Chapter Text
When Mickey had bit the bullet and finally ditched nine months ago, it wasn’t that he’d expected his life to magically get better, it was just that he knew it wouldn’t get worse. He knew that no matter how miserable a day out on the streets, in which he’d get heckled by random businessmen in suits taking furious phone calls, or mocking teenagers crowding by in clumps, no matter how many times he’d have to curl up in the corner of some alleyway where it smelt of piss and he could feel rats swarming around him, it would always be one hundred percent better than living in his dad’s house. And so far he was right.
He’d assumed the worst would be dealing with the way people treated you when you were obviously homeless. And it was bad, don’t get him wrong; the city had a certain malice reserved almost specially for the dirty people on the street, and Mickey had known that going in because he had been apart of that, it was just that he had not been expecting such a huge chunk of the cruelty he encountered would be the other homeless people.
The redheaded kid is back again today. Mickey really, really hates him.
He’s leaned back against one of the brick walls, smoking a cigarette and staring at Mickey through lazy, heavy eyes, his hair disheveled and his outfit a little too obvious. Everything about this kid is a little too on the nose. Mickey hates him so much, it’s not even funny. He keeps his back turned to him so he can at least save himself a little bit of grief and not have to look at him, but just his presence is enough. Mickey can feel him burning holes into his back with the way he’s staring. He wants to beat this kid black and blue, but it’s not worth it. And the one time they did fight, he almost kicked Mickey’s ass, and he’s still kind of embarrassed about it. He’s been trying to just pretend it never happened, but this kid seems determined to make sure Mickey can never ever forget about his existence.
So with a scowl, Mickey squeezes some more water across the windshield of the car in front of him - a Chevy Equinox. He’s always thought these cars weren’t too bad - the ones from the 2000s have a nice shape, good face on them. Mickey hasn’t driven in a long time, so he only judges vehicles by the way they look these days.
The girl inside gives him a less than impressed look, which is fine because Mickey’s not exactly taken with her either right now, but tough shit. He’s been on this street for almost seven months now. Everyone in the city oughta know the score by now; he’s sick of all these people acting like he’s some brand new nuisance. Nobody appreciates shit anymore.
He drops the spray bottle, and with his left hand, uses the squeegee he stole from an auto shop in May to wipe it down, drawing neat lines through the liquid. The driver’s face comes into view again, her mouth open in a crooked grimace, like she wants to tell Mickey off but is slightly amused by him doing this. He gets filmed a lot these days, but he could give less than two shits about that. Practically free advertising. He’s had people slam on their brakes and shout at him while he walks down the street. “Hey, you’re that homeless kid who washes windshields!”
It’d maybe be a little less demeaning if they didn’t laugh so much as they spoke. But if they want to harass him and ask him to do it, so what? They can laugh all they want, but at the end of the day it’s their money in his pockets.
Mickey stares, completely straight faced, at the girl as she snaps a picture of him with her flip phone. He thinks about flipping her off, about busting her car mirror, about motioning for her to roll the window down so he can reach in and grab a fistful of her hair and yank her halfway out the window while calling her an assortment of nasty things.
He does none of that. He stares at the hood of the car. He likes the color; these reddish - maroons that he’s been seeing lately. He thinks it looks nice. He’s thought about owning a Toyota Tundra in this color before, if he doesn’t die soon and actually makes it off the streets somehow. He thinks it’d look pretty sweet. And if some homeless kid with a busted up face and greasy hair came up to him in traffic and began wiping his windshield down, he wouldn’t take a fucking picture. He wouldn’t look at them like they were some mutated rat that crawled off the street. He’d give them a clean twenty dollar bill, and move on with his day.
He walks around to her window, and waits patiently until she rolls it down. She glances up at him with a sort of squint, as if Mickey has inconvenienced her entire day in doing this.
“Pay up.” Mickey says. “Unless you want me to wipe down your rear window, too.”
The girl stares at him. She has really thick, blond curly hair, and bright blue eyes. If Mickey still considered the action of having relationships that weren’t strictly transactional, and he liked women, he’d probably think she’s rather beautiful. He continues to scowl down at her.
“Pay up?” She says, sounding baffled. “You want me to pay you for that?”
“Yeah.”
“Um,” she glances around the street, where cars are idling on all sides of them, people inside looking increasingly irritated by rush hour. A few stare at Mickey, probably with one hand on their phone in case he does something to this girl so they can call the cops on him. He fucking hates that shit. He never touches any of these people, and they all know damn well he doesn’t, but occasionally someone will call him in at the station. It’s nothing but a pain in the ass when they do, because it depends on which cops come down to check it out, if they do at all. Mickey knows most of them by name at this point, but he wouldn’t exactly say he’s buddies with any of them.
There’s this one blond idiot named Tony, who always steps out of his vehicle all casual, like he’s in the motion of shrugging and going, “Hey, kid, hey. We’re all just people in this city, come on, work with me.” Mickey finds him really, really ridiculous, but he doesn’t dislike him because Tony never gets angry when Mickey insults him, just tells him to get out of here with a sigh. He’s too polite to be a Chicago cop, doesn’t seem to have that weird hunger for beating people’s faces in like the rest of them do. A few of the cops really hate Mickey. They’ll get out of their cars and chase him and shit. He lost his first squeegee running from this one a couple months ago. Mickey doesn’t know his first name, but the badge on his chest says ‘Grimm’, which Mickey thinks is about fucking right. Him and that particular officer have had it out for each other for so long, Mickey thinks he might begin consulting the witch on 32nd for some spell to kill his ass. Blow up his car or something. Maybe he’ll just pay one of the older veterans downtown to snipe or stab him out.
Mickey is growing more irritated standing here, some of the cars inching forward and honking at him. He glares at each of them, but they continue to creep forward. Something about a homeless boy in a scarf and puffer jacket with a squeegee and a spray bottle just isn’t all that intimidating.
“Look, just give me a dollar and I’ll leave you alone.” Mickey finally says, after this girl continues to just sit in her car, hemming and hawing. Completely useless and a waste of Mickey’s endless free time.
“Fuck no. I could’ve done that myself.”
“Yeah. But you didn’t.” Mickey’s gone through this argument a million times. He doesn’t give a shit, he’ll do it all day if he has to. It usually becomes less about the money and more about the fact that these people care so much to take time out of their day and argue with him. Not like he has anywhere else to be; he doesn’t understand what they think they’re doing picking a fight with an obviously jobless and beat up homeless kid asking for money. Of course he’s going to stand here and drag this out all day.
The girl shakes her head, and starts rolling up her window. Mickey sticks the squeegee through the top to block it, the wet rubber jabbing in her direction and dripping onto her pants, because fuck this chick in particular today.
“What the hell?! Go away!”
“Give me a dollar.”
“Fuck you. I’ll call the cops if you don’t leave me alone.”
“Yeah, you do that,” Mickey grunts, not moving. The girl rolls her window back down, and starts trying to shove his squeegee out the window. Mickey keeps poking it back in, and after a moment she has dirty car water dotting her car interior, clothes, and hair.
“Give me a dollar and I’ll leave you alone,” Mickey says again. She glares at him. “Screw you.”
Mickey rolls his eyes, and aims the spray bottle at her. She yelps, holding her hands up. He doesn’t actually want to spray her, because it’s a fucking pain in the ass to go and get more cleaning solution, but at this point he might sacrifice a few squirts. Whoever the hell this girl here is, he sure hates her ass. And he was admiring her car while he did this, too.
A few cars begin honking at them, some of the traffic in front moving up. Mickey flips them off and ignores them leaning out their windows to shout at him. He ignores the girl yelling at him to leave as well, until she reaches down and grabs a can of soda from the cup holder in her car and tosses it on him.
He makes a noise when soda goes up his nose and the aluminum bonks him on the head, and tries to lunge into her window to grab her, but the girl floors it and drives off, almost slamming into the back of the Honda in front of her. Mickey himself almost gets fucking hit by the other cars in the road about five times just trying to make it back to the sidewalk, where it’s then too late to chase after her because she’s already driven through the intersection and is on her way to the interstate. He’s fucking pissed, grinding his teeth and glaring in the direction she drove off in. And of course, that fucking redhead kid is there behind him, and he’s laughing at Mickey.
Mickey seethes at him over his shoulder, marching over to where he’s leaned up against the wall, letting out smokey laughs, his arms crossed.
“I swear to fuckin’ god,” Mickey hisses. “It’s like you fucking want me to hit you. How many times do I have to tell you to get the hell out of here?”
The kid squints down at him, his mouth curving up in a smile. He looks younger than Mickey yet is taller than him - though that's not particularly anything new for him.
“Nawh, I love watching your little show too much,” he replies, reaching a hand out and tapping the bottle that hangs around Mickey’s shoulders, where he tied the ends of the squeegee and spray bottle together with an old shoelace. Mickey follows his hand, furious.
“Get your fuckin’ paws off of me. And this is my goddamn street. You can’t pull your shit here.”
“Relax, sweetie,” the kid sighs, “I’ll be out of your hair in a second. I’ve got a date, I just wanted some entertainment before.” He hesitates, and takes another drag off his cigarette, blowing it out through his nostrils. Mickey has to lean back so it doesn’t go straight into his eyes. He wants to kill this kid right now.
“Unless you have something else fun for me to watch real quick.”
“Fuck off.”
The kid shrugs, still smiling. His green eyes are made more noticeable by the black eyeliner surrounding them. He flicks the butt of his cigarette away, stuffing his hands into the pockets of his jean jacket - which is too small for him. All his clothes are; his shirt rides up above his hips and allows the peek of a bellybutton, and where he’s cut the collar off to show off more of his collarbones, his pants hanging lowly off his freckled hips and riding up high on his ankles. They hug his thighs too tight, in a way that makes Mickey uncomfortable to look at, as well as the fact he never buttons them, leaving an open view down south. It’s like this kid is trying to be as revealing as possible at all times, which he knows he is, but Mickey still can’t stand it.
“Yeah, walk away,” Mickey says, still angry, as he turns around. “I forgot, you’re too busy getting bent over by skeevy CEOs and other bums who pretend you’re a woman to stay and watch a real working man.”
The kid sneers at him, amusement glinting in his eyes. “A real working man? Is that what you want to call that little display?” He laughs. “You getting doused in Pepsi is what constitutes a real working man?”
Mickey’s face burns at the jab, but he doesn’t waver. “Better than the shit you’re pulling.”
The kid smirks, in this irking, know - it - all way, like he has something above Mickey. Like because he allows older guys to tie him to a bed and slap him around telling him to shut up and like it, that he’s better than Mickey getting heckled and splashed by soda in midday traffic.
Well, what the fuck does he know.
*
The next time Mickey sees the redhead is four days later. He’s loitering outside a Speedway, waiting for his dealer to meet him and glancing through a newspaper absent - mindedly. His shoes are beginning to fall apart and he’s debating if he should just go dig through a store’s lost and found or get another roll of black electrical tape to wrap around them a few times again, when the kid comes strolling by, reaching for the door of the gas station.
Mickey glances over the edge of his paper and lets out a low whistle when he sees him.
“How was that date, eh?”
“Fuck off,” he bites back, quicker and lower than the tone he usually uses when interacting with Mickey. Mickey blinks, unaffected. The guy’s got a split lip and a black eye, and seems unable to put much weight on his left leg for very long. Mickey says nothing, and watches him hobble into the store.
He comes out a few minutes later with a yellow Gatorade and some protein bar. Mickey can’t believe that shit, that every time he’s seen him go into a store he’s come out with some health shit under his sleeve. It’s just sad. Living off of nothing and eating nothing while having nothing. He just doesn’t get it. Mickey doesn’t think he’s anything above a good plate of gas station nachos, even if there is something sinister about the goddamn cheese they use, but hey.
The kid lingers outside the glass windows for a moment, fumbling with the cap of his Gatorade. Mickey watches him, and doesn’t say anything. He really hopes his dealer starts putting some pep in his step right about now.
But it’s already too late, because the kid spins around and stares at him as he takes a sip.
“You got any smokes?”
Mickey scowls, but secretly he’s kind of impressed that this kid is ballsy enough to actually ask him that. “If I did, I wouldn’t be handing them out to your ass, of all people.”
“Come on,” the kid says, kind of quiet. “Just this once. I’ve had a sucky last few days, in case you can’t tell.”
Mickey sniffs, narrowing his eyes. “And that’s my problem how? You parade around these streets with your dick practically swinging in the wind, and you’re shocked when old dudes misbehave with you?”
There’s this habit this kid has that Mickey finds peculiar. It’s not that he cares about the well - being of him, it’s not that Mickey wants anything to do with him, really, it’s just that Mickey finds it ever so slightly interesting. Enough so that every time he runs into him, Mickey will draw their conversation out just long enough to watch him do it, and then, satisfied with his ability to conduct research, he’ll walk off and not think about him for the next couple of weeks.
He has this big, stretched out scab on the side of his face, a little below his right eye, that he picks at, constantly. Every few minutes he’ll reach his thin hands up and start at it with the blunt edges of his fingernails, not even looking like he’s aware he does it. Like it’s some compulsive act that he’s been trapped with for so long it doesn’t even register as an action to him. It’s like breathing or blinking to him. And sure enough, as he stands in front of Mickey to beg for cigarettes, he does it. Mickey follows his bruised, pale fingers with his eyes.
He fixes Mickey with this soft glare, and something about him just looks so pitiful. His limp, his protein bar and battered face, his surprisingly mild outfit of a knitted sweater with a big hole in the shoulder and just a pair of jeans, standing there in the gray streets with his bottom lip jutting out in injustice at the fact Mickey won’t share his smokes with some kid that hates him and Mickey hates back, scratching his nails on this seemingly permanent wound on his face.
Mickey stares at him for a moment, before he sighs and pulls the altoid tin he’s begun keeping his cigarettes in from his inside jacket pocket. Something in the redhead kid’s face opens when he sees, looking dumb - founded that Mickey is actually doing it, and fumbles for a lighter in his back pocket quickly. When Mickey hands him one, he pauses and squints at it.
“Fuck. You smoke Camels? That’s fucking disgusting.”
“Oh my god,” Mickey snaps. “Are you serious? I’ll kill you.”
The redheaded kid chuckles, even though Mickey wasn't completely joking. He watches him light up, his shoulders seeming to wring the remaining tension out of themselves after he takes a few puffs. But he doesn’t leave yet, keeps standing in front of Mickey with his hips jutting out to one side from the weird way he shifts his weight with that injured leg. He squints at Mickey.
“Who’re you waiting for?”
Mickey gives him a look, tearing the corner off the newspaper in his hands. “No one. What do you want?”
The kid shrugs, pulling his cigarette out of his mouth and holding it down by his waist. “I’m just asking.”
“Well, don’t.” Mickey grunts. He keeps the kid leveled in a low gaze, as if to tell him to never test his luck ever again like this, and the kid stares back but after a moment, a small grin breaks out on his face as he stares at Mickey. Mickey’s frown deepens, but he can feel his face growing slightly red.
“What the hell’s the matter with you?”
“Nothing,” the kid shrugs. “You’re just really funny, man.”
Mickey stares him up and down, working his jaw tightly. “Shut the hell up and get out of here before I kick your ass again.”
The kid lets out a soft chuckle, holding his hands up. He slots Mickey's cigarette between his lips, his eyes sparkling with something odd that Mickey has never seen before. He narrows his eyes at him, willing the kid to go get hit by a bus as soon as he begins to walks off.
*
Mickey is back to hustling / harassing his street on Friday - his best days, actually. He rolls in the most money on Friday afternoons, he’s learned. He's worked through anything and everything for that particular time slot, because it's that good. Lot of people coming into the city for the weekend, lot of exasperated people getting off of work and desperate to do anything to get Mickey to leave so they can just go home, it fucking rules. Saturdays are always his days to score and spend the entire weekend wasted, before getting up and working all week to go right back to the same thing. Mickey likes it, in all honesty. It's predictable, it's simple, it is what it is. How can he complain?
He's wiping down the rear mirror of some Nissan - he hates Nissans, all of them are just so goddamn ugly, except for the little trucks from the eighties, those ones are kind of sick, he can’t lie - and not paying attention to anything else. The person in this car is playing some questionable music, and Mickey keeps flicking his gaze up in hopes that the driver sees him and realizes that even this homeless, car - washing kid can tell their music taste is garbage.
He glances up through the window a third time, and as he does so, sees the reflection of someone else walking behind him. A reflection that's a little too familiar.
He throws a look over his shoulder, and sure enough the goddamn redhead kid is wading through traffic, his thumbs hooked in the front of his pockets and a swing in his step. He must've fixed his leg, or he's real good at shouldering the pain, because his limp is gone. Mickey watches disbelievingly as he swings his hips with each step, his eyelids low and tinted black, chin tilted so that he can gaze all sultry like into each car he passes, giving a few guys in trucks a wink. His white denim jacket has the collar flipped up, like some embarrassing fifties greaser wannabe.
Mickey just cannot fathom the audacity of this kid.
The person in the Nissan leans out the window and asks Mickey if he's done, already holding two bucks in their hand for him. Mickey quickly takes it and nods at them, before finding himself chasing after this fucking guy.
It's really not that Mickey cares what happens to this kid; if he never saw him again, Mickey seriously wouldn't be bothered one single bit. He might ask where he went, but no matter how horrible the answer would probably be, it'd never be enough to cause concern for him. It's just that this kid is one of the few others on the street that's around Mickey's age, one of the few that isn't some washed up veteran missing a few fingers with lazy eye that shouts nonsense at everyone who walks past them. And while Mickey can tell he's more often than not on something, he's not one of the twitching tweakers that hang out in the bus stops, begging young mothers and their little kids for money and refusing food.
And he's got that huge scab on his face. Mickey is just curious, that's all.
The kid is faster than he looks, and it takes Mickey almost a good few minutes to catch up with him, halfway down the street and with so many missed opportunities on cars he's passed, he might have to knock this kid upside the face when he actually gets to him.
He catches him as he's circling some green Camry, Mickey standing at the grill while staring the kid down on the other end. The driver seems unsure once Mickey appears, body twisted halfway in a glance backwards and his eyes flickering from the kid to Mickey.
“You've got some fucking nerve,” Mickey barks. He thinks he sees the driver panic at his words, but Mickey doesn’t even bother. He's got nothing for this guy and the traffic is still backing up - nobody is going anywhere.
“Ey,” Mickey calls at the kid as he moves to the driver window, his hand reaching out to trail his fingers over this guy's car, tapping on the window gently when he gets there. The guy's car is too clean for any fingerprints to appear, looks like the kid was never even here.
“I'm talking to you.”
He's close now, about a foot away from the kid, who smiles lowly at the guy in the Camry. Mickey doesn't bother to see his reaction to this redheaded fuck trying to pick him up in midday traffic.
“What, you finally want a ride?” The kid asks without even looking up at Mickey. “I don't give discounts to homeless, sorry.”
“Fuck you,” Mickey hisses. “You know what I'm talking about.”
The kid glances up at him, his eyes dim, the expanse of them seemingly a thousand years wide in the way he's looking at Mickey. An odd chill runs up his spine as he feels them bore into him.
“Just a hummer, then?”
Mickey snarls at him, unamused. The guy in the Camry actually rolls the window down, holding his hand out, tentatively. Mickey watches disbelievingly as the kid takes it, smoothing his fingers down over the veins in the guy’s wrist.
“Unreal.” Mickey mutters, shaking his head and glancing around, as if to ask everyone else in traffic if they're actually seeing this shit. “First you ask me for cigarettes, and now you think I'm going to just let you cruise on my fucking road? Are you fucking nuts or just retarded?”
The guy in the car glances at Mickey, probably wondering if they're a package deal.
“You don't own a street, honey,” the kid says, resting his hands on the roof of the Camry to lean his head into the window. The guy whispers something to him. The redhead nods, a thin smile pushing its way onto his mouth.
“You know what the hell I'm talking about,” Mickey says. “The red light district is down further south, but I guess you'd be too scared of that shit, wouldn't you?”
The kid is still a bit preoccupied with the Camry guy and doesn't respond immediately. The lights must be turning green way up ahead, because the cars around them roll forward a few feet, Mickey and the kid walking backwards along with them, before everyone comes to another halt. The kid allows his hands to linger on the guy's, before dragging them backwards and pulling himself out of the car. He winks at the driver, before turning to Mickey, his smile dropping immediately.
“You’ve got a goddamn problem. Has anyone ever told you that?”
“You’re my fucking problem.” Mickey says. The kid rolls his eyes, before he shoulders past Mickey roughly and continues walking through the road again. Mickey stares after him, his mouth gaping in shock. He starts after him again after a beat.
“Is that what your service is? Feeling guys up in their cars? I thought you offered a little more with the way you're all dressed up today,” Mickey calls, threading through the cars after him.
“This may surprise you, but a lot of people don't want to have half the city witness them allow an underage boy in their car right then and there,” the kid replies back to Mickey, turning his head but not looking at him. “I let them pick the time and place, for a higher price.”
