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The problem with getting married at the courthouse is the waiting. They’ve been sitting for twenty minutes just to hand over their paperwork, after which they’ll probably have to wait even longer until they can actually do this fucking thing. It’s almost like the system is rigged to make you think it through.
The paperwork is bogus, too. Paperwork makes it seem like they planned this instead of deciding over lunch at a shitty diner. Not that Mickey knows what that would’ve been like. To plan this.
He’s never even been to a wedding that was just for love. Every single one was because either the bride or groom (or, in the case of his mom’s half-brother, both) was in some kind of trouble. And. Well. He supposes Ian is in trouble if the police figure out he’s the one who helped Paula out the window. Not that it wasn’t a nice speech over patty melts about love and trust and shit.
Ian startles him by taking away the papers that Mickey has been gradually crunching in his fist. “So? Are you going?”
“Going?” Mickey scowls, confused. “Aren’t we waiting for the lady to call our names or something?”
Ian does one of his faces where everything kind of scrunches forward under his disapproving brow. “You said you were gonna take a smoke. Like five minutes ago.”
“Oh right. Um.” Mickey stands. “I was. I am.”
Mickey lets Ian get away with that stupid smirk and follows the hall back to the elevator. Outside, he leans against the wall in the shade of the building and lights his cigarette. He lets the first few inhales soothe him as he stares absently at the tide of people walking by who couldn’t care less that Ian Gallagher’s about to marry him. Maybe that’s for the best. Neither of them has any reason to believe they’ll be any good at this.
He realizes with a start that the plaza across the street is where Ian was arrested. Mickey watched that video a few too many times down in Mexico, thinking about Ian in jail, and Mickey free, and how it wasn’t supposed to be that way. How it was supposed to be the other way around.
Growing up on the South Side, Mickey learned getting attached to a future that was any different than the present he was living was a fool’s game. That changed in jail. He needed a different future just to keep him going, so he made one up. Ian. A beach in Mexico. Freedom. He almost made it happen, too. Even if he couldn’t get Ian to cross that goddamn border, he got enough of Ian on that trip to keep slotting him into the next plan. Enough of Ian to come back for.
Mickey flicks the end of the cigarette and takes another drag. He doesn’t know where this restless energy is coming from. He isn’t really worried about the whole marriage thing. Sure, it’s kind of sudden, but they’ve already been through so much shit together. What’s the worst that can happen? Divorce? He’s already done that once, and it wasn’t so bad. It’s probably way worse when you actually love the person, but at the end of the day a marriage is just a piece of paper.
Not to me, Ian’s voice echoes from a distant past, and Mickey closes his eyes and sends the smoke out through his nostrils. That’s it really. The problem. It’s not a piece of paper to Mickey either. Not this time.
Next to him, a guy bursts out of the courthouse dressed like a caterer, down to the weird jacket tail things dangling off his ass. He stretches, pushing his arms into the air above him like he’s in a fucking yoga class and not in the middle of the sidewalk on North Clark Street. He straightens quickly when he catches Mickey watching him.
“Got a spare?” he asks, pointing at the cigarette dangling from Mickey’s mouth.
Mickey grunts, annoyed, but hands him one. Then, after the guy pats his pockets and comes up empty, Mickey rolls his eyes and offers a light.
“Thanks. I promised my fiancée I’d quit before the wedding. Gives me just enough time for one more.”
“Wedding?” Mickey asks, eyeing his black suit coat with the shiny collar and the oversized flower pinned to it.
“Yeah. Upstairs.” He gestures vaguely toward the stone columns above them.
“At the courthouse? What the fuck are you wearing that for?”
He shrugs. “She wanted me to. We were supposed to do a big thing at the Cultural Center, three hundred guests, and then… I don’t know. Anna cried for a whole night about chairs or tablecloths or something, said none of it felt right.” He flicks the end of his cigarette and puts it back in his mouth. “So we called it off and decided to get married here, just the two of us.”
All of that sounds like rich people bullshit, so Mickey takes another drag, crosses his arms, and wills the guy to hurry up with his nicotine fix and go away. It doesn’t work. He settles in, leaning up against the building next to Mickey.
