Chapter Text
Apollo hated clutter. He hated dust, he hated grime, and he hated any sort of organizational system that wasn’t approved and strongly recommended by at least six different self-help catalogs.
Naturally, he hated the clutter, dust, and grime that swaddled the entirety of the Wright Anything Agency with a red-hot, burning passion.
“Hate” was a strong word, though, and admittedly not the correct one. The office had character; over his two years of working there, he had, miraculously, warmed up to it. It was messy, yes. Musty and always slightly salt-broth scented, also yes. But he could locate everything important fairly easily, and its distinctive layout tended to be popular with clients. So maybe it wasn’t completely irredeemable.
“Polly,” Trucy Wright had said a few hours earlier, her hands on her hips and her cheeks puffing from Apollo’s peripheral vision. “Move your jacket.”
“Jacket?” Apollo had replied, having been preoccupied with the manila-wreathed case files spread out on the floor in front of him.
“You know, this loud one! You can’t just drape it over the back of the couch! It’s not a coat rack!” She picked up the bright red suit blazer and beat it out, sending dust particles scattering onto the air-conditioned breeze. “I do important stuff here! Move it, or it’ll end up like Daddy’s hoodie—lost into the void of my magic panties!”
In that instant, a horrible realization swept through Apollo Justice: oh god, he was turning into a Wright.
It was then that he decided he needed to clean the pigsty of the office. And clean deep.
“Do you need this?” Apollo asked, holding up the plastic model of floating spaghetti that always sat on the main table. For some reason, the model smelled like tomato sauce, too. And garlic. He wondered if that had always been the case, or if his hunger was making him hallucinate (he had been cleaning for at least two hours straight).
“Yes.” Trucy’s response came with a definitive nod. She was planted on the couch in the center of the room, shuffling a deck of playing cards back and forth between her gloved hands.
“Look me in the eye and tell me that you need this.”
“I need it!” Trucy, indeed, met his eyes, and she pointed the deck of cards accusingly at him. “It’s a real crowd-pleaser! A great conversation piece! I’m sorry if your muggle mind can’t wrap itself around that, Polly!”
Apollo, figuring that he wasn’t going to get anywhere with logical reasoning (not while Trucy wore that obnoxiously steadfast gaze of hers), rolled his eyes and tossed the spaghetti plate into the “Trucy Says It Shouldn’t Be Thrown Away, But Common Sense Dictates Otherwise” pile. Which was, unfortunately, the only pile present.
The entirety of the Wright Anything Agency had been ransacked, with every piece of furniture turned over, inside out, and then dusted thoroughly from top to bottom. Cabinets were gutted, plants were brushed clean, and law books (alongside magic books) were reorganized into proper alphabetical order. As soon as he finished sorting through this final cabinet, Apollo could officially say that he was done, and he could work on putting the place back together. Hopefully he would be able to finish before Mr. Wright got home—wait, no, not got home! The office wasn’t his house, dang it! It was that kind of thinking that made the place such a rat’s nest to begin with!
“Polly,” Trucy said, concern in her voice, “if you clutch that duster any tighter, you’re going to snap the poor thing in half.”
Apollo restrained himself and forced his fists to unclench. He couldn’t let himself get distracted—he needed to finish what he had started.
With duster in one hand and cleaning spray in the other, Apollo scrubbed the top of the cabinet he was sitting cross-legged in front of. “Cabinet” might have been giving the thing too much credit—it was actually one of Trucy’s magical props, presumably once used to saw beautiful women in half.
Apollo opened the final drawer with perhaps too much ferocity, for a thick cloud of dust puffed up into the air, completely coating the front of his white undershirt in ancient gunk. His nose tickled and, before he could control himself, a deafening sneeze surged through his chest and rattled every piece of furniture in the joint.
“Ugh,” Apollo whined. “This is disgusting.”
“I’ll say. You should cover your mouth when you sneeze, you know. Unless blowing snot everywhere was your intention.”
“Not that!” Apollo brushed his nose clean with the arm of his sleeve. “All of this dust! When was the last time you even opened this drawer?”
He took the duster to the outer rims of the cabinet. More tiny specks danced up into the air, silhouetted by the dying light of the setting sun streaming in through the windows.
