#after the first time we ever see edgeworth talk directly to a defendant outside the courtroom.

[wardencommanderrodimiss]

Witches, Chapter 17: Blackquill wants to fight an orca; Phoenix wants to fight Blackquill; Athena contains within her a multitude of whale facts.

[Seelie of Kurain Chapter Masterlist] [ao3]

[Witches Chapter Masterlist] [ao3]

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Phoenix leaves early, tells Trucy he’ll meet her at the courthouse, and stops by the office first. The computer wakes up slowly and when it finally does, it’s as blank as Phoenix left it last night, not a word of assistance or encouragement. So he’s on his own. All right. Fine.

On his way out through the front, he stops. The lid over the piano keys is opened, something lying directly on the keys. His old badge, weighing down the corner of Lotta’s photograph, a snapshot out of time, poorly planned, Phoenix and Larry both jostled about by Maya, and Edgeworth almost smiling at that, and Gumshoe the only one who’s timed it right, with confetti fluttering through the air fallen from his hand. If he squints with the Sight from the right angle and distance, like it’s one of those illusion puzzles, sometimes he’ll see Mia standing to the side, smiling.

“I can take a hint,” he says, setting it back down on the piano. He can’t see her in the photo today, but it’s okay because it being here, not on his desk, and his badge here and not in his desk, means that she’s here, not frozen in a photo. “All right. I get it. I can do it, and I’m not alone.” He has people to help and to keep him in check. He’s not going to lose a second badge. 

At the courthouse he smacks himself in the face with cold water, hoping to knock sleep out of his eyes and with it, clear out the dust from eight years of not playing the lead. Athena bounds into the defendant lobby sounding as cheery as ever and announcing that she ran a few laps around the building to get ready, but tired bags hang beneath her eyes and he tells her such when he asks her if she got any sleep. “Do I really look that bad?” she asks, prodding at the skin below her eyes. “I’d better do something about that. Prosecutor Blackquill gives me shit over everything and I can’t leave another opening. Hey, Trucy!” she calls, as the other two members of the agency enter with Pearl. “You don’t happen to have concealer, do you? Or Apollo, do you? I need to look like I actually slept soundly and I’m desperate.”

“Sorry,” Apollo says. “The only cosmetics I use are hair gel.”

“You mean it doesn’t naturally do that?” Pearl gasps. “I thought for sure…”

“Concealer, coming right up!” Trucy produces a round makeup compact from her Magic Panties - she carries those around in a purse and everything that would normally be found in a purse goes into them - and holds it up to Athena’s face. “No, that’s not the right shade. Hold on.” She plunges her hand back into the waistband and pulls out what appears to Phoenix to be pretty much the same, but comparing it against Athena’s skin, Trucy nods, satisfied. 

“Since when do you wear makeup?” Phoenix asks. They’ve had talks about this topic. Why is it all so expensive. Why is this a scam industry that breeds insecurities. No I’m not buying you lipstick. You can buy it yourself when you’re much older. Yes I’ll buy you that lip gloss that’s in a narwhal-shaped container. That’s not really makeup.

“I don’t,” Trucy says. “This is old stage show stuff we still had!”

“We” being the Gramaryes, surely. She pats away the dark circles under Athena’s eyes and with a wave, wishes them both luck, and skips off for the gallery with Apollo and Pearl in tow. 

Leaving Phoenix to enter behind the bench, chat with this judge for the first time in a year. If he really thinks about it, this judge - this man, he was going to think, but after all these years he’s not really quite sure how to assess what the judge is or isn’t and whether he’s a being that exists in any capacity outside of the courthouse - has seen him at his lowest, to rise as high as he could, and crash again, sink lower than that, and now here he is again. This judge has presided over all three trials where Phoenix has been accused of murder. He saw Phoenix’s first trial and his last and now he’ll see this second first.

He tells Phoenix that standing here as a lawyer makes him look younger. Phoenix thanks him and decides not to mention that it’s definitely shaving that makes him look younger. Might as well just take the compliment, if it’s a compliment, and not another “baby-faced” jab. 

“And you look as young as ever, Your Honor,” he replies, and it’s true, really - his face hasn’t changed a bit since Phoenix first met him. No more wrinkles, and no less. Eternal, unchanging, a fixture of the courtroom who Phoenix knows how to work with. 

And then there’s the prosecutor. The latest prosecutorial mystery for Phoenix to unravel. Another one to save. 

Prosecutor Simon Blackquill has an even more frightening visage staring at him at level across the courtroom, rather than looking down on him from up safe in the gallery. Not that safe isn’t anything but relative when it comes to a man who throws silvery slices of wind with the slash of a finger and whose hawk flaps about as it pleases, but in the gallery Phoenix is just one of a sea of faces merely observing. Down here at the bench? He’s the man who offered to defend an orca, with nowhere to hide and nowhere to run from the man who brought an orca to trial. 

Funny how all this works.

Blackquill berates Phoenix for bringing this case to court, never mind that it’s Blackquill who actually brought this to court - and the poor judge got this case late last night and skimmed it and missed the part that the defendant is an orca. But otherwise Blackquill seems - to be taking this seriously? Enough to speech-ify on the fact that they have an orca to be prosecuted here. 

“Though she cannot be present in the courtroom, nor speak for herself, we will treat this defendant as any other,” he says, casting a glance toward the screen being set up behind the witness stand; hopefully in a few minutes Sasha will have Orla on video phone, introducing the defendant to the court and perhaps charming then with her cuteness. Phoenix has had enough witnesses try and play cute to turn the judge and gallery against the defense - it’s about time he gets to have that power on his side. “Man or beast, we stand equal with the same value to our souls.” He pauses, eyes narrowing at his own words. The hawk on his shoulder ruffles its feathers. That’s a loaded word, for someone who knows magic: humans have souls, fae don’t, animals don’t, and fae animals certainly don’t. A soul or lack of one is no indication of moral judgment or standing. It’s just an extra piece of the self that can be cut loose and used in magic, and this seems to be what Blackquill is pondering, and his bird getting at, because he amends himself. “To our lives and hearts. Take Taka, as much a person in spirit as the rest of us who stand here today.” 