“I’m gettin’ married today, too,” Mickey offers after a minute. It’s the first time he’s said it, and maybe he just needed to hear it out loud. Make it real. It’s not as sticky in his mouth as he thought it’d be. It’s kind of okay, even.
“What the fuck are you wearing that for?” the asshole mimics, nodding his head in Mickey’s general direction.
“Hey fuck you.” Jesus Christ. Mickey even went home and changed, and he didn’t notice the damn hole in his sleeve until he got here.
The guy raises an eyebrow and smiles. “Just messing with you. I wanted to keep it casual, too, but she already had her dress fitted and everything. She said she wants people to see the pictures and know we really meant it. The whole marriage thing. Even if we didn’t have the big ceremony.”
“Oh yeah?” Mickey grins. “Well you really look like you mean it standing on the sidewalk in this getup at two o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon.”
He laughs and shrugs, and the tails of his coat catch the wind as he steps forward and looks up at the tall, gray face of the courthouse. Maybe he’s dealing with a case of restless energy of his own. When he looks at Mickey again, he's squinting against the afternoon sun. “You having a party or anything later?”
“Nah.” Mickey thinks about telling him the whole deal, how they’re going to celebrate by going down to the police station to flash their newly-minted spousal privilege as a big fuck you. He might even tell him Ian’s a parolee. And a murderer. See if he can really scandalize this North Side motherfucker. He doesn’t, though. The guy has nice eyes, and he’s marrying somebody who thinks he’s out here having his last cigarette. Like saying for better or worse in some penguin suit is really gonna incentivize him to drop the worse.
After another awkward silence, Mickey flexes his shoulders uncomfortably. If this guy is gonna intrude on his space and steal his smokes, the least he could do is carry the fucking conversation. “You doin’ anything after yours?” Mickey asks finally.
The guy nods. “Dinner with friends. And the honeymoon, but that’s not until next month.”
“Ah.” Mickey tries to pretend like honeymoon is a word he’s ever given a moment’s consideration. He squishes the butt of his cigarette under his boot at the same time as he takes another one from his pack. Ian’ll text him if he has to come back, and who the fuck knows how long it’ll take once he’s up there.
“You and your wife going on a honeymoon?” the guy asks, scratching his arm through the suit coat.
Mickey freezes mid-lighting the cigarette balanced between his lips, flame dancing until it burns his thumb. “Ian’s a dude. And no. No honeymoon planned.”
“Oh damn. Sorry,” the guy says as he turns bright red. The best thing about being gay, or rather, the best thing after Ian’s cock, is seeing people like this stumble over their apologies when they realize they don’t know shit about him.
A little bit of Mickey itches to get in his face, but Ian’ll kill him if he gets in a fight right now, so he scratches at his eyebrow, shrugs, and lets it slide.
“Well. I should get back up there.” The guy tosses the cigarette butt aside before he turns to go, then stops. Turns back. “Um. Congrats. Truly.”
Mickey blinks, startled. “You too, man.”
With a shy smile and a wave, he disappears inside, and Mickey’s kind of glad he didn’t punch him. Christ, marriage better not make him soft.
As he finishes his cigarette, he thinks about the wedding that guy and his wife were planning. The whole deal with the fancy venue and decorated tables and shit. Probably waiters dressed up in suits with tails too. Flowers. Music. Free booze. Dancing. Letting people see you all cracked open and in love and happy about it.
Would he want that, if things were different, if they weren’t always trying to stay one step ahead of everything going sideways? Maybe if he could limit who gets to come and keep Ian from having too much say over the music and class it up a little, find someplace they can afford that’s not a total dump. Mickey wonders idly if, when two dudes get married, one of them should wear white. And if one does, does that make it more or less gay? He’d look pretty good in a white coat, maybe. And Ian in a suit would look… fuck. Way better than that guy bouncing around on the sidewalk, that’s for sure.
Anyway, it doesn’t matter now. Mickey puts his cigarette out against the wall and heads back upstairs.