Out of the corner of his eye, Apollo saw Trucy rise from her spot on the couch and stretch her arms up over her head.
“That drawer is Daddy’s. Only the top two belong to me and my magic business!” She skipped around the upturned furniture and kneeled down to join Apollo on the floor, brown eyes bright with curiosity. “I wonder what kind of stuff he has in here? Maybe it’s stuff he’ll be angry at you for rifling through!”
“Hey,” Apollo muttered with a sidelong glance in her direction, “you got up just to snoop.”
“I’m helping clean, silly!”
“Oh, like you’ve been helping for the past two hours?”
She stuck out her tongue.
“Let’s see what secrets Daddy’s hiding, shall we?” Trucy craned to reach inside the drawer. With an effortful grunt, she pulled out a giant pile of various, eclectically-shaped and horribly-dusty boxes from out of the interior.
“Oh, what do we have here?” she asked, a twinkle in her eye.
The boxes were stacked in a convoluted and haphazard manner, and when Trucy set them down on the floor, some of their lids popped open. Dozens of playing cards, plastic miniatures, cardboard squares, and paper pamphlets went careening onto the carpet.
“Trucy!” Apollo cried. “You spilled them!”
“Ah—that wasn’t my fault! They were already loose when I took them out!”
“Now you have to help me pick all of this stuff up!”
“B-but—it all got mixed together! What goes into which box…?”
Good question. As Apollo gathered the scattered pieces, he realized what, exactly, the boxes were for. They were board games: titles a couple of decades old, with faded labels and deteriorating cardboard boxes.
Well, he assumed the metal tokens went into the Monopoly box—he’d played that one before. The envelopes went into Clue, of course. What were the cards for, though? They were covered in pictures of fantasy creatures, with epic names branded across the tops. Some sort of strategy game…? But which box did that belong to?
“J-just guess,” Apollo finally decided. “It’s not like these things have been touched recently. Mr. Wright will never know.”
“Oh my gosh, Polly,” Trucy said with a tug on Apollo’s sleeve. “Look what I found!”
Apollo reluctantly tore his gaze away from the mess. In Trucy’s hands was a large, faded red book, with its pages torn, dog-eared, and creased. It only seemed to be held together by the force of Trucy holding it up for him to see—if she opened it, all of the pages would surely flitter out and away, and there was no way he was going to pick all of that up.
“It’s dusty,” he said, holding out the duster for Trucy to take.
“Look at the cover!”
Apollo examined it closer. The red, he realized, came together to form the image of a great, roaring beast, garbed from head to giant-sized toe in the bones and fur of some unknown creature. A woman wielding a spear leapt towards it, blue aura crackling in between her fingertips and a determined look stern on her countenance.
“A fantasy novel?” Apollo guessed. “It’s pretty big for a novel, though.”
“The title, dummy!”
Above the beast and fighter was white text: “PLAYER’S HANDBOOK.” Below that, near the bottom of the cover, were the words, “Everything a player needs to create heroic characters for the world’s greatest roleplaying game.”
Apollo stared for a second or two, before the dots slowly connected in his brain to form one coherent, if not incredibly confusing, conclusion.
“Mr. Wright played Dungeons and Dragons?” he asked incredulously. “Seriously? When did he have the time? How old is this book?”
“About twenty-five years, give or take.”
Apollo and Trucy both flinched at the sound of the voice emanating from the doorway. Hey, Apollo thought—Mr. Wright wasn’t supposed to be back for a couple more hours! Wait, what time was it, again? He had been cleaning for so long… ugh, maybe he had lost track of time.
Trucy, meanwhile, gave the nervously-twitching Apollo a sly smile and even coyer wink, before slowly turning all the way around.
“Daddy!” she greeted. “You’re home! You’re just in time—Polly’s cleaning!”
In the open doorway of the office stood Phoenix Wright, attorney at law, looking moderately disheveled and oh-so exhausted. His blue suit was wrinkled, his eyelids droopy, and his hair—usually impeccably styled—had flyaways frizzing every which way. Seeing the current state of the office didn’t appear to be doing any wonders for his mood, either.
