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“You know, when I told you to start fighting for yourself, this wasn’t what I meant,” Nasha starts, settling down with her tray next to his and pointing at where Eighteen’s grabbing someone’s collar over on the other side of the cafeteria.
Mickey lets out a bone deep sigh, stuffing his face with a square of protein that tastes like slop.
God, he misses macaroons.
“Yeah,” he mumbles around the food in his mouth. “I didn’t think so too.”
He listens with half an ear as the squabble behind them grows louder, doing his best to hide in the curl of his shoulders. Someone’s shouting, several people actually, and then—oh, goody, now there’s the familiar sound of someone getting punched in the face.
He can tell from the audible crack of a nose.
Not Eighteen’s, that’s for for damn sure.
Reaching for another square, he laments the lack of sauce. Sure, it brings up bad memories, but Ylfa kind of had a good thing going on there that Mickey has to reluctantly agree wasn’t all too bad of an idea (minus the weird religious worship undertones and the obsessive controlling issues, but still).
Nasha lets out an impressed whistle, turned around in her chair with an elbow resting on Mickey’s shoulder as support. “Oh, shit—” and then she ducks out of the way of a fork sailing through the air at unimaginable speeds in their direction, pulling him to the side just in case.
Mickey just keeps on eating.
Yeah, this would be so much better with some sauce.
“Careful, Eight!” Nasha shouts, shaking her head in fond amusement. She’ll probably have to go over there at one point to break them up, but Mickey thinks she likes admiring the way Eighteen gets all fired up during stuff like this.
(Because sometimes he does, too.)
“What happened?” she asks, before raising an eyebrow when he just hesitates. She nudges their knees together under the table. “Seven?”
He folds at the nickname, swallowing down the rest of his food to stall for a little more time, before he’s looking down at his tray and trying not to squirm in place. He doesn’t think he does a good job.
“Someone asked about—well, you know.”
His gaze flicks away from hers, too much of a coward to hold it.
“That question again.”
Hey, Mickey. So, what’s it like to die?
Nasha narrows her eyes, hands clenched into fists before she’s stretching her fingers out, all too aware of the cautious glance Mickey sends her way for the gesture. This time, he’s the one who nudges their knees together, thighs lined up.
“It’s okay. I was just gonna ignore it, really, but Eighteen was right around the corner and overheard, so…” he shrugs his shoulders. “It’s an overreaction.”
“Not enough of one if you ask me,” Nasha murmurs under her breath, nostrils flaring as her shoulders tense in that way he’s so used to—neck going stiff followed by the straightening of her lower back, something hot, but also something he’s noticed Eighteen has copied (and isn’t it weirdly domestic, how all three of them have just become amalgamations of each other, mannerisms and all).
It’s then that Mickey realizes a bit too late that maybe he’s just added more fuel to a fire that won’t be ending anytime soon, if the squelch of food being thrown at the wall is anything to go by.
Mickey sighs in defeat, glancing up when Nasha puts a hand on the back of his neck, squeezing in a gentle request to look up.
“It’s not an overreaction. He just cares about you.” At his sound of disbelief, she tilts his head to the side with a finger until they’re both watching as someone jumps on Eighteen’s back and he grabs at the back of their shirt, pulling them off only to slam them onto a nearby table.
Ouch.
“That’s what you call that?”
Nasha laughs, her hand sliding around to circle his shoulder so their faces are pressing together. “Yeah,” she breathes into his skin.
The both of them stare, entranced, as Eighteen snarls something incoherent, looking more wrestling match champion than current field worker. It’s ridiculously, unfairly attractive (which is all kinds of fucked up to think of himself).
“He’s just got a different way of showing it.”
And isn’t that just the understatement of the century?
But then Mickey really thinks about it, the way Eighteen’s temper snapped like a rubber band—quick and unrelenting, a barely there felt change of pressure—when he first overheard that damning question spoken into existence, a taboo but not, because no one put much stock into what hurt Mickey’s feelings on a good day, so what would be the difference now, even after the abolishment of the Expendable program?
