#what is the point of harassing another human being and expecting certain kinda of statements from an entrateiner

[carta-velina]

This is not it. Boycott, use the anger and uneasiness towards pressuring institutions, informing those around you and donating.

Sending hate mail, cancelling and harassing a singer and expecting some apologies from them will do nothing if not make you feel better about yourselves - nothing good for the Palestinians will come out of it

[wardencommanderrodimiss]

Chapter 18: Klavier and Phoenix both know weird people, and Apollo is always suffering for it. also, there is the inescapable passage of time.

[Beginning] [Chapter Masterlist] [ao3]

In four successive days, Apollo spots crows following him on six different occasions.

The first is sitting at the kitchen window the morning after his conversation with Klavier. It watches him with a critical eye, and remembering that he has the magatama sitting on his dresser needing to be returned to Phoenix today, he goes to get it. Just out of curiosity, really; but the crow is gone when he gets back.

He counts as part of that same occasion the crows digging around in the dumpsters around back of the office when he arrives. After Klavier mentioned a witch and a crow hanging around bothering him, he doesn’t think he won’t be able to notice crows, but the trash seems like normal crow behavior. He knows they’re smart, but there was something very uncomfortable about the staring of the one earlier. He doesn’t bother with the magatama in his pocket.

Even though Phoenix did imply that he did want Apollo to go chase down Klavier, he doesn’t know whether that was supposed to be in the middle of a Thursday, without preamble, and not asking to take the magatama on the way out. Biking over, he prepared excuses. Phoenix enters the office around 10 am and Apollo, offering the magatama, cannot even get through “Sorry—” before Phoenix cuts him off.

“No worries. How’s Klavier doing?” Phoenix flips the magatama over in his hand the way Trucy sometimes spins playing cards.

“Not good,” Apollo says, because he simply wasn’t, “but I don’t think going for ‘spiraling off a cliff’, either.”

“That’s good to hear.” Phoenix is still fiddling with the magatama. “If you can, keep an eye on him still, would you?”

“Uh,” Apollo says. “Yeah, okay?”

Trucy shows up in the afternoon, her arrival heralded by her outside yelling, “Stop eating trash! You’re better than this!” and Apollo counts that as Crow Encounter 1.5.

-

The second is in the building lobby when he and Clay head out grocery shopping over the weekend. All three of them freeze and stare at each other. “You see it, right?” Apollo asks. Clay nods.

Apollo holds the door open for it on the way out and it squawks at him.

The third is at the kitchen window again that evening, every time he looks. He doesn’t have a magatama this time, can’t do anything but glare back at it. It flies away, croaking loudly, when he brandishes a barbecue wing (Clay ordered them and invited Mr Starbuck over to watch hockey) at it. He doesn’t answer the two of them when they ask what he’s laughing at when he returns to the living room, not really wanting to talk about witches right then.

By the fourth, he’s figured out how to distinguish one of them. If there are several together, if he looks closely, one of them looks almost blue – a dark, glossy navy blue, but still blue – compared to any other. There’s no apparent pattern in the next crow sightings whether the bluish one is there or not. After the sixth, when it is there on a bench in People Park and doesn’t fly away when he and Trucy and Vera approach to eat, but instead just hops around his feet, he offers it an egg and gives up both on counting and on pattern-searching. That one is probably the familiar, he thinks, harassing Apollo whenever it can be spared from its work – though what use a bird is to a prosecutor, he has no idea.

The crows, he doesn’t mention to Klavier. He’s not sure if he should say something like “you should go say hi to your witch coworker so that I stop being stalked by birds as your one apparent human contact” when, since having seen each other in person, since that last thanks, their texts have not strayed from light, stupid remarks. Klavier complains about Vongole’s shenanigans (having apparently not yet hellhound-proofed his fridge) or passes along the weirdest out-of-context statements he hears in the halls (if that implies that he has rejoined office social life, Apollo doesn’t know); Apollo relays Trucy’s best and worst jokes or sends a snapshot of Vera’s latest painting. Phoenix catches him texting and asks, every time, if it’s Klavier. He does this every two days, then every three; then every week, like he’s willing to lengthen the leash with the consistency of the knowledge that – Klavier is alive? It’s a bleak thought, that Phoenix might be expecting otherwise.

October slips into November. The office gets colder; more blankets manifest on top of bookshelves and on desks and chairs and are thrown at Apollo’s head. He’s almost grown used to Phoenix’s constant presence, is used to, to the point of sometimes forgetting, Vera’s. Trucy starts a Youtube channel and makes getting work done in the afternoons difficult recording videos of little sleight-of-hand magic tricks, drags the wifi to a crawl uploading them. She records a cover of My Boyfriend is the Prosecution’s Witness, and then another one where she changes all the pronouns, and Apollo sends both to Klavier. She doesn’t talk much about fae magic anymore, tries to get Apollo into professional wrestling, and sometimes he pretends he didn’t see her sitting at Phoenix’s desk with the mitamah cradled in her hands. Vera tries to paint her nails in the office once and Phoenix gags on the smell. He asks Apollo what he’s been talking to Klavier about lately.

Toward the end of November, Apollo is alone at the office, reorganizing some paperwork for the little cases he’s managed to pick up, when he hears the front office door loudly creak open and someone yell, “‘Sup, Mia! Eyyo, Niii-iick!”

