Pound the Table | An X-Men Self-Insert

[October Daye]

Pound the Table
What If…? Episode 1

What If…? Noa Schaefer had been a lawyer in DC instead of Marvel?​

The phone rang, distracting me from the appellate brief I'd been working on just long enough to mess up my citation. I cursed and hit the backspace button, endlessly thankful that I only needed to use the typewriter for those rare times I went before Judge Howard. I knew it was unfair of me to bitch about that rule, it wasn't his fault that printer toner gave him a horrible rash, but it was remarkably inconvenient.

I picked the phone up, and looked past the frosted glass doors of my office to where I knew my secretary sat.

"Yes, Sophie?" I asked, and hoped that my annoyance wasn't audible.

"We just got a call from across the river, over in Gotham," she said, her voice sounding as put-upon as I felt upon hearing that. "One of your clients is demanding to speak with you today, has refused a phone call, and wants it in-person."

"And let me guess: they said something else, otherwise you would have just scheduled them for as far out as you could manage," I said with a sigh.

"Fifteen hours paid up front, with every actual hour of billable work being paid out at double rate," she said, grumbling.

That… that was a lot of money.

"Aaaand which client did you say it was, again?" I asked, suddenly feeling much more eager.

Then Sophie told me, and all that energy disappeared in an instant.

"Fuck," was my only response. Of course. Of course it would be him. That 'sweetening the pot' was purely so that I had a reason to go out there and humor him, wasn't it? "Did you at least ask Harvey if he could handle this before coming to me?"

"He's been at occupational therapy for the last hour, and is due to be there for another two," Sophie said. "Plus I already asked Clarence, who told me he's already paged Harvey to follow up on three other clients after he's back."

Damn it. There went that option.

"Alright," I said. "Call ahead and let them know I'm coming, and to have a wrist dampener ready."

"I already told them that you have the complaint ready to file suit if they pull out a neck one, and it just needs a date."

"Good," I said. "Hopefully you won't need to talk me down from filing suit again."

"Still easier than what Clarence deals with," Sophie muttered. And I couldn't help but agree: Harvey may have been one hell of an attorney to have on your side, but managing his triggers may as well have been a full-time job all on its own.

"Agreed," I told her. "Anyway, can you get the case materials ready for me?"

"I'll have it set for you to grab in fifteen," Sophie said.

"Excellent. Feel free to head out early once you're done with everything for today, I don't think I'm getting back to the city until after dark." With that, I hung up, and sat back down to work on my brief for another fifteen minutes. I couldn't stop thinking about what on earth it could be this time, though, and so I didn't actually make much progress on the brief at all.

Fifteen minutes later, I grabbed my heels from under my desk, stopped by Sophie's desk to grab case materials, and made my way to the underground garage for my car. The VW Bug groaned a bit at me for not starting it for over a week, but a quick look at the gas tank showed me I was more than fine for this trip.

As I pulled out of the garage and into New York City traffic at a horrible 2pm on a Thursday, I groaned, and cursed whichever gremlin gave me the idea to get my law license in New Jersey as well. Why?

Because now, I had to endure a two hour drive into Gotham fucking City, with a cassette deck that barely worked, and some of the worst radio stations in the country.

---

Driving through Gotham City is some of the most stressful, miserable driving in the entire country, especially during daylight. Gotham was, paradoxically enough, safer at night than where I lived in Manhattan. The problem, though, is that it was orders of magnitude worse during the daylight. With Batman making nocturnal criminal activities dangerous to life and limb (while the man may have never killed, he has left people with wounds so severe as to render a normal life impossible), it was obvious, and even expected, that petty crime would turn to daylight hours instead. So while Gotham had some of the safest city streets to walk at night, you weren't safe on its streets in daylight unless in a group or in a fast-moving car.

I was in neither. This meant that the glorious late summer day that just would not end left me on tenterhooks on my entire sojourn through the city. I'm pretty sure the only thing that scared off a couple of thugs two streets back is my obviously being a meta, and that was just not worth the risk to them.

Fortunately, the end of my drive was in sight, and I pulled my car into a compact parking space in the outdoor lot.

Unfortunately, this is because I was walking straight into Arkham Asylum, the most obnoxious, ridiculous, convoluted mess of a corrections facility to ever exist. I wasn't sure who was to blame, the lobbyists who some give credit for this obnoxious loophole, or the corrupt politicians who were probably already working on it behind closed doors. Or maybe it wasn't even self-interest, but purely laziness, as bureaucrats in Gotham's city hall did just enough for government work.

Or maybe there actually was something to those old rumors of an eldritch curse.

Regardless of reason, the fact remained that Arkham Asylum was somehow both a correctional facility and a medical institution, but only beholden to one or the other's regulations at a time, depending entirely on where in the facility you were. Ostensibly, the western half was a mental institution, and the eastern half was a correctional facility, with the dividing line being the center of the property line. Now, want to know the punch line?

The center of the property line didn't intersect the Arkham Asylum facility at all. The entire facility existed on the eastern half.

Now, what did this mean? Generally speaking, it meant that Arkham only needed to even pretend to be a mental institution when New Jersey's state hospital board was around, and that was assuming they didn't just… bribe the inspectors into going away.

Practically speaking?

My heels clicked on the tile as I walked through the front doors to Arkham Asylum's guest center, on the westernmost end of the building. One of the security guards, Mike, just tipped his hat and gave me a knowing look of commiseration. The other one?

"S-stop!"

A taser came out of its holster, and I knew even without having to look or listen that it was pointed straight at me.

"U-unidentified meta, p-p-put your hands on—"

"New here, huh?" I asked, interrupting the greenhorn before he could finish stammering through whatever it was he wanted to say. "Let me guess, first week, maybe second?"

"First week, ma'am," Mike said, tipping his hat. "Jenkins, put that damn thing away before we got a lawsuit on our hands." The new guard, Jenkins, gulped, then put his taser away, not taking his eyes off of me at any point in the process. "Sorry about that, Ms. Schaefer. Sometimes forget folks aren't as used to metas as we are."

"Don't worry yourself about it," I told Mike, waving off his concerns with a smile. "Anyway, down to business: Noa Schaefer here to see inmate number three-six-four-four-six-two."

"Patient," Mike instantly corrected, though he did chuckle a bit.

"You and I both know that's barely true, and mostly on paper," I responded as I reached into my briefcase and brought out my New Jersey bar association card, along with my driver's license, as proof that I was who I said I was. "Anyway, can I assume that my secretary sent my message along?"

"The warden weren't too happy about it, but he can go shove it," Mike said, taking both cards from my hand to inspect before giving them right back maybe three seconds later. "Alright, nothing looks amiss here. Ma'am, please extend a wrist for me."

As Mike asked, I offered him my right wrist, and rolled up the sleeve of my blazer so he could access it. A moment later, he fastened a metal bangle with a dull strip around the middle onto my wrist, and as the strip around the middle came alight in red, the world felt duller. I reached for a sunbeam that came in through the window behind me, and when I failed to hook my fingers around it, both Mike and I nodded.

"Alright, the meta suppressant is working," he said, more for the new officer than for anyone else. Mike had done this too many times to be surprised when the cuff did exactly as it said on the LexCorp tin it came in. "Jenkins, watch the door. Ma'am, please follow me."

"Of course," I said, and let Mike lead me through Arkham Asylum.

The mental institution half of Arkham was barely tolerable to walk through. It was filled to the brim with Hannibal Lecter-style 'cells', and obviously looked more like a prison than a mental hospital. Mike had explained to me one day that the classic 'padded walls' could be raised and lowered individually in every 'room' (he was very careful not to call them cells), and that it was easier to let security staff see everybody than to make them guess whether Harley or the Joker were waiting just behind the padded door with a contraband weapon.

And wasn't the former of that pair just a shame. I'd met Harleen before she went around the twist. Brilliant woman. Terrible taste in food, men, drinks, etcetera. But brilliant.

"Well, surprising to see you back here so soon."

Mike stopped in front of me with a sigh, and waved me off. Both of us knew things would be easier for the next day's staff if I stopped and said hello than anything else. Which is why I approached the cell just to my left, making sure to keep solid plexiglass between myself and the 'patient' at all times.

"Hello again, Pam," I said to my old friend. "Since you're here, I take it that you're still rather prickly to handle."

"Oh, you know me," Pamela Isley said, a wicked grin on her rose-red lips. "Always a troublemaker when trouble needs to be made."

"Trouble doesn't usually include a body count," I told her.

"And?" Pamela asked. "You could have gotten me off."

"Do I need to quote the rules of ethics at you again, Pam?" I asked, already feeling drained by this whole encounter. "I cannot represent you."

"That didn't stop you the first time, and you know it," she pointed out, crossing her arms with a huff.

"That was until…" I trailed off with a sigh. Until she got me into her bed, I'd been about to say. Again. "I'm sorry Pam, but as much is I'd like to talk with you more, I need to go. My client is waiting for me."

I gave Pamela one more look and ignored whatever else it was she said before returning to follow Mike. He didn't say a word until we'd passed through the body of the prison itself and out to the meeting rooms, which overlooked the Asylum's sprawling central courtyard.

"He's waiting for you in there," Mike said, pointedly ignoring… whatever that was with Pamela Isley just a bit earlier. "He's not a violent sort, and listed as a patient, so I'll be just outside. Knock on the door if you need anything."

"Of course," I said. "Thank you again Mike." I offered him a handshake, and took the opportunity to slide a hundred dollar bill into his hand. He gave a small nod of acknowledgment when the bill slid into his hand, and pocketed it without the cameras ever having noticed it.

Voila, the price I pay for safety and security inside of Arkham Asylum. Had I mentioned how much I hate Gotham City?

I opened the door to the meeting room, and saw my client sitting on the table, his back to the door. He had a handball, which he appeared to have been bouncing off the walls as he waited, if the little bits of green paint left behind on the rough cinder block were anything to go by. Somehow, he'd managed to swap out the usual mint-colored patient's scrubs for a darker evergreen, though he still had the long-sleeved mint undershirt beneath that.

"Good afternoon Edward," I told him as I entered the room and sat down at the chair set aside for me, endlessly thankful that Mike had sourced an open-backed one. Solid-backed metal chairs weren't just a pain to sit in, they also had nowhere for me to fit my tail, which left me barely sitting on the chair as opposed to just standing up. "I apologize for the delay, but traffic between Manhattan and Gotham is horrendous even outside of rush hour."

"Oh I understand full well, Ms. Schaefer" Edward Nygma said as he pushed off the edge of the table, turning to look at me as he leaned against the wall. "I truly am sorry for subjecting you to that, by the way, but I had the most incredible brainwave and I needed to see you before it went away!"

Uh-oh. It was one of those days, wasn't it?

"Edward, have you been off your meds?" I asked, frowning. "You know you just need to call and let me know if the side effects are a problem. Getting you off fluoxetine only took thirty minutes, I'm pretty sure another change of medication would be even faster."

"No no no, it's not that! I've been on my meds, they're doing wonderful work!" Edward pushed off the wall and paced around the table, a sort of manic energy in his footsteps. "Just yesterday, I actually had a full conversation without needing to ask a riddle! Oh, it was so freeing!"

Actually, now that he mentioned it… this was probably the first time I'd spoken with Edward that didn't start with 'riddle me this', wasn't it? I'd have to ask the guards if he'd asked any of them a riddle when getting word to the practice.

"That's wonderful, Edward!" I didn't even have to feign enthusiasm, because a result like that was genuinely good. "But that's not why you asked me to come down here, is it?"

"No, oh no it is not, I am so sorry, I got off track." Edward paced back towards his side of the table and took his chair, turned it around so he could lean over the back of the chair, and sat down, straddling the seat, arms crossed over the back. "Ms. Schaefer. Noa. Can I call you Noa?"

"As I told you the last twenty-seven times you've asked," I said with a sigh, "the moment you allowed me to call you Edward, you had my permission to call me Noa."

"Of course! Now then, Noa." Edward took one hand and drew his finger along the table in front of us, tracing out a fractal pattern that seemed like infinitely repeating question marks to me. "Do you remember how I was last arrested, eight months ago?"

"How could I forget?" I asked, letting myself gripe a little. "Edward, please. It's not often you get a call at five in the morning that your client was found bound and gagged on the front steps of the police station, with a folder full of incriminating evidence safety-pinned to his jacket. It's just shy of impossible to forget."

"Yes yes, my apologies," he said, waving off my concern. "And of course you know it was the Batman who left me in that sordid, sorry state!"

I sighed, and let my clasped hands rest on the table.

"Edward, we have been over this," I told him. "Batman's actions squeak through a loophole in the rules of evidence and criminal procedure, which specifically allows for the police to take a fortuitous finding and use it to their advantage. Moreover, there's the precedent from New Jersey v. Falcone, et al. cutting against you: Batman is not a recognized member of law enforcement, meaning that any evidence he manages to deposit into the hands of police is not Fruit of the Poison Tree. Five separate judges on three separate courts all upheld the police's assertions of plausible deniability in situations like yours, Edward."

I could not understand Edward's fixation on this. Fruit of the Poison Tree was a legal principle that flowed out from the Unclean Hands doctrine. Unclean Hands was a doctrine which stated that a person could not legally benefit from illegal acts. Fruit of the Poison Tree, therefore, flowed out of this, stating that law enforcement officers could not use evidence that they had procured illegally. Forced confessions, illegal searches and seizures, backdating a warrant for a police raid… any evidence obtained in these manners, among others, was considered Fruit of the Poison Tree.

But the problem is… there were limits to this. And unfortunately, the courts had come down on Batman's side time and time again.

"Ah, but there is a wrinkle here!" Edward said, a wide smile on his face. "A certain something that makes this time different from all other times!"

"Please tell me you weren't making a Passover joke," I half-prayed to Edward, an utterly deadpan expression on my face.

"... I plead the Fifth?" Edward asked with a chuckle, to which I sighed. "Anyway! Tell me, when was I found on the precinct steps?"

"January sixth," I answered immediately.

"And when," Edward continued, his voice low, "did the President of the United States sign H.R. 5239, officially legalizing and adopting the charter of the Justice League?"

"That was—"

I stopped dead, rolling over the thought in my head. The Justice League charter essentially deputized any and all of the members of the Justice League to act as law enforcement, so long as they were doing so on American soil, and so long as the costs of any damage that was proximately caused by their actions did not exceed that of the foes that prompted Justice League action in the first place.

More to the point? This deputy status could apply retroactively, meaning that a hero who signed onto the Justice League could use their signing to avoid lawsuit or criminal consequences from acting as law enforcement. But if signatories got the benefits of being law enforcement, then that would mean—

"November twenty-fifth of last year," Edward filled in for me. "And since Batman is a signatory of the Justice League's charter…"

"Edward Nygma, you mad genius," I said, letting the excitement I was feeling bubble up onto my expression. "Are you suggesting what I think you are?"

"Oh, I most certainly am," he said, his grin matching my own.

"In that case." I flipped open my briefcase, pulled out two legal pads and four pens, and slid half of the materials over to him. "Let's get started, shall we?"

---

"You've been working late."

"Oh holy mother of—!" I flinched backwards and yelled just after opening the door to the firm, the orb of light magic I'd reflexively called to my hand dissipating as I recognized the voice. "For fuck's sake, Harvey, turn on a light!"

A half-smile crossed my partner's face—the right half only, unfortunately. Major reconstructive surgery had done a lot, but nerve damage was another thing entirely, and so my poor colleague would likely be dealing with a severe case of Bell's Palsy for the rest of his life. The medical eyepatch over his left eye, testament to his fifth corneal abrasion in two years, was testament to that.

"Heard from Sophie you had to go to the hellhole again," he said, flipping closed the file he'd been working on. "Who was it this time? Ivy? Quinn?"

"Isley and Quinzel, Harv," I gently corrected him. "You know what the psychiatrist said."

"I know, I know," he said, voice slightly heated. "It's just – it's reflex at this point. Can't help it."

"It's okay," I told him. "Just… try at it. Oh, and before I forget?" I walked over to my office and unlocked the door, then held it open for him to join me inside. "It was Nygma, actually."

"Seriously?" Harvey followed me into the office. "What did that lunatic want this time? And is he still fixated on saying his riddles can't be used against him in court?"

"No, actually," I said. "And for once, I think he has a point."

I spent the next half hour detailing everything I'd gone over with Edward. Both my and his legal pads came out, and I explained everything we'd gone over and explored to Harvey. Ridiculous as it sounded when I said it out loud, Edward Nygma might just have been correct here. But despite my excitement, I could tell my partner was worried.

"Are you sure you want to do this?" Harvey asked, nursing a glass of scotch that he'd poured for himself about ten minutes in. "Noa, this could undo everything Batman's done for most of a year. Think of just how many people are going to be back out on the streets, how many people could get hurt!"

"You know I have," I said, keeping my voice gentle. "But if this pans out, and someone else does it first?"

"You want it to be you," Harvey said with a rueful chuckle. "Noa Schaefer, legal superstar." He favored me with his signature half-smirk. "That ambition is gonna get you hurt someday, you know."

"You said the same thing when I took your case," I told him. "See how that turned out."

"And maybe I'm the exception," he said. "Regardless. Are you sure you want to do this?"

"Absolutely." I stood up from where I'd sat at the edge of my desk, and looked at the frames on my wall. Articles, accolades, awards… but the only bit of this office that felt like a proper accomplishment was currently sucking down a glass of my Macallan 18 at a scary fast rate. "I think it can be done. And honestly? If we don't hold the heroes' feet to the fire, who will?"

"Who will indeed," Harvey said, looking at his glass. "Well. It'll make Wayne's Thanksgiving charity gala more than a little uncomfortable."

"Not like it wasn't already," I murmured, to which Harvey could only nod.

We sat in silence for about a minute longer. I caught a glimpse of the clock, and noticed just how late it had gotten.

"I should probably head home," I said, picking my briefcase up off the desk. "You okay to lock up?"

"Always am," he said. "And don't worry, this is the only drink I'm having."

"Good. I'll see you in the morning, Harv."

"And you as well, Noa."

With our farewells made, I left my office, dropped a few things off for mailing in the morning on Sophie's desk, and exited the firm.

The frosted glass door, Schaefer & Dent, LLP emblazoned proudly upon its surface, slid closed behind me with nary a sound.

---

This episode of "What If...?" has been brought to you by Ko-fi.

 

[Fables]

Casual noa is done.
Art baked.

Spoiler

 

[October Daye]

Pound the Table
Chapter Eleven

While the rest of us had been at court, I'd had a first-year associate from the firm pick up Katherine and her grandfather, and take them to get my witness prepared for the day. She had her hair done, then dealt with a makeup artist fussing over her for a couple hours to get that 'doesn't look like she's wearing any makeup' look (which I have never managed to pull off myself), all before being delivered to the courthouse. She looked the perfect picture of a sweet young thing from the Midwest, all smiles and naivete and trustworthiness.

"Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god—"

… assuming, of course, that she didn't hyperventilate, pass out, and ruin all that hard work before we could even make it into the courtroom.

"Katherine," I said, sitting down next to her at the table in the conference room, and putting a hand on the tiny garbage pail she had in her lap. "Just take a few deep breaths. You've been rehearsing this for weeks. You'll be fine."

We still had forty-five minutes, and I was not going to pass up the chance to fit a bit more prep in. That said, this wasn't exactly the prep I wanted, but I wasn't about to be a choosing beggar.

It did necessitate pulling Katherine into an adjoining conference room, though. This state of anxiety would not be helped by having to share a room with John when his fate was the cause of her anxiousness in the first place.

"B-but what if I screw up?" she asked, her grip on the trash pail still white-knuckled. "What if I make a mistake, and ruin everything?"

"Then you make a mistake," I said, speaking with the same tone I'd use for forgetting something at the grocery store.

Predictably, Katherine looked away from the garbage pail, expression suitably poleaxed.

"People make mistakes in the courtroom all the time," I told her as I reached into my briefcase for a printed copy of our testimony plan and an egg timer. "And regardless of whose mistake it was, it's the attorney's job to fix it, plan around it, etcetera. Think about it this way," I said as I put the stapled packet in front of her. "If someone in a play forgets their lines, what do the other actors do?"

