Fic: The Six Foot Deep End, Apollo Justice
Title: The Six Foot Deep End
Fandom: Phoenix Wright/Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney
Pairing/Characters: Trucy, Phoenix, ensemble
Word Count: 2,600
Spoilers for everything in the last game. Done for the "30 ficlets for 30 fabulous women" challenge, number 4: Trucy Wright.
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***
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In April of her sophomore year, Trucy's father was arrested for murder.
Frankly, everyone just kind of took it the wrong way when she said, "Well, it's been a long time coming."
It wasn't a big deal, really. The night felt a little strange, as in there was no one sitting across from her at the dinner table after she made scrambled eggs. And she had to feed the goldfish -- that was usually her father's job. And he wasn't there to get her up the next morning with his bustling in the kitchen, Court TV on low in the living room and the hum of his electric razor that never seemed to work.
But she went to school as usual, and it wasn't until second period, when she handed in a take-home worksheet on the Cold War and her history teacher gave her the strangest look that she realized other people must have heard. Sure enough, the next class, no one sat next to her, and when she went downstairs for lunch, she found the transcript from the police scanner taped to her locker. "WTF WRIGHT" was scrawled at the top in thick red Sharpie: she leaned her face into the paper and inhaled the aerosol smell of the marker, still heavy on the page.
The school counselor cornered her outside her contemporary ethics class later that day and asked her, in tones gentle enough to do ballet across eggshells and not crack a single one, was she all right?
It was in that moment that Trucy realized how much she had hoped nobody would ever ask that question. Because as soon as someone addressed it, asked her if she was okay, then of course she wasn't.
The counselor's arms were warm, if a little damp from the long climb up the stairs, but she wrapped Trucy up in a hug and offered her a Kleenex when it looked like her nose was going to start dripping. She let Trucy stay in her room the rest of the day, her face buried in the hand-embroidered pillow from a previous graduating class. She allowed herself that and only that, and when the counselor was away or too busy on the phone to be listening, she whispered it into the pillow, testing it out just to see how it would feel, "My father is dead. Zak Gramarye is dead. My mother is dead and my father is dead and I am an orphan."
The counselor asked, after the final bell rang, if she had somewhere to go. Trucy gave her her best, stage-bright smile and said of course. She'd be fine.
After all, she thought to herself, walking right past the line of school buses waiting outside, her biological father has been out of the picture for almost half her life, and her mother even longer. There was no point in feeling sorry for herself now.
The lady behind the reception desk at the detention center gave her a sympathetic look when she signed in and then asked where the bathroom was in a voice thick from her afternoon of crying. She splashed cold water on her face and blew her nose, straightened her hat and tugged on the hem of her skirt, cocked her hip and made a face at the mirror. No point in feeling sorry for herself at all, not while the man who loved her now was sitting in handcuffs behind a sheet of plexiglass.
Phoenix Wright pushed his hand against the glass the instant she sat down, knuckles crunched up and pressed white. The other hand was dragged along too, since they were connected by steel. The phone was jammed between his head and his shoulder. Trucy aligned her hand with his and pretended -- semi-successfully -- that they could touch.
"Hey, bumblebee," he said. "How are you holding up? I kind of dumped a lot on you yesterday."
"It's good to know the truth," Trucy replied quickly, and, to her horror, found her voice cracking. His knuckles pressed harder. "No, no. It's good to know the truth. Finally. I'm glad you told me."
"Trucy, can you promise me that no matter what, you won't come to the trial tomorrow?" His voice was low and earnest. "The court system here are like Jewish burials: they have to get us into the ground as quickly as possible. I don't want you getting mixed up in that."
"But --"
"Please?"
Trucy's jaw snapped shut with a faint click. She let the mouthpiece of the phone fall against her clavicle. As a magician, she had an eye for tells, and her father's was plain: he'd spent too long orchestrating this show very, very carefully, and he didn't want her getting in the way, not until he needed her to come out of the wings.
"Okay, Daddy," she said.
"Good. Did you remember to feed the goldfish?"
