𝗔𝗦 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗛𝗨𝗘 of the afternoon started to subside into early evening, Spencer found herself in her front yard with a trash bag and a pocket full of pent-up frustration whilst she delicately picked up the leftover trash that was still scattered around the perimeter of her yard.
In amongst the thicket of ripped apart garbage were a couple more envelopes. 2 to be exact. All from County Corrections and all of them scorched at the helm with the tip of what Spencer suspected to be a lighter. And the dates at the top had been once again, from over a year ago. A year before Andrei and his explosion of a getaway. A year before their lives turned into a bigger catatonic fuse bomb than it already was. More assumptions fell into fruition and it made her want to reach into the caverns of her warped little head and rip them right out. Blaze it. Crush it. Anything.
Nostalgia was a cruel mistress. It had a way of mudding memories and painting the prettiest pictures, when realistically, the canvas was stained with screaming, fighting and the occasional dish slamming against hardened linoleum. Her father had never been a perfect man, in fact, he'd been in cuffs more than a couple times before his inevitable arrest. Mostly for small minor things. But not enough to seal onto his record.
People had a nickname for him too. Big Ed. Or Gentle Giant. Gentle Giant was mainly due to his gargantuan height and staunch build that didn't match his reserved and observant nature. And Big Ed was a footnote place-marker that Kev and a couple other guys at the Alibi used to differentiate her dad from Karen Jackson's dad with. Who also happened to be named Eddie too, unfortunately.
Although, considering the outcome of the unfortunate circumstances of last year, the Big Ed nickname wasn't all the necessary anymore.
Eddy Barlowe drew. And he liked open roads. Trash television to mock. Tradition. His kids. Life. His wife till she didn't love him.
But he wasn't going to be that person if Spencer really did stick through her end goal to whatever she was wanting to achieve with piecing together all these letters. A reunion? An explanation? A seal to patch over a jaded childhood wound? Yearning for a parental bond because her other one was gradually slipping from her fingers?
The sputtering exhaust of a car suddenly repelled Spencer out of her captivating thought and shunted her back out into reality. When her eyes beamed to the pavement right across from her home and spotted a beaten up van messily park, Exasperation made her come to a halt in her actions. And when she saw the guy who'd been on her tail for weeks on end hop out of his seat, slam the door to his van shut, and go straight to her, her heart dropped. "You remember the date I gave you?"
Spencer waded trash bag in her grasp up from the top. He'd now reached the other side of her rusted fence. Or what was left of it, anyway. She had to think carefully. She had to think of Blue, who was sat out on the porch trying to work out sums for a homework assignment he'd been given, his pet rats enclosure right by his side. "Do you know that trespassing is illegal in all 50 states?"
Fake Dougie didn't deter from backing down from that measly throw away. "End of the month it was, but here I am, with no money and no patience left in me."
"Not my problem." Spencer chewed out lowly, ducking down to collect more of the strewn plastic below her feet. She didn't make eye contact with him, not out of fear, but out of guise to show him how disinterested she was in his attempts to make her uncomfortable. Feel like some big and scary threat.
As if one cue, the sliding door to the van slammed open, and the man's right hand accomplice stepped out meekly with darkened eyes and a canister of petrol. Fake Dougie's callous smirk blossomed when she'd risen from her bent position, and for all intents and purposes, Spencer had to constantly remind herself that this was just another lame tactic of grave intimidation. "You still sure?"
"Who're they?" The raspy, small voice of Blue behind her shoulder made Spencer jolt a bit. Her gaze swirled to him as he came forward, Maurice's enclosure firmly clutched to his chest.
Seeing Blue's sudden presence as an opportunity to further stick the knife in, Fake Dougie leaned against the bruised iron of their outer fencing and hastened on his best attempt at a doleful friendly smile. "Hey kid, this your house?" He nodded and that gave him further ammunition to keep going. "How long you lived here?"
"Since I was born, my mom had me in the bathtub, same with my sister too." Blue recounted. "She said it's cause she didn't want a nurse to steal us at the hospital"
A stifled bellicose chuckle repelled from Fake Dougie's lips. "Ain't that just touching, one family brought together under one roof. Hate to see that all go up in smoke."
Spencer took Blue by the shoulder and gently pushed him behind her. "Just leave us the hell alone, alright? I gave you cash——"
He wrenched out the crumpled 40 dollar note from the abyss of his pocket and flicked it to a small pool of water that had gathered against the ruins of her fence. " You gave me fuck all."
"Good, that's all you're gonna get."
A tumultuous amount of regret hit Spencer head on like an ugly rip current when she saw the look on Fake Dougie's face sour. "What was that?"
In hindsight, there were better ways she could've worded that. Probably toned it down with the venomous hostility. But she was tired of the constant cycle of damage. "Have you stopped to take a real look at where I lived whilst continuously stalking me for the last two weeks and vandalising my property?" She gestured around their surroundings. "I'm not wealthy. Hell, I don't even scrape the bar on financially stable right now. But even if I was...I wouldn't pay you 100k."
He tounged his cheek, his bruised fingertips trailing the roughness of his thin jawline. "Don't bother."
She blanked for a beat. Then she realised there was probably a catch coming. "What?"
