#so when did phoenix have the chance to meet fulbright?

[ivy-saurs]

it’s so weird seeing phoenix saying stuff like “detective fulbright is being unusually cooperative” “i guess i was wrong about you, detective…” and acting like he knows him so well because i thought this was his first time meeting fulbright

[hotel-japanifornia]

HJ’s Headcanon Masterpost

Hi guys, it’s me. I decided to create a comprehensive masterpost of all the headcanons that I’ve posted so far in chronological order. I just thought it’d be a good way of organizing things. So, here we are!:

Phoenix got his attorney badge presenting habits from Mia who in turn got it from Diego who got it from Grossberg and so forth.

Miles Edgeworth learned anti stalking techniques (where you learn a person’s routine to avoid them) after AAI2 in order to counter Oldbag’s stalking. This is why Oldbag hasn’t appeared since Turnabout Ablaze.

Maya Fey enjoys making bad puns, a lot.

While most of the main cast is on either Team Ladder and Team Stepladder, Simon is an outlier as he is on neither side of the debate. That doesn’t mean that he doesn’t enjoy trolling members of one side by arguing the opposite however (i.e. telling a member of Team Ladder that it is actually a stepladder and vice versa).

After Patricia Roland was arrested for the murder of Horace Knightley and subsequently convicted, the animal therapy program she ran was still kept around. Thus, when Simon Blackquill was convicted for the murder of Metis Cykes, he was assigned a young Taka. In a sense, Taka was initially his assigned animal, but later became his closest companion over the 7 years that would follow. When he got out of prison, Blackquill managed to retain custody of Taka through the prison warden who wanted to make amends for his false conviction.

Mia Fey once saw someone riding a motorcycle and thought they looked cool. So, once she got the chance, she learned how to ride one and got one of her own. Once she passed on, Maya ended up having the motorcycle under her ownership (somehow). She never learned how to ride it, unlike her sister, but she still takes great care of it. This headcanon comes from a piece of concept art of young Mia by the way.

Maggey and Gumshoe started dating shortly after I-1. They took a few years to get married due to Gumshoe’s low salary and Maggey’s constantly changing jobs, but they were really happy together.

Bobby Fulbright was one of the police officers who worked under Detective Gumshoe. Gumshoe was endeared to the younger man’s enthusiasm and passion for justice and the two eventually became close friends. Fulbright was even the first person to congratulate Gumshoe when he made the news of his engagement to Maggey public. When Gumshoe heard that Bobby was killed and had been impersonated by an international spy, he was absolutely devastated.

When Maya said that she was getting used to having her own place in the city in 1-2, she really did mean she had her own apartment. She wanted to be closer to Mia, so Mia helped her find a relatively cheap place that was reasonably close to her. She stayed in it for the trilogy but sold it when she had to go back to Kurain to train to become the Master.

Desiree was the one who proposed to Ron.

At some unknown point after 3-5 but before the events of AJ, Maya legally adopted Pearl. She also offered Pearl the ability to be the heir to the Master of the Kurain Channeling Technique if something was to happen to her, but Pearl politely declined, saying that she was happier being a regular spirit medium.

After 3-5, Maya and Edgeworth started meeting up frequently to watch the Steel Samurai together. They formed a bond during that time and had talks about the show, the extended universe, and eventually their own personal lives. They sometimes brought Pearl, Nick, and even Trucy along to watch but it was mostly just the two of them. Sometime after SOJ, they roped Simon into watching the Steel Samurai with them and found out that the Steel Samurai was a huge obsession of his before he went to jail. 

Trucy considers Maya to be a mother-like figure and often refers to her as “Mommy”. Maya was embarrassed by the nickname when she first met Trucy, but over time, grew to become comfortable with the young magician calling her that despite her and Phoenix not being together. This is because Maya learned from Phoenix that Trucy had lost her mother at an early age and she didn’t want Trucy to grow up without a mother figure like she did. As such, Maya talked to Trucy about the more feminine matters that Phoenix wouldn’t be so willing to talk about and dotes on her the same way she dotes on Pearl.

Like Maya, Mia had a large appetite. Although she tried to tone it down during her lawyer days, she could easily eat as much as her little sister if not more so.

Despite growing up in a mountain village and living a rather sheltered life, Maya is surprisingly good at flirting with people.

