Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“You really need to stop coming here.”

It’s the dead man who finds him.

“Keep wandering too far and one day you won’t be able to find your way back.”

The dead man finds him dying in his dreams.

He always does.

In front of them, an ocean of broken glass swells and crashes over itself, clawing its way up the sand in deep, gouging trenches, spitting shards that crack and collide and burst. Fragments flutter through the air, some as small as salt, lingering long enough to glitter before being sucked back into the lumbering mass. Ferociously kinetic, and totally, completely, utterly silent. There isn’t a whisper. Not even a hush.

Standing at the very edge of the mute destruction is a boy. Glass cascades around his ankles, his bare feet, the skin unmarked when the tide recedes. An old, worn keychain dangles from the fingers of his right hand. His left is curled into a fist. Smoke trickles between his fingers.

The boy and the ocean.

One of these things is real.

“Can you see him too?” he asks, rocking forward on the balls of his feet. His words are strange in his own ears. As if he’s thinking the words more than saying them.

The dead man’s brow furrows as he looks across the heaving expanse. “… No. He’s all from you.”

He tilts his head. The boy tilts his head too, face impassive but for a light smattering of curiosity lingering in his two-toned eyes: blue on the right, brown on the left, lit softly from within like the glow of a hearth. Behind the boy, the ocean shivers.

“I’m dreaming,” he says slowly, carefully building the shape of each word from his tongue to his teeth.

“In a sense,” the dead man allows.

“So,” he says, “I’m not really here.”

The dead man struggles with that for a moment then concedes with a sigh. “Semantics.”

He tightens his grip on his knees. His hands feel too small, his arms too far way. He can’t really feel either at all right now. When he rests his chin on his wrists, there’s only hollow bone waiting underneath.

The boy watches him, then looks down to his clenched fist. “At least let me dream in peace,” he mutters.

Phoenix sucks in a breath, too sharp, too quick, barely filling half his lungs—but still a breath. He is breathing. Choking on glass and vapour and stardust (not stardust. Something else. It has a name, they all have names, he just can’t quite—), furiously blinking through the strain. Trying to. Managing on his left but a swollen ache holding shut his right. He touches a hand to it. Pulls the hand away and stares at the broken skin dripping red from his palm to his wrist.

“I’m just trying to sleep,” Phoenix says, not quite as cracked or bruised as his face and hand.

Air shimmers and eddies around the dead man, gentle wisps pulling at his features, framing them older, then younger. Grey streaks, premature, darken down to solid black. His eyes are the same shape as Phoenix’s, underlined by just as many shadows, but he’s fuzzy at the edges, shifting in the light, and those little familiarities are swept away until Phoenix can’t ever be sure of what’s real and what’s not. What is, and maybe simply what he wants to see. A memory that was never real, or someone wishes was real, once upon a time, and too much has changed between now and then to know why it mattered.

“You are sleeping, if that brings you any comfort,” the dead man says, walking up to him, or maybe just appearing there, and crouching so he’s eye-level. “I can make sure you don’t stay, but I can’t make you go back.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Phoenix says. “Where else would I go?”

The dead man’s lips tug downwards, and he scrutinises him in silence. Phoenix isn’t sure what he’s looking for, nor how to give it to a dream of oceans and boys and dead men, where hours pass in minutes and minutes become hours. He—might be… losing time, a little. It happens more often than he likes to admit.

Isn’t there something else he’s supposed to be doing?

His vision sways, breaking away, rising to the sky. Undulating red and gold and blue and black. Sunrise colliding with sunset. Cold sand clings to his bare feet, but the stars are all around him, lights sparking and burning, flaring off the glass. Calling. Calling. If he presses down too hard, he finds vapour in place of dust. There’s rain on his face. Something like rain. Something cast off and left behind below while the stars trail up. Moving forwards.

Onwards.

On.

“Not there,” he says, suddenly very small. “I’m not—that’s not what I want.”

“I know,” the dead man says, so, so gently. Almost as if it matters. As if something is wrong that has to be made right. “You’re in pain and you don’t want to be. You don’t have to go until you’re ready.” He’s close enough Phoenix can feel the phantom flame of him. It wavers in the air between them, melting the glass to liquid mercury. “But isn’t there something else you’re supposed to be doing?”

Something inside Phoenix’s chest stutters. Sears against the back of his eyes the longer he keeps them on the dead man. He squeezes them tightly shut and digs his fingers in deep as he shakes and struggles to hold it in, everything, all of him, fighting (he did, he does, he is) to not dissolve into tears or hysterical giggles. He doesn’t need any more dissolving; he’s practically an ocean already.

When Phoenix asks his fingers to curl, it feels like they have to break to manage it, but they do. The red pulses in time with the harrowed beat of his heart. Blood, maybe, but it looks too bright for that. A kind of red meant for roses and kiss-bitten lips, for a child’s drawing slathered in horror delivered fresh from the crayon’s tip, and the flush on his teacher’s face when she leant right into him and hissed this is wrong.

He sees red and thinks of the electric crackle of a stoplight.

When he sees blood, he thinks something very different.

“It’s quiet here,” Phoenix murmurs. His voice, the dead man’s voice, the clink of the keychain in the boy’s hand: the only sounds other than his own breaths. “Something happened. Something… bad. It’s not supposed to stay quiet when things go wrong.”

“Silence is just another kind of grief,” the dead man says. He’s still crouching down to Phoenix’s level and, dimly, Phoenix wonders how his legs haven’t fallen asleep yet. “It’s easiest to notice something when it isn’t there anymore. We see all the places it should be, but isn’t. Hear all the things it doesn’t say.”

Phoenix does.

He hears them all the time.

“Something bad happened,” the boy whispers.

“Something worse didn’t,” the dead man tells Phoenix. “I know it’s hard to remember. But try. Staying here will only hurt you.”

Phoenix already knows you can feel pain in a dream. It’s just his kind of luck. He’s woken up to it, too, blood and skin bunched under his fingernails, a tearing in his chest howling wildly and gouges in his body made by his own hands.

Am I real? he thinks, and doesn’t dare to wonder.

“Oh,” he says, touching his red hand to his chest, right below his sternum. “I’m not afraid.”

The dead man tilts his head. Dark hair swings across his eyes, pressing shadows around the fire inside them, pulsing, or flickering, or collapsing. Ocean waves riding the heat of the sun.

No.

That’s not right either.

This isn’t an ocean.

“What are you?” the dead man asks.

“I think,” Phoenix says, swallowing a lump of cinder and breathing out the remains. “I think,” he tries again, “I’m angry.”

“Of course you are.” The dead man rubs a hand over his own forehead, lingering on the jagged lines spiralling out and cutting down to the bridge of his nose. The shape is familiar, though Phoenix can’t quite remember why. A moment passes, or perhaps an hour, and the dead man drops the full weight of his head into his palm. “I’m sorry. You have every right to be.”

Phoenix laughs. It’s strange, because he doesn’t mean to, didn’t realise he was going to until it’s flooding his oversaturated mouth, sharp and bitter and caustic. “I didn’t realise I needed your permission.”

“I very much hope you’re not asking,” the dead man mumbles. He smiles the same way Phoenix does when he’s in pain and trying to hide it. It doesn’t lie any better on his face. “I doubt you could find a worse candidate for it.”

“You know how it is,” the boy says with the taste of an autumn breeze. A curling wisp of bouncy hair. A smile like broken glass in a thousand, thousand reflections. “You come back, it means we gotta kill you for it.”

He knows. It’s the only shape his blood beats in. There’s fire and ice and shadow and lightning in the tips of his fingers and he could burn this whole glass ocean if he wanted to. He doesn’t. But maybe. At least then it would be over, and he’d finally be alone.

“I think” he says, enunciating it very clearly, “I might also be going insane.”

Of course, least of all he wants to be left alone.

The dead man blows out a long, slow breath. “Probably. I definitely was by the time I was your age.” He curls and uncurls his fist a few times, as if he’s expecting to find something to hold within it. “It’s a strange expression, don’t you think? Where are you going if insane is the last answer? There’s always somewhere else waiting after. We don’t see the world the way other people do. That’s not insanity. It’s just survival.” When he raises his head, he looks almost as tired as Phoenix. “It’s finding a way to live that’s the hard part.”

Phoenix crooks a smile at him. “Semantics,” he agrees.

And the dead man laughs. Laughs and laughs like he can’t remember how to stop. “Oh, danshi, it’s always semantics.” He reaches forward and gently curves his thumb over Phoenix’s swollen eye before Phoenix can think to flinch. It feels like being cradled by a wildfire. “Give it time. The world hasn’t ended yet. It’s okay to be sad, and you’re already kind enough. The rest is semantics and poetry.”

The boy crouches down amidst the glass, trembling. Smoke and bullet metal mix between his teeth. He can’t lick it away. It’s sweet along his tongue, and when he breathes in molten rain, its echo sings between his lungs, underneath his heart.

“That brother you were thinking of,” the dead man says, watching the glass spin the stars into a dance. Basking in the glow of it. “Remember what he told you? What he keeps telling you? He’s right about it. I could never make anything like this.”

Phoenix pulls his hand from his chest. He does not want to touch it.

He’s terrified of what blackened rotting thing might spill out.

“They can kill you all they want,” the boy says, something dark beneath the blue and brown smouldering inside his eyes. “You just won’t die. You can’t. Not yet.”

(He is, after all, a lawyer, not a poet.

Isn’t he?)

There’s something else he’s supposed to be doing.

Diego looks like he’s been crying.

Phoenix isn’t sure why. He isn’t sure of a lot of things, actually. Awareness returns to him in hesitant spurts, trickling through his limbs one bone at a time, heavy and bewildering. No sense of place or time arrives to fill the space around him. Only the shadows curling around his body, and the stars so very far away.

He blinks sluggishly with his left eye, his right fluttering weakly—swollen mostly shut. That part is real. Carefully, he raises his left hand in front of his face. It takes a few seconds (passing normally) to make out what’s become of his fingers. They’re wrapped so tightly in gauze he can hardly tell they’re part of him, let alone move them. Given the distant throbbing in his palm, that’s probably the point.

Something like dread and fear running a fever have banded together in a bitter slurry inside his mouth, spreading from the back of his throat to the tip of his tongue. Practice is the only thing that keeps his chest moving, a sharp type of breathing that makes him dizzy, tongues of fire licking up his lungs, but it’s enough to keep him alive. In and out. In and out.

Was he dreaming?

Not daring to move his head, he searches the gloom with his undamaged eye, waiting for the shadows to realign themselves into something recognisable. When they do, it’s in the shape of bars. They make up one entire wall of the room he’s in. A corridor walks by on the other side, the trailing ends of an artificial light crawling across the bare walls. He tilts his gaze the other way. A matching set of bars are on the window. (In and out. In and out.) There’s a distinct stench of cleaning chemicals overpowering the underlying hint of less pleasant bodily functions, and the more he wakes up, the more familiar the scratchy sheets feel against his skin. Cinder block stone scrapes at his shoulder. His pillow is of the same ilk. It might be the same one he had last time he was here.

Who did I kill this time? he wonders, muffled and distant inside his head. Oddly calm. He’s in a cell, which sucks, but as far as cages go, the detention centre is about as tame as it gets. It’s not a basement. It’s not an alleyway. It’s not a warehouse.

And that isn’t Diego crying in the corner.

His heart jumps, battering against his ribcage with such force it’s a wonder it doesn’t burst right out of his chest. He sits up and swings his legs off the lumpy mattress in one single movement. The woman in the corner startles, pressing back against the wall, and his breath stays locked in his lungs.

They stare at each other.

Neither one of them breathing.

Something bad, he remembers, cold seeping into his skin, the rest of his thoughts swept away as his ears retune to the world—the harsh, panting, wheezing, screaming noise of it. Outwardly, he keeps his face neutral, unflappable, unwavering, even as a ringing starts up, pressure squeezing the sides of his skull. He can feel the frozen air waiting for him to finally inhale, making his chest and head and hands shudder, pulling at his old hurts, digging into the new. A boy—a man more scar than skin.

But not dead.

Not dead.

And not alone in the very worst possible sense.

But—

Maybe it wasn’t Diego crying. Maybe Diego isn’t here right now (bad, bad, something bad), but if he was, he’d tell Phoenix to breathe. And he will be here. That fact may as well be the gravity tethering Phoenix to the ground. Whether he looks as worried—as angry—as scared as Phoenix remembers—well. That’s another matter entirely.

For now, Phoenix gives in. Inhales with a great clanging rush that nearly tips him onto the floor, and watches it cloud erratically on the way back out. Then he does it again. Simple and easy. In and out.

What was it he was dreaming about again?

Across the room, the woman keeps staring straight at him, blood dribbling from her parted lips and cheeks stained by tears. Her hair is light, blonder at the tips than the roots, sheered short in an asymmetrical cut that frames her face, matted by sweat. She has her arms wrapped around herself, though Phoenix doesn’t realise it immediately, vision swimming in doubles until he sees the weeping stump and it snaps back into brutal clarity.

Nausea, fresh and warm, bubbles in the pit of his stomach. He swallows the aftertaste of blood and the stale, smoky texture of bullet metal.

Her hand. She’s holding her own hand. Tucking it protectively against her breast. Shards of bone and broken muscle churn inside the wrist. Viscera covers her sternum to stomach.

Phoenix opens his mouth, managing little more than a croak. His mouth is too dry. He swallows again, saliva thin, and licks his lips. “Hello,” he says, as soft as a puff of vapour. “I’m Phoenix. Is there something I can help you with?”

She moans. Another spurt of blood slides off her chin. “M-Mah ungh.” The beat between each noise is the only indication they’re supposed to be words. “Ah oseh mah ungh.”

“I-I’m sorry?” Phoenix says, wincing at the crack in his voice. “I don’t understand what you’re—”

One blink to the next, and there she is.

Right there.

Standing over him, trembling knees inches from his own, the stump right in front of his face. His mouth snaps shut. A scream thunders through him, locked tightly in his ribs, howling between his lungs. He shoves it down, down, burying it with the rest of his screams as the woman’s jaw swings open. She bends down and leans right into him. He has enough time to see the bleeding lump of flesh in the middle of her mouth, her teeth slathered with its remains—

The fingers of her severed hand twitching towards his jaw—

Eyes bright, and white, and empty—

And dead—

And—

“You’d better take two steps back and you’d better take them real fucking quick, lady.”

A wretched noise breaks free from Phoenix’s flooded throat. Diego really does look like he’s been crying.

He’s standing right beside them, dark eyes wreathed in a red the same colour as his shirt, sparking with the force of his barely contained fury. She flickers back, startled by the electric edge of him, and as soon as she does, he plants himself firmly between her and Phoenix.

“Okay, pajarito?” Diego asks, not turning around.

The dead woman twitches uncertainly in the middle of the room.

Phoenix wraps his arms close, palms pressed flat against the ridges of his ribs. His skin feels stretched out, draped loosely over his skeleton. He could scoop it up and hang it on the bars to dry. “Uh-hmm.”

Diego does turn then. Phoenix can see his hands shaking. “Phoenix, talk to me.”

“Yeah-huh.” He presses his tongue against the back of his teeth. Folds it against the roof of his mouth. Flexes the spongy, swollen length of it around his gums.

Diego eyes him for a long moment, then slowly drops to the floor. He crosses his legs and sits in front of Phoenix properly, as if it’s just the two of them, resting his hands atop Phoenix’s knees. “Right. New plan. Breathe for me, properly. In and out. I know you know how to do that,” he says, a deep timbre rumbling straight from his chest, so quiet Phoenix has to watch his mouth to be certain he understands.

It shudders in the middle of Phoenix’s bones. Sometimes it feels more like Diego’s trying to coax the feral out of a wounded animal when he speaks like that. His touch is the same, or whatever you want to call it, because he can’t touch. Only approximate, fingers drifting somewhere between the bone and tendons of Phoenix’s patellae. So it isn’t warm (there’s nothing solid to hold the heat inside), but it’s close enough it makes Phoenix tremble.

Behind the taste of metal, he catches a hint of bitter coffee, and a tingle like the charge in the air before a lightning strike.

And eventually, the steady presence settles unobtrusively; gentle, but not in a way that kills him, and kind, but not like he’s breakable. Phoenix slumps, lets his eyes squeeze shut for a brief moment to absorb the pain, and forces a breath around the fading tension in his limbs.

Isn’t there something else you’re supposed to be doing?

“Mia,” he whispers.

Diego’s mouth quirks, part relief, part gratitude, part reflex. It barely shifts the stubble on his cheeks.

“First things first,” he murmurs, throwing a quick glance over his shoulder to eye the dead woman suspiciously before turning back to Phoenix. “Loud?” he asks, raising one hand to tap the shell of his ear. “Or loud?” he asks again, moving his fingers up to tap against the side of his head.

“Loud,” Phoenix mumbles, trailing his bandaged hand up to the side of his head. The pain pulses a steadier beat than the one inside his chest. “Not the rest of it.”

“So you can listen?” Diego asks.

Behind him, the ghost drops to the floor, rocking back and forth on her heels. Gaze flicking between them as another incomprehensible gurgle spurts all over the floor.

“We’ll get to you,” Diego snaps, harsh enough to make her flicker all the way back to the opposite wall.

“Diego,” Phoenix says, voice as rough as sandpaper, words shaved down to dust. He doesn’t have enough left to tell her I’m sorry. “Tell me. I-Is Mia—Is she okay? She—She isn’t—”

“She’s alive,” Diego confirms with another faint smile, a flash of white, a ripple surging through him like he’s about to fall through the floor. “Okay might be too much of an exaggeration, but she’s alive and she isn’t going to die.”

Phoenix sort of feels like falling through the floor himself. His body crumples halfway to it, his arms and a rail thin bed frame propping him up as he chokes on his first full lungful of air since sunset. It makes him lightheaded, which makes it easier, and he sucks in more greedily. Too fast, then slower, searing against his gut. His scalp tingles as Diego leans into his crown.

“Still asleep,” Diego goes on, fingers twitching, nails curling deeper through vessel. “Had her skull rattled pretty bad, and her arm’s a mess. She’s going to be so pissed off when she finds out it’s stuck in a full cast, but it’s nothing time won’t fix. Now she just has to swim up from whatever cosy nest she’s made for herself in her dreams.”

What he doesn’t say, doesn’t have to say, is he wouldn’t have left her side if he wasn’t sure.

“Okay,” Phoenix says and doesn’t know what he means. What it is he really wants. “Not okay. Sorry. I don’t know.”

“Ha,” Diego snorts, a hairline fracture down his throat. “You don’t know? You saved her. Joder, Phoenix, if you hadn’t been there—”

“Don’t.”

Clutching at him, hands empty, Diego shudders at his translucent edges. Before he can say anything else, Phoenix shakes his head, hiding his face between his knees.

“Don’t,” he repeats. He doesn’t know if it’s a request or a plea. “Please don’t say it.”

It’d be too much, no matter how softly Diego said it. Another roar on top of the cacophony already battering him to pieces. It’s always too much. He still wishes, sometimes, he could grow a thicker skin. That his emotions would harden like the calluses covering his hands and he could stop feeling so much, all the time, his entire body an open bleeding wound walking through the world.

All emotions are physical. That’s the problem. You don’t think I’m about to die and I’m scared, you feel scared. Your stomach drops and your heart spasms and your blood goes cold. That’s fear.

On the other side of the cell, the dead woman pushes a twitching set of fingers to her lips. “Alive,” she whispers—or something close enough to it.

Phoenix tucks his ruined hand tighter against his chest. Angry, he reminds himself, a burning sting like glass lifting his head and baring all his teeth.

“What happened?” he asks, the words falling and breaking wide open against the floor. “Who was that man? Why did he hurt Mia? Why did he—” He’s shaking again and there’s bile in the back of his throat, on his too-large tongue, but he makes himself say it. “Why did he try to kill her?”

Diego’s gaze flickers down. “It’s—a long story.”

“I’m not exactly going anywhere.”

“I’ll tell it, don’t boil over. Just give me a second.” He tilts another glance over his shoulder at the ghost. “I’d wager it has everything to do with her, too.”

The dead woman blinks once. Holds out her dismembered hand. “Ah kep ih so ey coo fich ih,” she says sadly.

“… Right,” Diego says, manfully enough. “Well, try not to freak out too much. Only one of us here is a captive audience, after all.”

“I’m so sorry about him,” Phoenix tells her.

“Trust me, pajarito,” Diego says, gaze hardening. He runs a hand through his hair, tugging at the strands of white breaking apart the dark tresses. “I’m not the one you should be apologising for.”

Here’s a sketch of how Mia Fey doesn’t die:

Diego comes howling out of the dark, and Phoenix does his best not to look.

It saves him crashing headfirst into a wall. He’s already late, racing against himself on the only familiar path he’s carved out of the city. He’s burning scorch marks onto the concrete—and then he’s skidding right through them. The bike screeches in open rebellion at the sudden stop and he nearly ruins his sneakers scrabbling for balance. He’s close enough to scatter brick dust in his wake.

“Phoenix, get to the office, now.”

Barely words, really, just a torn-out growl, all sensation and no substance. Phoenix wants to cover his ears, but Diego knows he hates this, he only does it when something is wrong—

Something bad. Something bad. Something bad.

He doesn’t waste time asking. Sets his feet back on the pedals, and if he was racing before, he’s flying now. Water swells in his eyes, smoke off the concrete, dry and cracked in the tearing wind, his fists clenched tight enough to start a fight with every car and person he swerves around. Most of them are already jumping out of the way, goosebumps running up and down their arms, breath catching in their throats, vision swaying on the white lines splitting apart the road. He doesn’t know how much of it is real and how much lives inside his own head. They must feel something, though, an echo of the nightmare opening up wide in front of him, hardly anything of the man left. And its eyes—Diego’s eyes, Diego, it’s Diego—

Phoenix just tries not to look. He takes in nothing but pedalling. The fire in his limbs could take on the sun and win. Other than that, he’s empty.

It doesn’t matter that this is the fastest he’s ever made it to the office. He clatters off the bike, shoves it through the door and dumps it on the floor with only the barest twinge of regret. Nothing. It means nothing. The shadows swing left and right, scurrying to get out of his way. Even his breath comes out of him like it’s trying to escape.

“What?” he finally gasps as he tears up the stairs. The elevator might’ve been faster, but the stillness of his own body would’ve eaten him alive. He’d be crawling the walls of the elevator shaft before it sauntered halfway up. “What happened? What’s wrong?”

But Diego’s trapped in his own storm, and the words don’t come. They’re years too late for an explanation that would’ve stopped this mess before it started: fifteen years to be exact.

(Funny how that number just keeps snapping them up and swallowing them whole. Let there be no doubt the universe fucking lives for all its accidents, cackling as it warms its hands on a sky coloured by void and fire.

Buzzing white lights flicker down the stairwell, electricity shivering in its wires. Can electricity feel cold? Probably not, but it sure as hell doubles down on the effort tonight. Dark and white. Dark and white. Tints of yellow hotel windows and sunset orange streetlights. There is no blue left.

Death ruffles its feathers and clicks its knife-point beak.

This, it will tell you, is important to remember.)

“What’s wrong with you?” Diego snarls instead, raging and already grieving and lost, lost, looping back to the worst parts of himself. It can’t be worse if the worst is already happening. “You’re faster than this, I’ve seen you run, you pathetic little bastard, you never stop. Don’t you dare slow down, don’t do this, you useless idiot, you fucking mutt—”

He spits blood and bitter insults at his best without anyone’s help. Really, he’d been asking to be murdered long before Dahlia Hawthorne came along.

But Phoenix does run faster.

He hits the third-floor landing so quick he doesn’t have time to spare on the pulsing lights or the vapour suddenly spilling from his lips, the ice in the air tearing out the heat of him. The office door is hanging ajar.

He slams through it to find a room filled with the dead.

Instantly, he stops, the clamour inside him clattering against his bones, ruthlessly ricocheting between his ribs. A whole crowd of dead eyes startle on him, white as light. Swearing and muttering, fearful and vicious, drooling out empty mouths and dripping themselves onto the carpet. And he feels all of it. Not with his eyes and ears—it runs in his blood, rings in his skull, bubbles in his throat. He’d turn and run the other way until his legs gave out if he didn’t know they’d follow him just as fast.

(He’s seen a lot of ghosts in one place before. He’s never seen this many waiting for one man.)

“Move!”

Diego. Howling. At Phoenix, at the ghosts—it doesn’t matter doesn’t matter doesn’t matter. Only the catch in his voice, like an echo, like a plead, like a sob—

Phoenix moves.

(That right there: everything you need to know about them. The spray-paint permanence of a graffitied wall. Diego and Phoenix. Phoenix and Diego.)

He forces his feet forward, one after the other, shoving through the ruthless shock of the closest ghosts—feeling them reaching back. Yanking, grabbing, clawing (help me and it wasn’t my fault and he did this, him, hurt him kill him make it hurt), and Phoenix—insane to think, but this is the best of him—he climbs right in. He recoils and rebounds off the wailing dead, and somehow makes it through. It’s a stagger finish, his hands almost breaking on the wood, but he makes it. He bursts through Mia’s door just in time to see a man outlined in blinding light—

A living man, raising both his arms—

Standing over Mia—

And Mia, collapsed against the wall, blood (real living blood, all depth and mass and weight) smothering half her face—

Eyelids fluttering and dim—

Dying—

And more dead calling, dragging their fingers uselessly down the man’s back—

And Diego screaming—

And himself, his own terrified voice ripped out his throat as he runs body-first into the man’s waiting arms. Red and dark and white, maybe purple, and the blue all his own. They clash in every shade, balance tilting over in Phoenix’s favour, which about the only thing other than a room full of ghosts on his side, because the impact is like he hit that wall after all. He tumbles down onto the shadowed floor, spinning through the dark, finding his knees and hands—

Something sharp bites at his palm. Shattered glass shimmers right beneath his face, a whole ocean’s worth of it. He shoves right into the hot slicing pain, feeling none of it, thinking only Mia, Mia, Mia—

His head snaps to the side, hit by a fist or an arm he never sees. It hurts. Stars spark and spin inside Mia Fey’s office, smacked out from behind his eyes, and outside, whirling in a fright past the window, a flock of pigeons drop their feathers into the fray. Of course it hurts.

It just doesn’t hurt anywhere near enough.

(How does it go?

You’d need more than that for a boy made of fire.

No. That’s not quite it.)

And there are hands pulling at his arms, pushing at his back, artic ice bruised into his soft flesh, but it’s still not enough—

Get up get up GET UP—

The ghosts yank him back to his feet and he sways into Mia’s eyes, staring at him, waiting for him. Purple glowing somewhere on her chest. He blinks hard, once, and reaches for her. He turns his back on a murderer and doesn’t hesitate about it, and he lifts her into his arms.

(This boy, Diego thinks, somewhere in the twisting, screaming mess of himself. That’s closer, but still not quite it, either. This beautiful fucking boy.)

Her arm twists and flops over her stomach, bone shifting under the skin. Her eyes slide shut. His knees nearly buckle. Then her other hand reaches back, weakly grasping at his shirt, her breath warm and crisp and clean against his neck. He holds her tight enough the pain in his palm reaches fever pitch and he carries her back through the dead.

The realisation is spreading now, the shock wearing thin and their voices curling into something else. Move and shut up and let him through and dear god, holy shit, fuck, let him run—

Diego takes his spot at Phoenix’s side, grim and pale, but with his own eyes back in place. Phoenix can only look long enough to see that much. The saltwater swimming through them is too much to bear with the weight in his arms.

He does not look behind him. He carries her all the way down to the lobby before he has to stop again, stunned into it by a brand-new shriek.

A girl stands in front of him. Dark-haired and bright-eyed. Pulsing in orange. Phoenix’s chest heaves and his arms tremble. He has nothing but burning air to offer on his tongue. There’s definitely something that has to be said, but Phoenix, for the life of him, with it cradled in his hands and tucked against his chest, has no idea what it could be.

“Mia?” the girl whispers.

“M’ya,” Mia moans.

“Mierda,” Diego swears.

Above them, a door slams shut. Or maybe wide open. A horde of furious screams echoes down the stairwell, chasing the footsteps stomping down. The girl takes a stumbling step back.

Phoenix forces his mouth wide open. “Run.”

She’s out the door in the time it takes to finish that single syllable. He sprints right after her, hits the open air and chokes it down, seeing the horror spread across him and Mia in the throbbing, stinging light of a city finally waking up. It lifts its head and finds the three of them, double-takes on one, eyes going wide and then wider, right on the blood dripping onto the grass sprouting between the concrete. It opens its mouth and demands:

How the hell does she still have a pulse?

(A lot of things, but down to the core of it: a man who loves her so much it ripped him two, and a boy with fire in both his eyes and the memory of bullet metal lining his pockets.)

“Find people,” the man snaps, scraping himself together on his anger, still flickering back and forth around them so quick he’s a smear of red and brown and white. “Someone. Anyone. The more the better.”

The boy drags himself forward one more time, pausing only long enough to see the girl stumbling after him. A car horn explodes by his ear. Voices follow, calling, alive or dead—there’s no point stopping to ask. It goes against every instinct he has, but there’s no more dark to hide in, so he runs towards the light.

Incredibly, its doors part to let him inside. The floor’s shiny enough he slips right through, makes it all the way to the centre of the lobby before his legs give up. He spills himself across the marble. Mia spills herself down his shirt; an eggshell blue button down he bought specially for tonight. She really liked it when he showed it to her. She squeezed his arm with the one now hanging off her in splinters and rolled her setting autumn eyes.

(“Don’t overthink it, Phoenix. She’s my sister, not the Queen of England.”

“I think I’d be less nervous meeting the Queen of England, honestly.”)

A shadow darts across her. He looks up. The girl snatches her hand back, staring at him. Shrinking from him. He can’t say what he sees in the expression looking back at him, crowding him on all sides like circling vultures. Ocean waves crash inside his ears, drowning out the muffled yells wrapped in tailored suits and floating dresses, demands sunk beneath frothing currents of cologne and perfume and flowers and blood. Gold winds its way through the girl’s eyes, molten and damning.

There’s nothing in him. He needs to tell her that, but there’s only more yawning emptiness where the words should be.

Only—there’s a tug at his chest. It pulls his gaze back down. Mia is trying to say something. Her mouth is moving. That means she’s saying something, doesn’t it?

He never gets the chance to find out.

He’d love to say it’s a surprise when the police burst in and point their guns at him, but when he’s forced to let her go, raise his hands and watch the blood dripping off them (his, Mia’s, why does it matter again?), it feels like the only way it ever could have ended.

Phoenix picks at the sweatshirt they gave him to wear after they took his sodden shirt, steadily unravelling it thread by thread. He’s curled against the wall, arms still wrapped around himself, and the material pulls taut across his shoulders, riding up his hips. Inside his head is a mess of paint and colour, mixing and slipping as he tries to pull it into a composition that can articulate fifteen years of history condensed into a twenty-minute explanation.

He'd put it into words, but there’d be little point. He’s never been good with words. Marvin Grossberg sold a secret that destroyed Mia’s family—no, it’s not about some sad old lawyer. The Fey family had a secret—or does have a secret? Diego’s being nowhere near as subtle as he thinks he is dancing around the topic. Find out for yourself, pup. But that’s just Phoenix getting distracted. Mia Fey came to this city alone to catch a murderer—kind of. A murderer by proxy. A fist full of bullets, if not the smoking gun. Redd White killed her. Tried to kill her when he’d already managed it fifteen years ago and didn’t realise, didn’t care, didn’t notice. Was it the same as Phoenix? A miracle in the night? Did Misty Fey murder her in her bed?

There he is, getting distracted again. He’s a lawyer, not a poet, and his art has always been at its most honest using a language without words.

So here's what he makes of it: red mixed sparingly with blue is best for blood. Green for the glass, with tints of more blue—cyan, maybe—for the reflections. Purple for the bruises, for Mia’s necklace, for White’s suit. White pouring from the eyes of the ghosts. (Light dripping out Diego’s.) No yellow, though there was yellow there, shining out the Gatewater Hotel, drowning him on its marble floors. Nearly all cultures have considered yellow in isolation one of, if not the least attractive of all colours. Yellow kept Mia safe tonight.

The only yellow in the cell is the dead woman’s hair. He hopes the sky is clear tomorrow. He hopes he can see the sun through the bars.

He hopes whatever Mia’s dreaming about, she can see it in everything.

“She only spoke about it a little with me,” Diego says. He’s tucked up at Phoenix’s side, an arm over Phoenix’s shoulders, more of a warning to the ghost still contorting over her severed hand and missing tongue. Phoenix is half surprised Diego hasn’t stood up and started hissing at her. “I think she regretted it as soon as she did. Tipped her hand a little too cleanly.” He snorts, suddenly, tugging at his collar. “Ha, never occurred to either of us someone else might come along and try to kill me first.”

That, at least, is a colour Phoenix always knows what to do with. “And she says she loves you,” he murmurs, nudging his elbow somewhere around Diego’s ribs. “First thing I’m going to do when you wake up is kill you.”

“You’ll have to get in line behind her,” Diego replies, remarkably cheerful at the prospect before his gaze turns serious. “Listen, it’s why she never told you. About any of it. It’s not because she didn’t trust you. I think part of her didn’t believe anything would ever come of it, from her or from him. But if it did, she wanted you to be safe.”

Phoenix tries not to laugh at that. For the most part, he manages. “You never told me, either.”

“Wasn’t my secret to tell,” Diego replies simply.

Phoenix nods, absently scratching at the wound on his hand through the gauze. He isn’t angry anymore. He doesn’t feel much of anything, other than the pain. You don’t get to be angry at people for things you don’t know about. You don’t get to resent people for flaws you can’t recognise. How can Phoenix ever resent anyone for keeping a secret?

He’s lied to everyone he’s ever met.

“I really need to find a way to meet people normally,” he mutters, thinking about the girl—Maya. He isn’t sure what to make of her, though he has a fair guess exactly what she made of him.

“Too much wrong with you for that,” Diego snorts.

Which more or less sums it up. It sort of helps, too, reminds Phoenix to match his hitching breaths in time with Diego’s. Diego doesn’t particularly need to breathe, hasn’t for years, but it’s still the most familiar sound to Phoenix’s ears. Rough around the edges but constant.

When he was younger, he used to want nothing more than to sit somewhere quiet in a room full of people and just listen to them breathe. He’d sneak into his parents’ room while they slept and listen to his mom murmur, his dad snore. Sometimes, on his worst nights, listening to Diego breathe is the only thing that keeps the ocean from swallowing him whole.

What a thing it is, just to be able to hear someone else breathing beside you.

Diego, he thinks (wants to say, but as so often happens, does not), Diego, do you remember we weren’t supposed to be this? I’m so cold. I’m so tired. Stay with me until I fall asleep, please. Please. I don’t want to see dead things anymore.

Want. It’s never been about wanting for him. It’s should or should not, what he has to do, what he must.

(Diego does. Diego wants him here. Larry, too, if only the parts he can stand, and his brothers, like Theo, even if Theo doesn’t know the truth, which makes him and Mia a little like each other, and the way they look at him, sometimes, he can’t stand it, but still—

He has to keep remembering. And it’s hard. It’s so, so hard. But he has to. He must. Otherwise there’ll be nothing left but splashes of paint and meaningless colour and an empty space where a boy once stood, and nothing to fill in the absence.)

Aloud, voice small, breaking a little in the middle, he says, “Murphy’s going to wonder why I haven’t come home yet.”

Diego presses his fingers through Phoenix’s hair, a trailing spark between his spikes and the shaved line of his undercut. “C’mon, pup, I know your opinion of me isn’t that low. Where d’you think I went before I came here?”

Someday, a man nearly getting murdered in a basement courthouse cafeteria isn’t going to be one of the best things that ever happened to Phoenix. One day.

“You have a terrible personality,” he tells Diego, and hopes Diego can’t see the beginnings of a smile falling out his mouth.

“Ha, tell me something I don’t know. Listen, she’s okay. Took a while to calm, and she ended up settling on the bed—I know, I know, she’s not allowed, but it’s the only way I could leave without her crying after me. Must be the best place to catch your scent.” Diego tilts his head down, matching his eye-level with Phoenix’s. There are only a few inches between them, but that’s never stopped him making a point of it once he had the wherewithal to start. “She really is okay. But she also definitely peed on the carpet.”

The smile splits Phoenix’s mouth in two. “Not her fault,” he says, barely managing around the ache in his throat. A desperate urge to hold his dog floods him to his core. He tucks his arms tighter around himself. “At least she didn’t do it on my bed.”

“Not for lack of trying. She’s going to need looking after,” Diego says, flexing his intangible fingers to underline his point.

It tingles down the back of Phoenix’s skull. “Larry.”

Diego’s face does some fantastically complicated gymnastics at that. He limits himself to grumbling, “Tell him it’s his way of finally paying you back.”

“He doesn’t need to pay me back,” Phoenix says for what might be the thousandth time. “Not for that.”

“I suppose lawyers subsist off statue clocks and questionable friendship choices nowadays.”

“I’ve survived on worse.”

“That’s not something to be proud of.”

“Neither is drinking seventeen cups of coffee during a trial, but that’s never shut you up, has it?”

Diego, like the mature, responsible adult he is, sticks his finger in Phoenix’s ear. It makes the muscle inside tense, eliciting a rumble, the same kind of low roar you get in a yawn that shakes your jaw and waters your eyes. Phoenix ducks away, grinning wide enough to make his black eye ache, forgetting, for a moment, that there is no boy by the ocean, and his body, however much it feels like something separate from himself, never has not been his own. 

But only for a moment.

It’s little more than a choking cough, but both of them are immediately silent, focussed on the dead woman huddled on the other side of the room. She doesn’t look scary. That’s the worst part. Phoenix has a vague sense what constitutes as horrifying in his view doesn’t match up with most people, but on her own, beyond what she can do to him—she’s just a woman. Past the blood and pain, she barely looks older than he is. And it’s not like she’s trying to hurt him. Phoenix has been hurt enough to know what that looks like, and it doesn’t look like a young woman cradling her own hand against her chest, crying as best she can through a chewed-up tongue. Diego watches her closely, but Phoenix tries not to stare.

It’s a wonder it’s just her who decided to follow him. Maybe she’s new enough she can’t grasp enough of herself to make another choice. Or she’s shattered so much there’s no other choice. Neither option is particularly good.

And he’s locked in a room with her.

(Not the basement. Not the alley. Not the warehouse.

He feels the pressure in his lungs: a sense of oncoming waves, though they’re made only of air. It takes another reminder to breath them in.

It isn’t an ocean, nowhere near as bad as that, but those thoughts will kill him if he doesn’t drown them out.)

It’s not your fault sits heavy in the roots of Phoenix’s teeth. She’s caught him at a bad time, is all, but it’s difficult to get a ghost to understand concepts like that again. They have nothing but time. They have forever if they want it, though Phoenix has yet to meet one who does.

Maybe, though, maybe the other ghosts following White were lucid enough to see a cage and realise, for now, there’s nothing Phoenix can do for them. Maybe they came, found him sleeping, and left him to rest.

It’s probably not true. But it’s a nice thought.

“There’s something else,” Diego says suddenly. He’s tugging at his collar again, pulling it away from his throat. “Good news and bad news, and they’re both the same piece of news. Nothing’s technically set in stone yet, but that’s only because it’s still the middle of the night.”

“Yeah, I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Phoenix says wearily.

“Miles Edgeworth is prosecuting.”

“Oh,” Phoenix says, holding himself very, very still, thinking, suddenly, of summer. Something about summer. The final tilt into something human, or very close to it, that can be seen and heard and comprehended.

Oh, he thinks again, heartbeat solid inside his chest. There I am. That’s what I was doing.

At his side, Diego is glaring at him. Very faintly, Phoenix smiles.

“How many places did you go before you came here?” he asks. He tries for amused, but it just comes out soft.

Diego snorts, a reflexive sound that doesn’t reach his eyes. Instead it pushes his hands up to run through his hair. They’re still shaking. They always are.

However terrible this night has been for Phoenix, it’s been a thousand times worse for Diego, not least because there’s absolutely nothing he can do to change any of it. Diego Armando is an anomaly, singularly unique in his existence: alive, but some part of his spirit adrift from his body, unable to wake up. It leaves him translucent in a way ghosts have never been for Phoenix, only the barest spark of sensation passing between them, and a sense of something deeper. Something without a name, or too many names, but all of them have been forgotten.

It happens a lot to Phoenix. Diego likes to call it his sixth sense, which is as good a name as any, because there isn’t one. Not really. Phoenix has seen ghosts his entire life, and he doesn’t know why, but there is that something. A little like standing on the shore at night and seeing a light flickering atop the pitch-black waves, almost trailing through the sky, knowing someone’s out there in the dark, but no sense of who or why.

The difference is that the light is right in front of him. Shapeless, formless, yet utterly undeniable. He knows at the same time he doesn’t. It’s an invasive certainty that picks apart his mind because since when did he know all this? It slips between his grasping fingers, voices and images and a song he can never make sound right in his head, a song that’s always being sung by everything, and he thinks, sometimes, in his sleep, in the right kind of dream, he can finally listen, but when he wakes up… what was it he knew again?

(He wonders if it means there’s something he’s supposed to be doing.

In his dreams, a dead man whispers to him that there is.

Death is a little cagier on the matter.)

“Managed to stop myself running off to find Davy,” Diego admits once he’s got a hold of himself. “She’s going to throw a fit when she finds out she missed this.”

“She might not miss it,” Phoenix says, smiling with closed lips. “I still have a trial to win.”

Diego raises an eyebrow. “Do you?”

Phoenix shrugs, tilting his right shoulder higher than his left. “I was already planning on it. You know what people are like around me. And with everything you said about White, I don’t have much of a choice now, anyway.”

“Ha, too much in the dark to see what’s right in front of you.”

Phoenix tilts his head, but no more than that. Diego isn’t like him. He doesn’t hide it. Most of what he says is still bullshit, but he doesn’t say it so you turn away—he says it so you pay attention. All the most important things, he says them only when he knows someone is already listening.

“I’m sitting right here,” Diego says. He offers a sarcastic hand wave and all. “All you have to do is ask.”

“To… be my lawyer?” Phoenix asks, perplexed. “I don’t think they’d let me wheel in your hospital bed.”

“No, me, you fucking idiot.” He shoves his finger in Phoenix’s ear again, grinning when Phoenix squirms and swipes at him. “I’m not going anywhere. Whatever hell we find ourselves in.”

“I know that,” Phoenix mumbles, rubbing at his ear.

“Good. You can bring the sunscreen.” Diego looks far too damned pleased with himself when Phoenix rolls his eyes over a snort. “Usually they’re not too happy with lawyers investigating crime scenes, but I’m pretty sure they haven’t added any restrictions to coma patients while I’ve been asleep. I’ll nose in on the detectives and see what else I can dig up on my own. Maybe pay old Grossberg a visit and knock that dumb painting off his wall.”

“And what am I supposed to pay you back with?” Phoenix asks lightly.

Caught in his own argument, Diego doesn’t so much as blink. “A coffee before you kill me.” His gaze softens. “Hey. It's what we do, isn’t it?”

It's almost scary at times how well Diego can read him. How hard it is to lie. I don’t remember what I was dreaming about and I’m just not hungry and it doesn’t hurt anymore. Old excuses, thinner than a too-small sweatshirt, finally falling to pieces. Phoenix has never been great at lying, anyway, and maybe he doesn’t trust Diego with all his secrets, but he trusts him with himself, and the enormity of that is enough to make his heart stutter and his stomach ache, even after all this time.

“Thanks, Diego,” he says quietly. He’s not brave enough to say more.

“Plenty of time to fall apart when it’s all over,” Diego says, and knocks his knuckles up into Phoenix’s jaw with an electric grin, thrumming with enough energy to break the sky. “We’re just finally getting started.”

Chapter Text

Find out for yourself, pup.

Easy for Diego to say.

Phoenix watches the numbers blink up, one-two-three, shifting his feet against the elevator floor and wondering, half-seriously, if he has time to find a bathroom so he can throw up. It’s better when the doors let him out into the corridor, the clip of claws trotting at his side. Murphy keeps her nose to the jade green flooring, practically inhaling it as she searches for any scents worth keeping. Sunlight streams through a window at the end, gilding her mottled coat, and from a thousand glinting buildings, the city offers her a sleepy wink. When he stops in front of the door, she comes to his side and cranes her neck back, ears flopping over themselves. Her head tilts when stopping is all he does.

What are you doing just standing there? she asks, he swears she does, blue and brown eyes peering into his own.

Phoenix huffs a sweltering breath and pats her head. “Yeah, yeah. I’m getting there.”

She wags her tail and nudges his hand off her. He curls it into a fist. Raises it—and hesitates. Just for one more moment. Just to catch his breath. Then he lets it fall against the door.

Behind the wood, a voice leaps to its feet. “Come in!”

The handle is warm between his fingers, grip slipping and unsure. He wipes them on his shirt while Murphy licks her lips and shakes herself impatiently, collar jingling up and down the stairwell. He doesn’t mean to smile. It slips right out of him as he pushes the door open.

And promptly walks face-first into it.

“Oh—shit, sorry! I should’ve warned you. I’ve made a bit of a mess in here.”

“It’s alright,” Phoenix says automatically, rubbing his nose and blinking the water out of his eyes. Murphy perks up at the sound of a new voice and he lets her dart ahead before squeezing himself in after.

A bit of a mess is a funny way to describe the war zone of boxes and half-built furniture he finds himself staring at. An incomplete set of shelves are slumped against the wall, struggling under the weight of too many books, the silver edge of a light switch keeping the whole thing from crashing through the floor. Sitting in the middle of the room is a couch staring out bewilderedly from beneath a glass tabletop at the cardboard boxing it in on all sides. A pile of metal and leather is spilled out a few feet past it, screws scattered like loose teeth. All the windows are cracked open, paper packing and bubble wrap swaying to the sounds of engines and voices and birds—the messy arrhythmia of the city beating itself against the ground.

Mia Fey is crouched in the epicentre, looking much the same as he remembers, if a little less worn and much, much cheerier with her arms full of dog. Her hair is tied up, looped in a ponytail, a few strands drifting over the collar of her oversized shirt. Beneath that, she’s wearing a plain T-shirt and jeans, trainers instead of heels.

It makes him feel a little better, seeing her like that. His own sneakers are one particularly muddy puddle away from stripping off his feet, and the only proper shirt he has is years old and way too small for him. He did the best he could with an old flannel piece he’s pretty sure once belonged to Marcus. It still smells faintly of oil, and it’s tucked far enough down his jeans he can feel the hem against his thighs.

“Cheaper to do all the building work myself. Just climb over what you can’t fit around,” Miss Fey says, motioning him forward with what little of her isn’t petting Murphy. “How are you? Who’s this?”

“Um, I’m okay,” he says, obediently clambering over a box. “That’s Murphy. S-Sorry, I don’t like leaving her in the apartment by herself when I can help it.”

Murphy darts back over to him and he takes the opportunity to free her from her leash before she can choke herself on an errant lampshade (or something equally embarrassing) in her excitement. Evidently, she takes that as permission to enact full reign on the chaos and sets about nimbly picking her way over and under the boxes, sniffing everything she can reach.

Miss Fey watches her, grinning as she swipes the fur off her jeans. “I don’t mind at all.”

The moment she takes her eyes off the dog, Phoenix braces himself. Her eyes are brown, lighter than Diego’s, coloured in autumnal tones where his are winter dark. They fall on Phoenix as if caught in a wind, fluttering, then all at once.

Yeah. There it is.

Not as bad as the first time a year ago (probably because Doug Swallow isn’t screeching where she can’t hear him, making the entire courtroom feel like a live wire), but it’s definitely there.

He keeps his face carefully blank, lowering his own eyes and twisting the worn lead between equally worn fingers. He loops it round his neck and tucks the clip through the handle, lets it fall against his chest and slips his hands into his pockets. There’s probably something he could say, or is supposed to say, but it’s usually easier to let other people speak first. When Phoenix tries, he’s the unwanted dog following them home, beaten down and left in the cold. When someone like Miss Fey tries, someone who holds the world at their fingertips and asks for more, it’s a conversation. Push and pull, satisfaction on either end, seeing and being seen.

He wishes Diego was here. When Diego looks at him, when he speaks to him and makes him human (or something close enough to count), it’s not so hard trying to be brave.

Alone, his tongue and teeth stay locked tightly shut. He’s learned—like a hand pushed into a flame and burned, but he’s learned.

From under his eyelashes, he watches her get to her feet. Hears her inhale softly, breathing in a little bit of everything, and ask, “Do you know how to build a chair?”

His gaze snaps up. Autumnal fire stands ready to meet him, flickering bright with unease, definitely some kind of wariness, but the corners of her lips have tugged back up and her hands are on her hips. Open and welcoming. Braver than him, certainly, and made of something ferrous.

“Not from scratch,” he replies carefully.

She grins at him like a dare. “I’ve managed two and a half bookcases and a desk, so I know that—” She indicates the heap of metal and leather— “Is just being difficult for no good reason. Maybe you can make better sense of it. You have an art degree. I think whoever wrote those instructions majored in impressionism.”

“That’s—” He catches himself on a laugh, choking it down where it rumbles against his stomach. “That’s not really a thing.”

“Pretty sure I told you I was terrible at art,” she says, throws it over her shoulder at him as she clambers into the adjacent room. “Would you like a drink? Tea? Coffee?”

“I’m alright, thanks.” Under a window, Murphy loses a fight spectacularly with a spread of bubble wrap, and they tumble down onto one of the only clear patches of carpet. She pops her way back to her paws and barks. He lifts her into his arms before she can bring the whole place down. “Um, some water for Murphy would be good.”

“I can manage that,” Miss Fey replies brightly over the clink and whirr of a coffee machine.

With little else to do, Phoenix carries his dog to the pieces of chair and sits with her in his lap. She settles her chin over his shoulder, tail sweeping across his knees, and he lets himself press his face into her neck. The sun is warm against his back, sticking the fabric of his shirt to his shoulders. Diego isn’t here, and Murphy might get scared by bubble wrap, but she licks his ear and wriggles until she’s comfortable, and the weight of her is enough to keep him from sinking.

A contradiction, he knows. It hurts to have the thought crop up so easily.

That’s what will drag him underwater.

“Shisturei shimasu,” he mumbles, muffled by Murphy’s fur, almost hiding how uneven and unfamiliar the words feel on his tongue. For one, long moment, he squeezes his eyes shut and breathes his dog’s familiar smell.

Then he picks up the instructions for the chair.

Miss Fey returns with a porcelain bowl full of clear water and sets it down before perching herself on an arm of the couch, holding a mug between her hands. She looks over the carnage through the steam, lounging easily. Queen of the cardboard and half-built.

“You’ve done some redecorating yourself,” she says, surveying him with a glint that bleeds purple like a bruise across her chest.

He has to force his eyes up from it in case she thinks he’s staring at something else. It’d be an easy mistake to make. There’s—well, there’s sort of a lot to look at. But nothing about it catches his attention the same way her necklace does: a carved stone that seems to pulse every time he turns away.

Belatedly, he realises he’s supposed to respond. It takes another second to understand what she’s referring to. The gold stud reflects a trembling dot of light along the wall, warm from his body, almost hot from the sun. He tugs at it, feeling the burn spread to the rest of his ear.

“Oh. Yeah. I sort of got it on a whim.”

Truthfully, he thinks he got it just to piss off Diego.

“You suit it.”

“Thanks,” he says, trailing his thumb up along cartilage. “I’ve been thinking about getting more.”

Diego will throw a fit.

(The secret stays chained in the back of his throat. He will not let it breathe. He will have it torn out of him and die from it first.)

There’s a flap of wings; a scuffle with the windowsill. Phoenix doesn’t turn until Miss Fey does first. The pigeon freezes at the sight of them staring back. Murphy lifts her dripping snout and growls.

Phoenix grabs her collar and holds his hand in front of her nose. “Do not,” he tells her firmly.

She huffs at him, but she stays.

Miss Fey snickers, and the pigeon clearly doesn’t understand what it’s missing as it spreads its wings and takes flight. Phoenix watches the blue, blue sky and tries not to think about the drop on the other side of the window.

“I’m glad you managed to move on from what happened last year,” Miss Fey tells him.

She may as well have thrust her hand straight into his chest. He has to let go of Murphy before his hands tighten enough to hurt her. Dog that she is, she immediately leaps for the window, placing her paws on the wall and sticking her nose through the gap. She bares her teeth for the whole city to cower under.

If he opened the door and let her run, she could probably find the stupid bird. Her nose is that good.

It’s bringing it back that’s the problem.

“Sorry,” Miss Fey says, and the weird part is, she genuinely sounds like she means it. “I shouldn’t have assumed. I didn’t mean to bring up bad memories.”

“S’okay,” Phoenix says. He tears his gaze from the sky. Picks up a length of metal and the screws meant to go with it. “It’s not your fault. I don’t really want to talk about it.”

It helps to keep his hands busy. He’s been taking as many shifts as they’ll let him at work. Drawing nonstop, even with his degree over with, though none of it’s any good, or ever finished. It always seems to turn into her. Scrap it up, start on a blank page. You can’t haunt graphite or paint. It’s his own hands that are the problem. So he works them until they’re raw, scalded by water, split by knives, stained by colour. Blue and red and purple are caught under his fingernails. Green flecks off on the leather of the chair. Orange and yellow line his palms. Diego’s worried. Phoenix is trying to make him not worried, because he’s tired of making Diego worried. He’s tired all the time. So he draws Diego. It still makes Diego embarrassed. Coming back to find Phoenix with a pierced ear got him so worked up they had to take Murphy for a walk to calm them both down.

Phoenix is trying.

So even though he doesn’t understand why Miss Fey asked him to, even though she’s scared of him, even though she looks at him like there’s something dark and dirty and wrong he can’t ever scrub away—

(Even though the glow of her necklace prickles at his skin, digging at a memory, at a dream, a shape he knows and doesn’t understand why—

Even though every second he’s in a room with her he’s lying to her face, keeping the man she loves from her, because Diego won’t wake up and Phoenix—Phoenix is trying but—)

Even with all of that, he still came here.

“I’m assuming you didn’t ask to meet me just so I could build you a chair,” he says, slotting the metal ends together to finish the base.

“Not quite. You graduated recently.” She waits for him to nod. “Do you know what you’re going to do next?”

Phoenix bites his lip. Turns his face away under the guise of searching for the next piece he needs. “I, uh… I’m not sure. There’s a graduate course to switch into law, but—but I can’t afford it right now.”

“Yeah. I’ve been thinking about that.”

Cautiously, he faces her again. “You have?”

Steam trails through her eyes like smoke. “You still want to become a lawyer, then?”

He swallows. There’s no break in the noise, no respite from the dead clawing at the walls below, flickering the lights, murmuring in the empty corners. But it seems strangely muffled. “I’m going to be one.”

“Why?”

What else would I be? nearly floods off his tongue. He bites down so hard he tastes blood.

Miss Fey tilts her head, a finger tapping against the side of her mug. “You said, last year, there was someone you wanted to see,” she says, curious more than accusing. As if he’s simply a strange animal she’s never seen before and can’t decide whether to keep.

“It’s… It’s complicated.”

“Mm. You said that, too.”

Phoenix raises a hand to rub through the fuzz at the back of his head. Sweat slides between his fingers. He tries not to look away. “I-It’s not the only reason. I mean, it was, at first, and it still is, sort of, or—or it’s part of it, but…” He scrubs harder, fighting back the frustration that always builds when the words just. Won’t. Come. “It’s scary in there. In court. Especially on your own. Having someone on your side… I mean, you know, don’t you? You saved me.” He breathes those words in. Gently lays them back out. “You saved me. I want to help people like that. I want them to know they’re never alone in there, no matter how much it feels like it. Because—because I’m there. We’re there.”

And maybe, while he’s doing that, maybe somewhere along the way there won’t be so many ghosts.

Maybe people will just die and that can be the end of it.

Maybe he’ll finally know what it’s like for the world to be quiet.

He jumps when Murphy touches her nose to the back of his hand, cold and wet. Fingers trembling, he runs them through her fur, and she settles her head on his thigh. Fluffs of fresh air sink into his jeans.

“Well then,” Miss Fey says abruptly, leaning forward and grinning so wide Phoenix leans back in the face of it. “How would you like that chair to be yours?”

Phoenix looks at it, then back at her. “What?”

“The graduate course you’re looking at—I can pay for it. On the basis, obviously, you’d be working here once you’re qualified. We can iron out the details, draw up a proper contract.” She wafts her hand around the steam, brushing gold and purple into the air. They curl up into another daring grin. “That can be your practical interview as well.”

Phoenix, for his part, is pretty sure he’s completely forgotten how to talk. “Working… here?”

“You need the experience,” she says with a shrug. “Whenever you’re not studying, you’ll work here. I’d pay for your time, too.” A sudden hint of hesitance breaks through her blasé demeanour. “If that’s something you want.”

