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Chapter Text

"What steady rhythm still doth move me at this hour / To put my pen to page and pray?"

- No-No Boy, "Nothing Left But You"

Nahyuta’s hands are shaking.

Being called to Minister Inga’s office is not exactly an uncommon occurrence. Such is the plight of the queen’s unwilling but loyal puppet; to be the country’s most esteemed prosecutor and more or less a hostage means meetings both ordinary and sinister. Nahyuta expects the worst every time.

He keeps his hands clasped tightly behind his back to hide his weakness. Inga’s not even looking at him, tapping his fat cigar into an intricate silver ashtray on his desk. The air in the room is thick with acrid smoke and the oppressive musky scent of Inga’s foreign cologne.

“A request came in for you, Prosecutor,” Inga says.

“Yes, sir,” Nahyuta says evenly. It sounds like he’ll be condemning someone else to the Twilight Realm soon—whether they deserve it or not. Nahyuta pushes back those last vestiges of rebellion that claw up his throat at the mere thought of it.

“It’s a strange one,” Inga continues. “Your services have been requested overseas.”

Nahyuta’s hands freeze. “Overseas?”

“In Los Angeles,” Inga clarifies. He sets the cigar back between his teeth. “Sounds like you’ve been making quite a name for yourself, Sahdmadhi.”

Los Angeles. It lights up some stupid, idiotic, childish part of his brain, and he’s forced to tamp down his reaction with practiced poise to avoid Inga’s ire.

“I’m not sure I quite understand, Minister Inga,” he admits. “What would the American courts want with me?”

Inga scowls around his cigar. “Are you stupid, boy?” he snaps. “They want you to prosecute. It would seem the chief prosecutor is short-staffed these days. Only fair they’d want a capable Khura’inese prosecutor to keep the rabble in check, eh?”

“I see,” Nahyuta says. Then the absurdity of the situation dawns on him: he has never been outside of Khura’in before. It’s not something hostages are typically given the freedom to do. Cautiously, he asks, “Forgive me, Minister, but I find myself surprised that Her Eminence should agree to such a thing.”

Inga raises a strong eyebrow, lips curling in a snide expression. “I’m not sure what you mean by that, Sahdmadhi,” he says in a low tone. “For a moment there it almost seemed like you were meaning to suggest that Her Eminence is ever anything other than gracious.”

Behind his back, Nahyuta’s hands begin to tremble again. “Not at all, Minister Inga, sir.” He bows curtly. “Please, forgive my discourtesy.”

Inga hums. “I can overlook it,” he muses. “But there are caveats, you know.” He points his cigar at Nahyuta’s chest, smoke curling off the end of it. “Failure overseas would reflect poorly on Her Eminence, see. We wouldn’t want that. We can’t possibly have you violating the terms of your work visa, either.”

In other words, be a good dog and behave yourself, Nahyuta thinks.

“Of course, sir. I will do my utmost to represent our great kingdom with dignity and grace.”

“Very well. You leave tomorrow.” Inga turns his chair away from Nahyuta. “Now get out of my office, boy.”

“Yes, sir.” Nahyuta bows again and slips out of Inga’s office with the grace of a monk but the speed of a frightened mouse. That’s not too far off from how he feels, most days.

The fresh air outside is a welcome reprieve from the cloying atmosphere in Inga’s quarters, but it isn’t enough to dispel the ominous feeling sinking into Nahyuta’s muscles. As a youth, he was made to believe it was the Holy Mother’s blessing that led him to such feelings; a gift of divine providence, of prophecy, of foresight. These days, however, it is simply the feeling he gets whenever he finds himself pinned under such an oppressive stare like a putrid beetle. Nahyuta Sahdmadhi is his father’s false prophet, the Holy Mother’s grim indifference laid bare.

No, no, no, Nahyuta chides himself as he stalks away from that dismal place. I must not disparage the Holy Mother’s gifts. I need to meditate. I need to pray until I feel better.

The strange reality looming over him is this: Since the very day Ga’ran sunk her claws into him, Nahyuta has been forbidden, implicitly, from travel. The queen’s concerns had been easy to imagine—should Nahyuta leave her sphere of influence, he could easily be led astray. He could petition outside help to secure the safety of his sister. He could run away, start a new life, and never return—and her collateral against Dhurke would be lost.