"They… uh, they try to feed them the line? Or get that line in the next one?" Katherine's answer was more of a question than a statement, but it did serve the purpose of distracting her long enough for me to get the garbage pail away from her and back onto the floor.

"And that's part of my job," I explained. "If you lose your place, or you forget something, don't worry. I will ask another question to remind you what you forgot, and you can just pick it up from there."

"But won't that hurt things?" she asked. Even as she asked this, though, I could see the tension leaking out from her shoulders.

"Not really," I answered. "We have people forget what to say on the stand all the time. It's just part of the day to day. But if you're still concerned," I tapped on the packet in front of her, "we can go over it one more time?"

"Please?" Katherine asked. I smiled back at her, made my way around to the other side of the table, and quizzed her.

This last bit of practice only focused on the hardest part of Katherine's testimony, the part she was worried about: the big pivot. It was the point at which she turned from a character witness to a material one, and it hinged on being able to sell the jury on this being a natural progression of her testimony. The specific answer that led to it was one we'd played with again and again, revised, changed, scrapped, rewrote, and practiced.

We sat there practicing for half an hour, and only took note of the time again when the egg timer went off. We had fifteen minutes to get into the courtroom now, and it was as good a time as any to stop.

"Feeling a little better now?" I asked, taking the packet from Katherine before sliding it and the egg timer back into my briefcase.

"Y-yeah," Katherine said, standing up from her chair. "Alright. Uh, ready as I'll ever be, I guess."

"One last thing," I said, hand still in my briefcase. My fingers closed around a glasses case, and I retrieved a pair of slim, rimless glasses, which I handed over to my witness. "Put those on for me?"

"Uh, okay?" Katherine opened up the glasses and slid them on, her confusion magnified by the clear lenses. "H-how do I look?"

"Perfect," I said with a smile. "It's a good look on you."

And, assuming Judge Andrews didn't somehow limbo his way under and around binding (if new) precedent, it meant that the same mental bias that made glasses help St. John would work in Katherine's favor here.

"Now, let's get going," I said, looking up at my witness. "Don't want to keep the jury waiting."

---

"Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you god?" The bailiff asked Katherine, who had just been seated on the witness stand. Her hand sat atop a bible, which she looked at as though it was about to bite her.

A bit of a shame that the court didn't have a Torah handy instead.

"I do," she answered. The bailiff nodded at this and withdrew, taking the bible with him.

"Permission to enter the well, your Honor?" I asked Judge Andrews.

"Permission granted," he said.

With that, I walked around defense counsel's table, and entered the well of the court, whereupon I walked to my right so that I stood at the very far left of the jury box.

"Good afternoon Katherine," I said with a smile. "Could you introduce yourself to the court for us?"

"S-sure," she said, voice ever so slightly hesitant. "Um, my name is Katherine Pryde. My friends call me, uh, well. I've heard Kathy, Katie, Kat, Kitty, and probably a few more that I don't remember?"

"And where are you from, Katherine?"

"I'm from Deerfield," she said. "It's a town a bit north from Chicago."

"That's quite a ways from Manhattan," I said, pacing two steps closer to the witness stand. "What brought you out to New York City?"

"Well, uh," Katherine started, fiddling with her fingers a little bit. "So summer after seventh grade, I went to this summer program for performing arts here in the city, and was doing this one for music. And the program had all these computers that let them do some cool stuff with music, and nobody else wanted anything to do with it!"

She giggled a little at that, and a quick glance out of the corner of my eye showed me that a few of the jurors were smiling at her. Good, that's what I wanted to see.

"We had one computer at my school in Deerfield, and I barely got five minutes to use that thing the whole year. So I started playing around on it, and then in, like, the third week of the program, the music and theater sections worked together to put on a one-act musical."

"And how did that go?" I asked.

"Objection," Lou Young said. "This is irrelevant to the matter at hand. Laying foundation has a limit, your Honor."

"The witness is explaining how she knows the defendant," Judge Andrews said, cutting me off before I could say anything. "I don't care how long the story is, I want it on my record. Overruled."

"Thank you, your Honor," I said. "Sorry about that, Katherine. Back to my question: how did the one-act musical go?"

"Well if I'm being honest, it kinda sucked," Katherine replied, prompting a few chuckles from the audience. "I'm sorry, it's just—look, there are actors who are good in plays, and actors who are good in musicals, and I don't care how good of an actor you are, if you can't sing, then nothing I do will make you sound good!"

"What do you mean by making them sound good?" I asked as a follow-up question, tilting my head ever so slightly to the side, as though I was confused.

"Well, I was running the audio booth for the play," Katherine said. "So I controlled the volume of the microphones and the music, how the sound came through, who was louder and quieter. And uh… well, long story short? The teacher who ran the program pulled me aside the next day and told me he'd put me forward for a scholarship to the high school if I wanted it."

"And what did you do about this offer?"

"I talked with my parents about it when I got back to Deerfield," Katherine replied. "We looked everything over, and decided that it was probably a better school than Deerfield High, or any of the ones in Chicago. And I mean, I'm living with my granddad, so it's not like I'm all alone out here."

"And how did this lead to you meeting St. John?" I asked, again stepping just that tiny bit closer to the witness stand."

"So we… uh, quick question?" Katherine asked, looking up to Judge Andrews. "Um, he told us all to call him John because none of us were pronouncing it right?" A few laughs resounded through the courtroom, and Katherine's blush was easily visible through the makeup. "Can I do that, or do I have to say his full name?"

"Let the record reflect that unless stated otherwise, any mentions of 'John' by the witness is in reference to the defendant, Mr. Allerdyce," Judge Andrews said, before he looked down at Katherine from the bench. "Continue, miss Pryde."

"Okay, so uh, the question was how John and I met, right?" Katherine asked.

"That is correct," I replied, nodding as I did. While a simple nod would have been preferable, that would have simply led to Judge Andrews telling the stenographer to record my nod on the record.

"Well, after about two weeks of high school, the theater department called all of us there on performing arts scholarships for a meet and greet in the theater, and to let us vote on what the first show would be," Katherine replied, tapping her fingers on the witness stand. "And I'm one of the last one to get there, cause I still wasn't used to having to get past so many people in the halls. When I get there, there's four actors, three actresses, and then there's John, and he just looks like he wants to be anywhere else, which I thought was pretty weird.

"But I saw where he was looking, and it was one of the three teachers who run the theater department, and he's just sitting up on the stage, smoking a cigarette." Katherine chuckled. "Or uh, I guess he was trying to, because it kept going out every time he tried to smoke it. Which I guess was John putting it out, but at the time we all just thought he'd ruined his cigarette somehow.

"But anyway, I sit down next to John, we all introduce ourselves, and then came deciding what the first production we'd put on was. And uh, we ended up deciding on Fiddler on the Roof," she said.

"My favorite," I added with a small smile. "Whose idea was it?"

"It was John's," Katherine revealed. "He got everyone on board with two words: fog machine."

"I can see why that went over well," I said, again stepping closer to the witness stand as I did. "So that's how you two met. When did you become friends?"

"Well, pretty quick after that," Katherine replied. "John was there for lighting design and I was there for sound design, so the two of us ended up working together a lot. I'm pretty sure we were hanging out together outside of class and theater stuff, what, a month later? Tops?"

"I see," I said, and strode forward until I was just in front of the witness stand, signaling to the jury behind me that something was coming. "And how did you learn that St. John is a mutant?" I asked.

Almost instantly, the tension in the courthouse ratcheted up a few notches. The usual small murmuring you hear from the gallery fell to a dead quiet, aside from the occasional creak of the benches as people leaned forward.

"Well, that's a bit of a crazy story," Katherine said, fidgeting a little with her hands. "But uh, does… anybody here know about theater lights? Like, at all?"

Over at my table, St. John raised his hand. Somewhere in the very far back of the courtroom, that same absurdly tall and broad man, who had been coming in every single day of the case (and who never took off his trilby hat), also raised his hand. I, for the obvious reason that I'd rehearsed this whole thing with Katherine nine times now, raised my own.

Somehow, in a city where Broadway existed, these were the only raised hands in the entire courtroom.

Amazing.

"Objection, your Honor," Lou Young said, standing. "It is not the witness's place to ask informational questions."

"Given what she asked," Judge Andrews began, leaning over from the bench, "I'm pretty sure the specifics require that we all know some particular information, and the young lady wanted to make sure we knew about it." He nodded down at Katherine. "Miss Pryde, please continue. I'm intrigued."

Yes! Hurdle one, passed!

Lou Young was correct: the witness asking anything other than a rhetorical question was not something that should be happening. Rhetorical questions got a pass because the answer was implied within the question, so they may as well have been a yes or no by another name.

"So, uh, theater lights are really, really big, right?" She held up her hands in pantomime, and sketched out in the air an object about two and a half feet tall, and a full foot in diameter. "And they also get really hot. Then there's these small lights, uh, we call them Fresnels, I think it's after the name of whoever came up with them?" Katherine shrugged. "Anyway, those lights, we're told that we should never put our hands on the glass, cause if we do, well we leave some of the oils on our hands behind when we touch stuff, and that will catch on fire when the lights are on for a while."

Katherine put her hands down on the bench in front of the witness stand, as if in demonstration, and I could hear a few of the jurors behind me raising their hands up or wiping at the spots around them.

"And well, uh… that happened," Katherine continued. "Someone must've touched one of the Fresnels on the lens, so when we started up the lights to check everything, it seemed fine at first, but then three minutes later we started smelling smoke."

"Why did nobody pull the fire alarm?" I asked, putting voice to the question on everyone's minds.

"Well, some of the seniors who work backstage? They liked to go up into the lighting catwalks for a smoke, so we thought it was one of them," Katherine explained. "Well, until the Fresnel lit on fire."

"What happened next?" I asked.

"Everyone kinda panicked," Katherine said. "I remember I was up in the light and sound booth, freaking out, tugging on John's arm cause it was just the two of us up there." She laughed, ever so slightly, but it was there. "He just slid open the window at the front of the booth, reached out a hand, and the fire flew off of the light and into his hand. Then he just closed his fist, and the fire was gone."

"How many people were there?" I asked.

"About twelve of us," Katherine said. "Everyone met up down on stage afterwards, and all of us swore we wouldn't tell anyone. We told the drama teachers the light burned out on its own, but that we cut the power before it could set itself on fire."

"And why did you promise not to tell anybody?" I asked, stepping a tad closer to Katherine.

"Cause we know how people think about mutants," she answered. "I've seen them come up on the news, and my grandpa just talks about how the last time he heard people talking about people like that was a few months before he wound up on a train to Auschwitz."

There. Right there, murmurs and whispers filled the courtroom. Obviously I couldn't turn and look at the jury, but I could hear the way three of the jurors' dangly earrings chimed as they moved their heads back and forth. This was exactly the reaction I'd been hoping for, because it relied very heavily on one thing: shame.

Our history textbooks painted us as the Big Damn Heroes in World War II. We were on the side of righteousness, the side of the angels, who no evil could stain. And here they were, having grown up hearing how they were the heroes… and the generation below their own compared them to the 'baddies'.

It wasn't exactly a scarlet letter, but it would have to do.

"So what happened after you all learned St. John is a mutant?" I asked.

"He stopped hiding his powers if we knew them," Katherine said. "He doesn't like smoking, and would always walk away whenever someone had a cigarette near him. But now, he just takes the fire out of the cigarette, and, " Katherine snapped her fingers, "whisks it away. Oh, and his powers make lighting design for sets so much easier!"

"How so?" I asked, leaning in as if interested. Sure enough, if the creaking of chairs was any indication, several jurors leaned in as well.

"Okay, so when the theater department gets started on building a set, the stagecraft folks?" Katherine looked up with a manic grin, and just as we'd practiced, it faltered a little. "Uh, right. So, stagecraft, it's uh, the people who build the set and props and stuff. And do backstage work for the shows."

I made a silent 'aah' of understanding, and Katherine took the signal to continue.

"Okay, so when they're building a set?" That excited energy was back, and Katherine scooted to the front of the chair on the witness stand so she could be just that little bit closer to everyone. "Well, the stagecraft folks build a little model of the set, complete with paper cutouts for the actors. And John's part of the lighting design crew, so they'd all gather around that little diorama, pull out some lighters, get some aluminum foil and wire and stuff? They made little cones of foil to focus it, and John gets some small bits of fire from the lighters, and they can test lighting before they actually start hanging!"

Katherine calmed down a little once she finished saying that, and blushed a bit.

"Sorry, it's just… a little cool, really."

"It's perfectly fine," I told her with a smile of my own. "So, how else does St. John use his powers, that you know of?"

"Um… I mean, aside from putting out cigarettes and lighting mockups?" Katherine shrugged. "I really can't think of any. Like, I've been with him in chemistry class with twenty bunsen burners going, and he doesn't even use his powers there to speed things up for us. Not even the time I wanted him to! That one lab with the magnesium took so long we spent all of lunch in the chem lab!" Katherine crossed her arms and turned to send a light glare towards St. John at the defense table. "You could've gotten us out of there faster, John! But no, we had to miss lunch right before PE! They made us do a timed mile on an empty stomach, John!"

Perfect.

"Katherine. In your opinion, is St. John the kind of person who would use his powers to attack another person?" I asked.

This question was crucial. This was me opening the door to character evidence, which meant there was a very real chance I would be facing a rebuttal witness from the prosecution on Monday. St. John had given me a list of how many people knew about his powers, and I knew all of them were on his side.

But there was always the chance that somebody else knew, and right now I was taking that chance.

"Objection!" Lou Young rose to his feet. "Counsel is leading the witness."

"Your Honor," I started, "I am merely asking the witness to testify as to her opinion on my client's character."

"And there are ways to ask that without leading the girl by the nose!" Lou continued, raising his voice.

"While those ways do exist," Judge Andrews said, "I do believe that 'the girl', as the DA put it, is looking a little lost."

Lou and I both turned to look at Katherine, who, sure enough, had a rather confused expression on her face. Which was, again, exactly as practiced – I'd told her to try and look as baffled, befuddled, or otherwise bewildered as she could whenever objections started flying. Legalese was a complex enough subset of the English language that it was rather believable, and with a bit of luck it would endear her to the judge.

Sure enough, that was exactly what had happened.

"Your objection is valid, DA Young, but in the interests of not losing our witness, I'm going to overrule it," Judge Andrews said. "The witness may answer the question as asked."

"Um…" Katherine looked up at the judge with a frown. "W-what was the question?"

The court stenographer read back my question.

"He's… really not that kind of person, no," Katherine answered. "Like, I know some people at school who I wouldn't even trust with a stick, but John's the type who just… you feel safe around him, you know? And like, when he came to school with stitches and a black eye, none of us could believe it, cause like, he's not the one who gets into fights!"

Perfect. There was the segue, maybe not in the exact words we'd planned. Regardless, it would work. I took a few steps towards defense counsel's table, acting against all popular wisdom by leading my witness's attention away from the jury. Matt heard the signal and pulled two copies of our prepared brief from where they rested at the very front of his trial binder.

"Katherine, when you say St. John came to school with 'stitches and a black eye', as you put it, when did this happen?" I asked.

"Objection!" Lou Young rose to his feet. "Your Honor, the defense called this witness to offer character testimony regarding the accused, which can only take the form of reputational or opinion evidence!"

"Your Honor, this question lays foundation for further testimony, the nature of which will become clear after my next two questions," I said. I could have produced the brief now, but that wouldn't have had the same effect on the jury. I needed one more key objection from Lou Young, one last bit of unwitting help from him in building my narrative.

"Your Honor—"

"Overruled," Judge Andrews said, leaning forward on the bench. "I want to see where this is going. Continue, counselor."

"Thank you, your Honor," I said, doing my level best to not crack a smile. "Once again: Katherine, when did St. John come to school with stitches and a black eye?"

"It was, uh, the last week of classes I think?" She held up her hands and started counting off fingers, looking up as though trying to remember something as she did. "Okay, last day of classes was Friday the twelfth, so… May eleventh? Yeah, the eleventh. And he'd missed the Tuesday and Wednesday too."

"And how much did St. John tell you of what happened to give him his injuries?" I asked.

"Objection!" Young yelled, rising to his feet with a stomp. "Your Honor, this is the clearest example of hearsay I've ever heard!"

"A moment of the court's indulgence, your Honor," I said in response, and walked back towards my table. Matt, sharp as ever, held out the two packets I'd signaled him to have ready for me. I took them from him, and went across the aisle to the prosecutor's table. "Let the record reflect that I am handing a copy of a document to opposing counsel," I said, then walked back into the well. "Permission to approach the bench, your Honor?"

"Granted. Both of you, up here for a sidebar," Judge Andrews said as he took the pocket brief from my hands, putting on his reading glasses with his other hand. "Ms. Schaefer, what am I looking at here?"

"Controlling precedent on this matter," I said, even as Lou Young stood up from counsel's table and joined as at the bench. "The decision in Richards v. Doom earlier this year, on May 28."

If I hadn't been so busy, then maybe I would have noticed this case when the decision was handed down, as opposed to learning about it when Sam Lieberman let me set fifteen first- and second-year associates on finding me some way to get St. John's side of the story onto the record. Fifty-five pro bono hours per attorney, and a second round of associates later, we finally had our answer—and we only thought to look at such a recent decision because one associate liked to read all of his newspapers for the week all at once on Friday afternoons.

Reed Richards v. Victor Werner von Doom, 962 A.D. 987 (1st Dep't 1989). Wherein the judge ruled that the description of an event where metahuman powers were used, spoken by the person who used those powers, was admissible as an exception to the rule against hearsay.

The particulars of the case were, in my opinion, utterly hilarious. For reasons that I was not aware of, Victor von Doom was the godfather to the Richards' daughter Valeria, and part of the agreement under which he was named godfather allowed for him to take temporary custody of Valeria several times a year. Mister Fantastic, for reasons that I could only begin to fathom, ranted and raved about past attempts to have this custody agreement and von Doom's status as godfather revoked, including multiple incidents in which he had used his powers to perform, if I was to be generous, stalking. All of this, he said in front of his daughter Valeria.

Valeria, in a display that proved her to be the most precocious two-year-old since the Richards' first child, repeated the entirety of Reed's rant back to Dr. Doom, verbatim. And then, at von Doom's prompting, she did it again, only this time she was on video.

Victor von Doom filed a restraining order against Reed Richards, and von Doom's attorneys submitted the video as evidence. At trial level, the judge ruled that due to the description of times in which he had used his superpowers, something which only Reed would be reasonably qualified to comment on, his rant (as repeated by Valeria and videotaped by Doom) was admissible as part of an existing exception to the rule against hearsay. Specifically, they slid in under the "statement by party opponent" exception.

Now, normally the "party opponent" bit would mean that this didn't apply to my case. However, the judge that wrote the opinion was a canny fellow.

"As you can see, your Honor, the opinion states that so long as the testimony contains information regarding the actual use of metahuman powers, and those statements came from the user, they may be offered regardless of whether the offeror is actually an adverse party," I said, making sure to speak clearly so the stenographer could hear.

"This is ridiculous," Lou Young said with a huff. "The party opponent exception clearly states—"

"That's enough Lou," Judge Andrews said, raising a hand. He took off his reading glasses and slid the pocket brief to the side. "Ms. Schaefer, I want to make this absolutely clear: I am in grave disagreement with the opinion in the brief you've presented. I believe it twists the party opponent exception into knots, all based on a case that wouldn't have required doing so in the first place, and stands as nothing less than judicial activism. But regardless of my opinion on the matter, if nothing else is sacred in a court of law, then stare decisis is. Your witness can offer the defendant's statements to her as testimony, but only those statements discussing the instances in which he used his mutant powers. Am I clear?"

"Your Honor," I started, "it would be highly prejudicial for the jury to not hear the context surrounding the instances of—"

"I do not care about the context," Judge Andrews cut me off with a small wave of his hand.. "All that you are allowed to solicit is a secondhand account of the defendant describing the exact instant in which he used his powers. Even a stray 'and', 'or', or 'but' beyond that will be stricken. Now I ask again: Am I clear?"