If? If? Do dogs bark? Do pigeons fly? Is the sky blue?

(Technically, no. The short wavelengths that scatter across the sky are closer to bluish violet, but the human eye isn’t sensitive enough to perceive it, so all we see is blue.

Tilt your head, squint as much as you want; another boy, a slightly different time, and he would’ve become someone else entirely. He likes art—which is an entirely inaccurate summation of the spasms that steal his fingers or the unsettled clawing at the back of his skull or the alarmed pulsing in his chest when he wants to draw but can’t. He likes art. He loves art. He loved art when it was a stranger, and he loves it now that it’s an old friend, and part of him, that little kid on his bedroom floor drawing his first ever friends, still wants to get to know it again.

And—and he’s good at art, and there’s never been much else he was good for, so it wasn’t as if it would be the wrong choice. Whenever he can’t draw, he feels like he needs to tear it out of his skin. Like if he ever stops, there won’t be anything left to see.

Try knowing that—then finding out it’s still not absolutely everything.

They did it because they had to.

You’ve never let me down.

The moments that change our lives aren’t always obvious, but sometimes they really do feel like lightning, and choosing anything else feels like letting yourself char to dust.

It was the sun that burned Icarus. Not the sky.)

So let him want. Let him grow hungry and hungrier. Let him whittle away in starvation under their fearful, gladdening stares.

Miss Fey wouldn’t be the first. Phoenix wouldn’t even hold it against her. His whole life he’s done nothing to earn the few splashes of kindness spilled on him. He has done worse than nothing, and he was given Diego. Larry.

Miles.

Iris.

See what happened to them.

See the prices they’ve all had to pay.

(I know it’s not enough, but I’m sorry.

A shaking hand. A silent scream. Paper crumpled and ripped and ground beneath bloody fists.

I’m so sorry.)

“Why?” Phoenix asks, arms curling around Murphy as she crawls back into his lap. His hands move without his knowledge, or really his consent. “Why would you do that?”

“The librarians in the courthouse know you by name, y’know,” Miss Fey says, gentle now. “They said you’ve been going since you were a teenager. You’ve read more in there than most of the lawyers they’ve seen.” She slides off the couch and mirrors him on the floor. “This isn’t a free ride, Phoenix. Law degrees aren’t a joke, and I’d expect you to keep up with the work here. And I’m going to be honest with you, most of it’s very boring.”

“I know, I’ve read the law books,” he blurts because—because he needs her to stop talking but—

She tips her head back and laughs. She laughs with her whole body, holding the mug clear to stop anything spilling out.

He watches her, hunching over the aching wretchedness in his chest as his dog—his brilliant, perfect dog—nuzzles the underside of his jaw. “M-Miss Fey, I—I can’t accept this. It’s too much, it’s—you can’t—”

“I know.” She rests her mug on the sharp angle of her knee and grips at her necklace. “Trust me, I know. It’s more than you could possibly imagine.” Her gaze drifts out the window, facing the sun. “It’s enough paperwork to give you carpal tunnel, and more late nights than you think you have left, and fighting with the police, fighting with the prosecutors, fighting with pretty much everyone, and you don’t get to stop just because you’re tired. Because as soon as you’ve managed all of that, you still have to stand in court and win.”

She locks eyes with him. And it’s this: it’s summer. Phoenix hates summer, but it’s different from the way Diego hates spring. Summer made him the happiest he’s ever been, and sometimes he thinks the happiest he’ll ever be, and it’s terrifying to see all that life he’s supposed to work out how to live stretching out in front, believing the best of it is already over. It slipped right through his hands and he didn’t even notice until it was gone.

When he ran away, at some point—though he can never remember when, because there was little point measuring time when there was nowhere he was supposed to be, nothing he was supposed to be doing—he came into possession of a bag of spray paint cans.

Stole it, if you want to get down to semantics.

But he was just a runaway kid. Of course that's the choice he made.

Memory has not forgotten us. There must be someone out there, maybe standing in the same spot, watching the same dying light, tracing their fingers over the sprayed katakana on the underside of the bridge. Vandalism, they think. Someone should clean this up, they think. But it won’t be them, in the end, poking at the date written under the name, recognising that if nothing else, and thinking. Thinking. Right up until they forget about it again.

The katakana reads: Phoenix Wright. He’d wanted to write something else, but he’d gotten stuck on is no longer here, is somewhere unimaginably different, is alive. So he just left his name and the year, two-thousand-and-eight, knowing no-one else who saw it would wonder what was going through his head.

Iris would have. Miles might have.

And Iris is gone.

So all Phoenix has left is to make everything he ever told Miles a promise he’s kept.

It’s summer.

It’s Miss Fey’s eyes on him, as intoxicating as the sky. “If you won’t, that’s fine, but don’t tell me you can’t. Never tell me you can’t. If you want this, you have to bring absolutely everything.”

It’s supposed to be purple, he thinks, dizzy.

All he sees is blue.

“So I hope you’re not afraid of hard work,” she finishes, leaning back satisfied. As if he’s already said yes. As if this wasn’t absolutely insane. Utterly, utterly fucking nuts.

And it’s this: he’s smiling. It’s practically busting his cheeks open. It’s so wide it actually hurts. He hauls mop water and bus tubs all night, and draws and paints all day, and every spare moment he’s not with Diego or Murphy he’s with the dead, the lost, the broken, the mad, the terrifying, the dead, dead, dead. He can hear them, still. He never doesn’t hear them.

And he’s going to be a lawyer.

Him.

“Nope,” he says, shaking and smiling and knowing he probably looks crazy, but all she does is match him. Meeting him halfway. “I’m not afraid of hard work at all.”

“What the actual fuck, Nick?”

Phoenix leans his forehead against the wall, static hissing against his ear. “Someone saw me do it, apparently.”

“Uh huh. Is this person blind? Legally blind? Did they smack their head on something several times and then see you do it?”

If he closes his eyes, he can picture blond hair, though darkening with time, still lit like a candle, as light and fluffy. Outrage always makes Larry’s face seem twice as large as it is, the way it gnashes through his mouth and widens his eyes. His voice sounds rough, lending him a grating edge, so he probably just woke up. He must not have checked the caller before he answered.

“But she’s okay, yeah?” Larry asks, voice rising to match the spread of his expression. “Mia—she’s okay?”

“She’s in the hospital.” Phoenix is gripping the phone hard enough to creak its plastic casing. With some effort, he loosens his aching knuckles. “I don’t really know. She isn’t going to die. But can you—can you get Ant to check on her?”

“Yeah, yeah, no problem. We’ll head down first thing.”

“We?”

Another burst of static makes him yank the phone away. Diego raises an eyebrow and looks around. The only other person with them is a guard pretending not to listen in.

When Phoenix cautiously brings the phone back up, a new voice comes out of it.

“Again, Phoenix?”

Unbidden, a smile tips along his mouth. He watches Diego trace it, then twists it to a grimace and turns away. “Hey, Theo.”

“This is becoming a bad habit. And that’s me saying that.”

Theo’s just as easy to picture; rough-hewn sand and salt, the second of the Butz boys, and the worst off for it. It’s not static, Phoenix realises. It’s the sound of Larry and Theo scuffling over the phone, crashing off each other the way only brothers do.

Diego flickers in front of him and gives back a grin dusted with sugar.

“Shut up,” Phoenix mutters.

“What was that?” Theo asks.

“I didn’t know you were back,” Phoenix says, tilting the mouthpiece closer.

“Only got in last night. Was gonna pay you and Murph a visit today, if you were free.”

“About that,” Phoenix says, ignoring the muffled give me back my fucking phone, Teddy! It’s easier to just keep talking and let whatever makes it through stand on its own two legs as best it can. “Can you and Larry head to my place and look after Murphy for a couple days? I’m not sure when I’ll be back.”

“Can we? Jesus, Phoenix. That’s the easiest thing you ever asked me—Larry, would you fucking sit down—”

“Nick? You need us to look after Murphy?”

“If you can stop fighting each other for two seconds, yeah.”

“Whoops. We got him sarcastic, Teddy.”

Theo’s voice, muffled by distance: why do I come back for either of you?

There’s more, but it’s lost down the cold, mechanical phone line. Theo came in from Rio this time—one of his favourites to run off to. Larry went with him for a few months at the start of the year, only coming back because his passport was almost out of date. If it wasn’t for the banality of documentation, Phoenix doubts either of them would ever keep their feet on the ground.

You need to come with me one of these days, Larry is always saying. He makes it sound inevitable. Most things are when it comes to Larry, and the only thing he has going for him is he manages to make it sound like freedom instead of a cage.

Phoenix isn’t entirely sure how to remind Larry his problem won’t go away in another country. That he can never be what Larry wants him to be, and just that.

Theo always smiles if he’s there when it’s brought up. It’s the saddest Phoenix ever sees him.

But Larry still says it, and, when it comes down to the churning meat and bone of it, Phoenix can hardly blame either of them for leaving.

He did it first, after all.

“She’s peed on the carpet,” Phoenix says, glancing at a nearby clock. He catches the guard staring straight at him out the corner of his eye. “The last time she was out was last night, so she might’ve done it again.”

“Aww, poor pup, all by herself. We’ll keep her company. You need anything else? We can come see you, yeah?”

That makes him pause until Diego, helpfully, swats him through the back of the head. “Yeah.” He blinks and cradles the plastic tighter against his ear. “Yeah. Can you pick up my suit, actually? And my badge.”

On the back of his eyelids, he can see Larry grin. All his teeth in on the action, crooked nose scrunched tight, eyes almost squinted shut. “Consider it done, Nick. Don’t go anywhere, alright?”

Phoenix does not say thank you. He does not say I’m sorry.

He does not say please don’t leave again.

His laughter hides behind his tongue like a sore loser. “Where else would I go?”

He’s allowed to shower after his phone call.

The guard follows him in.

It’s a narrow room with showerheads down one side, a bench down the other, and drains open like hungry mouths across the floor. White tile and whiter lights belt him across the eyes, heavy as a fist. While they sting and throb, the guard slumps down on the bench, arms folded and cap pulled low, the barest hints of sclera rolling after Phoenix. More a uniform than a man.

Phoenix takes a breath. Then he starts taking off his clothes. The sweatshirt peels away from his chest reluctantly, threads scraping off the rusted flecks dried along his chest. Half-bare, he shivers in the cool empty expanse, his only working set of fingers fumbling at his fly.

“I’ll head out after this,” Diego says, his hands stuffed in his pockets as he wanders the walls, tone mild as if this is all perfectly normal. “Start digging the trenches, unearth this witness they keep talking about.”

Phoenix forces himself to nod, hiding it with the motion of his body as he bends down to pull his jeans off over his sneakers.

“Maybe I’ll drop by the prosecutor’s office,” Diego muses. “Finally get a look at how the other half live. I bet they don’t even have to get their own coffee. They’ll ring a bell and someone will melt out the walls to serve it up. Ha, they probably even have—”

A sharp rush of air cuts Diego off, a noise like breath sucked through teeth. Phoenix doesn’t turn to look. His scars prickle atop his skin. He slips off his shoes with more concentration than strictly necessary, even one-handed. The rest of him shakes.

There’s no follow-up from the guard. There wouldn’t be. There won’t be. Phoenix is twenty-three, already searched and processed—not just barely sixteen, sticks and stones for ribs and knees, cupping his genitals for dear life as the most bored voice in the world tells him to move his hands and bend over.

(You lose a lot of shame very quickly when you live on the streets. It was something of an unwelcome surprise to find out he still had enough abject humiliation to scrape together for juvie.)

However, irrelevant, he can’t stop the memory from surfacing, and he lingers in his boxers as he affixes the waterproof protector they gave him for his hand.

Throughout his pacing, Diego keeps his back turned. Usually, he wouldn’t bother. He’s seen Phoenix in worse states than his dignity around his ankles. More ghosts have than Phoenix cares to remember. But there’s something about an extra living set of eyes in the room, about the lack of choice, and amidst it, Diego choosing not to look. He treats Phoenix so carefully sometimes, as though he’s letting himself grow and mature first. As if Phoenix wouldn’t accept him any way he came.

“You’ll be okay on your own with the little lady in your cell?” Diego asks eventually. He doesn’t also say I’ll stay if you want. Phoenix still hears it.

He hums a vaguely affirmative noise, most of it muffled by the first sputters of lukewarm spray. He keeps his face to the wall and his hands cupped low. Cold rushes up through his feet from the floor. Beneath them, the water runs pink.

“Cálmate, pajarito,” Diego murmurs.

Calm, little bird.

Phoenix mouths the words silently into the water, first in Spanish, then English. The drains swallow each one whole.

He does not feel like a lawyer.

Daylight streams through the barred window, grey as the clouds and twice as delicate, pressing hesitantly against the artificial white buzzing down the hall. It seeps its way into every corner, hiding under the bed. She’s there, waiting for him, peering over her fingers as the bars are slammed shut and the lock twisted home. A whole space carved out just for her amidst the light.

Phoenix has never understood why people think they can only see ghosts in the dark.

He sits on the floor with his back to the bed. Water, icy against the natural warmth of his skin, drips from his spikes down his neck. He rubs at them, spraying droplets across the blanket, and dries his hand on the mattress until the skin turns pink.

Carefully, hesitantly, the ghost inches her way closer, eyes wide but dry. He lets her come. Tucks his hands under his armpits to pretend he can keep them warm and manages to grow a smile.

“Hi,” he says, and she pauses a few feet from him, lingering in the quiet nest of his voice. “Sorry. I’m usually better at this.”

Her fingers tighten around the ragged, empty edges of her wrist, gaze falling, then rising just as fast. They always look at him like they’ll disappear if they look away. Like he’s fire, like he’s water, like he’s food, and they are freezing, thirsty, starving. He’s developed something of a kinship with prey animals. Has to push away the urge to make himself small, unthreatening and hidden. These emotions aren’t meant for him, really. Most of them are hers. The kind that makes him claw at his own skin to get them out, makes him want to dig through black-blue viscera and snap open bone, lips tightly shut against the pain, all his screams frozen somewhere deep and secret, heavy, heavier, but there, always there. He’s in there somewhere.

He presses the tips of his fingers against the floor—his left hand, because he knows no other way to deal with pain than to run straight through it. The ends of the bandage, frayed from the night he’s spent fidgeting, trying not to, trail steady lines through the dust.

“I’m Phoenix,” he says, repeating just in case, spelling out each letter in slow, looping shapes. “Can you tell me your name?”

The ghost peers at the space between them and slides closer. She doesn’t see the way his gaze flicks to either side of her, his muscles coiling, his hands twitching.

(It’s not like he could run far, but knowing that he would, that he wants to, settles the rabbiting beat of his heart.)

Between the multitude of fingers and the occasional spasm, it takes a few tries for him to get the message. “Charlie?”

The dead woman—Charlie, nods. A breathy rush of movement follows, and she unfolds her hunched knees, sitting back and blinking at the bars of sky on the wall. She mouths it to herself, cradling it along her lips. Etching it, he thinks, into what little remains of what she is.

It’s the only good part of this; one simple, easy thing Phoenix won’t let go of and is only his. Diego doesn’t know about the sketchbooks he fills by the dim glow of his phone when he can’t sleep, won’t dare go down there, knuckles convulsing against the sheets until he has a pencil in his hand and the images out of his head. They’re tucked in a special pile at the back of his closet: the faces of the dead and the names to go with them.

Usually, people have skeletons in their closet, or a few bones if they’re lucky. Phoenix has an entire graveyard.

He loves Diego like a brother—all spit and fire and blood and teeth—but there are brothers who have kept worse secrets, and he knows exactly what kind of face Diego would make. The lightning flash of fury (not at Phoenix, not unless Phoenix makes him) and the rumble of pain that follows it, like a scar across the fabric of the sky. Phoenix doesn’t know what bleeds through when he can’t be there for Diego, and Diego isn’t going to tell him.

He wishes he could offer solace the way Diego has for him, over and over. Even when he doesn’t deserve it. Especially then. But he’s far too good with his secrets to ask Diego for what he isn’t willing to give back.

Charlie is looking at him again, biting the nails of her dismembered hand.

From somewhere, he pulls up another smile. “Can you tell me what happened to you, Charlie?”

In half-drawn increments, here is what Phoenix learns: she was a private investigator. She was a good one, and she knew it because she made a lot of people angry. Eventually, she made the wrong people angry, so she was given a new name and a new life and nobody, least of all her, took the time to consider if that was something she wanted. If a life could be remade so easily. Making a mistake was an inevitable as the moon rise. Nothing but a matter of time.

And White and his company were waiting for her when she did.

(But she wasn’t supposed to die. They wouldn’t have bothered cutting off her hand if she was.)

Throughout the explanation, she steadily shifts closer, sits at his side so he doesn’t have to crane his neck to read the letters ghosting across the floor. They don’t leave a mark in their passing. Phoenix is the only one who will ever know they were there. And he lets her come close, because he’s tired and he’s cold and he has to keep stopping himself choking on a fat lump of something that isn’t his, was never there, never not chewed off and left him convulsing on the floor until it wasn’t too late, because it was already done, because—

She leans to bump her shoulder against his.

He moves away. He doesn’t move fast or far, hardly makes a thing of it beyond a rip through the carefully curated expression on his face and a ringing rattle against the bedframe.

“Don’t touch me,” he says. It’s the first thing he’s said for himself in hours. “Sorry, but—don’t. Please.”

Charlie flickers upright, gaze uncertain and—disappointed. The building flood in his mouth drains away and he swallows nothing but saliva. It burns going down his throat. With his thumb, he traces the warm pain splintering from his glass-torn palm to the ends of his wrist. He closes his eyes, and for a moment he loses himself in the red of the fire.

“Is that what you want?” he asks, when he’s certain he won’t breathe smoke and gag on the inhale. When he can open his eyes and watch the dark spots dance across his vision.

Between them, winking in and out, Charlie frowns. She places a question mark on the floor.

“White,” he says and clicks his teeth shut on the name. “It’s okay if it is. I just want to make sure. Because there’s other things. More than—than what someone else has done to us.”

Because out of all the ghosts clawing at White’s back, she’s the only one that followed Phoenix. It’s not—unusual, necessarily. Not weird, at least. If every ghost came to Phoenix, all the time, all at once, he’d have been torn apart a long time ago. The things that tether the dead aren’t static; they can be people or places, sometimes old memories, sometimes just simple reminders of what they want and wanted more than anything in the world.

(He still visits Daisy and Victor at Ivy sometimes, just to make sure none of the other ghosts are bothering them. He flips pennies into the fountain, letting them make their wishes as they play forever in the water that’s cleaner than anything they had in their brutally short lives, and still not enough to wipe the soot from their skin.

Someday, maybe, if he keeps going. He can’t grant them everything, but maybe one day it’ll finally be enough.)

Murders though—that's a different story. Like any transformation, the people with you when you die will become inextricable from the event. But if someone makes it happen, they become the event itself, that muddy swamp where causation and correlation begin to collide, two souls bound by an act that can never be undone.

Killers are haunted. Who could’ve guessed.

But Charlie still chose him over White, when none of the others did.

“There’s something else, isn’t there?” he presses gently. “Something you want just for yourself.”

Her eyes glisten under the dark weight of the clouds and wind carrying the promise of rain. “Whoa-ker,” she whispers.

Phoenix grimaces. “Sorry, I don’t know what you mean.”

Painstakingly, she spells it out for him.

“Oh. You have a cat?”

She chews her lip, hesitating before placing her severed hand in her lap. With her remaining fingers, she pulls the skin down below her eyes, looking all over the room. Then she looks back at him and slowly shakes her head.

“You couldn’t find it,” he realises.

(There’s a story Phoenix knows about eternity. He doesn’t remember where he first heard it, but more often than not, he draws it in the mouth of a boy with silver eyes, telling him, when the whole mountain of diamond has been chipped away by the little bird, the first second of eternity will have passed.

But, he wonders, where does the bird go when it’s finished?)

“When I’m out of here,” he says, and does not let himself think if, “I’ll help you find it.”

“Him,” Charlie corrects.

“Him,” Phoenix repeats dutifully.

She nods and picks up her hand. Gently cradles it against her chest.

Diego comes back while Phoenix is in the middle of considering what would happen if Charlie dropped her hand. She’s curled up at the end of the mattress, the tips of her shoes hovering close to his thighs where he’s tucked up against the wall, and her hand is lying beside her face. With an aching sort of softness, she strokes the lines and curves and bumps between her fingers and palm, drooling onto the blanket as she hums a mindless tune Phoenix doesn’t recognise.

The blood and saliva won’t stain. The mattress won’t hold the shape of her weight, won’t dip beneath something that was never supposed to be here. The only permanence ghosts can leave behind are the cracks opened by their rage and the scars left on his body.

If she left it, it’d probably find its way back without her noticing. Its memory is too much of a part of what she is, even if the world won’t hold it for her.

Phoenix lifts his head, stubble scraping across his collarbones, and rolls out the stiffness in his neck. In front of Diego, smiling comes easy.

“Charlie,” he introduces before Diego can rile himself up. “She’s looking for her cat.”

Diego still eyes her cautiously, tucking his hands in his pockets even as he nods in response to her nestled glance. “Happy to put a name to a face. Bad manners on my part, not introducing myself first. Just call me Diego if you can stomach it.”

“Diego,” she tries. The D muddles closer to a G.

“Close enough.”

Diego flickers onto the bed, a single frame of motion that puts him from standing to sitting at Phoenix’s side, legs pointedly slung through Charlie’s feet. She curls tighter, instinctively making space for him, or maybe just as perturbed as anyone to find their toes suddenly inside the meat of someone’s thigh.

“He’s not dead,” Phoenix explains. “He’s just an asshole.”

“Careful, pajarito,” Diego says, though he grins to suck all the seriousness out of it. “I’m also your lawyer.”

Despite having nothing solid to rest against, Phoenix leans in a little closer. “How’s that working out for you?”

Not terribly, as it turns out. Nothing as bad as Phoenix could fear if he had the energy to. Diego tells him about the witness; a shameless coquette with hands as dirty as her mouth (Diego’s words) given the wiretap the police found in Mia’s desk phone and the screwdriver clumsily hidden in her hotel room, and don’t even get him started on the second glass sitting on the table of her hotel room (seriously. Don’t). The police, in lieu of provable motive or much evidence beyond Phoenix’s blood at the scene and fingerprints everywhere in the office, are putting all their chips on her statement, and it’ll be her on the stand tomorrow. And, though they interviewed Mia’s little sister, the prosecution hasn’t called for her to testify.

That’s how he says it: the prosecution. Not Edgeworth, and certainly not Miles. He leaves the space open for Phoenix to ask, knowing that he won’t, and dips his head to rest over Phoenix’s.

“Which reminds me,” Diego says, tapping a beat with his fingers for Charlie’s hums to fall in time to. “Mia asked Maya to hold onto evidence yesterday. They talked about it on a call before Maya arrived. You need to get a hold of the recording.”

“How am I supposed to do that?” Phoenix asks. “They took apart Mia’s phone.”

“They didn’t take Maya’s.”

“She records her phone calls?”

Diego shrugs. “Mia set it up. You know how it is. Never say anything on the phone you wouldn’t want played back to you in a courtroom. One of our rules.”

“Right.” Phoenix passes a clumsy hand over his eyes. “Right. And what do we need it for?”

“Because Mia hid a whole sheaf of papers in that Thinker statue Larry gave her, but they’re gone now. White must have took them. It’s…” Diego’s voice sticks. Phoenix is close enough to hear him swallow. “It’s what he used to hit her.”

Of all Larry’s faults, Phoenix didn’t think maker of murder weapons could become one of them. He splits another notch in his teeth, all the way down to the root, jagged with the weight of another secret jammed in with the rest.

“Are you okay?” he asks.

Diego takes a measured breath in, waits a beat like he’s listening for a signal fire, then releases it in a slow, dragging exhale. The second time he does it, Phoenix tries to match him. It makes him dizzy.

“Ask me later,” Diego replies, soft as silk, and Phoenix knows it as a promise. “But I’m worried about Maya. She was supposed to stay with Mia. The hospital let her stay last night given the circumstances, but there’s no guarantee they’ll do it again. And she doesn’t have Mia’s keys. The police must’ve picked them up at some point.” His tone lowers to his favourite bitter blend. “They’ve torn the whole office apart. A bull would’ve made less mess.”

Phoenix tucks his knees to his chest and sits his chin on them, resting the ache in his jaw. He doesn’t know Maya in the slightest, wouldn’t have known she existed for years if Diego hadn’t mentioned her. What he does know is what it’s like to have someone there, someone who’s supposed to be there (maybe even meant to be there) just suddenly—suddenly not.

Like when Diego himself disappeared. It was only a few months after they met, and Diego had been following him everywhere, a haunting as hungry as any other, but gentle and skin-warm, and that wasn’t like anything Phoenix had ever known. And yeah, Diego’s an asshole, and he was a thousand times worse when they first met, but he saw what Phoenix did, what he lived with, and for all he hated it, still hates it, he’s never shied away from it. He’s never pretended it wasn’t happening. And he was there when Phoenix woke up from his nightmares, or when he was practically falling asleep on his bike, or—or the warehouse, when he would have lain on the floor and bled and bled, unable to feel his fingers, nothing but the pain, the crashing, screaming, dying rage, and the fear, the fear, Phoenix was so scared—

Diego was there. And when Phoenix asked him to stay, just until he fell asleep, Diego did.

And then Phoenix woke up and Diego was gone.

And it killed him.

Diego killed him.

Now, wrapped safely in Diego’s presence, Phoenix tries to imagine it happening again. A goodbye that didn’t have an I’ll come back soon dug into the beating heart of it. A barely-there touch that would melt like mountain snow and no winter would come to bring it back. An apartment, an office, a whole city—empty but for him and his dog. A voice besides his own who talked to him just because. Because of boredom or anger or joy.

Because he wanted to hear Phoenix talking back.

(Mia’s face with dead white eyes above her smile, the press of her hand biting cold and bruising deep, the desk she built with her own two hands gathering dust beneath his silent screaming mouth.)

He can’t.

He can’t do it and still be himself after.

The pain of it would finally kill him outright.

So what must it be like for Maya? At least Phoenix still has Diego and Murphy. Does Maya have anyone waiting for her? Or just her sister, lying broken and silent and still not waking up?

Just her. Alone. Forever and always.

“You and Mia are perfect for each other,” he says, a little heat worming into it, though not meant for Diego. He thinks, sometimes, he’s finally resigned himself to how unfair the world is, but it’s so happy to keep proving him wrong he can do nothing but keep getting furious about it.

Diego’s mouth twists into a wry smile. “You know I’d change it in a heartbeat if I could, pup.”

Of course he would. Obviously he would. Forget a single beat, he’d tear his entire heart out of his chest if it’d change things.

But he can’t.

But maybe—

Maybe Phoenix can.

He rises off the bed, startling Charlie with the movement, her fingers slotting together in a mockery of a tender hold as she jerks upright. She follows him to the bars, sticks her head right through and peers down the corridor. He presses his face against them.

“Hey, I need to talk to someone!” He sticks his arm through, bursting his hand like a supernova, fingers crackling on the fire. “I know you’re there, I know you can see me!”

Diego flickers right into the burning weight of it. “What are you doing?” he growls.

Phoenix ignores him. Presses his face tighter against the metal, because the cold weight of it is a balm to the constant pulsing around his right eye, and yells out again. It takes long enough another prisoner, who Phoenix is mostly sure is still alive, tells him to shut the fuck up, and he ignores them too. Eventually, the door at the end of the hall clatters open and a guard stomps through. Not the same one from this morning, thank god. The queasy bubbling in his stomach fades before it can boil into retroactive embarrassment.

“What the hell’s the racket for?” the guard snaps.

“I need to make a phone call.”

“Didn’t you already get your phone call?”

Phoenix rolls his eyes hard enough to make them sting. “Are you seriously using TV logic on a lawyer because you can’t be bothered letting me use the phone? It’s important.”

“Oh, well, if it’s important,” the guard mocks. He hasn’t made it as far as Phoenix’s cell, and he’s already turning around. “Sit down and shut up. You’re bothering the others, and you’re bothering me.”

Phoenix feels his heart droop—then hit the floor when Charlie appears in front of the guard’s face. She opens her mouth and manages half a word before she coughs, spewing a torrent of blood, chunks of something Phoenix is not going to think about splattering free. Immediately, she hunches away and shoves her hand (or hands) over her mouth. None of the gore lands on the guard, or the walls, or the floor.

But the guard stops, teetering mid-step. He shivers from the ground up, like he can feel the echo of the slip a puddle would’ve made beneath his shiny boots.

Neck creaking from the effort, teeth grit, the guard turns and asks, “One phone call?”

Phoenix dares nothing more than a nod.

“Fine. Wait here.”

“Did you mean to do that?” Diego asks, staring at Charlie.

She wipes her trembling chin and offers her severed hand. “Cahng yeh ich it?”

“I’ll… take that as a nice firm maybe,” Diego decides, laughter dancing in his eyes as he turns to Phoenix. “Tell me there’s a good reason we just gave that guy nightmares for the next month.”

“There’s a good reason,” Phoenix says.

(He has no idea where an immortal bird goes after it’s done tearing down a mountain. He thinks, though, this might be the start of an answer.)

Larry and Theo take his new request with them, leaving him a bark from Murphy that melts in his chest and nothing to do until they visit later.

Diego stays, thankfully, because Phoenix might have started trying to pick the lock with his bed sheets out of sheer boredom if left to his own devices for much longer. There’s only so much time you can spend chatting with a woman who chewed off her own tongue before you run out of things to say. Somewhere in the interim, mostly by accident, he snatches a little more sleep, shifting through branching dreams in the shape and colour of Sakura trees. He jerks awake to a clang—like a chain wrapped around the trunks, yanking them into the dirt. The petals dance when they fall.

“You got visitors,” the guard grunts.

“You should try smiling,” Diego advises, coolly unconcerned his words go unheard by their intended target. “It won’t fix you, but it might make your poor mamá happy.”

Phoenix has to bite the inside of his cheek before he loses himself and laughs.

Larry and Theo are waiting for him in the visitor’s room, elbows and knees and orange and yellow on one side, taut wires and a mound of stubble and dirty blond swept over dark eyes on the other. Facial hair suits Theo. Larry’s goatee looks more like a stubbed tail.

“Jesus, Nick,” Larry says, hands planted on the counter as he presses his face up to the glass. “You look like shit.”

“Thanks,” Phoenix says, all but collapsing into his chair. Its legs squeak across the floor. “So do you.”

“Hey!”

“They must have a room with your name on it by now,” Theo says, swinging back on his own chair as he drags his gaze up and down Phoenix. Whatever he sees, he keeps his opinion about it to himself.

“Oh, yeah. I even have my own toilet and everything,” Phoenix replies dryly, and Theo cracks open a faint smile.

“Seriously,” Larry says, face set to match. He’s close enough to the glass his breath steams against it. “Are you alright?”

Phoenix shrugs. “Is Murphy?”

Larry flaps a hand. “She’s fine. Had another accident before we got there, but we cleaned it all up, and she looked guilty enough about it. Angsty enough, too. It was practically her walking us while we were out. We couldn’t let her off the lead,” he adds, slumping back onto the edge of his seat and folding his arms. “She’d have run off to try and find you.”

In the face of them, with Diego lounging at his side, and a scraping emptiness in his hands where he should be able to hold his dog, Phoenix’s stomach grows hot. He feels, all of a sudden, like he’s on the verge of tears.

This wasn’t always a revelation. He cried all the time when he was a child, out of happiness and frustration, sadness and anger, and fear. Larry’s always enthusiastic to bring it up, even though it hasn’t happened for a long time. Phoenix could give the exact date and probably an accurate estimation of the time he last actually cried.

Crying, he knows, is the body’s way of letting go. Tears contain excess stress hormones, literally pour them out of your body, and shedding them also prompts the system to release oxytocin and endorphins. It’s why people usually feel better after a good cry.

Without the reprieve, for him, it all just burns.

(Danger Signs

Scratching at arms: No

Frequent vomiting: No

Disengagement from friends: No

Insomnia: Uh

Dangerous behaviour: Well

Three out of five is still pretty good, right?)

But thinking about his dog, the grounding weight of her across his legs, the softness of her fur and the feel of her heart beating solidly against his palm—it gets him pretty damn close. Not quite. Enough to make him rub his eyes to make sure nothing slipped out.

When he thinks his voice won’t shake, he asks, “And Mia’s sister? Did she go?”

“Oh, yeah. Wish you coulda been there to see her face light up at Murphy,” Theo says, tipping his head back like he’s going to laugh. “Looked like all her Christmases had come at once. We gave her the tour, showed her your food stash—”

“It’s not a stash—”

“You had, like, thirty cups of ramen in your cupboard.”

“So? So does Larry.”

“That’s different.” Theo slaps his hand down on Larry’s head, yanking it side to side. “He eats nothing but noodles. He’s ninety per cent noodle.”

Larry smacks one of his noodle wrists into Theo’s throat. “She’s got our numbers in case something goes wrong,” he says, taking over while his brother chokes to death. “We offered to say, outta politeness, ya know? But yeah, obviously she wanted Murph all to herself. We made sure she knew she was the only one with a key, too, after I gave her mine.”

Phoenix narrows his eyes. “You didn’t say anything weird to her, did you?”

“Nick,” Larry says. “She’s Mia’s sister. Fucking no. I’d have to go to space to get away from whatever Mia planned to do with me.” Then, as an afterthought, “Besides, she’s seventeen.”

“He asked,” Theo wheezes.

Phoenix sighs.

It’s a rather neat solution considering it’s the best Phoenix can do with what little he has. He isn’t going to be in his apartment for at least another day, someone needs to look after Murphy, and it means Maya has a place to rest with company that isn’t in the form of hospital staff or two strange men. Not that Larry or Theo would ever do anything, but it’s Phoenix who knows that. Why would Maya?

And Phoenix knows with all the blood in his veins how good a dog is for days as bad as this one. Especially Murphy.

She’s a very good dog.

“We asked about the phone thing, too,” Theo goes on, still rubbing his neck and peering at Phoenix through the shadows of his fringe. “She didn’t hand it over, though. She just asked us something.”

Larry elbows him. “She’s got no idea what she’s talking about.”

“Duh. She’s never even met Phoenix. How could she?”

“What did she ask?” Phoenix interjects.

“If you did it,” Theo says bluntly, shoving his hand into Larry’s face to stifle his indignant hisses. “We told her you’d rather kill yourself.”

“I’m sure that filled her head with kittens and rainbows,” Diego mutters.

“You couldn’t have come up with something less morbid?” Phoenix translates.

Theo shows his teeth. “Would’ve been less true.”

Phoenix can’t muster up any surprise.

“So when’s your trial?” Larry asks in between snapping bites at Theo’s fingers. All of them miss by a mile. “Must be soon.”

“Tomorrow.”

He’s still waiting for the anxiety to start. He knows it will, eventually, and having to wait while it silently carves out a home inside him always makes his teeth itch. But he thinks, maybe, this is one of those times where it’s too much to feel on top of everything else. It’s too busy sinking to claw anything more of him away. When he is alone and empty and scorched clean down to his bones, that’s when it’ll surface.

“You gonna be okay?” Larry asks, leaning forward again. “You want us to come?”

This does surprise him. He knows it shouldn’t, not coming from anyone in this room who matters, but he can’t help it. Even now, nearly three years on, he looks at Diego and wonders what the hell? At Mia and thinks but why me? At Larry and Theo, right in front of him, scars on all their bodies from each other, and wants to ask why would you do that?

Don’t you see what everyone else does? Don’t you understand how little time this will last? Let it kill me. You have every right to.

He does not say this.

He offers a smile. It feels feather soft and lands crookedly along his mouth. “Don’t worry about me.”

“C’mon, Nick—”

“Leave it, Larry.” Theo at last lets his chair land on all four legs with a crack. “You know what he’s like. Arrogant little shit.”

Because Larry is Phoenix’s friend, and Theo is Larry’s brother first, but even before Larry found out the truth and Theo forgot it, Theo has always understood Phoenix best.

(“You’re doing it all wrong, ya know. What’s all this—this goodness you’re giving him? All this nice? He doesn’t want nice, do you, Phoenix?”)

It sort of makes sense, when you think about it like that, why Larry hates what Phoenix can do as much as he does. He never had a moment to catch his breath and give it a fighting chance. It was already dead in the water.

It was lying dead on the bathroom floor.

(A small note about the incident in question: it was an accident.

Because of Phoenix, Theo got his chance to tell them that—and he was already Theo by then. Not Teddy anymore. And Phoenix was Phoenix, not Nick. The best they could do to sum up two broken teeth and a cracked rib and a murder.

The third time somebody killed him.

In return, Phoenix saved Theo’s life.

But how do you separate that from the outside looking in? How do you pull apart the boy carrying death on his shoulders and the brother who slipped and tumbled his way right into its spine?

Phoenix had just turned seventeen. Larry was still sixteen.

They were kids.)

So it’s Theo, five years older than the boy, six years older than his brother, grinning with a kintsukuroi smile, who says, “Remember what I told you last time.”

Phoenix feels his ears light. He does.

He does remember.

But it’s Larry, with his crooked nose, and that flicker of his eyes like he wants to look but knows he won’t see anything there, who’s more scared than anyone Phoenix knows, and probably more than Larry even realises inside, who asks, “You still carry it on you, right?”

Unbidden, Phoenix’s hand rises to rub the crook of his neck. The warehouse scar hasn’t hurt for a long time, but he’s never managed to get rid of the habit. “They took it. They took everything I had on me.”

“They’re gonna give it back, though,” Larry says. A statement like he can’t comprehend making it a question.

“Yeah,” Phoenix says, thinking of his keychain. Trying not to think about the bullet. “It’s personal belongings, not evidence.”

He wants to say, it’s him, tomorrow. I know you gave up caring, but I didn’t, and now I’m going to see him again. You can see that, can’t you?

All he does is rap lightly on the glass with the back of his knuckles, forcing Larry to flinch away out of reflex. “Seriously, Larry. Don’t worry about me. I saved you, didn’t I?”

(Cindy Stone hangs between them, another question never asked, and an answer that can’t be given without it.)

Say what you will about Larry—and Diego does, frequently—but he’s Phoenix’s oldest friend, and he never misses the mark proving that over and over. He grins, takes his whole face for the ride, squinting his eyes and showing off his teeth. “Yeah, you were fucking amazing, Nick. So don’t hold back just cuz it’s you, ‘kay?” He slaps Theo’s shoulder, nearly knocking him off the chair. “Or I’ll send him after you in prison.”

“Who’s he going to kill to get there?” Phoenix asks curiously.

Without looking at each other, both brothers reply, “Ant.”

“That fucking crow,” Theo adds under his breath.

Diego snorts all the way into a laugh, and just hearing the sound of it is enough to make Phoenix give in to his laughter, too.

Soon, he’ll have to go back to his cell and share it with a dead woman. Soon, he’ll have to put on his suit, and be taken to the courthouse in chains, and face down Miles Edgeworth for the first time in fifteen years, boys no longer in shape, one of them cast as an attempted murderer. And he will, he’ll do it gladly, because it’s better than the alternative. It’s better than an ocean, even if that small sliver of relief is starting to sound not that okay anymore. There so many things he still needs to do.

Soon. But for now, Diego is laughing beside him, and Larry and Theo are looking at him from across the glass with eyes he knows better than his own, and he feels warm all over. And it’s enough.

Chapter Text

What started as a ramshackle framework laid out in empty cardboard boxes and warped bursts of bubble wrap has long-since settled into its final composition. Bookshelves wear their books, desks spread over their chairs, their gleaming surfaces free of dust and cracks and wear; professionally standardised to their foundations. Little of it, despite building half of it, is Phoenix’s. Not the paintings on the walls nor the placement of the television—but he likes it that way. The Fey & Co. Law Offices belong to Mia, and it’s her palm lily inching its way out of the corner, her boyfriend lounging on the couch she naps on, her handwriting on the post-it notes stuck to case files, folded between pages, decorating the corners of his computer screen.

It's her hand that slaps his away from the cuff of his jacket, and her smile doing its best to form a scowl. “Stop fiddling with it. Honestly, Murphy’s more relaxed than you.”

“I’d hope so,” Phoenix says, flexing his fingers as he drops to a squat beside his dog and rubs under her chin. She sits smartly, but her tail wags furiously. “She’s the only one out of the two of us who’s actually graduated.”

Her official vest is a blue almost the same shade as his new suit. Where he tugs at the seams hung loose across his shoulders, fidgets with the waist of his pants, pulls at the collar buttoned to his neck, she shows herself off proudly. She looks ready to sit in his chair and start typing.

To be fair, she’s had a much longer training period to get used to it. Phoenix has only worn his suit for a cumulative total of about an hour and a half.

Mia gives up on her disapproving frown—it wasn’t fooling anyone, anyway—and laughs. “Let her out of that. We don’t have anyone coming in today. She may as well make herself at home.”

As soon as she’s wriggled the vest off into his grip, Murphy takes make yourself at home as an earnest invitation to give Phoenix’s face a thorough wash. He sputters and doesn’t try nearly as hard as he should to push her off. Once she’s satisfied, she shakes out her fur, settles herself at Diego’s feet and rolls over so he can rake his intangible fingers over her stomach.

Phoenix dries his cheeks with his suit sleeves and Mia raises her gaze heavenward. She doesn’t bother asking for help from anything up there. “Where’s your tie?”

“Oh.” He pulls it out his pocket—rolled up and crumpled at both ends. It’s a pleasing shade of pink, sunset kissed and more than a match for the blue, though the feeling of that exact shade flushing through his ears is hotter than he’d prefer. “I, um… don’t know how to tie a tie.”

Mia opens her mouth, seems to rethink, and closes it, only observing him quietly for a moment. “Your friend didn’t know either?”

“That definitely wasn’t the issue, gatita,” Diego drawls, holding his fingers aloft for Murphy to bat at with her paws.

Phoenix shrugs and dusts the fur off his pants before rising to his feet. “He didn’t explain it very well.”

Not for lack of trying. Diego explained four different knots and even demonstrated the process with his own tie, but Phoenix just kept twisting the ends together, and he was already running late with how long Diego spent dragging him around for the right suit. For someone who adamantly insists he hates thinking about clothes, Diego has a hell of a lot of opinions about them.

Mia sighs and sticks out her hand, wiggling her fingers when he hesitates. “Give me it. And take your jacket off.”

Phoenix does as he’s told. No sooner has he slung his jacket over the side of the couch than her hands are at his collar, folding it up. She’s shorter than him, leaning close to reach, soft where his bones are sharp, smooth everywhere he’s scarred. He holds his breath to keep himself still while she slings the tie around his neck and crosses the ends—then stops, a furrow in her brow.

“Here,” she says, letting the ends drop against his chest and instead picking up his hands.

A shiver chains itself to his spine. Fire spits between his knuckles. Her hands are so, so warm, holding gently where his threaten to flinch and crumble away. He still—he still isn’t sure what to do with it: this kindness Mia offers him. He wants, badly enough something inside his chest trembles with it, to let her hold on and thaw his cold, cold bones. But nothing is given for free, and Phoenix can’t afford something so lovely, no matter how much he wantswantswants—

And—

He knows.

Listen, he knows. He knows feeling like a bloody scrap of raw human every time someone touches him isn’t normal. It’s just—the only other kind comes from the dead constantly scraping and clawing away his skin, teeth shredding his throat, bones creaking against their joints. Murphy helps, but the last time another living person touched him (not the tingling, nascent sensations he gets from Diego, but actual touch) hasn’t been since Iris—

Well. Since Iris.

It was easier when Larry was in the country, always hanging off him, and he could spend time with the rest of the Butz family without feeling like a dog begging for scraps. The longer he spends in the rotting cold without a break, the more he feels himself falling upward; an endless sky of lights and the ocean breaking on his heels. Sometimes, he can’t even handle being touched for wanting it so badly.

(It’s the simple truth etched into the core of him: whenever someone reaches out, he can’t let them go.)

So he knows. But he can’t help it. Only breathe a dizzying rush of air and lock his knees and concentrate on not acting too insane.

All practical sense, Mia directs his hands to the ends of his tie and he grasps them with fumbling fingers. She snorts suddenly, and he really hopes she doesn’t misconstrue the renewed burning in his face.

Thankfully, all she says is, “Shit, wait. You’re left-handed, aren’t you?”

He unsticks his jaw. “Y-Yeah. Guess I need to swap the ends round?”

“Might actually make it easier on my end.”

She shows him he can adjust the skinny end to measure out the length of the final knot, then guides his hands through the motions Diego performed so quickly Phoenix barely had a chance to untangle them. It’s a simple enough process, really, and Phoenix is so blaringly present in his body he thinks he could get whacked over the head, lose all his memories, and still remember each pass and loop.

“Huh,” he says, tightening it up to his neck. Mia steps back with a critical eye, another grin hovering at the corners of her mouth. His fingers still sting. “That was a lot easier than whatever the hell my friend was trying to say.”

“Oi,” Diego says. It lacks his usual edge, corners aligning neatly with Phoenix’s in this matter above all else. “Not my fault you can’t follow basic instructions.”

Phoenix didn’t know trust could be so docile until he had Diego’s. He resists the urge to stick his tongue out.

“Now you’re starting to look like a lawyer,” Mia says. Her smile sticks the landing.

“Am I?” He runs a hand down the length of his tie. Breaks off to tug at his shirt cuffs.

She smacks his hand away again. “Stop it. You’ll ruin the shape.”

“The horror,” he replies dryly.

“Start coming here with a ruined shirt and I’ll show you horror,” Mia warns, gaze dropping and arms folding as she levels her first genuine unimpressed look of the morning at his feet. “Now you just need the shoes.”

Phoenix grimaces. He is actually wearing new shoes. His old sneakers finally fell apart at the soles and he needed something to wear while cycling and walking Murphy. These ones ride up his ankle, touching the ends of his pants, and he’s still breaking them in, but he’s earning enough nowadays that if he hadn’t already bought the suit they’d be the most expensive piece of clothing he owned. They’re definitely the most comfortable.

“Phoenix,” she says, wearily, “Lawyers can’t wear sneakers in a courtroom.”

“But I’m not in a courtroom right now,” he argues. “I’m not even a lawyer yet. I can just hide my feet under the desk so clients don’t know I’m not wearing Oxfords or whatever.”

“Oh, I absolutely want to be in the shop when you ask for Oxfords or whatever.”

“They’re shoes,” Phoenix says, in time and almost the exact same cadence Diego does it. Phoenix gestures at Murphy, halfway into a nap and swinging her paws in the air like she can outrun it. “Murphy will eat them whatever English place they’re named after.”

“Sorry, Your Honour,” Diego deadpans, raising his pitch to match Phoenix’s. “My dog ate my shoes.”

Phoenix swallows a laugh while Mia pinches the bridge of her nose. She learned that habit from Diego. “Just tell me you’re going to buy the damn shoes eventually.”

He’s looked up Oxfords-or-whatever a few times and discovered that, for a decent pair, it costs about two hundred dollars. That’s more than his suit and sneakers combined. He’ll have to skimp on food for a while to keep up his savings, and Diego will wear his eat-fucking-properly-you-damned-idiot glare the whole time.

Phoenix tugs at his tie, grinning as he just barely dodges Mia’s next smack.

“Yeah, Chief,” he says. “I’ll buy the damn shoes.”

Larry forgot the damn shoes.

And Phoenix can’t do up his fucking tie.

The shoes are partly his fault, admittedly. He forgot to mention them, and he keeps them in their box beside the sketchpads in the closet to stop Murphy chewing on them, so it’s not as if they’re easy to notice. And maybe he didn’t want to mention them, because he prefers the soft tread of his sneakers, the comfort of knowing he can run if he needs to. The few times he’s worn his Oxfords-or-whatever around the office, his feet were killing him by the end of the day. He was practically hopping through Larry’s trial just to get the blood circulating properly. And that’s also his fault, he never wears them so obviously they’re not broken in properly but—

But there’s blood on his sneakers.

Not a lot. He only noticed when he’d given up tying his laces and was tucking them in. A few drops, already rusted, barely visible. Mia’s or his—there’s no way of knowing.

He tries not to stare at them. The bailiffs have already been giving him uneasy looks, fleeting and embarrassed when he turns to meet them. There’s no point in inviting a closer inspection.

The tie he’s blaming exclusively on Redd White. Having a solid block of bandage in place of a hand isn’t conductive to tying knots, and though he’s managed to mangle his way to a few finished attempts, the end products were worse than no tie at all. His wrist gets in the way, his palm splinters, and the fabric slithers away from his fingers. He gives up for the thousandth time and slumps back into the couch.

Diego slides him a commiserating grin. “Should’ve let the Butz boys come.”

His own tie, usually hanging slack, is cinched around his collar, and his sleeves, usually rolled up to the elbow, are buttoned around his wrists. He always dresses like a lawyer, even down to the shoes. Phoenix thinks he might actually like wearing them. It seems the right brand of suffering for his kind of hell.

Phoenix barely moves his mouth when he talks. Diego’s close enough he only has to lean a little closer to hear. “You think they know how to tie a tie?”

“Ha, point taken.” Diego tilts his head over the back of the couch, stretching his limbs like a predator preparing to hunt. Dressed like a lawyer, maybe, but with canines that bite and earrings that flash and dark eyes that stalk. “Shame Charlie stayed behind.”

“Yeah. She could’ve lent me a hand.”

Diego’s grin widens, ready to crunch through bone.

Phoenix’s ears are bare. They took his earrings along with everything else, including his blood-soaked shirt, but they missed his sneakers. They gave him back his laces and handed over his tie. In fifteen—ten—five?—minutes he’s going to stand in front of Miles again. He brushes his thumb over his attorney badge. The metal is skin-warm and tantalisingly solid. His collar digs into his neck and his jacket still sits loose at his shoulders. He is alone. He isn’t. He’s going to stand in court again. Again and again and again. Lawyers can’t wear sneakers in a courtroom, but—

He curls his toes, watching the blood crease. The sunlight is watery through the window, misted blue, and he can taste it in the air: a storm’s coming soon. He hopes it’s big enough to rock the city to sleep.

“Loud again?” Diego asks, voice so soft Phoenix nearly misses it under the pounding in his chest.

Like calling the ocean a little wet, Phoenix wants to say, dry as dust and with a wry grin twisted up to match. He might have gotten it out any other day. There’s always a crack where the horror is so absurdly unfair it becomes funny, where seeing people’s eyes go wide and their laughter burst out of them helps him breathe a little easier, and if the only one laughing is himself, at least he can think about the next stupid thing to blurt out instead of turning around to confront the fear devouring him spine-first.

There’s more than one reason people don’t look over their shoulder in the dark. For most, it’s because they don’t know what they’ll find looking back. Phoenix knows exactly what’s waiting for him back there. Much better to keep looking forward and up.

(There’s something else he’s supposed to be doing.

There’s something—)

But, sometimes, head raised, he has to shut his eyes. Sometimes, he’s just too tired, and all the dead voices, the ceaseless screaming noise of them all, makes his head pound so bad he feels like he’s going to throw up. Or he does throw up. Other times, it’s too distracting, he’s always getting distracted, but he can’t because he has a dog and a half-ghost who need him here, and a boss who’s relying on him, trusting him, and the thought of letting them down makes his chest so tight he has to clamp his hands over his ears to make it

quiet

make it

go away

make it

STOP.

The third reason, luckily, hasn’t been a problem for a very long time, and the main culprit of that is sitting right beside him. The accessory was nearly murdered a day and a half ago.

(There have been stretches, however, in the past, long, long stretches, where he’s realised he can’t remember the last time someone spoke to him just because.

Loneliness is solitude with a problem.

But if the horror is inside you, how do you get it out?)

Diego and Mia don’t make things quiet, exactly. They just make it a little easier to remember how to live through it.

“No worse than usual,” Phoenix replies, eventually. Then, because it’s been years since he could lie to Diego, “I don’t think I’d be able to do this without you.”

“Not yet, maybe,” Diego hums, and threads his fingers through Phoenix’s spikes. “Aren’t you lucky I’m still here?”

As if there’s an answer to that Phoenix wouldn’t have to carve out of his chest.

He has half a moment to enjoy it before the door opens. What walks through nearly kills him anyway.

He’s on his feet before his mind can rebel against the action, rational thought screeching in five racing heartbeats too slow, and the girl stares at him, startled eyes too bright and features too young. It should be more obvious in the light than it was in the dark with his eyes full of a dying woman, but something inside him, buried in pieces, still cracks further.

It isn’t her. Why would it be her? Her hair is the same shade, and purple and red trail off her in the traditional training robes of an acolyte, and she has the beads hung around her neck as well, but—

But the stone in the middle is glittering sunrise orange instead of ripe, fruit-bearing pink. Her clothes are a different style, her hair as well, and her irises a few shades lighter; summer night and day. And she’s years too young, that would be enough by itself even if everything else was the same—which it isn’t, and never was. 

Phoenix feels his ears growing hotter the longer they stand there staring at each other. He may as well hang his tie over them to give it something useful to do.

The second thing he ever says to Maya Fey is, “Sorry.”

Just as before, it spurs her into motion, drawing her all the way to the coffee table. It huddles between them awkwardly, wishing it could be anywhere else. From that careful distance, she surveys him: she takes in all the clumsily stitched together parts of him and he realises he has no idea what she sees.

“Why?” she asks, blunted and a little raspy. “Why are you sorry?”

He does not say, I thought you were someone else. He does not say, I almost didn’t run fast enough, and if I hadn’t, I don’t think I’d have bothered coming here.

He does not say, How long do you have?

“I don’t think Mia intended for us to meet like that. Like this.” He says it downwards, right to his sneakers. “She’s going to be okay, isn’t she? Larry told me yesterday that—that she woke up?”

Diego told him, too, this morning. He stays quiet, still sitting, a steady, buzzing presence brushing through Phoenix’s knee.

“Y-Yeah,” Maya says. Clears her throat and tries again. “Yeah. She’s not very—lucid? They keep saying it should clear up in a couple days, but… she doesn’t remember what happened. And… And she couldn’t come here.”

“That’s—not why I was asking.” He forces his head back up. Red crawls along the corners of her eyes, the bags beneath almost as heavy as his own. He hasn’t looked in a mirror long enough to be sure how a smile sits on his bruised face, but he tries one on all the same. “She’ll be okay. She’ll smack us for being so worried the first chance she gets.”

Her mouth trembles. She breathes big, squaring her shoulders and fumbling for something tucked into her sash. “Your friends, Larry and Teddy. They said you were asking about my phone. Or—Theo. Or Teddy?”

Phoenix stares at the phone. At her fingers curled protectively around it, barring it from his reach. “Did he tell you to call him Theo?”

“Oh. Um, yeah.”

“Then he’s Theo. Sorry about them,” he adds. “They’re a little… They mean well. Even if sometimes they’re a bit too much. Or a lot too much. Theo definitely gets a kick out of it. Larry’s just an idiot.”

She laughs, quick and sudden, surprised by it enough she ducks her head and fiddles with the strap on her phone. “I—I should thank you. For letting me stay at yours.” She peers up at him from under her fringe. “I really like your dog.”

“Yeah,” he says, the strained edges of his smile softening. “I like her a lot, too.”

“She slept next to me,” she says. “I know I wasn’t supposed to let her. Larry and Theo told me—they told me—” Her words break inside her mouth and she presses a hand over it to keep them from scattering. When they squeeze their way out anyway, they do so mangled beyond recognition. “They said you didn’t do it.”

Phoenix thinks of his suit, ill-fitting as it feels despite how many times he’s worn it. He thinks about the badge pinned to his chest, and the not-quite-dead man sitting behind him. He thinks about a brand-new sketchbook left on his desk on the same day every year, and the dried blood on his sneakers, and—and after. He’s never had the luxury of imagining an after. There’s too much now, the afters fleeting things standing between him and what he won’t let go of. But—

But Diego. But Mia. But losing, but winning, but law. But this monster of want inside him, feral and howling, baring its teeth and breathing flame. Clawing its way towards an after that maybe, possibly, finally has him in it.

For a little while, at least, if not forever.

Just long enough to finally get his breath back.

“I’d never hurt her.” He flexes his left hand and doubles down, burning his desperation in the pain, raking it across his vocal cords. “Theo was right about what he said. The way he said it.”

It’s only when Diego curls a hand around his that Phoenix realises how badly he’s trembling.

“You know,” Maya says, when he’s sure he’s going to shake to pieces in front of her, “When she woke up, the first thing she asked about was you. She talks about you all the time.”

Phoenix swallows. “D-Does she?”

“She says you’re brilliant.” Maya smiles. It’s watery and uneven and barely holding together, but a smile all her own. “A real ‘strike fear into the hearts of evil’ type.”

