Mickey didn't quite know how he'd ended up in New York, it had just happened. And after that everything had just snowballed.
He'd started off working as a bouncer at the club The Hanger that wasn't really a club at all, but hey, he didn't know what else to call it. And somehow he'd wound up being offered a chance to fight and he'd impressed the owner so he'd been promoted to a fighter. It was weird though because he fit in there better than he had ever really fit in anywhere in his life.
The people who fought in the cage were all aggressive and rude and jagged around the edges. Tony was the one he bonded with immediately and Mickey didn't ever bond with anybody. It was Tony with the dyed blood red hair and the wicked smile and brutal punch who'd actually matched him in a shots competition. She had his respect in the cage and out of it. She was Mickey's sort of girl and he didn't even like people, let alone girls.
The men who worked at The Hanger to fight were mostly pussies and they pissed Mickey the fuck off because they were all about padding and whimpering when they got stitches for one accidental punch. They flinched and fell down at punches Mickey just laughed at and spat a little blood out because of. It was the girls that were vicious. And not even just the ones who fought in the cage.
Tessa had called him out immediately on being gay and had told him to not even bother trying to fucking deny it, none of them were going to say jack shit. Tessa was beautiful to put it simply, she made Mickey feel short and had natural jet black hair that he knew all the others girls envied. But she had a mouth on her that would rival a sailor and she was as devious as they came. She was the sort of girl who'd smile at your face and stab you in the back when you were least expecting it. Mickey didn't know why he liked that about her. He didn't even know why he liked her. As far as he was concerned, he should hate her guts. Especially since she kept cracking gay jokes when nobody else was around and that her theory for why he tolerated their shit was because he was their gay best friend.
Katy was about Mickey's height although he always told her she was shorter just to make himself feel better. She was one of the dancers and she was always being told not to twat the guy who felt her up, but to leave it to the bouncers. She thought that was fucking pointless, because she could hit just as hard. Katy was a bleach blonde that even though it wasn't natural, sort of hinted at how many brain cells she had in her head. What the girl lacked in common sense though, she made up for in bra size and baby blue eyes.
Tessa and Katy had already lived together because they were both as mean as hell and that made them get on, but it was Tony's idea for her and Mickey to move in. And so they had, because honestly it was cheaper for Mickey to do that and he didn't have to walk to work because Katy had a car. He'd sold the one Lip had given him before he'd landed the job at The Hanger.
It also was pretty fun having them around. They were like him. They drank more than they ate, they swore more than they talked and their compliments were delivered as backhanded insults. And he tolerated the fact that all their girly shit clogged up the bathroom and the living space because they understood the unspoken rule of not to eat his fucking Jell-O and they were smart enough to notice the scars on Mickey's wrists and not even bother asking about them.
And in return for the stuff they didn't do to annoy him and overall just being some of the only non-blood related people he tolerated, Mickey looked after them. He sort of felt like he'd lost Mandy as a little sister but gained three new ones, because they were tough girls and they could fight their own battles, but the first thing Mickey always asked when he found one of them crying was, "Who do I have to kill?"
Lip was the only person from his old life that he kept in touch with. It was because of Lip that he knew Mandy was fine, that he had a nephew called Michael and that the kid was a freaking genius. Lip came to visit him once a year, met the girls and gave him pictures. It was because of Lip that he felt in the loop a little, even when it came to Ian's life even though he didn't ask to be told stuff about that.
Lip liked the text him photos of Michael at his birthday party and Mandy asleep with drool dribbling down his chin. He sent him a picture of Ian passed out shirtless on the sofa with Mandy drawing on his chest. He knew that sometimes it was more for Lip's benefit than his, because he knew Lip felt like this was thanking Mickey somehow for what he'd done. Mickey didn't complain even though he pretended like it pissed him off. It didn't really. It didn't bother him at all that he had pictures of his nephew and his sister stuck on his wall, or even that he had one of Ian up there as well.
