#next up: phoenix and apollo try to parse thru what they know about dumpster man. also apollo suffers some more.

[wardencommanderrodimiss]

Witches, Chapter 4: a samurai, an alleged witch, and a convicted murderer walks into the courtroom. He’s the prosecutor. 

I spent an entire month hung up on this chapter. Take it. Take it. 

[Seelie of Kurain Chapter Masterlist] [ao3]

[Witches Chapter Masterlist] [ao3]

--

“I’m Apollo Justice and I’m fine!”

“I’m – I’m Athena Cykes and I’m fine! — Hey, that does help!”

“And I’m your boss and probably paying your fines for disturbing the peace.”

The question at the ready, Mr Wright what are you doing here, sputters out on Apollo’s tongue. Phoenix looks like someone else entirely, or maybe who he always should have been, like a lawyer, in a blue suit (iconic, almost) and a lighter blue vest, the jacket folded over his arm. He looks good, like there's something alive again behind his eyes. "What's with the suit?" Apollo blurts instead, and he doesn't know if it's rude to point out that he's never seen him look like he belongs anywhere in a courthouse except the defendant's chair. 

But Phoenix laughs awkwardly, rubbing the back of his neck, clearly just as uncomfortable with being here. Apollo tries to imagine how he must feel and can't. How many people must still think him corrupt, a forger and a liar? The place on his lapel where a badge should be is almost conspicuous. "Oh, this? I'm – well, I'm planning on retaking the Bar soon."

"Yes!" Athena crows, jumping up and punching the air. Her wide grin is accentuated by a whoop from Widget, whose simplistic expression matches Athena’s face. "I knew you would!"

"Why now?" Apollo asks. It's been half a year since his name was cleared, and he hadn't seemed exactly eager to put himself back behind the bench then. 

"Let's just say I've been given the feeling that I'm going to be needed back here again."

"That sounds ominous," Apollo says.

"Yeah, I've been told I have that vibe even when I don't mean to," Phoenix says with another awkward laugh. "What I do mean to sound ominous is, I didn't tell you about the prosecutor yesterday because I didn't want to psych you out too far in advance."

Oh. So he's aware of the shitshow happening at that office. "The one who's a convicted murderer?" Apollo asks. The grin still plastered on Athena’s face vanishes.

“You’ve heard of him?” Phoenix asks. “I guess me putting off mentioning that was pointless, then.”

“The detective in charge yesterday warned us,” Apollo says. He doesn’t even have the energy to be mad that once again, Phoenix made the assumption that holding back information was the best call, without consulting Apollo, without taking into account everything else he’s already faced. “That, and something about him and psychology? Can you tell us anything else?”

“Back before,” Phoenix says, with a wave of his hand that implies everything it needs to, “he was very good at extracting confessions from even the most reluctant witnesses. Power of suggestion, manipulation – very tricky, so I’ve heard.”

“And probably scary now,” Apollo says. “Considering – prison inmate.”

“Oh yeah,” Phoenix says. “The rumors about him – they say he’ll cut you down if you talk too much.”

Suddenly, the distance between the benches doesn’t seem like anything at all, and Apollo expects when they step through the doors that he’ll find himself face-to-face with a monster. The courtroom has taken the shape of a gladiatorial arena in his mind, him unarmed, and the prosecution with a blade. “That’s, uh, that’s – some kind of metaphor, right?” he asks. “I knew this was gonna be bad but that’s – right?”

Phoenix winces in sympathy. “I’m not sure it is,” he says, “considering the other rumors. They say he’s a witch.”

“No!” Apollo yelps, and it’s a purely instinctive reaction before the words really sink in, and if he had himself pulled together he would have responded any other way instead. He’s supposed to be the one who Athena can rely on, who Phoenix can trust to be competent at his job, not the one shrieking at shadows and rumors. “You’re joking! Mr Wright, please tell me you’re joking.”

The expression written on his features is uncharacteristically readable, and uncharacteristically solemn. “I’ve never met him – I can’t confirm or deny any rumors yet. But I’d say to be concise and pick your words carefully, just in case.”

“Um, Mr Wright?” Athena is fidgeting again, tapping her earring and searching vainly for something to do with her hands. Apollo almost passes her his file of case information out of pity, even though she has all of it scanned into Widget already. “What – what does it mean if someone’s a witch?” She shifts her weight from side to side, foot to foot, her ponytail swinging as her balance changes. 

“Technically, it refers to a human who has an ongoing contract with a patron for power,” Phoenix explains. “Realistically, it—”

“A patron?” Athena interrupts. Apollo feels an overwhelming pang of sympathy for her. Her first trial as a full-fledged attorney, and she has to deal with this for the prosecution. If last year he had been standing here having a conversation with Mr Gavin about this – well, he’s not sure what he would have done. 

