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1. trucy wright
December 16, 8:32 PM
Hickfield Clinic
Emergency Ward
He is awake, mostly. He had, the nurses tell him, been drifting for some time, caught between lucidity and incoherence. They didn’t want him to sleep, not when he might have been concussed, but he doesn’t remember much from the last six hours either way.
What he does know is this:
Luckily, Juniper Woods had been spared the worst of the blast, directly shielded by his (they pause and then say, tactfully, unwise) protective posture. She’d been left with enough strength of body and presence of mind to grab him after he collapsed.
Unluckily, this means that said “worst of the blast” exerted itself squarely on Apollo’s shoulders, and his back, and his arms, and a lot of his legs.
And now he is in hospital, and he is trying not to seem as out-of-it as he feels, because they go on to tell him that he has some guests.
The constant noise of the building is bothering him. You don’t think of hospital rooms as being noisy until you’re in them and you realise that the staff have got a whole lot of other shit to do that’s not involving you. To that end, he doesn’t expect to see Athena at his bedside, and isn’t disappointed to be proven right - she would have been fidgeting the entire time, and… well, she’s not really family anyway, is she? Not that Apollo… has any family? She probably wouldn’t be allowed in to see him, is what he means to imply.
Trucy Wright, though, has absolutely no qualms about noisy environments, nor about lying to the receptionist about being his blood relation. He supposes their similar hair colours sell the tale well enough.
“POLLY!”
“Truce– oof,” he wheezes, caught suddenly in something that’s meant to be a hug but which lands on his supine body more like a wrestling slam.
“Polly, you’re okay,” Trucy announces into his shoulder, and he’s doped up approximately to Saturn on painkillers right now on account of the full-body burns, but even so he can tell that this would hurt really bad if it could.
“Trucy,” Mr Wright calls, racing in after her, “Trucy, get off Apollo, he’s injured!”
“Oops,” and she disentangles herself, “sorry, Daddy. Sorry, Polly.”
“S’okay,” he tries his best to say, with a tongue that doesn’t seem entirely certain of its own purpose.
“Hey, Apollo,” says Mr Wright, just as inscrutable as he’s ever been. “You feelin’ alright?”
“Mhm,” and then, frowning, with all the focus of a two-year-old child centring on the way his mouth forms shapes around the words, “I’m fine.”
He takes stock. For a moment, he starts distantly panicking about a loss of depth perception, until he remembers that no, he put that bandage there on purpose. The eye bandage stays on until someone goes down for what happened to Clay.
… Maybe it’s for the best that Athena wouldn’t deal well with the noise of the hospital. Apollo feels like he might slip and tell her anything right now.
“Oh, shoot,” says Trucy, and his free eye flicks to her, “Polly, you’re bleeding!”
“Mm?”
“Just a little,” Mr Wright amends, directing his attention down to the arms that Trucy was just draped over. Oh. That’s a lot of white. They’ve really mummified him, here, haven’t they?
Trucy looks crestfallen. One hand comes up to pluck at the edge of her mouth. Amazingly, with the combination of the drugs and the covered eye, he’s pretty sure he actually isn’t feeling any discomfort from her tension at all right now.
(Dangerous thing to know. Put that one in the back pocket and hope it never comes up again.)
“M’fine,” he repeats, “it’s, uh. Can’t feel it. Whole lotta painkillers.”
“They should still help you,” argues Trucy. “I don’t want you to have to sit here covered in your own blood all night, Polly, I don’t think I’m asking too much with this.”
“I’m sure they’ll change his bandages soon, but they can’t go swapping it out every time he gets a spot of red, or they’d run out of cloth.”
“In the whole hospital?”
“Yeah, probably in the whole city, too.”
“Daddy,” Trucy huffs, “stop it. I’m worried. Hasn’t this ever happened to you, in your hundred million billion stories?”
Mr Wright pretends to think. “No, but it did kinda happen the other way around.”
“You were in the hospital? Oh, do you mean when you got hit by the car?”
“Nope. Fell in a river, actually.”
Apollo did that once, too. With Yuta. It was really bad. They almost died. Apollo has a bad habit of almost dying.
“Oh yeah? Well, were you trying to save somebody like Polly did?”
“I was, yeah,” Mr Wright effortlessly parries. “Aunt Maya, who else?”
Trucy folds her arms. Apollo wishes she was allowed to hug him like she wants to. He’s gonna be up and out of bed tomorrow for the rest of the Starbuck trial, right? He has to be.
“That was about, uh, two months before I met you,” Mr Wright continues, “and it turned out your Aunt Maya was actually in the safest hiding place in the whole world, so I guess I didn’t have to do all that… but it did make your Uncle Miles fly all the way back over here to see me, so I think it evens out.”
