A florescent vacant sign is flickering across the street, and Mickey can hear the buzzing from where he is seated on the ledge of his window. He had figured if he stared at it long enough, he could induce a seizure. He's still waiting for it to happen.

It smells faintly of exhaust and it burns the back of his eyes. The acrid taste in the air mixes with the tobacco that coats his mouth and the feeling reminds him of late summer nights that he thinks he probably should forget.

It's too late, or too early, depending on where you are coming from and it is Mickey's favorite time of day. The ambiguity provides him with a strange comfort and for a passing moment his uncomfortable skin is able to settle into the wrinkle of time.

His cigarette is mostly paper and filter now and the tobacco resides in the spaces of his cheeks where his teeth have gnawed craters and dents while Mickey fights the inevitable battle that is convincing himself that he needs to go to bed.

The bed was the last thing he had bought when he had moved in nearly eight months ago. He had spent weeks on the floor, in the smallest corner, wrapped up in an old sleeping bag he had stolen from the Goodwill. It was only when Mickey had awoken in the middle of the night, face to face with a particularly wide-eyed rodent, that he went out to buy a mattress.

The sales woman, who had helped Mickey with his purchase, had avoided his eyes and FUCK-U-UP knuckles adamantly. And it was only in the moment when he nervously asked her for their smallest bed, that her eyes flew up to meet his.

But even their smallest bed was too big. And the bed had to be restructured into something smaller, and as Mickey makes his way back into his apartment, the bed, now a cave of pillows, still seems to loom up at him in the dark. The pillows which he has stuffed up against the wall stack in such a way that only allows room for a single lone body on the edge of the mattress.

And still the bed is too big.


His skeleton is a 1001 piece puzzle. He is fractures healed over and a shifting foundation on solid ground. His face, the constant canvas for blooming bruises and purple rainbows, is a mould for Terry's fist; the bone flexes now instead of breaking after every wounding hit, having memorized the exact way it should fold around a fist.

His skeleton is a 1001 piece puzzle, and yet the pads of fingertips ghosting his face don't seem to know which pieces they fit in with. It is a few hours before Ian has to go back to the group home, it is minutes before day dissolves into dusk, and it's just seconds after sparklers and fireworks erupted behind tightly shut eyelids. Mickey wants to replay the last few seconds infinitely.

Stop.

Rewind.

Play.

Repeat.

They are undefined and sweaty, and Mickey feels… It's hard for Mickey to know, in that moment, what it is exactly that he is feeling. He is mostly at a loss for words, and if someone were to ask him to articulate all that is swirling heavily in the center of his chest, he knows he wouldn't be able to, because how is a boy, whose face only knows the shape of fists, supposed to understand love when it hits him.

And so Mickey ignores the suddenly overwhelming feeling he has to run his tongue along the sweat under Ian's jaw and blames these sudden urges on the joint they had shared earlier. But it's a feeling that is foreign and leaves a bittersweet taste in his mouth and if he's being truly honest with himself, he would know that it is something so much sweeter, something so much more permanent than a two-hour high.

"Mick?" Ian's mumbling into the dark. They're sprawled naked on the rooftop, and the skin on their backs are undoubtedly full of cement scratches and gravel markings and other non-permanent reminders of the night.

"Hmm?"

"Do you ever have the urge to just leave?" It's this conversation again. Mickey is sure they have had it at least half a dozen times. It goes the same every time. And so following the script, he asks "Where would I fuckin' go?"

"What do you mean where would you go? You could go anywhere Mickey!" Ian's sitting up now, excited…again.

"I'm fine here, Gallagher, settle down." He is yet to open his eyes, but he is certain he can predict Ian's every facial movement. Eyes wide, mouth moving too quickly for him to follow, excitement causing that damn blush to stain his cheeks. Mickey would be damned if he were to open his eyes and be wrong.

"Yea for right now, maybe, but I mean, what about your future? Don't you wanna end up somewhere but here?"

"What fuckin' future do I have? Gallagher, why the fuck are we talking about this right now?" He doesn't want to have this conversation, doesn't want to present his case to the jury, yet again; hates having to explain that he isn't made of anything beyond the fists and bloodied knuckles. But Ian, is shaking his head, and looking at him with those goddamn eyes, and Mickey can hear the judge making his verdict without Mickey having even spoken a word.

Still he doesn't want to hear it, and so he's changing the dialogue faster than a politician can when painted into a corner, "Did you need more time, or are you ready to go again Firecrotch?"