(shipping hc, skip if you don’t ship) Maya only started developing feelings for Phoenix around Reunion, and Turnabout. She really appreciated his will to stand by her during 1-2 even when other people had abandoned her, but until the murder in Kurain, she had only seen him as a friend.It was during the case in Kurain that she saw how loyal Phoenix was to her. Even when she truly believed she killed someone to the point that she begged Phoenix to just leave her behind to face the guilty verdict, Phoenix still stayed loyal to her and refused to back down from proving her innocence. Because of that, Maya gained some newfound respect for the young lawyer and started to have certain feelings for him.

[wardencommanderrodimiss]

Witches, Chapter 3: the difference between yokai and the fae is like the difference between Pokemon and Ultra Beasts which is “fuck if I know but now I’m afraid that I’m spending too long hung up on the ‘what’s a yokai’ point because unlike Ultra Beasts, yokai are not going to be relevant to the plot moving forward beyond this case”

We’ll call it worldbuilding, and setting the atmosphere of “there is even more than what we know beyond the scope of our main characters,” we’ll go with that.

[Seelie of Kurain Chapter Masterlist] [ao3]

[Witches Chapter Masterlist] [ao3]

Ms Athena Cykes, Attorney-at-Law, throws a policeman into Apollo like she’s an Olympic athlete throwing a hammer, and once she’s helped Apollo back off the ground and he’s introduced himself as her coworker – making her zero for two on decent introductions – she grabs him by the arm and makes him sprint along with her away from the scene of her crime. “Maybe he’ll just, y’know, have forgotten that happened,” she says, releasing Apollo halfway up the hill to the manor and letting him gasp for breath. “Just a little bit of head trauma to smooth things over?” She frowns, hanging her head slightly, her eyes turning toward the ground. “I didn’t mean to do that. It’s a reflex I have if someone grabs me suddenly.”

“I’ll remember to not do that,” Apollo says, his hands on his knees, trying and failing to recall the last time he ever sprinted uphill, “but I think that’s still a… problem.” Of felony level, or maybe misdemeanor if she’s lucky and the prosecution is charitable to the reflex argument.

“Maybe we can say a yokai did it,” Athena says. “Since there’s so many around anyway and all the locals are talking about that.”

“Yeah, our client’s daughter has already mistaken me for a red-horned demon,” Apollo says. “You might be next to get the yokai treatment.”

Athena tilts her head to the side and stares at him. Her eyes are blue, blue enough that Apollo would have to concentrate to see if they change color. “I mean, your horns aren’t red,” she says, “but I can see where it’s coming from.”

Sometimes Apollo wonders why he bothers. “But we’ve got our client’s problem to sort out first,” Athena says brightly, and Apollo pushes himself back upright. “Did you meet him? Gimme the details, rápido!”

He fills her in on his conversation with Mayor Tenma and all of the village folklore that he’s heard; she shows him a one-sheet special edition of the village newspaper, just printed, displaying a photograph of something resembling Tenma Taro flying through the air. “You don’t think it’s actually a supernatural murder case, do you?” she asks.

“I…” Apollo finds it easier to stare at the manor than to meet Athena’s eyes. “I – of course not!”

Athena raises an eyebrow.

In the manor foyer, they meet the caretaker, a petty pickpocket who tries to steal Apollo’s bracelet and is watching wrestling, or would be if the match hadn’t been postponed after the Amazing Nine-Tails’ failed to show up. They don’t get a chance to ask the caretaker what he saw; Athena chases him off by yelling when he makes a very suspicious remark about their wallets. And she complained about his Chords of Steel.

At the crime scene, he expects to see Ema, powdering the scene with Snackoos and her search for fingerprints, at home amidst the weirdness of the scene – but the familiar lab coat is nowhere in sight. No one is, when they cast their first look around the room, Athena yelping in horror at the feathers and bloody footprints, but before they have any time to investigate, they are ambushed by a man in a blinding white suit. After about a minute of circular arguing and a threat to arrest them, he finally introduces himself as “Detective Bobby Fulbright, champion of our good citizens and defender of justice!”

Yep, he wishes it was Ema here. Ema would just let them into the crime scene, but Athena has to talk circles around Fulbright to get him to concede. And it isn’t that Fulbright is particularly difficult to tie up in knots, either – it’s just another hassle that Apollo isn’t used to and didn’t expect. (He shouldn’t have expected to find Ema on every ridiculous case he takes, but there had seemed a precedent.)

