Work Text:
There are benefits to moving out of the house his family calls home. They are varied and many. But if he’s being completely honest, Ian’s favorite one right now is that after a big Gallagher blow-out barbecue, with the pool and the bouncy house and the kids running round on sugar highs, he and Mickey get to give a very cursory effort to the clean up, and then come home to their own place.
When they get back to their apartment, a little drunk, a little giddy, they stumble together to the couch and fall down in a mess of sweaty limbs and labored breaths.
"Hmm." It's so nice and cool in the apartment, and Ian wraps his arms around his husband as Mickey wiggles them around until he is laying flat on top of Ian, hot mouth huffing against his collarbone, relishing the contrast between cold couch beneath him and flushed skin above and around him.
"Hmm?" Mickey is his echo, threading their legs together and lipping gently at the skin of his throat, sending thrills down Ian’s spine and curling his toes even as he sighs in contentment.
Mickey is comfort. Mickey is safety. He is home and hearth and bread and salt. But he is also exhilaration. He is desire. He is the burning flame at the heart of living and it makes Ian breathless to think that he gets to have him. To keep him.
There is honey running through his veins, so sweet is this feeling, so thick. Ian could drown in it and die happily, fingers curling soft against the skin of Mickey's back.
"Was a good day." He breathes, stroking his thumb across a sensitive spot on Mickey's shoulder blade, grinning wide at the resulting shiver.
"Hmm. It's about to get better." God he loves the feeling of that smile against his skin. Can't get enough of it, wants to bathe in it.
"Oh yeah, you got plans?"
"Got a date with your dick, hot stuff, guess you can come along too if you want."
"Sure Mick, I'd love to come." Ian laughs, and delights in the resulting huff from Mickey. Can you say you're elated if you feel that way always?
"Bet you would. Bet you wanna come all over-"
Mickey cuts off abruptly and Ian pauses his hands where they had been working their way down the back of mickey's shorts. The face that was buried in his neck shoots up with a frown, looking down at Ian with concern.
"What is it?"
And maybe Mickey's about to say 'I don't feel good.' or that he's got to get up or that he's not even sure what's wrong. But Ian will never know, because one minute he's staring up into the unhappy face of his husband, and the next he's covered in vomit.
“What the fuck?!”
“Uhh.” Mickey, groaning above him, looks confused and shocked, and sorry. He managed to miss Ian’s face, thank god, he loves his husband but tasting a mouth full of his sick is still something Ian would rather avoid.
“Jesus.” He grimaces, a globule of something solid and acrid sliding down the side of his neck and dripping into the collar of his shirt, still warm. Fucking gross.
Mickey’s still frozen above him, freaked-out and embarrassed and unsure what to do.
“You ok?” Mickey nods vaguely, he looks completely shell-shocked.
“You wanna get off me then? I mean I love every part of you but-“
“Yeah, fuck. Shit man, sorry.” Mickey climbs off of him on shaky legs, and Ian tries not to look too disgusted out as he pads carefully to the bathroom, mindful not to drop any of Mickey’s stomach lining on the carpet.
“You think it’s something you ate?” He calls back into the living room. Mickey’s got a pretty iron-clad stomach, generally, a lifetime of eating whatever was available and washing it down with liquor means that there’s not really a lot he can’t keep down.
Even now, he appears in the bathroom doorway with a bottle of Old Style in his hand, swishing a mouthful around his cheeks. Ian doesn’t do much to try and hide the grimace on his face as he pulls his t-shirt over his head, trying to avoid the wet spots touching any more of this skin.
“Really, Mick?”
“What?” His husband shrugs, clear-eyed and seemingly unperturbed, “Tastes fuckin’ awful man whatcha want me to do?”
“Drink some water? Maybe?” Mickey just makes a jerk-off motion with his hand and takes another swig.
“Water doesn’t taste like anything. If I’m tryna get rid of the taste of puke why am I gonna drink something ain’t got no flavor?”
“For your health maybe?” Ian suggests, wetting a wash cloth and wiping at his neck and chin, his nose screwing up at the smell.
