Chapter Text
Athos pushes his sunglasses up onto his head as he enters the building, giving the security guard a half-hearted flick of his fingers in greeting. Her hair is an emphatic shade of red today; it hurts his eyes almost as much as the sun had.
"Good morning, Rona," he says as genially as he can, which falls several degrees short of genial at all.
"Good afternoon, Mr. A," she answers without a hint of sympathy.
"It is barely twelve," he says, snapping his sunglasses back down on his nose and jabbing at the elevator button. Rona doesn't dignify his protest with a reply.
Of course Porthos is already in when Athos stumbles into their little suite on the top floor (penthouse, the leasing agent had insisted; garret, Athos had corrected him; all we can afford is what Porthos had said, and what Porthos said generally about most things when Athos bitched about having to settle for less than the style to which he once was accustomed.)
Porthos liked to point out that he was not the one who'd gotten his trust fund cut off for having the poor taste to be the sort of person who believed that justice shouldn’t have a price tag, a color, or any particular taste in bed partners, which tended to make Athos say that surrendering his economic privilege had been his life's second worst mistake after sitting next to that dreamy brown-eyed twink on the first day of con law, because being called a twink made Porthos make That Face, and lord, Athos loved That Face.
Anyway, giving Porthos shit about how he’d been voted Tulane Law School’s best ass all three years in a row was better than talking about the real reasons Athos had been disinherited, which were approximately 2% about his flexible sexuality, 2% about his politics, and the other 96% about his announcement, over Easter dinner six years previously, that he was leaving Delafere & Delafere (estd. 1829) and opening a firm with his best friend. His black best friend.
His father had stared at him over the ham and finally said, “You realize you’ll never get into the Boston Club, now.”
His brother—who’d accidentally acquainted Athos with the idea of political queerness after the two or three hundredth time Tommy had introduced him to someone by saying he says he’s bi but really he’s just slutty—whistled a long slow whistle and then made an exploding noise, miming a mushroom cloud with his hands.
His mother had just looked at her plate and said nothing.
“Good morning, light of my life,” Porthos sings out from his office when Athos slams the door behind him.
“It’s afternoon,” Athos says. He tosses his things on the chesterfield in his office, and rubs his temple. “Is there coffee?”
“I’m just trying to accommodate your disabilities,” Porthos says, and from the squeaking noise, he’s just leaned back in his chair and kicked his feet up onto his desk. “And the coffee’s about an hour old.”
“Good enough,” Athos says, trudging into the glorified closet that serves as copy room, supply storage, and kitchenette. “My head is killing me.”
“Are you hung over?” That brings Porthos out of his office, the chair screeching as it snaps back upright. “Do I need to—“
“No, you asshole.” Athos pours most of what remains in the coffee pot into a mug that says SHOW ME YOUR TORTS, and takes a hefty sip. It’s thick and burnt and delicious. “Bouchoux.”
“Gesundheit.”
Athos takes another swallow of coffee, and decides that taking his sunglasses off isn’t worth it just so Porthos can see his massive, massive eyeroll. “That stopped being funny a month ago.”
“Yeah, because the school district should’ve caved a month ago,” Porthos says, and he’s not joking anymore. “Up all night, huh?”
“It’s a really good complaint,” Athos says. “I think. I can’t tell, I need you to go over it, if you have time. We need to just call their bluff and file. Missy says she’s up to it.”
Missy Bouchoux, named Michael at birth, had taken the summer before her junior year at home to begin her transition. After returning to school in August, she was repeatedly suspended for dress code violations – boys aren’t allowed to wear long hair, earrings, or makeup, boys aren’t allowed to wear the girls’ uniform skirt. At first Missy’s dad had wanted to keep it quiet and negotiate with the school board, a strategy which had had success in other districts, and would keep Missy out of the public eye. In the meantime her suspensions were piling up, jeopardizing her academic career.
“I’m tired of this, Mr. Athos,” she’d said to him last night, sitting in the Bouchoux family kitchen after yet another useless meeting. “I just want them to treat me right, why is that so hard?”
“Because people are shit,” he answered, and winced when Missy’s dad yelled LANGUAGE from the den. “Because people are sheep,” he corrected. “And they are afraid of you, because you are a fox.”
“Pretty sure that’s, like, super inappropriate to say to a teenager,” she said, but she was giggling, and that was all he wanted.
“Sure, I can give it a read. You want a redline?” Porthos is asking, and Athos nods into his coffee mug.
“That’d be great.” He tops off his cup with the last of the coffee, and starts making a fresh pot. “What else did I miss this morning?”
“Aunt Vonnie called. She wants to sue her neighbors again.”
Athos’ Aunt Yvonne, the other Delafere outcast, was the living embodiment of at least a dozen clichés about old rich New Orleans women, and the terror of State Street. He sighs. “What have they done now?”
