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Hands shaking, Trucy Wright locks the door to the bathroom in the prosecutor’s office behind her, gasping for breath more frantically than Polly usually does after a particularly stressful trial (which, frankly, was saying something, and would have been incredibly troubling to Trucy, if she wasn’t freaking out in the bathroom of a judicial building at the time).
As she attempts to steady her breathing, she sinks down onto the ground, thinking about what had gotten her into this mess in the first place; what her daddy had told her that might as well have been equivalent to destroying all of her magician’s equipment and then burning her patented blue magician’s outfit on top of that.
Her mommy was alive.
She had been alive this whole time. God, Trucy had even come face to face with her when Polly was the defense in the Tobaye trial a couple of years ago– and she hadn’t even recognized Trucy. Sure, her mommy had had amnesia during that time, but she was her mommy . She’d given birth to Trucy. You can’t just forget your own daughter , surely!
But what had really stuck with Trucy was the fact that her mommy had remembered her for a full two years . Two years, and she had never said anything. All those times Trucy and Polly had talked with her after the Tobaye case– they had had lunch with her almost every other week for a while afterwards! And Lamiroir– no, Thalassa had never said anything to her about it. All that time, and nothing.
All of this seemed to confirm Trucy’s fears.
First, there was her first daddy, who had run off when she was eight, leaving her in that courtroom by herself. She had always wondered why he hadn’t taken her with him– after all, he was her daddy, and she had thought that daddies and mommies were supposed to protect their kids, right? At the time, she had brushed it off the best she could. After all, she had to be happy for her new daddy– she was sure he would leave like other daddy if she was constantly complaining about her own problems.
But the nagging thought wouldn’t leave the back of her head:
Why didn’t Old Daddy want me?
But with her Mommy alive, she wouldn’t be able to pass it off as just being her old daddy’s fault anymore. She now had two parents that had known about her existence and simply seemed to brush her off their backs. Let her be lost to the winds of time, thrown into the foster care system to be taken care of by random families from all over Japanifornia– or, at least, that’s what would have happened if her new daddy hadn’t adopted her.
She supposed she should be happy now. After all, that pesky question that had been buzzing around in her head for the last ten years had been answered.
There could only be one reason that two parents wouldn’t want their daughter, and that was because of the daughter herself.
Trucy didn’t remember much of her childhood before her new daddy, but she remembered every time she would screw up during rehearsals for Troupe Gramarye shows– she remembered the way her grandfather would scream at her in front of mommy and daddy. The way Old Daddy would glare at Trucy, embarrassment apparent in his eyes, the way he would run off after Magnifi, desperately trying to convince him that this was a “one-time thing” and all she needed was extra practice. The way Mommy would look down at the ground, very obviously sympathetic towards Trucy, yet too scared to stand up to Trucy’s grandfather.
Fuck, Trucy thought to herself. I was so naive.
It all made sense. All her life, she caused screw-up after screw-up. She was destined to get punished for it at some point.
Trucy got up from the bathroom floor, still shaking like a leaf, and walked over to the big mirror in the center of the room. It was then that she finally realized that she had been crying, her face red and tear-stained. She made no moves to clean herself up. She saw no reason to, as she was alone in the prosecutor’s office at 11 at night– she doubted that anyone would come and disturb her.
Oh, shoot. I forgot. I left Daddy and Polly in the agency.
After her daddy had told her…the news, Trucy had run off. She probably should have said something to them before she had bolted out, but everything she had just learnt overloaded her mind so much at the time that she had short-circuited, unable to force any words out of her mouth other than “I have to go”.
She laughed underneath her breath. Classic Trucy, she thought. Never thinking of anyone but yourself. It would have been almost funny, if everything she did didn’t constantly push her entire family away.
This whole time, she hadn’t even thought about Polly . Thalassa was his mommy, too– him and Trucy were siblings, and she hadn’t even spared him a thought.
“Some sister I am,” Trucy scoffed, looking over herself in the mirror. She wasn’t exactly sure why the sight of herself seemed so interesting all of the sudden– it was as if her appearance had changed in some way, even though on the outside, she looked exactly the same. Same swoopy bangs, same eyes, same accessories in her hair…
Oh.
Now she knew what it was.
She was seeing her mommy and her daddy in her reflection.
Her mommy had clearly passed down her features to Trucy– from the way her hair fell on her face, the shape of her nose, even her eyes. Anyone who saw the two side by side would be able to tell that the two were related in some way. Her daddy hadn’t given Trucy many of his features, but her normal outfit had clearly been made with him in mind– even down to the symbols on her cape, clearly referencing the troupe’s suits of cards trademark.
If Trucy was being honest with herself, this scared the shit out of her.
She was afraid of looking in the mirror now, day after day, and seeing the two people she had once trusted the most staring back at her. It felt like cheating, somehow, to still be able to see two people who had probably despised you in your reflection.
This solitary thought fills Trucy’s mind as she stares at herself, trying to slow her heartbeat but failing horribly. She begins to gasp for breath, her reflection morphing into her parents as she claws at her heart, desperately trying to stop whatever was happening to her, but her eyes remain fixed on the mirror, unable to turn away. She watches as her parents begin to speak to her through the mirror, yet she can’t hear a single thing they say through the pounding in her ears. “ I can’t hear you! ” she screams at the mirror, yet the pair kept speaking to Trucy as if this was an everyday occurrence. Her heart rate kept climbing up and up as her legs started shaking as if they were about to buckle underneath her weight. Trucy kept screaming at the mirror, begging her parents to speak louder, until she had had enough. “ Just– leave me alone!”
