Chapter Text
“How many times do I have to fucking tell you? I wasn’t trying to kill the bitch.”
Mickey’s public defender (Jack or Jim Whatever-the-Fuck—he hadn’t been paying attention) peered over the top of his stupid thick-framed black glasses at him with the most unimpressed expression Mickey had seen since telling Fiona Gallagher that he was better with an iron when it was being used to commit felonies. How ironic.
“Miss Slott claims that you incapacitated her—”
“How the fuck was I supposed to know she had shit in her system?”
“—locked her in a moving crate—”
“Oh yeah? You got prints off that lock?”
“—and shipped her upstate.”
“Okay, she’s the one who shipped the crate. It just had…different cargo than she was planning,” Mickey argued lamely. He didn’t need that skeptical frown and raised eyebrow to tell him he didn’t exactly have a rock-solid defense.
“Mr. Milkovich,” his attorney sighed, pausing to consider his words carefully if Mickey was reading the room right. He couldn’t blame the guy: the poor bastard probably wanted to skip town when he heard who he had to keep out of the joint. There had to be enough stories of the Milkovich family circulating in legal circles by now to keep the booze industry in business for the next few decades. “From a strictly legal standpoint, you don’t have much of a leg to stand on. You’ve as good as admitted to drugging Miss Slott.”
Years of hiding his thoughts from Terry were the only reason Mickey managed to refrain from pointing out that Miss sounded a whole lot like he was calling Sammi a lady, and despite the constant stream of Russian hookers and other South Side garbage he’d become acquainted with growing up, he’d never met anyone less like a lady than Sammi goddamn Slott.
If his attorney could sense his thoughts, he was a good enough guy not to comment. Instead, he continued, “The rest of the story speaks for itself. Even if you weren’t responsible for her being placed in that shipping container, you did put her in a vulnerable position that directly led to the same result.”
“Don’t bullshit me, man,” muttered Mickey. “No jury in their right mind’s gonna believe I didn’t shove her ass in there.”
“No, probably not. You had the means, the opportunity, and the motive.”
Damn right, he’d had the motive. Not an hour went by where Mickey didn’t remember what that bitch had done to him—to them. The last year or so had been a roller coaster of emotional bullshit that gave him whiplash just thinking about it. His dad finding out his secret, marrying Svetlana, winding up with a kid, losing Ian, finding Ian the way he’d fucking found him. Coming out in front of a bar full of homophobes he’d been hiding from for as long as he could remember just so that Ian wouldn’t walk right back out of his life again. Not that Mickey actually thought that that was what would have happened, in hindsight. He and Ian had been circling around each other for years, sometimes at arm’s length and other times crashing together like magnets. Even when he thought it was over—even when it should have been over—they somehow ended up right back in each other’s orbits. A soft bastard would have said it was destiny or fate or some other horseshit like that. Ian definitely would. No, one of them would have cracked. In that instance, it was Mickey, and he couldn’t say he regretted it.
But they’d gotten—what? One night? Because the next day, Ian’s brain had decided it was time to throw another wrench into the shitshow that had become their lives. Mickey might not have recognized it, but everything between then and Ian running off with Yevgeny had been borrowed time. It was stupid to think that two gay guys from the South Side would get a happy ending like that. For them, it was always just better or worse, or that was how it seemed.
The night Ian got dragged out of his own damn house by MPs was supposed to be one of the better ones. They were supposed to change their bloody shirts, the unfortunate casualties of Ian’s attempt to fucking feel anything on his meds, and go out on a real date for a change. They were supposed to sit down at a nice restaurant and eat with those goddamn utensils like Ian wanted. Like Mickey wanted, though he’d never admit that out loud.
Instead, Sammi had shot their plans to hell and tried to ruin Ian’s life for…revenge? Over some shit between her weird-ass kid and Carl? Mickey may not have graduated from high school, but he wasn’t an idiot. Ian had nothing to do with any of that. He was sick. He needed help. He needed his family.
Not to be locked up until the army decided what to do with him.
Not to get caught up in whatever stupid crap Monica Gallagher was into these days.
So yeah, he’d had plenty of fucking motive to kill Sammi. The problem? That’s not what he was trying to do. A little bit of torture? A little bit of humiliation? A little bit of showing that bitch what would happen if she ever came for his man again? Sure. He was a Milkovich, and whatever baggage that might come with, never let it be said that they didn’t take care of their own. Mickey hadn’t been able to do that for Ian before his dumb ass ran off to the army and a fucking breakdown, so he had to make up for lost time.
