Golden Oaks Library
June 10th, 6:10 PM
After a stop by the Carousel Boutique found Rarity not at home—her younger sister, an adorable curly-haired filly named Sweetie Belle, told him she was having dinner with a prospective client and wouldn’t be back until late—a brooding Phoenix returned to Twilight’s treehouse library home only to find it empty.
Seems Twilight isn’t back yet. Better not tell her about Sonata, unless it’s absolutely necessary. Not only for my sake, but for hers as well, he decided as he ducked his head to go through the front door, mental and physical fatigue starting to catch up to him. He’d been in Equestria less than a day, but after everything that had happened and all he had been through, it may as well have been a week.
As he was walking to the kitchen intending to turn Fluttershy’s gifted vegetables into some dinner, he was stopped short by the unexpected sight of a bird sitting on a perch in the middle of the room, eyeing him curiously. “Hey! An owl!” Phoenix exclaimed.
“Who,” the owl responded to his voice.
He gave it an odd look. “Who? You! You’re an owl!” Phoenix replied.
“Who?” it repeated, almost sounding like it was asking a question.
“You mean, ‘Who am I?’” he guessed, not entirely certain it was intelligent but deciding that given all the sapient races in Equestria, it was best to assume so. “I’m Phoenix Wright. Spelled with a ‘Ph’ and a ‘W’.”
“Who,” it replied with an approximation of a nod.
Phoenix frowned. “You know… you make Big Macintosh look like a blabbermouth.”
“Who,” it answered, at which point Phoenix gave up.
At that moment, a small bipedal green-and-purple reptile appeared at the upstairs rail, wearing an apron and holding a mop. “Oh, you’re back!” The strange creature greeted him with a wave from the edge of Twilight’s bedroom loft.
Phoenix looked up at him in recognition. “Oh. You’re Spike, right? I remember meeting you last night,” he said as the baby dragon came downstairs, feeling embarrassed anew over his initial fear of him. When I heard he was a dragon, I thought he’d be a monster, but he’s just a little guy! he mused as Spike approached him; even counting the ridge scales on his head he barely came up to the taller human’s waist.
Spike rolled his slitted eyes as he leaned on his mop. “Yeah, I remember you, too! You were being a big drama queen this morning!” he reminded Phoenix in an annoyed tone, who winced and nodded ruefully. “Seriously, I’ve heard sheep bleat less than you!”
Phoenix grimaced. “Sorry about that. Getting one hour of sleep and having no dinner or breakfast will do that to you,” he apologized, thinking that for a creature that was supposed to be a baby, Spike had the intelligence and attitude of a teenager—and a rather sassy one at that. “So what’s this owl doing here?” Phoenix asked, nodding at the bird before him, who was studying him curiously back.
“Oh, him? That’s Owlowiscious. He helps Twilight with her late night study sessions, since he’s nocturnal,” Spike explained. “Basically, I help Twilight during the day and Owlowiscious takes over at night while I’m sleeping.”
He nodded his understanding. “Owlowiscious, huh?” Phoenix scratched his chin while examining the domesticated avian closely.
“Who!” the bird acknowledged.
“You! You’re Owlowiscious!” Phoenix said to the owl.
“Who,” the owl said in an air that Phoenix couldn’t help but get the impression was amused.
Spike chuckled. “Sometimes I keep at it hoping he’ll say ‘What’, ‘Why’, ‘Where’ or ‘How’,” he told Phoenix, who chuckled as well. “But ‘who’ is pretty much the only thing he can say. He’s really smart, though—he knows where every book and scrap of knowledge in this library is, just like me.”
“I guess you’d have to, being Twilight’s scribe,” he remembered, resisting the urge to pat him on the head—he was just too cute in that apron.
He nodded eagerly. “Yup! #1 Assistant Spike at your service!” he said proudly, putting his hands—yes, actual hands—on his scaled hips.
“Who!” the owl said yet again; Phoenix swore he heard an annoyed note in his hoot.
