Work Text:
Samantha Maroun woke up, looking over to see that Nolan was still in her arms and sighing with relief.
He had a rough night.
He had called her last night, confessing that he had been struggling to fall asleep and asked if he could stay at her place that night. She happily obliged, knowing that he would need to be fully rested for the coming morning.
But even when he had fallen asleep, he still struggled with nightmares-- an even gorier retelling of what had happened in the Canal Street station, where he hadn't been able to save Kimmie Hsu in time.
She had held him in her arms as he cried, reassuring him that Kimmie Hsu was alive and healing, that they would work their hardest to bring justice to the victims, and that it didn't make him a horrible person just because the Federal Government was pushing for the death penalty.
Nolan began to stir awake, turning over to face Sam.
"Good morning, eshgram," she whispered.
He smiled a bit at the nickname that she had given him; she told him that it was a Persian endearment meaning "my love."
He was her love.
"Morning," he echoed.
If it weren't for the circumstances that led him to spending the night with her, the both of them would have enjoyed this domestic interaction between them.
"It begins today," he said.
"I know," she said, unable of what else to say to make him feel better, except to kiss his temple.
They would be heading to the Federal Courthouse, first, before resuming their duties as ADAs for Drea Clarke's testimony in the case of the People vs. Blake Carter-- yet another case that was trying their mental well-being.
Nolan nestled further into her arms, burrowing his face into the crook of her neck and taking in the scent of the peaches and chiffon body wash that reminded her of her childhood home, while she played with his hair.
They didn't say another word; there would be plenty of time for talking later at work.
They stayed like that, laying in bed together for about ten more minutes before Nolan's stomach growled. The both of them laughed-- though Nolan's laugh was more out of embarrassment-- as Sam's hand ran over his middle.
"Guess that's any good excuse to get up," she half-heartedly joked.
"Yeah," he sighed.
~oOoOo~
They took an Uber to the Federal Courthouse.
After what Nolan had witnessed, he hadn't taken the subway for the past month.
They had held hands during the drive, but broke apart when they exited the car and began walking up the steps.
Back when he was a defense lawyer, he would have done anything to defend a case in the Federal Courthouse-- within reason, of course.
But all he could feel was the weight of the victims-- those who died and those who survived-- on his shoulders.
His attention was stolen when he thought he spotted a familiar face walking up the steps as well.
He heard that she was on the defense team, but...
"Andrea!" he called, walking over to her and offering as friendly a smile as he could.
No matter how strained things were, she had been his friend once upon a time... and something more upon another.
Sam followed closely behind him as he approached this Andrea woman.
Upon seeing her, all Sam could think was that she was possibly the definitive image of the "gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss."
Short, blonde hair as straight as a street lantern.
A black skirt suit that looked more at home on Nancy Reagan than on her.
The kind of smile that would usually accompany a heavily-accented and falsely saccharine "Bless your heart."
Maybe she was being a little unfair, but Sam's entire had been condescended to and discriminated against by women who looked like her back home in Georgia.
Again, maybe she was being a little unfair.
She had the same thought upon seeing Amanda Rollins, and now the two of them were best friends. Hell, she trusted Sam enough to look after her little girls.
But Nolan had told her that when he made the switch, he had angered many of his colleagues-- and Sam did not want to put up with any petty grudges.
"How are you doing?" Nolan asked Andrea, his voice going up about half an octave.
He leaned in to give her a somewhat awkward hug. "I haven't seen you since--"
"Our law school reunion," Andrea finished the sentence for him, holding her head out enough so Nolan would be obligated to give her a kiss on the cheek.
The uneasy feeling in Sam's gut was quickly replaced by a flash of hot jealousy that she forced back down as the acidic taste crawled up her throat. Nolan pulled away, standing at her side again.
Andrea addressed Sam. "Nolan and I volunteered for the Innocence Project together."
Sam only gave her a close-lipped smile. She hoped that maybe that supposed gut feeling was something only borne of unfounded jealousy, and that whatever ill will that Andrea bore towards Nolan was long gone--
"We used to fight like hell to keep people off death row."
That hope quickly faded, along with her smile.
She looked towards Nolan; he maintained his composure, though he still had an uncomfortable expression on his face.
"Are you really doing this?" Andrea asked him. "You're going for the death penalty?"
