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There's a folder Harvey keeps around. Never lets Mike touch it. Never lets anyone touch it.
Which, look, it's not weird. Not at first. Harvey's got his whole thing, his Harveisms, the four hundred records alphabetized by artist and then by year, the thing where he won't let anyone else touch them. A mystery folder barely cracks the top ten.
So Mike didn't bother with it. He couldn't — he'd just gotten in, and he was busy. Busy being a fraud. Busy proving to everyone and their mothers and mostly to himself that he was actually, genuinely good at this, that the whole thing wasn't a magic trick that was going to stop working on a Tuesday.
So yeah. The dark brown folder was none of his business. Maybe Harvey had a dark secret side. He probably had four. Five? Make it a hundred, to be honest, Mike was kind of afraid of him.
But here's the thing about Mike Ross: he is a nosy motherfucker.
So he'd try. Little sneak peeks whenever Harvey was not around. He never actually got it open — the cord was wrapped in a figure-eight around two brass buttons and the flap was stiff as a book spine, and his hands were never as steady as he wanted them to be. And it's not like the thing was wandering around. It lived on the third shelf, between a first edition of something Harvey had definitely never read and the photo of Gordon Specter with his horn, and it stayed there.
Dark brown leather. Gone soft at the corners. Water stain on the back, lower left, shaped a little like Florida.
And no label.
That's the part that got him. Because Pearson & Hardman catalogued everything. Client number, matter number, bar code, retention date. Louis had once written Mike up in writing, with a cc over a binder clip. Nothing in that building existed without a number on it.
And there was Harvey's, with nothing on it at all.
He asked Donna. Obviously he asked Donna.
Because c'mon. It's Donna. She has to know. She knows his coffee order in three countries. She knows what happened in Boston. She has to know, right?
Turns out she didn't.
Mike's honestly not sure he believed her at first but he spent ten solid minutes describing the thing, brown, leather, cord-and-button, water stain like Florida, and Donna just looked at him like he'd lost it.
"I don't know what that is," she said.
And Mike laughed. Donna didn't.
So, Harvey's best-kept secret. The one thing on this earth Donna Paulsen had never been told.
"Leave it alone," she said. Not teasing. That quiet thing she did maybe twice a year. "He'll tell you."
"And if he doesn't?"
"Then he'll tell you later."
Mike didn't think about the folder much, honestly. A lot had changed since he got in, back in 2011. It was 2015 now, and look, a LOT had changed.
They were together now. Him and Harvey.
Not like fuck buddies. Not like a thing with an end date. Like walks on Sunday mornings. Actual walks, actual daylight, Harvey Specter in a coat that cost more than Mike's rent ambling up Columbus with a coffee in one hand and Mike's hand in the other, arguing with total courtroom seriousness about whether Heat beats Godfather II.
(It doesn't. Mike will die on this. Harvey knows he's wrong.)
So no, he didn't think about the folder.
Until he started seeing it everywhere in the house.
Shelf in the study. Then the closet, behind the shoe rack. Then, and this one made Mike leave the room in the bottom drawer of the nightstand. Harvey's side.
A man moving something closer to himself.
Harvey thought he was being subtle about it, which was, okay, kind of adorable, but c'mon. We're talking about Mike. Mike who can walk through a room once in 2009 and inventory it for you in 2014. Mike noticed. Mike noticed everything.
He tried again, a few months after he unofficially moved in. Had his hand on the cord. And the thing is Harvey, that absolute bastard, wouldn't even catch him properly. Wouldn't get mad, wouldn't make a joke out of it. Just appeared in the doorway toweling his hair like nothing was happening and said, "You want the Thai place or the other Thai place."
And Mike said the other Thai place and closed the drawer.
And Harvey never mentioned it. Not that night. Not ever.
Which was so much worse, because it meant he'd known the whole time and had decided, every single time, not to make Mike feel like a thief in his own house.
Mike was going a little crazy.
Then came June 26th, 2015.
"We're going to D.C.," Harvey announced.
Mike surfaced from somewhere around fathom nine and looked at him like he'd lost his mind. Then looked at the clock–6:04. Then looked back at Harvey, standing at the foot of the bed at six in the goddamn morning in a charcoal three-piece, tie already knotted, cuffs already linked, sipping coffee.
"I'm divorcing you."
Harvey chuckled. Set the cup down on the nightstand, crouched, pressed a kiss to Mike's forehead. "We're not married."