On her way out the detention center, she ran into Kristoph Gavin. "Trucy Wright, how nice to see you," he exclaimed with a smile that made his eyes dance, like it was genuine. She stared at him in abject horror, feeling her knees turn to jelly and her stomach turn molten with the hate of it. This man bashed Zak Gramarye's head in with a grape juice bottle. This same man who sat next to her at a table in the Borscht Bowl Club at least once a week for a very long time killed her real father. Murdered him. Didn't even let Trucy see him one last time, see his smile -- it was the only part of him she remembered clearly.
"Excuse me," she forced a smile to her lips. "I need to go throw up."
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***
+
She went to court, of course.
She had the bloody ace ready long before her father ever thought to ask for it.
Even the best magicians need an assistant every now and then.
+
***
+
The summer following the trial that put Kristoph Gavin behind bars, Trucy Wright had, for the first time in her life, an honest-to-goodness best friend.
His name was Apollo Justice, and he was short, loud, incredibly disillusioned in his role models, and had possibly the strangest hair she'd ever seen. It defied gravity.
"What are you hoping to achieve with that look?" her father's friend Diego asked in a growl when he dropped by one muggy night in June with Mexican take-out and an old black-and-white movie. "Signals from outer space? And you need to change your clothes. That is entirely too much red. Nobody raised you right, kid."
"Don't mind him," Trucy said to the really off-put Polly, as she pulled plates out of the dishwasher and set the table. The smell of beans and rice filled the kitchen.
"What, you're going to tell me he's really soft and squishy on the inside, like a marshmellow?"
"Well, yes," said Trucy, who'd always been immune to sarcasm.
That summer, her father was rarely home. "Putting on his magic show, setting up for a grand finale," she told Polly whenever he asked, and he gave her a slant-eyed look like he didn't quite believe her. So they spent most of the summer together; working, making friends with mafia brats and rock stars, solving murders; the usual things a guy whose father figure brained someone with a grape juice bottle and a girl whose adopted father took off into the wild yonder for reasons unknown do together.
Strangely enough, it was in Phoenix's absence that Trucy Wright learned the most she'd ever known about him.
"My brother really did consider him a friend," she learned from the prosecutor while they waited outside the courthouse for Polly. He leaned against the seat of his motorcycle, hands in his pockets and face unusually clouded. They were going to go to a parade downtown, and then hopefully to lunch. Nobody knew good places to eat like lawyers did, Trucy had learned. Mostly, though, she was just excited Mr. Gavin had offered her a ride on his motorcycle. Polly would have to bike, but she'd do something later to make up for it. "I do so hate it when murder comes between a good friendship, don't you, little Fraulien?"
"Lawyers from Germany are a class all their own, bumblebee," was all Phoenix had to say about it when she told him what Klavier had said. "Like Swiss chocolate. Nothing else quite compares."
"You always used to be able to tell what he was thinking," sighed Ema Skye. She unbuckled the straps of her sandals and stepped gratefully out of them, dropping down on the couch next to Trucy in the employee lounge of the CAD. Rent was on the drama channel, and Ema had a particular weakness for musicals. Not that she would admit it, but Trucy knew this things. "His face was an open book and he tended to blurt whatever was on his mind. Now it feels like he comes in two flavors: bored and even more bored. I never liked poker faces."
But Trucy knew this was just how people worked: you have to know how to manipulate those around you. She'd learned that coming out of the cradle, somewhere between 1,2,3 and Goodnight, Moon. Know what their tell is and exploit it. It worked in magic. It worked in poker. It worked in court.
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***
+
She felt sorry for Polly. With his boss imprisoned, he lost his livelihood, had to come to them scraping for work. Polly didn't like her father, she knew. Respected him, yes. Hated him, even more so.
She couldn't warn him that he was being played, as casually as if he were the keys on a piano, made to sound the exact right note at the exact right time.
She couldn't warn him what was coming.
+
***
+
In October of her junior year, one week after Apollo Justice unveiled Phoenix Wright's magic tricks in precisely the manner he was supposed to and one week before her birthday, Trucy uncovered a secret she wasn't meant to uncover.
Her best friend was her brother.
"You didn't know?" Spark Brushel's eyes practically doubled in size, an expression made even more alarming by his thick glasses. He instantly began to fidget nervously with the end of his threadbare tie. "Oh, dear. Mr. Wright knew. He's known since April. Since ... er. Well, your dad. I mean, I was friends with your mother, I figured it out. And ... well. I can't believe he didn't tell you." Brushel blinked his big eyes.