Spike apparently did as well. “Oh? So are you. Or actually… would you mind being the ‘#1.5 Assistant’? I mean that’s still number one… sorta. It’s just that ‘#1 Assistant’ sounds better on me!”
“Who,” the owl apparently agreed.
“Me.”
“Who.”
“Me! Spike! You know my name!”
Spike, you’re not gonna win this argument! Phoenix knew, sitting back down on the sofa, taking a load off and studying the hollowed-out interior of the tree that was Twilight’s home. “Have to say, Twilight wasn’t lying when she said she likes reading if she lives in this library. It’s like a bookworm’s dream come true!” he noted, looking over her huge living room filled from floor to ceiling with stacks and shelves of books.
“Oh yeah! And you don’t know the half of it!” Spike snickered. “Let me tell you, Twilight’s a total nerd!”
“Excuse me?” an annoyed voice asked, startling them both; the two spun their heads to see Twilight had just walked in the open front door.
Spike cringed at the glare Twilight was giving him, putting on the silliest grin he could muster. “Oh! You’re back, Twilight! I… um… uh… I was just on my way to… um… organize those awesome books my intelligent and smart friend reads! Uh… later!” he raced back upstairs to the next room, mop in hand.
Phoenix stifled a laugh at Spike’s silliness, turning his focus back to Twilight. “So, did you find out what you needed to know?” he asked her, standing back up and respectfully clasping his hands in front of him.
She gave him a satisfied, if slightly distracted nod. “Yes. I have to say, your Magatama’s power is amazing. I’ll fill you in about what I learned before court tomorrow, but in short, I’m all but certain the pony who attacked you is the true culprit,” Twilight announced, looking deep in thought as she began to head upstairs.
Phoenix nodded, more than a little relieved, both to have a viable new suspect and that he wouldn’t have to confront Sonata again. “That’s very good news,” he granted, only to be caught short as he read between the lines. “Wait—so you’re not having me fired?” he followed up, holding his breath.
She stopped and sat down, looking away from him again. “I’ve thought about it a lot. And I realize now that you mean well,” she began. “What happened this morning is as much my fault for yanking you from your own world against your will, and then giving you no time to acclimate or prepare for a trial in this one,” she admitted. “What you did wasn’t fair to Fluttershy, but what I did wasn’t fair to you either… so it wouldn’t be right to hold it against you. And if what you say is true, you stand a better chance against Trixie than I do,” she conceded.
He relaxed at that, sighing with relief. “Thank you, Twilight. You made the right choice.”
“You’re welcome. But Phoenix…?” Twilight trailed off, looking fractionally back at him.
“Yes?”
Abruptly, she turned and lunged at him, rearing up and shoving the startled human lawyer against a bookshelf, her hooves against his shoulders and head coming up to his chest, her purple eyes glowing red and piercing his brown ones with a soul-freezing stare that could rival Fluttershy’s. As a frightened Phoenix watched, her horn began to glow orange—a color he recognized as one borne of anger—and realized with a moment of panic her aura was pinning him in place, putting him completely at her mercy.
She let his situation sink in before she spoke, apparently making sure she had his full attention. “These are my friends, Phoenix,” she informed him, a low, dangerous edge to her voice. “I love them more than life, and I’d do anything to protect them, so let me make this very clear: my friends are not to be used as pawns in a legal chess match between you and Trixie!” she warned him, giving him a brief but sharp shake with her hooves and aura, the glow in her eyes intensifying for a moment and causing his to widen.
“I now understand why you accused Fluttershy, and I accept that at that moment, you had no choice if you were to save Rainbow. But don’t you EVER!—pull a stunt like that again without running it past me first! Understood?” she prompted with another sharp shake of his shoulders.
