Harvey's barely answered his phone in two weeks.

He's had a couple of conversations with Mike and with Jessica, about work and the firm, and there's no easy answers there, but he doesn't care. He's spoken with Louis about his parole and his conditions of release, but he doesn't care about that either. He talks to his mom, which feels important, because he hasn't seen her yet since they pressed past all the gaps and barriers of the last two decades in a hospital room a couple of hours away, and they've come a long, long way since then, though there's still work to do. But even when he's talking to her there's a part of him just waiting for the goodbye.

Because none of it matters except for her.

None of it matters except for Donna.

Part of him thinks, he's a grown man, and he should be able to focus and multi-task, and worry about his career alongside his relationship, but he… doesn't.

Donna has taken a couple of weeks off work, and she doesn't worry about her job either.

So their phones sit, forgotten, in drawers or under blankets or wherever they've left them, and instead Harvey indulges every instinct he's had since he locked eyes with her across a crowded bar an eternity ago and just loses himself in her. He dresses in jeans or track pants or in nothing at all, and he's in no hurry to remind himself what pulling on a suit every day is like. They live on delivered pizza and strong black coffee, on wine and laughter. They fall into bed as soon as it's dark enough to justify the decision and they make love in the late evening. He wakes up in the hours between night and morning and pulls her in with kisses and touches, and they breathe each other in. They sleep late, arms and legs tangled together, pushing comforters back as the sun warms the room and their skin.

Sometimes, she'll stir in the early morning, pressing herself out of bed, murmuring about yoga and trying not to let her gym schedule slip, but he'll reach a hand out to curl around her wrist, and tug gently, letting her name rasp over sleep-ruined vocal chords. And then Donna will slip back in with him, pressing her skin against his, and he'll let his arm drape heavy over her waist and slide back into dreams and he thinks that's his favourite part, just letting the morning watch them sleep.

They keep talking each other into going out, into going for dinner or to a show, and Harvey thinks he needs to find his way back into the world, but then Donna will emerge from the bathroom wearing the dress she's chosen, and Harvey will be halfheartedly buttoning his jeans, and he'll look up and see her, and it's like the whole world stutters to a halt. He's spent years alone in a cinderblock room dreaming of her, and seeing her in front of him doesn't feel real anymore. He wonders if it ever will. He won't mind if it doesn't. She's stunning, she always is, and he doesn't want to leave the house. He doesn't want to share her with anyone. He's not ready for that yet. So he pulls him against her and kisses her until he's breathless and she's laughing, and her dress never stays on long enough for them to pick a restaurant.

Harvey's never been married, and so he's never had a honeymoon, but he imagines that this is what one would feel like. It's breathless and perfect, the way he doesn't have to do anything but be with her. Two weeks feel like a moment, and he wishes for an eternity of it.

Something about being engaged, he thinks, has shifted things; properly engaged, not his stumbled clumsiness in a prison visiting room, but here and free, with a ring on his finger, having discussions about the near future that range from what colour suit he should wear for the ceremony to where they should live.

There's one problem though, and it's that those discussions fizzle out the moment they become more than hypothetical, and he can't quite put his finger on why. It's not contentious, and they're not fighting, it's just something they can't quite seem to find their way through. They can't make headway into dates, or venues, or guest lists, and it confuses him that he's so indecisive about it, and he thinks he needs to do something concrete.

And that's how Donna catches him, with his face leaned in slightly too close to his laptop screen, scrolling through engagement rings and trying to find one for her that he thinks will catch the sunlight in the same way she does.

"What are you looking at?" she asks, fresh out the shower, wrapped in one of his robes and with her hair washed and gathered up in a messy bun.

"Hmm? Nothing." It's a reflex, trying to hide his thoughts and plans from her, and his hand nearly reaches for the screen to close his computer, but they're so far beyond secrets that there's no point. She'd take one look at him and know anyway.

She raises an eyebrow at him and bends down behind him to rest her chin on the slope of his shoulder. Harvey sighs and aims the laptop towards her, tweaking the screen against the brightness of the mid-morning sun. She looks at it over his shoulder and points at one, smiling into the curve of his neck. "That one. It'll bring out your eyes."

He smiles and brings his hand up to link his fingers through hers where they've fallen on the front of his chest. "They're for you."

"I figured." She kisses his cheek, tickling her nose against the light beard he doesn't feel like shaving yet. It's unhurried, this new intimacy, light and deep at the same time and something he cherishes. He loves the passion that sits underneath everything between them, and he loves that the tension that's always sparked between them hasn't dissipated, but the gentle ease of being hers, and being able to brush a hand along her arm or kiss her quickly as he passes her a cup of coffee in the morning is a revelation.

