Chapter Text
To his surprise, it was Elastigirl who suggested he have Evelyn’s holding situation looked at. They had been on the high rise of one of his mansions three stories above the sparkling blue pool where a party was raging, she had offered to serve as security and Winston was happy to have her there but he was certain she was laying down a trap. Evelyn had become the name no one dared to speak in front of supers or at least it had for Winston in the week since her arrest.
“She’ll be okay,” Winston said, still not wanting to say his sister’s name even though Elastigirl just had. ”The facility is clean and sturdy, a great place to reflect...”
Elastigirl rested her arms across the railing and squinted at the navy blue sky.
“Evelyn made a lot of enemies here last week, not just with supers-” Elastigirl said her voice distant, she trailed off then shook her head and looked at him with a composed expression that told him her head wasn’t in agreement with her words, her heart was. “If I was you, I’d have her moved. For her own safety.”
That was something Winston hadn’t considered, didn’t want to consider. Having Evelyn transported to another city would take time, legal proceedings and draw more unwanted attention to her, it was better to let her sit in the local jail while supers drowned out her betrayal in the public eye, moving her would only cause a media frenzy and besides-
“No one would be foolish enough to hurt her,” Winston said with a smile. That was flimsy reasoning and Winston knew it, but he had to believe it, it had to be true. Surely no one would think of killing the sister of one of the richest men in the world, that was insane.
Elastigirl looked at him knowingly and held his gaze as if she was trying to get him to see reason, Winston returned it with a smile and the stare off lasted almost a minute before Elastigirl sighed and looked back over the railing.
“You’d be surprised at how foolish people are when they’re driven by emotion,” She said lowly.
Winston looked at his shoes that little maxim was a stake of truth to his heart, it was painfully true. After all, it described his sister perfectly.
“I’ll talk to our lawyers again,” Winston said mildly. “And see what measures they think are necessary.”
Elastigirl nodded, shrugging a little as if that wasn’t exactly the answer she was looking for but was accepting it as good enough. Winston frowned down at his drink, supers could be strange people, hypersensitive to morality and their desire to help people always seemed to stretch beyond the battle even with villains. That was one of the reasons Winston’s father loved them so much, they were compassionate to their enemies and most of them would negotiate fair treatment for their arch-nemesis when they caught them. They were truly delightful human beings.
Most of them.
Winston had to remind himself that often, that not all supers were delightful and not all of them believed in showing their enemies mercy beyond human compassion, which was one of many reasons he sloughed through Evelyn’s mess meticulously, it was a balancing act one Elastigirl didn’t seem very aware of.
But a businessman was only as good as his word and Winston’s word was golden, he added yet another errand to his to-do list, talk to their team of lawyers.
The estimation had been a twenty-five month sentence, it was an odd choice, but their lawyers told them the courts had thrown in the extra month for reckless endangerment, he didn’t complain two years and a month was much better than Evelyn deserved considering her little stunt, people got life for less.
Winston didn’t tell her that though, he kept those thoughts to himself, Winston was supposed to be supportive, he didn’t want to be, but it was his job as a brother. Keeping his negative thoughts under wraps was the easy part, the hard part was the supportive part of being “supportive”. What exactly was he supposed to support? Her tantrum? Her betrayal? Her misplaced hatred?
Winston wanted nothing to do with any of those, it took several visits for him to spot the piece of his sister that was still worth supporting, it happened during one of the more silent trips he made to the prison, he was looking at the deck of cards he brought, contemplating whether he should even try to explain why trying to ram a boat into a city was a horrible thing to do. They already had that conversation three times and Evelyn seemed convinced of the opposite, that ramming a boat into a city was a good thing to do. If not out of a sense of duty Winston would have left the visiting room, then the city or maybe the country. Not forever, just a month or two, long enough for him to get his own thoughts together.
But he couldn’t bring himself to leave Evelyn to rot even for a month, so instead of taking a vacation from the nightmare Evelyn created Winston found himself searching the telephone books for a therapist.
Evelyn snapped him out of his thoughts with a sharp cough, he looked at her with a halfway frown, it wasn’t a natural cough he could tell that much, but he didn’t know whether to take it as an attempt to interact or not.
He decided to test the waters. “Should I deal the cards or do you want to?”
Sometimes she would ignore him, most of the times she’d just sigh and shake her head, other times she’d grace him with a word or two usually “No,” followed by an insult. But she today she took the cards, and slid them out of their box, she shuffled them carelessly, not the typical controlled carelessness she possessed but a carelessness that implied she didn’t know what she was doing. Winston raised an eyebrow, Evelyn had shuffled more than a few cards in her lifetime to know how.
Then she asked a question that haunted him for the rest of the week. “What day is it?”
“Thursday,”At the time he hadn’t thought much into it, perhaps they didn’t have calendars in her cell. But then he realized she should it was a very basic item. The next time he visited he brought one with him, making sure to mark off the date before handing it to her. She flipped through it slowly until she came to the end and turned and closed it.
“Saturday,” She said narrowing her eyes.
“That’s tomorrow,” Winston said.
“Hm,”
Winston offered her the cards again and to his surprise she took them but didn’t start shuffling them, he watched her and for the first time he noticed how haggard she looked, the circles under her eyes were shades darker than before, making them look like bruises, her shoulders were narrower than he remembered and she had a wild look in her eyes that put Winston on edge, how hadn’t he noticed that before?
“Saturday is when they poison the food,” She said with such certainty that it scared him but that was insanity. No one would be stupid enough to poison her, not while he was still living and fully able to sue the life out of them.
So at first he thought she was losing her mind, but there was something else in her eyes besides insanity it was cloaked by raw terror, it was small, fragile and hidden underneath a pile of bitterness but once he found it, it sparkled like a tiny diamond and couldn’t be unseen, it was tiny, innocent and needed to be protected, it was his sister. It was that spark that made Winston talk to their lawyers yet again.
So perhaps, the result of the trial was Winston’s fault, in a way, but in all fairness, he hadn’t told the attorneys to push that hard.