So he’s used to just taking it, and then moving on with his life. Because really, what else was he supposed to do? Bother Nasha about it?
She’s been caught up with her own personal business, more than busy with rising up the ranks of their government to enact some much needed change (and he’s so proud of her that sometimes his chest fills to bursting). He couldn’t possibly call her up every single time to come to his rescue.
But going off of the—very, very violent—food fight overtaking the other half of the cafeteria, maybe he doesn’t have to.
So yeah. Perhaps Nasha is right.
But then again, when isn’t she?
He blinks, jostled, as she pushes him down, his nose brushing over the table’s surface. The next second, a spoon comes soaring over the space where his head had just been, whistling through the air and tickling the hairs on the back of his neck.
Nasha’s lips thin. “Okay, that’s two different utensils in the span of five minutes. I’m not gonna wait until he starts throwing knives around.”
Hands protectively hovering around the sides of his head, Mickey looks up. “You’re gonna join in too, then?”
Sighing, Nasha piles a couple more rations onto Mickey’s plate (“Don’t argue with me on this,” she tells him when he tries to protest), and stands up from the table. Patting her holster, she bends down low to give him a chaste peck on the chin, lingering for just a moment. “Just sit tight and wait for us, okay?”
Mickey can’t do anything but nod weakly, the skin beneath his bottom lip tingling from the casual intimacy of it all.
“Okay,” he says, preening at the gap-toothed grin—so beautiful, so cute, all his and all theirs—she offers him. “Be careful though.”
Glancing behind him, he lets out a hiss as Eighteen spits in someone’s face, holding them up off the ground and yelling obscenities Mickey’s pretty sure he’s never learned before, but, well.
In a weird, roundabout way, it’s kind of nice.
Being the cause for a fight like this.
“Both of you,” he adds, and watches as Nasha winks at him before heading on over—and then she steps up on a table and throws herself on a man in the back, her elbows trapping him in a headlock, Eighteen is whooping, and the rest of the security team is filing in through the doors with tasers in their hands.
Realizing that their meal time is quickly coming to an end, he plucks the protein squares off of Nasha’s plate (and Eighteen’s while he’s at it, because why not?) and starts filling his pockets, stuffing the rest that can’t fit in his mouth.
By the time there are two guards circling him on either side and grabbing his forearms, he thinks, maybe this is what fighting for yourself is supposed to look like, after all.
Someone else throwing the first punch for you.
***
Hours later, when they’re all sitting in small cages stacked one on top of the other, side to side (because of course security would just group them all together without asking questions), he leans back to back against Eighteen.
“Thank you,” he murmurs, sitting with his legs stretched out to the point where they’re poking out the bars of the other side, resting in Nasha’s lap.
She gives him an encouraging look, patting one of his bare ankles.
“It’s all ’cause you’re a goddamn pushover,” Eighteen grumbles, crossing his arms and knocking the back of their heads together none too gently, a throbbing dull ache that he’ll probably feel hours later in bed.
You’re welcome, the gesture seems to say. In that rough, sort of backward way that Mickey has learned to interpret these past couple of weeks coexisting with each other. So one hand digging inside a pocket, he grabs a protein square and turns around, reaching through the bars to drop it onto Eighteen’s lap.
“You didn’t eat anything before the fight,” Mickey explains, and feels a fissure of warmth in his chest when Eighteen grunts and picks up the food, starting to eat.
A couple of moments pass, and then,
“This is so fucking dry,” Eighteen complains.
“Needs some sauce, doesn’t it?” Mickey says, hiding the start of a laugh into the heel of his palm, teeth biting into the skin, and Nasha rolls her eyes at the two of them while letting out an amused huff of air.
Eighteen keeps grumbling, Nasha is still patting at his ankle, and Mickey lets his laugh slip free, light and quiet.
The bars around them don’t seem quite so suffocating anymore.