Admittedly, it did make it difficult to forget about Gallagher when he had his picture staring at him all the time, but still. Mickey couldn't help it. He'd tried throwing it away once and had made the girls help him go through the trash trying to find it. That's how they'd found out about Ian.
Tony had actually punched him in the face for what he'd said to Ian about him being nothing but a warm mouth. He was sort of glad that someone finally had. Of course, he didn't tell them about the murder part. No, Mickey wasn't that stupid. He was more careful than that.
The girls all loved Lip, thought he was a genius and made him do their taxes when he dropped by once a year. He always stayed for a weekend and they made it a sort of event, getting so pissed none of them could stand up the next morning or really remember what they'd done. But it was fun, it was definitely fun.
Mickey would even go so far as to say he and Lip were friends, it made more sense than hgaving the girls as friends anyway. So he begrudgingly admitted it. When he started fighting in the cage as the bare knuckles fighter, Lip came by almost randomly and watched. He still came for his usual visits once a year, but he stopped by a couple of other times just to watch Mickey fight and take a shot and Mickey thought it was because Lip longed to be doing it as well. He remembered the fights that Lip had used to stage, knew Lip missed that sort of feeling that he couldn't have now with a kid.
But he also knew that Lip wouldn't give Michael up for the world.
Lip had asked him to come back for his and Mandy's wedding, but he'd refused. He'd wished he could, but he'd stayed away this long it wouldn't make sense to go back. So he just got very drunk that weekend on whisky and for his birthday the following week the girls got a picture of Mandy and Lip all dressed up standing at the alter framed.
Mickey hadn't thanked them, he'd told them that it was gay. But they'd heard a thank you anyway.
The day that Mickey's life decided it was going to take a turn in a new direction was on one of Lip's yearly weekend visits. He said he'd meet Lip at the club because he had to go bash in the skull of an ex who was stalking Katy.
Mickey was a popular sight at the club now because he was the only one who fought bare-knuckled. The favourite event was when willing volunteers signed up to fight him rather than just ones who the boss had picked. Because Mickey was popular, the boss hadn't even blinked an eye at him saying he was going to be a little late, had just thrown in another fight to fill up the time. Nobody had even thought twice about the fact that Mickey walked in with blood already on his knuckles.
"It's sorted," he said to Katy as he passed her podium and she bent down and kissed him on the cheek, making him grimace and pull away because he hated it when they did that sort of shit. She laughed at him and he gave a death glare to some guy who was staring a little too obviously at her tits.
The guy was obviously a regular judging by the way he flinched.
Mickey spotted Lip across the room at the bar talking to Tessa and he gave him a one-fingered salute as he stepped into the cage, arriving just in time for his fight. He didn't know the tool he was fighting, but then it was volunteer night, so he hadn't expected to.
The bell rang and Mickey didn't even hesitate to punch the fucker in the face. He loved this job, loved the thrill of the fight and the feel of skin under his knuckles as he hit. The guy was a pussy as he had bandages tied around his knuckles and Mickey hit him a little harder for that. To his credit, he did try to fight back, but he just wasn't that good.
Mickey had him pinned under his foot in under four minutes. Not quite a record, but close. The crowd screamed sort of drunkenly and he ducked out of the cage for a minute whilst they picked the next volunteer, because quite a few pussied out after watching a fight.
He sat on the edge of the raised platform with Tony, passing a cigarette between them even though they weren't supposed to smoke inside. "Never change, do you?" Lip asked, standing in front of them, "Either of you."
He handed Mickey a shot of vodka and another to Tony, who laughed and pressed a kiss to his cheek. "You wouldn't want us to," she laughed and then clinked glasses with Mickey before they both knocked down the shot. Neither of the so much as blinked as the acrid tasting liquid burned a path down their throats.
"You could volunteer," Mickey said, smirking as he settled back against the platform.
"And fight against you?" Lip asked, his eyebrows raised, "Fuck off."
Mickey just smirked. "Looks like I'm up," he muttered when across the room Tessa jerked her head at him, "You're buying the first round later." Like it would even go any other way, but he still said it anyway.
