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Mickey’s sitting in the kitchen after his morning shift at his security job and texting Ian about some stupid coworker when the back door to the Gallagher house flings open. His daughter comes bounding through, barely 7 years old, and throws her backpack on the ground.
“Hey kiddo, you’re home ear—“ he starts, but Amelia’s already flying up the stairs to her bedroom, small sobs following her the whole way. How the hell did she get home? He wonders, glancing at his watch. 1:30pm. An hour before first grade lets out. Him and Ian usually go together to pick up Franny, Millie, and her brother, Jed, depending on their work schedules. He stands and leans out the back door to see if she caught a ride from someone, and lo and behold there’s V, waving from her car.
“I was at the school for Amy and Jemma anyway,” she calls to him through a lowered window by way of explanation, “Somethin’ about some girls being mean to her, Mick,” she continues, waving her hand.
“Yeah, uh, thanks, V!” He calls back. She nods and drives off, the teenage bickering of Amy and Jemma in the backseat fading as she pulls into the driveway next to theirs.
Mickey closes the door and sighs, looking over his shoulder back up the stairs. His fingers itch for a cigarette, but he and Ian have been trying to quit lately so he collects himself, clears his throat, and walks to the kitchen. He reaches up into the cupboard for a little purple plastic cup — Millie’s favourite — and pours her some of the cranberry juice she loves so much.
When he reaches her and Jed’s room upstairs, she’s sitting on the edge of her bed, her feet dangling off and barely brushing the carpet below, pouting as tears form in her eyes.
“Hey, I uh…” Mickey rubs at his brow with the thumb of his free hand. Mickey sighs and steps forward, kneeling in front of her and setting the juice on her little nightstand. Seeing her sad puts an ache in his chest that he has to push down if he wants to be able climb over it to get to her. He pulls the edge of his hoodie sleeve up over his hand and brushes away her tears with it, “Hey,” he says again, softer now. She looks up.
“I’m always here. You can…you can talk to me—“ she sniffles and looks away. His brow furrows. Fuck.
What do you say in this situation? What did his mother always say to him when he was upset? With sudden, ferocious anger he realizes that he can barely fucking remember her at all now; her memory is walled behind too many years of Terry and self-hatred and violence.
He misses her with a pain that sits on his chest with the sudden force of a truck hitting him full-speed. He only remembers her in dreams and wishes desperately that he had more of her. He had been in juvie when she died. Not that anyone told him. No one fucking visited him back then besides her, and when her visits had stopped, death wasn’t the first thing to cross his mind. He figured it was work, or something with Terry, or she’d been using again. Hell, he was only 17.
Mickey wishes he remembered what song it was that she’d sung to him and Mandy as they fell asleep as kids, he wishes he remembered what she’d said to him when he skinned his knees when he was 5 and came home a sniffling mess, but more than anything he just wishes she hadn’t fucking died. The grief of it used to hit him in waves and he’d hit the world back for it; play a role for Terry, and maybe a little for himself too, because it was easier to pretend than to face the grief of it all head-on, easier pretend none of it had ever mattered to him in the first place.
If he knows what love is, he thinks, it is because of his mother. His mother, and Ian, and their kids. Time and experience have given him perspective on the complexity of parenthood; she had her faults, but she tried so damn hard. He hates her; for the drugs, for not staying, for dying. But he loves her, too, for the acceptance and the softness and trying, even in the circumstances of the gun-filled, crime-addled, violent bigotry of the Milkovich household.
He lifts his head and wipes the tears from his eyes as quickly as he can without Millie seeing, “Hey,” he says again, enveloping her small hands in his so gently he barely feels the weight of them. He looks down at the FUCK U-UP tattoos on his knuckles and the irony almost makes him breathe out a laugh. He’ll always be a little rough around the edges, he’ll always be South Side, it’s who he is; he’d rather die than be something he is not, he’s come to realize. But he’s a father, a husband, a lover, and finally free.
