DISCLAIMER: I don't own Early Edition or any of its characters. I just like to torture them.
Autoress' Note: WOW! Here I was expecting to be flamed beyond belief and I'm
sitting in a pile of requests for MORE! You guys are all so nice!
THANK YOU! Sorry this took so long, tonsillitis kept me from the comp for
a while and then I plain forgot to post this last time I was here.
To the girl who didn't like my character Sora being with Gary because she wasn't on TV, sorry
but I have had too much positive feedback to change my mind. I do understand where you're
coming from, though.
Gary wandered down the street, looking for a man in his mid-sixties.
~A guy's gonna get run over by a bus. A bus. Now you would think more
than anything else, you could see or hear a *bus* coming at you. But nooo, I
gotta get out here in the October cold, miss *lunch* even, to save some
old guy who's apparently totally blind and deaf!~
It ticked him off a little, because he had a lunch date with his
girlfriend, Sora Marley. Now he would be about half-an-hour late, because a
bus driver he'd saved earlier was now about to run over somebody.
~There are some days I really consider just ripping up this stupid
paper and letting the chips fall where they may...~
Just then Gary spotted the guy and his anger melted into pure
adrenaline as he ran to pull the guy back from the street.
He grabbed the man by the arms and jerked him toward the sidewalk.
They both fell over, but fortunately landed out of the path of the barreling
bus.
"Hey, buddy, you saved my life! Thanks a million!"
"You're sure welcome, pal, but I have somewhere I need to be..." Gary stood,
helping the man to his feet. Under his breath he muttered, "...and God bless Lucius Snow for
saddling me with this and not some idiot who doesn't care."
The man's cowboy hat nearly hid his eyes, but not so much that Gary
didn't notice him blink. "Did you say Lucius Snow, young man? Did you know
Lucius Snow?"
Gary frowned. "No, not exactly...did *you*?"
"Yes. I was one of his closest...no...surely you aren't...but how else, it only makes
perfect sense...you're...you're..."
"I'm who, buddy?" Gary was getting impatient. It didn't dawn on him
what the man was implying.
"I see you have a Chicago Sun-Times. May I see the date?" the man asked.
"No! I mean, uh, go get your own paper!"
The man staggered a bit and leaned against the fence behind them. "So you're the one
Lucius chose. My, my. I've often wondered about you. You're the young G. H. Lucius chose. You
seem to be doin' a good job."
Gary listened carefully, and selected his words with caution. "Are we thinking of the
same thing here? My initials are G. H., and I was chosen by Lucius Snow...but can you tell me
what for?"
The man rolled his eyes. "You're the G. H. that gets the paper, aren't you?"
Sora looked at the clock again and then let her eyes return to the
door. A mere twenty seconds passed before Gary finally entered, followed by an older man in
John Wayne-ish garb.
"Gary! You're late...umm, who's you friend?"
"Well, Sora, this is...umm..."
"My name is Bernard Westerson. I know, it must seem a bit corny what
with the way I dress, but I was bred and born out west, so it fits, and
besides, there isn't much I can do about it, since I'd rather not take the time and expense to
change it."
Sora smiled. "Come on, you two, sit down."
Gary placed a hand on her shoulder and bent down lower to Sora.
"Sora, do you know who this is? No, of course not. *I* didn't. He...he...this guy knew Lucius
Snow!"
"What?" Sora gasped. "I think the three of us have to have a major Q&A session."
Gary and Bernard both slid into the booth, Gary next to Sora with
Bernard across from them for easier questioning. And so Gary could be
close to her. "Where would you like to start?" Bernard asked. "I know, what
with all Snow left for you to find, you must think he's an absolute
'Tomorrow's Paper' expert. But I'll tell you this: he wasn't. You know as much as he did. And he
also learned from the guy who came before him."
Gary leaned back in his chair, eyes gaping at this treasure trove he had been so angry
with for no reason. "So he didn't know where it came from?"
"Nope."
"But it did come with the Cat?" Gary asked.
"The little marmalade kitty?" Bernard laughed. "That cat was such a
pain...scratched me every time I went to pick him up."
