So. Pretrial mode. There were a lot of myths about what we attorneys spent our time doing in the days and weeks leading up to trial. Pop culture would have you believe that, as a general rule, we spent an absolute litany of all-nighters and downed far more caffeine than was strictly safe, all in the name of crafting the absolute perfect argument. Copaganda and legal dramas operate under the assumption that any second spent thinking about something that wasn’t the upcoming trial was just another chance to lose, and that every spare iota of brain power must be directed towards scripting everything out — every objection, every question, every little movement in the well of the court (which, by the way, was the rectangular space with the lawyers at the bottom, the judge at the top, and the jury off to the side).
Every single one of those people was wrong.
In fairness, there were attorneys that spent every single second working on the case, all the way to the moment they arrived in court. Those were either new attorneys at their first trial, or… patent attorneys. At least in my experience. Look, patent attorneys scare me, alright? Something about the fact that most of them have a STEM bachelor’s or master’s on top of being a lawyer… God, maybe it was the fact that I was visibly other during my time in higher education, but theirs was a path I was never going to try and emulate.
But alas, I was off topic. Anyways. Getting back to the point, experienced trial attorneys tended not to let themselves spend too much time agonizing over every minute detail. If you were working on your case until the very last second, then something was very wrong with your case. Plain and simple. Either you fucked up somewhere, or the universe as a whole decided to take a great big dump all over your case, and you were engaging in a salvage operation.
Suffice to say, my upcoming trial was neither of these. It was a relatively simple case — oh, don’t give me that, it was… ugh, fine. It was as simple as a case about literal superpowers could be, okay? The case had a fun factual problem, actually, and the only reason I hadn’t handed it off to one of the other attorneys at the firm was that they didn’t have instant access to a good demonstrative regarding where a Moonshot’s powers and its active effects stopped versus where the aftereffects started, and who was at fault turned on that answer. That was it. It was hopefully going to be a quick one… assuming opposing counsel’s experts didn’t decide to try and stonewall me like that one jackass back in 2017, ooh, I would never forget that absolute dillweed and his—
A fluffy tail thwacked me in the face. It didn’t hurt, but I still flinched back, and wound up falling off of the throw pillow I’d been using as a seat cushion and flat onto the carpet.
“Gorou!” I yelped as I pushed myself up, ears lowered in annoyance.
“You were thinking about work again. Stop that,” the silver fox admonished, the four tails flowing behind him broadcasting his annoyance even better than his ears did. “It’s your turn.”
“Ugh, fine, sorry.” I huffed and pulled myself back to sitting cross-legged on the throw pillow as I checked my tiles. Let’s see, I had two E’s, one Z, one L, one B, and two S’s. If I’d had an A among my tiles, I would’ve been able to get rid of this stupid Z without giving Gorou an opening for overly many of his two-letter words, but the squares that would’ve prevented that weren’t available. There was an easy-to-use open A on the board, which was currently being used to spell out ‘Asphalt’ (Gorou’s opening word, that fox’s luck was dumb), and that seemed to be a good-enough option to me.
With that in mind, I grabbed four of my tiles, played the word ‘Zebra’ leading down to the second A in ‘Asphalt’, and gave myself 15 points, putting me ahead of Gorou again for now.
“I wanted to use that letter.” Gorou looked up from his own tiles and gave me a stare.
“Too bad!” I responded with a sweet smile and a playful wiggle of my ears. “Alright, old man. Your turn!”
“We both know I’m not a day older than twenty-five,” the fox said with a pout as he pushed his tiles around with the claws on a front paw.
“Twenty-five squared, you mean.”
Gorou squawked in mock outrage. I giggled at that, and laughed a bit harder when he hopped over from the sofa to get a closer look at the game board.
When Gorou first… wait, huh. I didn’t actually know the best word to use here, which was ironic, because the two of us were currently playing Scrabble. Um, let me think… when Gorou first empowered and bound himself to me, whatever it was that he did managed to lodge some of his centuries of knowledge squarely inside my cranium. A lot of that knowledge has absolutely massive gaps, but the part that thankfully had none was his knowledge of the Japanese language. The kitsune had forgotten more about his native language than most people ever learned in the first place, and thanks to whatever it was he did, I got the ability to speak, read, and write the language as well as he ever could.
