The thing you notice real fast about Mickey is that he's mellowed out a lot. He doesn't seem like he's on fire anymore, he's dimmed himself down now. Sometimes you wake up and find him in the living room, illuminated by the soft glow of the TV. You have crutches now, so you've been crashing on the couch because the stairs are too narrow and they piss you off too much and you just don't want to fuck with them right now.
"What're you doing awake?" You yawn, covering your mouth with a fist, like that's the important question, instead of here. You stretch before you can even think to stop yourself and come up short, gasping as pain ripples out across your back.
"What time is it?" You ask, because talking might cover up the ugly grimaces breakdancing across your face. It's been two weeks and you're still wearing bandages on your back and the only time you can stand to lay on it is when you're asleep, but you always wake up aching and sore, like you ran too long, or didn't stretch enough.
Mickey watches you and doesn't say anything for a second. He watches you until you get a little uncomfortable and want to shove him into talking. "I dunno, three last I checked," he says. "You okay there, Gallagher?"
You shove yourself up onto your elbows, mutter a 'I'm breathing,' that means you're just fucking fine, and struggle to sit up. The bandages tug at your skin and you bend back an arm to press the pads of your fingers into the one along your spine, the deepest one; nearly severed a vertebrae, they'd told you. They had to do surgery to get that piece of metal out, and the scar's going to be there forever and even though you can't see and probably never will be able to see it, it still bothers you, but what the fuck else did you expect with war? Signing up for war is like fucking without a condom. Shit's going to happen if you do it long enough, and it's never going to be pretty shit and you thought you were okay with that.
Mickey had scoffed when you'd told him that, and asked why the genius doctors don't just keep their fucking mouths shut about that shit? Who wants to know how very close they came to being paralyzed, anyway? Especially when you intend to go right back into that hell after all this, head held high, proudly wrapping your title of officer around yourself like that's not the flimsiest armor in the world. Maybe if you try real hard, and be the perfect brave solider, you might even get paralyzed this time; or dead. At times like that, you punch him in the arm and he nearly slams you back into the couch before he remembers the point of all this and comes up short and it makes you want to punch him again, for real this.
"What're you doing up?" you ask him again, and he stares at you like that's the stupidest question you've asked him this week, but you don't think it is. You want to know. Sometimes you even want to hear him say the answers; you want to hear the excuses in his own voice, his own words, but you don't press it a lot of the time because you think maybe that'll end up breaking him. He's not as strong as people think he is, you've already found fault lines in him, and you find yourself toeing them; avoiding them, sidestepping them, not positive if he'll crumble when you fuck with them.
Mickey shrugs, eventually. "Guess I couldn't sleep," he says. He turns off the TV, and darkness falls over the room like a blanket. "The house's quiet," he elaborates and if you watch him closely - which you do - you can see the teeth pulling face he makes. "I grew up in a house like this, everybody always bitching. At three in the fucking morning and somebody'll be bitching - fucker can be up alone and they'd still find something to shout about. But now everybody's gone, fucked off to wherever and it's quiet and..." He shrugs again, because he doesn't have the right words for it and you think you can read his shrugs like the novel they've always been, anyway. "Can't sleep, I guess."
"Wanna fuck?" You ask instead of apologizing. He'd probably hit you if you did, and maybe leave. Nobody's left you. The Gallaghers. They're right where you left them. Lip didn't go to college. Debbie did and you feel like maybe that makes up for it. Debbie's going to the local college, she's practically within walking distance and she still comes back here, home, every night, like she still has a curfew. Frank doesn't. You haven't talked to Frank since coming home. You haven't even seen him but you feel him and his presence, tightening around this family, holding their bits and pieces together, like a noose.
Mickey makes the teeth pulling face again. "You're a fucking cripple." Your absolute not okayness with that single sentence bleeds out into your face. "I don't want to break you when you're already -" he makes a vague gesture toward you and it pisses you off.
