Story The Fissures of Reincarnation - A Great Ace Attorney Fanfic

[NicetiesLATER]

Hello once again!

I'm here to share my first Ace Attorney fanfic, "The Fissures of Reincarnation," centered around the life, psychological dilemmas and emotional journey of Kazuma Asogi throughout the Great Ace Attorney Chronicles. Naturally, there's a lot of spoilers to be found here, so be sure to play through both of the games before reading unless you want to ruin Shu Takumi's wonderful surprises for yourself!

For those who have played the games (or don't care for spoileration), here's the summary:

Asogi. The samurai of the law, a man whose wishes to bring justice to his homeland may have been all a mirage to veil the dark inlets of rage and inquisition that came to the fore of his mind from the murder of his father. His struggles with the volatility of his own psychology, coupled with the ceaseless wit and determination of his soul to divine the truth, mark a journey of resurrection unparalleled in the Ace Attorney canon.

A character study fic focused on the revival quest of Kazuma Asogi that crosses the oceans and mores between Japan and Britain, viewed through a reimagining of the events leading up to, during, and after his return from the gates of hell.

 

[NicetiesLATER]

(Apologies for putting in the A03 link from before. I will try to avoid that in the future.)

Here's the fic:

“H O L D I T!”

The silver of my sleeve’s fabric crashed against the dais, woodgrains and cognitions alike splintering in the air. My fingers shook on the surface as they tightened against one another—a static charge enveloping the sutures of my garb. Clenched teeth and ruffled jabot, red and white and black searing in my eyes, I steeled my words.

“You don’t have the half of it, my learned friend.”

My tongue rattled with every letter. It crooned the words with a cadence that was familiar to the elegant baritone of the hooded one standing in the dock, his golden epaulets shining in the gaslight, glinting off the pale veneer of his face. It made sense: I’d learned the etiquette of British law firsthand from the grisly prosecutor, watching at his side for every deft movement of the hand, each uncorking of the bottle and the defense’s case.

Even still, I synthesized it with the low tenor of my Japanese tongue, just allotted with a British twang, to make the syllables all the more sharp to the ear.

“OBJECTION!”

More splinters splattered in the air on the opposite side of the court, a fellow dressed in black spouting his gums with his fists curled up in a ball, the white cufflinks of his sleeves coming out at the seams.

“On what grounds, Prosecutor Asogi?”

His voice also bore that strange, binational fusion of tones, though in a more understated way, trying to meld himself into the Queen’s English. Even now, after a year of scouring through London, he still had that novice’s unsettlement to him, albeit offset by the resolve burning in his eyes.
The marble columns of the Old Bailey gleamed by the flames of the Scales of Justice hanging overhead. Tens of the most elite men and women of the British Judiciary sat in the gallery with their bonnets and toppers wagging this way and that, their heads weaving amongst each other, lost in our war of words.

Perhaps they still feared the idea of two aliens to British soil deciding the course of the law in the Empire’s highest court; maybe they thought we were somehow promulgating a reverse imperialistic endeavor, with the eastern backwater rising to become the overlord.

Perhaps they had reason to panic for the sake of their nation’s integrity, for the boldness of what I was about to do.

“...The prosecution requests further testimony from the witness.
Testimony that will be crucial in understanding the true extent of the Reaper’s crimes, My Lord.”

I revamped my line of attack, once again bashing fabric against mahogany, my eyes narrowing ever further.

“Mr. Daley Vigil, you will reveal the truth of the Professor’s execution to the court!”

The man in the stand put a hand to his scarf, grasping at it, nearly choking himself with emotion. The picture of British modesty, his purple tassels of hair swung nervously as his hands glommed onto the banisters of wood marking the podium.
I didn’t mean to do so consciously, but the warrior’s will within—like a samurai raising his sword before a fallen foe—delighted in the force I had on another soul.

“The-the—the truth, Mr. Asogi ? Mr. A-so-gi...”

From the stand to the strands atop his head, his hand swerved, mussing it to extreme extents in his madness, and his whole body began to spin in place, a top of tribulation.

“Asoooooogi...Asoooogi...ASOGI! The name, it, it makes me tremble!”