"Bit late, don't you think?" Donna asks. "We've gotten engaged twice now and you've flamed out on having a ring both times."

She's joking, but it makes him think about how they don't do anything in the way tradition dictates. They loved each other long and loudly before they let themselves admit it. They called each other at night and broke up with boyfriends and girlfriends for each other while they called themselves friends. They resigned from jobs and got fired to protect each other and then swore black and blue that they didn't love each other that way. In the end it was the shotgun barrel of prison and not dating that snapped his brain into place and pushed him into her arms. And now he finds himself wearing an engagement ring rather than her, and that feels oddly fitting for two people who've done the opposite of the expected in every other area of their relationship as well.

But Harvey is also starting to realise just how much like his dad he is. He also believes in love at first sight, like Gordon did. He just didn't know it until he opened his eyes on one lazy morning and saw her, next to him, her arm thrown out, seeking him in her sleep, and he realised with a sudden clarity that he'd wanted to marry her since the second he'd met her. And he thinks that there are things that go along with that, things she deserves, and surely diamonds are one of them.

He unconsciously flexes his right hand and feels the weight of the ring he's wearing, and he wants so much for her to feel the same promise and hope that he feels from the weight of it on his finger.

She reads him, reads his thoughts in the quiet moment he's taking. "It's okay that I don't have one, you know," she says.

"I just… it feels like. I don't know." He's still shit with his words sometimes.

Donna presses a light kiss into his shoulder blade. "You're not letting me down."

"That's not it." He can't quite land on the right way to tell her how he's pretty sure his heart physically expands when he sees her and that he wants everyone else to know, so he waves his hand instead. "I want to get you one." I want to give you everything.

"I know. And you can, if you want. But there's no hurry, Harvey. I have you. I have you back. I don't care about anything else. All this?" She waves her hand at the laptop. "I like all this." She brings her hand back, rests it on his chest, just near his heart, her thumb smoothing over his collar bone. "But I love this. This is what I want."

"Honestly?"

"Honestly." She tips his head back towards her and kisses him, slowly and thoroughly. She tastes of peppermint and smells like vanilla and he thinks his favourite thing about getting to be with her is seeing her like this, fresh from the shower, her skin bright and freckled, in robes and sweats and utterly, utterly beautiful.

How he ever thought he could live with her as nothing more than a friend is beyond him.

As she pulls back, she smiles and says, "also, you have terrible taste."

Harvey looks back to the computer. "Hey, I thought these were nice," he says, his voice somewhere between amused and indignant.

"Which is exactly why I always buy my own presents." Donna affectionately pinches his earlobe as she pads into the kitchen and rummages for coffee cups. "You can pick one up at Dana Walden if you're determined. Take Rachel with you."

"Rachel? She always manages to find the most expensive thing in the room."

"Exactly. I've trained her well."

.

.

It's been two weeks, just about, and the real world is looming. Donna's going back to the office in a few days, and Harvey's due to go in with her to catch up with Jessica and discuss … something. He isn't sure what exactly. He assumes she's pulled some kind of magic trick to let him stay at the firm, and he's fending off a low level nervousness at the thought. He's been in survival mode for two years, and then wrapped up only in Donna for the better part of a fortnight, and he's realising that he's not exactly sure what to do with the outside world anymore.

It's mostly curiosity about the world he's been avoiding that makes him thumb through his wardrobe, one morning, while Donna's making breakfast. Outside of the suit he'd worn to come home in, he hasn't slipped on thousands of dollars worth of fabric and tailoring in a long time.

He pulls on a shirt, fumbling with the buttons on his cuffs for a long minute with fingers unused to the movement, and that feels like a bigger moment than it should, because he used to be able to do that while throwing back a cup of coffee, making a phone call, and mentally preparing briefs and depositions all at the same time. It's tight around the shoulders and loose in the waist, and the H.S stitched into the cuffs feels far too lavish after two years in badly fitting blue denim.

His pants don't quite fit either. The waist is slightly too loose, the legs feel too short after years in jeans he's had to roll the cuffs on, and he's definitely going to need a belt. He tries not to think too hard about how he feels like he looks the same but his clothes are saying otherwise. He doesn't fit anymore. Not quite. His chest feels tight and it's not just the shirt cutting in at his sternum.

He pulls a jacket off its hangar anyway, and slips it up over his shoulders, stretching out his back and arms to settle it against him. It doesn't fall perfectly like it used to and he can feel his shoulders pressing into the seams.

He thinks, I'm going to need to get all this tailored, and that thought feels so inconsequential that he's surprised at how automatically it comes to him.