“Daddy,” says Trucy, “I love you, but I don’t care about you and Uncle Miles’ thing right now. Polly!”
“Yeah?”
“You’re gonna get better soon, okay? You have to! I’m gonna be real sad if you don’t!”
“Course, Truce,” Apollo nods, trying to give her the earnest vibe she needs against her father’s levity. “Gotta do the trial, right?”
Mr Wright darkens. “Apollo, you’re not walking straight back into the courtroom with this many burns.”
He makes eye contact and tries to funnel all his feelings about Clay Terran into the stare. “I am. I gotta.”
“Listen, I know this means a lot to you, but you can leave it to me and Athena -”
“Please,” he grits out.
Mr Wright looks at him for a long moment. Apollo really never can tell what’s going on inside that head. Even if he wasn’t mostly numb as he currently is.
(Trucy takes his hand, at the edge of the bed. The hand with the bracelet. The bracelet that represents a family who can’t, or won’t, come to his bedside the way the Wrights have.)
“... If it’s that important,” Mr Wright acquiesces, “I’ll see about getting you checked out to go in the morning.”
“You mean we, Daddy.”
“No I don’t. It’s a Thursday night. You’re going to school in the morning.”
“Aw, what the heck?!”
“No objections. It’ll already be a miracle if you get to sleep before midnight. You’re not stopping in here on your way out the door as well.”
“But Daddy -”
“Trucy,” Mr Wright cuts her off, “Apollo’s gonna be okay. You’ll see him after school tomorrow, and then you’ve got all of winter break, right?”
Trucy deliberates, obviously not pleased. “Fine, I guess. Polly, I’m coming straight back here when I get out tomorrow, okay? And I’ll stay the whole night and the next day too if you’re still not better!”
“Thanks, Truce,” Apollo smiles.
Against Mr Wright’s assertions that they should at least be trying to get some sleep right now, Trucy insists on staying until Apollo falls asleep first. He’s cleared from fears of a concussion by an attending nurse, and then they comment on the fact that he’s bled through the bandages more than they’d have expected at this time (Trucy looks away innocuously), so they’re going to swap them out before he goes to sleep.
It’s a pretty methodical process. Mr Wright sits aside reading a magazine while Trucy watches every gory moment like her own personal car crash. He can’t see her after they do the arms, because the majority of his burns are on the back half of him and they need to turn him over, but he’s sure he could use her expression as a directly proportional gauge for how severe the injuries must be after just that first part. Probably for the best, then, that she’s out of sight for the rest of it.
The mild exertion does feel like it wakes him up a little, though. That or the drugs are just finally wearing off.
“Polly,” Trucy breathes, when the attendant leaves and she’s allowed to come back over, “was all that really from the bomb?”
And, well, he knows she’s worried, yes, but he also knows when Trucy needs a giggle. “No, some of it’s from when I fought an alligator.”
She blows a raspberry at him. “I can see you smiling.”
Which makes Apollo really smile, not the tiny quirk she could only see with her tells, but something big and toothy like he used to. And then he lets out the first breath of a laugh, and the wounds across his body all jolt in agonized agitation, and he winces away from it. Definitely the painkillers wearing off, then.
They give him a call button to press if he finds that he can’t sleep without another dose, but he’s determined to manage at least a couple hours. He’s going to court tomorrow and he’s going to be fine. He owes Clay that much.
2. athena cykes
December 20, 5:26 PM
District Court - Defendant Lobby No. 5
They delayed the Starbuck trial so they could indict Juniper Woods for the bombing, of all people, so that was a couple days wasted while the culprit could have already got away. At least it kept Athena busy. She might have been absolutely covered in nervous tells about the Clay thing, but she wasn’t lying about her love for Junie; she’d defend that case with integrity, even if he didn’t trust her with Clay’s. And Mr Wright was there to keep her on the rails.
Apollo wasn’t ready to relax, though, not by any means. He returned to the scene of the crime, Junie trailing him like a lost puppy, and… uh… well, sustained another injury, apparently.
“Apparently” because he can’t remember. Which is real helpful for a criminal investigation, thanks.
After the head wound, they put him straight back in the bed he’d just come from, and they told him not to leave until Monday morning minimum. True to her word, Trucy stuck it out all of Friday night and into Saturday, making a start on her homework packet across her lap when he was asleep and talking him through her plans for next year’s magic shows when he was awake. Briefly, Mr Wright stopped by with Athena and, surprisingly, Juniper, to let him know that she’d been cleared of her charges.
“I can’t thank you enough, Apollo,” Juniper told him. “You’ve helped me so much this year.”
“It’s what anyone would do,” he asserted in response.
