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whydoiexist1406 · 3 months ago

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Welcome to Part 2 of the JimCurly adopted brothers AU! I had this written a week ago, but my wifi decided to cut out on me LMAO.

Warnings: Curly POV so not as many. Alcohol, graphic description of maggots and larvae for use of a metaphor, uhhh...my hand slipped and I accidentally made Curly way less normal about Jimmy than I meant to LMFAO, so there is one-sided JimCurly this time.

(Also, the tense is weird in this one, I was trying something new. If anyone sees a tense change that doesn't make sense, please comment on it)

Grant Curly was happy.

He had no reason not to be, after all.

There was a dull thumping bass filling his bone marrow, shaking his lungs and rattling his ribcage, pulsing in time like the house itself had a monstrous heartbeat.

A plastic cup was heavy in his hand, the ethanol sting of its contents heavy at the back of his throat all the way up his sinuses, the bright orange liquor threatening to slosh over the rim when a wayward body pushes past his with a muttered apology that he never gets to hear, carried away by the upbeat tempo of a song he doesn't recognize.

His girlfriend, Lila, is talking to him about something her friend said, but he can't hear her over the sound of blood throbbing in his ears and he doesn't try to, too busy scanning the crowd around him. He hasn't caught sight of frizzy brown locks or familiar slumped shoulders in over an hour now, not without lack of trying, and Curly doesn't like how that makes him feel.

Yeah, Grant Curly was happy. Let's go with that.

The sensation of a warm hand tracing it's way up his chest, settling over his leaden heart, brings his focus back to the girl who was so obviously upset with the lack of attention, her pink lips jutting out at him in an exaggerated pout that made his brow twitch with the urge to furrow.

He hopes he got his confusion across by the way he looks at her, because he isn't in the mood to shout over the music.

She, apparently, is. Her first two tries are nothing but jarbled nonsense, but third times the charm, "who are you looking for?!"

Her voice carries shrill and strained, just barely rising above the electo crunch driving into his temples like an icepick, slowly chipping away at the dam in his chest that felt near to overflowing.

He doesn't attempt to scream his answer like she did. Instead he steps close, breaching her space, a hand settling on her waist to keep her still. He can tell she approves, ringlet locks wisping over the curve of her shoulders as she leans into the warmth of his skin.

"I'll be back." He whispers into the crook of her neck, the awaiting goosebumps he sees arise along her skin long premeditated when he squeezes her hip. She doesn't ask where he's going, too busy pouting her lips and batting her eyes to try and tempt him into a kiss.

He thinks of dogs and bells as he steps away before she can force the issue, shouldering his way through the crowd, head snapping this way and that as he scans once, twice, three times on his way through each room, heart pounding in time with his head and the heavy pulsing of the floor beneath his feet spurred on by overkill speakers.

One by one he paces the perimeter of each room and comes up empty. When he reaches the kitchen, he chugs the last few mouthfuls of his drink and deposits the empty cup in the trash beside his hip, mindful of the mess around him. The bitter sting of his mouth and throat, settling heavy in his stomach, does nothing to assuage the sinking dread coiling tighter with each face in the crowd that isn't the one he's looking for.

Still no sign of Jimmy. He only had one last room to check downstairs, a wayward bedroom. His feet carry him on autopilot past the threshold of people in his path, but his mind is lingering elsewhere, stuck like a record scratch on the tightness of his chest.

If Curly were honest with himself, he worried about Jimmy. He worried about him more than anything else. More than his grades. More than his social life. More than his future. And the closer it got to Jimmy's 18th birthday, the more that fear grew. Fear of the unknown, if he had to guess. Jimmy could do anything he wanted once he was an adult, and what he wanted to do could be anything.

Plus, the younger boy, though he could already hear Jimmy snarling about the moniker, insisting it was just by a few months, Grant, had been... different lately.

He wasn't sure how to explain it, beyond his own reaction to it. The sinking in his stomach, the anxious prickle of sweat at the back of his neck.

It wasn't the zoning out that was the problem, that wasn't anything new. It was how often it was happening. The look he would get in his eyes as he stared off into space. All too often it would remind Curly of the gleam of sharp metal and frantic breaths, of the acrid, suffocating tang of blood, of white walls and white bedsheets and the steady drip, drip, drip of an IV.

The painful twist in his chest, the rattling of his lungs when he forces a steadying breath, deep and measured, brings him back to the current predicament.

Right, Jimmy was missing.