(Who was the prosecutor on that trial, anyway? Apollo has no recollection of a face or a name. He thinks maybe he’s tried to remember before.)

“One of the fae,” Phoenix says. “A fae patron.” Athena’s eyes narrow in something like confusion or suspicion. “Realistically, though, ‘witch’ ends up being a catch-all for anyone vaguely magic; could be one of the fae themselves, or someone with magic from a different source, or a blessing with noticeable effect, or hell, someone who’s totally normal but has the wrong vibe. Hell, I’ve been called a witch plenty of times before.”

“Oh.” Athena’s eyebrows relax a little, but the nervous energy is still obviously coursing through her veins. “So he might not actually be anything at all!”

“We can hope,” Phoenix replies lightly. Athena squints at him, like she doesn’t actually believe he has any hope for the situation. “I’ve not met him, but I’ll be up in the gallery, so we can debrief when it’s over.”

“That would be really helpful,” Apollo says, trying not to sound as surprised as he feels and probably failing, as if he could hide anything from Athena anyway. A debrief, an explanation, answers, would have been just as, if not more, helpful a year ago. Maybe Phoenix is revising his strategies after the past year. 

“You’ve just gotta survive Prosecutor Blackquill, first,” Phoenix says with a small chuckle. “Good luck!”

And he’s gone, leaving the two of them to step into the ring. Athena slaps her fist into her palm. “Alright!” she says. “Let’s do this!” Her new smile looks a little forced, not that Apollo can blame her. But yesterday she threw a grown man about ten feet, so unless Trucy has been hiding the fact that her Magic Panties could swallow a man whole when threatened, Athena is the person that Apollo wants at his side to deal with this prosecutor. 

(Though he really, really hopes it wouldn’t come to a physical fight. They’ll be having several problems if that’s what it comes to.)

“It does not appear the prosecution is ready,” the judge says, frowning at the empty bench. “Is the defense?”

“The defense team is ready, Your Honor!” Apollo calls. Readier than the prosecution, and glad to have a moment to breathe inside the courtroom, too.

“Ah, Mr Justice, it’s good to hear from you again,” the judge says. “It’s been a while, hasn’t it? I’m afraid I don’t recognize the young lady with you, though.”

“I’m Athena Cykes!” she says brightly, bouncing on her heels to be a little taller. “Mr Justice’s junior partner, just out of law school, and ready to go!”

“Excellent, excellent,” the judge replies. “It’s always good to see new faces behind these old benches here. Sometimes I worry about our perspectives becoming stale with the same people arguing cases – which I suppose must include me, for however long I’ve been here – how long have I been here? – so I’ll never protest having someone new to shake up any complacency that’s developed.”

Athena nods several times, a lost, desperate look in her eyes as she glances at Apollo. “He likes to talk,” Apollo whispers. “And go on tangents.”

“Sorry about the wait!” 

They both jump; Athena nearly backhands him in the face, her flinch reflex more like lashing out. Fulbright, loud as ever, plants himself behind the witness stand. “We’ve got to bring Prosecutor Blackquill over from prison, of course, and the scheduling for it hasn’t gotten itself aligned just yet! We’ll try to get the timing right going forward so he’s not late again!”

Again. Not a promising word to hear in this context: how many times is Blackquill due to stand in court? What point is supposed to be proven with this farce? “Ah, I had almost forgotten,” the judge says lightly, like it’s a simple matter of having misplaced his keys or leaving something off the grocery list. “Prosecutor Blackquill is an inmate, isn’t he?”

Apollo considers screaming. 

(“This is not fine!” seems like a good refrain for the situation, would he not blow out Athena’s eardrums and then get held in contempt of court.)

The double doors behind the witness stand swing wide and two guards enter, each at the elbow of a man who can only be Prosecutor Blackquill. If there's one thing Apollo has learned from the last year, it's that appearances can be deceiving through his own human eyes, but even with those lessons he wouldn't hesitate to agree that this man is a witch. He towers above his escorts, even with his head bowed, and his long black hair and black clothes set against his skin make him look even paler and gaunter, like a skeleton, like a ghost, like a shadow of something that once was more substantive. With each step, the shackles around his wrists clink.

Iron, surely. Hopefully. If magic is the only thing that makes him dangerous, then maybe there's a way through this – but the chain between the cuffs is long enough to give some freedom of movement, and he's still physically imposing, enough that Fulbright's assurances of yesterday, that he is here to provide protection, seem hollow.