"Details," Mike whispered, tilting his chin up, catching his mouth.
God. Does it get better than this? Does it actually get better than this?
Mike slept the entire flight. Sweatpants, a hoodie he stole off a guy in 2007, curled into Harvey's side on the firm's jet, dead to the world. Too sleepy to question a single thing.
And like, what's the worst that could happen? He'd follow Harvey to hell and back. He'd follow him there and probably stop for coffee on the way.
He's Harvey's guy. In every single way there is to be somebody's guy.
So what if his boyfriend is crazy enough to fly them to Washington at six in the morning? Normal Friday.
He had to get changed before they landed, which became an emergency roughly forty minutes in, and look at that an hour and a half, door to door. God, Mike loves having a stupid rich boyfriend. Sometimes. (Constantly).
Here's the thing, though.
Harvey was nervous.
Which was terrifying, because Harvey doesn't get nervous. Or if he does, he never shows it, not once, not ever, not with a subpoena in his hand and a federal judge in front of him. Mike has watched this man lie under oath with a resting pulse of sixty.
But his thumb kept going against the edge of his cufflink. Over and over. Small and silent.
"Are you okay?" Mike asked, once they were in the hotel room.
"I will be." Tight smile. All the wrong muscles.
Okay. So it's officially the end of the world. And God, Mike was so sleepy.
"Can we grab breakfast?" He was changing the subject on purpose. Harvey clearly didn't want to talk about it, and Mike had gotten better at giving him the time to come around to a thing.
"Sure. Call room service but we're out the door in thirty."
Okay. Yeah. Now Mike was panicking too.
He ordered two coffees and some kind of breakfast bagel situation, or whatever it is the rich eat, which turns out to be normal food with too many zeros on the price.
Harvey didn't touch his coffee. Didn't touch the sandwich. Stood at the window with his back to the room and his hands in his pockets, looking out at the city like it was a door he was about to walk through.
"We have to go."
Sure. Hell's burning. Let's go.
Mike nodded and they were in a car in under two minutes.
"Hey." Mike found his hand and threaded their fingers. "Whatever this is. I'm here, okay? I love you."
Harvey finally, finally smiled. A real one. Not the client one or the courtroom one or the one he uses on Louis, which is closer to a weapons system. The real one, with the crease by his left eye, the one that lives in exactly one house and Mike's got the keys.
He didn't say it back. He says it maybe four times a year and every single time takes a layer of Mike's skin off. He just held on tighter.
Then the car slowed.
And holy shit.
Why the fuck were there so many people.
They were in front of the Supreme Court and there were rainbows everywhere, flags the size of bedsheets, flags on cheeks, a flag over a golden retriever, two thousand people packed onto the marble and spilling down into the street, somebody's trumpet going, two women in an actual wedding dress sitting and crying at nine forty in the morning, before anything had even happened —
June 26th.
June 26th, 2015.
Holy fucking shit.
Oh, heavens.
Mike's eyes went huge. He turned and stared at Harvey.
Harvey bit his lip. Bit his lip. Mike had never seen him do that. Not once in four years.
"Oh my God."
"Yeah," Harvey breathed.
And then it was a haze of everything and nothing.
They were escorted along the side, past the barricades, by a guy with a lanyard who said Harvey's name like it meant something to him. Ninety degrees and climbing. Cameras three deep. Flashing, yelling, singing somewhere in it, and under the singing a couple hundred people just quietly coming apart.
And now, only now, jammed against a barricade with his ears already ringing, Mike noticed Harvey's other hand.
The dark brown fucking folder.
Four years of it, right there in his fist.
Mike opened his mouth and absolutely nothing came out.
Then the doors of the Court opened and the interns came running.
(Nobody tells you that's how it's done. There's no gavel. No announcement. Somebody sprints out of that building with a stack of paper and runs it down the marble to the press, and everything anyone will ever feel about their own life is in that stack, moving at a dead sprint.)
Then time hit 10:01.
"—holding that same-sex couples may exercise the fundamental right to marry in all States—"
And the crowd broke.
Mike's hand was screaming in Harvey's grip and he couldn't feel his fingers and his ears were ringing and nationwide, holy shit, nationwide, five–four, Kennedy writing, Fourteenth Amendment and people were shrieking and the woman in the wedding dress went straight down onto her knees on the pavement and somebody's trumpet started and stopped because he was crying too hard, and Harvey's eyes were streaming, and the world was ending —
no.
