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wardencommanderrodimiss · 4 years

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Witches, Chapter 22: catching up with some old friends

[Seelie of Kurain Chapter Masterlist] [ao3]

[Witches Chapter Masterlist] [ao3]

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At the end of August, a hand-drawn - some of the graphite or charcoal or whatever it is that smears off onto Apollo’s hands when he opens the envelope - invitation arrives at the Wright Anything Agency. Addressed to Mr Justice, Ms Trucy, and Mr Wright, it cordially welcomes them over to Deauxnim Studios on Saturday. “Guess Larry finally found a place he wanted to get settled,” Phoenix says, picking up the envelope and turning it over. “He’s been bouncing around for a while.”

He passes the envelope back to Apollo, and on the back side of it, a scribble on the flap in a childish, spiky scrawl, very different than Vera’s writing, reads, V. says your new lawyer can come too, forgot about her.

“Better not let Athena see that.” Phoenix chuckles. “She’d hate to think she’s forgettable, even to a girl she’s never met.”

Apollo and Trucy arrive first on Saturday, after grabbing ramen for lunch somewhere that isn’t Eldoon’s, leaving Apollo with a strange guilty feeling that he isn’t patronizing Salt Hell. It’s a weird thing to think. Like he’s grown attached to that place, whether he wanted to or not.

He spent the morning, before he left his apartment, arguing with himself about whether or not he needed to bring iron with him. He doesn’t want to hurt Vera by accident, but he’s wandering into an unknown household of Mr Wright’s acquaintance, and that gives him a real sense of fear. Like sure, he’s met Larry before, but the guy accidentally became a witch. Doesn’t really inspire much confidence. And Apollo can’t even ask Clay’s opinion, because he never told Clay that Vera is a changeling, and he doesn’t want to get into that. In the end, he decides that he’ll be careful, but it’s better to take precautions, and slipped the iron ring onto his finger.

No one answers the door but Trucy tests the handle, finds it unlocked, and bounds right in. Apollo decides that he can’t really be faulted if he’s following her to keep her out of trouble, and heads in after. “Helloooo!” she calls, cupping her hands around her mouth. “Vera! Uncle Larry! We’re here for the artists’ loft grand tour!”

Apollo wouldn’t call it a loft, but the fact that it’s an artist den is obvious. On the wall right in front of them there’s a half-finished mural of a snowy landscape. To the left, canvases and poster boards spill out through a doorway, resting on the floor and propped up against the walls, depicting landscapes and fruit bowls, the Steel Samurai, a portrait of Vera with her face divided down the center as human and fae both, and one that is just splotches of blue like someone dipped a sponge and threw it. They pick their way carefully between the canvasses and enter the room, brimming with more paintings and charcoal sketches. There’s one of an orca leaping out of the water; another depicts a demon that, all considered, appears a bit like Tenma Taro would it drawn by someone who got a third-hand description. It doesn’t have arms, simply wings where its arms would be that have talons at the joint, and the drawn tongue reaches halfway down its chest, while its head lacks its weird batlike ears. But it’s definitely Tenma Taro, enough to send a shudder through him.

A year ago, examining the paintings to find that someone he never met had been following along to every case Apollo defended, and an accompanying feeling nothing short of horror in discovering it. This time, this is - she is - a friend keeping up with what’s going on even when they haven’t spoken in months. It’s nice to know.

Footsteps hurry down the hall. “Hey, Vera!” Trucy says, and did she say it before or after Vera actually appears in the doorway to let them know that it’s her and not Larry? “We arrive! Good to see you!”

Vera looks better than Apollo remembers last, bright-eyed and not as pale as she used to be. Written in her face, the color in her cheeks and the curve of a smile, is that she is not a scared shut-in anymore. She explains that she lives here now, got her father’s house sold to escape the trauma associated with it - well, she doesn’t say the latter clause of that statement but they all know it well enough - and Larry bought this place and she’s subletting a room from him. “Though I asked him a month ago how much it would be and how to pay him and he said he’d get back to me and hasn’t.” Vera frowns at the wall. There’s a framed photo of her and her father hanging there. “I should probably remind him.”

“God, I wish my landlord would forget to collect,” Apollo mutters.

Trucy laughs. “I think that’s Polly telling you not to remind him,” she says.

“I’m a lawyer,” Apollo says. “I would never say that.”

The three of them stop in front of a painting of a weird-looking but familiar dog and in silence, stare at it. Loud, exuberant knocking on the door heralds Athena’s arrival. “I’m not late, am I?” she asks. “I know the rule is that you’re not late unless you get here after Mr Wright, but that’s for work and not social events, right?” Apollo shrugs. Athena thrusts her hand out toward Vera. “Hi! I’m Athena Cykes, the new lawyer at the Wright Anything Agency! Nice to meet you!”

“Uh - h-hi.” Vera hesitates a moment and then shakes her hand. “I’m Vera Misham. Nice to meet you.”

“Trucy and Apollo said you were a client of theirs - oh! Did you paint all these?”

The panic in Vera’s eyes subsides. Wondering what all they’ve told Athena about her, why she was their client or whatever else. But Athena’s asking about her artwork now, and Vera is good about talking about her art, so she waves Athena back into the room they were just in and shows her the sketch of the orca. Trucy circles around the desk at the wall, and after a minute calls over, “Hey, Vera, who’s this?” She waves a large photograph of a woman, standing in the snow, her black hair tightly twisted on top of her head, her tired lined face wearing a knowing smile. Apollo would swear she’s familiar. When Apollo goes over to the desk, he sees a few pieces of scrap paper with hasty sketches trying to copy the woman’s face, pushed to the edge and onto the floor.

“That’s Mr Larry’s mentor,” Vera says. “Ms Elise. She’s the one who began the Deauxnim name. I wanted to paint a portrait of her, as a gift for him, but I haven’t figured her face out yet. I—”

“Is that guests I hear?”

Vera snatches the photo from Trucy and shoves it and the loose papers in between the pages of a sketchbook. Larry leans up against the doorway. “Long time no see, Trucy!”

“Uncle Larry!” She charges him and nearly knocks him over. “Yeah, it’s been practically forever! Since like, since we saw Gourdy!”

“Who’s Gourdy?” Athena asks.

“You’ll see,” Trucy says with a grin. Apollo sighs and resolves to find some sort of excuse to miss this event this upcoming December. Clay will be in space then, and Apollo is going to use that time to sleep in and not be heckled for it.

“Apollo, hi,” Larry says, now that he’s gotten his wind back from taking a magician to the stomach. “And Athena, hey, nice to meet you, I’ve heard all about you.” He extends a hand for her to shake by resting his elbow on Trucy’s head. “That you’re the crazy kid who helped Nick out with his first case back.”

“Did you get to meet the orca?” Vera asks. “How do you defend an orca? I followed in the news as best I could, but I still don’t really understand.”

“Well! Let me tell you.” Athena, thrilled to have someone new to regale with her tales of penguins and orcas from the aquarium, immediately launches into it. Apollo still doesn’t know how much of her telling is exaggeration. When he and Trucy had questions about the investigations, Athena was always quick to be the one to answer, and Phoenix and Pearl left her to it. Was the penguin as finicky as she said, and so freely allowed to roam the aquarium when it would be very easy to consequently steal the penguin - probably. Apollo will believe anything, when it comes to their cases and clients.

“I’m never gonna live this one down, am I?” Phoenix appears behind them, from the entryway, and Athena and Vera both jump.

