Work Text:
Trucy half-considers running away from home for the umpteenth time while Mr. Gavin talks at length about German intellectualism. This is not an uncommon thing for Mr. Gavin to talk about, but it is a bit boring, especially if you're only eleven, no matter how precocious of an eleven-year-old you are.
She doesn't think about it seriously, anyway, only in the insubstantial and unreal way all children must think about running away from home, and at the slightest of things besides. Trucy had grown up in something not so far from the circus and so, when she'd lived with her old Daddy, she'd always dreamed about running away to the suburbs and going to business university and swimming languid laps in a backyard swimming pool. Now, she lives with Mr. Gavin in his big Silver Lake house — it has a swimming pool, though neither of them really use it unless Klavier's over — and she's not quite sure where she's supposed to run away to — she's never been an outdoorsman, and besides, she does want to go to college because she wants to be successful and she's not sure how she'd do it if she left all her paperwork at home.
Mr. Gavin brings the Audi to a smooth halt at a red light. He turns and gives her one of his weird little smiles. "Everything okay, Trucy? You're quiet."
Retrospectively, she's not quite sure what makes her say it. In the moment, it feels wholly natural. "What if I wanted to be a lawyer when I'm grown up?"
Mr. Gavin gives her a different weird look. She sometimes thinks he has entire compartments of his brain dedicated specifically to minutely different weird looks. "Do you want to be a lawyer?"
The real answer is no, not especially, but Klavier is a prosecutor and a rock star, so who's to say she can't be a lawyer and a magician? She can multitask. She can have several goals at once. The thing is: there's not much to do at their house. Mr. Gavin works long hours and when he's home, they mostly stick to their own separate routines, and it's a big house, good for that kind of thing — they are, after all, just a man and a girl living in a place with altogether too many rooms for them — but she's bored. She's bored of practicing the same tricks over and over (the thing that most irks her about him is he doesn't like her doing tricks that are too complicated at home though, she figures, given the trick that landed her in his care, he has good reason for it) and giving Mr. Hat new and interesting voices and reading her library books and setting her bed and doing her homework and rinse and repeat and you must see how it could all get just so tedious, especially if you are a precocious eleven-year-old. How can anyone stand it! So she says, "I really do!"
Green light: go! Mr. Gavin mulls it over for a moment, drumming his carefully manicured nails on the steering wheel. "It's natural for girls your age to change career paths often."
"I'm not like girls my age," Trucy insists, and it's true because she's in the advanced class and she's going to a fancy private high school next year and she can do more parlour tricks than any other girl she's ever known could dream of, except, maybe, for her mother; but her mother was not a girl, and it would be wrong to say she really knew her besides.
"Being a lawyer is difficult."
"I can do difficult!"
"It's very long and very tedious."
"Mr. Hat can split the load with me."
"It's serious work. It can be dangerous."
This gives her pause. She thinks, as she sometimes does, of Mr. Nick. "I'll be careful."
He flicks on the turn signal and they enter their street, all the lawns pristine under the sleek and monochrome houses, their wide windows expressionless as they reflect the setting sun. Trucy hates their street, but she can't really complain. "It's dangerous even if you're careful."
"I'll be the most careful."
He mulls it over some more. He says: "I hope you aren't saying this because you feel I've pressured you in any way."
"You haven't," she assures, "and besides, if anything, you make it look fun!"
Up into the driveway. He puts the car to rest, unbuckles his seatbelt, and gives her gloved hand a firm shake. "Well then," he says, and there's a spark in his eye that she's startled to find she cannot quite place, "let's set our sights on Themis."
She grins, wide, tries to mirror the spark. "Deal."
Here is how Trucy Enigmar became Trucy Gavin:
Once upon a time there was a magician who got into a whole world of legal trouble. It seemed quite unlikely he would make his way out unscathed, and besides, magicians are unconventional creatures. Making the grade makes them break out in hives. For this reason, he enlisted his daughter for her help.
His daughter was, of course, so excited for her debut act that she fumbled with all the clever little buttons that did up her dress as she got ready that morning, and she shined her shoes three times before she had to go so as not to miss the bus. There were three men at the courthouse: the first had hair spiky as a hedgehog's, and a suit so blue it felt more like a costume than anything, and sneakers that had definitely seen better days, while the second was wearing sunglasses, and vintage Westwood, and the gaudiest chains you'd ever seen in your life. The last one was different. He had long blond hair, and a suit that she could tell with a performer's practiced eye had just as many clever little pockets and buttons as her own clothes.