Phoenix would love to know what Taka is, whether it’s just an ordinary bird, a fae creature, or a familiar - Blackquill doesn’t give a hint, and Phoenix doesn’t know what the difference between a fae animal and specifically a familiar looks like. And even if he did he can’t see through Blackquill’s twisted aura to know. 

The Twisted Samurai distorts everything around him, that even if Phoenix wants to test his eyes on Athena next to him, he can’t. The courtroom falls into darkness when he tries, inconsistent silver light throwing the colors off where they aren’t inverted. Athena’s wide eyes appear nearly gray, not blue, and her hair dulls similarly; he sees double of her, sometimes, like he’s dazed or cross-eyed. And across the courtroom Blackquill has eyes almost straight white, and nothing else of him the same. His shape twists and breaks like his reflection in a wavy funhouse mirror has been reflected into a rippling pond, his hair changing lengths, his skin all the depth of white tissue paper, veins and blood and bones below, a dead man walking. At his steadiest, his entire body simply trembles at the edges, like energy barely contained in a vessel too small for it, a person held together in a form that doesn’t naturally belong to them; and all of him either stark white or black, and mostly white, patterned like a photonegative of himself.

Phoenix closes his eyes and gives himself a moment to reset and readjust to the regular world that he’ll see when he opens them.

“The question, then,” Blackquill continues, while Athena squints in confusion at Phoenix because he’s been squinting at her with the Sight, “is what one - what our orca, in this case - has done with that life, and how stained and shriveled their heart.”

Then he decides to prove that the greatest monster in the room is him, immediately after the first witness testimony - from Norma DePlume, who is as much of a terror as Phoenix expected, and she and Blackquill as nasty to each other as he could have imagined - when he demands the judge give his verdict, because they’ve heard everything they need to, and, “deliver your judgement so that I may carry out the sentence.”

“Objection! Hold it!” What the fuck! “You aren’t - you aren’t planning on killing Orla yourself, are you?” Beside him, Athena can’t keep her “what the fuck!” contained, or rather Widget warbles it out, and Phoenix really, really wants to know who programmed the robot to say fuck. “Is that what you’re implying—”

Blackquill says nothing, merely smirks, and Phoenix decides that he absolutely, definitely, does not want to actually know the answer. If Edgeworth wants him to defend this man, which he does, that’s not an “if”, Phoenix would rather not think that this case only went to trial because Blackquill wanted to take a literal stab at fighting a whale. He’d like to think it’s because he and Athena and Pearl found some decent proof, reasonable doubt, and because of what Blackquill said there in his opening statement, that animals have value and deserve a fair chance, too.

(Maybe he just said that to get it on the record hoping for reasonable doubt of his own and a fair trial for Taka when that goddamn bird inevitably hauls off and claws someone’s eyes out.)

(Edgeworth didn’t even warn him that Prosecutor Blackquill had a murder bird! Is the logical conclusion that Edgeworth didn’t know about the bird? Points toward fae creature, a la Gavin’s hound, except who the hell is managing to summon any fae anyone in prison? That place is iron for a reason. Or maybe after everything else, Edgeworth figured this is nothing to Phoenix.)

“We have a right to cross-examine!” Athena’s shrill and rightfully indignant cry rings out over a shriek from Taka that sounds like laughter. “We’re always allowed to, you know!”

“I simply hope to spare us all the waste of time that comes as consequence of your methods,” Blackquill replies, directed more at Phoenix than Athena, who like last trial he seems to mostly be ignoring, “and spare you the heartbreak of burning yourself to ash in a fight for a ‘Not Guilty’ you will not win.”

Like yesterday, Phoenix wonders if they’re talking about an orca, or something else. About Blackquill himself, and the task regarding him that Phoenix has been given. Does Blackquill know what Edgeworth has asked of Phoenix? It sort of sounds like he does. 

“Okay, but I’m still going to cross-examine,” Phoenix says. And maybe drag it out a little more than usual, just to let Blackquill know he’s not intimidated. 

And DePlume likes the sound of her own voice, so maybe they’ll learn something new from her, some piece of information she hadn’t meant to let slip, if they push on her every statement.

What Phoenix learns instead is that Blackquill likes penguins and thinks them the only part of the aquarium actually worth anyone’s time, and apparently no one told DePlume that the victim died of blunt force trauma, not being bitten by the orca. Not that it helps; there’s more security footage than the short looped bit that they saw behind Fulbright’s back, and that does actually show that Orla had the victim in her jaws, and Blackquill can put a good - bad - spin on it. Sure, it wasn’t when the victim was killed, but it certainly was proof of her malicious intent, toying with a corpse like she’s a cat caught the canary - Blackquill stares Athena dead in the eye as he makes that analogy - but not even hungry to eat it, just taking another life between her teeth as a game. 

A game, and singing the while she does it. The theory, working from their preliminary autopsy report that Jack Shipley died instantaneously from a brain contusion, is that Orla headbutted him into the glass of the tank. DePlume didn’t see any moment of actual impact - that was what Phoenix saw on the security footage, Orla with her head tipped out of sight behind some tank decorations - but came to the conclusion that this was definitely the exact time of the victim’s death. A conclusion extrapolated from something that Phoenix really, really wishes Sasha had mentioned: a year ago, another orca trainer at Shipshape Aquarium died under such similar circumstances. 

DePlume wrote a whole damn book about it. Sasha entirely neglected this critical fact. Phoenix is going to scream. Maybe faint, instead, get just a little wobbly in the knee area, because Blackquill has this all in the palm of his hand, all under control, and what a horrible mess he would make of a jury trial. Start with them biased against him on basis of that tricky little matter, convicted murderer, and end with them swayed however he wants them to, just as he plays the gallery, but they aren’t the ones making the final call.

(Edgeworth fretted often about what a particularly charismatic and manipulative lawyer could do to the jurist system, and Phoenix thought he was worrying over Klavier, his charm, his glamours, his celebrity status. How likely instead that he was concerned with Blackquill, already planning ahead to when he would place him back in court?)

Though if Phoenix is going to faint for any actual reason, it’s the picture that Blackquill has projected up for the court. A page from DePlume’s book, half the sheet taken up by a glossy color photograph of the dead orca trainer - so that’s the kind of writer DePlume is, a sensationalist one, like some others he could name. The unfortunate girl was probably around Sasha’s age; her body lay on the edge of the show pool, water puddling beneath her and dripping from her long dark hair. Her shirt has flowing puffy pirate sleeves in a soft powder blue fabric. Almost the color of Trucy’s show cape, and it’s hard not to think of his daughter, but it’s even harder not to think of someone else wearing that color and killed while performing at her profession. It was a rehearsal, not a live show, when Thalassa died, but—

Reflections, reflections. He keeps running up against familiar faces on the corpses in this case.

