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The first time Harvey noticed it, he told himself it was nothing.
Mike had come skidding around the corner of the bullpen with a case file clutched to his chest like his life depended on it, and when Harvey had said, without even turning around, "Mike, get me the Kowalski deposition," Mike had practically vibrated on the spot before pivoting on his heel and bolting toward the file room so fast his tie had flown up over his shoulder.
Ten seconds.
Harvey had timed it because he was a man who noticed detail, and it was a detail, that his brand-new, not-actually-legally-employed-by-the-firm associate could locate a random deposition faster than Donna could locate her own coffee.
"Here," Mike said, skidding back in, slightly breathless, holding the file out like an offering. There was something almost hopeful in his face. Like he was waiting for a gold star.
"Good," Harvey said, and took it without looking up from his monitor.
Mike didn't leave.
Harvey glanced up. "Something else?"
"No, no, that's—that's it. Cool." But he was smiling, this dumb, pleased, crooked smile, and he lingered another beat before wandering off toward his desk like a man who'd just been told he was a very good boy.
Harvey frowned at the closed door for a solid three seconds after Mike had gone.
He decided not to think about it.
He thought about it two days later, when he found Mike hunched over the corner of his desk—as if Mike didn't have a perfectly functional one out in the bullpen—at eight-forty at night, one long leg jiggling under the desk at a truly alarming frequency, an energy drink in one hand and a highlighter in the other, murmuring dates and depositions to himself like scripture.
"Mike."
"Mm?" Mike didn't look up. His leg kept going. Harvey found his eye involuntarily drawn to it, the way you'd watch a paint can balanced on the edge of a shelf.
"When did you eat last?"
That got him to look up. "What?"
"Food. The thing humans consume so they don't die. When did you last consume some?"
Mike considered this with the seriousness of a man being asked to recall a crime scene. "There were, um. There were pretzels. In the break room. This morning, I think."
"Pretzels."
"They were good pretzels."
Harvey sighed, slow and deliberate, the way he did when he was about to make a point he intended to make only once. "That's not food, that's stress landfill."
"It has salt. Salt's a food group."
"Salt is a mineral, Mike, you're not a deer. You can't sustain yourself on a deer-lick."
Mike blinked at him, and then laughed, this surprised, delighted bark of a laugh, like he hadn't expected Harvey to say anything back, like he'd expected to just get ignored and was pleasantly startled that he hadn't been. It did something unhelpful to Harvey's chest, that laugh. He chose to ignore that too.
"I'm fine," Mike said. "I run on, you know. Vibes. Adrenaline. Red Bull."
"You run on my goodwill and the grace of a bar exam you never once took for yourself, so forgive me if I don't find that reassuring." Harvey snapped his fingers at Mike then. "Come on."
Mike blinked. "Come on where?"
"There's a diner two blocks down that does a burger that won't actively shorten your lifespan. You're coming, you're eating something with protein in it, and then you're going home to sleep, because if you fall asleep face-first into a client's discovery documents I will be the one who has to explain that."
"You're taking me to dinner?"
"I'm taking you to sustenance. Don't make it weird."
"I'm not making it weird, you're the one who—" Mike was already up, already grabbing his jacket, already moving toward the door like an overgrown puppy who'd just heard the word walk, and Harvey watched him do it with something curdling low and warm in his stomach that he refused, absolutely refused, to name.
The walks started as a practical matter. That was the story Harvey told himself, anyway.
Mike, it turned out, did not do well sitting still for extended periods. He could focus with an intensity that unsettled Harvey a little, when he was locked onto a case, words and numbers and precedent pouring out of that overactive brain of his—but the second the problem was solved, the second there was nothing to chew on, he practically climbed the walls.
He tapped pens. He paced. He talked to Donna about nothing until she physically turned her chair away from him. He reorganized Harvey's already-organized bookshelf twice, apparently just to have something to do with his hands, and had the nerve to look proud of it.
"It's alphabetized now," he'd said, beaming, the day Harvey discovered this.
"It was already alphabetized."
"By author. Now it's by author and then chronologically within author. It's better."
"Nobody asked you to improve my filing system."
"You're welcome," Mike said, entirely too pleased with himself, and Harvey had stood there in the doorway of his own office feeling faintly like he'd been burgled by someone who now demanded a thank-you card.
So the walks began. Ostensibly to get coffee. Ostensibly to "review a case in a less claustrophobic environment," which was a phrase Harvey deployed with a straight face exactly once before Mike called him on it.
"You just want me to burn off energy so I stop annoying you," Mike said, matching Harvey's pace down the block, hands in his pockets, sunglasses pushed up into his hair even though it wasn't remotely sunny.
"I have no idea what you're talking about."
"You do this thing," Mike said. "Where you decide you need something from three blocks away right around the time I start doing the leg thing."
"You have a leg thing?"
"You're so right. I don't have a leg thing."
There was a moment of silence, and then, because Harvey couldn't help himself:
"You absolutely have a leg thing, it's like watching a sewing machine."
