Chapter Text
Ian had gotten good at palming a candy bar without Kash noticing. He’d done it so many times he could almost convince himself that Kash didn’t know, but deep down he figured the older man saw everything that moved in his store. Ian knew that he wasn’t exactly making it subtle anymore as he slid a Snickers into his sleeve while he was restocking the shelves, unwrapping it with one tug of his teeth, and chewing it slowly while he drifted down the aisles with empty boxes to throw into the alley.
Kash never said a word though, never charged him, and when he glanced up from the counter there was always something watchful in his eyes, not disapproving, but not indulgent either, rather just that he was there. Sometimes, if Kash seemed to believe that he’d had too many snacks during his shift, the older man would tap the hard-sided black kit that Linda made Ian put up on the back counter of the Kash & Grab when he arrived, reminding him that his blood glucose meter was always there, always behind the register, a little nudge for Ian to test before he left.
Ian pretended to be annoyed by it, but the truth was he liked the attention.
He liked someone looking out for him who wasn’t Lip.
It hadn’t always been like this, automatic and only twinged with the slightest hints of shame. Ian could still remember, however fuzzy it was, the first time he got sick, truly sick, the condition that he could never truly run from making itself known when he was seven.
Sitting at the sticky kitchen table with the sunlight burning through the messy Gallagher windows in the heat of the summer, Ian remembered reaching for the cereal box they were going to eat from for lunch. His hand had barely brushed the cardboard before everything around him went sharp, then blurry, then nothing at all.
He woke to Fiona’s screaming, Monica’s increasingly useless panic, and the whole kitchen tilting or spinning around him. While Ian had felt awful for weeks leading up to that afternoon, awful was normal in their house. Headaches, exhaustion, being thirsty all the time, Ian thought it was just the summer flu that he got every year, something that would burn itself out if he toughed it out long enough. Everyone got sick sometimes, and there’d even been talk at the pool about something going around, and Ian was fairly sure that he’d just caught it. Nothing serious. Nothing special.
That morning, they’d been outside playing in the pool, and while the sun was already beating down hard enough to burn, Ian couldn’t stop shivering. He’d dug one of his winter shirts out from the back of his dresser and tugged it on when he and Lip were upstairs changing into their trunks, and even though the shirt clung to him weirdly the second it got wet, it at least hid the goosebumps that prickled his arms.
Tony and his brother had come over, Tony for Fiona, and his little brother because the Markoviches couldn’t afford a sitter. Usually, Ian loved it when Tony was around. He had thought it was the coolest thing in the world that Fiona’s friend was on the police cadets, that one day Tony might have a badge and a gun and so he’d pepper Tony with questions until Fiona or Lip dragged him off, unable to stop himself from asking about the academy, the drills, the uniforms.
But not that day. That day the sun felt too bright, his head too foggy, his stomach too twisted, and instead he sat on the shallowest rung of the ladder letting the others splash around him, too out of it to care. His body felt like it belonged to someone else, heavy and shaky all at once.
At one point, Tony waded over, slouching against the ladder as water droplets fell from his hair, asking, “hey, you good, kid?” his voice low in that way adults used when they were serious, “you eat enough breakfast?”
Ian blinked up at him, brain sluggish. He tried to remember breakfast, but the memory slipped sideways, all jumbled and blurred. Maybe there’d been cereal, maybe toast, but he couldn’t tell if it had actually happened or if he was just picturing it. His throat was too dry to explain any of that, though, so he managed a nod and muttered, “yeah, just a summer cold.”
Not even an hour later, lying on their kitchen floor, too weak to sit up, Ian wasn’t considering much other than the fact that his mouth tasted like pennies and his stomach was twisted up in knots. He could hear Fiona yelling at Monica to do something and Monica crying louder instead, the sound so far away that it almost didn’t matter. It was Tony’s voice that cut through the growing hysteria, barking out instructions, demanding an ambulance.
And Ian, small and scared and fading in and out, couldn’t figure out what he’d done wrong to make everyone lose their minds around him. All he’d wanted was his bowl of cereal for lunch.
Later came the sterile walls of County and the endless parade of needles, the nurses’ instructions about blood sugar, carb counts, insulin ratios - all numbers that just rattled off like multiplication tables, as though any of it could sink into the mind of a kid who wanted to run in the alley with Lip and forget about food, or medicine, or doctors who looked at him like he was already too far gone.
He’d sat swamped in that hospital bed with Lip sat at his feet as the nurses pressed handouts into Fiona’s arms, packets full of charts and grids with boxes for target ranges, each one making her eyes go glassy because the Gallaghers had never before had to live by charts or ranges. They lived by what was in the fridge and how long it could last.
Learning how to stick himself was its own war. Ian’s fingers were small, clumsy, and not made for lancets. The first time, the nurse took his hand and guided him through it, telling him to squeeze until the drop of blood rose fat and red, but Ian flinched so hard it spattered onto the table. Lip cracked a joke about crime scenes, trying to break the tension, but it’d only caused the nurse to look at them like they needed a call to CFS.
After that, Lip started calling it “pokey time,” like it was a game, but the sting never dulled and rather, Ian would sit there, jaw clenched, watching the tiny bead of blood spread until the meter beeped, tattling on him with its inevitable reading. Too high, too low, but never just right.
