Chapter Text
“Gallagher.”
Ian groans around a mouthful of BLT. “No,” he says, shoulders drooping. He just sat down to eat.
“Yup,” Kelly says, tossing him his jacket before heading for the rig. “Let’s go.”
Life at the firehouse is mostly good. The occasional abandoned sandwich notwithstanding, Ian really enjoys his job as an EMT. He likes helping people, and he’s learning a lot. It keeps him busy, keeps him in a routine, and he has a few friends now—friends that aren’t related to him, or could be confused for somebody’s grandpa.
He’s found a purpose after, well… everything. He’s made it into a new phase of his life, past the army and the psych ward, and he’s come out on the other side. He takes his meds like clockwork, and he checks in with his therapist once a month to make sure he’s still okay.
He’s figured his shit out. Mostly. It’s miles from where he was two years ago, and for that, he’s grateful.
“Gallagher!”
Ian scoops up half his sandwich for the road. “I’m coming!”
He drives the rig occasionally, but Kelly takes the wheel most of the time. She’s been here almost four years, and she knows the job better than anyone else Ian has met here. She’s a great teacher, and a good friend, and she’s the only person besides his boss that knows about his bipolar.
It’s why they’re assigned as partners more often than not. That, and they usually request it. They get along well, and Ian has even met her girlfriend a few times. He likes her too.
They cruise along downtown, dodging in and out of traffic with the lights on but no sirens. It’s not until they start to get out of the city completely—and Ian has finished his sandwich—that he even asks where they’re going.
“Medical transport,” she says easily. “Non-emergent.”
Ian bangs his head against the back of the seat. “Great. What nursing home is it this time?”
“It’s a different kind of transport.”
His brows furrow with curiosity, but before he can open his mouth to ask for clarification, he recognizes something. The highway signs and the exit ramp, the ones he’s been on only a few memorable times before.
He watches as the landscape grows more and more familiar, the hairs on the back of his neck standing up.
“Where did you say we were going?” he asks quietly, fearing the answer.
Kelly glances at him sideways. “Time to put on your big-boy pants, Gallagher.”
The rig pulls onto the road that leads up to the Cook County prison, and Ian’s blood runs cold.
“Medical transport,” he echoes. Breathes. “Non-emergent.”
“Yup,” Kelly says, oblivious to his internal panic. “They have doctors inside, but they call us when things get bad enough someone has to go to the hospital. It’s not often—the government doesn’t wanna foot hospital bills for these guys if they can help it—but it happens.”
She drives the rig up to the metal gates, idling while she waits for them to unlock and slide open.
“Figured it’s about time you got to see one of these,” she tells him. “Need to learn the protocols of how it works.”
Ian doesn’t say anything. He almost jumps at the loud buzz of the gates unlocking, his face going pale as the truck drives on.
He has a bad feeling about this.
“You alright over there?” she asks, second guessing her decision to bring him along.
“Fine,” he says quietly, his voice as even as he can make it. “Do you know who we’re transporting?”
“No, they don’t give out that kind of information until we have him on board.”
“Oh.”
They pull up to what Ian can only assume is the shipping bay, but the wide doorway and the ramp make it the best option for wheeling gurneys in and out he supposes.
“Buckle up,” she says as she puts the rig in park and, ironically, unbuckles her seat belt. “Let’s go see what we’re working with.”
Ian squeezes his shaking hands into fists.
“Okay,” he says.
They wait at the loading bay for a ridiculously long time. Two armed guards stand with them, eyeing them up and down suspiciously, even though they haven’t moved.
“You know, usually patients are ready to go when we get called for a transport,” Kelly says, annoyed. “It’s not like we don’t have other places to be.”
The guards don’t respond.
“This is fucking ridiculous,” she says under her breath, yet just loud enough for everyone to hear her. Turning to Ian, she says, “It usually doesn’t take this long.”
“Yeah.”
“They’re usually here waiting when we show up.”
“Okay.”
She stares at him for another minute before turning her focus back on the guards. “Do you know when they’ll be here? Because we can go save some other lives and then come back.”
“The inmate had some… complications,” the guard says cryptically. “It needed to be dealt with.”
“And we’re not qualified to deal with complications?” Kelly shoots back.
“What kind of complications?” Ian asks.
“Confidential.”
