[AJ: AA] Old, assorted Apollo Justice shorts

[taotrooper]

Turning on the lights

Lamiroir had been unsure about being a jurist, considering she wasn't even an American citizen and had just recovered from her eyesight operation a couple of weeks before, but Mr. Wright had insisted and told her it was an easy job. But what really lured her was a certain comment he had made, with a sneaky grin.

"At least read this case summary first," Wright said, handing out a sheet of paper. "Wouldn't you want to see how the defense looks like?"

She read the sheet, still amazed she could read written English so well, and her eyes went right to the names.

Victim: Drew Misham
Defendant: Vera Misham
Prosecution: Klavier Gavin
Defense: Apollo Justice

Apollo... that lawyer who had given her so much courage. The courage to look for the light.

"Trucy will also be at the trial," Wright added. "So what do you say, Lamiroir? You could see those kids in action again, now with your own eyes."

She couldn't help but smile.

"You win, Mr. Wright. I will be one of your jurists."

*********

She looked forward to the trial, and felt a bit disappointed the jurists weren't going to be at the courtroom. However, she understood the logics behind it. A TV was better than anything.

Lamiroir recognized the judge's voice as the one from Machi's trial. There was no surprise regarding Klavier Gavin, though, since she had read articles about the case and the Gavinners. She had already seen photos of his band and knew exactly what he looked like. The voice and the pictures and the attitude matched with what she remembered about him, naturally. It was good to see him once more.

But of course, she went to check on Apollo Justice, and so she did. Her first impression was that his rough voice didn't match his body, and that she hadn't imagined him like that at all. She didn't expect him to be such an adorable young man. She even thought he was more handsome than Mr. Gavin. There was something warm and familiar about him, like a memory lost long ago. Why was she feeling like that?

Trucy didn't help at all. She was ten times cuter than she expected -perhaps the cutest girl she had seen- and she already thought of her as cute when she was still blind. But the outfit... The blue top hat, the blue cape, the white gloves. Where had she seen it before? As the trial continued, she realized she hadn't just seen such clothes. She had wore them herself. Was she then a magician before the accident? She wasn't sure yet.

Unable to go anywhere with these reflections, she focused on the trial itself. After all, she'd have to give a verdict by the end of it.

Or she tried to, at least until Apollo did something odd.

She understood right away what he was doing. Somehow she knew the trick was in his bracelet, that he was holding on to him while staring so much at the witness it seemed even painful. He... was looking for something, and the bracelet was aiding him. Her own heart gave a jump, and her wrist felt like burning. She was even focusing in the witness' every moves with him.

And when Apollo confronted Brushel about sweating at a certain point, she realized she had noticed that as well.

As a matter of fact, didn't his bracelet looked eerily similar to hers, the one she'd had since forever, the one burning around her wrist now? Was that a coincidence? No, it couldn't be. She spent the rest of the testimony recalling how Apollo had called on their little moves when she and Machi testified.

It was around the end, before the poor girl passed out and the trial was interrupted for the day, that the name Gramarye was mentioned. Gramarye! Then her own name came to her: she had been Thalassa Gramarye before she was Lamiroir. And... her bracelet, the power from her bracelet, she could remember her father teaching her that perceiving technique when she was little. They were her heirlooms.

Wait a minute. Weren't they a pair of bracelets, not only one...?

Then she had that sudden revelation, the blinding light at the end of the tunnel and the deep darkness behind it. Her baby boy, she was forced to abandon him to his luck. She had left him with one of her bracelets. Thus she remembered her first husband, and saw so many parts of him in Apollo. Then she remember her second husband, and the days back in her father's Troupe, and the sweet little girl who looked so much like her, with the silk pink hat just like her daddy's. Trucy...

The memories were flowing her heart. There were still holes, but she was finally starting to recover them. Her children, her dear children; the children she had lost with that bullet and her sight. Thankfully everyone else in the jurist room was too busy with Miss Misham's fall to notice she was crying -or so she thought, since Phoenix Wright had.

Too much light can hurt your eyes, it's true. But she was grateful she could count with it at all. It is a welcomed blessing.



