Work Text:
[Incoming Call: Phoenix Wright]
[08:39PM, 16th December, 2027]
“Apollo was involved in a bombing.”
“He- he what?”
“In the courtroom, today. It’s probably on the news if you want the information. I rang to tell you he’s in hospital, pretty badly injured, but they said he’s gonna pull through. The hospital couldn’t notify you, obviously. They think you’re dead and the kid has no family records, anyway. I just thought you should know.”
“I’ll… be right there.”
“Visiting hours for non-family members are between four and six. Unless you want to tell him right now. But I’ll warn you, he won’t take it very well.”
“Then I’ll, I’ll- oh god, Phoenix. I have to tell him. Both of them. Just let me know when he’s… when he’s stable, and I’ll… I promise, this time. I’ll see him tomorrow, though, as soon as they’ll let me.”
It had been about a month before Phoenix deemed Apollo more-or-less okay enough to receive the news.
They had held a funeral for him as a baby, after she thought she’d lost him in Khura’in. It was small, pitiful: Thalassa had sobbed through his eulogy and her father had rested a comforting yet unemotional hand on her shoulder as she said her final goodbyes to her little boy.
She’d attended Apollo Justice’s funeral once before, and that was enough for a lifetime. The incident in Courtroom No. 4 was far too close for comfort - it was as though a switch had flipped in her brain as soon as she’d gotten the call. It’s all well and good wanting to wait until the time is right, but her children aren’t invincible. She doesn’t want to wait long enough that one of them dies before she can tell the truth.
This is the first time she’s properly seen him, been able to take him in fully since the revelation. When they first broke the news to him and Trucy, he was angry and then upset and then before she could even register what was happening, he had left - so she didn’t have a chance to take a moment just to look at him like she wanted to after regaining her sight.
Since then, things have been civil. There have been some awkward text conversations and some updates that are parroted back to her via Phoenix (she’s hesitant to ask about anything personal in case Apollo isn’t ready to tell her, so that mostly consists of what he had for lunch or if he’s won any cases recently).
But now they’re actually seeing each other. He doesn’t seem outwardly angry anymore, just uncomfortable and at times a little frosty; and as she fully looks at her son, all grown up, she’s struck by how much he looks like his father.
For so long, Apollo Justice had forever been her baby boy, never more than twenty inches long and six months old; the memories of him were tucked away in an old cardboard box that lived in the attic of her childhood home, sealed with brown tape and a heartbroken farewell kiss to the top as she closed it. Sealing away the memories of what she had lost was the only way she could even start to cope.
It had been somewhat of an ordeal trying to find it over two decades later. It wasn’t a secret that Magnifi Gramarye didn’t particularly like her running off to start a family and leaving Troupe Gramarye in the process, and after she returned she always had the sinking feeling that he was glad Apollo and Jove were no longer there to ‘hold her back’. But he never went near the box. He knew she would’ve run off again if he did.
She recovered it eventually, stored away amongst old Troupe Gramarye belongings in Valant’s house. She had reunited with him much quicker than with her children; he told her he’d always believed she might still be alive, and that she was welcome to any of the things that went to him when Magnifi’s house was seized after his death and Zak’s disappearance.
There hadn’t been much in the box, a tragic reminder of a life cut short. There was a keepsake of his first chocolate-brown curl of hair, the same shade as Jove’s and the same texture as hers; his first pair of shoes, so tiny and fragile, bright red with white laces; a photo album, splattered with old tear stains of her own and only half-full; and a baby blanket, lovingly embroidered with Apollo’s name and his birthday.
The blanket is what she hands over to him now in the empty office of the Wright Anything Agency. (She didn’t want to encroach on Apollo’s living space and he probably wouldn’t have been comfortable coming to her, either - leaving his office as a perfect sort of middle ground for them to meet). She’s as gentle as she can be, running her forefinger over the stitched calligraphy of his name and her eyes over the sewn patterns of moons and stars and planets.
“It was your favourite thing,” she tells him gently, fondly. “You used to point at all the bright colours, and we couldn’t get you to sleep if you could see it. You would be just too excited.”
Apollo accepts it. He takes it into his hands with nowhere near as much reverence as Thalassa had held it with; but he still traces the stitches with his finger, going straight to the red planet first just as he’d done as a baby.
Her heart twists behind her ribcage, half uncomfortable and half nostalgic. His fingertip is big enough to cover the entire design now, hands no longer wrinkled and tiny and only just long enough to wrap around Thalassa’s thumb.
“...It’s nice,” he says eventually.
