BREAKAWAY Author: Michele Lellouche Email: culturevulture73@gmail.com SPOILERS: "The Beginning" RATING: PG-13. SUMMARY: A speculation on what could happen in season 2, which will be blown all to hell by the first episode, my luck. DISCLAIMERS: David Hollander Productions, Gran Via Productions and CBS Productions in association with Columbia Tri-Star Domestic Television (now known as Sony Pictures Television) own 'em. I'm borrowing them for awhile and I'll put them back nicely in their action figure boxes when I'm done. No harm, no foul. AUTHOR'S NOTE: at the end --+-- "Still wish you could sweet talk Barbara into coming down and organizing us," Jake Straka said wearily, folding another empty moving box. "Me? You're her concert date of choice," Nick Fallin's smile was fleeting but Jake caught it and mock scowled back. "So when do the phone people come?" "Tomorrow morning, and right after them, the people to set up the headsets." "We're still missing something--" Jake took a step turn around the hardwood floor. "Furniture." He snapped his fingers and they both grinned like idiots, remembering the commercial that had started airing just as they had left Caldwell & Associates, bringing Henry Stone and Lisa Jacobi with them. Both took it as a good omen. The new partnership had signed up for furniture to replace the few beat up pieces that were there when they moved in, had kept their clients happy by cell phone and meeting all over Pittsburgh in the best restaurants they could manage. They had done their own typing on laptops and two inkjet printers. Two weeks in, accessories and supplies were arriving piecemeal but Nick felt absurdly happy as he hadn't without chemical alteration in he couldn't think how long. There was something to be said for starting over, starting fresh. Also something to be said for loyalty. "You going back to Legal Services this afternoon?" "I have no hearings tomorrow so I was thinking I might play hooky this afternoon, try and organize this disaster before the new furniture arrives." "Okay, then, I'll make you a deal. You stay here and organize, I'll go to Office Depot, get our supplies, come back with pizza," Jake offered. "Then we can finish the file organization together. And Henry and Lisa should be back by then. They can help." "Bring lots of pizza. There's a knighthood in it for you." "You're organizing the files, that's a sainthood. Or at least some years off of purgatory." Jake gathered his keys and gingerly stepped over and around boxes to the door. "Don't lose the receipt!" Nick called after him. The files from all of their cases were currently stacked haphazardly in piles on the polished hardwood they had paid dearly to rent. With four lawyers in the space and only a temp in part time at the moment, it was rapidly devolving into even more chaos. He picked up four of the empty cubic foot moving boxes, scribbled names on each one with a Sharpie, and set them on end, a trick his first secretary at Swann & Cranston in New York had taught him. Then he could simply stack the files inside without them falling over and driving him crazy. ************** Burton Fallin stubbed out the last cigarette in his pack, then boarded the elevator up to the new home of his son and some of the best young talent from Fallin--no, make that Caldwell & Associates. Trust Nick to know almost perfectly who to call on--he'd only made one mistake when Aaron Parker had ratted them out. He had barely seen Nick in the week since they had cleared up the Mandy Gessler mess and he had not seen the new offices. Nick had told him it looked old but classy. Burton had to agree on the old part, but he had never been a great fan of these redone lofts, remembering what they used to be. He hated the past that constantly repeated on him, that was never fully outrun. Easy enough to heap the blame on Nicholas but in the end, he couldn't entirely. There were too many tangles to accuse his son, who had done yeoman's work the last year in pulling himself together, in going on. He should have told Nicholas before he had brought in Caldwell. Now it had all gone to hell. "Hello?" He opened the door, smiling at the sign taped to the door, a simple list of the lawyers in alphabetical order, in Nicholas' spidery hand. He was expecting someone to be watching the door but only a few battered desks greeted him, crowded with two printers, three laptops, plus cell phone and PDA cradles, and a coffee machine. For a moment he stopped, pulled back thirty years to when he had started, in a nondescript office in an even uglier building. The young man now working across the room had been a tiny child then, but just as independent and stubborn as he was now. "Nicholas?" As he expected, the younger Fallin started, so involved had he been