Unfortunately for him, he was a Milkovich.
“So, what are we looking at?” he asked, deflating slightly in his seat. The chains on his handcuffs pulled taut against the bar they were hooked to, and Mickey glared at them so that he didn’t have to see his attorney’s face when he answered. Whatever it was, it wouldn’t be good news.
It was always just better or worse.
The fact that his attorney didn’t speak up immediately wasn’t comforting. Papers were shuffled, his fingers tapped noisily on the screen of his iPad, then silence.
Just give it to me straight, man. Jesus Christ.
Mickey was about to press the issue when his asswipe lawyer finally offered, “I can only see one possibility for a reduced sentence.”
Reduced sentence. Well, that was probably as scot-free as Mickey was ever going to get, so no use complaining about it.
“Right now, the heftiest charge is first degree attempted murder.”
Snorting, Mickey impatiently retorted, “Yeah, I got that part when the cops showed up. Keep going.”
Public defenders had to be thoroughly trained in the art of either patience or being a pussy, because this moron didn’t hesitate to appease him: “We could make a deal with the prosecution to lessen the charge to second degree, which is substantially less time behind bars.”
“What’s the fucking difference?”
“To put it simply, first degree means you planned to do it. Second means you didn’t.”
It was all Mickey could do not to say that he absolutely, one hundred fucking percent planned to make Sammi pay. If the look on his attorney’s face was any indication, he already seemed to have a pretty good idea of that.
“It was a crime of passion,” he continued without giving Mickey a chance to incriminate himself further, thank fuck. “You were upset about losing your partner and acted irrationally, not out of a premeditated desire to kill Miss Slott.”
Irrationally, huh?
In their neighborhood, it would be more irrational not to man the hell up under those conditions. Snitches and stitches and all that shit. If you didn’t lay down the law, then the law would mow you down in the street, maybe even inside your own home—and by law, he wasn’t talking about the cops. There was only one law in the ghetto, and the police had nothing to do with it.
Which was why Mickey asked, “How come that ain’t considered defense?”
His attorney blinked. “Are…you saying Miss Slott attacked you?”
“Uh, you hear what she got popped for?”
“I mean before your offense.”
That was a tricky question. As far as Mickey was concerned, anything that hurt Ian was a personal attack on him, and she’d knocked that one out of the park. But as far as he could tell, that wasn’t something this bozo was going to understand. That suit looked like it probably cost more than Mickey’s house, and that was including whatever those hipster yuppies were willing to offer for it. Gentrifying fucks.
His attorney took his silence as the response that it was and oh so kindly informed him, “Arguing defense of your partner could potentially leave you open to further charges.”
Mickey scoffed. “The fuck you talking about?”
“Legally, Miss Slott was performing her civic duty by contacting the authorities about Mr. Gallagher. You were harboring a fugitive, which is a—”
“That wasn’t his fault!” Mickey exploded, and the tiny room echoed with the cacophony of his fists beating against the metal table. For the first time since he’d been let in, the asshole sitting across from him actually had the sense to look a little scared. “He’s fucking sick!”
“I’m only trying to present you with reasonable options, Mr. Milkovich,” his attorney immediately evaded. He waved a placating hand towards the door, and Mickey realized that his outburst had almost gotten him put in a chokehold by the fat rent-a-cop outside, who was watching him as if he might flip the table. Which he absolutely felt like doing but wasn’t stupid enough to try. Not until he found out just how far up shit creek he already was.
Taking a deep breath, Mickey forced himself to slowly sit back in his chair and uncurl his fists where they were still pressed against the cool metal. It didn’t help quell the boiling pit in his stomach, but it kept the guard from busting in. That was a step in the right direction.
Once he was sure that Mickey wouldn’t gouge his goddamn eyeballs out, his attorney cleared his throat and said, “Your actions would be viewed by a jury as retribution, not defense, and the prosecution knows that. The best we can hope for is a plea bargain for second degree attempted murder.”
“Yeah, and how long is that?”
“Five to fifteen with the possibility of parole.”
If Mickey didn’t know any better, he’d say the guy had socked him in the jaw. All he could do for a moment was stare, mouth agape as his brain struggled to process what the best he could hope for really was.
