Monochrome
By carnifax (originally posted to tumblr)
Suits
Harvey/Mike
Rated T
Romance | Angst
Harvey knows that if Mike ever left, the entire world would fall into darkness. Life would go on as it had before, of course — but that's what Harvey is afraid of.
For everything that he has, for everything that he's accomplished or bought or fucked or closed, Harvey is boring. He knows he's boring every time he wakes up and crawls out of bed; every time he takes a shower and towels himself off and looks in the mirror and just stares at himself, stares into his own eyes and sees absolutely nothing behind them.
His life has become still, stagnant, stifling. His cologne — the same as it always has been — suffocates him with its familiarity.
His life is a checklist.
Work. Eat. Sleep. Fuck.
Money. Alcohol. Women.
He could buy any suit in the world but they're all the same. He could drink any liquor, fuck any person, buy any car, close any case — but they're all the same.
To everyone on the outside, he is rich and exciting and flashy and attractive and fortunate. To himself, he is dull.
His life is colorless. Black suits. White shirts. Black ink. White paper.
But just when the waters of tedium close over his head and he thinks he's about to drown in the banalities and overworn platitudes of the city, there's a spark, a hue that's a slightly different shade than the rest: Mike Ross.
With this kid at his side, Harvey feels his world expand around them. The things that were there before, from expensive cars to hotdog stands, seem altered. He can see and feel and taste the city around him as if experiencing it for the first time. He finds himself feeding the pigeons, watching the passersby, enjoying the inanities that he had always mocked.
And then it becomes more.
Harvey gets a few seasons of Star Trek from the library and he and Mike spend the entire month of April at Harvey's flat, drinking wine and educating the kid about redshirts and tribbles.
Mike gets Harvey cologne for his birthday — not nearly as pricey as what he has always worn, of course — but Harvey doesn't think twice before he starts using it daily, and ignores the satisfied look on Mike's face whenever the kid leans a little too close at work and notices the scent lingering on his boss' skin.
They go to dinner together under the guise of having work to do, but by five minutes in, their briefcases are always forgotten under their chairs; and by the end of those nights, Harvey is the one who picks up the check. Some nights, Harvey chauffeurs Mike back to his grungy apartment — some nights. The rest of the time, Mike ends up in the guest bedroom at Harvey's. Neither of them even notice that half of Mike's wardrobe has migrated into the closet there, dry cleaned side-by-side with Harvey's best three-pieces.
Well, Harvey notices — but he knows he'll never mention it, let alone complain about it, or else the kid might take that observation the wrong way and leave for good. Mike brings light with him everywhere he goes; Harvey has witnessed this in so many ways. And yet, it's most noticeable when Mike steps through Harvey's front door — maybe a little tipsy, maybe just high off their most recent win — and instantly illuminates the place with laughter and movement and that incandescent presence that is so innately Mike. Even in his worst moods, Mike's dynamism shines through.
Harvey knows that if Mike ever left, the entire world would fall into darkness. Life would go on as it had before, of course — but that's what Harvey is afraid of. He fears what he had before: the silence, the monotony, the heavy scent of his old cologne boxing him into his empty apartment.
The nights that Mike spends in his own apartment across town are already bad enough. Harvey doesn't sleep well, those nights. He feels like a child, tossing and turning until four in the morning; or otherwise simply staring at the ceiling all night with every light in the room turned on, not a single one of them with a glow as brilliant as Mike's.
It's during one of those nights, in fact, that Harvey realizes what should have been apparent to him months ago. Why he genuinely laughs when Mike tells him a pathetic excuse for a joke. Why he only feels concern when Mike breaks handblown Venetian glass all across the floor of Harvey's apartment, and why Harvey's response to Mike's immediate apology is, "It's just glass — Are you okay?" Why, more and more often, he finds his eyes drifting off the pages of his case files, instead focusing on Mike. Why he knows exactly what the tiniest change of Mike's expression means — furthermore, why he knows the geography of Mike's face so intimately, with every dimple, curve, eyelash, line and freckle accounted for. Why he feels so fiercely protective of the kid, and yet so immensely proud. Why, on the worst of the lonely nights, he lays there, chest aching and empty, gazing at the ceiling with light all around him, and still feels like he can't see a thing.
His life was colorless. Black suits. White shirts. Black ink. White paper. A perfect monochrome, perfectly safe and perfectly dull. But he lived that life for so many years that he's not sure he can survive the intensity, the warmth, the sheer vitality and passion for living that makes up Mike's very essence. He knows he's blinded by the glow, and that fact wears on him, destroying his sense of logic, his sense of up and down and left and right and good and bad. Nothing remains except Mike — and that scares Harvey.
But the thing that truly terrifies him, that utterly paralyzes him as he stares up at the ceiling on those desolate nights, is the idea that there may come a time when Mike's light goes out, when the world is submerged into darkness again, when Harvey is left alone in the city with no one to lead him out.
He fears the isolation because he knows — perhaps better than anyone — that after a man stares at the blazing sun for hours on end, the only thing left to fear is the night.