"He's still that way. No lap time unless *he* puts himself there." Gary chuckled
a bit. The Cat was stubborn to say the least. It surprised him a little to hear someone
refer to him as *a kitty*, and not *the Cat*.
"So he's still kickin'?" Bernard asked. "I guess I should have known."
The waitress came and took Gary and Sora's orders. Bernard said he'd
already eaten.
Sora looked at Bernard, then Gary, and back again. "So most of the
information you can give us is about Lucius Snow more so than the paper?"
"'Fraid so, Miss...I believe the young man here called you Sora."
"Yes, he did. I'm Sora Marley. And since he hasn't told you his name--I know him, and
he didn't--he's Gary Hobson."
"Hobson! I knew Lucius said it was Hob- or Hodg- something. I was
more under the impression of Hodgesen, but no matter. Come on, it's been
quite a while since I've met any real friends of Lucius's. Ask away, I'll be glad to talk."
"So he told you about the paper?" Gary questioned.
"Well, yes. I came into Chicago fresh off the prairie and he was the
only one who understood. I was his assistant at the Sun-Times for several
years, but more often than not I was the one who would go out and do the
savin' while he would typeset the story once it changed."
Sora frowned. "When *did* you come to Chicago?"
"Well, I was about twenty-five. I've tried to forget."
"Why?" She pried gently, a bit concerned.
He sighed. "I was born out West. I bought a ranch at twenty and
married at twenty-two. We had a daughter just a few days after our first
anniversary. We were happy for a while, and then there was that storm. It
was thunderin' and lightnin', and I was out a bit late herdin' the cattle.
My pretty little wife got worried, and so she saddled up her horse and bundled up our
three-year-old daughter in a heap of blankets, and she rode off to find me. She did--she
found me. She came ridin' towards me, and she wasn't twenty feet from me when lightning
struck. It hit them, killed her, and our daughter, even the horse. Gone. Instantly. No pause,
not really even much time to scream. I stuck around long enough to give them a proper
funeral and used my life savings to get out East here. Haven't left the city since. No reason,
my wife was my only kin."
"How sad!" Sora cried. "You must be lonely."
"Well, I must admit that ever since Lucius died I've just been in a rut. I wander
around the city all day, go in for an hour to do my job at six, and then I wander around
until I get sleepy and then I go home."
Gary paused. "Where do you work?"
"I do dishes during rush hour at a small restaurant over halfway across town.
For doing that I get three meals at the restaurant, a tiny room--not apartment, mind you,
a room--over the place to call my own, and a hundred bucks a month. They're really generous
to me. It's a family business and they make pretty big bucks."
Gary nodded. "So in other words, you don't have anything to do
except for that one hour every day?"
Bernard nodded. "I need to find a fairly cheap hobby so I could have
something to do, but I just never get around to it."
Gary smiled. "Well, any friend of Lucius Snow's is a friend of mine.
What would you say to helping me out?"
Bernard's eyes lit up. "You mean that? I could be out there helping
people again?"
"Sure. Now it wouldn't be all the stories, because this is my
responsibility, but if there was something happening at a certain hour when
I needed to be elsewhere, or if two things happened simultaneously, then
you could help me out a great deal."
Sora punched his arm. "That's what me and Marissa are here for."
"I know, but you have other things you can do."
Sora nodded.
Bernard decided that it was time for him to ask a few questions. "So, how many people
have you told? Telling is not a bad thing, if you do it for the right reasons."
"Well..." Gary thought about it. "When I first got it, I told Chuck, my best friend.
He was practically there when it came. Then I told Marissa a
few days later, after I used the race results to buy her a guide dog. You
see, she's a very good friend and she's blind. Then Sora began to come back
into my life, and so I told her. I needed as much moral support as I could get at the time,
because I was going through a divorce. And then...let me
see...my dad and mom had argued, and Dad came to see me, and he found
out. About a year later I was in an accident and the paper went to Dad the
next day and he came, and then when he landed in the pokey Mom got it
the next day and so she found out. She was mad because he went almost a
year without telling her. Then...Chuck got married so after a while he had to tell his wife,
Jade...and then I think that's everyone."
"Don't forget *Erica*," Sora muttered tersely.
