"Scourge" for cuke98

[pixie-on-acid.livejournal.com]

Title:
Author: pixie_on_acid
Written for: cuke98
Archive: Sure, but credit me.
Pairings: None (Gen)
Prompt: In one of the "Kill Ari" episodes Tony told ghost!Kate that
he's only intimidated by divorce attorneys - what's the back story
behind that? gen or any pairing besides Ducky/Gibbs or Gibbs/Abby okay
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: I own neither NCIS, nor the characters involved. They belong to CBS Television. I realise no financial return from these works, they are for entertainment purposes only.
Word Count: 1,007 (not including headers or definitions)
Summary: After all, the theory goes, you have to get divorced to deal with a divorce lawyer, right?
Credits: Who else but my trio of amazing betas jennukes (who also gave me some advice on an area of legality), squeelated (who sometimes has to remind me that my work does not indeed suck, rather that I'm just being paranoid again) and rinkle who sends me plot kangaroos (they're bigger than bunnies and tend to be a little more belligerent).
Notes: No spoilers (I would think), except for what's mentioned in the prompt.



Scourge

--
scourge (skûrj)
n.

1. . A source of widespread dreadful affliction and devastation such as that caused by pestilence or war.
   
2. . A means of inflicting severe suffering, vengeance, or punishment.
   
3. . A whip used to inflict punishment.
   

"scourge." The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004. 15 Aug. 2007. [Dictionary.com http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/scourge].
--
Everybody thinks it's a joke. After all, what could the never-married DiNozzo know about divorce lawyers? Gibbs, now there is a man with reason for fear, but Tony? After all, the theory goes, you have to get divorced to deal with a divorce lawyer, right?

Wrong. As Tony knows from hard experience, you don't need to get divorced, you just need to be part of a divorce. There are a myriad of ways to accomplish that, and short of being the divorcee, he thinks he's probably been forced into all of them.

Mom and Dad each had one, for as long as Tony could remember. Not that they ever finalised anything, signed any papers or even separated, but they had lawyers on retainer because they were going to, because they were in the process of it. Of course no self-respecting shark was going to give up such a lucrative, ongoing set-up. Every now and then he'd find himself hauled off to some kind of meeting or another, and plied with cookies and candy to say that the other parent was so mean, cruel or sometimes just unusual. Worse was when you got two of them in the room together, and they'd try to confuse him, taking his every statement and stretching it out of proportion, shading it with the colours each thought best. It was never about custody, as far as he could determine; he was just another weapon in the war. He was the innocent victim, but victim of whom depended on who was telling the story. It had one consequence, however: he vowed he'd never attend law-school ever. As cool as lawyers could look on television, in real life they weren't necessarily very smart, and didn't seem to notice reality when it was right in front of them. In the end, Dad cut Tony off when Tony saved his money to hire his own lawyer (a not-so-easy feat when no one wanted to be hired… something about twelve-year-olds not being able to enter into legal contracts). It was funny how the guy disappeared when the money did.

All of that would have been enough to scar him for life but there was, of course, more. First there was the friend in college who convinced Tony to play character witness in his divorce – even criminal defence attorneys don't badger that much, he's learned. Every little transgression he'd ever committed got hauled out and exposed. He can sympathise with the evidence that goes under Abby's scope, because those damn lawyers probably did examine his cellular composition, just in case there was something weird they could capitalise on.

Then came the real fun. First it was his partner on the force, wheedling, cajoling and threatening Tony into providing an alibi, under the guise of brotherhood. Tony still wishes that it was IAD that found out about the hookers first, and not the righteously suspicious (soon to be ex-) wife who hunted down the sleaziest sleaze-ball she could find. Fortunately by then Tony knew the best way to threaten a lawyer (which, contrary to what his partner thought was not with a loaded .32), mentioning the words 'slander', 'suit', and the name of Dad's favourite corporate merge (that being the correct term for a collection of weasels) all in the same sentence. It was probably the only encounter he's ever had that had an upside: he learned that sometimes a good bluff was just as good as the real thing.

He found himself subpoenaed to provide testimony that a wife had threatened violence to her husband during a domestic dispute, with the wife's lawyer claiming it had been the other way around, and neither side accepting the word of an uninterested beat-cop who hadn't wanted to be there in the first place, let alone learn what parts of the human anatomy were smashable, breakable or removable in any way. They ran him through a battery of tests and aggravations, each side trying to discredit him and/or make him feel half-an-inch tall.

But it was the last encounter that still leaves him shaking when he thinks about it. If he'd known she was married… he's not sure that would have stopped him, but knowing she was planning a divorce – he would have been half-way to Alaska before anyone caught up. It's not the fact that he was played that still sends chills up his spine (that thought just leaves him disgusted with his own lack of intelligence), but what came next.

It started with paranoia and the distinct feeling that someone was following him. Odd conversations where people admired his car or his shoes and asked 'how much', which didn't seem too odd until they began to add up. Then came what he still thinks of in capital letters as The Audit. He thought at first that maybe Dad had done something to bring the IRS sniffing around, which didn't make the examination of his financial affairs any easier. Somehow the investigators weren't impressed with his haphazard filing style or the foreign substances on some of his receipts (was soy-sauce really that bad to read through?), one even commenting that it was a good thing Tony hadn't gone into the family business, or it wouldn't just be one federal agency breathing down his neck.

In the end, he was hardly surprised when he received not one, but two summonses, one to 'discuss' how his girlfriend might have been using him to hide part of the estate, and the other to testify about what a harassing bastard the husband's lawyer was. By the end, he was willing to pay money out of his own pocket, just to make everybody go away.

Which is why, despite Tony's loyalty to the guy, Gibbs is on his own if he gets married again. He's willing to follow the guy through live fire, but he's not getting involved in another division of property issue, ever. Lawyers – especially of the divorce variety – are the epitome of evil.

The only thing worse is an accountant.

Comments

[goodisrelative.livejournal.com]

TOO funny.
:-)