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wardencommanderrodimiss · 4 years

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Witches, Chapter 17: Blackquill wants to fight an orca; Phoenix wants to fight Blackquill; Athena contains within her a multitude of whale facts.

[Seelie of Kurain Chapter Masterlist] [ao3]

[Witches Chapter Masterlist] [ao3]

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Phoenix leaves early, tells Trucy he’ll meet her at the courthouse, and stops by the office first. The computer wakes up slowly and when it finally does, it’s as blank as Phoenix left it last night, not a word of assistance or encouragement. So he’s on his own. All right. Fine.

On his way out through the front, he stops. The lid over the piano keys is opened, something lying directly on the keys. His old badge, weighing down the corner of Lotta’s photograph, a snapshot out of time, poorly planned, Phoenix and Larry both jostled about by Maya, and Edgeworth almost smiling at that, and Gumshoe the only one who’s timed it right, with confetti fluttering through the air fallen from his hand. If he squints with the Sight from the right angle and distance, like it’s one of those illusion puzzles, sometimes he’ll see Mia standing to the side, smiling.

“I can take a hint,” he says, setting it back down on the piano. He can’t see her in the photo today, but it’s okay because it being here, not on his desk, and his badge here and not in his desk, means that she’s here, not frozen in a photo. “All right. I get it. I can do it, and I’m not alone.” He has people to help and to keep him in check. He’s not going to lose a second badge.

At the courthouse he smacks himself in the face with cold water, hoping to knock sleep out of his eyes and with it, clear out the dust from eight years of not playing the lead. Athena bounds into the defendant lobby sounding as cheery as ever and announcing that she ran a few laps around the building to get ready, but tired bags hang beneath her eyes and he tells her such when he asks her if she got any sleep. “Do I really look that bad?” she asks, prodding at the skin below her eyes. “I’d better do something about that. Prosecutor Blackquill gives me shit over everything and I can’t leave another opening. Hey, Trucy!” she calls, as the other two members of the agency enter with Pearl. “You don’t happen to have concealer, do you? Or Apollo, do you? I need to look like I actually slept soundly and I’m desperate.”

“Sorry,” Apollo says. “The only cosmetics I use are hair gel.”

“You mean it doesn’t naturally do that?” Pearl gasps. “I thought for sure…”

“Concealer, coming right up!” Trucy produces a round makeup compact from her Magic Panties - she carries those around in a purse and everything that would normally be found in a purse goes into them - and holds it up to Athena’s face. “No, that’s not the right shade. Hold on.” She plunges her hand back into the waistband and pulls out what appears to Phoenix to be pretty much the same, but comparing it against Athena’s skin, Trucy nods, satisfied.

“Since when do you wear makeup?” Phoenix asks. They’ve had talks about this topic. Why is it all so expensive. Why is this a scam industry that breeds insecurities. No I’m not buying you lipstick. You can buy it yourself when you’re much older. Yes I’ll buy you that lip gloss that’s in a narwhal-shaped container. That’s not really makeup.

“I don’t,” Trucy says. “This is old stage show stuff we still had!”

“We” being the Gramaryes, surely. She pats away the dark circles under Athena’s eyes and with a wave, wishes them both luck, and skips off for the gallery with Apollo and Pearl in tow.

Leaving Phoenix to enter behind the bench, chat with this judge for the first time in a year. If he really thinks about it, this judge - this man, he was going to think, but after all these years he’s not really quite sure how to assess what the judge is or isn’t and whether he’s a being that exists in any capacity outside of the courthouse - has seen him at his lowest, to rise as high as he could, and crash again, sink lower than that, and now here he is again. This judge has presided over all three trials where Phoenix has been accused of murder. He saw Phoenix’s first trial and his last and now he’ll see this second first.

He tells Phoenix that standing here as a lawyer makes him look younger. Phoenix thanks him and decides not to mention that it’s definitely shaving that makes him look younger. Might as well just take the compliment, if it’s a compliment, and not another “baby-faced” jab.

“And you look as young as ever, Your Honor,” he replies, and it’s true, really - his face hasn’t changed a bit since Phoenix first met him. No more wrinkles, and no less. Eternal, unchanging, a fixture of the courtroom who Phoenix knows how to work with.

And then there’s the prosecutor. The latest prosecutorial mystery for Phoenix to unravel. Another one to save.

Prosecutor Simon Blackquill has an even more frightening visage staring at him at level across the courtroom, rather than looking down on him from up safe in the gallery. Not that safe isn’t anything but relative when it comes to a man who throws silvery slices of wind with the slash of a finger and whose hawk flaps about as it pleases, but in the gallery Phoenix is just one of a sea of faces merely observing. Down here at the bench? He’s the man who offered to defend an orca, with nowhere to hide and nowhere to run from the man who brought an orca to trial.

Funny how all this works.

Blackquill berates Phoenix for bringing this case to court, never mind that it’s Blackquill who actually brought this to court - and the poor judge got this case late last night and skimmed it and missed the part that the defendant is an orca. But otherwise Blackquill seems - to be taking this seriously? Enough to speech-ify on the fact that they have an orca to be prosecuted here.

“Though she cannot be present in the courtroom, nor speak for herself, we will treat this defendant as any other,” he says, casting a glance toward the screen being set up behind the witness stand; hopefully in a few minutes Sasha will have Orla on video phone, introducing the defendant to the court and perhaps charming then with her cuteness. Phoenix has had enough witnesses try and play cute to turn the judge and gallery against the defense - it’s about time he gets to have that power on his side. “Man or beast, we stand equal with the same value to our souls.” He pauses, eyes narrowing at his own words. The hawk on his shoulder ruffles its feathers. That’s a loaded word, for someone who knows magic: humans have souls, fae don’t, animals don’t, and fae animals certainly don’t. A soul or lack of one is no indication of moral judgment or standing. It’s just an extra piece of the self that can be cut loose and used in magic, and this seems to be what Blackquill is pondering, and his bird getting at, because he amends himself. “To our lives and hearts. Take Taka, as much a person in spirit as the rest of us who stand here today.”

Phoenix would love to know what Taka is, whether it’s just an ordinary bird, a fae creature, or a familiar - Blackquill doesn’t give a hint, and Phoenix doesn’t know what the difference between a fae animal and specifically a familiar looks like. And even if he did he can’t see through Blackquill’s twisted aura to know.

The Twisted Samurai distorts everything around him, that even if Phoenix wants to test his eyes on Athena next to him, he can’t. The courtroom falls into darkness when he tries, inconsistent silver light throwing the colors off where they aren’t inverted. Athena’s wide eyes appear nearly gray, not blue, and her hair dulls similarly; he sees double of her, sometimes, like he’s dazed or cross-eyed. And across the courtroom Blackquill has eyes almost straight white, and nothing else of him the same. His shape twists and breaks like his reflection in a wavy funhouse mirror has been reflected into a rippling pond, his hair changing lengths, his skin all the depth of white tissue paper, veins and blood and bones below, a dead man walking. At his steadiest, his entire body simply trembles at the edges, like energy barely contained in a vessel too small for it, a person held together in a form that doesn’t naturally belong to them; and all of him either stark white or black, and mostly white, patterned like a photonegative of himself.

Phoenix closes his eyes and gives himself a moment to reset and readjust to the regular world that he’ll see when he opens them.

“The question, then,” Blackquill continues, while Athena squints in confusion at Phoenix because he’s been squinting at her with the Sight, “is what one - what our orca, in this case - has done with that life, and how stained and shriveled their heart.”

Then he decides to prove that the greatest monster in the room is him, immediately after the first witness testimony - from Norma DePlume, who is as much of a terror as Phoenix expected, and she and Blackquill as nasty to each other as he could have imagined - when he demands the judge give his verdict, because they’ve heard everything they need to, and, “deliver your judgement so that I may carry out the sentence.”

“Objection! Hold it!” What the fuck! “You aren’t - you aren’t planning on killing Orla yourself, are you?” Beside him, Athena can’t keep her “what the fuck!” contained, or rather Widget warbles it out, and Phoenix really, really wants to know who programmed the robot to say fuck. “Is that what you’re implying—”

Blackquill says nothing, merely smirks, and Phoenix decides that he absolutely, definitely, does not want to actually know the answer. If Edgeworth wants him to defend this man, which he does, that’s not an “if”, Phoenix would rather not think that this case only went to trial because Blackquill wanted to take a literal stab at fighting a whale. He’d like to think it’s because he and Athena and Pearl found some decent proof, reasonable doubt, and because of what Blackquill said there in his opening statement, that animals have value and deserve a fair chance, too.

(Maybe he just said that to get it on the record hoping for reasonable doubt of his own and a fair trial for Taka when that goddamn bird inevitably hauls off and claws someone’s eyes out.)

(Edgeworth didn’t even warn him that Prosecutor Blackquill had a murder bird! Is the logical conclusion that Edgeworth didn’t know about the bird? Points toward fae creature, a la Gavin’s hound, except who the hell is managing to summon any fae anyone in prison? That place is iron for a reason. Or maybe after everything else, Edgeworth figured this is nothing to Phoenix.)

“We have a right to cross-examine!” Athena’s shrill and rightfully indignant cry rings out over a shriek from Taka that sounds like laughter. “We’re always allowed to, you know!”

“I simply hope to spare us all the waste of time that comes as consequence of your methods,” Blackquill replies, directed more at Phoenix than Athena, who like last trial he seems to mostly be ignoring, “and spare you the heartbreak of burning yourself to ash in a fight for a ‘Not Guilty’ you will not win.”

Like yesterday, Phoenix wonders if they’re talking about an orca, or something else. About Blackquill himself, and the task regarding him that Phoenix has been given. Does Blackquill know what Edgeworth has asked of Phoenix? It sort of sounds like he does.

“Okay, but I’m still going to cross-examine,” Phoenix says. And maybe drag it out a little more than usual, just to let Blackquill know he’s not intimidated.

And DePlume likes the sound of her own voice, so maybe they’ll learn something new from her, some piece of information she hadn’t meant to let slip, if they push on her every statement.

What Phoenix learns instead is that Blackquill likes penguins and thinks them the only part of the aquarium actually worth anyone’s time, and apparently no one told DePlume that the victim died of blunt force trauma, not being bitten by the orca. Not that it helps; there’s more security footage than the short looped bit that they saw behind Fulbright’s back, and that does actually show that Orla had the victim in her jaws, and Blackquill can put a good - bad - spin on it. Sure, it wasn’t when the victim was killed, but it certainly was proof of her malicious intent, toying with a corpse like she’s a cat caught the canary - Blackquill stares Athena dead in the eye as he makes that analogy - but not even hungry to eat it, just taking another life between her teeth as a game.

A game, and singing the while she does it. The theory, working from their preliminary autopsy report that Jack Shipley died instantaneously from a brain contusion, is that Orla headbutted him into the glass of the tank. DePlume didn’t see any moment of actual impact - that was what Phoenix saw on the security footage, Orla with her head tipped out of sight behind some tank decorations - but came to the conclusion that this was definitely the exact time of the victim’s death. A conclusion extrapolated from something that Phoenix really, really wishes Sasha had mentioned: a year ago, another orca trainer at Shipshape Aquarium died under such similar circumstances.

DePlume wrote a whole damn book about it. Sasha entirely neglected this critical fact. Phoenix is going to scream. Maybe faint, instead, get just a little wobbly in the knee area, because Blackquill has this all in the palm of his hand, all under control, and what a horrible mess he would make of a jury trial. Start with them biased against him on basis of that tricky little matter, convicted murderer, and end with them swayed however he wants them to, just as he plays the gallery, but they aren’t the ones making the final call.

(Edgeworth fretted often about what a particularly charismatic and manipulative lawyer could do to the jurist system, and Phoenix thought he was worrying over Klavier, his charm, his glamours, his celebrity status. How likely instead that he was concerned with Blackquill, already planning ahead to when he would place him back in court?)

Though if Phoenix is going to faint for any actual reason, it’s the picture that Blackquill has projected up for the court. A page from DePlume’s book, half the sheet taken up by a glossy color photograph of the dead orca trainer - so that’s the kind of writer DePlume is, a sensationalist one, like some others he could name. The unfortunate girl was probably around Sasha’s age; her body lay on the edge of the show pool, water puddling beneath her and dripping from her long dark hair. Her shirt has flowing puffy pirate sleeves in a soft powder blue fabric. Almost the color of Trucy’s show cape, and it’s hard not to think of his daughter, but it’s even harder not to think of someone else wearing that color and killed while performing at her profession. It was a rehearsal, not a live show, when Thalassa died, but—

Reflections, reflections. He keeps running up against familiar faces on the corpses in this case.

“Athena! Phoenix! Please!” Sasha pleads from somewhere out-of-sight, while Orla, centered in the screen, chirrups in confusion, but when she makes sound, she shows off her powerful jaws full of teeth. “Orla didn’t kill anyone! Please, we’re begging for your help!”

Orla waves a flipper, the gravity of the situation not really clear to her.

The trainer who died last year - if Orla really did everything DePlume says, biting and headbutting, they should see marks of that, blood and bruises, and there’s nothing. Logic himself out of fear, that’s right, he can do that - Orla can’t speak, but she understands them, and Sasha in part understands her. Sasha has faith in her. Phoenix has to have faith in Sasha.

“You’d be better off saving your breath, you sad slippery pup.” Blackquill leans forward, elbows on the bench, laughing, and Phoenix really, really does not like that. “Perhaps you did not see his face, but allow me to tell you - when he saw that photograph, he turned even paler than me. You were yourself rather afraid of the orca then, weren’t you, Wright-dono?”

Not enough for him to play the judge and gallery against the defendant, now he’s trying to turn lawyer and client against each other, make them lose faith in the other. How discouraged must Sasha feel, to be told Phoenix is doubting too?

“For shame, to take up the matter of a client who you have neither the courage nor drive to defend, and further crush them under the false hope you’ve given.”

“Nothing about my defense is ‘false’, Prosecutor Blackquill.” Keep his face and voice calm and level, don’t give Blackquill an inch or a twitch to work from. “If you’re hoping for an easy win by talking me into giving up, I assure you, it’s not going to happen. Orla is my client, and I don’t give up on my clients.” Whether or not she can speak to him doesn’t matter. That she’s an orca doesn’t matter. You can never truly know if your client is innocent or not, Mia said once, a very long time ago. And she’s right, and was always right, because even Truth can get subjective and messy, be talked around, and relying wholly on it made him an arrogant idiot. All you can do is fight with everything you have.

And he’s going to. He’s going to do Mia proud, orca or no.

“I see the trust that Sasha has put in Orla, and I respect that.” He sympathizes, after all the nightmarish cases when he’s had to trust someone that no one else would, or trust someone who didn’t even trust himself. “So I’m willing to have faith in Orla, too.”

“Yet you do not know the first thing about orcas, do you?”

“Is that relevant?” Phoenix asks.

He relishes the surprise that grips Blackquill’s features. Time to find out whether the Twisted Samurai, master manipulator, is smart enough to not be taken in by a tactic Phoenix has had seven years to perfect, playing the idiot and being underestimated. If it can’t get him anything about this particular case maybe he’ll learn something more about Blackquill himself that can help Edgeworth.

“Do you know why they are also known as ‘killer whales’?”

What kind of trick question, and how actually relevant—? “Uh, because people have a tendency to fear what they don’t understand, and because they didn’t understand orcas and just saw their teeth, they presumed that these creatures were out to get them too?”

