Chapter Text
Harvey closed his burning eyes for a minute. At least, that’s what he told himself. Just a minute until the pain would subside and then he’d plow through the next mountain of files.
The low, sweet sound of Ray Charles’ Georgia on my mind washed over him and only as he exhaled slowly and made the conscious effort to relax his shoulders he became fully aware of how tense his muscles had been. He desperately wanted to pour himself a glass of Whisky but that would come later, as a reward when he’d finally found what he so urgently was looking for – a solution for the mess he had gotten himself and Wyatt, the techno geek, into. He knew he would find it eventually. The thought of not being able to win for his client never crossed his mind. Well, it did but if asked he would take the 5th on that. He was, after all, New York’s best closer. And not even the honorable Judge Donald Pearl would wrinkle his reputation even if he was willing to sacrifice his own in order to stick it to his, allegedly, unfaithful wife.
With his head dropped back against the backrest of his lounging chair, he allowed his thoughts to drift back to the day he’d been supposed to hire his own associate. When Jessica had first told him that he had to take care of the associates’ interviews at the Chilton, and thus revealing to him that he finally made it to senior partner, in front of Louis no less (the memory of the face of that ferret still made Harvey snigger), Harvey had felt ecstatic.
That feeling hadn’t lasted. After 8 hours of tedious interviews with one Harvard clone after another, his joy had slowly but surely changed into resentment. Halfway through the day he had been seriously tempted to randomly hire any of the douchebags just to get it over with. Even his arrangement with Donna to streamline the process had been futile, because the candidates were all just so generic, boring and uninspired. Not at all a second him he was looking for, like he had told his assistant earlier. In the end he just couldn’t settle for anybody below his standards. After all, he would have to work with this person, probably see them on a daily basis and – oh, the thought made him shudder – mentor them.
NO! That just wouldn’t do. Harvey Specter wouldn’t settle for second best, even if that meant that he would have to dig through Wyatt’s case files all by himself. Or that the reason he was in this mess in the first place was, that he had tried to do everything by himself and thus filed the patent a day late, as Jessica had stated succinctly, much to his chagrin. The woman knew about everything that happened in her firm and the “I told you so” came as no surprise to him. It still rankled, though.
With that thought he forced his eyes open again, briefly pinched the bridge of his nose and picked up another folder with a sigh. The words blurred a little in front of his tired eyes but he willed them to make sense. He would dig himself out of this and if he needed to pull several all-nighters to do so, then so be it.
A strange buzzing noise crept into his consciousness and when he looked up, he saw the shadow of a young man in baggy jeans and a tee in the dim light outside his office. The slender man was slightly hunched over and moved slowly in a crisscross path across the hallway, holding the nozzle of a vacuum cleaner.
It took Harvey a few moments to realize that the guy must belong to the cleaning crew Pearson Hardman hired. A glance at his expensive wristwatch confirmed that it was way past midnight. The buzzing noise stopped and the guy made his way towards Donna’s cubicle. Harvey reached out to the lamp beside his chair and dimmed the lights to obscure his presence. Somehow he was intrigued by the movements of the man, although despite of his stature and the way he moved, Harvey hadn’t been able the make out more than the outlines of the slender figure against the dim hallway light. Somehow there was something familiar about the man, though Harvey couldn’t for the life of him pinpoint what it was.
The man had picked up Donna’s bin and emptied the contents into a large black plastic trash bag he was dragging behind him. Then the vacuum cleaner once more sprang to life and the inside of the cubicle was thoroughly hoovered.
The movements of the guy were efficient and quick, but his slender figure added a sort of gracefulness that appealed to Harvey. And once more, the sense of familiarity niggled at the back of his mind. Then the guy turned and for a moment his face was illuminated by the low lights of the energy saving lamps in the hallway.
Harvey gasped.