“Come talk to me…whenever,” he says, not sure if she’s listening but she seems to be hearing him so he continues, “About anything,” he continues, learning his head down to try and meet her gaze, the sincerity in his own voice surprising himself, “Everything can be fixed.”
She looks up at him and sniffles again, “The girls at school don’t like me, papa,” she says, her voice so tiny and shaky. Fuck the girls at school, he wants to say, but thinks maybe that’s not the best thing to say to a 7 year old.
“What makes you say that?” He says instead, standing from his kneel to sit beside her on the bed. She leans against his side and his heart swells several sizes in his chest. He puts an arm over her shoulders, rubbing her arm affectionately.
“They make fun of me,” she starts. He feels his breath catch. For having gay dads, is his first thought.
Him and Ian had talked about this before deciding to have kids, and Ian had arranged drinks at The Alibi with Jason from the fire station and his husband to talk about raising kids as gay fathers. There were things they had to consider that he hadn’t even thought about: finding an LGBTQ+ friendly doctor and school, asking for paternity leave if you’re not already out to your employer, “no, seriously, there are like no changing tables in guys’ restrooms, so have fun with that”, “you won’t believe the number of women that have come up to me to either flirt or ask where the mother is or god forbid, threaten me because they think I kidnapped my own kid”, dealing with the endless string of invasive questions as to how the children were conceived…the list went on and on. He remembers Jason saying: “If coming out was uncomfortable to you the first time, get ready. You’re gonna have to do it basically daily, and in front of kids who are gonna be looking to you for guidance.”
As if Mickey hadn’t basically just shit himself then and there. Ian had glanced at him, setting a firm and gentle hand to his thigh under the table to ground him. That night they’d talked and talked — or more Mickey had frustratedly ranted — about how fucking unfair it all was, about how he just wants to be able to raise his kids without all this stupid shit. Ian had smiled at him from across the kitchen table over their frozen lasagna.
“The fuck you smilin’ about?” Mickey had asked with a half-full mouth.
“You’re gonna be a good dad, Mickey.”
Millie sniffles again, jarring him from his thoughts. “What for?” he asks, trying to keep his tone steady.
“My teef!”
Her teeth.
Her goddamn teeth.
“Your…teeth?” Mickey echoes lamely.
“Look!” She says emphatically, with way more emotion than two missing front teeth usually calls for, and it’s all Mickey can do to not laugh. Not cruelly; on the contrary, this whole situation is so ridiculous and lovely and ordinary to him, even if he desperately hates to see her sad and doesn’t really immediately know what to do about the stupid girls at school.
“I think,” he starts, “that your teeth are beautiful.”
“…Really?”
“Yeah, really,” he says with a shrug, pulling her closer, “They’re just jealous you’re gonna get your big teeth before they are.”
She giggles, “My big teef,” she echoes just as the door downstairs opens and shuts. She wraps her arms tightly around Mickey’s middle and he lets out a soft oof of a breath, returning the hug, “Fanks papa!” She says, talking through the gap where two front teeth should be. He doesn’t feel like he’s really solved anything in particular, but she seems to have forgotten the day entirely as she bounds out of the room.
“Daddy!” She squeals, running down the stairs so fast Mickey’s afraid she’s gonna tumble head over heels.
“Heyyy, you little munchkin! What’re you doin’ home so early?” He hears Ian’s voice downstairs and smiles, knowing he’s bent down to pick her up and twirl her in the air. He wants to go downstairs and join them, but his body is glued to the bed. A thought passes through his mind then, and he wouldn’t speak it aloud until much later that night; until after him and Ian had taken Millie to pick up Jed and Franny from school, after the five of them had driven to a park down by the water and then for ice cream afterwards to make Millie feel better about her shitty day, until after Kev, V, Amy, Jemma, Lip, Tami, and Fred had all come over to the Gallagher house for a potluck dinner, until after him and Ian had washed the day off together in the shower with gentle touches and playful insults and recounts of each other’s days at work.
The lights are off and the Gallagher house is silent save for Ian’s soft breath on the back of his neck. Their hands are intertwined over Mickey’s chest like they are most nights, except Mickey can’t stop fiddling with Ian’s ring and Ian can tell by his breath that he’s still awake.
