Prompt: We get to hear Donna and Harvey's conversation during their dance at the end of 7x16.
She cocks her head at him at the bar, sees the deep hurt sitting in his eyes that he's trying hard to hide behind the way that he lifts his chin and his eyebrow and it's the face he makes when he doesn't want to talk about it. It's his inside joke, I-know-something-you-don't look, but he normally wears it with a grin that makes him look like a teenager and now he just looks like he's been pushed through every year of his life like a battering ram, and he's been worn thin and fragile.
He looks at her and he can see the look on her face that says she wants to talk about it, and Harvey doesn't so instead he asks her to dance and lets her lead him out to the floor and to Mike and Rachel, and she lets him pull her close, just a little closer than friends dance together. She feels his head dip towards hers and nobody else would have noticed it but for her it's like a road map of his hurt and his confusion and an admittance that's she's the only one, the only person that understands.
"You okay?" She murmurs it against his ear; it's quiet and it's just for him and she can hear him thinking about how she somehow manages to build a private moment for them in the middle of a crowd and in the middle of a party.
He almost says yes. She can feel it forming in his chest, the 'I'm fine' that rips from his soul automatically whenever he can't bear whatever weight has been dropped on his shoulders. It's so many years that he's built 'I'm fine' into his defences that he almost doesn't know how to respond any other way.
She squeezes his hand gently.
He sighs, says, "I don't know."
"They haven't betrayed you, you know," she says. "Mike and Rachel just..." She shrugs against the hand he has on her back. "They're just different people."
"You mean good people."
"You're good people too, Harvey."
"Am I?" She can hear the bitterness in his throat. It's evidence, the residual anger he has towards Mike and Rachel, and he hates it but there's comfort in being right he holds on to even when it hurts.
Everybody leaves.
"The best. You're the best of them, Harvey." She isn't usually so blunt but she feels like if he doesn't believe her he'll go home and sit in the dark by himself with a glass of scotch and let loneliness redraw him and that thought wrecks her. "You're the best I know."
He considers that quietly for a moment as he leads her across the floor.
"You look beautiful. Did I tell you that?"
He hadn't said it out loud, but he had in the way he looked at her like the altar they were standing in front of was for them and not Mike and Rachel.
So Donna hums instead of answering, and Harvey's mouth finds her ear and he murmurs "because you do," and she lets herself think that might mean something, and she hopes.
end