Shutting Down part 7


There was a point, just before Pearson Hardman lost Mike Ross for good, that Harvey couldn't ignore the gnawing feeling deep in his gut that told him something was wrong, terribly wrong, and as a hail Mary, he took Mike back. He let him sleep in his bed and wear his Harvard shirt and rest his head on his bicep and in return Mike had to talk to him, tell him he wasn't so far in the bell jar that this extension of humanity from Harvey wouldn't be enough to save him, had to promise to cut Trevor loose once and for all, kick the coke habit for good, and show up to work ready to kick ass like he had before. Before.

But being back with Harvey was only a temporary respite; the damage was already done, after all, and whether or not Harvey knew this, there was really no telling. The only sure thing was that he did try to stop it, consciously or otherwise, whether or not he even knew what he was trying to stop. He found that part out when he woke up one morning, rolled over to find several missed calls on his cell phone from an impatient client, a little too much breeze blowing in his face from the open door leading to the balcony, and a vacant place beside him in the sheets. The last part was out of the norm enough to rally Harvey out of bed, since Mike never, ever - no, really, never- found any occasion to wake up first and often had to be all but dragged from sleep and it was probably from all of the pot he'd smoked and the fact that he was twenty-five or maybe just because he was in such a deep, relentless, untreated depression.

Maybe it was the whole trifecta.

"Mi-ike,"Harvey called, in a sing-song voice, once he was out of bed - and the scene was very movie-esque, because of that voice, and because of the way Mike didn't answer him, and the way the breeze kept pushing the curtains around and the door creaked with just the slightest ominous hint that things weren't quite right, that maybe Harvey should abort his mission for coffee and walk out onto the balcony instead, and so, suddenly unnerved by the silence, he did.

He found Mike, in a dejected heap, positioned precariously on the edge of the railing, sitting, legs hanging down, a deadly distance from the Manhattan pavement below.

"Mike, what-"

"Would you have fired me?"

Mike's voice was low but casual, matter-of-fact, as if he was still within the safe confines of Harvey's bed and not dangling off of a New York City highrise. It stunned Harvey into silence, at first, as he looked around in a quiet panic, and then progressed to stuttering as he realized what was happening.

"Wh-what? Mike, what?"

Mike shrugged, which unsteadied him and sent Harvey reeling, stepping forward, then back, hand over his mouth, uncertain whether to stay put or act.

"If you knew I wouldn't tell Jessica-about anything, about us or about Harvard or any of it," Mike was speaking so calmly, like he was asking about the weather, that it disturbed Harvey on an entirely new level. "Would you have fired me?"

Harvey swallowed hard, replying in a distracted way as he wracked his mind for a solution. He was used to pressure. The kind of pressure where the firm's money or reputation was on the line, where a client's money or reputation was on the line, or a business, or a professional relationship, but rarely did it broach the territory of life or death. At least, not since he worked for the ADA. But that's where Harvey was at now, and he was out of his league.

"It's...Mike, it's beyond that point."

Mike hardly hesitated, peered over at the ground like he was high and it was something shiny, and said, "So, you would have, it just doesn't matter now?"

"Get down." Harvey told him, failing at sounding very stern or commanding. Instead he just sounded desperate and scared, like someone who was realizing what mattered to him at the very moment it was slipping through his fingers. Except, Harvey had been losing Mike long before he decided to hop onto a ledge, so his epiphany that maybe Mike meant slightly more to him than a good fuck or a reflection of himself at work was by then long overdue and laughably obsolete.

"Get down," he repeated, but Mike just looked over his shoulder at him with a mild, detached smile, like nothing at all was wrong, like he hadn't reached such a level of apathy that he was unaffected by his own aversion to heights or the amount of fear on Harvey's face.

