NOTE: A short but hopefully sweet coda to the season one finale that apparently takes place in a universe where that little bit with Trevor didn't happen at the end, or at least resolved itself inexplicably easily, okay?
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The boxes stayed in Harvey's office.
He'd gotten all of them somehow, all the files from when he was an ADA, and he kept—not sending them back.
Mike started charting Harvey's state of mind by how many disappeared overnight. When Clifford Danner got his first breath of fresh air in twelve years, there were thirty-seven boxes that night and thirty-seven the next morning, so Harvey had actually gone home and slept a full five hours, or however many hours people like Harvey, with three-piece suits and caffeine addictions, slept per night. But sometimes there were thirty-three boxes at night and thirty-one in the morning, and Harvey rubbed the bridge of his nose as if there were a headache stewing in there somewhere, held back only by stubbornness and extra-strength aspirin.
Leaning against Donna's desk and doing a serviceable impression of someone who was just making idle chitchat and was obviously totally unconcerned with his boss's ongoing mental breakdown, Mike asked why Harvey still had the files to begin with.
"Well," Donna said, "I was going to sneak in there under the cover of darkness and hide them all under sofas and in particularly tall clumps of grass, like an Easter egg hunt, but then I thought that maybe he might notice that."
"Okay, I'm just saying that I'm worried about him, and I know you are, too."
Donna sighed. "You just—you can't argue with him about things like this. You know Harvey, Mike, and you know how he is with responsibility. The buck never stops with anyone else."
Mike glanced into the office. Twenty-six boxes today from twenty-eight the night before. Fuck.
"So what do we do?"
"Wait for him to come out of it," Donna said. "And also I'm writing hate mail to Cameron, if you want to help cut some letters out of newspapers."
He did.
And until Harvey came in with his head down and shadows painted under his eyes, it actually made him feel better.
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Mike started staying late to keep an eye on things. He sent Jenny texts so she wouldn't worry while he manufactured reasons to casually walk by Harvey's office. He stayed until ten, ten-thirty, eleven, but he always went home before Harvey did, all the same. Fourteen boxes at night; twelve in the morning. Donna brought Harvey coffee with extra shots of espresso; Mike filled out endless reams of paperwork before Harvey ever asked him to. As if between the two of them, they could smooth the edges off of what had happened so that Harvey would stop cutting himself on someone else's sins.
Then one morning he came in and the boxes had gone from twelve to seven and his ability to tolerate this tailspin of a situation snapped.
"Five," he said to Donna. "Five of them."
"I know," she said.
"He's not in yet?"
She shook her head. "But Mike—he's almost done."
"He's almost done with his," Mike said. "What happens if he finishes these and requests Cameron's? All of them from the time he got there to the time he left?"
"No," Donna said. "No, he couldn't. That's two years of files for an entire office, and Cameron would have had his hand in everything, there'd be no way to go through it all."
"Unless you're Harvey," Mike said, "and this is what you're going to be doing for the rest of your life."
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So that night, when everyone else was leaving and Harvey had just opened a fresh box, Mike did what Harvey was always telling him not to do: he barged right on in. Hell, he slapped a cup of coffee down on the desk, flung himself into a chair, and grabbed a box of his own.
It was a mark of how exhausted Harvey was that for a second all he did was blink at him owlishly, as if he couldn't figure out whether he'd slipped into a dream without noticing it. Then he said, "Put that down."
"What? No. This is fun, right? I mean, that must be why you haven't done anything else in the last week."
"Mike. Put it down."
"Oh," he said, picking up a file at random, "felony assault, awesome."
"Put it down or you're fired." The words were heavy, the tone low—he wasn't joking.
Careful, Mike told himself. He slid the assault file back into its position and balanced the cardboard box on his knees, where it felt no more precarious than everything else. "Harvey," he said. "It didn't happen just because you let it happen. It's not on you. It happened years before you got there and it happened years in between and years after and everyone knew and no one did anything because—because people don't. And you were loyal. That's not—that's not a bad thing. You just have to pick better people, and hey, you did. You picked Jessica. And I understand why you feel like you have to go through these, but I can help you. And then we pack them up, and you're done."
Harvey looked at him, his expression unreadable, and all the think-like-Harvey skills Mike had cultivated were failing him.
Finally, Harvey said, "What would you have done?"
He knew that Harvey meant with Cameron, then. Mike licked his lips. They were dry.
"I don't have Cameron," he said. "I have you. So I'm lucky enough not to have to think about things like that."
Harvey nodded slowly, like he was going to sleep, and then picked up a file and started to read.
With a rush of relief, Mike did the same, and together they read on through the night until the boxes dwindled down to one. And then to none.