By necessity, nothing coming in threes can last. You probably know the rest. Trucy sure does. But let's go over it anyway:
You probably know about the trial and the diary and the diary page that was lost and then found, and thank goodness that it was! And you also probably know that it wasn't actually found and the man with the blue suit was actually just a big fat liar, though not a half-bad performer, even if he couldn't quite cry on command. The crying on command, in Trucy's opinion, would have sold the whole thing just right. People aren't used to men crying. Maybe the judge would have taken pity on him — but if he had, he would have gone on being a lawyer, and that wouldn't have been any good for anybody, even if Mr. Gavin continues to perfunctorily insist on Mr. Nick's innocence. And at the very end, yes, here it is: the daughter made her father vanish into a cloud of smoke as if he were no bigger than a penny, or one of those gummy little animal toys you can get from some vending machines. Fantastic!
Only, when it happened, no one said 'fantastic'. The bailiffs said other words that started with the letter 'f', but not fantastic. This made for a very tepid response to her debut act, one that sowed a very crucial seed of doubt that went on to be fostered into a mighty fine tree: the idea that maybe it is not so great to be a magician after all.
Afterwards, the daughter looked around and realized that, in the absence of a father, she could not do much since she was eight and in a court of law, and she was a skilled magician for her age, but not quite so skilled that she could make herself disappear with no prep beforehand. Who to take her in? Magicians are difficult to maintain, and their daughters, even more so. They need lots of enrichment and a good, healthy diet that does not include any excess of too-salty noodles or plastic spaghetti.
How did it end? Well: the bailiff took her little hand and guided her into the hall, and Trucy looked up and saw Mr. Old-boy hanging around the lobby with his suit jacket draped over his arm and his phone idle in his hand and his spine curved into an unhappy slump. She looked up and he looked up, and their eyes met across the quiet hall and it seemed for one second, one long, warbly second, as though he was going to say something to her — but in the end, he just gave her a smile that didn't even try to look like a real smile and turned away.
So now you know.
Well. One more thing.
The next morning the social worker said, "Good morning, Trucy. How are you? There's a man named Kristoph Gavin here to see you. I'm going to ask you some questions, is that alright?"
This question was followed up by a few tedious days of shuttling between this and that boring office, though she did try to make them less boring by wowing everyone there with card tricks everyone did think were fantastic. There was a hearing afterwards and this was also a very uninteresting affair, but at the end of the hearing it was decided that she was to become Trucy Gavin and the blond man was to become her guardian. "You don't have to call me your father if you don't like," her new guardian told her on the drive to the home they were to share, and there was something about his politely placid expression that indicated he did not want to be called Daddy, and so she didn't.
Now you know the whole of it.
What comes next is that Trucy goes to the fancy private high school and, quite frankly, she trounces everyone there. She's a real good sport about it, though, and everyone seems to like her stale tricks, and even the mean girls — obvious performers, since everyone has seen movies — eventually lighten up and smile at her and stop calling her a weirdo. (Not that Trucy minds being a weirdo; it's just that a weirdo is not the most ideal thing to be in high school.)
She's also been studying — "It's never too late to start prepping for the LSAT!" — and hanging out around the office on her ped days, annoying the interns and juniors and trying to sneak glimpses at whatever case is being worked on. It's usually a techie case, or else some big company or CEO or whatever needs help with this or that, you know how it is, it's LA, blah blah. It's interesting as far as these things go, but not very — she likes dropping by the most when Mr. Gavin's working a murder case, which he always foists onto the interns because he says it makes for a "well-rounded professional experience".
Of all of the interns, the one most committed to a "well-rounded professional experience" is Apollo Justice. Not a joke — that is his name. Apollo is also a weirdo, but he's a weirdo because he's so completely, utterly, jaw-droppingly normal.