“What, you just barge in and don’t even knock?” Larry asks. “Rude! What kind of guest are you, Nick?” Phoenix grins, and that’s the weird thing that has struck Apollo the few other times he’s seen Phoenix and Larry together. That Phoenix almost reminds him of Clay, then, now, whenever it isn’t Larry reminding him of Clay. The way they gleefully give each other shit. The strength of that many years between them.

“You defended an orca in court, Boss,” Athena says. “You are not going to live it down.”

“You co-counseled the defense of an orca!”

Larry takes them back to the sitting room - he and Phoenix bickering about whether or not his decor and entire vibe is pretentious - and pretentious is not the word coming to mind for Apollo. Now he feels the artist loft thing, mismatched furniture and clashing decor. A polished wooden table has a lace tablecloth and six all-slightly-different wicker chairs, while the couch makes him think of the Victorian era. A candelabra with lightbulbs sits on the end table. Landscapes and watercolor illustrations hang on the walls, and in between two of them hang a deformed analogue clock that looks like that famous melty-clocks painting. There are three pedestals around the room, like what a museum would keep vases on. Two of them do have vases, one empty and one filled with some wilted flowers, and the third has a small statue, about a foot tall, that again looks like another famous painting, the distorted face of the screaming man on the bridge.

“When’d you get back into metalworking?” Phoenix asks, eyeing the statue and then the clock.

“Oh, nah, that’s just way old stuff I had boxed up and finally had some space for,” Larry says. “Clock’s ancient, you’d been talking to me about some course you were taking where Dalí kept coming up. Other one’s a vent piece - last metalwork I did after the Thinkers.”

“Don’t tell me it’s a clock too,” Phoenix says.

Larry, halfway into the next room - from what Apollo can see, it might be a kitchen - leans back out. “Dunno, why don’t you try it and find out?”

Phoenix watches him leave and then turns back to the statue. He casually hefts it in one hand, bouncing it a little to test the weight, and then he grabs the head and twists it to the side. A scream emerges from it. Not a very convincing one, with the canned sound of being recorded on a device with not great quality, and made by someone who is trying not to disturb the neighboring apartments - but the suddenness of the sound still makes Apollo jump, and Athena and Trucy both scream in tandem with it.

With a heavy clonk, Phoenix sets it back in its place. He sighs, but with a smile visibly threatening to break through. “Real cute,” he says to Larry, who returns with a shiny, fancy metal tray of plastic containers of store-bought cookies. Why did Apollo think that the aesthetic clash would subside. “The Scream. Absolutely hilarious.”

“Hey man, it’s an accurate representation of my mental state at the time.” Larry sets the tray down on the table and gestures to them all to sit down. “I thought about giving it to you as a representation of how you probably felt too, and then I thought that might be—”

“Poor taste, yeah,” Phoenix interrupts.

“Yeah, so I had that in a box for a decade, and honestly probably gonna put it back because imagine like, an earthquake hits in the middle of the night and it falls over and just screams.”

“You could probably have it put in a gallery as a piece of performance art, or something,” Phoenix says. “Have it set just precariously enough, and cue screaming.”

“I don’t think I understand art,” Athena says, grabbing two cookies. “I mean, I get it, but also don’t at all.”

“That’s not about the art,” Phoenix says. “That’s just Larry.”

Larry slaps Phoenix’s hand as he reaches for a cookie. “You can’t be rude to me in my own house! My own house in which I have so graciously invited you!”

“I think Vera invited us, actually,” Trucy says. Larry rolls his eyes.

“Yes, I wanted to tell you all,” Vera says, and the silent scuffle between Phoenix and Larry ceases immediately. Trucy sets the screaming statue back in its place with a guilty look, having been about to unleash it on the unexpected audience of everyone but Apollo who wasn’t looking in her direction. “I’m going to be published!”

“Woohoo!” Trucy throws her arms around Vera’s shoulders and hugs her from behind. “Look at you go!”

Vera’s cheeks start to turn pink, and then in the center there’s a growing bluish tint. “Nice work, kiddo,” Phoenix says. “When’s the book come out?” His eyes flicker toward Larry. Had they talked about this before, that Phoenix, specifically, knew there was a book? - Or maybe he just knows Larry’s career enough to expect, of course it’s a book.

“Um.” Vera thinks for a moment. Trucy flings herself into the chair next to Vera that she had previously abandoned. “The beginning of November. Advance copies were just sent out and we got ours last week.”

“Can we see?” Apollo asks. “Or is that trade secrets?”

Vera drums her fingers on her cheek. “I suppose we could show you. If I know where we put it?”

“Somewhere beneath five sketchbooks, probably,” Larry says. “I’ll go take a look in a bit.”

“So you write children’s books, right?” Athena asks. “That’s what Mr Wright said. Write or illustrate? And-or?”

“Vera came up with this idea, I wrote it, and she did all the illustrations,” Larry explains.

“I kept thinking about everything you said about names, that one time, Trucy,” Vera says quietly, and though all of them can hear her, and Athena especially looks interested as the only one of them who wasn’t here before, who is shut out of this particular shared history, but even she doesn’t say anything. “So,” Vera continues, a bit louder, “I’ll be a published illustrator under the name ‘Verity Deauxnim’.”

“That’s a good name!” Trucy says brightly. “Verity Deauxnim! A real solid sounding stage name! Or whatever it is for authors. Nom de plume? That always makes me picture just like, a really bushy mustache. Get mustache glasses for your author portraits!”

“You know—” Larry begins, and Phoenix groans and places his head on the table. “Hey! Nick! Why’s your daughter more supportive than you are? It’s not a bad idea!”

“It’s a silly idea,” Phoenix says. He lifts his head. “But I’m glad to hear you’ve got that figured out, Vera. It’s not gonna lead you wrong, picking up the Deauxnim name for yourself.”

“It’s already done so much work saving Uncle Larry from the worst surname known to the world,” Trucy says.

“Yeah, was a whole real tragedy that I wouldn’t be known as ‘Larry Butz, the guy who was on trial one time for murder and did nothing else good ever’. Except like, that time I was the Steel Samurai on stage, that was pretty cool, even if I’d thought I was signing up for tech crew.”

This is the man who accidentally became a witch, isn’t it? That tracks. “What’s the book about?” Apollo asks.

Larry ends up answering first, Vera wide-eyed startled at being asked a question while she was trying to eat. “It’s an Ugly Duckling-type story, with the vaguest amount of actual animal research.”

“How vague is vague?” Phoenix asks.

“I’m a storyteller, Nick! I can’t be getting, like, neurotic about having all real true facts in there if it’s gonna get in the way of telling a good story, you know?”

“I feel like that’s how all of our witnesses treat their testimonies,” Apollo says. Athena shrieks with laughter and drops her cookie onto the table. Phoenix is silently and pointedly conveying something to Larry with just eyebrow movements and grimaces. Larry is pointedly ignoring it.

“Fortunately,” he says, pointedly, so that his ignoring Phoenix has looped all the way back around to Phoenix obviously having his attention, “Deauxnim picture books are not witness testimonies! And if we want to fudge it when we’re talking about ducks, that is our right!”

“Then don’t leave us hanging,” Phoenix drawls. “I’ve learned more about orcas than I ever wanted to, so what’s this about ducks, besides the ugly one?”

“I can’t believe you didn’t want to know about orcas,” Athena says. “What’s not to love about orcas?”

