Title: In the Den & Off the Clock
Fandom: Suits
Rating: All ages.
Length: 2k-ish.
Content notes: None.
Author notes: Oh jeez, no. K and zoamh's cliche generator share the blame for encouraging this, okay? Beta read by AU Rockstar, glitteryv - thank you so much!
Summary: Harvey had no idea that this was something he needed in his life, but there you go. Life is strange sometimes. [aka, MIKE ROSS, SECRET RACCOON]




"You forgot the file in the car, genius," Harvey says, looking past Mike and into his cramped apartment, curious to see if the eagerness to get home early was due to better company waiting for him. Didn't seem to be; the apartment was quiet and empty.

"It's not like I couldn't have gotten it from you tomorrow," Mike says, leaning against the door frame and holding the door half-closed, trying to block Harvey's view.

"Don't get cranky," Harvey says, "I know it's past your bedtime." It sounds like a joke but it isn't, really. Mike does get more irritable in the evenings, like a small child. Like a small child who can't keep track of his mittens. It never ceases to amaze Harvey how someone so gifted can also be so lacking in common sense.

"Yeah, yeah," Mike says, waving him off and Harvey turns to leave.

He turns back just before the door clicks shut and stops before he can warn Mike not to lose those documents again. Mike's face was distinctly inhuman - and then it wasn't, like it never had been.

"What's with the," Harvey gestures to his own face and fails to come up with any words beyond, "..whiskers."

"Give me a break, Harvey," Mike says, tiredly. "I shaved this morning. I'm off the clock."

"Yeah, and so did I. But somehow my five o'clock shadow doesn't come with a little black snout," Harvey says, and rolls his eyes. He cannot believe that Mike is just going to pretend that nothing just happened, here. No, wait, it's Mike; he can.

"I have no idea what you're saying," Mike sputters. He doesn't want to explain; that's okay. Harvey knows something's up and so does Mike. It's only a matter of time.

"Don't let anyone at work see that face. More importantly: don't let that contract out of your sight," Harvey says. "Off the clock is no longer a part of your vocabulary."

He throws a casual wave over his shoulder on his way to the stairwell and grins when he hears Mike's relieved sigh echoing down the hall. So dangerously naive.




Harvey has plans. Mike is something not-quite-human or something more-than-human, but Harvey has no idea what. Something with a pointy black nose, whiskers, and darker hair than Mike's regular shade. Fur. Darker fur.

The next morning Harvey meets Mike down on the street and hands him a coffee as he takes off his helmet.

"Thanks?" Mike says, taking the coffee in one hand. He's suspicious. Smart kid; he has every reason to be. Harvey's no one's coffee boy. "Huh. Milky."

"Is it?" Harvey asks and shrugs it off. "C'mon, rookie. Documents to highlight, coworkers to endure."

Harvey himself has a relatively light day at the office planned, with most of his real work happening in the evening at a dinner meeting uptown. As for Mike, he's planned to distract him with boxes and boxes of paperwork. That will keep him right where he wants him.

He lets Mike work in his office. After all, this isn't something the other associates need to see.

Donna brings him sushi and he eats half of it at his desk while Mike works. He leaves the other half unattended and eventually drops it in the garbage can. Mike does not seem to be tempted.

He crumples up a piece of paper from the shredding pile and throws it across Mike's field of vision. Nothing. He points out Mike's missing highlighter with a laser pointer. Nada. Desperate, he spritzes Mike with the spray bottle used to water the plants. Mike sputters quite a bit but he remains absolutely human while he does so.

At the end of the day, when Mike is jumpy as all hell and Donna is starting to look concerned, Harvey finally asks him, "Look. Is this thing with you going to interfere with the job at all?"

Mike says - pleads, really - "It hasn't yet, has it?" and Harvey concedes that it hasn't seemed to and lets it go. Until tomorrow.

Despite the whiskers, Mike is not a cat.




The next morning, Harvey swings by Mike's cubicle and greets him with a casual ruffle to his hair. Mike looks extremely disconcerted and once he stops blinking in Harvey's direction, he looks around. The floor is practically empty and no one is looking their way. As if Harvey would have chanced appearing affectionate in front of the associates. Ha.

"What's up, Harvey...?" Mike asks slowly, seemingly deciding to shrug off the physical contact and roll with it.

"You're working upstairs again today," Harvey says. "Get your shit together."

"I don't know," Mike says, gesturing at his screen, "it's just that I have all this stuff for Louis to--"

"You're working upstairs today," Harvey interrupts to repeat, punctuating with a solid whack of his newspaper to the back of Mike's head.

"Fine," Mike concedes gracelessly.

However, the rest of the day proves that Mike does not appear to respond to or even hear whistles beyond the range of normal human hearing and while he will catch small food items nine times out of ten, he never catches any with his mouth, not even when expecting the toss. He also appears to have zero interest in the roast beef sub sitting unattended on the windowsill.

They play a lot of catch, though, which helps Harvey think.

Mike is not a dog, but tomorrow will be better.




Tomorrow barely gets started before Donna barges into his office looking dangerous.

"Okay, what's going on," she asks, hands planted on Harvey's desk across from him. It's more of a demand than a question. "Somebody's baby assistant just told me that one of the associates got their fingers snared in a mousetrap this morning."

Harvey kicks back in his chair and loosens his tie with one hand. He shrugs and says, "They're hopeless."

"What is going on," Donna asks again. "It'll be worse for you if I have to figure it out on my own. I'm giving you this opportunity to come clean."

Harvey breaks and slumps over his desk. He glances out through the glass walls to see if anyone is lurking nearby, and gestures Donna closer. She leans in.