Here is what Apollo does: he comes into work with a cup of cheap coffee every morning (one sugar, one cream, don't ask how she knows) and proceeds to shadow Mr. Gavin like— well, like a shadow. Apollo doesn't have a girlfriend, or a boyfriend, or any friends, period, or at least, none he brings up at work. Apollo is practically married to Westlaw. Trucy wouldn't be surprised if it turned out that his dreams were confined to the database's minimalist layout. It's unhealthy. Apollo takes the bus to and from work, and Apollo keeps his passes on a lanyard just in case, she has to assume, a cop asks him to cough them up. Apollo is the squarest. Apollo is a total yawn. The only interesting things about Apollo are his hair (which he can never seem to fully gel down) and his voice (which he seems deeply committed to getting as loud as humanly possible).
It is because Apollo Justice-yes-that-is-his-surname is so astonishingly, mind-numbingly, incredibly boring that Trucy decides she wants to be his friend. She puts her plan into earnest action by starting off the Monday of his fifth week as an intern by slamming her math binder onto the desk next to his. He looks up at her. She looks down at him. He says, looking deeply indifferent, "Can I help you?"
"My name is Trucy, Trucy Gavin!" She sticks out her hand for a firm shake. He gives her a firm shake. He says, "I know who you are. We've met before."
"That makes two of us! You should introduce yourself."
"Trucy, I already know who you are."
"Humour me!"
"I'm Apollo Justice. And I'm fine—"
"Don't say you're fine quite so much. People might take you the wrong way."
"—on my own. Excuse me?" He has big, peering eyes that make him look like a frog when mildly incensed, which he is at the present moment. There’s something oh-so familiar about him that she cannot quite place, and it annoys her to no end, and so Trucy makes a crucial resolution: I am going to figure him out.
"Whatcha workin' on?"
He heaves the sigh of one resigned to a terrible situation, and tells her.
Mr. Gavin brings the idea up to Klavier while they're out. They don't go out as a group very often and Klavier's just gotten back from Budapest so Trucy is a bit bummed when he does it, but it's been long enough she feels Klavier deserves to know, anyway. There's no time better than the present!
Once he's tactfully put the idea out there, Klavier stops short where he'd been about to skip a stone across the rippling water. It's a nice place, and it's as cold as it gets in LA so they have Gourd Lake largely to themselves. It's just that she wishes it wasn't quite so grey — the sky is thick with cotton ball clouds. She supposes that she can't complain. Gourd Lake is as fun an adventure as you can get. It's thirty minutes away from their house and she always makes them walk until their feet are sore as anything, not a very difficult task given that Mr. Gavin wears dress shoes and Klavier wears combat boots. What is it about Los Angeles that makes everything feel like the end of the world, all of the time?
Anyway. "A lawyer?"
"Surely you've heard of them," Mr. Gavin says. It's clearly a joke and he's smiling a cordial smile, but it doesn't reach his eyes at all.
This is something Trucy has noticed: Mr. Gavin does not especially like Klavier. She's sure he loves him in his own weird way, but it's not a very profound love, and doesn't go any deeper than the transactional kind he affords her; certainly, it's not the kind of love two brothers ought to have. She doesn't mind her lot, but she's pretty sure Klavier minds his. She cannot possibly imagine it (even her extraordinary imagination has its limits) but she still wonders if he was different in some bygone time. If, maybe, what Klavier is so weird about isn't something fictional, but something long-lost.
"Well, yeah," Klavier answers, rolling his eyes good-naturedly. "I guess I just never thought the good Fräulein was interested in law."
She punches his arm in protest. "I'm interested!"
"Since when?"
"Ages." This is technically true. It's been well over two years since the conversation in the Audi.
"Ages," Klavier repeats, a bit wondrously. "And you never told me?"
She feels a little pang of guilt at not having done so. Klavier is probably her very best friend, even if she doesn't see him that often. He's definitely her coolest friend, which isn't saying much since she doesn't know that many cool people — her best friend is Apollo Justice, for goodness' sake — but if she did, Klavier would still beat them all by miles. And he likes her, she thinks — he FaceTimes when he's on tour, though this is less and less frequent, and always sends her presents, and hangs out with her whenever he's able — but that doesn't have much to do with anything. If we all got around based on how much people liked us, we'd never get anything done.
So she says, a bit hesitant, careful not to lay it on too thick, "I didn't want to say anything before I could commit. You know girls are always changing their minds at my age."
Mr. Gavin's wandered off by this point, occasionally digging his bespoke brogues into the pebbly beach, which is the only reason why she thinks Klavier is able to ask, "And are you going to work for Kristoph?"
