relativity (1/10)
Title: Relativity
Author: snowflake912
Pairing: Harvey/Donna
Rating: T
Part: 1/10
Words: 2,726
Summary: Time, she thinks, needs to be redefined. She rearranges the pieces of their history, and at least ten combinations make sense. This one doesn't.
Disclaimer: I don't own anything. I'm a poor grad student, playing around with these awesome characters.
Note: This is my first foray into Suits fanfiction. There isn't much of it out there, especially Harvey/Donna fics, but the ones I've found so far are absolutely quality fics. That makes me a little nervous about this, but I'm also excited about this story. It has been on my mind for a while. It's a Harvey and Donna fic set after the season 2 firing and returning incident. It's inspired by events on the show but doesn't particularly conform to them. Relativity here refers to - yes, none other than - Einstein's theory. It's about their story, their history, how time shapes it, how it could have changed it, and how it could still change it. It's angsty, and will earn an M rating eventually. Besides using the present tense, which I've only done once before, I actually have an outline for this story (which I never do). It's going to be ten parts, each set at a different non-sequential moment in time.
Relativity
1. See It Your Way
“Oh, I wish that I could move you
Faster, be still or rewind
But it's a matter of time.”
Matter of Time - The Rescues
September 2012 -
She regrets having said it.
The other time.
It tasted bitter on her tongue, like dark chocolate warmed to a slow sizzle, slithering down her throat. Hot and uncomfortable. Deliciously so. His golden eyes turned a shade deeper, lingered on hers like he could still taste her. There was a pause, a space of two heartbeats that brought back that balmy July night and how hot it had been in her small SoHo apartment. Then he forced his gaze away to a far corner of Manhattan, a hotdog stand and a child in colorful stripes - a place with no painful memories. When he looked at her again, he had donned his poker face, and he was the best damn closer in the city. She thinks she maybe imagined that first part. She can’t tell anymore. Boundaries and memories have been blurring in and out of focus for months. These days, his fingers brush against hers as he hands her a file. She thinks nothing of it until she finds the heat of his piercing stare trained on her like maybe lines have been shifting in the sand for a decade. Like maybe things will never be the same again.
It’s just that easy, a swipe of his palm over her Zen Garden, or three words uttered in perfect synchrony to the triad between an inhale, a heartbeat and an exhale.
The other time.
She wonders when she will stop thinking about it. It comes to her in flashes and snippets, like a song stuck on a loop in her brain, the catch of his breath, the smell of her shampoo in his hair, the warm press of his lips against her throat. She can’t quite remember what made her stop the last time - or rather the other time. She supposes it was Ryan Drake with his gentle green eyes and soft blond hair, personifying anything and everything Harvey Specter hadn’t been to her. It was also the day, three months later, when he strolled into the office in his expensive shoes, navy blue suit tailored to painful perfection - just another day - and he met her gaze, steady as you please, and asked her to pencil in a meeting with Scottie at 10 PM. Unflinching, she asked him if he would like her to make a reservation, but he only grinned and winked in response. He didn’t need a reservation because he was taking Scottie home. She smiled, the corners of her lips curling with a hint of suggestive teasing. It was so easy to slip back into their roles, that night forgotten as surely as if it had never happened. His tense bearing relaxed, and all the forts were back in business.
Pearson Hardman bustles around her, a flurry of activity with forty-six suits sitting heavily on a strained budget. She has her game face on even as she sketches out Ryan Drake’s features in her memory. She’s an excellent multi-tasker. She busily skims through legal documents while Ryan starts to take shape as human collateral damage.
You know what’s the funny thing about hurt people, Donna? They have no qualms whatsoever about hurting other people.
He’d been good at calling her out on things. He’d been good about giving her the upper hand at a time when control felt like an elusive beast on the hunt. He’d been good for her until he knew too much and those gentle green eyes started to probe deeper, past her panache and her witty comebacks.
Tell me about the last man you were with.
She laughed because really sometime between reluctant confessions, blurring lines and heated kisses, it became hilarious. Or maybe it was her way of dealing with the pain, compartmentalizing little morsels and shelving them to be dealt with one at a time like punctuation marks in their story. Their history. She made a joke to Ryan, but her humor fell flat and was losing its punch. While navigating blind, he felt for the wound and proceeded to pry his fingers into the bleeding gash.
Whoever he was, he really hurt you, didn’t he?
“Donna.”
