Archive of Our Own

It’s too fucking bright.

When Mickey looks back on this in ten, twenty, thirty years, the first thing he’ll remember is that it was too fucking bright, the blackout curtain gapped in such a way that a beam of midday sun was able to cut an infuriating rectangle of white light across his face.

He pulls up the covers--buries his face in the soothingly musty fabric. They’ve had the comforter for three months, and Mickey’s not sure whether Ian’s washed it yet. It smells like them.

He groans. Stretches.

Fucking West Side. Fucking sun.

“Yo!” he calls sleepily, pulling away the covers.

No answer.

“Yo, Ian!”

Nothing.

He remembers it’s Saturday. Ian gets up early, does his stupid yoga with his organic-vegan-queerbo-whateverthefucks. Goes to the gym. Runs. Pussy.

Mickey sits up in bed and yawns, eyes wandering to the digital alarm clock on the nightstand. 11:51. Vaguely, he remembers Ian saying something about going to the farmer’s market and picking up fresh vegetables for dinner because he’s on a health kick. Because they can do it, they’re sustaining a life together, they can eat well now.

Whatever. Mickey gets up and stumbles bleary-eyed to the kitchen to make himself some Toaster Strudels.

Ian’s bought them a fancy-ass toaster oven because it’s another thing they can do now. Mickey follows the directions on the back of the Pilsbury box to pop in two cherry strudels, sets the timer, and then heads to the bathroom.

He pisses, brushes his teeth, throws on some clothes. And five minutes later, after he’s iced his strudels and is just about to sit cross-legged on the couch to enjoy his breakfast, he hears his phone ring from the bedroom.

Mickey sighs, exasperated. He sets down his plate on the coffee table and saunters back to grab it, figuring it’s Ian inviting him to go with him to get their asscracks waxed or some shit.

He checks the caller ID. It’s no one in his address book.

“What?” he answers, poised and ready with a string of swear words to launch at a telemarketer.

“‘ey yo, Mickey.”

The voice is vaguely familiar. Mickey scratches his thumbnail across his eyebrow and has a seat on the edge of the bed.

“Hey?”

“It’s Bullet.”

Bullet. Clarence. Uncle Ronnie’s kid with the lazy eye.

“Yeah, hey.” Mickey sniffs. Something heavy settles in his gut like a stone.

It’s been a while since he’s talked to his family. A year or so, give or take--not since he and Ian had gone to the new Milkovich settlement in the lot off W. Swann to sort through some more of Terry’s old shit that had turned up. It was weapons, mostly. Couple AKs. Throwing stars. Vaguely antique-looking knives, probably used to do some rapey shit in some 1940s Ukrainian back alley.

Mickey’d got a tip about them from Sammy, and he’d been curious. Figured he and Ian could take a look. Add them to their arsenal or not.

They hadn’t taken anything, but they’d had some conversations--Ian had, at least, in that naive, open-hearted way he’s always had conversations. Mickey hasn’t thought about it since, the days passing quickly, time trucking along in the way it has ever since he’s been married and happy and shopping at fucking Whole Foods because they’ve graduated from staring to actually purchasing shit now that they’ve got some steady money and little to no financial worries.

Bullet hadn’t been there that day. It was Sammy and Alek and Zofia. The scrawny kid with the bad teeth. The only ones who weren’t in prison.

“What’s up?” Mickey asks now, curious, that stone in his belly getting heavier and heavier the more he considers the potential implications behind this phone call.

It shouldn’t be. It’s not like he didn’t agree. It’s not like he hadn’t wanted it in some loose definition of the word that had a hell of a lot to do with loving his husband. There were other things, too, that he chose not to think about because they made his palms itch. Because they felt a little bit wrong, considering.

He swallows heavily, pushing down that stone.

“Got a pick-up,” Bullet says.

“Uh, what?”

“Got a pick. up.” Bullet emphasizes the words like Mickey’s supposed to know what he means--like he’s trying to say something without saying something, and well. Fuck.

He runs a hand over his face. Plays dumb. “I don’t do that shit anymore. You know that.”

“Gone all faggy. Pussied out. We know.”

“Fuck you.”

“No offense, man.”

Mickey takes a deep breath. “Can I hang up now or do you got somethin’ worthwhile to say? I don’t do that shit. Find somebody else.”

“Nah. Think you’re gonna wanna pick this one up.”

The stone. His stomach hurts with it.

“Just get over here.”

Bullet recites an address and hangs up, and it takes Mickey a full fifteen minutes to work up enough energy to stand.

---

He doesn’t tell Ian, though he knows he should. He lets him ask farmers a million annoying questions about ripeness and flavors of fuckin’ eggplants, none the wiser, while he checks shit out. He figures if it’s a bust, if he ain’t getting good vibes or whatever, he’ll just leave, and Ian’ll never know and will never be able to fret about it.

He climbs into his SUV because he’s got one of those now; they’ve got a black Ford Explorer purchased nine months ago with the excuse of it being more secondary transport for the business. They were gonna remove the back seats and have Debbie do some welding work for gun lockers, but they never actually did it. Instead, they’ve been driving it around Chicago like a couple of middle-aged North Side marrieds, picking up their organic groceries and going to Target.

In the back seat is Ian’s gym bag and one of Mickey’s hoodie jackets. They’ve got an air freshener tree.

Mickey sets his vacuum-insulated coffee tumbler in the cup holder because he’s got one of those, too, and pulls on his seatbelt.

He does everything in slow motion, prolonging the trip. Takes time to manually tap through to a radio station even though all his favorites are saved as pre-sets. Fiddles with the air conditioning. Adjusts his mirrors like he’s about to take a driving test. Checks and double-checks the bundle in his back pocket, taken from an old Quaker Oats tin hidden away in the back of the closet.

He leans over for a moment, pressing his forehead to the steering wheel, and takes a series of slow, deep breaths. Shit.

Whatever.

He puts the car in reverse and backs out of his and Ian’s space within their fucking gated apartment complex parking lot on a chill West Side street and takes off for a place he hasn’t been in over a year.

---

Bullet’s leaning against the hood of a beater car, smoking. He’s got on a confederate flag T-shirt with the sleeves cut off, dirty, ripped jeans, and a pair of dusty curb-stompers with mismatched laces. His hair’s long and stringy like it hasn’t been washed in weeks, and on his face is the scruff of a kid trying to grow his first beard though as far as Mickey remembers, Bullet’s gotta be at least thirty. Weak-ass Milkovich hormones.

He parks the SUV and climbs out, locking the doors so it doesn’t get jacked even though he doesn’t plan to walk more than five feet away from it. Can’t have that kinda ride this deep South Side. Blink and your tires are gone. Step into the convenience store for a 40 and your windows are smashed.

Even Bullet eyes the vehicle, whistling low in a way that makes Mickey wanna bust his skull because there’s condescension there, an unspoken pussy-ass fag in the tone of it.

He hardens his jaw. His brow. Squares his shoulders.

And he thinks for a moment, as he’s swaggering up to his cousin, that he should’ve paid more attention to his clothes. He’s got on a soft, mauve T-shirt. Deep gray joggers. New black Timberlands he’d bought for almost two-hundred bucks online with a debit card.

He hadn’t thought of it, his brain too scrambled after the call. If he had, he’d have dug up some of his old shit he’s still got in a trash bag in the closet. Baggy jeans. Ratty hiking shoes. A stained tank-top.

He even smells good he thinks as the stink of Bullet wafts toward him--unwashed armpits and dirty, rotten shoes. Mickey hasn’t showered today and yet he smells fresh, still, like Tide Pods and yesterday’s Zest body wash.

Self-conscious, Mickey pulls at the bottom hem of his T-shirt, then crosses his arms over his chest as if to appear tougher, as if to disguise the married, West Side pussy he’s become from a cousin he hardly even knows. A cousin he gives way too much a fuck about right now even though he hasn’t spared a single thought for him since they were teenagers delivering shit to Uncle Ronnie’s fence in Terre Haute.

To make matters worse, Bullet chuckles. Spits, the fat, wet glob of it hitting mere inches from Mickey’s boot.

“Where is it?” Mickey asks, voice hard and cutting through the bullshit.

Bullet holds up his hands, and Mickey spies a gashlike scar across the left palm. A dare. A ritual. A blood oath.

“Don’t gotta be that way, Mickey,” he says, light and childish as if Mickey’s now supposed to hug him. “Just deliverin’ a package, man.”

“Who’s it from?”

Bullet moves around to the side of the car and pulls open the driver’s door. And just when Mickey thinks he’s going to get the package in question from the seat, he instead bends down and pulls a lever to pop the trunk.

Mickey swallows.

“Uhh, I don’t really know, man,” Bullet says off-handedly, moving to the back as casual as anything like he’s about to make a Craig’s List trade. “One of Coop’s whores.”

Coop’s whores. Desperate, drug-addled fourteen-year-olds whose parents don’t give enough of a shit to report them missing when they take off with a forty-year-old in a stolen junker.

Mickey eyes him. “Who gave it to you?”

“Bobo got it. Knew you was lookin’.”

The stone. Lead-heavy.

“Nobody’s lookin’ for it?”

Bullet laughs, pulling open the trunk. “Nah, man, Coop skipped town. Got the po-po on his ass. Left it at the house. They was keepin’ it in the tub.”

Mickey bites his lip and starts to move toward the trunk of the car.

“It ain’t fucked up, is it?”

“Bobo said it ain’t.”

“How much he want?”

Bullet peers into the depths of the trunk, then back up at Mickey, eyes dragging over his body, over his clothes. He looks past his shoulder at the SUV.

“Five grand.”

Mickey pulls the roll of bills from his back pocket.

“Hey, hey, hey,” he scolds when Bullet makes a reach for it. “Not so fuckin’ fast, Clarence. Need to see it first.”

Bullet tilts his head in resignation and steps away from the trunk. He waves his hand. “Suit yourself, Junior.”

Mickey shoots him a death glare, suddenly remembering the nickname, his older cousins assigning it to him because he was small. They’d stopped calling him that when he started beating the shit out of them for it.

He cracks his knuckles, the energy surging in his arms, all that pent-up rage coming back like a triggered memory.

But first. The task at hand.

He takes a deep breath and steps around to the trunk.

When Mickey looks back on this in ten, twenty, thirty years, the second thing he’ll remember is asking, the heavy stone working its way up his throat, “It got a name?”

---

It was wrapped up in a filthy blanket and lying in a cardboard box on top of a tire iron.

After Bullet speeds off, Mickey sets it on the back seat of the SUV and stares down at it in disbelief. It stinks. Shit and mildewed fabric and the vague, ammonia scent of cat piss.

He should call Ian.

He doesn’t.

Instead, he opens up Ian’s gym bag, empties it carelessly onto the floorboard, and sets the thing inside it, dirty blanket and all. He picks up a pair of Ian’s gym shorts and an Under Armour shirt that smells like sweat and tucks them back in the bag on either side of it, then carries the bag to the front, setting it in the passenger seat and buckling it in.

The thing just blinks its eyes and makes a sucking motion with its mouth, little tongue poking out. It doesn’t even cry. Mickey feels like he’s on autopilot as he moves around to the driver’s side and climbs in.

What the fuck. What the fuck?

His hands shake as he starts up the vehicle and puts it in gear.

The whole way home, all he can think is that he’s pretty sure he’s just made the biggest mistake of his life.

---

Fuck, it stinks. Mickey, figuring it can’t be worse than spending a month in a bathtub or a few hours in a dark trunk on a tire iron, zips up the gym bag until all that’s exposed is its face down in the gap and carries it that way into the elevator and up to the apartment.

Ian still isn’t home.

Mickey realizes as he closes and locks the door and then takes the gym bag into the bedroom, setting it gently on the bed, that it’s somehow only been ninety minutes since he first got the phone call.

Ninety minutes.

He unzips the gym bag, takes the thing out, and sets it filthy and stinking on his and Ian’s comforter.

It stares up at him. Mickey stares back, breath coming quick.

And at that moment, his phone rings. Both of them jump at it, the thing’s little limbs flailing out as much as it can while half-heartedly swaddled. Its face scrunches up like it’s going to cry, but it doesn’t. Mickey stares at it, almost willing it to, almost wanting it to. The quiet makes him sick.

It utters a quick noise, mouth making the sucking motion and eyes closing, and then appears to soothe itself back into silence.

He pulls his phone from his pocket. Takes a deep breath.

“Hey,” he greets, eyes never leaving the tiny thing on the bed.

“Squash or zucchini?”

Mickey’s brain being where it is, Ian’s words sound like gibberish.

“What?”

“Squash or zucchini? For dinner. I thought we’d do a chicken thing together. Have some roasted vegetables on the side.”

Squash or zucchini. In what world does squash or zucchini fit in with the thing on the bed?

He doesn’t answer for long enough that Ian gets concerned.

“Mick?”

“What?”

“You okay? You have a preference?”

Mickey sighs. “No.”

“No, you don’t have a preference or no, you’re not okay?”

The latter. Both. Mickey stares down at the baby on the bed and thinks he might be losing his mind.

“Mickey?”

“Uh.” He swallows, finally cutting his eyes away and toward the window, at the curtains that are still closed, at the single beam of light that’s still filtering in through the gap. “You should probably get your ass home. We got a problem.”

---

He’s fairly certain Ian believes he’s being held hostage in their apartment, but he doesn’t correct him--just accepts the oddly muffled, Fuck. Don’t move. I’m on my way. and hangs up.

The baby looks up at him from its dirty swaddle, its grayish-blue, ambiguously-colored newborn eyes blinking.

The farmer’s market’s close--just the next street over--but it’ll take Ian a minute to get here by foot. Mickey should probably work on cleaning the baby up.

He can’t make himself do it. He can’t stop staring at it like it’s an alien lifeform.

But God, it smells awful. Mickey thinks the least he can do is get it out of the rotting piss blanket.

He bends over the bed and carefully unwraps it, revealing a tiny little body in a filthy, baggy yellow onesie with a rabbit on the front. Its diaper’s leaked, the crotch of the onesie wet and the lining of the hem splotched with orangey-brown shit like the kid hasn’t been changed in a full day or longer.

Swaddled up with it had been an 8 oz. bottle with just the dregs of formula, the liquid old enough to have formed a yellowish film on top.

The baby’s skinny--weighs probably no more than seven pounds--and the skin of its arms and legs is blotchily translucent, white, pink, and veiny blue like it’s never seen the light of day.