"'For'? Try 'with'! He'll be working for me in a few years!"
The odd rut they'd settled into jolts a bit towards normalcy, and he flashes her his heartthrobbingly-Invisaligned grin. "I don't doubt that," he laughs, and they don't touch the subject again.
She's allowed to start interning officially when she's fifteen because the experience will look good on her Themis application. Naturally, she tells Polly the day the internship starts, and not a second before.
"Good for you," he grins, fist-bumping her as she does a lazy spin in the chair that's not officially hers. "You know, some of us actually had to work to intern here. Nepotism has its advantages, I guess."
Her face does something complicated entirely against her will, and she feels a familiar white-hot shame bubble in the pit of her stomach for it. "He's not my dad," she insists, and is made even more upset when she hears the peevish note that creeps into her voice.
Polly picks up on it. Of course he does. Stupid Trucy! "I'm kidding," he says a bit hastily. "You work as hard as anyone here. Harder, even. You're a smart kid. And I like you."
It is completely ridiculous that Polly is calling her 'kid' at his age, but she accepts it. "What're you working on?"
He turns the monitor to face her. "Murder trial. Though," and he frowns a little as he says it, "it's a weird one."
"How so?" She leans forwards, settles her chin in her hands. It's early in the morning, early early, and they're the only ones in for now.
He shrugs, thumbs through a block of acid green Post-its. "Well, to start with, I'm the lead defense."
"What! Polly, that's great, not weird!"
"No it's not," he groans. "I mean, yeah, it's great that I'm the lead and Mr. Gavin trusts me enough to let me do that and stuff, but that's not what I mean — what I mean is, the defendant is Phoenix Wright."
Ah.
"Phoenix Wright," she repeats blandly, and she tries, she really does, but it's no use; she forgets everything he says to her after she hears that name.
Here's the thing: Trucy can be nice. She is nice. She's nice and whip-smart and clever and cute, she's all kinds of really great things, but sometimes — sometimes! — she feels her patience wear down and down and down until she gets really quite upset; and when she's upset, she can't exactly show it, but she can do things about it, and so she waits until everyone goes home before she marches up to Mr. Gavin's office and knock-knock-knocks on the heavy wooden door.
"Come in."
She comes in. She looks at him. He looks up at her. She looks at him some more, long and hard, takes in the gleam of his glasses and the familiar lilac-scent of his cologne and the tidiness of all the books on his shelves.
She knows him intimately well. She knows him better than anyone — better than Klavier, at least, and Mr. Nick, since they're the only two people she knows know him in any capacity beyond the completely superficial. She has lived with him since she was very small and very stupid, and so she knows him, and what she knows most of all is that Mr. Gavin is an ugly person. That's the complete truth. It's not a totally derisive one because the whole world is ugly and there's nothing to be done with it, so it's okay if you become an ugly person to survive it, usually. In the real world, fathers vanish and guardians come around and sometimes there are nice things, things like pseudo-uncles and friends and hot chocolates, but none of it really matters. It's all just fluff and stuffing. This is the truth: evidence is everything, and evidence is total bullshit. Trucy — child of stars, magic atrophying in her blood — knows that better than anyone in the entire world. It means nothing to see a thing. It means nothing to accept something as empirical.
"Why didn't you tell me Mr. Nick killed someone?" she asks. She measures her voice, is sure to make it sound clinical and dull. Her calculation has the desired effect. Mr. Gavin is now on the defense.
"It didn't seem like proper dinnertime conversation," he jokes, and jokes lamely. "Is there any reason why you're bothered?"
He is an ugly person, and she is just like him. Here is another point: if evidence is everything and evidence does not exist, it stands to reason that there is no such thing as a truth or a lie, but there is such thing as a misdirection. Her whole life is built on the grounds of misdirection. "I don't know, Mr. Gavin. Why would I possibly want to know that Mr. Nick is a murderer?"
"Not a murderer," he points out, lowering the lid of his MacBook. It's dark out. The city is alive, floors and floors under their feet, but the air in the room is quite dead. "We haven't fought the case just yet. I'm sure he's not. And if he is," he adds meaningfully, "it'll be a good experience for Apollo. We'll get him a plea deal. Everything will be okay."
"I don't care that it's okay," she insists levelly. "I'm just upset you didn't tell me, that's all."
