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It’s a flutter of hope when Ian shows up. Hope, or just terror. Mickey takes a deep breath before he steps out to face Ian, smiles oddly at him, in sheer, gleeful bewilderment.
It’s a strange feeling that takes him right then. Wanting everything to be the way it was. Or, maybe not quite that. Maybe something else entirely. Something he doesn’t understand, doesn’t know he wants. And that’s the problem, isn’t it? He doesn’t ever fucking know what he wants.
He wants Ian, he thinks. He thought. He doesn’t know what that means anymore, though, and that, that is what sparks the terror.
“Hey,” he forces out, half-smile clinging to the words.
Ian turns. Looks at him the way Mickey always feared he would. Blank. Detached. Silent.
Terror.
It’s a brief moment, where he feels like they’re back at the start. His mind scrambles for the right thing to say. Maybe, ‘I’m sorry, let’s blow this shithole together.’
“Up to four sets of twenty,” he announces instead, and maybe Ian’s steady, unimpressed gaze should send him into retreat, because he can feel it, can feel how desperate he must look now, but they’ve come to that point, that maybe he doesn’t care. Because whether Ian’s out of sight or right fucking there, that suffocating feeling grows. Where there was contentment, or something resembling it, there’s now some sort of visceral puncture in his lung that leaves him gasping for air if he thinks about it too much.
He just wants Ian.
“Get in here,” he suggests to the stony quiet. “I want to show you something.”
Maybe it sounds just as paper-thin as it truly is.
“Come on,” he coerces lightly, and maybe it’s arrogant to turn and walk and expect Ian to follow, maybe he’s just setting himself up to be humiliated. “Come check it out.”
He doesn’t have anything to say, really. He has everything to say, the everything that he can’t say, but beyond that, behind the line, where it’s safe, there’s nothing.
He was never a nervous talker. Taciturne, he thinks the word is. Comfortable in the quiet.
The quiet. The quiet is different than the silence. This silence. This horrible silence.
He doesn’t have anything to say. He realizes it as Ian follows him, reluctantly, upright, to his room.
His mouth runs before his mind does.
“Wife made me take all my Nazi shit down,” he points out hollowly. “She hates Nazis.”
He’s never realized how much thought he’s put into every single sentence he’s said up until this point. What a vice grip he has on his tongue. The notion that he says whatever he wants to say is a monumental misconception.
He thinks maybe Ian knew that already.
“Apparently, the Russians kicked some serious Kraut ass in World War II, so…”
He picks up a cigarette, and if his hands shake a bit, a far cry from his casual demeanor, neither of them say a word.
“She can drink me under the fuckin’ table, man. It’s weird,” he complains around his cigarette, and he can feel his purpose, his senses, start to come back to him. He lights the cigarette. Relies on it like oxygen. Here he stands, rambling about the catalyst to all this like Ian’s a buddy from high school.
Terror. He’s terrified.
“Anyways…” He blinks for a moment, glances away, glances back. He just wants Ian, again. And maybe he should just let Ian go, but he can’t, he hasn’t since the first day. Not once, not really. He can’t. Ian’s the only thing that makes him real. Everything whips around him, a deafening static, like he died a few years back, went to purgatory, and now he’s teetering on the brink of Hell, because Lord knows there’s no one left behind to pray for him.
But Ian’s real. Vibrant. Not meant for the ghetto, not meant for poverty. Certainly not meant to love people like Mickey.
The thought that maybe Ian’s finally realized that himself makes Mickey’s stomach turn.
“She’s working tomorrow night,” he explains with a lilt. “Why don’t we pick up where we left off?”
There’s a tug at Ian’s lips, some sort of smile Mickey’s never seen before. Tight, pained, sort of smug.
He would have been too proud to keep going, before, being looked at like that. But what he feels isn’t primal, anymore. It isn’t the id, not the ebb and flow of sexual need.
He thinks maybe he’d be lulled if Ian would just fucking say something.
He takes a few steps closer, with his proposition. He’s aching for it to break, for it to be over, for the brutal fuck, the simple part, the reassurance that everything is wrong but maybe, someday, they’ll be together long enough for it to be alright.
“Figure she’s gonna be out fuckin’ dudes. Why can’t I?” he reasons, and for a split second, it sounds like a perfectly valid excuse. He raises the cigarette to his lips, doesn’t look away.
Ian shrugs, quirks that half-smile that used to make Mickey’s chest feel heavy and radiant. Now it just fills him with dread. Terror.
