A/N: All dialogue in Act II is taken from SUITS. Act IV was meant to go in a previous chapter (and will be moved eventually), but I stuck it in this one. I'm sorry if it doesn't flow well, but I know some of you guys like flashback Harvey and Alice, so I didn't want to cut it.
I
13 years ago, December
The District Attorney's office is a large granite building situated across the street from Columbus park, on the outer edge of China Town. The cab driver drops Donna off near the park's pavilion, at an area that has been condemned since the early 90s. There is a bum huddled beneath the fenced-off awning, trying to escape the falling snow. At his feet is a sign; bathed in the light of the street lamps, it reads: HOMELESS AND HUNGRY PLEASE HELP. Standing in the chilling breeze, warmed by her wool overcoat, Donna feels a sudden twinge of sympathy. Given all she's lost, she still has more than some.
She treks in heels unfit for the icy weather up the untreated pavilion steps and offers the homeless man what little cash she carries. His thanks is gracious, but his face falls when she conditions the money with a cab ride to a nearby shelter. "Spend the money however you'd like," she tells him. "But please, find a warm place to sleep."
Inside the county building, there is a security guard positioned in the main hallway. "The DA offices are to the right," he informs, letting Donna by with a guest pass. She realizes too late she could have entered at the opposite side of the building and saved herself the stares of fifty government employees. She tries to walk tall and look some-what dignified, but after being a hermit for the better part of six months, she imagines there is an awkwardness about her, like she's trying to crawl back into a world she no longer belongs to.
Donna rounds a corner and finds a paneled door labeled District Attorney. Inside is a large communal office that, aside from three young women, is practically deserted. She walks up to the reception desk and lingers, waiting for the curly haired clerk sitting behind it to end her phone conversation.
"Were you flirting or—?" The woman glances at Donna briefly and gestures for a moment. "Booze?" She says in the receiver. "Ew. Did you tell her to fuck-off? You did? Well that oughtta teach her."
It is with the reflexes of a COO and the ingrained necessity to keep the proletariat in line that Donna reaches over and presses the hook.
"Hey! What the hell?!"
"Harvey Specter," Donna says coolly. "Where can I find him?"
The receptionist looks around wide-eyed, as if trying to find a witness to the violation that just occurred. "Harvey isn't here," she says. "Now can I—"
"I didn't ask if Harvey was here. I asked where I can find him."
"I don't know. It's not my job to keep track of our ADAs."
Donna feels a stab of annoyance, but it is quickly smothered by a wave of hopelessness. The receptionist must sense Donna's utter defeat, because she softens and adds in a whisper, "Look, I would check with his secretary for you, but Tina's pretty useless. Come by tomorrow morning and I'll get you an appointment with him. What's your name?"
Tomorrow. Will there be one?
"Don't worry about it," Donna says. "But thank you anyway and…sorry about your call. Old habits."
Back out on the street, Donna stands stunned, feeling empty and contemplating what her next move should be when that same homeless man struts up to her.
"Why the face, Red?"
"I…" Donna frowns. "I thought you were going to a shelter."
"That was your idea, right?" Musing, he smooths his beard with long, thin fingers. "I ain't arguing. These shelters fill up too quick and an old git like me just takes up space. Plus I got God on my side, you see. My angel's red headed. I am rejoicing." He offers her a bottle of whiskey, which seems to have materialized into his hand. "Here. Take a sip, kid. You look sad."
Donna stares at the bottle. Macallan 18. She lifts an eyebrow.
The bum shrugs, unashamed. "Better than two hundred dollars' worth of crack."
"That…" Donna nods her head, and finds herself smiling. "That is true."
He waggles the bottle at her and she thinks, to hell with it, and takes a swallow. Childishly, she finds herself thinking about how disappointed her mother would be, then remembers their phone call from earlier, how she stood up on top of that ledge and almost —
She takes another swallow.
Before she knows it, she is sitting on the freshly salted curb outside Columbus Park listening to this man, who calls himself Fat Billy, play Master of The House from Les Mis on his ukulele.
