Author's Notes: In light of tomorrows Premiere of what could be a very different show, I thought I would put a fic out. Been toying with this one for a while. Hope not to ruffle too many feathers! ;-) Expect some appearances from nearest and dearest.
. ….
Seattle
By Atheniandream
. . ..
Two surprises. Two Cities. And two people desperate to protect what they hold most dear...
. . …
Donna Paulsen is in a rather precarious situation.
She's….got no other option, really.
Rachel is gone. Mike, too. It's 1am in the morning and, when the awkward opportunity of fate arises, and at the tender age of forty three, you actually lose your house keys,
The nearest possible option will do.
Breaking her door down is a no-no. It'll take literal hours to drive to her Mom in Cortland and snag her spare key - however inviting the idea of taking it back sounds - and she doesn't want a throw money at an expensive Hotel, mere miles away from her own locked apartment.
She used to have a key to this particular place, but now she doesn't. Not that it would help any. The idea of sneaking in at this late hour churns her gut like a cement mixer, playing on the emptiness, brought on from late night cocktails and very little food.
She straightens, rapping her knuckles on the door.
There's just one teeny tiny problem with her idea.
Her destination, is Harvey Specter's condo.
A place that she's never once slept in.
She bends her knees slightly, her dress swishing.
Maybe this was a bad idea….
…
Harvey Specter wakes with a start, plunged into the kind of darkness that used to give him nightmares as a small child, that thick soupy blackness that pours itself around you like molasses and catches at your breath, squeezing you. He blinks, fumbling for his cellphone, a worn in frown pressing against his confused gaze. For a second, he wonders if he's dreamt such a thing, until a moment later, a second knock echoes, full and rich and lively, alerting him to the possibility of a night-caller.
The days of Mike Ross appearing at his door are long gone, now…
He frowns, racking his brain, trying to recount anything that he's missed. He's not arranged anything, particularly notable. And he doesn't do that kind of thing, pay for a woman to arrive at his door in the middle of the night. It's not that he doesn't respect the profession or the tradition, but in truth he's never needed it before; women have always flocked to him. Sometimes he's been grateful, other times not so, but never ever lacking.
And he definitely didn't arrange anything...the women of his recent past know not to darken his door unannounced.
He manages to find the remote that triggers his blackout blinds to rise, the whir of mechanical duress in the background as he blind steps to the door. It's the height of summer, and he's been unable to sleep in the almost afternoon seeming sky. He first tried working late, to rouse tiredness, but that ended in one almighty crash, and after six days of working till eleven every night he thought it best to use what his lavish pay check had helped him to acquire.
"Coming," He calls harshly to the door, padding through the lounge, flicking on the light as he rubs at his face, tiredness dragging at his lips as they press against the growing need to yawn.
He pulls the door open, pulling it towards him. The blood pours into his face, his eyes widening fractionally at the sheer sight before him.
"...Donna…." He mumbles, his mind turning over.
And 'Donna' she is, dressed head to toe in a figure hugging turquoise sequined wave-emblazoned black gown.
He swallows, snapping the feeling that flares up in his chest clean in two.
.. . ..
Donna heaves an immediate sigh as she watches the door open slowly on its hinges. She had nearly turned on her heel, the stress of not knowing where you'll end up that gives the kind of relief that his, nay any familiar face can offer. Sure, she makes enough to have gotten a room nearby, but she's never been a fan of a stranger space. She would always rather spend time at a friends than a place where all manner of things could have happened.
The door opens to an odd image; Harvey, feathers softly ruffled, and hair sticking up at all places and a cloudy attention suddenly sewn poker straight as he regards her.
"Donna," She hears him mutter, frowning lavishly.
"Harvey…Hi," She placates, ignoring the way her own voice softens against his appearance. "I...lost my keys. And Rach used to have a spare, but-"
"No problem," He says, stealing the words from under her, as he gestures into the apartment. "Come in," He gestures, his head tilting as he opens the door fully for her.
She sheds a small sigh of relief, gliding past the open door and down the long hallway.
