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The scent that you left on my pillow,
The sound of your heartbeat with mine,
The look in your eyes like a window,
The taste of your kiss soaked in wine.
Ian wasn’t really supposed to drink, Mickey knows. He’s aware that it doesn’t bode well with his meds, and that he gets drunk way too fast, but tonight they’re celebrating.
It’s their first night in their new apartment, after all. They had spent the entire day moving furniture up three flights of stairs - which was not easy, and it was a wonder they didn’t get a divorce before it was over - but they were finally finished, for the most part. Ian had ordered a pizza to go with their cheap bottle of white wine, which they had devoured within fifteen minutes before collapsing in the living room. Mickey is sprawled out on the couch, and Ian is laying flat on his back on the floor in the middle of the room. He’s grinning to himself, and it makes Mickey naturally smile back at him.
Mickey picks up the bottle from the coffee table and takes a swig. They don’t own any wine glasses yet. The window is open, and music drifts in from the building across the street, which Mickey half-recognizes. He can hear an acoustic guitar, and a deep Southern voice, and it’s almost comforting.
“You know,” Ian says suddenly, staring up at the ceiling. His face is flushed from drinking and his eyes are growing glassy. “We should get a cat.”
“Why?” Mickey pulls a face.
Ian shrugs. He glances towards the couch. “I don’t know. It could be fun. Like… parenting practice, or something.”
Mickey’s eyebrows shoot up at this, and he nearly chokes on his wine. “Parenting practice?”
Ian smiles again, but he looks nervous. He looks over at Mickey, and his eyes are reading him. It kind of freaks Mickey out how easily he can do that. He’s always seen right through him.
“Yeah,” Ian says. “I mean, if we want kids someday… we should practice. If we can keep a cat alive, that’s a start, right?”
Mickey contemplates this. In a way, Ian’s kind of right. He wouldn’t admit it to anyone, either, but he actually doesn’t mind cats, and he’s always preferred them to dogs. They just never really had much use for cats in the Milkovich household.
“Alright,” Mickey gives in. Normally, he would put up more of a fight, but the booze is relaxing him, making him more pliable. At that moment, he only really cares about seeing Ian happy again.
Ian grins, his lips twisting into a little sideways smile. It’s a smile that has always driven Mickey crazy. It’s a smile that hasn’t changed since they were kids, and even when they were teenagers, it made Mickey want to kiss it off his face - just to see if he could.
Ian looks back up at the ceiling, his expression blissful. He looks so fucking beautiful like that - with his hands behind his head, a blush creeping up his neck, and still wearing the dusty grey t-shirt that he’s had on all day. His hair clings to his forehead where he had been sweating earlier. Mickey can’t tear his eyes away, and he won’t. He’s allowed to stare. He’ll keep looking, drinking it in, for as long as he wants. It’s these moments - where it’s quiet, they’re alone, and they aren’t pressed by the outside world - that Mickey understands what it really means to be in love. He doesn’t just love Ian, he’s in love with him.
Mickey stands up. His legs have become a little wobbly, but he steadies himself on the arm of the couch. “Bed?” he asks.
Ian lets out a content sigh. “I like this song, though.”
The music has picked up again across the street. Mickey listens for a moment, trying to pick out the lyrics. It’s Bob Dylan, he thinks.
“C’mere,” Ian reaches a hand up to Mickey, who is standing over him. “Lay down for a minute.”
“You know, we could lay down in our perfectly comfortable bed that we spent two hours assembling today,” Mickey quips, but there isn’t much force behind it.
Ian says nothing, but he opens and closes the hand that he’s holding in the air, beckoning Mickey to come down to his level.
Finally, Mickey relents. He crouches down and lays beside Ian on his back, and the floor is cold through his shirt. The breeze from the window drifts across him. He can feel the goosebumps rise on his arms. The wail of the distant folk song continues, and the sound is bittersweet.
Ian shifts closer to him, pressing their sides together, and the warmth of his body feels good on Mickey’s skin. He can smell Ian’s shampoo, his musky cologne, and some other smell that is uniquely him that always makes Mickey’s chest hurt - as stupid as that sounds.
Mickey feels Ian’s eyes on him. He turns his head to meet the other man’s gaze.
“Mick?” Ian’s voice is suddenly small.
“What’s up?”
Ian swallows. He’s staring right through Mickey. He’s seeing inside him, and that used to scare the shit out of Mickey. It used to make him want to crawl out of his skin, to hide. Now, though, it’s different. He’s different.
“Glad you didn’t give up,” Ian says quietly. His expression is so earnest it hurts.
Although Ian doesn’t elaborate further, Mickey understands. His throat tightens. It feels vulnerable, and it makes him uneasy, but he nods. “Me too.”
When Ian closes the gap between them, his lips taste like a strange mix between pizza, cigarettes, and eight-dollar wine. Mickey reaches up and grabs Ian’s jaw, melting into the kiss.
Between the alcohol and the lovesickness, Mickey feels pretty drunk.
I remember every little thing,
The high, the hurt, the shine, the sting… of every little thing.