No, hell, it wasn't ending, it was getting born, it was being dragged out screaming on the steps of a building made of Vermont marble —
and suddenly Mike was being kissed, both of Harvey's hands on his face, in front of God and CNN, and he doesn't even know whose tears he's tasting, his or Harvey's, but holy hell. Holy hell.
"Harvey!"
Five people came at them through the crowd, and holy shit, Mike knew them. He knew all of them. He'd read their names on the front of briefs he'd memorized in the back of a cab. The woman who stood in that room in April and argued it. A retired appellate judge who'd been writing about this since before Mike was born. A litigator out of Cincinnati whose amicus Mike could recite from the second paragraph.
They hit Harvey like weather.
And Harvey was so open, so completely out of it, smiling and crying and hugging every single one of them, suit creasing, tie going crooked, not fixing any of it. He said somebody's first name into their shoulder and it cracked clean in half.
Eleven years, the judge was saying, gripping him by both arms. Eleven goddamn years, kid.
Harvey couldn't answer.
And Mike just stood there two feet away holding a coffee he didn't remember taking, watching his boyfriend have an entire other life he had never once been shown.
Then a petite girl with a clipboard and a headset came barreling through and grabbed Harvey by the sleeve.
"It's speech time! You're third."
"I'm not—"
"You're third."
And without understanding a single thing, Mike was being pulled, through the coalition, through the press line, past a security cordon and a cluster of dark suits and somewhere in the blur a man Mike had voted for twice, all of it going by too fast to hold, a shit ton of media and —
oh God.
Oh God, Harvey was making a speech.
Mike was trembling.
They put him behind a cluster of microphones with the white columns rising up behind him.
Harvey set the brown folder on the lectern.
He didn't open it.
Mike stood eight feet to his left in a suit he'd put on an hour ago in a private jet with no idea. None. He had to lock his knees.
"My name is Harvey Specter. I'm a lawyer."
"I'm told that's not usually how you open when you want a crowd on your side."
And two thousand people with their faces completely wrecked laughed, and Mike watched the floor come up under Harvey's feet the way it does with a jury in the first thirty seconds, and thought: oh. There he is.
"I want to say something about what actually happened here, because in about a week the story's going to get simple, and it was not simple. It was thirty years of people filing losing cases. Losing them on purpose, some of them — losing them well, so the next one would lose a little less. There are lawyers who spent an entire career on this and died before today and never once got to be right out loud." His jaw worked. "Somebody hands you a file like that, it's not a case. It's a relay. All you're doing is running your leg without dropping it."
He touched two fingers to the folder. Took them away.
"My father was a musician. He'd play the same six bars a thousand times alone in a room before he'd play them for anybody, and when I was a kid I asked him why he bothered, nobody's listening. And he said, I'm not playing it for them. I'm playing it until it's true."
Mike stopped breathing.
"I sat on this." Harvey's voice went flatter, and so much worse. "A long time. I had the file on my desk and every argument for taking it and I did not sign, because signing meant saying out loud, in a building full of people I worked with, that this was mine. And I was very, very good at not saying things out loud. I'd built an entire career out of it. I was the best closer in New York City and I could not shut one door and say one true sentence about my own life."
The plaza went dead silent.
"Then four years ago somebody walked into a room I was in." Harvey's mouth pulled sideways. "He had no business being there. He was completely unqualified. And he stood in front of me and flat-out refused to be anything other than exactly what he was, and it cost him everything, and he did it anyway. And I went back to my office that night at a quarter to ten—"
He stopped. Breathed once.
"—and I signed it."
And Mike, crying openly now, on television, in front of the Supreme Court of the United States, caught the joke that nobody else in that square could possibly catch.
Refused to be anything other than exactly what he was.
Mike Ross. Whose entire existence was a lie with a good memory.
Except Harvey was right. That's the thing that takes Mike's legs out from under him, even now. Harvey was right, and he'd been right the whole time, and he'd seen the one true thing at the bottom of all of it four years before Mike could.
"So." Harvey looked up and out at all of them. "Today, five judges wrote down what most of you in this square already knew. That's all a law ever is. It's the last place the truth gets to." A nod, once, like closing a binder. "Took us a hundred years to write it down. I'm sorry it took us a hundred years. Go get married."
The sound that came back at him did not stop for a long time.
And then Harvey turned.