"Thankyou. I'm sorry to...impose. I know it's late." She adds, a self consciousness in her tone, the confusion of such a concept turning almost opaque between them.
"Donna, it's...fine." He says, after shutting the door behind them.. She can almost plot the frankness in his tone, his eyes hanging under a tired expression.
"You haven't..." She pauses, her eyes searching the place with an awkward humour about them. "By any chance, got a lady friend in here, have you?"
His mouth twists then, his eyes narrowing as he catches her drift. "Do you think I would have made it to the door, if I had?" He answers, rather smugly.
"Well, it might have been an emergency." She defends.
"And you locking yourself out of your own apartment, isn't an emergency?" He questions, a wholly genuine sense of confusion tainted intrigue mixing up his handsome features.
It's a direct assault on her, and not one she's entirely ready for, as she gawps at him, her head tilting to challenge his words. "I'm just...checking." She says, her voice bending into a self-consciousness that doesn't match the sight of her.
He smiles softly, seeming entertained with her, as his eyes gravitate to his bedroom, pausing for a split second before flicking his attention back to her.
"You want a drink?" He offers.
"Weren't you...catching up on some beauty sleep?" She asks, arching a perfectly shaped eyebrow.
"Yes." He pauses, his face deadpanned, with the faintest touch of sarcasm. "But someone woke me up."
"Touche." She says, watching as he skirts the kitchen counter and reaches for the fridge.
"Hot or Cold?" He asks.
"Tea would be great." She welcomes, smiling with a settled kind of relief.
"...Tea," He nods once, slowly, pausing for a fraction of a second long enough to awaken her intuition.
"You asked." She shrugs, feeling his scrutiny all over her. "Do you even make...tea?" She asks, the challenge of such a concept carefully woven into her words.
He turns to her with a cat like reflex, his face sharpening at the edges. "You want the tea, or not?" He says, a sense of grump in his voice, propped up by the flash of a look in his eyes.
She chuckles, bending to the sight of Harvey Reginald Specter, cup in hand, giving her a past-midnight tea-laden ultimatum.
"I would love some Tea, Harvey." She lavishes. "Thankyou."
His lips twitch and twist into a reserved smirk as he flicks a switch on the metal contraption that rests on the counter, plucking another cup out of the cupboard to his right.
"So...what's the dress for?" He asks, coolly.
When his words flood into the room, she looks up to find him glance at her only once, vaguely in between the picking of tea bags and rummaging in the fridge for milk, a slight avoidance in his gaze after that.
She tucks the feeling that his carefulness evokes in her, as she straightens, the slightly swimmy feeling in her gut laying waste to such things as modesty and coyness.
"You like it, huh?" She plants, all too innocently, feeling rather gutsy in her ten thousand dollar one of a kind haute couture gown.
His eyes snap to hers, frank and heavy and all Harvey. "Blind men might have to work around the sequins, but, even then..." He says, rather abstractly. "It's a dress for a purpose, that's for sure."
She smiles. "Is that your way of asking me if I was out on a date tonight?"
There is a palpable tension to their personal conversations now. There are things out on the table, things that didn't used to be an issue, that now become an additional chip to play in their gamble-laden game of two people avoiding the obvious.
She can't see his expression, as he busies himself with the task at hand.
She supressess a huff. She hates these silences that he's started to invoke between them. Half questions, with a subtext that she can feel and taste but not touch or see. She's the inevitable blind man scouring the moon-like surface of his heart for the bleak signs of life.
"No Date." She divulges." Just...the Opera...and Louis." She explains, watching how his eyes flick to hers at the mere mention of their co-worker. "Rachel was meant to come with me, but due to her impromptu nuptials and sudden city hopping…" She adds, her voice trailing off as she watches him look back to the counter, the muscles on his back softening at the information that she knows to be adequately disarming.
"So, you didn't go to Louis's, huh?" He asks pointedly, a smirk forming.
"Do you want me to go to Louis's?" She offers, the threat of the possibility catching him hook, line and sinker.
The look he gives her in reply is all she needs.
