Title: Shutting Down
Warnings: Language, drug use, implied dubcon, self-injury, suicide, character death.
A/N: This fic was a fill in response to a prompt over on the the Suitsmeme. It's sad and tragic and all that and I promise fluff as an apology when I'm done.

Original prompt (suitsmeme, prompt post round 2): Mike is in love with Harvey, but when he confesses it, Harvey rejects him and laughs it off. Mike is heart broken, and in a desperate attempt to numb out the heart ache, he starts abusing drugs. It lands him in therapy, and his depression starts to swallow his entire life. No one notices this because Mike keeps up an alright appearance, but eventually it's too much for him and he attempts suicide. Although Harvey can't return his feelings, he tries to help Mike as much as he can, Mike rejects his help thinking it's just pity. Mike ends up in a mental hospital, emotionally unstable and starts to lose touch with reality. Harvey witnesses Mike fall apart, and then Mike goes and succeeds in taking his own life. Harvey feels guilty, and in his own way (Doesn't how it to others) grieves the death of his associate. Everyone else in the firm grieves in their own way, and each one has a memory of Mike that they treasure in their own ways. Life changes for Harvey and those who knew Mike, even after death they are all haunted by his memory.

I would love to see everyone's first reaction when they find out about Mike's suicide attempt and when he actually succeeds at it. Bonus if you can describe how the funeral goes and who attends. Slash isn't really a must, but I'd like to see if Mike's death affects anyone! Lots of angst please, I wanna read it and cry my eyeballs out.

Mike stared numbly ahead, from his seat, his hands folded in a weak pile on his lap. The chaos of the hospital at midnight didn't slow for anyone, least of all him, he decided, but in the moment, so raw and apathetic from recent events, all he really heard were muddled, distant voices of doctors and nurses and patients. And all he saw was a white, white wall.

At some point - and maybe an hour had passed, or a minute, he really didn't know, or care - he found enough energy to turn his head down to his wilted hands, and his bandaged wrists, and the pale, tortured skin peeking out from beneath them.

Another hour passed, or maybe a minute-time was fluid and really, Mike hadn't know what day it was, let alone the time, in, well, see, that was the problem. So when a doctor, a familiar one, one so accustomed by now to his weekly ER visits and his self-mutilation and routine but-just-barely-unsuccessful overdosing, was shining a pen light into his eyes and trying with fire, wind, and rain - so to speak, of course - to get his attention, well, Mike was already too far inside of his own head, and he was long, long gone.

"I told you, Mike, I don't mix business with pleasure. "

"But-"

"But nothing! Now you have three cases and I'll be happy to give you another if that isn't enough work for that big brain of yours."

"But you said-"

"I'm a lawyer, Mike. I say a lot of things. I don't mean half of them. "

The doctor in front of him - thirty-five or so, give or take, Harvey's age, with light brown hair - was well-intentioned, but annoying. Mike swatted the penlight from his face and startled even himself with the movement. It required more energy than he thought he had - than he'd had in days, maybe weeks - and it snapped him out of his well-established shell of indifference.

"You want to talk now?" the doctor asked, and Mike should have taken him up on his innate compassion, on his time, because no one else seemed to have any. But he didn't.

"About as much as I want to jump out a plate-glass window," he said instead. He glared, but it was hardly threatening, and his eyes were gray now, not blue - no, not even close - and he just looked sick and lost.

Unfazed, the doctor sized him up, "So, you shouldn't be able to stop talking, then."

If Mike had it in him, he might have laughed, caustically so, that fake kind he did when someone outsmarted him, or mocked him, but he didn't have it in him. He had nothing in him. Maybe pain, but really, where pain had been there was just emptiness now; a dark, black pit of despair and it was hollow and neither this doctor or this hospital, or the pills, or the bandages, or talking, was going to touch it. And they certainly weren't going to heal it.

"I've never had occasion to stay any more than ten minutes with a patient in the ER on a day like this, on a Friday night, and you clearly don't remember me-" the doctor was saying. Mike stopped him mentally right there. He did remember him - his green eyes and his unyielding kindness and his nametag, what was it, Alex Freeman, MD - he remembered everything, whether he tried to or not. In fact, sometimes it was overwhelming. Either way, he wasn't going to bring it up. He was going to sit there in solemnity and let Alex finish, in the kind of breathless, concerned way he'd done the last time Mike encountered him in a triage bay: "...But I didn't take the Hippocratic Oath to leave a twenty-something sitting here alone looking like he'd be okay with the sun never rising again, so, please, Mike-Michael? Is there anyone I can call for you?"

Mike seemed unresponsive, avoiding eye contact with the same fervor he'd had to win a case, for Harvey, but he had heard the question, and names passed through his mind - Trevor. No. Jenny. No. Harvey. Fuck no.

Finally he just shook his head, "There's no one," he said, his voice small. And if he wasn't already the most miserable sight, he curled forward even more, his underfed frame slouching, his hands finding the bony place between his knees. And Alex was fairly unequipped to handle the magnitude of the situation, so he slapped a file down on the bed, sighed and stared.

If Mike ever thought anyone would ask him anything, it would something along the lines of, Why did you do this? And maybe Alex had asked him that before, but, that was one thing he couldn't quite recall. It just seemed like the obvious first inquiry, after all, looking at Mike, everything that was wrong with him, at least on the outside, was self-inflicted. So it caught him off-guard when Alex actually said - and he said it, he didn't ask it, probably because he wasn't prepared to try and negotiate oil from a water faucet, which is what it was like to get answers from the kid - Who did this to you - in a voice that seemed momentarily disgusted with humanity, and Mike just looked at the tile below him, and he couldn't bring himself to tell the truth, Harvey, and he didn't hate him, after everything, he didn't hate him, and the last thing he was going to do was give anyone else a reason to.

"I need to know if you're planning to go to Jessica about this-Because let me tell you something, Mike. If you go to her about this whole...situation, and you put my ass and my career on the line, I swear to God-"

"-This is the part where I like my person better than yours. See, I? I would never do that."

Harvey had huffed, "Good," he'd said finally. "Then we have an agreement."

Mike had left the office that night, adrenaline and anger in his veins, banging on Trevor's door like he didn't particularly care if it fell right off the hinges, or if they got into another fist-fight like before Montana. Maybe that would've actually hurt less.

"You know, when I said I wasn't dealing, I really meant it, Mike."

"Yeah, I don't care," Mike had hissed. "I need something stronger."

"Stronger?" Trevor had raised his eyebrows. He'd known something was wrong with Mike, something besides the usual, and that Pearson-Hardman was probably the common denominator, but he was an enabler, and if leaving it alone got them together on the couch with lines of coke on the table, then Trevor was going to do just that - leave it alone.

Mike had breathed, more than a little desperate, "Yeah, stronger."

"Like what?"

"I don't know, Trevor. What makes you forget?"