Chapter Text
Athena Cykes sat cross-legged on her bed, illuminated by the blinding blue light of laptop as she stared at the loading screen and its spinning wheel, spinning and spinning in perpetual motion as she waited for Apollo Justice to answer the video call. She hated that loading screen. It made her feel like a rat on a wheel, trapped in an endless loop of running and running and running on blue pixels until he finally accepted the call at their usual time, Fridays at 7.
For two years, the familiarity of his face had been a collection of pixels every Friday at 7. Every smile that had sent her heart aflutter. Every endearing roll of deep chocolate eyes. Every rustle of dark brown hair, whether it be the slick, professional style she’d met him with or the new mess that his hair frequently crumpled into—disheveled from work—with errant strands falling to his sunkissed skin only to be swiped away.
She could only see him and everything she’d grown to love about him on Fridays. Fridays at 7.
Sometimes she couldn’t even see him then. Sometimes there was nothing but the dark void of an empty screen, reflecting the pathetic yearning of her stare back at her. There would be missed calls, hours burnt like mere paper—letters she’d never received, letters she’d never sent—crinkled and fading into ash as she waited at her laptop, waiting for him, and late text messages with profuse apologies.
He was busy, she knew, far busier than her, rebuilding the Khura’inese legal system those past two years. Nullifying the Defense Culpability Act had eliminated the “Court of Resignation” that the accused had grown accustomed to, no longer forcing defense attorneys to the same fate as those they spoke for. Yet—to Apollo’s immense dismay—there were no attorneys to speak.
For a time, he had been the only one: a guiding star, shining bright in an empty sky, waiting for others to follow.
“You’ll be getting all the business!” she’d proposed with a grin years ago, the first time they’d spoken over a screen. “The Justice & Co. Law Offices are gonna make bank!”
He’d only scoffed. Tension was etched into the crease in his brow, the firm set of his mouth, and the arch of his shoulders as he leaned toward his laptop. “There isn’t a ‘Co,’ and I still need to fix up the office. It still looks like the kind of place you’d get into from a sewer…”
“Well, yeah, because it is. But you have the future queen and her regent helping you!”
“That’s true…” he’d mumbled. Yet, his eyes were glazed over, the deep brown of his stare dim and wearied. His hand tapped the scuffed wooden desk, just barely visible at the bottom of the screen.
“...You’re going to do it yourself, aren’t you?”
“W-Well, it—I inherited it. It’s my name painted on the sign.”
“...Seriously?”
He’d run a hand through his dark hair, disheveled by stress and fatigue, looking down to the corner. “It’s mainly just getting new furniture, cleaning out the cobwebs that Datz left… Deliberately. As if a former paratrooper can’t kill a few bugs.”
“He really doesn’t seem the type to be afraid of them,” Athena pondered, thinking back on the man, the “fangs” of the Defiant Dragons, incapable of keeping a straight face. And apparently, clearing cobwebs.
Apollo simply rolled his eyes, the familiar gesture signaling a segue away from the guy that let cobwebs hang around for years so spiders would kill all the bugs out of laziness. “The office just needs to feel more… personal,” he said. “And have a more homey feel. There’s still so much history and corruption engrained in the legal system, and people are used to relying on the Divination Séances, even if the DCA Tragedy changed their perspective on that reliance on circumstantial evidence.” He paused then, crossing his arms. “Even if that history is still there, and the Ga’ran regime still lingers… a-at the very least, a welcoming office would make the future seem approachable.”
“You’re too earnest about these things,” she’d teased then, rolling her eyes; yet, she liked the idea, liked the way he thought.
“You’re one to talk!”
“Besides, you still need to fix the rest of the office, not just get new furniture—the walls and the floors, and… and it smelled like sewer the last time we were there.”
“Because we had to come in through the sewer! We were being hunted down!”
“I know! I was there!” she snapped, the pungent sting of rotten eggs and the sound of squeaking rats coming back to haunt her in her bedroom, miles away from the cold sewer. And him. “Isn’t that the only entrance?” she asked. “Through the sewer?”
“I already took the boards off the door with Ahlbi, so no, I will not be making my clients pretend they’re… they’re ninja turtles.”
“…What?”
“D-Don’t tell me you never watched that as a kid!”
“Well. Your weird thing for turtles aside—”
“It’s a show! Come on! The turtles lived in the sewers!”
