Author's Note: This story is not in line with the spoilers for Season 5.

Also, I wrote this while under the impression that in Season 4 Debbie was in 9th grade and Carl was in 8th-apparently I promoted them each up a grade from where they actually are, but since Shameless plays fast and loose with age/time, I decided to leave it. This does not become relevant until Chapter 6, though, and it's not really a big part of the story, just the subject of some conversation. Fair warning for this minor canon inconsistency, though.

When Debbie and Carl were kids, Ian was Superman. He could run faster than any other kid on the block, jump higher and further, and cross a vacant lot with a glass of water balanced on his head. He could climb anything, had once on a bet even scaled the side of an abandoned factory, swinging himself into a broken third-story window. He was the neighborhood champion of holding his breath, balancing on one foot, walking on his hands, and playing bloody knuckles. But he was never a jerk about it. Everybody liked Ian; he was the one they called on to solve disputes and break ties and to fetch stray frisbees and balls off of roofs. He was the only kid who could be trusted to be fair and who could be counted on not to screw around up there and break his neck.

He excelled at sports, but when he got to high school he was drawn to the ROTC instead. He walked around in that uniform, carrying his head high, looking for all the world like the rare neighborhood kid who was going places. In a neighborhood where nobody had any plans beyond waiting around for their disability check or getting pregnant to pick up another welfare stipend, Ian had a plan to get out. Ian had a plan and there wasn't anyone who knew him who doubted that he'd pull it off.

Debbie and Carl were always proud to have Ian for an older brother. They were proud of all their older siblings, who were like celebrities among the neighborhood kids. Fiona was the most gorgeous girl on the south side. Lip was a genius. But Ian was a superhero.

Ian had a job like a grown-up where they trusted him as if he wasn't a south side ragamuffin, and where his boss bought him gifts as bonuses, like new shoes and a coat and an ipod, gifts that made Debbie and Carl green with envy. Ian had been outside of the city more than anyone else they knew because of ROTC retreats. He'd been to Michigan and Iowa, Wisconsin, and Missouri. Even Lip had only been as far as Krazy Kaplan's just over the border to Indiana. Ian told Debbie and Carl that they could have anything they wanted to, could go anywhere they wanted to, they just had to figure out a way.

He told them they could be anything they wanted to too, and he was living proof. Ian decided that he wanted his scrawny body to look like the ones in his magazines that he thought nobody knew about, and he set his mind to making it happen. Ian decided he didn't want to be like all the other sad sacks living in their neighborhood and he set his mind to making that happen too. He was going to get out and not come back until he was a hero.

Then Ian walked out one morning in his ROTC uniform and didn't come back. And Carl and Debbie wondered if he'd just found a way to make his plans happen even earlier than he thought. They'd been used to the idea for a long time that Ian was going to go away, and it wasn't so surprising that he'd engineered a way to do it sooner. He'd always been able to see further ahead than the rest of them.

But then he came back and everything was off and weird about him, and then they were there peering into Mickey Mikovich's dark bedroom, where Ian lay, looking frail and decimated. Lip and Fiona were nowhere to be found, and Carl and Debbie were left helplessly staring at the broken body of their Superman.

It didn't feel like anything could ever be right again after that.

There's a stupid memory that keeps popping into Debbie's head and won't go away. A year or two back the living room was filled with clothes. Fiona had instructed the siblings to empty out their dressers and closets for the annual ritual of trying things on before the start of the school year and passing down what didn't fit. Fiona supervised, taking careful note of what gaps in their wardrobes were going to need to be filled with newly purchased clothes, working out the calculations of who was allotted how much of the squirrel fund. It was always a contentious day. Debbie and Lip usually made out the best since there wasn't anybody to pass down clothes to Lip, and Fiona's clothes rarely lasted long enough for Debbie to grow into them. Ian and Carl historically made out the worst. This day had shaken out differently, though.

Debbie had finished trying on what little there was for her and was entertaining Liam on the couch when Lip and Ian started arguing about something. She wasn't paying attention to them, though. Instead, she was listening with amusement as Fiona attempted to convince Carl that he could get away with wearing a couple of Debbie's out-grown turtlenecks.