Trucy reached behind her and gripped the edge of the counter hard enough to make her knuckles go white. She didn't trust her legs at the moment. She stared at the little reporter; thin as a pencil and hairless as a naked rat, who had known for ten years that her mother had been a mother before, that there was a boy growing up in an orphanage somewhere with a family he never knew about still alive. Polly. Her Polly. Her brother?
"How can you live with a secret like that?" she blurted out. "The kind of secret that changes people's lives?"
"You don't," chirped Brushel, pulling a woman's compact mirror out of his pocket, and began to obsessively rub at his buck teeth with his forefinger. "Not really. Everybody goes a little psychotic in their own ways. I mean, look at me. And look at Mr. Wright. We've both gone right off our rockers, little Gramarye. We're not meant to keep secrets like we do. I'm really sorry you had to learn from me. I really am. But really," and here, he stilled, and looked at her so piercingly it was like being on the receiving end of a perceive. "Could you have picked a better brother?"
"I .... I have to go," said Trucy, and she slipped sideways, darting past the empty piano and into the back room. She took the steps down to the Hydeout two at a time.
"Excuse me!" she said hurriedly to the two poker players sitting there. Bad form, she knew, to interrupt a match, but these, at least, had to be extenuating circumstances. She grabbed a chair from the corner and dragged it over to her father's side of the table. Looking bemused, he put his cards on the table, face-down.
Trucy took a deep breath, and found that there was really no great way to frame a question like this. She winged it. "I have a half-brother?"
Her father's eyes darkened, the way they did when he was trying to hide something: if paranormal hadn't been Trucy's specialty, she wouldn't have noticed it. She'd known about this tell since that time he tried to convince her Santa Claus was real.
He glanced over at his opponent. "I'm sorry about this."
The man lifted his hands in the universal gesture of "it's not my business." "No, by all means. I can see this is important."
"Did you know? That Polly was my brother?"
He looked at her for a long moment. Then, "... Yes."
All the breath left Trucy's body. "Since April?" came out in scarcely more than a whisper.
"Yes."
"How?"
Phoenix took a deep, bracing breath and stuffed his hands into the pockets of his jacket. "A lot of things added up, but really, it was Zak who figured it out and told me. He'd had a long time to uncover your family history, including the existence of your older brother. Apollo. Apollo Enigmar, though, of course, he's gone by a separate name all his life."
She inhaled, before she forgot. The pieces began to fall into place. "And that's why you demanded he take your case, even though he'd never done a trial before."
"Zak said your abilities were inherited. To be honest, I doubted him, when he told me that my best friend's gangly, well-meaning assistant was the rightful heir to your family tradition. It was a bit of a gamble, to place my murder trial in the hands of a rookie and hope that a dead man was right. But the moment he caught Ogla Orly's tell, I knew."
"And when you left, over the summer, it wasn't just to set up for the final trail. It was to give me time with Polly, your newest recruit."
"It was the least I could give you," her father's voice was soft and earnest, and he stretched his hand out to her, as he had done from behind the plexiglass at the detention center. This time, she took it. "I'd had a good night; a good meal, a good card game -- well, at first -- and best of all, good news. Your real father could come back to you, but after he cracked Ogla over the head with that bottle and I called the cops, fate intervened. One day before he could have been free to call you his daughter again, he died. So I did the next best thing I could do, given the circumstances. I gave you a brother instead."
"Why did you keep it from me?"
She studied him, hard, the man she'd called Daddy for seven years, with his sharp blue eyes and his stubble he couldn't seem to manage. Ema said he used to be someone else entirely, someone whose feelings everyone could read, not just those with supernatural sensitivity. Spark Brushel said those who carry secrets bigger than them go a little psychotic. Trucy had no way of knowing: this is the Phoenix Wright she knew. She knew and she loved him.
And then he said, "It wasn't my secret to tell."
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***
+
When she sat down, the legs of her chair squeaked on the kitchen linoleum. Lamiroir's head twisted towards the sound, and her sightless eyes flickered back and forth in their sockets, like they were desperately trying to find proof of Trucy's existence.
"Hello," said the singer, a little breathlessly.
