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When she was little, all the fairy tales her father read her started with once upon a time and ended with happily ever after. Macy’s favorite was Belle because she didn’t have a mom either and Belle was smart too, just like everyone said she was. Of course in all these stories, it was the princess who got the happy ending not the witch.
It started out innocently enough.
Mel and Maggie grew up here together, they had entire lives with friends before all of this began and as much as they invited Macy to join, she could only handle being a third wheel so often. Plus she didn’t mind a casual night in. Especially when Harry was around.
In all honesty, Maggie and Mel had accepted her into their home and as their sister with more warmth than she could have ever hoped for. But they had a lifetime of history together and Macy couldn’t shake the feeling of being the outsider, the same way she had felt her whole life.
She doesn’t feel like the odd one out around Harry.
On the first night of his temporary residence in their house, Macy came home from work to find him in kitchen, unpacking groceries.
“What on earth do you girls eat? The fridge was practically empty and don’t even get me started on the pantry. Not even the most rudimentary ingredients for a dish,” Harry said, when he saw her standing in the doorway.
“Well we’ve been a little too busy with the whole demons trying to kill us thing to worry about cooking three course dinners,” Macy replied.
“Worry not Macy, for tonight we feast.”
As it turned out, Mel was out with Niko and Maggie had some sort of sorority event that Macy didn’t really understand, leaving her and Harry alone for dinner.
Harry’s self proclaimed feast consisted of steak with a side of sautéed vegetables and slow cooked potatoes and Macy was genuinely impressed.
Along with a bottle of wine Macy had discovered in one of the cupboards, the evening felt like it had a subtle romantic undertone, rather than just a dinner between temporary housemates.
“Where did you learn to cook like this? This is delicious,” Macy exclaimed, as she brought another forkful of food to her mouth.
Harry chuckled. “I’ve been alive a long time Macy. You pick things up along the way and it’s good to have hobbies.”
“You better be careful, Harry! If you keep cooking for us like this, we might have to keep you here as a live-in personal chef,” Macy teased.
“Given the state of the kitchen, I take it you and your sisters don’t spend much time in there?”
Macy shook her head. “Our mom was apparently a great cook and she taught Mel and Maggie, but they’ve been pretty busy lately. I, on the other hand, did not inherit that gene, so I’ve mastered the art of making sandwiches and ordering delivery.”
“Well if you ever want any pointers or lessons, you know where to find me,” Harry said smiling at her.
He had a sincere smile Macy thought as she smiled back at him.
~~~
Mel had returned from her latest Sarcana meeting and was debriefing the others on what she had learned. It sounded more to Macy like Mel was trying to convince the rest of them that Jada could be trusted and was being wrongly targeted by the Elders.
“Jada said that witch-whitelighter relationships are forbidden by the Elders,” Mel said.
“They are. If the Elders find out, they move to erase the whitelighter’s memory or even banish the them to purgatory,” Harry explained.
Macy’s heart sank a little.
As her thing with Gavin had been slowly fizzling out, Macy had been finding herself thinking of Harry more often and definitely not in the familial way that her sisters thought of him in.
“And then there are the ones who met untimely ends before the Elders found out,” Harry continued.
“What do you mean?” Maggie asked.
“A whitelighter’s role is to train and protect the witches they’re assigned to. Relationships complicate things. Feelings make people reckless and that is when people die. Let’s just put it this way: I don’t know of a single witch/whitelighter relationship that ended in happily ever after,” Harry said.
Great, Macy thought. So if by some chance Harry returned her feelings, they were doomed regardless.
Watching Harry and her sisters, she decided he had become too big a part of their lives to ever risk that.
(Not that she ever thought she would get the opportunity).
~~~
Valentine’s Day was here and Macy was in no mood to watch public displays of affection at every turn.
The Galvin saga had officially ended. He had been offered a better position at U of Texas’ lab and he had decided to go.
With her decision to give herself some space from Harry before she made things irreparably awkward and got her feelings hurt (or possibly got him banished to the Elder’s prison), she had been spending more time with Galvin. Her plan had ultimately failed given that Galvin left town and her feelings for Harry hadn’t seemed to have died down at all.
Maggie was supposed to spending the holiday with some new guy from school she had been seeing, while Mel was probably going to be with Jada. She had been taking her undercover role in the Sarcana a little too seriously for everyone else’s liking, but whenever the topic was brought up, the middle sister became evasive and defensive. After a particularly heated argument with Mel, Harry had decided to change his approach and avoid the topic altogether for fear of pushing Mel further toward the Sarcana.
Macy could not will time to move any faster. She just wanted to get the hell out of the lab and go home and take a bubble bath and decompress. She had been so focused on witch stuff for the past couple of months that her normal life had seemingly stalled.