"Turtlenecks are turtlenecks," Fiona coaxed, "There aren't boy turtlenecks and girl turtlenecks..."

"Fiona," Ian had said then, but she didn't hear him.

"Then why does it say 'girls' on the tag?" Carl argued.

"Fiona," Ian said again.

"Is that the problem?" Fiona picked up one of the turtlenecks, flipped it inside out and promptly ripped out the tag, "There. Fixed."

"It's still a girl's shirt," Carl said.

"Fiona..."

"Nope. Now it's gender-neutral."

"Neutral?" Carl laughed, "Like a dog when you cut off its balls?"

"That's neutered," Debbie corrected him.

"Fiona!" Lip said, finally wresting her attention away from Carl and the turtlenecks. They all turned to look at the boys and promptly started snickering, despite the death look Ian was giving. He was stuffed into a pair of Lip's discarded jeans, showing off a good five inches of sock at the ankle, and a skin-tight sweater that left exposed another several inches of bare wrist.

"Dumbass had another growth spurt this summer," Lip said.

Fiona let a giggle escape before she managed to suppress it and ask, "They all fit like that?"

Ian nodded.

"Be less noticeable when you're wearing boots and gloves this winter, right?"

Ian gave her another death glare. "I can't even lift my arms."

"All right," Fiona said, handing down her decision, "You get the new clothes this year. I think Lip's done growing anyway."

"What the fuck?" Lip said, "Karen already picked out all my stuff. I gotta pay her back."

"Well, Karen's just going to have to return it all," Fiona snapped. She always was snippy about Lip and Karen for some reason.

"No way," Lip said, "It's not my fault he's a walking glandular condition."

"Runt," Ian coughed.

"All right, all right," Fiona said and bit her lip in thought. "They'll be giving you new camo pants-can you just wear those?"

"I'm not supposed to wear my uniform when I'm not at ROTC."

"They gonna give you dishonorable discharge if they catch you?" Lip asked, "Kick you out of the pretend Army?"

"Maybe Kev has some old clothes?" Fiona offered.

"Jesus, I'm not that big."

"Now who's the runt?"

"Fuck you."

"Okay," Fiona said, picking up the small stack of bills she'd separated out for Lip's clothes. She split it into two smaller stacks and held one out to each of them.

"Thirty bucks?" Lip asked, counting his share quickly.

"Goodwill," Fiona replied with a falsely cheery smile, "That's practically a fortune!"

"What?" Ian said sarcastically, "Lip might have to wear second-hand clothes?"

"Yeah, good luck buying new with that thirty dollars, Andre," Lip muttered, deciding he was done with the whole operation and walking out.

After Lip had gone, Fiona slipped Ian another ten dollars from Carl's pile. "You can take Lip's old clothes," she instructed Carl before he had a chance to protest, "With those and Ian's, you have plenty." Then she sighed as she returned her attention back to sorting the remnants of Carl's out-grown clothes and said, "You gotta stop eatin' your vegetables, Ian. We can't afford this."

"Does that mean I don't have to eat vegetables either?" Carl asked eagerly.

"Sure," Ian replied as he started wriggling painfully out of Lip's too-small clothes, "You can stunt your growth just like Lip."

Debbie remembered being self-righteously angry about the whole thing. She hated when things weren't fair and it wasn't fair that Lip got half the money when it was Ian who needed the new clothes. She knew Fiona had only done it that way to keep the peace, but Debbie never liked it when people got rewarded for acting like assholes. It wasn't right. She'd complained about it later to Ian and been surprised when he just laughed and said he didn't care.

"You worry too much, Debs," he'd said, "You can't fix everything."

"But it's not fair," she argued.

For a minute, she'd thought that Ian was going to give her the pat response of 'life's not fair,' but she was glad to find that he didn't. Instead, he gave Debbie what, looking back, was an especially Ian-ish response. He said, "I only have to wear hand-me-downs a couple more years 'til I get out of here. Lip's stuck being a short asshole for the rest of his life. It all evens out."

