With thanks to vfl_sarah, who generously donated to Australian bushfire relief and asked for 'lots of angst'. Thanks to Sarah for her donation and also for allowing me to share this all with you! This is such a generous fandom and I'm so grateful to be a part of it.

Worthy

"Donna..."

"Don't do it. Don't fall on your sword again."

He looks at her from beneath hooded eyes, leaning on her chair for way more support than he feels like he should need, but he's exhausted and shot through from stress and his legs suddenly aren't working properly. He hates it as much as he loves it; how easily she pierces through to the core of him, knows exactly what he's thinking. Donna is his compass. She reflects him back to himself better than anyone else, and he knows it's slowly making him the man he wants to be but it's hard to stare at yourself in the mirror all day long and see the cracks under the surface. She knows how to grab onto his conscious and shake it awake, but it's always been to pull him away from his demons and back toward the sunlight and now she's trying to hold him back from throwing himself into the sun and burning up in it altogether.

Harvey knows his own demons and how they make him swing wildly between selfishness and sacrifice, and he feels the weight of every decision, every lie, every sidestep he's made in the last five years. He's not sure if protecting Mike has made him a better person or just a better liar. He loves Mike, but he'd been playing a dangerous game for years now and the thought was it worth it creeps in despite himself. Mike lied too, he knows. Mike convinced him and squared his shoulders and walked through the elevator doors every day with the confidence of a man who had earned a piece of paper he hadn't.

It was Mike. A lot of it was Mike.

But it was also him. He put Donna and Jessica and Louis at risk. He knew who Mike was immediately, knew he was a fraud, knew what bringing him into the firm and into his family could do, would inevitably do, one day. He knew he was flirting with disaster and pulling everyone towards the void with him. But there's a high in the risk that he loves, makes life like this instead of like this. Harvey likes to play in the grey, and pulling Mike alongside him drenched his world in shadow, even if he had to ignore the shade it cast over everyone else around him in the process.

And here Donna is trying to drag him away from the dark without letting him throw himself into the sun and it's hard because he has the weight of the world on his shoulders but the weight of her heart in his chest.

He can't do it, can't think clearly, can't choose between the shadow and the sun and he can't see the needle thread between the two. He pushes away, turns to leave.

And she follows him. She always follows him.

"Show him you have faith in him, like I have faith in you," she says as he stands in her doorway, and she's asking him not to do the thing she can see he's planning, she can see it in his eyes. She's asking him to remember Jessica, remember Louis, remember... her. Remember her and all that she is, wrapped up in his last 13 years and as inextricable as oxygen.

He remembers.

He remembers vanilla in his coffee and late night whiskies chased with shitty thai food and it being her turn to choose the music. He remembers her taking sips of her drink at 2am, stocking feet on the carpet, hips swaying unconsciously while she reads paperwork with her free hand, the nighttime bars of whatever record she's picked distracting her and the dancing distracting him. He remembers jokes and flirting and giggling (with other people he laughs but with Donna he giggles). He remembers moments where he'd fucked up and she'd arrested him with a stare of pure righteousness, and she could kick his conscience into overdrive with that look. He remembers moments where the knot in his stomach, the low and constant desire for her, would make itself known with a suddenness and an intensity that almost took him to his knees, and maybe the same thing happened for her at the same time and they would share a look under hooded eyes that promised everything and nothing all at once.

She's asking him to remember 13 years. To remember every word and joke and glance and touch.

She's asking him to stay.

—

He doesn't listen to her.

—

He meant to, he meant to listen to her, because she's always right and always knows what he should do, and so he went down to the courthouse to sit with Mike and show that he had faith in him, in the work they'd done and in the words they'd used. But then he saw Rachel, and when he asked where Mike was she said 'I don't know', and it hits him all at once who Mike is and of course he's not here you fucking moron and he ran.

He pushes out the door, down the street, past the people on the street and can usually run a lot faster but his heart is hammering against his chest and he can't get his breathing under control.

The elevator doors are closing, and he thinks he's going to miss it, but then he gets his arm through the doors, shoulders them back open.

The elevator takes too goddamn long and his hands twitch at his sides and he tries not to think of her staring at him and begging him not to. He tries not to think about how she isn't here to stop him, and he'd been so obvious last night and how could she have missed that and not be here to stop him. He thinks that's probably easier, because if she stepped in front of him right now, all strength and faith and patience, and asked him to run, he'd go and he'd never look back. He thinks maybe it's not that she missed the look on his face. Maybe she saw it and pretended she didn't, because they lie to themselves about each other all the time and maybe she just didn't have it in her to watch him throw himself into the sun.

The elevator doors click open and he pushes past them, looks up and sees Mike down the hallway, bolting out from the stairwell, and they lock eyes, and they've known each other long enough to know that they're both racing to throw themselves on the same grenade. Mike's eyes go wide, because Harvey is closest to Gibbs' door, so Harvey guesses that must make it fate. Mike opens his mouth, yells 'Harvey', but Harvey's already got his hand on the door and there's no time for negotiation with Mike or Gibbs so Harvey just pushes it open and says "I did it," and Gibbs looks up from her desk at the same time that Mike lands his hand on Harvey's shoulder but he's too late and it's done.

