Chapter Text
Back in that group house that Ian had insisted on trying to call a home, Lip had found a boy who wore his brother’s face, but who wasn’t him at all.
He’d recognised the face staring back at him, the familiar red hair and freckles and that slightly dopey smile, but that had been the extent of it. That had been all there was of the old Ian to remain, the Ian he’d read stories to and persuaded against believing in the monsters under his bed.
He’d known something was different the minute he’d laid eyes on his brother.
Lip – as proven – was far from stupid, and sure, sometimes he could be a little clueless, but he hadn’t been then. He’d seen the way that the other boys in that group home had eyed Ian warily. He hadn’t understood it at first. Hadn’t understood the fear in their faces, but then Ian had rushed outside and leapt straight into a fight fists first. And Lip had been left there thinking well huh.
His Ian wouldn’t do that normally.
But then, that was the whole problem, was it?
Later when he’d thought back, what had scared him the most was that the first thing one of the other boys had told him was, “Just don’t touch Milkovich’s shit and you’ll be fine.” He’d only needed to know Mickey five minutes, to see the distaste in the other boy’s eyes, the possessiveness there to realise that he considered Ian one of his things.
Ian was Mickey’s and Lip wasn’t going to let one little warning make him back off from his own brother.
In hindsight, maybe he should have done a little bit. If he’d only backed off that little bit, it might have spared him a whole lot of unnecessary grief.
As he’d said before though, Lip was smart, but he wasn’t always clued in.
He doesn’t know how they got from standing opposite each other in a group home’s living room and smiling to Lip’s pen hesitating over the paper now though. How did it get this far? This fucked up?
“What is it?” Amanda asks, confused by his hesitance.
She cards her fingers through the back of his hair, presses a kiss to his neck. Never in a million years would Lip have imagined himself writing out wedding invitations. Sure, the whole sitting naked on a bed while doing it part, that he could have seen as being realistic, but this was just another mystery in his life. How did he get here?
“I don’t know whether to invite my brother,” he admits.
Amanda doesn’t know the whole sorry story of Ian and Mickey and Lip, but she knows enough. She knows there’s tension there. She knows that Ian still doesn’t talk to Fiona and honestly, this time, Lip can understand why.
Her Jimmy comment was a step too far. It had been drawing a line where it shouldn’t have been drawn. But it was a little ironic that it was Ian who took offense. Ian, who had put his other half so far above the rest of his family that they weren’t even really in sight anymore.
It was the worst sort of irony. One that kept Lip up at night and had him swilling those ice cubes around his glass and only tasting bitterness.
“Why wouldn’t you?” she asks. “He should be there. Or at least have the option.”
And she’s right, in theory. But…
“He’ll bring his boyfriend though.”
“So?”
Lip rolls his eyes. “You can tell you haven’t had the displeasure of meeting him.”
She smacks his arm, hard in that way Amanda always does. She pulls no punches, his girl. It’s one of the things he loves about her. “Yes, I also haven’t met your brother, whose fault is that?” she asks. “You’re being childish.”
He scoffs. “How am I being childish? You don’t even know them!”
She stands and towers over him on the bed, hands on her hips and a scowl on her face. “Do you?” she asks. “Isn’t that what you’ve been complaining about for the last two years. How you don’t know who your brother is anymore?”
She drops back down, cups his face and softens. She could almost be bipolar and he could almost joke that she was, if he didn’t have first-hand experience of that particular demon.
“Baby, have you even made the effort to try and get to know him?” she asks.
He tries to pull his face out of her hold, but she keeps him pinned there. “Why do I have to be the one building bridges?” he asks, spiteful like a child, he’s fully aware. “I’m not the one who burned them.”
“Aren’t you?” she asks.
He hates this whole answering with questions shit. It’s practically psych 101, he knows that. It’s still annoying. And it’s annoying, because it still sort of works.
“Look, it seems to me like you haven’t been making all that much effort. Yes, he could change some things too, but if this boyfriend was so bad for your brother, they wouldn’t have lasted this long, would they?”
She pats his cheek, hard enough to sting.
“Sounds like to me that he probably feels like you’ve taken the thing he loves, the thing that got him through that whole fucked up foster care system and shit all over it,” she says. “Did you ever look at it like that?” She can tell the answer from the look on his face. “Of course you didn’t. Fucking men, always need women to sort out your shit.”
She plucks the invitation from her fingers and in her neat, scripture-like handwriting writes Ian Gallagher and Mickey Milkovich right in the To: section.
“I expect this to be hand delivered,” she says, kissing his cheek. “And if he isn’t at my wedding. I want a divorce.”
“Don’t you mean our wedding?” he calls after her as she saunters out of their bedroom.
Her laugh floats back to him. “Nope.”