She smiles to herself, looking about the apartment.
Donna has a piece of information. A piece, that for the past month or two, she's been holding like a winning card against her chest.
A while back, she screwed up. She told a lie, that somehow stuck. And since then it's been playing her for all she has, fixing her against the point, just as Harvey has begun to change.
He's...softening with her. Opening up to her. As if he has no more cards to lay down for her, even as the game is still playing. Now he's in it for different odds. For a different prize entirely, and all whilst she's now fixed with a hand that she knows won't get her anything, unless of course she's willing to go all in and risk every little thing that they have ever built between them.
"I should...have a key." He says, his voice swimming into their small silence.
"What?" She frowns, her lips quirking with interest at his words.
"To your place? I should...have a key." He shrugs matter of factly.
She blinks. It's not the kind of thing that she thought he'd ever say. She's not entirely sure how to take it.
Harvey pauses, feeling her silence as he hands her a hot cup. "You have a key to my place, after all," He shrugs. "And...now that Rach isn't in the city I just figure…"
She can see the wheels in his mind turning, that little spiral of doubt setting in…
"No, you're right," She says in a rush. "I've always had a key to yours. It...makes sense." She nods. "You know that I don't have that key anymore though, right?" She offers, raising the steaming cup to her lips.
"Yeah...I've been meaning to give it back to you." He admits, his eyes flicking to his own cup.
"Really?" She offers, blowing on her Tea.
"Yeah. It's always been yours, Donna." He tells her. "Truth be told, I should have never let you give it back to me in the first place."
He copies her gesture then, bringing the cup to his lips with a restrained smile as his lips squeeze into an 'o' shape, blowing slowly on the steaming liquid.
She finds herself getting lost in the sight of him, barefoot and grey toned, ruffled at the edges, leant against his kitchen counter sipping at his cup. He's slightly slumped in the shoulders, less proud and stoic looking than he would look if he was standing in one of his memorable suits. But there is still something drawing her to him in that moment, as she leans against her side of the counter.
"How's the Tea?" She asks, her eyes softening into almost moss green under the golden lamp light as she changes the subject.
"It's...Tea," He says, double taking her question in a way that gives even more suspicion to her approach. She watches that flash of something in his expression, that lays waist to his internal process and awareness of her, in his apartment, at such an ambiguous hour. She watches the way he switches off any impulse just as quick, his eyes flicking past her.
"It's getting late...you take the bed. I'll take the couch." He says, putting his cup down into the sink.
She frowns immediately. "Harvey. No. I did not come here to steal your bed. I'll...take the couch," She says, her eyes roaming at the overly bulky looking couch, square and leather and studded and wholly unappealing as a bed for the night.
"Donna," He sighs, a humour lacing his deep voice. "The couch as is awful to sleep on. I'll take it. Take the bed."
She can feel the worry setting into her own forehead. She assumes that he hasn't changed the mattress since she-who-shall-not-be-named-but-always-thought-badly-of last laid in it.
She swallows the urge to roll her eyes at the mere memory that a woman as twisted as Paula Agard ever even ventured into Harvey Specter's bed…
"I...don't think I need to sleep in a place that housed your many conquests, Harvey." She says. "It's okay."
"Donna," He says, her name bending an objection in his mouth.
"Look...the couch isn't...anyone's finest choice." She admits. "I'll sleep on top of the bed, and you can sleep in the bed. There...the perfect compromise." She reasons.
"What are you, sixteen?" He jibes, sneering at her offer. "It's a bed, Donna. Not an invitation to get naked."
"Does that mean that you usually sleep naked? Is that why it took you so long to come to the- "
"Don't….even." He cuts her off, giving her a look before she can even finish the joke.
She smirks, silenced for one of over a hundred times since they've known one another, as she watches him stride across the lounge with purpose, disappearing into the bedroom.
A pit drops in her stomach, the realisation dawning on her that she has never ever, in her lifetime, nor his, ever slept in his condo.
They had slept together once. Nearly twice. Both times in her small apartment. And many times for her on the couch in his office. But never his place.