He stands in front of the mirror, wearing a suit that doesn't fit his body anymore, and maybe it doesn't fit his insides either, his eyes automatically picking up on all the spaces it doesn't sit right on him and the way the beard he still isn't used to seeing changes everything as well, and he feels a wave of something that's almost nausea.

He takes a long, unsteady breath and punches it slowly out of his mouth. It shakes his lungs on the way in and his throat on the way out.

Donna pads out of the living room then, with a cup of coffee in each hand, and she starts to smile at him, starts to make a joke, probably about the fact he's not wearing sweats for the first time in over a week, but then she sees it in him, the creeping quiet that comes with him slipping too far into his own head. He's never quite able to hide it from her.

"You okay?" she asks, dropping the cups on his side table.

"Just... seeing what this looks like," he says, watching himself shrug into the mirror.

He hates staring at his own face. He looks a lot more haunted than he thinks he should.

Donna sees his fingers twitching shakily against his palm and slips her hand into his, squeezing lightly to still his nervous energy.

"Hey," she says softly, tugging his hand and turning him to face her. "Talk to me."

He fights the instinct to duck his head and break eye contact with her. Talking to Donna has always been second nature to him, and he's honest with her now as well, but he still has to choose not to pull away sometimes, and she still nudges her thumb over his knuckle to encourage him when he chooses honesty.

"I don't know if I'm ready to go back," he says, and his voice sounds a lot less steady coming out of him than it did in his head.

"To work?"

He's quiet for a moment, considering his response. He's more careful with his words, these days. He's spent far too many years using words as a barrier instead of a bridge but he's decided that he's not doing that anymore. Not with her, at least.

"Yes. No. Not just work. I've changed a lot." He waves a hand vaguely out the window. "I don't know how everything out there is going to feel."

Donna looks at him silently for a moment. She slips her hand up along his forearm, her thumb catching under his cuff, warming his skin with hers. "The things everyone loves about you aren't different, Harvey. Mike and Rachel and Jessica? None of us are going anywhere."

He's not quite sure how to say that he's not worried about them. Because he's worried about himself. He's been in a completely different world for two years, two years that somehow felt like ten. He's spent two years just hoping reality would look the same when he got out and he's not sure that it does.

He trusts his friends. They've stuck by him and he's certain they'll stay by him. He's not worried that the world doesn't have space for him any more. He's worried that he's such a different shape that he just won't fit into it.

Pulling on suits that don't sit on his frame quite the same way they used to feels too close to the fear hammering in the hollow of his chest and he doesn't know what to do with that.

Donna smoothes her hands over his chest, pressing his lapels down lightly. It's automatic, affectionate, just like she's done in his office a thousand times before. His hands land instinctively on her waist as she does, and he thinks distantly about all the other thousand times where he'd had to press his thumbs against his fingers to still the same instinct and he'd just helplessly wish for the feel of her under his palms instead.

He told himself more than once, lying in his prison bunk with his hands laced behind his head, that he'd never ever ignore his instincts for her again. So as he settles his hands on her waist he leans in and kisses her, and she kisses him back with the light and casual certainty of somebody kissing their forever, and he remembers again how worth all this is if it all adds up to her.

She pulls back, tips his head towards her so she can kiss his forehead, and says, "let's just start easy."

Harvey drifts his fingertips along her forearm to her wrist and ducks his head a little further to kiss her knuckles. He hums a yes against her skin.

"Let's invite our parents over for dinner."

Harvey is pretty sure one of his eyebrows punches right up into his hairline. "You call that 'starting easy'?"

"My mom and dad both love you, Harvey, and you're way too old to be scared of having dinner with your fiance's parents. Let's bring them around. We'll cook something easy and tell them the news and you can get used to small talk again."

He's quiet. Things are still new with Lily, and he hasn't spoken to her parents since he was convicted. He thinks he and Clara would be okay, but Jim's only ever just barely tolerated him, even before everything that's happened since he last saw him.

Donna links her fingers in his and squeezes his hand. "They know why you did what you did. They're not going to hold the last two years against you."

"Nobody wants their daughter marrying a criminal, Donna."

"Nobody sees you that way. Hey." She tugs on his collar, nudges her lips over his, kisses her faith for him and her family against his mouth. "They know you did it to save me and Mike and the firm. They love you. They do."

Harvey trusts Donna, and so he trusts she's right. But he's still him, so instead of admitting she's right he tips his head to the side and juts his chin out.

She laughs at his self indulgent pout, and kisses his cheek softly. "It's going to be fine," she says. "Now get over yourself and go call Lily. And take the suit off. I like you better in sweats."

.

.

