Of Ice Picks and Swarms
"You love me and you're gay..."
Those words…with that fucking voice…they have been rattling around in his head every single God damn second of every single God damn fucking day since Ian Gallagher, from his hunched over position in the weeds and dirt, let them slip passed his incredibly pink lips in a breathy, grounded out plea.
It was almost like Ian had kicked awake a dormant hornets' nest inside Mickey's head that grey, grey afternoon. Because ever since that fucked up moment in the overgrown yard, outside the abandoned apartment building Mickey haunts, an angry and violent swarm of memories, thoughts, and feelings that Mickey spent his whole life suppressing…broke through.
They had rapidly consumed his mind like wildfire, attacking every corner of both his subconscious and conscious mind with a vengeance; successfully turning everything Mickey knew, or at least thought he knew, upside down, backwards, and inside out…leaving him, simultaneously, feeling both vacant and bursting at the seams.
The alcohol and drugs Mickey steadily consumed didn't seem to help quiet down the angry horde either. Instead, they just help disperse the brimming swarm and allowing it flow, slide, and trickle down through the rest of his body; burning and scorching his veins like a vat of battery acid being poured on a hooker's face. He swore, sometimes, that if he sat still enough, he could actually see his skin bubbling and boiling, as if it was trying to resist the foreign takeover.
Because those angry and vicious little fuckers…they took pleasure out of wrecking havoc upon his organs. From creating complicated series of knots out of his intestines to flooding his already cottoned mouth with the metallic iron taste of blood, nothing was left untouched by the acidic and scalding combination of the swarm and Mickey's poison of the day.
But that…all of that was nothing compared to the feeling Mickey got in his chest every time he heard Ian's name. If he were to even attempt to describe the pain and overwhelming feelings of regret and guilt that bursts forth every time Mandy would spat out Ian's name during one of her long-winded rants about the Gallaghers, he wouldn't have done it justice. To him, it was worse than getting pistol-whipped within an inch of your life or getting shot in the ass. This was something more akin to the feeling of freezing ice pick being pierced straight through your heart, where it is slowly twisted and pivoted-drawing out maximum pain-before being pulled out again to heal, only to have the process repeated a hundred or a thousand times over.
The swarm and the ice pick, Mickey knew, were not only just slowly eating away at his flesh, sinew, and bones, but his willpower, resolve, and the last dregs of hope that he managed to somehow, in spite of everything, keep locked in a death grip somewhere deep inside his blackened, bruised, and bloody soul.
These monsters were slowly burning him away; turning him into a charred out, crusted, and crumbling remnant of what he used to be. Mickey thought, when he was sober enough to actually think, that he was starting to look more and more alike that apartment building he haunts than an actual human being every passing day. But that…Mickey knew, along with the demonic and possessed nest of hornets currently residing inside his brain and the freezing and intense ice pick that was constantly shredding apart his heart, was to be expected after he cut Ian loose. Because it is impossible to go and destroy the one good thing in your life without destroying yourself in the end…
So when Mickey kicked the shit out of Ian, he knew he had nailed his own coffin shut…he just hoped that he would maintain a constant state of drunken oblivion that would prevent him from seeing the Grimm Reaper's train storming down the tracks until it finally railed him…
Mickey though, despite all of this agony, was still a fuckin' Milkavich. And the number one thing you learn right away, besides avoiding Terry at all costs when he is on crystal meth, is to never, ever fucking let anything other than a smirk or scowl to reside upon your face. A Milkavich is supposed to….no, expected to be as cold as a corpse, adaptable as a cockroach, and as ruthless as a prized fighting pitbull. So Mickey had done what was demanded out of him since he was born and he learned to take in the ice, the boiling, and the swarm. He learned what combinations of drugs, alcohol, and tormenting of others made the very fast and very loud swarm quiet down to a white-static roar. Mickey had learned to live without fucking, seeing, or being with Ian Gallagher. He had learned how to survive again without Firecrotch.
And he had done a decent job at it too.
Well…that was until fucking Gallagher had to fall down deep inside the rabbit hole.
Just like Mickey did after he fucked the Russian.
And just like Monica had that one Thanksgiving….