Its eyelids are purplish. It has a rash on its neck and its hair, which is dark brown, stick-straight, and copious, is greasy, slicked to its head in places and sticking up in others.

The baby stretches its teeny arms up above its head and kicks its legs like it’s happy to be free of the swaddle--makes a gaspy noise like it’s lost its breath in the excitement of it all--and that-- that’s the third thing Mickey will remember when he looks back on this in ten, twenty, thirty years.

---

Ian enters the apartment in a rush, and Mickey can’t help but think, when he hears the door slam, that if he were being held hostage, he would’ve just now gotten his brains blown out all over their bedroom wall.

“What is it? What’s going on?” Ian demands anxiously, feet thudding down the hallway to their bedroom then stopping when he breaches the doorway.

He scrunches up his face. “What’s that smell?”

Mickey doesn’t say anything. Instead, he just steps to the side, giving Ian a view of the tiny thing on the bed.

“What the fuck?” Ian asks, voice a wondered whisper, his breath picking up audibly in a way that indicates he can’t believe what he’s seeing. His chest rapidly rises and falls.

Mickey clears his throat, eyes wandering to his husband, who’s got one hand on the door frame, his body half-in, half-out of the bedroom. His eyes are wide and mouth is dropped open.

“That’s a baby,” he says, and Mickey stares at him.

“Yeah, no shit,” he mumbles after a pregnant pause. Swallows. “Uhh, my cousin called. Said he had a pick-up for me.”

“Holy fuck.”

“Yeah.”

“Holy fuck, Mickey. We have a baby. That’s a baby.”

The baby in question kicks its legs at the noises around it. Ian, as if suddenly remembering he can move, quickly steps over to it. His nose scrunches up again at the smell, but he doesn’t comment further as if politely not wanting to offend the thing.

It can’t help it, after all, Mickey’s piece of shit cousins probably doing the bare-ass minimum to keep it alive. Wouldn’t be the first time. He knows from first-hand experience that Milkoviches fend for themselves.

“It’s small,” Ian says, out of breath.

Mickey nods. “Bullet said they kept it in the tub. Wasn’t eatin’ like a king, man.”

“Is it a boy or girl?”

Mickey shrugs. He hadn’t thought to ask. Bullet hadn’t even known its name--said Bobo thought it started with an L, but “maybe that was another one of Coop’s lil fuckers.”

Ian’s fingers work in an almost frantic way, his breath panting out with nervous excitement as he runs his hands over the baby’s arms and legs, over its tiny belly and rib cage, over its head, fingers stroking gently over the curve of it like the EMT in him is checking for injuries.

He tilts the baby onto its side, unbuttons the two snaps of its onesie at its neck, then the four between its legs.

Mickey watches him, arms crossed and breath held like he’s attending a surgical procedure, eyes on the doctor as he makes incision after incision.

“Shh, shh, shh,” Ian soothes as the baby starts to make whining noises, the first noises of its kind Mickey’s heard from it. They’re weak as a kitten’s mews, the thing’s voice scratchy like it isn’t used very often.

“Bobo said it ain’t fucked up,” he says, trying to fill the nervous silence between the adults in the room as Ian undresses the baby, gently working the fabric of the onesie up its body and pulling it off over its tiny head.

“Who’s Bobo?”

“Cousin.”

“Of course.” Ian turns to Mickey then, cheeks red, and smiles, a disbelief smile, before turning back to the baby.

Mickey watches as Ian removes its diaper, which is heavy enough with piss and shit to be sliding off its tiny hips, and--without a care in the world--lets it lie open and fucking nasty on their comforter.

And then, heedless of the absolutely rank smell emanating from the diaper six inches to the baby’s right, Ian beams down at its face, leans in, and pecks it on its button nose.

“Hey, little girl,” he whispers right in her face, smoothing back her hair, and when he turns to Mickey, his eyes are shiny with tears.

“Mickey, we have a daughter.”

That’s the fourth thing Mickey will remember.

---

She pisses on the bed a mere minute after her diaper’s removed. Ian delayed-reaction brings the edge of the swaddle over and catches the tail end of it but doesn’t otherwise comment or make a fuss. He just smiles at her like he’s filled with light and asks Mickey to get a wet washcloth.

Obedient, desperate to get out of the room, Mickey heads into the adjoining bathroom.

His hands shake as he opens the cabinet and pulls out a blue washcloth. Turns on the tap and waits while the water warms. He watches himself in the mirror--makes note of the flush creeping up his neck, the part of his lips, how his eyes are wild and unsure.

Mickey has his mother’s nose and mouth but Milkovich eyes. He wonders if the baby will have them, too, wonders if she’ll grow into her skinny, baby rat look. He wonders about nature versus nurture and traits passed down from parent to child.

Yevgeny. He had Milkovich eyes and Mickey’s mother’s mouth. He remembers lying him across his legs once or twice--in the rare moments he held him--and thinking about whether he would grow up to be kind and smart, well-liked and endlessly curious, or whether he’d be fucked for life, too, another son to a father who didn’t want him, who felt sick when he looked at him.

Ian and Svet had loved Yev enough for Mickey, too, and it dulled the pain of the things he struggled to feel. Mickey remembers watching Ian blow raspberries on the kid’s stomach and loving so much that Ian loved Yev--to the point that his guts had turned to lead. Good things couldn’t last, nothing worked out, Ian was beautiful and kind-hearted and loved Mickey’s kid like a parent so that Mickey didn’t have to.

He wets the washcloth under the warm tap and wrings it out.

The circumstances are different now. Mickey knows in his heart that he could’ve told Bullet no. That he had a choice in the matter this time. Knows that he was fast and ready with the money he and Ian had squirreled away, little by little--over six thousand dollars hoarded for a potential phone call, for a potential cash-hungry Milkovich who wanted to make a deal.

Still.

He moves to the doorway, watching Ian kiss the baby’s dirty little fingers, and he worries about his own heart and his own hands and whether they know to love and be gentle with tiny, defenseless things.

---

Ian’s already talking to her even though she’s only a month old and doesn’t know a damn thing he’s saying.

“We’re just gonna clean you up, okay?” he murmurs, voice soft like spun sugar. He takes the warm washcloth from Mickey and wipes away the worst of the filth. The baby makes those gaspy noises again like no one’s ever washed her, her mouth opening wide and showing pink gums and a tiny tongue with the yellowy-white spot of formula residue on it.

“Gonna need some shit,” Mickey supplies, and Ian looks at him, eyes wide like he’d forgotten they couldn’t let the kid go naked.

“Shit. Yeah.”

He glances back at the baby, who’s got her hands in tiny fists and is making huffy breathing noises as she looks at her own nose, eyes crossing.

“I’ll get it,” Mickey says, making a grab for the car keys he’d left on the dresser. He’s suddenly desperate to get out of the apartment, claustrophobic, the walls closing in around him.

The stone grows and grows.

“Yeah, that’d be great,” Ian agrees. He steps over and, with the nasty washcloth in hand, presses a featherlight kiss to Mickey’s lips. When he pulls away, Mickey sees love on his face in its purest form--sees a surprised happiness burning a blush up his cheeks.

“Love you,” he says, so casually.

Ian’s excited. He’s so damn tender, easy with the kid in a way Mickey will never be. A natural dad.

Mickey nods at him. Smiles, his lips tight. Belly aching. He spins the key ring on his finger and gestures to the doorway, and Ian steps back to let him go.

Over on the bed, the baby gives a quick squawk as if annoyed Ian’s no longer paying attention to her, and Mickey watches as his husband folds the washcloth to get to a clean side, moves back over, and starts to wipe at a spot he’d missed on her hip.

He needs a cigarette.

She’s so tiny and fragile, her arms and legs like a doll’s. It’s been less than two years since Lip and Tami had Jack, but even still, Ian’d forgotten just how vulnerable babies are--how much gentle care and protection they need.

He wipes the poop from her lower half, careful, careful, and casts an eye toward Mickey, who’s standing four feet away like he doesn’t think he should be in the room, watching him but pretending he isn’t.

“Gonna need some shit,” he says just after Ian turns back to the baby, his baby, their baby, and yeah, fuck, they are, aren’t they? Diapers and clothes and formula. A carseat. A crib. A stroller, probably.

“Shit. Yeah.”

He hadn’t thought of it at all in the moments following the one when he first laid eyes on her.

His baby.

He knew it from the moment he saw her, all dirty and stinky in a stained onesie. His girl. His little Milkovich with the straight dark hair and eyes like Mickey’s.

He studies her now, brain suddenly flooded with all the things he needs to do.

“I’ll get it.”

Mickey’s fidgeting. He takes the car keys from atop the dresser and jangles them nervously, eyes wild like a stray animal caught in a trap.

Something dims inside Ian, and he nods. “Yeah, that’d be great.” Moves over and pecks a kiss to his husband’s lips.

Mickey, we have a baby, he wants to say, pulling back to look at him. His lips are pressed together harder than Ian would like. Breath’s coming in hitches. He’s uncomfortable, and Ian’s heart hurts.

“Love you,” he says, giving him a reassuring smile which Mickey reciprocates with a nod though it doesn’t quite meet his eyes.

He loves him so much. His husband. Their baby’s dad.

Mickey motions toward the door, and Ian reluctantly steps to the side, returning to the squawking baby on the bed and giving his husband room to pass.

“Uh, later,” Mickey says, jangling the keys again, and Ian holds the washcloth in his hand and mirrors the goodbye, a chill tingling down his spine.

---

It was sketchy how it started, he knows. He and Mickey had taken the ambulance to the Canaryville Milkovich camp, making a quick pit stop between jobs. One of Mickey’s redneck, inbred cousins found Terry’s old weapons cache, and they were using checking out the goods as an excuse to put a bug in their ear.

He’d mentioned it to Mickey the year before when they were going through Kev and V’s furniture, a crib at the forefront.

“There’s gotta be a neglected Milkovich baby crawling around your family tree somewhere.”

Mickey’d been worried--what if?--worried about things he needn’t have worried about because he’ll be an incredible father, Ian knows. Patient and caring and loving--all the beautiful things that he is in his heart.

Ian had pulled him close, reassured him. Wanted him to feel nothing but love and confidence in his abilities to be a good dad. He had been with Yev even when he hadn’t wanted to be; he’d provided for him, protected him, cared as much as he could in whatever ways he could.

They’d taken the crib but had stored it in the Gallagher basement, tabling the conversation until the house had a buyer and they were forced to either throw it out or haul it to the apartment. They didn’t sell the house, Lip’s there now, and as far as Ian knows the crib’s still in the dark of the basement, crammed in a corner and filled with miscellaneous junk collected over the past two years.

Over the next year following the crib conversation, Ian and Mickey had only discussed it intermittently. Nothing extensive. Nothing committal. But then Mickey’d gotten the tip about the cache, and there was the phone call with Sammy, and Ian had asked him over dinner what he thought about mentioning something to the Milkoviches, just a whisper of it, just to feel it out.

Mickey’d stared at him for the longest time before shrugging, and Ian was willing to drop it. Wasn’t going to bring it up again. But then in bed that night, as they’d lain in the dark, Mickey’d asked in a voice that was so, so gentle, “You really wanna be a dad, man?”

Ian had shifted onto his side, propping his head up on his hand. “Hell yeah.”

Mickey had kissed him, a sweet, peck of a thing, and that was all.

The next day, they’d swung by the previously empty lot currently suffering under a Milkovich infestation. They checked out the weapons but didn’t take anything. And then Ian had said to Sammy and the others, belly twisting up with nerves, “Hey. If you hear of anybody wanting to get rid of a baby, y’know. Me and Mick are looking.”

Sammy had brought up something about buying a kid on the black market, and of course that wasn’t what Ian meant, but Sammy’d gotten it eventually. Made a homophobic comment or two. Said he’d keep an ear out but it’d cost them. Fine. They’re willing to pay.

Mickey was quiet during, playing idly with a switchblade in a way that reminded Ian of how he used to do when they were kids, hanging out at the dugouts on sticky summer nights that still don’t feel real, even after all these years.

He didn’t say anything once they were back in the ambulance either, empty-handed and thoughtful.

Over the next year, Ian had made a comment or two about a future they might have. Money was good--really good, their business thriving. They bought an SUV. Ian got an Orangetheory membership. Mickey has a row of brand new boots in the closet. They have a Macbook Pro and a pantry stocked with name-brand food.

He’d mentioned maybe buying a house one day for the extra room. Maybe two or three bedrooms. A fenced-in yard. Mickey had hmmed at it while he played on his phone.

Just two months ago, while they were sharing a blunt out on the balcony, Ian’d mused unseriously, “Can’t believe nobody’s popped out an oops-baby by now,” and Mickey’d mentioned something about his cousin Oksana giving a family discount for her back-alley abortions.

So when Ian’d arrived home to a tiny little thing on his bed, he’d been surprised to say the least. And he still hasn’t asked as many questions as he should, has just sort of run with it, accepting the girl as his without a second thought. He doesn’t know which branch of the Milkovich family tree gave her life, what happened to her mom, how she ended up on his bed covered in day-old poop and looking like she hasn’t had a speck of daylight even touch her skin. He doesn’t know her birthday, if she already has a name, if she’s eaten recently.

But it feels right. It feels perfect. It feels exactly how he thought it would, his heart exploding with affection from the moment he first looked down at her precious face.

---

She’s underfed. Ian doesn’t know that much about babies from a medical standpoint, his past EMT training not delving much further than infant CPR and his practical experience several years out of date.

But Ian can tell by the slight prominence of her ribs, by her bony ankles and skinny little thighs, not an ounce of baby chub present, that no one’s bothered to try to feed her up, to get her chunky and snuggly and happy like babies are supposed to be.

He scoops her up, her naked little form alarmingly delicate in his arms, and carries her to the bathroom.

One-handed, he grabs a thick towel from beneath the sink and unfolds it just once, leaving it doubled over. He spreads it out on the countertop and gently lays her on it before turning on the sink and reaching for another washcloth.

Ian talks to her while he gives her some semblance of a light sponge-bath, using the tiniest bit of body wash and wiping her down from head to toe, just enough to give her a refresh, and then wraps her up in the towel and takes her back to the bedroom.

He fashions a make-shift diaper out of a random T-shirt from the hamper and then burritos her in a fleece blanket. It’s all he can do for now--at least until Mickey returns with baby bath supplies, diapers, and clothes.

Next on the agenda: food.