Missing. Curly almost snorts at his own thoughts. Jimmy wasn't missing. It was a party, one he'd dragged him to in the first place. He was probably just lingering in a corner as always, watching people dance and drink and slosh around more than the liquid in their cups, with that same apathetic glare on his face. Familiar. Safe and sound.

But...just to be safe, he stops before the door of the last room to check, briefly pressing his ear to the painted wood to make sure he wasn't seconds away from being walking into something he had no interest in seeing.

He deems it safe when he doesn't hear the telltale sound of a girl giving her best go at earning a Grammy Award, the click of the latch when he turned the handle sharp in his ears even over the deafening music, before it swung open to reveal the bedrooms interior.

Revealing... nothing.

The room was empty, the light of the hall behind him spilling inside like a cascade of gold across the floor at his feet, his silhouette cutting through the middle. And amongst the darkness, there was no Jimmy to be found.

Okay, perhaps Jimmy was missing after all.

Curly barely felt it when his fingers gripped the brittle trim of the doorway to steady himself, nails digging into the soft wood until they threatened to bend and break under the increasing pressure.

Think, Curly. Think, think, think.

But it was hard to piece together a coherent thought amidst the rising numbness running through him fast enough to leave him dizzier than the alcohol tainting his blood.

He was overreacting, he knew it, he could feel it even, slowly welling up like blood oozing to the surface of a gash, but that didn't stop the tingling taking over his fingertips or the tightening of his chest, nor did the measured breaths in through his nose and out through his mouth.

Because if Jimmy wasn't anywhere in the house, then where the fuck was he?

There was nothing upstairs except the attic, which he already knew was locked by the way multiple people throughout the night had gotten told off for trying to sneak up there. There was absolutely no way Curly had managed to miss him when he'd toured the house, no matter how much he'd had to drink.

Which meant Jimmy wasn't in the house. had he left?

The image of a drunk – fuck, maybe more than just drunk – Jimmy blindly stumbling down the road headed god knows where to get hurt or taken advantage of by anyone driving past had barely taken hold in his head before his feet were moving without his permission.

Weaving and shoving his way through anyone unfortunate enough to be in-between him and the front door with little regard to the dirty looks and slurred swears it gains him along the way, Curly gets close enough to settle a hand on the knob before he glances up, and what he sees through the glass window has him falling still.

There's Jimmy, sitting on the stone steps that lead out to the overpacked driveway. But he's not alone. There's someone sitting next to him, less than a foot of space between them.

At first, he mistakes it for another boy, but when the stranger turns and he seeks round cheeks and full lips, he realizes it's a girl, her dark hair cut short and shaggy above her shoulders. He can't make out what she's saying, only faint whispers through the thick dark oak standing between him and the pair, but he can see her lips moving.

He doesn't see if Jimmy answers, can't hear despite how hard he strains his ears to pick up any wayward syllables, but he does see the brunette slam back the last of his drink and go to stand.

He can't, or rather, doesn't want to identify the nauseating twist in his gut when he watches the girl stop and pull him back down by the sleeve of his jacket. She leans in, her shoulder brushing Jimmy's when she pours half the contents of her cup into his, to... what, keep him there longer?

It's only when she turns her head just a bit more to the side and her olivine eyes catch his through the glass that he realizes how long he's been standing there, simply watching them, like a creep or some kind of stalker.

The brief upturn of his lips is forced even to him, the wave he gives her half-hearted at best, but he can't seem to muster the energy for anything more. She blinks, staring at him long enough that an itch begins to travel up his spine, starting at the base of his vertebrae and inching up towards his skull, and he turns on his heel and flees further into the house the moment her gaze detaches from him and drifts back to Jimmy.

He doesn't stick around to try and make out what she says next, if she mentions him at all or if Jimmy looks back to try and catch a glimpse of him when she does. Instead, he marches like a man going to war towards the kitchen. He hovers by the counter, littered with rapidly disappearing snacks and bottles both empty and full, until he sees a face even remotely familiar.

The last thing he remembers before everything goes too fuzzy for recollection is him getting roped into some kind of drinking game, the shots coming at a pace that could put a machine gun to shame.

When Curly wakes up in his bed the next day, no memories of when or how he got there after the party, at first he's afraid he drove home intoxicated.

After learning that no, Jimmy drove them home last night, Curly feels an entirely new brand of terror. He can only thank whatever higher power must have been watching over them last night that he didn't wake up in a ditch, or a hospital, dying from a brain bleed and every bone in his body turned to dust.