“I can see that,” he said, teeth half-clenched.
“And he’s rifling through your stuff!”
“Hey!” Apollo cried. “It’s not like that! I was just—tidying up, that’s all—”
“No, no. It’s fine. As long as you don’t throw anything important away, right?” Mr. Wright smiled. His smiles all seemed tired recently, Apollo had noticed, but he didn’t figure it was his place to say anything about it. If it developed into an issue, Athena would take care of it with one of her psychological evaluations.
Trucy got up off the ground and galloped over to her father’s side. “We found this in the bottom drawer of the divider!” She pushed the book out from her chest. “You used to roleplay? I didn’t know you were such a nerd, Daddy!”
Mr. Wright laughed, good-humoredly. “Well, it was a hobby of mine. I’ve been playing since I was a kid. I played it in grade school, high school, college… a little bit in my lawyering years, too.”
Lawyering years, Apollo thought. As if his current years weren’t his “lawyering years.”
“You had enough time to goof off back then?” Apollo asked, more to himself than anyone else.
Mr. Wright’s ears were honed, though, and his eyes gleamed as he met Apollo’s gaze. “I have more than enough time to goof off now, don’t I?” His chuckle this time was more mischievous than lighthearted—like he knew something Apollo didn’t (he had heard that chuckle far too often for his liking). “Besides, I wouldn’t call it ‘goofing off.’ You’d be surprised how good those types of games are with strengthening trusting relationships, business or otherwise.”
Trucy frowned. “Why didn’t you ever play it with me?”
Mr. Wright scratched his chin as he made his way farther into the office interior. He stepped carefully over all of the furniture and files, before finally settling down in the middle of the couch—right where Trucy had been lounging before. “Hmm, I don’t know. You need a few committed people to play it, so I guess it never came up.”
“How many people, exactly?”
Apollo didn’t like where this conversation was heading.
“If you’re done looking at it, I can put it back,” Apollo suggested a little too quickly. Mr. Wright’s lips quirked at his flustered words. “Uh, I’ve already dusted all of the other stuff in here, so we can put it back, and… and then I’ll finish cleaning. I’ll put everything back before I head off for the night, I promise.”
Mr. Wright focused his attention on his daughter. “Hmm, well. Technically, you can play with any number of people… but I’ve always found four to five to be a good amount.”
Trucy’s bright smile was starting to burn Apollo’s eyes. “We have four people! There’s me, you, Polly, and Athena!”
“Seriously,” Apollo tried again, his voice raising in Chords of Steel-trained volume. “I can put it away. Like, any time. It’s fine.”
Mr. Wright continued, “That’s only three. Do you know how these games work, Truce?”
“Kind of! Some of my friends have talked about it at school. We all make cool characters… and then we dress up as them, go out into the middle of the woods, and then shout stuff like, ‘Lightning Bolt!’ as we throw water balloons at one another, right?”
“…I think you’re thinking of a different type of game.”
Apollo was being ignored.
He gritted his teeth together. Uh-uh, no way—he wasn’t about to get roped into playing a roleplaying game with his coworkers. Not when there was actual work to do, anyway. He had to stop this before it could escalate any further.
“Hey—”
“—Everybody, I’m home!”
Oh good, the whole gang was here.
Athena Cykes bounded in through the already-open doorway, her garishly-colored yellow suit and skirt combo visible from outer space. “I’m back from my investi—whoa!” As soon as she noticed the state of the room, her smile fled from her face. “What’s going on in here? We’re cleaning again? B-but we cleaned the office last month….”
“Organizing the files on your desk is not the same as deep-cleaning,” Apollo said.
“Welcome back, Athena!” Trucy waved.
“Athena,” Mr. Wright said with a small nod. “How’d the investigation go? Sorry I couldn’t tag along. Business, you know.”
Athena tore her attention away from the chaos to give her boss a confident, V-for-Victory pose with her right hand. “It went great! I talked to a whole lot of witnesses and got a whole lot of evidence! Ema’s the main detective on this one, so she’s being super nice to me.” She tilted her head, thinking back to a time or a place inaccessible to anyone else in the room. “It’s kinda sad, but I think this is my first non-murder case. It’s weird! In all honesty, I’m kind of hoping a dead body turns up at the trial in a few days! Wah-hah-hah….”