“Jove was always into mythology, you know. He was the one to come up with your name,” she reminisces. “I liked it, of course. I started sewing the blanket after we agreed on it. Our little baby Apollo, like the space missions. You were going to explore the world, sweetheart. I… I’m sorry I wasn’t there for most of it.”
Apollo pauses before offering tentatively: “I… had a friend who liked space.”
“Oh?”
He shrugs. “Clay. He’s dead now.”
“I’m so sorry, sweetheart,” she says gently, the maternal tone of voice almost foreign in her mouth. “I’m sure he was a wonderful boy.”
“He was twenty-three, so not much of a boy anymore.” Apollo’s eyes bore holes into the cotton-thread stars of the blanket. “He would’ve thought this was cool. He was murdered by a serial killer last year.”
Thalassa feels her heart drop into her stomach. He’d said it with such nonchalance, with such a deadened look in his eyes - his friend had been murdered, and she wasn’t there to comfort him. She wasn’t there at all. And it wasn’t even because she thought he was dead, or because she was in Borginia, or because she was without both sight and memory - this was last month, and she was still too cowardly to go to him, to give him any sort of motherly support or love. She hadn’t even been a mere shoulder to cry on.
Though before she can even try to comfort, to start to say anything along the lines of oh dear or I’m sorry, Apollo is pensively running his finger over the date stitched underneath his name, the movement slow and thoughtful.
“That’s not my birthday,” he murmurs.
Thalassa stills in her seat. “Isn’t it?”
Part of her wants to tell Apollo that of all people, she would know his birthday more than anyone. She wants to tell him about the sheer panic that gripped her when he didn’t cry straight away and about the overwhelming love that flooded her upon hearing the first tiny, fragile breath of her first child. She wants to tell him about the first time she held her baby boy, shocked at how he could be so small, and how Jove had kissed her sweaty, exhausted forehead and then the tiny brow of their firstborn. She desperately wants him to know how loved he was.
Despite the amnesia that plagued her for years, that was one of the memories to return to her in full clarity. The first time he opened his eyes, blinking up at his mother as the first sight he would ever see; his eyes were a slightly cloudy grey that would months later shift to match the deep brown hue of his father’s, gazing up at Thalassa with something akin to amazement.
She wants to tell him that. But their relationship is still so new, as delicate as a baby’s breath, and the last thing she wants to do is damage this shaky semblance of politeness by turning everything he’s ever known on his head.
Apollo simply shakes his head. “I mean, uh. Neither you or Jove were there to tell anyone when it actually was, so it got made up,” he says, and then scoffs angrily. “Did you even know that? I came to America when I was nine. All my documents were fake. My passport, my birth certificate. It was a miracle they didn’t send me straight back.”
“Oh, my darling…”
“Please don’t,” Apollo cuts her off quickly, placing the blanket on the coffee table between their two coffee mugs that Apollo had prepared for them earlier, most likely stalling for time. “I mean- we had to just guess how old I was. So it’s not- I get that you would know, but it’s been twenty-three years. That’s what I have on my actual passport now, it’s what I celebrated growing up. And I know that it wasn't your fault you thought I was dead but it- you weren't there, and you never were, and you can't just come into my life after all this time and- and- y’know.” He deflates a little. “It's just… not my birthday.”
Thalassa could argue that however he wants to spin it, that was the day he was born - but she can hardly call what they have now a relationship at all. She doesn’t want to ruin something before it’s started, something she’s so desperate to have.
“I’ll, uh…” Apollo looks dangerously close to tears, hands nervously fiddling together in his lap before he stands, shooting up so quickly his hair moves with the force. “This was a mistake. I’m gonna go.”
Thalassa knows nothing that she can come up with will get him to stay, and even then, she doesn’t want to force him to be here if he doesn’t want to. So instead, she calls out before he can turn around to leave - and holds the blanket out to him.
“Please. Take it,” she says softly, feeling the soft fibres in-between her fingers. Normally she would feel a deep sense of dread and horror at the thought of parting from it - but now it’s different. It’s going back to its rightful owner, the one she thought was long gone. She doesn’t need the blanket now Apollo himself is back with her.
He looks mildly horrified at the suggestion. “I can’t do that. It means so much to you.”
“It’s yours,” Thalassa says. “It has your name on it, after all. I never thought you’d even be able to see it again, but here you are, all grown up. Please, my angel. Just have it. It always belonged to you.”
Apollo just takes it, wordless. He looks at the fabric with something unreadable in his eyes.