“What’s up?” Ian asks in a half-whisper, half-groan, his voice rough and sleep-addled.
“I…” Mickey starts, but the confession dies in his throat. Ian’s struggling to stay awake, but he knows Mickey too well. He knows this isn’t necessarily usual behaviour for him; anything they need to talk about they hash out pretty quickly these days with teasing jibes only two people that have loved each other since they were teenagers can get away with, plenty of trial and error, and a whole lot of plain old friendship and love. Ian thinks maybe it was almost always at least sort of that way, or could have been a little sooner, things just…got out of hand. Between his bipolar diagnosis and the subsequent self-esteem issues and identity crises, between Terry, Mickey’s internalized homophobia, general shitty family circumstances, and multiple juvie stints…yeah, he figures just about anyone might be thrown off a little bit by those things. But for better or worse these experiences make them who they are and they handle them now, imperfectly maybe but unrecognizably better than they did in their youth, and that counts for something.
Ian stays silent, knowing he can trust Mickey to finish his thought eventually, and if he doesn’t…well, he trusts him anyway.
“I wanna visit my mom’s grave.”
The statement hangs in the air for a loaded second. They’d never really talked about Mickey’s mom before. Ian knew she died while Mickey was in juvie, but only because Mandy had mentioned it in passing once and back then Ian wouldn’t have dared to bring up something so intensely sad and personal to him unprompted.
“Okay.”
The next day, Lip and Tami come over to help Debbie and Liam (who’s 18 and applying to college now, how time fucking flies) look after Millie, Jed, and Franny while Mickey and Ian drive to Limestone Cemetery a little over an hour’s drive out from the Gallagher house. Her side of the family had made sure that she at least had a gravestone to visit since her ashes were god knows where now. Terry had actually taken the time and money and effort to cremate her like she wanted, and Mickey thinks that that’s just about the only thing he ever really did for her. They used to be on the mantle at the Milkovich house, but Mickey suspects Terry did whatever it is Terry does and gotten rid of them in some drunken stupor.
The car crumbles the gravel beneath it as Ian pulls into a parking spot and turns off the car.
“You ready?” He asks softly. They hadn’t spoken the whole way there. What words would suffice? The GPS and some stupid news radio show had provided background noise, and Mickey had rolled down his window halfway when they were 40 minutes out. He had leaned his head against it and Ian had looked over at him and thought that he understood what love is a little better.
Mickey nods without saying anything, sniffs once and rubs his knuckle under his nose before he takes off his seatbelt and exits the car in record time. Ian takes a breath before following.
They have to use “some online grave finder thing” and they end up walking in circles for a torturous half of an hour before they find it. It starts to rain a little when they finally stop to stand in front of her plaque and the pair share a knowing look. Of course this would happen. It’s just a pitter-patter, so they decide to grin and bear it. Mickey takes out a cigarette pack from his pocket. Ian doesn’t stop him. Barely even thinks to.
Him and Mickey — they’ve been flung from the roof of their childhoods, hurtling toward all that they never got and all that they are owed, goddammit, all that they earned. He looks over at his husband, who has a cigarette held lazily between his pointer and middle finger in his right hand by his side. He wants to hold it, but he thinks maybe that’d be more for him than for Mickey, and it’s not what Mickey needs right now. He just needs his friend, he needs his husband, he needs someone to stand here silently and pretend for a moment that they can grow wings and stop the fall and just stay in the quiet and the stillness and the simple grief of it all.
“I miss her,” he says quietly after a long moment. Ian’s been watching his face this whole time almost absentmindedly, staring at the crows feet forming around his eyes, at the sharpness of his nose and the occasional twitch in his lip that tells him he’s holding back tears. He frowns and purses his lips.