He peers down at her, nothing but her face poking out of the blanket sweetly. She’s sleepy, has been awake for a surprisingly long time for a baby, and her eyelids are heavy. Ian runs a finger over her faint little brows--just two barely-there brownish shadows--and whispers as her eyes close, “Has anybody been feeding you?”

Ian continues to talk as he makes his way down the hallway, carrying his little girl into the living room, then toward the door. “Not very much, huh? Maybe they don’t know that babies need food in their bellies. That’s what I think. What do you think?”

The baby makes a kitten noise as Ian opens the door and carries her out into the hall.

Marissa three units down has a six-month-old. He knocks on her door, and she answers with said six-month-old asleep on her shoulder, shooting daggers Ian’s way for making such a racket.

After apologizing, he claims to be babysitting his sister’s kid, which is stupid to say but better than having her ask too many questions right now, and inquires after a bottle and some formula because it hadn’t been packed in her bag, and you know how babies get. This one’s a very hungry caterpillar, aren’t you, sweetheart?

Marissa eats it up, calls the baby a precious bean, and invites Ian in to wait while she fixes her a bottle of Enfamil. Ian can’t help but look down at his girl and bounce his eyebrows, their first scam going over without a hitch.

He follows Marissa into the kitchen and leans back against the countertop, watching and taking mental notes as she prepares the bottle nearly one-handed, the kid still flopped over her shoulder.

Ian looks at him--at his chubby cheeks, his wispy blond hair, his clean, striped onesie. His name’s Penn.

He looks next at his own tiny porcelain doll, at her little mouth open like a baby bird’s, her head turning from side to side like she’s hunting for food.

“Um.” Ian peers at Marissa, who raises a brow in recognition as she screws on the cap of a bottle and starts to give it a shake.

“D’you think I could get a diaper, too?”

“That’s one tired mama, forgetting the bottle and the diapers.”

“Yeah.”

Marissa hands him the bottle and gives him a wink. “Lemme see what I can find.”

She carries Penn down the hallway toward the bedroom, and while she’s gone, Ian takes the bottle and touches the nipple to the baby’s lips.

She scrunches up her face in distaste and gives a little cry, her mouth opening pitifully and the nipple pressing against her gums, formula leaking out just enough that it drips onto her tongue. And it takes a few tries, but eventually, she accepts the bottle, eyes opening wide and that gaspy, breath-hitch of a noise shaking out before she closes her lips around the nipple and begins to suck.

God, she was hungry. She makes noises as she eats, soft, puppy sounds, and Ian runs his thumb over her eyebrows again--one at a time--and smiles down at her as she closes her eyes and relaxes into getting her belly filled.

“A very hungry caterpillar’s right,” Marissa muses with a smile on her face, returning Penn-less from the bedroom with a stack of three diapers. “They’re 1s. She needs Newborns, maybe even Preemies, but it’s all I have.”

She steps close, looking down at the baby and watching her eat. “She’s cute. How old is she?”

Ian has no idea. He gives a rough estimation.

“Uhh, four weeks?”

“They’re perfect at that age. They just sleep and poop.” She gestures back to the bedroom. “My little guy back there’s started teething.”

Ian nods. He remembers Liam teething--the fevers and the crying. The diarrhea.

Speaking of.

The baby pulls back from the bottle and makes a coughing sound, prelude to a cry. She goes back in but then bawks again, mouth white with formula, and suddenly, the faint smell of her--the last bits of stinkiness clinging to her skin--becomes magnified.

Shit. Shit. Literally shit.

Ian quickly thanks Marissa, waving one of the diapers at her, and makes his escape.

---

It wasn’t much, though the smell was enough to curl his arm hairs.

Quickly, he wipes the baby down again, puts on the size 1 diaper, which is large enough to cover half her stomach and gaps a little at the legholes, and then leaves her on the bed while he gets a trash bag from the kitchen. He shoves in it her nasty swaddle, onesie, diaper, and old bottle. After tying off the bag and leaving it by the front door to carry down to the dumpster, he returns to the bedroom, wraps his girl back up in the blanket, grabs the bottle, and takes her into the living room.

He sits on the couch and finishes feeding her.

He thinks about Penn’s chubby face and can’t wait until she gets one, too. Hopes he and Mickey can get her healthy and strong with pink cheeks, shiny eyes, and sweet little rolls on her arms and legs.

Mickey.

Ian shifts around enough to pull his phone from his pocket.

Nothing.

He puts it back.

On the coffee table rests a plate of cold, hardening Toaster Strudels. Ian bites his lip and thinks about Mickey getting the call that morning--about him dropping everything, taking the money from the Quaker Oats can, and meeting one of his cousins somewhere deep South Side.

Just so they can get their girl.

He hadn’t told Ian; he’d just done it. He’d done it, and he’d brought her back here to her home, and he hadn’t complained.

Ian gazes down at the baby--at their baby. Her eyes are closed now, and her sucks on the bottle are growing slower and slower, only speeding back up when Ian makes a move as if to take it away.

Those Milkovich eyes.

She doesn’t look like Mickey otherwise, with a button nose and lips with a defined cupid’s bow, but her eyes are unmistakably his--Mandy’s, too, in shape and maybe one day in color.

Ian hopes so.

---

He’s thought about having kids with Mickey more often than he’d ever admit. He’s always wanted them--always wanted to grow up to be a provider, to do important work, earning money to give his family a good life. He likes the feeling of caring for something, of having a thing that’s his to love and to raise and to grow into a strong, kind, productive member of society.

At an early age, he’d hoped Mickey was it for him. He was bombarded by feelings bigger than any he’d ever known, his stomach in his throat when he thought of him. Sometimes, especially when they were young and just figuring out sex together, Ian wanted him so bad during it that he’d wanted to cry with it, squeezing Mickey’s hips and pressing his mouth to the back of his neck because he could, because there he was allowed.

He’d never said it, of course, but love at that age was all-encompassing, was the most enormous thing he’d ever felt. He spent long hours placing Mickey in his life and in his future, moving him about and finding where he fit like a child with a doll. Mickey would give up the shit with his dad. He’d go back to school, and they’d graduate together--Ian would help him--and Ian would go to West Point and Mickey would go with him to New York, picking up odd-jobs, taking some classes. They’d get their own place together after graduation, and Mickey would hold a steady job and would wait for Ian while he was off being brave, and then Ian would come home and they’d settle down, adopt a baby. Be a family.

The musings of a lonely kid who’s softened the harsh edges of reality with naive love.

The years went on. The thought was there--changed, for sure, but not gone. At one point it involved Yevgeny, involved Svetlana escaping back to Russia and Ian and Mickey raising him.

Yevgeny. He misses him even if he feels sick sometimes too when he remembers what he did. He’d loved him, though--so, so much--this beautiful little boy who was half Mickey. Sometimes he’d felt like his, like theirs, and Ian had drowned in contentment over the thought.

But then, well, nothing ever turns out how he wants it to.

He’d thought about a baby with Mickey again before they got married. The night before their wedding, they’d snuggled in together after a round of passion that still makes his toes curl when he thinks of it. And just like when he was fifteen, he’d felt the hugeness of love. He now knew reality, had experienced it first hand, but those feelings were still there, simmering under the surface. He’d closed his eyes and held Mickey close and thought of the two of them having breakfast with a pair of kids, the four of them laughing and telling each other stories around a dining room table. Bliss.

And now they have this.

Her.

She’s sleeping now, mouth slack around the nipple of the bottle. Ian knows he should burp her, but he lets her rest, her tiny lips parted.

With his thumb, he gently wipes up a thin trail of formula winding its way out the corner of her mouth, then leans in and kisses her. She still smells sour, in need of a thorough bath, but that can wait. For now, she’s here, and she’s perfect. She’s theirs. His little baby with the love of his life.

Ian hopes he can be a good dad to her. He knows Mickey will be. He holds his girl and he thinks of Christmas morning with a husband and a daughter. Thinks of bringing her to weekly family dinners--showing her off. She’ll have cousins to play with--Franny and Freddie and Jack--and her Uncle Liam will carry her around.

Most of all, he thinks of her sleeping on Mickey’s chest. Him kissing her head. Playing games with her when she’s old enough, all that Liquor Store Robbery shit he used to play with Franny that made him smile so wide it made Ian’s heart flutter.

Their very own baby to love. Their very own family.

Ian watches her eyelids flutter, watches her lips tremble and forehead wrinkle for a moment like she’s going to cry in her sleep before her face softens again, relaxed.

They’ll have to figure out the legal stuff. Get a birth certificate. Ian’d already looked into it months ago, and Mickey knows a guy for everything. They’ll claim she was a home birth, fudge a midwife and a witness. Debbie can be the mom, whatever. Gallaghers have been doing this shit for decades. What’s another scam? What’s another bit of fraud? It keeps life interesting.

But all that’s for another day.

For now, Ian cuddles her to his chest and revels in her warmth and her little stinky smell.

He thinks about the future.

Mickey thinks about the future.

It’s not something he ever did as a kid, figuring there wasn’t a point. Life’s shit and has no meaning. You die. The end. By the time he’d decided maybe that wasn’t true, his life was shit again and the meaning had left him and he wanted to die. The end.

But not the end. Not the end at all.

He still didn’t think of the future, instead letting it surprise him, his life thus far a mixed bag of unbearably bad and unbelievably good with seemingly no middle ground on which to rest his laurels. It was uncontrollable. A war. Things were suddenly good, though--suddenly great, marriage being the wildest sort of surprise. He didn’t bother predicting a future in which things could suddenly turn upside down. He didn’t want to.

But it’s hard not to think of the future while standing in the baby aisle of Target.

---

He’d smoked three cigarettes on the ride over in an attempt to settle his nerves. Trying to stop the growth of the stone in his gut.

It’s fucked up that he feels this way, and he can’t help but be disappointed by it. There was a moment a couple months ago when a comforting warmth had washed over him at the thought of a family.

It could’ve been the weed. He and Ian were baking out on the balcony, talking about inconsequential shit. And Ian had just said, casual as anything, “Can’t believe nobody’s popped out an oops-baby by now.”

Mickey had made some excuse--something about his cousin Oksana’s abortion business--but this little niggling thought weaseled its way into his mind anyway, unbidden. The two of them with a kid. A lil fucker on Ian’s shoulders. A summer afternoon with water guns, Ian and Mickey with those big-ass Super Soaker bazookas and a nameless, faceless child running around with a tiny pistol.

He didn’t allow the thought to linger, but its memory was a pleasant one that left behind an admittedly sweet residue.

He leans over the handlebar of the shopping cart and tries to feel it again. The baby accessories--the bottles and nasal aspirators and tiny toothbrushes--make his limbs weak.

Mickey knows what to get. Maybe he was a shitty dad to Yev in the end, but he paid attention. He’s not stupid. He slowly makes his way through the aisles, tossing in some bottles, a bottle brush because back in the day Ian always complained about not having one. A pack of pacifiers.

In another aisle, he grabs a baby bath, some shampoo and washcloths. Gets that Baby Magic shit because it smells good. He picks up rash cream and formula and wipes and a pack of Newborn-size diapers. Then he heads to the clothing section and throws in a few multipacks of onesies and gowns.

By the time he’s done, the shopping cart’s full of shit and he thinks he’s having a bit of a mental breakdown.

He considers leaving the cart in the middle of the aisle and taking off--almost does, in fact, even going so far as to pull his hands from the handlebar, pressing palms to his eyes, and turning around to make a break for it. He feels that adrenaline in his arms again, the power in his fists. He wants to punch.

He makes a quiet, desperate sound and spins back around, hands back to the handlebar, and makes his way to the check-out.

The total is $278.27, and he pays for it with his debit card because those are things he has now. Money. A bank account.

He leaves Target, and he puts the baby shit in the back seat of his fucking middle class, pussy-ass SUV, and he climbs into the driver’s seat and closes and locks the doors and places his head on the steering wheel and hates himself and hates himself and hates himself and cries.

He cries and then he punches the passenger seat. Punches it. Punches it. Brings his fists back to his own face and makes them open palms again and presses them to his eyes to hold back the tears. He sniffs, his breath a shaky heave.

Fuck. The stone’s so heavy he thinks his belly might burst.

Mickey sits in the SUV for twenty minutes, smoking cigarette after cigarette and waiting for his tears to stop and his snot to clear and hoping he can blame his red eyes on weed.

When he’s done, he cranks the car, wastes time with the radio again. Eyes the baby bath in the rearview mirror, white and teal and surrounded by bags of baby shit for a baby at his home, a baby Ian probably already loves even though she doesn’t even have a name because Ian can love things. He loves and he’s easy to love and Mickey loves him more than anything in the world.

Mickey sniffs one last time and pulls out of the parking lot.

He should go home.

He doesn’t.

---

He bitches endlessly about Ian’s queer shit, but he’s just as queer now, really. Practically a hair shy of putting on a fucking skirt and heels and parading down Boystown.

There’s a gay bar not far from their apartment called Hemmingway’s, and it’s hipster gay--like dudes Mickey would’ve beat the shit out of five years ago gay, the patrons in fucking skinny jeans and cardigans and artfully waxed mustaches.

It isn’t actually a gay bar by definition, but people sit around and drink IPAs and eat pita and hummus and it makes Mickey feel gay as fuck to step foot inside. True West Side Homo shit.

He goes in anyway sometimes, if only because the Alibi’s a pig bar now and he can’t park the SUV outside any of his other South Side haunts. And anyway, the owner’s not a pretentious fuck like the general clientele. He knows how to pour a regular fucking beer, and he knows not to bother Mickey when he doesn’t want to talk.

His name’s Taylor, and he’s mid-thirties. Hot in the kind of way that makes Mickey angry because he dresses like a pussy and has a neatly groomed beard. He’s also not gay judging by the framed photo on the wall behind the bar: a shot of his family. Him. A woman in a floral dress. A little girl on his hip, her arms wrapped around his neck. She’s missing her front teeth, and in her hair is one of those huge, ugly-ass bows that makes her look like a cartoon character.

“Hey, Mick,” Taylor greets as he pours Mickey a beer off the tap and sets the glass in front of him. “What brings you here? Kinda early.”

Mickey doesn’t want to talk. He picks up the beer. Gulps it in lieu of speaking.

Taylor taps the bartop. “Got it, man.”

He leaves him be.

---

He doesn’t drink alone very often anymore--at least not more than one beer while he listens to Taylor drone on about a band he recently saw live or answers Taylor’s questions about Gallavich Security. Mickey’s been trying to convince him to go into the weed business, citing Kev and V’s venture a couple years ago, but Taylor’s not into it. Doesn’t want to change the vibes of the bar, y’know? Whatever.