Both hands struck the dais now. The sheen of my teeth gleamed off the gaslamps, marking him a lamb in a court of wolves, and I half-contemplated unsheathing Karuma to put him in his place.

“Answer the question, Mr. Vigil. What is the truth behind the execution at Barclay Prison?”

It was a question that plagued me for half of my young life. Not the exactitudes of it—I wouldn’t know the true nature of my father’s death till I came to these bristling shores—but what gnawed at me was the prospect of a story I could better believe than the sad excuse of his passing by natural causes that I was given. It had to be something more!

Perhaps it wasn’t the British weather that was so cruel to him, but the British state and the British people; the image of Queen Victoria stamping her foot into my father’s throat appeared in my nightmares, and I became awash with an inner rage. I didn’t know what to think, precisely, but the absence of premeditation was something that could never satisfy my ravenous psyche.

It was a question that ate at my soul, that quickened the essence of my heart, that undulated in the force of my muscles, under the cheery masque of a man seeking to free his country from injustice. Perhaps instead that was simply the pretense of righteousness, the prima facie cause of my conviction for a British odyssey, that only hinted at the emotional contours of my quest. Idealistic rhetoric and honeyed words paired with swordplay and bashed fists.

At points, when I questioned the hidden vengeance lurking within me, I tried to delude myself into believing the masque was my face. That all my intentions were free of vice, and that my ambitions were somehow oriented for the good of my people. The ululations of my volition were not narcissistic but altruistic, I affirmed.

It was all a practical move by my subconsciousness; I had no need for sudden pauses in judgment, rethinking the daring nature of my journey. This justification of my plan was precisely the antidote I needed when, seeking the truth for myself, I strode into Judge Jigoku’s office in the Supreme Court one day, expecting passage to the West via a harmless study tour, when the specifications of assassination and guile brought to bear visions of spilled blood.

The gleam of the gaslamps was low. His Excellency had just put away a telegram with the Union Jack prowling across the upper-right corner, like a lion in the hunt for prey. The ebony folds of his beard tingled with the pleating of his fingers, a smirk hidden under while he listened to my opening statement.

“You must let me go.” My hands straddled the cedar desk. The dark hues of my Yumei uniform, bearing solid colors and sutured emblems that contrasted against the seal of the Rising Sun on my arm, painted the portrait of a black knight brazenly holding up his sword.

“Britain is my calling.”

I reversed course, hands molded across my back, inspecting the photos lying around the office of Jigoku standing on London shores. Besides the judge’s brusque physique, on his right laid Professor Mikotoba, whose face was full of paternal charm and wonder. Mikotoba, that enigma in his own right, came into my life as a beacon of wisdom—a shido-sha— right as my father on the photo’s left would never return home to grasp the bulbous cheeks of his son, ever again. He’d helped me study all this time, his hand always round my neck, muttering old Japanese proverbs and regaling me of his exploits with Detective Herlock Sholmes in the West.

“Mikotoba-sensei, how could you leave so soon? It all sounds like some fantasy, straight out of those foolhardy magazines!”

My younger self couldn’t imagine leaving that paragon of culture and civilization for all but a second. The West was like a cherry blossom floating off a branch of a Sakura tree, flitting off into the ocean, exuding a most pleasing aroma but dangling just out of reach, tempting all those entranced by it to leap off into the waters.
Whether they drown or not, it’ll be worth it, they say.

But Mikotoba never told me why the sweet scent of Britain faded for him. Why it grew pungent and foul.
He always simply closed his eyes, and shook his head, saying that I shouldn’t worry about the tales of old men. That I should be excited to make my own inroads into Europe.

Thinking back again to my invisibly unmoored posture at Jigoku’s office, I had held a swathe of excitement. I thrummed with that outlay of possibility that is most palpable to the young men of my age, those wishing to upend the conventions of their upbringing while simultaneously bringing glory to their traditional identity. The vivacity of youth, of the capability for change, was clear to me. But that appeal became corrupted by the mystique surrounding Britain which filled my gaze.

Jigoku caught the strange mix of my emotions. His keen eyes had seen many a criminal march in and out the doors of the Supreme Court, had shaken many a dignitary’s hand from the Orient to Orleans, and had not yet forsaken me as a man with a faulty motive. He knew the purpose in my gaze.

