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thefandomcassandra · 2 months ago

Text

A Distinct Lack of Something

This is supposed to be healing.

That's the thought going through Apollo's head as he watches Mystic Fey prepare the ritual space for him. This is supposed to be healing.

It's what it says on the flier for the Kurain Channeling Services. 'Contact your loved ones from beyond the grave! Achieve closure and heal from wounds left open. Reasonable price.'

Apollo isn't sure what he's expecting, but it's supposed to be healing.

"Ready?" Mystic Fey's voice is chipper but it can't fool Apollo's eyes. His bracelet pinches his wrist slightly, her mild tension obvious in how her dominant hand drifts to her sleeve to worry about where the hem is. He doesn't want to upset her though. He doesn't want to do anything that might muck up the channeling.

Apollo doesn't say, 'No.' He wants to, but he doesn't. Instead, unsure he can keep his voice steady, he just gives her a controlled nod. Her smile thins—almost as if she's aware of his emotional turmoil—and she nods back.

"Alrighty then! Let's go. And remember: I'm giving you the friends and family discount, coz of Nick! So don't stress the payment, okay?" Mystic Fey closes her eyes, inhales deeply, and begins the rite.

When Dhurke had shown up, however angry he had been, Apollo had felt something. He wanted Dhurke to apologize, wanted reparations for ten and some years of hoping, wanted his dad back. And in the end, all he got was a bittersweet reunion that ended in the horrible truth but it had been something. Even if that something had been pain and blood and tears and the knowledge that he would never get a chance to actually come to terms with the fact that Dhurke did love him. Pain was at least an emotion. Hurt was something worth feeling.

When Lamiroir and Wright came forward with the truth about his and Trucy's relations, he felt something. Immeasurable disappointment, mostly, because he expected that kind of horseshit from Wright but to think that he had a mother and she didn't want him? Just one more to the list. Admittedly, he had been more worried for Trucy than himself but maybe that was just because he was a jaded adult who was just...used to that kind of thing while for her it was still raw and painful. The apathy and resignation was something.

Watching Mystic Fey slowly become someone that looks almost familiar, like a warped mirror image, elicits no emotion from him. Nothing whatsoever.

He doesn't feel a thing.

The emptiness is terrifying in its own right.

Here is his dad—the man who helped make him, the man whose face he shares, who is half of his existence and yet—

He may as well be looking across the subway to another passenger standing in the train car with him. There's no connection, no spark, nothing satisfying in seeing him in-person—insofar as channeling can be considered as such.

It's almost...disppointing, if it can be anything at all. But it's nothing. Null. Void. Emptiness.

The man being channeled is just a man.

Jove stares at Apollo through Mystic Fey's bangs, borrowed brows furrowed in confusion. Then they raise, the tension around his eyes loosening, and he gasps out a word in relief. "Apollo?"

"...hiya." What else can he say? How is he supposed to greet this...stranger? A hug? Tears? Apollo clenches his fist where Jove can't see—not like Jove can Percieve the way he or Trucy or Lamiroir can. To him, this is an adult who looks like his child who is...

What does this look like to him?

The last time Jove saw him, he was swaddled in a blanket, curled in his arm as he tried to protect him from a raging fire. Now? It must be like night and day, like a bad dream.

Do spirits who have passed know they have died? Is Jove well aware he's long passed?

Jove works Mystic Fey's mouth for a moment, silently trying to express whatever thoughts are swimming behind his eyes. He gasps, coming up empty, floundering for anything useful. Then, at long last, he comes up with one simple question, "What happened?"

Apollo leans back and considers his possible actions. He can brush off Jove's concerns but that's callous and he's the one who pulled him from the Twilight to speak to him. He can act as though nothing has changed but that's foolish because it's been about thirty years since Jove has been alive. So he chooses option number three: he starts explaining.

Apollo is good at recounting the facts. It comes with the territory, with being a lawyer. He's good at taking the past and making it present, pushing history to the forefront as something relevant. He starts with the fire.

"Justice Minister Ga'ran successfully orchestrated and performed a coup against her sister." Clinical and pointed. He uses her titles as they come. She wasn't the queen yet, she was just the queen's sister, bitter and power-hungry. "She set a fire in Her Royal Highness Amara's personal chambers the night you died and blamed it on Royal Consort Dhurke Sahdmadhi, convincing even Queen Amara that her husband wanted her dead. Then she twisted the Khura'inese legal system into knots, enacting the Defense Culpability Act—a draconian law that punished any who aided a guilty defendant as if they were guilty of the same crime—and Dhurke fled for his life. So came to power Her Royal Highness Queen Ga'ran, who reigned for the next twenty and some years."

He watches Jove as he talks, voice low and emotionless as he recounts a history he barely remembers. Ga'ran's rise to power is, for him, something that happened before he had the ability to declare it unjust, but Jove knew both Dhurke and Amara in passing, so he had some connection that Apollo didn't to those specific events.