"Alright, whatever, fuck you," you say as even as you can but it doesn't sound bland enough to you. "I was just trying to help."
"I know, and it was cute," he says helpfully. It doesn't help a damn thing.
"I don't even really want to fuck you."
"Lying ain't gonna make a damn difference," Mickey says and you can hear his laughter in his voice, even when it's deadpanned.
"Shut up."
Mickey gets up and you tell him to fuck off when he straddles you. He doesn't sit as heavily on you as he has before and you know he's digging his knees into the couch, probably until his own leg begins to hurt, carrying his own weight because if he puts too much on you, your leg might explode or something.
"Chill out," he tells you, and you want to, you really do, but ever since that bullet tore through your leg, you feel like you've been wound so tightly. You feel on edge, like you're seconds away from going off - all the time.
You dig your fingers into the back of his neck and kiss him hard. He makes a sound that you swallow and it really does make you feel better, which makes you feel worst. You move, pressing Mickey down into the couch, pressing him down onto his back. Mickey lets you for half a second, too focused on or maybe distracted by the kiss but then he rolls his hips and shifts and you both roll off the couch.
You land on your back with him on top of you and a grunt of pain clogging your throat and you stay like that, his eyes on you. You're real still, trying to decide if it hurt, but when you start laughing, you can see something shift in his face, begin to relax. You laugh to wade through the pain, to keep everything from stopping and becoming about that again; the war, the pain, how you returned not entirely complete. He laughs with you. It spills into the room, laughter that is eventually muffled by teeth biting your throat and lips and his hands on your ribs, under your shirt.
His hands usually bruise when they can get a hold on you, and you know what Lip might say, what anyone might say, and sometimes you feel like reminding Lip that he makes love with a fist too. His street fights, his bar brawls, the stupid shit he says just to piss people off. Anyone would look at this like a domestic relationship and tell you that better halfs or significant others or whatever the fuck people are calling people they fuck now, they would say those people don't bruise. They never cause pain; they don't drive you mad. There are no bruises, no punches, no jabbing hard enough to leave resonating pain - they don't try to hurt you. They don't fight with you until you're both breathless and bloody, tired and thirsty but so hard even that hurts. Those people just don't do that. Because fucking is supposed to be something intimate. You're supposed to open yourself up and let somebody else close just so you can stick your dick in them and not feel bad about it. That's what intimacy is. Or something.
You don't buy that bullshit. Intimacy is supposed to be family, but you've had worst than bruises from Frank and your mother bruised you long ago without even laying a fucking finger on you. Those bruises are still tender and you can feel them throbbing against the hollow of your chest when you breathe in too deeply. Fiona hits you sometimes to get her point across, she elbows you in the ribs and gives you that look that is so sharp it might as well be a hit. The fist fights you've had with Lip left you with a broken finger once, but that's intimacy too. Love hurts; intimacy digs so deep inside of you it leaves you feeling full and hollow at the same time. It makes you breathless. It feels like someone punched you real hard in the stomach and even after the pain's gone, you just can't swallow enough air to get your breath back and that's okay.
Mickey leaves bruises on you, his fingers dig into your hips so hard they hurt afterwards but you never seem to feel them during. Before love had been like a game of chicken. The stares, the fingers digging into skin and teeth biting into flesh and sleeping in the same room and silence - it had all been like a game of chicken. And it felt a lot like you were still in it, racing toward eachother, breath held in anticipation of who would turn first, but both too stubborn and stupid to lose.
He used to bruise you and now he's touching you like you're a jar of broken bits and he doesn't want to crush the pieces anymore than they already are. Or he doesn't want to get cut. You're not sure but it pisses you off.
"I'm not fucking breakable, Mick," you grunt.
"You're practically cripple," he says again and you punch him so hard he rocks back on his heels. You can see it in his eyes and your knuckles ache. He looks like he's about to punch you back and you still yourself for it, but he never does, and that feeds into your anger.
