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“Whaddya think, Pess?” says Kaya Faraday, smooshing the Borzoi’s face between her palms. Said Borzoi is settled primly between Kay’s knees, big triangular ears pricked, and gazing up at her with that exact same pretending-not-to-be-calculating face her owner makes. Usually when he thinks whatever Kay’s about to do is a stupid idea.
It never is. Kay only has amazing ideas.
And this one is pretty pedestrian, actually, as far as things go. She doesn’t know this area super well, and she doesn’t know Pess super well, either, but a walk is something even she can probably figure out how to do without committing any crimes or causing any explosions, and it’s actually item one on her list of daily chores while she’s dogsitting this week, so there.
Kay Faraday, the scion of the Yatagarasu, following a list.
Lucky she likes Mr. Edgeworth.
And she likes Pess, too, and he’d done that whole speech before they left about her anxiety and how it was very important to manage her routine, rabbiting on until Kay’d had to wave him off with a promise she’d stick to the list, so sticking to the list she is. She can do this! What else is summer break for!
Kay bursts to her feet - and Pess does too, more out of alarm than excitement, skittering backwards in a movement that looks almost comical on her too-long legs.
“Sorry, sorry,” says Kay, with an apologetic scruff behind Pess’s ears, once she’s hit the ground again and the spike of tension in her spine has uncoiled. She acquiesces, if warily, and Kay winces inwardly.
Gotta be more careful…
Apparently having forgiven her, Pess shadows her from the sofa to the office where Kay’s foldout bed is, following close behind as Kay rummages around in her backpack (and admittedly through the piles of clothes on the bed, and on the floor, too, until she finds two unworn socks she can salavage. Look! It’s hard to live out of a backpack without stuff spilling out everywhere, okay! And it’s not like Mr. Edgeworth is here to see, so…)
Living out of a backpack is… weird, in general. Kay’s had to do it more than she’d like, after what happened with her dad and a few times since, but it never gets easier, to figure out where to sit and what to do in a space that is very much not your own. But she figures it out. That’s what Kay’s best at - doing things anyway, out of spite or determination, it doesn’t really make a difference.
It’s only once Kay is at the door, armed with not only socks and shoes but her phone, Pess’ leash and harness, and the bum bag of treats Mr. Edgeworth had insisted she had to carry on walks (wasn’t Pess well trained by now…?), that Pess gets the message.
And she really gets it - her lanky, horselike body twists into all sorts of excited shapes as she pitterpatters around in front of Kay, who bursts into laughter so hard she nearly drops the leash.
“You are so… shaped,” she giggles into Pess’s fur, kneeling down and letting the Borzoi barrel into her (gently; even at her most excited Pess is only ever gentle). “You’re shaped so funny. I don’t know how he thinks you’re all dignified and stuff.”
Pess sneezes right next to her ear.
“Okay, okay. You’re pretty sometimes too! I never said you weren’t.”
The hound reels back and regales her with a look that says, yes, you did, and their stalemate is only broken by Kay finally trying to figure out how the mass of straps in her hand actually becomes a thing that goes around her. Pess watches Kay struggling without lifting so much as a paw to help.
“Is this bit the top? Or does it go between the legs?” says Kay, proving herself wrong when she can’t get it to close around Pess’ barrel chest. “It doesn’t attach to the leg bit, anyway… unless that isn’t the leg bit. Is it? You’re the one who’s done this before, help me out here.”
Pess blinks, extremely slowly, and says nothing.
Kay is only just taking the harness back off again for the third time - it’s upside down, this time, or at least she’s pretty sure - when the doorbell rings. Kay freezes, thief’s instinct, and Pess does likewise at her shoulder for probably different reasons.
Oh my crow, he sensed me doing it wrong from all the way over in Europe and came home to lecture me, is Kay’s first thought, and while not totally out of the question (she’s heard those private jet stories from Franziska), it’s maybe not the super likeliest, so she unshrivels herself by force, a little.