“There’s a kind of duck that lays its eggs in the nests of other birds, like the cuckoo bird,” Vera says. “But the baby duck is nicer than the cuckoo babies because it doesn’t, um… throw the other eggs out of the nest once it hatches.”

“Ah,” Trucy says faintly.

“That would not make a great children’s story, I don’t think,” Apollo says. The secret extra-dark Ugly Duckling tale. Maybe even, if Apollo really thinks about it, that’d be the kind of shitty story that Datz would tell them. The interloper successfully makes it in to toss aside the ones who are supposed to be there; the usurper wins. That’s the kind of shitty story they lived.

“That’s why we didn’t do cuckoos,” Vera says. “That’s why it’s the duck that - that ends up put into a family where it wouldn’t naturally belong. The actual ducks in real life realize, because that’s part of, um, how they are, and they leave right away. But that’s not exactly what the story is. We stretch it a little. Like Mr Larry said.”

It should have hit him sooner, the reason that Vera had the idea for an Ugly Duckling story - the child of a different species dropped in a nest and left there to figure it all out for herself. It makes so much sense from that perspective. The swan that doesn’t know it’s a swan and thinks itself an odd duck is a just changeling.

“So then you got to draw a lot of fluffy cute ducks?” Athena asks. “I’d have gone with penguins, myself, but I see the appeal.”

“You said you got to meet a penguin at the aquarium, right?”

“Yes, but she hated me.” Athena still sounds like she’s about to start wailing when she talks about it.

When the familiar tune of a cartoon theme song starts up, Apollo figures it’s Trucy fiddling with something else. “Is that the Steel Samurai?” Vera asks.

“Yeah.” Phoenix pulls his phone out of his pocket. “Ringtone. Friend of mine won’t let me change it. Ah, hello, what’s up?” He doesn’t look concerned when he answers, but he starts to frown, slowly, his eyebrows creasing together, and everyone else at the table glances at each other. Phoenix turns around in his chair so that his elbows rest on the back of it, a finger pressed against his free ear to shut them out even though no one is talking. “You don’t remember? That - no, yeah, I can - yeah. I can just meet you there.” His chair scrapes on the floor when he pushes himself out from the table. Athena winces. Phoenix doesn’t move for another moment after he pulls the phone away from his ear, a blank stare fixed on it. “Sorry,” he says, finally standing and pushing the chair back in to the table. “I’ve got to go. Friend’s having an - issue.”

“What’ve They done now?” Larry asks, with such particular emphasis that even though he doesn’t name them Fair Folk or fae, they all know.

“Oh, for once it isn’t them,” Phoenix says, much lighter than Larry did, like they could be just any group of human friends.

“Then tell Edgey I say hi.”

“I have human friends other than Edgeworth, you dick.”

“Name three.” Larry looks very smug.

“Gumshoe, Franziska, and - Ema. Notice I’m not including you.”

“Is this what people mean when they say ‘male bonding’?” Athena asks. “Is that what this is?”

“Something like that,” Apollo says. He thinks of Clay, again, Clay needling him this morning that almost all of Apollo’s social life is now based around his job. (Apollo can’t leave the Agency. Apollo would have one friend left.)

“Yeah, I noticed when I had to find out from Edgey that you got your badge back and were off to court for an orca! You couldn’t even give me a call for that, huh?”

“I was busy with, you know, defending and being in court.” Phoenix claps a hand down on Vera’s shoulder. “Sorry I’ve gotta run out on you like this. But it’s good to see you again, glad you’re doing well. And I can’t wait for the book, too.”

“O-oh.” The poor girl sometimes looks so shocked whenever Phoenix talks to her so casually, so supportively. Like after she ruined his career she doesn’t understand how he can be so happy about hers. Even if he did set her up with it. “Thank you.”

“I guess I’ll go look around for our advance copy,” Larry says, watching Phoenix leave. “A sneak peak for everyone who’s staying here.” Phoenix flips him off over his shoulder, without turning around. “Not in front of the children!” Larry yells, standing himself. “And Nick, yo, next time I wanna hear about your stupid court stunts from you and not Edgey.” Larry turns, disappearing from the room the other way. “You kids hang out and talk about memes or whatever kids talk about.”

“Did you hear who Daddy was talking to?” Trucy asks Athena.

“I don’t listen in on phone calls unless it’s like, a case, usually,” Athena says, which is a statement with a lot of qualifiers there. Leaving her bases open while not technically lying, so no tells for Apollo or Trucy to call her on.

“Ugh.” Trucy slumps and her head falls back against the chair. “What good are cool powers if you can’t help me pry into my dad’s private life with them?”

Vera coughs softly, a gentle nudge to the nosy gang to, ideally, stop being so damn nosy. Trucy stands up and goes to sound the screaming statue again, startling no one because she’s snickering the whole time too. “If this weren’t so heavy I’d use it in a magic show,” she says. “Watch as the beautiful, talented magician pulls the mysterious screaming statue out of her Magic Panties!”

“Really would prefer not to,” Apollo says.

“Coward,” Trucy says.

“How is the magic show going, Trucy?” Vera asks. “Have you made any progress on finding a venue to perform in?”

Trucy catches them all up on her latest exploits in her attempts to become a professional stage magician. She’s convinced, utterly, that while the era of magicians on tv saw its heyday decades ago, she’s going to be the one to bring it back, and without “cheating” by using her real magic. “Like if I wanted to use real magic, I’d set up a shop on the streetcorner peddling suspicious plants as having come straight from the realm of the Fair Folk themselves, and then when angry repeat customers come back, I use Mr Hat to distract them and make off with their wallets!”

“Trucy, that’s how you get arrested on theft and drug dealing charges,” Apollo says. “I don’t want to have to deal with that.”

“Oh, yeah,” Trucy says. “I guess selling random plants would be suspicious. Someone at my school tried to sell kale pretending it was weed, once.”

“Sometimes I get sad that I missed out on all those stupid weird high school experiences that people get to have,” Athena says. “I mean, sure, I get weird court stories, and I don’t regret the path I’ve taken at all! But sometimes I just feel - I don’t know, something, about missing out on those regular growing-up experiences.”

Apollo opens his mouth to say that there’s really nothing Athena missed, because grade school and secondary school sucked, and everyone’s “funny high school stories” are just them repressing the rest of it that sucked, but Vera speaks first and says, “I do too, actually.”

“Oh?” Athena asks. She probably figured there was something more going on in Vera’s story when they mentioned that she’s a former client of Apollo’s, but being a nineteen-year-old professional is Athena’s normal. Though there’s higher odds of it in artistic fields than law, probably.

“I was homeschooled,” Vera says. “By my father. I… I didn’t really go out much.”

Athena nods sympathetically. She sits with her chin resting in her palm for a while, as Trucy spins a few more stories of what’s happened at school lately - repeatedly assuring Apollo that she and Jinxie stay far to the sidelines of it - looking at Vera. After a few minutes of this, Vera seems to notice, casting a quizzical glance at Athena. “Something about you reminds me of a friend I had when I was little, before I moved away,” Athena explains. “I can’t put my finger on it.”

“It wouldn’t have been me,” Vera says. “I didn’t have any friends when I was little.”

“Oh, that’s not what I meant,” Athena says. “I had only the one friend back then - I was a real shut-in, actually, myself. Her name’s Juniper. She was a real quiet, sensitive type, didn’t have any other friends like me, didn’t go out much at all. Not really an artist, other than a couple years ago she said that she’d taken up knitting, but there’s just - a certain je ne sais quoi.”

