Archive of Our Own ^beta

“Daddy.”

Mickey cracked his eyes open a slit as a small hand landed on his knee. He’d been trying to drown out the rest of the world, maybe doze a little if Mattie was quiet and he was very lucky. But now there was his son in front of him, staring up with perceptive little eyes, steady on his stubby two-year-old legs. “Yeah, kid?” he said. As usual, it came out much less intimidating than he intended.

Mattie’s expression was eager. “Playground!”

Mickey groaned. “Yeah, little man. Get your shoes on, OK?” It was a fruitless demand, he knew. Mattie was finally able to put on his Velcro-fastened shoes without help, but everything distracted him. Mickey could come back five minutes later and find one shoe mostly on and the other hanging from the doorknob while the boy stood in the bathroom investigating the toilet-paper roll. It wouldn’t be the first time.

Regardless, Mattie ran off to comply with his instructions, and Mickey sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose with the tips of his fingers. Maybe a trip to the park would get him out of his own head a little. He’d been on the couch for the better part of the day, letting Mattie get into trouble around the house while he moped. Life generally sucked for the Milkoviches, but lately the overall shittiness of it had been clinging to Mickey harder than usual. He couldn’t shake it off, this dissatisfaction, this restlessness.

He’d married Svetlana three years ago, and not exactly by choice; his father had walked in on him jerking off to gay porn one day, and despite the fact that Mickey’s hand flew off his own dick faster than a bullet out of a gun, the tension in the air—and the obscene noise of the video, still playing on—made it clear that Terry had seen enough. The silence between them hung thick for several seconds. Then Terry stepped forward, and Mickey was on his feet and stumbling to tug his pants up and step back at the same time—but not before the punch hit, square in the face, flooring him as his foot caught on the desk chair. Before Mickey could react, Terry was looming over him. “No son of mine,” he growled out, “is gonna be a faggot. Not if I can help it.”

A few days later Svetlana was there, and Mickey was many things, but he damn sure wasn’t an idiot. He knew what to do.

She’d told him she was pregnant a few weeks before they got married. Ten weeks along, she said, and Mickey didn’t have to be a genius high school graduate (in fact, he was neither of those things) to figure out the little runt wasn’t his. He hadn’t even known Svetlana existed ten weeks ago. But she pleaded with him, in her broken English, telling him the baby was his, and he thought, Fuck it. I’m already stuck with this marriage for the rest of my fuckin’ life. At least if Dad thinks I did this, he’ll get off my back.

Seven months later, Matthew Augustin Milkovich came into the world. It had been two and a half years since then, and Mickey still didn’t know how he felt about the whole thing. Svetlana worked a lot, at odd hours—“If jerking guys off at a spa can be called ‘work,’” Mandy had said to him once—so he had gotten stuck with the job of minding the baby while she was gone. Mandy helped, sometimes, when Mattie was so little and fragile that Mickey didn’t know what to do with him; but now that he was walking and talking and causing mayhem without their help, she mostly minded her own business and left him to it. It wasn’t exactly a fast-paced life of adrenaline and adventure. “I don’t know what to do with this fucking kid,” he had complained to Mandy when the baby was too young to even crawl yet. “All he does is shit and grab at things. He’s boring.”

(Well, he said that, and he’d meant it when he said it. But sometimes Mattie would go down for a nap, and Mickey would stay—just to make sure he was really out this time, he said. And an hour would go by before he realized he was still sitting there, staring at his son. Times like that, he couldn’t put into words what had seemed so interesting about that tiny little person just lying there breathing in the crib. All he knew was he couldn’t tear his eyes away.)

He snapped out of his thoughts again to Mattie running in from the next room—shoes on, miraculously, but on the wrong feet. He was carrying Mickey’s ratty sneakers in his hand. “Daddy, your shoes,” he said, throwing them on the couch and proceeding to pitch a fit in the way only a toddler can when Mickey tugged off his shoes and switched them to the right feet. The customary mid-afternoon headache was beginning to form in Mickey’s temples, and having a screaming kid sitting next to him, wiggling and kicking him in the thigh, didn’t help matters. Luckily, he’d found, little kid temper tantrums didn’t last very long; though he’d been sobbing on the couch only moments earlier, by the time Mickey got up and opened the front door, Mattie was already drying his eyes and leaping up to follow right behind him.

He grabbed Mattie’s hand as they walked to the park, more out of common sense than affection; the kid must have some secret invisibility powers or something, considering how easily he could disappear at a moment’s notice. Once they rounded the corner to the public playground, though, not even the Jaws of Life could have kept Mattie’s hand in his; he took off like a shot, making a beeline for the sandbox and accidentally barreling into a slightly older chocolate-skinned boy who took absolutely no notice of him. In seconds he had plopped down on his butt next to the other boy and the two of them were engrossed in their individual sand creations.

It was a few minutes before he noticed the man who had come to stand next to him. “That one yours?”

Mickey looked over to where Mattie was throwing sand around, scattering it in his hair and down the back of his shirt. Great, he was going to have a slightly gritty toddler running around his house all evening. “That’s the one,” he said tightly, glaring at Mattie, who remained oblivious, then turning to face the other man. “You got one of ‘em running around here somewhere?”

The man smiled—a ridiculous, sly grin that had Mickey’s heart embarrassingly skipping a beat for a second before he pushed that particular feeling back—and gestured with his head to the sandbox. “Yeah. Looks like mine’s making friends with yours.”

Mickey looked incredulously at the bigger kid’s dark complexion, then back to the stranger, with his bright red hair and pale-as-paper skin. He raised an eyebrow. “That’s your kid? The black one?”

