Hi all! I was just reminded by an exceedingly lovely review on here that I never posted chapters 2 and 3. Mind's been elsewhere recently, but in the mean time here's a very brief 2k filler chapter before The Main Event which goes down over the course of about eight thousand words in ch3. rating Will increase just . . not yet. On with the show!

—

Donna has enough time to think what the fuck and then the entire library just seems to erupt.

Everyone is talking, gesturing, pointing at Harvey's disappearing figure, and she feels the crescendo in her fingertips as every voice fights to be louder than the next. She decides very quickly that she cannot be here, that she has to leave, and every nerve in her spine seems to see leave and instead read follow him. Instinct says that he needs her: habit murmurs that she might only make matters worse. Instinct wins, because it always does, because every time that Donna's heart has kicked in her chest and warned her that he needs her, it's been right.

She thinks of the night in his apartment, Harvey splayed drunk and moonlit on the hardwood floor. She thinks of the time she called every one of her New York contacts in the space of an hour to piece together his location just to find him sat on some bench in the first place that she thought to look. She thinks, mostly, of him. His eyes. His hair. His smile. His suits. The way he looks at her sometimes, like he's the storm and she's the sky, and says things like you're coming back to me? as if she's ever been equipped to deal with so fatal a blow.

She stands, and the room falls silent. Just like that. The rumours that she's going to invite just by tailing him are already too much to even start dealing with — and she doesn't care. This is Harvey, and it's always Harvey, always the two of them crashing back into each other, switchblades to a gunfight. The scrape of metal. The slick of bone.

Sixty pairs of eyes watch as Donna smooths down the creases in her dress, tries her very hardest not to dwell on the torment that she'd seen written into Harvey's expression when they'd locked eyes, and starts walking.

It's easy enough to figure out where he is. Harvey will be where he always finds himself (where she always finds him), hollowed out over a sink in the relative privacy of the executive bathroom. Donna wants so desperately to catch him that it makes her chest hurt. It feels like self-sabotage, holding in her mind the way he couldn't even look at her for so long during the questioning, the way she watched him shrink back into memory the minute the word love was said out loud. And she wonders, because of course she does. Wonders if the man who walked out of that library was the Harvey of you know I love you Donna, because the only other option is the stranger that she faced the next evening who wouldn't fucking answer when she asked him love me how.

It's not resentment, necessarily, but there is something familiar about the way her chest seizes just to think about all of this. About the unspoken cruelty laced into more than a decade of doing everything except look these feelings in the eye. A part of her hates him for it — for every sideways glance, every phone call, every time he's showed up at her apartment just to say something insane like with you it's different and then leave without a trace. The tragedy: she can never quite hate him enough. It might always be this way — the two of them dancing circles around each other — and she'll revile it, but she'll let it happen. She made peace with this a long time ago. She is an addict and he is the sun, and if she has to spend the rest of her days held in his shadow then she will bear the weight of that simply because it's all she knows.

It is enough to just be in his orbit. It is enough just to live off midnight phone calls and casual office drop-ins and the way she has never once been able to stop thinking about the feeling of his hands fisted in her hair. (It is enough, she tells herself, and it's a lie every time).

By the time she reaches the door to the bathroom, this storm rages so harsh in her chest that she almost just turns to leave. She can feel her pulse in the hollow of her throat and her hands are shaking, for some reason, and she wonders if he can hear how fast she's breathing. Doesn't matter. Shouldn't matter. Donna splays a palm against the door and pushes. There will be no coming back from this.

"Louis, Jesus, could you just—"

She hears the way his breath catches and nearly keels over at the sound.

"It's me. Sorry." It feels stupid to say, because he can obviously see her standing here, but his expression is so momentarily floored that it feels fair to clarify. As if he didn't expect her to follow him. As if she hasn't spent the last decade doing exactly that. She glances down, taking stock of the situation, fixing for a few beats too long on the way his knuckles are going white against the sink. He notices her noticing, tries to ease the grip somewhat, and nearly collapses against the countertop with the sheer effort of staying upright. He doesn't even look embarrassed (of course he doesn't, of course she'd notice, she knows him better than anyone), more just exhausted. She takes a step towards him, and then another when he doesn't flinch away.

"Is this a panic attack?"

He takes a breath and shakes his head — she believes him, has no reason not to, but his denial doesn't negate the cause for concern. Difficult to know exactly what to do here.

"Okay," she says, "okay, listen, I'm. Is it okay if…?" She motions weakly towards him and he just nods, once, as if he has any idea what it is that she's asking permission for. Donna'snot even sure that she knows, so she lets muscle memory take over and finally just crosses the distance between them. The second she's within touching distance his entire body seems to just curve towards hers and the motion reminds her so much of so many halfway moments but this isn't the time. He's looking at her like she's celestial and she loves him so desperately and when he settles into her, his arms coming up to encircle her back, she forgets altogether why she ever even wanted to run.