That’s basically a psychology explanation, right? He’s basically working on Athena and Blackquill’s level, in their wheelhouse, now, right?

Blackquill stares at him. One of his eyes twitches. Taka scratches its head. The question is written plainly across his features, the icy stare and the cold scowl: how did you pass the Bar, twice?

Joke’s on him; Phoenix doesn’t know either.

“No,” Blackquill says. “That is not it.”

“It was a good attempt,” Phoenix says, glancing to Athena for confirmation. She shrugs, her teeth pressed together in a failure at forcing a smile, and she sharply sucks in her breath. Okay. Ouch. That noncommittal of an answer is a hell of an answer of itself.

“The reason,” Blackquill says, stressing the word, now acting along the belief that yes, Phoenix is a fucking idiot who needs to be addressed accordingly, “is that they are cunning and merciless predators known to hunt and kill even true whales. They are also known as ‘wolves of the sea’ for that same reason, that they are clever, powerful, and dangerous creatures who hunt in packs.” How, in the midst of going over the case, preparing witnesses, and filling in the gaps of the evidence Fulbright had, did he, from prison, have the time and resources to do this much research on orcas, down to etymology of the name? “Tell me, does that sound innocent to you? Does that not sound like the creature we have here on stand today, and her capacity to so efficiently kill a man before entertaining herself with that corpse?”

So he thinks orcas are smart enough to ascribe malicious intent to, and he’s doing his damndest to convince everyone else of the same. “My goodness,” the judge says. “So they truly are ‘killers’? Though may I ask, what do you mean by ‘true’ whales?”

Phoenix wondered the same, but if there’s time for a tangent then he’d rather use it to reconvene with Athena, steady themselves, and figure out how to work past this huge gap in their knowledge. It looks really bad, all the pieces they weren’t aware of. They need a new angle of approach as everything they’ve done so far has been smacked down—

“Oh, I can help you with that!” Athena says brightly, and her ponytail sways from side to side as she bobs up and down with uncontained glee. “Technically, if we want to get pedantic, which we do” - spoken like a true lawyer; Phoenix could shed a tear with pride - “what’s known as a ‘whale’” - she makes quotation marks with her fingers in the air - “is different in our informal everyday usage than in taxonomy. You traditionally wouldn’t call a dolphin a whale, right?”

Maybe Phoenix won’t have an opportunity to confer with Athena and will just ponder how dire this case has gotten on his own, while Athena spouts Whale Facts. If Blackquill meant to distract her, it’s working, but Phoenix is not honestly sure he could’ve expected this to happen, or the judge to ask. Either way, Blackquill hasn’t turned his back bored on the tangent yet; he has stepped back from the bench, arms crossed, the chain between his cuffs tangled up around them, eyes half closed, maybe glad for the break.

“But,” Athena continues, “you could! Technically! So from, like, primary school biology we know that classification in taxonomy goes, kingdom phylum class order genus species, but there are orders within orders and suborders—”

“Athena,” Phoenix says, not sure she can even hear anyone else but herself right now, “I don’t think His Honor needs this much detail.”

“Yes, do stop her,” DePlume says with a roll of her eyes.

Which makes Phoenix immediately want to change his stance and tell Athena to continue talking, but someone else gets to it first. “Let the lass go on,” Blackquill says dryly. “Don’t crush her spirit. I’ll do enough of that myself when we get to the next testimony and the sentencing.”

“—and so there’s a smaller order known as Cetaceans, that’s literally just, derived from Ancient Greek for ‘whale’. But this whales order contains two more even smaller orders, and those are toothed whales and baleen whales. Baleen whales are what you’d consider ‘true whales’, basically, like blue whales and humpback whales, and they’re probably what you think of if you were asked to picture a whale. But toothed whales include dolphins and orcas and narwhals—”

“Wait,” Phoenix says. “Narwhals aren’t giant fucked-up seals?”

Blackquill closes his eyes entirely.

“Nope! They don’t have a fin on their back, so maybe that’s why you got confused, but belugas don’t either, and they’re whales as much as narwhals are! But the short of the orca matter” - wasn’t the judge’s question about what a true whale is, not how orcas are taxonomically classified? - “is that they are actually classified within the dolphin family. Orcas are dolphins! So if you’d call a bottlenose dolphin a whale, you can call an orca a whale. They’re both the same amount of whale! Or informally you can just keep using the words ‘dolphin’ and ‘whale’ however, with no regards to which animals are genetically most similar, and people will get what you mean, because words mean what we’ve made them mean and that’s how we use them. But since you wanted to know, now you know!”

“I - yes.” The judge is slightly taken aback by her enthusiasm. “Thank you, Ms Cykes. You really have done your research for this case.”

Phoenix somehow has the feeling that she knew that long before this case.

“And yet.” Blackquill leans forward, his eyes alight and alive, a point ready to be made even off the back of something not case-relevant. “You dispute and explain the ‘whale’ part, but never once say a thing to refute the ‘killer’.”

“I - but, I—” Athena turns helplessly to Phoenix, her mouth opening and closing without any more words coming through.

“I simply cannot bear to hear more such drivel from the defense about trusting a killer,” he continues. “Can you, either, Your Baldness?”

Phoenix would’ve been thrown out of the court after bringing a bird in (or a whip, or for throwing an enchanted coffee mug across the room), or for even half of this amount of contempt for the judge - the rules have always been more lenient for prosecutors, he’s always known that, but there’s never been such a stark demonstration of it. Once this trial is over, he’ll take that up with Edgeworth. Far from the most important action to take to level the field, not by a long shot, but might as well make a note of it.

“Funny that he’s talking shit on ‘trusting a killer’,” Phoenix mutters, “when he’s the convicted killer here, asking the judge to trust his case.” He snorts, but Athena doesn’t laugh or make a sound. She stares across at Blackquill, drumming her fingers on her collarbone right next to Widget. The one to laugh is Blackquill himself, even though Phoenix was taking care that he wouldn’t be heard by anyone but Athena, to keep that from being an on-the-record statement when he’s said enough bullshit that already will be going into a transcript. (Goddamn narwhals.)

As if Blackquill wasn’t enough of an uncomfortable, inscrutable mystery. Where’s his damned bird? Taka isn’t close to Phoenix, but it isn’t right with Blackquill, either; it splits the distance, and Phoenix doesn’t know how good a hawk’s hearing is. Pretty good, he thinks. He’ll ask Kay if she knows. And Taka heard, what was his name, the tanuki from Mayor Tenma’s trial, talking to them in the lobby after, and what Taka heard got to Blackquill, got to Edgeworth. Is that how this works?

“I’ve been told I can’t take a hint,” Phoenix says, louder, and Taka circles over the room and decides to settle now on the judge’s head. “And I certainly am not going to take this hint of yours to give up, Prosecutor Blackquill, because I’ve also been told I don’t know when to quit.”

“Your self-awareness does no credit to you,” Blackquill says. “Very well. Witness, tell them what you saw, and what you heard. Deliver the fatal blow to their deluded determination.”

Back to work.

It’s touch and go, like every case, every time, just like Phoenix remembers, but they work through DePlume’s testimony, keep pressing the possibility of a human killer. Suggest that Orla was manipulated, given the command to start singing by a human culprit who wanted to draw attention to her, frame her, and create a witness. He’s pushing the bloody coin at the court as much as he shows his badge to witnesses during an investigation - and he’s not gonna stop doing the latter any time soon, not now that he’s got a new badge to be proud of because it means he survived and that’s worth announcing to everyone, right? - but the judge is coming around, surely—

And Blackquill is not; Blackquill’s a damn tricky bastard who has a blood-covered burlap bag, the exact piece of evidence Phoenix desperately wanted to find. He has the bag, he knows Phoenix wanted it for proof, but since he’s known of it since yesterday he’s had time to spin a tale that keeps Orla as the perpetrator. He’s prepared it to the point that it’s not even a bluff: he has Marlon Rimes as a witness to confirm that something happened, a loud clattering noise from the orca pool room that Blackquill argues is the moment that Orla, by pulling on a flag lying underneath them, upended four-hundred pounds of show props all precariously stacked, right down onto the victim’s head.

When Rimes said he had come here on Sasha’s behalf, because she had to stay behind with Orla - that wasn’t the full truth, clearly.

Not that Rimes is exactly happy to testify for Blackquill, either. The story is dragged out of him: he was up in the staff room around 10:10 am, roughly the time that DePlume saw Orla with the captain’s body, when he heard a crashing and peered into the room to see the props had all fallen, after they had been cleaned up neatly the prior night. “Just to clarify,” Phoenix says, already certain that Rimes is lying about the timing of this, but he wants to get the most information he can from this fake story if it might help him figure out why Rimes is lying. “You heard the sound, couldn’t go in the room because you need a security key for that” - Rimes nods - “but peeked in and couldn’t see the victim” - Rimes nods a second time - “but could see the props?”

Rimes nods a third time. “Yeah. The rest of the stuff mighta been blocking my view of the captain, but I could see a bunch of those gold coins lying all about everywhere.”

And the current running theory is that the gold coins, via bag, are the murder weapon. Phoenix has staked the case for a human culprit on those coins. “I suppose it fits as a certain tragic thematic,” Blackquill says. Phoenix braces himself for tasteless remarks. “With the pirate theme that the victim pursued for his aquarium, and consider how many pirates lost their lives in pursuit of gold. Perhaps it’s faery gold; I’ve heard that unfailingly claims lives. Or perhaps the orca wished to be compensated for her labor, and saw fit to take the matter between her own teeth.”

There it goes. There’s the cruel biting words, the nasty chuckle, Blackquill laughing with himself when no one else is. “We all deserve to be properly paid for our work, do we not? And I myself shall have a fine meal tonight.”

Several questions arise, none relevant to the case: how exactly is Blackquill paid? He’s a prisoner on death row; money isn’t exactly an issue, or worth anything, to him. Maybe he’s compensated with better food than standard prison fare. Maybe that’s what he means. Maybe it’s that and not the alarming, outlandish, prospect Phoenix can’t shake, not when Blackquill wears that cloying smirk across his face, the one that suggests he knows something more than he’s letting on, and he took the time at the beginning of the trial saying that he wanted to “carry out the sentence” - read: kill, because if Orla was guilty she’s going to be put down.

So, well, knowing Maya for as long as he has, there’s no way for him to discount the possibility that Blackquill, talking about dinner, means that he wants to kill and eat an orca.

(He’s tried for a while to figure out what it is that drives Maya’s appetite. Does she just think human food tastes better? Isn’t it supposed to be the other way around, that faery food tastes so exquisite that after having it, anything else is ashes in a human’s mouth? Is that even true? Something else to ask Thalassa. But for Maya, he’s not ever figured out whether it was just a trait she was born with, an insatiable void within that she’s driven to fill, or a way that she revels in the human world, that to get food here it’s a simple price of money, with no debt incurred, no complex magically binding rules of hospitality. Eating plastic packaging, though - the Gavins’ hellhound does the same, swallowed a whole takeout container that Phoenix offered it as a gesture of “please don’t kill me” - he’s got even less an idea.)

If this, though - this with Blackquill right here, the insinuation that might say more about Phoenix than Blackquill, about what he’s dealt with on a regular basis and how every place he turns these past two days he sees it - if this could be how he gets the answer to the “is he human or fae” question, so help him—

(If it’s anything for Blackquill, if he’s anything like Maya, then this is a thing about dominance, about being the one at the top of the food chain. About having any ounce of control over someone’s life, even if his own is out of his hands, and he on death row. Hey, is that analytical psychology? Everything that Athena refers to as “analytical psychology” means Phoenix doesn’t have a clue what it’s actually supposed to be.)

“Good to clear that up, Mr Rimes, thank you,” Phoenix says. Blackquill’s grin widens. He knows Phoenix is deliberately, consciously ignoring him. He knows that he’s gotten under his skin.

(Hell, he’s been there for months already, but more in the way of a faint itch, and now he’s plainly a knife jammed through Phoenix’s chest. Isn’t stabbing someone a way of getting under their skin, both literally and metaphorically? And he wouldn’t put it past Blackquill to stab him, literally. With magic, sure, but still.)

“Now,” Phoenix continues. “The trouble is, Mr Rimes, that there’s no way you could’ve been in the staff room at that time. Is there not a certain young woman whose acquaintance you made yesterday, in the food prep room, at this same time that you claim to have been in the staff room?”

Another thing to bring up with Edgeworth, in terms of legal reform: maybe some sort of public service announcements about the consequences of perjury? Make some informative posters to put up at bus stops and subway stations. That couldn’t hurt.

“Sasha’s under enough stress now, y’know? I didn’t want her to have to come in and testify. Figured if anyone should have to go up on the stand, it shoulda been me.”

“That’s a very…” Phoenix pinches the bridge of his nose. Very noble? Very stupid? Why not both? “Very kindly meant, thing to do, Mr Rimes, but that’s still perjury.”

“Yeah,” Athena says. “It seems like a lot of trouble to go to just so that Sasha didn’t have to come in and say yeah, she heard a noise. And now she’s got to come in anyway, and you’re in trouble too now. Why would you go to that extent?”

Why indeed.

He tells them. The calendar they thought was his, the one Pearl accidentally picked up, the one that tells them that the victim met with someone at the pool - that wasn’t his. He thinks it’s Sasha’s. He worried suspicion would fall on Sasha.

And now Phoenix is worried by that prospect, too.

He didn’t miss this part of being a lawyer, not at all. Damn all of it.

Rimes leaves to return to the aquarium, take over orca-sitting while Sasha has to testify, and that leaves Phoenix and Athena to pace around the lobby like fish swimming circles in a tank for the rest of the recess. Just waiting, helplessly, to know what horrible new revelation will come next.

Sasha’s testimony is about the same as Rimes’, except for the part where it’s actually true. Orla kicked up a fuss, DePlume started screaming, which of these happened first she doesn’t remember, because finding your boss dead in an orca tank doesn’t help one maintain a firm, linear thought process to exactly recall it later. No surprises there. Lacking any other strategy, Phoenix nitpicks and nitpicks at her testimony until even she is annoyed with it, even though he’s the lawyer she came to for help and she knew from the start that he cross-examined a parrot so she should expect that this is the strategy and the strategy is bluffing and bullshitting.

But it gets them places. It gets them information about the way the props fell over the victim, that Orla couldn’t have dragged him into the pool after they fell because that would’ve disturbed the scarf that landed on top of his body, the way that once again Phoenix’s entire theory is wrong and he’s got to dispute his own suggestion that he built this case on, the bloody coin as the murder weapon. It’s not. He disproves his own bluff that got the case to trial in the first place.

His real argument, his unwavering stance, is simply that Orla was not the killer, and against everything new they pull from Sasha, that holds true. The victim most likely fell to his death in the drained orca pool. Orla was manipulated, using one of the new tricks she’s learning, to grab the victim’s body and bring him back up to the surface. Sasha and Rimes get her to demonstrate, on the video phone, with a practice dummy. Blackquill’s case about a killer whale is losing ground, fast; Orla’s too endearing. “The whole gallery loves her!” Athena says brightly, and her voice and stance both turn smug as she adds, “And Prosecutor Blackquill’s shut right up!”