"And then what?" Mike asked, looking down again, swinging his legs more than necessary, observing the view as if it was harmless, as if one wrong move wouldn't send him barrelling into the ground skull-first. At one point, he took his hands off the rails and rested them in his lap. Harvey paced in a small box and glanced inside toward the bed, calculating the time it might take to run in and get his cell phone. The odds were stacked against him, but even moreso against Mike.

"And then...we go inside..." Harvey continued looking nervously between the bedside table and the balcony. He'd talked Mike down from the ledge a hundred times. Just never literally.

Mike scoffed, "And then what, Harvey? Then I go to work? Then what? Then I come back here so you can lie to my face, tell me I'm worth more to you than an investment to your winning career, just to keep me from being an even bigger liability than I already am? Then you screw me under the pretense of giving a shit? Then you get sick of me again? Then I go back to Trevor's and do some coke? Then-"

"Mike, get down."

"-Then I do too much of it and I wake up in the hospital and you argue with some dickhead doctor who thinks you're an even bigger dickhead, then I get out of the hospital and then I do some more coke, then I cut my wrists open, then you tell me I'm useless, then I take some pills, then what, Harvey?"

"Then you get better, Mike! Then we fix. This. Mike!"

"You can't fix me, Harvey," Mike sighed, slightly sadder and momentarily less apathetic. He looked back and shrugged, "You're the one who broke me."


Not for a lack of trying, but Mike Ross wasn't going to die by jumping off Harvey's balcony. And he wasn't going to fall off either as Harvey wrestled him back inside, but only because he was physically overpowered, which in and of itself was one of the many issues in their entire fucked up relationship. He practically threw him down onto the bed, though Mike rebounded quicker than similar occasions in the past, got to a sitting position and shook it off. Harvey backed up and paced.

"I'm done," he announced, in a shaky voice, on shaky lips, as his hands trembled. No one made Harvey Specter shake. No one made Harvey Specter tremble. Mike Ross did.

"Good," Mike said, and if he was at all fazed, he buried it under all of his demons, somewhere deep inside. He stood up and marched toward the door. "So am I."

The fundamental difference in their statements was that Harvey was referring to the situation, to Mike's actions, to their relationship - charitable as the title might have been - while Mike was referring to himself. To life. And Harvey had that figured out, could read Mike better than he ever let on, knew he was an iminent risk to himself, but short of actually pinning him down for the remainder of, well, forever, his hands were kind of tied.

"You're not going anywhere!" Harvey shouted.

"The hell I am." Mike wasn't concerned with listening; Harvey's commands may as well have been empty threats since they neither scared nor stopped him anymore, and since whatever Harvey might have done to keep him there, or keep him in line, was much less than what Mike might do to himself just to deal with his increasing emotional turmoil. Harvey pinning him against the wall and screaming at him was hardly competition to the consequences of overdosing on pills or doing cocaine until he heard voices and thought his head might explode or he might bleed to death out of his nose. And Harvey mentioning his job in a roundabout threatening way or fisting his hand in his hair so tight when he was high and telling him sharply to sober the fuck up all paled in comparison to taking a coke-laced razor and splitting open his own skin. There was really no level of abuse - emotional or physical - Harvey could inflict on him that Mike wasn't already doing a better job of on himself.

But before Mike left the apartment, Harvey asked him to wait. He didn't tell him to, ironically, he asked and Mike listened. Probably because he knew it was the last time he'd ever have to, and probably because Harvey sounded more broken than him at the moment, and Harvey probably asked for those very same reasons, because he had a feeling he might not see Mike again, might not ever have a chance to ask him anything again, and was tired of yelling at him, ordering him around when the only places it had ever gotten them was bars and hospital triage bays and bathroom floors and the ledge of his fucking balcony.

It was time for a different approach, one that might have done some good if he'd only used it a few months earlier.