As usual, Donna's right, and her parents love him.

Donna's fussing with snacks when the doorbell rings, so she pushes Harvey down the entrance to answer the door for them both. He looks at her with what he's sure is poorly hidden terror, and she sympathetically pats his hip as he fiddles nervously with the collar on his dress shirt before nudging him away gently and towards the door.

He takes a steadying breath as he opens the door, but doesn't even get the word 'hi' out before Clara has him wrapped in a hug that makes him feel like a long lost son. Jim follows with a warm handshake and a 'thank you' that Harvey isn't sure he should ask for clarification on.

Jim and Clara fall all over him with questions and excited comments about seeing him again, and it's almost overwhelming until Donna slips against his side, her arm finding its way around his waist, and she runs interference for him with the deft patience of a daughter who's had to balance over-eager parents for many years. Donna steers the conversation to her own work and running gags from her adolescence and Harvey leans into her lightly as a thank you.

Lily arrives a few minutes later and hugs Harvey and Donna together for a long moment, and a couple of years ago he'd have laughed himself out of the room just for daring to imagine a moment like this, and he thinks that if this is what normal feels like now, then it's something he can get used to.

They share dinner, and stories, and Clara and Lily are instantly thick as thieves, scheming over plans to remodel Harvey's apartment to be more suitable for the grandchildren they've spontaneously decided will be shortly forthcoming. Harvey laughs along at the same time that he steals a nervous glance at Jim and then at Donna, but Donna squeezes his knee under the table, quirking an eyebrow at him, and he's quietly thankful they've never really needed words to communicate because there's a silent don't panic, they're joking and we're fine sitting under the amusement in her voice as she tells them Harvey has to keep his cactus alive before they can discuss anything further.

They meander their way through dinner. Donna's giggling with her mother over wine and rummaging in the fridge for dessert, and Jim is examining the skyline in the fading dusk, when Lily takes her handbag and Harvey's hand and pulls him aside into the bedroom.

"Have you picked a date?" she asks, and it's so out of the blue that he has to take a moment to blink his surprise down.

"Have I what?" he asks.

She points at his right hand, and at the ring Donna had slipped on his finger a handful of days ago. "I know an engagement ring when I see one, Harvey," Lily says. "So. Stop stalling and tell me. Have you planned anything yet?"

"We've tried. Talked about it a little. We haven't decided anything yet. We're ... taking it slow."

Lily shakes her head at him. "You're an idiot, Harvey."

He's not sure if he should be offended or amused at that, so he just shrugs instead, and he feels a smile tugging at his mouth. "Yeah. People keep telling me that."

"Do you love her?"

He says, "yes," and he thinks about how inadequate a word it is for how he feels.

"Do you plan on loving her forever?"

"Of course." It's a redundant question. He's already loved her as long as he's known her and he doesn't think he could do anything else whether he was planning to or not.

"Then stop screwing around, Harvey. You've both waited long enough."

"But… I haven't had time to organise anything. I haven't got an officiant or a venue or rings and I haven't organised any guests... "

He trails off, because even as he says it, the sheer unimportance of it strikes him. He doesn't want hundreds of guests. He doesn't want handwritten invites and a registry, three course meals and speeches. Spectacle was him, once, maybe. But it isn't anymore, and Lily is right. He doesn't want any of that.

He just wants Donna.

Lily looks at him, and she knows. "How long will it take to get the people you need here?" she asks.

"Maybe an hour."

It's just Mike, and Rachel, Jessica, and Louis, he knows. He realises how simple it all is at the same time that he realises why Donna and him have tried, over the last couple of weeks, to plan, and each discussion has fizzled out. It's not that they don't want to get married. Harvey's spent nights dreaming of marrying her, dreams that were so vivid that he'd wake up feeling confused that the hand he slid across the bed to connect his skin with hers didn't carry the soft weight of a wedding band. He wants to marry her with a depth of confidence and impatience he's never felt, and Harvey is a confident and impatient man. Their conversations fizzle not because they don't want to get married, but because it's actually the exact opposite.

He loves her so much that the effort of venues and guest lists feels absurd. He doesn't give a shit. He just doesn't. He just wants to be married to her.

Holy shit. This is actually going to happen, he thinks.

"I definitely need rings though," he says. "Donna doesn't give a shit about being able to choose between chicken or fish but she's definitely not going to let me get away with not having a ring."

"I can help with that," Lily says. She ducks into her handbag, rummaging for a moment before holding a small, simple box out to him.

Harvey takes it and flips it open, and a flood of memories crack in his chest.

His grandmother's ring.

