fic: Incandescent (turn off the lights when you go)

[because_i_hope]

Title:Incandescent (turn off the lights when you go)
Rating:T, implied sexual situations
Ship: Rachel/Mike
Summary: Somewhere along the way, maybe after she fails the LSATs the first time, Rachel learns to deny herself the things she wants.


And why do you sing Hallelujah
If it means nothing to ya
Why do you sing to me at all?

"I always knew," Mike says, but doesn't finish.

Rachel is a hardened lover, all shell and casing, sometimes biting into shoulders with her teeth bared. She begs to be ripped open and excavated, to be understood. She remembers his flushed face, the pale impression of her bra strap when he'd taken it off, heart racing faster when she touched him, imploring him to destroy her.

The night after the double-date, she fucks Kyle.

But this is what she will never tell Mike:

She pretends it's him the entire time.

Somewhere along the way, maybe after she fails the LSATs the first time, Rachel learns to deny herself the things she wants.

When she discovers Mike is not a real lawyer (purely by accident, really, Louis should learn to keep his bickering to himself), Rachel feels something open up within her, threatening to swallow her whole from the inside out.

Wincing she closes her eyes, masking and willing the betrayal to fade. Mike, more than anyone, probably had his reasons. Rachel knows how invaluable he is to the firm, how many billables he has helped pile up higher than the ceilings in the main lobby, knows Mike is the most intelligent and clever person she's ever met... she cannot blame Harvey for hiring him or Jessica for keeping him.

Rachel can't find it in herself to blame Mike, either.

So instead she blames herself (not enough, never enough)

That night she finally watches Casablanca and weeps.

After months of distance, the first thing Rachel notices is that the flow of time has robbed Mike of all expression save apathy.

"I don't want your forgiveness," he says, carefully, as though she'd break down at the revelation. Rachel tries not to hold him responsible; he still doesn't know her.

"That's fine by me," she replies, leaning back into her office chair, "Because I'm not giving it to you".

Mike quirks a brow at that, almost as if the possibility of her anger being a permanent fixture had never crossed his mind. Advancing slowing, he stretches his arm in her direction.

She stands, taking the hand he'd offered. Old habits die hard, after all.

"You'll have to earn it," Rachel whispers, almost worrying that he hasn't heard her, but then he catches her eye and perhaps, with time-with trying because he is Mike, and she is Rachel, and their relationship hasn't been so easy, and maybe just maybe, it doesn't have to be-maybe he will.

...I can't go back.

She wonders what the hell ever happened to that voicemail she left him.

But Mike doesn't say anything, doesn't even hint at it for the sake of making her uncomfortable, or twist the words so that her heartbeat pulses loud enough to hear it in her ears.

Fine then. If he won't mention it, neither will she. She has let her arrogance get in the way of them before.

Mike is gaunt and lean, and walks with the same slow pace- measured half-steps that never falter in their rhythm-hands at his side. He never wastes his movements, has never been one for embellishment, or unnecessary ornamentation. Mike's plain white shirts and skinny ties are testament to that. The slacks he wears hang loose on the line of his hips, and Rachel can't help but frown at her lack of self-preservation. Why she continues to torture herself with the thought of him is puzzling.

Mike is all skin and rounded edges-there is never a shade of maliciousness to find on him.

That's what bothers her the most.

"I broke up with Jenny," he says, eyes shining in the dim lamp light of her office.

Rachel tells herself it's a normal reaction-Mike's words are like a knife at her neck with their sudden rigor-that her shiver hadn't come from the breath on her lips, but from the realization that now hammers painfully inside her chest.

"Oh."

Until this moment she thinks she has been a woman of action, but the sight of Mike, lovelorn and tired, makes Rachel wish she could go back and reconstruct a different ending.

"Our roads diverged when you kissed me back," she says after work, zipping up her coat in a hasted fury, "so let me show you how I built mine."

Mike is quiet. He is slow, deliberate, as if he must undo each lock before opening her, spreading her apart with his thin fingertips until she's splayed out and open for his perusal.

When Rachel sees him the next morning at work, she forces herself to forget how his palms opened on her skin, how she knew the taste of him before he'd even pressed his mouth to hers.

She watches him shake a client's hand, ushering them into a conference room and talking about lawsuits, about money, about winning. In the back of her mind, all she sees is flashes of skin that wind her up as tight as a coil.

"Hey," he says.

"Hi," Rachel replies, mouth drying instantly as her skin prickles under Mike's gaze.

"So, I was wondering if you wanted to go-"

"No," she interrupts, eyes flickering dangerously towards him, "We don't need that."

Mike doesn't say anything. Doesn't prod her for an explanation, doesn't demand some rationale behind her actions. Rachel considers this as their problem all along, the reason they've been so good at missing their chances.

That night, when Mike sees that she's dripping as his fingers come up slick, she moans at the emptiness he's do good at leaving.

Afterwards, Rachel brushes her lips against his brow, presses a single open-mouthed kiss to the hollow of Mike's throat until his blue eyes fly open and she can feel him, hot and heavy, pushed against her.

She draws herself up from the warmth at his side, knows that this will happen again and again, and knows just as well that his shabby apartment door stays open for her alone. For now, Rachel will fold herself up, put herself back together. Her blouse is half-buttoned, her skirt is wrinkled, and she ignores the twinge in her chest as she looks at Mike, face blank and expressionless, fixing her an uncomprehending stare. She leaves without a word and disappears into the night.