“I’ve not had much time for embroidery recently, so I might be a little out of practice,” Thalassa says. “But I’ll fix your birthday for you, okay?”
“You, uh. Might need it back for that,” Apollo laughs sadly. It’s a gentle noise, all light and silvery, yet undeniably melancholic at the same time.
Thalassa smiles as softly as she can as he hands the material back. “I’ll get it back to you as soon as I can.”
Apollo bites the inside of his cheek. “Okay.”
Thalassa, a moon born from fragments of Neptune’s original satellites, is in an orbital resonance with the innermost moon, Naiad, in a ‘dance of avoidance’.
Thalassa’s resonance with Naiad helps keep both moons in stable orbit, preventing them from either colliding or being ejected from the system. Naiad and Thalassa have probably been locked together in this configuration for a very long time, because it makes their orbits more stable. They maintain the peace by never getting too close.
She saw him for what she thought was the last time when he was a baby: chubby-cheeked, noisy enough to shake the house and about the length of her forearm, with her nose and her mouth and Jove’s gentle eyes and signature tufts of hair. She burned the memory of her little boy into her mind forevermore, sick with the yearning for him and the knowledge that from then on, they would always be apart.
Thus, their dance of avoidance began: a baby adrift and a grieving mother, destined to be eternally estranged; constantly passing in orbit but never ever meeting, never touching.
And it kept them both relatively stable. Thalassa grieved but she survived. She remarried and met the second light of her life in Trucy, in a just-as-tiny but significantly quieter baby who looked up at Thalassa with the same adoring, mystified look that her half-brother used to have.
Unbeknownst to the both of them, their orbits still aligned. When Troupe Gramarye were at the airport and gearing up for their next tour, making their way through check-in with suitcases crammed full of magic tricks and top hats removed to go through security, Thalassa was paying attention to baby Trucy and making sure she’s alright with all the loud noises and bustling people and bright lights. What she wasn’t paying attention to was the nine-year-old boy wandering about the airport on his own, clearly lost and quite obviously upset, hiding behind two small horns of brown hair that drooped sorrowfully from his head.
Thalassa Gramarye boarded her plane with her daughter’s small, wrinkled hand wrapped tight around her forefinger - and Apollo Justice, afraid and alone, made his way to the help desk in the airport, attempting to make do with the little English he knew.
The dance unwittingly continued on as Apollo grew up in America. Troupe Gramarye appeared on TV, on posters, on tiny commemorative stamps - and some of the other children in his foster home adored them, played dress up in colourful blankets to mimic the capes of their favourite magicians, showed Apollo videos of the coolest tricks and begged to go to their performances.
When Zak and Valant’s Quick-Draw Shoot’em failed, when Apollo was thirteen and studying for an exam with the TV playing quietly as background noise, he heard the news of Thalassa’s so-called disappearance. He sympathised for her family, hoped that she was alright, and returned to his textbook - because the time that they passed in orbit was never meant to last long. Any thoughts of Thalassa promptly vanished from his mind whilst the woman herself was in Borginia, restarting her life from scratch with no vision and no memories.
He was seventeen when he first heard the soothing melody of Lamiroir’s music. Apollo was too young to remember what his mother’s voice sounded like, so he didn’t register why Lamiroir’s dulcet tones seem so familiar and calming. Lamiroir sang tenderly in a language that Apollo didn’t understand, her music almost crooning at him like a mother would her baby - you have your father’s eyes, Apollo. You’re so tiny, sweetheart. Shh, Apollo, not so loud- but the orbital resonance kept him at bay, always just the right distance away from the truth, never quite figuring out why the woman’s music sounds so much like a lullaby.
Even after her manager was murdered and poor Machi was arrested for it, when Apollo Justice took his case, it still wasn't much of a meeting. Lamiroir never properly saw Apollo, and with her missing memories she didn’t recognise the boy as her son, didn’t even remember she had a son at all.
She regained her memories in time. She repossessed her sight and started to recover, started to blend Thalassa Gramarye and Lamiroir into one and get some odd sense of normality back, helped by the kind yet oftentimes evasive man who had cared for her own daughter for the last seven years.
Despite that, Thalassa still kept up the dance, unsure of what it would do if she interrupted it.
Apollo Justice was her son, her little boy, the baby who she tried so desperately to ingrain in her memory all those years ago when she thought she’d lost him forever. But then, burdened with the very real possibility of actually meeting him again, she found herself unsure.
Thalassa was part of the jury in Vera Misham’s trial, and she fondly watched her son and daughter fight for the young girl’s innocence from behind a screen with the other jurors.
