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wardencommanderrodimiss · 5 years

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Chapter Ten: the breather episode we all needed before it’s time for some Fae AU Original Plot(TM)

[Beginning] [Chapter Masterlist]

“Why didn’t you tell me beforehand?”

Phoenix does not look up from his phone, laboriously tapping out a text message key by key. He still uses a flip phone, one that looks older than Trucy. Apollo didn’t realize anyone under the age of 70 who wasn’t a drug dealer still used a flip phone. “It wasn’t necessary for you to know.”

“Bullshit it wasn’t,” Apollo says.

Phoenix raises one eyebrow. He is still focused on his phone. “It really wasn’t. You were able to put everything together without me telling you, weren’t you?”

Apollo doesn’t know whether it might be better to throw something or to punch him to bring his attention to this conversation that they are having in this here and now. “And it would’ve taken you two seconds to throw that part in – ‘hey, besides the curse on Vera, he’s also totally not human.’ What did you think, that him being one of the Fair Folk would be a step too far?” He remembers every time that Kristoph rolled his eyes at euphemisms for the fae. It makes more and less sense now. “That oh, the curses I’m not scared of, but no, that’s what’s gonna—”

“Maybe you’ve got bad experience with the fae – that magic is one thing, and fae magic is another.” Phoenix isn’t bothering to look at him and that’s pissing Apollo off more than anything else about this, not what he’s saying now, not what he didn’t say before, but the damned dismissiveness of it –

Apollo hooks his foot around the leg of the piano bench and drags it out. He thinks he’s going to be here a while. “And why the hell would that be my past experience?”

“I don’t know,” Phoenix replies. “I don’t know your whole life story.” Finally, he lifts his head, his black eyes studying Apollo’s face, and he leans back into the couch.

“Maybe it’s been a while since you wore this badge” – Apollo prods himself in the chest, next to his badge, hard enough that it hurts – “but it means something to me! It means I’m going to make my defense and find the truth no matter who I’m up against! Why can’t you just trust me to do my goddamned job? You’ve only trusted me with care of your daughter!”

Apollo hadn’t realized how much was pent-up, boiling between his ribs, until he started yelling.

“On your last point, lack of courage doesn’t denote lack of morality. And Trucy’s far from helpless – she’s got her own tricks, and she knows I have deals with friends in high places, if she’s really in a pinch.”

“You’d tell your own daughter to make a deal with the fae just because you can’t be bothered to supervise her?”

It isn’t that Apollo minds having Trucy as investigative partner, co-counsel, and something like an annoying little sister, all in one. He definitely would rather have not spent all night at a Gavinners concert, but that ship sailed long ago. Knowing about the Jurist System has at least given him an answer as to where the hell Phoenix has been while Trucy is running about investigating concert-murders and noodle stands, but it doesn’t cleanse him of that anger, anger on Trucy’s behalf, anger he doesn’t fully understand.

Phoenix’s face darkens. “I didn’t work out deals in advance for Trucy to have to pay the price.” He sits forward, elbows on his knees. “At any rate, that’s not what you’re here to talk about, is it?” His deceptively light tone belies the glower etched into his features. “This is not about me doubting your ability as a lawyer, Apollo.”

Apollo sits down heavily, feeling the thud of the hard wood bench jar through his entire body. “Just me as a person, then?”

Phoenix doesn’t sit back again, but he looks away, his stony expression twisting into something painful. He touches his neck, and Apollo thinks about how the first step to indicting Kristoph was to tear apart Olga Orly’s story by her habit of rubbing her neck. It seems to be the only tic that Phoenix has, that when he talks about curses, his hand goes to his neck, where through a magatama Apollo once saw black marks. “I made an assessment of you based on what I would have been capable of at your age,” he says.

“Which was – what, ‘magic okay, fae bad’?”

“Pretty much. I would have frozen from the start, had I known.”

