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the end
By the time Ian is tossed out of the army and makes his reluctant way home, Mickey is long gone.
Not long after the wedding, Terry’s parole officer finally emerged from whatever drug-induced haze he was in and arrested his charge on about six different violations. He was sentenced to ten years. Svetlana turned out not to be pregnant after all, which maybe someone should have picked up on since she was still flat as a board at the five month mark.
They didn’t get a divorce though, something about taxes and greencards. She lives in his old bedroom now and uses the house for her clients, which drives Mandy up the wall.
Mickey split as soon as Terry was sentenced. Just packed a bag and got the hell out of dodge and no one’s heard from him since.
“Jesus,” Ian says, gratefully accepting the joint Lip passes him. He stifles a shiver; they’re underdressed for the unforgiving February air.
“Yeah. Even when you’re not here your love life still resembles a Mexican soap opera.”
A part of Ian wants to ask more, wants to know why Mickey left, where he went, anything. But Lip’s voice is cold and brittle when he brings it up, like he might snap at any moment. For once, Ian decides not to push his luck.
“Did I miss Debbie’s play?” he asks instead. Before he left, she was going out for a community production of Phantom of the Opera. He vaguely remembers the family celebrating her making chorus while he took refuge in his room, staring at the ceiling. Carl brought up a slice of pizza for him and it gathered mold next to his bed until Lip threw it out a week later.
“Next week.”
“Good.”
They sit in comfortable silence on the porch. Sirens wail in the distance and Ian can hear the Davidsons across the street screaming at each other over money. Lip’s fingers twitch on the nape of Ian’s neck.
“You’re such a fucking asshole,” Lip breathes as he runs his free hand through his sleep-mussed hair. There are deep circles under his eyes and he looks exhausted in a way Ian’s never seen him, not even when Liam had the chicken pox and kept them all up with his crying for days.
No matter how hard he tried, Ian never could manage to banish thoughts of his family altogether. On the bad nights, the nights when he wasn’t quite sure what city he was in or whose bed he was on, his mind inevitably wandered to what his siblings would be up to.
He wondered how long it would take them to notice he was gone, how many days before the worry started to set in.
He figured once they did notice, maybe in the back of her mind Fiona was glad there was one less mouth to feed, that Lip was grateful to have one fewer little brother to look after.
He pictured them laughing, a little guiltily, over how stupid one has to be to fall for Mickey fucking Milkovich and expect any result other than the one he got.
But he passed a stack of flyers that mirror the ones Debbie made when Frank went missing last year on the kitchen counter, his face smiling up at him, and the last thing he wrote on the communal dry erase board (stop eating my protein bars Carl) is still there, faded and smudged at the edges.
It’s strange how the banality of reality can be worse than any horrors your imagination can dream up.
“Yeah,” Ian agrees through another drag. He doesn’t miss the way Lip squeezes the back of his neck.
When he nudged Lip awake an hour ago, his brother had blinked at him fuzzily before sitting up straight so fast they nearly knocked heads, grabbing him by the chin and studying him in the dim light. Ian had shifted uncomfortably and waited for the verdict.
He knows what his brother saw: the fading bruise on the cheekbone and the sunken eyes and the way his clothes hang a little looser than they had two months ago. At length Lip said, “I’ve got some of the good stuff,” and slung his arm over Ian’s shoulder.
Since then, Lip hadn’t stopped touching him, as if he could keep him grounded through sheer force of will.
“I’m sorry,” Ian offers when the last of the joint has burned out and the sun is starting to peek out from behind the trees.
“I know,” Lip says tiredly, and tousles his hair. He does; he always knows what Ian can’t bring himself to say, but Ian thinks sometimes you need to hear the words anyway. “You need a haircut.”
When he climbs into Lip’s bed that night he’s not sure which one of them he’s comforting. When he wakes up just a couple hours later more rested than he’s been in months, he decides he doesn’t care.
**
For the next few weeks Fiona vacillates between screaming at him and hugging him so tight he can barely breathe. Lip watches him like a hawk, Carl ignores him completely and Debbie attaches herself to his hip. The only one who treats him normally is Liam, and Ian finds himself spending more time with his youngest sibling as a result.
(He didn’t send postcards like he’d promised, but Liam doesn’t seem to hold a grudge)
His West Point dreams are shot to hell, but he goes back to school to make Fiona happy. It’s not like he has anything better to do, anyway.
“No idea,” Mandy says when he finally works up the nerve to ask the question that’s been plaguing his thoughts for months. Ian pretends to believe her for everyone’s sake.
It was always Mandy he’d call from a payphone when he was homesick and confused, too tired to keep moving but too embarrassed to go home. She never once asked him where he was or what happened. Instead she’d suck in a breath when she heard his shaky voice and start right in on a tangent about their math teacher or her newest nemesis at school.
It was Mandy who eventually brought him back, because if she could forgive him maybe the rest of them could too.
“Do you think Linda’ll give you your job back?” Ian suppresses a sigh at her blatant attempt to change the subject.
“Yeah. I just want a witness in case she decides to beat me over the head with a mop before she does.”
Mandy grins and links their arms together, her bony elbow catching him in the ribcage. For a moment they’re fifteen again, young and carefree.
Linda takes one look at them, rolls her eyes and says, “You’re back to base pay. Restock the frozen food aisle, I’m taking the boys to soccer practice.”
There’s something oddly comforting in the knowledge that no matter how badly he fucks up or how well he succeeds, Linda will always be exasperated with him.
Mandy hangs around for the rest of his shift under the pretense of helping but in actuality just snacking on candy.
“You regret it?” she asks, ripping the wrapper of a Snickers bar. His chest seizes and he shoves the feeling down vindictively.
“Leaving?”
“Nah. It. You know.” He does. Mandy never brought it up with him, not even when he left and he loves her for that. But her best friend and brother both abandoned her within a month of each other, and he owes her some sort of answer.
“No,” he says, and thinks he’s lying.
“Yeah.” She smiles sadly at him, then shakes herself. “Meet me at the video store in ten or I’m renting Ghost again.” Ian makes a face and she gives him the finger on her way out.