He gives her a weird look. "I'm sorry. I didn't realize you'd be interested in the case."
"Who'd he kill?"
"That's confidential," he says tactfully, and her senses come all alight: something is wrong.
Visiting hours are technically long-over, but she talks the guard into letting her in — she suspects it's the freshly-printed 'Gavin Law Offices' badge she flashes at him that seals the deal.
Now, Mr. Nick slides into the rickety metal chair opposite her and doesn't miss a beat. "Putting that badge to good use, huh?"
"Nothing illegal!" She spreads her hands in what she hopes conveys girlish nervousness and not anything more duplicitous.
"Debatable." He slouches, hands shoved deep into his pockets. She has surmised, after years of brief hellos and goodbyes, glimpses around corners, that this is his default position, like he's a video game character. There are ominous-looking bruises blooming beneath his eyes. He's the same age as Mr. Gavin, but he looks a thousand years older. The impression overall is that he looks, pardon, like complete shit. "To what do I owe the pleasure, Miss Gavin? The trial's not until tomorrow."
"Did you kill him?"
A slow, sidling grin. She remembers, again, the sad bend of his spine that day, like a sea creature rippling beneath the water. He's a real sleazeball. He's also incredibly, exuberantly sad. "Who?"
"Him. I don't know who. No one will tell me who."
Mr. Nick looks suddenly unnerved, like she'd just confessed she likes beating puppies to death with sticks during her free time. "You don't know?"
"I know it's a him."
Mr. Nick leans back in his seat, back, back. His face is kept carefully blank, but she sees that his eyes are wide and wild; she can practically hear the gears turning in his head. He has not lost any of the sharpness that so defined his earlier career, but the disbarment has made hard what was before floundering. Finally, he says, "I'll tell you, but you need to do me a favour."
"Ha!" She can't help the laugh, but she also can’t deny that the prospect thrills her. What kind of favour could a man like Mr. Nick ask her for? Maybe he'll ask for her to vanish him from the cell. "Like what?"
"Well, first I’m going to need you to trust me."
She's startled to find this isn't something she needs to do as much as a mindset she needs to switch to active-mode. She does trust Mr. Nick, which is maybe a strange stance to have on the lawyer who failed so bad at defending your father's innocence that he needed a fraudulent piece of evidence to prove it. (But there's that little niggling doubt again, the one that asks, well, wasn't that all just so very convenient?)
"Let's say I do, Mr. Wright. What then?"
"I'm Mr. Wright now?"
"Did you like when I called you Mr. Nick instead?"
He shrugs. "It doesn't matter."
She gets the sense it does matter. She doesn't press. "What then?"
"Do you think you could get crime scene clearance with that badge?"
"Are you going to make me identify the body?"
"Oh, God, no. I'm not that cruel."
They look at each other for a moment. When she dreams of the future, she dreams of herself on stage, a thousand hands rising out of the dark to clap for her, emerging from within impossible boxes, vanishing and reappearing without a second's hesitation. A magician, a study in confetti and light, shackles and bead strings. Crucially, this is a dream of the future and she is not and cannot ever be these things in real life. Besides, there's no room to practice at home, and Mr. Gavin never says no to the idea of her putting on shows, but he does snort a little and ask what she could possibly need the money for in a way that's as dismissive as any naysay.
Trucy doesn't need love and she only needs a minimal amount of gentleness, but what she doesn't need the very most is Mr. Nick's odd looks because they're not weird or patronizing, but rather unflinchingly understanding. They're the kind of looks she imagines a father might give his daughter, or a wise old cat might give its charge. She doesn't feel anything even remotely like that from anyone else in her life — most of the time, she feels like a very pretty parrot Mr. Gavin has perched in the corner of his office.
"Then how cruel are you?" she asks softly. (This is how they become co-conspirators: future felon and present parrot.)
The detention center is very cold, and very concrete. In it, Mr. Nick's normally crumply frame looks positively wadded up. "You remember the Borscht Bowl, right?"
She does remember, and she tells him as much. She tries not to think about the Bowl; it tugs at a part of her brain in a way she knows is very dangerous. It's a part of her brain that knows that if she went down there in earnest, she would become the poker queen of the entire world, red lipstick, sleight of hand, the whole nine yards, and she can't be because she's a good girl, a clean girl, she preens her feathers, she can recite greetings.
