AU WARNING
The Things They Cling To
A series of one-shots starring characters of Hey Arnold! and the things they care about the most. AU & OOC Warnings.
Disclaimer: I don't own Hey Arnold!
Them.
He wiped his hands on his jeans until he was sure they were dry; the last thing he wanted them to get in the mail was his envelope with sweaty handprints all over it.
He drew in a deep breath and willed his hands to stop shaking.
It seemed like the universe had thrown everything in its power to keep him from the post office, but he was here now, in front of the outgoing mailbox and holding the one thing that would bring him closer to what he wanted.
"Grandpa, Grandma, you have to see this! I found a map!"
He and his grandparents hadn't gotten much sleep that night. He couldn't have slept even if he had wanted to; he'd been so scared that if he had closed his eyes, the journal and the map—everything about that day would have just been his imagination running away from him again.
They, Grandpa and Grandma, had placed the map on their coffee table. They ordered more Chinese. They talked and cried and tried to be calm.
"Well, Shortman, it seems like fate has placed quite a gem in our laps, huh?" Grandpa chewed solemnly on his last dumpling, forcing the chewy dough and pork down this throat. "There are a lot of things that can happen now that you've found this and some of those things we do or don't find out, we won't like…but what do you want to do?"
"I want to find them, Grandpa."
"Alright, Arnold. Then that's what we'll do."
He wrote so many letters to so many organizations after that, failing and starting again and again from stage one. The Red Cross, the airbase where his parents had gotten their plane, the manufacturer of that plane, the government of The Republic of San Lorenzo, the chief of this or that remote village they may have passed their travels. He felt like the whole of Central America knew his story.
Most always sent letters with their regret about not being able to help him and advice that was almost immediately unhelpful. And sometimes he got nothing back at all.
He tried not to let it take over his life too much. He tried not to be so openly upset every time those simple, black-and-white, one page letters reached his home. It was for his grandparents' sake. They didn't deserve to have his worries on top of their own. He began reminding himself when something fell apart that he had only been doing this for a little while, a month, a year.
He continued to play baseball in Gerald Field.
And go crazy over this jazz song or that house record.
Skateboard and fly model airplanes.
Like like girls and then stop for whatever the reason was.
Find himself getting in and out crazy situations.
And dream wild dreams where things went his way.
"Do you think I'm crazy, Gerald?" He picked up another rock and tossed it in the river. Curve ball.
"About what?" His best friend did the same, his toss splashing a little further from where his friend's had dropped.
"Trying so hard to find them. I mean, Grandpa said that we might not find anything at first, but…I'm twelve now. Maybe there isn't anything else to know. It happened so—"
"Nah." Gerald turned to his friend. "Ya not crazy. Every time anybody sees you, talks about you, it's always about something good you did for them. 'He did this for me, he did that for me.' You're always doing good stuff for people without even being asked. Ya like…Papa Teresa. Why shouldn't you get what you want?
"I say, keep trying, man. You'll find them." Gerald threw another rock and they watched it skip and land with a definite, resolute thunk.
He grinned. "Thanks, Gerald."
"You're a bold kid, man. A bold kid."
That had been his doubt.
Or maybe that had been his opening, because that night, he'd gone on the computer and for some reason typed "Green-Eyed People." A few clicks on his Dell to here and there, and he stumbled on this one website that had nothing special about it except a plain backdrop and plain font and lo ng lists of links.
With blurry eyes and his mind worlds away from an Honors Biology paper he hadn't started and was due the next morning, he clicked on the first one that caught his eye.
And found this.
"Green Eyes, Babbling Tongues: A Short Study of Native Speech in San Lorenzo
by Eduardo del Verde Rosa"
This couldn't have been the same "Eduardo" that he had read again and again in his dad's journal.
Could it?
His eyes skimmed bthe whole thing, seeing "Green Eyes" and "my colleagues." And at the end of those twenty-five pages, in black-and-white, was a picture of all of them together. Eduardo, his mom, his dad, laughing and having the time of their lives. From the look of it, it had to be before he had been born.
He screamed.
He called his grandpa and grandma upstairs to see what he'd found.
He smiled when they screamed.
He wasn't crazy.
He'd found a piece of the puzzle.
He struggled trying to write that essay for class and went to bed with his laptop on—just to test whether the page would still be there when he woke up in the morning.
It was.
He spent another week looking for current information on "Eduardo del Verde Rosa" but had found that the whereabouts of his father's best friend was another dead end. The essay he had found had been written when he was three, after his parents had disappeared; there wasn't anything else that Eduardo had written since then, and the sites he found with information about him never mentioned anything current.
He went back to that page to read that essay again over and over. And on the fifth time, he finally saw something that he had missed before in the copyright:
"The Smith Institution of Anthropology"
His fingers opened another window and typed in those words and clicked on the first thing that came up.
And there it was, this glossy looking webpage with the pictures of exotic places and villages and people poring over flowers and laboratory equipment and links to all the places they had been.
"San Lorenzo."
"The jungle. The past. A new history. The Smith Institute has been in San Lorenzo since the 1970s, exploring the history of the peoples of Central America. Dedicating time and our love for the mysteries of the Mayan and Green-Eyes people, the institute awards grants to individuals exploring the landmarks the past has left behind…"
There wasn't any screaming this time.
Just seconds, hours, days, months dedicated to writing the most important letter of his life.
He didn't know what that moment was.
But he knew what it was gonna be.
He was almost fourteen now.
He looked at the envelope, his handwriting written painfully neat on the envelope. He thought about the letter inside, detailing to anybody who looked inside his life, his story.
And for a moment, he thought about them.
What they were like now.
What they were doing.
Where they were.
Who they were with, if they were with anybody.
Their adventures.
The things they said to each other every day.
What they'd tell him when he saw them.
What he'd tell them.
He opened the slot for outgoing mail and closed his eyes.
"Please let this work. Please."
He placed the envelope inside and walked out.
This could only be the beginning—the real beginning.
A/N: And there you go. It took me a lot of thought and this entire afternoon to write this. Please note the AU WARNING at the beginning; I know that this completely goes against the cannon—don't flame me. Really. I don't flame nor do I respond to flames in kind.
I don't have a lot of explanation for this except I couldn't write something with a theme I chose without mentioning Arnold and his parents nor could I just give him just one tiny oneshot—Arnold's the main character and deserves more. I've always wanted there to be a filler/backdrop for what happened after The Journal and what was going to happen (The Jungle Movie).
Plus, I wanted an explanation for a ton of things: What did Grandma and Grandpa say when they saw the map? Why didn't they look for Eduardo to get answers first? Where is Eduardo, anyway? How did Arnold get the money to send himself and his entire class to another country? You know, the things you think about when it comes to these things…
R&R—don't flame.