Pess, halfway mummified in baby pink straps and one paw snarled upwards in the mess, vanishes from the floor next to Kay shrinks back under the table in the hallway. Kay knows not to reach for her under there, that’s one of the rules on the list. Something about personal space. (She gets that - Kay likes to go up, and not in, but there’s something to be said for escapism in general).
Defeated by her foe’s tactics, Kay gives up and answers the door before dealing with the mess she’s made.
And waiting outside on Mr. Edgeworth’s doorstep is… Detective Gumshoe? He ducks his head under the lintel, forever crunching his big frame inwards in a way Kay knows is unconscious, with his coatsleeves bunched up under the shopping bags laden on each arm. His round features are pinched into such hesitance that Kay wants to laugh, to reassure him, joy in bubbles already spilling from her throat.
“Gummy!!” she squeals instead, launching herself towards him without any mind to what’s in the bags, because she knows he’s got it covered - and he does, taking her weight easily and wrapping his arms around her, gently enough that she isn’t even clonked by anything he’s holding. “Mr. Edgeworth said you might want to come over while I’m here, but I totally forgot!”
Gumshoe chuckles, the vibration almost surround-sound with the way Kay is smooshed against his broad chest. “Good surprise, I hope, pal?”
“The best surprise!” Kay says, hopping back down onto the stoop. “Come in!! Put some of that down, it looks heavy! Why do you have so much stuff, anyway?”
Gumshoe pauses for just a shade too long on the doorstep behind her, and Kay hears it even as she turns away from him and trots inside - the way his brain slows to choose the words, methodical in a way usually unlike him, and a little too careful to be just polite.
He’s here to check in on me, thinks Kay, and she isn’t really sure what the answering swirl of emotions in her chest actually is - because it’s dark and light overlapping, heavy fog of guilt blurring everything together, hope as startling and cold as ocean spray, the undercurrent beneath the water warm like affection. Except it doesn’t really feel like any one of them at all, the way all of it twists into a storm in the cage of her ribs, too many things swept up and muddied together for a name.
Gumshoe comes in and shuts the door, finally. “Well, I thought I’d give us a lil’ afternoon project, since I’m free. Unless you’re, uh, not - unless you’re busy.”
“Me? Busy?” she answers, before there is a rustle and a clink and Pess blinks accusingly out at her from under the table. Gumshoe stops at the end of the hallway, follows her line of sight, and raises an eyebrow.
“Um,” says Kay.
“We can… handle that first?” says Gumshoe, a smile pulling on the round apples of his cheeks, and Kay smiles back before she even knows she’s doing it.
“Once she comes out of there, sure. It’s walkies time. You know how Mr. Edgeworth gets about her routine.”
Gumshoe plonks down one half of the bags on the counter. “Boy, do I.”
Kay follows suit, jumping up to perch herself on the marble next to the bags, so she can rummage without having to stand on tiptoes - she isn’t short, but all the counters and cupboards in this place are built at a comfortable height for a six foot tall man, and sometimes it makes her feel like a toddler.
“What even is all this stuff?” says Kay, half expecting paints and brushes or something - not that Gummy seems like he’d be good at crafts, exactly, but she knows his big hands can solder tiny electronics somehow, so it’s not that farfetched.
“Hey, hey, pal,” he says, swatting her hands away gently, and sets down the other bags to hold out two items in front of her instead, blinking expectantly up at her with all of that Laborador earnestness. “Guess.”
Kay squints. He’s holding a carton of extra large cage-free eggs - somehow all unbroken from how she’d tackled him just then, but then he’s a more careful kind of guy than anyone assumes at first glance, so she’s mostly not surprised and only a little impressed - and a bag of cocoa in the other hand, the dark bitter kind.
We aren’t making cocoa, right? It’s sunny outside. Also I don’t think you put eggs in that.
Puffing out her chest, Kay flicks her ponytail to one side. “The prosecution has procured a hypothesis, but more clues are required in order to deduce the truth.”
