Work Text:
The Defense Rests
(After Two Objections, Three Migraine Pills, One Time-Saving Gesture, and One-and-a-Half In-Session Breakdowns)
Two days after the Terrorist Group Formerly Known as the Avengers was sentenced for its various, sundry, serious, and multiple international crimes, a group of six people met in a nondescript bar that was considerably bigger on the inside.
It wasn’t planned and yet, it seemed inevitable.
For these six people shared something that no one else (on their planet, never mind the wider universe) wanted any part of: they were the defense attorneys for the aforementioned Former Avengers.
And to a person, they all looked like they were survivors of a 38-month castle siege, complete with no food, water, sleep, sunlight, or a shower . . . accompanied by a constant bombardment of catapulted metal spheres on a tin roof, just to make sure their suffering was complete and total.
Also known as ‘repeated exposure to six of the dumbest, illogical, and most selfish people on the planet’.
Despite their best efforts to blend in and not draw attention, their faces were known to the public now and the pitying looks they got from everyone who recognized them should have grated on their nerves. That, however, would have required both energy and the will to care, so the pity was ignored in favor of coffee, water, and some really bad fried mushrooms.
(beers and wine were offered on the house, but the chance of getting alcohol poisoning without actually dying from it was too high, so they reluctantly and with great longing declined)
No names were asked or given, because they knew that they would now and forever be ‘so-and-so’s defense attorney’. For the rest of their lives, that would be the only moniker that mattered.
Their general miasma of rank despair and soul-crushing hopelessness cleared every table in a ten-foot radius, a courtesy (and a desperate desire not to be crushed beneath the despair and or infected with the hopelessness) none of them noticed.
“Well, it’s done,” Scott Lang’s lawyer suddenly sighed, slumping back dejectedly in his chair and giving the mushroom on his fork a woebegone look when it disintegrated because he flexed his fingers. “I think I’m going to change careers and become an outhouse maintenance man. At least then, I can legally throw the shit in a fire and incinerate it. And it doesn’t talk back.”
“Oh, what are you bitching about?” Natasha Romanova’s unfortunate charity case demanded bitterly, her Scottish accent incongruously soft. “At least your idiot understands reality and finally realized that he did, in fact, commit several crimes and was going back to prison. Sure, he was a criminal before he became an international terrorist but still: he learned something from that experience and didn’t try to argue his conviction or sentence. The arrogant Russian cow I got saddled with insulted my intelligence four times in five minutes, informed me that I wasn’t important enough to be her lawyer, and tried to seduce every male who wandered within eyesight. When all nineteen attempts failed, were laughed at, or ignored, she decided that working her wiles on the judge was the way to go!”
Startled blinks and a few open mouths greeted this, though Barton’s attorney was unsurprised. The Black Widow’s defender didn’t even notice her colleague’s faces, too caught up her own indignation at the memory of what the arrogant, foolish woman had forced her to endure.
“Of course, since the judge is both a professional and straight, her pitiful seduction failed to help her at all, which I still don’t think she realizes — except that it did stop Her Honor from considering any kind of leniency. Romanova was sentenced to death and will die literally believing that this is all some massive mistake and the most important person on Earth — wait, no, the second most important person, because she’s on top, right — is going to personally come to her cell any day now and release her while groveling and apologizing and kissing her dainty feet. Did you know she actually told the judge that she did what she had to do and if Her Honor wasn’t so egotistical, she’d realize that and stop the trial immediately?!”
As none of them had actually heard that, due to her trial, along with Rogers’ and Maximoff’s, being both separate and closed, the audacity sent a small wave of energy rippling through the group.
Not much, mind, and the lackluster mushrooms sapped it right down, but still.
Then Barton’s lawyer scoffed, earning a tableful of anticipatory eyebrows, and said, “The dumbass archer I got assigned to blamed Tony Stark for everything. And I mean everything. The A/C went down one day because the entire power grid got unplugged by a group of drunk, idiot teenagers rushing for a college fraternity and he flat-out said that Stark had done it just to be petty and make Barton beg him to fix it.”