“Five to fifteen?” he repeated, though he could barely hear the words as they were leaving his mouth.
His attorney nodded, not one ounce of sympathy in his eyes when he added, “Given that you’ve been in and out of the juvenile department of corrections multiple times, and with that Milkovich reputation, I wouldn’t count on anything less than ten.”
A decade. Locked up for a decade. The four years he thought he’d be without Ian paled in comparison to that. He’d be around thirty in a decade. His kid would be in middle school in a decade. The whole goddamn neighborhood would be full of organic coffee places and stupid fucking hipster bars in a decade.
Ian would have to move on with his life in a decade.
“What if we went to trial?”
Desperation was the only reason he asked, and his attorney had to realize it too. He was staring at Mickey as if he were the psycho instead of his psycho boyfriend.
Ex-boyfriend.
Sort of. They hadn’t finished that conversation, and it was definitely a conversation they were going to finish.
And not in a fucking decade.
“I…wouldn’t recommend it.”
“Why not? Maybe the jury’ll feel for a guy who lost it on some bitch who tried to ruin his life.”
“Or maybe they’ll see a thug who was angry that a heretofore law-abiding citizen got his lover arrested and tried to kill her for it,” his attorney shot back, finally losing a little of that patience Mickey had been testing. “It happens all the time on the South Side. You know that as well as I do. Do you really want to gamble on it and spend twice as much time in prison when you lose?”
Mickey didn’t have an answer for that. The guy had a point, there was no denying it. Plus, he’d said it himself: that Milkovich reputation wasn’t doing him any favors in front of a jury of his peers. Of course, they wouldn’t really be his peers. He’d be fine if they were. He’d be out on the street again tomorrow, storming up the steps of the Gallaghers’ house demanding to talk some sense into Ian. But that wasn’t going to happen because his peers? Yeah, they’d be a bunch of snobs from the parts of Chicago that wouldn’t wander into the South Side if you paid them. They’d be the ones who were glad to hear that a bunch of blue-bloods were moving into the neighborhood and making it impossible to afford for the people who’d spent their whole damn lives there. They wouldn’t even need to talk about it—they’d put Mickey away in an instant once they got a load of the tattoos on his knuckles and how comfortable he looked in an orange jumpsuit. Hell, they’d probably even ask the judge to sentence him to the maximum.
But there was still a chance, slim as it was, that they’d have a little compassion. Maybe they’d acquit him just because first degree wasn’t the right fit.
There wasn’t any wiggle room if he took the plea deal. Guilty was guilty, and a decade was a decade.
God, what he wouldn’t give for a pack of smokes and the biggest fucking bottle of booze he could get his hands on right about now.
What he wouldn’t give for a redhead who’d always had a hell of a lot more sense than he did.
“You mind if I think about it?” Mickey eventually murmured to the table.
His attorney was silent for a moment before he started gathering all his shit together. It wasn’t until everything was stuffed neatly in a briefcase that Mickey could probably hawk for a year’s supply of Ian’s meds that he answered, “I’ll be back in the morning.”
Yeah. Because Mickey could totally put all the pieces of his life back together by then.
***
When push came to shove, Mickey had next to no one he could go to for advice, much as he hated to admit that he needed it in the first place. Mandy was long gone. Iggy… Where the fuck even was Iggy anyway? He hadn’t heard from Sandy in months, Terry was a no-go even if he wasn’t already in lockup, and the Gallaghers… They didn’t know shit about the justice system. Not really. The closest they had was fucking Frank, and somehow that asshole always crawled out of trouble before things got too serious. The Gallaghers were visitors—the Milkoviches were lifers.
And boy, did he not want to think about that.
So, he ultimately only had one real choice if he was going to toss ideas around with anyone whose opinion was worth a damn in this context. Oddly enough, it was someone whose opinion he’d never given a damn about before. Funny how life had a tendency of making you take it in the ass, and not in the good way.
“What do you want?” Svetlana blithely inquired as soon as the call connected. Leave it to his bitchy Russian wife to get straight to business without any small talk. Admittedly, that was one of the few things he actually liked about her, if liked was even the word for it.
“Need some advice,” he muttered into the receiver without preamble, hunching his shoulders around the metal phone panel as if the guards behind him weren’t listening to every goddamn word he said anyway.
“I mean, there’s just no privacy.”
Shit. Ian thought the group home was bad? The hell would he think of this place?