“Dunno, something about goats.” Porthos shrugs. “Got depos scheduled in Schexnayder for the end of the month—“
“Whee.”
“—and I’m still sifting through discovery from Timmons. Which you were supposed to take half of.”
Athos sighs again, watching the coffee drizzle into the carafe instead of looking at Porthos. “I’m sorry,” he says, and means it.
Once they’d built up enough cred that they weren’t handling their friends’ divorces and DUIs just to make rent, they’d agreed that they were going to focus on impact cases—creating change for everyone instead of just one or two individuals. Missy wasn’t an impact case. Missy wasn’t important to anyone but her dad and the handful of friends who’d stuck by her. Maybe that was why she was important to him.
“I can find some time this afternoon,” he says, finally pushing his sunglasses back up on his head and turning to face Porthos; Porthos, whose expression is more on the fond side of exasperation than Athos had expected.
“You know you can’t help her—or anybody else—if you kill yourself trying.”
“Ugh, it’s too early for this sappy shit,” he says, heading back to his office. “Put the discovery in the dropbox, I’ll grab it from there.”
“I love you too, baby!” Porthos calls after him.
Three hours, one pizza delivery, a third pot of coffee and two cans of Coke later, Athos is balls deep in spreadsheets of arrest data, highlighting the records that fit their case’s fact pattern. He’s started to memorize the most common booking codes, but there are still plenty that he has to stop and check—always when he’s started to get into a rhythm. Porthos has marked up the Bouchoux complaint and Athos is waiting for a call back from Ryan Bouchoux to confirm one more time that Missy really is ready to file.
When their doorbell rings, Athos groans out loud.
“Porthos!” he yells when it rings again a few seconds later. An iMessage pops up on his screen.
On schexnayder conf call get the ducking door
The sound of the third ring strips Athos’ nerves and leaves them sparking like old wire; he can feel the muscle in his jaw jumping as he goes to the door. He can see the shadowy shape of a person on the other side of the frosted glass, rocking from foot to foot with impatience, and that just irritates him more. He snaps the deadbolt back and opens the door a fraction, bracing his arm on the frame and blocking entry with his body.
“Can I help you?” he says in his most bored, disinterested tone, a voice cultivated through centuries of aristocratic breeding. It was a voice that conjured up a cold stare over a dry martini, with a note of threat, leaving an aftertaste of some unknown, terrible consequence for disrupting the bubble of the speaker’s expensive insouciance.
Porthos called it the Queen Bitch voice. Porthos had a point, but it was too much a part of Athos’ DNA for him to be able to stop.
“Hi, yeah.” The woman on the other side of the door frowns at him. She’s probably a few years younger than Athos himself, her skin a luminous brown and her hair a cascade of black spirals. Her nose, regrettably, can only be called adorable. “My dad got arrested last night—“
Athos coughs around the lump that is his soul being caught in his throat. “Seventh floor,” he rasps.
“Excuse me?”
“Public Defender’s office is on the seventh floor.” He gives her a tight smile and looks away from her face, an idiotic mistake, it turns out. Her long legs are wrapped in the skinniest jeans Athos has ever seen, and the collar has been ripped out of her t-shirt. He has a sudden, violent urge to put his thumb right there at the base of her throat, where a few drops of sweat have gathered.
“I don’t need the PD,” she says, drawing his gaze back up. “I need. Look, is this Duvallon and Delafere or not?”
“It is,” he says, and it feels a bit like he’s confessing a sin. This is just. Utterly inconvenient.
“Which one are you? Wait, no, you’d have to be Delafere.”
It’s her turn to look him up and down. He could describe what she sees—a slim white man in his mid thirties with too-long hair and a scruffy beard, wearing a ragged pair of chinos and a faded Parliament t-shirt with the GOD BLESS CHOCOLATE CITY logo on it—but he can tell what she sees. Delafere, the name cut into the marble lintel of a tomb in St. Louis No. 1, painted on the glass doors of a high-rise suite on Poydras Street, bold faced in the society section of the Times-Pic; the whole goddamn long line of seersucker, Sazerac, sugar and slave money, Delafere.
“That’s right,” he says. He lets the door fall the rest of the way open, and stuffs his hands in his pockets. “You said your dad was arrested?”
“Yes.” She gives him another once-over. “I don’t need a defense attorney. I just need someone to—“
There is a crack, fine as spider silk, in her voice.
“Right, you’d better come in.”
Athos clears a spot for her on the sofa in his office, wadding up the printouts and stacking them on top of his laptop on his chair—there’s no room for any more on his desk. She waves off his offer of coffee or water, settling her bag on her lap after she sits, and folding her hands on top.