“I — what?” Lang’s attorney said incredulously. “That —”
“Yup,” Barton’s lawyer replied. “And he meant every word. I quit trying to reason with him on the second day, or even talk to him past ‘this is the day’s itinerary’, because he literally refused to listen. He honestly thinks that if Tony Stark had just . . . I’m still not sure what, actually, other than not be Tony Stark, but the entire time he kept ranting that if Stark had just paid for everything instead of trying to use them to fix his fuck-ups, none of them would have needed to break the law. My God!” he exclaimed, his obvious trauma pulling almost-but-not-quite sympathetic looks from his companions. “He mouthed off that first day before I could blink and told the judge that Stark should be on trial, not him and his teammates, because without Stark singlehandedly writing the Accords and chaining the Avengers like dogs, things would be perfect. It’s Stark’s fault they broke the law, so Stark needs to be punished.”
A very long silence ensued after that, broken by the soft thump of a coffee mug hitting the table.
“What . . . what did the judge say?” Wilson’s lawyer carefully asked. His eyes were wide with the twisted curiosity everyone else was feeling and they mentally applauded him for having the nerve to ask.
The other woman shook her head and hunched her shoulders at the memory, whispering, “He sat there with his mouth hanging open for more than four minutes. Then he blinked and called the prosecutor to state his case. Chance stood up, looked the jury dead in the eye, and said, ‘The prosecution rests’.”
Another stunned silence followed that pronouncement, but this time nobody dared to break it until the woman charged with defending Barton dredged up the last of her courage and admitted the awful truth to the only people who could understand.
“Everyone gawked at him for another minute before the judge just . . . he just nodded and looked at me and told me I could proceed.”
A beat, accented by a quick, nervous lip-licking, and then . . .
“And all I could say was, “The defense rests too, Your Honor’. Barton tried to escape then, screaming his usual profanity, so security tased him and the jury sentenced him to life right that second. That probably violated a few laws, but the judge signed off on it, so . . . and now I think I want to become a professional butterfly catcher. Then I’ll never have to deal with people again.”
The silence that followed this was so profound, several dead Greek philosophers suddenly felt inadequate.
It was broken faster than anyone could have anticipated by Sam Wilson’s attorney, a man whose twenty years of experience should have disqualified him from that kind of punishment . . . except for the minor fact that on the bar exam, his son had outscored the son of the head of the firm he worked for.
And by ‘outscored’, he meant ‘missed three questions’ compared to ‘failed so badly, it made the annual blooper reel’.
“Damn,” he drawled, tossing back a full bottle of beer like he was at a kegger and somehow managing not to belch in the process. “That dipshit I had to defend told everyone that he was helping Captain America save the world, so even if nobody understands the specifics — which he couldn’t give, other than ‘more Winter Soldiers’ and ‘the Accords are bad’ — it was still okay because Captain America was saving the world and he was helping. He got hit with thirty years of hard labor in Lagos and was sobbing into a used snotrag when I finally escaped.”
“Huh,” Maximoff’s traumatized defender mused. He’d only been practicing for a year and had no experience at all with fruitcakes, nutcases, insane mind-raping HYDRA operatives, or spoiled rotten brats masquerading as grown adults.
So finding out he’d gotten all of them stuffed into one person had been a shock.
“What d’ya mean ‘huh’?” Romanova’s lawyer prodded, pushing the platter of inedible mushrooms away with a glower of disgust that made the rest of the nearly-full plate dissolve into goo out of pure shame.
The young man glanced up through his eyelashes, gauging either her sincerity or his ability to actually share his own trauma, then shrugged and dived straight in the deep end.
“The witch did nothing but spout off about Stark being the devil with blood money and bloody hands and blood suffering and — she was weirdly obsessed with blood,” he told the tabletop, cringing at the memory. “And if she wasn’t blaming Stark for everything, she was ranting about how it wasn’t her fault because she can’t control other people’s fears and they should be grateful because she tried to save them. And that’s literally it; those are the only two things she would say.”
“Wow,” Barton’s defender murmured, clasping a shoulder in solidarity. “That’s . . . damn. Did you actually get a trial?”
After a deep sigh of raw exhaustion, the Witch’s Lawyer very quietly said, “Yes and no. The Accords Panel watched the recordings of our meetings and were apparently appalled, but said it didn’t count as a confession, so in order for it to be fair, she had to go in front of a judge and jury.”
“You poor thing,” Wilson’s lawyer lamented, draining his coffee and looking mournfully at the empty cup. None of the waiters were willing to actively serve the table and he understood why, but he desperately needed another injection of caffeine.