And Mike thought, just for a moment, as Harvey walked up to him, wrapped one arm around his shoulder and the other around his neck, to ask if he'd ever loved him, ever, just for a second, at any time, during whatever it was they had. Maybe for a fleeting moment in bed while they went over cases together? Or for a day when they won in court? Or a morning they woke up beside each other? But he thought better of it. He decided he already knew the answer and if Harvey lied it wouldn't do him any good, wouldn't do damn thing for the level of how far gone he was, and even if Harvey said yes and even if he meant it, somehow, Mike probably wouldn't believe him. Actions spoke louder than words, after all, and Harvey's actions had told Mike a million times, the answer, which was usually a loud and resounding No, and even if Mike did believe him, it probably was too late anyway. After all, wasn't everything?

So instead, Mike just took the opportunity to lean in, accept the embrace for what it was, he wasn't even quite sure, a silent apology, maybe, or just a resigned gesture to all of Mike's problems that Harvey couldn't fix, and was thereby throwing in the towel. Mike pressed his face against his chest, cried like he hadn't been able to for weeks, suddenly but only temporarily able to feel again, to feel all of the pain he had, and all of the love he still had, and he cried harder, took deep breaths of Harvey's shirt because he knew he'd never be able to smell him again, his cologne or his sweat or his clothes or his skin, and not because he wouldn't be in his bed, but because he wouldn't be anywhere. Harvey mirrored his actions, almost, and unintentionally at that, pressing his nose and mouth down on Mike's head, running his fingers through his hair, crying, but not hard enough that Mike could hear him, just enough to know himself that he was crying, and that he was crying out of guilt and regret and for Mike and for all of the potential he'd seen drain out of him, and for all of the youth and the life he'd taken, and how he hadn't tried to - he hadn't tried to hurt him, he hadn't tried to ruin him and everything he was or was becoming or could've beenin the future, but he had anyway, he had. And he had tried to fix him, but he'd ran out of resources and he'd ran out of time and out of energy and he cared, he did care, but not enough to follow Mike out the door that day. He'd wrestled enough pills from his hand, needles from his arm, razors from his fingers, drugs from his pockets, and he was at a loss. If there was more he could do, he didn't know what it was or he didn't take the time to figure it out. He just soaked Mike's hair with tears, because Mike was a waste: A waste of a genius, a waste of a lawyer, of a twenty-something, a waste; a heart-broken, starving, drug-addicted waste, and the worst part was that Harvey was supposed to have mentored him, supposed to have encouraged his potential, dragged it out of him like he'd been dredging a river, then watered it and watched it grow, but instead, instead, he had let it die - no, he'd killed it. Killed it until he was just a shell, until residual overdose-coma damage reminded Harvey of his crimes whenever Mike couldn't remember more than a single page from a book or a ten digit number for more than an hour. And so they were there, near the door, like it was some flashing beacon of finality, of what was to come, and Mike didn't want to let go and walk through it, and Harvey didn't want to make him, so they just stood there, and for a split second Harvey wished he did love him, the way Mike loved him back, because if he did and if he had, they wouldn't have been there to begin with, but he couldn't; he couldn't change that the only emotion he held for him was because he'd made him such a waste and because he was so guilty and he was supposed to be selfish and arrogant but he wasn't supposed to hurt people.

Mike Ross wasn't going to die by jumping off Harvey's balcony. He was going to die when he and Harvey finally pulled apart, and Harvey took his hands and pushed all the tears away from his eyes and then from his own and then kissed him - because it didn't matter if it gave him false hope, because Mike didn't even have the capacity for any hope - and he finally walked out the door and went to Trevor's. Except Trevor wasn't there, but the cocaine was, and there was more than enough of it to make him forget, forever. So he used it all, as much as he could get into his sinus cavity and as much as he could force into his veins before they blew and bruised into dark hematomas under his skin. He was going to die when it all hit his nervous system and respiratory system at once, and he never really even tried to fight it, just floundered in and out of consciousness, convulsed and stopped breathing in a tragically young heap on the floor, alone, with Harvey no where around, and isn't that really what all the signs had been pointing to from the very beginning?

That's how Mike Ross was going to die.