"That's..." Apollo's mouth dries out before he can get to a second word.

"Prosecutor Blackquill." Athena folds her arms tightly across her chest. "I'm certain."

He's softer-spoken than Apollo expects, his words rigid and carefully articulated and absolutely none of them promising anything but boredom and disdain for every single person in the courtroom, including and perhaps especially, the judge. That the judge makes the opening statement for him is barely even manipulation, but blatant uncooperation and insult, with just a smattering enough of flattery that – well, maybe that is manipulation, of the crudest sort that probably wouldn't work on anyone but the judge. It reminds Apollo of a sharper, crueler version of Athena getting information from Fulbright, quick words that scramble the situation to their advantage.

And Blackquill does have the advantage, right off the bat: having the judge repeat the charges against Mayor Tenma might already be swaying him toward the prosecution's argument, without any evidence yet being argued. Apollo has had this dream before, back when he was in law school, where the prosecution has the upper hand and then threatens to murder him for the sake of proving a point, but Blackquill is the waking nightmare, with a motion of the way one might draw a sword from a sheathe on the hip. His movement is truncated by the chain pulled taut, and even people willing to put a convicted murderer behind the prosecution's bench wouldn't let said man have a sword, but Apollo's heart is still pulsing wildly in his throat. 

Tell me those shackles are made of iron and would stop him casting a spell, if that's what he's trying. 

It takes another surge of willpower for him not to look up into the gallery and find Phoenix, glean from him some indication of whether they're in danger. But his job is to get to the truth, no matter who he's up against, fae or witch or convict, and they need to start this cross-examination before Blackquill can smear the mayor and influence the judge further.

Nightmare remains an apt descriptor, the shadow of the yokai hanging over everything, the charms on Mayor Tenma's head and the rumor that he wishes to release Tenma Taro, the charm in Apollo's pocket and the rowan on his wrist and iron on his finger, Blackquill's laughing dismissal of yokai as figments of the imagination. Nothing signifies his statement as a lie; but wouldn't a witch believe in yokai? Maybe he isn't a witch – or maybe he knows something more than even Phoenix does. Apollo doesn't even have the mental space to ponder that too. The contradictions he finds let him take one step forward and then two back as Blackquill sets him up to solve them and undercut his own arguments. Athena suggests that a monster was the killer and Apollo objects to his own co-counsel. And then Apollo accidentally suggests that there was a monster on the scene that only Jinxie, not Filch or L'Belle, saw.

The worst part is that it could be true. If Jinxie isn't just always imagining yokai – if she has the Sight in some form, but the others don't, then that's an easy contradiction to solve. Tenma Taro could have been in the foyer, easily. But the only evidence they have of its existence could have been faked, and all they have for testimony is the word of a terrified fifteen-year-old girl. 

Blackquill dryly acquiesces to have Filch testify, calling him "the tanuki", and dread wells back up within Apollo's chest. He can't hear animal comparisons as anything innocuous anymore. Anything, anyone, could be fae, a shapeshifter, not just a rabbit hole but a whole warren that he's lost within. 

Filch takes the stand with all the slimy flattery and shifty smiles that Apollo expects. "Y'ain't really asking me if I saw a monster go running by?" he asks. "Scary ol' witch drags me here, and you’re gonna waste yer time to ask about this yokai mumbo-jumbo? I sure don’t believe in that shit!” He pulses red, his hands, tugging at the ends of his spotted scarf. “Didn’t see nothing, and I was guarding the whole time!” Apollo sees red, again; lies, right from the start of the testimony, easier to hone in on.

“Mr Filch,” he says. “Can you repeat that last bit for me – you say that you were watching the foyer the whole time and saw nothing?”

“That’s exactly what I said!” Filch snaps, laughably indignant over the implication that he is a liar. “I ain’t ever—”

But the entire world lights up this time, not just spots on or an aura around Filch, not just an isolated tic again. The courtroom swims in shades of red, twisting around Filch, Blackquill, Athena, the judge – and patterned across the witness stand, the benches, a funhouse mirror distortion of what Apollo should see, a shimmering desert mirage overlaid over everything, paint spilled outside of the dark lines. He claps a hand over his eye and the red recedes, fading down to spots splattered across his vision like flecks of blood. 

The shriek in his new blind spot he thinks must be Athena, but she is on the other side of him – he can see yellow and her red hair swinging – and she yelps too, a different sound. Lowering his hand from his eye makes the red return, shimmering like a distant desert mirage, the sunlight off the sand at the horizon, distorting and filtering everything, including the bird of prey that dives down toward him with wide wings and outstretched talons.