“I know,” is all he says. And he does. Meanwhile, Mickey lives in all the things he cannot put to words. And so, when the cigarette has been burned out and stamped into the earth by Mickey’s mother’s grave, when his face becomes a little more solemn and the silence has stretched too long, Ian reaches over and tangles his fingers through his. Mickey’s hand is cold to the touch, a little damp from the rain, and Ian squeezes it all the tighter.
“You know, I…” Ian starts, and Mickey looks at him quickly, startled out of whatever thoughts he had been treading through, “I fucking hated Monica,” he continues, and where Mickey might have usually cracked an understanding half-smile, his face remains stone, “But I loved her, too.”
Mickey lets that sit for a moment, listening to the rain as it comes down a little harder now against the soft grass, against the leaves of the few trees that litter the cemetery grounds, “I wish I, ah—” he almost reaches for another cigarette as he stares at his mother’s grave, “I wish I coulda known her. Ya know, properly.”
And that’s all he says for the rest of the visit. She had died at the age he thinks he probably needed her most, and he would never stop needing her. Her death had given him the absolute boundless freedom coveted by all 17-year-olds and was only further enabled by his father’s chronic absence, but was painfully juxtaposed by being trapped between his youth and the growing-up-too-fast of a mother dead too young. A prison both of her making and so utterly, starkly, unavoidably void of her presence. She’s only available to him in distant childhood memories, and what is childhood if not death in another direction? That world is so inaccessible to him, so unimaginable now.
He’d stepped up, done what needed to be done, dropped out of school to help around the house. He ran drugs and scams and just about a billion other illegal businesses. It wasn’t a choice to him; Mandy (and later Yevgeny and Svetlana and Ian, too) needed food, and he sure as shit didn’t trust his dad with running a household.
“Let’s head back, man,” Mickey says after a moment, giving Ian’s hand a squeeze.
“You alright?” Ian asks quietly.
Mickey nods, “I just wanna get outta here, man.”
On the car ride back home, something in the air has changed. They both feel it. Mickey goes first.
“I remember when I was six, and my mom tried bakin’ Mandy and I these stupid chocolate chip muffins for some event thing. She damn near set the fuckin’ house on fire. I dunno how she managed it, but one minute Mandy and I are in the living room drawing or playing with blocks or whatever the fuck, the next my mom’s apron’s on fire and the whole kitchen is full of smoke from these charred-ass muffins,” he says through a laugh. Ian grins over at him from the driver’s seat.
“Wait, the chocolate chip muffins? What, for that weird Little League lunch fundraiser thing? No fuckin’ way that was your mom!” He hits the steering wheel with an open palm as he throws his head back in laughter.
“You tellin’ me she still brought ‘em?”
“Must’ve salvaged some of them, I guess, but I only remember ‘cause Monica got me one and it tasted like ass.”
“Ay, bitch, I’ll have you know I wash this ass for you, so watch what you say about things tastin’ like it,” Mickey responds with a grin.
“So I shouldn’t talk shit…huh?” Ian gives him a nudge with his right elbow.
Mickey smacks him away playfully, “Fuck off, man, you’re gross,” he responds affectionately. A moment of comfortable silence passes, only the rumble of the highway beneath the car and the GPS telling them to “stay left” filling it.
“I remember Monica that day,” Ian says, “Her and Frank were back from their…whatever it was they really got up to back then, I dunno. Drugs, a lotta sex, whatever.”
Mickey looks over at him when he pauses.
“She started baking this cake for the fundraiser, but she used like, way too much flour and it turned into an all-out flour fight in the kitchen,” he continues fondly, “I was covered in it when we got there,” he says, trailing off with a smile as he stares at the horizon ahead. Mickey knows he sees farther than that, though; across years, trying to reach back and lay claim to something that seems to only ever be able to reach back into him.
“No shit, I thought that was just your usual pasty ass,” Mickey shoves his shoulder lightly. Ian lets out a breath of a laugh, but Mickey can tell his heart’s not in it. Seeing Ian in pain has always come with its own special sting, “I wish I could’ve met her,” he says.
“Yeah, she would have loved you,” Ian breaths, “I wish I coulda met your mom, too.”