“No, thanks,” Ian responds coolly, but Mickey won’t accept it, he won’t have it, Ian can’t be done if he isn’t done.
It’s got to be an act. Some sort of ploy to get him to apologize, to compromise. Ian needs words. He’s always needed words.
Mickey doesn’t need words. They’re breathing. They’re here, alive, facing each other, unstoppable force, immovable object. They always collide. That doesn’t need words. It just is.
Maybe Mickey doesn’t understand why the sham of a marriage is so detrimental when they can still be together, in the way they always were. In the shadows. In their bubble. It’s better that way. Maybe he doesn’t understand it, exactly, but he does understand the gravity of the devastated look in Ian’s eyes the night of the wedding.
And maybe it’s naive, but Mickey’s certain if Ian just comes back, just kisses him again, he won’t have to say anything. Ian will feel it. Ian will feel the terror, too.
“Hard-to-get’s gettin’ me hard, Gallagher.”
Crass is all he knows, but it’s what they are, on the surface. He’s never touched Shakespeare.
Ian nearly seems to laugh, and there it is again, that surge of hope and horror.
“I’m leavin’ town,” Ian says simply.
The terror blooms into something far more toxic, fast-burning. Indescribable.
He still doesn’t quite feel panicked enough. He laughs. He’s a fantastic liar.
“There a queer rights rally somewhere?”
Ian’s expression is unchanging. “Army,” he corrects immediately.
“Ah, right.” The hitch in Mickey’s breath grows steadily worse, a tell he tries to mask with movement.
Because it’s plausible.
He pauses. A mistake. “You gotta be eighteen.” He sounds pathetic to his own ears, arguing against the idea in his own stubbornly quiet way.
Ian finally looks away, and there’s something blissful about his voice, his posture, something so serene, so starkly in contrast to the bloom of reality overtaking Mickey.
“Yeah, I, uh, figured a way around that,” Ian states cryptically.
Mickey studies him, for any sign that this might be a cruel joke, some manipulation tactic, but no, sincerity, utter calm sincerity.
“You serious?” Mickey asks. “You’re signing up?”
“Tomorrow morning.” Ian smiles. Isn’t afraid to look at him.
Mickey’s afraid. He’s terrified to keep his eyes on Ian, but he has to. He glances one inch to the right, and Ian will be gone without a trace. He’s sure of it.
“That’s a dumbass fuckin’ move,” Mickey rushes out, composure slipping. “How long?”
“Four years. Minimum.”
Something about it holds the same inflection as the phrase ‘ Checkmate. ’
Mickey’s floored, then. It’s real.
Ian’s real. This is real.
His vision swims. He can feel that his voice will be weak, when he speaks again.
Ian doesn’t seem to have a care in the world.
“What are you hopin’, I tell you not to go?” he demands, and his hands are shaking, they never stopped, because they’re supposed to collide, they haven’t collided, the unstoppable force to his immovable object is speeding in the other direction, and his fingertips, his temples, his lips, they buzz with the static energy. “That I’m gonna chase after you like some bitch?”
That should be the point of no return, when he’s avoided talking so much that he runs out of luck.
“I didn’t come here for you,” Ian strains as he turns, really leaving, really finished, and no, it wasn’t terror that he felt before, it was uneasiness at the worst. T his is terror. Suffocation. The thickness of his breath swallows him whole.
He doesn’t know what he wants from life, but he certainly fucking wants Ian. He knows it, he’s always known it, but he feels it sear into his veins with every passing second, and he has to say something, he has to stop this bullshit, because they’re them, they’ve never really ended, and they can’t end now, not when everything else is fake, not when everything else is a fucking lie, not when the real, agonizing pain of them, together, is the beat of his fucking heart in the middle of the illusion.
“Don’t--” he chokes out.
It’s the most he’s said in years.
There is no illusion anymore, when Ian looks at him. Ian saw him, before, but always skewed with that splintering fondness. But now, in the never ending gray, it’s starkly black to see the fear behind the grandiose.
“Don’t what?” Ian asks, voice strong. It’s a challenge.
Mickey tries desperately to meet it.
“Just…”
Don’t execute me for wanting to survive.
Don’t crush my soul just because you can.
Don’t fucking leave me to breathe alone.
Don’t fucking leave.
Just don’t fucking leave.
Nothing leaves his mouth but a defeated exhale. Nothing’s on his mind but the unbearable tightness in his throat.
His adherence to inertia causes him to wipe angrily at his eyes.
The look of bittersweet confirmation as Ian turns away is a cold goodbye.