That Ga’ran would permit him to work abroad now, for however short a time, suggests one thing: Nahyuta has been beaten into submission, and she believes the rebel inside him long dead. In truth, the fight left him the moment he saw Rayfa, and the rest has all been painful excess.

But what Her Eminence does not know is that Nahyuta had a little brother, once, a little brother they sent home to Los Angeles where his mother was born. If the Holy Mother’s divine providence truly does exist, perhaps this is it.

But, no, Nahyuta does not deserve such a mercy. Apollo is probably long gone from LA by now, and would not accept the wretch he has become anyway. He doubts they would recognize one another after so many years apart, even should they cross paths. Nahyuta will travel to America, he will do as he has been asked, and he will return home to a life as equally empty as he left it, and that is simply the way of things.

So Nahyuta ducks into the temple, sinks into his meditative position, and does what these last years have taught him best.

He lets go, and moves on.

Chapter Text

"Ain’t there some crest of a wave, oh, way out on the sea / In the back of a godhead’s ocean of ancient memories / That lifts some sacred boat / And its sailor, at least, his charming ghost / Who earned your heart when it was first free?"

- No-No Boy, "Nothing Left But You"

Truthfully, until the moment he boards the plane, Nahyuta is half expecting a sniper to take him out.

Nevertheless, his transpacific flight to LAX takes off without incident. There are too many innocent passengers on board for this to be an elaborate scheme to take him out—surely even Ga’ran would not go so far when poisoning him would be far simpler. Unless the abject cruelty is the point, as one last blow to Nahyuta’s soft-hearted father. That said, Nahyuta is likely of far more use to the regime alive than dead, else he’d have been quietly dispatched with years ago; though perhaps the prospect of using his corpse as bait for Dhurke would be far too tempting to resist.

Nahyuta banishes such thoughts from his mind as the plane reaches cruising altitude. To numb such paranoid spiraling, he spends a great deal of the flight in silent reflective prayer. The remainder of the time he passes staring out his window at the seemingly endless blue expanse of the Pacific as it stretches in all directions below him.

Travel is such a novel thing for Nahyuta that it would make him feel almost giddy, if that were an emotion he still thought himself capable of. He traveled a bit throughout Khura’in during his studies to become a prosecutor—a bright spot in his adolescence, however fraught it was to be the son of a known terrorist—but never outside of the country, and never in a plane like this. They were living on the run by the time Nahyuta was two years old, and living under his aunt’s thumb never afforded him such freedoms before now.

He wonders, idly, what it felt like for Apollo to make this same flight alone some fifteen years earlier. If seeing the ocean for the first time played on some distant memory of infancy. If arriving in LA felt like a homecoming, or if reality could never measure up to the half-formed memory of the thing.

But who is Nahyuta kidding, really.

He falls asleep at some point, and wakes when the pilot comes on the air to announce their imminent descent into Los Angeles.

The deplaning process happens to him in something of a jetlagged daze, and sooner or later he’s through customs and carting his bags out to the lot where he waits for his taxi, infinitely thankful for the English education his law studies provided him.

His first impression of California is that it’s so overwhelmingly bright here—the sunshine, the lights, the flashing cars. Everything seems to move so quickly, too, and yet Nahyuta feels like getting out to walk would most certainly be faster than sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the freeway. At least there’s air conditioning—is Los Angeles always this hot in April?

“This your first time in the States?” the driver asks conversationally over the din of traffic. Nahyuta wants to bristle at the (correct) assumption that he’s foreign, but the last few years have taught him to keep his tongue in check.

“Yes,” he says evenly. “I am here for work.”

“Really? What is it you do? If you don’t mind me asking.”

“I am a prosecutor.”

The driver raises his eyebrows in the rearview mirror. “A prosecutor? You don’t say.” He chuckles. “We’ve had our fair share of bad apples around here, so I guess it’s no surprise the government would start looking to outsource.”

“I’m afraid I’m not overly familiar with the situation.”

He shrugs. “I don’t keep up with all that, really, but there was a whole series of big scandals that made the news some years back. Even now it seems like every day there’s something in the papers, not that I understand the half of it. Last year there was some crazy fiasco down at the courthouse—something about a bomb? And a spaceship? Hell if I know.”

