Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

IAN

The dark-haired boy sits in the second to last row of the rehearsal auditorium where the other techies usually mill about, one foot up on the seat in front of him. He has the air of someone who knows his way around even if it does seem like it might be a case of false bravado.

Ian can’t seem to place him, but he vaguely recalls seeing him in passing on the quad last school year. Ian figures he must be a member of the cast. Other than the director and the actors, only the production department chairs ever need to attend the first table read. And most don’t. But as he runs through the cast list for the Fall production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in his head, he realizes that all the male roles are accounted for. Although there is something distinctly Puckish about him.

Briefly, Ian guesses that perhaps the guy confused the rehearsal auditorium for a lecture hall. But the blue-eyed grumpy looking guy seems to have taken a seat besides the stage manager, Quinn, and is listening to her intently and jotting down notes as she speaks. Ian doesn’t know how the guy manages it, but he manages to seem nervous even through a case of resting scowl face.

Having been cast as Lysander, Ian would think he ought to sit with the other actors. But being the assistant to the lighting chair, he opts to sit in the very back row. And no, this wasn’t just to get a better look at the stony-faced boy. Why would you think that? 

He takes a seat next to Robin, the super senior in charge of electrics for the theater company. Robin opted for a fifth year of undergrad to squeeze in a minor in Women and Gender Studies, which Ian is thankful for because he is far from ready for doing this kind of work by his lonesome. Sure, his brother showed him how to fix simple electrics to save on home repairs, and rewiring stage electrics comes easily to him. But he isn’t ready for the responsibility of hanging, cabling, and designing an entire season’s worth of shows just yet, nor is he prepared for that kind of stress.

“How was your Summer, Big Red?” she asks as she idly draws something along the rubber sole of her Converse sneakers.

“Not bad. I mostly just waited tables and tried to stay out of trouble.”

She looks at him, smirking like he just attempted a joke. “And what sort of trouble would you get into? Jaywalking?”

Oh, if only you knew. The Summer before college, when his bipolar first became symptomatic, he certainly got into trouble. By the time his family caught on and got him help, he almost missed Freshmen Orientation from the whammy his meds had on him.

He just shrugs in reply. “How about you? Do anything interesting over the Summer?”

“Same. Worked. Retail fucking blows, man. People have too much time and not enough brain cells. Oh! And I got arrested protesting with Greenpeace. I got to see how the penal system abuses its authority up close and personal.”

Ian hears a derisive huff of a laugh from someone in the row ahead of them. Ian’s eyes dart away from his conversation and scan the row ahead. Something makes Ian suspect the noise originated from the raven-headed man currently scratching the back of his neck.

“Something funny?” Ian asks as he lightly shoves the back of the guy’s chair.

“What’s it to you?” Asks the guy gruffly. There is something off about his accent. It seems familiar but at the same time foreign, like he can imagine the guy living around the corner from him or somewhere out in the East Coast. He twists himself around to face Ian. He feels something inside him freeze then immediately melt seeing the boy close up.

The stranger also seems to have a reaction to seeing Ian. His eyebrows shoot up and his nose crinkles. If Ian didn’t know any better, he would think something about his face must offend this guy. But as quickly as it appears, the grimace is replaced by a more neutral, almost soft expression. He shrugs, his full lips curls into a Cheshire Cat’s grin. “Ay, don’t mind me. I just know someone serving life I hope is intimately familiar with a broom handle.”

“Dark,” Robin comments.

The pale man turns around to face front, rolling his shoulders as he murmurs, “Yeah, well…”

“He sounds like a joy,” Robin whisper softly as she reaches into her duffle and pulls out a Tupperware full of shapeless vegan no-bake cookies. She takes one and offers the container to Ian, but he declines.

He was already curious about the mysterious newcomer before, but his brash candor intrigues him. He sees it all the time at home, the rough and tumble street of the Back of Yards in South Chicago, but it’s an anomaly here.

But then again, so is Ian. He wouldn’t even be here if he hadn’t been awarded a full scholarship. He worked diligently to get good grades. And for his efforts, Ian earned a full ride at Sable from a biennially awarded scholarship specifically intended for someone just like him: a student hailing from one of the two neighborhood of Southside’s New City region, suffering from extreme financial hardship and showing high scholastic performance.

He can’t let himself get distracted by the boy, though. That was a rule he made for himself when he first started attending the university. He’s here to focus on school. If he doesn’t maintain a 3.7 GPA, he loses his scholarship for a school he utterly couldn’t afford otherwise. So, guys are out of the question as long as he’s in school. Especially after what happened the Summer before Freshmen year, he is bound and determined not to waste the opportunity he has been given.

He would hardly say that he went back into the closet. He had been to a few of the campus Gay-Straight Alliance meetings before he realized it really wasn’t his speed, but otherwise most people don’t know. He owns up to it when asked, but he passes for straight most of the time. So, most people don’t think to inquire.

Before he can dwell on the rude boy in the row ahead of him, the read through comes to order. Quinn vacates her seat next to the mystery guy and sits on the lip of the stage with a thick five-subject binder in her hands. Next to her stands the group’s advisor and the chair of the Theater Department, Dr. Marcus Casciotti.

MICKEY

To say that Mickey is feeling a little self-conscious would be an understatement. He’s been to a few friends’ shows over the years, just as they have been to his concerts in the School of Music. But he has never even sat through a single Intro to Theater class. He feels as alien sitting here in the back of the small fifty-seat rehearsal auditorium as the theater kids would probably feel if he walked up to them asking them to transpose music from piano to bassoon on the fly.

What am I even doing here? He asks himself. But the answer is fairly straightforward: providence willing, he will be teaching music in either primary or secondary school. And that means there is a pretty decent chance that he’ll get roped into being involved into extra-curricular school musicals. Maybe just as musical director, but there is every bit a chance he might land himself in a position where he needs to know how to put a play together.

Mickey can improvise with the best of them. But knowing all the odds and ends of theater production is beyond his skill set, especially if he’s teaching kids who may end up wanting to pursue theater as a career just as he pursued music. Which is why he’s here. There is no room in his final year of undergrad for theatrical coursework, but he can learn by doing. He’s signed up to assistant stage manage the first mainstage of the season. He will participate in production crews, and by hook or by crook, he will learn how a show is put together from behind the scenes.

He is sitting next to the junior slated to stage manage A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She has overly elaborate eye makeup, but other than that she almost makes a performance of being low maintenance. She wears baggy jeans dappled in paint. They remind Mickey of his sister, Mandy who is starting her first year at an art conservatory outside of Philadelphia this year. Her hair is pulled back in a messy bun with several pens stuck through it. He wonders how much time she spent deliberating over the pens’ placement.

But as nonplussed as he is about the forced nonchalance of her appearance, he has to admit he feels like he is going to benefit learning from her. Quinn is in it to win it as far as theater production goes.  To hear her tell it, she arrived on campus thinking her focus would be in performance but has hardly been out from behind the scenes since halfway through her freshman year. Well, if Mickey is going to learn from anyone, it may as well be the girl who makes painting sets her personality.

There is a lull however when it gets to be fifteen minutes until rehearsal is scheduled to begin and Quinn decides to turn her attention to the actors who have yet to make an appearance as of yet. Mickey supposed that actors and musicians have more in common than he realized. Fifteen minutes early is actually on time and the actual start time is late. He thought that was just because musicians need to warm up, tune their instruments, gossip about who should or should not have gotten a coveted solo. But he supposes all performing arts have some variations of the same practices.

After Quinn excuses herself to call the late “actors,” Mickey cannot help but overhear a guy and a girl behind him in a perfunctory conversation about their Summer vacations. The guy talks like he is being charged by the word, or like he is dodging something he doesn’t really want to discuss. Still, for as few words as he uses, Mickey still clocks the most Southside accent he has heard since he moved back to Chicago for his college education.

The woman he’s talking to runs her mouth about volunteering with Greenpeace, bragging about her overnight arrest like it was a moral victory. Mickey struggles not to audibly scoff when she starts going on about the abuse of authority in the penal system. The girl spent maybe a night in a holding cell with her wrists zip tied. She hasn’t the vaguest clue. but then he cannot help but conjure an image of his bastard father being somebody’s bitch. The thought makes him snicker in spite of himself.

“Something funny?” inquires the man behind him, defensive of his friend.

Mickey turns around to face the guy and the source of the voice makes him feel as though something in his brain is short circuiting. The guy is beautiful. His skin is not quite as pale as Mickey’s; fair and speckled with constellations of freckles. His lips are thin and his slightly crooked smile gives him a naturally wry expression. Verdant green eyes that twinkle like emeralds stare back at him. And is head is crowned with brilliantly copper-red hair, straightened, but the tips are starting to frizz in the late August heat.

Why do I know this face?

“What’s it to you?” Mickey asks defensively in a kneejerk reaction. The redheaded stranger stares him down, lips pressed into a thin line. Mickey tacitly struggles to place where he must know this guy from. He also isn’t having the greatest time with the tightening in his jeans. He exhales, relaxing his body and trying to recenter himself. He’s known for being acerbic until you get to know him better. Much better, in fact. But something about this guy makes him want to tone down his usual attitude. “Ay, don’t mind me. I just know someone serving life I hope is intimately familiar with a broom handle.”

“Dark,” comments the ginger boy’s companion. Mickey looks at her. She looks like she rolled out of a Hot Topic in 2003.

“Yeah, well…” He’s really never talked to anyone outside of his family about what happened that send his father to life in prison and in turn sent Mickey and his sister Mandy to live with relatives three states away. It would go a long way to help strangers understand why he is the way he is, but it’s not his job to tell everyone about the worst thing that ever happened to him just so that they won’t give him the same condescending look little miss mall goth is giving him.

Mickey turns around in his seat, his eyes lingering on that freckled face one more time before sitting down and resolutely facing front as Dr. Casciotti brings rehearsal to order.

He rolls his eyes when the advisor insists that everyone move down to sit in the first three rows of the auditorium. He would rather them be spread out. He prefers breathing space whenever possible. He finds himself a seat in the third row back as close to the far end of the aisle as possible.

To his surprise, redhead sits beside him. He tries to act like it’s no big deal and the feeling of his stomach doing somersaults is just a bad reaction to the lackluster taco salad the cafeteria served this afternoon. As the other boy’s hairy, freckled forearm grazed smooth, pale his own on the armrest, he felt a jolt that seemed to realign his entire body. He vaguely remembers his Aunt Elaine going on about chakras during one of her Buddhist phases. He wonders if this is what she meant.

Before they begin, Casciotti has everyone go around the room, introducing themselves and their role or duty in the production. It’s all very yadda yadda yadda. Mickey has never been big on Shakespeare. These character names mean nothing to him until he sees them play out. But then the guy next to him stands. Fuck if this guy isn’t tall, over six inches taller than me, think Mickey who is not salivating in a completely normal, heterosexual way just looking at him.

“Hi, my name’s Ian Gallagher and I’m a sophomore in the theater department. I’ll be playing Lysander and I help out on lights.”

Ian Gallagher. He knows that name. He doesn’t know why, but that name is somewhere in the bowels of memory. Southside. He remembers so little of his childhood on the Southside of Chicago other than the bad memories. And the memories of his family. Of which, there is a lot of overlap. As he sits there pondering, Ian elbows him gently and Mickey realizes it is his turn to stand and introduce himself.

“Um, hey. I’m Mickey. Milkovich. I’m a fourth year in the Music Ed. program. I’m gonna be working backstage.” The other students nod politely. He feels so weird announcing himself, summarizing who he is, or at least his pretext for being here, down to three points of data. Name. Grade. Function. Although if there is one thing college groups love, it’s uncomfortable icebreaker activities. He ought to be used to it by now.

He knows there is a lot more to him than the three basic salient details he announced, but he’s not one for sharing personal insights with strangers. He’s not used to talking. Maybe that’s the key difference between actors and musicians. These guys must like to talk. Shakespeare, right? That’s all talking. At least in a musical, they get to take a break from the boring shit every ten minutes or so to perform a song. And from what little he has observed, that talk seems to mostly about themselves, but Mickey more accustomed to expressing himself through song, finding himself in other people’s music and lyrics and channeling himself through his instruments.

As he sits back down, he takes a quick glance to his left side. The thought that Ian may be tied to Mickey’s childhood in the Southside of Chicago withers when he realizes that the utterance of his surname elicited not an iota of recognition is apparent on Ian Gallagher’s countenance. Maybe he isn’t from the old neighborhood. The Milkovich name for better or worse should evoke some sort of reaction. Anyone who went to Canaryville elementary should have known the name by mere legend.

He sits down and steals another sideways glance at Ian Gallagher, curious about the mystery he represents. He is determined to get to know this guy better just so he can figure out what his story is and how it is that the guy seems so familiar. And that’s the only reason Mickey wants to get to know the guy. He’s certain of that.

He sits through the table read, trying to figure out the story from the unrehearsed dialogue alone. There is some royal marriage that gets introduced at the beginning and is all but forgotten until the end, a love quadrangle, of which Ian is a member, a particularly dumb set of actors that makes Mickey wonder if old Willy Shakes wasn’t trolling his cast, and a court of royal fairies playing tricks on each other and accidentally casting love spells on humans.

Mickey wonders if this has ever been made into opera. He’s had to listen and perform in quite a few in the past ten years when his aunt first had him audition to attend CAPA, magnet school for creative and performing arts back in Chicago where he spent the latter half of his childhood. And the plot of this play definitely sounds like something he might have come across in some operatic ensemble at some point. Although, this story sounds too complex for opera, which tends to take fifteen minutes of plot and sing about it for three hours.

When rehearsal is over, everyone stands and gathers their things to go. And that’s when Mickey sees Ian reach into an offbrand Jansport back and pull out a White Sox baseball cap. Baseball. He feels like he has been knocked over by a ten foot wave and the undertow is threatening to drag him under as his mind is flooded with memories of the worst Summer of his life and the one bright spot.

He doesn’t know what to say, but he knows he wants to ask Ian if he remembers much about their little league team, the Canaryville Lions. But he doesn’t want to seem like a crazy person to someone who doesn’t even seem to recognize his name.

And so he refrains, walking back to his dorm in quiet contemplation as the unearthed memory becomes fuller and richer with each passing step.

***

All throughout his childhood, his mother was always finding reasons to keep him, his baby sister Mandy, and his older brother Iggy out of the house. His eldest brothers Joey and Colin were already practically adults by the time he can really remember his childhood clearly. And both of them were solidly under their father’s thumb anyway. But she was always finding art classes for Mandy, junior sports leagues for Iggy, and cub scouts, library afterschool programs, and piano lessons for Mickey. If it kept them away from interacting with their father, they would be sent to it.

The Summer after Iggy turned eighteen and moved out to stay with friends, Mickey wanted to try baseball for the first time. He remembers his mom being annoyed that she would have to scrounge up the money for his own baseball mitt. He could reuse a lot of his older brother’s sports paraphernalia, but Iggy was a southpaw.

He was assigned to a team consisting of kids who almost all went to his school. Which means they all knew about the Milkovich reputation. And Mickey was hardly an angel growing up. He had either started or finished fist fights with a few of them. And most of them had some sort of run-ins with his brothers. Some of them probably knew his older brothers as their own older siblings’ weed dealers.

The one exception was the smallest boy on the team. Two years younger, the boy’s face was more was a violent mass of freckles and his head was a rat’s nest of springy red curls. The nine-year-old had a crooked smile and had recently lost a canine. The only kid who didn’t recoil from him for being a member of one of the most notorious families in town. It turns out that his house was located on the cusp of the zoning line that determined which kids in their neighborhood went to Canaryville Elementary and which ones were assigned to Lincoln Heights. And Ian was the sole Lincoln Heights kid on the team.

This meant that Ian was the one kid that was open to any jokes and wisecracks that Mickey told. He was the kid who clearly thought it was hysterical when he bucked the authority of the coach and his assistant. He can’t recall the coach’s name. Too far back in the memory banks. Though it was probably something dickish like Stuart. Or Todd. Maybe Cody. He and Ian Gallagher weren’t close, of course. The kid was nine and Mickey was almost twelve. At those ages, that sort of age gap may as well be decades. But the kid was always cool with him, the one friendly face in an assortment of kids ready to kick him when he was down.

One Saturday afternoon in early August, he walked back from practice. He really hadn’t done much; the coach tended to relegate him to the outfield. The coach really only ever gave you the time of day if you were his kid or a member of his son’s inner circle.

Not that Mickey cared much at all. Mickey gets a participation trophy whether the little pissant and his buddies win a single game or not. So, Mickey took pleasure in being the team’s bad luck charm.

His mother was usually home during the day, his father didn’t let her work. But that day, she was gone. The house smelled like bleach. He didn’t think much of it. She had gone to stay with a girlfriend or his Aunt Rose’s place a few times a year whenever she and his father had gotten into a fight. He figured she would be back by bedtime.

She wasn’t. Nor was she back the next day. Or the day after that.

A whole week went by and soon it was Friday the 10^th. He was so beside himself wondering where his mom was that he spent the day going through the motions. He was utterly joyless at the morning session of the science club at the library. He could barely eat the peanut butter sandwiches that Mandy made for them. He barely even spoke most of the day, he was so disjointed.

Then in the evening, the hollow empty feeling gave way to anger. He was at baseball and the Canaryville Lions were playing against the Archer Heights Cardinals. It was the game that determines which teams move on to some sort of little league finals; he doesn’t recall if there was a special name for it or not. It was towards the end of the ninth inning and there is no way they were winning, but the coach made it sound like the game was riding at each man at bat. Mickey hit a grounder and he runs to first base.

From the sidelines, he can see the coach screaming something that sounds awfully derogatory, like the guy thought he was supposed to try for a double when he barely hit the ball past the pitcher. He remembers thinking maybe I could have hit it further if you’d bothered training anyone besides your kid and his lackeys, assface.

But in the distance he could still hear, “I swear, if you cost me this game, Milkovich, I fucking swear…”

And that’s when Mickey decided to burn the bridge once and for all. He loosened the drawstring of his track pants and pulled out his little cock and begins pissing a hot, steamy stream of urine all over first base, handling himself with one hand while he flipped off the coach.

Everyone else seems to freeze. Only three sounds existed: the dull, rubbery splatter of first base receiving a golden shower, the referee and coaches of both teams screaming at him in chorus, and the melodic peals of laughter coming from Second Base. It sounded downright musical to Mickey. He turned his head, but he didn’t even need to look. It was the little redhead, who was always second to last in the batting order right before him. That’s how he remembered his name. “Ian Gallagher, Center Field.”

He was ejected from the game and the team is forced to concede due to unsportsmanlike conduct. The coach demanded to speak to Mickey’s parents about his behavior. Mickey thought the guy is in for a world of hurt unless his mother is miraculously home. Confronting his dad could easily result in a hospitalization. Fingers were known go missing.

As he sat in the back of coach’s Honda Civic, he was surprised to see not one, not two, but four police vehicles outside his house. His father was in the back of one of them, handcuffed and cursing up a storm that Mickey could hear beat for beat in his imagination even though the vehicle is soundproofed. A cop was setting up cones and yellow tape around the property. He raced out of his coach’s car, eyes wide with fear. But an officer in riot gear stopped him.

Then a hand found its way to his shoulder. He spun around to face a woman dressed in a plain black suit, her hair pulled back in a slim ponytail. “Mikhailo Aleksandr Milkovich?”

“That’s me.”

By then, the coach was out of the vehicle and asking an officer for an explanation. Mickey was too wrapped up to follow what the officer tells him, but he did hear a few key words. “Terrance Milkovich.” “Prime Suspect.” “Death of Laura Katya Rozhenko-Milkovich.”

His mother was dead. His heart sank like a stone and the world began to spin like was trying to make himself sick on a merry-go-round. His mother was dead. And Mickey knew, as sure of anything, that the correct person was screaming his head off in a police car not ten feet away.

“My name is Agent May Solomon, Mikhailo.”

“Mickey.”

“Sorry, Mickey. I’m here to take you and your sister somewhere safe.”

Mickey shook his head, eyes streaming tears. “No such place.”

“We’ve already reached out to your Aunt Rose.” Weatherly explained as she led Mickey to a non-descript civilian vehicle where his little sister Mandy sat, looking like she had seen a ghost. “She has made arrangements for you to stay with family out of state.”

He had hardly ever been outside of city limits in his whole young life. Out of state sounded like it may as well be a foreign country. He thought maybe it would be far enough to keep him and his sister safe.

Inside the car, he held his little sister tight. He would be the only one protecting her now that their mother was gone. The two of them always held the strongest resemblance to their mother, Mandy especially. Looking at her made the realization that their mother was gone sting even more, but he couldn’t be the one to avert his eyes from her. All they had was each other now.

It wasn’t until their home was a dot in the distance that Mickey had the lurching realization that today was his birthday.

***

Once in his dorm, his nose recoils at the smell of some truly foul-smelling athletic apparel. It is the major drawback of living with a jock on an athletic scholarship. Chaz is the hambone of a football player he had been assigned at random because he never wants to room with someone he halfway cared about. Even if he was big on forming friendship, he doesn’t want to wreck those relationships by housing with them only to be thoroughly annoyed by all the little tics and habits you only notice when you are living in close quarters with them. So, Chaz is fine. A meat-headed dullard who is still undeclared in his junior year, but fine.

Although, if he had to be paired with someone at random, at least the guy was half-way interesting to look at. And the guy predicts he won’t be around most weekends this semester because of away games. It’s actually the closest he’s gotten to privacy in any roommate situation he has been placed in since he was a freshman.

He makes a beeline for the minifridge. Not the one that he and Chaz share between their two halves of the room. The fridge he turns to is one that he keeps under his bed for his own personal supply. It is a half-sized minifridge he keeps under his bed specifically for his beer stash. He is going to need a few beers to dull the edge off the memories swirling around his head. Thinking of Terry generally has that affect on him even when he doesn’t remember that day in particular.

IAN

Ian is a public transit-dependent commuter, which is frustrating, but at least it allows for plenty of time to study during his daily treks to and from his South Chicago home and the suburban college campus. Technically, his scholarship guarantees him a room in the dorms, but after his first major manic incident, both Lip and Fiona convinced him that for their ease of mind, they would much prefer it if he commuted from home. Easier said than done. Sable University is way out in the suburbs. The express bus to and from the city has regular service during the day, but after 8pm, it drops to once per hour. And a college theater rehearsal schedule means you rarely get out of the theater before 9pm.

It is close to eleven when Ian finally pushes open the front door. The house is oddly quiet. There was quite a long stretch of time when this at this late hour in the evening, the kids would all be settling in for the night, school in the morning, or possibly they would be circled around the TV watching bad reality TV together.

But the majority of the family are either adults or acting like adults these days, each with their own lives and problems. The only real parenting concern is Liam, who is a goddamn angel to deal with compared to the rest of them. His teen mom of a sister, Debbie got her GED last Fall so she could provide for her baby daughter Franny. And Carl was shipped off last week for his first year of military school.

Fiona has less stress in her life from the responsibilities of parenting her own siblings than ever before. So she creates brand new forms of stress and calls them paths to personal advancement. Last Spring, she bought a six-story apartment building with her money from a settlement. Apparently, he musician ex wrote a diss track about her and it entitled her to a substantial amount in the divorce.

And now she is up at eleven cooking the books. Keeping the place up to code sounds like a full-time job. She hasn’t even changed into her comfortable clothes since she got home, too engrossed in her number crunching.

But at the sound of the door opening, she looks up and her cranky expression melts into a grin. “Hey Sweet Face, how was your rehearsal?”

“Good, I guess.”

“You think you’re going to do well?” It’s like Fiona was just waiting for a reason to throw in the towel for the night. She starts taking her ledges and collections of receipts that are spaced out on the coffee table like tarot spread and organizes them into a neat pile. “You said it’s a big part, right?”

“Yeah, it’s big. A lot bigger than anything I got last year.” He toes off his well-worn Adidas tennis shoes and leans on the back of the couch. “It’s a romantic lead.”

“Aw, do you have to kiss a girl?” his sister asks teasingly.

“Fi, I’m gay, not twelve.”

“Spoil sport.” She grumbles, standing. “What’s wrong? You usually let me get a lot further before you shut me down.”

“Well, there’s this guy—”

“Oh, fucking Christ.”

“Nothing’s happened. He barely even spoke to me for more than a minute. And he looked at me even less than that.”

“Then what’s the issue?” asks Fiona, standing and starting towards the stairs.

“He’s… I don’t know, he’s distracting. That’s all.”

“Ian. I need you to listen to me.” She’s the only Gallagher sibling who approaches Ian’s height, but even she has to look up at him as she plants a hand on each of his shoulders. “You’ve done so well getting your life back on track.”

“Fi, I’ve been good for over a year.”

“I know, sweet face. But… you got pretty wild last time. And we were all really scared. I don’t want you to do anything that would cause you to risk losing your full ride.”

“For fuck’s sake, Fi. I was manic and hypersexual. It’s not like I’m gonna be like that with every guy I—”

“I just want you to be mindful—”

“If I were out of control now, I wouldn’t even be telling you this. I would have just banged the guy in a broom closet and moved on to someone else by now.”

“Ian, calm down. I’m not trying to put you on blast.”

“Well, it sure feels like it,” he snipes as he shrugs her off and turns up the stairs.

“You know I’d be happy for you if you do meet someone, right?”