“—the building is all dingy, and gross, and… it looks abandoned,” she continued, ignoring his protest. “It… it looks like the roof is going to collapse, and the walls are going to crumble. It looks like a murder scene.”
She still remembered the smile on his face even now. The sudden softness of his features, as if all the months of tumult had been erased from both body and memory. The faint glimmer in his eyes as the grin took hold of him, putting him at ease for once. The warmth of him, his voice, his laugh; the warmth she felt knowing that she was capable of being his light as he grappled in a world of darkness, struggling to light a torch, blaze a path of precedents for the future to follow.
Blaze a brilliantly blinding path through history.
Then, he’d said, “Maybe it’ll be my murder scene, who knows,” and the warmth she felt disappeared, replaced by terror.
Now, she sat, waiting for him. It was a familiar scene, sitting in front of the laptop and its blue light, a single lamp on the nightstand accompanying her as she waited to talk to him just as she had for the past two years, since he stayed across the ocean and she went back on the airplane with the rest of the Wright Anything Agency.
She waited. Waited for him to answer, waited for him to say he was finally coming back, that Khura’inese law was finally stable, no longer burdened by law and prejudice of the past, and that he was free from the obligation to fix it in pursuit of Dhurke’s dreams.
She waited. Waited for him to answer, waited for things to return to normal, with him greeting her in the morning each day behind his desk with all its instant noodles and crackers and mangas and whatever; she didn’t care, as long as he was there, by her side.
She waited. Waited for him to answer, waited like a child outside the heavy doors of a robotics laboratory, or a child sent overseas for alleged safety only to be lost, stranded, from everything they’d ever known.
Perhaps he really had been murdered like he’d predicted two years ago, assassinated out of the lingering distrust that surrounded his profession. Perhaps he was simply caught in court, held up by a trial dragging into the evening. Perhaps someone had shoved him into the Pool of Souls and he—incapable of swimming—had drowned, dying like those in the spirit world within had already, and was now in the Twilight Realm.
Perhaps Athena, sighing and leaning back in the light of her laptop, was overthinking things.
Then there was a chime. A familiar ding through the screen.
A familiar sigh followed moments after. “Sorry I’m late.”
“How could you?” Athena said with a dramatic sigh, pulling herself up, onto her elbows. “You made me wait five whole minutes!”
“I had to get groceries—” Apollo said briefly before his head fell into his hands and complaints fell from his mouth like the rushing rapids of a waterfall. “You’d think that they’d have grocery stores by now since it’s the 21st century, but I guess not. And it’s not like bazaars are primitive or anything—they have them all over the world, whatever—and I like the personal aspect of them, buying food right from the source, and being near all the culture. But—I’m not trying to insult other cultures—but this is ridiculous! If I get shoved by a yak one more time, trying to get stuff to make dinner—I mean, seriously! Do they not realize how inconvenient it is?!”
“Maybe you’re inconveniencing them. Those yaks could be their livelihoods.”
“They are, I know they are—I have to milk twenty families’ yaks every week! But right in the middle of foot traffic?! People are trying to walk! What if there were children walking in the street, Athena?” he groaned, “They could get trampled!”
She looked up to the ceiling, pursing her lips in a caricature of deep thought. “You are short enough to be considered a child…”
“You’re shorter than me!” he shot back.
“How would you know?”
“I know what you look like!”
“You haven’t seen how tall I am, though!”
“I—it hasn’t been that long…”
She grinned, though the smile was bittersweet: the sweetness of her pride—though she was blatantly lying about her height—and the bitterness of how long it had really been since they’d last seen each other in person. “Don’t underestimate how tall two years can make a girl,” she said.
Apollo rolled his eyes. “I’m sure you’re taller than Prosecutor Blackquill by now.”
“Oh, I am!”
“How has he been, anyway?” he asked, a pleasantry that he clearly didn’t care about the answer to as long as the Twisted Samurai didn’t plan on going overseas and slicing him into sashimi. It was merely a segue to get off the topic of her being taller than him (though she was well aware that his short king-self still held one inch over her).
“I’m trying to get him to get a haircut,” Athena answered. “It’s been three years since he’s gotten out of prison, and his hair is still the same ratty mess. It’s just… gross! He has hairbrushes! I know he does! But it’s just—he needs a bloody haircut!”
Apollo nodded slowly.
“I’m offering to pay for it, and he still just—ugh!”