“My health is fine.” Ian loves his husband. He loves him more than anything. But sometimes the guy is so fucking determined not to take care of himself it drives Ian up the wall.
Ian works really hard for his health. He has to. He eats right and he keeps his schedule and he works out and he tracks his moods and he takes his meds and he limits his alcohol intake and he is mindful. Always. And he’s happy that Mickey is generally healthy, that he doesn’t have to do any of that in order to be ok day to day. But Ian does all of this stuff every single day to keep himself right and fucking Mickey won’t even take a drink of water after he’s just thrown up. It’s difficult not to be annoyed. Especially when he’s currently covered in sick.
“You literally just threw up on me.”
Mickey shrugs, unconcerned.
“That was just a one-off kinda thing, probably a bum hotdog or something. I’m fine now.”
And it’s as Ian’s turning properly to look at him so that Mickey can fully appreciate the eye-roll that Ian feels is the necessary response to his husband being his own special brand of idiot that Mickey’s eyes start to bug in panic and his free hand slaps quickly over his mouth. He’s gonna boot again.
“Toilet!” Ian points urgently at the toilet and Mickey gets with the program with a fraction of a second to spare, managing to position himself over the bowl just as his guts start spilling out of him for the second time.
He’s there a long minute, actually. The kind of vomiting that makes you feel like there’s a demon inside you trying to fight its way out. Ian screws his nose up at the sounds Mickey’s making as he finishes wiping himself down. Then he grabs a second washcloth and dampens it with cold water, folds it and kneels down beside Mickey and places the cloth on the back of Mickey’s neck.
“Yeah, you seem fine.” He says, because he may be a grown up now with a husband and an apartment and houseplants and shit, but he’s also a petty bitch when he wants to be. And, well, he wants to be.
Mickey’s still retching but he manages to give Ian the finger, and Ian laughs, rubs his thumb up into the hair at the base of his skull, soothing, just letting him know he’s there.
Maybe five minutes go by like that, Mickey emptying what seems like an obscene amount of liquid into the toilet bowl and Ian kneeling by him with soft hands on his back and in his hair. When it seems like it is finally reaching the end of the line, Ian wads up some toilet tissue and tips Mickey’s head up to wipe his frowning mouth with it.
“Done?” He asks, thumbing away the teardrops that have gathered in Mickey’s bottom lashes, looking over his face in wide sweeps.
“I think so?” He looks tired now, from the exertion, and still pretty confused. “Don’t know what’s going on, man.”
Shuffling himself around until he’s slumped on the floor, back against the cabinet, Mickey tips his head back and closes his eyes, exhausted. Ian reaches over and flushes the toilet, wonders how much of a protest there would be if he tried to pick him up and carry him to bed.
The front of his hair is damp with sweat and sticking to his forehead where he had rested it against the toilet seat. Gently, as though Mickey is one of his baby nephews instead of his husband, Ian brushes it back off his face, strokes through to the ends a few times when Mickey sighs at the contact.
Ten years ago Ian would have had his hand batted away and no contact for a week. Now Mickey presses into his hand, tilting to put Ian’s fingers exactly where he wants them. And he’s gross and half-conscious on the floor of the bathroom and the smell of his stomach contents is lingering in the air, but the thought makes Ian feel pretty giddy all the same.
“I think you’re dehydrated.” Mickey screws up his face in dismissal.
“Been drinking all day.”
“Yeah, beer. You wouldn’t have any water, you told me juice was for toddlers and grandpas, you used the soda I gave you to start a cola fight with Liam.”
Mickey snorts, amused.
“Used it to win a cola-fight I think is what you mean.”
“My point, Mick, is that beer is a diuretic. It actively dehydrates you. You gotta drink water if you’re out in the sun all day. They’re not interchangeable. Not all liquids are-”
“Alright, alright already. Get me some fuckin’ water then if it’s that important, not really loving the taste of beer just now anyway.”
Iaan gets the water, pours it in a mug because he thinks drinking from china tastes better after you’ve been ill.
