fandomtownies | Caritas, Sunday

and because I'm a masochist..

Hernando went to the bar to see Atton. Sparkle sometimes pulled this 'I don't want to bother him' thing and after their last conversation, Hernando was only too well aware that it was no bother at all to Atton. In essence, he was low-key checking in to make sure his boyfriend hadn't done something dumb like not talking to Atton.

Clearly not the case. "Hello Atton. Sparkle told you about it?"

"I mean, he was in our apartment screaming, it was kind of hard to miss," Atton said, barely looking up.

Hernando sighed and rubbed his forehead, "And that is better than him sitting in your apartment as a lump on the couch and deflecting anytime you prod him about it. Good. He made the call." Rubbed his forehead again, "I've accepted a guest lecturer position in Toronto. It's an open-ended contract but it comes with a townhouse. An address in Toronto that's not transient. It has a second bedroom for you. Unless you want other arrangements. But it's there. I'll commute back and forth to the island but I thought it would be a good idea to establish that residence and that tie before this.. begins."

"Think they're going to make him stick around there too, huh?" Atton said, rubbing the back of his neck.

Edited 2019-09-01 17:00 (UTC)

"If we're lucky, very lucky, then yes," Hernando said quietly, "He'll get an ankle bracelet and a limited area of mobility. It is easier to ask for that if it can be shown he has a place to be tied to. Otherwise, they will put him in jail. He jumped bail last time. There will be a warrant for his arrest just for that alone. One way or the other, once this begins, Sparkle won't be able to leave Toronto until it's over. I'm..hopeful. That he will get conditional release and a very large bail bond. That would be best for him. If they try to imprison him.." He took a breath. "He will run again. He will run if I have to pick him up and throw him. Sparkle would not survive prison. At best they would have to put him in solitary confinement for his own safety."

"Slicing into ankle bracelets is easy anyway," Atton commented, a disinterested drawl that was anything but. "But keeping up appearances, I get that. Sure. Toronto."

Hernando glanced up at him and then gave a nod, "Good. That will keep him from climbing the walls and feeling trapped. He'll have a parole officer who he'll have to do check-ins with and who will probably do unannounced check-ins. They're not legal in Canada but I've read that they happen. I have been doing.. an awful lot of reading." Research, the only way he truly had to fight. "Sparkle can't. He tries. He tries so hard but it all makes him spiral. I've taken on research. It's what I'm good at."

"Let me know if you need some help with that," Atton commented. "Sometimes I remember how to read Earth letters on flimsi if I concentrate really hard."

Said the guy who'd spent most of his original tenure at Fandom inhaling every bit of detail about Earth that he could.

"I would love some help with it," Hernando admitted readily, "I can think directly. I can look at the pieces and I can guess what is going to come up and what is going to happen. In short, I can think like Sparkle's lawyer might. I don't think I have it in me to think like Lewis Chance's lawyer will. You work with.. politicians.." Criminals. ".. and Sparkle says you are very good at what you do. Could you take that part on, please? Try to see every shifty, ugly, horrible way this man might come at Sparkle and come up with some way to counter it? I'm trying but.."

He held his hands wide, "This is an area I won't be any good at. I have no experience with people like that. Which I'm thankful for but does Sparkle no good right now."

Something flashed in Atton's eyes, but he muffled it quickly. "Yeah, sure, I can figure that one out," he drawled. "I've also met the weasel, which helps."

"I've met men like him," Hernando said, lips thinning, "It's a more than occasional personality type in academia. When they're found out, they're shut down hard. As they should be. He is the worst kind of scum, because he truly believes that nothing he does is ever wrong."

Beat.

"Please don't call him a weasel? Sparkle turns into a weasel and he's adorable. I don't want to think of Lewis Chance when I think 'weasel'."

Atton snorted softly. "We'll run out of animal insults on this island very quick if you're going to stick to that," he said, pulling up the non-alcoholic juma juice for himself. "I've met worse scum," he added, pouring a glass, "But you're slightly less likely to run into them in real life. 'Self-righteous wannabe heroes who manipulate everything as they like but don't want to think of it as manipulation', though, those are common."

"I haven't," Hernando said quietly, "met worse. Even New York, I thought they were just muggers until after Jack.. came home. It was easy to write off before I knew. I don't know who you're talking about with that last part but it's also a shoe that fits Lewis Chance. He is the hero in his own story, or the victim. That is how he sees himself. He will never acknowledge that he has harmed Sparkle. He will never believe he has. Because he meant well, you see. He's a good guy."