"—Tried playing it safe, didn't work. Now I'm gonna get nasty."
Spencer dropped the trash bag to the floor, her brow raising with a light sneer. She had to give it to him, he did play the part of a delirious antagonist pretty well. If that was what he was going for. "Yeah?"
"150k"
And there it was, the kicker. Only this time, an all consuming sense of amusement doused itself over Spencer and made her perpetually take his threat to raise the stakes as the joke it was. "Fuck off, whatever your name is"
"Darien, and that wasn't a compromise." He revealed. Darien. He fit the mould more better then his lame attempt at playing the big scary drug debt collector. "You hardwire that shit from somewhere, sleep your way around with some big wig yuppie in Naperville, I don't care. But I want my payings worth for the decade long of abusive crap your old man put me through."
The last fragment of his sentence pricked at her incredously. Like a needle to exposed flesh right before the dreadful incision. A sham marriage and a affiliation would always have her tied to him, Andrei. He wasn't her old man, he wasn't a step dad. He wasn't even really a dad to the one kid he did have. He lassoed in people with his fake benevolence, then spat them back out the moment he deemed them useless. His strength came from fear. He had domestic rage, but could mask it with excessive amiability.
He helped save their house, so Spencer had to make it up to him. His solution? Dealing. Make back money or find a park bench to sleep on.
He saved Odessa and Knox from being homeless in the midst of their heavy addiction. His idea? Move them in, make them tenants, and drain them of rent money in the process whilst also reigniting Odessa's addiction again just to make a quick buck.
He cocooned Coral in love, and warmth, and all the things she'd been missing when she'd buried the hatchet with Eddy. 3 years down the line? He moves in, He embellishes her with even more affection, hugs, anger —shouting, till it turns into shoving against fridges in front of the kids he claimed to love like his own. And eventually, after all that, he leaves her crestfallen and broke from everything he'd stolen. Money, the television ( they managed to get a new one from the Good Will ) small knick knacks that would've been good to repurpose for cash in a pawn shop, her dignity. Or what little she had left of it.
God, his escape was a blessing in disguise.
But the mess it had left behind was something akin to a premature hell.
When Darien had felt like he'd made his point clearly, he pivoted to turn and walk off in a moment of probable assumed triumphant victory. Spencer, for once in her life, didn't feel like standing down. "Who's all this for anyway, huh? Wife...kids? Because no offence, Darien, but I doubt you have any!"
Her failed attempt at a further instigation was fairly met with silence from the bang of Darien's car door and a pointed look that clearly illustrated how unbothered he'd been by it.
Darien's remaining accomplice, still nameless and apparently also not as boisterously cocky, detached himself from his leant position against the van's exterior and meandered over to Blue slyly when he observed him stuff grass into his rat's box. "Who's this little fella?"
Instead of resisting from engaging in further conversation with the man, Blue carefully pulled out the rodent and cupped its torso around the base of his hand, before angling it up towards the guy's peripheral. It were times like these where Spencer really worried for what he'd do if someone ever offered him free candy out of their dodgy white pick up. "His names Maurice, my pet rat. I pulled him out of a drain."
"Looks like that little cartoon mouse who cooks," He leered closer to run his thumb against Maurice's sleek taupe grey fur. Then stood aback once he'd finished spectating. "I had a pet too, you know, tarantula, named it Billy. Keep it close kid, and your house."
And with that, he closed the screw cap on his bottle of partially empty petrol and got into the passengers side of the van, before the vicegeral hiss of the engine spluttered once more and both men disappeared down the dead lane of their street. Hopefully, forever. Spencer clutched onto the bag of trash she'd started to collect when she retrieved it again, grip firming. Eyes boring onto the road. Jagged uncut nails digging into reddened flesh till it nicked. Blue's concentration fell to her. "Is he the guy who kept writing those things on our walls?"
She turned to face him, pushing down whatever degradation that had entire interaction had flared in her chest. "No..he's, nobody." Her blistered palm fell to his shoulder. His warmth made the permeating sting of what she'd just done flare a little less. "He's no one, alright? You're okay, bug."
Blue disgruntedly took her hand off his shoulder for the utterance of the nickname he was slowly starting to disdain. Bug. But the alleviated sense of un assurance over everything that he'd just witnessed still remained. And in her eyes, that was the best thing to come out of that entire scenario. It was the beauty of childhood innocence.
"Spence."
Spencer nearly strained her neck at the speed of light she'd taken to turn around at the sound of Ian's voice suddenly cropping up from the woodworks. As he made his way over to where they were still stood, she firmly tied the clasp of the garbage bag laid it to rest against the warped scaffolding of the fence. "What was that all about?"
"Just some guy looking for Andrei, he uh, didn't know about the whole fleeing the state thing." Every part of her could only hope he hadn't bore witness to the entire ordeal, and just the hostile ending.
"Did he happen to back into your fence too?" Ian nodded his head down to the managled assortment of splintered wood that was still spilled out along the pavement.
"Uh, no, Blue just got a little too creative with a baseball bat." Spencer excused poorly, Blue stared at her dumbfounded, but she was quick to ignore or it in favour of stepping over the rubble to join him on the other side. Which made Blue ultimately decide to make his exit and go back inside the house with Maurice. "You alright?"
