Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It was October. Edith Ross had been dead for two months already, and would be dead for many months yet to come. Mike was already dreading the so-called holiday season. As modest as his holidays had always been, they were going to be particularly modest if they involved a party of one. Mike had no idea what he was going to do.

Except work. Work was something that filled his time and wore out his brain and smoothed out his ragged moods. Work was something to rely on, even when Harvey wasn't. The rollercoaster of dealing with Daniel Hardman had been bad enough; once that was over everything was supposed to go back to normal (a few existential threats notwithstanding), and it hadn't.

Mike developed the idea that something was up after the third time Harvey interrupted a meeting for a cell phone call. He would turn stony and shoo Mike out of the room to talk, and afterwards no new work would show up on Mike's desk. So they weren't client calls, or they were clients that Harvey pawned off on someone else. Mike decided consciously not to be jealous; usually he was the one onto whom clients were pawned off, but he really didn't need any more work than he already had.

Three inexplicable phone calls in a single week were intriguing, but not intriguing enough for any detective work. Harvey was picky, defensive, and strange. It was possible he was demanding precise updates on the laundering of his shirts.

Then one gloomy Wednesday right after Halloween, Mike's phone rang. It scared the hell out of him, because the phone on his desk never rang. Nobody ever called for Mike, or if they did, they called his cell. He picked up the receiver and hoped like hell he didn't have to press any buttons to get on the line. "Hello?"

"You're not Donna," said a male voice.

"Really not," said Mike. "Sorry. Did the receptionist transfer you?"

"Maybe you can help me. You work for Harvey?"

"Yeah, I'm his associate, Mike Ross. Are you a client?"

The man on the other end of the line chuckled. "No, I'm his brother. He's not right there, is he?"

"No?" Mike paused. Mike had guessed that Harvey's mother wasn't dead, just dead to him. A brother, though -- Mike hadn't heard word one about a brother. "I sit in a cube downstairs from his office. Do you need to talk to him?"

"I tried that," said the brother with a sigh. "He's been stonewalling me for a week. Do you know what's up with him?"

There were a lot of mean jokes Mike could tell at a moment like this, but maybe not to the man's own kin. "Generally speaking, no, I do not know what is up with him. Is there something --?"

"My name's Ken, by the way. I called him on Saturday and he was in the hospital."

"He what?"

"I heard announcements in the background. Unless he was watching that one Three Stooges episode on top volume --"

Doctor Howard, Doctor Fine, Doctor Howard. An ambulance-chaser Harvey was not. "And he lied about it?"

"He wouldn't say," said Ken, "but I can't think of many scenarios that have him in a hospital on a Saturday afternoon that are good news."

Mike immediately ran through non-work scenarios likely and unlikely: boxing slip-up, cat-fight with that Amanda woman he hated so thoroughly, embarrassing accident involving sex toys. It would be possible for Harvey to be visiting a sick friend, except why would he stonewall his own brother about that? What if they were estranged too? As Mike thought through the possibilities, Ken asked, "Does he look okay?"

"I guess so? I mean, he looks like he's going to kill someone with the laser weapons in his eyes, but --"

Ken gave a small hard laugh like a rock skipped into a pond. "But that's not atypical. I meant is he losing weight? Or like, arm in a sling, can't get out of a chair by himself, anything like that?"

Was Harvey hurt in a way that Mike would notice, should notice? That stony face, was that the face he made when he heard bad news? If Harvey were dying, would he tell anyone? Mike said quietly, "No. I -- no."

"Damn." Ken's thinking was practically audible over telephone wires. "If you find anything out will you tell me?"

If Mike found out anything, it would mean Harvey was in trouble, sick or hurt or worse. If Mike found out anything, there was a good chance he would lose the one stable thing in his life, and really be left alone. If Mike found out anything, Harvey would never forgive him for telling the world. "Yes," said Mike. "Absolutely."

*

"And I'm going to be out on Friday," Harvey said on Monday morning. He slipped that little fact in after a complex description of whom to call and when in a contract matter, as if Mike would just note it down without placing it in context. He went on, "So I'll want the next draft of the Sarnow agreement by Thursday close of business."

"Ah." Mike looked up from the stack of drafts in his lap. Behind Harvey's head, the beautiful view, a little less beautiful on such a gray morning. "So by out you mean unreachable?"

Indifferent to his associate's attention, Harvey closed a file on his desk. "More or less till Monday."

Things that could cause Harvey Specter to be unreachable for three days included: running off to Vegas to get married (maybe), a secret ops mission to Afghanistan, a horrible sensory-deprivation tank accident, or open-heart surgery.

"Oh my god, you are dying," Mike blurted.

He wilted under Harvey's quizzical stare. Someone who was dying probably would not react with quite that level of calm when confronted so, unless that someone was hell-bent on proving his aloofness even on his deathbed. Harvey leveled his brows and asked, in something approaching a reasonable tone, "What the hell are you talking about."

"I, I -- " Mike took a breath and made the decision. You do not lie to your own kin about whether or not you're dying. Mike had strong feelings on this issue. "You've been fielding weird phone calls and you've been preoccupied and you were in a hospital on Saturday and now you're -- "

"Who told you --?" Harvey had been leaning back in his chair, but he thunked forward abruptly in his outrage. His cheeks turned red with it.

It occurred to Mike suddenly that Harvey was a man who carried grudges. He was good at it, practiced. Perhaps it was a bad idea to mention Ken by name, especially if they were estranged. "Jessica said --"

"You're talking to Jessica about me behind my back?" Harvey mouth went cruel, that way he did when he meant to make an example of someone. Someone being Mike.

"She called me into her office!" Mike raised his hands, palms out, please-don't-shoot-me. "What, was I going to say no?"

"Did you tell her anything?" Harvey growled. His hands gripped the edge of his desk as if he might decide to vault neatly over it and stomp Mike into little pieces. Although that might be construed as assault.

Mike cleared his throat and glanced over his shoulder. Donna had not even turned around, so obviously she didn't think Mike was in danger. Or any more danger than he deserved. "No, how could I? I didn't know anything." He watched Harvey's hands relax, saw the relieved twitch at the corner of his mouth. "I still don't know anything. You seem to enjoy keeping me out of the loop."

Pushing back his office chair, Harvey pinched the bridge of his nose. Mike watched him, unmoving, alert for a cue how this was going to go. Sometimes a direct bonk over the head was the only way to get anything out of the man, and sometimes he just bonked you back ten times harder. Harvey ground his teeth and said, "Fuck. Okay. So here's what you're going to tell her."

So Mike was going to be asked to lie about a terminal disease. Great.

Harvey turned on the earnest charm, that head-down eyes-up look he'd probably learned from George Clooney on ER. Mike knew exactly how it worked and still fell for it anyway. Harvey said slowly, "You're going to say I'm at a hospital on Long Island, donating bone marrow."

"But you're actually..."

"At a hospital on Long Island," Harvey repeated, deadpan, "donating bone marrow."

Harvey was pretty smooth, but he did not often tell lies. Half-lies, omissions, allowances of wrongheaded supposition -- but not outright falsehood. Then again, asking Mike to pass the word around rather than saying it himself might be a way of avoiding the small number of people most likely to call him on his bullshit.

On the off chance Donna was still listening in (depended on how entertaining she found Mike's constant humiliation), it seemed like a good idea to get Harvey on the record. "You're not sick."

"No I am not. You might need to get your head examined, though." Harvey made eye-contact as he said it, cool, all traces of anger gone. If he was lying, he was frighteningly good at it. Mike decided consciously to trust him. After all, if he were sick, Mike would find out eventually, right?

"You're really donating bone marrow."

"They did the preliminary testing last Saturday. I go under the knife Friday morning." Only Harvey could make an appointment for minor surgery sound like a Caribbean getaway. It was the latest thing, very exclusive. Mike was not invited.

"No offense," Mike told him, "but you don't seem like the type."

"That's why they have a donor registry. In point of fact," Harvey said, straightening his shirt cuffs, "I am very much the type, a nine out of ten match."

"Oh. So do you want to tell Jessica," and your brother, Mike managed not to say, "or do you want me to do it?"

Harvey rolled his eyes. "Get out of my office."

*

Listening to a man laugh at you over the phone has the potential to be incredibly aggravating, but Ken Specter's laugh was the infectious kind. He whooped till he ran out of breath, and then did that high little ih-ih-ih on the last puffs of air in his lungs, and then sucked in another huge breath and laughed all over again. "Oh, you didn't," he cried, and Mike could hear him wiping away tears.

"I don't officially know you exist, by the way," Mike told him, but he was smiling as he said it.

"Bone marrow, huh? I guess it's less of a commitment than giving a kidney."

"Well, your bone marrow grows back."

Ken made a little noise in his throat. He was standing somewhere with an echo, and his noise reverberated in the space. "Is it dangerous?"

"No, I mean not more than getting a tooth pulled." Mike decided not to mention the icepick-looking needle they used to harvest marrow from the pelvic crest. He told Ken, "People sometimes react badly to anaesthesia, so that's probably why he's banking on being out of reach all weekend."

"He's going to turn his cell off," Ken said slowly. "He's going to be alone in a hospital bored and in pain, and me 1500 miles away."

Mike struggled to imagine Harvey Specter in a standard hospital gown. The humiliation would be epic, which of course was why nobody would ever see him that way. "I'm not sure he wants visitors," Mike said at last.

Ken sighed. "He even tell you which hospital?"

"No. I asked Donna and she didn't know either."

"Said she didn't know, you mean." Clearly Ken was familiar with the Donna Experience. Maybe she would visit, would bring him flowers and crappy romance novels and sugar-free candy. Mike only had experience with his Gram being hospitalized, and didn't know what you would bring Harvey. Gold-plated matchbox cars, maybe. Or armfuls of work. He didn't seem like a video-game kind of guy.

Mike spun a little in his office chair and tried to imagine Ken's face: whether it was still and calculating like Harvey's or open and mobile as his voice seemed to imply. What he looked like, even. Mike had thought he knew Harvey, but clearly not. "So, are you going to be seeing him for Thanksgiving?"

"Not this year," said Ken, as if he were rethinking that decision. "This damn project is so far behind I'm about to start commuting between here and the next gig in Orlando."

"Here?"

"Dallas. The ballsy thing to do would be to parachute into New York on Thanksgiving morning, give him the shakedown, and fly out again that night to be onsite in the morning." Ken's voice was thin and reedy, exhaustion in every word. "It's what he would do."

It was what Harvey would do, probably. Exciting, unexpected, impressive. Unwise, but impressive. "He does boldly go where no one has gone before."

"Oh my god, he pulled the Captain Kirk thing on you too?"

"Of course he did," Mike told him, smiling. "But you know what, he isn't game like Kirk. You know, dorky plot you have to act out in front of cardboard and sell it as if it were real: he just tears up the cardboard and builds anew from scratch. He's more like -- he's like --"

"Don't say Captain Picard, I can't bear it."

Captain Picard was way too straight an arrow for Harvey, way too earnest. "No, you know who he is? He's like the original Khan. Ricardo Montalban with a ponytail and a Nehru jacket."

It was nice to hear Ken laugh. He sounded like he needed it, or maybe a really long nap. "Wait, my brother is a megalomaniacal, Corinthian-leather-fetishizing member of the genetically-engineered master race? ...Actually, that's not bad. Okay, go on."

"I'm disturbed that you can imagine Harvey in a ponytail and a Nehru jacket, but okay. So. He's constantly frustrated that the world doesn't just automatically do what he says, but he's also constantly, smirkily sure that what he says is the right way to do things, and the rest of the world will come around."

"Khan was a great big baby, though," Ken interjected, eager now. "Didn't he basically kill Mister Spock in a hissy fit?"

"No, no, no, that was the movie, and anyway Spock sacrificed himself to restart the warp drive --"

"Oh my god, you're just like Harvey."

"I've never even seen half the show, I just read a book about it when I was 12." Mike decided not to say anything about whether he was just like Harvey, and whether that was a good or a bad thing. "So anyway, in the show, Khan was charming and ambitious and tricky, and great with the ladies, basically like Kirk dialed up to eleven. His big flaw is that he doesn't have the patience to listen to people like Spock and Bones."

Ken was clearly not that interested in characterological analysis. "Khaaaaan!!" he bellowed, and an echo bellowed it back to him.

"God, where are you?"

"I'm in the wings of a symphony hall with a defective ceiling," Ken told him. "Long story. I'll tell it someday if we ever meet."

"Harvey's gonna be mad," Mike said slowly. "That we're talking about him without him knowing it."

"He doesn't need to worry. I'm too tired to think of any embarrassing stories about him right now."

Mike hesitated. "You and he -- you're like, you're close?"

"As close," Ken answered, clearly able to interpret Mike's real question, "as he lets anybody."

"Okay. So you do think it's weird that I'm goofing off with my boss's brother, is it? I mean --"

"We should have a talk some time about your bush-league definition of weird. Tell you what, I finish up this job, catch up on the Orlando job, I get to stop working 20-hour days. I always buy the tickets last minute, but I'll come up for Christmas. Maybe you can talk the man into taking a day off for his only brother."

"What, me convince him? Did I not just say the part about not listening to Spock and Bones?"

"So which one are you? Spock or Bones?"

Mike laughed and laughed. "Unfortunately I do not get to wear themed jammies to work, so I'm going to say I'm neither."

*

On the Monday after the procedure, strangers from Britain were in the office, and Harvey wore navy. It was a three-piece suit, severe atop a stark white shirt, waistcoat like a corset. It was sunny out, bracingly cold, and the dark color he wore made him seem more blond. Its close fit made him look not thin but sharp, crisp edges and a don't-fucking-touch-me manner. He looked like a knife.

It was reasonable to assume that Harvey was all bristling nastiness because Jessica was meeting with strangers (and not inviting Harvey to the meeting). So it took Mike till afternoon to realize that the knife in question grimaced every time he stood up or sat down. And that having somebody cut open your back and stick a gigantic needle into your pelvic crest probably hurts, even three days later.

"You need any painkillers?" Mike asked during their 2 o'clock meeting. He asked at a moment that Harvey wasn't moving, so it would sound like general conscientiousness rather than an observation of weakness.

"I'm fine," Harvey said. His eyes roamed the hall, wary. So maybe his back wasn't the only reason he was in a terrible mood.

So Mike kept his mouth shut and they got to work. Sarnow was a particularly bothersome adversary, constantly changing the fine details of the settlement contract as if hoping something would be overlooked. Mike took a bit of punitive pleasure in pointing out, in every endless draft, the same omissions and additions that had been wrangled five drafts ago.

"Why does he keep doing it?" Mike grumped to himself. "And what authority on this planet can make him stop?"

It was generally a bad sign when Harvey took complaints literally as questions. "You can write an estoppel clause into the contract this time, but it doesn't take effect till he signs it." Now that he knew to watch for it, Mike could see the stiffness in Harvey's posture. It was absurd that they weren't allowed to talk about it. Mike knew a little bit about absurd by now.

"Estoppel. I love that word. Estop! In the name of love." Despite the shared surname, Mike did not have a lot in common with Diana Ross, and could be sure he looked ridiculous posing like a Motown singer while seated in the office of a Midtown law firm. With extreme effort he kept a straight face, since the whole point of such self-humiliation was to get Harvey to laugh. Or at least to give that you-are-a-hopeless-dweeb look. Mike kept on mugging: "Estop that train!"

Harvey glanced at him, still cool. "Estoppel means being required by law to shut the hell up."

"And as soon as you can trick me into agreeing to that, I'll estop. See what I did there? Estop?"

Harvey did not take up the opportunity for wordplay. He did stand up though (another grimace), and paced away from the windows with his hands behind his back. "Okay, contract whiz. Explain to me in your own words why you cannot sell yourself into slavery."

It had been months since the last time Harvey had pulled the Law Professor routine. Mike had been sure they were past that by now. But mostly he led off with the most smart-aleck answer he could think of: "My current employment circumstances notwithstanding, a contract to do something unlawful is invalid. If you want me to promise to do illegal things, you can't go crying to the law when I break my promise."

"Not because it's unconscionable?" Harvey's eyebrow twitched, as if fun were dawning on him slowly.

"The contract is void. Doesn't matter whether it's voidable."

"Exactly." Harvey put on his superior expression. He was almost himself again, and Mike delighted to see it.

"I like the fact that you agree my job is unconscionable."

"It's a good fit for you," Harvey quipped.

Quips. Quips were good. Mike chuckled more than the joke deserved, and got back to the points of the contract in front of them. He failed to comment on the fact that Harvey wrapped up this the umpteenth draft of the Sarnow agreement standing up. Mike got up too, and carried documents over to Harvey and then back to the table as if their daily meeting had become a game of tag.

On the other side of the glass door, Donna gave Mike a funny look, but she was Donna: she managed not to let Harvey see it.

At the end of the hour, Mike marshaled all his piles of paper from the table into one big pile to be transported back to his desk. He paused before going and watched Harvey rest his hand on one of his basketballs (the Larry Bird one). Being a senior partner, he could easily have called off sick, or could go home early without giving a reason. As far as Mike knew, he fully intended to work the rest of the day, and the rest of the week, and probably on Thanksgiving as well.

"Do you know who it is?" Mike asked diffidently. "That gets your bone marrow. I know they make heart transplants anonymous, but it's not like --"

Harvey turned away from the window. The afternoon sun haloed the back of his head and put the sharp lines of his face into shadow. His voice was low as he said, "I don't know who it is, no."

"Oh." Mike shifted his pile of papers from one arm to the other. "Will they at least tell you if it takes? I mean, I'd want to know, after all that effort, that it actually saved a life, you know?"

"I'll know," said Harvey, and turned back to the window.

Mike shut up and let himself out.

*

"Yeah, he seems okay," said Mike, and cradled the phone on his shoulder as he let himself into his apartment. It was Thanksgiving Eve, and all the grocery stores were closed. Which was a problem, because Mike was pretty sure there was no food at all in his apartment.

Ken grunted, a hard little thing like a muscle cramp. "Because he would ever tell you if he wasn't."

"He has not yet collapsed at my feet, true." Mike truthfully had no idea what he would do if Harvey collapsed at his feet. Catch him, hopefully. Try not to scream his fool head off. "He was cranky, which is like admitting he's in pain. But only to people who know him really well."

"Typical." Ken sighed. He didn't echo today; presumably whatever he was doing in Dallas was no longer in a concert hall. Mike hunted in his fridge for edibility while he waited for Ken to work through his thought process. "If you hadn't intervened, neither of us would have known about it at all."

"Hm," Mike said. This was not the conversation he'd been expecting to have. He gave up and closed the fridge.

"I mean," Ken lamented, "you wouldn't go in for minor surgery and then just not tell your family, would you?"

There were ways to avoid it, of course. Ken Specter was still functionally a stranger. Mike took a breath, and decided to tell him the blunt truth. "I don't have any family."

"I -- uh, really? Sorry --"

"Only child, parents died when I was young. My Gram was the last, and she died a few months ago. I'm kind of used to it now. Work's become kind of like, basically my whole life lately."

Ken didn't say anything to that. They both stayed still in their respective locations for a good long minute. Long enough for Mike to realize what he'd just said.

"That's really pathetic, isn't it," he laughed.

"Not really, no," said Ken.

Mike opened the cabinets one by one in hopes that a sandwich had materialized there since last he'd checked. No wonder first-year associates lived on takeout: they never had time for grocery shopping. "Thanks for that song, by the way. You were right, it's better acoustic."

"I won't say everything is better acoustic," Ken said, and then paused long enough that Mike could recite the punchline with him. "But everything is better acoustic."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah, I bet you say that about Jimi Hendrix too."

"So, about family --" Ken stopped and breathed into the phone.

Mike was developing a great deal of experience in how to josh various Specters out of their weird moods. "You offering to adopt me?"

"No?" Ken chuckled, and then in the middle of his next pause he blurted, "I'm getting married."

"Congratulations," said Mike automatically, and then realized that the way Ken had said it was not as an unmitigated good thing. Mike held onto a sad, battered box of Chex (not even frosted Chex or anything, plain ones), unwilling to open it up noisily while Ken was obviously working through something important. He settled on the couch and waited patiently. At last Ken added, "My girlfriend got down on one knee and proposed this afternoon."

Mike smiled to himself. "They do that? How come none of mine ever did that?"

"Yeah, I'm still kinda stumped. I mean, I knew we were headed in that direction, but I thought I was gonna do something sneaky, you know, put it on YouTube and humiliate her in front of all our friends. Damn woman beat me to it."

"I am sure you look beautiful in diamonds," Mike told him.

"Actually," said Ken, and his voice went far away, "it's made out of a zip-tie and some silver where the jewel's supposed to go." Mike could hear the little clicky noise of the phone's camera, and then a beep-boop-boop as Ken sent it along.

"Modern artist?" Mike asked, as he examined the picture. The zip-tie was red, and trimmed neatly, unlike Ken's nails. His fingers were grubby and banged-up, like a mechanic's hands, the improvised ring nestled neatly on the third finger of his left hand.

"Structural engineer," Ken corrected. "We met on the job, actually. Joint consult in Toronto about four years ago. Her name's Annie."

"You were hanging from one rafter and she was hanging from the other? Wait, was she actually making buildings out of zip-ties?"

Ken laughed, a scared sound. Mike didn't quite understand the emotion he was hearing, and wondered whether people who knew Ken better would get it. Whether Harvey would get it. He felt a little like he was intruding where he didn't belong, which was --

"I made her one too, out of a guitar string. Kind of a symbolic thing."

"That's cool," Mike encouraged carefully.

"I'm not going to fuck it up this time, you know? Done it once in my twenties, and I sucked at it. I want to do it right this time."

Mike did not know what it meant to do it right. He'd clearly done it wrong every time so far.

"Anyway, I haven't told Harvey yet, so don't say anything."

Mike frowned at the box of Chex in his lap. "No fear of that."

"We're getting past the hurdle of her parents first. If they don't completely flip their lids and kidnap her back to Korea, then telling Harvey's gonna be a cakewalk."

Why telling Harvey should or would be difficult in any way was not clear, and Mike did not have it in him to pry. Ken would volunteer that kind of information, or not, at the pace he chose.

"Anyway, I had to tell somebody," said Harvey's kid brother.

"Well," said Mike, and opened the Chex box, "I'm honored."

*

It's a thing people do. Ask each other if they're seeing family for the holiday (even if they don't do Christmas), just to fill up the space in a kitchenette or a conversational gap at a year-end gala. Mike got used to it pretty quickly, and used to the awkward pause as people asked everyone else in the room, and failed to ask Mike. They all knew he was not seeing family for the holiday.

(He did get an unpleasant little charge out of volunteering his plans, each more outlandish than the last. He was a little sorry that Harold was no longer with the firm, because Harold was the only person on earth who really would have believed that Mike was planning to lead a military coup in Pishpek during his copious holiday free time.)

(It also turned out that a whole room full of Harvard Law's brightest did not know the name of the capital city of Kyrgyzstan. He might as well have claimed to be invading Mars.)

Somehow word had gotten all the way around to Edward Darby, who spoke delicately around the matter even as he and Harvey squared off in their insane testosterone contest. As arcane and weaponized as Darby's sense of etiquette could be, he had a talent for avoiding even the possibility of an awkward conversational pause.

Harvey, on the other hand, liked to rip band-aids clean off. It was not unexpected that he would ask, even in the middle of everything else that was going on. He waited till December 23rd, the day that a pair of ridiculously high heels arrived by messenger for Donna. She put them on immediately, left a lipstick mark on her boss's face, and pranced down the hallway in ecstasy.

Mike stood in front of her cube and watched her go, and watched Harvey miss the lipstick with his handkerchief, with a funny little pang. He decided not to mention the continuing presence of Sweet Vixen (Lancome 027) still marring Harvey's cheek: it was kind of nice to imagine that he wore the evidence of his popularity proudly. If it was unintentional, well, Mike was likely to be in earshot when Louis made hay out of that fact.

It was kind of an odd shape, like a greater-than sign or maybe kind of like a -- Mike ducked as a small white box flew at his head.

"You're off my fantasy football roster," Harvey called from his office.

Mike popped back up to his feet and retrieved the package from behind Donna's monitor. It was a square about the size of a grilled cheese sandwich, tied with burgundy ribbon. "You're supposed to warn a guy."

Harvey smirked the smirk of someone who had been throwing things at people's heads his whole life. "Your reflexes are shot."

Desperate times call for desperate measures. "You have lipstick on your face."

"And you don't," Harvey taunted. "Even the most pathetically dedicated associate isn't here on Christmas. So go ahead and sleep in day after tomorrow."

"So magnanimous," said Mike, who had no intention of obeying. The feud with Darby was too important to Harvey to let mere federal holidays get in the way. Out the window, the sky was heavy and gray, rain turning to sleet and back. Mike thought about having a brother, about flying out to see him when something important was happening in his life. He thought about Ken, who instead of coming here was with his future in-laws in California, nervous as a squirrel. He listened to the tap of droplets against the glass and asked, "And you? Going to be watching the college bowl games?"

He looked like he was thinking about it, the bastard. "Generally I stick to the bedroom. And I have yet to meet a woman who prefers my divided attention, although they're rumored to exist."

"Oh, of course," said Mike, and rolled his eyes. The only question was whether Harvey had met his Christmas Day sex kitten yet, or intended to pick up a stranger in the next 24 hours. Or whether he was making it all up and would be eating cereal in his underwear in front of the Yule Log broadcast like every other bachelor in the greater tri-state area.

Harvey chuckled. "You?"

"A quarter of my associate class is Jewish," he said, as offhand as he knew how. "Although a strong minority voted for bowling, the Michael Curtiz retrospective at the Cady uptown won out."

Harvey didn't pause, didn't call the lie obvious between them. "You came to Casablanca for the waters?" he asked, the lines bunching up around his eyes.

Mike raised his eyebrows gravely. "I was misinformed."

He got home that night and opened the little white box and discovered a pair of delicate, simple silver cufflinks. At the bottom of the box, a folded page of fine cream stationery (no initials or anything; Harvey would hate to be thought of as that fussy) that said: BUY YOURSELF SOME REAL SHIRTS and provided the phone numbers of three different custom tailors. One of them was starred: it would be open on Christmas.

Chapter Text

"Hey, you're alive," said Ken Specter without preamble.

"Hi," said Mike. He was hunting miserably through archived records at Jessica's behest, on his knees on the floor and damned sore. He took a seat and cradled the phone with his shoulder. "Yeah, not dead."

In the three days since Harvey had told him off, Mike hadn't thought about Ken. He'd been working too hard to make himself invisible, to slot in at Jessica's elbow as if he'd always been there, silent and obedient on her considerably shorter leash. And drowning his sorrows in Rachel, in a way he suspected he would regret later. He'd been trying to keep Harvey out of his mind, which meant doing the same to Ken. Mike had a pretty good idea how that loyalty was supposed to go.

Ken's breath in his ear, heavy. "So something bad happened?"

"What?" It was on Mike's tongue to deny it. Hey, everything's great, what are you talking about. "He said something?"

"You know him. I asked him whether senior partners get their own sidekick, and he got evasive." The pause was serious, sympathetic. "I was trolling him, you know, work up an excuse for us to meet instead of all this sneaking around pretending you and I don't know each other. And he said, I don't need a sidekick, like he's Batman and you're Jason Todd."

"Jason Todd is the one who got beaten to death." Mike rubbed his tired eyes. "So of course you'd make the logical assumption."

"Mike," came Ken's voice, gentle and warm. It was deep like Harvey's, even if the tone was different. "Did you break up with him?"

"He broke up with me," Mike mumbled, and on the swift intake of breath in his ear he corrected himself. "Not, I mean, not like that. We weren't -- anything. Just."