He has that Guiness or that Old Style sometimes if he’s feeling nostalgic, but he tends to save the other stuff for when he’s with Ian. It doesn’t mean anything, really; he just doesn’t see the point in getting wasted by himself anymore.

Mostly, he’s gone an unbelievable amount of time without feeling like he needs to get drunk to begin with.

He calculates the months in his head that afternoon as he ignores Taylor and sips his beer. When he realizes that the months have become over a year without getting trashed independent of his husband, he takes a heavy gulp.

It isn’t a bad thing. He knows that. It means he’s happy, and he’s willing to accept that for what it is: good. It’s good to be happy, and it’s okay that he’s happy. He has to tell himself that a lot these days. I’m happy. That’s good. It’s okay that I’m happy.

Pathetic.

Mickey drinks his beer in silence thinking about how happy Ian had been earlier, his face lit up bright like a candle flame. He’ll be a good dad to the kid. Whatever her name is. L. She’s lucky to have him--one Milkovich who’s managed to escape the curse, one who’s somehow wound up with a dad who’ll love her. Who won’t lay a hand on her, even when he’s angry. Who’ll read a whole fuckin’ book about babies like a pregnant chick so he knows how to take care of her.

He drains the last of the glass and sets it down with a clink. Taylor looks to him. Another? Sure. Mickey nods. Taylor pours.

Can he do it? What if he can’t? What if he can’t be a dad and Ian hates him for it, and what if he takes her and leaves? Ian won’t abandon her, and they can’t give her back. Mickey wouldn’t want her to go back--doesn’t think his stomach could take it, handing her back to Bullet who’ll toss her back in the trunk and then back in the tub.

Growing up Milkovich, you learn quickly that you’re expendable unless you’re useful. You make yourself useful quickly. If you’re a boy, you fight, and you run drugs, and you learn how to fire a gun. If you’re a girl, you clean up after the boys. Get smacked around until you’re old enough to get knocked up so you can smack a kid around.

Mickey doesn’t know her, but he doesn’t want that for her. She deserves someone to love her. Ian. He takes a drink of his beer and feels sick.

Speak of the devil. His phone vibrates.

He pulls it out of his pocket and finds Ian’s texted him a picture of the baby. It’s a close-up of her sleeping face, the only thing poking out from a green fleece blanket. Cute little fucker. Looks like Coop when Coop looked like Coop--back before the meth had made him pocky and wasted. Didn’t get the Milkovich nose, though. Hers is small and round like the one on that weird-ass pissing doll Mandy got when she was seven, a bribe for keeping quiet during one of their many welfare checks.

With the picture, Ian’s texted:

Belly full 😴
ETA?

Mickey scrolls back up to the picture. Taps it. Enlarges it. He takes a deep breath.

on my way

He sends the message, and when he looks up, Taylor’s watching him, eyes keen as he polishes a glass.

He doesn’t say anything because he’s smart, and after a long moment, as if rewarding him for it, Mickey sniffs. Says nonchalantly, feeling a flush creep up his neck, “Got a kid.”

“Oh shit, man.” Taylor sets down the glass and comes over. He shakes Mickey’s hand. “Congratulations.”

Mickey toasts his beer glass at him unenthusiastically and knocks back an inch of it.

He can tell Taylor wants to ask. Mickey hasn’t told him he’s gay, but Ian’s been in here with him enough that Taylor has to know. They’ve got their matching rings and shit. Sit side-by-side on barstools, their arms brushing, not leaving the customary gay space in-between.

“Boy or girl?”

Mickey avoids his eyes and suddenly wishes desperately he hadn’t told him. Now it’s a thing, and he doesn’t want it to be a thing. He doesn’t want it to be a thing at all, does he, but he keeps looking at the picture Ian sent. In three minutes, he hasn’t put his phone down.

“Uh, girl,” he answers, finally chancing a glance up at Taylor, who’s now leaned over the bar, committed to conversation.

“Great! Got one of those myself. Claire. She’s six.” He nods toward the framed family photo, a fond look creeping up on his face. “What’d you name yours?”

“Uhhh.” He hesitates. “L?”

“Elle? Pretty. It’s French just like ‘Claire.’”

“Yeah.”

Mickey picks up his beer, sufficiently weirded out by the conversation and hoping Taylor will go away if he buries his nose in his glass. He’s shit outta luck.

“Kids are the best, man. Claire changed my life.”

Good for you?

He apparently doesn’t get the hint that Mickey wants him to leave. Wants to finish his beer in peace. Leaning in even further, Taylor asks, “Got a picture?”

Mickey still has his phone in his hand. He’s looked at the picture of Elle five times since the beginning of their conversation.

He stiffens his jaw, nervously defensive all of a sudden, but holds out his phone so Taylor can see her.

“Beautiful.” Taylor looks at Mickey, softness flooding his features. “She brand new?”

“Uh, like a month, I think.”

“Tiny thing.”

“Yeah.” Mickey swallows. Fiddles with his beer glass, watching the foam along the sides slowly dissipate. With his thumb, he taps the photo again, enlarging it. Staring at it.

Without thinking, he adds, “She was neglected and shit, so.”

“Damn.” Taylor reaches for the glass he’d been polishing and starts up again. “This world really sucks sometimes.”

Mickey shrugs, not meeting the other man’s eyes.

“Well, glad she’s got a good home now.”

His phone vibrates in his hand. Mickey looks down at it.

Think she’s got eyes like yours

Ian loves her already. Wants Mickey to love her, too. He feels it in every word of this text, and it makes his stomach ache.

It’s the fifth thing he’ll remember.

She sleeps in Ian’s arms for an hour before he works up even an ounce of the desire to put her down. The more he looks at her, the prettier she gets, her tiny little features softening in sleep. She sleeps with a pout, and Ian knows she isn’t Mickey’s but it still reminds him of him, that bottom lip out just slightly in a way that makes Ian helpless to stop himself from taking a picture.

He texts it to Mickey and asks when he’ll be home.

on my way

Ian’s heart pounds, and a slow smile breaks across his face.

His husband and his daughter. Their first night together.

He hasn’t told the rest of his family about her yet, and he knows he should. They had a vague idea that he and Mickey had planned to eventually do something like this--get their hands on a baby Milkovich whenever one was made available. Ian had discussed with a few of them how they could help him get it on the up-and-up, registered as biologically Mickey’s and certified so it could go to school one day.

They won’t be entirely surprised when he tells them. It’ll be a happy thing, too. They might have a party at the house, welcoming her to the family. The thought turns Ian’s belly warm because he loves the idea of passing her around the living room, letting her get snuggles from people who will love her one day. Seeing the look on Mickey’s face when he realizes that they’ve created a family, even if it was with tape, glue, and a healthy bit of scamming.

He can’t wait.

But for now, all he wants is a quiet night with his husband and their brand new little girl. They’ll give her her first bath, put her in pajamas, and relax together on the couch--all three of them--Mickey feeding her this time and Ian with his arm around them both.

Bliss.

Carefully, after a moment of contemplation, Ian stands and walks the baby to the bedroom, where he lays her in the center of the bed, swaddled and warm in her blanket. He tries to make himself busy, then. Cleans up the bathroom. Turns on the TV in the living room. Checks the time and wonders what they’re going to do about dinner later, his plans for chicken and farmer’s market squash derailed.

Every few minutes, however, he can’t help but creep back into the bedroom to watch her.

She isn’t doing anything--isn’t even moving. Ian can’t help but lean against the door frame anyway, his eyes on the tiny bundle and the sweet face peeking up out of it.

He takes out his phone.

Think she’s got eyes like yours

Mickey doesn’t answer, and Ian hopes he’s driving, on his way home with stuff for their girl.

---

He eventually does find something to occupy himself, setting in to cleaning out the fridge, dumping old take-out boxes and expired condiments. It’s mindless work, but it passes the time.

He’s taking a sponge to a bit of hardened strawberry jelly on one of the shelves when he hears a key in the lock. Then a thump.

It’s Mickey. He comes barrelling in with a boxed baby bath in his arms and a row of Target bags dangling from both forearms. Ian drops the sponge to help.

“Got some random shit,” Mickey murmurs, unconfident, and Ian greets him and smiles at him reassuringly as he helps him de-bag.

He still has that look from earlier--the animal caught in the trap look--and Ian doesn’t know what to do with it. He opens his mouth to say something. Closes it.

Instead, he busies himself with digging through one of the bags, pulling out the Baby Magic Hair & Body Wash and matching lotion. It was the stuff they’d used with Yevgeny, and it sends a fond warmth into his cheeks to think of Mickey remembering it.

“Can’t wait to give her a real bath,” Ian says, nodding toward the baby bath which Mickey’s set on the floor. “She smells like a porta-john.”

Mickey gives a breathy puff of a laugh, no humor in it, the accompanying smile stopping at his cheeks. He doesn’t respond verbally--doesn’t ask after her, doesn't express any true emotion, even his laugh more of a sigh to fill the silence.

Ian tries to meet his eyes, but can’t, Mickey occupied by the Target bags and the random shit he’d apparently bought that looks entirely on purpose to Ian. All the onesies and gowns are carefully gender neutral, nothing pink or girly in sight. He’d picked the Newborn diapers and the tiny, 4 oz. bottles. The formula is the good stuff--the kind the Gallaghers had to steal from the supermarket for Liam if they wanted it. He’d gotten a bottle brush.

A faint smile turns up the corners of Ian’s mouth. He turns to Mickey, but he’s too busy unboxing the baby tub to catch it.

---

Together, the two of them unpack everything. They don’t really have the space for an entire baby set-up, they quickly realize. It’s a one-bedroom apartment after all, nothing but a few small rooms and a couple closets.

If they’re going to do this, they can’t actually live here for much longer. Ian considers bringing it up as he and Mickey pick a corner of the living room to fill with baby things. Even their bedroom’s too small for it. They certainly won’t be able to comfortably fit a crib in there--not with the way it is now, with two nightstands, two dressers, and a full-length mirror taking up the extra available space. They wouldn’t want to, anyway, as Ian’d ideally like to maintain a regular sex life with his husband.

He hums as he watches Mickey tear open the plastic wrapped around the tub. This isn’t even a fraction of the stuff they’re going to need--just enough to sustain them until they can get more. They need drawers for tiny clothes. A changing table. Ian’d like to get one of those swings with the spinning mobile that plays lullabies.

The Gallaghers never had any of that shit. They changed Liam on the couch or the bed. Sat him in the playpen. Let him crawl around everywhere. Play in the toilet. But it’s something he and Mickey can do now, and it’s something he wants to give to their kid. Something better than what he had growing up.

Their kid. They should probably think about a name for her.

The two of them take some of the supplies into the bathroom, and as they pass the bedroom, Mickey’s eyes cut toward the bed.

They linger. He’s watching her.

Mickey quickly casts his eyes away when he realizes he’s been caught looking, and Ian wants to tell him it’s okay. She’s ours. You don’t have to be embarrassed about thinking she’s sweet.

Instead, he flips on the bathroom light and opens up one of the cabinets so they can start filling it with diapers and wipes.

He makes conversation. “She’s a good eater.” Tells Mickey about Marissa and his and the baby’s first scam. Apologizes for the fact that she shit on Mickey’s T-shirt.

Mickey’s alarmingly quiet. He’s in a squat, methodically stacking diapers inside the cabinet like he’s stocking shelves. His eyes are dead. Emotionless. Ian’s just told him the T-shirt he likes to wear with his light-wash jeans now has baby shit on it, and he hasn’t voiced a single complaint.

He isn’t listening, something complicated going on in his head.

“Hey,” Ian says, smiling. Trying. “Earth to Mickey.” He snaps his fingers near his ear.

“Fuck you.”

The tone of it almost shocks Ian--heated and rough.

“Uh.”

Mickey pinches at the bridge of his nose and stands. He sniffs. Rubs his palms over his cheeks, then swipes down his mouth. He’s anxious. Something’s simmering.

“What is it?” Ian asks, confused.

Mickey leaves the bathroom and heads to the living room without a single glance toward the bed.

Ian follows him out. “Hey, what’s wrong with you?”

“Just.” Mickey pauses. Huffs. “Nothing.” He moves over to the pile of Target bags and starts sorting baby shit like he’s trying to keep his mind off something.

“Something’s wrong.”

“Nothing’s wrong, man.”

No, there’s definitely something wrong. Mickey won’t look at him.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Ian rubs a hand over his face and places the other on his hip. He takes a deep, frustrated breath, then lets himself cool for a moment, watching quietly as Mickey pulls the tags off a three-pack of gray and white onesies--stripes, arrows, gingham. He removes them from their tiny, useless plastic hangers and folds them into a little stack that he sets to the side before grabbing up a two-pack of gowns--solid teal, solid navy.

“I thought we’d wait ‘til she wakes up then maybe give her her first bath together,” Ian tries once Mickey’s also folded those, voice tender and positive.

Mickey looks at him. He worries his bottom lip between his teeth, then releases it. “Prob’ly had a bath before. She lived in a fuckin’ tub.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yeah, I guess.” Mickey shrugs.

“Okay. Great. Should I make dinner?” Ian checks his watch. It’s just 5:41, but he figures it’ll take an hour to prep and bake if he’s still doing the chicken thing. He’s got some Swiss. Maybe he’ll stuff the breasts. Cordon bleu without the ham. They’ve got leftover vegetables from the garden he could use to make a salad in lieu of the squash.

Mickey doesn’t answer him, just keeps stacking folded clothes. Moves on to unpackaging a two-pack of teal soothie pacifiers.

“D’you wanna help me stuff the chicken?” Ian asks, bouncing his brows suggestively.

Normally, Mickey would crack a joke at that, but this time, he just says, “Nah, it’s cool,” and makes a grab for another Target bag.

Fine. Mickey’s in a mood, maybe. He gets like that on occasion; they both do. They’re married and they love each other, but people in close quarters get randomly crabby with one another sometimes. It’s normal.

Ian’s worried, though.

Before heading into the kitchen, he pops back into the bedroom to check on the baby. She’s still asleep and motionless, just a bit of the blanket having loosened to indicate she’s moved her arms since he last checked on her.

He walks over to the bed and stands by her, looking down at her precious face. He thinks of Mickey’s body that day in Kev and V’s house. He was rigid, uncomfortable when Ian’d first pulled him into a hug, but after a weak fight, he’d relaxed.

Ian remembers the press of Mickey’s cheek against his shoulder--remembers sliding his hand to the back of his head and holding him close.