Mickey makes a face. “You’re sick.”
“I'm making seventy bucks tonight, is what I am.”
Mickey scoffs. The light goes green again, and everyone immediately lays on their horns at Mickey and the kid. Mickey flips off about six separate cars as he hops to the street, one nearly running his foot over just as he's stepping up onto the concrete. He glances around to keep arguing with the kid, but doesn't find him until he looks out to the road. Mickey stares, his eyebrows arching up high.
He cannot believe this. This kid has to be legitimately suicidal.
He's just standing in the road, smiling, as all these cars swerve and honk around him. A guy in a truck leans out the window to shout something at the kid, who in response lunges into his lane as the guy passes him, causing him to slam on his brakes and the car behind him to smash into the truck’s bed. The kid laughs loudly, and takes that opportunity to start running out of the road, far down the street as Mickey stares at him and the guy in the truck gets out to start screaming after him.
Mickey stares down the street, watching this kid haul ass down the sidewalk, his head thrown back in laughter. Mickey doesn't plan on following him, but the guy must've seen them talking because he turns his attention towards Mickey and begins gesturing at him wildly. Mickey doesn't want to hang around and find out what this guy is trying to tell him, and sets off after the redhead, determined to really beat his face in this time.
Mickey runs down a few blocks, already beginning to sweat from how many layers of clothes he has on, along with the backpack he keeps on him that contains quite literally everything in the world he currently owns, and how out of shape he is. He pauses to glance over his shoulder and check if the guy is actually chasing him, when a strong hand reaches out and grabs at the clothing over the small of his back, yanking him back and inside a small gap between two stores.
Mickey thrashes wildly, kicking at whoever the hell just grabbed him. He watches as the redhead stumbles back with a small ‘oomph’ after Mickey’s boot slams into his hip.
“Fucker,” the kid huffs, pressing his hands over the spot where Mickey kicked him. Mickey can see his bootprint pressed into the small slice of pale stomach his outfit allows to be visible. Something about the sight also causes Mickey’s gut to churn, but he shoves that thought down real fast.
Instead, he glowers at the kid before him, reaching out and whacking the side of his head. The kid lets out a yelp, and swings back at Mickey, his knuckle brushing over his shoulder, not fully making contact.
“What the hell, man?!”
“Are you out of your goddamn mind?” Mickey shouts back. “Cruising on my street and then making that guy crash for no reason? And why the fuck were you just standing in the middle of the road like that, too? Are you retarded or just suicidal?”
The kid looks like he’s about to swing again, but at the last minute decides against it, rubbing at his temple where Mickey slapped him.
*
Mickey then doesn't see him again for almost an entire month. He thinks it's just the strangest thing. Every time he goes out to wash cars, he watches the reflection in the window he's wiping down for the tall, gangly image of that kid to materialize behind him. It never does. He doesn’t even find him leaning against the brick pillars of the parking garage in the back, smoking with some ridiculously indecent outfit on.
He keeps choosing that one Speedway for his dealer to find him at for two weeks straight, but he never runs into him, limping or asking for cigarettes. There's absolutely no trace of this kid, no matter where Mickey goes. It's like the kid has up and vanished. Mickey assumes that he finally pulled the wrong guy, and that's it. Show's over forever now because he's either dismembered and being fed to someone's garbage disposal, or he's chained up by his wrists in a basement. Mickey thinks being chained up would be infinitely worse. He doesn't have that much desire to live. If something bad happens to him, he'd much prefer to just get it over and done with everything completely than have to live through all that shit.
It's not that he misses the guy or anything, he's just bored and curious. Wants to know if he can add another name to his list of people he knew at some point who have been murdered, or if there’s a really good, bloody end to this kid that spent his last few months annoying the hell out of Mickey and selling his ass. That's really all there is to it.
Mid - November, he asks this one girl on the corner of 56th about him. He's seen them together a few times, assumes they probably cruise the streets with each other late at night while making bad conversation, trying to flag down guys driving by with their windows rolled down.
She's got her hair done up like Amy Winehouse, and is trying to pull off some ridiculously short jean shorts in bright high heels and a black jacket that stops at the end of her ribs with a fur - lined hood, but her whole body is rattling with shivers from the cold. Mickey wraps his scarf around his neck one more time as he approaches her, burying his face into it. She reminds him of his sister, but her makeup isn’t good enough to be Mandy.
“Hey, sweet thing,” she coos as Mickey nears her. He rolls his eyes.
“Don't waste your time.” Mickey says quickly, giving her a look. “I'm not asking about that.”
The girl frowns, irritated. She turns back to the street, trying to stop her teeth from chattering. Mickey leans to the side and tries to catch her eye, shoving his hands deeper inside his pockets.
“Hey, you uh - you seen that little redhead kid around lately?”
The girl gives him an odd glance over her shoulder, her dry lips cracking into a wry grin. “Ohh, that's what you're asking about?”
“Christ,” Mickey groans. “No, that's not - I'm not tryin’ - he owes me money. Pivo's gonna kick his ass if I don't find him soon. So do me a favor and tell me where he's been hiding out the last couple fuckin’ weeks.”
She laughs, shaking her head. “Ya huh. Hey; tell Pivo he didn’t give me a full gram last time I saw him. If anyone owes anyone else money, it’s him to me.”
“Sure.” Mickey says, exasperated. “Now where’s the damn kid?”
The girl makes a noncommittal sound, twitching her head to the side. “Eh. No clue.”
Mickey stares at her. “Yeah? Is it crazy if I say I think you're lying?”
She gives him a dirty look. She says, “No need to be like that. Why the hell should I know where he's been?”
“ ‘Cause I seen you two together here before. You guys jack off dudes or whatever the hell around here.”
“Nah,” she says, waving a hand with bright pink nails, a few broken off. “Curtis stopped comin’ round here a while ago. Said he was working at different street, right before the interstate. I say good riddance. He was takin’ half my customers.”
Mickey snorts, even though the notion that he told someone he had better luck at Mickey's goddamn street makes him feel weird. Something between anger and curiosity. And now he has a name for the stupid face - Curtis.
But she doesn't find it too funny that Mickey laughed at it, and glares at him again.
“Look, unless you want to pay for something, get out of my face. I'm busy.”
“Well, so am I. I'm trying to find this fuckin' kid and I think you're lying.”
She looks him up and down, pinches at the fat of her bottom lip between two fingers. “Am not. I don't know shit about Curtis. I only see him when he works here, and guess what? He doesn't now. So leave me alone.”
“Fine, bitch,” Mickey mutters, storming off in the direction he came from. The girl ignores him, already turning in the direction of some guy in a button up that's passing by her.
*
So Mickey assumes that this kid - Curtis - is completely dead and gone. Oh well. He assumes that in a few days there will be some newspaper article about him, because after this much time and from what he's seen, he's sort of come to the conclusion that he's some runaway rich kid, mostly just from how annoying his demeanor is and his inane affinity for chintzy clothes. Like in My Own Private Idaho, how Keanu Reeves only had sex with the guys for the money and to piss his dad off, before rejoining everything as soon as he reached the age of inheritance. He wonders if maybe that's instead where Curtis is; if one day Mickey is going to pass by a restaurant and find him slid into a pristine suit and laced table, a girl hanging off his arm as he negotiates with random men about a business deal instead of sucking them off under the table. Mickey wonders if Curtis would pretend not to know him if he found him like that. All signs point to yes, in his mind, and he's at least thankful he's not some little fag like River Phoenix and never told him he really wants to kiss him one night sitting by a fire in the desert.
Like, please.
He asks around about him a few more times, just in case someone has actually spotted him, in some really funny and compromising way. No one knows anything, with most of the very limited list of people that Mickey actually speaks to not even knowing who he's referring to. Fine by him. He doesn't want any association with that skank.
He even asks Pivo, his dealer, because Pivo sells to at least a fourth of the homeless population in Chicago and chats up every single person he sells to for an uncomfortable amount of time, so if anyone is to have any idea, it's definitely him and his wretched little network.
“Who?” Pivo grunts when Mickey asks. He doesn't look up at Mickey as he thumbs through his bags, trying to find Mickey's eighth. Mickey watches him, shivering inside of his jacket.
“That fuckass little prostitute,” Mickey says. “With the red hair? White denim jacket?”
Pivo glances up at him, a disgruntled look on his face, his lips curled back like a displeased dog.
“No.”
“No, you don't know him or no, you haven't seen him?”
“Both.”
Mickey rolls his eyes.
Pivo is about the same height as him, which is embarrassing because even though Mickey’s accepted the fact he's not getting any taller, he's only seventeen. Pivo's at least fifty. He's got deep smoker lines etched into his face and a permanent scruff of a silver beard. He's starting to go bald, but tries to hide it. He's not very good at it.
He has some heavy accent that Mickey can never place, and he struggles to understand him half the time they talk. He only knows this guy because he's Iggy's old dealer. Iggy stopped using him because Pivo attempted to hold down whatever poor girl Iggy had over at the time and fuck her when he left the room for two seconds. Mickey’s really surprised that Pivo tolerates him, because Iggy beat the daylights out of him with a tire iron when he walked back in the room to find that. But Mickey was eleven, and slightly cleaner and not buried underneath layers of almost every article of clothing he currently owned at the time, so it's entirely possible that Pivo doesn't even recognize him as much as it is that he just doesn't care.
“Why?” Pivo asks, almost curious. “He owe you a fuck?”
Mickey glares at him. “No. Owes me some money.”
He thinks he'll just have to keep up this lie for as long as he's asking about Curtis. This is what he gets for wanting to know about a whore on the streets.
Pivo laughs, dry and seedy sounding. He hands Mickey his little baggie, his eyes crinkling at the corners.
“Yah, I'm sure.” He wheezes. Mickey tightens his jaw, shifting his weight on his feet.
“He keeps working on my fucking street. I'm sick of people thinking we're some two - man rub and tug bullshit.”
Pivo raises an eyebrow, tucking his product back into one of the massive jacket pockets on him. “You still washing cars down by interstate, yah?”
“I was before he ran off,” Mickey says. “Probably gotta go back to holding up gas stations or some shit now that it's getting colder.”
Pivo stares at him, scratching his chin. “You could come work for me.”
“Really?” Mickey isn't sure if this is a trap or not. Maybe he's going to lure Mickey into his little fucked up hide out, and then beat him with a tire iron. Pivo shrugs.
“Yah. Too cold for me to run up and down this city like this now. Help would be nice.”
“What would the cut be?”
“Ten percent.”
Mickey stares at him incredulously. “Yeah, fuck that. Don't piss me off.”
Pivo shrugs again, glancing up and down the street. “Fine. Freeze to death while getting used as bullet sponge. No skin off my back.”
“Yeah,” Mickey grunts, tucking his nose into his scarf. “You won't be saying that when you lose one of your most consistent customers. Who actually pays you, might I add.”
Pivo grins widely at him, and Mickey stares at all the black holes in his smile from the teeth he's lost, as well as the rotting ones that are still left inside his mouth, yellow and gray with decay. He wrinkles his nose and does not smile back.
*
It turns out, however, that Curtis is not dead, because on November twentieth, Mickey finds him standing outside a record store, of all goddamn places. He doesn't even recognize him at first; does a double take as he gets closer and pulls his cigarette out of his mouth, blowing out a puff of smoke in surprise.
“No fuckin’ way,” he says loudly, amused. Curtis doesn't act like he even heard Mickey. He stands there at his side for a moment, before ducking his body and waving a hand in front of his face. “Ey.”
Curtis flinches, his eyes moving down to Mickey, where faint recognition flashes inside of them. They no longer look like the same quick, constantly moving ones that Mickey had grown familiar with. Something about them is faded, quiet. Mickey frowns, glancing Curtis up and down to make sure he's got the right kid.
He's wearing a corduroy jacket that looks almost too nice for him, and a faded hoodie underneath with the hood pulled over his head. His pants are too big for him and utterly filthy, his green Vans poking out from underneath. He wears half cabs, Mickey remembers. He's never seen Curtis with so much clothes on. He actually looks like a regular kid right now, not the prowling sex - addled freak he's accustomed to.
He also looks as if he's lost a considerable amount of weight. He was pretty lithe the last few times Mickey saw him, but now he's really gaunt. Looks genuinely sick, his cheekbones and jaw stretched out like the latex wrapping around a furniture corner. It unnerves Mickey, he takes a step back with a frown.
“Oh,” Curtis says, quietly. “You.”
Mickey stares at him for a moment before he says, “Um, yeah.”
Curtis looks at him blankly, like the sight of Mickey is boring him. His big old hands hang loosely by his side, looking pale in the evening sunlight. Mickey’s fucking freezing just look at him.
Curtis turns back to the record store window, looking past all the shiny posters advertising sales or new albums pasted in the windows, like he's trying to look through everything in front of him and expand his gaze way out, to something beyond the store that's not even there. Mickey is beginning to feel really creeped out watching him. Maybe he was trapped in someone's basement this entire time.
“What'cha doing?” Mickey asks, after a moment. He almost thinks Curtis didn't hear him, but after an extended pause he mumbles, “I really want that CD.”
Mickey glances sideways inside the store. He can’t even see what the fuck this kid's pointing at.
“What CD?”
“The Oingo Boingo one,” Curtis says, his body swaying lightly. He stamps his foot on the ground to steady himself, and wouldn't you know it, his left hand reaches upwards to pick at the scab on his face. Mickey squints, trying to decide if the spot got bigger, or if it just appears so due to Curtis’ rather malnourished appearance now.
“The what?” Mickey blinks, looking him up and down again. “Are you losing it? What the hell did you just say?”
Curtis’ face flickers into an expression of annoyance, glancing over at Mickey. Mickey’s almost relieved when he does, because at least it means that Curtis is still fucking competent, despite his disheveled and honestly sickly appearance.
“Oingo Boingo, you retard,” he says, unnecessarily rude. “I want their fucking first album. I want to listen to it. Piss off if you're going to be a dick. I'm really, really not in the mood.”
Mickey wonders if Curtis doesn't know his name after all this time, or just can’t be bothered to give Mickey the recognition of saying it. Mickey only knows his because he asked some whore on the street about him, and she happened to let it slip.
“So why don't you go buy it?” Mickey chooses to ignore his petulant little outburst, figures it's not very nice to be bitchy to the underage skank who just escaped some fuckhead's sex dungeon.
Curtis sighs loudly, all his energy seeming to deflate out of him with it. His eyes go back to being shiny and sad, still dimmed by something Mickey’s never seen before.
“Don't have enough money.”
And out of every single factor of this situation, out of every detail that is just baffling the hell out of Mickey, this might actually be the most bizarre thing yet. Because Curtis has always had an odd amount of money; always seemed a little too loaded for a homeless little kid. Always fucked enough to have an honestly crazy amount of money for someone in his situation.
And now he's saying he doesn't.
And Mickey thinks a lot of things about Curtis, really, but he doesn't think Curtis would bother to lie like this. Curtis is like him, where he genuinely hates being seen as the pitiful little homeless boy. And Mickey knows that because that's one of the insults he threw at him two months ago that finally pushed him to take a swing on Mickey.
He glances over at Curtis’ melancholy face, his dead eyes boring into the shop window unmovingly. Mickey shifts his weight on his feet, contemplative.
“How much you got?”
Curtis frowns, wiping a hand over his face. In his head, Mickey counts to three, and sure enough, watches as his fingers find the scab again and scratch at the corner of it.
“I don’t know,” he says tiredly. “Like, nine bucks.” He blinks, staring into the window like he’s really thinking about something. He says, “I was out of it for a while. Sick. I had to keep giving Marla money to go get me food, but I’m pretty sure she was just pocketing half of what I gave her. So that’s why I’m out today. Sick of starving.”
Mickey nods, but he glances up at Curtis’ face, something seeming slightly off within his explanation, but he’s not even sure what or why. He sure doesn’t look like he’s eaten anything recently.
“You were sick for a whole month?”
Curtis frowns at him. “I wasn’t out for a whole month. Don’t say that.”
“The last time I saw you was October,” Mickey says. He can’t remember the exact day, but he knows it was a while ago. Curtis’s face twitches into something unhappy, nervous even. Mickey ends up feeling bad he’s even said anything because of how lost he suddenly seems.
“Who’s Marla?”
He’s quiet for a prolonged moment before quietly saying, “the lady who lives in the building with me. You ask a lot of fucking questions, you know.”
Mickey continues his frown, but nods anyway. They stand there side by side, staring into the dim lighting of the record store as the sun moves closer to the west. Something about it almost feels domestic, which is making Mickey squirm. He’s just so surprised that Curtis is alive and talking, even if he seems completely different from the boy Mickey had spent an entire day bickering with all those weeks ago.
Mickey stares at the scab on his cheek, the wet flesh beneath and the peeled layers which are already forming a new one soon to be removed. He looks at the heavy circles beneath his eyes, and his soft face.
“Hey,” he says, suddenly and without even really thinking, “let's go look.”
Curtis nods, but doesn't move. So Mickey shoves him with his shoulder, before moving around him and opening the door. Curtis stares at him blankly, until Mickey finally grabs the material of his jacket sleeve and pulls him inside.
Curtis walks like a newborn deer, gangly and awkward. It should be funny, but with his oddly emaciated appearance, it just makes Mickey a bit sick. He leads them back to the CD shelves, trying to find the album that Curtis had been so longingly staring at. Curtis is literally no help, just gaping around at the store, blinking heavily under the fluorescent lights. An unintelligible song plays overhead as they stare intently at the shelves.
“What album was it that you wanted?” Mickey grunts after a moment of awkward silence. Curtis stares at him, his eyes narrowing. He rubs at his scalp underneath his hood. Mickey tries not to stare at how much the bone of his wrist juts out.
“What are you doing?” Curtis asks quietly. Mickey doesn't meet his gaze, scratching his eyebrow nervously. The truth is; Mickey doesn't know what the fuck he's doing. He has barely any money. He doesn't even like Curtis. He doesn’t even know what album he was wanting or what the dumbass name of the band he just said was. What Mickey should’ve done the second he stumbled upon Curtis was jump him, just for being a dick and making him look like some homo chasing after him for the past few weeks. What Mickey should’ve done is walk right past him and continued thinking about new schemes he can try now for money.
Instead of saying any of this, or even giving the redheaded boy beside him an inkling of any one of these thoughts, Mickey just jams his hands into his pockets and mutters, “Fuck you.” Curtis’ face twists into another concerned expression, before it suddenly falls. He swallows hard, and then nods slowly, like he’s just figured something out. He mumbles to himself, too quiet for Mickey to hear, and he watches as Curtis pads over and quickly flicks through the CDs. He picks one out and nods for them to go to the counter.
Mickey keeps his head down low as they go up, too embarrassed by all of this to even make eye contact with the other boy as they slide it across the counter to the greasy haired employee. Mickey can only imagine how they look, but keeps a level face as if nothing is amiss with any of this.
The CD is a little more than Mickey really wants to spend at all, but he does it anyway, and feels like his entire face is on fire as he passes the employee his crumpled up bills. The guy gives him a look for only paying in ones and dimes, but it’s quite literally all Mickey has.
He hands Curtis back the CD, crunching the receipt in his hands quickly as they walk out. Curtis stares down hard at it as he follows Mickey outside. They turn to face each other, and there’s this really painful silence between the two of them before Mickey panics and turns around, ready to bolt and hide from him for the next couple of weeks, like the two of them are going to switch places now.
“Where are you going?” Curtis says. Mickey shrugs, keeping his gaze low.
“Back to my street, man.”
“Um,” Curtis frowns, holding the CD close to his chest. “You don’t want to do it at my place?”
Mickey frowns, finally looking up at him with a questioning gaze. “Your place?”
Curtis nods.
“For what?”
Curtis snorts softly, like he’s amused by this answer. “To listen to my CD, of course.”
*
Mickey is completely silent for the entire walk over there, keeping his eyes trained straight onto his feet. Curtis lives a good twenty minute walk away, and Mickey has no idea what to expect. He himself usually sleeps under the bridge or in some concrete corner each night, occasionally camps himself on one of the the Subway seats on really cold ones, but Curtis had said he had a ‘place’. He’s half picturing some mildewy little house he might share with some disgustingly older guy, his pimp, perhaps.
He wants to ask Curtis why on earth he wants Mickey to come back and listen to his CD with him, but he’s too embarrassed to even speak. He wants to run in the opposite direction and pretend none of this ever happened. Every time they pause to wait for a crosswalk, Mickey thinks about punching him in the stomach and running, but the sign always switches to the image of the walking guy before Mickey can decide to commit to that idea. So he follows Curtis the whole way home, like some bitch.
He leads them up into a run - down, rotting building, up a winding flight of dusty stairs, each one creaking a little too loud for Mickey’s liking beneath their feet. He leads Mickey to a floor at the top, where there’s a small, makeshift tent in one corner, and a duffle bag thrown to the side of it. There’s a small room down further, which has a light emanating from it. Mickey can make out the muffled sound of a radio and someone moving around inside it. A cold flash of fear grips him, and he briefly wonders if he’s going to be sold into some sort of sex ring.
