One Tries To Fly Away: A Cringefail Farmer X Harvey Fic

one tries to fly away: a cringefail farmer x harvey fic

first time posting fic on tumblr, so not sure what i'm supposed to be doing :D anyway i was possessed this afternoon and wrote this fic featuring @clarisinne's cringefail farmer and harvey. i liberally mixed metaphors in this fic, which i am not sorry for in the slightest.

crossposted on ao3--please enjoy!

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Harvey divided his life in two, in much the same way a historian splits history. For the historian, the ages are separated by the death of a Galilean man. For Harvey, there was before and after her.

For both Harvey and historian, time was reckoned by the coming of a savior.

He didn’t recognize her as such right away, partly because he wasn’t entirely aware of his own misery. He knew he was sad, sure, and he distantly felt the years piling up on his shoulders. But these feelings were familiar, and he had long since stopped noticing them. He didn’t remember a time when loneliness hadn’t been his faithful companion.

(A bird born in a cage does not miss the sky.)

Harvey, for his part, had made quite the comfortable life for himself in his cage. He’d decorated it with the few joys and achievements he had. The iron wires that wrapped around his life were predictable and study. Most days, he forgot to miss his long-dead dream of flight.

She had entered his life like a fireball, a meteor burning bright against his sky. Out of control, she hurtled from the heavens, crashing against his comfortable imprisonment and crushing some of the cage bars quite badly. She disturbed him.

He wasn’t sure how he felt about being disturbed.

He had seen her, fluttering around the town, bumping into everything and always popping back up with a flushed smile. She drew his eye—a spot of color against the dark and drab world. When she burst into the clinic, braids flying and eyes bright, he had no choice but to let her in.

(Looking back, that had been the moment when his life shifted from one age to the next.)

And she was clumsy, and loud, and she seemed to slam doors more often than not, and she rattled Harvey’s world in a way that no one had before. She dragged herself into the clinic at all hours, nursing all manner of cuts and bruises and broken bones. She brought him jars of pickles and lukewarm coffee carried from the farm, and sometimes the crushed remains of a plant she’d foraged on the walk into town and shoved in her pocket. And she was kind, and earnest, and lord she was cute sometimes, and—

And oh.

That feeling was new.

(A breeze blew through the bars of the cage.)

But he didn’t get ahead of himself. He was nothing like her—he would never be. She was, quintessentially, free, and he would always be held down by something: his job, his eyesight, his own fear. What use did a skylark like her have for someone as leaden as him? 

She did not seem to care about the weight on his shoulders—or perhaps she was just not aware of it. Maybe she hadn’t yet realized that this heaviness he carried was as much a part of him as his hands or his heart, and that he would never be able to join her in her carefree life.

Well. He would enjoy this for as long as he could, anyway. It was nice to have some fresh air, after all this time. For now, he would just be as good of a friend as he could manage—try to smile at her, try to keep her from dying in the mines, try to listen when she spoke. (These weren’t hard tasks at all—with the possible exception of keeping her from dying. That proved surprisingly difficult.)

And everything was nice, once again: a status quo, maintained. Harvey knew where he stood with her. He had been lonely for so long that this new type of heartache could blend in easily enough. He was fine. He just wanted to help her, wanted to double-check that she hadn’t hit her head in the mines, wanted to make sure she didn’t have any brain injuries—

She told him that she liked him. She ran away.

(The door to the cage cracked open, just a bit.)

And they didn’t fall in love right away, which didn’t surprise him—but she didn’t realize her mistake either, which did. She was just as awkward in courtship as she had been in every other aspect of her life, and she still carried with her that wild energy that always made his heart beat a little faster. What was a man supposed to expect from someone like her? How could he predict the way the wind would turn next?

They went on a date, and she fumbled over her words. She looked at him, sometimes, like he was worthwhile, and that made him feel all sorts of funny—like he was tumbling from a great height and wasn’t quite sure when he would land. 

He quite deliberately didn’t let his mind wander to their future—the worst thing he could get right now was false hope. For all he knew, she would soon come to him, tell him that she was sorry, but he was just too boring and sad and cloistered, and she had a whole life ahead of her. She would fly away, and he would stay here.

Then she tackled him, and she crushed a bouquet into his arms. She choked out a half of a garbled question and then promptly hurled into the grass beside him.

Well. If Harvey hadn’t been in love before, he certainly was now.

And that was the feeling, wasn’t it? That creeping sensation of warmth that had plagued him for months now. It was love, plain and simple. He was so unused to it that it had been hard to identify. And yet, there it was, stubbornly spreading its wings.

(For the first time in a long time, he let himself look beyond the bars that surrounded him.)

She hovered there, nervously within reach and clearly fighting the urge to run away. And yet he dared to hope that she might truly feel the same—that she might love him, in her way. That perhaps, she was just as scared as he was.  She didn’t know it, of course, but she had been the first one to truly reach out to him in so long—that freckled, calloused hand held out like a lifeline, to pull him up out of the fog that hung near the ground. 

He was frightened, sometimes, by the sheer intensity of his feelings. It was a lot for a man to handle, especially one like him, unaccustomed to how happiness felt. The brightness blinded him sometimes. 

He wouldn’t trade it for the world.

By this point, he had recognized her for what she was, and understood that nothing was going to be the same from this point out. Even if she did decide that it was all over, he would be better for having known her. He wouldn’t be able to go back to the cold metal of his containment, not knowing that there was a whole world just beyond. 

And then, in the absurd twist that he should have come to expect from his life, she took it into her head that he was leaving her (as if he wasn’t head over heels for her, as if he hadn’t been for months.) She poured out a litany of fears and insecurities, a deluge of pent-up pain that didn’t give him a chance to speak against the onslaught. She stood toe to toe with him, and she challenged him to tell her exactly how he felt.

He answered with his lips against hers.

(The cage shattered around him when she kissed him back.)

Harvey soared.

fin