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thetomorrowshow · 15 days ago

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Whumptober 31 - Asking For Help

title: for him it was not an important failure

fandom: limited life smp

cw: discussion of child/spouse abuse, murder

this is another part of my bad boys gang au, continuing days 6, 14, and 22!

“Hey, could I—”

“Jimmy!” Joel cheers, sliding Jimmy his half-drunk beer. “Have a drink! You’re old enough to drink, right?”

Jimmy rolls his eyes. “Right. That one never gets old.”

Grian snorts. “Just like you.”

“Dude, shut up!”

“Come on, sit down, sit down,” Joel waves. Jimmy takes a look around at the rest of the busy bar, then slides into their booth, folding his hands in front of him.

“I’ve got—”

Grian raises a hand, flags down a waiter who just happens to be passing by. “Yeah, could you get him something light? It’s his birthday, first time drinking—”

“Bro,” Jimmy growls, leveling his strongest glare at Grian. Joel almost chokes on his beer (which he had promptly taken back once Jimmy sat down).

“Oh, no, I think you made the kid mad,” Joel can’t help but rib. Jimmy turns his glare on Joel, which does nothing to intimidate him, but does make him laugh a little harder.

“I didn’t come here to get bullied,” huffs Jimmy. “I—I have a job, and I wanted to ask your help for it.”

A job? Why would Jimmy have a job?

Grian’s the one who usually brings back the jobs for their little team, as he’s technically in charge of them. Jimmy’s never just showed up with a job ready to go.

It’s unheard of. It’s weird.

Grian is just as confused as Joel, apparently, because he only frowns for a moment before holding out his hand.

“Yeah, right. Show me.”

Jimmy pulls a plain white envelope out of the inside pocket of his jean jacket, passes it over to Grian. “I asked for a job,” he says, and Joel can’t help but notice that his voice has taken on an oddly nervous tone, lowered to not be heard over the sounds of the bar. “They said I could pick a team. Will you?”

Grian opens the envelope, his eyes scanning the paper. After a moment, he passes it to Joel.

It looks like a run-of-the-mill intimidation job. Some guy who owes the Bad Boys a considerable amount of money, has already missed more than one payment. Joel doesn’t recognize the name, so it’s probably a local politician or some corrupt businessman.

“Why would they give you a job?” Grian asks.

“I—I asked for one. I want to—”

“You want to rise in the ranks, huh?” Grian says. “Leave your old pals behind for greener pastures?”

“No, I—”

“Joel?”

There’s something not quite right about this. Jimmy has never mentioned wanting to lead out a job before—why would he go out of his way to ask for one?

But a job is a job, Joel supposes. They get paid by the job, and he likes to get paid as much as possible. It looks pretty easy, in and out, get the money and give a warning.

“Sure,” he shrugs. “Sounds fun!”

“With Tim leading, it’ll be a trainwreck. . . .”

“Hey!”

“That’s half the point, see? I want to see the train explode in slow motion.”

Grian snorts. “And somebody has to drag your bodies out of the wreckage, I guess.”

Jimmy opens his mouth to argue further, but he’s cut off by several waiters approaching, a cocktail and a cupcake in hand. “We heard that someone here is a birthday boy?” one of them encourages, holding the cupcake out to the table.

Jimmy’s face goes redder than a tomato in one second flat. “Grian, I will kill you,” he moans.

“That’s him!” Joel points to Jimmy delightedly. “Old enough to drink as of ten-thirty this morning!”

The waiters break into a rousing chorus of ‘Happy Birthday’, despite Jimmy’s repeated mutterings of “I’m literally twenty-two!”

Joel just laughs and downs the rest of his beer.

The mark, a man named Ed Fowler, lives in a townhouse in a quiet part of the city, a moderately nice car in the assigned street parking spot and a recycling bin out on the curb. Joel pokes his head into it as they sneak past, under cover of the late night—empty. The guy must’ve forgot to drag it up yesterday.

Breaking into the house is easy, even with the security system advertised on the sign outside the main window. Ed had left his kitchen window cracked, and Joel boosts Grian up and through it, then crawls in himself, aided by Jimmy below. Once he’s crawled his way over the sink (full of dirty dishes, geez, can this man not clean up after himself?), he turns around and takes Jimmy’s hands, heaving him through.

