Chapter Text
Gordon Specter coughed up orange trumpet lilies for six months before he died, so when Harvey chokes on his first petal, he isn’t terribly shocked.
It makes sense, he would have thought if his eyes weren’t bulging with the strain of trying to take a breath. I should have known it was coming, he would have thought if he wasn’t using the last of his oxygen to give himself the Heimlich. It would be really ironic if I died like this, he would have thought if he wasn’t busy falling stomach first onto the wooden coffee table.
I wish she was here to laugh at me, he would have thought if he wasn’t having a panic attack over the spit shiny petal of a perfect white lily on his carpet.
It’s almost as long as his index finger, which scares him. His entire world narrows to the gentle crease in the middle, the delicate green veins where it narrows to reach a stem that is still inside him, the curve of Donna’s smile hiding in the edge.
Donna, he thinks, not that he can think much of anything. Donna, Donna, Donna.
Each deep breath is a relief and a terror because he doesn’t feel any different than he did twenty minutes ago. He read enough about lilies when his father was sick to be fully aware of every stage of development, every root pattern, every curl of stamen that is now growing in his chest.
He's lucky it's not sunflowers or peonies, large enough to cause structural damage. He’s lucky it’s not lily-of-the-valley or foxglove, poisonous and small enough to accidentally swallow.
He does wonder why it’s not belladonna.
But then again, it is genetic. His grandmother had told him about her own flowers, cherry blossoms, how they came out of her lungs as thick and generous as confetti on New Year’s Eve or rice at a wedding, fluttering down around her feet.
He had only been four years old and had demanded that she cough on command so that he could see them fall.
Grandma Specter had been sick with Hanahaki since she was eighteen. She had honored her father’s wishes to get married with a stiff upper lip and thinking metaphorically of England, expecting to die. But she didn’t.
When Harvey was twelve, he asked her about it. His au pair had called out sick and his parents were attending a meeting at the town hall, so he was sent to his grandparents’ house for the evening.
“Why aren’t you dead?” he asked, blunt and unpolished.
His grandmother had only raised a dyed eyebrow. Even if she and her illness weren’t polite topics of conversation, Grandma Specter maintained the graces of a society lady; nails manicured, hair colored a glossy brown, and tasteful pearls in her ears. It managed to offset the contracted pupils of her eyes, the wheezing of her breath, and the green tones in her skin, but only just. She always smelled strongly of flowers. Not like perfume but sharp, earthy flowers, summer going into autumn.
“We’re all going to die, young man,” she said sharply, in her lilting southern accent. “Sooner or later.”
“But you’re sick,” said Harvey, scrutinizing her from above his math homework. “My mom says you’ve got Hanahaki Disease.”
His grandmother frowned. “Lily should— yes, Harvey, I do.”
“Well, I read that you can die from that,” said Harvey. “But you’re still alive. Did they find a cure?”
His grandmother cleared her throat, lips closed. Harvey saw her swallow, the sound laboured. “There is no cure,” she said, short, breath floral. “Do your homework.”
But later that evening, she sat on the floor next to the guest bed and asked if he wanted to hear a story.
“I’m twelve,” he protested. “I don’t need a story to go to sleep.”
“It’s not really a story,” she replied. “It’s the answer to your question.”
At Grandma Specter’s debut, she met Beatrice Allen. Bea was dainty, dressed in ivory, and so beautiful that Harvey’s grandmother could barely speak. They snuck away to the country club pool, dipping their toes into the deep water and drank pilfered champagne, listening to the laughter and music coming from the ballroom. After the bottle sat empty between them, Bea had rested her lovely head on the other girl’s shoulder, cheek pressed against warm skin, and said that she wished that they both could stay there forever.
They wrote letters to each other. Stacks and stacks of letters, four banker’s boxes of letters worth, stashed away in the attic, and Bea signed each one with ‘yours always’ or ‘all my love’.
Three years later, Bea had run away to Florida with a white trash boy she met when he was her server at a restaurant; Harvey’s grandmother had married the son of one of her father’s friends and moved with him to the state of New York.
“It’s because I don’t know her,” said Grandma Specter. “That’s why I’m not dead. We met a few times and she was perfect and I still think of her. Besides, I loved your grandfather, too, rest his soul. Eventually.”
“Why isn’t everyone sick, then?” Harvey asked, brow furrowed. It seemed to him that a lot of people could feel that way.
“It’s a little like cancer, Harvey,” his grandmother said. “Unpredictable. We’re just more susceptible than most.”
But when he was eighteen and she was on her deathbed, she wasn't coughing cherry blossoms anymore. Harvey took her frail hand, soft and delicate as crepe paper, and asked her why she wasn’t sick anymore.
She knew what he meant, even as she was dying of another illness.
“Loving her was very romantic, young man,” she said. “It was a very beautiful type of pain. I liked knowing that I was dying because she left me. But love is a choice. You have to remember that.”
She didn’t die until he was twenty, but she stopped smelling like flowers, stopped coughing, and would look at pictures of his grandfather fondly. She planted an orchard of cherries with her gardening club, but she devoted herself to her family. She fell out of love as if it was as easy as changing a hat, after a lifetime of loving a girl bathed in the glow of champagne and pool lights.