That’s a sentence more than Apollo expected – that’s an admission he never could have imagined, not so much one of weakness – because Phoenix’s very name is synonymous with so many weaknesses and flaws – but of personal history. As far as Apollo knows, Phoenix might as well have coalesced in this office at age twenty-four and gone from there. “What happened to you?” Apollo asks, knowing he’s pushing it but unable to not.

“I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Little more than that.”

There. That’s the man Apollo knows, again. He hasn’t yet released his neck, but he is looking at Apollo again. “And I didn’t need you to be extra suspicious of Klavier, as you undoubtedly would have been if you had been told that his brother was of the fae. I needed you to be a little suspicious of him, to a point, but not to that point.”

“I’ve been suspicious about what he is since I met him,” Apollo says. “This is just more of the same. Doesn’t make me more suspicious, or less.”

He thinks of how Klavier practically begged him to leave employ of Wright’s office, how he had cold iron, heavily enchanted, on hand, to spare. Phoenix called him paranoid when they talked about the ring – Apollo wasn’t sure it was without just cause then, and now he’s even less sure. Precaution, protection –

-- Afraid of his own brother?

Something, if not Apollo’s suspicions, looks clearer now.

Phoenix raises an eyebrow. Apollo stops spinning the ring around his finger. “At any rate,” Phoenix says, with a lofty, half-dismissive tone, and this part of the conversation is over, anything about Phoenix, his choices of what to hold back and the magic that ensnares him, about the Gavins, about anything that Apollo, actually, really wants to know. He might as well just walk out now. There’s not going to be anything good in this. “Be proud of yourself, Apollo. No one else could’ve done what you did today.”

“That’s kinda hard to believe when you could’ve just plucked up any of the other junior associates working for Mr Gavin and put them through the same,” Apollo says. He rests his elbow on the cover over the piano keys and wonders if the instrument has ever been played.

“No, I couldn’t have.”

Apollo waits for him to elaborate. Apollo doesn’t know why he waits. Phoenix never elaborates. He gives up the truth only when it’s pried from him. “Why not?” Apollo prompts.

“It was always going to be you. No one else has quite the eye for the truth that you do.”

Something about that feels significant, like the words are three layers deep and the real meaning at the bottom, but nothing lights up red and Apollo has no hints for dissecting verbal tics. “Why can’t you just tell me things instead of insinuating everything?”

Apollo thinks he’s said this before. He’s definitely thought it.

“My mentor never in her life or after gave me a straight answer when a vague one was possible, and it helped me learn how to think and figure things out. Seems to be working quite well for you, too.”

Apollo knows nothing about Phoenix’s mentor beyond that she was one of the fae, and that simple fact seems to jive with this apparent teaching method that Phoenix prescribes to. Or maybe he’s just a douchebag, but Apollo doesn’t say that, because Phoenix might think that a slight against his mentor, and Apollo knows not to slander the dead, fae especially.

(Even living as fugitives in a ramshackle mountain shack, Dhurke taught him how to be polite.)

“If you want to take the day off tomorrow, I’m not planning to be in, and I won’t ask,” Phoenix adds, with a grin that isn’t as cold or sharp as most of his. “You’ve certainly earned it.”

And since Trucy has already gone home, Apollo has no reason to stick around at the office tonight; and even without Phoenix’s permission, he’d been considering it. He considers it even after he gets home before Clay does and crossing the salty threshold beneath an iron horseshoe doesn’t stop the laughter reverberating through his skull. Alone, it’s all he hears.

He expects to be awakened by a phone call from Trucy, demanding to know why he isn’t at the office and then arguing with her about what exactly her school schedule is anyway. He’s right that it’s a phone call, at 9:32 am – jarring him out of nightmares about red eyes and being late to work, and then he thinks he is late to work before he remembers that he turned his alarm off for the day on purpose with permission, and then he thinks he should answer the phone and the unknown number hailing him.

“Hello?” he asks, rolling over onto his stomach and trying not to let his voice get muffled into the pillow. “Apollo Justice speaking.”