“...I’m sure payment isn’t the issue,” he said. “I’m just glad he can’t send his damn hawk on me from across the ocean.”
“I’m sure you are… Taka misses going after you in court. She misses you and your landing pad forehead,” she grinned, fully prepared for the eye roll and groan from Apollo on the other side of the screen.
He was predictable like that, familiar like that.
“Oh, I bet,” he said.
She missed him and his predictable familiarity.
“And how’s your prosecutor? Prosecutor Sahdmadhi and his beads?”
“Same as always.”
Two years ago, Apollo grinned when talking about Nahyuta’s change: the frequent smiles that slipped from his lips, the passionate spirit that had reignited from resignation once being freed from Ga’ran’s control, the kindness breaking free from the cracks of his jaded, cynical shell.
“Still giving you sermons?” she asked.
Athena hadn’t spoken to Prosecutor Sahdmadhi since leaving the country and leaving Apollo, but for all the times he had been a nuisance in the courtroom, with his beads and sermons and that time he’d used the jury and her hearing to force back memories of that trial, of being a child in the courthouse, standing, pleading, her words falling on deaf ears—
“Oh, yeah,” Apollo sighed.
She was happy he had his foster brother back, at least.
“I don’t even know why he wanted to be a monk, aside from the fact that Khura’in is, like, one of the most insanely religious places. Ever.” For a moment, irritation bled through his words, dusting them in red. Yet, as soon as she’d parsed his disdain, he cocked a grin and changed the subject. “Just think, Athena. If I hadn’t been shipped away…”
“The Santa denier, religious?”
“...You do know that Santa—never mind. I just… the cases, you know, they keep piling up, and…” Apollo let out another sigh, this one leaving his lungs slowly, as if too fatigued to leave the sanctity of his body. “I can respect that Nahyuta wants to prosecute, I know that he’s wanted to be on the prosecuting side since he—since we were young, but…”
Athena frowned.
He sat up straighter in his desk chair behind the screen, miles away. “It’s been two years,” he said, “and things haven’t gotten easier. The caseload started at, what, 500 when I first took over?”
“I think you said something like that.”
“You’d think it would get lighter after two years. Wouldn’t you?”
“Yeah,” she nodded.
“It—it hasn’t. It really hasn’t,” Apollo said with a wry chuckle, “and I wish Nahyuta would try picking up some of the cases sometime—picking them up as the defense. I can’t take all these clients. I can’t.”
She could hear the strain in his voice, pulling it down, tearing it apart until cracks quavered his words.
“It’s not like being on the prosecution’s side is all that different from being the defense. You go through the same school, pass the same bar—although I guess Khura’in would have different exams, and all that… but it’s not like there’s a shortage of prosecutors. The prosecutors weren’t the ones who had their heads on the chopping block, or… or the threat of insane fines and lawsuits and whatever,” he huffed. “They were the privileged ones under the system.”
She nodded.
Apollo ran a hand through his hair. Errant strands fell to his forehead, flopping down in defeat. “Nahyuta has been really helpful these past few years, but…”
“Have you tried… you know… asking him?” Athena suggested.
“W-Well, I—you do realize how long the DC Act was in effect, right? Even if he was originally in the Defiant Dragons, he still spouted the government’s propaganda. There’s still going to be internal stigma, and—and I can’t just walk up and ask him, ‘Hey, could you do the exact opposite of what you’re used to just so I don’t have to go through 200 more cases?’ I’d rather avoid getting some… sermon, or sutra, or whatever the hell he’s got in that monk mind of his. Hell, I’d rather be banished to the Twilight Realm.”
“He… probably would have some sort of speech about it,” she admitted, thinking back on his courtroom ranting and raving, accusing them of being putrid and wretched and impeding the victim’s last rites. Those were two years ago, though, before the flames of revolution had been reignited in his soul. “But he wants to help you, Apollo.”
“I know that…” he sighed.
“He’s the one who asked you to stay,” she pointed out. Oftentimes, she found herself wishing he hadn’t; that he had kept his mouth shut, or given yet another sermon.
“I know, I was there.”
“If you’re struggling, then just ask him!”
“Athena…” he sighed again, the way her name came from his lips simultaneously wringing her heart and sending courses of confused electricity fluttering through it.