"He's not speaking to you."

"He tried to fire me. Actually he did that twice in two days." He tugged on the file drawer and it rolled all the way out, smooth. He shoved it and it rolled closed again. His ass was getting numb, sitting on the floor. The buzz of the fluorescent overheads was giving him a headache. "He doesn't -- he looks right past me in the hallways like I'm not there. I still have a bucketload of cases I haven't finished for him, and it's like he doesn't even want them now I've gotten my dirty hands all over them."

Ken said, "God." He and Mike breathed at either end of the line, and said nothing. Just breathing, as if they sat side by side, as if they were friends. Not counting Rachel (Rachel was too complicated to count), Mike might be able to list his existing friends on one hand. He might be able to use just the thumb. Mike tightened his free hand around his ribs.

"I --"

"He can be such an asshole," said Ken. "Don't let him get away with it."

Mike controlled his voice. He yanked on the drawer handle again, and obediently it opened. "There's nothing to get away with. I disobeyed him, he took it as a betrayal. There were --" There was no point in explaining the reasons, or Mike's own convoluted thought process. "He's weird about betrayal."

"He's a goddamn crazy man, you mean."

"Ken --"

"No, I'm serious. You forget, I've watched him do it all my life. He's done it to me once or twice. But I fought my way back. Don't give up on him."

Tears threatened at the backs of Mike's eyes unexpectedly. He closed the file drawer and put his hand over it, in case it might turn disobedient and leap open.

"You walk in there," Ken admonished, serious now, that command voice just like his brother, "and you just be in his face, all the time. He'll call you names, he'll tell you to fuck yourself, and just stay with him. Drop by his office, chase him down the halls, whatever you have to do."

"And do what? Plead my case?"

"No. Just look at him. Don't say a word. He knows what he's done."

"Ken, I'm the one who --"

"Mike."

Mike sniffled and said nothing. He traced the cool edges of the drawer with a finger.

"It's what he does. Pushes people away for stupid reasons. You ever see him fight with Donna?"

"Oh, have I ever," said Mike, watery.

"So you know. It's like the world ends. But then Donna calls him on his shit, and he's sorry."

Mike rolled that word around in his head, Sorry. He'd never yet seen Harvey sorry, or even mildly embarrassed. Mike resented the hell out of it sometimes. "I can't call him on his shit," he told Ken.

Who laughed. "Who's the one accused him of dying?"

That was only two months ago, when leaves had still been on the trees and Jessica Pearson had been in sole control of the firm. Things had changed a lot in two months. It was on the far side of a dividing line, and seemed like an eternity. "I did, didn't I?"

"Yes," said Ken, like a coach, like a best friend. It was absurd that they'd never met in person. "You did."

*

The thing Rachel liked most during sex was to be held down. Wrists, shoulders, a hard hand on her waist -- whatever was convenient. She hadn't yet asked him to grab her by the neck, and Mike wasn't sure what he would do when, if, she ever did. He was pretty sure he would say no, but he hadn't said no yet. Beggars can't be choosers.

They were at her place, listening to the clank of the radiators, naked. Her bed was iron rails, and she'd made jokes-that-weren't-jokes about being tied to it with scarves, but at the moment Mike just rested his head against the cool metal and caught his breath.

"We should have been fucking months ago," she panted.

He wasn't sure he liked that word. Then again, there were a lot of things about their arrangement he wasn't sure he liked. He wiped the sweat off his forehead with his arm, and then settled it in place over his eyes. Beside him, Rachel shifted on the sheets, a sound like waves on the shore. She had pretty nice sheets, probably nicer than a paralegal could afford. Mike wasn't sure what made sheets expensive, but could tell that they were by touch.

He quipped, "My life is a series of lost opportunities."

The weak January sun long since set, they lay in darkness except for the ambient light coming in the window. The room was small; the whole apartment was small; the roommate had noise-cancelling headphones and a lot of patience. No word what the downstairs neighbors thought, though at least all their late-night encounters happened at the office these days. Mike shivered and reached for the covers.

Rachel was beside him, naked, glorious. On some days like this, she would smirkingly prop up one leg to give him a view, as if the purple flash of her labia would instantly get him ready for another round. Today she just curled on her side with her hair in her face, sweat cooling under her breasts. Mike reached out and pushed her hair behind her ear.

"So... obviously you're smart enough," she said, with unlike me all over her face. "So how come you didn't just... go to Harvard?"

"You like me better as a crook," he teased, only a little bitter. He saw the gooseflesh on her arms and yanked the sheet up over her hip. To lie facing each other under the covers was dangerously like cuddling, something they'd managed not to do so far.

She laughed and said, "Seriously."

He decided on the simplest truth, to distract her from all the others: "Never finished college. I'm a little too old to start over as a freshman."

"But they could -- make an exception, or --"

Mike shook his head. "So could the admissions committee for one Rachel Zane."

"I wasn't even good enough to get to the committee --"

"You didn't even tell them who your father is. They would have let you in if they'd known you were a legacy." She made a face. Of course she made a face. She was so naive sometimes it hurt. She'd worked so hard to make her own way in the world, to ignore her father's money and power, and then the little tell-tales of her upper-class childhood would trip her up. Like living in a tiny apartment with $100 sheets on the bed. "The game is fixed, Rachel. You'll get along better once you understand that."

Her chin jutted like an accusing finger. "I don't believe it."

"Do you really think, even if I'd done everything right in my life, which I haven't by the way," and he sat up, jittery, "that I would ever be working for the best law firm in New York without lying my way into it? Do you think anybody else at Pearson Hardman, Pearson Whatever We're About to Become, made it here entirely on the up-and-up?"

She watched his face, wary and ardent, as if this were a quiz she had to pass. "Louis --"

"--would backstab himself if his arms were long enough."

"He's got his good sides." Rachel sat up to face him, breasts bobbing. "Okay, fine. Jessica."

"Uses blackmail when she has to."

She blinked at him, aghast. "On you? Wait, does she know?"

"No!" Mike lied.

Since the minute he'd pulled his wrinkled pants back up in a file room, he'd known that this conversation was going to happen. He could confess his own lies any time, but the lies that belonged to Donna and Harvey and Jessica he couldn't tell. Rachel liked him a little bit crooked, but only a little bit. For her to see that the whole firm was complicit in his crookedness, that actual agents of the law were in on it, would break her faith in the one thing she believed in. And if she ever turned on him, she should only ever be able to turn on him. Mike was not going to drag anybody else down with him.

He had always known this conversation was going to happen, and that he was going to continue lying to Rachel. He hadn't known it was going to happen while naked.

"Not on me," he said slowly, head in his hands. "I was a bystander. Point is, she fought her way to the top dirty, just like everybody else."

"And," she asked, and touched his shoulder with a fingertip, "Harvey?"

Mike laughed and it hurt and he put his feet on the floor to laugh some more. Rachel's hand rested on his back, as if to comfort him, but he wasn't crying.

"You know, he's pretty honest." He took a painful breath and the laughter left him. "He'll kill you dead, but he'll admit that's what he did, and do the time for it."

"Is that what's going on right now?" she asked, head cocked. "He's doing the time for something?"

"No," said Mike, and got up to find his clothes. "I am."

*

Trapped with him in an elevator, forty stories to go, Louis Litt at his elbow and a pair of insurance agents starting fixedly at the numbers as they climbed. Mike sweated in his jacket, not only because of the company. He wished he knew the secret to that cool collected look. Harvey ignored him with determination, with elan, without a trace of recognition that he'd ever risked his career for anyone so insignificant.

Word must have gotten around. Louis was not so frozen out of the Senior Partners' gossip that he could fail to know. But he nudged at Mike idly as if he were not standing in the middle of a cold war and said, "So, you and Rachel."

He had that weird little cross-eyed smile on his face that probably passed for affection, on Louis. Mike mostly just found it creepy. He kept his mouth shut and his eyes on his own reflection in the elevator's brass doors.

"Normally we frown on that sort of thing," Louis added, his nose in the air. He glanced at the insurance agents as if to swear them to secrecy. "But Rachel is a special woman."

Cheeks hot, Mike stood still and took it. He could feel waves of contempt radiating off Harvey's skin like heat. He had his hands in his pockets and an impassive look on his face. He was an expert at the low murmur of something terrible. Mike braced himself for the worst and all he got was a bored, dismissive little snort.

Harvey was looking at the insurance men. Mike caught his reflection in the polished brass. There was a cruel smirking curve at one side of his mouth. It felt like old times gone sour, played on the second go-round as horrible farce. Mike hated that smirk. He hunted up a retaliatory quip:

"What was I going to do? You wouldn't put out."

Deadpan would have been hilarious. Mike missed deadpan pretty badly, and heard his voice break on the last word. He stared mulishly at the elevator doors and kept himself together. Beside him, Louis's eyes went as big as dinner plates.

To this right, the insurance agents shuffled in their loafers and chewed on their mustaches. Harvey, the brass reflection of him, all his gold and warm tones, flattened out his mouth in a line. He glanced at Mike, and then away again, and kept complete silence the rest of the way up.

He was the first off the elevator when they got to their floor, not in a hurry, but with a determined stride that stopped for nobody. Behind him, Mike straggled miserably past the insurance men and onto the 50th floor after Louis. Who burst into a mean little chuckle.

"That was gold, Mike. God, if ever I wished I had my voice recorder." He winked and slithered away down the hall, leaving Mike alone in the lobby.

*

When it came time to pick a place to meet up, Mike consciously chose a bar Harvey would never have heard of, in a neighborhood he would never visit. It was a place called Sort, in the part of Bushwick that was on the cusp of gentrifying. The steel shutters and graffiti lent it a dangerous air (no moreso than the rest of the neighborhood, really), and it drew mostly a slumming hipster crowd (and hence it drew weed dealers and their hangers-on). It was near Mike's apartment, and he hadn't been to Sort since he'd stopped being a pothead.

Ken was waiting for him outside as he walked up the block, a figure comfortable loitering on the sidewalk on a February afternoon, stepping courteously aside for the little old Hispanic ladies with their granny carts. Mike recognized him at once: a younger, cooler, less controlled Harvey. Same jaw, same warm brown eyes, but completely unalike too: his hair was a curly blond mop a-flap in the cold wind. The back pocket of his jeans had worn a hole over the corner of his wallet. Ken was thumb-typing on a mobile device with a clove cigarette between his lips when Mike caught up with him.

"Oh hey, you must be Mike," Ken said at once. He was brawnier than his brother, broader through the shoulders. He had on a black motorcycle jacket and a ragged home-made red scarf and black boots that Mike recognized belatedly as steel-toed construction boots, heavy and scuffed. He held out his hand but Ken did not bother with a handshake. He went straight for a powerful one-armed hug.

In the clasp of someone who didn't want anything from him and wasn't trying to play him, Mike exhaled hard. "Hi," he mumbled, and inhaled the scent of Ken's clove. He didn't hold on too long; he was pretty sure he didn't hold on too long. He pulled back and saw a lopsided, knowing smile on Ken's face.

"Good to know they let you out of Manhattan," Mike cracked.

"Don't tell him you saw this," Ken said, and stubbed out his cigarette against the brick facade. "He thinks I quit already."

Mike led them inside the bar. Far be it from him to tell Harvey about anything. "So the Wrath of Khan extends even to his own family?"

"He seems to think anything can be overcome by force of will."

This was so characteristic Mike burst into bitter laughter. The bar was already dim on a Saturday afternoon, and he found them a table near the back. The wall was papered with kitsch 1950s advertisements, probably torn from old magazines. It had been a year and a half and he remembered the distinct smell of the place: drying glue, beer, and that vague after-smell of someone who has toked up, just not in the past two hours.

"Honestly," said Ken, after ordering something on tap, "I was not expecting somebody like you to work for Harvey."

"Well, I don't wear my OBEY t-shirt to work," Mike said. "But yeah. I mean, it was an adjustment. For everyone."

"But mostly you."

"But mostly me," Mike agreed.

They got their beers. It was cool, to hang out with someone new in an old place. Mike felt like a different person, but not so different that he didn't recognize himself now. And it was a little reassuring to know that despite shedding all his old friends he hadn't totally thrown over his old self and mashed himself into a Harvey-shaped mold. Dodged a bullet, there.

Ken quizzed him on bands he'd seen and Mike confessed he was hipster-adjacent, but not actually up on any recent music. "I used have a lot more time on my hands, but lately --"

"You had time on your hands, in law school?" Ken laughed.

Mike laughed along, a little mortified how quickly he'd forgotten to be on his guard.

They lapsed into silence. Ken fingered idly at the red plastic ring on his left hand, at ease. It didn't feel like a risk to show him this part of Mike's world. He blurted, "I was not expecting Harvey to have a brother like you."

Ken smiled to himself, and looked away. "First time I saw him in a suit, I didn't recognize him. It wasn't even one of those obscenely expensive things he wears now, just something from Macy's, or... wherever people get suits. He was in the DA's office then. My college graduation, I'm looking through the crowd and my eye passes right over him. I had this stupid thought, who's that mob boss standing next to my dad? and then I realized it was him."

"Wow," said Mike, trying to remember what Harvey looked like out of a suit.

"I never told him that." Ken shook his head. "It's not fair to him. He's the older kid, you know. He took everything harder than me. When our parents broke up --"

Mike nodded to signal he knew about it.

"-- he was 19 already, and that's a lot different from being 15. He heard stuff and saw stuff I didn't. He hasn't said a word to our mom in 20 years. She and I reconnected when I had surgery in college and you know, we're not friends but we're -- something. I tried to talk to him about it and it was like I'd told him I'd joined al Qaeda."

"Sounds ugly," said Mike, in a strangled little voice.

"I guess it was. I know they kept stuff from me. And you know Harvey: if he doesn't want to talk about it, you won't be able to talk about it. I don't think it went to court. Or maybe it did -- maybe he did, and argued with the judge till he got his way. I don't think Dad could have done it alone. Harvey got super serious right then, argued about everything. Couldn't take a joke. Absolute partisan for Dad: he wouldn't hear a word against him. Still won't."

"The only person he never pushed away?" That came out more painfully than Mike had intended.

Ken's face softened and his mouth turned down. It was different in person, the little visual markers of manners and facial expressions. There were things that didn't come across over the phone. Mike wondered what his expression was giving away and then realized, like slipping a knot, that he was talking to someone who wouldn't use that against him. He rubbed his eyes and shook his head, and Ken willingly detoured back to safer conversation.

"It's stupid that we're lying to him, right?" He smiled ruefully. "I mean, we're doing it because he's crazy. But that's not a good reason, coddling his craziness."

Mike wondered about that to himself. They'd both talked back to the Khan of Pearson Hardman, and they'd both been batted away like doomed redshirts, Ken more than once. They sipped their beers and Mike watched Ken swallow. A mole on his neck dipped and rose and he eyed Mike attentively, waiting for an answer.

Ken outweighed him by at least twenty pounds. Ken had curly yellow hair and Mike's was short and ash-colored; Ken was a little older and a lot more self-assured and he probably came by his employment honestly. But Mike recognized the expression on his face, the lurking confusion and the blunt concern, and realized that Harvey had hired a smartassed, fraudulent drug mule to shadow his every move not because Mike reminded Harvey of himself. Mike did not remind Harvey of himself. Mike reminded Harvey of Ken.

It was an itchy, frightening thing to discover. He couldn't tell whether Ken had guessed it too. "How's he feel about you planning to move back to New York?"

"Good, I guess. I mean, maybe he thinks I'll fill the hole he left when he knocked you back." Ken grimaced: maybe he had guessed it. "He thinks I'm out looking for apartments right now. Which I am. But he still thinks I want 1000 square feet so I can fit me and his ego into one room."

"You still haven't told him about Annie."

"We set a date. June. You'll be there, right?" Ken reached out a hand across the table, as if his ardent hope were not flashing neon out of his eyes.

"Yeah, course." Mike shook his hand like a promise, but Ken grabbed his forearm anyway and shook his whole body, as if that made the point more secure. They did not talk about how Mike was going to go to an event at which Harvey would also be present, and whether that would be an enjoyable experience for anyone. Mike said, "That's five months from now. You'll have to tell him some statistically significant amount of time before then."

Ken looked away. "I will, I will."

"It's not like you're ashamed of her," Mike encouraged.

"More like, afraid he'll try to scare her off."

"He wouldn't dare." Even as he said it, Mike realized he could totally imagine Harvey daring to do that. Succeeding, in some cases. Maybe most cases. He glanced uncomfortably across the table, and Ken looked the same.

"Oh, he would," said Ken, and buried his nose in his beer.

*

"We're going out for lunch," Donna announced at his cube, at 11:30 in the morning. Until that moment Mike hadn't been entirely sure she deigned to visit the junior associates' floor.

"We are? We are," he said, and stumbled to his feet. Her coat lay over one arm, a spill of gray cashmere. He picked up his own coat, put it down again, helped her into hers, and then picked his up again.

"You're buying," said she, and led him by the lapel to the elevators. Mike wondered for at least 15 floors what he'd done wrong, and then spent the next 20 floors reminding himself of what Ken would say. Ken would call Harvey on his shit. Even if he was flinging that shit via a third party, a strategy Mike had previously thought beneath Harvey's dignity. Well, there was a first for everything.

They settled at one of those upscale bistros that had more adjectives per menu item than menu items. Donna insisted on a table near the windows, as if the whole firm were likely to trudge by on their lunch hours and she wanted them to witness this little tete-a-tete. She was so conscious of details like that, like a politician. Mike suspected that she had taught Harvey most of his social graces.

She charmed the waiter and sipped a glass of white wine and advised Mike what to order. Her gaze was calm, those dark eyes attentive but without accusation. Mike still didn't know what she intended, and stumbled over his words in his dread.

"He's about to crack," said Donna as she daintily buttered a slice of artisanal bread.

Mike choked on a sip of water. "Who what?"

"Your campaign. It's working. How did you know?"

"My --?" She'd known Harvey for 15 years. There probably wasn't a single thing Harvey did that surprised her any more. "It's not really a campaign. But. I've been talking to Ken. I mean, he called me up first."

Donna was exquisitely controlled. She glanced at him over her butter knife, but did not raise her eyebrows. She didn't pretend she didn't know who Ken was, or wonder how Mike knew who he was. "You're right, that's a very Kenny strategy. Good for him."

Nothing to do with that but shrug. The silence between them grew like a fungus. He realized after a little while that the only things he knew to talk about with her were about work. "So how bout those Mets," he strangled out.

"Spring Training starts next week," she said sweetly. "Don't break Rachel's heart."

Her quick, efficient movements around her plate indicated the briskness with which she would stab him with a fork if he disobeyed her. He decided not to explain to her how complicated it was with Rachel. "Do you stab Harvey with a fork when he doesn't take your advice?"

This, of course, was the moment their lunch arrived. The waiter was clearly familiar with the difficulties of office life, and said nothing about forks as weapons. Sulky, Mike poked through his pasta salad like a hunter with a spear.

"No," said Donna after a little while. "I find other ways to get my point across."

She sat still and let him look her over. She had on a bright blue dress, half-sleeved as if it were not still winter. Her hair cascaded as always down over her shoulders. There was something daring about that, her own little fuck-you to the formal straits of corporate law. He'd never seen her with her hair up: even Jessica sometimes put her hair up, and put on suit jackets and toned down the height of her heels. Donna dressed how she liked, and was unassailable.

Of course Harvey listened to her. She might be the only person in the world he consistently listened to.

"You know what -- happened, right? I mean, you know I didn't want to --"

Donna smiled. "Jessica blackmailed you. And will again, if she has to. It's up to you," and her smile went brittle, "and to Harvey, to make sure she doesn't have to do it again."

Harvey, of course, was just as vulnerable to blackmail. It was like a nuclear weapon in Jessica's arsenal: it would completely destroy their friendship if she ever used it, and probably a lot of careers. But she would do it, if she had to. Harvey would not, and that was why Harvey didn't have his name on the letterhead.

"He's been an insufferable bastard since he dropped you," said Donna.

Mike chewed on his lunch. His exile meant that he saw it much less often than someone who sat directly outside Harvey's office. He just felt it from afar, and got stiff, awkward glares in the hallway. Donna got to deal with it up close, to clean up after it.

"Biased observer, I know," Mike ventured slowly, "but he's really been acting weird for a while. Like, I know the whole Summer of Daniel Hardman was stressful, but --"

"But he's doubled his sessions with his boxing coach? Challenged Jessica to a fight he couldn't possibly win? Wearing his id on the outside, and boy does it clash with his necktie?"

"Right," Mike mumbled. It sounded pretty bad laid out like that. It sounded like a man out of control, someone who was pitiable when he wasn't dangerous. Mike hated to think of Harvey as pitiable. "All of that."

"He's off his game. He needs you. He knows it, but." Donna shook her head.

Mike shook his head too. He'd never had any success getting Harvey to admit to anything, and Donna's encouragement notwithstanding he was pretty sure he never would have any success at winning himself back into Harvey's graces.

Across the table, she sat up straight, formal. She laid her utensils down as if they were distractions. She did not have that acerbic expression she used when she was irritated; her eyes were soft, watchful. She and Harvey looked alike, sometimes: it was the eyes. "So, just, walk into his office and tell him you love him."

"I'll be exonerated if I can make him laugh?"

Another Donna Paulsen non-sequitur. "Jessica is prepared to transfer you back to his bailiwick whenever you're done torturing him."

Donna and Jessica in league: not a surprise, really. If he had learned nothing else in his year and a half at Pearson Hardman, he had learned how to play along. "I thought the whole point was never to be done torturing him."

"Aha, quick study. I like that about you." She paused.

Mike was all out of patience with people who gazed at him like a jilted bride. "Don't," he said.

Donna didn't ask what not to do, didn't inform him that she wasn't taking orders from him. She picked up her fork, confident. "Kick his ass." A slice of tomato waved in Mike's direction, before disappearing between Donna's white teeth. "He needs it."

*

Mike did not mean to sneak up on Harvey. What he meant to do was drop off some files from Jessica, stay polite no matter what, and leave. The walls were glass. It wasn't like Harvey couldn't have seen him coming.

But Mike walked down the hall toward Harvey's office and saw him standing there behind his desk, his back to the windows. He was looking at nothing. His eyebrows bunched together and the lines around his mouth seemed deeper than usual. Mike paused at Donna's desk.

"You think I should --?"

"If you leave paperwork with me, I will shred it," she announced, prim. She had her back to Harvey, and couldn't see his worried expression. Or maybe she'd seen it already.

Mike squared his shoulders and marched himself to Harvey's door. He decided not to knock but just let himself in as he'd used to do.

"Jessica asked me --" he stopped. Harvey was blinking at him in consternation. Mike watched the gears move and the narrowing of his eyes as he remembered he hated Mike now. Harvey wiped all the worry off his face and turned away.

"Leave it on the table," he said, bland.

Mike took half a step forward. "What's wrong?"

"You're still in my office." Harvey turned back around, his mouth cruel. He settled into his chair behind his desk, the busiest man on the block.

"Yes, I am," said Mike, slow. He tapped the folder against his thigh, caught himself doing it, and laid it down on Harvey's desk. "I'm still in your office, wondering what's eating you up inside. Excuse me for being a compassionate human being."

"That always was your weakness."

Harvey Specter could sneer with the best of them. Mike had seen it make people stagger, the overwhelming weight of his contempt. But Mike had also seen that face, that crumple of uncertainty. "You are so full of shit."

"Excuse me?"

"You can't have it both ways." A warm tide crept up his neck and he wondered if his face was turning red. "If you really didn't give a shit about other people, you wouldn't shut me out like you are."

Mouth open to argue, Harvey caught himself at the last moment. "Doesn't Jessica have work for you to do?"

"You know I am the best in my class. You know I can recite back to you contract clauses you don't even remember writing. Why is it you don't want me working for you?" It was supposed to come out interrogatory, to a hostile witness, but Mike heard it in his own ears as a lament. He realized after a moment that he'd leaned forward and set his hands on Harvey's desk.

He loomed over the man, whose averted eyes indicated he recognized how their relative positions came across. But Harvey was cool: he didn't stand up immediately. He sat there, hands flat on the glass surface (leaving sweaty marks, Mike noted), and breathed hard. His shoulders moved with it. Mike backed off a little, in case of impending explosion, but he'd forgotten about Harvey's secret weapon.

He raised his chin, looked Mike in the eye, and said, "I don't work with traitors."

It stung; of course it did. That was why he used it. Mike nodded a little to himself, let the emotion pass through him, and when he was sure his voice was steady he said, "I'm the traitor. I'm the one who tried underhandedly to ruin a deal Jessica was making in good faith, because I disagreed with her. I'm the one who is so completely out of control I'd throw away the best weapon in my arsenal out of spite. Yeah, I'm the one whose emotions are a weakness."

Harvey shot to his feet. His chair rolled back behind him till it hit the wall. Mike's heart pounded so hard his necktie ought to have flapped like a flag.

"Get out of my office." It came low out of Harvey's throat like a whisper. The knuckles of one hand where they touched his desk were white.

Having been witness to Harvey's capacity for violence, Mike retreated immediately. He'd thought about it, during the weeks of their estrangement: a well-placed right cross might have solved their problem in a mutually understandable way. Anyway, you could recover from a black eye. But with the reality right in front of him, Mike discovered he would not be able to take a right cross without giving one back. And that would really be the end for them both.

He lowered his head and went to the door. Outside, Donna sat still as you please, her back towards them both and her fingers on her keyboard, as if she were not listening to the whole sorry affair. The cascade of her orange hair did not even twitch where it lay on her back.

The cold steel door handle under his grip, Mike turned around one last time. (It had been said, now and then, that he was a glutton for punishment.) He regarded Harvey, those bared teeth and that one hand curled unconsciously into a fist, and said, "I'm sorry. I hope whatever's on your mind gets better."

For the first time since the break, Mike felt the freedom of it. He'd spent weeks trying to apologize in word and in deed, pathetically bargaining for an iota of Harvey's regard. Now, finally, he was just sorry, and didn't expect to get anything back from saying so. He took a deep breath and made to leave.

"You're a worse asshole than I thought," said Harvey from across the room.

That deep breath came out in a crazy laugh. "If you say so." Mike stood there still gripping the door handle, his other hand cradling his aching ribs. "But unlike you, I would piss on my enemy if his heart was on fire."

"Matewan," Harvey supplied the movie's title automatically, and then blinked to himself, as if he'd just realized what he'd done. "You arrogant little --"

"Pot?" Mike interrupted. "Hi, this is Kettle --"

"-- in my own office and you ask me --"

"Yeah, absolutely." His voice was shaking now, from the adrenaline. He could feel the sweat between his shoulder blades.

"-- and you think you deserve anything out of me?" Harvey worked himself all the way up to a shout.

On the one hand, shouting in the office. On the other hand, Harvey no longer had his hands in fists and ready to use on Mike's face. Mike came away from the door.

"No, I don't!"

Harvey came out from around his desk, hands waving. "Then what do you want from me?!"

Mike laughed again, bitterer this time, not so crazy. "Nothing, Harvey. Nothing at all."

"So why the hell are you STILL HERE?!"

"Because people don't leave you!"

"FINE!"

"Fine!"

"OKAY!"

"Okay," said Mike, dazed. They were yelling in each other's faces, less than a foot away. Their emphatic gestures were such that pure luck was the only reason they hadn't smacked each other by accident. They stood there panting, at a loss, eyes wide.

"Okay," said Harvey, and turned around as his elbow came up. He would never straighten his tie while facing the hallway: he believed it made him look weak. But anybody looking at him could tell that was what he was doing, even from the back. Mike shook his head and turned once more to go.