There is silence on the other end of the line. Apollo waits for the beep of the call going dead, but then he hears a small voice. “Um? Mr Justice? It’s… it’s Vera Misham.”

“Vera!” Apollo pushes himself upright, pressing his phone to his face with a force that hurts. “How are you doing? Are—” He swallows his questions, tries to soften his voice, remembering how she flinched away from his loud outbursts when they met in person.

“They told me what you did,” she says, voice little more than a whisper. “That you… you won the case. Thank you.” Her voice cracks.

“Of course! It’s — I’m just doing my job!” He’s managed to keep his voice down, a little, and holds the phone a little away from his mouth. “I’m just glad we could help you, and that you’re okay!”

She goes quiet again and Apollo has to check to see that the call is still going. “Um,” she says. “Do you… have a number for — T-Trucy? I thought she might want to know, um, but…”

Calling Apollo has probably used half of her energy for talking to people. “I can call her for you, if you want?”

“Y-yeah.” Even as soft as her voice is, her relief is clear to hear. “If you could…”

“Of course!” The call will probably interrupt her in the middle of school, and Apollo doesn’t like to be encouraging her to interrupt her education more than she herself does -- but Vera is alive, against curses and poison, and they won, and that feels like something that deserves celebrating. “She might want to come visit,” he adds, because that seems like something Trucy, unerringly friendly Trucy who doesn’t know his home address because she has made clear she will turn up on the doorstep on Saturdays, will want to do. “Are you okay with that?”

More silence. Then, tiny, like the chirp of a mouse, “Y-yeah. If, um, if she wants to… knowing what I am.”

The doctors must have told her, or she overheard. “That’s not a problem for us, Vera,” he says, sure that whatever words he’s picked as reassurance will sound clumsy, but knowing he has to. “It’s nothing you should worry about.”

Then he calls Trucy, who picks up on the fifth ring and screams in his ear and tells him to meet her at the hospital as soon as possible, as he anticipated, so once she’s done yelling at him, he rolls out of bed and into some non-work clothes.

She is sitting on a bench out in front when he arrives, scolding him that she has been waiting for nearly twenty minutes, a timeline that doesn’t make much sense because he called half an hour ago and he gets the sense that Mr Wright is the kind of person who has never in his life taken a taxi when a bike or feet can get him anywhere for free and Trucy has adhered to that. Maybe she can teleport -- maybe Valant’s trick was no more than sleight-of-hand, but Apollo would believe Trucy has more real magic than she’s ever let on. They go in together, get directions and tramp down the sterile cold halls to find their client.

Maybe because of seeing Kristoph yesterday, his shifting faces and broken glamours, but Apollo is surprised to see that Vera looks like -- like Vera, wan and sicklier but otherwise the same person from the detention center. Visibly human, all the way. Her room is bare and empty but for a stack of DVD cases on the bedside table and a sketchbook in her lap, but she visibly brightens to look up and see Apollo and Trucy. “I didn’t think you’d come,” she says, blinking her big dark eyes furiously. “I…”

“Of course we did!” Trucy exclaims, plopping herself without hesitation on the foot of the bed.

“Of course we did,” Apollo repeats, feeling something burning behind his eyes. “Vera, I’m so glad -- that you -- I--”

“Hey, Apollo! Don’t start crying!” Trucy swats at him and misses, but there are tears spilling from her eyes too now. It makes for a silly picture in Apollo’s mind, him and Trucy blubbering and Vera there in the bed the only one composed, but when he looks at her again she is crying silently too.

“Thank you,” she says, scrubbing at her eyes. “Thank you, Apollo.”

“No, I -- I’m sorry!” There is so much that Kristoph said that is eating at him, and his laugh, but he wasn’t lying -- he couldn’t lie -- when he said that it was Apollo’s fault that she ingested the poison. “If I hadn’t -- scared you, and pressed you like that, then you wouldn’t have bitten your nails, and…”

And the curse would have stayed dormant, waiting? And then what?