She tried to ignore the fire in her cheeks. “You already said that defending and prosecuting are similar. Both sides go through the same training. Both sides are lawyers, at the end of the day. So just ask him to help lighten the caseload by taking on some of the clients!” she insisted. “Don’t let your ego put your foot in your mouth!”
“M-My ego?!”
“Your big, stupid ego!”
“I don’t have an ego!”
“Yes, you do! It’s bigger than your forehead, and you need to get over it and just ask Prosecutor Sahdmadhi to help you!” she snapped.
“Leave my forehead—”
“Apollo!”
“Okay, fine!” he groaned, a hand going to his forehead, the action clearly placed in his subconscious by her words.
Take that, Simon! she thought with a silent smirk. Who’s the master manipulator, now?
“I’ll ask him. Just—just not yet. I need to think about it first.”
Her smirk crumbled. “That sounds like an excuse to me,” she stated, narrowing her eyes and staring him down through the screen, trying to emulate how he used to stare down witnesses on the stand.
“N-No, it’s… it’s not. Really, it’s not, I just…” Apollo paused, the pixels of his face drawn with tension through the laptop’s blue light. His eyes looked to the side, to his scuffed desk.
“I’m thinking about coming back for the holidays.”
Athena’s heart fluttered like the pink butterflies of Khura’in soaring across the sea.
“What?” she blurted. She blinked, trying to better process the sentence that had come from the laptop speakers. “Coming back here?”
He cocked a brow. “Where else am I supposed to come back to?”
“How come you’re coming back now?” she asked, words spilling from her mouth, questions bursting from the floodgates of her brain. “You didn’t come home for the holidays last year—did something happen? Why now?”
“Last year, I was dealing with a 23-year-old backlog of cases. This year, there are more attorneys to help take care of them. Some are coming out of hiding, some are just law students… Granted, there’s not a lot,” he scoffed, “but I’ve been able to mentor enough that they can at least handle civil cases without floundering. Kind of like you, when you were first starting out.”
Athena chose to ignore his comment and his smug, stupid little smirk that was so cocky and arrogant and egotistical and strangely attractive even though she wanted to wipe it off his pretty face. “I thought all the cases were piling up, though—you were just complaining about it!” she pointed out.
“That’s… that’s why I want to come back for the holidays.” Though his admission was simple, strained by the stress of Khura’in that had become so familiar, there was an uneasy drag to his words. Tentatively, he muttered, “I need a break.”
“I don’t doubt it, after everything you’ve done over there,” she said. After how long you’ve been gone, she didn’t say.
“It—it doesn’t feel like a lot,” he said with a pitiful laugh. “It really doesn’t.”
Athena frowned. “You’ve been working yourself to death in Khura’in for two years, Apollo,” she said. “Of course, you’ve done a lot… You just haven’t noticed it, since you’ve been there the whole time. You can’t see the difference up close, but I bet you’ve done a lot, compared to when you first started working with Prosecutor Sahdmadhi.”
A sliver of a smile crept along his face. Yet, doubt still came through his lips. “I don’t know… you’re probably right.”
“I usually am,” she grinned. “You’re kind of a revolutionary rockstar, y’know, working so hard. Bringing all that change.”
He rolled his eyes with a chuckle. “Yeah, well… it’s just hard. If anything, I feel more like a falling star, plummeting to my death.”
“Don’t say that!”
“The country and the culture have so much to it. Khura’in kept its independence because of spirit channeling—because of its faith. And the people here care so much about faith, that… between the— alleged— fifteen hours spent in prayer, you’d think they’d care less about what lawyers do! There’s so much more to this country than the fact that they hate lawyers, but—even with the damn revolution—that’s the only thing that seems to matter!”
“Well, you are a lawyer, after all. You’re going to see more of that… learned hatred.”
“I-I know, but it’s like these people’s lives revolve around hating one single profession! Maybe it’s gotten a bit better with time, maybe it’s not as bad as when Mr. Wright first came over here, but…” His voice trailed off, and he shook his head slowly. “It’s so tiring. I’m… tired of doing this.”
Come back, Athena wanted to say.
She had stared at his desk for so long. Just days after he stayed behind, across the ocean, it had become a desolate wooden graveyard, absent of the instant noodles and mangas and everything that Apollo had brought to it, his trace the sun—the brilliant golden warmth—that once allowed flowers to rise from the ground, flourish in rolling emerald fields.
“I’m tired of fighting every day.”
Come back. She felt the words in her mouth, heavy like tombstones. Be here.
