Young Writers Society

The old detective took another muffin from the basket, cutting it in half with his pen knife and placing a part in front of each of them.  Harry looked down at the baked good with some amount of regret for how her sickness would be coming later.  It was delicious, but she probably wouldn’t manage to eat anything for the rest of the day.

“Your husband is going to make me fat, Jud.”

“Amarea tried to do the same thing on Nerot and she was quite disappointed in your lack of weight gain.”

“Princesses aren’t supposed to have any extra bits around them, my thighs were scandalous enough.”

Jud refilled their cups of coffee, sighing as the last drops fell out of the bottom of the urn.

“But you forget, Ehri, that you were a king.  It does not matter how a king looks as long as he rules his people in the right way.”

A king.

That time was a laugh.

Harry had not been called a king for over three hundred years and it was certainly something that Will did not know.  There was a need to tell her of many things of the past, but Harry’s past was very complicated.How was she supposed to explain being a child of war?  Or the king of a lost kingdom?  Or being wedded for a century to a woman she was with through the prophecy of a god?

“Jud keep your voice down when you toss around that word.  No one knows that about me, except for you.”

“Will knows nothing of your past and yet you have so much to share with her.  You know that all of these magazines say that healthy relationships depend upon communication between partners.”

“No shit, Jud.  But bull shit on you,” Harry paused to point a finger at Jud before continuing, “for trying to give me advice on a healthy relationship.”

Jud passed a hand away at her gesture and remark, taking the coffee pot from the table and began preparing for a new pot.  The need for coffee to keep the day alive was an obvious point as each group sat in their silence.  There was little chatter in the thoughts of Ria and Will, who had long since moved from the region of the kitchen up to the master bedroom.

A wise choice.

“Ehri, you know as well as I do that your pursuits of love have had rather bad endings.  You lost Cara to the war, twice.  You have done horizontal dances with every standard of beauty floozy in every bar across the galaxy.  And you thought that Ita Fiacre, daughter of Zinnia’s most prolific criminal, would be a suitable mate.”

He brought the refilled pot back, sitting it between them and drinking the last remnants of the current cup before continuing.

“Do not judge me for questioning your judgement.”

“I wasn’t planning on marrying Ita.  She was just a cover story and any sign of romance I held for her, was misattributed.”

“My friend, you may not have planned on marrying her but Ita wanted to marry you.  And now you have her as one of your best friends while her vision of unrequited love still stands.”

Ita was nothing more than a mistake and a bad judge of character.  It was just supposed to be a short assignment on Zinnia, within the corrupt little city of Delta, talking to a few drug dealers.  And when the chance of a connection with the boss’s daughter, any good agent would have stepped in.  They certainly would have gone along with the flirtations and the meetings.  And of course, the rolling in the sheets.

It had all been a necessary part of the plan to bring the organization down.

“Robe is my best friend.  Ita just happens to show up in my living room a lot.”

“And your kitchen.  And your squad room.  And downstairs chatting to the junior detectives.”

Jud stretched out the ‘s’ on ‘detectives’ while lighting another cigarette.

“Jud, how do you smoke those so quickly?”

A cough came from the other side of the table followed by, “I’m very stressed old bastard who just found out he’s going to be a father.”

Connecting the holy union of Jud and Ria to the thought of two careless teenagers making love in the backseat of a sedan…

It was yet another thing Harry wished she could delete from her mind but wouldn’t have the ability to do so.  She could forget recipes or the name of that solider in that bar on that whatever battlefield.  But things like Will’s favorite book and visualizations of embarrassing conversations, would always suffer a different fate.

“You are an old bastard.”

“And here I thought you were going to dispute me on the point.”

Harry looked down to the table to see her untouched muffin.  The gently laid white sparkling sugar could only make her think of the sidewalk treatments being out at that very moment.  Snow had been wreaking havoc in some portions of the Delta city since the season had begun four months prior and would stretch for six more months.  One aspect of adapting the Federation calendar, perfectly mastered for Earth and its close siblings, was the lack of seasonal alignment.  Depending on the times someone found themselves in, they might have winter for three years, as it had been done on Nerot.

“Jud?”

He had (thankfully) removed the cigarette from his mouth before eating the remnants of their third combined muffin.  At her pinging question of his name, Harry watched as the wrapper nearly went down the old alien’s throat.

“Yeah?”

“Do you ever regret working for the Federation?  Like sure it’s great health insurance benefits and a kinky calendar, but sometimes I wonder if maybe my life wouldn’t have been this way.”

“It’s kind of late to be taking a double thought at enlisting, darling.  I am correct in saying you enlisted, yes?”

A quick nod was all Harry could manage while flashing back to being a careless young soldier.  The Federation campaigns from her youngest days were focused on the word “escape”, offering people in the outer zones a chance at a life.  Normally they would have directed this at a farmer or an apprentice rather than a seventeen-year-old mercenary.

“I enlisted because I was born a solider, but I could not serve in my own army.  My mother made sure that I could never come back unless I wanted to serve on the throne.”

“Ehri, you seem to forget the fact that is not your mother said.  From my understanding of the time when you were a child, she was trying to stop one of your prophecies from happening.”

“…one of your prophecies…”

It was an outrageous fact for a person to have more than one prophecy about their future.  That a hero of a kingdom would have endless missions to fulfill and eternal battles with the darkest power.  Those were the stories that belonged in a beaten, leather bound book that was brought out to excite children.  Nerot had many heroes of great strength, many children of war like herself, all who served the throne in their proper ways.  All who had died upon their thousandth or ten thousandth quest for the king.

All who were willing to keep fighting as scrolls and crystal balls were handed down.

“She was willing to exile me, Jud.  Rather than let her heir have a chance at making the kingdom better, my mother simply locked me away at the ends of the time.  Or she could have at least just let me run away.”

Jud barely shifted in the chair across from her, slight movements only to be marked down as discomfort.  As much as they both wanted to get away from Nerot, from the wars they had suffered for the sake of “justice”, Harry could read the connections running across his mind.  Jud was of the school of thought that making peace with the past was completely possible, that old memories could be reworked as motivation for the future.

Harry could agree that the past motivated her, but they had very different views of what to do with that motivation.

“Oh, get out of my head, child.”

“You’re getting some cobwebs in your gears, Jud.  Might want to clear them out with some good exercise of the mind, rather than just using your hips all of the time.”

He took another sip of coffee while grumbling, “Ehri, why would I ever trust you with such a detail?”

“Because you need advice from your oldest friend that happens to double as comedic relief.”

The laugh that followed her statement proved the assumption to be correct.  It was true that she could give no advice to Jud in the field when it came to dealing with the creation of life.  And there was advice that she chose to give to him, it would be in the best interest of the young parents to avoid.

“I can also read minds and I can see all of the plans you are formulating with the purpose of scaring Ria.”  Jud paused while picking up the cigarette he had left lying in the ash tray, studying it for a moment and then grinding it into the dish.

“Ehri, you are not my oldest friend.”

“I do come pretty close considering how many of your ‘old friends’ are dead.  That is usually what happens when you hit your first millennia of living.”

“You sound pretty judgmental for someone already building on their five hundred chip.  Do you want to work the case or not?”