"Crystal," I replied frostily, and stalked back towards the witness stand, turning this over in my head. The decision in Richards v. Doom was meant to allow testimony regarding the entire event, as opposed to isolating the moments in which a meta used their power. This was specifically because you couldn't expect a jury to understand why the person used their powers that way without the context behind it.

Cabining the ruling like this was meant to be outside of Judge Andrews' purview, and just one more thing to bring up on appeal. He had to have known this, though, which left two options: one, he just wanted a 'tough on mutant crime' verdict ahead of campaign season; two, he was making a stand against judicial activism an ironic part of his reelection platform.

Regardless of which of these it was, though? If I'd had any doubts that he didn't care if this case was overturned on appeal, then they were gone. I was absolutely sure of it now.

There were many questions I'd wanted to ask Katherine. What did John tell you about how he ended up in that Alleyway? Who did John say started things?

I needed to press against the boundaries here.

"Katherine," I started. "What did John say happened in that alleyway that made him use his powers?"

"Objection," Lou Young said, standing immediately. "Per your Honor's ruling, counsel for the defense is only allowed to ask questions about the actual use of the defendant's mutant powers, not the events leading up to it."

"Your Honor—"

"Save it, Ms. Schaefer," Judge Andrews said, his voice harsh. "You heard my ruling during sidebar, and immediately tried to get around it. The question is stricken from the record, and the jury shall disregard. Try to sidestep my ruling again, and you will find yourself in contempt of court."

Shit.

I chewed at the inside of my cheek to stop from saying something I would regret, and fumed internally at this. Without the context, I would have to get short, sweet, and pithy. Just the absolute basics of the situation.

Fact one: pictures of the alleyway showed an almost straight line, where St. John restrained the fire from ever going past him. Fact two: none of the four thugs had any burn wounds. And fact three: the elements of the crime required that St. John had to actually attack them with a deadly weapon – in this case, his powers.

"My apologies about that, Katherine," I told her, trying my best to offer her a genial smile, despite the frustration I was feeling. "Given what Judge Andrews said, let me revise the last question I asked you: how much did John tell you about how he used his powers in that alleyway? Just how he used them," I clarified. "Not the why, just the how."

"John told me everything that happened," Katherine said, her voice hesitant as she flicked her gaze back up to the judge in the middle of what she was saying. Mercifully, Judge Andrews was silent on this, but he stared straight at her with laserlike focus.

"Okay then," I said, positioning myself at the front of the jury box. "How did St. John use his powers to protect himself in that alleyway?"

"John said he grabbed the fire out of the cigarette one of the thugs had in his mouth," Katherine said, making a slight grasping motion just in front of her mouth. "He told me he took that and just, made this big ol' wall of fire on either side of him and back behind him." She gestured with her arms in a semicircle above her. "Like a porcupine, almost. Just, well, burny instead of pointy. Or uh, maybe like, you know how cats puff up when they get scared? Kind of like that, but… uh, yeah. Burny."

Fact one: the fire was next to and behind St. John. On the record.

"And what about on the offense?" I asked her. My final question. "How did St. John use his powers against his four attackers?"

"I just said he made himself big and burny," Katherine said, frowning. "But um, other than that?" She shook her head. "John told me he just held the fire around himself until they all turned and ran, and that's it. No fireballs, no flamethrowers, nada. He just puffed up and put it out once he was alone again."

"No fireballs, no flamethrowers," I repeated, glancing sideways at the jury for just a moment before returning my gaze to my witness, and offering her a smile. "Thank you very much for agreeing to testify today, Katherine."

And then, I turned and headed towards counsel's table.

"Your witness," I told Lou, just before I sat down.

Lou Young made a big show of loudly sighing as he stood, taking the time to push his chair in and button up his jacket with excruciating slowness. I recognized buying time when I saw it – he was either thinking over his options, or just putting on a show to make me think he was.

And to be frank, I wasn't sure which of those two possibilities this was, so if it was the latter, it was working.

"Permission to enter the well, your Honor?" Lou asked.

"Permission granted," Judge Andrews said, and Lou immediately took position smack dab in the center of the well. A bit of an odd choice, in my opinion; if it were me, I would have positioned myself so the jury looked towards defense counsel's table, but couldn't see past me to see St. John.

"Ms. Pryde," Lou began. "You were not actually in the alleyway that day, were you?"

"Well gee, what gave you that idea?" Katherine said as she leaned back in the witness's chair and crossed her arms over her chest.

"I will need a yes or no answer, Miss Pryde," Lou Young said, never losing that greasy not-smile from his face.

"Then no, I wasn't," Katherine said, frowning.

"And your only knowledge of what happened there is the days-old account of somebody who had recently received medical attention for a head wound," the DA added, to which I frowned.

"And?" Katherine asked back. "I trust him."

"Regardless of whether you trust him, you'd agree that you have no way of knowing whether or not the defendant's account of what happened in the alleyway is accurate, correct?" Lou asked.

"Oh, just like you didn't know if your thug was lying to your face?" Katherine asked, all smiles all of a sudden. I had to clench my jaw hard to not smile at that one.

"Your Honor," Lou Young said to the judge, who leaned over from the bench to stare at Katherine.

"Ms. Pryde," Judge Andrews said, "while you have been given some leeway so far due to your age, I do not tolerate sass in my courtroom, young lady. Now, the District Attorney has asked you a simple yes-or-no question, and I expect you to answer him with either a yes or a no. Do you understand me, Ms. Pryde?"

The smile on Katherine's face faded when the judge began speaking to her, and the color faded further from her expression the longer Judge Andrews spoke. At the end, all that Katherine could do was nod, her skin ashen and shoulders ever-so-slightly shaking.

"Objection," I said, rising to my feet. "Badgering the witness."

"Overruled," Judge Andrews said. "Now, Ms. Pryde. Do you have any way of knowing whether or not what the defendant told you of the events in the alleyway are accurate, or not?"

"N-no," she said, unable to meet Judge Andrews' gaze. I wanted to say something, object, give Katherine a little breathing room here… but there was nothing I could say or do at this time.

"Then for all we know, you could have been repeating lies, correct?" Lou Young asked as a follow-up, stalking closer to the witness stand as he did.

"Objection!" I yelled out, still standing from my last one. "I think the DA can put two and two together and understand that his most recent question has been asked and answered already, your Honor."

"Your Honor, there is a difference between—"

"Sustained," Judge Andrews interrupted. "Ask a different question, District Attorney."

"Well, in that case," Lou Young said, turning away from Katherine. "Nothing further for this witness."

The DA strutted back to his table, pulled out his chair, and sat down, all the while looking like the cat that got the canary.

I stood from my chair.

"Nothing further for this witness, your Honor," I said. "The defense rests."

"Very well," Judge Andrews said. "Ms. Pryde, you are excused. Bailiff?"

The bailiff came up and helped Katherine down from the witness stand before escorting her back into the gallery. The courtroom was abuzz with murmurs, and a brief glance at the jury showed many a disappointed frown directed at the District Attorney.

"What are you hearing?" I asked Matt.

"He lost two jurors," Matt murmured back. "One commented about being glad her daughter wasn't forced to deal with Young. Another juror muttered something about the DA forgetting who was on trial."

Okay. That would be the parents, then. There were five parents on the jury, and three of them were going to be iffy. Well, only one of them now, hopefully.

"As both sides have concluded with their respective cases-in-chief," Judge Andrews began, "then unless there are any further matters to attend to, we shall proceed to closing arguments."

"Your Honor," Lou Young said, standing from his seat. "As the defense has opened the door to character evidence with Miss Pryde's testimony, the prosecution requests that we adjourn until Monday afternoon to allow a chance to prepare and call a rebuttal witness."

"If you can find a rebuttal witness," Judge Andrews said, "then I will expect to see a fax to my chambers when I arrive at 8am Monday morning. In the event that you do not find one, court shall resume at 9am this coming Monday with closing arguments. Should you manage to find one, the defense shall be notified as soon as I am, and we will meet in my chambers to determine when they shall be heard."

Translation: just like I did, Judge Andrews knew that there wasn't a snowball's chance in hell of Lou finding a rebuttal witness. This was nothing more than a play for time to draft his closing arguments.

And what was worse, I couldn't realistically object to this one. I had introduced character evidence first; therefore, he was allowed to offer his own.

That said, the fact that he wasn't immediately calling the witness or providing their name was proof enough that such a witness didn't exist.

"Court is adjourned."

Judge Andrews brought the gavel down, and the timer in my head started counting down.

"What now?" St. John asked, having to raise his voice a little to be heard over the movement in the gallery.

"Now, I get ready to knock the jury's socks off with my closing argument," I said with a smile that I didn't really feel. "Matthew, on the other hand, needs to get ready for a long, boring weekend of being my sounding board."

"It's bearable with a bucket of popcorn," he said. "So long as you ignore the pacing."

I offered only a disdainful sniff in response.

"And me?" St. John asked again. "What do I do?"

"You pray," I told St. John frankly, turning to look him in the eye. "You pray for your god to make those jurors ignore the DA's agenda of fearmongering and scare tactics. You pray that they listen to reason. You pray, and hope, because once the jurors go into deliberations, that's all we can do, so you'd best get started now. And Matthew should pray too," I added. "The more voices, the better."

"What about you?" St. John asked, fright and confusion warring in his eyes. "You're gonna be praying too, right?"

I shook my head.

"I'm Jewish," I said, fingering the small Star of David pendant around my neck, the only jewelry I wore on a daily basis. "If you've read the Old Testament, the Torah, you'll know that elohim is a wrathful sort. And I think that right now, we could all do with a little bit of mercy."

"Amen," Matt said, hands clasped around the handle of his cane. "Amen."

---

Sure enough, Monday came, and there was no rebuttal witness in sight. Of course there wasn't. The rebuttal witness never existed in the first place, and all of us knew that.

But what that request gave me was the opportunity to prepare both my closing argument and a pair of contingency plans. Just in case the jury collectively decided to shove their heads up each other's asses.

We seated ourselves in the courtroom early, the gallery filling up around us with the droning hum of a dozen hushed conversations. The media had set itself up in the gallery and along the left wall of the courtroom, reporters and cameramen ready and waiting to capture closing arguments in what was sure to be a landmark case. I could also see one man at the corner of the press area with what looked to be a Latverian flag patch on his sleeve – it would seem citing That One Case attracted some attention. Time would tell if that was good or bad, to be sure, but it wasn't important right now.

If there was one thing I could say for Judge Andrews, it was that he ran his courtroom in a timely manner. The moment the clock struck nine, I heard the curtain behind the bench part, and the bailiff stood.

"All rise," he intoned, and the lot of us took to our feet in accordance with his will. "Presiding, the Honorable Philip Andrews."

Judge Andrews took his seat, scanned the gallery, and lingered for a moment on the press. A frown crossed his face, just as it had all the other days he saw them, as he used no words to let the media know just what he thought of their collective presence within his courtroom.

"You may be seated," he said, and everybody took their seats. "District Attorney Young, you requested the opportunity to call a rebuttal witness in response to defense counsel's use of character evidence. Do you have a witness to call at this time?"

"We do not, your Honor," Lou Young said, his voice seeming apologetic, but I knew an act when I see one. "The prosecution apologizes for delaying the proceedings of this court."

The heavy wooden door at the back of the courtroom creaked loudly as it opened, and from what I was hearing, the person opening it was trying to just barely make an opening large enough to squeeze through before slipping in. I could only frown; that was poor etiquette at the best of times, and downright insulting at the worst.

Sure enough, Judge Andrews flicked his eyes towards whoever was probably slipping inside, but looked back to DA Young a moment later.

"Very well," the judge said.

Interestingly, he then proceeded to make a big show of shuffling some papers on his desk, flipping a legal pad and pulling a pen out of the holder on the left side of the bench. The door creaked closed as he did this, and I wagered he was just waiting so he didn't have to try and talk over the door.

"At this time, would the prosecution like to—Officer!" Judge Andrews yelled, slamming his palm on the bench suddenly. "Officer!"

The gavel soon joined it, and everybody in the courtroom looked directly to the front.

"Drop it!" Judge Andrews ordered. A moment passed, and he spoke again. "Put it out! Now!"

A loud stomp echoed through the courtroom, followed by the sound of rubber squeaking on the wooden floor. A tap on my shoulder turned my attention towards Matt, who had a hand over the side of his face closest to the judge and was mouthing a word at me.

'Cigarette'.

Oh, no.

"Bailiff!" Judge Andrews roared, slamming his gavel down hard enough I thought it would crack. "Bring that man to me!"

The bailiff stalked forth from the well of the court and strode with purpose to the back of the gallery. Mere moments later, he was frogmarching a young police officer, early twenties at best, up to the front of the courtroom. The bailiff brought him past the bar of the court, and he stood in the well, his hands shaking, and what little of his face I could see was pale and tense.

"State your name, Officer," Judge Andrews commanded.

"M-Malcolm Reynolds, s-sir," the young man said.

"Mister Reynolds," Judge Andrews started, putting particular emphasis on his choice of title. "Do you know how to read?"

"S-sir?" Reynolds said.

"There was a sign," the judge said, "on the door to the courtroom. It read: 'no smoking within the courtroom'. And if you had a working pair of eyes, a functioning brain, or even bothered to listen to the court sergeant for fifteen seconds, then you would know why that is."

The bailiff walked towards the bench and handed Judge Andrews an object, which he held up between two fingers for all to see.

"You brought a lit cigarette," he said, holding the now-extinguished article, "into the only courtroom in the entire country where that was tantamount to handing the accused a loaded gun. You endangered the lives of every single person in this courtroom because you didn't use the most basic level of care a man in your profession must exercise."

Judge Andrews leaned down over the bench, staring at the officer like the man was a turd on the bottom of his boot.

"I hereby find you in contempt of court. Another officer will escort you to turn in your badge and gun. You won't be keeping this job with a criminal charge on your record."

The judge gestured to the back of the courtroom, and one of the officers posted along the wall came forward to take the now-former officer Reynolds away to his fate. The man was dead silent as the officer escorted him away, dragging his feet like a man to the gallows.

When the heavy oaken door slammed shut behind the officer and his contemptible charge, naught but silence reigned in the courtroom.

That was, until I stood, my heels clicking on the courtroom floor.

"Your Honor," I said, doing my best to control my voice. "The defense moves for an immediate mistrial."

"Denied," Judge Andrews said, not even missing a beat.

I blinked. He… denied it? He denied the clearest example of a mistrial that ever should have existed?

"Your Honor—"

"What I told you in Chambers last week still applies, Counsel," Judge Andrews said. "There was no mistrial then, and there shall be no mistrial today."

I looked towards the jury, most of whom sat there with expressions of disgust, shock, and anger on their faces. Two seemed somehow unfazed, one sat with a scowl, and the man I desperately hoped was not the jury foreman had this oddly satisfied expression.

Some directed these looks towards the back of the courtroom, where the now-former officer had been escorted out, but much of it was pointed squarely at the source of the possible danger.

And in their minds, that threat sat at my table.

"But your Honor—"

"That is enough, Ms. Schaefer," Judge Andrews said. "I have already found one person in contempt of court. I have no trouble doing so again."

I sat down in my chair. What more choice did I have?

"Strike everything from the prosecution apologizing for not having a witness until now," Judge Andrews said, turning to the court stenographer. "We are starting fresh."

Even as the stenographer crossed every one of those incriminating lines out, I wrote down as good of a shorthand of the exchange as I could remember. I added the time, the name of the officer found in contempt, and what all happened.

I wanted to object to having that stricken from the record. But with the warning – with the threat I'd been given, I couldn't risk it.

"Now." Judge Andrews surveyed the courtroom, eyes glaring holes into everybody present. "I am ordering a brief recess to allow us to calm ourselves. We will reconvene in one hour."

The gavel came down. A crack of wood resounded, and the head fell to the floor, bouncing several times before stopping.

"And in the meantime," Judge Andrews said, only audible because nobody had dared move yet. "I shall acquire a new gavel."

---

Spoiler: A/N

First off, let me apologize for how long it took to get this chapter out the door. This past month or so has been annoyingly busy, largely with family. And let me tell you: dealing with family is tedious, tiring, and often emotionally exhausting. Particularly that last one, this past week especially.

And all of that on top of a painful job hunt that continuously bombards me with... well. "Hey, here's all these amazing job openings... that you can't apply to yet, because you don't have the necessary experience or license! What? We posted this as entry-level? Too bad!"

Ugh. At least bar exam results are likely to arrive on October 29, so... fingers crossed.

Anyway, we have one more chapter to go in this arc. After that, we'll have... two or three sort of cooling-down chapters before we dive into the next arc, which will include the next stage of the HYDRA plot thread laid down in chapter 1.

Lastly, I'd like to take the time to post yet another link to my Ko-fi page. If you liked what you read, and want to help this poor schmuck pay the bills and keep the yenta away while hunting for jobs, then I'd greatly appreciate it.

And now properly lastly, because I'm a lying liar who lies, the poll for which omake people wanted has concluded! The winners are:

1) What put Noa on the front page of the Bugle the first time? (this will be posted during the next arc, as I feel it will have more impact if it comes right before a John Jonah Jameson scene.

2) The QQ exclusive. We shall stop there.

2) Magneto the Mint Chip Bandit. (oh, this will be fun!)

Anyway, that's all I've got for you today. Hope you enjoy!

 

[Miho Chan]

stop, rule 4

*Confused foreigner noises* The heck is that?

FTFY

Click to shrink...

Just correcting them and anyone who will read the thread later. And the other thread was closed

Click to shrink...

Continuing a Derail and being generally disruptive is against the rules of Sufficient Velocity. User Mordimera has been infracted and thread banned for 3 days.

 

[October Daye]

Pound the Table
Chapter Twelve

Spoiler: A/N re: Brief Content Warning

The following chapter contains a realistic depiction of the onset of a panic attack – or at least, how I experience them – near the tail end of the third scene. This is simply to act as a warning for those who may be sensitive to such depictions.

---

I made three phone calls during the brief recess.

The first, I made to the secretary I shared with two other associates at the firm. She assured me that yes, she was recording the trial, and was already in the process of getting someone else to make a copy of the VHS tape.

My second call was to Sam Lieberman. It was approximately ten minutes of cursing, yelling, muttered planning, and insults to Judge Andrews' character that I wouldn't want to repeat within a one mile radius of the man. But what it boiled down to was that Sam was busy calling allies and soliciting amicus briefs for the appeal that we would hopefully never need to file.

And the third call… was the one I didn't want to make.

But I was not about to take a risk.

Time waited for no-one, however, and we were all back in the courtroom before long. The show must go on, so sayeth the judge.

"Ladies and gentlemen of the jury."

And it recommenced with Lou Young posturing before the jury, an unlit cigarette once again standing in for a baton. Three members of the jury had their eyes glued to the cigarette, at which I suppressed a scowl only by gripping harder on the pen in my hand.

"You've seen our evidence. You've seen the defense's excuses. All of that, all of this information, comes together to make a clear picture, clear as day."

I failed to see how anything came together to make a clear picture in this case, but that statement alone gave me a good idea of how he wanted to approach this.

"Four young Brooklyn men saw something. They saw something that couldn't, shouldn't be allowed to stand. They took actions to make sure that it didn't happen, to repair the harm done, and they paid the price for it. Mr. Samuelson, a young man with the rest of his life ahead of him, is a cripple. He is maimed, lamed, and left limping until the end of his days. Why, I'm no spring chicken, and I could run circles around him now."

Lou Young stepped closer to the jury here, free hand cupping his elbow as he pointed at the jurors with the end of his cigarette.

"The other three may seem to have come out of it unscathed. But talk to any soldier, any police officer, anybody who has ever been under the gun. They did not walk away scott free. For the rest of their lives, they are going to look at people on the street and wonder. 'Am I safe?', they're going to ask. 'Is that person a threat to me?', they will think, looking at Jane Doe and John Q Public.

