received this prompt:
"Donna is sentenced to three years in prison and Harvey cannot let that happen, so they run away like fugitives. (Bonnie and Clyde style)"
and figured it would work best as an addition to this pre-existing oneshot! so here. this is basically an AU fic now:
Donna and Harvey are already together. What if Donna really WAS convicted of the perjury which Tanner tried to accuse her of in season 2?
[three months later]
Guilty. Guilty. Guilty.
The gavel comes down, and Harvey with it, collapsing back into his seat so hard that he swears he can feel his bones protesting.
"Donna Paulsen," says the judge, a complete indifference to his tone which makes Harvey want to get back up and knock him to the floor, "you have been sentenced to three years in Danbury State Penitentiary."
He's gonna be sick. He's going to die.
Distantly, so distantly, Harvey hears the judge going over the facts of the case — one count of perjury, one count of obstruction of justice, one count of evidence tampering in a manslaughter case, it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter — and she's guilty. They found her guilty. The love of his life is going to prison, and he is going to let it happen. (She asked him if they would be okay. He hadn't had an answer. He does now: the answer is no, no, never again.)
He couldn't save her.
"You have 72 hours to report to Danbury prison."
Three days. They have three days.
Oh God.
Mike reacts first, and then Rachel, both racing at a near-sprint from the stands. Donna still hasn't moved a muscle. Neither has Harvey.
They have three days.
"I'm so sorry," Mike's saying, over and over, like it can fix anything, "Harvey, Harvey, I'm so sorry, you did all you could."
Rachel takes the second helm, kneeling in front of Donna and murmuring every conceivable word of comfort that she can think of. Donna, whose only sign of life is the devastating tremble of her hands, whose eyes are still just fixed on the judge's dais in front of her, like she's expecting him to come back in and retract the sentence. He won't.
He won't.
Harvey stands, suddenly, the blood rushing to his head so fast that he almost passes out right there. Mike offers something of a protest — then lets him go. Out, out, pitching at a stumble towards the bathrooms, his hand trailing against the panelled wall in the name of keeping himself upright.
He's sick. Violently.
He makes it, but only just, and the mortification of throwing up in some courtroom toilet feels pretty irrelevant against how much it feels like he is going to black out and die.
Anyone else. Anyone else. Not Donna.
It's over quickly, at least, except there's not really any time to so much as be grateful for that before Harvey starts to cry. She's everything. She's all he has. He's already doubled over so it doesn't take much, and by the time Mike has crept tentatively in he's already wracked with sobs so hideous that they're shaking his entire body. It's this complete, all-consuming despair that he's never knowingly felt before — because this doesn't happen to him. He doesn't lose. People don't leave him. They can't. She can't.
"There's nothing you could've done," comes Mike's voice, and then Harvey's crying hard enough for it to echo back at him from the bathroom walls because that can't be true. He could've worked harder. Done better. He could've saved her from three years of— god, three fucking years of jail time.
There's not even a deal to be cut. Tanner and his shark teeth, his flint grin. The man was out for blood. Strike, wound, slaughter. It's how this goes, right? There's no coming back from death by gunshot. Nobody recovers from three years in a cell.
"Mike," he manages, voice stretched thin between the sobs, and the poor kid clearly doesn't know what to do with himself. He's never seen Harvey like this. Nobody has. "Mike." He very nearly says help me, as if he could.
"I know," Mike soothes, a careful hand to Harvey's back which sits and then stays when the latter doesn't even flinch away. "Just breathe through it. It gets easier."
So he does. The breakdown can come, and it will, once the deadline has passed. Once Donna's in. But he's wasting minutes, and they're precious, and she needs him right now more than anyone else ever has.
"Yeah," he scrapes, breathing as instructed.
"Yeah," Mike returns. It's all he can give right now.
Minutes pass, then Harvey's standing. He's shaky on his feet still — Mike watches, cautiously, looking ready to offer a steadying hand — but he's up. He's up. It's taken him until now to catch the tear stains which muddy the lines of Mike's face, too.
"We should go back," he says. Quietly.
"Are you sure?"
No. He isn't.
"Mike. She needs me."
He's sure about that.
The next few minutes are a slow blur. Donna doesn't say a thing until they're long out of the courtroom, this birdlike fear flickering deep within her expression which Harvey doesn't yet know how to extinguish. Rachel leads her out, and he finds himself strangely ashamed of the way it's Rachel holding Donna's hand right now and not him, but his entire frame is shaking with the effort of walking in a straight line at the moment so maybe it's for the best.
They're both herded into a taxi together — she needs to be with him, Mike whispers to Rachel, despite the hesitation written into every line of her face, and he needs her just as much, you know that, we can stop by their place tomorrow — and then somehow that's it. Just him and Donna, and silence, and seventy-one remaining hours.
He takes her hand: she doesn't react. Her fingers are so, so cold.
The taxi slows to a stop outside of their apartment, and Donna slips out wordlessly as Harvey passes a twenty to the driver. The silence is awful — it's like there's ice to break. Like they haven't known each other for twelve years.
He wobbles a little as he emerges into the daylight: she reaches out to steady him, against all odds. Because, even now, she's his anchor. Even now, she's reading his every movement like a goddamn book.
So he does what he knows.
