Ian doesn't get leave for the first summer he's at Westpoint. Lip rambles off some bullshit about training over the summer, like he knows you even care and you tell him to go choke on a dick because you need him to remember that you don't care what his stupid brother's doing.
You quit the Kash and Grab as soon as Kash comes crawling back Ian's senior year, and get a job clearing out burned up houses. You scrape char off of walls and throw out destroyed furniture, but it pays well and it's not half as dangerous as the meat factory so you keep it even after Ian leaves for Westpoint and your probation ends.
When Ian comes home the second summer, you're in jail, stuffed back into a bullshit five by five cell and pointedly forgotten by the entire world for a couple of months. Mandy tells you that she'd rather it be something stupid; stupid keeps you out of prison. Ian visits you every week that he's home, even though you don't talk much because you don't have much to say and you don't want to hear the much that you do got to say. He talks enough for the both of you and you want to tell him to shut up more times than you can count, but you don't because there's enough silence on the inside.
Nobody chatters on like he does on the inside.
They care too much; or they're too dead inside to care at all. You're not sure which one scares you more; you're not sure which one you're inevitably bound to turn into. He talks about Westpoint and what he's learning and the clubs he's in and some other people he's met. He talks about the war and the government and something stupid that Lip's done since you've been locked up and you almost ask him how long it's been because the only thing you count now are the days in between Ian's visits.
You talk about Lip too; the last scam he came up with - which was honestly, mind stuttering genius but you don't tell him that part because you don't want to sound that impressed. You talk about Lip because you think that Ian would care more about what Lip's been up to than what you've been up to; because you think maybe what Lip's been up to is more important than what you've been up to. Ian visits you before he leaves, he tell you that he misses you and you tell him to shut the fuck up with that white noise, but it's mostly because you miss him too.
Sometimes you remember the warmth of laying between his thighs. You remember the chill from sweat soaked skin and the slick slide of his mouth over your hip. You remember the taste of his sweat in your mouth and the ache of his dick in your ass. And sometimes, when you're real close to sleep, you remember the pressing weight of his body heavy against yours in sleep and in the morning, you wonder why you even still care.
He doesn't come back for Christmas and it's not like you want him to. It's not like you've ever even spent Christmas with him before anyway. You get out jail a week before Christmas and you and Mandy spend it alone because dad's in the slammer again. Lip comes over and he brings beer and pot and ends up passing out in your bed, but you and Mandy stay up all night playing Gears of War and eating a pie Fiona made, so you don't mind it too much.
You get a package in the mail around the middle of January. It's money and a plane ticket and you can hear him in your ear, saying 'if you ever want to get lost'. You throw away the plane ticket because you think maybe you already are lost and you're terrified of what that might mean. You keep the money because your knuckles are going raw with the effort of keeping pace with the rent. You couldn't get the cushy job of scraping char from walls back after you got out of jail and you started pushing drugs instead, mostly coke. Sometimes Lip cuts you in on what he's doing but you know you probably don't help him as much as you should with how much he sometimes pays you. It feels too much like a hand out and it leaves you feeling cold. You don't do hand outs.
Ian comes back again for the next summer. He goes to you before he goes home. No one's home, no one but you and Lip. Lip's practically moved into your house because Mandy's never home. She's found herself somebody that might maybe love her as much as she thinks she loves Ian; and if the prick doesn't, you'll just break his face later. Lip's practically moved in because he's never been on his own before; he's never been alone and you think that's actually pretty sad. Lip's passed out on the couch and Ian stops long enough to stare at him. Then he goes to you and you almost back up because you're not sure what he's going to do and you don't want him to touch you.
You don't want him to touch you because you've never wanted anything as much as you want to feel his fingers on you, in you. He's almost to you when you move forward and shove him back into a wall so hard you hear the air stutter out of him in a sharp exhale. The two of you stand like that, his eyes on you, tearing you to pieces and your eyes on him, trying not to give anything away because you're not really much of the giving sort. He looks older and it crushes you beneath all of the lives you're not living. You're drowning and you can feel yourself choking and screaming that maybe this isn't what you wanted after all. He kisses you and you slam him back into the wall harder this time because his touch is deftly undoing you at the seams. You just want to hold yourself together for a while longer, knuckles white and fingers bloody as they clutch at the shattered pieces holding your entire being together. You've been looking for duct tape for what feels like years now but you can't ever find any.
Ian doesn't say anything. All of the banter, all of the mockery and the jokes and the stupid talk about stupid WestPoint - he doesn't say anything the entire time the two of you are together. He touches you and you internally buckle beneath all the words that are not being said. He touches you with his fingers and his mouth and his tongue and caresses you with the wet warmth of his lips and you letting him is the hardest thing you've ever done before. Your fingers ache to shove him away and tell him to fuck off.
When you wake up at two in the morning, you fumble to control the grin that seeps across your face, slow and sticky like leaking oil, when you find Ian still there in your bed, heavy and warm and vulnerable in his sleep right next to you.
