7 August 2026, Freewriters Community Daily Writing Prompt Day 3188: after midnight

“Hey, Cousin Harry.”

“Hey, Cousin Andrew. Come on in. The stargazing room is open.”

Mrs. Maggie Lee smiled as this entered the edges of her hearing just after midnight… her husband, Col. H.F. Lee, was a periodic insomniac, and the pattern had started at about age nine. Since he and Mrs. Lee had taken care of their seven little Ludlow cousins, he had observed that the oldest Ludlow boy, ten-year-old Andrew, was often coming out of his room at night and going at first into the front room, and then to the back porch on warm nights and sitting down and watching the stars and thinking big thoughts.

“And, like me, he is a double-Lee – a Lee ancestor from Col. Henry Lee's line on both sides of his family – so, Andrew is showing some of the marks of the family inheritance,” he said to Andrew's grandfather, Capt. R.E. Ludlow, who sighed.

“Grayson is tracking Andrew, too, just four years behind,” he said. “My mother and grandmother warned me, and I warned both Robert Jr. and Anne about this as children: some things about the Lee line do not need to be doubled up, and before marriage these things must be checked in Virginia in particular. I hoped with the passage of this much time, Anne's choice would not be a problem, but, here we are.”

“But you are not alone, R.E.,” the colonel said gently. “I have your back, and like our Lee elders guided me to manage the bipolar disorder running through many of us before there was that name or any treatment options, I can help Andrew and if need be Grayson learn how to live with this difference. Also, bipolarity does not always manifest in full: the thing about Andrew just may be that his brain has a lot to think about, and the daylight hours may not be enough.”

“That's possible,” Capt. Ludlow said. “Andrew is massively precocious, intellectually and spiritually, and needs a great deal of support for that.”

“I have your back, R.E. My late night setups are available for all family that need them.”

So, with the Lees and Ludlows deciding to live close together to raise the little Ludlows and any coming Lee children together, Andrew now had a place to go at night for some understanding company, and as it happened, if his big Lee cousin could relieve whatever questions were burning in his mind, Andrew usually could go home and go to sleep … or sometimes, Mrs. Lee would find him asleep curled up by his big cousin, who in his periods of insomnia generally was awake still, but very relaxed, a protective arm around his little cousin.

Mrs. Lee did her own tracking, though, and had discovered something interesting. The little Ludlow cousin did have periodicity … so, the underlying reasons for him being up were there... but in the same way the company of his big Lee cousin was gently preventing full-blown insomnia from getting established, the presence of the little Ludlow cousin was affecting the big Lee cousin's full-blown insomnia … the days of the colonel not being able to sleep at all were diminishing. Sometimes, Mrs. Lee found the big cousin and the little one both asleep, and more and more often, the big cousin would carry the little cousin back home and also come back to bed and go back to sleep also.

And, Capt. Ludlow had some input.

“Grayson got up for the first time last night, but he met Andrew who answered his questions, and the two of them curled up on the couch and went back to sleep,” he told Col. Lee.

“Well,” the colonel said, with a smile, “the thing about Andrew: anything you show up that is helpful, he's going to pass it on. Better double check the answers given, though. Andrew was asking me last time if a black hole is a type of Christ, because all history is rotating around Him.”

“Wait, what?” Capt. Ludlow said. “I mean, Christ is the great singularity of history, being God become Man, but ... uh, what?”

“You should also know that George and Milton are all fired up on building a starship to go examine this, but Grayson is refusing to build it because he is sure Legos are not rated for safety around anything bigger than Sagittarius A in our own galaxy, and they want to do TON 618.”

“Wait, WHAT?”

And Capt. Ludlow went to find three of his grandsons and their nine-year-old friend Milton Trent from next door, while the colonel was embraced from behind by his laughing wife.

“I bet retirement and peacetime never looked like this in your imagination, when you were nine,” she purred into his ear.

“Nope,” he said, laughing. “The future cannot be read in the stars, after all.”