Gumshoe snorts, and Kay crows, inwardly. “He isn’t that bad, pal.”
“Prithee. Indeed. He is,” says Kay, and then she breaks, mirroring Gumshoe’s grin back down at him and swinging her feet in the air as she peeks back down into the closest bag again. “There’s a lot of stuff here just for one project, Gummy.”
And there is - there’s at least four bags here and a couple more on the floor, and she hadn’t really noticed before because they all looked so tiny next to his wide shoulders, but they’re really full, too. Of a lot of things that don’t go with cocoa - there’s milk, bread, at least three bags of frozen stirfy veggies, and a tin of hibiscus tea, the kind she usually steals from Mr. Edgeworth’s pantry when she visits.
“Oh, the rest is just spare groceries I got while I was there, and some stuff from home. In case you needed something while you’re staying here, that’s all.”
Kay squints down at him, with her hands still buried in one of the bags, searching for more clues. Mr. Edgeworth bankrolled these groceries, didn’t he. They planned this. Or else there’s no way that tea would be in here. And it’d all be mostly noodles.
And the swell rises, again, crashing as high as her throat this time, and she has to blink away the tide of something for a profoundly weird length of time before she can be normal again.
“Anyway, I have no idea what we’re making. What do you make with cocoa and eggs? Apart from a really bad omelette?”
Gumshoe’s smile goes transparent again - exactly as wide as before, but hesitant behind it - and Kay has to put every ounce of concentration into not letting her own fall, because why is he dancing around her like this? It’s been a while since they’ve seen each other, sure, and Kay graduated high school since, but nothing has really changed, right?
“Well,” begins the detective carefully, “I wanted to bring something over, but I couldn’t find any at the store, to be honest with ya, and my kitchen at home isn’t really set up for baking, so I brought over the ingredients instead. And me. I brought me over too, to help make ‘em.”
Kay perks up. “We’re baking?”
Gumshoe fishes in his pocket and holds up his phone. “These. Only if you wanna.”
And she does wanna. Because visible past the crack in the screen is a recipe for something that even looking at makes her feel younger, warmer, safer - a beautifully lit, staged cookbook photo of something she used to eat out of a plastic wrapper in the walls of the courthouse, and she and Gumshoe had eaten together, once, a long time ago.
“Swiss rolls?” says Kay, and despite herself the excitement muffles a little in her throat on the way out, somehow, awed and quiet.
“Yeah. That okay?”
The lump in her throat dissipates, and she launches herself off the kitchen counter into him, and even if he staggers backwards with a yelp, he doesn’t even remotely wobble under her weight. “It’s awesome. Thanks, Gummy.”
“You’re welcome, kiddo,” says Gumshoe, squeezing tight around her ribs before he lets her go. “Don’t worry, I didn’t go out of my way or anything.”
“I mean, yeah. You did.”
Kay pokes him meaningfully in the arm, and he smiles. “Okay, I did.”
The rest is left unsaid, but is no less audible for being so.
By that time, Pess knowing Gumshoe reasonably well at this point (and having more than once been carried around by him despite her size), their charge has seen fit to exit her table-sized nook of safety. Kay manages to extricate her from the failed attempt at a harnessing, and gets the thing on her properly, but only with their two heads put together. Then, with someone to chatter to on the walk, and Kay keeping track of where they actually are when Gumshoe gets them entirely lost, her first walk with Pess is, surprisingly, the highlight of Kay’s trip to the city thus far.
And we get to eat cake later! she thinks, gleefully, conveniently erasing the baking part.
It takes them more than a few minutes to hunt around in Mr. Edgeworth’s kitchen for supplies, despite how organised it is - he only seems to have a scale and no measuring cups, which is very typically pedantic of him, but also profoundly annoying because Gumshoe’s recipe is measured in volume, and they have to google how to convert all the measurements. Which takes them twenty minutes longer than it should because Gumshoe gets rightfully sidetracked showing her photos of Missile.
“Can you bring him over before I go next week?”
“Sure thing, kiddo,” says Gumshoe, a little glint in his eye.