Vera shakes her head. “No. You helped me, and I.... I…” She picks up her sketchbook and simply hugs it to her chest, like a shield, something to combat the vulnerability of this conversation, something to put between her and the two of them. “I didn’t think you’d come,” she whispers, her voice breaking on the first word and growing hoarser. “To visit me. To… to have anything to do with me.”

“What?” Trucy looks -- and sounds -- indignant. “Why wouldn’t we? We were cheering for you to pull through! Apollo was fighting for you! For your future! Why would we -- we just--” She turns her narrowed eyes on Apollo, like he might have some insight. He shrugs and sinks down in the chair by the bed.

“Because of what I am,” Vera says, ducking her head down to her chest, her hair hanging past her eyes. “I, I’m, um…” She seems to be have trouble uttering the word, whatever one it is she is searching for -- changeling? Fae? “And I know people are… don’t like, are afraid...”

Trucy shakes her head. “We aren’t afraid! Especially not of you.”

“I don’t think you could be scary if you tried,” Apollo says, before immediately deciding he should shove his foot in his mouth, but Vera giggles and lifts her head. Trucy is beaming. They worked a laugh from her. What a long way this has come.

“I guess maybe -- maybe you’re both more used to magic than others,” she says. “It seems so strange, now, that I… that I didn’t know.”

Trucy tilts her head. Apollo doesn’t move, doesn’t want to break this spell that is Vera finally starting to speak, to open up. “Like I can see now. Or like, um, like I know what I’m seeing.”

“Daddy says it’s all a lot of colors,” Trucy adds helpfully. “Colors and glowing.”

Vera nods. “And I thought… I thought that everyone saw like that. Because I didn’t go out, or know anyone who’d say… it wasn’t.” Her eyes are still black when she looks back up. Apollo keeps expecting something different.

“Prosecutor Gavin did say that changelings often don’t know.” Trucy taps her chin thoughtfully. “Although you’re the only changeling I know, Vera, and that’s not a very big sample size.”

He had guessed that Vera might not know — but where did he get information to make that guess? (Maybe he was repeating something he’d heard, like Trucy is now — but Apollo thinks he could trust Prosecutor Gavin to be thorough, to not bring uncorroborated secondhand anecdotes into a trial.)

“I thought it was normal,” Vera says. “I thought so much was normal, and I didn’t look to see, and I…” Her head falls again. “The other lawyer. Do you know where he is?”

“The other--?” Does she mean Klavier?

“They said he came by earlier,” Vera says. “And brought all those--” She tilts her head at the DVDs.

“Oh, do you mean Daddy?” Trucy asks. Vera nods. “Though he’s -- not exactly a lawyer anymore.”

“That’s my fault,” Vera says. “Isn’t it?”

“It’s--” The look Trucy shoots Apollo is wild-eyed panic. “No, no, I didn’t mean--”

“It’s okay.” Vera’s hands curl a little tighter around the edges of her sketchbook. Apollo wonders if those are claws, like Kristoph’s. “I hope I can look him in the eye and apologize, someday. I’m sorry, and I… I’m not going to look away from the things I’ve done anymore. I’m going to know what I’m seeing.”

“Daddy’s had the Sight for ten years and he doesn’t always know what he’s looking at,” Trucy says.

She must know that Vera’s was a metaphor, but some of the tension slips from Vera’s shoulders at it, anyway.

They spent over two hours at the hospital, talking for a while about the Steel Samurai before Trucy tells Vera some things she knows about magic -- which Trucy claims is very little that she really knows, but to Apollo it seems more than anyone else. Vera never takes her eyes off of Trucy while she is chattering, not even to watch Mr Hat dance around the room -- Apollo can’t take his eyes off the wisp, even when he tries, and he finally has to tell Trucy to make it invisible because he thinks he’s losing his mind.