Lip nodded and didn't bother wishing Mickey good luck. Although maybe he might have wanted to when they saw who Mickey was up against. None other than Ian Gallagher stood on the other side of the cage, his eyes hard and his jaw set and for the first time, when he heard the grating sound of the bolt being thrown and them being sealed inside the cage, Mickey wished he could get straight back out again.
He didn't want to fight Gallagher.
He thought maybe he was imagining it. Or at least he hoped he was.
"The fuck are you doing here?" he asked, his eyes narrowing at the redhead, not liking the fact that the fucker actually had the nerve to look good. He'd taken his shirt off and was dressed in fucking skinny jeans, which made Mickey think that he hadn't intended to fight in any way.
"Could ask you the same question," Ian replied and his voice did shit to Mickey that he didn't want to think about.
He bared his teeth and neither of them moved even when the bell rang. "Fuck off, Gallagher, I live here," he snarled at the younger guy, "Nobody said I had to stay in shitty Chicago for all of my life!"
"Yeah, but you could have had the courtesy to at least fucking call your sister so she knew you weren't dead in a gutter somewhere," Ian snapped back and he was pissed, Mickey could tell. He thought it was sort of hot. "But don't worry, she knows you're not dead now."
He jerked his thumb sideways and Mickey just had time to look once at Mandy's face before Gallagher punched him in the head.
He knew that Gallagher hadn't gone into the army or marines or whatever in the end, but he'd still retained all that ninja shit that they seemed to have taught him. Mickey was punched and slammed into the side of the cage before it even really registered he was supposed to be fighting back, because he'd been a little preoccupied with the fact Ian was there and Ian was shirtless and the muscles the guy had were kind of ridiculous. Then Mickey snapped out of it and head-butted him in the face.
Annoyingly, it wasn't the usual sort of fight that happened in the cage with Mickey, but it was definitely vicious. They were sort of evenly matched, which pissed Mickey off because he didn't understand it. There was a lot of slamming each other around into the sides of the cage and a lot of rolling and pinning and punching.
Fingers dug hard into skin, but the problem was that neither of them really registered that as pain because for them, that was just associated with fucking. Mickey hardly even felt it and he didn't think Ian did either. It sort of reminded him of the first time him and Ian had fucked, when the hit had turned to gropes, but that wasn't about to happen when Ian was obviously pissed at him for taking off and he was pissed at Gallagher for being there/existing. He was just fucking with Mickey's brain and it pissed him off.
Ian managed to pin him down, but he leant too close and Mickey sank his teeth into the side of Ian's neck hard enough to draw blood. He took advantage of Gallagher's surprise and flipped them again, sitting on Gallagher's chest with his knees either side of his head, panting heavily. Ian just stared up at him.
"Did you seriously just fucking bite me?" he asked and Mickey knew he would have touched his neck if he could have reached.
"Don't even act like that's something new," he snarled down at the redhead, standing up when he heard the grate of metal against metal and the cage door swinging open. He didn't look at Ian again as he walked out of the cage, but he slammed Lip against the platform, snarling in his face, "Did you know?" Because he'd trusted Lip to keep the secret of his whereabouts and if he'd blabbed that, what else could he blab?
Lip shook his head as best he could with Mickey pinning him. "No."
And Mickey believed him. He nodded curtly and let the guy go, tugging his shirt back down and into place before taking a step back. "Look me up for that pint if you're not a dead man," he said and felt Tony's hand against his back, her arm winding around his waist as they walked away. He didn't even have the heart to push her away either, so he slung an arm around her shoulders as they walked because he knew this was her form of a comforting hug.
They knew all about Ian Gallagher and even though they'd never say anything to his face, it was obvious they knew he'd be confused and hurting a little bit by the way Tessa wordlessly handed him five shots and didn't so much as blink when he downed them all in one go.
Five minutes later he was sat, a little drunk, in the back room whilst Katy dabbed at his face with a cloth to try and work out if he needed stitches in his lip. "Bitch, get off, I'm fine," he muttered, but she just smacked him around the back of the head which was as effective as a shut up.