There’s a snort from behind him, and Ian jumps before remembering that Linda’s still puttering around, checking the money in the till. For a minute, Ian can see Mickey there, on the one day he’d managed to convince him to run the register. It had been a disaster, with Mickey verbally abusing their customers and tossing out incorrect change to get them out of the store faster. Linda had lectured them for an hour that night and took the loss out of Ian’s paycheck, because you’re supposed to be the responsible one, Ian.
Mickey never admitted to feeling guilty, but he did blow him in an empty theater that night, even if he didn’t let Ian choose the movie.
“I can close up,” Ian offers, but Linda pushes him out the door.
“I expect to see you here bright and early tomorrow morning to open. And you’re going to have to fire your replacement, boy can’t tell a peach from an apple.”
“Thank you,” he says sincerely and Linda’s face softens.
She brushes her knuckles across his cheek and says, “You just need to stop choosing the ones who can’t love you back. It’s a lesson everyone’s gotta learn eventually.”
With that, she slaps Ian’s face sharply and closes the door in his face, leaving him open-mouthed and dumbstruck.
“What was that about?” Mandy asks, Blockbuster bag dangling from her wrist.
“I have no idea.” Conceding that Linda really does see everything, he turns to face Mandy and takes in her smug expression. He groans. “Please tell me that’s not Swayze.”
**
Since he falls just short of graduation requirements that year, Ian has to take a couple summer courses before they’ll give him his diploma. He doesn’t get to walk across the stage, but he does get to cheer on Mandy when she becomes the first Milkovich to graduate high school.
He’s happy enough that he overlooks the way she’s canoodling with Lip at the party he helped throw at the Alibi. Because he’s a generous fake boyfriend, he’ll give it a week before gently reminding her all the ways they’ve imploded in the past, and all the ways they’re likely to implode in the very near future
“Hey.” Fiona plops down on the barstool next to him and hands him a beer. “That’ll be you in a couple months.”
“With my tongue down Lip’s throat? I hope not.”
She shoves him playfully and a few drops of beer splash onto his lap. “With a diploma, smartass. You know what you’re gonna do with it yet?”
Ian shrugs. “Fulfill my dream of working at the Kash and Grab for the rest of my life, I guess.”
Fiona fixes him with her serious face, which he really ought to be immune to by now like Lip is. She squeezes his hand and says, “Don’t be an idiot. Maybe you can’t do everything you wanted, but you sure as hell can do something.”
She leaves him to do shots with Veronica and Ian continues nursing his beer. Since coming back he’d expended a great amount of energy not thinking about his future and how royally he cocked it all up. But Fiona was right: at some point he was going to have to figure out a plan.
“Hey.” He snags Carl’s arm as he walks past, deftly ignoring the glare his brother shoots him. “Want me to teach you those hand grips?”
**
This time when he leaves, he does it right.
He lets Fiona throw him a going away party populated with more of Frank’s drinking buddies crashing than people he knows. Halfway through, Lip and Mandy kidnap him and take him to the old abandoned park where they get stoned and reminisce about things that didn’t happen that long ago, but feel a lifetime away.
“You’re going to miss me,” Mandy informs him. He nods, because he already knows from experience that he will.
“First one to leave the nest,” Lip says on the way home, kicking a rock down the street.
“Could’ve been you.” They hadn’t managed to talk Lip into MIT, but Fiona has bullied him into taking advantage of his full ride at Chicago to at least audit a few courses.
“Nah. It was always going to be you.”
Ian’s eyebrows jump to his hairline. It wasn’t that long ago that Lip was so desperate to escape the South Side that he was pushing Ian to abandon his family just to go live with his biological father.
But then he thinks of Lip’s soft pride when he showed him the train tickets, and the hours he spent tutoring him in trig on the off chance he could get into a school that would send him down a path that Lip liked only slightly more than he understood, and he wonders if that was how it happened at all.
“I’m scared,” he says, the weed making him honest.
“Yeah.” Their shoulders brush and something Ian hadn’t even realized was churning finally settles deep inside his stomach.
That night they stay up all night with Fiona watching shitty movies and getting high. The kids fall asleep half past two, sprawled out on the floor between the upended bowls of popcorn. With Fiona’s hand twisting in his hair and Lip’s thigh pressed against his calf Ian feels more at home than he can ever remember feeling in this family that doesn’t truly belong to him.
It’s also the first time he feels ready to leave.
“You’ve got everything you need? Toothbrush, underwear, all that?”
“Yes, Fiona.” It’s the fourth time she’s asked and the train is leaving in ten anyway, so it doesn’t really matter at this point. Her eyes are full of tears she won’t let herself shed. “I’ll come back,” he promises feebly.
Fiona laughs at him like she used to when he claimed that he just got lost on the way to school, honest. “We’ll come visit,” she counters firmly. “Be careful, kiddo.”
“Thanks,” he whispers into her neck and tries to pour eighteen years of gratitude into the word. He doesn’t think it works, but she squeezes tighter anyway.
“Remember,” Lip says, holding his bag out to him. “Young guys. And no convicts.”
“Fuck off.”
“Hey. You sure about this?”
Ian glances back at Fiona, who’s trying to hold a fussing Liam in her arms. He’s almost too big for her to carry easily these days. He thinks of Carl at home, his palms sliced up from where he tried to learn how to juggle knives, and Debbie with her bright green eyes that have seen too much. He thinks of West Point, and Mandy and Frank, and even of Mickey. It still stings, but he doesn’t feel that all-encompassing emptiness anymore, which he counts as progress.
“Yeah. I am.” Lip must hear something reassuring in his voice, because he visibly relaxes. He pulls him into a tight hug that Ian returns a little overenthusiastically.
“See ya,” he says when they pull back, and Ian offers a shaky smile.
This time when he boards the train, he feels less like he’s running away, and more like he’s running to something.
the middle
He’s eighteen and sharing a shoebox apartment with three other guys on the outskirts of Brooklyn. They never make enough to pay all their utilities, so this month they’re doing without heat. It’s only September, but he can feel the bite in the air already.
“Maybe you’d be able to make your share if you weren’t wasting all your money on smokes,” Eric says, snagging a couple out of his pack. Ian rolls his eyes; Eric’s from a wealthy family down in Maryland and he’s convinced slumming it for a few years after college will make him seem more worldly to chicks.
None of his roommates have the slightest idea of what it means to truly be poor; if any of them hit real trouble their parents are always there to bail them out. Ian doesn’t mind though, if they get bailed out so does he by default.
