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New Year’s Eve isn’t loud for them.
Not the way it’s supposed to be.
The apartment is dark, lights left off, the city below providing more than enough glow. Mike stands at the windows, arms folded loosely in front of him, watching fireworks in the distance tear open the sky and fade just as quickly. He doesn’t try to follow any one burst for long. He just lets it all wash over him.
Down below, the streets are already alive with chaos -- voices shouting, music blaring, people spilling into the cold with nowhere particular to be except together. He can imagine the crush of bodies, the noise, the complete mess of it all.
Up here, it’s quiet.
Up here, it’s just him and Harvey.
That’s always been the difference. No matter how loud the world gets, Harvey has a way of making everything else fall away. He has a way of looking at Mike like he’s the only other person in the room. Like he’s the only thing that matters.
Sometimes the comfort of it still catches Mike off guard. Maybe it always will. The way Harvey’s attention never wavers once it lands on him. Like Mike is something precious. Something worth choosing over everything else.
He rests his forehead briefly against the glass, breathing slow, grounding himself in the stillness. In the knowledge that when the noise finally reaches them, when the countdown starts and the year turns over, this quiet will still exist.
Harvey will still be here.
And so will he.
He’s happy.
That’s the strange part.
Not the intense, buzzing kind that makes him restless. Something softer. It’s the kind that scares him because it feels real enough to lose.
Prison taught him how quickly things could be taken. Coming out taught him how much it could cost to tell the truth. Some days he still carries anger around like a second skin -- anger at the world for making everything harder than it needed to be, anger at himself for all the years he spent running, and anger at Harvey, on his worst days, for loving him with a patience Mike didn’t think he deserved.
Harvey never stopped.
Not when Mike shut him out. Not when he lashed out. Not when loving Mike meant waiting in uncertainty, pushing against systems that didn’t want Mike back, didn’t want him whole, didn’t want him at all.
Harvey fought anyway. For his release. For his future. For a life that didn’t end at prison walls. For Mike to have something beyond survival. Something beyond all the afters that came before this moment.
Footsteps sound behind him, soft and unhurried. Harvey stops close, presence warm at Mike’s back before he ever touches him. Then his arms slide around Mike’s waist, easy and familiar now, like this is already a habit they’ve formed together.
Mike leans back into him without thinking.
They fit like this. It still surprises him sometimes.
Fireworks burst again, light spilling across the glass and reflecting them back -- two figures suspended above the city, held in a quiet pocket of stillness while everything else rushes forward without them.
“You okay?” Harvey asks.
“Yeah,” Mike says after a moment. “Just… thinking.”
Harvey presses a kiss into his hair. “That's a dangerous pastime.”
Mike huffs a soft laugh, then grows serious again. “I keep waiting for it to feel like the other shoe’s gonna drop.”
Harvey doesn’t pretend he doesn’t understand. He understands all too well. His hold tightens just slightly. “Me too.”
That honesty settles something in Mike’s chest. He covers Harvey’s hands with his own, grounding himself in the fact that this is shared. All the fear. The hope. The uncertainty.
They’d taken so long to get here. So many turns that could’ve ended differently. So many moments where it would’ve been easier to walk away, to choose distance over risk, to keep calling this something safer than love.
But love had found them anyway.
Not all at once. Not dramatically. It crept in through loyalty and late nights and showing up when it mattered most. Through choosing each other over and over again, even when it was hard.
A countdown starts somewhere far below them, voices overlapping, numbers echoing up through the streets.
Harvey shifts, turning Mike slowly, hands warm and sure at his back. Mike lets himself be moved, lets himself look at Harvey fully -- at the lines of exhaustion that never quite leave his face, at the softness that still surprises him every time Harvey looks at him like this.
Ten.
Nine.
Mike’s heart starts to race, not with panic, but with awareness. This is it, something inside him whispers. This is the life you didn’t think you were allowed to want.
Eight.
Seven.
He thinks about his parents. About Trevor. About Grammy. About Rachel. About prison. About every version of himself that learned to expect disappointment before happiness could even register.
Six.
Five.
Harvey’s thumb brushes his jaw, reeling his thoughts back in. Present. Real.
Four.
Three.
“I love you,” Mike says quietly -- not for the first time, not like a revelation, but like a truth he’s still learning how to live with.
Harvey’s expression softens in that way that still feels unreal. “I know,” he says gently. “I love you too.”
Two.
One.
Fireworks explode everywhere at once. The city erupts into noise and motion.
Harvey kisses him at midnight. It’s slow, familiar, unshowy. A kiss that doesn’t need witnesses. When they pull back, they stay close, foreheads pressed together, breathing in sync.
Up here, it’s just them.
And for the first time, Mike lets himself believe that all the wrong turns didn’t ruin him -- they led him here.
To this kind of quiet.
To this kind of love.
To a future that doesn’t feel borrowed anymore.