Ian nodded. "Yeah, I'm good. I just came round to ask you if you're free to talk tatics with us."
"Tatics?"
"Me and Lip decided to reveluate our options again for that whole take down Patrick thing, but we need your ruthless input." He explained briefly. "Stop us from gearing towards anything that might set us back".
"Like first degree manslaughter?" Spencer pondered sardonically, making reference to option four in their operation to take down Patrick.
A small smile twined his lips as they started walking in the direction of his house. "That's a Carl plan, and we don't listen to Carl plans unless we're desperate"
Spencer rubbed at the side of her arm. "I can give you my input, but it'll severely lack the ruthless part."
Ian was quick to onto the undertones of her statement. And could tell for the most part, that something beyond a brief confirmation of Andrei's disappearance had happened between her and those two guys. But knowing her, he didn't want to press her to tell it like it was head on. "Oh? Something happen?"
"Life, as usual." huffed Spencer, a strained weak laugh ejecting from her mouth to alleviate the quiet.
"Life's a bitch." acknowledged Ian with a similar tone.
Spencer came to a pause when she noticed Knox walking in and out of the empty property Odessa had been prizing up on all week with power tools. They were well and truly serious about this. Moving on. One stop to the next and it'd be out of the area. "Yeah, he is."
Ian's glance shot straight to her like she'd just muttered something odd. "He?"
"—I'm not putting all of life's crappy endeavours on a woman, we already have to go through enough in society as it is." She stated earnestly with a lazy shoulder shrug.
He let out a low, stifled chuckle at that. And Spencer's lips twitched at the crowns slightly when her once deepened murky ball of anxiety smoothed over into a lapse of timeless calm. Just for now. When Knox sauntered down the waring steps of the home for the 10th time, she decided to catch him in the moment to get updates on their house situation. "How's it looking in there?"
"It's more crappier then I thought." Knox exhaled as he approached them, his hand ringing on the back of his neck. "So I'm putting my hands to use and helping out with some renevoations to lower the cost of our eventual down payment, might call some of the boys from the construction site to come help me out too."
Spencer feigned bewilderment. A provable on-set reaction to wanting to, for some selfish druid reason, hear the opposite. A blip that might keep them from progressing for just a little bit longer. She couldn't stop thinking about all the probable realities of them leaving would be like if it did happen. More bill money to cover, less sustainable hands to help. Work. It was selfish, and she knew that. But after what had just happened, she didn't care. "He's letting you get the house?"
"He said he needs to think about, wants to work out a proper price, but we're basically on the line to owning it." explained Knox. "Man, I feel like an Asian version of Handy Manny right now you know, always fixing shit." He joked, clicking his fingers soon after when he remembered something. "Oh hey, Ian, you tell that guy who keeps sniffing round your place to not come anywhere near this one."
"You mean Patrick?" Ian tried to confirm, becoming slightly peeved at the thought of the man trying to further gain closer access to their house through different channels.
"Saw him lurking around here earlier this morning, said he was your cousin." Knox ripped his tool belt off his waist, and burried it under his arm. "Is it true Fiona's giving up your place to him?"
"No, not at all." cleared up Ian amicably. "If he comes back here, you tell us."
"Alright then." Knox hummed, before he then proceeded to turn right back around to continue his inspection, whilst whistling to a tune that sounded a lot like Baby Got Back by Sir Mix-a-lot.
From his confirmation, they were obviously drawing nearer and nearer towards a dead end. With the apprehended blow being Patrick obtaining the rights to purchase and destroy a home, a lived and loved home, for profit and financial gain. To tear down walls that hosted plaques and mantle worthy pictures, demolish wallpaper and barking that was etched with the height milestones. Burns in the carpet. A nestle of safety. For what it was worth, Spencer couldn't let him win. "About Tactics—"
Ian, being all ears for anything that could help, came to a stop once they'd reached the front of his home. "Yeah?"
"Think I know something that might work."
"—The something's legal, right?"
"If it got out, probably not." She revealed loosely. "But if you're trying to send a message, get Patrick off your tail for the long run, then they're your best bet."
Ian raised a brow, his skeptisim soaring to an all time high. "They're? As in, multiple people?"
"You've still got Mickey on speed dial, call him up." propositioned Spencer.
"Why me? You're his cousin." Ian was quick to randomly point out, for some odd reason.
Spencer wanted to swiftly correct him on that intentional blunder, but her perplexity for his initial hesitance made her forget about it instantly. "And you're each other's occasional booty calls." He peered up at her with a stoic expression when he finally decided to give in, reeling out his phone. "Alright, sorry, not booty calls...really close friends who like to screw each other on occasion. Am I getting warmer?"
"No, not even close." Ian muttered in the midst of 'searching' for Mickey's number to assumingly buy time, or just act like it wasn't at the top of his contact list.
When he finally came across it, he was quick to hand his phone over to Spencer to do the honours. "Seriously?"
"Hey, you're the one who wanted to call in a favour."
