(Pasta)
Joseph Dredd came home to the apartment after another shift overworked, tired, and in a generally foul mood. He opened the door and was instantly hit with the smell of... something. It wasn't pre-fab food from one of the processors like they usually had at the end of a regular day, it was an actual home cooked meal. Dredd could smell the spices in the air and hear the simmer of pots on the stove.
"Cassandra! What's going on?" Dredd shouted into the apartment.
Cassandra Anderson poked her head out of the kitchen holding a plastic spoon with a rag over her shoulder and red sauce smeared over one cheek. She waved to Dredd and ducked back into the kitchen to put down her utensils. She popped back out a minute later sans cheek sauce. The bandages around her midsection and right leg were coming loose and Dredd gestured for her to sit down on the couch so he could re-wrap them. Anderson shook her head and started stripping Dredd of his work uniform before they sat down on the couch. She took particular delight in taking off his helmet, revealing the infamous scowl.
"Are you cooking something? It smells... good." Dredd grumbled out as he grabs Andersons leg and props it up in his lap so he can re-wrap the bandages.
Anderson smiles and moves her body down the couch into a comfortable position.
"I was meditating earlier and I stumbled upon a memory of when I was a little girl. My mother used to cook for us whenever we could find fresh ingredients at the markets near our apartment block. Her favorite meal to cook was an old world dish from one of the pre-war Euro-Megs. She called it Fettucini Alfredo. I pieced together what I could remember of the recipe and added a few side dishes of my own. I figured we could eat something real for once and being on orders not to do anything too physical there was nothing else to occupy my mind."
Nothing physical hmm? That's a shame...
Dredd got done with the leg bandages and pulled Anderson up on his lap to get to her waist. He drew her shirt up to her upper ribs and proceeded to unravel the bandages placed there. When they came off her skin revealed a motley assortment of healing injuries, bruises and a few scrapes and cuts dotted around them. Dredd grimaced at the memory of how she sustained those injuries. They had been chasing after some perps fleeing from the scene of a crime when a wheel on her Lawmaster was shot out by one of the perps and caused her to crash on the highway. She had hit the ground hard and on impact her ribs cracked and road rash claimed her leg. Dredd immediately called for backup to go after the perps and a medic to come for Anderson. The medic told them she'd been an inch away from sustaining a punctured lung. She spent a week in the med ward after that and was put on R&R for a month. The medic who discharged her half spoke at Dredd when she warned against any physical activities for the duration of her recovery. Dredd gave her his trademark scowl and took Anderson home.
The timer dinged by the time Dredd was done with the bandages and they both got up to head into the kitchen, Anderson in the lead. The food was placed into a large bowl for them to take from and the additional dish of spaghetti was rescued from being overcooked and the sauce placed in a small container to cool down. Everything was taken to the coffee table next to the couch and they both sat down to devour the meal. Silence reigned supreme as neither one of them talked due to the startling amount of pasta being eaten.
Dredd ate slowly, tasting each bite as it went in. Anderson thought he had probably never had a freshly home cooked meal. She couldn't imagine him cooking something like this for himself and he never mentioned any family so he most likely sustained himself on nutri-meals and sim-coffee. She shuddered at the thought, it was like eating wet cardboard, full of the nutrients the human body needed to survive but disgusting to taste and swallow. The coffee was, well, coffee. Cheap shit that came from the ground floor cafeteria in the Hall of Justice meant to keep one awake, so forget having any edible taste to it whatsoever.
Glancing over at Dredd Anderson studied his face. His eyes were closed every time a bite of pasta went in, as if he were trying to memorize the essence of it with merely his tongue. She silently snorted at him. Typical, he had to analyze every part of the food as it was being eaten. He couldn't just enjoy the meal her poor injured self had labored over. She smiled though, at least he was getting something real in his system this time. With that thought, she thought it was time to talk to Dredd about what she had been waiting to tell him all day. The medics had given her the green-light, and something else, at her appointment the day before. She would have told him then but he had been just as exhausted if not more so after that shift so she decided to wait until the next day. Clearing the rest of her plate Anderson gingerly got up off the couch and took the dishes into the kitchen to clean later.
She came back to the couch and slowly plopped herself on the cushion next to Dredd and took as deep a breath as her ribs would allow.
"Joe, I saw the medics yesterday and they told me-" Cassandra began before an alarm started blaring next to the two of them. She gave a huff of frustration, it was the alert sent out from the Hall of Justice whenever extra Judges were needed as backup nearby. They went off according to the location of the requesting Judge no matter if the backup was on or off duty. She knew Dredd would take the call, the Street Judges had been stretched thin as of late. The citizens of Mega-City One had been rioting more than usual, something about there being cycles of violence and this one had been brewing to a head for some time. Didn't mean she had to like when it interrupted their off time.
"Go, I'll be fine here."
Dredd nodded once, food lay forgotten on the coffee table, instantly turning from Joseph Dredd, the man he was no longer keeping hidden behind the walls of his mind, into the infamous Judge Dredd, epitome of the Law and its staunchest defender. Uniform back on, helmet at his side, infamous scowl at the ready, Dredd went back out onto the streets to do what he did best, kick ass and save lives.
I had the idea to start a little drabble/mini-series of Dredd and Anderson after posting my first Dredd fiction awhile back. This little chapter will be the first of a 5+1 with each chapter being one of the five and the +1 being the final chapter or an epilogue of sorts, tbd at the moment. I was going to have it all in one big chapter format with each drabble chapter being in the usual 5+1 format but if I did that then this fic would never be finished or take months longer than it should.