And Trucy said, "Hi, Mom."
Fandom: Phoenix Wright/Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney
Pairing/Characters: Trucy, Phoenix, ensemble
Word Count: 2,600
Spoilers for everything in the last game. Done for the "30 ficlets for 30 fabulous women" challenge, number 4: Trucy Wright.
+
***
+
In April of her sophomore year, Trucy's father was arrested for murder.
Frankly, everyone just kind of took it the wrong way when she said, "Well, it's been a long time coming."
It wasn't a big deal, really. The night felt a little strange, as in there was no one sitting across from her at the dinner table after she made scrambled eggs. And she had to feed the goldfish -- that was usually her father's job. And he wasn't there to get her up the next morning with his bustling in the kitchen, Court TV on low in the living room and the hum of his electric razor that never seemed to work.
But she went to school as usual, and it wasn't until second period, when she handed in a take-home worksheet on the Cold War and her history teacher gave her the strangest look that she realized other people must have heard. Sure enough, the next class, no one sat next to her, and when she went downstairs for lunch, she found the transcript from the police scanner taped to her locker. "WTF WRIGHT" was scrawled at the top in thick red Sharpie: she leaned her face into the paper and inhaled the aerosol smell of the marker, still heavy on the page.
The school counselor cornered her outside her contemporary ethics class later that day and asked her, in tones gentle enough to do ballet across eggshells and not crack a single one, was she all right?
It was in that moment that Trucy realized how much she had hoped nobody would ever ask that question. Because as soon as someone addressed it, asked her if she was okay, then of course she wasn't.
The counselor's arms were warm, if a little damp from the long climb up the stairs, but she wrapped Trucy up in a hug and offered her a Kleenex when it looked like her nose was going to start dripping. She let Trucy stay in her room the rest of the day, her face buried in the hand-embroidered pillow from a previous graduating class. She allowed herself that and only that, and when the counselor was away or too busy on the phone to be listening, she whispered it into the pillow, testing it out just to see how it would feel, "My father is dead. Zak Gramarye is dead. My mother is dead and my father is dead and I am an orphan."
The counselor asked, after the final bell rang, if she had somewhere to go. Trucy gave her her best, stage-bright smile and said of course. She'd be fine.
After all, she thought to herself, walking right past the line of school buses waiting outside, her biological father has been out of the picture for almost half her life, and her mother even longer. There was no point in feeling sorry for herself now.
The lady behind the reception desk at the detention center gave her a sympathetic look when she signed in and then asked where the bathroom was in a voice thick from her afternoon of crying. She splashed cold water on her face and blew her nose, straightened her hat and tugged on the hem of her skirt, cocked her hip and made a face at the mirror. No point in feeling sorry for herself at all, not while the man who loved her now was sitting in handcuffs behind a sheet of plexiglass.
Phoenix Wright pushed his hand against the glass the instant she sat down, knuckles crunched up and pressed white. The other hand was dragged along too, since they were connected by steel. The phone was jammed between his head and his shoulder. Trucy aligned her hand with his and pretended -- semi-successfully -- that they could touch.
"Hey, bumblebee," he said. "How are you holding up? I kind of dumped a lot on you yesterday."
"It's good to know the truth," Trucy replied quickly, and, to her horror, found her voice cracking. His knuckles pressed harder. "No, no. It's good to know the truth. Finally. I'm glad you told me."
"Trucy, can you promise me that no matter what, you won't come to the trial tomorrow?" His voice was low and earnest. "The court system here are like Jewish burials: they have to get us into the ground as quickly as possible. I don't want you getting mixed up in that."
"But --"
"Please?"
Trucy's jaw snapped shut with a faint click. She let the mouthpiece of the phone fall against her clavicle. As a magician, she had an eye for tells, and her father's was plain: he'd spent too long orchestrating this show very, very carefully, and he didn't want her getting in the way, not until he needed her to come out of the wings.
"Okay, Daddy," she said.
"Good. Did you remember to feed the goldfish?"