★┆ ┆ ┆જ ✾
"𝗪𝗘'𝗩𝗘 𝗥𝗘𝗖𝗢𝗡𝗩𝗘𝗡𝗘𝗗 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗖𝗢𝗨𝗦𝗜𝗡 𝗣𝗔𝗧𝗥𝗜𝗖𝗞 𝗪𝗔𝗥 𝗖𝗢𝗨𝗡𝗖𝗜𝗟." Lip announced to Fiona as she walked through the back door from another tedious work shift. As of that minute, they'd circled through option's 1-3 on repeat like some cheap shot detectives nitpicking at the various different strategies they could use to take down their target. Option 4 had been thrown into the mix several times by Carl, but for obvious reasons, they'd collectively politely skipped over going through with that pursuit of action.
Fiona came to a halt at the kitchen table where they had a communed, her hand falling to her hip and an obvious amount of ebbing lethargy depleting her energy. "No luck on the legal front?"
"Uh, no." Lip ran a hand through his hair as he sat aback in his seat. "Turns out it's pretty hard to prove that someone had dementia when they signed a will. Or in our case, very fucking hard."
"Because she was already dead." remarked Ian.
Spencer clasped her hands together over the disoriented doddles she'd illustrated as a distraction tool and also as a way to open her mind up to conjure up any further suggestions. Throughout it all, she hadn't been able to quench the pastured aggravation for her confrontation with that Darien guy.
Putting a real name to the face who'd made it his life's mission to give her the worst headache riled it up even more. He expected her to roll over and play to the tune of his beat. Give, Give, Give...because someone she hated just as much as him had been toying with him for the past 10 years. That alone would've made her feel sympathetic, because Spencer got it. Except he was just as much of an asshole. "Already way past rigour mortis dead"
"Well, what was option two again?" Fiona questioned as she rounded the table to get a better look at the crumbled piece of paper that Debbie had scribed earlier which listed all of their available, plausible options.
Spencer reached to drag over the sheet so she could get a proper look at it. "Call your Aunt Ginger a basket case, but now we know that's obviously not gonna work."
"Which is why we're on three now." added on Lip. "Convince Patrick to back-off."
"Or Option Four, kill Patrick." Carl not-so subtly snuck in.
Fiona didn't bother to give his persistent need to include that choice a second thought. "Back to three, convince him how?"
Ian beelined his glance in Spencer's path, which was her ultimate prompt to enlighten the table on what she had decided to carry through with doing. Her phone call with Mickey Milkovich had been unsurprisingly short and brief, most of it was filled with him not taking her seriously and consistently asking wether or not she was under the influence ( because apparently, wild recklessness wasn't in character with the 'goody-two shoes' persona he assumed she had ) but eventually, he agreed to help. "Okay, I just brainstormed this last minute and I know it might sound sketchy, but I think it'll work."
Upon hearing the word sketchy fall into place with the start of her idea, Fiona's mind instantly went to something that bordered on heinous. "We're not lighting Patrick up."
Spencer tsked musingly. Given her current situation arsenic bonfires and threats of setting other people ablaze were all too ironic. "Why do you people always think so lowly of me? It's hurtful, honestly."
"Okay, so if not that, then what're you thinking?" Fiona said rather dryly.
The idea of grasping at violence as a last resort was a sentiment that Spencer never liked to abide by. She wasn't necessarily one who always advocated for peace, love and unity with an outspoken flare, but she also wasn't one to ignore risks and take immeasurable measures in order to restore. It was what she liked to call, the grit to grit redirect.
The ethos of it was simple: If one pushes hard, you push harder. If one doesn't fall, you make them stand down. A malice man's ethos, really. It reminded her of what Neo had told her during her impromptu visit to the detention centre. Play Dirty to Win. "You remember Blake Collins, right? And how she got ran out of the area—"
It didn't take long for Fiona to catch on. And in the same manner, pull out of wanting to go for the old fashion house call threat scheme that Spencer was in the middle of trying to talk over. "You want to set the Milkovich brothers on him? No way."
"What? Why not." drawled Spencer. "You want him to back off, no? Well Mickey and Co are notoriously known for doing just that to people."
"And a whole lot worse." She pointed out, her arms crossing to her chest.
"It won't be a brutal process, they'll just go in there, club him a bit, then maybe pistol whip him..I didn't ask for full details of what they're willing to do." Spencer tried to reassure like anything she'd just said would realistically change Fiona's doubts. "But, they will need payment, 500 up front."
"—We don't have that kind of cash on us."
"You know what, I've helped Mickey once or twice in the past, plus in a weirdly confusing way we're related, so 200 should do as a half-off for them." solidified Spencer.
She was talking like she was in close cohorts with him. As if, this, the casual exchange of cash for a warning between him, was normal. Prior to her discovering her whole new lineage that connected her back to Mickey as an aforementioned second cousin, the only times she had ever really sat down to 'talk' to him was during the days when she would go round to his place to hand over bags of narcotics that Andrei had repackaged for his dad. "-He'll understand."
Translation: she hoped he understood
"Not really the type to condone violence, but that's a discount beating." said Lip bluntly. "What do you say?"
Fiona blankly stared between both her brothers, a second long terse silence commencing in awaitance for any one of them to see the ridiculousness, as well as the danger, that following through with roughing up Patrick would bring. "Guys, we can't beat up—"
"We need a house." Ian cut her off sternly, her eyes darting up to meet her's, the lid to their shared squirrel fund already opened.