Is this rock bottom? Donna wonders. Sitting in the cold, drinking whiskey with a bum in a condemned park? She thinks about getting up and catching a cab back to Tribeca and the thought makes her sick. She can't be Donna Martell anymore. She won't survive it. That rooftop will keep calling, and Jonathan and his oppressive gray eyes will keep trying to shove her over it.
Billy strums a closing chord, and says to Donna, "You think she's cruel."
"She?"
"She. Our city. Mother-love." He pats the salted sidewalk. "She ain't though. You just gotta treat her right."
Buzzed and strangely hypnotized by Billy's rhythmic drawl, Donna places her palm on the sidewalk.
"You feel her purr?"
"No," she says sadly.
"Take another swig then, pretty lady. You'll get there."
Donna pushes her palm down harder, wishing she could press herself into the city and become it. Absorb its indifference. Change skin like a chameleon, into someone better suited for this world. But she can't. She's trapped. A prisoner to this growing feeling, which seems to have transcended sadness. She is packed full of it, filled up to the very brim, and it never overspills, it just condenses into this huge density. Like a black hole, she is sinking inwardly into an inescapable void.
Please. I don't know how to get free of this. Help me…
"I was looking for someone," Donna admits, brushing salt crystals off her palms. "His name is Harvey."
"Harvey! Why didn't you say?"
"You know him?" She lifts a skeptical eyebrow.
"Know him? Red, there's not a soul in this city us street folk don't know." He strums his ukulele for emphasis. "Fancy suit. Cocky. Goofy, fat kid in a candy shop kinda grin…"
"That's him!" Donna scrambles up. "Yes! That's him!"
"He's down there at The Local." He points up the block. "Kid goes there most Fridays, but he went early today. Won some big case."
A heady exhilaration booms in Donna's chest. She doesn't know why meeting Harvey feels so monumental, but she can't stop the thrill surging through her.
She clasps Billy's cool hand between both of hers. "Thank you."
"See, friend Red." He says, grinning. "I earn my cabbage."
II
Donna sits at the back of the whiskey bar, watching Harvey interact with a group of his colleagues.
Goosebumps travel up and down her skin. It seems almost…spiritual? Through Alice, this man has become larger than life. Like a saint, he has threaded silver-linings into her darkest moments and spoke words she holds sacred. It's irrational and silly — an arrogant Manhattan attorney is the opposite of holy — but she can't ignore the cathartic ebb nor the strange gravity coaxing her toward him.
She bites her bottom lip. How does she approach this? He has no idea what he symbolizes to her, and she's not sure she can get through a conversation about Alice without becoming a sobbing mess. She brought the notebook with her. Maybe she could just point to the line where it says "have mommy and Harvey meet," and that will be enough. But how sad and awkward is that? She wants to thank him, not drag him down.
Harvey breaks off from the group of attorneys and walks over to the bar. Donna seizes the opportunity, forcing herself out of her seat with a confidence she attributes to Billy's overpriced whiskey.
"You know," she says, stepping up beside Harvey, "usually when somebody wins their first trial they at least pretend to finish the drink their fellow ADAs bought them."
Harvey turns to her slowly. His dark eyes meet and hold hers. There is a moment, the span of a heartbeat, where she is certain he recognizes her. Not her from the hospital, but all the facets of Alice she embodies. His brow furrows. Impossible. She almost feels him shove the thought away.
He doesn't want to think about Alice, she realizes, and having this conversation is probably not something he's ready for. It's definitely not something she's ready for, and now she's stuck in an introduction she doesn't know how to bail out of.
"I'm sorry, do we—"
"Know each other?" Her masquerade smile quivers. "Not yet. But today is your lucky day."
Harvey lifts an intrigued brow. "And why is that?"
Good question. Why is that…
"Because it's the day you get to meet Donna," she says, and she has absolutely no idea where she's heading with this. She's pulling words out of the air like the worst kind of improv actress. At this point she just wishes the floor would crack open and swallow her whole.
"And let me guess." He smiles at her, strangely enticed by her astounding arrogance. "You're Donna?"