He doesn't get even halfway through a stern lecture on the dangers of driving under the influence and it's consequences before he realizes Jimmy isn't even pretending to pay attention and he gives up.

That in and of itself is nothing unusual. Par for the course, really. It only took a year or two for Jimmy to give up any and all pretenses of being a 'good kid,' within Curly's presence at the very least. No, what catches his attention is why Jimmy isn't paying attention.

Phone in hand, thumbs moving rapidly across his screen, Jimmy is giving whoever it is he's texting an amount of undivided attention he hasn't seen him give... anything, frankly. The only thing that came close would be the first video game him and Curly ever played together, just a month or two after they permanently moved him in. It's a memory held dear and permanently seared into Curly's neurons.

It's been so long now that he can't even remember what game they were playing, what it was called, or even what it was about. But he can remember the look on Jimmy's face, the way he tried to hide the smile overtaking him whenever Curly let him win, and he remembers most of all the feeling of pride at being the one to put it there.

The thought of that attention now being on whoever was on the other side of that screen does something strange and uncomfortable to his stomach, heavy and roiling like the wriggling of insects, like larvae have taken up residence within the gaps of his intestines and lungs. It's that feeling, and the knowledge that Jimmy doesn't have any friends, not ones that he would care to text so eagerly, that gets Curly to ask.

"Who's that?" He waits until dark eyes glance up at his face to nod towards the phone in his hand.

A pink tongue swipes across Jimmy's bottom lip, wetting the cracked skin, dry despite the many times Curly's has offered him chapstick, and he quickly tears his gaze away once he realizes he'd been staring much too intently.

"Why do you care?" Jimmy grumbles back, defensive, angling the screen away from Curly and towards his own chest as if the older teen was about to steal it from him.

The reaction was... confusing, though shouldn't have been all that surprising. Everything Jimmy did nowadays confused him, despite the perhaps unnecessary amount of time he spent thinking about him, his mannerisms, and the things he did and said any given day.

It wasn't his fault Jim was so hard to figure out, though, now was it? He wouldn't occupy so many of Curly's thoughts if he was more straightforward.

"Well, I don't. Just curious." Was his response, kept carefully neutral in an attempt to not agitate or scare Jimmy away by being too intense in one direction or another.

It seems to work, since Jimmy shrugs a shoulder, all faux nonchalance that he always thought gave him a mysterious, brooding aura. Curly refused to be at fault for how endearing he found it, whenever he tried so hard to come off as cooler than he was.

"No one special. Just a girl I met at the party last night." The words aren't spoken to the blonde directly, but rather to the screen in front of him, dismissive as he scans the text that just came in.

Anything Curly may have said to that is crushed by his teeth clamping together with a soft 'click,' jaw snapping shut again when the brunette doesn't bother to wait for him to say anything, just turns and trudges out of the living room to head to the safety of his bedroom.

The only thing he has to keep him company in the empty room is the sound of Jimmy's door slamming shut. Well, that and Polle, the tiny tabby padding down the hall where, presumably, Jimmy kicked him out of his room. He bent down, running a hand over the top of his head between his ears, fur like velvet under his fingertips.

Well, at least he had this. And it was almost the same, knowing he was touching something that was Jimmy's, touching it in the same spot, same manner he's seen him do a hundred times.

With gentle hands he carefully lifts Polle up off the ground, cradling him securely in his arms as he makes his way over to the couch. There, with his legs crossed and the feline curled securely in his lap, he wisps his fingers up and down along his bristling back, tracing the stripes that run perpendicular to each bump of his spine, his efforts rewarded with syrupy sweet purring each time.

Like this, it's easy to imagine that the warmth of Polle's fur seeping into his hands was residual heat from Jimmy's own.

Yeah, this would do for now.

Authors Note: the girl is NOT ANYA. honestly, none of the other characters will probably appear.

Not because I don't love them, I DO (Anya especially,) but they don't deserve to be subjected to these twos insanity any more than they already have in canon, and I would feel personally guilty if I wrote them in.

So, anytime I need a character to drive the plot, like the girl from the party, it will be played by an OC. Sorry if you were hoping to see any of them!

#curly mouthwashing #jimmy mouthwashing #mouthwashing #jimcurly #mouthwashing fic #i already have a bit of the next chapter planned so hopefully I'll get that one out faster #if my wifi cooperates long enough LMAO

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