Okay, so I don't know how well it turned out, but here you go. . .
Somewhere in between stealing a car and pulling up in front of the dingy motel that's name he was pretty sure was engrained into his memory forever, Mickey was almost positive that he'd forgotten how to breathe. He kept sucking in huge lungful's of air sure, but it wasn't providing him with any relief. He felt like his own skin was too tight, but then he supposed that much had been partly because of the blood smeared across his skin like war paint. He looked like something out of a horror movie, sweat and blood striped across his face where he'd scratched at his cheeks and rubbed at his eyes. He was about eight per cent sure that he had some on his lips as well, but he wasn't exactly in a state of mind to be able to tell which way was up, so his thoughts and predictions weren't the most reliable.
Blood had soaked into his jeans and shirt in huge patches of drying red. He could feel it cracking against his skin, the material crunching when he shifted. It was turning brown as it dried and a part of Mickey wasn't to attribute the fading colour to how the colour seemed to have drained out of Mickey's life with Kara's death. Except that was stupid, wasn't it? Colour couldn't leave the world, that was a really gay thought.
Except, actually, Mickey thought that he'd probably been living in black and white for a long time now. Maybe for always. The only colour he could ever think of was red. Red painted on his mother's smile when she'd hugged him for the last time. Red blotches on Mandy's cheeks when she cried. Red splattered across his shirt when he'd had that nosebleed after his dad backhanded him across the room. Red for the busted lip he'd given the first kid to ever try and mess with him. Red for his favourite flavour of Jell-O.
Red for Ian Gallagher.
Red for pain and red for blood.
Mickey wasn't sure whether or not he hated the colour and that right there was something that confused the shit out of him. And Mickey didn't like being confused; so he did what he always resorted to and just didn't think about it.
For some reason Carl was driving and Mickey didn't even know if the kid had his license, but he was past caring. Just so long as they didn't get pulled over, because that would be bad news given what Mickey looked like. Neither of them were talking. Carl was staring straight ahead, focussed and determined. Mickey's eyes were flickering all around him, but they always strayed to the window, staring out into what as fast becoming the night.
The sun had tainted the sky red for a while. Red sky at night, shepherd's delight. Mickey didn't know why he thought that.
Mickey was silent because like Carl he never really felt the need for words. But right then at that moment, he didn't have a fucking clue what he could have said even if he had wanted to. He just needed to shut his brain up, he needed to stop the images flickering behind his eyelids every time he blinked.
He wasn't tired, he was hyped up on adrenaline and anger and more than anything, he was flying off of his pain. He'd always been good at doing that, because Mickey had always had a lot of pain to call on. His Dad using him as his personal punching bag. His mother leaving. Every time Mandy cried and he hadn't been able to prevent it. That look on Ian's face when he'd said words he hated himself for. The way Ian had spat out his name, "Milkovich." Kara's death. Tegan's fear.
The motel is the definition of shitty when they get there and Carl gets out without a word, heading towards the office. Mickey waited in the car, because he knew if he got out now then he was just going to go and start kicking down random doors trying to find Tegan. He didn't know what Carl said, but eventually he comes back and taps on the window to get Mickey to roll it down.
He does one better and gets out the car.
"Room twelve," he said, pulling the gun out of the back of his trousers and watching as Mickey did the same. Neither of them were stupid enough to come unarmed and it wasn't like a gun wasn't something Mickey carried normally anyway. Especially not since Tegan's shooting. "The guy in the office said there was a girl and two men."
Silently, Mickey thanked his lucky stars that Tegan had been able to take down one before they could drag her out.
He nodded, saying nothing and then looked around at the doors in front of him, searching for number twelve. And there it was, directly above him. The motel was two storey, the white paint on the front of the building cracked and dirty. He rubbed at his bottom lip and spat on the floor to get rid of the taste of blood. It was worse knowing that it wasn't even his blood, it was worse knowing that it was Kara's.
"You just focus on getting her out of there," he said gruffly as they walked up the shitty steps to the second floor. The balcony wasn't wide and the banisters were undoubtedly a safety hazard, but Mickey thought that could maybe work out in his favour later on. "I don't give a fuck what else happens, just get her out."
Somebody else would have argued, but not Carl. Carl just nodded.
They didn't need to worry about being quiet when they walked up to the door. The windows were boarded up to stop the glass from being smashed and there was music blaring loudly from the room next door. Mickey couldn't even here his own footsteps so he definitely didn't have to worry about anyone else hearing them.