“That’s Liam. He’s my little brother,” the guy explained. Mickey just raised his eyebrow further. “It’s a long story.” Just as Mickey was about to turn away to keep an eye on Mattie, the redhead reached out his hand. “Ian Gallagher, by the way.”

Mickey ignored the hand, which didn’t seem to bother Ian as much as it was supposed to, and smirked. “Ah, a Gallagher,” he said, as if that explained everything. “Aren’t there a bunch of you running around? Like those Weenie kids from the books?”

Ian looked puzzled for a second. “The Weasleys?” he finally asked, and Mickey grunted in the affirmative. Ian chuckled. “Yeah, I guess you could say that.” He was scrutinizing Mickey; he could tell from the feeling of eyes boring into his head. “You’re Mickey Milkovich, right? Your sister was in my class at school. She’s nice.”

Mickey snorted. “You confusing Mandy with some other Milkovich? ‘Cause I’ve only got the one sister, but she can fuck you up.”

Ian laughed out loud at that. “Yeah, sounds about right,” he admitted. “Don’t mean she can’t be cool when she wants to be, though.” Mickey thought of all the times Mandy had been there through the worst parts of Mattie’s infancy, every time he’d been sick or cried so long that even Terry stormed out of his room yelling shut that kid up, for fuck’s sake, I don’t even care how you do it, and shrugged as if to say that Ian had a point.

“She fucking you or something?” Mickey asked, and almost regretted the words as they hung in the air. He pulled out a cigarette and lit it up. “This you coming to ask me for my blessing?” He squinted at Ian and blew out a stream of smoke in his general direction.

Something flashed in Ian’s face for a moment, and Mickey sensed a tension falling over them, greater than he thought the comment had warranted. “No, man,” Ian finally said, his tone forced-casual, not making eye contact. “I’m not interested in your sister.”

“Good,” Mickey offered, “because if you were I’d probably have to kill you.” And for some reason, that dispelled the awkwardness; Ian laughed, under his breath, and Mickey found himself smiling slightly at the ground too.

They watched the kids for a moment; Mattie had grabbed Liam’s plastic shovel and was using it to stab haphazardly at the ground, while Liam nonchalantly patted a lopsided sand sculpture into some unrecognizable shape. Mickey pitied the kid; if Mattie was in a destroying mood, that sandcastle was gonna be target number one in about thirty seconds. Luckily his new playmate didn’t seem to be bothered by anything—but Mickey supposed that if he’d grown up with the sheer number of siblings a Gallagher has, he pretty much had to take all that shit in stride.

“Hey, your kid’s about three, right?” Ian asked. “My sister Debbie runs a daycare from our house in the summertime. She could probably take him off your hands for a few hours every once in a while.”

Mickey squinted at him. “D’ya have to pay extra if your kid’s a total shithead?” he said around the cigarette in his mouth. His eyes cut back over to Mattie. Sure enough, Liam’s sand building was in the process of demolition by toy shovel, although the other boy seemed happy enough to help with its destruction.

Ian laughed. “This is the South Side, man. I think every kid in the neighborhood pretty much fits that description.”

Mickey let the smoke trickle from between his lips while he thought. “Well, thanks,” he said after a moment. “Wife’s away a lot working. Could use a break sometimes.” If you’d asked, he couldn’t have explained why he felt compelled to tell Ian this, or pinpointed why a flash of barely-detectible discomfort passed over Ian’s face. But the Gallagher kid hid it well, humming in agreement and shifting his weight from one foot to the other.

“Great. Think about it,” Ian said. And then he leaned over and swiped the cigarette from between Mickey’s fingers; before Mickey could do so much as make a noise of protest, he had wrapped his own lips around it, taken a drag, and handed it back. “Thanks,” he said when Mickey mutely took it, struck dumb with surprise, and then he was gone, yelling across the playground, “Liam! Time to go home!”

Mickey couldn’t say why the ballsiness of the act hit him with such a rush, or why he felt a ridiculous tingle when his lips met the place on the cigarette where Ian’s own mouth had been moments before. He wasn’t sure why the redhead’s face, his voice, his body stuck with him the whole way home, all through dinner, and into the evening.

He started to get a clue when he touched himself in the shower that night, thoughts of Gallagher still floating through his head, mind supplying new images that sent his desire through the roof. It was hard to stay oblivious when the idea of Ian plowing him into the wall made him come so hard he could barely stay standing.

But he didn’t really get it, not really, until he took Mattie for his first day at daycare with Debbie, a teenage girl with radiantly ginger hair and the kind of no-nonsense attitude that made him actually trust her with his timebomb of a son. Ian answered the door, and the smile that spread across his face set off answering fireworks somewhere in Mickey’s own chest. “You doing anything this afternoon?” he’d asked, when Mickey had finished dropping Mattie off and persuading him to play with the other kids.

For a split second, Mickey considered telling this dude to fuck right off. But curiosity got the better of him, as well as something else between them, something he was just beginning to be aware of. “Nothin’ much. Might watch a movie later, if I don’t pass out or somethin’. You like Seagal?”

“More of a Van Damme guy, myself,” Ian said with a smile, just this side of challenging.

“Too bad,” Mickey said, and his heart thudded in his chest with what he was about to do, but he focused every fiber of his being on projecting an air of casualness. “’Cause I was gonna say that you could swing by my place, if you wanna get away from this zoo.”

Now Ian’s smile was definitely sly. “Meet you there in an hour?”

By the time Ian showed up at his door, Mickey knew for certain: Gallagher had set up a trap, that day at the park, and he’d fallen right into it. He’d been played.

But, as it turned out, he’d been played in the best possible way.