Chapter Text
Looking back, it is hard to believe that everything started with a stolen computer and an empty house.
Mickey, then seventeen and already exhausted with the idea of school, spent the first two hours of his Monday morning laying in bed and toying idly with a knife, wondering what to do with the laptop bag resting on his desk.
Sure, when he snatched it from some high school on North Side he was planning to make some fast cash in the pawn shop, but he needed the computer more than the cash. An accident involving his angry father and a poorly thrown can of beer resulted in the premature death of his own shitty laptop a few weeks before.
The idea came from a crumpled paper in the stolen bag’s pocket. Apparently the students in Mr. Hertfeld’s media and progress class had to create a video diary on YouTube for a total of sixty points. Mickey couldn’t help but scoff thinking about the stupid shit those rich idiots would talk about, as if their lives were actually something interesting. One hour in his life would be more interesting than the daily goings-on of any North Side asshole.
Why not give it a try?
It only took him three minutes to remember where everyone in his family was. Jamie and Tony were both out helping Terry with some issue involving drugs and money. They would stop by the Alibi after finishing up and be home after dark. Colin was out as well, probably fucking around with that chick he’d been with for a few weeks. Iggy was still in juvie.
Mandy was the only sibling that was a wild card. She was probably at school. Mickey had never figured out how to get by in the classroom, but Mandy kept moving up the grades, so obviously she was doing something right.
Then again, she might have skipped the day to pester her lust interest of the week. Actually, no. Mickey paused and thought through the long list of boys Mandy had recently taken an interest in and realized she hadn’t changed it up in a few weeks. Gallagher, then. The ginger one who was playing hard to get.
Either way, she wasn’t likely to show up until at least one. For the moment, he was alone in the house.
He chugged a beer from the fridge and considered what he would say. Which story would he start with? The story of how his mom OD’d on heroin when he was twelve, or the story about how his brother got locked up for beating a kid half to death? Those stories would be more interesting than anything the North Siders had. What they wouldn’t be was funny.
With his hair slicked back and the ratty shirt he’d been wearing for two days switched to a similarly tattered hand-me-down top, he sat down at his desk. A story from just the day before came to mind, so he opened up the laptop’s default camera program and pressed record.
After five seconds of silence, he hit stop and deleted the video.
“This is so fucking…” he muttered, running a hand through his hair. What was he supposed to start with? Only a fucking tool would start with their name or some shit, so that was out of the question.
Most people wouldn’t guess, but Mickey had always been pretty chatty by nature. Not endlessly chatty like the dumb shits in the school hallways, just with people he tried to consider friends or family. He hit record again and tried to pretend that he was just video calling with Mandy.
“Have you ever seen someone get tasered?” he asked the screen after a few seconds, as if it were actually listening. “Let me tell you, it’s pretty fucking funny. Those assholes never seem to see it coming. I mean, you’re running through the grocery store bare fucking naked with coke stuck in your chest hair, what the fuck do you think is going to happen?”
Before he could continue, he snorted and held a hand up. That wasn’t the best lead-in. He wanted to tell the story, not just ramble on about how funny it was to see some coked up asshole fall on his ass. After a steadying breath, he continues.
“Let me start again. So I was at Keane’s the other day, just trying to get some food for a party, you know, like hot dogs or some shit. I was just trying to figure out how many buns I needed when some idiot started screaming their head off in the next aisle.
“Now I’m not normally one to get involved in other people’s shit, but when like three other people started screaming too? Well, that’s about when I figured it wasn’t a private issue. So I looked around the corner and bam!” Mickey flicked his hands at the screen for emphasis and laughed.
“Dick, right in my face. Big, floppy, and fucking nasty. Attached to this skinny ass guy who had coke all over his hairy fucking chest. Naturally, he was in the fucking cereal aisle, so there was a whole family trying to decide whether to get Lucky Charms or something infinitely shittier when he showed up with his schlong dangling around.
“Now me, I’m not really down with seeing that shit, especially around food. I was weighing the benefits of knocking him on his ass myself against the possibility of touching his dick in the process. That’s something I really, really did not want. Right as I decided to take my chances, the fucking cops showed up.”
Mickey leaned in and held up a finger, signalling a pause. The smile that had crept onto his face at some point during the story fell slightly. If he were actually talking to someone he knew then he wouldn’t have had to stop, but who knew who would see the video? The lucky viewer deserved to have a full picture.
“Now see, I don’t do well with cops. I mean, generally I don’t fuck with them and they don’t fuck with me, but I’ve dealt with plenty of them. We don’t get along. So this was probably the first time I have ever been thankful to see uniforms running over.
“Anyway, they ran in screaming, because cops always fucking yell, and grabbed at their stun guns. The guy just starts screaming back. I don’t mean the kind of scream someone makes when they’re startled, I mean just yelled and actually waved his hands around like he was in a cartoon. It was about there that someone jabbed him in the stomach with the stun gun.
“I guess this isn’t the first time this guy has pulled this shit, because when he was done twitching around he just sat down and tried to ask one of the cops about his wife. They dragged him out in handcuffs with a hat covering his dick. Poor cop probably burned it that night. After that, the rest of us just went about our business. That shit’s not that weird here, I guess.”
Mickey moved to hit the stop button, but hesitated before he could hit it. The video had been pretty fun and he wouldn’t mind doing another if he felt like it. It was certainly not the worst way to spend a morning. He shot the camera a smirk.
“So I guess if you liked that, then subscribe. Maybe I’ll do this again later.”
With that, he ended the video. There was more to the story, of course, like how he used the commotion to walk out of the store with enough hot dogs and buns to feed the whole party, plus a few bags of chips. Maybe one of the dumber brothers would have mentioned that, but he wasn’t stupid enough to admit to a crime on video.
Somehow, the hardest part of the whole thing was making his channel on YouTube. He wouldn’t put his last name on it, the last thing he needed was the page popping up in a google search for “Milkovich,” but that left him with fuck-all for ideas. In the end, he chose a stupid nickname that his brothers had come up with two summers ago.
At the time, he had been trying to hide.
Becky Hanson’s older brother wanted some weed. It was easily ninety five out with harsh sun and no breeze, so Mickey shouldn’t have been surprised when Jack showed up to buy in basketball shorts with his sweat-soaked shirt tossed over his shoulder. It should not have knocked the breath out of him.
When he came into his hand fifteen minutes later, it was to the memory of the light, wispy hairs trailing down Jack’s toned stomach and dipping under his waistband.
Later that afternoon, Mickey suffered through the miserable heat and showed up at the Hansons’ door. Becky grinned when he held up a condom. His arched eyebrows and smirk were a mask that he wore well.
Mickey fucked her hard and fast, but every sound he made was for the boy in the bedroom across the hall. The marks he let her leave were penance for the thoughts that brought him to his orgasm.
As soon as Mickey got home, Colin had whistled and called out, “Hey, it’s Hickey Mickey!”
HickeyMickey, by some miracle, wasn’t taken by some other idiot with a camera. Within three minutes, Mickey had posted the video and closed the laptop so he could focus on some lunch.
It wasn’t until a week later that he took a look at the stats. His heart jumped in his chest when he saw the numbers. Three hundred views, almost two hundred thumbs up, and five comments. One of them simply said “lol,” but the other four all asked him to make another video. It was then that Mickey realized he might have found something good.