“I see,” Nahyuta says. He’d think the man was making the whole thing up if he hadn’t caught wind of some sort of international spy being arrested several months ago.

“All I know is,” the driver continues, “seems like lots of innocent people went to jail for stuff they didn’t do, thanks to those types.” He shoots Nahyuta a grin. “But hey, if you’re around, maybe things are gonna change, you know?”

“Perhaps,” Nahyuta cedes. He doesn’t so much as twitch, but it’s a near thing; the numbness takes over in time to smooth any potential creases in his brow before they can form.

Let it go, and move on, he thinks to himself, like a prayer. Let it go. Move on.

The rest of the ride is quiet, and eventually they arrive at Nahyuta’s new accommodations, a stout apartment building downtown. He pays the driver and makes his way inside, where he presents identification to the receptionist and is given the keys to his provided accommodations. The elevator is out of service, so Nahyuta hefts his luggage up two flights of stairs to the sparsely furnished studio that will be his temporary home for the foreseeable future, at least until Ga’ran gets antsy and demands his return for some reason or another.

He has time to kill before he’s scheduled to meet with the Chief Prosecutor, so Nahyuta sinks down onto his premade bed and stares dumbly (and more than a little sleepily) at the empty grey walls and tiny kitchenette and generic furniture. It’s nothing like any place he’s ever lived in Khura’in, partly because of how American it all is but also because it’s so very dull, like a box built only for transient passersby like him, and not a home.

Yet Nahyuta feels an odd weightlessness in his chest, despite the atmosphere. It’s quiet in a new way, even with the low hum of cars passing by outside. It’s quiet in a solitary way, such that Nahyuta could probably get himself to meditate here so long as he can tune out the white noise of the city. Without the daily Dance of Devotion, he’ll have to live by his own schedule for such things.

That’s how it hits him: Nahyuta is alone in Los Angeles. Word of his courtroom victories and failures will likely make it back home to the regime, but he is well and truly on his own. No one is watching him. Nahyuta could shout at the top of his lungs right now and no one would come to scold him, save for perhaps some displeased neighbors. It’s the most freedom he’s had in years, stretching out in front of him for what feels like eons but could only be weeks—he hovers weightless above the open ocean, the endless deep.

He finds it only scares him. Who is Nahyuta kidding, indeed.

Chapter Text

"What perfect harmony still shakes me to the core / Begot this cynic’s soul to rumble?"

- No-No Boy, "Nothing Left But You"

Nahyuta’s new boss in Los Angeles is surprisingly soft spoken—though maybe Nahyuta is just very used to dealing with the Minister of Justice on a frequent basis, who’s loud and imposing even when he’s in high spirits.

But Miles Edgeworth is a man in a fine, well-pressed burgundy suit paired with a cravat, who greets Nahyuta in the lobby of the prosecutor’s office with a polite bow and a vaguely European accent. He carries himself with poise, but there’s a stiltedness to it in contrast to Nahyuta’s trained grace, odd for a public authority of his stature. Edgeworth makes a beeline for the stairs and assures Nahyuta he is welcome to take the elevator and meet him on the appropriate floor, but such a thing would feel discourteous, so for the second time that day, Nahyuta hauls ass up multiple flights of stairs.

He’s out of breath by the time they reach the chief prosecutor’s office all the way on the twelfth floor, but Edgeworth—who hasn’t broken a sweat—pays this no mind. His office is rife with the same elegance as his manner of dress, but there are a number of trinkets that betray some semblance of personality as well. There’s a beautiful tea set by the window, an ornate custom chess set, and even what appears to be some kind of tokusatsu figurine that reminds Nahyuta of the Plumed Punisher. On Edgeworth’s desk and placed sporadically on shelves are several framed photos, some older and fading and others clearly new. The most prominently displayed is one of what must be Edgeworth as a child, beside a smiling man with glasses and a wide-brimmed hat. The man doesn’t appear in any of the other photos Nahyuta can see.

That sparks a twinge of remorse in Nahyuta’s chest, just briefly, though he doesn’t know why.

There’s a recent group photo beside that, centered around a young girl in what appears to be some sort of stage costume, surrounded by several people including Edgeworth. They’re all smiling. His eyes are drawn to the person standing next to the girl, just a bit taller than her, and—

Chief Prosecutor Edgeworth clears his throat. Nahyuta bows apologetically, and his hands start to shake behind his back before he even has a moment to consider why.