“Asogi-san,” Jigoku offered. His baritone was even more imposing than it was in the courtroom; he was just a few feet away, sounding like a gong going off near my ear.

“Your Excellency?” I turned back around, opening my eyes, uncertain of what his response would be.

“I will let you go. On one condition. ”

He thought himself a premier judge of character, perhaps even above that of law, and thus he considered me the perfect man for the job. Unfolding papers tucked away in the lower recesses of his desk, with the cobwebs and dust granules filling the creases, he let me know of the plan:

If I wanted to set my hand upon Western sands, I was to bathe it in Western blood, becoming a student not of law, but death.

“There is a detective out in London, very respected and admired, yes, but a swarthy fellow, and one who simply knows a bit too much for his worth. It’d be best for Britain and Japan if he had a little accident at sea, no?”

Gregson. A swarthy name indeed. The letters emanated a man of blunt composure and stern tactics; one, essentially, who you wouldn’t be surprised to have a big red target on his back.
I didn’t know then about the muddied history the detective hid under the beige bill of his bowler, his eyes always betraying a sense of deep discontent about the world. When I arrived in Britain, I could sense that he knew something was up. In the slow, measured movements of his legs beneath his trenchcoat, he had almost a pre-mourning stance about him, knowing his voice would soon fade into the dark grasp of the underworld.

“Do you know him?” I asked. There was a curiosity in me as to Jigoku’s ventures in the British Isles, of course, and deeming him to be significant in this international game of mortality chess, I wondered at the reason behind the target.

“I told you that questions weren’t a part of your assignment,” he steeled his teeth, his beard somehow becoming even more prickly.

Bodies in the closet, I joked to myself at the time, nodding over.
“I know my role.”

Deception. I delighted in the fact that I could tempt him with my urge for blood, that I could give the image of a capability for murder; it was a paramount part of my facade. I was a shinobi acting in the dark.
He probably knew a ploy was an option. But so too did he know that the only thing binding me to this contract of death would be the knowledge of Gregson’s pivotal decision in the case that led to my father’s demise.

In demanding that a dead man’s body be defiled, Gregson caused another to join the ranks of the graveyard. That would be reason enough to carry out the job, Jigoku must’ve thought.

Still, I eased myself with the idea that I could ward off the rawness within:
I will be going to Britain. No blood will spill by my hands, or my steel.
I repeated this mantra in the morning each day of my quest, scrutinizing it each night in my discursive journal entries, poring over both the reservations and affirmations of my psyche surrounding the nature of my endeavors.

But soon enough, I was not ruminating alone. There was Ryunosuke by my side, too. Having braved the terrors of the Supreme Court with heart and valor, he now found himself content to while away his dreams of the British Isles in the spacious expanse of my...wardrobe. Clutching onto the halves of chicken I tossed out to him from dinner, mussing up the folds of his student outfit in the blue lowlight of the cabin on the SS Burya, he was my ally, my companion, my survivor-in-arms of the injustice of law and fate both.

Seeing him now, it’s almost impossible to fathom the gleam of potential I saw in him during those days, found between the beady eyes and off-kilter composure. There was simply a worldly appeal to Ryunosuke, not knowing then what greater portents were to be placed on his shoulders. A contemplative outlook encompassed his character; his grasp of the English language, while perhaps not as pinpointed as mine, was even more eloquent, his judgment of character keen. His incisive mind could slice through the thinnest divots in the cases of his opponents, his observations cutting sharper than Karuma itself.

Ironic, then, how often classmates at Yumei saw him as my underling. My leechlike companion, glomming onto my insights and popularity around campus, like I was strutting around with him out of pity.

“Asogi-senpai! Asogi-senpai! Can we take a look at your badge?”

Some of the younger students badgered me one day as I returned to the university following my success on the imperial bar exam. I triumphed on my first attempt and found myself bombarded by insidious volleys of adoration.

Mewling fools, I thought.
If only they knew why, I cogitated.

Ryunosuke was at my side then, too. Out of everyone in my life, he was always the greatest salve to the soul—helping me work my way through the logical situations of each hypothetical case while studying for the bar, emanating both his intuition and pathos with his presence.

