"The past is gone. It went by, like dusk to dawn."

[nickthewarbler]

Who: nickthewarbler, warble_on_jeff, alittletoolegal and jewhawk (posting order)
What: The verdict
Where: New York County Criminal Court, Manhattan
When: Wednesday afternoon, a couple of weeks after THIS
Rating: Leaving it open

Comments

[warble_on_jeff]

It had only been a matter of weeks that the trial had gone on... Dani, her legal team, and a number of witnesses fighting like hell to clear Nick's name, and to let everyone know, once and for all, that Neil Carter was a horrible person, an evil son of a bitch who'd pushed Nick to the point of having no choice but to defend himself, even when that had come at the cost of the bastard's life. Nick had never intended to kill Neil, and his act had been one of pure desperation not to die himself. Everyone in Nick's life knew that. They all knew the gentle person he'd been, though for some, like Jeff, it had been a long time since the last time they saw him before he fell into this life with his husband. But Nick was not, at heart, cold-blooded, and certainly not a killer. He wouldn't even hurt an animal, much less a human being, unless pushed to it with no other choice. Yes, it had only been a few weeks, but for Jeff, and everyone who loved Nick? It had felt more like an eternity

[alittletoolegal]

Dani was sure she had never felt this bad in her life. The collective amount of sleep she had over the past weeks was negligible and whilst it could be argued that it was all catching up with her, it just felt like something was wrong. She had been pregnant once before, and she knew that maternal instinct could be a powerful thing sometimes. Completely unexplainable. There was also the fact that a woman just knew her body, and you knew when something wasn't right with it. She didn't know what it was, but she knew that whilst they had been waiting in her office that wasn't too far from the court house for the jury to declare verdict, she had privately made an urgent phone call with her doctor for that afternoon, and she had been planning to go whether the verdict had come or not

[jewhawk]

Ordinarily, Puck would've been at Dani's, getting ready for Benny to come home. But his son had football practice, and one of the other moms, whose son was one of Benny's good friends, asked if Puck and Dani would mind the boys having a play date, and Benny had seemed so excited that they couldn't say no. With everything going on around him, it was hard for them to find things that really got Benny excited anymore, and they'd given in to the request pretty quickly

[nickthewarbler]

Probably looking back on this, Nick would never, ever know how he got through it. In fact, he probably would barely even remember most of it. The courtroom was dead silent and despite the fact the room was massive, it felt hot and claustrophobic to Nick, like the walls were trying to close in on him. He could hear a throbbing in his ears and he couldn't ignore how menacing the police guards looked at the side exit of the courtroom where he would be dragged away in cuffs after the guilty verdict to be thrown in prison for god knows how long