“That’s what a wisp is meant to do,” Trucy explains later, when they leave and begin a search for lunch at some place that is not Eldoon’s. “Distraction. Misdirection. Lead people astray because they just have to follow it.” She goes quiet and then points out a soba place that looks promising. “That’s how I helped Daddy escape the courthouse. My real daddy, I mean. My first daddy.”

“You -- you helped him escape?”

Apollo stops dead in the doorway and Trucy smacks him in the shoulder with his wallet to get him to move again. His wallet. This immediately following a conversation about misdirection, he’s not sure he can be mad. He should probably have seen it coming, at any rate. “Yep! He didn’t have magic anymore, so I had to help. So if you need to disappear, you know who to ask.”

She does not hand him back his wallet as she flounces inside.

“But I always knew he was alive, because of it,” Trucy adds, when they are seated and she has proclaimed her intent to sample the most expensive things on the menu. “And because he promised he’d come back.”

And he didn’t -- not to her. He went to Phoenix and he died, and that was the warning that Klavier gave Apollo, what seems like years ago -- death follows him like a plague. And that was true, and Zak’s promise wasn’t. “Trucy—”

“It’s okay,” she says, and that is a lie; her smile lights up red, as though her sad eyes didn’t betray her enough. “I have another daddy now, even if he’s really bad at playing piano.” Her voice drops when she says this, like she’s letting Apollo in on a secret he doesn’t already know. “And you, now, too! Even if you’re really loud sometimes.”

And even if she’s probably only saying that because the waiter remarked on how nice it was for Apollo to take his kid sister out for a treat. He didn’t know how to respond to that, so he didn’t, and Trucy grinned at him like the cat that has just devoured the proverbial canary. He’s not sure what she thinks she can leverage this new relationship to get and he’s not sure he wants to know beforehand.

(He could tell her he knows what it’s like to be left behind by a father, that they have this in common, that they have this that could bind them into a makeshift family if they wanted, but he hasn’t told anyone, not even Clay, about Dhurke, and even now that he could empathize, the words don’t come.)

“I’m so glad that’s my one defining characteristic,” Apollo says, and Trucy laughs.

After lunch they bike — or Apollo does, with Trucy stealing his seat and providing backseat backwards-facing driver tips, which only makes him more anxious that they’re going to tip into traffic and Apollo will be magicked away from having a peaceful afterlife by Wright who’s pissed about his daughter’s death and knows who to blame — back to the office. Apollo barely has time to think that he’s never actually been here while wearing jeans before Trucy drags him off again, insisting that it’s a nice day and they should spend it at the park. They skirt the area of the noodle-stand murder and head north, up past the Kitaki Bakery storefront, currently undergoing renovations, and Trucy insists on ducking in to say hi. There, they learn that the store is having extra space built on because it’s proved to be so popular, and are sent on their way with two complimentary muffins.

“It’s weird to think that our cases started just weird but mundane like that,” Apollo says, “and progressed to… this. I miss those days with absolutely no magic involved.”

“You sound old,” Trucy says through a mouthful of muffin. “Like ‘ooh, back in my day we had none of this fae stuff’ — and besides, you do know the Kitakis are a family of kitsunes, right?”

“What!”

“Mhm. I don’t know how much magic they are anymore, but they are.”

Do kitsunes have the same rules of hospitality and debts that the fae do? Apollo stares down at the half-eaten muffin in his hands and remembers when he wouldn’t let Klavier pay for a drink because he was too afraid of getting locked into a regrettable deal. Funny that he trusted the Kitakis more when all he knew was that they were gangsters.

“Speaking of magic,” Trucy adds, reaching into her purse and pulling out the envelope that Phoenix had given them a few mornings ago, what feels like another lifetime ago, “I took a look at this last night.” She unfolds a paper with a torn edge and big loopy sprawling script. Apollo’s breath catches in his throat. Is that the diary page? The real diary page? “My grandfather left it to my daddy, and he to me. He gave it to Daddy the -- the night he died.” Her face falls but she keeps going without giving Apollo time to say anything. “It says it leaves to the holder -- my daddy, now me -- the source of his magic.”