Her gaze swings upwards reflexively, but she’s a woman too well-versed in pretense to be caught off-guard. She favors him with an exaggerated wink fit for a great night on Broadway. It brings a half-smile to his weary face, and she’s not sure if it’s because he sees through her or because underneath his polished and sleek veneer, he’s exhausted. “I already called Benson and rescheduled his appointment till next Monday. Two new potential clients called in this morning - interesting prospects. I’ve sent you an email with the details. Lunch is on your desk, and I’ve delegated Mary Hughes to the boy wonder and Julianne Rice to Rachel. I coerced Louis into taking on Sarah Weiss,” she rattles off her list without pausing because in their precarious footing of the post-firing-and-returning world, she has little space to navigate besides lists and errands.
By the time she’s done, he has both elbows perched on the edge of her cubicle and a bemused grin on his face. “How did you get Louis to do that?”
She starts typing meaningless calendar reminders and shrugs the slim row of her shoulders. “I may or may not have let him into my cubicle.”
His jaw drops comically at her nonchalant admission. “You did not!” He trails his gaze over her, and she can tell he’s embroiling himself in the games because he desperately needs a reprieve from the tension coiling in his back.
She berates herself for being a shameless enabler. “A lady doesn’t kiss and tell.”
He pauses for a second, and it’s one full second longer than he should have. The slash of a dimple at the corner of his mouth becomes more pronounced as he stares at her mouth. She thinks his gaze darkens again to the same shade of thick honey that held her captive on the corner of Broadway and Prince Street. When he snaps out of it, he looks completely unfazed except for the almost imperceptible tightening of his jaw. She suddenly feels like a novice at pretense. “Did you find anything in case thirty-one?” he asks, curt and clinical, but he doesn’t really want to know. He wants a distraction.
“Case thirty-one?” she echoes, lifting one eyebrow mockingly. “These women have names you know.”
Somehow, he finds a smug smile and straightens to his full height. “You know how I am with names, Dana.”
“Funny,” she deadpans and wishes he chose any other name with which to taunt her.
His smile quickly falls away, and she resents the concern that wells in her chest. “Donna,” he sighs. “I’m screwed, aren’t I? This is bad. This is as bad as it’s ever been.”
She feels raw, torn between her lingering resentment over their renewed collision about the other time and the overwhelming urge to comfort him. “It’s bad,” she confirms, and she knows she’s teetering on an edge.
“Yeah.” He rakes the fingers of his right hand into his hair, leaving trails that look nothing like him. She wants to smooth them out, rearrange everything to its pristine perfection and go on pretending. She wants to run her own fingers through his hair until he’s unrecognizable.
“You’ll find a way.” Her voice makes up in conviction for what it lacks in confidence.
“It feels like I’ve played all my cards. My back is against the wall. Hardman is closing in on us, backed by Zane and his bulldogs. It’s turning into a shit show. Everyone is overworked and under-billed,” he trails off to heave a long breath. “I’m tired.” The small confession costs him a fortune in humility.
“Take the night off.”
He gives her an incredulous look and moves closer, propping himself against the edge of her desk, mindless of her personal space. “In the middle of this mayhem, you want me to take a night off?” he asks, the thread of amusement in his voice unmistakable.
She rolls her eyes. “Seriously, put everything down tonight, and go out for a drink. Take a friend. Relax. Unwind. A fresh mind makes all the difference.”
“You’re my only friend,” he teases, and somehow the tables have turned so dramatically it makes her head spin.
“That’s a lie.”
“You’re the only friend I’d want to have a drink with tonight.”
“That’s a lot of modifiers.” She looks at him a little too sharply, but it doesn’t unseat him. Not in the literal or the metaphorical sense. She really needs to work on her glares. “And it’s too bad because I’m unavailable.” It’s a blatant lie of course, but the last thing she wants to do is have a drink with him tonight.
He glances at his watch and frowns. “Oh, look at that, your boss is detaining you tonight. You’ll have to cancel your plans and become available.” He’s all lethal charm now, flashing the grin that clings to the dimple at the corner of his mouth. “Come on, Donna, I’ll let you take advantage of my fragile state of mind.”
The joke falls flat because all she can think about is the other time. He reads her like he’s been sitting cross-legged in her mind all along, privy to her innermost thoughts.
“Donna,” he says softly. “It was a joke. We both know it wasn’t like that.” So now he wants to talk about it.
She goes back to typing fake memos, but her fingers hit the keys too hard. She creates a little ruckus in her peaceful universe. She can see him staring at her hands like he can somehow will them to stop flying over the keyboard. She types faster just to spite him.
He rubs a hand over his face, suddenly looking even more exhausted and infinitely older than he did a minute earlier. “I’m sorry. It was a stupid thing to say. I wasn’t thinking…”
The typing mania stops abruptly, and the silence steals his words. “Harvey, please,” she says emphatically and immediately misses the furious click of plastic.
