#i'm still delighted i managed to get people on the mary pat x mick train haha

[pynkhues]

1, 4, 8 in SFW and 8, 10, 11 in NSFW for Mick and Mary Pat please.

1. Who cooks?

Mary Pat. Mick has a lot of skills, but he's an average cook at best, used to eating out or, if at home, eating from a can or a box. Mary Pat herself is pretty average – she's not Beth, after all, and her and Jeff never had money – but she's used to making boxes of pasta stretch, used to making the best of offcut meat and budget sausages that are more bread than pork, tins of tomatoes past their best before date, and the homebrand dried herbs that have that slightly musty smell.

She knows how to make something the better side of 'okay' out of it, and it still takes her a little by surprise, the way Mick can clean a plate of it, how he tells her it's the best thing he's had all week, how he asks her how she gets the sauce to thicken (just a little bit of cornflour) or the steak the right type of rare (practice, maybe, or gut instinct). Just is forever charmed because she's not the best cook, but Mick treats her like she is.

4. Living space has a leak! Who fixes it?

Mick! He's a handy guy!

8. Who knows how to swim? Who doesn’t?

Thing is, Mick lives for water. Has since he was a kid. There's something about the feel of it against his skin that's as close to luxury as he can ever imagine. He's never wanted the expensive sheets, clothes, never wanted the perfectly manicured hands of a pampered woman at his shoulders, but water? Yeah, he fucks with water. Has even more so as he's gotten older, and he doesn't really want to think about it, but when he does he thinks there's probably some sort of salvation in it. A washing of sins, a baptism in chlorine, and it's one of the few things he lets himself have.

Mary Pat, she's never felt one way or the other about it. She can swim, but she's not a strong swimmer (never really had the time to become one), but the first time Mick pulls her into his hot tub, she laughs, settles her back against the hydrojet and enjoys the massage well enough, but finds herself distracted by the look on Mick's face. The way his features smooth not in the way they do when he's schooling his expression, but in some sort of release. Finds herself feeling the gift of it, this peace he's offering her, extending to her, and maybe she finds something for herself in that too.

8. Favourite erogenous zones?

I think Mary Pat in particularly is really touchstarved, so she's often responsive to any sort of contact. I think in particular though, she likes her ears being touched but not her neck or shoulders, loves her cheek cupped, caressed, the backs of her thighs and her ass palmed, a graze of the small of her back.

For Mick, I think there's nothing really more sensual than his hands. Something about having the worn pads of Mary Pat's fingers tracing his palm, gently touching his bruised knuckles, massaging his trigger finger. The way she's not afraid of them, of him, the way when she's ready, she'll move his hands to her hips as she pulls him in for a kiss.

10. First to orgasm? Last to orgasm? Who comes the most? Does someone ever end up unfinished? + 11. Favourite romantic gestures during sex/orgasm?

(Combining these two, I hope you don't mind!)

It depends on the early days of their relationship versus the latter days. I tend to think Mick's the first man she's been with since Boomer raped her, and it means there's adjustments for her. A few false starts, a few uncertainties, a few nights where she needs to pull the plug, and Mick doesn't know what happened, but he's known women like Mary Pat before, and he knows to back off, to give her space, to let her roll away from him when she needs to. Knows how to let her create the distance she needs, but also knows how to gently cross it again when she's ready.

Knows how to live in this space with her, because maybe he hasn't been through what she has, but there's enough trauma, enough abuse, enough violence in Mick's own life that maybe sometimes he needs it too. Needs the quiet understanding when sex compounds the fracture instead of eases it.

But sometimes it does ease it. Sometimes they are soft touches with calloused hands and gentle, generous flesh with jagged scars, and they know how to kiss each other in a way that invites instead of demands and gives instead of takes, and it's in those moments where something doesn't spark inside them, but grows like a thicket, like a gasping spring time as Mary Pat lowers herself onto him and every way they've found something beautiful in everything ugly they've done and been through is enough to pull them both through.

Ask me for my shipping headcanons!