#with edgeworth and it's like oh. i see it now. and then she disappears forever. | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

wardencommanderrodimiss · 5 years

Text

the one where Trucy accidentally finds out

a fic I wrote start to finish today, based on this conversation yesterday and two very great comments from @anza-redstar and @runningwolf62

It’s ten years, to the day, April 19, when Daddy and Uncle Miles come into the office with a box so big that Trucy has no idea how it fit into Uncle Miles’ sports car. “What is that?” she asks, tucking the book she was reading back onto the shelf so it doesn’t get lost in the mess, and scampering over to look at the box. “A new microwave?”

“No such luck, kiddo,” Daddy says. “We’re using this one until it explodes.”

Uncle Miles glowers, like he expects that the office microwave will indeed someday explode. (It’s not as old as Trucy, but it’s older than her time with Daddy. It’s older than his friendship with Aunt Maya. So is Charley. So are most of the things in the office that aren’t related to magic.) Then he fidgets, awkwardly -- Uncle Miles is a very awkward man, and when he isn’t in a courtroom or on a crime scene, most of his movements are awkward -- and holds his arm like it hurts, because that’s what he does when he’s uncomfortable enough to realize that he is being awkward. “These are items that the police held onto related to… to the case ten years ago. Your grandfather’s death.”

“Oh.”

“It’s mostly papers,” Uncle Miles continues, still awkward, and Trucy does him the favor of looking away from him and prying open the box. Whoever taped the top wasn’t trying very hard. “Anything the police hoped could help enlighten them on the case. Personally, I think it was unnecessary for them to seize all of this, but I was not on the case. I saw your parents’ wedding certificate, in there, for instance.”

“I wonder if this is where your birth certificate went,” Daddy says. “I had to pay a lot for a copy.”

Uncle Miles rolls his eyes. He almost smiles. Then the moment is gone and he is frowning. “Usually this wouldn’t be released for another five years -- the statute of limitations is fifteen years -- but considering that this case is… sort of solved, as best as it will ever be, I pulled a few strings.”

“Thanks for that, Edgeworth.”

There are two more smaller boxes inside the large box. Other papers are piled up haphazardly. It would give Uncle Miles a headache if he tried to sort through it for very long. At the top of the piles there is a small book that Trucy picks up and flips through. It’s handwritten -- a diary -- her grandfather’s handwriting, she recognizes from his book of tricks, the one that he left her father and he left her. She reads a page. Mundane, daily things. She’s glad for that. Life with the whole Troupe is fading from her memory, no matter how she tries to hold onto it. Maybe this will help refresh her memory. She flips through the pages and watches the words go by, until abruptly, the pages are blank. She runs her finger down the torn margin of a page. Something was ripped out, what might have been the last page.

She sets it aside. Daddy looks at it and his eyes widen. He looks a little sick.

“I don’t envy you having to decide what to keep,” Uncle Miles says. “Especially since you’re almost well-known enough to have cases, now.”

“Oh, come on.” Daddy shoves Uncle Miles in the shoulder. “One of these days, you’ve got to stop heckling me like I’m a newbie.”

“Hardly,” Uncle Miles says.

“Once I’ve had my badge again for as long as I did the first time, then you’ll be sorry.”

Trucy leaves them to argue and starts to shove the box out of the way. There’s almost a path clear enough on the floor for her to follow, and there’s space behind Polly’s desk for the box to sit. She picks up a stack of papers at random and plops them on the desk. There’s enough space on his desk and his chair for her to remove most of the loose papers from the box and get down to the other two, and a few folders. The first folder looks like insurance stuff. She gets up and walks over to Daddy’s desk and sets it down there. Hopefully it won’t disappear forever.

The smaller boxes look like they hold loose, non-paper memorabilia. Those will probably be the most fun to look through and so Trucy closes them and grabs some papers. She will save those as a treat for the end.

“Is that for a case?” Athena asks, absolute horror frozen on her face, stopped dead on the threshold. She would probably turn and sprint back through the office and out if Daddy weren’t standing right behind her.

He puts a hand on her shoulder to move her forward and aside. “Yep!” he says, cheerily.

Athena’s eyes are wide and she does not blink. She has not blinked for fifteen seconds. “You… you can take this one, Boss,” she says. “I’ve got, uh, another client, definitely -- Trucy looks like she’s got that covered as your co-counsel--”

“Athena. I’m kidding.”

The look she gives him, and then Trucy, is one of pure betrayal.

“It was from a case, a long time ago.” Daddy glances at Trucy, trying to gauge how much she’s okay with Athena knowing. Trucy shrugs. She likes Athena. She doesn’t care if Athena knows. She knows everything about Athena anyway. “When Trucy’s grandfather died, and when I adopted her.”

Died, not was killed, and while the latter is implied by it becoming a trial and a spectacle, Trucy always said died too because she never believed that either her father or Uncle Valant could ever have killed Grandfather. In her heart she knew that. And Daddy told her that was true, that Uncle Valant told him that was true.

Athena tilts her head. She must hear something. Trucy always knows if Daddy is lying but beyond that he is hard to read and that’s why he’s so good at poker. Athena has a better time figuring out what he is feeling. Sometimes Trucy asks her. “You had me scared for a minute there, Boss,” Athena says.

Trucy turns back to her papers, Athena sits down at her desk, and they both work in silence for a little while. Athena isn’t good at sitting still and eventually she is up on her feet, bouncing around the room to burn off some extra energy. “Anything interesting?” she asks.

“I’m looking at the boring stuff first,” Trucy replies. It isn’t boring, actually, not in her opinion. She’s a magician and a businesswoman and she knows now where she got it, her grandfather’s meticulous financial record-keeping. Maybe the police kept it because they thought he owed money to someone and that was why he was shot. There could be lots of reasons.

“Huh.” Athena stoops to examine the inside of the box and reaches in to poke at something. “Oh, boxes within boxes. Fun. That’s -- hey, who’s this?”

Trucy looks up. Athena is holding a small and rectangular page, a photo, examining it curiously. She must have pulled it out of one of the other boxes; Trucy doesn’t remember anything left lying in the bottom. “Let me see,” she says, extending a hand.

She knows the woman in the picture not by memory, but by the old Troupe memorabilia that she keeps carefully framed up on her walls, because she didn’t have photos her family together -- maybe this is where they all went -- and that was the best thing she had to remember all of them at once, Grandfather and Mommy and Daddy and Uncle Valant, because one was gone and then the other three were in quick succession. Athena should probably recognize her as well. She’s seen the old posters. “That’s my mom,” Trucy says.

