She is high above the city here. This is a tower, and a time. Louis has tears in his eyes before he walks away; maybe she does too. Maybe she is standing in front of something that demands to be seen, after all this time.
I wanted to thank you.
For what?
For twelve years.
They live in glass castles, and they will fade in the end under a thousand lights. Donna doesn't want to be thanked.
I want more. She wanted more, and she got it, but now—
She wonders if it was enough.
She doesn't see him coming, but she knows he will. A thousand moments could have collided in this one, but they don't. She feels stripped quite bare of any memory or dream. She feels nothing except the tug of longing in her chest.
These things are never about choice. Choice was staying for twelve years, following him from sun-up to sun-down, folding away her own ambitions like flowers between the leaves of blank-paged books. So no, choice was not at the heart of it. At the heart of it was just that—
A heart. Hers.
Suddenly her tight-lipped wisdom, her knowing glances, her careful curation of his passing women—are you capable of doing one without the other, Scottie?—seem utterly, starkly pointless.
Why has she loved him from afar, if she is going to love him?
Because you wanted to stay with him. Stay with him, not love him.
Is she capable of doing one without the other?
She feels nothing but the floor beneath her feet.
She doesn't see him coming. Louis knocked the wind straight out of her, and she is alone and breathless and wondering on top of the world when Harvey strides in.
If she had looked, she would have seen his reflection first, would have seen him captured in this glass castle. A ghost who haunts her stillness and her chaos, a friend and a maybe and—
It's never about choice. Donna thinks that choice might be easier. But kissing him is not a proposition, it is a necessity. It is a need, it is a longing, and it is in her chest, knotted round her heart. It is on her lips, pressed on his.
It is everything she has ever been, no thousand moments—just Donna and Harvey, high above the city and beyond the reach of worlds.