"Because that is the crux of the issue here," Lou Young said, gesturing widely now. "Ladies and gentlemen, you are here today because we are afraid. We are afraid that just walking down the street is a risk, and that the right expensive suit or silver-tongued vixen will have everyone around us saying it's our own fault."

This time, I didn't bother suppressing the frown. An attorney's or firm's motivation for taking a case pro bono was generally off limits in closing arguments, just by virtue of it being a bit of a cheap shot. Yes, a sufficiently expensive team of lawyers could get most anybody off of charges, if given sufficient time and litigation. But this was not one of those cases.

And if he wanted to open the door to talking about motivation, I thought as I hastily scribbled something in the margins of my planned closing, then he was going to regret it.

"But that's why you, members of the jury, are here. You are the last line of defense between order and chaos, between the rule of law and letting our streets devolve into anarchy!" Lou was pushing towards the hyperbolic, if I was going to be honest, but at this point I was fairly certain he'd stopped bothering to give a closing argument and had transitioned into something else entirely. "You are here today to offer a deterrent, to give people like us some teeth against this threat. It all comes down to your choice.

"Soon, ladies and gentlemen, you will deliberate. And there, you will be asked to answer two questions. One: did the defendant commit the crime of which he was accused?" Lou paced backwards, turning his back towards the jury for a moment. "This is the easy question. This is the obvious question. This is the only question that you will actually be asked. But!" He turned now, holding his unlit cigarette aloft. "There is a second question. An unwritten question, one which has been hovering over this entire trial. And that question is simply: 'where do we draw the line between the normal and the extraordinary'?"

Attorneys are not supposed to object during closing arguments. There are very few exceptions to this, and unfortunately for me, while Lou Young had gotten incredibly close to the line… he hadn't said the magic pair of words.

And I had no doubts that unless the words 'jury nullification' left the DA's mouth, I'd be charged with contempt of court before I finished standing up straight.

"I have done what I can as your District Attorney, but finishing this fight isn't in my hands. It is in yours. This is your charge, members of the jury: to protect the fair city of New York, and with it, the rest of the country. I have every confidence you will do what must be done."

Lou Young bowed to the jury, then went back to his seat at counsel's table.

As far as closing arguments went… well. The jury would be hearing my opinion of this very shortly.

"Permission to approach the jury?" I asked Judge Andrews.

"Permission granted," he said.

I left my notes and prepared statements at my desk. I'd practiced this enough times over the weekend, and even with adjustments resulting from the prosecution's closing argument, I wasn't worried about stumbling over my words.

"Before anything else." I turned to the prosecution's table and offered Lou Young a soft, slow golf clap. "Bravo, District Attorney, on a riveting campaign speech. There are two problems though," I continued. "One, campaign season is three weeks away. And secondly?

"Sir, this is a court of law."

I waved him off, and turned back to the jury.

"Whatever grandiose statements, empty smiles, and false promises the District Attorney wants to offer to you, he can wait a few more weeks. Because this is not the podium outside of city hall, ladies and gentlemen of the jury. This is the New York City Supreme Court. And the only currency worth any good here is cold, hard, facts. So let's go over them, shall we?"

I brought up my hands and began to count off, starting with my right index finger.

"One: St. John Allerdyce has put forth an argument that he was merely defending himself. In a self-defense argument, a person has to not be the aggressor, and they have a duty to retreat. This means they can't throw the first punch, and they have to run away if possible. Per the testimony of Micah Samuelson, he and his cohort chased down and caught St. John.

"Fact two." The middle finger joined it. "Micah Samuelson struck St. John Allerdyce on the far left side of his forehead with a glass bottle. The tiniest bit in the other direction, and St. John would have been dead. You have seen the glass bottle that did this, the bloodstains on it, and Mr. Samuelson's fingerprints on its neck.

"Fact three." I raised my ring finger, and stepped closer to the jury. "Despite being a mutant with the ability to control fire, and despite using that fire to defend himself, St. John inflicted absolutely zero injuries on any of his assailants. None of them had any burns, and the one incidence of 'burnt clothing'? Well, there's good reason to believe that it was torched after the fact. Was it to save face? To provide an excuse?" I shrugged. "Whatever the reason, it does not matter. The only important thing is that it's pretty impossible to conclusively say that St. John burnt those shorts. That is to say, there is reasonable doubt about how they were burnt.

"Fact four." I waggled my fingers a bit, drawing attention to just how much I was putting on the table. "The only injury the supposed 'victims' suffered in this whole debacle, and the only one you may consider in light of the charges, is the broken leg suffered by Mr. Samuelson. A broken leg he suffered fifty feet away from St. John Allerdyce, resulting from his own inability to pay attention to where he was going. And while I sympathize with his disability, it is important to remember that he was ultimately responsible for his own condition.

"Ladies and gentlemen, these are the facts," I said, showing them my hand. "That is it. This is all that matters. Your job here is to answer one question: Is St. John Allerdyce guilty, or not?"

I sighed, and shot a dirty glance at DA Young. While I absolutely meant everything I felt in that glare, it was performative. Nothing more.

"The burden of proof in a case like this is what's known as 'beyond a reasonable doubt'. Essentially, this means that in order to convict, you need to be about as certain about this as you could ever expect yourself to be. There is no room for waffling here. This is not a 'probably', or a 'maybe', or a 'most likely'. This is an 'I am as certain as I realistically can be'. Ladies and gentlemen, this is an incredibly high bar. Ask yourselves: did the prosecution meet this bar?"

I waved the four fingers again.

"Their own witness admitted to starting the altercation, and took the Fifth Amendment rather than lie under oath. The police investigator responsible for this case did not find the bottle with St. John's blood on it because he didn't even bother to look. None of the prosecution's witnesses can definitively lay any injuries that occurred at St. John's feet, not even those of their star witness. Who, again, had no choice but to invoke his right to remain silent rather than commit perjury.

"Keeping this in mind, I ask you again." I stepped towards the jury once more. "Is St. John Allerdyce guilty? By this point, it should be clear that the answer is no. Not in a million years."

With my piece said, I headed back to my seat after offering a small bow to the jury.

It was in their hands now.

---

"S-so how long does this part usually take, anyway?" St. John asked, fidgeting in his chair, one hand tugging at the tie around his neck.

The jury had only been in deliberations for an hour and a half so far, and it was clear that the Allerdyce's were all feeling the anxiety. The consistent pacing and twitching, the whispered half-conversation that I wasn't supposed to be able to hear, the pallor of their complexions… with the end so close, the stress was getting to them.

I'd seen dozens of other clients in this position before.

But none quite so young as St. John, or in such dire of straits.

"I'm sure you're getting sick of hearing me offer this particular answer," I started, poking at the salad in front of me with my fork, "but that depends. I've had jury deliberations that lasted thirty minutes, and had another that lasted two full weeks. It generally comes down to two things." I reached into my briefcase to fish out a notepad and a pen, turned the notepad sideways, and drew two columns. "The first one is how complicated the facts are. You have relatively simple things like X punched Y, A hit B with his car, that sort of thing. Then there's the kind of fact patterns that need experts to come in and testify, such as in medical malpractice cases."

"Or like on Thursday and Friday for us?" St. John asked.

"Exactly," I said. "Now, the other half of this is the specific thing the jury needs to decide. In criminal law, this is the elements of the crime. These are the conditions: if X action meets conditions A, B, and C, then it is crime Y. Think about it this way: if the facts are the images on a puzzle piece, the elements are the pieces themselves. If the pieces don't fit together, it doesn't matter how pretty the image they make is."

"So then which one is this?" Linda Allerdyce asked, from the other end of the conference table. The slice of pizza in front of her had gone completely untouched, and I noticed that Jonathan's had managed to find its way onto St. John's paper plate instead. "How long do you think this one will take?"

"In my professional opinion… well actually," I paused. "Matthew, what is your take on this case and its relative complexity?"

Matt froze, the tip of his second pizza slice just bare moments from entering his mouth. He seemed to me to pause for a moment before setting it down, and took the napkin he'd tucked into the collar of his shirt to clean his fingers.

"Ah, well…" Matt took his time, probably to think things through. "I mean, I don't know. I think it's going to depend on the jurors themselves, really."

"What Matthew is getting at," I said, taking over now that he'd (thankfully) gotten to the point I was trying to make, "is that it's not always a matter of the facts and the elements meshing or not. Sometimes, it's purely on the people of the jury. Most laws tend to use a hypothetical 'reasonable person', who always makes the right decision."

I frowned, and stabbed a crouton with my fork.

"The problem is that there's no such thing as a 'reasonable person'. They don't exist. What we have instead are people, and people come with biases, preconceptions, and beliefs that we can't change. This is a particularly large issue when your defendant is a foreigner, non-white, gay… etcetera."

"Or a mutant," Jonathan Allerdyce said, glumly.

I sighed, and felt the deep burning of shame for a moment. I could have shared that I was a mutant with them. It would probably have cost me nothing. The odds of them sharing my secret was slim to none. But…

But I was afraid. Of what might happen if that got out. Of what might happen to my career – of what might happen to me.

Was it cowardly? Maybe. Heck, it probably was. But I didn't care. I was entitled to a little bit of selfishness.

That didn't stop the feelings, though.

"Or that," I agreed. "Regardless—"

A knock on the door interrupted my line of thought, and I frowned. What interrupted me, and I couldn't help but frown. If that was the DA coming in to offer a plea deal with anything other than maybe a token slap on the wrist, I was going to throw a fit.

"Yes?" I asked. "What is it?"

The door opened, and one of the court police officers peeked his head inside.

"Judge Andrews sent for you," he said. "Says the jury came back with a verdict."

The breath caught in my throat. Already? The jury had a verdict so quickly? In a case like this?

They hadn't even been out two hours!

"Let the judge know we'll be there shortly," I replied. The police officer closed the door, and I turned to look at the others in the conference room with me.

All three Allerdyces had gone white as sheets, with St. John even dropping the last half-eaten slice of pizza onto his plate from suddenly-numb fingers. His parents converged on him, identical expressions of terror on their faces, and it was for them that I tried my hardest to keep my own expression as calm as possible.

"W-what does that mean?" Jonathan asked. "That they're d-done so soon, I mean. Is t-that good?"

"It means that they saw very little to talk about," I said, closing the styrofoam container with what was left of my salad before I took a makeup compact out of my briefcase, to make sure I didn't need to touch anything up before appearing in public again. "Take a couple minutes if you need it. I'm sure the judge will understand."

The Allerdyces nodded, and retreated behind the divider St. John used to change in as much privacy as he was afforded by the criminal justice system. I stood near the door, where Matt joined me after a moment.

"You sound nervous," he murmured, quieter than a whisper, barely audible even to my hearing. "Your heartbeat went a little wild."

"I'm concerned," I told him, being honest but careful. "This is the part mock trial doesn't show you, Matthew. Juries don't tend to take so little time unless all of them are brought onto the same page really quickly. And given the jury foreman is probably against us?"

"Right." Matt tapped the ground with his cane. "So what, then?"

"We hope," I replied, drumming my fingers on the inside of my briefcase's handle. "And if that's not enough, we move to plan B."

---

"Has the jury elected a foreperson?" Judge Andrews asked.

Contrary to popular belief, the jury foreperson is not always obvious to anybody in the courtroom, and doesn't necessarily have to stay static. In general, the foreperson will simply default to whoever led the discussions during deliberations, and took on a leadership role in the process.

To translate: it was usually whoever talked over everybody else in the room.

"We have, your Honor." Juror number ten, one of the two finance workers from the very first pool for voir-dire, stood up. I bit back a curse; he had been one of the people I'd worried over from the very beginning, and for him to have been the loudest voice in the room…

I kept the motion I'd prepared underneath my notepad on the table, and hoped I wouldn't have to file it.

"And has the jury reached a verdict as to each of the charges?"

"We have," Juror Ten said to Judge Andrews' follow-up question, and produced a set of papers from a manila folder.

"Bailiff?"

At Judge Andrews' request, the bailiff approached Juror Ten and took the papers from him, before depositing them on the judge's bench. Andrews took his time going through the pages, flipping through them with his left hand (and licking his fingers to help pick up each page… I hated that habit) as he took some small notes with a pen in his right. This went on for only a couple of minutes.

But when the entire courtroom was dead silent, despite being packed to the gills?

Those two minutes threatened to stretch into eternity.

"Very well." Judge Andrews' voice broke the silence. "The defendant will rise and face the jury as it delivers its verdict."

Much as I wanted to stand in solidarity with St. John, only three people in the well of the court had permission to do so: the bailiff, the clerk of court, and the defendant. St. John looked back over his shoulder to his parents, hands shaking where they sat clasped on the table. I put my hand over St. John's for a moment to draw his attention, whereupon I signaled him with a slight nod.

St. John stood, and faced the jury.

The bailiff moved to stand just to the side of and behind St. John.

Lastly, beside Judge Andrews, the clerk of court stood, and Judge Andrews passed him the verdict paperwork.

"In the case of The People of the State of New York v. St. John Allerdyce, as to the first count, Assault in the Second Degree against James Boothe, we the jury find the defendant, St. John Allerdyce... Not Guilty."

St. John almost collapsed back into his seat, had both Matt and the bailiff not each reached out to hold him upright. All three Allerdyces gave muffled sobs of relief.

"As to the second count," the clerk of court continued, "Assault in the Second Degree against Theodore Nielson, we the jury find the defendant, St. John Allerdyce... Not Guilty. As to the third count, Assault in the Second Degree against Patrick MacEahern, we the jury find the defendant, St. John Allerdyce... Not Guilty."

It was very hard to keep myself looking forward, and to not turn towards my client. I knew what I would see when I looked at his face. I would see hope, relief, exuberation… he was an innocent man, and he heard the jury recognizing that.

I did not share in their exultation, though. The essential element for assault in the second, an injury suffered by the victims, had simply not been present. The jury instructions had been clear: no injury, no charge.

The same could not be said for the last 'victim'.

So no, I did not allow myself to hope.

Instead, I merely slid aside the notepad covering my motion paperwork, and picked it up in my hands.

"As to the fourth count, Assault in the First Degree against Micah Samuelson, we the jury find the defendant, St. John Allerdyce… Guilty."

Nobody spoke.

Nobody moved.

Nobody even breathed.

It was as though all of the air had been sucked out of the room. The clerk's proclamation hung on the air, suffocating all beneath the weight of his words.

The click of camera shutters slamming closed did not so much break the silence as punctuate it. Click-thunk-whirr, the cameras went, every second marking the passage of time as film canisters unspooled.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw St. John's legs give out. His knees never met the floor, as the bailiff bodily lifted him and laid him out halfway across the table. St. John offered no resistance to the handcuffs that encircled his wrists, nor to the pair of court police officers who came to take him away.

I took a deep breath and composed myself. This wasn't the first time a client of mine had received a guilty verdict, despite my best efforts. It was certainly the first time I felt it was truly wrong, that it was as undeserved as anything I'd ever seen… but I had stood in this position before.

And so I tuned it out.

"My baby, my baby!" Linda Allerdyce cried, her voice half-muffled at the end as she buried her face into her husband's shoulder.

I ignored it.

"St. John! St. John!" Jonathan Allerdyce called out to his son, his broken voice echoing hollow in the courtroom.

I ignored it.

To my right, Lou Young preened at this table, buffing his fingernails against the lapel of his jacket as he looked over at me, horribly-chapped lips pulled back as his smug sneer bored into the side of my head.

I ignored it.

"Let the convict be remanded to Riker's Islamd pending his sentencing hearing this Friday," Judge Andrews said, as the bailiff passed St. John to a pair of court police officers, who sneered at and jostled St. John as they removed him from the courtroom.

"Your Honor."

I took my opportunity to stand, moments before the jury could think to do so. I held the paperwork for the motions I'd be filing, the bottom of the papers draped across my right forearm, my left hand on the top to easily turn and hand it over.

"Judge Andrews, the Defense files an immediate Motion in Arrest of the Judgment!" I pitched my voice above the sudden increased volume, as people in the gallery began to stand up.

Judge Andrews held up a hand, palm facing me. The gesture was clear: 'let me finish this first'.

But I was not in the mood for this kind of stalling when the police had already taken custody.

"At this time," Judge Andrews spoke loudly into his microphone, "the Court would like to thank the jury for its service. Members of the jury, while you are under no obligation to speak to the press about this case, you are well within your rights to do so. However, whatever private goings-on happened during deliberation must remain private."

Either he hadn't heard my motion, or he'd ignored it.

"Your Honor!" I raised my voice, reaching almost to a yell. "Let the record show that the Defense files an immediate Motion in Arrest of the Judgment!"

"Wait your turn, counsel," he bit back at me before turning back to the jury. "You will be eligible for jury service again in four years," Judge Andrews continued. "But until then, thank you for your service, and enjoy your reprieve from this duty. The jury is dismissed."

"Judge Andrews!" I screamed, slamming my small stack of papers down on the table in front of me. I repeated this three times, to ensure that I couldn't simply be overlooked.

Judge Andrews turned to glare at me, and I glared back, letting my scowl play out across my face. I raised my papers another five inches off the desk, and slammed them back down.

"I will repeat. The defense files an immediate Motion in Arrest of the Judgment!"

The judge did not reply. He simply turned towards the bailiff and nodded at the man ever so slightly. The bailiff, for his part, started walking through the well to the bar of the court, eyes fixed on the doors at the back.

"Your Honor—"

I wasn't able to finish what I wanted to say, so shocked was I when the bailiff reached around me to rip my motion paperwork out of my hands, slammed it down on the table, then wrenched my arms behind my back and pulled me out from behind counsel's table.

"Wh—let go of me!" I yelled at the bailiff, straining against his grip, almost tripping over my own feet. But try as I might, I could not get him to let go – the bailiff was over a foot taller than I was, his one hand large enough to hold both of my arms together, the other pushing me forward by my shoulder and into the well of the court.

I tried to push against him, to struggle out of this manhandling—Matt looked for all the world like he wanted to help, but he couldn't – he was blind, he wasn't supposed to even be capable of knowing what was happening –

And that was when it happened. Something I've been afraid of for – for I don't know how long.

In my struggles, I ended up pushing my head back against the bailiff's chest. Which jabbed him with the points of my horns. Which were obscured by my glamour.

My flimsy, fragile glamour.

The world cast itself in sharp relief the moment my glamour shattered, the familiar crackle of sugar-glass and television static accompanied by rainbow fuzz. The bailiff yelped and leapt away from me. I stumbled forward, catching myself on counsel's table, and looked down at my hands.

Or more specifically, the bone-white scales visible on the back of my hands.

I'd known this day would come. For a very long time now, I'd mentally steeled myself for the eventuality that something would happen to expose me. That somebody would bump against me just the wrong way, that I would have to push back against something too hard, that somebody's arm or leg would catch on something that they couldn't see.

I thought I'd been ready for that, I thought as I gathered up my motion papers, and caught my hands shaking.

"Defense motions," I said, feeling suddenly breathless as I looked up at the bench, and caught sight of a wide-eyed Judge Andrews staring down at me, the color draining from his face. "Defense motions for… for an, uh…"

I took a deep breath, struck by the sudden feeling that there wasn't enough air in the room. An acrid burning sensation threatened to crawl up my gorge, and my clothes suddenly felt too tight, too hot, itchy and cloying on my skin where they had been fine mere moments before.

A sudden clamor picked up in the courtroom, but it sounded distant, far away, strangely metallic. Like I was hearing everything through a tin can. But that was silly, I thought. My hearing was better than a normal human's. Why did everything sound so funny?

Why did my voice feel so quiet?

"D-defense files a motion," I said, barely managing to form the words, holding myself up with one hand as the world lurched on its axis a little, "in arrest of, of the judgment—"

---

[Outside the Courthouse]
[John Jonah Jameson]

The verdict had had John Jonah Jameson digging his teeth into his cigar, doing his damndest not to bite straight through the wrapper. Guilty? Guilty!? Jameson had interviewed some of the finest legal minds in the state, let alone the country in preparation for tomorrow's headline! He knew a sham trial when he saw it; the only way that decision could have come from any more of a kangaroo court was if they'd been in Australia!