Thalassa looks young, really young. How old was she when she had Trucy? How old was she when she disappeared? (Not died, because Trucy knows that disappeared can be a euphemism to shelter a little girl, but she also knows otherwise in her heart the way she knew that neither her father nor Uncle Valant killer her grandfather, and the way she knew that her father was only disappeared, not dead, until he was.) In the photo, she is more relaxed, posed naturally, than the posters, without any of the magician’s trappings. She has a smile like the sun, as bright as the bangle bracelets she has.

“Oh,” Athena says. Moms are a fraught subject for so many of them, Trucy (disappeared), Athena (dead), Apollo (gone), Pearl (jailed), Maya (dead).

“I don’t really remember her,” Trucy says. She turns the photo over in her hands looking for a date and finds the back is blank. “She’s been gone most of my life.” She avoids dead again, the way Daddy avoided was killed about her grandfather. “She was a magician. The brooch I have was hers. Blue was her color, too.”

“Oh, really?” Athena sits on the floor. She probably wanted an excuse not to do work and now she has one. “I thought it was blue like Mr Wright.”

“It’s blue for both of them,” Trucy says, because she can’t parse out what came first, looking again at the promotional material with her mother’s face or at the dusty suits in her new daddy’s closet. “You know, it’s funny, now. I’ve lived with Daddy longer than I ever did with my other daddy and the Troupe.”

She’s eighteen. It’s been a full decade. She grew up without any of the Gramaryes. It was why she was so excited to welcome Mr Reus to her performance, because she had dreamed of performing on stage with her family, and he was the closest thing left around. And then that went south, and she got Polly instead.

“Yeah,” Athena says softly, touching her earring. “It’ll be -- another year, year and a half, and then I’ll have lived half my life without my mother.” Her hand remains on her earring. “What was her name?”

“Thalassa.”

After a few days, bleary-eyed sorting through pages, more finances and ancient stage diagrams and bookings for performance venues that have been renamed and renovated, she sets the remaining stacks of papers aside and cracks open the box that Athena found the photo in. There are dozens of newspaper clippings of reviews of performances, some old TV Guides that mention the Troupe, and some more photos. There’s a few of the four of them, a few of five of them with Reus, and she quickly sets those aside beneath some papers to figure out what to do with. They’re valuable, important, but she can’t stand to look at his face, can’t stand to see him with them after what he did. She wonders why the police kept these, either -- maybe looking for other suspects. Maybe they just boxed up Magnifi’s life and didn’t bother to think about what might be important for his granddaughter to have.

She and Athena go out and buy frames for every picture of her family, her mother and her parents together and them and Uncle Valant and all of them, happy, smiling, and all of them and little baby Trucy. At the bottom there’s a photo of her mother and baby Trucy, but there’s a date written on the bottom and it’s years before Trucy was born. How did someone get the date so wrong? Was it thoughtlessly added later? There’s another picture of her mother, so young, so young, laughing with a man with brown hair and a guitar. Who is he? Another reject of the Troupe? Some friend outside of it? The Troupe was pretty insular, Trucy knows that much -- they had a lot of practice and performing to do. Of course it was always just them.

The two mysteries go in one of Apollo’s desk drawers.

The other box, at the top, has a certificate of marriage for Thalassa Gramarye and Shadi Enigmar. Trucy stares at it for a long, long time.

Beneath that, her birth certificate. She goes to wave it in her daddy’s face. “Look what was in there!” she announces.

He doesn’t look up. “A magic dove.”

“Daddy!”

He grins and takes the paper from her. “Now we’ve got an extra copy of it. Good to know.” His eyes travel over the mess on his desk. “As long as I don’t lose it here.”

Her grandfather has another diary, even older, some of the pen and pencil scratches starting to fade. She shelves that with the other one, intending to read them but not sure what she’ll find, almost afraid after Reus that there might be something dark in them. Or maybe she’ll learn for sure why he was kicked from the Troupe. What if it isn’t what she’s sure it was, that he didn’t have the attitude for it? What if it is like he thought? She doesn’t have the certainty that she does for other things.

When she comes back to the box, after standing in front of the shelves for a long time and then running off to Eldoon’s with Athena, she thinks for a moment that she for some reason put her parents’ marriage certificate back in. Why would she do that? She can’t afford to be absent-minded. She has a business to run. She has almost tossed it aside in annoyance when the name catches her eye.

It isn’t her father’s.

Her heart sits in her throat. Her mother was married before? No one ever said that. Is there anyone alive who knew that until Trucy found this? The name is Jove Justice. JJ. It’s a name Trucy has never heard before. There’s a wedding photo beneath it that looks like it was taken at a courthouse. The man in the photo is the brown-haired man. Her mother looks still so young. How young was she when she was married the first time? Would it be like if Athena got married now? If Trucy did? She hasn’t removed the photo from the box, just stared at it and stared, and beneath it she sees hints of another certificate, another birth certificate, probably, certainly, and she is ready to yell over to the next room where her daddy and Athena are working on a case, but first, she looks at it. She looks at the names.

That isn’t her father’s name either.

A sibling? An older sibling, going by the date on the marriage certificate, and she is afraid of what she will find next. A death certificate? That would explain why no one ever spoke of this, why she grew up with no one her age around her, why when all the adults were gone she was alone --

She looks at the names again, not just Thalassa Gramarye and Jove Justice, but the baby. Baby boy. Her brother. Baby, her older brother. Her brother --

She’s losing her mind. No, she lost it, completely, finally, and it’s been six months since she’s seen Apollo, she’s only seen him once since May when she was sure he would be a fixture in her life for the rest of it, when she was sure she would always have him around to tease and annoy, and it’s because she misses him that her mind is doing this, is putting that name there, and she touches the words printed on the certificate and wonders when her eyes will refocus and she will actually learn the name of the brother she lost, her half-brother, son of Thalassa Gramarye and Jove --

Jove --

Justice.

Not sure what else to do, not sure how to react -- how did Pearl react when she learned about Iris? She was young then and maybe it made more sense then, maybe this would have made more sense to Trucy when she was little -- she screams.

This is, to put it mildly, not the best idea when the two people she shares the office with are two twitchy people who have had loved ones murdered and are still paranoid or traumatized from it, two people who go together to crime scenes and see bodies and piece together murders and are doing that right now and are in the worst mind frame to hear screaming.

