Continued from yesterday:
In a quiet little cafe, usually chosen by discrete people for discrete purposes, one man speaks too loudly - thus gaining momentary attention.
“You can *not* be serious!”
The gathered discrete stare at the man with the red sunglasses, then turn back to their own business when no further theatre occurs at the table.
Xavier merely tented his fingers and waited until Scott sat back down. "We have to allow for the possibility that some more… open-minded humans may wish to work with our students. We shouldn’t turn anyone aside just because of their race.“
”*Why*?“ said Scott.
"Why not?” Kurt took the words out of Xavier’s mouth. He was currently at extreme ease and sliding into boredom, judging by the way he was balancing cutlery on his fingertip. The holographic disguise he wore *should* have made him unnoticeable… except he’d figured out the controls in a scant few seconds and set it to a cross between Cary Elwes and Errol Flynn. “I worked with humans my entire life. Stopping now seems such a shame, ja?”
“Life ain’t like a circus, flyboy,” grumbled Logan.
“No? So why are there so many clowns?”
Ororo laughed behind her hand.
“It’s *dangerous*,” Scott persisted. “Who knows if we’re letting in another Stryker?”
“Ah… That would be me,” said Xavier. “You seem to forget that you're sitting next to the best background-checking source available.”
“Not to mention the fact that a few of our students would test their resolve,” added Ororo.
“Some of ‘em been testin’ *mine*,” said Logan.
“Really?” said Kurt. “They never give *me* any trouble.”
“That’s 'cause you’re the *entertainment*,” the burly man snarled.
“Is it written anywhere that I’m not allowed to do things with a little flair?” said Kurt. He flipped the fork in the air and caught it neatly. “Atchung. Lunch.”
~
Sara watched, emotionally numb, as her mother stumbled and fumbled into a complete breakdown in the court.
_This is how our Dragons die,_ she thought. _Not with a bang, but a whimper._
On the stand, her mother tried in vain to throw all the blame on 'that girl’ - Sara. How it was Sara who deliberately and purposefully became the antithesis of a perfect daughter. How *Sara* destroyed all of Jaquelline’s dreams. One by one.
How it was *Sara’s* fault that she, Jaquelline, couldn’t give Sam a male heir like she was supposed to.
_Wait. What?_
“I tried and tried,” Jaquelline sobbed, “*four* years… and every time, *SHE* did something that… that… caused a miscarriage…”
All the hospital visits. All the effort of being a brave little girl for Mommy. Neither she nor Daddy had said a thing about *why* she was sick in hospital.
Ms Adler whispered in her ear, “You know anything about this?”
“Not before today. I always thought her alcohol problem lead to interesting ulcer complications. I know she enrolled in the AA when I was four… without much success.”
Ms Adler requested a recess to gain evidence for the court and to round up a counter-witness. Sara told her where to find the relevant journals from Sara’s point of view, where mother’s record-box was, and the number of their family doctor.
After that, she was dragged back into her holding cell until recess was over.
The only positive point to *that* part was Mort was there. Daddy had evidently paid for a very nummy suit. She’d hold him, and snuggle in that delicious outfit and the arms of the man who wore it… except they were in separate cells and there was a hallway between them.
“You’re takin’ your time,” he said. “I came *in* and you were waitin' for some court thing. Tell me the jury’s out?”
“Mother’s making things awkward.” Sara leaned on the bars. “Dragons never go down easy. You?”
“No witnesses for or against, a waterlogged booklet that may or may not 'ave been me passport. Legal argy-bargy back an’ forth. Bit of a mess on the witnesses - I was the only one. Done and sold in a day, luv. Me jury’s out righ’ now.”
“Luck and fortune find you, dear,” she said. “Mother sprung some dirty laundry on us. She *claims* I sabotaged all potential siblings in utero.”
“*God* I could fucking kill that woman…” Mort snarled.
“Don’t. The best fate for her is to let her lie in the hole she dug," Sara traced an interesting patina on the bars with a fingernail. "Once Dr Nemertea[1] gets on the stand about the whole thing, the bubbles shall mark where she sank.” Sara sighed. “No more deceptions. No more vitriol. No more rants… soon.”