Mike laughed, and bumped his shoulder against Harvey's, easy, unthinking, the way you'd bump a friend, and Harvey didn't step away.
"Anyway," Mike said. "Thank you. For the walks. I don't—I don't do great, just sitting. Never have. I used to get sent out of class for it."
"Diagnosed?"
"Labeled. There's a difference, I think." Said lightly, tossed off, but Harvey heard the part underneath it anyway, the part Mike hadn't meant to let show, and filed it away without comment, because that was one thing he'd learned fast about Mike Ross—you didn't poke at the soft parts out loud, you just quietly made sure not to step on them again.
"Well," Harvey said instead, "consider these company-mandated. For productivity. Not because I care whether you implode at your desk."
"Sure," Mike said, grinning down at the sidewalk. "Company-mandated."
The hole-digging, as Harvey privately termed it, was a separate problem, and a more delicate one.
Mike had a gift—genuine, dangerous, occasionally spectacular—for wandering directly into territory he had no business being in.
He'd corner a partner in the elevator and offer an opinion on a case he'd read about for fun the night before. He'd needle a witness in ways that were either genius or catastrophic depending on which side of the line he landed on that day. He'd pull a thread in a contract because it itched at him, some instinct he couldn't explain, and half the time it unraveled the whole case in their favor and the other half it nearly got them both fired.
"You can't just say things to opposing counsel," Harvey said, for perhaps the eleventh time, steering Mike bodily by the elbow away from a hallway conversation that had been about four sentences from a malpractice suit.
"I was making a point."
"You were making a Harvey problem. There's a difference. I make the points. You make the coffee run and look pretty in the background."
"That's insulting on at least two levels."
"Only two? I'm losing my touch." But he'd said it without heat, steering Mike back toward the safety of Harvey's own office, and once they were inside with the door shut Harvey had rounded on him properly. "You cannot just dig around in a live case because your gut itched. You do that on my time, in my office, where I can shovel the dirt back in before anyone sees the hole."
Mike looked, for a second, genuinely stricken—not at being scolded, Harvey realized, but at the idea he'd have embarrassed him. "I didn't mean to—"
"I know." Harvey exhaled, some of the sharpness draining out of his voice without his permission. "I know you didn't. Just—bring it to me first. Dig where I tell you to dig."
"That's a weirdly specific thing to say."
"Don't make it weird."
"You keep saying that like it's going to work."
It was late—later than either of them should still have been in the office—when Harvey found him asleep. Not the collapsed, boneless sleep of exhaustion, but the accidental kind, chin dropped to his chest, pen still loose in his fingers, three case files fanned open in front of him like he'd simply lost the battle mid-sentence.
Harvey stood in the doorway of his office—and why does Mike always end up in his office?— and looked at him for a moment too long.
He should wake him. Should tell him to go home, get a real meal, sleep in an actual bed for once instead of whatever configuration of couch cushions Mike called furniture.
That was the sensible thing, the correct thing, the thing a person who felt nothing in particular about his overpaid, illegally-employed, undernourished, overcaffeinated shadow of an associate would obviously do.
Instead Harvey found himself crossing the room quietly, taking the pen out of Mike's slack fingers before it could roll and leave a blot across the discovery documents, and standing there another few seconds, feeling something in his chest that he was going to need a considerably longer flight of stairs to outrun.
"Mike," he said, quiet.
Mike startled awake with the particular full-body flinch of someone raised to wake up fast and ready to move, blinking blearily up at him. "M'up. I'm—what time is it?"
"Late enough that you're going home."
"I can still—"
"You can still fall out of that chair and concuss yourself on my watch, which is a worse use of both our evenings. Go home, Mike. Eat something that isn't neon-colored. Sleep in your own bed."
Mike scrubbed a hand down his face, looked up at him with that same crooked, unguarded look from days before, the one that made something in Harvey go soft in a way he had exactly zero interest in examining. "You worried about me, Harvey?"
"I'm worried about my case files. You drool."
"I do not drool."
"You absolutely drool, there's a very sad little wet patch on the file right now that I'm going to have to explain to a partner."
Mike laughed, tired and real, gathering his things with the slow, fumbling motions of someone only half back in his body, and as he shuffled toward the door he paused, glanced back.
"Thanks, Harvey."
"For what."
"I don't know. All of it." A shrug, a small, unpracticed smile, gone before Harvey could decide what to do with it. "Night."
"Night, puppy," Harvey said, before he could stop himself.
Mike froze in the doorway. Turned. "What did you just call me?"
"Nothing. Go home."
"You said puppy. You called me puppy."
"I said nothing of the sort, you're delirious, go home before you start seeing things too."
But Mike was grinning now, wide and delighted and entirely too smug for a man who'd been drooling on a discovery file twenty minutes prior, and he pointed at Harvey like he'd caught him at something, which, Harvey supposed, he had.
"Goodnight, Harvey," Mike said, singsong, and slipped out before Harvey could throw something at him.
Harvey sat down at his desk, alone, and stared at the door for a long moment, and did not, could not, quite manage to be as annoyed about the whole thing as he wanted to be.