The idea of such a thing makes her uneasy.
She looks down at her cup, noticing that any remaining tea she might have had has been sipped cleanly from her designated mug without her full concentration, as she observes him walking out of the bedroom, a small pile of clothes in his hands, that he places on the counter next to her.
"Here," He offers the pile with a forced gruffness. "I'm not having sequins in my bed." He says.
"I didn't come here to cuddle, Harvey." She tells him.
He looks at her, a streak of frustration in his darkened eyes as he regards her. "Good." He challenges.
"Good." She parrots.
"You're impossible," He resolves, rolling his eyes at her.
"And yet, also one of life's great mysteries…" She tells him, smiling smugly.
He gives her a vague look, watching as she picks up the pile of clothes and saunters past him with purpose.
. . ….
Donna is...here. In his apartment. In the middle of the night. At first look, there's something, oddly sensical about the decision to appear at his door. They've known one another long enough to depend on one another, sure. And he's told her before, that he'd never let anything happen to her. But since their kiss they've...in terms of where they stand in the personal, they've been on separate pages, and yet now, on a seemingly different book than before.
Her coming to him, like this, puts them on an...angle. A tilt, from one another.
Now they're going to be sleeping in the same bed. His bed. A bed that he regularly shared with another woman, not so long ago.
The idea of his recent past coming to haunt him once more, sends a shiver down his spine, one he's not fully able to shake when she doesn't reappear after about ten minutes.
He turns off the lights in the lounge, save for once small lamp that casts enough golden light in the large room to light him a way, as he pads with a reticence towards his own bedroom, like he has his grandmother to stay, and they'll be sharing a bed, the completely opposite situation pulling out all the same awkwardnesses in him.
He rounds the doorway, and pauses at the view, the lamp by his bed lighting the edges of the room on fire, and Donna, laid on - not his side of - the bed, dressed in his Harvard Sweater and grey slacks, her law defying tumble of auburn hair wrapped into a large bun atop of her head.
He watches as she blinks, once, twice and a third time to accompany a worn in question in her eyes.
"What?" She says, examining him.
"Nothing," He says innocently, padding over to his side of the bed, sliding under the covers with a practised ease.
"Exactly how many women have worn this delightful sweater?" She asks, pulling at it with fussy fingers.
"None." He says plainly, his jaw sharpening.
"Not even Scottie?" She questions, rather boldly, and eyebrow arching.
"Nope." He says, popping the 'p'. "She had her own, remember?"
She nods, folding her arms against herself.
"Do you have a...blanket...for me?" She asks then.
"It's three am, Donna. Just get in the damn bed." He groans, settling against his own pillow, a hand scooping it up to soften the edges as he lays to face away from her.
"You're so...fussy," She says, observing his militance.
After a moment or two, he hears the rustle of sheets and a cool puff of air to rest against his back as she stirs, no less than two foot away from him.
He squeezes his eyes shut for a moment, all feeling and any pent up frustrations - of which there are many - lessening enough to get him to relax once more.
"Goodnight Harvey." He hears her say.
"Goodnight Donna." He replies, flattening his body against the sheets.
When he hears a light snore, he revels in the way that it calms his bones, the pull of sleep dragging him finally under.
. . …
A knock at the door on a Sunday morning rouses one of the two people currently occupying the Specter household.
Two people, much closer than they had started or expected to be.
Harvey's eyes snap open, his hand clenching into material that's not the bedsheet, or his own clothes.
His eyes widen, flicking up to freckles and ripe auburn hair that's come undone in the night, like a curtain of autumn leaves against a charcoal sheet and ivory frames. He bites his lip, removing his hand from Donna's waist as she stirs against him. He doesn't have the time to enjoy the happy accident that has befallen him, as a second knock raps on the door.
He groans, his attention stripped as he swings his legs out of the bed, planting his feet into the wooden flooring in a way that causes him to wince at the funny angle that he must have slept at.
He pads through the apartment, yawning against the back of his hand as he glides to the door, opening it with only half his usual interest.
He blinks, eyes widening in a rush at the petite woman at his door.