One brave waitress recognized his need and a compromise was reached: she scuttled over like a hampster on Speed, put two full carafes of coffee and two of water one table over, and retreated to the register before any eye contact could be made.
A single raised glass of acknowledgement was sufficient and the table went back to sharing its collective misery after the beverages were obtained.
As though the interruption hadn’t happened, Maximoff’s attorney blew out a deep sigh and, not once looking up from the scratched table top, shared both his actual trauma and the reason he was still sane.
“But the first day of the trial, we’d just gotten to the courtroom steps when a group of people came screaming around the corner. I mean actually screaming,” he clarified, still not looking anyone in the eye but the one randomly scratched into the middle of the table. “None of them were speaking English so they had to watch the video and then find a translator to figure out what they were saying — turns out Maximoff killed their families in Lagos — but they shouldered between us and her and then just . . . just . . . hacked her to pieces.”
Stunned silence greeted this, though it was heavily tinged with disbelief, and that finally got the young man to raise his head.
“No, I mean that literally,” he insisted, eyes a little wild at their doubt. “Two of them had machetes, one of them had that weird axe-thing that you see in Halloween costumes of Death, and the other three had knives.”
“. . . well,” Lang’s lawyer said in response, taking an easy sip of his coffee before nodding approvingly. “At least you got spared the courtroom drama.”
This simple truth had the rest of them nodding as well, Maximoff’s guy among them, and his lips quirked in a tiny smile as he said, “Right? The hilarious part is that when she was dead, the group put their weapons down and waited to be arrested. Only, none of the cops even tried. Every one of them made a show of turning to look in a different direction and talking really loudly about how dangerous the streets are. So after a few minutes, they picked up their stuff and left. And the ME’s report said ‘suicide’. So that was that.”
Another long pause ensued, though this one was dark with envy. The witch’s lawyer understood and didn’t take it personally. He did pull up a picture of mozzarella sticks on his phone and held it up in the general direction of the register in a silent request to order a plate of them as a peace/’sorry I got off so easy’ offering, operating under the assumption that they couldn’t possibly be worse than the fried mushrooms.
Also, his first major client had been assassinated before he’d had the chance to get her to a courtroom . . . and nobody cared.
Including him.
The fact that he wasn’t really bothered by this was mildly disturbing.
Then again, the witch had been massively, disturbing-in-all-the-bad-ways, insane, so . . .
“What about you? You’ve been suspiciously quiet.”
That sudden demand, paired with an imperious statement of fact, yanked the table’s attention to the only man who hadn’t so much as coughed since they entered the bar.
They had gone to the deliberate effort of not looking directly at each other’s faces; anonymity was the goal tonight. But this man’s presence was such that they found themselves compelled to look up. Eyes a disconcerting shade of grey met the eyes of first the unfortunate woman who’d gotten saddled with Natasha Romanova, then evenly swept the rest of the table, but he said nothing. In fact, after a solid three minutes of him drinking a glass of water so slowly, the last of the ice hadn’t just melted, it shrieked in agony on the way down, he gave a shrug that everyone hoped wasn’t as careless as it looked and leaned back, sweeping his gaze around the table once more and openly taking each person’s measure.
“I was curious how your . . . clients . . . were,” Steve Rogers’ lawyer finally rumbled, his face disconcerting in its complete lack of expression. “And to be blunt, I desperately needed to know that stupidity really is contagious. Because if it was just him and those other idiots still followed him . . .”
Oh. Okay, yeah, that was a terrifying thought. To a person, the entire table shuddered in fear-laced disgust before remembering their prurient curiosity and turning back to the de facto leader with expressions that were doubtless way too eager for the atmosphere.
On the other hand, given their collective circumstances — careers stalled even more than they already had been, their actual names forever replaced with ‘attorney for International Terrorist and Former Avenger so-and-so’ . . .
Maybe they could form the Bar Association equivalent of The Breakfast Club.
Or not. That thought was even more horrifying than realizing either Steve Rogers was The Pied Piper or stupidity was now demonstrably contagious.
“Well, we all shared,” Barton’s lawyer informed Rogers’ man in a desperate attempt to escape their panicked realizations. “And even knowing how stupid they all are, he can’t be that bad.”