“Who’s the patient?”
“Inmate,” the guard says, then leans his ear down to listen to something on the radio clipped to his shoulder. “They’re coming now.”
Ian can feel him before he sees him. Goosebumps litter the back of his neck, his heartrate speeds up, and he loses all the breath in his chest.
He almost doesn’t recognize him at first. Bright orange jumpsuit rolled down to his waist, regulation white canvas shoes, pale skin covering his chest, his shoulders, his arms, and dried blood crusting in patches all over him.
It’s the tattoos that come into focus first as he gets closer. Family mantra etched into his knuckles, and a scarred over old infection carved into his chest, peeking out just barely past the neckline of his bloodied tanktop.
“Holy fuck,” Ian mutters.
Kelly—again—looks at him oddly, because Ian is nothing if not completely professional in the field. He doesn’t cringe or wince or fucking swear at the injuries he sees on a daily basis. He doesn’t freeze in terror when he comes across a patient screaming in pain or on the brink of death.
But this, lying in a gurney that rolls right up to Ian’s feet, isn’t just a patient. Or an inmate.
It’s Mickey’s blue, unfocused eyes that Ian stares right into as they blink against the sunlight, his face completely red-purple on one side and his eye socket swollen so much his lids are practically closed shut.
The world slows down, time moving like they’re all passing through thick mud.
There’s dried blood on his chin, and beneath his nose, and down the front of his shirt too. He doesn’t move, his body lying limp in the bed as his chest barely rises and falls. His breathing is audible, this shaky, broken inhale that’s too slow and too shallow, like his lungs are filled with water—with blood, maybe. Like he can’t really breathe.
His body and his face are beaten, but his hands aren’t torn up in the way Ian expected them to be. His knuckles are barely bloodied, barely bruised. Mickey didn’t fight back—or couldn’t fight back. He could’ve been jumped, for all Ian knows.
And that’s when his focus snaps back into the present.
All of Ian’s fear and trepidation spike into adrenaline and routine. “Are you fucking kidding me?” he snaps. “Why is he still conscious? You didn’t give him anything to knock him out? He should be intubated.”
“He’s still breathing.”
“Barely.”
The guy who must be the prison doctor, if his sunken face and broken spirit are anything to go by, says, “Son, we don’t have those kinds of resources here.”
“That’s bullshit.”
“Ian.” Kelly glares at him, eyes hard.
He knows her well enough to read her face. He knows it’s bullshit. She knows it’s bullshit. Every guard and medical personnel in here knows it’s bullshit. The prison has resources—granted, probably not enough for regular use, but they do have them—they just don’t like to use them.
Especially on inmates.
Ian meets Mickey’s gaze, his one eye blinking hard now that he’s focused on Ian. His breathing quickens, almost hyperventilating, and his face twists into this shocked expression beneath the blood and pain.
Ian and Kelly get on either side of the gurney, making sure the hand rails are locked in place.
“You’re gonna be okay,” he says to Mickey, his panic only bleeding a little into his professional EMT voice. “I’ve got you.”
He reaches down and brushes his gloved fingers against Mickey’s wrist.
Mickey flinches.
“Here’s his file,” the doctor says to Kelly, holding up a manilla folder filled with papers before handing it to the guard standing next to him. “Officer Trout will be escorting the inmate. Once you get to the hospital he can handle the paperwork from there.”
“What happened to him?” Ian asks.
“Some of the other inmates beat him.”
“Why?”
The doctor levels him with those lifeless eyes. “Does it matter?”
Ian has never wanted to punch someone more.
Instead, he looks down at Mickey again, that shaky, stuttering, wheezing breath still echoing around them all. “You’re okay,” he says quietly, reaching down and taking Mickey’s arm in his hand. He needs to start a line and then intubate. “Trust me.”
As soon as the words leave his lips, as soon as his gloved fingers wrap around Mickey’s wrist, Mickey yanks his arm away.
It’s the most he’s moved since they wheeled him out here.
“Hey!” Officer Trout yells, banging his baton against the handrail. “Do you want me to cuff all your limbs to this thing? Because I can.”
Ian’s face twists into indignation. “Are you out of your mind—”
“He’s right,” Kelly cuts him off.
“What?”
Kelly doesn’t meet Ian’s eyes. “Both his wrists should be in soft cuffs. It’s protocol, with everything we have in the back of the rig.”
