me looking at one of them."

"Which one?" Mac asks out of curiosity, and raising a brow when Kate touches the blue fabric. "Ah, the embassy."

"Crazy story."

"Try being in the middle of it!"

"Harm told me all of his side of the stories, but maybe when we get you moved in, you can tell me about the ones he didn't remember… which oddly wasn't too many. Or maybe your side of the stories too?"

"We can certainly do that… for now though, you two need to get back home so we have furniture to actually sleep on tonight."

"Did you already wash all the new sheets?" Kate asks, already excited to get things moving in the house.

"I did… they're in the linen closet in the hallway."

"Okay, then we'll see you at home!" she says with a smile, walking out of the closet and grabbing a box to get down to the car.

"You know all the stories, huh?"

"The way you looked in some of those dresses, Mac… I could never forget any second."

She smiles back at him and leans in for a kiss before the two go their separate ways until the evening.