Community Service: The Morning After (Inez and Garrison)

[x-desperado.livejournal.com]

After a night in jail, Inez gets a visitor, although not with the news she wants to hear.




Inez kept pacing back and forth. She'd seen jail cells before, of course, but never from the inside. At least they'd taken the handcuffs off. Not that she couldn't have broken them just with a twist of her wrists. She had to resist the temptation to just punch at the wall until it gave, then start running and just not stop. It wasn't as if she wasn't used to that.

So why wasn't she?

Frustrated, she reared back her fist and swung at the wall - but stopped the blow an inch from the concrete with a restrained grunt of futility. "Why is this so fucking stupid?" she asked to no one in particular.

"Yeah, asked that one myself." Garrison Kane stepped into the holding cell area, with Dan Loomis giving him a final look before closing the door behind him. Kane walked up to the bars, and put his hands in his pockets, rocking back on his heels. "Man, when you screw up, Inez, you don't do it lightly."

Inez groaned at the sound of Garrison's voice. "Oh, great," she said, "what, they couldn't find my asshole uncle to come chew me out and tell me how much I'm just like my dad? Yeah, I know, I screwed up." She turned around to glare at the Mountie through eyes that'd obviously been wiped until they were swollen and red. "But those assholes deserved a lot worse."

"No, they didn't." Kane shook his head and took a seat in the bench opposite to the bars. "They were a group of teenaged guys making gross sexual jokes. Happens everyday in every school with every group of kids in this country. You can crush a truck in your bare hands, Inez. You could have killed one if you'd hauled off and hit them."

"So what now?" Inez asked quietly, looking anywhere but at Kane. "So now I'm this dangerous threat to the community? Gonna ship me off to juvi?"

"They're planning to try and have you tried as an adult. If that happens, you'll go to a state penitentiary to serve out any sentence." Kane sighed. "This doesn't look good, kiddo. Even if I can get dismissed the bullshit salad bar of charges they've heaped on top of you, the charges by Sanjay Patel and the three teenagers will hold up in court. You trashed the place in front of a bunch of people, and those three guys are convinced you were planning to kill them."

"I just lost my temper!" Inez protested. "Can't the Professor do something? Like, make them all just forget about it?"

"He could, but he won't. Turns out bailing students out like that led to terrorism as an extra-curricular for one of them. The fact is that you're the one who screwed up. What are you going to do about it?" Kane braced his elbows on his knees and waited for her answer.

Inez went back to pacing. "Fuck. I don't know. I mean, I could offer to fix up the diner, I guess? I've got a job, I could pay off the damages?" Yeah, in about twenty years she thought to herself.

"It's a start. What else?"

"I don't know, okay?" Inez practically shouted. "It's not fair that we've gotta be held to some higher standard just because of what we can do! We get shit on for what? So they can treat us like freaks and talk about how we're dangerous? If I was just some normal girl, all that would happen would be that I got thrown out of the diner. So what the fuck am I supposed to do, huh? I can't change what I am!"

"Get used to it. Life's unfair. It's not fair to someone who gets crippled for life just because you lost your temper and hit them." Garrison shrugged, having heard variants of this for years. "You have a responsibility to control yourself, because you're stronger than every one around you. Those three guys couldn't have caused as much damage as you did in a minute if I gave them sledgehammers and a half hour. Deal with it." He enunciated the last three words carefully.

"You want to get angry and hit someone? Fine. Tuesdays and Thursdays starting next week. I teach advanced hand to hand to a couple of people. You can take your best shot at me. Between Cain and I, that should be more than enough to vent. But out there, you either control yourself or you face the consequences of the people that you will end up hurting when you lose it."

"No one got hurt, okay?" Inez protested before she got the point of what Garrison was saying and walked to the back wall of the cell. "Okay, okay. I get it. I'll fix whatever needs to be fixed, take whatever classes I've got to. So what happens now?"

"I don't know. If Mr Patel and those teens don't drop the charges, you're going to face a hearing to determine how you'll be tried and whether or not bail is going to be offered. I've send an e-mail to your uncle, but I don't know if that's going to help much." The Canadian scratched his beard. "It's pretty bad, Inez. If the charges stay, I don't know if we're going to be able to get you out of this."

Inez folded her arms and sat down on the small rack that served as a bed. "I fucked up," she said quietly.

"Spectacularly enough that you should get a fucking prize for it, yeah." He got up off the bench and leaned against the bars. "We're going to do all we can to help you out. No matter what, no one's going to abandon you in here."

Inez just nodded and folded her arms around her knees. "Thanks, Mister Kane," she mumbled into her arms as she just stared at the floor. They were going to do all they could, she believed them. But if they couldn't... maybe she'd have to do it herself.