“You’re a good person, Mickey,” he’d said, fingers sifting through his hair. “You’re gonna be a great dad.”

And he is. This tiny little mouse is lucky as hell to have him. Ian doesn’t doubt for one second that Mickey will be exactly what she needs--someone to play with her, protect her, hold her when she’s scared. Mickey’s loyalty is unmatched. He’ll be in her corner always and will literally and figuratively beat the shit out of anybody who crosses her.

Ian imagines five, ten years in the future. Maybe she’ll play a rec sport. Soccer. Tee-ball. Basketball. Mickey will get thrown out within twenty minutes for swearing at the refs.

Maybe she’ll take dance. Ian imagines Mickey tying her hair back in a bun and helping her get into her leotard and tutu.

But now: a tiny thing on the bed with her whole life ahead of her and her strong, compassionate, beautiful father flipping the fuck out in the living room.

After one last gaze, Ian leaves the bedroom in favor of the kitchen, watching Mickey the whole way and hoping in vain that he’ll watch him right back.

It’s unpacking the shit that does it.

Something about his stop by the bar and listening to Taylor drone on and on about Claire had calmed him--as had Taylor asking to see the picture of Elle that Ian had sent him. It’d made her feel real and his situation normal, and by the time he’s home and trying to figure out the best method of carrying seven Target bags and a boxed baby tub up to the second floor, he’s breathing a little lighter.

But then he makes it up to their door and enters the unit to find Ian happy and talking about the stinky baby and wanting to give her a bath, and then he and Ian are starting to unpack the bags, and all of a sudden, he’s breathing in small sips and his chest squeezes like he’s having a heart attack.

They’re going to have to get a new place. It’s been two years, and Mickey’s just gotten used to this one. He’s learned the neighborhood frontwards and backwards, knows his bougie-ass neighbors, knows the liquor stores and the nearest supermarket and the fastest route to Walgreens to pick up Ian’s prescription refills.

They need at least two bedrooms. There’s no room for Elle’s shit in theirs, and she can’t sleep in the fucking living room forever.

He and Ian will need to uproot again. Mickey doesn’t want to. It’s embarrassing how attached he’s become to their West Side apartment. He looks at himself in the mirror every day--sees his nice, new clothes and his name-brand boots and the haircut he gets from a guy down the block with a pompadour. Mickey’s face is clear. He hasn’t had a cut or a bruise on it in years. Hasn’t gotten in a single fight. He’s assimilated against his will, melted into a picture of West Side Gay, and now that he has, he doesn’t know if he wants to part from it.

He hates change. It makes his stomach hurt, this idea that he doesn’t fit in somewhere. He didn’t fit into the West Side. Now he doesn’t fit into the South Side. He recalls the look on Bullet’s face when he got out of his car. The judgment. The slurs he knew he was calling him in his mind. He’d wanted to beat the shit out of him, pummel his face, stomp him into the ground, just to prove the South Side was still in him.

He imagines him and Ian buying a South Side house. Ian’d want to clean it up like a fucking gentrifier. Have a garden and a playset for Elle and a doggie door for a goddamn golden retriever or something. They would become the very people they always hated.

Mickey looks to Ian, who’s reading the weight range on the diaper box like it’s fascinating.

We can have this, now, he imagines him saying, his face lit up bright like it always gets.

They can. They brought in 150 g’s last year, and that was after expanding their business. Hiring three guys. Getting two more vehicles. They’ll bring in more this year, the Chicago weed business booming. Ian wants to lease an old office space in a stripmall on Cermak so they can have a storefront.

They’re doing well. In all ways.

The problem is that Mickey doesn’t know how to accept the fact. He’d always dreamed of getting rich, living like a king, giving a big fuck you to anybody who thought he couldn’t do it. Now that he’s on his way there, he’s pussying out.

Mickey Milkovich, a married man with a beautiful daughter and a nice house and a successful business. It’s a lot to take in.

It’s so new. It’s fucking terrifying.

Especially the daughter part.

How can he be a dad? A good one? Kids deserve good dads, and all Mickey’s feeling right now, on the cusp of fatherhood, is overwhelming anxiety to the point that his chest feels like it’ll crack open.

He follows Ian into the bathroom to help him put away the diapers and wipes, and on the way, he spots her. She’s asleep on the bed, tinier than Mickey remembers from even a few hours ago--just a bundle in a green blanket with her small face peeking out.

He hates this. He hates this and he doesn’t hate it at all. He hates that he doesn’t hate it because he should hate it. The baby’s there, and she’s too small to actually do anything, and she’s vulnerable, and Mickey looks at her and sees all the ways he’ll probably fuck this up and all the ways he doesn’t want to.

What kind of dad can he be? He wasn’t emotionally available for Yev. He didn’t read to him or cuddle with him or tell him he loved him. That whole time, he never once even lied and said it just because good dads are supposed to love their kids. I love you. Love you, little man. He wasn’t a good dad.

If he could do it all over again, he’d try harder. Push past some of the pussy shit keeping him from being who he should’ve been. Svetlana used to tell him he wasn’t trying hard enough. That he wasn’t a good dad because he was lazy or stupid.

Maybe he was stupid because he didn’t know how to be a good dad. He made them money and he sat the kid on his knee sometimes and he was there, at least. It was all he could do, his stomach cramping up when he thought about other things. He knew in theory what dads should do, but every time he tried to do any of them with Yevgeny, his heart pummeled into his gut.

He thought about his dad, and he thought about the crack of a pistol against the bridge of his nose, and he thought about sex and Svetlana and blowing his load that way in front of Ian. And that and the resulting months and the resulting squirming little creature with Milkovich eyes and Laura’s mouth felt like shackles on his wrists and ankles.

He was a bad dad because thinking about being a good dad made his mouth taste like blood, but he’d cared about Yev as much as he could. He had tried, as much as Svet told him otherwise.

It’s been years. Yevgeny’s gotta be nine by now. Mickey hasn’t heard a word from Svetlana since he broke out of prison.

He never wants to see them again.

He watches Elle’s face screw up in her sleep and then smooth out again, and he worries that he isn’t cut out for this. He worries that the inability to be a good dad has been beaten out of him or fucked out of him. He worries that he doesn’t know how to love a kid the way a kid deserves to be loved because he’s never managed to do it before. Not really. Not fiercely.

He likes Franny. She’s a funny kid. She’s not his, though. They were close back when he lived at the house, but he was never expected to raise her or teach her or comfort her or take her to the doctor when she was sick. He wasn’t her dad.

Can he be a dad to Elle? A good one like Ian? There’s no proof that he can. He failed miserably the first time. There’s a kid out there with 50% of his DNA and he actively hopes to never see him again.

Not because he doesn’t want to see him or to meet him or to know what he’s like now that he’s a real person with thoughts and opinions. But because he doesn’t want Yev to be disappointed. He doesn’t want some kid with Milkovich eyes and Laura’s mouth to know that his dad never wanted him. That he tried, even still, but he wasn’t good enough.

Mickey thinks that never seeing Yevgeny again is the only way that he could ever be a good dad to him.

In that moment, Ian catches Mickey’s eye. He’s still staring at Elle, thinking.

Stomach in his throat, Mickey quickly turns away and heads into the bathroom.

---

He stacks diapers on autopilot. Ian talks to him. Tells him about Elle in that fast, up-pitched voice he gets when he’s excited about something. He tells Mickey how much she ate, how much she shit, something about their basic bitch neighbor with the little blond boy.

It irritates Mickey. It irritates him that it irritates him.

Ian loves her. Ian’s going to be a great dad without even trying. Every time he smiles over the kid, Mickey feels that surge of adrenaline in his arms. Wants to punch something. Feels that stone in his belly.

He desperately wants to be like Ian. It’s fucking jealousy, and it’s stupid. But all he can think as he makes three stacks of tiny diapers in the cabinet under the sink is that it’s not fair that Ian can be like this. Ian doesn’t have to worry about being a shitty dad because he just won’t. There isn’t a chance.

He was a great dad to Yevgeny and he didn’t even blow the load that made him.

It’s not like Ian had a great example of fatherhood, either, so that isn’t even the issue. There’s just something wrong with Mickey.

He bites the insides of his cheeks, eyes watering like a fucking pussy. There’s a lump in his throat. The stone. It isn’t fair. Surprise, surprise.

Ian snaps his fingers in his ear, getting his attention, and it pisses him off.

“Fuck you,” he says, the first thing coming to mind.

Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. Fuck you for being immediately okay with this. Fuck you for being so excited without having to worry first. Fuck you for knowing you’re going to be a good dad because you’ve already been one.

Ian looks upset--a shock shooting through his frame--and it makes Mickey’s heart hurt. His face crumples.

“Uh,” Ian says in the way he does when he’s trying not to show his hurt, this forced nonchalance framed as What’s your problem?

Mickey gets up, eyes hitting the mirror above the sink and wanting suddenly to punch it. He hasn’t had split knuckles in years. Hasn’t done anything more violent than assaulting the empty seat of a car in months and months.

Instead of shoving his hand through mirror glass, Mickey rubs his palms over his cheeks. Rubs one over his mouth.

“What is it?” Ian asks, nonchalance gone and replaced with confusion.

He’s claustrophobic, the walls moving in. Mickey leaves the bathroom in favor of the living room, eyes not daring to land on the bed.

“Hey, what’s wrong with you?”

“Just.” Mickey stops in his tracks, back still turned. He considers complaining, You. You’re perfect. Instead, he murmurs, “Nothing,” heads back over to the Target bags the two of them had tossed into the corner, and sits down.

He opens up a random bag and pulls out a pile of clothes. Onesies. Gowns. Footie pajamas. Tiny, stretchy pants. Socks so small they look like they’d fit a cat.

“Something’s wrong.”

Mickey closes his eyes. “Nothing’s wrong, man.”

“What is it?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Mickey picks up one of the three-packs of onesies and pulls off the tags. He removes the hangers and tosses them away, then folds the articles, one-by-one, and stacks them by his knee. They’re so small. Elle’s so small, her little body tinier than he remembers babies being.

Lip’s newest kid was a fat little fuck, nine pounds, round, rolled, and red-faced from birth. He’d held him because everybody else was doing it at the time, and it was like holding a bag of flour. Holding Elle is like holding a paper doll. Even at a month old, probably, if Bullet knew what he was talking about, she’s tinier than Jack ever was. Yevgeny, too.

Mickey grabs the gowns from the pile. Pulls off the tags. Removes the hangers. Folds them. Autopilot.

“I thought we’d wait ‘til she wakes up then maybe give her her first bath together,” Ian says, his voice sweet in that certain way that makes Mickey’s heart grow soft with love even though he always knows it’s more often than not a way of trying to calm him.

It’s fine. Mickey always lets him do it. He looks at Ian now and bites his bottom lip.

“Prob’ly had a bath before,” he says, accepting the kindness but not wanting to give up being an asshole. “She lived in a fuckin’ tub.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Okay. Great.” That calming, cautious, unsure face again. “Should I make dinner?”

He never gives up. It’s one thing that both bothers and endears Mickey to him.

He finishes up his folding and then picks up a package of pacifiers.

“D’you wanna help me stuff the chicken?”

There’s a comeback for it. It’s one Mickey would normally supply. Instead, he murmurs, “Nah, it’s cool,” and hopes Ian leaves him alone.

This time, he does. He makes a huffy noise and then goes into the bedroom for five minutes. Mickey finishes unpacking all the baby shit in the meanwhile, and by the time Ian leaves the bedroom and heads into the kitchen to start dinner, he’s left with a pile of empty packaging and several neat stacks of clothes and accessories.

He grabs the trash and takes it to the garbage. Then, realizing there’s nothing to do except watch TV, help Ian with dinner, or lie on the bed and watch Elle sleep, he picks up a trash bag Ian had left near the front door, grabs the bags from the trash cans around the apartment, and heads out to take them to the dumpster.

It’s a long journey; he hates it, usually. Avoids it at all cost, making Ian do it or giving him blowjobs in exchange for picking up his chores.

This time, he lets himself enjoy the walk.

For a luxury apartment complex, they do a shit job of convenient garbage disposal. Tenants have to carry their trash downstairs and put it in the compactor near the parking lot, just outside the leasing office.

Mickey usually takes the elevator, but today--even with four bags, he takes the stairs. He heads down two flights and out into the lobby, then exits the building and hangs a right to the compactor.

After tossing in the bags and pulling the door closed, he turns to go back inside, only to practically run into that basic bitch Marissa with her kid in her arms.

“Mickey,” she greets, giving him a huge, bleached-white grin. She turns to her little boy, who’s rubbing his eyes with his fist.

He’s about six months old and has that roundness that makes all his clothes look tight, his stretchy, gray pants showing the rolls at his thighs and his belly poking out of his dinosaur-print shirt. He has a film of white-blond hair--just starting to come in after being born bald as a cue-ball.

Elle may be small, but she has a great head of hair on her, more than this lil fucker already.

Mickey nods in greeting to Marissa and attempts to side-step her in order to avoid conversation. She doesn’t let him.

“How’s the baby? Hope that diaper’s working out.”

Mickey squeezes his eyes shut in irritation.

“Uh, yeah,” he says, recalling Ian saying something about her giving him a diaper. “Holds piss and shit like a charm.”

“Good to hear.” She smiles at him, moving to get in front of him so she can talk directly to his face even as he squirms around, trying to find an exit from the conversation.

“Ian said his sister didn’t pack her bag very well. I told him she must have mommy brain.”

“His sister?”

“Yeah. The baby’s mom?”

“Oh. Yeah, yeah, yeah. His sister. Yeah, she sucks.” Mickey crosses his arms over his chest. So we done here?

“Thought you two might be wanting to have one of those,” Marissa says, voice quiet and conspiratorial. She’s a breath away from elbowing Mickey. Wink, wink. Nudge, nudge.

Mickey’s heart rabbit-kicks. “Uh, yeah. Maybe.”

He takes a step to the side in active attempt to leave, hoping he can just start slowly walking away and she’ll get the hint and leave him alone.

“Always thought you’d be great parents.”

That stops him in his tracks. He pauses. Looks down at his boots. Considers letting that be that and walking away.

Instead, he turns to her. “Why?”

Marissa smiles. “Your dynamic. Ian’s nurturing with babies. I saw it today. Natural, y’know.”

Ian’s a natural. Yeah, he’s got it. Mickey turns back away and starts to walk off.

“But I bet you’re every kid’s best friend. I can see you really listening to them. Taking them seriously. Playing with them.”