That white petal on Harvey’s floor is proof that all his efforts to avoid making that choice — not dating in high school or university, breaking things off with Scottie as soon as she started looking at him sweetly, staying resolutely celibate while he articled — were for nothing.
He goes out to a bar, even though it's the middle of the day, picks up the first pretty blonde he sees, and takes her home to his tiny studio.
The light from the window, which faces a sad grey brick apartment, highlights the uneven skin under her makeup.
“You taste so good,” she murmurs when he kisses her, a little out of practice. “So sweet.”
She probably thinks it's sexy, until Harvey coughs lily pollen into her face.
-
The thing is that not much changes except Harvey.
His studio is still tiny and his mattress is still artfully arranged on pallets he found in the back alley, not because he doesn't want a bedframe but because the cheapest bedframe wouldn't fit through his door. His fridge is still empty except for one onion and packets of takeout soy sauce. The wall beside his front door is covered in ink fingerprints from when he doubles over coughing after coming inside; he sweeps up petals once a week now, empties them out of his pockets, spits them slick and slippery into a bin by his bed.
He's still up early in the mornings, walking down to the District Attorney's office, only it takes him twice as long now.
Donna is still as sharp and gorgeous as ever behind her desk, Cameron is as vital and whip-smart as he was before, and Jessica’s secretary still calls him to confirm their standing once-a-month dinner at Sake No Hana.
Nothing changes, so it's Harvey who has to keep up appearances. It's Harvey who sees his undereye circles go green and braves the women at the Nordstrom makeup counters to buy concealer. It's Harvey who starts gulping extra strength advil to calm the low-grade fever which makes him shaky and pale. It’s Harvey who can’t take the stairs anymore without wheezing, who needs to sit down after ten minutes of standing, who finds himself pale and shaking after a light run around Central Park. It's Harvey who leaves a bottle of Dayquil consciously on his desk, as if he's fighting a long and nasty cold.
He wishes he could ask his father or his grandmother about it; the enormity of their deaths centers around the fact that he has the disease which killed them. Never mind that it was a common cold that got his grandmother because a lifetime with a chronic illness made her vulnerable to anything. He thinks about his father, about the way that his veins and lips and the waterline in his eyes went strangely colorless as the chlorophyll cancelled out the hemoglobin. He thinks about the way his grandmother got better through sheer force of will.
And then he sees Donna, vivacious and snarky and a little irritated that he's avoiding her. Seeing her hurts but he can admit that he likes it, that it feels only natural to be in love to the point where it kills him. After years of suppressing it, it feels right, and even a little bit traditional in the style of the Classics, to fall for a woman who does not want him.
When he sees Donna, the petals irritate his throat to the point where he starts throwing up when he coughs. It feels good. A sort of futile grand romantic gesture.
Despite all this, the world goes on. It's strange how quickly dying becomes a fact of life.
Harvey adapts. He has to take a cab to the restaurant where he’s meeting Jessica; he's started taking cabs or the subway, skipping on his morning coffees to afford it.
Sake No Hana is dimly lit, which is good because it means that it gives Jessica plausible deniability not to notice Harvey’s wan face and the fact that he’s getting thinner. She does notice: he sees it in the once-over she gives him and in the purse of her lips.
Jessica’s eyes are dark and knowing over the menu. “Van Dyke has been talking about instituting drug tests at the firm,” she says.
Harvey takes a deep breath, which crackles, and decides not to pretend. “I’m still clean,” he says, because she picked him up out of the mailroom when he still had the NYU coke habit and a slew of party animal girlfriends to match. “I’m just sick.”
“How sick?” asks Jessica, because she didn’t get to her position without having intuition so clear it may as well be witchcraft.
She watches his jaw clench then relax into a sleazy smile. “Green around the gills,” he says, because he didn’t get to his position without knowing how to discourage her from asking too many questions.
Jessica gives him a sad look and orders for the both of them.
The next day, Donna reads him like a goddamn book, like she always does, but this time it is painful because Harvey has spent the night thinking about the pity in Jessica’s face when he had to lean against a wall as they waited for their separate cabs. He coughed, too, and felt grateful that the petals weren’t small enough to fly from his lips like to land like blood spatter in an evidence lab.
Donna’s hair is smooth and sleek, red like a fox, and she’s wearing heels which make her almost as tall as Harvey.
“Whatever woman you've started seeing,” she says, “you need to drop her.”
What woman?
He almost says it out loud.
“I’m single,” he says.
“Fine,” she replies, smiling. “You rushed shaving today because you slept in, you’re not even wearing a tie, you've been stressed and bone tired recently, you have a cough from how much you're smoking, and the woman you’ve been seeing over the past three months wants her to be your boyfriend but you shouldn’t because she’s crazy.”
What woman? he thinks again.
His confusion must be written clearly on his face, because Donna leans in and says: “Anybody who sprays your clothes with her perfume is in cloud cuckoo land.”