“Want to fuck?” Ian rolls his eyes. That’s the other thing Eric does to seem more worldly. Which would be fine, except he’s awful at it.
“I gotta get to work.” Between working as a cashier at a vegan grocery store and a salesman at a flagging record store, he just manages to scrape by. Every month he squirrels away a few extra bucks, though he’s not sure exactly why.
“Liar,” Chris calls from the kitchen. “You don’t work tonight. Now go break out that good weed I know you’re hoarding.” Chris, Ian once explained to Lip, might be less of a tool than Eric, but he’s infinitely more of a dick.
“Worst fuck,” Eric prompts when they’re all good and buzzed. They’re doing whiskey shots off the floor, since none of them are willing to spring for a table.
“I got this. Bitch didn’t tell me she was on her period until I had my fingers way up in there. Took me weeks to feel clean.”
“Nasty. Gallagher?”
Ian shakes his head and takes another drag. “C’mon, man. You’re so fucking private all the time, you’re like Eddie.” Eddie is their mythical third roommate. He pays rent once every two months, and Chris claims he’s seen him once, but Ian’s pretty sure he doesn’t exist.
“No such thing as a bad fuck. If there is, you’re doing it wrong.”
Eric guffaws and Chris quickly changes the subject. “Worst breakup, then.”
“My high school girlfriend dumped me at my birthday party,” Eric offers up.
“You were still having birthday parties when you were in high school?”
“Were they themed?”
“Fuck off, the both of you. You’ve got to go this time, Gallagher, you’ve passed the past three rounds.”
The name must trigger something he thought he buried a long time ago, or that’s the best excuse he can think of for what happens next.
“Fine. Uh, a guy once dumped me for not helping him murder my father.” Lip always did warn him that weed loosened his tongue too much. It got him in trouble with Mickey quite a few times, and apparently he hadn’t grown out of it as much as he’d hoped.
“That’s fucked up, man.”
“Seriously.”
“Well,” Ian hedges, feeling oddly defensive. “Frank is an asshole.”
“The boyfriend?”
“No, my dad. And he’s not even really my dad, he’s my uncle. My mom slept with Frank’s brother. And besides, he didn’t actually go through with it. The murder, I mean.” He’s starting to remember why he doesn’t talk about his life that often. “Fine, maybe it was a little fucked up.”
“A little?”
By the time they pass out, Eric’s fashioned what he claims is a tiara out of toilet paper and Ian’s been officially crowned the king of awful relationships. At one point he invokes Kash in a half-hearted attempt to defend his spotty sex life. It almost works too, until the whole married, two kids, fifteen year age difference thing comes up.
Then he decides to just sit back and embrace his throne.
**
It’s almost spring when he starts to feel the itch in his fingers.
New York is busy and frantic and so fucking dull. There are no stakes here, where he does the same job he’s been doing since he was fourteen and fucks the same kinds of people he always has.
For his nineteenth birthday Eric got him an in at a pub he frequents and a week later Ian’s their newest bartender, forging the ID he needs like it’s old hat to him. He kept his own name this time, and it feels like a victory.
The job isn’t half as interesting as you hear in the movies; he spends most of his nights getting hit on by cute, sad girls that remind him of Mandy and wondering if the men he serves have kids at home like Frank does.
“Kev’s thrilled,” Fiona tells him during their somewhat weekly phone call. “Thinks he was a big influence on you.” Shortly after Monica left, when Frank was even more of a mess than usual and Fiona had more on her plate than any sixteen year old could handle, he and Lip used to spend a lot of late nights at the Alibi. They mopped up tables and broke into the jukebox when no one was looking, filling their pockets with quarters that jingled all the way home.
On especially quiet nights, Kev let him and Lip behind the bar and taught them the weirder mixed drinks he’d ever served. He’d laughed when Lip dunked Ian’s head under one of the kegs and cornered him so Ian could get his revenge.
He doesn’t say it, but Ian thinks of all the things Kev gave him over the years, bartending skills rank pretty far down on the list.
“You’re good at it, though,” Eric slurs one night after he’s been dumped yet again by a brunette he claims was the love of his life. Ian considers cutting him off so he doesn’t have to carry him home. “You’ve got that silent, stoic thing going on.”
Ian starts; he can’t imagine exactly what Mickey’s reaction to that description of him would have been, but he suspects it would involve a lot of laughing. Once, when Fiona had stopped in the store and Ian and Mickey had to jump apart like startled animals and pretend to look busy, she’d accused him of hiding things.
“You never tell me what’s going on in your life,” she’d said sadly, juggling the fruit and smokes that Ian had given her on the house. “You’re so quiet all the time.”
She’d shut the door on the sound of Mickey choking on his beer. When he’d finally recovered he’d fixed Ian with an indignant expression and demanded, “What, do you just take it all out on me?”
It was a stupid memory, from back when they were still just barely friends, but Ian had always liked talking to Mickey. He wasn’t exactly responsive, but he usually listened, hard as he tried to hide it. And after a lifetime of Fiona’s well meaning conversations that were always interrupted with bigger, more immediate problems and Lip’s gentle judgment, it was nice to just talk and be heard for a while.
“It’s like you were born to bartend,” Eric continues, oblivious to Ian’s reminisces. The words sink in and Ian feels oddly numb, pouring another shot by rote.
That night, after he’s tucked Eric into bed like Lip once had to do with him the night of a wedding that feels like eons ago, he lies awake for a long time.
Over the next week he counts his savings and narrows down his options. There’s still too much of the South Side in him to ever want to be a cop, but that’s no reason to put all his physical training to waste.
“You’re serious about this?” Eric asks over his shoulder while he surfs Craigslist for sublets. “You’re really moving out?”
“I’ll pitch in rent for next month,” he assures distractedly.
“That’s not the point. You’re just going to abandon me with that asshole? What about that guy you’re seeing, Jack something or other?”
John, actually. They’d been dating for just shy of a month when he said I love you in the middle of sex and Ian had nearly vomited on him. They’d mutually decided to part ways after that, with Ian wondering idly if he could find a way to bill a wayward Mickey for the massive amounts of therapy he was apparently in desperate need of.
“You’ll find a new roommate in no time,” he says, because no way he’s explaining that mess.
