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scarlet-witchery · 11 months ago

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New Traditions

Two Gallaghers and two Milkoviches decide to get a Christmas tree. Sounds simple enough, right? post-s10, just a bunch of tooth-rotting holiday fluff. Written for my dear @m4ndysk4nkovich, I hope you enjoy, darling! (on ao3)

Mickey wasn’t quite sure how he’d gotten himself into this situation. Probably it was the fact that he couldn’t say no to Ian, or Debbie, and the fact that Debbie was now dating Sandy, and he had nothing better to do on a Sunday. Debs had said something yesterday about needing to get a tree, because “it’s your first Christmas as newlyweds, Mickey, how can we not celebrate?” and “Franny just loves Christmas, she’ll be heartbroken if we don’t have a tree!” But trying to lug a ten-foot tall tree back to the Gallagher house with just the four of them and Debbie’s car was a lot more complicated than any of them had expected it to be.

He wiped his brow on the back of his sleeve and frowned. “Nah, it’s gonna fall off if you fuckin’ leave it like that. Sandy, just fuckin’ shove it—no, the other way-”

Sandy groaned in frustration and pushed the tree in the opposite direction where it was tied on top of Debbie’s car. “Make up your mind, would you?”

“I’m not the one who decided to get us all up at the ass crack of dawn for this!”

Tellingly, the two ginger Gallaghers who’d been the cause of this whole fucking trip were off to the side, not bothering to help him and Sandy with getting the tree sorted out. Debbie and Ian were talking about something—what, exactly, Mickey couldn’t hear, but apparently was more important than helping him and Sandy out with the tree—and Mickey got momentarily distracted when Ian’s face broke into a wide grin, laughing at something Debbie had said. Fuckin’ Gallagher. So sue him if he liked seeing his husband smile. The ring on his finger gave him a free pass for shit like that.

Sandy threw a snowball at his face. “Hey! What the fuck?”

“Focus up, Mickey! If they’re not gonna help, I at least need you to tighten the ropes on your side. I can’t do it by myself, you know.” Apparently Debbie and Ian heard that part, because they hurried over to help out. Debbie gave Sandy a quick kiss and a “sorry, sorry!” as she took up her side of the ropes. Ian leaned over and did the same to Mickey, which only proved Mickey’s point that the Gallaghers were a bunch of saps. Christmas just seemed to make it worse.

“Okay, okay!” Debbie chirped, and Mickey had no idea how she could be so cheerful when it was so goddamn cold outside. “Ian, can you and Mickey help balance the back end a little better? I don’t want it wobbling when we’re driving back home.”

Sandy smirked. “Yeah, Mick sure knows all about the back end.” And Mickey couldn’t let that stand—he reached down and gathered some snow in his hands, tossing it right at the smug look on her face. She let out a noise of protest, but Ian was laughing, and Mickey felt a little surge of victory at the sound.

“C’mon, Mick, we gotta get this back home so we can decorate-” but a snowball caught Ian with his mouth wide open, causing Debbie to let out a shocked laugh. Ian brushed his face off, snow covering his gloves as he shook his head to get it all out of his hair. “What the fuck!”

In a moment, the tree was all but forgotten in a mad scramble to get snowballs formed and thrown—Ian tossed one that flew apart all over Debbie’s winter coat, causing her to retaliate immediately and catching Mickey in the side of the head instead. Sandy dived behind the car, getting Ian square in the back when he wasn’t looking. Debbie whooped with laughter and ducked as Mickey tried to throw another snowball at her head and missed.

“Gotta do better than that, Milkovich!” she crowed, and Sandy made a noise of protest. “Sorry, babe!”

Ian laughed. “You let her call you babe? Mick barely lets me get away with anything like that.”

“Yeah, because I got a name, you can fuckin’ use that if you wanna call me something,” Mickey muttered. He reached up and smashed the snowball in his hand against the back of Ian’s head in retaliation.

Ian squawked, spinning around and grabbing Mickey around the middle to pick him up, despite Mickey’s squirming and loud protests. The sight made Sandy howl with laughter, falling against Debbie to keep herself standing up. “Like I said before,” she said with a grin, “little domestic bitches!”