Trucy hears glass shatter somewhere off in the distance as she falls to the ground, hands clasped over her ears.
______________
By the time she comes to, she’s not entirely sure how much time has passed. Or, for that matter, what the fuck just happened.
She’s sure it’s been a couple hours, judging by the way she feels, but when she checks her phone, it’s only been about twenty minutes since she first entered the prosecutor’s office at all. She’s still getting her bearings together, trying to steady her breathing, when she hears a knock at the door and freezes.
Shit. Shitshitshitshitshit-
“Fräulein? Are you in there?”
SHIT.
As Trucy scrambles to get up, she could only think that this was bound to happen. She knew that many Japanifornia prosecutors were work-a-holics (exhibit A: Papa), but Prosecutor Gavin being one was not what she would have expected. Usually she would adore seeing Klavier out and about, especially when Apollo was there and she could make fun of him crushing on the prosecutor, but she wasn’t exactly excited to talk to him after having an episode over her messed-up family in a public bathroom.
But she digressed.
Trucy attempted to clean herself up, brushing off the floor gunk on her cape and moving to wash her face, when she realized that the glass shattering she heard earlier was the bathroom mirror.
Oh, fuck my life.
She washes her hands quickly, takes a breath, and puts the biggest smile she can muster on her face– after all, she didn’t want to trouble anyone with her problems more than she absolutely had to. In fact, she would have to do something when she got back to the agency for Daddy and Polly. She’d probably given them both a heart attack at this point, running off into the night like she did.
Almost like…
Another breath.
She opens the door to a startled Klavier Gavin looking down at her and grins up at him.
“Oh, hey Prosecutor Gavin! I didn’t know you were still here! You really have to start taking care of yourself, you know! Sleep is important.”
Klavier just looks at her, looks at the shattered mirror, and looks back to Trucy.
“I could say the same thing to you, Fräulein Wright.”
Trucy freezes.
“I…I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about, Prosecutor Ga-”
“Apollo texted me, Trucy. I know about…I know what Herr Wright told the two of you.”
Trucy’s face slowly begins to crumple at this new information.
“I…I figured you might be here, since you know how to get in because of Herr Edgeworth.”
Now he knows how self-centered I am, how I scared off my own parents, how I didn’t even TRY to talk to Apollo…
Trucy crumples on the floor of the bathroom once again, crying over so many things at once, but mainly how much of an asshole she is. From making her family worried, to shattering a mirror in a public place, to getting Klavier fucking Gavin involved? She really could not make this any worse.
“Fräulein, what are you talking about?”
…Unless, of course, she had said that out loud. Crap.
“You know I don’t mind helping out friends when they need help, right? Learning everything you’ve just learnt isn’t something one can just digest easily-”
“Yeah, well, it would probably be easier to digest if I wasn’t the reason for all of this stuff anyway, because apparently I’m incapable of being a decent enough daughter for my actual parents to want me.”
Klavier pauses and stares at Trucy for a short minute.
“Fräulein…what…what do you mean?”
Trucy simply stares at the floor, silent, as Klavier scans over her once more before he walks over to the mirror.
“Trucy…do you know why I cut my hair short?”
Trucy’s head snaps up at this, because, truthfully, she always had wondered why. It had been a sudden decision, she had figured, but she had never been able to figure out the truth behind the decision.
Klavier leans over the sink and looks into the shattered remains of the mirror.
“It’s because everywhere I went, every time I saw myself, I was reminded of Mein Bruder.”
Trucy would have to be an idiot not to know who he’s talking about at this point, and her cheeks heat up at the thought of prompting him to have to think about Kristoph Gavin.
“Prosecutor Gavin, I’m so, so sorry, I didn’t mean to-”
“Fräulein. There is no need to apologize.”
Klavier turns around to face Trucy so she can better see his face– she suspects it’s to show her Perceive that he’s telling the truth, and it’s working. She isn’t picking up any tells from him.
“I’m telling you this because I suspect you are going through something similar to what I was dealing with in the aftermath of Kristoph’s trial,” he says, tensing up when he says his brother’s name. “I just- I want you to know that you are not your family. Blood may bind families together in some ways, but does not constitute someone as being responsible for somebody else’s actions. You, Fräulein Wright, are not responsible for your mother and father’s actions. I know it might seem that way right now, and looking in the mirror to see someone who reminds you of them certainly doesn’t help, but I need you to trust me when I say this. Take it from me, Fräulein.”
Trucy doesn’t realize that she’s crying until she tackles Prosecutor Gavin in front of the shattered mirror and gets his shirt extremely wet with tears.
______________
After Trucy calms down and the two talk a little bit about everything from the Gavinners to how growing up with the two’s respective families was, Trucy and Klavier begin their venture out of the bathroom— but not before Klavier stops Trucy in front of the shattered mirror.
“The next time you look into the mirror, try to only focus on this spot on your head.” Klavier points to a cowlick on Trucy’s head, something that she usually forgets about, since most of the time it’s under her hat.
“Why? What is that supposed…to…”
Her eyes widen at the realization, grinning at the cowlick in the mirror.
She has her brother’s horns— much smaller, but they’re still there.
She looks like Apollo.