Which was the reason he wasn’t on the other end of the phone. Among others.
Because she had a really creepy way of sneaking into your head and reading your thoughts—or maybe because Mickey was that damn transparent lately—Svetlana huffed, “And why don’t you ask Carrot Boy?”
He’s never been locked up for real.
He broke up with me. (Sort of.)
His head’s already enough of a goddamn mess without me tossing even more onto his fucked up genetic plate.
All were true, but Mickey settled on, “Got his own shit to deal with.”
Svetlana hummed noncommittally, and Mickey was pretty proud of himself for not snapping at her. He could practically see that fucking judgy stare of hers. It was the same every time: when he’d brought an unconscious Ian home from the club so he could sleep the coke off in their bed, when he’d tried to stiff her on money for the baby, when he’d stupidly attempted to stay on Terry’s good side at the baptism even though he hadn’t wanted to be there in the first place. Nothing grated on his nerves more than that illegal Russian hand whore looking at him like he was the one with the goddamn problem.
Luckily, whether she took pity on him or just wanted him off the phone, she didn’t give him shit the way she normally would. There was a puff of static as she sighed at the other end and then repeated, “What do you want?”
Mickey scuffed his shoe on the cinder block wall and stuffed his free hand in his pocket. “They’re talking about a plea deal.”
“Take it.”
“You haven’t even heard what it is yet.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Svetlana dismissed him. “Is already better.”
That brought a bitter chuckle to Mickey’s lips. It wasn’t untrue, but it still hurt like a motherfucker to have someone else acknowledge what he was already well aware of.
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Not the advice you wanted?” she asked all too knowingly.
Now it was Mickey’s turn to sneer. “What, that I should throw myself in the can for five to fifteen? The fuck you think?”
“I think you are still scared little boy, only there is no daddy to run to this time.”
“Say that again and I’ll rip your teeth outta your mouth,” Mickey rejoined testily. Unsurprisingly, Svetlana wasn’t intimidated.
“Hard to do from prison cell.”
“I ain’t scared of shit,” he deflected, bluff effectively called and therefore not worth pursuing.
“Oh, really? You aren’t scared of losing Orange Boy?”
That shut him the fuck up, all right. Not needing to see him to witness her victory, Svetlana didn’t spare him a second to recover.
“You think he won’t wait for you. You think he will realize you are piece of shit and move on.”
“I need the shit-talking, bitch-slapping piece of South Side trash I fell for.”
Well, at least Ian already knew Mickey was a piece of shit and didn’t care. Never had. Why the fuck that was, Mickey would never know.
Didn’t mean she wasn’t right, though.
Mickey glanced over his shoulder, but the guards were too busy talking about some kid’s birthday party to listen in on his conversation. Svetlana didn’t make him answer, which was nice just in case they were paying more attention than it seemed. He wasn’t ashamed to be out—that ship had already sailed. He still wasn’t about to air his business when he didn’t have to.
“You shouldn’t worry.”
Fuck off.
“Who the hell says I’m worried?”
Choosing not to dignify that load of crap with an answer, Svetlana simply stated, “He loves you,” as if that solved anything. As if that was enough.
Fucking newsflash: Mickey had figured out that Ian was in love with him a long time ago, and love was still never enough, not even when Mickey finally grew a pair and admitted that he felt the same way. Some stupid bullshit tore them apart regardless of their goddamn feelings, only it wasn’t a few months in juvie this time. Mickey Milkovich had graduated, motherfuckers. This here was the big leagues, and where he would have considered it inevitable a few years ago, now he was desperately searching for any loophole he could to keep him out of the joint. He’d known he was fucked for life as a kid, but he hadn’t had a reason to change that back then. Now some red-haired asshole fucking needed him no matter how hard he tried to convince himself that he didn’t.
South Side pride didn’t protect you from South Side logic. If it did, maybe he’d have had more choices than listening to the wife he never wanted telling him to take a deal he didn’t want that would keep him away from the one thing he did.
“So, you think I should take it?”
Mickey had to be grateful, albeit grudgingly, when she let him change the subject. “You would rather go to trial? Get sentenced to longer?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I’ll get lucky.”
Silence.
“Okay, fine,” he sighed. “Jesus Christ, I get it.”
“Think of this as opportunity.”
“An opportunity,” Mickey echoed incredulously. “How the fuck is this an opportunity?”