Phoenix chokes on his next breath, rocking against the stillness of it all the way down to his bloody shoes. “Th-That’s…” he starts, haltingly, and finds nothing to finish it.

Maya’s grin grows edges, sharpened like her sister’s, but with a playful slant offering a flash of the girl she’s maybe supposed to be. “She also said to give you three years before you’re really worth it.”

Phoenix scrapes his fingers through his hair, nails catching along his scalp as he risks a glance at Diego. Diego tilts his hand back and forth in a see-saw motion.

“That—” Phoenix starts, again, forcing his lungs to work and trying for a third time. “That sounds more like her.”

“I can hear it in her voice when she calls,” Maya says, thumb swiping down the buttons on her phone, her arm wrapping around her middle. “The place she worked at before… she did her best, but I could tell it was never what she really wanted. With her own office, and you there… she sounds so much happier.” She lifts her chin. Thrusts her phone out without warning, leaning over the coffee table and nearly smacking him in the chest with it. “So—So don’t you dare lose in there today, okay?”

His hand is still shaking a little as he takes the phone. But his voice is steady when he promises, “I won’t.”

“Defendant!”

One of the bailiff’s snaps so suddenly Phoenix nearly drops the fucking thing in surprise.

“Court is about to begin. Proceed to the courtroom at once.”

“Finally,” Diego hisses. He flickers to his feet, a jumpstart like a shot of espresso. “Now or never with that tie, pajarito.”

“Shit,” Phoenix mutters, shoving Maya’s phone in his pocket and grabbing uselessly at the dangling ends. There’s not much more he can try that he hasn’t already attempted. Apparently, he can train a courthouse dog and pass a bar exam, but all it takes is a piece of glass and he can’t tie a damn tie.

(Here he is, with his rumpled suit and his blood-stained sneakers and one half of his hands tugging at a strip of fabric around his neck. Here she is, all scrap and edges and spark, offering more of everything he doesn’t know how to ask for, and even less how to return.

Hold your breath, Death whispers, clicking its beak and tilting its head to cover itself in a pitch-black smile. You’ll love her for what she does next.

Because what she does next is—)

“Wait.”

“Get a move on,” the bailiff snaps.

“And I said wait,” Maya snaps right back, ferocious enough it makes Phoenix flinch. She turns back to him and motions to his tie. “Do you want me to do that for you?”

Phoenix glances down at her robes. “Do you know how?”

“Well… no.” She moves around the coffee table, standing close enough to reach out and touch. “But how hard can it be?”

He makes himself breathe. In and out. “Just—give me your hand for a second.”

She holds the knot steady while he folds the tie over and up, her knuckles resting warmly on his breastbone as he tucks the wide end through to finish it. Before he gets the chance, she takes the tie and tightens it up to his neck. Grabs his collar and straightens out the crinkles he’d yanked into it in his frustration. He has to bend his knees so she can reach.

“There,” she says as he straightens, his hand tracing the back of his neck where her thumb briefly caught. “Now you look like a lawyer.”

He brushes his badge again as he moves his hand back down, so warm it seems more like an extension of himself. He wants to believe that. He really, really does. “Ready to strike fear into the hearts of evil.”

Maya laughs. She matches him teeth for teeth, just as wild, orange dancing across her skin.

“Prove it, then,” she tells him. Dares him to, really.

So how the hell could he possibly go in there and do anything different?

He’s lost count of how many times he’s been in a courtroom by now. Twice as a lawyer, third as a defendant, and so many more watching from the gallery, standing at Mia’s side, helping Murphy do her job. He’s grown used to the rhythm of it: the creaking whine of wood and the shuffle of feet never managing to muffle themselves; the scent of floor polish and sweat and something distinct to old buildings, like age itself is heaving a stale sigh into the foundations. Yellow lights buzz down, valiantly staving off the stormy sky as it settles its weight on the skylights, its pressure seeping through the glass.

He takes his place behind the defence’s bench without anyone demanding what the hell he thinks he’s doing. The defendant’s chair sits empty and confused, the bailiff in charge of it doing his utmost to make sure it doesn’t get up to any funny business. Above, the gallery fills, law students and press and curious spectators jostling between seats like movie-goers in a theatre.

Their ghosts following them like solid smoke.

It’s always strange being under their scrutiny. Logically (in some nebulous, half-formed way), he knows it’s fair access, that it’s better to have some form of public attention holding them to their word, but… they have no attachment to this. No stakes. When it’s done, whatever the outcome, they will simply go home.

So many things have ended here. So many things will begin. The surface of his desk gleams, but they can’t erase the nicks and scratches worn into it from all the fights he can only guess the toll of.

Memory does not forget us.

History already has.

He was sixteen. He was twenty-one. He is twenty-three. Time, it feels, has made no difference, a thousand scattered shards of the same reflection, crystalline and endless. He can see some of it, and he knows what image he wants it to form, but he has no idea which parts make up the whole.

He knows this: it’s not a basement, it’s not an alley, and it’s not a warehouse.

It’s Miles Edgeworth, standing on the opposite side of the court: burgundy and black and white and silver; a stoplight smeared in long-exposure streaks, bathed in shadows and rain. There’s a flicker in those mercury eyes as they meet blue and brown, a sharply prodding sweep cataloguing the bruise around Phoenix’s eye and the bandage on his hand, lingering on the old scar splitting across his mouth. Searching for other traces of harm. Fifteen years haven’t made Miles any more subtle than he was when they were boys.

Phoenix holds himself still under the inspection, waits for that cool stare to return his gaze again. Half-wonders if the whole courtroom can hear the thundering beat of his heart. See it pulsing inside his jugular.

Tell me, he thinks, more than a little desperately. I promised you I’d be here. What are you going to do about it?

Miles doesn’t look away. There’s a stone-edge set to his jaw, tension creaking atop his shoulders like the weight of a mountain, and yet he holds himself cool and crisp and composed. There’s nothing of the warmth and familiarity that was once them. Miles and Phoenix. Red and Blue. Part of a matching set, do not separate.

No. Not anymore. Not ever, probably.

The pale slash of Miles’ mouth tells Phoenix all he needs to know—what he’s always known, really:

Miles is a lawyer.

Phoenix is a mess that needs cleaning up.

(But there’s still only one way Miles can hurt him that would ever matter.)

Someone coughs. A door slams shut. There’s a jangling of keys. Phoenix’s gaze is drawn to the noise, instinctual and wary. When he looks back, Miles has his head down and is busy arranging his papers.

Phoenix would do the same if he had any, just to work away the restless, buzzing energy revving up his blood. It’s still not anxiety. Not anything close to fear. It’s more like that feeling he gets when he cycles with Murphy to the tracks by the beach, lets her off the lead, sets his feet on the pedals and prepares to match the speed of an Australian Shepherd. Or what he used to feel on the starting line, his bare feet wrapped, the sun beating on his shoulders and everything hushed in anticipation for the signal fire. As if his whole life had been leading up to the flinch before the crack, the breath before the countdown hit zero.

All he has is Maya’s phone, which is more than he had when he used to run. But forced into the stillness of a courtroom, it means he has no way to avoid the other set of eyes on him, watching silently over Miles’ shoulder. The soft grey he remembers replaced by misty white.

Gregory Edgeworth stands behind his son, looking, at the very least, a little more interested in Phoenix’s presence. Whether it’s recognition or whatever broken thing inside Phoenix that draws ghosts to him like moths to a flame, he doesn’t know. He never got the chance as a boy to speak to Gregory before Miles left and took his dead father with him.

Never could explain that for all the ways he ruined him, Damien Wright did not hit him.

(Nor that he wishes, sometimes, or has wished, has torn through his skin and beaten his fists against walls and chewed it through his screams, that he did.)

Now, he does his best to catch Gregory’s eye. Watches a frown dip across the man’s brow, an errant flash of light catching the rim of his glasses.

Diego sticks a finger in Phoenix’s ear before he can follow through.

“Eyes on the prize, pup,” he chides. “We’re not doing this by halves. Keep your focus on what’s in front of you until you reach it, then you can look to what’s waiting beyond. Hell, I’ll go over there and drag him in front of you myself.”

Phoenix ducks his head. “Mia,” he whispers.

Diego has one hand in his pocket, the other resting on the desk, fingers drumming a silent beat atop the wood. Phoenix would bet money he’s itching to wrap them around a mug of coffee. His gaze is dark and heavy with it.

“Maya, too,” he says, nodding his head towards the gallery above the prosecutor’s bench. “Don’t start breaking your promises now. It’s not what we do.”

Because Maya’s still here. She’s sitting right at the front, gripping the balustrade, made tiny by the distance and size of the hall, yet utterly unmissable in her unique clothes. She grins in response to his stare and mouths three words, miming fists to make sure he gets the message.

“What did she say?” Diego asks, squinting.

Phoenix manages a desert scorched smile. The words come out hungry for more. “Knock ‘em dead.”

Diego’s laugh echoes, turning every dead eye to him. “Ha! She’s something else, isn’t she? Go on then, boy. Let’s go and show that prosecutor brat what you’re made of.” He leans forward, teeth showing sharp and proud. “Let’s show him something to be afraid of.”

Show him what you’re made of.

Where do you even start? How do you walk towards your yesterday without falling into everything you once were? How do you find home without finding all the places you’re not supposed to be first?

What are you, if you’re not this?

Go on then, boy.

Phoenix tilts his head a little to the side. Two pairs of grey eyes twitch across him. His crooked lips taste of gun smoke and metal.

Tell me.

Was time all it took to make you afraid of me, Miles?

“Mr Wright,” the judge says, then pauses. He always seems to take his time looking at Phoenix when he gets the chance, as if measuring him up. “Are you sure you’re up for this?”

Phoenix just tries to keep his mouth from twisting in distaste. “Yes, Your Honour. I’ll be defending myself.”

Easy enough to say. Harder to learn the rules, press the right statements, hit all the contradictions he can—but not impossible. Giving it all his heart and lungs and sweat and blood is as natural as the rain falling. He doesn’t know how to be anything other than what he is. He doesn’t know what that means. He doesn’t know how he stands it.

This is The Problem of Words, Phoenix has found, capital letters and all: some things, you say them aloud and you make them not true. Some things, you say them aloud and it’s the only way they can be true.

“The prosecution has been ready for a while, Your Honour,” Miles says, and god, the truth is, just like that, Phoenix is a boy again. He’s eight years old, almost nine, freshly picked berries smeared around his mouth, summer water on his skin and bullet metal in his pocket. “Shall we get on with things?”

Something inside his chest aches.

He knows he’s not giving the scruffy detective Miles calls to the stand his due attention, but for once, it might actually work in his favour. What little makes it past the river rushing through his ears has his heart beating inside his tongue, hot and furious as Mia’s near-death is crunched and stomped all over by outright conjecture.

Everything hinges on these testimonies. Without evidence, Phoenix and Diego don’t have an uphill battle so much as a mountain war, rocks trembling beneath the carnage and one wrong move enough to slip and send Phoenix falling, with no way for Diego to catch him.

Fire licks at his feet. He bounces on the balls, like a runner preparing to kneel before the starting line. Maybe it’s not the shoes that are the problem. Maybe it’s just this room, and the flames it awakens inside him, and the familiar hollow pain in his stomach, so much deadlier than anything that has ever broken his skin.

When the detective tries to tell him he dragged Mia out the office—the detective’s words—in an attempt to hide the body, it’s no wonder he loses his temper.

“She isn’t dead,” Phoenix interrupts, ignoring Diego’s glare. The detective (what was his name?) stutters to a halt. “And why would I carry her all the way down if I was trying to kill her?”

“I don’t know,” Miles replies, snatching all of Phoenix’s awareness again, stealing all the words out his mouth. “Why did you?”

They’ve found their way back to that childhood rhythm, apparently.

“Down, boy,” Diego growls, fingers hitched to the back of Phoenix’s collar. “First rule: don’t start the prosecution on something they didn’t ask for. You’ll get your chance.”

“I must admit, Mr Edgeworth, I also find it a little odd,” the judge is saying over Diego. “Mr Wright’s actions seem more indicative of trying to help than harm.”

Miles doesn’t baulk. Instead he shrugs and spreads his hands. “There are two possible reasons. Mia Fey’s younger sister was scheduled to meet her and the defendant at the time the incident took place. He was aware she would be arriving and was attempting to hide the severity of the crime.” He sets his fingers on his desk, a sharp tap underlining his words. “Or, more likely, he noticed the witness.”

“You have a witness?” the judge asks. His whole beard fluffs up in sharp interest.

“Of course, Your Honour. This poor, innocent girl witnessed the crime with her own eyes,” Miles says. He announces it, really, lifting his chin to address the whole court.

Not a mountain, then. A bottomless pit—no, that’s not right, either. Miles’ hands are too soft for the digging. He lets his vernacular do all the dirty work, standing at the edge of the trench, letting them fall and fill it, watching Phoenix sink beneath.

Phoenix bites his tongue as the court responds in kind.

The judge slams his gavel to silence the murmurs. Gregory shifts, folds his arms then places his hands on his hips. Tugs a handkerchief out his pocket and delicately wipes at the blood bubbling around his lips.

He’s nervous, Phoenix realises.

Trust a dead man to have a better idea of the truth than an entire court dedicated to it.

Phoenix simmers in the heat and swell of it, the heaving weight of warm bodies tucked together too much for the cold hovering at their backs. Condensation piles against the skylights. Vapour threatens his teeth as the ghosts—dragged here by their living memorials—mutter and argue and whisper to themselves. Phoenix is always cold. Shaking and sweating in the cavern of his suit. Gregory’s eyes bore into him and he cannot look back. There are three lawyers here and a boy trying to scream.

Tell me, he thinks, toeing the line between begging like a child and pleading like a man on his knees as April May takes the stand. Miles looks at her, and Phoenix can see no difference. Please, just tell me if you’re afraid of me, too.

“Witness, state your name, please.”

“April May,” she says, offering a cheerful wink for flavour. “At your service!”

“Since when did this include audience participation?” Phoenix chokes out under the clamour of the gallery and the judge’s gavel.

He needs to calm down.

“I did try to tell you,” Diego says, bitterly amused, but with a fist curled tight. Remembering, maybe, another woman who charmed the court and left him for dead on the basement cafeteria floor. “We’re in for a ride with this little señorita. Try not to get thrown off.”

Phoenix grins. “Try not to bleed everywhere.”

Diego’s shoulders slant, and as the court quietens, Phoenix listens to him breathe. There are too many people watching. He can’t reach out, the way Diego always does for him, and let Diego measure each one against the palm of his hand.

So, because he can’t help himself either, he returns to Miles’ waiting gaze and goes right back to drowning.

Once the minutia is out of the way, Miles is happy to grab his ankles and drag him deeper. “And could you identify the man you saw?”

“Well, of course!” May turns her eyes to Phoenix. There’s no wink for him, though he recognises that coy satisfaction, as if she’s taken a delicious bite and can’t wait to go in for seconds. “He’s standing right there in that cheap suit.”

Phoenix forces a bland smile. “We haven’t formally met.”

“I’m sure the pleasure’s all yours.”

“I’d say yes, but you’re doing a much better job of faking it.”

The poison that corrodes her smile could put certain butterflies to shame. “I’m not convinced you’re able to tell.”

“If we could return to the point,” Miles interjects, a ragged undertone in his voice that makes it sound longsuffering. “Without the defendant trying to make a joke out of it.”

“Trying to?” Phoenix mutters, because he knows Diego will hear it.

Sure enough, Diego swipes him through the head. Too late for it. His laughter is already settling along the wood and marble walls. “Who’s the lawyer here?”

Phoenix flicks him an offended glance.

“Three years early,” Diego reminds him. “Maybe four if you don’t start paying attention.”

It’s not a particularly pleasant scene to tune back into. May isn’t graceful with her words (or her demeanour, or much about herself in general), but she doesn’t need to be. She isn’t the one on trial. Her words barely even belong to her, and it’s always easier performing someone else’s words in place of your own.

“Well, Your Honour?” Miles asks, cold and controlled, like a man chipped out of ice, out of diamond, and for the thousandth time Phoenix wonders who cut out his tongue and stitched their own in its stead.

(But then, he already knows, doesn’t he?)

“Oi,” Diego says, just that, and Phoenix jolts to attention.

“Hold it! I still have my—” he says, smacks his hands on the desk and almost blacks out when his left hand erupts. “Cross-examination,” he finishes through gritted teeth, attempting to pitch his voice lower than the pain, with dubious success.

“I can assure you your injuries will garner you no pity,” Miles says, brows lowered, jaw clenched.

He’s looked at Phoenix like that before.

(Before, before, before.

“My dad doesn’t hurt me.”

“Someone does.”)

“I don’t remember asking for it,” Phoenix says. He keeps his face entirely blank. “Your Honour, I have a right to cross-examine the witness.”

The judge sighs, holding his beard steady in his hand. “Yes, of course.”

Miles scoffs. His voice hardly fits around it. “You’re Miss Fey’s understudy, are you not? Of course you’d follow in her footsteps, her cowardly way of finding faults in perfectly good testimonies—”

“Miles,” Gregory says, he speaks for the first time, and that is as Phoenix remembers it: mellow and smooth and deep as the hole fired into his heart.

Pain flares in Phoenix’s palm again, bone-deep aftershocks rattling up his arm. He realises he’s trying to clench his fist around something that hasn’t been there for a long time, finding only ragged cracks. His mask splits. “You want to call someone a coward, Edgeworth, try saying it to their face,” he snaps. “In fact, never mind that. Mia’s sister is sitting right above you. Show some respect, for her sake, if you can’t muster up the energy for Mia’s.”

“I think that’s enough, Mr Wright,” the judge says, and he’s right, because Miles flinches, his glare hot and heavy. Phoenix replies with a snarling grin. “You may begin your cross-examination.”

Say what you want about me, Phoenix thinks, wishing he could step closer, move beyond the benches holding them to their marks on opposite sides of the court and look as closely as he needs to. The way he could, once upon a time. Call me a murderer if you want. It may as well be true. There are dead people who would tell you it is. But don’t be a monster just because everyone says you are.

Tell a man he’s a demon and what else could he try to be? It’s not Miles’ fault.

But it’s someone’s.

It’s always someone’s fault.

(Tell a boy he isn’t human and what will he grow into?

Is it fear? Is it?)

May makes it easy, a contradiction they simply have to retrace. The Thinker clock is dented, stained the same way as Phoenix’s sneakers. It festers through Diego’s words, turning them as bitter as the coffee he badgers Phoenix to drink, as sharp as the knife that once sat in Valerie Hawthorne’s spine, as ashen as the flames that burned down the first home he ever had. Three years asleep have done nothing to dull his edges. Where Phoenix might fumble, hesitate, allow himself to get distracted, Diego turns his chains into strings and drags him forward.

It's weird hearing Mia’s voice when the time comes to play the recording. Her voice is tinny and small through the speaker, little more than an imprint of the woman she is. A chrysanthemum made of tissue paper, shrivelling in on itself. He has to set the phone down to stop it shaking out from between his fingers.

Maya is staring at him. The entire courtroom is—living and dead alike.

Diego’s hand rests at the base of his neck, swiping his thumb in slow arcs over the skin. Phoenix almost can’t take the heat it inspires, how kindly it’s done, and he ducks his head when the pressure grows too much.

He knows what it looks like when someone has already made up their mind. He’s known from the moment he walked in here, bruised and frayed and still struggling to push the dreams from his head, that a noose had already been slipped around his neck.

It really isn’t Miles’ fault. Like the water that drowns, Phoenix has spent his entire life choosing the path of least resistance.

Trust: that’s what it always comes down to. What Diego and Mia always tell him. Trust in your client. Believe in them to the end. He doesn’t have a lot of practice believing in himself, but for Diego, for Maya, for Mia—for when he doesn’t know how to be brave on his own, for them, he will be. Whether or not he can do this is a luxury for semantics.

He just has to.

“You know what to do,” Diego murmurs.

The recording ends. Phoenix shakes himself like he’s coming up for air, like a dog shaking of its collar, and bares his teeth at April May.

“Well, Miss May? Care to explain how else you could have known the weapon was a clock?”

And—

Yeah. There it is. Just like it always is, eventually.

“What’s it to you, porcupine-head!?” she snaps, that old, old anger people always drag up to convince themselves they’re not afraid. “That stupid clock doesn’t matter. You did it! And you should die for it!”

Phoenix’s smile doesn’t so much as twitch. He’s heard worse from Diego for putting milk in his coffee. “This stupid clock, as you put it, matters because it was used to assault Mia Fey. It matters because only two were ever made, and the one that isn’t here is in police custody. It matters because the only place you could have heard it was in the Fey and Co. Law Offices.”

“Are you insinuating Miss May was present at the Fey and Co. Law Offices?” Miles interrupts, and for the first time, he matches Phoenix’s smile. It’s not a nice smile. Not the rarely gifted thing from their childhood, like happiness was a risk, but one he was willing to take. This is a bent, malleable smirk, moulded out of his face by uncaring hands. It makes him look like a smug bastard, and Phoenix is struck by an upsurge of boyish desire to wipe it off his face by any means necessary. “The last hope of a flailing amateur, I suppose. She already has a rock-solid alibi for the time of the incident. Or are you also willing to insist she can be in two places at once?”

“No, I’m not saying that. She’s too short.”

“Precisely, she’s—” Miles hesitates as the words sink in. “She’s too what?”

“Short,” Phoenix repeats. “The person I saw that night was a lot taller. He was also a man. That’s why I carried Mia out of there, if you’re still curious about that. Turns out there was a secret third option.”

There’d be silence if it wasn’t for Diego snickering beside him. Phoenix tucks his hands in his pockets and squints up at the skylights, waiting for the storm to break. A flash of dark movement steals his attention; a crow walking down one of the frames. He feels the claws pinching his shoulder.

That fucking crow.

“Someone else was at the scene?” the judge demands, robes billowing as he leans forward.

“That would be very convenient for you, wouldn’t it?” Miles snaps, slamming his hand down on his desk.

The crow takes off in fright. Phoenix tilts his head at Miles. “Not really. He punched me in the face and tried to kill my boss.”

There’s that fire again, blistering up the ice wall. Steam should be coming out Miles’ ears. He reigns himself in with obvious difficulty. “At least keep your argument on track. What does any of this have to do with Miss May knowing the statue was a clock?”

Phoenix’s train of thought crashes to a stop.

Diego picks it up and carries on through the carnage. “Ha, you tell me. You’re the one with a wiretap in evidence.”

Right. That’s what they were doing.

“Oh, dear,” the judge sighs. “Mr Wright, I presume you have an explanation for this?”

“Not on me, Your Honour,” Phoenix says. “But Mr Edgeworth does.”

It’s the first time, Phoenix thinks, he’s truly caught Miles off-guard since the start of the trial. And there are so many things he should be thinking about (he’s in court, Mia’s in hospital, he’s being accused of her attempted murder), but this is bright, this is yellow, this is blue and red and sky and summer. He can feel the metal railing scraping against his hands, the awkward lurch in his midriff as he teeters for balance on shoes a size too big, water splashing and flowing cleanly beneath him, and Larry’s laughter lifting him into the air. Miles is still on the ground, but from high enough up, it’s all a matter of perspective.

Phoenix reaches out his hand. Miles takes it. He holds it tight enough he doesn’t let go, even when they hit the water, even though it leaves them struggling, floundering. This time, and just this time, he holds on through it. They swim. They swallow water and laugh. They suck their childhood right out of the river.

He wonders if Miles still remembers that day after the barbeque at Larry’s house. Wonders if he still thinks about the bruises, the sparks of a shattered classroom light, and the dead woman he never knew that came in the dark and watched him sleep.

I’m not scared, he’d told Phoenix, and Phoenix’s dead mother whispered,

Liar.

She said it with a smile.

Her blood dripped down her back.

Phoenix kept looking at Miles so he didn’t have to look at the hole in her head and reached out his hand. He doesn’t remember when Miles let it go.

Here, now (there’s something else he’s supposed to be doing), he sets his feet firmly on the floor, the tread of his sneakers gripping the marble. He wants to run. He’s so ready to move it hurts to stay standing still. But, for the first time in a very long time, he wants to run towards.

“So what?” May is saying, desperately searching for her lines. “I-I mean, isn’t this a murder trial? What does tippity-tapping have to do with anything?”

“Complicity and conspiracy,” Diego replies. Phoenix doesn’t quite manage to relish in it the same way. “And for that final bitter twist, proof of malice.”

“Your Honour, this is ridiculous!” Miles says. Phoenix thinks he can hear his nails dragging down the desk. He’s always hated losing. “The defence has no evidence to back up his claims. While it is my greatest displeasure to admit the witness was tapping the victim’s phone, that is a separate crime. Her testimony still stands!”

“He isn’t going to stop.”

Phoenix doesn’t jump. He’s had nearly twenty-four years to learn to keep his flinches chained around the hollows of his throat.

Gregory stands inches to the side of him and he won’t look round. All the way on the other side of the room, Miles looks strange without his father behind him. Alone in a way he never has been, never can know he isn’t.

“You know he can’t,” Gregory says, quieter. “You know why, don’t you?”

“We’re a little busy at the moment,” Diego snaps, slotting himself between them. He pushes his hand through Gregory’s bullet hole for good measure.

Phoenix sees it out the corner of his eye and grimaces all the way through his demand for the bellboy’s testimony. Shakes out his hand and pretends it’s the pain breaking his voice.

“He can hear us, can’t he? He can see us,” Gregory says, unmoved, something shaking through his ephemeral body. Something like wonder. Something like panic. His glasses slip to the end of his nose. He doesn’t push them back up. “How? Why? And you—” He peers over the metal frames at Diego. “What are you?”

And—

It doesn’t matter, in that moment, who might see it, or what they might think. Phoenix turns his head enough to look Gregory in the eyes, burned bloody, blisters on his bones, smoke in his lungs, and—

And Gregory takes a step back.

But one look is all Phoenix has time for. He forces his gaze back to the living, meeting mercury light and clinging before the fire can leave him as ash.

“I can take care of myself, pup,” Diego mutters.

“Mr Wright, I’d appreciate it if you’d stop glaring like that,” the judge says.

Phoenix doesn’t dare open his mouth. He knows the wrong name would come roaring out.

Incredibly, impossibly, Miles still meets him head on. His arms were folded, but now they unfurl, and he takes the dying embers of Phoenix’s rage while they still have the chance to catch and flare anew, his own eyes smouldering darkly.

“Very well, if the defence is so eager,” Miles says slowly, letting Phoenix watch the shape of every word form. “I’m sure you’ll agree, however, Your Honour, that this trial has gone on long enough. If the defence can’t find an issue with the bellboy’s testimony, nor provide any real evidence of this alleged ‘other man’, there’s no need to further drag out these proceedings.”

“Fucking brat,” Diego growls, revelling in every percussive beat somewhere to the side. “You need an ultimatum to win you may as well lie on the floor and ask someone to carry you across the finish line.”

In the harsh light, Miles wears his red like the glow of a dying star, skin pale, hair a vapour-threaded shock of thundercloud, eyes silver and silver and silver. Bleeding across the space between them.

“You can see that for yourself,” he says. Liquid mercury replaces the flames in Phoenix’s veins. “Can’t you, Mr Wright?”

And it’s this: Phoenix hates being called by his father’s name. It perforates his eardrums, claws at his throat, it’s ugly ugly ugly. Nobody says it the right way. They don’t hold it with the spit and teeth it deserves. Not even Miles with all his frozen edges and wet clay smirk.

But the world feels fifteen feet smaller, the wall behind him reaching for his shoulder blades, and he’d hold himself against it willingly if it meant Miles would look at him like that, and keep on looking at him. Calling him any name he wants.

(He won’t look back, but that means he can’t ever be sure what pieces of himself are still there. Not without someone else running straight at him.)

He can see the thought in Miles’ face, then. And it isn’t fear.

Jump, Wright. I dare you.

He hopes Miles can see the answer in his coiled, molten frame.

Catch me if you can, Miles.

Mia told him once, in this very courthouse, it’s not always about the evidence itself, but how you present it. In a way, Miles is right, just not the way he means it: the wiretap is irrelevant. Like any question, it’s asked not for the thing itself, but for the space it creates waiting for an answer.

What does scare you, Miles? Phoenix wonders, as the bellboy gives him what he needs, as Miles recoils and protests, as Gregory reaches out and sinks his fingers through Miles’ shoulder and looks so, so sad. Are you afraid of something? For something? Where do you begin to tell the difference?

He thinks he should be angry Miles hid White’s presence from the court—Diego sure as hell doesn’t bother staying quiet about it—but all he can muster is weary resignation.

This is how it always goes: his fists around empty air, his body starving, and the rest of the world eats its fill. He’s almost glad, in a way, that Miles has lived a whole life without him. Demons must be burned for every sin they commit, and Miles’ sins are so, so ordinary.

He’s only human, after all.

Phoenix is little. He is want in a bloody-sneakered boy that does not deserve it, and someday that monster is going to tear itself loose, and they will know. They will know and they will leave and they will never come back.

It happened to his mother. His father.

Iris.

In his own way, it happened to Larry, too.

But for now, while he can, while he still has a beating heart left, sullied and tainted and broken as it may be, Phoenix does what any boy would do:

He lights Redd White’s name on the floor of the court and smiles as it burns.

Chapter Text

The first time Phoenix stands in an empty courtroom, he thinks it’s going to swallow him whole.

It’s not the fear of it, exactly. Fear never sits tamely on him, never works the way it’s supposed to, and sometimes it’s hard to tell. Case in point: he’s afraid of heights, but he isn’t scared of falling. He’s too used to the sensation—stomach lurching, nerves screaming, limbs useless, helpmehelpmehelpme—to be anything but wearily resigned. He doesn’t want to fall, it’s just that if it ever happens, he knows there'll be nothing he can do to stop it. He isn’t afraid of open space, and he isn’t scared of dying, and he thinks, maybe, the thing that really scares him is the choice.

Precipices are change. A step back or a step forward. Falling is just what comes after, and there’s never been an after that also has him in it—particularly not when that after ends with all his bones breaking at the same time, exploding his skin from the inside out. He doubts he could put himself back together after that (he’s seen ghosts who have tried, and failed), so there’d just be a Phoenix-shaped stain on the ground and a ghost forever torn apart and no more choices to make. He doesn’t want to let go when he should have held on, and he doesn’t know how to tell the difference.

The poets might, but a year in law school hasn’t made much of a difference to his word-making skills. Most of his essays would be returned slathered in red ink if Mia didn’t proofread them first.

Back in the office, he tried to explain, “I don’t know how to say it. I know the answers, but I don’t know how to explain why.”

“You’ve spent long enough reading about it most of it is probably instinctual by now,” she replied, squinting at his handwriting. Or his vernacular. Or resisting the urge to close her eyes in despair. “It happens more often than you’d think when you’re in court. Sometimes you just have to follow your gut and make up the rest later.”

“Mia, I love you, but that’s terrible advice,” Diego drawled. He’s been stalwartly refusing to help Phoenix with his essays under the justification Phoenix has to learn to do it himself, which is true, but Phoenix thinks the real reason is he can’t be bothered.

Phoenix, therefore, felt perfectly justified in ignoring him. He slid down his seat until just his eyes peaked over Mia’s desk. “I don’t understand why I’ve got to write thousands of words explaining it if I’m still getting the right answers.”

“Evidence,” Mia and Diego replied in tandem.

If the desk wasn’t in the way, Phoenix would have let himself slide all the way to the floor.

He must have looked pitiable enough, because Mia put his essay down and hauled him up from under his arms. He squeaked. She barely strained her breath.

“You know what? It’s break time,” she said. “We’re going on a field trip.”

It’s long past the end of the official working day, but the courthouse still has a healthy weight of bodies inside. Mia nods and smiles at the faces she knows, ignores the ones she doesn’t, heels clicking their way down the hallways as if announcing how firmly she belongs. Phoenix’s soft tread follows, beaten in quiet only by Diego’s weightless prowl, and he hunches his shoulders inside his shirt, his hoodie, his jacket, trying to ignore how much it feels like he’s trespassing.

He doesn’t do a very good job. Only once they’re safely concealed inside the courtroom can he bring himself to speak up. “Y’know, when you said a field trip, I was sort of expecting somewhere more…”

“Decadent?” Diego offers.

“Educational?” Mia teases.

“Fun,” Phoenix decides.

“You want to be a lawyer and you’re telling me this isn’t fun?” Mia grins, walking backwards to show it off, her voice echoing up for the ceiling to catch. It throws it back as she pats the defence’s bench. “Come here.”

He lets her manoeuvre him behind it, too bemused to argue. The warmth of her breathes down his spine as she steps to his side. Diego takes his place between them, half a step behind.

Two lawyers look out to the empty hall, and Phoenix looks with them, even though something about it makes him want to close his eyes and turn his head. A room absent of people to fill it always feels hungry, and there’s an answering pang inside him, dug so deep he almost curls over from the force of it. His fingers twitch where they rest on the wood, and his chest aches just a little, and he wants and wants and wants.

“Sometimes you need a reminder of what you’re heading for,” Mia finally explains. “You can’t know anything more than what’s in front of you, but if you’re only ever looking at that, it’s easy to forget everything still waiting for you to reach it. A friend of mine—” She pauses, tilting her head in wry acknowledgement— “We used to do the same kind of thing whenever one of us was stuck too deep in our books. If nothing else, it’s a relief to give your brain a chance to think about something else for a while.”

“Ha, is that what you called it?” Diego snorts.

Phoenix sends him a quizzical look.

Diego grimaces. “Actually, forget that. Ignore that. Don’t mind me, just daydream ramblings.”

Phoenix leaves him to it. Sometimes he’s better off not trying to decipher whatever the hell Diego is talking about.

“Suppose I can practice my dramatic pointing,” he says, rolling his shoulder before flicking his arm out, finger extended, to accuse the witness stand. His hoodie pulls his jacket taut, lining his arms and chest perfectly. At the end of his cuffs, his hand looks larger, older. Less like it belongs to a scared little boy and more like it can keep what it holds.

In the place in his head where pictures form, he can see the boy. Twenty-one, then sixteen, then younger. He hauls himself up to peer over the stand, a wide smile on his face. You’re here, little Phoenix says, breathless. You’re actually doing it!

The best way to help a ghost is to be kind. Instead of raising an objection, Phoenix lets him speak.

“You need to work on your volume if you want to make a statement,” Mia tells him, snickering.

Instinctively, his thumb drifts out beside his index. The boy tilts his head into the shadow of a gun. Bang, he mouths.

Phoenix folds his thumb gently back around his fingers.

“I’ll save it for a trial,” he says and lets his arm drop. “When I finally get there.”

Mia hums and hoists herself up on the bench, then swings her legs round so she’s facing the court. “It must feel different standing here instead of the witness stand. Or sitting in the defendant’s chair. Not as scary, I’d hope.”

“Not quite.” He hesitates, and she doesn’t ask, but eventually he joins her anyway. “At least if you’re standing on this side people have to listen to you.”

She bumps their shoulders, something knowing in her gaze. “Especially whoever’s standing opposite you.”

Phoenix rubs nervous hands on his thighs. He’s been trying, with Mia, to lay his cards fair and even for her to see. Look, he would say, here are my sins. I thought I was unforgiveable, once, but I was just fifteen. I’m supposed to know better by now. I’m supposed to be more than this. Look. See the blood in my scars and my beating heart. See what I’ve done to you. What I’m still doing to you.

Diego wanders out to the middle of the room, standing, Phoenix thinks, in the space he once crushed a coffee mug and let his blood drain out over the pieces. He looks up now, instead of down. Forward, instead of back. His fingertips trace over the scars.

There are moments, always, like this, where the truth hangs down in easy reach. It’s the perfect time in a court of law, where Mia would have to listen and know Phoenix wouldn’t lie. Not about this. Children let go and lose, and shoot each other with finger guns, and draw nightmares with crayons and stalk paper, red as blood, black as shadow. All of Phoenix’s monsters have blue and brown eyes.

He never did get the hang of drawing self-portraits.

On the witness stand, the boy disappears. For a single blink, a woman takes his place.

And the moment passes.

The courtroom opens up wide around them, its teeth the panelled wood and marble tile, its tongue branded by balanced scales. In the brown and white and gold of it, when Phoenix looks down, he’s drenched in blue. He knows a quote, read to him in a lecture hall, that every decided colour does a certain violence to the eye. Violence, Diego has told him, is not a history; choosing it is. The red of him makes the matter seem non-negotiable, but then Phoenix remembers Diego’s favourite colour is purple, the exact shade that hangs around Mia’s neck, and all the questions come back again.

Opposite, the prosecutor’s bench remains empty, caught by the bleeding angle of the sun, and swathed in dust motes. They’re yellow, and they’re red, and they’re blue.

“A friend of mine,” Phoenix says, grinning when Mia rolls her eyes, “Said if you need a reason to keep going, you’ll never find one you like. You have to want one.”

“Sounds like a smart guy.”

“Girl,” he corrects. “She was a girl.” And dead people still have names. “Her name was Davy.”

Mia sits in that for a moment. “Was?”

(Some facts about Davy Jones: her last name is the real deal. Her first name she chose for herself. She was seventeen years, three months and twenty-six days old when she was drowned in a river. She has enough freckles to form her own galaxy. Her second greatest aspiration was to be a pirate. Her first is to watch her brother grow up. She met Phoenix by the ocean.

She pulled him right out of it, in fact.

One of his first contradictions. After all, whoever heard of Davy Jones saving someone from the sea?)

“She died,” Phoenix says, smile slipping before he can catch it. “She was killed a long time ago.”

Mia’s eyes are soft. In the shadows, they’re blue. “Phoenix—I’m so sorry.”

Diego’s gaze cuts towards them, and Phoenix flinches. “No, it’s fine. I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

He sets his feet back on the floor. Tugs free of Mia’s grasping hand, his elbow tingling, and tucks his hands inside his hoodie pocket, palms pressed against his stomach. He looks up through the skylights to the open sky. Deep blue slowly mixing to sunset blue, which is something between yellowish and lilac, but still too light to call it night. It’s a beautiful day. It was a beautiful day. There are no clouds, so it’ll probably be a beautiful night, too, and tomorrow will be just as beautiful.

A beautiful day to die.

It’s all people ever seem to do.

“Sorry,” he says quietly, and isn’t entirely sure who he’s speaking to.

“Don’t be. Being dead isn’t the most important thing about her.”

Phoenix blinks and risks looking back. Mia is fiddling with her necklace, touch light as if hardly aware she’s doing it. Diego flickers to her side, hand pressing over the one laying open in her lap, and Phoenix has to wonder sometimes, because Diego can’t touch her anymore than he can touch anyone, but when his scars meet her smooth skin, she straightens her back and looks straight at Phoenix. Her smile is exactly as you’d expect it to be.

“My family always says grief is just love with nowhere to go,” she says, and Diego chuckles and murmurs, “I’m pretty sure the poets say that, too.”

“But I think,” Mia goes on, “That’s just a complicated way of saying it’s okay to be sad. There’s no shame in it, nothing you’re supposed to hide.” Her hand tightens around the stone, holding with purpose. “I’m glad she told you that, and that she knew you well enough to know she had to. It’s better to remember that, isn’t it? So you can live without leaving her behind.”

Phoenix doesn’t have to guess what Davy would think of Mia.

Make sure this one keeps you, Nicky.

He takes a deep breath, feeling his stomach press against his interlocked fingers. “She taught me how to pick locks.”

Mia breaks into a laugh. “Of course. Of course she did. As if I didn’t know what I was letting myself in for when I hired the bike thief crazy enough to try and get a murderer to kill him.”

“Utterly fucking nuts,” Phoenix agrees.

Leaning back against the bench, his hand still holding onto Mia’s, Diego smiles.

Phoenix doesn’t mind it so much when it comes from them. Mia says bike thief like it’s the worst of him, means crazy the same way Diego meant utterly fucking nuts. Maybe even the same way he meant there are so many things wrong with you.

“Let’s see if we can’t channel it into something productive, then,” Mia says. She hops off the bench and meets him in the middle, unpinning her badge as she goes. When she starts fiddling with his lapel, it takes him a moment to understand what she’s doing.

“You’re… giving me your badge?”

“I am—temporarily—letting you hold my badge,” she corrects. “I can’t teach you to pick locks, but I can show you what this feels like, at least.” She smooths his jacket into place and steps back, folding her arms as she surveys him critically. “Getting there,” she says. “Definitely getting there.”

Phoenix grins, stifling what is most definitely not a boyish giggle as he flicks his gaze over to Diego.

Diego rolls his eyes, settling them back on Mia with something impossibly soft. Glowing inside the dying light. “Yeah, yeah. You look adorable. Paint it and make it last, would you?”

“One day,” Phoenix says, answering them both, passing his tattered fingers just shy of the metal. Mia always keeps her badge polished to a gleam, and it feels strange to hold it so close. Resting a few inches above his giddy heart. Gold swallowed by endless blue.

He’d bite it until his teeth cracked just to make it his own.

“You learn better by doing, don’t you?” Mia asks, nudging him playfully as she sweeps past to take the prosecution’s place. “So let’s have some fun with it. You can work out the words later.”

She’s right—though Phoenix is never sure if that’s natural inclination or a reaction to the constant crawling under his skin whenever he’s forced to sit in stillness. It’s liberating to be at the forefront, to be the one doing instead of done to. And for all the things he’s taken, he’s not stolen anything Mia can’t do without, has been so, so careful not to ruin anything she’ll need for later.

Borrowing: that’s as good a name as any. Borrowing a little of the woman who saved him until he grows strong enough to give back.

Whether there’s violence at work here is still something he’s trying not to see in himself. When he looks in the mirror, it wears his father’s eyes.

(Which is to say, he’s not a great liar.

But he’s gotten very good at pretending to be human.)

“Um, Mr Wright?”

“Phoenix.” He digs a knuckle into his blue eye, ignoring the sparks of purple-red pain the flash behind his eyelid. “Sorry. I’d rather you just call me Phoenix.”

Maya blinks at him, a pane of glass and a world away. The last thing he expected was her to visit. He returned her phone at the end of the trial (the court transcript will do if he needs to bring up the recording again), so it’s not like there was any reason for her to leave Mia’s side.

And yet, here she is. Gazing at him with eyes shaped so much like his own, like Kaa-san’sMom’s, like Mia’s, like Iris’—

(He had to ask. He couldn’t help it. He had to know, because she was as ruthless as her sister in her methods, if not in her intent. Because he learned the relief of sating a lifelong craving, because of her, and she left him starving in the cold with no way to fill it again. Because there are so many graves he’s never been to, and the guilt rots away his roots like a diseased Sakura tree.

Because he does not know how to love if it is not with absolutely everything.)

“Oh, sure… Phoenix,” Maya says, she treats his name carefully enough, as if it might burn on the way out. “But, um—are you alright?”

He fights down a laugh. What he thinks is a laugh. It scratches at the bottom of his throat, ugly and hysterical.

So Mia was raised in a clan of self-professed spirit mediums. So what? It’s a fucking joke without a punchline. Miles used to say Phoenix was lucky—unfathomable, he said. There’s a dead woman waiting for him back in his cell. Phoenix wants to laugh and laugh and laugh. Of all the lawyers, of all the people. Luck. Or not. Because Mia—Mia asked him. He only went to her for Dahlia, not for anything in return, because it had to be her, because Diego—

Diego knew. Diego, who’s angry at Phoenix for not eating, but Phoenix doesn’t know how to explain to him every bite feels like chewing lumps of flesh. Diego, who must have told Gregory to stay away, because there’s been no sign of the older Edgeworth, and Phoenix is thankful and furious in equal measure—angry, still, at Gregory, for saying what, not who, even if the what is easily summed up as asshole, because Diego knew and he didn’t say anything. He let Phoenix think he could be something, something more than a boy waiting to be devoured by the dead, and this whole time—

(“You can’t let anyone know. Phoenix—look at me. Promise me you won’t ever tell anyone what you can do.”)

Phoenix forces a breath.

Keep it simple:

He’s angry.

And hungry.

Tired.

He’s really, really tired.

And he wants—

“I’m fine,” he hears himself say. Diego snorts and Phoenix is—not dealing with that right now. “Still amped up from court.” His mouth silently forms Kaa-san without any air behind it. Just a click at the back of his tongue, like a gun being cocked. Even with that little practice, he can’t bring himself to say it aloud. “So, your—your mom. White’s the reason she left.”

Maya shrugs, arms rising to settle her haori more comfortably around her shoulders. She keeps clutching the material afterwards. Hugging herself loosely. “Yeah. It’s why Mia left, too.”

“I’m sorry,” Phoenix says, fingers digging into the soft skin of his thighs through his jeans.

“It’s okay.” Maya shrugs again, lifting a perfunctory smile. “I was too young to really remember any of it, and Mia and Oba-san only told me bits and pieces. For me, the worst of it’s always just… knowing he’s wrong, y’know? Whether people believe it or not, Kaa-san never would’ve lied. Nobody in our family would lie about that.” Her smile sours and she ducks her head, her fringe covering her eyes. “And he took us and made us into a joke. For money.”

Phoenix swallows another sorrysorrysorry. That word—he hates it. He’s always hated it. What the hell is anyone supposed to do with sorry? He says it so often his tongue has grown into the shape, swollen and suffocating, and people are always telling him to stop apologising, but they never ask why there’s blood and sick all down his chin. Words aren’t enough. They’ve never been enough. And yet it’s his job to make them be. What the hell is he supposed to do with that?

What does he think he’s been doing all these years?

He pulls a thread loose on the hem of the too-small sweatshirt. His whole body won’t stop twitching, needing to move, to run, to do. Maya watches him on the other side, eyes squinting for a moment, then slackening, though her gaze keeps searching for something in him, on and on.

All he can think about are the times Mia did exactly the same thing. Paranoia licks up the back of his neck. Its mouth is wet-red.

It isn’t a joke. It isn’t funny.

He smiles anyway. “It’d be sort of a weird thing to lie about dressed like that.”

Maya looks down at herself, then frowns up at him. “What’s wrong with my clothes?”

“I didn’t say there was anything wrong with them. That was all you.”

“Hey!” she fires back, too fast and with all the force of someone used to being the younger sibling. “Shut up.”

The litany of children everywhere, still unsure of themselves, awkward in their own bodies and furious at the world for it. Still growing into what they want to be, and all too aware of what they might never be. He can see her trying to shove all her youth down, like she can skip the last tottering steps and finally find a way to not feel so afraid all the time.

Her mother and her sister. He doesn’t need to ask when she was forced to grow up.

“He’s not going to get away with it this time,” he tells her, because for all she tries to pretend otherwise, she’s still just a kid, and she needs him to. Besides which, “You don’t have to worry about me. It’s not about me, anyway.”

“It is, though,” Maya says, an odd weight to her tone. “That detective came to talk to me again. Me and Mia. She still doesn’t really remember what happened, but she mentioned White, and he said—the detective, he said they’re thinking about putting me on the stand. Or—they were. I think he worked out I’d just be trying to help you.” She leans forward a little. “But you could call me, couldn’t you?”

“I could,” Phoenix says slowly. “The only person you saw was me, though. If I can’t prove White was there—”

“But you could make something out of it,” Maya interrupts, eyes stark in the glowing gloom. “You were amazing in there. You could make it work.”

Phoenix tilts his head, tipping her words back and forth, because that—that just sounded like blatant praise. And he has no idea what to do with it. “Um, I guess?”

“Only…” She bites her lip. “It’s just—I think the detective told me more than he was supposed to? I kept asking questions and he kept answering them, so, y’know, duh I asked more, but…”

“What’s gone wrong now?” Diego mutters, and despite everything, Phoenix has to agree.

“What is it?” he prompts.

It comes out all in a rush. “Well, the reason they were going to put me on the stand is because there’s some sort of problem getting White. That woman, April May, she’s still refusing to admit who was in the room with her, and they want White, they must have listened to you and Mia, but they… can’t get him,” she finishes lamely, head bowing into an apology. “The detective was mostly grumbling to himself, so I didn’t catch all of it, and he ran off pretty quick afterwards, but… none of that’s good, is it?”

A shiver curls itself through the shadows at the corners of the room. Maybe a fortifying breath from the storm brewing outside, gathering even greater strength. Or maybe it’s just Diego and Maya, breathing the way people are supposed to. Either way, it falls across all three of them, but only Phoenix feels the phantom weight of a chain tightening around his throat.

“No,” he croaks. “It’s not good.”

Pure reflex turns his eyes to Diego, a brief glance that communicates a thousand things, little of them useful, and then Phoenix remembers Diego knew and—

And Phoenix knows. Listen, he knows he isn’t being fair. It’s not even Diego he’s angry at, truthfully. It’s just the easiest thing to latch onto, because Diego is here, and he’d take Phoenix’s anger, he’d welcome it, let him scream and shout and snarl, stop him biting or clawing or beating at himself, and maybe, if Phoenix really is that lucky, maybe Diego would come back at him with his own fury.

(“Kaa-san, y-you’re hurting me—”

“Please.”

“I won’t!”

“Promise me!”

“I… I promise.”)

“There has to be something we can do,” Maya says, startling Phoenix with its vehemence. “I could try? I could talk to May, or—or I could go to White, his company, see if I can find anything—”

“No,” Phoenix interrupts, right as Diego growls, “Don’t you dare.”

“I can’t just do nothing!” It ruptures right out of her, a short of sparks only illuminating the fear roiling underneath, and—

(And the stone on her chest, shaped like Mia’s, like Iris’—

It’s only for a second, but Phoenix swears it burns—)

“What if he comes back?” she’s asking him, like he might actually have an answer. “What if he tries to hurt Mia again? What if—what if he comes while she’s still hurt, and she can’t fight back, and you…” She doesn’t seem to know how to finish that sentence, struggling in vain before puffing out empty smoke. “It’s stupid. You didn’t hurt her. He did.”

That’s the hardest thing about truth: words rarely do it justice.

Phoenix is no wordsmith. All the letters, the sounds to go with them, they collapse and they break, crashing against each other into an unintelligible mess. Half the time he doesn’t know what’s going to come out his mouth until he’s already saying it, and right now his head’s making such a racket he could stab out his eardrums, drown in the noisenoiseNOISE of it, and still find no meaning, no matter.

Nothing.

(Here is a painting Phoenix has never seen: it shows a hunter and his dog, the pair outlined in sunset with a lake glittering behind them. The paint is lathered on so thick you could suffocate inside it, and its size means no matter what room it’s in, your eyes will always be drawn to the blue and gold of it before anything else.

I am sorry, Grossberg tells Mia, has and will tell her a thousand times.

The painting remains on the wall.

I do not care what you are, she says back. Only that it ends.)

All of a sudden, it feels like too much to bear. He doesn’t know where he begins and ends—his edges feel scrambled and shaky, malformed and leaking, like a child’s first attempt at painting a Pomeranian; he feels too bloated for his skin, too broken to be contained and defined.

And Maya—Maya is still looking at him. She’s holding the stone now, clutching it between shaking fingers, but her eyes are darting all over his face. Staring at him like he’s the only thing she has.

What comes out of it, all that sound and light and fire and fury that never shuts up, never gives him a moment’s peace—it’s not a plan. He’s still not used to after (and he’s been trying, he really, really has), but now it’s just the next few hours, and the choice that has to be made. What he has to do to keep that after living and breathing. And after that—

It’s not a plan. It’s barely even an idea. It’s just a question that has to be asked.

What if there’s a way this doesn’t end?

"Miss Fey—"

“Wow, no.” Maya sits back, grimacing. “Definitely no. If I’m calling you Phoenix, you’re calling me Maya.”

“Maya,” he says. He lets it linger long enough to steal a taste of its humanity. Then he says, “There is something you can do.”

Diego jerks. “Phoenix.”

“Name it,” Maya says.

“Do you know Marvin Grossberg?” Phoenix asks.

“The lawyer Mia used to work for? What’s he got to do with it?”

“Phoenix,” Diego repeats, all sorts of bitter warnings building themselves up into half-formed promises. His eyes are so, so bright.

Phoenix doesn’t look at him. “He knows about what happened between White and your mom. I need you to go to his office. Tell him to contact White. Tell him Phoenix Wright wants a word.” He hesitates. “And so does Charlie Parker.”

Maya’s expression twists, less like desperation, and more like she thinks he’s lost his mind. “Like… the jazz musician?”

“Not quite.” He rubs at his neck, skin prickling beneath the indents of teeth. “White might not even remember the name. From what I know, he definitely doesn’t care. But I need him to talk to me. Tell Grossberg that. I don’t care how he has to do it. If he’s ever felt anything for Mia, any fondness, any pride, any guilt, he’ll get White to come here.”

“But… what are you going to do?” Maya asks dubiously.

“Trust me,” Phoenix says.

Somehow, he manages it with a straight face.

“What are you doing?” Diego asks flatly.

Phoenix waits until the guard’s footsteps have disappeared before resting back against the bars, letting their cold weight seep through him. “Spirit mediums?”

“You really want to get into that right now?” Diego demands. “You know why I didn’t tell you.”

Phoenix looks away, looks past him to the dark sky churning outside. The storm still hasn’t broken, its howling winds almost enough to drown out the dead voices screaming under its furious mass. Look at me and it’ll be okay and where are you? Sorry and sorry and sorry. And Diego, still here, the most living part of him hidden away, and still here, even though Phoenix has done worse and worse than nothing, every day, every moment—

But he can’t—

He can’t—

(“Kaa-san…?”

“P̶͗r̷̰͘o̷̼͗m̶͚̻͝ī̴̻̩s̴͒e̷̘͛̿… ̶͎͙̈́̕m̸̧͉͒ȅ̸…”)

And—

He’s eaten nothing, but he’s going to be sick. He’s going to expel his stomach and lungs and heart until he is a husk of a boy.

“Diego—”

“One thing at a time,” Diego says, deadly calm. “Tell me what you’re doing with White.”

What I always do, Phoenix doesn’t say.

The mention of White’s name lifts Charlie’s head, bares her teeth, the fingers of her severed hand curling into a fist. She and Diego look at him like there isn’t anything else, and the more they look, the more Phoenix isn’t sure there’s really anything there. That maybe all the dead he’s been wearing in his bones for years have caved around him and erased him entirely. That he’s become just another shadow; a boy waiting at the edge of an ocean in a dream.

He has to think about something else. He doesn’t have time to break himself against it. If he starts, he won’t be able to stop. Mia needs him. Maya needs him. Charlie needs him.

“What did you say Grossberg’s dumb painting was called?” he asks, sinking, losing air. He grips the bars behind him with both hands, trying not to whimper, body locking up against the pain—keeping him upright inside his skin.

The question itself is an old joke between them. Phoenix doubts Diego ever bothered to learn the painting’s real name.

“Paint thinner,” Diego growls, looming over Phoenix with all his three extra inches of height. “Phoenix. What. Are you. Doing?”

It started as a distraction after his own trial, a way of separating the art from chain necklaces and poison, bringing something other than guilt to the canvas, and, as an added bonus, making sure Diego didn’t die of boredom whenever Phoenix went wandering through art galleries. They’d rename the pieces as they went, leaving Phoenix with a propensity to speed out of rooms so nobody would see him burst into laughter. His favourite is still Diego’s preferred name for Nighthawks, verbatim of Edward Hopper’s alleged response to being asked why the diner has no visible exits: ‘Shit. Fuck. I did it again. God damn it. Fuck. Not again. I did it again. Shit.’

(Here is the problem: Diego and Mia have never understood that Phoenix wasn’t afraid of Dahlia Hawthorne. Not the way he was supposed to be.)

Diego glares, still there, still here, and the only thing Phoenix has to give is to look at him, and keep on looking. He wants to hold on. He wants to let his head fall on Diego’s chest and crumble onto his lap, have Diego’s arms settle around him—on and around, finally not through. He wants Diego to tell him the right words. He’ll show his teeth and tell him he’s starving for the truth.

And he is starving for the truth. He just won’t be able to stomach it; his insides have shrunk with malnutrition.

“Something you’ll hate me for,” Phoenix says, and pretends it’s enough red to return to the man who stays for a boy who has never deserved it.

“This is quite the great departure from my normal way of doing things,” White says, eyeing the hardback chair with distaste before toeing it across the ground. The screech of it sends a ripple through his ghosts, an answering echo of hisses and snarls.

“Shut up,” Diego snaps, a two-syllable bite lathered in dusty poison.

White is barely audible over their answering growls. “Not to my taste, frankly. Not to my taste at all.”

Phoenix watches silently. Visiting hours have been over for a while. Too long. The lights buzz dully, weak from their impromptu awakening. Condensation nips at their corners.

“You’ve lit quite the fire under Grodyburger,” White says next. At least, Phoenix thinks he does. His mouth shapes every word like he’s thinking it for the very first time. “I don’t think I’ve heard the man so impassioned in years! Though I suppose with his illustrious protégé in such a state he must be feeling rather conflicted.”