When he gets to the right office, Ian watches him walk down the hall, and Mickey has the briefest flash of what it would be like to walk down an aisle toward him, the way his face would look, one corner of his mouth tipped higher than the other, like the only person in the world who’s got Mickey’s number and knows it.
Ian kisses him when he sits down, the kind of kiss Mickey didn’t even used to like. The kind of kiss that isn’t meant to be followed by shirts coming off and belts coming loose. The kind that acts as a stand-in for I love you when it feels like too much to say it, or when it doesn’t feel big enough to say it.
Mickey smiles when Ian sits back, and that edge of restlessness fades with the nicotine and Ian’s steady gaze.
Then Larry sends him a video and some lady hands over a piece of paper that Ian doesn’t sign and everything goes sideways like it always fucking does. By the end of the day, they’re not getting married at the courthouse or anywhere else until he convinces Ian the whole proposal is his idea again, which is a much bigger pain in the ass than it should be, considering this was Ian’s idea in the first place.
But even once Ian comes around, there’s no fucking way Mickey’s going to tell anyone that he spent those few nights in Barry’s bed getting attached to another future. Ian still. Always with Ian. But this time with a wedding.
Terry is the one who really makes it possible, just by being his standard-issue Milkovich piece of shit self. Mickey can throw fits without actually telling anyone how much he cares that the chairs are gold and the cushions are white and the right people are sitting in them on the big day. He can blame Terry for all of it, and no one has to know he actually wants a big fucking gay wedding with all the stress and planning and tradition. A wedding where no one’s in trouble except the kind of trouble you’re in when someone gets this far under your skin, when every future you can imagine involves them. A wedding where the piece of paper actually matters.
Of course Terry also almost makes the whole thing impossible before they seal the deal, but in the end, Mickey gets what he wants for once.
He gets to see Ian’s face when he walks down the aisle. It’s softer than he thought it would be, less cocky, which helps because it’s fucking weird to be up there in front of everyone. He gets to hold him on the dance floor. He gets to drive off to their honeymoon suite where Ian fucks him into the mattress until they’re so tangled up that their names get scrambled on their tongues.
There’s even a nice symmetry in his first wedding being held under threat of death and his second being held in spite of it. Maybe that’s not symmetry. Balance? It’s something anyway, something that rights a wrong he didn’t even realize was crushing him until he slid a ring on Ian’s finger and it lifted away.
A year later, Mickey unwraps a wedding photo that one of the Gallaghers gave them in a cheap wood frame and sets in on the fireplace mantle to fill up some of the oppressive white emptiness of their new apartment.
Ian walks in from the bedroom and steps up behind Mickey, wrapping his arms around him and tugging him closer so he can nip posessively at his shoulder. “Okay the new bed is made. I can finally fuck you like you like it. No siblings in the next room. No shitty air mattress. Just you all hard and—” He stops when he sees the picture, and his arms go slack. “What the fuck? I’m pretty sure that was supposed to be a joke.”
“What? No it’s fucking not.”
“Yes. Look at my face!” he says. He has a point. In the photo, Ian’s eyes are halfway closed and his mouth is halfway open.
“Well it’s staying. I like it,” Mickey says. “I look hot.”
Ian laughs with a puff of air hot against his neck. “You do.”
“You look happy at least.” Mickey says it quietly enough so Ian can ignore it if he wants.
“I am,” Ian says, just as quietly. Mickey blows out a breath, leaving a deep, unpleasant stretch in his lungs. It feels like he’s been holding that breath for at least a week. They've been bickering a lot with the move, and every time it just reminds Mickey how little they still know about how to do this. It’s nice to hear I am happy and not I was.
No matter what future he was aiming for, he never saw the West Side coming. It would’ve been easier to imagine a future in jail. The booze is definitely cheaper there. But he’s got Ian, and a piece of paper that says it all, really. And this picture.
“You know what I like about this?” Mickey asks, smiling at it.
“What?”
“We look like we really meant to do the whole marriage thing.”
In the photo, Mickey is laughing and his hand is tucked at a specific angle under Ian’s jacket, which may or may not be the cause of Ian’s heavy-lidded expression. But still.
Ian drops his chin to Mickey’s shoulder. “Yeah. We do.”