“Athena! Phoenix! Please!” Sasha pleads from somewhere out-of-sight, while Orla, centered in the screen, chirrups in confusion, but when she makes sound, she shows off her powerful jaws full of teeth. “Orla didn’t kill anyone! Please, we’re begging for your help!”

Orla waves a flipper, the gravity of the situation not really clear to her. 

The trainer who died last year - if Orla really did everything DePlume says, biting and headbutting, they should see marks of that, blood and bruises, and there’s nothing. Logic himself out of fear, that’s right, he can do that - Orla can’t speak, but she understands them, and Sasha in part understands her. Sasha has faith in her. Phoenix has to have faith in Sasha.

“You’d be better off saving your breath, you sad slippery pup.” Blackquill leans forward, elbows on the bench, laughing, and Phoenix really, really does not like that. “Perhaps you did not see his face, but allow me to tell you - when he saw that photograph, he turned even paler than me. You were yourself rather afraid of the orca then, weren’t you, Wright-dono?”

Not enough for him to play the judge and gallery against the defendant, now he’s trying to turn lawyer and client against each other, make them lose faith in the other. How discouraged must Sasha feel, to be told Phoenix is doubting too? 

“For shame, to take up the matter of a client who you have neither the courage nor drive to defend, and further crush them under the false hope you’ve given.”

“Nothing about my defense is ‘false’, Prosecutor Blackquill.” Keep his face and voice calm and level, don’t give Blackquill an inch or a twitch to work from. “If you’re hoping for an easy win by talking me into giving up, I assure you, it’s not going to happen. Orla is my client, and I don’t give up on my clients.” Whether or not she can speak to him doesn’t matter. That she’s an orca doesn’t matter. You can never truly know if your client is innocent or not, Mia said once, a very long time ago. And she’s right, and was always right, because even Truth can get subjective and messy, be talked around, and relying wholly on it made him an arrogant idiot. All you can do is fight with everything you have. 

And he’s going to. He’s going to do Mia proud, orca or no. 

“I see the trust that Sasha has put in Orla, and I respect that.” He sympathizes, after all the nightmarish cases when he’s had to trust someone that no one else would, or trust someone who didn’t even trust himself. “So I’m willing to have faith in Orla, too.”

“Yet you do not know the first thing about orcas, do you?”

“Is that relevant?” Phoenix asks. 

He relishes the surprise that grips Blackquill’s features. Time to find out whether the Twisted Samurai, master manipulator, is smart enough to not be taken in by a tactic Phoenix has had seven years to perfect, playing the idiot and being underestimated. If it can’t get him anything about this particular case maybe he’ll learn something more about Blackquill himself that can help Edgeworth. 

“Do you know why they are also known as ‘killer whales’?”

What kind of trick question, and how actually relevant—? “Uh, because people have a tendency to fear what they don’t understand, and because they didn’t understand orcas and just saw their teeth, they presumed that these creatures were out to get them too?”

That’s basically a psychology explanation, right? He’s basically working on Athena and Blackquill’s level, in their wheelhouse, now, right?

Blackquill stares at him. One of his eyes twitches. Taka scratches its head. The question is written plainly across his features, the icy stare and the cold scowl: how did you pass the Bar, twice? 

Joke’s on him; Phoenix doesn’t know either. 

“No,” Blackquill says. “That is not it.”

“It was a good attempt,” Phoenix says, glancing to Athena for confirmation. She shrugs, her teeth pressed together in a failure at forcing a smile, and she sharply sucks in her breath. Okay. Ouch. That noncommittal of an answer is a hell of an answer of itself. 

“The reason,” Blackquill says, stressing the word, now acting along the belief that yes, Phoenix is a fucking idiot who needs to be addressed accordingly, “is that they are cunning and merciless predators known to hunt and kill even true whales. They are also known as ‘wolves of the sea’ for that same reason, that they are clever, powerful, and dangerous creatures who hunt in packs.” How, in the midst of going over the case, preparing witnesses, and filling in the gaps of the evidence Fulbright had, did he, from prison, have the time and resources to do this much research on orcas, down to etymology of the name? “Tell me, does that sound innocent to you? Does that not sound like the creature we have here on stand today, and her capacity to so efficiently kill a man before entertaining herself with that corpse?”

So he thinks orcas are smart enough to ascribe malicious intent to, and he’s doing his damndest to convince everyone else of the same. “My goodness,” the judge says. “So they truly are ‘killers’? Though may I ask, what do you mean by ‘true’ whales?”

Phoenix wondered the same, but if there’s time for a tangent then he’d rather use it to reconvene with Athena, steady themselves, and figure out how to work past this huge gap in their knowledge. It looks really bad, all the pieces they weren’t aware of. They need a new angle of approach as everything they’ve done so far has been smacked down—

“Oh, I can help you with that!” Athena says brightly, and her ponytail sways from side to side as she bobs up and down with uncontained glee. “Technically, if we want to get pedantic, which we do” - spoken like a true lawyer; Phoenix could shed a tear with pride - “what’s known as a ‘whale’” - she makes quotation marks with her fingers in the air - “is different in our informal everyday usage than in taxonomy. You traditionally wouldn’t call a dolphin a whale, right?”

Maybe Phoenix won’t have an opportunity to confer with Athena and will just ponder how dire this case has gotten on his own, while Athena spouts Whale Facts. If Blackquill meant to distract her, it’s working, but Phoenix is not honestly sure he could’ve expected this to happen, or the judge to ask. Either way, Blackquill hasn’t turned his back bored on the tangent yet; he has stepped back from the bench, arms crossed, the chain between his cuffs tangled up around them, eyes half closed, maybe glad for the break. 

“But,” Athena continues, “you could! Technically! So from, like, primary school biology we know that classification in taxonomy goes, kingdom phylum class order genus species, but there are orders within orders and suborders—”

“Athena,” Phoenix says, not sure she can even hear anyone else but herself right now, “I don’t think His Honor needs this much detail.”