With a single nod, Trout and the doctor get to work.
And maybe Kelly was trying to help in her own way, trying to get them to swap the metal cuff digging into one wrist into two cotton medical restraints instead, but they don’t take the handcuffs off. They just add the cotton ones.
They add the leg restraints too, even though Mickey hasn’t moved his legs an inch, and Ian tries to protest but Kelly shakes her head at him.
All he can do is stand there and watch Mickey, barely breathing, being tied down to the bed like some wrangled animal.
There’s a lurch in Ian’s belly, and for a second he thinks he might throw up.
It’s awful. All of it.
And that’s when he remembers that they’re not picking up Mickey—his Mickey—from some house call, or a general store, or even the side of the road. They’re in a maximum security prison, where everything is designed to be as inhumane as possible.
He can’t stand it, and he’s only been here ten minutes.
Mickey’s been here two years.
“Let’s go,” Kelly says once they have the gurney loaded up in the back. She eyes Mickey warily. “We gotta get him to a hospital. Non-emergent my ass.”
While she jogs around to the driver’s side door, Ian hops up into the back with Mickey and Officer Trout. With one more glare at the doctor, he shuts the backdoors.
Mickey’s breathing is only getting worse.
Ian wonders how long he’s been like this, banged up and bloodied; how long that fucking doctor waited until they called for the transport. Has it been minutes or hours? For how much of it has Mickey been conscious?
He doesn’t know.
What he does know is that the labored breathing from before they got him in the rig has only deteriorated in the last three minutes while Kelly drives. His breaths are shallower, and his eyes keep welling up with unshed tears from the obvious increase in pain.
“Mickey.” Ian leans forward in his seat, elbows on his knees and hands clasped together. “Please.’
Mickey keeps staring at the ceiling, blinking back the wetness.
“Let me intubate you,” he says, bartering with him. He doesn’t even know if he should be doing this—all protocol went out the window the second he was who was strapped down to this gurney. “I’ll knock you out, you won’t feel a thing. You’ll be in less pain. It’ll help, I promise.”
As soon as the last word—promise—leaves Ian’s mouth, Mickey finally looks at him. Glares at him, really, as much as he can glare through the pain and hard breathing.
“Please,” Ian says, his own voice breaking. He swallows around the lump in his throat, trying to keep it together.
Officer Trout scoffs loudly from his seat. “Fucking kids these days,” he murmurs, mostly to himself. “Gettin’ soft, talking to prisoners like they’re human beings. Like they’re people.”
Ian wants to kill him.
But his eyes never leave Mickey, constantly taking in all his symptoms and monitoring the rise and fall of his chest.
It stutters.
Mickey takes in these short, gasping sips of air, his face looking more and more panicked. He can’t breathe. Not enough, almost not at all.
“Mickey,” Ian whisper-shouts, begging him to allow for intervention.
And there—right there between the wide eyes and the chest that barely moves—is a nod.
Ian leaps into action, autopilot taking over as he grabs a twelve-gauge needle and some tubing to start a line in Mickey’s arm. He tenderly rotates his elbow, opening it and finding easy access. His arm is warm, still full of life as his blood continues to pump through his body for now.
Mickey doesn’t pull away this time, but he doesn’t look at Ian either. A tear falls from his eye, rolling sideways over his temple and into his hair.
“Close your eyes,” Ian says quietly, angling himself to block Trout’s view with his body. He runs a hand back over Mickey’s hair, smoothing it down. It’s gotten long on top, longer than it ever was before.
Mickey blinks once before his eyes get hazy. They go unfocused on the second blink, and the third time they stay closed.
“I got you,” Ian whispers, grabbing the intubation tools and tilting Mickey’s chin up.
He gets it in on the first try, securing the bag on the end and squeezing it rhythmically with his fingers. Air flows into Mickey’s body, his chest rising and falling minimally, but it’s there. The heart monitor stuck to his finger still beeps steadily.
He squeezes the bag every two seconds.
Mickey’s lungs need to rest, and Ian will gladly take the burden of breathing for him.
“Twenty-two year old male,” Ian says as soon as the ambulance doors swing open to the waiting ER crew. “Injuries to the face, head, and chest. Possible orbital bone fracture, likely some broken ribs.”