Apollo pokes his head out, not sure what or who he will find, and certainly not expecting a man wearing red skinny jeans and a blazer jacket so orange that Apollo feels compelled to tell him that Halloween was last month. The beret doesn’t really help the costume effect. “Hello?” Apollo calls. “Do you need something?”

(He’s learned from Iris’ warning.)

“You must be Apollo! Nick’s told me about you, like, once, but he’s pretty shit about keeping everyone up-to-date, so I figure that’s good. Is he around or am I gonna have to camp out here until he finds his way back?” The man wanders in past the couches to examine Vera’s smaller paintings propped up on the piano. “Ooh, nice.”

“Um, who are you?” Apollo asks.

“He hasn’t told you about me?” Apollo shakes his head. “‘Course he hasn’t. Nick’s useless. The name’s Laurice Deauxnim, call me Larry. Everyone does, except everyone who doesn’t.” He extends a hand and Apollo stares stupidly at him for a few seconds before he realizes that he should shake it. “Nick didn’t tell you I’d be coming around?” Apollo shakes his head again. “Seriously, Nick, c’mon.” Larry turns his eyes to the ceiling and spreads his hands wide. “Useless, am I right?” he entreats the ceiling, or maybe Mia, considering that he had mentioned her name on arrival. He must know Phoenix well, to know her. “Anyway, I’m an author-artist, I was off on a book tour-new inspiration tour-vacation kinda thing when he talked to me about your changeling friend, but now I am back, baby.”

A pillow hits Larry in the face, and not softly lobbed the way blankets hit Apollo or Trucy, but like it came straight from an air cannon.

“Uh,” Apollo says.

Larry tosses it back at the couch. “Good talk, Mia.”

“I have no idea when either Mr Wright or Vera are going to get here,” Apollo says. If he thinks back, he can remember Phoenix saying that there was someone he had to introduce Vera to – but he can’t imagine this man, orange and red to Vera’s blues and purples, in any way having any way to relate to her. He can imagine Vera retreating back somewhere into the kitchen and not coming back out. He also can imagine purgatory, which is what waiting around for Phoenix in the same office space as this man will be. Iris may have been cryptic and terrifying, but she was quiet.

It’s about ten minutes of some chatter that Apollo tunes out, Larry examining Vera’s paintings and brushes and talking probably mostly to himself, occasionally looking to Apollo like he expects a response he doesn’t get. They both turn expectantly to the door as it opens, and Trucy wanders in with some boxes of Eldoon’s stacked high. “Uncle Larry!” she yelps. “You’re here!”

Uncle, huh. The last one of those was Valant, and this Larry seems to be at least at that level of eccentric, but on Phoenix’s side, not Zak’s.

“Sure am, kiddo! Where’s your dad? He still sleeping, or he finally quit that stupid club?”

“Yeah, he just didn’t go back after the murder trial,” Trucy says. Her smile takes on a bit of a plastic quality as she says the last three words. Who else knows about her father’s murder, who outside of that courtroom; who has she or Phoenix told? “He’s really bad at keeping people up-to-date, huh?”

Larry looks at Apollo and says, “It took him four months to tell me he had a daughter, y’know? And we live in the same city!” Trucy giggles.

Apollo wonders if Larry was ever told that Trucy was adopted. Somehow, he wouldn’t put it past Phoenix.

“Trucy, what exactly is your school schedule?” Apollo asks. He gets the same answer every time, but he still feels obligated to ask, if her father won’t seem to.

“Don’t worry about it,” she says.

“Oof, don’t let Edgy hear that.” Larry rescues Trucy from beneath the noodles and puts them on the coffee table. “Y’know you’re in for another five-hour lecture about ‘the importance of education’” – he throws his voice to some weird accent that sounds nothing like anything and makes Trucy laugh harder – “and how ‘you don’t want to end up like some certain particular orange man who’—”

“You’re not a good example for the perils of flunking high school,” Trucy says brightly. Apollo has a sudden parental urge to ask her what her report card looks like. “You’ve turned out fine, Uncle Larry!”

“It’s all sheer dumb luck and he knows it.” And there’s Phoenix, strolling in with his hands in his hoodie pockets like he knew exactly the timing of when to best appear to make the best joke. “Hey, how’s it going, you sorry bastard?”

Larry gasps in a comically dramatic way, clapping his hands over Trucy’s ears. “I’m fifteen, Uncle Larry,” Trucy says tiredly. “I know what swear words are.”

“Oh.” Larry removes his hands. “Right.” He stares at Phoenix with a glare that keeps turning halfway into a grin before he can fix it. “Well, dumbass, you wouldn’t have to ask how I’m doing if you’d pick up the phone once in a while! Edgy’s better about chatting with me! Edgy is!”

“Sure he is,” Phoenix says with a lazy wave of his hand. “He’s not the one who the fae have banned from getting a new phone that texts faster than a brick.”

“So you two are old friends?” Apollo asks.

Larry gives him a thumbs-up. “Right in one,” Phoenix says.

“Yeah,” Apollo says, “that’s kinda how I greet my best friend, so.”