Her daddy’s face is bloodless, and Athena has her fists up, and they barrel into the room together and find Trucy sitting on the floor surrounded by loose papers and photos and boxes and holding one in her hands and screaming.

Athena does not have the time to parse out what exactly the emotions of the scream are, because that can wait until they are out of danger, so when she finds the danger is apparently the written word, she stops and listens. It isn’t pain, or fear -- there is no fear in Trucy’s scream. If she had Widget analyze this, they would be spinning out of control with shock, not fear. And no anger. Sadness, blue cold sorrow, and joy, too, something red and warm, butting up against each other and drowning together in shock.

“Trucy, what’s wrong?” Mr Wright asks, crouching down to her level. His voice holds pain, of a sympathetic sort, pain and sadness. It’s written on his face, too, plain enough that Athena doesn’t need Apollo to see it. (Mr Wright sort of can notice things like Apollo did, and Trucy a little better, but neither of them are like Apollo.)

“My -- my mom -- my brother my brother -- he’s my half-brother – he’s my brother!”

Mr Wright doesn’t ask. She can’t hear anything when he’s silent. Something Athena can’t name flits across his face.

“Trucy, you don’t have a brother,” Athena says gently, sitting down next to her, moving to put an arm around her shoulders, wondering what words written on a paper could turn bright, composed Trucy into a gibbering mess. Trucy pushes her away and shoves the paper she is holding at her instead.

“My brother!”

It’s a birth certificate, dated twenty-four years ago. Athena starts to read it off. “Born to Thalassa Gramarye” – that’s Trucy’s mother’s name, but this can’t be Trucy – “and Jove…”

Oh, god, she’s heard the name Jove before, and it was in Khura’in, and it was the story of a dead father and a lost child who was never returned to his mother–

“Jove Justice,” she says, her voice finally unsticking, and it trembles, and anyone without her ears could hear her shock. “And – Apollo Justice.”

That’s Apollo, that’s their Apollo, twenty-four years old and a father named Jove but that’s Trucy’s mother, their Trucy, Gramarye, and her mother, Thalassa.

“He’s my brother,” Trucy says softly. “Polly’s my brother – Polly’s my brother and that’s – that’s why – that’s--” She springs up, runs out of the room, comes back a moment later with a photo of her mother. “Bracelets!” she shouts. “Look, look, it’s like – like his!”

Golden bangle bracelets with a thin lined pattern encircling them. Athena’s head is spinning. She looks at Mr Wright, waiting for shock. Surprise. Anything. He has a good poker face but big surprises, he doesn’t quite hide. This, he’s hiding, and he’s still not saying anything, not moving, not reacting, and Athena can’t hear anything. Maybe Apollo could. Maybe Trucy could if she weren’t too torn up by her own shock to concentrate. Hers hasn’t faded; it still permeates her voice, entirely.

“Apollo’s your brother,” Athena says. “Apollo is – Mein Gott, Apollo’s your brother.” She laughs. She doesn’t know what to do but laugh. She looks back down at the names on the paper. They haven’t changed. “He’s not going to believe you when you tell him!”

“Can I see that?” Mr Wright asks, quietly, gesturing at the certificate. Athena hands it to him. “Thanks.” There’s only the barest amount of shock in his voice, buried deep, and there’s some other things, more complicated, a little too complicated for Widget. Some sadness that isn’t quite sad, not sorrow or grief, but something like regret. “Huh.”

He hands it back to her, and she runs for the scanner – it was a gift from Prosecutor Edgeworth that Mr Wright doesn’t know how to or want to use – so she can email proof to Apollo, while Trucy runs for a phone.

Apollo wakes to the buzzing of his cell phone beneath his head. It’s dark when he opens his eyes. What time is it, he wonders, knocking his phone to the floor with a thunk before he can manage to pick it up. Three am. Three am, and Trucy is calling. He fell asleep still fully dressed on top of the covers because he and Nahyuta were compiling their evidence for an overly complicated case until midnight, and when he went upstairs to the living quarters – after nearly a year, he still thinks of it as Dhurke’s, not his – and now, for whatever reason, he is being awoken by Trucy, who really should know what a time zone is at this point. “Hello? Trucy, what the hell--”

“Apollo you’re my brother!”

“Trucy, it’s three am.” Apollo sits up and regrets it. “I don’t know what conversations you’re having over there that – adopting people into your family -- but--”

“Apollo! I’m serious! Your mom is my mom! We’re half-siblings, Apollo!”

“What.” Maybe he’s still asleep. Does it really work to pinch yourself? Is that really a thing? “My – my mom--”

He doesn’t actually know what happened to his mother, just that Dhurke never found her. There are a thousand things that could mean in a country in turmoil.

“She’s my mom! Thalassa Gramarye! We’re siblings, Apollo!”

“Check your email!” That’s Athena’s voice, and some squeaks of a squabble. She probably ripped the phone from Trucy’s hands. “We sent you a copy of your birth certificate!”

“My – my birth certificate?” Apollo rolls onto his feet. There’s a little bit of moonlight spilling in through the windows. It had only recently, last year, occurred to him, after seeing Nahyuta again, that his birth certificate, all of his documentation, was forged. Dhurke didn’t even know his father’s first name. None of it could be real. He’s tried not to think about it since he came to Khura’in, about how he’s basically going to be immigrating back to his home country, the country of his birth, because his passport is built on a forged document, because all of it is, and he can’t in good conscience keep using it. He has a Khura’inese passport now. The birth date listed in it is still made up. “You’ve got to be kidding me with all of this -- if this is a joke -- it’s three am-- where’s my laptop?"

It’s downstairs. He isn’t good at taking these stairs in the dark. They’re slightly different heights halfway down.

“Apollo, we would not do this to you,” Athena says. He believes her. She was in the gallery last May as his family history was laid bare for everyone. She should know well what this means to him.

But then that means – and that’s stupid. Right?

He realizes too late that Nahyuta did not return to the palace and instead passed out at his kitchen table, and no matter how low Apollo keeps his voice, he has already woken his brother up. He remembers Nahyuta sleeping like a log when they were children, but there is so much about Nahyuta he remembers from when they were children that no longer applies, because even free of Ga’ran’s chains, the years apart, with the revolution, gave time for his brother to become someone else, someone who can personally help update prison security because he knows the best ways to break out of them, someone who can throw a knife almost as well as Datz. Someone who awakes at the slightest sound, because that might be the regime’s forces come to arrest them all.