Phoenix feels a choke rising and shoves it back below the surface. There’s nothing but empty space, a wasteland of water: all his panic, paranoia, fury, guilt—all of it drowned.

“Well?” White asks, as if he’s not been speaking nonstop since Phoenix sat and let the other man tower over him on the other side of the glass. “You wished to converse, did you not? Is my giantesque vocabulary intimidating you? There is something you want, is there not?”

White is tall and broad—and diminutive standing in front of the dead behind him. His perfectly coifed, dyed purple hair cartoonishly eccentric next to their matted, tangled messes. His suit ostentatiously bright beside pulpy flesh and shards of bone. The shadows don’t even try to touch him, swirling across the heavy sky outside, a distant rumble signalling the imminent crash of rain. His eyes are blue, but Phoenix would not paint them that colour.

“No, no, wait, let me guess,” White says before Phoenix has a chance to open his mouth. “The mighty lawyer has business with me. Information he simply must impart. Grodyburger said it would be simply ruinous.”

Objection, Phoenix thinks idly, reflexively. Hardly a guess if White’s spitting back Grossberg’s words.

Then he takes that thought and drowns it, too.

“And yet, I have to wonder, how devastating could it be? If it was really so catastrophic, you’d hardly be sitting where you are. What good does information do you with no-one to sell it to? No way to use it? You couldn’t even—”

“And yet, here you are,” Phoenix interrupts, hardly recognising his own voice. It’s never not his own, but it unnerves him, sometimes, how blank he can make it sound. Distantly polite. A little bored, perhaps. But nothing else. “Nothing you can do about it in here, either. In court? That’s a whole different story.”

White laughs, a whole sweeping show bringing his hands to his chest, and all of his lungs behind it. “As if I would desecrate my personage with such dubious environs.”

Phoenix tilts his head. “Who said anything about you being there? I don’t have to prove you tried to kill her. I just have to prove I didn’t. One unreliable witness, another who saw me carrying Mia to safety, no fingerprints on the clock, no motive. Not exactly beyond reasonable doubt, is it? For the head of an information company, you left out a lot of details. Maybe you should’ve written my name down somewhere. But then, the way I hear it, you didn’t even know my name.”

There’s a guess for you. White’s glinting smile drops an inch, a twitch running from his shoulders down to where his ring-decorated knuckles are suddenly gripping his lapels.

People always have a tell. Diego’s taught Phoenix that much. There’s always something they cling onto when they’re afraid, and he has learned, had it torn into him over and over and over and over and over and OVER—

It is very easy to be afraid of him.

And Phoenix knows what people do to things they’re afraid of.

“Here’s the thing, White,” Phoenix says, ignoring Diego’s restless prowling, Charlie’s silence, the rest of the ghosts held at bay (for now) by their own fear-fascination-fury. “I don’t actually need anything from you. I just wanted to see if you’d come, because it proves that what I know scares you, whether I do anything with it or not. Or maybe it just means you were stupid enough not to realise that.”

The bite scar in the crook of his neck itches and the burn scar on his ribs prickles. The basement left him no scars, only another iteration of the same warning, crawling up the notches of his spine: this is what is meant for a boy like you.

“Either way,” he says, forcing a stiff shrug. “Doesn’t matter much to me. You can’t even kill someone properly. What do I have to be afraid of?”

White still has a smile on his face. He’s peering through the glass like Phoenix is trapped underneath it; a particularly interesting specimen he’s preparing to dissect.

“What the fuck?” one of the ghosts says, an odd, breathless rattle through his crushed throat. “What are you talking about?”

“He killed us.” Another, only a small trickle of vomit on her pyjamas. “We’re dead because of him.”

And another, though they’re interrupted by someone else, and someone else, and someone else, over and over, on and on, until the ROAR of it is battering Phoenix’s chest like they’re shoving their hands right into it. They stay on their side of the glass, wary enough of Diego’s crackling edges, a few shooting glances at Charlie standing at Phoenix’s back, but even though they probably can’t make out their own voices anymore, none of them stop.

They throw it up out of themselves, rattling and clattering off each other, and it churns in the air, writhing like it has its own mass made of last breaths and hitching heartbeats. It sucks up every scrap of warmth in the air, beats itself against the lights, the windows, the murderer and the guard and the not-quite-dead-man and the boy. Bringing it all in so it can throw up more of its fearhurtangerfearhatewantwantwant—

Human, Phoenix thinks, much less idly. This thought threatens to spark a fire, a steady blue core of flame.

(He knows about fury, about hatred, about resentment, he’s a lawyer, justice is his job now, and righting dead wrongs is all he’s done his entire life, but—

Is this really all people are made of?)

It’s harder to drown something so determined to burn. He swallows the heat of it, vapour clouding in the sudden dim of the flickering lights.

As it happens, it doesn’t make a difference. With a final flash of his waxwork smile, White turns on his heel and walks straight through the seething mass. Phoenix can hardly make out the shape of him by the time he closes the door.

The ghosts really don’t like that.

Their noise lurches back through the walls—swears and threats and all sorts of black thoughts Phoenix makes himself drown, though they don’t die quick enough to stop him wondering if they’re true or not. He doesn’t want to know if they’d follow through if they could. He doesn’t want to think about what they could do to him if they tried.

Nothing about this has calmed Diego. He’s still himself, eyes still brown (if shining a little too bright as the lights settle down with a muted angry whine), but he’s running his hands through his hair, tugging at his earrings, his collar, his tie. It’s enough to make Phoenix jittery by proxy, and he’s already running on enough anticipatory adrenaline he can sort of smell the stormy dark of dusk. Sea breeze salt and something sweet like apples. Or maybe, despite all the junk and horror in his head, he’s just hungry.

But now he’s getting distracted.

He’s forever getting distracted.

(Not the warehouse. Nicholas was just one, and he was so much worse, but there are so many of them, and—)

The door behind him opens, nearly making him jump out his skin. It’s another officer, holding the brim of her hat down like she’s trying to hide from what she’s doing. Her voice is too quiet and the howling of the ghosts is too loud, so Phoenix has no idea what she says to his guard (the same one who watched him shower, incidentally—drown it drown it). The guard, for his part, only throws Phoenix a long look that could mean anything before following her out.

“Cigarette break?” Phoenix offers. It’s not one of his better jokes, and his flat tone doesn’t help matters.

Diego’s glare cuts it right in two. “I’m going to see what’s going on.”

And he goes. Leaving Phoenix alone.

Only—not quite.

Charlie half makes a move like she’s going to follow but thinks better of it. She steps to his side instead, tilting her hand back and forth in the grip of the other as she considers him, mouth closed.

He’s not sure what to do about her silence. It drifts along the surface of the ocean inside him, never breaking for air, but close enough he can feel it pulling at him, as if there’s something else he’s supposed to be doing or saying. Something he’s forgetting, maybe. But what can he do? He can see ghosts and he can hear them and he’s the only one who can, which makes him no use to anyone except people that are already dead. They claw their way in, make themselves at home in his marrow, and he’s never found a way to tear them back out. There’s just him, and the vulnerability that comes with it he knows better than the colour of his own skin.

(“P̵͋h̶̢̡̨̺̣͇̙͓̰̹̤̏͜ͅͅo̴͆̿e̶̡̧̤͎̤̟̊̈́͌̃̚͜͜͝n̶͗̄̉͝i̶̒͗x̷͉͚̥̳̥̖̏̍͜?”)

Charlie’s silence sits in the back of his throat. It makes itself comfortable. It crosses its legs and tilts its head at the shards of bullet metal buried there.

Outside, the sky flashes, a great rush of white followed almost instantly by booming thunder. Phoenix turns to look at it, even if the lightning is long gone by the time he does, his eyes hot and his core shaking. He has to look away before her silence swallows him up, like he’s lost something and just didn’t notice when it killed him.

Looking everywhere but her is the only reason he notices it. He nearly misses it anyway. He’s counting everything he can see, adding the camera and its blinking light—and pausing. Lightning fires outside again. He tilts his head in case it’s a trick of the light, some weird refraction through the glass. When nothing changes, he swivels in his chair and checks the camera on his side. His mouth goes dry.

The cameras are off.

(Is that ROAR getting louder?)

“Got it in one, pajarito,” Diego says, dark and bitter and furious as he flickers right back to Phoenix’s side. “I do fucking hate you.”

It’s not particularly news to Phoenix, but his face still twists into a grin, sharp and biting along his cheeks. “That bad?”

“Worse.”

On that nauseatingly ominous statement, the door opens a second time.

As soon as Phoenix sees who it is, he’s on his feet, chair scraping out from under him. The sound, the sudden motion—whatever it is, White pauses in the doorway long enough for Phoenix to see there’s nobody behind him but his screeching ghosts. Long enough to understand there won’t be another living soul there until White chooses to leave.

White closes the door with a sharp click Phoenix never hears. His breath puffs out of him; a heavy, freezing sigh. Phoenix can smell the gunpowder in it.

“It seems to me that your particular proclivities haven’t fully grasped the situation you’re in, Mr Wrong,” White says—maybe. It’s hard to keep track of his mouth when Phoenix is watching his hands.

Phoenix tries not to reply. Really, he does. “Is that the best you’ve got? I was called worse when I was eight.”

White laughs, more chilling than anything the ghosts could manage by themselves, entirely genuine in its delight. “What does the name of a mere lawyer matter? You’re not even worth the ink your guilty verdict will be stamped in.” He saunters forward, and suddenly Diego is standing between them, and Phoenix is staring through his back, and White says, “You are nothing—”

Right as Diego snarls, “Don’t you dare—”

But it’s too late and too little.

Try and scare a murderer, and it isn’t fear they feel first.

It’s fury.

And here it is, packed in a fist, gilded in gold, nearly blinding through all the white tearing apart the clouds. Phoenix is already twisting away, fast—only fast enough to save his bad eye and ruin the other instead, a brand-new riptide of agony opening along his cheek. Reality reduces to useless blobs of colour—blue, purple, white, red, red, red—and, dizzily, he thinks of a garden left behind in the mountains. Something grabs his collar, yanks him up away from it. Gravity is his only point of reference. That’s thrown out into the waves too when the fist comes back, slamming into his stomach, the impact juddering up the column of his spine, and all he can do is fold over like sodden paper.

He barely registers the dull pain of his knees smacking into the tile because his whole body is convulsing, rebelling against itself. Blood and bile and drool splash onto the floor, a sweet-sour mess out of tune with the screaming in his head. Some brilliant piece of evolution joins the noise, informing him he needs air now, and his stomach grudgingly acknowledges that’s probably the best course of action. He breathes. It’s stuttering and thick and made of metal, but it’s still breathing.

And White: his laughter is raucous, offensive, spitting into the wounds. Phoenix flinches away. The next hit—a foot, swung lazily into his ribs—rolls off instead of cracking deep. Black and blue spill inside him. His back hits a wall, and the shock of it punches the air out of him again, and the window’s right above his head, the sky out of sight, but he swears he can see it lining the roof the same shade as a wet bruise.

Something dark and made of feathers spins in a panic against it, flocking into his lungs, fluttering and wild.

And the ghosts: shadowless and crowding over the mess of him. Wingless vultures waiting to feast. The emptiness behind their eyes threatens to drag him all the way under, hands wrapped around his ankles.

(This is how it goes, that’s how they like it: keep him straining to hold his head above water. You will drown, the world tells him, has always told him. Light warps between his glass-torn fingers, and the water is cold and the water is deep and the hands will drag him under the yawning waves. You will drown wondering how you could have saved yourself. You will die knowing you could not.)

But Diego, shoving himself in front of them, breaking at his edges. But Charlie, startling Diego enough to keep him himself as she scrapes all her silence out of her like someone scraping a tongue out of a mouth with their own teeth and—

“Don’t touch,” she snaps.

Tilted and warped from the floor up. Watercolour splashes seeping too far. Spray paint released too long and too close. No words. Just colours swelling and saturating and sharpening to something much more fatal.

White hardly seems real in the middle of it. None of the pieces match up. A grin with unbroken skin. Eyes dark with fervour. Suit pressed perfectly into his muscles. Not a blemish or a hair out of place.

Just a man. A living, breathing man.

What does White think he can do to Phoenix with that?

Kill him?

The thought makes Phoenix laugh. He has two missing teeth and a scar on his lip that killed him worse than White ever could. He has bullet metal branded into his heart, and a warm touch missing from his head, and an old, faded keychain sitting somewhere in this building. Mia’s blood might still be on his sneakers.

He’s a drooling, worthless scrap of a boy, and the laughing hurts, his stomach too raw to hold more than a gasping wheeze, but at the sound of it, the horde of ghosts go uncertainly, blessedly quiet. Even Diego’s looking at him like he’s gone insane. More insane.

What’s the next stage beyond utterly, utterly fucking nuts?

Where are you going if insane is the last answer?

White’s laughing again, too. Purple swims in Phoenix’s vision, flickering like the glow of Mia’s necklace when she’s angry, when she’s hurting, when she’s smiling so bright she shines like the stars—

And here’s that fist again, dragging him up by his hair. His laughter chokes off. He can feel the roots tearing against his scalp.

“Do you think,” White whispers, almost gently, still smiling with those bleached teeth sucked out of his gums, “There is a scrap of power I cannot take from you? You are a barking dog needing an education in obedience—not even that!”

Another rattling shot of laughter and White’s hand tightens in Phoenix’s hair, forcing him to twist upwards, hands scrabbling against the floor to relieve the sharp pain in his chest. White lashes out, barely a slap compared to the others, but the rings knock against the side of his skull—one-two-three-four-five—and knock all the sense from his head. He hangs off White’s hand, panting.

“Not a dog. I’m sure you’re cheap enough, but a dog would have a larger cock.” White punctuates the point with a deep jab into the flesh above Phoenix’s hip. “A bitch? At least a bitch would be useful. What are you then?” he asks, low and mocking and clearly fucking rhetorical. “A mangy pup, overeager and whiny, desperate for attention, and determined to make a mess. Truly, do you have any self-respect?”

Enough to punch White in the dick if he’s going to crouch there with his knees apart like that.

But it wouldn’t stop him. He’d probably swing it round to get Phoenix done for battery, again, and nobody would listen if he tried to tell them it was self-defence, again (not a basement, not an alley, not a warehouse, he’s not there). Phoenix is an idiot, but he isn’t stupid. Mia never would have kept him if he was.

So he doesn’t, no matter how satisfying it’d be. He sucks in as much breath as he can, just enough to spit out, “Charlie Parker.”

Behind White, Charlie jerks. Curls her lips back and slowly wraps her fingers around White's neck. Unable to touch but trying. Approximating.

White’s face twitches.

“Blackmail’s one thing. Complicity in torture and murder?” Phoenix bares his own bloody teeth. “What about your own attempt at murder? You tried to kill Mia. You didn’t. Because of me.”

White lets him go.

The cold shock of the floor smacks into him before he has a chance to fully register it. Something thick mixes into the saliva leaking from his slack mouth. White is towering over him again, brows pinched and hand flexing at his side, almost as if he didn’t mean to let go. Charlie’s fingers slip inside his trachea. His gaze sets, and he inches forward—

And Diego’s between them again, cracking and howling out every part of him.

Phoenix closes his eyes.

“No,” Diego says, spat out and ground up through the bitter cold.

And White doesn’t hit Phoenix again.

Slowly, slowly, slowly, Phoenix builds himself back up to his feet. He has to lean against the wall to keep his legs from buckling, and every breath is made of sandpaper, but he’s standing.

“I know you’re not going to kill me. You can’t,” he rasps. “I’m the mangy pup you set up for murder. I’m the nothing who indicted you in court. You want to stop me, White?”

For the first time, he lets his gaze rove over the dead eyes staring back. Then he spits at White’s feet. It lands next to the puddle of bile cooling inches from White’s shiny shoes.

And Phoenix smiles. “You’re going to need to do better than a fistful of bloody rings.”

There.

There it is.

There’s the fear.

White straightens his lapels. His smile looks pasted on with cheap glue. It peels off at the corners. “It’s been a long time since I indulged in a public demonstration,” he sneers, flicking blood off his fingers. “Do try to make it worth my while. It truly would be devestating to discover the ramifications were Miss Fey's assault to go… undisciplined.”

He leaves the same way he came in. Just opens the door and walks right out, closing it behind him. For anyone else, that’d be the end of it, as quickly as it started.

But Phoenix isn’t anyone else.

He scrapes his way into another breath and calls out to the lingering dead.

“Is that really what you want?” He still can’t look at Diego, so he makes himself look at each and every face. When all they do is stare, he clarifies, “Is White enough for you?”

He doesn’t say, please let there be something more, but that’s mainly because he tore open the inside of his cheek at some point and he’s too busy swallowing blood.

It comes all at once, this time.

He invites the noise, and they’re so riled up they don’t hesitate.

Deserves it I didn’t why would you please I shouldn’t—waiting for NO and IwishIthought, but there wasn’t—you know I said he said, is there? WATCH ME he’ll keep hurting killhimkillhimkillhim see him nobody am I please they never—I just wanted, dead we’re all dead ithurt and ithurt the woman he won’t ever, ever stop RIP IT OUT HIS remember we were never—I am trying and he and she and my and his turn cut tear all that blood. You see me SHUTUPSHUTUPSHUTUP want them to know he took it—daughtersonmomdad friend IlovedhimIlovedher, please not forever enough somebody else will the truth is—believe me did you not my fault pleaseplease help me—didn’t even notice I was going to do and be stole it should’ve killed him IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN HIM loved I did I still care I—not this is there even why did you don’t you know when does it STOP JUST something better—there isn’t has to be an end—

And those are just the words Phoenix can make out. It’s just what they’re saying, and they can say anything, really. Maybe they even believe it’s true.

But here’s the most important thing to remember, the thing that has to be remembered, above all else: a ghost is a want. It’s not a fact, not a thing-right-there-just-look-at-it as Diego likes to say, though that’s as close a name other than ‘ghost’ Phoenix has heard. Ghosts aren’t truths, and they’re not lies either. Just a want.

A hunger so big it devours them even as it looks for new things to eat.

It’s why they come to him. Why they won’t ever, ever stop.

If you take a bite when you’re starving, it only makes you hungrier.

He can barely find himself inside the sound, would float away entirely if his body wasn’t a mess of pain signals running as rampant as a pack of wild dogs through the red-purple-blue of him. His tongue finds the gash on the inside of his cheek and he presses in, heaving away from his next breath and curling what he can of his fingers against the wall.

It’s there, somewhere in the agony of it, he finds the current he’s looking for. Softer than a whisper. Wound around his neck. Pressure whining higher and higher inside his skull.

“I should’ve told them.”

Steady and sure and so, so sad. Solid enough the ghosts around it, the ones not drowning in resentment, turn to cling to the frozen weight the way Phoenix does.

“They deserve to know why I… I had to. Even if they never forgive me for it. I should’ve just told them.”

“Okay,” Phoenix whispers.

Of course, Diego’s there to hear him.

“Show’s over,” he snarls, the pieces of him pressed back together in their regular furious red. Every sharp edge stabs right through the wailing mass, heavier than a knife in the back.

It takes a while, almost too long, but they do leave. Phoenix can still see the last retreating backs when his legs finally give out. He slides all the way to the floor, jolting when the impact strikes him from tailbone to tip, and tucks his hand over his shoulder. He thinks he can feel the rain despite the roof, hears it throwing itself against the glass, and he’s shaking from the pain of it, the cold, the anger crashing and howling inside him, too vicious to hold it down and drown it out. Anger at being hit, humiliated, left with a pool of his own sick and, worst of all, skin tingling where White touched him, because even if it was fists, at least it was something, and the shame of it bubbles against his stomach like boiling water.

He should’ve hit White, damn the consequences.

He should’ve fought back—

“Phoenix, look at me.”

The interruption is like an echo, like being shouted to underwater, and he comes up gasping.

Diego’s sat in front of him, legs crossed, shoulders lax, seemingly at ease as if the only thing waiting for them after is a sit-down dinner and a stupid jazz record. But Phoenix knows where to look, and when he looks down, Diego’s hands are shaking.

Diego offers a rueful little smile and presses one against his own chest. “At me,” he repeats, that rumble straight from his lungs, deeper and fuller than thunder could ever hope to be. “Take your time.”

It isn’t easy, wouldn’t be even if they had all the time in the world. It feels as if there’s something locked around Phoenix’s lungs, stopping them from expanding all the way. Eventually, though, he manages something like a deep breath, then twenty. His grip slips from his shoulder, hand falling to rest between his knees beside the other, and Diego reaches forward to fold his hands over both. Clenching tightly shut through bandage and skin and muscle and bone.

Charlie, huddled a few feet to the side, stares at their joined hands intently as she rocks back and forth on her heels. Phoenix feels his ears grow warm, but he doesn’t pull away from the meagre hold. He needs it more than he’s prepared to be embarrassed about it.

Not running Phoenix’s way.

Just living Diego’s way.

“Okay?” Diego asks.

Phoenix swallows more blood. Carefully tests his teeth. Half his face feels like a bag of butcher’s meat. He offers a horror show of a smile. “Ask me later.” Another breath; then two. That’s the trick of it. Wingbeats in his featherweight lungs. “You?”

Diego snorts, lowers his head and falls right into a chuckle. They’ve taught each other more than a few things, but the echo in that laugh is all Phoenix’s. “Ask me later. When I’m not thinking about punching you myself.”

Phoenix shifts, barely able to manage it without another part of his body screaming. “In my defence,” he says, already knowing it’s not enough, “I didn’t expect him to beat the shit out of me.”

“You wanted him angry.” Diego cuts right to the point.

He does that. Says things. He needs the words to make it make sense, and if it only makes sense to him, well, that’s everyone else’s problem, isn’t it? It’s how he sees the world. How Phoenix would paint it for him if he could.

“Angry,” Phoenix says, only tasting the blood red colour of it. “Angry and scared.” Is there a word for that? He thinks there is, trapped at the tip of his tongue. It tumbles down, lost in his throat, burning against his stomach. “Angry scared people do stupid things. Like agree to testify in court about a murder they tried to commit.”

Diego looks at him, gaze so full of that same fear and fury, except all of it’s pointed at him—and Phoenix can’t. He can’t bear to see his own resignation in Diego’s eyes, knowing he’s the one who put there. He lets his head fall back against the wall and stares at the ceiling. Ordinary cinder block and the shadows of rain finally breaking over the city. His own blood drips down with it.

“Angry scared people do stupid things,” Diego agrees, and if Phoenix didn’t know him better, he’d say it sounded bitter again. But he does know him better.

And it just sounds sad.

(Here, again, is the problem: Diego doesn’t understand. He can’t understand, because he’s human and Phoenix is—

Well. He knows what happens to boys like him.

He knows there aren’t any boys like him.

Not a basement. Not an alley. Closer to the warehouse, but still not anything as bad as that. And he’s angry, sure, there’s always plenty of that, but it isn’t fear palpating up his throat. It can’t be. How could it be?

How could a murderer ever scare him?

He was raised by them, after all.)

Chapter Text

There’s blood on his hands.

It’s not a huge amount of blood. The scrapes barely reach further than skin-deep. He keeps staring at them, rubbing the coagulating edges over jagged metal the wrong size and shape, senses dulled beyond the sting he knows he should feel. It’s a small price to pay for Mia carrying him all the way back, he supposes, though he can’t remember, exactly, who decided that was the best court of action. Or when—or why. Whatever. He’s woken up in worse ways.

Mia was nearly in tears about it despite his reassurances. He’s only seen her crying once before.

Diego is very Not Happy about it all.

“Don’t leave her out there,” he hisses. He’s blocking the doorway, arms folded and eyes narrowed. Hair white—raw and pure; a shock of bright in the shivering city glow.

Behind him, the stairwell is dark. The light’s been busted for ages, leaving it that strange, empty shade of blackish orange that swallows the stars overhead. Backlit by it, he looks very mature and disapproving.

Phoenix blinks slowly. “I can walk through you,” he points out.

Mia’s arms sling over his shoulders, pulling the rest of her close before Diego can reply. Phoenix’s grip on the door is the only thing that stops them both falling to the ground for the second time tonight. “That’s the spirit. Doorways can’t get the best of us,” she hums, then slumps, voice dropping to match. “I don’t wanna walk anymore. S’your turn to carry.”

Diego pinches the bridge of his nose.

Oh yeah.

Very disapproving.

Phoenix giggles. He can feel Mia move with the motion, pressed against his back and the jackrabbit beat of his heart. A strange sensation swims in his belly. All soupy and complicated. “I have to touch you to carry you.”

“My god,” Mia gasps. “You put Herlock Sholmes to shame. Herlock. Herr lock,” she repeats, dragging out the name, stifling her snicker against his shoulder blade.

Wrapped around his keys, bloody and drenched in the scent of metal, his fingers twitch. He frowns down at the bruises on one side. “… Did I punch someone?”

“Maybe?” Mia lifts up on her toes, wrists warm across his collarbones. “I know I did.” She makes a fist and clumsily smacks him in the jaw. “Right in a kidney. Didn’t you tell Larry I have a boyfriend?”

It’s late, he thinks. Very late. Or maybe very early. There’s a chill in the air that only comes during that particular time of night, and it struggles to gain an upper hand on the sluggish heat ambling through his veins. He isn’t cold. Body still echoing and echoing the click of lighters and the clink of bottles and the snap of a misplaced mistimed word in the wrong direction.

Right. Right. Larry, in all his drunken wisdom, made a pass at Mia, Phoenix got annoyed and then… it all gets a bit hazy after that. Neon flashes of Theo laughing hysterically and Larry bent double against a wall and Diego with his head in his hands and Mia—Mia on a railing, somewhere, by the river? Feet on the bottom bar and waist braced against the top and arms spread wide. Reaching out—or just waiting. For something. Someone. Sakura petals falling and—

I’m glad you’re having fun.

It’s spring. Phoenix closes his eyes and tastes summer.

“No. Wait—yes. Yes, I told him.” He tightens his grip on the door. He feels like he’ll fall through the floor if he lets go. Like that time Diego fell through an elevator. Another laugh bubbles out of him, airy and free. “We both definitely know.”

“S’fine, then.” Mia’s practically climbing onto his back at this point. “My legs are tired. C’mooon. I trust you.”

Oh.

Well then.

Diego’s got his I’m-trying-to-kill-you-with-my-eyes glare on. Which is more or less the same expression he had after he fell through the elevator. “You just had to get completely wasted—careful!”

The shout doesn’t particularly help Phoenix stop staggering. He swears the floor doesn’t usually move this much. He falls up to the elevator more than walks, hands tight under Mia’s thighs, and peers at the button to call it. After a moment of very serious cogitation, he smacks Mia’s knee into it.

“Ow,” she mumbles against his neck.

“I might drop you,” he warns, a little belatedly, swaying between Diego’s hovering hands.

“You’re fired if you drop me.” Her breath drifts over the fuzz at the base of his skull and he has to stop himself shivering. “Why’s your hair so spiky and so soft?” She drags a hand up and he nearly drops her anyway when she starts pulling at his spikes. “Contradiction,” she hisses at them. “Objection.”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Diego says.

“I like my hair,” Phoenix protests. “I’m very attached to my hair.”

That strikes Mia as funny for some reason. The elevator doors open and Phoenix forgets to ask as he stumbles inside. He uses Mia’s knee again for the buttons, smacking five different floors, but at least one of them is his own. As it lurches upwards, she hums a song he doesn’t recognise, absently petting his hair. He squeezes his eyes shut and concentrates on the dark behind his eyelids. Diego’s the only reason they get out when they’re supposed to.

On the landing, Phoenix hunches over to keep Mia on his back while he gets his keys in. Scrabbling paws rush to greet them as soon as he opens the door.

“Puppy!” he yells, delighted, and crouches down. Mia yelps at the sudden change in height and stops herself tumbling to the floor by shoving him face-first into it. When he rolls over, Murphy is enthusiastically sniffing him, and he sinks his hands into her fur. “Puppy.”

“Puppy,” Mia agrees. He’s vaguely aware of her stumbling into his apartment, but Murphy is very soft—so much soft, all over his hands, and she’s wagging her tail and licking his jaw and all around being the best dog in the world. Mia probably won’t mind.

Diego does—which, rude. “Phoenix, get your legs out of the damn hallway and close your door. No—get your keys out of the lock first!”

“Mean,” Phoenix mumbles, leaning back against the door and squinting at Diego through the dimness. “Why’re you so mean?”

“It works on you,” Diego snaps.

“Ah,” Phoenix nods.

Diego suits the dark. It seems a shame to force him out of it, so Phoenix leaves the lights off and finds his kotatsu by bashing his shins into it. He turns the heater up and cuddles Murphy close. She endures it for all of about three seconds until the shower switches itself on and she wriggles free to investigate the noise.

“Puppy gone,” Phoenix tells Diego sadly.

Diego all but collapses on the floor beside him. Not a flicker—a full body motion with all the weight he doesn’t have behind it, jittering through the lines of him. Phoenix’s chest pulses in lieu of an impact, lungs echoing the sigh Diego pulls out of himself. He crosses his legs, sets his elbow on his knee and his chin in his palm, watching Phoenix tiredly.

“Puppy will come back,” he says at length, and pokes a finger between Phoenix’s eyes.

Trying to follow it makes Phoenix go cross-eyed, the room spinning into a frenzy. He stops. “That’s nice,” he grumbles. “You don’t do nice. Don’t want nice.”

“Me cago en la puta, what do you want?” Diego groans. “Remind me never to stay sober for you again.”

“Please yourself, don’t you?” Phoenix mumbles, barely audible to his own ears. He’s still holding his keys. Still expecting to look down and find himself holding something else. It’s the brass, maybe. Or the blood. He knows Diego is watching him—knows that if he looked up, their eyes would meet. His tongue hangs loose and heavy inside his mouth. He curls onto his side and tucks his face into the crook of his elbow, suddenly afraid of what else might come spilling out.

(It’s not like he’s scared of what Diego would do with it.

There are so many things wrong with you. It doesn’t matter. Not to me.

He believes that. Trusts that Diego believes that.

It’s just—he wonders, sometimes, if Diego really knows what he should mean when he says it. Because there are so many things wrong with Diego, but there is something deeply, irrevocably wrong with Phoenix. There always has been. When he was younger, he found himself wondering if it was contagious. If maybe everyone was so scared of him because they could see it festering inside, and they’d do anything to save themselves from it.

Sick boy.

Damaged boy.

But that was a child’s thought. Now, he knows it lives in his hands. It reaches through his eyes. Not a contagion, not a disease. It’s simply what he has grown into. What he has been from the very beginning.)

“I drank too much,” Phoenix realises with such an upsurge of clarity it’d knock him to the floor if he wasn’t already moulded against it.

“Definitely,” Mia says, grabbing his hand, startling him so badly he almost yanks it out of her grip. She’s turned the lights on and her apologetic look takes a while to reconstitute into a recognisable shape as his eyes adjust. “Hold still.”

She extracts the keys from his clenched fingers, then folds them open, one by one. A damp cloth appears from—somewhere, and she clumsily wipes it over his bloody palm, warm water draining down his wrist. There’s water all over her, too, dripping into his hoodie from her wet hair, droplets shimmering along the soft line of her jaw.

“I tried to drop you gently,” she says. She’s sitting right above his head, sitting upside down.

“S’fine. I’ve had worse.” The gentle, repetitive motion sinks through his skin to his bones, easing the permanent ache entrenched in the marrow. “How’re you sitting on the roof?”

She laughs at him. He knows she’s laughing at him because she’s not explaining the joke, but it’s sort of okay because she isn’t doing it in a mean way. He doesn’t know how it’s possible not to laugh at someone in a mean way, but Mia’s cool like that.

“How’ve I never gotten a kotatsu?” she asks, sticking her legs under the blanket when she switches to cleaning his other hand.

“How should I know?” The cloth catches the edge of a scrape and he winces, pulling away.

She lets it go. “Can I have yours?”

“No.”

“Mean. Phoenix, you’re a mean drunk.” She chucks the cloth down and reaches for a bottle set on the kotatsu steadily bubbling around the lip. Says in a melody, “One drunk, two drunk,” and brings it down to his mouth. “Three drunk, more drunk.”

“Please,” Diego says. “For the love of god. Do not drink more.”

Which is all well and good to say, but Phoenix’s current options are: drink more, spit it out, or just choke on it and die.

He drinks more.

Coughs and spits half of it out because drinking lying down apparently isn’t an ability you magically gain with enough alcohol in your system. Mia laughs at him again. Murphy reappears to lick it up.

“No.” He pushes at his dog. “Not for Murphys.” She bites his hand, but it’s just a play bite. He wiggles his fingers inside her grip, unafraid of her teeth. “Good dog.”

She starts licking his palm instead: the dog way of making everything better. He does his best to rub her chin.

Mia taps the bottom of the bottle on his head to get his attention. “Phoenix,” she says. Leans down until her mouth is right next to his ear. The bottle clinks against his earrings. “Phoenix. Your apartment is a shithole.”

It’s the same apartment he’s had since he was eighteen, the same place he told Diego he could stay if he wanted. Little pieces of the other man have started taking up space they don’t really have—books Phoenix has never read, albums he sleeps to more than he hears, food he’s still learning how to make and enjoy. He’s never painted the walls, but Diego convinced him to stick some of his paintings up. Phoenix is never sure what’s any good, so he lets Diego pick. Funnily enough, none of the paintings of Diego ever make the cut.

None of that is shit.

But only one of the burners on the stove top still works. The oven itself does not. He has no mirror. He can no longer open the window in the bedroom because the latch is broken. Half the slats on the bed are cracked, and he’s taken to curling up with Murphy under the kotatsu more often than not.

Murphy settles on his chest, anchoring him to wherever gravity is supposed to hold him. He stops himself hugging her and just rubs at her sides. “Yeah, it kinda is.”

Mia straightens with a huff and curls her finger under his chin, forcing his head to tip all the way back. “You’re s’posed to be annoyed about that.”

“S’just where I sleep. I don’t need more,” he says, putting up with the strain to his neck because he can’t be bothered moving.

She pulls at her wet hair. “Your shower is awful. I’d get more pressure sticking my head under a leaky tap.”

Phoenix tilts his head sideways. Stares at the dove grey sweatpants Mia's wearing, the hems pooling on the floor beside her crossed ankles. She was definitely wearing a skirt earlier. “Did you steal my clothes?”

“Mine are gross. S’my whole point." She pokes his forehead. "Something isn’t working, you get something new. Y’don’t need more. Don’t you want more?”

And she buries her fingers in his hair.

He makes sure to stay very, very still. He doesn’t look away from the grey fabric, even as he becomes hyper aware of every single nerve in his body, the growing strain in his neck and Murphy’s head settling on his shoulder. Fire trailing languidly down his spine. Gentle fingers card through his hair, softly but not uncertainly, as if they’ve done it a thousand times before.

They haven’t. Mia reaches out a lot, sort of the same way she touches her necklace. It’s always brief—a playful smack on the shoulder, a nudge to the ribs, a squeeze around the elbow—like she knows it won’t last but can’t stop herself leaning into the pain to begin with. He is so, so careful to never ask for more.

Diego’s eyes are liquid soft on both of them, quiet and cool and dark. Smooth as a moonlit night. It’s so quiet Phoenix can hear his own heartbeat. Murphy’s quiet sigh of content. The soft puffs of air Mia lets out as she caresses his hair.

Wanting is for something else, he thinks, hazy. He has to bite his tongue to stop it slurring out of him. It looks like me and it talks like me, and I think it’s what I was supposed to be. What you want me to be. Have I always been this? Loving a monster just means there’s love and a monster. I think I was supposed to be something else.

But he’s a selfish one, if anything, because when her fingers start to drift away, he arches back into the touch with an animal noise of protest. Her hand is warm, damp from the shower and sticky with spilled beer. It’s familiar, for all that it’s only happened twice, and only this night.

Mia lets out a soft laugh. “There’s already supposed to be a dog here.”

There’s that weird squirmy feeling again, though it’s gone too quick to make sense of it. His body and mind are lagging into each other, and he shivers despite the warmth. “I don’t know,” he finally whispers. “I’ve never had more.”

“You’re a lawyer now,” Mia says, fumbling with her free hand for the bottle of beer. “They’re gonna give you a badge and everything.”

A slow grin spreads over his mouth, pulling at his teeth. “Crazy, right?”

He passed.

He actually passed.

Mia shakes her head and wipes beer off her chin. “Least crazy thing about you.” She ruffles his hair. “My point is you can deserve better. You afford better.”

“… I do wha?”

She frowns. Shrugs and takes another drink. Pouring it up. Phoenix has to close his eyes against the spinning. His mouth is dry. He really needs to pee. But his eyelids are heavy, and Murphy is warm, and Mia’s touch is soft, and he can hear Diego sighing, chuckling like he doesn’t know what else to do with the air. The guilt eats Phoenix alive a little, but he’s too selfish to not enjoy this easy comfort, how readily it is given away.

Mia starts humming that song again, softly, softly. She can’t really carry a tune, but while the song itself is unfamiliar, her voice isn’t, and he finds himself melting further under her touch. Everything is so familiar. The brush of Murphy’s fur and her heartbeat beside his own; the sticky smell of alcohol and sweat, fresh laundry and the body wash he prefers; the breath from Diego, Phoenix’s naturally falling in time, and a spark of lighting atop his fingers where they rest on Murphy’s scruff.

He could recognise who it is without looking, just by the way they feel.

(There’s blood on his hands. Underneath, his skin is stained by blue paint. It isn’t much of a painting, won’t sit on any walls or change many lives. Blue with a bit of gold scraped at its edges, like dawn approaching, or a glow that will not die, whether you’re there to see it or not.

Monsters come and go, but the blue holds.

Here you are again, it says, preening its wings.

And so am I.)

“I did good with him, didn’t I?” Mia murmurs, voice echoing far, far away. As if she’s speaking to herself, for herself. “I finally managed to keep something good.”

“Yeah,” Diego murmurs, and Phoenix realises he must be dreaming. It’s the kind of stupidly hopeful dream he has, sometimes, alive only when it’s in the dark. “We did good.”

He sleeps and dreams of open, endless blue skies.

“Oh my god—are you okay!?”

Phoenix flinches half a step back, almost crashing into the bailiff escorting him. He isn’t usually so easily startled, but being jumped by a seventeen-year-old Fey girl is something of a new experience, and he has to catch himself against the door, heart pounding in his chest. She darts across the lobby, almost runs to him, hands twitching and rising and stopping inches from his face, cupping the scant few inches of air between them. Through the bars of her fingers, her eyes are so round Phoenix could draw the sun into them.

He tilts his head, eyelids heavy when he blinks. It’s an odd combination of sensations with the sudden rush of blood through his veins. It makes his skin buzz. “What is it with you and Mia and stealing other people’s clothes?”

The hoodie is dark green, the tassels worn to fluff at the ends and a rip on one of the sleeves clumsily sewn shut. If his clothes are too big on Mia, they absolutely swamp Maya. She pouts up at him from the forest folds, her fringe a stringy mess from water damage and the rest of her hair tucked beneath the damp collar.

“It’s raining and I forgot a jacket,” she says, her outrage faltering as she tugs the cuffs higher up her wrists. “Um, you don’t mind, do you?”

“I don’t mind.” He takes the opportunity to unlatch himself from the door and slip past her. Careful, layered steps, one after the other, get him to the wall beside the window. “Just curious. Do you two forget clothes often or is it like a territorial thing?”

As he leans against the wall, rests his head on the quiet wood, he feels a tingle between his shoulder blades. He sucks in enough air to make his ribs snarl. Diego swipes him through the back of the head. “Stop being an idiot.”

You first, Phoenix thinks, but Maya’s right on his heels.

“We’re not cats,” she protests, stepping round to meet him, using the windowsill to balance as she raises herself on her tiptoes. It puts her nose level with his chin, making it a fair bit harder to ignore the way her gaze is flicking over every part of him. “Phoenix, you look like someone tried to mash your face into pudding.”

“That bad, huh?” He smiles—as much of a smile as he can manage, anyway. His smiles usually sit crooked, but right now it’s because he can’t move half his face. “Must look worse than it is.”

“I hate you,” Diego reminds him, still stubbornly measuring his breaths.

“Seriously, I’m okay,” Phoenix says. Somehow resists the urge to glare over his shoulder when Diego snorts.

Maya isn’t any more convinced. With her hair down and his hoodie dripping all over her, her eyes still wide and cheeks puffing out with worry, she looks about as young as he feels. Eight years old, if that.

“I’m okay,” he repeats, softer. “White just got a little nervous about court.”

This does not have the calming effect he intended.

“White did that?” Maya squawks loud enough the poor bailiffs cowering by the court doors jump about a foot in the air. “What—how? And they let him? Why didn’t anyone stop him? How is that allowed? Why did he—how could—what even—”

“Maya,” Phoenix interrupts, gently grasping her elbow before she can tip herself into a frenzy. “I’m going to get him today. He isn’t going to hurt her again.”

Maya twitches, and he lets go immediately—only to freeze when she grabs his hand. She squeezes it tight, then quickly loosens her hold, but he can feel the tension radiating inside her knuckles, shaking along her frame inside the depths of his hoodie.

It makes him want to pull away, skin still thrumming hotly under every bruise, cold everywhere else, a hostile clash of too much and too little, pain and numb, noise and silence. In the midst of that, any scrap of tenderness just feels like the last piece of decisive evidence there is something broken, and he does not have time to work out how to piece it back together. All he can do is hold the pieces tight, until they split the skin of his palms, and hope it’s enough to keep moving forward.

Before he can work out how to tell her that, her other hand latches around his wrist. Holding him here with her. Her gaze doesn’t lose its intensity for a single moment. “But he hurt you.”

A tiny tremble lodges itself against the shell of Phoenix’s spine. Spasms from Diego’s fingers. Phoenix wishes he would stop. Every breath weighs so much his knees are starting to ache from holding him upright. He has to keep reminding himself not to rub the butterfly bandages on his cheekbone, not to hold the ache in his stomach, not to stand in any way that puts too much pressure on his ribs. They were kind enough to throw him an ice pack with the bandages (if that’s what kindness is), so he can mostly see out of his left eye, but there’s little he can do about the ashy wash of exhaustion smothering them both from the inside out.

The thing is—Phoenix is okay. Diego can snort about it until his nose falls off. The man spent the whole night at his side, gently murmuring every time Phoenix jerked away from pain, from the briefest nightmares never given the chance to fully form, holding him above the waves until he drifted off again. And Maya, as jarring as it is, looks so concerned and so familiar that even if it’s in all the wrong ways, it’s hard to be anything but glad of it.

Phoenix couldn’t ask for more. Wouldn’t, because he’s still so unused to care that his legs will buckle under it before long. It’ll disappear between his fingers like sand if he holds on too tight.

He raises their intertwined hands and gently prods Maya between the eyes, pushing her back onto solid footing. “Don’t worry about me,” he says. Asks, really, though he doubts she’ll hear the request. “It only hurts when I breathe. And talk. And move. Actually, just existing in general seems to do it.”

A startled giggle spurts out her mouth and she finally lets go to contain it beneath her hands. “I-I’m so sorry."

“Don’t be. Better to laugh.” He gives her a one-shouldered shrug, absently rubbing circles into his palm. Chasing the lingering sparks clashing atop his skin. “Besides, I think only being able to smile with half my face will really add to my charm.”

“Mia’s right,” Maya realises, finally. “You’re crazy.” She’s taken to cradling her own face, as if just looking is enough for her to feel the echoes of pain.

“Always better to be laughing than scared,” he murmurs, and turns his gaze to the world outside before any more of him can break off and sink its teeth into her.

The storm has passed, but the rain is still a heavy, persistent thing, darkening the morning to a strange kind of lingering night. With this last chance, he basks in the constant rushing white noise drowning out the never-ending wails and screams. Beyond the water, the view is blurred, smeared into a swirl of distant dancing lights, and the urge to stand in the midst of it, just for a little while, nearly steals the remaining strength clinging to his knees.

He’s always loved the rain. Even on the streets, when there was no guarantee he’d get dry later and had to avoid it as much as possible, sometimes he couldn’t help himself. There is nothing that makes him feel more unimportant than a storm; nowhere that makes him feel as free: it’s the only time he thinks of Diego telling him it’s not your responsibility and wonders if in some way it could be true. He could close his eyes and dissolve, travel the opposite way down the threads of time, unravelling, unmaking, and becoming—better. Something better. Something worth being. And it wouldn’t be dying, he doesn’t want dying, because something new would grow out of his rotten bones and it would live.

(“It’s sort of… It’s like when you have a favourite colour, and you start seeing it in everything. That’s what it’s like. Because that colour isn’t really everywhere. I’m not blue and you’re not blue, and the sky’s blue sometimes, but we can’t always see it, but the blue is still—still there? And it’ll be there whether you’re paying attention or not. But when you do see it, it’s like—like ‘there you are again. And here I am, too.’ Standing in the rain feels the same. Does that make sense?”)

It really isn’t about dying. At least, Phoenix doesn’t think so. It’s just about starting from the beginning again.

“Thanks for coming,” he mumbles. He only realises he does it aloud when there’s a sharp intake of breath, and he opens his eyes with no memory of having closed them.

Diego’s shaking hand slides up his back to cup the nape of his neck. He finds himself looking down at Maya as she steps up to him and reaches for his tie where it hangs slack and crooked around his collar, still knotted from the day before.

Too quick for him to stop her, she unties it, then copies the motions he fumbled through yesterday, ending in a tie a little longer than he prefers, but far neater. She tightens it up to his neck and keeps hold of it after, knuckles white around the knot, etching their shape into the fabric.

“You’re going to get him today,” she says, shaking a little. Not like a dare, or an order, or a promise. Just a simple statement like it’s the truth.

Slowly, persistently, relentlessly, Phoenix breathes.

In and out.

In and out.

Maybe, if he does it enough, he’ll be able to prove her right. Maybe, finally, he won’t fuck something up before he even gets to have it.

“Watch us,” Diego says, and he steps up to Phoenix’s side as he straightens his own tie.

It feels, Phoenix thinks, a little what living is supposed to feel like.

For once, he can’t find any reason to object. He’s even about to let her know where she can hear it when the door snaps open. Instead, he watches Maya peek over his shoulder, the way her face solidifies to the same steel cast as her sister’s when she’s furious at someone but isn’t willing to let them see the roaring heights of the pyre.

He has a pretty good idea of who it is before he finds the wherewithal to look for himself. He’s not expecting his heart to immediately seize at the sight.

(Breath. Cadence easy and familiar as it falls into a huff. “No. That makes absolutely no sense.” Silver eyes narrow at his smile and his shrug, but it’s okay, because a soft chuckle follows, and warm fingers entangle his own. “You’re incorrigible. Now come inside before you catch a cold.”

“Rain doesn’t make you sick, Miles,” he giggles. He has no idea what incorrigible means, but he likes the way it sounds in Miles’ mouth. “That’s just something parents say to stop you tracking water everywhere.”

“I’d rather not take the chance, if it’s all the same to you,” Miles replies, entirely too dry for the weather.

Phoenix’s hand is wet and cold and probably not very nice to have on someone else’s skin, but Miles doesn’t seem to mind. He never does. It makes Phoenix feels like a hearth has replaced his heart, glowing softly, insistently, gentle tendrils of warmth and safety and—and summer. Something about summer. Like any warmth, when it comes to Miles, all Phoenix wants to do is make sure there’s enough for both of them.

So he lets himself be pulled inside. Lets himself squeeze the hand in his a little tighter. Miles squeezes back.)

It’s cold in the lobby. It’ll be colder in the courtroom. Too much open space and too many old walls, leaving it stifling in summer, and unable to hold in the efforts of the heaters on a day like today when so many dead come calling.

Miles freezes as soon as Phoenix turns around. It only takes a second for his composure to crack, a great rumbling tear of ice, twisted and furious and snarling out of his throat as his silver gaze sweeps across Phoenix’s face.

“What on earth happened to you?”

Phoenix’s heart restarts, then tumbles through its next few beats. “This is going to be my whole day, isn’t it?” he mutters, mostly to give himself time.

“Ha, welcome to the mortifying ordeal of being physically perceived,” Diego snorts.

Phoenix scrubs his hand through his hair, lets it fall to rest on his shoulder, thumb rubbing into the crook of his neck. “Busy day yesterday,” he says at a more normal volume, ignoring Maya’s sideways glance. “Walls to stare at, people to piss off, murderers to catch. You know how it is. Did you need something? Only I’m sort of being accused of attempted murder in like, ten minutes, and it’s going to take up most of my morning.”

Most of the words spill out entirely of their own volition, and he can feel Diego and Maya watching him. Gregory, too, Miles’ constant walking shadow, the outrage on his face almost an exact replica of his son’s. Phoenix doesn’t mean to look.

Doesn’t mean to let Miles see him look.

But Miles has always watched him in a way nobody else has, before anyone thought to or wanted to or cared enough to, constantly seeking where so many others turn away and hide their eyes. Miles’ head twitches to the side, shoulders tensing—an abortive movement like he wants to follow Phoenix’s gaze but knows he won’t find anything he can see. His eyes harden. Sharpen. Serrated and silver as the edge of a knife.

Phoenix closes his own. He can taste his heart on his tongue still struggling to find its rhythm, and suddenly he feels every inch of his pain and exhaustion down to the core of his chest. In the mellow dark, he can hear Miles coming closer, the sharp clip of his Oxfords-or-whatever, so achingly familiar in all the best and worst ways.

“Wright,” Miles says and Phoenix digs his teeth into his tongue. “Who did this to you?”

That’s familiar, too.

(He’d know Mia and Diego and Murphy blind. He thinks he’d know Miles blind, too, just by the way his breaths came, wherever they are, whenever they are—at school, on the bridge, in the courtroom.

The thought scares him so much he has to think of something else.)

“What are you doing here, Edgeworth?” he asks tiredly.

When he scrapes together enough courage to look again, Miles is—there. Right there. Staring intensely at the gash on Phoenix’s cheek as if he could sift through the blood to find the shape of the man who spilled it. He can’t, but Phoenix has a bizarre urge to try and hide it anyway.

“Looks worse than it is,” he mutters, brushing his knuckles around the swollen meat of it and letting his head turn with the motion. But he can’t bring himself to break Miles’ gaze.

Silence stretches out between them, reaching into Phoenix’s joints and lungs. It goes on so long Phoenix begins to wonder, a little dizzy, if Miles will say anything at all, or if Diego and Maya and Gregory will just be stuck staring awkwardly at Phoenix and Miles staring awkwardly at each other until court is called.

But eventually, volume pitched low, voice held carefully steady despite the frustration so clearly etched into his features, Miles says, “I had an interesting discussion with the prosecutor’s office this morning.”

It makes Phoenix feel more of a feral mutt than he already is. “I’m so happy for you.”

Miles’ lips thin to a tight line. “White’s decision to testify was remarkably sudden,” he goes on, as if Phoenix didn’t say anything. “He was adamant there was nothing he could contribute to today’s proceedings. And yet, I’ve been informed that whatever he chooses to say now will be the ‘absolute truth.’”

“Yeah, he sort of let me know that already.” Phoenix's fingers find the bite scar again, thumbnail dragging over his trembling pulse.

“Good God, Phoenix,” Gregory says, appalled. “Did White—”

“Why are you saying it like that?” Miles interrupts his father, unknowingly, their voices melding and mixing and crashing all over each other.

“Don’t talk,” Diego tells Gregory, twitching forward a step.

“But—”

“Edgeworth. Don’t.”

Phoenix, somehow, manages not to cover his ears. He runs his tongue over the wound inside his mouth, feeling it swell and grow through him. “Like what?” he asks, bland, if a little breathless.

“Like—” Miles huffs, a muscle in his jaw pulsing like he’s trying to stop himself grinding his teeth. “Like it means something.”

“It does.” Phoenix drops his hand and tucks it in his pocket, clenching and unclenching his fingers around empty space. “We chatted. I mean, he did most the talking. Have you noticed that about him? I barely had the chance to tell him to shut up.”

“Are you capable of taking anything about yourself seriously?” Miles snaps.

He looks tired.

(Even that isn’t unfamiliar. Miles used to show up more exhausted than Phoenix some days, something of an achievement in those lonely months after Kaa-san—when she—well, all that, and the rest of it. He rarely explained the sudden bouts of insomnia, and Phoenix was reluctant to ask, scared, even at that age, it would invite questions about his own sleepless nights. But Phoenix learned, the way only children can learn about each other, through half-thought confessions with little regard to their consequence, that it was to do with Gregory.

Children reflect their parents. They have little choice in the matter when it’s the only thing they have to base the world on. Then they grow, and their parents become people they don’t know. When they look down, their hands are always stained: blood or bruises or blue paint. Sometimes, they will catch a glimpse of themselves in the mirror and freeze, just for a second, because that face is theirs. And no one is them. No one is you.

That’s how it is for everyone, though. Every single person in this world has felt completely alone at least once.

But how the hell are they supposed to know that?)

Phoenix smiles and lies right through the raw gashes on the inside and outside of his cheek. “Nope.”

“Then you understand.” Miles pauses, takes a moment to rub his brow. When his hand lowers, he looks into Phoenix’s eyes, searching for something Phoenix isn’t entirely sure is there to find. “You know what’s going to happen in there today.”

“No,” Maya bites out, all of five foot plus a couple inches, and clearly in denial about it. She puffs as much of herself up as she can half-swallowed by Phoenix’s hoodie, ferocious as a spitfire despite it. “I don’t understand. Phoenix didn’t hurt my sister. Why isn’t anyone listening to us? We don’t want this!”

“Nevertheless, it’s what is happening,” Miles replies shortly, lingering on Phoenix before turning his sharp glare on Maya. “I’m truly sorry for what you’re being put through, Miss Fey, but this isn’t an issue of what you want, or what you think you know. My job is prove the defendant guilty. And I always get my guilty verdict.” There’s an odd gravity to his tone, one Phoenix can’t place. Behind him, Gregory opens his mouth—and shuts it. Tips up his glasses to rub his dead eyes. His son’s are filled with fire. “Always.”

It's not really a flinch, what Maya does. More a hunch of her shoulders, as if she’s pulling her anger in, seething out of every pore, but the motion does move her back an inch, and Phoenix—

Phoenix moves before he's aware he's doing it.

One second he’s sagging against the wall, trying not to, the next, quicker than the flicker of a ghost, he’s standing in front of Maya, mercury slicing across his jugular. Vertigo hits him, the corners of the room tinging white, and there goes his heart again, thundering away like it’s just caught up to what he’s doing.

They stare at each other: Phoenix and Miles, PhoenixandMiles. Something flashes across Miles’ face, spreading the glare out into something like confusion, or maybe disbelief. The tension’s almost worse than Maya’s, static and heavy on the air, a storm about to restart, and Phoenix’s ribs are sharply protesting being forced upright, but if he moves, if either of them move, the sky will break, and everything beneath it will be torn in two. Or maybe the world will just go back to spinning, and Phoenix will lose the nerve to look Miles in the eye.

He feels like he’s standing on a cliff, struggling not to sway with it. He’s so close it would be nothing to reach for Miles, right then and there. Press his fingertips to the underside of Miles’ wrist, and slot their palms together, and feel the fresh spill of warmth in the tiny gaps between. The world might crack apart. They won’t.

But Phoenix’s skin is still crawling, tenderised and easy to chew. It’d rip right through him. Soon, too soon, they’ll have to hold themselves opposite—not split, not apart, too inextricable for that, just… opposite. Always heading straight for the other.

They don’t have time. There are a thousand things Phoenix wants to say (I promised, I keep my promises, I missed you, I just want to talk, I sent you letters, I ran out of things to say so quickly, so I sent you drawings instead, it’s the only language I know, the only way I could tell you I still have it, I kept it, I lost the bullet, but I kept that—)

In the end, there’s only one thing he can.

“Say that again after you’ve won. I haven’t lost yet.” He brings his own fire and watches it light through Miles’ sharp exhale. “You don’t have to act like any of this is new territory for me, Edgeworth. I’ve had worse than White.”

It’s the wrong thing. He knows it as soon as the trembling cracks collapse back into their rigid shape, sharp alabaster banded by snowmelt.

“People lie,” Miles says, strangely, contradictorily soft. “And they lie in court most of all.”

On the edges of his peripheries, Phoenix sees Gregory’s hand flinch to his chest. Right over the bullet hole.

“Don’t expect me to act like I know you, Wright.” Miles’ gaze is so heavy, and Phoenix tries not to shudder under the weight of it. “I’m not convinced I ever did.”

When he leaves, he slams the door behind him.

Gregory struggles through something like a deep breath. Two of them. He always used to look so tall to Phoenix. Comfortable in his body and its existent weight in the world. They’re the same height now. Immolating the same way. Grief, after all, like any fire, needs oxygen to burn.

“Soooo,” Maya says in the ringing aftermath, nudging Phoenix with her elbow. “You two know each other?”

