have you seen this clown!! (curt)

[calla]

C U R T

He gets home and the couch is empty, but that's not too unusual. Charlie folds up a blanket and says that Pietro's moved on already, but that's not too unusual either. He's got his cycle. He comes and goes with the rain.

Curt still forgets and has to put away the extra plate at dinner that night.

But the routineness of the whole thing ends rather abruptly. A week passes where Curt's waking up before the sun rises and heading to work, then coming back when it's dark to crash for a few hours before leaving again for the night shift. The twins take to fussing an hour earlier in the mornings, and Curt relinquishes that precious sixty minutes of sleep to try and soothe them, lets Charlie rest since she's the one taking care of them all day. It hurts a little - the fact that the only time he sees his kids are when they're crying and it's dark out and all he wants to do is crawl into the bassinet and cry with them.

Charlie runs her hands over the scruff that's growing faster than he can shave it and says it makes him look too much older. She kisses the corner of his mouth and complains about the burn.

He'd probably be able to get a better job if he cleaned up more.

It's alright though. It passes. Another week goes by and it's approaching the time where Curt usually sees Pietro on the curb by himself near Jerri's and then hauls him up and takes him back home, shoves him under every blanket they can spare until he stops shaking. The kids like him - that's the usual excuse he tries to feed Charlie when she's sitting up staring at the closed bedroom door like she's going to burn a hole through it. It's an easier explanation than trying to get across to her how worried he gets and how long he's known Pietro and what that actually means for them.

The kids don't throw as many tantrums when Pietro's around. Letting him crash is the least they can do.

But, still. With the rain. The stays are unpredictable. He knows Pietro. He has to keep telling himself that.

That's why the first few times Curt passes Jerri's after work and notices that the alley's empty, he doesn't let it bother him. But then it keeps happening. Pietro never shows up.

And of course, even that's not that big of a deal. He's got loads of places to crash; loads of people opening their doors after just one sad look. Curt really shouldn't be worrying about him, because Charlie's right; he's only hurting himself. It's Pietro's choice to live like this. He's the one upsetting them all and uprooting them every few months. They don't owe him anything just because the kids like him. He's probably a bad influence, anyways.

Well, not probably. He is a bad influence. It's a recurring argument, usually held out in the alley beside the house so the neighbours don't hear.

Still, Curt checks with Flick and CJ, who say they haven't seen him since he last ducked out, right around after he left Curt's. Flick tries to get him to hold a bug. Curt tells him he's got something in the oven he needs to get back to. CJ catches him on the bottom step as he leaves to say that there's no openings at the fishery, but he can keep asking around.

It pulls a little, having to go through his friends like that. He tells CJ not to worry about it - he's got something else lined up.

He goes to Kyle's to check under his couch and ends up getting roped into nursing a warm beer and a whole carton of spur-of-the-moment cigarettes with him for a few hours, reminiscing like they're both fifty years old. Then Curt has to leave, because once Kyle gets his six-string out he becomes an even worse influence than Pietro. Curt's got a whole high school's worth of fuzzy booze-soaked memories with the guy to prove it.

He takes the long way around the pier to get the smell of Kyle and nicotine off him, even stops by Julian's to ask if they've seen Pietro and instead receives the equivalent of a magic eight ball answer. Outlook not so good. He checks the local haunts. Under the dock. That one dive bar no one likes. He even swings by Jerri's again in case he just didn't notice Pietro passed out behind the dumpster the first time.

He leaves the backdoor unlocked until Charlie gets up to check on the twins and screams when she sees a raccoon stuck in the kitchen garbage.

He thinks she knows what he's doing, even if she doesn't outright say it.

It hurts to still love her sometimes. Curt looks at her and feels a nostalgia that he's too young for.

When he's supposed to go out with the twins for bonding time, which is really just Charlie's alone time, he straps them into the stroller and pushes them along the boardwalk, just in case.

He walks the beach at night, just in case.

Eventually, he gets in hot water with both of his bosses for missing shifts, but he keeps it quiet so Charlie doesn't find out.

He doesn't need that. They don't need that.

There's something uncomfortable that's settled in him now. He knows something is wrong. Not just the normal sort of wrongness that Pietro attracts, but something else.

He keeps bracing himself for a little thumb sized print-out in the paper about a body washing ashore.

He ends up making a handful of missing posters with a simple pencil sketch. It's not his best because it's from memory, and he's sure he's taken some artist liberties, but it looks enough like Pietro that someone will hopefully recognize him. Charlie never sees what he's working on, but she does catch the set of graphite sticks that he has out on the table, and that's enough to bring back the little crease between her eyebrows.

It's a tricky subject, especially now, with how tight things are. Growing up, after the partying but before the kids, Curt had wanted to be an artist. He almost was one, content to paint Kyle's new drum kit and make portrait after portrait of Charlie just because he could. The only problem was art is nearly synonymous with zero-income.

Suddenly there was a baby on the way. Suddenly there were two babies. Their families cut them off when the twins were born and that was the end of it. Painting was only a hobby that would one day end up with him down on the beach selling coloured shells for pennies, his children dressed in rags, his wife emaciated and miserable.

No one really told him that she'd end up being miserable either way.

Kody and Blue are in charge of their own little stack of flyers. They feature a stick clown drawn in crayon, sporting a big blue smile with big purple tears. Curt makes sure to compliment them on their creative use of colour and takes them out to tape to the streetlight poles.