Non-lawyers seem to have a skewed perspective regarding how long a lawsuit actually takes, and I will happily blame television for this. If primetime copaganda is to be believed, you can sue somebody on Monday and be in court one week later.

Sorry to burst any bubbles, but that was a ridiculous proposition.

Two weeks had gone by since my morning trip to National Guard HQ, and in that time, painfully little had actually gotten done. Yes, we had the various government responders’ reports, but the soonest we could question them was another couple of weeks out. Worse than that, I had another case going to trial in a week and a half, which meant I’d need to hand the pre-filing work entirely over to Julio and Fatima starting tomorrow, and hope they had a good enough grasp of what needed doing to keep going.

Part of that temporary handoff, though, was meeting with the client to let her know what was going on. There wasn’t a chance in hell I was about to go radio silent on her from April to May without setting up a point of contact.

All of this was to explain why I’d set up shop in the same conference room as last time, complete with my tablet, my folder of hard copies, a breakfast burrito that had gone cold an hour ago, and the remains of a sickeningly sweet coffee concoction whose name I couldn’t actually remember. Julio and Fatima arrived maybe three minutes after me, and both of them thankfully shut up once they saw that I was drafting opening statements for the trial I had a week from Monday, though Fatima started reading it over my shoulder.

Ten or so minutes later, Mrs. Banks made it to the conference room, with her escort just giving us a nod before retreating back to… wherever public-facing support staff and paralegals congregated.

“Glad you could make it on relatively short notice.” I stood up and pulled out a chair for Mrs. Banks, then another for the absolutely massive tote bag she was carrying. “Sorry if you had to squeeze this in between errands.”

“It’s fine,” she said, voice only slightly less hollow and dead compared to three weeks ago. “Figured if y’all were callin’ me in for a sit-down, it gotta be important.”

“Well for the future, yes and no,” I told her as I returned to my seat, curling my tail around to hang off the end of the chair. “I try to do in-person or webcam follow-ups with clients at least once a month, sooner if a case is particularly active or close to a deadline. As for today, though, this is a bit of an update, along with a combo of good and bad news.”

Destiny Banks wilted slightly in her seat, her eyes aimed at the table. I supposed the term ‘bad news’ was a bit overwhelming to keep hearing as much as she had been.

“Alright. Gimme the bad first, I wanna end on a high note.”

“Alright,” I said. “The bad news is that I, specifically, am going to be largely unavailable for at least the next three weeks, possibly up to five.”

“What, goin’ on vacation or something?” Destiny spat, casting a glare in my direction.

“No, I’m going to trial.”

She frowned, and I readied to have to explain. As much as we might like to provide all of our attention and energy on a single case at a time, that just wasn’t how it worked. While this was almost certainly the biggest case on my docket, it was far from the only one; hell, I had almost a dozen other cases, and was used to having more than twenty at a time. Clients tended not to understand this, though. They wanted to be priority one all day, every day, until their case was resolved… and that just wasn’t realistic.

“I take it that’s what these two’re for?”

I blinked in pleasant surprise, then offered a slight smile.

“Yes, actually,” I said, waving to my two juniors. “These are Julio Cabrera and Fatima Osmani. While I’m unavailable, they’ll be handling things pertaining to your case. Fatima has more experience overall and with wrangling paperwork in particular, but if you need one of us to talk to somebody, Julio is better at explaining in layman’s terms. Additionally, both of them speak more than just English — Julio speaks Spanish, Fatima speaks Arabic and… uh…”

“Punjabi,” she supplied. “And a bit of Farsi.”

“I am so sorry I forgot that,” I told her, ears low in embarrassment.

“What about you?” Mrs. Banks asked. “You gonna let the kids get all fancy with other languages and all that?”

“I mean, I speak Japanese, but I can count the number of times that’s been useful on one hand,” I told my client. “But that’s not important right now. Anyways, what matters is figuring out our next steps. We’re gonna have to wait on talking with Barricade until I’m done with my trial, but I think we have times set up with the other people of interest sometime next week?”

“Wednesday, Thursday, Friday,” Julio said. “Fire brigade chief, arson investigator, building superintendent. Who else you want us looking into?”

“As many of Mrs. Banks’ neighbors as are willing to talk to us.”

“About that!”

All three of us turned to Destiny, who had reached down for her big ol’ tote bag. She stuck an arm into it, and next thing I knew, there were two separate 3-inch binders, practically bursting at the seams.

“Oh my God…” I murmured, feeling my eyes go wide and my tail start to shift. “Please please please please tell me that’s what I think it is?”

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

“Well I went around talkin’ to all my old neighbors these past three weeks,” she said. “Lotta them had time to grab their important shit before everything burned, or they went and grabbed it from they e-mails and printed ‘em for me.”

I grabbed a binder, pulled it towards me, and flipped it open. Then I flipped a page. Then another. Then another, and another, and oh my fucking god, it was what I thought it was.

“Julio, Fatima, please remember to thank this absolutely amazing woman every day for the next three weeks,” I said, flipping the binder shut and passing it over to them. “She just saved all of us a few months of work, each.”