Planning a counterattack is well within the realm of possibility for why he’s silent. He might also be convincing himself that whale meat would taste nasty anyway. Or Phoenix might be terribly uncharitable, and Blackquill never intended to eat the orca. He never said it outright. He just had a look about him that didn’t seem innocent, if he’s ever seemed innocent, which Phoenix does not believe he has. Probably shouldn’t say that about a sort-of client, but here they are.

Also here they are, with the judge agreeing, ordering an investigation be done of the bottom of the orca pool, and Blackquill still sullenly silent, the trial inexorably rolling to its final conclusion, a verdict, Orla saved—

“Prosecutor Blackquill!” Fulbright makes a loud reappearance, waving a manilla envelope with one hand and with the other trying to extract a paper from the envelope, and he isn’t really doing either with any dignity. “The thing you ordered has come in.”

“Hmph.” Blackquill doesn’t raise his arm to accept the paper - finally extracted from the envelope - Fulbright offers him. He doesn’t move in any way, doesn’t make a sound or an indication of a command, and Taka alights from his shoulder, snatching the page from Fulbright, talons piercing through it, and circling up to the judge. “If you would read that out to the court, Your Baldness.”

“Ah - and what is this, exactly?” The judge slowly pulls the sheet lose, care made to avoid his hands getting close to Taka’s talons, but also to not rip the paper even further.

“An updated autopsy report,” Blackquill replies.

“God damn it!” Phoenix should not say that so loudly, and saying it out loud at any volume is too loud with Athena around, especially when he’s been over Courtroom Manners 101 with her and had the lesson basically boil down to don’t challenge the prosecution to a fistfight by the dumpsters in the back lot and don’t curse on the record. But the words escape from him anyway, like air knocked from his lungs when the prosecution roundhouse-kicked him straight in the gut. “Why now? Just when it’s going good for us—”

“During the recess, a particular thought occurred to me,” Blackquill says. He’s the one ignoring Phoenix, now, though there’s nothing smug about it, only chilly disdainful professionalism. “I asked the body to be reexamined, bearing in mind what had been nagging at me. Now.” He jerks his head to the side, directed at the judge.

“Very well.” The judge casts one last cautious glance at Taka before he allows his attention to turn to the paper. “Let’s see here… The cause of death, blunt force trauma, shown to be consistent with - with a fall? A fall of around sixty feet? But the orca pool is sixty-five feet deep! This report backs up the defense’s claims!”

Blackquill nods once.

“What?” Phoenix’s yelp is even louder this time, never mind that this is good news. It’s good news. It’s solid evidence in favor of his claim and his client. Why does it feel like someone still has a foot on his chest?

“The orca could not possibly be involved with what happened with an empty pool,” the judge says. “This autopsy report proves her complete innocence!”

“Yes,” Blackquill says, at length. Even it being his autopsy report, it takes him several seconds to finally acquise. “I suppose it does.”

Taka spreads its wings and flaps back to Blackquill’s shoulder.

“Then we did it!” Athena bounces again, her excitement bubbling over into obvious physical expression, just as her every other emotion refuses to be contained. “Prosecutor Blackquill can’t even object! He isn’t even trying! You’ve done it, Boss! You saved Orla!”

His agreement with her, they’ve done it, Orla’s safe, emerges as a sticky click from the back of his throat. Words don’t come, and another choked attempt at response is lost against the clack of the judge’s gavel. “This court finds the defendant, Ora Shipley” - right, Phoenix had entirely forgotten that Orla’s “legal” name is something different than what she’s called - “not guilty!”

An expected Objection! doesn’t follow, not from Blackquill, not from a different witness, not anyone. Beside him, Athena woops and throws her hands in the air, extended a bit toward Sasha, who pumps her fist in the air in return. “Phoenix! Athena! Thank you both so much!” She springs out from behind the witness stand and calls over to the video phone, “Hey, Marlon! Give Orla some celebratory snacks!”

“Sure thing! Congrats, Sasha!” Orla on screen is pelted by a hail of fish, catching only about half of them, like someone flung a whole bucket at her. He probably did, in fact.

The judge clears his throat, taps his gavel once. “That concludes today’s—” He taps the gavel again, raises his voice a little more. “Today’s proceedings!” Court’s never going to be officially dismissed at this rate, with the hubbub; Athena’s leaning over the bench now, grinning, saying something to Sasha, and Orla chattering loudly. She’s so caught up in the fervor, but Phoenix still waits for the other shoe to drop, always is waiting for that, and he still concentrates enough that he hears, over the sound of her and Sasha’s laughter, a low, throaty chuckle drift across the courtroom.

Then Blackquill slams his palm on the bench, and the courtroom goes quiet enough to listen to the rattle of the chain echo into silence. Athena, basically lying sprawled across the bench , pushes herself up. Sasha has frozen.

For a moment, Blackquill doesn’t move, his eyes fixed down on his hand on the bench. Then he raises his eyes up, his face alight with smug triumph. “My sincerest thanks, Wright-dono.”

“Huh?” There’s no way this goes that’s good, is there? Maybe Blackquill could surprise him, like the updated autopsy report surprised him, or maybe he’s going to have to ask Athena how many languages she knows and how to say oh fuck in all of them. (She knows German, right? He could pull double time with that, between swearing in court, and driving a few people he knows up the wall.)

“For your work in drawing out the truth.”

If Blackquill had a personal stake in wanting to know the truth behind this case, that would be one thing, but—

“Now, Fool Bright. Arrest this woman.”

“Certainly!” Fulbright throws up a jaunty salute with two fingers. He and Blackquill are the only ones moving, like they’re the only ones alive, everyone else turned to stone, unable to do anything but wait. “Sasha Buckler, you are under arrest for the murder of Jack Shipley!”

“What?” Sasha springs backwards, knocking into the bench and grabbing onto the edge of it to hold herself up.

“No! I don’t believe it!” Athena smacks both of her palms down on the bench, pushing herself up entirely off of her feet, suspending herself in an attempt to be taller.

The shoe dropped. “For what reason—”

Blackquill cuts him off before he finishes asking the question. “Come now. You must have had some idea in your sorry sad head that this would be the outcome. The drained pool in the orca room accessible only by key card - the orca being framed with its show commands. Who else had access and ability to be on the scene and properly manipulate the orca? She and the victim are the only two who participate in the training and commanding of the orca, and her security card, last night, had the last recorded usage until the body was discovered yesterday morning.”

“Yesterday, we requested security card logs from the company that handles them,” Fulbright says. “Apparently, the aquarium employees don’t know the card usage is tracked. Come along now, Ms Buckler. It’s time we have a nice long chat down at the station.”

Card usage records, think Phoenix think; he’s run up against this kind of thing at least once before. What are all his theories and bluffs to get around that? If employees didn’t know that their ins and outs were recorded, someone who had their own card would probably use it, but a culprit who didn’t have a card would still have to steal it, even if they didn’t know they could frame someone that way.

Objecting at this point won’t stop what’s in motion. Fulbright takes Sasha by the upper arm, escorting her away, and she follows in a dazed trace. But Phoenix is not going to not object, if he sees any way to, and Sasha is his client about as much as Orla is, and Athena is indignant and seething beside him. “Why would Ms Buckler have come to us for help with Orla’s case if she intended to frame Orla?” he demands. “Why wouldn’t she just let Orla be blamed and escape the scrutiny?”

Blackquill snorts. “She’s quite the performer, acting the part of such a worried girl concerned for the life of her friend. Perhaps she thought to even better sell her concern this way, knowing all the while with a witness, the margins of victory were quite slim for you. I of course suspected her from the start. That the orca may have been a malicious killer, or may have been a pawn and victim herself of someone so heartless as to place the blame upon the unwitting - I considered both possibilities.”

Phoenix should have figured something was up, that he had another culprit ready to blame, when the update to the autopsy report arrived. If Blackquill ordered the body reexamined for - what, exactly? The differing patterns of blunt force trauma for being slammed by an orca against glass versus falling a long distance? Squish versus splat? - then did he expect that the defense was going to find that angle? If he wanted the examiners to specifically consider falling, then that meant he realized Orla was innocent. And if she was innocent, then he could just switch targets. He was waiting for this since they put Sasha on the stand.

He had unwitting pawns of his own.

“I really must thank you again.” Blackquill is undeniably enjoying rubbing salt into the wound. “I surely could not have done this without your assistance. After all, you were the one who put the witness so at ease as to bring forth the information about the orca’s lifesaver trick.”

This is not the kind of defense-prosecution collaboration that Phoenix signed up for.

“Wait - wait!” Sasha wakes to the reality of her situation, snaps out of the confused daze the accusation put her in, and starts dragging her feet, not slowing hers and Fulbright’s trajectory out of the courtroom in any way, but succeeding at making a horrible squealing noise of her shoes on the polished courtroom floor. “I didn’t kill the captain! I would never do anything that would hurt Orla! I - oof!” Fulbright seems about two seconds from lifting her off the ground and simply hauling her from the courtroom that way. “Please! Phoenix! Athena! I—”

Her voice fades and a door slams.

“Sasha—” Athena has her feet back solidly on the ground, her hands still pressed against the bench, fingers curled under her palms to form trembling fists. She doesn’t speak again, doesn’t move again. Even once the judge has adjourned the court - this is Orla’s trial, after all, and she is resoundingly innocent - she remains still, her eyes fixed blankly out into space. Phoenix has to tap her on the shoulder to get her moving, and even then, when she does, she walks with the same slow cadence that Sasha did as she tried to figure out what was happening. Widget is still lit up, displaying its sad purple-bluish face, but Athena might as well have shut herself off.

“What a horrible end to a trial,” Trucy says, shaking her head. They’re already in the lobby waiting, she and Apollo and Pearl, all serious and solemn and surprisingly quiet. “It was going so good! I was so excited for you both! And then—!”

“She didn’t do it!” Athena blurts. Widget snaps to red. “I believe that with my whole heart, I know it, Sasha didn’t do it! Her voice and her heart were both saying the exact same thing, that she didn’t! And no one listened!” Her anger teeters on the edge of tears. “The whole court should’ve listened and no one - no one—”

“Well, obviously you listened,” Apollo says. He looks pretty uncomfortable with her distress, drawing himself back, his arms tightly folded together, but as he speaks, Athena’s body snaps up straight, her head level again, eyes wide, like she was just doused in cold water to finally wake her.

“I - Boss!” She spins around to face Phoenix. “Boss, we have to defend Sasha! We have to get to the detention center to see her, right now! Right now!”

“The police aren’t even going to be back at the detention center yet,” Phoenix says. “They do have to drive there, you know. It’s not like it’s - wormholes or anything.” He deliberately goes for a word far from fae connotations, far from something that will give Pearl, Athena, or Trucy any ideas. “We’ll go back to the office and regroup, figure out how we approach today’s investigation at the aquarium, and we’ll go there—”

“But you’re going to be defending Sasha too, right, Boss?” Athena demands. “If you’re not, then - then I - and—” She looks to Apollo and Trucy, her words all tangled up, but the intent clear: she’ll do it with or without him.

“Of course I will be,” Phoenix says. “But the police will be interrogating her for a while, probably, so we should do some investigating first, so we’re not just waiting around at the detention center, and so we can have something actually helpful to tell her, because…” He drags a hand through his hair. It’s the way this always goes, the up-and-down trajectory where after every crescendo there’s a further place to fall, and if he ever proves innocence in one matter for certain, something else waits in the wings to tell him he lost a different round he didn’t know he was playing.

“Because what, Daddy?” Trucy asks. “You think she’s going to want a different lawyer? You proved Orla didn’t do it! She sounded really grateful to you and Athena! Of course she’d want you as her lawyer!”

“I should’ve seen this coming,” Phoenix says. That’s the trouble: Blackquill said he must surely have had some idea of how this would end, and he did, and he pushed it away, and it caught up to him. “And figured out - some way around it, asked Sasha what her alibi was and what she was doing because if we were proving a human culprit then of course the prosecution could turn it around to—”

“But how could you have seen that coming?” Athena glares at him like he’s a lying witness on the stand, and she, ready to tear him apart verbally and physically. “That Prosecutor Blackquill would - ugh! Prosecutor Blackquill.” She says his name like a curse, the tone that Maya always used on Edgeworth’s name at the beginning. (Then he stopped being such a pain in the ass and became their friend and she stopped using his name at all.)

“How could you have even thought to ask Ms Buckler those questions?” Trucy says. “Like ‘hey you were the only one to use the security key in the past 12 hours right’? Or ‘did you leak any of your top-secret orca whistle patterns to anyone else’ or ‘how do we break into police files to get the full security camera footage’ or—”

“I get it, Truce,” Phoenix says. She squints doubtfully at him. “No, I do, really. But the thing is—”

She rolls her eyes and turns silently to Apollo, the obvious sentiment conveyed that this further objection is him further not actually getting it, and Apollo snorts, and Phoenix’s heart clenches up with a vice around it that they’ve only had a year and not a lifetime to perfect their silent, condescending, sibling communication and they don’t even know that’s what this is. It’s the same way Edgeworth and Franziska can cast the briefest glance at each other but convey three levels of disdain and mockery and coordinate a savage teardown of whatever sorry fool has earned their ire—

Where was his original thought going?

“The thing is - this happens all the time, to me, with my cases. Where everything I do to prove my client innocent just further pushes them, or someone else they love, closer to drowning. Just makes it worse.” Edgeworth’s new confession, an accusation against Ema. A last accusation against Maya, her own mother. Phoenix’s own badge because he tried too hard to save someone with it. Just the highlight reel. “And it’s kind of horribly crushing every time. I didn’t want you to have to go through that, Athena.” Look how badly it affected her. She asked him something like that back when they first met, didn’t she: what happens if no one listens to you? And here it went, and hurt her badly.

All four of the kids stare at him, unblinking, confused. “But then you would’ve had to defend and investigate all on your own!” Athena protests. “And - and then you’d have no one to share the crushing despair with!”

“I don’t want to share that,” Phoenix interrupts. “I’m pretty sure I’m cursed.” And like the other ways he’s cursed, he’s afraid that sooner or later it will take one of his kids as victim. Less horrible than Death catching up to them, of course, but still. He’s put them all through enough.

Pearl studies him intently, chewing at her thumbnail again. She concentrates hard enough that her glamour starts slipping from her eyes, turning them red. “I don’t see anything,” she says. “I mean, Misfortune could do it, but you only got that when you stopped being a lawyer.”

Apollo recoils. He knows exactly where that one came from.

“But your win record is still kickass!” Athena punches her fist into her opposite palm. “So even if it happens you still pull it off! And I want to learn how to do that! From Apollo and from you, too!” In his logical, detached brain, he can keep a good distance from her, and then when she’s staring him in the face reminding him of why he became a lawyer and the good things he’s done - it’s that much harder. “C’mon, if we’re going to the office we’d better go now! We’ve got investigation to do!”

“You know,” Pearl says as they head for Athena’s car, “you sure do know a lot about orcas. And I didn’t get to learn much about Orla at the aquarium, unfortunately, and I know she’s not the point of contention in court anymore—”

“Do you want me to tell you more orca facts?” Athena interrupts. As though she honestly needs the excuse that Pearl was going to offer her, of teaching them things they can use in court to defend Orla. Pearl nods.

On the drive back to the office, Phoenix gets the other front seat, and Apollo, Trucy, and Pearl squish themselves into the back. Athena chatters animatedly to the rearview mirror the whole time.

“Was there something you wanted to say to me, Athena? Or show me? That’s a very large book you have, there.”

“...Junie brought it to me from the school library. Since I haven’t been able to go in lately.”