The door in the back of the Fox Chamber is the entrance to the so-called Forbidden Chamber, where Tenma Taro is said to be sealed away. There’s a heavy lock with no keyhole sealing the doors tight, and though he remembers Jinxie mentioning a warding charm on the door, Apollo sees nothing of the sort in the room. Besides one overturned chair, there doesn’t seem to have been a struggle. Beneath the chair lies a piece of bloodied cloth, which they can only investigate when Athena has lied to Fulbright to get him out of the room. “Hey, detective, did you hear?” she calls across the room, and she had barely let Apollo in on her plan before launching into it, but that question coupled with that grin of hers says everything Apollo needs to know. “Down on Yokai Lane, there was a red-horned demon threatening a teenage girl!”

There’s no way he’s going to believe—

“Why didn’t you say something sooner? In justice we trust!”

He rushes from the room, and Athena turns her sharp smug grin on Apollo. “That was… kinda easy, actually.” She isn’t frightening – that isn’t the right word – but she’s clever and clearly has no reservations about picking at a weakness she sees, and she sees Fulbright’s. No wonder Phoenix hired her. “Now we can really investigate!”

“Unless he comes back and arrests me for being a demon,” Apollo says. “Thanks a lot for that, by the way, tossing me under the bus there.”

“¡De nada!”

While they move the chair and scramble to otherwise search the scene, tugging again on the Forbidden Chamber doors, opening the window, and Athena kneeling and nearly sticking her head beneath the coffee table, she explains Widget, the strange little electronic she wears around her neck. Apollo had spotted its screen changing colors and making faces and hadn’t thought much more of it. Apparently it’s a high-tech mood ring that sometimes just shouts things, in combination with a computer, that can also take pictures, and she scans in a three-dimensional visualization of the crime scene “just in case. You never know what comes in handy, and Fulbright seems like a bit of a dunce so who knows if or when we’ll get a crime scene photo.”

“It’s really just all advanced technology?” Apollo asks. “That it can vocalize your mood?”

“What else?” the robotic voice chirps, and Athena nods and continues, “What do you think I’m gonna tell you? That it’s magic?”

She doesn’t plainly laugh at him, but she still looks amused, and Apollo swallows what little pride he has left after a year at the Wright Anything Agency and says, “Uh, maybe?”

“Mr Wright asked the same thing, actually,” she says. “If it was magic, or a merger of magic and tech. I guess it makes sense you’d ask the same! You do work together, after all!”

Once, Apollo would have taken it as a compliment to be compared to Phoenix Wright. He doesn’t feel that charitable now. “But on the subject of magic – you know that Mr Wright is…”

How to describe Mr Wright, anyway? He’s enough of an enigma personally, without the fae factor. And then – fae-adjacent is how Klavier describes him, the riddle of a man who wasn’t stolen as a child, never made a deal, never had it in their blood, and still ended up marked by the handprints of half a dozen fae. They’re petty and scary and selfish; the curses make sense. The whole package?

“Oh, the thing with his eyes?” Athena asks. “Where he can, like, see ghosts and stuff?”

“Sort of,” Apollo says. “Actually not really, but you’ve got the overall spirit of it.” She squats down and picks up one of the feathers, spinning it in her fingers and frowning. “Wait – he just – showed you that his eyes change color and you accepted what he said about why that happens?”

“Well, yeah,” Athena says. She sets the feather down and her mouth twists disgustedly at the blood soaked and dried into the carpet. “I could hear that he’s sincere, everything he said about magic. And now we have a giant mutant bird or a monster committing murder, so.”

“I’d personally consider a giant mutant bird to be a monster.”

Athena hears Fulbright returning before Apollo does and they feign innocence, like they’ve just been examining the alderman’s old wrestling trophies all this time. Apollo almost feels bad for the detective, having been sent on a futile demon-hunt – he doesn’t appear to have connected Apollo to Athena’s words and Apollo is infinitely grateful for it – and arriving back only for Athena to manipulate him into giving up information again. This time, he’s apparently been so confused by it all that he unprompted offers them a warning about the prosecution.

If they were fae, or a witch, fine. If the warning was that there was just some sort of magic, uncertain in origin but obviously present – fine. Fine. (Obviously not fine, but liveable. The kind of thing he’s faced before.)

“A convicted – are you joking?”

Athena winces and claps a hand to the ear that is closer to Apollo. Fulbright isn’t fazed by his scream. “Not at all! By order of the Chief Prosecutor himself, so there’s not much room to question it!”