He cracks his head against the wall behind him when he springs back, squinting his one eye closed to return the world to mostly its usual colors. “What the—”

He looks to Athena. Her hands are clenched in fists, a fierce glare leveled on the hawk – he thinks it’s a hawk, though he doesn’t know much of anything about birds beyond the doves that Trucy sometimes conjures out of her Magic Panties – and that is a small assurance that it isn’t something like Vongole, near invisible to everyone else. And Blackquill shakes his head back and laughs, laughs, and the hawk, with one powerful flap of its wings that buffets Apollo’s face with cold stirrings of air, launches itself back into the air. It wheels about near the ceiling and dips down towards Filch, making him squeak and duck his face into the witness stand; with a little shriek that might be a laugh in bird, it rises again and settles on Blackquill’s shoulder.

“Allow me to introduce my trusty cohort, Taka,” he says, reaching up to scratch it under its chin with one finger. Apollo wouldn’t want his hands that close to its beak, or his neck to those talons, but the bird’s piercing yellow eyes blink shut with some level of contentment. 

“And,” he continues, turning his dark eyes back to Apollo, “my darling Taka simply loathes magic tricks like yours, boy.” Apollo can’t blink the red out of his vision, can barely tell that Blackquill’s eyes don’t turn blue. “Stand on your own feet with some evidence instead of letting someone else’s eye do the work for you.”

“But I’m not—” Apollo swallows his objection, and a scream, when Taka launches itself like a bullet back across the courtroom. He throws his arms up in front of his face to make sure it won’t simply try to claw out his eye, and everything that he can see while shielding himself is tinted red again. (Rose-colored glasses, there are not.) “This isn’t a trick! It’s just me!” 

“Apollo, what’s wrong?” Athena has him by the shoulder with one hand, the other swatting at Taka. He fears she will be bitten or clawed, but the bird, or Blackquill, seems to decide they have been harassed enough in this moment and returns to the other bench. “Did it claw you? Are you bleeding?”

He thinks he should be, from the way the world looks, splattered and drowning in red, but there’s no physical pain, nothing on the surface, nothing but a headache brewing. “You know I explained to you yesterday how I can see lies?” Apollo asks. Athena nods. The red across her face doesn’t look like a filtered light, but again like a spray, spattered across her skin, like it has a real physical presence, dripping from her, over her eyes. “Well, Blackquill’s doing something to do it. My vision’s all haywire and I don’t – I don’t understand—”

All he knows is that this probably isn’t supposed to happen, that all of Klavier’s glamours and Phoenix’s other tricks never once interfered, but Blackquill, whatever the hell he is, is stopping Apollo from plainly seeing Truth.

Cold snakes its way up his spine and wraps itself tight. Can he request a quick recess now, race up into the gallery, and ask Phoenix what the hell they’re up against? How someone can stonewall a blessing, bleed the world red like everything or nothing is a lie?

“No animals in the courtroom!” The judge strikes his gavel several times. “Prosecutor Blackquill, if you would please—”

He can’t finish his request (though it’s easy to guess what it would be) owing to Taka taking to wing and perching, delicately, on the judge’s bald head. Apollo winces. Those talons, no matter how light they rest, must still hurt, and the threat of them is a certain kind of paralyzing terror. Blackquill has an iron grasp on the courtroom proceedings and the outcome is not favorable.

“You’d be hard-pressed to get him out of here,” Blackquill says. “But he’s simply having a bit of sport; he won’t harm you save if he’s truly famished.”

The judge’s eyes nearly roll back into his head peering up at the hawk. “Then keep him well fed, I beg of you,” he says. The hawk balances on one leg and scratches its head.

Blackquill: two. Every ordinary rule of the courtroom Apollo thought he knew: zero.

“Back to cross-examinations and looking for contradictions, huh, then,” Athena says. She isn’t looking at Apollo now but leans out over the bench, glaring across at Blackquill like she can bore a hole through his head. He, as he has done for almost all of this entire trial, resolutely ignores her.

“We’re fine,” Apollo says. Athena looks sharply at him. Were he with anyone else, he thinks he did a good job at hiding the trembling threatening to make its way into his voice, but Athena’s super-hearing cuts right through him. “We can do it the old-fashioned way.”

So they do.

A thin, battered consolation, an offering like the universe wants Apollo to keep his sanity but doesn’t really have much energy to devote to it, is that Blackquill’s hawk doesn’t take sides. It chases Filch off the witness stand when his perjury undermines Blackquill’s case, and as the bailiffs race after their fleeing witness, who may have been dismissed by a hawk but not the judge, it loops about the air, keening proudly. Its performance is almost distracting enough that Apollo doesn’t notice Blackquill, still silent after the judge asked him if he had any objections, testing the length of the chain holding his arms together, tugging his wrists apart and making it go taut. 