“Oh,” Vera says. She starts picking at her nails, which now appear to be whiter and pointier than they were before. Another slip, from wondering, perhaps, if the similarity Athena sees is just in personality, or something she doesn’t realize she’s picked up on. Do the inner voices of human and fae sound different? Is that something Athena can notice - something she even knows she notices?

“Found it!” Larry reenters the room, waving the book around a little too much for Apollo to get a good look at the cover yet. “It was on the unused sketchbook shelf.”

Vera nods in understanding. Athena doesn’t follow so easily. “You have a shelf full of unused sketchbooks? How many do you need at one time?”

“Different kinds of paper work better with different materials,” Vera explains. “So when there’s a sale, we stock up.”

“Part of being a writer is having a lot of cool notebooks that you never actually plan on using,” Larry says, which is coming close to almost offering an explanation, but a much worse one than Vera’s. He sits back down at the table with them. “So doing traditional art is also a lot like that, except I do eventually use the sketchbooks. Mostly.”

“Oh, so it’s like how Mr Wright never uses all the law books we have in the office, right?” Athena asks.

Trucy takes the book from Larry and drags her chair around the table to squish herself in between Apollo and Athena, so they can all read from the same angle. Vera is chewing on her nails now, watching them with apprehension for any reaction, though they’ve barely even considered the cover yet. “That’s exactly what it’s like, I think,” Trucy says.

The lights in the office are off, though the door to the back room is open, and Phoenix always closes that one before he leaves. Though, he figures, if she’s gotten here before him, it’s not like she would actually have need to turn the lights on. That’s the thing about being blind - the dark isn’t any different than the way it usually is.

He finds Thalassa sitting next to his desk, leaning up against the side with her knees pulled up to her chest and her head rested against them. Phoenix scuffs his feet noisily across the carpet and her head turns, just slightly, while keeping her face buried. She knows he’s there and doesn’t want to acknowledge him. He lowers himself to the floor across from her and rests his back against Apollo’s desk, and he waits in the dim light that Mia has only partially switched on.

“I almost forgot.” Thalassa raises her head, and because Phoenix doesn’t have his magatama on his person - he left it in his desk, next to her soul - she looks perfect, statuesque and glamorous, not a wrinkle or hair out of place. Perfect enough that she’s wholly unnatural, armored as she is in glamour to become something cold and stony. “I almost forgot everything.” Her hands, clutched tightly in her lap, unfold from around her mitamah, deep blue like a twilight sky. “I left myself a memo that should I find myself slipping, I was to call you for help - but I thought it was just that, slipping somewhat, and the most I would forget was your office address or phone number, not why it even was that you were the one who could help me at all.”

“And it wasn’t,” Phoenix says.

She nods. “It was everything. About you, about my children, about everything from when I came to this office after the trial. And then everything before I was shot. I was left again with that darkness, and Borginia, and the two trials here.” The duration between losing her life, and finding her soul.

“Do you think, because of the length of time you’ve not been around it?” Phoenix asks. “Or perhaps distance - but you’ve stayed in LA this whole time, right?”

She regards him for several second; blind though he knows she is, her Sight remains, and with that she can pinpoint his own Sighted eyes. Just hovering ominously above a necklace-shaped noose. A bit weird, no doubt, and Phoenix doesn’t have to doubt because Godot told him it was weird in a stronger term than weird. (Speaking of weird, there’s something thematically to contemplate that magic gone wrong, the fae crossed, so often deprives humans of their eyes, even when they are left with Sight. Ema would tell him that two isn’t a large enough sample size to draw any actual conclusions, scientifically, but for his purposes, Phoenix is going to ahead anyway.)

“Not quite,” she admits. “I did return to Borginia for a short time. I wondered, as I did, if I could uncover some connection or reason as to why it was there I was sent following my death.” Her tone is so casual, so calm, that it’s uncomfortable. This huge blank in her past, why she was there at all, and she speaks of it like it’s no concern to her. “And more than that, there were some last affairs of Lamiroir’s to put in order - Lamiroir, the duo, Machi and I, I mean. He can never return to Borginia, and so there is nothing more there for me.”

“Shit, yeah, the smuggling charges, that’s…” Machi, fifteen years old, functionally exiled from his homeland, sitting in jail knowing he won’t even have a foundation to build off of when he gets out, because Borginia’s draconian cocoon-smuggling laws are a sword over his head for the rest of his days. “I hope they didn’t give you any trouble over it.”

“Thankfully, they seemed satisfied that I truly had no part in what Machi and Daryan did,” she answers. “Or - considering that the country has been in an uproar since last year, with a very long debate about what we owe the rest of the world when something so dangerous could also save lives - perhaps the customs officers were very tired of talking about cocoons.” She smiles faintly. “Perhaps Borginia will have its own legal reforms, as you are striving for here.”

Nothing like a high-profile celebrity case to catch the public’s eye, if the lawyer on defense doesn’t fuck it all up.

“So it could have been the distance that you traveled that caused this problem,” Phoenix says. “Or the combination of time and distance, or just time.” And with magic, nothing ever easy. “But either of those could be dealt with,” he adds. “You could drop by the office more to - to refresh your memory. Could say hi to the kids, too.”

He means - or, if she had asked, he would have said he meant - she could say hello as Lamiroir. The kids helped her out by defending Machi, and they still, quite regularly, listen to her music. (The only place where their musical tastes converge, really.) But she decides what he means without asking, and with a curl of her lip, hiking her shoulders up, she says, “I will not reenter my children’s lives while there is a chance that I will only cause them further grief.”

She reaches up and runs her hand up along the desk, finding its edge to hold on to and pull herself up to her feet. For a moment Phoenix fears that she will leave the conversation on that note and walk out, but she seats herself delicately on his desk, her hands primly folded in her lap and one leg crossed over the other at the knee. As classically poised as she ever is, and Phoenix is glad she’s decided to stick around. Maybe Mia would stop her, but Phoenix knows he wouldn’t have gotten on his feet in time. Why did his bones stop being able to take any kind of pressure as soon as he hit thirty? Why do humans live at all; merely to suffer back pain?

But he doesn’t really like carrying on this conversation with Thalassa looking down on him, either, and with a groan he drags himself upright and sinks into Athena’s chair. “Perhaps placing my soul back in the hollow it was carved out of will simply drop me down into the grave I so narrowly escaped all those years ago,” she continues bitterly. “Or perhaps one day my memory will have regressed to the point that I will only be Lamiroir the amnesiac even while I sit with my soul held in my hands.”

“But we don’t really even know that will happen,” Phoenix says. “I very much doubt that will happen.”

“Do you,” she says curtly. “Pray tell, how? Even I do not know - could there have been some other spell cast by Magnifi to keep me alive, or was my soul’s separation all that was necessary? Can you tell me that? Can your friends know unless they have bought the souls of some unlucky damned humans and then watched them die, as an experiment?”

Pearl is the one researching how to set this right. Neither she, Maya, nor Iris knew when he first asked, but Phoenix isn’t the type to give up on someone, and Pearl has a vested interest in becoming as powerful as she possibly can to support Maya, so she won’t be giving up, either. As far as Phoenix knows, anyway, there have been no souls experimentally bartered about. And Pearl had agreed that if anyone was likely to know the nuances of these particular magics and how to help her, it would be them, that faraway hidden place that the Winter fae branched from thousands of years ago. She and Maya just - couldn’t divine where in the world that is, that one final Court they know nothing about, know no one who has ever been.