“I don’t wish to keep you too long,” Edgeworth says evenly as he adjusts his own glasses. “I’m certain you must be exhausted from such a long flight.”

“Yes, sir,” Nahyuta says.

Edgeworth’s tone is oddly soft when he says, “...Please, Prosecutor Sahdmadhi, have a seat.”

Nahyuta lifts his head from its bowed position to find Edgeworth looking at him with a searching expression—not quite concerned, but something close to it.

“Ah, my apologies,” Nahyuta says, hurriedly sitting down with his hands in his lap. “I’m afraid the jet lag is making my brain run a bit slow.”

“I understand,” Edgeworth says, expression slipping back into something more neutral as he reaches for a pen and sifts through the folder of documents on his desk. “As I said before, I won’t keep you. Unfortunately, there is a growing backlog of cases in our system and thus there is much we need to discuss.” Edgeworth’s grey eyes snap up to meet his. “I understand that the current state of the court system in Khura’in is strikingly different from our own, is that correct?”

“Yes,” Nahyuta confirms. “Our religious traditions command it as such. And at this time, to my knowledge there are no practicing defense attorneys in the country.”

“Is that so?” Edgeworth says with a polite nod. “Well, I feel I should warn you then that we have a multitude of very tenacious—and very principled—defense attorneys currently practicing in the Los Angeles courts.” His voice takes on an almost fond tone, strangely enough. “You will find, I hope, that collaboration leads to the most complete understanding of the truth, though you may find some of your colleagues to be something of a force to be reckoned with across the courtroom. Many of them are, perhaps… loud.”

Nahyuta nods. “You must understand, sir. As a monk, I hold deeply to the Khura’inese belief that a trial acts as a victim’s last rites. My duty to find peace for the victim goes beyond my duty to my people; it is of sacred importance.”

“I see.” Edgeworth tilts his head in curiosity. “I don’t believe such convictions to be in contradiction, in fact.”

“Perhaps not,” Nahyuta concedes.

They get down to business after that, though Nahyuta can’t shake the feeling that he’s revealed more to his new boss than he actually spoke aloud. There’s a certain knowingness in everything Edgeworth does, though it’s approached with a sort of empathy that can only have been learned, and never innate.

He wonders what principles guide Edgeworth’s leadership, if not religious ones. After all, sometimes Nahyuta is certain his religious convictions are the only sense of structure and meaning he has left in an otherwise increasingly numb and empty way of life.

As he prepares to leave Edgeworth’s office, Nahyuta remembers something important.

“If I may ask, Chief Prosecutor,” he begins hastily, “I was told something about a bombing taking place in the courthouse last year. Is that so?”

Edgeworth looks surprised at this, and for a brief moment the calm and collected chief is gone and replaced by the image of a deeply weary man, bogged down by the horrors of the job. But the mask quickly slides back into place; Nahyuta sees it happen.

“Ah, well—Yes,” Edgeworth says tightly. “It was a terrible affair. Many of the details are considered classified at this stage, but I can assure you we don’t have any reason to believe such a threat to be ongoing, if that is your concern, Prosecutor Sahdmadhi.”

“Not at all,” Nahyuta says. “I was simply curious. I hope the victims were able to receive their proper last rites.”

“Ah. Quite.” Edgeworth’s posture goes a bit rigid. “It was a… very complicated situation, all things considered, but I do believe all involved were able to receive some sort of closure, in the end.”

His eyes flick to the bookshelf just briefly, which Nahyuta finds curious. He finds his own eye drawn to the group photo again, and opens his mouth as if to speak, but the words get stuck before he’s even conscious of what they mean.

“Prosecutor Sahdmadhi?” Edgeworth prompts. “Were you going to ask me something?”

Nahyuta blinks and looks away from the shelf. “Ah,” he says, “no, perhaps not. My apologies, sir. It has slipped my mind.”

“If you’re quite certain,” Edgeworth says warily. He clears his throat, straightening his posture before he adds, “It is important to me that I remain available as a resource to you, so if you recall what it is you wanted to say, or if there is anything you… need ” —he places an odd emphasis on the word— “please do not hesitate to let me know.”

