Questions, hints, and grief... (UDC 4)

Gaze

As she's gotten older, Gadget has often wondered many things about her friend who seems to have two names, "Robocop" and "Murphy", and a soft spot for her best friend Jimmy Murphy, though no one ever actually says anything about it. It's not until she's at Jimmy's house and sees the pictures of a very familiar face gazing up at her from photographs... that something clicks.

Picking up the framed photo, she stares at it. At the man with dark hair in a police uniform holding a baby with Jimmy's mom, with eyes she knows though she has never met him before.

Wink

Jimmy watches as she picks up the photograph of his father, his mother, and himself as a baby and studies it intently, and wonders why she's so interested in it. It's just his family in that photo. One he's looked at often enough to have it memorized. What he wouldn't give, sometimes, to have his family be that again. Whole. Happy. Together. "Gadget?"

She jumps a little, startled, and turns to him. "This is of you, right?"

He nodded. "Why?"

"I don't have any like this."

Oh. So that was what drew her to it...

Distance

As she puts the photo back where she found it, Gadget feels like wincing for not saying what was on her mind. She knows those eyes, that face under the helmet is the same. The same and yet... distant. Changed.

Glancing at the photo one more time, she knows she made the right choice in keeping silent. It's not hers to tell, though it would probably help them to know. "Where is he?" The words are out before she even knows she's said them.

Did it sound as stupid to him as it felt to ask?

Cold as Ice

The question draws him up short and he stares at her. "What?" Usually, no one ever asked that question.

She motions to the photo. "Him."

It is a question he is unprepared to answer as his mother beckons them gently into the kitchen. How can he answer in just the right way? What had made her ask? The questions tumble through his mind like a landslide as he sits down at the kitchen table. Unable to speak, he simply looks back at her from across a table.

Eternal Flame

Gadget looked from Jimmy to his mother and back again, taking in the shocked silence that had settled around them. She looked away. "I shouldn't have asked."

"No," Jimmy's mother said slowly. "I'm glad you did, Gadget."

Gadget blinked and looked at the woman who was smiling warmly at her, though her eyes were shimmering with unshed tears. "I don't understand."

"It was six years ago today that Alex died. On duty." She reached over and held her son's hand, then took hold of Gadget's, held it firmly. "And it's good to remember the bad with the good."