(Apparently Phoenix’s counterpart over at the Prosecutors Office is as batshit as he is. Wait, isn’t that Edgeworth? Apollo has met him and didn’t think—)

“That’s completely nuts!” Apollo says. He tries to swallow the shout but it still comes out as an indignant squawk. Athena wisely has not removed her hand from her ear and takes a step away. “What justification – even the Chief Prosecutor – a convicted killer—”

(In his head he is already composing a text to Klavier that consists only of question marks. Good fucking luck to Klavier to figure out what he’s referring to.)

“Killer he might be, but he’s also a master of psychology. Who better for the job of proving to everyone that yokai are nothing but figments of the imagination, and no fake creature committed this murder?”

Apollo imagines what Ema would have to say about this: the dead-eyed look on her face, the “maybe it will still be better than working with the fop,” and probably not nearly such a staunch conviction that it couldn’t have been magic. They saw Kristoph collapse together, found Trucy’s mother’s mitamah, and met Gourdy. She knows.

“This prosecutor,” Athena says softly, all her bravado and enthusiasm of barely two minutes ago gone. “His name wouldn’t happen to be Blackquill, would it?”

“That he would be!” Fulbright says, with far too much cheer for the fact that they are discussing the way the Prosecutors Office has been twisted inside and out. “Simon Blackquill. So you have heard of him?”

“Yeah,” Athena mumbles, rubbing her arm like a sudden chill has come over her. “You could say that.”

Maybe when she was studying psychology she looked up prosecutors of her profession, but that doesn’t entirely account for the haunted look on her face, and the way Apollo feels just that much colder, too.

-

“I still wish I had gotten to try on the Amazing Nine-Tails’ mask,” Athena says. “I want to see what kind of magic powers it gives you!”

“That’s probably just a story,” Apollo says. Probably. “And you shouldn’t go around sticking your head in the evidence, anyway.”

The breeze has a bite to it and the shadows are long by the time they make it back to the office. Their investigation found them plenty more clues, none of which piece together, and more testimony leading to dead ends. The manor caretaker, Filch, is lying about something; the mayor’s aide, L’Belle, is lying about even more, brimming with red and an apparent preoccupation with Tenma Taro; and the mayor himself tried to lie and pretend he wasn’t being blackmailed into pushing for the municipal merger. And Apollo doesn’t have Trucy, Ema, and Klavier to count on. He has Athena to count on, as much as he can when she is stepping behind the bench as a barred lawyer for the first time, and they have whatever the hell is happening on the prosecution’s side to battle against.

“I bet Fulbright took it away so that he can get magic powers from it,” Athena says.

“I bet Fulbright took it because he’s the detective in charge of the scene and it might have something to do with the murder.”

“Apollo,” Athena says with a whine. “You are no fun.”

“I’m not supposed to be fun! We’re supposed to be solving a crime!”

She and Trucy would enjoy working together. The trouble is whether anyone would actually get defended without someone to keep them pointed at the goal.

The office door is unlocked as always, but the lights are on and Phoenix, in jeans and a t-shirt and no shoes, is lying upside-down with his legs hooked over the back of the couch and his head hanging off the side, on the phone. Apparently he has given up all concerns on making a good first couple impressions on Athena as her boss in a formal capacity. This doesn’t surprise Apollo. That he complains about having back pain and then continues to sit like this doesn’t surprise Apollo either.

“Yeah,” Phoenix says, his eyes turning toward the two of them and then back to the ceiling. “I know, but you know I’m very good at keeping secrets. Which – no, that’s not my pitch to get security clearance, that’s my pitch for you to just tell me even though I don’t have clearance t—” He sits up slowly, laboriously, and saying nothing, obviously being chewed out by whoever is on the other end of the line. “I know, I know. I get it. I’m just telling you that solving a cold case where I’m not allowed to know much more than the defendant’s name is not going to be a cakewalk.” Rubbing a hand over his eyes, he adds, “But the kids are back and don’t look happy, so I think I should deal with that first. – Uh-huh, yeah. We’ll see. Talk to you tomorrow.”

The phone cracks against the coffee table when he tosses it down. Athena winces. “Hey, Apollo,” Phoenix says lightly. “Athena. I finally caught a cab and got your luggage home.”

“I, uh.” She stands with her shoulders slumped for barely a moment before she pops back up, hands on her hips. “Sorry? Sorry that I can’t lie and say I’m sorry for leaving because I’m not. I’ve never gotten to help with an investigation before, and I got to see a crime scene with all the blood” – why does she sound excited about that? – “and everything!”