He remembers it in the amber glow of childhood memories, remembers the constant of her hands in Sunday visits and sleepovers. He remembers her ring, dusty and floured, as he stood next to her in the kitchen while she snuck him offcuts from babka and the browned edges of honey cake as she cut it up. He remembers Passover, the yiddishisms she'd pepper her language with when she tutted at him for sliding down the hallway with stocking feet. He remembers acceptance, and love, and safety, and how she taught him to laugh freely and wholeheartedly.

Donna's completely different to his grandmother, but she makes him feel as safe and accepted and loved as he felt as a kid, and it'll be fitting, he thinks, to slip a ring onto his wife's finger that reminds him of how she pulled him back to all of that joy.

"Thanks, mom," he says, and his voice stutters over his vocal chords as he pockets the box, and he has to press the back of his hand to his mouth because he will not ruin the evening by bursting into tears in front of his growing family.

"What about you?" Lily asks.

"I can get Mike to pick something up for me on the way," Harvey murmurs, mostly to himself. He's got the ring Donna's already given him, sitting on his right ring finger, but they'd talked about a second one. Donna couldn't care less about tradition and which of them has two rings, and he thinks that he wants the one he's already wearing to remind him just of that morning, of her kneeling in front of him and asking him to be hers.

"You could," Lily agrees. "Or you could use this." She holds out another ring, and this one isn't in a box, just wrapped in tissue paper, wrinkled and worn from being folded and unfolded again and again. It's silver, thin and simple and inexpensive, but it catches Harvey's breath in his lungs like he's been punched.

Dad, he thinks. Oh my god. Dad.

He takes it with a shaking hand, runs it between the tremor in his fingers. A year ago, he couldn't have held it. A year ago, he wouldn't even have been able to talk about it. It would have reminded him too much of the hurt and failure and anguish that had haunted his life, too much of all the things he'd run away from, and the way he couldn't, just couldn't understand the grace and patience his dad always held out towards Lily.

"Mom…" The question he hasn't got the breath for hangs in the air between them.

"He always kept it," Lily answers anyway, and her voice settles into something bittersweet. "He always loved us all, Harvey, and he didn't regret anything. He wanted me to have it, and he wanted you to have it, when you were ready."

Harvey runs his thumb along the band, worn with time and nicked where his dad knocked it into his saxophone over years of gigs and recording sessions. It's the ring he remembers from the joy of his growing up and from the pain of his adulthood and it's heavy with his dad's spirit.

"I don't know, mom," he says.

"I know. And you don't have to use it. You can do whatever with it. But he wanted you to have it. And I'm sorry I didn't give it to you before now."

"Well, I wasn't exactly in the right place to handle this before," Harvey says, painfully aware that the gap between them was started by her but widened by him. "What about Marcus?"

"You're the eldest. And Marcus didn't have the bond you two did." She looks like Harvey feels like he probably looks like as well - hopeful and grateful and torn in half that it came before Gordon could see it, that forgiveness and reconciliation came so long after they'd placed him in the ground. That Lily had been reaching out to him for years and that it had taken him so long to reach back, and if it wasn't for Donna maybe he never would have in the first place.

He doesn't know if he has what it takes to wear it.

Because it's all of it - all the hope of what could have been and all the weight of decisions made and regretted. It's all the love Gordon held and all the promises kept or unsaid or unreciprocated. It reminds him of the way his dad loved.

And he loved like nobody else Harvey had ever known, other than Donna. He loved fiercely, and brightly, and without hope or need for return. He loved with his whole heart when nobody around him deserved it. He loved Lily when she was unworthy of it and he loved Harvey when he threw hurt in the road between them. He loved his family with commitment and joy and he loved them with the seasons shifting, loved them unchanging when everything around him changed. He loved like people who love at first sight do.

Gordon loved his family like Donna loves him.

Gordon loved in his life the way Harvey hopes he can love, one day. And, he thinks, there's something in the spirit sitting in that worn silver band that says something about the ways he's learning to walk and think and hold himself.

Loyalty, not as a two way street, but instead a simple constant, undemanding of return.

He looks up from his dad's ring, frustratedly blinking back tears, and Lily pulls him into a hug, and he feels grounded and put back together in a way he hasn't in decades.

He's finally home, and he has a question he has to ask Jim.

.

.

Donna's pouring herself a second glass of wine and just starting to wonder where Harvey's disappeared off to when he suddenly materialises at her side, bumping his shoulder lightly into hers and landing his palm at the small of her back.