“She did? That’s very kind of her. And what is it - An Encyclopedia of Marine Mammals. Very nice.”

“Mhm. I’m nearly done reading it.”

“You’re reading the whole thing? Cover to cover?”

“Don’t you do that with books? Um… being a lawyer is a lot of reading, isn’t it? You should read it all. To make sure that you don’t catch an innocent person by mistake.”

“I do, don’t worry. I wouldn’t want any person sent to the gallows for something they didn’t do.”

“Then why don’t you read whole books?”

“I don’t read entire encyclopedias. You know, a lot of libraries don’t let you take them home with you at all. You just look up what you want to know while you’re there.”

“But I want to know everything that’s in this encyclopedia.”

“Well, then I suppose you know better than I and I shouldn’t be telling you what to do, I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. Do you want to hear something I’ve learned so far? Um, since you’re always taking time to, to teach me what you’re learning.”

“I’ve heard it said, and found it myself to be true, that by teaching something you learn it better yourself, too. It helps us both that way. It’s very efficient. Go ahead, tell me something about marine mammals.”

“I’ll try and find something you wouldn’t already know.”

“I’m a law and psychology student, not a marine biologist. I don’t know anything. How about you tell me about - penguins?”

“Birds aren’t mammals, silly! But I can tell you about orcas. They’re black and white like you and penguins are, too! They’re the largest member of the dolphin family - they’re not whales at all!”

“Killer whales aren’t whales?”

“Nope! And the ‘killer’ part, is because sailors would observe them hunting and killing baleen whales, and they were first known as ‘whale killers’ and then that got flipped, somehow. And now people tend to think of them as vicious killers, but they aren’t! Wild orcas have never killed a human! They’re just strong and hungry.”

“That they gained that reputation is unfortunate but not surprising. Humans have that tendency to fear what they don’t understand, and to not bother understanding so much of the world around them. To presume that their impressions of the world constitute its one objective truth.”

“...”

“I’m sorry. The cases I’ve been studying lately have me pondering this sort of matter quite a bit, lately. This and worse.”

“Do you want to talk about those? That might make you feel better?”

“...how about you explain to me what a ‘baleen whale’ is.”

“They don’t have teeth - they’re the ones like humpback and blue whales that have, like, bristles in their mouth that they filter in plankton through. That’s what baleen is! It looks sort of like my hairbrush over there.”

“Speaking of, you certainly don’t look like you brushed your hair at all today.”

“No? I… Mom’s been busy all day working, and I was busy reading so I didn’t think I…”

“How about I go get it and fix your hair so that you look presentable, and you tell me more about orcas.”

“I look fine!”

“You look like it was arranged by nesting birds looking to make a comfortable place to raise their young.”

“Pbbbbft! Oh, but did you know that orcas are one of the only species of mammal besides humans and other primates that undergo menopause? Female orcas who can no longer have babies stick around to help raise other babies and take charge of the group. Different populations of orca tend to live in different-sized pods but for most of them, the babies even once grown up don’t leave on their own and instead they’ll stay with their moms for their whole lives—”

#roddy fanfics #fic: the witches of los angeles

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wardencommanderrodimiss · 5 years

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Chapter Eight: these are not valid investigative procedures, Phoenix, what the fuck

last of the Phoenix POV chapters for now. This took so long to post because I’d been fighting with revisions to Ch 6 as well, but maybe we can get this rolling again now!

[Beginning] [Chapter Masterlist]

He tracked down Valant the night before the trial, after Apollo worriedly mentioned his reaction to the mystery envelope. The kid has decent instincts, even though Valant isn’t dangerous, not the way Magnifi was, not the way that Zak could be, only in the way that any witch could be dangerous, and particularly the way of certain witches Phoenix has known -- dangerous mostly to themselves. A fool in over his head, for purpose, for love, for power -- it’s an old story. So often the stories just repeat themselves.

“And that is it, then,” Valant says, staring up at the looming shadow of the coliseum in the darkness, where Phoenix found him prowling around its edges, searching for something that he never had a chance of finding. “My last chance, gone; Fate, toying with me, taunting me, and my life, lived in thrall to the dead.”

A witch’s power might fade with the death of a fae patron, and the chains might no longer be visible -- but something remains. Something always remains.

“I know how that feels,” Phoenix says. Valant turns his eyes over Phoenix, black glinting blue, and in nearly the same moment that the color changes, he recoils in horror, gripping his staff as though about to strike.

“You do not jest, Mr Attorney.”

Its relevance undeniable after the first day of Vera’s trial, Phoenix tells Apollo the most condensed summary as he can about the trial of Zak Gramarye and all of the magic and enchantments swirling about it. He never had the chance to make any notes on his conversation with Valant the prior night, so that, too, he must cut down to size -- Magnifi’s suicide, Zak’s false confession to clear Valant’s name, Valant’s own guilt for tampering with the scene of the suicide. What is in the envelope he leaves for another day -- it’s more a distraction than relevant to the case, and Trucy will have her chance soon to chase down the remainder of the Gramarye magic and undoubtedly drag Apollo along for the search. When they finish talking, he leaves Apollo with the court transcript and video of that last case to review again and the notes he made speaking with Valant and the Mishams during the course of his investigation seven years ago. There is more, there is still so much more -- he has not mentioned all of the curses marking each one of them, or Maya, and certainly not the picture that Zak gave him the last night of his life, showing Thalassa and her heirloom bracelets.

He had thought that Apollo’s aura seemed familiar, the first time he saw him at Kristoph’s office, and the reason for that is one of the truths that he does not yet intend to hand out.

Thalassa needs to know first.

(When Valant, murmuring to himself, said that they never saw a body, that she may still walk this earth -- Phoenix did not tell him what he already knew.)

There are several things that Thalassa needs to know, first.

Giving Apollo the transcript feels risky -- at the end of it he might decide that Klavier is the more trustworthy one. The prosecutor seems to have him charmed, magically or not (probably not), and Phoenix knows he hasn’t made a good impression on anyone since Mia. (No, not even Mia, but perhaps Ema.) And he certainly didn’t do a good job of defending himself in that trial -- Klavier was prepared (too prepared) and Phoenix too dazed and dazzled by enchantments and confused by who and how to know how to put up a fight.

He would have just told Apollo that Klavier was unusually prepared, beyond what a supposedly simple anonymous tip should have been able to get him, but he thinks that might just turn Apollo against him further, make him seem more to be playing Apollo against Klavier. He knows he can seem manipulative -- he knows he can be manipulative -- and this can’t be one of those times. Too much is at stake for Apollo not to believe him -- he needs Apollo to reach on his own the conclusion that Klavier knew too much. And if he accepts that, then he might be willing to accept what Phoenix knows about Kristoph and hasn’t yet divulged.

There’s just two last things he has to check before he can lay on Apollo the final answer of who killed the Mishams?

(No -- Vera isn’t dead, not yet. No one can lay down death so quickly like the royal women of Kurain.)

“I’ve a question for you, if I may, Valant,” Phoenix says. Valant is still staring at him, eyes bright in the dark, somewhere between suspicion and fear. “Zak’s Sight -- he was already losing it when I met him. It was part of his contract with Magnifi, and ended with his death.”

Valant nods, slowly, his blue eyes narrowing now, more suspicion than anything else. “Yet you, after all this time, can still See,” Phoenix continues.

“There is no question in your words, Mr Attorney,” Valant says.

“I think you can understand the question implicit,” Phoenix replies. Valant’s choice of a point of contention is a clear signal that this is not something he wants to discuss, but if Phoenix knew how to take a hint, he probably wouldn’t have ever become a lawyer in the first place.

“And I should imagine that a man so adjacent to the Fair Folk as yourself should understand the value of exact words.”

Fae-adjacent. That’s one way to describe it -- one way to point out that Phoenix should know to be careful in speech, not because he was a lawyer, but because of how he has tangled with magic. Not because of the path in life he chose, the purpose he worked toward, but because of what he stumbled into, this life equally blessed and cursed. His life, shaped by others, in thrall to death and the dead.

“You decided after Magnifi you still wanted a window to the Twilight Realm?” Phoenix asks. If Mia’s death had freed him -- what would he have done?

Valant slowly shakes his head. “Do you think that I before Magnifi went, never once prior having stepped forth from the world of the mundane? You must know that, as Zak Gramarye was not his, Valant Gramarye is not by birth my name.”

Phoenix nods. This still has about a hundred directions it could take. “And what I once was called I can no longer say, for that I traded away for the Sight. And from Magnifi I sought both power and a new self.”

“Your name for the Sight?” Phoenix repeats. He knows of of names taken, like Magnifi’s stripped from him entirely upon his banishment or Godot’s claimed by Dahlia in her victory, or given, has heard folktales of dead names erased or names that are otherwise not true tossed away in a dangerous trick to screw the fae in a deal – but to give away one’s self, plainly, in trade, is only a few steps down from selling one’s soul. How long did Valant spend nameless, without self, drifting unacknowledged until he became Valant? And no wonder he has been so determined to reacquire power, to be Magnifi’s heir, to be someone of import, someone known, if he knew what it was to not be named. “That seems a steep price for something so small.”

“Small? Mr Attorney, to have eyes that can See is no small thing. How many with even magic in their blood cannot See – how many who can See do not know how to interpret their vision? You were a lawyer, were you not – knowledge and truth are power over the Fair Folk. What price did you pay for clarity of vision?”

“It was a gift,” Phoenix says. From Maya, after Mia’s death, so that in that sole regard they could stand on equal footing, so that Maya could have an ally rather than a student.

Valant winces. “My condolences,” he says, and it sounds like he really does mean it. “In the long run, it is a far greater cost paid by you than I. For you to be close enough to one of the Folk that they chose to award you with a gift…” He taps his staff against the ground. “Zak and dear Thalassa were Magnifi’s favorites, and see where it left them. See the yoke you wear about your neck.”

“Hey, Mr Wright, you don’t think you can give me an advance warning next time when you decide that I’m working a critically important case for the future of our legal system?”

“Good to see you too, Ema.”

She flicks a chocolate snack at his face and turns back to the table where the evidence is laid out. “This is everything that Vera had on her when she collapsed,” she says. “Rest of the case evidence is elsewhere, but Mr Edgeworth said this is what you wanted to see.”

Phoenix nods. There is a pencil, its point worn down dull, the eraser flaking apart, and a sketchbook open to a page showing a wide sketch of the courtroom. She had given too much attention to shading in the columns behind the judge and the panels of the doors to have a promising career as a courtroom sketch artist, and while the drawing otherwise looks finished -- there, the judge’s shiny head, and there, Trucy with the wisp at her shoulder that is never hidden to the eye of a fae -- but the place where Klavier should be is a furiously scribbled cloud, some of the lines pressed so deeply into the page that the imprints must be visible on the next.

So she didn’t know what to make of what she saw. He files that fact away and turns his attention to what his real concern is, the glittering crystalline bottle of nail polish.

“From what the arresting officers said,” Ema says, “she wouldn’t be dragged out of the house without having those with her, just wailing and screaming -- said she couldn’t go outside without her good luck charm. Don’t know if that’s the sketchbook or the nail polish.”

“The polish,” Phoenix answers, automatically, ignoring Ema’s darkening expression at the fact that he is so immediately sure of such. “Have you--”

“Detective Skye, you were to wait for accompaniment before you allowed him in to look at the evidence. Wright. We talked about this.”

“Gumshoe and Faraday weren’t around, you weren’t here yet, and I trust him more than I trust anyone else around here,” Ema says. She doesn’t throw snacks at him, but munches forcefully.

“You really shouldn’t be eating in the evidence room,” Edgeworth says. “Both for the chance that you might contaminate the evidence, and because some of that evidence is poisoned.”

“Death comes for us all,” Ema says dryly. “Let me have my fucking Snackoos.”

Edgeworth furrows his brow and turns his glare on Phoenix, like he expects Phoenix to know how to deal with her, like they’re fellow members of the Bitter Cynics With Trust Issues Club -- which, well, they are, her of the mundane chapter and him of the magical. “This is all because I’m not trusted to not tamper with evidence?” Phoenix asks, knowing perfectly well that is the answer, because no matter how many strings Edgeworth has pulled to get him into this position on the committee, no matter how he and Franziska and every other connection Edgeworth has have fought for this chance, the reputation of the last seven years has all but obliterated the reputation he gained as the defense attorney who stood up to von Karma and Gant.

(And his association with Mia hasn’t helped, since it was revealed what she was, just two months before he was disbarred. Forger is one insult; witch is a name of a different sort, an even higher hurdle to jump, a description of him that almost isn’t wrong.)

“Yes; and building on that, there’s been concern -- not from me, mind -- that Detective Skye is a bit too friendly toward you.”

“Who’s saying I’m friendly?” Ema asks. “How have I gotten that reputation?” She scowls when Phoenix laughs. “Was it the glimmerous fop who was concerned? Mr Wright hasn’t touched anything, if you’re worried.”

“It doesn’t matter who it was,” Edgeworth says, which is not a no and thus makes this a matter that Ema will probably not drop so easily, even though Phoenix agrees with his sentiment. It could be anyone. It probably was Klavier. It doesn’t matter. They have bigger concerns. “I said that I wasn’t worried, Detective.”

“Ema,” Phoenix says, forestalling what he expects to be a continuation of the argument, “have you touched any of that evidence without gloves?”

She shakes her head. “Of course I haven’t. I do know what protocol is.” Edgeworth snorts. “Plus, you said to check it for poison. I’m not stupid. It’s atroquinine, specifically -- we just let the hospital know, because apparently they hadn’t figured it out--”

Phoenix gestures at the bottle of nail polish. “It would be easier to determine from that. Poisons don’t always react the same way in the fae.”

Ema freezes with a chocolate halfway to her mouth. She slowly lowers it back into the bag. “Ms Misham was one of the Fair Folk?” she asks. Phoenix nods. “That’s, uh -- shit. Why didn’t we know that one?”

“Prosecutor Gavin didn’t tell you?” He has heard -- from Ema, from Edgeworth, from Trucy, from Apollo -- that the working relationship between detective and prosecutor is a rocky one, but still, that is information that would be useful for her to know, that they might think could help determine a motive. That is information that, if not widely disseminated, should at least be passed to someone else on the investigative team, to have up their sleeve if the defense made it relevant -- or didn’t know. And Gavin is thorough -- it’s a surprise that he would have kept that one close to his chest.

Unless he was willing to sacrifice part of his case to avoid the question that inevitably is coming.

“How would he know?” Ema demands.

“So he didn’t tell you.”

“Wright,” Edgeworth says, voice low and dangerous, a growl but not a hiss. “How would he know?”

“I may have left out some facts about the Gavin brothers from everything I’ve said about them the last seven years,” Phoenix says. “The short of it is that Klavier has the Sight.”

“Wright…” The snarl is already gone from his voice; Edgeworth’s sigh is one of empty resignation, now. He knows Phoenix better than any other human, and he knows it is Phoenix’s nature to not show his cards until the last possible second. It pisses Edgeworth off, Phoenix knows it, but he prefers a frustrated Edgeworth to a worrying one, and his response to Phoenix telling him about Dahlia’s curse was enough for Phoenix to decide not to burden him with more. He hates to worry him.