“That’s Marla,” Curtis says, very softly. It still startles Mickey, turning quickly to face him. He watches as Curtis sheds his jacket, tossing it to lay across his duffle bag, as he sinks down onto a thin mattress that pokes out from his tent. He glances up at Mickey, his eyes dark and so goddamn sad all of the sudden. He looks incredibly tired, winded from their short outing.
“She’s cool,” Curtis says. “She won’t bother us. But don’t freak out if she walks in. She doesn’t really wear clothes.”
Mickey gives him a look, slowly inching his way over to him.
“How the fuck did you end up in a situation with her, then?” He asks after a moment. There’s a definite chill in the building, but it’s at least warmer than outside. Mickey is still cold, though, and keeps all his clothes on. Curtis gave him a sideways look when Mickey didn’t move to take his own jacket or scarf off after him, but he doesn’t say anything. Mickey is thankful for that much.
He watches as Curtis leans to the side, resting his knees on the stained floorboards and rooting through his duffle bag, where he pulls out a small, silver CD player that is covered in various stickers. He fumbles around in the dim of the apartment, using the window to the side of them and its soft, blue evening light to find the outlet.
“My mom set us up,” Curtis says. Mickey waits for a more in depth explanation, but he doesn’t say anything else.
He has to tear the plastic cover off the CD before he can pop it in. Mickey leans forward a little, curious as to what the hell this band with that kind of name sounds like.
Curtis turns it up fairly loud, pausing with his hands on his knees to listen to the sound of trumpets, and then an odd electronic beat begins. He nods his head, turning back to Mickey with the jewel case in his hands, staring down at it.
“This is their first album.” He says, shuffling back over to Mickey. “My brother and I used to really like it. Only A Lad. My older sister showed it to us; our parents used to have a bunch of records and this was our favorite for a while. We used to listen to it all the time, but they eventually sold it for some cash.”
Mickey blinks at the sudden honesty, and simply nods in response. His brothers showed him a lot of music, too, but nothing like this. He’s never really heard anything like it.
“They’re the guys who wrote Weird Science.” Curtis says, like that would hold any weight at all to Mickey.
“Like the movie?”
“No. The song that inspired the movie.”
“Oh.”
He nods, setting the CD down beside the bag as it continues playing. The singer has a really odd, frantic voice, and Mickey almost kind of doesn’t mind it. Almost. He thinks if he wasn’t freaked out of his mind about the sudden direction his day has taken, it’d be a lot more enjoyable.
He realizes after a second that Curtis is staring at him, sitting a few feet away. He glances around a few times, but keeps coming back to the green eyes before him, eventually relenting and staring back. He can feel drips of sweat running down his armpits, and reaches around himself to stuff his shirt in the crook of it so it absorbs all his nervous sweat.
“I didn’t like that movie. But my brothers really did.”
Curtis frowns. “What?”
“Weird Science.” Mickey mumbles. “They would always skip the beginning, with those two dork asses in their room on their computer, and only watch the parts with the hot lady they make.”
“Oh,” Curtis exhales a short laugh, nodding. “I’ve never seen it, actually.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“There’s better John Hughes movies. Don’t waste your time.”
Curtis looks at him pointedly, a small smirk on his face. “You like John Hughes movies?”
Mickey’s face burns. He knows his entire neck and face have surely just gone red at this moment. He ducks his head, picking at one of the loose threads on his cargo pants. He opens his mouth to say something, but is too nervous all of the sudden. All of this is freaking him out, bad. He can’t believe Curtis invited him back to his place just to listen to the CD Mickey bought him out of some weird, mangled feelings of pity. This has to be the gayest thing that’s ever happened to him.
“I like Pretty In Pink,” Curtis blurts out. Mickey glances up at him, where Curtis is still sitting in front of him, smiling sweetly. His voice has this overtly sweet tone all of the sudden. It's such a complete shift from how he normally talks that it's making Mickey feel even flightier because it’s just so strange, as if he’s talking to a wounded animal. “Don’t tell my brother, okay? We would always watch and say The Breakfast Club was the best, but I actually liked Pretty In Pink the most.”
Mickey lets out a nervous laugh, tearing a small thread off of his pants in the action.
“My brother would call me a fag if he knew that.”
“I think he might call you that, anyways, man.”
Curtis gives him a strange look, before he clears his throat, and reaches forward. He extends one hand to lift up Mickey’s jacket, while the other goes straight for his belt buckle. Mickey immediately freaks.
“What the fuck?!”
“What?”
Curtis hisses when Mickey flies backwards, kicking his wrist with his busted shoe. He scrambles back up against the wall, glaring sharply at Curtis, who is now hunched over on himself rubbing at his thin arm with his opposite hand.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Mickey hisses, his heart racing a million miles an hour. Curtis stares blankly at him. “Um. I was gonna blow you.”
“Jesus Christ,” Mickey laughs tightly, his hands feeling over the layers of grime caked onto the floor here. “Is that why you invited me back to your place? To fucking use me? Did you never get taught how to just say ‘thank you’?”
Curtis’ brows draw together in a baffled expression. Mickey can see his teeth poke out from behind his lips, his tongue running over them.
“What?” His eyes are massive, his face pale with visible sweat beading down the sides. “Okay, I’m confused.”
Mickey stares at him, his chest still heaving. “Yeah, I think you are, too.”
Curtis rests his haunches back on the heels of his shoes, staring blankly at Mickey. “I - I thought you bought me the CD because you wanted me to blow you, and shit.”
“Oh my god,” Mickey would probably find this hilarious if he wasn’t sweating so bad, still pushing his back as flat against the wall as he can to put the most distance between them. “You serious?”
Curtis stares at him helplessly. “Why the hell else would you buy it for me? You hate me.”
Mickey opens his mouth, but nothing comes out. He just gapes wordlessly at Curtis, looking completely stupid and useless. Curtis keeps his gaze locked on Mickey, waiting for an explanation or something, but Mickey just can’t say anything. After a few failed attempts at speech, he snaps his mouth shut and just shrugs, tearing his eyes away and staring down at his dirty knees.
After a few moments of this really intense, awkward silence that has stretched out between them, Curtis quietly says, “So…you don’t want anything from me?”
Mickey shakes his head quickly. Curtis fixes him with a gaze that lingers on a little too long.
“Oh. Okay.” The track switches, the next song is just as electronic as the first one but it’s not as good, and maybe Mickey only thinks that because the guy is now singing about being in love with someone, still keeping that odd, needy tone in his voice.
“Um, why did you buy me it, then?”
Mickey frowns, still refusing to look up at him. “Just fucking forget about it, okay? Don’t - I’m not - I wasn’t -” he can’t find the right words, can’t find anything that could serve as some plausible explanation, because even Mickey’s lost on this one. So he clams up, and shuts his jaw tightly again, giving him absolutely nothing in response. Curtis keeps staring at him, and once he realizes Mickey isn’t going to talk, he lets out this quiet sigh. Mickey can see his shoulders drop out of the corner of his vision.
“Okay,” he says, quietly. “Well, uh…if you don’t…want that, I’m gonna go back to sleep, then.”
Mickey blinks, confused. He allows himself to glance up at the boy in front of him, his face still tucked in his jacket and scarf. Curtis is back to looking like a wilted flower, his shoulders slumped over and his hands pulled into his lap.
“To sleep?” Mickey asks, after a second. Curtis nods.
“I’m…still not really feeling well,” he says, ominously. Mickey wonders what he has. He doesn’t sound sick, doesn’t sniffle or cough or anything, but he just looks beat. Like he got out of a really nasty bar fight, but without any visible injuries. Something about it is just off, in a way Mickey’s never seen. Maybe he got AIDs, or something, and is dying right in front of Mickey right now.
“So, if you don’t mind, I’m going to go back to bed now.”
And sure enough, Mickey watches as he crawls inside his little tent, and draws a thinning quilted blanket over him, wrapping it around himself tightly as he settles down on his shitty mattress that serves as a makeshift bed. Mickey stares at the soles of his shoes, stacked on top of each other.
“Um,” he says, “do you…want me to leave?”
He can see the movement of his shoulders rising and falling from inside.
“I don’t really care,” he answers, softly.
Mickey watches him, expecting a joke or something, but there doesn’t seem to be a punchline to this. It looks as if he literally is going back to bed right now. The album continues playing. The third song is just as mundane as the second. Mickey stays pressed against the wall for a moment, glancing around the place. He wants to ask Curtis if he could maybe slum it here for a few days; it’d be nice to sleep somewhere so blocked from the wind, somewhere that’s perfectly dry - looking. But he’d rather slit his wrists than actually say any of this to his face. He glances back down at the room and thinks about the fact there’s some naked old lady in there.
And in the end, he gets up and heads down the stairs, leaving Curtis to sleep and listen to his new CD of the album he’s already heard so many times before. Before leaving, he glances around one last time, and stares down at the duffel bag, at the name embroidered on it. P. GALLAGHER. It looks official, like it was army - issued. Mickey wonders who he stole it from.
*
No matter what he does, Mickey cannot stop thinking about the night he bought that CD for Curtis. He tries to distract himself a million ways, but the visions of that night won’t quite replaying in his mind every second of the day. He keeps getting so worked up about it that he feels as if he’s giving himself brain damage.
Someone in the street honks at him as he sprays down their window later in the week, and Mickey is so high - strung that he doesn't even flip them off or anything, just immediately reaches over and punches their window through. The cops promptly get called on him and his fist is fucked up for the next few days, and he has to spend those few days chainsmoking under the bridge in hiding. He gets so desperate, he calls Pivo up and asks if he has any crack. Pivo laughs in his face before he even asks if Mickey has that kind of money, which he doesn’t. He’s not angrily stupid enough to take a swing at Pivo for that, but he’d really like to. He settles for a few Xanax and calls it a day.
But that in it of itself is a dumb decision, because Mickey immediately remembers why he never does Xans anymore, after he wakes up a day later, bruised and stiff, curled up next to the old lady who lives by the newspaper stand. She says good morning to him when she sees him looking around nervously after he wakes up and realizes where he is. His nose is sticky from clotted blood, and he can feel more dried on his upper lip, like it started bleeding and he never wiped it away. There's a new soreness in his ribs, and a pounding headache between his temples.
He scrounges a few quarters for a coffee from the gas station and accepts his fate. Him and his brothers used to do this for fun, actually; take Xans, black out, and go to bars or bad streets to purposefully get into fights so they could compare their wounds whenever they regained consciousness and laugh about it together. A low form of entertainment, but something the three of them had found utterly hysterical for some reason. Mickey broke his nose one time and it had healed a little crooked, but he still finds it as funny as he did when he came to that morning and stared in the bathroom mirror.
When he'd bought them, Pivo had mumbled around a cigarette and asked if Mickey found “his hooker”. Mickey told him to watch his mouth, but said he'd gotten what he wanted from him, which wasn't even true in any sense, but it felt right to say. Pivo had laughed a loud, rusty laugh, and Mickey had left very quickly.
*
Mickey is trying to sneak into the back door of the movie theater when Curtis finds him, fucking somehow, a few days later.
“Hey,” he says, walking up to him. Mickey's heart leaps into his throat when he hears that voice, and his mouth immediately tastes of stomach acid. He pretends not to have heard him, but if Mickey has learned anything about this kid, it’s that he’s quite literally nothing if not persistent and unfathomably annoying.
“Thank you for not robbing me,” he says from behind Mickey. Mickey can’t help but let out a small laugh, shaking his head as he kicks the bottom left of the door, where it breaks it loose.
“Y’ain’t got nothin’ worth stealing.” He mutters.
Throwing a careful glance over his shoulder, he’s surprised to find Curtis looking nothing at all like the last time he saw him. His hair is softly done, and his eyes are bright, though Mickey notices no eyeliner this time. He’s wearing what is probably his cleanest jeans, slung low over his hips with the front unbuttoned, and a tight shirt that looks like he got it from the little boy’s section in a store. He’s got his thumbs hooked in the front of his pockets again, and Mickey suspects the reason he does that is because he swears this kid wears women’s jeans due to the way they hug his hips and look so similar to the ones Mickey’s sister used to own, and of course never had pockets.
“That’s not true.” Curtis shrugs, “you could’ve gone through my bag and found something you really liked. Taken my CD player and pawned it.”
Mickey stares at him for a moment, something odd and warm coursing through him as he does. He ignores it. “Don’t give me any ideas.”
“Yeah,” Curtis laughs quietly. “I guess you do know where I live, now.”
Mickey frowns. “Is there a point to this or are you just looking for chitchatting?”
Curtis stares at him, taken aback by Mickey’s sudden tonal shift. “Um, not really. I was just saying hi, I guess.”
“Okay,” Mickey says, gruffly. “Well, hi.”
Curtis doesn’t leave though, takes his hands out of his pockets and balls them into fists at his hips, his expression sharpening.
“What is your problem?”
“You,” Mickey sniffs. “You won’t fucking leave me alone. Every time I turn around, you’re fucking there.”
“You came to me last time,” Curtis says, frustrated. “You bought me that CD. And I know you were out fucking asking about me.”
Mickey can feel his eyes widen involuntarily when he adds that last part, whipping around to face the redheaded boy. He tightens his jaw so hard he feels like he might crack one of his molars in half.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Mia told me you fucking asked about me.” Curtis says, softly. “I don’t owe you any money.”
Mickey doesn’t say anything. Mia - must be the street whore who Mickey asked.
They keep staring at each other, the tension between them becoming thick and unbearable. Mickey hates him, he hates Curtis so much he wants to kill him. He wants Curtis to reach out and grab him. He wishes he had that bowie knife Iggy used to flaunt, so he could shove it into the inches of pale skin visible between his jeans and shirt. He wishes Curtis would put his hands on him.
“Leave me alone,” Mickey says, after a moment. Curtis narrows his eyes at him.
“I don’t understand you.”
“Nothin’ to understand.”
“Why are you all banged up?”
“Is this all you know how to do? Pester me with stupid fucking questions?” Mickey squints at him, taking a step back. “Do you think I’m gonna go skip downtown with you and hold hands because I bought you a fucking CD when you were walking around all sick and fucked up?”
Something that could be read as hurt flashes in Curtis’ eyes. Mickey doesn’t know what the hell that is about, doesn’t want to know what that could be about. He wishes he had never met this kid.
“Why did you do it?”
“Christ,” Mickey runs a hand down his face, turning away, “I fucking told you to leave me alone.”
“If you hate me so much, why did you buy me the fucking CD?” He hears Curtis take another step towards him. Mickey tenses up, sucks in a breath as small sparks of pain flitter across his ribs. The bruising has gone down, but it still pains him to move too fast or breathe too quickly. He wonders if he actually broke a rib, or just got kicked that hard.
“Fucking answer me,” Curtis says, in this whiney, bitchy tone, and Mickey just can’t take it. He spins around, balling his fist up and landing the punch right to Curtis’ jaw. It’s the same hand he used to punch that person’s window on the road the other day, and it hurts like a motherfucker. He hisses, shaking his hand out with white hot pain spreading through his knuckles, while never taking his eyes off the other boy. Curtis loses his footing and almost falls back, but catches himself last minute. He glares at Mickey hotly, surging forward to grab his shoulders, pushing Mickey down and shoving his knee up quickly into Mickey’s gut. Mickey lets out a groan at the brutal contact, before securing his arms around his waist and shoving them both backwards.
They throw a few more punches, a few misses and a few squarely landing on the other. Mickey’s ribs feel like they’re on fire. Curtis has blood on his face from a punch Mickey landed on his forehead.
He’s surprised that scab isn’t infected; rotting in his face, and that Mickey isn’t going to cause it to explode with pus by landing the right hit.
Despite his pansy - ass appearance, Curtis is stronger than he looks. There’s something about the grip in his hands, the way he grabs Mickey, that’s really putting some evil thoughts into Mickey’s head. He needs to either kill this kid, or break free and run far away before he does something he regrets.
Curtis grabs his wrists, holds them up by Mickey’s head in an iron grip and glares down at Mickey. His face is all fucked up, and Mickey hopes it stains and ruins his shirt forever.
Without warning, he leans forward and spits a mix of saliva and blood right at the corner of Mickey’s mouth, which is open in a grimace as he strains back against him. Mickey’s eyes widen when he feels it hit his skin, feels and tastes the few drops that made their way inside his mouth. Mickey instantly goes hard in his jeans, and without much thought, throws himself forward to headbutt Curtis as hard as he can.
*
“The hell happened to you?” The Speedway employee snickers at Mickey. Mickey glares at him, but reaches his hand to feel at the massive bruise on his forehead from the fight with Curtis two nights ago. He pokes at it with the tips of his calloused fingers, and winces. The cashier chuckles, ringing Mickey up. A fountain soda, and a shitload of candy stuffed into his jacket.
“One dollar.”
Must be a discount on items up your sleeves.
It’s already dark when Mickey steps out, and he shivers despite all the layers he has on, clothing and plastic. The chocolate is probably already melting from being pressed against him for this long, so he takes a minute to pause under a streetlamp and shake himself out, muttering. A few people pass by and give him questioning looks, but it’s nothing he hasn’t grown accustomed to. Mickey’s still not sure what he’s going to do when it snows. All he knows is he’s never going back to that house; ever. And it’s not like anyone has put up any missing posters for him.
He knows if his dad catches him out here, he’ll probably chase him through the streets and demand him to come back, but he won’t do too much until he or someone in association (i.e. Terry’s network of rats) with him spots Mickey. Though he should probably start planning to bus hop to a different state if he knows what’s good for him. Maybe he can go to Louisiana, or Utah. Maybe it doesn’t snow as much there. Knowing his luck, he’ll pick a state that has a secret pocket of his fucked up ass family, and they’ll report him straight to Terry. Go fucking figure, with his luck.
Mickey has no plans except to drink his soda and chainsmoke under the bridge tonight, though he wishes he was watching TV. One of the cafes down east stays open late, and if the meeker college students are working tonight and not that gray - haired bitch, Mickey can usually stay pretty late in there as long as he buys a coffee or whatever. They usually play movies, too; albeit on a tiny TV in the top corner. Mickey really should get into sports so he can at least have something to stare at half - heartedly in all these places while pretending to be some loyal patron.
It’s dark enough for Mickey to stare at all the lights on his way over to the cafe, glancing inside the apartment buildings with open curtains. He thinks about what it would feel like to live in such a comfortable place right above the city streets. He thinks only happily dull, wealthy people can live in apartments. The concept is so strange to him; your house inside of a building, owned by someone else, all next to hundreds of others doing the exact same thing in the same confined space.
Sometimes, he does miss his room.
After crossing the street, Mickey finds himself opposite some fancy diner, and stares into the massive windows at the front, at couples sitting across from each other at the tables, talking and laughing and staring. He feels his stomach twist, and glances away, but not before catching sight of a redhaired boy leaning over a table. He pauses.
Sure enough, Curtis is inside one of the windows, under a large sparkling chandelier, and staring opposite some old guy. Mickey snorts bitterly, tucking his nose into his scarf. Fucking typical, and fucking unreal. And fuck him.
He allows his gaze to linger as people pass him by, ignoring the wide berths they give Mickey as they walk around him. It might be because he hasn’t showered in two weeks, and it might be because he’s currently burning a hole through the building with the way he’s watching this kid. Something about it seems a little funny. Mickey lights up a cigarette, restless. It dangles from his lips loosely as he squints, studying the picture in the far window he’s got his vision lasered in on.
Curtis leans forward to talk to the older man, but every few seconds his head falls forward, before jerking upright. His eyes look half - closed, even from Mickey’s view here, and he keeps adjusting his hands on the table, over and over. In a repetitive motion, much like his scab, he has to keep resetting himself to just sit up straight.
Mickey feels saliva pool in his mouth, as if he’s going to throw up. He smokes the cigarette without removing it from his mouth, biting the edge of the filter and breathing the smoke out of his nostrils all in one solid action.
He doesn’t know how long he stands out there, but it’s long enough to where he burns through another cigarette and is debating lighting up a third, when he sees the man get up, and grab a coat in one arm and Curtis in the other. Curtis stumbles, then tilts his head up with a wide grin, his eyes fluttering closed. Mickey feels something twist violently in his stomach as he watches, and for the first time in days it’s not his ribs.
They disappear behind the slats of concrete, then reappear through the backgrounds of the windows as they make their way to the door. Curtis keeps trying to walk in a straight line, as if he’s doing some sobriety test, as if this guy with him is fool enough to think there’s any possibility he could be clean right now. He grinds his teeth, and watches as they exit the door. The man straightens Curtis up, leans in to whisper something in his ear. Curtis droops over, redoing his footing about three times before the guy has to reach out and grab him. He smiles but it drops quickly, before he replaces it with another smile. Mickey presses the heels of his palms to his eyebrows, groaning, before running across the street without much thought, or plan, or anything at all.