“Uh, ma’am? Your, uh, your tail…?”

I looked up at Mrs. Banks, blinked once, and felt my cheeks start to burn as I processed the sensation I’d been ignoring. My ears went down as I brought a hand to hold my treasonous tail still and stop the wagging, but it was clearly much too late for my reputation.

“I, uh, that, uh…” Well, there went all chances of anybody in this room taking me seriously ever again, clearly. “I, uh, got a bit excited at that, um, sorry.”

Both Fatima and Julio were holding back giggles.

Mrs. Banks didn’t bother, and began laughing uproariously in her seat. She went on like that for a good ten seconds or so before getting herself under control, even as her shoulders continued to shake a tad with suppressed laughter.

“I-I am so sorry,” she said, suppressing another giggle. “I just, I haven’t really had much to laugh at for a few months now. I really needed that. Thank you.”

All of my embarrassment fell away in a rush, replaced by pity and concern. For a moment there, Destiny had managed to forget the truly awful circumstances that had brought her to the firm’s door in the first place. And admittedly, that was probably a gift to her. It was a moment of levity, where she’d been ever-so-briefly able to ignore her own pain.

I briefly coughed into my hand, both to get myself out of my own head and to draw attention back to myself.

“In any case.” I turned towards Julio and Fatima. “Once document review is done and dusted, I want you two pulling what you can from these documents to draft affidavits and prep exhibits. The more affidavits we have from people who lived in the building, particularly as pertains to the building conditions or the quality of repairs made to the premises, the better. We can’t sue the city here; that would mean Barricade is on the other side, and we cannot have that happen if we want a fighting chance—“

“Whoa now hold on one goddamn second!”

I let Mrs. Banks interrupt me, turned towards her, and lowered one ear her way as a prompt to continue.

“That pathetic excuse for a ‘superhero’ left my boys to die! And you want to just let him off!?” Mrs. Banks yelled, slamming her hands on the table as she glared down at me.

I sighed, ears drooping before I gave her my full attention.

“Mrs. Banks—”

“I better be about to hear a damn good explanation comin’ outta yo’ mouth, or Lord help me I don’t wanna know what comes next!”

I tapped my finger on the table, thinking for a moment. There were two different approaches available to me here, and neither of them were good. As it stood, though, I needed to give my client something. Something that would hopefully shock her back into her seat.

“How many people have you killed, Mrs. Banks?”

She had no response. I looked up to see a wide-eyed expression on her face, mouth ever so slightly agape as she tried to figure out how to respond to that.

“I have five bodies to my name.” I held up a hand, and five little, purple candle flames danced above my fingertips. “Ernesto Rivera,” I said, and the flame above my thumb winked out. “Guadalupe Rivera.” The light over my index finger faded out next. “Frankie Edwards.” Then my middle finger. “Evangeline Edwards.” Another flame disappeared. “And… little baby Lea Edwards.”

I let the last flame gutter out, closed my hand into a fist, and just… sighed.

“Five people that I burned to ash. Not even their bones were left. I’ll never forget their names, no matter how much I want to. No matter how much their screams haunt me.

“But, guess what? It may have been my powers that killed them, but it wasn’t my fault.”

Nobody spoke up. Not Julio, not Fatima, and certainly not Mrs. Banks.

“The NMR’s ‘training’ is a crock of shit,” I continued, laying my head against one hand and staring at my client. “You get six weeks to try and get full police training, and EMT training, and SWAT training, and maybe some firefighting training for another couple weeks. But it’s not actually useful, because they don’t care. Nothing has meaningfully changed since I was a superhero. We’re just flashy, shiny stuff to make you look one way while the real business happens in the other direction. And sure, sometimes our powers are useful. Most of the time, though? We’re in over our heads, we don’t know what to do, and we panic. We lash out. We go on autopilot. We stop thinking. We fall back on instinct.

“All because we were not trained to handle crises, and were expected to anyway.“

The clock ticked in the silence that followed. Five seconds. Ten seconds.

Fifteen.

I stood up from my seat and picked up my tablet.

“You can disagree with my suggestion if you want,” I told Mrs. Banks, who still seemed almost shell shocked by my little spiel. “But keep in mind that, on the topic of superheroes, I know more than anyone else you’re likely to ever meet. I’m not telling you to forgive Barricade. I’m telling you that trying to punish him is useless. The NMR would fight it tooth and nail. And besides, if my experience is anything to go by, he’s punishing himself more than enough already.”

I walked over to the door, but paused before leaving.

“You don’t have to let it go. But you’re gonna need to let it wait.”

With that parting shot, I left the conference room, and headed back to my office. This case was Julio’s and Fatima’s for the next few weeks. I had a trial to prepare for. At the same time, though, I knew I wouldn’t be able to completely let this case slip my mind for that time. I knew myself too well. Hopefully the monotony of trial binders and rehearsing my opening statement would be enough to keep it off my mind for a bit.

And if not, well, Gorou would just smack some sense into me. That smug fox always did.