“Yes, do stop her,” DePlume says with a roll of her eyes. 

Which makes Phoenix immediately want to change his stance and tell Athena to continue talking, but someone else gets to it first. “Let the lass go on,” Blackquill says dryly. “Don’t crush her spirit. I’ll do enough of that myself when we get to the next testimony and the sentencing.”

“—and so there’s a smaller order known as Cetaceans, that’s literally just, derived from Ancient Greek for ‘whale’. But this whales order contains two more even smaller orders, and those are toothed whales and baleen whales. Baleen whales are what you’d consider ‘true whales’, basically, like blue whales and humpback whales, and they’re probably what you think of if you were asked to picture a whale. But toothed whales include dolphins and orcas and narwhals—”

“Wait,” Phoenix says. “Narwhals aren’t giant fucked-up seals?”

Blackquill closes his eyes entirely. 

“Nope! They don’t have a fin on their back, so maybe that’s why you got confused, but belugas don’t either, and they’re whales as much as narwhals are! But the short of the orca matter” - wasn’t the judge’s question about what a true whale is, not how orcas are taxonomically classified? - “is that they are actually classified within the dolphin family. Orcas are dolphins! So if you’d call a bottlenose dolphin a whale, you can call an orca a whale. They’re both the same amount of whale! Or informally you can just keep using the words ‘dolphin’ and ‘whale’ however, with no regards to which animals are genetically most similar, and people will get what you mean, because words mean what we’ve made them mean and that’s how we use them. But since you wanted to know, now you know!”

“I - yes.” The judge is slightly taken aback by her enthusiasm. “Thank you, Ms Cykes. You really have done your research for this case.”

Phoenix somehow has the feeling that she knew that long before this case. 

“And yet.” Blackquill leans forward, his eyes alight and alive, a point ready to be made even off the back of something not case-relevant. “You dispute and explain the ‘whale’ part, but never once say a thing to refute the ‘killer’.” 

“I - but, I—” Athena turns helplessly to Phoenix, her mouth opening and closing without any more words coming through. 

“I simply cannot bear to hear more such drivel from the defense about trusting a killer,” he continues. “Can you, either, Your Baldness?”

Phoenix would’ve been thrown out of the court after bringing a bird in (or a whip, or for throwing an enchanted coffee mug across the room), or for even half of this amount of contempt for the judge - the rules have always been more lenient for prosecutors, he’s always known that, but there’s never been such a stark demonstration of it. Once this trial is over, he’ll take that up with Edgeworth. Far from the most important action to take to level the field, not by a long shot, but might as well make a note of it. 

“Funny that he’s talking shit on ‘trusting a killer’,” Phoenix mutters, “when he’s the convicted killer here, asking the judge to trust his case.” He snorts, but Athena doesn’t laugh or make a sound. She stares across at Blackquill, drumming her fingers on her collarbone right next to Widget. The one to laugh is Blackquill himself, even though Phoenix was taking care that he wouldn’t be heard by anyone but Athena, to keep that from being an on-the-record statement when he’s said enough bullshit that already will be going into a transcript. (Goddamn narwhals.)

As if Blackquill wasn’t enough of an uncomfortable, inscrutable mystery. Where’s his damned bird? Taka isn’t close to Phoenix, but it isn’t right with Blackquill, either; it splits the distance, and Phoenix doesn’t know how good a hawk’s hearing is. Pretty good, he thinks. He’ll ask Kay if she knows. And Taka heard, what was his name, the tanuki from Mayor Tenma’s trial, talking to them in the lobby after, and what Taka heard got to Blackquill, got to Edgeworth. Is that how this works?

“I’ve been told I can’t take a hint,” Phoenix says, louder, and Taka circles over the room and decides to settle now on the judge’s head. “And I certainly am not going to take this hint of yours to give up, Prosecutor Blackquill, because I’ve also been told I don’t know when to quit.”

“Your self-awareness does no credit to you,” Blackquill says. “Very well. Witness, tell them what you saw, and what you heard. Deliver the fatal blow to their deluded determination.”

Back to work.

-

It’s touch and go, like every case, every time, just like Phoenix remembers, but they work through DePlume’s testimony, keep pressing the possibility of a human killer. Suggest that Orla was manipulated, given the command to start singing by a human culprit who wanted to draw attention to her, frame her, and create a witness. He’s pushing the bloody coin at the court as much as he shows his badge to witnesses during an investigation - and he’s not gonna stop doing the latter any time soon, not now that he’s got a new badge to be proud of because it means he survived and that’s worth announcing to everyone, right? - but the judge is coming around, surely—

And Blackquill is not; Blackquill’s a damn tricky bastard who has a blood-covered burlap bag, the exact piece of evidence Phoenix desperately wanted to find. He has the bag, he knows Phoenix wanted it for proof, but since he’s known of it since yesterday he’s had time to spin a tale that keeps Orla as the perpetrator. He’s prepared it to the point that it’s not even a bluff: he has Marlon Rimes as a witness to confirm that something happened, a loud clattering noise from the orca pool room that Blackquill argues is the moment that Orla, by pulling on a flag lying underneath them, upended four-hundred pounds of show props all precariously stacked, right down onto the victim’s head.

When Rimes said he had come here on Sasha’s behalf, because she had to stay behind with Orla - that wasn’t the full truth, clearly. 

Not that Rimes is exactly happy to testify for Blackquill, either. The story is dragged out of him: he was up in the staff room around 10:10 am, roughly the time that DePlume saw Orla with the captain’s body, when he heard a crashing and peered into the room to see the props had all fallen, after they had been cleaned up neatly the prior night. “Just to clarify,” Phoenix says, already certain that Rimes is lying about the timing of this, but he wants to get the most information he can from this fake story if it might help him figure out why Rimes is lying. “You heard the sound, couldn’t go in the room because you need a security key for that” - Rimes nods - “but peeked in and couldn’t see the victim” - Rimes nods a second time - “but could see the props?” 

Rimes nods a third time. “Yeah. The rest of the stuff mighta been blocking my view of the captain, but I could see a bunch of those gold coins lying all about everywhere.”