Unfortunately, the transfer was very much one way. Gorou couldn’t initially speak, read, or understand English any more than the average Japanese TV-watcher. Fortunately, the connection between us did let Gorou piggyback on my understanding of the English language… when I was there, and hearing or reading the same thing he wanted to understand. If I wasn’t there, he couldn’t understand any English. Which meant he needed to learn English. The problem was, if I was seeing or hearing the same thing he was, he filtered that through my understanding. So I had to either not be present (not really possible), or we had to compartmentalize ourselves from each other.
Getting Gorou a tablet of his own helped, because he could angle it so I couldn’t see, and a bit of soundproofing in the right spots gave him a movable space that I couldn’t hear, either. That got Gorou up to speed on the most basic vocabulary and grammar, but getting him further than that proved… difficult.
Until six months into my involuntary year in Japan, when Sir Ambrose brought the two of us a game of Scrabble. And boy howdy, did Gorou fucking love Scrabble. Like, don’t get me wrong, it was a good game, but I had never seen someone take to it with such fervor as the damn fox did.
“It is a game of knowledge, wisdom, chance, and strategy,” he’d told Ambrose a few months later, in heavily accented but unbroken English. “You must know what options are available to you, divine what options are available to your opponent, understand when not to take action, and how to salvage poor fortune. And being able to spell the words top-to-bottom has helped me more than I expected.”
Suffice to say that Scrabble became a regular part of mine and Gorou’s evening routine, and there wasn’t a chance in hell either of us was going to pass up a chance to play during a pretrial ‘don’t think about the trial’ relaxation period.
Plus, I got to enjoy the sight of a fox ever-so-carefully tiptoeing across the coffee table and scrabble board. For all that he was a serious person, that seriousness was pure comedy in motion whenever he got invested in something. Imagine the laser focus of pure severity… directed at a children’s board game… and coming from a small animal that weighed maybe thirty pounds soaking wet.
It was as funny as it sounded.
“Ah. I know.” Gorou hopped backwards off the table and landed perfectly on the couch cushion (the precision of which still shocked me after seventeen years), and started pushing tiles off of his slate. Four letters (O, G, I, Y) all made their way onto the table, and he put one tail on top of each letter to start sliding them into place.
The O started at the top, going into the U I’d used for ‘purse’ earlier, followed by the G, I, and Y slotting into the space between ‘purse’ and the first A in ‘asphalt’. The letters spelled out ‘OUGIYA’, with the Y going through a double-point square, for a grand total of 14 points.
Gorou looked up from the game board, an insufferably smug expression on his muzzle as I gaped at the board.
“No,” I said, reaching for the Scrabble dictionary. “No, there is no way that’s a real word, I refuse to believe it.”
“It is the—”
“Gorou, no, I’m going to consult the Holy Book of Scrabble-Legal Words!”
The book slammed down onto the coffee table, thankfully not disrupting the placement of any Scrabble tiles (Gorou would have killed me if I ruined the board state), and I wasted no time flipping it open.
“Let’s see, start at P, go backwards to OU, and… oh no goddamn way.” I looked up at the fox, who somehow managed to look even more smug than before. “Gorou, have you been studying the Scrabble dictionary?”
“And if I was?” the fox asked, flicking an inquisitive ear in my direction.
I frowned, then looked at the score. Gorou was now ten points ahead of me, and he’d gotten four of the last five tiles from the bag. Given the letters I had available to me, and what was already on the board…
“Ugh… damn. You win again, you sly, little — urgh!” I tossed the notepad I’d been using to track our scores onto the armchair behind me. “C’mon, can’t you go a bit easy on me?”
“You didn’t even let me play my last word,” Gorou said with a haughty sniff. “So no.”
I rolled my eyes. “Fine, fine, just, ugh, show me what the word would’ve been.”
Contrary to my expectations, Gorou didn’t take his tiles and spell it out for me. Instead, he padded over to the Scrabble dictionary, paged through it with a tail, and then pointed out a word to me. I leaned over to read what he’d settled on.
“... you and your loan words, I swear to god,” I grumbled, eyeing the fox with some amount of disdain. “Okay but seriously, this is ridiculous, how many hours have you spent going through the freaking—”
DING-DONG
“Eep!” I yelped, jumping all the way from the floor to the armchair in fright at the unexpected doorbell, and found myself landing sideways in a rather uncomfortable position. My tail was stuck under me in a way that wasn’t actively painful, but it was certainly awkward, and I rolled out of the armchair and back onto the floor to alleviate the pressure. Why was I even — oh right, the doorbell!