He had a stomach flu once when he was little, too small really to remember much about it. But Monica was there, it was one of the times she was there, cool hands on his forehead and a china mug pressed into his too small hands. There baby, drink the nice water. Better than in a glass isn’t it? And it was.
The sound of heaving brings him back to himself, Mickey is back over the toilet when he makes it back to the bathroom. He’s at the stage where there’s very little left in him to give. Just huge, spine bending retches giving way to inconsequential dribbles of bile and saliva. He looks completely miserable as Ian hands him the water. He gulps it down, grimacing at the taste of his own mouth and throws it all back up again in seconds, and then throws up some more.
“Drink some water, he says. You’ll feel better, he says.” Echoes off of the toilet bowl which Mickey’s head is almost completely inside, and it’s stupid that it makes Ian fond to hear him gripe, but he fell in love with a griper, and it warms his heart beyond measure to hear his husband grumble at him even as he tosses his cookies.
“Yeah, we may be past the point where water can help.” Ian decides out loud, stepping carefully over Mickey to get to the top cabinet where he keeps the first aid stuff, sure he has a box of Pedialyte in there.
“I’m gonna die?” Mickey asks with only mild interest from his spot back on the floor, his hand holding absently to Ian’s ankle above his sock, a grounding touch, comfort. Ian smiles.
“Probably.” The hand at his ankle squeezes, and when Ian glances down Mickey’s smiling just a little, eyes closed, mouth open so he can breathe easier.
“Huh. Tell Lip I always hated him. And he looks like Ratatouille.”
He finds the Pedialyte and sets to mixing it up in the mug.
“You know that’s not his name?”
Sachet mixed, he sits down on the floor again and nudges Mickey to open his eyes. He cracks one in confusion.
“Huh?”
“The rat,” Ian clarifies, passing over the mug, “his name’s Remy. Small sips this time.”
Mickey takes a sip. Screws his face up at the flavor, he doesn’t like orange. But he takes another small sip anyway at Ian’s urging, obedient.
“So the guy’s Ratatouille?”
He sips. Ian stretches his legs out so that they’re on either side of Mickey, squeezes with his ankles just because.
“No the guy’s Linguine.”
“Then who the fuck is called Ratatouille?” Mickey asks, looks confused, and sips.
“No one. The film is called Ratatouille.”
“That’s stupid. We’ve said Ratatouille too much man it’s not a word anymore.”
“Hmm.”
For a while, Mickey sips his electrolytes quietly, one hand wrapped possessively around the mug, the other having drifted again to Ian’s ankle. Warm and slightly clammy against his skin, playing idly with his leg hairs. Ian, gazing at his flushed and tear-streaked face screwing up each time he takes a tiny sip, can’t help but smile.
After Mickey finishes his drink, Ian will pull him up from the floor and wipe off his face, corral him into brushing his teeth even though by then he’ll be pretty much dead on his feet. He’ll help him out of his clothes that still hold the scents of sunshine and smoke and too-dry grass, and into some soft sweats and a threadbare t-shirt that used to be Ian’s, used to be Lip’s, if it comes down to it.
He’ll guide him into their bed and pull the covers up above his shoulders, brush a kiss against his forehead, his eyelids, his jaw, before changing himself and climbing into his side of the bed. Mickey will scoot over and shove his head unceremoniously underneath Ian’s chin, a possessive palm flat against Ian’s bicep. He’ll snuffle around and burrow in and Ian will glow, incandescent with the pleasure of this small physical event, a nightly occurrence now, that never fails to make him melt.
They’ll fall asleep with smiles on their faces and warm breath on each other’s skin, and then in two hours when Mickey wakes up to vomit again, Ian will follow him into the bathroom, eyes screwing themselves open as he wets another washcloth and preps another mug of solution. And they’ll sit on the bathroom floor until the sun comes up and they can hear their neighbors getting ready to start their days.
And all through the night and into the morning and the next day and the day after that, Ian will beam and glow and love his husband, his life. He’ll love him forever, on bathroom floors or in bars or the back of a stolen ambulance. He’ll love him forever, in sickness and in health, he swore that he would. So he will.