“Heck yeah,” says Kay. I’ve only got this week to one up all of Pess’ other aunties. A doggie playdate is gonna boost me in the rankings for sure.
Then Kay arms herself with whisk and spatula - the Yatagarasu is always doubly prepared, she’s decided - and Gumshoe starts reading off the recipe, with Mr. Edgeworth’s reading glasses perched on his nose, no less, since he broke his in the store earlier apparently. Pess, settled back into her routine despite the strangers in the house, curls up in what Kay knows is her usual spot - on the other side of the kichen, underneath the bay window, where she can doze in the afternoon sunlight and still keep a supervising eye on her people.
“Okey dokey,” says Gumshoe over the glasses, their frames oddly sharp and square on his round face. “Says here that first we need to cream together the eggs and sugar.”
“You know what that means?”
“No idea,” he says, cheerfully.
“Cool,” says Kay. “Me neither.”
But it sounds like a job for the whisk, anyway, and so already vindicated by her decision to be adaptable, Kay sets about beating the eggs and sugar to smithereens. She only realises halfway in that she, Gummy, and the entirety of the kitchen backsplash are now splattered in tiny little flecks of egg-sugar-foam.
Eh. Oh well.
“When do I stop?” calls Kay over the clattering of the bowl and the aching of her wrist. Chefs must be way more ripped than she thought. Maybe this is good catburglar training after all. I’m gonna have arms of steel.
“Um,” says Gumshoe, and squints between his phone and the bowl so worriedly that Kay slows her beating by reflex. “Now? I think? Maybe?”
“Well, how do we know when it’s… done? Does the recipe say?”
“Uh…” he says, scratching the back of his head. “I’m not sure, but sometimes on the cooking channel they hold the bowl over their heads. To show that the egg is whipped enough to hold its shape. I think.”
Kay feels her eyes go narrow. “Gumshoe.”
The big man’s frame shrinks into itself. “They do! I swear! I’m not saying you should do it, I’m just saying--”
“You’ve known me for eight whole years. You’d never lie to me.”
His face liquefies into concern. “Of course not! Kay--”
She flashes him her widest, toothiest grin, letting it warp dangerous at the edges just the way she’s perfected by now, and whips the bowl into the air.
And the egg-sugar-foam doesn’t budge an inch.
…At first.
She’s staring straight at Gumshoe as she does, grinning, defiant - the Yatagarasu must have a certain sense of theatrics to carry things off, and Kay errs on the side of maximalism about it - and by the way his face splits into a grin it must be working! It’s only as she’s looking up to check that she notices the very top peak of creamy yellow foam is just beginning to wobble downwards, and with the threat of wet egg all over her head suddenly all too real Kay whips the bowl back down onto the counter so fast the resulting bang is near-deafening.
All three of them jump about a mile into the air.
"We did it!" says Kay at the same time as Gumshoe yelps "You scared the bejeezus out of me," and Pess retreats yet again to her hallway safe space - though it seems to Kay this time that it’s more out of resignation than actual fear.
“We did it,” Gumshoe repeats a second late, and holds out his hand for a high-5. Kay slams her palm into his with the speed of an approaching bullet train.
“Who said baking was hard? Okay, what’s next?”
“Next… it says we sift in the flour and the cocoa,” he replies, unconsciously reaching for the bags on the island. Kay snatches the cocoa away in a fit of impetuous childishness, her blood still running hot on the high of a successful bit.
“Oh, sorry, kiddo, go for it!” says Gumshoe, skittering backwards. “If you wanna do it, that’s fine.”
The big man is positively turning himself into a pretzel with the effort to make himself smaller. The adrenaline in Kay’s veins falters, and something goes sour in the back of her mouth.
She sets down the mixing bowl. “Gummy, I’m not in school anymore. I’m eighteen. You don’t have to make me feel like a big kid.”