“So...how’s the fit of the badge on your arm? It looks quite tight! I couldn’t imagine wearing such bristling fabric,” he joked, keeping me along the stony path of the Yumei promenade with his usual spirit of awkward effluence. Guiding me away from the hangers-on with the deftness of anonymity.

Later that day, I concluded a speech on my efforts to be the first student declared a legitimate attorney at Yumei while still engaging in his studies. Preparing to walk off the podium and rejoin Ryunosuke at the end of the crowd, suddenly a mob of classmates apprehended my form.
I became absorbed in a sea of catapulted honorifics and dull praise, hailed as this scion of the law, as Japan’s savior in a time when Japanese justice was under a larger microscope than ever.

“ASOGI-SENPAI! ASOGI-SENPAI!” They marshaled, they screamed, they bleated onto my brow-beaten form.

I could barely breathe. I still had Karuma at my side. I felt like a warring daimyo encircled by enemies, feeling the last moments of his life sputter out, his grand ambitions fading before his eyes with each clash of metal. I wanted to cut them all down, right there, right then. To assure them what my true feelings were about Britain and Japan.

The bunch of liars we were, pretending to be sophisticated, copying the musings of the very conquerors who saw us as a funny little island; the land of the Rising Sun that could make a beautiful, peripheral ornament to the British Empire. We still pretended that the old had to be the way of the now, heralding bloodshed and tyranny as pax Romanum and libertas.
For a single moment, I wanted to unleash. Let go of the pulsating memories, the gripping manifestos, and the image of my father’s hand on my teenage shoulder in our old family home—his caress long since taken away from me. I wanted to prove how deluded they were to believe me a pure and just warrior. I wished to lose myself in the conflict of my heart.

But he wouldn’t let that happen.

“Kazuma! Over here!”

The spikes of his hair pricked into my vision from amidst the crowd. I’d never seen him so determined: university uniforms tangled on the blossom-laden ground while I kept moving along the waves of stupefied humanity, as I saw him pushing and shoving people away to reach me.
His hand needled its way to me from the gaping limbs of those around him, and he cried out:

“Grab my hand!
HOLD IT!”

The flag of the Rising Sun flew in the distance, playing spectator to the clasping of our wills against one another; it watched how we resisted the storm of adulation for a false prophet. Mikotoba and Jigoku’s eyes burst out at the sight of Ryunosuke’s resolve to keep me grounded. My feet returned to the earth, and the others started to diminish, routed by his courage.
Ryunosuke was my anchor. He could save me.

That day, I knew I had to bring him with me. No matter what—I didn’t care for the study tour stipulations of only a single student allowed, along with Mikotoba’s daughter Susato acting as my judicial assistant. Oh, Susato, ever studious and wise for her age, how vigorously I tried to keep Ryunosuke’s stowaway nature a secret.

She also expressed that wonder about the West I had held at a young age, though I pondered if she too had her questions about Mikotoba’s ventures out there, in the great beyond. But I had my own secrets to hide, and Ryunosuke, I suppose, was one of them.
I wouldn’t part the old world for the new without him. He had the intellect and tact; I the sharpness and ferocity. I had the legal knowledge and composure; he the natural talent and wit, fastened by a strong heart despite the frail physique.

He was a friend who could check me at my worst moments, reorient me with logos and pathos alike; someone who I’d want defending me, all the same.
In the final seconds of my time aboard the Burya, as my neck hurdled toward the musty wooden ground, my bones preparing to crack amid the force of gravity, my hachimaki headband flew out in the strangest way. Its maroon ends fluttered in some randomly concerted direction, which my eyes followed before my vision ended.

They pointed to the wardrobe where Ryunosuke was encased in slumber. Constructed of that same mahogany make our hands would crash against, golden handles looking just like the scales we’d serve under one day, his wooden chrysalis was the last thing that manifested for me.
Once again would the waves of fate lie between us, with thousands of miles of watery hands from Pacific to Atlantic sundering us; shipwrecked partners we were, on an ocean of lies and piracy.

But that wouldn’t keep him from his journey; nor me.

For in a lawyer’s heart rests not just the sword of justice, but an unbreakable link to our relations. We are chained to them, beautifully beholden to them across the years and distances.

And nothing could break it. No one—but myself.