Grey eyes flashed with an unholy mix of hysterical laughter and genuinely black despair.
“When I asked if he’d been read his Miranda rights and did he understand them, Rogers looked me straight in the eyes, blinked three times, and said, “What does Carmen Miranda have to do with anything?”.
Dead silence did not fall.
It should have.
But it didn’t.
Watching Natasha Romanova’s lawyer, who was laughing so hard she was crying, slide off a dingy, wobbly chair in a dingy, wobbly bar might have the funniest thing any of them had ever seen.
And God knew they’d all earned it.
It took close to ten minutes for everyone to calm down and the last of their laughter to fade, but once it did, Lang’s defender (and the other one they were all envious of, because at least his client understood reality, even if he was also a moron) softly cleared his throat and just as softly asked the obvious follow-up question.
“What did you tell him?”
Rogers’ lawyer snorted, drank half his water, and scoffed. “I told him we used her version of rights for men and women got Clark Gable. A last little gift for people who are about to be convicted of very serious crimes.” Four heartbeats passed. “He believed me and didn’t ask anything else.”
. . . wow.
Suddenly, they all felt a little better about their clients. Mind-raping international terrorists, thieves, and murderers they might be, but they all had a least a modicum of intelligence. Maybe (probably) not more than that, but still: a modicum was better than nothing, which was apparently what Steve Rogers had been born with.
“The reason he didn’t ask is because he immediately went on a truly impressive rant about how he isn’t a criminal because he didn’t do anything wrong because he’s Captain America so that means he’s a good man and the Accords just wanted to turn him and the Avengers into attack dogs and the governments — all the governments — are so corrupt they hunted an innocent man down like a dog for something he clearly didn’t do.”
What the . . .
“And then, somehow, he went from ‘corrupt governments wanting control of the Avengers’ to ‘Tony Stark writing the Accords to cover his guilt in ULTRON and all the other horrible things he’s done’.”
The man sounded downright bewildered and not one of them could blame him — even Maximoff’s attorney.
And she genuinely believed that Tony Stark had personally murdered her parents just because he could!
“I . . . I don’t ev—I can’t b—what!?” Wilson’s lawyer gasped, looking about two seconds away from passing out cold on the floor. In a move of slightly-spiteful help, Barton’s defender threw a half-glass of water in the man’s face and successfully shocked him back to awareness.
The poor schmuck cursed with defending Steve Rogers didn’t even notice. He heaved a massive sigh and told the next part of the story.
Which was the same as everyone but Lang’s. Go figure.
"Rogers wailed about ‘saving the world’ and ‘Bucky didn’t do it’ and ‘I’m Captain America and no one else can lead the Avengers’ and ‘the safest hands are ours and everything that went wrong wasn’t our fault and it wouldn’t happen again’ and ‘if Tony would get over his ego and admit that Rogers knew best and just do what he was told, none of this would have happened’."
Okay, so it was a little more self-involved than the others, but that made no difference.
Rogers’ lawyer took in their aghast expressions and a bitter smile twisted his lips.
“It gets better,” he rumbled, giving an even more bitter chuff of something that could not be called laughter by any stretch of the imagination when several jaws dropped open. Nobody could bring themselves to actually ask, though, so after a minute or so of dead silence, he sniffed and provided a description of the event that made him decide to abandon his legal career that was a lot more entertaining than it should have been.
Especially when one considered how dry said description was.
“Like the rest of you, I gave up trying to have any kind of conversation with the man at our third meeting. It seems that once Mr. Rogers gets an idea in his head, it is immediately Gorilla glued into place, and nothing will change his mind. He does not accept that people can change, nor does he acknowledge that first impressions aren’t always correct, and he seems either incapable of understanding that he makes mistakes or he simply refuses to, and I honestly can’t say which. So I did my duty to the exact letter and got nowhere with Rogers, but it’s on record that I tried, and somehow, I managed to keep a straight face when I told the judge my client insisted on speaking directly to the court and making sure the people under his protection knew the real truth.”
This earned him quite a few blinks, which he acknowledged with a nod.
“That’s a direct quote. And it’s why I didn’t even try to talk him out of digging his own grave.”
A tableful of nods answered this, as they’d all been in the same boat. To a less insane degree, sure, but still: all of the former Avengers were apparently delusional, self-aggrandizing fools.