“Why would you ever say that?” Apollo mumbled under his breath.
“It’s a robbery case, yes?” asked Mr. Wright.
“Yeah, for a Mr. Elan Crawlnober. It’s so weird—he’s admitted his guilt, but it’s completely obvious he didn’t rob that bar! He keeps going on and on about being one of the ‘greatest thief in the land,’ and being so ‘ruthless’ and ‘cruel’, and it’s kind of grindin’ my gears!” Athena shook her head, perhaps in an attempt to clear her thoughts. “Ugh, it’s always the weirdos, isn’t it…?”
“I’m sure there’s a reason for the strange behavior,” Mr. Wright said. He scooted over so there was room for Athena on the couch. She took the invitation gratefully. “And I’m sure whatever that reason is will be revealed in court.”
Athena sighed as she sank deeper into the plush cushions. “Yeah, I’m sure. Anyway, enough about me—what’s poppin’ over here? Other than Apollo being our maid again.”
Apollo’s skin prickled at that, but he swallowed his annoyance and refused to say anything petty. Verbally, at least.
“We’re going to play Dungeons and Dragons!” Trucy shouted. She held the book out in front of her, practically shoving it into Athena’s face.
“What?” Athena scrutinized the cover with a full-fledged frown. “What did you do, Justice? You wound back time to 1985.”
“What a dweeb!” Widget added from around her neck.
“I cleaned! There’s nothing wrong with cleaning, guys!”
“We don’t have to play if you don’t want to,” said Mr. Wright. When Trucy gave him a cutthroat glare, he amended, “W-well, I wouldn’t want to distract Athena from her case.”
Athena thought in silence for a second or two, before a string of dark, odious chuckles rolled from her lips. Her gaze hardened in Apollo’s direction. “Hey, what’s wrong, Apollo? You want to play, don’t you?”
Apollo wasn’t sure what expression he was wearing, but judging from Athena’s snickers, he assumed it wasn’t a very professional one.
“It’s not—I just—I, uh, don’t really have time for games,” Apollo said, reaching up to scratch the back of his head. He had never been a big “game” person; at least, not ones of the board variety. You usually couldn’t play those with only two people. “Mr. Wright’s… right. We shouldn’t distract Athena before her big case.”
“Ridiculous! Me, distracted? Who do you think I am?” Athena shook her head. “I think it might be fun! The trial isn’t for a few days, and it might be a nice way to take my mind off of things!”
“You mean a nice way to slack off.”
“Slacking off is good for the brain in moderation! They say that for every fifteen minutes of work you do, you should relax with at least five minutes of play. And with how much I’ve been working recently, I think I’ve accumulated a whole lot of playtime!” Athena hooted out another laugh. With teeth that sharp, and a voice that loud—her complexion and character reminded Apollo of that of a wolf. Or maybe an obnoxious, bright-yellow cockatiel.
“C-cockatiel?! Hey, those are big words coming from you, you… pollo!”
Trucy, still hovering near Athena and Mr. Wright, tucked the Dungeons and Dragons book under one arm and hooked her other hand onto the crook of her hip. “No fighting!” She turned towards her father with a grimace. “See, Daddy? We need to play this game! It’ll help build trust within the Agency!”
Apollo grumbled, “What do you mean? I trust everyone perfectly fine—”
“You have a point,” Mr. Wright said, cutting him off.
“And I’m all for it,” Athena added. “We could use some good ol’ Wright Anything Agency bonding! Who knows, Apollo: maybe our minds will get all synchronized if we play this game together! And we’ll totally kick butt at the Crawlnober trial!” Ugh, that smile was back. She nodded her head resolutely, and her massive, orange locks bounced along with the motion.
“It’s your trial, not mine. I’m just coming with you so Prosecutor Blackquill doesn’t make you cry.”
“There you go again—!”
“Hey, now.” Mr. Wright swiftly butted into the conversation. Despite Apollo wanting to say something snippy to Athena in return (and he had a great comeback prepared, mind you!), whenever Mr. Wright spoke, he felt obligated to shut his mouth. The man commanded authority, even despite Apollo knowing that he was bluffing most of the time.
