#uomihimee

… I mean, mostly.  Because she employs her best friend Vriska Serket as her legal aide, which mostly means Vriska reads her the relevant documents she can’t get in Braille and drives her places when taking the bus would be inconvenient.  Terezi is blind, after all.  (She has a big fluffy white seeing eye dog named Pyralspite and she loves him.)  But Terezi knows full well that this isn’t Vriska’s only job, and that honestly she’s pretty much only doing it so everything about her looks nice and legal and Productive Member of Society.  Her real passion, and real source of her ridiculous amounts of money, almost certainly comes from heists.  Vriska is a criminal mastermind working for a prosecutor and they both acknowledge the irony of that, but Terezi feels sufficiently guilty about the prospect turning in her best friend that she just kind of doesn’t look too deeply and  pretends she doesn’t know, and Vriska is more than happy to keep it that way.

But!  Other than Vriska, Terezi prosecutes crime to the fullest extent of the law.  And life is good.  So when a murder case finds its way to her, she jumps at the chance.  Murder cases are her jam and she always does her best to see murderers put away for good.  And this one’s a doozy - the rich loser stoner juggalo son of a powerful CEO is on trial for a double murder.  Premeditated, almost ritualistic.  It seems like a no-brainer, honestly.  Evidence is thin, but one conversation with the guy and Terezi is sure he’s guilty.  Besides, something about him just rubs her the wrong way.  Gamzee Makara - she knows she’s heard that name and heard his voice before, but she can’t quite place where.

She builds her case.  The pretrial stuff goes on, and by the time the defense requests their meeting to share evidence, she feels she’s got this in the bag.  She goes to meet the attorney for the defense… and the moment he barges in the door, grumbling about something predictably inane, she recognizes his voice and his smell and his attitude and everything.

Karkat Vantas went to law school with her.  They had kind of been a thing for a while, on and off, but Terezi never took it too far because Karkat was always so… high-maintenance, and adversarial, and dense.  Like at first he never noticed when she tried to flirt with him and then when she’d given him up as a lost cause he finally started act like he was into her and then he was weirdly clingy while insisting he totally wasn’t and it just ended awkwardly for both of them.  She hasn’t seen him in at least two or three years.  (Well, she hasn’t seen him ever, but you know.)

Nothing has changed between them.  Karkat grumbles and yells and pouts.  Terezi teases him - it’s so easy to get him riled up, and he’s hilarious when he’s flustered and annoyed.  (He still wears that awful cologne she loves, the one that smells like cherries.)

But, she realizes, that’s why she knows the name Gamzee Makara - he was one of Karkat’s friends.  She never liked him.

The trial commences.  Terezi and Karkat’s back-and-forth in court is less than wholly professional.  But Terezi feels it’s going pretty well.

Then her witnesses start disappearing, recanting their statements and declining to show up in court.  It’s shocking and immensely frustrating.  Terezi thinks Karkat is having them bribed or threatened, and she’s livid.  She knows the lawyer stereotypes, but she’s always strived towards truth and justice, and this is not only flagrantly illegal, it’s immoral, and it’s cowardly.  Even with their issues, she had thought he was so much better than that.  But, of course, she has no proof.

It’s when a witness turns up dead that everyone acknowledges that okay yeah something really wrong is going on.

With the help of trollcops Sollux and Equius, police detective Kanaya and private detective Rose (who are dating), local ballistics expert Jade and morticians Dave (who really wants to be a rapper but hey dead shit ogler is a perfectly valid job) and Aradia (who’s way too enthusiastic about her job, it’s a little bit unnerving) at the morgue where the case-relevant bodies are being kept and analyzed, Terezi tries to find out exactly what’s going on in this case.  Vriska helps through… less conventional and probably less legal channels.  Karkat, insulted by Terezi’s passive-aggressive accusations, refuses to participate.

Subsequent trial sessions are far less banter-y and far more aggressive, and Terezi has less and less to work with.  Someone is trying to cover this up.

Vriska makes the first breakthrough, and her lead eventually brings the investigation to light that Gamzee was almost certainly in a cult, and the murders - and cover-up - are almost certainly cult activity.

Terezi has a new line of evidence to argue with, but her case is crumbling because there’s too much room for doubt.  Karkat is arguing for Gamzee’s innocence with such conviction, and she doesn’t have anything decisive enough the sway the jury to a full conviction.  She needs something drastic.

Then, obligingly, Vriska shows up with something drastic - some piece of evidence so irrefutable that there’s no way Karkat can spin it or dismiss it.  It’s exactly what she needs - but Vriska’s story of how she got it is so fishy.  It’s pretty obvious that, even if this evidence wasn’t forged, it was acquired illegally and will be inadmissible in court without a lot of lying.

So Terezi is caught in a dilemma - which is more important, following the law and upholding her morals, or getting this cultist killer off the streets so he can’t kill again?