And Apollo -- Phoenix doesn’t want to scare him. He doesn’t know what Apollo has been told by Klavier, but if he didn’t even point out to the detectives that the defendant is a fae for fear of questioning -- Apollo probably doesn’t know much more than that he can See. Not why, not anything about Kristoph -- and Phoenix needs Apollo to stare the two of them down, and he doesn’t know how much the boy would balk were he warned in advance. He’s not as stupid as Phoenix was.

“He’s human?” Ema asks. It sounds like a question not meant to be answered, and she follows it up a moment later with, “I thought so, because that fucking accent absolutely, unequivocally, counts as a lie.”

Edgeworth fails to stifle a laugh, but he blanches when he looks back at Phoenix and sees his eyes. “What are you looking for?” he asks. Ema’s attention turns immediately to Phoenix as well.

“Confirmation of my suspicions,” Phoenix answers, gesturing for them both to step back from the evidence table. If being in the vicinity of it is enough, it’s already too late, but he doesn��t see death marked on Ema the way it was on Vera.

The bottle looks different through eyes that aren’t human. (Vera should have seen this, Vera should have known, how could she have known, how many changelings don’t know what they are.) The crystal edges still catch the light, but inside the liquid looks like thick red mold, something rotten, curdling inside and straining to get out like it is something alive, an amorphous beast all its own. Phoenix glances about and crosses the room to the box of rubber gloves on the far shelf, snapping two onto his hands as he returns to the bottle. He unscrews the cap and pulls the brush forth, not so far that any of the polish will drip, but enough that there could be flow of air from the bottle to the outside.

The leaking wisps of something like smoke that he expects to see don’t come.

Huh. Strange. He didn’t think he’d win this time when he called its bluff -- unless --

“Wright, what the hell are you doing?”

Phoenix tosses each of the gloves in turn toward the waste bin and misses both shots. “I know it’s cursed, but I can’t figure out how to activate it.”

“Most people don’t want to activate cursed objects, Mr Wright,” Ema says.

“I’m already cursed,” he says. “There’s not much this particular thing can do to me.”

Phoenix picks up the bottle and Edgeworth inhales sharply. There’s a wild look to his eyes, one of fear, the one that Phoenix has been trying to avoid all of these years. “Your fingerprints on that bottle certainly will be able to do something to you,” he says stiffly, a valiant but futile attempt at masking what it is about this that truly concerns him.

“I should hope that any fingerprints were collected and analyzed already,” Phoenix says. The bottle doesn’t tremble in his hand or feel anything like the excess of energy that should be contained within it. He closes his fingers around it, finding himself reaching for something that isn’t there, and draws the brush from the bottle, wiping off the excess on the edges and squinting at it. The curse doesn’t look or feel any stronger now. The temptation to touch the polish on his skin is nearly overwhelming. “I don’t think I can activate it,” he says. “Not without licking it, and--”

Edgeworth has his wrist in a vicelike grip before Phoenix can finish his sentence. “--and that still won’t give us an accurate reading on the situation,” he continues, turning a glare on Edgeworth, whose expression doesn’t change, and he doesn’t release Phoenix’s wrist. “Because I’ll be poisoned.”

“So we wouldn’t know if it’s poison or the curse affecting you, and it won’t affect you, a human, the way it did Vera,” Ema adds. “There’s too many variables to make it a good experiment.”

“Also, the fact that he would be poisoned,” Edgeworth says.

“Hey, it takes about half an hour to kick in, right?” Phoenix asks. “There should be enough time for me to put together some data points.”

Edgeworth makes a strangled sound from the back of his throat. “I do have a question about that,” Ema says. “What’s the point of poisoning and cursing the bottle? I mean, if we’re trying to go about assessing this scientifically, why not just one or the other? Is the redundancy necessary?”

“Yes, and no,” Phoenix says. He tries and fails to elbow Edgeworth away, but Ema, having abandoned her Snackoos to grab gloves, plucks the bottle up from his hand and sets it back down on the table. It takes several seconds for Edgeworth to finally let him go. “There’s a couple different possibilities for why one would -- or wouldn’t do that.”

“We’re gonna be here for a while, aren’t we?” Ema grumbles, but she still looks intrigued, her eyes fixed on Phoenix and slowing to take her gloves off like she’s forgotten that she meant to be doing that.

“You wanted the scientific assessment.” Phoenix finds a wall to lean against. “Poison is the option to leave less of a trail -- I know that sounds odd, with forensics, but if you clean that up well enough” -- he gestures at the bottle -- “like so, then you’re clear. Magic always leaves an impression -- curses are especially distinct. Someone who has the Sight will be able to recognize what curses have come from the same person, and maybe even match that imprint up with the person themselves. So a killer who knows there’s others with the Sight tangled up in her webs is going to poison her victim so as to not leave that obvious beacon to follow.”

“Her?” Ema asks. “You don’t mean Vera?”

She is frowning, her lips pressed together in concentration, but Edgeworth just looks sad. “No, I don’t -- Ms Misham hasn’t poisoned anyone,” Phoenix says. “I was thinking of… someone else.”

He keeps being surprised to have Zak’s locket there when he touches his neck, but even when he isn’t wearing it, he can still feel a cold chain shifting against his skin. “Curses,” he says, clearing his throat, and it doesn’t help, he can still feel the sharp scrape of glass and metal down his throat, and then something less solid but even more suffocating cinching tight around his neck and lungs and heart, “are for if you want to baffle the humans investigating your case, and you’re sure that no one with the Sight is going to be looking at the corpse.” He can’t make himself take any breaths deeper than short gasps. “Or if you need someone dead in a hurry. If you don’t care that you’ll be Seen. Just as long as you can shut them up before they can say more.”

He’s a dead man, living on time borrowed -- no, stolen -- from someone else.

Ema pretends she doesn’t hear his discomfort, that she doesn’t see Edgeworth touch a hand to his arm for the briefest of moments. “So wait,” she says, “how is she even alive after all of this, the curse and the poison -- and still, why? That’s just asking to be caught both ways. More stupid than thorough.”

“You’re right,” Phoenix says. “It is odd, but speaking logically, it tells me a few things.” The crease between Edgeworth’s eyes deepens. “Hey, I know how to think logically, too!”

“Did I say you didn’t?”

“It tells me that the killer knew she was a changeling — he couldn’t count on solely the atroquinine to kill her, like he could for Drew.”

“Wait,” Edgeworth interrupts. “Do we know for sure that Mr Misham wasn’t cursed?”

Phoenix slaps the magatama into his palm. “I suspect he wasn’t, but also suspect I might not be allowed into the morgue, and have somewhere to be after this anyway--”

Edgeworth keeps glaring at him. “So no, I can’t say for certain yet that the stamp wasn’t cursed, or Drew directly,” Phoenix continues, “but I can be pretty sure, because he was only human, and thus likely to fall to atroquinine. Vera, on the other hand -- there’s no way to predict what toxins will do to the fae -- even iron and metals, it all depends -- and the killer couldn’t use atroquinine alone and be sure she would die.”

“But why not just the curse?” Ema repeats.

Because he didn’t think he was strong enough,” Phoenix answers. “He didn’t think his magic was enough to kill her, even with a curse of death. So then,” he continues, catching himself rapping his knuckles against empty air like he would were he holding a paper in front of him, “the catalyst would be the same thing. Vera chews her nails when she is anxious -- she gets anxious when she goes outside. She is called on to testify about who the client is, she’s on the witness stand, gets nervous, chews her nails -- the nail polish is cursed and poisoned. Together, maybe that’s enough.”

Maybe tomorrow, or tonight, but for now Vera still clings to life, and -- god, Phoenix hopes it isn’t enough. Guilt has chewed him apart enough over curses and death -- he should have known that mysterious “good luck charm” would haunt them, he should have found some way to force her to show it to him, how could he have known he should have known -- and please not Vera’s life on his conscience too.

“Then what’s death do if a person can walk around living with it?” Ema asks.

Edgeworth looks at Phoenix. Phoenix looks anywhere but at Ema. The strongest curse is cleanest: a swift end to one sole person. The power behind her curse would have been the most kindness Dahlia did for him -- but a weakened curse? Death, not like a gunshot but a dull, serrated blade, messy and painful and lingering, and Phoenix wishes that were an accurate analogy. He wishes that death marked on his chest left him the only one hurting, the only one dying. No, he lives, and that, life, was Mia’s gift. Life, for him, breathing room between his throat and Dahlia’s noose; life, for him, and everything around him dies.

He can’t force himself to look back at Edgeworth either.

“If he hadn’t been poisoned, Drew Misham likely wouldn’t have lived to be old,” Phoenix says, and Ema is silent, and he thinks that means she understands.

Or maybe he always would have been poisoned, no matter how long the stamp was saved, maybe he was just doomed in that way. Maybe there was never an if he hadn’t been poisoned; maybe there is only the curse, reshaping reality, and to parse any other circumstances out from it is a hopeless case, a circular argument, and he is the serpent eating his own tail as he in vain tries to understand what could have been otherwise. There is no otherwise.

Edgeworth hasn’t pressed the magatama back into Phoenix’s hands but has been giving it a wary look for the duration of the time he has been speaking. Slowly he holds it up to one eye, to examine the nail polish bottle. He can’t hide the disgust and horror, in equal measure, that crosses his face.

“One last thing,” Phoenix says. Ema has retrieved her snack bag and tosses a chocolate at him. He catches it, seriously considers it for a moment, and decides that even if there probably aren’t any traces of poison on his hands, and that probably he could survive atroquinine poisoning, it’s not worth it. He misses the trash can again. “I know you don’t deal with curses around here, but do you have some way of recording what’s up with that bottle -- to on-the-record get that information to Prosecutor Gavin, without him having to come down here to take a look.”

“The glimmerous fop can drag himself over here,” Ema grumbles. She seems to be throwing more chocolates at Phoenix than she is eating. “Especially if he has the Sight. Especially since that means he should be able to see who did it. Why should I bother filling out something for him?”

Klavier already knows who the murderer is. Klavier has known for a while -- of that, Phoenix is certain. Whatever fight he has put up, whatever fight he will put up tomorrow, the way that the curse swallowed up Vera was unmistakable, and that is far from the only clue. He will hardly need to come down here to look at the nail polish again to confirm the facts, and it might be safer if he were to stay away from it.

But Apollo and Trucy must have been in close proximity to it as well, waiting with their client in the lobby, and they were as fine as ever.

“If he does want to see it, don’t let him touch it,” Phoenix says. “Gloves or no. Even if Edgeworth is going to have to straighten out your salary or employment at the end of it, don’t let him touch it.”

“But you touched it,” Ema points out, aggressively crunching down on another Snackoo. “And I did. Unless” -- her eyes narrow -- “you’re worried about him being able to tamper with the -- the curses?”

“That’s not the part I’m worried about with him and curses,” Phoenix says.

“Fine, keep your secrets.” Ema throws another chocolate at him. “If he fires me, I’m hitting you up to pay my bills.”

“Me? When we have Edgeworth right here?”

“I’m not paying your rent, Wright.”

Phoenix laughs. Edgeworth’s stony expression does not change. “For once,” he adds, “you could stand to tell me things as you learn them.”

“I’m sorry,” Phoenix lies, because he’d drag this hell out another seven years if he had to, damn himself for all eternity in a second if the alternative had the merest chance of putting Edgeworth in reach of Kristoph’s claws. His is one life Phoenix cannot gamble.

He can’t live with that again.

“There’s one thing I have left to do, and then I’ll be able to tell Apollo, with certainty, everything he needs to know to start tomorrow’s trial.” And the rest won’t take long to follow. “Is Trucy still at your office, or did she go back to the agency?”

“I dropped her off at your office on my way here,” Edgeworth says. “Am I to suppose you’re keeping secrets from her, and that’s the reason you sent her off to me?”

She handed him the diary page that ruined his life; either her father or her uncle shot and killed her mother; Kristoph killed her father six months ago, when he reappeared sure that enough time had passed to make one same return and then a clean break forever. She’ll have to find out the last of those at some point, likely soon, too soon, soon enough that he should just tell her -- but the rest? On that, he swore Apollo to silence.

Edgeworth knows him too well. “Yes. I’ve already told Apollo everything I didn’t want her hearing.”

They make for the door, to leave Ema behind, but she stops them with a word. “Hey. Mr Wright.”

The door closes on Edgeworth’s shoulder, keeping it propped open for Phoenix. “Can you tell how someone acquired the Sight?” she asks. “Like, can you see it? Do you know?”

“Is this about Klavier?” he asks.

“If he did something really fucked up for it, like selling his soul, you’d tell us, right?”

“Ema, I picked him to be the prosecutor for this case. Do you really think I’d do that if I didn’t think he had integrity?”

She snorts. “Him, integrity, that’s – hah. You’re still not answering the question, anyway.”

Edgeworth raises an eyebrow and inclines his head at Ema, like he agrees that yes, Phoenix did dodge that question. “No, I wouldn’t tell you, but I wouldn’t have picked him for this, either,” Phoenix says.

Ema gives him that doubtful look again. “Mr Wright,” she says, “you didn’t answer my first question, either. If there’s a way you can tell.”

The answer, like most things with Phoenix and magic, is situational, dependent on a hundred other factors. Witches are easy to tell. Klavier – after seven years, Phoenix finally has a guess at what Klavier is, but it’s still just a guess.

“Because I’m not entirely stupid about magic things,” Ema adds. She tried to quantify magic, assess it scientifically, when she could; Phoenix explained to her about his eyes, a decade ago, and she directed him to sit on the floor and grabbed a magnifying glass and stared at his eyes like somewhere in there something had shifted that even she could see. That passion burned itself out. Phoenix knows how that feels. “I know there’s something fucked-up about the glimmerous fop.”

“I’m inclined to be suspicious about anyone who has the Sight,” Edgeworth says. Phoenix claps a hand over his chest and feigns offense; Edgeworth ignores him. “There’s no good way of acquiring it; and even if I were to trust the person, I will not feel the same about the circumstances that got them that…gift” – his mouth twists. Phoenix has used that word to describe the Sight and other blessings, too, but he has never felt it to be quite right – “nor the reasons they might have felt it was necessary to have. No one will simply think that it might help them in investigative procedures.”

Ema’s face falls. The snack bag crumples noisily in her hands and she tosses it to the trash. “My sister thought about doing that,” she says quietly, so softly that Phoenix barely hears her, and Edgeworth steps closer. “But that – that wasn’t just, simply. Didn’t wake up one day and figure cutting a deal for the Sight would just be a fun little thing. I keep remembering now, one of the times she brought the case home, and the whole team -- I remember sitting in the hall and listening to her and Jake argue, I think everyone else had gone home, and they were arguing, that yeah maybe the case doesn’t have anything to do with magic but if it does, she can’t just pass that up, she can’t just not follow that lead, even for…” She glances down at her hands, like she expects to find a new bag of Snackoos in them, like she doesn’t know what to do if she doesn’t have that nervous habit to lean on. “She said she’d sell her soul to convict Joe Darke, if she had to.”

“In a way, she did,” Phoenix says.

Ema nods. “In a way.”

Edgeworth closes his eyes and turns his head away.

In the way that people like him and Lana and Phoenix sell their souls, the mundane way, piece by piece, lie by lie, until there’s nothing left but that cold hollow where something human once resided.

“But that was why,” she adds, even softer, and Phoenix has to lean down further to hear, and Edgeworth doesn’t come closer this time, “I was going to -- to your… to Mia. Like sure she’s a defense attorney, but I thought, then, that -- that if it came to it, I would sell my soul to her for my sister back. For her soul back.”