The sheer loathing in those words was.. completely un-Hernandolike.

"I was talking about Lewis," Atton said, rolling his eyes. "Just FYI. Though I've known more than him. A lot of people have a streak of it. Thankfully out here, at least most of them don't have superpowers."

"Ah. Yes, I see now. I'd have used 'martyr'. He doesn't really care if he's a hero. Because he's trash." He smiled a little, "I believe you accused me of it the last time we spoke, in fact." He didn't mind. He could understand why Atton would think that and now he knew the trouble was Sparkle being Sparkle, which helped him provide some prodding in the correct direction.

In Atton's few experiences with Hernando, Hernando had shown... some of the traits he knew from Sparkle's worse boyfriends. But he was loathe to step in there unless he thought the traits were more than just traits but actual red flags-- and so far, it didn't seem that way.

"You get different flavors of martyr, too," he noted. "Some are worse, some are better. Lewis Chance isn't a Sith Lord, but he's definitely towards the worse end of the spectrum."

"I don't know what a Sith Lord is," Hernando admitted, almost apologetically, "That isn't a thing we have where I'm from. Lewis exhibits the traits of narcissistic personality disorder. Extremely so, co-mingling with traits of true psychopathy." He was silent for a moment and then said quietly, "That's one of the things they might try to hit Sparkle with. At best it'll be 'borderline personality disorder', but that's one avenue Lewis' lawyer is undoubtedly going to pursue. That will be easy enough to fight since it is not true and any competent therapist would know this five minutes after talking to Sparkle."

Atton squinted at him. "You know you can just call him an asshole," he said. "Sometimes people are just assholes, no mental health whatever involved."

"Oh, he's an asshole," Hernando said easily and meaningfully, "I'm thinking how the lawyers are going to present it. He's the type of man who's going to fight going in front of a therapist because he believes there's nothing wrong with him and a court-ordered psychiatric evaluation is a weapon we can use. 'Asshole' is just an opinion that happens to be fact."

"If a psychiatric evaluation works out the way you want to," Atton said mildly. "You a therapist? You meet Lewis Chance at all?"

"I have not met him, no," Hernando said and added, "Dr. Lecter is helping Sparkle with this. He helped him find a lawyer. I've no doubt he would be equally up to the task of finding a therapist." He took a breath, "Because it is an absolute fact, Atton, that they are going to throw all of this at Sparkle. They are going to try to paint him as the person to blame. The promiscuity will come up and they will make it ugly and Sparkle will have to sit there and listen while they paint him as .."

Hernando took a breath again. "And be damned if I won't see to it that his lawyer serves the same sort of dish to Lewis goddamn Chance."

"Space, Hernando, it's not about finding a therapist, I'm saying you have no idea they're actually going to find whatever you just armchair diagnosed from here in that guy's skull ," Atton said, running his fingers through his hair in a moment of frustration. "You run in there with some strategy you concocted in the back of your head based on some mock-up you made of that guy in your head, you're-- well, the lawyer'll probably step in, but you're going to make everyone's lives a lot more miserable."

Edited 2019-09-02 16:54 (UTC)

"It doesn't matter what's inside his skull, Atton," Hernando said quietly, "That won't matter at all. What matters is what a certified therapist would say about it. This isn't about the truth, though it wouldn't be a lie either but a medical interpretation. This is going to be a war of character assassination. Truth and facts alone aren't enough to win this. Not with a man like Lewis Chance. He'll be charming and well-spoken and erudite because men like him always are. We're going to be lucky if Sparkle can even speak."

Atton rubbed his forehead. "Look, not to get into the weeds here, but trust me, I don't need the lecture on screwing people over the complicated way," he said. "What I'm saying is that if you want to make this into a thing where a certified therapist shows up and tells the judge about what an awful little bastard Chance is, you better find one who's prepared to lie for us if they need to."

"Yes, Atton," Hernando said simply, "I know. They will need to be able to defend their medical interpretation against anything another therapist could throw at them." He lifted a shoulder, "He is an awful little bastard. He admitted several criminal things when he forcibly outed Sparkle. It was in the papers in his own words. Attacking Lewis Chance is the job of Sparkle's lawyer. My job is to support Sparkle through this." He was silent a moment, "The truly horrible thing about this is that Sparkle loved that bastard once. Loved him and trusted him and some small part of him still loves... the man he believed in. If this goes well, it is going to kill that part of Sparkle and that, too, is going to hurt him. I hate this."

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