They told him that considering the fact that he'd fallen out of a window and had also been shot on top of that, that he was pretty damn lucky. He had a concussion, a broken leg and a sprained wrist, but that was in the same arm as the bullet wound, so he couldn't really feel it. He was drugged up and sleepy, but he forced himself to stay away to comfort Tegan and to listen to be read his own statement by the cop Tony.

Apparently Carl had gotten Fiona to pull some strings and since Tony had been the first one on the scene they were twisting the story slightly to say that Carl had been there all along with Tegan when she'd been kidnapped and it had been Tegan's father who had tackled Mickey out the window, not the other way around. Mickey who had only just run onto the scene when he'd come back from finding Kara dead in their apartment.

It was a bit of a bullshit story, but the cops in Southside Chicago were too lazy to really give a shit and he was pretty sure that Fiona's rich boyfriend had caused some money to be exchanged hands somewhere. Mickey didn't really give too much of a shit. All he cared about was the broken teenage girl that refused to move from where she'd curled up against his side.

Mickey didn't know what they were going to do now, but he figured that they'd just take it a step at a time.

The first step was getting Tegan to calm down and stop crying with a gentle touch against her spine and the spoken truth that Kara would kick their ass for grieving too much. At least openly. Tegan nodded numbly at that, but she straightened up, wiping the tears from her cheeks and biting her lip hard enough to make it bleed in order to stop any more from falling.

"You're my hero," she whispered when she thought that he'd passed out again, her lips close to his ear and her voice not even shaking in the slightest when she whispered the words. Quiet enough for them to be a secret, quiet enough so that nobody else could hear. And he thought that maybe she did know he was awake after all.

Mickey didn't say anything, he wasn't expected to, but he was pretty sure that the ache inside of his chest had nothing to do with his wounds. He was also pretty sure it was a good feeling, but it was so alien that it was hard to be positive. He didn't have a name for the feeling, but he didn't really need to have one actually.

The next step apparently was to be yelled at by his sister; which didn't surprise him all that much. Mandy ranted and raved and then hugged him so tight his shoulder flared up again. But he didn't say anything. He let her have that moment and then told her truthfully that there wasn't anything for them to be afraid of anymore.

He'd never seen Mandy look so relieved.

And then there was the moment that Carl chose to appear, when Tegan had finally left the room to go see if she could find some half decent coffee or something. He'd probably been waiting for that moment and he slipped into the room and just stared at the wall behind Mickey's head for a long few minutes.

"You saved my life," he said and there wasn't any sort of real emotion in those words. It was just a statement. And maybe Mickey had saved his life by taking that bullet. Maybe he hadn't. Maybe it would have just hit the wall or clipped his arm. Or maybe it would have hit Carl in the chest, stopped his heart.

There were a lot of maybes right there, but he supposed it didn't really matter.

"You helped save hers," he replied just as bluntly, in exactly the same tone, because he was starting to realise that in some weird way, just slightly, him and Carl were one in the same. They weren't the same, not even close, but they understood each other and that was just fine.

Carl nodded and didn't seem to feel the need to say anything more on the subject. He didn't say thanks, because his thanks had been in the fact he'd even come here at all to say those words. Mickey understood that, it was all Mickey needed to hear. Hell, it was more than Mickey needed to hear.

"I won't tell," he said before he turned away and Mickey could feel the frown creasing up his forehead, "About Ian," he clarified. He licked his lips nervously, like he was waiting for Mickey to blow up in his face or something. And Mickey would have done, but honestly, he just didn't have the energy. "I won't tell ever," Carl promised as he slipped back out of the room and the weird part was, Mickey actually trusted him on that one.

Tegan turned up with coffee a few minutes later and she had a ghost of colour in her cheeks that made Mickey feel like the world had righted slightly. She wasn't any better, none of this was and she wasn't okay, but then neither of them had ever been. But that small splash of colour at least meant that they were getting there.

The next step was getting discharged. It was Mickey pulling a face at the fact that they now had even more hospital bills to pay. Tegan came in the day after he got home and said she'd been offered a job. It was at the Kash and Grab doing Ian's old job and the pay as higher than minimum wage, better than most other people would pay. Mickey didn't know what that meant, he didn't know why Linda would do that, but he wasn't going to complain. They needed the money, plain and simple.

Then there was that horrifyingly painful step of burying Kara. The Gallaghers did their usual thing where they all pulled together and scammed people out of money. Just like they did when Mandy needed an abortion, something Mickey so didn't want to think about because seriously, sometimes he didn't know how the hell either of them could be related to their sick fuck of a father. He didn't know why they were doing it, didn't ask, because he didn't want to know actually. It didn't quite feel like a hand out because it hadn't exactly been money honestly earned, so Mickey accepted it. She got a relatively nice coffin and a better headstone than Mickey or Tegan could ever have hoped to afford.

They could have had her cremated, but that just seemed sort of twisted considering what had happened in the past with the fire and everything. So they buried her. And everyone left Mickey and Tegan to their own devices, let them grieve on their own, just two figures standing at the foot of the grave and throwing dirt down on top of the coffin with fingers that were already grubby anyway. They didn't get dressed up, not really, even though Mickey did take a shower the day before. Kara would have laughed at them if they'd done that. So they didn't.

They didn't cry either. They just stood silent, side by side as the wind whistled through the gaps in the trees surrounding the cemetery. As the wind whistled through the cracks in their lives that would probably never be filled in. They didn't move for a long time; not even when the heavens opened up above them and the rain running down their faces could have been mistaken for tears.

Mickey became Tegan's legal guardian because nobody wanted another pissed off teenager on the system and as far as a lot of people were concerned, Mickey was her family anyway. It hadn't said Milkovich on Kara's headstone. They'd put her maiden name, Williams and Mickey had scratched on the same image of Kara's tattoo himself. The same tattoo that both he and now Tegan had on their skin. He'd gotten his the day that he had been told at the hospital that Kara was improving. The birds were on his ribcage, Tegan's were on her shoulder.

There wasn't the usual script on the headstone, it didn't say "Loving mother and friend" or some shit like that. Instead it had the lyrics of the song that Kara had always insisted on playing every time they headed off to a new place. Run by Daughter.

So we'll keep each other as safe as we can,

Until we reach the border,

Until we make our plan,

To run. . .

Mickey thought it was stupid, but he knew she would have liked it, so he mouthed the words silently as he stared at them, the song he knew he'd probably never be able to forget drifting through his brain just like the wind through the cemetery.

He didn't like the first line much, because it made him feel like he'd failed. He was supposed to keep them safe, to keep them alive, except maybe the line did have a point. As safe as we can. There'd never really been any option of all of them coming out of it alive, he saw that now. Maybe he'd seen that in the beginning. Kara had always said that her ex would be the death of her.

But that didn't mean Mickey had to like the fact that she was right.

After that, the final step just seemed to be living. Not moving on. . . just living. Because really, Mickey didn't think they knew how to do much else actually. They knew how to run and they knew how to live and they'd slowly run out of options for what they could do. He supposed living was probably the better one though.