“Yeah? Well act like it instead of making me feel like a headcase any time I admit to having fucking emotions.”

“That’s not what I’m doing.”

“But it’s how it feels, sometimes,” Ian huffs in frustration. “Look, I know I’m not the best about keeping you guys up to speed with what’s going on with me.  But that’s not going to get any better if you keep acting like your two minutes away from counting my pills any time I open up to you guys.”

“Okay, I’m sorry. You wanna tell me about this guy, then?”

“Well, he’s a music major—”

“Fucking Christ,” she smirks playfully, “Have you learned nothing from my bad example?”

“Music Education,” he clarifies on an eye roll. “And I think he might be Southside, but I can’t place him.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. He’s just got this… this vibe.”

Fiona inhales and exhales slowly. “A vibe, huh? And you like this guy?”

Ian has no idea if he likes the guy. He’s barely spoken to him at all. “I’m… intrigued.”

“Yeah? Well, you’re going to be working with this guy, right? Make sure you think things through before you go and shit where you eat.’”

“Yes, mom.”

“Not your mom, just concerned.”

Ian closes the bedroom door behind him quietly. The Boys’ bedroom is a fair bit emptier than it used to be, but he still shares the space with a little brother who is eight going on forty and needs his beauty sleep. He doesn’t even turn on the light to get himself situated for the night. That’s one of the bonus side effects that comes from hanging around backstage on so many plays since middle school. He’s adept at functioning in the dark.

He strips down to his boxers and curls into his bed, kicking the blanket down past his waist and wrapping himself in the bedsheet. As he drifts off to sleep, he imagines raven-colored hair and eyes like lapis lazuli.

Chapter Text

The thing about assistant stage management that has Mickey about ready to quit is just how dull a process it is. After a full week into the rehearsal process, mostly what he has done is sat alongside the other ASM, Layla, and follow along in his script. Apparently, he was supposed to take notes on the blocking and whatever else the director tells the actual stage manager, Quinn. In theory, there are ancillary tasks he could be doing, but Layla has been an ASM a few times and she and Quinn have a long working relationship, which Mickey thinks might be code for being scissor sisters. Every time a task comes up, she turns to Layla while she insists that Mickey simply follow along in his script until he gets the hang of things. Mostly what he does during rehearsal is read his advanced music theory.   

Blocking is an obnoxiously slow process. For the first week and a half of rehearsals, the process is all about going through each scene on a granular pace to determine who stands where at what time and when do they move and why.   

The closest frame of reference that Mickey has to compare it to was the one questionable year he learned trumpet specifically in order to participate in band camp in his sophomore year of college. Marching band is arguably an even more tedious process, but at least he got to actually do something. Maybe Mickey would be slightly less frustrated if the assistant stage managers weren’t expected to arrive an hour before start time and according to Quinn, once they’re working with props and sets they can sometimes be still here well after rehearsal lets out for the actors.  

It isn’t until the last rehearsal of that first week that something actually happens to wrest Mickey from the doldrums. It is the first blocking session for the Athenian highborn characters. It’s the opening scene, which seems ass-backwards to Mickey that they don’t circle back to them until the fifth day of rehearsals.   

The redhead strides into rehearsal looking like a chorus of angels willed him into existence. He smells sugary-sweet. He deduces from the shirt Ian has on that he must work at a restaurant that specializes in pies. Mickey takes a moment to consider whether he has ever really taken the time to contemplate how his other guy friends, er, classmates smell beyond the basic axis of not enough deodorant or too much cologne.  

“Hey,” he finds himself saying, to his surprise. Mickey isn’t great at opening conversations, particularly with new acquaintances. He tends to prefer to blend into the background until he’s used to a new person before he actively engages with them. Mickey realizes that he seriously needs to get over that before he starts student teaching next semester.   

Ian looks just as surprised as Mickey does that he actually spoke, eyes darting left and right to make sure Mickey isn’t addressing anyone else. But there is hardly anyone else here to confuse. There maybe two other actors accounted for, but both are outside smoking. And Casciotti and Quinn the stage manager are locked in a conversation all their own.   

“Um. Hi. Mickey, right?” He remembered. Mickey is having that same strange feeling in his stomach again and he doesn’t know why. For a moment there, Mickey almost thinks Gallagher remembers him from years before. But if he does, Mickey isn’t going to be the first to mention it. He doesn’t feel like getting confirmation if it turns out the guy doesn’t remember him from way back when. He has his pride, such as it is.   

“Yeah. That's right,” he replies noncommittally. “You didn’t miss much the past few days, Gallagher. Never knew this gig would be so fucking dull.”    

The taller man sets down his messenger bag and collapses himself in the seat right next to Mickey. He watches the sophomore fold in on himself so that he’s sitting on the chair,  arms wrapped around his bent knees. It’s like watching a Swiss Army Knife fold itself up.  

“Preaching to the choir,” the boy commiserates. “Last year I ASM’ed for Major Barbara . Layla kind of likes to take charge. Especially when Quinn stage manages. I was bored out my skull until we were assigned different duties and I actually had something to do.”  

“Think you’re right, man. Usually when I’m not on stage singing, I’m the accompanist. I’m used to having something to do with my hands.”  

“Accompanist?”  

Mickey nods. “Piano. My mom signed me up when I was six. And I guess it stuck.”  

“Six? Damn, that’s young. I wish my parents were supportive like that.”  

Mickey doesn’t know if his mother was supportive. If she were alive today, if he’d grown up in Southside, he doesn’t know if he’d be here now, pursuing a career of encouraging children to express themselves creatively. And if his father had a say, he’d probably have a criminal record instead of any career prospects at all.    

“My parents really aren’t in the picture.” He has exchanged not ten whole sentences with this guy, but he’s already talking about his family? "But my aunt is pretty great. And my uncle isn’t half bad either.”  

 “Yeah, my parents aren’t around, either.” The guy claps Mickey on the shoulder. “I-I was pretty much raised by my sister.”  

The spark Mickey feels at the physical contact is explosive, like a rocket ship just launched from his chest, bursting into the outer stratosphere. How is nobody else feeling that sensation of the world reordering itself around them on a seismic level? Are Dr. Casciotti and Quinn simply too close to the epicenter of the event to recognize the hurricane raging inside Mickey for what it is?  

Mickey has to wriggle away from Ian’s touch before he does something ridiculous with another dude. With a quick blink of his baby blues, Mickey views an askance. If the guy felt anything like the sensation Mickey experienced, he is doing a fucking good job of hiding it on his face. Good thing Mickey already had a text book in his lap or he would have some hiding of his own to do.   

“I, er, I wasn’t planning on trauma bonding, if that’s what you got in mind, freckles.”  

“Freckles?”  

“Yeah, why not? You got plenty of ‘em.” Mickey tries to sound tough but something about the way Ian looks at him causes him to smirk playfully.  

Ian reciprocates with a smile of his own. “I wasn’t trying to, what did you call it? Trauma bond. My childhood was a little… intense.”  

“Oh, yeah?”   

“Yeah,” Gallagher replies, jutting out his chin.   

The tone of Ian’s voice is a challenge that him makes Mickey feel flushed behind the ears.   

“Try me.”  

“My deadbeat dad is actually my uncle. And my bio dad won’t have anything to do with me because my parents tried to extort him.”  

“My dad’s a jailbird, serving life.”  

“My family doesn’t do Thanksgiving because my mom offed herself halfway through the meal.”  

“Yeah? Well, the reason my dad is doing time is also the reason why I don’t get to celebrate Mother’s Day.” Mickey almost wants to reach into the air and shove the words back down his throat. Did he really just tell him about what happened to his mom? Christ, now he’s gonna treat me like some sorta pity case.   

“Shit. Really?”  

Mickey figures the genie is out of the bottle, may as well own it. He nods. “Don’t go spreading that around, though. I don’t even know why I told you.”  

Ian leans forward in his seat. Hands on knees. “Of course. Same with my mom.”  

“She really did it halfway through Thanksgiving?”  

The actor shrugs. “Less than halfway.”  

Mickey wants to course correct. When he said he didn’t want to trauma bond, he meant it. Though he wasn’t expecting the Gallagher kid to have anything that could rival his shitty childhood. But Mickey doesn’t know how to come up with a smooth segue, so he jumps trains of thought completely.  “So,” he starts, not sure where he’s going with the conversation, “You sound like you’re all over the place around here. Actor. Lighting dude. ASM. What’s your deal?”  

Ian shrugs. “I’m an actor, but I know how to fix basic electrics. I like making myself useful. And I wanna direct someday.”  

“I don’t follow.”  

“Slip-a-Sable policy. Before you direct, you have to stage manage. Before you stage manage, you need to ASM.”  

“Oh. Working your way up the ranks, huh?”  

“Yup. I want to direct the student one acts in the spring, get plenty of experience early so I’ll be a shoo-in to direct the student Main Stage when I’m a senior.”  

“Sounds like you got goals for yourself,” remarks Mickey encouragingly.   

“My older siblings are giving me pushback about majoring in theater. They’d rather I chose something with more of an employment guarantee after I’m done here.”  

“Fuck them!”   

“Right? My brother went to school to be a robotic engineer, but I’m the impractical one?”  

“Listen, it’s your life, not theirs. It makes you happy, right?” Admittedly, he feels a little incensed, but he can’t help but think of what a dead end he would be in now if his aunt hadn’t nudged him towards auditioning for a performing and creative arts high school. “And yet, I bet they sit in front of the fucking flatscreen every night without thinking those actors had to start somewhere.”  

“Exactly,” Ian sighs. “At least if I polish my résumé now, they’ll let me get through the next three years without fucking harping on my ass.”  

“Damn, Gallagher…”  

“What?”  

“You. You’re feistier than I took you for.”  

“And what’s that supposed to mean?” Ian asks in a tone that implies that he’s going to grade Mickey’s answer.  

“It’s just when I overheard you and whatserface.”  

“That would be Robin. You might not want to get on her bad side if you want to do tech.”  

“Yeah, well… when you guys were talking, I kinda took you for, I don’t know. The mild-mannered type.”  

“Yeah? Well, Robin was running her mouth about shit she doesn’t know anything about. And I know better.”  

“I could tell. Keep things close to the chest, huh?”  

“Milkovich!” Shouts Quinn, approaching the pair of them brandishing a roll of spike tape. “Quit chit chatting with the talent.”  

“The talent?” Echoes Ian. “Pfft.”  

“Is she serious?”  

“Yeah.”  

“You’re going to help me spike the stage,” insists Quinn as she leads Mickey away.  

***   

Of course, it’s only when Mickey suddenly has someone worth talking to that he suddenly finds himself busy. It turns out the difference between being bored senseless and being run ragged is Layla being a no-show. It adds fuel to Mickey’s theory that Layla and Quinn are definitely banging because Quinn spends the entire rehearsal in an uncharacteristically testy mood.  

Mickey is expected to help clean up before he can leave and the actors have already long since cleared out by the time he is free to go. Before Quinn can come up with any more textbook busywork for him to do, he slings his cumbersome SwissGear backpack over his shoulder and starts his hike across campus to the student dorms.  

It’s the first week of September and while the days are getting shorter, there is still enough glow from the setting sun to light the way as Mickey walks in a sky lit up purple in the east and vanishing shades of yellow and pink at the western horizon.  He doesn’t make it far before he spots a head of vermillion atop a tall and well-formed body standing on a grassy street corner of their suburban campus, his body lays slouched against a bus stop sign.   

It isn’t the first time Mickey has noticed another guy’s body. It happens all the time in fact. Usually, he just figures it's something all guys must do. Doesn’t every guy check each other out and see how they measure up? Though, for some reason he can’t help but feel a little more self-conscious about the way he keeps catching himself eyeing up the redhead. Mickey hasn’t the slightest clue what exercises he would have to do to get his shoulders to look like Gallagher’s.  

“They finally let you out, Mickey?”  

“I’m starting to wonder how late the bitch’ll keep up when there’s actual shit to do.”  

“There’s a reason why she keeps getting paired with Layla. She has high turnover.”  

“And her fuck buddy is there to keep the peace, huh?”  

Ian seems impressed. “What gave them away?”  

Mickey shrugs. “Lucky guess. And I know what eye fucking looks like when I see it.”  

It’s getting too dark to tell quite what, but there is some sort of shift, almost imperceptible, in the other student’s face. But it is gone as quickly as it appeared. “So, um, you coming to crew this weekend?”  

“Not really into rowing, man.”  

“Stage crew,” the redhead clarifies, rolling his eyes. “We start building the set on Saturday and Robin and I are gonna start hanging instruments. Lighting instruments.” Mickey didn’t exactly think they were hanging saxophones, but he appreciates Ian clearing that up, albeit facetiously. “And then we’ll start cabling on Sunday.”  

“I probably should. The only reason I’m doing any of this is just in case I end up in charge of some damn high school musical and need to know what the fuck I’m doing. You going?”  

“I’m only going to be around till noon tomorrow. I got a shift at my sister’s diner.”  

“Your sister owns a diner?”  

Ian shrugs. “She manages it. Weekends are really the only time I can pick up shifts. But I’ll be around the whole time on Sunday.”  

“I’ll definitely consider it. So, you commute, huh?”  

“Yeah. My family lives in the city. Which wouldn’t be a terrible commute, but, well, you know how buses are, right?”  

Mickey knows the type of neighborhood Ian is from and the kind of background Ian probably hails from. Riding the El and taking buses was second nature to him by the time he was seven. But his middle class aunt and uncle reared him up from twelve until adulthood. Technically, they adopted him and his sister Mandy, but they never asked the Milkovich siblings to call them mom and dad. When they signed off on Mickey’s intent to move back to the Chicago area after he won a full scholarship to Sable, they gave him his Uncle Wyatt’s old SUV while his uncle upgraded to a new one.  

He’s grateful. His aunt and uncle gave him a happier and better adjusted adolescence than anything he could have expected under his father’s tender mercies. But sometimes, he gets the sinking suspicion that a younger version of him would not recognize the man he’s become, too soft, too spoiled by a comfortable life. He is worried that he has forgotten where he came from.  

“Yeah, I remember what that’s like,” he answers a little sheepishly. “Y’know, I got a car, if you want a lift into the—”  

“No, I’m fine,” Ian cuts him off curtly. “Don’t worry about it. I’m used to it by now.”  

“You sure?” Mickey doesn’t know why his veins feel icy. It's no skin off his back if the guy doesn’t want a ride, right?  

“I'm good, Mickey. I get a lot of my work done by the time I get back to town this way.”  

“If you say so, man,” shrugs Mickey as he starts on his way again, not fully understanding what that stabbing feeling in his side is.  

The remainder of Mickey’s walk back to the cul-de-sac of the upperclassmen dormitories, he replays in the conversation in his head, trying to figure out what exactly he said wrong. He doesn’t look back until he knows for certain that the redhead is less than a dot in the horizon. But Mickey did note that the bus back into the city still hadn’t arrived by the time he turned away from the main road.  

Chapter Text

He really should have taken Mickey up on his offer. Ian can admit that to himself. He didn’t want to worry the guy, but his bus should have arrived ten minutes before Mickey crossed his path around 9:35pm. He had hoped it was just running late. But it never ended up showing. He ended up having to wait for the next bus to come at 10:25pm. It’s a commute that can be a tight twenty-five minutes by car, but the bus winds its way through the South Chicago suburbs before it even crosses city limits. And he still needs to catch the El once he’s back in town. He isn’t home until after midnight.  

Lip is on the comfy chair with an imposing-looking text book laid out in front of him on the coffee table and a small plastic bag of edibles beside it. His eight-year-old baby brother Liam is curled up in a ball on the sofa, conked out in front of some anime. Dragonball ? Naruto ? It’s not Sailor Moon or Pokémon , which are the only ones Ian can ID on sight.  

Lip looks up from his studies and his expression sours, despite his reaction time being dimmed  from the chemically-induced effects relaxation of the weed gummi. “Ian? What happened? You look like hell.” 

“Thanks. My bus never showed up. And my late bus was packed because the normal bus was a no-show. I was stuck next to a homeless guy who... I probably should have more sympathy towards, considering...”

“Crazy?” asks Lip in a tone that  belies that he most definitely knows that was a shit word choice. But Ian has learned to roll with it. Honestly, he would rather his siblings be dipshits but understanding than act like they know better than him about his own mental health.  

“Pretty much. Though, I bet the meth isn’t helping him either.” 

“You know, I could have swung over and grabbed you.” 

“Thanks for the offer, but riding around the neighborhood is one thing. I’m not riding bitch on a bike you fixed yourself for thirty minutes.” As part of Chicago Polytechnic’s ruling for Lip retaining his place in the university, he had to attend a thirty-day rehab program and subsequently attend Alcoholics Anonymous. And through AA, Lip befriended his sponsor, Brad, who ended up offering the second eldest Gallagher sibling an apprenticeship in his motorcycle repair shop.  

“The way I drive, it’s more like twenty.” 

“Oddly, not the encouraging added detail you think it is, bro,” Ian snarks as he toes off his tennis shoes. “Remind me to swallow my pride and say ‘yes’ the next time someone offers me a ride home.” 

“Why didn’t you?” inquires Lip, padding up the stairs behind his taller sibling. 

“I don’t know. Talking to Mickey feels so easy, you almost forget... I'm going to school with a bunch of rich bitches, Lip.” 

“Yeah, I’m familiar with the experience,” Lip reminds him. And true, Lip goes to an elite polytechnic school on scholarship. But Lip his Southside upbringing like armor, a point of pride.  Ian would rather blend in. “And who’s Mickey?” 

“A classmate. Sort of. He’s a senior in the school of music.” 

“Look at you batting your eyes at someone only two years ahead of you,” nods Lip with facetious approval. “I’d call that personal growth.” 

Ian flips him off as he enters the Boys’ room. Exhausted and not expecting a modicum of privacy in this house, Ian doesn’t even wait for his brother to make himself scarce before he pulls off his socks and wriggles his way out of his second-hand pair of jeans.  

“He’s just someone I’ve been talking to.” 

“Well... good.” 

“Thanks for your approval?” 

“I mean it, bro.” Lip insists. “Look, I know your situation last Summer looked pretty...” 

“Messed up?” 

“You weren’t well.” 

“I’m still not well. I’m just medicated now.”  

“You weren’t yourself.” 

“I was a slut,” corrects Ian, hoping being straightforward might fast track them to the end of whatever point his brother is trying to make. 

“Well... you’ve been so closed off since then. Class, work, theater, sleep. Class, work, theater, sleep. I don’t think you mentioned one new name to me your entire freshman year.” 

“I’ve talked to the guy twice, Lip. Ease up on the throttle.” 

“And he offered you a ride home? Why’d you refuse?” 

“Can’t you badger me some other time when I haven’t been up since four in the morning?” asks Ian as he turns out the light. Is it passive-aggressive to shut the lights out just to telegraph that you are so very done talking for the night? Yes. But considering the other notion floating towards the surface of Ian’s thought process is to tell Lip to fuck off and remind him about his own shitty relationship history, Ian believes he chose the more conducive option. 

He pulls off his Patsy’s shirt and climbs into his bed using only his sense of touch and wraps himself into his habitual sleeping position, curled up on his side and facing away from the door.  

He tries to sleep but the thoughts in his head are racing like dogs at the track. Mickey is a puzzle he can’t help but want to solve even though he knows he should probably leave well enough alone.  

Still, no matter how much he tries to clear his mind of thoughts so he can get some rest, Mickey Milkovich keeps floating to the surface of his thoughts.  

He spent the whole of rehearsal watching the guy grumble and grouse about every single thing he was called upon to do like a stubborn mule. But then Mickey would turn into softy around him. Tense shoulders would relax and his perma-scowl would reshape itself into a soft smile.  

But who is the guy? It’s obvious he has money, or at least he grew up in comfort. But he has this gruff vulnerability, like a clenched fist around a slashed palm. It makes Ian feel like this relative stranger would be right at home in Ian’s world. He offered Ian a ride home on a whim. Ian grew up in a world where you look after your own and it takes a while to earn that kind of trust. And Ian almost took him up on his offer.

He wishes he had said ‘yes.’ He feels less lonely when he talks to Mickey. 

He spent his first year of undergrad being an island. Friendly enough with his other theater majors. You need to form a rapport when you perform with scene partners. But at the end of the day, he eschewed friendships. He spent the school year focused on maintaining his grades and his mental health. He came back for sophomore year feeling much more sure in his footing. Being around Mickey makes him feel like the world is even more solid beneath his feet, but it also makes him feel lighter. 

Christ, why am I driving myself up the wall over this guy? I don’t even know if he’s into guys. 

He tries to clear his mind, put Mickey out of his mind. But he still falls asleep again envisioning those baby blues. 

***  

Sunday morning finds Ian arriving at the theatre surprised to see Mickey sitting on the stoop outside the building. He has a carrier tray with four cups of coffee from the campus’ coffee shop in the student union.  

“Gallagher!” He calls out extending a cup of coffee to him.  

“Hey Mickey, missed you yesterday.” Ian takes the coffee, but he is confused. “What’s with the Starbucks?” 

“I felt bad about skipping yesterday. I was kind of hung over,” explains Mickey, gnawing on the inside of his cheek.  

“You didn’t have to do that.” Ian insists as he sits beside him. “You’re hardly the only one who didn’t show up.” 

“Yeah. But I told you I’d be here,” Mickey shrugs. “Felt like I let you down.” 

Ian can’t help but feel a warmth flow inside him. The notion that Mickey was thinking of him feels like champagne bubbles up and down his whole body. “Well, thanks for the brew, man.”  

“So what’s with the theater being locked?” 

“Campus police has to let us in.” 

“Hmph,” Mickey grunts.  

“Not a big fan of cops, huh?” 

Mickey takes a long drag of his drink. “I grew up not trusting ‘em, but, well, let’s just say my feelings on the pigs is a lot more mixed.” 

Ian knows better than to ask. 

“Not that campus police really count, right? They’re not even packing heat.” 

Ian smiles wryly. “What do you think tasers are?” 

“Y’know, my dad used to be an arms dealer?” 

“Jailbird dad?” 

Mickey nods. “I grew up seeing a lot of weapons coming in and out of the house. I wasn’t supposed to know, but you know how kids are? Too nebby for their own good.” 

“Nebby?” 

“Sorry, nosey. I spent a lot of time in Pittsburgh. Sometimes, it slips out.” 

“Aha!” Crows Ian tipping his cup as though making a toast. 

“What?” 

“Your accent, it slips between Chicago and something else. I was trying to figure out what. Now I know.” 

“Having fun trying to figure me out, Gallagher?” 

“You could say that.” 

A short while later, Robin arrives. In one hand she has a large brown paper bag of bagels. Ian later explains that Casciotti budgets bagels for crew to entice people to actually show up. In Robin’s other hand, her phone to her ear as she touches base with campus PD. “Yes, I’m the student technical director and the work study. We have Dr. Casciotti’s permission to be in the the space and I take full responsibility. Just like yesterday and every weekend last year. Can’t you just make a note so I don’t have to go through this spiel every weekend?” 

Ian leans in and whispers to Mickey. “They make her do this every time. I think they have fun making the steam shoot out of her ears.” 

Mickey nods appraisingly. “Really brings out her inner Karen.” 

“Don’t let her hear that,” Ian snickers. 

“Whatever, I don’t think she likes me much anyway.” 

***  

A short while later after campus police finally lets them into the building, Robin sends Ian upstairs to the catwalks to start running cable to the lighting fixtures they hung the day before. “Oh, and take Mr. Personality with you,” she insists.  

“Mr. Personality? That me?” Asks Mickey as he follows Ian up a tight, winding stairwell.  

“It sounds like you’ve made quite the impression after only a week. Might I suggest picking and choosing who you pop off at?” 

“I’ll take it under advisement.” The shorter boy grins.  

At the top of the stairs lay coiled up piles of thick black electrical cables of varying length and a few rolls of white gaffers tape. Ian crosses a cable over his shoulder like a bandolier and pulls a roll of tape around his wrist, encouraging Mickey to do the same before kneeling down in front a hatch in the wall. 

“What’s going on?” Asks Mickey as he follows suit.  

“The clearance on the catwalk is kind of low. I think the theater may have been designed before child labor laws,” Ian explains as they crawl into the catwalk.  

There is no overhead lighting in the catwalk. Any illumination comes from the auditorium below them. Ian keeps looking behind him to see if Mickey is struggling up here. But if he is having problems, he is too proud to admit it. The seven inch difference in their height proves to be advantageous for Mickey. He can at least maneuver himself into a sitting crouch and duck walk around the catwalk.  

From the ground, Robin instructs them like she is directing traffic. She refers to a chart she drafted by hand, she shouts up into the rafters telling them which lighting instrument needs to be cabled to what outlet on a specific lighting pack. Meanwhile once they finish cabling each instrument, she has a hapless freshman whom she threw into the tech booth run the dimmers on the DMX lighting console to test that it is working.  

“Whose idea was it to make the catwalks this short?” Asks Mickey after some time as he reaches behind to massage his lower back. 

“Try being six-foot-one,” Ian huffs out while still aiming to sound cheerful. 

“And you don’t get paid for this shit?” Asks Mickey as he reaches down for the male plug of a nearby Par 64. 

“Nah,” He shrugs, “I’m on full academic scholarship. I’m not eligible for work study.” 