He tilts his head toward her, brows drawn.

“It’s the way you two are with each other. Not being weird about it, but I’ve seen you. In the garden. In the hallway. How you relate to each other. The vibes I get.” She shrugs. “Saw you at the pool with a little boy last summer. Ian was swimming with him on his back and you were shooting him with a water gun from the pool chair, making him laugh.”

It was Fred. They were keeping him for the day while Lip and Tami took Jack to get his six-month shots.

And yeah, fine. Whatever. Fred had liked him a lot that day. He was at the age when he called him “Ick” and Mickey would dramatically complain at him every time he did it, making him laugh until he lost his breath.

Mickey shrugs at Marissa. Her kid makes a whining noise, and she bounces him against her chest.

“Anyway,” she says, reaching out and patting his shoulder. “Good to see you. Enjoy your niece. She’s cute.”

Mickey can tell Marissa thinks she’s made him uncomfortable and is making her own escape.

She has.

He swipes his hand over his face and, with an awkward nod, takes off toward the lobby door.

---

When he gets back to the apartment after loitering in the lobby for a few minutes, twenty minutes have passed since the time he first left.

The apartment smells hot from the oven on 400-degree preheat. Ian’s standing at the kitchen counter, stuffing the last bit of Swiss into a slit he’s made in one of two large chicken breasts he has on a pan.

Mickey goes into the kitchen because why not. He loves his husband, even still.

Ian looks at him, brows lowered like he’s performing an assessment.

“Uh, hey,” he greets, nodding down at the chicken breasts. “Cordon bleu without ham.”

Mickey hates that he not only knows what cordon bleu is but that he and Ian have made it together multiple times, listening to fucking oldies music while stuffing chicken breasts with ham and cheese.

He nods at Ian and leans back against the side of the fridge.

The Gallagher fridge always had tons of shit stuck to it. An old calendar, a chores board, miscellaneous magnets and reminders.

So far, theirs has managed to be relatively clear. There’s a magnetized metal clip holding a stack of take-out menus. A mini whiteboard on which Mickey’s drawn a dick with jizz shooting out of it and on which Ian’s written, “Alibi 6/16 @ 7.” Some family thing. Somebody’s birthday.

Mickey wonders if they’ll eventually have a fridge covered in childish drawings. A little Valentine’s Day heart made at pre-school. A drawing of three stick figures--two big and a little one in-between. A sun in the corner. A house in the background. M-shaped birds in the sky.

“Saw Marissa,” he says, crossing his arms over his chest.

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah.” Mickey bites his lip. “Didn’t know you told her she was Debbie’s kid.”

“I told you. You just weren’t listening. That was the basis of our whole scam.”

Ian getting so excited over that dumb scam makes Mickey’s stomach twist.

“Whatever.” He shoves away from the fridge and opens it up, pulling out a beer.

---

Ian stays in the kitchen, finishing the chicken prep and then putting it in the oven before opening the fridge and pulling out stuff for a salad. Mickey heads into the living room and sits down on the couch to watch TV.

He doesn’t give a fuck about the local news, but he watches it anyway. He’d think that everything was going to shit, but everything’s always been shit in the first place, so the dramatic news stories about crap the upper and middle classes are just now learning and caring about is boring as hell. Not to mention depressing. South Side Ministry Vows to End Hunger for Children on Summer Break. Great. Good you’re just now learning that’s a thing.

“Uhh, onions: yes or no?” Ian calls, leaning around the kitchen doorway. He itches at his nose with his forearm, his hands dirty from manually mixing a salad.

“No.”

“Not even red ones?”

“I hate onions.”

Ian shrugs. “Suit yourself.”

He leans back out of view and apparently resumes his work. Mickey flips the channel to a syndicated sitcom rerun and settles in to watch it.

But he hasn’t even had a chance to return his focus to the TV when a sharp noise comes from back in the bedroom, the prelude to a cry. Mickey swallows, heart working its way up into his throat.

Ian doesn’t hear it, as he keeps chopping away, the click, click, click sounds of the knife hitting the cutting board soothing and rhythmic in the background.

Mickey holds his breath. Waits.

He hopes Elle had only woken for a moment. Maybe she had a bad dream. Maybe the abrupt change in noise caused by Mickey switching TV channels startled her. Maybe she’ll go back to sleep.

No. No such luck. Within the span of twenty seconds, what began as a singular, cough-like ah sound has turned into a full-blown cry.

Mickey sits up on the couch at the same moment that Ian steps into the kitchen doorway, hands still covered in bits of chopped vegetables. And God, he looks happy--happy to hear the annoying-ass sound of a crying baby, like just the reminder that she exists has boosted his spirits.

“She’s awake,” he notes, and yeah, no shit, genius.

Ian looks to his hands and then looks to Mickey, and Mickey knows what’s coming before it even leaves Ian’s lips:

“Will you get her?”

Mickey knows he must look like a deer in headlights.

It’s a simple thing he’s been asked to do: pick up the crying baby. Hold her. Rock her. He’s done it a million times with Yevgeny. Hell, he’s done it with Jack on the occasions in which Ian and Mickey found themselves babysitting him.

He can do it because it ain’t that fucking hard.

Except the only thing he can do right now is breathe in hard puffs out his nose because Ian’s asked him to get their tiny daughter--to comfort her as a dad, not as an uncle the kid sees once a week.

Dads are supposed to hold their babies close. Kiss their head. Rub their back. Sing to them.

Mickey’s eyes water again--stupid, stupid--and instead of getting up off the couch, he just sits there on the edge, puts his head between his knees, and presses his palms over his eyes.

“Mickey? You okay?”

The baby fucking wails--the worst, loudest baby cry he’s ever heard, like lying in the dim light of a perfectly good bedroom on a cloud mattress, wrapped up in a fleece blanket is the most terrible thing she’s ever experienced.

Kramer on Seinfeld says something ridiculous and a laugh track goes wild.

Vaguely, Mickey hears the sound of the kitchen sink turning on. Ian washing his hands. His head swims.

There’s a pound on the wall from next door. Fucking Blanco being a bitch again. What? They can’t fuck loudly, they can’t listen to music with the volume all the way up, they can’t have a baby in their own fucking apartment they’re paying a thousand bucks a month for? Fuck that.

Mickey feels the adrenaline in his arms again, sizzling down to his fists. He wants to punch. He wants to beat the shit out of his fucking neighbor who thinks he’s too good for them, hoity-toity motherfucker with the Siamese cats and the silent fucking wife and kid who don’t make a fucking sound.

He gets up, and he’s breathing hard. He thinks… He thinks maybe he’s having a panic attack. He flexes his fists.

“Mickey. Mickey.”

He smells Ian before he sees him. He smells like fucking onion because he didn’t listen and put onions in their salad anyway and no amount of washing his hands with citrus soap can cover up the evidence.

Elle cries and cries.

“Hey, hey, hey,” Ian murmurs, so soft Mickey has to strain to hear it over the rest of the sound filling the apartment. “Mickey. Breathe.”

Hands press to his shoulders. Squeeze. He smells Ian’s breath. He’s been eating the cherry tomatoes as he puts them in the salad, and it’s given it a weird, acidic smell.

Mickey wiggles his shoulders, pulling away.

“Mickey.”

“Will you leave me the fuck alone?”

Mickey has desires to leave the apartment, to go to some large, open, air-conditioned space that isn’t loud, loud, loud and that isn’t so small that it overheats when the oven’s on and that doesn’t smell like onions and tomato breath and Chicken Cordon Bleu without the ham.

There’s nowhere to go, though. That place doesn’t exist. And anyway, he can’t. He doesn’t think that he can physically move much further than a few steps toward the door.

Ian’s hands go to his shoulders again, and he squirms back, trying to get away again, but Ian pulls him in tight and presses their foreheads together.

“Breathe,” he murmurs. He breathes in Mickey’s face--iiiiiiin, oooooout, slow. Regular.

Mickey fights back for a minute, not giving in, but Ian holds him more tightly, his hands moving from Mickey’s shoulders to the sides of his head. His thumbs stroke his cheeks, pushing the skin back toward his ears, and Mickey closes his eyes enough to focus on the warm puffs of breath beating out against his skin.

In, out. Iiiiiiiin, oooooout.

The baby cries, Blanco beats on the wall again, George says something awkward. Laugh track.

In, out.

Ian’s hands cup his ears. Move around to hold the back of his head. He stays with him. He makes sure he’s okay.

Mickey calms, the tightness in his chest dissipating, his breaths beginning to slow. The racing in his heart like he’s been running a marathon and the anxious thoughts bouncing around between his ears begin to leave him, draining out along with the breaths in his lungs.

In, out.

He relaxes, arms going from stiffly against his sides to around Ian’s middle. Ian kisses his head. Smells him. Pecks again at his eyebrow.

“Here,” he says, walking with Mickey back to the couch and helping him sit down. He picks up the remote and mutes the TV.

And he looks torn for a moment, eyes cutting to the hallway before landing back on Mickey’s face, but he eventually starts trying to sit down beside him.

Mickey shakes his head. Gives him a gentle shove. “Get the baby,” he says, words coming out gaspy as he still works to chill out. “She’s fucking loud. Blanco’s gonna stroke out.”

Ian smiles, relieved, and disappears to do just that.

Mickey expects Ian to bring her into the living room with them, but instead, he stays back in the bedroom, quieting her down. He hears faint murmurings as Ian talks to her. Something about a diaper. He hears the bathroom light flip on, the squeaky opening and closing of the cabinet beneath the sink. Humming.

He rubs his eyes, exhausted all of a sudden.

Ian says a sentence that includes “Daddy,” and Mickey hears the sccrrtch of the adhesive diaper tabs being pulled.

Elle’s settled down, making the occasional fussy sound every now and again but for the most part, her cries having ended.

God, that’s their kid. Ian and Mickey have a kid. Mickey’s expected to be a dad to that thing. He blows out a breath, shutting his eyes and trying to keep himself calm.

“I don’t know what the fuck’s the matter with me,” he says out loud. It comes out without a thought, and it shocks him to hear it leave his lips.

He’s not sure at first if Ian hears it, as there’s no response. He’s relieved, running his hands over his face again and breathing in slow, even sips.

But then, he hears the padding of sneakers on the floor. He waits. The noise travels around the living room, then makes its way to the couch. The left cushion sinks under the weight of a man and a baby.

Elle makes a snuffling noise, and Mickey opens his eyes to find Ian beside him holding the bundle in his left arm and the baby’s tiny hand in his right, thumb stroking across her wrinkly fingers and sharp nails.

Ian watches Elle’s face for the longest time, eyes and mouth soft with it. When he opens his mouth to speak, Mickey assumes he’s going to talk to her, but he doesn’t.

“When we were kids,” he starts, not looking at Mickey, focused only on their daughter. “I used to daydream about being with you forever.”

“Pssh.” Mickey gives him a look that he doesn’t catch, then turns away. “Lame.”

“Maybe. Still did, though.”

A beat.

“Used to dream about us getting an apartment together when we were older. Making money. Being happy.”

When Mickey doesn’t respond to that, Ian continues. “There were a few versions of the dream, y’know. It always changed over the years, especially when we got older. Became...fuckin’ felons.”

He’s smiling, Mickey can tell, so he looks at him to confirm it.

Yeah. He’s beautiful. Mickey’s cheeks begin to warm.

“But always, in every single dream, I wanted to be a dad with you.”

The last part of the sentence is laughed out like he’s embarrassed, his voice going weak.

“Shit was fucked up with Yevgeny. I loved him.” He swallows. That’s hard for him to say, considering. “And you were so good with him, Mickey. Just...so much awful shit was on you, and you fucking…provided for him and protected him.

“And for a while, y’know, I hoped maybe Svet would go back to Russia or something. I dunno. Maybe that’s fucked to say or whatever. But I hoped maybe that was our chance to be parents. But.”

But the most insane amount of shit happened next. Mental problems. Break-ups. Prison. Mickey turns back to Ian, who’s finally looking at him.

He doesn’t finish his thought and instead moves on. Mickey’s grateful for it, the thought of talking more about Yevgeny like torture.

“After everything,” Ian says, inching closer, closer until their shoulders are touching. “I always wanted to have a family with you.”

“I’m fucked up,” Mickey says, the first thing in several minutes. “I don’t know how to be a dad. I wasn’t one with Yev. Not for real.” He swallows. “And you’re just--”

“What? You think I know how to be a dad?”

“I mean. Obviously.” He waves to the calm baby in Ian’s arms. He’s let go of her hand, and now she’s bringing it to her mouth. She’s hungry.

Ian eyes Mickey, incredulous. Then understanding, a soft look passing over his face. “I was fourteen when Liam was born, and I just helped with him. Then there was Yev, and Svetlana had him a lot of the time. Mickey, this isn’t a situation of me knowing what I’m doing and you...not. I’ve never had a baby completely dependent on me before. This is fucking scary.”

He doesn’t get it. He’s trying, but he doesn’t understand. Mickey huffs a frustrated breath and turns on the couch, facing him.

“You’re a fuckin’...natural, though. You’re so loving and shit. I’m not…like that, I’m--”

“Mickey, shut the fuck up.”

“You shut the fuck up.” He looks up at the ceiling, exasperated, breath picking up again. “We got this kid this morning, and all day, you’ve been fucking…smiling and shit, and all I’ve wanted to do was punch something.”

He presses his palms over his eyes again, feeling the stupid tears cropping up because he’s a fucking pussy who’s too chickenshit to be a dad, too abnormal to be happy about having a baby.

“You’ve been like, cuddling her and shit, and I had a fucking breakdown in the Target parking lot and then went to the bar, and--”

Ian wraps his free arm around Mickey’s neck, pulling him in.

“Will you stop fucking hugging me?”

Ian squeezes harder. “No. I love you.”

Mickey struggles for a minute, half-heartedly, then lets himself relax into his husband, resting his forehead on his shoulder for a moment before turning his face to press against his neck.

“Asshole,” he murmurs against his skin.

Ian’s arm loosens now that he knows Mickey’s relaxed. He cups the back of his neck and strokes the skin and the hairs at his nape.

“You wanna know a big reason why I’ve always wanted to have a family with you?” he asks, voice cotton-soft.

Mickey sniffs. Doesn’t respond.

Ian waits, but when he’s sure nothing’s coming, says, “Because I knew you’d be an amazing dad.”

“Fuck you.”

“I’m serious.”

Mickey feels a press of lips against the top of his head. A whisper of a kiss.