(this was a lot more comforting than it should have been)
“Unfortunately for him, the prosecuting attorneys were He Who Shall Not Be Named.”
Stunned and horrified gasps greeted this statement and three of the five listeners made the sign of the cross.
None of them were Catholic.
“And She Who Scares the Hell Out of Him.”
Lang’s lawyer came so close to fainting that his head actually bounced off the table hard enough to jolt him back to full awareness and he joined the others in staring with even more horror as they processed this information. Rogers’ attorney smirked at their reactions, which everyone readily conceded was fair. He’d been the one to deal in person with two of the most successful, powerful, frightening legal minds on the planet, and in defense of a man so stupid, it defied both description and understanding.
(Their names weren’t necessary. Daredevil and She-Hulk would just kill you, and fairly quickly at that. Matt Murdock and Jennifer Walters would ruin your life with a placid smile and bill you for the privilege)
“So there Rogers is, absolutely determined that he’s an innocent man being railroaded because Tony Stark is the devil and somehow, out of the clear blue nowhere, the governments of 117 countries decided that he, Rogers, was the perfect choice for a government attack dog—”
“Hang on!” Romanova’s lawyer blurted out, looking seriously shocked. “Are you saying that Rogers thinks the United Nations is a government?!”
A single nod was the only response, but she moaned in agony nonetheless and stuffed three mediocre, but not poisonous, mozzarella sticks in her mouth. Unruffled, The Man Who Ended It All kept talking.
“The entire courtroom looked like they were watching a B Horror movie made by Tarantino’s younger brother: wide eyes, gasping, white faces, whimpering, crying . . . I’m pretty sure I saw a pitchfork, and I know that woman had a chainsaw. It’s probably a good thing nobody had popcorn,” he mused to himself before focusing back on his tale. “And Rogers unintentionally fed the fire, which was the worst part: he really, genuinely thought he was right. But then he spouted off ‘I’m sorry people got hurt, but more would have died if we hadn’t been there’ and I thought You Know Who was going to have a stroke from pure fury. I’m pretty sure the only reason You Know Her Too didn’t is because she works for Stark, so she’s pretty unflappable. But it was still a close call.”
A loud snort was the only reply to that obvious fact, but Rogers’ defender took no insult.
“And it’s obvious he’s used that line a lot, because she came out of her chair like an avenging angel, snapped her fingers, and proceeded to eviscerate my client so beautifully, I bought a bootleg copy of the video. She had a PowerPoint already made and started with the disaster in DC and laid out in language so simple and concepts so basic that a kindergartner would understand that by himself, Steve Rogers is directly responsible for the deaths of 402,573 people, and that’s just from him crashing those aircraft in the Potomac. When he blustered that he’d had no choice because everyone onboard was HYDRA and he also hadn’t had time to think of anything else, she played the CCTV footage of him stealing his original Captain America uniform from the Smithsonian. He looked like he’d sucked a lemon, but I’m pretty sure that’s because even he had a hard time justifying that kind of blatant theft. Not that anyone asked, because at this point who cares, but still: stealing is wrong and Captain America is never wrong. She could have tied him in knots over that, but thankfully decided not to.”
He paused there and tried one of the mozzarella sticks; his nose delicately wrinkled when it crumbled to curds on his tongue, but fried cheese is fried cheese, so he gnawed it mostly to death and washed it down with water before clearing his throat and giving his enthralled audience the next part of the story.
“She pulled up a spreadsheet and actually laid out in columns and rows just how little sense Rogers’ claim made. She pointed out that calling Tony Stark just to help with the aircraft would have resulted, at worst, in less than 100 deaths, and that was the actual worst-case scenario. Reaching out to James Rhodes, War Machine, would have potentially endangered maybe 300, and that’s just because he lacks Stark’s complete skillset. Rogers had full access to the Project Insight list and there were dozens of computer experts who could have helped him stop that project and make an excellent start in filtering out HYDRA from SHIELD. Stark is skilled enough that it would have taken him two hours to neutralize the algorithm and he has the contacts needed to get the information to the people best placed to handle it. The hundred or so people in the available government contact pool who are two or three levels below Stark could have done it in ten, twelve hours, and there are four times that number of civilians whose abilities are known.”
