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Through the noise I hear you call for help
You can't protect yourself
Frog mask and yellow cape
So desperate to escape
I came to you, hands wrapped in adhesive tape
That was when we were young and green
In the dawning hours of our team
Some things you will remember
Some things stay sweet forever
—The Mountain Goats, Animal Mask
For seven years, Simon had the same dream.
It didn’t visit every night, but it came more often than not. At first it was excruciating, and he wrenched awake from it each night panting in terror, chest heaving underneath his sweat-soaked shirt. By the end of the first year, though, its edges had been blunted. The world outside stopped mattering to Simon the way it had before; if he tried, he could almost convince himself it wasn’t real. None of it had happened in any way that mattered. It was only a dream.
By the time the nightmare turned seven, it was a haunting more familiar than anything else in Simon’s new life—save, of course, for the guilt and the grief—and it welcomed him like an old friend when he sank into its arms.
Part of Simon was grateful: at least it gave him a chance to see Athena again.
Sometimes the dream gave him good moments. Athena in his lap, his chin on the top of her head, as she read to him from one of his textbooks, Simon correcting her when she stumbled over words too big for her mouth. Athena sneaking bites from Simon’s food when she thought he wasn’t looking and giving him a cherubic grin when he turned back around. Athena riding piggyback, clinging to Simon’s shoulders as he went about his business, his little shadow. Athena sitting at her small table in the corner while Simon and Metis worked, drawing pictures he always ended up pinning to his wall. Things that had happened in another life—or at least Simon thought they had. It was hard to distinguish the pieces of true memory from the fictions fashioned by his brain. Had he really tucked Athena into bed and read her stories until she snored whenever her mother was too absorbed in her work to leave the lab, or did he only think he had? At some point, of course, the difference stopped mattering.
Sometimes the dream only gave him one moment. The one he’d never be able to scrub from his memory as long as he had to live. Athena’s smile, smeared with blood and hollow-eyed, gristle dripping from her chin. Metis gutted on the table, the arms of the machine wet with gore above her. Athena telling him cheerfully that she was fixing Mom.
Simon hadn’t screamed. He didn’t think he’d cried. He’d been stuck there, rooted to the threshold, unable to tear his gaze away—and then something had clicked and he’d rolled up his sleeves and gotten to work framing himself for a murder.
Athena hadn’t understood what he was doing. That was when she started crying.
Sometimes the dream ended there.
Sometimes it went on: the discovery, the arrest, the trial. Simon silent at the defendant’s stand as Athena stood as a witness and pleaded for his life, insisting that he didn’t do it, begging him to tell them the truth. The urge to shout at her until she gave up— how dare she try to incriminate herself, did she not understand that he had done it for her, this was the only way he could save her —and the urge to run to her and hold her close and weep. Neither of them had won out in real life, but sometimes they did in the dream. It never ended any better, but at least he got to have Athena in his arms one last time.
Seven years in, and he had never been able to stop thinking about her. She must have grown up. Eighteen by now. He wondered where she’d gone, without any family members to take her in. Was she lonely? Did she remember him? Did she know how much he loved her?
He didn’t remember anymore if he had told her—he did most nights, right before it was over. Be good, Thena. I love you. Everything is going to be okay. And she would look at him with terror in those big round eyes and say something like What’s happening? Why did you do that, Simon? Why isn’t Mom getting back up? or I’m scared. I don’t want you to go. Please don’t leave me, Uncle Simon. And sometimes, on the worst days, Is Mom dead? ...I killed her, didn’t I?
Had any of those happened? Was a word of it real?
It was selfish, but he hoped he’d told her. He hoped she remembered him.
Simon had never stood in a courtroom before.
Simon had stood in a courtroom before, but never behind this bench. This courtroom felt no more welcoming than the one in which his death penalty had been handed down, and he briefly wondered if it would be different were he standing there a free man, a prosecutor by his own volition, without the ever-present weight of the shackles to remind him of his place. Somehow he doubted it.
The grand doors at the head of the room announced every entrance with a creak and a stately gust of air, and every time, Simon found himself looking over before he knew what he was doing, hoping and dreading the footsteps would be hers. None of them were—
Until one set was.