She looks away. “And I found you, just a human.”

“Only human.” And too well aware of it, that even soulless, he is just human.

“But you still won it back for her.”

Phoenix doesn’t know what to say to that. Edgeworth is looking at him now, too. The volume of their conversation has slightly risen again; he probably heard the last sentence or two. “For whatever it’s worth, which is about nothing at this point,” Phoenix says, trying to deflect, trying not to think about how his own is the one soul he hasn’t managed to get back, realizing that Ema spoke so quietly because she wanted only Phoenix to hear and dropping his voice back down low, “I don’t think Mia would have taken you up on your deal.”

Ema is wringing her hands again, glances away and then stalks back toward the evidence. “So if the fop made a trade for the sake of his case, it had to be some fucked-up case.” Her suspicious glare settles again on the bottle of nail polish.

Edgeworth’s brow furrows. Doubtlessly he is thinking of a certain fucked-up case that Klavier was assigned to. Phoenix doesn’t know if he should dissuade that line of thinking, if Edgeworth assuming that Klavier thought that the Sight was necessary to take on Phoenix is a less charitable assumption than any other that he could make.

“And again, I do trust Klavier,” Phoenix says. Ema and Edgeworth’s arched eyebrows are almost mirrors of each other. “So trust my judgment, and the truth will come to light tomorrow.”

Somehow, impossibly, Ema’s eyebrow raises higher. She stood at the bench with Phoenix; she knows how his judgment can be. He decides that her semi-justified lack of total faith in him is close to warranted, and that he can deal with it another day. “See you around, Ema,” he says, taking the door from Edgeworth. Together they start down the hall.

“And where are you going now, Wright?”

“There’s someone I have to see. Maybe I can pry a motive out of him.”

The lock are black.

Phoenix has never seen them like that before.

#fic: the seelie of kurain #roddy fanfics #WOOHOO new chapter happy new year i've been fighting with this since the old year

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wardencommanderrodimiss · 6 years

Text

Seventeen (Once and Never Again)

The joke: a Themis graduate/rock star falls in with another alumnus whom he hated and a Great Thief. The punchline? Who better to understand how it is to be shaped by betrayal.

on ao3

A lot of the faces at the Prosecutors Office are familiar, even after years away, because the average age trends about two decades older than Klavier and at that point little changes other than the one Payne’s horrible hair. The most familiar face he absolutely does not want to see is two days after he gets back — he is coming out of the elevator, still puzzling over a conversation he had this morning with Prosecutor Edgeworth that felt like it had at least three hidden layers. And there in front of him is someone he remembers from school who he wishes he didn't.

Sebastian Debeste looks older, but not by much — not by seven years, with his round face and hair much the same — and wears glasses now, his eyes gone huge behind them as he recognizes Klavier. They stare at each other, Klavier struggling for something to say, anything, even just "Hello, Prosecutor Debeste," and he manages nothing before Debeste, who was probably going to the elevator, makes an undignified retreat toward the stairwell. He is barely out of Klavier's way before Klavier bolts for the main lobby, sure that Debeste’s eyes follow his flight.

He isn't assigned to a case that goes to trial for a month and a half after his return; it does not take him long to refamiliarize himself with the office, but it gives him time to come to know the people who have arrived since his departure. He ends up down at the precinct a lot, consulting with the detectives there, learning the faces he hasn't seen before. He wishes he could work with Daryan again — one of the things he likes about Daryan is that even if he has his moments in which he is an asshole, he is consistent in it, and Klavier knows what to expect from him.

Others, not so much.

The first time he realizes that he is going to have trouble is a week after he returns to the office and he is sent down to the precinct to seek out Detective Gumshoe. Klavier recognizes the name, remembers the detective from that damned Gramarye trial, and recalls him being amiable. This recollection ends up in pieces approximately ten seconds after encountering the detective. Klavier manages to say, "Herr Gumshoe, I have some files that were requested from the office. My name is—"

"Yeah, pal, I remember you. Gavin, the kid who made Mr. Wright lose his badge!"

Something in his chest flash-freezes, brittle frost clinging in between his bones. He thrusts the files into Gumshoe's hands without a warning. "Phoenix Wright," he says coldly, his throat beginning to lock and leaving every word clipped short, "lost his badge himself, for forging evidence."

"Tell yourself that all you want, pal," the detective says (and Klavier does tell himself that, often, every time that trial's ghost emerges from the grave to haunt him. He has to tell himself that, he can't have been wrong; it has to have been Phoenix Wright, all him, only him), "but I know Mr. Wright, I knew him for a long time, and he would never do something like that!" The detective is at eye-level with Klavier, seeming a little shorter when he hunches, his shoulders high, staring down Klavier, like a bull about to charge.

"Then I'm sorry that he disappointed you," he says, and the lump in his throat has dissolved into a bitter-tasting bile, knew him for a long time and he would never, "but sometimes no matter how many years you've known someone, you don't actually at all."

Something must show on his face because for a moment the detective falters, something like pity flashing across his features, and even when he again appears as though he wants to charge Klavier down, something of his anger is gone. "Yeah, but not Mr. Wright."

What would it be like, he wonders, to have the detective's staunch, unreasoning loyalty; his is the faith of hundreds of witnesses Klavier spoke with in his time as prosecutor, every loved one, family member, friend, of a suspect who insisted again and again, they would never do this, they could never do this, I know them and there's no way—

Is everyone like that in some way? The thought flits across his mind and lodges itself in his heart which feels swollen too big for his chest, like it will soon suffocate him. Is it Klavier who is wrong, somehow, to think that the only thing that even seemed remotely implausible about the story is that Kris left behind enough evidence to be caught?

Much as he hates the tailspin into existential crisis, hates the reminder of the case that led him to flee the office, sometimes he thinks Gumshoe’s objection to him is better than the alternative. Gumshoe at least had a real, concrete problem with his real, concrete past actions, rather than, like other detectives and prosecutors he keeps knocking heads with, taking issue with a facsimile of Klavier Gavin constructed only on rumor and presumption. He’s used to people reading him wrong; he just expects it from the tabloids, not coworkers.

“You’re not on tour anymore, dude,” Daryan says to him one day at lunch, in the middle of May, three weeks after their return. “Nobody loves you here.”

“Quite rude of you to say,” Klavier says. “Not even you, Daryan?” He tries to put his chin on Daryan’s shoulder but is shoved away with a hand in his face before he can manage. “My own friend, betraying me like this? After everything we’ve been through?”

“I’m gonna hate you in a minute if I didn’t, dude.” Daryan rolls his eyes but is laughing.

“You’re also quite wrong. I’ve met a few fans down here at the precinct.” It’s the opposite side of the coin from those who dismiss him as a vapid rock star; these detectives, the fans, still only know him as a construct. But at least it is a kind of interaction at which he is well-practiced.

“Almost evens out the fact that Skye hates you extra.” Daryan shakes his head. “She’s a fuckin’ ice queen, hates everyone, but god, dude, what did you do?”

“I have never seen her before in my life.” Another virtue of Gumshoe: he aired his grievances, not like Skye, who told Klavier to fuck off without either preamble or a follow-up. “I suppose it is my natural effect on women, ja?”

“You mean the part where you instill in them an insatiable lust for murder?”

“Yes.”

“Cool; just wanted to be clear, so that we — oh my god not again.”

“What?”

Daryan is looking at something through the doorway to the hall, at an angle Klavier can’t see. He sits up and leans over Daryan’s shoulder to follow his same line of sight. “Vending machines,” Daryan says, gesturing to the machines, and the young woman sitting on the floor in front of them. “She’s always fucking doing this.”

“Who, and what?”

Daryan stands and motions for Klavier to follow. “Yo, Faraday,” he calls on approach.

The woman looks up. She has long beautiful glossy black hair that she swings over her shoulder with a toss of her head. “Hi, Daryan!” she chirps. Klavier can see now that she has her hands stuck through the flap of the vending machine, maneuvering what appears to be pliers duct-taped to two pieces of rubber tubing. He thinks he can see the concept behind it — the tubes as extensions of the handles to operate the pliers and grab a bag of chips — but in practice it does not seem to be working out that way.

“There’s other vending machines in this building, you know.” Daryan sounds like he has said this before. He sounds weary.

“Yeah, but none of them stock Snackoos, and I paid for my Snackoos, so I want my Snackoos!” The pliers clatter noisily against the inside of the glass pane as she attempts to extract her innovative mechanism. “Haven’t seen you around before,” she says to Klavier, apparently unconcerned with holding a conversation from the floor. “Are you new here? I’m Detective Kay Faraday!” She grins and extends a hand up to him.

“Prosecutor Klavier Gavin.” He has to awkwardly double over to shake her hand. “I worked here before but have spent several years on leave.”

“Oh, so like Daryan.” About five seconds pass in silence and then Faraday gasps. “Wait! Are you in his band too?”

His band? Klavier does not have to look at his friend to know the smug expression that must be on his face, but he chances a glance anyway and yes, Daryan looks very smug. “Ja, he is in my band.” Daryan shoulder-checks him right into the vending machine. With the collision, the bag of Snackoos is jarred loose.

“Thanks, guys!” Faraday says brightly, retrieving her snack from the machine and jumping to her feet. “Anyway that’s cool that you’re in a band. That sounds way more exciting than the average day around here.”

“It is,” Daryan says.

Faraday shoves a handful of chocolate into her mouth and her bright eyes dart between the two of them. Klavier can see the question, the obvious why did you come back to work, then? and he forces the detached mask of celebrity and its empty smile, back into its place. “Hey, you know what’s cool about here, though?” she asks. “Me!” She places a playful punch on Klavier’s chest. “Maybe we’ll get to work together!”

Klavier knows a genuine smile when he sees one; Faraday’s is. “Perhaps we will.”

“I’ve gotta get going,” she says through another mouthful of chocolate. “See you later, Daryan!”

She darts off down the hall with her hair swinging behind her like a cape. “That’s Faraday,” Daryan says, still sounding something between tired and bored. “The unstoppable force to” — he hits the vending machine — “this ol’ bastard of an immovable object.”

“I think I like her,” Klavier says.

Daryan rolls his eyes. “Always a sucker for a pretty face.”

“Blatantly untrue.”

Daryan looks at him.

“Maybe a little true.” But he has to admire the tenacity of someone who has improvised an invention that attempts to optimize her vending machine experience. Plus, she didn’t blow him off like more of his coworkers than not have.

And she is pretty. That is true.

He isn’t lucky enough to be assigned to work with her on his first case back out on investigation. He has to work with Skye instead, which is a miserable experience for both of them, and he is almost ready to wish he had never returned right until he meets the reason exactly why he returned. When the girl, pouting about not being allowed to investigate the crime scene, hands him the letter of defense request, he looks down and nearly drops it in shock, faced with the name Apollo Justice. That is the man who has been staring unabashedly at him, then.

He escorts them into the crime scene anyway, because he has looked it all over and will know if something has been changed. And Skye remains with her Snackoos and fury and he imagines if they touch anything she will tear them apart. If Justice is corrupt and tries anything, he and Skye will catch it, and he will nail him to the wall in court tomorrow and be done with it.

That isn’t how it happens and by the end of the case he thinks he has a little more measure of the man and no more perspective on Kristoph, which doesn’t really surprise him. Daryan heckles him for losing his first trial back. Faraday hears half of their conversation and, apparently having talked to Skye about the investigation at another point, demands to know who on earth if not the mafia prince was the murderer. Daryan wanders off back to work after getting tired of Faraday snickering like a child at the word panties as Klavier tells the abridged version of the trial. “Finally, an interesting case, and Ema doesn’t even appreciate it.” She pats Klavier on the shoulder. “It’s okay though; she doesn’t like anyone.” She pauses, her hand hovering in the air. “Except me, of course.”

The next three weeks of cases he continues to work with Skye. He is starting to grow used to hostility — from her, from other prosecutors, especially Edgeworth, and Klavier can see himself thrown out the door when the mantle of Chief Prosecutor falls to him as it looks wont to do sometime in the next year — and started to ignore it. It’s isolating, certainly, when the three nicest to him since he arrived back have been the dog he didn’t know Kristoph had that he is now responsible for, and at work Faraday, who he sees less frequently than the hawk that at some point took up residence in the courthouse. (And if he really wants to feel lonely, the only other two names he can add to the list of “most pleasant interactions with people I didn’t already know” are Justice, the man who put his brother in jail, and his assistant who Klavier took to be his little sister until he saw her name is Wright.) But he’s spending more time back with the band, prepping for a concert in their home city for the first time in years, and that takes a little bit of the sting away.

He does email Faraday, and Justice and Fraülein Junior Wright, inviting them all to the concert. He’s definitely not desperate for a social circle outside of his band. He’d invite the hawk too if it wasn’t a bird and thus probably unable to read, or have an email. Fraülein Wright emails back with no less than a dozen smiley faces and five less-than-three hearts. Faraday’s response is much less prompt and contains about seventeen frowny faces interspersed between phrases about how she already had plans and save a ticket for me for the next one!!

Sincerity is the hardest thing to gauge in text and Klavier has no way to know how genuinely Faraday means what she wrote until he runs into her at the Prosecutors Office two days before the concert. Or rather, she runs into him, with no more warning than a yell of “Yo! Klavier!” before he is knocked off-balance by a fast-moving humanoid shape.

“H-hello.” He manages to stabilize himself against a wall and Faraday is beaming at him.

“You know, Daryan mentioned the concert last week and like — Sunshine Coliseum is kinda a big deal — so I went and looked you guys up and shit, you guys are actually legit celebrities! And your music is actually really good!”

There is a moment during which what she says has not registered; and then it does, and Klavier doubles over wheezing.

“You thought we were bad?” he manages to gasp out.

Faraday throws her hands in the air. “Well, how was I supposed to know? The only pop culture I’ve been in tune with in the past decade are some eighteen new derivations of the Steel Samurai!” She wrinkles her nose but is still grinning.

“I preferred the Jammin’ Ninja, myself.”

She glances around as though she expects the Steel Samurai to materialize through one of the walls for the slander. “Word of warning,” she says in a voice dramatically hushed. “I might agree, but don’t say such things ‘round these parts.”

“What, that the original Steel Samurai was an overrated show with poor production values and—”

Faraday slaps her hand over his mouth with such force that his head bounces off the wall. “No!” she cries. “Sorry, that probably hurt.”

Klavier wonders what anyone else passing through the lobby thinks of whatever is happening here. “It did,” he says when she removes her hand and steps back, putting a little space between them again.

“I swear I didn’t come over here to beat you up,” she says with a grin that does not look very apologetic. “If I give you my schedule in advance, you’d pick the date of your next concert based on that, right? I would really love to go.”

In that, he can read her sincerity. “I have not a clue when our next show will be,” he says, because this concert is meant to be something of an end note, and an apology, but also mostly to rectify the fact that he didn’t get to perform with Lamiroir before he had to come running home, “but once a day is chosen, I will inform you immediately, ja?”

“It’s a date!” she exclaims. “Get me front-row tickets so I can heckle you.”

“Don’t push your luck, Fraülein.”

She sticks her tongue out at him. “Well, I think — oh, hey, Seb!” She bounces on her heels and waves across the lobby to flag someone down.

It’s just Klavier’s luck that she’s friends with Prosecutor Debeste.

“Kay, what are you — oh. H-hi, Prosecutor Gavin.”