She remembered him every time she cleaned the bathroom, how they’d fight over who was to scrub the toilet. She remembered the familiar thunder of his voice, the familiar warmth that seeped into it when a smile crinkled his deep, dark eyes. She remembered the edges of his face, lit by harsh courtroom lights. Not the lights across the seas in Khura’in, or the light of her laptop monitor as it distorted him into a cascade of pixels, but the lights he had led her through, all those years ago in April when their biggest worries were yokai and wrestling.
“It’s been like this for two whole years. I’m… exhausted.”
Come back, she wanted to say, the words threatening to fall from her lips for all the years they had shared and all the memories that lingered in his absence, like weeds clinging to the sun’s last rays. Come back. Be here.
“That’s why you should come back for the holidays,” she said instead. “You need a break, Apollo.”
“I know—”
“If you don’t give yourself a break, you’re going to get burnt out. Then you won’t be able to do anything.”
“I know…” he repeated, the words coming through the speakers in a recalcitrant groan.
“No more fighting yaks in the bazaar to get your instant noodles for dinner, no taking care of 200 cases at once, no more being too emotionally constipated to ask Prosecutor Sahdmadhi for help…”
“Emotionally constipated?”
“Am I wrong?” she grinned, watching as he—yet again, in that stupid Apollo way of his—rolled his eyes from behind the laptop screen. “You’re gonna need an emotional laxative.”
“That’s disgusting.”
“And true. I got it from Prosecutor Gavin,” she said proudly.
“Nimm deine Abführmittel!” Widget chimed in.
“He misses you too, you know.”
“I—whatever,” Apollo said, waving off the conversation in disdain. “I’ll get a ticket for the 23rd. And I’ll fly back on the 26th.”
“What?!” she gawked in an unwitting shout, wide-eyed and casting Widget’s bright yellow shock across the room. “You haven’t been back in a year and—only three days?!”
With a lopsided, apologetic smile, he raised his hands. As if that would keep her from marching across the damn ocean and knocking some sense into him. “I-I don’t know if I can stay a whole week when I still have work to do! There’s still so much that…” His voice trailed off.
Athena sighed, rolling her entire head along with her eyes. “Apollo, you’re one man,” she said. As she looked deeper into the screen, deeper into the darkness of his eyes, the lines of fatigue etched into his face, and the tension gripping his body, her voice softened, trying to reach him.
She needed to reach him.
“The DC Act has been gone. There are courtrooms, at least, and more defense attorneys to take clients, now that they’re not scared of being executed for doing their jobs. You’ve been mentoring them all this time, haven’t you? Reintroducing them to the courts? Things are getting better, Apollo,” she said. A sigh left her lips. “It’s not like there’s total anarchy.”
He was giving too much of himself. He’d walked across the ocean and plunged into the abyss, as deep and dark as the night sky. He had ignited a torch and blazed a path, cutting through the inky darkness of Khura’in’s corruption with brilliant splendor. He’d lit the stars once again, created the constellations.
But his flames would flicker into smoking embers. They would need to be stoked to life again.
“You’ve been doing this for two years! ”
The comfort of friends and family could only do so much until he gave himself away entirely and the embers finally died, grey plumes evaporating into the air they’d fought so hard to clear.
“Give yourself one week off!”
“I don’t—”
She cut him off. “Apollo Justice!”
“Fine, jeez! You sound like Rayfa—Her Benevolence, I mean. Whatever. I’ll stay until… until the 30th, and I’ll be back for the New Year’s rite,” Apollo said, crossing his arms. “Happy now?”
“Yes,” she said with a self-satisfied smile. “I’m happy that you’re avoiding burnout, and I know that Trucy will be happy to have her assistant back, too, while she works on her magic during winter break.”
“…It’s times like these where I don’t miss being at the office.”
“Suuure, you don’t,” she grinned, for she could hear the notes of affectionate happiness that danced in his exasperated deadpan; the notes that had been fostered with years of magic tricks and investigations and being Trucy’s sibling in anything but blood.
“S-Seriously, she’s in college, shouldn’t she be worrying about her coursework instead?!” he insisted.
“What if magic was her coursework?”
“She needs to saw me in half to get a degree?”
“How do you know it’d be sawing you in half? Trucy isn’t a one-trick pony, Apollo! You of all people should know that! You’ll be getting an earful at the airport when we—”
An idea struck. It sizzled like thunder, cracking her thought into blazing crumbles.
