Chapter Text
Mickey Milkovich is not very good at many things. He failed almost every subject in school, he was way too short to excel in basketball or football, children and animals feared him, and he couldn’t even boil eggs without burning something down.
So it couldn’t be held against him that he was fucking proud of the one thing he was exceptional at.
Mickey Milkovich was very good at silently taking a beating.
It isn’t something he was born with, it is an acquired skill. And he had many opportunities to practice. He was hit at least once a week, and beaten at least once a month since he can remember.
Once, when he was in kindergarten, he remembered getting into a fight with some kid and getting pushed off of monkey bars. He was sitting in the nurse’s office, his right ankle swollen and his right leg potentially broken, but he didn’t cry. Even then he knew only pussies and fags cried; and he thought that his dad would be proud of him in this moment, for gritting his teeth and blinking through the tears.
While the nurse and school administration tried to call his parents (Mickey thought they were very silly for thinking anyone would come get him), Mickey read a poster on the wall of the nurse’s office; since he was neither a pussy nor a fag, he needed something to distract himself from the pulsating mess of his right ankle, and the only distraction was a poster about early signs of leukemia. It warned parents to notify their doctors if they found some strange, unexplained bruising on their children.
Mickey doesn’t remember that day for getting a cast on for the first time, not for school nurse waiting for someone to pick him up from the ER for hours (eventually, Iggy came, but he was driving their cousin Dennis’ car. Dennis was in the back seat, smoking a joint. School nurse frowned upon seeing that and later wondered if it was a right decision leaving Mickey in the care of a 14-year old driving without a license, but at that point she already stayed 4 hours more than she was paid for, so…). Mickey remembers that day as the first time he realized there were children out there that could have unexplained bruising.
Mickey never didn’t have some kind of bruises on his skin, but all of them were easily explained.
Mickey Milkovich was very good at being in pain.
And he always was in pain, but it was always recent, sharp, fresh pain. Easily explainable.
The first thing he did after waking up every day was doing mental inventory. Does his face hurt? Are his ribs bruised? Is it safe to yawn, to stretch his arms above his head?
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The first time Mickey heard a phrase “chronic pain” was the day he got shot for the first time and got sent to juvie for the third time in his life.
“Mr. Milkovich, I am afraid that the bullet is still in your thigh. The X-Ray showed us that the bulled nicked your femur, and if we don’t get it out, you might experience chronic pain for the rest of your life. The good news is that it missed femoral artery by quite a while, so the surgery should not be complicated.”
“Fucking surgery? Do I look like I am fucking insured?”, he hissed at the doctor.
It was okay, for hissing was not the same as crying.
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When Ian was diagnosed with bipolar, Mickey did a lot of googling. He googled: bipolar disorder, how do you know your partner is depressed, bipolar dating advice. Later, seeing as googling questions he already knows have the answers he won’t like became his hobby, he googled chronic pain. He read the definition: Chronic or persistent pain is pain that carries on for longer than 12 weeks despite medication or treatment.
He thought of a bullet grazing his thigh and he thought of a bullet grazing his hip (and filthy pedophile hands holding his butt, not doing very good job of taking out all of the pieces while everyone around him is yelling; he swallowed a yelp then. He didn’t cry but it was a close call, but he didn’t beat himself over it too much – nobody would’ve heard him anyway). He knows that he has a piece of a bullet in his ass near his hip because that spot aches in the exact same way like his thigh does when the weather is about to change.
He sits on his bed, head in his hands, and for the first time ever lets himself feel a little bit sorry for him. He let himself feel a lot of feelings today, what was one more?
He stares down at his legs, as old as he is (that is to say, barely 20). One of them is referred to as the bad one in his mind, but he doesn’t think of the other one as the good one for sure, the other one is the one with the wobbly knee. He presses the palms of his hands into his eyes, pushing the tears back in his eyes and pushing the self-pitying thoughts in the far corners of his brain.
It doesn’t count as crying if the tears never fell.
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Mexico is hot and he learns how to swim.
He is also shot again, and he is also a fugitive and he can’t go to the hospital. It is his shoulder this time, and he is stitched together by a sawing needle disinfected with tequila.
He is glad that he has at least one bullet wound that wasn’t Ian’s fault. He is trying to get over him, but it is hard to forget someone when you have two bullets stuck in your body because of them.
He winces a few times while he is stitched together like a ragdoll (before the tequila kicks in. They made him drink a few shots, because as well as disinfectant, strong alcohol can be used as an anesthetic). He can admit to himself now that he is both a pussy and a fag, but he still refuses to cry.
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It says a lot about Mickey that the most peaceful period of his life so far was while he was in prison. It was like a dream, he and Ian spending a few hours a day on their work details and then fucking and sleeping and even cuddling and then fucking again. It is fucked up, but given the upbringing he had, it is not unexpected that he could feel like he was in heaven while being an inmate of the federal prison.
Seeing as good things don’t tend to last very long, and that their minds were idle while their hands (and other body parts) were busy, it didn’t come as a surprise when things started to get Not Good.
They were cooped up in a very small space, forced to share every second of every day, and while Ian was used to everybody being in his fucking business all the time, Mickey was not.
When he was younger, Mickey could spend days alone, shooting at the walls of some abandoned building. His voice would grow hoarse with misuse, and it would scratch his throat while he told lies about his whereabouts to his father (he was at some girls place. His family couldn’t know her, she wasn’t from around here, she went to a different school. He knew his brothers saw that he was full of shit, but he hoped his dad was too drunk to care. He often was).
It was raining outside, and Mickey was sitting on his bunk and absent-mindedly rubbing the words FUCK U-UP inked into his skin. It seemed like his knuckles were the only fucking parts of his body that didn’t feel like they were burning from inside out every time he moved. He was irritated because the last few months in prison he didn’t really get in any fights, he was taking it easy for the first time in forever, and he forgot that he wasn’t a kind of a person that just got to walk around pain free. He was promptly reminded when he woke up gasping for air and clutching his leg. The stabbing pain of the old wound kept him tossing and turning, and he would’ve been afraid of waking Ian up with his jostling, but he knew that his meds made him sleep like a fucking corpse.
Mickey got to sleep, finally, and it seemed that only minutes later he was being woken up by Ian’s morning wood poking at his sore hip. He pushed him off of the bottom bunk.
“What is your problem?”, Ian yelled.
“I’m sick of the smell of the goddamn mayonnaise!”, Mickey said.
“Only other time I had sex while I was in this much pain was with Svetlana”, he didn’t say.
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His shoulder screams at him while he yanks at the handcuffs that tie him to the Gallagher’s washing machine. Everybody seems to think that he is not serious about this whole homicide thing, but none of them know how true desperation feels like, not like Mickey does.
No, the old fucker already ruined his first fucking wedding; he wasn’t going to ruin his second one too. So he needed to die, Mickey knew, but no one was taking him seriously, and he was drained. He realizes that he barely has energy to stand upright, let alone murder anyone, so he decides to slump in a corner after his passionate speech.
He knows that Terry will never let him be happy, but that fact is comforting Mickey in a fucking twisted way. It is a constant that Mickey can count on. But what if he kills Terry and still feels this fucking miserable? Who will he blame then?
If he melts into Ian’s huge embrace after he comes to sit next to him on the dryer, well so what? And if one single tear falls into his lap when he leans into Ian and his hip protests, well, nobody saw it, and nobody is certainly going to go around accusing Mickey goddamn Milkovich of crying.