“I don’t want a new roommate,” Eric says petulantly. “I only just broke you in.”
Ian finally looks up from his work to see Eric lying dejectedly on the couch and feels a pang of guilt. He closes the ancient laptop they all share with a sharp click. “I need to use the last of my weed before it’ll show up on a drug test.”
The grin he receives is blinding.
When he leaves it’s with little fanfare. Eric makes him commit to a visit (he’s under the impression the reason he never gets laid is because east coast girls just don’t get me) and Chris grumbles about rent. He hops on a bus because it’s cheaper than a train and suffers through the longest four days of his life.
He settles for San Diego in part because of its roots in the military, and mainly because he knows Lip would never let him live it down if he went to San Francisco. All that tutoring finally comes in handy when he takes the entry exam for the San Diego Fire-Rescue Academy and aces it in one go.
A month into training he gets a text from Eric: ur sister sent u a care pkg. forget to tell her u left? brownies r awesome
Eventually he does get around to calling Fiona, but not before taking a shot of whiskey to soften the blow.
“You’re what?” Fiona shrieks, and Ian holds the phone away from his ear with a wince. “When did you move? And what do you mean firefighter?” He thinks he can hear Lip snicker in the background and he definitely hears Carl say “ask him if he’s seen a house explode.”
There’s some commotion on the other end of the line and the next voice he hears is Lip’s. “No accounting jobs open?” he drawls.
“Fuck off. I’m good at it.”
“I don’t doubt it,” Lip says with that bemused tone that made it’s first appearance long before he found Ian’s porn stash; back when he was ten and announced to his family that he was going to join the army when he grew up and save the world. It used to bother him that his family never really understood him, but by now the consistency is almost comforting—besides, it’s not like he really understands it himself. “I just don’t get why all your dream jobs involve literally throwing yourself in the line of fire.”
“Ha. Put Fi back on the line. Or better yet, Liam.”
“I thought you liked Brooklyn.” Judging by the slamming door and the faint sirens, Fiona’s taken the phone out on the front stoop and locked the litter inside. The kids are probably bickering over the dinner table, older now but still just as vicious if he and Lip were anything to go by. He catches himself smiling absently and Fiona clears her throat over the scratchy connection.
“I did, I do. I just wanted a change.”
He can tell Fiona isn’t placated by that. “I just want you to be happy,” she says, an undercurrent of sadness lacing her voice. She always drops that phrase, in some form or another, in all of their conversations. It’s like she believes happiness is this unattainable goal he’s constantly chasing after and always coming just short of achieving.
He wishes he could find the words to tell her he is, if not happy, at least content where he is. Sometimes when Fiona looks at him these days he can tell she sees Monica staring back at her, and he’s not sure he’ll ever be able to change that.
“When are you going to come visit?” he says, changing the subject swiftly.
**
He knows something’s wrong the moment he inserts the key into his lock and feels the slight jiggle that wasn’t there when he left.
Dropping his bag at the entrance he pushes the door open carefully, instinct taking over and longing for the old Gallagher bat.
He surveys his cramped apartment, searching for the intrusion. Eight months into his probationary year at the fire department and he can finally afford a place to himself in a shit part of town. After twenty years of pushing, biting and punching his way into three minutes of downtime in the bathroom, living on his own is almost eerie.
Half his clothes are on the floor, two bags are on the kitchen counter and a truly hideous bong is sitting on the coffee table. Either it’s the work of the world’s most incompetent burglar or…
“Hello, Mandy.”
“Your brother is a fucking asshole.” If he had a nickel for every conversation with a Milkovich that started with that sentence, he’d be swimming in money like fucking Scrooge.
“Some people call before travelling across the country to squat in their old friend’s tiny apartment, you know.”
“Whatever. I ordered pizza for you like a good little housewife. You got cash, right?”
He doesn’t, so Mandy answers the door topless and manages to finagle the pie away from the delivery guy just like old times.
“What’d Lip do this time?” he asks when they’re fed and huddled in his twin bed.
“Fucked some scientist bitch he goes to school with. You know what he said when I confronted him? ‘She’s an engineer, not a scientist.’ Like I’m stupid or something.”
Unfortunately that does sound like Lip, and the familiarity makes Ian snort fondly. “Shut up. I can’t believe that dick would cheat on me. She wasn’t even that hot.”
“What, were you two exclusive?” Ian can’t hide his surprise; they’ve broken up and gotten back together so many times over the years he’d just assumed they had a standing agreement to not let their mess of a relationship interfere with their dating lives.
Mandy scowls at him. “Well, no. We sort of broke up last month after the thing with my boss. But still.”
Ian laughs, deep and hearty, and Mandy punches him in the gut. “You’re such an asshole. You have to take me out to cheer me up.”
“Hang on, wasn’t your boss at the salon a woman?” Mandy actually flushes a little, and Ian crows. “Should I be welcoming you to the dark side? What is it with you Milkoviches?” His brain catches up to his mouth and he freezes.
Mandy recovers first with a tentative grin. “It’s got to be you. Spending too much time around Ian Gallagher turns you queer.”
“That actually explains a lot,” says Ian, playing along. “Kash, Jimmy’s dad…”
“Lip just thought you had a magic cock.”
Ian spits his beer out and stares at her incredulously. “Have you guys talked about this?”
“Well you have to admit, you’ve had a weird sexual history.”
“Why does everyone say that?” Mandy just laughs at him and Ian drags her to a lesbian bar for revenge.
Living with Mandy is about as terribly fantastic as he always imagined it to be. She’s a slob, has no respect for personal boundaries, and takes it upon herself to redecorate a week after she arrives.
She also insists on taking him out to clubs and movies after his shifts, plays wingman for him and provides a never ceasing font of information about what he’s been missing on the South Side.
Genius that he is, it only takes Lip a few weeks to clue in. Ian arrives home one night, sweaty and miserable from the heat, to hear Mandy screeching obscenities into her phone in his bathroom. He doesn’t mean to eavesdrop, but there’s only so much room in the apartment and he stubs his toe twice on half-empty paint cans before giving up and lounging on his bed.
If only he could hear Lip calling her a crazy bitch it would feel just like home.