“One moment!” I yelled towards the front door. Then I turned to tell Gorou to make himself scarce, only to realize that the quick silver fox had already jumped over my brown-furred self. All I caught was the tips of his tails disappearing out the top of my field of view and over the banister to the townhome’s second floor.
I stood up, winced a little at my current outfit of choice, and went to the door.
“Who is it?” I asked, even as I stood on my tip-toes to look through the peephole and mentally cursed the people who didn’t place the damn things for people who were shorter than five and a half feet.
“It’s Alice,” responded a voice I definitely hadn’t been expecting, words only slightly muffled by the door. “I’m sorry to bother you at home, but it’s something that needs the kind of privacy we can’t get in the office. If you’re busy, I can come back later?”
“Um…”
I looked back at the game of Scrabble still splayed out on the living room table, and then much more importantly tried to remember if I was wearing pants or not. Decision made, I plastered an apologetic expression on my face, folded my ears down in the most piteous way possible, cracked open the door, and peeked through the crevice at my boss.
“I am so sorry to ask, but, uh, would you terribly mind waiting out here a moment?” I said, not even having to try and force a blush. “I’m, um, not fully decent.”
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If the sudden amused expression on Alice’s face was anything to go by, I was in the clear, thank goodness.
“Take all the time you need,” she said. “Oh, but take this first!”
“Huh?”
A round, tinfoil-covered thing suddenly showed up in the center of my vision. I glanced from it to my boss, offering her a questioning look.
“Apparently you made a good impression on my husband at the last holiday party,” Alice offered as an explanation. “I told him yesterday that I’d be late tonight, he made this and told me to pick it up first before heading your way.”
I gingerly took the thingamajig, and spun it around in my hands. It was covered in foil on the top and sides, but the bottom was a cool metal of some kind.
“I, um, thanks? But, uh…”
“Matcha cheesecake.”
My ears and tail perked up in an instant, and I could feel my mouth watering just at the thought. Oh, ohoho, ooooh goodness, oh my lord I was going to be eating like a queen this next week!
“Ooooh my God thank you thank you thank you let me go put this away and get decent I’ll be right back!”
I closed the front door and blinked straight to the kitchen in a flash of purple flame, precious cargo in tow. It went directly into the fridge, then I hastily shoved all the Scrabble stuff into its box and slid it under the sofa — I could put it away properly later. Then another quick blink and I was upstairs throwing on a pair of flannel pants (huh, Gorou wasn’t on my bed, wonder where he was), and a third and final blink brought me back to the front door.
Was I dressed to impress? I looked down at my current outfit — an oversized Hello Kitty hoodie over a pair of flannel pants, which rode a bit low on my hips to not crowd my tail — and just shrugged. Ugh, whatever, if the boss’s husband liked me enough to bake me a cheesecake, what I wore in my own home wouldn’t be a problem.
I opened the door wide, and welcomed Alice Tanaka-Schotz into my home.
“Sorry about that,” I said with a nervous giggle as I closed the door behind her.
“Oh no, my employee made me wait two extra minutes when I arrived unannounced at half past nine, such a shame,” she deadpanned as she took her shoes off, thank goodness I didn’t have to ask. “If anything, I should be the one apologizing for — huh.”
I froze, only barely managing to stop my tail from creeping between my legs. Huh? What did she mean, ‘huh’? Did I forget to get all the Scrabble pieces put away? Had I forgotten a sweater or something on the sofa?
“Naomi?” Alice asked, and I braced myself for the worst. “Just out of curiosity, did it take you a while to get your exotic pet permit, or did being Moonshot help on that front?”
“… uh.” I blinked, and turned to actually check where Alice was looking. Then I saw it, and couldn’t help the groan.
There on the stairs, peeking out from the bannister, was Gorou. Who I’d just told to make himself scarce, as a just-in-case.
I sighed. “God, frickin’ — ugh. Look, it’s a long story, and I’d rather not get into it; just, say hi to Gorou, he’s being a persnickety little drama queen again.”
Gorou, for his part, responded by offering Alice and me a very toothy yawn before he darted upstairs. I was glad to see he’d kept all of his tails held together, and that whatever magic or some such he used to make them several times the length of his body was clearly not in play.
“I’ll just chalk it up to a Moonshot thing,” Alice said.
