Chapter Text
Everything Goes Away
We were tight knit boys, brothers in more than name
You would kill for me, and knew that I'd do the same
And it cut me sharp, hearing you'd gone away
But everything goes away, yeah everything goes away
But I'm gonna be here til I'm nothing but bones in the ground
It was cold and dark outside. Wind whistled around the top floors of Pearson Specter, generating an eerie, muffled howling sound. The sun had long since gone down, leaving the soft overhead lights to illuminate the halls and offices. Hardly anyone remained in the building. Even the associates had gone home. Not Mike Ross or Harvey Specter, though. No, both the associate and the name senior partner were still somewhere in the high rise.
Donna Paulsen, legal secretary extraordinaire, wasn't sure where either of them was, but they were around there someplace. She was just returning from a trip to the ladies' room and was about to gather her things and beat a long overdue retreat home when she noticed it.
There was a man in Harvey's office.
Now it wasn't exactly like this was terribly unusual; people were in and out of that room all day long. The oddity of the situation came into play with the fact that Donna had not let him in and, to the very best of her considerable knowledge, neither had Harvey. She frowned, craning her neck to get a better view of him.
The man was laying on Harvey's couch, looking not so much like he were relaxing, but more as if he had passed out and someone had flung him haphazardly towards the nearest piece of furniture. His limbs sprawled in every which direction, and he looked sheer moments from toppling to the floor. His hair was dark and straight, flopping across his face and obscuring enough that she couldn't recognize him from this far away. She supposed he would have cut quite the imposing figure, seeming tall and impressively muscled, had he not looked like she could have knocked him right over with a feather. Something nagged at the back of Donna's mind, something was familiar about him.
The thing that really set her on edge was how incredibly battered he looked. Blood stained his torn grey t-shirt, ugly black and blue contusions evident wherever skin was visible. He looked straight out of an action flick, and she was pretty sure a healthy person's chest wasn't supposed to hitch like that. As she was reaching for her phone to call security – she wasn't naïve enough to approach him herself – she froze as something made a crashing noise behind her. The intruder's accomplice?
When she turned around, phone clenched in what she later assumed had been an attempt at having a weapon on hand, Donna saw Harvey standing in the hallway by her desk. He had approached without her hearing him, and she mentally chided herself for spooking like that. It was in his place that a person would first be able to catch a glimpse of the man in the office, she noted.
Quickly locating the source of the crash – the shattered coffee cup that had just slipped right out of Harvey's fingers as if his hand had just forgotten how to hold onto something – Donna frowned and looked up at his face. Harvey looked for all the world as though he had seen a ghost. Face pale and hands shaking with barely visible tremors, he took a step forward, faltered, then stopped. Donna leant over her desk, trying to catch his eyes, which were wide and spooked, completely fixed on the hurt young man on his couch.
“I'm so sorry,” she said hurriedly, feeling very unsettled by the entire situation. “I have no idea how he got in there, I must have been away. Do you want me to call security up here?” The phone was halfway to her ear, her finger hovering over the button, before he answered. When he finally got his wits about him enough to answer, Harvey sounded shaken right to the core. Rattled.
“No. No that, uh. Won't be. No.”
Moving like a man in a daze, Harvey rounded Donna's desk. When he opened the door, the person on his couch sat bolt upright, wavering dangerously close to falling over, apparently not quite as out cold as Donna had thought he was. They stood locked in eye contact for what felt like forever, and the gnawing feeling that she knew this man from somewhere grew in her chest.
“Oh my god.”
Over the intercom Harvey's voice was hardly audible, low and in shock. It was in that moment that it clicked. She knew where she'd seen him before.
On Harvey's bedside table there was a photo, one she'd seen when she went to pick up a suit for him. It was of a younger Harvey, fresh out of undergrad, with his arm wrapped around a tall, dark haired teenage boy, both of them mid-laugh. The man standing in the office in front of her now was older, scruffier, badly beaten, and had a hardened look about him, but he was unmistakable. The boy in the photo, all grown up.
The stranger's mouth twitched into a hint of an empty, humorless smile. His lower lip was split in two places, and the change in expression opened one of them up again. “Hi, Harvey.”
Donna put a hand over her mouth. Marcus Specter. Marcus Specter was standing there in Harvey's office, blood tricking down his chin, wavering on his feet, staring at his older brother with a look that was a mix of apprehension, defiance, and something raw that Donna couldn't put a name to.