Although he can’t remember who really started it, Mickey is pissed, and he needs to be right. Ian had come home from work again and started nagging the absolute shit out of him, whining about money and bitching that Mickey wasn’t pulling his weight.
They had been fighting on and off for the past two weeks if he was honest. It was always the same shit every time - money, trust, partnership, bullshit.
Mickey was sick of hearing it. He was sick of feeling useless, of being told what to do, of hearing the same fucking rant every day. The tension built as the days went by, and Mickey knew that neither of them would be willing to give up. They were both too goddamned stubborn for that. Instead, they let the pressure keep building, the two of them growing more and more resentful each day.
Mickley had wondered to himself if this was just what married life was like. He wondered if they were doomed to eventually hate one another - he and Ian had never been notoriously good at communicating their feelings - or if it was just a rough patch, something that all couples go through. Regardless, it sucked, and he was starting to snap.
They finally reach their boiling point that night.
It’s probably the fourth night in a row that Ian has brought up the same contentious topic, and Mickey has had enough. They’re standing chest-to-chest in the kitchen. Ian’s jaw is clenching. Mickey can hear the blood rushing in his ears, and he tightens his fist, ready. They’re both breathing heavily and waiting for the other’s next move.
Honestly, Mickey isn’t really sure who swings first. Either way, they’re suddenly wrestling through the kitchen, crashing into the table and chairs. Ian throws Mickey to the ground. A mug clatters off of the table and Mickey watches it shatter on the floor, just as Ian’s fist is connecting with his eye. Mickey eventually ends up back on top, and he’s struggling to pin the other man’s arms above him, hating the smear of blood on Ian’s lip. God fucking damn it.
Eventually, Ian stops squirming, and Mickey slowly releases his grip on his arms.
Mickey rolls over onto his back and lets out a cough, tasting blood somewhere in his mouth. His eye is already starting to swell.
He feels like shit. He always feels like shit when they fight. He wants to say something, but he knows that everything would come out wrong, and Ian usually speaks up first anyways.
When he doesn’t, Mickey eventually gets up and digs through the freezer, pulling out a bag of frozen vegetables to press against the bruise that is blooming on his jaw. He goes to their bedroom by himself, leaving the broken mug and Ian laying side-by-side on the kitchen floor.
When Ian finally comes to bed, Mickey’s nearly asleep.
Ian kicks off his pants and peels off his shirt before he climbs into their bed, and Mickey feels the mattress dip as the other man lays down.
“I love you,” Ian’s voice fills the dark room.
Mickey swallows hard. He hates this. “Yeah,” he answers, and his voice sticks in his throat. “I love you too.”
“We’re gonna be fine,” Ian adds, and in some ways, it almost seems like a question.
“Yeah,” Mickey replies, and he rolls over. He can’t see Ian in the blackness, but he knows that they’re facing one another. “I know.”
He does know. Ian said that they would be fine, and they would be. They had to be.
Guess you forgot what you told me,
Because you left my heart on the floor.
It had been a regular night. Absolutely nothing was out of the ordinary.
They had been making dinner at the apartment, and Ian was standing at the stove, stirring the macaroni and complaining about his day like he usually did. Mickey sat at the table and drank a beer, half-listening to Ian’s rants while scrolling on his phone, interjecting occasionally to read something out loud.
There was nothing to suggest that anything could go bad. There was no warning.
One minute, Ian was holding the spoon in his hand and squinting against the kitchen light, and the next, he was laying on the ground at Mickey’s feet. Mickey had just been opening his mouth to ask if he was okay when Ian had begun to stumble, and then he collapsed on the hardwood.
Looking back, Mickey reads into every millisecond of that moment. He thinks constantly about the warning signs he might have missed or the things he could have done differently. The paramedics told him that it was near-instant - that no amount of CPR or life-saving measures could have changed a fucking thing - but for whatever reason, Mickey refuses to believe this. It just doesn’t seem possible. A brain aneurysm in an otherwise perfectly healthy twenty-three-year-old male doesn’t seem fucking possible.
He’s standing in the emergency entrance now, and he’s completely numb. There’s a cigarette dangling from his hand, but he doesn’t remember lighting it, and he’s not even sure where it came from. He doesn’t remember how he got there. The Gallaghers had been gathered in the waiting room, and all he remembers is knowing that he had to get out of there. He was suffocating.
His insides feel impossibly tight, and the pressure could easily knock him to his knees. It feels as if he is stifling a scream that threatens to tear through him at any moment, despite the fact that he is standing in silence, ash falling onto the pavement from his barely-smoked cigarette. His mind is entirely blank. He knows if he lets himself think about anything - anything besides the parking lot in front of him - it will be game over. It will end him.
At that moment, he can’t even remember Ian’s face.
Baby, your ghost still haunts me,
But I don’t want to sleep with him no more.
Mickey sleeps on the couch, now.
He hasn’t slept in the bed - their bed - since September. The bedding hasn’t been changed, and dust has begun to settle on top of the duvet. Mickey can’t even start to imagine pulling the blankets and sheets off to wash them. The thought makes his stomach lurch so violently that he thinks he will be sick.
He had tried to sleep in their bedroom at the end of the first week. That was his first and only attempt.