There was no time to dwell on Candice Arme or Constance Court or Juniper’s stuffed rhino. Apollo got up, renewed by an IV and some (less intense) painkillers, and insisted on signing himself out ahead of time. It occurred to him that the hospital bills weren’t gonna be pretty, but he couldn’t waste valuable minutes lamenting that he was gonna fall even further into debt than he already had from his student loans. Mr Wright could help him sue the bomber for damages once they found them.
So he turned back up at work just to request a leave of absence, and he didn’t let Athena follow him on the way downstairs.
Blackquill’s sister (who is also Blackquill, he supposes), at least, understood it. She wasn’t even all that fazed when Apollo admitted to his deepest suspicions. “The princess, huh? I wondered what she was doing back here after all this time. If it really was her…”
“I don’t know,” Apollo said. “But any information you can share with me would help me get a little closer to the truth.”
She didn’t need to tell him why she was helping. One look at the coat pulled tight around his crossed arms could have told you that. She knew what it felt like better than anyone else.
Of course, Mr Wright ended up doing what he does best, pulling off an unthinkable turnabout, shifting scrutiny to the one guy that Apollo had never in a million years suspected. To think that he’s been fraternizing with Fulbright for months, blindly trusting his information - and what if something from the Tenma trial, or the Shipley trial, or Junie’s trial, was forged? - how the guy could lie so constantly like that without giving away a single twinge of tension is beyond him.
And he killed Clay. So he’s gonna fucking rot in jail about it.
Athena doesn’t punch Apollo like he asked her to, but she does slap him, which is appreciated. With his suspicions of her totally shredded to pieces, he’s willing to take off the eyepatch for the first time in a week, along with the rest of the bandages.
“...............”
Apollo frowns. Athena’s staring.
“Oh my god,” beeps Widget.
Mr Wright takes her by the shoulder. “He’s fine,” he tells her, “trust me, it was so much worse on Thursday.”
Oh! Apollo looks down at his arms, the only part of him where the scars aren’t covered by his backup suit. (That lawsuit for damages he’s filing against the Phantom is also gonna need to cover some new clothes.) It’s pretty gnarly stuff even now.
Athena is still pinging tension like nobody’s business, his bracelet gripping his wrist as tight as her hands are curled into fists at her sides. Like she hadn’t realised till this moment that all of that wrapping wasn’t for show, like it hadn’t just taken him several minutes in the bathroom to remove it all.
So he does what he thinks Trucy would do in this situation and tries to distract her out of her misery by saying something totally batshit insane instead. “No, no, Athena, those aren’t scars. They’re my new tattoos. I’m thinking of trying out a tiger look, you know?”
Sure enough - snap - the tension floods out of her as she tries to process that, and then gets replaced by a bewildered, infectious cackle. “Merde, Apollo, you’re too much!”
And he laughs back, because if he doesn’t, he’ll start crying, and Mr Wright has always solemnly assured him that the only time a lawyer can cry is when it’s all over, so until they bag this Phantom he’s gotta keep his smile in gear. “Seriously, I’m fine, like Mr Wright said. A little thing like that’s not gonna stop me from getting back behind the bench.”
“Where you belong!” Athena cheers. It’s enough to make him really feel like they’re on track to save the legal system. Which they are.
His Honor doesn’t seem to notice that anything’s changed about Apollo, which is fair enough, because the court’s got other more pressing matters to unravel. Blackquill, though, betrays his nonchalant façade for just a moment when his eyes flick across Apollo’s darkened arms. He must not have realised that Apollo’s injuries were that serious either; he and Athena really are two of a kind.
They drive their evidence into the ground, rip the Phantom’s mask from his face, and then the man gets shot on the stand, at which point Apollo retreats abruptly into subdued withdrawal. It’s been a while since he heard a gunshot firsthand - the last time might have been LeTouse, although that had turned out to not be gunfire at all, hadn’t it? Either way, the flashing-back memory of watching a man die in front of him does not go quietly, and for once it’s enough to stem Apollo’s Chords of Steel until court is very much adjourned and Trucy is bounding back safe into her father’s arms.
Athena clings to Blackquill all night like he’ll be thrown back in jail if she lets go of his sleeve. Blackquill, finally losing the IDGAF war after years of hard-fought battling, lets her.
Apollo runs his fingers over his scars while he waits for Trucy to finish picking at the rest of his bowl of ramen and wonders if people are going to stare like that forever.
3. klavier gavin
February 12, 11:41 AM
Sandford Golf Club
Tearoom
parking now!! xx
Leave it to Klavier Gavin to pick the single weirdest possible location to meet up for lunch. And leave it to him to be twenty minutes early for an already-early lunch appointment, too. Ignore the fact that Apollo’s even earlier.
It’s been… a really long time since he last saw Klavier. Since last October, in fact, with the Themis Academy case and the mock trial and everything. So much has happened since then that it feels like they’re almost strangers. Didn’t they used to be closer? Or is he just rose-tinted remembering their court oppositions like hanging out, instead of contractual obligations?