“Luck and fortune find yer, luv,” said Mort. “You’ve needed it for a bloody long time.”
*
“Twists and turns,” said Kitty. “This trial’s becoming a soap opera.”
“Naw, it’s only this witness,” said Jubillee. “The woman’s a dog's mother.”
“It’s worse than the OJ trial,” said Hank.
“The… what now?” said Avery.
Hank sighed. “I feel *so* old…”
*
“Mr Adrien. Once again, I see your smiling face next to yet *another* suspected mutant terrorist… I’m starting to wonder if you’d rather send roses.”
“I just like to keep busy,” said Sam. “It prevents boredom.”
Judge Scheindlin drummed her fingers on the desk. “Well, *I’m* starting to get bored. Does the prosecution have any hard evidence?”
“Um. No, your honour.”
“Not even a positive indicator for the X-gene?”
“No, your honour.”
“Witnesses?”
“Arresting officers, Ma'am.”
Judge Scheindlin sighed. “Fine. Call them up. *I’ll* ask the damn questions. Let’s hope it streamlines things…”
*
Jenny had a stack of medical reports with executive summaries on her desk. She had journals neatly piled nearby. She had Sam notified should his presence be required.
And she still had to face the Gorgon.
_Great. Now the kid has *me* doing it._ “Mrs Adrien. You remember Sara’s birth?”
“Of course. It was extremely difficult. I sweated and strained for *hours* to give life to that ungrateful girl and–”
“Your honour…” sighed Jenny. “Permission to treat Mrs Adrien as a hostile witness?”
“*Please*.” The judge levelled a glare at Mrs Adrien. “You will constrain your answers to 'yes’ or 'no’, or find yourself in contempt. Understood?”
The woman seethed. “Yes.”
“According to these records, you spent sixteen hours in labour… not including the day and a half of early contractions that were too far apart to admit you to hospital. Is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“Was Sara a big baby?”
“Yes.”
“And yet you refused a caesarian.”
“Objection… relevance.”
“I’m proving state of mind, your honour.”
“Overruled. Answer the question, Mrs Adrien.”
“Yes. I refused a caesarian.”
“Please read from your private journal, dated the day after Sara's birth.” Jenny handed her the book. Handily open at the right entry.
“I did it,” Jaquelline read. “I fought the odds and I won. I have the most beautiful baby girl in the whole world, and *I* bought her into the world. Not the doctors. Not some surgeon. *Me*. Every time I look at her, I feel so proud. My lovely little trophy. *My* prize…”
“Thankyou,” said Jenny, taking the book back. “Do you recall what the doctors told you after you finished writing…” she checked for show, "*five* pages like that?“
"Yes.”
“Did they give you bad news?”
“Yes.”
“They told you that, if you wanted to have a second child, you had to be extremely careful… didn’t they?”
“Yes.” Smoke almost curled from her ears.
“Do you remember the precautions they gave you?”
“Yes.”
“Please list them for the court.”
“I couldn’t… try… for two years. I had to stop drinking. I was on a special diet and a regime of pills… and I had to avoid stress.”
“And during this time, you had to submit to physical exams to ascertain your health, am I correct?”
“Yes.”
“How old was Sara when you started drinking to excess?”
“OBJECTION!”
“Overruled.”
“She was… eleven months old, wasn’t she?”
“Yes.”
“Was Sara a talented child at eleven months?”
“No.”
“Yet I have here a number of reports saying that even at that age, she was precocious. Walking, trying to talk, working things out… I ask again, and remind you of the penalty for perjury… Was Sara talented?”
“Yes.”
“Was she talented enough to unlock the liquor cabinet?”
A long, slow-burning pause, during which Mrs Adrien glared burning liquid death at Sara. “No.”
“Was she talented enough to make you a drink and bring it to you?”
Were the laws of physics different, Mrs Adrien’s restrained fury would have caused her to spontaneously combust. “No.”
“Could you read another journal entry, Mrs Adrien? Dated two weeks before her first birthday.”
“I’d like to plead the fifth.”
“Mrs Adrien, you are not on trial,” said the judge. “Read the journal or a bailiff will.”
Mrs Adrien growled under her breath, and refused to take the journal.
“Bailiff?”
