Mickey’s Hands
Mickey’s Hands
Mickey never really liked his hands.
As a child, his dad would berate, “They’re too soft, like a girl’s, like a faggot’s! I’m not raising a faggot!”
He started to keep them dirty, purposefully ignoring his mother when she would tell him to wash up for dinner. Letting his father see his dirty hands, see that they weren’t soft. That he wasn’t soft.
His hands were always decorated with scrapes and bandages, jagged nails from biting them, little tuffs of skin puckering at his nail beds, splinters and splices from different activities from the neighborhood. Bruises from getting into fights.
His mother would frown at them, but he could see that his father’s were content, content in the knowledge that his son wasn’t soft, wasn’t a faggot.
Different scars decorated them as he got older, broken glass, someone’s tooth, a cigarette being put out, even faint claw marks from a kitten he befriended in the alley behind the Kash and Grab.
When he was thirteen his dad took him to a friend’s house, “time to get the tattoos, then no one will think you’re a faggot, they’ll know you’re a Milkovich.” His hand had been on Mickey’s neck, rough, calloused, dirty, making Mickey squirm against the contact.
His dad had shoved him down in a rickety kitchen chair while his friend etched the jagged dark words along his knuckles FUCK U-UP, along each finger, like his dad’s knuckle tattoos, like his brothers. They hadn’t warned him about the pain, he had whimpered at one point, and his dad had leaned into him, making the tattoo gun against his skin sink deeper than it had been before.
“Only faggots cry.” Terry had snapped.
Mickey made sure to blink back his tears and bite his lower lip until he tasted blood, keeping the whimpers he wanted to cry out inside, the tears locked away.
Until he was home, his mother had seen his hands and once Terry had left for the night she came to Mickey’s room with ice wrapped in a towel, and a green square tin with a balm in it that she gently soothed into her youngest son’s skin.
“You can cry Mikhailo, he isn’t here, and I love you.” She murmured as he winced at her touch along the new marks.
He let himself relax and tears slipped down his cheeks. As she rubbed the balm onto his hands, she told him how much she loved him, how special he was, and how he will always be loved by her no matter what.
A new scar appeared when she left them, he had been sitting in the abandoned building he used as an escape and cried. He punched a brick wall when he couldn’t find her anywhere, punched it again and again until he finally felt the pain of bone breaking.
Ian had asked him why he had a cast around one hand, and two fingers in splints on the other when he saw him next. He caught the redhead curiously looking at his hands when he came to work.
Mickey had ignored him and flicked through the magazine that he had been looking at on the counter.
Pale freckled hands reached out and gingerly touched his fractured ones, a hot searing went through Mickey, but it didn’t hurt.
“I’m sorry about whatever happened. If you need anything, I don’t mind being your hands for you.”
“They’re just hands man.” Mickey muttered, feeling a blush along the back of his neck.
“But they’re your hands, and I like your hands.” Ian murmured softly.
Mickey looked up surprised, expecting Ian to have a goofy look on his face like he usually did, but the look there was tender and longing.
Mickey had taken in a shaky breath and nodded. Ian giving him a small smile before grabbing an anti inflammatory medication and pouring out the amount of pills that would help Mickey’s pain.
Mickey saw freckled fingers entwined with his as he and Ian grew, as they loved, as they fought, every time he could they were holding hands. He tried to memorize the patterns on Ian’s, and Ian would try to memorize the scars on Mickey’s. He liked nights like that.
The cool silver band over his finger feeling strange and unnerving, but exhilarating at the same time as he and Ian clutched their hands together, raising them over their heads walking down the aisle.
Husbands, they were husbands.
Mickey ran his thumb along a callous that was permanently on his hand.
One that wasn’t from labor.
A mark that wasn’t from pain.
It was small, barely noticeable.
Just under the ring finger of his left hand.
Where his wedding ring rested.
His husband had the same small callous on his hand.
Mickey never used to like his hands.
But now, they showed the world that he was forever loved, in love, and in a state of happiness that he had never known.
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