An expansion on one of the ficlets from the Quarantine Chronicles. I wanted to explore this idea further, and hey, there's a real gap in the market for some proper angry!sex in the Darvey fandom.

This is quite a dark one, but I think Harvey's anger and issues could have used more honest exploration, and I always thought it was unfair Donna didn't really get to be angry at Harvey and the way he played with her loyalty at times.

As always, reviews are gratefully received.

She meets him at the elevators, and she's the last thing he wants to see.

He's been twitching with stress all morning, feeling the tautness through his arms and into his chest, his stomach tight with frustration and shaken up rage, and he's nursed it all night, sitting in the dark of his living room with a glass of whisky and staring anger at the floor long enough for him to see his fist clenching against his pants leg by moonlight because he hasn't turned a light on.

He stared hard at the cactus on his low table for too long in the time he didn't sleep.

He's not used to this anger, not with her. He's felt it in flashes before, when she's passed on files to Jessica or shredded documents, but that was always to protect him and help him and save him, and that makes rage pass quickly and slide into nighttime fantasies of comforting her and whatever comforting her slides into when he's alone in bed at night. And this - this was not that. This was Donna in a moment of pure want and selfishness and greed, taking him into her like he was some experiment she was trying to find a conclusion to. She knew him, knew the hate he was only just now working through with his mother and her shitty choices and the shitty way it fucked up his childhood. She knew. She's heard him silent on the phone at midnight when he calls because there's nobody else to talk to, and she knows the quiet from him was because he couldn't speak without his voice cracking and not because he didn't have things he wished he could say. She's seen him fall silent at talk of family gatherings and she knows he sits alone at thanksgiving and she's seen his jaw clench when he hasn't been able to add anything to a round of family anecdotes being told over drinks on a Friday night. She's seen his eyes and whatever they've looked like when she's tried to talk to him about it, and he doesn't know what it's like to match gaze with him when he's glaring from beneath his eyebrows but she once said he looked like he was a ninety year old and a ten year old all at once and that's how he feels anyway, an orphan worn out and made old by too many years of hiding and lying, living with the deepest anger at the way people fuck other people and ruin lives. And then she kissed him.

Jesus.

He remembers her lips from an eternity ago, and that was something they both wanted then, that they both fell into, crawling over each other for a night and tasting cream and strawberries against each other until they'd discarded pretence and foreplay to press sweating and sugar stuck bodies against each other, and it's still burned into his memory with a clarity of detail that he hasn't had with anyone before or since. The image of her skin and hair is as sharp as a knife in his brain, and the feeling of his hands and his thumbs drawing dull red down her back still twitches against his skin from time to time, the sight of his hands dragging down her spine to her hips so he can yank her back against him and watch the slick of sweat and sugar along her spine while she braces herself against the headboard and grits his name past her teeth. He hadn't been able to tell then if that was just fucking or something more, but he'd told himself since, it was fucking.

He turned that night over in his head as well in the moonlight, letting anger and indignation colour memories in shades of bitterness, and she had no right, no right to pull him into her orbit and kiss him like he was hers and make his stomach flip against his own will, make herself the main player in his fantasies and urges again, and he wonders what did she need to know that was worth the torture of making him text Paula but think of Donna.

He doesn't think about how it's the first time she's ever put herself above him, and he doesn't think about how much shock and hurt is under his anger because that feels too close to thinking about how unfair it is that he's always been the person that comes first, and anyway their lines have been perfectly clear for years, at least before she went and fucked it all up.

So he sees her at the elevators, and fury bites fresh at him, and his heartbeat is in his ribs and his ears, and she's talking about hiring a new senior partner but honestly who gives a fuck. He's responding, but he's not thinking about work, because he's thinking about her and how his anger is right there and he could just let her have it, let her see it, because if he has to have all this roiling inside him than so should she. Because he doesn't want to work. Because he wants to punch a hole through the wall and shake the blood off his knuckles and let that speak about how much he gives a shit about hiring senior partners.

She can see it as well, she's ignoring it because she thinks she can pull him into professionalism with her own measured tone, but he can see her tense and vibrating under her dress and there's something about her managing to be composed that sets his teeth further on edge. It's unfair that she's set a bomb off between them and he's buzzing with barely contained rage while she looks for all the world like it's any other day and for the first time, for the first time ever, he thinks fuck her, and he's mad enough that the guilt of that thought doesn't spike through the anger.