“I think it’s sweet,” said Debbie, as Ian planted a loud kiss on Mickey’s cheek. Mickey felt his face heat up, and not just from being out in the cold for so long. “They’re newlyweds, after all, you can’t blame them for being all lovey dovey.”

Sandy shook her head. “Never thought I’d see Mickey Milkovich so dickwhipped. Not that it’s a bad look on him,” she added quickly, noting the scowl on Mickey’s face, even as Ian still held onto him like an oversized teddy bear. “Anyway, are we getting this tree back to the house or what? We only got a few more hours before Tami’s supposed to bring Franny back from shopping.”

“Shit!” Debbie yelped. “We gotta get the tree decorated before they get home!”

The four of them wiped the snow from their coats and their hair, then grabbed the ropes holding the tree to the top of the car and tightened them enough to keep it safely in place for the ride home. Then the two Gallaghers and two Milkoviches bundled into the car—Sandy grabbed shotgun, although neither Ian nor Mickey intended to fight her on it. They sat in the backseat, shivering as they waited for the heat to kick on, and Ian reached out with one gloved hand to take Mickey’s in his own. When Mickey glanced over at him, Ian grinned brightly, cheeks pink from the cold. Then Debbie slowly pulled out of the parking lot and onto the road, driving carefully at Ian’s insistence.

As they made their way through the freshly-plowed streets of Chicago, Sandy reached over and turned the radio on to some station playing the most obnoxious Christmas songs known to man. Of course Ian and Debbie knew the words to most of them, singing loudly to drown out Mickey’s protests. It just made Sandy grin as she glanced back at Mickey, and when he asked her to change the goddamn channel—he even said please, which he thought was pretty big of him—she only snorted and turned the volume up.

“C’mon, Sandy, these Gallaghers sound like dying whales with this shit,” he complained, earning him a punch in the shoulder from his husband. Never mind that these two were his favorites when it came to that bunch, but there was only so much Mariah fuckin’ Carey that a man could put up with. And he knew he was gonna wake up hearing that goddamn Feliz Navi-what the fuck ever song in the middle of the night later. See if he got them all decent Christmas presents. Maybe he’d just steal Franny one of those Easy Bake ovens and let Debbie and Sandy deal with the consequences.

It took half an hour to get back to the Gallagher house with how Debbie was driving, but when Mickey complained about it Ian reminded him that the last thing they needed was to have an accident with a ten-foot tree strapped to the top of the car. Unfortunately Mickey couldn’t exactly argue with that logic, so he just bit his lip and stared out the window while Ian squeezed his hand and promised to make it up to him later.

Getting the tree inside the house, however, proved to be more difficult than they’d anticipated. Thank fuck there were four of them, and that Ian had gotten the boot off his leg two weeks earlier, otherwise they might be in real trouble. But they undid the ropes and caught the tree as it tried to roll off the car roof, all of them nearly falling on their asses as they stumbled back to avoid it falling on their feet. The last thing Ian needed was to break his damn foot again, Mickey thought, feeling a rather large prick of guilt for having been the cause of the last injury. He was determined that it wouldn’t ever happen again, so if he pushed Ian out of the way when the tree nearly fell on top of him, he got his thanks in the form of a kiss from his husband to the top of his head. It didn’t make him blush, but it was a near thing.

“Okay,” said Debbie, letting out a deep breath that could be seen hanging in the air before her. “It’ll probably be easier if we take it in the front door instead of up the backstairs.”

Ian nodded in agreement. “Yeah, I think you’re right. Mick, you and Sandy grab the top half, and me and Debs will get the base.”

“Why do we gotta get the part where we’re walkin’ backwards?” Mickey demanded, but Sandy just smacked him in the back of the head. “What the hell, Sandy??”

She rolled her eyes. “Stop whinin’ like a little bitch. You’re not gonna let some stupid tree get the better of you, right?”