His current favorite attorney's response had been expected as well: cool, calm, collected, and with a contingency in her back pocket. Or her briefcase, as it were.

"So, is this anybody else's first time hearing about one of those motions?" Heads turned from all the other news trucks, gathered as they were around the portable televisions running on their various news vans' cigarette lighters, to the young new hire from CNN. The kid – what was he, fresh out of journalism school? He had the badly-shaven peach fuzz for it, Jameson thought – raised his hands in protest. "W-what? I've never heard of it!"

"A motion in arrest of the judgment," a reporter from CBS whose name Jameson had wiped from his mind after the man's third accusation of plagiarism got smoothed over and hushed up behind closed doors, fielded the answer, "is basically asking the judge to say 'so what' to the jury verdict. The judgment gets entered, but nothing happens after. No sentencing or anything."

"But it doesn't look like the judge is having any of it," another journo, this one from NBC, piped up. "Damn, is she crazy? She's interrupting the judge!"

"So?" Jameson asked, taking a puff of his cigar before pointing it at the television screen. "That's a shit judge. He honestly probably deserves it. But you, quit interrupting!" He knocked on the top of the Bugle's little tv set, injecting some fuzz into the picture for a moment. "We're watching."

And watch they did. They watched in stunned silence as the judge decided to throw his weight around, the bailiff began to manhandle the defense attorney—

And they saw as whatever had been covering her fell away, revealing her to the world as a mutant.

"Holy shit, the bitch was a—"

"Keep your opinions to yourself!" Jameson yelled, silencing anybody who would have dared speak. "You can think whatever you damn well please, but you do not get to say shit about her. You want to talk, you interview first."

He took the cigar out of his mouth, and pointed at every single reporter present in turn, one by one.

"If I hear about a single one of you making unfounded statements or baseless conjecture, or dragging that woman's name through the mud for doing what all of you would have done in the same situation?" Jameson stared pointedly at one reporter from Fox, who knew Jameson had destroyed audio of the man drunkenly proclaiming his love to his sister's husband. "Very little happens in this town without my hearing of it, mark my words."

The threat lingered on the air, drowning out any further attempt at discussion. There were no more words to be said, after all. John Jonah Jameson had put his money where his mouth was.

And nobody else was willing to do the same.

Unfortunately for all involved. This distraction from Jameson meant that all of them missed the camera feeds from inside the courtroom cutting off abruptly, one by one.

"Hey, what gives?" "Someone page Matthews, tell him to get the feed running!" "I swear if Smithers tripped over the cords again, I'll—"

"Hold up!" Another reporter pointed to the top of the courthouse steps, where a single pushed open the door to the New York Supreme Court. It was not District Attorney Louis Young. It was not Judge Philip Andrews.

No. Instead, it was another man; tall, well muscled, dressed in a suit that had gone out of fashion before Jameson had smoked his first cigar. And when he took off his trilby hat, Jameson wasn't the only one who felt his heart skip a beat… and then immediately get closer with a microphone, dictaphone, camera, or whatever recording equipment they had available.

"Forty-four years ago," the man began, looking out over the press corp's heads and to the city behind them, "I gave my everything for these people. The people of the United States. Of New York City. Of Brooklyn." He paused for breath, and sighed. "I gave it willingly, never once second-guessing if I had done the right thing. If the people I was laying down my life to protect deserved it. I had hoped to never have those thoughts.

"Which is why it is with the deepest sorrow that I say that today, I am ashamed to be a New Yorker."

Captain Steven Rogers frowned, and brought his hat to his chest. He looked down, down at the press, who held their peace in stunned silence.

And in that moment, the wrapper of Jameson's cigar finally gave up the ghost.

"For the past week, I've sat in that courthouse," Captain America said, gesturing behind him with hat in hand. "I listened as a fellow kid from Brooklyn went on trial for what was clearly a sham. I listened to the witnesses, saw the evidence, drew conclusions. And I may be working with science that's forty odd years out of date, but even I understood what I heard. There was only one real conclusion to be drawn. That boy was innocent."

Steven Rogers brought his free hand up to his face. He pinched the bridge of his nose and rubbed at his eyes, then inhaled a long, shaky breath.

"I fought against the Nazis," Captain America continued. "Against people who would slaughter and crush and wipe out simply because somebody was other. I fought them because the world deserved better — because we deserved better."

The long, mournful horn of a prison van pierced the odd quiet as it pulled out from the parking lot beneath the courthouse. The corrections department van, bound for Riker's, that Jameson would bet a case of cigars had the Allerdyce boy.

"That truck is carrying an innocent kid to hell, for the crime of being born different," Rogers said, pointing at the van. "If that's what I can come to expect, if that's the new normal? Then I wish I'd stayed in the ice, because the America where this is the standard is not the country I was willing to die to protect."

"Well said, Captain Rogers!"

The voice seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, echoing off of both the steps below them and the buildings around. Jameson looked up, used to this kind of reverberation, and found what he was looking for atop the courthouse.

A man stood atop the pediment, from which he stepped off and slowly began to descend. He wore an odd getup, a bodysuit of red accented with purple, a similarly purple cape trailing behind him in the wind, and all of that topped off by a weird bucket-like helmet that somehow shadowed the man's face, despite its being completely open at the front.

The man extended a hand, palm facing up, and lifted. Off to his left, Jameson heard the prison van's horn blaring, and he looked over to see the van lifting into the air, slowly rising to join the man floating over the plaza.

"Forty-four years ago, Captain America," the man said, projecting his voice, "you liberated me and mine from Auschwitz. Today, I only ask that you stand aside, so I may act in kind for this young man."

Captain America and the flying mutant stared at one another for a few moments. Nobody dared say anything, for fear of drawing the attention (or worse, the ire) of such powerful men.

Then, after some unspoken message passed between them, Steven Rogers placed his Stetson back on his head.

"I wouldn't be able to stop you if I tried," the Captain admitted.

"Indeed."

With a negligent flick of the mutant's fingers, the back of the prison van opened up, and St. John Allerdyce floated out, suspended by several broken sets of handcuffs and the nightstick of the officer that had been in the back with him.

"Only when this fine city remembers what the meaning of justice is shall my protection cease!" The mutant bellowed. "But until that day, mark my words, this man will be safe, and more importantly, free!"

And with that, the mutant set the van back down on the street before he flew off, with the (in Jameson's opinion, and likely in fact) wrongfully-convicted teen in tow.

Nobody dared to speak. Not after Captain America himself decried his home. Not after they had just been compared to the Krauts. Not after this utter sham of a trial had come to a close in such resounding fashion.

"Well, if nobody else is gonna say something, I will!" John Jonah Jameson said, stepping in front of all the cameras, microphones, and dictaphones. "What we just saw? That may not have been legal, but it sure as hell was right!"

Jameson puffed at his cigar, forgetting before then that he'd ruined the casing, before he pulled it from his mouth and pointed at the rest of the press.

"Mark my words—if that had been that no-good Spider-Man breaking him out? Why, I'd have shaken his hand and called him a hero. True hero!" Jameson exclaimed. "And you can quote me on that!"

---

I don't remember having left the courtroom this past Monday. The last I could recall, I'd been trying to file my motion again, even after having been outed, and then… and then I was back in the conference room, with Matt hovering protectively at my side. It wasn't just him though; Sam Lieberman had somehow found the time to come down from Central Park West and fend off the press vultures, file the initial appeal paperwork and request for a new trial for St. John, and file formal complaints against both DA Young and Judge Andrew (for prosecutorial and judicial misconduct, respectively).

All in the three, maybe four hours before I came back to myself.

Sam Lieberman himself drove Matt back to Hell's Kitchen, and escorted me up to my condo, where he told me to take the next two days to recover, and that he'd handle things for me at the firm.

Those two days were utterly miserable. I spent them examining every single little detail, everything I'd entered into evidence, every choice I made, every observation I'd gleaned. I just could not understand how the jury could reach its verdict.

But every time I looked at my scales, or felt my tail twitch against the legs of my chair, or brushed my horns against the seat back, I was reminded of what was likely the ultimate cause of it all.

And I hated it, because it was just so wrong. St. John never asked to be the way he was.

I never asked to be what I am.

Two days. Tuesday and Wednesday. That was all the time I'd had to rest and recover.

And so, on Thursday, I arrived at the firm bright and early, to a changed environment.

Where before I had often been met with glances of disinterest or disdain, now it was… something else. People wouldn't meet my eyes, and when they did, most looked away instantly, as though eye contact was suddenly dangerous. Those few willing to stare back sneered, and scowled, steely, hateful gazes following me as I walked down the hall to my office.

I had scarcely set my briefcase down when my phone rang, and when I answered, it was Antonia calling me up to the boss's office.

I dropped everything and went. I ignored the glares and stares as I went five floors up in the elevator, and the frightened flinch from Antonia as I passed by her desk to open the frosted glass door to Lieberman's office.

The door slid closed behind me, and Sam turned around from where he stood at his beverage counter — his "side bar", as he called it. He had two glasses in his hands, which he brought over to his desk, setting one in front of himself, and the other before one of the new chairs at the front of his desk — open-backed ones.

"I figure after seeing the 'real you'," he said, and I could practically hear the air quotes, "you might prefer a different seat." He swirled the glass of amber liquor in his hands, then glanced up at me. "You can look however you prefer in here, Noa. It's fine."

I sat down with a sigh, and released my hold on my glamour. It fizzled away into prismatic static, and even though I know Lieberman had seen me like this on Monday, I still felt a nameless apprehension clawing at my heart.

To his credit though, he didn't comment. Lieberman instead gestured to the glass set in front of me on his desk. One that was oddly free of clutter, save for a single near-empty, unlabeled case folder.

"This stuff is vile," Lieberman said, wincing as he took a sip. "And 7:30's a bit early for drink, I know. But I figure it's appropriate, at least."

I frowned, and reached for my glass, studying the liquid before taking a hesitant sip.

A moment later I was wincing, and probably a moment away from retching.

"Laphroaig?" I asked, disgusted. "Why would you even own a bottle of that?"

"It was a gift," Lieberman said, eyeing his own glass with distaste. "I hate it. And ever since, I've used it as the bearer of bad news, because it'll all taste like ash in your mouth anyway."

I took a shaky breath, and looked down at the glass of scotch in my hands. I was scared to say anything. And afraid to hear it, too.

"If it had just been up to me," Lieberman started, rolling the glass tumbler around in his hands, ice tinkling against the sides, "I would've pushed you to partner straight away after this. The press is on your side, public opinion is on your side, Captain fucking America is on your side?" He scoffed. "It's just a matter of getting the judiciary to stop thinking that Andrews' twenty-plus years on the bench means he knew something we don't, and that's just a matter of time."

Sam Lieberman took a long sip of his bitter, smoky excuse for scotch whisky, then clasped his hands and looked me in the eye.

"But much as I'd wish it, I'm not the only decider. Lewin has a voice, Loeb has a voice, and our largest clients each have their own voices. And after you got outed on live TV?" Sam gestured at my horns and scales, at which I couldn't help but run my fingers over the bone-white patch on the back of one of my hands. "We got calls from some of the firm's biggest clients. I'm sure you can imagine what was said, Noa."

"I walk or they do?" I guessed, eyeing the lone folder on Lieberman's desk.

He nodded.

"I tried," he said, eyes closed, fingers rubbing his face. "God knows I tried. All Tuesday, most of Wednesday. Because you deserve better, Noa," he said, opening his eyes to look at me. "You deserve better than to have small-minded men with billions in their pockets deciding your fate on appearance alone."

Sam Lieberman spun the folder around, slid it towards me, and flipped it open. Inside was what I'd been afraid I would see since the moment I walked into his office.

"And you deserve better than what little I could eke out for you."

Before me lay a severance agreement. One already signed and dated by both Elijah Lewin and Isaac Loeb.

"Bonus pay equal to your share of a generous estimate of what the legal fees would have been, had the Allerdyce case not been pro bono," he said as I scanned the document. "Additional pay equaling the anticipated salary accrued for the expected duration of the appeal and a new trial, and estimated legal fees for both. A release stating that any clients you brought into the firm or served as lead attorney for could follow you to your next firm with no consequence or additional fees paid to this one, so long as no new conflicts of interest prevent it. And your end of year bonus, paid now."

I read the terms, feeling my heart sink as I did. Lewin and Loeb had been careful; this severance agreement also waived any current or future causes of action, including any that did not yet exist, against the firm. Furthermore, it heavily implied that if I didn't sign the agreement, that LL&L could keep me from ever working as an attorney in New York again.

"It's not enough," Lieberman said, his voice barely above a whisper. "It'll never be enough. But even that was all I could get them to give."

"It's not right," I murmured aloud, more to myself than to Lieberman. "I… I just…"

I couldn't look at the severance agreement. Not when it was so raw.

Sam Lieberman took pity on me and flipped the file closed.

"They want that signed or shredded and your office cleaned out by end of day tomorrow," he told me. "I couldn't get them to budge any further than that, Noa. And… I'm sorry," Sam said. "I wish I could've done more."

"Yeah," I said. "Me too."

I scooped up the folder, gave Sam Lieberman one more thank-you, and left his office. I walked through the halls of the firm, uncaring that they saw me as I truly was at this time.

It wasn't like they'd care to remember me after I was out the door, anyway. They'd never cared about me before; why start now, when I'd be gone next week?

I returned to my own office… or at least, what would be my own for only two more days.

My eyes scanned along the walls, and I took in the paraphernalia I'd accumulated over my eight years here. My bar certification hung above my J.D., and beside that sat the eighth-page article describing my first solo win in court, with little gold star stickers around the headline. An award from the NY State Bar for Best New Female Attorney hung just above that. Below it sat a commendation from the Junior League, and under that, a framed 30 Under 30 article from five years ago, my name highlighted in bright canary yellow.

All of this, in my eight years, I thought as I pulled them off the wall.

All of this.

And none of it mattered… all because I was a mutant.

I wanted to scream, to cry, to rant and rave at the unfairness of it all. I could yell, throw things, demolish this office while it was still mine. But what would that do? It wouldn't change their decision. It wouldn't do anything to dim that incandescent ball of raw feelings burning in my chest.

All I could do was… take that anger. Take all that frothing, seething rage, that bitterness and sorrow, and use it.

I looked once more at the markers of a career that I'd pulled from my walls, took them in as they lay across my desk. The result of hard work, what little of it was recognized or realized, anyway. This was what defined me, more than my heritage, or my creed, or my species. It was proof of grit, of skill, of competence.

It was proof that I was worth every penny.

Lewin and Loeb wanted me out?

Then I suppose I'd best prove what they were giving up.

---

Spoiler: A/N part 1

I apologize for the delay on this chapter. I meant to have this done a fair bit sooner, but unfortunately, some evolving personal issues got in the way of that. More to follow in the second A/N, but that's being parceled out so y'all don't have to see it if you don't want to.

Anyway.

With this chapter, the first arc of Pound the Table has officially concluded! *cue lone party horn*
So with that out of the way, a brief roadmap of what's coming next:

–Chapters 13 and 14 will focus on setup for the next arc, and indeed the groundwork for the remainder of the entire fic's structure, including introducing 3 new minor characters that will be recurring. They're not particularly plot relevant, but character development is important, and I think that's just as important as plot, if not more so! After all, the best plot in the world means pretty much nil if it's not carried by the strong, developed personalities of well-written characters. Furthermore, Chapter... probably 13, unless things go long? Let's shoot for that. Anyway – Chapter 13 will also contain the next stage of the HYDRA journal subplot that appeared in chapter 1. Which means that yes, Magneto is gonna be doing Magneto things.

–Chapter 15 will get us into the next case, which will be looking at defamation, and how building a civil case differs from the criminal.

For this, I'd actually like to request if any of you, the readers, happen to have an opinion on what the unlikeliest string of accomplishments in a single tennis tournament is. As in, the most ridiculous feats of athleticism you can think of, all performed relatively back-to-back, in the same tennis tournament. Specifically, on hard courts, as the New York Tennis Open is.

This next arc should take us quite a few chapters (though, probably only half of the 10 that this arc took), and then its aftermath will lead straight into the arc immediately after.

Spoiler: A/N part 2, electric boogaloo

Alright, folks. This is the part I really didn't want to do, but I'm in a bit of a corner, and I'm just gonna lay my cards on the table.

When I first started up my Ko-Fi page, I was fully open that it would only exist until such time as I had gainful employment, and that I would be taking every possible step to make that eventuality happen as soon as possible.

Unfortunately however?

Evolving issues and a rapidly-growing-untenable living situation led me to decline an offer of permanent employment, as it would have tied me down to the state of Virginia... and if things continue to evolve the way they have been, it will not remain safe for me to keep living here.

With the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday, and family coming in town, I am hopeful that they actually take things seriously, meaning things begin to improve.

But given past patterns, I am not feeling optimistic.

There is a very real chance things turn south, and rapidly, at which point I will be relying on the generosity of relatives.

I don't like doing this. I really don't. But if there's any kind of help you can offer, I would be appreciative in the extreme.

Because I can't keep living with an alcoholic sibling, waiting for the day he graduates from loud and angry to violent and angry.

I hope y'all enjoyed this first arc, and stay with me as this story continues to grow.
Once again, if you are interested in tossing a coin to your Witcher writer, my Ko-Fi page – more of a tip jar than anything – can be found [RIGHT HERE].

---

This thread was crowned as one of the "Elements of Sufficient Velocity" during the forum's 2023 "Sufficiently Skeletons" Spring Event! Take a look below!

​

Spoiler: 2023 Element of SV

4, Seek the works of the abacus's first creator​

 

[October Daye]

Pound the Table
Chapter Thirteen

Spoiler: A/N 1

And on the fourth night of Chanukah, I offer unto thee... a new chapter! (And yes, it's still the fourth night, as the sun still hasn't come up where I am. For those of you in Europe, it's also still the fourth night, since the sun hasn't gone down yet. As for those of you further east than that... sorry, uh, maybe it is the fifth night. But for the rest of us it's still the fourth night!)

I wanted to get this up before the FFXIV expansion went live, so I kinda cranked it out. And it ended up being one of my biggest chapters so far, purely by accident.

Anyway. This chapter ties up a few loose ends, lays down a few plot threads, and hopefully teases enough stuff to keep y'all entertained and guessing while I go grind a bunch this Friday and over the weekend. I have given myself these three days to be bad – after that, it's back to a regular schedule of actually being productive!

---

[Friday, September 8, 1989]

"... tough on the mob, tough on mutant terror, and tough on crime!"

The radio in the corner of the locker room was on a commercial break, and of all the ads that it had to play, it would be this one. Out of all the dozens, even hundreds of different things that could have been advertised on this station, it had to be this.

"Lou Young: fighting to keep the city and streets safe, for you and for me!"

"You know what I wanna know?" One of the other women in the locker room, a brunette with her hair pulled into a messy bun, asked as she stood there half-dressed, hands on her hips and facing the alcove we kept the radio in. "How in the hell is he still leading the polls? Actually, no, how is he even still in the running at all?" At this, she turned to face me, her eyes pointed somewhere on the floor just behind me.

Specifically, she stared at the tip of my tail.

"You've got a lot to learn, Casey," said another woman with brown hair in a short pixie-cut, tossing Casey a water bottle as she crossed back over to her locker to get her skate socks. "Young's leading, yeah, but he's also got a record number of challengers."

A few other items went into the locker, including a law enforcement badge, before she closed it and turned back to us, then stood on a bench and clapped her hands a few times to get all eyes back on her.

"Alright ladies, listen up!" All of us looked up, and in my case, very far up. "We're up against some girls from across the river in Jersey. They're talking a lot of smack, and part of it is they're claiming that their pizza is better than ours."

A chorus of boos came from most of the others in the room. I was one of the ones who hadn't said anything, mainly because I was too busy with the laces on my skates. The last time I'd managed to get to roller derby, my scales had been freshly shed, and I'd had to loosen the skates to not irritate the new ones. Now, though, my scales were in no such condition, so I didn't have to worry about that… and instead I had to tighten my skates back up.