The man and Curtis begin to move down, the man supporting most of Curtis’ frame with his large hands. He’s wearing the same kind of coat Mickey’s elementary principle would wear during recess monitoring.
“HEY,” Mickey shouts, as soon as he’s within a few feet of them. “Hey, you! Yep, old guy with the kid, I’m talkin’ to you!”
The man glances back nervously, but his eyebrows knit together in confusion once he sees Mickey. He brings Curtis to a halt with his other arm reaching around to press flat against his chest, facing Mickey now. Curtis blinks blearily, his mouth pressing into a flat line. He still has the scrape from Mickey headbutting him.
“Where you two heading?” Mickey asks, staring straight into the man’s eyes. He blinks back at Mickey, twisting his face into some ugly sort of smile.
“I’m sorry, do I know you?”
“No,” Mickey says, “and I think we should probably keep it that way.” He nods his head towards Curtis, who is frowning at Mickey through his half - closed eyes. Mickey sees his mouth move but can’t hear any sounds that escape.
“Where are you taking him?”
The man narrows his eyes, chuckling lightly.
“I don’t think that’s any of your business,” he smiles thinly. “I suggest you leave us be.”
“Really? Let you just walk off with this underage kid? I oughta just be cool with that?”
The man shifts, agitated. He glances around to see if Mickey is drawing anyone’s attention from how loudly he’s speaking. Mickey zeroes in on it.
“Yeah? That the plan for tonight? You’re just gonna take this sixteen year old boy home? You gonna escort him? After taking him out to dinner, or whatever the hell that shit was?”
The man gives him a look, his grip on Curtis tightening. Mickey stares right back, his gaze steady. A few people lingering around the restaurant have begun to take notice from Mickey’s yelling, glancing their way.
“How much?”
Mickey blinks, scrunching his face. “Excuse me? You tryna hire my ass now too?”
“To get you to shut the hell up,” the man says, pulling at his wallet in his back pocket. Mickey feels his eyes go wide as the guy starts to flip through the bills, struggling to do it one - handed in order to keep Curtis up. Curtis keeps his eyes on Mickey the entire time, his face pulled into a tight frown.
“How do you always find me?” He mumbles, or at least that’s what Mickey thinks he hears him say. The guy is holding out a stack of bills to Mickey, insistently shoving them towards him.
“Please,” he says, though not politely. Mickey stares down at it, and then towards Curtis. He squints at the man. “You serious right now?” He thumbs his nose, shaking his head.
“Yeah, I just don’t think this is gonna cover it.”
The guy grits his teeth, looking like he wants to murder Mickey. “That’s at least two fifty. Surely that’s enough to buy you some decent fucking clothes or a shower.”
Mickey chuckles. “Do you talk to all your underage boy clients like this? Or just the ones you like?”
The man opens his mouth to reply, with god knows what, but Mickey’s grown tired of this little back and forth game they seem to be playing, so he instead chooses to swing his fist square into the man’s stomach, knocking the wind out of him. Mickey pulls his fist back, and aims the toe of his shoes right up the guy’s crotch, which gets him to his knees with a groan. Curtis looks down at him and snorts softly before he falls over, splayed on the frigid concrete. Mickey swoops down to grab the man’s wallet, giving him one last swift kick in the torso, before he reaches over to Curtis.
“Jesus Christ, man,” he sighs, grabbing his biceps firmly, hauling him up. Curtis makes a soft noise, leaning into Mickey. Mickey squawks as his weight pushes against him, completely dead weight. He keeps trying to stand Curtis up on his feet, but he seems completely out of it, his eyes rolling back into his head and breathing going shallow. Mickey holds him up, his body completely limp and ragdolling on top of him for a moment. This close, Curtis smells nice, and his body is warm against Mickey’s, and it’s freaking him the hell out.
Out of options and desperate to remove the two of them from this situation before this old shithead at Mickey’s feet gets up, Mickey huffs out a small groan and moves his grip downwards, grabbing Curtis by the waist and hauling him over his shoulder. He’s goddamn heavier than he looks, but he’s clearly gained some of his weight back, which Mickey thinks is good. He gives the old man on the pavement one last dirty look, and a swift kick in the ass before he departs.
They get a few odd looks as Mickey retraces the way back to Curtis’ building, but no one reaches out to them until they’re one block away from the building. Someone closing up a store glances over their shoulder at Mickey, and blinks widely as they fumble with their keys.
“He okay?”
Mickey nods, shifting Curtis’ limp body on his shoulder, one arm wrapped firmly around his waist to hold him in place, the other around his legs. He wonders what the hell this kid took.
He has to set him down when they make it inside the building and to the stairs. Mickey shakes Curtis to try and get him to come to, but he’s still completely out, head lolling on his shoulders. Mickey, out of options and exhausted, resigns to pulling him up the steps with his hands under his armpits. If Curtis wakes up with the backs of his thighs completely black and blue the next morning after being whacked on the stairs the entire way up, then he can bitch, and Mickey can bite back about how he should be thankful that Mickey actually put him up in his bed and saved him from another night of borderline rape and kidnap.
If Mickey’s still here in the morning. He might have to tuck Curtis into his horrible bed and just dip. But it would be incredibly nice if he got to sleep somewhere out of the wind tonight. But Mickey can’t get everything he wants, he knows.
After a million years, they make it to the top space where Curtis’ set up is. Mickey heaves him into the small tent, falling down on his knees to the side of him, breathing heavily and sweating profusely. Mickey drags the back of his hand over his forehead, glancing around. There’s no sign of the freaky naked old lady. He has no idea what time it is, or if she’s even here, if she leaves at all. He closes his eyes, giving himself a minute to collect his thoughts and think about what’s next; process whatever the hell he did just now, when he feels a cold hand on his thigh. He jumps maybe six feet in the air.
Curtis mumbles something under his breath, his thumb smoothing over Mickey’s pants. He quickly reaches down and pries his hand off of him by the wrist, throwing it over his chest. Curtis huffs. Mickey stares down at him, before tentatively reaching over him to grab for the quilt and pull it over him. Curtis moves again as Mickey tries to tuck the edges into where the mattress meets his body, trapping the heat in.
“How did you find me?” Curtis mumbles, trying to open his eyes and having them fall shut, over and over. Mickey watches his face for a moment, mouth open in surprise. He snaps his jaw shut, sits back on his heels.
“Was walkin’ by.” He sighs, feeling a thick exhaustion tracing through him. He wants to curl up on the floor right here, right now, and sleep forever. Mickey knew he was out of shape from days of eating nothing by gas station candy and dumpster meals, but he didn’t know it was this dire. This is just embarrassing.
“You’re always there,” Curtis mumbles, oddly. Mickey frowns at him, hesitating before he replies.
“I’m not. You just got lucky a few times.”
Curtis hums. Mickey picks at a small hole he's discovered in his pants, where the pocket is ripping at the seam where it meets his pant leg. He stares at the pale flesh beneath it, blocking everything else that tries to reach inside of his head. He’s become real good at that; completely shutting his mind off and laying dormant. His sister used to tell him that one day he was going to do that, and freeze himself like that - like what you'd tell a little kid who makes an ugly face. It scared him temporarily, but he doesn't know how else to get through some of these things if not completely mindless.
He'll worry about it some other day.
“That guy make you take something?”
“No,” Curtis shakes his head, his eyes still closed. “He was too intense for me tonight, so I took some shit in the bathroom.”
Mickey blinks. “On purpose?”
“Yeah. Sometimes I gotta…dope myself up to get through some of those guys.”
Mickey hooks his finger through the hole in his pants, tugging and ripping the seam further. He feels kind of sick, but doesn't say anything.
“Are you gay?”
Mickey squints at him, dumb - founded. Curtis looks dead, quite frankly, but is still finding time to ask him the most irritating questions possible. “Just because you're knocked out doesn't mean I won't still kick your ass.”
Curtis chuckles at that, and after a few moments of quiet, says; “You should stay.” Mickey swallows hard, but Curtis keeps talking before he can reply.
“I like you. You can stay. You…you can touch me or whatever, by the way. I won’t mind.”
“Did you just offer to let me molest you while unconscious?"
Curtis lets out another soft laugh. “Mhm. Go for it, I don’t care. I won't remember it. Some guys are really into that…”
“You let guys do that to you?”
Curtis shifts, rolling onto his side with his back facing Mickey. He moves his shoulders in an attempt of a shrug. “Money talks.”
Mickey looks away to breathe out a heavy sigh. He stares around the room, at all the nothing that Curtis owns, except for this small mattress he's laying on, the clothes on his back, and this overstuffed duffel bag. Something about it is so indescribably lonely, Mickey feels suffocated. But he too kind of wants himself to stay.
Groping and fucking people while they were asleep, passed out on an entire cocktail of things, that's the kind of shit Mickey's family was into; the kind of shit his brothers would do for cheap kicks on a Saturday night and whisper about later, laughing and shoving each other as if recounting a fun night instead of their committed sexual assaults. And Mickey’s no saint, but he even felt a little queasy about that one. Never could take the final push to move on that kind of action, despite how much his brothers and uncles teased him for it. Like he was a pussy for not wanting to rape the underage girls they were always bringing around.
“You are the most depressing person I think I've ever met, Curtis.”
He only says it because he assumes he's finally fallen asleep, but he's startled by Curtis laughing, mashing his face deeper into his really lame excuse of a pillow.
“Who told you that was my name?”
Mickey's entire face goes hot. “Mia.”
“Hmm…When you asked about me? Hah…I hate her, so mean. No, I don't hate her. Ummm…” he pauses, inhales deeply. “What do you think my name is?”
Mickey frowns, slightly annoyed, slightly curious. “Eh?”
“ ‘S a fake. Curtis. It’s not my real name, I just didn't want some of those guys to be able to find me. Outside, ‘n shit.”
“Might be the smartest shit you've ever pulled. Who told you to do that?”
Curtis laughs again, shaking his head. “Don't go back to being mean. I hate you when you do that…now guess my fuckin’ name.”
Mickey stares at him as he speaks, at the back of his head. He needs a haircut. His red hair is trailing down lower, curling around the backs of his ears and nape of his neck.
“Does it start with a P?”
But he - Curtis, P. Gallagher, whatever his name is or isn’t, not that Mickey gives two fucks - is knocked out, for real this time. His breathing has softened to a slower pace. Mickey watches him sleep for a while, staring at his sharp shoulders rise and fall. He thinks about what he said, that Mickey could touch him, fuck him, whatever. He pushes himself backwards, trying to put as much space between the two of them as he can, feeling unnerved by just the thought of that.
After a moment, Mickey pokes his head outside of the tent, and searches around blindly in the dark for the duffel bag. He drags it and himself over to the window on the far wall, sitting beneath it and trying to catch the streetlamp to get a small light.
Inside, there's a lot of clothes, which he piles next to his knee carelessly. None of them are folded, most not even washed, it looks like. He'll stuff them back inside when he's done.
Mickey is surprised to pull out three books, incredibly wrinkled and battered, probably from being shoved around and beat up from inside this bag, which has been god knows where with this kid.
There's a string of condoms, a dead D.S. and MP3 player with no signs of batteries or charger, and a photo folded in half, all in the side pocket, next to a toothbrush, nearly empty tube of toothpaste, and an impressive collection of various deodorants and colognes. In the other pocket on the opposite side is a wallet with no money inside, but it does hold a library and Blockbuster membership card. The Blockbuster card lists someone named Frank Gallagher as the owner. Mickey frowns at it.
There's an I.D. inside the wallet, one that Mickey has to fumble to pry out of the clear plastic with cold fingertips. It's a picture of the kid staring straight forward, all serious. Mickey notices there's no scab on his face in this photo, and that the I.D. lists him as being eighteen. According to it, his name is Phillip Gallagher.
Mickey knows that this kid is a lot of things, but he’s not eighteen. And while his bag may say P. Gallagher, he’s beginning to have reason to believe this kid isn’t Phillip.
After a second, he sets the wallet back down and reaches in to open the photo, holding it carefully between his fingers. He stares back at a family photo - no shit - of a bunch of kids crowded beneath a Christmas tree. A girl with brown hair and really sad eyes looks to be the oldest, with two boys beside her. The one closest to her has some odd Bob Dylan haircut, and really bright blue eyes. The kid to his side is the one asleep a few feet away from Mickey, though younger looking, his red hair flat - ironed to give him these crazy bangs, and his face is so thick with freckles, Mickey just can’t help but laugh quietly to himself. Three smaller kids are sitting in front of them, one little girl, also with red hair, smiling really wide and holding a black baby, and a little boy flipping the camera off.
Mickey stares at it for a long time, then glances at the redhaired boy's sleeping figure, slumped inside the mattress all hopped up on god knows what, selling his ass on the street. Mickey just doesn't get it. What could these kids have done that was so bad it pushed him to this?
*
Mickey wakes up to the radio in Marla’s room blasting a frankly ridiculous volume to be hearing the weather report at. Mickey has always prided himself on being able to sleep through genuinely anything, but even this gets him to stir awake. One time, some semi - truck got brakechecked, and there was a huge accident on the bridge in which several people died, and he slept through the entire thing right below. He can’t lie, he’d snickered to himself upon finding it out.
This one only lasts a few minutes; he stares at the soles of the redheaded whatshisname’s boots sticking out of the tent, and listens to the sounds of beginning traffic just below them. He fell asleep on top of the duffel bag once he’d repacked it, his legs tucked under him. His back kind of hurts as well from spending all night on the stiff floor and awkwardly stuffed bag, but he drifts back off to sleep fast enough. When he wakes up the second time, the sun has shifted down further, later in the afternoon, and the redhead kid is awake, smoking while leaning out the window right beside Mickey.
Mickey glances up at him, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes in the noon light. The kid doesn’t see him, the window pushed open and his arms folded on the sill to lean his shoulders and head out. Mickey wonders what he’s looking at right now.
When he finally does realize Mickey is awake, he peers down at him with wide, green eyes, black smudged around his sockets. Mickey stares back, nervous.
“Mornin’,” he says quietly, ashing his cigarette over the edge of the window. Mickey feels his entire face grow warm, for some reason, and looks away rubbing the back of his neck. He grunts in response.
He wants to ask how he slept. He wants to ask what his real name is. He wants to ask why he would ever think Mickey would ever want to do those things to him in his sleep, what about him still manages to give people those kinds of ideas, how they always manage to find the worst pieces of his family to stick to him even after all these miles and months of separation, and without knowing anything about Mickey.
He doesn’t say anything.
They sit in this awkward silence for a few minutes, Mickey pretending to not even care that he’s only a few feet away from him, while the kid continues to smoke and stare out the window listlessly. Mickey hears the sounds of the cars swerving and honking, of Marla’s radio and her shuffling around inside her room. He swipes his hand over the duffle bag, and thinks about the photo he found inside it.
As if reading his mind, the kid suddenly turns and nods at the bag. “You weren’t planning to wake up before me and run off with that, were you?”
“No,” Mickey snorts, nervous now that the kid’s attention is back on him. “You don’t have shit worth stealing.”
“You look through my stuff?”
“Nuthin’ to look through,” Mickey thumbs his nose, staring down the hall. “Cute Christmas photo. That your family or just some friends from prep school?”
He looks back out the window in lieu of a response, his face pulling into a tense expression, his eyes squinting at the city. Mickey watches as he reaches up to pick at the scab. “My family.” He answers after a moment. Mickey nods, not sure what else to do.
“They looked pretty nice. Don't know why you're selling your ass on the street instead of staying with them, y’know.”
The kid frowns, takes one last breath into his cigarette before flicking it out the window. He turns to stare at Mickey, his face pulled into a tight frown.
“How long are you going to stay here?” He blurts out suddenly. Mickey blinks, taken aback. “What?” He scrunches his face, feeling silly sitting on the floor and letting himself be spoken to like this, by this guy of all people. “You want me to leave?”
The kid stares at him, his hands leaning back on the windowsill. He tilts his head, his eyes never leaving Mickey.
“Well, no offense, but you’ve made it pretty clear you don’t want to be around me. Even though you seem to constantly go out of your way to do nice things for me,” and Mickey can’t help but notice he doesn’t answer whether he wants Mickey to leave or not. “You always do something really nice and then…get really fucking mean. And, like, it’s great that you took me home last night, but…I don’t want you to stay if you’re going to be throwing a fit and cursing me out in a few minutes.”
And all Mickey can think, is that he just hates this kid. He hates how well he seems to already know Mickey, how there’s now a recognition of pattern with his behavior around him. He hates how he waited all morning for Mickey to wake up, standing beside him and smoking, probably planning what to say when he woke up. He hates that he won’t stop picking at the scab on his face. He hates that this kid never even said fucking thank you for last night. He rubs his knuckles on the thick cloth of the bag, still under him, and stares down at the embroidered name and thinks about the I.D. he found inside last night.
“Whose identity did you steal?”
The kid gives him a pointed look, his eyebrows drawing closer together.
“Your bag,” Mickey says, “has the name ‘P. Gallagher’ on it. And you have a driver’s license that says you’re an eighteen year old named Phillip Gallagher. And you have Frank Gallagher’s Blockbuster membership card.”
The kid’s lip draws back, his teeth poking out lightly, as his frown at Mickey deepens. Mickey keeps his face completely straight, staring back at the kid and holding eye contact the entire time.
“How do you know I’m not eighteen years old and named Phillip Gallagher?”
“You barely even have armpit hair, man,” Mickey sighs, “who would be stupid enough to believe you’re eighteen? And isn’t that your whole schtick with guys out there? That you’re just some young and willing kid on the street?”
The redheaded kid rubs a hand over his face, his fingers tracing carefully over the scab.
“I don’t know why it matters to you. I’m not eighteen, either.” Mickey says, after a moment. “Also, you told me that one day, about some people ‘not wanting the city to see an underage boy get in their car’.” The kid is still being weird by the window, all silent and twitchy, so Mickey lets out another quiet sigh, and starts to pull himself to his feet, his knees clicking in soreness.
“Look, if you really don’t want me to stick around,” he says, “I’ll just leave, Jesus -”
“I’m sixteen,” he blurts out. Mickey pauses, looks him up and down. The kid stares back at him, peels off another chunk of his scab without even flinching.
“Phillip is my brother. I pretended to be him to join the army. Wasn’t old enough to enlist.”
Mickey stuffs his hands inside his pockets. “You get lost on the way to bootcamp?”
“I ran away.” He shrugs. “From my family, and then the army.”
“Why?”
The kid pauses before sneering at Mickey. “Why do you even care?”
Mickey rolls his eyes. “Fuck me for asking, man.” He watches the kid’s face suddenly soften before looking away from Mickey.
“Army made me feel weird. I just started feeling so suffocated and…pulled some stupid shit, then ran. Doesn’t matter. I asked my mom for help so I wouldn’t have to go back home. That’s why I live here, with Marla.”
Mickey makes a face, blinking. “Am I allowed to ask about that, or are you going to bite my head off for this one, too? You didn’t want to go back home, so you asked your mom for help?”
“She hasn’t lived with us for the past couple years,” the kid sniffs, “ran off. Liked drugs more than she likes us. But I think after I escaped the army, we’ve kind of begun to understand each other a little more. She’s gonna come back for me soon. We’re going to Las Vegas.”
“What’s in Vegas?”
The kid shrugs. “Not our family.”
Mickey nods, all too familiar with something along those lines. “So your name isn’t Phillip or Curtis?”
The kid gives Mickey a small smile. “No. It’s Ian.”
Mickey nods again in response, repeating the name in his head over and over and over. He’s so busy trying to figure out how the name feels fitted onto all of his old memories that he doesn’t even realize that the kid, Ian, is staring at him expectantly, his eyes wide again, searching.
“What?” Mickey says gruffly, his face heating up.
“Well, what about you?” Ian says, quietly. “What’s your story?”
Mickey scrunches up his face. “I don’t have a ‘story’, man. I hated living in my shithole house and my dad was gonna fucking kill me, so I left.”
Ian keeps looking at him, though, like he expects Mickey to break into a long - winded explanation of everything that’s ever happened to him. He seems to be annoyed when Mickey doesn’t.
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.” Mickey shrugs, moving his hands inside of his pockets outwards from himself. “Sorry.” But he’s not, really. He doesn’t think this kid wants to hear about any of the sad shit that went down inside his house the last few weeks Mickey was there; doesn’t really want to dissect himself so casually in front of him and tell him all the nasty details about his pathetic life, about what his dad did to push him over the edge and run away. No one wants to hear that shit, and if they ever say they do, they’re lying.
Ian watches him for a moment, looking as if he’s thinking really hard and trying to figure out a way to pry. Mickey suppresses a groan, preparing himself to being subjected to this fucking guy’s ridiculous interrogation, but instead all he asks is, “Is that all your stuff?”
“Eh?” Mickey blinks, glancing down at himself. “Like, on me?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh. Yeah.” Mickey admits softly.
“Where do you sleep at night?”
“Under the bridge, usually,” Mickey shrugs. “If there’s something up down there, or it’s too far, I’ll take a bench or some concrete corner.” Mickey is above nothing, and below everything.