Taken aback and more than a little afraid, a stunned and speechless Phoenix did the only thing he could think of. With great deliberateness, he reached up to gently grasp her hooves in his hands, swallowing as he did so. “Y-yeah… I won’t, I promise,” he said a little unsteadily, giving her blunt appendages a squeeze, finally understanding exactly what Twilight had been going through and how fiercely protective of her friends she really was. “Believe me, you couldn’t hate me any more than I hate myself for it, but I shouldn’t need to do anything like that again. From here on out, my only purpose is to get Rainbow acquitted and to find out what really happened in the forest that night,” Phoenix pledged to her, more determined than ever to put an end to the shroud of secrecy and deceit that hung over the case and lay bare the truth.
She studied his face carefully, as if trying to gauge the candor of his words. He met her intimidating red-eyed gaze as evenly as he could, determined to show her that he meant what he said. Apparently accepting his words as genuine, she finally nodded in satisfaction and released him from her aura, her eyes and horn glow returning to normal, to his immense relief. “I-I’m sorry. I… I didn’t mean to scare you…” she apologized. “It was just that… I’d been holding that in all day and I had to get it off my chest,” she told him, now leaning on him heavily and looking strangely spent.
He felt his fear ebb at that, his heartbeat starting to slow back down to a normal pace. “It’s all right. I’ll be the first to admit I deserved that,” he replied, giving her a wan smile and another squeeze of her hooves, marveling again that they were slightly yielding, completely unlike the hard hooves of his world’s horses. “This hasn’t been one of my better days—” now there’s a prize understatement! “—and I don’t think I have any right to ask this of you or Fluttershy after this morning, but… please forgive me?” he beseeched her, bowing his head before her.
She finally favored with him a warm smile, though he noticed her gaze flickered to his hands on her hooves for a moment. “Fluttershy already forgave you, so I guess I can too. The Princess also said I can trust you, and that everything would be fine if you were here,” she told him, leaving him wondering again how Twilight’s ‘Princess’ knew of him. Abruptly, she started to tear up again, her big, purple eyes drawing him into their depths. “Phoenix… please save my friend!” she begged him, her voice shaking noticeably as she swallowed hard. “Please…”
His heart all but melted at her plea. He reached around to gently hug her head to his chest, being careful not to touch her horn. “I’ll try—no. I won’t let you down this time!” Phoenix promised, vowing to be worthy of her trust. Though initially surprised, her eyes going wide as he moved to hug her, Twilight did not resist, slowly relaxing into the embrace. “I swear to heaven and on the memory of my late mentor that I’ll prove Rainbow Dash innocent, and neither Trixie nor Timberwolves will stop me,” Phoenix swore to her quietly, running a comforting hand through her soft fur and silky striped mane, feeling Twilight trembling slightly beneath his fingers.
“Th-thank you,” came Twilight’s quavering voice, and with that, the unlikely pair held the embrace, unable or unwilling to let go of the other until—
“Oh, get a room, you two!” Spike called down from the second floor landing he was mopping, causing them both to blush and pull away. “Take all the mushy stuff somewhere else!”
“Who!” Owlolicious added, looking at them curiously; Phoenix could have sworn the avian was smirking out of one corner of his beak.
Still blushing, Twilight pushed back from him and dropped back to all fours, sitting down and rubbing a hoof behind her head in a surprisingly familiar gesture, looking sheepish. “Um… th-thank you. That spare bed is in the same place,” she said, turning away from him. “Try to get lots of sleep this time, okay? I’m pretty tired after all that’s happened today. Investigating sure takes a lot out of you.” Twilight yawned, stretching out slowly before him much like a cat would, her tail rising momentarily as she did so.
“Tell me about it.” an equally-flustered Phoenix agreed with her, rubbing the back of his own head, trying not to glance at her briefly-exposed hindquarters. Did she do that deliberately?
“I, uh, think I’m going to bed early,” Twilight announced, her cheeks still flushed, seemingly unable to look him in the eye all of the sudden.
Phoenix’s cheeks were warm as well. “Alright. I’m probably going to crash soon, too,” he said in sympathy, and he wasn’t just saying it—it was nearly six hours before his usual bedtime, but after as little sleep as he had gotten the previous night, to say nothing of the exhausting events of that day, he didn’t care.