"Now, head on out there and get some warmups in. Maybe intimidate the visitors a bit, huh jammers?"

A few cheers at our team captain, and then the girls were out of the locker room en masse, leaving just two of us: me on my bench, and the captain herself, who stepped down from her bench and sat beside me before reaching around me to pick up my helmet.

"Glad to see you could make it Noa," she said, even as she moved to thread my horns through the straps of the helmet. Just another requirement when everything is designed for ears, and you don't have any. "I'll admit I've been getting a little worried."

"You know how things can get sometimes Cate," I told her, taking over on the helmet front once she had it looped semi-comfortably around my horns. "I try to make it when I can, but it's been a little more hectic than usual of late."

"A little more hectic?" Cate scoffed as she ran a hand back through her short hair, sitting down next to me to get her own roller skates on. "Try a lot. And not just for you. The special agent in charge wants to ask you a few pointed questions, and I'd like to get those answers to him before he gets a chance to make your life uncomfortable."

I sighed, staring up at the fluorescent lights hanging on the ceiling of the gym.

"Let me guess, the mutant that took St. John?" I asked.

"Got it in one," Cate confirmed, and I bit back a curse under my breath.

Because now I was stuck telling a lie to one friend to cover for another.

I had first met FBI Field Agent Cate Caine, captain of the local roller derby team and probably my best friend in New York City, back in 1981, as part of the same case that eventually ended with my first appearance on the cover of the Daily Bugle. There was a lot of baggage that I didn't want to revisit there. Suffice to say, the two of us were at odds during the case itself, with a bit of legal trickery on mine and Sam Lieberman's part forcing the FBI to back off of the issue entirely.

Of course, the utter clusterfuck that case turned into in the weeks after acquittal brought the FBI right back in, and Cate with them. It was an utterly horrible time, and I will forever be thankful that Cate was able to look past our earlier animosity to reach out a hand in friendship when I so desperately needed one.

Now, let me head off the obvious questions. Cate knew what I actually looked like, and had known within a couple months of meeting me. Yes, she knew I was lesbian; heck, when she first met back up with me after the case, it was an accident, because we were both patrons of the Stonewall. And yes, to answer the obligatory question, we did try dating. One date. And it didn't even last the whole date, because it became very obvious that despite how we were in our professional lives, neither of us was the take-charge type in a relationship.

Instead, she became my best friend. Partly because the two of us understood what it meant when the other went completely incommunicado for a few months at a time, and didn't begrudge the other letting work take over her life for a time. Partly because when we did have time to spend together, we didn't let work interfere.

Except now it would, because I had to lie to her to protect both my client and my friend. Or at least, fudge the truth a little.

Or maybe a lot.

"I have my suspicions," I said, turning the possible things I could say over in my head. "I am fairly certain a friend of mine knows who he is, but he hasn't said anything as such to me. And given where and how the two of them most likely met, I would be surprised to get anything conclusive."

"Maybe," Cate hedged. "Maybe not. Your friend – what is his name, and how did he meet this mutant? If we know that, we might be able to get him to tell us."

"He's not an American national," I said. "His name is Erik Lehnsherr. And as for where he met this mutant?..." I trailed off. Instead, I just showed her the underside of my left forearm, and drew a few fingers from my right along it.

Understanding blossomed in her eyes, and Cate instantly shook her head with a frown.

"No point then," she said, a combination of relief and annoyance in her voice. "He isn't about to tell us anything about someone who was in the camps with him, then." Cate looked up at the ceiling and breathed out hard, tapping the floor with her roller skates. "The kid's safe, though? You know this?"

"I do," I confirmed for her, standing up from the bench. "I'm not being told where he is, but I've spoken with him. Different payphones each time, but we've spoken."

"Good." Cate breathed in deep, and then sighed, letting all the tension out of her shoulders. "Alright! Work stuff over. You ready?"

"You have no idea," I said with a smile. The two of us shared a laugh, and then joined the rest of the girls out on the roller derby track.

The rest of our team, resplendent in their green and gold, squared off against the visiting Jersey girls in concrete-gray with emerald green accents. I could hear quite a few barbs levied at each side, along with a fair bit of rancor, hissing, spitting, and everything else you'd expect from rival sports teams. Believe me, just because it was all girls didn't make the teasing and taunting any less vicious.

That said, there were boundaries, lines that nobody was willing to cross. Nobody lobbied insults at the way one of the Jersey girls' purple(-dyed?) hair slithered and writhed, moving and gesturing like it was another limb. Nobody dared comment on the adam's apple that made itself apparent on Leticia's neck when she swallowed. Nobody's eyes lingered on the thin, silvery lines of scar tissue running horizontally along both of Michelle's thighs.

And while eyes certainly turned to see my tail waving behind me, the horns on my head, and the scales running along my body, nobody stared.

It was a welcome relief to know that that, at least, had not changed.

A blown whistle drew our attention, and almost as one we turned to see someone walking between the two teams, rubber end of his cane clicking on the hardwood floor. It was a man, short blond hair fading to gray at the temples, wearing a white doctor's coat out of place here in a roller derby rink, brown corduroy pants, a sky-blue button-up shirt, and a darker blue tie.

"Good evening everybody," Dr. Donald Blake said, both hands resting on his cane. "It looks like I'll be your referee again tonight."

"You've been the ref since I've been here!" Candace called out, drawing some laughs. "And you'll still be the ref after I die too, I bet!"

"Gods, I should hope not," Dr. Blake said with a smile, prompting a few chuckles from us. "Now, while I know that there can be some roughhousing here, I expect a good, clean match."

"No roughhousing, really doc? What do you think this is, field hockey?" Leticia asked, her voice heavy with amusement.

"Or hey, if you wanted clean, you should've ref'd water polo!"

"Sylvia, dear, water polo is just as brutal, with the added negative of being wet and chlorinated," the doctor fired back. "Regardless. We want a clean match, no fighting, no kicking, just some good, skilled roller derby. Of course," the doctor said, pointing at himself, "that's never a guarantee, which is why I'm here."

"Thank you, doctor!" One of the girls on my side said (I couldn't recognize the voice – must have been one of the newer members), prompting a few chuckles.

None of us really knew why Dr. Donald Blake supported our little roller derby leagues. I'd asked Cate, but he'd been involved in the scene even before she had been, and even the people who'd been here first weren't entirely sure. What little we knew was that he spoke with a very slight Norwegian accent, he kept mentioning a brother that nobody had ever seen, and that he was apparently trusted by both the Fantastic Four and the Avengers. But that was… pretty much it.

What mattered more, though, was his actions. His card routinely made the rounds at the Stonewall when people needed medical help. He provided several people with insulin, hormones, and other medicines either at cost or free. And while I hadn't had to try and source it from Dr. Blake, he was one of the few doctors I'd heard of that didn't try to patronize when prescribing birth control.

Simply put: he was a good man, and for whatever reason, he decided to spend his hard-earned money making things easier for people like me.

"Now then!" Dr. Blake pointed at the Jersey girl with the prehensile hair. "Miss, as much as I would stare at your hair the way I did lava lamps during the 60's and 70's, I will have to ask you to tie it into a bun. The same goes for any of you with hair down to or past the small of your back," Dr. Blake said, pointing at the rest of the Jersey girls… before turning to face us. "That means you, Simone."

"But I braided my hair this time!" Simone, an NYU junior, said with a pout.

"And it still reaches the small of your back, I can see it from here," Dr. Blake followed up.

A few of us chuckled at that, myself included, even as Simone grumbled and skated back to the locker room.

"Since it'll be a few minutes before she's back and we can start," Dr. Blake said, walking up to my team. "I'd just like to let all of you ladies know that I have appointments available if any of you need a physical, or any other medical exams." His eyes lingered one me for a moment, and raised an eyebrow.

"Thank you for your offer, doctor," I told him with a smile. "But I already have an appointment with my primary care physician scheduled."

"One with discretion, I assume?" Dr. Blake asked, eyes falling on my horns and scales.

"Absolutely," I confirmed. "And convenient. Though I admit, he can be a little bit… eh, strange."

---

[Sunday, September 10, 1989]

"Now search inside you." I frowned, opening my eyes ever so slightly as I offered a raised eyebrow at that. "Eyes closed, Noa. Look with your mind, not with your eyes."

"We've done this before," I murmured, but did as I was asked, and also kept my fingers on what looked for all the world like a crystal ball. The one time I called it that, though, I had received a death glare so focused that I wouldn't have been surprised if I'd spontaneously combusted. "You don't need to give me the instructions every single time, Stephen."

"And yet, I will reiterate anyway, because you consistently go from meandering to focused every time I do," Dr. Stephen Strange said as he shifted from looking over my left shoulder to passing by the right. "Now quit distracting yourself by trying to hear my facial expressions, and focus."

Much as I would have liked to disagree, the good Dr. Strange was correct in that I was distracting myself. It was a bad habit of mine when I got frustrated.

And I was indeed frustrated, because it was starting to seem like my capacity for magic had failed to grow at all for the third year in a row.

"Find the connection." Stephen's baritone rang in my ears, even as I turned my focus inward. "Feel the magic, and let it flow. As much as you can manage."

I felt for it the same way I did when I hooked my fingers around a strand of light. The sensation came from a similar place as my power, an odd sideways that I didn't quite have the right words to describe. But this one was slightly… I suppose 'deeper' would be the closest word I could think of? It wasn't quite right, but it was about as close as I was going to get without having to borrow some of Stephen's textbooks on metaphysics and devoting a month to self-guided study.

Regardless, I found that spot, that odd connection. And once I had a grip on it, I pulled, and tugged, and coaxed as much as I could from it.

The not-a-crystal-ball in my hands lit up brighter than any bulb, shining a clear, pure white that I could make out even through closed eyes. It was so bright I had to lower my head ever so slightly, and even then it shone so strongly that I knew I would see a spot in my vision for the next minute or so afterwards.

"Hold it," Stephen said. "A moment longer… okay. You can let it go now."

The dam slammed shut immediately, the orb of light fading back into clear crystal. Moments later, my stomach made its displeasure at being empty known, and the first traces of a headache began to gnaw at the back of my eyes and press against my forehead.

"Well?" I asked, reaching for my glasses on the table in front of me and sliding them on. One silver lining about not being employed: this was my fifth straight day without having to put in contact lenses. My eyes hadn't been so free of itchiness in years.

"Same as last year," Stephen said, holding a light meter in his hands. Given the way my magic tended to manifest, it was the easiest way to tell what my throughput was. Maybe not the most accurate, but certainly simple. "No real change. Comparatively speaking, you are in the bottom five percent of magic-users."

And of course, there was that. Congratulations Noa, you have superpowers, and can use magic. But your power's only real use is letting you live a more normal life, and your magic is barely more than a party trick without outside help or substantial wind-up time.

This was probably a rather common fate, and I probably wouldn't have used any more substantial powers anyway, but it was the kind of thing that would have been nice to have and not need.

"And do we have any guesses as to why that is, this time?" I asked, still blinking the bright spot out of my vision.

"Perhaps," Stephen hedged. "You brought your foci like I asked, yes?"

There was no real need to give a verbalized reply here. Instead, I gestured with my tail at the bulky duffel bag that I'd brought with me to 177A Bleecker Street. Stephen, taking the hint, picked up the bag and opened it, then withdrew the four objects from inside.

"You never did tell me how you got your hands on these," Stephen asked, turning the slightly-ornamented wooden scroll pins in his hand as he took them out.

"You mean you don't think I could have just bought four Atzei Chaim to do with as I pleased?" I asked rhetorically, a bit bemused. Stephen, to his credit, simply raised one of the Torah rollers and gestured in question. "Okay, fine. A particularly bad tornado rolled through St. Louis, ruined the synagogue, and they were going to be disposed of anyway. So I took them instead."

"And you've somehow managed to use them as a focus for magic," Stephen said. "With no training on how to make them, and no idea whether they were a fitting material or not."

I just shrugged, feeling a little embarrassed.

"Do me a favor." Stephen set the four Torah rollers down on the table in front of me, taking the not-crystal-ball and putting it off to the side in the process. "What you did with the orb was letting as much power flow from yourself into it. I want you to try and do the opposite with these."

"Clarify?" I asked, though I was already reaching out to lay my hands atop the wooden scroll rods.

"Rather than trying to draw on your own magic, try and draw from these, and into yourself."

It was a strange bit of advice, and as I closed my eyes and cast out with my magic, I couldn't help but wonder why.

The answer presented itself in short order, though: four points of what I could only identify as light, so similar to the one I felt within myself, pressed against my awareness. Carefully, I tried to tug at them the same way I did when casting, and felt all four respond. Though I couldn't see it, I felt as the light unspooled, twining around my fingers and seeping into that same point so close to my heart, and yet also not. Again, I didn't know the right words to describe that sort of mystical geometry, nor did I care to learn.

All I could say was that once the four motes of light faded, my hunger faded from a painful bite to a dull gnawing, and my headache faded from 'monkey with a mining pick' to 'squinted at the newspaper for too long'.

"The reason your magic never grew any stronger," Stephen said, picking up one of the Torah scrollers and running a finger along the top, "is because you had bound it up inside of these. You attuned yourself to them. But because they weren't prepared to be used that way, a large chunk of the magic that should have rested in you had to stay inside of them. To hold open the connection, as it were."

A motion of Stephen's hand later and the Torah scroller in his hands disappeared. Moments later, the other three followed suit.

"I want to see what happens if you try to use this."

His hands reached into a pocket, and moments later emerged with… I wasn't quite sure, actually. It was a small cylindrical object, glossy in the light, and a little bit larger than a highlighter. There was what looked to be a lid on one end, and a clip, but with the way Stephen was holding it, the lid should have been turning. And it wasn't.

"What is that supposed to be, exactly?" I asked, standing up to get a closer look at the object in his hands.

"A mezuzah," he said, "made to look at least partly like something else – namely, a fountain pen. The disguise isn't perfect, and it won't hold up as a pen to a close inspection," Stephen explained as he handed me the glossy navy object, ornamented with small, gold engravings of Hebrew characters, "but I'd argue it's more portable than half of a scroll."

I held the mezuzah in both hands, testing its weight before reaching out with my magic. It came easily, small streams of light flowing from my fingertips, filling the engravings of Shin, Dalet, and Yod along the… what was this made from? It felt to me like it could have been metal, but I couldn't be sure. Regardless of the material, it was cool to the touch, and moments later, I felt an awareness of it snap into being.

With nary a thought, and the briefest flicker of light in the engraved Hebrew spelling out "Shaddai" on the mezuzah's surface, it floated into the air, and an impulse had it floating above and behind my left shoulder, following my gaze.

"How do you feel?" Stephen asked, his cloak peeling off his shoulders to vaguely motion at my new focus. "Hungry? Headache?" The corners of the cloak came up, moving almost like hands, and tapped at the mezuzah where it hovered. It budged, and I could sense that movement in space, but it returned to its former position without any effort.

"Fine, actually," I said, sending the mezuzah in a lazy figure-eight in front of me now. "I'm still a bit peckish, but this is… I don't know," I admitted, bringing a hand to my lips in thought. "Something about this focus is easier to use, and I can't put my finger on it."

"Well, we'll stick a pin in it. Anyway." Stephen snapped his fingers. His cloak stiffened, moved as though it were turning an invisible head in its collar to look back at the good doctor, then zoomed back to its position around Stephen's shoulders in the blink of an eye. "I want that focus on you at all times."

"Really?" I asked, reaching to pluck the ornate mezuzah out of the air. "After years of telling me to stop using a focus, you want me to have this one?"

"Well for one, this is a focus made for you by the Sorcerer Supreme, not a fancy piece of driftwood you brute forced into the job," he said. "And more importantly, Noa? You didn't spend all those years as an outed mutant," Stephen replied with a grimace. "As much as I wish it were otherwise, your situation has changed. Like it or not, you are in danger now, and you are simply too small and too weak to protect yourself otherwise."

I didn't bother trying to fight Stephen on this. Why? Because, well… he was right.

I'd been mostly shielded from anti-mutant bigotry and sentiment by my own powers. But while I could count on the poor memory of the general public (and John Jonah Jameson's utter stranglehold on the narrative from that day) to ensure your average Joe on the street couldn't recognize glamoured me for a mutant, the same couldn't be said of everybody. And given the staggeringly high odds that the one person who decided the "mutie lawyer" needed to be taken down a peg would be able to physically overpower me?

I could understand his point, even if I disliked the way he phrased it.

"Very well then," I told Stephen, waggling the mezuzah in my hand before putting it away in my purse. "If you insist."

"Good," he said with a nod, relieved. Then his demeanor shifted, slightly, from concern back to professionalism, if a different kind than before. "Now Noa, remind me: when was the last time you were here for a proper checkup?"

"... um." That caught me ever so slightly flat-footed, and I had to actually think back. When was the last time I actually visited Stephen for something requiring his prefix instead of his title? That must have been, uh. "Last November, I think?"

"Ten months," he said. "Not quite long enough for me to justify a yearly physical. But, I do believe you're due for a flu shot!" Arcane traceries spit out from the ends of Dr. Strange's fingers, forming a small portal in front of his hand. He reached in, and a moment later, found himself with a handful of latex gloves and a syringe.

I could only wilt in dismay, as I knew the time of stabbing had come.

And if anything, my displeasure only made the good doctor's grin grow wider.

---

[Tuesday, September 19, 1989]

Not having to put in contact lenses was a perk of not having to go into work every day.

Having to use the New York Subway because I couldn't bill the firm for a car service instead, on the other hand, was a definite negative.

I absolutely hated using the subway. It was crowded, damp, old, pungent… and this was before I got to the rats.

Or more specifically, this one rat that I kept seeing at the Washington Square station… how in the world did a rat get bigger than the average dachshund?

And more than that, where did it keep finding pizza!?

Regardless, the biggest problem I faced was the crowds. My glamour was incredibly fragile, which forced me to travel at off-peak hours if I wanted to get anywhere in a timely manner. The few times I hadn't been able to, particularly early on during my time in Manhattan, I'd found myself going past my stops because I couldn't push my way off of the train, then having to double back. It was a massive waste of time, and one I hadn't been keen on revisiting.

Unfortunately, until I had my new firm open and started bringing in cash flow, I didn't exactly have a choice. So instead I took the A line north, then swapped to the L, whereupon I headed east into Alphabet City, and exited at the 1st Avenue station.

I exited onto the street, and immediately stopped in at the local newsstand. Somebody in my building had been swiping my newspaper if I didn't get around to grabbing it before 7am, so I hadn't had a chance to look at the headlines. Thankfully, a news stand was maybe half a block away from the stairs down into the subway, so I was able to pick up a copy of the Bugle with little difficulty.

"Anything interesting?" I asked the newsie running the stand as I handed him a dollar.

"Well aside from that Spider-Man, I think the sports page is leaking!" He handed me a copy of the paper and a quarter for change, then flipped the newspaper to the lower half of the cover and pointed at a headline. "Would ya look at that, some good news for a mutant for a change, huh?"

"I couldn't agree more," I said, putting my change away before I read the headline and the first few sentences of the article, which itself was a follow-up from an article last week. A pro golfer came out as a mutant last week to show solidarity, and was summarily dropped by all of his sponsors. Now, though, the Bugle was reporting that he'd been picked up by two Japanese companies: Sony and Subaru.

"Can't say the same for that tennis champ though," the newsie said, running a finger along his silver mustache and adjusting his aviator-style glasses. "All them accusations of cheating with mutant powers, and a month and a half after the tournament? Felt mighty convenient."

"I don't really follow the tennis scene, I'm afraid," I told the newsie, folding the paper under one arm. "So I'm afraid I can't really comment."

"Well I looked, there's a recap and update on page nine!" The newsie tipped his hat at me, and nodded. "Bit of a scary world for mutants right now, I'd say. You be careful now, miss!"

"I will," I said, feeling a little chill run up my spine at his particular choice of words even as I started walking south and east. Something about that man at the newsstand set me on edge… but he also had an air of comforting familiarity. I couldn't quite put my finger on it.