Inwardly, I cheered, but all I showed of that relief was a soft smile and a gesture towards the sofa. Alice accepted the seat and set her purse down on the coffee table, at which point I sat myself cross-legged on the armchair, letting my tail wave behind me.
“So, um, not to be a poor host, but what’s the occasion?” I asked. “I mean, not that you’re bad company, but I don’t usually expect my boss to make a house call this late on a Thursday night.”
“And if you did expect that, it would probably mean I’d been breaking dozens of labor laws,” she quipped back without missing a beat. “It’s a bit of a… well, not so much a delicate matter as it is a private one. I remember that you emailed HR with a sexual harassment complaint about Mr. Schwartz relatively recently; do you recall?”
“Ah… do you mean the one where I said Bob was waiting at the entrance and made inappropriate, sexist, and anti-Moonshot comments when I came in? Or was it the one a week later where, uh, he tried to run his fingers through my tail?”
“Both.”
“O-oh.” I fidgeted a bit, bringing my tail around to my lap so I could ease my discomfort. “I, uh, kinda forgot about them until you brought them up, to be honest? I mean, I got read receipts from HR, but that was it. Which was disappointing, but given his mom’s position at the firm, um. Not unexpected.”
“There was no follow-up because I deleted the complaints before Rachel could see them.”
… she what?
“You remember Barbara? Our current head of HR?” Alice asked, and I found myself nodding. “She was a friend of Rachel’s before the firm hired her. I haven’t had the proof I need to get Tess involved, so until I did, I made it a point to keep a close eye on any emails coming into HR, just in case they were complaints about Robert. Rachel may be the Bierman in the firm name, but that doesn’t mean her son should be able to get away with what he has.”
“And even with that, my complaints couldn’t stay in the system because…”
“Because so long as Rachel didn’t see them, they gave me the ammo I needed to get Tess involved. Bierman v. Schotz is one thing, but once it was Viskie and Schotz, that was that.” Alice gave me a wicked grin, and it was so downright predatory I felt my ears pin back involuntarily. “Suffice to say? By the time you’re done with your trial, Robert Schwartz will need to find new employment elsewhere.”
It took me a moment for all of that to meander through my thoughts. Once it did, though, I found myself smiling and sighing in relief.
“Oh thank God,” I said. “Like, seriously, thank you. Bob the Nepo Baby was bad enough when he just fondled my tail, but I swear last week he was going to try and grope my—“
“He did what.”
The sudden, harsh, almost reverberating baritone made Alice flinch and me stiffen up. I turned to look at the bannister, but the flash of silver fur as Gorou alighted on the coffee table stopped me partway.
“... did that fox just—”
“You told me that this matter was simply a disagreement, Naomi,” Gorou continued, his voice answering the question Alice had been about to ask. “Not that this ‘petulant child’ was attempting to defile you.”
“That — ugh,” I sighed. “Gorou, could this please just wait a little bit, I was in the middle of something!”
“No,” the fox said, refusing to elaborate any further.
Behind him, Alice was visibly schooling her features back into her usual placid mask, her shock and surprise maybe, hopefully, fading from the sheer mundanity of our conversation.
“Gorou, would you please just let me finish this very serious conversation?” I asked, trying to keep my tone from sounding pleading. “I promise I’ll buy you a nice bottle of sake this weekend.”
“Actually I would prefer a good port. Better pairing with my cheeses.”
I stared at the fox, whose four tails just wavered back and forth in amusement.
“Oh for the love of — what is it with you and cheese?” I asked, incredulous.
“Do you have any idea how little cheese there was in Edo-period Japan?”
“Oi!” I snapped. “Answering a question with a question is my schtick!”
“Did you copyright it?” the fox asked, that familiar expression of insufferable smugness drifting across his muzzle.
“Did I — no!” I explained, standing from my chair to better gesticulate. “I’m Jewish! Answering questions with questions is this whole thing with us!”
“Jewish… but also living proof of Shinto.”
“You, but I… ugh!” I put both hands on the table and leaned in close until I was almost nose-to-nose with him. “Gorou, I love you—”
“I love you too.”
“—but can we please wait to relitigate this for the…” I floundered, thinking. “Uh—”
“Twenty-seventh,” Gorou provided.
“—twenty-seventh time, thank you, until some later time when my boss is not sitting right there!?” I gestured at where Alice had tucked herself into the corner of the sofa, and now sat with a decidedly amused expression on her face.