"Hey you," he says innocently, and she narrows her eyes at him a little. There's a glint in them that she remembers from when he was in his early days at the firm and spent most of his time coming up with ways to torture Louis. She's seeing more and more of that lately, the Harvey she remembers from before a constant survival mode - the Harvey she first fell in love with, years ago, over drinks and friendly dinners and light hearted flirting. She loves the new Harvey that he's been digging up and digging out, honest and thoughtful and reflective. But she loves the Harvey who doesn't hesitate to slip his credit card out to pay for A1 printouts of Louis' mugshot or for a tradesman to bolt his office door shut, and then explain to Louis that it was necessary because of 'termites' while swallowing back the smile that reaches his eyes.

She loves the Harvey who sits waiting and smiling at her desk in the morning with a cup of coffee for her that's sweetened to the point of being a health risk. She loves him in the way he kicks his head back when he laughs, or the way he ducks his smile into his chest when he's trying to hide it, and the way his eyebrows have a mind of their own half the time. She remembers every moment of his easy humour and stupid pranks and movie quotes.

That's when she first realised she didn't love him but that she was in love with him, a year or so after they started working together, when she realised she remembered everything he did with a particular clarity she hadn't experienced before, and that every moment she remembered made her smile into her daydreams.

She especially remembers the smile he gets when he's about to try and pull off something outrageous, and he's trying to hide it now.

"Hey," she says, suspicion colouring her voice. "You okay?"

"Yeah. I'm good." He pauses for a moment, and the grin he's been tucking away slips onto his face. "I have something I wanted to ask."

"Mmm? What's that?"

"How about today?"

"How about today what?"

"How about today?" he says again, and then he's suddenly on one knee in front of her, her hand pressed between both of his, and he's looking at her like she's the only thing in the whole world.

She breathes out, but she might be saying oh my god. She's not sure.

"I just. I don't want to set a date and find a place and pick a menu," he says. "I don't care. I just don't. I don't want to waste anymore time. I want to marry you. Our parents are here, it's a perfect evening, and I can get everyone else here in an hour. This is our home. Let's just do it. I'm sick of not being married to you."

She's not quite sure if he tugs her hand or not, but then she's kneeling too, because they've always balanced each other out, stood together and lifted each other up and it feels right to be at his level now. She cups his jaw, smiles into him, and what can she do but kiss him, her fingers in his hair, and everything is exactly as it's meant to be.

"So, yes?" he murmurs against her lips.

She bumps her forehead against his. "Yes."

.

.

Things fall in quickly the way they do when Donna takes charge. Within an hour, Harvey's living room has filled out; Jessica's beaming and proud, Louis looks like he thinks he should check on Harvey's sanity and he's bitching that his tie isn't formal enough for the occasion, but he's still grinning ear to ear. Mike looks at Harvey like he always knew, clapping him on the back and pulling him into a hug while Rachel grabs onto Donna like a reunited sister and they both laugh and cry their excitement over the top of each other. Harvey's slipped a textured navy jacket and tie on over the top of his shirt. Donna's changed too, from her casual jumpsuit to a dress that she loves but hasn't had the chance to wear yet. Sleeveless, white, not because she needs the symbolism but because Harvey loves her in white, irregular hemline slashing from her calf to her knee, and she's in heels for the first time in at least a week. She misses the height difference but she loves the way Harvey's eyes go slightly blank when he sees her.

Mike's found an officiant somewhere on the way over, he explains to Donna. Jessica slips her hand along Donna's elbow and murmurs her congratulations while she takes the officiant aside to fill in the details.

Mike waves them off as he turns to her and smiles wide. "Donna." He hugs her. "Good to see you've come up for air just in time to make a crazy decision."

"Only just. And it was Harvey's idea." She kisses him on the cheek. "How's the firm?"

"Fine." She can hear the lie sitting under it but she lets it slide. "So this is the most Harvey approach to a wedding possible."

She nods - it's reactionary and bold, it's impulsive, and best of all, it's just like him.

It's perfect.

"I'm happy for you," Mike says. She squeezes his arm and starts to turn the subject to the ceremony, to where Mike needs to stand and what he needs to do, but he interrupts. "I mean it, Donna. I know how long you've waited. I know how hard it's been."

"It was a long two years, yes, but -"

"I don't mean two years. I mean all of it."

She looks at Mike, and he's looking back at her as clear as he ever has, and she can see that he knows the patience of each individual moment of the last 15 years. He saw the uncertainty, and the hope, and the quiet frustration, and he saw the way she quietly lay herself aside over and over for Harvey.

He saw it all.

"All of it," he says again. "Every second, Donna." He nods at Harvey. "You're the best thing that ever happened to him. The best. He is who he is because you've loved him for as long as you've known him."

Donna sucks back a watery breath and thinks about how when he wants to, Mike can really press where it hurts. "He's always been a good man," she says.