He took it and read, “I don’t know how she does it, but Sara Louise found every cushion in the house and piled it up in front of my drinks. She almost buried the cabinet, this time, and fell asleep on one of the big ones before I found her. Sara woke up just as I finally got it open and said, 'No, Mommy. Yucky.’ So I told her I needed it to settle down and she said, 'You drink milk’. She was so sweet, like a little angel looking after me. I had to add milk to my glass to make her calm down.”
“Thankyou.” Jenny took the journal back. “You *added* milk to your alcohol.”
“Yes,” Mrs Adrien growled.
“At which point did Sara *make* you drink alcohol? When was it *her* fault?”
“I– She was always doing things…”
“When did Sara *make* you disobey your doctor’s orders?”
“I *NEEDED* IT! I could never *cope* with whatever she was doing! She was a little freak then, and she’s an even bigger freak *NOW*!”
The entire jury was glaring venom at the woman.
“No further questions,” said Jenny.
“Prosecution?”
“We have no questions.”
“Witness may step down.”
Mrs Adrien had to be escorted away from Sara by a bailiff. “If you think this is the end…” she hissed.
Sara looked her in the eye, almost emotionless, and said, “You have no power over me[2].”
Jenny half expected the Gorgon to melt.
The gavell slammed, making Sara jump. “This court is in recess until tomorrow morning,” said the judge. “I think we all need a break.”
“Amen,” whispered Sara.
[1] …but they call him Dr Worm ;) They Might Be Giants obscure side-fling #44958…
[2] _Labyrinth_ fling.
~
Detective Goren proved to be almost entertaining. He seemed to believe that Sara was innocent of all charges and showed no remorse for mangling the Prosecution’s case to hell and gone.
Sara wanted to hold up score cards, but she satisfied herself by drawing them in cartoonish form amongst her doodles.
“And you had a chance to examine Sara’s journals?”
“What I could read of them, yes,” said Goren.
“What you could *read* of them?”
“After a certain point, Sara became aware that her journals were being read by -ah- unwelcome eyes… so she encoded them. Once she got accustomed to one code, she further encoded her workings until we had to stretch our resources just to decode them.”
“And you saw nothing… nefarious in that?”
“Every teenaged girl desires a certain level of privacy,” said Goren. "Most rely on those lockable diaries… Sara just took hers to an extreme.“
"So… *This* page, for example, could mean anything?” the Prosecution showed a diary apparently full of gibberish and an interesting representation of the solar system.
“Actually, that is a treatise on the fractal nature of the universe," said Goren. "The picture nearby is a drawing of a molecule based on the known planets and their orbits around the sun. The actual personal stuff’s on the next page, with the scarecrow figure.”
The court laughed.
“And how can you actually *tell*?”
“There’s a few levels of encoding. Theories and ideas are encoded at a low level, daily events usually turn up at mid-level, personal thoughts are high-level. I asked some encoders and the US military asked me if they could pay her for her high-level codes… Interesting work for a kid in Remedial Ed.”
Glare. Goren had obviously digressed again. “And how can you tell that the -ah- high-level stuff isn’t part of an elaborate plot to assassinate the President?”
“Sara’s almost completely non-violent,” he said. “If she *was* the sort of person who committed murder, we’d have been investigating a matricide years ago.”
“*Detective*…” warned the Judge.
Goren put on his best I’ll-be-good smile. “That is,” he corrected, "an intensive psychological profile revealed Sara to be the least likely to kill anyone. She may… investigate the idea as a purely mental exercise - a thought-game… but actual physical violence?“ Goren shook his head. "You’d have to *really* push her buttons to get her to even defend herself.”
“I refer you at this point to the defendant’s 'perfect crime' journals… how many of these match unsolved mysteries on the books of the NYPD?”
“Actually… none of them.” Goren smirked. “None of the unsolved cases *anywhere* match the situations mapped out in these books.”
Sara let out her breath. That had been her biggest concern after dealing with mother.
“And on a further note, they’re hardly perfect,” Goren added. “In each 'case’, Sara’s written down possible flaws, including the fact that the plan is written down. She’s more thorough than most detectives I know.”
Sara twitched. Praise… why did she have so much trouble with praise?
