#also the fiona hall of shame got me feeling weirdly emotional about how much ian must miss fiona!!!!

[unbridgeabledistances]

soft prompt ideas: comforting each other, cuddling, waking up together/going to sleep, going on a date, idk just being in each other’s company? i’m terrible at being specific but i hope these help!

hi bby<3 thank you so much to u (and everyone else!!!) for sending in prompts, they brought me so much joy and now i have SO many little soft things in the works:’)

yesterday ended up turning into a long day and i didn’t get to finish most of the things i started, but i wrote this while i was freshly showered and in bed and wanted to quickly whip up some bedtime softness to end the day right!! so here is the softest, quickest pre-11x07 bedtime one-shot and ode to the gallagher house, i hope u enjoy<3

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Ian turned the creaky handle to shut off the shower, stilling the scalding water that had been beating a steady stream onto his body, soothing his aching muscles and weary bones. Ian was tired—after he and Mickey had gotten back from their various security stops around the outskirts of the city, he’d promised to help Lip track down and deliver parts to the people who’d bought the odds and ends of the stolen bikes, and then he’d somehow ended up in Lip and Tami’s living room that was half-packed into boxes for hours, silently sipping a beer and listening to them tag-team their attempts at persuading Ian to convince Debbie into wanting to sell the house— an effort that was a lost cause, and they all knew it.

It was kind of funny— they’d all gotten so close to losing the house so many times before, from being pulled out by DCFS officers to being kicked to the curb by fucking Patrick, to feeling desperate ripples of fear as they watched the house be put up for auction for a bunch of Northsiders and boujee fucking families who picked through the bare skeleton of the rooms as they pleased— so it was funny that after all of that, after their front door being plastered with more bright orange eviction notices than they could count, that the eventual thing driving them out of the house in the end would be a Gallagher himself, just because Lip wanted some extra cash. Ian got it— they were older now, and Lip had a kid to worry about— but he couldn’t help but feel a soft pang in his gut, something muted and dull but still there, every time Lip nonchalantly mentioned “fixing the house up” and “making gentrification our friend” and “getting on with our lives”—even though he and Mickey had readily agreed, at the family meeting that Mickey now had a right to be a part of, that it made the most sense to sell the house and for the two of them to find a place of their own.

And honestly, that prospect was a little terrifying; it sounded silly, but this crumbling house, with its paint stripping away and its roof nearly caving in, had pretty much been the only constant in Ian’s life for as long as he could remember. He had memories, ones that were soft around the edges, of him and Lip and Fiona sleeping curled in the backseats of cars and, on a few of the worst nights, on playgrounds or stoops or streetcorners when Frank and Monica were too far gone— and then inevitably one day, one sunny afternoon, they would come home to this sturdy gray house, and even then Ian understood that this was a place he could always return to. He didn’t really know what a world without the Gallagher house looked like; he always found his feet leading him back to these four walls, even those months when he was living with Mickey and he’d walk the silent moonlit city blocks back home to splash in the pool with everyone on those muggy, late summer nights. Thinking about the comforting sag of the Gallagher house was one of the few things that kept Ian going in the colorless cinderblock walls of his prison cell; the concave mattress of his single bed at home wasn’t much better than the inch-think foam pad he scrunched onto each night in his cell, but it was still familiar, it was still home, it had still held him through all of these years.

Lip wanting to sell the house was just another bitter reminder, along with the changing storefronts of the Southside neighborhood stores, the people walking by with baby strollers and shopping bags of organic groceries, the notches on the closet door that showed how much Franny had already grown, and the tinny sound of Fiona’s voice wafting through a Facetime call, a voice too small and too quiet to fill the absence she’d left behind—that things were always changing, that life wasn’t going to stop for any of them.

Ian clambered out of the shower and wrapped a towel around his waist, scrubbing his face with his hands to try to clear his head. The hallway outside the bathroom was still, the only sound the soft hissing of the radiator—when the fuck did this house get so quiet? There was no boisterous laughter wafting up from downstairs, no clanging in the kitchen, no WWE blasting from the TV at full volume; Lip and Tami had moved out, Liam was grown up and preferred steady conversation to the classic Gallagher screeching, and Carl was either off at the station for the night or doing god-knows-what in the basement— when did silence start to sink into these walls, without anyone really noticing? Even Frank was getting quieter, somehow, giving more blank stares than quick replies when they talked back and forth in the kitchen.