Grian’s already going through the cupboards by the time Joel pulls Jimmy all the way through, eventually finding and withdrawing a box of Cheerios.

“No good cereal,” he grumbles.

“Do you even eat dinner before these kinds of jobs anymore?” Joel asks, leaning up against a counter—much of the counter space is taken up by a microwave and a couple of empty beer cans. There’s a tied-off, bulging trash bag near his feet, and judging by the sound it makes when Joel kicks it, it’s full of more beer cans.

Grian opens the fridge. “Nope. Oh, gross, his milk is expired. Maybe he’s got chicken nuggets.”

“I’m gonna check the living room,” Jimmy mumbles, and with barely a sound, he slips out of the kitchen.

Grian glances at Joel, and Joel finds a reflection of his own feelings in his face—confusion, concern, suspicion.

“Jimmy’s being weird,” Joel says. Grian nods.

“Super weird. Do you think it’s just . . . y’know, leading a job?”

Jimmy had been the one to scout out the house, had presented a plan. Sure, it had been the usual plan for how Grian ran these kinds of jobs, but being in charge is a lot of pressure. It probably didn’t help that Joel and Grian had both been teasing him all day about it.

“What time have you got?” Joel asks, instead of responding. Grian checks his watch.

“About two in the morning. Just jitters, you think?”

Jimmy doesn’t go quiet when he gets jittery, though. He over-talks, laughs too much, hollers out his nerves. He’s so loud when he’s got jitters.

But this is a new situation. Maybe this is just a new kind of Jimmy Jitters that they haven’t seen before.

“Yeah, probably,” says Joel, though it feels not-quite-right. “Does he have any chicken nuggets?”

“Chicken strips, actually. And a handful of frozen dinners—you wanna pop this in the microwave?”

Grian tosses him a freezer meal. Joel raises an eyebrow as he examines the package. “Really? Spaghetti and meatballs?”

“You underestimate my love for pasta.”

“Yeah, but the salisbury steak ones are way better.”

“He doesn’t have any of those, he has that one and some ham and potato ones. Clearly, I chose the best option offered.”

They aren’t trying to be quiet. They’re honestly being pretty loud, and Grian turned on the kitchen light before Joel even got in, so they’re about as inconspicuous as a pack of drunk teenagers trying to sneak in. Joel only adds to it when he rummages through the silverware drawer for a knife to cut slits in the top of the frozen dinner’s plastic film, then tosses it in the microwave with a slam of the door.

It isn’t a stealth mission.

It’s intimidation.

That’s all the noise it takes for Joel to hear creaking coming from the staircase, the door leading to it situated between the kitchen and the living room. He leans back against the counter, making sure he looks carefully unbothered. Grian keeps rummaging through the freezer, making occasional noises of disapproval.

“This salmon has got to be centuries old, it’s covered in ice,” Grian says. He chucks it in the nearby trash can, heavy enough that it drags the trashbag down with it into the can.

“Get out of my house.” Joel looks up. Grian doesn’t.

The man standing at the bottom of the staircase must be Ed Fowler, and he isn’t exactly what Joel expected. Judging by the food and beer cans, he’d expected a portly, greasy guy, the kind of guy who spent hours in front of the TV without eating a single vegetable.

Ed Fowler is fairly fit, his grey nightshirt showing some pectoral definition, his arms muscular. He’s a big guy, definitely taller than Joel, and his light-brown hair is speckled with grey, cropped short enough to almost be militant.

And maybe it is militant, given the steely look in his eyes and the gun in his hands.

“G! Three makes company!” Joel says, and Grian makes brief eye contact with him, his sight of Ed blocked by the freezer door.

Three makes company—their code for whether or not someone has a gun. They haven’t used that one in a while, not since Jimmy joined them. Now they usually say something like our friend is here, but for some reason Joel had jumped to the old one.

Ed doesn’t move, his gun trained on Joel.

“Ed Fowler,” Joel says. The microwave beeps beside him. He ignores it, though Ed’s eyes flick toward it. “How long has it been since you washed dishes?”