Ian frowns at him, crossing his arms over his chest. “Sounds cold.”
“ ‘Cause it is. ‘S why I wear all my shit on me. And so it doesn’t get stolen or lost.” Though it’s not much like Mickey has to steal; he has even less than Ian. No sentimental photos or electronic devices or anything. Just several changes of clothes and a couple knives and a pair of brass knuckles pooled at the bottom.
They stand there together in silence for another few beats, the weird tension that seems to exist solely between the two of them palpable and filling the entire space. Mickey can feel his face burning up, keeps thinking about what Ian said to him, about how he knows Mickey is just going to get mean if he stays, but how Ian let himself be distracted by Mickey’s questions anyways. He wonders who the fuck Ian Gallagher is, or at least who he thinks he is.
“You’ve probably gotta get going soon, huh?” He randomly asks, bringing Mickey out of his thoughts. He stares at Ian.
“Traffic is going to start picking up on your street soon, right?” He gives Mickey a short smile, but it’s almost clipped. Doesn’t reach his eyes.
“Too cold for that anymore,” Mickey huffs. “Better ways to freeze my ass off than panhandling while window washing.”
Ian laughs when Mickey says that, like it’s just the funniest thing he’s ever heard. He giggles, shaking his head, his eyes never leaving Mickey, who tightens his jaw in response.
“So what’re you gonna do for money, then?” Ian asks, once his laughter subsides. “You just going to be with nothing for the whole winter, or do I need to start teaching you tricks for street cruising?”
Mickey narrows his eyes, bristling at the fact that he would even think Mickey would stoop to that. If it was a joke, it wasn’t very funny.
“Look, just because I'm short on money now and we've talked a bit doesn’t mean I'm open to selling my ass to anybody willing to pay.”
Despite the fact that Ian doesn’t directly say anything to that, something within his face tightens and Mickey knows he’s fucked up. He clamps his jaw shut, but it doesn’t undo the fact that he just played directly into the prediction that Ian made just minutes ago. He kicks at the ground with his boot, expecting to hear Ian’s voice telling him to get out and leave him the hell alone. Instead, all he does is ask Mickey what he’s doing today.
Mickey gives him a look before answering.
“Nothing,” he thumbs at his eyebrow, glancing at Ian warily, who gives him another smile.
“Well, me neither. I was gonna take some Librium and walk around town today. You wanna join?”
Mickey scrunches his nose. “Librium?”
“Downers, feels kinda like booze. I do it a lot.”
Mickey blinks, shifts his weight on his feet. “Okay.”
Ian ducks into his tent quickly, and pulls out a small bag with a handful of small capsules inside. He beckons Mickey over as he takes one out, twisting it open on the crook of his thumb. Mickey stands and watches as he tilts his head down and snorts it right there. He laughs softly to himself as Ian pinches the bridge of his nose with another sniffle, before holding the bag out to Mickey.
Mickey kneels down beside him, and fishes one out. He holds it between his fingers, squints at it, as Ian stuffs the bag somewhere back inside his tent. Mickey’s impressed that he’s just shown him where he keeps his drugs, but Ian seems to have a habit of this. He tries so hard to hold Mickey at arms length, tread carefully around him. But he’s so desperate for Mickey’s attention, and whether this can be attributed to the fact that they’re the youngest people they’ve met on the streets and some of the only ones who haven’t tried to rob each other, or whether this is because Ian perhaps has some odd affection for him, Mickey can’t be sure.
The sleeve of his jacket is dusted lightly by the powder as he shakes it out onto his thumb, mimicking Ian’s movements. He can feel Ian watching him, see him smile as he watches Mickey lean his head down. Mickey coughs once, dragging his sleeve over his nose. He looks up to find Ian grinning a dopey smile at him, his pupils noticeably wider.
“First time?”
“No,” Mickey sniffs, blinking rapidly. “My brothers were really big into coke and ket and shit. Pretty sure one of them has a hole in his…fuck. What’s it called? Philtrum? The this part,” he pushes his index finger against the soft part of flesh between his nostrils.
“Brothers, huh?”
Mickey scowls at him, already feeling a pleasant pressure beginning to bloom within his skull. “Don’t be annoying.”
Ian just laughs, and wraps his jacket around himself before bounding down the stairs, as if he just expects Mickey to follow.
He does.
*
Ian is kind of annoying, but Mickey finds that he actually quite enjoys walking around town with him while high. They stumble through the streets, wading through all the people and whispering to each other, laughing and staring aimlessly at everything. They go into almost twenty stores to just stare at nothing, Ian sliding dozens of things up his sleeve. Mickey asks why he even wants half of that shit because some of it is useless to them, and Ian explains he doesn’t, he just likes to steal. Mickey thinks that’s really funny, and he laughs about it for maybe ten minutes.
Mickey blinks, and it’s eight at night. He and Ian are sitting on a bench at a bus stop, not actually waiting to get on the bus. Mickey is beginning to shiver under his jacket, and stuffs his hands deep inside his pockets. Ian convinced him to leave his ginormous backpack back at his place, and Mickey, now doped up, agreed. He’s wondering if that was a bad idea when his fingers brush against something stiff inside his pocket, and he discovers the wallet he took from the guy while rescuing Ian yesterday night. He stares at it dumbly, transfixed at the amount of cards and cash in this wallet, and the ugly I.D. photo of the man staring back at him. His voice dies inside his throat, and it takes Ian a few moments to actually notice. Most of their day has been spent like this; Ian rambling on about something while Mickey sits there borderline nonverbal.
“Wha’s that? Hey. Hey.”
“ ‘S the old guy’s wallet.” Mickey says after a moment. “The one who was trying to take you home last night.”
A weird look flickers over Ian’s face. He leans his head over Mickey’s shoulder, frowning down at the wallet. He reaches his hands out and without even asking, plucks it from Mickey’s grasp. Normally Mickey would immediately sock him in the face and yank it back, but here, he just lets him.
“Holy shit,” Ian breathes, thumbing through the bills. “Dude. You should’ve let me go home with him. Look at all this fucking cash.”
Mickey frowns, turns his head to stare at Ian’s face. “Don’t say that. You couldn’t even stand up straight. I had t’ carry you back to your building, man.”
Ian glances at him, his eyes wide and shining in the evening of the city. Mickey watches a million passing cars reflect inside of his iris.
“Really?”
Mickey nods.
“I don’t even remember that,” Ian mumbles, reaching his hand up to start picking at the scab. “I don’t remember you taking his wallet, either.”
Mickey is a little hurt that Ian doesn’t recall any of his valiant efforts from the other night, but he really doesn’t feel like telling him about how he literally beat up a random man for him, for no discernible reason. It’s really not like Mickey is doing this for anyone else.
“We should do something with this,” Ian says after a moment. Mickey blinks at him.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” Ian says, snapping his head up and glancing around the road. “We should…we should buy a Taxi to New York.”
Mickey can’t help but chuckle at that, his warm breath pushing a faint cloud into the cold air. “Um, I don’t think that’s the best use of our money. We’d be out by th’ time we actually got there.”
“Fine. What do you suggest?”
Mickey shrugs, looking away. “I don’t know. We should buy a fridge for your building. And a space heater, maybe.”
Ian stares at him, his eyes imploring. When Mickey wakes up the next morning, he’ll be horrified to remember this, that he basically implied to Ian that he wants to keep staying at his place. That he was already finding things to fix up inside it, for his own comfort, but in the moment he doesn’t even register the weight of what he’s just said. He thumbs his eyebrow, and glances down at a brightly lit building, giant open windows and a billboard at the top covered in lights and a sprawling cursive name upon it.
“We should go out to eat. At, like, a really nice restaurant.”
Ian snorts.
“Do you see how much money is on here? Plus the cards? We could buy so much Librium and coke on this. We could buy a million joints and cigarettes. We could…”
“Good god,” Mickey huffs. “We do that anyways. You sleep with enough old men that that’s all covered. Why don’t we do something nice for a change, you goddamn tweaker?” It’s not that Mickey disagrees with the notion of going out and buying drugs with it, he’d gladly call up Pivo right now if he could, it’s just that he feels like he’s fucking starving right now.
Ian presses his mouth shut tight, glancing Mickey up and down.
“You’re hardly restaurant material, you know.”
“Fuck you.”
Ian smiles really wide when Mickey says that. Mickey growls under his breath and looks away, his face pink in the beam of the streetlight.
“I’m just saying…” Ian purrs, “you’re not…the cleanest…”
Mickey, despite being well aware of just how dingy and dirty his appearance is, narrows his eyes. He doesn’t say anything, but Ian must feel bad because after a minute he agrees to go. They walk past the restaurant just behind them, to something nicer and more extravagant. Ian knows a lot of nice places from his various excursions with rich guys, and Mickey is desperate for a real meal for the first time in months. His mouth is practically watering when they step inside of one, and finally get allowed in without needing to have been on a waitlist three months ago. It has dark wooden walls and a red velvet carpet stretching through all the walkways. There’s a lot of blinding chandeliers and massive oil paintings with complicated gold, looping frames. Ian and Mickey pause to stare at a lot of them, already getting dirty looks from the other patrons when they see they’ve just been seated.
The waitress looks like she really wants to refuse service, but Ian is polite, and they have the cash, and both of them are following the dress code of wearing shoes and shirts, so she just sticks them in the far back corner. It’s good enough for them.
Mickey’s eyes are glued to the menu the second she places it down. Ian, however, can’t seem to take his eyes off Mickey.
“I think I’m gonna get the whole fuckin’ seafood platter,” Mickey mutters, mostly to himself. “Wait - look at this lamb shit over here. Fuck. What are you getting? You care if I blow a ton of this money on multiple things? I mean, I did get it for us.”
Instead of replying to Mickey’s questions (though he’s not really looking for a genuine answer, he’ll do whatever he wants regardless of what Ian says, he got the wallet, afterall), Ian peeks at him over the top of a menu with soft eyes.
“You’re really cool to hang out with when you’re not at my throat the whole time.” Ian blurts. Mickey’s entire face goes up in flames. He pokes the top of his head over the plastic menu, both of them only visible from the bridge of their noses and eyes up. Ian’s eyes are gentle; wide and captivated by Mickey’s incredibly lackluster action before him. Like he’s just overjoyed to be in the proximity of him, no matter how dull. Mickey’s eyebrows are drawn together in an attempt of a glare, but they falter and the aggressiveness he wants doesn’t reach his eyes.
“Okay.”
“Okay.” Ian smiles. Mickey looks away.
“I don’t think I even know your name, you know.”
“I’m sure you do.”
“I really don’t.” Ian dips the menu down a little, leans closer to Mickey over the table, who shifts back a few inches. “You know my name. Tell me yours.”
Mickey frowns at him. “You actually don’t know my name? After all that time you spent harassing me?”
“You didn’t know mine.”
Mickey scoffs, but he knows Ian isn’t going to give this up ever. So after a pause, he quietly says, “Mickey.”
“Just Mickey?”
“Yep.”
“Come on,” Ian pushes, always desperate for something more. “You know my name, my brother’s, and my dad’s.”
“Because you’re stupid, and too trusting.” Mickey glances up at him. “Your dad?”
“Frank - the guy whose Blockbuster membership I have.” Ian pauses, before continuing. Mickey doesn’t think he’s even read anything on the menu. “Well, actually, he’s not my real dad. My brother and I found that out a while ago - did a DNA test on all of us. I’m the only one who isn’t related to him. My mom fucked his brother on PCP.”
“Oh. Okay.”
Ian stares at Mickey expectantly, and when Mickey doesn’t say anything else, he seems to grow a bit irritated.
“This is the part where you tell me something personal about your own family, you know. Or at least your last name.”
“I don’t owe you shit, Gallagher. Sorry about your weird ass parents, though. Or happy for you, if your dad’s a piece of shit.”
“He is,” Ian sighs, seeming a little deflated by Mickey bringing that up. He rubs the bridge of his nose hard, squeezing his eyes shut. “Ugh, let’s hurry up when the food comes. I think I need to do another one. I’m starting to sober up.”
“Is this what you do all day when you’re not fucking old guys?” Mickey asks after a moment. “You just get really high and traipse around all day like some disgraced supermodel?”
“I guess so.” Ian pauses, flicking his eyes back up to Mickey. “You think I’m supermodel material?”
“Hmm. You wish, you fuckin’ fag.”
Mickey worries his bottom lip between his teeth, staring at the redheaded boy across from him as Ian laughs lightly, his eyes drifting back down at the menu. The dull hum of dozens of people’s conversations, paired with the sharp interruptions of silverware clicking against dishes fills the empty space where their conversation used to be. There’s a lady who looks like PJ Harvey on the violin up front, playing live in front of all these people who couldn’t give less of a fuck.
“Milkovich.”
“Hm?”
“My last name. It’s Milkovich.”
Ian visibly perks up at this, and Mickey feels something warm inside him at seeing Ian’s reaction.
“And don’t ask me any more stupid questions. That’s all you get tonight.” But Ian just smiles at him, probably delighted in the knowing of Mickey’s last name, and what seems to be the promise of more to come.
“Mickey Milkovich…”
“Don’t start repeating it out loud, man. Come on.”
“M&M,” Ian snickers. Mickey gives him a dirty look, right as the waitress materializes beside them and asks if they’re ready to order. Ian looks caught off guard by her presence, but Mickey’s already dropping the menu and cracking his knuckles, telling the girl she better get her pen and notepad out.
*
Ian didn’t even need to order anything, with the shit Mickey just pulled. Mickey usually is pretty stingy about sharing any of his food with anyone at all, but even this is a lot for him, and Ian let him crash at his place last night, despite how much of a shithole it is, and shared his drugs and seems to be open to letting Mickey stay longer. He keeps telling Ian he can take a bite of the various things he’s ordered, and Ian keeps staring at it all with an expression that can read as either disgusted or impressed. They try to order a bottle of wine, but the waitress shuts them down really fast. Mickey needs to implore Pivo about a fake I.D. next time he sees him. Lost his old one a few months ago.
Ian watches in barely hidden amusement as Mickey shovels huge bites of potatoes, steak, lobster, and more into his mouth, chewing obnoxiously and rambling about the shitty restaurant experiences he’s had in the past, all while intermittently pausing to wipe his nose on his sleeve or cough when something he swallowed without chewing enough gets lodged in his throat. Ian seems more content to stare and listen to Mickey than to actually eat, and gives Mickey half of his food. Several of the people around them give nasty looks throughout all of this.
“You know,” Mickey says at one point, sweeping his gaze around the restaurant while chewing a chunk of steak. “I bet I could beat every person here’s ass.”
Ian laughs loudly, but when Mickey doesn’t, he laughs again, harder.
“Are you serious?”
“Yeah.” Mickey says. “Why wouldn’t I be? Look at these jokers.”
“Is that really what you think about all the time?” Ian grins. “Like, anywhere you go, you square up everyone in your head?”
Mickey swallows hard, frowning at Ian. “You’re saying that like it’s a bad thing.”
*
Mickey tips the waitress one hundred and twelve dollars, and Ian insists that’s an incredibly odd number. Mickey says it’s a really good one, and she should be thankful. They bicker about it the entire way back to Ian’s place. Mickey only did it because Mandy used to work at a restaurant before he left, and it seemed to completely suck the life out of her every single night, but he doesn’t feel like getting into all of that with Ian at the moment. He wishes Ian and Mandy could have met; he thinks they’d get along annoyingly well, and the very fact that the thought crossed his mind makes Mickey flighty, just from the simple domesticity of it.
It’s freezing by the time they step outside, but Ian seems completely unaffected by it. He practically drags Mickey down the sidewalk, running circles around him, all while Mickey lumbers back like a bear preparing for hibernation. He wants to go to sleep the second they make it back up the stairs, Mickey winded from the effort much to Ian’s amusement, but Ian is already reaching into the tent to grab another capsule. He asks if Mickey wants one, and Mickey shrugs and says ok, because it’s here in front of him, isn’t it. After one more line, Ian asks if Mickey wants to go sit on the roof and smoke. He shrugs again, the smooth wave of blissful ease melting back over him.
They have to climb the fire escape outside one of the windows to reach the top of the building, and Mickey is afraid for a few seconds he’s going to slip and fall to his death, his depth perception a little out of whack right now. Ian just laughs and hoists him up the last stretch, his hands grabby and warm on Mickey’s sleeves and wrists as he pulls him up. Mickey shivers, tucking his nose into his scarf as Ian lights up beside him, both of them staring out at the sea of lights and moving cars on the freeway. Mickey doesn’t want to give this wretched ass fucking place that’s done nothing but make his life more and more miserable at every given chance some credit, but in the moment he can’t deny that it looks beautiful from all the way up here.
“I love doing this,” Ian hisses on an inhale, holding the cigarette out to Mickey. He takes it gratefully, slotting it between his lips with frozen fingers. He thinks he needs to invest in some gloves, soon.
“I love the way the city looks at night.” Ian chatters on. “All the lights, and the…you can’t really see the stars, that’s always bothered me. Light pollution…someday I want to go way out in the woods where there’s nothing so I can see them all. I’ll memorize a ton of constellations and find all of them…I hate missing out on that…”
Mickey just stares at him, blowing out a small curl of smoke. Ian is really, really talkative, but the drugs are stronger, and so he ends up kind of just rambling incoherently, a bit more to himself than Mickey, really, which is fine because Mickey is too stoned to make much conversation. He takes another puff from the cigarette as Ian’s mouth opens again.
“Some of those old guys, they want me to stay with them for…like…days…just cooped up somewhere with them so we can fuck endlessly. And I always tell them okay, only if they get me in a hotel…they think it’s because I’m homeless and because I like room service…which is true…but actually, I only do it because I love to wake up in the middle of the night and stare down at the city.” He blinks, pulling his tongue over his lips. “I love how it’s still awake at any given moment…there’s always something…I love that constant fact. No matter what it’s always true, always there. Always…can count on that. If nothing else…if ever anything else…always…”
In the dark, Ian turns and stares at Mickey for a moment.
“Do you really not want to have sex with me?”
“No,” Mickey mumbles, a little annoyed by the whiplash of Ian’s talking. “I don’t like it.”
Ian laughs outright at this, his eyes crinkling at the edges gently. Mickey’s learning that he really likes to watch Ian do that.
“That’s not true; everyone likes sex. I just mean - what's wrong with you? Do you just only like women? Is that what it is?”
Mickey’s face burns hotly. He shuts his eyes, thankful for the drugs and the dark of the evening. Thankful for everything that has led him unto this very moment, here with Gallagher.
“I don’t like any of it. Don’t bother me about it. I just don’t, okay?”
Ian is silent for a while. Mickey can feel his eyes lingering on him, again trying to figure out ways to pry and prod Mickey into a detailed explanation to give him some form of satisfaction. Mickey still kind of hates him for that.
“Okay, Mickey Milkovich.” Ian smiles. Mickey punches him in the arm.
*
It’s not that Mickey has a problem with recreational drug use - that’d be hypocritical of him to a degree that would just be sad - it’s just that Mickey didn’t realize just how wired Gallagher was practically all the time. Mickey’s starting to realize that almost every single time they interacted, Ian was probably high off something. He has a whole concoction of shit hidden in that tent of his, and picks things at random to spend the entire day blasted off of.
And Mickey doesn’t really care, because he always shares, and for some reason hasn’t kicked Mickey out of his humble abode here, but he’s just shocked at how much this kid truly has. Mickey likes drugs, has tried a whole slew of them thanks to his savage beast herd of a family, it’s just that at the end of the day, he really is starting to realize he prefers a nice meal and to get drunk, if he had to pick. Not all of the insane uppers and then bizarre mix of pills that Ian has a serious penchant for, and then running around the streets and talking nonstop. No wonder he hasn’t been kidnapped and strung up in someone’s secret dungeon yet; he’s too goddamn fucking annoying for anyone to want to keep him around that long.
Ian tells Mickey hundreds of stories; all they do every day is get loaded and then lie around until Ian grows too restless and they have to do something else. Mickey lays on his back usually with his eyes closed as Ian talks and talks and talks. Mostly he tells vile stories from his escapades of having sex with any old guy who gives him a second glance, though he does have quite a few of younger guys who occasionally take him up on his offers. Ian even tells him he’s fucked a few women, when the money was good enough.
“Didn’t know you swung both ways,” Mickey had muttered, unsure of what else to say to something like that.
“I don’t,” Ian said, “I’m gay. But I’m open to almost anything if they pay me enough.”
He then told Mickey about a couple who’d approached him, and asked to be their third, fucking the woman while blowing the guy. Ian says that he doesn’t like sex with women, but as long as they don’t kiss him, they cough up enough money, and he’s a little high, he’ll do it. Mickey said that’s really gross, and asks if he’s ever been tested for anything. Ian got really irritated when he asked that, and so the conversation ended there.