“No kidding! Me, too,” Mickey hums as he connects the light to its power source. “Being from Southside finally helped out for once.” 

It takes a moment for what Mickey just told him to register in Ian’s brain. Southside. He was right after all. It wasn’t just wishful thinking. But he needs to be sure he isn’t just hearing what he wants to hear. “Wait, Southside. Really? What neighborhood?” 

Mickey quirks an eyebrow up, lower lip pinned between his teeth. Is that amusement? Annoyance?  

“Back of the Yards,” he replies as though it should be obvious. Sorry if you’ve got this weird, shift accent, Mickey . 

And suddenly, amidst all the information that Ian has absorbed in under ninety seconds, his brain makes a leap and a connection. He’s from the same neighborhood at the same school two years ahead of him. What are the chances? “You aren’t a Carson recipient, are you?” 

He smiles. Mickey’s smile has a way of making the hairs on the back his neck tingle. “Small world, huh?” 

“You’re not screwing with me, right?” 

“Is that weird old guy who always used to use his kids to panhandle outside the Alibi still around?” 

“Who, Frank?” 

“Frank, yeah. That’s the guy’s name. Fucking Frank.” He recalls it like it’s a nickname and not the entire neighborhood’s perpetual lament.  

“Shit, you are Southside. Yeah, Frank’s still around. You know how I told you about my deadbeat dad-uncle?” 

Mickey’s pupils twitch. “Get out.” 

“Yup. We’re on South Homan. You?” 

“Trumbull.” 

Ian rears up in surprise. Mickey grew up literally two streets over. How did they never meet? Unfortunately, Ian didn’t think before he moved and he hits his head on a wooden crossbeam with an audible crack to the crown of his head. “Fuck!” 

“Shit, Gallagher. You okay?”  

Before he knows it, Mickey closes the distance between them. His delicate hand is cupping the base of Ian’s skull while he shines his phone’s flashlight. 

“I’m fine, Mick.” 

“Like hell you are. You’re bleeding, Red.” Ian almost freezes when Mickey’s hand moves to his bicep and tugs him toward the hatchway back out into the stairwell.  

By the bottom of the stairs, Ian is feeling woozy. Maybe Mickey is right and he needs medical attention. Or maybe he’s feeling dizzy because of just how quickly Mickey led him bounding down the stairs.  

“Where the hell do you think you guys are going?” Asks Robin as though she had caught a couple of military deserters.  

“Student Health. Gallagher’s got a concussion.” 

“‘m fine.” 

“We have a first aid kit.” 

“He split his head open, probably needs stitches,” Mickey holds his hand out to show a distressing amount of Ian’s blood on his alabaster palm. 

“Shit. Fine. Hey, freshman!” She turns about to face the bored girl in the tech booth scrolling on her phone. “I got a new task for you.” 

Mickey never takes his hand away from Ian’s shoulders the entire walk from the theater to the student union where Student Health Services is housed.  

“You’re gonna be fine, Red. Stay with me. Can’t have you falling asleep with a concussion.” 

“That’s a myth.” He knows he should be taking this more seriously. He can feel his own blood trickling down his neck and getting absorbed by his t-shirt. He knows the upperclassman is right on the money. But he doesn’t like the fact that Mickey is going to all this trouble because he acted like an idiot. 

And yet he loves the fact that Mickey never once falters from his side.  

Two hours, three sutures, and one IV drip later, Ian is cleared to go home, but with a strong warning to take it easy, don’t operate any heavy machinery, drink plenty of water or clear fluids, and get really friendly with a bottle of a bottle of ibuprofen. The nurse practitioner also hands Mickey a packet detailing Ian’s treatment summary and Information on how to care for and clean his stitches until they biodegrade in ten-to-twelve days. 

“Well, that’s an embarrassment I’ll never live down,” mumbles Ian as they step back out into the light of day a little after 4pm.  

“It could have happened to anyone. I’m sure the fucking theater would get shut down for business if anyone reported the shitty clearance on that catwalk.” 

“Yeah, probably.” Agrees Ian as he observes Mickey tapping away on his phone. “Who are you texting?” 

“There you go getting all nebby again. I’m texting the boss lady, letting her know you’re out of commission for the day.” 

“Oh. Thanks.” Ian knows he sounds awkward. He was expecting to have more of an excuse for them to hang out together during crew, figured they would head back once he was discharged and continue on. “Well. Do you wanna walk with me over to the bus stop?” 

“Fuck off with the bus stop… I’m gonna give you a lift.” Mickey insists, tugging at one of the less bloody areas of Ian’s shirt, leading him in the direction of the student parking garage. 

“You don’t have to do that.” 

“Knock it off, we’re cool, right? Besides, I want to see what the old neighborhood looks like these days.” 

The question forms on Ian’s lips, but he self censors in case the query is too personal. But by the time they are in the garage elevator, he cannot help but ask. “You’ve been in the area for three years and you never visited your old stomping grounds?” 

Mickey just shrug’s noncommittally. 

“But don’t you have family in the area?” 

“You just answered your own question, freckles.” 

Ian needs to learn to play it cool when Mickey keeps using these nicknames he keeps throwing out at him. “Freckles” in particular seems to have an affect on him. He tries to discretely adjust his jeans without it being too obvious.  

“My one brother Iggy knows I’m in the area, but understands why I’m not in a hurry to show up at the next family reunion.” 

Mickey clicks on the fob on his keychain and lights blink on a smaller SUV that looks like it’s seen its fair share of mileage. The engine starts to hum. Mickey reaches into the back hatch of the vehicle and pulls out a gym bag. He extracts a t-shirt and hands it over. "This isn't the freshest thing in the world, but at least you won't be getting blood everywhere."

Mickey turns around as Ian changes his shirt right there outside the vehicle. Ian wishes he hadn't. He wants to surreptitiously glance over and see whether Mickey's eyes are wandering when he exposes his chest. The signals are so confusing with this guy. There is a genuine fondness, but Ian still can't quite figure out whether he's chasing a chimera with the guy or not. The shirt is a little snug around the shoulders, but at least he's fond of baggy clothes at the gym. Otherwise, Ian would have suspected a shirt meant for Mickey's measurements would have been a midriff on him.

Once he's covered up, Mickey is opening the passenger side door for him. Ian didn't peg him for chivalrous.

“All aboard?” 

Conversation in the car shifts to lighter topics. Mickey asks Ian what other parts he has played on campus, but Ian was mostly relegated to student written workshops and one acts for charity last year. In turn, Ian asks what the music school is like. Mickey describes it as a very competitive cult just waiting to re-enact the staircase scene from Showgirls. Ian makes a mental note to google it later. They bond over a mutual love of action movies and trade war stories about childhood on the Southside. And suddenly it makes sense how they never crossed paths when so many of Mickey’s anecdotes center around his school’s cross-town rival.  

They are so engaged with each other that it isn’t until they are back in familiar territory that he notices that Mickey hasn’t set his navigator for the address Ian rattled off to him. They slowly drive down South Trumbull Avenue. Mickey’s eyes narrow to slits as he scans the street.  

And Ian realizes what is happening. Mickey wasn’t kidding when he said he hasn’t been to the neighborhood in nearly a decade. He’s looking for his childhood home, but can’t quite pick it out of the lineup on first blush. 

“Ha! There it is! Good old 1955 South Trumbull! Looks worse than I remember. Fucking yikes.” 

Ian looks where Mickey is pointing and it’s a struggle to keep his jaw from hitting his lap. Mickey tends to paint a dark picture of his childhood. Who doesn’t? But when Ian’s eyes land on the dilapidated estate, he cannot help but exclaim, “Fucking Christ! The house of horrors?” 

“The fuck you called it?” Asks a bemused Mickey. 

“Oh. Um.” At first he avoids eye contact, concerned he might be insulting, but Mickey seems more curious than anything else. “There was this urban legend, like it’s the Amityville of the Yards. They say the owner killed his wife and kids in there.” 

“Half true. Just my mom.” 

“Christ, Mickey…” 

Mickey looks at him as if to say I don’t want your pity.   

“What? I told you about this already.” 

“Yeah,” he acknowledges. “But it just hits harder, you know? Knowing that… this… was you here. Like, the worst day of your life happened in my own back yard and people fucking talk about it like a local ghost story. I mean… shit, man.” 

Mickey looks down between them, then back up at Ian. He doesn’t know what Mickey notices that he doesn’t. But then Mickey pulls his hand away to resume driving and Ian feels the loss of warmth under his own palm. The SUV continues on. 

Great, way to play it cool, Ian.  

“Nice to know you care, Gallagher.” 

“Of course I care, Mickey. I’m your friend .” He spreads some extra mustard on the last word just in case Mickey thought he was trying to make a pass at him. 

“Friend, huh? Well, I guess I’ve been called worse.” 

“It is seriously bonkers to realize you were one block down and two streets over all that time when we were kids.” 

“My aunt would call it providential.” 

“Providential?” 

“Like fate or destiny. Maybe we were always meant to meet up.” 

“Yeah. Maybe,” agrees Ian. “Thanks, by the way. For today.” 

“No need, man.” 

“I’m historically bad at knowing my limits. Even worse at asking for help.” 

“Sounds like we have that in common, at least,” smirks the older boy. 

As they turn onto South Homan, Ian points out his address and the car pulls up in front.” 

“Nice house you got here.” 

“It would be nicer if there weren’t seven or eight people all crammed in there at any given time.” 

“Why don’t you live on campus. Our scholarship includes room and board.” 

Ian seizes up. He doesn’t feel up to explaining his bipolar. Or the fact that Fiona and Lip feel like they need to keep close tabs or him. Or that he was so devastated after his diagnosis that he didn’t put up a fight after they insisted.  

Instead he answers, “Things are always coming up in my family. Better to stick closer to home. You gonna be at rehearsal tomorrow?” 

“Yeah.” Mickey answers. “But you’re not on call again until Wednesday.”  

“I just figured you might want someone there to keep you company. And it sounds like you get along with people better when there’s a friendly face in your corner.” 

“Yeah? Don’t you think you’re giving yourself too much credit, there?” Asks Mickey. “Correlation isn’t causation, you know.” 

“Do you not  want me to come tomorrow?” 

“Hey, hey… I never said that , Gallagher,” half-grins Mickey. 

Ian steps out of the SUV and leans into the open window. “Then I guess I’ll see you tomorrow, Mick.” 

Mickey shakes his head fondly. “Make sure to take some ibuprofen before you hit the sack, Gallagher.” 

And then Ian is watching him drive off. Ian waves and laughs when he sees Mickey flipping him off through the rear window. He doesn’t go inside until Mickey’s SUV is a dot in the horizon. 

Chapter Text

“Sure you don’t want to come inside this time?” Asks Ian, showing off the toothy half-grin he uses when he thinks he can charm his way into getting what he wants.

Mickey has to shake his head. They’ve been standing outside his house chatting longer than the drive into town had taken. Mickey would have thought Ian would be tired of him by now for one night. But weeks and weeks of giving Gallagher a ride home after rehearsal and Ian is still asking if he wants to come in. “I keep telling you, Red. I’m not a ‘Meet the Family’ kinda guy.”

“You gotta let me make all these rides up to you somehow.”

“You chip in for gas and that’s plenty.” Mickey demurs as he leans on the side of his SUV.

“Uh-uh.” Replies Gallagher resolutely.

Mickey’s left eyebrow glides upward. “Uh-uh?”

“Nope. I’m not taking no for an answer. You’re gonna let me do something nice for you.”

Mickey grimaces, trying damn hard to hide the fact that a smile wants to burst forth. He palms his forehead and cards his fingers through his hair before he gives in. “Fine. Treat me to dinner. Tomorrow after hard tech.”

“It’s ‘dry tech,’ Ian corrects gently. “And where?”

“How about Patsy’s?” Suggests Mickey as he opens up the gate for Ian. He didn’t set out to walk Ian to his door, but it comes naturally to him without even thinking about it.

“Patsy’s? Mickey, I practically eat there for free. I could get you pie and diner food any time.”

“But you have yet to deliver, so here I am asking.”

“Dry tech tends to run late. Especially when Casciotti directs. He gets pretty ambitious with the light and sound cues. Are you sure you wanna drive into the city just to eat at a greasy spoon?”

“Good point. Just bring something with you and we can heat it up in my dorm room.”

“Your dorm room?”

Mickey crosses his arms, cocky. “Yup. My roomie Chaz just got one of those air fryer things.”

“Are they even allowed in the dorms?”

“Fuck if I know.”

Ian gives him an appraising look, like the decision is bigger than Mickey realizes. “Any dietary restrictions or allergies?”

Mickey has to snicker at the question. No, he doesn’t have any allergies that he’s aware of. But his Aunt Elaine is what Mickey refers to as religiously curious. He may have not have any religious affiliations, but even now a visit to his aunt and uncle’s house in Pittsburgh can result in a meal with any number of religious restrictions depending on where Elaine is on her spiritual journey.

“No, none to speak of, Freckles.”

“Alright, Mick. Reheated diner food on me.”

“I’m looking forward to it. And my roomie’s gonna be out of town for an away game. Do you wanna crash at my place since we gotta be back in the theater so fucking early?

“Did I just get invited to a sleepover?”

“Fuck you is what you were invited to.”

***

Mickey reads the instruction booklet that came with Chaz’s air fryer. But they don’t make much sense to him. Whatever, aren’t these things supposed to be user-friendly? He turns back to his own side of the dorm room to see Ian unloading a few cellophane-wrapped entrees that he brought from his sister’s diner. It’s a small feast of cheeseburgers and chicken patty melts as well as two sides of fries.

He can’t help but notice that Ian is tending to his task seated at Mickey’s desk, despite the fact that Mickey made a concerted effort to not only clear off the crap that usually sits at the foot of his bed. In fact, his side of the room looked immaculate by the time he left for Dry Tech. He wanted Ian to feel comfortable sitting on his bed. He can’t quite place his finger on why he wants to see what that looks like, but he can feel it in his bones. The bed is where he wants Ian.

“So what do you want?” Wasn’t Ian sitting before? How did he get so close without Mickey noticing?
Mickey’s pulse quickens as he looks over at the food. Then he looks back at Ian. Shit! They’re standing practically nose-to-nose by now. “What do you want, Mickey?”

“The… the patty melt looks good.”

“Tell me what you want, Mickey.” Ian demands as he presses Mickey against the wall, pinning him between his arms. The heat of his breath on Mickey’s neck is making his brain go haywire. “Do you even know what you want, Mickey Milkovich?”

“Yeah, I do!” hisses Mickey back, both scared and needful.

“Then, say it.”

“No.” He tries to push Ian away, but it is as though he were superhumanly strong. He doesn’t even flinch.

“Say it, Mick.”

Mickey licks his lower lip and wipes his palms on his jeans. “Make me.”

Ian meets his challenge, a large hand reaches between Mickey’s thighs and he feels strong fingers grip his anatomy firmly as though there was not two layers of denim and cotton between them.

“Admit what you want, Mickey.”

“Fine!” he roars, voice cracking. “I fucking want you! Is that what you want to hear?”

“And that’s what you want?”

“Yes! Ian!” Mickey exclaims as he lurches forward and finds himself sitting up in bed, drenched in a cold sweat, his mouth dry as a bone. He looks around and through the dark, he sees his roommate Chaz is in his bed, blissfully asleep. The meathead likes to fall asleep with his earbuds in. So fortunately, he doesn’t have to deal with the embarrassment of explaining why he was screaming out another guy’s name in the middle of the night.

He pushes away the covers and realizes he needs to change his briefs. A fucking wet dream like a teenager. Just as well, he was meaning to do a load of laundry first thing anyway. He strips off his stained underwear and pulls out a pair of sleep pants and a tank top before he quietly strips the bed.

He ruminates as he loads up the washing machine. It’s a surprising rare instance when he didn’t have to fish out someone else’s laundry before he throws his stuff in. He supposed this is a perk of waking up unreasonably early. Four in the fucking morning. He’s a college senior. Four in the morning shouldn’t exist unless he’d already been up all night.

Chaz is up by the time he gets back to his room. It must be a travel week for him because those are the weekends when the guy is already gone by the time he gets up on Saturday morning. He’s in a pair of distracting grey sweatpants and a hoodie from Sable’s athletics department. “You’re up early, Mikhailo,” remarks his ever-observant roomie. This is the typical level of their conversations, which have been few. He hasn’t even taken the time to ask the guy to call him “Mickey.”

“Yeah, well, I got shit to do.”

“Changing the sheets, huh?” he smirks. “Bringing a girl over while you got the room to yourself?”

“Nah, but I got a buddy coming over.”

“That Ian guy?”

Mickey’s expression tightens. The delicate balance of him and Chaz cohabitating hinges on a mutual indifference. He keeps out of the beef-headed dipshit’s way and vice versa. Harmony. He doesn’t open up to the guy about his personal life and he would mentally go to his happy place if Chaz started talking about his. So, how the fuck does this guy know Ian’s name?

“You talk in your sleep, bro.”

Please don’t call me bro, fuckhead.

“Yeah, it is,” answers Mickey as he sets to work organizing the disorganized coursework laid out on his desk. “He’s bringing over food and we’re he’s gonna spend the night. That a problem?”

“As long as none of my shit gets broken or stolen, do what the hell ever, bro.”

Mickey eyes him appraisingly. Aside from the fact that the guy is a linebacker who bench presses three hundred pounds on the regular, he seems mostly harmless. And despite Mickey's grumpy posturing, he’s been as close to friendly to Chaz as he would with anyone who was foisted on him at random by Resident Affairs. Still, he gets cagey about who outside of his inner circle, which is a pretty exclusive list of people, knows the fine details of his life.

And Gallagher is a fine detail, alright. Mickey usually goes through life like he’s wearing a suit of armor. Even after years of therapy, he would much rather keep people at a distance. But Ian somehow manages to work his way past Mickey’s barriers without even realizing that he’s doing it. And what’s more, Mickey doesn’t seem to mind.

Mickey kneels beside his bed and pulls out his spare pair of sheets from a modular storage tote. Aunt Elaine insists on him having a few spare sets of bedding even though normally, he would just reuse the sheets in the wash once they’re done. They’re nicer if he is being honest and he doesn’t expect the shoddy dryer on his floor to have the sheets dry by the time he has to leave the building at 9:30.

“Sure you and this Ian are just buds, right?” asks Chaz when he looks like he’s on his way out the door.

“Not that it’s any of your business, Chuck.” He barks. “Why? What makes you think…?”

“The sheets look nice. You’re cleaning. Do you like this guy?”

“Fuck off, man.”

“You know, it’s okay if you do, Mikhailo.”

“Is that coming from personal experience? Play a lot of grabass in the huddle, huh?”

Chaz rolls his eyes, hopefully regretting the decision to broach the subject with Mickey.

 “Hey, Chaz?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you mind if he sleeps in your bed?”

“What’s wrong with yours?” grins the jackass. There must be murder in Mickey’s eyes because the overdeveloped blond oaf immediately relents. “Sorry, you’re sleeping there. I forgot. Yeah, I have problems with strangers in my bed. Too Goldilocks for me. But…” he squats down under his bed and pulls out a sealed box. “I got this air mattress.”

“Gee, thanks.” Mickey snarks. The guy should have quit while he was ahead. Chaz not wanting anyone in his bed would have been a good excuse to suggest Ian sleep in his. It’s not gay to want to share a bed with your friend, is it? “Do you got an air pump or do you think I got that much hot air?”

“Have a nice weekend, bro,” is all his roommate adds to the conversation before he is out the door and on his way to the coach bus shuttling him and the rest of the team to some other college somewhere across the Midwest.   

***

The house of the theater is pitch dark, the only illumination is the theatrical lights flooding the stage as the current cue is built light by light. Mickey stands on-stage, his hand up to his forehead to deflect the light shining on his face. Two folding tables are set up in the house and the consoles for the temporarily relocated light and sound boards.

“Bring Channels fifteen and seventeen down to sixty, Gallagher.”

“Gotcha.” Ian taps out a few buttons on the light board console and Mickey feels a bit of relief when the lights bearing down on him dim to a lower level of brightness.

“Better?” asks Robin turning to Dr. Casciotti.

“Just a moment. Hey, Mikhailo, can you walk across to stage right left facing front?”

Mickey complies without argument, just relieved to be doing something for the first time in over twenty minutes. He puts his marching band training to work performing Face Left as he marches to the right. The goal of this particular little exercise was to ensure that the whole area is properly illuminated and the lights don’t cast any shadows on the actors faces.

“Can I see what it looks like if you throw some purple on the cykes?”

Mickey turns around and watches as Ian programs the strip lights upstage shift from a light pink to a rich purple on the cyclorama, he has to tweak the three channels several times until they’re just right to get just the right early dusk that Casciotti asks for.

“Okay, now Mikhailo, can you walk across the stage again?” Mickey can feel his fingers attempting to tense into fists, but he walks across the stage for the five dozenth time this morning.

Gallagher had warned him that Dry Tech is a bit of a slog. It’s a slow and granular process as the director, stage manager, and technical director work their way through the script moment by moment and programming in every single light and sound cue. They started at ten and by the time they break for lunch at 12:30, they had just started Act 2 Scene 1. It’s a five act play. Mickey is convinced they are in for a long night.

“Don’t worry,” Ian insists as the walk back from the nearest campus dining facility open on weekends with Styrofoam containers of greasy bad decisions. “They’re being thorough now, but by five o’clock, Casciotti will be reusing cues and short-handing shit like fucking crazy.”

“Seriously?” asks Mickey, sneaking a tater tot from his container as they walk back into the theater. “Cause right now it seems like every time someone scratches their goddamn nose, it’s another lighting cue you gotta program.”

“None of us wants to be here all night. Besides, anything they rush through at the end of today, they can polish tomorrow during wet tech and first dress.”

“And that’s going to be the real long day, right?”   

Ian nods. “In the real world, if you’re equity, anyway, it’s what they’d call a ten out of twelve. College theater’s not so extreme though. We start wet tech at nine, Casciotti orders a bunch of pizzas for lunch at some point. And we finish up by four. Hopefully. Then, the actors get a two hour break. We get one. And we start first dress rehearsal, full costumes and makeup at seven…ish.”

They settle into seats near Ian’s station at the lighting console, feet propped up on the chairs as they dig into their lunches. “I think this is the part that’s really going to take some getting used to.”

“Well, you’ve done college opera, right?”

“Yeah, as a tenor. I’ve never even done the production end with music before.”

“How long did one of those ritz probes go?”

“It’s sitz probe, and no fucking twelve hours. I guess someone decided a long ass fucking time ago that a bunch of divas like opera singers and musicians won’t stand for spending more time in a room together than they actually have to.”

Ian snickers. “Actors aren’t exactly the most well-balanced people ever either.”

“So, why do you do it?”

“Do what?”

“You’re an actor, right? That’s what you’re really passionate about. That’s goal after graduation, right?” Mickey waits for Ian to nod affirmatively. “Then why put in all the time and man hours doing the production end of things?”

“I told you I grew up poor, right? Like, mom was absentee and my dad refused to work and any money that crossed his palm got traded in for whatever he could drink, smoke, snort, or inject into his blood stream. So, it was up to the kids to get money any way we could. My big sister, Fiona, worked the most, but I probably worked the most consistently. I had a job at a grocery store. The money wasn’t much to write home about, but I was allowed to bring home expired groceries.”

Mickey is perplexed how the Gallagher clan has lasted as long as they have without their parents getting stripped of parental rights. Not that he thinks much of his dad, but at least the guy kept the heat and electricity on. And his mom spent his entire childhood struggling to keep the kids safe from him.

“Am I missing something?”

“My point is that I treat the theater a lot like how I treated helping provide for the family. If it’s something you care about, if it matters to you, it takes time, effort, and a hell of a lot of patience.”

“And that’s not just acting, huh?”

“I suppose not, no. Hadn’t really thought about it much.”

Mickey reflects for a moment and tries to find something in his own life that compares. There is his music, of course. He wasn’t born at his piano. And he spent his teen years doing odd jobs to pay for private singing lessons just because he wasn’t getting enough individual attention in the classroom. But thinking further back, he suddenly has a realization that he can’t help but chatter aloud, not knowing if what he is saying makes a lick of sense.  

“Y’know, before my mom died, she used to have a community garden plot. She used to take me and my sister and put us to work. I hated it, but now I think I get what she was going for. A little kid only sees the end result. The flower or the fruit or whatever. But to get there, like you said—time, effort, patience. That’s what theater is for you, huh? The process? Doing your part to make everything all come together?”

Ian nods with a curt “Mm-hm. What did your mom used to grow?”

“Hell if I know. Bunch a cooking stuff. I think there was mint. Maybe dill. Why?”

“I still have a garden plot on Hermitage. Mostly just tomatoes, but I was just—"

“Get the fuck outta here!” Providence. Fucking strings of destiny just barely missing each other. “That’s where my mom used to take us.”

“Ships fucking passing in the night, man…”

Before long, their lunch break passes. They barely touched their food, too busy chatting each other up, as opposed to what they do every other day. Lucky Ian is behind a table and can nibble on his food until dinner time. But Quinn has Mickey and Layla running around like a pair of chickens with their heads cut off. So, he scarfs down the remainder of his lunch as quickly as possible before it’s back to the coal mines for the rest of the afternoon.