"I was trying to. Being with you for two seconds, Sora, is a hundred
times more than spending a whole day with Erica. Don't be jealous of a
ghost from the past, please. I never cared about her the way I do you."
Bernard nodded. "A girl."
Gary agreed. "Yes. I had missed twenty dates in thirty days, so I told her and then
we went out...for the first time of about ten times."
Bernard smiled. "Six people. Seven with me. More than Lucius ever did."
"Who did he tell?" Sora asked.
"Well, me, of course, and he told each of his parents on their
deathbeds. That was only a few months after he first got it. He tried to tell a girl he met
on a trip to Rome..."
"I met her," Gary said, softly. "She was a widow when she met him, and had one
daughter. It took my telling her what I knew of Snow but she
decided to move on. She had a boyfriend, last I heard. I still get a note in
the mail from her now and then."
Bernard continued. "But, as I was saying, he decided not to put her
through it all and left her alone in Rome. So it was only me and his parents."
Gary took it all in. "Are we going to see each other again, or is this a one-time deal?"
"We'll definitely be seeing more of each other. I would not miss out
on being around younger folks for anything. Let me write down my number
and the number and address of the restaurant for you so we can get in
touch. You, too."
"Um, I own a restaurant, McGinty's...it's in the phone book, but I've got my own phone,
here's that number."
Bernard rose from the table. "I am so glad I met you, Gary. It's fate. I was so lonely
I was getting to the point where I might have walked out in front of that bus on purpose. Thank
you so much."
"You...you're welcome."
Bernard grinned. "You remind me of Lucius...always hesitant to take a compliment.
Now, I'll be on my way, I think you two had a date." He left the small restaurant.
Perfect timing came into play as Gary and Sora's food arrived just
them.
Sora just shook her head. "Wow. That was weird. I feel like I saw Lucius Snow's ghost."
"Not Lucius Snow--but definitely a ghost."
"Yeah. A ghost with a chance to live again, thanks to you."
Gary shrugged. "He'll never do more than half the stories unless I need an entire day off."
Sora smiled. "Which you might need more of, now that you have a girlfriend."
He smiled back at her. "You've got that right."
A/N: Reveiw, please! More to come!
Autoress' Note: WOW! Here I was expecting to be flamed beyond belief and I'm
sitting in a pile of requests for MORE! You guys are all so nice!
THANK YOU! Sorry this took so long, tonsillitis kept me from the comp for
a while and then I plain forgot to post this last time I was here.
To the girl who didn't like my character Sora being with Gary because she wasn't on TV, sorry
but I have had too much positive feedback to change my mind. I do understand where you're
coming from, though.
Gary wandered down the street, looking for a man in his mid-sixties.
~A guy's gonna get run over by a bus. A bus. Now you would think more
than anything else, you could see or hear a *bus* coming at you. But nooo, I
gotta get out here in the October cold, miss *lunch* even, to save some
old guy who's apparently totally blind and deaf!~
It ticked him off a little, because he had a lunch date with his
girlfriend, Sora Marley. Now he would be about half-an-hour late, because a
bus driver he'd saved earlier was now about to run over somebody.
~There are some days I really consider just ripping up this stupid
paper and letting the chips fall where they may...~
Just then Gary spotted the guy and his anger melted into pure
adrenaline as he ran to pull the guy back from the street.
He grabbed the man by the arms and jerked him toward the sidewalk.
They both fell over, but fortunately landed out of the path of the barreling
bus.
"Hey, buddy, you saved my life! Thanks a million!"
"You're sure welcome, pal, but I have somewhere I need to be..." Gary stood,
helping the man to his feet. Under his breath he muttered, "...and God bless Lucius Snow for
saddling me with this and not some idiot who doesn't care."
The man's cowboy hat nearly hid his eyes, but not so much that Gary
didn't notice him blink. "Did you say Lucius Snow, young man? Did you know
Lucius Snow?"
Gary frowned. "No, not exactly...did *you*?"
"Yes. I was one of his closest...no...surely you aren't...but how else, it only makes
perfect sense...you're...you're..."
"I'm who, buddy?" Gary was getting impatient. It didn't dawn on him
what the man was implying.
"I see you have a Chicago Sun-Times. May I see the date?" the man asked.