Well. When she put it like that, Mickey had no choice but to grab his end of the damn thing—getting stabbed in the face by pine leaves or whatever the fuck they were in the process—and help Sandy lug it up the narrow stairs while walking backwards. But he couldn’t be too irritated, though, not when Ian and Debbie were chatting excitedly about maybe getting Franny and Liam to help them bake cookies tomorrow afternoon. Mickey planned to sit at the table and watch the disaster unfold while drinking a beer, but the mental image it conjured was actually pretty cute.

Not that he’d ever say it out loud. Although judging by the grin on her face, Sandy was thinking along the same lines, so maybe it wasn’t too bad to make some halfway decent Christmas memories. The last time he’d really done anything for the holiday was right after Ian’s first depressive episode, with Svetlana suggesting it might be a good way to help cheer him up. To Mickey’s surprise, the lights and the tree and the presents had actually worked, a little, and Ian had even smiled when he saw Svetlana helping Yevgeny rip open the few little gifts they’d scrounged up some money for. It had been the first real bright spot in their lives since they’d cobbled together a little family between them all. Things hadn’t lasted—they’d been too good to last—but it’d been nice to see Ian smile. Mickey had thought he might never see it again.

And now he got to see Ian’s smile every fucking day for the rest of his life. Sandy was right after all—Mickey Milkovich really was dickwhipped. But he could handle it, as long as it was for Ian fuckin’ Gallagher.

Between the four of them, they maneuvered the tree up the steps and in through the front door. It took some work to get it through the entryway and into the living room proper, but once they finally did, Mickey and Ian held onto the tree so it wouldn’t fall over while Debbie and Sandy scrambled to clear some room in the corner opposite the TV so they had a place to put it.

“Why didn’t we do this before we left?” Sandy said, tossing some old beer cans into a trash bag.

Debbie shrugged. “Probably because we left too early so we could get a good tree?” She motioned Ian and Mickey forward, reaching out to help steady the tree as they finagled the tree into place. She’d found a tree stand in the Gallagher basement the night before—that had been what started this whole thing in the first place—and helped the two of them set the tree trunk into the stand so it wouldn’t fall over. “Fuck yes!” she crowed. “Look at that—teamwork makes the dream work.”

Sandy leaned over, putting an arm around Debbie’s back. “Babe, I’m begging you, never say that. Ever again.” Debbie just grinned and kissed her firmly on the lips. It made Ian roll his eyes, but Mickey saw the fond smile on his face even still.

“Okay, okay, fine,” Debbie relented. “Now, I got our old box of lights and decorations, so we just need to get the stepstool and we can start getting things on the tree.”

Mickey didn’t bother to protest—he knew it was a waste of time, although he put up a decent show of grumbling about be fuckin’ careful, clumsy ass when Ian decided he’d be the one to get up on the stepladder to string the lights. According to Debbie, the lights had managed to keep working for the last ten years, and there was a moment when they first plugged them in that they thought the bulbs were dead, followed by a collective sigh of relief when they finally turned on.

“At least we don’t gotta run and get some new ones at the last fuckin’ minute,” Sandy said, flopping back onto the couch with a sigh. Debbie grabbed her hand and pulled her back onto her feet, propping her chin on Sandy’s shoulder as she hugged her from behind.

“We still gotta put the decorations on, babe. Can you grab the garland from the box?” Sandy let out a big, showy sigh—a move that was pure Milkovich—and turned around so she could reach back and smack Debbie’s ass. It made Debbie yelp and jump in Sandy’s arms, but she grinned with laughter as she got Sandy in a ticklish spot along her ribs. The two of them started horsing around, giggling like dumbasses while Mickey rolled his eyes and grabbed the box of decorations. “You helpin’ me with these, right, tough guy? Fat lotta use those two idiots are gonna be if we’re getting this done before Franny gets home.”

“Yeah, I’m gonna help, don’t worry,” Ian said, grabbing a box of ornaments and a baggie full of hooks. “You wanna hook ‘em and I’ll put ‘em on the tree?”