“Certainly, Chief Prosecutor, sir. I thank you.” Nahyuta bows, more casually this time, and sees himself out, thick stack of paperwork and case files in tow.

That photograph haunts him the entire way back to his accommodations, and he doesn’t know why. He never got a truly good look at it, but something about it kept drawing his attention; and Prosecutor Edgeworth seemed to notice that too. It must be of great importance to him to be placed in his office in such a place of esteem, but prying into his boss’ personal affairs seems like a one-way ticket back to Khura’in, and that would end with Nahyuta’s intense suffering for his failure, surely.

It’s different from the reasons he has for avoiding Inga’s quarters, but nevertheless, he vows not to spend too much time in Edgeworth’s office, if he can help it.

Chapter Text

"For the reconcile / To crack a joke and catch a smile / Why keep my fingers clenched dear muse?"

- No-No Boy, "Nothing Left But You"

Following the first case they work on together, Ema Skye, detective and forensic investigator, invites Nahyuta for coffee.

This is a surprising development, as she doesn’t seem to like him very much, the same way she doesn’t seem too overly fond of anyone, really, and Nahyuta supposes in his case the feeling is mutual.

It’s not that Detective Skye is distinctly unpleasant to be around; in fact, when she’s in a good mood, she can be downright jovial, Nahyuta has noticed. It’s just that she tends to be in a foul mood disproportionately whenever he’s around, which is understandable given that thus far the majority of their interactions have taken place at crime scenes, and probably doesn’t have too much to do with him in particular.

More to the point, Detective Skye appears to be an all-around diligent and intelligent woman, which is what makes her laissez-faire attitude and outright contempt for spirituality so very grating. She probably feels similarly about Nahyuta’s religious leanings and strict habits, so perhaps they’re even.

It’s with that logic in mind that Nahyuta agrees to coffee, though it’s largely about politeness more so than anything deeper than that. Skye appears almost taken aback by his agreement, but she recovers quickly and leads them to a small cafe tucked into the corner of a larger building just a couple of blocks from the courthouse.

It’s the sort of place he thinks native speakers would call a “hole in the wall”, which he’s fairly confident is meant to be complimentary, though it doesn’t sound like it to him. That said, it is rather cozy; Los Angeles is a fast-paced, high-strung sort of town, all bright lights and busy streets and people rushing every which way, and sitting in a quiet cafe doesn’t exactly remind Nahyuta of home , per se, but it’s a welcome change of pace.

The detective sips languidly at a simple iced latte, Nahyuta at a cup of oolong—hot, because proper tea is not meant to be iced, thank you very much. Skye laughs at this declaration and tells him he sounds just like Edgeworth, and he can’t tell if it’s meant to be flattering—but the detective always speaks fondly of the man, so Nahyuta decides not to feel insulted, at the very least.

“Why have you invited me here?” Nahyuta asks placidly after a short while has passed with them sipping their drinks in strangely companionable silence.

Ema Skye rolls her eyes, arms crossed over her chest.

“You’re kind of a jerk, you know that?” she scoffs, and Nahyuta appreciates the honesty. Most people he’s met are wont to tread lightly around him because he’s a foreigner they’re too afraid of offending. Being treated like any of Detective Skye’s other colleagues is refreshing.

“I am aware,” Nahyuta responds evenly. “However, you have yet to answer my question.”

She shrugs and picks up her drink again, swirling the dregs around in the bottom of the cup. “We’re essentially coworkers, so… And, well, I don’t know, I guess you just seemed lonely?”

“Lonely? Detective Skye—”

“You can just call me Ema, you know.”

“No thank you.”

Another scoff. “See? Jerk.”

Nahyuta chances a wry smile. “Call it a cultural difference in propriety,” he says. “In any case, there’s no need for you to concern yourself with my social habits. I am here for only a short time, and to form any close attachments would result in certain… inconveniences.”

Skye sits back in her chair, hands shoved in the pockets of her lab coat. “Wow, you’re really selling the whole monk thing.”

Nahyuta feels his eyebrow twitch. “That’s not what it’s about.”

“Really? Because the whole ‘no attachments’ thing sounds very Buddhist.”

“I am not Buddhist.”

“I’m aware of that. Do you really think I don’t listen to anything you say?”

Nahyuta sighs. “No, that isn’t it.”

