No Fathers, No Problem

Vera’s mouth pulled slightly, but it was not a smile. The original host had actually planned the whole thing, at least part of it, and Vera knew that. She had gone through the memories of the book enough to understand the desperation, the stupid plan, the sister who should have been in that room instead of her, and the trap that had turned into something much bigger than anyone expected. 

The original Vera had been scared, cornered, jealous, hungry for a way out, and stupid enough to believe one dangerous plan could give her a future. Vera understood desperation. She had lived beside it long enough to know how easily it could make a person reach for the wrong door. But understanding did not mean she planned to confess anything. 

Technically, the body had done it, not her. Technically, the woman they wanted to punish no longer existed in the way they thought she did. And in Vera’s mind, no harm was done by refusing to hand herself over to three noble houses that were already trying to crush her and take the children with them. If they wanted a victim who would cry, confess, beg, and make their work easier, they had picked the wrong woman.

“Three males had me,” Vera said, her voice dropping lower. “Now I am pregnant, and all of you want to protect their honor. Their honor. Not the children. Not the woman in the cage. Not the fact that I was brought into this courtroom without proper defense. You want to argue for five hours because your clients do not want to take responsibility for the children they created.”

The words moved through the courtroom like something sharp dragged slowly over glass. No one interrupted her this time. The lawyers who had been shouting over one another all morning suddenly looked like they had forgotten how to speak. One of the representatives lowered his eyes for half a second, then forced them back up because the cameras were watching. Another tightened his mouth so hard the skin around it went pale. 

The judge’s expression changed then, not fully, not enough to look like pity, but enough to show he understood the trial had turned under his feet. His fingers stopped moving over the files in front of him, and his gaze shifted from Vera to the plaintiff side with the first real doubt he had allowed himself to show. The upper balcony was no longer whispering with open disgust toward Vera. The noble families were quiet now, their faces stiff, their eyes calculating. They had expected a human girl to cry, plead, deny, or break. Vera did none of that. She sat there with her belly round under her hands and spoke like she had already lived through worse than their punishment, like their court, their titles, and their outrage were only another loud problem she needed to survive.

“That is fine,” Vera said. “I agree to their terms. Waive their rights to the children. All three of them. Put it in writing. If they do not want responsibility, I do not want them showing up later with titles, blood claims, or some noble excuse to take what they abandoned.”

One of the representatives made a choked sound. The first lawyer spun toward the royal balcony, panic flashing across his face because this was not how the original petition had been designed. They wanted punishment without responsibility. They wanted guilt without consequence. They wanted to stain Vera badly enough that they could control the children later if those children proved useful. The entire case had been built around one assumption: Vera would fight to keep the fathers attached. She would beg for recognition, ask for support, cry about the babies, and make herself look desperate enough that any future claim from the noble houses would look generous instead of predatory. But she had turned it around in one sentence. She was giving them exactly what they claimed they wanted. Vera could almost see the trap now and it made her fingers curl protectively over her stomach.

“Second,” she continued before anyone could interrupt, “what is my punishment? Because I do not have a lawyer. I was dragged into this courtroom without preparation. I was not given a proper chance to review the evidence, and every lawyer in this room knows no one wanted to defend me because no one wanted to go against the prince, the lord, and the general. Are defendants in this galaxy expected to simply agree when powerful men point at them, or are people still free until proven guilty?”

The silence that followed was different from the first one. Before, the room had gone quiet because the judge ordered it. Now it was quiet because Vera had stripped the case down to the bones, and everyone could see how ugly it looked. No lawyer had stood beside her. No one had explained the evidence to her properly. No one had challenged the missing money trail, the lack of access, the physical impossibility, or the fact that the three men involved were powerful enough to break stone while she looked like a strong wind could knock her into the wall. 

The public reaction shifted so quickly that even the courtroom screens seemed to struggle to keep up. For the first time since the trial began, the cameras were no longer focused only on Vera’s face. They moved to the lawyers, the plaintiff representatives, the sealed noble balconies, and the judge’s bench. The public comments became harder to ignore, scrolling faster and faster across the side screens.

[That cannot be legal.]

[She is tiny. I saw the prince once. He is massive.]

[Why does she not have a lawyer?]

[How did nobody ask this before?]

Vera did not care about their pity. Pity was weak currency, and she had learned long ago not to depend on it. In her old world, pity did not buy food, did not close wounds, did not keep a door barricaded when zombies scratched at the other side. Pity often came from people who wanted to feel decent without doing anything useful. She cared about the judgment. She cared about getting this ridiculous trial over with. 

She knew what was supposed to happen next because this entire mess came from a book that had once become popular in her old world. She had read enough of it to know that Vera Ross was only a side character, a disposable woman written into the story to suffer, fight for recognition, and then get thrown away when the real heroines appeared. 

In the original plot, Vera would fight tooth and nail to keep the fathers tied to the children, begging for names, rights, protection, and scraps of acknowledgment from men who hated the inconvenience of her existence. 

This Vera had no desire to do that. She had died once already. She was not going to waste her second life crawling after men who wanted clean hands and empty responsibility.

She wanted the judgment. She wanted to be sent to the garbage center sooner and be done with the bureaucracy. A garbage center sounded like punishment to these people, but to her it sounded like space, waste, broken metal, old systems, discarded parts, and maybe enough forgotten resources to build a life no one could easily touch. She had survived on a dead planet with poisoned air and corpses walking through ruined streets. She had slept in half-collapsed buildings with a knife under her hand and hunger clawing at her stomach. She had carried water through streets full of rotting bodies and fought animals twisted by radiation, infection, and whatever else the end of the world had left behind. If these spoiled nobles thought trash was the worst place to throw her, they lacked imagination.

Still, she wanted the children secured before anything else. They were hers now. Not the prince’s political problem. Not the lord’s shame. Not the general’s mistake. Hers. And knowing what would happen next in the story, knowing how noble families treated blood when power entered the picture, there was no way she was going to let those children suffer because three grown males wanted clean reputations and empty hands. The future brides, the delayed guilt, the sudden claims of blood, the noble excuses, all of it sat in her mind like a map of traps waiting to close. Vera would not wait until the children were born to start protecting them. Protection started now, in this cage, with every word recorded.