The fourth year of Westpoint is supposed to be important. You get letters from Ian, and he talks about the stupid school and what they're supposed to be doing one they graduate. He talks about himself a lot, and you never talk about yourself to him, but you talk about Lip, which is nearly the same thing now. Every letter he sends always has a couple of hundreds folded into it, but that's not the reason you don't ignore them. You can't understand why he's still paying you; you can't understand why you feel like maybe you should be sending something back too - something more than just a page full of your stupid words. And more than all of that, you really can't understand why you start including pictures of his family in the letters you send him - like any of that is any of your damn business anyway. He never says anything about it and you never say anything about the money and you're both old enough to know that asking for more is a sure way to ruin a good thing.
You don't cry when he leaves again at the end of his last summer, but you kiss him and feel like that's pretty much the same thing anyway. You bite him until he bleeds and you taste him in your mouth after he leaves; his blood and spit and cum, and promise to promptly forget the feel of his thighs pressed tight against your thighs as he pounds into you and the feel of your thigh wedged in between his as you sleep with him at night. You hate when he visits because you hate when he leaves; you hate missing him because you know it's not love. Love doesn't exist. Trust, hope, love, none of that shit is real. You try to remember that the first time you walk in on Lip crying. You try to remember that you don't kind of like having him around too, and you try to pretend that you don't really care that he's crying about the same thing you feel like crying about. When you offer him a joint, it's not to apologize, it's not to silently tell him that you wish you'd done something to convince Ian to stay with the two of you. It's just a joint.
Ian's deployed right away, and the two years that he's gone, you find it harder to breathe. He still writes you, still sends you whatever cash he can, like he owes you rent money or something, and a couple of times you try to send it back, but Ian's a stubborn little fucker; he just sends more in his next letter. He tells you that there isn't much he can buy outside of cigarettes anyway, and you think - what's the fucking point of that then? Doing all this bullshit for not shit; might as well be locked up in prison for all of the not living he's busy righteously doing over there.
You still send him more pictures than he needs. Not the bullshit pictures of phony people smiling phony smiles and striking phony poses. You send him pictures of Lip right after one of his fight clubs, looking banged up to hell and grinning a lop sided drugged up grin that can only be the natural product of too much pot and vicodin.* You send pictures of Carl in the midst of a successfully completed exploding volcano - half melted barbies acting as the poor sons of bitches caught in the crossfire. And of Fiona right after she's woken up, looking like hell warmed over; one of Frank passed out and Debbie applying make up. On the back, Lip handwrote how many days it took Frank to realize he was wearing makeup. It was six. For a while, Lip's all about taking pictures, because catching people off guard can be funny, and for a while - the funny is really all that matters. There's a few of Liam, since he's older now - practically ten. He's taken Lip's bed - Lip told you once - and nobody's taken Ian's bed. You find it hard to believe, since Ian once told you that He, Lip and Carl basically play musical chairs with their beds, and pretty much everything else they own.
The letters stop coming and you go months without receiving one and that's when you start to really panic and hate yourself a little bit more because it's not like you even really care about the letters or the money or hearing from him. The letters don't really mean shit and he filled them with a lot of shit you don't really care about, but the letters meant one thing. It meant he was alive and when they stop coming, you think maybe he's dead and it scares you shitless.
When you find out he's been injured and been given leave to come home and heal, you feel like punching him. When you see him in the living room of the Gallaghers, slouched low on the couch, feet kicked up on the table, you almost do a double take. He looks the same, except you can see the thick bandage on his thigh, barely visible beneath his shorts. For some reason, you were expecting him to be physically scarred, or missing an arm or something more obvious, even though Lip had already told you that Ian had taken a bullet to the leg and some shrapnel to the back. There had been an explosion or some shit, and Ian - this fucking bullshit do-gooder - had thrown himself over a fellow soldier to shield him from the blast. What the fuck was that bullshit? You feel like punching him all over again. You feel like asking him - demanding he tell you - why he was so goddamn eager to get his ass blown up. Didn't he have other things to live for? Weren't those things important enough?
"He got back earlier." Lip's at your shoulder and you jerk your head around to him because you hadn't heard him coming up behind you. You've been in his house as much as he's been in yours; nobody's surprised to see you here. Nobody's ready to tell you to get the fuck out; nobody looks at you like you don't belong anymore. "I was going to tell you but you were…" Lip trails off and you get it. You were fucking somebody else. You're glad he didn't tell you; because then you probably wouldn't have been able to get off, and you don't even want to think about what that might mean. "Busy."
"Whatever," you grunt and he knows that's just code for 'thanks, now leave us alone'. You crash on the couch, take the game controller out of Ian's hands and the two of you play Doom until Lip fucks off up to his room.
"Throw your stupid ass on a grenade again, Gallagher, and you had better come back dead," you tell him quietly, eyes fixed on the screen. "Or I'll kill you myself."
He doesn't say anything for a while and you want to snap at him. You usually can't get him to shut up. "I know," he says quietly, like he knows exactly what you're thinking, exactly what you're feeling and it's too much for you. "Sorry," he adds, sheepish and sweet and you shrug because if you don't shrug you might just pin him to the couch. "It won't happen again."
You elbow him and he grunts, even though you know you didn't really elbow him that hard. "Better not."