“I had something to run by Mr Edgeworth. You two know each other?”

Debeste eyes Klavier with suspicion benefitting a stray alley cat. “We… were in the same year in the same school,” Klavier answers, when it looks like Debeste won’t.

“Oh.” Like a balloon sputtering out, Faraday deflates. She looks at Debeste and her mouth twitches into a frown, just momentarily, but long enough that it is clear something is unspokenly passing between them. “And you studied abroad, too, right?” she asks, and the chirp like a songbird is back in her voice, pushing aside whatever it was that made her falter. They talk about banal things, where in Europe he was, where in Europe she and Debeste assisted on Interpol cases — and if anything has Klavier reassessing his old impressions of Debeste, it is that — until Debeste nudges her in the shoulder and points at his watch.

She sprints out the door yelling her goodbyes across the lobby, receiving dirty looks from everyone else around, and leaves Klavier and Debeste with each other since they saw each other two months ago. “So you, uh, know Kay,” he says, twisting his hands together and toying with the fingertips of his gloves.

“Ja. You are friends?”

Klavier almost takes pity on him and goes for the stairs instead of the elevator, but instead they both wait there, Debeste’s foot tapping at the floor with impressive speed. “Yeah, we — we’ve worked together for a long time. Since — well.”

Since something he doesn’t want to talk about. Klavier can guess. He had been at the Prosecutors Office since January. He remembers the events that started off April.

When the elevator doors crawl open, Debeste almost looks like he wants to run. “Herr Debeste,” Klavier says, staring at the numbered buttons and wondering which floor Debeste’s office is on. Debeste stops on the threshold and the doors bounce open again off of him. “I find myself thinking, since our last encounter, that I am far from the man I was at seventeen, ja?” And better, too, he hopes.

Debeste keeps his face firmly turned forward, but his eyes dart toward Klavier. He takes that as a cue to continue. “And I should hate to be judged as who I was seven years ago.” And maybe that can’t be helped, maybe the Gramarye case will be his mantle for all time, but he at least can be less of an asshole than he was in that trial. He won’t let Kristoph decide how he should act toward anyone else. He decided that with Justice. “And I think then I should offer you that same courtesy as well, to not be judged as who you were.”

Because frankly, Klavier remembers him being an idiot.

(An Interpol consultant, really?)

“Ah, yeah.” Debeste chuckles somewhat nervously. “I was, um, insufferable when I was seventeen.”

“Ach, I was quite the douchebag myself.”

Debeste snorts. “I mean — Kay hated me at first. How hard to you have to work to get Kay to dislike you?”

Rather hard, Klavier thinks, considering that she likes Daryan, who is off-putting on first impression to most people. “Well, she never met me at seventeen.”

Debeste’s office is on the twelfth floor. He stops with his hand over the door, frowning like he has something difficult to say, but when he opens his mouth all that he says is, “See you around, Prosecutor Gavin.”

And Klavier doesn’t think more of it that day, but later, when the dust has not settled but is no longer being stirred up higher into the sky, he is staring at an email from his manager, cc’d to the publicist team, a charred guitar on the table behind him, and he thinks, at least he’s one more person I can add to the “pleasant interactions” list.

He didn’t know it was possible to be this tired.

He starts talking more to the hawk and to Vongole. He ignores an email from Professor Courte and three of deteriorating professionalism from Faraday. He chats about the weather with Debeste, ignores the look around his eyes that shows him struggling to figure out how to broach the topic. He lies to his bandmates and says that he was asleep when they send concerned texts checking in, even though he doesn’t sleep before one am most nights.

He doubted the accusation leveled against Daryan more than he ever doubted the initial news about Kris, right up until the reasoning started to line up too well, make too much sense; but the conversation of several months ago with Gumshoe still haunts him, the way the detective believed even in the face of evidence. I knew him for a long time, and he would never—

But he did, Wright did and Kris did and Daryan did. Sometimes no matter how many years you've known someone, you don't actually at all. Isn’t that what Klavier said? Isn’t that what he keeps discovering for himself? How could the detective still believe in Wright? It isn’t supposed to be like that, not after the verdict comes down. Not after the evidence is —

Evidence is everything.

At the end of July his attempts at work one morning are interrupted by a furious banging on his door. “Klavier Gavin!” The voice is surprisingly unmuffled by the solid wood in between them. “Yo! I know you’re in there! Seb says he sees your bike still here when he leaves and already in when he comes in. Do you sleep here? That’s kinda gross, like go home and shower, dude.” A different intonation of thump comes from lower on the door. Klavier assumes she kicked it. “I see the light on in there! I know you can’t be sleeping through this racket! Show yourself, villain!”

Klavier rests his head on his desk. His attempt to tell her to go away comes out of his throat a barely-audible croak.

The door handle rattles, then stops. When the silence has gone on for about a minute, he starts to think that he is free, only for the lock to click and the door to slowly swing inward. He springs to his feet, nearly overturning his chair, and Faraday appears on the threshold, kicking the door fully open. “Faraday, what the—”

“You weren’t answering your door,” she says. “Or your email.”

“Then take a hint!”

She steps into his office and pushes the door back closed behind her. “Nice guitars,” she says brightly, and as her eyes drift from the wall to Lamiroir’s still on the table, she frowns. “It’s a shame about that.”

“Faraday.”

“About everything,” she adds. “When you find out someone’s not who you thought they were.”

She’s trying to sympathize. Klavier can only half-swallow the anger that was brewing in the pit of his stomach. “I don’t want to talk about this,” he says. He’d already had to talk about it. He’d had to say something and then it had to be filtered and curated and caked in stage makeup to be acceptable to be read by the world. The statements released to social media were barely made of his words, by the end; because his words weren’t coherent and the feelings they conveyed couldn’t be sanitized and rather were quarantined.

They are celebrities, him and Daryan, and they never belonged to themselves. Their meteoric rise and the blazing place of glory from which they fell were never theirs.

“Then can I talk?” Faraday asks. She’s sitting on a precarious stack of binders that he hasn’t returned to their places. He starts to raise a hand to gesture her to the door and stops. He combs his bangs out of his face instead. He doesn’t say anything.

“I wondered what people were saying, like online and stuff,” she says, and Klavier looks back at her in alarm, trying to read from her face whether she has stumbled into that part of the fandom. Her expression doesn’t hint as to the presence of repressed horrors working back to the surface, so it seems she didn’t. “And it’s weird, that there’s all these people who never met you who are mourning this thing that happened, and that even me knowing him for a couple months means I knew someone different than they’re thinking.”

She leans toward him like she’s offering him the chance to follow that. He does not take it. “Because I actually knew him as a person, you know?” And still didn’t even realize that they were celebrities until they basically told her. “I split a pack of Swiss rolls with him that last day. He was pissed about not being on the case” — Klavier knows this — “and I told him not to worry, because the truth always comes to light and we always make sure the innocent get their due.” She frowns. Her perch wobbles beneath her and she plants her feet back firmly on the floor. “I meant that to be reassuring but I guess it didn’t work like that.”

“Nein. Not at all.”

Her dark eyes stay fixed on his face. “I’m sorry,” she says. “That’s all.” When she stands, the tower of binders slips apart to scatter across the floor. “Ah — shit.”

“I will arrange those,” Klavier says, waving his hand to dismiss her from the mess she has made. “Just try not to sit on anything else, ja?”

“I will sit on everything,” she says, looking and sounding very serious despite the actual words. Her eyes are wide like an owl’s when she stops on her way back out the door. “Everything.”

She sends him the culmination of the unprofessional emails the next day, consisting of seven emoticons, three words abbreviated and two misspelled, inviting him out to drinks with herself, Debeste, and Skye. He declines. Better not to push his relationship with Detective Skye from “workplace antagonism” to “off-hours hostility”, although some of the concert evening before the murder happened probably tripped them over that line. He can tell when he’s not wanted. It might not cause his behavior to change in any way, but he can tell, and this one isn’t a fight worth having.

Except Faraday keeps emailing him invitations, and then whether she convinced him or he made the step himself, Debeste starts asking him if he wants to join their outings. It’s harder to decline him, in person, when he’s making sad puppy eyes at Klavier over cheap sushi they grabbed for a quick lunch. The sudden sensation of guilt blindsides Klaiver; does he feel bad for disappointing Debeste? Is that what this is? How is one of his few friendly relationships with someone he knew just well enough to hate in school?

“Why does Kay like you?” Skye asks him.

“Why does she like you?”

Skye flips him off. He isn’t sure when she dropped the act of cool professional disdain but now at least they can be honest about where they stand: sweet sweet mutual antagonism.

“She doesn’t really like me either,” Debeste says. “She knows how to hold grudges.”

Klavier should know how to navigate that kind of person, but really, he doesn’t. His conversation with Debeste turns to the “secret project” that there have been rumors of since the start of the summer — some foundational plans for reform, Debeste says, which he has apparently learned from Edgeworth, though that is also all he has learned from Edgeworth — and an Interpol case that very likely will be pulling Debeste and Faraday off the continent for the month of September. Once they are gone, Faraday sends more emails that come at odd hours for both Los Angeles and France — and then Cohdopia, then Romania, then Germany. Klavier knows absolutely nothing about what the pair are up to besides their ever-changing locations. Their case keeps them away into October.

The winds are shifting back at home, too. He and Skye are told the morning of that they are the prosecutor and detective presiding over the (pardon the pun) trial run of those mentioned reforms. Klavier starts to say that he really would have liked to have had some advance warning as to his role in the Jurist System, and to know at least a little about the committee that has been working on this since — when, exactly?

And then he is told that Wright is involved and he throws his hands up. Of course there is no warning. Of course there is no preparation time. A man who has never once in his life thought ahead about anything would not offer others the courtesy. The only thing he and Skye can agree on is that they don’t like to be left scrambling but aren’t surprised that they have been.

It’s Wright. This is the best he will give.

The victim’s name is Drew Misham. Klavier tells himself he doesn’t know that name. He tells himself it’s coincidence. He tells himself it has nothing to do with that.

(But it’s Wright. He must have an extra ace up his sleeve. Why else would he want the man who disbarred him to stand as prosecutor for his pet project?)

And it’s not a simple case (of course not), and it’s not coincidence. Face the music, Gavin; there’s no way out but down through the dark.

When he gets home after the first day in court, after a second investigation that yields nothing but frustration, he passes out on his couch and ignores emails from Courte, Debeste, and Faraday, all asking about the Jurist System.

He ignores new ones the next day, too.

Instead of calling in sick, which he probably couldn’t be blamed for doing, he goes in to the office while the last vestiges of night still cling to the slowly-lightening sky. It could be inspiration for a song; it could be a metaphor. He lets it go without further acknowledgement. He doesn’t get any work done; instead he remembers when his brother came to visit him in this office seven years ago. He remembers his brother’s laugh, yesterday. He still leaves late and goes in early again the next day. It means he doesn’t have to talk to anyone but still almost feels useful for being there.

At nine am, still early enough that some of the less dedicated have not yet arrived, someone knocks on his door. He wants to ignore it.

“Prosecutor Gavin?”

He stares at the computer screen in front of him which has gone dark. His reflection — a hot fucking mess if he can say so himself — stares back. He can’t let anyone see him like this. He has a face to uphold, a reputation that has already been tarnished enough.

“Prosecutor Gavin? I saw your motorcycle in the garage. I know you’re here.”

When did Debeste get back?

Klavier opens the door.

Debeste doesn’t look much better than Klavier feels — clothes rumpled, hair a ruffled mess, eyes visibly bloodshot beneath his glasses. “When did you get back?” Klavier asks, because Debeste looks surprised at his appearance, as though he was prepared to keep knocking and had no plan in place for if Klavier were to answer. “You look terrible.”

“To the office? An hour ago. I had some things to clear with Prosecutor Edgeworth. To Los Angeles? Three hours ago.” He blinks for a whole second and shudders, shaking his head, trying to wake himself. “I wanted to know what your thoughts on the Jurist System are, from being there.”

It made me lose my brother.

As though he didn’t lose Kris long ago.

Klavier steps aside to let Debeste in. “I think it could be a very good thing,” he says.

They talk about other cases where they have been left scrambling for evidence, because evidence was everything; about how to possibly even begin implementing this system on a larger scale; about the kind of shifts in office culture that will need to happen; about how it would affect curriculum at Themis Academy. Klavier thinks he might escape having to talk about the cause of that look of pity that Debeste keeps shooting him. There’s so much else to discuss, and Klavier can skirt around the details of the case just enough that a certain name isn’t mentioned. Not by him.

But when there’s a lull, Debeste says, “I’m sorry.”

“I need to get back to work,” Klavier says.

He stands and gestures to the door. Debeste gets to his feet but does not move.

“I didn’t know what to do when my father was gone,” he continues. “I faced him and said what I wanted to but then I had no idea what to do after that. I knew who I wanted to be but how to get there seemed like an impassib—impassable wall. But I learned to accept help from other people. That’s what I had to do.”

Klavier had looked it up out of curiosity, some months ago. Blaise Debeste was executed last May, falling squarely in the middle of the average five-to-seven years from sentencing to conviction. “I’m quite fine on my own, Herr Debeste.”

But the question that Gumshoe left him with nearly half a year ago still hangs over him like a shroud. “When the charges were first raised against him, did you think, simply, there is no way he did this? Were you surprised?”

“Of course I was,” he replies, which is not really the response Klavier wants to hear. “Someone I trusted made the accusation and I couldn’t believe it.” And someone who Klavier was sure to be corrupt brought the charges, and Klavier barely doubted. “I thought my father could do no wrong, certainly not murder. And then — and then there was one piece of evidence, one detail that was so distinctly my father that I… I realized. Even I couldn’t miss that one.”

He fidgets nervously while he waits for Klavier to respond, but he does not say anything else, not even the question he must be thinking: Why do you ask?

Why does he ask? Maybe he needs more than a hawk or his brother’s dog to confide in. Maybe he needs to clean the skeletons from the closet he alone keeps. After the secrets he and Kristoph shared came to light, maybe it is time for this, too.

“I was… surprised, quite, to learn he had committed murder, but I did not doubt it. I did not question the veracity of the charges until I saw Wright’s name as a person involved and only then did I wonder, could my brother have been framed? And even then, I asked myself, is Kris capable of murder, and I figured, yes. Who believes that so easily, so readily, of their own family? What is wrong with me?” He stumbles back into his chair, sinking down in it, clutching his head with his hands. The silent screaming inside his skull has taken physical form, a pounding from the inside out. “And after all those years that I trusted Kris too much — I trusted him enough that I ruined an innocent man’s life! Unthinking! Unquestioned!”

Only later, only too late, did he question, and he did not allow himself to consider other answers. “I trusted him just as long as it took to fuck everything up! I should have asked more questions — I should have been more suspicious — how could I not even have questioned why he knew about the forgery! How could I have been such an idiot?” He hears from Debeste the sharp intake of air through gritted teeth at the word. “To not even ask! To think nothing was wrong when so much did not make sense! I was a prosecutor! It was my job to question! To never assume — to never simply believe!”

Klavier looks up. Debeste is quiet, his expression stricken and his eyes wide and teary and fixed on the window behind Klavier. He moves to sit on the table next to him, misses, and thuds down to the floor. Blinking fiercely, he says, “If you’d stayed at Themis and not gone off to study abroad, you should have been valedictorian.”