Begrudgingly giving in and also sharing a similar need for all of this to be over, Fiona stuck her hand into her pocket and started fishing out as much money as she had on her. Soon enough, all those with the funds followed in her lead, including Spencer, who was happy to give away the tips she'd rightfully taken from work at the record store into the pile. When they'd stopped, she was the one to cordially tuck the 199 dollars into a white envelope. "Thank you for your cooperation."
A light sigh fell from Fiona's lips. An obvious sign that she wanted no part in whatever happened beyond this any further. That wasn't so hard to understand. If anything, it was reasonable and rational. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I'll be scraping blood and shit from under my fingernails." She turned on her heel and made her way up the stairs. "And then I'll be at V's, getting drunk and pretending I didn't just order a hit on a relative."
Everyone else followed suite in deserting the area. Ian rose from his chair whilst redialling Mickey's number again, probably to inform him about them all equally being on-board, on top of other private matters. And Carl, with no real sense as to what had just gone down, wandered back to the living room to retire on the couch and indulge himself on the Adult Swim content that had just come up on the TV.
Spencer couldn't pertain her gaze taway from the envelope, at the indentations along her palm that had somehow assessed from the pressure she'd applied out of—anxiety? anger? both? It hadn't hurt as much as she'd assumed it would. Lip caught her staring, and at how stoic she looked. He always did. "Sure you wanna do this?"
She opened the envelope and ran her thumb along the top of the money like she was counting it, before completely sealing the white envelope entirely. "I'm in the mood to hit something, might as well be Patrick"
"You okay?"
"Just...perfect." Lies. Spencer managed to play it off smoothly though. At least, she assumed so. "You mind if I borrow your guys's bat?"
"Check under the stairs." instructed Lip. Doing as she was told, Spencer folded the sealed envelope in two and placed it into her shorts pocket, before migrating over to the open den under their main staircase. "But...don't actually use it on him. Just bring it for posterity, adds to getting the message across."
Ducking down to retrieve the bat from its concealed corner behind the old broken railings of Liam's crib, Spencer twirled it around in her hand as she made her back over to the kitchen. "Why not? I've got a good swinging arm."
"Cause I don't want him to pull something out on you." answered Lip. "Even if you do have past experiences with using people's faces for target practice."
Her eyes fell into a small glare. "It was one girl, and an accident. I wasn't really in the right sound of mind."
That was one way of putting it. Saying that phrase alone sent an unnerving sense along her skin. That was what her therapist had once said to her as a kid, stuck in that room moments after everything had gone down with the girl she'd hit in fury. When she'd realistically meant for the blow to poor Daphne's septum, to be for herself. Frustration over something didn't matter.
"You think she looks like Voldemort now?"
Spencer inched closer to him at the foot the back door, a beady smirk igniting. She placed the bulb end of the bat just below the perimeter of his chin. He matched her energy. "Think you will in a second." She wrlyly joked, before leaning in closer to leave a chaste kiss against his cheek and departed on her merry way.
★┆ ┆ ┆જ ✾
𝗔𝗡 𝗘𝗬𝗘 𝗙𝗢𝗥 𝗔𝗡 𝗘𝗬𝗘 makes the whole world blind. If one keeps punishing those they deem cruel, then are they really better than the perpetrators themselves?
Spencer couldn't shake that phrase from her mind whilst she walked along the desolate path leading towards Patrick's place, bat in hand. She had a moral compass, and it was telling her to turn the hell around and call off whatever justice retaliation this was supposed to be. But leaving would mean retreating, and retreating would mean subsequently failing to do the one thing she'd adamantly assured she would follow through with assisting in. Getting Patrick to stand down.
This felt like more than him, though. Then trying to protect the honour of a house that had deep sentimental value to someone, multiple people, who she'd grown to care for. This was her falling prey to the gut twisting plague of frustration over everything that had happened. Her house, Andrei's stupid debts—It was a perpetually selfish thing to think of, she was aware.
But it made sense as a clear origin point for her swathe of determination. Threatening to take away homes just for a power trip or egoistical gain.
When Spencer finally made it to the isolated area just along the way from Patrick Gallagher's grotty little hideaway home, Mickey was already there, as was his sort-of brother Colin. He spotted her from a mile away and lowered the blunt that had been pinched between his fingers, and for some reason, looked surprised to see her. "You?"
"Who'd you think was going to show up? I was the one on the other end of the line." Spencer reminded him. Then, realisation dawned on her instantly as to who he'd actually expected to tag along with him. "Oh"
Mickey didn't take too fondly to her vagueness, and shot her a stoic perplexed look. "Oh what?"
"Nothing." Spencer blissfully murmured, making leeway towards the side entrance of where Ian had said Patrick's backyard shed was located. From the small crack between the homes decaying fence. There was a light weakly flickering in there. Meaning, he was right where they wanted him.
"You got anything useful on you?" Mickey questioned lowly. He watched her raise the bat up in an obvious manner, and he didn't shy away from showing his disappointment. "That's it?"
"What? You're normally the one who's got like, infinite guns stored on you at all times." said Spencer, the slick oak of the bat slacking in her hold whilst she leaned against the rough exterior of the rest of the gate. "Plus I'm not actually going to use it."