"No! I mean, uh, go get your own paper!"
The man staggered a bit and leaned against the fence behind them. "So you're the one
Lucius chose. My, my. I've often wondered about you. You're the young G. H. Lucius chose. You
seem to be doin' a good job."
Gary listened carefully, and selected his words with caution. "Are we thinking of the
same thing here? My initials are G. H., and I was chosen by Lucius Snow...but can you tell me
what for?"
The man rolled his eyes. "You're the G. H. that gets the paper, aren't you?"
Sora looked at the clock again and then let her eyes return to the
door. A mere twenty seconds passed before Gary finally entered, followed by an older man in
John Wayne-ish garb.
"Gary! You're late...umm, who's you friend?"
"Well, Sora, this is...umm..."
"My name is Bernard Westerson. I know, it must seem a bit corny what
with the way I dress, but I was bred and born out west, so it fits, and
besides, there isn't much I can do about it, since I'd rather not take the time and expense to
change it."
Sora smiled. "Come on, you two, sit down."
Gary placed a hand on her shoulder and bent down lower to Sora.
"Sora, do you know who this is? No, of course not. *I* didn't. He...he...this guy knew Lucius
Snow!"
"What?" Sora gasped. "I think the three of us have to have a major Q&A session."
Gary and Bernard both slid into the booth, Gary next to Sora with
Bernard across from them for easier questioning. And so Gary could be
close to her. "Where would you like to start?" Bernard asked. "I know, what
with all Snow left for you to find, you must think he's an absolute
'Tomorrow's Paper' expert. But I'll tell you this: he wasn't. You know as much as he did. And he
also learned from the guy who came before him."
Gary leaned back in his chair, eyes gaping at this treasure trove he had been so angry
with for no reason. "So he didn't know where it came from?"
"Nope."
"But it did come with the Cat?" Gary asked.
"The little marmalade kitty?" Bernard laughed. "That cat was such a
pain...scratched me every time I went to pick him up."
"He's still that way. No lap time unless *he* puts himself there." Gary chuckled
a bit. The Cat was stubborn to say the least. It surprised him a little to hear someone
refer to him as *a kitty*, and not *the Cat*.
"So he's still kickin'?" Bernard asked. "I guess I should have known."
The waitress came and took Gary and Sora's orders. Bernard said he'd
already eaten.
Sora looked at Bernard, then Gary, and back again. "So most of the
information you can give us is about Lucius Snow more so than the paper?"
"'Fraid so, Miss...I believe the young man here called you Sora."
"Yes, he did. I'm Sora Marley. And since he hasn't told you his name--I know him, and
he didn't--he's Gary Hobson."
"Hobson! I knew Lucius said it was Hob- or Hodg- something. I was
more under the impression of Hodgesen, but no matter. Come on, it's been
quite a while since I've met any real friends of Lucius's. Ask away, I'll be glad to talk."
"So he told you about the paper?" Gary questioned.
"Well, yes. I came into Chicago fresh off the prairie and he was the
only one who understood. I was his assistant at the Sun-Times for several
years, but more often than not I was the one who would go out and do the
savin' while he would typeset the story once it changed."
Sora frowned. "When *did* you come to Chicago?"
"Well, I was about twenty-five. I've tried to forget."
"Why?" She pried gently, a bit concerned.
He sighed. "I was born out West. I bought a ranch at twenty and
married at twenty-two. We had a daughter just a few days after our first
anniversary. We were happy for a while, and then there was that storm. It
was thunderin' and lightnin', and I was out a bit late herdin' the cattle.
My pretty little wife got worried, and so she saddled up her horse and bundled up our
three-year-old daughter in a heap of blankets, and she rode off to find me. She did--she
found me. She came ridin' towards me, and she wasn't twenty feet from me when lightning
struck. It hit them, killed her, and our daughter, even the horse. Gone. Instantly. No pause,
not really even much time to scream. I stuck around long enough to give them a proper
funeral and used my life savings to get out East here. Haven't left the city since. No reason,
my wife was my only kin."
"How sad!" Sora cried. "You must be lonely."