"Paula…" He says, all the blood draining from his face and any other appendage that may have awoken moments before.
"Harvey...I...sorry, I didn't call before, I'm just...umm. Can I come in?" She asks, a curtness to her tone despite the stumbling block.
"Uh," He stumbles on his words, red and copper and aurburn flashing in his mind's eye like she's a flag and he's the bull. "Now's not a great time, Paula, I'm kind of a little…"
"I'm pregnant, Harvey."
The three words tumble out onto the carpet, heavier than any of Mike's many bags of weed...
"What?" He blinks, once, twice, the sound in his ears sharpening into a confusion and a high pitched drone.
He's sure he can actually feel his heart stopping at her words.
His Ex-Girlfriend. Ex-Therapist. Ex...
Pregnant.
Pregnant...
By Him?
"I…" He starts, his eyebrows knitting into a complex frown.
"Harvey, I have yoga, so I think I'm gonna-"
He feels a hole open up at him as he hears her familiar voice behind him, at the same time witnessing the small woman in front of him visibly straighten at the other woman's entrance.
He turns, a second drop in his gut at the sight of Donna, hair still rippling and his Harvard sweater and slacks hanging from her womanly, almost model-like frame.
"Oh," Donna pauses, mid step. "….Paula." She says, her voice immediately hard edged.
"Well…" Paula says under her breath, her large blue eyes striking into his at their very core. "That didn't take you very long, did it?" Paula says, her eyes dragging back to his. "This is probably...an inconvenience...for you both." She reasons, english-toned sarcasm lacing her words.
"Paula...I...can we-"
"I can go." Donna interrupts, her tone morphing into sharp and withheld in a New York second.
"Donna," He finds himself saying, his voice feeling harsh and bile tinged, his eyes finding her face yet unwilling gaze.
"Yeah, I should…" She says, nodding to herself, the cogs turning in her mind.
"Are you seriously going to let her leave without telling her?" Paula remarks, the words directed at him, as she folds her arms about herself.
"Tell me what?" Donna pauses, her eyes narrowing.
This is like a building, with a foundation of nightmare upon nightmare, rising up between them.
Between Donna and he.
"Well, I suppose I'll have to be the bigger person here, then." Paula says, sidestepping Harvey to regard Donna. "I just came from the Doctors. I'm...pregnant. Or so it seems."
He feels a lump in his throat as he too turns, piecing together the way the information only solidifies Donna's poker face. He can almost see her running before her feet have even lifted from his polished oak flooring.
"Okay...this doesn't have anything to do with me, so I should just…" She stumbles slightly on her words, a quick recovery despite the evident shock.
"Donna," He says, turning to her, a minute head shake as she finally connects with his gaze.
"Harvey." She says, her tone changing for him and only him. "Paula's right. You two need to...talk. Alone. This is none of my business." She says hurriedly. "Thanks for letting me...crash. I'll just...get my things and be...on my way."
He feels a dead-weight sink into his chest, all those tiny little hopes, any that he may have had the audacity to even entertain about them when he'd first awoke are dashed in sheer seconds, Paula's words pouring ice cold water on the entire affair.
In less than a minute he sees Donna slide to the bathroom, and emerge in a startlingly quick amount of time, suddenly redressed in last nights attire, like some dirty stop-out.
It doesn't look good, her looking this good and perched in his apartment on a Sunday, dressed for Saturday.
Sunday used to be his and Paula's day...
He swallows any feelings that the memory of last night gave him, as he watches, mute as she glides silently past them both.
He is left...almost literally holding the baby.
. . .
When Donna's feet hit the sidewalk, the music of the city flooding into her ears, she feels a bold lurch in her stomach, something violent, and heavy threatening to dislodge itself from her being, something far more serious than any hangover could ever encourage.
She thought Paula Agard was a thing of the past.
Right now, she seems to be overtaking every possible future…
. . .
You left me in the worst way
I'm scarred and I'm tear stained
And when you know I'm hurting
Put my heart out, it was yours to break
'Need You' By Flight Facilities