Ed’s chuckle is humorless. “Too long. What do you boys want?”

Grian grimaces. “Look, I know Joel’s not that tall, but we’re fully adult men,” he says, closing the freezer. He still doesn’t look at Ed, instead walking back toward the silverware drawer, holding a frosted-over carton of ice cream. “Got any clean spoons?”

“Right. I suppose I should say Bad Boys,” Ed says. “Why are you here?”

Grian shrugs nonchalantly. “Oh, you know. We get a job, we do it. I think the question is for you, Ed—why would the Bad Boys be at your house at two in the morning?”

Ed looks genuinely confused, though he hides it well with a small smirk. “I’m guessing it isn’t a booty call,” he jokes, and Joel almost laughs.

This guy is pretty cool, actually. The kind of guy that Joel would grab a drink with, probably. Well, maybe. Depends on his profession—his build kind of looks like a cop, and that’s a red flag from the get-go.

Where’s Jimmy? He was only going to check the living room, it can’t have taken too much time.

Last time Jimmy went missing during a house visit like this, it wasn’t pretty.

The microwave beeps again. Another minute that he hasn’t appeared.

“You’ve missed some payments,” Grian says, his tone still casual. He manages to find a spoon, but the ice cream is so frozen solid that it won’t even dig in. He chips away at it, finally turns to face Ed. “The boss sent us to collect.”

“I haven’t owed the Bad Boys anything in years.”

Joel shrugs. “Not according to our records. Nothing we can do about it, so you might as well fork something over.” Now that Grian has eyes on Ed, he turns to the microwave, popping it open. The freezer meal looks more unappetizing than it did earlier, but he pulls it out anyway.

“That’s stupid,” Ed spits. “I don’t have any debts!”

“Yes, you do.”

Joel looks up.

There’s a gun just in sight, pointed straight at Ed’s temple, and Jimmy takes a step into the light, eyes trained on Ed.

Ed’s eyes glance to the side. His face turns red quicker than Joel’s ever seen, cheeks suddenly ruddy with anger.

“James,” he says, and despite the clear rage in his face, his voice is calm. “Put the gun down.”

James? Does this man know Jimmy?

If he does, then Jimmy never should have accepted this job. It’s an unspoken rule in the Bad Boys that you don’t do jobs that involve people from your personal life, and Jimmy knows that well enough.

Jimmy doesn’t move. His hand is steady. “I don’t think so,” he says. “I think this is when you put the gun down.”

Ed’s fingers tighten around the grip of his gun. “What, and leave myself defenseless?”

Jimmy laughs—short, sharp, ugly. “Yep. Drop it. Kick it over to Grian.”

Joel glances at Grian—he’s gone still, the ice cream forgotten on the counter. He’s staring, staring at Jimmy, worry creasing his brow.

This isn’t right. Something about this isn’t right at all—maybe it’s the cold tone of Jimmy’s voice, usually so lively; maybe it’s the whitening of his knuckles around the grip of his gun.

After a long, long moment, Ed slowly drops into a crouch, carefully setting his gun on the ground. He pushes it to Grian, the gun skittering across the tile floor of the kitchen. Grian catches it under his foot, but makes no move to pick it up.

When Ed straightens, he keeps his hands up and open, so that everyone can see that there’s nothing. “All right,” he says, voice once again even. “How much do I owe?”

“Twenty-thousand,” Joel says quickly. “That’s the first payment. Seventy-thousand, total.”

“Right. Well, I want it made clear that I don’t owe anything, but I’ll cut a check for fifteen-thousand now if you can arrange a meeting with one of your bosses. I want to get this cleared up.”

That sounds good to Joel, honestly—this situation isn’t right at all with the way Jimmy’s acting, he suddenly wants to get out of here—so he casts a look toward Grian, waiting for him to accept the deal.

Grian doesn’t say a word. He looks toward Jimmy.

Oh, no.

Jimmy’s leading this mission.

Can’t Grian take over? Doesn’t he see that Jimmy is clearly acting on some personal grudge and thereby compromised?

Jimmy doesn’t look at either of them. “I don’t think that’ll cut it,” he says, and Joel’s heart sinks. That isn’t the right choice to make; he’s letting his emotions get in the way of this job. He should accept it and let them get out. “I think you know that.”