Zapping

It was past 11:00 when she had arrived to her apartment. She threw the keys on the kitchen counter and hanged her handbag full of forensic solutions -all of them mail-ordered- and candy on the bedroom's door handle. She took off the glasses and the wristwatch. She felt tired, old, bored, tired.

After putting her pajamas on, she went to the kitchen and prepared a cup of lukewarm tea. She sipped and inhaled the aroma, hoping it'd replace the smell of chemistries and dried blood in her system. It didn't quite work; she should've known.

She sat down at the couch in the living room. Her free hand fetched for the remote control. She was too grumpy to watch the news, so she surfed around instead. Reruns of a cheesy soap opera, in which the main character's love interest was so classy and elegant: go on, remind her how lonely she's feeling. Click. An old war movie that had won an important award back in the day: it just seemed like any other war movie to her. Click. A documentary about mediums in current days: after three minutes she was bored again. Click. An interview at the music channel with some guitarist guy with an awfully large, ugly hairdo: she winced when he was asked how it was like to work with band leader Klavier Gavin. Click click click.

She threw the remote away while hissing. She gulped the rest of the teacup as she had ran out of Snackoos. She burned her tongue, this is just great. In resignation, she went and check her DVD collection, and decided to watch classic episodes of Forensics in Florida, her favorite TV show ever, until she fell asleep.



Traditions and lipstick

It was a silly little thing, really, and Klavier would be the first one to accept it was ridiculous and irrational. It never stopped him from doing it every time, to his fellow band members' amusement. He wasn't a man to believe in superstitions, true; he probably did it to soothe the nerves before hitting it off on stage. He'd feel uneasy without the sign in the mirrors.

It started during their first gig in an important L.A. nightclub. The Gavinners thought they were fortunate to be even playing in such a place, no matter how badly things could turn out. The audience there were used to high-quality talent, and they had heard that star-searching agents looked for the next scene hit over there. Not that it truly mattered since it was just a hobby and all of them but the youngest ones had a stable job in the forces -Gavin was about to take his bar exam overseas and Crescend was still in the police academy. That didn't stop them from feeling anxious and dream big, or at least hoping they wouldn't be kicked out because they sucked.

This girl who was Daryan's girlfriend at the time was hanging out with them backstage while they waited until it was their turn. But Daryan was too nervous to make out with her, so she went to the dressing room's mirror to redo her makeup. Bored out of his mind, Klavier glanced at her from behind his sunglasses. He saw her leaning over and stretching her arm forward.

"What are you doing, Fräulein?"

"Dunno," she shrugged, "just drawing on the mirror."

He got up from the cheap chair he was sitting on, took off his sunglasses, and checked on her. Indeed, there was a cute little red rose made out of lipstick in the left border. His friend's girl reached for her makeup bag and looked for a second stick, that one in a soft pink shade. She doodled a second pink flower next to the red one, perhaps wanting to breed her own artistic garden. Klavier stared at the dropped red stick. Well, that seemed to be a distraction as good as any other.

He grabbed the lipstick and toyed with it. Then he drew an angular design over the reflecting surface, the same thing he had doodled on his notes during class at college, absentmindedly, at least a hundred times before. A stylized capital G.

"What's up with that, man?" He saw from the mirror that Daryan was standing behind them, hand on his girl's hip, with the face he'd use to tease others directed at Gavin.

"You see, no matter what happens on stage tonight," Klavier grinned, "the Gavinners left their mark in this club. Literally, of course."

"Since when is that things our mark, anyway?"

"Since now." Klavier's face looked defiant at Daryan's eyes, as though he was waiting the second guitar to complain to the leader's not-so-democratic decisions. And perhaps he would've if the band hadn't been called at that precise moment.

They were a sensation, and were invited to play again for the next weekend. On that second Sunday they were discovered by a good agency, and by the end of the month they had a juicy record deal.

Klavier Gavin didn't believe in luck: he was exactly where he wanted to be because he had worked hard and had been smart enough. But he was still a man of passions who followed his heart, and he still drew the Gavinners G on the mirrors with the same shade of red before every concert, every gig.

If the prosecutor's lobby had any mirrors, he'd also doodle on them. The court was his hardest stage, after all.