A/N: I AM SHOOK BY EVERYTHING DARVEY RIGHT NOW
For someone who has spent her life telling it like it is, she isn't so very used to being told.
And to be fair, Louis wasn't talking about her. Louis was just spilling his heart and soul as he always does, with that rasp of emotion rising in his voice. It's the sound of bleak honesty, and it always draws Donna's sympathy.
This time it broke her heart.
Mike was right. And Louis doesn't know how right he is, but Donna does, and it's all that matters.
Later she will tell herself—she is good at telling, remember? Just not at being told—she will tell herself that she has not yet decided.
(But if she had not yet decided, why would she have kissed him? Why would she have let herself go, why would she have made her heartbreak become a breaker, a wave that crashes on every shore of her life?)
She is more than in love. She is love. She breathes and holds it and thinks it so deeply that it seemed unrecognizable, sometimes. As though something so permanent could not also be so perilous.
But that is the wave, and the undertow all at once. That is who she is, and what she does—and what she did tonight.
She thinks she can rise up, fall down, and rise up again.
But she needed to know.