But Apollo certainly does notice it when Blackquill raises his arms, hands curled into fists, and slams them down on the bench. And Apollo doesn’t need Athena’s ears to hear the chain links clatter, broken, to the bench.

Apollo yelps; Athena is the one to this time smack her head against the wall. For a moment, everything is swallowed up in red, and then it returns clear for a moment. Blackquill’s lips twitch. He lowers his head like a charging bull, makes a motion again as though to draw a sword, and this time he raises his hand the whole way out and up, draws a slash through the air with his finger, and Apollo feels it across his cheek, a slice like a papercut with ice imbedded, and he reaches up and feels for a scratch, feels nothing instead. But the sensation lined up so perfectly with Blackquill’s movements, and the smirk he’s giving Apollo is one smug and knowing. Again, he is surrounded by a red aura that doesn’t touch him but shoots tendrils off into the rest of the courtroom, and again, the others are painted with it. 

Witch, whispers a voice in his skull. Witch or fae, and what’s the worse: that Blackquill is his own monster, or that there’s something out there strong or tricky enough to shackle him, the convict prosecutor, the twisted samurai, in a different kind of chains? 

(Aren’t those shackles supposed to be iron? Iron to stop magic, to prevent defendants and prisoners from trying to kill the attorneys?)

But Blackquill leans against the bench, back to the rest of the court and, over the clamor, says dryly, “I’m not in the habit of cutting down unarmed cowards.” 

He’d like to object, but Apollo is scared enough that he can’t actually protest at being called a coward; certainly he isn’t about to mention that as a convicted murderer, Blackquill probably did cut someone down unarmed, unfair, too soon before their time. (He doesn’t want to be next and he’s not sure what Fulbright plans to do if Blackquill turns truly hostile.)

Jinxie’s testimony is going to make or break the defense of her father: what, exactly, did she first see? She’s visibly shaking when the bailiff escorts her to the witness stand, shuffling a stack of warding charms in her hands like they’re playing cards and she the dealer. She eyes the bailiff, and Fulbright to the side, suspiciously, but when the judge clears his throat she shrieks and sinks down behind the witness stand, slapping another charm to her own forehead for protection from the leader of the demon army or whatever she claims the judge is. Apollo can’t keep track of all of these yokai on top of his usual fae problems.

“Now, now, little scamp,” Blackquill says, folding his arms and giving an amused chuckle that doesn’t make him look any less like a demon, either. “Let’s see your face, and I presume you must know why you are here.”

Jinxie raises herself up slowly so that her chin is level with the top of the stand. "Bags," she says.

"Bags – ah, the tanuki." Blackquill's attempt at figuring out what Jinxie means is quicker than Apollo's would be. "He'll be captured again shortly, I am sure, but yes, you are here to corroborate his testimony."

Jinxie shakes her head and stands up straighter, her palms flat on the stand, her shoulders squared. She looks that much braver even staring down Blackquill. "No, your bags," she says. "The ones under your eyes. You must have trouble sleeping." She steps away from the stand and approaches the prosecution's bench – Apollo wants to lunge forward and pull her back away – holding out one of her paper charms. "Here. This will keep Azukiarai away."

Blackquill's eyebrows disappear beneath his messy bangs. "The yokai that washes azuki beans?"

Of course the man pretending to be a samurai would know right off the bat which yokai Jinxie is referencing. "Yes," she says, stretching her arm out further. "It's a very distracting sound. He keeps people awake at night a lot, but if you stick this on your forehead you won't hear him anymore."

Blackquill blinks. "Well," he says stiffly. Then he slowly reaches out and pulls the slip of paper out of Jinxie's fingers. "W-well. Thank you."

Satisfied, Jinxie returns to the witness stand. Athena's eyes, flickering red like Jinxie is now, are darting between her and Blackquill and her incredulous gaze next turns to Apollo. "Huh," she says. "Prosecutor Blackquill got more than he bargained for."

"Mm." As Apollo watches, Blackquill turns the charm over in his fingers and then slips it into his pocket. When he looks up he meets Apollo's eyes. His glare could split rock. Apollo turns his attention back to Jinxie, hoping that Blackquill can understand the message: I didn't see anything.