No one besides Thalassa.

“Fine,” he says. “Yes, we’re still trying to figure it out - yes, we don’t know that it won’t, but we don’t know that it will, either. And say, for argument’s sake” - because that’s what lawyers do, argue, and a smile twitches onto her lips - “that you were actually to die or have your memory wither away. That you think that may happen. Shouldn’t you meet your children now, tell them the truth, while you can? They deserve to know, at the very least, that they’re siblings.”

Her smile vanishes; her brows furrow. “Then if I am dead or in essence lost, you of course may tell them.”

Of course, she says, after she has not made that obvious. It would not have truly shocked him if she’s instead said that she would bury her childrens’ relationship with her. “And when they ask how I found out and how long I’ve known? Why I hid it for that long? Do you think they won’t hate me if they know that I knew you, and kept the chance for them to ever meet their mother from them? It’s not like I can lie to them about anything!” There’s nothing satisfying about making a point that shuts her up. Both sides of this argument are the the losing ones. “Do you think that either of them would simply not care about what happens to their mother?”

Trucy is hurting, daily, ever since she learned the truth of her grandfather’s magic; she doesn’t hide it with a smile at home. She wants to be a stage magician because that’s the kind of magic that will only make people happy, will never hurt anyone. And Apollo’s never talked to Phoenix about it, but Trucy informs him that there were several foster homes in the picture, none ever stayed in the picture, and that Apollo always changes the subject (“Conspicuously,” she says, over dinner, no idea that she’s talking about her half-brother, “changes the subject. Polly’s really bad at lying.”) if she asks him about family.

“I do not know,” she says. “You are the one who knows them—”

“And I know they would care! That they’d want to know you!”

Thalassa goes quiet. She presses her fist against her mouth and closes her eyes, inhaling loudly and exhaling even louder. “This is precisely the trouble, that you are the one who knows them.” She lowers her hand, curls it tight around her other hand and her mitamah. “You, you reckless, stubborn, fool of a man! What may I expect from you next as you think you may - go about trying to set this right? To save me - do I wait for you to bargain away your own soul to your fae friends, so that they may better understand, because their help you ask of them has a price? Or do I let you search for the Summer Court and their reserves of knowledge - so that you may die there, as Jove did, seeking something from them that they will never offer you?”

“What was Jove looking for?” Phoenix asks. It’s a new piece of an older story, that at the end of last year (one of the few times they communicated between October and now) he’d asked for clarification on two points. First, if she knew where the Summer Court was, and when she shut him down she preempted his second and third questions, too: no, she would absolutely not tell him where the Summer Court is, and yes, Jove had died there. She hadn’t then said that he was looking for something.

A sharp, searing pain bursts through his chest, launching his heart up into his throat where it pounds with the staccato rap of anxiety. It echoes in his head the same way, thumping at the forefront of his skull, not quite painful but nonetheless a weight all the way down behind his eyes, settling in with conflicted feelings; exhaustion wants them to close and burning wants them to leak. He wants to run, he wants to hide, there’s no fight in his instincts, only flight and freeze, and a powerful cold seeps down his skin, from across his shoulders down his arms. Shuddering, he crosses his arms together tightly, as though the gesture will form a physical barrier that will spare him from the ice in Thalassa’s eyes.

It’s her, he realizes, belatedly. It’s just glamour, just manipulated perception. Just, hell of a word to use when she’s decided that rather than project her stony detachment, beauty that refuses to show an emotion behind it, she’ll put the fear of god in him instead. Fear of her. “You’d rather I not ask that question,” he says.

“Forgive me, I did not mean to be so emotional,” she says, and that would, genuinely, be comical. Her face had not changed at all, not a quiver at the corner of her mouth or between her brow. The only sign of her emotionality is what she made Phoenix feel. She squeezes her eyes shut, pressing her hands together in front of her mouth, taking a few silent seconds to recenter herself. The pressure in Phoenix’s chest loosens. She’d probably understand if he went to grab the magatama, stop her from doing this to him again. “But understand this, in everything of yourself that you risk for my sake, every time you dig for something new and dangerous - my children know you.” Implying that he’d have something else to want to research in the Summer Court, were she to say more. She’s not that good at deterring curiosity. “It would be much more painful to them if they were to lose you, than if I were to wither away.”

Implied: the cynical weighing of lives to determine which one of them it’s better to save. Implied: we can’t both come through this in one piece. It’s the calculations that Rimes and Prosecutor Blackquill made and tried to toss on Phoenix: Sasha or the orca, you can’t save them both.

And how, again, did that trial work out?

“Fortunately,” Phoenix says, “it’s far from guaranteed that those are our only two options. In fact, I’d say that it’s very unlikely.”

“You could have been a Gramarye,” Thalassa says. “Because there is one thing besides magic that the men of this name are skilled at, and that is pulling unearned confidence out of their asses.”

“Ah,” Phoenix says, with the vague sensation of being smacked in the face. “We could call it optimism. That might be nice.”

“Of course,” she says, not sarcastic but instead sounding pitying, and that might be worse. “I admire the faith that you hold, truly, I do.” Which is why she just called it overconfidence, no doubt. “But this way you stick your neck out for others means that it is your neck on the line.” She touches her fingertips to the base of her neck, her blue, blue eyes fixed on one of the few aspects of him that she can see. Funny, that; she doesn’t know what color his eyes are beneath the Sight or the way his hair refuses any and all attempts to flatten it or the shape of his face, but she knows the worst moments of his life, his greatest enemies, secrets that he never intends to share. On the other side, to balance their scales, he knew her before she remembered her.

“I fear where it ends,” she says finally. “Because you and I are not lucky people, darling.”

Both so unlucky that it almost doubles around - that it’s frankly a miracle they’re alive. “Yeah,” he says. “But you don’t know me at all if you think I’m just going to give up on someone.”

#roddy fanfics #fic: the witches of los angeles

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wardencommanderrodimiss · 5 years

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Chapter 21: cameos, indulgent nods to crack ships, and oh wait this is kind of an anticlimactic place to end the first fic what do you mean that’s an ending.

[Beginning] [Chapter Masterlist] [ao3]

“So she’s like a centaur but the human part is a catfish.”

“If the only human part of a centaur was its head, yep.”

Trucy’s insistence on not divulging anything about Gourdy ahead of time was apparently just for the sake of surprise, because she tells Vera about it later that day despite her not coming to the lake. Larry wanders to the office with them, as well, and promised a drawn explanation that isn’t coming quick enough for Vera to not be completely confused by Trucy.

“Do you think reverse-centaurs are a thing?” Trucy asks.

“Minotaur,” Apollo says.

“If a reverse-centaur and a mermaid had a kid, it would be a seahorse,” Trucy says.

Phoenix groans and puts his head in his hands. Trucy smirks triumphantly, and Larry looks up so fast that Apollo wouldn’t be surprised to have heard his neck snap. “Can I use that idea for a book?” he asks.

“Oh, god,” Phoenix says.

Trucy’s bursts of – inspiration? Questionable genius? – are the sort of thing that Apollo uses to contextlessly start conversations with Klavier. It takes most of the pressure off him to be clever or have any excuse for talking, and right now, he did promise Trucy to extend her New Years invitation. But first, the lead-in, centaurs.

-The Fraülein’s mind is a compelling but uncharted territory

And Klavier barely knows the half of it, either.