Cool see you
Apollo shuts his phone off and sinks into his chair with a sigh. He’s dressed down, to a degree, and trying not to overthink it. Golf clubs shouldn’t have dress codes; it’s a sport. Then again, this place apparently has a whitelist. He had to show them a selfie of Klavier holding up his membership card to even get into the café. And Klavier had known this, which is why he took the selfie in the first place, before even leaving the house. Only in LA.
(Honestly, the fact that there’s a golf course in LA at all is an affront to nature. Like Gavin’s overly perfect white teeth, or the endless expanse of concrete that is the Sunshine Coliseum parking lot. They didn’t have any of this shit in Khura’in.)
Movement shifts his vision in the direction of the door, where Klavier Gavin steps inside and does a little shuffle with his boots against the mat. He scans the room, sights Apollo, and shoots him some weird middle-gesture between finger guns and a two finger salute as he approaches.
“Herr Forehead,” he grins, sliding into the chair on the opposite side of the table, “what a pleasure it is to sit across from you again.”
“Well, we’re not usually sitting,” Apollo murmurs.
“How I have missed that interminable pedantry!”
God. He’s too fond. Apollo can’t put up with this. He’s immediately remembering why they don’t hang out one-on-one. “So why did you bring me here, anyway? Are we going to… play golf?”
“Ach, god, no,” Klavier waves a dismissive hand, “I hate golf. It’s too…” Kristoph, neither of them say. “I just like the food. And you won’t find many other establishments in Los Angeles that don’t contain at least one Gavinners fan who’s going to interrupt your meal.”
Well, that makes sense enough, Apollo supposes. “So you pay for a membership to a golf club when you don’t even like golf?”
“Herr Forehead, I make back the annual cost of membership in royalties about every sixteen hours. Truly, it does not make a difference to me.”
Always jarring to remember that Klavier’s part of the 1%.
They talk about traffic, and the weather, and how things have been at the WAA and the Prosecutor’s Office lately, and all of that meaningless drivel that lets him get back into the swing of talking to Klavier. The man’s as charismatic as ever, with his grins and winks and the way he leans ever so slightly into the conversation like he’s trying to just barely graze Apollo’s bubble of personal space. It’s nice and low-stakes in a way their conversations usually aren’t.
Until his eye catches on Apollo’s arms, seemingly absently, and his smile starts to gradually dip.
Apollo takes a breath. He’s been over this dozens of times in the last couple of months. Everybody wants the story, and he got sick of telling it very quickly. In the end, he’s developed a habit of just giving whatever explanation comes to mind, regardless of how realistic it may sound.
So when Klavier asks, “Er - Herr Forehead. May I ask what happened to your arms?” Apollo opens his mouth and waits to find out what will come out of it.
“Happened? No, my arms have always looked like this. Hadn’t you noticed?”
Klavier furrows concerned brows at him, like he’s trying to suss out whether or not this is a lie. “I can assure you, Hase, I have spent plenty of time admiring your forearms in my day, and they definitely did not always look like this.”
Whatever Hase means. “Why were you staring at my arms?”
“You’re always asking for it,” Klavier argues, “rolling up your sleeves like that, like a harlot.”
“We live in California, Gavin, I’m not walking around with full sleeves if I can help it,” he says, purposefully ignoring the Victorian-ass slutshaming.
“Anyway, you seem to have lost all your arm hair, for one, and for two they have all these lines on them. Something definitely happened.”
Apollo huffs. Klavier is persistent as ever. Fine; he’s enough in Apollo’s good graces to get the real story. “Well, do you remember the courtroom bombing in December?”
Klavier frowns. “Ja. … Were you -?”
“Uh-huh,” Apollo nods quickly, hoping that that will be the end of it, knowing that it won’t.
“Ah.” Klavier takes a long moment to process this information. “Shit. Verzeihung.”
“Yeah.”
“And that was right before that whole ordeal with Fräulein Cykes and Herr Blackquill’s -”
“Yep.”
“Good god,” Klavier mutters, “crazy week for you.”
“It was a rough one.” And he doesn’t even know anything about Clay.
“Ja, I bet,” he starts to laugh. “I’m sad you didn’t call me, now. We could have commiserated.”
Apollo squints, confused. “Commiserated over what?”
And Klavier holds up one hand, wiggles the fingers in the light. “Do you not remember, Herr Forehead? Ach, I’m wounded. You were right there in the audience, as well.”
So Apollo casts his mind back, and he doesn’t have to muse on it for long, because the memory of the guitar exploding into flames live on stage is one he’s witnessed from several blurry phone-recorded angles since that night. “Oh! Right, yeah, that’s true, I was. Sorry.”