And then finally she speaks it out into the oxygen and into the world and says, "here's how I see this, Harvey. Either we go in there and we interview a legitimate candidate, or we go right now and we talk about what you don't want to talk about."

He stares, and she holds his gaze, and he should pick the interview, because he doesn't want to talk about it, he wants to forget it ever happened, forget her lips and the touch of her tongue against his, forget how it flashed up memories of bare skin and sugar syrup and his hands pressing bruises into the alabaster of her skin, because even though he wants to forget it's all he can fucking think about, he's been thinking about it all night, it's forcing its way into every waking thought he has, which is awful, because he's never had a kiss that's done that before, that's shifted his atoms around it. He's never had a kiss that made every decision he's made feel like dust and made his relationship feel as inconsequential as unused passing moments, and it makes him angry, and it makes him confused, and it makes him terrified, and the last thing he wants to do is talk about it.

And then, he hears himself saying, "okay, fine, Donna, let's talk about it," because something deep inside him has been waiting for this, waiting to scream his frustration at her and smack his hand into a table and let her see what she's done, what she's torn out of him. He takes her by the elbow and pulls her into a side room, and he feels her breath catch because he rarely touches her and never when his anger has the better of him. She's not scared, but she's surprised, and her eyes are wide when he locks the door shut before rounding on her so fiercely that she almost takes a step back.

"What the fuck were you doing, kissing me?" he demands. "You know how I feel about cheating. You know how hard it's been for me to forgive my mother and move on and you know I'm with Paula, and you still kissed me. Did you even think about how doing that would affect me and affect my relationship? Did that even enter your mind?" He's furious, rigid and angry and unleashing on her every thought he's turned over and over in his brain for the last hours.

He's expecting an apology, and contrition, because she always said she'd never hurt him and she's meant to be his friend. But she matches him, and that surprises him, because he thinks she should be contrite and apologetic, but she is not, and he belatedly realises she's furious too, bright and angry as the sun and she's throwing herself into the ring, she's finally throwing a punch and she doesn't really care if she goes down swinging. Because maybe he hasn't kissed her when he shouldn't, but he also knows she wants more from him, and he knows he's never been able to decide if he wants to let her go or wants to let her in so he doesn't do either, he just tells her he loves her and takes it back because he's a coward, and asks her to bear the weight of him refusing to choose what he wants so that he doesn't have to carry it himself.

"Of course I didn't think about you," she snaps. "You've never thought about how what you do affects me, why the fuck is it fair for you to demand it of me? I've given up everything for you, Harvey -"

"Well I didn't ask you to."

"No, you just assumed I would. And I needed to know."

"Needed to know what."

"If all those times you've looked at me and asked me to stay and told me you fucking love me mean anything, Harvey. Because you pretend that they do, until it matters that they do, and then you pretend that they don't, and I can't stand it anymore."

He spreads his arms out at his sides. He's edging closer to her and she's edging closer to him and they're both trying to take up the most space in the room. There's something sparking and it's mostly anger but there's a thread of something else in the air and it's pushing into his belly. "What do you want me to say?" he asks.

She stares at him, exasperated, before spelling it out like he's a five year old. "I want you to say that you love me and mean it and fucking…. do something about it."

His lungs and his chest are heaving and he suddenly realises how close he is to her, and she's breathing heavy too, matching his look with a ferocity and an anger all of her own that goes back way before last night, an anger that feels long and tired and too long buried, and he doesn't think either of them have blinked, and she might be a black hole or she might be the sunlight, and he's angry, he's so angry because she's betrayed him and everything she knows about him. From his stumbling into a secret life as a kid, until she helped him hang a new painting on his wall, she's betrayed all of it.

He thinks he hates her.

But either way his bones are spiralling towards her, and he closes the gap, and then his mouth is on hers and it's so fast that his body doesn't have time to catch up with his instincts and he backs her into the wall without even raising his arms. Her shoulders hit the wall with enough force that a dull thud rolls past his ears as his hands slap into the wall on either side of her and he can't tell if he's trapping her or if he needs the balance. It's probably both. She hesitates, it's a moment almost too short for him to notice, and then it's halfway between a kiss and a sigh when she pushes back against him, and he's furious and so is she and there's a guttural passion that's flared up alongside their anger so quickly that he's not ready for how it shakes through his body and he guesses this is what happens when words aren't enough anymore.