Jove watches with wide eyes—not Perception wide, bug-eyed and piercing, but attentive—eerily still. When Apollo mentions Dhurke, there is a twitch, his fingers moving to finger the frets of a guitar long-lost to fire. He doesn't know the man any more than Apollo knows him—especially considering that Dhurke didn't even know his name, let alone the name of his wayward wife, who assumed Apollo and Jove both died that day—but he recognizes his name. Recognizes his importance.

The only proof Apollo has of that night even happened to him is a mottled patch of skin set in the small of his back, a palm-sized old burn scar that has long since faded into the rest of his myriad wounds. For Jove, however, this moment was but a breath ago. Acrid fire-hot air being exhaled, clean mountain air being inhaled. A shock to the system.

"That man...the Royal Consort—?" Jove's voice is eerily like Apollo's. Channeling is a wonder, the body shaping itself to fit the mitamah, and to hear such a strong tenor come out of Mystic Fey's mouth is jarring. Still, it's like listening to a recording of himself. Uncanny. Odd.

"Dhurke fled to the mountains on the edge of Khura'in, forming a rebel group known as the Defiant Dragons, intent on reclaiming the country his wife loved from the tyrant who controlled it. There he raised his son and myself for almost ten years while hiding from Ga'ran's royal guards and the new Royal Consort and Justice Minister's militarized police force." Does Jove wish he had been the one to raise Apollo? Or is he grateful that his son had been taken care of?

"What about Thalassa?" The name doesn't hurt as much as Apollo thought it would. "Did she—?"

"Before the DC Act was instituted, when he was still the Royal Consort, Dhurke looked for her to deliver the news but...with only your performer name to go on, it was...difficult. She had heard of the fire and...assumed the worst." He does his best to keep any of his lingering disappointment from seeping through. "She was unaware I was alive until a decade and a half later."

"So she's okay?" A man who cared for his wife more than himself. No wonder Dhurke had found him a kindred spirit.

"She is well." It's a non-answer, a perfect courtroom deflection.

Jove doesn't even see need to ask for clarification. He just believes him at face value.

"And then?" He hangs on to Apollo's every word. Displaced in time, panicking to some degree, he grabs at any flotsam to weather the storm and Apollo is stringing him along on worm-eaten planks with coats of whitewash glowing bright in the night.

"I was sent overseas when it got too dangerous." The less fun parts of the past are recounted as clinically as he's able. He scrubs every bit of emotion out of the facts and watches Jove's face instead. "I grew up in the foster care system in the greater Los Tokyo area. By the time I aged out of the system, I already was well on my way to becoming a defense attorney. It was my dream and I promised my friend we'd achieve our dreams together."

Would Clay have liked Jove? Clay liked almost everyone—the 'almost' being because, despite how cheery and willing to smile at anyone Clay was, he was capable of holding grudges on others' behalf—and Jove was...

Jove was—?

Apollo didn't know what Jove was but if he had been around before the whole tragedy occurred, he would've been someone Clay liked.

"I became a lawyer. I found out I had a half-sister. I helped Dhurke finish the work he started." Truth. Truth. Truth. The barest version of it, sure enough, but truth nonetheless.

It isn't as if Jove doesn't deserve the full truth—Apollo would probably give it to him if he asks, too unsure of how to speak to this familiar stranger to ever deny him anything while he lives on borrowed time—but more that Apollo never tells anyone the full truth if he can help it. He never told Clay about the Defiant Dragons or the political upheaval back in Khura'in. He never told Mr. Wright anything he wasn't sure wouldn't be used against him. He never told Trucy about Clay or the Space Center. He only told Athena about Khura'in when he didn't have a choice.

He's a man of close-kept secrets and nothing—not even family he never met in the first place—will change that.

And Jove, trusting his son, only asks one clarifying question. "A half-sister?"

Of course that's what he would focus on. A man who loved his wife, knowing she's alive and had another child—a child that he might not know but would have loved regardless—is a gift. Of course he would ask after her. Of course he wants to know.

Would Trucy care? Would she flash her bright and sunny smile—Gramarye azure and lawyer steel—and wrap her arms around him and declare him family too?

Why is it so easy for her in the first place?

(It isn't. Apollo knows that. Beneath the sunshine and glitter and laughter are masks on masks on masks. Being abandoned hurt her as much as it hurt him; she's just better at hiding it than he is. That's a trait they share along with their Perception: a history of being left behind.)

"Her name is Trucy Wright." The surname won't mean anything to Jove, who would recognize Gramarye but wouldn't know a defense attorney who wasn't even practicing when he died. "She's a magician. About seven years younger than me."

Jove's borrowed eyes sparkle with joy and wonder. "Does she look like you? Like her?" He wants Apollo to paint him a picture with words. He doesn't even think to ask if he's got photos of her.