“Oh no, don’t mind me, please continue,” she said. “I’m perfectly fine.”
Both Gorou and I gave her a Look (™) for a moment, but when that failed to get any kind of response from her, the two of us turned back to each other.
“I wouldn’t have been worried enough to interject if you’d told me everything from the beginning,” Gorou continued.
“Yes, look, I’m sorry, okay?” I offered. “I know I didn’t tell you what was going on, but in fairness we both remember how overboard you went back in ‘08, don’t we?”
“And in fairness, even if he deserved it, I did still go overboard, and I accept that,” Gorou responded without missing a beat. “But I have been good, and there won’t be a repeat.”
“Okay. In that case, I’m sorry,” I told him. “Going forward, I’ll be better, and make sure to keep you fully abreast of what’s going on, okay?”
“Okay. Thank you.” With that, Gorou tilted his chin up and licked me on the nose, which drew a small giggle from me. I sat back in the armchair, after which Gorou hopped onto the arm, then down into my lap, and made himself comfy.
And now, with that handled, I could return my attention to my boss.
“Um… I am so, so sorry about that interruption,” I told Alice, whose placid smile was starting to look a bit shaky to me. “Uh, where were we?”
“... actually, I think we managed to cover all the salient points before — Gouro, you said?”
“Gorou,” the fox corrected, putting emphasis on the second syllable to correct her pronunciation.
“Right, yes, thank you, before the interruption,” she said. “Unless you have any questions for me, I will just… stop imposing on your evening, and see myself out, then?”
I looked at Gorou, and lowered an ear in question. He tilted his head and lowered his own ears, which was a good enough approximation of a shrug.
“No, I think we’re good. Oh, should I bring the pan back to you once the cheesecake is done?” I asked.
“Toji wouldn’t be mad if you kept it, but he’d be disappointed in me,” Alice said as she stood from the couch and picked up her purse. “Well in that case, um. I’ll be off. And enjoy the cheesecake, Toji’s very proud of that recipe.”
“I will!” I made to stand up from the armchair despite Gorou’s objections, but Alice waved it off.
“It’s okay, I’ll let myself out. Have a good evening, Naomi. Gorou, it was a pleasure to meet you.”
“Mm.” Gorou nodded in her direction, but didn’t say anything else, which was… probably for the best, given how brittle Alice’s smile had gotten. She made her way past the little entrance hall, put her shoes back on, and left.
But I didn’t hear her footsteps heading away yet. So Gorou and both leaned just a little bit closer to the door, and perked up our ears.
“A talking fox. A talking fox!” Alice exclaimed. The relative privacy of my street was probably why she was okay saying it out loud. “Four tails? Shit I need to talk to Toji, oh my God he’s not going to believe it, wait no holy shit what if the fox tries Toji’s cheesecake and likes it? Edo period, he said that, when was… 17th century!?”
“Do you think she knows we can hear her?” Gorou asked me in Japanese.
“I wasn’t going to tell her,” I replied back in the same language. “Her husband apparently likes me, by the way. Want to try that matcha cheesecake?”
“I’m surprised you didn’t already have a slice.” With that, Gorou hopped off my lap, and headed towards the kitchen. I followed him without hesitation. A minute or two later, the pair of us had slices of cheesecake on the coffee table, with a spoon in my hand and another spoon expertly manipulated with two of Gorou’s tails. We both listened closely to the door, but apparently, my boss had finally gotten it all out and moved along.
“Shall we?” I asked. Gorou offered a perfect foxy grin, sat back on his haunches, and clapped his front paws and two free tails together. At the same time, I clapped my own hands together, and mirrored his smile.
“Itadakimasu!” he and I said at the same time.
Then we each took a bite, and—
“... oh my—” I whispered. “Holy shit. Whoa. I… that…”
I went back for another bite.
“Oh. My. God. Okay I know I say this a lot but holy shit, that is better than sex.”
“Mm, mhmm,” Gorou mumbled around a bite. Then he paused, blinked, and looked up at me. “... Naomi, most things are better than sex to you.”
My throw pillow artillery strike missed by a mile, and the resulting scuffle left me trying to eat my cheesecake while a cackling fox propped himself up with his back paws straddling my shoulders and his front paws between my ears, all while poking me in the nose with the one tail he still had free.