And the current running theory is that the gold coins, via bag, are the murder weapon. Phoenix has staked the case for a human culprit on those coins. “I suppose it fits as a certain tragic thematic,” Blackquill says. Phoenix braces himself for tasteless remarks. “With the pirate theme that the victim pursued for his aquarium, and consider how many pirates lost their lives in pursuit of gold. Perhaps it’s faery gold; I’ve heard that unfailingly claims lives. Or perhaps the orca wished to be compensated for her labor, and saw fit to take the matter between her own teeth.”

There it goes. There’s the cruel biting words, the nasty chuckle, Blackquill laughing with himself when no one else is. “We all deserve to be properly paid for our work, do we not? And I myself shall have a fine meal tonight.”

Several questions arise, none relevant to the case: how exactly is Blackquill paid? He’s a prisoner on death row; money isn’t exactly an issue, or worth anything, to him. Maybe he’s compensated with better food than standard prison fare. Maybe that’s what he means. Maybe it’s that and not the alarming, outlandish, prospect Phoenix can’t shake, not when Blackquill wears that cloying smirk across his face, the one that suggests he knows something more than he’s letting on, and he took the time at the beginning of the trial saying that he wanted to “carry out the sentence” - read: kill, because if Orla was guilty she’s going to be put down.

So, well, knowing Maya for as long as he has, there’s no way for him to discount the possibility that Blackquill, talking about dinner, means that he wants to kill and eat an orca.

(He’s tried for a while to figure out what it is that drives Maya’s appetite. Does she just think human food tastes better? Isn’t it supposed to be the other way around, that faery food tastes so exquisite that after having it, anything else is ashes in a human’s mouth? Is that even true? Something else to ask Thalassa. But for Maya, he’s not ever figured out whether it was just a trait she was born with, an insatiable void within that she’s driven to fill, or a way that she revels in the human world, that to get food here it’s a simple price of money, with no debt incurred, no complex magically binding rules of hospitality. Eating plastic packaging, though - the Gavins’ hellhound does the same, swallowed a whole takeout container that Phoenix offered it as a gesture of “please don’t kill me” - he’s got even less an idea.) 

If this, though - this with Blackquill right here, the insinuation that might say more about Phoenix than Blackquill, about what he’s dealt with on a regular basis and how every place he turns these past two days he sees it - if this could be how he gets the answer to the “is he human or fae” question, so help him—

(If it’s anything for Blackquill, if he’s anything like Maya, then this is a thing about dominance, about being the one at the top of the food chain. About having any ounce of control over someone’s life, even if his own is out of his hands, and he on death row. Hey, is that analytical psychology? Everything that Athena refers to as “analytical psychology” means Phoenix doesn’t have a clue what it’s actually supposed to be.)

“Good to clear that up, Mr Rimes, thank you,” Phoenix says. Blackquill’s grin widens. He knows Phoenix is deliberately, consciously ignoring him. He knows that he’s gotten under his skin. 

(Hell, he’s been there for months already, but more in the way of a faint itch, and now he’s plainly a knife jammed through Phoenix’s chest. Isn’t stabbing someone a way of getting under their skin, both literally and metaphorically? And he wouldn’t put it past Blackquill to stab him, literally. With magic, sure, but still.)

“Now,” Phoenix continues. “The trouble is, Mr Rimes, that there’s no way you could’ve been in the staff room at that time. Is there not a certain young woman whose acquaintance you made yesterday, in the food prep room, at this same time that you claim to have been in the staff room?”

Another thing to bring up with Edgeworth, in terms of legal reform: maybe some sort of public service announcements about the consequences of perjury? Make some informative posters to put up at bus stops and subway stations. That couldn’t hurt.

-

“Sasha’s under enough stress now, y’know? I didn’t want her to have to come in and testify. Figured if anyone should have to go up on the stand, it shoulda been me.”

“That’s a very…” Phoenix pinches the bridge of his nose. Very noble? Very stupid? Why not both? “Very kindly meant, thing to do, Mr Rimes, but that’s still perjury.”

“Yeah,” Athena says. “It seems like a lot of trouble to go to just so that Sasha didn’t have to come in and say yeah, she heard a noise. And now she’s got to come in anyway, and you’re in trouble too now. Why would you go to that extent?”

Why indeed. 

He tells them. The calendar they thought was his, the one Pearl accidentally picked up, the one that tells them that the victim met with someone at the pool - that wasn’t his. He thinks it’s Sasha’s. He worried suspicion would fall on Sasha.

And now Phoenix is worried by that prospect, too.

He didn’t miss this part of being a lawyer, not at all. Damn all of it. 

Rimes leaves to return to the aquarium, take over orca-sitting while Sasha has to testify, and that leaves Phoenix and Athena to pace around the lobby like fish swimming circles in a tank for the rest of the recess. Just waiting, helplessly, to know what horrible new revelation will come next.

Sasha’s testimony is about the same as Rimes’, except for the part where it’s actually true. Orla kicked up a fuss, DePlume started screaming, which of these happened first she doesn’t remember, because finding your boss dead in an orca tank doesn’t help one maintain a firm, linear thought process to exactly recall it later. No surprises there. Lacking any other strategy, Phoenix nitpicks and nitpicks at her testimony until even she is annoyed with it, even though he’s the lawyer she came to for help and she knew from the start that he cross-examined a parrot so she should expect that this is the strategy and the strategy is bluffing and bullshitting.

But it gets them places. It gets them information about the way the props fell over the victim, that Orla couldn’t have dragged him into the pool after they fell because that would’ve disturbed the scarf that landed on top of his body, the way that once again Phoenix’s entire theory is wrong and he’s got to dispute his own suggestion that he built this case on, the bloody coin as the murder weapon. It’s not. He disproves his own bluff that got the case to trial in the first place.

His real argument, his unwavering stance, is simply that Orla was not the killer, and against everything new they pull from Sasha, that holds true. The victim most likely fell to his death in the drained orca pool. Orla was manipulated, using one of the new tricks she’s learning, to grab the victim’s body and bring him back up to the surface. Sasha and Rimes get her to demonstrate, on the video phone, with a practice dummy. Blackquill’s case about a killer whale is losing ground, fast; Orla’s too endearing. “The whole gallery loves her!” Athena says brightly, and her voice and stance both turn smug as she adds, “And Prosecutor Blackquill’s shut right up!”