The three of them chatter over each other, chaotic snippets of conversation burying themselves beneath each other and beneath the weight of obvious years that Apollo is not privy to. Trucy is scolding Larry for forgetting how old she is, and Larry is saying that he just doesn’t have the brains to keep track of the ages of all his friends’ daughters’ cousins’ in-laws, and Phoenix is telling him that he unlike some people doesn’t even have that expected of him and still can’t manage friends’ daughters, and then Trucy has her laptop from somewhere and is pulling up her Youtube channel, and her hat is hovering in midair obviously balanced on her wisp, and Larry elbows Phoenix into a bookshelf.

It’s weird – it’s far more than weird – to see Phoenix on that level of familiarity with someone. With Iris, the history between them, obviously deep, was obviously a gulf that they weren’t trying to, or couldn’t, bridge. But today, Apollo thinks he almost sees a hint of the man Phoenix was before, and not just before the disbarment.

He can’t exactly get away from them; the filing cabinet is in the back room where they settle, Larry lounging in Phoenix’s desk chair with his feet up on the desk, Phoenix sitting on the desk, and Trucy bouncing about all over. He listens to some gossip about mutual friends of theirs – which includes Prosecutor Edgeworth, somehow – and Larry’s career, learning that he’s a picture book writer and artist. A quick search of his name, on Apollo’s fourth stab at how to spell that surname, turns up that he is probably about as successful and well-off as a picture book writer can get. On his wikipedia page – personal life section incredibly short – there’s a note about a woman named Elise with the same surname, another author-illustrator, many less books under her belt, all more than seven years ago, and even less about who she was behind the books.

If Larry wasn’t a friend of Phoenix’s, Apollo wouldn’t think that anything about that was really a mystery. Some people prefer their private lives.

As it is, Apollo tries to dredge up anything from his memory of that month-old aside. It was the same day as his conversation with Klavier, which pushed just about everything else out of his head and didn’t let it back in. “Are you the friend whose mentor was one of the fae?” Apollo asks at the closest thing to a lull in the conversation; Trucy is laughing while Phoenix and Larry glare at each other in mock anger about a joke Apollo didn’t catch, off a discussion about shapeshifters. (Apollo desperately doesn’t and wants to know more about what they know about shapeshifters. It’s the way he feels about most new magic concept. He hasn’t braved asking Trucy more about kitsunes.)

“That’s me,” Larry says. “Unless you’ve made other unfortunate artist friends while I’m not looking, and that’s unlikely, since the only friend you’ve made in the last seven years was a mortal enemy.”

“Look at you,” Phoenix says dryly. “You’ve learned how to use logic, even though I have made friends, thanks.”

“You haven’t told me about any new friends, either,” Trucy says, pouting.

Larry pantomimes stabbing Phoenix in the leg with a pencil. “Anyway yeah,” he says, still gesturing with the pencil but now like he’s a professor lecturing with an imaginary blackboard, pointing to concepts visible only in his mind. “That’s me. Her name was Elise, or at least that’s the name she went by at the end.” He is quiet for a few seconds. “I found her art at a low point in my life, which I guess that low point was ‘most of my twenties’, there Nick I said it before you could, and was so inspired that I reached out to her and I worked with her up until she died.”

“You forgot that the ‘worked with her’ part involved swearing your apparent ‘undying fealty’ to her teachings and ‘everything she could provide you’,” Phoenix says, making a few quotes with his fingers, again with that deep dryness to his voice, not quite sarcastic but plainly amused. “Which – Apollo, tell me the problem of using that phrasing to one of the fae?”

“Everything?”

“Yes,” Phoenix says.

“Shush, Nick,” Larry says.

“I haven’t heard this one,” Trucy says. She perches herself on Apollo’s desk and puts her chin in her hands.

Larry groans. Phoenix’s expression is positively gleeful. “So he’s talking to her about learning painting and publishing from her, in his overdramatic exaggerated way that he says everything,” he says, more animated in his manner of speech than he has ever been before, “and she’s hearing from that ‘oh, he wants to gain magic from me’ and that’s one way how you can accidentally become a witch.”

Does Phoenix know anyone whose life isn’t a fae nightmare? “They don’t make you draw up a meticulous contract beforehand?” Apollo asks.

“They hold the cards in that setup – if you, human, the one at risk, don’t ask, I can’t imagine many would suggest it.” Phoenix snatches the pencil out of Larry’s hand. “Again, sheer dumb luck for it to turn out all right. Be careful swearing oaths to people – you might end up bound and magic for it.”

“I’ll keep that under advisement,” Apollo says, and Phoenix nods like he has imparted some sort of sage wisdom instead of saying something that should, by every right, be obvious.

-

He isn’t around for wherever and whenever Phoenix introduces Vera to Larry. Their conversation about her assuages some of Apollo’s fears about Larry’s exuberance; Phoenix becomes a human thesaurus but only for the words “sheltered”, “quiet”, and “shy”. “Sorta like Pearls was when we first met her,” Phoenix says, another glimpse of their depth of history, and Apollo wonders about who this girl is before Phoenix adds, “Except Vera grew up here, and Pearls on the other side of the veil.”

Ah. One of the fae. Go figure. How many of them does Phoenix know, anyway, and how is he not dead from it all yet?