He paused again, nodding to the expressions of actual pain he saw on the faces of his peers, and sighed deeply.
“She informed Rogers that, actually, he caused more than a thousand times more unnecessary deaths with the live, certified numbers and stats in front of him, and he looked her dead in the eye and said, 'I did what I had to do. And I stopped HYDRA'.”
Choked gurgles met this statement and he nodded gravely, braving another mozzarella stick and chewing as quietly as possible in a vain attempt to keep from bothering the already-disturbed waitstaff. Once he finished it, he emptied the water pitcher and the same waitress who’d lost Rock-Paper-Scissors when the group entered the bar darted forward like a woman practicing for Olympic sprints, swapped out the empty one for a full one, and disappeared into the kitchen in less than twenty seconds.
It really was impressive and the unfortunate lawyers resolved to tip her nicely when they finally left.
Or died of humiliation.
At this point, it could go either way.
As if the thought had triggered him, Rogers’ defender poured a new glass of water, swigged half of it, and went back to telling his ill-fated colleagues that their careers would never face the depths to which his was doomed to sink, thanks to one client and a really unlucky game of dice.
“Well, Herself couldn’t actually talk after hearing that,” he began dryly, clearly remembering the experience with more fondness than perhaps was warranted, even under the circumstances. “So He took over. First thing he did was whip out another PowerPoint, only not made by Microsoft and thus almost bearable. Then he got about three steps away from Rogers on the side and asked, in the most dead-even voice I will ever hear in my life, what he knew about Brock Rumlow. Rogers puffed up like a pufferfish — yes, I said it — and declared that Rumlow was HYDRA and he and the Avengers stopped him from destroying Lagos and escaping with the weapon he’d stolen.”
Silence.
Then —
“That was it? He didn’t offer any other reason or produce some kind of information that was hidden or restricted for security?” Lang’s lawyer demanded incredulously, looking remarkably like a deeply offended rooster: hair spiked in a bad imitation of a mohawk, long, pointed nose, and a shirt so red it would blend in to the Gryffindor common room.
Rogers’ attorney noticed this only because the man’s face was also violently red, though face and shirt clashed so badly it made everyone cringe for the basic color palette of the universe. Then the unfortunate, but remarkably unruffled, defender for the indefensible sighed and shook his head.
“No,” he said quietly. “I mean, yes, that was all the idiot said, but that’s only because You Know Who made this really weird gesture (he demonstrated and got similar confused looks, which was oddly reassuring; at least it wasn’t just him) and this portal thing opens right in front of the bench and this . . . this person . . . wearing clothes right out of Game of Thrones stepped through. She was tall, bald, and absolutely terrifying because it was obvious she’d read your mind and found you, all your ancestors, and any descendants you might ever have to be completely and totally deficient. Rogers just blinked at her, but she never let him say a word and announced she was the Sorcerer Supreme and her offer to explain the real world to Rogers, complete with pictures, had been accepted by the court. It was a beautiful moment,” he reminisced, loftily ignoring the envy the rest of the table was choking on.
“She looked Rogers dead in the eye for a minute, then waved her hands and two new . . . portal-things . . . opened. The one on the left showed what happened in DC: the aircraft crashing and Romanova dropping all that data online. Then it showed in really gruesome detail several people who died as a direct result of those two actions. Once we were all horrified and trying not to puke, she flapped her hands again and the other portal-thing played the same scenario, only this time they called Tony Stark after Fury explained Project Insight. Then it showed the results of that. Four people would have certainly died, all of them HYDRA, had those two morons chosen to reach out for help. You could have heard a feather hit the ground when it was done — and then Rogers scoffs and says, I swear to God, ‘I don’t know what Tony bribed you with, but there’s no way that would have happened. He’s too egotistical to work with anyone like that. And besides, it was my mission. Destroying HYDRA has been my job since the day I rescued the Howlies’.”
Vacant stares quickly appeared on each face as the other lawyers processed that.
The defender ignored them all and continued with such obvious relish, the nachos in the kitchen cried ‘thief!’.
