Work Text:
Harvey's annoyed.
He'd had his driver turn the car around not even three minutes after they dropped Mike off, suit pocket suspiciously empty with his phone nowhere to be found.
He doesn't keep exact count, but he presses the button for the elevator no less than twenty times and waits impatiently. He's thinking about finding Mike and saying goodnight before he leaves again when the doors open, parting with a ding. It's another twenty pushes of an elevator button before they click close and send him up the floors.
He must've left his phone in his office. Unlike him, to be so forgetful, but he's feeling off-kilter, lately, in the midst of—well. Everything. He just wants to grab it and go home.
The elevator rises to their floor, mercifully, quicker than it came down. He bustles through the doors when they open, and then—
Huh.
Mike?
He's slouched against the small strip of wall between the elevators on the opposite side, one arm folded around his torso. His head is lowered, fingers raised above his eyebrow, lips curled in a pout. Harvey clears his throat and says,
"What happened to working?" He walks over to him, phone forgotten. He's more curious about Mike—who seems to jump at the sound of his voice. Hm.
"Why are you here?" Mike asks without looking at him. Harvey tilts his head to catch his gaze, and Mike turns his head to avoid it.
Hmm.
"I forgot my phone. What are you doing?"
"Nothing."
"No, you're doing something, even if it looks like nothing. You're not looking at me, for one."
Mike doesn't say anything, just keeps staring into the distance, turns away from Harvey a little more. Harvey clears his throat. "Mike. Look at me."
A deep sigh, and then Mike lifts his head. He squints his eyes and looks at Harvey.
Blood trailing from his nose, a bruise pillowing across his eye, and a busted lip. He looks at him beneath his hand and says,
"Told you, it's nothing."
Harvey can hear the pain in his voice now.
"Mike—Jesus. Who did this to you?" Harvey's on him before he knows he is, slipping his arm through the cup of his elbow and leading him away to the bathroom. Mike allows this with no complaints, save for a mumbled,
"I'd rather not talk about it, actually, thanks. Where are we going?"
"The bathroom, where else? I need to know who did this so I can kick their ass. Now, how can I do that if you don't tell me who it was?"
"Why are we going to the bathroom, Harvey?"
"Because you're bleeding all over our floors. Now come on." He opens the bathroom door with his elbow and steps to the side, letting Mike enter first, nudging him forward with a light touch on his back. "Tell me who did this."
"Listen," Mike sighs again, weary, and meets Harvey's eyes in the mirror. His shoulders curl in, and his gaze drops—a guilty pup with his ears pinned low. "I deserved it."
Harvey frowns. He finds Louis' first-aid kit stashed in a cabinet beneath the sinks and flips it open. "What did you do?"
Mike shakes his head. "I don't want to tell you."
"Mike." Harvey stresses his name as he looks through the kit. Antibiotic ointment, q-tips, bandages, rubbing alcohol, ice pack. "Why not?"
When Mike speaks again, his voice comes out harder. "Because of the story you told me, about your mom and your dad."
Harvey tenses. That can only mean one thing. He scatters the utensils out on the counter and sifts through them, setting aside what he needs and decidedly not looking in Mike's direction for a moment.
Harvey likes to think of himself as put together, but he'd be a liar if he said he didn't have a few wounds that never healed quite right. Like the one on his kneecap, where he slid straight into a shard of glass touching home plate in Little League at twelve, or the one on his ankle when he got wasted at a college party and fell through a coffee table. Healed over, shiny scar tissue, but they always sting a certain way when he presses on them.
The ache from his mother's betrayal sits somewhere in the depths of him, a wound that never closed quite right. It's scored through his heart and bleeds into every decision he makes and every person he trusts.
Some things, Harvey thinks, cannot be forgiven.
"You got off easy, then," he tells Mike, because it's true. When he looks at him again, he's slouched against the counter, staring down at the floor. Remorse colors his eyes a darker shade and wears his lips into a frown.
It doesn't suit him—guilt. Mike wears it like a suit jacket three sizes too large.
He looks up at him and says,
"Yeah. I know."
It sits in the air for a moment. A quiet tension. He feels a little nauseous.
Harvey tears his eyes away from Mike's forlorn gaze, focusing instead on the purple blooming beneath his eyelashes and the blood caked around his nose.
It's something, he thinks, that the wound closes again; it leaves room for the rest of his emotions to flow back in. Mike might have deserved it. He does deserve it.
Harvey doesn't want to see it.
That pain in the depth of him dulls, makes way for anger, but even that settles to something lesser. Calmer. Gentler.
He turns the sink on and runs his hands beneath the water, reaches for the soap and washes them. Mike is silent beside him, watching idly through what Harvey imagines would be a raised eyebrow, if it wouldn't hurt him to.