Harvey has put in an incredible amount of effort not to let her know that he has Hanahaki but he’s still surprised that it worked. Keeping a secret from Donna means keeping a secret from all of New York, and it's not like he hasn't slipped up and spewed lilies in side alleys and bodegas. He suspects that Donna has a network of cab drivers and servers and artists as well as her little club of executive assistants. And yet, for once, she can't see what's in front of her.
So, the smell of lilies on his clothes is unmistakable and his cough is considered a side effect of a smoking habit and his exhaustion the result of sleepless nights with someone else.
It is the only time Donna has ever been wrong about him. He marks it on the calendar: it's the seventh of the month.
-
He builds the grief in layers around his persona. And make no mistake, Harvey Specter is a persona. Harvey doesn't realize it until there's a recess during one of the depositions he's heading and he overhears opposing counsel squabbling in the men's room as he's walking in.
“It's fucking Harvey fucking Specter,” one of them complains. “The case may as well be over and our client in jail.”
Harvey gives the man a truly magnificent smirk and the whole group clears out. Then, he gets on his knees in front of the toilet and vomits an entire lily: blossom, stem, leaves, root system. It isn't streaked with blood, which is a bad sign. It means that his chest is so full of plants that there isn't anything left to damage. He jots that down in a tiny Moleskine he keeps in the pocket of his suit jacket.
He's essentially an expert in Hanahaki Disease these days and he keeps a very detailed diary of the effects. The code isn't hard to break. P for petal, L for leaf, F for flower — brief sentences about the preceding events, the condition of the lily. It's a love note, in the only way Harvey knows how to write one.
So he was expecting this flower, the pain of it. Donna had been tousled and satisfied this morning, a little late and purring like a cat. Unsurprisingly, this resulted in a dark pit in his chest, almost painful, the twinge of wrongness that preceded a panic attack. He had shoved it down. He is paying for it now.
It really is a beautiful blossom. It smells like illness to him now, but the thickness of the petals never fails to amaze him. The woodiness of the stem, the way the stamen whispers pollen across his lips. He runs his hands over the spit coating it and marvels. He made it. It's a part of him, as certain as his hands are, as his voice is. His body is collapsing into itself for her. It's almost a religious experience.
His nails are more and more green these days. The sheen of them. His eyes are sick-looking, too. Donna has started to buy him those trendy vitamin shots, endorsed by pilates instructors and spiritual types. Every morning, he grimaces and tastes ginger, lemon, turmeric.
She no longer comments on his cold. He hears her snap viciously at a colleague who asks if he has cancer.
He still wins his cases. He wins them easily, simply, sorting piles of damning evidence and gently swaying juries and doing it all with a voice as smooth and confident as a healthy man. Cameron invites him to dinners and Harvey charms professors emeritus and family friends and retired judges and some truly vile sharks who Cameron knows from law school.
Harvey doesn't ask him why he associates with those kinds of lawyers. He just turns his charisma to one hundred and ten and coughs discreetly into the table napkins.
And when he gets home, to his lonely studio, he stretches out his arms and imagines Donna in them. He dreams about her and wakes up with tears soaking into his pillow. He dreams about her and the brilliance of her hair and it destroys him to wake up.
He isn't sure if seeing her is better or worse for him. The Moleskine suggests worse: his Hanahaki attacks are more frequent, more painful. But his own intuition says better. Being around her, just her, is like a balm. Every rare and precious moment becomes a benediction: a shared taxi after a horrible fundraising event, hurried Thai takeout when Cameron slams down several boxes of records on his desk, one long sleepless night where they end up laughing about nothing at all.
He could live in her laugh, in the joy of her smile. There's a pleasant tension between them which soothes his throat when they're together. It can hurt all it damn wants, as long as he can see her laugh.
They share a drink of scotch after hours, after winning a particularly unpleasant case. He steals it from Cameron's desk drawer, along with a pair of monogrammed glasses.
Donna lounges in her chair, one highheel dangling from her foot by the toe.
“Congratulations,” says Harvey. “This one's yours, too.”
She feigns shock. “The great Harvey Specter admitting he doesn't do it all by himself? I don't buy it. Where are the cameras?”
Harvey melts onto her desk, leaning down to fill her glass. “No cameras. And nobody will believe you if you try to repeat it.”
And she looks up at him, still with that faux indignation and he can't help but part his lips. He likes her a little fiesty. It makes her so vivid that she burns into the back of his eyelids.
He almost kisses her, then.
He doesn't. And then Bertha interrupts anyway, something about him hitting on Donna. He retorts with something about a menage-à-trois but the comment hurts. He isn't hitting on Donna. He's not some cheap flirt. He's almost dead with how much he wants her.
It’s only a few days later that Donna comes to him with the lost papers and he explodes at her; it’s bad enough that he’s dying, but overlooking evidence on a case is beyond the pale.
“I’m here, you’re here. Do your job.”
She leaves.
He throws up in the bin under his desk, petals slick with blood. After some weeks of clean flowers, the blood is a bad bad sign. It's spreading. Like cancer. Like a wine stain.
I love you, he thinks, desperately. It's the first time he allowed himself the words. I love you. Come back. Please. Come back. I'll do anything.