"If — and this is entirely up to you — you go into the basement of the Bowl, you'll find the crime scene. There's a cupboard in the corner. Look underneath it. There'll be something taped there."
"What is it?"
"I can't say," he says, and tilts his head a little. "But whatever it is, if you choose to take it, have it with you during the trial. I'll leave the choice of whether or not to use it up to you."
She runs her hand down the side of her leg, hooks it into the hem of her skirt. "That's not really a choice. You know I'll go if you don't tell. You're being unfair. What is it?"
Mr. Nick pulls his hat down lower on his head. Somewhere in the building, an exhaust roars to life. "Just a naughty magician's trick," he says, and his voice is frayed as hundred-year-old cloth. "Goodnight, Miss Gavin. Thanks for visiting an old coot like me."
She goes, because she is a magician and if magician's make the grade, they break out in hives.
Here is what she finds:
- A playing card.
- That's it.
Here is what is on the playing card:
- A dollop of dried blood.
- That's it.
You know the rest, don't you? What you don't know is this: Trucy goes with Polly and Mr. Gavin to the trial as part of their defense team.
Mr. Gavin is an ugly person. She comes to a decision.
During the recess, she slides the evidence baggie into Polly's hand as discreetly as she can manage. He notices, of course, holds it up to the tasteful mellow lights in the lobby. His brows, if possible, furrow further. "Trucy, what is this?"
She wishes very suddenly for her magician's hat, which she hasn't seen since she was ten and decided she was too grown up for it. She misses being able to duck her face and know it was hiding her from view. Her terms or no terms.
"Just something I picked up," she says, and she doesn't bother with the theatrics, doesn't figure out how she wants to make him feel. The trial will go how it goes. Evidence is everything is nothing. Etc. "Listen, do you trust me, Polly?"
His face softens. "Of course I do."
"Hold on to that, then. The last hand is about to be played. You'll need a trump card to make it, right?"
"I don't— understand. A trump card...?"
She tries to look reassuring. "It's a magic card. Use it wisely, and the game is yours. That's all."
The game is, in fact, his. Afterwards, Polly wanders around the lobby looking stunned. She's startled to find she doesn't feel any sort of way at all. Sure, her guardian figure has just been arrested for being a literal murderer, but, well, no one's a saint, right? Her brain keeps politely skirting around the fact of who her guardian killed, but who cares. Who even cares about silly things like that?
"—out of a job. And what about Trucy?"
She looks up at the mention of her name. Polly is no longer wandering around the lobby (when did that happen?) but in anxious conversation with Mr. Nick, who looks a little less like a crumpled tissue.
"You could come work for me," Mr. Nick offers.
Which is totally ridiculous. Mr. Nick doesn't have a law practice. He doesn't have any kind of practice.
But things must sort themselves out somehow because Polly takes her arm and leads her out into the rainy day. Someone needs to go up there and tell God to take a few set design classes. Bad things happening on rainy days is so passé.
Somewhere in the back of her head, she wonders if she should go say hello or goodbye to Mr. Gavin, but in the end, she lets herself be led all the way to Polly's no-nonsense apartment where she lies down on the couch and sleeps for an entire day, and when she wakes up, her breath is stale and her nice court clothes are wrinkled right up to the edge of no salvation and not a step beyond. She does not cry because she is not a ninnyhammer but she is Mr. Gavin's daughter-thing, and she can kick and howl and tantrum about it all she'd like; she can scream until she's blue in the face and the cows come home; it won't matter. Nothing about that will ever, ever change.
Polly is nice enough to let her stay with him for the next few weeks. She suspects he's trying to see into something about custody, but she's fifteen and he's very young, and so she doubts anything fruitful will come to pass in that regards.
She spends her days cashing in on the pity cheque to get days out of school, and she spends these days off sitting on the sofa and sometimes the balcony thinking not about her stupid dead father, but about Mr. Gavin. She aches about him. She wants to go with him places, like the carnival, or the sea, places he never really bothered to take her. She wants to tell him when she's sick. She wants to call him just to hear his sensible voice on the other end. Mr. Gavin had liked her and he had let her stay in his house and he had given her food and water and he had put his elegant hand on her shoulder at her elementary school graduation. Mr. Gavin was the only person in the entire ugly world who understood her, and Mr. Gavin was a murderer. Come home, she wants to tell him. Come deal with me. You don't get to fucking leave me. What the fuck is wrong with you. What the fuck.