"Harvey," she whispers, finally, once he works up the courage to turn and face her. It sounds like a prayer. It sounds like I don't know what to do. He's not sure what it is about her voice which triggers his reaction — the fear within, maybe, the way it breaks over his name — but the single word is all it takes for him to be all but dragging her in his direction, gathering her to him until she's pressed so tight against his aching chest that the pain at last starts to soothe a little. She drops her head to the crook of his neck, breathing in so sharply that it sounds almost like it's hurting her.
"I love you so much," he murmurs. He can't quite think of anything else to say. "So much." Too much. He very nearly says don't leave me, except.
"I love you too," she sobs, and she's crying, she's weeping, she's actually physically biting the skin of his shoulder to keep in the gasps which keep wracking her slender frame.
"Come on," he whispers. "We still have days."
She doesn't move, and he doesn't make her, so it takes another few moments before anything else happens at all.
When she does shift it's only really sideways, and he notes without a word that she's still somewhat hiding her head in the warmth of his shoulder. Oh god, he loves her so much. They need this — the physicality. The way she strokes his back, the way he holds her head. It's just another thing that they're going to lose.
"It's okay," he lies. Because he has to. "We're gonna be okay."
And then, with Donna still clutching at Harvey like he's a lifeline (because he is, he is, he is), they head inside.
He somehow manages to keep up the pillar-of-strength act all the way until they make it into the apartment, Donna still curled against him as he shuts the door quietly behind them and then immediately slumps back against it. She doesn't seem to notice as they slide down to the floor, only pressing herself further into the cove of his body in a show of complete dependency which he's never really seen from her before.
Physical touch is one thing — they're a couple, they're in love, always sneaking caresses beneath tables and twining their hands together as they stroll through the city — but this newfound spool of need for him is so different that it rends the bones in his chest.
"Stay," she whispers, like it even needs to be said at all. She's speaking in code, even if she'd never admit it. Stay, in particular, to be translated as please don't leave me. Please don't let these three years come between us.
"Of course." She needs to know. Translation: you're it for me. You're all I have.
Maybe it's minutes, maybe it's hours, but when Harvey opens his eyes again the curtain has fallen a little over the city and they're still down here, pressed to the floor. There's a dusk-pink hue clinging to some of the buildings that he can see out of the windows and he's hit all over again with the fact of how little time they have left together: three days. One of which is already coming to an end. Shit, fuck, he doesn't know how to do this.
"Let me make you dinner," he hears himself saying. The words are quiet, broken, hopeless. There's a silence so long that he wonders for a moment if she's fallen asleep against him, and he instinctively turns to press the same kiss to her temple that he always does when she drifts off like this. Except her eyes are open, wide as ever, gaze trained on the part of his shirt which lifts gently up and down with every new beat of his heart.
"Okay," she responds, finally. They don't move.
"Dinner," he repeats, sounding desperate.
This time she does shift a little, if only to give him the leeway to get up on his own. He turns once he's standing, his shaking frame nearly carved all the way back over again by the sight of her on the ground. This is a shell of the woman he knows, the woman he loves, the woman who inexplicably looks smaller and more frail than she ever has before in the light of their shared apartment.
"We still have three days," he whispers, crouching back down to her level. Her gaze shifts, though the stare she sets him with is so absent that it feels a little more like she's looking through him than at him. So blank. Empty. "Donna. Please."
Some shard of his plea must resonate with her: she stands at last, clutching onto his forearms, her eyes clenched shut against the same phantom pain which Harvey's had lodged in his chest since the verdict.
"I love you," he murmurs plainly. Because it's all he knows. Because all of a sudden there are only three days left before she's hearing him say the words through a plastic prison screen.
She stills beside him. Which, of all the reactions he's ever catalogued to these exact words — this isn't one he knows.
"Don't do that."
She's reading his mind. He should've known.
"What am I doing?" The play at innocence is glaring at best, and Donna's all of a sudden fixing him with this expression like molten glass.
"The sentimental thing, Harvey. Come on." Something flares in his chest at that — he won't rise to her words, he won't, but is she seriously telling him right nowthat he needs to tamp down his own emotional response to goddamn prison time? — and he swallows against the indignation which rises up sharp past his ribs.
"Okay," he says, painfully slow. Okay. "What do you need from me?"
"I just." She breaks away from him for a second before thinking the better of it, swimming back into touching distance like a ship to a storm. He's cautious, though, forcing his hands to land at her elbows rather than her face, her neck, her hips — so desperate to just keep her here close to him that he abandons all other attempts at proximity. "I just want tonight to be normal," she whispers, finally, brown eyes devastatingly wide.
The word is need, he thinks. She needs normal, needs him. Needs to pretend for just one of their three remaining evenings together that anything in their world will ever be normal again.
"I can do normal."
It's a lie. She must know that. She takes it anyway.
"You reckon?"
"I do."
A very long, deep breath.
"Okay," she manages. "Okay, Harvey. Make me dinner."
He smiles, endlessly soft, throwing caution to the wind and stepping a little further into her space. She doesn't flinch, doesn't shift away like he half-expects her to.
The kiss that he smudges to her lips then is so soft, so latently careful, that it maybe doesn't quite fit into the parameters of normal the way he knows it should. As if he cares.
All Harvey can find it in himself to focus on is the way her mouth moves against his, the tiny breath she takes when he curls a hand up through her hair.
He draws back eventually, resting his forehead against hers in the name of staying close. When she smiles up at him for the first time since maybe three days ago, it's like watching the sun come out.
Dinner. He can do that.
reviews never fail to make my week !
more to come soon (i promise) but im in the middle of exams right now so apologies if there's a slight delay xxx