"Ooh," she shakes her head and grins with an in-over-my-head kind of hysteria, "you have no idea how Donna I am." And she has no idea either, but she just keeps grinning and thinking this must be what losing your sanity feels like.
"Well, Donna." He sticks out his hand. "I'm Harv—"
"Harvey Specter." Instinctively she takes his hand. A persona starts to take hold; it is years spent as COO mixed with just a little too much alcohol. "You really think I'd be talking to you if I didn't know who you were?"
He looks skeptical. "And how exactly do you know about me?"
Alice. Do you remember her? She had a face full of freckles and a contagious laugh. She hated shoes, but loved her skates, and could eat faster than you ever thought possible. She wants to tell him how much her daughter loved him; how she had idolized him. But grief constricts her throat and she has to rush to deviate from the subject.
"I know about everybody. But what I don't know is why this is the first case you ever took to trial."
The conversation shifts. Business. Donna starts to relax into a role she's quite used to. And for whatever reason Harvey seems to buy into this brazen train wreck of confidence. This Donna.
God, what would Alice think? Would she be ashamed? Amused? Proud of her mother for not being such a stick in the mud?
Donna latches on to the latter, feeling like she's gained something precious. Although she can't really put her finger on what it is.
At Donna's request, Harvey buys her a drink and they move to a table at the back of the bar. They continue to discuss Harvey's case and it quickly occurs to her that his big 'win' is Brandon Russo — the very case Donna forced Cameron to pass off to Harvey as a gesture of appreciation. The pride and excitement in his voice as he speaks about the trial breaks Donna's heart; with the falsified evidence and tampered jury it was a fool proof win, and what she thought was a career boosting gift begins to feel somewhat demeaning.
It seems operating in the corporate world of tyrants and hierarchies has desensitized her. Turned her savage. She lost sight of the fact those high ideals like self-respect, accountability, and hard work matter to people — at least, the good and honest ones.
Good and honest…is there really such a thing?
Harvey continues to talk. A lot. Donna gets the notion that he's not only cocky but intensely self-absorbed. His life, career and ambitions reign over the conversation, and Donna sits there and listens, completely fascinated, not at all by anything he has to say, but by how expressive he is. Each shift in his emotion displays across his face and wraps into his tone — aggravation, joy, boredom — it's almost perverse how easily she can read him.
She thinks of her husband, of his impenetrability and stoicism, and what a relief it is not to have to blindly guess at someone's emotions for once. Sure, Harvey's full of himself, but there's something genuine about him. She sees it in his eyes, how youthful they are in their enthusiasm, how they gleam at her, how they beckon like golden archways into some upside down world where life is full of passion and excitement.
She wants so badly to join in. To see the world through those honey colored lenses and believe in a life that's conquerable; a life where losing isn't an option. She wants to convert to him like a religion, and become enlightened by whatever crazy ideology he's preaching. Law? Jazz? Ferragamo ties? Cool. Show her where to sign.
She wonders if this was what Alice felt. This warmth at being near him. She can't really define it. She only knows it feels right.
"Okay. Enough about me," Harvey says, startling her. "Let's talk about you."
"Ooh, my favorite subject."
She bites the inside of her cheek and tries not to panic. This is it then. The cat has to come out of the bag. She eases her hand into her purse and touches Alice's notebook. This is why she came here, isn't it?
…isn't it?
"You know what I think?" Harvey's dark eyes bore into hers as if suddenly afflicted by severity. Still, there is the undertone of a boyish grin tugging at his lips, making him look so very untough. "I think your favorite subject didn't come up to me just to find out why I went to trial."
She holds his gaze. The silent exchange feels intensely intimate, and it drives in just how long it's been since someone dared to look her in the eyes. It's like being marred, the way people dodge and divert their glances, as if they're afraid they'll catch sight of her disfigured soul.
She doesn't want Harvey to look away. But he will when he finds out. They always do.
It's such a lonely way to live. So few people understand the magnitude of her loss, and even fewer know how to have a conversation with her about it. It's so much easier to lie and pretend, to flutter her eyelashes and wear a mask.