He bites her lip between his and pulls his hands down, grabs her hard enough to bruise, and there's a dark pleasure he feels in knowing she'll wear the marks of this, go to bed tonight knowing he had his mouth and his hands on her. She slides her tongue over his, open mouthed and nudging, and then along his jaw, and maybe she wants him to say he loves her but he doesn't know if he does and this isn't that moment anyway and she knows this isn't the moment, so she says 'fuck you' against his ear and he says 'fuck you too' and he bites down the side of her neck hard enough for her to gasp and push her hips against his unconsciously. He pushes her body back against the wall harder with his own and mutters for her to fucking hold still even as he knows she won't.

She gets her hand under his jacket and her nails scratch down his sides, there's enough sting to it that he wonders distantly if she's drawn blood, and he's only just got enough sense to run his tongue over that spot where her neck and shoulder meet instead of sucking down because if he leaves marks there where everyone will see, there will be questions they can't answer, and anyway he wants this to be just hers, just her knowing his fury when she steps into the shower and when she stretches sore muscles under her sheets tonight.

She's hitched a leg up against the shelves behind them and she yanks his hips against her, he feels his breath punch out his lungs at that, and she's not bothering with his shirt or his waistcoat or the top of her dress, this is not strawberries and cream and lazy laughing foreplay, it's all her needing to know buried under all his outrage and her long simmering anger thrown in to boot, needing to know him inside her and around her, and she has her hands at the front of his pants and she's pulling down his zipper before he can catch his breath.

He hikes up the front of her dress, just enough to push a hand in between her thighs, and she's flushed against his hand and her underwear, and he just pulls it aside as he brings his mouth back to hers and pushes his tongue against her teeth. He puffs a breath between his cheeks and against her lips when she gets her hand around him and pulls his cock from his zipper, her hand sparks a jolt of electricity through him and he says, "goddammit Donna," against her skin and it sounds like a challenge because he thinks it is.

She shifts, lifting her hips and he thinks she says fuck me but he's probably imagined it because he doesn't know how much of this is real and how much of this is him sitting at home in the dark and casting his mind over memories of her body. Either way she grips him and guides him to her, and he pulls her wrists up in one hand, bracing her arms over her head and lifting her with his other hand, and then he has the purchase he needs, and he sinks into her and she makes a sound that's low in the back of her throat and sounds like a cross between a grunt and a moan.

He picks up pace immediately, pushing into her and she's tight and slick and fuck, and Donna braces her leg on the shelves so she can get purchase against him and presses back until the buckle on his belt catches her just so with each thrust, and he can feel his rhythm in the way her wrists jump against his palm. She says "there," and she's keening, and she's loud, too goddamn loud, and he just has enough presence of mind to let go of her wrists and slide his hand over her mouth to muffle the stuttered moans punching out of her with every thrust and he says "shh" but it's less a demand and more just his lungs firing breath out along with her.

They're both too pent up and too angry and too close to the edge too quickly, and she shatters apart before he even has a chance to push his hand between them and nudge his thumb over her clit. He pushes into her a few more times, shallow and erratic, and then his stomach coils and he's coming, and her hands are around his shoulders, and he hates how intimate this moment feels.

He's barely gotten his breath back, sucking air shallowly into his lungs with his mouth open against her neck, when she pushes back against his chest, saying "Harvey," like he's a stranger, and he lets her down and steps away like she's hot to the touch, and he almost feels like he should hold his hands up so she knows he's not going to touch her.

She fixes her dress, and he fixes his pants and straightens his jacket, and she's looking at anywhere but him, and he's looking nowhere but her, his breath coming still in ragged gasps and he can't think except for the dull need in his belly he still has to strip her naked and fuck her on the research table.

She runs her hands through her hair, and runs her palms down her dress to straighten it, and when she looks at him, it's with the clear anger of someone who has asked for love and gotten the opposite.

"Don't touch me again," she says, and she unlocks the door, and leaves, and slams it shut.

Harvey waits five minutes before leaving, and he doesn't see Paula again until the bruises fade.