Even if he lives in a palace now. Even if he rules the country now.

Apollo grabs his laptop off the couch. Nahyuta’s pale eyes are open. “What is going on?” he asks.

He lowers the phone from his mouth. “I have a sister.”

He says it automatically, even though he has no confirmation; he has only Trucy and Athena’s words at three am.

Nahyuta does not lift his head off his arms. Apollo can’t see his mouth but the skin around his eyes looks like he might be smiling. He definitely sounds like it. “I am glad you have finally accepted that you may call Rayfa such, but why at this time--”

“No, I mean, blood-related.” It can’t be -- she can’t be. But -- but this would be the cruelest joke to play -- and they wouldn’t. They aren’t like that. “A half-sister. My mother.”

Nahyuta raises his head.

“Apollo? You still there?”

He brings his laptop to the table, where Nahyuta has shifted aside crime scene photographs and copies of testimony to clear a space. He gestures at the lamp, giving Apollo enough time to brace himself for the light. “Okay, I’m checking my email now.” Sure enough, there is one from the main office email, with an attachment, and the subject line a keysmash. Either Athena or Trucy could have written that. “It’s loading… slowly…”

He helps Nahyuta reorganize their evidence while he waits. He wonders how long his brother was awake after Apollo went up at midnight. Maybe he wasn’t ever actually asleep. After about a minute, he returns, scanning what does indeed appear to be a birth certificate. And the names – Thalassa Gramarye, yes, Trucy’s mother – and – Jove Justice –

Apollo slumps down in his chair. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” he says. “There’s no way – there’s no fucking way--”

“We found it in a box of my grandfather’s things,” Trucy says, breathlessly, but she isn’t shouting like she was. “With my birth certificate, and my parents’ marriage documentation, and yours – it’s got to be real, Polly, it’s got to be! Your bracelet! Your power! Mine’s like it – like how I taught you what to do – it’s a Gramarye thing – the bracelet is our mother’s! There’s a picture of her – I’ll send that – Athena--”

There are more sounds of distant scrambling. Apollo stares at the screen. Apollo Justice. His name is there, Apollo, and Jove, and Thalassa Gramarye –

Nahyuta leans over his shoulder. “Your birth certificate?” he asks. Apollo pushes him away until his hair isn’t falling in his face. “Yes, your father, Jove Justice” – he’s reading it the other way, right to left, because that is how Khura’inese is written – “and Thalassa…”

“Yeah.” Apollo says. He doesn’t hear anything on the other side of the phone now. They probably dropped it.

“Gramarye,” Nahyuta says. “Gramarye, as in…” He presses his hands over his eyes.

Gramarye, as in the trial where they met for the first time in fifteen years. Gramarye, the trial where Nahyuta tried to get Trucy – Apollo’s sister, his sister – convicted of murder.

“Yeah,” Apollo says.

It’s quiet, nothing but the sound of the wind and the creak of the house settling. Or maybe a rat. Probably a rat.

“Now we know your real birthday,” Nahyuta says quietly. He sits on the table, still leaning over the screen to look at it, like he still can’t believe it either. “We’ll have to tell Datz.”

“Now we have proof that I’m an American citizen,” Apollo says. Now he has a sister. That’s hardest to believe. He said it earlier just fine, but now, with proof, with something real, something with those names, Gramarye and Justice, side by side, his tongue freezes. “And my mother’s name -- I have names for both of them. I have…”

A sister. A sister. He had his sister for two years and then he left to help his brother. When Phoenix told him about Magnifi’s death, that was the death of Apollo’s grandfather. And when he told him about Trucy’s mother being shot -- that was Apollo’s mother’s death, too.

His heart sinks. She’s dead. He can’t meet either of them. He saw the last moments of life of his father by blood; he reunited with his father who raised him in time for him to die; he found his mother to know that she already died without having to look for that information.

A faint noise arises from somewhere to his right and a few seconds later he realizes it’s voices through the phone. “Polly! Polly! Did you just abandon us? Apollo!”

“Sorry,” he says. “I was talking to Nahyuta.”

“Oooh, three am, you sounded so mad like I woke you up, and now you’re like, nah, I was hanging out with my brother instead.”

“We were working on a case, and you did wake me up--”

“Oh! If he’s your brother then is he also my brother?”

“Maybe? You’d have to ask him. He says that his sister is my sister, so I guess it would work backwards…”

Nahyuta is frowning. He probably can piece together what Trucy’s question was by Apollo’s answer, and his expression might either mean that he doesn’t want Trucy as his sister (unlikely) or that he is once again remembering how harsh he was in her trial and grappling with the fact that she is not only his brother’s dear friend, but now his own sister (much more likely).

“Does Mr Wright know this?”

“Yeah, he was around when I found the stuff. He hasn’t really said much. Maybe he’s trying to figure out whether he’s your dad or not, since he’s my dad and I’m your sister so you’re sort of, like -- maybe?”

Apollo wants to say that historically, being his father is something like a curse, but he wouldn’t say it to Trucy, who also has a dead father, or in front of Nahyuta, when that shared wound has not yet closed. (Apollo got the closest thing to closure. Nahyuta’s last conversation with him was while they stood as enemies in the detention center. Rayfa never knew him.) “Maybe,” Apollo says, and his mouth is dry.

A second email pops up, again from the office address. “Just sent you a picture!” Athena chimes in. Apollo can picture her leaning over Trucy’s shoulder to shout into the phone, the same way that Nahyuta is leaning over his shoulder to look at the laptop screen.

“It’s our mom!” Trucy adds. Our. Our mother. Apollo doesn’t know what to do with that phrase.

The picture that loads is of a woman with braided light brown hair, wearing a white dress. Her hands are visible in the image, and around her wrists, two golden bangle bracelets. Two bracelets just like one that sits on Apollo’s wrist. He tears his eyes from his mother’s face -- his mother, his mother -- and looks at Nahyuta, whose eyes are on Apollo’s bracelet as well. “Oh,” Apollo says. He tabs over to google for an old Troupe Gramarye poster, to compare the face of Magnifi’s daughter there, to the photo with the bracelets. Like he expects to see it’s a different person. Like he expects somewhere, this will fall apart, and it hasn’t. It doesn’t. Trucy is saying something and the words don’t make it from his ears to his brain.