I couldn't linger on that though. There was still an important errand to run today, and so I began my walk to the appointed location. Or, as I would be calling it once everything else was all set, I thought as I found my posting front and center in the advertisements of the Daily Bugle, my new office.

It was a recently-renovated building in Alphabet City, fixed up following a period of unrest (and a bit of the Avengers getting somewhat reckless). The building itself wasn't anything special, just a regular old office space, though the interiors were disappointingly painted in the beige and brown so common in the eighties. Why people thought that was hip and trendy, I wasn't sure, but personally I hated it. Unfortunately, this was what I could find, so here I was.

To get into the building, I had to walk past an exterminator's, which took up the lion's share of space on the first floor, and had eye-searing neon signs out front. It was a bit of an eyesore, but from what I had seen, they took care of the building at cost in exchange for a reduction on their rent, so it was a fair arrangement.

As I walked inside and headed up the stairs, an absolutely wonderful scent floated into the stairwell from the other major occupant of the ground floor, and I had to resist the urge to turn around and grab either a late breakfast or early lunch. The other major occupant of the first floor, alongside the exterminators, was a Jamaican restaurant. I don't think I've ever had Jerk chicken that tasted quite so good as when I stopped in just after signing my lease for the office space here. It was savory, it was sweet, it was spicy, and the chicken was outrageously tender. I'd ended up getting another half a chicken to take home for dinner that night, and wished I'd gotten more.

I ascended three flights of stairs to the fourth floor, and stepped out of the stairwell into a hallway with ugly brown carpeting. If you have ever been in any corporate space you know the type: patterned and colored so that coffee stains wouldn't show, no matter how many of them you spilled. It was drab, it was bleak, but it was effective.

And given that I'd seen the realtors who also had office space on this floor spill coffee pretty much every time they got out of the elevator? The landlord was getting their money's worth.

Ignoring the carpeting, I turned left out of the stairwell and walked down to the end of the hall, to suite 401. I slid my key into the lock, turned the deadbolt, and pushed the heavy wooden door open.

Once I got inside, I was able to see that some of the furniture had been moved in already, since I'd given the building super permission to supervise. Cushioned chairs with backs that opened at the bottom dotted the outside of what I would set up as a lobby and reception. A large desk, big enough for two people, stood before a large frosted-glass wall, and a hallway deeper into the office extended to the left of the desk. A door was set into the frosted glass, with brown paper covering a spot that would be about head-height for anyone else. The paper needed to stay on there for a little longer, so I kneeled down to unlock the door, whose lock went into the floor, and then pushed open the door into my new office space.

Floor to ceiling windows covered the back wall, the same way they had in Sam Lieberman's office back at LL&L. The view, however, was nothing so impressive: being a fourth floor office, all I could really see was… well, more buildings. They had character, yes, but it was nothing like the gorgeous view of Central Park that LL&L's litigation group had.

Filing cabinets sat along the left wall, next to a door that led to the other hallways of the office, as well as a back entrance and exit. It was the doorway I'd be using once things actually opened up; clients and visitors used the main entrance, the staff did not.

In the middle of the space sat a large, wide half-donut shaped mahogany desk, my office chair already set up behind it. I had yet to get my work computer moved over from my condo, so it simply had the spot marked on the desk in masking tape. A white cardboard box of stuff sat on the desk, and I reached in, then placed the various framed accoutrements from my old office out on the desk.

I turned around to face the walls, and started scanning for spots to hang these. My license and J.D. would need good billing on the walls, yes, but I also wanted to highlight the framings dedicated to accomplishments and career highs. In my opinion, those were just as important as the rest, and—

The deadbolt on the side door unlocked mere moments before it opened, and an unfamiliar woman stepped into the office space.

But I was a bit too busy jumping out of my skin to pay any particular attention to the newcomer.

Holy—!" I yelped, almost dropping the framed newspaper article in my hands.

"You need to be more aware of your surroundings, Schaefer," the woman said, swinging a small backpack around to her front as she stepped forward. She walked up and dropped it on my desk, even as I frowned at her for the rudeness, then stepped back and crossed her arms.

"Would it kill you to be polite, Raven?" I asked, turning to the backpack and opening it up. It had a few letters in it, with addresses in Brooklyn and the Bronx on them. They each held the same return address, or lack thereof, anyway. Where the return address should have been was just a name. Six letters, one bit of punctuation.

St. John.

"I do believe I told you not to use that name," Raven Darkholme said as she made herself at home in my office, flesh rippling before settling back down to a normal consistency.

I took a moment to eye her, and found myself both impressed and unnerved. Once again, she looked completely different from how she did the last time we met. And just like that day two weeks prior, her appearance was utterly unremarkable. Nothing about her stood out: the mousy brown hair pulled back into a low ponytail, the mud-brown eyes, the skin ever so slightly tanned by a summer sun… all of it was so boring that I doubted I'd remember this woman if I met her again.

And that was the point, I thought to myself. This was the fifth skin I'd met the shapeshifter in, and I wagered that just like every other time before, I would forget what she'd looked like within an hour or two of seeing her.

"I am not going to call you by whatever moniker you choose to use when engaging in activities that may not be strictly legal," I told her, thumbing through the letters in the bag. "In fact, you probably should never have told me your preferred 'title'. Erik hasn't even said anything of the like to me, and you should have followed his lead."

"Says the woman who does nothing but hide away," Raven fired back.

I looked up at her, scanned her from head to toe, and raised an eyebrow.

"Funny, coming from you," I said. Then, without waiting for a response, I turned around to spread the letters out onto my desk.

One each to St. John's parents, one to each set of grandparents, and five to various friends of his. There was also one addressed to me, but if the past was any indication, it was a simple request for an update on the status of his appeal. Thankfully I'd prepared for that one ahead of time, otherwise I'd have to put up with Raven's pleasant company for longer than I'd prefer.

I set those letters aside on my desk, then reached into my purse and retrieved a set of five letters. A shared letter from Jonathan and Linda, another pair of letters from his grandparents, one from Katherine, and an update on his case from myself, all found their way into the backpack on my desk.

I'd scarcely finished zipping it up before Raven ripped it out of my grip and swung it over her shoulder. Honestly, what did Erik see in this, this… harridan? I'd barely spent more than a grand total of two hours in her presence, and I already wanted to strangle her.

"Two weeks," Raven said, walking to the door. "You know the number to call." She put her hand on the door handle and pushed down, and I realized that as much as I would love to be alone in my personal space again, there was something I needed to ask.

"Before you go." She turned around and crossed her arms, scowling at me. I took her surly expression as a signal to keep going. "You've been less than cordial towards me since the moment we met," I told her, sitting on the corner of my desk. "I should think I deserve to know what I did to deserve that treatment."

Raven turned back around and opened the door, but stopped before going through.

"It's nothing you did," she said, even as her hair, flesh, and even clothing rippled and writhed, settling into an appearance similar to the janitor I usually saw on this floor. "I just thought I had you pegged. I was wrong."

Then, without another word, Raven left my office, leaving me alone in the empty space. She'd probably be exiting through the side door in a few moments. And from how long it took the back exit to close, she just let the door close on its own, and didn't even bother to lock the door behind her. Sure enough, a quick check showed me that, just like the last time we'd had this little rendezvous, Raven left the door unlocked.

What. A. Bitch.

What I wouldn't give to… no, I shouldn't think that way. There was nothing wrong with having a disagreement with somebody, and I was more than professional enough to maintain a cordial relationship with somebody that I disliked. As peeved as I may have been at Raven, and even more so at Erik for making me go through her as an intermediary, there was no point in complaining about it.

Instead, I turned back to setting up my office. Now that I thought about it – a left-to-right progression would probably be the best place to start, wouldn't it? If I hung my diploma and license on the left side of the door, and then started hanging things in chronological order going to the right… hmm, would that work, actually? It would wind up particularly uneven once I got to the newspaper articles and awards, now that I thought about it.

No, that was not the best way to do it. Back to the drawing board, it would seem. It was hard to imagine just how difficult finding a good arrangement could be until you had to manage a larger space than normal, but—

A sudden loud, insistent knocking on the door to the office space startled me from my musing, and I backed away from the wall, not even bothering to straighten the frame, and looked towards the front. Who in the world was knocking? Janitorial staff shouldn't have been coming in here until after regular business hours ended, so why was—

The door opened, and even through the frosted glass, I could see a fuzzy shape step through the door and allow it to close behind them.

I scowled, cursing myself for forgetting to lock the front door – and right after I'd cursed at somebody for not locking the back! Regardless, I put on a neutral expression, and walked out to the front.

"I'm sorry," I said before even looking at who entered, "but this office isn't open for business for another few weeks." The person flinched for a moment, seeming indecisive, before standing up, shoulders squared and chin high, and turning to look me in the eye.

She was a young woman, couldn't have been more than twenty-five years old. Her chestnut-brown hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail, and light makeup complemented the cream blouse and black pencil skirt she wore. Part of me wanted to ding her for wearing flats instead of heels, but that was the bitter, spiteful half that wanted others to have to endure what I went through, and I quietly stuffed it back into its box of schadenfreude at the back of my psyche.

"Have you hired a secretary yet?" the young woman asked.

I blinked.

"I beg your pardon?" I asked, a bit bewildered. There were a lot of things I expected this person to say, from wanting legal advice to asking how to sue somebody to needing a defense attorney… but are you hiring was not what I'd expected.

By way of response, the young woman pulled a sheet of paper from a folder in her arms. I expected her to walk over towards me to try and shove it into my hands, but blinked in surprise when instead, the paper just floated towards me through the air, text facing me the entire time, until it hovered a foot and a half in front of my face.

Leaning out from behind the resume, I peered at the girl, and could only raise an eyebrow in surprise.

To her credit, she didn't even flinch. So, I shrugged, and went to checking the resume.

It was… a bit of a mess, I had to say. Parts of her experience were attractive and useful – a high school job working in retail, and a part-time college position in a department store, both lent themselves to a public-facing position like secretary-plus-receptionist at a law firm. But there was a particularly large gap immediately after college that worried me.

More than that, this was not the proper way to do this.

"You want a job?" I asked, plucking the resume out of the air.

The woman opened her mouth as if to respond, but then shut it, and merely nodded instead.

"Then come back a week from today for a proper interview," I told her, folding the resume in half as I lowered it. "Bring a transcript, list or letter of reference, and a cover letter. And wear an actual suit. You dress to the nines for an interview, then ask about dress code once you have an offer."

I waited for a response. The only answer I received was, again, a nod. With a sigh, I turned around to face my office door, and pushed it open before addressing the girl again.

"And don't think you get an edge just for being a fellow mutant," I said as a parting shot, letting the glass door fall closed behind me.

I walked around my desk and sat in my new office chair, leaning back with a soft groan as I did. Two days, I thought. I'd put out word that I was hiring a secretary and a paralegal two days ago, and already had a bite. That was a good sign, yes. A very good sign, actually.

But for the love of God, I thought as I tore the resume in front of me in half, then in half again. There was an order to this. Procedure and protocol were key, especially when you were applying to work at a law firm.

And from the way that girl froze up when pressed, odds were she wouldn't be able to hack it in the actual interview.

What was her name, even? I read it on her resume, but I couldn't even recall. Sarah, Susan, Sandra?

Oh, whatever. Just went to show: if you want to make a strong first impression, make sure it'll be good first.

---

[Friday, September 29, 1989]
[Erev Rosh Hashanah]
[St. Louis, Missouri]

If there was one thing that I would say was part and parcel of being Jewish, I would answer with one word: tradition. We tended to get very set in our ways, and liked the comfort and familiarity of something stable and repetitive. Heck, I'd been getting takeout from the same Chinese hole in the wall every Christmas for the past six years. Even when the weather was utterly horrid, even when I felt terrible and didn't want to go outside. It was a personal tradition to get Chinese food on Christmas, and my personal tradition to get Sichuan Beef from the same place every time.

But that was a small tradition. Right now, I was taking part in a much more important tradition.

I was visiting my parents for the high holidays.

I would absolutely have preferred to just travel with a carry-on, but unfortunately, I had a bad habit of packing too much to be able to get my own carry-on into an overhead compartment easily. Instead, I just checked a bag, brought my briefcase and purse as carry-ons, and suffered through the discomfort of airline seats with stiff, solid backs.

And then we got delayed, because the plane had to circle around a patch of bad weather, adding an extra forty-five minutes to our flight time.

It was a welcome relief when the plane touched down in St. Louis, Missouri. Once off the plane, I found a restroom, stretched my poor, abused tail, and primed myself to hopefully remember where I was going.

Lambert International Airport was just as it had been when I'd visited last year: cracked and dirty linoleum, peeling carpeting laid down at some point in the mid to late 70's, and carts with squeaky wheels. Baggage claim was slow as usual, and then it was a pair of crosswalks to get to the rental car center. The car Hertz gave me was literally too big for me to reach the pedals even with the driver's seat all the way forward, so after a half-hour discussion (argument) with the front desk (and then a manager), I found myself on my way in a cheap Chrysler sedan, pre-Iacocca vintage.

Going from traffic in Manhattan to traffic out in the Midwest was quite the whiplash, let me tell you. Even when I hit what could charitably be called 'heavy traffic' for the city, I was still rolling along at a steady twenty-five miles per hour. It took maybe thirty minutes to get out to Creve Coeur, and I took the usual left turn at the synagogue, then pulled up to the curb outside the first residence past the synagogue.

I would have pulled into my parents' driveway, but oddly enough, there was an unfamiliar car parked there. It was also a rental car, similarly to the one I'd driven over here, which set me a little bit on edge. The high holidays tended to be just for us. Who in the world could be visiting, and have done so on such short notice that I wouldn't have gotten a call, or even been paged?

With this in mind, I grabbed my suitcase out of the trunk, set my briefcase over its handle, and wheeled up the walkway to the front door, leaving my glamour in place instead of letting it break apart. Rather than use my key to let myself in, I rang the doorbell, and waited.

"One minute!"

I heard someone yelling from inside the house, followed by a rapid-fire string of Yiddish that I couldn't quite make out through both the front and screen doors. The front door opened up a few seconds later, then the screen door, and then I found myself pulled tight into a pair of spindly arms.

"Aaah! Noa, dear!"

I hugged back, letting my glamour crumble under the embrace as we rocked from side to side in our hug. A good twenty seconds later, we pushed back from each other, and I smiled at my mother.

"Hey Mom," I said, in English since we were outside of the house. "Sorry I'm late, the flight was a bit delayed."

"Oh that's fine, that's fine," Rifka Schaefer said, reaching around me to grab my suitcase as I spoke. "We saw you on the news and in the papers again, honey – you've gotten too skinny! Have they not been feeding you over in New York?"

"I've been eating fine!" I protested, switching to Yiddish once we crossed the front door. "It's just been a hectic few weeks, and maybe I've missed one or two meals."

My mother left my bags in the foyer, then led me into the kitchen. Once there, she turned to face me with a bemused expression, crossed her arms, and tapped her foot. Oh, and she raised one eyebrow.

"... one or two a week?" I amended, weakly.

"I thought so," she said. "But oh, you picked a great time to come!"

"I come this time every year," I told my mom, feeling a bit confused.

"Yes, but this year an old friend of your father's happened to be in town, and stopped by! He's even sticking around for services in a few hours!"

That drew me up short, and I suddenly couldn't help but panic a little.

"Mom!" I said, then waved a hand at myself. Specifically, at my horns, scales, and tail, which were clearly on display, with someone that was absolutely a stranger in the other room.

"Oh don't worry," she said, waving me off. "If I thought there was a problem I'd have told you to put your face back on before coming inside."

"You don't know that!" I hissed, unable to keep the worry out of my voice. "What if—"

"I know that voice!" boomed a voice from the other room. Moments later, a tall, gangly man, yarmulke on his head, talit on his shoulders, and well-kept beard adorning his chin, stepped through the doorway into the kitchen. His eyes fell on me, and he crossed the space between us in the blink of an eye, picking me up into a grand, back-breaking hug.

"Aah, my bubbeleh is home for the new year!" Rabbi Aaron Schaefer quite literally lifted me bodily off the ground and spun me in his arms like I was still a child. My stomach jumped a bit when he did this, but I also couldn't help the happy giggles at this treatment. I felt like a kid again, and it was all too soon that I was back on the ground and just giving my father a normal hug. "I was worried you wouldn't make it!"

"Blame the weather," I said. "It tried, but I still made it in time for services!"

"Yes, yes! Ach, you're too skinny!" I could only turn to shoot a glance at my mother when my father said this, who simply offered me a bemused expression. "Rifka, do we have any kreplach left? We need some meat back on your bones!"

"Aaron, dear?" Rifka stepped up and put a hand on his shoulder, pointing back into the room. "Aren't you forgetting…?"

"Ah, you're right!" Aaron waved his hands in the air, as if cursing himself for forgetting. "Noa, I must introduce you to my friend!"

"Before that, you're sure your friend is okay with, well, this?" I asked, waving a hand over myself.

"Aah!" My father said, then turned gravely serious for a moment, his pitch dropping. "There were a few mutants like you in the camps with us. Jew, Romani, homosexual, mutant… we were all equal in our suffering there," he said.

And then, like the flip of a switch, his mood brightened.

"Max!" Rabbi Schaefer yelled into the living room, then walked into the doorway separating it from the kitchen. "My daughter has arrived! Please, come meet her!"

"Are you sure I'm not intruding? I was just going to take my leave, I don't want to impose—"

"Max, it's no harm, truly! Please, come, say hello!"

Alarm bells went off in my head when I heard that voice. It was shockingly familiar, and I'd heard it quite a few times over the past two years. But it couldn't be, I told myself. What were the odds that—

"Noa, bubbeleh!" Aaron walked back into the kitchen, trailed by a man who froze at the sight of me, his friendly smile turning into a rictus grin from shock. "Max, this is my daughter, Noa. She left us to live in New York, but ah, she comes home for the high holidays, good daughter that she is!"

I wanted to say something in protest, but I couldn't form the words at the moment. Instead, I could only stare at the man that had walked into the kitchen behind my father.

"Noa, this is an old friend of mine, Max Eisenhardt. If not for him, I wouldn't have made it out of Auschwitz alive."

And meanwhile, the man I knew as Erik Lehnsherr stared back at me, his expression making the apology I knew he couldn't quite voice.

---

Baruch atah Adonai, eloheinu melech ha'olam, asher kidshanu b'mitzvotav, v'tzivanu, l'chadlik ner shel Chanukah.

Once again, for any of you who are feeling generous: you can find a link to my Ko-fi page right [HERE]. Happy Chanukah, and a Merry Christmas to all of y'all who celebrate that holiday.

Just... keep Mariah Carey away from me.

Spoiler: A/N 2: Status Update

So, I wager a few folks are curious about the personal situation I was dealing with last time I posted a chapter. And well... there have been a few interesting developments.

The first one: when family was in town for Thanksgiving, I managed to impress upon them the severity of the situation. My brother is going back out to LA for the first time in 3-4 years, and before that happens, all of the alcohol is being relocated out of his reach. Our parents are monitoring the situation very keenly, and starting to put some controls in place. (Thank God...) He'll be out there for two weeks, but while he's out there?

Leading into the second... purely by serendipity, I may end up with a multi-month period of not having to worry, because said brother needs a major surgery. And given that our dad is a surgeon, and knows dozens of other surgeons he trusts out in LA, and my brother works 100% remotely... well, he'd be out there for it.

All of this being said, this is a band-aid, not a fix. It is a temporary reprieve that gives me some much-needed breathing room, but it will likely not solve the ultimate issue without a lot more pushing.

But it's something. And that's what counts.

Spoiler: Minor A/N 3

Also also!

After I helped a friend of mine and her girlfriend clear one of the Ultimates on FFXIV (which took a good 20-25 hours of suffering because people don't know how to do Titan Gaols...), she went and reserved me a spot on an artist's commission wait list, complete with paying for it. So while there is a bit of a wait... anticipate more art of Noa within the next couple of months!