Every time she says things like this I have this fear that it’s all actually real

-Then I hate to be the one to tell you -but seahorses are very real ;)

Ah. There it is, that strange desire that Klavier instills in him, where Apollo wants to take one of the heavy law books from a shelf in this office and smack him upside the head with it.

I am going to pretend you said nothing and just tell you that Trucy is throwing a new year party at our office and wanted to invite you

Trucy has brought her laptop out to the couches to pull up reference images of catfish for Larry. What is a party in this ridiculous place even going to look like? Will Mia throw them out at some point, like a host who finally wants to reclaim her house?

-Certainly thank her for that for me, but I already have plans

Or is lying, which Apollo can’t see because they aren’t having this conversation in person, and instead just wants to avoid the possibility of crossing paths with Phoenix. Or he’s still wary about the office itself. There are far too many options.

Alright, but if she finds out those plans are hanging out alone and sad at your apartment she’s gonna be mad And she does not let people escape her wrath

-I don’t think you quite understand the rockstar lifestyle :P -But I am duly warned

I don’t think you live it

-Hm.

“Do you think he would’ve come to the Gourdyversary if I’d invited him?” Trucy asks.

“I really, really don’t,” Apollo says.

She puts a hand on her chin and frowns in concentration in a similar manner to her father. “Yeah,” she agrees. “He’d probably be even more convinced than you were that Daddy conducts human sacrifices.”

On New Years’ Eve, Apollo takes a late lunch and wanders back to the office to find that in the meantime, Trucy has arrived from school with a friend. She introduces the other girl, who is furiously scribbling some complicated symbols on a pack of sticky notes, as Jinxie, and Jinxie introduces herself by smacking Apollo in the forehead with the sticky note she has just finished drawing on.

“Red, horns,” she mumbles, retreating back behind the couch with her pen at the ready again. “Fae.”

“No no, he’s human!” Trucy says. “He’s just a lawyer.”

“Fae lawyer,” Jinxie says. “There are lots of those.”

“I’m human,” Apollo says. “Really. Trust me.”

She squints suspiciously at him. Her eyes don’t change color – is she fae, unknowing or self-hating or hell, it’s probably sensible for the fae to be afraid of other fae. Or is she just twitchy and paranoid, worse than Clay, more like Starbuck. Still not appearing exactly happy about the situation, she at least seems calmed enough to emerge back from around the couch. In the back room, the phone rings – Apollo cannot recall the last time someone called that phone – and Trucy races back to it, Jinxie trailing behind her. Apollo has to follow them to return to his desk, where he’s trying to finish writing up notes for the Gourdyversary. He keeps a journal for more than just cases, now, tries on paper to make sense of magic (doesn’t really manage), and it’s taken several days to truly set in that he didn’t dream up the catfish-horse.

“Wright Anything Agency, Trucy speaking!” She flings herself into the desk chair, rolling it halfway out from behind the desk, as far as the phone cord reaches, and a grin spreads across her face. “What, no, it’s not the new year yet! It’s not midnight! No, I in fact don’t know what a time zone is!”

Apollo tries and fails not to roll his eyes. She spots him and scrunches up her nose until whatever is being said on the other end of the line draws her attention away. “Ooh, Paris! I wanna get there someday, you’ll have to tell me what to do – oh! I’m gonna put you on speaker and you can say hi to Apollo and Jinxie!” Her bangs flutter when she blows out an amused breath. “No, not everyone who hangs out here all the time works here. You’ll still have desk space! I think.” She drops the phone, letting it dangle to the floor, and hits a button on the base of it.

“Who’s this, exactly?” Apollo asks.

“Athena,” Trucy says. “She’s studying to be a defense lawyer and then she’s gonna come work here too!”

“Hi,” Jinxie says.

“I’m taking the Bar in February!” The voice on the other end of the phone is as chipper as Trucy, with no real trace of an accent despite the fact that she is evidently not in the country. “Mon Dieu, I’m taking the Bar in February! I have to study!”

“Yeah, I remember that period of sheer panic,” Apollo says. “It was worth it in the end, of course, but it wasn’t fun.”

Athena’s heavy exhale is slightly garbled through the phone. “That helps, thanks,” she says. “So you’re Apollo?” And then without waiting for his response, she barrels onward. “I guess we’ll be working together someday! Soon. Soon? Hopefully? Hopefully! Power of positive thinking!”

“Hopefully,” Apollo agrees, and he doesn’t think about it much, or tries not to, but something he misses about Kristoph’s office is that it was more people than just him and his boss, that there were other lawyers there, others of similar experience levels to him. If he lets himself feel it, he misses having other defense attorneys to talk to about other cases. He misses having more people around than a ghost, a flighty ex-attorney who’s been disbarred longer than he ever had his badge, and whatever teenage girls wander in with Trucy on any given day.

“February!” Trucy repeats. “You could be here soon! Like by the spring!”

“It takes a long time to get the results, just remember that,” Apollo says.

“Do you think I should keep studying while waiting?” Athena asks. “In case I don’t pass, so I can just go right back in and take it again?”

“That sounds like some sort of personal purgatory,” Apollo says, “but I mean, if you want to…”

“Well, if I keep studying and do pass, then some of it must be good to have a refresher on for when I go into court, right?”

Increasingly, Apollo thinks that over half of what he learned in law school has been entirely useless for the actual predicament of trying a case, and that he probably would have been better off taking a course on local folklore as well. Is it folklore if it’s true? Does Athena know the kind of office she’ll be stepping into? But he doesn’t exactly want to discourage her, not when she actually needs to be hitting the books most, so he says, “Yeah, I suppose.”

“Hm. You don’t sound convinced.” There is silence for a moment, and then she says, “But I’ve been studying this long, so might as well just keep going with it ‘till I know! Trucy, if I pass but haven’t found an apartment, would your dad mind if I crashed on the couch? You’d never know I was there, I swear!”

The amount she’s talking, Apollo doubts it. “I’m sure he would be fine with it,” Trucy says, which Apollo doesn’t doubt quite as much, but he’s not exactly sure about that either. “Or if he’s not you could sleep on the floor in my room and climb out the window every morning!”

“Sweet,” Athena says. “One less thing to worry about! Anyway sorry to cut this short but I wanna call your dad’s cell to tell him I’m officially testing in February and wish him a happy new year, and then I need to either sleep or run around the house a dozen times first to get rid of this nervous energy from talking about it. But Happy New Year, again!”

“It’ll be an awesome year if you’re around!” Trucy says. “But it’s still nine hours to go!”

“Time zones, bitchesssss,” Athena crows, drawing the last sound into a hiss that grows fainter, like she’s pulling away from the phone, before a beep signals the end of the call.

“She’s great,” Trucy says, bouncing in the chair. “You’re gonna love her, Polly.”

“She sounds exuberant,” Apollo says, because he’s not really sure what else to say. How does Phoenix meet people like this? How does he even have this much of a social circle? Is he more pleasant to everyone who isn’t Apollo, or are they more tolerant of it because they weren’t the ones who lost their first job being played for a fool with a bloody playing card?

“Very,” Trucy says. She springs from her seat, her laptop now in hand from one of the drawers.

“Is she a fae lawyer, too?” Jinxie asks.

“Of course not,” Trucy says. “And she’s not even a lawyer yet, either! Not everyone Daddy knows isn’t human!”

“You understand why we ask, though, right?” Apollo asks, as Trucy drags Jinxie back out to the couches, where for the next two hours bits and pieces of conversation about anime and pro wrestling drift back to him.

