brody hedges. professional alcoholic. (hedged) wrote in cosmologies, @ 2011-05-18 20:01:00 |
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Entry tags: | brody hedges, hope hedges |
Who: Hope and Brody
What: Hope finds information.
When: Today! May 18.
Where: Hope's flat.
Status: Complete. PGish? Maybe swearing.
There was always something comforting about being in Hope’s house. Brody didn’t know if it was because he was with family or it was Hope herself but he was always grateful for it. He had helped himself inside after she said that she had something to tell him. He called hello before going straight to her fridge and grabbing a beer and sitting down on her couch. He knew she didn’t really mind, it’s something he always did. Well something he’d done after the murders, before when they were alive, things hadn’t been like this, he’d always been close to Hope but their lives didn’t revolve around the losses.
He set the bottle down and looked at his sister, not really suspecting that whatever she had to tell him was that important. It could be anything from Gary ate the neighbor’s cat to they creepy old man who lives upstairs is a pedophile who shaved off his face and had a new one attached. Anything was possible.
“What’s up?” Brody asked.
The snowstorm and the riots had meant that Hope had been stuck inside for long periods of time alone, lately. That meant she’d got a lot of work done in the past few days. She hadn’t received many new cases either, which meant that she’d had plenty of time to work with her own pet project. She had promised Brody that she would find out who had killed his family. But with the trail grown so cold, Hope honestly didn’t have much hope. But yesterday as she did her daily check of the new arrests and warrants alerts in the NWCPDsphere, Hope had found a familiar name. With some searching, some drawing back old evidence from cases she barely remembered, Hope thought, perhaps, she had a lead on their case. Or at least, an enemy.An enemy was a lead waiting to happen.
So she had called her brother over, and now wished vaguely she’d thought to stock something stronger than beer in the refrigerator. Hope smiled at her little brother, picking up a reluctant Gary the Beagle for moral support during all this. “Hi.” She said, keeping it steady for now. “So I don’t want you to get too excited about this. It isn’t that concrete, and I’m not even sure it’s real...but do you remember that money laundering case, years ago? It was a couple, with a son. Who’s been in and out of jail on petty shit and has a blog declaring his hate for all Hedges in very colorful language...it could be a start.”
That wasn’t what Brody had been expecting and his heart skipped a beat in his chest. He remembered the case, it had happened fairly early but not early enough for him to still take death threats and vulgar language towards the police very seriously. The force had looked into it and Brody had been wary at first, but then nothing had happened and he’d forgotten about it entirely. He had been far busier in those days anyway, and it had been easy for him to forget all the bad things in the world, but now that he was reminded the familiar itch for something stronger or to hit something came back. He took another drink of his beer and tried to keep calm.
“I remember,” Brody said, after putting his beer back down. “Nothing happened right after, I’d forgotten, because people were always threatening to kill cops left and right, still are.” Nobody in NWC liked cops, cops made life harder than usual on the large amount criminal population of the city.
Gary had started barking, so Hope had to let him go. Suddenly she had nothing left to hold as a security measure, so she was left staring at her feet and trying to ignore the fact that her brother was drinking his beer in a much less than casual manner. She looked up at him, though, when he told her that he remembered. Hope smiled. It wasn’t a happy smile, necessarily. But she was right. She’d been correct. Not that she wanted to be. “Great.” She breathed softly, shrugging off the gravity of what this could mean in favour of pursuing the lead.
“Can you tell me what he said? What you remember? It could be important. Not that I’d be able to quote you on it from then obviously...did you file this as a report?I It’d be in archives...”
She already had her holoputersphere (that’s a Future Computer) up and was all ready to start hacking into the police archive database, but she refrained for a moment to look over at him. “Do you want me to look into this?”
Brody ran his hands through his hair and sipped his beer again. Did he want her to look into it? That meant - well it meant a lot of things, things that Brody deep down wasn’t sure that he was ready to face whatever consequences there were. He sipped his beer. He knew what he had to do as much as that meant facing whatever it was.
“It was just a load of shit, you know,” Brody said. “You know, you ruined my life, I’m going to make you pay.” Brody looked into his beer bottle and took a deep breath. “It’s - cops hear that shit all the time, I didn’t think it was really anything.” He was an idiot, he should have been more careful, but there was no way to know and it had happened years later, but still the guilt started to creep in. It was his fault.