“You were valedictorian of our class,” Klavier says, head back in his hands. “Why should my presence make a difference in regards to your standing, ja?”

“No, I mean — you should have been. You wouldn’t have but you should have and I—” His breath shudders when he inhales and he holds it for a moment before his shoulders slump with his exhale. “My father bought my grades.”

Klavier blinks.

“I don’t know if it was with money, or influence, or threats, or the agge — aggregate, of the possibilities, but none of my accomplishments were mine. My class rank wasn’t mine, my badge wasn’t mine, and I didn’t notice. Not until he told me.” Sebastian fiddles with the badge on his lapel. “Everything was because he wanted a shining star of a son to crown his rule and even if he didn’t have that he could at least make people think he did. He made me think I was what he wanted. I didn’t question it. I never doubted.”

“He was your father,” Klavier says. “He was Chief Prosecutor, he was Chairman” — he had power of the likes that Kristoph could only dream — “and surely a man like that is trustworthy, ja? Surely you can trust your father, ja? Surely your father has no reason to lie to you, and you were seventeen.”

Sebastian is still blinking back tears but his lips curl into the tiniest smirk. “Yeah,” he says. “And surely you can trust your brother, yeah? Surely your brother has no reason to lie to you. You were seventeen.”

A turnabout worthy of any of the trials in which Apollo stands behind the bench.

Klavier rubs his eyes. “Perhaps we should not have been prosecutors at seventeen, ja?” But Klavier had a harder time facing down his brother at twenty-four than seventeen, while Sebastian at seventeen could still throw his father’s yoke from his shoulders.

“And maybe our families shouldn’t have been…” Sebastian makes a noncommittal noise and shrugs.

“Manipulative douchebags?”

Sebastian’s laugh is weak. “I don’t think that was what I was going for but it might be a synonym.” When he drags his fingers through his hair he doesn’t smooth it down but instead pushes strands up out of alignment. “It’s hard to face the truth but it’s always better once it’s done.”

And Klavier knows that. He’s always known that. But there’s something slightly comforting in someone else caring enough to make the reminder, like Apollo, almost adorable in his earnestness, try to remember what’s really important to you. “It is,” he agrees softly.

“I’ll let you get back to work,” Sebastian says, clambering back up to his feet. Klavier starts to tell him that was an excuse, a hollow pretense for Klavier to throw him out before he had to talk about the pain of the past six months; but Sebastian probably knows that, right? Knows that and has given them both a graceful way out. “And I need to go shower and sleep because I haven’t for thirty hours.”

“You didn’t sleep on the plane?” Klavier asks.

“Not with Kay around. She gets very excited finding out which of her favorite movies she can watch. And insist that I watch.”

Klavier does not know what Faraday’s tastes in film are, but he has a hunch that there is very little good about them. “Ach, perhaps you should deal with that,” he says.

“See you around, Prosecutor Gavin,” Sebastian says.

Klavier stares at the closed door long after he has left. Maybe he should get some sleep, too.

He deliberates it with eyes unfocused on the darkened screen of his computer and after some ten minutes he gathers himself together to call out. He goes home to Vongole’s tail thumping on the floor, no idea of his turmoil — just happy to see him again so soon. There’s something to consider there but hell if he knows what. For a moment, when he lets himself collapse into bed, there is no weight of anything his brother has saddled him with more than the dog who thinks him a more comfortable pillow than the three beds he has failed to convince her to use.

When he wakes up around dinnertime, it is to an email from Faraday inviting him out to drinks on Friday with Sebastian and Skye. His usual answer is already typed out, his finger hovering over the send button, before he really starts to think. Vongole is barking from her bowl and he deletes the message as he pours out some food for her. His new reply is one word: Sure.

Maybe he’ll regret it, but Skye throwing a drink in his face or him making Sebastian hate him again or whatever could happen will be no worse than the ever-growing stack of regrets from every other point in his life.

Skye doesn’t directly address him all night, which is about what Klavier expected, but the surprising thing is that she seems to tolerate Sebastian quite well, despite what he said once about her disliking him. She leaves early, to Faraday’s chagrin, saying that she’s taken a vacation “after that shitshow Mr. Wright dumped us into” (that “us” being the most neutral way she has ever acknowledged Klavier’s existence) and is flying out to see her sister in the morning.

“You’re gonna be getting drunk on the plane anyway!” Faraday whines, hanging halfway out of her chair with her arms around Skye’s waist. If Skye takes one more step, Faraday will hit the ground hard. “Why not just start hungover?”

“Your Interpol trips must be a blast,” Skye says over her shoulder to Sebastian as she pries Faraday’s arms apart. She looks more amused than Klavier has ever seen her. Faraday seems to have that effect on people.

“They are… something,” Sebastian says.

Faraday falls out of her chair.

When the three of them leave, later, Klavier intends to just go home, but then he is wedged between Faraday and Sebastian and somehow lets them drag him into a cab that they take back to Faraday’s apartment. “We do pizza and movie nights,” Sebastian explains as Faraday laments to no one in particular that she is craving mozzarella sticks. “Sometimes with Ema but usually just us and really awful movies.”

“Klav,” Faraday says. “Klav. Klav. Have you ever seen Giant Octopus Tsunami vs. MegaShark?”

“Why the hell would I have ever seen that?”

“Because it’s fuckin’ awesome and you are going to stay and watch it with us because Ema won’t. Like. It’s a tsunami full of giant octopuses...es and it’s gonna make landfall and destroy the city unless the scientists can engineer a giant shark to eat them all before it can—”

Klavier tips the cab driver extra.

Faraday’s apartment is a mess with the decor of a dorm room, Christmas lights strung up around the living room and pictures without frames taped up in a collage on one wall. Faraday goes into her kitchen and starts tossing bags of snacks in to Sebastian. Despite working with Skye for six months, Klavier had no idea there were this many flavors of Snackoos. He stands awkwardly in the middle of the room, unsure of where he should be while they argue about what kind of chips she needs to put on on her shopping list. The pictures draw his eye again.

A lot of them are selfies but rarely is she alone; by Klavier’s rough estimation, Sebastian is in over half of them. Most have a strip of masking tape stuck beneath them with the year and the location, and most are in Europe. Vacationing in between Interpol cases, perhaps. A woman who appears to be about their age with short grayish hair and a scowl appears in several, her expressions comical next to Faraday’s huge grins. Skye shows up a few times as well. Klavier recognizes Detective Gumshoe, of all people, in several of the photos that are unlabeled, but two include the dancing Blue Badger outside of Criminal Affairs. In one Faraday has her badge shoved toward the camera, Gumshoe beaming behind her.

In the center, in a place of honor, is a photo printed larger than the others, of Faraday, younger, and Gumshoe with, of all people, Prosecutor Edgeworth, who does not look happy to have been dragged by the neck by Faraday into frame.

He thinks of all of the curt conversations he has ever had with Edgeworth, both before he left and now that he has come back, and wonders if Faraday has lucked her way onto a barely-existent good side, or Klavier has for reasons unknown gotten on his bad side. Could it be as it was with Gumshoe — something about Wright?

Faraday and Sebastian are yelling at each other about pretzels.

On the TV stand, there stand four framed photographs. Three include Faraday: her a small child, beaming at the camera with a man with brown hair half pulled into a bun; her, slightly older, and a tall man with graying hair and a ratty gray trenchcoat; and her about the same age as prior with an older, white-haired couple. The last is of the two men together, without Faraday, the photo centered awkwardly in the frame and too small for it; the edge next to the brown-haired man is torn but the shoulder of someone else is visible.

“That’s my dad and Uncle Badd!”

Klavier jumps. He doesn’t know how Faraday got behind him without his noticing. “My dad was a prosecutor,” she says, pointing to the brown-haired man. “And Uncle Badd was the detective he always worked with, like me and Sebby now. Oh, and those are my grandparents. I lived with them after Dad was murdered.”

Klavier opens his mouth and closes it. He wouldn’t know what to say to that even if he were completely sober. “Oh,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

“It was… it was just over fourteen years ago, now,” she says. “Sometimes still hard to believe.” She smiles but it’s a sad look. “I think he’d be proud, though. Uncle Badd says he would be, whenever I go see him — he’s in prison now,” she adds, casually, like she hasn’t just dropped the heaviest parts of her life on Klavier’s shoulders with no warning. “Seven years out of fifteen for covering up evidence of thefts he and Dad committed.”

Klavier turns to stare at her. “They felt the law was too limited for some things,” she says, tugging at her scarf and swaying a little on her feet, “and that some wrongs never got brought to court, convictions that should’ve didn’t, and a smuggling ring that they were chasing — there was never enough evidence, you know? The smugglers’d do whatever to get evidence back, or kill witnesses, or whatever underhanded. And in the law they felt, like, they couldn’t do it in the law. That it’s all about evidence and sometimes there’s no legal way to get permissible evidence.”

“And evidence is everything,” Klavier says.

Kay plops down on the floor. “So they’d steal it, all these corporations who dealt with the smugglers, they’d go in and steal it and release all their shady documents to the media, and then when the break-in was investigated, Uncle Badd would make sure there was no evidence for them to catch my dad. But then they caught on, and they killed Dad.” Her sad smile reappears. “We caught ‘em eventually. I helped. And Mr. Edgeworth did too. Us and Gummy.”

Sebastian drops a bag of Snackoos on her head and offers a bag of pretzels to Klavier. They are all sitting on the floor now. “I can’t wait to tell Uncle Badd about the Jurist System,” she continues. “I don’t think it would’ve helped for the smugglers but the rest, the limitations of the law that they saw…”

“The law isn’t absolute,” Klavier says. “It has to change.”

Kay nods. She misses her mouth when she tries to eat a Snackoo. “Change to better serve justice and the truth,” she says. “I bet Dad would be happy with it too. What’s the plan for uh… um… like doing the thing, all over—”

“Implementing it?” Sebastian asks.

Kay sticks her finger in his face. “That!”

“For now the talk is that a trial will have a jury when the prosecution requests it,” Klavier says. “Ease us into it, and the public too, ja?”

“Cool,” Kay says. “That’s cool.” She flops back to lean against Sebastian’s shoulder. “I wanted to be a prosecutor once. Be just like Dad. And then I helped out on some investigations, and then watched the trials, and I decided I’d rather be out there on the crime scene than standing in court. So I became a detective instead. But wouldn’t it’ve been funny if I was a prosecutor with you guys too? Or if I’d been then maybe you’d be different things.”

Klavier shakes his head. “I only wanted to be a prosecutor,” he says. “Music was a hobby and I went to Themis and didn’t have any other plan.”

Sebastian doesn’t say anything but Klavier remembers the conversation they had about his father and doubts that there was any other path for him, either. “Oh yeah,” Kay says. “You went to Themis, too.” She reaches over and grabs a handful of pretzels from the bag Klavier has. “What was it like? I wanna know, because I went to public high school and the only thing I learned about the law is whether it’s legal to grow weed beneath the bleachers; and the answer, my friends, is shockingly no.”

“Shockingly,” Sebastian deadpans. “I mean, it was, um… dubious, considering, you know, the grades thing.” She must know the story of his father because she nods without questioning the vaguery. Didn’t he once say that the two of them had been friends since then? “Is that more or less dubious than bleacher weed?”

“One time the school got evacuated because there was a kid setting toilet paper on fire and it got mistaken for a bomb,” Kay says, which is absolutely not an answer to the question that Sebastian asked. “But I guess Klav you left and went to wherever-the-fuck in Europe—”

“Deutschland.”

“Dutch-land, where’s that?”

“Germany.”

“Oh.” Kay considers that in silence for several seconds, her eyes going crossed. “I’m super drunk.”

“I am aware.” Her story about her father and uncle was surprisingly coherent, all things considered. Klavier tries to remember what she was saying to him about Themis. It’s more difficult than he thought. He might be drunk too. “I had always wanted to study abroad,” he says. “And I knew I could likely get my badge sooner there. It wasn’t a problem with Themis, ja, that I left, though the experience did… very much depend on the professors.” He remembers the head of the prosecution course to be entirely unexceptional — or rather, he doesn’t remember. “Herr Debeste, did you ever have Professor Courte?”

“Courte… Courte… no, doesn’t sound familiar.”

“She taught the judge course — was my favorite professor. Taught me there should be no truth but that found properly, that justice cannot come from unjust means.” And it had been that which brought him to a different conclusion than Kristoph: that the law cannot be static.

Sebastian shakes his head. “No wonder I didn’t have her,” he says. “My father wouldn’t let me take a class with someone he couldn’t buy.”

No; and Courte would rather die than let herself be bought. “She was a big inspiration for me,” Klavier says. Her, and his brother; so at odds with each other. “We stayed in touch while I was studying in Germany.” And now if he could just have the guts to push through the shroud of shame to reply to her emails. How did Sebastian grow from where they were at seventeen, but Klavier regress into a neurotic wreck?

“Most of my memories of Themis are kind of terrible,” Sebastian says, “but maybe we should go back sometime. Show Kay around—”

“Best bleachers to grow weed under,” she says.

“—Introduce me to your professor.” Sebastian continues like he hadn’t heard Kay. She pouts at being ignored.

“Ja; perhaps we’ll have to do that someday.”

Kay is watching him now, and even with her face pink, her eyes a little glassy and unfocused, he can still see that she is evaluating the expression on his face, deciding what needs to be done with his crestfallen look. “Did you guys even have bleachers?” she asks, prodding his leg with her foot and grinning at him, attempting to draw one back out from him. “Or do law nerds not know how to play sportball? Hand-eye coordination test, quick!”

She throws the whole bag of Snackoos at him.

After they have spent another ten minutes reminiscing on Themis and hearing Kay’s Public School Stories that they have no way of knowing if true, Kay stands up, stumbling and nearly falling over Klavier, to find her phone to order pizza. Klavier stops her to tell them that he has to go home to let the dog out, expecting a fight with Kay like Skye had earlier. What he does not expect is Kay to whirl around to stare at him, her eyes huge, looking at him like she has never seen him before. “You have a dog?” she asks. “Holy shit you have a dog! I want to meet your dog. Klav. I gotta meet your dog.” She tumbles onto the couch. “Party with your dog. Klav. Klav. I am inviting myself over to your house. Where do you live.”

Sebastian looks absolutely mortified. “Kay—”

Klavier had known he was lonely; he had figured that out easily for himself, even before losing Daryan. He just hadn’t realized how lonely until for this portion of the evening he wasn’t. “We can get pizza with my dog, ja? So long as you do not actually feed it to her; she is getting a bit round.”

Kay is already crowing something about sleepovers and Sebastian is saying something else and Klavier thinks for a moment that he is a teenager again, naivety gone but the rest — unselfconscious and surrounded with people for a movie or games in a dorm room—

He doesn’t want to ever again be who he was at seventeen, but there might be something to keep from then in spite of it.

His apartment looks nothing like Kay’s; her mess is obviously lived in, and cozy despite itself. After six months his is still barren, empty walls and boxes containing both his and Kris’ material lives stacked in the corners. But with the three of them sprawled on the floor, Kay with her face shoved into Vongole’s fur but still arguing with Sebastian over pizza toppings, Klavier almost feels like it could one day be a home worth staying in.

#ace attorney #klavier gavin #sebastian debeste #kay faraday #the fic summary is last minute but i think it works okay. maybe.#ace attorney bullshit tag #what is my writing tag #i still don't know #roddy fanfics #series: a rock star a convict and a bird walk into the bar association

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