Burn it Down
This is what Ian gets for lying down with Milkoviches. Mickey's starting to scare himself a little.
In the end it was a do-gooder, rent-a-cop, neighborhood watch, America's Most Wanted wannabe motherfucker that did them in. Some fat asshole from Fucksville, Oklahoma with one hand down his pants and the other one on his fucking computer mouse thinking he can make the world a safer place by logging on every day to some Nosy Nelly true crime forum.
Only this time Mr. Dudley Do-Right cocksucker practically tripped over his one and only true crime collar when he hadn't been able to peel his eyes away from the two faggots playing grabass at a gas pump at the border of the Cherokee Nation. Later the Feds would ask him what made him notice the couple. "They were uh… fighting. But not like real fighting. Like… uh… flirting if you know what I mean? The one guy, the escaped con, he had his hands in the ginger guy's pockets."
Horsing around too much in front of one observant jackass was what led to Ian Gallagher now sitting in a holding area at the federal pen on Van Buren Street in downtown Chicago. Just like gonorrhea, Mickey Milkovich was the gift that kept on burning Ian Gallagher down.
Mexico hadn't been what Mickey expected. On his very first visit to the beach some douchebag had kept trying to feed him oysters and then demanded money when Mickey shoved him away. What else could Mickey do but beat his ass and then break the plastic tray over his head while he was down? Pretty soon every cabana boy in sight was vamoosing his way, and the only move at that point was retreat.
Beach wasn't what everybody made it out to be anyway.
He wouldn't have known about Ian's fate if, after that, he hadn't made the ill-conceived decision to buy a burner and call the Milkovich landline. There were a lot of people in Mexico, but nobody he knew was anywhere around here. He guessed he missed the Southside or something.
"So, you know your butt buddy is doing a bid for you?" Iggy had been the one to pick up the phone.
Mickey's entire body had turned to water. He'd dropped the phone on the floor of the cantina then, and he'd had to fish it up out of the mess of god-knows-what ends up on the floor of a Tampico bar, but he didn't hesitate to bring the phone up to his ear again.
"Hey Mick, you still th-" Iggy had been saying.
"What the fuck did you just say to me?" Mickey cut him off.
That's when the whole story came out. The amateur detective, the black and white security camera footage and Ian's lily-white ass sweating it inside with a Class D felony charge for aiding his escape.
Mickey sucked his bottom lip. Smoothed imaginary lines on his forehead, ran his fingers through his hair.
"This isn't me anymore," Ian had said to him at the border.
"That's what you get for lying down with Milkoviches, bitch," Mickey thought, palming tears from his eyes with the heel of his hand. "That's what you fucking get."
He'd said that last part out loud without realizing.
He'd drawn attention to himself with the phone call. The bartender had stopped polishing the counter, and all eyes in the bar were on him now. Without quite knowing what he was doing he smashed the burner phone onto the bar top, a million little black plastic pieces, leaving Iggy on the other end of the line still calling out , "Mickey? Hey, Mick?"
He's starting to scare himself a little.
When the boy whore cruises him down by the riverfront he nearly let's himself get bent over, but at the last minute he grabs the boy by the scruff of his neck and does the work instead. Nobody has fucked him the way he likes it since Gallagher, and he doesn't know if anybody ever will.
Mickey Milkovich is a man who doesn't make things his problem. Well, that's not quite true. But when he crossed that border checkpoint alone he'd sworn to himself that he'd never go into anything ever again without first knowing dead sure what was in it for him.
Or hell. Maybe he'd always been like that and Ian was just a fluke. After all, he'd wrapped that do-gooder prison GED teacher's ponytail around his hand and whispered into the shell of her ear (from behind, always from behind) that once he was out of that hellhole they'd walk on the beach together, cuddle up at night, make fat babies.
The teacher had looked more like Angie Zago than she looked like his sister, but he had a hard time looking at her face anyway. Because the stupid, hopeful expression there when she looked at him over the test prep Scantron sheets was one he'd seen a thousand times before on Mandy's face when she watched some new dude pull her back down into bed and thought what she was seeing was love.
Yeah, he'd told the teacher "I love you." He'd made her believe it. She'd believed it all the way up until no car came to pick her up from her North Shore apartment. She may have believed it while they tightened the handcuffs on her wrists. For all he knows she believes it still. Sometimes when he closes his eyes at night he sees that stupid, hopeful look on her face.
He wonders if Ian thinks of that day he left him in the desert and sees the same expression.
()()()()()
He didn't think he was en la playa long enough to acclimate, but when the Windy City's namesake hits him as he steps off the Greyhound his teeth start to chatter and he shoves his gloveless hands under his armpits for warmth. It's only March, but at the corner of Cermak and Trumball one stupid flower has decided now's as good a time as any to poke its petals up through a crack in the sidewalk. Mickey grinds the misguided thing down with his boot.
Mickey hasn't bothered to disguise himself, because fuck it. He sees curtains flicker in windows and knows the Southside smoke signals are already telling the world what the cat drug in. The wind whips at his ears, and there's ice in the chain links of the fence. His nose is running.
Hell's not hot, he thinks. It's cold.
He decides against taking a match to the house. For now. After all, he can't be sure his father's inside.
He follows the L tracks. They way Mickey figures it, it's him the feds really want. The moment he crossed back across the border he knew he was giving up the best version of life he could ever have expected, in favor of the only life Terry Milkovich's fucked-for-life faggot of a son should have ever suspected.
For Mickey Milkovich, "happiness" will always be like trying to catch smoke in a clenched fist. For Ian Gallagher, though, it doesn't have to be like that.
He's never loved anybody else, and he guesses he never will.
Mickey stubs a cigarette out on a sign that says "FBI Chicago Field Office," spits on the sidewalk, swaggers inside.