“Yeah, I won’t begrudge you that.” Is that sarcastic, or bitter, or does he actually mean it? Apollo can’t tell, still can’t read the man unless he lets him, and right now, Phoenix isn’t letting him through. “Good to get field experience. How’s the case coming?”

“You guessed right,” Apollo says. “Unhappily. If our client isn’t the killer, a giant bird yokai might be, and I have no idea how we are going to indict that.”

“Have you actually seen that yokai, or just some apparent evidence of yokai?” Phoenix asks. Athena taps her necklace and it projects a holographic screen with her crime scene scan. She points out the feathers and bloody footprints with real enthusiasm. Phoenix sits forward, a deep frown sending creases up his forehead. “So it might be a yokai, and it might be someone trying to trick you into thinking it’s a yokai.”

“That’s what the detective believes,” Apollo says. “That monsters aren’t real.”

“There’s also this photograph!” Athena says, shoving the newspaper under Phoenix’s nose, through the projected screen. “Someone saw it flying!”

“Did either of you see that?” he asks, accepting it from her and quickly scanning the front page. “Or anything yokai-like?”

“Trucy’s friend Jinxie who found the body said she saw it fleeing the room,” Apollo says. “And she and Trucy and I all saw -- I think it was probably a person in a Tenma Taro costume? Way back before the murder, during the festival. The village people say that it can steal your soul if it looks you in the eye.”

“That’s bullshit,” Phoenix says, holding up one finger. “I obviously don’t know much about souls” – the frown has returned to his face, his tired eyes turning up to Apollo – “but I’m pretty damn sure it’s not that easy.”

“I’d hoped as much,” Apollo says. Athena now has her head cocked, like an owl trying to listen intently for its prey, the entire year that she hasn’t been around. “Have you ever been to Nine-Tails Vale, Mr Wright? Have you ever seen a yokai?”

“I’ve gone up a few times with Trucy.” He opens up the newspaper but turns it over again too fast to have actually read anything. “Wanted to make sure it was safe for her and Jinxie to be hanging around there, so I’ve looked around and never seen anything – maybe they’re on a different wavelength than fae things.” He grins and his eyes flash blue. “Or maybe they’re just the stories that my grandparents leveraged to threaten me into going to bed.” Athena laughs and Phoenix raises an eyebrow. “No? Neither of you had that experience?”

Athena shrugs. Apollo shakes his head. (Dhurke didn’t need to use boogeymen to keep Apollo and Nahyuta in line. The regime’s very real soldiers were more than enough of a danger to keep them close. Datz was the one with outlandish stories, but those never had a moral or purpose, and Nahyuta liked them because there was absolutely no way he could see what was coming next.)

“So we’re still where we started, not knowing what’s real and what isn’t,” Apollo says. What must Athena think, them talking so seriously about yokai? And Apollo had tried to tell her earlier this afternoon that he didn’t believe Tenma Taro is the killer. “Couldn’t some of the yokai be fae creatures? There’s—” He remembers, a bolt from the blue, one of the puzzles that Trucy dumped on his head with no forewarning. “Like, kitsunes. Isn’t that—”

Phoenix sighs for a very long time. “Yeah. If we try to create taxonomic classifications we’re gonna be here all night. Words don’t actually mean anything, and in my head I put them more on the fae side, shapeshifters of any sort, even kitsunes and tanuki and—”

“Tanuki!” Athena grabs Apollo’s arm. “That’s it, Apollo! The caretaker, Mr Filch – he looks like a tanuki, and in the Fox Chamber there were those statues—” She releases him to turn Widget’s projection of the scene toward the door, the statues, one broken, flanking both sides. “That’s got to mean something! I’ve put it together! I’m connecting the dots!”

“I don’t think you are,” Apollo says.

“I’m connecting them!”

“Hey.” Phoenix shrugs. “Shooting in the dark sometimes gets me somewhere. Don’t bank on it, but you never know.” Standing, he puts his back to them and heads for a bookshelf. “You’ve got some evidence and witness testimony, at least?”

“And no idea how it fits together,” Apollo says, and then, with Athena looking at him and Phoenix here with them, it feels like an admission of failure, a plea for help that he doesn’t need, because he’s pulled it together with only vague advice from Phoenix before. “So same as ever.”

“Oh,” Athena says. “So this is how cases are supposed to go?”

“Maybe not ‘supposed to’,” Apollo says, “but it’s how it always ends up being.”

“If yokai are anything,” Phoenix says, still focused on the bookshelf, pulling one book down, “they’re other strange things that got tossed out of the Court and fell through the cracks.”