“Trucy,” he says, and she falls silent. “Can you give me… like, an hour to process this, and then I’ll call you back?”

“O-okay.” She doesn’t sound happy. Apollo’s heart sinks further. He hopes she’ll understand that this isn’t anything against her.

“You know we have a trial in the morning,” Nahyuta says.

“Yeah, and our strategy from the start was already just ‘fuck it’.” Apollo uncovers the phone. Trucy and Athena both know that’s always their court strategy, but he doesn’t want them to rag on him some more. “All right. Talk to you in a bit, Trucy.”

“See ya, Polly.”

Apollo pushes the laptop away and rests his forehead on the table. “How can one family have so many secrets?”

“The Gramaryes?” Nahyuta asks. He knows the tangled web woven beneath the surface. He saw it in the trial. Apollo doesn’t know what additional else he knows, how much he researched -- knowing Nahyuta, back when Trucy was on trial, he looked up the transcript of the trial that’s ten years ago now, and the ones three years ago.

“The Gramaryes, and -- our family -- every family I’m a part of, murder and -- secret siblings and -- long-lost siblings, and -- more murder.” Even if Nahyuta read everything on-record, he wouldn’t know how Thalassa died. “I just wanted a normal life, I -- god, I couldn’t have been normal even if my father wasn’t killed, or even if Dhurke found my mother, if I grew up with her family I--”

“Would have been a magician, or a singer, perhaps,” Nahyuta said. “Could, perhaps, have grown up with your younger sister.”

Athena would be able to figure out what he is feeling when he says it, but Apollo doesn’t have much to go on. Nahyuta can keep his voice level too easily. Apollo can guess, though: sorrow, longing, regret.

“I wouldn’t be here now, though,” Apollo says. “Wouldn’t have known you, and Dhurke, and--”

Couldn’t have helped you. Couldn’t have saved you. Nahyuta glances away. He must be thinking the same.

“I wish Dhurke could’ve seen this, at least,” Apollo adds. “That sending me back would, eventually, let me find my family. And that--” He stops. Something has crawled its way back to the front of his memory, something that he blocked out that then disappeared behind more important things. “Oh, god.”

“What?”

He must sound horrified, because Nahyuta looks incredibly concerned. “Dhurke met Trucy, when he -- when he came over with Maya” -- if he phrases it like that it’s easier to not have to relive the moment the truth hit him -- “to get the Founder’s Orb, and -- god, he was like, ‘hey, son, nudge nudge, this girl would be good bride material’ -- eurgh.”

“Ugh.” Nahyuta puts his face in his hands. “Why did he have to be like--”

“Dhurke, why?”

It’s a question Apollo asked a lot -- it’s a question he still asks -- but it usually hurts more than this. Even if he does still sort of want to die.

“By the Holy Mother, there had better be an earthquake at the palace,” Nahyuta says, “from Father deservedly turning over in his tomb.” Nahyuta pauses. “Isn’t she seventeen?”

“Yeah.”

Nahyuta sighs. “Too young for that. And too young to be framed for murder.” He doesn’t say much about that trial, always gets a sick guilty look on his face whenever they skirt close to the topic. “Perhaps he meant she seemed a good kid and would be a welcome addition to our family, which is in itself a new sort of irony, that she already is, no marrying her off to one of us necessary.” He isn’t looking at Apollo, clearly pondering something else too. “You know,” he adds after a minute, “Mother was only nineteen when she had me. Ga’ran… used that against Dhurke, at the trial. She could claim that she was still young and naive and easily-duped, even though Dhurke was only twenty then. And twenty-two at the trial.” His eyes are vacant. “They were too young.”

Apollo hadn’t done the math on that. “She was only twenty-one when her sister tried to kill her.” When he was twenty-one, he was studying for the bar. When Nahyuta was twenty-one, he was already under Ga’ran’s thumb trying to protect his little sister. “I wonder how old my mother was. When she had me, and when -- when she lost her husband.” Too young to have lost so much, without question. “And when she died.”

Nahyuta doesn’t ask how Apollo knows that she’s dead. They sit in silence, looking at her picture. His mother. His half-sister. Sister.

“Apollo Gramarye,” he mutters. He shakes his head. “Doesn’t have quite the same ring.”

Nahyuta doesn’t respond, but after about a minute, he starts laughing. “What?” Apollo asks. Is he finally having the breakdown that probably, honestly, he probably needs to have? Is Apollo the one losing his mind? Did they both lose it?

“That damned murderer -- the magician, Retinz, Reus -- what karmic justice he faced.” Nahyuta shakes his head, still chuckling. “He was convinced that, though his plots were exposed, he had won against the Gramaryes, because he fooled Trucy and she needed you to save her. But you are a Gramarye by blood just as well as she. So he did, ultimately, lose to the Gramaryes.”

“Huh.” Apollo only vaguely remembers Reus saying that. He just remembers how relieved he was that Trucy was safe. He just remembers the sick feeling in his stomach listening to Nahyuta. His sister, and his brother. What a shitshow: the Gramaryes, the Khura’inese royals, and the two families together. “Man, what were the odds? That my law career would start like that, that I’d end up at the right place--”

“The Wright place.”

“It wasn’t a pun, Nahyuta, shut up. -- The place where I just… my sister’s there. I end up working for the man who adopted my sister. What are the odds?”

“I think the Holy Mother puts people where they need to be,” Nahyuta says. “You, to find them -- you, to find us again.”

“She was definitely putting me through some trials, there, at the start.”

“Perhaps this is another sign from Her.” Apollo shrugs when Nahyuta does not immediately elaborate on the thought. “That your sister has discovered this, now. It’s been nearly a year you have been in Khura’in, helping me, has it not? Perhaps this is a sign that you are due to return and spend time again with your other family.”

Maybe he’s right. Maybe it is.

His sister.

“Once you finish your current docket of cases,” Nahyuta adds.

Apollo punches him in the shin.

Please leave your message after the tone, and I will return your call.

“Hey, Thalassa, it’s Phoenix. So, funny story about the kids…”

#lmk if you don't wanna be tagged but i wanted to give credit where credit is due #for a great concept and a few lines of dialogue that i've borrowed for this #ace attorney #anyway i have a reading to do for class tomorrow now i think #i started this at 9:30 this morning and then had class and lunch and then started writing again #and basically haven't stopped writing since #ace attorney bullshit tag #roddy fanfics #this was meant to be funny but also became partially a character study on trucy and apollo's fucked-up family lives

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mylittleedgey · 7 years

Text

Phoenix tried to crane his neck to look at the other man. “How do you feel about me?”