He must have dozed off, because the next thing he knows it’s suspiciously quiet. He sits up, his limbs creaking a bit from a long day, and strains to hear if Mandy’s still around, or if she’s gone to get take-out since there’s nothing in the fridge but week old leftover pizza.
“Nah, he’s at work,” Mandy mutters, and Ian sighs, resigning himself to a vaguely moldy dinner. “Yeah. I don’t know, he seems good. Why the fuck would I lie about that?”
Ian lies back and tries to tune the rest of the conversation out. When they first started fucking, Ian had been worried that his two best friends would leave him in the dust. Now he’s starting to wonder if that would have been preferable to knowing they apparently just spend all their time gossiping about him in hushed tones.
After what feels like an age, Mandy slams the door open, her face flushed and eyes red. She stops dead when she sees him and Ian musters up his most obnoxious drawl: “Good evening.”
“How long have you been sitting there? You could have made a noise.”
“I think the better question is: why do you lock yourself in the bathroom to take phone calls when the apartment is empty?”
Mandy gapes at him for a moment, gaze flicking to the bathroom door and back to him. Then she snorts and climbs onto the bed next to him, lounging her head on his stomach. “Habit, I guess. It was the only place my brothers wouldn’t chase me.”
“You’ll never guess what Lip told me,” Mandy announces over the shitty action movie they’re watching a few hours later, rearranging his arms to her liking. Ian thinks he probably could; from what he can tell they just cycle through the same five conversations they had back in high school. “Carl joined ROTC this year.”
Ian laughs, startled and pleased. “You’re kidding.”
“Nah. Wants to learn how to shoot shit, apparently.” It’s the perfect outlet for him and Ian doesn’t know why he didn’t think of it sooner. There’s still that familiar pang of regret but it’s muted now, like the ache of a wound that’s long since scabbed over.
“Good,” he murmurs, and thinks he should call them soon. He’s never been able to lie to Lip, so he’s been avoiding messages since Mandy moved in.
Mandy bumps her knee against his and smiles. “Bet he won’t look half as hot as you did in those fatigues.”
For the first time since moving west, Ian has someone to bring to the monthly station barbeques. Mary, the chief’s wife, looks so relieved that he has a life outside work she might cry.
“Oh, Ian, is this your girlfriend?” she exclaims, clasping Mandy’s hand tightly in manicured fingers.
“God no,” Mandy scoffs, extricating herself quickly. “I did beard for him back in high school when we were fucking each other’s brothers, though.”
And now she looks like she might cry for an entirely different reason.
A few of the guys nearby cover their smirks; he’s not out, exactly, but they’ve spent countless hours chatting around the station and Ian’s never put too much effort into keeping his sexuality a secret. Ian plasters on a fake smile and kicks Mandy in the shin when no one’s looking.
Despite that rocky start, Mary and Mandy hit it off nearly instantly. It helps that Mary introduces herself as the owner of a small beauty parlor in the city and Ian’s spent the past few weeks berating his impromptu roommate into finding a job.
Mandy spends most of the afternoon entertaining the crew with tales of their adolescence on the South Side. Ian is only reasonably certain the statute of limitations has passed on all of them.
“Please tell me you hit that,” Mandy says on the walk home, clutching a business card in her hand.
“Which one?”
“Any. All.”
Ian just smirks and dodges out of her grip.
**
“Seattle, huh?”
Mandy and Mary have become as thick as thieves since Mandy got that job, and there’s no keeping any secrets anymore.
“It’s just a thought.”
“Fiona will go apeshit. You’ve barely been here a year.”
“We don’t have to tell Fiona until I’m settled, then,” he says, and tries infuse a threat into his tone. Mandy cocks her brow at him and scoffs.
“Don’t you have to start all over to be certified in another state?”
“Jim knows the chief and he put in a good word for me. I’ll have to take a few tests, but it won’t be too bad.”
The fight drains out of her and she sags like a puppet whose strings have been cut. “I just don’t get what you’re looking for.” She sounds tired and sad, and he hates that it’s his fault.
He scoots over on the bed and waits for her to position herself next to him, head on his shoulder and legs tangled between them. “I’m not,” he whispers, running a hand through her hair, the streaks of pink and orange replaced with softer, auburn highlights.
For all that he used to complain about Mickey’s emotional constipation, Ian’s never been good at putting how he feels into words. And he doesn’t know how to explain the twitch in his toes, the restlessness in his bones that overcomes him; that need to be somewhere else, to see something more. He’s twenty-one and he has his whole life in front of him, and he doesn’t want to waste it replaying the same day over and over again.
He loves his job and his friends, but he’s sure if he stops for too long he’ll get trapped in a life that’s happy and dull rather than terrifying and exciting.
“I’ll be fine,” he says at length, and Mandy sniffles a little. “You know I love the rain.”
the beginning
“Your problem sets are due on Monday, no excuses.”
The class begins to file out noisily, while a few girls go up to the podium to flirt with the TA. Ian stays in the back of the auditorium, surveying the room. It’s an intro class filled to the brim with over eager freshman. Standing there makes him feel the weight of his twenty three years and just as out of place as he’s ever been.
Pulling himself out of his reverie, Ian goes against the crowd to make his way down the steps.
“Like I said, if you have any pressing questions you can come to office hours on Tuesdays and Thursdays.”
“Yeah, but it’s just this one here.” The girl is wearing a low cut with enough cleavage that even Mandy would be reluctantly impressed, her too-large earrings brushing her bare shoulders. She’s the sort of girl who pretends to be dumber than she is for attention; judging by the notes she’s clutching she could probably be teaching the class.
“Weren’t you listening?” Ian barks in his best military tones, and the girl jumps about a foot. “Professor Gallagher’s got plans.”
“Not actually a professor,” Lip corrects, but he’s grinning so wide it nearly splits his face. They wait for the girls to collect their things, beaming at each other like idiots. He hasn’t seen Lip since he was living in Brooklyn, though they keep in touch more often than Ian does with any of his other siblings.
“What are you doing here?” Lip asks, shoving his laptop haphazardly into his bag, not taking his eyes off Ian. “I thought you were—oh fuck, you didn’t.”
“Austin wasn’t really for me,” Ian says breezily. “Fucking heat. And you said you got that fellowship at MIT, so.”
Lip shakes his head and laughs. “Come on, I’ll buy you a drink.”
