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Victoire Encorte does not particularly like flying on airplanes; being nearly six feet tall and mostly leg will do that to a girl, tragically enough. Add in the fact that her knees protest at the mere idea of sitting in a cramped middle seat for hours and the fact that she only ever flies when she’s going to visit her parents in France—a nearly 12 hour long flight—and she thinks her dislike is fairly justified.
She does it, though, because her mother complains at her for hours when she doesn’t at least attempt to come for the holidays, and because recently her boss has given her enough of a raise that she was able to pay for first class this time. Still hell on her knees, but less so than it is usually. And if she’s going to squeeze herself into a plane in order to deal with her parents for a week, she might as well get free champagne out of the deal.
Victoire is sitting by the window enjoying her free champagne and texting her girlfriend about her experience with TSA (she’d picked a fight with the agent who had tried to take away her embroidery scissors and won) when the people sitting next to her take their seats. She doesn’t pay them any mind, really, as her experience has taught her that it’s not worth taking the chance that the people next to you are going to want to chat. Besides, there’s an aisle in between them here in first class; nobody has to climb over anyone to go to the bathroom. Yet another reason she normally hates flying.
Before she puts her headphones in, though, she takes stock of the two people sitting next to her. Always good to have an idea of who you’ll be sharing space with for the next 12 hours. Plus, a voice that sounds suspiciously like her girlfriend’s adds, you never know who you’re going to run into!
They don’t seem to be anyone special, Victoire notes. Two young men with mildly bizzare hairstyles—the blond one seems somewhat familiar, but she doesn’t really care to figure out why—talking about their trip. Not important, not relevant to her. She goes to put on her headphones when—
“Don’t you think we should have waited until the trial was over before leaving?” the shorter man asks, sounding strangely nervous. “I mean, not that I don’t trust ‘Thena, but…”
“Nein. It was only arson. You have nothing to worry about,” the other man responds soothingly. The German throws Victoire off a bit, but not more so than the fact that they seem to be talking about an arson trial? Are they fleeing the country or something? She lifts her phone up surreptitiously to take a picture of the two of them and quickly sends it to her girlfriend, captioned ‘Do you know who these people are?’, cursing under her breath when the message doesn’t go through. Service is always kind of shitty out on the tarmac. “Athena is perfectly capable of handling it.”
“I know, I know.” Short Guy sighs, running a hand through his weird hair spikes. “But even cases like arson always seem to turn into murder cases with us.”
Jesus Christ. Are these two in the mob? They look a little too—well, she’s not going to say that, but they don’t look like they’re in the mob, for sure. The blond one looks like he’s on his way to audition for a European boy band. Victoire slowly puts her headphones on but turns her podcast off entirely so she can still hear the conversation next to her.
“And if this one turns into a murder case, you know that Athena will have Mr. Wright’s assistance if she requires any help. Don’t tell me you intend to let a little murder get in the way of a nice vacation.”
What the fuck, she mouths to herself, fiddling with her phone case just to make it seem like she’s doing something. Beside her, Short Guy scoffs. “I can’t tell what I hate more—that you called it a little murder or that you’re referring to our honeymoon as a nice vacation.”
Blond Guy laughs at that, and Victoire honestly thinks that the two people next to her might be crazy. At least she knows her earlier assessment wasn’t entirely wrong, so she doesn’t feel quite as bad about thinking that they looked a little too gay to be in the mob. They are gay, apparently, just… also maybe in the mob.
God, she wishes her girlfriend was here. Helena would be finding this maybe the funniest shit that’s ever happened.
She’s so caught up in wishing Helena was here that she nearly misses Blond Guy’s response, only managing to catch the last half of the sentence. “—only that the last time I mentioned that this was our honeymoon in public, your face turned a lovely shade of red only rivaled by your usual attire.”
“Well, that’s because you said it loud enough for everyone else to hear too! And we were running late!”
That explains why they hadn’t boarded when she had. She wants to keep putting together the puzzle of the these two strange men, but she’s rudely interrupted by the PA system on the plane letting the passengers know that they’re getting ready for takeoff. Victoire grumbles slightly to herself, putting her tray table away and handing the empty champagne flute to the flight attendant who comes by.