Gumshoe crumples like a wet paper bag on the other side of the kitchen island. “I don’t wanna - I didn’t mean to--”
“I know, Gumshoe, I know you didn’t mean it, and I know you’re only here because Mr. Edgeworth told you to come over and make sure I’m ok, so it doesn’t matter.”
The rapid deflation of the detective’s frame stops. He frowns. “No, I’m not. I mean, he knew I was coming. But I wanted to say hi while you were in the city. ‘S’all. Promise.”
Everything goes quiet. “Oh.”
“And you are a big kid. I never meant to make you feel small. S’not your fault that to me you’re still a little girl running around in the courthouse to me, whenever I think of ya.”
The storm clouds billow impossibly wider in Kay’s chest.
What a time to have immortalised in someone else’s memory. If she concentrates really hard, she can still be there - the wood polish of the courtroom, the dusty, inviting silences of empty courtrooms and corridors for her to wander in, powdered chocolate and cream all over her fingers - but it all gets fainter every time she tries, no less because sometimes it feels like it was barely even real, and over so fast even when her memories of it yawn out like one infinite summer, like VCR tape over-hot and stretched between two fingers.
Because everything is so different. She has been someone else, someone other than that little girl, for a long time now - growing away from her ever since she’d gone to live with her mother’s family, because none of them knew the Kay as she was then. They still don’t. It’s something that’s eaten at her, silently, how she’s the only one left to remember not only her father as he was to her, but an entire stretch of time where he was all she knew, him and a dusty courthouse and a secret destiny.
A courthouse is a big, empty place to live in when you’re a memory like that.
And then Kay gets it, suddenly. Why all of Gumshoe’s bulk has been on such comically gentle tiptoes around her all day (even more than his usual, which was saying something). It’s not because he’s here begrudgingly that he doesn’t know what to say. It’s because he loves her, instead.
She’s glad someone is still holding onto that little girl. In case she ever has to let go of parts of her to grow into something new. She thinks maybe she already has - but knowing Gummy’s grip is still tight on the other end of the balloon string makes something relax in the very center of the storm in her chest.
He was there, then. And he's here now, too. It means something. A big something, or a lot of little ones put together, maybe.
“Hey, Gummy?”
“Yeah, kiddo?”
“Thanks for coming over.” And for… everything else, too.
The detective’s face wobbles into a smile. “Anytime. I mean it. I’ve got your back, pal.”
Kay feels her face wobble in tandem. “I know.”
Gumshoe hands her the flour, and the cocoa, and figures out how to re-tare the mixing bowl on the scale again, and Kay feels light piercing the clouds, deliberate, ray by ray.
“Do we add anything to the flour? This looks really dry.”
“Yeah, pal, I think we gotta - Oh. Did we preheat the oven? I forgot to read that step before.”
“Gu-myyy,” Kay chides, conveniently ignoring the fact that she, also, forgot about the oven.
He holds up his hands, mock-placating, and while Kay incorporates the flour and the cocoa into their egg fluff goes to investigate.
“You sure you got it? I need another step,” says Kay, when there are no more streaks of flour in the batter.
“Uhh,” is all Gumshoe has in reply, so Kay puts down the whisk and goes to investigate.
Uh oh.
Mr. Edgeworth’s oven doesn’t look like an oven at all. It looks more like a chunk of a spaceship plonked into the wall of his kitchen, with symbols next to the few buttons and a huge screen display taking up most of the center. It blinks, mockingly.
“You’re gonna have to got it, Gummy, I have no idea what I’m even looking at.”
“I dunno, kiddo, this isn’t really the kind of machines I’m good with…”
But, after more than a few minutes and well past when Kay has fully glazed over, he does something, and a light goes on, with a whir of air.
“You did it!”
“I think so!” says Gumshoe.
“We’re an unstoppable team.” Pity you aren’t a cute girl. I need a tech expert on the Yatagarasu team.
Gumshoe grins down at her. “Yeah! We are!”
“Besides, I’m the Yatagarasu!” Kay continues grandly, returning to her mixing bowl. “What’s a little cake-making compared to stealing the truth?”