The bar they go to is a dive all the way across town where Lip assures him they won’t meet any brownnosing students. Looking at the broken barstools and the rather suspicious stain on the pool table, Ian’s inclined to agree; he can’t imagine too many robotics majors hanging out here.
“Sell-out,” Ian reiterates, shoving another shot across the table.
“Fuck you. They give me full access to their labs in exchange for three hours of teaching snot-nosed brats a week. It’s a good deal.”
“Sixteen year old you would be ashamed.”
“Sixteen year old me was an asshole. What about you? You got a job and a place?”
Ian waves away the concern dismissively. “I’ve been here for weeks.”
“What station you working at?”
“I’m not. Doing the EMT thing full-time these days.”
Lip actually drops his beer at that. “You’re kidding. You’re giving up the life of danger? And you’re calling me a fucking sell-out.”
“Shut up. Firefighting is good in theory, but in reality it’s an awful lot of burnt food and giving lectures in high schools.” Besides, working as an EMT means he doesn’t have to go through new tests and qualifications every time he moves.
“Well look at you. Taking your first, wobbling steps towards responsible adulthood. Next you might actually stay in a city for longer than six months.”
Ian hums noncommittally and Lip rolls his eyes. “Another round, then.”
It only takes Lip a few weeks to convince Ian to move out of his motel room and into the shoddy apartment he’s renting on his salary (‘it’ll be just like old times, with you wasting all the hot water jerking off in the shower.’
‘fuck you, I jerked off on the toilet. With the shower on.’
‘…’)
Fiona shrieks with excitement and then bursts into tears when they tell her. Ian thinks it’s a toss-up between her PMSing or her actually being that excited that he has a babysitter again.
“You can bring guys home, you know,” Lip says over his cereal bowl when Ian comes through the door.
Ian shrugs. “This place is tiny. I don’t see you bringing girls around.”
“That’s because my little brother kidnapped my girlfriend and abandoned her with a lease in San Diego, effectively cockblocking me into eternity.”
“That’s…not really what happened.”
“Close enough,” says Lip, pouring him a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios. They’re his favorites, but Debbie liked Fruit Loops and Carl liked Cap’n Crunch, so Fiona always compromised and bought Frosted Flakes. “Must be getting serious, you’ve been out every night this week.”
“Er,” Ian says, searching for the most sensitive way to explain that no, not really.
Back during the last summer before Ian left Chicago, Mandy went through a massive political correctness/feminist phase that Ian cheerfully followed her into because it annoyed Fiona and Lip to no end. One night Lip had jokingly called them sluts and Mandy climbed onto her soap box to deplore the double standard and point out that Lip had actually had more sexual partners than Ian had.
Lip never admitted it, but he must have felt guilty because he never again used the term, even though it might actually apply these days.
“When was the last time you had a boyfriend?” he asks instead, carefully keeping disapproval out of his tone and in the implication.
“Uh, David? Last year? That was sort of a relationship.” It was close, anyway. They went on a couple dates before realizing that they had very little in common and were better off as friends and fuck buddies.
He’d actually had a few relationships since leaving home, not that he ever told anyone about them. Mostly they were assholes, though on a couple memorable occasions, he’d been the asshole, back when he was still a teenager and so fucking angry at everything.
Eventually he just decided he was better off unattached.
Lip, however, disagrees, if the endless parade of blind dates he starts setting him up on are anything to go by. Ian humors him because the rent is insanely cheap, but there’s only so much he can take.
“I was just trying to help,” Lip mutters defensively over conciliatory whiskey shots after Ian sends yet another creepy robot boy packing.
“Why does everyone think I need fixing?” Ian complains.
“We don’t, we just—“ Lip cuts himself off and furrows his brow, deep in thought. “Well, you are sort of fucked up,” is what he lands on, and Ian thinks he should have taken an extra few minutes to work on that.
“And you and Fiona are the models of well-adjusted adulthood. When was the last time you had a girlfriend? Should I set you up with a bunch of psychotic chicks to get my rocks off?”
“We’re not the same, Ian,” he says, his voice high with exasperation.
“Because I’m a fag?”
“No. Because you want to be in love. You want a boyfriend, and all the stupid, sappy stuff, and that’s fine except you’re too fucking scared to admit it.”
Ian scoffs, irritated with this conversation, this night, and his siblings who are so certain they know best that they never bothered to get to know him. “Love is a fairytale. It doesn’t exist.”
There’s a weighty pause while Lip runs his knuckles over the crack in the wooden table until they turn white. “You were in love with Mickey,” he says at last, having evidently lost an internal battle.
“I was infatuated with Mickey,” Ian corrects, deftly ignoring the sinking sensation in his stomach.
“Infatu—You didn’t get out of bed for a month after he got married.”
“Yeah, and Romeo and Juliet killed themselves a week after they met, what’s your point?”
“My point is, just because one guy broke your heart doesn’t mean you have to deny its existence for the rest of your life.”
And wasn’t that oddly sentimental coming from Lip.
“Look, if I thought you really didn’t want it, then I wouldn’t care, Ian. But you do, or you did, anyway. Before.”
“Yeah,” Ian mutters, a bitterness he’d thought he’d forgotten seeping into his words. “But I grew up.”
Lip sighs, but his eyes soften and Ian can tell he doesn’t want to fight anymore. But he’s never been able to let someone else have the last word, so when he gets to his feet he adds, “Maybe in this case, that’s not something to be proud of.”
**
He says goodbye to Lip in mid-May, when all the papers scattered around the apartment have been collected and graded. Ian holds onto the apartment for the rest of the summer to finish off the lease, but he’s mentally packing his bags.
“They always needs EMTs in Chicago,” Lip says a few weeks before he leaves. In the seven years and countless questionable decisions since he left, neither Fiona nor Lip have ever tried to sway him to come home. He knows it’s costing something for Lip to bring it up now.
He simply smiles and hands Lip the last beer in the fridge; his brother doesn’t bring it up again.
He knows he should feel guilty for not considering it; it’s not as though his job prevents him from moving back, or even visiting. Sometimes he even regrets it—as much as he tries to keep in touch, he knows he’s missed milestones, and Liam would probably barely recognize him.
But his entire adult life has been predicated on moving forward at warp speed so nothing can catch up, and Chicago feels like a giant step backward into a snake pit.
