Chapter Text
“Ian, somebody’s here asking for you!” Debbie yelled.
“Who is it?” Ian called back from the kitchen, where he literally had his hands full, trying to squeeze the water out of a can of tuna fish.
“How the hell should I know?”
“Could you come in here and finish making lunch, please?” Ian asked as he ran his hands under the faucet, trying to wash away the fish odor clinging to his hands.
“Gotta get Franny up from her nap,” Debs said, and Ian could hear her clomping up the front stairs from the kitchen. He bit his tongue and tried to remind himself that, despite being a mom to a toddler, she was a teenage girl and prone to immature brattiness still.
He sighed and took the pan of macaroni and cheese off the burner he had it warming on, placed it on a trivet, and shut off the stovetop.
Ian walked to the living room and saw a heavyset young woman standing awkwardly right inside the entryway, and noticed that standing next to her was...Yevgeny? No, not Yevgeny, this boy had jet black hair, although he had the same eyes and lips as Yev. A pang of guilt shot through Ian as he remembered just how long it had been since he had seen Yevgeny. He shook his head as if to clear it and took a closer look at the woman standing next to the child.
She too had black hair, but now Ian was close enough to see it was a dye job, probably done at home if he was any judge of these things. Her hair was dry and frizzy at the ends, and it looked like dark blonde roots were grown out by about an inch at the part on top of her head.
“Um, are you Ian Gallagher?” the mystery woman asked.
“I am…and you are?”
“Oh, you don’t know me, but do you remember Mickey Milkovich?” Ian’s eyes darted quickly to the boy at her side, then back to the woman. He nodded slowly. “Oh, good,” the woman said, letting out a big sigh. “Well, Mickey, he told me if I ever needed him but he wasn’t around, I should try getting in touch with his sister or his brother or you.” She held out a brown scrap of paper. Ian took it from her and looked down at it.
It seemed to have been torn from a grocery bag, and there was writing in pencil on it. Ian recognized Mickey’s messy boy printing immediately-the letters written in what Ian used to privately think of as Stay The Fuck Out font. He had to blink away a film of sudden tears that had sprung to his eyes to read the words.
Mickey had scrawled Mandy’s name and old cell phone number (that Ian knew for a fact wasn’t working anymore), Iggy’s name and a number, Ian’s name with just his address was third, and then scrawled across the bottom of the list it said: DO NOT GO TO MY FATHER EVER FOR ANYTHING. “Do not” was underlined five times.
“I, uh, I don’t have a phone, so I didn’t try calling Mandy or Iggy, but I went by their house and the place is all boarded up,” the woman continued, as Ian stared at the paper in his hand for quite a long time.
He finally looked back up at her at that comment, another pang of guilt stabbing through him. He hadn’t been past the Milkovich house in years-he’d go blocks out of his way to avoid it if he had to.
“Um, Mandy’s number’s no good anymore,” Ian said distractedly. “At least it wasn’t the last time I tried.” He dug his phone out of his back pocket. “You want to use this? Try calling Mandy or Iggy?”
She shrugged, but didn’t reach for the phone, so Ian said, “I’ll just give them a try, hold on.” He punched Mandy’s number into his phone, but got the same message he received the last time he tried it-the number was no longer in service, no other information available. He got the exact same message with Iggy’s number. Ian had put his phone on speaker, so the woman and the child heard the recorded messages too.
Ian realized that this woman was truly down to the last name on the list now, and if Mickey had said to come to him for help, the least Ian could do was try.
“Hey, I’m sorry I kept you standing here,” Ian said. “Won’t you please come in? Can I get you guys something? You thirsty? We’ve got juice boxes.” That last said to the little boy, who looked up at him with those blue eyes and raised eyebrows that looked just like…
“We don’t want to put you out none, but a drink would be nice,” the woman said.
“Yeah, come in, come in,” Ian said, waving them towards the couch. “What would you like? Water, pop, coffee? I could make some-or you could have a juice box too…”
“Water’s good.”
“Right, coming right up, be right back,” Ian babbled, hightailing it into the kitchen. When he returned, he handed the woman a bottle of water, and then out of habit from years of doing it for his younger siblings and now his niece, he peeled the straw off the juice box and poked it through the foil seal before handing it to the boy. When the kid reached out for the box, Ian noticed a very distinctive birthmark on the back of his hand.
Ian looked over at the woman and said, “Would you mind coming to the kitchen with me while I finish making lunch? My little brother’s upstairs cleaning his room, but he’ll be down soon looking for it.” The woman nodded and stood up.
“You wait here,” she said to the boy. He was sipping his juice and nodded obediently.
“Do you like to color, buddy? I think we have some old coloring books in the desk over here,” Ian said, as he walked over to the corner of the room. Sure enough in the drawer there were some busted up crayons in a paper cup and an old coloring book of Liam’s. Ian set them onto the coffee table and stared at the boy’s right hand as he picked up a green crayon. Ian led the woman to the kitchen and motioned her to take a seat at the table while he went back to the stove and put the mac and cheese back on to warm up. He forked the tuna from the can into the pot and then opened a can of peas, drained them, and put them into the mix as well. Then he dumped in a can of cream of mushroom soup. He stirred everything together, checked that the burner was set on low, and then covered the pan to let it all heat up for a while.