“All I can think when I picture you with a kid is you loving the hell out of it. Like, playing games with it. Holding it when it’s scared of the dark. Saying it doesn’t have to be afraid of the monster under the bed and that the monster under the bed should be afraid of you ‘cause you’d kick its ass.”

Mickey chuckles into Ian’s neck in spite of himself.

“Just today, I was thinking about her playing soccer or something when she’s six, and you yelling out like, ‘The ref’s a little bitch!’”

Okay. Fine. Mickey snorts at that. Pulls back out of Ian’s hug but doesn’t move away too much. “Well if it’s a bad call, the ref is a little bitch.”

“If the call goes against her, it’s always gonna be a bad call.”

Mickey shrugs, and Ian smiles at him.

The moment settles around them, tense but beginning to loosen.

He appreciates Ian. He knows what he’s doing, but he appreciates it all the same. He desperately wants to believe him.

“What if I can’t do it?” he asks before pressing his lips into a tight line.

“What if I can’t?”

“You can.”

“So can you.”

Mickey sighs. Frustrating motherfucker.

“Do you want to do it?” Ian asks, voice sterner than it’s been the whole conversation. He watches Mickey’s eyes carefully, going from one to the other.

Mickey bites the insides of his cheeks.

It’s embarrassing, but fuck. He forked over five grand that morning without a second thought. He could’ve said no and walked away and would’ve never had to experience any of what he’s experienced today.

He swallows heavily. Looks at Elle, who’s dozing again, her tiny, lilac eyelids fluttering. She’s going to have long eyelashes, Mickey can tell.

She’s beautiful.

“Yeah,” he says weakly, and his bottom lip shakes.

And he fucking cries like a giant pussy, quickly swiping at his eyes to keep the tears at bay though he obviously knows Ian sees--is watching him carefully from a foot away.

God, he hates himself. He’s a fucking weak-ass bitch crying over wanting to be a dad. Crying over the fact that he loves his husband more than anything and wants to raise a little girl with him. Wants to play with her and protect her and fuck up anybody who says a mean word to her. He wants to love her, too.

“Fuck. Mickey.” Ian pulls him back in, and he kisses all over his face. His cheeks, his forehead, his closed eyelids.

He saves his mouth for last, planting sweet presses of kisses to his lips.

“I love you,” he says again, and Mickey nods, their foreheads together.

“Love you, too.”

It’s the sixth thing he’ll remember.

Ian loves his husband. Has loved him since he was fifteen, will love him until the day he dies. He knows everything about him: his strengths, his weaknesses, his quirks, his fears. He knows what makes him smile, what makes him laugh.

He knows when he’s excited about something. When he’s confused. When he’s nervous. Knows when he’s sad.

He knows when he’s uncomfortable.

He’s uncomfortable right now.

Mickey awkwardly loiters in the kitchen while Ian stuffs the chicken and then, as if not knowing what to do with himself, grabs a beer from the fridge and moves into the living room to watch TV.

Ian chops the salad, worrying hard enough to go through an entire head of lettuce and three carrots without even realizing he’d switched vegetables.

By the time he’s dumping the salad ingredients in a mixing bowl--including a sneaky bit of onion that Mickey probably won’t even notice--there’s a racket coming from the back room.

The baby’s crying.

In all the worry over his husband, he’d momentarily forgotten about her, and now, just the sound of her piercing cries--an awful fucking sound but also the most incredible--makes his heart pound and face light up with happiness.

His girl.

He looks down at his messy hands. Shakes them over the bowl to no avail. And he could obviously just wash them, but, well. He moves to the doorway and calls to Mickey.

“She’s awake!” He breathes a hopeful sigh. “Will you get her?”

Ian doesn’t know what he was expecting. A yes, a no. Either of them would’ve been more believable to him than what actually ends up happening.

Mickey, eyes wide at first like Ian’s asked him to go next door and invite Marissa to a threesome, makes a weird, breathy sound. He swallows hard, then gasps again, and his breaths begin to turn to pants.

Ian steps forward, two feet into the living room--just enough to see Mickey’s eyes fill with tears, the beautiful blues gleaming in the light of the TV.

His husband leans over then, dropping his head between his knees, and presses his palms over his eyes, his #1 tell that he’s crying. Ian knows that about him.

“Mickey?” he asks, concerned. “You okay?”

He doesn’t respond, and quickly, Ian turns back to the kitchen and washes the bits of vegetable off his hands at the sink and dries them on a paper towel.

It’s loud, the apartment noise seeming to grow by the second. Mr. Hernandez next door pounds on the wall because he’s snooty and straight-laced and doesn’t mind his own business.

By the time Ian’s back in the kitchen doorway, Mickey’s already up, and his breaths are coming so hard that Ian hears them over the sound of the baby crying and the TV blaring, and he’s worried he’s about to hyperventilate.

“Mickey. Mickey.”

He moves toward him at lightning speed, stands six inches away.

“Hey, hey, hey. Mickey. Breathe.”

He grabs him. Holds him tight. Mickey squirms away, though, and Ian lets him, not wanting to freak him out further.

He’s having a panic attack. Fuck.

They tussle. Mickey stands in the center of the living room gasping like he’s just run a mile, telling Ian to leave him alone. No way. No fucking way. Ian grabs him again, doesn’t let him go. Pulls their foreheads together and tries to help him breathe.

They’ve done this before. Mickey’s no stranger to panic attacks, and Ian’s no stranger to helping him through them. He used to get them back at the Milkovich house in the months following Yevgeny’s birth and christening. He’d wake in the middle of the night panting, and Ian would press their foreheads together and hold on to him, telling him to breathe, breathe, you’ve got this.

They never spoke of it. Mickey was always embarrassed afterward, and Ian never wanted to bring it up.

It’s happening again. He helps him through it in the same sort of way.

Breathe. Breathe.

In, out. In, out.

Mickey’s breath is bad. Ian doesn’t know if he’s eaten all day. Likely not, judging by the petrified Toaster Strudels on the coffee table he’d thrown away while Mickey was taking out the garbage.

Ian doesn’t care. He lets him breathe in his face because he’s breathing, and he loves him, and there is nothing more important in the world than him feeling better.

And after a few minutes of tensing and coaxing, their breaths finally aligning, Mickey seems to calm. He wraps his arms around Ian’s middle, and Ian kisses his head and his left eyebrow. He inhales his skin. Holds him close.

Together, they walk to the couch, and Ian helps him to sit, knowing he’s always exhausted afterward. He mutes the TV because Seinfeld is annoying as shit, and then wonders about the baby.

She’s screaming her lungs out. He doesn’t want to leave her alone to cry, mind going to a tiny baby crying herself to exhaustion in a nasty bathtub.

But just for a minute, maybe. Maybe he can help Mickey relax, then--

Mickey shoves him. “Get the baby,” he says, still out of breath. “She’s fucking loud. Blanco’s gonna stroke out.”

Ian smiles at him. God, he loves him.

---

In the bedroom, the baby’s red-faced and squirming, her little face nothing but a scrunch of forehead wrinkles, eyes squeezed shut, and mouth open to expose her gums as she wails so loud Ian’s eardrums sing.

“You are loud, little girl,” he murmurs, scooping her up and pulling her to his chest.

Her tiny body vibrates as she continues to scream, and Ian’s heart breaks at the sound even though he knows this is what babies do. He gently bounces her as he walks back and forth across the bedroom, hand on the back of her head, humming in an effort to calm her down.

It works--at least a little. The volume lowers.

“Shh, shh, shh,” he soothes, pressing her face to his neck so she’ll learn his smell, so she hopefully knows he’s safe and is there to protect. “You don’t gotta cry. I’m here. I’m here.”

After a minute, he lays her back down on the bed and unwraps the blanket, leaving her lying there naked save for the too-big diaper. She stretches out her arms and legs, glad to be free of the swaddle, and Ian smiles down at her even as she starts to whine again, little gaspy ah!’s threatening to turn once more to cries.

The diaper’s large enough that all he has to do is pull back the leg hole to see inside it. She’s a poop-machine, apparently. Whatever. So are her dads.

“Let’s get you a fresh diaper, little lady. Maybe one that actually fits this time.”

He grabs a diaper and a pack of wipes from beneath the bathroom sink, then sets in to change her.

“Your daddy poops a lot, too,” he says, pulling away the tabs and opening the diaper. He lowers his voice to a whisper. “Don’t tell him I told you that, though.”

She’s good as gold during, pulling her hand just beneath her chin and opening her mouth like she’s trying to eat it. She makes a cute gaspy noise at the damp babywipe, and Ian smiles down at her and presses a kiss to her wrinkly forehead.

One-handed, he tugs away the old diaper and shakes out a new one, holding her up by her legs and sliding it beneath. He’s just pulling the front of the diaper up and is about to work on getting it adjusted and closed when he hears from the living room something that makes his heart drop into his gut.

“I don’t know what the fuck’s the matter with me.”

Ian has loved Mickey Milkovich for twelve years. He’s been married to him for three. He has heard things come out of his mouth that have made him want to break down and cry for him.

Still, this is one of the saddest things he’s ever heard.

He finishes applying the baby’s diaper, wraps her up again in the blanket but keeps her arms free, and carries her into the living room.

Mickey’s still sitting there on the couch having not moved since Ian left him. He’s got his eyes closed and is running his hands over his face, breathing slowly like he’s afraid of getting worked up again.

Ian carries the baby over to the couch and sits down on the left side of him.

Maybe Ian should’ve known earlier. Probably. He’s loved Mickey long enough that he should be able to know what’s bothering him without being told. Maybe in the excitement over the little girl in his arms he’d assumed Mickey would be just as excited. Maybe he’d forgotten that things weren’t exactly solved that day in Kev and V’s living room, a hug and a You’ll be a great dad not the only thing he needed once reality hit.

Ian holds the baby’s hand, running his thumb over her tiny fingers, tiny nails. And with a deep breath, he tells Mickey more things he should know.

He confesses things he didn’t think he’d ever tell anyone. Things he thought would die with him. Those naive musings of a lonely kid that, in retrospect, don’t seem so naive now that he’s got his job and his steady income. His husband and his baby.

He never thought he’d tell anyone about them, but he’s glad he’s doing it now. Mickey deserves to know just how long Ian’s been thinking about this--just how long he’s loved him so deeply, so entirely. Just how much faith in him he truly has.

Things get tense when he brings up Yev. Maybe he shouldn’t have brought him up to begin with, but more than anything, he wants Mickey to know that he was a great dad to him despite not having to be. It would’ve been completely reasonable of him to run away and never look back. To refuse to have any role in the life of the kid that, while beautiful and deserving of love and loved so desperately by Ian, was the product of an absolute violation of his body that makes Ian sick to remember. Even still, Mickey held him, made money for him, asked after him and protected him, all without obligation. He was there. He had every right to not be, but he was, anyway.

It didn’t occur to Ian until many years later--when he grew up and learned more about the world and about rape and trauma--that it probably killed Mickey to be around Yev sometimes, even though he pretended otherwise because the baby didn’t do anything wrong. Yevgeny was the beautiful, innocent product of something horrible, and Mickey knew that and didn’t punish him for it.

Ian lets the Yev conversation slip between his fingers. A continuation of it would lead to nothing but pain.

He looks into Mickey’s eyes. Loves him so much he could die with it.

“After everything,” he says, scooting closer. “I always wanted to have a family with you.”

Mickey looks heartbroken for a moment, his face crumpling in a way that makes Ian’s own heart break in two.

“I’m fucked up,” Mickey murmurs. “I don’t know how to be a dad. I wasn’t one with Yev. Not for real.” He swallows. “And you’re just--”

“What? You think I know how to be a dad?”

“I mean. Obviously.” Mickey waves in the baby’s direction, and Ian eyes him because it’s ridiculous, really. Ian’s never been a dad. He’s never had a tiny, vulnerable little girl to protect and grow into a strong, healthy person.

But he knows Mickey knows that. He doesn’t mean that. Ian’s face softens.

His sniffs and says, “I was fourteen when Liam was born, and I just helped with him. Then there was Yev, and Svetlana had him a lot of the time. Mickey, this isn’t a situation of me knowing what I’m doing and you...not. I’ve never had a baby completely dependent on me before. This is fucking scary.”

It is. It’s the scariest thing in the world. All of that fear is just dulled right now because he’s so excited, and he knows that in a few days, once the jittery smiles have worn off, they’ll be replaced by nerves, by Am I doing this right? and What if I’m not what she needs? and How do I make sure she’s always safe and happy and knows she’s loved?

Mickey blows out a breath. Annoyed.

“You’re a fuckin’...natural, though,” he counters. “You’re so loving and shit. I’m not…like that, I’m--”

“Mickey, shut the fuck up.”

Jesus Christ. Mickey’s the most loving person he’s ever known. The way he loves. Ian could never compete.

But all Mickey says in response is, “You shut the fuck up. We got this kid this morning, and all day, you’ve been fucking…smiling and shit, and all I’ve wanted to do was punch something.”

He presses his palms over his eyes again, and Ian wants to squeeze the life out of him.

“You’ve been like, cuddling her and shit, and I had a fucking breakdown in the Target parking lot and then went to the bar, and--”

Ian wraps his arm around his neck and pulls him close. Tight.

“Will you stop fucking hugging me?”

Ian squeezes harder. “No. I love you.”

He loves him so much he can’t stand it, and it kills him that he thinks he won’t be a good father. It’s so completely false. Nothing could be further from the truth. If Ian’s learned anything in the two years since they first had that conversation, it’s that Mickey Milkovich is the most beautiful person he’s ever known, and any kid that will ever get to call him “Dad” will be the luckiest kid in the world.

After a minute of struggle, Mickey relaxes against him. Calls him “Asshole.”

Ian relaxes his grip on him and drags his hand to the back of his neck, rubbing at him.

“You wanna know a big reason why I’ve always wanted to have a family with you?” he asks, this confession as necessary as breathing.

When Mickey doesn’t answer with anything but a warm huff of breath against his neck, he adds, “Because I knew you’d be an amazing dad.”

“Fuck you.”

“I’m serious.”

Ian presses a kiss to his head. He can’t help it. He can’t help it at all.

And he proceeds to tell him about his dreams for him as a dad. How great he’ll be. All the sweet things he imagines. All the funny things. The games. The protectiveness. The sports.

His heart lights up as they talk about it, as Mickey huffs laughs against his skin and looks somewhat happy for the first time all day.

