Fic: Pipe Defense
Title: Pipe Defense
Fandom: Shameless (US)
Pairing: Gen
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Strong Language
Summary: Terry comes to beat up Ian but Fiona beats him up instead.
At AO3 or below
The door bangs open, lock breaking. Everyone jumps and Debbie yells.
Someone get the bat, Fiona thinks. She grabs her dinner knife and holds it behind her leg, ready.
“Where is he?” Terry Milkovich demands, huge and terrifying in Fiona’s kitchen.
“Frank doesn’t live here anymore,” Fiona says, securing her grip on her knife.
“Not him,” Terry growls, “the fag that’s been fucking my children!”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Fiona says. “Not get out of my house.”
“I owe your redhead a few more beatings.”
To her left Fiona sees Debbie flinch before gritting her jaw. She has a fork in a death grip. Fiona’s pretty sure Terry isn’t talking about Debbie though.
“What did you do to Ian?” she demands, slightly emboldened by Lip and Carl creeping down the stairs behind Terry, armed with a bat and knife respectively.
Terry growls at her, a sound inhumane and terrifying. It takes all of Fiona’s nerve not to flinch. “Ain’t done nothing yet,” Terry says. “Owe him a few more hits to his pretty faggot face. No one’ll wanna fuck him when I’m done.”
The words more hits play over and over in Fiona’s head and she sees red. She’s practically paralyzed with sheer rage and wants nothing more than to throw her knife at Terry Milkovich’s throat. No one hits her kids.
But then Mandy and Mickey stampede through the broken door and the standoff breaks. Mandy’s holding a shotgun while Mickey has a metal pipe.
“What the fuck?” Terry yells at them.
“Dad, calm down,” Mandy says.
Terry pulls a gun out of his waistband and then pure chaos erupts. Mickey rushes forward and swings the pipe at Terry’s hand. Fiona hears bone crunch but the gun doesn’t fall. She’s moving too, trying to get between the Milkovich boys and she sees the baseball bat in Lip’s hand lash out.
“Debbie, Carl, stay back,” she commands.
“Dad,” Mickey says. “Calm down, it’s not-”
“You’re no son of mine,” Terry roars, pushing at Fiona.
“Everybody stop!” she yells, but of course no one listens to her.
Terry surges forward again and this time manages to get a hand over Fiona’s shoulder. He gets a hand on Mickey and pushes him back, half on his grip on Mickey’s neck and the other fingers bruising his jaw. They stager back as a confused mass of fighting bodies until Mickey’s back hits the wall. He shouts and brings the hand that’s not whacking at his father with a metal pipe up to his face and starts scratching at the back of Terry’s hand.
“Hey! Hey!” Fiona shouts. “Back off, you two, I don’t wanna clean blood off this floor.”
Just then a gunshot rings out and everybody freezes.
“Drop!” Fiona yells as she crouches down, ending on the balls of her feet and ready to move. She tilts her head up and sees Mandy holding a smoking shotgun, pointed at their roof.
“Mandy, what the fuck?” she yells, standing. Her eyes dart to her right where Carl and Debbie are picking themselves off the ground. There’s no blood on them and Fiona’s just glad they’d obeyed her command to hit the deck. Her terror recedes enough for rage to seep back in. “Okay, that’s it,” she says, cutting off Mandy’s explanation. She grabs the metal pipe out of Mickey’s hand and marches over to Mandy, taking the shotgun too. “I have three Milkoviches in my house, a hole in my roof, and not a whole lot of understanding.” She unloads the shotgun and points the pipe at Terry. “You talk when I point at you, or Lip hits you in the head.”
Lip nods.
“Talk,” she demands, still facing Terry. “Why’re you here?”
He grunts at her. “Came to give the other boy a beatin’.”
“Why?” Fiona insists.
“Owe him one.”
“Lip…”
Lip raises the baseball bat but Terry says, “I ain’t gonna ignore a fucking faggot in my neighborhood.”
Rage builds up in Fiona again. She knows that confronting Terry Milkovich is a terrible idea, but her anger completely overpowers any sense of fear. Out of the corner of her eye she sees Mickey shift uncomfortably and she swings the pipe at him. “Talk to me. Why are you here?”