“Good night,” Twilight called to him, then trotted upstairs to her upper-floor bedroom loft. A stunned Phoenix watched her leave, his eyes drawn to the exaggerated movement of her hips—or was he imagining it? And why would he even notice it?—quickly tearing his gaze away when he saw Twilight look back at him.
“See you in the morning,” he replied in a surprisingly even tone, and by the time he chanced a look back up, she had already disappeared into her room, leaving Phoenix alone and brooding, no longer able to deny what he was thinking and feeling.
He sat back down on the sofa trying to make sense of it, a growing urge and attraction that, looking back, he realized he had first started to feel the previous night. He clutched his head in his hands, not even caring that Owlowiscious was watching him, all his thoughts suddenly consumed by a single, overriding question:
Did he like Twilight? If so, why? He’d only known her a day and she’d all but kidnapped him; dragging him unwillingly into her world and lying to him in the process. But for that, she’d also quickly become his guide and friend; he had come to appreciate her intelligence and talents, fascinated by her ability to wield magic and her exotic equine form. But that in turn begged the question: was his attraction to her just an odd adjunct of his affection for animals—and to think of her (or any other pony, he had quickly learned, that way was utterly insulting—or something more?
The more he thought about it, the more he was certain it wasn’t a simple matter of her being a pony—if it was, he’d be falling for every mare he met. If he was being fair, he’d certainly noticed other ponies, able to appreciate both Applejack’s rugged beauty and Rarity’s exquisite looks. He’d even ended up with Pinkie’s head in his lap at one point, and he half-thought he might have some kind of crush on Fluttershy, especially after her rescue of him. But if that’s all it is, why hasn’t Maya fallen for me three times over? He wondered, as that was the count of how many times he’d saved his assistant from murder charges or kidnapping.
But with Twilight, it was different. Far from just being the ‘total nerd’ Spike claimed, Phoenix could tell the bookish unicorn was smart and savvy; a very strong-willed and fiercely devoted friend who could accomplish miracles with her magic; simple in her appearance but not unattractive for it. Qualities that meant he’d be no less smitten if she were human and about six years younger, before the betrayal that all but ended his interest in the opposite sex.
Or had it? When Twilight had rejected him after the trial, he’d been hurt as much as when he got stood up at his junior prom in high school; he’d wanted nothing more than her forgiveness and the chance to win her trust back. But now that he’d apparently gotten it?
He sighed at that, his tired and slightly overwhelmed mind reminding him that, regardless of the fact she was a pony, getting romantically involved with a client was a very bad idea. But then again, Twilight wasn’t so much his client as his temporary assistant and co-counsel (which hardly made it better), though comparing her to Maya on that basis wasn’t fair to either. Other than the fact she couldn’t channel Mia, Twilight was far more mature and capable; with a little training and seasoning, he had no trouble seeing her as a full-fledged attorney who could do well even in the courtrooms of his world.
Much as he did in court when he was having trouble discerning the truth, Phoenix tried looking at the situation from another angle: did Twilight really like him? The evidence certainly suggested yes, between her odd behavior, pink aura, and the all-too-equine displays she’d made at the end of their conversation—though much as it was for him, he doubted she herself fully understood why.
He shook his head at that. He hadn’t had a girlfriend in a long time—no surprise, considering what his last one did to him—and he had never dreamed he might find a new one in a world of intelligent equines. Never mind the fact she was a pony, not a human; never mind what their respective societies would say about it…
Was such a thing even possible?
Sensing that his thoughts were trying to head down paths he wasn’t anywhere near ready to go, he shook his head again, deciding that regardless of the answers, it simply wasn’t the time or place to pursue them. “Business first, Phoenix,” he thought out loud, reminding himself that he had a client to defend and a case to win, resolving to put whatever was happening with Twilight out of his head until after the trial was over.