The intercom buzzed to life back on Harvey's desk. "Ten minute warning on the Pelletier meeting," came Donna's voice. She was a master of neutrality, as innocent as if she had not just heard every word (and most of them without need of a listening device).

"Where's your brief on Pelletier?" asked Harvey, to the back of Mike's head.

"Don't have one," he said, hoarse. He had no idea who Pelletier was.

"Well, go draft one then." That particular tone, that exasperated distracted tone: Mike hadn't heard it since the New Year. He hardly dared recognize it now.

Mike bit his lip hard, and nodded. He walked out of Harvey's office punch-drunk, and almost walked into his bosses. He hadn't even realized Edward Darby was in town, but there he stood, blocky, arms crossed, with a mystified expression on his face. Beside him Jessica wore her secret smile, the smile she wore when she'd won something her opponent didn't yet know he'd lost.

"What just happened?" Mike asked her.

Darby cocked his head. "Glass office walls are such a peculiarly American innovation." Behind him, Donna was standing up, all business, and collected a couple of pages from her printer neatly.

"Mark this moment, Edward," said Jessica, without looking at him. She reached up gently and tapped Mike on the shoulder. "You won't see him that flustered for another ten years."

"Ah," said Darby, without surprise. Behind him, Donna stared daggers into his back, then came around his side to hand off a folder to Mike.

"Pelletier summary, file box numbers for your reference." A snowflake would not melt on the tip of her pert nose. She didn't wink at Mike: she didn't need to. "Now get to work, puppy."

"My work first," said Jessica, as Mike swayed before her. "You don't officially go back to working for him till Monday."

Chapter Text

As if the weather were attuned to one human being's emotional state, a thaw struck in the last weekend of February. Obviously, inevitably, at least one more wallop of snow must come in March, but never mind that: everyone in New York had to go outside. Toddlers played on the sidewalk and college students organized touch-football games in Central Park, and slid in shallow mud amid the dead yellow grass. Painfully optimistic women strolled the streets with bare legs pebbled with gooseflesh.

Mike lifted his bike off the wall and rode it into work (just a half day, just a Saturday) and then rode it uptown to Rachel's place. His thighs were a little sore -- obviously, not riding often enough to keep in shape -- but it was exhilarating, just the churn of the gears and the singing of cold air as he zoomed up 9th Avenue. He'd forgotten that crazed freedom he'd had as a bike messenger, the audacity of threading through cranky traffic and the unadulturated joy of flipping off delivery trucks as he darted out of mortal danger. He arrived at her building sweaty and whistling, and found her waiting for him on the marble steps outside.

Her face to the paltry winter sun, she looked like a model at a photo-shoot: severe, serene, the white fur of her jacket collar around her throat. No weekend sweatpants for her: he'd seen her every hair in place and he'd seen her naked, and really nothing in between. Mike had one jeans leg rolled up to his knee and shoes that were more duct tape than shoe, and felt ridiculous before her.

"Hi," he said.

She brought her chin down and registered his presence. "I don't want to go inside. Let's do something fun." She peered down at him and the rattletrap thing he called a bicycle. "You can teach me how to ride a bike."

"You don't know how to ride a bike??" He'd begun to heft it onto his shoulder to carry it up the stairs to her apartment, but dropped it back to the pavement instead. "That's like -- what do you even say when you're realizing you didn't forget a physical skill? Because, it's --"

"Like riding a bike," she laughed. "I know how. Just not. You know. On an adult bike at adult speeds. The way you do."

Mike did not wear a helmet, ran red lights, and sometimes dragged on the bumpers of tourist buses to give himself a break. He was pretty sure nobody should be biking the way he did, if they valued their lives. If they weren't making a living at it. "Well for one thing, that's the wrong kind of outfit," he pointed out.

She kicked one kitten heel at him. "You just want to see me change my clothes."

"Maaaybe," he said, and hefted his bike frame again. He had no doubt she had something already chosen for the occasion.

Indeed, bike parked in her living room, he discovered a set of sporty black racing shorts laid out on her bedpsread. She glanced at them, and then at him with that cheeky little glint, and then they were both taking off their pants. Rachel had the presence of mind to throw the bedspread aside before they tackled one another, or those shorts might have needed a wash before they ever got worn.

It was good. It was the best sex they'd had in a while. She pulled his hair and he held her down unasked and they wrestled, laughing, till it turned to panting. As a way to work up a sweat, it beat urban bicycling by a knockout. When it was over he lay in her bed riding a wave of well-being, goofy, unguarded.

"You're different," she said drowsy. Her hair was a haystack around her face. It was the only time he got to see her unkempt and he enjoyed it immensely. He traced the areola of one breast with a fingertip and watched it pebble. She said, as if his silence were argument: "You are."

Mike was afraid what she might mean by that, so he didn't answer. She grabbed his hand and flattened it to his own chest. She pointed her turned-up nose at him, more alert than he'd thought.

"Are you okay with Harvey now? Or I guess I should ask is he okay with you?"

Interrogation was not why Mike was here. He shrugged. "Yeah, I mean. Yeah. It's kind of... we're still kind of. Weird. But it's getting there."

She rested her head against her hand and pinched him on the ribs. "I don't really understand it. Why you put up with him." He frowned at her and she clarified: "He's never been anything but polite with me, but the way he treats you."

It was flattering, a little, to see her anger. Usually in the past she'd been angry at Mike, not for him. The muscles in her upper arms were taut, as if she were awaiting his answer to spring into action and defend him. Harvey wouldn't hit a woman, so Rachel would win that fight. He smiled to himself at the visual, and then grimaced at her confusion.

"It's a thing. With him. It's like, that's how he shows affection, by telling you your mother dresses you funny."

"Mike," she said slowly, her brows drawn together. "You didn't see yourself in January. You were walking around half-dead. I really thought --"

It was not in him to allow her to complete that sentence. "That was a specific thing. He was really angry at me, and he --"

"Did you tell him?" she interrupted. "About your secret? Is that what it was?" She sat all the way up so that she towered over him.

"No. No, that wasn't it." He sat up too, and turned away. "So about that bike ride."

"Are you going to?" Rachel asked his back. She leaned against him and rested her chin on his shoulder. It seemed like a gentler question when she asked it like that, quiet, in his ear, with her bare breasts pressing against him. It seemd like a question he wasn't required to answer. She went on, "I mean, now that you're friends again. That's what friends do, they tell each other the truth."

Mike had told her the truth. Some of it, anyway. He wasn't sure friend was the right word for how he felt about Harvey, or Harvey about him. He didn't know what the right word was.

"Come on," he told her, with a nudge. "Before the sun goes down."

Rachel accepted his non-answer with a little bite on the point of his shoulder. "I'm putting my life in your hands," she declared, and went to rummage on the floor for her bike shorts.

*

Because it was only 20 minutes after 8 AM (and really, that was a complete miracle, who can even do that), Mike did not call ahead to announce his lateness. He just showed up, his jacket dotted with melting sleet, and figured the sling on his arm would be explanation enough for why he'd missed precious minutes of work. He hustled into Harvey's office and found the man lolling in his chair with the phone on speaker.

"Oh, here he is, late as usual and what did you do to yourself?" His chair popped upright as punctuation for that sudden mid-sentence topic shift. Usually Mike enjoyed those little displays of verbal derring-do, but not so much when he was the target of them.

"Slipped on the ice, broke my wrist," said Mike, with one eye on the phone. If that was Marcon Industries on the line, they surely did not need the details of his slapstick clumsiness. But it wasn't the CEO who interjected,

"Dude, WHAT?" It was Ken Specter. He sounded tired. Considering how late he usually called, it was safe to say that he was not a morning person.

"Mike Ross, my brother Kenny," said Harvey, frowning. "Kenny, my associate Mike."

"Wow," said Mike, and then remembered this was supposed to be his first introduction. "Hi Kenny. Just so you know, Harvey has never mentioned you to me in the year and change I've been working for him." Harvey gave him a dirty look, and Mike, feeling bold (or maybe that was the adrenaline), gave him one back.

"Okay, but you broke your wrist this morning?!"

"It's sleeting out, and gravity is a harsh mistress," Mike joked, and flexed his fingers as much as he was able, given the swelling. "It's only a soft cast, five weeks unless the joint collapses. I've broken it a few times before, so. Not that big a --"

"A few times?" Harvey asked sharply, at the same time that Ken said,

"How many is a few?"

"Twice?" Mike recognized the humor in being interrogated by both Specters at once, and immediately recognized what a bad idea it would be to let on he found it funny. "Fell off a fire escape when I was eight, and then got hit by a car when I was a bike messenger about six years back. That was both wrists and a lot of road rash. So it could be worse."

"And you still give me a hard time over cutting off my fingertip?" Ken teased his brother.

"You cut off your own fingertip?!" asked Mike.

"Yes, and yes." Harvey made a face that indicated it wasn't as funny a story as Ken seemed to think it was. "And that was nothing compared to the hard time I'm about to give my associate. Did you at least get the address of where you fell?"

Mike gazed at him, shy, and Harvey gazed back without an iota of irony. "I'm not going to sue, Harvey."

Ken laughed out of the speaker. "What kind of lawyer are you?"

"The kind of lawyer with health insurance?" Mike disliked the way Harvey examined him, inquisitive, prosecutorial. That mean look he could put on -- they were still too raw with each other, it was still too soon, to see that mean look even when it was aimed at some unknown third party. Mike put on a dismissive air. "The kind of lawyer who recognizes that shit happens."

"Note," Ken said, "that he is not keeping his medical adventures an unnecessary secret."

"Adventure, shit," said Harvey mildly. "It was a donation. And how's he going to hide a cast on his arm? If you're on drugs you're going home right now."

"Just Ibuprofen," said Mike, who was reading upside-down the items strewn across Harvey's desk. A DVD case peeked out from under various travel-agent itineraries, with the Korean flag across the top. Ten Quick Korean Lessons. He opened his mouth to make a joke about Annie's parents kidnapping her back to Korea, and then realized he couldn't tell it. He did not officially know about Annie. "They gave me a prescription for the good stuff, but I haven't filled it yet."

"Hey Mike," said Ken, "Clear this guy's calendar, will you? I'm going to be in town next week, on my way to Korea to meet my future grandparents-in-law."

"Hey, congratulations," Mike said, as if for the first time.

Harvey frowned at the phone. "I'm coming with you."

"No dude," said Ken firmly, "you're not. They're not preteen bullies, they're grandparents."

If he'd been alone, Harvey would have argued. Mike could know that even without witnessing how he opened his mouth, glanced at Mike, and closed it again. Ken seemed to be holding his breath on the other end of the line. Mike filled that silence with administrivia:

"Anyway, if you ever need to go to the ER, I strongly recommend you do it at 6 AM on a Wednesday. They were faster than McDonald's. I'm gonna go learn how to highlight legal documents wrong-handed."

Ken was eager for the topic-change. "Wait, you were a bike messenger and then you went to law school? I gotta tell you, you have a much more interesting resume than I would expect out of your standard corporate drone."

"You underestimate me," Harvey interjected, with an amused tilt to his head. Mike decided that the better part of valor was keeping his mouth shut.

"Anyway," Ken said, "Drinks, next Tuesday. You, Harv, Annie and me. 8 o'clock?"

"I... can do that?" Mike kept a wary eye on Harvey. Harvey shook his head no, and that was just about exactly what Mike needed to say yes. With a grin he said, "Yeah, I can do that. Unless I end up needing surgery by then."

"Your bones are made of peanut brittle," Harvey accused.

"Only the finest spun sugar for Grammy Ross's boy," Mike sassed him. He started to wave his hands, and then realized that was a very bad idea. "Not that big a deal. Clearly it is too late for me to come up with a really cool story for work. Like got mauled by a tiger cool."

"I'm not sure how many tigers there are in Manhattan," Ken cautioned him, laughing.

"Yeah," said Mike, with an eye on Harvey, "and you can't sue a tiger."

*

Mike and Harvey were early, Mike because Harvey was his ride and Harvey because -- it wasn't proper to say he was nervous, because nervous was a thing that didn't happen to Harvey Specter. He just leaned on the bar and ignored Mike completely in favor of watching the door. He had a glass of Scotch, but all he did was run his fingers along its rim.

"Honestly, I look great in bunny ears," Mike said casually, but Harvey made an agreeing noise and did not move his gaze. Mike eyed him, curious, and that was how he got to see the moment that Ken and Annie walked into the bar.

In the year they'd worked together, Mike had seen Harvey proud and excited and triumphant, but he hadn't seen that kind of grin before. It opened Harvey's face, like the key to a Faberge egg, and revealed something else inside the self-conscious, self-confident mask he wore to work. Mike sucked in a surprised breath and turned to face the way Harvey was facing, and only then did he think to look for Ken and Annie.

Ken blustered into the crowded bar, followed by an Asian woman in black with striped tights. Ken still had on the motorcycle jacket he'd worn in February -- Dallas and Orlando hadn't given him incentive to pick up a winter coat yet. He fell into Harvey's arms with a big toothy smile as if the last time they'd seen each other had been years instead of a few weeks.

"Max Headroom, how you been?" cried Ken, a little too loud for the room.

"You look more like a homeless person than ever," Harvey returned, and yanked the black cap off Ken's head. His curls stood up in the staticky air. "And this must be Annie."

As they maneuvered toward the flat surface of the bar, Ken unconsciously moved his arm to circle his fiancee's shoulders as if she needed protecting. Annie did not look like someone who needed protecting: she wore perilously high-heeled ankle boots with gigantic buckles on them, presumably for the greater contrast with the rainbow stripes on her fantastic legs. Her thick black hair was cut in a chic off-center style, her bangs covering one side of her face in a graceful arc. "Annie," said Ken, and his voice went a little funny, "this is my brother Harvey. Harvey, my future wife Annette Choi."

In an ideal world, you don't meet your future sister-in-law for the first time in a crowded bar, for an hour, before she's whisked off to the other side of the globe for ten days. Ever the gentleman, Harvey ignored that subtext and everything it might say about his relationship with Ken. He shook her hand firmly and said her name and pivoted her to face Mike. "My associate, Mike Ross."

She ws unsurprised by the cast on Mike's wrist, and grasped his fingers rather than try to shake. Clearly Ken had passed on that little detail; maybe Ken told her everything. He was back to top volume.

"Mike Ross! Wearing the monkey suit and everything!" Ken grasped him by both shoulders and clapped him up in a hug. Maybe he did that to all his friends; maybe he just did it to people who needed it. Mike did not have to fake his grin. Over Ken's shoulder, he noted but did not linger on the exasperated expression on Harvey's face. Mike saw it often, usually aimed at himself. Usually not with those pleased little bunched lines at the sides of his eyes.

"Yeah," said Mike, for Harvey's benefit, as he was let go. "They kind of make you wear one every time you're in the office."

Smooth as always, Harvey ordered more drinks and won the very brief argument about whose credit card they went on. Annie lifted her cocktail to her lips -- it was a Sidecar, 100% liquor. Harvey eyed her choice in appreciation and scoffed at his brother's beer. "Lightweight."

"Somebody's got to navigate the airport sober," said Ken.

Annie added, "And not me. I hate flying." She did not actually drain off the entire drink in one go, but close.

"Wait, you're leaving tonight?" In Mike's mind, the printout on Harvey's desk from last week unfurled: overnight direct flight to Seoul, departure 11:45 PM.

Ken glanced quickly at Harvey, then away. "We're here just long enough to pick up some tchotchke presents to give out. Maybe on the way back we'll have more time for tourist attractions."

The brothers glanced at each other, uncertain. Harvey said, "You're no tourist. You can leave New York, but you'll always be from here."

"No kidding," Annie cut in, to the surprise of them both. She gestured to the bartender for a second Sidecar. "You haven't heard him grouse about the crappy bagels they sell in Dallas. Anyway, my firm's moving me --"

"It's a promotion," Ken cut in, antic overtop the anxious.

"Promoting me," Annie went on, "to the office on Varick Street. So I for one will be living the stereotype. Statue of Liberty green foam crown, here I come."

Ken added, "No, she's not gonna stay in your spare room, Harv. I know a mezzo at the Lyric who's letting us sublet through July."

Mike watched the mental calculator at work behind Harvey's eyes, and filled in the conversational gap he was leaving. "So yeah, what do you actually do?"

"I'm the one who yells at architects so their buildings don't fall down," said Annie, with a hand over her heart. She moved that hand to Ken's chest and said, "And this guy makes sure you can hear me yelling in the back row."

"Acoustical engineer," Ken supplied, and put his hand over Annie's. "The shape of a hall, the materials in the walls and the ceiling, how many seats there are and how they're organized -- all of those affect sound. I specialize in chambers and unamplified halls, but the symphonies call me up too whenever their original consultant screws up badly enough."

"Wow," said Mike, and managed not to do more than glance at Harvey's little smile. "So when you said you were hanging from the rafters, you weren't kidding."

"You're a hell of a one to talk," said Ken, and put down his beer to grab at Mike's broken wrist. He was a little too enthusiastic for comfort, but not so much that Mike was willing to tell him so. "I don't know anybody who's broken his wrist three times." He shook his head and traced the edges of Mike's soft cast. It was an intimate thing to do, tactile curiosity and a weird peremptory kindness.

"Holy crap, your finger," blurted Mike. Ken's left hand was intact (red zip-tie firmly in place), but his right hand with its fingers closed looked oddly like a mitten: the index, middle and ring fingers were all the same length. It was absurd that Mike should not have noticed it the first time they'd met. As he'd mentioned on the phone, Ken Specter's middle finger ended in a blunt little stump about a centimeter short, without a pad or a fingernail.

"He didn't tell you?" asked Annie with a laugh, but Harvey's mouth turned down.

Ken laughed too, and poked Mike on the forearm with his stump. "The moral of this story is, A ten-year-old is not allowed near a circular saw without supervision."

"Neighbor had a contractor in for some damn thing, left the setup on the sidewalk." Harvey's explanation came out low, quiet. Mike did not hear that tone often, and did the mental math: Harvey had been fourteen when it happened. Old enough to feel responsible, but not old enough realistically to have been able to do anything about it. "Some genius apparently thought he could make himself a skateboard out of scrap wood."

"It was gonna be cool, too," said Ken. Mike wondered suddenly how many times they'd told this story in each other's presence. Ken seemed casual, impatient with Harvey's disapproval. "I had it all drawn out, made a cut template out of cardboard and everything. And then I watched my hand go under the blade and thought to myself, wow, I'm holding that wrong, and I didn't even feel the pain till after I saw the blood." Ken's eyes gazed unseeing as he described his childish thought-process, a little rueful but without the tension that ran through Harvey's body. In that moment they looked nothing alike, Harvey coiled tightly and Ken languid and nonjudgemental. "Honestly, though, every engineer you meet eventually coughs up a story like mine. Nails through feet, hands mashed under a piano lid, singed-off eyebrows. A fingertip is nothing."

Harvey gazed on his brother serenely. "You didn't have to listen to the screaming," he said. But Mike could see the press of his lips and the way he clutched his Scotch. Leave it to Harvey Specter to say something sarcastically as cover for the fact that it was literally true. They gave each other identical frustrated looks, and Mike opened his mouth in search of a joke.

"Aw," said Ken, with a flap of his foreshortened hand, "and what about that scar on your forearm, Annie?"

"Okay, I'm not allowed another till I'm in the terminal," Annie announced, and finished off her Sidecar with a flourish. Her cheeks were red and perspiration beaded her hairline. She flicked her bangs out of her eyes and her gaze landed on Mike. "And I got that scar from ironing a skirt when I was 22."

Mike prided himself on his improv skills. "Oh man, wobbly ironing board? Did you burn the carpet too?"

Annie turned to Harvey and gave him a grave nod over the rim of her glass. "Don't ever let your associate use power tools."

"Already banned," Harvey told her, just as grave. "He's not even allowed an electric toothbrush." Ken at his elbow swallowed a funny little smile.

"I'm sure I'd accidentally stick it up my nose and liquify my brain," added Mike, in elaborate misery. Harvey glanced at him, obviously aware of what Mike was doing, but not bothered by it.

"Anyway, it was decades ago," Ken said, unable to let it go. If he seriously expected Harvey to forget simply because of the passage of time, he didn't know his own brother very well. He told Mike, "School that fall was pretty exciting. And I had to learn chord progressions all over again. Dad always said he could hear the tap when my middle finger hit a key."

"You're the only one who can't," Harvey said, and put on his shark grin.

Ken made an impudent face at him, and they were back to chuckling.

*

So yeah, surgery. Mike was just as happy not to look at the x-ray of what a collapsed wrist joint looked like, just agreed to whatever the doctor recommended. (The doctor mostly recommended he quit breaking the same wrist over and over again.) He scheduled it for Friday and cleared the time off with HR and then sat in his apartment ticking off all the things you can't do after surgery.

You can't bike. Tying his necktie was going to be a hassle, so he prepared five ties in advance, and hung them on a hook in his closet. Paper plates and plastic forks (can't wash the dishes), sweatpants for the weekend (zippers a no), plenty of illegally-downloaded entertainment (nothing that required focused consciousness). He spent Thursday evening practicing how to wrap his arm in a garbage bag and tape it, and the answer was: avoid showering as long as possible.

He'd eaten his last meal and was trying not to think about the painkillers he was going to be prescribed in the morning when his phone buzzed with a text.

on the other side of hte planet and its still winter, said Ken.

Because he suspected smartphone-typing would be a hassle as of tomorrow, Mike decided to call him up. "What are you doing awake?" he asked.

"Aren't you going in for surgery?" Ken asked back. "It's only six in the morning here."

"Jet lag is that bad, huh? Surgery's not till tomorrow."

"That international dateline thing really fucks with your head. I'm in the future."

"You're in Korea," Mike reminded him, chuckling.

"Oh, right. Of course. Same difference." Ken switched gears in that abrupt way Mike was beginning to recognize. "You got someone to check in on you over the weekend?"

"Huh?" asked Mike, as if he hadn't asked himself that question a bunch of times already. He'd cut ties with everyone from his old life. He just wasn't that close with any of his fellow associates, anyway not close enough to trust them not to pull some kind of dirty trick. Rachel was too -- he didn't want her to see him vulnerable. She'd seen too much of that already. "Yeah, I'll be fine."

"Don't choke on your own puke," said Ken, with a vague drunken seriousness. That might possibly explain why he was up at 6 AM his time. "Hey, sorry about Tuesday night."

Mike teased, "You've been together for four years and you never introduced her to your own brother?"

"Two years, but yeah," said Ken, as if it had been a serious question. "So thanks. For running interference. Annie liked you too."

"She's pretty sharp," Mike said, remembering the way she'd helped sidetrack the conversation. "I didn't realize you played piano."

Ken yawned into the other end of the line. "We both did, Harvey and me. I still do, you get enough liquor in me and the party's flagging. I don't think he's touched a keyboard in a while, though."

Mike thought about what he knew about Harvey. "Since your dad died?"

"No, longer. Hell, it's probably been 15 years. He just, I don't know. Too busy, or it's beneath the dignity of an attorney or something. He's given up a lot of things."

There wasn't anything to say to that. The myriad things that Harvey indulged in -- the cars, the luxury goods, the casual sex -- Harvey had plenty of things to fill up his life. They listened to each other breathe from thousands of miles away.

"Get some sleep," Mike said.

"Get some takeout," Ken replied instantly. "Dumplings and spring rolls and things you don't need silverware for. For after the surgery."

"Yeah. Good idea," said Mike. "Have fun not scaring Annie's grandparents."

"Have fun being a cyborg," Ken told him.

*

On his first day of official cyborgdom, Mike was mostly confused and addled. He'd arranged in advance for Ray to pick him up from the hospital -- it turned out hospitals frowned on signing out drugged-up young attorneys on their own recognizance to navigate the wilds of the New York subway system -- but the necessity of things like opening car doors or putting one foot in front of the other was more than he could handle.

"My wrist is like the size of Cleveland," Mike said, as Ray got back into the car with a paper bag full of prescriptions. That wrist was carefully bound and resting in a sling, that Mike kept forgetting about till he smacked himself in the face with its strap whenever he tried to gesture.

"You did just have surgery on it," Ray pointed out.

"Good point," said Mike. He stared out the car window at the red tulips for sale on street corners till they arrived at his place. Without being asked, and ignoring Mike's surprise, Ray took his good arm and walked him up to his apartment and let him in. "I gave you a key?" Mike asked, because clearly his memory was not all it might be.

"It was in your pocket," Ray told him, and manhandled him to the couch. "Sit."

"Okay," said Mike, and watched in dull puzzlement as Ray set out prescription bottles on the coffee table. Mike could recite every one of those drugs' names, their indications and counterindications, their side effects. "Wow, that's a lot of drugs."

"All for you, kid." Ray got down on one knee and shucked off Mike's shoes and lifted his feet till he was lying on the couch. His arm throbbed and he rested it against his breastbone so at least it would throb in time with his heart and they would cancel each other out.

It occurred to him at that moment that Ray had already gone above and beyond by, you know, getting out of the car and coming upstairs, and tomorrow Mike would be going it alone wrong-handed and still groggy. He listened while Ray poured him a glass of water, and thought about the long stretch of lonely weekend ahead of him.

"Go ahead and rest," said Ray, hoarse as he set down the water glass on the coffee table.

Obedient, Mike closed his eyes for just a second and when he opened them again it was night.

He knew it was night because it was dark, the only light a yellow pool on the other side of the room against which he slitted his eyes. He'd been dreaming, a fact he only recognized when he remembered that his apartment was not actually contiguous with the Algonquin Hotel. He was starving and he felt like someone had chopped his hand off, except he could tell it was still there because he jostled his elbow against the back of the couch and groaned.

"Your next dose is on the coffee table," said a familiar voice.

Mike was still in the grip of that strange and heavy dream. "Kenny?" he asked.

"Careful of the glass," the voice went on, as if Mike hadn't said anything. It was a low and sonorous voice and Mike thought it was like a musical instrument, and that was how he recognized that it was Harvey's voice.

Mike rubbed his eyes and struggled to sit up. On the table in front of him, the glass full of water Ray had left. Two white pills sat on a plate along with a couple of crackers. "What?"

"Better not to take painkillers like that on an empty stomach," said Harvey, still on the other side of the room. "If you followed your doctor's instructions, you haven't eaten anything since yesterday so you wouldn't choke on your own puke."

Still stupid, Mike tried to reach out for the crackers with his bad hand and regretted that at once. Carefully this time, he picked up the crackers wronghanded and munched on them as he'd been told. He watched Harvey as he worked under the lamplight, the quiet glide of his pen and the flutter as he turned a page. He was sitting in a (somewhat dilapidated) easy chair with a clipped stack of pages in his lap and the lamp spilling its yellow glow over his shoulder. He was still in his business suit, minus the jacket, which Mike soon located hung on the back of a kitchen chair.

Bunched at Mike's hips was the blanket that usually covered his bed. He downed the pills and drank down the glass of water and set it back on the table and thought very hard. Harvey had only been in this apartment once or twice before. Harvey did not have a key to this apartment. Harvey was in this apartment.

Harvey could teleport through walls? Harvey got the key from... Ray. Mike ran his good hand through his hair and stood up. He stumbled to the bathroom and found the light switch and realized it was Friday night. Harvey was in Mike's apartment on a Friday night, working, when he could be out seducing half the models in Manhattan. Mike shuffled back into the living room and tried to focus.

Across the room, Harvey stared at the page in his lap. His pen neglected in his grip, his eyes were not scanning back and forth as with reading. His mouth was grim and his brows folded together. He looked not tired but worn, stretched too thin. Mike wondered how much he must be dropping the ball at work, to give Harvey such a dismal expression. He didn't seem to realize that Mike was watching him.