Instead he heads to Philly at Mandy’s suggestion. In honor of Lip and the quest Fiona had put him on he makes an effort to go on one real date a month, which is how he meets Arthur.
Arthur is thirty-five, well adjusted, funny, and kind. He teaches algebra at a local middle school and Ian can imagine a fuzzy future ahead of them, complete with pets and huge Thanksgiving dinners, if that was the sort of life he wanted.
It’s not though, and they both know it. So there are no hard feelings when Arthur’s ex comes back into town and they want to give it another shot. They stay friends, and when the 7th grade history teacher at Arthur’s school is diagnosed with cancer, Ian steps in to coach the soccer team.
The extent of his knowledge of soccer is to not use your hands, but he remembers Jimmy coaching Carl’s football team for a couple weeks and decides that really, anyone can do it.
To his surprise, the kids actually adore him. He’s young and energetic and since he’s never assigned them homework he quickly rises in the ranks to be the favorite coach in the school. When spring try-outs come around, there are nearly fifty kids on the field in equipment of varying stages of disrepair.
Even more surprisingly, Ian finds himself getting rather invested in the whole thing. They came in fourth in the league in the fall, which Arthur assures him is the best they’ve done in a decade, but Ian insists they can do better.
So one April morning he borrows Arthur’s car to drive out to the nearest Wal-Mart in search of cheap cones, balls and maybe even a couple pairs of cleats for the poorer kids.
“Can I help you, sir?” asks a bored voice, and Ian feels the jolt of recognition deep in his bones before he even turns around.
When he does, he finds himself face to face with Mickey Milkovich for the first time in nearly eight years.
They stare at each other, equally dumbstruck, for what must be a full minute. In the back of his mind, Ian thinks this is one of those landmark moments in his life, one of the days he’ll look back on years from now as a turning point.
He snorts. Instinctively, his hand goes to cover his mouth, and the brightly colored soccer balls (requested by the girls now that he’s made the team co-ed) he’s holding tumble to the floor. The laughter he’s trying to pin in comes bubbling out, and he’s doubled over in the middle of the sports aisle in Wal-Mart, laughing so hard he’s vaguely concerned he’s going to suffocate.
Mickey makes an aborted move forward, his face scrunched up in concern, like he’s worried Ian’s had a psychotic break. It’s entirely possible. “What.”
“Retail, Mickey?” he wheezes, desperately trying to catch his breath. “Fucking retail?”
Now that he’s assured he probably won’t be responsible for checking his ex-fuck buddy into a mental institution, Mickey’s face is settling on a more familiar disgruntled expression. “Did you need to buy something?” he snaps, running a hand through his hair. It’s a few shades lighter than it had been back when they were kids, and Ian can’t decide if it’s funnier if he’s started dying it now or if he had been back then.
The mental image of Mandy lathering cheap hair dye into Mickey’s scalp over the kitchen sink is enough to send him into another fit.
“All this time, and you’ve been hiding in a fucking Wal-Mart,” he exclaims, like it’s the greatest gift he’s ever been given, which it just might be. “With the vest and everything.”
“You are such a—“ Mickey cuts himself off before he can violate company policy but he’s staring down at Ian, grinning helplessly.
As grand romantic reunions of former lovers go it’s probably the stupidest on the planet, and it’s just so perfect that Ian can’t quite regret practically skipping out to Arthur’s car, Mickey falling into step beside him.
“All these years,” Mickey pants, rolling down a window and leaning back on the leather seats, “I thought I was exaggerating how good this was.”
Ian laughs, craning his head towards the fresh air. “The only thing we ever excelled at. Fuck, I forgot how hot it gets. I haven’t had car sex in…”
“That time in Riverdale, trying to sell off your neighbor’s weed. ”
“God, when that awful van you had broke down in the middle of summer.”
“And you were acting like a little bitch and wouldn’t let me just steal a car to get us back.”
“I didn’t say you couldn’t, just that I wasn’t coming.”
“Same difference.”
That casual comment jogs the old uncertainty in his memory; the way Mickey would be able to drop something so seemingly sweet into conversation offhand, but when asked directly he’d freeze up. Ian had spent half his adolescence thinking Mickey was just shit at communicating and the other half convinced he was reading too much into everything.
Maybe age has softened him, or maybe Ian’s outgrown some of his teenage insecurities, because he’s sure he can read the fondness in Mickey’s exasperation now.
Mickey lights up and they lapse into comfortable silence. He looks sort of wanton like that, his body twisted towards the window, cargo pants bunched around his knees, chest and cheeks still flushed from exertion. There’s a blissed out expression on his face, and Ian thinks with distant pride that Mickey only ever looks that young and carefree around him.
“I should go,” he says, refastening his belt. Mickey hides his disappointment swiftly, but Ian can still recognize the signs—the way he grinds up his half-finished cigarette into ash and the jut of his jaw.
“Whatever. My break’s probably over anyway.”
“Why,” Arthur drawls that afternoon when Ian returns sheepish and empty-handed, “does my car reek of sex, you dirty, dirty man?”
It ends there. No one can begrudge him one last fuck for closure’s sake, but anything more would be crossing the line from foolish to suicidal.
Which doesn’t explain how he winds up back at the store the next weekend, requesting assistance in finding a dishwasher. Mickey clearly expects this to be some kind of innuendo (which: what the fuck would that even mean) judging by the way his face falls when Ian actually drags him to the home appliance section and makes him recite the specs for every brand in stock.
“And what colors does the Whirlpool come in again?” he asks in his most posh voice, after nearly an hour of intense sadistic pleasure.
“Jesus Christ, would you fucking choose one already?” Mickey hisses, keeping one eye on the manager that Ian’s carefully maneuvered them next to.
“Oh, I couldn’t possibly afford a dishwasher right now. But you’ve been ever so helpful.” Ian grins as cheekily as Mickey used to when he made some awful joke he was convinced was clever. He has approximately three and a half seconds to enjoy the spluttering rage on Mickey’s face before he flees.
They’re too old for this, he thinks as he pushes a cart behind him, blocking Mickey’s path. But he hears Mickey’s delighted laugh and a security guard has to get off his ass to interfere, and fuck, maybe they’re not.
“They what?” Ian demands when he runs into Mickey at a bar a few nights later.