“Kein Problem,” Klavier’s back to smiling once again, like nothing bad has ever happened to him. It must be a very practised mask, if he maintains it like this so often. “You remember now; that’s what matters. Although I suppose you weren’t aware that I could hardly play for weeks after it happened.”
“I’m sorry,” Apollo says. And then, once he’s thought about it for a few more seconds, “Not… really comparable to my situation, though.”
“Is it so much worse?”
“Oh, yes. Goes all the way down the other side of my body, you should see it.”
Klavier raises cheeky eyebrows. “I should? Herr Forehead, if you want to get undressed for me, you need only name a time and place.”
“Shut your mouth, Gavin,” Apollo huffs. This guy is unbelievable.
“I like this look on you, for the record,” he continues, “you should wear a polo shirt more often. I get a whole extra quarter of your arms.”
“Normal thing to have an opinion about.”
“Well!” Klavier picks up his menu, like he’s allowed to just leave it at that and not experience consequences, “I think it’s about time I talked you through this menu, oder?”
The worst part of it is that Apollo is going to let him escape those consequences, if only because he refuses to waste any more brain power on deciphering Klavier’s intentions than he strictly has to. “Fine. What’s good in the golf lunch world?”
Which is how Apollo ends up eating a “garden superfood salad” that costs thirty-one of god’s own American dollars, and is also unfortunately one of the best things he’s ever tasted in his life, and drinking some kind of herbal tea that he can’t put a name to any of the notes of, all on Klavier Gavin’s dime. They don’t end up playing any golf at all, either, which is some relief.
Maybe they should meet up outside of the courtroom more often. If only so he can score more expensive free lunches.
4. ema skye
April 27, 12:13 PM
Penrose Theater
It had been a pretty good day, all things considered, before Trucy was arrested for manslaughter.
She’s currently at the Detention Centre, hopefully not working on a disappearing act, having asked Apollo and Athena to go find her diary for her while she’s waiting. They take roughly six steps back onto the grounds of the Penrose Theater before Apollo hears somebody call his name.
“Is that you?”
Whoa, it’s - “Ema?”
He tries to duck around her, get away from the threat of awkward conversation, but he should have known that Ema wouldn’t let him leave without at least a healthy dusting of chocolate powder in his hair. That’s… not what happens, though. Who knew that all it would take to put a spring in Detective Skye’s step was graduating from plain ol’ Detective Skye to lead forensic investigator?
(Well, maybe that was obvious, in hindsight.)
She gushes about having finally passed the exam, and Athena warms up to her right away, which is great, because Ema hasn’t exactly come bearing good news about the case. “I guess you haven’t heard. The case is being treated as a straight-up homicide now.”
“What?”
So that’s not very promising. Ema feeds them all the intel she can get away with, working for the prosecution as she is, and the prosecutor is…
uh…
well, maybe it’s a different Khura’inese native called Nahyuta Sahdmadhi?
Maybe?
That’s not a cope he can cling to for long. Since when did Nahyuta become an international prosecutor? And is he going to bring the stupid anti-defense-lawyer sentiment of Khura’in with him into Apollo’s perfectly good American cases? All Apollo can do is hope that Nahyuta will listen when Ema tells him that Trucy’s a nice kid, really.
Whatever. He’s fine. He’s fine! He’s Apollo Justice and he’s fine. And he’s gonna investigate the goddamn crime scene and it’s gonna be fine. No DC Act in LA. Everything’s totally fine.
Ema will only let them investigate the crime scene if she’s allowed to tag along, so they loop her in on the trip. As they’re walking through the front-of-house in the direction of Trucy’s dressing room, Ema starts craning her neck in a frustratingly familiar way.
“Scientifically speaking,” she opens, which is how she starts any sentence that she’s not sure how to finish, “um… you’ve got some epidermal contractures there.”
Athena cocks an eyebrow. “En Inglés, lady,” Widget chirps.
“She means my arms,” Apollo says, and Ema shrugs at the pair of them sheepishly.
“Uh - just - is everything okay?”
Four months into having visible scars, he’s mostly gotten used to it. The wound care process was a lot more intense in the first few weeks than it is this far out from the blast. Nowadays he just applies “bio-oil” when he remembers to, which purports to make them less intense, but it’s hard to tell how much that’s working and how much is simply the effects of time. The lack of hair as Klavier once pointed out is a sore spot, sure, but hey - he hadn’t exactly had the most visible arm hair beforehand anyway, so it’s not like he’s missing much (he tries to convince himself, ruefully). Even the novelty of touching the new way his skin clings to itself, wraps differently around the radius from the bone, has pretty much worn off by now. Alternation between weirdly smooth skin and hypertrophic patches that pull away from where they used to relax is his new normal.
All this to say that, yes, he is okay. The only part of it that still annoys him is telling the damn story. So he opens his mouth to find out what alternative explanation he’s going to produce today.