She had the chance to greet them both after the trial. They were only behind a door. The only thing separating her and her babies was a simple panel of wood - not country borders, not amnesia or blindness, not miles and miles of separation - they were there and she’d be able to see them, knowing exactly who they were.
There was nothing stopping her from rushing to the Defendant’s Lobby and ending this dance of avoidance once and for all, reuniting with her sweet son, all grown up after twenty-three long, long years…
It was like there was a gravitational pull tugging Thalassa in the opposite direction. She just couldn’t.
And so she didn’t.
Thalassa left the courtroom, close enough to Apollo to keep him in orbit but far enough away that nothing would go wrong.
Phoenix Wright sent Apollo out of the office when she came to speak to him, urging him to investigate a location that wasn’t really necessary just to keep him away while they discussed things. More specifically, when they discussed him - when Thalassa found out that neither her son nor her daughter knew that they’re siblings, or that she was alive.
And after that dreaded revelation, she couldn’t stop seeing Apollo. She’d never realised how intertwined their orbits were until then, when she spotted a photo of him in a newspaper article about Kristoph Gavin’s second charge of murder, or when she passed him randomly in the street, or when she heard the unmistakable sound of her little boy’s powerful voice in the background of a call with Phoenix Wright.
It didn’t end. Months went by and he seemed to keep spinning around her. He was in the news again, that time for successfully defending the mayor of a nearby town. She caught him out of the corner of her eye, sitting in the same cafe as her for lunch and talking animatedly to a sweet-looking girl with long, ginger hair. He was in the background of the pictures of Trucy’s birthday party that Phoenix sent to her. And when it had been long enough since the events of her manager’s murder that she was comfortable enough to catch up with Klavier Gavin, she saw her son’s smiling face on the man’s lockscreen.
She’d never been aware of it before, but then it was inescapable. No matter where Thalassa Gramarye went, the dance continued, and Apollo Justice was always in resonance with her, never too far away.
And then she’d gotten the call from Phoenix.
Then it had to end, no matter how out of her depth she felt, no matter how terrified she was, no matter how violently her heart seized at the uncertainty of finally reconnecting with him.
Apollo wasn’t even in hospital by the time visiting hours rolled around the next day. He was back out there, fighting for Justice and pushing himself far too hard - and then he was assaulted, and she got yet another nauseatingly terrifying call from Phoenix telling her about it, and she’d broken the speed limit rushing to the hospital.
She dragged her uncooperating feet through the doors and stood lingering outside his room, feeling ill at the sight of her baby boy in a crisp, white bed, unconscious and hooked up to who knows how many wires as his chest slowly moved up and down with shallow breaths.
Her stomach lurched as she took in the fragile state of her little one, knowing that she couldn’t stay by his bedside to hold his hand until he woke up. How would she explain that to Trucy when she got there? That the singer they met last year for a few days on a case was sitting by Apollo’s sleeping body and sobbing?
The dance has to end at some point. She won’t be kept from her children any longer.
She blew a kiss to him through the glass window, begged Phoenix Wright to please, please be there for him when he woke up, and left before anybody else could see her, already planning in her mind how she was going to break the news once this was all over.
She’s not as torn as she thought she’d be about changing the blanket.
It doesn’t change the happy memories of her life with Jove, the person she was before terror had ravaged her life. She finds that actually, anything that starts to mend her and Apollo’s relationship is fine by her.
That night, she’d sat at her kitchen table and unpicked the decades-old stitches by lamplight, and matched the shade of cotton as best she could before sewing in his new birthday underneath the delicate embroidery of his name.
She’d had to ask Phoenix for the date. October fifteenth, he'd told her; whoever had guessed his birthday had done a fairly good job, only a couple of weeks from the true day. Apollo was specifically cagey about who had done the guesswork, but she just hopes he’ll tell her if they're closer, if he feels comfortable. It’s not something she’ll force.
She remembers sewing the blanket for the first time, unaware of the tragedies that would fetter her life not long after. She was eighteen years old when she started the project, still eighteen when she had Apollo, nineteen when she lost both husband and child. It was like the universe’s idea of a bad joke, to become widowed before she was even out of her teens, and… well. There wasn’t even a word for what happened with Apollo. She had returned to the Troupe irreversibly changed.
But now she has him back - and she hands him the blanket that she’d sobbed into at his funeral, stitched with both the loving hands that had expected him before he was born and the older, gentler hands that had fixed it up now he’s an adult.