The scientist was completely spaced out when a knock at her office door startled her.
The door opened and Harry walked in.
“Hey! What are you doing here?” Macy asked with a slight smile.
Given the proximity of her lab and his office, he stopped fairly often for lunch or to discuss recent developments in the search for the demon of the week. Harry tried with Maggie a few times in the past until she told him to stop because her friends were finding it strange how close she seemed with the professor of classes she wasn’t taking.
“Well, you’ve seemed a little down since Galvin left town, so I was hoping this might cheer up a bit,” Harry said in his usual, slightly awkward manner. From behind his back, he pulled out a small bouquet of flowers with a little card attached to them.
“Happy Valentine’s Day, Macy,” Harry said.
Macy’s jaw dropped.
“Oh my god, these are beautiful,” the witch exclaimed as she took the flowers.
Harry smiled warmly at her.
“You didn’t have to do this,” Macy said, hugging him.
“I wanted to.”
~~~
They were hidden in a utility closet in a some factory basement as they waited for Mel and Maggie to pull through on their part of the plan and trap the demon.
The closet seemed more spacious from the outside, Macy thought as the heavy metal door shut behind her.
Harry was standing just inches in front of her. Macy’s heart rate quickened when she realized exactly how close they were. She could feel the warmth radiating from his body and his breath against her cheek.
It takes her a minute to summon the courage to actually look at him instead of at the floor next to their feet, but when she does, she finds that he is already looking at her.
Macy doesn’t think she’s ever had anyone look at her so intensely before.
Harry’s eyes flicker to her lips and she swore that he was leaning just a little bit closer. Her eyes fluttered closed as she waits for him to bridge the gap.
He doesn’t.
Instead he announces that her sisters are calling and orbs the two of them to where Mel and Maggie have caught the demon.
Once the demon has been banished and they’ve all returned to the house, Macy quickly excused herself to her room, too mortified to even look at Harry.
She couldn’t believe she actually thought he was going to kiss her mid-mission. This is Harry she was talking about. No one was more professional and focused than Harry.
~~~
One night as she laid in bed, drowning in the silence, she wondered about what it would be like if they weren’t a witch and white lighter.
Just two people.
Two people who meet and click and fall in love and live happily ever after.
That thought is over before she can even really dwell on it. He was born in 1920 and dead decades before she was even existed. They were never meant to be.
~~~
At this point, even Macy can see that the way Harry feels about her isn’t purely platonic.
There’s a difference in the way he behaves with her sisters and the way he behaves with her. He looks at Maggie with a fatherly annoyance when she’s texting instead of listening to him lecture them on the importance of taking their training seriously and he bickers with Mel like a brother growing very wary of her stubbornness.
Meanwhile everyone saw how Harry looked at Macy with the same intensity he had looked at her with that night in the closet.
Everyone including Charity.
The red-headed elder popped in one day to see how Mel’s undercover mission with the Sarcana was going.
She spent the “meeting” going back and forth between suspiciously glaring at Mel who she believes is not telling the full truth and where Harry and Macy are standing.
The discussion was nothing but frustrating for both sides until Charity put an end to it.
“Let me remind you that you are there to infiltrate their ranks and be our informant, Melonie, not to fight for their cause. They are a terrorist organization and when the time comes, they will be punished as such,” the Elder declared as she sat up.
The Charmed Ones frowned at each other.
“Harry, may I have a word,” Charity said in a tone that implied it wasn’t a question. The whitelighter followed her out of the house. Macy followed them quietly.
“What is this about, Charity?” Harry inquired once they stopped on the deck. Macy stopped behind the corner of the house, where the duo couldn’t see her, but she could hear them.
“I don’t know what the nature of your relationship with Miss Vaughn is, but I do know what it is supposed to be,” Charity said forcefully.
Macy’s eyes widened.
Harry crossed his arms defensively. “What exactly are you insinuating?”
“You are here to guide them, not to romance them,” Charity continued, pointing her finger at Harry.
“I have done nothing of the such,” Harry pushed back, but Charity cut him off.
“Consider this your first and only warning. You are here to do your job and nothing more than that. You know what the consequences are and the Elders will be swift with their punishment should we find out that our rules are being disobeyed,” Charity threatened before she orbed out of the backyard.
Macy quickly slipped back into the house, a sinking feeling in her stomach.
~~~
In the weeks since Charity’s impromptu visit and threat, Macy had been making a renewed effort to give herself some space from Harry. While nothing had been going on between them, she wasn’t going to be the reason he got his memories erased by the Elders again.