The gay mobster couple next to her quiets down as the plane takes off. Short Guy takes out a Steam Deck 2 and opens up Haunted Chocolatier, prompting his husband (gay rights, she supposes) to lean over and say, “I thought you told Athena that you hated that game.”
“Only so she’d stop talking to me about it at work,” Short Guy replies. “It took ConcernedApe forever to release this. I don’t need it all to be spoiled for me because ‘Thena doesn’t know how to be quiet.”
Blond Guy barks out a quiet laugh at that, and Short Guy glares at him. “Entschuldigung, schatz. You have to admit there’s some humor in you saying that someone else doesn’t know how to be quiet.”
Victoire carefully considers this conversation. Mobsters probably don’t refer to being in the mob as work, right? Or maybe they would if they were on a plane, surrounded by people… who had already heard them openly talking about arson and murder earlier.
Well, mobsters or not, they’re kind of a cute couple. She’s curious who Athena is—another member of their organization, perhaps, if she sees Short Guy at work. The Mr. Wright they mentioned earlier—a superior of some sort, maybe?
She takes out her notebook and flips to an empty page, making notes to herself about what she’s heard so far. Short Guy and Blond Guy are talking about the game right now, and she would also like to play it spoiler-free, so Victoire tunes them out for a bit as she starts to create a possible web of relationships on the blank page. She tells herself she’s only doing it to tell Helena the whole story later, but the truth is, she’s always been a sucker for a good puzzle.
The two of them don’t say much outside of Blond Guy occasionally asking questions about the game, and eventually Short Guy puts on his headphones and the two of them fall silent. Victoire mourns the loss of any future information. She closes her notebook—for now—and turns on the podcast she’d been listening to before the gay mobster couple had started talking.
Eventually the flight attendants come by for drink service, and she takes off her headphones just in time to hear Blond Guy say, “Apollo, do you want anything to drink?” as Short Guy removes his own headphones.
She nearly knocks her newly acquired Diet Coke over in the rush to open her notebook again, earning her a disappointed look from the nearby flight attendant. Victoire writes down that Short Guy = Apollo and also that Athena, therefore, is possibly not just a coworker but a sister, given the matching names. Unless they’re both code names? In that case, it seems more than likely that Blond Guy will also have a name from Greek mythology.
“I’m alright, thanks,” Apollo says, though he looks up from his console to smile at the flight attendant. Polite mobsters, apparently. Blond Guy asks for a glass of water. “No champagne or anything?”
Blond Guy smiles at his partner as he accepts the water from the flight attendant. “I thought it best to save the celebrating for solid ground.”
Apollo rolls his eyes. “Don’t tell me you believe that stupid myth.”
“It is not a myth, schatz, there are records of that case. And if there’s going to be a murder on this plane, I’d like to have my wits about me.”
Records of a case? Victoire furrows her brow. She supposes it’s possible that the mob has someone in the Los Tokyo legal system; they’d probably be able to get access to old case files that way. She notes that down just in case.
“You’ve been on a thousand international flights before. How many of those have had murder involved?” Apollo asks, and his husband just shakes his head. “No, don’t shake your head at me, Klavier. How many of them have had murder involved?”
Klavier. Victoire doesn’t know a lot of Greek mythology, but she does know a little bit of German, and she’s certain that that has to be a fake name, because who the fuck names their child Piano?
(Okay, to be fair, she’s aware that her name is “Victoire Encorte”, which sounds like Victory In Court, but that’s why she’s distanced herself from the legal world as much as possible. She’s a fucking veterinarian, and Dr. Encorte sounds so much better than any sort of legal title would have. There is no way that the guy who looks like he wouldn’t have been particularly out of place at Eurovision is actually named Piano.)
“None of them, but if it could happen to Edgeworth, it could happen to me,” Klavier says, somewhat gravely. Apollo scoffs loud enough that the row behind them turns their heads. “Do not be so dismissive. When you begun this line of work, would you have ever predicted that one of your clients would be an orca? Nein. So it is not strange for me to want to be prepared for a murder aboard this plane.”
Her theories about the mob are starting to crumble. Maybe they’re… marine biologists? Doctors of some sort? Scientists? Victoire generally considers herself a smart person, but she’s having trouble linking together “murder” and “arson” with “orca”.
