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Mike wakes up high.
Not like that. Well, like that. But not one-hundred percent high, like that . His mouth is dry, a little sticky, and the nausea hits him when he swings his legs out of bed.
The culprit crunches under his feet: an empty, family size bag of sour patch kids that he’d completely forgotten to dose for. When he was high. And now, he’s high .
Not like dosing for it would have even mattered, because his damn cannula had kinked again .
He grabs a swig of water from the tap on his way to the toilet, unlocking his phone, and yep. His blood sugar has been a straight line for most of the night, riding the top edge of the graph’s range, little arrow in the middle not giving him a value or an indication of where he’s going, just the word HIGH. Like he didn’t already know.
Throwing up seals the deal.
“Hey, Donna,” Mike gets out, trying to keep his phone from falling through his sweaty fingers and into the toilet, “I’m not doing so hot, I—”
Mike tries to think of an excuse. They’re working on it, but they keep running into snags with his employee insurance, and Mike’s a little reluctant to push too hard because of the whole not actually a Harvard graduate, not actually a college graduate, actually just a sneaky little fraud thing, so him being diabetic hasn’t actually come up, yet. Suits hide pump sites and glucose monitors pretty well, who knew, and Mike’s good to ride it out on Medicaid until they figure it out.
“I made some bad decisions,” he settles on, and Donna makes a noise of understanding. “I’ll be good by tomorrow.”
“Oh, you poor thing,” Mike can hear her quick fingers on her keyboard, “I’ll tell the prison warden you have food poisoning.”
He laughs, knowing Donna probably thinks a handle is what took him out, not a Costco bag of sour candy. He dry-heaves a little longer then wobbles over to his medicine cabinet, washing away the little sting from the finger prick as he waits for the true damage.
Also HIGH. Shit. He knows he has ketone strips somewhere but his brain is foggy and he’s cold and sweating at the same time. He turns the shower on and closes his eyes, slumping against the tub.
His eyes snap open when he hears a pounding on his front door, then a jiggle to his doorknob. His bathroom is full of steam, way more than it should be, he’d only shut his eyes for a minute—
“Mike,” he hears, muffled, “open the fucking door.”
Standing is…an ordeal. Mike tries and fails to fix his bangs that are stuck with condensation to his forehead, grabbing his phone which blinks at him that he’s still goddamn high and that it hadn’t been a minute, he’d been out for an hour—
“I swear to god, Mike!”
Mike swings the door open before Harvey can knock again, his fist raised.
“Jesus,” Harvey says, stepping inside, “you really do look like shit. But no matter how bad a hangover is, that’s still no excuse to miss work.”
“I’m not hungover.”
Harvey narrows his eyes.
“Still high, then.”
Mike laughs, weakly, then harder at the look on Harvey’s face, then doubles over and pukes on the floor.
A hand on his arm, steadying. Mike doesn’t shake him off, even though his touch hurts , his goddamn skin is sore.
“I—” Mike feels like he’s moving through syrup, swaying a little. He can feel himself sweating through his shirt.
Harvey finally notices the shower running and the steam curling out of the bathroom. He tugs Mike over to the couch, settling him with hands on his shoulders. Mike closes his eyes and focuses on not throwing up on the carpet. He hears the water stop running and remembers his meter on the counter, sitting upright with a noise he knows gives away just how terrible he feels.
“Mike, what the hell is going on—”
“I passed out. I think.”
“You think ,” Harvey crouches to look at him, putting the back of his hand to Mike’s forehead, “I’ve gotta admit, this is the worst hangover I’ve ever seen.”
“Not a hangover,” Mike groans, “I’m diabetic.”
Harvey blinks at him.
“And,” he swallows hard, throat dry and sore, “I think I need to go to the hospital.”
They triage Mike pretty much the second the intake nurses get eyes on him, wrapping his arm in a blood pressure cuff and sticking a thermometer in his mouth.
“DKA?” One says, helping him into a wheelchair. She stops Harvey with an arm across the chest when he tries to follow. “Relationship to the patient?”
Mike’s head is lolling, eyelids fluttering. There’s one right answer, if Harvey’s going to be allowed to keep an eye on him. “I’m his partner.”
The nurse nods and lets him follow.
Mike makes a little, pitiful noise when they stick his finger, drawing a drop of blood.
“Start fluids, page endo,” she says, then turns to Harvey, “when was the last time he took insulin?”
“Um,” Harvey flounders. The nurse hands him a clipboard.
“Fill this out to the best of your ability.”
Donna picks up on the second ring.
“Harvey, where are you? I’ve had to kill off like eight of your family members to make excuses for rescheduling—what’s that sound? Are you in the hospital?”
“Help,” Harvey says, “what the fuck is a ketone?”
“What? It’s, like, acid that your liver makes when you don’t have enough insulin, Harvey, what’s going on?”
“Mike, he’s in DK, something—”
“DKA? He’s diabetic?”
“Apparently.” Harvey glances at Mike, the twin IVs in his arms, and the thought of how could I have let this happen rings in his ears like a siren. Mike sighs and shifts. “This looks serious, the doctors just keep coming in and out and asking me about his correction factor and his insulin to carb ratio.”
“It is serious,” Donna says, tightly, “he could’ve gone into a coma.”
Harvey feels something turn in his chest. Panic, unfortunately familiar, darkens the edges of his vision. He doesn’t have to say anything. He hears Donna moving things around, then: “I’ll be there in twenty”. Harvey wonders if he should tell her they probably won’t let her in, but remembers that it’s Donna , after all.