He tells Mickey a lot of stories about his family, though not intentionally. Sometimes he’ll randomly see something and mention how his sister liked that, or branch off something Mickey says and tell a story about his siblings, smiling really wide until he catches himself, and then clips the story short and gets a little quiet. Mickey wants to ask why Ian ran away; they still haven’t gotten to that part in all of his rambling. But he doesn’t want Ian to ask him about his own family and life before this, so he keeps his mouth shut to be fair.
Throughout all of this, Ian frequently tells Mickey that he’s not worried about being out here because he knows his mom is coming to get him soon.
“When?” Mickey asks, after the third time Ian reminds him of this honestly useless fact. Ian shrugs, looking away from Mickey’s gaze.
“I don’t know. Whenever she gets back. We didn’t have a set date or anything.”
Mickey gives him a look but doesn’t say anything else about it. Ian hasn’t even told Mickey where exactly his mother is, just that she had to go. Mickey figures it’s because he doesn’t even know.
Ian is sensitive and weird about his mom, he’s noticed. He tells Mickey stories about his parents abandoning him and his two older siblings in drug dens and bus stops when they were really young fairly often, how they’d regularly pawn the kid’s stuff to go out and buy smack; it’s all nothing Mickey hasn’t heard or experienced first hand before, he’s just never seen someone so contradictory in their own mind and speech. Ian will laugh and bitterly remark about a specific time, saying, ‘well, that’s just typical of her, now isn’t it?’ (as if Mickey knows a thing or two about Ian’s mother), but then other times he’ll jump in and start saying he gets it, and give all these justifications that Mickey doesn’t care about and didn’t need, because he couldn’t give two shits about Ian’s mother.
He says nothing, and just nods along to whatever Ian decides to go with that day. It’s none of his business.
A few times, Ian says his mother is taking him to a different city than the last. He says they’re going to L.A. the next time he brings it up, and Mickey points out that he thought they were going to Vegas, which causes Ian to pause for a moment, and mumble to himself, waving Mickey off. A few times he insists he never said Vegas or L.A., and it’s actually New York. Mickey learns to just stop saying anything, because all it seems to do is make Ian really distressed and tense.
*
By December, Mickey sleeps in a sleeping bag in the corner by the window, with a heap of blankets piled on top of it. He often stares at Ian’s feet sticking out of the tent as he’s falling asleep. Ian always sleeps with his boots on, like he needs to be ready to go at any moment. Mickey thinks it’s funny. He just can't fathom Ian's strong desire for always being active in something.
He’s not exactly sure what their arrangement is supposed to be, really, because Mickey hasn’t brought in any money since the wallet he ripped off that guy, but Ian doesn’t ask for anything. He will, however, regularly check to make sure Mickey doesn’t want to bang. Mickey says the same thing every time (“No. I don’t like sex. No, there’s no reason why. I just don’t. Stop fuckin’ asking me, for fuck’s sake,”), and begins to wonder if Ian has fried his brain from the assortment of shit he takes daily and is now just stupid, or annoyingly stubborn.
Ian never seems to buy this, and will just shut his mouth until a few days later, like he really just cannot grasp this one thing.
Mickey meets Marla two weeks later, who sure enough, walks in with no clothes on, and doesn’t seem to care at all that Mickey is there to witness it. She asks Ian some questions about Frank - his dad, of all people - and if he’s still in on some money laundering scheme, the whole time acting like her tits aren’t out. A naked woman isn't a shocking sight to Mickey, especially an overweight one with bad hygiene, but he’s more impressed that Marla’s able to keep going butt - ass naked in this weather than anything else. Ian offers no explanations about why his mother set him up to live in this building with her or why she’s always naked, and Mickey’s not sure he even wants to ask, because everything with Ian is usually some really awful, twisted story that makes Mickey a little queasy.
And it’s not that Mickey scares easily, it’s just that he’s never had someone who’s life is on par with his for being as bleak and terrible as his own. Usually he’s the worst in the room, at all times no matter where he goes; he’s never had equal competition.
*
They listen to the Oingo Boingo album Mickey bought Ian for almost a solid month, until the both of them are well and sick of it.
“We should buy some more CDs.” Ian says, ripping the cord out of the wall. Mickey watches him from across the room, slumped back against the wall with a cigarette dangling from his lips and his feet kicked out wide. The building is getting colder and colder every day; reminds him of the two winters in a row where his house didn’t have heating and they all had to wear snow gear to bed for months. “My MP3 player died months ago, and I don’t think any of the outlets here actually work. Or at least, not without the cost of someone’s nervous system.”
“CDs are fuckin’ expensive,” Mickey grunts. “You got that kind of money?”
Ian grins at him over his shoulder. “No. But I know how to get some.”
Mickey makes a face, which makes Ian laugh, but he’s kind of not kidding.
“Don’t do that,” he says, exasperated. “I don’t need you to go out and get your hide tanned by some Jeff Dahmer viagroid. I can pull in a couple hundred bucks in a pinch, if you really want, man.”
Ian glances at him curiously. “Really?”
Mickey nods, ashing his cigarette.
“How?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Mickey says with a grin, just to irk him. “Just start makin’ a list of the albums you want.”
*
While Mickey hasn't spoken to his brothers in well over nine months, finding all of their grimey little shithead friends isn't that hard. And it's even easier to convince them to let Mickey in on one of their jobs for a quick four hundred. Gallagher can sell his ass all he wants for less, but when Mickey can make more than he does in a week by just helping to break into a few storage units, he's having the last laugh.
Ian harassed Mickey nonstop about what he did exactly, and Mickey only holds the truth back from him to irritate him, which is way funnier and easier than it ever should be to do.
“Fuck you,” Ian whines. “You know how I get all my cash, and it's illegal, too. Tell me.”
“Yeah, and I wish I didn't know.” Mickey snorts, holding the wad of cash in his hands away from Ian’s prying hands. “And I never said it was illegal. How do you know I don't have a secret job I go to when you're out there?”
Ian swats at him, but he has a grin on his face. He grabs at Mickey, who ducks last minute and hunches underneath Ian, scurrying away. Ian leaps after him and wraps his arms around Mickey’s middle as they collide. They both collapse with a laugh, Mickey wheezing as all the air is squeezed out of him as Ian falls on top of him, like a rat in a cartoon.
Ian laughs, his body shaking with the action, and dips his head down to press against the back of Mickey's shoulder. Mickey freezes as he feels the crown of Ian’s head tap the base of his skull, his entire body going still. The weight of Ian lying atop him along with his fuzzy head brushing against Mickey's is too pleasant, already making him panic.
Ian crawls off after a moment, and once Mickey has a moment to collect himself, they head off to the music store. Ian chatters to Mickey good - naturedly the whole walk there, holding his arms behind his head and walking with a real spring in his step. Mickey is hunched over with his hands in his pockets as usual. The store has a stale, vintage smell to it. The only sounds are the guy at the counter punching in numbers on the computer and the fans blowing air in small pockets throughout the building.
“I love Filter,” Ian says once they begin sorting through the CDs. Mickey pauses his hand, fingers skirting over the rows of jewel cases in the ‘O’ section to give Ian a look.
“Filter?”
“Yeah,” Ian nods, “like, ‘Hey Man Nice Shot’. That band.”
“I don't know what the hell you're talking about. And what kind of name is Filter?”
“A very nineties name,” Ian replies, oddly serious. “You don't know Hey Man Nice Shot?”
Mickey shakes his head, moving on to P's.
“Well, there was this newsman in the eighties, Budd Dwyer, who went on air one day and blew his head off on the morning news. Right in front of all his colleagues and people at home. And that's what Hey Man Nice Shot is about. It’s their big hit.”
“That is fucking grim,” Mickey whistles, shaking his head. “Really telling about you, I fear.”
“I'm an underage prostitute from the South Side, violence is all I know.” Ian says, leaning over a wooden shelf to pass Mickey a CD. Mickey grabs it, studying Ian’s face. It's an album by Filter, sure enough. Title Of Record.
“You're from the South Side?”
“Yeah. That surprise you?” Ian jokes. Mickey blinks.
“Um, yeah. I honestly kind of assumed you were some rich kid out here just pissing his parents off.”
Ian gives Mickey an incredulous look, one that's actually really hilarious. His eyes are squinting down at Mickey scathingly, his lips pulled back in a twisted grimace. “Are you fucking with me?”
“No,” Mickey shrugs.
“Holy fuck.” Ian looks mortified. “Is that seriously the vibe I give off?”
Mickey chuckles, already on the Q's. There's unsurprisingly very little. “Your taste in clothing when you’re cruising is disgusting. That’s mainly why I thought it. Goddamn white denim jacket, man.”
Mickey thinks he's really injured Ian by this speculation of his, because he's silent for a few minutes with a disgruntled expression on his face. Mickey has to bite his cheek to keep from giggling to himself for a few minutes.
“What's your favorite album?”
“Hm?”
“Of all time,” Ian says, holding his hands up, fingers spread wide. “Your ultimate favorite album?”
Mickey thinks for a moment, before shrugging. “Don't have one.”
“What? No fucking way. You have to have at least one. Come on, Mickey.”
Mickey glances over the rest of the alphabet, not even having anything in particular that he wants and is looking for. “I dunno, man. I don't really listen to music. Whatever my brothers or sister plays is what I hear, or any of the shit on the radio.”
Ian stares at him for a moment.
“Serious?”
“Serious.” Mickey pauses, before adding, “Well, I like Bad Religion.”
“Really?”
“Mhm.”
Ian wrinkles his nose, petty. “All of their songs kind of sound exactly the same.”
“ ‘S why I like ‘em. Have one album, you have ‘em all.”
Ian exhales a soft laugh, his eyes all soft on Mickey all of the sudden. “Your brothers show you them?”
“Kind of,” Mickey shrugs. "They jacked cars a lot - scrap ‘em for parts or to sell to people, they were those assholes who if you caught them with your car, they’d only sell it back to you for a ridiculous price - and this one they got had this big red CD case on the dash. They gave it to Mandy and I after they picked out everything they liked. Guess whoever owned it before was probably the biggest Bad Religion fan ever, they had like every single fucking album in there. Mandy and I would listen to them sometimes, just for something. I liked ‘em.”
“You should get some of their stuff while we’re here.”
Mickey shrugs, scratching at his eyebrow. “I dunno. They’re not my favorite or anything, but I like ‘em alright.”
Ian blinks back at him. “So get something. I'm getting a bunch of stuff. What’s their best album?”
Mickey pauses to think about that. “My sister always said Suffer and How Could Hell Be Any Worse were their best. I don’t have favorites. I’ll listen to anything.”
“Okay,” Ian says. “Hey, I want Suffer and How Could Hell Be Any Worse by Bad Religion. You think you could go get those for me?”
Mickey narrows his eyes at Ian, unimpressed, who stifles a small laugh behind his sleeve. But he does end up grabbing them, Ian trailing close behind him.
“What other albums do your brothers and sister like?”
“Ugh, my brothers are fucking obsessed with that one Bloodhound Gang album, Hooray For Boobies. If I ever have to hear that album again, it'll be too fucking soon. They like a lot of rap, mostly, and all this eighties hair metal garbage from my uncle, Poison, Mötley Crüe, that shit. My sister likes some similar stuff, but it’s better. I don’t really know the names of a lot of what she listens to. She likes Lauryn Hill. And that fag ass Swedish motherfucker, HIM. And all of them love Eminem; background noise of my fuckin’ house.”
Ian watches him intently as he speaks, and once Mickey finishes, he glances up and sees Ian smiling at him. His ears and face go red. “What?”
“Nothing. It's just cool hearing about your life.”
“Shut the fuck up.”
“Are you the youngest?” Ian presses, ignoring Mickey's defensiveness. Mickey glowers at him for a second, before he quietly says, “No. Middle.”
“Is your sister the oldest?”
“Youngest.”
“How many brothers do you have?”
“Two.” Mickey tilts his head, tightening his jaw. “What are you getting at here?”
Ian chuckles disbelievingly. “Nothing, Mickey, Jesus. I'm just asking about your family. You know all about mine.”
“I don't know all about them, freako.”
“I'm not asking you anything you don't already know about me,” Ian replies passively. “I'm playing fair.”
Mickey continues giving him a dirty look, but doesn't say anything else. After a moment, Ian asks what their names are. Mickey almost bites at him to shut up, but he holds it in. Sighing quietly, he says, “Colin, Iggy, and Mandy.”
“Iggy?”
“Yep.” Mickey says, with a tone telling Ian to not push his luck. Ian seems to get it, and nods with a small smile. Mickey feels his neck prickle in the feeling of being in unfamiliar territory, but it passes quickly because after a couple minutes Ian says: “You know what my favorite album is?”
“No.”
“Guess.”
“Oh my god, shut the fuck up and just tell me.”
Ian snickers. “It's American Idiot by Green Day.”
Mickey is quiet for a moment, running the names through his head a few times in a smooth pattern like the spinning belt of a car motor, swiping over and over. “Ain't they the ones who wrote Californication?”
“No,” Ian grins, his eyes flicking up to Mickey brightly. “They’re the ones who sing like, Basket Case and Longview. You really don't know American Idiot?”
Mickey shrugs.
“It's the fucking shit. They were real big in the nineties, and then kinda stagnated, but they put that album out in 2004 and blew up again. It's a rock opera that’s a commentary on the U.S. after 9/11 and protest of the war in Iraq.”
“Hah, silly me for not loving a rock opera.” He glances up at Ian, his eyebrows twisted up in a questioning gaze. “Your favorite album is a protest against the war and you went and enlisted anyways? You sure you actually listened to it?”
Ian ducks his head sheepishly. Mickey laughs.
Ian is also a very big fan of The Cure, which makes Mickey groan upon learning, but true to his word he allows Ian to buy some of their stuff. He follows Ian around the store holding a thick stack of them, as Ian glances around one last time to make sure there's nothing else he wanted. It’s one of the few times Mickey has seen Ian have real fun while relatively sober.
“Do you like Elton John?” Ian asks quietly, as they wait in line to pay. Mickey stares at him uncertainly.
“Um, no.”
“What about Fleetwood Mac?”
“Don’t know ‘em.”
“What?” Ian stares at Mickey, looking genuinely shocked. Mickey blinks.
“Sorry,”
Ian shakes his head. “My mom really likes Elton John and Fleetwood Mac - Frank used to call her Stevie Nicks, sometimes. I’m wondering if I should get them for her. They both really loved this one Irish band that just sings about getting fucked up, too…Flogging Molly…”
Mickey is quiet, worrying his bottom lip between his teeth. After a moment, Ian adds: “You know, so, like. When she comes to get me, I’ll have a surprise for her. Something to listen to in the car.”
“We can come back later for those,” Mickey says slowly, “I’ve only got so much money this time, and we've got all these here.”
“Oh,” Ian says, “yeah. Sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
*
Mickey has noticed that since his residence, Ian has completely refitted his schedule of when he goes out. He used to be most active in the later afternoons to evenings, but now he waits until night on the days he cruises, opting to instead spend the daylight with Mickey.
He’s not sure how to feel about it.
He doesn’t want to bring it up, because he doesn’t want to talk to Ian about what he does out there and be bombarded with all the mental images of Ian and some old guy’s hands all over him, but he wonders what’s up with that. Makes his stomach feel like it's twisting in and in and in on itself, his palms sweaty.
Each night around ten, Mickey will watch Ian flutter around the room, pulling on clothes and staring at his reflection in this giant cracked mirror he has leaned up against one of the back walls, running his hands over himself and frowning. Turns out all the too - small t - shirts he wears he stole from his little brother before leaving, which Mickey found utterly hysterical.
“God,” he’d cackled, much to Ian’s annoyance when he’d told Mickey, “that is just so fucking wrong, Gallagher. Your conscience is fucked.”
“Whatever,” Ian had hissed, his face noticeably pinker.
Ian undresses and refits outfits dozens of times in front of Mickey while he does this, which still freaks Mickey out. He knows Gallagher sells his body to keep himself afloat (or as Ian insists, because he likes it), so of course Ian’s not going to give two shits if Mickey sees his ass, it’s just that Mickey feels his face completely burn up every single time and has to look away. It’s just that sometimes, after he leaves, Mickey is so worked up about watching him that he has to jerk off in the corner so he doesn’t lose his fucking mind all night.
He justifies this a million ways to himself - Ian talks about hooking up and what he hopes does or doesn’t happen all night as he changes, he implements the idea of sex into Mickey’s mind and that’s what does him in, but secretly, he knows all of it is bullshit. He knows why he gets uncomfortable when Ian talks about having sex with all those people, he knows why his face burns to the touch when Ian yanks his shirt over his head and his biceps and collarbones are on full display. He knows why he gets so nauseous every time it starts to get dark outside and he knows what’s incoming. It’s just that Mickey really doesn’t have time to deal with all of that right now, and he doesn’t know what good any of it would do him if he sat down and dissected and admitted it, so every night he watches Ian with the most uninterested gaze he can force onto his face, and says very, very little in response to Ian’s nonstop word vomit.
It all causes him to feel more like a pervert than anything his brothers encouraged or roped him into did.
The first few times, Mickey had tried to stay awake until Ian got home, to make sure he actually did and that he was alright and safe, but Ian almost never comes back until the early AM, looking sore and like he got dragged through the streets. Then he’ll crash for a few hours, usually waking up just a little bit before Mickey - who sleeps for almost twelve hours straight every day anyways. They’ll both be awake by mid noon, and then they’ll spend the rest of the day fucking around until they repeat this whole cycle all over again.
Mickey is currently sitting in a lawn chair they stole, smoking and pounding Blue Ribbons while glancing sideways at Ian, who is wrestling a particularly small shirt over his head right now. The most annoying part about this routine of theirs is probably the million fucking times Ian asks Mickey if his hair looks alright, as if that’s what any of these people Ian suckers in are paying attention to.
“I used to be fucking jacked,” Ian groans, wiggling his arms above his head. It’s actually pretty funny to watch him struggle, but Mickey’s got a pit the size of the Earth’s core forming in his stomach right now, so he can’t really laugh. He gulps another mouthful of cheap beer as Ian complains.
“I was in ROTC before I ran away to the military. I could do a hundred pushups and pullups. You should’ve seen me when I was there for those first few weeks. I was seriously in my prime, Mick. You don’t even know.”
And, well, yeah. That image goes straight to Mickey’s dick.
“Now,” Ian sighs, pulling at the hem of the shirt to bring it a little further down his ribcage, “I’m soft.”
“Probably because all you do is pop pills and fuck.”
“True,” Ian exhales, smoothing his hands down his stomach. Mickey has to look away. “My abs are fucking great from that, though.”
Mickey swallows hard, rapping his knuckles against the cold plastic of the chair. “ ‘S from all the puking you did a few days ago, I think,” he’s of course referring to when him and Ian got drunk, and decided to race each other up and down the stairs over and over, determined to see who would bail out first. Both of them ended up with huge bruises on their sides and legs from how many times they’d stumbled and ate shit, but Ian had eventually been the first to go only on account of him suddenly leaning over the railing and vomiting so hard, it made Mickey wince. He’d teased Ian about being out of shape, and Mickey’s realizing he really hit a nerve with that one, because Ian keeps bringing up the military and ROTC like this.
Secretly, Mickey thinks about that night constantly as well, though not for the same reason as Ian. He doesn’t give a fuck if Ian is out of shape despite the fact that he’d laughed at him for it. Mickey doesn't know why Ian took it so personally anyways, like Mickey's fit.
He’s just enamored about the fact that him and Ian get along so well they can do pointless shit like that together and have the time of their lives. It’s something Mickey would’ve done with his brothers out of sheer boredom, yet with Ian it had been the most fun thing to ever happen to him at the moment. Mickey feels like he’s going to choke himself dead from the way he keeps holding so much about this kid so close to him.
Ian turns back to him, his lips pursed and eyebrows drawn close together. “Don’t be a dick. I wasn’t feeling good that day and you know it.”
“Mhm.”
Ian smirks, walking back over to where Mickey’s camped out. When he reaches him, Ian leans forward and plants his hands on the arm rests of Mickey’s chair, looming over him. Mickey frowns up at him, knowing his face and neck are probably already bright red. He blows a cloud of smoke right into Ian’s face.
“Fuck’re you doing?”
Ian tilts his head, and leans in close to Mickey’s face. He starts to lean back, his heart slamming into his ribcage as if it’s trying to break free, but all Ian does is lean a few inches from Mickey’s face before plucking his cigarette out with his fingers, slotting it into his own mouth with a wry grin.
“Nothin’,” he purrs. Mickey glowers at him, the rush of adrenaline from such a simple act, from a literal prostitute, making him weak at the knees and shaky in the hands.
“Fuck off,” Mickey huffs, swatting at Ian. “ ‘M sicka you. Don’t you have to get going?” He thinks about asking Ian to stay all the time, but it wouldn’t do anything. Someone needs to make money so they don't actually starve, and Mickey doesn’t even know what he’d gain by asking Ian of that. If Ian stayed in one night, so what? They’d get drunker and drunker until they both eventually fell asleep after a few hours of talking. And, well, they do that all day anyway.