The team of doctors and nurses wheel the gurney out of the truck and get the legs extended. Ian moves with them, squeezing the air bag helping him breathe until someone takes it right out of his hand in one fluid motion.
“Patient exhibited signs of labored breathing, shallow breaths, and possibly collapsed lungs,” Ian keeps going. “I had to intubate him in the rig. He couldn’t breathe.”
He rattles off the dosages of the drugs he gave Mickey before intubation, still moving in time with the ER care team as they take him into the hospital. Officer Trout is right on his heels, and he can hear Kelly a few steps behind.
“Does he have a name?” one of the doctors calls out.
“His name is confidential,” Officer Trout says. “He’s an inmate at Cook County, and his information will be given out only to his direct care team on a need to know—”
“Mickey,” Ian says without thinking. “His name is Mickey.”
While Trout glares at him like he wants to handcuff as well, thankfully none of the medical staff bats an eye at the information that Mickey is a prisoner. One of them finds the metal handcuffs still attached to his wrist and rolls his eyes.
“Can we get these off?” he calls out.
Trout turns his attention back to the doctors. “Is it medically necessary?”
“Is it—” the doctor starts, astonished. “He’s unconscious! It’s not like he’s going anywhere anytime soon!”
“They only come off if it’s medically necessary, and then we have other restraints that need to be put in place instead.”
The doctor looks around for any kind of backup. “Who the fuck is this guy?” he asks the room.
The rest of the team are too busy assessing Mickey’s injuries.
It takes Ian a full minute to realize Kelly has caught up to them, and it takes another forty seconds to realize she’s staring at him like he has two heads.
“What?” he snaps.
“You… know him?” she asks, brows drawing together. “The patient?”
Ian runs a hand over his face, exhaling harshly before finding Mickey again in the growing crowd. “Yes.”
“Trauma Room One is open!” the charge nurse calls out, and suddenly the crowd is moving.
They wheel Mickey into a closed room, working on getting him hooked up to monitors and a machine that will take over and breathe for him for a while. Ian takes a step towards it, but a heavy hand from Trout lands on his shoulder.
“This is as far as you go,” he says gruffly.
Ian shakes the hand off, probably more dramatically than necessary, but he doesn’t care. He fucking hates this guy. He hates everything about this—hates the prison, the guards, the way Mickey looks lifeless in that cot right before the doctors close the door and cut off his view—but right now, he really fucking hates this guy.
“Hi,” a young nurse says, coming up to Ian and hesitantly looking between him and Trout. “Um. We need someone to fill out these forms for the patient. Insurance information, medical history, next of kin or point of contact. Is that either of you?”
“His only point of contact is Cook County Correctional, and the number’s at the top of the first page,” Trout says, handing over Mickey’s file to the nurse. “You can relay any information or questions there. The rest of it is his brief medical history since he got locked up.”
She blinks at him, slowly taking the file from his hands. “Um. Okay.” She looks at Ian with wide eyes, in pure disbelief that this is how it works.
They can’t even call his family? Ian has no idea if that’s right, or if it’s even legal. All he knows is that Trout is an asshole, and probably doesn’t know anything about Mickey’s life outside the four walls of his prison cell.
“Gallagher,” Kelly calls out, and he turns to face her. “We gotta go.”
“What?” he asks, taken aback.
“Our job is done here,” she says gently. “There’s nothing more for us to do. You know that.”
He does. He understands it when it’s other patients, when it’s a guy who collapsed on the sidewalk or a kid with a broken arm. They bring them to the hospital, relay any information they have to the ER team, and then they’re on their way. More people to help, more lives to save, or whatever.
He knows this.
And yet, his feet are rooted to the hospital floor, the soles of his boots stuck to the linoleum with the weight of a hundred tons.
“I—” he starts.
“You can’t come in here!” the doctor from before yells when Trout tries to barge into the exam room.
“Legally you can’t bring him in here without me,” Trout argues.
They go back and forth, and Ian doesn’t pay much attention to what they’re saying, but through the gap in the open door he can see two other people cutting Mickey out of his clothes and draping sterile cloths over him.
“We have to get him prepped for surgery,” the doctor says.
“Do what you have to, but I’m not leaving his side.”
The doctor wrestles with it for a second before relenting. “Fine. You can stand outside the OR and watch from the gallery window, but you can’t go in.”