Away from the microphones and the crowd and the fourteen cameras, and his eyes found Mike, and Mike realized they'd never actually left him, not once, not the entire speech, the whole speech and he tipped his head, barely.
C'mere.
Mike's legs took him. He does not remember deciding.
And then he was standing right in front of Harvey. Close enough to see the salt drying at his temple.
And Harvey reached into his jacket and went down on one knee on the marble.
He looked up at Mike through tears, tie crooked, and gave him the single most beautiful fucking smile Mike Ross has ever seen on a human being.
"Michael James Ross. Will you marry me?"
And here's the part Mike, who can tell you what page a case is on, who can tell you what his grandmother was wearing the last time he saw her, who has never once in his adult life lost a thing he didn't work extremely hard to lose —
cannot remember.
He does not know what he said.
He's tried. He's gone back and felt around in there for it the way you feel along a dark wall for a light switch, and there's just nothing. A clean white gap in a life that has no other gaps in it.
There are dozens of videos. He's never watched one.
All he kept is, nodding. Nodding so hard it hurt. His hands on Harvey's face, hauling him up off the ground. Somebody's flag going over both their shoulders. Harvey laughing wetly into his mouth. Cameras flashing everywhere.
That's it. That's all he's got.
And honestly? He thinks that's right. Out of everything he was ever handed for free, he thinks the only one that ever mattered was getting to let go for a second.
They got back to the hotel at nine that night. Deaf. Sunburned. Hoarse. Harvey's jacket somewhere in Washington, permanently.
Mike sat on the end of the bed with his shoes off and his ring finger feeling weird, and Harvey stood there a second, and then crouched down, pulled the brown folder and put it in Mike's lap.
"Okay," he said.
Mike's hands weren't steady. He unwound the cord — figure-eight, two brass buttons, four years of wanting — and opened the flap.
And it was all there. Eleven years of it.
Amicus briefs with his name fourth on the signature page. Sixth. Eleventh. Strategy memos. A photocopy of a 2004 district court loss with three words in the margin in Harvey's hard slanted capitals: NOT THIS ONE. Wire confirmations, dozens of them, going back almost a decade, same two organizations, never mentioned to a living soul. Letters from strangers in Ohio and Kentucky.
A funeral card.
And at the very back, loose, folded twice, a piece of hotel stationery.
The Chilton. June 23, 2011.
On the front, in Harvey's handwriting: a list. Harvard candidates, in interview order, every single name struck through with one clean line.
Every one.
Except the last, added at the bottom in different pressure, faster, pressed hard enough to emboss the paper: Mike Ross.
And on the back, same pen but later, the letters gone loose the way his hand goes after nine p.m. a phone number, the name of an organization, and four words.
Tell them yes. Sign it.
Mike read it about nine times.
It took him four years to find out what was in that folder. It took him maybe six seconds after that to do the math that Harvey had been one of the lawyers on this thing since 2004, quietly, from a shelf in an office, with nobody's name on it.
And that he got in June 23, 2011.
The day they met.
Not the week after. Not the month after. That day. That Thursday, in that hotel, with weed in the briefcase and a broke kid running from a bust, Harvey had gone back up to the fiftieth floor, sat down at his desk at twenty-two forty-five, and finally signed the thing he'd been carrying around in his chest for seven years.
Because of him.
"Harvey," Mike said, and it came out in pieces.
Harvey sat down next to him. He looked tired in a way Mike had literally never seen on him, not worn down, just set down. Like a man who'd finally gotten a case out of his hands.
"I couldn't tell you," he said, quiet. "In the beginning because you were so young, and you were a secret, and I had enough of those. And then I couldn't tell you because I wanted to tell you like this." He shrugged. It was an awful, naked little shrug, nothing like him. "And if it had gone the other way today, I'd have handed it to you in the car and said, fine, we'll do it in New York, and screw them."
Mike set the folder down on the bed carefully.
Then he climbed into Harvey Specter's lap and held on.
"Four years," he said into his neck. "Four years, you absolute—"
"You have an eidetic memory." Mike could hear the smirk building. "Honestly thought you'd have it by Christmas."
"I tried—"
"I know you tried. You tied the cord over instead of under. Every single time."
Mike pulled back and stared at him. "You counted?"
"Nine," Harvey said.
And Mike laughed until it turned into the other thing, and Harvey held the back of his head with one hand the way he always does, and out the window, across the whole city, somebody had lit the White House up in colors you could see from the Potomac.
And they were free, and in love, and fuck ‘em all.