"People say we look alike." Only the hair and the eyes. "But she's got her father's skin and build so she's a fair amount darker and taller than me." She wouldn't stop teasing him but his years in Khura'in proved to have some advantages, considering he can now bench press her with little-to-no issue. "She's a riot." True, if not reductive.

Jove rubs the back of his head, fingers awkwardly catching on Mystic Fey's long hair. "Sorry you got my height."

Without a thought, a slight knife slips through Apollo's court-perfect tone. "So it's your fault." It's all in good fun—the type of bite he reserves for Athena or Trucy or Ema, nothing but snark—but he doesn't know Jove. He doesn't know how Jove will react to this and he breathes in sharply—

"Ha!" He laughs like Apollo too. Or, no, cause and effect; Apollo laughs like him. Heavy, like a single note on a timpani, and concussive.

Something strange and violent writhes in his gut.

(How long had Apollo spent practicing Dhurke's booming laugh? How much of his life had he given up in pursuit of making himself a mockery of the people he loves? And still, when placed in a museum of habits and traits, even his laughter is genetic. It's cruel, in a way.)

Apollo wants Jove to look at him. See him. Talk to him about him, not other people. Even if he doesn't know how to actually talk to the man, how to feel about him, he wants—

Apollo wants a lot of things he can never have.

"You, uh, missed a lot...obviously." It feels redundant but what else can he say? How can he even speak to a man he doesn't know, who doesn't know him?

"Obviously." Jove, too, seems unclear on how to proceed. He listened, of course, and absorbed all of the things Apollo had told him but now that they have to hold a dialog, he's at a loss for words. "I, uh..."

They're both awkward and quiet.

Maybe he's opinionated too. Maybe he's loud and shouts too much and is quick to anger and slow to forgive. Maybe Apollo inherited more than just his looks from his biological father.

"I'm glad."

"Huh?"

Jove smiles. His eyes crinkle, small crow's feet giving his joy a warmth to it that Apollo's own stern face can't begin to replicate. "That you're okay. That you survived."

"You saved me."

"No." Apollo watches as he plays with Mystic Fey's long hair. "I protected you. Dhurke Sahdmadhi, he saved you. Raised you." Something sad and bitter and oh-so-familiar crosses his face only to be buried beneath another smile. "He did a good job. You've grown up to be a wonderful young man."

Young, as though Apollo isn't older than Jove was when he died.

"I...owe him a lot."

"I wish I could tell him myself."

"I'm sure you have already." Considering he's dead.

And in that one brief passing moment, Apollo understands Jove.

In the same way that he's looking at a funhouse mirror of a person—a perfectly warped reflection of himself pasted over someone else's body—Jove is too.

Apollo was barely two when Jove died.

They're functionally strangers.

"I'm sorry."

"For what?"

"Calling you out of—" Does Jove believe in the Twilight? Did he have faith of any kind? Would it be unkind to imply he was in the Khura'inese afterlife? "Having you channeled."

"I was under the impression I could refuse." A face, a name, and consent. The medium reaches out to make contact and the mitamah resonates, decides if they want to go back or not.

"But still—"

"Apollo." He looks at him. The stern way he cuts him off, flat and final, rings resonant and familiar. "You're not bothering me. You didn't uproot me. You're not in the way. I'm glad to have met you - to have seen how far you've come." Oh. "I'm sorry I couldn't be there for any of it."

He's kind, Apollo realizes in this moment. He's a kind man. He can see how Thalassa might have fallen for him—not his easygoing smile or his warm eyes, but the way he listens and how he hears you.

Apollo swallows the lump that's suddenly formed in his throat. "It's - I don't blame you." I don't know you. Why would I blame you for dying? You aren't Dhurke or Thalassa or Mr. Wright or any of the myriad other adults who have disappointed me before. You didn't do it willfully. You died; that happens. You're nothing to me so you don't need to apologize. It's a waste of borrowed breath.

As if he can hear the unspoken truth, Jove just sighs and nods. "Thank you for letting me borrow her body to talk to you."

"I—"

"Keep on keeping on, okay Apollo?"

Two strangers in a late-night subway car make eye-contact. Neither really know the other but for a brief moment they're sharing something. The doors open and one of them leaves. The bond is severed.

Jove leaves Mystic Fey's body and she takes greedy gulps of air as she remembers what living is like.

Apollo breathes too.

"Did it help?" Mystic Fey guzzles down water, chest heaving as she recovers from the channeling.

"A little." Apollo lies.

(Jove takes a chunk of Apollo with him when he leaves. A small bit of Apollo's flesh carved away with a sincere smileconcussion as he vanishes back into the Twilight. Now he knows his birth father, even if superficially. Now he can never not know him.)

(That's something at least.)

#the sheepy writes fic #ace attorney #ace attorney spoilers #spirit of justice #spirit of justice spoilers #soj #soj spoilers #aa6 #aa6 spoilers #long post #i am once again making apollo suffer #tee hee [bonks my hat like trucy}

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