Athena had changed. Of course she had changed. Seven years had passed, after all, but part of him had expected the girl walking into the courtroom to be the little sister he’d left behind, preserved unchanged in amber. That she wasn’t struck him like a knife between the ribs, each year he had missed a barb digging into his flesh. She’d been eleven the night before, and now she was a young woman.
He could recognize the little girl from his memories in this new Athena—she really hadn’t changed that much, had she? She’d gotten tall. Not as tall as Simon, but it was clear as she took her place by Wright’s side that she had a good inch on him, maybe two. He hoped it was two. Her hair was swept up in the same improbably dramatic ponytail she’d always insisted on wearing, and something ached inside Simon as he remembered her handing him a comb and a hairband, plopping down in front of him and telling him to get to work already. She wore the same smile now as she had back then, but it didn’t ring true anymore, strained and stretched thin around the edges. She was trying to smile despite having nothing to smile about—Simon couldn’t decide if that made her naïve or brave.
Despite all that growth, though, she was still so young. The tight set of her shoulders betrayed her nerves, and Simon could see her flinch minutely when the voices of the gallery rose too high around her. He wanted to snap at them to shut up. He didn’t. It wasn’t his job to protect her anymore.
Athena looked over at him, her face shuttering for a moment. Simon ignored the part of him that thought, bitter and vicious, Good. He knew he’d changed as much as she had; he wasn’t the big brother who’d been taken away from her anymore. He wasn’t anything. Athena’s face curved into a hesitant smile, and—
Simon wanted to hug her. He wanted to cross the courtroom and sweep her up into his arms like they’d never been torn apart. He wanted to lift her off her feet and spin her around until they were both dizzy and find out if Athena had the same laugh now that she had as a child.
He didn’t.
Simon had endured a great deal of pain over the past seven years; it was what had defined his existence, the axis upon which his world rotated. Wake up in agony, fall asleep in agony, and more often than not feel little other than dulled agony during his waking hours. Sometimes the dream was a reprieve, but most times it only served as further torment. Suffice it to say, Simon and pain were intimately acquainted.
His entire wretched history, however, was dwarfed by that one horrific moment, reduced to a mere stubbed toe in comparison.
Seven years. Simon had spent seven years giving everything he had to protect her. His mentor’s most beloved treasure, and his own. Telling the world the same lie so many times that it began to feel true on his tongue. The one who killed my mentor was me. I took Athena’s mother away from her. I ruined her life. It was true for everyone else; why shouldn’t it be the same for him? Wasn’t it better this way? This was how it should be. Simon behind bars, Athena free where she belonged. Her safety was worth it. It was worth anything.
Seven years, and Phoenix Wright had cut them down before him without blinking. Did he not know what he was doing? Destroying all of Simon’s hard work in the name of the truth —but what would the truth matter, in the end? Perhaps it would save Simon from death row, but he had chosen his path, and he would be damned before he saw Athena in his place instead—that was the choice he had made. It was the one he would make every time.
That’s what I saw. And now you have it—the truth that you so desperately wanted.
Forcing those words out had nearly killed him. The look on Athena’s face afterwards made him wish it had.
She hadn’t done it.
Athena was innocent.
Athena had been proven innocent.
Simon had never let himself believe this moment would come. It would have been the subject of wildest dreams, if the past seven years had allowed any of those to survive; it was beyond belief. Even as the verdict was handed down, a strange dizziness kept Simon in its grasp—it was the incomprehensible feeling of freedom, the lack of a burden weighing his shoulders down. He didn’t know how to stand without it anymore.
Simon was free. He was free and he was alive and he was going to stay that way—and, far more importantly, the same held true for Athena.
It was nothing short of a miracle.
The hours after the trial were little more than a daze, but Simon remembered one moment with crystal clarity: as soon as she was allowed to, Athena ran up to him and threw herself into his arms, burying her face in his shoulder and undoubtedly wetting his jacket with her tears. Muscle memory made Simon hold her close and hug her back—clumsily, he was sure, but he could hardly be blamed for being out of practice.
That morning—hell, only two hours earlier—Simon had been utterly convinced that he was destined to die without ever experiencing this again.
As he held Athena, much bigger now but still so small and precious in his arms, and his own tears dripped onto her hair—Simon was suddenly very, very glad that he had not.
It was a new and unfamiliar feeling, but not an unwelcome one.