—

He's been left. He's not sure how long; Gibbs has been watching too many procedural cop dramas and has taken the clock out of the room like she's in fucking NCIS, left his cuffs on even, just to provide a constant reminder to him about who's really in charge, and he opens and closes his fists behind him to try and keep the blood flowing.

Mike had protested in Gibbs' office, had railed at Gibbs and Harvey, had done his best to take a bullet that Harvey had already jumped in front of. The problem was that Gibbs wanted Harvey, not Mike - it had always been about Harvey, Gibbs had always been going through Mike to get to him, and Harvey knew it and he wasn't interested in getting up off the train tracks. Harvey pulled Mike's arm towards him, saying 'stop it, Mike, there's no point', and Mike yelling at Gibbs turned into Mike yelling at Harvey, and eventually Mike and Harvey nearly came to blows and then Harvey found himself shoving Mike, found himself yanked backwards a second later, arms pulled behind his back and he only dimly heard the click of handcuffs as the security guard locked his wrists together.

He protested when they dragged him backwards out of Gibbs' office, Mike's demands to Gibbs ringing in his ears. He protested when they pulled him into the interrogation room, protested when dropped him into the chair and again when it became clear they were going to leave him handcuffed in his seat by himself to sweat it out.

It took what felt like hours before Gibbs had come by to gloat and lean on him and try and get him to rat Jessica out and he hadn't answered so Gibbs wondered out loud if he'd like to spend the night in a cell by himself, and Harvey had rolled his eyes at the absurdity of it all, snapping 'for fucks sake I'm not Keyser Soze'.

She'd asked him who Keyser Soze was and he couldn't figure out if she genuinely didn't know or if she was quoting his own reference back to him and that was about right for Gibbs. She's a fucking shifty snake in the grass and he struggles to read her even though reading people is what he does. Maybe he couldn't read her because she wasn't really human, he thought darkly.

He's well versed in the various tricks prosecutors use to make their targets panic, so he keeps the tightness in his chest from becoming a racing mind and heartbeat, stops his brain finding ways to bargain and stops his mouth calling out that he wants to talk to his lawyer. But only just.

He's in the middle of cursing the day he met Gibbs when hears the door click, and he looks up with an insult on his tongue, some callous joke to mask his worry and his guilt, and he knows it won't help but finding a creative way to tell Gibbs to fuck off will make him feel better for a couple of seconds at least.

He sees who it is, and his words die in the back of his throat.

She stares at him as the door closes behind her, then says, "Harvey, you fucking idiot."

"Donna."

"Harvey." She's furious, terrified, repeats his name like she thinks he might evaporate from the earth if she doesn't speak him into being. "What did you do?"

She sits down in the chair opposite him but it's more like she collapses into it. She drops her handbag in front of her and she's shaking with adrenaline and rage and fear and her hands twitch like she doesn't know what to do with them, like she wants to reach out to him, to hug him or potentially hit him, but his hands are locked behind him and so she holds herself back. She tries to slump back in her seat but there must be something that pulls at her in the same way it pulls at him and they lean across the table towards each other.

And she repeats, "what did you do?"

He probably has that slack look on his face that he gets when he doesn't want to talk about it. "You know what I did."

"Can't you make a deal?"

He shakes his head. "I said it was me. Just me. You, Louis, Jessica - you're in the clear. Gibbs wants me, not Mike, and she knows she doesn't have a case against Jessica. There's no deal to make." He sighs, resigned. He can't think of anything else to say.

Jesus. What a fucking nightmare.

She doesn't look relieved to be off the hook. "What happens now? Will there be a trial?"

He tries to shrug; it doesn't really come across with his shoulders pulled back behind him. "I already admitted guilt. Gibbs will get me to plead, they'll deliberate with a judge and reach a sentence. No trial."

"Can you negotiate?"

"I already did. Gibbs gets me and in return she can't come after any of you or the firm."

"I meant negotiate to get you off, Harvey." Her breath catches on his name. She's trying hard to be calm and she's vibrating with the effort of it.

"The only way I get out of this is if I turn you all in. I'm not going to do that."

"That's not your choice."

He finally looks her in the eye, and it's the look he gives her when she's trying to sacrifice herself to save him and he won't let her. He wishes he hadn't had to look at her that way so many times through the years. Donna was constantly hurling herself into the breach for him, sheltering him from the worst of the fallout from all his shitty choices and impulsive decisions.

"You don't want to do this," he says.

"I do." Donna is losing the battle for her composure, and it shows in her voice, she's almost shouting now and there's a hoarseness that he only ever hears when she's at the end of herself. "You don't get to make this decision for me, Harvey. That's not fair. I'm in this as much as you are."