“Um,” he says, realizing that he’s now got to either sit next to her or stand. Standing would be rude, he decides; he sits and folds his arms, tucking his hands in his armpits. “So. Tell me what happened.”
She looks at him for a long moment, then looks away toward the windows. You can’t actually see OPP from here—their suite is on the wrong side of the building, for one—but he’s familiar with the expression. It never stops making his stomach turn.
“Your father,” he prompts, trying on his gentlest voice. It doesn’t come naturally to him—Athos’ first language was sarcasm, particularly the flippant dialect of people who could say whatever they wanted without real consequence, but who played at politesse as a social chess game. He often gets misread as condescending still, even when he’s being utterly sincere—that or impatient. It seems he manages to come across correctly this time, though: the woman just nods, and takes a deep breath before she speaks.
“In the last few weeks he had written a lot of letters to the papers, to the Times-Pic and the Advocate, and to a couple of the tv stations, wanting to know why they’d stopped covering the sheriff’s fiscal misconduct story. The independent press is still looking at it, a little—the Lens says they’re working on something—but it was like.” She rolls her eyes at the ceiling, shaking her head. “The allegations come out, there’s a big flurry of press, then nothing. It just went away.”
“Right,” Athos says, nodding. He shifts against the arm of the couch, reaching for a legal pad from the floor. There’s a long line of pens on the back of the couch, where he puts them when he gets up and then forgets where he put them. He grabs the first one in reach, pulling the cap off with his teeth. “G’wan.”
“So he was arrested last night.” She sounds disgusted and unsurprised in equal measure. “They came to the house, they had a warrant and everything. For criminal defamation.”
Athos sits back. “For writing letters to newspapers? That’s—“
“Right, I told you I didn’t need a defense attorney.”
“Right,” Athos echoes, scribbling on his pad. “Well, a civil suit can’t go forward til the criminal charge is resolved—“
“That’s not my main concern right now,” she interrupts again, and she grips her bag in her lap. “It’s that I can’t find him. He was arrested a little after ten last night, and I followed them to central booking but they wouldn’t let me in—he has a heart condition, he’s 76 years old—“
Athos’ phone buzzes from within the pile of papers on his chair, and they both turn to look at it, loud in the little room. It goes off four times before stopping. “Sorry, please go on.”
“They wouldn’t let me leave off his medicine,” she says, swallowing hard. She gives her bag a little shake, and pill bottles rattle. “And I have been trying all night and all day to find out which section he got booked into, which magistrate, what the bond is… it’s been more than sixteen hours now.”
The phone buzzes again, and the papers vibrate with it. “What’s your father’s name?” Athos asks, scratching the rest of her story onto the page in his loopy pseudo-shorthand. “I’m sorry, god. What’s your name? I’m sorry,” he repeats. “That should’ve been my first question, I’m just. Off, today. Please.” He gives her what he hopes is a reassuring smile.
“Sylvie Baudin,” she says. “My dad is Hubert Baudin.”
Athos blinks. “Your dad is Brother Hubert?”
“He hasn’t been a brother for thirty years,” she says testily. “I should know.”
“I didn’t mean it like that,” Athos says, putting his hands up. “What I meant was—no, I didn’t know he had a daughter, but what I meant was, a notable activist like him. It’s not just… Joe on the street getting lost in OPP—“
“Which is also fucked up and wrong.”
“Which is, also, fucked up and wrong,” Athos agrees, getting to his feet. He slaps his thigh with the legal pad as he walks between the couch and his chair. “And happens all the goddamn time, but you’d think someone would be talking about Brother Hubert being arrested, and now you can’t find him in the system? You checked the dock—“
“Yes, I checked the docket master online. For what it’s worth.” Sylvie shakes her head. “This is. The last I saw of him, they were shoving him in the back of the car like.” She scrubs her hand across her eyes. “A couple people said you guys were the best bet.”
“Let me make a couple of calls. Porthos – he’s the Duvallon half—he’s on a call for another case right now, but we’ll rope him in too.” Athos fishes his phone out of the mess on his chair. “I’ll just—“
He was expecting that call from Ryan Bouchoux. He was expecting the buzzing to have been a missed call and a voicemail from Ryan.
“What? What is it?”
He can hear Sylvie getting to her feet behind him, and he shakes his head.
The missed call is from d’Artagnan, downstairs at the public defender. D’Artagnan’s a Loyola grad who’d been Athos and Porthos’ first and last intern back when he was a rising 3L, and who’s been working as a client advocate for the past four years while continuing to pretend he’ll eventually take the bar.
hey there’s been another death in the jail call me
Athos was in accident once, coming around a curve where a highway offramp merged with the surface street. A truck had just rolled out without looking, without paying any attention to the yield sign, just. Pow. The thing was, though, that Athos had come up on that curve twenty, fifty, maybe a hundred times before, but that day, without knowing there was anything coming from the ramp, he’d known he was going to get hit. He’d known it with absolute clarity, so much that he’d started to brake well before he caught sight of the truck’s red bulk barreling toward him.