He’s quiet for half a minute, and it feels like the longest thirty seconds ever recorded in history. She’s got a thing or two to add to Einstein’s theory of relativity. Time has a funny way of stopping sometimes only to pick up and zoom away when you least want it to. “I thought you wanted me to talk about it,” he says finally, and he looks earnest, confused. She’s never wanted to slap him so much in her life.
“Not now,” she clips out and keeps her hands busy, rearranging items on her desk, trying not to touch him, a task that’s been made difficult given that he’s sitting on her desk.
She knows he’s angry when he pushes away from her desk suddenly, looks away and then looks back at her, lips pressed in a grim line. “I’m talking now,” he says matter-of-factly.
Take it or leave it, Donna. Goddamn him. She tells herself she hates him, but she lifts her gaze to his angry stance, his burning eyes, and God she hasn’t felt this way about him in years. “Not here,” she counters, and this time she strives for calm.
Unfortunately, her contrived serenity does little to appease his ire. He reaches for her, fingers easily snaring her wrist before she can start phase three of her dismissive typing. She glowers at his hand where it rests on her arm, but he doesn’t let her go. “My office,” he bites out.
“We’re both busy.” She’s this close to snapping into mulish mode. He seems to understand that he’s scratching at the surface of her stubbornness, so his hold on her loosens, until his fingers encircle her arm like a light caress.
His voice loses its hard edge, and he lets her go. “We can take a ten minute break, Donna.”
Indignant, she pushes back her chair, almost running over his foot in the process, and comes to her feet. He doesn’t celebrate this small victory but starts walking towards his office. He stops at the door and waves her in, an unlikely moment to become a gentleman. When he steps in, he closes the door. Little good it does for all the glass. She entertains the thought of scratching one of his Pink Floyd records and playing it on a loop. We’re just two lost souls swimming in a fishbowl, year after year.
“So?” she begins, watching him pace the length of his office.
“This…” he says and waves a hand between the two of them. “It’s weird. Since you got back, it’s been weird.”
This, she thinks, is the world of post-firing-and-returning. “It’s not weird to me,” she lies, and it becomes easier to believe it. “As far as I’m concerned nothing has changed.”
He treats this like a game of poker and stares at her until he can see past her façade. “Donna, it’s weird,” he asserts, and he’s a little impatient because her cards are on the table, and he wants to get down to the business of stripping her of everything she owns.
She swallows, but the grit in her throat is still there. At least he’s not looking at her right now. She takes comfort in that as he continues to pace. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”
He stops as if this of all things is unexpected, and his eyes scan her features for clues. “About what?”
“About the other time.”
It makes him laugh, and she’s almost tempted to move in for the slap. She feels like laughing too because five years later, it’s still tragically humorous. “You think you needed to say it for me to think about it?” he asks incredulously. There’s something fierce about his expression that stills her, and she doesn’t know what to make of it. He’s almost disappointed, like it’s her fault that she doesn’t know he apparently thinks about it.
“I don’t know.”
“I think about it,” he states, and it’s nothing romantic like I think about it everyday. Nothing crushing like I think about it because it was a fucking mistake. Just I think about it. Here, Donna, another morsel to feed your soul with obsession.
“Harvey, I am not in love with you.” She doesn’t know why she feels the need to reassert this. It’s maybe more for her benefit than his. “It was five years ago. We’ve both moved on from whatever that was. It was an emotional time for both of us, and we were just there.”
He smiles a little, but it’s not a happy expression. His eyes harden instead of softening, and he tucks both hands into his pockets. It makes him look detached in the perfect lines of his tailored black suit. She loves him in black. “You’ve always been excellent at rationalizing.” It sounds more like an accusation than a compliment.
“It’s the truth,” she says, her voice softer to downplay the defensiveness creeping into her posture.
Harvey studies her long and hard. “Okay.”
Disbelieving laughter flits past her lips. “That’s it? Okay?” she repeats and throws both hands up resignedly before digging them into her hair.
“What do you want me to say?”
She shakes her head, hands sliding out of her coiffed locks. His eyes glimmer with something she doesn’t understand as they follow her hands because maybe he thinks about his fist in her hair. I love your hair. Damn him. “Not that,” she says softly, drawing his gaze back to hers.
He invites another silence and basks in its presence, letting her words die a slow painful death. Time, she thinks, needs to be redefined. She rearranges the pieces of their history, and at least ten combinations make sense. This one doesn’t. Then he says, “I wouldn’t change it.”
Donna doesn’t think there’s much else he could have said to completely unravel her. His eyes chase hers away from his basketball collection to the baseballs and finally the records, but she’s given up too much to lay her final cards on the table.
“Donna,” he sighs in frustration.
She spins on her heel and walks away, leaving silence in her wake.