He dries his hands and steps over to him. Mike blinks beneath his hand, frozen while Harvey hovers.
"Are you going to let me help you?"
Mike swallows. He moves his hand away from his swelling eye. "I could do it myself," he argues, but it's weak, noncommittal. Harvey purses his lips and says,
"Could you really? You can't even hold yourself up." He gestures, pointedly, to where Mike is, at this point, half-sitting against the countertop.
There's no argument—Mike just sighs and closes his eyes. Harvey looks at him, gaze trapped somewhere between the curve of his lashes and the arc of his nose.
Something warm and sweet and dangerous blossoms in those depths.
"Just get up here," he tells him, tapping the counter once and then twice. Mike tenses, then props himself up on the sink. Harvey lets his hand hover at his side, ready to support him if he needs it.
"Can I ask you something?" Harvey asks. Mike hmms, looking away from him and toward the first-aid kit, supplies littered about disastrously.
"That depends. Could you hand me that ice pack?"
"Thought you might want your eye cleaned before you iced it," Harvey says, but hands him the ice-pack anyway. Mike smacks it against the counter and shakes it vigorously.
"Not for my eye," he frowns, then holds the ice-pack against his torso. Harvey watches the way he winces and wonders whether there's a bruise blooming across his ribcage to match the one coloring his eye purple. A thought, there and then gone: I could take care of that, too. I could take care of you. "What's your question?"
"I couldn't have been gone for more than five minutes."
"That's not a question."
"When did this happen?" Harvey grabs a disposable towel from the first-aid kit and lets the water run over it for a moment. Then he leans into Mike's space and, carefully, cleans the dried blood from his nose.
Mike's skin is weirdly soft—freakishly, even. Harvey's fingertips brush against his nose as he wipes the blood away. Warmth trickles through him where they touch.
"About as soon as you left."
"Were you ever planning on telling me?"
"Um, no." Mike winces when Harvey moves the towel from beneath his nose to where the blood was pooling from. He bumps his forehead into Harvey's hand in the process and then flinches further in pain. Harvey huffs a sigh.
"Mike. Stay still." He dabs at it again, softer this time, pressing it against the wound for shorter durations. "I've barely even started."
"I told you I could do it myself," Mike argues, but his eyes slip shut and Harvey can feel the way he lets his muscles relax.
"Were you just going to show up tomorrow with a black eye expecting me not to ask any questions?"
"Yes, that was the general idea. I don't know, I hadn't thought that far ahead."
"You have a tendency not to," Harvey agrees. He watches Mike part his lips, but moves the towel down toward them, blotting it over the split in his lip. "Ah, don't argue. You've got a little something on your face, here, I'll get it."
Mike makes some sort of noise, though Harvey can't tell if it's born of pain or annoyance. Likely a mix of both. He cleans the blood from Mike's lips, thumb brushing over smooth skin, soft and foreign and warm.
They're close. Too close. When Mike breathes, Harvey can feel the warmth of it on his fingers. Mike's knee presses into Harvey's thigh. If he's not careful, he'll smack their heads together the next time he straightens.
Harvey feels a bit like his tie is choking him, and a bit like he and Mike are still not close enough.
"There," Harvey says when all the blood is wiped clean. He can see clearer now where the wound is, a small but deep gash slightly off-center of his lower lip. "Better."
"Still hurts," Mike complains. "Actually, kind of hurts more, since you keep touching it—"
"Do you know that you make a horrible patient?" He sets about cleaning the gash beneath Mike's eye, but he jolts back when he presses the towel to it. Biting back another sigh, Harvey pulls him back in with a hand on his shoulder. "Thank you for proving my point," he emphasizes, then washes the blood away. "Seriously. Quit moving."
"I'm not trying to."
Mike's eyes flutter closed. He pulls away when the blood is gone, swapping the towel for a q-tip spritzed with rubbing alcohol. Mike peeks an eye open, frowns at Harvey, and closes it again.
"How did you forget your phone, anyway?"
"Well, if I knew how I forgot it, I probably wouldn't have forgotten it."
"I don't know that it works that way owch, man!" Mike hisses when he presses the q-tip to his wound, flinching away from Harvey and blinking his eyes open. "God, that burns."
"What did you expect it to feel like? A warm hug? Seriously, Mike, are you made of porcelain?" Harvey's eyes flitter about his face—sweet blues look back at him. His hair's a mess, his lips curl down in a wince, there's a couple flakes of dried blood on his neck Harvey missed. Porcelain, precious, perfect. "I have seen children handle pain better than you."
Mike's expression sours and he narrows his eyes at Harvey. Harvey purses his lips, biting back a smile, and raises his hand from his shoulder to the back of his neck. He curls his fingers there, grip steady and certain.
