#anyhow so uh perhaps i ghosted him for a month straight (so i am at fault too)

[gallavictorious]

Fic: Foreign Country

For fuck’s sake... So I got an ask in response to this comment, wherein the lovely nonnie suggested that Ian and Mickey’s reaction to the Kash and Grab would be a reverse sort of situation, with that place holding very happy memories in spite of being a site of trauma (because Kash shot Mickey there). I’m paraphrasing here, obviously... And I spent over a week trying to write the fic that this ask (unintentionally) inspired and now when I posted it Tumblr was messing with the ‘Read more’ so I, stupid and/or tired bastard that I am, deleted the thing to repost it but of course that means the ask is gone aaaaand yeah. I AM SO SORRY NONNIE! :( Hope this one finds you all the same.

Anyway, here’s my resonse:

Ah, yes. Yes! Nonnie, I applaud your dedication to sparking joy and thank you for sharing this delightful reflection! <3 And, uh, it got me thinking about the Kash and Grab and its role as the site of so much that went down with Ian and Mickey in the early years, and yeah, now there’s a ficlet. It involves a trip down memory lane, some angst, some fluff, and a rather startling number of I love you:s. It’s also the reason why it took me so damned long to get back to you… Sorry about that!

Did you ask me to write this? No. Does it stay completely true to your observation rather than carelessly running with it? Also no, but with slightly more regret.  

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Never returning had not been a conscious choice. Neither was going back.

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Chicago, on a Thursday afternoon in early October, and the air is unusually crisp when Ian steps out from the ambulance station. He's been working the early shift and now he pauses on the sidewalk and turns his face towards the sun, considering. No one's expecting him for another few hours, and it's a fine day: maybe he needn't rush home. Maybe he could walk for a bit.

It's an idea. He's feeling restless, though not the sort of restless that heralds the on-set of a manic episode (or so he thinks, but he makes a mental note to keep an eye out for other signs, and maybe mention it to Mickey). But yeah. He could walk for a bit, then maybe find a station for the L when he tires.

So he walks. Walks and walks and doesn’t tire, and eventually he finds himself on a familiar street and outside a familiar store and he realizes with a start that he hasn't been here in years. Hadn't even known the store was still open, but the sign on the door proudly proclaims it so, and above it the name remains the same, white letters on red: Kash and Grab.

Huh. Without making a conscious decision to, he's stopped walking and is just standing there, staring at the store. The sight of it brings a strange jumble of emotions, and the quietly jarring mingle of familiarty and distance that comes from returning to a place where once you did belong, but belong no longer.

The last time he stood here was the day before he ran off to join the Army, leaving Linda with nothing more than a short message on her phone. That’s more than what his family got, so he hopes she wasn’t too upset. He never asked; never came back; never really thought back – until now.

He hesitates for a moment, then walks up to the door and steps inside. He’s running low on smokes anyway.

It's the smell that hits him first. It hasn't changed, and brings him back to the days when it would cling to his clothes and follow him home, a not unpleasant but distinctive whiff of frozen food and sweet spices.

The interior hasn't changed much either. There’s a kid behind the counter that looks to be in his early teens, and Ian wonders if it’s one of Kash’s sons, if Linda's still running the store. He could ask, but who knows what Linda's told her kids about the teenager who fucked their closeted father before he ran off?

He glances at the boy again – and yeah, he could be Kash's, there's something about the eyes and the chin – and wonders if he ever looked that young when he manned the register. Wonders if that's what he looked like to Mickey, when he'd come into the store to just take whatever the hell he wanted, wether it was chips or, later, Ian's fucking breath away.

Ian Gallagher. You messed with the wrong girl.

And just like that, it's like no time's passed, and he's 15 and 16 and 17 again; he's doing it with Kash and he thinks he loves him; he excels at ROTC and dreams of Westpoint; his mother is alive and he doesn’t yet know that Frank isn’t his father at all – it hardly matters anyhow, because Fiona is there, as she has always been there, as he still thinks she will always be.

She got out and good for her. If she'd stayed here, she'd never been free of her role as sister-mother – never free to be Fiona. And as for him... he'd mourned the army dream when it died, but knows now that it was an uninformed dream, one he would not have cared to live even if  given the opportunity.

Glancing at the counter where he used to open his trigonomy textbook he feels no regret, though perhaps a twinge of sadness for the loss of that optimistic, determined kid, who had not had an easy life by any means, but who had yet to take any real blows, any blows that truly mattered. Those had come later (had come in this very store, some of them) and standing here, where he'd spent so much time as a child and none as a man, he feels something of that kid returning. Remembers the weight of the hundreth can put on a shelf; feels the ghost of a (too) easy smile on his lips; sees himself as he moves between the backroom and counter and fridge.

And everywhere he looks, there is Mickey. Mickey, in a dirty coat or a security west, angry and rough and funny and sometimes with the briefest flash of something softer, sweeter. He is stealing and scaring of thieving kids and restocking the shelves and plotting to murder Frank and moaning as Ian pushes into him.