Mickey took one last hit of his wearing messily rolled up joint before he flicked it to the floor and let it die against the dry concentrate beneath his feet. "So what's your plan then? You gonna go all Strawberry Shortcake on his ass? Make him sit down for a heart to heart?"
For all intensive purposes, Spencer ignored the unintentional sardonic undertones of that statement. "No, actually, I was thinking you'd have that covered."
He looked over to his brother briefly and swung the gate open without warning, before glancing back to her again. "Stay behind him, and don't say anything that's gonna piss this guy off."
With one foot in-front of the other, Spencer cautioned her steps through Patrick's back yard. "Why would I do that?"
"Because you've got form, Barlowe." Mickey didn't hesitate to fire back.
Spencer slung the bat to her shoulder. "Loving the vote of confidence."
On his silent say-so, Mickey slammed open the rickety entryway that led into Patrick's shed and put himself in-front of Spencer. The inside of his workspace looked like something out of a twisted horror movie. A singular light source swinging from the crook of the wood panel above, a miscellaneous array of different tools propped all around the floor and littered against some dusted workbench. Patrick didn't move a muscle, choosing instead to keep his back to them. "Hey, you gotta back off the Gallagher's house."
"I gotta? Me?" Patrick hollowly echoed, fingers curled against an object that Spencer couldn't quite make out from the corner of her eye. She lowered the bat in her procession to her side, just incase.
Taking the opportunity to rise up and go in for the kill, Colin lunged forward and grabbed Patrick by the shoulder harshly to clock him with back of his gunmetal grey revolver. However, Patrick beat him to it before he could administer any real damage to him and sent his fist right into the boy's face, then another to his gut.
Frustrated with Collin's lack of coordination skills, Mickey huffed incredulously. "C'mon, what're you doing?" He watched him groggily rub at his head on the floor. "Jesus, get up!"
Whilst Colin tried to reposition himself again, Patrick set his sights on Spencer. She stayed silent. "Nice to see you again tag along." He cracked his knuckles to soothe them from the blow to Colin's cheek. "What? Couldn't prove your worth to my family so now you're bringing a crappy swinging bat and hiring an elf and Dave the Goliath to do your dirty work for you? How about you just...hop on back to your pit, and leave Gallagher matters to people who're actually part of the Gallaghers, yeah?" His glance swooped over to the boys. "Goes for Marty McFly and the Pillsbury Doughboy too."
Getting quickly fed up with his snide monologue, Mickey directed his small pistol straight at Patrick. "Don't test me, motherfucker. If you don't leave their house alone, stand down." The edge point of the gun migrated to Patrick's sullen darkened right eye. "—then that lazy eye you have right there ain't gonna be so lazy anymore."
Patrick let out an amused pitiful laugh as he inched forward. "That's cute."
A pinching click came from his gun once more, concentration zeroing in immensely. "Take a step closer, and it'll be your last."
And then, out of nowhere, the door heavily slammed behind both Spencer and Mickey. And every fibre in Spencer's being thawed when she heard a shotgun cock loudly at the back of her head. She paled and a rippling sensation she'd never felt before kicked into full throttle.
"I'd like you to meet the wife, Ellen." Patrick glowered with pride.
They turned and met the luring, stone-cold sneer of a large woman stanced at the foot the mini-warehouse's doorway. Game fuckin' Over
Accepting defeat was a hard pill to swallow. But in the prevalence of the situation that they'd found themselves in, being cornered even though they were three to two, was enough for them to call it quits. And quite frankly, Spencer was still trying to dispel away the suffocated feeling of anxiousness she'd felt when Patrick's wife had sunk the muzzle of her gun near inches away from her skull. She had waited for it. The nauseating bang.
Guns to her were symbols of what ceased her normalcy. Of her ability to really see colour in the world instead of the bleakness of it. Her dad had brandished a gun once. Let his protective inhibitions blind him with unbridled rage. And now, he was rotting in some jail cell without any knowledge of what was going on in the life of the woman he'd been trying to protect in the first place. That was why objects, bullets, ricocheting off of splinter made her to stiffen. In movies, in real life. It reminded Spencer of him. And of what he did. "Sorry for freezing up like that."
She had been the first one to break the terse silence between them both whilst they walked down the sidewalk in the dead of the dark. Mickey hadn't seemed as annoyed at the failed attempted to get Patrick to back down then Spencer would've thought he would. If anything, he gave off the sense that he was rather unfazed by any of it. "How were you supposed to know he was gonna pull out his pet tree of a wife? Fucker just caught us off guard."
"I'd go more for the string-bean chia pet type." mused Spencer passively.
Mickey kept his eyes trained onto the open lane ahead of them. "Why'd you even wanna get involved in this shit? Not really up your alley."
She shrugged. "Needed an outlet, thought I might as well take my chances. Also just wanted to help out, you know, kinda like you."
"Except I asked for a fee after I did my community service."
And now the moment of truth came. Trying to beat around the bush on the subject of why Spencer hadn't brought the money in full like she'd promised. "About that—"
He came to a screeching halt before the words could even trail out of her mouth. "Don't tell me you don't have the cash after all of that, I don't threaten to pop people for free."
Spencer arched a brow. "Really? You're normally up for it most days from what I've seen in the past."