"Do I have to hold you still?"
They look at each other. Mike's eyes get wide before he narrows them again, looking away. "No, no. I get it. Quit moving."
"Oh, so you do know how to listen. Thank you."
He carries on, dabbing the q-tip to the wound beneath his eye, then the cut in his nose, and finally, the gash on his lip.
Mike doesn't mention it—so Harvey doesn't either. His hand stays on his neck the whole time. When Harvey applies the antibiotic ointment to his skin, Mike doesn't wince. He squeezes his eyes shut while he smooths it beneath his eyelid, and grits his teeth when he rubs it in, but doesn't move an inch.
"Hurts," Mike comments, eloquently, and something like affection blooms in Harvey's chest.
"Sorry," Harvey tells him. "Almost done." He scrapes his fingernails softly along the short hairs at the nape of his neck. He feels the way Mike shivers, first, and then feels the goosebumps form after.
Mike opens his eyes when he's finishing up, fingers splayed across his cheek as his thumb circles the last of the ointment into the cut. They look at each other again, for the first time or the thousandth, Harvey struck dumb by the way Mike's eyebrows pull together, the slight pout of his lips.
Beautiful, he thinks.
"Perfect," he says. He pulls back, discarding the tube of ointment and gesturing toward the mirror. "All patched up."
Mike turns to look in the reflection, and Harvey looks with him. Staring at the two of them, there's little Harvey can think of to explain the way his hand still lingers on Mike's neck, or how Mike's knee is still pressed against Harvey's thigh, or even the way Mike's turning his head this way and that to inspect his face in the mirror and how only then does Harvey notice the drops of blood staining his white shirt, because he'd been too busy looking at him, earlier.
All Harvey can think of is to buy him a new one.
"Like nothing even happened," Mike drawls, lifting his fingers to his face to poke and prod at his wounds. Harvey squeezes his neck in gentle warning,
"That'll hurt, you know."
"Yup. Sure does."
They catch each other's gaze in the mirror again. Mike clears his throat and says,
"Thank you."
Harvey slides his hand from his neck to his shoulder, swallowing around the sudden burning feeling in his chest. He taps him there, softly, and says,
"It's nothing. Let's get you some painkillers and then—you're okay to go through those projections, still?"
"My face hurts, not my brain, Harvey."
"Right. Well, I'll head over with you. I need to find my phone."
Mike laughs, shaking his head. "I think I already know where it is."
"And how would you know that?"
Mike winces, and nods with his head toward his suit jacket, where it's hanging on the door of a bathroom stall. "Check the pockets."
"You—?" Harvey does as he's told, digging through the pockets until his fingers stumble on something familiar. He pulls it out and, sure enough, his phone stares back at him. "Did you steal my phone?"
"No," Mike rolls his eyes, shoving himself off the counter. He stumbles on the landing, and Harvey's there in a second, ready to support him if he needs it. "It was in my pocket. What the hell did you put your phone in my pocket for?"
"Why the hell would I put my phone in your pocket?"
"I don't know. That's why I'm asking."
"I didn't put my phone in your pocket."
"Well. Someone did. And it wasn't me. And there's only two of us. So."
"How are you so sure it wasn't you?"
"I would remember."
Harvey squints. "You know what—we both know that's not true, but you just look so miserable right now." Mike rolls his eyes. "I'll let you have it."
"Jee, thanks."
"Never say I'm not a kind boss."
"I'm going to go through those projections, now."
"Uh-huh." Harvey watches Mike throw his jacket over his shoulder, walking slowly and lopsidedly toward the doors. "Mike, wait. Are you sure you'll be fine if I leave? You're not concussed?"
"I'm great, Harvey." He turns to look at him, one hand lifted in a wave. His sarcastic smirk softens into something sweeter, sincere. "Really. I'm fine. Thank you for helping me. I'll see you tomorrow."
"If you're sure." He bites back the desire to check him over a second time. A third time. A fourth. "See you tomorrow."
Mike waves his fingers with his little wave, and then the door swings shut behind him.
When Harvey turns to the sink again, intent on putting the first-aid kit away, he finds his reflection instead. He stares at the look on his face. Sparkling eyes, squinting at the corners, cheeks peachy with the smile he's been failing to fight off for some time now.
He considers this. He also considers the warm, sickly sweetness in his chest.
He considers Mike and all of his oddities and his impossible commitment to being the best he can be. His easy laugh and boyish grin and relentless determination. Their shoulders pressed together and a hand on his back and their fingers brushing passing files.
Harvey considers Mike Ross, alone in the bathroom with his blood on his fingers. He stands there and he burns something bright.
Then he swallows it down and goes home.
(He thinks about Mike there, too.)