Apollo doesn’t know why he thought Phoenix was actually listening to him. It’s a step forward and then two steps diagonally back any time he feels like Phoenix is anything of a mentor or a guide or someone to lean on.

“Exile’s a common enough fae punishment; over the centuries there’s probably been plenty of things that can’t go back to the Twilight Realm but never start to blend in here.”

“Centuries?” Athena repeats. “How long do the fae live? And wait, what’s the Twilight Realm? Do you—” She turns to Apollo. “Do you know what he’s talking about? You’ve been over all this?”

“There’s been some cases where it’s come up,” Phoenix says.

“And he always tells me after the fact,” Apollo adds.

Phoenix doesn’t acknowledge that statement, but he doesn’t try and object to it, either. Athena’s frown is deepening. Apollo doesn’t like this look on her face, the one where she looks like she’s staring straight down into his heart and is disappointed to find out how rocky his relationship with Phoenix actually is. She should get used to that feeling of disappointment that happens around him.

“Twilight Realm is – Faeryland, you’d call it,” Phoenix says. “And I’m not actually sure about their lifespans. I don’t know if they know. Usually they just cut each other down in their prime in power struggles.”

Athena’s entire posture collapses, her hands sliding off her hips and her shoulders slumping. “Oh,” she says. “That’s very sad.” And she’s blinking rapidly, like to stave off tears, and already Apollo has noticed – how could he not? – that she wears her entire heart on her sleeve, ready to show almost every emotion almost all at once.

“I suppose,” Phoenix says. He looks back at them over his hunched shoulders, something sheepish blinking across his face, like he’s never considered that angle. When he turns, he has a book open across one palm. “Mia and her mother wrote a lot of things down,” he says, a statement out of nowhere that maybe, if Apollo is lucky, will tie back to something they were talking about. “Tried to keep track of lots of things, denizens of the Court and exiles and all. Most of it gives me migraines if I look at it, but Mia made some notes in the margins and one of the things I thought I remembered – which I was right—” He squints down at the pages and then raises it toward his face. “Fuck, do I need glasses?”

Athena’s lips are pursed, her cheeks puffed out, a grin and a laugh swallowed.

“Some of the weirdest little things that get thrown out of the Court don’t land properly. They aren’t as humanoid as the true fae, they can’t marry in with humans and fade away – they can’t ever fully physically be here. Not quite corporeal, blinking in and out. And—” Again, he raises the book back to his nose. “And definitely would avoid someone like me who’s rubbed elbows with all seven of the fae royals from the past two generations.”

“She scribbled all that in the margins for you?” Athena asks. “That was nice.”

Phoenix laughs. “Not all of it,” he says. “We talked – a lot, about everything, in the early days.” The sad, wistful look in his eyes is one Apollo has seen a few times before. It’s the softest he ever looks. “Most of that was part of it, but I needed to jog my memory again with any little thing.”

“Oh, yeah,” Athena says. “Of course. Makes perfect sense – that’s psychology.” Phoenix chuckles, but like the wheel of her emotions that she’s already displayed, Athena moves past the cheer of having an answer and getting to name-drop her favorite subject, and once again turns up sadness. “I can’t imagine, though. Losing your home and then just being stuck, just, lingering, and you’re trapped in between and don’t have anywhere to belong.”

“Are you tearing up again?” Apollo asks.

“I wish there was a way to help,” she continues, wiping her eyes, but not quickly enough. “You know? Like even if they’re monsters – were they always? I’d probably be grumpy too if that happened to me.”

Psychoanalysis of yokai is not where Apollo thought this day would end up.

“One challenge at a time, Athena,” Phoenix says. He sets the book down on the bookshelf but doesn’t slot it back into place. “I know you became a lawyer to save people – exactly what you said, that if being a defense attorney was a way to help people, and your ability could help with that, then you knew you had to.” Even while deflating a little at his first comment, a grin starts to spread across her face, and there’s something almost like envy curling tight in Apollo’s chest, that there was something more than a blessing on her eye that drew him to her, that he remembers this about her, cares to remember. “But that doesn’t have to be everyone and everything, all at once. Damian Tenma is your client. Don’t worry about the yokai beyond what ones might have been involved in the case.”

Athena nods, her chin jutting out. “Tomorrow, Mr Tenma,” she says. “And the next day, everyone else!”

Phoenix closes his eyes and his eyebrows raise like he’s trying to roll his eyes behind the lids. “It’s a start,” he says.