Gregory looks at him. To him. Lurches forward a step.

Stops in place when Diego flickers between them. Whatever expression Diego wears, Phoenix doesn’t see it, but Gregory doesn’t come any closer.

Phoenix hums a vague noise that doesn’t really mean anything. “Depends, I suppose.”

“On what?”

“It’s complicated,” he says to Gregory, watching the man’s face twist every which way like he doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “Court’ll be starting soon,” he goes on before Maya can say anything else, stepping past Diego before the asshole can add his own comments. “We should go.”

(He is standing on a cliff.)

“Mr Wright…”

“Yes, Your Honour?”

The judge peers down at him, beard sinking with the downturned slash of his mouth. “You appear to have accumulated more injuries.”

Phoenix shrugs. “I walked into a door.”

“A door,” the judge repeats, unimpressed.

“It was a very aggressive door,” Phoenix says impassively. “I think I might have done something to upset it.”

“The prosecution moves to have that struck from the record,” Miles says, arms tightly folded, voice even more so. “There’s no need for the defence to waste the court’s time.”

“… Sustained,” the judge says.

Phoenix barely spares enough attention to hear any of it. White’s ghosts have started filtering in, Charlie drifting at the side of the darkly muttering horde, almost as jittery as Gregory where he’s pacing in and out of the shadows behind the prosecutor’s bench. Diego remains steady at Phoenix’s side, but that’s only a matter of practice.

Absently, Phoenix pokes his tongue into his cheek. The wound hasn’t bled for a while, but the taste of iron doesn’t go away.

White doesn’t fit the courtroom any better than he fit the detention centre, smiling the same smile as when he had Phoenix bleeding at his feet, his gestures loud, his words little more than rushing static floating away in the drumming rain. He calls himself Blanco Niño and Diego mutters, “Go, white boy, go,” with ash drifting across his eyes, and Phoenix smiles a very empty smile, something inside him breaking a little more. It was shattered long before White; the day blood splattered over the witness stand and Miles’ yells echoed the screaming inside Phoenix’s chest, the skin on his arms welted bright, furious red.

(Eight years old, then younger: six, or maybe seven. He’d chewed the end of a pen long enough to make it all the way through the plastic, and the ink spilled across his tongue. Kaa-san held him over the sink and stroked his hair while he washed it out, and though her touch must have been golden-warm, in his memory it’s dead cold, and her eyes are white.

Laughing, sighing, she asked, Oh, Ryuu, did you have to love it so much you’d to eat it? How hungry are you?)

Listen: Phoenix knows. He knows his situation isn’t ideal, which is why he still admonishes himself for doing—well. He’s read and read, and watched enough cases, written all the essays, passed all the tests. He’s done it by himself, with Mia and Diego, with Larry; he’s running everything he has, and cracked one too many things out of frustration, and given nothing less than absolutely everything.

Which is a long-winded way of saying that ever since Terry Fawles’ trial, he’s never stopped feeling flayed open.

And Phoenix isn’t stupid. He knows he was probably the only person who went into his first trial as a lawyer thinking he would do anything else but lose spectacularly. And he would’ve, if it wasn’t for Mia stepping in at the last second.

Why should his second be any different?

It would be easy, so, so easy to let himself fade amidst the cold and pain and noise, hand Diego his tie like a leash and let Diego drag him to the bitter end. And Diego would do it, even if he’d hate Phoenix all the more. It’s Mia’s life at stake, which means the same thing for them in differing strokes of colour, and it’s Maya tottering over the gallery balustrade, and it’s I did good with him, knock ‘em dead, go on then, boy. It’s so many things wrong with him, utterly and unignorably, but—

But the thing is, the absolute worst part: it’s not even about winning. If he only stood here for the sake of winning, he wouldn’t be standing here at all. It’s not that it would hurt to lose, nor that no one seems to want to take him seriously, not even Miles with all that ferociously wound, furious condescension. People can look down on anything from high enough above, and that includes him. No matter how terrifying the height might be.

A good lawyer is sought after. A good lawyer is wanted. A good lawyer wins.

A better attorney stands here, over and over, even when everyone else thinks the gavel should long-since have fallen. Winning is the best of it—but it still means it ends.

And Phoenix just wants to keep standing here.

The ghosts are—they are what they are; vicariously vindictive as Phoenix rakes his glass-torn palm through White’s abysmal attempts at testimony. They laugh and jeer, calling across each other, and more than once Diego has to flicker away from Phoenix’s side to catch the words Phoenix can only barely grasp through the stinging ache in his eyes. Charlie keeps to the defence’s bench, just a little to the side, batting away anyone who drifts too close. Her silence presses into the space around her, gaze oddly intense as she watches despite its dead weight.

There’s nothing he can do about them other than trust exposing White will make them quiet. They leave no space for anything else.

(Yet every time he turns, through twisted limbs and bleeding, macabre grins, when Phoenix looks up—

Miles is there looking back.)

Ultimately, it comes down to the glass (as if bottle necklaces weren’t enough yet). Phoenix never actually took the time to think about where it came from (because it makes him think of oceans and a sky on fire and not that I don’t want that do I?), and White’s mistake is so absurdly simple, so incredibly stupid, so insanely angry-making, Phoenix has to swallow the red of it to stop him spitting it across the floor.

He takes a deep breath, sort of choking on it. Bravery is a trick of adrenaline, and some things tumble out of his mouth without him meaning to, but this he says with every fraying fibre of his soul.

“You tried to kill Mia Fey, didn’t you?”

A little like a skinned animal, a little like his mom, White gnashes his teeth at Phoenix. He isn’t smiling anymore. It makes his cheeks sag, hate and high-rise disgust clashing horribly with the sweaty flop of his hair.

“Mr Your Honour,” White rasps, struggling away from the dead hands he doesn’t know are cheerily clawing through his mouth. Charlie, it seems, has started a trend. “My stomach, you see, it is hurting—”

“How awful for you,” Phoenix drawls, poking one of the bandages starting to peel off his cheek. “Answer the question.”

“You—” White cuts himself off with the slit of his teeth. “Miss Fey was—I… I—”

Through his thumping heart, Phoenix can no longer tell if the taste of iron has simply trickled in from his memories of if it exists here with White and his ghosts and the buzzing courtroom lights.

He is fire. He is dead cold. He is his father’s eyes and his mother’s blood: a bullet-metal boy.

But he’s still standing here.

Maybe that does sort of make him a lawyer.

(But we already know how this story ends.

… Don’t we?)

“I think it’s time you admitted it, Mr White,” Miles says, suddenly, and Phoenix startles so badly his thigh hits the underside of the bench. Miles twitches at the sound, but his gaze doesn’t move away from White.

“What?” Phoenix asks, forgetting, for a moment, where and when they are.

“I said it’s time for Mr White to admit to his crime,” Miles repeats, achingly slow. “Namely, placing the wiretap in Mia Fey’s office phone.”

Phoenix needs a moment for the words to reform into sense, unsure he heard correctly. They don’t change. They go on speaking, echoing on and on. “What?” he repeats, half an octave higher, voice cracking over the change like a boy’s.

“Mr White was at the Gatewater Hotel at the time of the assault,” Miles says, as if any objection Phoenix has raised didn’t happen in the first place. Like White’s testimony is the absolute truth. “Ergo, he must have seen the light stand at a different point in time. The distorted postulations of the defence have simply confused him.”

“I must admit to some confusion myself, Mr Edgeworth,” the judge interjects, which saves Phoenix the need to ask anyone what a postulation is. “Where exactly are you going with this?”

“As the court is already aware, a wiretap was found in Miss Fey’s office phone, which is how Miss April May was able to ascertain the weapon was a clock, not just a statue.” Miles unwinds his arms and places his hands flat on the prosecutor’s bench, staring down at the space between them. “However, it has not yet been established when it was placed. Nor by who.”

“Puta madre,” Diego snarls, and Phoenix nearly hits the bench a second time.

“April May admitted to placing the wiretap,” Phoenix says, half-glancing at Diego, bewildered by the sudden incandescent reaches of his rage.

“No,” Miles says. “She admitted to listening in on a conversation between Miss Fey and her sister. At no point has there been evidence to suggest she was the one who placed it. Not even to suggest she has ever been inside the Fey and Co. Law Offices. As the defence has now… helpfully uncovered, it’s undeniable Mr White entered the premises at some point. It’s the only explanation as to why he could recognise the light stand breaking. So, Mr White,” he says, and looks at White, face unreadable and so, so far away. “It’s time for you to confess. You’re the one who placed the wiretap. Am I correct?”

It takes a beat. White straightens so fast his ghosts flicker back in fright, hissing and spilling into each other. “I—yes. Yes, of course. You are most correct, Miles.”

Miles, he says, and Phoenix wants to—his hands ache, wanting to just—it doesn’t sound right. Sounds even uglier than people saying Wright, the way his trembling lips curl over its shape. Miles frowns but doesn’t correct him, and violence Phoenix doesn’t deserve to wish for pounds hotly under his ribs.

“Mr White! You will testify to the court about this wiretap at once!” the judge demands, and—

Diego is still struggling to pull himself in, a different kind of metal spreading over Phoenix’s tongue, tangy with the undertone of familiarity. Something that makes the hairs on his arms and the back of his neck stand on end.

A sweeping sense of disquiet falls over their ghosts, heads swivelling in confusion. Their muted resentment is loaded with pressure, reaching tentative fingers into the air, testing the rising swell of water, the growing waves crashing against the skylights. The rain is very loud, yet, somehow, very quiet.

Phoenix presses and burns, questions and burns, and still feels his words struggling to catch a light, no matter how fiercely he’s willing to fight. The courtroom is too cold.

And the hand that held paint brushes in Phoenix’s bedroom, and clung desperately to a keychain made one-of-three red-blue-yellow, and let itself be pulled onto a bridge to jump into a river, and squeezed Phoenix’s in the dark and the quiet and the little world they made just for themselves, and reached back to hold on every time Phoenix tried to let it go—

That hand slams into the wood with so much force the sound of it cracks like a gunshot.

“Enough,” Miles says, steady and cold, as if there isn’t a man underneath. Just walking, talking block of ice. “The only person who could have assaulted Miss Fey that night… is the defendant.”

There is no meaning to those words. No emotion. No feeling.

I always get my guilty verdict.

“Bullshit, Edgey!”

Phoenix jerks his gaze up and behind him, beaten into silence by Larry’s voice, of all things, sounding from above. He’s leaning over the balustrade of the gallery right at Phoenix’s back, orange jacket flaring out around him and fury spitting from his eyes.

“What is wrong with you?” Larry snaps, people left and right of him leaning away from the force of it. “Nick would never kill someone, never mind Mia! What the actual fuck are you doing?”

“Order!” the judge bellows, slamming his gavel. Phoenix barely hears it beyond the vibrations in the wood splintering under his fingernails. “Bailiffs, remove that man at once!”

“For fuck’s sake,” Larry yells, not a candle to Marcus’, but loud enough to rattle in Phoenix’s bones like a wildfire. “It’s always like this! You don’t have anyone else, so you blame Nick, just because it’s convenient.”

Stop it, Phoenix thinks. His tongue won’t form the words, a useless piece of flesh hanging between his cracking teeth. It doesn’t—I’m not—Larry, stop. Please.

“All your big fancy words don’t mean jack shit, Edgey, they never did, you—” Larry ducks a bailiff’s reaching arm, only to send himself right into the grasp of another. “Damn it—look at him! At least have the guts to look him in the eye when you—”

He cuts off with another series of swears as he is, quite literally, dragged away. It still doesn’t shut him up. He’s yelling the whole way out, though Phoenix misses the details, the sound swept away by the din rising behind him, above him, around him. Some of it lives and breathes. Most of it doesn’t. An ocean of noise. A boy treading water.

Amidst it, the silence suddenly at his side is twice as loud. Charlie looks at him, wiping a sticky streak of red from her lips to her hands. Then she turns to look across the court.

Not at White.

At Miles.

“Liar,” she whispers.

Phoenix can’t feel his hands. Numbing tingles shoot through the ends of his wrists. When he yanks himself round, Diego is already at the prosecutor’s bench, and though he looks absolutely incensed about it, his eyes meet Phoenix’s and they’re dark, bitter brown. Gregory steps forward, too, and he’s saying something like please, like you don’t understand, like listen, but his face is grimly resigned, and Phoenix realises, with an aching sort of helpless horror, that this isn’t the first time Gregory’s had to do this.

A rancid, reeling miasma of dead eyes and empty mouths and broken bodies flood past White, and Phoenix can see it taking shape: knives and bullets and ropes and fists and feet and glass and metal and white and white and white. Focussing on one man. The wrong man.

They can’t touch Miles, but that doesn’t mean Miles can’t feel it, has never, ever meant they can’t hurt him. His gaze is empty, head in a hard-jawed downward tilt, shadows filling the hollows around his eyes, and he’s rubbing his arm, fingers in spasms, curling in, like he could crawl inside himself, tear himself right open, like he wants to—

It bubbles inside Phoenix, not at him, not for him, but calling all the same, greedily sucking at the rotten thing that tethers him to the dead. Lights flicker though his vision, threatening to burst and break. He can’t get his breath back. Remembers broken shards of ceramic and the fresh, wet tear of his own skin leaving his neck and the way it felt when Kaa-sanMom grabbed him by the ankles and clawed up his legs—

And through it all, Phoenix still looks up, because most things pale in comparison to making sure Mia’s murderer can’t ever hurt her again, but when it comes to Miles, Phoenix will always be looking up, even if it kills him.

(At the very least, we know this is how it starts.)

The light above Miles explodes.

There’s a crackle of burning ozone, a surge of pressure like lightning, and the bulb inside the sconce shatters. Glass spills out the upturned shade (some shards as small as salt), glittering as it rains down. Cullet shaves Miles’ shoulder. He jerks back. Clutches the melting seams of his suit and stares wildly out of the sudden dark, finding blue and brown through an ocean of dead white, his eyes wide and growing wider, mouth falling open and—

“Phoenix.”

It’s so close. That’s the only reason Phoenix hears it. Spoken right into his ear. Sluggishly, his eyelids slide through a blink. Mercury melts into winter coffee dark.

“Phoenix—your nose.”

Something trickles over his lips. He clumsily wipes it and stares down at the blood on his hand. There’s a weird sense of gravity to the moment, like it means something more than what it is, but he couldn’t begin to explain how. Only remember the all-encompassing wrongness of it the first time he felt it splatter against his face. How warm, how—how he could almost pretend it was something else, but never really did, because blood is blood, and all blood can ever be is a bullet and a hole and an ending.

(Here we are again, Death whispers. It sounds like it’s trying not to care. It fails.

Here, we have the blood.)

And when the darkness finally reaches out to swallow him whole, he breathes, and he's glad.

He knows it’s a dream. There’s too much warmth on him for it to be anything else.

Hands, he thinks, tethering him to the ground. A cliff edge somewhere behind him—or below? And—

Fabric, tucked against his face. Fingers, pressed under his jaw. His left side. He tries to pull away, only succeeds in rolling his head over flat marble, a thousand square tiles, diamond tiles, sharp and biting and hungry, red and red and red—

His neck pulses, the old bite would bristling, and they won’t—

they’re still

touching

and

something bad happened. Something—there’s something he’s supposed to be doing, something important, wingbeats and empty, open, endless blue sky. Of it, in it, from it, for it.

Someone’s calling his name. It sounds like—

(“Phoenix?”

“Yeah?”

“… Can I ask you something?”

He looks up from the soap coating his hands, then down to the side. Miles’ face is screwed up a little, the way it is when he’s chewing the inside of his cheek. There’s a streak of orange drying across his chin, and when he flips his hair, it catches the rain shine, tinting the whole of him in sunset and silver.

Phoenix tilts his head all the way down, resting his cheek on his forearms. The chair wasn’t really made to be knelt on, and his legs are starting to hurt. “What is it?”

“You said…” Miles rubs at his Missile-yellow-stained hands. Phoenix feels his eyelids drift halfway closed as he stares at them, and thinks about holding them. He thinks about doing that more often than he ought to, really. “A while ago, you said you don’t draw your mom because it made your dad cry. Why… Why did he do that?”

Air waits in Phoenix’s lungs. He breathes it all out slowly, tasting the paint on his lips. “Because I lied,” he says quietly. Miles finally looks up at him. He picks the nails out of his palms one by one, but no matter how hard he tries, he can’t unmake his shaking fists. “Because I drew her as a monster.”

Here’s what he isn’t brave enough to say: because I drew her with my eyes.

Inside his pocket, burning right through to his skin, a bullet is eating him alive.)

He’s—dreaming. Isn’t he?

Of course he is.

Let’s not be silly.

There’s no other reason MilesEdgeworth would look so scared.

Chapter Text

             Two                s                                          
ThreeOne rules for being human:

You will tell no one.

You will admit nothing.
You do not have to ask permission.
You are going to die.

He wakes to find a short figure in pink bending over him. “Oh, it’s you,” he says, calming.

“Here I am,” she agrees. “And so are you.”

“Trying to be. I sort of forget how it feels sometimes.” He goes to lever himself up, but his limbs don’t cooperate. They’re oddly heavy, sticky inside the joints, laden with a bittersweet lethargy that makes them feel separate from his body. “It’s okay. You find me again, anyway.”

“Always,” she murmurs, pressing a hand over his chest. A drifting fall as soft as Sakura petals.

Immediately, he stills, breathing steadily against her palm. There’s something different about her touch, the way it reaches under his skin, curling beneath his bruised ribs, resting somewhere beside his heart. Down and deeper down. Brushing over the frozen secrets he keeps safe there and all the unhealed gashes leaking something he’s never known the words for.

Her face creases, fingers tensing as if she could scoop it out and let it go for him later. What remains of her bones tense and roll over in the dirt.

“I never meant for you to bear this,” she whispers, and the way she looks at him when she says it—

It’s funny. There are a lot of things he would do for the people he loves. Has done (and will do). Most of it hurts, which is okay, because he’s used to it, doesn’t remember being without it, and it means they don’t hurt. He’d burn the world to the ground and throw himself on the pyre if it would keep them safe.

But when she looks at him like that—he thinks she wouldn’t do the same for him. Instead, she would sit by him while he tried to sleep. She would search inside his closet and under his bed for monsters. She would make him breakfast when morning finally came, and she would hold him while he cried, and she would have something to say other than I’m sorry.

“It’s heavy,” he murmurs. Dips his head to the side to hide his eyes, and smiles. It tastes like salt. It tastes like salt and sweetness and iron. “I forget how heavy it gets, carrying so many dead things.”

“And yet you carry them,” she says, her eyes so, so sad but so, so kind, “Through this world where dead things should only be laid to rest.”

“I have promises to keep.” He swallows. It aches. “I’ve had so many.”

“And still time to keep them.” She brushes a finger under his eye, then cups his cheek. He can’t bring himself to look at her. “This isn’t just an ending. Don’t you feel it?”

Phantom metal locks around his throat, something feral beating wildly underneath. Demanding to be free. It’s something, at least. It’s far better than the constant draining ache of absence and loss. Yellow burns into the blue of him like a sun branded across his chest. Blossoms trail off her sleeves, branches winding over old wounds, and though the shape and colour aren’t right, it makes him think of baobab trees; roots growing so large they split the world in two. Large enough to tear mountains and oceans apart.

How many seconds in eternity?

“Phoenix, tell me.” Her brown eyes thrum with a kind of fire he’s only ever seen in dreams. “Doesn’t something feel new?”

He doesn’t know about new. There’s only cold marble waiting for him, and the shape of his soul has always been made of feather and fang before metal and root, but there’s a badge burning a hole through his heart and far too many things for him to hold onto, even if they won’t hold onto him. All he needs is one second. The very first second.

Phoenix looks up at her, blinking hard because his eyes hurt so much from trying to hold back tears.

“Still time,” he repeats, and tries to believe it.

She leans down and kisses his forehead. When he breathes in, he can smell—yes, of course, earth, that deep, deep earthen scent, like how the air smells after rain in summer. But there’s also something that makes him think of oil and metal, like the frame of his bike speeding under starlight, or the shape of his badge when he holds it in his palm.

Something built that will not break.

(Somewhere far away, too far for him to hear, but maybe not for him to feel in the deepest, most precious parts of himself, there’s a single beat of wings.)

“Ittekimasu,” she promises.

And—

“I know you’re awake, pajarito.”

Phoenix opens his eyes. Almost immediately closes them again. The lights are overbright, searing right into the back of his skull, and it’s only now he remembers to feel the pain scraping through each and every part of him. Beneath him is a leather couch, tough and merciless on his hurts, a softer weight cradling his head. All he can gather from his scant, fleeting glance is the defendant’s lobby, empty and quiet but for the constant pattering rain hiding in the dim beyond the windows.

“It’s just us. There’s a bailiff outside, but they seem to think you’re too delicate to cause any problems.”

“M’not delicate,” he mutters.

“Ha, you went down like a Victorian woman in an over-laced corset.”

Pink flutters at the edges of his stinging vision. He turns to follow it and finds Diego waiting for him instead, sitting on the floor and facing outwards to the rest of the room.

Phoenix reaches up to rub the sticky weight out of his eyes. Brushes his hair off his forehead and lingers on the spot just above his left eyebrow, tracing the receding warmth with the very tips of his fingers. He feels like he’s forgetting something. But Diego’s here, and if Diego’s here, it’ll be okay.

So he doesn’t panic. He doesn’t feel much of anything, actually.

Just cold.

“That’s never happened to you before,” Diego says, quiet with it. He doesn’t turn around. His gaze is fixed on the ceiling. Tension winds his shoulders up to his ears, his breaths careful, one after the other, as if trying to conserve oxygen. To keep himself from sinking. Other than that, he’s perfectly still. The perfect model for a painting.

There’s something sitting on the coffee table right beside his knees. Phoenix resolutely does not look at it.

When he shifts his jaw he can feel the wounds on his face crack along their dry edges. “I got the shit beaten out of me yesterday.”

“And you haven’t eaten.”

“I did eat.”

“Ha, yeah, sure. Two bites of a stale sandwich processed to hell and back. I bet it didn’t even survive the return trip,” Diego grumbles, reaching up to tug a strand of hair in front of his eyes. He twists the brown wisping into white around and around. Then he lets it go. Tilts his head back until his mottled crown dips into Phoenix’s stomach. “Phoenix,” he asks seriously, “What happened?”

Phoenix matches Diego’s breathes. Swallows around the empty pit of nausea flooding him inside and out.

The worst part isn’t that ghosts can touch him. It’s what he feels when they do.

Sometimes—sometimes he doesn’t actually mind them trying. Hell, Davy helped him cut his hair for years. Admittedly, the first time was because he was using a rusty knife he shouldn’t have had anywhere near his skin, let alone using it to chop his hair down to the scalp, and he was so delirious with fever she made the executive decision to learn how to cut hair with a rusty knife very quickly rather than watch him slice off his own ear.

It was never so dramatic after that, thankfully. She’d tilt his head this way and that, guiding his hands and scissors, and even if it left his scalp itching, neck aching and fingers too stiff to move for hours, whenever he remembers those moments, he always, always remembers them blue. He’d make a mug of something sweet when they were done, and she’d stay to talk about her brother. And he already knew most of what she was going to say, because Davy is always thinking about her brother, but it was easy to let her words wash over him as he took slow sips and chased the pain with the warmth and her smile.

She still likes tugging on his spikes when she visits, and she’s never refused a hug when he’s offered, and he knows enough about drowning the worst parts barely register past the lingering taste of rotting river water. And anyway, the pain isn’t—it isn’t that bad.

But sometimes—sometimes the ghosts die in worse ways. Their hands are cut off and they chew out their tongues, or it’s their fingers, one by one, until there’s nothing left but a snarling wounded thing, or—or crashes, they’re always awful, or maulings, or burns, or starvation, or—

And—

And feeling that is a mess. Like the time he’d been screaming and screaming and screaming and nearly succeeded in chewing through his forearm before Dad grabbed him and dumped him in the middle of a coldcoldcold shower and ordered him to breathe.

Phoenix doesn’t remember the details of that ghost. After his mom chased it off, it never came back, and he thinks, maybe—maybe that’s fine, because instead, he remembers his dad; the rough skin of those workman’s hands as he helped Phoenix get dressed when Phoenix couldn’t do it himself.

(That’s another worst part: sometimes, Damien Wright really was just his father. A little quiet and a lot of fear, but so very tender, and so very sweet. He held Phoenix’s face in the dark and whispered, “My son.” Just like that. My son. As if reminding them both. He rocked Phoenix to sleep like he was a little kid again, and he was still there when Phoenix woke in the morning.

And Phoenix loved him.

Obviously he loved him.

How else could his dad have killed him?)

All of which means he doesn’t actually know what happened. But he can guess. He’s a—whatever it is he is, and that means he can see ghosts, can touch them, can… hurt them.

And it means they have power over him, too.

He shuts his eyes. Opens them when the dark threatens to swallow him back down. “Is Maya still here?”

Diego snarls an inarticulate noise. “Left during the trial.” He rubs at the stubble on his jaw, tilting his mouth into his palm. “She scurried off in the middle of White’s testimony. I think she tried to get your attention. It wasn’t for nothing. I’m not pissed off at her,” he adds unnecessarily.

Phoenix tilts his head and pokes Diego in the side of his neck. “And you didn’t go with her?”

“I was a little busy trying to help you.”

“And?” He traces a curling line of white slotted neatly against the brown. “It all went to hell without your help. I don’t know why I—” expected anything different. He bites his tongue. He does. He does know why. “You should’ve gone. It might be Mia. You should go and make sure.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Diego growls, trying to swipe Phoenix’s fingers away. “I’m not leaving you alone.”

“It’s different if it’s for Mia.”

“No, it isn’t.”

Phoenix swallows, again and again, struggling to breathe around the new acidic burn trailing from his throat to his chest. It’s guilt.

Guilt for making Diego worry so much. Guilt for still being like this, for somehow messing up the gift Diego and Mia gave him: a chance to stand up in court on his own two feet. And still he somehow fucked it up, because he always manages to fuck it up, and it hurts the same way every time.

“Sorry,” he says, softly.

“Shut up or I’ll shut you up,” Diego snaps, which really should be an empty threat but he’s gotten creative over the years. “First rule when I wake up is any time you say sorry I get to throw boiling coffee at your face. Qué barbaridad! Fucking sorry. What the hell are you sorry about?”

“For scaring you.”

Diego gives up on swatting him with a strangled, “Fuck.”

Phoenix lets him have it. Diego says joder when he doesn’t want to mean it and fuck when he does. It’s all in that last percussive ‘uck’, apparently.

“Maya’s with her,” Diego says, sighing, whole body collapsing into it. “What am I going to add to that?”

Shame is also an emotion that lives in the throat. Dense, familiar and curdling. It’s heavy. Phoenix just wishes he could do—something. Something. There must be some way to keep it—not as it is. To make it better than an ending, or maybe just a better ending, where you can see everything waiting on the other side.

(There’s something else he’s supposed to be doing.)

“Y’know,” he says, “Being a lawyer isn’t as much fun as I thought it’d be.”

Another snort, short and bitter. “Ha, at least your sense of humour’s intact.”

“It’s about the only part of me that is.”

That, finally, makes Diego look at him. Phoenix isn’t sure where his own gaze is—the roof or the windows or the back of his eyelids, but he knows Diego is looking at him. It hurts. It shouldn’t. Mercury shouldn’t bleed into coffee. Fear shouldn’t be the last thing he remembers before closing his eyes. He wishes his skin wasn’t so tender, bruising every time he brushes against something sharp. He’s not even thinking about the real bruises. He’s thinking about a boy giving up his strength and going limp. One breath at a time.

And then Diego says, “One of these days you’re not going to be able to make a joke about it, baby boy.”

An agitated ripple flows through Phoenix’s stomach muscles, forcing him to sit up and swing his legs off the couch. On purpose, half of him goes right through Diego. He loosens his clenched fingers piece by piece. “I told you to stop calling me that.”

“Aw, baby boy annoyed he’s hearing what he is?” Diego asks meanly. “I’d be annoyed too if I was about to be beaten by a man wearing a purple suit in public.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Phoenix mutters. “At least if White’s going to kill me he’s doing it with pizazz.”

Diego grins. Phoenix smiles. And then he sort of laughs, too, though he tries to hide it, because Diego is clearly far too damned pleased with himself.

“Not over yet, pup,” Diego says, which is only marginally better. “Besides, your face looks all wrong when you go limp like that. Smiling suits your face much better.”

(A conversation to be repeated an uncountable number of times:

You will do this?

Yes.

You will bear it?

Yes.

And if it kills you?

Then it kills me.)

The rain is still falling. If the ghosts are howling inside it, the drumbeat pulsing against the side of Phoenix’s skull is too loud to hear them. It’s only now he realises he’s not wearing his jacket. Someone took it off and folded it beneath his head. He pulls it into his lap, thinking he’s going to put it on, because he’s coldcoldcold, but in the end he simply holds it, fighting the strange urge to crush it against his chest. His badge is silently waiting for him. Shiny and new. When he touches it, it’s cold, too.

He drags his hand away and reaches out, carefully brushes his thumb over another curling lock of brown and white at the base of Diego’s neck. He’s not entirely sure how Diego pictures it. Sometimes, it stays its old earthen brown. Sometimes, it’s a wave of downy white. Most often it’s this mix between the two, almost like Murphy’s fur, and he’s struck by a sudden upsurge of fondness for both of them so strong he has to take a moment to let it grow into him.

“I think there’s something wrong with me,” he muses, smiling again when Diego actually laughs. “I’m serious. I don’t think people are supposed to feel this calm when they’re about to be found guilty of attempted murder.”

Diego leans into the press of Phoenix’s palm and raises an eyebrow. “Do you trust me?”

“Always.”

Phoenix does not hesitate.

“So, what do you have to be scared of?” Diego asks.

Diego, Phoenix thinks, I am so, so scared, all the time, and I’m trying not to be, but I know the world doesn’t want me in it and I have no idea what I’m doing. I’m angry at Mil—at Edgeworth. I’m angry. Are you happy? Because that wasn’t winning.

That was just being cruel.

He doesn’t say it. He’s not really sure what the point would be, other than making Diego about a thousand times more worried than he’s doing an awful job at pretending he’s not. Or maybe Phoenix just knows him too well. It’s a nice thought, one that gently wraps itself around his tender ribs, as if holding onto something precious.

“I missed him,” is what he settles on instead. It’s enough of a truth it makes him feel a little braver. “And now I still miss him.”

There’s something sitting on the coffee table right beside Diego’s knees. Phoenix still does not look at it. He doesn’t have to. He rubs his face and tastes soap and metal. When he traces the phantom tracks down past his lips and chin, he finds red dotting the collar of his shirt.

The handkerchief, stained by his own drying blood, watches him carefully from the tabletop.

“He’s okay,” Diego says, though he doesn’t make it sound like a good thing. “His papá, too. Most of White’s little entourage backed off after you passed out. Little brat ran over before you’d even hit the ground. I think that startled them. He was pretty loud about it. Very insistent you weren’t fit to be standing in court in the first place, let alone with those injuries.”

Liar, said Mom.

Liar, said Charlie.

It doesn’t feel like a lie so much as a truth that needs changing. Does that cancel it out? Does that make it better? Worse?

A loudness stretches out around them. A distant noise like

                    shhh…

                                                    shhh…

The sound of incoming waves.

They’ll crash over him soon enough. Anything would split apart under their weight. Phoenix has never stood a chance.

But there’s still time.

“Do you trust me?” Phoenix asks back quietly.

“With your life?” Diego isn’t kind enough to hold in his laugh. He wouldn’t be him if he was. “Never.”

“What about Mia’s?”

“Any day,” Diego says, instantly and without thought. “Listen, it’s my fault. Still haven’t learned my lesson. The moment you walk in there thinking you know what’s going to happen is the moment you lose. Sets you right up to be blindsided.” He reaches up, settling his fingers over Phoenix’s and stopping any protest before it can form. “You’re a lawyer, Phoenix. Don’t let anyone in there tell you otherwise. Including me.”

Phoenix edges his way into a grin. “I thought you were my lawyer.”

“Semantics,” Diego says.

It’s sort of hard not to believe him after that. Out of the two of them, Diego’s always been the poet.

Phoenix’s badge has warmed from his body heat. He holds it tight enough to burn his fingers, then leans past Diego and picks up the handkerchief. The clean parts of the fabric are gentle with his scars. He tucks it in his pocket and it curls up comfortably. Soft and content. Loyal as a dog.

“What are you thinking?” Diego asks, watching him closely. Searching for the answer he knows Phoenix won’t give.

“I’m thinking,” Phoenix replies, “I have promises to keep.”

He puts his jacket on. The badge sits in its lapel, right over his heart.

Right over his stupid heart.

The exploding light has been attributed to damage from last night’s storm. There’s been lights flickering throughout the building all day, apparently. Doors slamming shut, you know how gusty these old buildings can be, tucking people into their jackets, rubbing the backs of their shoulders, right in that place they have to look round to see. But things seemed to have calmed down, and Phoenix officially isn’t dying, so the trial is set to continue.

“Honestly, you’d think this place was haunted,” Diego says.

Phoenix smiles faintly, unable to muster up the care to hide it. The court official scurries off pretty quick after that.

Walking back into the courtroom isn’t as harrowing as he feared, though he has to keep blinking against the headache reaching into the backs of his eyes. Too much white, stark white, softened by brown and shadow, but white and white and bright. Old marble and dead eyes seeping through the meagre barrier of his skin. He tucks his hands into his pockets to stop them wrapping around himself, only to find himself gripping the handkerchief tight enough to feel the blood flake against his fingers. Red on white on dark.

It's funny. It’s not. But it’s stupid and simple and true: because of his mom, Phoenix has always known white to be the colour of grief. For many, it symbolises rebirth and purity, as well as mourning—particularly for children. From irises to the barren terrains of winter, to the paleness of the skin of someone already gone, and the white-knuckled grip of someone else’s hand, thinking, who could I possibly be without you?

Maybe that’s why ghosts lose the colour of their eyes. Maybe their own loss has bled into them so deep they can’t absorb any more colours.

But, of course, meaning is often heavier than whatever words we attach it to, because grief is just another kind of sadness, and sadness is just another word for hurt, and anger is just that hurt turned outwards. Each link clinking into place down the chain. Steadily crushing his throat.

He grits his teeth as its yanked a little tighter.

“Splendiferous,” White says, blocking Phoenix’s path before he can take more than a few steps. “So happy to see you well enough to face your punishment, Mr Wrong.”

“Why are you still here?” Phoenix asks.

“It would be terribly irreparable for me to miss this, wouldn’t it?” White’s smile is a laceration on his face. Phoenix is surprised it doesn’t crack and bleed when he shows his teeth. “A little mongrel pup finally learning his place in the world. Eat or be eaten.” He leans closer. Underneath his cologne (probably worth more than Phoenix’s suit), he stinks of stale sweat. “I’m certain your bitch will learn the same soon enough.”

“I’m going to kill you,” Diego promises, pulsing sea-salt starlight, layering lightning through his tone. White jerks back, caught in the discharge. Even his ghosts hover warily.

But White can’t hear it. He doesn’t know what it really means, does he?

(He should have paid closer attention to what he was bleeding beneath his fists.

Did you know? Death laughs. He didn’t even bother cleaning his rings.)

Phoenix’s anger, when it lifts its fanged, feral head, tends to fester in his blood. It doesn’t go anywhere. Instead, it clogs his veins and stops his heart and does no harm but to himself. He prefers it that way. He’s seen anger that rails and thrashes, he’s seen the bodies it leaves behind, and he wants to split no skin but his own.

Sometimes, he looks in the mirror and it’s his dad's eyes staring back: so furious he shakes with it, the single strike of a match leaving blazes in his wake. Sometimes, he can’t help it. Sometimes, Phoenix feels a firing pin snap in his chest and wants nothing more than to let the primer explode. He looks in the mirror and sees his dad’s eyes staring back; he sees a boy who exists to do nothing but ignite a carefully crafted life of warm embraces and quiet beds and a wife who will kill herself, and sometimes he thinks the boy deserved so much worse.

Phoenix knows he is little of his mother and everything of his father, and he has promised himself he will do anything to keep from following his absent footsteps.

When he smiles at White, his heart beats strong and healthy. It wants more. It wants violence. But whatever he might wish otherwise, he is still his father’s son. And that’s the only thing that keeps him from slamming his fist into the centre of White’s terrified eyes.

“I don’t know what you’re so excited about,” he says instead, curling his hands around the words—the only weapon fit for a court of law. “I haven’t lost anything yet.”

He’s sure White had a whole song and dance prepared, but Phoenix slips round him before he regains his composure. He takes his place behind the defence’s bench. The gavel hasn’t fallen. True to his own words, he’s not going to act like he’s lost before it’s even happened.

When Phoenix looks up, Edgeworth is there, but he isn’t looking back. He’s busy reflecting the floor, as cold and pale. Gregory manages a few seconds before dropping his gaze, too.

They look lonely in the dark.

“Does the defence have anything more to add?”

Phoenix manages not to laugh. There’s definitely something wrong with him. The injuries, the lack of food, lack of sleep—the ghosts. Always the ghosts.

Does he have more?

He has nightmares drenched in glass and the ocean around his ankles. Nightmares with pale hands and pale eyes that keep clawing up his legs, blood-spattered nightmares over stark white and white is so empty. It isn’t, not really, because it’s everything blended together, the most colour the universe has to offer. He’s never thought of it as bad before (he’s used to it, it’s just how things are), but it makes him sick now. He sees white and he wants to colour it in, wants it to change, wants it to be something else. White gauze tightens around the wound but doesn’t address the cause. White tried to kill Mia and he will try again.

Tell them, he thinks, eyes wide, staring at the open, hungry mouth of the court. Tell them. Just be brave for a few more seconds and tell them.

“A name,” he says, fear almost strangling his voice silent. “A few names, actually.”

The judge leans over his bench, far enough down his beard trails over empty space. “Names, did you say?”

“Charlie Parker is one of them. You’ll have to sift through some witness protection records, but her death should be filed under her own name.” He glances over when White chokes loudly on his own lungs. In a better world, it’d be his tongue. “Or would you prefer they started with Misty Fey?”

Alarm flares in White’s eyes, pupils exploding with black. “What do you think you’re doing, Mr Wrong?”

Phoenix tilts his head and lets himself smile a wide smile, tricking the fear right out of him for as long as he doesn’t have to look at the man staring at the floor in the dark. “Exactly what you told me to do.”

“And what is that supposed to mean?” that very man asks.

“It means look them up, Edgeworth,” Phoenix says, right to him without ever turning his head. “Look them all up.”

Understanding where Phoenix is going with this (as always, sometimes before Phoenix is aware of it himself), Diego has already flickered to the nearest of White’s ghosts. The message spreads quickly, the first of them already stepping forward, stepping past White, and saying—

Just saying their name.

It splatters out and stains the air.

They flicker back a little, blinking, as if surprised by the sound it makes. Phoenix repeats it, as slow and clear and loud as he can make his voice, and the owner clasps a hand to their mouth.

And then they begin to cry.

And here’s the next one, and the one after that, after that, after that. It’s scuffed and more than a little confusing at times, all of them pushing to be next, impatiently talking across each other, because they have no reason to help themselves, no reason to want beyond what they are. It doesn’t help that White rears up, that he starts saying, “Stop this, cease your pathetic barking, shut up—” and the judge bangs his gavel, demanding White, “Be quiet,” though hardly anyone, least of all White, listens.

If there’s one thing Phoenix knows intimately, it’s noise. All ghosts sound the same: they sound like they’re reaching out to tug at your clothes, like they’re whispers in your ears, like they’re just white noise you can fill in. Take a dead thing and give it a name, and you give it something to breathe in. You give it a reason to chew and swallow.

(It’s like this: Phoenix ran out of Terry Fawles’ trial with MilesEdgeworth’s name biting through his lips. He pushed through the crowd, sprinted down the halls, chasing something even faster—that already started so much further ahead.

The red of Edgeworth’s suit glared back at him so suddenly he skidded to a stop. Edgeworth was walking away, being led by someone, maybe, though Phoenix hardly noticed past the scream rising from the courtroom and the fidgeting looks Gregory kept shooting over his shoulder. They weren’t moving very fast, but Phoenix’s feet felt stuck to the floor, his heart so heavy and loud in his chest he could hardly breathe around it let alone move.

It's like this: as Phoenix watched Edgeworth go on ahead, as he pulled his sleeves down over the scratched skin of his arms, as he chewed the name and swallowed it into the howling pit of hunger at his core, he thought, just look back. Just once.

But they have too much of themselves in each other.

Edgeworth didn’t look back.

Phoenix is so tired of watching Edgeworth’s back get smaller and smaller.)

He’s come so far. He wants to be able to say something else, say, I’m here, I’ve caught up, finally, I told you I would, I promised—

He’s standing in the right spot, but it’s in Mia’s place. In Diego’s. In every dead voice calling through the court.

Nothing more than an echo.

“The man is clearly deranged!” White howls. He grips the witness stand like it’s the only thing stopping him from lunging across the room to beat Phoenix to death next.

“Sometimes,” Phoenix agrees, raspy and tired, ribs aching enough he leans on the bench and doesn’t try to hide it. “That doesn’t make it less true. I don’t particularly care who you are, White. In here, it shouldn’t matter.”

“But it does,” White spits. Rust crawls around the rim of his rings, scraping off on his pale, clammy skin. “Don’t delude yourself into thinking this had any other ultimatum.”

“Yeah, I don’t think that word means what you think it means,” Phoenix says, and slips on another smile.

He keeps it in place when Edgeworth clears his throat. Edgeworth’s arms are folded, finger tapping on his elbow. On anyone else, Phoenix would say he looks agitated, but even that tiny motion seems thoughtfully crafted down to each individual knuckle. “If you’re quite finished.”

“Not really.” Phoenix rubs his eyes, skirting carefully over the bruises. “But I guess you’re asking if I have evidence.”

He flicks his gaze over the crowd of ghosts, checking to see if there’s anyone he missed. The ones with the wherewithal stare back silently—Charlie among them. The rest moan and wail and cry. Diego places a hand on his shoulder, lending him courage. Phoenix looks at White’s sneering purple snarl. Edgeworth’s icy exterior folding each piece of him away like a structure of forced anatomy. The dead eyes only a little more barren. He listens to the rain beating against the glass and thinks he hears a yell somewhere inside the court. From this distance, it’s too far way to understand.

He sets his sneakers firmly against the floor. “Then no. Not at this time.”

The judge surveys him. “Very well,” he says slowly, bewildered. He takes his time looking. Fumbles his beard this way and that with the exertion.

“Mr Your Honour, I’m certain we all have places to be.” White’s glare is nothing short of a promise of all sorts of new pain. “I certainly do.”

Idly, Phoenix wonders if he’ll survive the transfer to prison once White’s done with him.

“The court did not ask for your input, Mr White,” the judge says sharply. He sighs and drops his beard for his robes. Tucks himself in. “If the defence truly has no more evidence to present—”

Phoenix isn’t sure what interrupts him. He’s so used to hearing things nobody else does that it takes him a moment to notice the other living heads in the room turning towards the growing commotion echoing its way through the courthouse.

“Another spirited match, I imagine,” the judge says, regaining the court’s attention. “As I was saying—I presume you’re also finished, Mr Edgeworth?”

It’s strange, then, to see Edgeworth raise his head a little. He has his hands stuffed into his elbows. His lips half-pursed in consternation. He’s watching the marble floor, but he’s not seeing it, eyes twitching back and forth under a slow blink. And it’s obvious, so stupidly obvious that he’s trying to catch a glimpse of Phoenix when Phoenix isn’t looking—but Phoenix is always looking.

“I have nothing more,” Edgeworth says, mouth a little open afterwards as if he’s going to add something else, chin lifting higher, and Phoenix feels a flutter in his chest at—being addressed? Being part of Edgeworth’s sentence, spoken aloud?

But, quite abruptly, Edgeworth clamps his mouth shut. Gregory’s fingers ghost over his shoulder. He inhales something that seems to hurt and declares the finality of his statement with a single nod.

Phoenix looks at him. And looks at him. Seeing, perhaps finally, what he refused to admit to himself before. Edgeworth is a lawyer and Phoenix is a mess that needs cleaning up—another mess, one of however many Edgeworth has dealt with in the four years he’s been a prosecutor. Larry screamed at him to look at Phoenix, but why would he want to bother? The only thing Phoenix is worth is the cruelty of hearing him say goodbye. Edgeworth tried (I always get my guilty verdict), calculated and quick, as if that would somehow exorcise the pain. His mind is already outside this courtroom, maybe on the next case, and all the others waiting after it. There hasn’t been a place in that after for Phoenix for fifteen years.

Phoenix is only here. There is no after. He is trapped in this unimaginable present.

And he does not see how he can ever get from here to there.

Miles, he thinks, bloodied and sullied and knowing he doesn’t deserve to ask. Do whatever you want. Hate me, kill me, hurt me. Rip my soul clean from my chest and I’ll smile as it bleeds, if that’s what you need, if that’s what will make you happy. Just hate me for what I am, please. Just see me. Please.

Please.

(As if a boy, whose life has never been his own, would be lucky enough to choose what he would die for.)

He doesn’t even get the chance to try and say it.

The doors to the court slam open hard enough Edgeworth looks all the way up, flinching right into Phoenix’s waiting gaze and—

“Fucking—everyone shut up!”

She’s swaddled in a too-large forest green hoodie, a hospital gown sagging to her knees and a pair of men’s boots swallowing her feet. Only one arm is on show, the other bulging out the fabric across her midriff, and bandages hold half her head. She’d red-faced and sweaty and panting, dripping rainwater all over the floor, clinging to the door like she’ll collapse without the support—

And Mia Fey is, unequivocally, the most beautiful thing Phoenix has ever seen.

“M-Miss Fey!” the judge exclaims. Then, after a beat to catch the echo of her words, “Excuse me?”

“You’re excused.” Mia flaps her hand as she forces her feet to carry her into the room. “I mean, objection, or whatever, I don’t know.” She makes it halfway to the stand before she gives up, bending over with her only working hand braced against her knee. “I just ran all the way up here, what do you want from me?”

Phoenix is already moving, faster than anyone can stop him, chasing Diego’s lightning smear. He ducks round the ghosts until they part for his passing and he can see her as clearly as she can see him. Her eyes, swollen from exhaustion, go wider and more awake than a sun cresting the morning horizon.

“Phoenix—your face. Your shirt.” She grabs the bloody material as he reaches her. Pauses and looks down at the floor again. In the flattest voice he’s ever been alive to hear so far, she says, “Your shoes.”

Diego chokes on a desperate laugh. He bends over from the force of it, hands desperately tangled in his hair.

Phoenix has to hold his cheek to stop it literally splitting open with the force of his smile. “Mia—you’re here.” Stuttering, gasping inside its shrinking pocket of air, his brain catches up with his mouth. “You ran here?”

“’Course I’m here. Forgot how many stairs this place has,” she says, like that explains anything. She’s struggling for air still herself, so much of her weight pressing into him. Leaning like a half-built bookshelf.

He holds steady, though his voice nearly cracks to pieces. “Y-You didn’t have to run—you’re okay. Are you okay? You look—and are those Ant’s shoes? And Maya, where—”

BANG

The doors, hanging open from when Mia strode through, slam shut. A grinning miasma of too-wide smiles and too-many teeth leer at the man slowly edging towards them. The wood creaks, trembling, trying to throw the plethora of contorted hands off. Charlie stands abreast the horde, grinning with a wide empty mouth and bright, bright eyes.

White freezes as every living pair in the room focus on him. He smooths down his suit, looking like he’s about to melt into it. “Miss Fey,” he says with something that’s probably supposed to be a smile. “Such a relief—”

“You,” Mia whispers. White’s mouth sutures shut. She looks up at Phoenix. “You got him here?”

“What do you think happened to my face?” Phoenix asks wryly.

He blinks at the sudden ferocity that shears Mia’s expression, that kinetic crash of fear and fury. Her hand slips around his tie, and before he gets a chance to do much more than yelp, she drags him all the way to the stand with her.

“Forget whatever else was going on,” Mia says. “I’m here. I’ll do it.” She frowns at the empty defence bench. Glances back to where Phoenix is barely managing to keep his feet. “Where’s your lawyer?”

Standing behind you, trying not to cry, he nearly says.

Clutching his ribs, he wheezes, “I’m my lawyer.”

Mia squints. “… Seriously?”

“Is that really the issue right now?” Phoenix hisses incredulously.

“Miss Fey,” the judge says again, beard quivering, looking, of all things, like he’s trying not to laugh. “A pleasure, as always.”

Mia just looks at Phoenix: at his bruised face and ruined shirt and bloody sneakers. Her in his hoodie and a hospital gown and one trip in those oversized boots away from collapsing. A flicker of something gold flits about the curve of her smile. “Go on, then. Show me what you can do.”

“Your Honour, I have to object,” Edgeworth barks, and Phoenix barely hears his next words when the ghosts actually do start laughing. “Miss Fey isn’t fit to testify. You only have to look at her to understand that. I have medical papers explaining the extent of her cognitive impairment—”

Mia rounds on him. “I’ll show you cognitive impairment, you little—”

“Is it not true you don’t remember the assault?” Edgeworth cuts right into her.

Her glare is so furious it’s a miracle Edgeworth doesn’t spontaneously combust. But she doesn’t actually answer the question either.

“Phoenix,” Diego says. His hand clenches through Phoenix’s left.

Phoenix doesn’t know if the thought was already waiting inside his head, or if it’s Diego grabbing the wound and saying his name. Glass shatters under his tongue. Held between them, Mia and Diego, and the words fall out unafraid. “I’m not asking her to testify about that.”

“You’re—not?” the judge asks.

And, “You’re not?” Mia snaps.

And, “You’re not?” Edgeworth demands.

“No,” Phoenix answers all of them. It’s not the worst of it, not even close, but he can feel another grin fighting to form all the same as he looks at Mia. “I want you to testify about the light stand.”

Mia stares back at him like he’s gone insane. Which, to be fair, is usually how she looks at him. “You want me to testify about what?”

“The light stand in your office. It broke that night, during the struggle—”

“Objection!” Edgeworth yells, the loudness of it briefly pausing the rabbiting beat of Phoenix’s heart. “You’re leading the witness!”

“Objection!” Phoenix snarls, letting himself flare vicious and wild. Edgeworth leans back from the force behind it. Phoenix hopes he feels it alright. He hopes it resounds the same way in Edgeworth’s chest and echoes in that stupid head of his, makes him snap out of whatever keeps clouding his eyes when he looks at Phoenix. Makes him stop looking at Phoenix like he’s already gone. “White testified he heard it break. You’ve been very happy to keep bringing up the fact I cut my hand on it.”

“Did you break it?” Mia interjects.

“What?” Phoenix startles. “No, I just kind of—fell into it?”

“I spent a grand on that!”

“You wha—You spent a thousand dollars on a light stand!?”

“It was a very nice light stand,” Mia snaps. “And you broke it.”

“Okay, the next time someone’s bashing you over the head with a clock I’ll politely ask them to leave, will I?” Phoenix snaps back.

“Maybe!” Mia spins round to pin White to the wall with her glare. “I better get damages paid out for that thing. It’s the very least you owe me.”

It takes the court a few seconds to understand that’s a genuine request. “Um…” The judge clears his throat. “As… scintillating as this is, could you perhaps answer the question, Miss Fey?”

Mia yanks on Phoenix’s tie again. “Nobody asked me one.”

“You didn’t give me a chance!” Phoenix protests, fruitlessly trying to tug himself free. “Right, okay, the light stand—can you confirm when you bought it?”

“What does that matter?” Mia asks, blinking her way through a squint, as if trying to wake herself up from a dream.

Phoenix can’t entirely convince her it isn’t one. He is fumes and trailing smoke and unsure how he managed to twist himself upright for this long without her holding him, even if she’s half-strangling him while she’s at it. And in that state of delirium, with one bleeding, broken hand held by Diego, he says, too quiet for himself to hear over the chittering ghosts—

He says, "Trust me."

Please.

Mia’s fingers slacken. Tighten. They do it again a few more times, matching the shivering rise and fall of her chest.

And she answers, “The day before Maya arrived. I bought it the day before I—before I was attacked.”

“Is there evidence of this?” Edgeworth asks, harsh and quick as a whip.

“A receipt.” Mia shakes her head a little, balance tilting further into Phoenix. They’re the only thing holding each other up. But her voice is steady and clear. “It should be in my office. Or, considering the police have turned it upside down, it might be in your office, Edgeworth.”

“Mr White confessed to placing a wiretap last week in your office,” Edgeworth says. “He testified to seeing a light stand during that time.”

“Well, he must have been hallucinating because it wasn’t there," Mia hisses. "If it was his testimony, and your supposition, the burden of proof falls to you. Not me, and not Phoenix.”

“Oh, good girl,” Diego breathes. “That’s my girl.”

“Your Honour, this is ludicrous,” Edgeworth scoffs. “Miss Fey is clearly in no condition to provide accurate testimony, whereas Mr White has been unequivocally clear. Despite her claims, there is no concrete proof that Wright is innocent!”

“Perhaps,” the judge says. And then, slowly, incredibly, like lifting a weight with bones that should crumble beneath it, “However, Miss Fey is standing before us. Arguing emphatically on behalf of the accused.”

“Of course I am!” Mia says, relentless and built like a collapsing storm. “Phoenix would never hurt me. Never. Do you hear me?”

Phoenix does. He tries to keep his knees from buckling.

Mia doesn’t notice. “White, on the other hand,” she says, spitting his name like it’s a rotten piece of meat.

The man in question is still trapped against the wall, eyes moving frantically, searching for an escape, but slower, and slower again. Finally seeing the cage he walked himself right into. The one place in the whole world where running will not save you, no matter how fast you are.

“I’ve been looking into him for years. I’ve got names, if you want them. I remember those very clearly. The man’s a blackmailer and a thief and a murderer. He’s standing right there, and you’re going to blame Phoenix?” She finally lets go of Phoenix’s tie to smack the witness stand hard enough it rattles. “Wake up and look at him!”

“Names,” the judge repeats, or just mouths the word. And his gaze turns to White.

“One more day,” Edgeworth throws out, and it’s sort of like he’s woken up neck deep in water, desperately reaching for anything that will keep him from sinking for one more second. Phoenix could tell him how useless it is. Control is not something water gives. All he’ll find is more liquid and salt. “I need time to make enquiries into this matter. I need time to—I have to—”

Gregory steps to his side, placing himself between the jeering ghosts and his son. A bullet hole of a man. The sad, collapsed shell who has not moved in fifteen years. His glasses flash with the crack of it.

And yet, Edgeworth looks so, so alone.

And again, again, of course it happens now: Phoenix is distracted. Thrown back three years in time. Because it wasn’t Terry Fawles who scratched his skin open, and it wasn’t Mia or Diego that bled his heart into his lungs, and it wasn’t the court that gnawed into his stomach and burned a hole right through his heart. It was the fact that something about Miles Edgeworth was so decidedly wrong.

“Edgeworth, what are you doing?” Phoenix asks, untethered and drifting. Not meaning to say it aloud. He’s not even sure, for a moment, that Edgeworth will hear him.

The next second, silver eyes fixate on him. Selfishly, monstrously, he revels in the burning stains they leave down his face. Tries to find a name for the expression branded into his skin.

Here’s one piece: people change. Not changing means you’re dead. If you’re alive, you move and you breathe. If you’re alive, you can grow, become better at things, drop bad habits and nurture new ones. You are always in the process of becoming.

Here’s what they don’t tell you: it will still, always, be you. You don’t change. If you change, you die.

In the house Phoenix grew up, there were gaps in the fence at the bottom of the yard, and a grassy verge on the other side. Sometimes the rain would carry things through, and one day it brought Phoenix a chrysalis. He’d picked it up and ran inside, yelling at Kaa-san where she was slumped mostly asleep on the couch, still recovering from a late-night callout. I’m gonna watch the caterpillar grow wings, he’d said, and Kaa-san barely managed to take it from his hand in time. You can’t cut a chrysalis open, she chided, holding it so carefully. You won’t see it changing. Only something half rotten. It’s a violent thing, Ryuu, but so, so delicate. If you open it, the caterpillar will die.

The process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay. It is always the death of something else. Phoenix tries not to think about it too much. He tries to think of his mom even less.

Who killed you, Miles? Phoenix asks, bitten back and hidden inside the bloody gash beside his gums. He’s been told his stare is intense (by Iris), unnerving (by Diego) and downright creepy at times (by Larry), but Edgeworth still doesn’t look away, so Phoenix just tries staring harder.

Edgeworth’s shoulders tense, fists grinding tight like he can claw his way out of the dark, jaw moving like he’s grinding his teeth. Like he always used to. Looking back at Phoenix looking at him. Like he always, always has.