"I have takeout," Mike said into the quiet room. "It's cold, I mean."

But Harvey shook his head and got back to work. Laboriously, Mike one-handed pulled a carton of potstickers out of the fridge, then decanted them onto a plate and set them in the microwave. He pressed his bad hand in its sling into his ribs, sweating it out till the painkillers kicked in. He brought the warm plate back to the couch and ate with his fingers. Harvey flipped up another page.

"What time is it?" Mike asked, because he was afraid it was midnight and Harvey had been sitting there for hours.

"7:15," came the answer. Harvey shot him a pitiless glance. "Your sweetheart Rachel called. I told her to drop by Sunday at noon. So you'll have enough time to make yourself presentable before she arrives."

"She's not my sweetheart," Mike grumbled automatically. Harvey arched an oh-really eyebrow at him. "It's complicated. We're friends, but kind of -- you know, it actually is possible to sleep with someone and also respect her as a human being at the same time."

Harvey made a noise, that noise he made when Mike was so far off base he didn't even know what base he was supposed to be looking for. "She's coming by on Sunday."

The whole point of dealing with it by himself was to avoid any sense of obligation on her part. Rachel Zane was a powerful buttinsky when she felt she needed to be. "She doesn't have to do that," he protested, low.

"No," Harvey said, "she doesn't." And lowered his head to examine the pages in his lap again.

The dim quietude of the room (and the excellent drugs working their way through his system) persuaded Mike to give up the topic. He leaned back into the couch and gathered the blanket into his lap again.

"You can still go out," he said, and closed his eyes. "It's Friday night."

"Maybe later," came Harvey's low voice, and Mike was asleep.

He woke in the morning in his bed, a pillow wedged carefully under the elbow of his bad arm. He had no memory of being walked around his apartment and manhandled into bed. The blanket had been tucked under his feet. On the bedside table, Mike found a glass of water, a small plate of crackers, and his next dose of painkillers.

*

It wasn't that Rachel had never been to his place (she had) or that she'd never seen him disheveled in it (ditto). But that had been in January, in concert with a vaguely-submissive sexual attitude, and now it was March and he couldn't exactly hold her down by her wrists. She came to his door with yet more tin takeout containers and an apprehensive expression on her face.

"You look terrible," she said, and breezed past him into his messy apartment. "Do you need more painkillers?"

"I'm good right now," he told her. He decided not to mention that he'd taken a shower just for her, awkwardly washing his hair one-handed.

Hot food on the counter, jacket hung up, Rachel put her hands on her hips and that can-do expression Mike dreaded on her face. He shuffled like a very tentative zombie out of her way in case she spontaneously manifested a broom and started cleaning. But Rachel always had the element of surprise:

"Why didn't you move into that place? In Manhattan?"

"Do you really see me living in Manhattan?" he asked.

Of course she did. She lived in Manhattan. He didn't know her parents' address but it was possible she'd lived in Manhattan her whole life. And she'd never buried a grandmother. She bit her lip and left off the residential editorializing in favor of rustling through his cabinets. "Where are your real plates. I figure you've been eating chicken nuggets all weekend, so I brought real food. Italian."

"When I was sick as a kid, my Gram used to make me pasta e fagioli. All spicy and clears out the sinuses, like hot and sour soup."

"They didn't have that," she said. "Just sausage in red sauce and some chicken piccata."

Mike let her take control. He sat down gingerly in the chair farthest from the kitchen counter, and watched as Rachel assembled them lunch. She even set out napkins (paper towels, but folded into triangles). She laid a knife next to the fork at Mike's place-setting, and he stared at its absurdity.

"Oh," she said. "I can cut up your sausage for you."

She did, standing at the counter, her back toward him. Mike saw the tension in her and couldn't place it. She'd wiped it off her face by the time she turned back around and deposited the plate in front of him.

"So how bout those Mets," he began, at the same time that she said,

"So Harvey was keeping an eye on you when I called." Her eyebrows were high, an expression of mild curiosity. She speared ziti off her own plate. (Ziti: good choice. Ziti could be poked at like the sausage slices, whereas spaghetti: no way.) There was something on Mike's face because she added, "I'm impressed. I didn't think he was the type."

"He's not," said Mike. He thought about making some flip comment about Harvey protecting his investments, but this was Rachel, so he told her the truth. "He got guilt-tripped into it."

"I've met the man," Rachel reminded him. "Harvey Specter can't be guilt-tripped into anything."

"His brother Ken called him up and told him to come over. He said something, that I'd heard Kenny say verbatim just a day before. Maybe he thought I was too messed up to notice." He stabbed at the ziti and they squirted away from him across the plate.

Rachel watched him do it, quiet. "So maybe it wasn't his idea. He still came over, didn't he?"

Implicit in this line of questioning was the fact that Mike hadn't asked Rachel to do it. "Yeah."

She picked at her plate. They both picked at their plates, Mike more clumsily than she.

"I haven't been seeing as much of you lately."

"I had no idea Jessica was letting me slack till the slack went away."

"But you don't need me any more. Now that you've got him back."

"I -- no --" Mike shut his mouth till he had an answer in his brain. "It's not like that."

"What is it like." That brittle quality of her glance, the way she bit off her words: it was how she looked when she talked about Harvard.

Mike didn't know what the right thing to say was, but he started explaining anyway. "He told me not to get involved with you. He said it would be a distraction, and -- " And Rachel still didn't know that Harvey was in on the fraud. "I, you, right then I felt like I had nobody, and you were there. And maybe it's a little fucked up --"

Rachel frowned.

"-- or a lot fucked up. But Harvey would never say anything against you now we're together."

"But he still disapproves," she concluded, not at all wrong.

Mike shrugged in lieu of answering directly. He was pretty sure Harvey liked her fine as a person, as a colleague. Just not as someone Mike was sleeping with.

"You want him to catch us in the library?" Rachel asked, the lilt in her voice evidence that she wanted it very much.

Mike shook his head. "I want him to acknowledge that sex doesn't automatically mean mistrust, and that, you know, caring about people isn't weak and crazy."

Rachel had nothing to say to that. They ate at the tiny table, facing each other but eyes on their own plates. The afternoon light filtered in through the window, bounced off the brick of the building next door. Mike was getting the hang of using a fork left-handed.

"What I want," said Rachel carefully, eyes down demurely, "is rough sex in a supply closet when Edward Darby's in town."

Her gaze flicked up, that naughty little curl at the edge of her mouth. Mike's face was hot. "I like a girl who knows what she wants," he said.

*

"They have this tape, it's like super-advanced sports tape," Mike was explaining, "and they do a computerized map of your musculature and the parts that need support, and then it automatically cuts the tape before they put it on your wrist. It's like a bandage, only it's tape, and it's supposed to help." He lifted his arm to show the webcam his current design, which was bright green and looked like some kind of half-sleeve tribal tattoo.

"Whatever you say, Locutus," scoffed Ken. "Physical therapy via bondage tape? Yeah, pull my other leg."

"I didn't even know they did physical therapy for broken wrists. So."

Ken's brows drew down in the little window on Mike's screen. Mike breathed in: it was still startling how much Ken could look like Harvey sometimes. It was exactly Harvey's worn expression. On Harvey, it was absolutely private, an intimacy not ever to be remarked on. Mike waited for cues on how Kenny wanted him to behave.

"Mike," said Ken at last, "they do. Have that. They should have gotten it for you the first two times too."

"Oh. Well," and Mike waved his good hand, dismissive. Ken could obviously guess about the years without any health insurance at all, and probably had a general picture of the rest. "I got it now."

"Good," he said, firm. "Good."

Mike was not up for anybody's pity. "So Annie's settling in in her new office?"

"So far so good. Hey, you'll -- would you keep an eye out for her? You know, take her to lunch once in a while? She's never lived in New York before."

"Yeah, sure. When are you done in Orlando?"

"The 5th. I'll be in town long enough for the wedding planning to be half my fault, is the idea." He gave an equivocal little smile. "Hey, you think I should invite Donna?"

Mike shrugged. "Are you friends with her?"

"She scares the living crap out of me," chuckled Ken. "But by some miracle she and Harvey get along, so --"

"He's not gonna bring her as his date."

"No, of course not." The chuckling was over. Ken rested his elbows on the desk where his laptop lay -- a hotel room? A conference room? anyway, a bland room somewhere far away from New York -- and leaned in far enough he started to fish-eye on Mike's screen. "They would never have lasted this long. I met his boss, Jessica? Probably ten years ago now. And I guess I thought if he could get along with her then he should be able to, you know, date the same woman for more than two weeks."

Mike mulled it over. "He found out last year that she'd been married and divorced while he was in law school. Jessica, I mean. He was really weird about it, I mean, weird because she hadn't told him, but mostly just... weird."

"She was married? God, I used to have the biggest crush on her."

Mike swallowed a wry little chuckle. Who among them did not have a crush on Jessica? "I don't know how close they were then. He kind of yelled at her about it when he found out. First time I ever saw him jump down her throat."

Not the last time, obviously. Mike still did not understand why Harvey had turned on her in December, what specifically had set him off. That it was reckless and ill-considered went without saying, but usually his impulsive behavior had a stimulus, some rule he chafed at or an adversary he wanted to smash. They seemed to have mended fences, or maybe it was that Jessica could afford to be magnanimous. Mike had not seen him apologize.

"God," said Ken thoughtfully, "I hope that's not the only action she's gotten in the last twenty years--"

"He's not -- Harvey would never --"

"No, no," Ken corrected. "Of course not. It'd ruin the virgin queen complex he's got going."

Mike made a face. "Anyway, invite Donna if you want to see her at the wedding. Don't invite her just because she's one of the few people who gets along with your brother."

"Don't worry," Ken said, with a weird expression on his face. "Your invitation is already in the mail."

Chapter Text

Mike was nervous. He'd been in Harvey's apartment before, and he'd seen Harvey on his birthday before (though last year he hadn't announced it, and the only way Mike had known about it at all was Donna's fussing at him). But here he was, in Harvey's apartment, on Harvey's birthday, and Harvey wasn't the one who had invited him.

"Hey, you're just in time," said Ken, as he opened the door.

"You made Mike come over?" Harvey stood in his kitchen in jeans and a t-shirt, whisking eggs in a bowl. He was barefoot. He hardly glanced at the two-handed birthday gift Mike deposited on the counter: Champagne and orange juice. Mimosas were the only legitimate form of alcohol to be consumed before noon. Harvey did not look up as he said, "This isn't part of your job, Mike."

"You making me breakfast isn't part of my job?" Mike asked, cheeky, and Ken chuckled.

"It was me making him breakfast, what with him not turning 41 just any day, but apparently I don't know the first thing about how to scramble eggs."

"He was mixing them with a spoon," Harvey accused, smirking. He poured another dollop of cream into the bowl, and whisked again.

"Yeah, Kenneth," teased Annie, as she pulled her head out of the stainless steel fridge. "Don't you know you can whisk with a fork?" She came around the kitchen island and immediately took up next to Harvey. Adroit, and much shorter without her heels, she danced out of the way of his elbow and fetched the butter and cut a fat square of it into the pan.

"They're all turning against me," Ken moaned, delighted and terrible at hiding it. "Anyway, you hungry, Mike?"

Mike wasn't hungry, but he did enjoy the show very much. Harvey and Annie worked well together, the former much more familiar with the space (it being his after all) and the latter ducking under his arm or around his body to put together toast, coffee, and mimosas. Harvey stood solid in front of the stove and made eggs. He didn't notice how intently Kenny was watching him, how he drank in every casual touch and interaction with Annie.

Mike sidled over and threw him an elbow. "See? He likes her fine." Ken shot back a shy little look, and put a hand on Mike's shoulder.

"I hope so, man. I hope so."

They ate on the balcony, squinting in the sun, big blowsy white peonies in a vase with their petals flapping in the breeze. Ken ate off Annie's plate and she shooed him with great mock-seriousness. Mike watched Harvey watch them, the way those dark eyes moved over their bodies and their frank gazes and how they touched one another. His face was still, that brooding way that Mike sometimes caught him at, but present and intense. He wasn't smiling, exactly, but he didn't frown either.

Mike hooked a finger around Harvey's glass and went to pour him another mimosa. There had to be some alcohol threshold beyond which Harvey would relax, but Mike hadn't found it yet.

While he was pouring the doorbell rang. "What," called Harvey from the balcony, "did you invite Donna too?"

"Donna turned you down, bro," cackled Ken, distant as Mike went to answer the door. "Not even you can get her up at this hour on a Saturday. She'll stalk you later for drinks."

Mike stood in the doorway, agog, as a pair of delivery men wheeled something huge at him. "Delivery for Specter?"

"Uh, yeah," said Mike, and got out of the way. He shouted back toward the balcony, "Harvey! Delivery!"

The delivery men wheeled past Mike with their merchandise. It was six feet tall on its wheeled dolly, and five feet long. It looked like an enormous dark wood box shrouded in plastic and made a faint harmonic noise as it bounced over the threshold. He heard the alarmed note in Harvey's voice as he demanded, "What the hell did you buy, Kenny?"

"It's your birthday present." Ken's voice had lost its mocking lilt. "I got you a piano. Seemed like it was time. Tuner should be here at 10:30."

Mike had never owned a piano (or really, known anybody who had), and wasn't really sure what it would look like to have a piano delivered. Apparently, for uprights at least, they could use a service elevator and just wheel it right to your door.

The delivery men pushed it to a space against the wall near the kitchen and lifted it down, and Mike was surprised to realize it was not a pristine new piano, but one that had been dinged around a time or two. As it came out of its plastic webbing it became clear that its lines were not the kind of sharp, cutting-edge look Harvey generally preferred out of his furniture, but a little rounded and a little worn down, like something touched by a hundred hands. It was dark wood, mahogany or walnut, the grain a a brilliant pattern like flames.

The delivery men lifted it this way and that way till Ken was satisfied with its location, then pulled a matching bench and set it on the floor. It wasn't ornate or claw-footed or anything, but kind of simple, square, built to last. Mike wondered to himself why Ken had picked this one, when he could have gone for a Liberace-style white grand piano inlaid with mother-of-pearl, if he'd wanted. (Maybe it would have had to come in by a window, on the tallest crane in the world -- but that would not be an obstacle to the Specter brothers.) Harvey was staring at his birthday present.

Ken signed in the right place, tipped the men, and shooed them out. He exchanged glances with Annie as she came in off the balcony, but they held their tongues.

Head bowed, Harvey lifted the lid and sat down at the keys. Kenny was smiling. Harvey wasn't; he furrowed his brow as if trying to remember something long lost. He lifted his hands and unlike your average amateur, who hits a note with soft diffidence, he set his fingers firmly on the keys and began to play a two-handed song.

Mike recognized it within about three notes: "The Entertainer," a Joplin ragtime. Harvey's hands did different things, his left seesawing between notes and his right doing runs in sequence and then playing a chord. He cocked his head to listen, frowning, and moved his middle finger and tried again -- the harmony he was looking for. Mike knew nothing about the piano, and not all that much about music theory, but even he could hear the occasional dissonance: loudly, as Harvey hit wrong keys and then corrected to the right ones, and in the subtle tones of an instrument that needs a good tuning.

With slow care, stately like a march, Harvey remembered the melody with his fingers. After a few minutes he started working the pedals with his bare toes, and the sound changed: richer, more resonant, more flexible as he shifted his feet. He moved on to a new part of the song and Ken sat down next to him on the bench.

To help, Mike thought, since he knew Ken could play. But all he did was wrap one arm around Harvey's waist and watch, murmuring advice as the melody went into a different key. After a minute of it Harvey threw an elbow and Ken gave an exaggerated sigh and began to play a descant on the tinkly high keys, something that worked like the melody Harvey was playing but upside-down, backwards, like intricate fretwork or like math. Mike was kind of regretting how little he knew about music.

They were into it now, and Ken let go his brother's waist so he could play a double melody on the upper register and Harvey put both hands on the deeper piano keys. The two of them moved in time, even as Harvey had to pause and noodle out the next chord by ear -- Ken waited for him patiently and struck back up without a lag.

Annie snuck over to Mike's side and whispered in his ear. "There's a reason he wanted you here." Mike glanced at her, unsure, and she tilted her head till her stylish off-center bangs were in her eyes. "So I wouldn't have to go it alone."

"Do what alone?" Mike murmured, as the twin pianists began to pick up speed.

"This. Being here. With them."

Mike pulled away, shy, and then leaned in again to correct her. "I'm not marrying Harvey."

"Too bad," she teased. "From the way Kenny talks, it sounds like a woman will never make him happy."

Instinctively Mike bristled a little at that, and then paused. He'd thought it himself, of course. And Annie had far more claim to the familial right to criticize than he did. But still he bristled: the automatic habit of defending Harvey against all comers. He smiled at her ruefully. "Sorry, I'm not that much of a martyr."

"You're like me even so," said Annie, and put her arm around his waist. She might have said more, but the Specter brothers at the piano were turning rough, elbowing each other as they played to induce mistakes. It made for terrible music, but Mike hadn't heard Harvey laugh like that in, well, ever.

*

Harvey wasn't listening. Mike sat next to him in the conference room and watched him stare at the city skyline reflected in the table's shiny surface while Edward Darby talked. Harvey didn't fidget or doodle, just stared, and anyone who knew him less well would assume he was deep in thought.

Darby did not know him well -- could not. He was here biweekly as the last stages of the firm merger shook out, and they maintained a cordial but formal relationship. (More cordial on Darby's part, and Mike took mental notes about the upsides of being a gracious winner.) He sat with his back to the windows, crowned in reflected sunlight, his bulk swathed in expensive wool with an air of restrained violence. He measured the other attorneys in the room pitilessly. Louis sat at the foot of the table, very still with his head cocked, both hands on the shiny surface in front of him. If he'd had a tail, it would have been between his legs.

"The new American subsidiary must needs be run differently," said Darby. That line between Harvey's brows: it was his worry line. He looked like he was afraid he would lose, which was absurd, because Darby was the one person in the firm to whom he had lost already. Darby smiled and said, "But our client's main concern is, to be blunt, that a well-funded colony at long distance from its motherland should develop rebellious tendencies over time."

Louis blinked, that way he did when the penny dropped. His dark eyes moved over Harvey's shape, flicked over to Mike, and back again. With more instinct than deliberation, Mike chose to act the moment Louis turned to see if Darby had noticed. He nudged Harvey in the ankle under the table, just hard enough he'd feel it.

Let it never be said that Harvey Specter will jump when you startle him. He didn't move at all, except for his gaze, which lifted from the table and drifted smoothly over to meet Darby's sharp little eyes.

Mike watched a suspicious expression wander across Louis's face, and then disappear into a mien of pious superiority. Darby took no notice and Mike breathed out. Under the table, Harvey kicked him, hard, so hard Mike yipped in surprise.

"Hm?" asked Darby, with patient curiosity.

Mike faked a cough. "Sorry. Frog in my throat."

Around the table attorneys smirked, openly enjoying Mike's humiliation. Harvey sat by his side, blameless, bland.

Darby eyed him still and did not speak. The other people in the room coughed and fell silent while Darby sat quietly. He did not glance at Harvey even once, but offered Mike a gentle little frown. It became incumbent on Mike to look away first, as the silence stretched.

Next to Mike, Harvey sat serene and attentive. He did not respond when, five minutes later, Mike kicked him back for revenge.

*

It should not be possible for someone so intimately involved with classical music not to own his own tuxedo. "Dude, I own my own tuxedo," Mike told him, and held the door open. They were at Rene's. No point in doing things half-measure.

Ken scoffed. "You own a tuxedo because Harvey got you one. He told me the whole story."

"About Atlantic City and everything? No, I won't count cards for you." Mike almost walked into Ken, who was standing two feet into the place and with the distinct air of fleeing it as soon as possible. It didn't look different from the other times Mike had been here -- actually there were fewer fastidious sales people than usual available to pass judgement on these two uncouth intruders. The precise lay of items on display, though, the overwhelming sense of expertise and breakable things --

"Okay, so, this place intimidates the hell out of me," confessed Ken, low.

"You aren't the only one," said Mike under his breath, as the tidy man came around from behind his desk. "Rene, good afternoon. This is Harvey's brother, Ken. He's looking at purchasing a tuxedo."

"Ah," said Rene, with a quick glance up and down Ken's frame. Or his clothes. "Your first?"

"My only," said Ken, who was wearing his usual work-boots and a clean-but-wrinkly button shirt (at Mike's insistence). "Getting married."

"Ah. And the best man?"

"They don't have to match," Mike put in. "Probably better if they don't, in fact."

"Unconventional," sniffed Rene. "I understand you want to match the quality of Mr. Specter's style without duplicating it exactly?"

"Uh, honestly, I don't know the first thing. This is Mike's idea."

"Mike's idea to bring him to you," disclaimed Mike. "Ken's idea to want to look great. Why he came to me for that --"

Ken looked at him steadily. "Because you know his standards. I want him to see, you know, that I'm not some clueless shmuck in a rental this time."

"Ken, you're not a clueless shmuck. You know more than you think you do." Mike grinned at him, hands in pockets. "You've been to how many symphony openings?"

"Yeah, but that's like, people who were born into it, and they're all over 50. You know, the huge 70s lapels and the whole thing fits weird now that they've aged."

Rene paced quickly around Ken's body, eyes sharp. "You do not wear many suits?"

"A few," Ken started, but Mike understood the question.

"Just off-the-rack stuff. I don't think he's ever had clothes tailored for him."

Rene hesitated. "So --"

"Given the time frame," Mike suggested, "I think we're looking at made-to-measure, with two fittings. Will that do?"

Rene made a noise of vast disdain in his throat. "If it must." He whipped out his measuring tape and herded them into the back.

"Okay," said Ken, clearly mystified. It pleased Mike, to discover something Ken wasn't good at, and pleased him more to realize that he could teach Ken this one little area of expertise. It wasn't that important to Mike, not the way it was to Harvey. But Mike would get to be there when Harvey saw the final results.

Ken moved as directed while Rene measured his body. The questions came rapid-fire: "Is there someone from old Hollywood you want to look like, or something more modern? You prefer narrow lapels? Shiny fabrics, or matte?"

"Go modern," Mike told him. "Harvey's is classic, kinda 80s but not in a bad way."

"I am told," Rene said over his shoulder, "that the young people dislike the batwing tie."

Mike paused. Indeed, Harvey wore that kind of bow tie with points that looked like a bat-signal affixed to his neck. Indeed, Mike thought it faintly ridiculous. He was pretty sure he'd never mentioned that outright to Harvey, though, unless he'd gotten drunker at that holiday party than he'd thought.

"Dad wore that kind of tie," said Ken absently, and then realized. "Oh, that's why Harvey wears it, huh?"

Mike said nothing. He watched Rene's efficient motions and the quick way he annotated his measurement sheet with a stub of pencil. He was much less frightening like this, an expert engrossed in his expertise, than when he sat bored at the front of the shop. Mike could see why Harvey liked him, now.

"We're looking at a brownstone," Ken said, non-sequitur.

"I don't think you can wear those to a wedding," Mike told him.

"Jackass. To live in. I feel like we're doing all the grownup stuff at once, like I finally crossed a threshold somewhere in there."

Mike counted off on his fingers. "The house, the wedding, the tuxedo --"

"Changing gears on my career," Ken pointed out. "Staying in one place for a while. I know a guy at Phaidon wants me to write a book. Kind of a head-spinner."

"Kind of awesome, you mean."

Ken put his head down and watched Rene wrap the measuring tape around his knee, then his ankle. He said, "I spent my 20s being a complete fuckup."

Mike tapped him on the elbow in solidarity. "Believe me, I know the feeling."

"Aw, come on."

"No," said Mike, with a sad little laugh. "Really."

"The thing is," Ken said, earnest in voice because he was holding his arms out for measurement and couldn't gesture, "I went back for my master's, I got my shit together, I started a career. And like, I want him to see that. I want him to quit looking at me like I'm his fuckup kid brother."

"He doesn't look at you like that," Mike said, though the topic had never come up before.

They went through the whole rigmarole, choosing fabrics (satin lapels on a narrow shawl collar), deciding on pockets and venting and buttons, and considerable embarrassing (and surprisingly frank) discussion of trouser legs and the underwear that complemented them best. Ken did not own a tuxedo shirt or a bow tie, and the shoes were entirely beyond him: one step at a time.

"It's really heavy fabric," Ken commented, as he fingered the cotton of a tuxedo shirt.

"Looks more substantial," Mike explained. "You'll need studs and cufflinks for this kind of shirt. Tell you what, you can borrow mine."

"I thought the bride was the one who had all something borrowed, something blue."

"Well, what with the tux, your holey underwear, and my cufflinks, all we need is blue and you're all set."

"Pocket square," interjected Rene, with saintly patience.

"See?"

*

The thing about a perfect memory is that you don't often get calls from numbers you don't recognize. Mike considered sending it to voicemail, and on the third ring decided to take a chance. "Hello?"

It was a familiar voice. "Mike, hey."

"Annie? Hi, everything okay?" Mike stood up to take a walk: no point in letting Associate Alley listen in.

"Yeah. Yeah, I'm in my office. I -- have you heard from Ken today?" It was not part of Mike's picture of Annie to hear her so tentative.

"No, should I have?"

"His phone's off. Which like, never happens."

"And," Mike asked slowly, "you think he's dead in a ditch somewhere?

"I don't know. I just -- something's up. Do you know if he talked to Harvey?"

Mike strode down the hall and took a right. It was possible to make a circuit of the floor in a five-minute leisurely stroll; after that he would probably have to find a place to hide and talk. "Not in my hearing. Harvey's out today, though."

"Oh. He is?"

"Yeah, it happens sometimes. Actually, it happens about once a year. He took a day off midweek in April last year too."

Annie paused for a long time before she asked. "Was it the 24th?"

The penny dropped. "Yes. It was the 24th. What happens on the 24th?"

"I think that's the day their dad died."

"It's -- Oh. That wasn't recent, was it?"

"Six or seven years? I'm not sure. It's not something Ken really talks about a lot. I mean, he talks about him when he was alive, but not. You know."

"Oh, cause it happened before you met."

"Yeah. You didn't know Harvey then, did you?"

"No. Donna did, though."

Annie huffed out a frustrated breath into his ear. "That lady is intimidating."

"God, if she intimidates you, then the rest of us are doomed. Uh, do you want me to ask her?" Mike asked, and turned to find the nearest staircase to head up to the 50th floor.

"I mean, is there anything to ask? If they're doing some kind of secret family thing --"

"No, you're right. No." He came to a halt, his eyes on the plants in some empty junior partner's office. They were spider plants, that could survive in low light. Junior partners usually didn't get windows.

"I don't want to intrude if they're like, if they're visiting their mom."

Mike let out a mordant chuckle. "They are really, really not doing that."

"Oh god, seriously?" Annie lamented. "I thought Ken was being dramatic."

Clearly she knew at least the basics. "Harvey doesn't talk about it a lot. But, is nuclear warfare dramatic?"

"So wait. Is that going to be an issue at the wedding?"

"If..." Mike thought about Harvey's snide, steely behavior towards the people he brushed back. "If they're both there, probably. What did Ken say about it?"

"Would he have said anything about it? I guess if I'd asked him."

"Oh. Uh --"

"How do you not invite your own mother to your wedding."

Well, this was an unforeseen pickle. The wedding was two months from now, not nearly enough time to work up an emergency plan."Uh, has Kenny mentioned that he has thus far only allowed you to meet Harvey under extremely controlled circumstances?"

Annie made a noise in her throat. "Is he a lawyer or is he a rampaging hippo?"

"Um, kind of both?"