Then Jinxie says that the Fox Chamber was positively filled with yokai and Apollo has other things to worry about, like his case, and the fact that what Jinxie is saying makes no sense with it, and that Blackquill is ready to throw her off the stand right from the start. Athena next to him is scrambling to keep up with Jinxie, tapping out inputs on Widget's projected screen, pulling up images of the yokai she mentions and piling them around the scan of the crime scene. "Your Honor!" she calls, lifting her head and without her eyes on it continuing to plug away at her screen. "I think her memory is simply confused by fear! But I should be able to help set her mind at ease with a quick therapy session – with your permission, of course."

"Are you sure about this?" Apollo asks. Her definition of therapy, in the middle of a trial, aside, there's an ever-growing part of him afraid of what they'll find if they keep digging. And they have to, for the sake of the truth, for the sake of their client, they have to, but anxiety knots itself up tighter and tighter in his chest. He doesn't have a plan for if they find out the yokai are real. He doesn't have a plan for if they find out they're nothing but a figment of Jinxie's imagination, either. He doesn't have a plan, period, and that's nothing new, but he wishes that it would change one of these days.

"Absolutely!" Athena's grin is big and white and the most confidence he's seen from her the entire morning, enough confidence and certainty to set him half at ease despite himself. "I know how to do this."

"I think that's an excellent idea, Ms Cykes," the judge says. "Any objections, Prosecutor Blackquill?"

Blackquill is the black eye in the center of a hurricane of red, Apollo's scrambled vision that he’s soldiering on through because he's going to look like an idiot if he goes through this entire trial squinting one eye shut, and Apollo waits for his sharp objection, waits for the hawk to strike at Athena this time. Magic tricks – Athena's said nothing to the court about her ears, the integral part that hearing emotions plays in her psychological approach, but if Blackquill noticed Apollo right from the outset then shouldn't he know there is something about Athena, as well? If he warped Apollo's perspective, wouldn't let him get away with using that blessing, then what leeway will he grant Athena to do anything when she might pull out a trick too?

But he isn't even staring straight at Athena; his eyes are fixed somewhere past her, half vacant, and when he speaks each word is a labored, pained drawl. "It makes no difference to me." If Apollo had Athena's ears, her ability to pick up the subtlest emotions, what would he hear from Blackquill? All he sees is red, everywhere, too much to know if it is or isn't a lie. Maybe her ability isn't magic; maybe it is just naturally good hearing, honed through the years, the exceptional edge of mundane. Maybe there's nothing about her that Blackquill can See to object to. "Though I doubt we shall find anything useful from it."

"Oh, you'll see," Athena mutters darkly. "I'll show you!" She swipes aside the display and pulls up a new screen that shows Jinxie's testimony and some simplistic emoticon-esque faces in the corners. The distressed-looking blue face is pulsing out of control, causing a pained buzzing noise to emanate from Widget. "So what I think is happening," she says, "is Jinxie's fear – it's causing this overflow error we're getting, basically – has her reimagining ordinary objects as yokai in her mind." She taps the new screen several times to produce a flat mock-up of the crime scene, covered in the yokai Jinxie named, burying the bodies and most of the furniture. The screens cut a clear path through Apollo’s red vision and he’s grateful for it, whether it’s just by chance or Blackquill is granting him a reprieve to follow along with Athena’s tech.

"You don't think she saw any yokai?" Apollo asks.

Athena's gloved fingers twitch over the display. "You do?" she asks.

"I don't know," he admits. She fixes her attention on him fully now, raising her eyebrows. "It doesn't seem like a possibility we can entirely discount to say that she's – what, hallucinating?" Athena nods. He should tell her about Kristoph, watching him break down on the witness stand, watching the human flake off of him and leave madness and fae behind. She wouldn't be so able dismiss the thought of monsters then. 

"We won't get anywhere trying to straddle the line and say maybe either way," Athena says. "We’ve gotta commit to something – look, Mr Wright said he's never seen a yokai, right? Even though he’s been there several times. What are the odds that Jinxie would see a bunch of them all in the same place at the same time?”

“You have a point.” Are yokai pack animals? Are they territorial? Are these ridiculous questions to be asking of creatures that might not even be real?

“We’ll adjust course if we glean something new,” Athena says. “For now let’s start with the yokai Jinxie seems most afraid of.” She pushes the projected screens to either side of her so that she can lean over the bench and better make eye contact with Jinxie. “Jinxie,” she says, her voice raised, “can you tell us a little about the cat yokai on the ring of fire?” 

Apollo leans back to look past Athena to her mockup of the yokai-infested scene. The cat in question hovers near the ceiling, over where the table and the mayor’s body would be. “That’s a kasha,” Jinxie says. “They steal the bodies of the recently deceased! It was there for the alderman!” She speaks now with the same fervor as when she and Trucy were chattering about wrestling, her shyness abandoned, but the wild look in her eyes is of terror and not excitement. 

