Punishing

VII


During Trixie's over-the-top oration, Quatre slipped into a trance. The lids of his eyes fell half-mast, his frown drew back into its natural cupid's bow curve, and he allowed his boyish golden locks to fall slightly into his face. He was minimalizing his prescence under the scathing remarks that Trixie was dropping, as if he were an abused husband.

The icing on the cake to his (most definitely calculated) feelings of victimization, came at a well-plotted spot where Trixie was just beginning to start on his family. A few unsqueezed tears spilled out of his eyes, silently, but with enough theatre to compel the baliff to award him a box of tissues.

Finally, Trowa got his first look at Quatre's face when he did a (well-thought-out) quarter turn to regard his wife's attorney. The look was convincingly hurt, but, Trowa spotted the skillfully applied make-up that accentuated the emotion (more than Quatre was actually feeling it).

'Oh...he's good,' Trowa thought to himself, admittedly affected.

++

Trixie had completely lost her defense team by the end of her testimony.

A testimony that went something like this:

Trixie and Quatre met at the behest of their overbearing parents. Their marriage had been pre-arranged since the tender age of three (yadda yadda yadda). When they met, sparks flew, love at first sight, stars doing somersaults over the moon, and whut not. Winner Jr. insisted on an expedited union, and (since he was spoilt) was granted it.

They couldn't keep their hands off of each other (blah blah blah). Trixie was the virtuous wife from Russia, who spoke little to no English at first but loved her new husband so much, and who did everything for her husband and never suspected him to be a philanderer. However, she turned out to be sorely mistaken.

She'd miscarried two of Winner Jr.'s children, attended Winner Sr.'s funeral alone, and had to deal with the rest of Winner Jr.'s terrible family. They hated her, ridiculed her, and demonized her.

A few months into their marriage, Mr. Winner Jr. came home with hickeys, mussed hair, ruined suits, glazed eyes, and no interest in her. He outright scorned her, belittled her, etc. Later, he made her move out of their home so that he could entertain lovers undisturbed.

He took all of the money that she brought into the marriage and invested it without her consent. He forbode her to keep pleasant company and used her as a mere trophy wife at public functions, and now that he'd finished with her, he just wanted to discard her...

++

There was more to her testimony, but most of it was irrelevant or silly or incomprehensible.

++

In a temporary truce, Trowa and Taylor were playing a game of hangman. They'd been through words like: ambidexterous, cleidomastoid, masticate, homogenized, micturate (at which they'd both indulged in a muted chuckle), Freudian, halycon, iconoclast, mitigate, klingon, along with others.

Trowa was in charge of the game when Wufei stood for his cross-examination. Taylor was having a hard time guessing the letters for 'polysaccharide.'

"You said," Wufei began, pacing as he did so, "that Mr.Winner had sexual liasons with: the maid, a lady named Kimie, senator Relena Peacecraft, the clerk at the coffee shop, the caterer at your wedding, and so on, and so forth. I have a few problems with this, as you may very well imagine..." He paused a moment to give her a good hard stare over the rims of his glasses.

Trixie squirmed.

"Here is where I don't see your story adding up: at Mr.Winner's estate, there are no maids. All female staff were dismissed two months after Mr.Winner's thirteenth birthday, and have since been replaced by forty Arabian men; the Magnuacs. 'Kimie' is the name of Mr.Winner's twenty-fourth sister, is it not? Ms.Peacecraft is happily married, and the darling of the media, correct? Tell me, what paparazzi in his right mind would pass up the opportunity to photograph the senator and my client in an unprofessional light?"

Trixie searched the flourescent lights in the ceiling for an answer.

"You made up all of the testimony that you gave here, today, didn't you?" Wufei queried dryly.

"No!" Trixie squeaked with a shake of the he
"
"Which coffee shop does Mr.Winner frequent?" Wufei asked.

"Why?" Trixie replied defensively.

"It's a simple question," Wufei pressed.

"H-how the f-...er, how should I know?" Trixie amended mid-sentence.

Taylor decided to pipe up for the sake of piping up, "Objection."

"Grounds?" Dreiser peered from his perch, volumes of old law translated through his eyes into an impressively penetrating stare.

"Relevance," Taylor replied as if he were speaking up a cliff face and didn't expect to be heard.

Judge Dreiser mercifully turned his gaze to Wufei, who had already begun to speak, "I just want to know how well Ms. Titiana knows her husband, if at all. Surely, a once loving, mutual relationship, should have some degree of familiarity attatched to it."

"Objection overruled," Dreiser pronounced, nodding his large head for Wufei to continue.

Wufei willed his eyes to become like darts to pin Trixie, to stir a primal fear in her so potent that she might suffer an episode of temporary amnesia, "How well do you know your husband?"

++

By this time, some of the hawk had returned to Quatre's features.

Trowa could tell from the distance in Quatre's posture that he must've been thinking about his own impending testimony. At this point, it probably wasn't even necessary, but Trowa knew in his heart that Quatre was dying to tell a story.

Trowa was, to a degree, dying to hear that story.

++

In the only way that an attorney can, Chang went on a killing spree, wielding words as his sole weapon. He meticulously picked apart Trixie's testimony and reveled in her discomfort. It was a secret pleasure. He was the type of lawyer that the common man would refer to as a 'junkyard dog.'

He bent what could not be broken, found avenues around closed roads, and loved (more than anything else in the whole world) victory.

He'd been waiting, ever since he'd first entered college, to cleave apart, irrevocably, a marriage of the nature that he was arguing, today.

++

Quatre's eyes took on a curious sheen. There was a smile hidden in his lips, a sinister curl.

He was an animal that had smelled the distinct flavor of b.
.


TBC...


note(s):

Stay tuned for Quatre's testimony~ woo~
I didn't go too in-depth with Trixie's testimony because the tedium would kill me.
How do you like my Quatre?? :D

thanks for reading~!!