Ed growls. “Look, I can get the money. I just want to talk to your boss.”

“I don’t want the money, though,” Jimmy says softly. “I know you don’t owe anything.”

“James—”

“Jimmy—” Grian says, reaching forward—

“I want you to talk to me like a grown man,” Ed says. “Can you behave long enough to do that?”

“I’m going to kill you,” Jimmy says, as if he didn’t hear either of them speak, voice still so eerily soft. “You see?”

Ed’s adam’s apple bobs. “If you do it like that, you’re nothing but a coward. Sit down and talk.”

“I’ll do it as a coward. I don’t care how disappointed you are in me. Not anymore.”

Joel swallows. They need to get Jimmy out of here before he does something he regrets—yeah, all of them have killed before, but not like this. Not as whatever—whatever revenge this is.

“Grian,” he whispers. “Tell him to stand down.”

Grian doesn’t say anything.

“James,” Ed says, and now his voice trembles, cracks in his cool facade beginning to spiderweb out. His eyes dart back and forth between Grian in front of him and Jimmy to his left, his mouth a thin line. “James, put the gun down and let’s talk about it. I’m not ready to die today.”

That’s the wrong thing to say.

Joel sees it in Jimmy’s face, the way his features darken, the way his eyes harden. “Was she ready to die?” he asks.

“I—”

“Was she ready to die? The doctor said the hemorrhage was caused by recent head trauma.” Jimmy digs the gun into Ed’s forehead; the man blanches. “Which concussion do you think caused it? How many times did you slam her head against the wall over the years?”

“I didn’t kill—”

“Was I ready to die?” Jimmy asks, and his voice is shaking now, as well. “How old was I, fifteen? A kid that you left bleeding out on your bedroom floor. Do you know that I thought of her? I was dying, and all I wondered was if she felt the same way. Alone. Terrified. Sick.”

“Yet you survived,” Ed spits. “James, I didn’t kill your mother.”

“Keep telling yourself that. It won’t save you, in the end.”

Oh.

Oh, no.

When Jimmy was only eighteen, Joel had become fairly certain that Jimmy was experiencing some level of abuse at home. He and Grian had started slipping extra bonuses into Jimmy’s money (he remembers how excited the kid had been, showing them that he was getting paid more than he expected), and when Jimmy had announced to them that he was going to be able to afford an apartment, they celebrated with him. They bought him a tiny cactus as a housewarming gift and never mentioned their involvement in his pay raise.

After he got the apartment, Jimmy finally started to mellow out. He started laughing more, blaming himself less for mistakes, getting control of the anger that burned within him.

He had stopped showing up after every weekend with new bruises.

If Joel’s right, this man is his father.

Now that he’s made that connection, he can see the resemblance. Jimmy’s hair is just a couple shades lighter than Ed’s, his nose the same sharp angle. Ed’s eyes are the exact same hazel as Jimmy’s, and if there were a few more lights on, Joel expects he would find the same light freckles on Ed’s cheeks that Jimmy has.

He—he thought this man was cool mere moments ago. He almost laughed at his joke.

This is a man who abused Jimmy, and—apparently—almost killed him.

Joel feels sick, and it isn’t from the the smell of the microwave dinner.

“You don’t want to kill me,” Ed says. It might be a threat, it might be a beg. Jimmy laughs again, still that horrible, ugly laugh that’s so unlike Jimmy.

“I’ve wanted to kill you since I was fourteen,” he says. “Lizzie’s the only thing that kept me from shooting you in your sleep.”

Ed latches onto that. “Elizabeth wouldn’t want you to—”

“Lizzie isn’t here right now. She’s sound asleep in the apartment that I saved up for for years to get us out. I got her away from you. I saved her.”

“I’m not the monster that you think I am, James.”

“What, so you’re normal?” Jimmy scoffs. His words come faster and faster, emotion driving each syllable. “Normal people don’t choke nine year old boys until they pass out. Normal people don’t—don’t put their cigarettes out on their kids’ backs. Normal people don’t hurt their kids, dad!”

“I—and what does that make you, now?” says Ed. “A gangster? How is that any better?”