"Because people are assholes, they get on my nerves." Mickey stated causally as he concealed his gun away from potential prying eyes.
"—Except for Ian"
Visibly, Mickey was quick to grow tired of the delay with the handover. On top of her comment. "My money, Barlowe."
"Alright, I've got it, Sheesh." mumbled Spencer. She rifled through her pocket till her fingers grazed the envelope. When she pulled it out, his first instinct was to take it off her hands politely, but before Mickey could make the move, she'd reeled it away. "But I need you and your brother from something else, it's important. And it'll make coming out here worth your while."
"Then I get my payings worth?"
She offered him a delicate smile, a plighting reaction from the new idea she'd just conjured up in her mudded brain. "Every single last buck"
★┆ ┆ ┆જ ✾
𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗔𝗕𝗔𝗡𝗗𝗢𝗡𝗘𝗗 𝗕𝗬𝗣𝗔𝗦𝗦 that laid under the titanium fused tracks of the L train just above it smelt heavily of mixed waste, pacified smoke and despair.
Every degraded surface of brick and mortar that ran along it was defaced or inked in a tundra of different tags of graffiti that were both vastly colourful in language and poignant in their messaging towards current issues that were plaguing the community. Corruption, An Uprise of Gentrification, slander to the Government who made falsified promises to better the area when they realistically thought of it as some mummified corpse.
A tear down the democracy type of thing
Most of all, the shallow abandoned bypass under the held host to Darien and his right hand man whenever they weren't terrorising people for copious amounts of money that they didn't own. How Spencer knew this was of course, through the main malignant source of the entire debacle, Andrei. She made a couple trade off's under it once upon a time. It was probably the reason why Darien had been so hell bent on getting her to pay the price from Andrei's action to begin with.
She was his ultimate cop-out. A process of power retrieval from the years of power he'd been drained of.
And to finally put an end to his never-ending innocuous anarchy, Spencer's only option was to get through to him in the only language he could obviously understand. Belligerence and Kind Threats. Luckily for her, she knew someone who majored successfully in that area of expertise.
Mickey took in his surroundings. At the credence of a small fire flaring right in the hub of the bypass, at the men in withered coats slumped inside makeshifts tents made of old tarp coverings. The distinct scent of weed mutating with the embers of leftover smoke protruding from just along the way. He turned to her dead on like she was clinically insane. In hindsight, being led to a random location with no context would probably garner a similar reaction from the average human being. "You want me to beat up a bunch of hobos?"
"No, further down this way is where a couple of these guys hideout." Spencer nodded her head over to the place in question, and both Mickey and his brother followed the direction in where she'd gestured over to. "One's called Darien, don't know the other guy's name though. They've been harassing my family for cash for months now, constantly asking for Andrei's drug debts and compensation."
"—Give it then, problem solved."
Spencer had expected him to be blunt about her explanation, given his normal nature. "Not where 100,000 dollars is concerned."
His eyes widened slightly. "100,000?! Well shit, no wonder why they're pissed off. Gettin' screwed in the ass like that, what'd you expect?"
"I wasn't the one who fucked them over though, that was all on Andrei." Spencer affirmed clearly. "And I'm frankly sick and tired of having to be at the brunt end of other people's screw ups. Cleaning everything up all the time." She stuck her hand in her pocket to retrieve the money, fully handing it over to him this time. But pulled out the cash Lip, Ian, and Fiona had put in originally for the scare Patrick away plan, and only gave away her 3 months of collected pay from the record store. Making up for around 80 bucks. "So, you guys in?"
Silently, Mickey teared open shuffled the money around between his fingertips. Then his face fell slightly, and she immediately detected that he'd caught onto the shortage of his initial promised sum of cash. "Pretty sure I remember asking for 500"
Apprehensive, Spencer decided to turn on a side of her that she normally never liked using in situations like this. "80 is all I could stretch, you know, with heavy times in the economy and all." Her voice grew softer. "I also thought you could do it out of the kindness of your heart, hand for a hand? I remember all those times I'd always used to look the other way when you were stealing from Kash or checking cars—"
"Alright, alright, enough already." Mickey spoke up, choosing to cut in before he had to listen to any more of what she had to say. "We'll take care of them, and I'm not gonna bother asking you to join."
"Good, don't want to." Her lips splintered into a commendable smile. Glossy and all. "Thanks in advance Mickey. I owe you one."
"Yeah, you do." huffed Mickey monotonously. He pulled out his hand gun from the waistband of his trousers and casually made his way over to where Darien was situated, his brother stoically following just behind.
Spencer pivoted right on her heel and walked right out without even having the indignation to look back. Rationalising every small step, every little trickle, that had eventually led her to stoop to the level of those who she consistently tried to deter from ever turning into was merely impossible. She'd seen no other option but to ignore her morality and give in. Reach to the depths of her darkness. But for some astronomical reason, her usual surge of panging regret didn't surface as she walked back home. She didn't feel anything.
It was weird and wrong, but pervasively satisfying.
Once she'd finally reached her house, Lip was already sitting outside of it immersing himself in a cigarette from his pack of Marbolo's whilst seemingly typing in something on his phone. When she felt the familiar blaring vibration of her phone nestled away in the corner of her left pocket, she fished it out and chose to answer from her position on the other side of her mangled gate. "Why're sat out here?"