"Under the law--"
"The law?" she didn't even give him a chance to plead his case to her, which he shouldn't have had to do. "We're talking about the death penalty."
"Next time, tell your client not to kill seven innocent Asian Americans," Nolan snapped.
A sense of pride swelled through Sam as he turned on his heel to head up inside.
"Before you walk away in a righteous huff," Andrea began as if he had done this a million times before. "I'm gonna need the name of your confidential informant."
Nolan looked at her with an expression of what Sam could decipher as frustration and possibly contempt before he turned back around.
"See what I mean about that righteous huff?" Andrea asked her as if it were some inside joke that she would never be in on.
Sam smiled, but wished her harm with her eyes, as she moved to catch up with Nolan.
~oOoOo~
"Why would she agree that this was a hate crime?" Nolan asked Sam the next day as they walked down the stairs.
"Well, it makes our lives a hell of a lot easier," she tried to lighten the mood.
Nolan scoffed and shook his head. "Rolling over and agreeing to a crucial element of the offense is not Andrea's style."
Sam's phone buzzed and she took it out to look at it once they reached the end of the first flight of stairs. While Nolan began to move ahead, she stopped.
"Well..."
"What?" he turned back around.
"You're right," she said. "She's agreed to the hate crime theory because she wants to use it against us."
"How?" Nolan asked.
To anyone else, his voice would have sounded normal, but she could catch onto the nervousness in it.
"They're changing their plea to not guilty by reason of insanity," she replied, "claiming that pathological bigotry is a mental disease or defect."
~oOoOo~
Nolan spent the night at her place for the third night in a row.
But the previous night and tonight, it was more for her than for him, after they both had witnessed Drea Clarke's murder on the steps of the New York County Courthouse.
Neither of them felt up to cooking, so they ended up ordering Mongolian food for dinner and watching Little House on the Prairie.
As Almanzo and Laura shared their first kiss, Sam finally got the courage to ask Nolan what she had been wanting to ask him for the last day or so.
"How close were you with Andrea Rankin?"
Nolan looked down at her, looking a little confused... and possibly flustered?
"I-- wha--?"
"Sorry, I shouldn't have--"
"No, no, no, it's okay," he assured. "You-- you just want to know my history. You're my girlfriend. That's-- that's understandable."
He sighed, wondering where to begin.
"We met on the first day of orientation at Columbia Law. I had basically been in Rochester all my life, while she grew up in Manhattan, so she helped me adjust. When I was having trouble in our Legal History course, she offered to tutor me."
Sam was surprised.
She didn't think that Nolan would have needed tutoring.
From what she had seen, he could probably recite every American law book cover to cover and only stop when she or Jack begged him to take a break.
"I don't remember how we started going out, but it started as dinner and a movie every weekend, and... we-- we got physical pretty quickly."
He blushed a bit. "She was-- she was my first..."
Upon seeing Sam's amused and teasing smile, he cleared his throat.
"We, uh... we ended up moving in together before the end of our first year," he confessed.
Sam thought to herself that it sounded awfully fast, but she kept her opinion to herself.
"We were together for a few years, but it was over before I even considered leaving defense," he told her. "It was just-- it was a million other things. She didn't particularly get along with my family, and Nick's addiction was at it's worst while we were together. She definitely made it clear that she didn't think much of him, so he didn't think much of her."
He sighed.
"And there were-- other things."
Sam's stomach dropped a bit as something that she never even considered entered her head.
"Nolan, did she ever--?"
"No, she never physically hurt me, Sam," he assured her before she could ask. "She never hit me or anything... but she could be..."
Oh... it all clicked in Sam's mind before Nolan even continued.
"She'd make little comments about how I probably wasn't as smart as I thought I was. She would take something like the one time I left the toilet seat up, or the fact that she slipped after I just waxed the floor, and blow it up into a huge argument. At first... I liked that she had a firm hand. I thought it was kinda sexy. But it kept getting worse and worse until I went to the couch on my own accord and cried myself to sleep."
Sam took his hand, rubbing her thumb over the back of it to offer as much comfort as she could.
"I don't remember how we ended it-- maybe she dumped me, maybe I dumped her-- but I felt so much better once I got out of that apartment," he said. "I felt like myself again."
He sighed again.
"But... we're both lawyers. Whether I left defense or not, we were bound to bump into each other again eventually."