The injections were worse. Fiona tried to be brave for him, steadying his hands when he shook, showing him how to pinch the skin of his stomach just so. Sometimes she couldn’t watch, and instead handed him off to V, who’d sit beside him on the couch, making exaggerated faces and noises until Ian pressed the needle into his side, quick and shallow. The insulin burned as it slid under the skin, a slow fire that never felt normal, no matter how many times he did it. Sometimes, even if it didn’t really hurt anymore, Ian cried anyway, hot tears of frustration because it wasn’t fair, because it hurt, because they never had enough of anything and now, he was just another place that their money had to spread to cover.
Those early days when Ian really had no grasp of how serious, how bad things had got, or how bad they could get, V was always coming over with juice boxes hidden in her purse or strings of glucose tablets from the ward at Cook County. She would check to make sure he was doing his injections and testing correctly, and would whisper encouragement when his hands wouldn’t stop trembling, but perhaps most importantly, she never made him feel like a burden. It was a game, and for a while, V treated it like they were on some secret mission together, and when he was small enough to still believe in magic, it worked.
The magic, like most things on the South Side, dulled pretty quickly.
Ian had to admit though, he had learned the language faster than he wanted to. Even though he’d never been the best at math, Lip had shown him over and over how to do his carb counts, the two of them scrawling the numbers onto the back of receipts, while V had reminded him that juice boxes could be medicine in the middle of the night, and even though the sugar tablets left chalk on his tongue, they were a better rescue than the freshest Sunny D. On his own, Ian learned how far a vial of insulin could stretch if he was careful, if he used the smallest dose he could get away with, if he let himself run low and promised to eat later. He got a grip on the differences between fast-acting and long-acting insulin, though he only understood them as “the one that works now” and “the one that keeps you alive while you sleep.”
Even then there were weeks - months - when money vanished into bills or booze and suddenly there wasn’t enough left for his meds. Fiona would bargain with the pharmacist, sometimes walk out with fewer vials than Ian was supposed to have. Lip took to counting the little glass containers with him as they put them in the fridge, whispering the final tally like it was contraband, and figuring out how many days they could stretch it before Ian went without.
Then came the quiet terror of rationing, shooting less than he needed and waking up drenched in sweat, heart hammering from a low that could’ve kept him from ever waking up at all. That was when Ian learned, under Lip’s watchful eye, how to steal from ambulances. Not in some big, clever heist, but rather just slipping through an unlocked door behind the hospital or while a crew was on a call in the neighbourhood, fingers shaking as he rifled through cabinets until he found the bright orange glucose tabs, an extra syringe or two, perhaps even a vial of insulin if he was particularly lucky. Ian only tried to take enough to hold him over, enough to keep him upright at school the next day, but never enough that it would be missed. Never enough to cause red-flags to go up in the ambulance service, and never enough for them to start locking stuff up more carefully.
Ian hated the way his stomach knotted every time, hated the fear of getting caught, but the wild oscillations between hunger and low blood sugar were worse. It made him feel like he was drowning from the inside out.
Now he was fifteen, and Ian liked to think he had it figured out. His fingers knew the dance of lancet and strip without looking, his brain could tally carbs faster than Lip could get the first question of an SAT answered. He had his pump clipped to the waistband of his jeans, the lump carefully hidden by the baggy fall of whatever plaid he’d chosen that day, and Ian just tried to keep telling himself that he was fine.
More than fine.
He was tough, Kash would remind him, tougher than anyone gave him credit for.
He tore into another Snickers and caught Kash’s glance from the counter. The man nodded at the meter, like always. Ian sighed, rolled his eyes, but slid it into his pocket on the next pass anyway. He’d check before he left.
“Test, stay level, and don’t be stupid,” V’s voice echoed in his head.
Ian groaned and dragged his feet about it, making a show only because there was something satisfying in being watched by Kash, in being cared for just enough that someone noticed when he forgot. It wasn’t like Fiona had the time or the patience these days, and Lip’s brand of attention was a whole different can of worms. Kash was steady, Kash wanted him alive, wanted him well, and that alone made Ian want to come back again and again, circling the aisles like a stray cat that had found a place it believed that it might belong.
It was stupid, probably, how much he craved the pride in Kash’s eyes when he got something right. Like the day Ian mentioned leading the ROTC camping trip and Kash lit up, clapping him on the shoulder with a grin that made Ian’s chest warm, or the quiet praise when Ian tested his blood sugar without being asked, as if he’d done something extraordinary instead of just stabbing his finger like he’d done a thousand times before. To Kash, he wasn’t a problem to be managed, not the kid brother or the forgotten Gallagher, but as someone worth noticing. That feeling, that maybe Ian was the center of somebody’s universe, even briefly, was intoxicating.
And then there was the backroom, the hush of the front door of the store locking, the hum of the refrigerator units surrounding them, Kash’s steady hands closing in on him like he was something precious instead of disposable. Ian’s pulse always jumped, part nerves, part exhilaration, part the simple miracle of being chosen. He hadn’t been chosen for much in fifteen years, maybe for chores, maybe for blame, but never for this, never for affection.
As wrong as Ian knew it was, that an adult, a married man, had chosen him, Ian couldn’t let it go, couldn’t stop coming back to Kash, day after day. Some nights, after he got back late from doing inventory at the store, Ian would lie in the bed in the room he shared with his brothers and think back to that first time he was sick in the kitchen, marveling that he was still here at all. Every candy bar he stole, every test strip he wasted, every stolen kiss in the Kash and Grab backroom felt like a kind of rebellion against that awful summer as he promised that kid that he wasn’t going anywhere.
Not yet. Not if he could help it.