As Mickey had suspected, Debbie and Sandy were pretty useless, at least at first—Debbie insisted they couldn’t decorate a tree without hot chocolate and marshmallows, which led to her and Sandy disappearing for a good twenty minutes into the kitchen. Mickey refused to go in there and see what they were up to, but it definitely involved a whole lot of giggling. Regardless, they did come back with four mugs of hot cocoa, topped with marshmallows as promised. And it’s not as if he and Ian hadn’t spent a good couple of minutes playing grabass while the girls were out of the room, anyway.

At some point, someone—Mickey wasn’t sure who—had turned on a Christmas playlist on their phone, and he was just grateful that the mix was better than what they’d been listening to in the car. He even found himself smiling at Ian as they arranged some of the old Gallagher decorations on top of the fireplace mantle. So maybe the holidays were bringing out his more sensitive side—so what? He was a newlywed, and his husband was dancing around the living room with Debbie standing on his feet like a little kid while Sandy grinned from where she sat on the couch. Finally, their work was done, and the living room was decked out to the fucking nines for Christmas. Ian had even found a garland of fake holly to wrap around the bannister leading up the stairs, which Debbie had cheered over when it turned out they had tiny, twinkling lights hidden between the leaves.

Now the four of them sat on the couch, drinking and watching Home Alone, when the front door opened and they heard the cry of “Mommy!”

“Franny!” Debbie said, her face lighting up at the sight of her daughter. Tami wasn’t far behind, holding Fred in a baby carrier on her chest. “Hi, baby girl! Did you and aunt Tami have a good time?”

“Yep!” Franny said, throwing herself onto Debbie for the biggest hug she could give. “I got you presents!”

“I’ll help her wrap them tomorrow, if you want,” Sandy offered, to Mickey’s surprise. It seemed even his cousin had gotten into the holiday spirit after their work today.

“That’d be great!” said Debbie, turning Franny around to sit her in her lap. Ian reached over and tugged at one of Franny’s pigtails, making her giggle. “And guess what else we’re doing tomorrow, sweetie?”

“What?”

“We’re gonna make cookies with uncle Liam!”

Franny shrieked with delight, clapping her hands and hugging her mom. “Yes! Yes! Yes! I love cookies!”

Tami set their shopping bags in the alcove under the stairs. “Hey, Debs, I’m putting our war spoils over here, okay? I figure that’ll be far enough out of the way from the little ones.” She plucked Fred out of his baby carrier and set him in his playpen behind the couch.

“Yeah, no worries, that’s perfect.”

Mickey leaned in close against Ian, his husband’s arm resting comfortably over Mickey’s shoulders. “Lemme guess, you wanna join in the cookie making tomorrow, huh?”

“Nah,” Ian laughed. “I figured we’d go get our own shopping done, just the two of us.” He clinked their beer bottles together, the lights from the tree reflecting with a twinkle on the glass. “After today, I could use some quality time with my husband.”

“Well,” Mickey said, wagging his eyebrows, “I can’t really say no to that, can I?”

“I mean, you could, but what would be the fun in that?”

“Yeah, yeah. You’re a real softie, Gallagher, you know that?”

Ian didn’t answer, just gave Mickey a kiss on the cheek, which Mickey didn’t bother to protest. Next to them, Debbie and Sandy were being just as disgusting, Debbie resting her head against Sandy’s shoulder while Franny lay across both their laps. Tami headed upstairs after they all agreed to keep an eye on Fred so she could grab a shower, and she hit the overhead light off for them as she went. The living room was now lit only by the Christmas tree in the corner and the strings of lights they’d hung up along the mantle and the stairs behind them. And yeah, maybe the holidays weren’t really his thing, Mickey thought, squished on the couch between two ginger Gallaghers while they continued to watch the movie, but if they kept being like this, he might not have as much reason to complain in the future. Right now, life was good.

#gallavich #sebbie #ian gallagher #debbie gallagher #mickey milkovich #sandy milkovich #shameless fic #shameless #leinth writes fic #this is the first time i've written a holiday fic so i hope y'all enjoy! i banged this out in about 3 hours lol hopefully it doesn't suck

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