The answer came with almost no hesitation. “Significantly stronger than I’m comfortable with admitting to.”

“For how long?”

“...How long has it been for you?”

He sighed. “When we were in elementary school, I told my parents I was going to marry you. They told me it was illegal, and I said you would be a lawyer then so you could make it work.” he smiled wistfully. “I didn’t understand gay sex, or much about sex at all beyond what Larry had told me...”

“Which was absolute rubbish.” Miles interjected.

“Indeed.” Phoenix agreed wholeheartedly. “You know what I mean, though, right? It wasn’t like, creepy, I just wanted you to be part of my life forever. Like my parents were to each other, but before I realized Mom wasn’t really just trying to help Dad fix his zipper with her teeth that time they thought I was asleep.” He laughed nervously. “I’ve always considered it my first crush, if that doesn’t sound too creepy? My parents almost had me convinced it was just a phase I went through until I saw you on TV as an adult. I mean, I’d seen pictures in the paper, but the whole package, and that voice on top of it...” He nudged the other man. “And you?”

“More complicated.” he replied, and for the first time in a very long while Phoenix saw him grip his arm in that pose that always meant he was remembering something painful. “I suppose in retrospect it was obvious that Von Karma was trying to distance me from my past life, to keep me isolated and at his mercy… but at the time I believed everything he said about ridiculous childhood games and boyhood obsessions that would only serve to hinder my growth. I spent a great many years without thinking about you, save through the veil of shame I cast over my entire childhood.” Phoenix was silent, but wrapped an arm around the prosecutor’s waist in an awkward reclining hug. “You must understand, that on one level I blamed my childish ways for causing the panic that had caused me to block out the memories of my father’s death, preventing me from helping to convict my father’s murderer, and on a deeper level I believed it was my dangerous hysteria that had caused me to… to e-end my father’s life.” He gritted his teeth. “I’m sorry, none of this is what you asked.” he replied in a distant tone that indicated his mind was far away in an elevator he’d never fully escaped, even now.

“I’m sorry.” Phoenix breathed. Words were ridiculous at a time like that.

“No, don’t be.” Miles replied, and no mood matrix was necessary to show how high strung he was. “I-I only say this so you understand that the sheer contempt I showed for you when we met again was an extension not only of my indoctrination by Von Karma, but the bitter hatred I felt for myself. Even when I saw that you had sacrificed so much to help me, I couldn’t accept those feelings, let alone return them. It would have required me to confront everything I’d been running from. I literally was not able to speak to you.” The self-reproach that had dogged him seemed stronger than ever now, and he stood nervously, refastening his pants and smoothing his vest. “Zip your pants, Wright, I can’t speak to you when you’re like that.”

“Hey, I...” He stood quickly and rushed to make himself presentable. The one-eighty in Miles’ personality left him breathless with worry.

“No, please don’t go, I’m sorry.” he stammered a little too quickly for his usual dignity. “I’m...” he breathed in deeply. “I’m okay. It’s just been a while since it all came out last.” When Phoenix stepped forward, he was shocked to feel the slightly taller man surge forward and encircle his arms around his shoulders. “It was almost like a fail-safe. He couldn’t bring me down in court, but everything he had beaten into me was so strong that I couldn’t understand how to break it. Gant too, he knew exactly what he was doing.”

Phoenix wanted to respond, but there was nothing. “I was there. I’ve always been there.” he finally announced weakly, hoping it didn’t sound accusatory. “Even when you can’t bring yourself to speak to me, know that I’m always there for you.”

Miles was silent for several moments. “You know when an animal is sick, and they somehow realize their time is up? They distance themselves from everyone to die alone. Maybe they don’t understand what’s happening, but they still do. It’s instinct. I think that’s how it was for me.” Phoenix said nothing, but his grip tightened nervously. “I’m sorry I frightened you when I left, but I’m glad you didn’t see me like that. It wasn’t a pretty sight.”

“You don’t ever have to be pretty for me.” he replied softly with a half smile, and he stops short of mentioning he’s never known a time when the other man wasn’t pretty. “But I try to respect your privacy. I know you don’t like to be seen like this.”

“You’ve seen me worse.” Miles breathed into his shoulder. “Only you.” The room was silent and still for several moments, but Phoenix was surprised to find that it wasn’t awkward. Instead, it felt surprisingly intimate. “In any case, to answer your question, it was probably six months from after our being reunited when I admitted to myself that my ridiculous feelings for you were not going away, as much as I hoped they would. When I met you again and you went on that tirade about how you never wanted to see me again, I thought it was all settled, but then you had the poor grace to forgive my cowardice. In my time abroad following that I decided it was time to come clean, for better or for worse, but then, before I could...” he paused. “You asked me to defend the love of your life.”

“Oh….” Well, that answered his next question, namely what the hell kept them from doing this years ago. “I’m sorry,” The words lost meaning after a while.

“I never blamed you. You follow your heart, and if it led you to save me, how could I fault it for leading you to others? I admire it immensely, as hard as I am on you about it. You were so single-minded on saving her, I felt like you didn’t even see me there. I guess I accepted it as my punishment for treating you so badly. But then, when the truth came out in court...” he cleared his throat, and Phoenix distinctly heard the breath catch. “I knew I had lost. I couldn’t compete with someone who loved you so strongly, or so openly. What happened with her?” There was genuine confusion in his voice.

“We’re good friends. Still, actually.” Phoenix replied shyly. “Trucy and Pearl call her Aunt Iris. She’s the one that taught Trucy how to knit my Papa hat, you know. Trucy taught her how to make things disappear. She’s pretty good at it, it freaks the crap out of Bikini.” There was a continued silence. “I… I went to see her a lot in prison.”

“I know.” Miles answered quietly.

“Oh, you saw that?” One hand instinctively went to the back of his neck.

“I admit it was extremely unprofessional of me, but I was aware. Every Friday, for three years. You only missed twice.” His teeth bared in what was hard to describe as anything but a grimace. “It ate me alive that I was being so petty, but every time you visited I held my breath and awaited the formalization of your relationship. I swear, though, I never used my connections to listen in.”