in his filing. "Hey, Dad." Nick turned, smiled to see his father carefully entering, avoiding the boxes. "I see you found the place." "It's a good location." "Jake found it. We're close to the courthouse and I'm close to Legal Services, so it's good. Want a tour? Although there's not much to tour now." "You _are_ getting furniture?" "That'll be here day after tomorrow with the computers. Phones come tomorrow. We should be pretty much operational by the end of the week." Nick led him around the small suite, eight rooms along one side of the large open space that the boxes and furniture currently occupied. "We've got room for six lawyers plus support staff. And a conference room." "Why this kind of place?" Burton asked, thinking how little the dark wood baseboards and trim, the plaster white interior walls and brick exterior walls looked like Fallin & Associates's modern steel and glass space. "Jake got us a selection of places--really modern spaces and this one. We all liked this best--we all loved the floors, the plaster--Lisa got it repainted by some friends of hers, they refinished the bricks too. It's not really law firm, it's more ad agency, software shop. Since we're going to be nontraditional, it worked." He didn't add that it reminded him of Legal Services of Pittsburgh as well, but done way more upscale. "So you're really going to make a go of it on your own." "Well, not by myself. Jake, Lisa, Henry-all good lawyers." "You ran off with half the firm's talent." "Half? I thought I got it all." He tried a joking tone, was rewarded with a wince-smile from Burton. "Well, except you. We've brought a lot of clients with us and once the rest see the kind of treatment they'll get at Caldwell, I have a feeling a few more will jump ship." "Caldwell is going to come after you, Nicholas." Nick almost laughed. "What can he possibly do except smear what's left of my good name across the city? Not much left to wreck there. Especially after the last week or so. But if worst comes to worst, and it's a dismal flop, I'll live off my savings until I finish out my community service hours, then see if Alvin can use another lawyer he has to pay for. I'm developing a real feel for things besides corporate finance-family law, landlord-tenant, criminal." "Any firm in this city would kill to have you," Burton growled. "Except Caldwell & Associates." Nick muttered. "Kirk & McGee," the elder Fallin added as they returned to where they had started. "Give you half an hour, you could probably name a few more," Nick said sourly. He returned to his filing to try and avoid one more confrontation. Burton sat heavily on one of the folding chairs. "Caldwell could hurt you." Nick leaned on the box he had been filing into, dimly impressed with how strong it was. "He and Lichtman came waltzing in, and took what you worked 30 years for, what all the rest of us sweated blood for." "He helped keep you out of jail." "Do we know that? Judge Stanton was your friend, Dad. How do we know that he didn't do it himself?" "Nicholas--" "Hell, one of them could've set me up!" Nick pivoted back towards his father. "Y'know, I never did figure out exactly who sold me out to the cops." He realized what he said just as Burton looked askance at him. He drew a deep breath. "I never found out how the police knew to raid my apartment..." "That's a pretty long shot theory--Nathan Caldwell had you set up so that he would pull the strings to get you off and by doing so, take over the firm? Isn't that a pretty big stretch?" "I guess so. Because you'd also have to factor in your getting the federal judgeship." Nick moved to his next stack of files but when Burton didn't pick up the thread of the conversation, the younger Fallin turned to look at his father. Burton was steadfastly staring away. "They withdrew the nomination." "Can't blame that one on Caldwell." Nick forced himself not to flinch from the bitterness in the elder Fallin's voice. "No, you can blame that one directly on me," Nick admitted, and then decided to forge ahead. "So you'll go and take back the firm." He returned to his filing, expecting a quick, sharp response, a tirade from his father as to exactly why he had to do it, blame for Nick somewhere figuring into it. Anything but the deafening silence. Burton walked past him, to the arched windows with sills low enough and wide enough to perch in on a rainy day. "These places, these old lofts--can't you smell the mold and the age?" Burton stopped, leaning on one side of the elaborate brick frame. "You can't smell anything through the cigarette smoke." Nick moved to lean on the other side of the frame. "It smells like a fresh start to me, to Jake, to all of us." "My fresh start's gone." Burton shook his head, smoothed at the back of his neck. "How