On her way out the detention center, she ran into Kristoph Gavin. "Trucy Wright, how nice to see you," he exclaimed with a smile that made his eyes dance, like it was genuine. She stared at him in abject horror, feeling her knees turn to jelly and her stomach turn molten with the hate of it. This man bashed Zak Gramarye's head in with a grape juice bottle. This same man who sat next to her at a table in the Borscht Bowl Club at least once a week for a very long time killed her real father. Murdered him. Didn't even let Trucy see him one last time, see his smile -- it was the only part of him she remembered clearly.
"Excuse me," she forced a smile to her lips. "I need to go throw up."
+
***
+
She went to court, of course.
She had the bloody ace ready long before her father ever thought to ask for it.
Even the best magicians need an assistant every now and then.
+
***
+
The summer following the trial that put Kristoph Gavin behind bars, Trucy Wright had, for the first time in her life, an honest-to-goodness best friend.
His name was Apollo Justice, and he was short, loud, incredibly disillusioned in his role models, and had possibly the strangest hair she'd ever seen. It defied gravity.
"What are you hoping to achieve with that look?" her father's friend Diego asked in a growl when he dropped by one muggy night in June with Mexican take-out and an old black-and-white movie. "Signals from outer space? And you need to change your clothes. That is entirely too much red. Nobody raised you right, kid."
"Don't mind him," Trucy said to the really off-put Polly, as she pulled plates out of the dishwasher and set the table. The smell of beans and rice filled the kitchen.
"What, you're going to tell me he's really soft and squishy on the inside, like a marshmellow?"
"Well, yes," said Trucy, who'd always been immune to sarcasm.
That summer, her father was rarely home. "Putting on his magic show, setting up for a grand finale," she told Polly whenever he asked, and he gave her a slant-eyed look like he didn't quite believe her. So they spent most of the summer together; working, making friends with mafia brats and rock stars, solving murders; the usual things a guy whose father figure brained someone with a grape juice bottle and a girl whose adopted father took off into the wild yonder for reasons unknown do together.
Strangely enough, it was in Phoenix's absence that Trucy Wright learned the most she'd ever known about him.
"My brother really did consider him a friend," she learned from the prosecutor while they waited outside the courthouse for Polly. He leaned against the seat of his motorcycle, hands in his pockets and face unusually clouded. They were going to go to a parade downtown, and then hopefully to lunch. Nobody knew good places to eat like lawyers did, Trucy had learned. Mostly, though, she was just excited Mr. Gavin had offered her a ride on his motorcycle. Polly would have to bike, but she'd do something later to make up for it. "I do so hate it when murder comes between a good friendship, don't you, little Fraulien?"
"Lawyers from Germany are a class all their own, bumblebee," was all Phoenix had to say about it when she told him what Klavier had said. "Like Swiss chocolate. Nothing else quite compares."
"You always used to be able to tell what he was thinking," sighed Ema Skye. She unbuckled the straps of her sandals and stepped gratefully out of them, dropping down on the couch next to Trucy in the employee lounge of the CAD. Rent was on the drama channel, and Ema had a particular weakness for musicals. Not that she would admit it, but Trucy knew this things. "His face was an open book and he tended to blurt whatever was on his mind. Now it feels like he comes in two flavors: bored and even more bored. I never liked poker faces."
But Trucy knew this was just how people worked: you have to know how to manipulate those around you. She'd learned that coming out of the cradle, somewhere between 1,2,3 and Goodnight, Moon. Know what their tell is and exploit it. It worked in magic. It worked in poker. It worked in court.
+
***
+
She felt sorry for Polly. With his boss imprisoned, he lost his livelihood, had to come to them scraping for work. Polly didn't like her father, she knew. Respected him, yes. Hated him, even more so.
She couldn't warn him that he was being played, as casually as if he were the keys on a piano, made to sound the exact right note at the exact right time.
She couldn't warn him what was coming.
+
***
+
In October of her junior year, one week after Apollo Justice unveiled Phoenix Wright's magic tricks in precisely the manner he was supposed to and one week before her birthday, Trucy uncovered a secret she wasn't meant to uncover.
Her best friend was her brother.
"You didn't know?" Spark Brushel's eyes practically doubled in size, an expression made even more alarming by his thick glasses. He instantly began to fidget nervously with the end of his threadbare tie. "Oh, dear. Mr. Wright knew. He's known since April. Since ... er. Well, your dad. I mean, I was friends with your mother, I figured it out. And ... well. I can't believe he didn't tell you." Brushel blinked his big eyes.