 

[October Daye]

Howdy, folks. Hope all my fellow Jews had a good Chanukah, and made out with a decent haul. (I myself got, like, 10 pairs of new socks, of which I was badly in need!)

This is a pretty small announcement, really just three things.

First off, I've set up a small poll for who should be the focus of Pound the Table's first Xmas omake. The group of selections is small, yes, but we are only one major arc into the story.

Second up: the next canon omake will be dropping this coming Sunday. So please look forward to Magneto the Mint Chip Bandit, resplendent in his finery. And his SPOON!

Lastly. And this is... well, wow.

So, if the big banner front-and-center wasn't enough to let everybody know this, Sufficient Velocity is hosting a User's Choice Awards for the best fics, alternate histories, quests, etc. of the year. And, uh.

Pound the Table is one of the five finalists for Best Ongoing Fic of 2021.

As of writing this, the vote margin is razor thin. So if any of you like this fic, and want to show some support, I'd be flattered and thankful if you'd head on over to the thread and cast your vote.

And, uh. That's it.

Thanks everybody, and hope you have a great evening!

 

[October Daye]

Pound the Table
Sidestory | Magneto the Mint Chip Bandit

April, 1984

"Stupid tradition," I murmured to myself as I exited the subway at the 23rd street station. "Oh, congratulations on your first solo case, go get drunk with the boss in the middle of the workday, please tell me who thought of that…"

It wasn't exactly normal for me to not be in the office at noon on a workday. Especially not on the day after I'd finished the last remaining damages paperwork on a solo court victory. But there was a good reason for it, oh was there. And it was because I'd rather just have the day off normally than take part in the sheer idiocy that was Schmoel Lieberman's 'tradition'.

Normally, when one of the attorneys under him finished off their first solo case, he took them to split a bottle of very expensive wine with him over a long lunch before returning to the office. Only, I hadn't known that's what was happening, not exactly. It was something he only told me about after I'd finished off my first solo case, so I had to assume it was the same for everyone else.

But see, if I had known this was the plan, I would have managed to avoid pissing off my boss. Or at least had an attempt to. Because if I'd known, I could have told him that there was no way someone as small as I was would be able to split an entire bottle of wine with him without both of us being drunk. Which kind of ruined the point of going back into the office afterwards.

So instead, Lieberman got pissed, told me I had the rest of the day off, and shooed me away.

With how annoyed I was, I went for my favorite comfort food: Chinese. It was a small hole-in-the-wall off 9th and West 24th, and it was probably the only Chinese place in the city that actually made the food properly spicy when I asked for it. And not 'white person' spicy, but actually, properly spicy.

A block and a half of walking later, I picked up my Sichuan beef (dinner tonight) and spicy garlic chicken and broccoli (lunch now). I paid, tipped, walked out… and stopped. I'd been coming to this Chinese place for the past two years.

Which begged the question of how I'd managed to miss the old-timey ice cream parlor across the street.

Well, it wasn't like I had anything to do, and Chinese food microwaved well. I walked into the ice cream parlor, intent on doing nothing more than sampling a few flavors, or maybe getting a small cone.

I wound up leaving with a full quart container of ice cream. Oops.

… what? The mint chip tasted like actual mint and not crappy peppermints!

---

October, 1987

I groaned to myself as my pager went off. Two flights of stairs from my condo, and I was getting bugged by work? I was already in the office for twelve hours today! I didn't take a lunch break! And it was eight p.m. on a Friday! What could they possibly need me for right now!?

No. No, no. I was not going to answer the pager, and if anybody asked, its battery died and I hadn't had a chance to change it.

I ascended the last flight of steps to my condo, key at the ready… and paused.

Was… was that a magnet on my door? Why was there a magnet on the door?

… wait. Was it…?

I slid the key into the lock and opened the door, kicking off my shoes (and spotting a second set, leather men's dress shoes) before setting foot any further inside.

The front door to my condo opened into a small foyer, with a coat closet and powder room (and laundry!) on the left, a doorway to the kitchen area on the right, and extended a little forward into a fairly sizable living room. To the far right of the living room, a hallway went back towards the two bedrooms, one of which I'd converted into a home office for when the weather meant it was just not safe to go into the office.

I closed the door behind me, set my briefcase down beside my purse on a small side table I kept by the door, and walked into my living room.

"How do you know where I live?" I asked as my erstwhile visitor came into view.

"I have tracked down dozens of war criminals in the past few decades." Erik Lehnsherr didn't even bother looking away from my TV, which currently had an early season hockey game on it. Rangers versus… I couldn't tell from here. "People who were actively covering their tracks. Finding one woman whose name, profession, and home city I already know? Child's play, my dear."

"Uh-huh. And to what, exactly, do I owe the pleasure of your company?" I crossed my arms, not caring that he wasn't looking at me.

"Well, given the nature of what was discovered in Oregon, I assumed you would appreciate an update?"

I let the silence stretch. Not too long, but enough that Erik turned to look at me.

"Give me a minute," I said. "I need to change and get my contacts out."

"Why anyone would suffer through those instead of simply wearing glasses, I do not know," Erik murmured, and I could practically hear the scowl of distaste that probably sat on his face.

"Oh, that's easy." I paused in the hallway out of the living room. "I do prefer glasses myself, yes, but the look is clearly not professional enough on me. The one day I wore glasses over contacts, I was immediately treated like a secretary. Make of that what you will."

And with that, I retreated to the back, and closed the door to my bedroom. My skirt suit came off and went into the dry cleaning bag. The bra came off (blessed relief!), and I instead wore a tank under a sweater, and paired that with one of three pairs of sweatpants I'd managed to get a tail hole into. My glamour came down, and then into the bathroom I went, and cleaned off my makeup before getting my contacts out.

For those who've never worn contact lenses: to get them off (or at least, to get soft contacts off), you need to pull down your bottom eyelid with one finger, then essentially 'pinch' the lens off the surface of your eye with two others. It is an incredibly disconcerting thing to do the first several times, but you do grow accustomed to it. It does weaken your blink reflex a little bit, though, just fair warning.

Now that I was comfortable, I exited the back and went back out into the living room, ready to discuss whatever updates Erik had on that HYDRA notebook. Because to be honest, I'd been incredibly curious.

"Alright!" I flounced down into a somewhat overstuffed armchair just to the side of the coffee table, and checked the TV (Rangers vs. Blackhawks – okay fine, I'll root for them, let's go Rangers!) before turning to Erik. "So, regarding—"

My eyes fell upon what Erik held in his hands. It was not the notebook I'd found in a hidden drawer. It was not papers, notes, or anything else that I would've thought relevant to the discussion he wanted to have.

No. It was a bowl and a spoon from the dairy side of my kitchen, and in that bowl and on that spoon was something ever so slightly green.

"Erik?" I asked sweetly. "Where exactly did you get that ice cream from?"

Erik blinked, but did not answer. I stood up from my armchair, grabbed the bowl and spoon from him with a dirty look, and went into the kitchen.

Except that when I passed the threshold, the spoon, still laden with mint chip ice cream, flew into the air and back to Erik's open mouth, depositing its cargo before flying to the sink.

Whose faucet started all on its own.

"You get a pass this one time!" I yelled back into the living room. "One time! Do you understand me, Erik Lehnsherr!?"

"Crystal clear," Erik said.

Somehow, I didn't believe him.

---

July, 1988

Misery.

Utter, abject misery. That was what this day had been. I lost a contact, my heel broke (thank goodness for a backup pair of flats), I sneezed so hard my glamour broke (in my closed, locked office at least, but still)... and oh yeah, the bottle of Midol I kept in my desk had run out.

And all of this was before getting to just how obnoxious the client I'd had to deal with today was.

Uuugh.

All I wanted was to get home, take a nice hot bath, curl up on the sofa with a bowl of mint chip and my heated blanket, and fall asleep early.

I unlocked my front door, took off my flats, set my briefcase down, and went to the kitchen to get the ice cream warmed up enough that I could get a bowl without issue. But when I opened the freezer and reached to pick up the quart of ice cream… it was light. Far, far too light.

I took the box out, opened it up… and saw a ziploc bag inside where there should have been ice cream. Inside the ziploc was a twenty dollar bill… and a small red-with-black-tips u-shaped magnet.

I threw the empty carton against the wall. Then I stalked to my living room, pounded a number into the phone, and started speaking the moment I heard the line pick up.

"I am going to take a nice hot bath after a very long, very miserable day," I said, more calmly than I ever had before. "I know you have a key to my condo, and the means to get things places in a very short amount of time. You have thirty minutes to get a fresh quart of ice cream into my condo before I'm out of the bath. If I do not have my mint chip by the time I'm out of the bath, I will tell Pietro where you keep hiding the coffee and hard candies. Do you understand me, Erik Lehnsherr?."

The line clicked dead. I slammed the phone down onto the receiver and wrote out a small note to leave on my kitchen counter, along with a thing of genuinely high-quality coffee beans I'd intended to give as a Secret Santa… only to learn it was a White Elephant instead when I actually stopped to read the card. Then I stalked back to my bedroom, and unwound in a bath that was as hot as I could comfortably stand.

After I dried off, got the heated blanket plugged in, and turned the TV on, I checked the kitchen.

Sure enough, where before there had been a bag of coffee beans and a sheet of notebook paper, there was a quart of mint chip ice cream and a sticky note.

I owe you one
Pietro

I could only smirk as I scooped myself a big bowl of ice cream. Sure, it probably wouldn't stop Erik from helping himself every time he happened to be in Manhattan.

But at least he now knew the consequences.

---

This sidestory brought to you by Ko-fi.

 

[October Daye]

Pound the Table
Sidestory | Holiday Traditions

December 25, 1989

"Whoa there Matt, careful!" Foggy's sudden grip on the underside of his arm was the only thing that kept Matt from slipping as the two stepped up onto the curb. His foot slid along the sidewalk, making hardly a sound as it skidded along the ice, and he finally found purchase a good bit in front of where he'd initially wanted to step. It was just part of the hazards he dealt with.

To Matthew Murdock, all ice was black ice. Imperturbable, undetectable, and immediately dangerous.

"Thanks Foggy," Matt said, patting his friend on the shoulder once his feet were back underneath him, and wincing when his bruised knuckles protested. The sidewalk was mostly clear, but snow continued to fall, threatening to ruin Matt's perception of the world around him as it blanketed the city in a curtain of quiet.

"Hope it's not just for that," Foggy said, his tone turning joking. "You woke me up how early? To go to morning Mass? And this after midnight Mass? C'mon Matt, we could've been warm and cozy and drinking eggnog right now."

"I put up with being a plus-one at a Nelson family gathering," Matt said. "You can handle getting me to church one day a year."

"Of course the one time you need my help getting somewhere, it's Christmas," Foggy mutters. "Of course."

Matt just gave a good-natured chuckle and let Foggy lead, letting the crunch of slush and snow under his friend's boots guide his steps. But at the same time, he ruminated, just a little.

Normally, Matt didn't need much help getting anywhere. He could find his way around the major city streets simply enough, and people would fall over themselves to help whenever the blind man asked for directions. Finding where he wanted to go was simple. Easy.

Unless it was snowing.

Matt was loath to admit that the winter was his least favorite season. It wasn't the cold that was a problem. It wasn't the shorter daylight hours, either – it wasn't like daylight made a difference to his ability to navigate. And he was anything but some Scrooge who hated the holidays.

No, Matthew Murdock hated the winter because of the snow.

He could appreciate the fun that children got up to in the soft, fluffy ice. He knew the pleasures of a snow day, the revelation of staying inside and sipping hot chocolate rather than brave the cold.

But it was different for him. Because it wasn't simply that the snow was cold, or the ice was slick, or any of that. It was something far smaller, yet oft overlooked.

Snow dampened sound.

Noise illuminated the world for Matt. The honking of a car horn three blocks away threw the world into focus in ways that he wasn't sure a sighted person could understand. He knew where everything was – every piece of litter, every rattling car part, all the contents of every pocket, every person pacing the street. For a brief, glorious moment, the world lay before him, mapped out and carved in stone.

But in the winter, surrounded by snow, it was fuzzy. Dull. The sound didn't travel properly. It got stuck in the sleet, fading to echoes in the ice.

It was the one time where Matt truly felt as blind as he was.

"We're almost there, yeah?" Matt asked, realizing he'd lost track of how many blocks they'd traveled.

"One more block up," Foggy confirmed. "And if we were still living at the old place, it would've been four more blocks. Thank goodness for paying summer work, huh?"

"Gonna have to agree on that one," Matt said, offering a smile he didn't quite feel. "And good pay, to boot."

They walked the rest of the way in silence, and Matt's thoughts turned to his summer. That summer of learning and work, of diligence and… disappointment.

After the trial, Sam Lieberman took over as his supervisory attorney for the remaining few weeks of his summer at Lewin Lieberman & Loeb. He'd spoken with the man at length, had a conversation in his office that was louder than it should have been, and where Matt received the verbal equivalent of a wet trout to the face. It had been a disappointing end to an incredible experience, and made his return to his 2L year a melancholy affair.

What made it worse was that he hadn't heard anything from his old boss. Sure, Foggy found the clippings in the Bugle and the Times that showed she'd started a new practice. But even though he'd gotten the address and sent a letter, he'd heard nothing back.

It was… disheartening. Matt had enjoyed not having to hide how good his remaining senses were. He'd enjoyed that sense of validation for doing a good thing while on that case.

It was a feeling he'd tried to recapture at night, by foot and fist.

Matt and Foggy eventually made it back to their building. Seven flights of stairs awaited the two, which was unchanged from their old place, but in-unit laundry meant they didn't need to do the same when they ran out of clothes.

It was after the fourth flight of stairs that a curious scent caught Matt's nose, and he paused on his way up. Foggy's footsteps on the fifth flight paused, and he heard his friend take a couple of steps down.

"Matt?" Foggy asked. "You alright?"

"Yeah," he said. "It's just… why do I smell Chinese food?"

"No idea, but come on," Foggy said, starting back up the stairwell. "I wanna get in and grab some eggnog."

And yet, as the two climbed, the scent grew stronger. Enough so that Matt could pick out the exact dishes that had been ordered – chicken lo mein, broccoli beef, pork fried rice, and potstickers.

"Uh, Matt?"

Foggy had gotten to the top of the stairs before him.

"What?"

"There's a bag of Chinese takeout in front of our door," Foggy said.

That revelation brought the both of them up short. Matt's first thought was that at least they wouldn't need to resort to cold cuts for lunch, but he couldn't help but ask why there was a bag of Chinese food there. He remembered something outside of a Chinese place a few weeks back – Matt had stepped in and stopped two thugs from shaking down the owner, around eleven o'clock at night. But he'd been sufficiently masked to prevent anyone from recognizing him, he thought.

"Is there anything on the bag?" Matt asked, pulling his apartment key out of his pocket.

"Uh…" Foggy's knee hit the floor of the hallway with a small thud, and the rustling of cheap paper and plastic followed moments later. "Oh, hang on, there's a card in here. It's uh." The paper slid along Foggy's hands, firm against his touch. "It's addressed to you, actually."

"Huh." Matt extended a hand, and Foggy obliged, pressing it into his grasp until Matt's fingers closed around it. While Foggy opened the apartment, Matt flipped the card in his hands and felt for a return address, finding none.

But when he felt for who it was addressed to, he found only his name, twice. Matthew Murdock, written in ink.

And below that, his name again. Only this time, in braille.

"Well go on," Foggy said. "Open it!"

Matt turned to face in Foggy's direction, and waved at the hallway he was still standing in.

"Get inside first obviously, come on!" Foggy tapped on the door a few times, and Matt took the hint. He walked into the apartment and collapsed his cane, then busied himself with opening the letter while Foggy got out plates and silverware for lunch. If someone was going to give them Chinese food, they weren't going to waste it.

But in the meantime, Matt sat down on the armchair in his and Foggy's small living room. He opened up the letter, took out the paper inside, and inspected it.

It was a rather thick paper, closer to card stock than anything. He unfolded the letter and ran his fingers along the inside, finding exactly what he thought he would: more braille.

And so, with some trepidation, he opened it up and started to read.

Matthew;​

​

I'll preface this with an apology. I'm sorry for not getting in touch with you when you sent me that letter. It's bad of me to try and offer an excuse, but in my defense, the case I'm working on has been rather all-consuming. I'm filing a request for judicial intervention soon, so pay attention to the sports section of the news come January. ​

​

But I've digressed. ​

​

Merry Christmas, Matthew. ​

​

If the paper that this letter is on is any indication, my firm has access to a braille printer. It's not exactly a standard Christmas present, but, well. You have unlimited access to it. If you need anything printed in braille, anything at all, just let me know. And if you find you need advice or help, I'm a phone call or subway ride away.​

​

Now, I bet you're probably wondering about the Chinese food. And as for that, just ask yourself: who else is open on Christmas? It's an unofficial Jewish tradition, and one that I am happy to share. ​

​

I wish you a wonderful holiday, and a Happy New Year. Best of luck in finishing out your 2L year.​

​

Sincerely,​

​

Noa Schaefer​

Matt finished reading. And then his fingers drifted down below the signature, finding exactly what he was told would be there.

It was something so small. An address, a phone number, and a promise.

"Matt!" Foggy yelled from the kitchen. "I'm gonna eat all the potstickers myself if you don't get in here!"

"Don't even think about it!" Matt yelled back. He put the letter back into its envelope, set it down on the armchair for now, and went to go eat. He could call later.

After the chicken lo mein.

---

Merry Christmas, Happy Kwanzaa, and Happy Holidays to all y'all reading this.

To my fellow Jews? Happy National Eat Chinese Takeaway Day.

I myself am solo for the holidays and New Years for the first time in… I think ever, actually. And after having a roommate for the first time in six years, the privacy is nice, yeah… but it's also a little… too quiet, really.

So those of you who are with your families, make sure to show them some love. And for those of you who are also spending the holidays on their own…

Just remember. You may be solo, but you're not alone.

Spoiler: A/N

So for those who aren't following the poll, Pound the Table is currently neck and neck with another fic in the 2021 SV User's Choice Awards. The lead between the two has only been as much as 20 and as little as one for the past few days.

If any of y'all still have a vote to cast, and are at all willing to show your support for this fic, I would greatly appreciate any votes sent my way.

But while you're there, I would also appreciate it if you showed a bit of love to some of the other competitors and checked them out. Specifically, I will shill a little bit for @Flairina and plug A Backwards Grin. It's definitely a very different sort of fic than Pound the Table is, but it's very well-written, and I genuinely enjoyed reading it. Plus, it features my second favorite Pokemon (Mawile) front and center! Now granted, Mawile is no Absol, but still!

And with that out of the way… I hope everyone had a good December 25th, and I wish all of you a Happy New Year—

Oh, the oven finished preheating.

Later!

 

[October Daye]

Okay, the New Years has come and gone, we're all unhappily sober again, time to speak.

First off — to all of you who voted in the User's Choice Awards, thank you so much, oh my goodness. That people thought highly enough of this fic and my writing to nominate it was already a major dopamine kick — but seeing that banner at the top is just… hoo boy.

It feels REAL good.

But. Let me just say that for as much as y'all enjoyed reading this fic?

I'm having way more fun writing it. Mwahahahaha! The best dopamine is for me, and me alone!

… anyway.

As a sort of… I guess part-recognition, part-thanks, a small thing. How many of y'all remember that "What If…?" side story I did? Now how many of y'all want more such looks sideways?

So first of all — the plan is for every arc of Pound the Table to have one "What If…?" episode. And second?

As a "thank you" to all of y'all, I'm now taking submissions for Arc 2's "What If…?" sidestory.

If you have a divergence in the story so far or a different starting point entirely that you'd like to have me explore, then send me a PM with "prompt" or "what if" in the subject header.

In a few days, I will take my FIVE (5) favorite prompts and set up a straw poll to decide what Arc 2's "What If…?" will be.

Note: continuation of the first "What If…?" is NOT one of the options you can submit.

---

Anyway. Happy New Years, everyone!

Now if you'll excuse me, DC and northern Virginia are due for a snowstorm this week, so I'm off to get groceries.