“Well,” Phoenix chuckled awkwardly, “you might have saved us both a lot of trouble if you had. We talked for hours, and it was so much like old times, but it was never… like it had been. We never really discussed it until maybe a year in. Out of the blue, one day she asked me if ‘it was Mr. Edgeworth’. No context. I mean, I figured it out pretty quick, but I couldn’t answer her directly, and I guess that was all she needed to know. The next time we met, it was as friends.”

“I… see...” Miles was surprisingly calm and thoughtful. “She and I rarely spoke, but I do recall that she specifically requested that I not be present at her parole hearing. It seemed odd, seeing how I served as her defense council. I wonder… if she didn’t want to see me.” His eyes shifted in an almost guilty smile. “I always got the feeling that she knew exactly what my feelings were for you.”

“When I didn’t?”

“She was a very perceptive young lady.”

“If she knew, she could have said something.” Phoenix pointed out.

His gaze soured. “Were I in her position, I don’t believe I would have done any different.” he admitted darkly. “I would never have consciously come between you and your happiness, but to actually be the catalyst that brought you together with another...”

Phoenix studied his face with total confusion. “There’s no way I’m worth both of you losing sleep.” The idea that Miles actually had feelings for him was strange enough, but the idea that two people he cared about felt strongly enough to anguish over who he chose… it went beyond flattering and into the profoundly disturbing. “I never meant to hurt anyone.”

“Of course you didn’t.” There was a smile again, and a little squint that went straight to his spine in a nervous tingle. “You don’t have it in you. It’s your nature to care about everyone, just as much as it is for people like Iris and I to be taken in by it.”

“You seem to have a lot of respect for her considering she’s a rival.”

“As I do for you, my greatest rival.” Miles smiled. “But in all seriousness, I understand her well. Perhaps better than you. Her greatest crime was that she allowed her sister to convince her to sacrifice her own morals for the sake of Dahlia’s ‘greater good’. I’m sure it was slow, and subtle, and probably at the expense of her own confidence, her very identity. She may have gone her entire life without realizing how low she’d allowed herself to be dragged if it hadn’t been for you. We’re the same in that way.”

He’d certainly never thought of it that way, but it made a lot of sense. “It must not have been easy for the truth to come out like it did, but I believe she was better for it.” Miles continued. “No, I’ve been too close to her situation to ever wish evil on her.” Hie smiled with just hint of bitterness. “I wouldn’t trade places with her for anything, of course. I’m not that good a person.”

“You really feel that strongly about me?”

Miles’ eyes darted to the side again, the way they tended to when he was embarrassed. “How many ways are you going to make me say it, Wright? I could start in other languages, but I just don’t see where it would do either of us any good.”

“I’m not trying to tease you.” Phoenix explained quickly. “I just… I can’t believe you, or anyone, really, would look at plain old Phoenix Wright and see something worth fighting over.”

“You’ve had some destructive relationships.” Miles pointed out with a frown that only experience taught him was concern. “I know very little about your love life, but I’m aware of that. That’s why I thought you would be better off with someone like Iris, who could actually treat you right and let you know how important you were, as opposed to someone like me, who would call you an idiot on your deathbed and will likely never pay you a compliment without it hiding an insult.” He shrugged suddenly, indicating that line of conversation was over without waiting for a response. “But I guess that’s neither here nor there if you’re satisfied with my personality as it is.” Suddenly he stood, picking up his phone and settling himself down behind his desk. “And while we’re on the subject of my shortcomings as a partner, I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to leave in about twenty minutes. I have some meetings to attend to, and there’s really no excuse I can see for inviting an unrelated defense attorney to them. So we should probably get the more important aspects of the relationship defined now.” He finished whatever he was typing on the phone and set it down, folding his hands neatly on top of the desk. “Unless you’d like to try sex again? We could probably make it in time.” The words were spoken with such a bold lack of hesitance that Phoenix could barely shrug stiffly in reply. “But there will be plenty of time for that later, when we’re better prepared.”

“Just to make sure we’re perfectly clear, I am not in any sort of relationship that would prevent me from starting one with you, and I have no objections to the idea. I don’t smoke and I never drink to excess, in fact I believe you’re familiar with any of my bad habits that would interfere with a relationship. I’m not sure if I snore, I haven’t had anyone watch me sleep in years besides Gumshoe, and he wouldn’t tell me.” He looked up suddenly and harshly. “I nod off in the office occasionally, before you ask. Sexually, I’m comfortable with both giving and receiving. I’m known to be rather controlling in either position. I should mention that although I’ve had many complaints about my personality and the like, I’ve never had a single partner criticize my abilities. In fact, response has been overwhelmingly positive.” He maintained the confident eye contact until Phoenix finally looked away with a blush. “But I promise I’m always open to suggestions for improvement.” His eyes narrowed. “And it will improve in case you were worried about that. I’m afraid I was a bit off my game today. I’d normally prefer advance warning, but as they say, fortune favors the bold.”

“As for my emotional qualifications, I don’t normally do ‘relationships’. I would prefer you not pressure me into putting feelings into words. I have no problem with providing you with a monogamous relationship if that’s what you choose, and in case it wasn’t clear, your daughter is a charming young lady and I have no wish to interfere with her life or your involvement in it. I… can’t guarantee that I can hold my own weight in our... affiliation. I also… can’t promise that I won’t hurt you, as I know I have done in the past. I can only promised that I would never do so intentionally. These are, I’m afraid, the best terms that I can offer you. Is that acceptable?”

It seemed like an odd set of stipulations from a man who had practically jumped on him at the first sign of affection, but there would be time later. In a way, the utterly indifferent way he laid out the relationship like a legal document was comforting. “I… agree to the terms and conditions?”

Miles smiled, giving that odd squint that made Phoenix’s heart flutter like a lovesick teenager. “My first question for you would be: do you have any idea how your daughter feels about you being in a relationship? Would it make a difference if it was with another man? I’ve heard her ‘new mommy’ talks.”

“Actually,” he replied awkwardly, “she’s the one that put me up to visiting you today.”

He blinked. “You’ve spoken to your daughter about us?”

“Well, I kinda might have mentioned to her that I heard you talking to whichever Paine it was at the party last month, and he kinda implied you liked me, and you kinda didn’t deny it...” he explained.

“That’s what this is about?!” Miles sputtered.

“...Yes?”

He sighed. “Of all the ridiculous….”

“...Does that change things?”