Mickey nods slowly and looks back to the road.
“I know I didn’t know her, but…I think she woulda been proud of you, Mickey.”
Mickey can feel tears brimming in his eyes. He glances at his husband, his face contorting into a grimace as he tries to stop the tears from falling. This. This is how it will go. They will trace their fingers over remembered lines, recalling until they catch upon a border changed by time and experience. They will not run at the sight. They will talk about charred muffins and flour fights in the kitchen and together grow around the hurt like vines wrapping around tree branches, healing the way bones do.
Ian reaches over and sets a hand to his shoulder, giving it a squeeze. Mickey reaches up and covers his hand with his own.
Ian glances at him, offers a shaky smile and rolls down the windows. Mickey gives his hand a squeeze before reaching to crank up the radio and starts belting.
“You steal the air out of my lungs—” He looks over at Ian who quickly joins in, “You make me FEEL IT!” They both break out in breathy laughs, “I pray for EVERYTHING WE’VE LOST, BUY BACK THE SECRETS! DON’T TAKE THE MONEY!” They collapse into a fit of laughter at the ridiculousness of it and when they exit the highway, Ian leans over and kisses him.
When they get back home and open the door to the house, their kids squeal and yell and rush to meet them with arms outstretched. Lip, Tami, Liam, and Debbie stand to follow from where they were sat around the kitchen table with Fred and Franny.
“We made cookies!” Millie says while jumping up and down with a grin.
“You did?!” Ian says, matching his daughter’s expression, “I wanna see!” Millie drags him by the hand into the kitchen.
Mickey smiles at him. He was born to be a father, he thinks.
“Hey, thanks for lookin’ after the little ones,” Mickey says to Lip and Tami as Jed clings to his leg and he ruffles his hair affectionately.
“Yeah, no worries, man,” Lip responds with a small shrug and a smile, “I think Fred likes being the big brother.”
Tami looks over her shoulder, “Fred, you comin’, bud?” She calls.
“Yeah!” Comes the reply, followed by ten year old Fred bounding into the living room with curiously full pockets, an incessantly giggling Franny, and a slightly exasperated Liam.
“Hey, you ain’t slick, little man,” Lip says with a laugh.
“Wonder who he gets it from,” Tami says with a pointed look, but there’s no malice behind it and Lip rolls his eyes fondly.
“What you got in your pockets?” Lip asks, bending to be eye-level with him.
“…Cookies…” Fred says, refusing to meet his eye.
Ian pokes his head out from the kitchen, “I told him he could have some,” he says, and Lip gives him an exasperated look.
“In his pockets?”
Ian shrugs, “He’s his own man,” he responds as Millie tugs on his arm again to drag him back into the kitchen.
“Alright, well, we should get this little man to bed, then,” Lip says, straightening as he puts an arm over Fred’s shoulders to steer him toward the door.
“Hey, Lip,” Ian calls from the kitchen.
“What’s up?”
“We still good for lunch on Saturday?”
“‘Course, man. Brad scored some tickets to the game and offered them to me, wanna take ‘em?”
Ian emerges in the doorway, Millie hanging onto his leg like a little monkey, “Oh, shit yeah!”
Lip grins at him and turns to pat Mickey on the shoulder as he passes him to get to the front door.
“Thanks again, guys,” Mickey nods to them and Lip waves a hand by way of answer as the trio file out the front door.
The house has a little extra warmth from the oven being on and is filled with the smell of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies. The living room is washed in a warm glow, and Mickey notices that the lamp to the left of the fireplace is working again; Lip must’ve fixed it while he was over. The sound of his kids and his husband giggling and talking float in from the kitchen. The sink turns on as Ian starts to wash some of the remaining dishes. SPLASH! Jed, Millie, Franny, and Liam start laughing and their feet bang against the floor as they run around the kitchen.
I think she woulda been proud of you, Mickey.
And later that night, when the two of them have put all the kids to bed and the house is dark and the only sounds are soft breaths, cars passing from the street below, and his husband telling him night, love you…Mickey thinks so, too.