“This . . . sorcerer . . . waved again and we got to watch Sokovia and how that could have been drastically mitigated. Then she showed Milwaukee. And Seattle. The Atlantic coastline of Florida. Lima. Lagos. Berlin. Bucharest. Lagos in particular was actually the worst, because all they had to do was wait until Rumlow left town with the weapon and follow him, and nobody would have even been hurt. But every time, that prick Rogers insisted that he had done everything right and spouted that crap about ‘can’t save everybody but more people would have died’ again — and that was after seeing how many people would have lived if he hadn’t gone or listened to other people’s ideas! The sorcerer stared at him after she showed us Bucharest and when he just glared right back at her with that same obstinate ‘I don’t care what the evidence shows’ look, she rolled her eyes so hard that I got a headache, slapped some kind of magical gag on Rogers, and told the judge that if he’d give her a minute, she’d look at the possible futures of hell freezing over and Rogers admitting he was wrong and had wronged other people, and tell him which one had the greatest probability of happening. I honestly thought His Honor was going to cry, but he managed to ignore the temptation and politely refused and then asked if the prosecution had anything else. It being You Know Who and You Know Her, Too, they did and presented us with a staggering amount of videos, audio files, flight logs, and credit card statements proving theft, embezzlement, fraud, corporate espionage, and deliberate misuse of resources. Neither of them actually said anything, you understand; they just handed copies to the jury and sat down. And rested their case.”
This pause was more meaningful than the others, though not nearly as delicate.
“. . . I . . . I don’t — what did you do?” Wilson’s lawyer asked with great caution, afraid of the answer and yet unable to let it go.
Rogers’ lawyer smirked.
“Nothing. Wasn’t anything I could do, since the You Know Whos made sure I had the originals before the trial started. And remember: I’d been dealing with Rogers for six days by then. You know, I once debated a mushroom about the morality of right and wrong in law enforcement in college after I smoked my roommate’s entire stash of pot. That damned smartass mushroom, the biggest toadstool on campus, was smarter than Rogers and made better arguments. But I had to defend the idiot to the best of my ability.”
They all nodded, having been in the same boat, albeit to lesser degrees.
Barton’s defender narrowed her eyes, seeing something on the other lawyer’s face that the rest of them had missed, but didn’t get the chance to ask.
“And I did. When the judge asked me to proceed, I did the same thing you did,” he told them, nodding to Barton's poor schmuck. “I stood up, nodded to His Honor, turned to the jury, and declared that the defense rested.”
“Wow,” Lang’s slightly-less poor schmuck murmured, grabbing the last mozzarella stick and contemplating it way too seriously under the circumstances. “What did the judge say?”
A genuine laugh was his answer. “He said ‘thank God. Members of the jury, do you wish to debate and select his sentence or do you elect to relinquish that right to me?’ And damned if that jury didn’t leap at the chance to foist Rogers off on the man. A few of them actually jumped out of their chairs to make sure the foreman saw them. It was beautiful.”
“Sounds like it,” Romanova’s defender said enviously, finishing her eighth cup of coffee and sighing. “So what did he decide?”
Malicious satisfaction oozed from every word of the answer.
“Since Doctor Wu and his team successfully created a counter to the serum, he ordered it given to Rogers and once the reversal is confirmed successful, he sentenced him to five years of being the primary PSA for criminal behavior. He’ll be on every billboard, radio ad, TV commercial, magazine ad, Internet ad, marketing presentation, and high school pamphlet in the world, explaining all of his crimes and how he’d broken the law and how he hopes that his experiences will keep others on the right path and making the right decisions.”
Dead. Silence.
It was broken by the table’s waitress, who had unfortunately been bringing a fresh pot of hot coffee and heard the last few sentences, collapsed on the floor in hysterical laughter, and in the process, spilled the entire pot across a floor so deeply stained with prior coffee spills that you couldn’t actually see the new mess. Of course, no one at the table noticed except for Rogers’ attorney because they were in the same boat: laughing their heads off while the table took their weight.
And all he could do was smile smugly and mentally pray that the rickety, wobbly furniture supporting more weight than it was ever meant to hold actually met the challenge.
It did, miraculously, but it was a near thing. Had the laughing jag gone on for another couple of minutes, it would have been a very different story.
Speaking of, it was time to end this. They had all shared their stories and their woes and, frankly, edible food and decent alcohol were becoming necessities.