“Yeah, uh, do not get your top surgery done at Claire’s, is all I’ll say. They missed.”
Ema snorts. “They what?!”
“You heard me!” says Apollo, who will not be able to afford top surgery for at least another five, six years at his current pay rate. At least Mr Wright has the Chief Prosecutor wrapped around his little finger, subsidizing flights across the Pacific to see Maya Fey and snazzy tailored suits. On the contrary, Apollo’s income is comprised of sporadic client’s fees and the run-off from his faux-kid-sister, who is, as has been previously established, currently in danger of being permanently put out of her line of work.
(... Apollo needs a sugar daddy. Or maybe he could ask Mr Eldoon to do it for free. If nothing else, the high salt content would probably kill any infections.)
Athena, who is by this point clued-in enough about the bit to join in without any tension, nods enthusiastically. “Yeah, it was pretty nuts. I guess you get what you pay for, right, Apollo?”
“What the fuck are you talking about,” Ema continues to giggle.
“On the bright side, everyone’s so distracted by my arms that they don’t even bother to look at my -”
“Apollo, Jesus Christ,” Ema says, “okay, if you don’t wanna talk about it, you don’t have to! My bad for bringing it up!”
“Oh, Athena can tell you, it’s fine,” says Apollo, so she does.
“He got blown up a couple months back.”
“He - excuse me?”
“The courtroom bombing?”
“The courthouse got bombed?!”
“You might’ve been out of the country,” Apollo fills in, “I mean, that was when - um - when Fulbright was assigned to all our cases.”
“Oh,” Athena says. “So you normally work with Detective Ema?”
“Against her will.”
“Hey,” Ema raises her hands, “it’s not you I have a problem with, it’s the fop.”
“Well, you must be happy to see him retired.” (On indefinite hiatus from criminal cases, were the exact words he’d used at the golf club.)
“Hang on, go back to the bombing! What happened?”
“It’s a long story, and we’ve got a notebook to find,” Apollo declares firmly. “I’ll catch you up when Trucy’s not on suspicion of murder.”
“Okay,” says Ema, “one more question. Do you always tell people dumb stories like that?”
“Yeah,” he admits, “I don’t really like talking about it.”
“Sweet. Can you do it again when we see the witness?”
“Sure.”
Bonny de Famme’s reaction does not disappoint. When Ema asks, mid-fingerprint-dusting, so, Apollo, how’d you get those burns? and Apollo replies well, let’s just say another one of Trucy’s tricks is on Mr Wright’s blacklist now, she lets out the most hilarious little meep! of shock and sudden concern for her and Trucy’s working relationship going forward. And retroactively too, Apollo’s sure.
Too bad. Trucy Wright only leaves room in the program for one permanent assistant.
(Or, at least, she will, when they clear her criminal record tomorrow.)
5. nahyuta sahdmadhi
April 28, 4:58 PM
District Court - Defendant Lobby No. 3
“He was asking after you, you know.”
Ema’s voice is muffled by Snackoo, but Apollo hears it loud and clear nonetheless. She’s just finished apologising to Trucy for testifying against her; Trucy, saint that she is, refuses to even acknowledge that an apology is warranted. Met with a stalemate, Ema has opted to get down the last of the bag of stress-snacks that she’d opened on the stand earlier, and amid that, she’s brought up Nahyuta.
Because of course she means Nahyuta. She can’t possibly mean anyone else.
Apollo asks anyway, cautious. “Who was?”
“Sahdmadhi,” Ema munches. “Wanted to know if you were injured. I told him to ask you himself.”
“Good,” says Apollo, and then, “you did?”
“Of course. You said everybody gets a different story, right? I wanna hear what you’ve got cooking up today.”
“Does that mean he’s coming to the -?”
“Detective Skye.”
Ema’s back shoots up straight. “Y-Yes?”
Because here he is, in the defendant lobby, close enough to really see the way the years have changed him. (They haven’t changed him that much, really. Same silky hair and piercing eyes that beg brown contacts. Same untenable fairness. The only thing that’s different is his sense of dress.) “I require your forensic expertise in order to close this case. Come, let us go.”
“Wait,” Apollo cuts in, inching into Chords of Steel range, “Prosecutor Sahdmadhi!”
Nahyuta does not rise to meet his volume. He stays as placid and serene and even-tempered as he has all goddamn day. “What could you possibly have to say, Mr Justice? The trial is over. You and I are strangers once more, with no further need to interact.”
“Strangers?” Okay, now he’s just trying to piss Apollo off. Like he had before with the stinkbug comments. “I know you haven’t forgotten about me.”
(“Forgotten?!” Athena repeats behind him.)