And just like that, he can see the change in Ian's eyes. The green darkens considerably, the shift going straight to his gut and he is instantly hard. Before Mickey can blink again, they are tangled in their familiar dance, of bruising hands, and knocking hips.

"Fuuccck" And suddenly, Ian is grinding out profanities between teeth into his ear that shut off his mind and rushes all the blood in his body south. Mickey thinks he can feel a trail of wet kisses down his shoulder, but he can't be certain because suddenly it's white behind his eyelids, and pleasure shooting through his body and all he can do is grasp at the sleeping bag beneath them and hope he'll come back down to reality in one piece.

Mickey is certain it's sweeter than any high he's ever had.


Mickey hates dreaming.

Even more, Mickey hates the feeling he gets after waking up from a dream.

It's the feeling of losing the eternal internal battle of resisting sleep because dreaming is like remembering and remembering is too fucking painful, and surrendering to sleep because just the act alone of being awake is exhaustingly painful. It's the feeling of not actually knowing what amounts to losing. It feels pretty fucking shitty either way.

He's alone, he's cold, he's sober and there's a maddening twinge that is twisting in his chest. And it reminds him of when he had hitchhiked his way aimlessly from town to town with Terry's drug money and a pillowcase full of clothes.

It had been cold then when he had left, but he had always been too hungry or too tired, or too desperate to keep moving, to allow memories to completely evade his dream space. It had been a month of stolen cars and sleeping in drugstore bathrooms before he found himself in this state, with its bright lights and empty promises and a one room rent controlled apartment that he could still barely afford. But it was a block away from where a HELP WANTED sign hung low in the window of what looked like an abandoned warehouse, and Mickey had needed a job- a real job with real money that wasn't stolen or cheated or scammed.

It would have been easier for him to run drugs along the East Coast for his uncle. Fuck, he probably would be living in a nicer apartment had he made that decision. But, he couldn't risk it after what had been done; couldn't risk getting caught, couldn't risk raising any flags.

It wasn't like jail was a foreign concept to someone like Mickey Milkovich, or that the thought of getting arrested frightened him, but this was different.

This involved Mandy. Sweet, broken Mandy, who had punched Randy Kilgore in the nose when he had laughed at Mickey's pathetic excuse for a toy at the sandbox when he was six, and Mandy was five.

Sweet, and broken Mandy, who had always come to Mickey because there was never a time when Mickey hadn't protected Mandy, and because there was never a time when Mandy wouldn't have taken a bullet for Mickey.

And it's because they really should have been twins, and because it's Mandy's tear-stained cheeks and pleading eyes that make their way into his dreams some nights.

Mickey really fucking hates dreaming.

He is still regretting his decision to buy a mattress; he had always been more comfortable when his body was uncomfortable, cold, bloody, stiff – put any Milkovich in that environment and they were bound to strive.

The reminder that he had actually gone out to purchase something, a mattress for that matter, makes him scoff out loud and he thinks someone should have written a headline somewhere: MICKEY MILKOVICH BUYS BED.

And he's laughing fully now, alone in his one-room apartment, a full bellied laugh, that sounds more like glass shattering than any real laugh and it doesn't take him very long to stop and realize how pathetic and broken it must sound.

It hasn't sounded whole since – his mind isn't allowing him to finish that thought.

Instead it's pushing through the memories and the sounds and is pulling him back into the present and the silence that plagues his apartment. There's a scrape of door against the floor in the apartment below and the sound of a woman's muted voice announcing her presence, and Mickey knows it's time to get himself out of bed.

There's a mumbling of voices below him as he rinses his mouth with a swig of Jack and then a familiar thumping sensation of bass makes its way through his floorboards.

"FUCK!" If there is anything Mickey has learned that he hates more than dreaming, it's waking up from a dream to shitty Top-40 shit and with his bad mood made effectively worse, he wants to run down a floor and show the residents of the apartment below, what exactly the tattoos on his knuckles mean.

They're fucking lucky that he's running late for work.

He's on his way out, the word SECURITY stretched across the back of his work jacket, his door scraping against his floor, his lock clicking into place, when he hears a laugh that doesn't sound like glass shattering- it's a sound that makes his blood freeze instantly.

But then, it's gone, and all he hears is the thump-thump of the bass from the floor below.

He knows for certain, that it isn't the thump-thump of his own blood responding to a sound that reminds him of sweetest high he has ever known.