"God, if his best friend is calling him that --"

"I'm -- he's --" Mike felt the heat in his chest at being called best friend. "He's like a pitbull. He'll defend you to the death or he'll rip your throat out, and there's not a lot in-between."

Annie was quiet for long enough that Mike checked the display to make sure she was still on the line. Finally she asked, "Does he defend you to the death?"

"Yes, Sometimes. Yes."

"Okay." Her voice went sly. "Does he lick your face all over and pee on the floor when he's excited?"

"Um, no? I hope not?"

"Yeah, I grew up with pitbulls. That's a hazard."

"That's a hazard?"

Annie laughed hard. "I figure, I am so totally prepared for when we have kids."

"You -- yeah. You guys are --"

"Yeah." Annie Choi choked up on the phone with someone she hardly knew. "He's ready, I'm ready."

"That," Mike told her firmly, "will be awesome."

*

Another call came on the first of May. While Mike was in the room, of course. It appeared to be fate that everything happened to Harvey while Mike was in the room, or else Mike spent way too much time in Harvey's office.

Another call came to Harvey's cell phone and his face shuttered closed as he looked at the display. Not Ken calling, then. He looked -- stony, stiff. Worn. Mike guessed from that expression alone that it was something to do with the bone marrow donation he'd done last fall, and re-ordered his stack of papers to leave, still favoring his half-healed wrist. But Harvey shook his head and made a quelling gesture.

Mike quelled, and sat still. Harvey said his name into the phone, and nothing else. Attuned to the etiquette of private phone calls, Mike stared over Harvey's shoulder out the window as if lost in thought.

There wasn't any conversation, not on Harvey's end. Just his face in the bright morning, just the involuntary mobility of his face as it lost its formal mask and cycled through solemnity, caution, a strange weightless relief --

Mike had thought it over now and then, how he'd feel about saving someone's life. It wasn't a year yet, so probably the life wasn't officially saved, but some kind of milestone, some hurdle cleared -- maybe a setback overcome. The idea rested in his backbrain, waiting for an idle moment, and then leapt to the fore and bounced around like a tennis ball, bashing into things and knocking over his mental knicknacks. Mike had a pretty good idea how he'd feel if he'd saved the life of a stranger.

The look on Harvey's face was not I saved the life of a stranger. Mike watched him, rapt. Harvey had totally forgotten that anyone else was in the room, that there even was a room. He had no idea the tremble of his lower eyelids, the unselfconscious upturn of his mouth, how quick his breath was coming. He stared into the middle distance and it wasn't I saved the life of a stranger. It was something much closer to I just dragged my brother out of a burning building.

Harvey was way too involved for it to be just a lucky match on a faceless donor registry. He knew exactly who'd gotten his bone marrow.

He said, "Thank you," into the phone, and hung up. He put a hand to his forehead and sat back, exhausted.

Sitting very still, Mike waited to be noticed. It was only a minute or two, not long enough to be embarrassing. Harvey sat up and cleared his throat and settled his elbows on either side of the contract they'd been discussing. "Right. So why did you structure clauses 17-19 this way?"

Mike was on the wrong side of the desk, the side that gets to look out at the view and be intimidated, not the side that has the view, imperiously, at its back. He stared at Harvey, at his shadowed eyes that revealed nothing, at the studied firmness of his mouth. He lowered his head and turned to the clauses in question.

*

"Darby alert."

When associates hissed it to one another, it was a warning to re-do the top button of your shirt. When Rachel swayed down Associate Alley to Mike's cube and whispered it at him, it was something else.

"Uh, uh," he said, and stood up rather than have this conversation in front of his peers. He grabbed her elbow and escorted her down the hall. "We are seriously not doing this."

"No?" she asked, with a naughty little smile. She was wearing a low-cut cream-colored sweater, as if she'd known since yesterday about Darby's presence. Mike forced his eyes away from her cleavage and followed her into the copy room, where at least they could have a private conversation under the hum of the machines.

Mike started at the beginning. "Okay, no, I don't think I can do that while Darby's in the office. I know it turns you on, but I can't risk it."

She crossed her arms, hunched forward. "You didn't have a problem with it that first time."

It was true, Darby was in the office that first time, when they'd been down in the records room. That first time they hadn't used a condom either, and hadn't bothered to take off their clothes. Mike said nothing and let her think through how specious an argument that was.

"What happened to brazen Mike Ross?" she asked at last, and turned away.

Mike couldn't help but laugh at the absurdity of that. "Me? Brazen? Have you met me?" He touched her arm and she spun back to him.

"I'm a fraud," she said, in his face, leaning in close now, moist into his ear. "You're conning a white-shoe law firm. If that's not brazen I don't know what is." Her hands found his waist, tickling, and danced up his back under his jacket.

The breath that Mike took was shaky, but not (okay, mostly not) for the reason Rachel might hope. He pulled her hands away and folded them against his chest instead. "I'm not Keyser Soze," he told her, head down. "I'm not even a very good con man. A better grifter than me would have figured out how to get paid without doing any of the work."

For once Rachel would not let her hands be held. She slipped free of Mike's grip and slid her palms up to the sides of his jaw. "Still sexy," she told him, and kissed him. It was a really nice kiss. She was really into it. Mike had to force himself to pull away and rest his forehead against hers instead.

"I was such a loser." He felt the tremble in his ribs. "I know you hate it when I lie to you. I was a loser. I counted cards in Atlantic City, I played alley craps with weighted dice, I conned clueless teenaged cashiers with change-raising. I used to steal backpacks at Columbia and NYU when I was younger. Always go for the rich kids: they'll have more valuable things, and they can take it if they lose those things."

Mike was not a fool. He knew she'd gone to NYU. He knew she was a rich kid. Her perplexed expression said she was not a fool either.

"It's not sexy. Getting your ass kicked by someone you've cheated isn't sexy. Taking someone's wallet and maxing out their credit cards while throwing away the family photos isn't sexy. I was a loser and this job is the closest I've ever come to going straight and I need it, Rachel, I don't want to be that loser any more."

Her hands rested on his shoulders and then she turned it into a grasp, firm, her nails biting into his shoulder blades. "Mike Ross, you are not a loser."

Rachel had the best eyes, dark and searching and restlessly intelligent. He held her gaze as he said again, "You hate it when I lie to you."

"So," she said, her hands still on him, "Don't."

He'd thought it would be hard to say, and in the end it was easy. "Harvey's in on it."

Rachel blinked, and her fingertips moved up and down his lapels while she thought. "Is that why he was so angry at you this winter?"

"No. He's known all along. He helped concoct the fraud in the first place."

She pulled away then, as Mike had expected. Crossed the room, put a hand down on the copier that was spewing out collated and stapled handouts. He saw her lips move as she spoke to herself, and then she turned and said it out loud to him:

"So even your deepest darkest secrets, even there he gets more than me?"

"He didn't want me to tell you," Mike said. "He doesn't know I'm telling you."

They stood across that hot, loud copy room from each other. Mike was afraid she would yell, but she didn't. Her eyebrows were huddling together on her forehead like conspirators, and her chin stuck out that way she had, that stubborn reckless way she'd told him off so many times before inevitably coming back to him.

"Darby alert," came a hiss from the doorway. Mike glanced over but whoever it was had already gone -- just the quickest impression of the back of a head and a collar firmly in place. At once Rachel tugged her sweater up at the shoulders to hide her cleavage. Mike watched her do it while he double-checked the lay of his necktie.

*

Harvey had a code written in public spaces. If he went to the observation deck on the 55th floor, that meant he didn't want to be recorded but was interruptible. Gramercy Park, to which he had access to a key despite never having lived in the neighborhood, was absolutely inviolable. Not only because Mike didn't have a key, and could not follow him there, but you weren't even to mention that he'd gone there, or lurk for him outside the locked iron gates. If Donna said he was in the east 20s, he was to be left alone, usually for the rest of the day.

Grand Central was where he met with sources, and Herald Square the sources Mike wasn't supposed to know about. (Never Times Square: too many cameras.) Bryant Park was -- it was a space Mike hadn't really figured out yet. A bit too far from the office for a casual walk, but not so far that Mike couldn't hike over and chase him down. Harvey didn't dress like a tourist, but enough of the Conde Nast and fashion crowd passed through there that he wasn't remarkable.

He was standing on a set of wide stone steps in the shade when Mike came looking for him. There was no sign he'd sneaked off for a junk-food lunch; there wasn't really any sign of what he was doing except frowning at the world. In his impeccable summer suit (pale gray) under the dapple of the sunshine through the trees, he looked like a model fled the pages of some dour fashion magazine.

It wasn't so obvious on Park Avenue, but Harvey Specter was not, in fact, stylish. Mike would not have learned it so quickly if not for Bryant Park, where men wore trousers cropped at the ankle or shoes with ridiculously long toes. The fashionable wore color and fabrics in a way Harvey did not; wore scarves; experimented with off-center buttons and unconventional profiles. Even their haircuts had personality. Mike couldn't quite even describe it, but he could point to someone ambling through the park and say, That is stylish. Harvey by contrast was expensive but conservative: always the same profile (double-breasted was a radical departure), always the same narrow spectrum of colors, always the same fit and set of textures. To roll up his sleeves was to signal that the workday was long since at an end. The business world brooked almost no variety.

So Harvey looked like a square in Bryant Park, like a stockbroker stranded very far from Wall Street and grossly unfamiliar with the culture industry. Standing by himself like that, alone in all the hustle-bustle of a tourist park, he looked a little -- lonely.

Mike put on a neutral face and approached him. "Donna said to bring her a slushie," he said. "Louis has got me doing a thing, so I don't think I can get her one till 5:30."

"You're pawning slushie duty off on me?" Harvey sniffed.

Mike smiled at him. "She loves you best." Harvey took this assertion with a fractional nod of acknowledgement. He was clearly not in top form, if he could not manufacture a quip at such an opportunity. He hadn't been in top form in a while, maybe not since January, maybe not since the previous fall. He could put on an okay game when he had to, but at some point he'd decided he didn't have to with Mike.

They stood next to each other, each with an elbow against the stone wall. The wind blew the trees around, a gentle sussurating sound, and their neckties flapped in tandem. On the wildest impulse, Mike reached out and told him.

"So, it wasn't a stranger."

The proof was in the fact Harvey understood immediately what Mike was talking about. He said nothing, and busied himself in capturing his necktie. It fluttered under his hand like a sparrow.

"I don't know who it is," said Mike. "Ken doesn't know, and I'm guessing Donna doesn't either. No, I haven't discussed it with either of them."

The alarm on Harvey's face didn't dissipate with that reassurance. He was litigator enough to keep his silence while Mike dug himself a deeper hole.

"You can tell me to fuck off if you like," Mike told him, and tapped at the satchel slung over his shoulder. He could fuck off right now and be early for the thing Louis wanted him on. But he didn't think he'd be early. "I won't bring it up again. But I'll know, and you'll know I know, that it's important enough you lied about it. And I think," he added, as Harvey finally opened his mouth to interject, "I think you should tell me and make me complicit in whatever secret you're keeping rather than leave me in the dark."

"Why." He showed his teeth as he said it, a sharp little word.

Mike had learned how to argue from the best. "In the former case, you use me to fill the chink in your armor. In the latter case, I am that chink. I'm one of the few who knows you are vulnerable, and I'm more dangerous because I don't understand that vulnerability. I could do something that would put you in a bad spot, and I wouldn't know I was doing it till it was done. You let me in on it, and we can form a united front. I can address it the way you want me to address it, or avoid it, rather than take my own wild stab at a strategy whenever you get so completely distracted you don't even hear what somebody's saying."

Harvey stared at him. Behind his dark eyes something moved, something big and dangerous like a goaded elephant.

"You know I can keep a secret," Mike said, unnecessarily. "What's two secrets instead of one?"

Of all the things Harvey Specter might do, retreat was last on Mike's list. He watched Harvey turn and walk away and only belatedly thought to follow him. He trotted after just in time to hear out of the corner of Harvey's mouth: "You don't want to know this one. Trust me."

"I do trust you," said Mike. He turned around to walk backwards in front of Harvey. "And I think I need to know this one."

Harvey stopped, so Mike stopped with him. They were mid-block, concrete on all sides. On the corners, tourists and late lunchers strolled in the sun. Taxis blared their horns and pedestrians told them to go to hell. Harvey stuffed his hands in his pockets and lowered his head, like someone ceding defeat. It was the opposite of what Mike had hoped for, or honestly, expected.

"I am telling you this once, and that's the end of the matter, are we clear?"

Mike watched the cascade of caution and foreboding and anger on Harvey's face, and nodded in silence.

Harvey said, "A number of years ago I was involved with a woman and it ended badly. She was religious, I was thinking about my career. When the child was born she asked me to stay away, so I did."

Mike closed his mouth hard enough he could hear his teeth click. The child. The CHILD. Harvey Specter was a father. Of all the things Mike had not been expecting. Harvey gazed impassively at the traffic rushing by.

"We've corresponded sporadically since then, or rather I write to her and she returns my checks. Until last fall, when she called me unexpectedly, and told me the girl had leukemia. They'd tried chemotherapy, and it wasn't working."

Sweaty, Mike worked through the unsaid and half-said of what he was hearing. It was exactly the sort of thing Harvey would do, just keep it all close to the vest: a kid, a terrible illness, how he felt about it or whether he felt anything at all. He had a little girl, and she was sick to dying, and he didn't tell anyone. He stood there with the bright sun starkly defining the lines on his face, eyebrows folded together like clenched hands and his voice as level as if he were reading tax documents. Ken was going to shit a brick.

He said, "Genetic relatives are the best bet for a match. Her mother asked me to be tested, and I matched. If it hadn't worked out, I would have told Kenny."

Mike blurted out his agony. "Oh my god, Harvey, I don't even have any siblings and I know that's not the way you do it. He's going to kill you."

Harvey's face was drawn. "I'm prepared for that."

It was the second lie Harvey had told him. Mike added it to the stew pot in his brain and stirred it around a little. "So what, you just hadn't got around to it yet? Harvey, he's your brother."

Harvey employed sarcasm frequently in the workplace. "You told that grandmother of yours everything you were doing?" he asked, but he got the pitch wrong and it came out defensive rather than sardonic.

"You can't let him find out by accident. What if you get run over by a garbage truck?"

Harvey waved a hand with irritated dismissal.

"What if your ex gets run over by a garbage truck? If you ended up going to court -- is your name even on the birth certificate?"

"No." Harvey did not need to say that New York is one of several old-Puritan states where the children of unmarried women are presumed to be fatherless in the absence of an affirmative affidavit, or a lawsuit. Harvey knew that Mike knew that fact. "She told me to stay away, and I did."

Told now. The first time it was asked. She had to be some kind of woman if she could tell Harvey what to do. Or he had to be some kind of --

Mike discovered he didn't think of Harvey as a man who could willfully ignore his own child. His weird, stiff sense of honor wouldn't allow it. No, she'd told Harvey what to do, and Harvey, ashamed or afraid or just too stunned to think, had done it.

The silence extended between them. Harvey's expression drew down into the frown that said he was back to distracted brooding. Mike realized he was facing his first opportunity to form a united front. Anyway, to form a diversion that could josh Harvey back into present reality. "Ken's going to want to meet her. The kid. It's the first thing he'll ask. After he gets over yelling at you, I mean."

Harvey didn't answer at once. He neutralized his features the way he did when a client meeting wasn't going his way. He said with slow firmness, "He won't be able to. I'm not going to tell him, and you aren't either."

"But --"

"No," Harvey said, with all the intimidation he could muster (which was a lot). Mike stood there defeated and realized what he'd let himself in for. Harvey eyed him knowingly and then turned away to walk back toward the office. He said quietly, "I've never even met her."

"Not even --?"

"No," said Harvey. "No point making things complicated for her."

And that was all, as far as he was concerned. He did not wait for Mike to catch up with him, though he slid a glance to one side to assess Mike's processing capabilities.

Quiet, not like a whisper but like someone two rooms away, Harvey said: "Now you know."

Mike walked at his elbow in silence.

*

Mike spent the rest of the afternoon at Louis's side, plodding through a financial negotiation with a sickly child in his brain. A girl, probably between age 2 and 5 if it was the most common form of childhood leukemia. Probably not old enough to understand what was going on. Certainly not old enough to comprehend the idea that the man who'd saved her life was very close to her and very far away at the same time.

At the end of the day (the end of the business day; he still had four hours of work before he could head home) he sat in the front seat of the taxi with a filebox in his lap and another one between his feet and tuned out the sound of Louis's petty strategizing in favor of watching the people who waited at street corners. Mostly they were commuters, suits and more suits and if you were lucky a tourist in tiger-print leggings; every once in a while a toddler in a stroller, on the way home from daycare.

Harvey was not an irresponsible man. He was not the kind to shirk a duty, however oddly he sometimes interpreted duty. Mike had been mulling it all afternoon and hadn't yet figured out how Harvey had managed never to meet his own daughter. Just the idea of it happening to Mike made something weird bounce around inside his ribcage, an anxious, determined flutter like a bat lost in a living room. If there had ever been a kid, if there ever were a kid in the future, Mike would not have been able to stay away.

It was in the elevator that Mike realized, indeed, it was after 5:30 and he did not have a slushie to hand off to Donna. Filebox under his arm, he hoped like hell that Harvey had remembered. He was generally good with little interpersonal gestures, but maybe not after a conversation like that.

She was packing up for the evening when Mike swung by. Donna was not the kind to change into sensible shoes for her commute home; he hadn't yet seen her admit to the idea that four-inch pumps were not sensible in every way.

"He gone?" Mike asked, and inclined his head toward Harvey's office.

"Dinner with the Takenaka group." She waggled her eyebrows at him. "He's being a complete wimp about pronouncing the French off the menu, so I sent him early to practice with the maitre d'."

"They do that?" Mike marveled. Of course they did that, for Harvey Specter. Or for Donna. She had influence far beyond the understanding of mere mortals. She did not deign to answer his question.

"He wants you working the background on the Takenaka doohickey," she said, eyes on the box he carried.

"And by doohickey you mean the research on the code they're licensing?"

"Of course," said Donna with a smile.

"And he wants it by morning."

"Of course."

Mike thought for a New York minute about his priorities, and took the file box into both hands to put it down on the floor. His wrist twinged at him still, sore and unable to take that kind of weight, and he kept back a dull groan.

"Is that Louis's crap?" Donna asked him.

"His casework?"

"Yes, his crap. Did he go blind and not see the brace on your wrist for the past five weeks?"

"Louis sees all," Mike intoned at her. "Louis knows all."

Donna rolled her eyes and stood up. She was still perceptive, still funny, still on her toes at all times. No expression out of place, no clutter on her desk or distracted mannerisms. Mike came around behind her cube to help her with her jacket and saw an empty slushie cup in her trash. It was not possible that Harvey had come back to the office, slushie in hand, and told her. So either she knew already, had known for a long time, or she still didn't know.

Mike would have said till that very moment that Donna knew absolutely everything about Harvey, that even he didn't have the subtlety or the stones to avoid her piercing intelligence. But it did not fit his picture of Donna that she should know about the child and be able to tease Harvey about his atrocious French as if nothing were amiss.

If Donna didn't know, then Jessica almost certainly didn't know. Then again, Jessica had been married and divorced without ever telling Harvey, and they were still friends. A weird kind of friendship, not Mike's kind, but it seemed to work for them.

If Donna didn't know, then nobody knew. Nobody who could drag the child through the mud, or threaten her, or use her as blackmail material. Nobody knew, except for Mike.

Chapter Text

"Welcome," said Harvey, "And thank you all for coming."

He stood on the dais at the front of the roof deck in his tuxedo, the bride and groom beside him. Although he could have reached behind him for the standing microphone, he chose to project for the assembled guests the way he did in a courtroom. Mike was one of the few there who'd seen the Best Closer in New York in such a setting. Except for Ken and Annie and Donna, he was probably the only one there who knew Harvey at all. It was up to Harvey whether to stick to his attorney persona, or slough it off for one night.

Mike had been to a few church weddings in his day, and one performed entirely on bikes (don't ask), but hadn't been to a wedding on a rooftop before. It was a wide space, with tiles underfoot and little potted trees here and there, atop a midcentury building on 10th Avenue. Mike had no idea how the happy couple had managed to rent such a space, or how they'd managed to afford it. The guest list came to about eighty people, including six toddlers (two of them Annie's nephews), all dressed to the nines. Annie wore a red sash to temper her off-white dress, and brilliant lilies in her hair. Ken's tuxedo looked fantastic on him, and Harvey for once was not wearing his Batman bow-tie, but one shaped like a butterfly to match his brother's.

Harvey continued: "In case the resemblance isn't clue enough, I'm not just the best man I'm the brother of the groom, and that means I'm twice-over positioned to tell humiliating stories about him."

The audience laughed, as they were meant to.

"I've never given one of these speeches before, so I really didn't know what to say." He reached into his breast pocked and pulled out a few folded pages. "I asked my assistant to write a speech for me, and this is what she wrote in full: 'Don't be a wuss. Write it your own damn self.'"

More laughs. Up nearer the front, Donna raised both hands in victory and whooped, Champagne glass in one fist. Harvey turned to Ken and Annie and told them, "So I asked my friend Mike to take a crack at it --"

"Told!" shouted Mike from his position in the back, grinning.

"--told him to take a crack at it," Harvey went on, unruffled, "and this is what he wrote, again in full: 'Annie and Ken are the awesomest couple in the history of coupledom. I solemnly swear that I will not smoosh their names together into Kenannie, and I will never say a mean thing to either of them, even if their children are funnylooking.' Thanks a lot, Mike."

Ken beamed into the audience, and Mike raised his Champagne glass in acknowledgement.

"So I guess I'm on my own on this one. So, despite the opportunity, I'm not going to tell about how Kenny is 36 years old and I had to tie his bow tie for him an hour ago. I'm not going to mention that his middle name is Floyd. I'm not going to explain how he got that triangle-shaped scar in his scalp -- that one was my fault, honestly -- or about that time he called me from Singapore at 4 AM because he'd misplaced his passport. Those aren't the stories I'm going to tell.

"I've got two stories for you instead, one old and one new."

Mike had seen Harvey perform many times, and he was good at making it look off the cuff despite meticulous rehearsal. In this case, though, he had his head down and a puzzled little smile, as if he really wasn't sure what he was going to say next. It helped that he didn't have to persuade anyone: it was just his job to lead the toast.

"The first one is from when I was 16, a sophomore in highschool. Had to have shoulder surgery. So there I was, April through June, strapped into a brace so I couldn't move my right arm at all. And every morning during those two months, Kenny gets up an hour before he has to, to help me put my clothes on. Every day. Wrestles my shirt on over my head, ties my shoes, hell, I couldn't even buckle my belt at first. He was in the seventh grade, twelve years old. He was in a different school than me, started later than mine did, so he could have slept in that extra hour. I didn't ask him to do it. He just got up every morning and did."

Harvey was talking to the audience, so he couldn't see the tender, startled look on Ken's face. Annie saw it, though, and grasped his arm more tightly.

"Second story. I get at call at work out of the blue one day two weeks ago." Mike thought for one hot panicky moment that Harvey would tell about the child, which of course he was not going to do. He continued: "Now, at this point I have met this woman three times. She's lucky I recognize her voice at all. She cuts right through the bullshit and she says to me, 'Hi, we put in an offer on a house this morning. It's in Brooklyn. Don't give him guff about it.'"

Really, Mike would not have called Harvey funny, but he was pretty good at it.

He went on: "So I said, 'Who is this?'"

More laughs. Annie put her hand over her face in mock-shame.

"She spent the next 20 minutes on the phone telling me how perfect their new house is going to be, all in architectural terms as if I would know the difference between a spandrel and a corbel. As if I would say anything about a house in Brooklyn not being good enough for my kid brother."

Another startled look from Ken. This time Harvey was expecting it, and they gazed at one another over Annie's head for a long moment. But Harvey was Harvey, and couldn't allow emotion to go unmocked:

"Even though Brooklyn is not good enough for my kid brother."

Mike led the whistles and assorted boos that greeted this remark. Annie, still arm in arm with her new husband, blew her brother-in-law a Bronx cheer.

"But Kenny has someone who will defend him to the death, and Annie has someone who will get up stupidly early to help her out. And if they have to live in Brooklyn somehow I will find a way to forgive them for that. Because I'm pretty sure wherever they end up, that's going to be the place to be. And obviously you all," and Harvey swung his arm to indicate the audience, "knew that already, but have a little patience with those of us still stuck in Manhattan."

Mike stood at the side and surveyed the laughing audience. Annie's family, her friends (painfully cool and funky) Ken's friends (a little more unkempt and/or "practical"). Harvey was the only member of Ken's family there, although --

A woman caught his eye. Small, aging but in that Catherine Deneuve way that made her age difficult to guess, in a dark gray beaded dress that looked as if it had been custom-fitted. It looked expensive. Her hair was a shade of blonde that turns gray almost without your noticing, stylishly cut short. She stood in the back with her glass upraised like everyone else, but she stood alone. Her eyes were fixed on Harvey up on the dais with a glittering hunger.

Mike had never seen her before, had never even seen pictures. Harvey was unsentimental about the people he excised from his life, and most of Ken's things were still in storage. But she wasn't hard to recognize: she was their mother, whom Ken had failed to invite so that Harvey would show up. Annie had been true to her word, and invited her.

She was in the back, unobtrusive, though Harvey would be able to find her if he looked. Her pale eyes ate up every move of Harvey's, each hesitation and that little half-smile as he found his way past the hardened mask of business he wore so often. Her lips moved along with his at times, encouraging. Mike did not even know her name.

It was possible to interpret a certain graciousness in how they kept out of each other's way. Mother present but not bringing herself to her son's attention, son failing to notice his mother right in front of him. They were alike in obstinacy. How Harvey endured it, how either of them did, the iron will required to stay away from your own family, for years --

The child, the child. She was never out of Mike's head for long.

Harvey was probably the only one who would refuse to feel that irony like a knife in the chest. Mike was the only other person on the planet who knew enough to feel that irony at all.

He'd lost track of the speech in progress. Mike tuned back in just in time to drink along with everyone else, and then cheer the smiling couple as they clinked their Champagne glasses together. Harvey's voice rang in Mike's ears, but he couldn't have said what wisdom, if any, Harvey would pass along to his brother at a time like this.

*

Mike Ross was a goofy drunk, which fact he knew, because he and Kenny hung off one another laughing in their now-wrinkled tuxedoes as the wedding reception drew to a close. The wind off the river had picked up as the night grew later, and women were shrugging themselves into shawls and light jackets, but Mike was sweaty and floaty and would have been dizzy except that Ken held him safely upright.

"Dude, dude, you cannot dance," Mike told him. He'd witnessed Ken's attempts to dance, with Annie, an hour ago while both of them were still sober enough, and the only people who hadn't laughed to see it were the jazz trio playing guilelessly in the corner. How Kenny, the professional music specialist, could be so unable to find the beat was a great and hilarious mystery.

"The Harv got all the dance genes in this family," asserted Ken, with great inebriated seriousness. "You should see him."

Mike had seen him -- with Annie briefly, with Annie's sister, and then Annie's mom, and then with a bevy of architects (all in black, some with heavy square glasses) and engineers (surprising penchant for sleeve tattoos and strapless dresses) as they realized that perhaps only one man at the entire event could execute any kind of orderly steps. He glided, improvisational and forgiving, able to anticipate the turns in the music. He never stepped on anyone's feet, unlike Mike.

They could barely manage their way past three chairs and over to where Harvey stood, back to the party. He had both hands on the waist-high wall and was gazing serenely at the Hudson River. He noticed them coming -- it was possible Kenny had tripped on one of the chairs, but luckily Mike caught him -- and turned around with an ironic little chuckle.