Nahyuta stares him down, completely tranquil. When they were kids, Apollo used to greatly appreciate that Nahyuta was the one person he knew who never set off his migraines. Now that he’s long since learned that they’re not really migraines, though, but rather tells for tension, that information takes on a different connotation. Apollo can’t get a read on his former brother at all right now, and it’s seriously bugging him.
“You've really changed, Nahyuta,” he tries to probe. “Telling me to let it go and stuff. What happened to you?”
For a moment, it seems like Nahyuta is going to brush him off completely, give him some zealous Khura’inist comment about the impurity of his soul or what have you and go - but with a long, feline blink, he stoops to the bait and scans level eyes across Apollo’s body. “I could ask the same of you, Mr Justice.”
Apollo loosens the vise grip he has on each of his own inner elbows, arms unfolding, and turns them over to let Nahyuta get a better look up close. Then he goes back to tracing the engravings of his bracelet. “Yeah, uh, well, this one time, one of my defendants turned out to be guilty. He was real mad I wouldn’t get him off the hook.”
(“Polly,” Trucy mutters uncomfortably at his back. She must sense the sheer extent to which he’s wound up.)
Nahyuta’s head tilts, but it doesn’t pair with that little smirk of his for once. Shame. Apollo hopes at least Ema is finding this funny. “You should see the other guy,” he continues into the dead air.
It’s impossible to tell whether Nahyuta genuinely believes him or not; all he does is gently clasp his hands together and return to neutral gear. “... Now, if you will excuse me. Detective?”
And there he goes.
Apollo wants to let his head fall into his hands, if not collapse entirely on the couch across the room, if not walk out into the street and let LA traffic take care of him extremely slowly. Did this reunion have to happen the exact second that Mr Wright is out of town? Out of town in Khura’in, no less? And on a case where Trucy’s life, her career, and three million dollars of repossessed office belongings and debts hung in the balance?
Athena is grimacing, not even trying to hide it. There must be horrendous levels of discord in his voice. “What was that all about, Apollo?” she tries to open gently. “How do you know Prosecutor Sahdmadhi?”
Isn’t that a loaded fucking question.
+1.
May 16, 11:01 AM
Wright Anything Agency
Listen. Apollo’s not religious. He’s kind of regretting that fact right now, though, because it’s not like the ground’s going to open up and swallow him on its own.
“I must be dreaming,” he murmurs, “or hallucinating… or both.”
“No, you’re not, Apollo!” says Trucy, gripping his arm, thankfully tight enough to ground him in the face of Dhurke fucking Sahdmadhi, standing in the doorway, at his office in California. “It’s that TV-hijacker-slash-insurgent in the flesh!”
The years have changed Dhurke a lot, chiefly in that he’s missing an eye. Not an easy thing to lose. Apollo wonders what the story there is. He claims that he really is just here to see Apollo, except for the ulterior motive that he also has, which is second to his primary paternal intentions. Charming stuff. Apollo pockets the photograph, charges his standard fee, and refuses the sushi.
On the bus to Kurain Village, they talk shop. It’s kind of like that nothing conversation he had with Klavier a few months back, only Dhurke’s one working eye never drops below his neckline, like he’s afraid to take his eyes off of Apollo lest he jump out the window and roll away to certain death on the asphalt of the 5. Apollo is still nobly fighting the IDGAF war, though, unlike some prosecutors he won’t name. He spent many dedicated years working to push all fond memories of Dhurke and Khura’in and the Dragons far into the dusty back corners of his brain, and one reappearance isn’t going to change that fact.
Trucy seems enthralled by their connection. She’s probably jealous of the very concept of your father coming back to get you; after all, hers promised her too, didn’t he, and look where he ended up seven years later.
Archie Buff is dead. His orphaned child is left behind. Where has Apollo heard this fucking story before?
“Listen up, diaper baby! Your commanding officer's orders are absolute! Disobedience means a one-way trip to the firing squad! Do I make myself clear?!”
“Um - sir, yes, sir!” He salutes the drone.
“Good, good! We might make a man out of you yet, private!”
(Apollo’s done the work to make a man out of himself already, he wants to assert, but lets it lie for now. Clearly, this kid does not permit his pedantry in the way that his friends might.)
It’s touch-and-go until he lands on the piece of information he needed to crack the conversation open. “You lost your mother, too?”
In a house fire, no less, it turns out. “I've lost both my parents now. You can't possibly know how I feel!”
Only he can, in several ways. Apollo shows the drone the photo of his father, and fumbles through the mystery of his mother, and then he takes a last look at Dhurke before deciding that he needs to tell the Buff kid exactly what it is that ties them most closely together. “And I was even in a fire myself, not too long ago, now.”
“You were?” comes crackling through the microphone.
“See here?” He holds his arms up slowly, in surrender, bringing them close to the camera. “It was only in December. I was at work, doing my job, trying to protect my client from false accusations, and somebody chose that moment to blow up the building.”
