Honestly I have no idea where this came from. Maybe it was the consecutive watching of Meanwhile and Game of Tones in the same night coupled with way too much sad music...? Anyways, enjoy this random drabble! Sorry it turned out so depressing, and that his parents are a tiny bit OOC. I like to believe they really did love their son and they just never did a good job of showing it 3
Seventy-two hours after a person goes missing, if there has been no sign of them nor proof of their continued existence, they are presumed dead.
Mrs. Fry was never really one to comply with the law anyway, especially if it stood between her and her football game - or more importantly, between her and her children. Yes, she didn't like to show it, and she certainly didn't try, but Mrs. Fry loved her children as most mothers do: Unconditionally.
... She just had strange ways of showing it.
Anyway, when Phillip J. Fry was declared missing on January 1st 2000, she was of course worried- but not overly stressed. This wasn't the first time he'd wandered off, probably chasing a puppy or something equally ridiculous...
It was on January 14th, when a police officer contacted them by their crappy landline, about how they should start assuming that their son was dead... Mr. Fry had been the one to pick up the phone. When the bored, droning, detached voice said the words 'consider funeral arrangements' in a tone that clearly suggested he didn't actually care and he'd probably been tasked unwillingly with the job of manning the phones for exactly these kinds of tasks, the Fry family patriarch had had enough. He slammed down the plastic device on the receiver hard enough to crack it more than it already had been, and with that statement, he'd stormed away upstairs to read his newspaper in private... and though he never told his remaining child or his wife, he'd let just two tears loose for his missing son.
Mrs. Fry had had enough as well.
"I'm going out to look for my son," was all the answer she gave Yancy when she grabbed her jacket, her purse, and the keys to their stuttery barely-functioning stationwagon, and stormed out. "I'll be back for the four o'clock game."
She drove around New York and the Bronx for hours.
For the first time in decades, Mrs. Fry missed a game. As the clock struck five fifty, time found her curled in the driver's seat of their stationwagon, crying.
Four days later, they had a small, private funeral for Phillip J. Fry.
Years passed.
Yancy got a job, a wife, a son... Mrs. Fry could be happy, now that she had grandchildren to partially fill that gaping hole in her heart left by Fry's absence.
(She often dreamed of Phillip, and would always remember a certain dream on the night of March sixteenth, 2001, in which Phillip had done something extremely rare- something he hadn't done hardly at all in life. He'd apologized, cried, and given her an honest-to-God hug. She never forgot that embrace, and liked to think it was the ghost of her son reaching through to comfort her, even though she and Mr. Fry had never been one for fairytales or ghost stories.)
She lived to be old, ninety-six to be precise, and not one day went by when she didn't think of her son lost to time. They'd never had the money to hire someone to look for him, so when Yancy's son- Phillip's namesake, she'd thanked him through her tears for that- hit success just as she was turning eighty-one, they'd hired an investigator.
Nothing was ever found, though the man had suggested they check Fry's last delivery.
(It was a cryogenics laboratory, and the one time Yancy and Mr. Fry had gone there to look, they'd found nothing but a crinkled note years old with the words 'I.C. Wiener' on it and the address of the building. They hadn't looked in the glass tubes, since there were still restrictions from the scientists who ran the building, and they'd been too frosted over to see through clearly without wiping off some of the condensation.)
Nevertheless, the mystery of her son aside, Mrs. Fry went to her death a relatively happy woman. Mr. Fry had gone a year or two before her, and as she lay dying on her bedside, showed one more rare display of love in asking for Yancy to play instead of a currently running game the audio of the New Year's game she'd been listening to on the night Phillip disappeared. She went away peacefully in her sleep, a single tear falling down her cheek just as the dim voice in the background of the game crackled, 'Two, one... Happy New Year's!'
The irony was not lost on her surviving son when she passed away on December thirty-first, 2043, at precisely 9:58pm, the last time she'd laid eyes on Phillip J. Fry fourty-three years before.
Centuries passed, history forgot the original Phillip J. Fry.
Until that fateful day: January 1st, 3000.
Fry took his first breath in a long millennia, and his greatest adventure began.
(Of course, what he didn't know when he visited the sewers and the old ruins of New York City, he walked right on by the cemetery where his mother was buried without a passing glance. He never thought much of it, really, which was entirely understandable but still impossibly sad.
A few years later he visited her, on a night when he was particularly hammered. He sloshed a bit of beer out of his fourteenth bottle, dropped a wilted pair of daffodils on the weathered stone that indecipherably read bits and pieces of her name, and cried for twenty minutes. Then Bender found him and without sparing a second of thought for who his friend was kneeling over, whisked him away for another round in a mutant bar in another part of the sewers. When he awoke in the late afternoon of the next day, he didn't remember a thing about where he'd been, and Bender had thought so little of it he never said a word.
And although Mr. and Mrs. Fry had never been ones to believe in ghosts stories, if Fry had remained in the cemetery - or spared a glance over his shoulder - he might have seen a brief flickering apparition of his parents standing hand in hand where he'd left his two flowers, smiling widely at his back and waving him goodbye.
They could never be prouder of the son they'd lost to time.)
The End