In all her years of knowing Harvey, Donna had met Marcus in person exactly once. It was four months after their father had died when Harvey got the call. He had ran out of the office without even grabbing his coat. Hours later, after she managed to track down where he'd dashed off to, Donna walked into a room at New York General Hospital to find Harvey sitting beside a prone figure in a hospital bed. His shoulders were shaking hard with barely contained sobs, a lax, motionless hand clutched tight in his. She had walked over and put a hand on his shoulder. Harvey's head jerked up from where it had fallen beside Marcus's, and Donna didn't think she would ever be able to get the look he wore out of her mind. She'd never seen him look that afraid, fear and grief warring on a tear streaked face.
The wound his father's death left behind was still far, far too raw. Just four short months after he had watched his father put in the ground and his little brother was at death's door as well. It was more than even Harvey could handle.
That day was branded harshly into Donna's mind. The first time she had ever seen Marcus Specter, the fabled younger brother, blended with the worst breakdown she had seen a person have. Harvey had stayed at the hospital for as long as he could, rooted to his spot at Marcus's side, praying to god and anyone who was listening to not let him lose the last piece of his family he had left too. When he'd asked nobody had been able to tell him what had happened, an empty space in the situation where the circumstances that had led to Marcus's condition should be, just a stream of very scary words.
Concussion. Severe lacerations. Internal bleeding. Might not wake up. Prepare for the worst.
He'd been back at work four days later, just to straighten a few things out with the firm, and he'd been wearing lavender. Harvey never wore lavender, Donna could remember thinking as she sat at her desk and watched her boss and friend rummage around in his office with dark circles beneath his eyes and an air of hopelessness around him. That night while Harvey was asleep in the same chair she had first found him in, Marcus disappeared. Vanished from the hospital, the only marker that he had ever been there in the form of a panicking Harvey and a rumpled bed.
They never heard from him. Not a letter, not a phone call, not an email. Marcus evaporated from his room at NY General and simply wasn't seen again. Donna lost count of how many ways Harvey had tried to find him, but it had all fallen short. Wherever Marcus was, he didn't want to be found.
That was then.
Now, almost three years later, once more Donna found herself confronted with both of the Specter brothers in the same place. Except this time they were both conscious. Well. Conscious might have been stretching it a bit, if the way Marcus swayed dangerously, unsteady on his feet, was any indication. The legal secretary watched them for a second longer, eyeing the way Harvey's mouth moved as if he were trying to say something but couldn't find his voice, how Marcus looked ready to bolt at any moment.
She pressed a button on the intercom, switching it off. Whatever was about to happen, whatever conversation they were about to have, it was sure to dredge up memories and feelings that were too personal and private for her to pry into. Donna sat down at her desk and looked at her hands, twisting at her fingers as she tried to process what was happening.
Marcus Specter , she thought, shaking her head. I'll be damned.
“Marcus.” Harvey's whisper was saturated in disbelief.
“It's Eliot now.”
“What?” As if this day couldn't get any more confusing.
“I don't go by Marcus any more. Haven't in a while. Different name, different life. My name is Eliot.”
A thousand things raced through his head. Sixteen year old Marcus- Eliot's first disappearing act and his return to Harvey's doorstep three months later. How changed he'd seemed and his refusal to tell anyone what had happened. Each of the four subsequent vanishings and how every one ended with his brother on his front porch, usually looking haggard, drawn, and damaged. The last time he left, resulting in that heart stopping phone call almost three years ago.
What did you say to a brother you hadn't seen, or even spoken to, in three years - who suddenly showed up in your office, bleeding all over your carpet? Presently Harvey was trying to decide between hugging him, shouting at him, calling an ambulance, or possibly attempting to do all of the above at once. In the end he took the most obvious course of action.
“What happened to you?”
It was as much of a 'where did you go' as it was a 'where did you get those injuries'. Eliot seemed to pick up on this, looking down and away, not answering.
“Hey,” Harvey said quietly, stepping towards him and taking him by the shoulders, surveying him. “C'mon, talk to me.” He got his first good look at the true extent of how bad his visible injuries were when Eliot looked up from the floor. His split lip aside, the young man's face also bore a blackened eye, a scrape on his forehead, and a truly impressive bruise with a laceration at the center of it that extended from his cheekbone down his jawline. However it was the dark, heavy circle of bruising on his neck that really worried Harvey.
