Mickey listens to all of it without interrupting, letting the pauses stretch out a little longer than usual as he reels in his own impulse to fill the silence, because it's clear Toma's still reading him for a reaction and he doesn't want to rush past anything that mattered. Nor did he want to come off as rude when the other was clearly in need of a listening ear. When Toma mentions the whole boy band thing, he can't help the small huff of a laugh, mostly at the absurdity of it, pop idol turned apocalypse cook, but he reins it in fast when Toma mentions the depression, letting his face settle into something quieter and more attentive instead. "Hey," he says, voice falling a few notches softer than he usually allows, "that's not nothing. Any of it. The band thing, the depression, not knowing about your guys, that's a lot to be carrying around and still function, let alone cook three meals a day for a mall full of strangers." He doesn't reach for a joke to smooth it over, just lets it sit there acknowledged, because he figures Toma's had enough people either brush past that kind of thing or make it weird, and he'd rather do neither.
"For what it's worth," Mickey continues, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, "you don't gotta hold a gun to pull your weight here. Feeding people, keeping the inventory straight, that's not some fallback job, man, that's the actual job. Half this place would fall apart in a week without someone doing exactly what you're doing." He gestures vaguely with his fork toward Toma's plate, thinking silently on how fast the collapse of their micro-society would come. "And for the record, I'd take a guy who can make a decent meal out of canned beans and mystery meat over another trigger-happy scavenger any day of the week. Skills is skills dude." He knocks his knuckles once against the table, but he doesn't stand up yet, like the conversation's yanked something loose in him he wasn't planning on saying out loud. Human connection was a strange thing, especially in these times.
"Can I tell you something kinda stupid?" Mickey says instead, rubbing the back of his neck, eyes somewhere off to the side rather than on Toma. "I do the whole," he waves a hand at himself, at the easy grin and the deflecting, "act like nothing gets to me thing. Like I don't care what people think, don't care if I screw up, whatever, brush it off. But I do care. I lay awake plenty of nights running through every dumb thing I've said or done, wondering how bad people think I am." He chuckles a short laugh, but it doesn't reach his eyes the way it usually does. "And honest truth, I know I'm kind of a fuck-up. Always have been, probably always will be a little. I'm not gonna sit here and pretend otherwise. But I'm trying, you know? Every day I'm trying to be a little less of one." He shrugs, like he's already regretting saying that much, and finally pushes up to stand, gathering his plate like it's something to do with his hands. "So yeah, I'll come find you. Food court or the storeroom, doesn't matter. Might even let you show me how to properly cut things without stabbing my own fingers, since apparently that's not obvious to me either."
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