(For this tiny crack of time, all that separates Phoenix Wright from Miles Edgeworth are the meagre number of steps between the witness stand and the prosecutor’s bench. If Phoenix really wanted to, he could run and make it even less. Make it hello. It’s been a long time. I was looking for you. You’re kind of amazing. I missed you. Did you miss me, too?

Right here and now, all that separates them is creaking wood and a flat stretch of white marble. In time, the entire width of the Atlantic ocean won’t feel as insurmountable.)

Bitterly, Phoenix reminds himself:

Phoenix and Miles are somewhere else now.

In the end, it’s all a bit of a confused mess, though Phoenix is mostly sure he’s declared not guilty at some point. He’s also ninety per cent sure Mia blackmailed White into a very pathetic confession that left him sliding down the wall like a deboned animal, but nobody else really brought it up. They let Phoenix out, and nobody’s waiting to slap him back in handcuffs, and Mia isn’t burning the courthouse down with White still inside it, so he figures everyone’s ended up where they’re supposed to.

Except, maybe, Edgeworth, but that—Phoenix can’t think about that right now.

Not when the doors to the lobby close behind him, and the ghosts muffle to something almost approaching quiet, and Diego’s here and Mia’s here and Phoenix can’t do anything about that except crush her to his chest.

“Phoenix,” she wheezes against his neck. “My arm—”

He yanks himself away, still gripping her shoulders as best he can. “Sorry.”

She smiles, a little tremble in it, and swallows harshly like she’s going to be sick. She tugs him back to her, folding him into a gentler hug. Cradling his back protectively. Breathing in his bloody shirt. Diego steps closer, wrapping his arms over their shoulders and burying his face into her hair.

“Sorry,” Phoenix whispers again, not meaning it, not entirely sure what he’s trying to mean, or who he’s saying it for.

Mia shakes her head against him, hair tickling his jaw. When she pulls back, her mouth is open, ready to speak, but her gaze suddenly lists to the side, and whatever it is, he never finds out.

“I think I need to sit down,” she mumbles thickly.

They make it to the couch. It doesn’t move an inch even for her. Diego stays curled around Mia like an overly possessive cat, eyes closed and shoulders shaking as he mouths Spanish too quickly for Phoenix to follow. Phoenix barely gets his knees out from under him before they finally give up, leaving him to thud dully against the floor. The coffee table digs into his back as his vision blurs from the drastic drop in height.

“God, Phoenix. What the hell?” Mia eventually says. She has one hand pressed to the side of her head, holding the bandages as she blinks and breathes, blinks and breathes. She squints at him through her capsizing eyelashes and speaks with the world in her eyes; all of its hope and none of its hate. “You saved my life. You saved my goddamned life.”

He shudders around his hurts, dizziness pulling his head down. Just the dizziness, he tells himself. “You saved mine first. And again, just now.”

Mia nudges his chin back up with her knuckles, fond, and maybe a little sad. “Think we might makes things even one of these days?”

“I hope not.” Phoenix swallows his next breath. “I really want this job.”

The sadness deepens, flooding her expression before she twists her lips and drains it away. She hunches over from the effort, grabbing his tie and a fistful of his shirt underneath to steady herself. It’s the kind of woman she'll always be: a fighter to the last. “You want to keep this job, I have a condition,” she says. Purple pulses across her jugular. A burning sky reaches through her eyes. “You don’t get to go dying on me.”

Diego’s hand flinches to his neck, twisting the collar of his own shirt.

Phoenix feels frozen. More exposed and vulnerable than he did under the eyes of the whole court. “I-I wasn’t planning on it.”

“I don’t care what you’re planning,” Mia says, every word another strike through her grasping fist. “It doesn’t happen.”

“Okay,” he whispers. “It doesn’t happen.”

Her eyelids flutter. Slide all the way closed. She doesn’t wait to check the truth of it. “Good,” she murmurs, quiet enough she might be speaking to herself. “I’m not losing anyone else.”

Is it fair to tell a lie you wish more than anything could be true? It was so easy when it was only dead people who sat with him, watching him struggle against the ocean he’s been treading for years. Before even that, when his mother and father found the shape of their cruelty, and it was his fault for daring to exist in a world that did not want him.

Here, he couldn’t run if he wanted to. Which he doesn’t. Maybe. Her warmth is pressed too firmly against him, and Phoenix doesn't have the strength left to pull away. Even if he already knows this will only make it harder to let go.

“Where’s Maya?” he asks, needing something, anything, to give his battered chest a break.

“I don’t know,” Mia admits, frowning. “Someone tried to stop us on the way up. She stayed behind to distract them.”

“I’m surprised anyone was brave enough to try. You look like you escaped a mental hospital.”

She bats him with the sleeve of his own hoodie. The only reason he feels the impact is the water weight in the fabric. “Shut up. I’ve never turned up to court looking better.”

“And you were complaining about my shoes,” he says, his grin a tired thing that doesn’t even reach his wounds.

“Phoenix,” Mia groans.

“Yeah, wearing my sneakers is the true crime. Everything else has just been a fun warm up.”

“Phoenix.”

“Mia.”

“Diego,” Diego adds, unhelpfully.

And Phoenix laughs. He laughs, and it hurts, but Diego starts laughing too, which just makes it harder to stop, and Mia’s hissing, “Shut up, Phoenix, I’m supposed to be annoyed at you right now,” but she’s laughing as she does it, covering her mouth to try and hide it. Phoenix doesn’t know if they’re laughing so hard because they’re happy, or because they’re relieved, or because they’ve finally gone as insane as they look. He just knows, in this moment, he loves them. He loves them like it’s the last time he’ll be able to.

(That’s how you know it’s coming.

Whenever there’s lightness, buoyancy, one last second of reprieve: that’s when you know drowning isn’t far.)

Here we are, he thinks, holding onto the hands holding onto him as long as they’ll let him stay. I would know us anywhere.

“C’mon,” Mia finally gasps out, grabbing his shoulder tightly as she pushes herself upright. “I better make sure Maya hasn’t gone and gotten herself arrested.”

“She may as well,” Diego says, grinning at Phoenix with a boyish wink. “I know a pretty good lawyer who could help her out.”

Phoenix rolls his eyes and starts the agonising process of getting back to his own feet. If they wouldn’t kick him out, he’d quite happily curl up on the floor and go to sleep right now.

Or not.

Promises to keep, and all.

Mia leans on him as they leave. He doesn’t get a chance to look up as they stagger out into the halls, too busy making sure she doesn’t fall. But he doesn’t mind carrying her. He’ll carry her for as long as she needs him to.

She isn’t heavy at all.

(It’s the end of something, perhaps.

But doesn’t it also feel like something’s new?)

Chapter Text

“You got lucky, Miss Fey. You got damn, damn lucky, and I’m not talking about Nick charging in there.”

Anthony Butz, forever known as Ant thanks to the Incident (different from the accident—no capital letter, see?) and unrepentant harbinger of that fucking crow (“Is that a crow? Is that a fucking crow on our fridge?”, “He’s minding it.”, “Minding it? Minding it!? I fucking mind, Ant, for fuck’s sake—“), has one hell of a tone when he needs it. A side-effect, or maybe a symptom, of growing up in the Butz household. It doesn’t make Mia apologise, but it does make her go a bit quiet, her gaze sliding up and down his auburn curls, his odd-one-out green eyes, scrubs hugging his wide frame like he was grown in them.

“Your arm took most of the trauma, which is why it’s currently in two more pieces than it should be,” Ant goes on, flipping a pen round his fingers as he speaks. Both Mia and Maya watch the display of dexterity with dazed fascination. “You saved your own life in that moment. It took the force meant for your skull. But that’s still a nasty fucking knock you’re dealing with.”

A short composition of Mia Fey’s injuries:

Compound fractures in radius and ulna.

Laceration on forehead.

Depressed skull fracture.

Bleeding has been noted in the brain.

Currently no surgical intervention required.

Patient must be kept under strict observation.

In other words, don’t let her leave the hospital and definitely don’t let her stand in court.

Obviously.

“Excuse my language,” Ant adds, deadpan. It’s a good thing he doesn’t say sorry. He’s so unapologetic Mia would probably jump out of bed to hail down the objection it would deserve.

Speaking of proof, Mia’s response is certainly some sort of indication she’s too used to betting with her life as far as it’ll take her. She only has to think about all of that for half a second before replying, “I don’t suppose you could play that down if someone comes asking if I was fit to be standing in court or not?”

Ant traps the pen between his fingers and squeezes so tightly Phoenix is surprised it doesn’t crack. “Miss Fey, I can’t knowingly condone—”

“I wasn’t going to lie here and let Phoenix be sent to prison!”

“He’s been there before. I’m sure he would’ve survived.”

“Juvie,” Phoenix feels the need to correct, because Maya’s eyes are starting to look dangerously round. “Mia is okay, though. Right?”

“No.” Ant watches three of them flinch and sighs a little. “But as long as you don’t run off to participate in any more court proceedings, you will be, Miss Fey. I just have to stress the danger of head wounds, particularly one as serious as yours. There can be all sorts of complications. Ones we can catch and treat as long as you’re here.”

They must make an odd group taking up one corner of the window by the ward. Maya perched on the bed holding the scant few inches of Mia’s hand that isn’t strapped into medical equipment, both of them dripping rainwater all over the sheets. Phoenix hunched by the window, sodden suit hanging off him, rain beating against his spine, barely able to hold his own weight. And Diego at Phoenix’s side, silent and unseen, staring out as if afraid he could look too closely or speak too loudly and hurt Mia more than she already is.

Phoenix lets him get away with it. They aren’t, and never have been, particularly brave. They’d rather bleed out all over the world, because the blood is real, because the blood is physical. You scratch your skin open, let it be bruised and ripped and torn, then you wash it, put a bandage over it and you’re better. There’s no way to unsay things. No way to shut your eyes and pretend it’s gone just because you can’t see it anymore.

At me, Phoenix thinks, but can’t say. Instead, he shifts, tilting his weight enough to tip his shoulder into Diego’s.

It makes Diego shudder, all the unspoken words sighing out past his teeth where they’re scooped up by the white sterile air. He hunches over after them, curls until his head is level with Phoenix’s shoulder and he can pretend to rest it there.

“If Maya and Phoenix are safe,” Mia says, finally, “Then I’m not going anywhere.”

Maya’s hand tightens, then loosens. “Onee-san,” she whispers, though Phoenix isn’t sure if anyone else notices.

“Then we’ve got ourselves a deal,” Ant says, and, very pointedly, rounds on Phoenix.

It startles Phoenix out of his quiet daze, muscles tightening like a wind-up toy, and he has to stop himself hissing as the pain turns sharp. “Looks worse than it is,” he says reflexively.

Ant flips the pen into his palm and tucks it into his pocket as he advances. “Really? Because it looks like half your face is split open, you have a bandage for a hand, and you’re hunched over like you’re about to cough out your diaphragm.”

“I’ve seen you drop pens way too many times to be intimidated by that,” Phoenix mutters.

“Let me see, Nick,” Ant says, softer. His hand outstretched.

Out of the five of them, Ant is probably the sanest one here. That’s also true of his family. But he’s still a Butz, and most times it’s just easier to let yourself be dragged along than fight the inevitable.

Phoenix puts out his hand.

With the bandage out of the way, it’s not actually that bad (though most things aren’t that bad next to a woman starting to slur through near-death exhaustion). His palm and fingers are filled with scratches, loose skin flaking, framing the gash between his middle and ring finger held together by dry blood and thread. “You never fucking do anything by halves,” Ant grunts, peering critically at the sutures. When Phoenix doesn’t reply beyond a wince, Ant shakes his head and just says, “Come see me in a couple days to get them out.”

Since Phoenix can still feel and move all of his fingers (as much as his pain receptors allow, anyway), Ant takes to prodding at his face next. The gouge over his cheekbone will leave a nasty scar. Mia twitches at the news. Phoenix just swipes Ant’s hand away and leans his ear into Diego’s hair. His ribs and stomach are a whole other mess, but since nothing is broken and Phoenix hasn’t been pissing, coughing or vomiting blood, there isn’t much Ant can do beyond telling him to, “Take a fucking break and eat something.”

You fucking idiot is not said but appreciated all the same.

“I’m serious,” Ant says as he wraps Phoenix’s hand back up. “Go home, Nick. Hug your dog. Get some sleep. You too, Maya.” He turns and manages a harried smile. His curls bounce in time. “Try not to get yourselves in trouble. For your sister’s sake, if nothing else.”

“No plans for it,” Maya says, her smile weak but there.

“No promises,” Diego mutters, far more honestly, and Phoenix manages not to snort.

Ant hurries off with his boots under one arm to lecture his next patient—presumably with less swearing, though Phoenix wouldn’t take that bet—and the rest of them sit in silence for a drawn-out moment. Visiting hours aren’t supposed to start for a couple hours, and the rest of the beds are filled with patients that have nothing better to do than pretend not to look. There’s a constant buzz battering the inside of Phoenix’s ears; a mix of the usual muted clatter and chaos of hospitals, and the confused screeching of ghosts who haven’t quite worked out they’re dead yet.

He picks at the new bandages, trying to lose it all to the rain. At the same time, he’s trying very hard not to think about the water dripping off his clothes.

“Um, Phoenix?”

“Hm?”

Maya’s fiddling with the sleeves of his hoodie, hands circled around Mia’s wrist. She tucked herself back into it after Mia (unrepentantly) returned Ant’s shoes. “Is it okay if I still stay with you?”

Phoenix hesitates, biting the raw inside of his cheek when she notices and falters. It’s not—there’s no real reason for her not to stay, and it’s maybe better? Rather than having to be alone? Most things are better than having to be alone, obviously, it’s just—

“Wait, what?” Mia asks, dragging herself back to blinking awareness. The sides of her fingers scrabble against Maya’s. “What’s wrong with my place?”

“Oh, nothing! Nothing, it’s just…” Maya flicks Phoenix an uncertain glance. “The police still have your key.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

Another glance. Something twists uneasily in Phoenix’s gut. After a small hesitation, Maya says, quietly, “… I did. Twice.”

Mia takes that in and slowly sinks deeper into her pillow. It doesn’t look comfortable. Her shoulders are braced pretty high, her broken arm held awkwardly across her midriff, and without Phoenix and Ant’s clothes to add size, she looks remarkably small under her blanket. Strangely colourless without her necklace to light up her pulse.

Diego folds his arms tightly and keeps his head pressed beside Phoenix’s. “I’ll come with you,” he says, calm and even, as if saying it isn’t killing him one word at a time. “I’ll make sure no monsters come calling while Maya’s there.”

It’s not the brave thing. Phoenix knows he isn’t brave. He’s never considered himself a good person either, or at least, never had the time to spare a thought for it. But this hesitation, what he’s doing to them, what he keeps doing, what he can’t not do—it proves something he’s too scared to admit.

What makes a monster? he wonders, watching Maya curl tighter around Mia. What makes a demon? The caring, or the not?

Sometimes he wonders what a better him would do, but there isn’t a better him. There’s no-one else but who he is. He’s so tired of standing under the weight of it.

But since he can’t flay himself open in front of a woman and a girl and a brother who care too much, who have slowly but surely given him everything he knows, with the echo of ocean waves, that he cannot live without, he says, “Of course you can stay,” firmly, and watches the words drown with a smile.

It’s worth it to see Maya, fire branded and sickly with it, smile a bright, hopeful thing in response, and finally let Mia go.

Phoenix looks over Diego’s head to the lashing rain outside.

In the reflection, he sees a boy suspended in water.

He should’ve known then that it’d be looking in the mirror that does it. It’s how these things always go; the last thing you’ll ever see above the surface and the first thing lost beneath the waves.

But, bracketing both, tender and filling and endless, a breath in:

“For fuck’s sake, Nick.”

It’s the way he holds onto that cliff edge of an f, how he lingers on the sibilant s and carries the a right into that final percussive plosive stop. Larry, when he tries, always ends up gasping the whole thing out. Theo spits it like he’s grabbing the words and smacking them into the ground. Ant doesn’t even bother with the attempt. Marcus Butz is too much an artist with it, filled with the joy of the craft and all the blood, sweat and tears that had to accumulate to bring the creation to fruition.

“You trying to set a new record or something? Didn’t you already break state’s? Criminal records aren’t nearly as impressive, y’know.”

Phoenix’s new apartment is on the second floor of a two-storey complex, stairs slinking up the exterior and the rest of the Butz boys currently overflowing out from under them. Larry’s candlelit hair wafts up behind Marcus’ shoulder and Theo raises a greeting hand through smoke, cinder glowing beside his mouth. Human kindling shedding sparks amidst the sinking city. It looks at Phoenix, casually wading where he’s treading water, and says, you gotta admit, he has a point.

“Not officially,” Phoenix says, referring to the latter question. He rests his weight on the lowest slant of the handrail while Maya hops up two stairs and dangles over. Diego hovers warily at her back, too used to the brothers to be anything but helplessly bewildered. “You’re not going to ask me to run right now, are you?”

“Nah, never do it right, do I?” Marcus’ grin glints, his scrap metal smile. A little shame-faced, a little frustrated, and always honest with it.

Ever the responsible one. The longest standing breadwinner.

“You’re proving yourself right just by saying that,” Theo says, first to break out into the cloud cover and the city’s fond embrace. His lips curl around his streaming cigarette. “Now’s the perfect time to make him run.”

“Leave off him, Teddy.” Larry moves faster, stepping right past Phoenix to swing up to Maya, taking off his jacket as he goes. The stairs themselves are sheltered from the rain, but that doesn’t stop him settling the orange weight across Maya’s shoulders. “Geez, you must be freezing, little Fey.”

It balances precariously, bewildered by the sudden change. “Oh,” Maya says, testing the lapels. “Um, I’m okay, actually.”

“Let him have this,” Marcus advises. “Nick would just dump it in a puddle.”

It’s true. Orange really isn’t Phoenix’s colour.

Instead, in all his sodden glory, he gets an arm around his shoulders and a lungful of smoke right to the face. “Nothing like coming home, is there?” Theo drawls.

Phoenix blows the smoke right back at him. “Like you would know.”

Put these three Butz boys together and it’s like looking at a time lapse that had its key frames overextended and its character models mixed up. Flickering blond hair of varying lengths, limber muscle thinning to lithe wire, but the same shade of brown in every eye. They’re so much alike that they’ve all, at one point or another, absolutely despised each other for it, and still occasionally do. It makes a kind of sense to leave Ant out. It’s a lot harder to add him in at the right time, which—well. Theo once made a joke that Ant had a different parent hidden somewhere in the tide of their past. It’s the only time Phoenix has seen Tommy Butz truly furious with one of his sons.

Considering his sons—the accident, the Incident, Larry’s entirely as a person—saying that is the complete opposite of saying the ocean’s a little wet. Theo’s never been the sort of person to settle for anything less than absolutely everything.

(Some people are like that, Diego says. If there isn’t a war, they’ll start one.

Phoenix doesn’t think any of the Butz boys want a war, though. They just want to be themselves, exactly as they are. Instead, they got a mom who named them after emperors and kings then left their fates to the wind without ever looking back.

All of them but one.)

Theo, here: insufferable and invincible in every way but the ones that matter. Sea salt and workman’s hands. He smiles like it’ll be the next thing that kills him, and when he looks at Phoenix like that, it makes the emptiness in Phoenix’s stomach tug at his skin so hard he’s left breathless.

“Murphy was supposed to be here, too,” Larry says, matching Maya hanging over the railing, waist a dubious fulcrum as he knuckles Theo’s hair down over the smile. “She’s stuck inside cuz someone had to come see me get arrested.”

“You barely got arrested,” Theo snorts, shaking Larry off with easy familiarity. “Nothing like last month. They didn’t even put you in a cell.”

“They handcuffed me, though.” Larry bares his wrists. “I’ve got the marks to prove it.”

Marcus reaches up and shoves Larry’s hands back up to his chest. “Nick’s the one with marks. You going to let Ant take a look?” he asks Phoenix.

“He already did.”

“Good.” He finally steps into the rain to smack Theo on the back. It nearly sends both Theo and Phoenix flying. “You’ve seen him. Happy? We gotta get back before Dad loses his mind trying to run the shop himself. You’re staying, Larry?”

“Yah. Duh.”

Marcus pulls out his car keys like a magician brandishing a hidden handkerchief. “Then we’re all squared away. So, get in the fucking car, Teddy.”

Theo sighs the weight of the world and bends to the concrete to stub his cigarette out—then just shoves the damp mess of ash and tobacco into his pocket. With his other hand, thankfully, he ruffles Phoenix’s spikes. “Don’t go anywhere else while I’m not there to kill you for it, okay?”

His touch and eyes linger a moment before he pulls away. It’s warmwarmwarm and it echoes, echoes, echoes.

(Remember what he told you? What he keeps telling you?)

Phoenix is too tired to do anything but burn with it.

“Yeah, pup,” Diego mutters, suddenly right at Phoenix’s back, mouth beside his ear. “Wouldn’t want that.”

Or he could just completely ignore it’s happening. That works, too.

Marcus watches Theo saunter to the car then looks up at Maya. “Nice to meet you, by the way, little Fey.”

“Maya, actually,” she corrects with a pout. It’d be more convincing if she didn’t have to keep pushing up her hood to be able to see.

Marcus nods, not a hint of agreement to the motion. “Sure, sure. Sorry I can’t stay to meet you properly. I know you’ll have your hands full with your sister, but when you get the chance, keep an eye on our boy for us too, would you?” he asks, waving a handful of rain towards Phoenix. “No use relying on these idiots for that.”

“Hey!” Larry protests.

“What are you, our mom?” Theo calls back, his smirk cracked and dirty.

Lucky them that Maya’s here. She tilts the lip of her hood back to peer down at Phoenix, offering a shy, shiny grin. “I’ve already got my eye on him.”

Phoenix raises his lips, familiar and without feeling, and hides his gaze in the sky. Diego settles his chin on Phoenix’s shoulder. It can’t be comfortable, even if Diego can’t feel the ache, but he does it anyway.

It’s still a mystery to Phoenix, how brothers love sometimes.

And a breath out:

Marcus blares his horn as a see you when I see you as he drives away, scaring the casing off every raindrop in the vicinity. It’d be fitting, perhaps, for him to rampage down the road, but he’d never handle a car that way. Blinkers on, a tranquil turn, engine with hardly a purr and wheels cleaning up the road. A runaway time bomb wouldn’t be as careful.

“Never a moment’s peace, huh, Nick?” Larry asks, still draped over the railing and half a laugh in his voice. His fists clenched tightly shut. Before Phoenix can muster up an ask or an answer, Larry turns and sweeps his arm out for Maya, getting them moving the only way he knows how: “Ladies first.”

Maya wavers on the stairs until Phoenix nudges her up. “It’s fine. You’ve still got a key, don’t you?”

“I do.” Her eyes brighten, the orange of her necklace clashing horribly with Larry’s jacket. “I’ll go and get Murphy for you.”

“They gave your key back, right?” Larry asks, lingering on Phoenix just to offer his support through a light kick in the shin. “And everything else as well?”

“Yeah.” Phoenix hauls himself up through liberal use of the railing and Larry’s shoulder knocking against his own, Diego’s hand slipping through his back. “We swung by the detention centre before we came here.”

His keychain and earrings are tucked in his pocket, safely swaddled in the handkerchief. They’re remarkably small things. He’s already used to the extra weight and soon he’ll forget he was ever without them. But right now, it’s strange. Makes him feel like there should be more of him here than there is. Like the people in front and beside and behind are from a whole different world, one he’s never been a part of. Nothing sticks. There’s an undertow messing with his ankles.

It has the hold of a mother.

“You look weird without your earrings in,” Larry says, reaching up to flick Phoenix’s ear.

Phoenix lets him. “Feel weird, to be honest.”

“Hey, seriously, you okay?”

“Yeah. Just tired. I haven’t really slept.”

Larry doesn’t look like he believes him, which—alright, fair enough. Phoenix hasn’t given much reason for Larry to trust him when he says he’s okay, even when he actually is. All Larry has to work with are his own nightmares to fill in the gaps. They bear little resemblance to Phoenix’s most of the time.

“There’s nothing, y’know…” Larry teeters on the edge of it, gaze flicking ahead to Maya as they make it to the landing. He leans closer. Lowers his voice. “There’s nothing weird, is there?”

Phoenix doesn’t have to look behind him to know where Diego’s attention is. It’s impossible to see the hospital from here, but city architecture isn’t really a barrier to a man who can fall through elevator floors. If Mia could see him, she’d have smacked him out the ward already to stop him fussing.

“Nothing to see other than the usual,” Phoenix mutters.

Larry huffs a relieved breath, rubbing rainwater off his nose. Phoenix absently picks at his anger, feeling it flare and fall with each pass of oxygen through his lungs. He’s grown tired of it, doesn’t have the energy to spare on feeding it and wouldn’t bother even if he did. He doesn’t want to be unkind. The Butz boys didn’t have to wait to see him, and Maya doesn’t have to be here, and Diego doesn’t have to stay, and Larry is scared, of course he’s scared, of course he doesn’t want to be scared.

But Phoenix isn’t a fucking saint.

Why are you here? he thinks, tongue in the blood in his cheek and breath fizzling, sinking, flooding. It would be so easy to let it spill free. Say it louder: Why are you still here?

There are marks on Larry’s wrist, pencil thin and slick with water. They shimmer the same way Edgeworth’s suit did under the cascading glass.

So much colour in all that grey.

“Okaeri—woah!” Maya half-yells, or maybe fully shouts and Phoenix just can’t hear it for the noise in his ears. She stumbles away from the door, is pushed, really, and Phoenix startles back into something like reality.

The most he sees is a black and brown and white blur before he’s knocked back through Diego, and then he’s on the ground. Somewhere in the fall his hearing resurfaces, tuning to that beautiful kind of sound that pulls at his ribs whether they’re swollen or not, that opens them up for his heart to race right out of.

“Murphy,” he breathes, and a whole brand-new set of words and nonsense that fall free amidst her little grunts and whines and half-barks as she wiggles all over him. “I’m here, it’s okay, ssh, I missed you too—” He gets his arms under him and pushes up just as her paws hit his stomach. He wheezes, short and sharp. She scrabbles back, ears pinned, but bless her, bless her, tail still with enough wag to whip up a typhoon. “I see you,” he breathes again, lifts her paws onto his shoulders and laughs his way into a smile as she tries to sniff and lick his face at the same time. “Okay, okay! I see you, puppy.”

She bobs and weaves his meagre attempts to fend her off, never pulling away. When he sinks his good hand into her fur, it goes on for miles—kilometres. Thicker with dampness, but clearly brushed ears to tail.

“Holy shhh-are you okay?” Maya squeaks.

“C’mon, Murph,” Larry’s voice laughs next to them. “Let him get inside first.”

Murphy spares no more than a glance at Larry’s cajoling hand. Phoenix loves that sideways dog-look; the blatant what-the-actual-fuck-are-you-talking-aboutness of it. He slips his knuckles down the back of an ear and she licks up his cheek before he hides the gash against her throat. She starts licking his hair instead.

“Yeah,” he whispers, soft enough only his dog can hear it. “Me too.”

The admission cracks his chest, well and truly, like a wound rolling over in its sleep, and it isn’t anger waiting for him underneath.

It’s something far worse.

“With me, Murphy,” Diego calls, and she hesitates, but for Diego she goes, circling his legs without ever passing through. She waits long enough for Larry to drag Phoenix to his feet before plastering herself back to his side. “Ha, good enough.”

Good dog, Phoenix thinks, grips her scruff, then says like a croak. “Good dog.”

Good fucking dog.

Finally, the mirror.

Or, more accurately, the reflection.

The problem is this: it sneaks up on him. He’s still not used to having it there. It’s not out of any dislike (though you’d be forgiven for thinking so). Mirrors are one of those things, like light and cold and white, that ghosts tend to have a hold over, especially around him, and it’s just easier to go without one. But this mirror was here when he moved in, and as easy as it is without, it’s even easier to simply live with it until it gets to the point where it has to be thrown away.

Given enough time, people can get used to living with anything. Whether that’s a good thing or not is something most everyone is still trying to decide.

Phoenix is toeing off his boxers into the collapsed shell of his suit, running a hand through his hair and wincing when the stitches catch on the wet strands. The shower is on and steam is already wafting out the confines of the wet room door, reaching for the earrings and badge and handkerchief and keychain placed carefully on the narrow counter above the sink.

He turns the wrong way at the right time, empty and overfull, and there he is.

Right there.

Stomach and chest and face a collage to make Matisse proud; vivid stokes of black and blue and purple everywhere but the yellowing green circling his right eye. Hand and cheek virulent in their rusted tears. Dark hair flattened by rainwater, dripping into his stubble—longer than he likes. Skin, usually a warm tone, sickly with an ashen tint, as if he’s looking at it through several layers of refracted light. The same shade as his mom. Dead or alive.

His hand flinches up like a reflex, trembling below his left eye. To someone else, it might seem like he’s testing the gash, but he’s really looking at the brown peeking out above. Dull and tired as always. A match for the blue opposite in every way but colour. Half his dad’s sky and nothing of his mom’s smoky grey. His fingernails drift along his eyelashes. As if he could scrape the colour out his irises and still see.

They don’t glow.

His mouth splits, a bitter angle down before he can stop it.

Steam distorts the image. The sharper edges of his body—shoulders, collar bones, chin, nose—poke through the fog, a body halfway in, or out, of an ocean’s morning surface. Weightless and eerie. A shadow-thing, even in the light.

Beautiful, he thinks, an echo—

Suspended in water, he thinks—

And—

He blinks.

He’s sitting on the floor.

Back pressed against the bath.

Thread stitching his lips.

This isn’t—he got himself down here. Slid the shower door shut first, then his own hand gagging his own mouth. He can’t—he needs to move it, because his fingers are half-smothering his nose and it keeps getting harder to breathe but they might hear him and—

They might—

He digs his thumb into the gash on his cheek. Feels the sharp split of something breaking and the warm flow of fresh blood.

Breathe, he tells himself, curled tight and curling tighter as the extractor fan whirs full force, drowning the sounds from his heaving chest, battering in and out his ears. Breathe, fight it, just—count them, it’s okay, breathe, they’re safe, breathe, she’s alive, she—almost wasn’t, she couldn’t—she didn’t—but White—but Edgeworth—and—shit, shitshitshitshitshit—

A whimper leaks from his skin. He squeezes tighter, as if to contain the flood in a single stitched palm, eyes wide seeing nothing but its rising swell, streaming past his feet, his ankles, his knees, his waist—

I can’t hold it back, he thinks. Please, I can’t, I can’t—

(The thing about panic attacks is they always feel like the end of the world. He’s familiar enough with them he understands logically what’s happening to him, but it’s nearly impossible to argue with a body convinced it’s in horrifying danger. He works best on adrenaline, runs fastest when somebody is trying to stop him. The moment that all ends, he keeps going until he crashes.

He falls.

And the ocean waiting for him when he does.)

Please, he thinks again—

And—

“Ay, Dios, Phoenix.”

Diego. In front of him. Crouching and sitting and gaze steady and every other part of him shaking.

Phoenix’s eyes shut. Ruthlessly, he drags them back open. The shower room—shower room, he’s in his shower room—swims around him, smearing, bleeding watercolour. He looks at Diego. He tries to breathe. He tries again. He wants Diego to go away, he wants Diego to stay, feels small and stupid and pathetic and—he just wants—please—

“Stop that,” Diego says, gently passing the back of his hand through Phoenix’s bloody fingers, and he’s an asshole, but he isn’t an utter fucking idiot, so he doesn’t tell Phoenix to breathe, because Phoenix knows, Phoenix is trying— “Look at me,” he just says, and slowly, carefully, curves his hands up to cover Phoenix’s ears. They don’t block out any noise. They can’t.

Phoenix has to do that himself.

(He’s not the sort of person who wants a war either, let alone the end of the world. Not really. His stomach just never stops aching for something to have.)

Under the rumbling quiet of his own palms, he sucks in enough air to make him choke, setting fire to his ribs. It’s loud, loud, loud, banging and ringing and thumping, but it’s all in his own body, just him. There’s nothing trying to claw its way inside, no water but the innocent, stricken spray from the shower. Him—and Diego. Phoenix and Diego. Two exhales against one, and eventually one and a half, and finally one for one. It takes time, far, far too much time, but there is an end, and there is an after. There always has been. He didn’t drown.

He didn’t drown.

(He didn’t.)

Shaking and light-headed, he blinks one too many times, watching Diego’s face crease and flicker into something so worried—trying to hide it. Immediately, shame floods in and drowns the rest of the panic, and it takes absolutely everything in him to keep looking at Diego looking back at him.

“I didn’t…” He tries to say. Clears his throat to get it working. “Didn’t expect that… to happen—right now.”

“I’m surprised it took as long as it did to be this bad.” Diego looks at the open wound on Phoenix’s face, jaw tight, but all he asks is, “Is it an ocean?”

Phoenix wipes at the blood, doing little more than leaving a sticky, sweaty smear along his hand and cheek. The air is stifling from the spray, and in the heat the smell seems worse. He breathes carefully through his mouth, ignoring the nausea-ridden flood of saliva, and tilts his head back to rest on the edge of the bath, counting the beats of his heart.

“Little bit,” he says, wishing he didn’t, shivering around the awful ache of admitting it.

(But he fought. Remember that. Right up to the last moment, he was still fighting—)

“They wouldn’t think any less of you, pajarito,” Diego murmurs.

Phoenix cups his hands back around his ears, leaving enough space to hear Diego talk, but no more than that. “Too loud.” Diego sighs and looks about a thousand years old, and Phoenix—Phoenix is so, so ashamed. “I-I’ll tell Murphy.”

“Ha, she already knows. She’s guarding the door. Maya’s making dinner—don’t panic.” Diego’s mouth curls. “She’s smart enough to not let Larry near it. They’re okay. Everyone’s okay. Just waiting on you now.”

“Okay.” Phoenix coughs a little. “I’m—M’okay.”

"Uh huh."

“I’ll eat. Whatever it is.”

“Sure you will.”

“You can stay with Mia,” he whispers. “I can—I’ll deal with anyone that comes. If they come.”

The half-smirk, really not a smile at all, slides off Diego’s face. It’s this way he has sometimes of looking at Phoenix like he can’t quite work out what he’s seeing, and more than anything wishes he could look away. “You’re in pain,” he says quietly.

Phoenix lifts his own smile, hoping it feels genuine. “I’m always in pain.”

“So don’t sit there and tell me to make it worse. I’m here, whether either of us like it or not,” Diego growls—and that’s better. The tension unwinds from Phoenix’s limbs and his chin lolls against his knees, too tired to hold his head up any longer. “You think I want to be anywhere else?”

“Yes,” Phoenix says, because lying just isn’t something they do aloud, and Diego’s grin is a bitter, weightless thing. “I know you don’t want to watch me shower.”

Diego snorts and stands like a normal person instead of flickering upright. “If you fall and crack your head open, I’m going to laugh before I do anything else. Just so you know.”

Phoenix waves a vague gesture at his shower stool. Diego hovers, but soon he’s gone, and Phoenix is left alone once more. Mostly. Almost. His smile fades as he listens to Diego comforting Murphy through the door, a sound as constant as the running water and fan. His head, spinning with words and names and dead things for so long, is silent.

But not empty.

He doesn’t trust his knees to hold him up, so he slides himself across the floor, shuddering where the water hits him, watching it spin a thin trail of red, then pink. He’s spent the last few days sitting or standing in one spot, and yet, since that night, since Diego came howling and they nearly watched the woman they both love die, he feels like he never stopped running.

This is how it’s supposed to work: he cycles to get where he’s going. He runs just to run. Nowadays, there are enough places he’s supposed to be that he doesn’t miss the running so much. But Theo was right. At times like this, it’s the first place his mind goes back to. The running and the training, Marcus’ then Theo’s. All that doing it wrong, all that nice—and then all the not; violence in his own hands and the sun scorching in every season and a row of slavering, lit upon boys. He breathes in deep, feeling out the very edges of his bruises, and when he looks again, every one of them wears Edgeworth’s face.

Phoenix flinches. Swallows a whine. Hides his face in his hands and feels the wetness drip around his ears. He breathes like he’s running. One breath, then the next. One step, and the one after it. Whatever else is going on, you make the choice to take that step, and you keep making it, over and over and over. A hundred times. A thousand times. A million times.

Eventually, the first second of eternity will pass whether you’re aware of it or not.

You’ll run right through where it once stood.

It gets him onto the shower stool, his ribs and stomach thanking him profusely, and it gets him reaching for the soap. He takes his time, scrubbing from the creases of his toes to the folds of his ears, the smell ticking his nose—making him sneeze. The water washes it all away, clearer and clearer, until he can’t stand it anymore and switches it off. Shards of adrenaline cling to the walls. It gets him out and it gets him dressed, earrings-badge-handkerchief-keychain collected in the pocket of his loose cotton shorts. He touches them through the fabric. Holds the nothingness of a bullet that is not there with rewrapped fingers that won’t stop trembling. Tucks himself into the familiar cradle of a soft hoodie. Feels his barefoot feet.

A reminder, or maybe an attempt at insistence, that that first step can start from anywhere.

But he still avoids the mirror.

“What took you so long?” ask a pair of mismatched socks and floating hair slung over either side of his couch.

“Lost track of time,” Phoenix replies, half-carried there by Diego and his dog.

Larry looks up when Phoenix reaches him, a strange kind of pull at his mouth and something far too intense in his eyes for how he’s splayed and sunk into the cushions. Stubbornly, relentlessly present. A sea wall made of elbows and knees.

Phoenix looks at the neon green and canary yellow covering Larry’s feet instead. He pokes the curving arch of each. “Can I sit on my own couch?”

Larry hums a noise that could mean anything and flattens his feet against the armrest. Tilts his head with far too much consideration. It’s only when Maya appears from the kitchen that he hitches up a grin and rolls off the couch, nearly tripping her and her hands full of plates.

“Whoops,” Larry laughs, cutting short their awkward dance across each other with a tap to her knee and a quick sideways shuffle past Phoenix’s ankles. “Sorry, little Fey.”

“Maya,” she corrects, this time with all of her, short kimono flowing cleanly and face scowling with intent.

“Yeah, good luck with that,” Phoenix mutters. The couch is barely big enough to fit two people across, and as Phoenix sinks into it, Murphy takes up her usual spot on the other cushion, her head on his thigh. Diego has the sheer audacity to snort as he lounges over the armrest at Phoenix’s side.

“Aw, don’t be like that, Nick.”

“I’ve been meaning to ask about that,” Maya says. She sets the plates on the kotatsu with a suspicious glance at Murphy. Murphy is far more focussed on enjoying Phoenix’s clumsy ear scratches. “Where did ‘Nick’ come from?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” Larry asks, smiling a little too wide. “It’s his nickname.”

“I hate you,” Phoenix tells him, heaving himself forward for the plate Maya hands him specifically and elbowing Larry on the way.

“Don’t listen to him.” Larry’s already three forkfuls into his food—some sort of curry that splatters all over his shirt when he waves his hand. “If he actually wanted me to stop, he’d make me. He doesn’t really mind.”

“I’m sitting right here.”

Maya lowers herself to the floor opposite Larry and waves. “I see you. Hi, Nick.”

There’s something tentative enough about the motion and the open hope in her smile Phoenix can’t summon the desire to argue the point. “You didn’t have to make all this,” he says instead. “You could’ve just heated up leftovers.”

“Told you so,” Larry says smugly.

Phoenix kicks him.

Maya giggles, shoulders loosening. “You deserve better than that after the last couple days,” she says. Phoenix blinks. “It’s no big deal. I cook all the time for Oba-san and my little cousin. It’s not my favourite thing in the world or anything, but I don’t mind doing it when I need to. And it helps to keep my hands busy, y’know?”

Yeah. Phoenix knows. It’s good to be good for something. “What is your favourite thing in the world?”

Her grin curls with a glint. “Eating.” With that, she claps her hands together. “Itadakimasu!” A lot of the enthusiasm dies when Phoenix and Larry stare at her. The building flush on her cheeks could paint the morning sky. “Um…”

“I thought only old people did that,” Larry says, a piece of chicken tipping off his fork with a commiserating splat. “Or like, in anime.”

“Oh. Uh…”

Phoenix isn’t sure why he does it. If it’s the way Diego is glaring at Larry, or if, even now, almost sixteen years later, it’s still embedded instinct; if gratitude, like loneliness, is a language written on bones. He doesn’t clap his hands—he’s made that mistake already slamming them into the bench—but he inclines his head over his plate and murmurs, “Itadakimasu.”

And, since he’s absolutely starving, he eats.

Larry slides him another look, then makes a show of a shrug. “Thanks for the food, little Fey!”

Maya’s smile lights right back up.

They settle in, and Phoenix has to remind himself to chew and swallow every bite. It’s pretty good. A bit overly bland, but that turns out to be deliberate on Maya’s part. Larry digs through Phoenix’s cupboards with his usual reckless abandon, pulling out spices to create his own bizarre concoction, and when that inevitably goes up in smoke, he finds some near out-of-date stuff in Phoenix’s fridge and shares it with Maya, letting them eat their fill. Phoenix hands off the last pieces of chicken to Murphy, and when he puts his plate down, she takes that as her cue to wriggle the rest of the way onto his thighs. He watches them all, a bit dazed: Larry animatedly swinging his hands through the light; Maya tilting her head back and laughing like a firecracker; Murphy on her back and gazing up at him with bright blue and brown while he strokes the fluff on her belly; Diego, tie slack, hair a mess from how much he’s been running his hands through it, swimming at his edges and soft in his eyes. Breathless while still breathing. Warm and electric and alive.

There, see? Diego glows. Mia and Maya and Larry glow. Across the court, even fifteen years late, Edgeworth glowed.

Phoenix doesn’t.

That’s just how it is.

But—it’s okay. The lights are low and orange, bouncing off the wooden floors and magnolia walls, making the whole apartment look doused in honey. The bluish streets peak through the gaps in the curtains, rain steadily beating against the glass, and the light cast from the people inside thrums like a sealed aquarium, a paper boat bobbing up and down on the vast ocean, too stubborn to go down under the waves.

He almost speaks. Almost says something. He can’t say he has the same problem with loneliness as he used to, even if it’s a wound he will never outgrow. But right now, he’s quiet, surrounded by people breathing beside him, his tender stomach as full as it can handle, and his body warmed by a dog who will not leave his side.

It reminds him of being six or seven, watching with wide eyes through the crack of his bedroom door, left ajar. How his parents would leave the bathroom light on across the hall so the house wasn’t entirely dark.

Nightlights, he realises, eyelids heavy and hands full of soft, breathing fur. They glow like nightlights.

And so he lets himself be lulled by the warmth of it, and he doesn’t say a word about oceans, or about running, or about maybe not being that okay after all.

There are hands around your ankles and a boy standing in front of you.

He is smaller than you remember. Or perhaps you have simply grown, while he remains the same as he has always been. Light is coming in from somewhere, but you cannot see the source, the sky blanketed by an endless cover of off-white, and nothing beneath your feet. Glass, you think, reflecting only the absence of colour. Water, you think next, fighting down a shiver as its surface refuses to part beneath your weight. The vast expanse of everything, unmoving.

The blue and brown of the boy’s eyes, unfeeling.

This, you know, is not the truth.

In one hand, he holds a keychain. In the other, he holds his smoking fist. He looks at it, then offers it, his palm pried open. You are careful looking down. Knuckles dig deeper into your ankle bones. Nails scrape across your Achilles tendon. You do not move.

“You promised,” the boy says. Despite his blank expression, he doesn’t manage to keep the anger out of his voice. “You keep your promises.”

It isn’t big. Too small for a boy’s hand, even. Rarely are these things as big as the weight they force you to carry. They will not break the sky or bleed out your hollow veins. They will not part the seas or burst open your rotten bones.

There is only what you won’t let go of. Not what you shouldn’t, or what you can’t. Just what you won’t.

You are so, so cold. Every part of you hurts, that fire inside whining and wavering. You think of DiegoMiaMilesLarry, wistfully. Hands sometimes cold but always reaching out to offer warmth. You wish you could find the place where time is at its thinnest, touch it, tear it down, a mountain turned to dust covering you in sleep, and when you wake you will… you will be home. You will have crawled there from your nightmares. They will be by your side and breathing, having followed soon after. It is autumn. A breeze comes through the open windows, carrying the scent of rain. You pretend you have not woken up. See? It does not ache.

The water trembles. Hints of something rumbling in the deep, so far away that to hear it is to hear the echo of the earth turning: an impossible burden of noise. It cracks. Something begins to rise with it, growing from the dark. You cannot see it, but it feels familiar. You want it to stop. You want it to go away.

“Why does everyone do it?” the boy asks quietly.

God, it never goes away.

But this you remember perfectly, and you mouth the next question—the words he does not say. He smiles like a wild thing, a sharp-toothed hungry thing, and thrusts his open palm out higher, smoke bleeding out under his nails.

You reach, and the hands around your ankles tighten, and you do not breathe, but still, you reach. Your fingers do not fold around the offered palm, nor the bullet sitting in its centre, but around the keychain. Holding it in your hand. Holding the boy’s hand. He tilts his head, blinking wide. Fire roaring in both his eyes.

You do not say, let’s do it for the love that used to be here. You do not say, I hope it still is. You do not say, please.

It does not speak. There is no sound. It has no bones or breath.

It comes from the water.

The boy flinches, but you would know it is there even without that tiny surrender. Heats spreads from the small of your back, breathes down the nape of your neck, hangs on your twisted skeleton and frantically flaps its wings. The dead hands around your ankles tense hard enough to shatter. You cannot move. You cannot run.

The boy looks at you, his fire bright and flickering and very, very afraid.

There is something standing behind you.

You do not turn around.

Phoenix wakes in the dark, skin crawling into itself and chest locked in a heavy battle of breath and heartbeat, desperate to break free.

Something is moving behind him. Steps creeping over the hardwood floor. He doesn’t dare move more than his eyes, lowering them to where Murphy remains peacefully asleep over his thighs. His fingers are still wrapped in the safety of her fur, his wrist pinned by the scruff of her neck. The softest, warmest blanket in the world.

She wouldn’t—she’d be awake if it was something dead. Diego would already be snapping out his usual warnings. There’s nothing but the rising strain around his ribs and Murphy’s soft breaths and step, step, step.

A moment later, the curtains across the balcony doors are cracked apart, and then there’s a soft click from the lock. When he cranes his head round, he catches sight of blond hair flickering in the after-rain glow before it slides through the shadows and out of sight.

The pressure in his limbs eases, a flurry of little pains nipping at the slackened space before they retreat into silence as well. He doesn’t know what time it is, but the light peeking in is pale and watery. Goosebumps rise from his ankles upwards, an early morning breeze making itself known. It’s probably just after sunrise, or maybe close before it. He can hear his slowing heart rate in his ears, his shivering breaths resounding off the walls. Not quiet, never quiet—but still. Still. For him, that’s close enough to count.

He opens and closes his eyes a few times, trying to wrench out the fading echoes of white and smoke, absently rubbing the back of his neck. When he gently lifts Murphy to slide out from under her, she snuffles and wakes almost instantly.

“Ssh, Murph,” he whispers, fondly rubbing her snout. She takes a moment to orient herself, then nuzzles his wrist. “Go back to sleep.”

A tiny whine catches the tail end of her yawn, bouncing off the flats and sharps of her teeth. She licks it off and nimbly rolls to her paws. Stubbornly keeps to his side as he follows Larry out.

The balcony extends to catch his bedroom, ending in a wall on both sides to keep his neighbours from spying on him—and him from spying on them, for the most part. At the wall nearest the living room side of things is a cheap plastic table, one of the legs propped up by a brick where the rest of it snapped off at some point. There’s one matching chair, all creaking white, and a folding wood chair with sore joints and a worn cushion to cover the splinters.

Larry is perched on the latter, mismatched socks pulled up to rest on the edge, arms dangling over his knees and a cigarette hung loosely between his fingers. He’s humming something, though most of the melody is kept to his lungs, breathing in and out a tune Phoenix can’t quite make out.

He must know Phoenix is there, but Phoenix hesitates on the threshold, clamping down on his breath again, because he recognises the way Larry is sitting—that clenched and curled up boy. His face stiffer than the corroding hinges huddling uncertainly beneath his weight. The morning stillness fades, bleeding into a kind of silence meant for aftermaths when everyone forgets how to say too much of everything, so nothing is said at all.

The kind that comes with grief.

(The kind that comes from contemplating one’s commitment to a murder.)

Murphy offers it at least a second or two of respect before the pre-dawn air takes precedence, fur fluffing in interest behind her twitching nose. She puts her best paw forward, and Larry doesn’t tell either of them to go away, so Phoenix follows, bare feet twinging on the cold concrete. He flattens his toes and breathes out a sigh as he sinks into the flimsy plastic at Larry’s side.

“Tried not to wake you,” Larry says at length, shifting a little. Ash crumbles onto one of his socks.

“S’okay. Wasn’t having great dreams anyway.”

Larry looks over, blinking the simmering lethargy from his eyes. “D’you mean ‘not great’ as in bad?”

Phoenix rubs the fuzz beneath his spikes and frowns at the horizon. It frowns back. Something itches in the small of his back. “No. Weird ones. I always have dreams like that. But I always forget them after.”

A smoking snort strings out Larry’s nose, then his mouth. “Probably better off without the memories if it’s you.”

“Maybe. But then I just wonder what I’m missing without knowing why.”

That elicits another hum. It shivers along Larry’s taut vocal cords. “That Armando dude about?”

Phoenix glances over to where Murphy is sniffing at the doors to his bedroom, tail raised in a faint wag. “I think he’s with Maya.” He picks at his bandaged hand. Adds, “It’s just us.”

Larry nods, voice trailing back into silence. Phoenix doesn’t press it. Silence with Larry rarely feels awkward or loaded, and although Larry’s the one keeping a conversation going most of the time, it never seems like it's done just to fill the stillness with noise. They’ve spent more than a few international phone calls barely saying a word to each other, content doing their own thing—Larry watching a movie, Phoenix sketching or painting.

He thinks he might be the only person Larry is okay being quiet with, because while he knows how loud Larry can be, he doesn’t mind if Larry isn’t. At the very least, he doesn’t automatically assume something is wrong. When something is wrong, though, even when it’s stupidly obvious, it’s better to wait for Larry to come out with it on his own. He’ll say it, or it’ll spill over into everything he says until there’s no need to spell it out, and they’ll talk about it whether Larry meant them to or not.

(But it was with MilesEdgeworth that Phoenix first learned to sit quietly with someone. So much so that sometimes Phoenix had to stop just so he could think, wow, Miles is my best friend. When they were eating lunch or walking back to Miles’ house after running around all day, too hungry and too tired to chat. When Miles was reading and leaned to rest on Phoenix’s shoulder while Phoenix was drawing. When they were just sitting together, and there was no need for words.

But those are all things they did as children. Things that ended.

Things they won’t ever do again.

Probably better off without the memories, yeah. But Phoenix finds it doesn’t matter if he is or he isn’t, because he needs them. Desperately. Even if the memories only ever seem to press down, and down, ocean pressure keeping him stuck in place, clawing at his ankles—exactly everything he's trying to outrun.

Because who the hell is he if he isn’t that?)

Murphy settles her head on his knee. Phoenix blinks out of his reverie, startled. His eyes sting, and he isn’t sure if it’s because of the wind, or because of the ache in his cheek, or because of something else. He sinks his fingers back into her scruff. She gazes up at him, no judgement, no worry, just… there. Usually, he’d pick her up and let her sit on him. At three years old, she might be fully grown, but she’s not so big he can’t still treat her like a puppy sometimes. Unfortunately, he doesn’t think his ribs would be able to handle the weight. He can hardly bend over to kiss her fluffy forehead. She licks his chin as he pulls away, eyes sliding shut around another yawn as he circles a thumb behind her ear.

As if taking cues, Larry lets out his own huge yawn, slumping lower in his seat. He cracks open the stillness and Phoenix takes a breath, then a step.

“You’re never up this early.”

Larry looks over with a sideways smile. He blows a smoke ring before saying, “I haven’t slept yet.”

Phoenix stares at him. “The sun’s coming up.”

“Oh, like you can talk.”

“Yeah, well, thank god by the way, but you’re not me.” Phoenix tilts his head, scrunching his nose and nearly sneezing when the tender nerves everywhere on his face sting confusedly.

He is, admittedly, terrible at falling asleep (if he isn’t passing out from exhaustion, at which point he’ll collapse anywhere he feels relatively safe). Larry, however, has always been able to fall asleep instantly, a talent remarkable as it is really fucking annoying. He sleeps like—well, not like the dead, because the dead don’t sleep (hello? and I’m tired and no more no more no more), but it’s definitely something heavy enough to be buried in.

Larry grimaces as Murphy peers at Phoenix suspiciously. “It’s no big deal, Nick. It’s just been happening sometimes.”

“What does ‘sometimes’ mean?” Phoenix asks when he’s sure he isn’t actually going to sneeze. Murphy, still cautious, takes cover under his chair just in case.

Larry shrugs. “Like a month?” He waves a nonsensical pattern through the smoke. “A month, I think,” he repeats, taking away the question of it. “I don’t mark it on the wall or anything.”

A month. Unravel the days and it leads them right back to the start. Nowhere to go but exactly where they are.

Phoenix’s fingers curl tight around nothing. “I didn’t know,” he says, hollowly.

“Wasn’t worth mentioning. It just happens.”

Larry hunches back over his cigarette only to realise it’s burned down to the filter. He makes a face then digs it into the little clay tray he made himself… two? Two years ago. Phoenix isn’t sure how it ended up at his apartment, now that he thinks about it.

Barely missing a beat, Larry lights up another. In the flashpoint tail end of smoke, he traces the invisible lines around his wrist where the marks from the handcuffs have already faded. The fire reaches into his eyes. He spits it out like a confession. “Getting accused of murder fucking sucks.”

Phoenix winces at the loudness of it. “Yeah. It kind of does.”

“Right?” Larry gestures into the sunlit glow, swiping swathes of silver into the pink and yellow of it. “So, you and Murphy passed out on the couch, and Maya took the futon in your room, and it felt kinda weird to take your bed, and it just—it’s all…” He lets loose an exaggerated full body spasm. “Feels like I’ve got ants all over me again,” he says through another forced grin that barely lasts long enough to catch it in the dim embers of the cigarette. “You, though—you never pass out that fast.”

Phoenix looks away. “You didn’t have to stay.”

Larry makes a tuneless noise. “You always say that.”

No, Phoenix thinks. I really, really don’t.

Sunrise is starting in earnest now, the pale city kind scrabbling for a hold on the tallest buildings and hardly scraping the lowest depths. Water drips off the fuzzy streetlights, swirling lazily through kaleidoscope puddles. Clouds still dust the highest edges of the horizon, already starting to melt, fluffy and indolent and uninterested in anything below. When Phoenix breathes in, he smells smoke and concrete. When he blinks, he sees red and blue.

“Today fucking sucked, Nick,” Larry says. He flicks ash into the tray more violently than necessary. “Yesterday. Whatever. Why the hell didn’t you mention Edgey would be there?”

Phoenix shrugs at the colours of the sky. “I didn’t think it’d mean anything to you.”

“Why wouldn’t it? It was Edgey. And he was treating you like—like that didn’t matter at all. He always has. Ever since he left it’s like he just forgot. He just let us go so he wouldn’t have to care about us anymore.”

“It was nothing to do with that,” Phoenix says, remembering Gregory’s words, that look on Edgeworth’s face like— “He was just doing his job for most of it.”

“Don’t do that. Don’t fucking lawyer this.” Larry glares at him, but it’s nothing compared to Diego’s on his nicer days, so Phoenix is barely fazed. “I didn’t get it when he left, and I didn’t get it when he didn’t respond to our letters, and I don’t get it now. And you—I know whatever you two had was—whatever the hell it was to you, but what he did was bullshit.”

“I know,” Phoenix says, tiredly. “I was there. I heard you.”

“Then why does it still matter so much to you!?”

Phoenix smacks his uninjured hand over Larry’s mouth. “Keep your voice down!” he hisses. Larry, somehow, takes it all as enthusiastic consent to sink his teeth into Phoenix’s fingers. “Larry, what the actual fuck—“

“I know I don’t get it,” Larry snaps, quieter, though that’s mostly because half of Phoenix’s hand is stuffed in his mouth. Phoenix yanks it free and wipes it clean on Larry’s shirt, ignoring Larry’s attempts to shove him off. “But don’t tell me that was anything but what it was. Don’t tell me he didn’t know. He wouldn’t even look at you—”

“I didn’t ask you to come,” Phoenix snaps back, fisting Larry’s shirt tight enough to permanently stretch out the collar. Smoke harshens his throat. Fire licks under his teeth. “He didn’t look at you, either. What the hell were you even doing there?”