“He didn’t give Rogers the chance to even gasp,” he continued once the humor had tapered off and he had everyone’s full attention. “But then he baited the most perfect hook I’ve ever seen. I mean, I hate fishing so I haven’t seen a whole of bait or hooks, but still: it was exquisite. He told the moron that if, after those five years, he was genuinely remorseful about the death and damage and destruction he’d caused, a clean slate would be an option.”
Dead. Silence.
But this one was different. It was horrified, affronted, appalled, and just really, really pissed off.
“He what?!” Barton’s lawyer spat, so enraged that he did actually send some saliva flying into his coffee. “He offered to let that asshole walk?!”
“Kind of,” Rogers’ defender replied. “You’ll note he said ‘an option’. But Rogers was shaking his head while the judge was talking and barely let him finish before he spit in the world’s face. Again. He said, and I quote, ‘Sir, I know that you’re just doing your job, but you obviously don’t understand what it means to be a hero and make the hard choices. I did what needed to be done and I always will, so what’s your real offer’?”
Everyone in the building choked: lawyers, waitstaff, bartenders, cooks, janitors, the drunk guy peeing on himself because he waited too long to hit the bathroom, and the couple breaking up in a screaming match worthy of a Real Housewives of (Insert City Here) episode.
“Please, please tell us the judge had an actual answer to that,” Maximoff’s attorney begged, eyes huge and full of tears. “Please. I will give you my ’65 Ford Mustang, mint condition and fully restored, vintage burgundy, if you tell me that the judge didn’t let that POS get away with that bullshit.”
Rogers’ lawyer nodded. “He did,” he reassured the younger man, who really hadn’t deserved this particular trial by mind-raping, insane fire. “He said, ‘Fine. After five years, you will be executed in and by the country you caused the most harm. Court adjourned!’ And that’s the last I saw of Rogers. There wasn’t anything I could do and if an appeal is an option, it sure as hell isn’t going to be me doing it. No, I went home and poured every bottle of liquor down the drain because I wasn’t ready to die from alcohol poisoning that day. And now I can retire and go work with horses at a trail-riding company, which was my retirement plan all along. It’ll just be a few years early.”
“I’m going to become a swim instructor,” Romanova’s defender offered, finishing off the mozzarella sticks.
“Video game tester,” Lang’s man said with a raised glass.
“Stay at home dad,” Wilson’s attorney chimed in, giving his now-cold coffee a disappointed look that was utterly wasted, as the coffee knew perfectly well it should have drunk and finished a half-hour ago.
“Mississippi River boat tour guide.” That was from Barton’s unfortunate soul and it earned several appreciative ‘ooohs’, which were toasted with the empty plate.
“Trauma counselor.” That was from the man assigned to Maximoff and it silenced the table for several seconds before Rogers’ voluntold corporate sacrifice nodded with complete respect and told him, “Keep your car. You’ll need it for more reasons than you know.”
A brief moment of hesitation ensued, one fueled by a desperate desire not to lose what little pride was left, before the young man let out a deep breath and gave a single nod in return.
“Well, gentlemen, ladies . . . I can’t say it’s been a pleasure,” Romanova’s lawyer said as she stood up and dropped a hundred-dollar bill on the table. “But it has been an honor. I wish you all the best of luck in your futures.”
The others followed suit, and in the process gave the waitress the best night of her entire life, before they headed for the door. No farewells were offered, or names.
They left as silently and unobtrusively as they’d arrived and went on with their lives, a little more at peace with themselves, if not the world.
Of course, their serenity was wrecked when a sarcastic asshole who hated lawyers with a passion typically reserved for professional sports or That One Ex decided to play Burl Moseley’s Don’t Be a Lawyer from his phone. Which was attached to a portable Bluetooth speaker, because of course it was.
And so it was that the six unfortunate people tasked with defending six of the most notorious criminals in the world — past, present, and future — were chased into a clear, beautiful evening by a song that perfectly encapsulated the exact reasons they now hated their jobs, their lives, and their very existence.
Still, they had to appreciate the irony: it was, indeed, a fitting commentary on the state of things.
So Barton’s lawyer started to sing along at the top of her lungs, surprisingly in tune, and hailed a cab to the light, scattered applause and appreciative chuckles of her now-former colleagues as, one by one, they vanished into the night.
And in the sudden quiet of the empty street, that guy who laughed at the end of the original, vintage Flash Gordon laughed.
~~~
fin