“What?!”
“I could have made it out safe in time,” Apollo says. “I knew about the bomb as soon as everybody else did, but I stayed behind to help somebody else who’d fallen.”
“A casualty of active duty,” Sarge mutters.
“Just a member of the gallery. She’d tripped and fallen trying to get away from the danger. It was too late for both of us to get away, so I just stood in front of her and made sure to form a shield.”
“And was your civilian charge okay?” A beat. “Private?”
“Yes, she was fine,” says Apollo, “but I wasn’t so lucky. I got super bad scars all down my back and on my arms. I tried to charge straight back into - uh - into the line of fire the next morning, but I couldn’t quite manage it. I had to let my… commanding officer take the lead.”
He doesn’t want to look at Dhurke while he’s telling this story. He doesn’t know if he’ll like the reaction he sees.
“I don’t know what your injuries were like, sir, but I do know that I’m in the same boat as you, recovering from a life-changing incident like that. Some parts of it never get better. Some parts of it do.”
“Wow,” is all that Sarge can give him in return. It’s hard to imagine the face that lies beyond the mechanism. Life’s not like the movies, is it, is the part he doesn’t tack on.
Dhurke clears his throat, to Apollo’s right. “Sergeant Buff, his experience is very much like your own. If anyone can understand the sadness in your heart, it's him.”
So Sarge promotes him to Corporal, and Apollo takes advantage of the newfound allegiance to pick up as much new evidence as possible about Archie Buff and where he might have taken the Founder’s Orb. He doesn’t miss the way that Dhurke surveils him, suddenly a degree more intense than before. He’s not sure what to make of it. Very much unlike Mr Wright, Dhurke makes no habit of hiding the things that he feels - it’s just a matter of identifying the feeling behind the expression.
Last time Apollo had to do that, he didn’t know how to use his bracelet and his perceptive skills. Now, he’s almost scared of what he’ll find.
Pearl Fey directs them up to Mount Mitama by the light of glowing-moss inside the doctor’s hiking boots. Abruptly, against their will, they are alone and walking in the dark.
At least there’s no tells to watch out for this way.
“Son,” says Dhurke, at his side, “was that all true?”
“You think I was lying to the orphan child to squeeze them for information?”
“Okay,” he acquiesces, “I see how that sounds now. So you really got caught in a bombing incident? How did that come about?”
“Uh,” it’s harder to explain it when he’s not trying to impress the war-movie Buff, “there was another case I was working on where the building had been blown up. A decommissioned version of the bomb was brought in to represent the real thing as evidence. Or, at least, we all thought it was decommissioned.”
“What a trip.”
“And then when I tried to go back and look for more evidence about who reactivated it, I actually got clocked in the head by a guy who wanted to cover up his own crime. I don’t even remember that part.”
“Apollo…” His tone is painfully concerned.
“I’m fine,” Apollo insists, “I made it through okay. And we found the guy who did it, so it’s fine.”
Dhurke is silent for a fair amount of even footsteps through the darkness. “It’s good to know that you’re so dedicated to the cause of defending. That you’d walk right back into the danger zone for the chance to find some exonerating evidence, even when it wasn’t your case any more.”
Apollo finds himself chuckling, even though it’s not really funny. “You know, I didn’t tell Sarge the whole truth back there. I was protecting my friend from the explosion, yeah, but that’s not the reason I was still in the room. I stayed behind even though I knew it was a bad idea, because I didn’t want our case to be destroyed. I literally threw myself in front of a bomb because the idea of letting the culprit get away made me that angry.”
Which makes Dhurke actually laugh, this big booming thing that catapults Apollo straight back into being eight years old and hidden in the mountains. “That’s my boy,” says Dhurke Sahdmadhi, Defiant Dragon, the last Khura’inese defense lawyer left in the land, and Apollo finds himself a hair away from crying.
He’s always been a crier. Dhurke knows that better than anyone, surely. Still, he doesn’t want to break down, here in the darkness, the constriction, the damp. He’s already at rock bottom. He doesn’t want to make himself any weaker than he already is.
(The only time a lawyer can cry is when it’s all over, Mr Wright reminds him.)
Thankfully, blessedly, Dhurke doesn’t say anything else to make the situation worse for Apollo. He doesn’t start bringing up his own legal exploits, or explain how he lost his eye in the fifteen-odd years since they’ve seen one another. But he does put a hand on Apollo’s shoulder - the arm with the bracelet - and lets his presence linger as they walk.
Man, it’s weird, he muses, having family. Sure, all of his flesh-and-blood is dead or disappeared. But he’s got a girl who shoves him into cannons, and colleagues who’ll stand behind him when he’s at his worst… and now he’s got his foster father back as well. That won’t be easy to get used to.
Still, though. He thinks he’d like to.