The detective looks at him with a curious tilt of her head. He half expects her to start trying to analyze him with some sort of wretched chemical solution (not that her forensics techniques haven’t proved to be of use, just… very hard to get accustomed to, compared to the Khura’inese reliance on spiritual insights). Instead, however, she looks out the window next to their table.

“Look, I spent a lot of time living between different places when I was a teenager, and not making any friends just because I knew I’d be leaving sucked. It got lonely after a while.

“I don’t know if I should tell you this, but a friend of mine was really badly hurt in the courtroom bombing last year,” she continues when he doesn’t respond. “We weren’t super close, mind you, but it kind of made me wish we were? I don’t know, those couple weeks really made me think about how easy it is to just let people slip past you if you don’t put in any effort.”

“...My situation is rather complicated, Detective.”

Her eyes snap back to his. “Is anyone’s situation ever not complicated?”

“Perhaps not.” Nahyuta runs his thumb over the edge of his teacup. “Why would you have any interest in befriending me, anyway? We are not very much alike.”

“It’s not like we have to be best friends. It’s just, would it really hurt to just grab a drink off-hours from time to time?” Skye shrugs. “Besides, I mean, yeah you’re an annoying asshole, but you’re not nearly as bad as some of the other prosecutors I’ve had to work with, so hey.”

“I don’t know whether I should consider that a compliment, Detective Skye.”

“Come on.” She points her empty cup at him. “You’ve met your coworkers, haven’t you?”

Nahyuta ponders this for a second, and then nods, grimacing.

Later, when they part ways for the day, Nahyuta does not leave the cafe with a new friend, but he does leave feeling a bit less boneless and strung out than he normally feels these days, which may have more to do with the caffeine boost than the company, but he can’t possibly be sure.

“Detective Skye,” he thinks to ask as they’re leaving, “your friend who was hurt… Are they alright now?”

“Oh!” Ema Skye actually smiles at him. “Yeah, he’s doing a lot better. He’s a defense attorney, actually. Who knows, maybe you’ll run into each other one of these days.” She snorts. “I’m not sure which of you I should feel more sorry for if you do.”

Nahyuta hums. An interesting prospect, to be sure, but not one he’s certain he would welcome, given the way Ema speaks about the majority of people she works with.

They split up out front of the courthouse, and Nahyuta waits for the bus in the late afternoon light. As his own thoughts creep back in the resulting solitude, Nahyuta is unable to fully extinguish the sense that he has done something wrong, a feeling that sends his hands trembling around the straps of his messenger bag all the way back to the apartment.

Perhaps he shouldn’t have caffeine past lunch.

Chapter Text

"To own the past, forgive the fool."

- No-No Boy, "Nothing Left But You"

When it finally happens, it happens when Nahyuta is attempting to prosecute a 17-year-old girl for murder.

Detective Skye asks him in advance to go easy on the girl, because she’s a friend and because Nahyuta is reasonable and level-headed and all these other things he maybe could have been if he hadn’t spent half his life on one side of a revolution and the other half on the other. Something about him is poisoned, so he takes the part of his brain that says condemning a teenage girl to life in prison is sickening and compartmentalizes it into the same part of his brain where he keeps all his memories of his mother and Dhurke and Datz and Apollo, and tells Skye to get lost and do her job impartially and without complaint.

And then, of course, as if he crawled out of the dark recesses of Nahyuta’s mind himself just to taunt him, there at the defense’s bench, standing a good half a foot shorter than his bright-eyed co-counsel, is Apollo Justice, head-to-toe in red with his hair sticking up and that glimmering badge sitting proudly upon his lapel. It couldn’t be anyone else, really, because if anyone’s changed it’s Nahyuta, and it’s Apollo practically glowing with a righteous fury that would make Dhurke proud.

Apollo falters only for a brief moment when he notices him, and Nahyuta watches in real time as Apollo visibly packs him away into a little mental box of his own, and Holy Mother, Nahyuta thinks, which of us is Dhurke Sahdmadhi’s son?