It’s the same certainty he feels now, staring at the words on the screen. He can’t know it’s Brother Hubert, he can’t know, but he does.
“Actually, never mind calling. We’ll just go over there,” Athos says, dismissing the message. “I’ll change.”
“You don’t think the sheriff’s a George Clinton fan?” Sylvie says, and when he turns she’s got this brittle smirk on her face, like the joke cost more than she had but she was trying anyway. She’s trying even though the same sense of wrongness is clawing at her, he can see it in her eyes.
Athos has to brush past her to get one of his emergency suits off the back of the door, and she jumps.
“Sorry,” he mumbles. “Listen. That was.” He holds up his phone with his left hand. “A friend of mine. He works for OPD as an advocate, and he says. His text said someone has died at the jail.”
Her face goes slack. “You think—?”
“I'm not—.”
She grabs his arm. “Mr. Delafere, please. Be honest. You don’t think it’s a coincidence. You think it’s him.”
“I don’t know,” he repeats, gently taking her fingers off his arm. He refuses the urge to press her hand. “It’ll take me just a moment to change and let Porthos know what’s going on. We’ll go over to lockup, we’ll find out what’s happened. It could be nothing, but.”
“Brace for it anyway.” Sylvie’s eyes are bright and wet. “Right. I’ll get my bike and meet you over there.”
“No, come in my car, it’ll be faster. Two minutes.” He’s not sure that his smile is anything but bleak, but he offers it anyway.
Athos barges into Porthos’ office without knocking, miming for him to mute his phone, pointing vaguely toward the outer office and shaking his suit in its plastic bag from the cleaner’s. Porthos stares, then leans toward his phone.
“Hey, excuse me, sorry, Bill, Dani. I need to put y’all on hold for just a second.”
“Sure, Porthos,” comes a tinny voice out of the speaker, and Porthos pokes the screen a couple of times before turning an expectant look on Athos.
“What the hell?”
“Right. Short version.”
He talks while he changes. Porthos doesn’t comment or interrupt, and Athos is so intensely grateful that he sat next to that dreamy brown-eyed twink a decade ago, because Porthos gets it, instantly, nodding along with the last of Athos’ explanation.
“Here,” he says, pulling open a desk drawer and tossing Athos a neatly rolled light blue tie to go with his dark navy suit. Athos catches it in midair, and loops it around his collar.
“I’m borrowing your brown wingtips,” he says, sticking his toes into the shoes in question, sitting at the base of Porthos’ coat tree. “Thank you for having freakishly tiny feet.”
“You mean thank me for allowing you to stretch out my shoes with your freakishly large feet,” Porthos bats back. “Get out, I need to finish this call. Good luck.”
Sylvie is pacing in the room, doing something on her phone, when Athos trips back out of Porthos’ office. He bends over to tie his shoes. “In my office on the floor by the door—“ he says. “Can you grab the leather messenger bag there?”
“Oh. Sure,” she says.
He watches her feet walk away, and then straightens up, finishing off his tie. Sylvie returns a second later, holding his bag out. He throws it over his shoulder, and digs in the front pocket for his keys. “Okay, let’s move.”
They’re silent in the elevator, silent as she follows him into the parking garage to the car. She waits while he clears a stack of papers off the passenger seat, and only says it’s fine when he apologizes for the swamp of coffee cups on the floor. She sits and stares out the window for the scant minutes it takes to travel the handful of blocks up the street, and he sees the way her hands go tight on her bag when he makes a wildly illegal left turn onto South Dupre, and she still doesn’t say anything.
“We’re going to the bond desk,” he explains, spotting a space near the entrance that he’s pretty sure he can wedge into.
“I’ve been to the bond desk.”
“This time you’re going to the bond desk with me.” He makes short work of parking, then throws the car into neutral and pulls the brake. “Let me do the talking.”
Sylvie inhales like she’s going to argue, then lets the breath out, her shoulders falling. “Fine.”
“Okay.” He grabs a hair tie off the shifter and pulls his hair back; there’s nothing to be done for how ragged his beard is, but he smoothes it with his palms the best he can. “Okay,” he repeats.
Athos isn’t sure when she takes his hand. Maybe it’s right after they go into the building, or after they pass through security. Maybe it’s just before the walk up to the window at the bond desk, maybe it’s all of those. He just knows her slim, warm fingers are folded into his, and he thinks of Porthos, oddly—that first day when they started talking about nothing and Athos knew within ten minutes that this guy was going to do be his best friend for the rest of his life. Athos feels her squeeze his hand and he knows that no matter what happens next, he is one hundred percent screwed.