“Anything’s better than a wife-beating cop,” Jimmy snarls, and for a moment, his hand shakes. The gun slips from Ed’s forehead briefly, scrapes down the side of his face, and Ed freezes.

“James—”

Jimmy reasserts his hold on the gun, one thumb running over the grip. “This is your gun,” he says, his voice soft again. It’s scary, how quickly he can go from one to the other. “E.J.F., your initials. You gave it to me. Remember?”

“James—” Ed says again, but Jimmy cuts him off.

“I want to make it hurt. I want to watch you bleed out. But I’m better than you.”

Silence.

A bit of ice drips off the ice cream carton.

Joel hardly dares to breathe.

“Please don’t kill me,” Ed whispers, the blood entirely drained from his face, leaving it pale as milk. “I don’t want to die.”

Jimmy’s face doesn’t change. “Neither did my mom.”

BANG.

For Jimmy, the job was surprisingly well-executed.

As it turned out, he had gone to TIES.

He had approached Etho of TIES six months earlier, presenting him with a fat file folder of evidence of Ed Fowler’s corruption. Ed Fowler, a high-ranking police officer, was known to take bribes from certain less-reputable gangs while borrowing money from those less likely to kill him, including TIES. In fact, he had borrowed sufficiently from TIES that Etho felt justified in sending someone to collect. He gave Jimmy the details and Jimmy forged the handwriting of a higher-up in the Bad Boys to write out the job. While in the living room of the townhouse that Joel now knew to be Jimmy’s childhood home, he had disabled any security systems or cameras that might incriminate them.

With Etho’s permission, as Jimmy claimed, they ransacked the place and made it look like TIES had destroyed it looking for money. Of course, they took any money and valuables they could find. Joel found a couple of very nice guns in the master bedroom—he wasn’t just going to let them go to waste.

(He looked at the floor, at the stained brown carpet, and shuddered.)

By the time they leave, it’s almost four. Nobody speaks, but that morning, for the first time, Jimmy pulls up GPS navigation to an apartment address on the other side of the city.

They walk into Jimmy’s apartment at around five in the morning, the pink-haired woman living there already awake. She and Jimmy make long eye contact, in which Jimmy kind of shrugs and blushes, and she frowns.

Then she smiles, and invites them all in, and introduces herself as Lizzie Fowler.

Joel pays more attention to Jimmy than he does to her, keeping an eye on his emotions, but Jimmy seems fine. A bit shaken (he’s barely spoken since he did it, face pale and blood spattered across his knuckles), but fine.

Lizzie and Jimmy go about preparing something to eat—and Grian raids their cereal, humming in satisfaction as he finds something sugary—and Joel just stands awkwardly in the center of the kitchen, not sure what to do.

Soon enough, the eggs and toast are done, and everyone retires to the living room.

“Thanks for the help,” Jimmy mumbles, once they all have some sort of breakfast item in hand, and Jimmy’s sitting between Grian and Joel on the cheap sofa, his head leaning on Grian’s shoulder. Lizzie’s on the floor in front of him, her back against the sofa, idly picking at Jimmy’s pant leg.

“I don’t think we did anything, Tim,” Grian tells him, idly running a hand through Jimmy’s hair. “Like, that was all you.”

“Not that.”

Jimmy’s at the most relaxed Joel’s ever seen him, his eyelids fluttering, his shoulders slumped. He yawns, leans further against Grian.

Joel wraps an arm around him, leans in as well.

Grian smiles at Joel when he catches his eye. Joel smiles back.

They can reprimand Jimmy later. They can tell him how foolish he was for getting other gangs involved in personal revenge, how terribly that situation could have ended. He’ll probably be getting suspended from jobs for a while, restricted to manning the front or janitorial duties.

That can wait, though.

The sparse living room grows lighter and lighter as the sun breaks over the horizon, gradually bathing them all in its warm yellow glow.

It’s a new beginning that isn’t for him. It’s for Jimmy and Lizzie, almost uncomfortable in their silence, but not quite leaving each other’s side. It’s for Jimmy, a release of the weight that he’s been carrying for years. It’s for Jimmy, able to seek out comfort at last.

Joel just has the privilege of witnessing it.

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