Work Text:
It's worse in the daytime.
When you were little, night scared you. You and Lip would curl up together with Fiona, all in one tiny bed, holding hands under the covers. You listened to the sirens and screams and rattling trains like rattling breaths that passed by your window. Your parents would come stumbling through the door and you'd close your eyes and pretend to be asleep, hide from their too-wide smiles. Or worse, their angry eyes, Frank smacking you, Monica crying and walking away and not helping. Night was a bad time.
But now, night protects you. You spend your nights in a haze, a cocoon of glitter and pills covering you. It's thicker than Fiona's threadbare blanket. Sometimes in a mirror you'll catch yourself with a smile like the ones that fell through your door at 3 AM, but you only snort more, drink more, swallow more, trying to get it all out of your head. You grind on the laps of old men, thinking about a beautiful boy calling them viagroids and kissing you. Whenever you get pulled into the bathroom, you don't fight back. Just pretend it's him. Kiss them like they're him, fuck them like they're him, suck their goddamn cocks like they're him. The emptiness inside you is caving in and you think maybe every time you let an old man touch you it gets worse, but it doesn't matter, because night is safe.
In the day, you wake up in a cold, empty house, sleeping in ROTC wilderness gear, alone. You've never, ever slept alone before- you've always shared a room, with Lip, with Carl, with Liam, with Debbie briefly when you were living at Uncle Patrick's. You slept in the car snuggled up like a puppy in the middle seat, your head drooped onto Fiona's shoulder, Frank drunkenly snoring in the front. You slept in the same bed as Mandy a few times during sleepovers, whispering back and forth. You slept in Mickey's bed once, pretending not to remember you'd held him all through the night. You wrapped yourself around him, hooking one leg over his hip, wrapping your arms around his torso. For someone everybody was scared of Mickey was so, so small. You kissed him quietly and softly right below the ear, and he let out a warm, happy sigh. That night ended in Mickey being brutally attacked and raped while you helplessly, uselessly, pathetically watched.
Those memories all come flooding back in the mornings, along with the harsh light of day and the ever present stinging hangovers. For a while you try to fight it but eventually it starts to feel hopeless, so you give up on daytime. You start drinking, smoking, doing drugs as soon as you wake up, putting more and more duct tape onto the cracks in your soul. You go in to work earlier and earlier, where it feels like nighttime no matter what. The men in gay bars at 3 PM are sad, sadder than most of the people you met on the Southside. They're rough and drunk and touchy, and you don't like it, but you don't have the energy or the mental strength to ask them to stop. You zone out into a world of cigarettes and baseball fields, where pale skin and dark hair lies before you like a map and you can trace every indentation and pizza bagels fly around your head like little angels.
But the pizza bagels explode like fireworks or bombs, and inside there's blood instead of tomato sauce and the cigarettes burn and your map turns yellow and purple with potholes and uncharted territory, pieces falling off, sidewalks ending. You run farther away when Lip and Debs find you. You can't love anyone anymore, not even them, because they still belong to real life and the real world and you belong to nighttime now, to spending half your nights in random strangers' beds and the other half squatting in an old crack house, to feather boas and bare skin.
In the daytime, you think that maybe you miss him, miss home, miss your brothers and sisters and your full-to-the-brim house and the way Carl used to get in bed with you when he was sad at night and Mandy always leaned on you when you got high together under the El. But at night the lights and the noise fills you up and you can fool yourself into thinking fuck them. You're fine. You don't want him back at night. You can imagine him touching you every single day, but it doesn't make you want him. It just reminds you of what wanting felt like, of how it felt to love someone. Mickey burns inside you like an unhealed gash.
When he finds you, part of you sees his blue eyes like an ocean and his shirt buttoned all the way to the top, but most of you pushes him away, hides and covers your wounds. You don't want him anymore, don't want anyone. You're better off alone. Alone nobody hurts you.
Alone nobody holds you either, and when you shakily gain consciousness and find yourself in a car with your head in his lap and him holding your wrist- not your hand yet, but your wrist- you feel your heart moan, think that this will only lead to more tears and pain and hurt, and fall back asleep.