Sometimes Rachel wonders why Mike bothers with her, why he doesn't leave her for the unrelenting woman that she is. Sometimes she believes that he does this because it's the only way she'll have him. But only sometimes.

Mike fills her soundlessly, eyes red and spinning with desire as she comes, pale pink mouth open in a silent scream.

Later Rachel will reason; she fucks Mike to forget the promises she can't keep, the discontent in her life she can't escape, to banish the early hour regrets she knows she'll have. Rachel fucks to forget everything.

It's not that she doesn't date anyone from the office. That's just an excuse. Rachel doesn't date anyone at all.

She leaves her hot breaths, her desperate pants, her ragged cries, in the palm of Mike's hand when she comes apart around him. Sometimes when she can control the bursting emotions inside her, Rachel will brush aside the hair in his eyes, and she'll let him kiss her to sleep-let him leave soft and fleeting touches to her neck, her shoulders, her back.

But this time is different. This time Mike whispers Citizen Kane against the paleness of her skin-We never lost as much as we made-marvelling the dips and curves of her body with trembling hands, surveying every inch and committing her to his boundless memory.

"I'm a little out of practice," he says, quietly, and Rachel allows herself to feel the first stirrings of anticipation, "but maybe you can teach me."

"Teach you what?" she quips, fishing underneath his bed for her heels.

"How to live for myself."

Rachel freezes, instantly recognizing what Mike really means because for so long in her life she has wanted to know how to do it too. How to break free.

It takes a little longer than she expected for Mike's stillness to rupture, eyes hard as steel and demeanour radiating heat and anger and burning grief that Rachel already knows how this will end. She can see it from a mile away.

"I don't understand you," he starts, barring the entrance of his apartment with his arm.

"Sometimes I don't understand me, either."

"I'm serious," Mike growls, "Why do you do this to me? To yourself? This isn't how it should have turned out... it never had to get to the point where you won't go out on a single date with me. You can't admit you actually wanted this."

"This is exactly what I want," says Rachel, teeth clenched so hard she can hear the grinding in her mouth. The foolishness of this conversation, the sudden absurdity consuming her rationality at this very moment, holding her prisoner in her own flustered thoughts, is going to make them both regret this.

"It doesn't have to be like this," he reasons carefully.

Hope, Rachel decides, is a wretched thing -one that flutters between reality and possibility, fleeting as it escapes through the space between her fingers, something that will inevitably break her.

"Yes it does."

"Why?" he shouts, pushing himself off the doorjamb and running a hand through his hair.

"Look Mike, you've probably already figure this out, but," Rachel stops suddenly, breathing uneven and eyes stinging with shame. The pit of her stomach feels like it's eroding away, leaving behind an emptiness inside her she's afraid she'll never be able to fill up again. "I disappoint everyone important in my life. My parents, myself, and soon I'll disappoint you, too."

"Rachel..." Mike says, in that breathless sort of way that would probably make her weak in the knees if she weren't so mortified at the moment.

"No. It's okay," she counters, walking towards the open door, "This is why it has to be like this. So no one will get hurt."

Rachel doesn't have to look at him to understand the bitter irony in her own words.

A week later she walks into the office kitchen, throat drying up instantly when she sees Mike standing next to the counter, shoulders sagging and expression far and distant.

He hands her a cup of coffee wordlessly, his calloused fingers sliding gently by hers as she makes a grab for it.

"I like my coffee with two sugars and one cream," Rachel mentions offhandedly, not really caring how it is because she'll drink it either way.

"I know," Mike responds grimly, and she's suddenly struck with the fact that yes. Yes, he did know. He'd known-had wanted to know-everything about her once. It's an unnecessary task he'd taken infinitely more seriously than the others the firm had assigned to her.

Rachel signs wearily; the realization leaves her with an odd feeling-something like two people reading the same story at different paces.

She was at the beginning, and evidently, Mike was nearing the end.

The thought leaves an odd taste in her mouth the coffee can't wash down.

"Excuse me."

And as he leaves, Rachel finds herself releasing the breath she never knew she'd been holding. Mike hadn't notice the white knuckles in her sides, or the little lines around her pursed mouth.

"You want me for pride's sake," Rachel says one day, when she's feeling particularly vindictive, "You want to fix me, Mike, and you want me to thank you for it."

She won't pretend to understand what she means to him-and pain associated with any more humiliation and discontentment in her life prevents her from making any effort to believe it either.

She leaves before she can see his reaction. She's good at that, anyway.

There's not enough left in Rachel to love anyone, especially not Mike-not in the way that he deserves-but he still wants her somehow, in some way, and she finds herself unable to argue against the expectant look in his eyes she knows better than her own.

They see each other in that way sometimes. Between the early hours of dawn they shed their clothes and silently observe fading freckles, the movement of flesh, the creases beside their eyes. Age comes slowly, without ordeal. They trace it across each other's faces and neck, in the deepening lines of their hands and mouth.

When he looks to be asleep, Rachel tells Mike she loves him, and it sounds a little broken when it reaches her ears.

"Mike."

"Yeah?"

"You knew, didn't you? All this time, you knew."

"I think so."

Rachel will stand and Mike will follow her. Their fingers may brush, and she will bite back a smile (sometimes a moan, sometimes a scream) and so will he, both their faces hidden from the other. She will go left, he will go right.

Mike will wonder if he is lost. Rachel will realize she can never go back.

The end.