But still. It’s the crime of simply wanting it.
“Yeah,” Ian sighs, glancing out the window briefly before he hands the cigarette back to Mickey. He stomps over to his tent, ducking inside to do his nightly shot of coke or speed, the very last part of the routine. Mickey listens to the telltale sign of him sniffing loudly, then a soft cough, before he’s clambering back out and digging through his duffle bag for his white denim jacket. Mickey takes another drink from his beer.
“I seriously don’t know how you haven’t gotten hypothermia yet.”
“Chicago tough,” Ian replies, which Mickey can’t help but snort at. “Frank used to pass out drunk in the yard all the time, be there all night, and then wake up perfectly fine in the morning. Maybe he somehow passed that gene to me. Probably some of his leftover spunk in my mom infected me when she was fucking his brother.”
Mickey grimaces, but again chuckles nonetheless. Ian walks back over to him one last time to steal a sip of his beer. As he lifts the can to his lips Mickey looks him up and down, his eyes cautiously wandering over his body. He scrunches his face as they scathe up his chest, and does a double take.
“Am I drunk, or are your nipples fuckin’ pierced?”
Ian swallows the last of the beer, crunching the can in his hands and kicking it across the room with a grin. “Both.”
“You’ve got to be shitting me.”
Much to Mickey’s delight and horror, Ian’s response is to peel back the shirt with his thumbs and expose his chest to Mickey, where sure enough, Mickey finds two bits of silver dotting each side of his nipples. How the fuck did he not notice them before?
“Huh,” Mickey stutters after a prolonged moment of staring. Ian raises his eyebrows, leaning forward. Mickey instinctively jerks back.
“Like what ya see?”
“Pull your fucking shirt back down,” Mickey snaps. Ian smooths it back down over his torso with a snicker, where it only extends to just above his bottom ribs. Mickey chews the inside of his cheek, hard. The faint taste of blood floods his mouth.
“Where the hell did you get that done?”
“Some guy who worked at a piercing shop did it in exchange for me fingering him.”
Mickey gives him an incredulous look. “A guy asked you to finger him?”
“So, Mickey, fingering is when, huge surprise, you take your fingers, and -”
“Shut the hell up, you know what I mean,” Mickey huffs, rolling his eyes. Ian moves to the top of the stairs, slipping his shoes on. “That’s just a girly thing for a dude to ask for.”
Ian scrunches his face, lifting his knee to adjust his heel. “Not really.”
Mickey watches him with heavy eyelids, his fingers toying with the tab on a new can of beer.
“Why’d you do it?”
Ian looks at him for a moment, before shrugging. “Thought it’d be sexy. Some guys really like it. All the women I’ve done stuff with were all into it.”
Mickey hums in a quiet response.
*
Two nights later, the temperature drops lower than it’s ever been, and Mickey feels like he’s going to fucking die inside his sleeping bag. He sleeps with all his clothes on anyways, but even with the added blankets and layers, he can still feel the chill seeping into his bones and refusing to leave. He keeps waking up intermittently throughout the night, his teeth clicking together involuntarily as if he’s some bitch on Molly.
He isn’t awake when Ian gets home, but at some point in the night he wakes up and sees boots sticking out of the tent. He watches them for a moment, and wonders if they’re going to find Marla dead in her room the next morning. Mickey wonders if they're going to wake up dead the next morning.
He closes his eyes and attempts to sleep again, toying with the idea of going to try and find another quick job so they can buy a space heater to fucking stay alive during the winter, when Ian’s voice suddenly speaks in the dark.
“Mickey? Are you awake?”
“Maybe.”
A soft exhale. “I can hear you shivering over there.”
Mickey grunts in response, not sure what to say to that. He sees Ian’s feet stir.
“You come home early with frostbite?”
“Probably.” Ian replies. “I think I need to find a way to make snowgear look sexy.”
Mickey laughs quietly at that, curling in on himself inside his sleeping bag in attempt to preserve what little heat he has. Ian is quiet for a long stretch of silence, and Mickey thinks he’s fallen asleep again.
“Mickey, just come here.”
“What?” Despite the fact it’s pitch black inside the building, and Ian’s inside a tent, Mickey still scrunches up his face when he hears this.
“Come sleep in here with me.” Ian says, quietly. “It’s too fucking cold for this shit.”
Mickey’s heart leaps inside his throat. He doesn’t reply. Mickey knows himself, and he knows Ian. And this offer feels measured, as if an invisible weight is tied to it. And it’s not that Mickey thinks that Ian is going to molest him in his sleep, it’s that Mickey doesn’t trust himself to fight Ian off if he tries anything.
“Mickey,” Ian says again, more insistent. “I’m not going to let you freeze overnight. Don’t make me wake up to a human popsicle. Get over here.”
Begrudgingly, but also too easily, Mickey picks himself up, his limbs stiff and sore, and pulls all of his shit inside Ian’s tent, having to feel around with his hands once he makes his way inside. He jumps when he reaches out and accidentally grabs Ian’s arm, pulling his hand away quickly as if he’s been burned, but Ian reaches his hand out and grabs Mickey’s wrist, tugging him down. Mickey makes a soft noise in protest, situating himself to Ian’s left. He settles on top of his sleeping bag, and lying on his right side, he can just barely, ever so slightly, see the soft outline of Ian beside him. He’s got his hood pulled over his head, the strings tied together to keep it snug, and is lying on his side staring straight at Mickey. A few stray hairs escape his hood, the fuzzy outline visible against the tent walls.
“Hi,” he smiles. Mickey huffs out a small breath in response, his chest swelling with something heavy and deep. Despite the darkness of this little cave, Mickey keeps his eyes open just to try and trace the little of Ian that is visible to him. Ian sits up for a second to smooth one of those gray Uhaul utility blankets over the both of them.
“Y’still cold?”
“It’s like, twenty degrees, man,” Mickey mutters, wrapping his jacket around himself tighter. “Of course I am,”
Ian hums, and before either of them can say anything else, Ian is reaching forward and wrapping an arm around Mickey. Mickey jerks away from his touch, tries to move away, but Ian ignores his obvious protest and pulls Mickey flush against him.
“What the fuck, man,” Mickey hisses with a strained voice, squirming.
“Saving body heat, asshole,”
And Mickey knows he’s lying. And he knows Ian knows he knows. But it works - Ian is a nice, full warmth pressed up against him, tucked into Mickey’s side, his face so close to Mickey’s he can feel his breath fanning gently over his face. Mickey feels like he’s holding his, and he’s sure Ian can feel his heart pounding in his chest. He tries to shift to the side so his heartbeat isn't so close to Ian. He’s just glad Ian is polite enough to not say anything.
“Fuck,” Mickey breathes out, barely audible to him. Ian doesn’t say anything, and Mickey is left wondering if he even heard.
So Mickey lets it happen. He allows both of them to live under this false pretense, to play this game and pretend they’re both only doing this to stay warm in the night. That’s the only reason.
It’s in this moment, in the darkness of a makeshift tent and under Ian’s grasp that Mickey begins to realize he is way in over his fucking head with this one.
*
There’s a small layer of frost over everything inside the building in the morning, the little sunlight that filters through the window making everything appear glittering in the dawning light.
Mickey wakes up on his right side, Ian pressed against his back with an arm still thrown over his middle and his face pressed against the nape of Mickey’s neck. He feels nauseous, sickened by just how badly he wants this to last. Sick at how he doesn’t want Ian to wake up, because then he’ll have to face this, this thing he’s allowed to fester between the two of them.
After a few moments, closing his eyes and allowing this closeness to linger, Mickey wiggles himself out from under Ian’s arm, and crawls out of the tent. He throws one last melancholy look at the other boy, curled up around the empty space where Mickey was, his face smushed into his pillow, still fast asleep. Something painful twists inside Mickey, and he quickly removes himself from everything before the knife twists over once more. He spends the rest of the morning chainsmoking by the window and drinking what’s left of the Blue Ribbon in the plastic chair, his head feeling like radio static; no coherent thoughts or emotions can be picked out, just a constant stream of strangled, unintelligible thoughts and noises. He thinks about nothing and everything. When Ian wakes up, he doesn’t say anything either, and they go through another day as if nothing happened.
*
When Ian is out that night, Mickey stares long and hard at the tent while Suffer by Bad Religion spins in the CD player. After a bit of this, he ends up so badly worked up that he yanks all of his blankets and his sleeping bag out and throws them back in the corner he was the night before. It doesn’t make him feel any better, if anything he feels even more hollowed out, but it doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t matter.
*
Mickey falls asleep sometime around eleven, out of desperation to escape his own head. He wakes up sweaty and confused sometime later in the night, something heated pressing against his side. It doesn’t take long to register that, once again, Gallagher has taken it upon himself to mold himself against Mickey and fall fast asleep. Mickey stares in disbelief. He cannot fucking believe the audacity of this kid. He really cannot fucking believe this.
He tries to shift away, putting some space between them, but Ian just rolls over and grabs at him again, securing an arm tightly around Mickey’s chest and his hand jammed between Mickey’s ribs and arm. The sleeping bag provides a barrier between them, so Ian isn’t actually touching Mickey, but it feels paper thin. Ian burns right through, searing Mickey’s skin through every single layer. He clenches his jaw so hard he feels like it’s going to crack, squeezing his eyes shut.
There’s no excuse in the temperature tonight. It’s cold, but enough that Ian can have just his jacket and pants on, with a few blankets wrapped over him. He didn’t insert himself into Mickey’s sleeping bag. Mickey seethes with the realization that he wishes he had.
He turns his head, and sniffs at Ian’s hair. He smells of cigarette smoke and thick cologne. Mickey knows it’s from other men, older guys who gave Ian what Mickey just can’t. He knows he’s smelling the scent of hands that grabbed Ian and forced him around, men who are married and business partners and have children, and still went out and fucked the redheaded boy on the street who lingered too long in the buzzing light of a store front.
He settles back down, staring up at the dilapidated ceiling. He hopes it caves in on them and kills them, so Mickey never has to wake up and actually figure any of this out, so him and Ian stay like this forever, never moving apart ever again.
He lets out a shaky breath, his eyes fluttering closed. Nose tucked into Mickey’s neck, Ian lets out a soft snore. Very slowly, Mickey reaches his hand up, tilting it back so that the back of it is laying against Ian’s shoulder, weaving his arm underneath Ian’s bicep. His thumb and index finger twitch back, grabbing the soft material of Ian’s clothes between them. He pulls, twisting it inside his grasp. A small noise escapes his throat as he does so, one he didn’t know he could even make or where the hell it came from. Ian doesn’t stir, so Mickey accepts defeat. One time of fighting it was enough. He inches closer to Ian by practically millimeters, and falls back asleep.
*
They never talk about it. Mickey can tell that Ian really, really wants to, and he thinks Ian can tell that he really, really doesn't.
It's as if something new has been discovered, because Ian is ridiculously handsy all the sudden. He was always touchy before - in that way that only middle children in large families are - but now he can't seem to keep his hands off Mickey. Every chance he gets, he's grabbing at his jacket sleeve or wrist, placing a warm hand on Mickey's thigh when reaching over him for something. He grabs Mickey's ankle one night and pulls him towards himself, Mickey squawking at the motion. He has to part his legs widely so that Ian can sit halfway inside, leaning forward to show Mickey something he'd taken from some guy the previous night, and Mickey acts noncommittal about it all, but the entire time his face and neck is burning and his heart pounding.
Every morning, he wakes up to Ian pressed up against him, molded like a cat to the shape of his back. Every morning he says nothing, and dislodges himself out of nervousness before Ian can wake up.
The problem is, that Mickey thinks Ian is beautiful and it makes him sick. He thinks that Ian is funny, and perhaps the easiest person to talk to that he’s ever met in his life and it makes him furious. He thinks if he woke up and looked down to see a sleepy, yawning Ian with messy hair and tired eyes leaning into his shoulder, he'd puke. Or sucker punch him. Whatever his body's knee jerk reaction in the moment would be.
Mickey really, really hates this kid.
*
They spend Friday going to the public library, because while talking the previous night Ian discovered that Mickey had never been to one. He still can’t seem to believe it, muttering and shaking his head as they walk over. Mickey points out that he didn’t even make it past the ninth grade before dropping out. Ian says he never made it past junior year, but he used to go all the time. It was one of the few buildings him and his siblings could kill time at without spending money and stay warm while their parents were out scoring. He tells Mickey about all the times he and Lip fell asleep as Fiona read a book to them on a bean bag. Mickey tells him that’s real sweet, and asks Ian if he wants Mickey to do that to him today. Ian thwacks him on the back of the head.
Mickey doesn’t really read, though, to no one’s surprise, so they spend the entire day staring at music videos on the computer. One of the ones Ian makes him watch is Hey Man Nice Shot, which then prompts them to start trying to find the video of that guy blowing his head off on live television. The full video isn’t available much to Mickey’s displeasure, but there’s dozens of videos of him calmly talking in a press conference for a few minutes before grabbing an envelope and pulling out a small handgun, raising it and telling everyone everything is going to be okay before the video abruptly cuts off. Mickey even takes it upon himself to type out a few different versions of ‘Budd Dwyer blood final recording death on camera shotgun to mouth’, in which Ian shakes his head quietly beside him.
“All the footage is like three pixels wide,” he says to Mickey, “what are you possibly hoping to see?”
*
The library ends up becoming a regular occurrence for them, once they realize they can go and watch movies or burn CDs on the computers there. They make several mixes for the CD player back at the building, and every couple of days will get really high (Mickey had finally convinced Ian to let him buy weed, sick of all the stomachaches and weird gaps in their memories from Ian’s assortment of pills. “What,” he’d sniffed when Ian had protested, “no one is above a fuckin’ joint, asshole.”) and watch a movie in the back corner.
Ian always uses these moments as an excuse to lean close to Mickey, his head just tilted over Mickey’s shoulder, resting an arm on his shoulder or pressing their knees together. Mickey says nothing, even when Ian’s fingers start pinching at the sleeve of his jacket. Even though Ian gets fucked by strangers every night and sometimes in very public areas, and has been for almost a year, holding hands with Mickey seems to be something even he can’t muster the courage for. Mickey’s almost a little insulted by it.
Marla comes to them one day and hands them a list and fifty bucks, asking them to go to the store and get everything there for her. Both Ian and Mickey are already high by the time she makes this request, having been getting ready for their library movie, but Ian doesn’t even hesitate to accept it.
“You care when we get it?” He asks politely, tucking the list into his sock. Mickey watches him, confused. Personally, he opts to keep all his money and change inside the small hole he’s maneuvered in his scarf.
“Sometime by tonight,” Marla mumbles, already turning away and walking out. “Before I go to bed.” Ian nods, even though she can’t see him. He tugs Mickey down the stairs and out the door, the two of them bracing themselves against a cold gust of wind as Ian pulls the door shut tight. Mickey buries his face into his scarf, Ian tugging the side flaps of his hat down and grinning at Mickey, his cheeks already tinged pink.
“Since when are you her little lackey?”
“Oh, it’s only ‘cause I’m scared of her.” Ian answers, suddenly serious. “She used to have me run errands for her all the time when I first moved in, and I always did them to be polite, except one time she asked me while I was hungover so I said no, and she threatened me with a hammer.”
Mickey blinks, before promptly bursting out into laughter.
“Nudist homeless lady threatens underage hooker over grocery run…that’s like an SNL skit.”
Ian gives Mickey an incredulous look. “You watch SNL?”
“Fuck off.”
The library is a short walk, Ian and Mickey walking shoulder to shoulder in the frosty street. They stop briefly at a gas station to buy snacks, where Mickey suggests they use a couple bucks of Marla. Ian shakes his head quickly, his beautiful eyes wide.
“Hell no. She counts down to the cent. I need my kneecaps, Mick.”
Mickey snorts.
The library is mostly empty when they walk in, the librarians behind the counter giving them sideways looks. It’s obvious they don’t think very highly of Mickey and Ian, but they’re both polite for the most part and mind their business. They only got threatened with being kicked out once, when they’d tried to play one of the board games. The problem is they’re incapable of doing anything without spending the entire action loudly riffing off one another, and it had only taken a few minutes for one of the tall scary ones to lean in and hiss a warning to them. They’d tried to play it quietly, but then they couldn’t stop laughing at each other, and had eventually just slipped it back on the shelf before the lady came back to beat their asses.
Mickey carries the plastic grocery bag of chips and candy bars, swinging loudly at his side as Ian weaves between the shelves, looking them up and down for the perfect movie. Mickey usually falls asleep the second he finishes smoking, but Ian is one of those people who could rebuild a car motor while stoned.
“Ugh, we’ve watched everything good.”
“We’ve watched like, four movies, you little brat.”
“Okay,” Ian frowns at him, shedding his jacket. “Name something to watch, then.”
Mickey opts to keep all his layers on. He’s still chilled from the walk. Ian asked him yesterday if he’d ever cleaned his jacket. Mickey said no, and Ian had made a horrified face.
“What about Pretty Woman?” Mickey yawns. “So you can see yourself properly represented onscreen?”
Ian rolls his eyes, lifting himself on his tiptoes to peek at the very top of the shelves. Mickey snickers as he watches.
“Hah, unless you’re secretly rich and have been hiding money from me this whole time, I hardly think I’m anything like that movie.”
Mickey is stunned into silence at the implication of Ian’s words. He clamps his jaw shut. Ian acts like he didn’t just say that, though, sweeping his gaze the spines of DVDs.
“Ooh. What about this one? Wild Things.” Ian says, after reading the short blurb on the back of one movie. He thrusts the plastic cover in Mickey’s face, who gapes at it for a moment before batting Ian’s arm away, a scowl pushing its way onto his face.
“Y’don’t need to be so damn close,” Mickey growls. “What’s it about?”
“Two teen girls accuse their hot school counselor of raping them.” Ian says, glancing at the shiny cover. “And a police detective suspects foul play.”
“Wow,” Mickey says, dryly. “Sounds fantastic.”
“It’s got Kevin Bacon and Neeve Campbell.”
“Who?”
“The chick from Scream,” Ian says, flicking his eyes back up to Mickey. “Hey - Matt Dillon, too.”
Mickey shrugs, stifling another yawn. “No objections here.”
“All hail democracy,”
They set themselves up in their preferred corner in the back, tucked away from the rest of the library but still available for the librarians to check on them every couple of minutes. Mickey is stuffing Reese’s cups in his mouth before Ian can even turn the subtitles on. They quietly discuss every single thing that happens in the movie, Ian more into it than Mickey. Matt Dillon addresses a crowd of high schoolers at an assembly, writing SEX in huge print on a chalkboard in front of all of them. The crowd cheers. He adds CRIMES, underlining it and causing the crowd to boo.
“God,” Mickey scoffs. “I hated assemblies. Fuckin’ hell. I always skipped. I’d rather work the damn lunchline.”
“You’d look funny in the paper hat,” Ian muses. It does not miss Mickey how he leans slightly towards him, eyes still on the screen. Mickey allows his gaze to linger on him for a moment too long, before he fixes back on the screen.
“Those assholes put me on lunch duty a few times. I just ate everything until they got pissed enough to kick me out. I spit in some people’s food, too,” Mickey chuckles saying the last part. Ian makes a face. “My sister called me ‘lunch lady’ for weeks after. Fuckin’ bitch.”
Ian is quiet for a moment, before he asks, without looking at Mickey, “You miss her?”
Mickey presses the pad of his thumb over the corner of his jaw where his mandible and upper row of teeth meet. His whole jaw has been aching in the mornings lately. He thinks he keeps grinding his teeth while he sleeps.
“Yeah.”
“We could go visit her, if you ever wanted.”
Mickey exhales a heavy breath, weighing the idea in his mind. If he sought out Mandy, she probably would punch him and ask where he’s been, but she wouldn’t care too much. If anything, she’d mostly be furious at Mickey for leaving her stranded alone in the house with their dad, because God knows Iggy and Colin turn the other way all too happily whenever their dad starts in on his shit.
“We weren’t that close.” Mickey says after a pause. “She probably doesn’t miss me too much. Pawned all the shit in my room by now, I’d bet.”
“You talk about her like you miss her, is all.” Ian shrugs. He glances at Mickey now, who makes a point to ignore him. “You guys sound like good friends to me whenever you mention her.”
Mickey makes a soft humming noise in response, and Ian thankfully drops it. They both watch the movie without talking for a couple more minutes, until the scene cuts to the two girls making out with Matt Dillon - the aforementioned counselor that they just accused of assaulting them.
“The fuck kind of movie did you just pick out, dude?” Mickey huffs, reaching a hand up to scratch at his eyebrow. He frowns at the screen, and before he can think very carefully, he blurts out, “You kiss any of those old guys?”
It takes Ian a moment to register Mickey’s question. He turns to Mickey, an odd expression Mickey’s unfamiliar with on his face. Mickey looks away, his own face burning.
“What?”
“I don’t know. Nevermind.”
Ian stares at him. “Are you asking me if I kiss anyone I fuck?”