He had gotten piss drunk, and he was seeing red, convinced that he could bully his way down the path of grief. If he could just man up and start doing things to try and go back to normal, then he would be fine.
Mickey had stomped his way into their bedroom and clumsily stepped out of his pants. He swayed, and then fell into the bed with a grunt.
He climbed to the head of the bed, settling back against the pillows. He tipped the whiskey bottle back and washed back two sleeping pills that he had left out on the nightstand, relishing the burn in the back of his throat.
Eventually, he passed out.
It was only a few hours later when he was jolted awake to the sound of shouting - directly in his ear.
“Mick!”
Mickey could hear Ian’s voice calling to him, yelling out through the bedroom.
“Mick!” Ian’s voice grew louder. “Mick, help,” he choked out, and it sounded like he couldn’t breathe.
Mickey sat up, his heart thundering against his ribcage. He reached out blindly into the darkness, grabbing a fistfull of sheets in one hand, and thin air in the other.
“Ian?” Mickey called out, and it echoed in the empty bedroom. It felt as if the floor was lurching, and everything started to spin.
Bile rose in Mickey’s throat, and he leaned over the side of the bed to throw up. His stomach clenched as he vomited and his back heaved.
Later, when he finished cleaning up, he moved to the couch.
He dragged a quilt with him, and laid down. He draped the scratchy blanket over his body, staring up at the ceiling that was illuminated by the streetlights outside. He focused on a water stain in the corner. Eventually, he felt his face grow hot, and wet.
It’s been three months since then. He feels a red hot shame when he thinks about the fact that he still sleeps on the couch weeks later, unable to drag himself to the bedroom. It stands in front of him like a great, looming obstacle - blocking his path to recovery.
It just seems so fucking impossible.
In many other ways, Mickey has been able to get up, to move on. He’s still finding jobs and making runs, and he’s pulling in decent money. He shuts himself off to get the work done. The fear of losing the apartment - their apartment - looms over his head, and it keeps him moving forward.
He’s done all of the stupid fucking shit you’re supposed to do when someone you love dies. He went to the funeral, he sat in the front. He talks to Lip and Debbie still, and he goes to visit Liam, Franny, and Fred. He keeps up with his connections. He even lets Ian’s family help him out sometimes - although it goes against his every instinct. He drinks way too much, and Lip has pointed this out several times, but he does try to keep up with his three meals a day. He takes regular showers and attempts to keep the apartment somewhat decent. He hasn’t touched any of Ian’s things, but he’s organized his own, moving them to the living room.
So it drives him insane that he can’t sleep in his bed. His back hurts constantly from sleeping on the crappy hand-me-down couch, and his neck is almost always stiff. Mickey wants to try again. He wants to be able to sleep on the mattress that once felt like heaven beneath him.
He just can’t stand to wake up next to Ian’s ghost.
They say time is the only healer,
God I hope that isn’t right,
Cause now right now I’d die to not remember.
It’s nearly two months later when Mickey rips the closet door off of its hinges.
He’s blind drunk, raging, and he thinks that he’s crying, too. He can taste the salt on his lips, but he’s not entirely sure. His face is bright red and burning hot, and he’s breathing hard, trying to keep his balance. The crappy plywood door is in his hands and it’s cracked down the middle. He looks at it in disbelief. Fuck.
He had avoided their room for so long. He had artfully managed to stay away for months, never breaking the stalemate, and suddenly he was standing in the middle of it, staring at the contents of Ian’s side of the closet. They look back at him, challenging Mickey. It's just a pile of clothes, but he's never felt angrier in his life.
Ian’s shirts are hung - perfectly neat, in order - and his shoes are lined up at the bottom. His pants and hoodies are folded and stacked on the middle shelf. He always kept it ridiculously organized.
Mickey swallows the lump in his throat and tosses aside the closet door carelessly. He grabs as many shirts as he can off the rack, and whips them across the room with as much force as he can muster up. They don’t go very far, but it feels good all the same.
“Fuck you, Ian!” Mickey yells, his voice hoarse and cracking.
He grabs two of his shoes, and turns to hurtle them at the vanity mirror on the opposite side of the bed. He hears the glass crack. The sound is satisfying. He wants to hear it again.
“Fuck you!” Mickey’s nearly screaming now. The neighbours probably hear him, and he doesn’t care. He doesn’t give a fuck.
Mickey grabs a boot. He chucks it towards the window, and it hits it with a thud, landing on the floor below. He grabs the other and aims for a lamp.
“You said we were gonna be fine, you asshole!” Mickey’s vision is blurring and his head is swimming. He thinks he might pass out, but he keeps fighting, desperate, bellowing. He grabs at another few shirts and topples the shelf to the floor. The sweaters scatter around his feet, and he nearly jumps when the fabric touches against his bare skin, as if it burns him.
Mickey’s sobbing when he pulls the rack down completely, taking the rest of the dress shirts out with it. His throat is burning and he can hardly breathe. He’s gasping for air, and he’s throwing things in all directions.
He can barely see when he finally collapses amongst the clothing and destruction.
“Fuck you, Ian,” he gasps out.
The room goes black around him again, and this time, he dreams of nothing.