He doesn’t realize until he wanders out into the front room to stretch his legs that Vera has arrived. The three girls are huddled together on one couch in front of Trucy’s laptop, clearly watching something, which must be the reason that the internet connection on Apollo’s phone has slowed to an undead crawl. Spotting him, Trucy jumps up and ushers him back to the nebulously-existing kitchen to help her carry out several bottles of sparkling grape juice. She sets each on the floor as she unloads them from the fridge and Apollo, without thinking, reaches down and grabs it, backhanded, the way he would to swing it as a weapon, the way they argued about in Phoenix’s murder trial.

It’s awkward to pick them up differently, but he makes sure he does, fumbles with all the bottles in his arms and staggers back out, Trucy grabbing the doors for him. She’s promised that he and Clay won’t be the oldest adults here, however much she scoffs when she calls him an adult (rude), and however much Apollo doesn’t actually care if there isn’t any alcohol. He and Clay started the past three Januarys with hangovers and regrets and it’s probably about time to stop doing that.

The next person to arrive at the office is Ema, with two incredibly large bags of Snackoos, and Kay, who has nothing but an abundance of energy as she flings herself over the back of a couch to introduce herself to Vera and Jinxie. “I’m going to sleep at 10 pm and there’s nothing any of you can do to stop me,” Ema announces, dropping one bag on the coffee table, and apparently planning on keeping and eating the entire other one herself.

“Rough day?” Trucy asks.

“By noon I was wishing that I was working with Gavin, so yeah, that bad.”

“Gavin’s not that bad, though,” Kay says, rolling from the couch to the floor and bouncing up to her feet.

“He’s pretentious and obnoxious.” Ema forcefully tears open the bag of Snackoos. “But he at least doesn’t give a shit when I use fingerprint powder before forensics gets there, whereas Prosecutor Whasisface—” She stops with a chocolate nearly to her mouth, staring down at it in confusion. “Shit, what’s his name? Balding screechy voice prosecutor.”

Kay very slowly shrugs and turns her hands up in confusion. That description is almost ringing a few unpleasant bells in Apollo’s mind – distant ones, like there’s a mountain in between him and said bells. “I was just fucking working with him,” Ema mutters, shaking her head. She pops another chocolate into her mouth. “Whatever. That guy. Bumps the glimmerous fop up a notch in my rankings of favorite prosecutors in this damned nightmare coven office.”

“I was talking to Gavin the other day and he said you’re his favorite detective,” Kay offers.

Ema’s frown deepens. “He should probably be introduced to more detectives,” she says. “God, is that why I’m always working with him? Is he requesting—”

Kay has found a pack of playing cards and asks Trucy to show her how to throw them. Jinxie slaps one of her sticky-note sigils onto Kay’s back, which she must have noticed but apparently doesn’t seem to mind. Satisfied with her work, Jinxie goes to sit down on the piano bench next to Vera, who has cleared it off and is tapping at the keys trying to make a pattern of sounds that isn’t unpleasant.

The next arrival is Clay, who brings champagne and with it nets an apology from Ema about the time that she said she would trip him into the path of a hungry bear. Kay apparently doesn’t think this is a remark worth questioning and instead simply introduces herself in the same enthusiastic way that she met Apollo at the lake. “Hi! I’m Kay Faraday! You must be Apollo’s roommate!”

She shakes Clay’s hand like she’s trying to detach his arm and he raises his eyebrows at Apollo. “Sorry; if I’m supposed to have heard of you, someone dropped the ball—”

“I met her four days ago,” Apollo interrupts. “Like, only four days ago.”

“Irrelevant,” Kay says, waggling her fingers, and then she turns and shrieking, dives toward Trucy who had picked up to examine one of the champagne bottles. It turns, as expected, into a argument, citing the legal drinking ages of a dozen countries before a debate begins over the morality of lies of omission and perhaps more importantly, whether Phoenix can magically detect those as well. By the time Trucy throws Apollo and Clay out to pick up snacks at the Kitaki Bakery, Snackoos apparently not being enough for her, Kay has diverted all attention entirely by picking up a bottle of grape juice and threatening to chug it all.

“I like her,” Clay says.

“Of course you do,” Apollo says.

They’re halfway across People Park when Clay asks abruptly, “She’s human, right? All of them but Vera?”

“I – I have no idea about Kay or Jinxie.”

“Cool, cool,” Clay says. “I can’t wait to find out at the worst time that they’re not. That’s gotta be how it goes, right?”

At the bakery, Apollo turns his back on Clay for two minutes, to stammer out an answer to Little Plum asking how Apollo and the office are doing, and finds out that Clay somehow in that time got Wocky’s number. It would be very funny, after the conversation they just had, to tell Clay that the family are all kitsunes and to see his expression, but Apollo still isn’t quite sure what that means – are they shapeshifters? Cursed like werewolves? Foxes turned into humans? Some other kind of lingering magic? – because Trucy never explained, just laughed at the look on his face. Maybe he’ll ask Trucy for elaboration on that later, and tell Clay another time, some day when he really wants to mess with him.

Kay still has the juice bottle in her hand, is now standing on the coffee table, Ema throwing Snackoos at her and Trucy eating those Snackoos while cheering for Kay to chug. Someone new has arrived, a brown-haired mousy-looking young man trying to discourage Kay from the mad scheme she is in the middle of describing. Playing cards lie scattered across the floor and couch; Apollo can only guess what that was about. Throwing them, most likely. “—and technically, that is to the letter what I said I would do,” Kay says. She finally steps down from the table.

“If not the spirit of it,” the man says. “Though I’m not sure why I had different expectations for you.”

Kay snaps her fingers and lets them linger as a pair of finger guns. “I’ve got no idea either!”

He doesn’t pay much more mind to her, instead turning to Apollo and Clay. “Uh, hi,” he says, extending a hand to Apollo. He wears gloves, thin white ones. “Sebastian Debeste. Prosecutor. If you were wondering. Which maybe you weren’t.”

Apollo can’t actually recall knowing what a prosecutor’s badge looks like, in-person. Klavier certainly doesn’t wear one, and he’s the only prosecutor that Apollo has met closer than across the width of the courtroom. And Edgeworth, once, not that he remembers whether or not he saw him wearing a badge.

“Oh, uh, hi. Apollo Justice.”

“So you two have the coolest names for lawyers, ever,” Clay says. “Just to make sure we’re all aware of that.”

“I—” Kay starts and then stops. “Wait yeah, you’re right. I was gonna say Judge Courtney has the best name but she picked it as a pun knowing she was gonna go be a judge so that’s not quite fair.”

“Justine Courtney,” Sebastian says. “It’s a very legal system name and she’s – well, she’s one of the Fair Folk.”

It’s still better than the surname Fey, at any rate. But a judge, one of them, too? How do they judge – as fair or strict as humans? The determination is made solely on the evidence, like the Jurist System is trying to mitigate, but in that, he hopes, that the fae would assess evidence evenly. He wonders what a jury of the fae would look like. Even more swayed by emotion, their petty pride willing to acquit someone they know is guilty because by their morality, the crime is just? Kristoph is one of their own damned by that system – or is he one of theirs? Do changelings belong to the Court?

He closes his eyes and tries to tune out the chatter of Clay introducing himself and saying yes he’s an astronaut as in really going to space, next year, which next year is tomorrow but it won’t be until December that—

That’s normal. Space is normal. Clay is normal (in a certain context). Clay is the only normal person here and now it’s too late for him. Apollo dragged him into this. All his overabundance of caution that he tried to share with Apollo and he’s ended up here, both of them here, curiosity to kill them and turn them into cautionary stories that the next person like Clay will repeat.