***

“It was nice of your roomie to offer the air mattress,” Ian says at they take turns blowing it up. Mickey silently curses Chaz’s name.

“Oh, yeah. It woulda been even nicer if he had a pump so we weren’t blowing this thing like a couple of fags.”

Ian gets quiet and suddenly the lackadaisical effort he had been putting forth gave way to a concerted effort. Mickey can’t help but think he said something wrong, but he doesn’t quite know what.

“That pie was amazing, by the way.” Mickey thinks aloud. Honestly, he just wants to break the silence.

“I’ll pass on your praise to the chef.”

“You wanna put on a movie? I got a hard drive full of pirated action movies.”

“I think I just want to hit the hay.”

“Oh. Okay, I guess that makes sense,” murmurs Mickey, feeling put out.

Ian takes the overnight bag he brought and pulls out a flat circular pill organizer with listings for each day of the week and subdivided into AM and PM. He opens up a compartment and dry swallows multiple capsules at once.

“What’s all that for?”

“They keep me halfway normal. I’m a mess if I don’t take them twice a day. Side effects suck, though.”

“I used to be on Adderall. But I ended up having to do without. The dry mouth was murder on my singing voice. What do yours do?”

“Well,” Mickey can’t help but notice the lack of eye contact. “I have shit alcohol tolerance for one. And I get the occasional tremor in my hands. And if I don’t take these babies on a full stomach, I get the runs real bad.”

“Shit.”

“Exactly.” Mickey laughs, but Ian is still acting being distant. Mickey feels cheated of seeing the twinkle in those emerald green eyes.

“Did I say something, E? You kinda seem like you’re mad or something.”

“It’s nothing. It’s just… you do realize I’m gay, right?”

“Huh?” Mickey doesn’t know why that makes him so happy. He’s straight. Why would that matter to him? But it makes him feel that jittery roller coaster in his stomach that he always feels  whenever Ian stands a little bit too close to him. “Shit and I called us a couple of fags. Shit. Why didn’t you say anything before?”

“I’m not in the closet, but I’m also not big on broadcasting it these days.” He looks at Mickey for the first time since Mickey put his foot in his mouth. “You seriously didn’t know?”

Mickey tries to respond, but he suddenly finds himself short on words. “Uh-uh,” is all he manages to say.

“Does it change anything?”

“Ian, you’re my friend. That’s not usually a word I toss around a lot. You matter to me. No matter who you bang.”

It’s not what he wants to say. But he really can’t put into words what he wants to say. Mickey still doesn’t know what he is. And he isn’t bold enough to fess up to what his gut is telling him he wants. But he knows he likes being near Ian. That’s what friends are, right? People you like being around? That’s totally normal.

The redhead smiles and Ian feels like he just got hit by a lightning bolt. For a nanosecond he wonders if Ian feels about him the way he feels about Ian. But he pushes the thought away. Just because the guy is gay doesn’t mean he wants to flip Mickey over and… anyway, Ian is his friend. That’s what Mickey can handle. That’s where he can meet him. As friends.

“Thank fuck, man. You wouldn’t believe the number of friends that vanished overnight after I came out.”

“They sound like a bunch of shitheads.” He looks at the air mattress as Ian puts Mickey’s spare bedding on it. “You know that thing looks fucking uncomfortable.”

“I’ve slept on worse. We lived in a VW van until I was three. I can manage on an air mattress.”

Dammit. Ian is too fucking noble for Mickey’s own good. Doesn’t Gallagher hear an innocuous invitation to join him in bed when he hears it?

“You sure you don’t want to watch a movie?” asks Mickey, thinking if he can’t get Ian into his bed at least they can stay up late together.

“Got any VanDamme?”

“VanDamme? Pfft. You out of your mind? Segal could kick VanDamme’s scrawny ass.”

And so goes their night. Mickey plays the part of the loyal friend while inside he feels like his veins are pumping molten magma through his body. Nothing has changed between them from Ian coming out to him. But the world has completely changed knowing whatever Mickey feels for him, there might be a chance Ian may feel the same someday.

Even if he’s too chickenshit to ask.

Chapter Text

“Yes, Fi. I’m taking my pills twice a day like a good boy. Now could you get off my back?”   

“And does your boyfriend—?”  

“He’s not my boyfriend,” bites back Ian ruefully.  

“Sorry. This boy who is your friend and whose room you sleep in multiple nights a week, does he know how important keeping up with your meds and maintaining a routine are for your health?”  

Ian grinds his teeth, annoyed at the cross examination. “He knows when I need to take my meds. But no, I haven’t gotten around to telling him I’m mentally ill.”  

Fiona takes the breakfast plate he has been rinsing for over three minutes from his hand and puts it in the industrial dishwasher. “Look, if you and this Mickey guy are really getting close, then doesn’t he deserve to know just in case something—?”  

“This isn’t like before,” he interrupts sharply. The episodes aren’t as often and aren’t as intense. If something does happen, at least I know what’s going on and I can advocate for myself. I can explain if and when I have to. As long as I take care of myself, I’m never going to be in another situation where you’re all standing over me, making decisions for me like a fucking child.”  

He grabs the next dish and repeats the process. Ian knows he needs to reel it in. Losing his cool is only going to add fuel to the fire. But he feels rightfully justified at losing his temper. He lost so much of his treasured independence in the weeks that followed his diagnosis. Once upon a time, he thought he was the one sibling Fiona didn't have to worry about, the one who could take care of himself and consistently help with the bills, bring home expired groceries so she didn’t have to go dumpster diving, and could solve all his own problems.   

And now he’s the problem; Hurricane Monica Reborn. They treat him like a ticking time bomb they need to be ever vigilant of. He hates it when they treat him like he is a diagnosis first and a treatment plan second; being an actual human comes in at a distant third.   

“I’m not trying to treat you like a child,” she demurs after a long inhale and presumably counting to ten in her head.   

“Well, it sure feels that way,” he gripes as he takes a scrubber on a plastic handle and vigorously goes to town on a resistant pool of sugary caramel on the pie plate he’s working on. “Look, I’m grateful for the job, Fi. I don’t think anywhere else would be as flexible with my schedules. But I hate that feeling—like you only keep me on so you have an extra place you can monitor me.”  

She takes the next rinsed dish and it too gets slotted into place in the dishwasher. “I don’t mean to. I know I promised it’s supposed to be manager/employee between here, but you know me. I can’t turn off the big sister goggles. I’m always gonna worry about you. Even when you’re eighty.”  

“Well, could you do so more quietly. And from ten yards away? I can literally feel you breathing down my neck.”  

Fiona smiles dryly. “I’ll take it under consideration. But Ian, this Mickey. Friend, boyfriend, whatever he is... he matters to you, right? Shouldn’t you be able to trust someone that important to you? If he cares about you, he’s not going to vanish into thin air if you tell him.”  

Ian doesn’t want to think about what his sister is suggesting. It’s his life, his condition. And it’s up to him to determine who should know, when, and how he discloses his diagnosis. But really, he doesn’t even want to deal with it. The summer of his diagnosis, when he was well and truly too much to handle, his older siblings thought they were just being so helpful letting Ian’s modestly-sized friend group know about his bipolar. Overnight, his social network halved itself. They must have concluded that Ian wasn’t simply having a fit of teenage rebellion— this is who he is now. And it was too much for them. And by late August, his circle of friends tapered off completely with empty promises of “we’re always going to be friends, going away to college isn’t going to change that.”   

Perhaps that is what made it so easy for Ian to double down on his interest in acting in his first semester and didn’t think twice about declaring a theatre major instead of something more practical. He always loved the theater, but suddenly there was a great appeal in slipping into different roles, throw himself into other people’s lives. Even if just for an hour or two he could let himself slip into a character instead of being Ian Gallagher the head-case, everybody’s problem. And now he’s playing the role of Ian Gallagher the normal guy for Mickey’s sake. And he isn’t ready to unmask.  

Ian juts out his chin. He hasn’t even composed a coherent succinct answer that will get his sister off his back, but he’s sure between sheer annoyance and a background in drama, he can at least come up with some sort of witty declamation. But instead, she stops him as she takes one last rinsed plate from him and placing it in the machine. “That’s rhetorical, Ian. I just want you to think about it.”    

And then, Fiona acquiesces to his request and gives her little brother some space.   

Despite himself, he considers her suggestion. Logically, yes. Mickey means far more than Ian can admit. Even if he isn’t ready to put it into words yet, he feels the connection all the way down to his core. Even if the guy is as straight as a flagpole, there is a bond there. It formed quickly and deeply to the point that Mickey feels downright familial after only three or four months.   

It’s been so long since he let someone in the way he has with Mickey. He’s the first person to matter to Ian in a very long time who doesn’t look at Ian and sees the depression or the mania or the goddamn psychosis. Mickey gets to see just Ian. And Ian isn’t ready to lose that. Sure, someday if their friendship lasts beyond undergrad, he’ll have to loop the guy in.   

But for now, it can wait. Mickey makes him feel normal; makes him feel like things are going to be okay someday. He wants to cling to the one relationship in his life that doesn’t make a point of reminding him that he’s sick in the head on a nearly daily basis.  

With the morning rush over, he preps two lunches on the short order grill, packs them up in Styrofoam containers, and pulls on his heavy winter coat to gird himself against the late November chill as he heads to the El where he’ll get off at the South Loop for his transfer. They days are really feeling short now. At only half past nine, but there is hardly a hint of a sun in the overcast sky, just a bleak blanket of clouds and fog that blends in seamlessly with the blanket of snow wrapped around the landscape.   

On the bus headed to Sable University, he pulls out the latest in a long line of cheap convenience store earbuds and plays an 80s hair metal playlist Mickey sent him last week. He knows what he actually should be doing is opening up his text book for the core Poli Sci course he has once he arrives on campus. It’s only a 102 intro course teaching how the US government works, which was more or less already covered in 12 th grade civics. He’s not too stressed about the class.  

Instead, he pulls out the binder with the thin twenty-eight page one-act script he is directing for the  student-written, directed, and produced Winter Showcase. They have been rehearsing for three weeks, which considering the length of the script is plenty. But today is their last rehearsal before Thanksgiving. Then they move directly into tech week on Saturday, much to the consternation of students who live out of state.  

When the bus sidles up to the stop closest to the student dorms, Ian grins in surprise at the sight of a certain raven-haired boy in a cumbersome winter coat that seems to double his size. He’s bundled up tight aside for his thumbs. Even though he wears smart gloves for using personal devices, he ended up slitting the thumbs open so he can putz around on his phone. His head is crowned in a snug green beanie that leaves only the front of his hair exposed. His normally milky white complexion is rosy from the chill.   

“You got the goods?” Mickey asks like he just stepped out of a mafia movie. And from what Mickey has told Ian about his childhood, that makes sense. To hear Mickey recall his childhood, there was hardly an illegal enterprise south of Roosevelt that Terry Milkovich didn’t have a thumb in.  

“You know, you didn’t have to wait out here for me,” sighs Ian as he allows the shorter man to relieve him of the bag of food from Patsy’s.  

“True,” agrees Mickey. “But you already had to take a train and a bus in the snow uphill both ways in the snow to get here. The least I could do is walk you to my roomie’s air fryer. Besides, it was this or practice for my senior showcase and I have till April for that shit.”   

In addition to Mickey’s music education major, he is going to graduate in the Spring with minors in vocal and piano performance. To that end, he has to plan a one-man show for each discipline. It makes Ian question when or even whether music majors find time to sleep because in addition to a vocal concert and piano concert, he will be student teaching full-time and has a fifty-page thesis. And despite all that, he still plans on pitching in with at least one mainstage for the theater department.   

Ian is certain Music majors directly inject the caffeine directly into their bloodstream.   

Chaz is already gone for Thanksgiving. Apparently, the team is playing over the holiday. And it’s a bit of a shame. Ian gets along pretty well with the big lug. Even if Mickey seems to be constantly annoyed with the guy. Though for Mickey, that isn’t saying much. The only people Ian has yet to hear him sound genuinely happy to hear from is when he calls his adoptive parents and little sister back in Pennsylvania.   

“So, you just have that government class or whatever, then history of drama, right?” Asks Mickey as he shrugs off his coat. Under it, he is wearing a muscle tee with a sleeveless denim vest over top of it. Ian finds it amusing that despite finishing out his adolescence among the  middle class, he still dresses like he would fit in back in the Yards without a second glance.   

The corner of Ian’s mouth tugs up by he tries to keep his expression flat. It’s very charming that his best friend has committed his classes to memory. In fact, if Mickey was more than just his best friend, he’d call it downright sweet. So often, it feels like Mickey unwittingly comes right up to the line between friendship and something more, but never crosses over. He never thought he’d be one of those guys who ends up completely twitterpated over a straight boy, but here he is.   

“Right. And you just have your classical piano practicum, right?”  

“It’s the Romantics, but yeah.”  

“I know you’ve explained the difference,” admits Ian as he loads Mickey’s lunch onto the upper oven tray and his own onto the lower one. “But I still get them confused.”  

“Well, I could always show you,” offers Mickey as he gestures to his Casio keyboard, which is stored in a travel case beside his desk.  

“Didn’t I hear you say the keyboard is shitty substitute for an actual piano?”  

Mickey’s head wobbles as he shrugs. “Sure, that sounds like something I’d bitch about. But then, a piano is a shitty substitute for a pipe organ, but I made it work. Sorta.”  

“You can play a pipe organ?”  

“Technically. In theory.”  

“What about a calliope?”  

“I’m not taking you to the circus, Gallagher.”  

“What about a baseball game?”  

Mickey looks up from his keyboard and gives Ian a perplexed look that lingers for long seconds before he bristles in a full-body maneuver as though he were a dog shaking off the bathwater. “No, Red. I’ve never tried my hand at calliope. Nor would I want to. The calliope is what happens nine months after a piano fucks a kazoo.”  

“That’s a weird visual.”  

“Weird fucking instrument, too. You need steam to play ‘em,” Mickey explains as he finishes setting up his key board and sits down to play.   

Ian cannot help but notice how markedly different Mickey’s posture is seated at the piano, or his Casio in this case, versus when he sits just about anywhere else. Even ignoring the fact that both feet are planted flat on the floor, neither tucked under him, he looks like it is a position he has spent time mastering. His hands, usually so small, are splayed out across the keys like talons. His back is straight in a way that draws undue attention to his posterior. Ian suddenly wonders if concert pianists wear tailcoats to keep people from noticing their asses instead of the music.  

“Okay, so Classical piano sounds like this.” Begins Mickey as he plays a piece Ian can’t quite identify but he recognizes as Mozart because the melody featured in a production of Amadeus that he ushered for four weeks just so he could get into the Lyric Opera House for free. Mickey tells him the title is Rondo Alla Turca. The music is elegant and crisp as an autumn leaf. There is a pinch to the side of his smile, smirking like Mona Lisa. Then he segues effortlessly into a much more easily recognizable piece, Beethoven’s Ode to Joy . There is a sense of precision to it that seems downright lofty and Mickey whole expression shifts to something imperious, bordering on pompous.  

Ian can only sit and listen dumbfounded.  

“And now here’s something from the Romantics.” And again, Ian can identify the tune though he’s never heard it on piano before. Mickey leads with his shoulders, swaying dramatically as he lets the music flow through him.  

“This is from the old black and white Dracula , right?”  

Mickey nods “ The Mummy , too. But it’s originally the swan queen’s main theme in Swan Lake . Tchaikovsky. “Hear how it’s less concerned with being grand and structured? The Romantics were all about emotion and intensity.”   

Abruptly, Mickey’s body language shifts. It’s powerful as though his entire form was all balled fists and gritted teeth. He throws his head back and launches himself at the keys tempestuously as the stormy melody he plays. The music is angry. It’s defiant. In short, it is Mickey music.   

Ian cannot help but be floored by the performance. Each piece he has played is distinct not just melodically but in the energy it brings into the room. Cheeky with Alla Turca, stately serious with Beethoven’s 9 th symphony. He brought something beautifully tragic to the Swan theme. And now this, his whole body practically groaning from an ache that can never be assuaged.   

And that’s when Ian realized: Mickey is an actor. Yes, like any musician with aims at going pro, he is a wealth of expertise, precision, and technique. But he is expressing with his whole body as he pours his inner essence into each and every note. He is telling the story from his fingers to his heart and all the way down into his toes.   

Ian has heard Mickey practice his singing a few times and he has always fought the urge to swoon over it. But Mickey behind his piano is a different experience entirely. This isn’t just performance. It’s galvanizing, an electric thrill that seems to distill the storm clouds that so often swirl around Mickey into something concentrated and honed to a fine point. In the three and a half months since they met, Ian thought he had come to understand him better than most. But this moment blows past whatever he thought he understood before. Ian thinks he understands Mickey more listening as his fingers practically dance along the black and white keys than he ever has before.   

Mickey, especially in this last song, is using his art to bear his soul unvarnished. Ian feels like he’s seeing Mickey for the first time in his natural context. He is certain that Mickey is going to be a good teacher and he’s shaping up to be a capable stagehand. But this is where Mickey belongs, rendering raw emotion into heart-pounding musical experiences through his instrument.   

When Mickey finishes, the room is quiet for an impossibly long two seconds, then Ian bursts into an excited applause, forgetting that they’re just sitting in Mickey’s dorm room and not in a concert hall. He was already sweaty and red-faced from all the energy he exerted in the final piece he played, but Ian’s clapping makes him chuckle softly to himself, turning even redder with bashfulness.  

“What the fuck was that?” asks Ian, astounded.  

“Chopin,” answers Mickey, still catching his breath. “His Revolutionary Etude. The story goes that he was Polish and damn proud of it. But I guess not that proud, ‘cause he lived in Paris, but whatever. Poland and Russia went to war, but Poland got utterly crushed. And this was his response.”  

“Oh, so it’s like a protest song?”  

“More like a lament. Or even a threnody.” After a beat, Mickey explains, “That’s a song for the dead.”  

“You gotta play that last one in your showcase in the Spring.”  

Mickey scratches the back of his head as he packs his keyboard back up. “I don’t know, man. Don’t you think it’s too… showy?”  

Ian palms his forehead with an audible slapping sound. How is this handsome idiot so sure of himself when he’s telling people off, but suddenly timid when it comes to acknowledging his own talent?  

“Showy is the point, dumbass! It’s a show -case.”  

“Yeah, yeah. I get the concept.” He murmurs, tucking the keyboard back between his desk and the wall. “You really think I should?”  

“Mickey!” Ian claps a hand to each of Mickey’s arms. “Do you have any idea how fucking talented you are?”  

“Piano players are a dime a dozen, man.”  

“But you aren’t.”   

It suddenly occurs to Ian how close they are standing. His fingers are curled around Mickey’s smooth biceps. He is looking so deep into Mickey’s eyes that he can count the flecks of silver amongst the oceanic blue. He sees Mickey’s pupils dilate. He hears Mickey’s breathing hitch and shallow.   

Ian shies away first. He doesn’t know what the hell was going on, what was making his pulse quicken and his synapses in his head go haywire. He’s straight , Ian reminds himself. And no matter how many times I try to convince myself otherwise, wanting him to feel something more than friendship isn’t going to fucking make it so .  

“Um… no homo,” Ian manages to sputter out.  

Mickey’s eyebrow quirks up and now it’s Ian’s turn to feel self-conscious and timid. “Yeah,” Mickey agrees, his voice suddenly thick and wet. “No homo.”  

Before either of them can think of how to shift gears, the buzzer on Chaz’s air fryer rings out. Ian feels literally saved by the bell.  “C’mon, food’s done.”   

Chapter Text

Look at you , Mickey thinks as he clears off his Uncle Wyatt’s paperwork from the family piano. Technically, he is supposed to be clearing it off so that it can double as a sideboard at Thanksgiving dinner. But before he drapes the decorative table cloth over the old girl, he can’t resist the temptation. You’re probably long overdue for a tuning, aren’t you? His fingers glide across the cherrywood fallboard and his thumbs hook under, lifting it up and recessing it back to reveal the keys he spent his teen years pounding away at day in and day out. He sits down at the bench and smiles. This is his favorite place to be his adoptive parents’ home, maybe in all of Pittsburgh.   

His fingers find their place and he positions himself to begin. A single G Major chord resounds around the first floor. It’s a little out of tune, but he has heard worse. He didn’t even set out to play anything in particular, but within twenty seconds, he is plucking “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini” by Rachmaninoff out of the air.  

“Mickey! Can I get your help in here?” calls his aunt from the kitchen.   

He sighs, slumping forward so that his forehead rests on the upper panel. Slipping the fallboard back over the piano keys, he shouts back, “Just a sec!”  

He finds his Aunt Elaine in a semi-squat in front of the oven, the chamber lit up so she can scrutinize her pecan pie. Elaine doesn’t take the holidays lying down. She has been chipping away at her small feast since Tuesday. The fridge is filled with casserole dishes that need only be heated up before the main event after the Rhozenko and Reese cousins arrive this afternoon. She already made enough food to keep them in leftovers until the December holidays. And inevitably, once Uncle Wyatt’s sister, Dora, and Elaine’s mother, Bubbe Rose, arrive with their annual offerings, there won’t even be enough space on the dining room table.   

Of course, no man is an army and Elaine isn’t above putting her adult children to work, if needs be. Usually, Elaine’s birth daughter Audrey would take the lead while Mickey and Mandy would do simpler tasks like pealing potatoes and heating up the canned cranberries. But Audrey is visiting with her serious boyfriend’s family this year. And Aunt Elaine believes in seniority. So, as the second eldest of her small brood, that means Mickey is probably going to have his hands full.   

But it certainly beats helping Uncle Wyatt up with the cleanup.  

“There you are!” She exclaims as though she hadn’t just summoned him. “All rested up?”  

His plane had touched down in Pittsburgh International last night after one in the morning and he refused to make his aunt and uncle stay up that late to pick him up in the airport when he is still perfectly capable of taking public transit. He brushed the dust off his trusty old transit card and took the airport flyer into downtown and had to wait for a transfer to Squirrel Hill. And wait he did for close to an hour. He was in the process of texting his sister for a lift before the last bus of the night arrived. It was nearing three in the morning before he slipped in the house, much to the excitement of the family corgi, Harley. How that little four-legged narc didn’t wake the whole house is a mystery. But Aunt Elaine was up anyway, dithering over an old plastic case of Betty Crocker recipe cards. As though she would ever deviate from her tried and true recipes.  

When she intercepted him in the foyer, she pulled him into a hug. She is the only person on the planet he allows hugs from. She isn’t his mom, and she would never claim to be even if she is legally his parent, but Aunt Elaine has put forth the time and effort. On a fundamental level, Mickey even now struggles to see Wyatt and Elaine’s house as his home, but she has gone above and beyond to make him feel like he will always be welcome and loved here without making him feel like a charity case.   

And when she saw that the bags under his eyes had bags under their eyes, she tabled her traditional coddling routine and insisted he go to his room and sleep in. Mickey thanked her quietly, knowing he would have stayed up if she had insisted on sitting him down and fixing him a late supper if she had insisted like she normally would.   

But now, it’s almost noon and he has accepted his fate, rolling up his sleeves before she even rattles off a list of chores. “Alright, I’m good to go. What do you got for me?”  

“I need you to go to your sister’s room.”  

“What? Why?”  

“If you bothered looking at the family calendar, you’d know. She planning on FaceTiming your brothers again and wanted to see if you wanted in this time.”  

“Those assholes?”  

She gives him that look. Typically, Aunt Elaine is as grim and threatening as a kitten, but when she means business she can stare Mickey down like he is standing between a grizzly bear and her cub.  

 “You’re serious? I would’a thought you’d think they’re a bad influence.”  

“They’re fine. They’re not your father and that’s the important thing.”  

“They’re drug dealers, Elaine.”  

She looks at him like he’s adorable, which is only mildly annoying. It used to drive him up the wall when he thought she wasn’t taking what he had to say seriously. “Pfft. They sell weed, kid. Are you going to stand there and tell me you’ve never taken an edible before, kid?”  

“Well...”  

“Do you think your uncle and I have never gotten high in our lives?”  

A synapse in his brain must have misfired. Oh, sure. He can definitely picture a younger version of his aunt getting into all manner of shit when she was younger in the spirit of  open-minded “experimentation.” Uncle Wyatt on the other hand was born an old stick in the mud. He figured that’s what balanced them out. She’s the electricity and he’s the ground line. Shit, I must be spending way too much time helping Gallagher with the lighting grid if I’m coming up with analogies like that.   

“Sorry, I refuse to believe Wyatt ever had got baked in his life.”  

Aunt Elaine smiles. “Okay, you caught me. He didn’t. But he did play lookout for your mother and me so your Baba Ekaterina never caught us.”  

“You seriously want me to catch up with them? I’ve spoken to Iggy a couple times, but that’s about it.”  

“Mickey, when we took you and your sister in, the only reason we didn’t take the lot of you was because you were under age and they weren’t. We never to keep you from anyone besides your father. Besides. Do you seriously want to settle down back in Chicago once you’re done in the Spring? These boys are your family every bit as much as Mandy is, as much as your uncle and me. They’re going to be your closest kin. They’ve been your closest kin ever since you started going to that school. It's past time you start reforging some bonds.”   

“Isn’t there a lasagna you want me to make from scratch or something?”  

“Mikhailo Aleksandr, you march your butt up there and—”  

“Alright, fine. Whipping out the full name on me...” Mickey rolls his eyes like he is still a teenager as he turns around.   

