I Owe You A Love Song
3 – The Queen
"Mother, there's someone I'd like you to meet."
Queen Jordan of the Grid doesn't look up from her latest sketch of the main stage from which her son will speak to the crowd for the country's one thousandth birthday. "A man or a woman, Junior?"
"Don't call me that; I'm not six. And this has nothing to do with me."
"Good. It was difficult enough already negotiating for Lady Radia's hand in marriage without half the lords revolting. I don't want you sabotaging it and the peace with Arjia with your dalliances-"
"I told you, it has nothing to do with-okay, fine. Sam?"
She starts and the marker skips across the page. Sam? Just a coincidence, right? Over two decades and she still jumps whenever she comes across that name. Jordan doesn't look up until she hears another pair of feet pad into the spacious, Spartan room, and then looks up.
The marker makes a thick, erratic line as it slides down the paper and falls to the floor.
She knows that face. It's not just what she sees in the mirror every day but the shape of his jaw, his nose, the inquisitive curiosity that's always there no matter what's presented to him. It's been years – twenty-seven, her mind supplies – and she can see the Kevin Flynn in the young man standing in front of her as bright as day.
There's none of the warmth and kindness in the blue eyes, though. The young man – Sam, her letter to Kevin said his name was Sam - looks at her blankly, like she's a statue to admire from a distance, and the joy in her heart wilts, fades away.
Of course he doesn't know. She told Kevin to say nothing about her.
"You know who he is," Ed says. "Why didn't you say anything?"
"Scandals are unbecoming of the ruling family of the Grid," she says calmly. She watches Sam – her son, her other son, her lost son – fidget and look around as she adds, "Who told you?"
"That old fart-"
"Edward Junior."
He rolls his eyes. "Sorry. I asked Dumont about the centennial traditions like you told me to and he said something about reciting family trees from memory. The book he gave me had a footnote. An engineer named Kevin Flynn."
Both she and Sam look sharply at Ed, who seems pleased with their reaction. "He was one of the top engineers for the Arena. Officially he was fired for trying to stop Father from attacking Arjia by sabotaging the Training Grid but the footnote was in a genealogy records book. So I asked. Nicely."
He walks up to her desk and leans on it so that they're eye to eye. "I hope you're not hiding any other siblings, are you? The birthday is but a few weeks away and everyone alive needs to be there, according to Dumont."
She breaks eye contact to look around him at Sam, who's baffled by the entire exchange, if not the situation. She wonders what's going through his head; raised as a commoner for twenty-seven years only to find out his mother is the queen has to be quite a shock.
"Mother, I haven't got all day."
Jordan looks at Ed sharply. "There's nobody else. Sam's your only brother."
"Only sibling. Father always said he wanted a daughter. Probably why he's so taken by Radia."
Ed smiles at her as he steps back and turns to Sam. "Why don't I leave you two alone? You have twenty-seven years to catch up on and I have a country to run."
She watches her older son leave the room and wonders again exactly when he became a total stranger.
"They didn't even bring my dog along," is the first thing Sam blurts out as Queen Jordan refocuses on him and he mentally kicks himself.
What else is he supposed to say? All these years he thought his mother died in an accident when he was two. And now, now he learns that she's the queen and his father was once an engineer for the court. Well, at least it explained why Kevin was never a good energy farmer.
She smiles softly at him and Sam realizes why the prince looked so familiar. What he sees everyday in front of a mirror he can see in her face, and in Prince Edward's, too.
"I can arrange for your dog to be brought here," she says as she leans down to pick up the marker she'd been holding when he walked in.
Sam frowns. "I'm not going to stay here."
"I'm afraid you have no choice," she says. "You are my son, after all. I am the one with the royal blood, which makes you a prince of the Grid."
There is nothing about that statement that feels right. Sam takes a shaky breath, looks around for a seat. The queen presses on something – a circuit, there are circuits on the floor – with her foot and a chair unfolds itself and rises up from the cluster of circuits to his right.
"You should sit," she says. "I'm sure this is…overwhelming."
"You think?" Sam mutters as he touches the chair. It's there, cushioned and material under his hand. He carefully eases himself down. "After fifteen years you'd think this'll get easier."
"Fifteen?"
He suddenly wonders if she knows what happened to his father. Then again, she's Queen Jordan; why would she care if a bunch of unassuming people were killed by pirates? Even if she loved one of them long enough to have a son…and then leave them?
"Dad's dead," Sam says, slouches down, crosses his arms, and watches her carefully for a reaction.
The visible shock in her face doesn't take away from the thought that immediately follows after.
And so's Tron.
