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They are not romantics, Athena thinks.
Which is not the same thing as saying they don’t love each other, of course. No—even before she knew them in any meaningful way, she knew they loved each other. She’d been a teenager, adrift in a sea of law and languages and the terror of losing the little family she had left, and still their love was one of the few certainties she’d had.
But they are not romantics.
She’d overheard Pearl asking Mr. Wright about it once, while Pearl was on the warpath, and he’d had, unexpectedly, less patience than usual.
“I stopped believing in soulmates in college,” he’d said.
Pearl and Athena had both recognized that for the dismissal that it was.
And the Chief Prosecutor—well. Athena may be better at reading him than most, but she’d still not describe him as anything resembling effusive.
Maybe it would have been different ten, fifteen years ago. Back before he’d moved to Khura’in, Apollo had, in a bout of youthful optimism and not-yet-exhausted hero worship, forced her to watch some of Mr. Wright’s old trial tapes, many of them featuring the much-younger Prosecutor Edgeworth. It was remarkable to see, really: the showmanship, the bravado, the youthful confidence that they were doing the right thing. They haven’t lost it, but they haven’t quite kept it either.
They’re older now; a little more tired, a little more scarred in ways that don’t quite show. She knows why, of course. Neither of them has been so lucky as to keep their dirty laundry out of the public eye. Athena reflects, wryly, that she has some idea of what that’s like.
She watches them, sometimes, when they don’t know that they’re being observed. There are no grand pronouncements of adoration, no installations of flowers. It’s the small details that she picks up on:
A brief touch of the hand, a check-in after a long day—the wordless confirmation that everything is all right.
A fight they don’t have, because they’ve learned when to disengage and try again later.
And sometimes, during the celebration for some milestone or another, a shared smile: a supernova, a seawall versus anything that could tear them apart.
They love each other—she's rarely been more sure of anything than that. But more than that, this is a decision that they've made, and they'll stand by it come hell or high water.
No, Athena thinks; they are not romantics. But maybe they don’t need to be.