The story goes like this: Over the next few weeks, Nahyuta will make multiple exhausting trips between Khura’in and LA, taking back-to-back cases with Detective Skye in tow. Back home, he’ll meet Apollo’s boss, in yet another instance of bizarre divine providence. Then Minister Inga will die, and then his father will have already been dead, and his mother will return from plain sight, and his aunt’s wicked regime will fall, all in the span of a few days. The revolution will come to Khura’in at last, in the form of Nahyuta’s baby brother, half-drowned and incandescent, and by the end of May, Nahyuta will find himself Prince Regent of the country whose people he’d condemned, and he and Apollo will spend the next eternity trying to clean up the mess the revolution left in its wake.

And on a night in early June, when they’re both unable to sleep, they’ll take Datz’s horrible beat-up Jeep up the mountain to the old hut where they used to live, and they’ll sit on the roof like they used to do even though Apollo’s scared of heights. Apollo will spin the keys around on his finger even though Nahyuta drove, because Apollo is 24 and scared of driving even though he stared down machine guns just fine. When he points this out, Apollo will tell him it’s because he wasn’t the one holding the death machine, and besides, he was terrified out of his mind that day, he just didn’t have a choice.

“It’s not a big deal,” Apollo will say when Nahyuta furrows his brow in response to that, but he’ll start scratching at his arms the way Nahyuta has noticed he does when he’s feeling particularly twitchy or anxious.

“Your scars,” Nahyuta will say, “you were in the courthouse bombing.”

“I didn’t know you knew about that,” Apollo will say, and Nahyuta will confess that he didn’t, not until he was faced with its aftermath. And Apollo will be cagey about the whole thing, but he will admit, “That was the worst week of my life,” and neither of them will bring up the fact that the day they held Dhurke’s funeral doesn’t make that list.

“I’m sorry,” Nahyuta will say, and Apollo will reply, “Don’t be,” and Nahyuta will struggle to say what he really means, but Apollo will act like he already knows, because somehow in the last fifteen years he’s gotten frighteningly good at reading people. Even Nahyuta, who’s spent a decidedly long time attempting to numb his emotions into unreadability.

“It’s all over and done with,” Apollo will say, all serious and round-eyed and earnest, a hand wrapping around Nahyuta’s bony wrist. “There’s nothing we can do about any of it now.”

And that will be the final crack, this acknowledgment that nothing he does now will undo the last five, fifteen, twenty-three years, and Nahyuta won’t quite shatter, but it’ll be a near thing, and in fits and starts and then all at once Nahyuta will cry, and cry and cry and cry , until the pain eases for once; and Apollo won’t say a word, and that’ll be just fine.

All that to say, once Nahyuta’s life has been irrevocably altered again and he at last finds himself with the sudden freedom and emotional bandwidth to do so, Nahyuta will put all of the pieces together: the picture in Edgeworth’s office, Ema’s talks of friendship and being alone, asking him to go easy on her friends, Apollo’s scars, all of it. He will be forced to reckon, at last, with how much these last long fifteen years have taken from him, and how everything he wanted was waiting for him all along just out of view.

But for now, Nahyuta goes numb to his own shock, and lets his training guide him toward a full conviction—only to find the truth unravel before him like spools of fine thread, slipping between his fingers. Here is a tale of deceit and pain and family drama that Nahyuta has no part in but that makes Apollo practically irate. The Holy Mother does not guide him here, does not move the needle in any meaningful way. Nahyuta and Apollo operate in disparate realities, two ships passing one another in an endless, raging sea.

When the dust settles, Nahyuta locks eyes with Apollo in the courthouse lobby through his reflection in the vending machine’s glass. Young Ms. Wright is tucked protectively under his arm while he stops, halfway to pressing a selection on the menu, to stare at Nahyuta’s reflection. There’s a moment of tense silence where none of them speak, but Nahyuta is prepared to be torn to shreds for the person he’s become before Apollo averts his eyes instead, quickly gets his snack from the machine, and leads Ms. Wright away without a word.

She turns to look at Nahyuta curiously over her shoulder as they go, with a stare so bright and piercing that it lodges itself sharply in Nahyuta’s chest and stays there like a shard of broken glass.

The shame doesn’t change him, because it can’t, not yet—but it’s the first crack, just a tiny fracture to let the light in. In the far reaches of his mind, Nahyuta lets himself hope—pray, even—that a day will come when looking at his brother doesn’t feel like looking at a stranger, that a day will come when Nahyuta gets up in the morning without fear that his sister will be harmed if he does not bow his head like a dog and obey.

Holy Mother send that it comes soon.