“What the hell do you think? You’re so fucking stupid sometimes, Nick!” Larry’s furious whisper is far more a shriek, and Phoenix nearly tackles him.

(It’s a relief. It’s such a relief how easy it is to fall back into things with Larry like this, even now, after all this time. Fifteen years and Phoenix has still never quite managed to get used to it. He doesn’t know if he ever will. He doesn’t think he wants to.)

The folding chair is squatter, so it isn’t hard to get an arm around Larry’s neck to pin him when he’s busy trying to hold his cigarette clear. Larry writhes, scraping both chairs over the ground, and whacks his skull against Phoenix’s chest, and Phoenix hisses involuntarily in pain—right as Murphy lets out a spectacularly unamused growl. The sound is explosively loud in the early morning stillness. They both freeze. Cast simultaneous looks down, then over to the bedroom balcony doors. They don’t twitch or part or ask everything okay out there? Diego’s dark gaze doesn’t appear either.

Larry wriggles free, rucking up his hair as he goes. The first reaches of sun catch it, shedding the yellow tufts for something a vivid shock of red, and Phoenix has to squint to make it out as the throbbing pain does weird things to his vision. Plastic digs into his back and there’s sweat on his skin that isn’t his own, itching everywhere he held Larry against him.

It itches. It’s supposed to mean something’s healing. He’s too tired to work out what doesn’t hurt to touch anymore.

“Why does it matter so much to you?” Larry clatters back out, leaning away when Phoenix shoots him a glare.

Phoenix rubs his palms on his shorts, stopping only when his fingers catch on the lumps in his pocket. He curls them around the familiar shape of his keychain. A gust of wind pushes a few stray strands of hair into his eyes, but he doesn’t move to push them away.

The problem is, Phoenix isn’t good at saying the thing. He’d like to blame his mom and dad for it, but truthfully, he thinks that’s just how he is. He doesn’t want to say it, not with words that spit and bleed and collapse and hardly ever mean what anyone’s expecting them to. Words are for the court; the truth for all its lies, the dead for all their screams, the defendant telling you please, listen to me, just listen, why won’t anyone listen? There are so many things about himself he doesn’t have a name for (just Phoenix, I’m that or I’m nothing, I still don’t know what it means, if I want it, but maybe if you say it enough, please—), and there are roots in the shape of Edgeworth’s name dug into almost every one. Does he really need words for it? For Larry, of all people? It’ll be true whether it’s spoken aloud or not, and he always just assumed Larry wouldn’t bother his ass about it either way, but…

Maybe… Maybe Phoenix should have said something. About Edgeworth prosecuting.

He licks his dry lips. “Do you remember—” he starts. Hesitates some more. Feels the scars on the bottom of his feet itch. “Do you remember when Theo started taking me running?”

Larry’s startled expression nearly makes Phoenix chew through his tongue. It darkens in the next second, offering something dry and cracked and old—still oozing every time it’s handled. A warning sign so clear it may as well be stamped across his eyes in the bloody light of the dawn: Do Not Touch.

But what he says, tentative and trusting, is just, “Hard to forget with how much money we made off Bulldogs.” Phoenix curls his toes against the concrete and tries not to bite his cheek open. “Oi. Don’t make that face.”

“I’m not making a face.”

“I’m pre-empting your face.”

Phoenix narrows his eyes. “Who taught you that word?”

“Maya got curious about your art room so I showed her some of your sketchbooks. Found a bunch of your old essay notes inside.” He flaps a hand to ward off Phoenix’s response. “Don’t worry. I only showed her the finished stuff.”

“Right,” Phoenix mutters, ignoring the tingling heat in his ears. “Anyway, when you gave up—”

“I didn’t give up,” Larry huffs. “You two ran like you were possessed.”

“Ha very ha.”

“I didn’t mean that.”

(Three kings and a punchline. Marcus got responsibility; Theo got daring; Ant got curiosity.

Larry got fear.

Phoenix isn’t sure which one of them is better off.)

“I didn’t mean that,” Larry says again.

Phoenix tightens his grip on his keychain. Forces himself not to swallow. He just lets it burn inside. “We’d run to the edge of the city sometimes before we stopped. And every time we did, he’d get this look in his eyes, like he wanted to keep going, but he knew if he did, he’d just get lost. Like… like he knew no-one would be able to find him, and maybe that was the point.”

“He was fucking high, Nick,” Larry says, all in a breath, like the memory might disintegrate and fly away inside the smoke. Grey and decay spread through his orange-lit eyes.

“Not always,” Phoenix says quietly. “But whenever I see Edgeworth… I just see that same look.”

Larry studies him intently for a long moment. “You think he’s high?”

“What? No!” Phoenix snaps, and it’s Larry’s turn to slap a hand over his mouth. Since he’s far more mature than Larry will ever be, he doesn’t bite it. He just licks it. Which turns out to be a mistake because now he has his own spit wiped on his hoodie and the taste of cigarette stinging the inside of his cheek. “… He wasn’t, was he?”

“He definitely got some kind of high when he covered White’s ass,” Larry mutters.

“It’s not like that. And it wasn’t like that with Theo either.” Phoenix tugs his sleeves down over his cold hands. “I was there. I-I know what people said about him. And they’re doing the same thing to Edgeworth now. But none of them—they don’t actually know.” He clenches his eyes shut. Clings to the taste of smoke and tries to pretend it’s not his heart beating on his tongue. “He—He’s changed. I know that. But it’s not… Something’s wrong. Can’t you see that? And until I find out why, I’m not going to just leave him alone, Larry. I-I can’t. Even—Even if he wants me to. Especially then.”

(A note about running: if you’re not running to win, there doesn’t seem to be much point, does there? Eventually, it always becomes a why. For or from? To or away? Who or where?

But then you do it. And you do it. And you do it. And maybe it still feels like nothing. That you’re constantly bashing yourself against a wall no matter which way you turn. But hit that wall enough times, even when you start coughing up blood, even when your arms and feet feel like they’re going to shatter, if you keep coming back again, and again, and again—

Eventually, that wall will break.

Everything has its turn to die. If the world really did end, forget survival and maintaining humanity and cannibalism and weird cult societies or whatever it is post-apocalyptic protagonists put up with; the first thing Phoenix would do is start a running club.

And maybe, if he ran far enough, maybe afterwards he’d have a reason to go and steal a bike.)

“I don’t know,” he says, looking away, pulling his hood up to cover the red well and truly staining his ears. “You asked why it matters. That’s why it matters.”

Larry hums a noise that doesn’t seem to mean anything but what it is. “Doesn’t give him the right to treat people like shit.”

Phoenix curls tighter. “I know.”

“Do you? Because I really don’t know with you sometimes, and it—” Larry shakes his head and balances the cigarette between his lips so he can ruin his hair some more. He breathes in and watches the end flare like he wants to feel the fire instead of the smoke. He breathes out like he’s in pain. “You’re my best fucking friend, Nick.”

Yellow and blue overtake the clouds, scorching the sun on the edge of a burning wing. Smoke trails out into the bleeding afterimage. Phoenix has known Larry for so long. He thinks he could paint what every emotion looks like on his face, even the times he’s silent. Any tenderness Phoenix knows, Larry learned it alongside him. For the better part of their teenage years, they saw each other more than they ever saw their own fathers. Latchkey kids, roots tangled before they could understand it, grown where they could, no neat guide except for each other: Phoenix knows how to shave because Larry taught him. The first time he saw Larry cry was a month after Phoenix’s dad left when the social worker told them Phoenix couldn’t stay. The scar on his lip is from Larry’s elbow. Larry’s crooked nose is from Phoenix’s fist.

(And that night, he’d run so far and so fast, reeling from blood and sick and terror, half mad from it, the snap of his—ģ̸͉̲͎̼̘͎͎̗̈́̿͐ī̴̪̤͖͙̬̑̃̈́͗̇̏͠ͅv̶è̵͗̎̕ ̴̡̛̖̯̫̈́̓̀͌͑͒i̸̔͐̑͘t̶̩̑̀̑̈́̕ͅ ̴͗b̸̛̳̺̠̓͒͑̄͌̿͋͒̚͝á̴c̸͗͗͂̿͆k̴͑͗—his foster mother’s arm against the floor and the slam of the basement door—Phoenix, don’t open the door—when he was running and running and ready to never stop—

Larry caught him by his shoulders and said

Wait

said

I’ll come with you

said

Promise me.)

Sometimes, when Larry stays over, Phoenix will wake from a nightmare and have to suffocate his breathing to stop from waking Larry up. He’ll lie there, shivering in the dark, watching Larry’s chest move up and down. Anchoring himself to the familiar, relentless rhythm. And he’ll think, maybe we didn’t mean to know each other. Maybe sometimes we’ve wished we never did. But how could we possibly have ever done anything different?

“I’m scared, too,” Phoenix says, leans forward, and take the cigarette from Larry’s mouth.

Larry lets him. Slumps low enough he can twist and prop up his feet on Phoenix’s knees. “Yeah?” he whispers.

“Yeah,” Phoenix breathes, mouth full of ash and cinder.

All of which is simply to say this: Larry knows better than anyone. Better than even Diego. Whatever demons came to haunt Edgeworth, Phoenix has been running with them his entire life, and Edgeworth can kill him all he wants.

Phoenix just won’t die.

Chapter Text

Fifteen days before a woman is murdered in her own home after returning from a trip to France, Phoenix wakes early enough to walk Murphy through the blue hour. The meagre remains of his old apartment waits for them, and they sit for a while, one a little breathless, the other content, both their hearts beating a little faster. Together, they watch the blue slowly peel from the walls and spread into the warm sky.

By sunrise, all gold and green, Phoenix is cleaning. He scrapes fur off the floor and wipes down the walls, fills in the dents and scrubs over the cracks. Moving boxes slide back and forth like ships at sea, one half crap, the other half important, only a few leftovers giving him pause between the two as he packs the last of his life away; shredded pencils and cracked paintbrushes and a ragged blanket and a grey-stained-pink hoodie—soft and stiff from lack of wear.

(He keeps the last one. He doesn’t have the heart to throw it away.

It’s a universal truth, in hindsight. Inevitability doesn’t take prisoners.)

Diego’s books make him hesitate as well, more for the expression on Diego’s face if Phoenix threatens to throw them out than any intention to. The record player gets pride of place beside Murphy’s things. She guards it zealously. That, even she knows, is sacred.

Afternoon brings Mia, high on the humidity, fairing no better than Phoenix in his shorts and sweat-backed T-shirt. She bludgeons the bedframe with intent and nearly scares Marcus and Larry off when they show up late, even after they offer to help hide the body in the dump. The mattress ends up the subject of a discussion on the merits of arson for a worrying length of time before it’s given mercy beside its battered life partner. Removing the evidence takes hardly any time between the four of them, the pile of crap sent with it, and Marcus gets to reattaching cupboard doors and fixing window latches while Phoenix, Larry and Mia pack up everything important into the car. Murphy sits in the open-doored driving seat, panting expectantly. Ready and more than willing. It ends up falling to Marcus again to explain the dangers of such an endeavour, actively impeded by Larry, while Phoenix and Mia head up to do one final sweep. It’s a cursory acknowledgement. Nothing of Phoenix remains there.

They clean it up like a crime scene.

Well, for the most part.

Larry finally passes out within minutes of Phoenix finishing his cigarette. He drops so heavily he nearly takes the chair with him, and it’s only Phoenix’s last second hand smacked into his body that saves him.

“Ya know,” Larry half-wheezes, rubbing his diaphragm and blinking the morning sun out his eyes as he sways to his feet, “I think I need to go to bed.”

“You scare me when you make sense,” Phoenix tells him.

As punishment, Larry stuffs his hand inside Phoenix’s hood and uses his full height to rub his knuckles into Phoenix’s scalp. Phoenix smacks at his arm, but Larry just grabs a handful of spikes instead, gripping them like he wants to pull harder, fingers pulsing in their effort just to hold. He keeps Phoenix’s head pressed down, so the highest Phoenix can see is his chest. His body is blocking the sun, the light haloing him yellow, the shadows smudging him blue.

“Hey, sit still a second,” Larry says, sounding half-asleep already.

“What?” Phoenix mutters, resigned.

“Next time, you can just say it.” Larry breathes out, long and slow, as if he’s picking something up and gently laying it back down. “I want to hear it if it’s you. I don’t want to turn around and suddenly you’re not there anymore.”

And everything inside Phoenix moves. It feels like the moment just before he gets his hands on his sketchbook, right before he picks up a pencil: his ribs don’t hurt, but his chest does a little, and warmth trickles down from his scalp to his toes. He tries to look up, pressing into Larry’s hand (because he can never fucking help himself), but Larry doesn’t budge an inch.

“I’m not doing that,” he says. He doesn’t say, I wouldn’t do that to you again. He hopes Larry hears it anyway. It’s much easier to tell a lie when nobody involved has any idea of what the truth actually is. Whatever Larry sees, he hopes it’s better than what little he has to offer.

Maybe it really is. Maybe it’s something, at least. Because Larry’s nails scratch lightly through his hair and he says, “I know. I do know that.” He slips his hand free and tugs the top of Phoenix’s hood down, lingering over another yawn. “Just—it’s okay to say it, okay?”

Phoenix clenches his fingers against his thighs to hide all the parts of him that are shaking. “Okay,” he replies quietly.

Larry deliberately steps on his toes when he leaves. His socks are damp.

Minutes pass, the wind steadily wiping away the moisture, the sun reaching higher. Signs of life are starting to appear, sparks of rumbling engines or opening doors or another smudge of blue walking by, moving and moving until it’s gone. A part of Phoenix wants nothing more than to curl up in bed for the next week or two, but his mind and heart are restless, and he knows from experience no sleep will come to bring him respite.

In fact, he’s starting to feel weirdly hyper, his leg bouncing, muscles twitching all over his hands. Murphy clambers onto the vacant chair and dumps her front half unceremoniously onto his lap, nowhere near as subtle as she thinks she is about wriggling more and more of herself over the armrests. Eventually, he gives in and lifts her up to rest on his shoulder, her warm sigh drifting down the collar of his hoodie. They watch the city as it drags itself free of its sleepy abyss, shaking off the last vestiges of the storm, taking in the new sun through a thousand winking eyes.

“Hi, city,” he murmurs.

Another bad habit, but strangely the one he’s most reluctant to indulge. It isn’t that he regrets moving further outside the city, nor that he misses the worst of its clash and clatter, wide open and lightning lit, so often without purpose. Noise that doesn’t care about you. Noise that simply gets on with things.

Still, there are only so many times you can wake up in the biggest bedroom any city has to offer before you can’t deny the reality of it any longer: underpasses, overhangs and alleyways. Not the alleyway. Just all the others, same and stained and stinking. Phoenix knows broken needles and leering eyes the way other boys know tender hands. His voice would split against the walls. Quiet and desperate. The most he could risk letting himself bleed when anything could overhear and prowl down to savage what little was left. He had no-one else, so he talked to the city—to feel both less and more alone.

Another smudge passes the gaps in the buildings opposite, their footsteps hardly louder than a breath. He wonders where they’re going—out so long or up so early, visiting someone’s grave or hurrying to stop something worse, waltzing back home after the best night of their life or rushing there in tears because it ended up the complete opposite. There’s a word for this, Phoenix is pretty sure. Diego would be able to tell him; that hopeless, unendurable feeling he gets from knowing that everyone around him has their own lives, and while some of them may intertwine with his, some do not and will never. They’ll keep living anyway, never crossing each other’s path until only their ashes remain. They will laugh and they will cry, and they will beat and spin and dance and die, and Phoenix will only know the shape of their broken bones and the shade of their blood and the violence in their every touch.

Against that, he doesn’t know why it’s so terrifying to imagine that there are people out there that he’s got nothing to do with. The two things are probably related. Maybe. Correlation and causation aren’t the same, right? There’s always a third variable. More often than not, it tastes of blue.

But Phoenix knows nobody else sees it that colour.

He tucks his chin down to rest between Murphy’s ears. She inches tighter against him, close enough he may as well say screw it and just put up with the ache she’d make in his ribs. But the thing is, it hurts, and as steady as he tries to hold her, his body keeps flinching away from it. His fingers cramp. His chest pulses. Everything he sees makes his hands itch. Denser than the lingering fire crawling up his spine.

Finally, silently, he pads back inside. Murphy as his mottled shadow. They pause for a brief detour to the laundry, and she takes great pride in dragging a fresh blanket over to the couch before letting him drape it over Larry. He makes sure to tuck it under Larry’s now bare feet. For a moment, he lingers on the door to his bedroom, but ultimately decides against it. He doesn’t want to risk waking Maya up. Or, worse, end up having to talk to her.

God, that’s an awful way of putting it. He doesn’t mean that, he just—he doesn’t have the energy to pretend. Spirit mediums and you deserve better and a stone burning in purple and pink and orange.

He has no idea how he’d draw any of it. Words have no chance.

So instead, he goes to where he wanted to be from the start. His little art room is more of an oversized closet with a window, and it’s the only part of the apartment that looks ready to live on its own. There’s just enough space for a drawing desk amidst the sketchbooks and canvases and a cushion for Murphy taking up the rest of the floor. A pair of floating shelves line two walls, sagging with the chaotic load of paint and paint thinners and brushes and charcoal and pencils and spray cans with their respirator mask hanging down. There’s a jar of thumbtacks balanced precariously on the edge of one, all the art on the walls of his old apartment now pinned up in here. He’d be quite happy to leave it all in his sketch pads, tucked under his desk, stashed away in folders (though having any sort of portfolio is sort of a moot point now), but Diego was having none of it.

I want to see what you’re making, he’d said, poking his finger right between Phoenix’s eyes, the way he always does when he thinks Phoenix is being particularly dense. I want to see what you fall in love with every day, the way you see it.

Fucking sap. No guessing what Diego’s in love with—the sound of his own damn voice. Though if Phoenix could speak like a building storm, calm and wicked in turn, he’d probably love it a little, too.

Honestly, where does he even find these people? How the hell is he supposed to argue with that?

(It makes him shake just thinking about it.)

The cheap office chair squeaks when he spins into it. Murphy huffs a reply before clamping down on a rope toy she’s been methodically unspooling piece by piece. She’s doing a fantastic job of it. The tilt of her head, the curve of her teeth, purposeful and perfect in their imperfection, and nothing ever looks the same in different lights, and he nearly makes himself bleed again when he bites the raw insides of his cheek to distract himself from the urge to draw the same thing more than once.

He wants something else. He wants—

It’s okay to say it.

He grabs a pencil and a fresh page before he can second-guess himself. The scratch of graphite against paper has become near therapeutic for him, and he loses himself easily—not thoughtless, but if you practice a move enough times, it becomes as natural as breathing. An edge here, an edge there; the drawing flows out of him, and he can breathe. His hands don’t itch anymore.

It helps that he can’t use his left in any meaningful way. It’s harder to concentrate on the final image when he’s too busy focussing on shaping the lines and proportions correctly. He’s better at drawing with his non-dominant hand than most, but that’s only out of pure necessity over the years. If he can’t use one, there isn’t really another option.

Wishing to have more is, unsurprisingly, something he thinks about quite often. Maybe if he had twice the amount of limbs he currently has he’d be able to get where he wants without needing to slow down, or hold onto what he has without letting something else go.

The sunrise, an explosion of a boy at its centre. Bars on the window and Gatewater yellow spilling sunflowers over the floor. Cracks on the marble shaped like shattered coffee mugs. Nails dipped in purple picking up a ticking phone. A smile that’s a little too narrow. Trees blooming out of season in the middle of a storm, scattering pink across the sky. White made purple, made black, made silver and red and red and blue.

It's really no wonder Phoenix is always getting distracted. That his first instinct on finding a bag of spray paint cans was not someone’s going to miss that, but here’s everything I could paint with this, here’s the way I’d shade it, here’s how I’ll colour it in.

The two hands he has now, however, are still trembling. There’s a nudge at his thigh and he reaches down to stroke Murphy’s head.

“Gonna be a while before I can cycle around with you properly,” he says, feeling her ears prick to the sound of his voice. “We’ll still have plenty to do. Someone has to look after the office while Mia’s recovering.”

He warms his hands on his dog and leans back in his chair, gaze appraising. The sketch isn’t bad, even if he’s not completely sure what the expression is supposed to be. The mouth a thin line, jaw a little tight maybe, cheekbones sharp enough to cut glass, eyes staring ahead. Blank. Distantly polite.

Most people, when they draw portraits, referenced or not, tend to draw their own features into them. It’s not an amateur thing, either. There’s an argument it’s not even unconsciously done. How could hands so precise make such an obvious mistake then refuse to fix it? Art is made for people by people. It is a reflection of the world as you see it, and the world needs you in it to be seen.

Phoenix does not see his own face or eyes staring back. He doesn’t see a demon, either. Seeing monsters—that’s a little more complicated.

“People Park’s usually pretty quiet after the lunch rush,” he goes on, voice soaked in the brittle weight of his marrow, something deep and thrumming spitting through his chest. He barely notices the words coming out his mouth. “Diego can play sheep, and there’s always the river. I’ll bring a towel and you can sit on me while you dry so Mia doesn’t come back to find wet fur everywhere.” 

He unscrews an almost empty tube of paint, staining the tips of his fingers and the edges of the bandage with what’s already leaked from repeated use. He trusts his right hand to paint far less than he trusts it to draw, and when he doesn’t know what someone is thinking, he colours them. He bleeds inside the line. He smears it through MilesEdgeworth’s chest. Thinks of Edgeworth’s hands as they pulled away from him, the creases and shadows around Edgeworth’s eyes, the sound of Edgeworth’s steps on marble. How the number of hours that they have together compared to the number they’ve been apart is so, so small. He takes care to miss the heart. When he tilts it into the morning light, the white space tints blue.

He rubs his eyes, huffing a mirthless laugh against his wrist. There’s an answering whine at his side and the edge fades as he layers a soft smile down at his dog. Blue and brown stare back at him steadily. “Sounds pretty good, right?”

Murphy sets her front paws on his thigh and noses at his chin, tail faintly wagging. Almost like she’s saying never mind all that now. What are we going to do today?

Dogs are good like that. Dogs can be happy any old time.

He leans into her, pressing his ear to her chest just in time to feel the rapid fluff of her fur and the rumble of her growl. Cold tickles the back of his neck.

Diego’s bitterly acidic drawl sounds only a moment later. “Ha, about time you arrived. But not here. No. Shut up. Don’t make me say it twice.”

Phoenix looks at the lines on the paper. The smearing of graphite on his knuckles. Red rusting beneath his nails. His entire body feels like a single bruise. He can’t remember what it’s like to not be stained with colour.

But he moves ahead anyway. Being shattered has never stopped him before.

“Ready-set, Murph,” he murmurs, and pretends not to notice the way his voice cracks on the exhale.

Her answering smile is all fang.

Diego’s corralled what turns out to be two ghosts in the tiny parking square below. He’s doing his best impression of Murphy at them: shoulders raised and teeth bared and arms crossed. If Murphy could cross her paws, it's a sure bet she would be.

Charlie waves at Phoenix on his way down. Phoenix waves back. He catches the red and tucks it back into his pocket.

When he gets there, he slouches and straightens and curls his stinging fingers and squints at the morning sun. Murphy stands guard in front of his knees, tongue out. Diego slides a look down to the sketchbook held beside his thigh, braced open with the flat plane of his thumb, the pages lifted away from the rest of his paint-stained jeans.

“It’s not done yet,” Phoenix says, but he flips the sketchbook round for Diego to see so Diego doesn’t have to ask. The sight of it makes Diego’s lips curl tighter against enamel, every sharp piece turned back towards Gregory in a mockery of a smile. For now, this is how they talk about it.

“It’s not his job to fix your son’s messes,” Diego says to the older Edgeworth, continuing a conversation Phoenix was clearly never meant to be part of. “Don’t go giving him worse ideas than what he already sets himself up for.”

“I had to drag him here,” Charlie tells Phoenix, slurring on the words a little. “He said he didn’t want to come. But he kept looking like he wanted to say something to you, and here he is.”

“Miss Parker,” Gregory says, stiffly.

Charlie only offers a twisted, macabre grin.

Phoenix closes the pages of his sketchbook, then reopens them to check how much paint stains through. A few flakes that bleed into a loose sketch of the rooftops across from his balcony. He closes it again and stuffs it into the front pocket of his hoodie. We don’t choose it, he wants to say. We just don’t get to choose it. Instead, he looks up at Diego and asks, “Do you remember that day on the beach? With Valerie?”

“Ha, do I remember,” Diego says, trying for a glare. It’s not one of his best. It’s down and on its knees before the fight has even started, and Diego reaches up to tug frustratedly on his hair. “Of course I remember. It was one of our best moments.” His grin is a patchwork thing, stitched together with all the wrong parts. “Us and the ocean, burning together.”

It was a fucking mess was what it was, as most things turned out to be if they had Dahlia Hawthorne at the centre of them. They were still carrying so much emotional debris, old festering hurts and fractured loneliness beyond one woman and her dead, it was a miracle they didn’t tear each other part any worse than they did. And Phoenix wonders, sometimes, if they hadn’t accidentally swapped pieces of themselves in those first months where they’d raged and crashed against each other. If the way they pass through each other leaves something else behind, handprints bruised into their spirits in the shape of the other’s grasping fingers.

He doesn’t need to say anything else. He’s not sure he has the words for it anyway.

“You just can’t,” Diego mutters, like it’s just the two of them without the dead people watching. “You can’t not do it and still be yourself.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t ever apologise for that,” Diego snaps. “Whiny little pup. And you,” he says, rounding back to Gregory, flickering right up to him before Phoenix can stop him. “You don’t touch him. Just because I can’t smack the shit out of you right now doesn’t mean it’ll be that way forever. I’m going to die one of these days, too.”

“Alright,” Phoenix interrupts. “I’m not actually a damned dog. I know what I’m doing.”

Diego snorts hard enough to toss his head back.

Phoenix remembers all over again why one of the first things he wants to do when Diego wakes up is punch him. He points at the actual dog of the group. Murphy bumps her nose against it affectionately. “Fine. But she knows what she’s doing.”

Not even Diego can find a way of arguing with that. He sighs. “Her back’s going to break carrying both of us on it one of these days.”

“Lighten the load a little, then,” Phoenix says, shifting his weight to try and seem steadier than he is. “I’ll be fine. Maya and Larry need the sleep. Go be with Mia. She misses you.”

“Yeah, yeah, you don’t have to hit that low.” Diego glances at where Charlie has crouched in front of Murphy, the dog eyeing her back every shade of wary. “Take care of yourself,” he offers, a little grudgingly, but he does that at least. Then, with a final glare at Gregory, and a pause to run his hand over Murphy’s head just to see her squirm happily, he flickers away.

Phoenix can see him lingering on the landing. Asshole.

Gregory sees it too. “You’ve certainly made yourself an interesting friend.”

“He doesn’t like you,” Phoenix explains.

“Yes. I gathered that.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it too much,” Phoenix says, pulling out his phone. “He doesn’t like anyone.”

He texts Larry to say there’s something he has to take care of, he doesn’t know when he’ll be back, and to let Maya know she can stay as long as she needs. He tries not to grip the blue casing too hard. It’s held together with tape. The cracked screen fights back as he tries to navigate to the web browser.

“Sorry, Mr Edgeworth,” Phoenix says, his voice quiet, sinking into the fading silence as more and more of the world opens its eyes around them. “I know you want to talk, but there’s something else I have to do first.”

He has red beneath his fingernails rusting off onto a blue keychain, gold pierced into his ear and Gregory’s son tucked against his stomach. Those parts of him say he’s ready. So ready it hurts.

But another part sees Charlie trying to coax Murphy with her severed hand and remembers that when Murphy was maybe ten or eleven months old—she ran away. It had been a bad night, leaving them all jittery, Phoenix a little bloody and more than a little sick. He’d darted into a shop to grab something for his stomach, leaving her tied outside, and when he got back, her collar and lead were hanging empty. He doesn’t know what fired through her and made her run, but he and Diego spent the rest of the day cycling across the city trying to find her. And he thought—he really, really thought—that she’d be lying on a road or in a ditch, or a ghost had found her instead, leaving her in pieces, like some stupid horror movie, and he’d never find her. He’d never know what happened to her.

It was only when night had fallen and Phoenix was so exhausted he was pushing his bike along instead of riding it that Diego pressed him to go back to his apartment. So exhausted, in fact, he didn’t even argue. Diego walked with him, and promised he’d keep looking, and when they arrived—

There she was. Huddled beside the bins, mewling. Waiting for him.

He was so relieved he let her sleep with him in his bed. Hugging her close all night. Diego would kill him if he told anyone, and he’d deny it until his dying breath, but Phoenix has a hazy memory of Diego curled around them both somewhere in the middle of the night, and thinks, despite the cool veneer, Diego had been just as scared.

So, yeah. He has so many things he wants to ask Gregory. But there’s another promise he has to keep first.

“You can come with, if you like. If Charlie doesn’t mind.”

Gregory shoots Charlie a bewildered look. She gazes back at him silently, such an unbelievable silence, a whole space where your ears and your eyes and your mind are telling you there should be something there, like it’s just waiting for you to fill it, though what exactly it wants from you is anyone’s guess. It doesn’t grieve, and it isn’t longing. It doesn’t move with the wind and it doesn’t stir the water. None of which is particularly helpful in explaining what it actually is and does, but how do you explain a silence with eyes that stare back at you? How do you describe silence that has a sound?

“Come where?” Gregory asks, quiet enough Phoenix could say he breathed it if he were alive.

Phoenix tilts the phone screen for Charlie to see, a map website open and ready for an address. “To go find a cat.”

Here’s an easier question: what’s a new apartment worth next to a woman murdered just because she came home?

It’s nothing. Absolutely nothing at all.

It still feels like something, though. Actually, it feels a lot like this: during their final check, Mia finds a half-crushed carton of cigarettes trying to hide on the upper shelf of the closet. A lone survivor sits inside. Love her or hate her for it, but Mia grins and waggles it under Phoenix’s nose. “C’mon. Before the Butz boys see us.”

Phoenix lights it on the only working burner, gently singing his eyebrows, then goes back to the bedroom to test that the window’s well and truly fixed. They pass the cigarette back and forth like school kids hunched behind the bike sheds. Mia coughs on the windowsill and Phoenix’s stomach lurches as she rocks in and out of the summer sun day, laughing right in the face of it. She’s a hell of a lawyer, but her smoking is amateur at best. Diego looks so helplessly in love Phoenix has to look away from both of them.

“It doesn’t look half-bad with nothing in it,” Mia says, sucking in fresh air as her gaze skates over the bare walls.

“Nothing but potential now,” Phoenix says. He turns away and leans as close as he can to the window without peering at the drop below. Summer ruffles the sweat in his hair. Fire kisses his lips. “It’ll be something new.”

Mia smiles, purple dust curving around her cheeks. Phoenix’s fingers itch, but all his sketchbooks are stuffed in the back of Marcus’ car. “Does that scare you?”

It’s summer, and he thinks he might be smiling. Selfish boy, starving boy—that’s what he feels like. Most days it’s fine. He only thinks about what he’s missing when he’s reminded of it. And he’s reminded of it right now, because the sky is the bluest it’s ever been, and there is no safe place for him beneath it, but he wants one. A safe place does not exist, but he could make one.

“Yeah,” he says, tipping ash into the wind. He sticks his head out a little further to feel the breath of it on his cheeks and the sun on his shoulder blades. “But not as much as it used to.”

The smoke gets in all their eyes.

“I heard you’re looking for a cat.”

Phoenix doesn’t drop his onigiri in surprise. He intentionally lets it go so Murphy, staring at him morosely ever since she finished her watermelon slices, can snatch it out of the air and spray rice everywhere as she chews. For some reason, the only thing he can think to blurt out is, “Sorry.”

The woman standing over them looks entirely unimpressed. Her hair is tied back, her faded blue jacket embroidered with flowers he isn’t even going to attempt to name, and the arch in her raised eyebrow has clearly been perfected to a fine art. Sharp brown eyes linger warily on the cuts and bruises shading his face, and he thinks he should probably pull his hood down so he looks less like a teenage runaway, but it’s cold. Whenever the wind hits ears too long he always ends up with a headache, and he has more than enough aches to be getting on with, thank you very much.

“You’re looking for a cat with a dog?” she asks before he gets a chance to answer. Her hands are in her pockets as she tilts her hip against the back of the bench, aiming her eyebrow at Murphy as if expecting her to explain the situation.

Murphy tilts her head back and forth a few times, licking her lips. Phoenix does his best to translate. “Uh, yeah. The cat belonged to a friend of ours—I mean, mine. Sorry. Someone said they’d seen him around here, that the store owner might have fed him a couple of times.”

He’s sitting outside a convenience store in one of those out-of-the-spotlight towns between cities, too far away to be a suburb, too close to know what else to do with itself, and not big enough to be its own creature. Phoenix had to take three trains to get here, and he’s not entirely sure where here ended up being. There are hills looming over both sides, buildings clinging to the lower slants and more steadily trickling into the valley like the whole place flowed out of the earth and dried in a bewildered heap under the cold sun. There’s no centre—just streets that lean further towards commercial or residential, and little delineation between the two.

People’s shoulders slope and slouch the same shape as the valley, eroded by time and the world outside of it. The woman standing in front of him now is the first upright person he’s seen all day.

“I don’t want to take him if he’s being looked after,” Phoenix adds. “I just want to know if he’s okay.”

“Hm,” the woman replies, which isn’t particularly encouraging. Her eyebrow finds his sketchbook next, head tilting reflexively to properly examine the drawing Charlie directed him through on the train rides over. She gives it a long, slow blink. “Do you take criticism?”

“About the drawing or just as a person in general?” Phoenix asks, casting a quick glance to check that Charlie and Gregory are still drifting up and down the street within view.

“I meant the former, but I’m already starting to lean towards the latter,” the woman says bluntly. She has a plastic bag digging into her wrist and she uses readjusting it as an excuse not to look at him. “I couldn’t draw him the way you do. Maybe spend more time doing that instead of whatever got that done to your face.”

“Right,” Phoenix mutters. He stuffs his sketchbook back in his pocket, collects his trash and stands. “Thanks. I think.”

“Hey.”

Phoenix turns. The woman’s staring at his face again, scrutinising him in a way that’s almost unbearable. By now, Gregory’s noticed the interaction, and Phoenix hides a wince as both he and Charlie flicker over. He automatically rubs Murphy’s head when she presses it into his palm, her weight leaning into his legs. It’s easiest just to keep looking down at her.

“You just want to see him?” the woman asks.

Charlie makes a soft noise. Gregory puts his hand on her shoulder. Phoenix works his tongue around his mouth to remind himself it’s actually there. “Mhmm.”

The woman sighs and angles her body to the side, her eyebrow finally collapsing. It makes her look far older than she is, accentuating the lines around her eyes, the downturned cast of her mouth. Her hand flutters in a clear invitation, steady and unblemished, and though everything about her demeanour screams on alert, she lifts her head and braves the midday sky. “Don’t just stand there gawping like an idiot. I’ve got other things to be getting on with, and as much as it worries me to say, I expect you do too. Come on if you’re coming.”

Phoenix scrabbles after her. She leads him along and up and over, hardly pausing to look back as Murphy carries him most of the way. Some of the hills are steep enough that if there was nobody around, Phoenix would crawl up them on his hands and knees. He’s been on his feet far too long, and the bruises eating into his core are starting to drive him out of his mind.

“Are you alright?” Gregory asks dubiously after a particularly harsh wheeze.

The woman’s too close to risk a verbal answer. Phoenix forces a shrug and steps a little further away in case Gregory forgets Diego’s threat from earlier.

Eventually, they turn onto another street, again that mix of business and home. He counts a couple of coffee shops and a bakery, a flower shop and a hardware store, stands sitting ready to sell ramen and udon for anyone strolling about on their lunch break and a laundromat with the door stuck open, which makes the whole street smell like a mix of detergent and salt. Nobody seems to pay it much mind. They drift along, occasionally stopping to chat with each other or look through the wide store windows, crossing the road away from the lights because there isn’t nearly enough traffic to warrant the extra wait time (though there are a couple of ghosts who look like they could argue otherwise).

It’s sort of nice, Phoenix supposes, as long as nobody is forcing him to live in it. He’s not really fond of places where here comes down to wherever you happen to be standing. There’s nowhere else to go once you get there.  

He’s so focussed on keeping up he nearly runs right into the woman’s back when she suddenly stops outside the flower shop. It’s an unassuming place. It doesn’t even have a name—just the word flowers in artsy font on a plaque next to the door, and an awning the same shade as the ferns and flower stems spilling against the windows.

“My landlord doesn’t allow pets,” the woman says, tilting her head to indicate the inside of the shop. “And I don’t particularly want to draw attention to that fact. You’ll have to leave your dog out here.”

Phoenix swallows the instinctive jolt of panic. He’s having enough trouble just getting his breath back. “She won’t make a fuss,” he manages. “She’s a good dog.”

“Is that according to you or to her?”

“I can keep an eye on her,” Gregory offers. At least he waits to make sure the woman has finished speaking first.

Phoenix minutely shakes his head while he motions for Murphy to sit. She obeys, and Phoenix rubs her ears. “According to the courts. She’s a facility dog. Practically more qualified than me.” She pants happily, tail sweeping up the wind, a warning implicit in the barrier she makes of herself between Phoenix and the dead beside him. “And no offence, but I’m not walking into a stranger’s place and leaving my dog behind.”

The woman purses her lips, but after a moment, she nods stiffly. “You had better prove me wrong, boy.”

Charlie nearly stays behind. She’s shaking, teeth in her lip and hand clutching her other so tightly she could squeeze it into pulp. It’s the sort of thing Diego’s always good for, and Phoenix takes a moment to regret telling him to stay behind. Gregory looks on helplessly, which isn’t his fault, sort of, at least nothing Phoenix can blame him for. It’s much easier to be on the verge of something than to actually be it. But the woman is opening the door and telling him to move forward, and Phoenix can only go.

He doesn’t have to turn around to know when Charlie forces herself to follow.

You’d think it'd be easier being brave when you’re dead.

It’s a neat apartment, Phoenix notes, though his standard for mess, like his fear, is a little lower than most. Cluttered is the word he’d use for it, the magnolia walls nearly hidden beneath cheap paintings and photography and bookshelves stuffed to the brim, the little kitchen and living space lightly dusted with drying utensils and thrown-away magazines, two white doors presumably leading to a bedroom and bathroom. The only thing that catches his attention is what looks like a moderately sized portrait, covered with a sheet that drifts in the breeze breathing through the open windows.

Incense drifts under his nose, pulling Murphy with it, and his eyes slide to a small shrine tucked in the corner. A photo lies on the shelf without a frame, streaks of sunlight obscuring the features of the face, only the curling ends of hair visible against their shoulders. The woman shakes out her hair across the room, and Phoenix watches the strands curl into the same shape beside her neck.

Someone important to this woman has died. They died scared and alone. And it was not that long ago.

She shuts the windows, then tuts as she turns and catches his gaze sitting back on the sheet now hanging limp against the wall. “Don’t pretend you have any right to stand there and pity me, boy,” she says, low and defensively cutting. “It’s not your business anymore, and I don’t need your help to carry any part of it.”

He tilts his head, taking in the reddish-brown tint of her hair and the exact shape of her eyes. Make-up expertly applied, but nowhere near enough to hide the haggard lines underneath. Other than the two hovering at his back, there’s no hint of a ghost anywhere. It’s hardly uncommon that a house is haunted without its living occupants noticing, because oftentimes the function of a haunting is just to linger rather than harm or come to light. Whatever could have loomed here did not come to harm anyone inside these walls.

If he had to make a guess (and it would be an educated guess), he’d say it came to say goodbye.

He makes himself smile. “Sorry for intruding.”

“Stop with the apologising,” the woman says, striding over to one of the doors. “You’re giving me a damn headache.”

The moment she opens it, the loudest, most musical meow Phoenix has ever heard breaks apart any response he could have formed. A mound of black fur darts in, puddles of white around the paws and mouth spilling gold in the sun. With hardly a pause or a second glance at Murphy, the cat begins winding his way between Phoenix’s feet. Another happy trill colours the air as his single eye focuses on Charlie, and she drops to her knees before hesitating, looking down at her severed hand.

“Guess he really does know you,” the woman comments.

Phoenix shrugs, a little bemused as he lowers himself down, gently grasping Murphy’s scruff to stop her from getting too exuberant with her sniffing. “Hi, Walter,” he murmurs, his smile loosening to something more genuine as the cat rubs his cheek against the back of his offered wrist.

Charlie shakes her head and lets out a choked laugh. “He’s fat.”

Gregory makes a suspicious noise, quickly covering his mouth with his hand. Phoenix has had a lot more practice hiding his amusement. “He’s put on weight since I last saw him,” is all he says.

“Yeah, well, never had a cat before, have I?” The woman folds her arms, squinting at him suspiciously. “His name’s really Walter?”

“He was named after a friend,” Phoenix explains. “Walter the person never really appreciated it.”

Walter turns his head to bump his nose against Murphy’s, then decides to start clambering up Phoenix’s arm. Phoenix curls his other around Murphy’s back to stop her getting offended while Walter perches somewhat precariously between his neck and shoulder, poking his head out eagerly to meet Charlie’s tentative fingers. She isn’t anywhere near touching Phoenix. She wouldn’t. He still finds himself holding his breath.

“Does he know you’re here?” the woman asks suddenly. She hasn’t made any move to come closer, and Phoenix isn’t sure, but he thinks he sees her shiver when Gregory—who’s taken to investigating the apartment—passes by a little too close.

“Who do you mean?”

“Walter the person,” she says impatiently.

“Oh. Uh, no.”

“Does anyone?”

Phoenix tilts his head at her, bumping his cheek against Murphy’s head as Walter leaps off him to purr against Charlie instead. “Not really.”

The woman snorts. There’s a strange glint in her gaze as she scrapes it over the gutted edges of his face. It makes him feel cold for reasons that have nothing to do with the chill leftover from the wind. “I know your type, boy. Arrogant to a fault, the lot of you.”

“Are we?” he asks lightly. “What type is that?”

“Kind.” She spits the word, practically leaving a stain on the floor. “Kind and sick with it. If one person can barely shoulder their own grief, what makes you think you’re the one who’ll be able to take it all?”

Phoenix keeps his smile in place, little more than a dried oil spill in the shadow of his hood. His heart is still thumping and thudding around his chest, but Charlie is busy with her cat, and Gregory is by the shrine with his gaze fixed on the woman, and he can breathe. In and out. Whatever this woman has been through, there’s no way she can know enough about him to see what he really is. She’s just someone who’s lost someone.

“It’s heavy,” he agrees, and no more than that.

She makes a noise like harrumph and folds her arms tighter against her breast.

He’s not entirely sure when it became a problem: being kind. An affliction instead of the obvious choice—at least to him. It’s the sort of thing people kill you for, don’t you know. It’s gotten more than one person to a horrific end in the myths of old. There are so many reasons you aren’t ever supposed to look back.

A shape on the wall covered with a sheet. Before that, a mirror showing a face that is gone, but cannot be extricated from the person who created it.

He gives Walter a final scratch at the base of his tail, then pushes himself back to his feet. Charlie won’t move on quite yet, but she’ll probably be gone by tonight. He can feel the beginning tingles of something like relief. They grate at him, the ghosts, their silence, their everything they were supposed to be, and now everywhere they aren’t. They aren’t supposed to be here. They’re dead, they're—not-living. Torn away from what they should be and they should be dead.

It’s not your responsibility.

But the question after that is, how can he just leave them? He’s had an entire life to understand they won’t just go away, that the reason he can run himself into the ground and fight and run and run is because if he ever stops, they’ll catch up. He knows if he looks over his shoulder, he won’t be able to keep moving ahead. Sometimes, that seems the same as saying it would be the end of the world.

And yet, when he thinks of Miles, Gregory standing at his back, and when he thinks of Mia, Diego standing at hers, he thinks, more than anything, looking over their shoulders would be the most human part of them.

So what the hell is he supposed to do?

(There’s something else he’s supposed to be doing.

There’s something standing—)

He forces a bow, because despite Diego’s best efforts, he’s not actually a rude piece of shit, and turns to the door. He has his hand on the handle when Murphy suddenly tugs at her lead, pulling him round in time to flinch away from Gregory trying to grab his arm.

Gregory’s hand instantly drops, but sparks of something deeper than a set of bruised ribs still fizzle against Phoenix’s chest. It’s disturbingly, familiarly warm.

“I’m sorry,” Gregory says, looking down, looking away, making an aborted move like he wants to tug at something on his head. When his fingers only fumble over his hair, he sighs and rubs his thumb over his eyebrow. “I think there’s still something she wants to say to you.”

The woman is indeed looking at him, halfway moved across the room and mouth parted like she simply forgot to give the words a voice. Phoenix has to tighten his jaw to keep himself from shaking.

“Here’s the thing, boy,” she says. Voice low as if she doesn’t want to be overheard. Gripping the edge of a cabinet and rubbing her palm right over the corner. She squeezes it tight enough to leave a bruise. She says it again. “Here’s the thing.”

Her gaze flashes to the shrine, then back to him, something pale and sickly pressing against the inside of her skin. Old and grieving the most unnameable thing in the world. Breathing and moving despite it.

“I hadn’t talked to her in years,” the woman tells him, ragged and a little wet, as if it’s coming out of her throat unbidden. “There was plenty reason for it on both sides. And all I can think about nowadays is what I would say if I still had the chance. I tell it to incense and a picture somebody else had to give me. But the thing is—” She stops again, trembling an inhale and shaking her head with an aggression she can’t possibly deserve. “The whole stupidity of it is, if she were alive, I wouldn’t say any of it. I’d think, I’ll do it tomorrow. I’d think, I’ll do it the day after that. But I never would. I’d just live knowing she was out there living, too. And I’d tell myself it was enough.”

Somebody yells outside. Phoenix does not know if the voice is living or dead. Nobody in the room turns to listen to it. The sunlight doesn’t taste like anything.

“Today, I did this for you,” the woman says. “Tomorrow, you do whatever you can for someone else.”

With both her hands attached to her wrists, Charlie strokes Walter’s fur, his eye closed in contentment, his purrs rumbling against the floor. “Thank you,” she whispers to Phoenix, eyes as bottomless as they are white, brimming with so much emotion Phoenix has to look away. He’s never been good at meeting people’s gazes, dead or not, but he can’t, for the life of him, remember the last time he looked someone in the eye and didn’t feel ashamed.

“Listen to me, boy. We don’t do this alone.”

Phoenix is so tired.

“Thank you for having me, Miss Stone,” he says, and he’s already out the door with his dog and a dead man before she can say anything more.

When Phoenix was younger, he thought Gregory Edgeworth was the second coolest person on the planet. The first was Signal Blue, because he always kept people safe and never stopped moving forward. But even as a child, scrappy and starved and burning at every edge, he understood the importance of a man whose ghosts stayed just because they wanted to tell him thank you.

He tries to remember that when they’re standing outside of a different door. Murphy peers up at him. Gregory hesitates at his back. He traces the whorls and loops in the wood, gaze coming to a dull rest on the scrap of police tape caught in one of the hinges.

When he tries the handle, it turns. It takes him a few long seconds to remind himself there will be something different waiting for him inside.

And he opens the door.

Stops and feels the way his face physically drops. “Jesus. Diego wasn’t kidding about the mess.”

That’s him saying that. The Fey & Co. Law Offices were probably tidier when they were still in their initial cardboard cutouts. There are files spread in heaps across the carpet, loose forms scattered over the couch and coffee table, the shelves half-empty of their books and the survivors haphazardly slung across each other, desperately clinging for support while everything else is battered into bewildered submission by paper. His own desk… actually doesn’t look that different from normal, but when he checks what’s on top of it, he doesn’t recognise anything. The drawers have been scrambled, their contents with ambitions of setting out on their own, and when Murphy takes it in her jaws, Phoenix realises her cushion has quite literally been turned inside out.

“They were struggling to find a motive,” Gregory says, frowning with his hands on his hips as if he’s about to scold the mess back into proper order. He stands over it like a dad. “They do enjoy tearing things apart far more than they like to put them back together.”

“You’d think they’d get the hint eventually,” Phoenix mutters.

“You wouldn’t have a job if they did.”

Phoenix looks up from fixing Murphy’s cushion, swaying along as she presses her paws to his hip and whines impatiently. Once more, Gregory turns away, this time with a hand under his chin, fingers curled against his mouth.

Call him paranoid, but Phoenix is starting to get the distinct impression Gregory has no idea how to talk to him.

“You could make that sound less like a good thing,” Phoenix says cautiously, setting the cushion down and motioning for Murphy to stay. He takes a step towards Mia’s office, and another, trying to ignore the way his gut tightens, writhes, fuzzy indentations of something sharp and metallic pressing against the back of his throat.

Inside is somehow worse. Glass shards glint a thousand different shades of light, their razor-sharp edges furiously gripping the floor around a space of dark in the shape and size of Mia’s body. Soil has made a home amidst the carnage, settling itself anywhere the way plants will, and Phoenix finds his feet carrying him forward before any memories can reach out to snatch him back.

“Aw, Charley, what did they to do you?” he murmurs, reaching out to touch the crooked leaves. Someone must have propped it back up at some point, angling it round to use the wall as a crutch.

“Charley?” Gregory repeats, startled.

“It’s Mia’s,” Phoenix says. “Nothing to do with Charlie Parker. She’s had it as long as I’ve been here.” He frowns. “I don’t actually know why she calls it Charley.”

“And how long have you been here?”

“Uh, a little over two years. She took me on as a paralegal after she defended me on a murder charge. A different murder charge.” He tugs his hood down and runs his hand through his hair, trying to wrestle the spikes into some semblance of order. They don’t put much effort in cooperating. “It’s not a lot, but I know it’s weird that it happened twice.”

“… Right.” Gregory tips up his glasses to rub his eyes. “You’ll have to forgive me, Phoenix. I’m finding it a little difficult to understand. Law isn’t something I ever would’ve expected for you to choose as a career.”

Oh, that’s the problem? Here was Phoenix thinking the fact he could talk to dead people was what this discussion would be about.

“That was fifteen years ago,” Phoenix reminds him.

“I’m aware of that, unfortunately.” Gregory settles his glasses back into place with a sigh and comes a little further into the room. “Sometimes, I hardly notice. Other times, it feels far more akin to an eternity.” He looks at his hand, rubbing little circles into his palm, brows set low. “But to be perfectly honest, most of the time it doesn’t feel like anything at all.”

Murphy’s head pokes round the door behind him, her ears and tail drooped low, hangdog and uncertain. Phoenix motions for her to stay again and she does, sitting still for a moment before her mouth drops open to pant. “Let me clean up the glass first, Murphy.”

While he sweeps up the shards, he tries to work out what Gregory’s expecting him to say. For the number of times he’s been asked it, he’s never thought of it as something that needed to be explained. People might not look at him and think lawyer (wrong seems to be the general consensus, though he’s heard freak and thing thrown around too), but it’s another one of those things you just don't get to choose. It grabs you, so often when you’re least expecting it, and it breathes fire into your lungs and forces open your eyes and makes you look as it screams at you, what the hell are you doing just standing there?

He knows. He knows he knows he knows. The list of things he isn’t is far longer than the list of things he is, and what he could be has remained an empty page in a forgotten sketchbook since he first learned the meaning of the word want. Living with anything simply becomes a dull ache after a while. Living without is an entirely different matter.

When you’re without, you’re only ever looking towards it.

“I want to help people,” he says, though it sounds hesitant and lame in the echo of two dead woman, a mother without a child taking in a cat because it had no-one else and a hungry mouth. He digs a piece of glass free, feeling the edges press against his skin. He puts it down and makes himself bleed another way. “And… I heard the name von Karma from ghosts before I knew he was—was Edgeworth’s guardian. When I found out, I thought… well, I’d only ever heard the worst of him, so maybe… But I went to the Fawles trial, and Miles—Edgeworth, I mean, he looked… He looked like I used to. Before I met him.”

Sometimes, on his worst days, he thinks he wasn’t supposed to survive his mother’s suicide. It’s nothing poetic. Phoenix isn’t fucking stupid. She didn’t just come home and kill herself, and she never raised a hand to him except to hold him tighter—but she still killed him. She still stayed, no matter how many times Phoenix begged her to leave.

It was his father with empty eyes and workman’s hands who left him alone, but his mother still lay beside him after it all, and somehow, he hates her the most.

(The great fear: that nothing will love him enough to stay.

The greatest fear: that something will.)

Gregory observes him, a silence inside of him like falling. “You became a lawyer for Miles?”

And there are a lot of things Phoenix could reply with: that isn’t only for Edgeworth, he really does want to help people, he doesn’t know how to do anything else, and sure, he didn’t have to become a lawyer to do that, but Edgeworth never returned his letters, and Phoenix knew—knew nothing less would be adequate. Being just Phoenix would never be enough.

“You were there,” is what he chooses to say. “You know I promised.”

“Phoenix,” Gregory says, taking a step forward before visibly holding himself back. “Phoenix, you can’t be a lawyer for one person.”

“You’re always a lawyer for one person. Then the next. Then the one after that.” He stands and tips the glass into the bin, squinting at the floor to see if he missed anything. “It’s not that different from helping ghosts, honestly. Did you notice?”

Gregory tightens his jaw the same way Edgeworth does. Or is it the other way around? “And you decided the logical next step was to put it towards law?”

Phoenix hums, scratching absently at his cheek. His palms feel sweaty. His scars itch. “Don’t really remember not doing it, to be honest.”

“But why a defence attorney, of all things?” Gregory asks, sharper.

There was definitely a time when Gregory could have frightened Phoenix, but that was at least three years, a few dozen stitches and a bullet ago. The truth of it is so stupidly simple he doesn’t understand why it needs asking, let alone repeating.

He wants to be a lawyer for the same reason he loves art: because it’s his. Something he can make his. Not something done to him or chosen for him, and okay, yeah, Edgeworth was the catalyst, but so was the kindergarten teacher who handed him a pencil and paper and said draw. So was his mom when she brought him to her breast—when he was too young to comprehend what it meant—and said have your fill.

(He thinks back to the courtroom, trying so hard not to—unable to stop himself. That last look at Edgeworth and the expression he didn’t know how to name. Except that isn’t the truth. He just didn’t let himself think the words. He was drowning enough already it wasn’t hard to let them sink and thrash and die unheard.

But he’d recognised Edgeworth anywhere. The exact shine in those silver eyes reflecting back at him.

This is how it always goes: you will lose. You will not be good enough. And no matter what you do, you can’t not want.)

Why did he become a lawyer?

Does he need a reason to draw? Is there a reason you want to eat when you’re hungry?

“I’ve never seen so many ghosts in one place the way they were for White.”

The non-sequitur catches Gregory off-guard enough to make him flicker in place, hand rising to press at his chest. “… Yes. There were a lot.”

“One by themselves can do a lot of damage. Most don’t even realise how much.” He rubs at the crook of his neck, letting his nails drag against the rough tissue. “But most of them aren’t like that. Most of them are… well, they’re like you and Charlie. Like Diego, or my friend, Davy. They just want to know the people they love, the people they had to leave behind, will be looked after. And this—” He gestures to the office around them, glass and blood and paper and all— “This is one way to make sure that happens. Besides, if you know someone’s done something wrong, shouldn’t you do something to fix it?”

Gregory’s eyes widen. The next second, he chokes, hastening to pull out a handkerchief to wipe the blood away. He doesn’t make a thing of it the way some ghosts do, practically leaking everywhere. He almost seems embarrassed—or, no, maybe self-conscious is a better word? It still isn’t completely right, but the only other one that comes to mind is living. It’s the same way people turn their heads to sneeze or apologise if they interrupt someone with a yawn.

Phoenix tilts his head. “Do you not think so?”

“It’s not that.” Gregory clears his throat. “You just… reminded me of someone. For a moment.”

“Oh. Thanks?”

Gregory fiddles with the handkerchief, folding it over and over, shoving his knuckles into the stitching. It’s strangely difficult to tell what he’s thinking.

Phoenix’s fingers twitch, suddenly wanting to grip the handkerchief curled up back in his apartment. He settles on the floor, Charley’s leaves softening his back, Murphy’s fur propping up his front when he invites her into his arms. She fills out the gap between his crossed legs and tucks her snout against his neck.

“Mr Edgeworth,” he asks, fur cupping the tender lines of his jaw, “What happened?”

The answer he gets is nothing; another heavy silence that pressures his bones and whispers against his eardrums. Gregory doesn’t stop or tense or break out into something monstrous. It isn’t like that. He just keeps folding his handkerchief, touching the blood lines, whatever gunk and grime gets stuck in dead people’s throats. Finally, he finds some words to speak half-rotting there too.