The first door on the second floor opened and a barely dressed woman tumbled out, dragging a man by the hand. She was laughing, high pitched and painful for Mickey to listen to. She didn't so much as look at them, too engrossed in her laughter and the man who's hand she held. The thing was that Mickey could tell the difference between what was carefree and what was forced, that laugh was definitely forced. He could tell by the creases around the woman's eyes, by the stress and the sadness etched into the lines of her face.
He had to look away because in a way, it felt almost like he was looking in the mirror. Not for the first time, he wondered what people actually saw when they looked at him.
A shot rang out almost as soon as Mickey kicked the door open, except it hit the wood of the doorframe and Carl was reaching around and firing back with a scary sort of accuracy almost immediately. They could hear Tegan screaming from the bathroom and Mickey jerked his head in that direction before firing off a shot that grazed by the other guy's leg, making him yelp.
Tegan's dad was recognisable by his blonde hair and Mickey felt a sick sort of satisfaction curl in his gut when he realised that there was a deep cut across the side of his neck, bleeding still but obviously nowhere near as much as it had been when he'd received the injury. He recognised that feeling inside of himself as pride and it made him grin, wide and crazy and far too full of teeth.
Plaster exploded near to Mickey's head as a bullet tore into the wall and he fired off another shot at the guy he didn't know, Tegan's Dad having ducked down behind the bed out of sight. Mickey didn't know why he took the moment to notice that there was actually a pretty large window behind the bed considering that it was a shitty motel. Then again, he'd seen stranger things.
Carl cursed when a bullet tore by him and in the bathroom, Tegan screamed out a litany of curses that sort of made Mickey want to blush. Of course he didn't, he was a little busy getting shot at.
Everything was happening fast, too fast it seemed and he could practically smell the adrenaline and the fear in the air. It was heavy and choking, but they were all feeding off of it. Things were happening fast, but at the same time it all seemed to be in slow motion.
He didn't know if it was he or Carl who shot the guy in the neck, but that wasn't what Mickey focussed on. Instead he focussed on the firing of Tegan's dad's gun and for a moment it was like he could almost see the bullet as it streaked through the air. He just had time to slam his hands into Carl's side, forcing him out of the way before he jolted backwards, pain exploding in his shoulder.
Thankfully, he'd pushed Carl in the direction of the bathroom and out of the corner of his eye he could see him crawling towards the bathroom door on his belly, elbows dragging against the dirty brown carpet. The carpet that was the same colour as the blood dried on his clothes.
Except there was red now too. Red on his shoulder where the blood was starting to well up, front and back because Mickey could feel that it had been a through and through wound. He knew what it felt like that that shit hit bone and this wasn't one of those times. He didn't know how it had gone straight through because last time he checked he had fucking bone in his shoulder, but he didn't have time to think about it.
He didn't have time to think about it because the red on his clothes, on the hand he pressed into his shoulder was the same as the red that was clouding up his vision. He dropped the gun to the floor, his arm hanging useless by his side and blood dripping from his fingers onto the carpet. Then he was moving. He was moving as soon as Tegan's Dad made the mistake of standing up, raising his gun to fire one last time.
He never got the chance, because the mantra of kill the bastard for me, kill the bastard for me. Kill. The. Bastard. For. Me. was ringing through Mickey's head. And then his body collided with the other man's and pain was exploding in his shoulder again, and he could feel the air being knocked out of his lungs, except he'd tackled the guy low, around the middle. His good shoulder had gone into his gut and they were falling backwards. They were falling out the window, glass shattering around them and raining down, falling faster than their bodies it seemed.
Kill the bastard for me.
Mickey. Mick. Not Milkovich. Mickey. Kill the bastard for me.
The fall wasn't long, but it was long enough for Mickey to somehow get Tegan's dad underneath him and when they finally hit the ground, the impact was softened slightly for Mickey. It didn't completely detract from it, but it was definitely softened. His shoulder was in complete agony and he could hear the blood pounding through his head.
And Mickey knew, he knew he wasn't light. He was short, but he had packed on muscle since he'd had a need to protect someone other than himself. Not that he'd done that so well, but still. "Muscle weighs more than fat, Mick," Ian said, his lips stretched into a cocky smile and his eyes shining, "Everyone knows that." And this guy underneath him, Tegan's father, he'd had Mickey's full bodyweight slamming him down into concrete.
As Mickey rolled off, pain in his leg now as well as his shoulder – fuck actually, everything hurt – he could feel a stickiness spreading out on the floor and he knew it wasn't just his blood. He knew it. He could hear someone screaming and he was pretty sure that it was his name that they were yelling. He could hear sirens in the background, faded out and muffled by the ringing in his ears.
He was pretty sure that he felt hands grabbing his face and saw bright blue swimming above him; but that was right about the time that he blacked out, so he couldn't be sure.