He could practically hear the smirk in her voice when she answered, “Your uncle called when he heard the news.”
“Which one?”
“The one with friends in high places.”
Aw, shit.
The thing about the Milkovich family was that there was no shortage of shitheads willing to do whatever they had to in order to make a buck. His dad’s brothers? Some of them were even bigger douchebags than his old man, which was saying something. He’d done a few drug runs with them and his cousins, carried out a few less than savory operations to intimidate anybody who owed them money, and basically acted as their errand boy to put away some cash in the past. Up until now, he hadn’t been in a position to help them with their inside gig—the one where they took contracts from pussies who were too chickenshit to get their own hands dirty.
Well, Mickey had been a drug dealer, a pimp, and a conman. Adding prison hit man to his resumé was basically just a drop in the bucket at this point.
“He sure works fucking fast,” Mickey muttered. His family was already positive he’d be going away for long enough to get some shit done—more of that South Side logic in action.
“Is good offer,” Svetlana countered firmly. “Will help me pay to take care of baby while you are in prison.”
“I’m so glad all this works out for you. Really,” he shot back sarcastically.
If you could hear an eye roll, now would be the time. “Stop complaining. It is good for you too.”
Glaring at the wall, Mickey took a quick inventory of his situation and retorted, “Oh, yeah? How you figure that?”
“Just think. By time you are released, Yevgeny will have forgotten you,” Svetlana practically purred before the line disconnected.
***
There was a lot that jail and juvie had in common. For one thing, the food was shit. For another, so was literally everything else.
The nights were the worst part. During the day, at least there was stuff to keep you busy, and by stuff, Mickey meant working out. That had become a habit of his during his yearly stints in lockup, though he’d denied for the longest time that it had anything to do with wanting to see a certain someone’s reaction to it when he got out. Pushing his body to its limits meant that he didn’t have to use his head, which was a goddamn blessing when all you had was time and nothing to do with it. Every now and again, he’d find someone worth holding a conversation with. It was usually just grunts and nods and staying the fuck out of each other’s way, but that was really all conversation inside was good for anyway. They’d pass a few hours like that, do some community service to pretend that they were being prepared for release to become productive members of society rather than because the system couldn’t afford to keep them, and then get shut into their cells so they could start all over again tomorrow.
All the push-ups and sit-ups in the world weren’t enough to keep you out of your own head when the lights went out and the other inmates told you to stop making so much noise and go the fuck to sleep. It didn’t matter if you were in juvie or jail—you were well and truly fucked at night.
And Mickey had the next decade of his life to look forward to it if he followed Svetlana’s advice.
He’d be an idiot not to. He knew he’d be an idiot not to. Mickey Milkovich wasn’t going to get a break from any jury. He checked all the boxes in the ghetto trifecta: poor, gay, and thuggish. Honestly, it was dumb to even ask Svetlana for her opinion—he already knew what he had to do.
That didn’t make it any easier to do it. Even as he told the little voice in his head that nonsensically argued he might have a chance at a trial to shut the fuck up, he couldn’t help wondering. Hoping. What the hell else did he have?
Not Ian, that was for shit sure. If he could be persuaded to take back what he’d said a few days ago outside his house, it still wouldn’t make a difference. Mickey couldn’t ask him to wait. Ian had already been waiting for his ass to pull his shit together for longer than Mickey cared to think about.
That was why he’d run off to join the army, wasn’t it? By that point, Ian had been almost single-handedly fighting for them to be a thing for nearly two years, and what had Mickey done? Fucking nothing. No, wait, that wasn’t true—he’d set them back at every turn. Sometimes it was worth it. Towelhead catching them together and then shooting him at least meant that he never laid another hand on Ian, as far as Mickey could tell. All the rest… What a fucking shitshow, all so that he could protect himself from whatever Terry would do to him if he found out exactly what he’d raised. And Ian had been patient with that, for the most part. Even if he didn’t understand, he’d tolerated it. He’d accepted being Mickey’s dirty little secret and only pushed back against it a couple of times. In fact, the more Mickey thought about it as he stared at the underside of his cellmate’s bunk above him in the dark, he could only count two occasions where Ian had ever asked him for anything. Two.
To admit that he loved him, just once.
Not to marry Svetlana if he gave even half a shit about him.