“Which is…?” Apollo prompts, when Trucy is not forthcoming, rather just continuing to frown at the page.

“I don’t know,” she says. “He wrote that there is a map on the back, but…”

She turns the paper over. The other side is blank.

“There’s a trick to it,” she says, “there’s got to be, but I don’t know it.”

“Invisible ink? A magatama? A missing second page?”

“Not the last, but maybe one of the others.”

They spend the rest of the afternoon researching invisible ink on the office’s sluggish and ancient computer, Trucy digging through the drawers of her father’s desk for the magatama and coming up empty. “He usually keeps it in here,” she says, pouting, while Apollo takes notes on some of the more complicated chemical compounds that can reveal invisible ink, wondering whether they will have to rope Ema into this and if they’re even on the right track, because why would Magnifi use anything but magic to hide the trail to his magic? “I don’t know why it wouldn’t be.”

“He doesn’t usually keep it with him?”

Trucy shakes her head. “He says he’s not usually worried about being glamoured.”

Implying that whatever he’s currently up to, he is.

She leans over Apollo’s shoulder to look at what he’s written. “I bet Ema would be a good person to ask.”

Score one for Apollo’s powers of predictions. “I’ll ask Daddy tonight for her contact info. I’m sure he has it. And maybe on Saturday if we haven’t solved it, we can get her over to help. I bet she likes puzzles.”

“If she hasn’t had enough of that in her day job as, y’know, a detective.”

“More heads are better for figuring out stuff like this,” Trucy says, casting a forlorn look at the diary page. “Hey, your friend -- your roommate -- you said he knows stuff about magic, right? You should get him for this too. It’ll be like a treasure hunt!”

“Most of what Clay knows about magic is how to avoid it, and no, I am not asking him if he wants to spend his weekend trying to get a blank piece of paper to give up its secrets.”

Apollo spends Friday alone at the office until early afternoon; Trucy whirls in like a tornado and grabs his arm and tells him that their treasure hunt will commence with Ema tomorrow and now they’re going to visit Vera. He manages a cursory protest -- “How am I going to get any clients if no one is at the office to meet with them!” -- but he’s not sure he wouldn’t still be jittery from that last trial if he went back into the courthouse today or next week, so he allows her to steer the direction of his day again.

Vera doesn’t look quite as pale, and she doesn’t notice them come in at all until Trucy chirps, “Hiya!” Then she jumps, scattering the colored pencils that were resting carefully ordered in her lap. Sitting on top of the stack of Steel Samurai DVDs is another sketchbook.

“That prosecutor came by to visit earlier,” she says. She taps the pencil against her lips, like she’s trying to replace her habit of chewing her nails with something else. “He was much nicer than he was in the courtroom.”

“That’s good,” Apollo says. She had seemed afraid of him, right before her collapse, and then that was the last thing on Apollo’s mind.

“He brought me a sketchbook and the pencils,” she says. “He said he’d understand if I didn’t trust a gift from him, but they don’t look like my nail polish or anything… I guessed that’s okay, then.”

“What did you talk about?” Apollo asks. He doesn’t want to turn this into a cross-examination but he’s also desperately curious as to whether Klavier let slip anything that Apollo can use to try and figure him out.

Vera shrugs. “About… about me, mostly. And, um, adjusting to knowing what… what I am. He was really nice about it. He didn’t sound like he was… afraid, or anything.” Her thumb comes to her lips and she chews exactly once on her nail before she pulls it away, frowning even more now. “He told me I should avoid eating salt as much as I can. That I’ll feel better that way.” She lowers her voice conspiratorially, and both Apollo and Trucy lean in to listen. “He brought his dog with him,” she whispers, “but she’s not, um, a real dog, so the nurses didn’t know she was here.”