He finally sat down across from the woman, giving her a shy smile.
“So, how can I help?” he said.
“Well…” the woman took a deep breath, then plunged in. “I’m an old friend, I guess you’d say, of Mickey’s. My name’s Angie Zago, and I used to live around here.”
Ian blinked, and raised his eyebrows. Of course he knew about Angie, he could still here Mickey talking about her that day in the store, so long ago-before Mickey had even kissed him…
“Uh, so, a few years back, me and Mickey, well, we’d fool around here and there. I mean, most times when he came over, we’d just smoke weed, drink beer, and he’d watch tapes of my favorite show with me. I think he just liked getting out of his house, ya know? But, ah, sometimes, not too often, but every once in a while, well, only a coupla times we did it all the way really, we…fucked.”
Ian nodded, and pursed his lips. This he knew-not the details, but that it had happened.
“Um, so, the last time I saw him, he came over and we...ya know, fucked, and he had a condom in his wallet, but I guess it was old or whatever, cuz it broke when we were doin’ it. He said he’d buy me a morning after pill, but I told him not to worry, I was due to get my period any time then, I thought, and that there was no way I’d get pregnant having sex right then.”
Ian didn’t remember much from high school biology class, but he had heard his sisters having conversations like this-about when during their cycles they were most likely or least likely to get pregnant, and they seemed to be firm believers in the time right before and right after their periods they were “safe” too, so he just nodded.
“Well, so, he came pretty quick, so we spent the rest of the afternoon watching Vampire Diaries on tape till it was time for him to go to work.” Ian gave her a pained smile and nodded-shit, he remembered that day as if it were yesterday. “Did you watch that show? It’s my favorite.” Ian shook his head no, wondering if her show had anything to do with the story. “That night, after my foster dad got home, he went to watch a Cubs game he had taped, and he found out I had taped Vampire Diaries over it, and he punched me in the face-broke my nose.”
“Jesus,” Ian winced.
“It was totally worth it-fuck him, he was an old perv and was always finding reasons to hit me or fuck me. I hated his pruney old dick-uh, anyway, for once I knew why he was hitting me, and for once it was for something I had done to make myself happy. But, uh, with the pain from the broken nose and how high I stayed for a couple weeks while it healed, I totally lost track of the fact that my period never came, you know?”
Oh, Ian thought.
“And then when I figured out I was preggers, I had no idea when it had happened, and about a dozen different guys, including my foster dad, could’ve been the father, so I figured I’d wait it out and see what the kid looked like. When he was so white and with them blue eyes, I was pretty sure Mickey was the dad.”
“Uh-huh,” Ian choked out.
“And, well, I had always been kinda chubby, so I was able to hide the pregnancy the whole time-my foster dad would’ve made me get an abortion for sure. My foster mom figured it out-she got suspicious when I started refusing to have sex with my foster dad, and that skank called DCS and got me put into a group home, probably so she could get another girl in there to handle her wifely duties for her. But, anyway, there were so many of us there I could really hide the fact I was gonna have a baby, and I ran away after I gave birth to him in the rec room one night, and started living in shelters instead of being in the child welfare program. I named him Ian Damon, for my favorite actor and his character on Diaries,” she smiled.
Ian’s head was spinning. “He’s Ian too?” he heard his voice say from what sounded like very far away. He got up and went to the stove to check on the lunch. Luckily it hadn’t burnt to the bottom of the pan but it had started to stick, he should’ve been stirring it more.
“Yup-you should see Ian Somerhalder, he’s sexy as fuck,” she grinned.
“So, about you needing my help?” he said gently.
The smile fell from her face. “Yeah, about that-do you have any way to get in touch with Mickey? I know he busted out of jail and no one’s heard from him since, from what I could find out.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t have any information on him either,” Ian said, returning to the table. On the way there, he glanced back into the living room and saw that young Ian was still busy coloring. “Uh, I might have one person I could ask, but I honestly don’t know if they have a way to get ahold of him either. I would say don’t get your hopes up, you know?”
Angie looked even more crestfallen. “It’s just-I gotta find someone to take the kid.”
Ian drew in a sharp breath. He bit his lip and hoped she’d go on without him having to pry.
“I’ve been living in Detroit-it’s a real shithole, worse than here, but I’ve got a friend who I’ve known for a couple years, we met in one of the women’s shelters. She’s got a job, well, hookin’, but she got into a house and there’s a madam who runs it and keeps the girls safe and lets you live there and everything. And she doesn’t mind big girls-she has clients that want them, that’s why my friend thought of me-and the only thing is, I can’t have a kid there. I mean, I wouldn’t want him to grow up there anyway, but I don’t want to put him into the foster system. I got put there when I was six and that’s the first time I got molested-I don’t want that life for him.”
Ian’s heart went out to her, and he couldn’t help but think how narrowly he and his siblings had escaped a version of that fate as well. He one hundred percent agreed that Mickey’s son shouldn’t be put into the system.