Over the next week, Vera’s art supplies begin a slow migration out of the office. She leaves some pencils and sketchbooks around, shows up whenever Larry is meeting with his agent – apparently he hasn’t been home in a while, has a lot to catch up on, drags Phoenix along to anything dealing with a contract while they argue about something pro-bono a decade ago that Phoenix is trying to collect on. Apollo and Trucy leave the office that Friday evening, leaving Vera the only one there, her head in her sketchbook, not even looking up to tell them that she has found the zone and she doesn’t need them to wait around to walk her home.

“I’m so proud of her,” Trucy says, skipping down the sidewalk beneath the spotted streetlights. “She’s come so far since we met her!”

“She’s older than you,” Apollo reminds her.

“That doesn’t mean I can’t be proud of her,” Trucy says. “I’m proud of you when you win a case. I’m proud of Daddy that he’s getting his life back together. And I’m proud of Vera for how she’s doing with everything she found out about herself and her family.”

“And how are you doing with everything about you and yours?” He hasn’t asked her, because she has never drawn close to it, seems to have chosen pretending nothing is wrong as her coping mechanism, which Apollo understands. He’s tried forceful repression and almost succeeded at it. He can’t blame her for not wanting to face all that is behind her. But it seems like a better time than any, the distance of nearly a month and a half, and in the dark Trucy doesn’t have to look at him, doesn’t have to work to hide her facial expressions from him.

After a short delay, her face turned from him under the lights, Trucy says quietly, “Mia had some old grimoires. Daddy’s up late reading all of them, looking for stuff about mitamahs. He wants to help, he always wants to help, but he’s so busy, he’s got court stuff and Court stuff and he was talking about taking the Bar again and now this and I wish sometimes for his sake that we hadn’t ever gone and found any of it at all.” Even in the dark, he sees her shadowy figure slump. “And I wanted to be magic like my grandfather and now I don’t know what to be, but I do know I’m a Wright, and Wrights don’t run from the truth even when it hurts or just kinda sucks.”

In spite of himself, Apollo laughs, and Trucy does too. “Your dad has a real way with words,” he tells her, and she laughs again. “But I mean – if you want to learn about magic, you can learn about magic. It doesn’t have to be like anyone else. You can be magic like you.”

(Like Apollo is a defense attorney not like Dhurke, but like Apollo, and he wants to tell her he understands but like every time before, he doesn’t allow himself to form the words.)

“I guess,” she says. “I guess I can.”

-

His Saturday plans to sleep in and stay in bed for longer end with his phone’s incessant buzzing. 8:36 in the morning, and he is being called by the number that is saved in his phone as the Wright Anything Agency, the ancient desk phone that Apollo doesn’t know exactly how to make an outgoing call from. He’s not sure he’s ever taken a call on it, either; clients just seem to walk in or be handed to him, and he goes from there.

“Hello?”

Silence.

“Trucy,” Apollo says, “this isn’t really funny.”

He hangs up and plants his face back into his pillow.

Buzz buzz buzz.

Wright Anything Agency.

“Trucy—”

At the loud burst of static, Apollo tries to jerk away from the phone in his hand, rolling halfway out of bed in the process. “What the hell,” he says, at some distance to the phone with no idea of whether he can be heard. “Can we not do something weird for one weekend?”

Again, he hangs up, but this time he does not move. His phone barely has time to return to its lock screen before there is a third incoming call from the same source.

He puts it to his ear and waits. The static is back, soft enough to listen to. Its hiss isn’t constant but has peaks and valleys like a hum, like a whisper, like if he just listens hard enough he would swear that it has the same pulse and rhythm as speech. Blinking at the wall behind his bed, he cautiously asks, “Mia?”

The crackle in response is loud, but not painfully. If he had to classify it as anything, it seems like an affirmation, not the scolding of the static of the second call. “Okay,” he says. “You win.”

He hangs up, waiting for a fourth call to chase him down, and it doesn’t.

“Dude.” Clay slumps into the kitchen, yawning, to take in Apollo dressed in a t-shirt and jeans and shoving a granola bar into his mouth. “Where are you going?”

“I’m getting crank-called by my office’s ghost and I’m presuming it’s for something important,” Apollo replies, through a mouthful of granola, and the words come out such a mess that he has to repeat them after he swallows. At Clay’s dead-eyed expression, he adds, “She’s a benevolent ghost, mostly, I think. Mr Wright said.”

“Yeah, call me if you want me to start looking into exorcisms,” Clay says. “Otherwise” – he throws a thumb over his shoulder – “I’m goin’ back to bed.”

In the gray morning, the streets are sparsely-populated and about as quiet as it gets, restless night over and day not quite begun. The office, when Apollo reaches it, pops the door open before he can even try the handle to see if, like every morning, it is unlocked for him. “Hello?” he calls. The room is empty. No one responds. “Who am I even looking for?” he mutters, and in response, the last of Vera’s paint cans rattle. “Vera?” The lights blink and a book falls, almost in slow-motion, from the shelf next to the far door. “Okay.”

How did he not notice Mia’s presence before Phoenix pointed it out? Had she left him alone to flounder before then? Had everything weird just faded into the background weirdness of his life? He opens the door. The lamp on his desk flickers on, a spotlight twisted to point at the bathroom door. In the quiet, the sound of soft sobbing reaches through the door. “Vera?” Apollo repeats.