And what's so wrong with that? Harvey assumes she's just some secretary. Why correct him? Why pull the notebook out and bare her soul? Why make them both uncomfortable? That's not why she came here. That's not why she stepped off that ledge.
So why did she?
Is she searching for something? Running away? She doesn't know. All she knows is right now she feels better. Functional. And she doesn't want it to stop.
She can't afford for it to stop.
Harvey's smile widens. "You want something," he says.
She removes her hand from the notebook and grins back at him.
"I sure do."
III
She doesn't want to sleep with him, and oddly this just solidifies the growing notion that this Donna is perhaps the most beautiful woman Harvey's ever seen.
He can't help but stare at her, his eyes tracing the lovely curve of her cheekbones and jaw, and down the delicate tilt of her nose. He takes in her lips as she talks, watching them curl into a mischievous grin that reaches up into her eyes – captivating dark eyes that sparkle with majesty and shine with intelligence. She has eyes that know, that have seen. He is in awe.
More than in awe, he is tantalized. His hard-won trust and tendency to keep everyone at arm's length simply doesn't apply to her, for reasons he can't quite understand. There is just something about her, something almost…familiar?
Sadly Harvey is pulled away from the redhead by a man with a job offer. He turns it down, and should probably feel a sense of gut twisting nausea at the loss of a million dollar sign-on bonus, but looking across the bar at his new secretary, he thinks he's gained something far more valuable.
A Donna.
She doesn't want to sleep with him, but he thinks having her at his desk might be frustratingly better.
IV
14 years ago, July
"All right, remember what I said. Eyes on the ball and swing out. We're not chopping wood."
Alice nods and lifts the bat into the air. She bends her knees and juts her elbows out like the baseball guys on TV. The helmet she's wearing is too big and cuts off part of Mr. Gordon Specter's head, but that's okay, because she only needs to see him throw the pitch.
"Less squat, chuckle head."
Alice straightens and looks up at Harvey for approval.
He nods. "Good." Then he shouts across the baseball field: "Okay, old man. Give us one right down the middle."
Mr. Gordon tosses the baseball underhand. Alice holds her breath, closes her eyes and swings with all she has. The bat cuts through empty air, the weight of it sending her into a forward spin. She stumbles a few steps but manages to keep upright.
Harvey sighs. "Terrible."
"What!" Alice whirls around, frowning. "But I did what you said!"
"Don't give her a hard time, Son," Mr. Gordon calls from the pitcher's mound. "She's doing okay."
"See," Alice argues weakly, but she feels her face flush in shame. She hates letting Harvey down.
Harvey lifts Alice's helmet visor until she is able to meet his eyes. "Do you wanna be okay or do you wanna win?"
Too shy to hold his gaze, Alice stares down at home plate, drawing a line in the dirt with the toe of her shoe. "I wanna win," she mutters.
"Then Listen. That geezer out there is too soft. He wants to pat your back for participating, but we don't play for hugs and kisses. We play to win. Got it?" He slaps her helmet back down. "Now smash this ball out of the park."
Alice nods to herself, feeling Harvey's words rise up and bubble inside of her. She lifts her bat back over her shoulder and eyes the fence across the field. The distance looks impossibly far away — a million miles, at least. Her palms begin to sweat and her guts feel full of flutterflies.
"Relax," Harvey whispers. "Eyes wide-open."
Mr. Gordon smiles and nods his head, ready? Alice nods back, the tilt causing her helmet to fall forward. She quickly shoves it up.
He tosses the ball. It soars through the air. Harvey says, "Breathe," and she breathes; "Now!" and she swings.
She misses but not by much.
"Dang it!" Alice slams her bat against the plate like a mallet. "What the heck!?"
Harvey chuckles behind her and launches the ball back to his father.
"Easy, kid," Mr. Gordon shouts. "You'll get your piece."
"It's this dumb helmet," she huffs, kicking up dust. "It keeps fallin' in my eyes."
"You're not taking it off," Harvey tells her sternly. "Now quit with the excuses. You've got this, just focus."