the hell can I go back, Nicholas? Go back in...." he trailed off, strangled some word that Nick interpreted as "disgrace." "And know you're not there?" Nick caught his breath, tried to find Burton's gaze but his father was staring out the window as if he could see the rivers from here, not the old building across the street. He could feel the anger going through him, as it hadn't since he had escaped the disaster with Mandy Gessler. "They set us up, Dad. They took advantage of my addiction to set themselves up to steal the firm out from under you." Burton finally looked at him. "Good God, Nicholas, where do you come up with this stuff?" "All I could do while sitting in jail was watch television and think and think--amazing what watching a lot of soaps and Jerry Springer and being surrounded by people who are, of course, not guilty, can do for your imagination." He smiled, snorted. "Doesn't mean it doesn't make sense. That I wouldn't put it past them." Burton sat down on the sill, closed his eyes. "You never trust anyone." Nick tightened his jaw. "I trust people when they give me a reason to." "I don't know what I'm going to do, Nicholas." Burton looked up at his son, cut his eyes away after a glancing contact. "I've been wandering around the house--I should've taken up golf." The younger Fallin almost smiled. "You wouldn't last playing golf. You'd club someone." "Are you saying I don't have any patience?" Burton said archly. "Well, I don't and it had to come from somewhere." Nick shrugged, sitting down beside his father. "I don't know what I'm going to do," The elder Fallin repeated. In his desolate voice, Nick heard Burton again telling him of his father, Nick's grandfather, drinking himself to death after being fired from Clayton Steel. Nick felt his chest tighten, his nerves hum, and he spoke before he could even process it. "Come work with us." He looked at his father, who seemed poised to protest but Nick rode roughshod. "You can't be in charge--none of us is--but come work with us--work with me. I'll sell it to everybody else, hell, why wouldn't they want you? You're still the best lawyer of us all." In the face of all that enthusiasm, it took effort to fight. "Nicholas, I can't start over at my age." "Why can't you start over? I did. You helped me start over, let me help you. You're a fighter, Dad; you can't quit on me now. Caldwell is going to be pissed off when our firm gets up and running and he finds out just how many clients we took from him." "I join you and you might as well draw a target on your back." Nick laughed. "Bring him on. I deal with tougher people than Caldwell and Lichtman on a daily basis. He sold us out, Dad. If you go off quietly into retirement, that sonofabitch wins. I have spent a solid year unable to stop a lot of bad things from happening to people I came to care about. Hunter, Lesley," he swallowed, torn again by her death as he only let himself be in moments he fiercely guarded. "Let's just say I feel a lot of payback in my heart and soul." He ran one hand over face. "I doubt before this year you could've found anyone who would've said I _had_ a soul." "Is that your subtle way of telling me that going through hell builds character?" Burton looked at him with a smile hiding under his moustache. "Well, everyone keeps pounding it into my head, over and over and over." Nick smiled back. "You're not the same person you were before, Nicholas. You've made some mistakes this year, slipped, but a year or so ago, you would have never even suggested going to Legal Services full time. You wouldn't be here with Jake, Henry and Lisa opening your own firm, in this bohemian space." "Bohemian," Nick repeated softly. He looked at his father; saw the waiver of resolve building in him. "Don't answer me now. Stick around. Help me file," Nick urged. "File?" "You wanted something to do. Besides, Jake's bringing pizza, Henry and Lisa should be back soon. It'll be a party." Nick stood, offered a hand. Burton looked from the hand up to Nick's eyes. For the first time in a long time, he was reminded of the bright child Nick had once been, not the man tenuously holding things together, or the one who had medicated himself to get through a day. He took his son's hand, let himself be pulled to his feet. "I suppose I should see who you spirited away." "I think you'll be surprised." Nick slid a stack of files to his father. "No doubt of that, "Burton started thumbing through the folders. "No doubt at all." AUTHOR'S NOTE: The commercial Jake and Nick are talking about is the Visa Business Card for small business ad, where the two guys are setting up their own office in a loft and they are sitting on boxes when one says "we need furniture." For some reason, I easily cast Jake and Nick in the parts.