Abruptly, the sobbing stops. “I’m fine,” she says, her voice raised as much as it possibly can be, soft as it is through the door. “You can go home.”

“You’re crying,” Apollo says. “I’m not going anywhere.” He slumps against the wall and slowly folds down to the floor. “I didn’t have any plans for today, anyway.”

“Please go home.” Vera’s voice emerges closer, from the crack along the wall. She might have moved, too. “You don’t need to see me.”

See her? There’s something he can work with. “What happened, Vera?”

A second passes, an audible sniff, and then several more seconds. “I don’t know how to go back,” she says, fainter again. The lock clicks open. Apollo scrambles to his feet as the door opens. His breath catches.

Something broke, and it isn’t just the cracks in the center of the mirror.

Vera doesn’t look like she was the one who opened the door. She sits on the floor, hugging her knees, and her fingers digging into her jeans are too long, ending in what looks like sharp bony claws. The skin on her hands and face is variegated, patchy, blue a few shades light than her hair and pale lilac mixed across each other like they were sprayed and splattered down onto a canvas. Her ears end in points and curve near their tips but are surprisingly short, ending at least an inch before the top of her head and instead hooking outward. It reminds Apollo a little of a bat. Her red eyes are a little too big for her face, blinking furiously, and she quickly reaches up to rub away the tear tracks down her cheeks. Apollo almost jumps forward, terrified by those claws going so close to her eyes, but he holds himself back and then realizes, with the iron ring on his hand, he would just make things worse. He shoves it down into the pocket of his jeans.

“Oh,” Apollo says.

Why did Mia call him and not Trucy? He’s no good at this.

“Mr Laurice told me all about his mentor.” Vera’s voice, now that she isn’t raising it through the door, drops to a raspy whisper. “And how he didn’t know what she looked like. He showed me a picture of her how she looked as human, but... “ She sniffs again. “I wondered what I look like. So last night I tried and…” Another, louder sniff, and then a sob that she doesn’t choke down. “I can’t go back. I’ve tried and tried and I... And I can’t go out like this.” She chews on the end of one of her thumb-claws and he can see several of her teeth end in long points like her ears and fingers. “People can’t see me like…”

“You’ve been here all night?” Vera nods. “Did you – did you have dinner?” She shakes her head. Apollo fails to conjure a memory of whether she had anything substantial for lunch or was absorbed in her work that early, too. “Okay, um, here’s what we’ll do.” He extends a hand to Vera. She stares at it for several seconds – maybe she can See some lingering effect of the ring – but accepts it and he helps her up off the floor. “I’m gonna call Trucy because she knows a little more about magic, and I’ll run out and get you something to eat, and we can all figure this out together, okay?” She nods. “Okay.”

He tries his best not to sound frantic when he explains the situation to Trucy. Can a glamour just go away, forever? Vera can’t go back to living like a shut-in, not like this, not when she’s been learning not to shy so far away from the world, not when she’s been introduced to a mentor who can do more for her than just let her hang out in a cramped Anything Agency. “I will be there in five minutes,” Trucy says, hanging up immediately after, not letting Apollo ask how she intends for that impossible timetable, since she said she was at home, to work.

Five minutes later, a void-portal opens near the bookshelf – Vera screams – and Trucy stumbles out with a makeup compact mirror in her hand, and Apollo wonders how he forgot about that Gramarye trick. “Got it the first time this time!” she announces proudly, holding the mirror aloft and then letting it fall from her fingers, slumping over as though exhausted. Her hair is tangled, obviously unbrushed, and she doesn’t even have her hat, probably having thrown on the clothes closest at hand, jean shorts and a baggy t-shirt and her white boots. She flings herself over the back of the couch and stays as she lands.

“You didn’t need to exhaust yourself to get here immediately,” Apollo says. Vera puts her face in her hands; maybe it would have been better for her to take longer to arrive, give Vera more time to accept that someone else was going to see her now too.

“I did.” Trucy rights herself and leans forward. “Vera!” She grins. “You’re so pretty!”

Vera moves her hands apart to look up at Trucy with one big red eye. “Those are such good colors for you! You look just like a pretty painting!”

That’s Trucy, good at this, and Apollo, only a comfort to someone who is a thousand times more willing to talk than Vera is. “I’ll go get you something to eat,” he says.

“Not Eldoon’s,” Trucy scolds, turning a frown and furrowed brow up at Apollo.

“I know, and I wouldn’t anyway. No one should have Eldoon’s at nine in the morning!”

Trucy’s expression tells him that she has definitely had Eldoon’s this early in the morning at least once before.

He makes a run to the source of their other dietary staple, Kitaki Bakery, instead. Mr Kitaki knows by now what the Anything Agency tend to get and doesn’t bat an eye when Apollo asks for whatever they have that is minimal salt. Halfway back through People Park, his thoughts bouncing between that first case and Vera’s situation now, he realizes that he and Trucy aren’t the only ones who could help with Vera’s situation.

Hey so, weird question about glamours Is it possible to like get it stuck and not be able to use it again

That doesn’t make any sense when he retreads after pressing send, so he tries again, stops walking to concentrate on whatever the hell he’s trying to convey. Context. Context would probably help.