She turns back to face the mound, lifts her bat, and digs her feet into the dirt, relentlessly determined. She nods at Mr. Gordon and he throws the ball with the same slow, upward toss. Alice watches closely, unblinking, as the ball spins toward the plate. She breathes in the humid summer air, steps forward and swings.
The bat connects with a clang. The ball arcs upward, flies over Mr. Gordon and into the crabgrass outside the baseball diamond.
Alice drops the bat and leaps into the air with a "whoop!" Harvey catches her under the arms and spins her around, smiling in her favorite kind of way, with all gazillion of his white teeth and crinkles around his eyes. She hugs him around the neck and laughs.
"I did it, Harvey!" She says. "I did a home run!"
"You're goddamn right you did. You smashed the absolute shit out of that ball."
He drops her to the ground and they both jog across the field to join Mr. Gordon on the pitcher's mound.
"Did you see that?" Alice asks, throwing off her helmet and springing up to give Harvey's dad double high-fives.
"I saw," he says. "Incredible."
"I know. I figured it out. You just gotta keep your eye on the ball. I could hit ten more right now. Easy."
"Easy." Mr. Gordon's smile widens. He turns to Harvey and slaps him on the shoulder. "Sounds like your egos wearing off on her."
"Mine?" Harvey rumples Alice's red hair, his eyes grinning with affection and pride. "She came like this. Pain in the ass since day one."
V
Cameron Dennis isn't surprised to have termination papers for Harvey's secretary dropped on his desk the Monday following the Russo trial, but he is surprised by who delivers them.
"I have a request," Donna Martell says, taking a seat in his office. She is different than he remembers, warmer and more approachable, or perhaps it's just the absence of Jonathan's tyrannizing presence that allows her to shine.
"A request?" The district attorney feigns shock. "This is new. I thought you just blackmailed people to do what you want."
Donna shrugs. "I shouldn't have to use threatening language for you to understand my requests are nonnegotiable."
"Of course. Carry on."
"You're going to fire Tina." She points at the termination papers. "I've already filled out the paper work. Gross incompetency, which is a gross understatement. Have you seen her filing system?"
"I didn't know she had a system."
"She does. It's numeric and it's a disgrace."
"Right." Cameron signs the termination and tosses it in his processing bin. "Anything else?"
"You're going to hire me as Harvey's new secretary."
This is…unexpected.
Cameron cocks an eyebrow. "Why?"
"Because."
She stands to leave.
Realizing she isn't going to say any more on the subject, Cameron probes, "Forstman wants Harvey. He liked the way the kid handled Russo. I hear he's offering big money."
"You think I can't handle Forstman?"
"Isn't he a shareholder? I figured he was on your side."
"I've resigned from Duke-Sanger."
"Interesting." Cameron scratches his mustache. "Well, if it's any consolation, I think you make Charles Forstman look like Mother Teresa."
"Best I'm on your side then," she whispers, smiling. Then she winks at him and struts out.
Watching her go, Cameron finds himself thinking of Alice. How the kid gave off the same vibrancy. The sun just shone brighter when she was around.
He decides then that he likes Donna…in a weird his-balls-are-in-her-hands kind of way.
VI
It's been two weeks. Jonathan figured she'd be back by now.
He misses her. More than he expected to. He hadn't fully realized just how much of his life she inhabited, or how much she did behind the scenes: pressing his suits, brewing the coffee, paying the bills, cleaning. Donna was the heartbeat of their home and with her gone it decays around him.
He'd take the decay, gladly, if he could just get back even the inane pieces of her. Her nonsensical talk when she's tired, those outlandishly erotic love notes hidden in his breast pocket, all 500 million of her elastic hair ties abandoned on whatever surface occurred to her, her toes at their coldest – god, even the scuba diver role play she'd been nagging him about. He'd take it all and cherish it.
It's like losing a limb – he has to learn how to function with a huge chunk of himself missing. But he refuses to put in the effort, because she's coming back. She has to come back. Her dresses are here, her Mount Everest pile of fucking shoes. She's a mature, rational adult, she wouldn't just runaway. Yet the days keep slipping by, and he can't keep sitting around waiting for her.
Donna is lost to him. He needs to just accept that.
