Work Text:
Every morning Yev watches his Pa count out his pills at the kitchen table. One, two, three, head back and swallow.
Every morning Yev watches his Dad watch his Pa. Every morning he watches his Pa’s throat contract as he swallows and his Dad’s seems to take his first breath of the morning.
He didn’t understand when he was younger. He still doesn’t think he completely understands.
He knows his Pa’s ill and will always be ill. He knows his Pa doesn’t let it define him. He even knows some vague bits of a story about being kidnapped by his Pa and taken partway to Florida. He doesn’t want to know the rest of that story though.
He knows that there will always be a certain tightness to the skin around his Dad’s as he waits for his Pa to pick up the phone. He knows that there will always be a little bubble of tension before his Pa swallows down those pills.
But he doesn’t need to know anything else. Because his Pa is still just Ian Gallagher. The same Ian Gallagher, the same Pa who taught him to swim and made him pancakes and coaxed a smile onto his Dad’s face when it seemed nobody else could.
Just like his Dad was still the Mickey Milkovich that other parents avoided. The same one who drank a little too much, swore even more and sometimes looked at Yev like he was haunted.
They were still the Ian Gallagher and Mickey Milkovich that looked at each other as though the rest of the world could just fall away and they wouldn’t have the mind to care as long as they were together. And Yev was still their son. They were all still family.
No matter what the kids at school said. No matter what his teachers whispered.
Yev loved them how they were.
Ill, healthy, crazy or sane. Maybe it wasn’t necessarily the right way to love that he’d been taught, but it was the only way he wanted to know.