That was it. Two requests in the whole time they’d been together. There were other things, sure, like playing the jealousy card with that ancient doctor or practically daring Mickey to kiss him, but that was different. That was fucking little shit, which was why Mickey could give in to it. When the big shit went down, he ran away with his tail between his legs. Ever since Ian came back—or, more accurately, ever since Mickey had dragged his coked-out ass back—he hadn’t been so okay with waiting anymore. He hadn’t been so unguarded anymore. A little piece of the old Ian hadn’t survived him marrying Svetlana, and that was on him. Not Terry or Ian’s fucking bipolar bullshit—Mickey.
So, he couldn’t even begin to ask him to wait again, this time for a hell of a lot longer than he ever had before. He couldn’t be mad when he thought about how Ian hadn’t visited him in the last few days since the cops had dragged his ass off to jail to wait for a trial or a sentence or whatever. Well, okay, maybe he was kind of put out. After all, Mickey was only here because he’d gone after Sammi for Ian’s sake. That had to have earned him at least a little gratitude even if they weren’t technically together anymore, right?
The reminder made him nauseous, and Mickey rolled over on his flimsy excuse for a mattress to face the blank grey wall. Stupid fucking Sammi had interrupted before they could finish what Mickey fully intended to be a very long and painful conversation. That was the only way Ian Gallagher was going to say goodbye to him. He had to mean it—Mickey had to know that he meant it.
Right now…he wasn’t so sure. Ian was off his meds and had just gotten home from a road trip with his drugged up, psychotic excuse for a mother, who Fiona and Lip had told him spent most of her time denying she was bipolar to begin with. The entire drive home, they’d been swapping stories of all the crazy shit she’d done; by the time Mickey had pulled up outside their house, he was positive that Carl’s story about her trying to fly off the roof was pretty tame compared to everything else. Even so, Fiona wasn’t as worried that Monica would hurt Ian as she was that the bitch would convince him that they all wanted to fucking change him.
And on that, it looked like the score was one for Monica and zero for the Gallaghers. Even less for Mickey since he was the one who had to fucking watch the fallout.
“Too much is wrong with me! That’s the problem, isn’t it? Too much is wrong with me, and you can’t do anything about that. You can’t change it. You can’t fix me because I’m not broken—I don’t need to be fixed, okay? I’m me.”
The deafening silence in his cell couldn’t mute how Ian’s voice seemed to shatter when he dropped that bombshell or how Mickey’s brain had short-circuited when he realized where the hell he was going with that whole outburst. Maybe being locked up wasn’t the worst thing, though, at least temporarily. At the time, he’d been too fucking devastated to really think about what was going on. A few days and a lot of thinking later, Mickey knew exactly what it was.
Ian was trying to protect Mickey. From him.
It would have been funny just how much the tables had turned if he wasn’t currently facing down the likelihood of a decade-long stay at the nearest metal motel. If not for how much more fucked up than usual their lives had been lately, Mickey might have thought he was imagining things. Mickey wasn’t the one who needed protecting from Ian. Fuck, Ian was the shithead who needed to be protected from him. That was how this relationship worked: Ian deserved better and Mickey did his best to live up to that. Not that he ever could, but sometimes he’d convince himself that he must be close since Ian stuck around.
Yet there was no arguing with the way it had all gone down and how goddamn obvious it was in hindsight. Ian Gallagher wasn’t a subtle guy when it came to his emotions. His family might be blind half the time (they had to be if they didn’t call the fucking cops when Ian went MIA for months), but Ian was the easiest book Mickey had ever read. And that look on his face? The one he had to turn his back on Mickey to try to hide? Yeah, he’d seen that shit before.
He’d seen it at the Kash and Grab. It was a miracle that he even remembered, he’d been so pissed off at the time. Frank had had plenty of opportunity to run his mouth about what he’d seen in that freezer, and none of Ian’s bullshit could cover the fact that he’d tipped the asshole off. It wouldn’t be Ian if he didn’t. Tough guy or not, he was a big softie. That was why their…discussion had ended in something Mickey still regretted saying and a pair of red, tear-filled eyes that had followed him down the street while he stalked Frank to the nearest alley. Eyes that made him toss the gun and get himself sent to juvie where he wouldn’t have to worry about Frank spilling the beans or his dad finding out or what he wouldn’t fucking do just to make those goddamn tears go away.
