Brother from another mother

Karl - The Junior Partner

A/N: This is set shortly after 2x01, Jessica finds out that Mike is a fraud and Harvey and Mike are working on Myra Harrison's suits against Drecker publishing.

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It starts off innocuously enough, as these things tend to do.

Thanks, Karl!"

Harvey doesn't think anything of it at the time. Mike is a friendly guy; of course he'll be going out of his way to get along with the other attorneys, of course they'll be helping him out. People like to help Mike out; he has that sort of aura about him, the "lost puppy" feeling. Harvey's certainly familiar. Anyway, Karl is still new to the firm, it only makes sense that Mike wants to make him feel welcome. Included, and all that crap.

It occurs to him, a bit later, that Mike is awfully familiar with this guy awfully quickly. How long has Karl been here, a week? Maybe two? Not only is he a junior partner, but he's what, ten years older than Mike, and they're already on a first name basis. Karl clearly has no sense of how to handle his prestige; Harvey makes a note to ding him on his next performance review, or at least point it out to Jessica.

Not that he's going to let himself get caught up on petty little things like that.

"Mike," Harvey says, swaggering up to his cubicle in the middle of the afternoon with just enough arrogance about him to make it clear that he's too good for this filthy bullpen.

For his part, Mike looks up with a start, resting one hand atop the pile of papers he was just scribbling across and the other on his keyboard, as though Harvey might buy that he's somehow capable of writing and typing at the same time.

"I've got the report on Drecker's publishing records," he blurts out. "I've only been able to get my hands on the last five years so far, but I think they've got more in their in-house records, I'm gonna call and ask them tomorrow."

Leaning against Mike's cubicle wall, Harvey looks down at the paperwork sprawled across his desk, the hectic mess of annotations and yellow highlighter scribbles. Either he's being ridiculously productive, or he's doing a damn fine imitation; either way, it ought to keep the rest of the associates off his back, and the longer they can pull that off, the better.

"And then what?" he asks. Mike looks at him perplexedly, and Harvey sighs.

"After you get your hands on the last thirty years of Drecker's catalogs," he says, "do you have a plan for that, or are you planning to skip straight ahead to the paper mâché dinosaur herd?"

"Oh!" Mike turns to his computer screen and skims whatever's printed there at roughly the speed of light, looking up again with a slight smile tilting his lips. "I'm gonna find some publications to counter Myra's claims that she was plagiarized."

Harvey arches his eyebrows when Mike elects not to elaborate.

"That's it?"

Mike arches his eyebrows right back.

"Yes," he says, just a little snidely. "Have you ever actually read anything these guys have published? They're not exactly pushing the envelope here; they have a base and they pander to it, I don't think they've put out anything based on a legitimately original idea in years."

Not bad, not bad. It's not too surprising that Harvey never came to that conclusion himself; Drecker doesn't put out the kind of material he keeps stocked on his shelves at home, and he hardly has time to comb through their backlog when he can just as easily swindle them into accepting the terms Swinton has laid out for their proposed merger.