#fine headcanons

[tinyredlawyer]

hc + 🤕 for a pain-themed headcanon

A pain-themed headcanon [x]

✨︎ Apollo can't remember the courtroom bombing or Ted Tonate's murder attempt at all, or most of his time in the hospital afterwards -- besides how much it hurt. And because those injuries happened while he was practically insane with grief over Clay, he can't mentally separate the physical pain from the emotional pain he was in. Even when he was medicated for it during his treatment, and even after he made a full recovery, he still feels psychogenic pain where his injuries were when he thinks about loss.

[tinyredlawyer]

Is Apollo creative? What are his outlets?

✨︎ Apollo is not even a little bit creative, in most senses of the word. If you try to get him to come up with some sort of fiction, he'll just repeat the plot of the last movie he watched. If you try to get him to draw or make some sort of craft, he will demand very specific instructions for how to make it and won't improvise. Even creative problem-solving, which is necessary for his job and he's forced to engage in regularly, often ends with someone else leading him the answer.

✨︎ However, Apollo loves, and is quite good at, writing. He's a words guy, and loves putting ideas down and finding the most satisfying way to capture his thoughts. Writing legal reports and letters and journaling are probably his top outlets, and he will write a (nonfiction) book one day.

[tinyredlawyer]

What are his guilty pleasures?

✨︎ Apollo doesn't have a healthy relationship with food, and while it's improved by leaps and bounds since he started living independently and got into law, food is still his guilty pleasure of choice when he's anxious or just wants to feel good. Ice cream and decadent desserts top the guilty list, but he's also the guy who can destroy a whole pan of lasagna by himself if he's in a mood, and then will take it upon himself to finish the leftovers of the person next to him. He definitely regrets it later, but he still indulges much more often than he wishes, and has more-or-less accepted his reputation as a bottomless pit with no willpower when it comes to food.

✨︎ His guilty pleasure in food is not just limited to things that are rich or sweet, either. One of his weirder comfort food staples, that he's probably even more embarrassed to admit than his extreme-but-relatable weakness to carbs, is badly-cooked or burnt rice. He doesn't even know why shitty rice makes him feel better, until Datz makes him food once after moves back to Khura'in, and he realizes that most of his childhood diet was made by men who were crappy cooks.

[tinyredlawyer]

How has his ability to perceive when someone is hiding something from him changed his relationship to people if at all?

✨︎ Apollo doesn't really think about his power as having much of an effect on how he deals with people or any of his relationships in particular, besides making him more observant and aware of the everyday ways people can be dishonest overall.

✨︎ The biggest effect is when he can't use his power, when he isn't wearing his bracelet. More and more after learning how to perceive, Apollo has become dependent on his bracelet for a sense of security in dealing with others. Without it on, he doesn't have confidence in his own ability to judge the honesty of others, and develops a bit of paranoia that any given statement could be a lie.

[tinyredlawyer]

Question time! What is something that Apollo doesn't like about himself?

✨︎ Apollo is actually very not-proud of his unwavering dedication to the truth. He's had the concept of Truth idealized as something that is always good and always just and always worth fighting for since he was young, so you'd think that he'd feel noble about fighting so hard for it in court -- but from accusing Kristoph Gavin of murder, to mistrusting Athena, to prolonging a hostage situation to make Phoenix find the truth for him, Apollo's pursuit of the truth has frequently superseded his other values and put him at odds with people he respects.

✨︎ The fact that he has a history of bowling over his own principles and loyalties for a single ideal scares him a bit, and makes him doubt if there's a low he wouldn't go to, or a person he wouldn't betray, to justify getting to the truth of an incident. And yet the drive persists.

[tinyredlawyer]

✨︎ Thinking about how at a couple different points in Turnabout Serenade, if you present Apollo's attorney's badge to Ema, she praises him for acting like Phoenix, to which his thoughts are "Why do I carry this around?" and "I guess I don't need to carry this around everywhere".

✨︎ "Carry around" meaning that he isn't wearing his badge when that conversation happens, but he still just walks around with it on his person all the time. Since the first time you can trigger that conversation is at a concert in the middle of the night and Apollo isn't involved with the case yet, that confirms that he keeps his badge with him even when he's not working. But since he uses that wording later in the case when he is working, too, that also makes it sound like Apollo doesn't wear it, or anything he can pin it to, during the investigation? So either he changes out of his suit right after the trial (or at least takes his vest off), or for some reason he takes his badge off of his lapel outside of court but still keeps it at the ready to show off?

✨︎ I have no final point here, I just chronically read too much into optional conversations.

[tinyredlawyer]

for the uncommon questions meme: What are their chief tension areas?

Uncommon character development questions [x]

✨︎ Apollo holds most of his tension is his arms, particularly his fists.

✨︎ Starting at his shoulders, he holds more tension the farther down his arms you go; if he's stressed his shoulders might get a little stiff, but his hands will go into a full death-grip. He frequently has his hands in fists when he's tense, and if he doesn't have his arms tightly crossed, he will push them against what's nearest or lean heavily on them.

✨︎ Holding tension primarily in his arms also means that his bracelet is placed on the most advantageous spot for him to detect stress in others with his power.

[tinyredlawyer]

(from klavierforte) Would you be interested in traveling anywhere outside of the States and Khura'in?

"Does it matter? It's not like I'm ever going to have the freedom to go globetrotting while I'm this country's only defence attorney, anyway."

Apollo only let the tetchy non-answer sit for a moment before sighing and deciding to be honest. "... I don't know anymore. I spent a long time being stubborn and ignoring everywhere the world outside America. I didn't let myself care about or get curious about anywhere else, because I was scared of getting too close to Khura'in and bringing up old memories.

"But I'm in Khura'in now, and things are fine. They're wonderful, actually -- I love being here. There isn't anywhere I'm keeping my distance from, anymore... but where else would I go? There are probably a million more places out there that would blow me away to see, but... It's intimidating now, thinking about how big the world is. Maybe I'm just too stuck in my ways, but keeping my world smaller is still more comfortable.

"For now, anyway. I'll have to get up the nerve to travel new places by the time Trucy starts her world tour, at least."