“Employee of the month,” Mickey repeats with a shit-eating grin. “Apparently my commitment to stopping shoplifting goes above and beyond the call of duty.”
“You are so full of shit. I’m never going to be able to go back there without being drop tackled.”
“Damn straight. Did you wanna—“ he’s cut off by Eddie, Arthur’s boyfriend, calling Ian back to the table. “Ah. Never mind.”
His face falls and he’s turning his back, returning his attention to the bartender. Ian hesitates only a moment before saying, “Come on.”
People don’t change that much, though, and Mickey is still shit at first impressions. He’s quiet and a bit taciturn when Ian’s friends try to draw him into conversation. But it’s a large group, even Ian doesn’t know a few of them, so he doesn’t blame Mickey when he begs off early claiming a morning shift.
“Got to make those commissions,” Ian teases lightly as he walks him to the door.
“Fuck off. I’ll have you know that’s only part time. I work at a mechanic’s shop down the road from here.”
They stand in awkward silence for a minute, blocking the door. “Well,” Mickey says at the same time Ian mutters, “Oh, fuck it.”
He lifts Mickey’s shitty old cell from his pocket, ignoring the irritated curses. Of the two of them Ian was by far the superior pickpocket—stealth and Mickey were two concepts that just never meshed.
“Here. My number, for, well, whatever.” On a whim, he entered his contact info under firecrotch and he catches the twitch of Mickey’s lips when he sees.
“Right,” he says, and leaves.
“He seems interesting,” Arthur murmurs in his ear when he returns to the table. Ian shrugs but says nothing.
**
He doesn’t expect Mickey to call, but he’s not surprised either when his phone vibrates with a text consisting solely of an address in a part of town not far from the school he volunteers at.
be there in twenty :D he texts back, because Mickey always hated emoticons.
“And after Seattle was Albuquerque, which was where I got certified as an EMT. And then Austin, Boston and here.” The list doesn’t seem so long when he says it like that, really. They’re sprawled out on Mickey’s creaky bed, some comedy show on the TV neither of them are paying attention to.
“Looking for me?” Mickey asks with that curious mix of hope and disdain Ian’s never seen replicated in anyone else.
“Hardly,” he answers honestly. “But I guess finding you wasn’t so bad.”
He expects Mickey to laugh it off, but he’s suspiciously quiet. Ian pushes himself up on the pillows to examine him, his mouth twisted unhappily.
“My dad,” he starts, avoiding eye contact like it’s an Olympic sport. “He went back in a couple weeks after you left. If you hadn’t—“
His words are heated but Ian’s surprised to hear no real anger behind them, just a distant regret.
“I thought about it,” he says slowly, when it becomes clear that Mickey’s not going to continue. “After, I mean. But we were such a train wreck, Mick. It wouldn’t have worked.”
Mickey looks doubtful, and it’s funny how maybe he ended up being the more romantic of them. But then, Ian has always had the clearer memory, for better or worse.
He remembers how angry he’d been at himself when he got back, having thrown so much away for the romance of heartbreak. How he wondered if he had tried harder, pushed less, or found the right thing to say, if maybe he could have fixed the damage Terry did to them. If he’d just stayed, maybe Mickey would still be around and their lives wouldn’t be so irrevocably fucked up.
And when that cloud of depression had finally lifted, he remembers how furious he’d been at Mickey, for treating him like shit for months and for never, ever saying what he needed to hear.
It had taken him a long time to realize that neither of them was the villain in the story, that what was broken was beyond their control and that self-preservation isn’t a crime.
“I don’t regret it,” he says decisively, and finds that this time the words don’t taste false on his tongue. “It’s over and done and we’re here now. So pass the lube, would you?”
**
There’s no moment when it clicks, no one morning where he wakes up and thinks I’m dating Mickey Milkovich. It happens gradually, and before he’s noticed they’ve slipped into a comfortable routine.
But then, that’s the way it always was, he supposes. Ever since that day he’d burst into Mickey’s bedroom with a tire iron they’ve fallen together like it’s inevitable, and no matter how hard they tried to escape they always wind up back at square one.
So when his lease runs out, Mickey says, “Do whatever you want, I don’t give a shit,” and a week later he’s moving his meager belongings into Mickey’s apartment.
And when Lip says, “You seeing anyone?” he shrugs and mutters, “None of your business,” through a smile, and he can practically see Lip’s smirk.
And when Mandy asks with an air of feigned indifference, “You liking Philly?” he says nothing at all, because she’s the one who added the city to his list and she’s known all along where Mickey was, and so he’s going to leave her hanging in the wind for as long as he wants.
Their first real fight is brutal. They know each other too well for it to be anything less. Mickey always goes feral when he’s backed into a corner, and Ian knows enough of the holes in his armor to know where to aim his comments so it gets ugly fast.
Ian slams the door behind him, fuming and hurting.
After a few hours of wallowing in self-pity, the pain is fading and he’s starting to feel a little embarrassed that such ancient wounds can still flare up. He pays his tab and assures the kindly bartender that he’s walking home.
When he stumbles through the door Mickey looks momentarily shocked, like he hadn’t expected Ian to come back, which is just stupid given that all his stuff is here. Then he blinks and realizes numbly that maybe he’s not the only one with scars.
Pushing some dirty clothes out of the way, Ian sits on the couch a few feet away from Mickey. “Sorry,” he mutters. Mickey doesn’t answer because he’s pretty much allergic to apologies, but he flips the channel to South Park reruns and relaxes onto the cushions.
Mickey still can’t say how he feels, might never be able to, but then Ian’s not the same lonely, insecure sixteen year old boy so desperate for someone to care about him anymore. He knows, and Mickey at least makes an effort to show what he can’t say, and that’s more than most people have.
Together they’re a tangle of trust issues, violence and tempers. But for as awful as Mickey can make him feel, he can also make him laugh louder than anyone and come harder than he thought possible.
It’s not perfect, but perfection is safe and dull, and Ian’s never wanted that anyway.
So he still feels that itch in his fingers, that intoxicating need to be elsewhere, but now when he leaves Mickey is sitting beside him, hands on the steering wheel and muttering about fucking wanderlust, like you’re peter pan or some shit. Ian just laughs, head tilted back into the sun, fingers deftly unzipping Mickey’s fly as they drive toward the horizon.