"He's got some kind of," and Harvey gestures at his own face again, "animal thing going on."

"A sort of raw, animal magnetism?" Donna asks, although she looks extremely doubtful and slightly concerned. For Harvey's sanity, probably.

Harvey sighs and pushes himself up from his desk. He has clients to look in on. Elsewhere.




He runs into Mike on his way out of the building. Mike looks like shit and Harvey tells him so.

"I miss sleeping all day," Mike complains from underneath the box of folders he's carrying.

"Yeah, there's so much to miss from your extravagantly drugged-out lifestyle," Harvey mocks, but then it clicks. Of course. "You're nocturnal."

"I'm not anything, Harvey!"

"Uh, no? You definitely are," Harvey argues. He's seen it. "Nocturnal animals. Bat. Raccoon. Badger. Owl? No, not feathers. Or, wait - why limit Mike Ross? Some kind of fairytale monster?"

"I'm not a monster, god," Mike whisper-yells, twisting around to check the hallway for eavesdroppers. Harvey gives him a faux-apologetic pout.

"You better have that library work done before I get back," Harvey orders, pushing Mike out of the elevator. "We're working late tonight."

"Harvey," Mike whines, but the doors are closing and Harvey waves him off.



It's just passing midnight when Mike finally cracks. He's been twitchy for an hour or so, irritable since somewhere around ten. Ten minutes ago he'd started touching everything within reach with a glazed sort of focus. Including Harvey before he'd wisely removed himself from Mike's reach.

"You're going to fry what's left of your brain before you own up, aren't you?" Harvey asks curiously. He wouldn't admit it but he'd thought they had a little more trust between them than this.

Mike blinks slowly back at him and then looks down and startles at the collection of small items that are scattered around him and the one hand he has buried in the cushions, digging for lost coins.

"You're like seventy-five percent there," Harvey says. "Might as well."

Mike snorts and then curls into himself and gives into the laughter.

"What?"

"This isn't curiosity," Mike says, rolling over on the couch to face Harvey. "This is Harvey Specter offended that I know something he doesn't. That I'm keeping something from him. That he does not know the whole story. Probably doesn't even matter what it is."

"I'm sure you know all manner of trivial things that I'm unaware of," Harvey says dismissively. The kid has an amazing brain; fact. "And it is a fuzzy nocturnal creature, so: get on with the fuzzy nocturnal creature."

"I hate you so much," Mike says and starts to unbutton his shirt.

Harvey raises an eyebrow at the show.

"Oh, shut up."




The changing - the shifting - doesn't come with a dramatic poof of purple smoke or an agonizing crush of bones, but is instead hardly noticeable at all. Harvey notices that Mike changes, of course, but somehow mostly in the way that he was Mike and now he is ...small. Small and brown and burrowed within a mess of Mike's clothes. A small, roundish raccoon, bigger than a cat, smaller than a mid-sized dog. Long legs and shaggy fur. Adorable.

Harvey stands up to get closer and Mike reflexively crouches in response. Harvey slows his approach but there's no way he's passing this up. He's touching a raccoon. He's touching little raccoon hands and little raccoon hands are exploring his. Rounded raccoon ears and a bushy striped tail. There are no words for this.

No words except, "I am going to pick up a raccoon."

Harvey had no idea that this was something he needed in his life, but there you go. Life is strange sometimes. He holds Mike firmly around the middle and lifts. Mike barks a strange squawking chitter but Harvey ignores him. Holding! A raccoon!




Harvey lets Mike be after that. It doesn't interfere with the job and Mike can fight the impulse to be a raccoon in front of clients, no matter how late they work. It's not pretty, but it's good enough. A week later they're at a party and they've probably had too much champagne.

Harvey looks around, trying to spot Mike in the mingling company, and finally spots him chatting with a young caterer and touching all of the food. He winces. Sometimes it seems like the kid is incredible, the next Harvey Specter... and sometimes it seems like he's an idiot. It's always one extreme or the other.

Harvey catches up to Mike as he's jamming two creme puffs into his mouth and gently scares off the caterer. Definitely too much champagne for the hour.

"Mike, you're killing me, here," Harvey says.

"What?" Mike says, voice muffled by pastry. "Shut up; it's instinct! Can I go home now?"

"You're not going to get any better at these things by going home early," Harvey chides. "Though it's been two hours and I'm not sure you could get any worse. Put down the creme puffs."

"I'm hungry," Mike complains but obeys, which is the important part.

"You know what," Harvey says, "yeah. We're done here. Raccoon Mike obviously needs to be free."




They end up back at Mike's apartment by unspoken agreement and Harvey loses his jacket and tie and Mike goes into his bedroom to change and toddles back out small and furry. Harvey resists the urge to pick him up again, but barely.

He busies himself with finding a movie to watch on Mike's TV and wins the lottery with Voyage Home. Mike busies himself climbing in and out of the bathtub and splashing water everywhere. Apparently Mike plans ahead for Raccoon Time. He dries off scrambling through the shelves and digging through cupboards and eating random things that he finds. Eventually he waddles over and claws at the window.

"Yeah, I don't care, Mike," Harvey says, getting up to microwave popcorn while Mike forgets all about the window and fire escape for twining around Harvey's legs and begging unabashedly. "You're not going out to get rabies tonight; no you're not."

He stays up late watching old movies and raccoon acrobatics and Harvey does get Mike to catch food in his mouth, but he's still not great at it. Mike falls asleep on the couch next to Harvey who stretches out alongside him, collecting raccoon fur on his suit and wrinkling everything. It should be awkward, spooning a raccoon, but it turns out nothing is awkward with raccoons.

A pile of snacks, stolen cable, and less late-night appointments. Happily ever after.