He looks at the material with an expression Thalassa can’t quite place, something blank but terrified at the same time, baby brown eyes wide and sparkling. They’re back in the Wright Anything Agency again, their perfect middle ground, and yet she still somehow feels like she’s intruding.
The silence is awful, and she can’t help but ramble as she waits for his response. “I’m sorry, baby, I’m not as good as I was twenty years ago - but it’s legible, isn’t it? And I’m sorry if I made you think I wouldn’t accept it. You had all those birthdays without me, after all, and-”
A tear drips from his eye, falls from his face and seeps into the fabric.
Maybe he was right before. Maybe this was a mistake. Maybe losing both of her children was the universe’s way of telling her she wasn’t meant to be a mother - if Apollo even cries at her trying to atone, perhaps there’s no hope-
He gingerly places the blanket on his desk, wordless, and rushes forward to hug her.
…It’s a lot to take in.
Especially since she’d been terrified he would never want her no less than two seconds ago: but he’s here, wrapping his arms around her back and resting his chin on her shoulders. That’s her baby, finally coming back to her after all this time, and the world goes still as she hugs him back, resting her palm in the small of his back.
She finally, finally bridges the gap between them, tipping back and forth on the ledge between elation and terror, embracing him as tightly as she can.
The last time she’d held him - even hugged him, touched him at all - was when he was a baby, tiny enough to be cradled in her arms or lifted up and spun around by Jove, only three teeth and inquisitive little eyes. He’s still fairly small now, if she thinks about it. He’s nearly her height, but if she stretches up and subtly coaxes his head downwards then she can properly wrap her arms around him, protect her son in her arms with a hand on the back of his head and her chin resting atop the crown of his hair.
Jove wasn’t a very tall man. He was about as tall as her with the added height of his hat and the lifts in his shoes, and since he passed when he was only nineteen, he might not have even finished growing. She’d always found herself wondering about what kind of man he would’ve grown into if he was her age now, if they’d had the chance to grow old together.
…Call her sentimental. He was her first love, after all. But his short stature had always made her wonder, too, how tall Apollo would be if he wasn’t forever six months old. He hadn’t even been able to stand up on his own at the time she lost him. She’d imagined either being able to call him her ‘little one’ forever, or having her sweet son the same height as her, or at last having somebody to reach the tallest cabinets in the house.
She thought she’d never find out, that she could muse but never truly know - but now he’s here, shivering between her arms and coming up to just about her nose, if she doesn’t count his sticking-up hair.
She can’t help the tears that begin to prick at her own eyes, then.
“You’re okay,” she whispers into his hair. “You’re okay, darling, and I’m so sorry it took me so long. My little Apollo. Jove would have adored who you’ve become, sweetheart. I’m so proud of you.”
He just presses his face into her shoulder, clutching at the back of her shirt. …He’s wearing her other bracelet, she realises, the metal gently nudging her spine as his hands lock together.
He’d enjoyed playing with the thing as a baby, batting at it with clumsy hands when it shimmered in the light; and so she’d given it to Jove the day before she lost him forever, just in case he struggled to get Apollo to calm without it.
She’d just assumed it had been lost in the fire, along with father and son. So when she regained her memories, when she remembered the loud and spirited lawyer who had gotten dear Machi found innocent of murder, and the way he’d been able to spot her lies, twisting that golden bangle on his wrist-
Her baby. He’d kept it all the years they were apart, unknowingly connected to her.
And he’s still wearing it now, even knowing exactly where it comes from, who it links him to. The woman who hid from him, forced his boss to lie to him and his sister because she wasn’t ready, kept her distance from him through all the trauma and pain that she should’ve been there for.
Apollo is still so kind, so sweet and gentle, even after everything. After every terrible hand life had dealt him, the ones Thalassa knows about and the ones she doesn’t, her little boy has ended up better than she could’ve ever imagined he’d be; so brave and so resilient and so ready to try.
…Maybe this will work. They’ll never have the traditional bond of a mother and son, and she’s not going to fight to force their dynamic into that - but they’re going to have something. She’s not going to let him go again, even if it kills her.
“Thank you,” he murmurs shakily, head tilted to stare at the blanket on the table. The words, spoken in his fragile voice, are enough to calm her; he’s here and they’re starting to move past her betrayal and maybe by the summer, or by Christmas time, or by sometime far, far away in the future, he’ll be comfortable with her. They’ll be close. And her little boy will be well and truly back with her.
“Thank you,” Thalassa says, and kisses his temple the way she’d done when he was an infant, smiling against his warm skin.