Harvey had thought that talking to Jessica about taking her name off the wall was going to be the hardest conversation he would have to have tonight. She'd dropped her name off the wall and her reputation off the map, at least in New York, and that sat hollow within him, because she's given him everything and deserves so much more than being disavowed and shamed by the person she'd given everything to.

He seeks out Donna, because he needs to tell her, and because he needs her to tell him that everything is going to be okay. She's been distant since she's been COO, and he guesses that's natural, she's not outside his door all day anymore, but he misses her and misses the calm she has, misses the way she reassures him and the way that he can breathe when he's with her because everything's going to work out.

She's not at her desk, she's perched at the edge of her window, which isn't like her, but it's late, and it's been a hard day, so she's probably just taking a minute. He should tell her to go home after this, he thinks.

"Good, you're still here," he said. "Because I have some news, and …"

She looks up at him, and he stops. She's wide-eyed, and shocked, and she looks like she looked when his father died, or when Jessica let her go, or when he told her he loved her and then may as well have told her he didn't, and his guts drop out at the same time his heart catches in his lungs, and every thought he has of conversations about Jessica drop out the back of his head as he distantly wonders who he's going to need to fucking kill for making Donna look like that.

He reaches out to her, to slide his hand under her elbow, something he's done a million times before, but as he asks "are you okay?" and as she looks up at him and as his fingers run under her arm, she blinks, like she's only just realised he's walked into the room, and she says "Harvey," in a way he's never heard before.

"Donna." This is not what he's expecting, not like anything he's ever seen in her, there's something that's reached into her and shifted things around fundamentally, and he can see her cracking under the weight of it. She is a well, and she can absorb and contain depths like he's never seen in anyone else before, and that's something she's always hid away from people, not because she's scared but because she's fierce and because she protects the people that sit inside her. And now he looks at her and feels like if she shifts just a millimetre he'll see everything in her cracked and laid bare, and that is new.

"Are you okay?" he asks again. "Is something wrong?" He thinks distantly about ambulances and hospitals and his finger twitches towards his phone, but then she says, "I spoke to Louis," and she's talking and breathing okay, so maybe it's Louis, maybe he's had another heart attack or a car accident or maybe he's been arrested, they're all getting fucking arrested these days.

"What's happened," he says, and he goes for his phone, because Louis being the topic of conversation always ends up in a phone call. He's punching up Louis' number when Donna speaks again.

"He's not with Sheila."

Of all the things he thought might be on the tip of her tongue, that was not it.

"… I know," he says, and he tries to stop his voice sounding like confusion and frustration because she's not making sense and he always understands her. "He told me."

"He's meant to be. With Sheila."

Harvey puts his phone away. There's something in the air and in her words that's just on the edge of being made physical, he can feel it in the oxygen around them and he can see it in the set of her shoulders. He feels an instinct in him to run, and he pushes it away. "Donna, what's going on?"

"He said he's meant to be with her, and he isn't, and he's lost his chance. He said it's killing him." And then she looks at him, looks at him properly, and her eyes look exactly like a conversation he's never had with her and that he's always held tightly in one hand and hid with the other.

"Donna…"

"I can't, Harvey. I can't anymore. We need to talk about us."

Us.

He hasn't had a panic attack in a long time, but it suddenly feels like the start of one. His heart jumps and sweat spikes in his spine, and he swallows, but there's something else there as well - some undercurrent, some undertow of push and pull that sits beneath both of them and she's just calling it what it is, which is that it exists and that it's there and that they never, ever, acknowledge it.

"There isn't an 'us', Donna. You made that clear a long time ago. And … look, I would be lying if I said I hadn't thought about it, but… you were right. It wouldn't work."

"I think I was wrong."

"I -"

"And I can see you're with Paula, and I can see you're happy, and I want to be happy for you, Harvey, but I can't. I've tried. I swear to God I've tried." Her voice is a waver and he is breathing hard because this is so, so far beyond where they've drawn lines and there'sa reason that they've always silently agreed to not talk about it, because talking makes it real, and he backs off from her, it's not conscious, it's just flight, and he doesn't know what else to do.

She stands and steps forward and there's something in her eyes that arrests him.

He should run.

Instead, he says, "you were happy for me with Scottie."

"Because I knew she wasn't it, Harvey. That was easy. But I look at you and Paula and… I don't know." She doesn't say it looks like it's something. She doesn't have to. He knows it, he's felt something in his gut about it, and he can't hide from Donna. If he's felt it, if he's ever felt or thought or known anything, she knows it too.

He can't quite get his throat around his vocal chords and he swallows again, and his voice is dry, and why the fuck is that, because he should just be able to say it's not you and move on, and why is that so hard? "Donna, I know Paula and I being together has been a surprise for you, and -"

"It should be me."

God fucking dammit.

She's coming towards him now, and he thinks he should back away, thinks he should just say no, and that this is a mistake, and tell her to go home, and make sure she gets into a cab okay because they're friends, and he cares about her, but he's with Paula. But he doesn't back away, because she's suddenly gravity. "Donna," he says, and it's only just above a whisper, and he's never heard himself say something that sounds so much like no and please all at once. "What are you doing?"

"If I'm wrong, tell me, and I will never bring it up again. I promise I will never breathe a word of any of this again, Harvey, if you tell me you don't feel anything."