"I suppose that's the purpose of an open bar," he said to himself.

"Reg," said Ken, and detached himself from Mike to fall into his brother's arms, "you say the nicest things to me." Harvey ignored that quip, and held onto Ken at the shoulders. The smile lines around his eyes were like canyons.

Muzzily Mike asked, "Wait, Reg? You call him that?"

"Reg and Floyd, Hartford and Kentucky," Ken rattled off. "What, you never had nicknames?"

Mike was too impaired to try to explain the fact that Mike is a nickname. Anyway, he didn't have a brother. Harvey did not even grimace as he continued the litany of wordplay: "Barbie and Ken. Many are the demeaning nicknames of childhood. I know you value your life sufficiently to desist."

Harvey could deliver a threat with a grin, and keep that grin through Mike's wild laughter.

He watched the brothers arm in arm, Harvey sober and Ken drunk, grasping each other at the shoulders tightly. Harvey took the opportunity to wrap his arm around Ken and whisper in his ear, something quick and blunt, and then rested his forehead at Ken's temple. Mike couldn't see his face from that angle, but he could see Ken's, and that dazzled, fragile smile was more than enough to guess at what was said. Kenny tapped his older brother on the face with his palm, and they came apart. Ken with a guffaw, but Harvey heavy-lidded, strange and grave and still.

"Hey Mike," said Ken, not at all self-conscious as he wiped his eyes. "Thanks for all your help, man."

Mike fell into one of Ken's patented bear-hugs, which was great, because it meant he did not have to keep his own balance. "This is the awesomest wedding I have ever been to."

"The only way it could have been better," said Ken, with careful enunciation, "is if Dad were here."

Over Ken's shoulder, he watched as the lines around Harvey's mouth deepened. Mike wanted to hug him then, and he was drunk enough to consider it. Kenny let him go, and slapped him gently on the back. "Gotta go find my wife," he said, with a grin.

Mike watched him go for a moment before he remembered to stage-whisper "Kenannie!" to his back. Harvey, at his side, gave the joke a perfunctory chuckle and stuffed his hands into his pockets.

"Best party ever," crowed Mike, and slung an arm around Harvey's neck. Dimly he recognized that he might be taking his life in his hands, but fuck it: how often did your own brother get married? "Don't think I don't see your hand in this. Or Donna's hand. Is she still here? You're her puppet, you realize. Her party-planning puppet."

"You," said Harvey, "are drunk."

"Defense so stipulates," Mike told him. He swayed into Harvey and found himself buoyed. "Seriously, though. Awesome party. Ooh, maybe it wasn't Donna. This is one of your charm-the-pants-off plans, isn't it? A pantsless party plan. With puppets."

"Mike --"

"No, I'm good, the pants stay on. You can't woo me with your awesomeness wiles."

Harvey flexed his shoulders against the awkward grip Mike had on him. It was marring the line of his jacket -- can't have that. Mike let go and rested his palm in the middle of Harvey's back and inhaled the scent of nice wool and sweat and his own vodka breath.

"I know you paid for the location, and I was with Ken when he went to tip the bartenders and they told him it was already taken care of. I know you," Mike wagged a finger in his face, "and your meticulous planning. Oh my god you were Bridezilla, weren't you? Brozilla. You totally were. BrooooooZILLAH!"

The hilarity of this observation was somewhat lost on Harvey, who arched one cool eyebrow at him. "Blush and bashful," he murmured in Mike's ear.

Mike had to double over to laugh as hard as that deserved. Bent at the waist, he coughed and laughed and coughed again, sore and dizzy. Harvey rested an open hand on his back, till the dizziness became apparent and that hand became a grip on Mike's belt so he wouldn't crash to the floor. "I'm okay," he croaked, and straightened. Something about the innocent expression on Harvey's face set him off again, though, and he tucked his head in against Harvey's shoulder and hooted his amusement.

"Don't you dare die at my brother's wedding," said Harvey, his arm now just about the only thing keeping Mike off the floor.

"I'm okay, I'm okay," Mike gasped again, and wiped his eyes. "It's too nice a wedding to die at."

They faced the almost-empty dance floor, leaning against one another. With his free hand Harvey pulled loose his bow tie and popped the collar stud on his shirt. Mike liked the feel of him, the solidity, the space that he took up. "You had fun though, right?"

Mike practically had his head on Harvey's shoulder. Harvey had to turn his head and peer to even see Mike's face. "Yes," he said strangely. "I had fun."

"Good," said Mike, and patted him on the chest. "Good. You don't have to charm Kenny."

Harvey said nothing. He let Mike hang off him and stood quietly in the midst of the thinning crowd. The musicians launched into one last song for the one couple still on the parquet. Mike wondered if Harvey recognized the song. If he could play it on the piano. Well past midnight, the city lights blazed on around them. Mike rolled his head back for a look at the sky above. After a moment he realized he had put basically all his weight on Harvey, and hadn't been brusquely dumped. Still a little giddy, Mike stood on his own two feet and turned around so he could see Harvey's face.

He put his hands on Harvey's shoulders, serious, or anyway trying to be serious but probably failing. "You are an awesome brother. I mean it," he added, as Harvey's eyes slid aside.

"Sure, Mike." Harvey plucked Mike's hands off his shoulders, and set them loose in empty air cautiously, as if still concerned Mike was going to fall. "Let's get you home."

He turned and walked toward the elevator, and Mike followed him. "He wants you to be proud of him, that's all. He wanted you to like the suit."

Harvey stood at the elevator doors with his head cocked, as if hearing a church bell from somewhere far away. "Rene's work," he said, then slowly: "You helped him pick it out."

Mike couldn't help but beam at him. "You noticed."

The dim evening lights, the last sign-off of the jazz trio, scattered clapping. Harvey's loose bow tie swayed in the breeze. The lines in his forehead bunched up and he worked his mouth, opened it, closed it again. Mike felt the smile fading off his cheeks and gazed at him, rapt, silent. It was a wonder to look at him like that, like the door to a long-neglected room thrown open and its drapes thrust aside to let in the cool fresh air. Unconsciously Mike's hand came up between them, as if by touch he could make it real, make it last. Harvey did not notice the hand, did not take it or push it aside.

The chime of the elevator sounded above their heads. Harvey looked down and when he came up he had on his ironic smile. "Bedtime for bunny," he told Mike, as the doors rolled open.

"Brozilla," he said one last time, and sniggered himself into the elevator. Harvey shook his head, and turned away to laugh.

*

Rachel took him for an iced coffee break at four in the afternoon. It was one of those crippling hot days, pitiless sun and the stupidity of having to wear long-sleeved wool suits. Mike was able to leave the jacket behind, and roll up his sleeves, but that was as far as it went for male officewear comfort. Rachel strolled beside him in the July sun in a diaphanous dress, arms bare.

They sought the dappled shade of the midblock ginkgo trees and watched patterned shadows move in the light wind as they settled on the edge of a planter. Come evening the thunderclouds would roll in and the rain would break the heat, but it wasn't broken yet. Rachel was odd, stiff, fussy with her hair. Mike slurped on his drink and considered the timing.

They were pretty good together. He thought so, anyway. He tried not to lie to her and she tried not to think the worst of him. Dating a perfectionist had made him a much tidier person, and given him the opportunity to practice sexual techniques with an exactitude he hadn't known existed. He had a bad feeling she was ending it, based on no evidence except her visible nerves.

"I'm breaking up with you," she announced, and ducked her head to take a sip of her iced coffee.

He sat still and listened to the traffic from the end of the block. "That sounds pretty final."

"It is. I'm -- I've made the decision."

Anyway, doing it near the end of the day would allow him to lick his wounds in private in the file room. So at least she was being gracious about it. "What did I do wrong?"

She looked him over, canny, sharp. In that moment she looked like Jessica. "You know me," she said at last. "Do you really think I would settle for second best?"

"I'm second best?" Mike asked, stung.

"No." Rachel re-crossed her legs so she was pointed away from him. "I am. I've been here through this whole thing, Mike. I'm not stupid. I see it every day. You look to him first, in everything. Harvey matters to you in a way I don't."

"Rachel. I'm not sleeping with my boss."

"Maybe you should, though." Her lip curled. "Just to get it out of your system."

The way she said it sounded like a low blow, but it landed without impact. He'd thought about it, of course -- half the firm had thought about it. But Mike had witnessed early and often the fact that Harvey never went on second dates. And didn't handle exes well, obviously. There were very good reasons why thinking about it was as far as things had gone.

"Why would I sleep with him when I have you?" he asked, unable to keep the pleading out of his voice.

Bedraggled pigeons stalked their ankles, pecking at flecks of mica in the concrete. The sparrows scattered before them, and reassembled when they'd gone by. Rachel had crossed her arms and her legs, in case her words weren't indication enough. "You try, and I appreciate that. But you don't like pushing me around."

Mike huffed a laugh at himself. "Honestly, I'd been hoping for you to push me around."

"See? Basic mis-match." She could make it sound very reasonable. "Harvey would be glad to push you around, though."

That wasn't what Mike wanted, not from Harvey. He got plenty of that in his work-life already. What he wanted from Harvey was that surprised open look, that sense of a rose unfurling in time-lapse photography as Harvey let down his defenses. Screwing him wasn't going to achieve that; Harvey slept with plenty of people with his defenses firmly in place.

"Sleep with him, and then call him a loser," said Rachel, nostrils flaring, "and see how he likes it." She registered Mike's shock and ducked her head for a sip of iced coffee.

Mike fussed with the straw in his drink and tried to come up with the right thing to say. "He doesn't call me a loser."

Rachel tried again: "All the cruelty and emotional violence in the world can't put you off him --"

"It's a complicated relationship --"

"And it's the most important thing in your life," she said, the way she told off clueless new associates. "More important than me."

"And you can't have that," Mike added, snide.

"No," she said. She was cool, collected. She knew herself, at least. "I can't."

They sat together in the shade for a little while longer, but there wasn't a lot else they had to say.

*

There was some fantastical line through Brooklyn the wrong side of which was a different city. Mike wasn't sure exactly where the line lay, but on its far side you had to drive, and bikes were pitiable. On this side of the line, bikes were a menace (as they should be) and pedestrians were the ones you pitied. Mike had spent his entire life trying to ensure that he lived on the right side of the Bike Horizon.

His cramped two-room apartment in "East East Williamsburg" -- actually Bushwick -- was easy to afford now: loyalty and inertia were the main reasons to stay at this point. It had been a lot harder to manage his place before he landed in his current position -- the waves of yuppies moving through Brooklyn had created a different line, faster-moving, and much more punishing. That was the Dough Line, and Mike had known a lot of years on the wrong side of it. He was glad to have come into some dough before the moment -- soon, now -- when the Dough Line and the Bike Horizon overlapped completely, and the cheap Manhattan-adjacent neighborhood disappeared.

Crown Heights was still Manhattan-adjacent (well, a straight shot on the subway, anyway), and the Specter-Chois had somehow found a brick row-house with a high front stoop and a postage stamp of back yard and all the historical detail you could hope for. It wasn't even in that bad shape, give or take a few water stains on the ceiling and a hideous kitchen. Mike had no idea how they afforded that much space, four levels including the ground floor, and enough bedrooms for a horde of children. Maybe Harvey had helped them out on this expense as well.

He realized as he stood in the back of Ken and Annie's rented van that he was now technically a yuppie, helping a pair of yuppies move into a neighborhood that had been kind of a slum when they'd been children. Mike wrangled a milk crate of records onto the curb and wondered if you could get a non-yuppie badge solely on basis of being able to survive in 340 square feet of apartment.

"Don't do that," Ken interjected. He was standing in the propped-open doorway of their new home. "I am sure your wrist is not at full strength."

"I'm not a yuppie," Mike asserted weakly. But he put down the milk crate. The records were all classical -- probably the brothers had agreed to split the collection some years back -- and stiff in their deluxe cardboard sleeves.

"I don't think they call us yuppies any more," Ken told him, and lifted the crate. "Although I don't think a corporate lawyer is allowed to call himself a hipster, either."

"Damn the man," Mike intoned, and headed back for another load out of the van to the sound of Ken's laughter.

Truthfully, the Specter-Chois did not have a lot of stuff to be moved. Two dozen boxes, three or four more crates from the van (rescued from Harvey's storage space), a battered bureau, some curb alert chairs they'd liberated on their drive through Brooklyn Heights -- as a married couple, their furnishings were even more bachelor than Mike's. They didn't even have a bed yet, and would be making do with a hand-me-down futon a friend of Annie's would be delivering two hours from now. By the time the last of the records were upstairs and the van safely parked in a legal spot two blocks over, Mike felt that he really hadn't qualified in his attempt to help them move.

"Don't be so hard on yourself," Ken teased, and handed him a beer. He flicked on the ceiling fan and they all watched in sweaty fascination as its faux-wooden blades lazily began to swing.

"Harvey's paying to get the TV delivered this afternoon," said Annie. "Some huge thing to prove... I don't know what. Don't you think he'll claim he helped us move too?"

Mike leaned against the melamine countertop and rested the cold bottle against his sore -- not in a bad way, not really -- wrist. He thought about trying to explain about the Dough Line, and decided against it.

"Is he even coming to see the place, or is he still hung up on Brooklyn cooties?"

"Oh, I bet you crowed when you heard our new address." Ken said, and began to put away the dishes he'd received as wedding gifts. "He said you're a Brooklyn loyalist."

"He means I grew up in Borough Park," Mike corrected, with a smile. "And yes, it is possible there was a victory dance."

The upper cabinets were small and warped, so the dishes took up almost all the available space. Annie opened another box and wrinkled her nose at the battered and dusty pots. They looked okay to Mike, the kind of thing people passed down through families, but Ken had had them in storage while his consulting work led him from place to place. Hotel room living didn't lend itself much to kitchen adventures, any more than lawyering did.

"I'm buying us a wok," Annie announced. "And a steamer. And a crockpot."

"IKEA will provide," said Ken.

"Just because you've been eating off paper plates for the past six years --"

"Just because you didn't want to pack up your entire apartment in L.A. and move it all here in an epic cross-country road trip --"

They stuck their tongues out at each other and Mike laughed.

Annie explained: "If you've driven 3000 miles in a truck with bad shocks once, you've done it a hundred times."

"I didn't even learn to drive till I was 22 and getting paid to help people move on Craigslist," Mike told her. She raised her eyebrows at him: obviously not a New Yorker born. "What. I've never owned a car, so who needs to learn?"

Ken backed him up unexpectedly. "Hey, I only learned in college. And that was only to have a backup driver on liquor runs." He eyed Mike and took a pull on his beer. "We grew up in the city too."

Mike knew that. He didn't know where. It was one of those mysteries Harvey seemed to employ effortlessly. He could make cracks about Hell's Kitchen as if H. L. Mencken were still in his rolodex, as if Harvey were even old enough to have heard of Hell's Kitchen when it was riddled with tenements. Mike rolled his eyes at it sometimes, but he'd never yet caught Harvey in an out-of-towner mistake.

Ken watched him, avid, amused. "He wouldn't tell you, would he? Always playing hard to get." Mike shook his head, but didn't ask. Annie did the honors.

"And?"

"The only place I really remember is the house a block off Stuyvesant Square. You know, old brick, skinny townhouse. Kinda like this one, only skinnier and no stoop. I showed you some of those pictures," he told his wife.

"Where is that, though?"

Mike answered: "Manhattan, edge of the East Village. Kind of -- was it already upscale by then?"

"More than Stuyvesant Town. But no, it was kind of artsy, near to the venues Dad played in, but also kind of middle class. There still was such a thing as middle class in Manhattan back then. I guess it was a compromise -- I know they got the place on Mom's money. Dad grew up in Bushwick."

"That's where I live," Mike blurted, a little startled.

"Yeah, I remember," said Ken while he sorted the silverware. "I think it was a white working class area back then. Germans and Bohemians. His dad was a driver at a brewery there. My mom came from the Upper West Side. She wasn't a Rockefeller or anything. But --"

The tension on Ken's face. Mike remembered the glimpse he'd gotten of her at the wedding. Annie stood behind her husband, spatula in hand, and shook her head at Mike. Time to switch topics. "Did I hear you say you had pictures?"

Ken turned on like a light bulb. "Ah ha ha, you have never seen Harvey in his 80s preppy stage."

"Oh my god," Mike marveled, "did he pop his collar?"

"Oh you innocent!" Ken made a beeline for the boxes in the living room. The room with nothing but boxes in it at the moment; Mike suspected that some high-end furniture place, rather than IKEA, would provide. They sat on pillows on the floor and paged through an old photo book while Annie stood on a chair to install a curtain rod in the kitchen window.

"Oh my god," Mike said again, and again, and again as Ken turned the plasticky pages. (Annie laughed every time, obviously conversant with the shockingness of the Specter family photos.) The oldest pictures were square with rounded corners, all the colors faintly yellow. Harvey had been a skinny blond grinning boy, in short shorts, painfully charming even when saddled with a ruddy bundle of infant brother. They sat posed together in a hideous avocado-green chair at intervals through the pages.

Here was Harvey in a park overlooking the Midtown skyline, probably in Brooklyn Heights. Harvey and Ken on a ferry somewhere in the harbor, squinting into the sun, tow-headed and sunburnt. Harvey about age 9, bashing his brother in the head with a rudimentary light saber. Harvey sitting at the piano with his father at his side.

"Oh," said Mike. It was an upright, square and plain and hard-used, just like the one now in Harvey's apartment. The man next to Harvey wore rolled-up shirtsleeves and suspenders, and played an octave with a stub of cigarette in his mouth. He had a strong nose and dark curly hair, his brows furrowed in concentration. Beside him, skinny blond Harvey held down two keys with his child-fingers.

"Yeah, he had us in his forties," said Ken, although that wasn't what Mike had been recognizing. "I figure I'm ahead of the game getting started at 36."

He resembled Jack Benny a little, stocky and doomed someday to heavy jowls. In his fifties, still fit, he looked like a working man, shoulders stooped, full mouth pursed around the cigarette. His long fingers were stained with nicotine and stood out against the white piano keys.

Mike turned the page.

"And that's my mom," said Ken, his finger on a shot of a woman with honey-colored hair parted in the middle. She wore a brown-and-orange sundress and carried a toddler Ken on one hip. Compared to the father on the previous page, she looked like she belonged to a completely different time. She was also about a generation younger. Ken said, without a shred of uncertainty: "You saw her at the wedding."

Mike did not have it in him to lie. "Did you warn Harvey in advance?"

"I did," interjected Annie from the kitchen. She gestured with the screwdriver in her hand. "I'm the one who invited her: it was my responsibility."

"She didn't make a fuss," Mike observed. "She stayed out of the spotlight."

Ken ran his thumb along the edge of the album. "We had a talk beforehand. Anyway, it's anticlimactic for her. She came to my first wedding."

"And he didn't?"

"He had just started working for Jessica." Ken turned his face away. "I might also have forgotten to tell him it was happening."

"Jeez."

"Well, it was at City Hall, not some big thing. And he would have tried to argue me out of it."

"Hm. You did get divorced."

Ken sat quiet, and Mike regretted pulling the adversarial shtick on him. He could talk back to Harvey that way, but Ken was not Harvey.

"I had to make my own mistakes," Ken said at last. "Harvey doesn't get that."

"No," Mike agreed. "He doesn't."

"She wanted kids, and I wasn't ready at 23. I'm ready now. She sent a card, but she couldn't haul a husband and four kids across half the continent or you'd have got to meet her too. That was a big deal, to get divorced and find a way to still be friends with my ex."

"Unlike your parents."

"Bingo."

Mike thought for a moment, then busted out in a grin. "I bet Harvey hates her."

"He calls her Calamity Elaine."

Mike smiled. "Wait, you've been divorced twelve years and your brother is still calling your ex-wife names?"

At the other end of the building, Annie burst into laughter. Ken looked up at her, adoring, and said, "Of course. Have you met my brother?"

*

The thing about having a little bit of money is, it helps you put off -- or maybe avoid entirely -- dealing with shit. Mike had given himself one year not to think about the storage locker in Queens where his grandmother's stuff resided, and it was August. The year was up. He asked the movers to show up mid-afternoon for the heavy stuff going to charity, but took for himself the stuff that could fit in a backpack and a pair of bike panniers.

The flurry of arrangements, and his own complete discombobulation at the time, meant that hands other than his had packed up Edith Ross's belongings. Careful hands, hands thoughtful enough to wrap up the glass with plain brown paper rather than newspapers that would remind him of the date. But they had been hands that didn't know her well enough to sort out her change jar from her drinking glass. Her things had been winnowed so many times already -- when they moved out of Borough Park, out of Williamsburg, out of East Williamsburg, when she went into care, and then moved from one facility to another -- so the amount of her household detritus was small. That meant that every item he touched carried a significance.

Sweaty, exhausted despite doing no manual labor, choking in the stuffy, dim concrete of the locker, Mike sorted out the last memories of a life. Her clothes were all for Goodwill, and her shoes. Her hairbrush and other toiletries apparently hadn't been packed, or anyway Mike never found them. Her scanty jewelry, the best of it sold during hard times, lay carefully packed in its leather box, with surgical cotton for padding.

The books, the puzzles, a pair of afghans folded over cedar blocks: Mike didn't cry till he found the photo albums. They were wide and tall, two of them, the size of old record boxed sets, with scuffed white Naugahyde covers embossed with flaking gold. He'd been through them many times as a child -- it was his main visual reference for his parents, for their lives beyond his own kid-perspective memories. He didn't need to open the cover to recite off the pictures in order: Dad as a little kid, hundreds and hundreds, snapped with all the fragile wonder of new parents. Dad in grade school and as an awkward, gangly teen (comforting, that) and then Dad with hilarious gelled 80s hair standing shyly next to a beautiful woman.

It was after that that the pictures changed perspective, Gram in frame as often as not. Dad took the picture, or Mom, or later, clumsily, even Mike. The albums spanned 60 years, and that only because Gram had brought none of her own childhood photos with her when she married. It could have been 80 years, easy.

Mike biked away with the few keepsakes he'd sorted out from the junk, and sobbed along Greenpoint Avenue on his way home. He was done by the time he got to his neighborhood. When he died someday, there wouldn't be anyone who could inherit those photo albums and make sense of them. That family was ended, and he was all that was left.

There was a small number of things Mike wanted to see find good homes. To Donna, his Gram's old hardcover of thrilling tales, crime stories with female protagonists from the 40s. Donna took one look at the tattered dust jacket, and gathered the book carefully in both hands as if it were the treaty for world peace. He didn't even need to tell her why he was giving it away. She was just Donna, and she knew, and thanked him in a choked little voice.

He gave Jessica the two nicest pair of screw-back earrings Gram used to wear. ("These are real gold," she told him, sharp-eyed. "I know," he answered.) For Rachel he set aside a couple of costume-jewelry pins of Gram's, one brass and the other rhinestones and silver. He wasn't sure how to give them to her yet -- it seemed cowardly to leave them on her desk -- so he held onto them for a little while.

For Ken and Annie, he had a photo matted and framed: Mom and Dad and infant Mike, posed in front of their tiny walkup in Borough Park they'd lived in for ten years. They'd lived there till Mom and Dad didn't need any accommodations any more, and Mike had moved in with his Gram. He polished the dark-wood frame: five inches square, hardly worth displaying anywhere in their gigantic old house, but he figured they would understand. He flipped carefully through the albums to find something for Harvey as well.

Something he wouldn't scoff at or find too cheesy; something he would recognize without Mike having to explain. He settled in the end on a black-and-white snap, oblong on dull paper: probably the last roll of film ever taken on Jim Ross's 1955 Brownie camera. (Mike broke it when he was three. He'd only meant to take it apart to find out why the pictures had to live inside the camera till they were developed.) It was a picture of Mike himself, in profile on a sunny day, sitting on a dictionary on a kitchen chair in order to be able to read the encyclopedia that was open on the table.

The dictionary was a Webster's 2nd unabridged, so more than 15 inches tall. You couldn't see the encyclopedia's title or volume number, only toddler-Mike's fat fingers smoothing back a new onionskin page, but Mike remembered the set vividly. It was a World Book set from 1960, less the T volume, acquired at a tag sale (so the story went) in 1975. He finally threw out the set when, at age 20, he re-read the section on computing and discovered that mainframes were cutting-edge technology. They were deadweight he didn't have to move, when moving Gram into a cheaper apartment.

Mike was two years old in that photo, with fat cheeks and white-blond wispy hair. It was a day he could remember -- even his memory blanked out much earlier than that -- a warm day, Spring, his Dad away at work. He'd had to pause in the middle of reading about flowers to ask what a rhizome was. Mom had picked him up to get at the dictionary and help him find out.

He stood in the middle of Harvey's office on Monday morning, unsure how to hand off such an artifact without tripping the "emotions are for losers" circuit. In the end, he tucked it into the pile of receipts Harvey had set aside to sort. He would find it some time later that day, and do with it whatever he liked.

He spent the rest of the morning handing out knicknacks to other acquaintances in the office: Gram's bedside clock, a paper fan. Norma gratefully received the St. Anthony medallion Gram had kept on her keychain. And Mike got caught in the act of leaving a snow globe ("I Found Love on the Jersey Shore") on Louis's desk.

"Yeeees?" said Louis from the doorway, in that vaguely lugubrious way he had. He gestured at Mike with his briefcase.

"Uh, it's nothing." Mike put the snow globe down, and turned it so that you would be able to read its text from where Louis would sit. Its plastic snow wafted downward, blameless. "Rachel said you might like it."

Louis came into his office and bustled around Mike, fussy with his piles of paper. "We've got to get that girl into Harvard."

"Yes," said Mike, glad to be on safer territory. "We do. Did you know she didn't even tell them she was a legacy?"

"Did you know," Louis out-gasped him, "that she didn't even fill out the totally voluntary racial self-identification questionnaire?"

"She's so ethical it hurts," Mike sighed.

"She is so ethical," Louis gave him back, "that it hurts my soul. Listen, Mike, I know you two broke up --"

Mike shuddered to himself at the idea of Louis asking for permission to go hit on Rachel. Really, at the idea of Louis hitting on Rachel at all, permission or no.

"I just want you to know that I would never express any prurient interest in someone I was planning to mentor."

"Okay," said Mike.

"She's like a daughter to me," said Louis, a hand pressed dramatically over his heart. "A very gorgeous daughter."

Anything to get off this topic. Anything. "She's not your pony. Anyway, Harvey mentioned once he was thinking about mentoring her."

"That smarmy bastard. He would try to steal my mentee." He raised his chin haughtily. "Rachel would never have him, though. After the way he's treated you."

Mike opened his mouth to protest, and closed it again. "Just swear to me. Louis, swear to me. Say it: Rachel is not your pony."

The high dudgeon of Louis Litt was something to behold. "Rachel Zane is her own pony," he declared.

"Right," said Mike.

Louis added, "A pony that is going to Harvard."

And who among us would disagree with Louis?

*

The facade of New Yankee Stadium was sandy-colored and sharp, like a corporate lobby. Harvey, of course, loved it, while Ken scoffed at the movie-theater seats amazingly close to the base paths. They argued amiably in their section, waited on by staff who could deliver sushi and beer right to your elbow, animated with extended reference to the arcana of baseball fields long gone.

Annie and Mike sat beside them in silence, grinning at each other while they pretended to absorb the amassed sports wisdom of the Specter family all in one logorrheic lump.

"Seriously, you didn't have to." Mike tuned back in to the low note of frustration in Ken's voice. He knocked knees with his brother, not in a sweet way. "I can pay my own debts."

Annie tensed up at once, but said nothing. Harvey, being Harvey, smoothed the overwhelming plaster of his own certainty over the moment. "I can't take my kid brother out to a ball game, now?"

