There's nothing in particular about it all that sends him into a tailspin.
He feels bad about it even as he tries to hide it - after all it's all been perfect. Him showing up at her door, fragmented declarations of love squeezed between gasping breaths and the hurried and somehow too-slow unbuttoning of clothes. It's all he's wanted and ignored; all she'd wanted and hidden because of his ignoring.
I'm here now, she'd said, moments before the most peaceful enveloping of sleep he can ever remember having.
And so, bolting awake in the middle of the night with his heart hammering into his temples and his stomach catching in his throat is not what he'd expected when he next found consciousness. Or rather, when consciousness found him.
There's something terrifying about perfection.
Harvey's life is chase. Always has been. Not dreams, but goals, and onto the next one. And the next one. And the next one. He has mental lists of houses, cars, cases and women, they're detailed and long and - importantly - they don't end. There's always something new to go after, some new model Tesla, some asshole who's avoided the feel of the law breathing down his neck, some blond or brunette he's clocked across the bar.
(Never a red head)
New cars always get designed, new penthouses always get built, and new ambitious blondes and brunettes always move into the city. And so the list gets ticked off and grows all at once. He had never thought that when the word Donna popped up on that list, unexpectedly and urgent and underlined, that it was also the last thing on his list. He found quite to his surprise that he'd jumped right to the end of it all and now
Nothing.
Nothing, when your whole life is 'get everything', feels a bit like dying. He just hadn't noticed in the flurry of hands and mouths and I-love-yous. And so it announced itself at around 3am in something he'd come to realise as halfway between friend and foe - telling him something was wrong, and pay attention, idiot, all the while forcing him to outlive mortifying vulnerability in front of people who saw him as superman.
You fucker, he thinks, as he holds perfectly still for three seconds to will his stomach into control before admitting defeat and bolting for the bathroom. He finds his way on instinct; even if waves of nausea didn't force him to rely on muscle memory he could have found his way half asleep in the pitch black with his eyes closed anyway.
It's not like he's been to her apartment that often - it's just that things of her tend to etch themselves into his brain into sharp relief, drawn like ink against watercolour so that everything but her fades into a blur of washed out colour in the periphery…
He's pretty sure it's the panic attack making him wax poetic about the way he manages not to hurt himself as he stumbles to her bathroom to throw up everywhere.
Donna appears halfway through him clinging onto the bathroom floor for dear life and if she thinks maybe the reason he showed up in the first place was because he'd drunk an entire bottle of Macallan and was now paying for it, she doesn't say anything. She magics a cool, damp washcloth from nowhere, sits with him, the cloth on the back of his neck and her hand at the small of his back. He thinks dimly that he should be embarrassed at the way she trails fingers through pooling sweat at the base of his spine, but she doesn't say anything so he decides not to care.
She says it's okay, and he thinks it probably isn't if he's going to have an existential crisis every time they make out, but it doesn't seem worth having a fight on top of a panic attack so he files it into the 'things to discuss later' category.
Later, though, it's not the impossibility of being with her if it means he blacks out in the toilet every night that they discuss. It's not what he thinks for a moment is the inevitability of Them: of almosts followed immediately by never-minds because someone or something gets in the way.
He's half expecting something along the lines of I-should-go to come out of his mouth. After all, it worked so well the last time.
She just presses him into the shower and then back into bed, and when he tries to start a list (chase - goal - onto the next) about maybe they should talk about it and Them and if the list ending is too much for Them, she just says,
'Go to sleep, Harvey.'
'But -'
'It's scary. And that's okay.'
He thinks for a second.
'Are you scared?' he asks.
She thinks. For a long moment. Long enough for Harvey's insides to start that familiar rattle again. But she's not avoiding. She's thinking, hard and genuine.
'Yes,' she says finally. 'Who wouldn't be?'
He thinks, well, that's true.
Anyone who lives in the shadows long enough panics at the heat of the sun. And they've been digging caves to hide in for a long time.
Donna is sunlight, but the way she lays her hands against him feels like shade and ocean breeze. She could be the death of him, exposed and vulnerable, but she won't. Like the earth, she'll hold all things together for him. Like breathing. Like life.
Panic attacks and waxing poetic aside, he decides it's not an inaccurate thought.
'But real is scary,' she says into his thoughts. 'If this didn't mean anything, I wouldn't be scared. But it does. So…'
'I'm terrified,' he finishes.
'Utterly terrified,' she agrees, and somehow it's good, them both admitting it, that this is big and scary and huge, way beyond what either of them thought they were capable of feeling. Harvey thinks maybe his stomach shifting around earlier was actually making space for his heart to get bigger. She is too much and he feels too much for it's original size.
He's only gone and outgrown his insides just to make space for her, and yeah, that's scary.
And, somehow, now that he's said it, it's also… okay.
Sleep, she says, pressing him into the mattress, and her fingers slip through his. She plays her thumb in small circles against the back of his hand.
It feels like the way she'd move a pen to tick off something on the to do lists she used to write.
Car.
Case.
Blonde.
And, he thinks, as he falls back into sleep, having Donna tick off the end of that list, the one with her name at the end he didn't know was there,
It's good.