"He has. But you're the one who helped him know it."

"Are you going to tell me he's not good enough for me?"

"He isn't," Mike says, and glances between Donna and Harvey with a smile. "But I guarantee you that there won't ever be a second of the day he's not trying to be good enough."

As he says it, she catches Harvey's eye, he smiles at her, and there's a promise sitting in his eyes. He looks hopeful and settled, and he looks like he's in love, and it's for her. He murmurs I love you across the room at her, and she doesn't have it in her to feel embarrassed at him being a big sap. She mouths back I know, and then they swap and she says she loves him and he says he knows. He tips his glass at her like he's trying to pick her up in some bar, his smile pressing the corners of his eyes together. Donna thinks about all the times he looked at her like that in secret and about how he's doing it now out loud in front of the whole world, and it takes everything in her not to cross the room and pull him into a kiss.

Instead, she hugs Mike and says, "Thanks, Mike. I'm glad you're here."

And, a few moments later, with Rachel smiling through tears next to her, she steps up to Harvey, up to his bright smile and his hopeful eyes and that particular tilt of his head he gets, just every now and then, when he's in a room full of people but he feels like it's just him and her. She steps up to him in their living room, in front of the fireplace they've sat and eaten shitty takeaways in front of, where they've talked and laughed and dreamed together about the future and where they've dozed with their backs against the sofa, their hands resting in each others laps and the lick of flame warming their faces. Their home, where they've found each other at the end of long days before he'd gone away and where they now hold each other in the long slow of the morning, where they've made coffee to wake up and tea to relax and where they've kissed for hours as the twilight rolled through. They've talked about plans and dreams here, shopping lists and appointments, argued and made up and laughed and cried. They've been in this space as colleagues, as friends, they've shared forbidden glances and they'd told each other they loved each other for the first time here, around the kitchen counter while he was burning toast for breakfast. It had all happened here.

And now she's going to marry him here.

They hadn't written vows. There wasn't time, and there wasn't anything other to say than I will and I do. They've said everything they needed to say a thousand times over, not just in the last two years but in the decade before that. It just hadn't sounded like I do at the time. Instead it had sounded like but with you it's different or do you want to be alone or are you saying you're coming back to me and what can they say to each other in this moment that means more than all of that? His eyes say it all anyway, even if all their time together hadn't - they're all love and promise and full up with the future, and there were no words she could say that could match what she sees in the way his smile pinches his eyes at the edges.

I do, he says, and grins like he's won the jackpot.

I do, she says back, and she smiles, but she feels tears threatening, and she thinks, holy shit. We made it.

They get married.

.

.

They celebrate into the late hours with their friends and their parents. They dance and drink, and Donna secrets away dozens of tiny moments into her heart. Mike, giving a speech composed entirely of abuse thrown at Harvey over the various ways in which he'd been an idiot to wait as long as he had, while Harvey laughed deep into his chest and pressed a long slow kiss against her temple. Rachel, crying her makeup off at various points in the evening and pulling Donna aside to tell her she's beautiful and Harvey's the luckiest guy in the world, and Donna doesn't argue with either of those statements. Jessica, giving Donna a subtle nod across the room, because she'd known longer than anyone else present how much had changed for them to all find themselves there. Her parents, proud and excited.

But mostly she secrets away Harvey.

Harvey, absentmindedly playing with the new ring sitting on his left hand like it had always been a part of him.

Harvey, smiling and still for long moments, taking his time to look across the room at her like there was nobody else in it.

Harvey, finding her out of nowhere through the evening, his hand brushing hers, and she lost track of the amount of times he leaned into her ear to murmur that she looked beautiful or that he loved her.

Harvey, slipping his hand through hers to pull her into a slow dance as the night wore through and the music slowed.

And, when everyone left, Harvey, drawing her into the bedroom, undressing her like she's porcelain, something deep and still slipping between them as he kisses her and murmurs I want to make love to my wife. He says the words 'my wife' like he's praying, and if it hadn't taken 15 years she'd swear she was dreaming.

But she isn't, and he's real, and they'd found each other in the world outside their unsaid fantasies and hopes.

It's everything.

.

.

It's Monday morning. Harvey's getting dressed, and two weeks without working out and reacquainting himself with food that contains flavour hasn't taken the edge off the physicality he walked out of prison with. His suits still don't fit quite the same as they used to, and they're not this season, which would have been unacceptable a couple of years ago, and even though Donna's talked him down from a panic attack over it in the last few days, it still all adds up to uncomfortable.