Jonathan steps out of the cab at the District Attorney's office. It's crowded this time of day, making it easy for him to slip past the guard. He could have met her in a bar, or at a restaurant, but that would have taken away the element of surprise.
He sees her sitting at a cubicle in the front of the office, smiling and talking on the phone. It's a strange picture to take in, because he'd seen Alice sit at this very same desk on occasion. Now both of them are gone. And, god—
God.
He wants to fall to his knees. Beg her. Please. Please come home. Please we can make this work. But it's only been two weeks and already her eyes are less haunted. Her smile is more genuine. She's out in the world interacting with people, moving forward for once. Can he really take this away from her? Can he actually justify dragging her back, only to let her waste away in their empty house with all its haunted memories?
She's happier here. Whatever this secretary scheme of hers is – it's crazy as hell and it kills him to admit it, but he thinks this may be what she needs.
Wordlessly, Jonathan sets the divorce papers on Donna's desk.
She hangs up the phone, and slowly lifts her eyes up to meet his.
It's in this moment Jonathan realizes the full weight of what he's losing. She is more than his wife, this woman, she is the only person in the entire world who understands him. They share the same demons, and have done things together they will never talk about, not to anyone. He also understands that no amount of marriage counseling could have cured them. There is just too much they can't take back. Too much of each other they can't unsee and unknow. It's like being the kind of soldier where killing becomes as natural as taking a piss. The only way to acclimate back into the civilized world is to get yourself as far away from the trigger as possible.
Some people just aren't good for each other.
Sometimes love isn't enough.
Understanding this, Donna blinks back tears. Then turns her attention to the paperwork before her and signs, putting their marriage to rest. Jonathan tries to stand, straight-backed and at attention, beneath the weight of all of it.
It's almost liberating that it should end so peacefully, without any shouting or accusations. After the hell they went through with Alice, Jonathan has no desire to hurt her or to make this any harder than it needs to be – life has dragged them enough.
With this surrender, he walks away from Donna, silent and in a daze, his feet carrying him out with desperate quickness. It's the first thing they teach you in the army.
Grieve later.
VII
She meets those gray eyes over her desk, and the world stops. He came for her. He cares. She didn't think he did, but here he is, and she can't help the light fluttering of anticipation that fills her stomach.
She wants to tell him that he was right, that all she needed to rejoin the world was to drag herself back into it. She wants to apologize for being so stubborn, for not calling, for leaving how she did. She'll even go back, she decides, on the condition she keeps her job with Harvey.
But he doesn't ask her to come back. He doesn't say anything. He just places a file on her desk, and she knows what it is before looking at it.
She goes through all five stages of grief within the span of a heartbeat:
Denial (No. This isn't the end. It can't be.)
Anger (How dare you.)
Bargaining (Please, I can change. I won't leave again.)
Depression (How do I go on from here?)
Then finally, acceptance (We don't work anymore. This is what's best for us.)
She signs. With Jonathan's silent disinterest, it feels less like ending a marriage and more like ending a merger. When he retreats, he doesn't look back. Not once.
Donna staggers away from her desk, in a daze, ignoring questions from her colleagues. She makes her way to the bathroom, shuts herself in a stall and cries.
She cries and cries. It hurts almost as bad as the morning Alice died, because she's not just losing a marriage or a person, but a piece of herself.
She feels so heartbroken for the girl that fell in love with him. How she would melt when he came home from work, lips rising into a grin. How she'd blush when he looked at her, even years after being married, because he made her feel like ten thousand fireworks were shot off inside of her. It's not fair for her to have to lose him too.
She squeezes her eyes shut, calming herself by force. She tells herself she can no longer be the woman she was. That she has to let her go...
She buries that broken woman deep. Abandons her in the furthest corner of her mind, along with a pair of children's silver sequence converse, love letters from a gray eyed soldier, the designer dress suits of a COO, and the sound of ivory keys.
She buries it all so deep that her lies become sacrament. Because it is either this or that ledge.
So when she walks back into that office and sits down at her cubicle she is new. She is whole. She is perfect.
She is Donna.