“You were going to…give him to Mickey? To raise?” Ian asked.
“Yeah,” Angie sighed. “If he’d take him. Now I don’t know what the hell I’m gonna do. I ain’t got no Plan B, ya know?”
Ian gnawed on the cuticle of his thumb for a moment, thinking. He knew he owed Mickey and this innocent kid something, if only the mother would go along with it.
“How would you feel about…letting me adopt him? If we can’t get ahold of Mickey? Would that be okay?” Ian asked, knowing he was being impulsive, and already hearing Fiona and Lip’s reactions in his head. He wouldn’t listen though-he had listened to them before when it came to his life and Mickey’s place in it, and he had wound up miserable and alone.
“Holy shit, you’d do that? “ Angie said, looking at Ian like she wanted to believe him, but it seemed too good to be true. “He could live here, with you?” Angie looked around the kitchen like it was some set on the Price Is Right or something, not the rundown near-dump that it was. “If my kid could live in an actual house? With good people? Yeah, I’d be okay with that.” She looked out towards the living room, even though she couldn’t see her child from where she sat. “But, um, you know what you’re getting yourself into? This would be forever-I’m not coming back here, ever. He was easy enough to take care of as a baby, but now he’s old enough to be going to school, and school means paperwork and questions, and they’d take him from me for sure. I already know I gotta let him go, and I’ll miss him, he’s a sweet boy, but boys grow up and I’m just not mom material, ya know?”
“I admire you for being able to admit it,” Ian said, thinking of Debbie and her stubborn insistence to have a baby and then spend the time since looking for people to take care of it for her-she even let Frank babysit for fuck’s sake.
“Hey, do you guys want lunch? We’ve got plenty,” Ian said. “It’s not much, just mac and cheese with some cream of mushroom soup and tuna and peas in it-we call it Tuna Shit Surprise.”
“Ian will love it-he’s not a picky eater at all. He’s a good kid, you’ll see.” It was important to Angie that Ian liked her kid. She knew she wasn’t much of a mom and didn’t have natural motherly instincts, but she wanted both Ians to be happy with the situation they seemed to be jumping into.
The kid ate up big at lunch, and also had two tall glasses of milk. Ian couldn’t take his eyes off the boy. With his hair sticking up in all directions and his holey clothes and busted out sneakers, he was the spitting image of Mickey during their Little League days. No question this was Mickey’s son.
“Do you have a place to stay while you’re in Chicago?” Ian asked after they ate. Angie insisted on doing the dishes, and had her Ian help her by drying them.
“Oh, not really,” she said. “Was kinda hoping on one of the Milkoviches letting me crash with them, if I found them.”
“No problem,” Ian said. “You can stay here.” He had hoped he’d be able to talk to Fiona and Lip about everything first, before presenting the kid to them as a new member of the family, but oh well. The sooner everyone got used to the reality, the better. He supposed he could run over to Fiona’s apartment building and try to catch her there, but there was someone else he had to see first.
“Hey, Angie, do you mind if I take a picture of Ian? I think we have a Polaroid camera here somewhere,” Ian asked.
“Of course you can take a picture of him,” she said.
Ian ran upstairs and rifled through Carl’s stuff till he found the camera and a pack of film. Ian shuddered to think why Carl had brought it home from a second hand store to begin with, but now wasn’t the time to worry about it again. Ian went back downstairs and asked the younger Ian if he could take his picture.
“Sure!” the kid said, his eyes lighting up. Ian gave him a warm smile. The kid was adorable in his own right, and the fact that he smiled just like Mickey was icing on the cake.
Ian took a picture of the boy standing in front of the couch, then got another idea. “Hey, how about one of you coloring? I can take it from above, like an overhead shot or whatever.”
“Okay!” The kid kneeled down in front of the coffee table like he had before and started to color. “You up high enough?” he asked.
“Yeah, I think so,” Ian laughed, and snapped the picture. They watched as the pictures developed-Ian had placed them down on the coffee table when the camera spit them out.
“They look good,” the younger Ian said, smiling.
“They sure do, buddy, you make a great model,” Ian told him. “Okay, guys, I gotta go out, but I’ll be back as soon as I can. Debbie!” he yelled. Debbie came clomping back down the stairs. She hadn’t eaten with Liam and Ian and the unexpected guests-she was a vegan now and rarely deigned to eat with the family.
“What?” she said, blowing on her nails, which she had been painting when Ian called her.
“Could you please take care of our guests for a while? I’ve gotta go out, but I’ll be back as soon as I can. This is Angie and her son Ian. They’re going to be staying here a while, in my room. Maybe you could show them where that is?”
“Ugh, fine,” Debbie said in an aggravated tone. “Come on, it’s up here.” She started clomping back up the stairs again.
“Don’t worry, she’s nicer than she seems,” Ian reassured Angie and her son. “And I’ll be back soon, I promise.”
“Take your time. We were on a bus all night from Detroit, I’m sure we could both use a nap,” Angie said, and her son nodded.
Ian rushed to where he was going anyway, the photos in his hoodie pocket, one hand staying on them, making sure they didn’t fall out. He hoped the person he needed to see was where he thought they’d be.