He reflects as he takes the stairs. His life would be nowhere near what it is now if he’d grown up as his brothers have. Hell, he might have ended up in the family business like his eldest half-brother, Joey. He may have ended up with a rap sheet that reaches down to the floor.  

At the top of the second-floor landing he heads towards Mandy’s door, but then hesitates and keeps walking to his room at the far end of the hall. As the elder sibling, he had been granted the larger room when they first came to live with their aunt and uncle. But he yielded up the larger room, considering he really only stayed with the family for a third of the year.   

Mickey finds himself laying in bed, curled on his side. He promised Aunt Elaine that he would coordinate with Mandy to FaceTime with their brothers, but the thought of it makes him vibrate with anxiety. Sure, he’s contacted Iggy maybe three times in the past seven semesters, but it has only ever been texts. He has never come face-to-face with the family he and Mandy left behind as children.  

He can stall. He’s been a piano accompanist enough times in his life that he knows how to vamp for time.  

His fingertips thrum against the bed spread. It’s the fancy bedding she uses when company visits. She hasn’t been shy about the fact that his room is the designated guest room whenever he is away at school.   

The impulse occurs to him and before he even has the time to second-guess the decision, his phone is in his hand and he is waiting for the phone to connect. He cannot remember the last time he called someone on the phone instead of texting. If it were anyone other than Gallagher, he would feel uncomfortable at the prospect. But talking to Gallagher helps. He can’t quite explain it, but hearing Ian’s voice, and knowing Ian is listening to him, has a way of putting him at ease like nothing else can. He’s never had a friendship quite like that. Then again, forming lasting friendships was never something Mickey excelled at before he started hanging around Ian Gallagher.    

The call connects and he hears the scratchy sound of Ian’s voice on the other end of the connection. There is a lot of noise in the background for a family that doesn’t gather for the holiday. “ Mickey ?”  

“Hey, Gallagher, how’s your holiday going?”  

“I did tell you we really don’t do the whole Turkey Day thing around here, right?”  

“Yeah, yeah. How is your time off from school going?” Mickey asks, rolling onto his side.  

“I’m resting up for now. Fi has me scheduled for this afternoon at Patsy’s. Fiona put together a holiday menu. She’s expecting a crowd.”  

“Thanksgiving at a greasy spoon sounds like my idea of a good time,” admits Mickey, who has gotten hooked on Ian’s offerings from work. Despite having been in school outside of Chicago and even working gigs in the city, he has made a point of avoiding the old neighborhood. Canaryville and the Back of the Yards are home to the family he hasn’t faced in years. But Ian gives him this little taste of home whenever he shows up with a take-home container. “You expecting good tips, at least?”  

“Every little bit helps,” Ian shrugs.   

“Do you like working there? With your siblings, I mean?”  

Ian doesn’t answer right away. “Fiona can be a bit much. It’s a lot having her basically acting like my mom at home and my boss at work. Other than that? Yeah. I kind of miss having Lip at work, but I’ll get to show Carl the ropes over Winter Break.”  

“Do you have any family you don’t talk to?”  

“I’m really only close with my siblings. We never visit relatives. In my family, it means you need something. I met my bio dad once when I was fifteen and he seemed okay, but his wife put two and two together. And she was not happy about it.”  

“Wicked stepmother?”  

“She’s the wronged party,” he sighs. “Why are you asking? Is something up, Mick?”  

He doesn’t answer straight away. It should be the simplest thing in the world. Ian knows what it’s like to be Southside. And he also knows Mickey better than anyone. If there is any man alive that Mickey trusts with the details of his home life both past and present, it’s Ian.   

“It’s no big deal, just something Elaine things I oughta do. My aunt thinks I should connect with my brothers,” he admits, scratching the recently trimmed shorthairs on the back of his neck nervously.   

“What? Like Iggy and all them?” Ian asks. “Do you want to?”  

Mickey breathes in deep, as though inhaling the question like a character in a Kirby game will make the answer that much clearer. It doesn’t. Conflicting arguments formulate, fizzle, reform, undulate against one another like a tsunami raging in his mind.   

Mickey remembers when he and Mandy were first taken into protective custody, then two days later when Elaine arrived to bring the two of them home with her. He had only just turned eleven the other day, still so very much a child even if he tried to be Mandy’s rock. He didn’t understand why it was just the two of them being taken so far away; if his brothers are all adults, why couldn’t they live with one of them?   

In those first few months in his aunt and uncle’s house, he cried himself to sleep over missing his brothers almost as much as for his mother.   

But as he grew more comfortable with the much more comfortable life that Elaine and Wyatt offered, he felt guilty. A clean home, his own room, utilities that stay on? His brothers never had that in their lives. An honor roll student in a creative arts school? Forget about it. Milkoviches usually don’t make it past the tenth grade. He was given free range to tickle the ivories at an age when his brothers were all pressed into service by their father. As happy a life as he had with their relatives, it felt so un-Milkovich. He always imagined they would resent him, think less of him.   

And the fact that he has been spending more time with Rosy Palms while he closes his eyes and thinks of his gay best friend isn’t helping. What happens if he gets to talking with his brothers and they figure out that he might not be entirely straight?  

“I want to, yeah.” He admits. “But I’m not sure it’s the best idea. I don’t think I’m the type o’ guy they want to be friends with.”  

“I always figured brothers and sisters gotta like you no matter what.”   

“Isn’t your brother your best friend or something?”  

“You’re my best friend, Mick. But yeah, I got lucky with Lip. Still doesn’t mean we see eye to eye all the time.”  

Mickey honestly isn’t sure he heard most of what Ian just said. He doesn’t know if he feels incredibly touched to realize that Ian thinks of him as his best friend as much as he does Ian, or if he is bothered at how insufficient the expression is for how he feels.   

“I’ll give it a shot.” Mickey finally answers.   

“They’re gonna love you, man. Just…”  

“Just what?”  

“Try talking to them the way you talk to me, okay? Like you’re actually happy to see them.”  

“You think I’m happy to see you, Gallagher?” Mickey asks, smiling into the phone.   

Ian takes a moment to reply. Mickey can hear Ian’s voice crack. “Compared to the way you talk to most people? Yeah.”  

“Okay, so be nice. I’ll take it under advisement.”  

Rap-a-tap-tap  

“Mick?”  

Mickey sighs. He isn’t used to family cutting into his time with Ian. He doesn’t like the way it makes him feel. He loves his sister, even if he doesn’t always say it. He shouldn’t feel like a territorial lion protecting his kill when she interrupts a phone call. But he swallows back the feeling and reminds himself where he is.   

“Hey, man. My sister’s looking for me. Call you tomorrow?”  

“Yeah, of course. I’ll be back on the morning shift, so any time after two work for you?”  

And then I get to see you again on Sunday , Mickey thinks to himself. “Yeah, I got nothing but time tomorrow.” Mickey catches himself before he says something very honest and wholly vulnerable before the call disconnects. Then he curses himself for not saying it.  

Rap-a-tap tap. This time Mandy lets her in.   

His baby sister stands two inches taller than him now. Her hair has grown back out and in its natural shade. After her first year at art school, she came home with her hair fashioned into a very blonde pixie cut with blue highlights. She looks more herself now, even if she has adopted a more dressed down aesthetic. Mickey supposes she paints all the time now; why bother wearing anything she doesn’t want to get covered in acrylics?   

 “Who were you talking to?” She asks.   

“Just a friend from school.”  

She smirks and Mickey hates that she can pull off that trick of being as readable as the Mona Lisa . “Since when do you have friends?”   

“Fuck off,” he rolls his eyes at her as he repositions himself to sit up in bed.   

“That’s not a dig.” She assuages. “You’ve always been the loner type. Like people give you a rash or something.”  

“He’s just a friend from school. No big deal.”  

“Okay, are you sure this isn’t like a lab partner or something?”  

Mickey presses his fingers to the side of his temples. “I mean, we were paired together. But it turns out he’s from our old neighborhood. We even kinda knew each other back then. It's actually pretty nice having someone who gets what it's like, you know? It's just...  What are you smiling at?”  

"Nothing." She is eying him, grinning with an expression so bright, you would think he just cured cancer. "Your friend have a name?”  

“Of course he does. And that’s all you’re getting out of me.”  

She quirks an eyebrow at him, hands on hips. “Seriously?”  

“He’s nobody you’d know. He didn’t go to Canaryville with us.” He stands up, pocketing his phone. “So, I hear you wanted me to join in on your little FaceTime session?”  

Her smile returns, a bit more earnest than it had been before. “Yeah, bring your keyboard. I told ‘em you’re a musician and they want a demonstration.”  

“I’m guessing the selling point isn’t my classical repertoire?” He asks as he takes his keyboard from its stand.  

“Christ, no.” She laughs. “I told him you know ‘Stairway to Heaven.’”    

Chapter Text

Ian thinks he will be the first in the theater as he heads; an advantage of being a towny in the wake of a long holiday weekend. Even with shitty Sunday bus service, he expects to have plenty of time while everyone else will be content to run late getting back into town, just him and the lighting console. He wants to take the extra time to patch his circuits into something a bit more user-friendly. It’s not something Robin is in the habit of bothering with, but he knows she will appreciate it when she isn’t using her handwritten Rosetta Stone to make sense of which instruments are plugged into what packs. 

So, color him surprised when Mickey’s black second-hand SUV parked outside the house. He’s leaning on the side of the car with two cups of coffee from Dark Matter. The big bulky puffer jacket he is wearing almost makes him look like a kid wearing his father’s coat.  

“Mick?” He asks, confused as he shuffles his way down the front steps. 

“‘Bout damn time, man. I thought you said you were gonna be out the door at eight.”  

“It’s eight-oh-five. What are you doing here?”  

“I took an early flight and figured you could use a lift on my way back to campus.” Ian doesn’t buy it that he didn’t plan this, but Mickey is playing this off so smoothly. If he weren’t straight, Ian would be swooning at the gesture. 

“Y’know, you didn’t have to wait out here. You could’ve come inside.” 

“It’s fine, Gallagher. I wanted to surprise you.” 

Ian looks around at the ample amount of accumulated snow they got over the holiday. It’s not as bad as it gets by January, but it is still nothing to sniff at. "I mean it, Mick. You’re welcome here. Honestly, I think it would shut my brother up if he had proof you existed.”  

“Don’t worry about it, wasn’t out here all that long,” he shrugs as he offers Ian one of the cups in his hands. “Besides, I haven’t seen the old neighborhood by daylight since I was a kid.” 

Ian leans next to Mickey and takes a sip of his coffee. At school, he just gets the cheapest thing at Starbucks. Pike Place dark roast, black with two sweeteners; that’s Mickey’s order. He prefers coffee just do its job. Keep him up when he’s studying late and fight off the hangover when he indulges too much the night before.  

Typically, Ian is content to have the same, even if on his own his coffee tends to be more of a serving apparatus for flavored creamers. But he is surprised by the drink Mickey procured for him. It’s earthy and spicy, tickling its way down his throat. And there is something minty and sweet, too. 

“You like?” Mickey asks, clearly recognizing the look on. “They had peppermint bark Sumatra and I guess it made me think of you. ‘Cause you always had those mints backstage.” 

Ian rolls his eyes, smiling into his drink. Lucky me getting to be besties with the one straight boy who notices my breath . “Yeah, I drink this sorta thing by the gallon this time of year. Or I would. Meds and all.” 

“Yeah, can’t get too hyper or something right.” 

More like manic . “Yeah, something like that.” 

“C’mon,” Mickey insists, going around to the driver’s side door. “Let’s hit the road before family spots me.” 

“It’s so weird.” Ian remarks as he climbs inside the passenger side door and throws his bag in the back seat. “You grew up so close by. You sure your brothers still live in the area?” 

“Yeah, they told me as much when we talked the other day. They still live in the... what did you call it? The Amityvillle of the South Side or something like that?” 

"Shit, I did say that, didn’t I? God, I’m an idiot.” 

“It least you weren't holding back.  You know how I feel about people walking on eggshells with me.”  

He cuts through the alley and turns onto South Trumbull Ave. He doesn’t explain to Ian the reason. Ian understands. Once or twice, when Mickey has given Ian a ride home late at night, he has made a point of passing by his old family home. But never in broad daylight. He doesn’t pull over and take a good look. He never does, but he nonchalantly glances at it as though it were any other home.  

“Colin’s done a good job with the place. Fresh coat of paint, no broken glass, no trash all over the yard. The flower boxes in the bay window are a nice touch.” 

“You wanna stop and get a closer look?” Ian asks encouragingly. “We don’t got to be at the theater ‘till ten.” 

Mickey’s mouth pinches to  one side as he seems to consider the suggestion for a moment. “Nah, I’d rather keep a respectable distance. Work my way up to it now that I know I still got family there. Besides, you want to get up early and tinker, right?” 

“Tinker?” Echoes Ian, training his face to seem offended at the implication, but it probably comes across more bemused. 

“Yeah, like when you had us going through all the lights to make sure nothing burnt out or something before the last dry tech.” 

“Well, I did want to program the board to make things easier for Robin.” 

“That’s what I thought.” Replies Mickey, clicking his tongue. “Although, how do you know how to do that shit and she doesn’t?” 

“She would if she bothered to read the manual. She’d rather do things the hard way than do the reading.” 

The car turns onto Halstead Avenue and from there, they zigzag through the neighborhood until they merge onto the 94 southbound. The cityscape becomes more of a blur as they pick up speed.  

Driving with Mickey in the day time is a different experience than late at night. There is a vitality to it, perhaps because they aren’t caught in that tightrope act of stalling to spend more time together versus racing against their own late night exhaustion. Ian cannot help but imagine what it would be like to go on long summer road trips together; Niagara Falls or maybe the Grand Canyon, or maybe they could drive south to New Orleans. The windows would be down, the breeze dancing through Mickey’s hair, making him look positively windswept. In his daydream, Mickey doesn’t even flinch when Ian runs his fingers through his hair. 

“You with me, Gallagher?” 

“With you where?” Asks Ian, dazed as he lets the fantasy fizzle away, leaving him with Mickey looking at him expectantly. 

“I asked if you’re okay with McDonalds? I haven’t had breakfast yet and I’m thinking McGriddles.” 

“Oh, sure I’m game. Didn’t you have to be up for hours for all the pre-flight shit?” 

“Yeah. But Pittsburgh International is overpriced and O’Hare is worse.” 

They arrive at the theater with a bag of greasy breakfast food and a pair of iced coffees and once Ian has sufficiently talked campus police into letting them inside the building, the boys set up the tables and run the cables into the house so the light and sound team won’t be stuck in the booth all day. Ian does his little pet project, but it is surprisingly quick work. He still has forty minutes to sit on the stage with Mickey and enjoy their breakfast before Dry Tech is technically expected to start. And that’s assuming everyone is there and ready to go at ten, which is a stretch for the first day back after a holiday.  

The boys lounge on the stage of the chilly theater like they had spread out a picnic basket instead of laying on their spread out winter coats awaiting the heat to kick in. Ian is amused by the way Mickey eats his McGriddles. They are meant to be treated like a sandwich, a single unit of meal. But Mickey seems to treat the form the food comes prepared in as more of a suggestion, easily overridden. He eats the top pancake, then the sausage patty, before he folds up the bottom pancake and eats it like a mini sandwich all its own. If it were anybody else, Ian would think it is absolute Philistine behavior. But on Mickey, it’s surprisingly cute to watch him play with his food.  

“So, I’m guessing your video chat with your brothers went okay?” Mickey hadn’t brought up his brothers since their phone call on Thursday morning. Though they’ve been texting back and forth throughout the days since. 

“What makes you figure?” 

“When we drove by your house, you mentioned it was Colin who fixed it up,” Ian shrugs. “I thought maybe it might’ve come up when you guys talked.” 

Mickey tries to hide the smile curling up the corners of his mouth, but he can’t fool Ian. “Yeah, we had a better time than I was expecting. I thought they were gonna give me such a hard time about the music thing, but turns out they were into it. I was taking requests after a while. Joey’s fucking tone deaf, though. Absolutely butchered ‘Piano Man.’” 

“See? Didn’t I say you’d have a good time?”  

“You waiting for me to give you a pat on the back, Nostradamus?” 

“Maybe? Or a shoulder rub?” Ian admits sheepishly. “They’re killing me from waiting tables all weekend.” 

“Bet those Thanksgiving platters you were talking about didn’t help. C’mere.”  

Before Ian even realizes what is happening, Ian is letting Mickey pull his him between his thighs and small, yet deft digits are exploring his shoulders. He didn’t expect Mickey to take him up on the request, but he is soon sighing with relief as those classically trained fingers ply upon his muscles like just another musical instrument. 

“Fuck…” he groans. The heat definitely feels like it’s working now. He doesn’t know if Mickey has magical hands from years of practice or if they just feel that way because Ian has wanted Mickey’s hands on him since August. 

“You weren’t kidding, Gallagher. You’re all knots back here.” 

“If you ever give up on music, you got a good shot as a masseuse, Mick.” 

“Hi praise, man,” Mickey hums as he continues to make Ian feel like there are fireworks rocketing off in his brain. Ian takes deep breaths, desperately trying to keep his body calm, but everything about Mickey’s touch feels exhilarating. 

His breath hitches as Mickey’s hands slowly travel downward. Mickey must hear Ian yelp because he explains, “I’m just following the tension, E.” 

“‘Kay.” 

“You want me to stop?” 

He shakes his head. “Keep going.” 

Both boys are suddenly very quiet, not a thought between them other than the physical contact. The world seems so still around him, the only truth is that his best friend’s hands on him feel like a circuit finally being completed, like it should have always been there. His breath on the back of Ian’s neck feels warm and salty-sweet. 

He doesn’t know how long they stay like that, their bodies stock still, not even Mickey’s fingers moving after a while, just the urgent rhythm of their breathing telling each other not to break the contact.  

He doesn’t know how long they stay like that. But finally there is a clatter in the distance and the telltale sound of Quinn and Layla welcoming each other back and Robin’s typical bluster. Suddenly, Mickey’s fingers are gone and both boys are shifting away from one another. 

And Ian suddenly feels so cold. 

“Frick and Frack, you two seriously the only two here?” Asks Robin, brandishing a Box o’ Joe in one hand and delicately balancing two boxes of donuts in the other. The spoils of her Dunkin employee discount. 

Ian is tempted to point out that it is twelve past the hour, which means by theater logic, the three of them are almost thirty minutes late themselves. But he doesn’t see the point in poking the bear. It’s always difficult getting everyone into the theater on-time. They’re college kids, no matter how much they try to think they’re practically professional adults. And the Winter Showcase is student-produced, so they don’t even have Dr. Casciotti here to crack the whip.  

Slowly but surely, though, Dry Tech hits its stride a little after eleven. The directors and stage managers of the four short plays each take their turn programming their light and sound cues with the technicians. But the stage managers all double as each others’ run crew, so Mickey is kept busy while Ian waits for his turn at bat.  

All the while, Ian is left to think about what just transpired between them. Those sparks. They’ve always been there. Or at least they have for Ian. Mickey has to realize, doesn’t he? He’s straight, but he’s not an idiot. Ian is convinced that whether Mickey admits it or not, he must feel that there is something between them moving beyond friendship. Mickey has always treated Ian differently than just about anyone Ian has ever seen him interact with, which is to say Mickey actually seems to like being around him. Two Southsiders in a sea of upper middle-class kids who simply cannot understand the world of want and deprivation they came from, they grew anchored to one another just so easily. But it feels like it’s evolving into something deeper, more meaningful. Or maybe it’s just in Ian’s head. What if Mickey is just a good friend and Ian just wants to believe that platonic affection is something more?  

He quietly curses himself. He’s hardly a virgin. Well, maybe a born-again virgin these days. But back before his diagnosis when he was so eager to please whomever, he never learned to figure out whether guys liked him or just wanted him. He was so young, always too eager to throw himself at guys and hoping things will sort themselves out after the fact.  

He knows Mickey likes him. But does Mickey want him?    

The question doesn’t come up when they break for lunch. Or at dinner before the actors arrive for Wet Tech. And they carefully dance around the topic of the massage all the rest of the week. 

***  

The week passes quickly enough. The final weeks of the semester always fly by faster like this, like the looming threat of final exams is barreling towards them. The Winter Showcase feels like a sandbar protecting the mainland from the oncoming storm. The end-of-the-semester stress gets channeled into the production. Four original student-written one act plays, three performances. Then before Ian even realizes it, it is ten-thirty and he and Mickey are walking into DeQuay Bouchard’s aunt’s house for the last cast party of the semester.  

Ian has come through his first time at directing mostly thinking he did an okay job. He got good performances out of his actors despite not getting his first or even second pick of the scripts. He’s even more impressed with Mickey as his stage manager. For someone who is otherwise content to hide behind his piano and keep his scathing opinions to himself, Mickey knows how to corral people and create a sense of order you wouldn’t expect him to be capable of.   

“Y’know,” sighs Mickey as he pours himself a glass of Kentucky bourbon, “I usually hate these things.” To say that his drink is aromatic is an understatement. Ian can practically feel the fumes coming off it. 

“You seemed okay at the Midsummer cast party,” shrugs Ian as he snaps open the pop top of a can of Starry.  

“Guess you’re right. But it’s fewer people grinding up on each other here.” 

“Give it time,” smirks Ian as he sips his drink.  

“You know what I mean. It’s not exactly a frat kegger. Crowds are the fucking worst, man. And it’s not schmoozy like when the music school crowd does their thing.” 

“Cast parties just exist for us to put a show to bed. And make inside jokes. Bad ones.” 

“I’ve noticed, your puns hurt like heartburn.” Mickey takes a long swig of his drink.  

“You love ‘em.” Ian refutes as he loads a small paper plate with pizza rolls. 

“You got charm enough to make me stay a few hours, Gallagher. I’ll give you that,” Mickey admits as he finishes off his drink.  

Ian has known Mickey can really pack in the alcohol, but it is only at cast parties like this that Ian has observed him drink any more than nursing an Old Style in the privacy of his dorm room. But this is the second cast party they have attended together where the very first thing Mickey has done is down a drink as quickly as possible and just as quickly pour himself another.  

Ian reminds himself that Mickey just got done telling him that he doesn’t do well with parties and crowds. Social lubricant, that’s all it must be. Ian has seen what it looks like when someone has a problem with drugs and alcohol. Lip had his future basically served to him on a silver platter and nearly lost it all. He drank to deal with stress, to numb himself when things became too much for him to cope with. He drank to quell the nagging voice in his head telling him he isn’t good enough. It took a college tribunal and thirty-days at a rehab clinic before he got his drinking under control.  

Even worse are his parents. Frank spent Ian’s whole life claiming to be teaching his children self-reliance only to turn around and spend welfare checks meant to support a family of eight on an impressive variety of ways of altering his consciousness.  

And his mother? Like him, Monica was bipolar, Frank could never get her to stay on her prescribed meds very long. Having the wild Monica he fell in love with was more important to him than having a healthy Monica who could have still been with her family now if she had only had the support system she needed. She medicated in other ways; despite the adverse effects it had on her moods. She would always rather be manic and happy than stable and face a numbing reality. 

But this isn’t anything like that. Mickey is fine. He’s warm and pink faced, smiling warmly and letting himself enjoy the party even if it is only once in a while. Ian knows he isn’t supposed to drink thanks to his meds. They turn him into a total lightweight. But if Mickey is getting smashed, he wants to cut his own edge off so that he doesn’t worry. But he looks at Mickey, blessed with features that could have been carved from marble, enjoying himself as if unchained. Handsy and playful. He thinks of what could happen if either of them gets behind the wheel of Mickey’s SUV in a few hours. And so, he abstains and feeds off Mickey’s contact high instead.  

The party carries on. Cheesy line dances are danced. At least three relationships form, reform, or implode (showmances are a delicate thing), and the techies all get together to roast the actors via hastily created awards written on paper towels. Mickey refrains from joining the other stage managers and board ops, insisting to Ian that the paper towel awards are a silly tradition. But Ian chooses to believe he just didn’t want to leave Ian for the half hour it takes to put the awards together. 

One in the morning rolls around and the party is still raging. It is the last real time to cut loose before they all spend the next week holed up in their dorms, apartments, and the library studying all next week and taking final exams the week after. But Mickey is done. Still very plastered but so tired, that he keeps dozing off leaning on Ian for support.  

Ian manages to lure him away from the party and into his SUV. He takes some umbrage when Ian insists on driving, but his stance changes when Ian says he couldn’t live with himself if Mickey got in an accident. Though it really is a short drive back to campus. The beauty of a school nestled in the suburbs—nothing is ever all that far away. Even Chicago city limits are only about a thirty-minute drive. 

Ian guides Mickey by the shoulder to the elevator, then to his dorm room. Chaz is gone. Ian figures he must be at some sort of party of his own.  The football season is over, which rules out him being away at games. The air mattress is already out and inflated, it having been the plan for Ian to crash with Mickey all along. 

“Okay, Mick. We got back in one piece,” Ian declares as he lowers Mickey onto the side of his bed and clicks on the soft light on the lamp on his nightstand.  

Mickey grins warmly at him as he begins unbuttoning his shirt. Despite all the effort Ian took getting him to sit comfortably, Mickey stands back up so that they are at eye level again. “I had a good time tonight, Gallagher.” 

