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The metal door clanged shut behind them as Ian and Mickey were herded back into their cell for the night, Mickey still trying to continue his argument with a fellow con through the thick glass window until a guard forced the other inmate to keep moving towards his own cell further down the row.
Mickey raised his voice to deliver a final parting shot at their retreating neighbour before turning from the door with a shake of his head.
“You fucking believe that guy?” he scoffed, toeing off his shoes and moving over to the stainless steel can to take a quick piss. “As if Sosa can even fucking compare to Shoeless Joe,” he groused. “Fucking Cubs fans, man. Bunch’a inbred North Side dipshits…”
As his stream trickled off so did he, but Ian hardly noticed. He was standing motionless in the center of their small six by eight, starring off into nothing, and was only shaken out of his daze by the sound of the flushing toilet.
“What? Oh, yeah…Lorenzo’s full of shit,” he agreed, still distracted.
Mickey glanced his way, a small furrow appearing between his eyes, but if he’d noticed how preoccupied Ian had been since meeting back up after their separate work assignments that afternoon, how quiet he’d been all throughout dinner, how increasingly twitchy he’d become over the past hour—well, he wasn’t saying anything. Yet.
Mickey continued shuffling around the small space, stripping down to his boxers and undershirt while Ian continued to stand just in front of their bunk, rocking anxiously on the balls of his feet until he heard the sound of a hundred doors simultaneously locking into place and the harsh warning buzzer that immediately followed. Ten minutes till lights out. Now or never. Ian took a deep breath and ran a shaky hand through his short buzz—red again, much to Mickey’s apparent delight.
“Hey, Mick? Do you think you could turn around for a sec?”
Mickey stopped in the middle of what he was doing and raised an incredulous brow.
“The fuck for?” he asked. “Don’t tell me you finally found a sense of fucking modesty, Gallagher.”
Ian rolled his eyes at the lecherous smirk stealing across Mickey’s face as he made a move to grab at Ian’s junk.
“Fuck off,” Ian laughed, dodging Mickey’s groping hands. Then more softly. Nervously. “I wanna give you your Christmas present, but it’s—it’s a surprise.”
Now both of Mickey’s eyebrows rose high on his forehead.
“Thought you practically buying out the fucking commissary last week was my present,” he said, motioning towards the still sizeable stack of Snickers bars arranged neatly on the small table next to their sink.
“It was,” Ian answered simply as he toed off his own shoes and kicked them towards the wall. “Now could you just…?” He made an impatient twirling motion with his finger, but Mickey just continued to stand there, arms crossed defiantly over his chest.
They stared each other down for several long seconds until Mickey finally rolled his eyes and turned around to face the door.
“You’re fucking ridiculous, you know that?” he huffed.
Ian smiled to himself and quickly started tugging at the snaps of his jumpsuit, not sure how many minutes he had left until the room would be thrown into darkness.
“Yeah, but you love me anyway,” he quipped without thinking.
It took him a second to realize his slip of tongue, but when he did his eyes immediately shot up to where Mickey remained standing still with his back to him. Too still. He didn’t say anything, but Mickey’s body language had always been like its own secret code, and after all these years Ian was nothing if not a master cryptographer. His posture, stiff. His shoulders, raised just slightly towards his ears. The fingers wrapped around his left bicep, squeezing just a bit too tight.
“No, I mean—shit, I mean I didn’t mean…” Ian began to stammer, his traitorous tongue now feeling like a lead weight inside his mouth. They’d talked a lot since Ian was locked up a few months ago. Talked about everything, really. Long conversations at night, tangled up together in Mickey’s bunk when, for a few hours at least, it could be just them. No bullshit, no posturing. Nowhere to hide, and finally no need to. But somehow, after everything, those three little words seemed to be the one thing they still hadn’t been able to say.
It was silent for an endless moment longer and then Mickey sighed.
“I swear to god,” he began, his fingers easing up on his arm and his shoulders relaxing, “if I turn around and you got a giant red bow tied to your dick…”
A surprised bark of laughter escaped past Ian’s lips and he felt the tension leach out of the cell as quickly as it had seeped in.
“You’ll what,” he joked, peeling off his jumpsuit, “write Santa a personalized thank you note?”