“That would actually make sense,” Apollo says. 

Athena frowns. “It does,” she says. “That’s exactly how it works, though; that her mind is filling in something that makes sense, to her, in place of the reality. Now.” She frowns and taps her earring, sending the crescent moon swinging back and forth. “If she’s mistaking something for a kasha, what do you suppose it could be?”

Reaching again toward the image of the crime scene, she has barely started to enlarge it before Apollo thinks he has something. “Jinxie!” he calls. “Do you think the kasha you saw could have been the light fixture here?” He gestures to the image. Jinxie’s eyes go wide. “It’s circular, with the flame design—”

“Oh?” She flinches, several of the charms slipping from her fingers and drifting to the floor. “Oh! The – the light!” For a moment more she looks dazed, and then her shoulders square toward Athena, though her voice drops to a mumble. “The light.”

“That sounds promising,” Athena says quietly. Then, louder, “What about this wall-like monster on the side?”

“Nurikabe!” Jinxie’s confident posture slumps forward, her arms around herself, protecting herself, again, her warding charms clutched tight over her heart. “It’s a wall monster! It’ll block you or lead you astray!” 

“It’s a folding screen right there, see?” Apollo points to the left side of the crime scene, the folding screen with foxes detailed on it. Jinxie’s eyes widen again. She doesn’t react like Apollo expects someone being told they’re seeing things would; maybe she knows or expected, in some sense already, and needed someone to help her pick through it. He hopes that she isn’t being bowled over by Athena’s interpretation of the situation, that if she doesn’t agree she’ll stand up for herself. 

He’s reassured, a little, that Athena might be right, of Jinxie’s grasp of the situation, when as they piece together the rest of the “yokai”, she pushes back about the raccoon-dog. “It wasn’t just one,” Jinxie says, and Athena begins immediately updating Widget’s display. “There were two tanuki.”

“Weren’t there two statues?” Apollo asks.

“No, one was broken,” Athena says, spinning the angle of the scene recreation about to show the doors and swiping it over in front of Apollo. “There was just the one intact.” Her frown deepens and her eyes narrow. “Was Filch there? Could he have been there?”

“The statue might’ve been broken after Jinxie left,” Apollo says. If they’re pursuing Athena’s psychological route, then what she said is right and they should commit to the mundane explanation, so that’s what he’s going to do.

“The Fox Chamber doors are very heavy,” Jinxie says. “And if you’re not careful they’ll bang up the walls behind them.”

“Filch has been acting very suspicious, though,” Athena says. “And he already looks a bit like a raccoon, so it wouldn’t be a stretch for Jinxie there to be remembering him as one.”

“Wait,” Apollo says. “You aren’t saying that Filch is a shapeshifter and was on the scene as a tanuki, just that Jinxie was imagining him as one—?”

“Yeah,” Athena says. “That seems more likely of the two, doesn’t it, than him actually turning into one?”

Oh. So she was looking at it from the mundane perspective anyway. Apollo’s head starts to spin. They’ll have to ask Phoenix about Filch, too, and the matter of his precise level of humanity. He should have been writing down what he needs to ask Phoenix. He’s not sure he’ll be able to recall most of the thoughts he’s having in the middle of this Blackquill-induced, migraine-inducing storm.

“It doesn’t matter,” Blackquill says. He looks bored; Athena might be the lawyer in this trial who is high-school aged, but Blackquill has all of a high schooler’s disdain for a boring class, his elbows on the bench, head slumped over and chin propped up on his fists, eyebrows raised and eyes half-closed. At least he’s bothering to face them this time. Taka has relocated back to the judge’s head.

Athena slams her palm down on the bench. Every time she does that, the proximity of the sound is jarring, because for all that Trucy acted almost as a lawyer, she never picked up her father’s mannerisms, and Apollo is used to being the only one at this bench doing the hitting. “What doesn’t matter?” she asks, her voice clipped and sharp on every word. 

“Everything you’re doing,” Blackquill replies. His mouth curls at one side. “But if you must know your specific faults for today, now, surely it did not slip past those ears of yours that our shifty tanuki does have an alibi for the time of the murder.”

“Oh.” Athena visibly deflates.

“He was with Mr L’Belle, remember?” Apollo says. Truth be told, the matter had slipped his mind as well, with all the talk of tanukis, and he wonders if it’s possible that Blackquill set them up to trip over that matter by emphasizing that particular moniker for the man. Like no matter where they run, they’ll just stumble into traps that Blackquill has laid elsewhere on the road. 