“Yeah, me too,” Ian agrees as he toes off his sneakers. 

“Thanks for taking me.” 

“You’re the one who drove,” Ian reminds Mickey as he tries to look anywhere besides Mickey’s pecs as he disrobes his shirt. He has stayed overnight in Mickey’s dorm room a few dozen times by now. Ian thinks he should be used to it by now, numb to how it makes him feel when Mickey shucks off his jeans leaving him in just his tighty whities. He licks his lip and tries to focus on his feet. But he catches sight of Mickey’s shapely calves in the process and his brain short circuits.  

“You know my favorite part of the evening was hanging with you, right?” Mickey asks as he slips under the bedsheet and comforter. 

Ian beams warmly. “Mine too. Never had a friend quite like you, Mick.” 

“Same. I never had a ride or die,” Mickey agrees as he watches Ian lower himself onto the air mattress. A minute passes, maybe two. Mickey doesn’t break eye contact as Ian attempts to settle into the air mattress. He’s slept on it so many times by now. It should feel like old hat to him. But it feels awkward and unnatural. He turns away. Maybe he can settle more easily without Mickey in his line of sight, without staring back into those ocean-blue eyes staring back at him. 

“The bed’s cozier,” Mickey suggests. 

And just like that he turns to face Mickey once again. Despite the buzz, there is an earnest pleading in Mickey’s gaze. “It’s probably warmer, too.” 

Ian grins softly at him. “It’ll probably be a tight squeeze, Mick.” 

The raven-haired upperclassman blushes as he reflects the smile back at Ian. “I don’t take up that much room, man.” 

***  

Sunlight slats in through the blinds of Mickey’s window, warming Ian’s face. He feels himself wrapped around something warmer and more solid than his body pillow. His eyes flutter open and he is greeted by the sight of his warms wrapped around Mickey’s smooth, soft body, legs entwined. Hands resting on the cakes of his best friend’s posterior. Mickey’s forehead is nestled into the small of Ian’s shoulder. 

He breathes in deep, inhaling the faint traces of Mickey’s aromatic shampoo, the smoky lingering scent of the bourbon he was drinking last night, an apple-scented deodorant that has long since begun to fade, and something else that is pure Mickey. In spite of himself, he nuzzles against Mickey’s nest of hair, long enough to hang past his ears if he didn’t slick it back every morning. He cannot help himself when he places a single chaste kiss on his friend’s forehead.  

This can’t be real. Mickey likes him, but not like this. It has to be a dream. But if it is a dream, Ian resigns to close his eyes and continue it as long as it will last.  

Chapter Text

He wakes up the morning after the last cast party of the semester with his face pressed against the heat of someone’s flesh. Wiry, coppery chest hair tickles against the almost imperceptible scruff on the tip of his chin. He blinks away the crust of sleep from his eyes and realizes that he must not have been dreaming. He really did work up the courage to invite Ian into his bed last night. They are both naked except for their briefs. And Mickey feels his own unit twitch and dribble pre involuntarily at the realization. Looking down, Ian’s own morning wood is protruding past the waistband of his Fruit of the Looms and is pressed against Mickey's leg. His jaw nearly drops when he sees that Ian’s manhood runs nearly half the length of Mickey’s thigh. 

He almost reaches for it, just to see what another man’s shaft feels like in his hand, but he chickens out at the last second. He squirms out of Ian’s embrace, as blissful as it may feel, before he does something stupid that he will live to regret. He sits on the side of the bed, fishing out his clothes from last night. They’re tangled up with Ian’s clothes. Mickey tries not to think of the symbolism.  

He is halfway dressed when he feels the weight in the bed shift. Looking over his shoulder and sees Ian sitting up, propping himself up on his arms. He’s wearing that big dopey smile that keeps working its way past Mickey’s defenses. 

“You weren’t kidding, Mick. Your bed is so much easier on my back than that air mattress. Thanks for letting me bunk with you.” 

“What are friends for?” hums Mickey in reply. He wants to kick himself. What are friends for? Why aren’t you telling him he is welcome to join you any time? Why aren’t you telling him how long you’ve wanted to do that with him? Why aren’t you acting like you’re going out of your way to friendzone yourself with the first and only person you’ve ever let get this close? Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.  

“Some party last night, huh?” Ian asks. 

“Yeah, I got so fucking drunk.” 

“Yeah. Me, too,” Ian’s tone is clipped and awkward. Mickey wonders if Ian is trying to pass off last night as just a drunken mistake. Then again, that’s what Mickey’s doing too. It’s like they have only one brain cell between them sometimes. 

“Do you...” Mickey hesitates. He almost asks if Ian wants to talk about what they did or did not do together last night, but he shifts lanes at the last second. “Do you want to head over to the caf? My treat.” Coward. “I need something greasy and starchy to soak up this hangover.” 

“What about water? Clear liquids?”  asks Ian as he reaches over the side of the bed and grabs his hoodie from the floor.  

“I’ll take alternate remedies under advisement, big guy.”  

They never discuss the night before, how they woke up enmeshed in one another. Mickey never finds the courage to confess that he wouldn’t mind waking up like that in the future. They both proceed like it is just like any other time Ian has crashed in Mickey’s room, as though they didn’t wake up to find that the earth had shifted below them and now everything is different. Maybe waking up cuddling with your best friend isn’t a major deal for gay guys, Mickey ponders. What if this is earth-shattering for me but just another morning for Ian?  

Mickey figures best he keep his feelings to himself until he can sort them out. And in the meantime, he is content to continue on palling around with Ian and pretending that everything between them is just as it was before. Because apparently it was a non-issue for Ian. 

To play it safe, even if he can’t help wanting to study with Ian every day for the next two weeks of the semester, he pushes for safe terrain, neutral territory. The library, the dining hall, the lounge in the student union.  

He wants Ian in his bed again like he couldn’t believe. He wants to breathe in the earthy cedar wood scent of his body wash and his Old Spice cologne. He wants to be bold enough to discover if Ian’s breath tastes like peppermint on his lips. He longs for so much and he wants it all with Ian. But he still isn’t ready to process what that means on a deeper level.  

And then the semester is over. University policy states that the students need to be out of their dorms twenty-four hours after their last final exam. He longs to invite Ian to spend the night on that last night before he left for home. He wishes he could work up the nerve to ask Ian to come home with him. He feels like such a coward when he doesn’t. 

He drives back to Pittsburgh this time. He isn’t about to spend four weeks exiled to Western Pennsylvania without a method of transportation. But the drive is a long eight hours compared to the ninety-minute flight. And it leaves Mickey alone for far too long with thoughts he has been pushing aside and sublimating ever since the day he befriended the redhead.  

Long ago, his life fell apart. He was torn from his home, his family apart from his sister, and sent away from everything he ever knew. Despite years of therapy, the only times he ever felt at peace was when he would give himself over to his music; tune out the world and focus on how his body reacts to the music, practically breathing in every melodic phrase like oxygen. In all that time, his bond with Ian Gallagher is the only thing to ever rival what music means to him. Ian Gallagher both calms him and excites him. He sets Mickey’s mind on fire, his heart alight, and causes a burning need in his nether regions.  

It’s not that he had been blind to other guys around him. Yes, he has looked at guys before. What guy doesn’t, he figured. He would notice guys and would compare himself to them, wonder what it would be like to have traits they had that he lacked. He has caught himself wondering whether some guys’ bodies were as firm as they looked, wondered how their hands would feel on him. He never acted on those thoughts before, he could always dismiss them. He thought that meant he couldn’t gay. He thought if he was, then those moments of curious intrigue would be something more intense, inescapable. They would be passion. But he always pushed past them before. He always had something more important to think about— he had his music. But meeting Ian made Mickey feel like he has lived his life in silence up until then. 

He takes a pitstop on the way home at one of the large, circular rest stops that dot alongside the Ohio turnpike. He pulls his phone off the cradle mounted to the dashboard and turns off Google Maps before he checks to see if he has any messages. There are a few from Elaine where she works her way through a one-sided conversation on what Mickey wants for dinner. She apparently settled on ordering some Primanti Bros. while he was busy driving. Then there is a message from Mandy warning him to look up Saturnalia so he can follow along with Elaine’s latest deep dive into alternative winter holidays.  

But nothing from Ian. It shouldn’t bother him. No doubt, Ian is being dragged into the Gallaghers’ own holiday festivities just as Mickey is slowly bounding his way into Elaine and Wyatt’s. Hell, from the picture Ian paints of his siblings, he wouldn’t be shocked if Fiona put him to work at Patsy’s for the length of Winter break. He’s become so used to him and Ian having their weird lack of boundaries that he forgets that Ian has a whole other side of his life that doesn’t include him.  

The thought hits him like a sucker punch.  

Over a plate of Sbarro’s pizza and a Red Bull, he tries again to sort out how he feels about Ian. He needs to get it on a lock now before he slips up and ends up pouring out his woes to his sister or his aunt over the next three weeks.  

So he pulls out the notes section and makes a list of things he knew to be true about how he feels for Ian Gallagher. 

• Ian Gallagher is his best friend,
• He wishes they were more.
• He thinks Ian feels the same way but he isn’t sure.
• Waking up in Ian’s arms felt natural
• When he closes his eyes, he can still feel Ian’s touch.
• He has brought himself to climax several times in the past two weeks just thinking about it.
• He hopes that it wont be an isolated incident.
• Ian has been through a lot with little to show for it and deserves good things. 
• He doesn’t know if he can give them to him.
• He wants to try.
• He doesn’t know if it makes him gay, but he doesn’t know what else to call being obsessed with your male best friend.
• Ian makes Mickey understand love songs a little better.
• He should have kissed Ian when he had the chance. 

Four hours later, he holes himself up in his room at his aunt and uncle’s house, as he usually is for the first several hours after the long drive from Chicago.  He is laying in bed on his stomach, one arm wrapped around an old plush otter that Mandy likes to give him a hard time about. He nibbles idly at a pastrami on rye while he reviews what he had written on his pit stop. They read in turn as both maudlin and saccharine, but not exactly histrionic. They feel true.  

He is about to put his phone away and take a power nap before dinner when an incoming call  pops up on his phone. It’s a FaceTime request  from Ian. Mickey feels a tightness in his chest he didn’t even notice suddenly slackens. The exhale is soothing. Usually, he and Ian text each other back and forth throughout the day even if it is just sharing memes or bitching about assignments. The only other time they’ve spoken to each other on the phone was at Thanksgiving when Mickey needed the added encouragement before he talked to his Chicago family for the first time in years.  

The call connects and he is treated to the sight of Ian, his hair askew, wearing a white undershirt that hugs his chest and biceps. “Hey, Gallagher. Merry Christmas.” 

“And a joy-oh Nöel to you, too, Mick.” The redhead replies in butchered French. Ian’s voice is an uneven mixture of fatigue and enthusiasm. 

“Over ten hours without so much as a meme from  you, man. I was starting to worry you were in the hospital or something,” Mickey jokes. 

“No such luck,” Ian sighs. “helping install drywall all day.” 

“Why?” 

“Because Fiona is insane. Anyway, didn’t anyone ever tell you that texting while driving makes accidents three times more likely?” 

“Thanks, Mister Crash Test Dummy.” 

“Excuse me for worrying, okay? I didn’t know how bad the roads would be.” 

“The roads?” 

“Yeah, according to my weather app you’re supposed to be hit by a heavy snow storm coming down from Ontario.” 

He looks out the window and sure enough snow has started to fall in the hour or so since he arrived. “Looks like I got in the house just in time.” Mickey grins. “Are you worried about little old me, Gallagher?” 

“Of course!” Ian practically sings. “Damn right, I worry about you, Mick. You’re my favorite person.” 

That just about does Mickey in.  He presses his face into a line to keep from grinning like an idiot, despite the fact that he is blushing a vivid shade of scarlet.  

From there, they talk about everything and nothing. Mickey props his phone up on his nightstand and they must spent over an hour talking about their holidays so far. Ian tells Mickey about his little sister’s attempts to recruit one of them to play Santa Claus for their niece. And Mickey regales Ian of Aunt Elaine’s plans on incorporating a Pagan Roman holiday into their Christmas. Ian relates a big family fight that broke out when Lip found out that Fiona used the family home as collateral for a loan so she could buy a laundromat. 

“Wait, a minute. She bought a what? That’s way outta left field.” 

“Agreed. And it’s a money pit. I got pulled off waiting tables to help fix up her new business without getting paid.” 

“Your family, man… Too much Sturm.” 

“And more than enough Drang, I know.” 

“I don’t see why you don’t live on campus. Our scholarship covers the dorms and I don’t know how you get anything done in that nuthouse.” 

Ian is silent a moment, but then sighs. “It’s not really an option, man.” 

“Aw, c’mon, I could get Chaz to move into his frat house and we could be roomies.” 

“And where would you be without Chaz’s air fryer?” Mickey doesn’t know why he keeps shooting down the idea, but he’s trying not to read rejection into it. 

“Why do you stay there man?” 

Ian looks away from his phone, his expression darkening. “It’s… it’s complicated.” But then he looks up at Mickey, flicking away a tear with the back of his thumb. “But I’d love it if we were roommates, Mick.” 

There is a sudden loud clattering coming from the background. 

Mickey grins crookedly, biting at his lip anxiously before he takes a leap and asks, “What about bedmates?” 

Ian smirks and looks like he is about to reply, but then he catches sight of something out of the corner of his eye and does a double take. “Holy shit!” His eyes dart back and forth between the camera as he reaches for a baseball bat with his free hand. “Frank! Don’t you fucking dare!”  

“What’s going on?” 

“I gotta go, Mick,” he apologizes with his eyes. 

“Hey, say no more.” Mickey accepts bemusedly as Ian ends the connection. If half the stories Ian has told him are true, then he is in for a treat when Ian follows up with him later.  

He only has a few moments to himself before Mandy knocks on his bedroom door and lets herself in. “He sounds nice,” she remarks, and it takes Mickey a bit of willpower to bite back the impulse to remind her that nobody asked her to volunteer her opinion.  

He looks her up and down. Her pixie has grown out by about half an inch and has dyed a garish fire engine red. Mickey swears he hasn’t seen his little sister stick with a single hair color since she was fifteen. 

“Do you just eavesdrop on me out of principle now?” 

“We share a bedroom wall and your voice carries. Was that the friend you were talking to at Thanksgiving?”  

“Yeah, that was him.” 

“Planning on telling me his name this time?” 

“Okay, the questioning’s way too invasive.” 

“Does he know that you want to be more than friends?” She asks.  

“Fuck off,” he volleys back with no bite behind the words. It doesn’t sound like an accusation, but Mickey still cannot help but put up his defenses. 

“I mean it, Mick. You actually sound fucking happy for once,” she insists as she takes a seat at the bench of Mickey’s keyboard. 

“Maybe I’m happy ‘cause it’s Christmas,” he shrugs. 

“Please. Have you met you, Mr. Grinch?”  

“Hey! I actually do like Christmas.” 

She smirks, looking at him like she is engaging in a staring contest and waiting for Mickey to be the first to crack. “Yeah, but you’re the most pathologically crabby person under the age of seventy I know. Or you were until you met this guy.” 

Mickey is still bristling at Mandy’s suggestion even if she has hit the nail on the head and somehow manages to cut through the bullshit more deftly than he is managing. “You know, it’s kind of wild to just assume I’m into someone just because he makes me happy.” 

“That’s literally what you’re supposed to assume if someone makes you happy. How are you this bad at feelings, you fucking Vulcan? Are you being all cagey ‘cause I know you like someone? Or ‘cause that someone’s a boy?” 

Mickey doesn’t answer. Even if he had a response at the ready, he doesn’t think he would share it. But he smacks his lips together as he thinks about her question. He knows he wants Ian more than he has wanted anything. But what about the realities of what it may mean? Ian has been out since he was fifteen. Being with him would mean being out himself. Does he have the fortitude to be seen walking hand in hand with another man?  

At Mandy’s insistence, he joins the family… and also his Cousin Audrey’s annoying serious boyfriend, Brett… for a movie after dinner. Uncle Wyatt always puts on A Muppet Christmas Carol the first night all the kids are home for the holidays. Wyatt is always more about the tried and true staples while Elaine always wants to try new things. 

Towards the end of the movie, Mickey gets a text from Ian.  

Ian: sorry about before. Frank caused a raccoon infestation. I wish I was exaggerating. 

Mickey: pics or it didn’t happen. 

Ian sends him a picture of Ian’s arm scratched up. 

Ian: I’m in the free clinic for a tetanus shot. Merry Christmas 

Ian continues to spin a tale that actually stretches back a few weeks involving his louse of a stepfather walling himself up in the house so they cannot kick him out again, this didn’t last, obviously. Then the guy took over a the vacant home of a vacationing neighbor and converting it into a fake homeless shelter only to get ousted by the indigents that he had been grifting. This afternoon’s development involves him sneaking back in the house by climbing in a second story window and letting in a family of raccoons in the process. Something tells Mickey that the raccoons were easier to get out of the house than Frank. 

Ian: So what does a normal Xmas look like at your aunt's house? 

Mickey: Normal is relative. I did tell you about my aunt’s Saturn thing, right? 

Ian: At least it’s never dull around your place. 

Mickey: He says as he waits for an emergency tetanus shot. 

Ian: Never boring in a good way. I don’t even know what Xmas is going to look like for us this year. We want to do something for Liam and Franny, but considering Fiona practically sold the house out from under us, I don’t know. 

Mickey: So no holiday plans at all? 

Ian: Fitz invited me to his NYE party. 

Kory Fitzroy, one of the other openly queer guys in the theater department, Mickey realizes immediately. Like Ian, he double dips between acting and tech, painting most of the sets. Mickey feels a heat behind his ears and a tightening in his gut. Where does Fitz get off inviting his Gallagher to a party? Mickey fumes and excuses himself from the living room, not wanting to draw attention to himself.  

He wants to ask Ian not to go out with this guy. He wants to plead with with the redhead to be patient with him, wait for him while he figures his shit out. But that isn’t fair to Ian. His life is fucking complicated. He deserves a guy who doesn’t add to the struggle. He deserves to find a guy who isn’t too chickenshit to admit he likes another boy.  

Ian: That sound like a good idea? 

Mickey: You do what you want, Gallagher. 

He knocks his head against the hallway wall and bites back the urge to scream. It’s not his place to make these kinds of decisions for Ian. As much as he wants to hold onto the guy, he can’t bring himself to tell Ian what he wants. So what gives him the right to ask Ian to choose him?  

He pockets his phone and contemplates breaking into his uncle’s liquor cabinet. This might be the kind of conversation he is better off having with a bottle of whiskey. But then his phone buzzes again. He contemplates ignoring it. He doesn’t feel like torturing himself by continuing this conversation where he pretends to be happy for Ian getting a real date for once.  

But… it’s Ian. And so he checks the message, sitting on the second step of the staircase before he unlocks his phone. He reads. 

Ian: Any interest in driving back to Chicago early? Be my plus one? 

Mickey feels a rush flow through him and his whole body relaxes. He starts typing a response, smiling like an idiot. But then he second guesses what he taps out and deletes it. This happens two more times before he finally hits “Send.” 

Mickey: Just don’t go thinking I’m gonna buy you a corsage or something. 

Ian: Wouldn’t dream of it, Mick  :)

Chapter Text

N’Sync’s “I Drive Myself Crazy” fills the air. Even though it is muffled, it cuts through the unnatural quiet of Patsy’s storage room. Ian reaches for his pocket, a hot flush rushing up the back of his neck, self conscious that anyone outside the room heard his personalized ringtone for his best friend. He is so thankful that he is in Patsy’s back room looking for replacement syrup for the pop machine when the call comes in.  

“Hey Duracell,” Mickey croons.   

“Duracell?” He smiles into the receiver.   

“Well, yeah. All that red hair, you’re a total copper top.”  

Ian blushes at the meaning of Mickey’s newest nickname for him.   

 “Feeling rested?” Ian asks.  

“You know it.”  

 Mickey had driven back to Chicago the day before, but if talking to him on the phone was any indication, then Mickey was sorely beat after the long drive. But he certainly seems bright-eyed and bushy-tailed when he calls ahead to let Ian know he is coming. Mickey is generally a texter, but there is something about time apart that makes both of them more prone to using their phones as they were originally intended.  

“You gonna be good to go if swing by to pick you up in about an hour?”  

“An hour? Mick, the party isn’t until nine tonight.”  

“Yeah, and we haven’t hung out in two weeks. Think we’re gonna get any quality time when we’re in a house full of your loudmouth theater friends?”  

“You do realize you resemble that remark, right? Anyway, slow your roll. Fiona put me in charge of the brunch rush.”  

“What? Like you’re the maître d?”  

“The host, yeah. More like the chump of the day. I’ll be done around one, if you wanna hang out then.”  

“Yeah, sure.” Replies Mickey breezily. “Want me to pick you up at the diner, then?”   

“Do you need the address?”  

“It’s off Union Ave, right? Like on the doggie bags you bring over?”  

“Oh, please. Don’t deny you order Grubhub when I’m not looking.”  

“I’m not denying anything,” Mickey snickers into the receiver. “Catch you later, tough guy.”  

Ian is all smiles as he pockets his phone and heads out to replace the syrups in the pop machine. His younger brother Carl looks over from where he is manning the deep fryer.  He looks at Ian with an incredulous look. Which is to be expected. Carl is on break from his first year at Chicago Military Academy and in the past four months, he has become surprisingly self-serious.   

Once upon a time, the kitchen would have been both the best and worst place in a restaurant to staff Carl. On the one hand, he has always had a fascination with watching things burn. On the other hand, he has always had a fascination with watching things burn. But a little structure and discipline has gone a long way with Carl, who treats working in the kitchen like it is a sacred trust.  

“What are you so happy about?”  

“No reason.”  

“What’s his name?”  

“You don’t know him, he’s a friend from school.”  

Ian is feeling pretty grateful now that Fiona is distracted by the laundromat and Lip has long since washed his last dish at the diner. Either of them would have a flurry of follow-up questions. They would ask if Ian is focusing enough on school, maintaining his scholarship, is he taking his fucking meds. Carl doesn’t have the wherewithal to probe further.   

The difference between working at the diner over his vacations versus the weekend shifts Fiona usually schedules Ian for comes down to the pace and the workflow. Working mornings on Saturdays and Sundays is a marathon. Everyone wants to gather together for brunch. And “brunch” is a surprisingly nebulous time frame. So, there is no specific “morning rush” on the weekends. It’s all rush all the time.   

But the 31 st lands on a Wednesday. And  people aren’t taking off in droves the day before the actual holiday the same way they do for Christmas Eve. It follows more of a typical weekday ebb and flow. This means, Patsy’s was already in a bit of a lull when Ian took Mickey’s  call. To be honest, Ian would rather the shift be busy so he doesn’t notice the amount of time standing in between him and Mickey.   

But the pace picks up steam again at 10:45 when the lunchtime regulars begin filing. And from there, Ian almost regrets wishing for the pace to pick up. Local businesses are fond of doing group orders through GrubHub and UberEats while everyone from construction workers to the yuppy gentrifiers from the yoga place down the street all come in to take a load off for their lunch hours.  

Halfway through the lunch rush, he gets pulled back to the kitchen for an argument between Carl and Luis, who works the short order grill on a regular basis. Carl had been covering the grill the past couple days while Luis took his children to visit their aunt in Indianapolis. But now that he has been remanded to the fryer, his little brother is being what Ian would call obnoxiously anal retentive, calling into question every aspect of Luis’ work. One would think Ian’s brother was eying a job with the city health inspectors or a fire marshall the way he interrogates  Luis over storage standards in the cooler and pantry,  temperature standards in the freezer, whether he is grilling the burgers all the way to 165f before plating them, and even the frequency Luis cleans off his grill.   

The new and improved Carl makes Ian long for the mischievous little gremlin he used to be. Ian spends more time mediating between the two than the hourly pay is really worth. It takes a while, but he convinced Luis not to quit, reminding him that Carl is going back to school in two days. And he secures Carl’s cooperation by threatening to send him across the street to help Fiona. And if weren’t for the fact that Ian didn’t want to lose someone on the fryer in the middle of the lunch rush, Ian thinks he  might have made good on his threat. Carl can do less damage in a half torn apart storefront full of power tools.   

Once he puts out that fire, he is about ready for a break. He needs twenty minutes to himself while he debates whether the flexibility of working for his sister is worth the aggravation.   

Ian comes back from his break, consisting of a protein bar and blue Gatorade out in the alley, to find one of Fiona’s newer hires, Didi, looking for him.  The expression on her face is enough to cause Ian’s butt cheeks to clench. If there is one thing that he dreads on the rare occasions that Fiona schedules him to supervise a shift, it is one of the wait staff approaching him with that expression. Because it generally means a customer is about to chew him out.   

“What seems to be the problem, Deeds?”   

“We got a jerk at table three, says he wants to speak to you.”  

“Did we get his order wrong?”  

“You might’ve. He asked for the gangly redhead that served him last time.”  

“Fuck…”  

He reaches behind him and tightens the half apron around his waist, grabbing his notepad and pencil from the front pocket, nervously twirling the little golf pencil between his index and middle finger like a miniature baton. He has been made to field complaints about other wait staff on the rare occasions that he has been appointed to supervise a shift. But Fiona has always been around when people have complained about his service. He inwardly groans for lack of a safety net, even if it is highly doubtful that Fiona will can him without a damn good reason.   