With a nod, Trout slips into the room while they finish prepping Mickey for surgery. Ian wishes he could hear more—what kind of surgery, is it serious, is it dangerous—but he can’t.
The emergency room is still bustling around him, but it feels quieter.
“Ian,” Kelly tries again. “We have to go.”
He presses his lips together and looks at her, trying to figure out how to explain this. How to tell her he can’t leave.
How he did that once already, and the guilt nearly killed him. How he can’t do that to Mickey again, not now.
“I can’t,” is all he says. “You go, but I have to stay.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I have to stay and make sure he’s okay.”
“Mickey?”
His name feels like a gut punch when she says it out loud. “Yeah.”
Kelly eyes him cautiously for a moment. “Ian. How do you know this guy?”
He can read it on her face, a question born out of curiosity rather than judgment. The puzzle pieces don’t line up in her mind with what she knows about Ian, and what she knows about the kinds of people who end up in maximum security lockup.
There are a lot of answers he could give. A lot of things he could tell her—and might, someday—but he doesn’t have the strength to explain any of it right now. It’s too much, too complicated, too dredged in a past she doesn’t know a whole lot about.
“He’s family,” is what Ian goes with, and it feels right. He shrugs one shoulder. “Kelly, I have to stay.”
Her face relaxes slightly, like she’s trying to understand. She doesn’t know the details, but she knows he’s serious, and she knows nothing she says will make him change his mind.
She nods once. “Sue’s gonna wanna call you when I get back alone.”
“I know.”
“I can try to hold her off.”
“No, it’s—” Ian shakes his head. “It’s fine. Tell her to call me. I’ll… try to explain.”
Kelly presses her lips into a thin line. “Okay.”
He can tell she wants to say something, wants to ask more questions, probably, but she doesn’t. She bites her tongue and hugs him quickly instead, arms tight around his shoulders for barely a breath.
“Text me,” she says, her eyes serious.
Ian nods. “I will. Later.”
It must be a good enough answer, because the next second she’s jogging back out the emergency entrance they came in, jumping in the rig, and driving away.
She’s a good friend. He should tell her about Mickey. Maybe an abbreviated version, but still, he should talk about him.
“Excuse me,” he says, finding the young nurse from earlier. “Hi. I was with the patient that just went down to the OR: Mickey Milkovich?”
“Yeah,” she says, face relaxing. “You were with… the officer.” She hesitates on the word, remembering who the patient is and what his circumstances are.
“Not really,” he says. “Occupational hazard.”
She lets out a soft breath of a laugh. “Yeah. I get that.”
Ian gives her the rest of Mickey’s information. His medical history predating his incarceration (what Ian knows about anyway), his blood type, his family history. She has most of his demographics from the files the prison sent over with him, but he gives her alternative emergency contacts that she seems grateful for.
“That’s his sister,” he says, giving her Mandy’s name and number. “She’ll want to know what’s going on.
“Got it,” the nurse says, typing it into his chart. “Anyone else?”
Ian hesitates only for a second.
“Yeah,” he says. “There’s someone else.”
He gives her his own phone number and makes up some story about forgetting how ‘this guy, Ian’ and Mickey are related. She lists him under Family but leaves the specificity blank.
True to his word, Ian doesn’t leave. He sits in the waiting room for hours.
Slumped in a hard plastic chair, he sits with his arms folded over his chest, his forearms brushing against the soft white cotton of his undershirt. His uniform pants and boots are still on, but his EMT shirt is folded and hanging over the arm of the waiting room chair.
He checks his watch. Three hours, and still no word on Mickey’s surgery.
He scrubs his hands over his face, taking a deep breath. It could be worse, he supposes. They could’ve called him to say Mickey’s dead.
The thought makes him almost vomit in the waiting room.
He’s left a couple texts and a voicemail on Mandy’s phone, but she hasn’t answered him yet. Her phone doesn’t even ring, just goes straight to voicemail, and he wonders if she changed her number. It’s been a couple months since the last time they talked. It’s possible.
He feels guilty for not keeping up with her either. She doesn’t live in Chicago anymore, sure, but he could’ve tried harder to keep in touch. She was his best friend.
Mickey was his best friend too, and he doesn’t call him either. And he’s only fifteen miles outside the city.