Mike’s breathing has settled, steady rise-falls of his chest as he sleeps. Watching him be so quiet and still is novel enough that Harvey doesn’t register the time passing before Donna’s pushing through the door.
“‘Acting experience’, “ she says, settling into the plastic chair next to him, red hair windblown and looking like a flame “should be a goddamn job requirement for legal secretaries. Didn’t think to tell me you told them you’re Mike’s boyfriend? I said I was your inappropriately young wife then had to gaslight them into believing I’m old enough to be Mike’s mother. Which, bad look for you, honestly.”
“I said partner.”
“That’s even gayer. What kind of pump does he have?”
“A piece of shit one.”
Harvey’s head snaps up. Mike doesn’t really look much better, still pallid, his hair stuck to his forehead and temples with sweat, but he’s awake and talking and alive . Something’s pinning Harvey to the chair. He watches Donna jump up and start fussing but he can’t bring himself to move, doesn’t trust himself to stay upright if he stands.
“Damn cannula kinked again,” Mike’s telling Donna, “and I…”
He goes red, a welcome flush of color.
“I got high and ate a family size bag of candy. And forgot to bolus.”
Harvey knows he must look confused.
“Take insulin,” Donna explains, “dumbass.” Directed at Mike.
“I know, but it’s not like it would have helped!”
They argue a little, but it’s spirited, no anger. Harvey finally remembers that Donna’s sister is diabetic, having been diagnosed when she was five and Donna was seven. Donna had told him about giving herself pretend injections to make her sister feel better despite her own fear of needles.
She’s perched on the edge of Mike’s bed with the clipboard, scribbling down what he says. It’s still in a language Harvey can’t understand and that makes him…uncomfortable. Slipping out is easy enough, he feigns a coffee run, and he nearly bowls over the nurse that had done Mike’s intake a couple hours earlier.
“Your wife found your boyfriend, then?”
Harvey stares, thrown, but the nurse just shrugs.
“None of my business,” she says, “just as long as he has someone around that knows how to help him.”
Guilt roils in his stomach, acrid.
“We haven’t been together long,” Harvey tries, “it’s…new.”
She steps behind the desk, rummaging for a minute, then reemerges and hands Harvey a pamphlet.
“Coffee’s on the first floor.”
When he gets back, Donna’s asleep with her head pillowed at the foot of Mike’s bed. Mike looks up from his phone and smiles, tired eyes and dry lips, but it makes the tightness in Harvey’s chest unravel a little.
Mike holds up an arm. There’s no IV in it, just a dark bruise blooming on the inside of his elbow.
“Look,” he says, proudly, “only one left.”
“Pinnacle of health over here,” Harvey deadpans. He crosses over to them, settling a hand on Donna’s shoulder, helping her up when she mumbles and yawns.
“I’ve got it,” he says, and she blinks at him, eyes bleary. Harvey waves the pamphlet at her and she snorts. “Well, I know how to swipe a credit card. The doctor said he should be okay to leave soon.”
Donna kisses them both on the cheek on her way out. Harvey’s so glad she can read his mind, can tell he needs to do something, needs to feel like he can fix this, and can tell he’d be too embarrassed to do it with an audience.
“So,” Mike says, “you gonna yell at me?”
“No.”
“Well, that’s new–”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” God , he sounds like a teenager. Mike doesn’t owe him anything, in fact, Harvey can bet he knows more about Mike than maybe anyone. But he didn’t know about this . And Mike almost…
“I didn’t mean to hide it,” Mike wrings his hands, not looking Harvey in the eyes, “but the insurance mess and my not-exactly-legal employment status, I’d just figured it was easier to not say anything. Medicaid was working and my salary more than covers the copays, so–”
Harvey drops the insurance card onto Mike’s lap.
“How–”
“We can go through your benefits when you’re good to come back into work.”
Mike turns the card over in his hands, new, shiny, and stiff. He fixes Harvey with a look that makes him feel like he needs to sit down.
“You bullied someone,” Mike says, but he’s smiling. He’s seen this before in Mike’s face, in his voice: admiration, a little bit of wonder. But there’s something else, something laid bare. Trust.
“I handled it,” Harvey says. It’s uneven. He hopes Mike didn’t hear it but knows he did.
“You made a scene, didn’t you?”
“He was an asshole.”
Mike laughs, warmly. The knot in Harvey’s chest dissipates.
“You’re an asshole.”
“I am,” Harvey stands and tosses one more thing at him: the pamphlet. “Which is why I didn’t do this for free. You’ve got a lot of explaining to do.”
Mike runs him through the basics on their drive home, telling Harvey he’d been diagnosed when he was ten. His parents had died the next year.
He tells Harvey about the first time he’d gone into DKA, when he was sixteen and just didn’t give a shit anymore, didn’t care about anything, anyone, let alone himself. Waking up feeling like death warmed over to Grammy’s terrified face had been the only thing to snap him out of it.
“The least I could do was try to take care of myself,” he says, “because she didn’t deserve that.”
He explains his insulin to carb ratio, his correction factor, his last A1C.
“Six,” he’d said, eyes shining, looking like himself again.
After he steps out of the car and thanks Harvey, soft and shy, Harvey steers Ray to the nearest bodega to grab some juice boxes to stock in the center console. Just in case.