He turns the corner to face what is sure to be a hostile experience, but he stops dead in his tracks, eyebrows furrowed. For a moment, he darts his head around, suddenly worried about being spotted by Fiona. Not that he is worried about Mickey meeting his family, but he doesn’t feel like getting grilled unprepared. It takes a moment for him to recall that Fiona is still across the street at the Wendell’s. “I thought I told you one o’clock.”  

Mickey Milkovich sits in the corner booth clad in a snug denim jacket with alpaca wool lining the collar. His hair has been trimmed into a neat Ivy League cut that is sure to impress when he starts student teaching the week after next. He looks up from the large, laminated menu he has been studying and says, “Why didn’t you ever tell me you guys have cheesy gravy fries? Holding out on me, Gallagher?”  

He rolls his eyes. “Because the food’s cold by the time I get to campus and even if reheated fries didn’t taste like ass. And we both know neither of us is gonna clean that mess in Chaz’s air fryer.”  

“Fair point.  So, yeah. I’ll take the off brand poutine and a side of turkey bacon.”  

“I’m not your server, Mick,” Ian smiles despite himself.   

“Yeah, but I’ll tip you better than poor man’s Zendaya over there," he replies cockily, sticking his tongue out of the corner of his mouth. Ian feels his khakis tighten. He wonders offhandedly if Mickey has any idea what he does to him. He adjusts his posture just in case it’s noticeable underneath his apron.  

“You’re lucky you’re cute, Mister Milkovich.”  

Mickey twitches for a moment at the sound of his own name and for an almost imperceptible split second, his debonair mask falters. But the moment passes as swiftly as it comes.  

“Who are you calling cute, Gallagher? I’m fucking adorable.”   

“The customer is always right,” Ian snickers, jotting down Mickey’s order.   

“And could you set aside two slices of the orange creamsicle pie for when we head out? My treat?”  

***   

“So you drove up from campus an hour early just to grab some diner food?” Ian asks as Mickey leads Ian to his car a few blocks away.  

“Didn’t actually spend the night in the dorms,” Mickey shrugs. “One of my brothers offered to put me up for the night.”  

Ian feels himself warm up from the inside out. “So things are going well with them?”  

“I dunno. It’s a little weird. They think me and Mandy are a little silver spoony with college and all, but it’s not like they treat me like some class traitor or nothing like that.”  

“So, were you at your old house?” Ian has to admit, the mental image of knocking at the infamous House of Horrors and asking if Mickey can come out to play gives him a case of gooseflesh.    

“Are you kidding? Colin has a baby. Like the tiny kind that needs four a.m. feedings and shit like that. Count me out.”  

“Oh, yeah. We all went through that last year. Franny has a set of pipes on her. So which brother did you stay with?”  

“Iggy. If you can look past the fact that a cloud of Blue Dream follows him around like he’s Pigpen from the Peanuts cartoons, staying with him isn’t that bad.”  

“So, where does Iggy live?”  

“If I told you, I’d have to kill you.”  

Ian stops dead in his tracks and it takes Mickey two paces before he realizes he is walking alone. He turns to face Ian, grinning devilishly. “You’re fucking gullible, man. I ever tell you that?”   

“You’re a dick, did I ever tell you that?”   

Mickey hits the button of his key fob and his SUV gives two staccato beeps mere feet from them. “He lives here,” Mickey answers, gesturing to the ten-story apartment building that his car is parked in front of. “He’s doing pretty well for himself. He’s an experience concierge at Greene’s Dispensary, which is moving up in the world. He used to deal in the alley behind the Kash N Grab.”  

“That was your brother?” Astounds Ian, eyes widening.  

“Greasy, stringy blond hair? Eyes too close together? Yup, that’s Iggs.”  

“The Kash N Grab was my first job. My brother and I used to get our weed off him.”   

Mickey is giving Ian a soft, worldly wise smile as they board his vehicle. “You know, my aunt has a word for shit like that. All those little coincidences we have. We grew up a street apart, ended up at the same school despite the fact that I ended up all the way on the other end of the country, we both won the same scholarship, you know my brother. That sort of thing.”  

“Coincidence?”  

“Providence. Think fate, kismet. That sorta thing.”  

“What?” Ian asks, suddenly intrigued. “You mean like we were always supposed to meet or something?”   

Mickey’s cheeks redden. “Definitely ‘or something,’ Gallagher.”  

***   

Kory Fitzsimons is a self-important tool. Ian knows this even if he won’t admit it aloud. He knows the guy likes to throw these parties just to show off the fact that his parents are never home and he has the run of his large suburban home. If it weren’t for the fact that it gave him a flimsy excuse to ask Mickey to come back from Pennsylvania early, he probably would have given it a hard pass.    

That said, he does owe the guy because with Mickey student teaching for the first nine weeks of the Spring semester, this might be one of the few times he will have an opportunity to hang out with Mickey. The upperclassman has insisted that they’ll still have plenty of time to hang out together, but he has known friends to drift away before. In the wake of his diagnosis the Summer after high school graduation, the friends he had known since he was knee-high all seemed to vanish overnight.  

And he doesn’t want to add Mickey to that list. So he resolves to just swallow his pride if he catches himself acting a little clingy.  

Ian has been to a few parties with Mickey now. He always clung to Ian like a life preserver, and even now Mickey doesn’t stray too far for him, but it is nice to see that he is a bit more comfortable with the rest of Ian’s theater friends. He tells jokes, can deliver one hell of a zinger when nobody anticipates it, and actually has one or two moves when he can convince him to join in with everyone dancing.   

Ian can’t get enough of watching Mickey dance, as it turns out. The way his head bobs and his shoulders bounce. The cavalier way the half-drained beer bottle practically dangles from his loose grip as he cha-cha slides first to the left, then to the right. The sway of his hips and the way his pert butt shakes.   

The way those deep azure-blue eyes never look at anyone but Ian, like they’re the only ones in the room.   

As midnight approaches though, Fitz’s house seems too warm. Ian and Mickey both need some fresh air, so despite the cool weather they excuse themselves to the back patio.   

They’re quiet for a long time, sitting on the varnished wooden steps shoulder to shoulder. Without even realizing it, he finds himself rubbing the small of Mickey’s back. And Mickey leans in closer to the touch. Ian tries to remind himself that Mickey has been drinking, and Mickey is always physically affectionate with him when he’s feeling a buzz.    

“What are you thinking about?” Asks Ian, just trying to break up the silence.  

Mickey leans his head on Ian’s shoulder. “This is my last New Years as a kid, man. Kinda has me freaked out a little.”  

“I hate to break it to you, Mick, but you’re twenty-one. You haven’t been a kid for a little while now.”  

“You know what I mean, red.” Mickey insists. “This time next year, I’ll be outta school, or in school but the other half of the equation. I’m so messed up man.”  

Ian feels prompted to take the bottle Mickey keeps shifting between his hands away, despite the fact that it has been empty for quite some time, setting it down in front of them. “I’ve seen you further gone, man.”   

“I’m not talking about that, man. Me. As a person. I’m messed up.” He inches away from Ian, but then seems to second-guess the decision to break the physical contact. He rolls onto his back and rests his head on Ian’s lap. “I’m twenty-one and I’ve never been with anyone. I’ve gotta get myself blind stinking drunk just to—”  

“Are you telling me you’re a virgin, Mick?”  

“Not that I’m trying to advertise,” Mickey fires back, hot under the collar. “Fuck! I’ve never even been kissed.”  

“Seriously?”  

Mickey nods. “No interest until recently.”  

“That so?”  

“My little sister—”  

“That’s Mandy, right?” Asks Ian, who has borne witness to many mentions of Mickey’s younger sibling, but only heard her name once or twice.  

“Yeah. She told me a week or two ago she thought I was asexual,” he admits, attempting to laugh it off. “I just didn’t think there was anyone worth kissing, is all.”  

Ian shrugs. “There’s nothing wrong with waiting. I know that sounds like a chick line, but I wish I’d been smarter when I was younger.” He looks down averting his gaze. “I was kind of a slut after I first came out.”  

“Hey!” Mickey swats his chest lazily with the back of his hand. “Don’t talk about my best friend that way!”  

Ian laughs, putting his hands up in surrender. “Alright, apologies to your friend.”  

“At least you saw what you wanted and you went for it, man.”  

“That’s the problem right there. I didn’t know what I wanted at sixteen. So I ended up trying a little of everything. I’m lucky I didn’t catch anything.”  

“Well, at least you put yourself out there. It might not’ve been the safest choice, but you’re smarter now, right?”  

“I guess... So, if you’ve always been single at New Years, what do you do when the ball drops at midnight?”  

“I play ‘Auld Lang Syne’ on the family piano.”  

Ian pulls out his phone and looks at the time. It’s 11:58. “I don’t think Fitz has a piano. I guess you got a couple more minutes to think up something else, then.”  

A crooked smile tugs at the right corner of Mickey’s pout and he rolls over so that he is sitting on his knees.  

“Think I got enough time to raid Fitz’s kitchen? Bang some pots and pans?”  

Or we could just bang, Ian thinks.   

His companion seems to be thinking along the same lines because Mickey is looking at him with lidded eyes, his gaze following Ian’s lips. Ian can’t help but do the same, mentally tracing the artfully bowed curvature begging to be caressed.  

“Okay, everybody,” comes a distant muffled voice from inside the house. “We’re at one minute till the new year!”  

“Can I ask you something, Mick?”  

“You know you can, Gallagher.”  

Ian hesitates, but then asks, “Are you straight or gay?”  

He expects Mickey to sit back and wonder, but Mickey almost seems like he has a question ready. “I don’t know what I am. But..."  

“But what?”  

Ian doesn’t know who leans in first. But slowly they inch closer until Ian's long thighs are bracketing in Mickey. The pianist’s small but nimble fingers cupping his biceps while his own find their way to the small of Mickey’s back. The tips of their noses nuzzle against one another while their lips just almost brush against each other, but not quite make contact.  

“But if I wanna figure things out with anyone, it’s you. Just you. Ian.”  

In the distance, Ian can vaguely register the other partiers counting down from ten. He hears roars of “Happy New Year!” But by then his lips are on Mickey’s and he cannot even fathom that the people in the universe exist in the same universe as him and Mickey. Everything falls away as the embrace deepens and the world is all champagne corks popping. The world changes indelibly as he maps the feel of those velvety lips against his own. And Ian can only wish that this moment will never end.  

Chapter Text

He wakes up laying face-down early on a Saturday morning in mid-March reaching for a body he knows isn’t there, but should be. His eyes flutter like a hummingbird’s wings, almost demanding his attention until he sits up and rubs away the crusty buildup of last night’s sleep from his eyes. He looks over and sees his jock roommate Chaz in the bed across from him.

Mickey could kick himself for not being bold enough in the Fall semester when his roommate was gone so much for football away games every other weekend. Now, it seems like Chaz is always around and always when it’s least convenient. And even though the guy is observant enough that he suspected Mickey had a thing for Ian before Mickey pieced things together, the dumb fucking jock won’t take a goddamn hint whenever he has Ian over.

And on that note, he rears up on all fours and looks down to the area between their beds where Ian is asleep on Chaz’s inflatable air mattress. The moody, emo, high school version of Mickey would be judging the hell out of the dreamy expression washing over present-day Mickey’s countenance. Ian is a side-sleeper, turned facing away from Mickey, his arms wrapped around a pillow. Mickey never thought he would be jealous of a Sealy Sterling but here he is. Mickey’s spare blanket is shoved down past his thighs, giving Mickey a full display of the way his vertebrae jut out as he curls in on himself. One of these days, they need to switch things up and let Mickey be the big spoon so he can trace Ian’s freckled constellations from his broad shoulders all the way down to the waistband of his Fruit of the Looms. And someday, hopefully soon, he needs to find the courage to delve below.

Christ, Ian must have the patience of a saint. They kiss and when they have the chance they cozy up together, but Mickey isn’t ready to take things further than that despite the stupid things simply being around Ian does to his body and mind. Mickey used to think he was fairly clever, but being around Ian turns him into a total idiot. But the strange thing is that he doesn’t seem to mind it. In fact he revels in it, especially now that he knows the feeling is mutual.

They can be idiots together.

But on top of Mickey simply not being ready to turn in his V-Card just yet, there is the aforementioned dearth of privacy. Of all the dumb luck, Mickey got placed with the one student athlete who doesn’t treat college like one long keg party. And his girlfriend is studying abroad in Italy this semester, so he is seemingly always around. He has lost track of the number of times they’ve gotten back to his dorm room late at night and Mickey has needed to ask Ian if he would mind sticking to the air mattress. Even if all they are doing is snuggling up at night and occasionally kissing, Mickey is cautious to do so with an audience.

In truth, they haven’t had all that many opportunities to share a bed as they could have last semester if they’d both been bolder. Mickey's student teaching cut into his free time more than either anticipated. The middle and high school rotations each came with assignments to grade each evening as well as time spent outside of the classroom with choir rehearsals. He couldn’t be up at all hours with Ian because he had a set in stone call time each morning of 7:20am. So, while Ian had carte blanche to spend the night after his rehearsals any time, both of them understood that it was only Fridays and Saturday nights that they could really stay up and hang as they are wont to do. It’s getting harder driving Ian back into the city on Sunday mornings for his 10 to 6 shift at the diner most Sundays. He hates the goodbyes. When did I become such a clingy, little bitch?

But towards the end of February, Mickey’s schedule freed up for the elementary school portion of his teaching practicum. There was no homework to grade, no choir to guest direct. It really freed up his evenings. And just in time for Ian to drop Mickey’s name to design the sound for the Slip A Sable Players’ final mainstage of the year, The Infernal Machine. The original designer withdrew for the semester and Ian insisted to Mickey that it would be a walk in the park for him.

The kicker than made Mickey leap at the opportunity instead of bite Ian’s head off for nominating him without checking with him first was the fact that this would be Ian’s first time as lighting designer in his own right. Robin was deeply afflicted with a case of senioritis in the lead-up to Spring Break. And in her magnanimous wisdom, decided that Ian was up to the task. Obviously Ian is up to the task, but she cemented the opinion of her that Mickey arrived at his first table read back in August—she's slightly more full of herself than she is full of crap. She gets to spend the last few months of her college career pretending the sun will never set on the carefree bloom of her youth and passes it off as a rite of passage for Ian, make him wear two hats for the production on top of learning a king’s ransom worth of lines.

But lucky for everyone involved, Ian is up for the challenge. And heading up two of the six key production elements of the show meant that they attended every production meeting together. Mickey was still helping out Ian at crew each weekend climbing up and down ladders and crawling through catwalks to hang, cable, and focus the lighting fixtures. But now Ian was also helping Mickey scour the internet and the library’s audio collection. And when they can’t quite find the sound bytes Mickey needs, they use Mickey’s access to the recording studios in the music school and figure out how to create the sounds they need in foley.

And in the back of his mind, Mickey feels a giddy sense of euphoria knowing that their names will be next to each other in the program under the Production Staff. Though he catches himself and wonders how and when did he become the type of guy who uses “giddy” in a sentence, even in his internal monologue.

Of course, the sound designer really doesn’t need to be at every rehearsal, but Mickey still finds transparently excuses to attend every time Ian’s name was on the rehearsal call list. Mickey isn’t exactly out, but he and Ian are an open secret at least within the theater program. In fact, they are sort of the new Quinn and Layla in terms of how much speculation everyone seems to have about them. And even though they aren’t exactly holding Ian’s hand, Mickey is surprisingly okay with folks knowing at least here in the theater. At least he is in good company, knowing about a third of the guys are some flavor of male preference.

Despite Ian's turn as Lysander last Fall, sitting in on rehearsals for The Infernal Machine provides Mickey with his first opportunity to really enjoy Ian's performing unencumbered by other responsibilities. It is so easy to forget that Ian is a Drama Performance major because he slips so easily into the technical and directing end of theater. But seeing him in his natural element makes Mickey feel like he is meeting Ian all over again in a truly spectacular way. Cast in the role of Anubis, Mickey is transfixed whenever Ian takes to the rehearsal stage and he gets to behold his best friend with benefits disappear into the persona of a wry, jackal-headed god of death. His bearing changes, lanky limbs becoming almost balletic in their movements. Mickey has sat through a lot of student actors since August, and perhaps he is a little biased, but Ian is the first time he’s seen one of his fellow students on stage and see a future professional.

It is a surprisingly apt play for Mickey to end his short tenure with campus theater. It is an adaptation of the Oedipus myth that asks the audience what if Oedipus was also kind of Hamlet, and also very French. More relevant to Mickey, though, is the extent to which the characters spin their wheels on the nature of fate and destiny. For someone who has given so much thought over to providence ever since the day he met Ian, it feels very on the nose.

This morning is the first day of tech week. It is also the first day since Mickey’s student teaching. This play is the first of four projects that stand between now and receiving his sheepskin in May. And really the only one that Mickey is doing by choice. He still needs to write his senior thesis for his music ed program, then he needs to present and defend his thesis to the school of music’s academic committee, which sounds nerve-wracking. Then for his piano performance major, he needs to put on his own showcase. The performance aspect is actually the easiest part of that project. He is also responsible for selecting his program and doing some amount of self-promotion in order to get some butts in the concert hall. Compared to everything Mickey actually has to do to get his goddamn degree, designing the sound for a play (not even a musical, a play) ought to be a cakewalk.

Mickey watches as Ian sleeps. He is so calm, so tranquil. In a couple hours, they need to be up and headed to the theatre, but for now Mickey is content to bask in the serenity of Ian being truly relaxed. The previous weekend, he had seemed a little… jittery. Mickey doesn’t quite know how else to phrase it. Hard for him to sit still, hard for him to stick to one subject, in fact it was hard for Ian to keep up. Ian was talking so fast it almost felt like a video set to 1.5 speed.

It was a little unnerving the way his normally easy-going buddy acting so out of sorts like that. But something seemed to register for Ian last Sunday morning when Mickey asked if he was on cocaine or something. He watched as Ian pulled out a journal and reviewed something like a detective going over the forensic evidence. Afterwards, he called one of his siblings and asked if they could meet him at the clinic for a med adjustment. Mickey offered Ian a ride into the city, but Ian declined. It was the first time Ian ever refused a ride before. Mickey would be lying if he said it didn’t cause him to feel a sting of rejection.

Ian never explained what exactly what was wrong, but he seems fine now with a shiny new prescription. Ian has never quite explained what he takes all those pills for every morning and night, but Mickey figures it must be for hyperactivity the way he was bouncing off the walls all last weekend. Mickey figures who doesn’t have ADHD these days? The meds must not be an overnight thing because Ian Ian had been sluggish a couple evenings earlier in the week, but he was right as rain by Thursday.

Ian rolls over facing Mickey. After that it isn’t too long a wait before Ian opens the one eye not obscured by his pillow. The green of his eye catches the morning light as it draws in its focus. The corner of his mouth tugs upward when green meets blue. “Hey,” he whispers.

“You sleep okay?” Mickey asks.

Ian sits up, the blanket falling to his side. Mickey is fairly certain that he is doing a piss poor job of pretending not to notice the prodigious bulge in Ian’s briefs. “Not as good as I could have,” Ian croons leaning in to find Mickey’s lips, but Mickey pulls away.

“Dude, my roomie is right over there!”

“He’s fast asleep,” Ian insists as his hand reaches out to caress Mickey’s jawline.

Mickey allows Ian to advance closer. Although considering a much lower organ than his brain is doing the thinking, there is only so much will in him to resist. But the fear of being caught runs deep in him, no doubt born of spending the first eleven years of his life trying not to be noticed even looking at his father cross eyed.

“C’mon, E. He could hear us.”

“It’s not like I haven’t seen guys going at it before, Milkovich,” murmurs Chaz in a state of twilight sleep as he sits up. “Happens all the time at the frat house.”

“And why are you here creeping on us instead of your frat brothers, weirdo?” Mickey asks, as both boys search around for clothing on the floor. He feels like such a girlfriend cliché when he realizes he is wearing Ian’s shirt and it covers a third of the way down his thighs.

“Because you’re not as big a slob as the Phi Kaps.”

“Yeah? Well, I still don’t like giving a free show,” he hisses, pulling on his dorm shorts.

“Anyone ever tell you you’re wound too tight, Milkovich?”

“It’s just as well,” Ian resolves as he pulls his clean shirt the day out of his overnight bag. “We oughtta head to the caf soon unless we plan to be hangry at dry tech.”

“What play are you guys doing?” Asks Chaz as he shuffles over to the en-suite to put his contacts in.

“You probably don’t know it,” Mickey huffs.

“It’s a version of Oedipus.” Ian answers.

“The incest play?” Asks Chaz from the bathroom sink.

Mickey rolls his eyes. Chaz is no dummy. He is an engineering major with a double minor in chemistry and Italian, and he is consistently on the Dean’s List. But in this moment, he is the quintessential dumb jock roommate Mickey often teases him for being.

“Sure, man. It’s the incest play.”

“Or at least the most famous one.” Ian adds. “You want to come? We both got some comps.”

“Won’t your families want to come see the show?”

“Nah. I’m just doing sound. Besides. My aunt and uncle will be up for my senior showcase next month.”

“What about your folks, Ian?”

Ian just shrugs.

Wait, are you fucking kidding me? Mickey’s eyes bulge and his eyebrows rocket into his hairline at the notion that Ian’s family wouldn’t have any plans to see Ian’s big moment. Sure, Anubis isn’t exactly the lead (although Mickey thinks Ian can act circles around the senior playing Oedipus), but he is certainly a featured part and worthy of the Gallaghers’ attention.

He isn’t going to make a scene with Chaz still in earshot, but Mickey is practically chewing his bottom lip raw with all the choice words he could say about the fact that Ian doesn’t even seem to mind that his family are consistent no-shows in his life except when they need to put him to work. He tries to check his privilege and not weigh in on what could very easily be a sore subject. But it is a struggle to push the bile far enough down his throat.

Neither of them say another word on the subject until they are out of the dorm building and halfway across the quad bound for the student dining hall. Mickey’s look of indignation on Ian’s behalf must be shining like a beacon because Ian finally attempts to explain. “They all have their own shit going on. Lip works full-time and he is trying to graduate. Fiona’s getting her apartment building up to code—”

“Apartment building?” Mickey asks, suddenly feeling like he must have missed some significant updates, like the protagonist in an accidental time travel story trying to figure out why there are strangers living in his house. “I thought she bought a laundromat.”

“She did. And then she sold it at a profit and I guess the extra money was burning a hole in her pocket, ‘cause now she’s a landlord.”

“But you still gotta pick up shifts at Patsy’s to help make ends meet?”

Ian’s brow furrow, like he never questioned why he’s busting his hump to work shifts at a greasy spoon on top of a full academic load while his sister has the means to buy up multiple properties within the span of a year. “I guess?”

“Christ sake, Gallagher.” Mickey sighs, upset that Ian just rolls over and takes this sort of treatment from his family so readily. “I know you’re a middle child, but seriously? They don’t appreciate what an amazing guy you are. You got yourself a full fucking scholarship. You maintain a three-point-five. You go above and beyond to make sure all these plays get lit or stage managed or whatever, don’t get out of the theater till after ten most nights. And you still manage to do work diner shifts at the ass crack of dawn at least two mornings every week. What does it take for them to show a little interest?”

“It’s always been like this with us, Mick. I’m used to doing my own thing. Fiona has always had her hands full. Lip tends towards self-sabotage, Debbie went full-on rebellious teen on us the moment she hit puberty. Carl always needed to be kept out of trouble, and Liam’s always been the baby.” Ian sounds so resigned the way he describes his family. And under that resolve there is a melancholy acceptance, like this is the way things ought to be. He cannot help but feel in his gut that there is something else Ian isn’t telling him, but it isn’t his place to ask. “I don’t want to be another problem Fiona has to manage if I can help it.”

They swipe their student IDs for entry to Baum Hall and each grab a cafeteria tray. The cafeteria is more sparsely populated on weekends. Members of the local student population pack up their duffel bags and their laundry baskets for a visit home. As a result, the cafeteria’s offerings are somewhat pared down compared to during the week. But on the other hand, the lines are shorter and there is rarely a struggle to find a table.

They splinter off to the different service stations. Mickey loads up on waffles and various breakfast meats while Ian waits his turn at the grill for a made-to-order omelet. Mickey finds them a two-person table in a less-crowded corner. He doesn’t touch his food, but sips leisurely on his black, sweetened coffee. He stews over the idea of telling off Ian’s family while he waits. All the while, he wonders what those people have said or done to him to make him feel like a burden they have to endure.

But he also worries about overstepping. He reminds himself that they aren’t a couple, not really. They’re friends, yes; very close friends who kiss each other, and touch each other, and do a lot of PG-13 above the waist stuff together. But Mickey doesn’t think he could gather up the stones to ask Ian if they’re boyfriends. The word still sounds too foreign in Mickey’s mouth.

And even if he was bold enough to ask, Ian has mentioned time and again that he doesn’t want to be in a relationship because he needs to focus maintaining his scholarship, which is something Mickey understands. Before they met, it was so easy for Mickey to let his music consume him body and soul. He didn’t know what it feels like to be around someone who makes Mickey feel utterly driven to distraction until the end of his undergraduate career was visible on the horizon.