He is on the floor, too, cursing Kash but otherwise strangely unaffected by having been shot. Ian thinks he might have been more scared and upset than Mickey. It strikes him now as a moment of innocence lost; your lover shot by a jealous ex, a real gun and real blood and what if Kash had had better aim? This was a thing that happened in the world, and if that could happen – anything could.

It strikes him, too, as a turning point: Mickey going away could easily have spelled the end of their intense but brief affair. For all they knew each other's bodies they hadn't really know each other back then, and while Ian had been crushing hard he had not yet loved Mickey. Perhaps they might both have moved on, found other lives and loves. Perhaps that had still been possible, then.

Or perhaps not. It was the first time they were separated and the first time they found their way back to one another, but not the last. It's a dance of coming together and coming apart and coming together, again and again, and they've traced its steps for close to a decade, never once stopping, not truly.

Because even in the absences, Mickey had been, is; there, always, in the stretches of time when he was locked up in juvie; in the eager hours of wating for him to show up at the store; in the exact distance between them at any given time.

Ian can still feel the jolt, like a punch to his gut, like electricity, of looking up from stacking oranges and finding blue eyes staring straight into his.

He remembers the last time they were in here together, when him and his siblings had been taken away by the CPS and Mickey invited him to crash at his place. He remembers his giddy delight at the question, his excitement at the realization that Mickey wanted to spend time with him. He had been so nervous, and looking back, knowing what he now knows, he thinks that Mickey might have been fucking terrified, but there'd been such ease to that evening and night; such familiarty and tenderness. And oh, the sex had been fantastic.

He tries to remember only this, not what came after with the morning light and a door suddenly slammed open –

Mickey had never returned to the store after that, and a few months later Ian had left for the army. Not really for the army, though; what he'd been moving towards had not been nearly as important as what he was moving away from.

Stings, still, that memory; but less than it once did, and as he strolls down the aisles, noting where the pickled cucumber jars have been replaced with tins of tuna and where the small bottles of cheap olive oil still remain, he is surprised to find himself... okay. For a long time, so much of his past had been a painful, tangled thing he did his best to forget, and even after he made his peace with it, he made a point of looking forward rather than back. Now he thinks that maybe, if you're happy with where you ended up, the hardships of the road which led you there are easier to bear.

Doesn't make everything that happened right; just... yeah. Easier to bear.

He buys a pack of cigarettes. The kid behind the counter is eyeing him suspiciously, but Ian thinks that has more to do with him walking around the store and staring at random things rather than with the boy recognizing him from some lurid tale of Linda's. Ian almost asks him to say hello to her from him, but nah. Let old dogs lie.

Outside, twilight is coming on, and there's a slight chill to the air now that the sun is sinking. Ian lights a cigarette and sucks the smoke deep into his lungs. This, too, is familiar, and for a moment he feels unthethered, unsure of when he is, who he is.

Without really thinking about it, he picks up his phone. Mickey's still working but can't be too busy because he answers on the second signal: “Hey.”

“Hey,” Ian says, and then he doesn't say anything else for long enough that Mickey asks him if he fucking wanted something or he's just being a creepy ass phone stalker.

It makes Ian smile. Grounds him. “I love you,” he says.

A beat. “You called me at fucking work to tell me that?” And Ian knows that the gruff disbelief is partially an attempt to cover Mickey's surprised delight at the proclamation.

“Yeah, I guess I did,” he says. Waits for a moment, but Mickey is silent. “You gonna say it back?”

“You fucking serious?”

“Kinda need to hear it.” Because he gets to say that; gets to ask for that. They're not kids not anymore and they don't need to hide. They’re fucking married.

That is real. That is now.

“Jesus Christ, Ian.” But then Mickey, as Ian knew he would, relents. “I love you,” he says, and Ian doesn't know if he's already alone or if he just doesn't care who overhears him, because he doesn't lower his voice or take the time to move somewhere more private.

A brief silence as neither of them speak, but simply rest in the warmth of the words, the truth of them.

Then: “Are you okay?” There's a trace of real worry in Mickey's voice now, and there's a part of Ian's that immediately annoyed because he hates that people worry about him so easily – but a larger part of him has made his peace with it; knows and accepts the reason for it; loves that Mickey loves him enough to worry.

So he offers a brief smile, even though Mickey cannot see it. Hopes it translates into his voice.  “Yeah. Yeah, I'm fine, I promise, it's just... I'll tell you when you get home, okay?”

“Okay.” And maybe Mickey isn't convinced but he takes Ian's word for it. Trust. That's another thing they've been doing better with. “I'll see you in maybe an hour then? I get off at five.”

”Yeah, I'll see you then.” And, because he can, because it's true: ”I love you.”

“Yeah, yeah, you fucking said that already.” A brief pause, then quietly: “I love you, too.”

They hang up. Throwing one last look at Kash and Grab before he walks off, Ian is pleased to realize that he feels nothing but a vague sense of affection for the place. Some things withered and was left here, sure, youthful dreams and ambitions and most of his naivite – but the best thing about it he kept, and Ian will see him soon and hold him soon, and this time he will neither leave nor let him go. Their new dance will move to a different beat.