"What about your law school reunion?" Sam asked.
"Oh, I barely talked to her there," he replied. "She was the one who initiated the conversation. I just kept my answers as short as possible and looked for any possible opening to leave."
Sam kissed him, tasting the beef and broccoli he had for dinner on his tongue.
"I'm sorry you had to go through all of that," she apologized. "And I'm so sorry that you have to deal with her again."
"Hey, it's not like you selected her as John Nelson's defender," he said. "The most we can do is work hard, get this trial over with, and hopefully... we'll never have to see her again."
They both smiled.
"You know, I love you," Sam said.
"I love you, too," he repeated, kissing her.
~oOoOo~
Sam watched Nolan carefully as they walked down the steps of the Federal Courthouse.
There was no telling what was going through his mind after John Nelson was sentenced to death by lethal injection.
Maybe a small part of him-- like her, she was afraid to admit-- was grateful that his miserable existence would be ended and he would never harm another living creature.
But she knew that no matter what Nelson had done, Nolan would have this on his conscience for the rest of his life.
It was messy. This whole case had been messy from the beginning.
"Andrea."
Sam turned to see Andrea Rankin approaching them with an anger slowly building in her eyes. She looked over to Nolan, as if to ask permission as to whether she should step aside or if he wanted her to stay with him.
"I'll catch up with you," he said, though he sounded a little unsure himself.
But, regardless, Sam stepped to the sidelines so she could allow Nolan to have some semblance of privacy.
He held out his hand to Andrea. "You did a nice job."
Andrea let out an airy scoff. "I can't believe you actually went through with it."
Nolan let his hand drop to his side as Andrea continued to scold him as if he were a teenage boy that totaled the family car and not a full-grown man with a law degree.
"You sent a man to his death."
Sam could see his neck muscles tightening and swore that his voice almost broke when he finally spoke up again.
"I did my job," Nolan said, sounding as though he had been physically struck. "Same as you."
Andrea could only give her head a slight tilt, her eyes scanning over him. "You've changed, Nolan."
Sam inhaled sharply, marching up to the smug little bitch and standing at her boyfriend's side. "Yeah, seeing seven innocent people bleed to death after being shot by a white supremacist will do that to you."
Andrea didn't seem phased at first. "He's only a white supremacist because he's sick."
"Yeah, sick and twisted," Sam retorted. "But that's not what we're talking about right now. We're talking about the nerve you have to say that Nolan's changed. You said the last time you saw him was at your law school reunion. When was that?"
"2020, just before lockdown," Andrea answered.
"So, you haven't seen him for two years," Sam hypothesized. "And you don't know what he has gone through in that time."
"And just how long have you known him?" Andrea asked.
"About two years," Sam replied.
"So, you don't know him as well as I do," Andrea mocked Sam's tone before returning to her normal voice. "I met him on our first day of law school. I helped tutor him for our Legal History course while you were still reading the CliffNotes of Catcher in the Rye. I was there to hold him while he cried about his junkie brother--"
"His brother died of an opioid overdose back in 2013," Sam interrupted.
Shock came over Andrea's face for a few seconds.
"And do you even know why he switched to prosecution?" Sam asked. "He was forced to defend a guilty man when the firm he worked for was supposed to help those wrongfully accused. And now, he's working his ass off to try to help the victims."
"And I suppose you tell yourself the same thing about yourself?" Andrea challenged. "Helps you sleep at night?"
Sam visibly seethed. "And what are you going to tell yourself when you realize that you've told the survivors and families of the victims that... that their trauma doesn't matter? That it's just collateral damage of this supposed mental illness?"
Andrea didn't seem to have a response to that.
"Now, you can apologize to Nolan... or you can walk away," Sam told her. "Simple as that."
Andrea's eyes stared daggers at Sam, before sending an even harsher glare towards Nolan and skulking off into the crowd. Sam turned to face Nolan, expecting a lecture for making a scene.
But he looked... grateful.
"Th-- thank you," he said, hinting at a small smile that Sam returned.
"Anything for you... eshgram," Sam told him, reaching to take the hand he had held out to Andrea.
As much as he wanted to kiss her right then and there, Nolan Price had a few other ideas on how to express his thankfulness to Samantha Maroun when they got home.
"So... your place or mine?" he asked.