Maybe he should just drop the subject when Ian comes to sit down. Mickey doesn’t know how he could possibly explain to Ian just how worthy he is of his family’s attention, if not affection, without it turning into Mickey stumbling into a ham-fisted declaration of love. And even if he were ready to say so, he absolutely does not want to say so in front of the eight dozen other students currently enjoying their breakfast.

"I don’t think Lip and Fiona ever really accepted that I chose theater.” Mickey looks up from his daydreaming to see Ian sitting down with a concoction that looks more cheese than omelet and a tall tumbler of chocolate milk.

Phlegmy, comments the annoying music teacher voice that now lives rent-free in Mickey’s head.

“But they know this is what you’re majoring in, right?” Asks Mickey. “It’s not like The Jazz Singer.”

“What like the old black and white movie?”

Mickey’s lips quirk into a drole half grin. “I watched the Neil Diamond version.”

“Neil Diamond?”

“What? Did you think my musical tastes jump straight from Stravinsky to Annie Lennox? Just wait till I tell you about my Beach Boys phase. Super cringe. I went blonde and tried to grow my hair out.”

Ian snickers. “You’re fucking with me, right?”

“You’ll never find the evidence unless you make a trip to scenic Pittsburgh. Thank fuck I didn’t have any social media back then.” And given his druthers, he still wouldn’t. But it is an invaluable resource for getting his name out into the community for performance and tutoring gigs. But he is hardly social on his social media. He just posts videos of his piano and vocal performances and responds to inquiries from people looking to hire.

“Getting back to your question, damn did we go off on a tangent.”

Mickey rubs Ian’s knee cap under the table. “We do that a lot, actually.”

“Yeah. So, no. I’m not exactly going to get disowned by my family if I get a theater degree. But in the Gallagher household, nothing is more important than keeping the family together. And for years that boiled down to finances. Keeping a roof over our head, the lights on, water, heat, you name it. My dad is a louse and Fiona may have carried the bulk of the load, but we were all expected to pull our weight. I started working for a child predator when I was thirteen.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah, I know. But it brought home the second biggest pay of the household and the most consistently. I don’t doubt that Lip made sure Fiona knew what was going on, but we needed the money and I brought home free groceries. So blind eyes were turned. And that’s just how it always was.”

Mickey wishes he hadn’t eaten so much so quickly. He thinks he might be sick.

“It’s not that she doesn’t care. We call care about each other. But there’s always a deadline, always a price point. Everyone is expected to chip in, pay their fair share. Family always has to come first. Goose. Gander. And unless I plan to go to New York or LA and get very lucky, Fiona thinks I could help the family better with a business degree. Or nursing or IT, something that’s more likely to guarantee me job prospects when I graduate.”

“You have a minor planned out, right?”

“English. It isn’t exactly a high demand field outside of school.”

“You know, you don’t have to get an ed degree to get a teaching certification. English and drama. Good combo for a high school teacher, right? Your sister’s gotta believe teaching will pay the bills.”

Ian smiles. “Not really. She’d probably like the idea even less than acting. Don’t get me wrong, I like the idea of teaching. Lip’s floated it around the dinner table a few times. But Fiona? Nah. She’s the type of person who believes in the hustle. A job’s not worth doing unless you can turn a profit if you bust your hump hard enough. Teachers are salaried, right?”

“Depends on a school district’s contract, but generally, yeah.”

“Same rate no matter how many hours you spend grading papers. Fiona would call that a grift. I wouldn’t mind it though. Getting paid just to share something I’m passionate about with the next generation? Not a bad deal. But…”

“But what?” Mickey asks finishing off his waffle.

“I want to tell the story, you know? That’s what happens when I act, when I figure out how I connect to a character and how I’m sharing him with an audience. Teaching’s fine, but that’s what I was meant to do.”

Ian is meant to do a great many things. Mickey has yet to observe Ian take on one duty in the theater that he hasn’t rocked. Mickey has learned more about production through their friendship than anything Robin or Dr. Casciotti has taught him.

“I just wish sometimes that someone in my family believed in me even a fraction as much as I do,” Ian admits, a quaver in his voice. “Like, I spend so much time in that house feeling like I have to psych myself up about what I do. Because that’s the only encouragement I’m gonna get around there. Family’s supposed to have your back, right?”

Mickey wants to tell Ian that he does have family who has his back. But he suddenly feels uncharacteristically timid, like he hasn’t earned the right to feel like Ian is his family, that Ian is his. What if he declares himself Ian’s family and Ian shrugs it off— they’ve only known each other for a matter of months, after all. So, for want of the words of affirmation he is too afraid to speak, he takes Ian by the hand, hoping the physical connection can do the heavy lifting instead.

They stay like that sitting quietly for some time, fingers interlaced, and breathing in time with each other. And it is almost an afterthought that this is the first time that they have held hands in public.

Chapter Text

Ian never thought he would miss the overcrowding of the boys’ room. With Lip having been settled into Fiona’s room for some time now and Carl away, it’s just him and his eight-year-old baby brother Liam in residence. Liam’s toddler bed has been disassembled and the corner where it once resided has been replaced by a child-sized desk with a handmade hutch that Ian and Lip built for his books. Liam now resides in Lip’s bed and nobody is in the bunk above him. This room once felt impossibly full. Maybe now it feels so desolate now because he isn’t sharing an even smaller room with two grown men, one of whom never fails to find an excuse to get up in Ian’s personal space in a way that is almost always welcome. 

It’s four in the morning and Ian is getting dressed for the Early Bird shift. Liam sleeps with a face mask on, so he can turn on the overhead light and see what he is doing even though he still is in the habit of picking out his clothes the night before and getting dressed in pitch darkness.  

He heads to the bathroom to brush he teeth and lacquer down his stubborn curls. Then he heads downstairs expecting to find a darkened kitchen but instead finds his eldest sibling at the kitchen table under the kitchen light on a dim setting. She has her hair pulled back into a braid and she is dressed in boy shorts style pajama bottoms and an oversized grey sweater and she has two large binders and a calculator laid out on the table. In the corner, the dryer is gently whirring. 

“Hey. Fi. You’re up early.” 

 “Morning, sweet face. I’m just getting caught up on the ledgers.” 

“I can’t remember the last time you were up this early.” 

“It’s been a while, hasn’t it?” She muses. “It’s funny. I took the day off and here I am getting up even earlier than usual. And here I am cooking the books for the diner.” 

“You may as well go into work and hide out in the back, at least then you’ll be getting paid for your efforts.”    

“No, I absolutely have no plans to head into the diner today,” she insists as she closes the binder she is working on and leans over the table. “So, you’re going in, huh?”  

“Yeah, it’s Thursday.” He doesn’t have classes until 1:30 on Tuesdays and Thursdays this semester, making them the obvious choice for his diner shifts.  

“You could take the day off, Ian.” 

Ian’s brown furrows and his jaw tenses. “Why would I do that? And miss out on the the luxurious tips of the five A.M. rush?” 

She looks at him with wide doe eyes that make Ian feel like she is patronizing him. It reminds him of quite a few times that sometimes feels so long ago, but right now feels very recent. He remembers her turning him over periodically on the days when he wouldn’t get out of bed. Her eyes worried and the fear was painted on her countenance when she would ladle broth down his throat and convince him to accept sips of Gatorade and change his soiled sheets. And those were the pitying eyes she shone upon him in despair the day he finally allowed his siblings to haul him to the psych clinic. 

He wishes his sister would say what’s on her mind so that he could stop cycling through all the reasons she could possibly be judging him.  

“I just figured you could use the rest. That’s all.” 

“I’m fine, Fi. You don’t have to worry about me,” Ian insists as he pulls out two pieces of potato bread and pops them into the toaster.  

“You’re up before the crack of dawn, you’re out of the house before any of us are awake.” 

“If this is about my meds, I mean it. I’m keeping up my mood journal. I’ve got alarms on my phone so I remember to pop my pills. 

“When you aren’t in the diner, you’re at class all day and you get home so late. And that’s just on the nights where you come home.” 

“I crash at my buddy’s dorm room. I swear, I’m not getting wrapped up in shit like I used to.” 

The toast pops up with a jolt. That and the rhythmic thump of the dryer is the only noise in the room for a long moment. 

“I know,” she concurs. “You’re in a really good place right now. And for what it’s worth, I’m proud of you.” 

“Okay,” Ian replies. Wearily. “I’m glad we had this talk.” 

“Are you sure you don’t have anything you want to tell me?”  

“We covered our bases, right?” Ian huffs as he butters his toast. “School. Patsy’s. Pills. I haven’t danced on a podium or went home  with a strange man in almost two years.” 

She rubs at her temple with her thumb and forefinger. “You seriously weren’t planning on telling me? Any of us?” 

“Tell you about what?”  

His sister heaves a heavy sigh and pulls out a folded up piece of paper. He recognizes it as one of the 10”x11” posters for the play that the theater kids hang up in every bulletin board, stairwell landing, and elevator on campus. “I found this stuffed under my windshield wiper a couple days ago.” 

She unfolds it to reveal a handwritten note on the reverse side. He recognizes the penmanship, somehow both meticulous and yet somehow scrawl. Mickey’s writing. “Apparently, someone out there decided to speak on your behalf.” She slides the note across the table for Ian to read. 

Fiona,  

You don’t know me, but I’m tight with your brother. I know you’re not the biggest fan of him majoring in theater, but Ian’s got it in that big freckled head of his that you wouldn’t want to see him perform. I don’t even know if he told you he’s in a play, let alone invited you. But I know you didn’t come see him in Midsummer Nights Dream either.   

He acts like he doesn’t want to burden you and it's such fucking bullshit. I watch him bust his hump every day. I don’t even know how he does it. He shows up to campus most days smelling like fried food, keeps up his grades, and he does whatever he is asked to make these shows happen.   

I know he’s got this big middle child thing going for him and shit. He talks like asking you to see what he does is just some inconvenience. And I figure he probably wont ask because he thinks you don’t care, but I know what it is like to grow up in a house with people who don’t care or worse. They don’t churn out people like Ian. You must have been good to him for Ian to dream as big as he does.   

It’s a big part. And he’s amazing in it. He makes magic happen on stage and Ian deserves a little recognition.   

We open on Thursday at 7:30 and play through this weekend end next. Do Ian a favor and show up for him.  

-M  

Ian could kill him. Where does Mickey get off writing letters to Ian’s family when he won’t even stop inside for a few minutes when he picks Ian up from the house? Mickey’s letter makes Ian sound like a pathetic, needy attention whore and it makes Ian want to crawl into a hole and die.  

“Why didn’t you tell us about your play?” 

“Well, it’s not like you guys showed up to my last play.” He tries not to sound as bitter, even if he is. Though the truth is it had been a relief. Ian feels his chest tighten as he looks up from Mickey’s missive at his sister. His muscles tense in anticipation of her disappointment. He shrugs. “But it’s okay. I get it, Fi. Really. You’ve got a lot on your plate.” 

“You gotta tell us this shit, Ian,” Fiona  insists in one of the softer variations of her mom voice. “You can’t ice us out and then act like we’re ignoring you.” 

“That’s not what I’m…” he heaves a heavy sigh and regroups. Look. You have a household to keep afloat and two businesses to run, Fi. I get it if my plays don’t exactly—” 

“Nope. Uh-uh,” she refutes decisively. “You can’t keep playing that card, Ian. You’ve been playing that card since you were twelve. In fact, reverse uno—you've got a lot on your plate too. And I know some of that is on me. You know I’m okay with the whole theater thing, right?” 

“Since when?” bites back Ian abrasively. “You and Lip both acted like I was throwing my life away.” 

“Well, yeah. You got a free ride. Do you know how rare that is? I didn’t want you wasting it on a degree that won’t guarantee you a job when you’re done.” 

“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Ian deadpans. 

“Do you have any idea of how many people fly out to the coast hoping to make it and they end up waiting tables or other shit jobs that you can just as easily do here before they end taking a greyhound back home.”  

“You know Chicago is a major theater town, right? I have no intention of going anywhere. But you know it’s a real shot in the arm to know you’re just counting down the day I land flat on my face.” 

Fiona’s expression falters. “I’m not— we aren’t waiting for you to fail. You’re great,” she insists earnestly, but Ian is fast reaching his limit for the day of her holier-than-thou act. “You know I think you’re a good little thesbian, right?” 

“Thespian.” 

“That’s what I said. Now, come on. You used to always invite us to see your shows.” 

“Yeah, but that was before.” 

“Before what?” 

Before everything changed.  

Ian doesn’t know how he can put into words what he is feeling. There is so much bitter resentment and disparaging remorse that courses through him as he tries to verbalize what he’s feeling. But he’s an actor. He knows how to improvise and employ a bit of circumlocution. He inhales deep as he quickly reckons how to attack it at an oblique.  

“I used to be the one you never had to worry about. The kids needed you to step in for Monica and Lip needed someone to keep him from getting in his own way. But I could always handle things on my own so you wouldn’t have to worry. You guys not noticing me meant I was doing something right. And when you used to come to my shows, that used to be my chance to let you see me at my best.” 

Fiona nods. “You know, I still remember your first show. Winthrop in The Music Man. We were all so proud. God, Monica was beside herself over— oh.” Fiona suddenly slumps her shoulders, crossing her arms over her chest. She slouches in her chair like she is trying to make herself smaller as understanding seems to bloom across her face. “Monica. The bipolar. Is that what this is about?” 

“Kind of,” he admits. “You guys don’t treat me the way you used to. I went from being the one you knew could take care of himself to the one who was suddenly everyone’s problem.” His voice cracks and he can feel the heat spread from the back of his neck and along the apples of his cheeks. He hates himself for the way his body is betraying him. “All of a sudden, you were noticing me all the time whether I wanted you to or not. You were always just waiting for me to do my next crazy thing! So you have any idea how hard getting your life back on track is when your nearest and dearest keep watching you like a hawk, waiting for you to fail?” 

“That’s not what we were doing, Ian,” she reaches across the table and takes his hand. Ian wants to recoil from the touch, but he has to admit it is soothing the way her thumb massages the the curve between thumb and forefinger. “At least not intentionally.” 

“I’ve tried so hard to make you all see that I put my life back together instead of waiting for me to turn into Monica 2.0 overnight.” 

“We do see. I guess we don’t show it, but—” 

“I don’t want you to see my shows because I can’t control the narrative anymore.” 

Fiona’s head tilts to the side. “What’s that mean?” 

“I used to know when you came to see my plays, you were seeing me putting forth the best I had to offer. I don’t know what runs through your head when you look at me anymore.”  

Ian sighs. This is the most he has talked about the inner workings of his mind with his family since he was in the psych ward receiving his diagnosis. It’s exhausting. He pushes himself away from the table and stands. 

“Where are you going?” 

“Work. I gotta go.” 

“You’re not on the schedule.” 

Ian immediately stops and turns about face. “Since when?” 

“I got Sierra, Didi, and Luis to cover your show day shifts. Now go upstairs and get some rest.” 

He briefly experiences annoyance at having the wool pulled out from under him, but the relief soon overwhelms whatever frustration had initially swept past him, refreshing like a warm breeze on a rainy day. “You were being serious before?” 

She nods, pushing her hands behind her neck. “I still wish you had a fallback plan, like a business degree or something, but I can still support you in my own way.” 

“Don’t I need to cover my fair share of the bills?” 

“I’ll cover you this month.” 

“Well… that’s really—” 

“You can work some doubles over Spring Break. Make it up to me.” 

“There it is,” he muses wryly to himself as he turns around and heads towards the stairs. “Well, I guess my bed is calling me.” 

He is just mounting the stairs when Fiona calls out after him in a sharp practiced tone loud enough to catch his attention without waking the rest of the house. “About that friend of yours who stuffed that letter in my windshield?” 

Ian stops on the second step and turns to face her. “Yeah?” 

“He’s the mystery guy who picks you up from the diner and drops you off some nights? The same guy you’ve been crashing with?” 

“Yeah, that’s him.” 

“Is he important to you?” 

The question is simple and massive all at once. “Yes,” slips his lips and he feels lighter than he has in ages. He hasn’t had the opportunity to talk to anyone about how he feels about Mickey with the family, like Ian and Mickey are each others’ little secret. All those months ago, he tried to tell his sister that someone caught his eye, but she shut him down so quickly. She made him feel like him getting feelings for someone again was retrograde to his own mental health. So, he kept Mickey to himself.  

“Hold onto him, sweet face. He wouldn’t have written all this if you didn’t mean a lot too him, too.” 

But it’s freeing knowing that one of his siblings has even an inkling of who Mickey is and how he has changed Ian’s life for the better, even if she doesn’t even know the name of the man who has become such a cornerstone in Ian’s life. He knows Mickey gets cagey whenever the prospect of meeting any of his family presents itself. But perhaps… just perhaps. He dozes back to sleep with vague musings of a life together with Mickey formulating in his imagination.

Chapter Text

There is a pounding on the door of the small semi-soundproofed practice room Mickey has holed himself up in. He pretends not to hear it. No doubt whoever it is, another room will move on when they realize nobody is heeding their call. But Mickey isn’t yielding up the room until he’s ready or he runs out of his reserved time, whichever comes first. There is only so much time Mickey can spend in the library gathering up primary and secondary sources to back his frustratingly ambitious senior thesis each day. And even if he didn’t need to practice for his senior showcase, he needed some time at the piano just to maintain his own tenuous grasp on his sanity.   

“This isn’t fair, Milkovich! Other people need the space, too!” Mickey thinks he can identify the voice, despite the door muffling the sound and his insistent playing tuning her out. She’s a second-year contra-bassoonist who only switched from clarinet on account of the comparative lack of competition. She puffs out her cheeks when she plays, giving her a froggy appearance. On account of it, most of the other instrumental music students call her “Kermit.” Of course, he has no idea what her actual name is, but mentally he tends to refer to her as “Becky with the Bad Embouchure.”   

She could find a utility closet to practice in as far as Mickey is concerned. If she needed a practice room so badly, she should have reserved one like he did. And perhaps reserving a three hour block is overkill, but he needs to log the hours and put in the work if he plans on achieving what he envisions for the final piano performance of his college career. And his Casio is a poor substitute for the real thing. If he wants to get his fingers on a piano, not his keyboard, an honest to goodness piano, he needs to rely on the music school’s resources, even if it means he is forced to pull rank. For a composer like Liszt, he wants to feel the full effect.  

Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 is a piece he definitely wants to consider for his piano showcase. He remembers back in November when he was first musing over the idea of this final performance. Admittedly, he may have been unconsciously looking for an excuse just to show off with Ian in the room. But when he caught himself, he blushed and asked if Ian thought they were too showy, to which the redhead replied that being showy was the point.  

And perhaps that is what led him to Liszt. Frank Liszt was the first rockstar pianist. He pioneered the idea of pianists hosting concerts completely divorced from the rest of the orchestral ensemble. And apparently the guy was the type of guy you’d see on the cover of some teeny bopper magazine today (Mickey doesn’t see the appeal, but he’s starting to think he might have a very specific type) and there was even a medical term for people going into a frenzy over seeing him perform. Lisztomania was Beatlemania before Beatlemania.  

So, if he really wants to impress, he’s going to show Ian just how showy he can be. He hasn’t had a chance to play for Ian in a while. But if the cast party next week is at LaQuan’s aunt’s house again, the old broad has a baby grand. And he is looking forward to find a flimsy excuse to get into that music room and impress the pants off his best friend and sorta-not-quite boyfriend.    

Nearly forty minutes after the previous interruption, there comes a knock on the door again. He looks at the clock on his phone and sure enough, he still has this room reserved for another twenty-two minutes. Becky seriously needs to find something better to do with her time than stand outside Mickey’s rehearsal space stomping her feet.  

He gets up from the piano and stalks all of the four feet to the door, about ready to give Becky a piece of his mind. But instead, he comes face to face with Ian, his jaw clenched and his expression somewhere between rage and serenity. Mickey doesn’t quite register the decidedly mixed expression on Ian’s face; Ian has never even had an excuse to wait for him in the music school lobby before, let alone hunt him down to the private rehearsal rooms on the upper floors.  

Before Mickey has any time at all to react, the large catcher’s mitts Ian has for hands make contact with Mickey’s chest and shove him backwards a few faltering steps. He doesn’t push Mickey all that hard, but it catches Mickey by surprise.  

“What the hell is with that letter you sent my sister?” asks Ian heatedly as he steps in and closes the door behind him. “I don’t know whether to punch you or kiss you,” he simpers as he takes Mickey by the hips and pulls him in close. Mickey could get used to the way Ian is manhandling him. It’s a flimsy excuse to have Ian’s hands all over him and something about the roughhousing gets Mickey’s motor revving.   

“Well, you know which option I’m voting for, big guy.” he beams back at Ian’s already-softening expression as he laces his fingers through red curls and pulls Ian down for a kiss. He is surprised how bold that is for him. Mickey is almost never the one to initiate unless they are alone in his dorm room or if he is at least a little tipsy. And here, he isn’t even sure Ian thought to lock the door behind him before Mickey took what he wanted. But if anyone makes him feel courageous, it’s Ian Gallagher.  

Their tongues caress as Mickey relaxes into the sensation of strong hands sliding up the inside of his sweater, nimble digits that Mickey could imagine manipulating the strings of a harp just as easily as his body. He feels flush as needful, whimpering moan escapes him as Ian’s fingers rub circles into the hardening saucers of his pink nipples.   

Mickey almost doesn’t care that these little practice rooms aren’t half as soundproofed as the school likes to claim they are. But he does find it within himself to gently push Ian away. “These walls are like paper, man.”  

“I’ll say,” Ian agrees with a crooked grin. “I could hear you going at it all the way from the stairwell.”  

“What? Like you could pick me out from all the other piano students on this floor?”  

“Of course, I found you on the first try!” Ian confirms, throwing out his arms in triumph. “You think I don’t know the sound of your music? Nobody plays like you.”  

And fuck, if that doesn’t bring Mickey to the brink of creaming in his jeans. But he gathers his composure and sits down at the piano until his little soldier isn’t standing at attention anymore. “So, why did you come over here contemplating violence?”  

“That letter you shoved in my sister’s car.”   

Mickey reddens again, this time from embarrassment, suddenly second guessing himself. He’s never really dealt with other people’s family before. Hell, he is fairly hands-off with his own. His thoughts spiral as it occurs to him that reaching out to Ian’s eldest sibling might have been an overstep, a gross miscalculation in just how welcome he is in Gallagher affairs.  

He shrugs and turns away from Ian, his fingers finding their places on the keys. “I don’t know, man. I just… you’re too good for them to keep on ignoring what you do. Like, not just a good actor, E. You’re a good person— you deserve a little happiness.”   

Nervously, Mickey’s digits do what comes naturally to them, gliding across the keys, sputtering out the frenetic first variation of Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. “And I figure the type of people who bring up someone like you gotta be the decent sort, right? So I figured maybe they would bother actually showing up if someone else told them what a big deal this is to you.”    

“Mick—”  

“You always minimize what you need and prioritize them. And that’s noble and shit, but Ian— it’s not selfish to want to share the good times with the people you care about. And they’re important to you. You’re not being a burden or whatever by asking them to see you thriving.”  

Mickey feels the weight on the bench shift as Ian sits beside him, the slight transmission of body heat as their shoulders rub against each other. As much as Mickey has come to enjoy their actual overt physical contact, there is something to be said for “accidental” moments like this have their virtues, too. They may kiss when nobody is looking and cuddle when they have the dorm room to themselves, but their shoulders can bump against each other and their fingertips can graze against each other while handing each other things out in the open. That little tingle he gets when they touch like this before that first kiss at New Years used to make Mickey feel like a camel who has been fed a sip of water before crossing the Sahara. And even now, there is a nourishing, galvanizing quality to these little moments of offhand physical connection.   

Mickey’s moment of zen at Ian’s touch is brought to an abrupt halt and he has to stop playing all together, though, when Ian puts his index finger to the first octave and starts plucking out the baseline of “Heart and Soul.”  

He twists his body to face Ian as directly as possible, pursing his lips together to keep from giggling. “Seriously?”  

“You aren’t the only one with mad skills at the piano, Mick.” He leans in and gives Mick a quick little peck on the cheek. “For the records, I’m not mad.”  

“The beauty of a long-ass commute?”  

 Ian quirks his mouth to the side thoughtfully. “No, I think I was coming around before that. I think Fiona heard me, actually sat me down and we talked, and I think she actually was listening to what I had to say for the first time since I was seventeen. She even insisted I take off from my morning shift so I’d be bright eyed and bushy tailed for tonight.”  

Mickey smiles, nodding sagely. “So, we’re good, then?”  

“Hm… mostly. But you just put yourself on my siblings’ radar.”  

“Not like I signed my name,” Mickey demurs as he rubs a hand against Ian’s thigh.   

“She put two and two together, Mick.” Ian is smiling warmly. “She figured the same guy who makes sure I get home safe and sound and lets me stay with him when it gets too late just might be the one advocating for me.”   

“What can I say?” Mickey asks. “You’re worth sticking your neck out for.”  

“You do realize your days of passing up my invitations inside are numbered, right?” Ian leans in, their foreheads touching. “Fiona’s gonna want to meet you. Lip’s might try to do the intimidating older brother shtick.”  

“He can try.” Mickey challenges as he accepts a kiss.