“Not really, it’s just…” He drummed his fingers on the desk testily. “He does that from time to time, normally when he’s drunk. He changes the target of my affections occasionally. Usually it’s Blackquill these days. After all, I helped save his life, obviously I must be...” he trailed off distractedly. “To think his idiotic rambling...”

“...I’m sorry?”

To his surprise, Edgeworth strode strongly around the desk, took his shoulders roughly, and claimed the attorney’s mouth in a dominating kiss. “I refuse to acknowledge his role in my current happiness.” he announced curtly as he pulled away.

“...Sorry?”

“But you...” Miles continued. “If I’d known that was all it took, I would have started rumors myself.” His hips angled forward, trapping Phoenix against the desk, and it was suddenly very apparent that his partner was more than ready for a second go already. Lips closed on his mouth again, and Phoenix was again blown away by the fact that he was in a heavily physical relationship with High Prosecutor Miles Edgeworth. He leaned into the other body, shifting to better accommodate the angles with his own…

“Hey, Pal, I- whoaaaaaa!” Phoenix jumped back, forgetting that there was nothing behind him but desk, and impaled himself on Edgeworth’s name plate. “Should… I…?

“Detective!” Edgeworth answered with his usual composure and a great deal more than his usual contentment. “Mr. Wright and I were just discussing the opportunity of a new partnership. And I did indeed call you for a reason.” Ignoring Phoenix, he walked to meet the tall detective. “I need you to pick something up from the drugstore, can you do that for me? it’s a personal matter, so I’m afraid you’ll need to clock out for a break, but...” He slid a crisp piece of paper our of his wallet and handed it to the older man. “This should compensate you for your troubles.”

“You don’t have to-”

“-I want to.” Edgeworth interrupted. “The contents are rather embarrassing, but it’s already paid for and I’ve asked that the bag be stapled with the receipt on the inside. Is that alright?”

“Well, sure, Sir, but...”

“And Detective?” Edgeworth looked up.

“Yes, Sir?”

“You may feel free to congratulate me, if you wish.” he replied with a quiet smile.

The detective was still for a second, like a dog being invited on a couch it knows it’s not allowed on. Then instinct took over and he enveloped his boss in a massive bear hug. “Oh, Mr. Edgeworth, I’m just so happy for you, sir!” He was almost bawling, and Phoenix quickly realized that Gumshoe’s unease wasn’t from catching his boss with his longtime rival, but merely not knowing how their relationship allowed him to react. “Good for you, sir!” He gestured towards Phoenix. “You too, come here!”

“I’m… good, thank you.”

Edgeworth scowled over the massive bulk of one of Gumshoe’s arms. “If I have to, you have to.” he commanded, only half joking, and Phoenix begrudgingly joined the group hug.

“Who was it that confessed?” Gumshoe asked.

“Wright, actually.”

“Congratulations, Pal!” Phoenix was rewarded with a hearty thump on his shoulder that threatened to knock the wind out of him. “See, Mr. Edgeworth, I told you that piece of fluff with the braids didn’t have anything on you!”

“Detective!” For the first time in the conversation, Edgeworth went full scarlet in the face. “I told you-!”

“Oh!” Gumshoe straightened nervously. “I mean, Mr. Bright-”

“-Wright.” Edgeworth corrected.

“Mr. Wright, Sir, he never spoke badly about… well her, it’s just, I mean, I’m not even gay but Mr. Edgeworth is something else!” Like a parent who didn’t want to speak badly about the other kids in the class but was absolutely convinced that his child was a pure prodigy. “I mean, I guess you know, if you’ve been kissing on him-”

“Detective.”

“-And he really deserves someone to treat him right, and I guess your salary isn’t that great, but he can-”

“-Detective.” this time it was more authoritative.

“Oh, and I, uh, guess I’m still kinda interrupting things, but I’m really happy for you both, and you’re always welcome to dinner, and Maggey will make a cake-”

“Thank you, Detective. The order is under my name, but the clerk knows you by now, so you shouldn’t have a problem.”

“Yes Sir!” Gumshoe answered with a salute he recognized as Maggey’s signature response, and Phoenix wondered who had picked it up from whom. “Good luck, Sir!” He ran out the door, slamming it boisterously on the way.

“Good luck with what?” Miles wondered aloud.

“… So… Gumshoe knows?”

“Although he still doesn’t remember your name, apparently.” Edgeworth noted. “Yes, he does. I assure you I never told him anything, but he is actually a detective, and he does occasionally do his job. Not always when I’d prefer.”

“...Did you just send him on a lube run?”

“And condoms.” Miles noted. “And before you ask, it’s a matter of hygiene and I use them on toys as well.”

“I could have gotten-”

“I trust you with a great many things, Mr. Wright, but I assure you that I do not trust you to purchase the brands based on their protection against injury and infection rather than their cost.

“I could’ve-”

“What brand of condoms do you use?”

“I, uh...”

“What’s on sale?”

“Shove it.” Phoenix sulked.

“Oh, I intend to.” Miles smiled. “But I intend to do my shoving using glycerin-free water based lube and individually tested condoms. Now, I don’t mind telling you that that your self-imposed curfew is going to make things difficult. I don’t normally get out of here before eight. If you could be here by, say, eight fifteen I could give you a ride home and still make sure it’s worth both our whiles.”

“Wait, Trucy will be home by then, so we couldn’t...you know, at my place. The walls are pretty thin.”

“I live in Santa Monica, I doubt we’d have time to make it to my house and back even under optimal traffic. That leaves the office or the car.”

“You live in Santa Monica? Wait, you have a house? Not an apartment?”

Edgeworth sighed. “Do you really believe I’d waste so much money on something as extravagant as a sports car if I hadn’t taken care of basic living arrangements? Besides, it was hardly fair to Fushimi.” <- one of two dogs, it became my headcanon after working on this that Edgeworth has a problem with picking up dogs when puppy mills are busted and may have even financially helped Gumshoe get into a house because Gumshoe does better with multiple and badly trained dogs while Edgeworth finds homes for them. Also that Miles may use his position to try to influence people into adopting dogs?

---

Ended there when I realized getting into the house and the dog was just way too much talking. Parts of this were cannibalized into the finished story. Gumshoe’s mention of Iris made more sense when they’d just finished talking about her and how Edgeworth had been keeping tabs on them. The Iris part seemed pretty heavy and possibly like it should be a separate fic, I’m interested in the possible similarities between Dahlia and Von Karma. Also Edgeworth going in and out of suicidal talk seemed abrupt.

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