But then, after a moment of quiet, when they’ve settled into the moment, Mickey asks, voice filled with a worry that sinks in Ian’s belly, “What if I can’t do it?”

It shouldn’t even be a question.

“What if I can’t?” he counters.

“You can.”

“So can you.”

Mickey sighs, and Ian wants to smile at him. Doesn’t.

Instead, he asks the most important question of all--the only one that matters.

“Do you want to do it?”

Mickey swallows heavily, and his eyes wander to the baby in Ian’s arms. She’s half-asleep again, has seemingly decided she’s safe enough not to be awake all the time now that she’s been with them for most of the day.

Ian sees the gears turning in Mickey’s head. He waits. Patient.

Finally, sending the strongest wave of relief crashing overtop Ian, Mickey murmurs, soft, soft, “Yeah.”

And then he cries.

Ian loves him with every ounce of his being. He pulls him back in. Kisses his face. His cheeks. His mouth. Over and over.

I love you I love you I love you I love you.

“I love you,” he says, pressing their foreheads together. The feeling is overwhelming. All-encompassing. Is the same as when he was fifteen and thought he could cry with love, like it took up so much space inside him that he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t feel anything else, didn’t want to feel anything else.

Mickey is his and he’s perfect and beautiful, and they have a little girl that they’re going to raise and love and who’s going to grow up knowing that her parents are it for each other and have been since they were scrappy kids in a bedroom, fighting over a tire iron.

He feels Mickey’s forehead slide against his as he nods. As he says, “Love you, too.”

Ian kisses him again, smooth and slow. Rubs their noses together, back and forth.

---

The oven timer goes off a minute later. Ian huffs a laugh in Mickey’s face, and Mickey tells him his breath smells weird.

Yeah, okay, Mickey. Whatever. Ian shoves him and smiles, so in love his stomach hurts.

He stands with the baby. Her little eyes have peeped open just a crack at the movement from her dads kissing and hugging.

“Hey,” he says, peering down at her for a moment and then at his husband. Mickey knows what’s coming. He already looks unsure.

Ian smiles, reassuring him. “The only reason you haven’t been cuddling her all day is because you haven’t gotten to hold her for real yet.” He bends and holds her out for Mickey to take. “Hold her while I get the chicken out of the oven?”

Mickey swallows heavily but takes her.

For as long as he lives. Ten, twenty, thirty, fifty years into the future, Ian will never forget the sight of Mickey first holding their beautiful daughter.

They have a lot to do. A lot to prepare. They have to get the crib from the house, introduce her to the family, figure out illegal ways to get her legal. Take her to the doctor. Find a bigger and better place to live. Fill a room with things just for her.

They have time.

For now, Ian’s going to enjoy his first night with his family in their cramped little West Side apartment. He’s going to fix the baby a bottle and then himself and his husband dinner, peering out the kitchen doorway every couple minutes to watch the love of his life feed their baby. He’s going to bring their plates into the living room so they can eat without putting her down. And later, he and his husband are going to give their girl her first bath, put her in pajamas, and get her to sleep.

And then they’re going to love her for the rest of their days.

Elle’s lighter than Mickey remembers, just as she’s tinier than he remembers every time he sees her again after leaving the room. She’s the smallest baby he’s ever seen, he thinks--at least in real life. Maybe 18 inches. Short.

Shit, she’s going to be short, isn’t she? She’s inherited the Milkovich short genes. Guess it’s okay for a girl, though. Girls aren’t going to get bullied for being 5’1” like boys get bullied for barely reaching 5’7.”

Anyway, if anybody bullies her for anything, Mickey will kill them. He knows that already, peering down into her half-lidded eyes.

He exhales heavily.

Shit.

He’d told Ian yeah, he wants to try being a dad. He wants to try everything dads are supposed to do. Mostly, he wants to believe everything Ian said about him. He’s not sure if he can, but he will try.

It’s scary as hell, his stomach twisting at the thought. The stone’s still there, he thinks. He thinks it’ll always be there, at least a little, always that niggling worry, always that fear that he’s fucking up, that he’s not being what Elle needs, that he can’t do this even though Ian’s explicitly told him that this is something they can do, something they can have, just like they can have an expensive-ass toaster oven, an SUV, and Whole Foods produce.

He looks down at his baby, his girl, he guesses, the little thing he hopes he can love and that he hopes will love him back.

“Hi,” he whispers, touching her tiny fingers. They’re so delicate. So baby-pruny and little. She grips his index finger, and his heart pounds.

It’s the seventh thing he’ll remember.

---

Ian brings him a bottle. Mickey’s caught him peeking at them from the doorway--sometimes covertly, sometimes not. His face has gone red with it, embarrassed, but Ian apparently likes what he sees, so he tries not to let it get to him. He’s just holding a baby.

Mickey takes the bottle when offered. Stares at it.

He knows how bottles work; he’s not a fucking numbnuts. But he’s never actually fed a baby a bottle before. Svetlana got her tits out every opportunity she could--was into the nursing thing for health reasons or whatever. Other than Yev, it’s not like Mickey’s had many opportunities to feed a baby.

“She knows what to do,” Ian says gently, nodding his head in Elle’s direction.

Mickey sighs heavily. Okay. Here goes nothing.

He presses the nipple to Elle’s slightly parted lips. It’s like poking fruitlessly at her gums for a few seconds, but eventually she catches on to what’s happening and latches to the bottle. She sucks hard to the point of making noises, eyes bright and focused on Mickey, who leans in a little so she can see him better.

“God, I love you,” Ian says, watching unashamedly from a few feet away. “You’re so hot.”

Mickey snorts and lifts his middle finger away from the bottle until Ian catches it, laughs, and returns to the kitchen.

---

They have dinner together at the coffee table. Ian takes Elle from Mickey, burps her, and finishes feeding her while Mickey eats, and then they switch.

Babies are boring as shit. They don’t really do anything, even while they’re awake. It’s warm in the apartment, so they take Elle out of the blanket and lay her vertically on Mickey’s lap, her little feet against his belly.

She’s cute as shit, moving her arms and legs in jerky motions like she’s just learning how. Mickey touches her little belly and her bony knees and lets her hold on to both of his index fingers, moving his hands gently apart and then closer to her chest so that she’s doing slow push-up motions.

She does smell like a porta-john, the shit and piss smell from earlier still clinging to her skin like she’s been in filth for so long she’s absorbed it.

When Ian’s done with his dinner, they grab the baby tub, fill it up with a few inches of water, and set it on the living room floor.

“Bath time, stinky girl,” Ian sings-songs in a high voice, removing her diaper and laying her in the sling portion of the tub.

And no matter what Mickey said earlier just to be a deliberate dick, Elle most certainly has never had a real bath like this--at least one that she can remember. The water is warm and comfortable, but she makes loud gaspy noises every time the water touches her, her eyes going wide and mouth opening, showing her gums and tongue.

Ian pulls his phone out of his pocket and films it, having Mickey pour a cup of water across her belly, rinsing away the suds. He’s beautiful and pink-cheeked, and Mickey can’t help but tilt his head back for a smiling kiss after he stops the video with a grin that lights him up so bright it’s nearly blinding.

They wash Elle with Baby Magic that smells just as Mickey remembered. Wash her hair, too, which looks even longer wet. It’s baby-thin but there’s a ton of it, most growing from the center of her head rather than the edges, and wet it comes across as one dark-brown ponytail that would hang over her forehead if it were brushed that way.

Mickey holds her, her head tilted back, as Ian scoops up water and, using his hand to block it from getting in her eyes, rinses out her hair. She gasps at that, too, and Mickey tries not to react though his heart feels like it’s going to beat its way out of his chest.

After her bath, they dry her off and let her stretch out naked on the bed for a few minutes, kicking out her arms and legs. She pees on the towel two minutes later.

Whatever. Let her. For all Mickey knows, it’s her first night not sleeping in a tub. She can piss wherever she wants.

They do try to get a diaper on her before she decides she has to shit again, then they lotion her down and put her in the teal gown.

Ian takes a thousand pictures of her lying on the comforter--turns it into a whole fucking photoshoot, even going so far as to stand on the bed so he can get a full shot of her from above.

“This is fucking embarrassing,” Mickey comments, watching his dumbass of a husband move around the bedroom like a lunatic, turning her on her side and then her belly so he can get different shots.

“Hush. You’re gonna thank me in thirteen years when she’s decided she hates us and all we have are pictures of her being cute to remember her by.”

“Jesus Christ. I’m getting a beer. Want one?”

“Thanks.”

Mickey rolls his eyes and leaves him to his pictures.

They bring her back to the couch after the photoshoot. Ian holds her in his left arm and drinks a beer with his right, and Mickey drinks his own beer with his feet propped on the coffee table and his left arm between the couch and Ian’s back, wrapped around him from behind.

He’s leaned close, against his side. When Ian’s finished with the beer, he’ll put it down and will instead pull Mickey all the way in, and then it’ll be the three of them, just as he wanted, his girl in his left arm and his man in his right.

For now, though, they relax and drink. Mickey gets up at one point and grabs the package of mint Oreos they’ve been working on all week, and they finish them off while watching TV and making casual comments about their baby.

---

“Do we need to put ointment on her neck rash?”

---

“We need to get a carseat. Were there any good ones at Target?”

---

“Lip’s gonna shit himself when he sees her.”

“No, I don’t think so. Debbie’s gonna shit herself.”

---

“Her second toe’s longer than her big toe.”

“Yeah. Why, is that fucked up?”

“I dunno. Google that shit.”

...

“It’s normal.”

---

“What does Coop look like?”

---

“Did you see the birthmark on her hip?”

---

“I love you.”

“Yeah. You, too.”

“You’re gonna be a great dad, man.”

“We’re gonna be great dads.”

“Psh.”

“Yep. I’m not takin’ no for an answer. Suck it up, buttercup.”

“Suck my dick, butter…”

“Butterrrrr…?”

“Shut up. Fuck you.”

---

“Hey.”

“Hm?”

“Her name’s Elle, by the way.”

“Elle? Like E-L-L-E?”

“Yeah. I mean, if you want.”

“Elle. It’s nice. Pretty.”

“It’s apparently French.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. ‘s’what Taylor at the bar said.”

“Wait. Did you name her without telling me?”

“I dunno. Maybe.”

“So you’ve been like, calling her Elle in your head all night?”

“Yeah. Why? What’ve you been calling her?”

“Uh. ‘The baby.’ Her. She.”

“You were kinda right. Elle means ‘she’ in French. I Googled it.”

“Elle Milkovich.”

“Elle Gallagher.”

“Elle Gallagher-Milkovich. She needs a middle name.”

“Come up with something.”

“‘kay. I will. Since you chose her first name without telling me for like, eight hours.”

“Don’t choose anything lame.”

“I won’t. It’s gonna be the best middle name in the world.”

“Uh huh. I’m holding you to that shit.”

“Do it. C’mere.”

Mickey smiles exasperatedly. Huffs a happy breath. He sets the empty package of Oreos on the coffee table beside Ian’s beer bottle and scoots closer, Ian’s arm going around his shoulder.

Elle’s asleep again, her little mouth sweetly open.

“She sleeps like you,” Mickey comments fondly, and Ian turns his head and kisses his face.

“I just felt her fart like five times against my hand, so I’m pretty sure she sleeps like you.”

“Maybe she has the Milkovich dairy allergy.”

“I’m pretty sure she’s just gassy ‘cause she’s a baby, and since when is there a Milkovich dairy allergy?”

Mickey shrugs. “I dunno. Since forever. You didn’t know that?”

“That you’re lactose intolerant? No?”

“Yeah.”

“And you just eat dairy anyway.”

“Whatever. You only live once.”

“That’s why you get a stomach-ache every time you eat cheese. You know that, right?”

Mickey makes a jerk-off motion with his hand, and Ian looks at him disapprovingly.

The baby shifts in her sleep, and the two of them turn their attention back to her.

Gassy or not, she’s cute. Even cuter now that she’s had a thorough bath. Now that her hair’s been washed, it’s fluffed up on top, the shorter hairs above her ears curling upward in tiny wisps and the longer bit appearing thicker and shiny in its clean, ungreased state.

Ian leans down and kisses her forehead, right at the edge of her hair. “Welcome home, Elle,” he says in a gentle voice, a smile working its way onto his mouth. “Hope you like it here.”

Mickey leans closer, reaching out with his right hand to rub his thumb against the space between her eyes. “Everybody’s fuckin’ nuts. You got a buncha aunts, uncles, and cousins. Annoying as shit. Fight all the time.”

“Yeah. That’s true.” Ian pauses, running his palm over her hair. “But we’re all gonna love you.”

That’s one thing you can’t deny. The Gallaghers fucking love each other, and they’re going to love Elle.

Mickey doesn’t know if she’ll ever have a relationship with anyone in his family. It’s too soon to know anything, really. Maybe one day Mandy will show up. Maybe Iggy or Colin. He wouldn’t hate them knowing her, if only just a little. Of the Milkoviches, they were never the worst.

“Wanna hold her?” Ian asks, removing his arm from around Mickey’s shoulders and preparing to hand her over.

Mickey holds out his arms.

He kisses her for the first time once she’s situated--presses a peck to the center of her forehead. She has that signature baby smell from her bath, and Mickey breathes her for a moment before pulling away.

Ian takes his left hand. Kisses it. Holds it, lacing their fingers together.

It’s the eighth thing he’ll remember.

Mickey looks at his family. His husband. His daughter. All beautiful. Everything he never thought he’d have in a million fucking years when he was a gay teenager growing up South Side, having to beat or be beaten, never daring to imagine a future in which he could have a life of love and safety. Never daring to imagine that one of his biggest problems would be stressing over having to move again--maybe into a house, this time. Would be worrying about giving the little girl in his arms the best life he can give her, about being a good dad even though he’s not sure he has what it takes.

He’ll fuck up. He knows he will. But he’s got Ian, and Ian’s going to tell him every fucking day that he’s going to be a good dad, that he is a good dad, and maybe one day he’ll believe him.

Mickey peers down into his daughter’s face. She scrunches up her nose, bares her gums like she’s going to cry, then settles down again, all in her sleep. He smiles at her.

In ten, twenty, thirty years, he’ll remember, he’ll remember, he’ll remember. He’ll remember it all.

He doesn’t know what the future holds. He doesn’t know just yet what he can or can’t do.

One thing he does know, though, is that he’s gonna try. He’ll commit himself to that.

For now, he’s going to relax here with his husband and their daughter. He’s going to bask in them. In the light. In the bright.