Trucy reached behind her and gripped the edge of the counter hard enough to make her knuckles go white. She didn't trust her legs at the moment. She stared at the little reporter; thin as a pencil and hairless as a naked rat, who had known for ten years that her mother had been a mother before, that there was a boy growing up in an orphanage somewhere with a family he never knew about still alive. Polly. Her Polly. Her brother?
"How can you live with a secret like that?" she blurted out. "The kind of secret that changes people's lives?"
"You don't," chirped Brushel, pulling a woman's compact mirror out of his pocket, and began to obsessively rub at his buck teeth with his forefinger. "Not really. Everybody goes a little psychotic in their own ways. I mean, look at me. And look at Mr. Wright. We've both gone right off our rockers, little Gramarye. We're not meant to keep secrets like we do. I'm really sorry you had to learn from me. I really am. But really," and here, he stilled, and looked at her so piercingly it was like being on the receiving end of a perceive. "Could you have picked a better brother?"
"I .... I have to go," said Trucy, and she slipped sideways, darting past the empty piano and into the back room. She took the steps down to the Hydeout two at a time.
"Excuse me!" she said hurriedly to the two poker players sitting there. Bad form, she knew, to interrupt a match, but these, at least, had to be extenuating circumstances. She grabbed a chair from the corner and dragged it over to her father's side of the table. Looking bemused, he put his cards on the table, face-down.
Trucy took a deep breath, and found that there was really no great way to frame a question like this. She winged it. "I have a half-brother?"
Her father's eyes darkened, the way they did when he was trying to hide something: if paranormal hadn't been Trucy's specialty, she wouldn't have noticed it. She'd known about this tell since that time he tried to convince her Santa Claus was real.
He glanced over at his opponent. "I'm sorry about this."
The man lifted his hands in the universal gesture of "it's not my business." "No, by all means. I can see this is important."
"Did you know? That Polly was my brother?"
He looked at her for a long moment. Then, "... Yes."
All the breath left Trucy's body. "Since April?" came out in scarcely more than a whisper.
"Yes."
"How?"
Phoenix took a deep, bracing breath and stuffed his hands into the pockets of his jacket. "A lot of things added up, but really, it was Zak who figured it out and told me. He'd had a long time to uncover your family history, including the existence of your older brother. Apollo. Apollo Enigmar, though, of course, he's gone by a separate name all his life."
She inhaled, before she forgot. The pieces began to fall into place. "And that's why you demanded he take your case, even though he'd never done a trial before."
"Zak said your abilities were inherited. To be honest, I doubted him, when he told me that my best friend's gangly, well-meaning assistant was the rightful heir to your family tradition. It was a bit of a gamble, to place my murder trial in the hands of a rookie and hope that a dead man was right. But the moment he caught Ogla Orly's tell, I knew."
"And when you left, over the summer, it wasn't just to set up for the final trail. It was to give me time with Polly, your newest recruit."
"It was the least I could give you," her father's voice was soft and earnest, and he stretched his hand out to her, as he had done from behind the plexiglass at the detention center. This time, she took it. "I'd had a good night; a good meal, a good card game -- well, at first -- and best of all, good news. Your real father could come back to you, but after he cracked Ogla over the head with that bottle and I called the cops, fate intervened. One day before he could have been free to call you his daughter again, he died. So I did the next best thing I could do, given the circumstances. I gave you a brother instead."
"Why did you keep it from me?"
She studied him, hard, the man she'd called Daddy for seven years, with his sharp blue eyes and his stubble he couldn't seem to manage. Ema said he used to be someone else entirely, someone whose feelings everyone could read, not just those with supernatural sensitivity. Spark Brushel said those who carry secrets bigger than them go a little psychotic. Trucy had no way of knowing: this is the Phoenix Wright she knew. She knew and she loved him.
And then he said, "It wasn't my secret to tell."
+
***
+
When she sat down, the legs of her chair squeaked on the kitchen linoleum. Lamiroir's head twisted towards the sound, and her sightless eyes flickered back and forth in their sockets, like they were desperately trying to find proof of Trucy's existence.
"Hello," said the singer, a little breathlessly.
And Trucy said, "Hi, Mom."