There was no defense against this line of argument. Ken desisted, a puzzled little frown on his face. Mike frowned too: he'd been under the impression that Ken had organized their little outing, some kind of bonding adventure with Mike there as a buffer, as before. If Harvey had bought the tickets, if he was doing it to pay one of Ken's perceived debts --

The players jogged around in front of him doing their pre-game warmups in the grass, as real as anything. Harvey knew Mike had never been to a baseball game in person before. Baseball parks, like airports, were generally beyond the Bike Horizon, and their designated activities well beyond the Dough Line. Mike could not think of a single thing that Ken owed him, or that Harvey thought Ken owed him, that would be paid off with $200 luxury tickets.

On the other side of the safety netting, members of the home team stretched in their uniforms. One or two lay on their backs and had an assistant yank their ankles beyond what a 30-year-old bicyclist could manage, stretch-wise. Some VIP marshaled a pair of kids in full Yankees gear as they greeted their heroes. Mike watched the confidence of the man (dark hair gelled back, teeth capped -- maybe a TV producer) and the shy fascination of the boy and girl at his side. The player took a knee to talk to them properly, and the girl pulled nervously on her ponytail.

"My Gram came from Bensonhurst," Mike said, not for any reason. The organ music continued in the background but he felt like he'd spoken into a yawning chasm of silence. Annie elbowed him gently for more. He didn't look at her so that he wouldn't have to see over her shoulder whether Ken and Harvey were listening.

"She used to ride up to Flatbush to go see the Bums at Ebbets Field."

"They called them Bums?" Annie laughed. "This was the home team?"

A rumble of chuckles beside them. Both Specters, low in their throats. Mike put on an antic mien. "Well they may be bums, but they're my Bums!"

"Danny Kaye," said Harvey softly, almost too softly to hear.

"Hey," added Kenny, "I knew that one too."

"They were terrible and she loved them. She met my grandfather at Ebbets Field. They tore it down when my dad was five and she was so mad. She said her son was not going to see the Dodgers anywhere but their natural habitat."

Ken leaned forward to add his two cents: "And vowed never to attend another game?"

"Oh, you have no idea," Mike told him, animated now. "My Gram was Eye-talian. Nursed a grudge like Florence Nightingale. She could recite the names of all the girls who'd broken up with me, in time order."

"You're Italian?" Annie asked, laughing.

"Yeah, I don't look like her. My dad was adopted. Doubtful they'd have given her a blue-eyed kid if her name was still Edith Selvaggi, though. So Jim Ross ended up being good for something."

They all chuckled dutifully at that, chuckles that were drowned out as the official announcer began to speak. it was all unfamiliar rituals to Mike: the national anthem, the throwing out of the first pitch. People took seriously their duty to listen as some specially-chosen child screeched "Play ball!" into a microphone. The players arrayed themselves on the field and set to.

So the thing was, when you watched a ball game at the actual park, there was no play-by-play narrator to tell you what just happened. After the third or fourth time Mike and Annie chorused "What? What?" in hopes of an explanation, they switched up seats to place an informed person next to a clueless person at all times. Harvey made unimpressed scoffing noises for about two minutes before he forgot his superior attitude and started trying to persuade Mike that baseball was the most important pastime in the world.

"Uh huh," said Mike, only half-listening. He got to sit in a comfortable chair on a sunny Sunday afternoon and not think about work. And people went and fetched him french fries whenever he wanted. The players could just stand there hula-hooping for all Mike really cared. Sure, eventually something happened -- walks were boring, but any time the bat made contact with the ball was fun -- but in between it was all leisurely talk and nostalgia for a time Mike didn't know.

"See that?" Harvey was saying. He leaned in to Mike's shoulder and pointed, as if his arm were a shared telescope. "He's varying his arm slot. Not a lot of pitchers can do that."

Mike had to watch the next ten pitches intently to have any idea what he was talking about. As the pitcher flung himself forward off the mound, sometimes his wrist came up way over his head, and sometimes its arc was closer to horizontal. Without slow-motion and replay, Mike had no way of guessing how this made his pitches different. "Could you?"

"No." Harvey's voice was low and pleasant in his ear. He'd lowered his arm and was monopolizing the armrest between them, when he wasn't stealing fries off Mike's lap. "I was all brute force, no finesse."

Mike let his mouth drop open. "I am absolutely shocked."

"Yeah," said Harvey, chuckling. "You and finesse are so well-acquainted."

Without thinking, he stuck out his elbow to claim his fair share of the armrest. "I work the dork genius angle. What's your excuse?"

"Being seventeen at the time." Harvey shoved him off the armrest with a smile on his face. "You're starting to turn pink. Where's the sunblock?"

Mike hunted around in his satchel and came up with a tube of cream. At Harvey's insistence, he'd been anointed already before the game began, and would have to be punctilious till the shadows got long enough for their section to be in shade. Neither Specter on the other hand seemed to burn: their skin turned warmer and darker almost imperceptibly, like trying to watch cookies bake. Mike recoated his ears and nose under Harvey's scrutiny: better that than walking around the office tomorrow like a sad, contract-reading lobster. He nudged Ken, who grabbed the sunblock for Annie. She was looking a little wilty, freckles bright on her cheeks. Dutifully Ken squirted a white dot of lotion onto the back of his hand, and smoothed it into his wife's skin.

Mike watched the way they moved together, the glances they threw at each other and the little touches they gave: solicitous, kind, an intimacy so unconscious they'd clearly forgotten it was intimate. It was possible to drink in their partnership, bask in it, and be envious. Mike looked away just in time to notice Harvey's eyes as they moved over the same details.

Beside them, Annie rested her head on Kens's shoulder and curled one hand around his forearm. Ken showed no sign of irritation at Annie's ignoring the game: in fact, he leaned into her weight and breathed in time with her, their chests rising and falling in unison. Ken wove his fingers into Annie's without needing to look. Hers were long with ridged nails cut bluntly; his were meatier, blond hairs on his knuckles like gold wires, and though he didn't bite his nails he clipped them pretty brutally, and left ragged cuticles behind. (Honestly, his amputated finger was the neatest one on either hand, smooth with scar tissue.) On his ring finger, the dull gray of solder on plastic; on hers, the wink of silver crimping together three turns of a guitar string. They wore no formal golden wedding rings.

Harvey, who got his nails done (not that he would ever admit to such a thing), scrutinized the game with his hands to himself. Mike nudged his elbow off the armrest again.

This meant war. Forearms alongside one another, they shoved and pressed and attempted to roll each other off the disputed territory. Mike more or less forgot that a ball game was going on, engrossed in the muscular play and the sensation of arm hair against his own. Harvey kept his eyes forward, as if the battle were an inconsequential detail, but he fought with the dedication and dirty tricks of someone who'd been doing it all his life. Finally, just as Mike felt he had the chance of winning, Harvey grabbed him by the wrist and lifted his arm away entirely.

"Cheating!" Mike called, but his voice was lost in the crowd as the batter made contact. Whoops flew up all around him, and then butts out of seats as the section stood en masse to cheer the ball's trajectory. Harvey stood too, and perforce Mike stood with him, still in his solid grip.

Annie and Ken alone failed to stand. Annie, Mike realized, had fallen asleep, and Ken sat with her, patient. He twisted his neck to see Mike, and shook his head, smiling.

The hand on Mike's wrist gripped him tighter, as Harvey hissed "Come on, come on," to nobody in particular. He brought up his hands (so, perforce, Mike's hand) to face-height, leaning to the left to encourage the ball to stay fair. Mike didn't even look at the field: he saw the moment the ball landed fair in Harvey's face. The excitement of it, the triumph. His hands turned to fists (okay, the one that didn't have a hand in it did), and his throat moved with a shout that was inaudible in the general roar around them. After a moment Harvey let him go, the better to reach out and whack him on the shoulder.

"Did you see that?" he cried, and whacked Mike again. "Did you see that?"

Mike had not seen that. Mike had not been paying attention to baseball in any way. He bore up under the enthusiastic assault and sat again when Harvey sat. Thinking he was cheeky, Mike claimed the armrest for himself. But Harvey was no longer interested in the competition between them. He slung an arm across Mike's shoulders, the better to lean in and explain fine points of on-field strategy. His thumb landed on the back of Mike's neck, steady, comfortable.

"Okay, now watch the first-base coach," said Harvey in his ear, ignoring the flush of Mike's face as if it were sunburn after all.

Grinning, Mike relaxed into the arm behind him and did as he was told, with no idea who was winning.

Chapter Text

"Fussy, fussy," was what Donna was saying, as Mike rounded the corner. Harvey was pouting at her which meant he was probably aware of the failures in his own behavior. He loomed over Donna's cube with his wallet in his hand. She told him, "I trust you will find something on the menu you can ask for."

"Client lunch?" Mike asked.

"Client lunch," Donna sniffed. "The client in question loves that new French fusion place."

"Ah," said Mike.

"And this provides what insight into my psychological depths?"

Mike was not foolish enough to openly discuss Harvey's problem with French. "Ah, voir dire," he joked. "And now we have reached the end of all the French I can say."

"Flambe," said Donna, rolling her eyes. "Don't be late."

Harvey made a face at her.

"Say Yes, Donna."

"Yes, Donna," said Harvey, and went.

"Fussy, fussy," she said to his back.

Mike waited just till he was out of earshot to ask, "How do you even do that?"

"Years of practice."

"Hey, I'm at 2 years more or less," Mike pointed out. He checked the corridors in either direction and leaned on the edge of her cube. "Is there a graduation ceremony? Do I get my junior achievement badge some time soon?"

"You're hilarious." Donna gazed up at him without illusion. "And you know something."

"I do?"

She gave him that little you will soon die weeping smile she usually reserved for Louis. "He was nice to Jessica this morning. I am not saying you're the one who gave him the lobotomy, just that you know who did."

"Does Harvey know you're slandering him like this?"

"Pod people can't be slandered," she pointed out. "Answer the question."

Mike stood up straight and tapped his folder against his leg. Harvey was as hard on his sleep pattern as ever, and more receptive to the combative quip than he'd been in a long time. He took pleasure in baiting the new British partners, but no more than he took pleasure in baiting anyone else. He wasn't currently at war with Louis. He never, ever made reference to the child, and would never forgive Mike if he told anyone. Even Donna. Maybe especially Donna. "Has he ever lied to you?"

"Has Harvey Specter ever lied to me," she said. "You mean, has he ever told me a meeting ran late when he was actually out seeking his junk food du jour?"

"That's French, I like that. But no, I mean, about something --"

"Important." She did a lot of her job with charm, so to see that charm turned off was a little -- odd. Surprisingly vulnerable. "You mean, have I failed to notice how he's turned into a completely different person in the last year?"

Mike wanted to tell her so bad. He wanted her to tell him, so that he could know he wasn't alone. But even if Donna knew, she would never tell. She was Harvey's perfect friend, far more perfect than Mike could hope to be. He watched her mobile face.

"I think Ken --"

"I think you changed him," she interrupted. "He's had a brother for 36 years but they've never been this close."

"That's all Ken," he denied. "I'm just a useful tool in his hands."

He was standing over her, but somehow Donna could look up at him in a way that made him feel small. "You and Kenny are alike: you push him and push him and don't know when it's getting dangerous."

Mike frowned at her. "It's not --"

"I make it a practice not to ask him questions he's not prepared to answer." She gave him a superior smile. "So no, in general, he does not lie to me."

"But he doesn't always tell you the truth."

"But he doesn't lie to me."

"But," Mike persisted, "he doesn't always tell you --"

"I push him only as far as I think he can handle."

Donna did not know about the child. Mike was certain of it now. The creeping intimidation of her calm certainty fell away from him.

She said, "And you still haven't answered the question."

"I don't know," said Mike, and it was easy to lie to her, effortless. "I don't know what's changed."

She scanned his features, skeptical, but gave up after a moment. "Be on the lookout," she said, and turned back to her computer screen.

*

The long slow strokes of a paint roller were hypnotizing, just the thing to lull you into an afternoon nap on a rainy Sunday. If only you didn't have to wash paint off your hands (and sometimes, if you were clumsy, your face), and there was also the matter of whether Ken and Annie owned enough beds for a guest to get one (probably not). The patter of rain came in through the kitchen windows, dull but not cold, and above that Ken's phone, plugged into frighteningly high-tech professional speakers, as it played piano-roll polkas.

Mike shuffled on the drop cloth and moved to the next expanse of wall. His roller was covered with a cheerful yellow, not a color he'd ever painted a room before. It was technically the dining room on the first floor ("Parlor floor," Ken corrected, hip-deep in the arcana of row-house terminology), but considering the Specter-Chois did not own a dining table at the moment, the purpose of the room was not yet clear.

The ladder fell open under Ken's hands. He climbed it as he asked, "So what does your house need, huh?"

"Nothing?" Mike said, his brains still on the soothing, sticky sound of the roller. "I mean, I ask the super for stuff and sometimes it gets fixed."

"Oh. I guess I thought you owned your place. Are law school loans really that bad?"

"No, I, no." Mike wiped another fleck of yellow off his cheek and realized that nobody'd ever asked him why he lived in a tiny efficiency in a poor-to-mixed neighborhood. Corporate lawyers could afford better, even ones who had real loans to pay off. He could afford better. He reapplied his efforts to the wall. "I did buy a place in Manhattan. It was for my grandmother, but she died before she could move in. I couldn't live there myself, so I sold it again."

"That sucks," said Ken quietly. Up and down, and up and down, the roller spread yellow on the old plaster wall. It was like melted butter, comforting. They worked side by side in silence for a little while, the absurd polkas bouncing gladly behind them.

Ken did the fine work, edging with a brush just below the crown molding. Hunched forward, eyes intent on the bristles, as if this task were as fascinating as an amicus curiae. He had paint in his hair, a fact Mike didn't have the heart to tell him yet. Mike was running out of wall, and would soon have to rearrange the drop cloth to turn the corner.

"You know," said Ken, as the brush glided another inch, "you make it pretty tough to pay a guy back for all his help."

Mike gave that the chuckle Ken expected. "You don't owe me anything. I want to be here."

"No seriously," said Ken, without looking down.

"Seriously. You didn't know me before. I, uh, well, you've heard my brain on the hamster wheel. I used to spend half my time high to get it down to a dull roar, and the other half hanging out with my weed-dealer buddy hoping to score from him. You leave me alone in my own 340 square feet of paradise, and once I've scanned through all the cable channels and knitted myself a replica of the Brooklyn Bridge out of drinking straws, it gets pretty hard to resist the temptation."

Ken thankfully did not express an opinion about the patheticness of one's mental crutch of choice being marijuana. "Dude," he said, "you need a hobby. Knitting is big these days. We can find you a circle of manly knitters."

"I'm thinking of taking up recreational latex painting. Seems like a lot of fun, with the right company." Ken glanced at him before returning to the sharp edge he was painting. It was easier for Mike to say it to the wall: "I'm not kidding when I say my two hobbies used to be weed and Doritos. I managed to pick up lawyering to fill 80% of that time, but they kind of frown on you spending every day in the office."

"You left a lot of stoner friends behind."

"I left everyone behind," said Mike. He'd never said it so bluntly before, even to himself. "Except the ones who left me. I had a girlfriend for a while, but that's over."

"Wait, you had a girlfriend? And you didn't bring her to the wedding?"

"Yeah, it would have been weird. We work together, she knows Harvey -- it would have been weird."

Ken was quiet for several long minutes, as if the brush in his hand required total concentration. Finally he said, "Because I really thought you were gay, and working yourself up to dating my brother."

"Well," Mike told him, philosophical, "that's what she thinks too. Which is why she broke up with me."

"Ouch."

They let that hang between them as Ken climbed down off the ladder and they repositioned the dropcloth for the next -- last -- segment of wall. Ken did not ask the obvious question, and the hamster wheel in Mike's brain insisted on filling that gap.

"He's not interested in the long-term. He's pretty honest about it, really, which is the only redeeming feature of his ability to pick up a waitress in a bar." The roller sucked up paint from the tray, and went onto the wall. Yellow up, yellow down.

"And you are," said Ken behind him. "Interested in the long-term."

Mike painted rather than continue the conversation. They'd criticized Harvey plenty, the two of them, and it didn't change things. Mike got to the top and ran out of wall: the whole dining room was painted, except for the last details that required Ken's brush. In front of the kitchen sink, Mike turned the tap with his elbow and watched water dilute the color off the roller and send it down the drain.

He worked his fingers into the nap, soapy, and the yellow poured off. Mike liked this kitchen, with its window over the tiny back yard, its ramshackle cabinets too small for modern cooking paraphernalia. They would probably take down the strip of wallpaper that decorated the top of the kitchen wall eventually, but in the meantime its homey ugliness was comfortingly familiar.

Lost in thought, Mike startled when Ken pushed in beside him at the sink. They shared the stream out of the tap, each with his tool in his yellowed hands washing carefully, their shoulders bumping at odd moments.

"I quit smoking," Ken told the faucet.

Mike had not seen him smoke in months, not since the first time they met. "Did the Wrath of Khan finally descend upon you?"

Because their shoulders were touching, Mike could feel the hitch in Kenny's breath. He set aside the roller and gave the man his full attention.

"No, that's not why," said Ken, and put his head down. He didn't volunteer a reason and Mike didn't push him. They cleaned up together and dried off and raided the fridge for beers. The polkas droned on in the other room, half-forgotten. His hip against the counter, his jeans dotted with yellow spots, Ken tugged aside the curtain from the window and stared at the rain as it fell. "You're not biking home in this."

Ken was not ready for him to leave anyway. Mike said nothing. He watched Ken take a deep breath and come to a decision.

"Even if he did break up with you." Mike winced, and Kenny went on. "I've spent the last 20 years juggling relatives who can't be in the same room with each other."

Mike did not think of that as something to be proud of. Ken stood up and crossed the narrow space and got a handful of Mike's t-shirt. His gaze was intense, overwhelming. Whatever his dislike for confrontation, he was still a Specter.

"So you'd still be welcome here. You know that, right?"

The surprise of it was what undid Mike. He took a shaky breath and lowered his head. The patented Kenny bear hug came up around him (the beer still in his hand cold against Mike's spine) and Mike struggled to get ahold of himself.

"That's what family means," Ken said, cheerful now, jostling. He pulled Mike forward out of the kitchen and paced him toward the front of the building arm in arm. "Also arguing me out of painting the living room lime green."

A close examination of the spackled, shabby white walls was an excuse for Mike to turn away and make sure his eyes were dry. The living room had acquired a couch (gray), and a television, but not much else.

"I think," Mike said over his shoulder, "that lime green is a great idea."

*

"Mike Ross," came that alto voice, and he'd been hanging around with Kenny Specter too long, because that was the first time Mike realized that Jessica Pearson sounded a little bit like the computer's voice on Captain Picard's Enterprise. It was the briskness of her, the authority, the calm. Jessica Pearson could totally tell you No intelligent life and you would believe her.

He managed to keep that entire train of thought inside his head, as she came at him down the hallway. She wore an ecru knitted dress and high heels: obviously planning to meet with someone whose socks she wanted to knock off. She gave Mike a perfunctory smile and gestured for him to walk along with her.

"Louis has asked me to write a recommendation letter," she said. She nodded at her employees as she passed them, friendly but determined on her trajectory. "One of the paralegals."

Mike lengthened his stride to keep up. "Ah, yes. Rachel Zane."

"Needless to say, I know her father."

"You do," Mike agreed.

Jessica was cool, impersonal. "Is there a reason I should write this letter?"

"Yes." Mike paced alongside her and marshaled his argument. "Because she's maxed out all the advancement she can get at the paralegal level. Because every senior partner she works with think she's brilliant. Because unlike half the associates you hire, she actually does want to spend her entire career in corporate law."

"Those are reasons for someone to write her a letter. Is there," she asked, "a reason I should write the letter?"

Mike stopped. Jessica was an able improviser and took only two steps before she swung around and faced him. It was something he needed to say while looking her in the eye.

"Because I want you to mentor her. She's got the brains and the ambition but she doesn't have the guile, and I realize that if I'm saying it then she's really bad. Louis could turn her cynical, but I think you could turn her into a star."

Jessica Pearson's wide and lovely smile. Mike was not so naive as to think that she was flattered.

"You think I can make her into another Harvey?"

"God, I hope not," said Mike with mock weariness.

"I heard that!" called Harvey, from a conference room four doors away. Jessica, unsurprised, glanced over her shoulder at him. They said a great deal to each other without a word. It wasn't a friendship Mike understood, but they smirked at one another in mutual understanding. When she turned back to Mike, she seemed to have made a decision.

"I make no promises. But I'll meet with her."

Mike smiled at her, relieved. "You won't regret it."

"You'll hear about it if I do," she said, and brushed past him on her way to her next meeting.

*

It was never strictly necessary to chase down Harvey at his home, because he was in the office early and late. Mike had always made a habit of it, though, and today was no different. He had a gaggle of associates he was theoretically meeting for drinks in Tribeca in an hour or two, but before then he headed over for a look at the late October sunset from Harvey's floor-to-ceiling windows.

"I got your financial disclosures right here," he announced as Harvey let him in.

But Mike figured out pretty quick that Harvey wasn't in that kind of mood. He'd taken off his jacket and tie and rolled up his sleeves, and gave the folder a puzzled glance as he accepted it. He followed Mike back into the living area of his own apartment without any objection, a thoughtful expression on his face. The doors to the balcony were open, and the breeze came in cool over the room. The lid on the piano was open.

Papers down on a side table, Harvey sat again on the bench and set his fingers on the white keys. His back was to Mike, shoulders hunched. In his white dress shirt, he looked like that picture of his father Mike had seen in Ken's photo album. A long slow caress up to the high keys, and Harvey set his fingers firmly and began to play.

Left to his own devices -- and wasn't that some strange kind of trust --, Mike drifted over to the windows, but the lowering orange sky couldn't keep his attention. He pulled at the knot in his tie absently and turned.

The kitchen was pristine, all hard white surfaces in a way that Mike thought of as aggressively masculine. Harvey was not the kind to leave the toaster out on the counter and mar that wide, luxurious emptiness that you'd see in a design magazine, so it was hard not to notice a rectangle of high-quality cream stationery set out on the island. A matching envelope, not embossed or anything, but fine and heavy, like the paper dollar bills are made of. A fountain pen lay neatly next to the blank page, but that was all.

Harvey was not in the habit of hand-writing letters when a printer would do the trick so nicely. Mike did not allow his glance to linger. More than likely he was writing another letter to the mother of the rescued child. It was almost a year since the transplant, and they would be able to say definitively that she was cured. Mike couldn't imagine what Harvey was planning to write, and the blank page tended to indicate that neither did Harvey.

He sat on the bench, noodling at his piano. It was some kind of early jazz, something Mike could not quite recognize, with the melody in the right hand while the left bounced back and forth between notes in a rhythmic chord. A closed book of sheet music sat on the ledger: he was playing from memory, at half-speed so it came out dignified rather than like dance music. He watched his hands as he played, deep in concentration, and ignored Mike.

Harvey sat on the bench as he always did, at one end of it, plenty of room beside him. Mike suspected that even when he was alone he sat that way: trained by a lifetime of playing next to his father, his brother. Mike watched him and wondered whether he let women see him this way, whether he brought home his conquests and let them persuade him to play, or whether he put them off with some kind of deprecating lie. Just a piece of furniture I inherited, he might say. Harvey wasn't the kind of man to pretend disinterest in something so important to him, but he also wasn't the kind to allow his bedmates the intimacy of watching him play. Mike hadn't seen him pick up a woman in a long while.

He got to the bridge and Mike recognized the song at last: King Porter Stomp. "Jelly Roll Morton," he said aloud, and Harvey corrected:

"It's Fletcher Henderson's arrangement. With the piano playing every part except the brass." He spoke over his shoulder without looking up.

Of course he would play all the parts except the brass. Half the bench next to him was just empty and ready for someone to sit there. So Mike on impulse went and sat there. It sounded different, when it was right in front of you. The wood of the piano's frame vibrated subtly in a way he could feel in the bones of his face.

"You make it look easy," said Mike, mild.

Harvey did not miss a note. "I make everything look easy."

Mike cracked up and elbowed him gently. "Harvey Specter, you've got hidden depths."

"Oh, read a couple of music theory books, you'll catch up."

After all this time, Harvey's idea of how Mike's brain worked was still completely wrong. "It's a physical skill. You don't get that out of a book. You practiced for years to learn to do that, right? Even though it was a long time ago. It's like riding a bike."

It was too direct, too heartfelt, for Harvey Specter to respond to that directly. He scoffed, "Are you telling me you didn't learn to ride that goddamn bike from reading a book about it?"

Mike knew how to play this game. "A master never reveals his secrets," he intoned. He turned back to the keys in front of him, smiling.

The veins and tendons on the backs of Harvey's hands stood up as he played one note, two, a chord. It did seem effortless, the way he contorted his fingers into new shapes to hit the right keys at the right time. He hit a few high notes, his forearm straying into Mike's space, and then retreated back to the lower register. Head down, his shaved neck extended almost horizontal from the back of his loosened collar.

He came to the end of the song and played the closing notes sharply, lifting his wrists. Mike couldn't help himself: "Play it, Sam. Play As Time Goes By."

Harvey snorted. His shoulders jostled Mike's as they sat together. "Find me the sheet music for it and I will. But no singing."

"No singing," Mike agreed, and watched Harvey reach out for the song book in front of him. He flipped the pages aside without picking it up, and the reason became clear pretty quickly: there were loose pages leaved into it. One ruled page with handwriting, a print-out, a photo glimpsed only briefly that Mike was pretty sure was of Harvey's father, in his tuxedo. Harvey turned a page and Mike saw himself, the snapshot of him as a toddler. Harvey did not linger over it or explain it away, just walked his fingers forward toward the piece he was looking for. At last Harvey settled on a page and then settled his hands again to play.

"Okay," he said, slow while his hands were working, "this is Fats Waller, Handful of Keys."

And indeed, it was a handful. Even at his leisurely tempo, Harvey played trills and curlicues, this time with his eyes on the page rather than his hands. Mike watched his gaze move from one cluster of notes to another and then watched Harvey's fingertips as they found their locations by touch. Unlike the previous song, this one required use of the entire keyboard, and Mike found Harvey's forearm in front of him more often than not. His elbow brushed Mike's side, again, a third time.

It was sprightly, a clever little song once Mike had listened to the main melodic line a couple of times. It sounded a little like someone showing off. Harvey reached up and flipped to the next page and soldiered onward, mouth open, eager. Mike was pretty sure he couldn't be playing it cold, just from reading. Surely he'd practiced it a few times before. It was thrilling, though, to see the work and the concentration result in something lovely. No, Harvey would not let many people see him this way.

Heat rose off his shoulders. The breeze from the balcony was turning cold as the orange evening fell into a rosy twilight shade. Without thinking too hard about it, Mike reached out to still Harvey's right hand and when he turned his head to find out why Mike kissed him.

Quickly, not demanding, and he backed off after a moment, Harvey's elbow against his side. Harvey's gaze rested on Mike's mouth, and he did not try to pull his hand away. Slowly he brought his eyes up to Mike's, and in the dimness they were black and bottomless. He leaned in for a second try and Mike met him halfway.

Kissing your boss ought to feel more dangerous than that, more like a risk. Harvey lifted his right arm so instead of across Mike's body it went around, short fingernails sharp on Mike's shoulder blade. Side by side as they were, they leaned into one another, both of them panting, the smell of sweat strong. Mike felt like some huge fishhook had him by the solar plexus, yanking him forward in a way that was half-painful. He hung onto Harvey's ribs and felt a similar shudder, something helpless and glorious and impossible. They weren't even kissing now, just melted together into a four-legged lump on the bench, knees pressed hard against one another, faces in each other's collarbones. Mike clung to him, afraid and exalted.