Ian runs his hands over his legs, squeezing at his knees.
He just has to keep waiting for now.
Four hours, then five.
He tries to drink bad hospital cafeteria coffee, but it doesn’t even work. He falls asleep in his seat, head bowed and eyes heavy.
Eventually, he gets the call.
His phone rings so loudly that it startles him awake, and he fumbles with it to try and make the noise stop without hanging up.
“Hello?” he asks, looking around. As if the person calling him is at the one nurses station he can see from here.
They’re not.
“Hi, is this Ian Gallagher?” a voice asks.
“Yes.”
“This is Marissa calling from St. Joseph’s Hospital, we received records that you are one of the emergency contacts listed for Mikhailo Milkovich?”
Ian’s stomach drops, even though he’s the one who put his own damn number down. “Yes, that’s me. How is he?”
“We’ve been trying to reach his sister, but she hasn’t picked up any of our calls,” they say. “You’re also listed here as family?”
“Yeah, we’re… cousins,” Ian says, wincing.
“Cousins?”
“We don’t have a lot of other family,” he lies. “Is he okay?”
“He came in earlier with extensive injuries, and the surgical team has been working to repair them for a while now…” She tells him more about Mickey’s surgery, how his lung collapsed, how there was more internal damage than they initially anticipated. She tells him about how they patched him back up, and how he’s out of the OR for now.
Ian swallows around a lump in his throat. “So he’s gonna be okay?”
“He’s out of the woods for now,” Marissa tells him. “They just brought him up to his room, and he should be regaining consciousness in the next hour or two if all things go well.”
Ian lets out a stuttering exhale.
“Can I see him?”
She gives him the room number, and Ian thanks her before hanging up.
He lets his head hang back for a minute, shoulders dropping and neck stretching as he takes a slow, deep breath, letting the stress of the last six hours flow out on the exhale.
Mickey is alive.
He’s alive, and he’s going to be okay.
He makes it up to the sixth floor and gets a visitor’s badge from the nurse at the desk.
There’s an officer sitting in a chair outside Mickey’s hospital room, but it’s not Trout. There must have been a shift change sometime in the last few hours, because the guy on watch now is a younger guy, not quite as hardened by the years of working in the system as Trout was.
Ian’s just glad the guy doesn’t know he was the EMT that brought Mickey in. That probably would’ve looked more suspicious than a registered family visitor just trying to see his ‘cousin’.
The officer only gives him a little bit of trouble, double checking Ian’s visitor’s badge, license, and something on the prison record database he has pulled up his phone. He wonders if he’s still on Mickey’s visitors list from two years earlier, but he doesn’t have a chance to give it too much thought before the guard lets him go inside.
Ian closes the door behind him, standing in the entrance and just staring at Mickey for a full two minutes.
He looks so small in the hospital bed, white blankets over his legs and a hospital gown pulled up to his shoulders. His face is still bruised, more purple-black than before, but less swollen. Mickey doesn’t have the breathing tube in anymore, and his mouth is parted slightly as he breathes. His chest rises and falls evenly.
He’s beautiful.
Ian’s chest swells with something he hasn’t felt in a long time, this warm, swirling thing that bangs at his sternum to get out.
His eyes fill with tears—of relief, of regret, he doesn’t know—and he has to take a steadying breath as only one falls.
Ian drags a chair over to Mickey’s bedside, taking up residence in this one just like he did downstairs. He leans forward, props his elbows up on the mattress.
Mickey’s hands are chained together in two metal cuffs, but they’re not digging into his skin the way the cuffs from earlier were. There’s a bit more slack on this chain, maybe a foot extended between his wrists if he tried to move them. They’re connected to a longer chain that dips down off the side of the bed and is latched onto the arm rail that’s locked down below.
It’s a stark reminder of Mickey’s circumstances, but Ian forces himself to get past it. Prison was never really the thing that got in between them anyway.
That was all Ian.
Gently, he lifts one of Mickey’s hands from his lap and slides his own against it, pressing their palms together. He almost wants Mickey to wake up at the movement, but he doesn’t. He just keeps breathing, his face slack and his body limp.
An hour or two, if all goes well. That’s what the nurse said.
So Ian settles in on his hard plastic chair, Mickey’s hand clasped in his own, and he waits.
And waits.
And waits.