Vera’s at the agency and she looks not human and she wants to change back and can’t and she’s freaked out Is it possible that she’s just stuck forever or is there some way to go back And how Trucy and I know nothing

He doesn’t know what rock star prosecutors do with their Saturday mornings – it probably depends on what they do with their Friday nights, and Apollo has no clue about that either – but the message is out there, if Klavier is awake to help.

Maybe that’s why Mia called Apollo.

The TV blares the opening theme of the Steel Samurai on Apollo’s return to the agency. Vera, still blue and purple and fae, at least no longer hides her face, and Trucy flings herself into the couch next to Vera. “We’ve got a game plan,” Trucy announces. Apollo hands her the pastry boxes. “Chill out, eat food, relax, and maybe it works better when not stressed.” She pats Vera’s hand, apparently unfazed by her claws. “We’ll just have a chill day in today!”

“I’m sorry,” Vera whispers. “I know you both had better things to do.”

Trucy looks at Apollo. Apollo looks to the ceiling. “Nope,” Trucy says.

“Not really,” Apollo agrees. “You should’ve called, Vera – called last night, especially, really.”

She ducks her head. Her ears more a little, flaring out and moving down. “I didn’t want to be a bother,” she says. “Since I said I would be okay… And then you were all home again, and I would call you back…”

“You’re not a bother, Vera! You’re family!” Trucy grins at her and squeezes her hand. Then the smile falls off her face. “Wait, Polly, Vera didn’t call at all? How did you know…?”

Vera blinks at him, her big eyes making her resemble some sort of owl, if owls had demonic red eyes. “I got a series of calls from the office phone,” Apollo says. “No voice on the other end. I think it was Mia.”

“Oh,” Trucy says, sinking back into the couch. “I bet it was, too.” They watch the Evil Magistrate make a long villainous speech before he flees, and then Trucy adds, “I always wish I could’ve known her while she was alive. ‘Cause I always think I do know her, and then I think – do I, really? How do you get to know someone from her ghost? And why wasn’t I allowed to know her? Why’d some stupid bastard who thought he was hot shit take that away from us?”

The office is silent until the next episode starts and Trucy launches into a story about how Phoenix defended the original Steel Samurai actor. It seems like a diversion, a distraction, from the way the air hangs heavy after Trucy’s outburst, the way the audio from the TV sounds thinner and hollow. He doesn’t mind it. Vera listens to her unblinking, hypnotized, though it is impossible to tell where exactly her eyes are focused, on Trucy or on the television; there is barely a change in the hue of her eyes where the light hits them, no apparent pupils in her ping-pong ball eyes.

They make it through that episode and half of the next, Apollo still puzzling over the apparent circles of people that Phoenix knows, and all jolt at the sound of knocking on the door. Phoenix doesn’t knock, and it’s still barely 9:30 on a Saturday morning. Is the agency properly open on weekends? What are its hours? Apollo has never had a clear idea. The three of them sit frozen for several more seconds, time enough for the knocking to start again. Trucy vaults the back of the couch. “Coming!” she calls, smoothing down some flyaway hairs and yanking the door open. “Oh! Prosecutor Gavin! Hi!”

If Apollo is surprised – and he is, frozen in place and staring in confusion at the back of Trucy’s head as she continues to frantically comb flat her hair – then Trucy, who has no idea that Apollo contacted him, must be shocked as all hell. He checks his phone to see if he hadn’t missed a text in response, some advance warning, finding nothing. He just showed up.

Something thumps to the floor. Apollo finally turns his head. Vera flees over the back of the other couch, landing heavily and slamming the door to the other room hard enough to shake the coffee table. “Vera! Wait—!”

“I see I’m already not helping the situation,” Klavier says dryly. Apollo expects to see the tired-eyed man he last saw over a month ago – has it been that long? – and the plastic smile that paired with that bitter tone. But Apollo doesn’t have the magatama on him, and Klavier is Klavier, insufferably glamorous (in every sense of the word), and he’s grinning at them both with his spotlight smile, like even just in a t-shirt and jeans with his hair pulled back low, he should only be at home on the stage.

Apollo hates him again, though he can appreciate that he isn’t wearing that stupid necklace.

“You could have just… texted back.” Apollo scrambles to his feet as Klavier enters the office, as out-of-place as he was the first time he dropped by. “Or – or just called if it was too much to write—”

“Oh,” Trucy says. “You texted him? That explains – anyway, ignore him, Prosecutor Gavin.” She pats Klavier’s arm. “I’m glad to see you.”

“I could hardly ignore a distressed damsel, ja?” Klavier asks. “And besides, I haven’t seen my favorite Fraülein Magician in a hot second.”

“Vera tried to hide from me too when I showed up,” Trucy says, trailing behind Klavier as they pick their way through the usual office mess. “It’s not just you. And she—”

Klavier yelps and jerks his hand away from the doorknob. Still at some distance to it, Apollo can feel the cold radiating from the metal, an unequivocal warning. If it’s Mia not letting them in, she must have reason; there must be something—

“Your rings,” Apollo says.

“Huh?” Trucy asks.

“Prosecutor Gavin – those are iron, right? And Vera—”

Klavier’s eyes widen. “Ah,” he says, immediately plucking them off of his fingers. “Of course.”

“What happens?” Trucy asks. Klavier, reaching for the door again, a little more hesitant than before, freezes. “Like is it like magnets that it just repels, or…?”