She runs her hand out, over his forearm, and it's gravity, it's fucking gravity. Her fingers brush against his as she pulls her hand up his arm and to his shoulder, and even if he wanted to leave he couldn't now, because her touch is as inevitable as breathing and he can't run away from it any more than he can run from oxygen.

"Donna…" he tries, and it's begging, but he doesn't know what he's asking for.

"Tell me to stop."

"I -"

"I just have to know."

He should run.

He should fucking run.

The thing is, he has to know as well. So he doesn't.

Because she's not crazy, and she's not making things up, and he feels it too, those flashes, those sparks, those moments of maybe and almost. She's caught him, staring at her. Of course she has, because it happens all the time.

It happens when he sits back from his computer to stare into the distance and work through a thought or strategy, and then realises at some point he's not doing that, he's just watching her at her desk, watching the way her shoulder falls towards the phone when she answers it and how her head tilts to the side as she makes notes on post its for his calendar, and she'll look up and see him and smile at him with her smile that's mostly with her eyebrows and he smiles back and doesn't even feel like he's been caught.

It happens when he finds her in the copy room because he can't remember his own schedule and the whirring of machines drowns out the swing of the door opening, and he starts in the doorway because she still, somehow, still takes him by surprise, the same way she did when he saw her a dozen years ago across a crowded bar in Manhattan, and he thinks there's something to the way that seeing her every day feels like seeing her the first time. She always senses he's there before he can gather himself away from his own memories and turns to call him lazy or mister or just to tell him what his password is, or jokes about having to go to his house in the morning to help him get dressed, and something in his heart cracks a bit when she says that.

It happens when he tells her to go home because it's late and she doesn't, and she works with him until he goes to the bathroom, exhausted, to splash water on his face and he passes through the kitchen so he can return with two cups of coffee and she's fallen asleep on his couch with a file in her lap, and he just watches, and it feels too much like something domestic, it's too close to a scenario he sees as clear as day, of saying okay you that's enough for the night and gathering her up to take her to bed and hold her until the morning chases in.

And it happens, sometimes, when things have been too close and too tense and too much like consequence, and there's no joke or smile to break the maybe, and he doesn't blink and neither does she and he could swear to God there's gravity yanking him towards her and her eyes are darker than usual, and maybe his are too, and she's a goddamn supernova and there's no escape and they almost, almost say fuck it.

Those almosts are the hardest.

So she needs to know. And he can't muster a 'no', or leave, because she's right and it's his fault. She needs to know because he's been screaming it at her, he thinks, for years.

And so she slides a hand from his shoulder to his neck, and her thumb crosses over the shadow of his morning shave, and time stutters to a halt. Something sparks between her fingers and his jaw, and he shouldn't, but he leans in to her, she's gravity and he's falling into it and his brain is screaming at him to be smart and be sensible and not to be his fucking mother, but then her other hand slides around her shoulder, and she's got her fingers in his hair and how does she know he dreams about her fingers in his hair, and the world goes quiet.

His breath is hitching in his lungs, he can feel his eyebrows knotted and he doesn't know where to look because she's fucking gorgeous and he's trying to remind himself that he doesn't want her because he's with someone, but her eyes are shot through brown and green and her skin has the pattern of freckle and alabaster that visits him in his dreams, and her hair is his waking fantasy.

And she kisses him.

It's everything, everything he's missing slotting into place, the press of her lips against his, and she tastes like finally, and she tastes like finality, she tastes like the answer, she tastes like kissing should taste. She moves her lips against his, and it's gentle but he can feel the need in it, the need to know and be known, and he kisses her back, and as he does he feels his eyebrow lift against hers. It's not surprise, not exactly, because he knows. He's thought about this, about her lips and her body against his. He had expected… something. But he hadn't expected to feel like

Oh.

He hadn't expected to taste forever.

Her teeth nudge against the cleft above his top lip, she has his lip between both of his, and her tongue just touches against his teeth, and it shouldn't do what it's doing, this kiss. It shouldn't be striking his body and shuddering up his spine and changing gravity so that she's the centre of the world like it is. It shouldn't feel like this is BC and AD and time splitting in two. It shouldn't feel like everything for the rest of his life will be sorted to before the gentle tug of her mouth over his and after. But it does, and he's fucking terrified.

He doesn't lift his hands. He doesn't trust himself and what the night would look like if he brushed the touch of her skin and hair under his palms. He thinks it would probably look like him finding a wall to push her up against, to grab on to every fantasy and idle thought and every touch hidden in a morning shower he's had and crack them into reality. It would be good, he thinks. So good. But it would be too much, and he doesn't know if she would push him away or if she would find her hands down his front and over his pants and toying with his zip, and that's far, far beyond what this is meant to be, and he doesn't know if that or if 'no' would be more of a disaster.

She pulls away first, and that, he thinks, says far too much.

Shit. Shit.

She looks at him, searching and silence, and he has a bizarre urge to say her name, and he can't quite stop himself so "Donna" slips out of him like a prayer, and if he was ever going to pretend that kiss hadn't fundamentally rearranged his atoms, he'd just told her that if he said it, it would be a lie.

He shouldn't run. He knows. He swears to God she knows too. So he shouldn't run.

But he does.

For sunncolours (Emjay) who reversed the kiss in 7x10 and inspired this to drop out of my fingers on a Saturday afternoon. Thank you for your talent that inspires!

Reviews are appreciated.