“Objection,” Apollo replies, and Victoire is baffled by that turn of phrase. “The orca wasn’t my client.”
Klavier waves his hand flippantly. “Ja, yes, and I have never whipped anyone in open court, but these sorts of things, they leave a lasting impression on the minds of those who witness them.”
Oh, Victoire thinks, oh my God—
“So your argument is that because it happened once, everyone in the prosecutors’ office is convinced that it’s going to happen again. Right.” Apollo sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose. “And they think defense attorneys are the crazy ones.”
“Holy shit, you’re lawyers,” she blurts out, and both of them turn to look at her. Victoire quickly slaps a hand over her own mouth, mortified.
Klavier, thankfully, just looks amused. She cannot say the same for his partner. “Yes, we are. Is there a reason that’s such a surprise to you?”
Victoire wants to crawl into the space underneath the seat in front of her and not come out until they land in Paris. “Um… you were talking quite a bit about murder and arson at the beginning of the flight. I thought you might have been in the mob or something like that.”
“You don’t know who we are?” Apollo asks, somewhat incredulously. Klavier elbows him in the side.
She huffs, feeling inclined to defend herself considering the two of them had just been talking about representing an orca in court. “Well, I’ve been able to work out that you are a defense attorney, likely, and he’s a prosecutor, and that your names are Apollo and Klavier. Also, it’s your honeymoon, and he is inexplicably worried about a murder occurring on this plane.”
“How long have you been eavesdropping on us?” he squawks.
Victoire shrugs, tucking part of her hair behind her ear. “How much of it is eavesdropping if I could hear you through my headphones?” she replies, neglecting to mention that she hadn’t been listening to anything in said headphones. “But now I’ve learned that you aren’t in the mob, you’re just… strange lawyers, and we don’t need to speak for the rest of the trip.”
That draws a laugh out of Klavier, who says, “Ja, this is true. Enjoy your flight, miss…”
Well, she supposes she does owe them her name. “Ah, Victoire.”
“Fraülein Victoire,” he repeats, and she thinks maybe if she was interested in men and didn’t already know that he was very much taken, it would be a little charming. “We’ll endeavor to be a bit quieter with our conversations going forward.”
Biting back a response about not minding if they kept talking loudly because their lives are far more interesting than her podcast, she nods. “Thank you. I hope you enjoy your flight too.”
Unfortunately, the two of them talk in hushed tones for the rest of the flight, and she can’t pick up any of it. Victoire resigns herself to her podcasts until she falls asleep.
She wakes up to the announcement that the plane is going to be landing soon, and out of the corner of her eye, she can see Apollo shaking his partner awake next to him. It’s early in the morning in France, but when they land and she takes her phone off of airplane mode, she can see several texts from her mother asking her to text when she lands, and a response from her girlfriend to something she’d sent earlier. Victoire frowns. She doesn’t remember sending anything to Helena that she hadn’t already seen the response to; they’d exchanged goodbyes at the airport before Victoire had boarded the plane.
Opening up the message thread between them, she sees, first, that the blurry picture she’d taken of Apollo and Klavier had in fact sent, and that Helena has sent her a wall of text in response.
-
Helena <3
OMG BABE ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME
WHAT DO YOU MEAN ‘DO YOU KNOW WHO THESE PEOPLE ARE’
I KNOW YOU LIVE UNDER A ROCK BUT LIKE
babe. love of my life. victoire. victoire encorte. victory in court. that’s klavier fucking gavin
and his HUSBAND??? i think i saw on twitter they just got married gay rights etc
and bc i love you and i know you live under a rock. klavier gavin is a MULTI PLATINUM ARTIST and WELL KNOWN PROSECUTOR
‘do you know who they are’ she asks and then goes RADIO SILENT
i hate you text me when you land in paris
-
…well. That certainly makes Victoire feel a bit stupid, in hindsight. She texts both her mother and her girlfriend that she’s arrived in Paris, and sinks into her seat while they taxi to the gate.
Abruptly, the plane stops. The PA system crackles to life, and a distressed flight attendant cries, “There’s been a murder!”
Klavier says, “I told you it could happen!” while Apollo attempts to shush him, citing something about not sounding too triumphant about a murder having happened.
Victoire just sinks lower in her seat. Next year, she’s making her parents come visit her.