Planning a counterattack is well within the realm of possibility for why he’s silent. He might also be convincing himself that whale meat would taste nasty anyway. Or Phoenix might be terribly uncharitable, and Blackquill never intended to eat the orca. He never said it outright. He just had a look about him that didn’t seem innocent, if he’s ever seemed innocent, which Phoenix does not believe he has. Probably shouldn’t say that about a sort-of client, but here they are.

Also here they are, with the judge agreeing, ordering an investigation be done of the bottom of the orca pool, and Blackquill still sullenly silent, the trial inexorably rolling to its final conclusion, a verdict, Orla saved—

“Prosecutor Blackquill!” Fulbright makes a loud reappearance, waving a manilla envelope with one hand and with the other trying to extract a paper from the envelope, and he isn’t really doing either with any dignity. “The thing you ordered has come in.”

“Hmph.” Blackquill doesn’t raise his arm to accept the paper - finally extracted from the envelope - Fulbright offers him. He doesn’t move in any way, doesn’t make a sound or an indication of a command, and Taka alights from his shoulder, snatching the page from Fulbright, talons piercing through it, and circling up to the judge. “If you would read that out to the court, Your Baldness.”

“Ah - and what is this, exactly?” The judge slowly pulls the sheet lose, care made to avoid his hands getting close to Taka’s talons, but also to not rip the paper even further.

“An updated autopsy report,” Blackquill replies.

“God damn it!” Phoenix should not say that so loudly, and saying it out loud at any volume is too loud with Athena around, especially when he’s been over Courtroom Manners 101 with her and had the lesson basically boil down to don’t challenge the prosecution to a fistfight by the dumpsters in the back lot and don’t curse on the record. But the words escape from him anyway, like air knocked from his lungs when the prosecution roundhouse-kicked him straight in the gut. “Why now? Just when it’s going good for us—”

“During the recess, a particular thought occurred to me,” Blackquill says. He’s the one ignoring Phoenix, now, though there’s nothing smug about it, only chilly disdainful professionalism. “I asked the body to be reexamined, bearing in mind what had been nagging at me. Now.” He jerks his head to the side, directed at the judge. 

“Very well.” The judge casts one last cautious glance at Taka before he allows his attention to turn to the paper. “Let’s see here… The cause of death, blunt force trauma, shown to be consistent with - with a fall? A fall of around sixty feet? But the orca pool is sixty-five feet deep! This report backs up the defense’s claims!”

Blackquill nods once.

“What?” Phoenix’s yelp is even louder this time, never mind that this is good news. It’s good news. It’s solid evidence in favor of his claim and his client. Why does it feel like someone still has a foot on his chest?

“The orca could not possibly be involved with what happened with an empty pool,” the judge says. “This autopsy report proves her complete innocence!”

“Yes,” Blackquill says, at length. Even it being his autopsy report, it takes him several seconds to finally acquise. “I suppose it does.” 

Taka spreads its wings and flaps back to Blackquill’s shoulder. 

“Then we did it!” Athena bounces again, her excitement bubbling over into obvious physical expression, just as her every other emotion refuses to be contained. “Prosecutor Blackquill can’t even object! He isn’t even trying! You’ve done it, Boss! You saved Orla!”

His agreement with her, they’ve done it, Orla’s safe, emerges as a sticky click from the back of his throat. Words don’t come, and another choked attempt at response is lost against the clack of the judge’s gavel. “This court finds the defendant, Ora Shipley” - right, Phoenix had entirely forgotten that Orla’s “legal” name is something different than what she’s called - “not guilty!”

An expected Objection! doesn’t follow, not from Blackquill, not from a different witness, not anyone. Beside him, Athena woops and throws her hands in the air, extended a bit toward Sasha, who pumps her fist in the air in return. “Phoenix! Athena! Thank you both so much!” She springs out from behind the witness stand and calls over to the video phone, “Hey, Marlon! Give Orla some celebratory snacks!”

“Sure thing! Congrats, Sasha!” Orla on screen is pelted by a hail of fish, catching only about half of them, like someone flung a whole bucket at her. He probably did, in fact. 

The judge clears his throat, taps his gavel once. “That concludes today’s—” He taps the gavel again, raises his voice a little more. “Today’s proceedings!” Court’s never going to be officially dismissed at this rate, with the hubbub; Athena’s leaning over the bench now, grinning, saying something to Sasha, and Orla chattering loudly. She’s so caught up in the fervor, but Phoenix still waits for the other shoe to drop, always is waiting for that, and he still concentrates enough that he hears, over the sound of her and Sasha’s laughter, a low, throaty chuckle drift across the courtroom. 

Then Blackquill slams his palm on the bench, and the courtroom goes quiet enough to listen to the rattle of the chain echo into silence. Athena, basically lying sprawled across the bench , pushes herself up. Sasha has frozen.

For a moment, Blackquill doesn’t move, his eyes fixed down on his hand on the bench. Then he raises his eyes up, his face alight with smug triumph. “My sincerest thanks, Wright-dono.” 

“Huh?” There’s no way this goes that’s good, is there? Maybe Blackquill could surprise him, like the updated autopsy report surprised him, or maybe he’s going to have to ask Athena how many languages she knows and how to say oh fuck in all of them. (She knows German, right? He could pull double time with that, between swearing in court, and driving a few people he knows up the wall.)

“For your work in drawing out the truth.”

If Blackquill had a personal stake in wanting to know the truth behind this case, that would be one thing, but—

“Now, Fool Bright. Arrest this woman.”

“Certainly!” Fulbright throws up a jaunty salute with two fingers. He and Blackquill are the only ones moving, like they’re the only ones alive, everyone else turned to stone, unable to do anything but wait. “Sasha Buckler, you are under arrest for the murder of Jack Shipley!”

“What?” Sasha springs backwards, knocking into the bench and grabbing onto the edge of it to hold herself up. 

“No! I don’t believe it!” Athena smacks both of her palms down on the bench, pushing herself up entirely off of her feet, suspending herself in an attempt to be taller.

The shoe dropped. “For what reason—”

Blackquill cuts him off before he finishes asking the question. “Come now. You must have had some idea in your sorry sad head that this would be the outcome. The drained pool in the orca room accessible only by key card - the orca being framed with its show commands. Who else had access and ability to be on the scene and properly manipulate the orca? She and the victim are the only two who participate in the training and commanding of the orca, and her security card, last night, had the last recorded usage until the body was discovered yesterday morning.”