"This isn't a one-time deal," he murmured.

Harvey didn't answer in words. His left elbow came down on the piano keys, a goofy cacophonous blurt of music.

"I want, I want --" Mike couldn't say what he wanted.

A big breath expanded Harvey's ribcage. He moved and Mike realized they were disentangling their bodies. And that was when the danger struck, an icy spike of fear that Mike had fucked it up, and this was all going to fall apart. He let his hands come away and rest again in his lap.

Harvey didn't let go, though. He rested his forehead on Mike's temple. "It's not something I'm good at," he said in Mike's ear, all the way at the bottom of his register so it vibrated in Mike's ear like the piano. Mike took a breath and waited for the definitive rejection, but Harvey stayed where he was, silent, his breath hot against Mike's neck. It was too good, too gentle: even Harvey could not be so cruel.

It seemed like a long time, but maybe it wasn't. "Be patient with me," Harvey said at last.

Patient. Mike turned his face and they were kissing again, calmer now, not so frantic. "You mean," he told the stubble on Harvey's chin, "I shouldn't put out yet."

The sky was a dark rich purple, and no lights in the entire apartment. Mike could hardly see his face. He felt rather than saw Harvey's smile. "I thought I was the one who wouldn't put out."

That hellish elevator ride, those long weeks of loneliness back in January. He'd only been trying to score points, but leave it to Harvey to see the literal truth under the sarcasm. Mike said, "Got you all bothered, did I?"

"Go turn on the lights, you fucking tease." He put his hand back down on the piano keys and played a chord blind. "I gotta practice."

Mike cracked up. He couldn't help it, and shook laughing with Harvey's hand still on his shoulder. "Practice makes perfect," he gasped out, and went to find the light switch.

*

November. The leaves on the trees in the median strip turned yellow-brown but stubbornly refused to fall. Mike brought in a brilliant red maple leaf from his commute and kept it in his cube, vaguely of the opinion that it would be a good color for a room in Ken and Annie's house. The plasterers were done on the upper floors, and they would need help with the paint roller again soon.

Mike opened the drawer of his desk one day and discovered his grandmother's pins underneath a few of his business cards, folded carefully in Kleenex and then forgotten. He'd meant to give them to Rachel, but had wimped out back in August. On impulse, he decided that it was time.

Up the stairs, picking bits of fuzzy paper out from the nooks and crannies of the pins, he blew on them and then licked his thumb to try to swipe off the dust of their dis-use. He detoured to the bathroom to wash them carefully with hand-soap, and blotted them dry with his pocket handkerchief. The brass one looked like a feather, scored to show the pattern of the barbs off the shaft. The silver and rhinestone circle-pin was harder to clean, but flashed brightly once dry. With the two of them cradled in cotton, he slipped off toward Rachel's office.

She was at her desk, reading with a critical frown on her face.

"Uh, hi," he said, and realized how foolish he must look. "I brought you something."

It wasn't that they hadn't talked in a couple of months. They could keep on their professional faces just fine. They hadn't talked, but they hadn't made a scene either. "Mike," she said faintly, still brains-deep in whatever case she was researching.

"I went through my grandmother's things." He held out his open hand to her, the two pins winking in the sunlight. "And wanted you to have these."

Slowly, as if afraid he would snatch them away, Rachel put out her hand. She lifted the circle pin and examined it.

"They're not real diamonds, obviously."

"Mike, this is --"

"And I'll never wear it," he said, and choked out a laugh.

She set down the circle pin and picked up the feather. It was heavy despite its delicate look, solid brass. Without a word she took it and pinned it to her sweater, just below her collarbone.

"Thank you," she said, still with her eyes on herself.

"It looks good on you," he said, and meant it. He wasn't sure what he was supposed to say next, but Rachel took care of that.

"You've changed." She watched as he folded his handkerchief and stuffed it back into his pocket.

Mike strangled in his necktie, head down, and said nothing.

"Are you dating him?" she asked.

That startled him enough to meet her level gaze. There was no malice in her attention.

"Kind of? Not really?" He paced in front of her desk and floundered for an explanation. "I don't know if he can really do anything serious. That's not his M.O. But I'm --"

If he couldn't say it to Rachel, he couldn't say it to anyone. He let his shoulders slump.

"I'm in love with him. And I don't -- sometimes I feel like I'm going to fly apart. It's terrifying."

"That's why they call it falling, I guess."

"I hate it sometimes. I don't -- if he's doesn't want --"

"I know," said Rachel.

"But I can't... not." Mike took a long breath. She gazed at him patiently from her desk and he calmed down and was able to stand still before her. "The possibility of devastating failure, and then having to get up and decide what to do next if it happens --"

"Yes Mike," said Rachel, with her old brittle smile. "I'm familiar with it."

"Apply to Harvard again," he begged her.

She did not blink. "Already am," she told him, her expression as pitiless as anything.

*

If he hadn't ended up an attorney, Harvey would have made a great sous-chef. He didn't have the imperious time-management skills required to rule the kitchen, but if you put things in front of them he could chop them like a champ. He stood in the little kitchen of the Specter-Chois and chopped, till Annie handed him green beans which he could snap with his hands.

Mike had kind of thought that Thanksgiving in Crown Heights was going to be a housewarming party, what with a table finally having arrived for the dining room (AND chairs!). The living room had turned a warm sandy tan and sprouted a pair of stuffed side chairs, and the hallway next to the stairs bore a series of vertical paint samples in various shades of gray. But the only guests here to appreciate it were Mike and Harvey. The kitchen wouldn't fit them all, so Mike and Ken hung out on the threshold of the dining room, kibbitzing and drinking beer, as was their proper role on this earth.

"Yeah, so where is everybody?" he asked sotto voce, while they laid out plates on the table. Really, if not for the wedding who knew what they'd all be eating off of. "I thought you said a couple friends were coming over."

"Later," said Ken, without a pause. "Family first."

Mike straightened and managed to wipe the thunderstruck look off his face before he turned back toward the kitchen. Annie stood red-faced over a boiling pot over the stove, poking at something. Beads of sweat leapt out on her forehead, though Mike was pretty sure he hadn't seen her drinking. "Uh, maybe we should spell you guys?" he suggested, but Ken had already beaten him to it.

He dragged a chair away from the table and commanded, "Sit, woman." And for once Annie said nothing and sat. She fanned herself with her hand and without a word Harvey took her place in front of the stove.

Ken darted in behind him and opened the freezer for a couple of ice cubes. One he dropped down the front of Annie's t-shirt (to her shrieking laughter) and the other he held against the back of her neck.

"Game-time's four o'clock," he said, as if continuing a conversation they'd already been having. "And that's about when dessert will show up."

"Oh okay," Mike joshed him, "that's what your friends are? Just dessert-delivery devices?"

"From you," and Ken pointed at Mike's chest, "I expect dish-washing."

"Dammit Jim," Mike protested, "I'm a doctor, not a kitchen worker!"

Harvey failed to notice this joke. He stood there subdued in front of the stove with his long sleeves pushed up, stirring the boiling pot. It was possible he wasn't listening at all. Mike drifted over to stand by the sink as if ready for action, and peered over Harvey's shoulder at the potatoes he was crushing against the edge of the pot. The chicken on the far counter sat in its tinfoil hat, resting -- dinner was pretty much ready. Mike obviously hadn't been paying attention. Harvey crushed the potatoes in their boiling water like lying witnesses in a deposition.

"I think we should tell them now," said Annie, loud.

Mike was looking past Harvey to see what the hell she was talking about, so he saw that little frown before Harvey lifted the pot and elbowed Mike in the side. Mike slid out of the way and the hot water poured into the colander. Harvey was wreathed in steam, up around his face, curling his hair. Between his shoulder blades, a small dark patch of sweat on the cotton of his shirt.

Colander up, shaken firmly, potatoes back into the pot. Harvey raised his elbow and mashed those potatoes as if they'd called him names. Beyond him, in the cheery yellow dining room, Ken eyed his brother uncertainly, but kept his fingers against his wife's neck. "Yeah, no time like the present."

Harvey put down the spoon in anticipation. Obviously, he'd guessed what was up, or suspected. He didn't turn towards the dining room. Mike saw him take a deep breath, as if to face the worst, and then his face went blank.

"So yeah," said Annie, and waved her hand. It was just about the only time Mike had seen her shy. "Kinda pregnant."

"WHAT," Mike whooped in his shock. He jostled Harvey, who stood stolid before the stove. "How, what --"

"Please don't make me explain the how," Annie laughed, and stood to receive the hug due her, and a kiss on the cheek. Hyperventilating, Mike turned to reach out for Ken, but he was halfway in the kitchen with his arm around Harvey, who stood there with his jaw clenched and his eyes screwed shut.

"Dude, dude," Ken was chanting, low, the brothers forehead-to-forehead, their different shades of blond hair overlapping. "Dude." That was somehow the right thing to say, because as if he'd suddenly remembered his lines Harvey opened his eyes and put a hand against Kenny's chest.

"How many times have I told you not to call me dude." His eyes swept past Mike entirely and he half-led, half-dragged his brother back toward Annie. He was the portrait of graciousness as he took her hand and leaned in to kiss her cheek. "When is the big day?"

"Next May," she said, and shook her bangs over her eyes. "They told us not to tell anybody till three months in."

Mike launched himself at Ken. "Son of a bitch, that's why you quit smoking." Ken obviously had several extra arms, because he managed to keep a grip on his brother as he thumped Mike on the back.

"You mean, he quit years ago, because it's a terrible habit," Harvey corrected.

"Yes, of course that's what he means," said Ken. And had to hug everyone all over again.

"Okay," Annie said at last, "so the pregnant lady is hungry. How about we sit down to dinner?"

Mike provided the extra hands for transporting the food to the actual table, while Harvey finished mashing the potatoes. It seemed like a real holiday table, with a chair on each side and the cheery yellow walls behind them. They sorted themselves out and sat in front of their plates.

"Best Thanksgiving ever," said Ken, in lieu of anything so mushy as a blessing. He sat at the foot of the table and spent most of the meal gazing fondly at his wife at the head. Harvey ate in silence. It fell to Mike and Annie to make conversation, mostly about all the things pregnant ladies were not allowed to do, touch, or taste. (Put on hard hats: yes. Eat tuna fish: apparently no.) Alert, they observed their dinner companions and recognized each other's efforts at keeping things light. It seemed unlikely that the brothers Specter would fight, given how they'd been earlier, but they might yet pull some kind of weird quiet misunderstanding with one another.

The dishes were cleared and coffee brewing as the afternoon grew late. "Asbestos?" Mike asked Annie.

"Asbestos'll kill you pregnant or no," Annie reminded him. She sat serene in her dining-room chair: poisonous building materials were pretty much her bread-and-butter. "But at least it's slow. It's lead you have to worry about in old houses."

"Oh god," said Ken, and clutched his chest. "Are you going to make me paint the living room all over again?"

"Note how we got all the walls upstairs redone with new plaster," his wife told him, as he opened the cabinet to pull down coffee mugs. "Just don't sand anything and we'll be safe."

Ever mature, Ken stuck his tongue out at her. Harvey had his hands in his pockets, and watched them spar with an intent expression on his face. Ken took that moment to grab Mike's shoulders one more time.

"You're gonna be a great dad," Mike told him.

Ken mashed him close. Mike thought it was just another hug, but then Ken whispered in his ear, "Now when you're old, you'll have somebody to look after you." He changed his grip on Mike's shoulders and turned him around. Throat tight, Mike stared into the dining room with no idea what he was supposed to see. "Up, you doofus."

Mike looked up. On the header that separated dining room from kitchen was one small photograph, not more than a few inches square, framed in black. It showed a young couple with their infant in arms, standing proudly in front of a walk-up in Borough Park. It was the only thing on the wall aside from the gentle ugly stripe of wallpaper "Oh," Mike warbled, and wiped his eyes. "Right."

Self-possession having abandoned him, Mike stood there in the kitchen like a fence-post, in the way. Ken man-handled him a little in one direction, and then a different set of hands took him up and led him by the elbow into the living room. He was maneuvered in front of the couch and sat down and someone sat down beside him.

A big hand rested between his shoulder blades and presumably felt every tremor in Mike's body. Lips at his temple, in front of his ear, against his cheekbone. The tremors turned into something else and Mike was kissing him, eating him up, thumbs on Harvey's cheeks and breath in his face. In the Specter-Choi living room, in front of everyone, really, who gave a shit. Harvey's hand landed on his knee and held on. They paused only to breathe.

"If only I'd known," Harvey remarked, cool except for the flush in his neck. "How mashed potatoes turn you on."

They were doing this, yes they were. Ken and Annie were quiet as churchmice in their own home. Mike hadn't let go of Harvey's face and tried to plumb the depths of his seriousness. Harvey was smiling, that smug little grin of his, but as Mike watched it fell away and underneath lay a withered lump of melancholy, shrunken and long neglected like the last of the winter apples. Harvey did not even try to deceive him. Mike knew everything, and Mike was the only one who knew.

The child, of course, the child. Mike's hurt was not the only hurt in this room.

There was a quip Mike was supposed to come up with at a time like this, if for no other reason then to let Ken and Annie feel like they were allowed to talk, and like, enter their own living room. Mike did not have a quip available to him at the moment. "You okay?" he murmured.

Harvey made an equivocal shrug. "Climb into my lap and ask me that."

Deflections, deflections. It was what they did. "Fucking tease," Mike told him, and forced a laugh. "The guests will be here any minute." They both laughed, to signal to the owners of the house that they were free to move about in it again. Harvey kissed him one last time and oriented himself forward in time to accept a mug of coffee from Ken. One hand stayed warm on Mike's knee.

Ken came back with another mug for Mike, a weird expression on his face that was half surprise and half I-told-you-so. Annie settled behind him on one of the stuffed chairs and flexed her knees.

"Game's gonna be boring after all this," she said, and sipped her coffee.

"Yeah," Ken told her, "But we still get dessert."

*

And that was all. There was a little girl in the world with Harvey's bone-marrow growing in place of her own, and she would go on to a happy and healthy life none the wiser. Would never meet her cousin or her awesome aunt and uncle. Mike wouldn't ever be able to tell her how Harvey had changed in the past year. She was present in Mike's mind every day, ten times a day, and Harvey, as he'd said he would, never spoke of her.

He sat in his office brooding sometimes, but didn't answer if you asked him what was on his mind. He still gamely carried it alone, even with willing porters by his side.

He was up on the observation deck when Mike found him, papers in hand that needed to be signed before the messenger arrived to courier them to the client. It had snowed in the morning, sharp and wintry, but the sun broke through the clouds at lunchtime and the afternoon promised melt. The metal railings had dried and Harvey leaned on one, his face inclined toward the setting sun as if he were on a beach somewhere.

"Signatures," said Mike, by way of explanation and apology. He gave Harvey the folder and turned his back and Harvey rested the papers on Mike's shoulders to sign them. Mike felt the pen like a tickle against his scapula, and then it was done.

Harvey was inclined to solitude, clearly. But the messenger wouldn't arrive for another twenty minutes and Mike for once did not have a shocking backlog of makework on his desk and it was a sunny afternoon in December. He put his forearms on the railing and looked down at the city, the canyons of Midtown and their elegant blandeur. He probably would have just brooded there for a few minutes and then gone to meet the messenger, but Harvey turned around and stood next to him in the same posture. They looked down over their domain together.

They could have talked about the plan for Christmas, and whether they were going to settle definitively on the Crown Heights house as home base for Specter family events, but they didn't. They could have talked about the Mets, who were making bad trades at the Winter Meetings, but they didn't. It seemed to Mike that any time they were alone together in silence it was because of the unspoken thing.

"Tell Kenny," he said suddenly. It was what he'd been thinking -- he'd been thinking it for months -- but he had never intended to say it.

Harvey of course knew what he meant. He said nothing, didn't react at all. He stared impassively at the Depression-era details on the facade across the street. Harvey of course had thought about telling Ken in the past, surely since long before the first time Mike asked him to. He'd thought about it plenty, and hadn't told.

To the nothwest, Central Park lay a sodden gray expanse. A handspan of it was visible, a long diagonal strip between two taller buildings, and then another triangle further north. All the leaves were off the trees, and the naked branches sought the paltry sun without clothing. It was more than a year since the bone-marrow operation. Mike said carefully, "He's afraid you don't trust him."

Dark eyes traveled the landscape below, settled on one thing for a moment, and moved on.

"You're so stupid sometimes it makes me crazy," Mike confessed, hot. "You'd rather confide in your no-account two-bit pothead fool of an associate than in your own brother."

Faint lines of irritation crossed Harvey's face at that description. Mike barreled onward.

"He thinks you're weird about his becoming a father because you think he's a fuckup. He still thinks that you think he's a fuckup. And it eats him up, god, you don't even know. He wants you to be proud of him and he thinks you aren't."

He could feel Harvey's eyes on him now, the weight of that attention. Mike swallowed against the knot in his throat.

"Just clearing up the reasons for your weirdness would be enough. Just, let him know it's not his fault. But if you could let him in on it, let him see that even the Great Harvey Specter fucks up sometimes, it would -- he would --"

That stiff, combative, honorable expression on Harvey's face. "I promised I would stay away."

"You did. You have. And so will Kenny, if you ask him to."

Harvey listened, and didn't cut Mike off. He didn't just say no and walk away. He stood there, forearms on the railing, creases in the upper arms of his jacket. He frowned at the world below him and said nothing.

"It doesn't make you look weak," said Mike, and ventured a hand onto Harvey's neck. It wasn't something they did at work. But what the hell, they didn't talk about the child either. "He won't think any less of you. I don't think any less of you. Hell, you've been living with it for how many years, and I'm not even involved and it's killing me. You're a hell of a lot tougher than I am."

The folder with its signed papers flapped a little in the breeze. Harvey had them hanging over a 55-story drop, casually clamped between thumb and middle finger, as if they dared not fall. He took a breath, and straightened.

One thumb on Mike's chin, Harvey pushed in close and kissed him, toothy, intense. He stepped away at once without a blush. "I'll take these down to the messenger," he said.

Mike stood alone on the balcony in the crisp afternoon breeze.

Chapter Text

Although it had never happened in the history of the firm, part of Mike's training was an hour-long safety seminar about what to do if an angry client showed up unexpectedly and started shooting. (Short version: duck and call 911.) The only people who showed up at Pearson Hardman unexpectedly were angry people; the clients were generally rich enough to demand instant attention, but they were also rich enough that their attorneys would go to them, and not the other way around. So. Mike really didn't have a good idea what to do with someone who didn't have an appointment, but wouldn't leave.

"Does he have drop-in hours or something?" she asked. The security guard had called her a woman, but Mike stood in the lobby in front of a girl. She was lovely, tall and skinny like a gazelle on new legs, wearing a woman's formal wool coat that was too large for her and jeans. Her eyes were rich dark brown in a pale face, and her hair was dark gold in a pixie cut that made her look even younger than she probably was.

Mike sighed and led her to a corner of the lobby. "He's not a math professor. He only meets with clients by appointment. And you don't have one, Miss --"

"Kate D'Amato," she said, and looked Mike up and down. There was a certain frankness to her gaze that belied her age, despite her obvious uncertainty in the world of business. Her Long Island accent was strong. "I really need to meet with Mr. Specter."

"I'm his associate, so, you're meeting with me instead." Mike offered his name, and his hand to shake. She frowned at him, confused.

"I'm not going to meet with him?"

"If you can tell me a little bit about your problem, I might be able to bring it to him and see if he can take you on as a client. But he charges an awful lot --"

"I'd like to meet him," she insisted.

"I'm sorry, Miss D'Amato, I don't mean to pry, but are you even eighteen? Because if you're not --"

"My mother would have to sign for me?"

"You're not allowed to enter into any contracts on your own behalf without a parent or guardian's signature, yes." Mike gave her a canny look. "I... doubt you need criminal defense."

She laughed. It was a nice little laugh. Even though she was screwing up Mike's afternoon, he liked her a lot.

"I'd still like to meet him. If you could take me to Mr. Specter now, that'd be great."

She was not going to get in to see Harvey, who anyway was still at a client lunch at this hour. But honestly, if she was a minor -- and she'd deftly avoided answering that question -- then it was probably best to bring her to someone in authority, someone who could tell her no definitively, someone who could call her parents. "Tell you what, I'll introduce you to his exec Donna, and we'll see what she can do." The girl seemed satisfied with that answer, and followed Mike toward the elevators.

He made an effort at small talk, but Kate wasn't really interested. They got off at the 50th floor and she gawked at the conference rooms, the furniture, the view: her face was a pitched battle between awe and determination. He recognized that battle from his own first tour through the office. She carried her winter coat folder over her joined arms like a shield.

The fly in the ointment was that Harvey was not still out at lunch as Mike had expected. Harvey was in his office, writing on a notepad. He glanced up as Mike approached Donna's desk.

The situations in which it was possible to surprise Harvey Specter were few and precious. He glanced up and then down again and then his eyes snapped up again, and his lips parted as if to speak while he stared through his glass door.

Mike had long thought that Harvey had a nice face, his eyes warm brown and eyelids heavy and the lines around his mouth indicative of laughter. A nice face, a Basset hound face, which he controlled ruthlessly lest anyone think him soft. It was gratifying and rare to see Harvey's face so openly astonished. His brows went up in mesmerized wonder, as if Mike were leading around a unicorn rather than a pushy, clueless client. In all the time Mike had worked for him, he'd never seen Harvey so unguarded, so enthralled, and it was charming and vulnerable and strange. He slowed his pace along the hallway.

Donna was sitting still, her back to Mike, clearly shocked at her boss. She did not turn around even as Mike came abreast of her cube.

"Ah, Donna, hi, this is Kate D'Amato," he said, although Donna was paying him no attention at all. "I'm sure Harvey's got a ton of things on his plate --" And that was the moment Kate swept past him, and just walked up to Harvey's door and opened it and walked in. Teenagers. Mike skipped forward to intercept her.

"Miss, Miss, you can't --" he reached for her arm, and she neatly stepped out of the way and came to a stop right in front of Harvey's desk.

"Hi," said Kate. Her voice shook, only a little. "You're Harvey Specter. I'm your daughter."

Mike breathed out slowly. Harvey was not surprised, or anyway, his surprise had come the moment he'd seen her, and he did not react to her words. Mike did the math in his head; he'd assumed the child was, you know, a child. But Kate was sixteen, seventeen: born when Harvey was in law school. Years and years, and when the call came in, he'd volunteered without question.

Harvey stood up. "Mary Catherine D'Amato." He said it as a statement, not a question. Of course he would recognize her, despite never having met her before. They had the same eyes. Mike glanced from one to the other again, amazed.

"That's me," she answered brightly. She was afraid, of course she was afraid. Harvey was terrifying. She glanced around for somewhere to put her coat and Mike took it from her without a word. He laid it gently on the back of Harvey's couch.

Years and years -- she'd been born when Harvey was still a student, still penniless on Jessica's sufferance. She'd been born before he even met Donna. The girl shrank where she stood, the disappointment growing with every moment of silence. He wanted to intervene, but there wasn't a single thing he could think of to say. Mike half-reached out to grab Harvey and shake him, then stopped. It was up to him to respond, or not, and make her feel welcome, or not.

Kate took after her father in more than just coloration and height. "So anyway," she said, tough through the quaver in her voice, "I figured I should thank you for saving my life."

Harvey opened his mouth. Damn his inscrutable expression.

"For the -- bone marrow. Thing." Kate's smile began to falter. "Thirteen months, leukemia-free."

"Congratulations," said Harvey, his voice very low.

"They didn't tell me," she said. "I don't think I was supposed to know. But it came so fast, I mean, they tested Mom and my uncle and my cousins and when they didn't match it was going to be weeks or months or never. A match that fast I was either the luckiest duck in the world, or it was a relative."

That relative stepped away from his chair and came around to the front of his desk. He didn't deny he had saved her life, but neither did he claim that honor. He gazed at the girl, that probing, hard intelligence which Mike knew from experience was hard to bear.

She clutched her purse in front of her. "My mom doesn't know I'm here," she admitted.

Harvey's facade slipped, and the corner of his mouth turned up. "You snooped in her mail," said Harvey, engrossed in the mobility of her artless expressions.

Kate laughed, a self-deprecating little sound. "Her file cabinet. She filed your letters in a folder right behind my birth certificate."

Harvey slowly raised one hand to her. She slipped forward a step and met that hand and his fingertips brushed her cheek.

"Hi," said Kate.

"You're beautiful," Harvey breathed. He traced the shape of her cheekbone and she smiled back.

Mike realized abruptly that they'd forgotten he was there. "Hey, this is great," he said, and reached out to nudge Harvey's elbow. "How about the two of you have a seat on the couch right here, and I'll go cancel the afternoon's appointments."

They obeyed him without any acknowledgement that they'd heard a word. Harvey sat next to his daughter and his hand leapt forward again and Kate grabbed it.

He frowned a little. "We should call your mother. She's probably worried."

"Class trip. She thinks I'm looking at dinosaurs uptown," said Kate.

"She'll be angry. We agreed I wouldn't --"

"But you didn't," Kate interrupted. "I did."

"Argumentative," Harvey said, with a dazzled little smile.

Mike left them alone then. They were sitting together on the couch, hand in hand, and did not notice his leaving. He closed the door behind him and was just in time to offer a handkerchief for Donna, who was absolutely ruining her mascara.

She swung the curtain of her hair to hide it, and was almost back together again (anyway, she was done sobbing) when Louis ambled by fake-casually. "Mike," he said sharply, "what horrible thing did you say to Donna." He leaned forward over the wall of her cube and made as if to touch her shoulder, but his desire not to die bloody asserted itself, and he desisted.

"I don't know what you're talking about," Donna declared, her voice still a little wobbly. Mike's handkerchief disappeared into her fist and then into her lap under the desk.

Sadly bereft of subtlety, Louis peeked over Donna's shoulder into Harvey's office. "Bad news?" Louis asked, all fraternal concern. "If Harvey is treating you badly you just say the word."

Mike opened his mouth with no idea what violent dismissal was going to come out, but Donna, ever professional, beat him to it. "Very important client," she said, and drew herself up with a deep breath. She struggled to control her grin. "Very important."

"Incredibly important," Mike echoed, and watched the suspicion dance across Louis's rubbery features. "Harvey's going to be very busy today."

And with that Mike realized one more thing he had to do, and with a glance at Donna (as if she could not handle Louis alone, every day of the week and twice on Sundays) he excused himself in search of a quiet room in which he could place a phone call.

"Hey Ken, it's Mike."

"Hey. You would not believe the ridiculous shit they sell for babies, dude."

"And you're buying one of everything, I know you." Mike faced the wall in one of the conference rooms (not a glass wall). He breathed deep. "Listen, I'm not calling for me but for Harvey. Are you free this afternoon?"

Ken paused. "I have to make an appointment to talk with my own brother now?"

"No! Sorry. Jesus." Mike sighed. "He's just preoccupied at the moment and --"

"What happened? Is he okay?" Ken spun instantly from bothered to worried.

"It's --" Mike swallowed hard. "No, it's good news. It's very good news. Is Annie there or is she working?"

Ken said, tentative "Mike?"

"I'm okay," said Mike. "Can you both come by the office?"

"Annie's on a site visit in Parsippany. I, uh, I can probably be there in 45 minutes. You can't tell me what this is about?"

"Ken," said Mike, and his face hurt from smiling, "I am really sure that he's going to want to tell you himself."