Ian stepped out of the bathroom and crept down the hallway, walking carefully in case Franny was sleeping; there was a comfort in the melody of the creaking floorboards, reminding him of all the nights when he’d lay awake staring at the ceiling, sometimes gripped by the swirling black thoughts he thought he’d never be able to shake off, and he would hear Fiona tiptoeing around in the hallway, checking in on everyone while she tried not to wake them. Ian gripped the handle of the flimsy accordion bedroom door and slid it open as quietly as he could muster, ready to crawl into bed and hopefully snap out of all this wallowing.

And… oh.

The lamp on the bedside table was still on, shining a soft glow into the cramped room— but Mickey was curled up and fast asleep on Ian’s side of the bed, his mouth half-open and his head tucked to his chin, his hair slightly mussed and ruffled by on the pillow he was gripping onto. Ian smirked—he knew it was getting late, and Mickey might be asleep when he got home—but there was something so soft and innocent about the way Mickey was laying, like he was breathing in the scent of Ian’s pillow, that made him stop for a moment before mindlessly crawling into bed next to him. Ian let himself linger in the doorway for a moment, just listening to the steady waves of Mickey’s breathing, taking in the sight of his flushed cheeks and the innocence in his sleeping face that was so bare and open that it almost hurt to look at.

Instantly, Ian felt something bloom in his chest from the pit of uncertainty that had been planted there. The Gallagher house had always been his home—but he realized in a sweeping moment that his best days here, ones where he felt solid and settled and himself rather than someone he was pretending to be, were the days when Mickey was nearby, the days when Mickey was just down the road.

Mickey made up the only other home he’d had, the only other place he’d felt this safe; they’d built a cocoon around themselves in the equally-as-shitty Milkovich house, smoking and laughing and whispering into each other’s skin in the darkness. Even as Ian’s grip on reality felt like it was slipping through his fingers, Mickey’s warm body next to his kept him rooted, in the same ways Mickey’s thrumming presence beside him kept him safe in all the blaring uncertainty of federal prison and imposing cell walls and the press of too many strange bodies in orange jumpsuits. Ian had always felt safe in the Gallagher house—but so much of that, since he was a scrawny fifteen year old, was because of the nights he spent awake in bed thinking up pipe dreams of a future with the loudmouthed kid he worked with at the convenience store, or when he could crawl into bed after a late night EMT shift and feel the solid, grounding weight in his chest as he remembered his road trip with Mickey to the border, and thought about Mickey having some kind of a better life in Mexico. So much of that feeling of home, especially through all of the epic highs and colossal lows, was just knowing that someone out there, by some miracle, loved Ian as deeply as Mickey Milkovich could— knowing he had a doorstep to run to when his own house was infiltrated by Monica and some stranger threatening to take Liam, or a bed to crash in for months when everything else in his life felt like shifting, unstable ground. So much of home was right here, and it always had been.

Ian quietly slid shut the squeaky folds of the door, discarding his towel and throwing a threadbare t-shirt over his head—and then he gingerly stretched out onto the opposite side of the bed beside a sleep-soft Mickey, his body radiating heat and the ends of his hair still damp from his own shower, smelling of the fresh scent of cheap shampoo and very slightly of toothpaste, mingling with the earthy smell of cigarette smoke and the other scent that Ian could only just describe as Mickey. Ian let himself lay there for a moment, listening to Mickey breathing— just breathing.

He reached over Mickey’s torso and shut off the bedside lamp, enveloping the room in a heavy cloak of darkness—but this time the silence didn’t seem so bad with Mickey’s steady breaths punctuating the quiet. He slid a hand over Mickey’s waist, resting his chin on the crook of Mickey’s shoulder and breathing in deep—he could feel Mickey’s heartbeat vibrating into his own chest, feeling the rise and fall of his ribcage as he held him close. Ian felt all the latent tension, the lungful of air he didn’t even know he had been holding, drain out of him—and it started to make him feel weirdly light and giddy to imagine sometime in the near future when he and Mickey would actually have a place of their own, a place where they could ride out the silence together just like this— a place with clutter and creaking floorboards and slanted moonlight of their own.

If the Gallaghers were “getting on with their lives,” like Lip had said—then this right here was the only thing that Ian was moving towards, just like he always had been.

#lol this was very contemplative and not very narrative heavy #but i hope u enjoyed?? #i wrote 90% of this in my phone notes lol #also the fiona hall of shame got me feeling weirdly emotional about how much ian must miss fiona!!!! #anyways ty so much for the prompt<333 #gallavich #gallavich fanfiction #gallavich fic #ian and mickey #shameless #shameless fic #ian x mickey #ian gallagher #mickey milkovich