Brody swallowed hard. “I think you should look into it.”
Hope put down the computer for a moment in favor of looking at her brother with some concern. She was trying hard to do this the right way, to get results without getting his hopes up too high so there was no way they’d be crushed if this didn’t turn out for the best. She had no way of knowing what the result of all this would be, and that scared her. Brody had been fragile since the disasters of a few years ago. Some days, she could swear he was getting better. Others, she wasn’t sure. But she needed to keep track of it either way. She nodded a little.
“Okay. I’ll continue.” Hope paused, staring him down to make sure he was actually all right with this. She caught the glimmer of guilt as though through some sibling-wrought sixth sense. “But this isn’t your fault, whatever happens. Do you understand me? We did the right thing back then and it is not us.” She shrugged. “And you could be right. This could be just nothing, just a routine psycho. But it’s a lead, so...that helps.” It was better than nothing, which is what they’d been working with for years now.
Brody had to remind himself that no matter whatever personal anguish he went through, it would be worth it, to know why they’d died, to perhaps even bring the people who had done this to justice. He knew that as much as he wanted, this wouldn’t bring them back, nothing could bring them back, but maybe - maybe it would be close. Maybe this was it, this was the moment. Of course, he was scared of what they could find, the guilt of what had happened was already trying to take it’s toll on him, no matter what Hope said or what he told himself. He had always done the right thing when he was a cop, but the idea that was what had caused his wife and child to murdered made him what to throw up.
“I know,” he told Hope. “We had the law behind us, I know.” He took a sip of his beer and wished again that it was something stronger, but tonight when he was alone he would get so drunk that he passed out. So drunk that he would stop thinking, but he would hold it together for Hope. Maybe he’d find somoene to take home, anything that was a moment’s escape. “I know this could be nothing and I know it could be everything, but just in case it’s something, we have to do it. We have to see if that’s it.”
Hope nodded rather emphatically and sat closer to her brother, just in case he needed her to. “Exactly. We were in the right. And there was no way we could have known...I mean if this was true..” Hope’s voice broke off and she ended up staring at her hands, trying very hard not to remember the last time she held her niece or the fact that once upon a time, she’d had two brothers. She shook herself out of it, smiled at Brody to reassure him that everything was under control. It was fine, as long as she was in charge of it. And she would be. She was.
“Don’t even worry about it. I’ll take care of it and you just try not to think about it, ok? Are you going to be okay?” Hope hated that she had to ask that now, but she did. She didn’t want to leave him alone tonight if she was at any more afraid than usual of what he’d do to himself when she left him.
Brody reached over and squeezed Hope’s hand. “I’ll be fine,” he told her. He really really wanted her to be comfortable with doing this, even though finding out scared him. It scared him more than he wanted to admit because it meant - well it meant knowing. He was afraid of knowing exactly how it had happened, knowing how someone could kill a child and her mother in broad daylight. He sipped his beer and looked Hope in the eyes and gave her a sad smile. “I won’t think about it too much.” That was a lie, but he couldn’t tell her how he’d obsess about it, she probably already knew that he would. Hope knew him better than anyone else.
Hope didn’t let go of her brother’s hand for a moment, as though that could keep him safe. She thought now that perhaps she should have thought about telling him before this. Maybe it would have been better for him not to know. But she had to tell him. She couldn’t have gone on without his permission. She could tell that he’d think about it, despite his denial. But she just shrugged instead of protesting it. “You better not. Or I’m stopping.” She smiled at him just as sadly, knowing of course that she’d do no such thing.Her voice grew a bit softer, but it was just as filled with conviction as it had always been. “I’ll find this person. I swear. Okay?”
“I know you will,” Brody said. No matter what happened, he had faith in Hope, it would turn out the right way. Brody wasn’t sure what he’d do when they knew for certain, he didn’t know if he would be the type to go insane with anger or just had the justice system lock him up, he hoped it was the latter but the former was possible. “It’ll wind up just how it should wind up, it’ll be okay.” He smiled at her and squeezed her hand again. Hope would take care of him, she always did, ever since they were little.