Debbie keeps thinking about this memory now, lying in bed like tonight, or while walking back and forth to the Milkovich house, or while listening to Fiona and Lip getting into arguments all the time now that they're splitting the household responsibilities, playing mom and dad. It's like a song Debbie can't get out of her head and, more and more, it feels like it means something, like that one stupid memory might be the key to understanding how the whole family could fracture into pieces in less than six months.

Fiona's always had a haphazard approach to everything, lurching from one drama to the next, and Lip, for all his intelligence, is a hot-head, just as likely to let a problem explode out of spite as to solve it. Ian had always been the pragmatic, calm center of the older kids. He had a temper, but it cooled off easily. He didn't put himself in charge of things, but he was there when you needed him. And, unlike Fiona and Lip, whose personal lives the whole family knew far more about than they wanted to, Ian kept his dramas to himself. In this way, Ian always maintained an illusion of being free from worry and problems. When things in the house got too crazy, Ian's presence was sort of soothing, balancing things out. The younger kids always found themselves gravitating to wherever Ian was when things got too crazy. Debbie never realized how important this was until it was gone. Ian had taken all that calmness with him when he left, and in his absence the household had descended into an every-man-for-himself kind of chaos.

Debbie had high hopes when Ian came back that his presence would return everything to the way it was, but it quickly became clear that wasn't going to happen. Things had changed. And Ian had changed. He'd come back a different person, one who had a wardrobe of expensive new clothes and a leather jacket, one who didn't need to sleep and spent an excessive amount of time making his hair just right in the morning, one who laughed too much and made stupid jokes instead of giving honest answers when you asked him anything. He wasn't the stable center anymore who made everyone feel more calm. Instead he was a cartoon version of himself who kept saying strange things and whose nervous energy just made everyone feel uneasy. It was almost as bad as if he'd never come back to have this imposter sent in his place.

Then he'd crashed and it had all made sense at last, even if it wasn't the kind of sense Debbie would have ever asked for. She knew that was how the world worked, at least for the Gallaghers. But that didn't stop her from being angry about it.

Maybe that was why she kept thinking about the stupid day with the argument over who got to buy new clothes; the unfairness of it made her fume self-righteously in the same way. Just as it wasn't fair that Ian got screwed that day because Lip was a selfish asshole, it isn't fair that Ian got screwed yet again because Frank and Monica were selfish assholes who thought nothing of having kids when they knew their genes were toxic. The unfairness of it all makes Debbie so angry that it's hard to sleep. She doesn't know that she believes now what Ian told her then, that it all evens out. There doesn't really seem to be any way for that to happen in this situation.

As much as she is angry on Ian's behalf, she's angry on her own behalf as well. It isn't fair that her brother was taken away from her. He was her favorite brother, too. He was the one who never told her he was too busy with his own shit to deal with her stupid problems, the one she could count on for help when Lip and Fiona were being dumb about stuff, the one who could reliably make her feel calm again just with his quiet presence, the only one of her siblings who actually looked related to her...

Debbie rolls over, untangles the covers from around her body, and reaches for her phone. She sends a text to Matty:

Can't sleep. Cheer me up.

The phone is silent for so long that she assumes he must be asleep already. Then it lights up with Matty's reply:

Wanna see a show at the Aragon tomorrow night?

It's not exactly the response she was hoping for, but it'll do. She's never been to a concert before and it'll be cool to tell people she's been to the Aragon, even if it means a long-ass train ride. She texts:

Sure. Thanx.

She sets the phone back on the nightstand and rearranges the covers, determined to clear her head and get some sleep. She's just closed her eyes when light flashes from the phone again. She smiles as she reads the message:

P.S. You have really pretty hair.

That's better. She burrows deep into her pillow and sighs, all thoughts of Ian replaced by thoughts of Matty. This doesn't make it any easier to sleep, but at least it's a much more pleasant way of being kept awake. The anger and frustration drains out of her, replaced by fluttery bird wing excitement in her chest, so good it's painful. Love hurts. Whether it's love for your sibling who might never come back from whatever psychological hole he has crawled into, or love for your sort-of boyfriend who is equal parts frustrating and amazing…one way or another, it all hurts.