She thinks things mostly along these lines for eighteen whole days, ignoring calls from her friends and from Klavier, and on the nineteenth she decides it's probably bad form to make your generous host look so alarmed, and so she drags herself off Polly's couch, bats the wrinkles out of her clothes, and announces she is going on a walk. Her walk leads her to the bus station, and the bus takes her to People Park, and from there she follows Maps right to Phoenix Wright's doorway.
Mr. Nick swings the door open looking, somehow, even more like shit than before. That's weird, right? He's just found out that Kristoph Gavin framed him for murder, and probably lost him his badge seven years ago to boot — surely he should be jumping around in ecstasy, throwing Gatsby-esque parties and dialing every judge in the county to get his case reassessed. Instead, he's wearing the same old, battered sweater, a few chipped cartoon pins stuck to the breast. "Trucy," he greets, and he has the self-awareness to at least look a bit sheepish about his appearance. "I wasn't expecting you. Did you call?"
"You know I didn't," she says flatly. "Can I come in?"
He steps aside, gestures her into the apartment. It's— quirky is the best word that can be used for it. It smells lame and sad, but not unclean. She sits on the couch and he gives her a plastic cup of OJ, condensation already beading to it. She takes a perfunctory sip and then she asks him, "Did you forge that card, Mr. Wright?"
"Yeah."
"You gave it to me anyway."
"He would have gotten away." A weighty silence. "Do you mind?"
And she's not very surprised to find that she doesn't. "He would have gotten away," she echoes.
"How are you feeling? He was your dad."
"He wasn't my anything," she snaps, which is a lie. She hates how at-ends she feels. She hates that she's so frazzled. She hates that this is having any effect on her at all. That stupid Silver Lake house should be hers, and she should be doing fucking pirouettes on the countertops. She doesn't think Mr. Gavin wrote anything about what should happen to her if he was incapacitated; she doesn't think Mr. Gavin really thought he could even die.
Mr. Nick raises his hands like, Okay! Then: "Where have you been staying?"
"Polly's," she sniffs. "I mean, Polly's couch."
"Okay." A longer silence. "You trusted me. I didn't think you would."
She shrugs, feeling more and more wretched by the second because he's looking at her with this stupid, mushy-faced expression full of that same understanding — and what does Phoenix Wright of all people know about losing everything, about having everything that meant something to you being taken away, about— ah.
"I've been unfair to you," she says, and she doesn't burst into tears because she is not a girl, she is a pretty parrot.
Mr. Nick says, "Forget all that. Do you want to stay with me for a while?"
This makes Trucy laugh for a long time. She thinks she might cry a little, and the crying would only mostly be related to the laughing. "No."
"It was worth a shot," he grins, not looking at all wounded by her mirth. "Well, swing around anyway. You're always welcome. Wright and Co. still kind of exists. We could use an upstart future lawyer such as yourself."
"Who's we?"
"Me," he acquiesces.
"I'll think about it." Yet another pause. "You could turn it into a talent agency."
"Sorry?"
"A talent agency," she repeats. "Since it only kind of exists. That way, you could hire anybody, and you wouldn't have to wait for aimless lawyers to blow in through the door."
"I guess you have a point. Why? You don't want to be a lawyer?"
"I don't want to be a lawyer that works for you," she corrects. "I'd have to be a real moron to work for you as a lawyer. But, well, I'm in high school—"
"Jesus Christ," Mr. Nick mutters.
"—and I think I'm destitute, but I also think the Gramarye name still holds a teensy bit of sway."
"Are you asking me to represent you?"
"No, I'm asking you to pay me. You'll have to trust me on this one," she says, and she feels a bit better for the first time since the arrest. A bit more like her real self, buried underneath all the Gavin-ness — but she can't think about that because it makes a doubting pit yawn open in her chest, one that very correctly reminds her that Trucy Gavin is the truest thing there is.
Mr. Nick gives her a big smile, a real smile, unheeding of any chest-pits. It's the most genuine one she's seen from him in seven years — maybe the only genuine one. "It's a deal," he says.
And this is how Trucy Gavin comes to work for the Wright Anything Talent Agency.