“Like most magic, it depends.” Klavier’s eyes have a vacant, absent look, one that glamour can’t hide. “The scar on Kris’ hand, though – that was iron. I don’t suppose he ever forgave me for it.”

He obviously braces himself before touching the doorknob again, shoulders slumping with relief when nothing happens. “Vera!” Trucy calls, ducking in under Klavier’s arm. “It’s okay! None of us are mad at you, Vera!”

“I’m sorry for yelling at you in court,” Klavier says. “That was unbecoming of me, and you undeserving.”

The bathroom door is open, the kitchen door is nonexistent, and Vera’s voice rises up from somewhere in the room. “I did deserve it,” she says. Trucy makes a beeline for Phoenix’s desk. “You can be mad at me. It’s okay. I screwed everything up, and I’m just like your brother--”

“Nein, Fraülein, let me stop you there.” Klavier walks to the desk and leans against it, his back to Trucy attempting to drag Vera out from underneath. “The only thing you have in common with my brother is that you are both changelings, and I can hardly hold a grudge for that, ja? I do not fault Herr Forehead for being human when many heinous criminals I have prosecuted are also human.”

Apollo decides not to acknowledge that.

Her work done, Trucy hops up onto the desk. Vera stands there, her head ducked, her ears flattened out to the sides and drooping further. Klavier glances back over his shoulder and grins at her; unlike Apollo or even Trucy, he doesn’t have to hesitate a moment. He would have Seen her before, wouldn’t he? “There we go,” he says. “No need for pretty little Fraüleins to hide their pretty faces like that, ja?”

Vera lowers her head further, her eyes almost frantically avoiding Klavier’s, her clawed fingers tugging her hair down around her ears. It doesn’t help. “I would still rather look like me,” she says softly. “I want to be me again.”

Klavier sighs heavily. “Well, that’s the first part of your problem, Fraülein: this is you, much as anything else is.”

A soft sob escapes Vera’s throat. Apollo glares at Klavier. “Like I am Prosecutor Gavin and Klavier the rock star; I am not me if you cut away either. Everyone has different faces for the world at different times, ja? Yours and mine, Fraülein, are just a bit more literal than most.”

Vera sinks down into the desk chair, her hands spread out in front of her, the white hooked claws splayed apart. “I’m afraid I have no answer that will be like—” Klavier snaps his fingers. “I’m not very good at teaching magic, I’ve been told.” His knuckles pale on the hand that he doesn’t have in the air, tightly gripping the edge of the desk. “But I can promise you only more hurt in trying to bury half of yourself.”

“Turn your thinking around!” Trucy says brightly. Klavier looks relieved, probably that they aren’t going to dwell on what he said, read into it everything that is definitely there beneath the surface. “You’re not trying to – to change yourself or anything, just be a different self for the situation. Like how I’m not allowed to wear my top hat to school, or Polly – well, I guess Polly’s only got one face and it’s loud.”

“Hey!”

“There you go proving her point,” Klavier says with a smirk.

“Daddy says that magic is all about being sure,” Trucy continues, content to ignore that which she has sparked. “That if you don’t think you can, you won’t. So you can! I know you can!” She beams at Vera. She’s a good cheerleader; it’s part of what makes her such a good counsel in court. (The other part is that she’s smart as hell, but sometimes Apollo needs someone to believe in him when he doesn’t believe in him.)

Vera stares at her claws, visibly uncomfortable with the attention all on her. “Why didn’t my father tell me?” she asks. “I could have figured this out a long time ago.”

Apollo, thinking about someone else who wasn’t told, who also found out in a bad situation, fails to not look at Klavier, who glances away. Trucy turns to look at him as well. “There’s hardly a guide for how to raise a changeling, ja?” Klavier drums his fingers on the desk. “Perhaps he hoped to stop you from being torn in two like this. Perhaps he worried that once you knew, you would try some sort of dangerous magic. Perhaps he was afraid to face it, too. Who knows? I have wondered often myself, much as I know it is far too late to ask.”

Apollo thinks, if not quite that question, he and Trucy just as well have questions for their parents, far too late to ask them. And Trucy’s face falls, her eyes cast down toward her boots, undoubtedly thinking the same. There’s one other question Apollo has, one he could ask, one that isn’t too late, and doesn’t: why Klavier didn’t tell anyone what Vera was. Was he afraid to face it, for fear of facing that echo of his brother?

For several minutes, the only sound in the office is the faint rumble of the TV from the next room over. Trucy is the first to move; she doesn’t speak but instead gasps and smacks Apollo’s arm. “Vera!” she says, fortunately excited, not horrified or afraid. “Your hands, look!”

And she grabs one of Vera’s hands – still mottled like paint splashes, but purple and blue the whole way up her fingers, ending with silver nails and stubby human fingertips. “Good work, Fraülein!” Klavier says, leaning halfway over the desk to look. He grins at her, another one of his flashbulb smiles, and Apollo would swear that the skin on Vera’s cheeks, even the blue part, takes on a purpler tone. Is that how she blushes with this face?

“I thought glamour was just illusions,” Trucy says, still holding Vera’s hand and studying it like it is a piece of evidence. Vera for her part at least doesn’t seem to mind. “But like…” She taps the end of one of Vera’s fingers. “There’s obviously not an invisible claw here. So it’s like a kind of shapeshifting?”