“Yesterday, we requested security card logs from the company that handles them,” Fulbright says. “Apparently, the aquarium employees don’t know the card usage is tracked. Come along now, Ms Buckler. It’s time we have a nice long chat down at the station.”

Card usage records, think Phoenix think; he’s run up against this kind of thing at least once before. What are all his theories and bluffs to get around that? If employees didn’t know that their ins and outs were recorded, someone who had their own card would probably use it, but a culprit who didn’t have a card would still have to steal it, even if they didn’t know they could frame someone that way. 

Objecting at this point won’t stop what’s in motion. Fulbright takes Sasha by the upper arm, escorting her away, and she follows in a dazed trace. But Phoenix is not going to not object, if he sees any way to, and Sasha is his client about as much as Orla is, and Athena is indignant and seething beside him. “Why would Ms Buckler have come to us for help with Orla’s case if she intended to frame Orla?” he demands. “Why wouldn’t she just let Orla be blamed and escape the scrutiny?”

Blackquill snorts. “She’s quite the performer, acting the part of such a worried girl concerned for the life of her friend. Perhaps she thought to even better sell her concern this way, knowing all the while with a witness, the margins of victory were quite slim for you. I of course suspected her from the start. That the orca may have been a malicious killer, or may have been a pawn and victim herself of someone so heartless as to place the blame upon the unwitting - I considered both possibilities.”

Phoenix should have figured something was up, that he had another culprit ready to blame, when the update to the autopsy report arrived. If Blackquill ordered the body reexamined for - what, exactly? The differing patterns of blunt force trauma for being slammed by an orca against glass versus falling a long distance? Squish versus splat? - then did he expect that the defense was going to find that angle? If he wanted the examiners to specifically consider falling, then that meant he realized Orla was innocent. And if she was innocent, then he could just switch targets. He was waiting for this since they put Sasha on the stand.

He had unwitting pawns of his own. 

“I really must thank you again.” Blackquill is undeniably enjoying rubbing salt into the wound. “I surely could not have done this without your assistance. After all, you were the one who put the witness so at ease as to bring forth the information about the orca’s lifesaver trick.”

This is not the kind of defense-prosecution collaboration that Phoenix signed up for.

“Wait - wait!” Sasha wakes to the reality of her situation, snaps out of the confused daze the accusation put her in, and starts dragging her feet, not slowing hers and Fulbright’s trajectory out of the courtroom in any way, but succeeding at making a horrible squealing noise of her shoes on the polished courtroom floor. “I didn’t kill the captain! I would never do anything that would hurt Orla! I - oof!” Fulbright seems about two seconds from lifting her off the ground and simply hauling her from the courtroom that way. “Please! Phoenix! Athena! I—”

Her voice fades and a door slams.

“Sasha—” Athena has her feet back solidly on the ground, her hands still pressed against the bench, fingers curled under her palms to form trembling fists. She doesn’t speak again, doesn’t move again. Even once the judge has adjourned the court - this is Orla’s trial, after all, and she is resoundingly innocent - she remains still, her eyes fixed blankly out into space. Phoenix has to tap her on the shoulder to get her moving, and even then, when she does, she walks with the same slow cadence that Sasha did as she tried to figure out what was happening. Widget is still lit up, displaying its sad purple-bluish face, but Athena might as well have shut herself off.

“What a horrible end to a trial,” Trucy says, shaking her head. They’re already in the lobby waiting, she and Apollo and Pearl, all serious and solemn and surprisingly quiet. “It was going so good! I was so excited for you both! And then—!”

“She didn’t do it!” Athena blurts. Widget snaps to red. “I believe that with my whole heart, I know it, Sasha didn’t do it! Her voice and her heart were both saying the exact same thing, that she didn’t! And no one listened!” Her anger teeters on the edge of tears. “The whole court should’ve listened and no one - no one—”

“Well, obviously you listened,” Apollo says. He looks pretty uncomfortable with her distress, drawing himself back, his arms tightly folded together, but as he speaks, Athena’s body snaps up straight, her head level again, eyes wide, like she was just doused in cold water to finally wake her. 

“I - Boss!” She spins around to face Phoenix. “Boss, we have to defend Sasha! We have to get to the detention center to see her, right now! Right now!”

“The police aren’t even going to be back at the detention center yet,” Phoenix says. “They do have to drive there, you know. It’s not like it’s - wormholes or anything.” He deliberately goes for a word far from fae connotations, far from something that will give Pearl, Athena, or Trucy any ideas. “We’ll go back to the office and regroup, figure out how we approach today’s investigation at the aquarium, and we’ll go there—”

“But you’re going to be defending Sasha too, right, Boss?” Athena demands. “If you’re not, then - then I - and—” She looks to Apollo and Trucy, her words all tangled up, but the intent clear: she’ll do it with or without him. 

“Of course I will be,” Phoenix says. “But the police will be interrogating her for a while, probably, so we should do some investigating first, so we’re not just waiting around at the detention center, and so we can have something actually helpful to tell her, because…” He drags a hand through his hair. It’s the way this always goes, the up-and-down trajectory where after every crescendo there’s a further place to fall, and if he ever proves innocence in one matter for certain, something else waits in the wings to tell him he lost a different round he didn’t know he was playing. 

“Because what, Daddy?” Trucy asks. “You think she’s going to want a different lawyer? You proved Orla didn’t do it! She sounded really grateful to you and Athena! Of course she’d want you as her lawyer!”

“I should’ve seen this coming,” Phoenix says. That’s the trouble: Blackquill said he must surely have had some idea of how this would end, and he did, and he pushed it away, and it caught up to him. “And figured out - some way around it, asked Sasha what her alibi was and what she was doing because if we were proving a human culprit then of course the prosecution could turn it around to—”

“But how could you have seen that coming?” Athena glares at him like he’s a lying witness on the stand, and she, ready to tear him apart verbally and physically. “That Prosecutor Blackquill would - ugh! Prosecutor Blackquill.” She says his name like a curse, the tone that Maya always used on Edgeworth’s name at the beginning. (Then he stopped being such a pain in the ass and became their friend and she stopped using his name at all.)