“Yeah! Are you gonna do the spee-”
“EVEN IN THE DEPTHS OF NIGHT,” Kay crows, gesturing toward the ceiling with the whisk and then whipping it around to point directly at him, “when no other bird dares take flight,” and they laugh so hard it isn’t even a problem she dripped batter all over the counter and the floor.
Because there’s time to clean it all while the cake is in the oven, and neither Pess nor Mr. Edgeworth will ever be the wiser, because it’s easy with the two of them to go over every splatter and speck, laughing, and to put away the rest of the groceries into the wide empty expanses of Mr. Edgeworths’ ginormous pantry (he’d gone just slightly overboard about that, seriously, there’s enough to feed a family for two weeks in here, but she allows herself to be touched, now; he did it because he wanted to, and that meant she wasn’t a burden at all).
It’s easy. Gummy doesn’t mind that she isn’t the little girl he remembers anymore, and that some days she feels like she’ll never know how much of that little girl still lives in her, or how much of her dad’s legacy she should bring with her into being an adult (whenever she decides to actually start doing that), or whether she’s even allowed to have people like Mr. Edgeworth or Detective Gumshoe so unwavering at her back when she didn’t do much to earn it, yet, other than be a great thief who never actually steals anything.
It’s enough. She’s enough, because Gummy is still here whether or not she has anything figured out, and he doesn’t mind her teasing him over the little bit of cake batter on his nose, so who cares about the rest of that stuff anyway.
The oven dings just as they’re deep in a conversation about the Jammin’ Ninja’s current season - Gumshoe has no idea what she’s talking about for most of it, but he has a surprising amount to offer about the Steel Samurai’s current spinoffs, on account of being anywhere close to Mr. Edgeworth’s radius when the last season was airing.
They both rush to their positions for the final steps - cooling the cake, whipping the cream, and rolling it all together. And whether it’s the oven or their rolling technique or the fact that neither of them have baked anything successfully even in not-so-recent memory, when they peel back the dish towel it’s not… quite what Kay expected.
It looks like a swiss roll, enough that Kay’s stomach rumbles appreciatively. But the cream is oozing out of the sides, making it more sort of flat than round in a perfect spiral, and there are long cracks, gouges almost through the cake and into the cream on the inside, running up and down the surface of the cake.
They spend a long moment not quite looking at each other.
“It looks tasty,” is what Gumshoe says, finally, just as Kay is saying “For a first go at it, I think…”
She looks at him, finally, and grins. “It looks a bit shit, doesn’t it.”
“Yeah,” says Gumshoe, eyes dimpling shut. “I wonder if we can fix it? Fill in the cracks with something?”
“Ooh! Like icing?”
“Or ganache.”
“Sounds fancy. Let’s do it!”
“Alright!”
And as Gumshoe is looking up a recipe for ganache, and exact steps on how to prepare it, Kay remembers something.
“This reminds me of - I think my dad told me about this once.”
“About… swiss rolls?” says Gummy, looking up from the bowl.
“No, no,” giggles Kay. “I mean - there’s a thing. It’s called kintsugi, I think.”
“Now you’re the fancy one, kiddo.”
“It’s like, filling in the cracks on purpose, or something,” says Kay, hopping up on the counter to help Gumshoe smoosh chocolately goo into the holes. “From the Japanese side of our family - they fill the cracks of pottery with gold, so that you appreciate them just as much as the unbroken pieces, because they’re all part of the whole. I think. It’s pretty, anyway.”
“S’beautiful, kiddo,” says Gumshoe, quietly.
And it is. With the cracks filled in, it looks sort of on purpose - the cracks like bark on the outside of a tree, or something, as if this is a yule log - and Gumshoe and Kay then busy themselves with taking a string of photos to send to Mr. Edgeworth (conveniently leaving any messes they haven’t cleaned yet just out of frame), before cutting round slices of their own handmade piece of the past.
And the swiss roll doesn’t taste like it has any cracks at all.