"No you aren't." His voice is raising in line with hers. "And you can't, Donna. They'll ruin you, because you know the whole story. If they get you, they get Jessica. And if they get Jessica, they get everyone."

He pushes closer to her. He needs her to see that this is it, this is the only way, he can't let anything happen to her. "It would topple the firm, Donna. Even if you don't go to prison, you'd be blacklisted from stepping foot in a law firm again. And besides all that, they know you and me are..." He doesn't have the words for what they are, so he doesn't try. "If you let them come after you they will break you. And if they break you they'll get what they need to put me away for even longer than they can now, and tear everything else down as well."

The steam goes out of his voice, and he sits back against his elbows, sighs. "You can't, Donna. I'm sorry, but you can't. This is over. It's done. This is how it has to be."

Her eyes go wide, and he can see the reality of what he's done settling in. Donna isn't someone who lives in denial, exactly, but she has a faith in him that borders on the religious, and she walks through life with the unwavering certainty that there's nothing he can't fix. Watching him resigned, surrendered, backed up in a corner he's willingly run into - it doesn't compute for her. She would have walked in here expecting an idea, expecting a scheme, expecting Harvey to tell her not to worry and that he had a plan and that he needed her to go pull some shady shit and find a file or charm someone from some law enforcement office somewhere. But he doesn't, and he sees her body cave in on itself just a little as reality clicks into place for her.

He's going away.

"How long?" she asks.

He shakes his head to the side; it's the face he makes when he doesn't want to answer her, and she sees it, says "Harvey. How long."

A pause. "7 years."

"Fuck, Harvey!"

He looks down at the desk. He can't seem to meet her gaze. "It'll be okay."

"You liar. How could you do this?"

"I had to." He doesn't know how to tell her about the instinct driving him to prove to her that deep down he is who she believes him to be. He doesn't know why it forces him to make decisions that hurt her. False confidence and platitudes always come far easier than honesty, so he says, "Donna, it's going to work out."

"No, it won't." She's up out of the chair, cutting through his bullshit, bearing down on him, and her hands tremble. "Harvey, I've worked for you for 13 years. I've been your friend for 13 years. What do I do? How am I meant to -" she cuts herself off because the only possible endings to that sentence finish with I love you or I can't do this without you and neither of those are things they say to each other.

He wants to comfort her, wants to minimise the gravity of what he's done, and he opens his mouth but all his words about leniency and first time offences and good behaviour get lost when he meets her eyes with his and he can see the same crack in her that's opening up inside his chest and he realises it's not just her losing him, it's him losing her and everything, everything they have and share is teetering on a cliff edge because of him. He's thrown himself into the sun and he's burning her up in the process, and all their maybes and one days and if I ever pull my shit togethers along with it and holy shit what have I done and how could he have chosen Mike over her. He stares at her and she stares at him and his mind goes blank, and he can't find any words to make it better, can't even say sorry, because what the fuck would be the point.

He tries anyway, pushes his chair back with his legs so he can stand, meet her gaze, but he only gets out 'Donna,' before she's around his side of the table, knelt in front of him, her hands on his knees, her eyes locked on his and it's like gravity itself has yanked them together. She opens her mouth to say something, and she searches for words but none come, and if it wasn't here and now he'd probably have found it amusing that she can't figure out what to say, but none of this is funny, it's terrifying and precarious and it's fucking cruel that it feels like Donna might be about to tear down the wall that they've built carefully between them just in time for Gibbs to slap another four up around him anyway.

Donna can't find anything to say, and finally just presses her forehead against his and he squeezes his eyes shut because this is not how he imagined touching his face to hers would happen and it's fucking unfair. He feels her hands come up and cup his jaw, her fingers curling into the hair at the base of his skull, he feels her eyes shut against his, feels her fighting her instinct for him, fighting the urge to raise her voice against the injustice of it all, to rage and fight, and he can feel the tremor through her body that mixes fury and fear for him.

He leans against her and he wouldn't admit it out loud but she's so much stronger than him and it's the only thing that stops his stomach hollowing out.

"You're an asshole," she says, but it sounds like I love you.

He nods against her forehead and he sighs to release his lungs because his breathing is coming hard, it's catching behind a knot forming in his chest and rattling past his vocal chords. "I know."

"I wish you were a worse person."

"I know."

He swallows.

"I wish you didn't think I was a good man."

"I know."

He wants to grab her hand, flexes his fingers with the instinct, and she must have read it in the way his shoulder twitches because she slides her hand around his waist and grips his fingers loosely, slides her other arm around his shoulders, and he pushes his face into the side of her neck and she smells like her. Harvey isn't sure how a quiet minute of peace has managed to invade this goddamn disaster of a situation he's created for them both but he's not complaining, and he's not fine, she's not fine, but they can almost believe it for a minute.

"It's going to be okay," he says again, and they almost believe that too.

end

Thank you for reading! Reviews are encouraged - they help me improve my writing and engage with such a supportive fandom. At this stage, this is a one-shot, but it may become a multi-chapter if and when I have time to develop it, so do let me know what you think.