Somebody had put their hands around his little brother's neck and choked him – hard. Hard enough to leave thick finger marks on Eliot's skin. Harvey brushed a thumb along his jaw, tilting his brother's chin up so he could get a better look at it.
“God, kid.” The hot, furious feeling in Harvey's chest swelled as he stared at the marks. He wanted to hit someone. Preferably the person who had done this. In his preoccupation with the bruises, his thumb moving absently across Eliot's cheek, he didn't see the expression the young man now wore.
Eliot flinched slightly under Harvey's scrutiny. So much of this situation was utterly foreign to him. Years had passed since he had last been Marcus Specter, last been somebody's little brother. Harvey seemed to notice this reaction and frowned, looking up to make eye contact with him.
“Eliot?” The name sounded so strange in Harvey's voice. He imagined it had felt strange to say. “Are you alright? Do you need to sit down?”
That was the tipping point, the moment at which the whole situation became more than Eliot could take. Realizing just how much attention was focused on him was... startling. Not just attention, not idle curiosity, but concern, and affection; it didn't connect in his head that this was for him, and when it did he froze up under the weight of it.
And it was Harvey. Harvey, standing in front of him with Eliot's face held in gentle hands. Gentle hands that were large, rough, and strong, and since when had those kind of hands ever been careful with him?
Hands like that had slammed him against walls, threw punches into his solar plexus, impacted against his jaw, wrapped around his neck and choked the life out of him. They weren't careful with him, and they certainly didn't cradle like that.
If he had realized what he was going to do before he did it, he would have stopped himself.
When Eliot's arms wrapped around him, clutching his older brother like a man drowning clutches a life preserver, Harvey made a startled noise, staggering a bit before regaining his balance. His voice was a buzz of static in Eliot's ears, incomprehensible and fuzzy. Probably a question. Probably 'are you okay'. Instead of responding he held on tighter, burying his face in the curve of the lawyer's neck and shoulder. A few moments later he felt Harvey reciprocate, embracing him with all the desperation of a person reassuring himself that someone he loved was alive and in one piece. The hand splayed flat on Eliot's back rose and fell with his breaths, and a part of him could have sworn that Harvey was counting them.
Counting the years it had been since Eliot's brother had last hugged him felt like twisting the knife lodged in his chest, the one that had been placed there by hearing the name 'Marcus' again after so long. Now he remembered why he had stayed so far away, why he'd never let himself entertain the idea of going back for longer than a moment. Because once he was here, once Harvey called him 'Marcus' and looked at him with equal parts concern, love, confusion, shock in his eyes Eliot knew it would be the hardest thing he had ever done to rip himself away from this again.
That would come later though, so for the moment he just dug his fingers into the back of Harvey's suit jacket, and if he was gripping so tightly that it hurt, well, Harvey didn't say anything. He was as calm a presence as Eliot remembered from his childhood, an immovable force that would, come hell or high water, stand between him and anything that bore him ill will. Nothing had ever been able to shake Harvey.
Or, no. That wasn't true. Eliot could remember coming home the first time, each of the first five times, and how Harvey had shouted and shaken him, 'don't you ever fucking do that to me again, Marcus Eliot Specter, do you hear me?'. And of course he had done it again, and again, and again. Each time he left and each time he came back, the one universal constant being that he would eventually find himself once more on Harvey's front porch.
Their mother had long since left the family by the time he vanished for the first time, but even when he was still alive it was never their father Eliot came home to. It was Harvey, always Harvey. No matter how guilty he felt, how much hurt he could see in the older sibling's eyes, he still kept doing it.
People could say what they would about him, but Eliot Spencer had never once claimed to be a good person.
Before he could do something truly ridiculous, like start to cry, Eliot forced himself to let go, step back, and take a breath, looking anywhere but at Harvey's face. Harvey, for his part, was managing to keep his confusion under control impressively well. He caught Eliot by the arm when he faltered, his injuries seeming to finally catch up with him, helped him back over to the couch and sat him down on it. He then crossed to his desk, pressing the intercom button. Eliot watched with slightly dazed eyes as Harvey spoke to the secretary outside who had, for some reason, not gone home yet.