Perplexed, his glance shifted from left to right, before staring straight on and seeing Spencer idly standing just a few feet away from where he was. "Because your porch has better connection then mine does?" A rivulet of smoke ejected from his mouth as he spoke. And she softly grinned, before treading over the leftover trash to head over his way and take a seat right next to him. "How'd it go?"
Spencer propped the bat against the chopped wood of her porches railing. She then handed him back the remaining money left that him and Ian, and Fiona had put forward. "Patrick didn't cave, just laughed in our faces. Also called me tag along again...which was fun."
Lip took another hit of his cigarette, and then passed it over to Spencer. "Should've knocked his lights out."
"Wouldn't have got the chance when his wife was aiming a shot gun right at the back of my head." Spencer mustered out, a stifled breathless chuckle jotted from her evasively. And she killed the unearthly rattled sensation it'd caused on her ribs by blotching out with the ballooning essence of smoke and ignorant bliss.
Unlike her however, Lip didn't seem to find the pacified hilarity in her being stuck in a situation that was that torridly dangerous. "Shit, are you alright?"
"Uhm, yeah, yeah, I'm good." Spencer muttered around the cigarette. For once, she genuinely wasn't lying. "Didn't leave any internal scars or whatever. I'm sorry I couldn't help out properly though."
"You kidding? You've more than helped." Lip reassured swiftly. And it smoothened over the unprecedented area in her mind that normally loved to weigh her down.
Suddenly, from behind them, the front door creaked open and Blue stepped outside with a can of soda pop ( even though he was fully aware he couldn't consume those past a certain time ) along with a copy of the Magic Tree House by Mary Pope Osborne. A school thing, she could only assume. "Did the bad dude with the truck come back?"
Perplexed, both of Lip's brows crashed to the centre of his forehead. "Bad dude?" He let out a small laugh, his glance swooped over to Spencer. And she couldn't think of anything but to flash an irreverent smile and hope Blue stopped talking. "What bad dude?"
Spoiler alert: he didn't hold back
"He came over before, asked if me and Spencer lived here then said it would go up into smoke." Blue took a sip of his soda in between his insightful exposition. "He also said he'd come back again with his gas can, and his friend had a tarantula called Billy."
Silence fell momentarily. And Spencer's glance drifted over to his dulled state. At him trying to properly process all the information he'd just been given all at once, information that she'd concealed purposefully because she wanted to pretend like everything was okay.
Except this time, Lip wasn't willing to sit around and watch her fight pillar to post over a problem that she didn't need to deal with. And chose instead to pick up his phone to dial the cops. Spencer eyes darted down to what he was about to do with a heightened amount of resistance. "Whoa, no, don't do that."
He lowered his thumb just before hitting the 1, but his adamance to continue still seemed flagrant. "These guys have been harassing you for weeks on end, non stop. Laws never been on our side in the past but they will with this. And don't say you can handle it, alright? This has gone far beyond that."
"I know I can't." admitted Spencer, tipping out the extra ash remnants from the cigarette out to the step below. "That's why I asked Mickey to help me handle it instead."
He blankly stared over at her, slightly bemused. "What?"
"After that whole spook Patrick plan went to shit, I asked if he could help me deal with them, give them a not-so subtle warning, something to scare them off...nothing really brutal. Payed him with my 80." Spencer explained away, more embers or smoke evading from her parted lips when she reeled the cigarette away, before eventually returning it back to him. "Surprisingly, he didn't say no."
"When you said deal with, did you specify that meant not to leave them lying in a gutter?" stated Lip coyly, hunching over his busted zippo lighter to reignite the dissolving orange hue cascading out of the spliff, his hand vacantly cupping over a weak burst of the flame.
She let out a weak chuckle at his insinuation, as she crossed her legs. "Okay, Mickey Milkovich might be a lot of things, but he wouldn't actually go that far."
"—And you can confidently say that?"
Realising that it was probably best to check, Spencer sighed to herself and turned on her phone, rising up in syndication. I'll call Mandy."
ronnie's notes
spencer really let the attributes from her mom's side of the family ✨shine✨in this one, huh?
I honestly only wrote this part just as an excuse to write in a spencer/mickey interaction...because I haven't found an appropriate place to put one yet and that's a crime in itself. he's hands down one of my favourite characters in the show tbh. like, okay, he was messy and did some screwed up things...but literally who amongst these people didn't??? at least one character in the show commits at least one crime/ partakes in something illegal or gets arrested
frank alone was a walking, talking hazard sign. that's why I put his ass as a tw at the beginning of this fic 💀
also this is the official conclusion to the whole drug-andrei thingy storyline w/ spencer, which has been doing on for 61 chapters??? oh lordt. I can now sigh peacefully now. but the next storylines that are incoming are gonna be...impactful, in not so many words.
also also plz tell me if you want me to slow down w/ updating once a week, or these are too long to get through. I'm just trying to publish as much as I can before I start uni in september, so I'm churning these out like a maniac. and I just realised it takes one day & 17 hours to get through this entire thing and i'm not even on the fourth season yet...yikes.
but as usual thanks for reading and make sure to comment/vote for more bestie boos 🥳 lysm