They don't move for the longest time. She loves him. She loves him. He's all she knows.

"You don't need to say anything," she murmurs, finally, and he shifts just slightly away from her so that they're both looking each other in the eye.

"I want to."

"I know."

"The question Louis asked—"

"I know."

"Bastard."

Donna smiles, and his face is so close to hers. She swears she feels the whisper of his eyelashes when he blinks. "Yeah. Dick." The urge to kiss him is so all-consuming that she has to look down, except she's in stilettos today and taller than usual, and she misjudges it, misjudges the distance, and the whole fuck-up ends up with her in his arms and his lips pressed soft to her hairline. It's the loveliest feeling in the world.

There's a moment where he doesn't pull away, and she thinks, like she always does, oh, this is it, this might actually be it, and then he shifts backwards and folds his hands behind his back as if she's too white-hot to touch anymore and Donna feels her heart break in her chest.

"Harvey." The name is a heartbeat. A prayer. He shakes his head.

"We can't—"

"Why?" I love you. I'm right here. I've always been right here.

"Donna. You know why."

The problem is that she doesn't know. Twelve years of hopeless push-and-pull has been more than enough to dissuade her of the whole 'not mixing personal and professional' schtick and she's sick of it. Either they are or they aren't. She's so exhausted of lying immobile along the line of this fucked up middle ground.

"Do I? Do you?" She spits the words and watches as they land. He seems momentarily shocked by her anger, this lash-out mere moments after such a display of tenderness. It makes sense, really: she almost never lets herself reach this boiling point, and especially not publicly, and especially not in front of him. But she's tired. "Why wouldn't you answer Louis? What are you still so goddamned afraid of?"

He straightens here, defences set, that awful steeliness shuttering itself over his expression as she stares.

"You think I was about to tell a room of sixty people that I love you?" He says the words. He says I love you and he doesn't even seem to notice. He says the words out loud, just like two years ago, and doesn't so much as pause for breath. "Fuck, Donna, you're not stupid. You know how that would land."

"So lie." She's yelling. Is she yelling? "Storming out of that fucking library was enough of an answer to every single person in there and you know that. You couldn't have just said no?"

"I wasn't going to lie on the stand—"

"Why not? Why the fuck not, Harvey? This whole fucking thing is a lie!" Violence. Explosion. She's swearing too much and her arms are flailing and she's shoving into him, seeing red— "all of it! Everything between us, this entire piece of shit situation, every time you treat me like I'm something and then walk away like I mean shit to you!"

He's staring at her properly now and there's an apology written into his features and she doesn't care. She does not care. She's crying, when did that start, and she loves him, and she's about to say it out loud—

"I've loved you since the day we met, Harvey." Her voice breaks over his name. "You have to have known that. You're not blind."

She takes a step back and the proximity is unbearable still. He's wearing this expression that speaks of understanding, holding his hands out to her like she's some wild animal, and she can almost feel her bones breaking under the pressure of this.

"You never told me."

Harvey's voice is hoarse, and whisper-thin. Something splinters inside of her.

"You never let me." Donna turns to the door before the sight of him shatters the last few stores of her resolve. She feels sick. Faint. Awful. Here's the one man in the world who would die for her, and here's the one woman in the world who would die for him, and there's the bridge that they'll never cross. Even if it kills them not to.

When she speaks again she's facing away from him, half-worried that the defeat in her posture is going to corrupt the weight of her words.

"You never even let me try."

—

Donna starts walking and she does not stop. She steals out through the maintenance stairwell, down thirty flights until she feels dizzy with the depth of it, half-expecting (hoping. The emotion is hope) that Harvey will be stood waiting for her in the lobby when she finally emerges. He isn't. She presses on.

Nobody approaches her like they sometimes do — all friendly, of course, old friends or colleagues or just familiar faces asking if she's around for drinks one evening — and she's grateful for it through the haze if only because of how hard she reckons she wants to hit someone right now. It's raining, hard, and she doesn't care. Her hair sticks cold to her neck, dress to chest, and she doesn't care. Doesn't even hail a cab. She walks the half an hour home, which she never does anymore, she realises with a pang. If Ray isn't busy then Harvey has him drive her, and if Ray is busy then Harvey dials her a cab. Everything comes back to him.

At some point, somehow, she gets home. Dripping rainwater, soaked to the bone, Donna fumbles her key four times in the door before it finally slides in and twists. She thinks of Harvey. Of his hair, his suits, his smile. The way he folded into her today, shadow of a man, whisper-soft. She thinks of his laugh, and of the flowers that he bought her last week, and of the feeling of his hands against the planes of her back. As though through smoke, she finds the closest seat in her apartment and plants herself there.

Hours pass.

She does not move.