The hushed request sounded more like the background hum of a refrigerator than an actual string of comprehensible words. Eliot stared blankly at the wall across from him, feeling like he was floating partially between consciousness and the blackout he knew from experience was sure to be imminent. This concussion didn't feel as bad as some he'd sustained, that was for sure, but it was certainly not just a bump on the head either. A collection of moderately severe injuries piled on to top of each other could be just as detrimental as a single lethal one. And after what had happened-
Wait.
What had happened?
Before he could dig any deeper into that line of thought, it came to Eliot's attention that Harvey was trying to talk to him.
“...liot? Eliot?”
Again, he was struck with how deeply jarring the name sounded in his brother's voice. “Hm?”
“Um, not that I'm not- not glad that you're here, but...” Harvey's voice was nervous, uncertain, and the notion that after all these years he could still shake the unshakable Harvey Specter was amusing to Eliot's addled mind. “Why are you here? In New York?”
Wasn't that just the question of the hour.
“I, uh,” Eliot hedged, dropping his gaze and refusing to meet Harvey's eyes. This wasn't going to be a fun conversation. “I don't. I don't know.”
“What do you mean, you 'don't know'?”
“'S not complicated. I don't know how I got here.”
Harvey looked at him blankly. “You... don't know? How you got in the state of New York?” When Eliot simply nodded (regretting the motion shortly after), he gave the man on his couch a shrewd look. “Start at the beginning.”
And so he did, though admittedly leaving out large chunks for both of their sakes. Eliot talked in a rambling, concussed sort of way about working as a 'bodyguard' – more fabrication than truth, but then, Harvey didn't need to know that -, traveling around, getting involved with his crew.
That was the part he edited and censored the least. He glossed over the years between his first disappearance and meeting them, sparing his older brother every detail that could be spared without rousing suspicion. Then he got to the part where he had been contacted by a man who needed his stolen airplane plans... retrieved.
Harvey was pretty sure that Eliot wasn't aware of this, but when he reached this point, but observing the younger man's face he was met with the unforgettable way Eliot's expression changed when he told about the people he'd met on that job, the one that had changed everything. He talked about them with light in his eyes, unconscious little gestures accompanying his words as he spoke of Nate, Sophie, Hardison, and Parker, a crew of criminals that now fought for the other team and dragged him along on the ride. It was the first time, Harvey mused with an odd ache in his chest, that Eliot had truly seemed happy in a very long time.
As he listened to the wild stories Eliot proudly spun of retributional thievery and ridiculous, Robin Hood-esque brands of con artistry, Harvey wondered if any of these people even knew his name.
Across the floor in the supply closet, Donna was digging through half opened boxes of staples trying to reach the seldom-used first aid kit that Harvey had requested she retrieve. It was here that Mike Ross found her, kicking at discarded file folders and gently extracting orphaned Post-It notes from her hair. He quirked an eyebrow and leant against the door, waiting for her to finish what she was doing. Donna emerged from the whirlwind of office supplies, triumphantly clutching the first aid kit, and was halfway out the door before she noticed Mike standing there.
“Hey, Donna,” Mike said, far too brightly she thought, for someone who had been at work for as long as he had.
“What do you want,” she asked, hurrying past him back towards Harvey's office. “I'm kind of busy at the moment.”
Mike noticed the first aid kit she clutched in her hands and grinned. “Yeah, seems like it. What, did Harvey bruise his ego or something?”
Donna rolled her eyes as Mike laughed at his own joke. She so did not have time for this.
“Actually, Mike-”
“Kidding! I was kidding. Where is Harvey anyway? I came by earlier and he wasn't in his office so I went to the file room he was looking in and I couldn't find him there either and then...”
Tuning out Mike Ross and his extensive babbling capabilities was a coping mechanism Donna had developed the first week he'd been working there, and she continued down the hallway with Mike doing his awkward little side shuffle walk after her, still running his mouth. A couple of times she made an attempt at interrupting and shutting him up, but she simply didn't have the energy – or the concentration – to spare to deal with him right then.
What finally quieted him, however momentarily, was when they rounded the corner and came into sight of Harvey's office and, more to the point, the people inside the office.
“Donna,” Mike said slowly, not taking his eyes off the two men immersed in conversation, “why is there a guy in Harvey's office that looks like he could either be the Terminator or somebody who recently lost a fight with the Terminator.”
Oh boy. This should be a fun conversation.