~
Mort stepped out of the court a free man. And his first act as a free man was to find a nice patch of wall and try to nut a dent in it. “God. Damned. Fucking. *Bastards*,” he snarled, impacting his head against the plaster.
Fucking *yanks*.
He’d been proud of being a Brit, of being English. Even though he was a yob, he was better than almost all of the bloody Yanks because without *his* country, theirs would have never got started.
And some *fucker* of a Yank had to dig up some document that said he was half Yank.
“They’re just names, Mr Toynbee,” said Adrien. Sam. Sara’s father. "Names on a piece of paper.“
"One of 'em’s a *fuckin’* Yank,” Mort howled at the wall.
“Well… speaking as a 'fucking Yank’, I’d have to advise that you take the advantages of being one.”
“Yeh?”
“For example, you can stay in this country without fear of being deported,” said Sam. “You can stay near Sara.”
Mort glared at him. So far, he seemed unperturbed that he and she had a 'thing’ going on. But then, he’d seemed unperturbed after watching the securicam footage of his wife mentally abusing his daughter. Mort had only known after the judge asked Sam about it. “You got anythin’ to say 'bout her'n me?”
“Us Adriens fall in love for a very long time,” he said. “With the right partner, that’s a divine blessing. With the wrong partner…” he stared off into nothing, unconsciously touching the gold band on his left ring finger. “If you decide on staying with Sara… be prepared for forever. Decide - *forever*. Changing your mind - can only hurt her… maybe even damage her. Sara’s had too much pain already.”
“Damn straight,” said Mort.
“I’m glad we agree on that,” said Sam. “Because if you hurt her, I swear to God I *will* destroy you.”
“I owe 'er me life,” said Mort. “I owe 'er… me *salvage* rights. I don’t want nuthin’ for 'er that she don’t need for 'erself… and if that includes me pissin’ off, I’ll go. I’ll go even if it bloody kills me… 'cause I want 'er to get better.”
Sam grinned. “Then I believe we have a deal.”
The second mutant-human handshake in the history of the nation sounded as a muffled clap in the empty corridor. There was no fanfare. No flash of photography. No assembled mass of media[1] to observe and record. Just two men shaking hands in a hall.
“Can I drop in on 'er?”
“Sure. Show of support,” Sam carried himself a little lighter, now. "My little girl needs it.“
*
Sara *knew* when her father entered the courtroom. It was a knack she’d always had, of picking up the subtle vibrations that always spelled out 'Daddy’s home’ in her mind.
She smiled and waved for both he and Mort, but kept it down. Not appropriate behaviour when hearing about her alleged escapades as Adrian Essel, the transie 'ho.
As far as muckraking went, it was a sad effort. There was no proof. Just rumours, innuendo, and a kneejerk reaction from the PTA.
And was easily disproved by the school’s own documentation on Sara. Including the numerous memos she’d sent around with regards to Adrian Essel and his lack of existence in reality.
Finally done with dredging up her past and present as a potential mutie psycho, the Prosecution played the trump card of paranoia.
Who knew exactly what this *mutie* would do if provoked?
Who could tell what damage she could wreak if allowed back out into the public?
_Who knows what evils lurk in the hearts of men?_ Sara thought.
Ms Adler was on her toes, asking how many humans had committed atrocities with nothing more than their own ingenuity. Could we trust our *neighbours*? Evidently not… but we don’t feel the need to lock them up because of their race. Certainly, Sara *could* blend her way into some situation dangerous for the rest of the world… but what was the point. Just because one has the *capability* to do something doesn't mean that they *would*.
Every human being on the planet with a certain IQ and a modicum of training *could* be the next Adolf Hitler… but they choose not to. That choice is an individual’s right by birth. Sara had not *chosen* to expose her mutant nature. She certainly hadn’t *chosen* to have a member of her race perform a spectacular attention-grabbing stunt just after she got in trouble about the riot. She definitely didn’t choose to be a mutant.
Now the choice of her life lay with twelve people who’d heard a lot of confusing things.
Sara barely had time to hug and kiss her Dad and Mort before the bailiffs gently escorted her to the holding area.
To wait.
And wait.
And *wait*.
[1] I like this as a collective noun. A mass of media ;) Sort of like a bark of papparazzi :D
~