“And furthermore,” Blackquill continues, now fully grinning, “as you’ve wasted this time deciding whether what the little scamp saw is or isn’t real, I suppose even you must have realized by now that she has, neither as real nor hallucination, named Tenma Taro as present in that room.”

And it’s Apollo, this time, feeling the ground plummeting from beneath his feet. “Uh, Jinxie?” he says. “So, now that we cleared up the other yokai, do you remember now if Tenma Taro was also there?”

Jinxie blanches. Her answer is clear from that alone, that she knows what the better answer for her father’s sake is, but can’t truthfully speak to it. “No,” she says. “I didn’t see any Tenma Taro in the Fox Chamber.”

And Blackquill laughs, and it doesn’t sound like Kristoph’s laugh, like spiders down the back of his neck, but it’s still ice in the air, something dark and wicked coursing through the echo. Apollo slumps onto the bench. Fine, he thinks, fine fine fine, so the entire presumption of our case has fallen apart, fine, fine—

“Apollo!” Athena smacks not just her hand but her entire wrist – that must hurt – down on the bench next to him. He jumps, snapping his head back up and staring at her. Widget around her neck has turned red with fury; so have the backgrounds of its screens. It isn’t just his twisted vision making them that color. “We’re not sunk yet! There’s still some other discord in Jinxie’s voice.”

“What’s that mean?”

“She still hasn’t remembered everything! We need to hear her testimony again! What happened when she first went into the Fox Chamber!”

But what Jinxie remembers, the key she took from the chamber, just sinks them further. It leaves Athena dragged under by the lifeline she tried to toss to their case, leaves her snarling her frustrations wordlessly, loud enough that even the judge remarks on it, and Apollo only feels more sympathy for her. He didn’t start on a case like this; when his back was against the wall, it was because he was trying to duck out of the way of the barbs that Phoenix and Kristoph were throwing at each other. It never felt like this in this way, this hopeless to their client with the prosecution just chuckling at their plight. 

(He really can’t remember the prosecutor on that case.)

“Athena, are you all right?”

“No!” Her face twists in a snarl, her hands curl to fists, but there are tears in her eyes she can’t blink away. “I know Mayor Tenma is innocent, but nothing we say helps! We don’t have enough to make them listen!”

Blackquill watches them silently for a few moments, out of his heavy-lidded eyes, and what he’s thinking Apollo couldn’t begin to guess. He can’t even be certain that it would be disdain. “Cykes-dono,” he says curtly, still nothing more behind his eyes than a corpse. “Allow me to put you out of your misery.”

“Erm.” She lifts her ponytail away from her neck and fans her skin. Her mouth twists. Blackquill’s words are a threat, but his tone – some of the least inflection Apollo has heard from him – isn’t, and with her ears if there’s more to ponder, she must be pondering it. “No thank you?”

That smug smirk crawls its way back onto Blackquill’s lips, and the red that spins throughout the courtroom, the background radiation of today’s trial, forces its way back to the foreground, twisting so brightly and so quickly that Apollo thinks he might be sick. He closes his eyes to the liar’s red bleeding into the air and hears chains clink, hope that movement isn’t a precursor to another attack of paper-sharp wind. “Abandon your client and your misplaced faith in him,” Blackquill says. “Let the relief of a clear head and clean conscience finally greet you. The man before you is nothing more than a murderer, no trace of a withered blackened soul left to save. Give it up. Let it go. This will make the inevitable guilty verdict far easier to accept.”

He’s not even trying to do his job; he’s trying to win by convincing the defense to give up on their jobs. “Don’t listen to him,” Apollo says. His eyelids are heavy, hard to blink open. Everything feels weighted. “He’s just twisted.”

Just is a bit of an understatement, and even more of one when he sees that Athena’s determination, her confidence, has fallen away, replaced by a perplexed daze, her head frozen tilted to the side. Is Blackquill able to deliberately mess with her ears, or is she just picking up on the undertones anyone else would give her, trying to psychoanalyze the prosecution, understand what the hell is happening down that dark and winding road. “Athena?”

“I’m – I’m fine!” She shakes her head wildly, her hair flying, trying to shake herself out of a stupor. “Just – just could use a lap around the courthouse. I’ll be back!” 

Apollo slams his fist on the bench. “Objection!”

-

The verdict isn’t declared, not today, but they don’t get a chance to talk to their client in the lobby, immediately whisked away by officers and bailiffs as he is for claiming to be Tenma Taro possessing Mayor Tenma; and so Apollo, fleeing the courtroom as quickly as he can in the hopes that his vision stops tormenting him, still feels that they lost today.