Maggie, Macy, and Harry had been at the house discussing how Hunter could be related to the recent break-ins around the edges of town while Mel was at another meeting with the Sarcana.
A phone ringing interrupted Harry and he looked pointedly at Maggie.
“What? It’s not me,” Maggie said, lifting up her phone to prove it. Harry turned to look at Macy.
“Oh, sorry, it’s my boss. I have to take this,” said Macy, answering the phone and walking toward the kitchen.
“Well we’ve gotten absolutely nowhere,” Maggie sighed.
“Hopefully the Sarcana have some useful information for your sister.”
“Hopefully,” Maggie replied. “Shoot. I have to get to work, I’m gonna be late.” She had grabbed her coat and shouted a good-bye at him before Harry could even formulate a response.
By the time Macy finished her phone call, Maggie was out the door.
“Where’s Maggie?” Macy asked, walking back into the living room.
“Apparently she had to get to work,” Harry said, rising from his seat on the couch.
“Oh.” Damn her, Macy thought.
“Are you hungry? I thought I could whip us up some dinner? Or we could go out to eat if you’d prefer?” Harry suggested, a little eagerly.
“I’m sorry, Harry. I have to go. I’m late for… a thing,” Macy said awkwardly, reaching to grab her purse from the table and make a hasty escape from the house.
“Macy, have I done something to upset you?” Harry asked bluntly.
She stopped fumbling with her purse and looked up the whitelighter. His posture was tense as he waited for the answer.
“N-no? Why would you think that?” she said unconvincingly. The look on his face told her that he didn’t buy that for a minute.
“Well, I couldn’t help but notice that for the past several weeks you seem to have been avoiding me,” Harry told her.
“What- no- what? We see each other all the tim-”
“Macy, you and me have not been in the same room alone for more than thirty seconds without you making some excuse to speed away like you’re on fire in weeks,” Harry exclaimed.
Macy looked at the floor guilty. He was absolutely right.
“Now if I’ve offended you or upset you in anyway, I sincerely apologize-” It was her turn to cut him off.
“No, it’s not- it’s not that, Harry,” she said.
“Well then what is it?” Harry asked crossing the space between them until he was standing right in front of her. He continued, “Because I considered us friends Macy.”
The hurt was written across his face and Macy’s heart clenched at the thought of her causing it.
“We are friends,” she said, a little desperately.
“Macy, I didn’t mean to upset you,” the whitelighter said, wiping away a stray tear that was making its way down her cheek.
“It’s not your fault, Harry,” Macy rambled, as she let Harry guide her to the couch. “It’s mine. I let myself get these feelings for you and I know I shouldn’t have, so I just needed some space to sort myself out.”
Harry caressed her cheek. “That’s what has been bothering you this whole time?” he asked.
As Macy nodded, he leaned in and kissed her.
~~~
There were many times in the past few years where Macy thought that she should just get it over with. It’s not like she was expecting her first time to be perfect or magical or something cliche like that. So what was she waiting for?
As she laid on the bed with Harry standing over her, pulling off his undershirt before climbing on top of her, Macy thought that this was what she had been waiting for.
~~~
Going into this, she had known better. It was Harry himself who had spoken of the tragic fates of the couples who predessed them. They had to have known that they were doomed from the start.
So when she lost him on a chilly autumn night almost a year after they first met, Macy couldn’t truly say she hadn’t expected it. Things in Hilltowne had been much too quiet lately and her relationship with Harry was too good to be true.
Alistair Caine’s interest in the Charmed Ones had not decreased in the slightest. On the contrary, he was just lying in wait for the right moment to strike. And while his plan hadn’t worked in quite the way he wanted it to, it wasn’t a total failure either. After all, what’s a witch without their whitelighter?
After it happens, Mel and Maggie try to quell Macy’s guilt. It could have happened to any one of them, they told her. They all loved Harry and they all would have fallen into the same trap and gone looking for him had they believed Alistair had kidnapped Harry. And Harry would have died trying to save any one of them from Alistair.
Macy knew all of this was true. It doesn’t change the fact that it happened to her though.
~~~
There is a theory that there are an infinite amount of alternate universes out there.
It keeps her awake at night.
You know how sometimes you’ll forget your phone in your house and have to run back and get it and then later you’ll get rear-ended or run into someone you’ve been trying to avoid and all you can think is if I didn’t go back for my phone this morning, none of this would have ever happened. Who knows what would have happened instead? In one of those other universes, you didn’t go back to get your phone. In another, you never forgot it in the first place.
She overthinks every moment in the hours leading up to his death and obsesses over every action and nonaction she took and wonders which one would have saved him. Would any of them have saved him?
“in some other life we are standing side by side and laughing that in some other life we are apart”