And he opens his eyes and Ema is listening enraptured to what Clay has to say even though she heard it all on their road trip back in October. Trucy grabs her Magic Panties off the back of the couch and produces from within it several cardboard cone party hats. One she reaches out to arraign over apparent thin air, but it remains floating, now wedged onto the wisp. The next hat she hangs off of Apollo’s spiked bangs. Ema shakes her head too much to allow Trucy to put one on her, but Kay takes two. Sebastian seems to be listening both to Clay, and to Jinxie plunking away on one of the piano keys over and over and over, Vera flipping through the sticky notes. It’s normal. They’re all still people, somehow, people who don’t give Apollo time to dwell. “Trucy?” Sebastian says when Clay finally stops for breath. “When did your dad last tune this thing?”

“I don’t think he knows how to do that or what that is,” she replies. The levitating hat next to her bobs like her head does.

“Oh,” Sebastian says, staring blankly ahead. “That’s an offense – affront – I’m trying to come up with more synonyms and blanking—”

“Shitty,” Clay suggests.

“I was thinking more about how it affects us that just describing what it is,” Sebastian says, “but… yeah.”

“Disgust-inducing,” Clay says.

“Hey Sebby,” Kay says. “Do you remember that one bar wherever in Europe that they like, had the shots that they lit on fire? Do you remember that?”

“If this is to ask if I’ll set the champagne on fire, the answer is no,” Sebastian says. “That seems like an affront, a, uh – blasphemy! Feels like blasphemy, here. Particularly.”

“I don’t think Mia cares about casual use of magic,” Trucy says.

Oh. So they aren’t talking lighters or matches. “You – uh, Prosecutor Debeste,” Apollo says, feeling like he has the answer to a riddle but that he’s somehow taking a shot in the dark. “You wouldn’t happen to be the witch-prosecutor that Prosecutor Edgeworth and Gavin mention, are you?”

“Oh.” His face falls, immediately, and he doesn’t recover right away, not the way Apollo is used to Trucy and Klavier throwing up masks. “I – probably? I must be. I don’t actually know that there are any other witches in the office, not that I’ve seen or Seen” – he doesn’t say the word the same way when he repeats it, the implication obvious. “So if they said anything bad don’t tell me.”

“It was back in October, when he was annoyed with people trying to check in on him,” Apollo says. “So whatever he said was probably just – annoyed.”

“Yeah, he got like that,” Kay says. “Gets. Whatever. He’s been a little better and now it’s Mr Edgeworth who’s getting cagey and secretive with all that secret Chief Prosecutor business.”

Apollo’s phone buzzes. He expects a message from Klavier, because there’s no one else he regularly texts who isn’t in this room, but it’s Clay.

-witch -guess i shouldnt consider meeting cute guys around u bc everyone is like this

Apollo makes sure that Clay sees him roll his eyes and put his phone back into his pocket without replying. He could say a lot about how despite that, Clay has still acted like that about Klavier.

“Hey,” Trucy says. “You should tell me and Polly all of the Prosecutors Office secrets, so that we’re totally prepared for whatever we face in court next!”

Ema flicks a Snackoos at Sebastian. “We don’t have secrets,” she says. “Everyone’s way too dramatic for that.”

“Set the grape juice on fire,” Kay says.

“Speaking of secret business,” Sebastian says, clearly and deliberately ignoring Kay’s request and when Trucy seconds it. “Kay, did you know Agent Lang is in town? Because I ran into him just a bit ago coming out of Mr Edgeworth's office with a stack of files, said they’re working on something, I have no idea what but they both seemed – kind of super unhappy.”

“What?” It’s easy to see what Ema meant when she said they’re dramatic; Kay springs up from her perch on the arm of the couch and puts her hands on her hips, frowning with a pout almost as unnecessarily exaggerated as some of Trucy’s. “Wolfman is around and didn’t tell me! I can’t believe him!”

Apollo wonders if he’ll ever reach the end of this network of people Phoenix knows, or if he’ll ever understand it. “It worries me when you say things like ‘Wolfman’ because I have no idea if you mean ‘werewolf’ or ‘guy who really likes wolves’.” Like Trucy and her centaurs but the answer is probably going to be worse.

“Both,” Ema says without change in expression.

Apollo throws his hands in the air. “Oh come on!” Next to him, Ema winces and puts a hand up to her ear. She deserves the wrong side of the Chords of Steel for that.

“He’s not a werewolf,” Kay says. “You’re going to kill this poor guy.” She points at Apollo. “It’s a family thing. They’re all super into wolves. His hair is like—” She holds up her forefingers like ears at the top of her head. “But he can’t turn into a wolf. He would, but he can’t. Which is good for not giving random people on the street heart attacks because he’d just wander around like that because what is the point of shapeshifting if not messing with people?”

She spreads her arms wide like she’s either waiting for applause and agreement, or trying to draw out some kind of debate or dissension. Sebastian walks past her to where Jinxie and Vera have googled how to tune an upright piano. Ema throws a Snackoo at her.

“I think that’s a sound theory,” Clay says. “Isn’t that just the entire thing of the Fair Folk, messing with people?”

The lights blink off for two full seconds. Apollo freezes, as does Clay, but the group over at the piano don’t stop their conversation and Ema is still throwing snacks, now at Kay. Mia, messing with them; most of them, used to it. “What is the ratio of those you’ve eaten to those on the floor?” Apollo asks. Ema shrugs.

“Yeah that’s basically it,” Kay says to Clay.

“You see why I worry,” Apollo says. He can feel a weight gathering behind his eyes and higher at the front of his skull. The conversation is all suddenly too loud, backed by the force of the topics they’ve covered, what almost proved overwhelming earlier, fae judges and now prosecuting witches and petty shapeshifters, and he extracts himself from the middle of it and retreats back toward Charley’s corner.

“You okay, Polly?” Trucy doesn’t give him a chance to catch his breath alone; she appears at his elbow, looking up at him with concern.

“Does it ever just hit you that this is all kind of completely mad?” he asks. “All this – this everything?” She pats his arm sympathetically. “Because it just hit me again, that just – last year I was pretty sure of what I could expect from my life.” And then, April. And then, Phoenix. “This year I know I’m going in without a clue! Just waiting for the fae to amp it up to celebrate the new year!”

“They won’t do that,” Trucy says. Her confidence is reassuring until she adds, “Time works differently for them. They don’t know when’s a new year or what. They’ll just amp it up for no reason if they want to, nothing by our calendars.”

“See?” Apollo asks. “That’s what I mean. Uncertainty and terror.”

She leans her elbow on the bookshelf and pokes at the spines of the large tomes. “Lawyers and performers always gotta smile, right through to the end, whatever it is. And you know what?” She bounces a little in place but says nothing, waiting for him to play along with her.

“What?” he asks, trying to at least sound annoyed even if he can’t manage to feel it. Better not let her know how much she can get away with when Mr Hat is already bobbing around his shoulder, prodding him in the arm with the tip of the cardboard party hat.

“Lots happens, and we figure it out.” She stops moving, all but her head, turning to glance to the doorway to the next room, and beyond that, Apollo knows what she’s thinking of, a desk, a drawer, a soul encased inside. “We make it through. We always have.”

[brief note on this ending]

#fic: the seelie of kurain #roddy fanfics

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