"I got shot," you say and it's dismissive and Mickey laughs at you, and at that, and at the complete lie you just told him without even saying anything. You just got shot. You're fine.
"Shut the fuck up, Mickey," you snap because you're running out of viable words to say and nothing is sounding right and he's still laughing at you.
"You're stupid, Gallagher, aren't you?" He says and when you try to hit him again, he blocks you and pins you to the ground so hard you have trouble staying still because the pressure hurts too much and he's right. You're practically crippled. You're fucking ruined and you did this; you signed yourself up for this. You fucking asked for it.
"I got shot," Mickey said, and he's still smiling and you're still waiting for him to explain the joke to you. "For stealing a candy bar. And it took me months, you fucking idiot, to stop jumping at every fucking sound I heard. Do you know how loud Juvie is? Months. You got shot. In a fucking war zone." You wait for him to add the 'and you fucking asked for it' but it doesn't come. "Months," he repeats instead. "You're not fooling anyone. And you look fucking retarded trying to so just fucking stop, you stupid, breakable cunt."
Mickey sits back on his heels again. "We all are," he says so quiet you almost don't catch it.
"What?"
"I fucking said we all are," he snaps back, defensive now because he doesn't know what the fuck he he's trying to say and he's talking too much already. "That's the big epiphany I had all these years you been gone. People get hit by trucks all the time, man. People step on mines and piss off the wrong crazy fuck and drown in bathtubs and choke on food, man. Meth labs explode, bullets fall from the sky, we are mixing bombs to destroy the earth, man - the fucking Earth. We are ants. We spend our entire lives fucking other people over, and ourselves, giving away pieces of ourselves like a fucking butcher, right, until nothing's left. We're fucking corpses. Yeah, we're breakable, we're rotted, you're decayed and you're coming apart. Your smile right now, is faker than Anderson's tits. And every time you smile, I feel like punching you."
Mickey stops and ducks his head. He bites his way into your mouth so aggressively, you grimace and bite him back. You taste blood and wonder if it's yours or Mickeys, but then Mickey's pulling away again and you grunt in protest and feel like telling him to just get on with it and fuck you because sex is something you've known how to do for years. It's physical and primal and something you can almost touch; it's damn near tangible, something you can feel low in your gut and it doesn't hurt you. It's real and it's painless and you just want to focus on that.
"So lose the bullshit pretenses," he says. "Cry or laugh or get shitfaced, I don't care what you do, just get fucking on with it. Deal with it, get over it."
"You'll laugh at me," you say because you know he will. Mickey didn't get enough hugs as a child, or something, you decided back in the beginning of all of this. You never talked about it, of course, some things just can't be talked about, no matter how close you get to a person - intimacy isn't a catch all, not really. He doesn't cry about things. When he got shot, when his mom died, when Mandy found out about you two and punched him so hard in the face she broke his nose, and then ignored the both of you for weeks. He doesn't cry and you used to think that maybe he just doesn't care about anything. He laughs, at times when he should cry. He laughs when he should laugh too. He doesn't cry.
"Yeah. I'm going to laugh at you," he agrees. "Because that's how much I fucking care." And you think you probably believe him. You probably love him, and you think he probably loves you too and you wonder if love means the same thing to the both of you and if you'll ever be old enough to actually say it out loud and if that would change a damn thing when you do.
You shove yourself up onto your elbows and stop for a second because the position arches your back in a way you're not sure you like, but then you keep going, all the way until you're sitting up and he's in your lap, legs spread over your thighs but he's not really sitting on you. He doesn't look like he feels like moving either, so there's a pregnant moment there where you stare at him and he stares back at you and nobody moves or says anything.
"Okay," you say.
"Okay," he repeats.
"Get off me," you say.
He laughs at you now. "Fuck off. Get your dick out, Gallagher. We're fucking doing something." And you think that this is something you can do. You can focus on his hand in your shorts and his tongue in your mouth and the weight of something set deep in your bones getting lighter, easier to carry.