“When you what? Haul me to my magic-induced death? Troupe Gramarye’s final magic act, and my final act of life?” he scoffed.
“You’re getting tickets to fly in on the 23rd, right?” Athena asked, ignoring his stupid smart remark and opening a browser tab with a single click. “What airline? Did you already get them?”
“W-What? No, I didn’t get them, I was just considering it—what are you scheming? I can tell you’re scheming something!”
“I’ll fly into Khura’in on the same day, a few hours before you leave, and then we can fly back together!”
When Athena clicked back into the video call, the pixels of the screen painted an expression she had never seen before on Apollo, something so incredulously dumbfounded that he could only manage a blank stare. His deep, dark eyes were wide with the wonders of the starry cosmos, as vast and neverending as his gaze. His mouth was a straight line, poised as if words were incapable of expressing the feelings blooming within.
It was astounding! Her genius had rendered him speechless!
“I—” he started, struggling to articulate his amazement at her pristine brain’s planning.
She grinned as she waited for him to gather his thoughts.
“That…” he began slowly, easing back in his desk chair as he searched deep in the labyrinth of his mind for a response. Then, he shook his head. “Athena, that has got to be the stupidest thing you’ve said in a while.”
“What?!”
“No way!” Widget blurted from around her neck.
“How is it stupid?!”
“Why would you buy a plane ticket just to fly over here, pick me up, and fly back?!” he snapped.
“I-I thought you were scared of heights!” she explained. “I thought it would be a nice gesture! And then we’d get to see each other! We haven’t seen each other in a while—not since Trucy’s graduation! We could catch up on the plane, and I could help you when you puke in the bathroom!” She neglected to mention how, truthfully, it wasn’t the best idea economically. But the fact he’d actually called the idea stupid made her want to go through with it, just to prove her point.
Whatever point that was.
“I’m not going to—”
“I’m being considerate!”
He groaned, finally accepting that he would likely end up vomiting in the bathroom due to the same fear of heights that—time and time again—had left him stark white and pallored, trembling like a newborn fawn. “It’s a waste of money!” he asserted. “You wouldn’t even be there a full day!”
“It’s my money to waste!” she countered even though he was right, he was really, really right and her bank account was going to regret it.
“Gatekeeper!” Widget blurted, indignant.
“Would you really tell a young lady how to spend her money, Apollo? Are you that controlling?”
He flushed. Flushed—face red and rosy and cute, dammit— in the presence of her absolutely stupid bluff. “I-I’m not controlling! I just—”
“Then it’s settled,” she declared, “I’ll be waiting for you at the airport, and we’ll fly back together!”
Apollo opened his mouth to protest, but she shook her head vigorously, waving her hands in front of the screen. “A-Athena—” he stammered, despite her visible shunning of speech.
“No! No arguing! It’s happening! It’s settled! I’m gonna buy the tickets! Which airline are we using?”
“You won’t even be there a single day!” he insisted instead of answering the question.
“Don’t care!”
My bank account definitely will, went unsaid.
“Why not stay for at least a day?” he repeated.
“Nope!”
I really rather would, but I can’t let you win this, went unsaid.
“You can see the sights!” he protested.
“I’m blind!”
Yeah, blind to logic, went unsaid.
“Be real!” he groaned, “It’s been years since you’ve seen Khura’in!”
“Too bad!”
Maybe it’s for the better, went unsaid.
His shoulders shrunk in on themselves, eyes giving her that half-lidded stare of exasperation. “Athena…”
“Apollo…”
I just want to see you again, went unsaid.
He sighed, leaning back in his desk chair and staring up at the ceiling, unseen on the laptop screen that held his image. “You’re dead set on this, aren’t you?”
“Which airline are we using?” she repeated, for she was not being stubborn, she was being adamant, being firm with resolve, determined in her endeavor to finally see him again in person without the aid of a monitor.
She could tell there was an argument bubbling in his throat, waiting to shoot out of his Chords of Steel. She could feel it in the soft crackle of silence from her laptop, see it in the furrow of his brow.
Yet the argument never came. He rolled his eyes and leaned forward in his chair, hands going to his keyboard. “Let’s compare prices, first.”
Finally, she had won.
Athena Cykes was officially one of the most idiotic people on the face of the Earth.
She had not “won,” no, she had lost!