Mickey shrugs, looking incredibly uncomfortable. He sweeps his hand against the corner of his mouth and bites at his thumb. “Came to stop ‘im,” he says, eyes making contact with a point over Fiona’s shoulder. It’s all very strange behavior, especially from Mickey Milkovich.
Fiona’s about to press him when Terry interrupts.
“Fucking faggot,” he grumbles. “Oughta beat you again.”
Fiona points the pipe at him and barely refrains from chucking it at the man’s head. “I wasn’t talking to you,” she says. She wants to go back to Mickey, but the boy looks even more uncomfortable, eyes flicking everywhere, never settling. His fingers twitch.
Terry ignores Fiona and continues shouting at Mickey.
“I told you not to see that boy again,” he growls. “You shoulda stayed away.”
“You were gonna kill him!” Mickey blurts.
Terry makes a sound of rage and moves towards Mickey, who skitters back.
Mandy rushes forward to flank her brother and Fiona moves too, getting in between Terry and Mickey again.
“It’s no business of yours if I kill him!” Terry roars, leaning around Fiona to yell directly in Mickey’s face.
Mickey is plainly terrified; he’s pleading, “Dad, Dad, stop,” over and over with one hand resting over Fiona’s shoulder to push Terry away.
“I beat that fag up once and I’ll do it again! I’ll kill him if I want, he ain’t worth anything anyways!”
Fiona acts before she thinks about it. She swings the pipe around and hits Terry Milkovich in the side of his head.
“What the fuck?” Terry spits. “You crazy bitch!” He moves on Fiona but she swings out again and connects, at the same time Lip takes the bat to back of Terry’s knees.
He falls to the ground and Fiona moves to a more advantageous spot. She as mad as she can ever remember being. As mas as she was when she found out Frank had used Liam as collateral. She feels nothing but rage and it makes her fearless, makes her invincible. “No one. Hits my kids,” she tells Terry before she kicks him in the side of his head. “Now get the fuck out of my house. And stay. Away.” She enunciates; she plans on being very clear.
“You can’t tell me what-”
Fiona kicks Terry in the jaw before he has a chance to finish his sentence. “The fuck I can’t. Now get out of my house.”
He stares her down for several still seconds before he spits at her and stomps out the broken door.
Fiona wipes the spit off, disgusted. “Stay there!” she says, as both Mickey and Mandy try to sneak out after their father.
“We were just trying to help,” Mandy says quietly.
Fiona figures she must look damn scary right now and she puts the weapons down on the ground deliberately, taking several deep breaths. “How did Terry find out about Ian?” she asks, forcing her voice to be calm.
It doesn’t seem to help. Neither Milkovich says anything for several moments until Mandy hits Mickey on the back of the head. “Just tell her, I don’t know the whole story.”
Mickey rubs at the back of his head where his sister had hit him and looks around the kitchen again.
“Mickey, I’m not going to hit you,” Fiona promises.
He laughs, but it’s humorless. “He caught us together. It was my fault; I was careless it was…it was stupid.”
Fiona stares at him for a while before she decides that it is not the time to question her little brother’s taste in men. “You been sleepin’ with Ian? Do you know where he went?”
Mickey makes eye contact then, he looks surprised. “He didn’t tell ya?”
“He told you?”
“Said he went to enlist,” Mickey says, returning to looking at nothing in particular.
Fiona is dumbfounded. She feels cold, a new terror rushing through her. “He’s not eighteen,” she points out.
Mickey shrugs. “Said he found a way around that, I don’t know.”
Fiona takes several breaths, trying to center herself. “Alright, everybody, come on,” she says, turning on her heel.
“Fi?” Lip says, following at her shoulder.
“We’re going to get Ian,” she says. “You too, Milkoviches!”
She doesn’t look behind her to make sure that she has a trail of kids; she knows how to count them by their footsteps. Lip’s strong at her flank, Debbie’s light and fast, Carl’s offbeat and long, longer than they should be, trying to look more like Lip, and two more: she can tell that Mandy’s walking fast and noisily and Mickey steps are more of a shuffle. She misses Ian’s steps at her other side.
She’ll get him back. She has to.