Mickey shrugs. Ian won’t stop staring.
“I don’t,” Ian says softly after a while. “Sometimes they force it on me, but I never choose to. It’s not - I don’t…” he shakes his head, agitated, and doesn’t say anything else. Mickey remains silent, unsure of how to feel towards any of that. Ian keeps glancing at him as if he’s willing Mickey to say something, anything else, but he clamps his jaw shut and pretends to be focused on the movie.
No wonder his mouth aches like this, with the shit Ian does to him.
*
The movie has about five separate twists, each involving murder and sex, before finally coming to an end. They both have displeased looks on their faces and are unsure where to begin to think by the time Ian is pushing the button that opens the DVD tray, retrieving the disc as the credits loop.
“I can’t tell if that was the best movie I’ve ever seen, or actually terrible.”
“I think I need to pick the next few we watch,” Mickey sniffs, watching Ian snap the case shut before standing up and stretching. His jacket rides up as he does so, and Mickey eyes the small sliver of pale skin that’s briefly exposed.
“I think I’ll have to remember this one,” Ian says in an odd tone, “to show my mom later. I think she’d like it.”
Mickey stands up, his knees clicking, and stares at Ian. He doesn’t want to lead Ian on in this seemingly false reality about his mom that Mickey is beginning to take notice of. Something about it is just so pitiful. It’s like telling the kid dying of cancer that they’re going to get better after seeing their labs have come back worse this time. If Mickey had a Make - A - Wish, it’d be to wipe Ian’s memory of his mother.
*
Ian stays in the next night, opting to get drunk with Mickey instead of fucking strangers for money. Mickey is secretly pleased, but feigns indifference when Ian announces this. They sit cross - legged on the floor facing each other, passing back and forth a small bottle of Grey Goose that Ian acquired from some old guy the night before, and a bottle of Coke to wash it down. Mickey teaches Ian to breathe all the air out of his body before taking a shot of the alcohol, because it makes it so it doesn’t burn. Ian tries it, blinking at Mickey with a small smile afterwards.
“No shit,” he grins. “How the hell did you learn that?”
Mickey smiles back, but his stomach flips at the memory of being taught it. “I used to spend a lot of time with a Russian chick.”
Ian leans forward, his eyes wide and beautiful as always. “Yeah?”
“Mhm.”
Ian frowns when Mickey doesn’t elaborate, but he’s one of those really chatty drunks, shockingly, and passes the time with his own incessant rambling. Mickey is happy to allow him to take the reins, and takes another shot from the bottle.
As the night progresses, Ian gets weird and begins to go on and on about his family, almost emotional in a sense. Mickey watches him warily, really hoping this doesn’t turn into a night of having to hold a bawling hooker in his arms and awkwardly patting his back. Mickey cares about Ian, he does, it’s just he’s maybe one of the worst people ever when it comes to social things like that. He’d do his best, but he has a feeling it would be rather stiff in the end.
“I mean, I miss them so much, it’s not even funny, Mick. I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know why I did this. But I just couldn’t take it anymore, in that house. I hated the way everyone looked at me…after I fucking…ran off and did that,” Ian mutters darkly. He keeps saying things like that, implying that something of his own doing caused a shift in the house and the way his siblings treated him, but keeps failing to actually explain what it was he did. Mickey just keeps drinking and staring.
“My brother, you know…he kept trying to tell me what to do. Kept telling me to go to a fucking clinic…but you know what, man? He was the biggest hypocrite loser ever. He was fucking this girl in our neighborhood, Karen…god…that fuckin’...he got her to try blowing me when he found out I was gay. Can you believe that?” Ian’s eyes go wide, spreading his hands open at his sides. Mickey stares at the gaps between his fingers. “I sat at her fuckin’ kitchen table pretending to do math homework with Lip, while she crawled under and started sucking me off. While her mom was in the kitchen. What the fuck? And then she got pregnant, ‘cause she screwed any guy that looked at her…oh, well I guess I’m one to talk about that…anyway, she let Lip believe it was his baby, ‘cause he was all in love with her…and doin’ all this shit for her…goddamn. I’m glad I don’t like women, I tell ya what, Mick…”
Mickey is silent, trying to think of what to say in reply to any of that. Ian keeps shaking his head and frowning, picking at a small tear in his jeans over his knee. Mickey can see a few freckles poking out of the small window of it.
He settles on blankly saying, “Your brother knows you're gay?”
“Yeah,” Ian sniffs. “They all do. When I told Fiona she said ‘I know’. I never figured out how she did…”
“And they don’t care?” Mickey asks, his voice small. Ian scrunches up his face.
“No. I mean; Lip was pretty upset when he found out, but I think it was mostly because I was keeping it from him. And sleeping with my boss. Fiona, you know, she just wants me to be safe…Carl, Debbie, and Liam are too little to really understand or anything…whatever.”
Something burns inside of Mickey’s chest as he listens to Ian. He sets his jaw, watching as Ian reaches up to scratch at his scab, still keeping his eyes in an intense gaze on the floor. He’s not wearing shoes, his socks ugly and mismatched. Mickey narrows his eyes, and quietly says, “You know why I ran away?”
Ian snaps his head up immediately, his eyes massive. He rips a thick layer off his scab, roughly. It almost makes Mickey wince, but he keeps his gaze level. He almost wants to laugh at Ian’s reaction; he knew saying that would get him. Hook, line, and sinker.
“My dad found out I was gay. I fucked up - got caught with my pants down behind the house with this guy my brothers used to go shooting with. My dad, you know, it’s his way, or you’re dead. I don’t think he really sees any of us as people. We’re like these fucking animals he got stuck with, or something. So yeah, he wasn’t real happy about it. He, uh…beat the living daylights out of me, and he locked me in my room for a few days, and didn’t let anyone talk to me or feed me. Mandy tried one night and he just about killed her.
“So after three days, he pulls me out of my room, and sits me down in this chair, and he spends the next few days calling sex workers to our house, and makes me fuck them. He would tell each of them when they walked in to, ‘fuck the gay out of him’. There was this one he really liked - Russian bitch - Svetlana. He’d make me go a few rounds with her before he’d take her for himself. He’d stand in the corner and watch, with a - a gun in his hand, y’know, and if I seemed like I wasn’t enjoying it, or I couldn’t get it up immediately, he’d shoot at me.”
Mickey thumbs his nose, squeezing his eyes shut tight so he doesn’t have to see the face Ian is making right now. He doesn’t want to know, really.
“My brothers thought it was hilarious. They’d stand in the kitchen and watch and laugh. Whatever, right? They were just waiting for their turn with the girls. Anyway, my dad brings me out one day and tells me he can ‘just tell’ I’m not getting it yet. That it’s not working. That I’m still some limp - wristed mutt in his house. And - and you know, I kept my fucking mouth shut. I didn’t say shit when he was doing all that to me, but he was still so goddamn mad. Fuckin’ asshole.” He pauses to take another shot, not using the chaser in his scrambling. He takes another.
“So he tells me he’s gonna reset me, make me go back to my ‘roots’, whatever, I don’t know. He talked a lot, and I still had blood clogging my ears from how hard he kicked my damn face in after catching me, so, whatever. And he tells me, he wants me to fuck Mandy. ‘Cause, uh, a fact about my dad, is he got her pregnant about a year ago, because he’ll get drunk and ‘mistake her for mom’. I think he’s just sayin’ that shit, ‘cause that’s just the type of guy he is, and because he tells me it always ‘works for him’ right after he gets out of prison and has to shake off raping the other guys in there.”
Mickey rubs his right side temple, feeling the ghost of all the bruises from then. It feels like all of this happened one million years ago, just yesterday. Everything is so faded already, yet so intense and searing in his brain he doesn’t think he’ll ever get any of the details out of his head. He inhales sharply.
“Anyway, I made a deal with that Russian chick, Svetlana. She helped me run out when he wasn’t lookin’. ‘Cause fuck that, y’know. No way. No fucking way.”
Mickey’s never told anyone about this before, because there’s never been anyone to tell, so he has no idea what to expect. He knows Ian, but he doesn’t know what he’s going to say to this. He doesn’t know what he would say to this, especially if his family was as nice and caring as Ian’s. So he bites his tongue and keeps his gaze glued to the floor, his heart hammering in his chest like a rabbit.
He expects an incoherent stream of ‘I’m so sorry’s and other sentimental shit to begin pouring out of Ian’s mouth. But Ian instead reaches over and cups Mickey's face in his hands. He smooths his thumbs over the skin beneath Mickey’s waterline, the pads of his fingers coming away wet from faint tears. Mickey jerks back, his face pulling into a tight scowl. He risks a look up at Ian, who is watching Mickey with an expression similar to someone who’s just seen a ghost.
Mickey hates him.
“Knock that off,” Mickey hisses, leaning back. Ian does the opposite; leaning forward and grabbing at Mickey to pull him closer. Mickey keeps pulling back, trying to push Ian off but Ian holds tightly onto him, gripping Mickey's jacket tightly in his large hands.
“God fucking dammit, Gallagher, get the hell off me.” Mickey grits out between his teeth, huffing as he shoves Ian’s chest hard. Ian grabs the side of Mickey’s face with his left hand, and Mickey freaks. He swings and nails Ian right in the mouth, knocking him back. Ian grunts, holding his hand over his mouth. Mickey scoots back, breathing uneven and too fast. Ian bares his teeth at him, where blood is curling through his saliva and smeared over his teeth. He looks upset, and as soon as Mickey looks away, Ian punches him back, his fist going up against his jaw and snapping his teeth together harshly.
“Fuck!” Mickey shouts, before suddenly bursting into tears.
He can’t believe this. He doesn't know why the hell he's crying. Ian didn't even hit him that hard.
And it isn't that Mickey's crying, it's that he's drunk and he blinks and he’s fucking bawling. It's that he's hysterical; crying so hard he can't breathe and snot is smearing on his upper lip.
It's that Ian is seeing him like this.
He presses the heels of his palms into the sockets of his eyes, ducking his head low and curling in on himself in an attempt to hide. He keeps letting out these awful, tight gasps as he tries to catch his breath.
Ian says something that's rendered intelligible by Mickey's sniffling. Mickey just shakes his head in response to whatever it was. After a second, he feels strong hands grabbing at him again and he doesn’t even bother to fight it this time. Ian pulls him close in a tight grip, one hand at the base of Mickey’s neck and the other strong over the wide of his back. Mickey leans against him, tucking his face into the side of Ian’s neck so Ian can’t see him like this anymore. His breath hitches, the sounds being swallowed by the pale skin of Ian’s collarbone.
*
Mickey doesn’t remember either of them falling asleep, but he wakes up sometime in the really early morning, around two or so, still being smothered by Ian. His whole body has gone stiff from the cold, as well as the sleeping on the dirty, bare wooden floors. Mickey groans, pressing his cold nose into Ian’s throat. They’re pressed together on the floor, tucked into each other on their sides, their legs tangled and everything. Mickey is only slightly embarrassed.
His face feels tacky; dried with tears, sweat, and snot. He definitely wiped some on Ian. He feels a little bad.
When Ian wakes up, he runs a hand through Mickey’s hair, scratching at his scalp roughly. And it shouldn’t send a jolt of electricity down Mickey’s spine, but it does. He grunts, his eyes fluttering shut. He can feel Ian smile, before raising himself up on his elbows. He blinks down at Mickey, bleary - eyed.
“What time is it?”
Mickey shrugs, his face warm. He feels shy or something, nervous to be around Ian after everything that transpired just a few hours ago. He’s still a little drunk, his head swimming. He can tell Ian is, too.
“You need a haircut, man.”
“Fuck’s wrong with my hair?”
“Nothin’,” Ian smiles, threading his fingers through it again. “It’s just really long.”
Mickey shrugs, letting out a heavy sigh. Ian tilts his head, resting his chin on his shoulder and staring down at Mickey. Mickey’s hands go clammy; Ian’s gaze is a little too domestic, a little too fond. And he doesn’t much have time for it right now. He wishes he did, though.
“I could cut it for you,” Ian says after a pause. “If you wanted.”
Mickey squints at him. “You’d probably cut my ear off. I can’t trust a junkie like you with scissors by my face.”
“Nah,” Ian chuckles, scraping his nails over Mickey’s greasy scalp again. “I cut my own hair. I got it.”
Mickey eyes him warily. It’s true - his hair has really grown out since being out here. Mandy would usually trim it every once and a while, sometimes messing with it and gelling it if Mickey allowed her. Mickey just kind of stopped caring about his looks after he ran though. It falls over his forehead, now, long enough to pull at in the back as well, stringy and messy. It doesn’t bother him too much, though he can’t say he’s exactly fond of it either.
“When’s the last time you washed your hair?”
“Oh, fuck off.”
Ian giggles, “You know, I’m really nice to you for how shit your hygiene is.” Mickey scoffs, rolling his eyes. “I’m not that fuckin’ gross. And if I stay dirty, everyone leaves me alone. Don’t gotta worry about any old guys grabbing me or Russian hookers anymore.”
He means the last part as a joke, even if it is the truth, but Ian doesn’t seem to take it as such. His posture deflates ever so slightly, his smile dropping. Mickey runs his tongue over his lips nervously, still lying on his back on the floor with Ian on top of him. He hopes Ian moves soon, this positioning they’ve got going on is kind of doing something to his brain. He’s gotta have a few wires crossed or something.
“Fine,” Mickey sighs, to distract them. “You can cut it. But if you screw up, I get to stab your ass back.”
Ian smirks down at him, his hand reaching low to pinch at Mickey’s middle. Mickey hisses and swats at him.
*
Ian insists they go out on the roof, so that they don’t have to clean any of the clippings up once he’s done. Mickey agrees because he sure as fuck isn’t going to clean anything up, either, it’s just that it’s barely above thirty degrees outside. He brings the Smirnoff with them as they stumble outside, huffing and shivering. They pause to stare out at the distance; the illuminated skyline of the city and the moving stream of cars rushing below.
“If I jumped off right now,” Ian says suddenly, “you think I’d die on impact? Or would I just break my legs?”
Mickey gives him a look. “Uh, probably break your legs. And a bunch of other shit.”
Ian nods, turning away, his back to the scene. It’d be a nice picture, Ian leaned back against the concrete block that encircles the top, hair blowing in the wind and his face dipped in shadows as he lights up a cigarette. He turns back to Mickey as he blows out a small curl of smoke.
“You got any requests?” He snips his scissors in emphasis. Mickey snorts, pushing his knuckles against each other to crack them.
“Nothing gay. But I guess that’s all you’d know.”
Ian rolls his eyes as he grabs an empty box that they left outside a couple nights ago while taste - testing various chip flavors. He pats it, motioning for Mickey to come over and sit down. Ian grabs at the collar of his jacket, and says, “You wanna take this off? I’m gonna get hair all over it.”
Mickey’s face goes pink in the dark. He scowls up at Ian. “Yeah, whatever excuse you need to tell me, perv.”
Ian gives him an odd look as Mickey sheds off his jacket, then his wool sweater underneath. He’s left exposed in only his black Alcoholics Anonymous t - shirt, the one he stole from his Uncle Joey right before he dipped. He’s never been so exposed in front of Ian, and finds himself feeling rather nervous even though Ian has been in his birthday suit countless times in front of Mickey.
“Nice shirt,” Ian mumbles around his cigarette, reaching out to tug at Mickey’s hair. Mickey swats his hand away, Ian snickering.
Mickey takes one last shot from the bottle before allowing Ian to continue.
Ian grabs Mickey’s head within the palm of his hand, bowing it so he can start trimming the sides. Mickey closes his eyes, focusing on the feeling of Ian’s fingertips, gently skirting over his skull, the soft breeze blowing through the both of them that doesn’t chill Mickey to his core, only because he’s wasted again. His hangover is probably going to be killer tomorrow.
“When’s the last time you washed your clothes?” Ian asks, the sound of his scissors clicking following his voice in suit.
“Jesus, this shit again.”
“ ‘M just asking. I’m pretty bad about laundry out here too, y’know. So damn expensive.”
Mickey rests the palms of his hands on his knees, trying to remember. “I don’t know. Probably two months ago.”
“Shit. We should go to the dry cleaners tomorrow. I’ll pay for both of our sakes.”
Mickey chuckles. A soft stretch of silence flows between them, the only sound that of cars rushing past on the freeway beside them. Mickey’s always liked the sound of cars in the night; has memories of laying in bed with his siblings in their various foster homes or wherever they were being held up, watching the shadows of the window panes rise and distort before collapsing in the beam of a headlight. He hates sleeping in complete silence - just can’t do it. There was always some form of noise in his house at all times.
“Mickey,” Ian suddenly says, quiet. “Can I ask you something? About last night?”
Mickey freezes, his heart stilling inside his chest. He opens his eyes to stare down at the filthy rooftop. Ian’s feet shuffle nervously from this angle.
“Depends,” Mickey mutters. Ian scratches up the back of his head, parting his hair.
“When you said your dad caught you, you said it was with your pants down with a guy your brothers were friends with. Does that mean you have had sex before?” Mickey is quiet, and Ian softly says, “You don’t have to answer that. Sorry.”
A chunk of hair falls out of the corner of his eye. Mickey wonders how bad Gallagher’s fucking his shit up right now.
“Yeah.” He says hoarsely. “Used to. I fucked a lot of women before I realized…you know. I’d fuck anything that moved. Didn’t feel right, though. Didn’t like it as much as my brothers claimed to…I thought they were just annoying for a while, figured I’d ignore it, until their buddy kept coming over. He’d give me these looks…and shit. And…well. I risked it.” He huffs out a small laugh, thin and reedy. “Look at what that got me.”
Ian’s scissors still atop his head. “That was your first time with a guy?”
Mickey nods. Ian sighs. He reaches his hand down and passes Mickey the cigarette. Mickey grunts out a small thank you.
“Can I give you bangs?” Ian asks a while later, and Mickey tilts his head up to glare at him. Ian snickers.
Mickey isn’t too sure about this way they’re posed up right now. His head level with Ian’s hips, Ian standing over him and pushing on his head…well, Mickey’s only human.
“What about just a small fringe?” Ian pesters, smoothing Mickey’s hair down over his forehead. “Like just a little bit.”
“Do whatever,” Mickey sigh eventually, “just save your money for buying a clipper to buzz my shit tomorrow instead of the fuckin’ laundry.”
Ian laughs, shaking his head. He tilts Mickey’s head up as he moves to touch up this fringe he wants so badly. Mickey blinks his eyes, and maybe it’s the alcohol, maybe it’s Ian not saying anything about what he just did a few hours ago, maybe it’s the lights of the city bouncing off of him in the paling sky as the sun begins to rise, maybe it’s just the way Ian is. Maybe it’s none of these things. But Mickey cocks his head, staring up at Ian, and wants something more than what he has. Wants a lot more.
Ian meets his gaze, looking down at Mickey with something that lodges itself between Mickey’s ribs. Makes him want to look away and hide again, makes him want to never move. He stares in Ian’s green eyes, soft and wide, and thinks about just how much he really, really likes him. He doesn’t realize he’s holding his breath until his head goes a little fuzzy.
“Mickey,” Ian whispers, his hand still resting on the top of Mickey’s head, holding it in place. “I really want to kiss you right now.”
Mickey feels his heart in his throat, hears the rushing beat of it in his ears. He runs his tongue over his lips, suddenly aware of how chapped they are. “So do it.” He says.
Ian looks down at Mickey in shock, and he’s too slow, and Mickey’s losing his fucking mind. And Mickey’s drunk and letting Ian grab him like this after spending the past almost two weeks cuddled together every night, and Mickey really, really likes Ian. He pushes himself off the box and presses his mouth to Ian’s.
In the milliseconds within their collision, a million thoughts race through Mickey’s head. The first is that he’s never kissed someone; not seriously. He’s had some girls in the past who wanted a kiss and though Mickey’s never had much of a desire for it, he obliged and gave them quick ones. He’s never kissed someone like this, and he’s not quite sure what to do, and he’s fucking praying that Ian won’t notice.
The second is that Ian has definitely kissed someone like this before. He’s still in momentary surprise, before his arms slowly come to rest on Mickey’s shoulders, cradling him. He tilts his head and darts his tongue in Mickey’s mouth, and Mickey doesn’t know what to do with his hands or his mouth, but he really likes this.
The third is that he likes everything about this. He likes the careful click against Ian’s teeth, the soft noise he lets out when Mickey nips gently at his bottom lip, the way they keep trying to stumble forward and get any closer as if it’s even possible.
The fourth is that Mickey rests his hands at Ian’s sides, fisting the fabric of his clothes within his scabbed hands.
The fifth is that Ian is breaking away for a moment to rub his face against Mickey’s, breathing him in deeply and smiling against his skin. Mickey pushes his forehead into Ian’s, trying to catch his breath. He pulls Ian closer, pressing his mouth to the side of Ian’s flatly, before recapturing his mouth in another long, languid kiss.
The sun rises in the east, and sets in the west.