She could not lay her head down, even though it was now 3 A.M., because she did not know what to do without him. She didn’t need the world to see that she’d been the best she could be. She didn’t need anyone to remember her name—didn’t need something bigger than the sky or the vast amount of stars in the galaxy, burning bright in the night just as he did overseas.
She needed him: the one card she couldn’t use. The one who was coming back and tearing her head apart and making her spend $1,326 without doing a single thing.
For how hard she had worked through academia, how relentlessly she had pushed through life, never before had she felt such attachment, such stupidly lovesick yearning, raw and desperate. Never before had someone caused her such dismay, sending her heart aflutter one moment and unwittingly bringing her to pathetic sobs in a pillow the next.
Never before had she screamed someone’s name atop every roof in the city of heart.
Loud and clear: Apollo Justice.
She had stupidly tripped, fell hard—harder than she knew how to handle—and dug her own grave with the force of impact as she skidded across the dirt, blowing a massive, gaping hole in her bank account in the process that no amount of screaming into her pillow could fix. She was not screaming his name, no, she was screaming at herself; screaming for her money. Yet, no matter how loud she screamed, there was no force in the heavens that would hear her, take mercy upon her pitiful soul.
Still, she screamed.
“What is wrong with me?!” she groaned. The pillow muffled her voice, but did nothing else. Perhaps if she kept her face there long enough, buried in the linen, she would suffocate and die. It was a permanent solution to a temporary problem, yes, but at the very least, she would avoid Apollo’s smug stare as she—miserable after wasting hours on an airplane, just to go on another airplane—admitted his victory.
He was right.
She knew he was right.
Buying those plane tickets was the stupidest thing she’d done in years! It was a waste of a day! A waste of money!
“Simp!” Widget wailed from around her neck.
“I am not—” Athena cut herself off; for she was talking to herself! She was responding to her innermost thoughts! She had finally lost it!
“I’m seeing that yellow wallpaper!” Widget cried, “This is it, I’m getting the grippy socks!”
“No!” Athena groaned yet again.
Her stupid, insane infatuation had finally rotted away her brain. All the parts needed for not wasting a ridiculous amount of money just to see Apollo again had been destroyed by him. It was the certainty with which he’d called her idea “stupid,” the inevitable cockiness she’d have to endure once she saw him again—it was the promise of seeing him again.
But for over a thousand dollars!
“It’s not worth it!” she screamed into her pillow.
“It’s so worth it!” Widget screamed from her neck.
“No, it’s not!” she protested to no avail. Her brain—the parts that somehow hadn’t been lost in her idiocy—knew the trip wasn’t worth it. But the logic she’d once had, the logic that carried her through academia and to the gleaming gold of her attorney’s badge at eighteen had disappeared. She’d used the remnants, but the embers had died more and more with each case she worked. Vanished into plumes of smoke.
And now there was nothing. She was choking on the smoke, suffocating in the consequences of her stupid lovesick actions, and in the ashes and haze, her heart had taken over and blown $1,326 to see a guy she’d liked for four years.
She screamed into the pillow yet again, for she knew she was giving too much of herself to him. And he didn’t even realize it.
“Get over it!” Widget huffed.
She was investing too much energy into his problems, even when they were an ocean away, irrelevant to the world she lived in. She was wasting too much time, burning through the hours as she longed for what could’ve been— what could still be when that plane lands —and practically torturing herself with what happened after the screen went black and she was plunged into darkness yet again.
Was he okay? Was he moving on? Was he dead?
Athena sighed.
Was he going to forget her?
He wouldn’t. She knew he wouldn’t, even as he toiled miles away in Khura’in, growing and changing along with the kingdom itself; yet, it was that very change that scared her. Her desperate attempt to escape that change, to reignite what had once been—in Nine-Tails Vale, at Themis Legal Academy, at Penrose Theater—had shoved her off the deep end. $1,326 into the deep end.
For so long, she had longed for stability. For comfortable familiarity, weaved into the lives of others—some sort of family, something more than metal peers and a silent mother; some sort of love.
“Simp,” Widget said again, yet there was no force behind it.
As she stared into the darkness of her bedroom, eyes unable to perceive the patterns in the ceiling, there was nothing more she could do. Screaming into her pillow wouldn’t change anything. The money was gone and the plane tickets were hers. Several hours spent on an uncomfortable, crowded airplane were in her future.
At least Apollo was, too.