“Yeah, I was pretty sure she’s magic,” Trucy says.

“Pretty sure?” Apollo repeats. “You fed her chocolate! You’d better have been totally sure!” Not to mention how she has only been visible to a handful of people. Apollo was certain she was magic from the beginning.

“Her name is Vongole,” Vera says. “She’s kind of scary.”

“Really?” Trucy asks. “She just looks like a big puppy.”

“Her teeth are…” Vera shudders. “They’re all red and… red and oozy.”

“I don’t remember that,” Trucy says. It hadn’t occurred to Apollo that she might look different with the Sight, when so few of them could see her to begin with.

“But she is very fluffy.”

“Ooh,” Trucy says, “I bet.”

“Did he say what she is?” Apollo asks. “Or how he got her?”

Trucy glowers at him. His cross-examination voice must have kicked in. Vera shakes her head. “No. But she’s very gold, like both of them are.”

“Both of -- you mean Prosecutor Gavin, and, er--” Had Vera ever heard Kristoph’s name? He hired her to forge him evidence -- he nearly killed her -- and she probably still can’t recognize him by name.

“The devil,” Vera says quietly. “Yes. They both…” She twists her hands together. “I don’t know how I thought they looked the same. They’re both the same…” She flutters her fingers in the air in a vague circle, miming an outline -- maybe she means something like an aura, the way some of the colors through the magatama weren’t marked on Phoenix but surrounded him. “Gold. They’re both golden. But under that they aren’t anything alike.”

When they leave Vera, the sky is growing dark. Trucy showed her the diary page, the blank back, and asked her if she could see anything; Vera stared at her in confusion and told her, no, the paper was empty. “We’re not quitting on this,” Trucy tells Apollo as they dip between the brightening streetlights. “It’s the last thing I have from my family! We’re going to uncover these secrets, no matter who we have to ask!”

Apollo isn’t sure he wants to know -- this is what Magnifi asked Valant and Zak to kill him over -- this is what Valant tried to frame Zak over, that Zak disappeared over, that Zak reappeared and died over -- and he isn’t sure if it’s better for some things like that to stay buried. But he’s curious -- probably too curious, they both probably are -- and he can sympathize. If Dhurke had left him with anything -- if the bracelet from his mother could have held any tangible clue --

“What are you doing this weekend?” Apollo asks, kicking off his shoes and scattering some salt with them.

“Star Trek and cooking shows, probably,” Clay says. He has one leg hooked over the back of the couch and an unopened pack of Swiss rolls lying next to his hand. “Why?”

“Trucy has roped me into trying to solve a magical mystery,” Apollo says, already feeling stupid before he’s asked the question, “and she thinks more heads are always better, that we can use as many perspectives as possible whether or not someone is actually--”

“Dude,” Clay says, “are you asking me to help you with whatever-the-fuck you and your almost-Fair-Folk-fuckup boss’ daughter -- I mean he’s the fuckup, not Trucy -- are up to?”

“I’m asking if you want to help,” Apollo says, rubbing his eyes. “Which I know you’re the one who advises against stuff like--”

“Fuck it.” Clay sits up. He looks like a shot of caffeine has just kicked in.

“What?”

“Someone’s gotta be the one who says if your ideas are bad, so fuck it, dude, I’m in.”

“And if you can’t stop us and we all die in a horrible magical incident before you even get the chance to go to space?”

“Then I’ll be pissed at you sure, but ride or die, y’know? And besides” -- he grins, wickedly, and Apollo regrets everything -- “I bet Trucy’s the person I’m waiting for who can properly use all this middle-school-stories ammunition I’ve got saved up about you.”

#fic: the seelie of kurain #roddy fanfics #surprise! where's the plot going now? no one but me knows! it's gonna be fun!#next chapter is a treasure hunt except at the end it's just more of the gramaryes being terrible #posting this at 11 pm because in the spirit of clay: FUCK IT #sorry if you were about to want to sleep

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