“I think it might be fun,” Mr. Wright continued. “We should get in some quality time together—before I leave for my trip.”
Trip. Apollo shuddered to think about it. Not because of Mr. Wright leaving—the office would be a lot quieter without him around (and hey, maybe he could actually get in some real cleaning without Mr. Wright getting all sentimental about some piece of junk)—but because of….
“To Khura’in? Man, it’s already that soon?” Athena asked.
Yeah, because of Khura’in. But that was neither here nor there, and he didn’t care to dwell on it.
He could’ve sworn he saw Trucy glance at him, but when he looked up at her, she was too busy rifling through the handbook to have been paying him any attention.
“It’s a handful of weeks away, yes.” Mr. Wright hummed to himself and stared off into a random corner of the room. He—he wasn’t staring at the plant, right? “It’ll take me a few days to get everything prepared for the game; it’s a little bit complicated, after all. I’ll be happy to play the role of game-master, since I’m the most experienced. Let’s aim for, let’s say… Friday?” He brought his attention to the group and offered a slanted smile. “I’ll make a suggestion, though: you guys should probably invite some friends.”
“Friends?” Trucy repeated. Her bottom lip caught between her teeth. “But I thought we were going to play it as an agency!”
“We can. But, like I said before—Dungeons and Dragons is something better experienced with more people.” He pointed at Trucy, then Athena, then Apollo—as if counting them. “Let’s see… if you all brought one friend along, that would be six people. That’s a good number. The standard party is of four, but I can manage six. I'm a little rusty, though….”
“Sweet!” Athena immediately sat up straight and reached into her pocket. “I’m texting Junie! Oh, or should I text Jinxie?! Maybe Robin or Hugh would want to come?”
“Ah, who should I invite?!” Whatever worry or disappointment Trucy had felt before seemed to have entirely dissipated as soon as Athena had brought out her phone. She, too, whipped out her own device (seemingly from thin air, Apollo noted). “There’s this cute girl I’ve been working with during my magic routine—would she like to come? Hmm… Mr. Reus probably isn’t the type. Do you think Pearls can make it here on such short notice, Daddy?”
Mr. Wright’s mouth dropped slack. “I said one friend, guys.”
“Polly!” Trucy rounded on him suddenly, causing Apollo to jolt upright in surprise from his position still planted on the floor. “Who do you think you’ll bring? Oh, maybe you can invite Ema!”
The thought of asking Ema Skye, with her munch-munch-munching and ever-present scowl, to play Dungeons and Dragons with the balls of energy that comprised the Wright Anything Agency was too much to bear.
“Thanks,” Apollo muttered, “but I think I’ll pass on this.”
“You can’t pass, Polly! This is something we’re going to do as a family!”
Athena looked up from her phone. A light blush started to rise up her cheeks. “F-family?”
“Well, you’re both inviting friends, right?” said Apollo. “You’ll have enough people. I should probably brief myself more on the Crawlnober case, anyway. I need to look over Athena’s notes—”
“You have to play!” Trucy balled her free hand into a fist. “If Polly doesn’t play, then I’m not going to, either!”
That made Athena snap to attention. “What the heck, Apollo?! You can’t just ruin our family bonding like that!” She put way too much emphasis on the word family, and her lips trembled into a crooked, too-pleased grin as soon as the word left them.
“What kind of monster ruins family bonding like that?”
Apollo wheezed. “Mr. Wright, not you too!”
“I’m just saying.”
The three pairs of eyes on him made Apollo want to curl up into a ball. Were they really serious? They had so much stuff to get done, especially with Athena’s case and Mr. Wright leaving for—ahem, abroad in a few weeks’ time. They didn’t have time to play games.
But, with Athena’s gruesome glare, Trucy’s pleading frown, and Mr. Wright’s half-amused grin, he found that his resolve wore down pretty quickly.
“Well,” he said after a while of silent deliberating, “it’s just one game, right? How bad could it possibly be?”
As Athena and Trucy rejoiced, Apollo vaguely wondered why Mr. Wright was snickering.