He’d seen it the day his dad beat the shit out of them and brought Svetlana into the house for the first time. It wasn’t passion that had Mickey throwing himself into the act, the mask he had to wear to make sure nothing worse happened if he didn’t. There was no meeting Ian’s eyes that morning. There was no watching him try to look away or his face crumple when he realized that he’d still have to listen.
He’d seen it outside their old stomping grounds, where Ian would train for ROTC and Mickey would just shoot shit. The booze he’d been chugging to forget about what he was going to do in two weeks didn’t erase the way Ian had looked at him, begging Mickey to throw him just one bone and admit what Mickey apparently hadn’t been able to hide as well as he’d tried to. And what had he done? Kicked him in the face. Left him bleeding on the ground and walked the fuck away.
He’d seen it at the psych ward. The deal was seventy-two hours, but it sure as hell felt like once Ian went through that gate, he wasn’t coming back out again. Like a goddamn moron, he’d apologized—fucking apologized. Mickey couldn’t be sure whether it was for cheating on him or taking the kid or up and vanishing. Regardless, Mickey had already forgiven him. He was fucking manic. If he’d been in his right mind, he wouldn’t have done any of that shit. If Mickey had listened to Fiona and Lip about that mental health assessment or whatever, it never would have happened in the first place. How the hell was Mickey supposed to blame him when he was off his rocker? Yet there he was, apologizing and giving him that look.
The same look he’d worn when Mickey showed up in the middle of the night instead of going to pick Ian up from the hospital like he should have.
The same look he’d worn all the other times he thought he was about to lose Mickey.
The same look that had been on his face when he told Mickey to take a flying leap the other day.
“You used to love me. Now you don’t even know who I am.”
Oh yeah, Gallagher? You sure about that?
“Shit, I don’t know who I am half the time.”
That was probably the toughest part of this whole mess. The rest of the Gallaghers were so focused on how destructive he’d be that they didn’t fucking stop to think about what this shit was doing to Ian’s head. He was right: after he came back, there were times when Mickey really couldn’t tell that he was the same kid he’d fallen for, gotten shot for, gone to juvie for, come out for. He could deal with that, though. Anything was better than being without him like before. But what about Ian? His whole life was going down the drain because of some dumbass disease his shitty mom had passed down to him. All his dreams of being in the army were gone. (Not that Mickey was complaining, but he was trying to be sympathetic, dammit.) Going back and finishing high school would be hard enough without the added bonus of being drugged up the entire time. His family had their own shit to deal with, and his two rocks were never fucking around anymore with Fiona doing…whatever the hell Fiona did and Lip away at college most days. Talk about the worst goddamn timing.
And now he was pushing Mickey away too, only not for the reasons he was selling. It wasn’t about Mickey trying to fix him, though he didn’t doubt for a second that Monica had put that little seed in his head. No, manic or depressed or whatever, this was still Ian Gallagher. Maybe he didn’t think that he knew himself anymore, but Mickey always would.
The first thing Mickey knew? Ian Gallagher couldn’t lie for shit.
“You don’t owe me anything,” he’d said, as if Mickey was just sticking around because he felt he had to. And wasn’t that fucking hilarious: Mickey Milkovich did what he wanted to when he wanted to do it. Sure, it might take a while for him to figure his shit out, but he got there eventually. Taking care of Ian? He didn’t owe him that. It was what they did—it was part of the deal—and he’d told Ian as much.
And Ian, like the sweet bastard he was, gave him one last out.
“I don’t want you sitting around worrying, watching me, waiting for me to do my next crazy shit.”
Crazy shit. Crazy like drugging his half-sister and stuffing her in a shipping crate? Crazy like picking up some random dude or a decent looking bitch instead of just waiting another day for his phone to ring? Crazy like promising to stay with goddamn wedding vows?
Okay, the last part wasn’t so crazy. What was crazy was that he didn’t say hell yes when Ian asked if that was what he saw for them.
What was crazy was not grabbing that dumbass’s stupid fucking face and kissing him until he forgot what the hell he was trying to do.
What was crazy was that Sammi hadn’t given him a chance.
But maybe that was okay. If she did, Ian would be waiting for him, and Mickey definitely wouldn’t be able to make good on sickness and health and all that shit. Not for a fucking decade.
And a decade was what it would have to be. If he tried hard enough, Mickey could almost convince himself it was all for Ian. He wanted to protect him? Well, there was no place safer than prison, right?