Heading for the kitchen, Phoenix fixed himself a salad made from Fluttershy’s basket vegetables, mixing a simple dressing of oil, vinegar and spices he found in the pantry—once again, he’d rarely tasted better carrots, cucumbers, lettuce, or radishes—and ate a couple slices of bread and butter that Spike said he’d picked up earlier that day just for him, enduring no little ribbing from the scribe for hugging Twilight.
After washing his meal down with a fresh cup of herbal tea prepared for him by the baby dragon (who heated the kettle by breathing fire on it!), he went up to the spare bedroom he hadn’t been able to get any sleep in the night before. The way his eyes were starting to flutter, he suspected that wasn’t going to be a problem this time around, though he was worried about having nightmares after his experience in the Everfree Forest.
If I have them, at least let Fluttershy rescue me in them again! he silently prayed to whatever Gods of Equestria were listening. That in turn reminded him that he owed his shy equine savior a second apology, this time for inappropriate touching.
He sighed and rubbed his eyes at that. It was a mistake borne of ignorance, but he knew that was no excuse—after seeing how Twilight had reacted to her horn nearly being touched, he should have guessed that wings and associated areas were off-limits for pegasi as well. I’ll find her tomorrow and apologize personally, I promise.
As he began to undress, undoing his tie and then pulling off his suit jacket and slacks, his thoughts turned back to the trial, settling on Sonata and the extortion scheme she had detailed to him. This whole situation with Sonata is still bugging me. Not only her blackmailing, but her appearance—is it only a coincidence she looks like Mia? Or is she somehow really her? he wondered, half-hopefully. For if she was, it might yet be possible to reach her better nature.
He shook his head at that. Twilight says the pony who attacked me is the true culprit. We’ve got our new suspect, so maybe I should just wait until morning instead of stressing my brain about this, he decided, resolving to put both the case and Twilight out of his head until the next day.
Carefully draping his suit over a chair—a slightly pointless exercise considering the shape it was now in—he pulled off his dress shirt as well, which he noticed had been stained with sweat. Hope I can get these laundered and my suit repaired before court tomorrow, he prayed, still dreading what would happen when Rarity saw it again.
He sighed at that, pulling off his socks, now stripped to his undershirt and boxers—with Twilight around he’d go no further than that. Wishing he could do something more than just wait and sleep, he pulled the mattress off the bedframe and laid it on the floor instead, extending its length with cushions stolen from the library lounge—that way, his feet wouldn’t be awkwardly hanging off the edge and he might be able to get at least half-comfortable. Abruptly, he stopped. “Wait a minute!” His brow furrowed with a sudden idea, getting up and going to the rail overlooking the living area. “Hey! Owlowiscious!” he called downstairs. Swiveling his head to Phoenix, the owl immediately flew up and lit on the rail beside him, waiting. “Do you think you could do me a couple favors?”
“Who,” the avian gave an apparently affirmative response, listening while Phoenix explained what he wanted, waiting as his human guest wrote out a letter with his pen on a spare piece of scroll paper he found on the room’s desk.
“Do you understand?” he asked the owl, handing over the message.
“Who!” Owlowiscious gave him a nod, taking the note in his talons and flying off into the evening through an open window into the deepening dusk, the sky turning orange as sunset approached.
After the owl was out of sight, Phoenix shut his room shade and settled down in his improvised bed, reflecting on the day’s events. It had been a rough day to say the least, beginning with his poor preparation and trial performance followed by a near-deadly decision to go into the forest alone. But he’d also learned a lot; with the new evidence and information he’d uncovered, the pieces of the puzzle surrounding Ace’s murder were still a little scattered but coming together bit by bit. They had a new suspect; he just had to find the proof of his involvement when the trial resumed, or things might take a turn for the worse once more.
He swore that would not happen; both for Rainbow’s sake and the fact that he would not—could not—let Twilight down. Until then, however, all he wanted to do was sleep.
Satisfied he’d done all he could, Phoenix lay down on the bed and pulled the blanket over himself. His head on the pillow and feet resting on the lounge cushions, he closed his eyes and was snoring softly less than a minute later.