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He stands outside Beckman Correctional and takes a deep breath.
The last time Ian was here, walking in through these security gates, he was terrified. Officially a convicted felon, he stood right here in this same spot and hugged his family goodbye, setting his shoulders and steeling himself for whatever he might find inside. He was nervous, then, but he tried not to let it show. He braced himself for the worst, clenching his jaw and curling his fists, surrendering himself to the security guards who stripped him of his freedom.
He walked towards his future with his chin up and his head held high.
The thing is—what he didn’t know then, and what he does know now, is that he’s always ever been walking towards one thing.
One person, really.
It’s like a magnetic pull of epic proportions, like a celestial shift that only touches the tides of Ian’s life. Everything he’s done, everything he’s doing—it’s all just steps in the right direction, the only direction.
Because true north is still true north even when the arrow on his compass is pointing halfway across the world.
And what he really didn’t know then—and what’s making his stomach flutter in anticipation of now—is that when he walks through those gates, both times, he’ll find the love of his life on the other side.
He’ll find Mickey.
So, Ian takes one more deep breath, and goes inside.
He gets through security without any issue, having done this enough times for enough different people by now to know the visitation routine by heart. He gets strange looks from one or two of the security guards, like they’re almost confused by the sight of Ian in a jacket and jeans instead of a tank top and a yellow jumpsuit. He nods to another one who addresses him by name, one who remembers him easily.
It's almost surreal.
Going back to a place he thought he’d never want to go back to.
Going back to a person he never wants to leave.
Ian sits down in the battered plastic chair on one side of the plexiglass. A chill runs down his spine as he stares at the worn-out phone dangling from the cradle, its twin on the other side. His palms are sweaty, and he wipes them on his jeans while he waits. He pats down his pockets out of habit, finding a handful of printed pictures (mostly of the baby, and one old one of teenage Mickey and Ian that he found while digging his stuff out of the attic) and not much else. His phone and his keys sit in a locker three corridors away.
The buzz of the prison door unlocking pulls him out of his own head, and his eyes snap up to where it’s sliding open. He tracks the inmates as they walk by, one, two, three heading down past his window to visit their own loved ones. Two of them he recognizes. One looks new.
And then he sees him.
Mickey walks into the room like he walks into any room—chest out, chin up, his eyes darting around to every face in there, scanning the walls, the corners, the places where the shadows lurk. He wets his lower lip with his tongue, dragging his teeth over the chapped skin as his gaze passes from guard, to guard, to inmate, to guard, and finally—to Ian.
A small smile tugs at the corner of Mickey’s mouth and something inside Ian’s chest bursts.
Suddenly it’s eight years ago, and Mickey is sixteen with a bullet would and a pair of crutches, staring at Ian through a plexiglass window in a juvenile hall, giving him shit and trying to hide his smile with a ducked head and the phone held in front of his mouth. It’s like they’re kids again, and six months behind bars feels like forever, but two hours on the L every other Sunday for fifteen minutes on the phone feels like nothing.
Mickey sits down, picks up the phone with one tattooed hand, and then his jumpsuit shifts from blue to orange, his hair a little longer and his eyes a little heavier, nineteen and sad—staring at the life that slipped through his fingers. A wife and a child he never asked for, a newly medicated boyfriend who can’t look him in the eye. The fifteen-year sentence hangs heavy on his shoulders, and a misspelled name scars deep in his chest.
It’s almost too much. Almost enough to make Ian want to run from this place and never look back.
But then those same tattooed fingers tap firmly on the glass—followed by a guard yelling and Mickey flipping him off—and it’s not eight years ago, or even five; it’s here and now and Ian blinks hard as his mind wanders back into his body.
Mickey raises his brows from across the table, a few more wrinkles lingering on his forehead with the movement, deeper laugh lines tugging with his frown. He’s older now, a few more years and a couple new scars, a tattoo inked onto his forearm and his body strong as it’s ever been. He stares back at Ian with a glint in his eyes, shining like the light at the end of a long—long—tunnel.
Ian picks up the phone. “Hi.”
“Hi,” Mickey says back, his eyes scanning Ian’s face, his chest, his arms. His brow furrows, and the crease between them holds uncertainty; a nervous tick thrums through the line where his thumb swipes over his brow.
There are a hundred things Ian wants to say to him, starting with I love you and—well, probably ending with it too. I miss you, I miss you, I miss you. He wants to tell Mickey that it’s not going to be like last time—that it will never be like last time again—that he’ll wait, as long as it takes. That he’ll visit every chance he gets, that he’s never, ever going to run away from this. From him.
(And yes, he’s said all of these things before, the words whispered into the crook of Mickey’s neck and kissed into the skin on his chest, prayers and pleas and promises passed between them in the nights just before Ian’s release. He’s said all of these things before, and Mickey knows—Mickey believes him—but Ian wants to say them again, right here right now, on the other side of it all.)
Mickey’s staring back at him with wide eyes and a furrowed brow, and all Ian wants to do is kiss that confused look off his face, cradle his jaw in his hands and melt the tension away with his touch. Words have never been their most effective method of communication, but for now it’s all they have, so—Ian has to say something.
“Did—” He clears his throat. “Did you get my letter?”