“How could you have even thought to ask Ms Buckler those questions?” Trucy says. “Like ‘hey you were the only one to use the security key in the past 12 hours right’? Or ‘did you leak any of your top-secret orca whistle patterns to anyone else’ or ‘how do we break into police files to get the full security camera footage’ or—”

“I get it, Truce,” Phoenix says. She squints doubtfully at him. “No, I do, really. But the thing is—” 

She rolls her eyes and turns silently to Apollo, the obvious sentiment conveyed that this further objection is him further not actually getting it, and Apollo snorts, and Phoenix’s heart clenches up with a vice around it that they’ve only had a year and not a lifetime to perfect their silent, condescending, sibling communication and they don’t even know that’s what this is. It’s the same way Edgeworth and Franziska can cast the briefest glance at each other but convey three levels of disdain and mockery and coordinate a savage teardown of whatever sorry fool has earned their ire—

Where was his original thought going? 

“The thing is - this happens all the time, to me, with my cases. Where everything I do to prove my client innocent just further pushes them, or someone else they love, closer to drowning. Just makes it worse.” Edgeworth’s new confession, an accusation against Ema. A last accusation against Maya, her own mother. Phoenix’s own badge because he tried too hard to save someone with it. Just the highlight reel. “And it’s kind of horribly crushing every time. I didn’t want you to have to go through that, Athena.” Look how badly it affected her. She asked him something like that back when they first met, didn’t she: what happens if no one listens to you? And here it went, and hurt her badly. 

All four of the kids stare at him, unblinking, confused. “But then you would’ve had to defend and investigate all on your own!” Athena protests. “And - and then you’d have no one to share the crushing despair with!”

“I don’t want to share that,” Phoenix interrupts. “I’m pretty sure I’m cursed.” And like the other ways he’s cursed, he’s afraid that sooner or later it will take one of his kids as victim. Less horrible than Death catching up to them, of course, but still. He’s put them all through enough.

Pearl studies him intently, chewing at her thumbnail again. She concentrates hard enough that her glamour starts slipping from her eyes, turning them red. “I don’t see anything,” she says. “I mean, Misfortune could do it, but you only got that when you stopped being a lawyer.”

Apollo recoils. He knows exactly where that one came from.

“But your win record is still kickass!” Athena punches her fist into her opposite palm. “So even if it happens you still pull it off! And I want to learn how to do that! From Apollo and from you, too!” In his logical, detached brain, he can keep a good distance from her, and then when she’s staring him in the face reminding him of why he became a lawyer and the good things he’s done - it’s that much harder. “C’mon, if we’re going to the office we’d better go now! We’ve got investigation to do!”

“You know,” Pearl says as they head for Athena’s car, “you sure do know a lot about orcas. And I didn’t get to learn much about Orla at the aquarium, unfortunately, and I know she’s not the point of contention in court anymore—”

“Do you want me to tell you more orca facts?” Athena interrupts. As though she honestly needs the excuse that Pearl was going to offer her, of teaching them things they can use in court to defend Orla. Pearl nods.

On the drive back to the office, Phoenix gets the other front seat, and Apollo, Trucy, and Pearl squish themselves into the back. Athena chatters animatedly to the rearview mirror the whole time.

-

“Was there something you wanted to say to me, Athena? Or show me? That’s a very large book you have, there.”

“...Junie brought it to me from the school library. Since I haven’t been able to go in lately.”

“She did? That’s very kind of her. And what is it - An Encyclopedia of Marine Mammals. Very nice.”

“Mhm. I’m nearly done reading it.”

“You’re reading the whole thing? Cover to cover?”

“Don’t you do that with books? Um… being a lawyer is a lot of reading, isn’t it? You should read it all. To make sure that you don’t catch an innocent person by mistake.”

“I do, don’t worry. I wouldn’t want any person sent to the gallows for something they didn’t do.”

“Then why don’t you read whole books?”

“I don’t read entire encyclopedias. You know, a lot of libraries don’t let you take them home with you at all. You just look up what you want to know while you’re there.”

“But I want to know everything that’s in this encyclopedia.”

“Well, then I suppose you know better than I and I shouldn’t be telling you what to do, I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. Do you want to hear something I’ve learned so far? Um, since you’re always taking time to, to teach me what you’re learning.”

“I’ve heard it said, and found it myself to be true, that by teaching something you learn it better yourself, too. It helps us both that way. It’s very efficient. Go ahead, tell me something about marine mammals.”

“I’ll try and find something you wouldn’t already know.”

“I’m a law and psychology student, not a marine biologist. I don’t know anything. How about you tell me about - penguins?”

“Birds aren’t mammals, silly! But I can tell you about orcas. They’re black and white like you and penguins are, too! They’re the largest member of the dolphin family - they’re not whales at all!”

“Killer whales aren’t whales?”

“Nope! And the ‘killer’ part, is because sailors would observe them hunting and killing baleen whales, and they were first known as ‘whale killers’ and then that got flipped, somehow. And now people tend to think of them as vicious killers, but they aren’t! Wild orcas have never killed a human! They’re just strong and hungry.”

“That they gained that reputation is unfortunate but not surprising. Humans have that tendency to fear what they don’t understand, and to not bother understanding so much of the world around them. To presume that their impressions of the world constitute its one objective truth.”

“...”

“I’m sorry. The cases I’ve been studying lately have me pondering this sort of matter quite a bit, lately. This and worse.”

“Do you want to talk about those? That might make you feel better?”

“...how about you explain to me what a ‘baleen whale’ is.”

“They don’t have teeth - they’re the ones like humpback and blue whales that have, like, bristles in their mouth that they filter in plankton through. That’s what baleen is! It looks sort of like my hairbrush over there.”

“Speaking of, you certainly don’t look like you brushed your hair at all today.”

“No? I… Mom’s been busy all day working, and I was busy reading so I didn’t think I…”

“How about I go get it and fix your hair so that you look presentable, and you tell me more about orcas.”

“I look fine!”

“You look like it was arranged by nesting birds looking to make a comfortable place to raise their young.”

“Pbbbbft! Oh, but did you know that orcas are one of the only species of mammal besides humans and other primates that undergo menopause? Female orcas who can no longer have babies stick around to help raise other babies and take charge of the group. Different populations of orca tend to live in different-sized pods but for most of them, the babies even once grown up don’t leave on their own and instead they’ll stay with their moms for their whole lives—”

#roddy fanfics #fic: the witches of los angeles