“It’s magic, Fraülein,” Klavier says. “It is a glamour. I don’t know what to tell you.”

“I’m an artist,” Vera says softly. “Whatever face I have… I’m an artist. And I’m not trained to hold a brush with claws, so…” She shrugs. Trucy finally drops her hand. “They went away.”

Magic is about being sure, and if she’s sure of anything, it’s that.

Klavier offers her a high-five, which she accepts. “You’ve got it, Fraülein.”

“Just not…” She frowns. “The rest.”

“Ach, don’t doubt yourself now. I’ve no doubt before long you’ll be able to show off either of your lovely faces whenever you choose. And all without my poor advice.”

Vera starts to giggle and then hastily presses her hand over her mouth. “It helped,” she says.

They can’t hear the front door open, but it is apparent when the murmur from the TV is added to. Phoenix’s voice drifts in, half a conversation, starts and stops, and like no one else is with him. They all look to the door and Phoenix enters, phone in one hand, two heavy-looking leather-bound books balanced in his other arm. His eyes pass over the four of them, flashing blue and black, but his part of his conversation doesn’t falter. “Okay, but there’s absolutely no need to have a midlife crisis at seventeen,” he says. He drops the two tomes on Apollo’s desk.

“I did that,” Klavier says quietly. “Wouldn’t recommend it, either.”

Phoenix stands with his hand still on the books, shaking his head at whatever is being said on the other end of the line. He rolls his eyes. “Well first I’d take a breath, and then – no, they’re not going to discriminate based on your birthday, I know a kid – not really a kid anymore, she’d kick my ass if she heard that – who got her badge at thirteen so you are – take a breath, please.” He drags a hand down his face. “Yeah, words of wisdom still aren’t really my forte, so I’d hang up the phone and go study some more – yeah.” He laughs. “And I do kinda have to cut you off, sorry. Got some kids here in local time I gotta check up with.” His eyes flicker between colors at them again. “Of course there’ll still be room for you here. Just maybe not as much space as I thought a year ago. Talk to you later, kiddo. Right,” he says, shoving the phone into his pocket and spinning on his feet a little to properly face them all. “Someone wanna give me the opening statement?”

“Glamour’s stuck,” Trucy says.

“I panicked,” Vera says, sinking down a little further in the desk chair.

Phoenix nods. “It happens. Even some friends of mine, they’ve known their magic their entire lives – still, they get hurt or tired or hungry or upset, and they’ll end up stuck for a bit, too. Which – checklist.” He holds up two fingers and taps one for each question. “Have you eaten recently?” Vera nods. “Sleep okay last night?” She shakes her head. “That’s not gonna help, for sure.”

“I feel a little better now,” Vera says, staring down at her hands again. They are still clawless. “Trucy and Apollo helped. And Prosecutor Gavin too, a lot.”

“Good to hear.” Phoenix takes a few steps toward his desk and stops, raising his voice without turning his head. “Speaking of, Prosecutor Gavin could at least stand to say goodbye before he sneaks out.”

And Apollo turns his head and Klavier simply isn’t there any more. He made the joke – probably not a joke – about being seventeen and now Apollo scans the room and he is simply gone. Gone, and knowing the sensation to expect, Apollo can’t make his eyes focus on a space next to the door.

“You don’t have a magatama on you,” Klavier says. He doesn’t really reappear, like he was invisible and now isn’t. “How did you…?”

“I’m a father,” Phoenix says, “of a daughter with a will o’ the wisp that, when she was littler, she liked to use to distract me while she stole cookies out of the pantry.” Trucy’s face turns pink; Phoenix grins unrepentantly. “I know when you kids are trying to make me look somewhere else.”

“Ah,” Klavier says.

Phoenix waves over his shoulder. “Don’t be a stranger,” he says. “Door’s usually unlocked.”

Klavier nods once, wide-eyed, numbly, and he slips through the door.

“Still didn’t say goodbye,” Phoenix mutters.

“I don’t think he likes you very much,” Vera says quietly, staring intently down at her nails.

“No,” Phoenix says. “Not really. We’ll work on that, but you first, kiddo.” He claps a hand on Vera’s shoulder. “One worry at a time.”

“Daddy,” Trucy says sharply. She has gone to Apollo’s desk, paging through the thick volumes that Phoenix deposited there. “You said you were running errands when you left.”

“That was my plan,” he says, dragging his hand down his face, but nothing about his movements appears like a lie to Apollo. “Then I was handed possible new leads and got waylaid.”

Trucy’s frown deepens. “Daddy…”

It must be about the mitamah again, like Trucy said last night. “I’m not overworking myself, sweetheart, I promise,” Phoenix says.

And that isn’t a lie, either, not to Apollo’s eyes, but the dark shadows under Phoenix’s eyes still contest that truth. He can’t actually be managing just one worry at a time.

-

I’m pretty sure Mr Wright doesn’t hate you You didn’t have to run out like that 

-Ah, you had all your agency people there -I didn’t want to impose 

You’re like the least imposing visitor to ever show up here tbh Not like the fae woman who just showed up and then told me to watch my phrasing on how I ask clients if they need help 

-the what

Yeah

-You’ll have to tell me about that sometime