The cigarette’s almost at the filter before you take it from his hand.

Again.

Mikey barely reacts at first, still leaning against the alley wall behind the restaurant while smoke curls through cold Chicago air around both of you. The city sounds quieter back here somehow. Just distant traffic, muffled music bleeding faintly through brick walls, and the soft scrape of Mikey’s boot against concrete while exhaustion hangs heavy around his shoulders.

“You do that every time now,” he says eventually, voice rough from cigarettes and lack of sleep more than actual irritation.

“You burn your fingers every time now.”

“Builds character.”

“It builds nerve damage.”

That finally earns the smallest twitch of a smile from him, though it fades quickly afterward. Mikey’s been off all night. Louder during service in the forced kind of way. Talking too fast. Laughing too hard at things that weren’t actually funny. You noticed it hours ago because by now you’ve learned the difference between happy Mikey and spiraling Mikey.

Most people don’t.

Most people see charisma and stop looking deeper.

You don’t.

The alley light above you flickers softly while Mikey drags both hands down across his face tiredly, rings catching dull yellow light for half a second before disappearing again into shadow. There are dark circles beneath his eyes tonight. Worse than usual. His hoodie smells faintly like kitchen smoke and coffee and cigarettes.

“You okay?” you ask quietly.

“Fantastic,” he says immediately.

Too fast.

You just stare at him.

Mikey exhales hard through his nose before looking away toward the street instead. “Alright, maybe like… medium terrible.”

“There he is.”

“Don’t sound too excited.”

The silence after that settles softer than awkward. Familiar. Mikey’s always been loud around most people, but around you he gets quieter in strange little moments like this. Less performance. Less deflection. Like part of him gets too tired to keep pretending all the time.

Your eyes drift toward the fading red mark across two of his fingers where the cigarette nearly burned him before you grabbed it.

“You weren’t even noticing again,” you say gently.

That makes something shift across his face almost immediately.

Not anger.

Something sadder than that.

For a second Mikey just looks at you quietly like he doesn’t fully understand what to do with the fact you keep paying attention to him this carefully. Then he laughs softly under his breath, though there’s no real humor in it this time.

“Nobody’s taken care of me like that in a real long time,” he admits finally.

The honesty lands harder than he probably intended.

Mikey notices it immediately too because the second vulnerability slips out, he tries covering it back up with a crooked grin.

“Jesus Christ,” he mutters, looking vaguely horrified with himself. “That sounded way sadder out loud.”