Mickey’s only response was to throw a silent one-fingered salute up over his shoulder. Ian laughed again before hissing quietly when his undershirt gave a bit of resistance as he pulled it up over his head. He balled up the soiled garment and tossed it onto the upper bunk along with his obnoxious yellow uniform.
Standing there now in just his boxers and socks, Ian felt an unpleasant roll in his stomach he didn’t think had anything to do with the slop the kitchen crew had tried to pass off as turkey stuffing at dinner. Ian clenched his hands into tight fists at his sides and took another steadying breath, willing the buzzing in his brain to quiet the fuck down. He wondered idly if Mickey had felt this nervous, that day.
“Ok, you can look now.”
Mickey turned slowly, a hint of that lecherous smirk back on his face as his eyes immediately searched out the front of Ian’s underwear. Finding nothing out of the ordinary there, he continued to drag his gaze up over Ian’s body, appreciative eyes taking in the sharp cut of Ian’s hips, the trail of coarse red hair creeping up from boxers to belly button, the hard plains of his abs, up up up, until—
Ian could tell the instant Mickey saw it by the way his breath hitched in his throat and his expression went perfectly blank. For the next several seconds—minutes? hours? time seemed perfectly meaningless to Ian just then—neither man moved nor spoke. The recycled air in their cell seemed to grow thick, muffling the sounds of the rest of A-block winding down for the night as Mickey’s eyes traced over the shaky letters inked into the pale skin over Ian’s left pec. Over his heart.
The buzzing inside Ian’s head had reached a fever pitch, and just when he thought he might suffocate from the heavy weight of the air bearing down on them, Mickey broke the deafening silence for a second time.
“You know, Milkovich is spelt with two L’s,” he stated, voice flat. Emotionless.
Ian let out the breath he’d been holding in an ugly sort of snort, and Mickey’s eyes briefly flickered up to his face before just as quickly turning back down. Too quick for Ian to get any sort of read.
“No it’s fucking not,” Ian answered, his tone light but his words laced with obvious anxiety. Like maybe he had fucked this up. Fucked everything up, again. But then Mickey uncrossed his arms and moved closer, eyes still fixed on the fresh tattoo, fingers reaching out but stopping just short of touching the still tender skin.
Mickey was shaking his head slightly, and though Ian couldn’t be sure, since Mickey still seemed unwilling to look anywhere but at the fifteen letters emblazoned across Ian's chest, he thought maybe there were tears forming in the corners of Mickey’s eyes. The hoarseness in Mickey’s voice when he spoke next made Ian think he was probably right.
“The fuck would you scar up your skin like this, man? With something so—” Mickey let loose a shuttering breath, not seeming to know how to finish the thought. He brought a hand up to thumb roughly at his nose. “—so fucking ugly?” he finally managed gruffly.
Ian felt his heart clench painfully at the meaning behind Mickey’s words, knowing he still had so much to make up for, so much hurt and time lost, so much damage, but thankful that he now had the chance to start making shit right. He brought his left hand up to cup Mickey’s face, forcing the shorter man to meet his eyes before he responded, a field of green consumed by an ocean of blue.
“I think it’s beautiful,” Ian said, rubbing his thumb tenderly along Mickey’s cheek, willing him to understand, to feel the truth in what he was saying. "It belongs there,” Ian continued, bringing his other hand up to press over Mickey’s heart, thumb knowing where to trace the inked letters of his own name hidden beneath Mickey’s thin shirt without having to look. “Just like I belong here.”
The buzzer sounded a second time then and the lights flickered out, throwing their tiny cell into near total darkness. Before Ian’s eyes even had a chance to adjust, he felt Mickey’s hand come up to grip the back of his neck, their bodies fitting together, so familiar, until there was nothing left between them.
“I do love you, you know,” Mickey whispered into the dark, his breath ghosting softly over Ian’s lips before he joined them to his own.
Under the lingering ache left by the janky prison needle, Ian’s heart raced. He sighed into the kiss as he pulled Mickey even tighter against him, not yet willing to move his lips away even an inch so he could return the gift of Mickey’s words with words of his own, but he would. Every day from here on out. Every time.