He's not panicking, not really, but he's working hard to stop his fingers shaking as he fights, again, with the buttons on the cuff of his shirt. He guesses he shouldn't know what walking back into his old firm after two years, and two years in prison at that, should feel like, but he's still nervous. His nerves have turned his heartbeat into a cramped rhythm against his ribs, and even in the morning cool of his bedroom he feels an inch away from breaking into a damp sweat.

He's trying to get the knot in his tie to sit right when Donna slips up quietly behind him and wraps her arms around his waist, bumping her nose into the ridge between his shoulder blades. "You okay?"

"Yeah. Just trying to remember how to do this whole morning routine thing."

"Oh come on, it's just like old times," she says. She nudges him in the shoulder so that he turns to face her, and she smoothes his tie down, her face drawn in a bittersweet smile. Her wedding ring edges off the side of his lapel as she does and it's new enough in the familiar of her tidying that she glances at it in the same moment he does.

"I like that this bit is different," Harvey says.

"Me too." She tugs on his tie lightly, pulling him down to kiss him quickly, then says, "Let's go. Just because you're potentially unemployed doesn't mean we can sit around here all day worrying about your hair. I actually have a job."

Harvey laughs almost in spite of himself, her kind refusal to let him spiral tethering him to the here and now, and he says, "thanks," as he follows her out the bedroom and towards whatever the day has waiting.

.

.

Walking back into the office after two years is as bizarre as he'd thought it would be, but the hardest part of the day is watching Donna walk down the hall to her desk and his old office, and not just because of the bittersweet kick in the guts he feels at having to remind himself that it's not his office anymore. They've been constant in each other's presence for two weeks now, and the feel of his hand dropping to his side from the small of her back leaves him feeling a lot more exposed than he was expecting.

But he has to admit the view is good, especially when she looks back over her shoulder to wink at him.

He walks into Jessica's office, and she greets him with a hug and gestures for him to have a seat on the couch opposite her. "How are you?" she asks.

"I'm … processing," Harvey says. "Things are different. But I'm handling it okay, I think." He shrugs loosely.

"Are you going to be able to be okay with not practising law?" Jessica asks.

It takes Harvey a long moment to respond, "I don't know how to answer that."

Because he doesn't.

The study of law and the practise of it have been virtually all consuming for him for the better part of two decades. He's sacrificed for it, a lot, and not just the things everyone knows lawyers give up - Saturdays and leaving at 5pm and being able to leave his work at work. He's given those up, but he's also given up so much more. Mostly, he'd lain down anything that made him feel too much. He'd thrown out caring makes you weak like a security blanket, but it wasn't just that. It was also that caring made him stop and think and consider his own complicity in the hollow pain that chased him like a ghost for years. Caring made him weak, but thinking made him scared. So he didn't. Instead, he practised law.

And now… well, now he had to figure out what all that meant. So he just says, "I guess I'll have to work it all out."

"There'll always be a place for you here, Harvey," Jessica says. It sounds like a reassurance, but Harvey hears the hesitation hiding behind her words.

"But?" he asks.

She sighs. "But if I'm honest, I don't know what I can offer you right now. Things are … there are a lot of eyes watching us closely right now."

"Gibbs told me she wouldn't come after any of you if I -"

"She hasn't, Harvey. She kept her word." She gestures towards him. "But we still had a senior partner go to prison for fraud. And the kid at the center of that lawsuit is still here."

"As a consultant, not a lawyer."

"You know as well as I do that distinction doesn't make a damn bit of difference to the people deciding if they want to give us their business or not."

"What are you saying, Jessica?" he asks.

"I'm saying I can't offer you anything, Harvey."

He hadn't been expecting an offer, not really, because he'd already known everything she'd just said deep down. But hearing it out loud from Jessica lands on him like a ton of bricks anyway.

"I know this probably isn't what you were expecting," she said. "And I wish I could do more. But even if Mike stepped down, bringing you back would put us in the ground, Harvey."

"I understand." And she'd done everything, he knew. The reason he left prison with a place to live and anything in his bank account in the first place was because of Jessica, quietly covering bills and keeping up his salary, probably out of her own pocket.

"I can't ever repay you. For any of it," he says, and hopes she knows he's not just talking about his rent and salary. He owed her. Not just for these past two years, but for everything. For law school, and his career, and Donna, and for standing by him when he'd run fully alongside Mike into his selfish impulses and put everything she'd worked for at risk.

He deserved exactly nothing from her and yet she'd quietly upheld him anyway.

He stands and hugs her.

He'll worry about what he's going to do later.

A/N: As always, thank you for reading and coming on this journey - multi chapters are a huge commitment for an audience to join in on and I so appreciate everyone who is reading! Please leave a review and let me know what you think, feedback is the life blood of the fanfic community.