Work Text:
“You can’t keep clicking on these email links,” Apollo huffs at him, far too irritated for 10AM on a Tuesday as he taps away at Phoenix’s work computer. He’d never known it was possible for somebody to angrily click a mouse, but Apollo is doing it with gusto. “You have thousands of viruses on here, and you wonder why you can never get any work done.”
“It’s an old computer,” Phoenix protests. “I still had this thing when I worked for Mia, you know. It’s not my fault it runs so slowly.”
When they found out Apollo was coming back from Khura’in to visit them all for a little while, Phoenix had mostly been excited. What he hadn’t been expecting was a full on telling-off about his internet safety habits from his former employee, and then an impromptu search through all of his (private!) emails.
“It runs so slowly because you keep downloading viruses,” Apollo says. “Since when were you related to a prince from Zheng Fa? And even if you were, why would you give him your bank details?”
“...Because he asked me if he could keep his inheritance in my account? I have a lot of relatives, Apollo, I can’t keep track of them all. For all I know, that email scammer could have actually been my relative.”
“Okay. Just for reference, don’t give anyone your bank details.”
“What about when I get emailed to say I won a giveaway?”
“Especially not to them,” Apollo stares at him incredulously before returning to the computer screen, scrolling through the seemingly endless amount of things Trucy lovingly refers to as ‘junk’. “Why did you click this thing that said your iPhone was hacked?”
“Because I thought my iPhone was hacked!”
“You don’t even have an iPhone! You have a Nokia that’s older than Trucy!” Apollo runs his hands through his hair exasperatedly. Phoenix wouldn’t be surprised if he saw some grey hairs instantaneously popping up. “You’re thirty-seven. You’re nowhere near old enough to be acting like this.”
“You should be at the club, boss,” Athena chimes in helpfully. Whatever that means.
“Fake giveaway, someone pretending to be your grandma, another fake giveaway,” Apollo recites the list aloud. “Someone asking for your bank password, a giveaway again, an invitation to a pyramid scheme-”
“That’s not a scam! That’s just Larry!”
“I’ve reported him anyway,” he mutters. “A fake bank email, an ancestry lookup… don’t tell me you actually thought you were related to that prince.”
“Oh! I was waiting for this one,” Phoenix says, turning back from staring scandalised at Athena to look at the screen. “I found some old letters from my great great grandpa or something in my Mom’s attic, and he used to be a lawyer too. It made me want to know how we got from lawyer to lawyer, you know? He seemed like a pretty interesting guy.”
Phoenix moves to take back control of the computer mouse (since- you know, it is his email and his computer and his desk!) but Apollo just clicks on the page and opens it without batting an eyelid.
“Sure. Just open my emails, why don’t you,” Phoenix says with an eye roll.
“You lost your right to email privacy when you started clicking on random links that said download now to find out what type of pizza you would be,” Apollo huffs, putting his hand on the back of Phoenix’s office chair and firmly pushing him so he rolls away from the desk, unable to stop Apollo’s weirdly rapid mouse-clicking.
“What type of pizza would you be?” Athena asks.
“Mushroom,” Phoenix says from his newfound spot in the corner, looking like a scolded child on timeout.
“Huh. Figures.”
He frowns. “What does that mean?”
“Nothing!”
“It only told me mushroom to download malware on my computer! Why do you think that I’m a mushroom pizza when-”
“Holy fucking shit,” Apollo interrupts. “Why does that say Jove Justice?”
“-that doesn’t even make any- wait, what?” Phoenix stops, and freezes, and short-circuits so hard that he doesn’t even chide Apollo for his language. “What do you mean, Jove Justice? Where?”
Phoenix only knows Jove Justice from an old polaroid they used as evidence in court (that is now framed on Apollo’s desk in his new office in Khura’in), and the Divination Seance that showed them his last moments. There’s no way Jove Justice, Apollo’s late father, is on his family tree. He’s sure Apollo is tech-savvy enough to have concocted a very strange prank in the time that Phoenix was arguing about pizza.
“Where do you think?” Apollo hisses back, looking ever-so-slightly green.
“Of course your dad isn’t in my family tree,” Phoenix says, but he’s sounding less and less sure by the minute. “I must have, uh, gotten the sample mixed up. Cross contamination, and all.”
“You think I spat in a test tube all the way from Khura’in?” Apollo says, looking even more nauseous as he turns the monitor to face Phoenix. “You think I spat in your test tube all the way from Khura’in?”
And… Apollo was right, holy fucking shit. There it is, clear as day. Jove Justice in his family tree. In Phoenix’s family tree! Jove Justice in Phoenix Wright's family tree, and nobody else in the world has ever had a name as strange as Apollo’s biological father.
“Hey, hey! What’s going on!” Athena stands up from her desk to peer at the screen, too - and it takes a few short seconds for Widget to turn his signature shocked yellow. “Oh, he really is on there! Mr Wright, you share a great grandmother with Apollo’s dad! Isn’t that funny!”
Apollo gags into his hands.
Athena brings up Widget’s holographic screen, and does a lot of tapping that Phoenix is too shocked to pay attention to and Apollo is too nauseous to care about.
“Apollo! This means you’re…” she taps some more, frowning at the screen. “...Mr Wright’s second cousin, once removed.”
“I’m gonna remove myself in a minute,” Apollo groans.
“Hey! Come on, Pollo, it’s not that bad being related to me. Look at Trucy!”
“I’m more related to you than Trucy is,” he butts back before freezing as he realises what he’s actually just said. “Holy Mother, I’m more related to you than Trucy is. This is the worst day of my life.”
Okay. That’s a little harsh, given everything that’s happened to him - getting blown up, and violently assaulted, and finding out his long-lost father had been dead for three days and he had been talking to his channelled spirit - but, well. He supposes Apollo’s ‘worst day’ is his own opinion.
It also means, as well as being his daughter, Trucy would also be his second step-cousin once removed. It's funny how family works, really. But he can't really tell either of them that. They still don't know they're related.
“That’s so weird to think about,” Phoenix murmurs in thought. “My great grandma is your great great grandma, Apollo.”
“There’s nothing great about this!” Apollo shrieks, mortified. “We’re cousins!”
“How distantly related do you have to be to make it not a conflict of interest in court?”
Athena scoffs. “The judge never cares about conflict of interest in court. If he did, half of our trials would've never gone ahead.”
“Sorry, but it sounded like you were thinking of making this public,” Apollo hisses. “I'd rather die.”
“Hey! I’m a renowned lawyer, buddy! It'd be good to have some family contacts in the legal world.”
Apollo looks scandalised. “My dad was the most famous defense attorney in his entire country. The country where I work, and it would actually matter. You’re just- some guy from California!”
“Just some guy? I thought you used to idolise me!”
“Used to being the key phrase there."
“Hey, guys!” The door to the WAA swings open and there is his darling daughter, fresh out of school for the afternoon and blissfully unaware of everything that has taken place in the last ten minutes. Her face slowly drops as she surveys the room and sees everyone staring in abject horror and Phoenix banished on his office chair to the corner of the room.
“Nothing!” Athena squeaks even though she hadn’t been asked anything, and wastes no time hiding underneath her desk and silencing Widget with a hand over his little speakers. “We weren’t talking about anything!”
In the next few seconds, some sort of wiring must get messed up in Phoenix’s brain - because where he means to say ‘Hello, sweet Trucy, I missed you very much, how was school’ - or something reasonable along those lines, what he actually says is:
“I- we- Polly and I are related,” he blurts out feebly instead.
Apollo bangs his head onto the desk.