And she’s decided that yes, she’s going to do it, she’s going to have to, when that Karkat appears on her doorstep.  Terezi will have to tell him about the new piece of evidence and new argument she’s going to be using anyway, but as she opens the door it’s immediately obvious that that’s not what Karkat is here for - his breathing is uneven, he smells like stress and fear, and his voice has that strained quality where it’s obvious he’s trying not to cry.

“What are you doing here?” Terezi asks.

“I just need to talk to somebody or else I’ll go fucking batshit and tear my own damn head apart,” he mutters, and it’s obvious by the sound of his voice that he’s looking awkwardly off to the side, like he can’t even face her at this point.  “I need to talk about - I don’t even know, the case, Gamzee, everything - and you’re basically the only fucking person who it’s not illegal to.”

Terezi invites him in, and they just sit at her kitchen table with a pot of coffee and talk for hours.  Karkat has always been bad at his emotional coping skills, and he hasn’t really had anyone to talk to, and now he spills everything he’s been feeling.  He jumped to Gamzee’s defense the moment he heard that he’d been charged because Gamzee is one of the few friends he has and hadn’t fucked up everything beyond repair with (Terezi learns that she is in Karkat’s mental category of “friends I used to have but fucked up everything beyond repair with and now they hate me”), and he adamantly refuses to believe that Gamzee is guilty because he’s terrified of losing him, and he wants to believe in his friends no matter what.  But the plain fact that the evidence does seem to point towards Gamzee would be bad enough if that evidence doesn’t keep mysteriously disappearing, which he has no idea how that’s happening but if it’s a cover-up that only makes it even more likely that Gamzee really is the killer and the willful cognitive dissonance it’s taking to accept all this information is tearing him apart, and if it is all because Gamzee’s in a murder cult that’s terrifying, and Karkat doesn’t know what to do.

All of Karkat’s fears and stresses and insecurities come spilling out and Terezi isn’t exactly sure what to do with them.  But it’s nice to be talking again, talking for real (with only the gentlest of ribbing), even if it is about a thorny case that no matter what happens, someone’s going to lose a lot, and lose it painfully.

Terezi keeps meaning to bring up the evidence Vriska found, but somehow it’s never really the right time.

As the night gets later the topic strays farther and farther from the actual case, until they’re just - talking.  About themselves, about what they’ve been up to in their lives.  Karkat details his long procession of losing friends and alienating people (which, listening to it, Terezi thinks he’s blown way out of proportion - no one hates Karkat nearly as much as Karkat hates Karkat).  And Terezi finally admits her misgivings about Vriska, and their precarious arrangement.  Both of them are really just massive balls of stress.  They handle it in different ways, but it’s nice to finally be able to admit this stuff to someone for a change.

At some point they realize it’s one in the morning and they’ve been sitting there talking for hours, and Karkat gets up and hurries to leave, all embarrassed.  Terezi realizes she never actually told him about Vriska’s new evidence.  And then she realizes that that was because she never really wanted to, and she can’t use illegal and possibly forged evidence, not now.

Their next day in court is a lot more subdued than it’s been.  Their vulnerabilities are all patched up and locked down again, of course, and the arguments and sass come thick and strong, but it’s a lot more friendly now.  They can appreciate each other without being like “You’re trying to send my best friend to prison!”/”You’re manipulating witnesses and interfering with a fair trial!” and they understand what the other is going through.  It does mean that they’re both now doubly determined to win, though.

There’s a final climactic testimony from Gamzee himself, and when Terezi is questioning him she uses points she gleaned from Vriska’s evidence to hit a nerve, and Gamzee has a spectacular AA-style breakdown on the stand.  “I KILLED THOSE MOTHERFUCKERS FOR THE MIRTHFUL MESSIAHS AND I AIN’T GOT A FUCKIN’ RAT SHIT OF REGRET, MOTHERFUCKER!” or something similar.

Everyone is in shock.  It does not take very long for Terezi to weave a very believable argument connecting all the weird cult activity going on to Gamzee and the two murders.  Gamzee is not helping his case at this point.

The trial wraps up fairly soon afterwards.  Gamzee has been established to be of sound mind; an insanity plea won’t go anywhere.  The jury returns a unanimous vote convicting Gamzee of two counts of first-degree murder.

It’s a sensational case and the press is going wild with it.  Karkat tries to slip away as quietly as possible so he doesn’t have to deal with all that, but Terezi finds him in some typically-deserted far hallway of the courtroom and sits down next to him.

“I’m sorry about Gamzee,” is all she can say.

Karkat is definitely sniffling, even though he tries to hide it.  “No you’re not.  You hate him.”

“But you don’t,” she says, and he can’t argue with that.

He sighs, and tries to turn it into a kind of sarcastic joke.  “Remind me never to face you in court again.  That was a fucking nightmare.  You’re so…”  He can’t find a word he’s willing to say.  “Tough,” he eventually decides on.

Terezi laughs a little bit at that.  “Well, I can think of a way to guarantee you’ll never go up against me in court again.”

He looks up at her, taken aback.  “Did you just threaten to kill me?”

“No, you idiot,” she says, and she kisses him.