It’s not even close to any of the two dozen things sitting at the tip of his tongue, but it’s the only thing his brain could come up with.
And Mickey—God, Mickey actually laughs at the question, and the grainy, breathy sound that floats between the phones makes Ian smile like a damn Pavlovian response.
“Did I get your fucking letter,” Mickey muses, shaking his head with a fond smile. “Let’s see—the one I got on Monday? Or Wednesday? Or Friday—”
“Okay,” Ian teases, “you know what—”
“Four letters!” Mickey says almost incredulously. “Four fucking letters—you’ve been outta here a week, Gallagher.”
“Nine days,” Ian corrects automatically.
Mickey rolls his eyes and tips his head back to the ceiling, holding the phone away from his mouth a bit, but Ian can still hear him mutter, “Jesus Christ.”
Ian laughs at that, pressing the phone closer to his ear, like that will somehow make him closer to Mickey.
Mickey shakes his head with a soft grin, leaning back in his chair with one arm crossed over his chest. “Fucking—tree killer.”
“God, I know,” Ian breathes, running a hand over his face as he feels the blush creep up his neck. “I’m sorry,” he says around a smile that doesn’t really look like he’s sorry at all. “I just—I’m not used to not talking to you every day.”
Mickey’s face softens. His eyes flick down to Ian’s mouth, just for a second.
“I sit in my room at night and all I wanna do is tell you about what’s going on,” Ian continues. “I wanna tell you about the weird shit Carl’s up to, or Debbie’s latest tantrum, or how Lip’s kid actually smiled at me yesterday. Like a real, full on, smile because I made the cute little fucker laugh.”
Mickey grins, all teeth before he quickly bites it back. “You got pictures?”
“Yeah,” Ian says easily, knowing they’ll get to that in a minute. He props his elbows up on the table and drags his chair closer to the glass.
Mickey does the same.
“I just miss you,” he says quieter, his gaze falling down to the four letters marked on Mickey’s fingers. “I miss talking to you. Talking to someone who gets it—who gets me.”
Mickey has to look away at that. He pretends to look over his shoulder, then the other one, before finding Ian’s eyes again. He slides his free hand across the table, his fingers lifting just slightly to rest the tips of a couple against the glass.
Ian matches him easily, resisting the urge to press his whole palm up against the divider.
Mickey smiles at him, slow and soft, a little unguarded. A barely there curl of one corner of his mouth that makes Ian’s insides melt. “I miss you too.”
Ian’s face relaxes and his shoulders drop slightly. “Anyways,” he says, swallowing the lump that’s suddenly stuck in his throat. “It helps. The letters, the—writing it all down.” He blinks a couple times, letting out a self-deprecating laugh. “Helps me make sense of everything going on in my head. You know, with the whole ‘adjusting back to society’ thing.”
Mickey nods slowly, like he gets it. Because he does get it. That’s half the reason Ian keeps writing the stupid letters in the first place—nobody else would understand.
“Sorry,” Ian says with a soft shake of his head. “I know they’re a lot. I can… I don’t have to send them anymore.” He bites at the inside of his cheek. “I’ll stop.”
Mickey, to his credit, looks wholly unfazed by Ian’s ramblings. His hand stays firmly pressed against the divider, steady and sure, the other cradling the phone against his ear. Blue eyes stare from behind the plexiglass, unwavering.
His voice is low, almost raspy, when he mutters, “Who said I want you to stop?”
Ian can’t help but smile at that, a wide set grin that splits his face in two before he ducks his head. He can feel his cheeks heat, and a warmth spreads out from his chest. God, he’s so stupidly in love it almost hurts.
They talk about life outside the prison walls for a little while, specifically the craziness that always is the Gallagher house. Ian shows him pictures of Lip’s kid—to which Mickey, begrudgingly, admits that Fred is a cute little fucker—and tells him stories about Franny and Liam, the two of them growing up faster than anyone can keep track of.
They talk about life inside for a bit too, but it’s mostly just Mickey complaining about his new cellmate. Honestly, Ian thinks the guy sounds fine—but the new guy isn’t Ian, and that’s all Mickey really cares about.
The buzzer rings while Mickey’s still staring at the picture of them as teenagers, two kids from a lifetime ago that he barely even recognizes anymore. Ian promises to make a copy and send it in his next letter, just as the guards start barking at the inmates to pack it up and get in line against the wall.
They mutter soft I love you-s into the phones with their last few seconds, and Ian promises to come back and visit again next weekend. Mickey says he doesn’t have to. Ian tells him to shut the fuck up.
The letters keep coming, almost every other day like clockwork, and Mickey finds himself on a first name basis with the fucking mail guy before the end of the month. He writes his own letters too, though those are fewer and farther between. He sends maybe one for every six or seven he gets from Ian, but he sort of likes it, writing everything down. He gets what Ian means.
Mickey keeps all the letters he gets from Ian, pages and pages of paper folded and tucked under his mattress like a scattered manuscript of Ian Gallagher’s life. He reads them over and over again, running his fingers over the pen marks and memorizing every word. Some of them are longer, some just a quick few sentences, but all of them end the same.
Love,
Ian
It’s a story in and of itself—and Mickey’s never read anything sweeter.