Chapter Text
Every heart is a package tangled up in knots someone else tied
- lyric from the song ‘Kathleen’ by Josh Ritter
Harvey woke with what felt like a throat full of sand and a head full of shattered glass. As per usual, his heart felt like a boat that had endured the night before being hurled upon the rocks and only just survived intact. That was a common feeling for it these days, and never more so after time spent in Mike’s company. It wasn’t that being with Mike didn’t buoy Harvey up. It did. It was just that always having to watch the man he loved walk away from him, whether it had been to return to his cell in Danbury or to his fiancé, sent him crashing right back down again. Ripping him from the crest of a wave and dashing him against the rocky shoreline, setting him on a collision course with pain, regret, jealousy and, yeah, Harvey could admit it, loneliness.
Except … Harvey didn’t remember watching Mike leave last night. He ventured to crack open one eye, and immediately rued that decision when a ray of light peeping through a gap in his curtains hit him like a bad cop in an old movie, hard and square in the face. Groaning, he tried to gather together the remnants of last night that were gingerly picking their way through the shards of broken glass in his head, and hoping not to end up like Willis in ‘Die Hard’, feet bloody and having the worst day of his life.
He remembered the bar, giving Mike the offer letter to return to the firm (not the only letter he had wanted to give him, but the safest one, the one least likely to leave him watching Mike walk away from him for good), and he remembered the scotch. Oh boy, did he remember the scotch. He still didn’t remember Mike walking away, though.
Slowly the pieces of last night knit themselves together into something resembling a pattern Harvey could recognise. Unfortunately, the pattern screamed more ‘ugly Christmas sweater made by Grandma’ than ‘Tom Ford made to measure menswear’. The feeling of Mike’s arms around him as he swayed to and fro out of the bar, stumbling over his own designer-clad feet and into a taxi, filtered through the fog of memory. That was not how he had envisioned his first time in Mike’s arms (beyond the few meagre hugs they had shared that had always left him aching for more) being. He groaned again at the remembrance of just how wasted he had been.
“You stay classy, Specter,” he rasped, finally managing to roll over and swing his legs off the bed. Water. He needed to rehydrate before he attempted to put together any more fragments of the evening before. Glancing at the bedside clock to ascertain just how much of the morning he had lost to last night’s excess he was surprised to find the very thing he was about to go in search of. A long, cool drink of water. Not the long, cool, blue-eyed drink of water he longed to wake up to every morning, but a welcome one all the same.
He downed half the glass in a few quick gulps, chasing the two aspirins whoever had left the water had also thoughtfully supplied and pondered the presence of all this on his nightstand. He knew there was no way he’d been in a coherent enough state last night to think this far ahead so someone else had taken care of it for him. There were only a handful of people who could anticipate Harvey’s needs like that, or who cared to. He was pretty sure he’d remember if Donna or Marcus had turned up at some point during his little binge session of scotch and self-pity, and Jessica probably would have left him to suffer, so that left … Mike.
Harvey groaned for the third time in as many minutes. It wasn’t enough that he had gotten so hammered in front of Mike that he had to be helped from the bar, helped into a cab, into his apartment, into his own bed. No, he had to get himself into such a state Mike had felt obliged to take care of him like a wayward child. He was the one who was supposed to take care of Mike, not the other way round. But that way lay another round of self-pity and self-indulgent pining and Harvey Specter didn’t have time for whiners and cry-babies. Mike was a free man, a safe man, and that was all that mattered. And although he would never be Harvey’s man, he was still his guy, his friend, his family, and that wasn’t nothing. That was something. Something incredible. And Harvey would settle for Mike in his life in whatever way he could have him. Just like he’d said in his letter. Which was when his eye fell upon another letter, one set a little further back on the nightstand with Harvey’s name on it in Mike’s handwriting.
Something like a jolt of molten lava fired through Harvey’s veins, sweeping away all vestiges of his hangover. His mind was wide awake and crystal clear now. Yesterday he had written Mike a letter and today he had woken up to one from him in return. Sure, he hadn’t given Mike his letter (Had he? He swiftly ran through all his collected memories of the previous evening and reassured himself that, no, he had not.), but the timing felt more than a little coincidental. It felt … Harvey wasn’t sure what it felt.
Scary? Thrilling? Right? Yeah, all of those things, but mainly it felt right. But ever the realist, he hurried to tamp down the hope rising in his chest, beginning to lift his heart, a little bruised and battered, but still seaworthy, like a rising tide lifts all boats and bears them away from the rocks. Harvey dealt in realities, harsh or otherwise, not wishful thinking, no matter how tempting it was. There was no way he could know what was in Mike’s letter. Not without opening it. Well, he might be too much of a coward to tell Mike how he really felt about him, but he refused to be cowed by an envelope bearing his name and the writing of the man he loved. He might be a coward, but Mike wasn’t. If he had something to say to Harvey that Harvey wouldn’t want to hear, he would say it to his face, like a man. And Harvey couldn’t let himself hope that Mike’s letter was a reflection of his own, full of love and longing. Or so he told himself. His damn heart, though, it was floating on a sea, not of serenity or tranquility, but of dreams and expectations. Hope. The like of which Harvey had never known he housed the capacity for until Mike had stumbled into his life and turned it upside down and inside out and, ultimately, right way round.
Stop it, Specter! It was probably nothing more than a response to the offer letter Harvey had issued Mike with on behalf of the firm, that was all. Don’t get carried away with yourself, Harvey chastised himself, as he pretended it was the effects of the alcohol he’d attempted to drown his sorrows in last night, and nothing else, that was causing his hands to shake. He opened the envelope as carefully as possible, as if trying to preserve the purity and integrity of it for future generations. Sliding out the folded-up missive as if he thought it might crumble into so much dust in his hands he steeled himself with a deep breath and proceeded to read Mike’s words. Although drinking them in might have been a better way of putting it.
By the time he got to the end and Mike’s multiple P.S.s he was laughing and crying in equal measure. He had to hold the letter away from his body so as not to ruin its pristine beauty with what he deemed to be his unworthy tears, flowing freely down his smiling face and dripping off his chin like fat, little droplets of water from the eaves of a frozen roof, ice melting in the morning sun. This couldn’t be real. Could it? Could Mike really return his feelings? Could he really be that lucky?
A noise from the other room caught his attention, as surely as the realisation Mike really was still here, just like he promised in his letter, caught his breath in his throat. He was still here! Waiting for Harvey to come and find him. Waiting for Harvey to go out there and claim him as his own. But he was pacing, or so it sounded. Mike was a bundle of nervous energy at the best of times, Harvey knew that, loved it, but pacing meant more than just being restless. It meant nervousness, real nervousness, not just an excess of energy. It meant fear. Why was Mike afraid? Did he regret what he had written?
No! Harvey refused to think that. Couldn’t think that. After all, he was feeling nervous too, if he was being honest with himself. Of course he was. Of course they both were. They had just stripped their souls naked and bared them to the person with the most power to wound them. Words on a page were one thing. A lovely, precious thing to be pored over and memorised, the memory of them enough to warm the coldest nights, but they were still just that, words on a page. They were two hearts connecting, but they weren’t the touch of a loving hand against warm skin, they weren’t fingers gently carding through soft hair and they weren’t the consuming fire or soothing balm of a soulmate’s kiss. And that was what they both needed the reassurance of now. Right? There was only one way to find out. Mike had left Harvey an invitation to the rest of his life. It was only good manners he should R.S.V.P., wasn’t it? Joy wrestling fear, Harvey reached for his phone, still not sure which emotion would win out…