"Well, I must admit that ever since Lucius died I've just been in a rut. I wander
around the city all day, go in for an hour to do my job at six, and then I wander around
until I get sleepy and then I go home."
Gary paused. "Where do you work?"
"I do dishes during rush hour at a small restaurant over halfway across town.
For doing that I get three meals at the restaurant, a tiny room--not apartment, mind you,
a room--over the place to call my own, and a hundred bucks a month. They're really generous
to me. It's a family business and they make pretty big bucks."
Gary nodded. "So in other words, you don't have anything to do
except for that one hour every day?"
Bernard nodded. "I need to find a fairly cheap hobby so I could have
something to do, but I just never get around to it."
Gary smiled. "Well, any friend of Lucius Snow's is a friend of mine.
What would you say to helping me out?"
Bernard's eyes lit up. "You mean that? I could be out there helping
people again?"
"Sure. Now it wouldn't be all the stories, because this is my
responsibility, but if there was something happening at a certain hour when
I needed to be elsewhere, or if two things happened simultaneously, then
you could help me out a great deal."
Sora punched his arm. "That's what me and Marissa are here for."
"I know, but you have other things you can do."
Sora nodded.
Bernard decided that it was time for him to ask a few questions. "So, how many people
have you told? Telling is not a bad thing, if you do it for the right reasons."
"Well..." Gary thought about it. "When I first got it, I told Chuck, my best friend.
He was practically there when it came. Then I told Marissa a
few days later, after I used the race results to buy her a guide dog. You
see, she's a very good friend and she's blind. Then Sora began to come back
into my life, and so I told her. I needed as much moral support as I could get at the time,
because I was going through a divorce. And then...let me
see...my dad and mom had argued, and Dad came to see me, and he found
out. About a year later I was in an accident and the paper went to Dad the
next day and he came, and then when he landed in the pokey Mom got it
the next day and so she found out. She was mad because he went almost a
year without telling her. Then...Chuck got married so after a while he had to tell his wife,
Jade...and then I think that's everyone."
"Don't forget *Erica*," Sora muttered tersely.
"I was trying to. Being with you for two seconds, Sora, is a hundred
times more than spending a whole day with Erica. Don't be jealous of a
ghost from the past, please. I never cared about her the way I do you."
Bernard nodded. "A girl."
Gary agreed. "Yes. I had missed twenty dates in thirty days, so I told her and then
we went out...for the first time of about ten times."
Bernard smiled. "Six people. Seven with me. More than Lucius ever did."
"Who did he tell?" Sora asked.
"Well, me, of course, and he told each of his parents on their
deathbeds. That was only a few months after he first got it. He tried to tell a girl he met
on a trip to Rome..."
"I met her," Gary said, softly. "She was a widow when she met him, and had one
daughter. It took my telling her what I knew of Snow but she
decided to move on. She had a boyfriend, last I heard. I still get a note in
the mail from her now and then."
Bernard continued. "But, as I was saying, he decided not to put her
through it all and left her alone in Rome. So it was only me and his parents."
Gary took it all in. "Are we going to see each other again, or is this a one-time deal?"
"We'll definitely be seeing more of each other. I would not miss out
on being around younger folks for anything. Let me write down my number
and the number and address of the restaurant for you so we can get in
touch. You, too."
"Um, I own a restaurant, McGinty's...it's in the phone book, but I've got my own phone,
here's that number."
Bernard rose from the table. "I am so glad I met you, Gary. It's fate. I was so lonely
I was getting to the point where I might have walked out in front of that bus on purpose. Thank
you so much."
"You...you're welcome."
Bernard grinned. "You remind me of Lucius...always hesitant to take a compliment.
Now, I'll be on my way, I think you two had a date." He left the small restaurant.
Perfect timing came into play as Gary and Sora's food arrived just
them.
Sora just shook her head. "Wow. That was weird. I feel like I saw Lucius Snow's ghost."
"Not Lucius Snow--but definitely a ghost."
"Yeah. A ghost with a chance to live again, thanks to you."
Gary shrugged. "He'll never do more than half the stories unless I need an entire day off."
Sora smiled. "Which you might need more of, now that you have a girlfriend."
He smiled back at her. "You've got that right."
A/N: Reveiw, please! More to come!