“You don’t understand the most basic fact of what you’re trying to get involved in.”

He says it like a eulogy.

Phoenix tightens his hands on his dog.

“Your father is the one who said that to me,” Gregory goes on, raising his gaze in time. “I couldn’t begin to understand what he meant at the time. I didn’t even want to try. But do you know something? I genuinely believe he thought he was trying to protect you the only way he could.”

Phoenix laughs. He doesn’t mean to, nor is he particularly aware he’s going to. It spills out of him like an open wound. He doesn’t find a single word out of Gregory’s mouth funny in the slightest.

Gregory steps over him. He ignores Murphy’s rumbling growl and lowers into a crouch. This time (and hopefully, please, the only time) he holds himself like a lawyer finally talking to a scared little boy about the monsters crawling through the walls of what was supposed to be a home and a family. “Phoenix. Please. Tell me the truth. Did your father hurt you?”

(“Does it still hurt?”

Phoenix shrugs. His leg is extended across the couch, a melting ice pack shackled around his swollen ankle. Primary colours flicker in the TV screen, shapeless, formless things out the corner of his eyes. He keeps his head down. Endlessly, he rotates the bullet between his fingers. The worn edges gnaw his fingertips.

“Gomen ne. I should’ve been paying more attention. I should pay more attention.” Mom frowns and curls her arms tighter around her knees. She sits on the floor like a girl. When she bows her head, Phoenix slips further into the blanket Dad threw over him before he left, sinking until he can’t see her. Until he doesn't have to look away from the hole in her head. “I’m no good at looking after you anymore, am I?”

They've been here before: Phoenix sitting on the couch, not watching the TV, not talking to his mom. His dad nowhere to be found, with no promise of when he'd be back. The ghost that wrenched his ankle is even further gone, the apartment tender in the aftermath, the light fragile and his chest threatening to heave on every breath.

Phoenix has told a lie.

This is not something new. It’s—It’s just a reflex, nowadays, to tuck his hands close, to hold his head down so no-one can see the truth tearing in his eyes. They’ve never been made of the same stuff. He thinks Miles might have finally realised it, though, and it—he just—he doesn’t know. He’s not a very good liar, but that didn’t seem to matter to Miles before. There are times like this where Miles sees through him so easily, but there are other times where Miles just… trusts that he’s telling the truth.

If guilt meets shame, is there a chemical reaction inside the body? Phoenix wonders if he’ll just implode one of these days. It might be a better alternative than having to carry it for the rest of his life.

“Kaa-san,” he says quietly. “Don’t feel sorry for me.”

The front door opens, a shift of air and a whisper of sound Phoenix only hears because he’s been listening so intently for it. He quickly tucks the bullet into his fist and hides it beneath the blanket. Dad looks tired when he comes in. Tired and sad and haunted.

“I don’t think you should spend time with that boy anymore,” Dad says. His voice cracks. It sounds nothing like a gunshot. Phoenix hears one anyway.

“I can’t not see him,” Phoenix argues, his own voice tiny and young. “We—We’re in the same class.”

“He thinks I’m the one hurting you.”

“He doesn’t know. I can't tell him. I'm not going to tell him.”

He shakes as he curls tighter around the bullet. Holding it to his chest. If he was braver, he’d say something more. Say, but I want to tell him. He’d stand up and face down both of them and say, louder, I want to tell him, he deserves to know, he’s my friend.

But he isn’t and he doesn’t. He doesn’t rush out the apartment to Miles’ house and thrust the bullet out for Miles and his father to see. He doesn’t plan any sentences starting with here is what I really am. He doesn’t move. He doesn’t look at his dad. And he definitely doesn’t look at his mom.

Dad shakes his head and walks to the window, passing his hand over the TV static as he goes. Every step elicits another groan from the sore floorboards beneath the carpet. “He knows what you did,” he says to the night outside, and Phoenix’s heart stops. His fist trembles. It hurts to hold it so tightly. “Why did you even bother coming home after it in the first place? Why are you still here?”

Mom makes a sound like a dying thing. “Damien, don’t you dare. You know why. You can’t—”

“He wasn’t going to,” Phoenix croaks. Both his parents flinch away.

It’s a strange game of whispers not meant to be played. One can hear everything, one can hear nothing, and both listen only when they want.

And, of course, the boy in the middle.

Slowly, as if trying not to spook a wild animal, Dad moves to crouch in front of where Phoenix is, forcing Mom to crawl to the middle of the room. His hand hovers over Phoenix’s shoulder, as if questioning whether the touch would be welcome or not, and Phoenix remembers, with a fresh pang of shame, how he’s slapped his dad away the past few days. He’s ran down the sidewalk so he wouldn’t have to meet Miles or Larry’s gazes. He’s pulled his hood down low and hidden under his covers to stop himself having to have anything to do with Mom.

Phoenix doesn’t like this hesitation. It makes him feel sick, like he’s really—he’s really done it, hasn’t he, made his dad too afraid to touch him. But he’s a selfish, selfish boy, so before he can lose the hunger for it, he takes his dad’s hand and settles it on his head. Dad’s touch is slack for a moment, as if he wasn’t expecting it, but in the next one he’s gently rubbing his fingertips over Phoenix’s scalp. Warm and calloused and familiar. The way he always used to without a second thought.

Phoenix shuts his eyes and hordes it greedily. Selfish boy. Monster boy. Tightening his fist around the bullet as his dad tugs his feathery tufts of hair.

There’s kindling in the man’s fingernails. Look close enough and you can see the rising smoke.

“Are you going to let them take me away?” Phoenix whispers.

His dad doesn’t answer immediately, body tensing and breath turning empty. A thousand words are spoken into that silence. Phoenix could name the colours of every single one.

“No. I won’t let them,” Dad finally replies, gently tugging on Phoenix’s hair until Phoenix meets the blue of his eyes. “You know that, don’t you?”

Phoenix thinks of the bullet in his hand. Fireworks and gun metal and what it feels like to have Miles’ fingers curled around his own. River water and autumn fire and red and yellow and blue. His dad’s grip viciously tight on his arm and this whole thing was a fucking mistake.

Thinks, Do I?)

“My dad didn’t hit me,” Phoenix says, and wonders, despite the awful truth of it, if it’s the wrong thing to say.

Gregory’s expression crumples inwards. Listening close enough he hears what Phoenix says—and precisely what he doesn’t. He flickers back to his feet, taking in the beaten remains of the office, the whole sordid shadow of what was nearly ruined beyond repair, and the boy sitting on the edges of it all just barely starting to scrape himself back together after a lifetime of losing.

“You know as well as I do the world will never be as kind as we hope it to be,” Gregory says, though he does it like he’s saying it to himself. “What sort of end do you think you’re going to find?”

Phoenix stares at him. Remembers, again, silver and red, and glass raining down, glistening against a thousand grieving eyes, and a hand slamming into a desk like if it lets go no-one will be waiting to catch it. Thinks about how, when someone dies, the first thing you do is wish for them to come back. About those stories in which that wish is granted, but the one who comes back from the dead is not quite right, is not quite the same, is not quite what they were before. Because death is not something you should come back from.

Murphy slumps as Gregory moves away, finally worn out and relaxed as long Phoenix is holding her. Her heartbeat chases his. If there was an ending, he’d want it to be that. He’d want it to be— “A better one.”

“And if there isn’t one?” Gregory pauses at the doorway, as if he can’t help pressing further. “Do you know what it’s like to be so close to someone, but all you do is keep hurting them?”

“Yes.” Phoenix swallows and tucks his dog closer. “I’m used to it, honestly.”

Gregory shakes his head. “This isn’t yours to carry.”

“No offence, but I don’t think you get to make that choice about me. I’m not doing any of this for you.”

“It goes both ways,” Gregory replies gravely, and finally tucks his handkerchief back into his pocket. “Just—try to be careful, will you? My son doesn’t need any more dead things following him.”

“I—” Phoenix starts, startled, but before he can utter anything beyond that single syllable, Gregory is gone. He stares at the empty spot in the middle of the floor for a few seconds, then lowers his face into Murphy’s fur, ignoring the way it catches at his cheek. “I have no fucking clue what any of that was supposed to mean.”

Murphy heaves a sigh of agreement.

(So, here’s the thing about the bullet: its place in this story isn’t here yet.

There’s a lot of things it has already done; pieces that cannot be extricated from the whole. It’s not just one thing, despite the size and shape of it, because it’s so many other things that wouldn’t have happened without it. They are lovely and gorgeous and nauseating and cold, they are burning blue flames with laughter gleeful as a child’s shining through the crackles, and somewhere amidst them is an answer nobody knows is there to find. The words will come. Too bad saying them makes them more than that. It makes them so much more than that.

But not yet.

Instead, we have a boy left alone with his dog, slowly trying to put back together a life that is not his own but is perhaps finally beginning to feel like he’s part of it anyway. We have a father and a son who have had to forget what it feels like to look each other in the eye. We have two sisters, one of which remembers while the other does not. We have a question. The first and last question. And it always starts with why.

When a boy is left alone too long, he hungers.

That is Phoenix’s first answer.)

Chapter Text

“So,” Mia says thicky through a mouthful of chocolate pudding, “Tell me if you notice anything interesting.”

Phoenix holds the newspaper spread for Diego to read over his shoulder, trusting the other man will point out anything worth commenting on (because Diego just can’t—and as far as Phoenix is concerned, never should—help himself). His own gaze skips from the announcement of the ‘Infamous Demon Prosecutor’s Defeat’, to the photo of said prosecutor taking up half the article space, to his own face shoved in the opposite corner. He sighs. “Why’d they have to use that picture?”

“Ha, really selling the underdog story, aren’t they?” Diego snorts.

They could have gotten the point across without the mugshot. Phoenix knows it’s him, because it has the same-coloured eyes as him, but he barely remembers it being taken. He doubts the him in the photo was much aware of it in the moment either, blue and brown shadowed and blank, quietly storing away the horror; a snapshot of a man drowning on perfectly good air.

It’s an unusual diptych, creased into paper and held together by staples, more reminiscent of a modern art project, but pictures speak a thousand words, and they speak even more if you line them up beside each other the right way. Phoenix has read enough articles about Edgeworth to feel like he recognises the picture they used more than the man himself. There’s no defeat about it. Just something upright and untouchable, the mercury shine in his gaze muted by newspaper ink, the shadows beneath them missing their blue and the crackling edges of his suit bleeding through the page.

(How does it go again?

If you are in love with red then you slit or shoot.

If you are in love with blue you fill your pouch with stones good for sucking and head down to the ocean. Any ocean will do.)

Mia smacks her lips with far too much aplomb and points her spoon at him. “Cut it out and save it for me. I’m sticking it up on the office fridge.”

“We don’t have an office fridge,” Phoenix points out.

“I’m going to buy an office fridge specifically so I can stick it up there.”

“I thought you needed to buy a new light stand,” Maya says, leaning over from her seat to peer at the article as well.

Mia’s mouth forms an ‘O’. She sticks the spoon into the gap and grabs a sticky note, awkwardly balancing her pudding cup between her knees as she scribbles down the reminder. Phoenix tips a glare down towards Maya. Maya grins around her own share of chocolate pudding and holds her fingers up by her eyes in a sideways V, the cuff of his hoodie slipping down her wrist. She’s taken to wearing it so much he’s given up on the notion of getting it back.

He’s also found he doesn’t really mind.

He glances behind him at the sound of wings, something dark flitting away from the window. There’s always a strange sort of remove from the inside of hospitals to the outside, a lingering acknowledgement that nobody wants to be here, and while it’s nowhere near as bad as seeing the sky through barred windows, it presses against the glass like white hot heat.

People talk about the smell, but whether it’s hospital or prison, there’s a point where you just go beyond it. Like cigarette smoke (supposed to kill your sense of smell completely, sixteen years old and tired enough of blood and seawater to feel somewhat hopeful at the prospect), it takes over your clothes and curls up under your skin. Weeks away from it, months and years, yet sometimes, somehow, something catches hold—and there it is again.

He knows it was rude of him to open the window and let the breeze steal inside. Mia’s taught him a lot, though, and that includes nothing less than pure insolence. Diego has his own bitter brand, but hers is something else, every woman for herself: if Death wants to make a run for it, there’s no harm in being a sore winner.

(Indigo is for cruel bargains. Violet is for brute force. She’s wearing her necklace again, the stone cradled in the hollow spread of her breast. Diego touches it sometimes when she’s not looking, feather-light and contemplative, mellower than desire, but still with plenty of want.

If you are in love with purple you smile every time you are bruised. Phoenix doesn’t think Diego or Mia have ever loved something that didn’t break their fingers.

The air is fresh and chemical, the lights buzzing off-white and the noise continuous enough for Phoenix to almost tune it out. He’s better now with a couple days of food and sleep in him, but he’s still wary of catching salt. It’s over, Diego told him as they started cleaning up the office carnage, face lit amidst the paper, catching fire. It’s okay to cry, pajarito.

It’s probably true if Diego’s saying it, but Phoenix has more important things to be getting on with.

What else for a boy in love with every colour of the spectrum?)

“Anything else catch your attention?” Mia asks.

Diego’s chin tickles the top of Phoenix’s scalp as he leans into a sigh. “They hardly mention White.”

Phoenix skims the article properly. There’s plenty about Edgeworth, his so-called perfect record and the dark rumours surrounding it, his tutelage under Manfred von Karma and the dark rumours about his perfect record, previous convictions—most notably of the Joe Darke killings—and even mention of the Fawles trial in conjunction with Mia being the victim this time. Phoenix’s part is far less impressive, though they took care to mention his previous murder charge, again, ostensibly, in connection to Mia. As the headline suggests, however, they’re far more focussed on the fact Edgeworth lost to a rookie attorney than they are the true culprit.

“That was fast,” he mutters. He’s smearing ink up and down his fingers, the paper crackling in protest between his knuckles. “Though I can’t say I’m surprised he has a few journalists under his thumb.”

“He’s trying to avoid the moral outrage convicting him of anything worse than what he did to me. At least, that’s how Grossberg sees it. He gave me that paper when he visited earlier.” Mia’s smile could chew through glass. “He came all this way just to tell me he’ll be representing White.”

“Whoa, whoa, wait,” Maya says. She sits up straight, pulling her weight off Phoenix’s arm. “Why would Grossberg do that? I thought you worked for him before. Doesn’t that mean anything to him?”

Mia’s eyes skitter strangely over Phoenix’s face—as if she’s expecting to see someone else in place of him, or simply in the act of replacing him. Diego’s growled expletives, a creative mix of Spanish and English crashing into each other, echo in Phoenix’s ears. He lowers his gaze with a shrug and rubs the crook of his neck. He probably stains ink there, too.

“What?” Maya asks again, louder.

“I worked for him,” Mia says, setting the finished pudding cup aside and resting her hand on her chest, fiddling the stone back and forth. “But the only reason I did is because he’s the one who told White about our mother. White sold the information to the papers, but Grossberg is the one who told him in the first place.”

Maya folds herself up quite suddenly, sinking into the hoodie even as she lifts her head to stare her sister in the eyes. Mia responds with a practised bluff—the same calm, easy-going expression Diego puts on in the face of Phoenix’s oceans. There’s a crack that runs through it every time. That’s how the light gets in. It’s white again, this time the scratch of her cast against the bedsheets as she positions it, then repositions it, then huffs and holds it against her stomach. Finally, she turns her gaze to the pot of purplish, bluish flowers on the bedside table.

“You gave me his number,” Maya says, and no more than that, which doesn’t really clue Phoenix in on what she’s talking about.

“There wasn’t anyone else. Not before,” Mia replies. For some reason, Diego breathes another tired sigh and rests his forehead down on Phoenix’s shoulder. Bemused, Phoenix tilts his head until mottled hair tickles the tender inside of his cheek. “He’s not that terrible of a lawyer, usually. White’s a special case.” Her gaze lifts back to Phoenix, her jagged smile along with it. “Do you know what else he told me? He’s not even going to try to win.”

Phoenix shifts uncomfortably. He knows hardly anything about sisters outside of what Diego has told him, but Sam was her own special case, not least because she was convicted of beating their foster parents to death and burning their house down. Diego insists it wasn’t actually her, and Phoenix trusts Diego too much to question otherwise, and anyway, he doesn’t think Mia’s the sort of person who would do that either. She hits things when she’s angry and he’s never seen anyone burn as bright as her in court, and if she’ll do everything she’s done for a boy like him, if she’ll take him and feed him and give him so much more than he’s ever deserved, obviously she’d do the same for her sister.

But there’s more than one way to kill someone. Look at White. Look at dead white. Look at Grossberg. Not even trying to win? That’s the best answer Grossberg could come up with? As if that’s not the same thing he’s been doing for the past fifteen years, rolling over belly up and saying take them, not me, and please remember to tell them I am very sorry about it.

Maybe it isn’t about winning. But that doesn’t mean you don’t try. It’s not scary to lose, no more than it is to win—but it’s terrifying to look up after either and know the person opposite didn’t want it as much as you. That to them it was something fleeting and transitory and unimportant. What’s the point in doing it at all if you aren’t doing it with absolutely everything? Phoenix doesn’t want Grossberg to win anything for the smarmy, purple-haired bastard, he just—whatever.

This isn’t something he can afford to waste time on. It’s just—just whatever.

When he looks at Maya, though, a crease between her eyebrows (in the same place as Mia’s when she’s quietly frustrated), he thinks she’d understand what he means.

“I know you threatened White with all those names,” Phoenix says, cautiously interrupting the little patch of silence before it can grow any larger. “But we might have a problem with evidence in the long run. The files you had on White are gone from the office. Everything filed under ‘W’ actually, as far as I can tell.”

“With the police?” Mia asks.

“No. It took them a while to work it out, but no.” Which is a relief, honestly. He had enough trouble getting his bike and Mia’s apartment key from them. With his ribs and hand the way they are, he won’t even be able to ride his damn bike for another few weeks. He doesn’t want to think of the hoops he’d have to jump through to get an entire folder of potentially sensitive paperwork returned. “I think White just grabbed what he could while they were busy arresting me.”

“He didn’t get everything, then,” Mia says, satisfied. “I’ll give you a list of what we should still have. If he wants to play with lawyers, I’m sure as hell going to make sure he doesn’t get any pleasure out of it.”

“Speaking of which, I should get going,” Phoenix says. He folds up the newspaper, and while he knows he’ll regret it, he tucks it into his bag. “You need anything else before I do? Maya?”

Maya startles a little, as if she wasn’t expecting him to think of her at all. She shakes herself out of it quickly enough, but he still feels something lonely and familiar twist inside him like an answer to a question nobody thought to ask. “I’m good. Oh—actually, more pudding would be good.”

Phoenix tosses his unopened pot to her. “Go nuts. I’ll ask Ant if he’s got any more stashed away if I see him.”

Maya grins. “Thanks, Nick.”

“Wait,” Mia says. She points at the pot of flowers. Given the discussion so far, Phoenix assumed Grossberg had brought them and was half-considering offering to burn them. He’s very glad he didn’t. “I had Ant get those for me. Could you take them to Diego’s room?”

Diego flinches back a full foot. He nearly drops right out the window.

“Sure,” Phoenix says as neutrally as possible. “I didn’t know flower arranging was one of his talents.”

“It’s not,” Mia sighs. “He’s convinced, for some reason, that I’d try and run off again if he let me leave the ward, so I chose something and showed him a picture.” She stretches her only working arm above her head, almost pushing it all the way out of the hospital gown before letting it fall back onto the mattress with a thump. “I don’t know what he’s so worried about. This dying shit is easy.”

(Bad time to mention she was throwing up when Phoenix arrived, perhaps.)

“You’re not dying,” Maya says. “You’re not allowed to die before me. I’m not explaining that to Oba-san. She’d never shut up about it.”

“Right,” Mia laughs. She reaches for Maya’s hand. She has to turn the whole of herself over to do it with the cast in the way. Wires bend and flex across her. It’s funny how much not dying looks like dying sometimes. Like poking a bruise or splitting a scab. You just can’t help reaching for a taste. “Or you could channel me. That’d take the smirk off her face.”

“I think it’d make things worse, actually,” Maya mutters. She lifts herself off her chair to perch on the bed, letting Mia lie more comfortably. “Pearly would be happy to see you, though.”

Mia smiles. Her necklace shines.

Phoenix says nothing.

“Phoenix?”

“Huh? Uh, yeah?”

She raises an eyebrow at his stumbling, but she leaves it be. “If any requests come in for you, don’t worry about tidying up the office, okay?”

Phoenix rolls his eyes and forces his own laugh. “C’mon, Chief.” He shrugs his shoulder to indicate the bag and the newspaper inside. “Who’s going to hire me after seeing that picture?”

“You’ve really got no idea,” Diego murmurs as he follows Phoenix out. When Phoenix glances at him questioningly, he doesn’t seem to be in the mood to explain. He’s too busy staring at the flowers, the dip and spread and purple pulse of them.

Phoenix jostles them. “Are they good ones?”

“Wisteria,” Diego says. “Luck, love and longevity.” He tugs at his collar, biting his way through a bitter smile. “And victory over hardship. Suppose there’s no harm in it. That’s the point of being happy, right?”

Phoenix’s hand tightens on the strap of his bag. He can feel the outline of his earrings digging through his skin, two helix rings and a studded lobe. “Because you’re going to be sad later.”

“Ha, look at that. You do listen to me sometimes.” Diego’s eyes soften. “I’ll meet you back at the office, yeah?”

“De nada,” Phoenix replies. He bumps his shoulder through Diego’s, then runs before Diego can swipe him through the head.

Here is a secret: the first time Phoenix saw Diego sleeping, Mia brought him, and she was crying.

Well—she didn’t start out crying. That would’ve been an alarming way to start the day. But at the end of it, Mia asked, blurted it out, really, if he’d like to come with her.

It was August 27^th. He didn’t have to ask what she meant.

The weirdest part about it is that whenever he remembers it, what he remembers most is he didn’t know what to do with his hands. They had to drop Murphy back at his apartment, so he couldn’t run them through her fur or fiddle with her lead. Diego stayed behind with her, mildly panicked at the idea of Phoenix going at all (which for Diego is more or less the same as saying approaching imminent mental breakdown). Phoenix offered to refuse, but Diego just forced an unnecessary breath, then ten, then twenty, and by the time he was done, Murphy was sitting at his side and he managed to say, “It’s going to happen one of these days. It may as well be now.”

There’s a joke to be made about waiting around for these things, but in the moment, Phoenix hadn’t found it very funny. It took seeing it to understand, and he hates that he does, but it makes a disturbing amount of sense why Diego thinks of himself as two different people; the man dead to the world and the man living where only Phoenix can see him.

He stood on one side of the bed, and Mia stood on the other. He couldn’t stop fidgeting—tugging at his sleeves, reaching for his keychain, twirling a pencil around his fingers, smearing graphite over the lines of his palms. Part of him wanted to reach out, to feel the weight and warmth and bitter breathing beating life of the most important person in the world to him. But Mia was there, and he was busy pretending he hadn’t noticed she was crying, and another part of him was terrified that if he reached out, his hand would just sink right through.

Absence, by its definition, is empty space where something once was and now isn’t. Phoenix isn't sure he understands it, because the full-body physical ache he feels whenever he loses something (or realises it's something he never had in the first place) feels so much like something he imagines he could break open his chest and pick it out. If Dahlia Hawthorne had managed to murder him, if he’d died choking on blood, feeling it run down his cheeks, drying and sticky around his eyes—they’d have found it in the autopsy. Like stones, brilliantly coloured and beautiful, filling up his heart. He’s wished, sometimes, to show what he carries to others, but they’re too heavy to bear with only his own two hands. And like so many other children left behind, packaged between parents, picked up and dropped over and over, eventually, he decided there was no point.

Tell someone to leave you alone enough times, and one day they will listen. Yet you wonder why nobody ever asks if you’re really alright.

(Leave it to Phoenix Wright to be the outlier. Leave it to Diego Armando to pick up the pieces of his own making.)

Here is another secret: this is not the second time Phoenix has been here.

He sorts out the flowers first. He knows far more about growing them than he does naming or displaying them, but he thinks he does a passably decent job. This ward is a quiet place given the nature of its patients. Most people in comas don’t tell you to put a post-it note on your fridge saying, ‘Remember to buy milk, actual milk, not just chocolate you fucking child’. They don’t give the shovel talk to your childhood friend’s father. They don’t insult the sugar in your coffee or hang art on your walls or say, if I could unhurt you, I would, but I can’t. So I will stay with you through the hurt, however long it takes.

You leave a space at the table for dead people. Not the sleeping ones.

Still, Phoenix takes an extra moment to make sure no-one’s watching before gently resting his hand on the man’s chest. It doesn’t slide through. The warmth is more of a suggestion than the usual spark and flare of another person, but it is there, and it grows the longer he leaves his hand against it. Soon, he feels the heart beating beneath his palm. There’s a myriad of machines that could tell him the same thing, but he prefers feeling it himself. Sometimes he thinks about tucking his ear against it, holding it close enough he can place it by the rhythm in his own chest. But he also thinks Diego wouldn’t like that very much, even if Phoenix never told him.

So he doesn’t. He keeps his hand on Diego’s heart and tries to listen. Tries to reach for—something. Down and deeper down. Scorching in between his lungs. He can’t quite put a name to the feeling, but he doesn’t let it go. He looks for its answer, for some kind of echo, like feeling sweat trickle down the back of his neck and remembering the summer sun. Like reaching up a hand to steal a star from the sky, the sky above the ocean that isn’t an ocean, because it’s just a bad dream, but the sky, the lights, the dead man—

Those things are real. Waiting for him.

Waiting for everyone, eventually.

Like hell, he thinks so vehemently the sheer emotion makes him dizzy. Like hell will this be the only way we ever know each other.

A shock of dark feather catches his eye as he pulls his hand away. The crow flies from the window frame without looking back. He follows its shadow out the door.

(This dying shit is easy.

It’s being killed that’s the hard part.)

So, this is where he washes up.

It only takes a couple more days for Mia to be released from the hospital along with strict instructions to not even think about going back to work, and to come back immediately if there’s the slightest hint of something wrong. For the most part, she listens.

“Really,” she says later, off the record, staring at the spot on the floor where she once lay dying, “I don’t know what everyone’s so worried about. If I was going to die I’d have done it already.”

Phoenix nearly drops the precarious stack of files in his arms, tripping on nothing but the words themselves. As it is, a few sheafs break free from the top, and he has to perform some awkward balancing exercises to stop the whole thing crumbling. Maya, staring somewhat bemusedly at the chaotic mess of files with her arms around Murphy, snatches at the distraction gratefully.

“You told me it would be an emergency,” she says. “I thought you were exaggerating.”

Mia turns away from the window and stops fiddling with her necklace in favour of putting her hand on her hip. “You’ve seen his apartment.”

“I’m not that bad,” Phoenix protests. “I’m just—processing.” Another file slides free from his arms, hitting the floor with a commiserating sort of smack. Paper spills out to rest at Mia’s waiting feet.

“Seems pretty dire to me,” Diego drawls, as if he’s not the worst enabler of Phoenix’s abysmal attention span. Diego is also not built for this any better than Phoenix and a drama queen, so Phoenix can’t even be a brat about it unless he wants Diego batting at him all day like an unhealthily caffeinated cat.

“It’s a process,” Phoenix says, grimacing.

His hands are dry, the unstitched gash threatening to crack beneath its bandage, the rest of his body aching in all the ways he’s familiar with. It looks worse than it is. The work to sort the office is nowhere near as bad as he and Diego feared—but it’s not only law. It’s the dead. He draws them. Diego and Murphy growl at them. He sleeps with them over his bed. Diego’s the only reason he goes back to his apartment or he’d keep working till morning to take what should be and make it what is. Because here’s the thing: he’s the only one who can help these ghosts move on, and that’s nothing new. It’s not even something worth whining about; he’ll just do it again. There’s nothing to do but the same thing over and over.

Phoenix also knows a lot about running a law office by now. Far more than he should. Three years isn’t a long time, but it’s enough to grow, and when it’s just the two of them, Fey and Co., if they want to keep this place moving, either one of them has to be able to do absolutely everything.

The thought makes Phoenix want to bare his teeth. It makes something inside of him bleed he wants it so badly. And people think he’s crazy for choosing it.

“I should’ve known better than to expect you’d only make a start,” Mia sighs. “At least it’ll make things simpler.”

Phoenix tilts his head further to the left to peer round the files. He’s starting to get a crick in his neck, and he might actually cry from relief when he can see in front of him again. “Make what simpler?”

“It was Maya’s idea,” Mia starts.

Immediately, Maya takes over. “I figured I could help out while I’m here!” she says, rocking back and forth on her heels, swaying Murphy with her like a dance partner.

Murphy cocks her head at Phoenix, mirroring his confusion. “Help out with what?”

“Same as you, when you started working here,” Mia says. “Just to keep things moving ahead without dropping anything in the meantime.” She blows a piece of hair from her cheek, maybe sensing his hesitance (even if she can’t possibly understand the reason for it). “Do you know how long it took people to stop calling me Marvin Grossberg’s protégé? I’m not dealing with that again. You can show her the ropes.”

“So she actually understands what we’re doing?”

“Hey!” The protest jumps out of Maya’s mouth. “I’m a spirit medium in training, not a little kid.”

“Sorry,” Phoenix says. “Sometimes when I open my mouth, words just come out.”

Company relations, started the Wright way.

The bottom line, of course, is that Mia isn’t really asking. And it’s not—it’s just—it’s the same thing as when Maya asked to stay at his apartment; there’s no real reason to object. Nothing he can say. And after everything, after attempted murders and missing mothers and fucking crows and I always get my guilty verdict, it’s… strangely easy. It’s Phoenix and it’s Maya, and it’s Phoenix and Maya, burning the candle at both ends while Mia and Diego bask in the lambent light of conflagration. Sometimes, the candle flickers, flames disturbed by the sharp breaths that slip between the spaces of their teeth. Other times, the flame burns too brightly for them to stand it, all searing skin and sting with no relief.

Diego laughs until he cries when the request comes through for Mia and Phoenix to submit testimony about the assault. Maya presses her thumb over Edgeworth’s name, printed crisply at the base of the letter, and Phoenix pretends not to notice the way she watches him.

He submits a written statement instead and has Maya draft up his refusal to testify. The refusal takes three rewrites before it’s anything approaching polite, and Phoenix is still leery about how enthusiastic Diego is about the final product.

“I don’t know what you’re so worried about,” Maya says, throwing him a smile that’s only a little too wide. “This lawyering shit is easy.”

“Have fun while it lasts,” Phoenix advises. “You’re the one who’s going to have to stop Mia killing White and Edgeworth on the day.”

Maya huffs a laugh out her nose but otherwise doesn’t reply. She’s fiddling with the letter, curling it over the joints of her thumbs as if she can’t decide how to fold it, but it’s not hard to see that she’s thinking of something else.

(It’s not a bluff, either. Three days ago Mia came to the office as if she was finally coming home. It seemed that way until around lunchtime, when she looked at Phoenix preparing to take Murphy out and asked, “Can you pick up a bell while you’re out?”

“A bell?”

“Yes, a bell. We’re running out,” Mia repeated, slower, as if she thought he’d chosen this moment to become wilfully deaf or forget the English language or something. When he still clearly had no idea what she was talking about, she stalked over to her half-empty cup of coffee and waved it at him, nearly spilling the remaining contents everywhere. “See? Bell!”

Then she looked at what was in her hand and went very still, and very quiet.

“Onee-san,” Maya said with a trembling kind of bravery. “Maybe you should head home.”

“I’m fine,” Mia said, but her voice broke, and she turned away, unaware she turned right into Diego’s arms. Of the helpless, furious look Diego sent Phoenix over her head. “Just so we’re clear,” she managed a few moments later. “I’m doing this because I want to.”

Whether she meant going home or something else entirely, neither Phoenix nor Maya was brave enough to ask.)

“She’ll be fine,” Phoenix echoes. “The whole thing’s a formality at this point anyway. They’d have subpoenaed me otherwise.”

“Yeah,” Maya says. And again, quieter, as if saying it enough times will be enough to make it true, or perhaps simply to convince herself. “Yeah.”

They don’t talk about it. But that’s okay.

Mia, in a stunning display of self-control, doesn’t try to kill Edgeworth or White. Phoenix spends the day delivering messages, returning lost things, and chatting to the dead. He looks into their white eyes, just barely covering the loneliness and anguish pouring out of them, and wonders how many are left. He looks at Mia and Maya and Diego, and wonders how many more children are out there, cast away and unwanted, surviving on hunger and sheer bloody insolence. He looks at the setting sun and wonders if Edgeworth’s looking at it too.

Then he makes himself mentally walk past whatever detour his memory tries to take, and even manages to pretend that it works.

(This is how it always goes: he tries to carry his stupid heart. He drops it every time.)

There’s no in-between as days turn to weeks and weeks turn to a whole new month. There never is for boys like Phoenix. Not really, anyway.

The gashes close and harden and he relearns how to eat without the taste of blood in every bite. When he holds his left hand up to Diego’s right, their scars complement each other nicely. His ribs still bother him, so whenever he gets the urge to go cycling, he draws instead. He colours Charlie Parker in blue beside Cindy Stone in yellow and ignores the way his mind searches for the third colour to fill it. He busies himself with days that go on too long, nights that hurt too much, and somehow far more paperwork than he or (to her slowly rising horror) Maya ever anticipate. They check crisply printed boxes and argue about handwriting, crossing off each name on Mia’s list and sharing containers of lukewarm noodles from the stand down the street while the clock ticktickticks, and it’s Phoenix and it’s Maya, and it’s Phoenix and Maya, washed up together, both a little lost and unsure about the other, but still there.

When Phoenix looks up, there she is. Bent over the coffee table, her tongue between her teeth as she scans through an old news report. When she notices him looking, she sits up and smiles. He can hear Mia humming through the open door, and he can see Diego out the corner of his eyes tickling the fluff on Murphy’s belly as she runs through her dreams.

He absently rubs the stinging in his chest. The feeling isn’t dissimilar to growing pains. And he smiles back.

Amid the myriad off things he’s learning to live with, having the TV on at the same time every morning is probably the most incongruous. The scenes are bright and blaring, the plots rambunctiously overdramatic, the fights ridiculously choreographed, and the music filled with drums and swells and flourishes. The sound of clashing steel and the feel of metal between his fingers completes the symphony, and Phoenix feels sort of caught in a memory as it happens, layer-over-layer. Still, he can’t bring himself to refuse it. If nothing else, like the music he plays for Diego, it drowns out the screams for a while.

Then there’s another familiar sound, one Phoenix hears sometimes in his better dreams: a young voice calling out a triumphant quote, the swish of air surrounding a pose, and—

And Maya whacks the side of her hand into his head yelling, “Samurai chop!”

“Ow!” He ducks away from her, reacting more out of instinct than any real pain. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Whoops. Sorry, Nick,” Maya says, grinning at least halfway repentantly before pointing at the TV. “But come on, that episode was amazing!”

“I’ll take your word for it,” Phoenix mutters, absently tugging his hair around the spot he was hit.

Maya pouts, flopping back onto the couch before she can threaten more bodily harm. Her foot taps to the music accompanying the narrator’s “Next time! On the Steel Samurai!” before she straightens back up with a gleam in her eye. “At least Murphy has some taste.”

Murphy is indeed sitting with her face inches away from the TV, ears pricked and tail raised as her gaze flicks back and forth across the screen. She’s barely moved from the spot since the show started.

“I’m not sure you want to publicly admit you share your media preferences with children and dogs,” Phoenix says. “I thought you weren’t a little kid?”

“You bet I’m not,” Maya says. “I’m only a little kid in the same way you look at a cat and go, oh my god, look at that little guy. That’s me and Murphy.” She ruffles Murphy’s scruff and Murphy, riled up from whatever’s caught her attention so starkly about a children’s TV show, barks. “See? She agrees. We’re just little guys.”

“Says the woman about herself and a female dog.”

“Gender is like death. It’s a social construct,” she intones, and Phoenix genuinely can’t tell if she’s fucking with him or not. “It’s okay if you don’t understand. It must be terrible being so old.”

So that’s a yes to fucking with him.

Probably.

“I’m only twenty-three,” he says, making a mental note to never let Maya or Larry spend any extended amount of time together. Ever. Then he pauses when another thought hits him. “Twenty-four,” he realises.

“And you’re already getting forgetful,” Maya says. She presses her hands together and bows her head in mock prayer. “Don’t worry. I’ll make sure we pick out a good care home for you.”

Phoenix throws his pen at her. It bounces off the top of her head and finally distracts Murphy from the TV—which is all well and good until Maya throws it back and Murphy decides she wants in on the game. He’s half-smothered in dog fur and struggling to extract the pen from Murphy’s mouth while keeping both of them from falling off his chair when Mia decides to walk in. Diego drifts at her side, more than willing to be unhelpful about the situation.

“We leave you two alone for half an hour,” he says dryly.

“Hard at work, I see,” Mia comments in more or less the same tone, which is mildly impressive considering she does it with three binders full to bursting balanced on her arm.

“You’ve got law, I’ve got the Steel Samurai,” Maya says. “It’s not much, but it’s honest work.”

Phoenix finally gets the pen off Murphy, though she remains happily on his lap and he has to reach around her to help Mia put the binders on the desk before she drops them. He’s grown used to being able to see the carpet and he’d like to keep it that way for at least a while longer.

“Wasn’t there something about that in the news recently?” Mia asks. “Some kid got into an accident while they were sneaking into the studio and died?”

There’s a beat of silence broken only by Murphy’s cheerful panting.

“Wow, gatita,” Diego says. “Why not talk about something really depressing while you’re at it.”

“What?” Mia says defensively to Phoenix and Maya’s stares. “I’ve been stuck at home with nothing to do for weeks. You’d be amazed the kind of things you start hearing about. Like for instance—” She slides a sketchbook off the top binder, something Phoenix missed before with Murphy blocking his view. “They opened up a new art shop a couple blocks from my apartment. Well, stationary mainly,” she admits as she offers it, “But they have a whole art section too.”

It’s nothing special: a softcover in dove grey that’s textured enough to easily hold, and a smooth collection of pages coloured closer to cream than white. It feels durable too, happy to be bashed about in his hoodie pockets or bag. Murphy appraises it briefly with her nose before settling back against Phoenix’s chest, which he assumes means it meets approval.

“You didn’t have to,” he says. Usually Mia leaves it out instead of giving it to him straight, and he’s not really sure what she’s expecting from him now. “I—birthdays aren’t—”

“A big deal to you,” Mia finishes for him. “I know. Doesn’t mean I don’t want to get you something.” She runs a finger over the edge of the top binder, her gaze stuck to its navy surface. “Doesn’t mean I don’t think you deserve something.”

For what? Phoenix wants to ask but knows the answer will not settle the all too familiar turmoil in his stomach. Diego flickers over, fingers drifting across Phoenix’s scalp, not touching, never touching, for once in his life silent, and Phoenix remembers how to breathe.

“It’s your birthday?” Maya demands. She clearly retraces their conversation, because her next question is a disbelieving, “You forgot?”

“It’s really not a big deal,” Phoenix says. “It’s just one day.” Carved out for him specifically, but nobody bothered to ask if it was something he wanted in the first place, did they? He nudges Murphy into a more comfortable position over his thighs and indicates the binders. “What is all that, anyway?”

He mays as well spray changing the subject in neon paint across them. Thankfully, Mia lets him get away with it.

“It’s everything I’ve found on White, including the stuff he stole from the office,” she says. “Our favourite prosecutor is building a case against him.”

Phoenix twitches slightly at the implication. “I thought that was already over with?”

“For what he did to me. Not the rest of it.” Her expression is uncannily reminiscent of the face she wears when she’s staring down murderers in court. “He’s not worming his way out of prison while I’m around to have a say about it. Just because he kept his side of the bargain doesn’t mean I have to play fair on mine.” She looks at Phoenix, her lips dancing around a smile. “You’ll be taking it to Edgeworth.”

Phoenix looks away, swallowing against the unsettled pulsing spreading up to his chest. “Why me?”

Mia leans down, using the arm rest of his chair to keep her balance as she tries to catch his eye again. “One, because I can’t guarantee I won’t punch him.” She nudges Murphy’s head aside with her chin. “Two, because I said so.” She reaches up and flicks his forehead. “And three, because I already called to tell him you’d be delivering it within the next hour.”

“Please tell me that wasn’t an hour ago.”

Mia rolls her eyes. “As if I would.”

Phoenix clutches Murphy tighter against him and flicks his gaze towards Diego.

“Yeah, no,” Diego says, sticking his hands in his pockets with a nasty grin. “I’ve had enough of the little prosecutor brat and whatever the hell’s going on with his papá to last to the end of the year. There’s enough poison in my system already.”

“Fine,” Phoenix mutters as Murphy start licking his cheek. “But I’m taking Murphy with me.”

If he still hadn’t clocked the date by the time he arrived at the Prosecutor’s Building, Larry’s sudden avalanche of texts would have at least clued him in on the matter. He resolves to read through the bulk of them later, already mentally preparing himself to have a Butz barging in his door, an evening of take-out food, cheap beer, and far too many cigarettes. He’ll have an aching head, a mouth full of ash and a comatose boy taking up his couch again come morning. If he’s lucky, Diego might even swing by to make sure he suffers his hangover properly.

It sounds kind of shit put like that. He’s already looking forward to it.

He tucks his phone back into his pocket and shifts on his feet, resisting the urge to sigh and draw any more ire from the narrow-eyed receptionist. The lobby of the Prosecutor’s Building is glass and gold, wine red seats and warm-toned floors, the ceiling high and the masses beneath it meandering through like ocean currents, interwoven and constant, little more than white noise against the echoing empty space. Never stopping, never slowing. Moving, moving, moving.

Nobody living, other than the receptionist, sends a second glance to where he’s leaning against the wall, Murphy’s weight rolling between his legs as she tries to follow the tides with her nose. It’s not the most unfamiliar feeling in the world, though he does have to wonder about the lack of scrutiny in a building where every job advert would list ATTENTION TO DETAIL as a required skill in at least six different ways. He’s wearing the upper half of his suit, but he also has a dark zipper hoodie beneath his jacket, washed-out grey jeans and his usual sneakers—not to mention the dog between his knees. Against the crisply tailored outfits, accessories refracting the sun shining through the doors, casting rainbows like miniature multicoloured spotlights, he’s starting to wonder if there’s a secret dress-code handed out alongside prosecutor badges.

He tugs at his earrings before shoving a hand through his spikes, bouncing on the balls of his feet. It’s been twenty minutes since he arrived and his hour’s almost up. The receptionist assured him she would let the relevant parties know he was here. Given the dubious look she gave his—well, everything, ‘relevant parties’ might just have been code for ‘torturously slow security’.

At least she doesn’t have any ghosts. He keeps his gaze stubbornly raised to avoid the curious stares drifting over from the dead. There aren’t many, but if he’s stuck here any longer, one of them is going to say something whether he looks back at them or not.

It comes as a surprise, then, when a voice he’s never heard addresses him by name. “Mr Wright.”

There’s a woman standing a few feet from him. Mia’s height, slimmer build, but a clear line of muscle running beneath her smart suit. Hair a lighter shade of brown that sweeps down her neck, mixing with the red scarf dipping past her collarbones. Blue eyes that could shade to green in the right light, pupils small and dark, guarded and unreadable, holding his stare without a twitch to hint at what she’s thinking.

“That’s me,” he agrees, breaking away first to look down at Murphy. She has her head cocked at the new arrival, but she offers no more insight on the matter.

“Chief Prosecutor Lana Skye,” the woman introduces. He’s still catching up with the ramifications of that when, to his surprise, she bows instead of offering her hand. It’s more of a nod with her narrow shoulders pulled into the motion, stiff and clearly unpractised, but a bow nonetheless. While it isn’t exactly uncommon, he’d still expect a handshake from someone with white skin outside of a shrine or temple—particularly from someone in Skye’s position.

(It never goes away. He can’t suffocate his features any more than he can bury the memory of yukata cotton on his skin, his mother’s gentle touch on the back of his neck, the rippling explosion of fireworks. A sky lit on fire. The autumn chill feels sharp against his skin, and the flames feel familiar in his body.

The feeling of being other is such a physical thing.

But this—he doesn’t know what it means, this courtesy. He knows what it means from Mia and Maya. This is something else.)

Cautiously, he reciprocates.

“Mr Edgeworth and I were in the midst of a meeting when you arrived,” she says when he straightens. She has a clipped way of speaking, sharp and pragmatic. The kind of voice that expects obedience. “If you’ll follow me.”

He has to scrabble to pick up his bag to keep up with Skye’s brisk pace. “With me, Murphy,” he says hastily, and Murphy keeps close to his side as Skye leads them into the building proper with a swipe of a keycard, the sleek lobby switching bluntly into a sedated mix of modern and traditional.

Carpeted floors, low cream furniture, sconces on the walls, accents in tawny tints and shades. It’s like a muffled version of the courthouse. There’s even a statue of Themis guarding a water cooler.

“Is the elevator fine, or would you prefer to take the stairs?” Skye asks.

“Uh, the elevator’s fine.” While they wait for one to arrive, Murphy takes the opportunity to sniff Skye’s skirt. Phoenix tugs her back to him. “Sorry.”

Skye glances down, as if only noticing now there’s a dog with them. She doesn’t move away, but she doesn’t make any kind of move to welcome Murphy’s attention, either. Her quiet is starting to grate against the anxious, fluttery thing in his chest, but he knows better than to break it.

The elevator arrives and Skye motions for him to go in first. Instinct put him against the back wall. He regrets it as soon as the doors close and Skye mirrors him directly, leaning against the silver metal, her arms folded loosely across her middle. Doing absolutely nothing to disguise the cold, analytical stare she covers him with head-to-toe.

Phoenix’s stomach sinks as they rise. There’s an influx of pressure at the base of his skull, needling the top of his spine the way it always does whenever the distance grows between his feet and solid ground. 12 is illuminated in yellow-white on the panel, a blinking chain climbing towards it as they pass each floor. He concentrates on that and the rough texture of his keychain against his fingers. When the flashes of light hit 7, Skye finally deigns to speak.

“I don’t usually escort people through this building.”

He picks a spot slightly to the side of her chin to look at. “I assume you don’t usually stare at people in elevators either.”

She hums, shifting her weight to favour her left leg. He recognises the movement; a habit to compensate for the weight of a gun on your right hip.

His grip tightens around his keychain. Murphy’s claws shift against the floor.

“You seem nervous,” Skye observes.

“It’s a bad habit,” Phoenix mutters.

“I’m getting the sense of that.”

10. Ten floors between him and the ground. Only two more to go. “Could you use a different sense?”

Skye nods as if he just confirmed something for her. “Defensive, too.”

That makes him crook a grin. He bares his teeth and crinkles his eyes and feels out the way Diego sometimes tilts his head back like he’s about to burst out laughing any second. Diego has a nice laugh when he means it. When he doesn’t, it crackles and chars the air like lightning. “I’m a defence attorney. What else could I be?”

“Allow me to offer a suggestion,” Skye says, unmoved in the slightest. “You are what Mia Fey, for whatever reason, has seen fit to give you. Aside from that…” She sweeps one last stone-faced look over him, then turns to face the doors. “I can’t say I see much else of worth.”

In the shiny metal, Phoenix can see the warped shadow of his reflection creeping over Skye’s shoulder like a wild thing. A sharp-toothed hungry thing. Slowly, he pries his nails from his palms. He's a little surprised to find, when he rubs his fingertips over the raw skin, that he hasn’t drawn blood.

The doors open, but the air doesn’t feel any clearer beyond them. It takes every ounce of will and the memory of Mia (bleeding, broken, dying in his arms, dead in his dreams because he didn’t run fast enough) to step out instead of throwing his bag at Skye’s feet and slamming the button for the bottom floor. It’s not bravery. It’s the exact opposite, in fact.

He thinks Skye knows that, too.

“I can find my own way from here,” he tells her.

“I’m sure you’re capable of that much,” Skye says. Like handing him a participation trophy and a badge made out of cardboard. “Come on.”

The elevator has already left. There’s nothing to do but keep moving forward.

Skye knocks on a door that’s the exact same as every other door stretching down the corridor apart from the plaque reading 1202. Phoenix already half-feels like he’s in freefall. Hearing Edgeworth’s voice, even blanketed by a wall, only adds more heat to the fire.

“Chief Prosecutor,” Edgeworth greets as they enter. He doesn’t get up from his desk, sitting all the way across the room. Mercury eyes, so much more fatal than a picture, shift briefly to Phoenix. “You appear to have picked up a stray.”

Phoenix batters down his response, letting it saturate his blood. It isn’t hard to distract himself. Every part of Edgeworth’s office screams for attention. Wide-eyed windows show off the sprawl of the city, the sky above it and the ocean waiting beyond, almost blinding him with its light. A frame on one wall holds, of all things, the same jacket Edgeworth wore to the Terry Fawles trial, everything about it ostentatious and loud. A couch rests beneath it, ready to catch it if it falls, and suspiciously well-used otherwise. Opposite—paper. Reams and reams of it. An entire wall of immaculate shelving overcrowded with all different styles and sizes and colours, everything ordered to a kind of perfection that’s almost unnerving. Or maybe just overwhelming. If they gave this office the same treatment as Mia’s, they’d have to send out search parties for the poor souls who succumbed to the sheer volume and resigned themselves to being buried.

It makes the burning thing in his chest bare its teeth again, not so much out of surprise as for the unwelcome, unhelpful, unneeded reminder that drives the point of the matter home: Phoenix and Edgeworth aren’t in the same league. If this is a race, at best they’re close enough in their own lanes they can almost touch each other—but despite it seeming like they’re almost on even ground, Edgeworth is several laps ahead of him. It was easier to forget when they were standing opposite in court, but it’s hard to forget now.

“Begging for scraps, Wright?”

“Why? Do you have any?” Phoenix says back. Not loudly or quietly, or with any particular kind of intonation at all.

Edgeworth raises an eyebrow. Behind him, Gregory has the exact same expression.

Phoenix swings his bag off his shoulder, absently noting where the strap has dug in, and bumps his knees against Murphy. She’s stood herself between him and the rest of the room without a fuss beyond the raised fur down her back. Sensing his disquiet. Good dog, he thinks, leaning down to smooth her shaken hackles.

“You have a dog,” Edgeworth says slowly, as if unsure the words are correctly surmising the situation. “Is the dog relevant?”

“Only to me,” Phoenix says. “You can’t have her, by the way.”

Edgeworth has even more trouble with his next sentence. “I—wasn’t asking for her?”

“I’ve seen her at the courthouse before,” Skye interjects. Whatever disdain she casually dropped in the elevator for him to trip over like a fumbling puppy has neatly tucked itself away. “She’s an official facility dog, isn’t she? Though it was Mia who was handling her at the time.”

Phoenix shrugs. “Murphy needs a handler. Sometimes it’s better for Mia to be that person than me.”

“I had no idea,” Edgeworth murmurs, and he looks at Skye when he says it.

Phoenix answers anyway. “I’m not surprised. You specialise in criminal law. Most of Murphy’s cases are juvenile or domestic. Assault, too, but like I said, Mia usually handles those.”

If he’d had his way at the beginning, Mia would have taken all of them. He’d been as nervous as the person Murphy was there for the first time he did it, but if he’s good for little else, he knows he’s always done right with her. She stepped up without a whimper of protest and gave it absolutely everything, and she’s been doing it ever since. And he loves her so much that even here, even now, when she tilts her head back to check on him, he can’t help but smile.

Until Edgeworth asks, very quietly, “Abuse?”

Phoenix looks up. He doesn’t need a tell to know exactly what Edgeworth is thinking.

“Sometimes,” he replies blandly. “It depends on the case and who’s willing to come forward.”

“I suppose you would know,” Edgeworth says, threatening to bore a hole through Phoenix’s head (and the wall behind for good measure) with the force of his gaze.

Phoenix thinks of his dad. Thinks of Manfred von Karma. Thinks of Gregory standing stoic and silent and looking everywhere but Phoenix. A very different smile cuts across his mouth. Pulling at old scars and new. “Not really. Why? Do you?”

Heat splinters across Edgeworth’s brow, heavy and searing down the sharp curve of his cheekbones. It breathes against Phoenix’s throat. More of this and it might start becoming another bad habit.

Skye pointedly clears her throat. “If you’ll allow me a moment before you two get down to business,” she says, turning from the halfway point between them to face Phoenix fully. “On behalf of my office, I want to extend a formal apology to you, Mr Wright.”

Phoenix physically feels his mouth drop open. He doesn’t close it fast enough to hide the reaction from anybody else.

“Don’t judge her too harshly,” Gregory sighs, suddenly looking like the last fifteen years have caught up to his soul all at once. He seems on the verge of something more, maybe finally fucking explaining something for once, but Skye continues before he can gather the resolve for it.

“The full extent of Redd White’s crimes are being revealed to us now, thanks to Mia.” Skye straightens her scarf, unnecessarily. “I’m here to assure you there will be no miscarriage of justice this time. White will face the harshest punishment that’s within our power to sentence. And Mia—” For a brief moment, Skye’s eyes flash, but it’s gone too quick for Phoenix to see what emotion is lighting them up from the inside. “Mia won’t be in danger from him ever again.”

When Phoenix turns, Edgeworth is no longer meeting his eyes. Not quite. Instead, his attention is fixed to a spot on Phoenix’s cheek just below his left eye.

There’s a saying Phoenix knows from Diego: good flowers have deep roots, bad ones dwell in shallow soil. A man who crumbles because of a woman who refused to die and a boy covered in bruises and blood who refused to stop would have fallen without their help. A system that baulks under the same pressure—well. Nobody ever claimed the law to be perfect.

Once again, he’s struck by Skye’s pupils; dark, and dark, and dark. They’re what Phoenix imagines the ocean floor is like.

The world has always ended at the ocean.

“Does it help?” he asks quietly.

Wary as she is, Skye still carries too much of the detective in her. Phoenix knows the signs to look for. He knows she won’t be able to resist asking. “Does what help?”

“The cruelty. Does it help?”

There’s a loaded pause, during which Phoenix realises that insulting the Chief Prosecutor and her staff is maybe not the best career choice he’s ever made, but just as quickly he realises he doesn’t care. It is, paradoxically, the same reason he finally feels how angry he is. Angry at Skye for disregarding him so callously. Angry at Gregory for being a cryptic, condescending prick. Angry at White for hurting Mia so badly, both now and fifteen years ago. Angry at the entire system that allowed a man like White to rot its soil in the first place.

But most of all, he’s angry at himself.

Defeat. That’s the word that stupid news article used. Defeat and lost and winwinwin. Like Phoenix pulled off a miracle to win a sprint even though it was Diego and Mia who dragged him across the finish line. If he’d won anything that day, they wouldn’t have had to be there in the first place.

If he was worth anything as much as that, maybe Edgeworth would—

Stop it, he tells himself viciously.

“I think that’s enough pleasantries,” Edgeworth says, crossing his arms over his chest to weather the furious tension now focussed on him. “Chief Prosecutor, I appreciate your assistance on this matter, but I believe I can handle things from here.”

Several seconds pass before Skye recomposes her features into something not actively hostile, her fingers twitching at her sides from the effort. She has small hands. Thin and calloused. Bizarrely, Phoenix wonders if she’s been eating enough. “I leave it to you then, Mr Edgeworth,” she says stiffly, and walks out the same way.

The door fumbles from her grasp at the last second as she closes it. The snap echoes between Phoenix’s ribs.

“I see you haven’t gotten any better at making friends,” Edgeworth says with a cracked sort of dryness as he leans back in his chair. Sunlight catches him from behind. Yellow streaks down his neck, orange blazes across his jaw, blue dances in his hair. He crosses one leg over the other, rotating his seat slightly to the side, and his entire body lights up red.

Phoenix’s hands itch.

Stop it, he thinks again, louder.

“I thought we were acting like we don’t know each other,” he says. His heart bleeds across his tongue in all its wretched glory.

A tug on his wrist saves him from having to watch Edgeworth’s reaction—or worse, Gregory’s. Murphy is pacing restlessly, and when he leans down to rub her snout, she gently grasps his fingers between her teeth.

“Do you mind if I let her off?” he asks. “She’ll start whining if she’s stuck in place much longer.”

Edgeworth purses his lips and his father hovers closer behind him than ever. “I suppose not,” he says. Phoenix has unclipped her lead before the last word is out his mouth. “As long as she doesn’t make a mess,” he adds pointedly. “Though I suppose if she’s professionally trained I won’t have to worry about that.”

“Wow. You started and finished that entire argument all by yourself.”

“Whatever your issue with me, it has nothing to do with the matter at hand,” Edgeworth snaps. "Neither of us have to be happy about it."

“My issue?” Phoenix drawls. “Is that what we’re calling it? C’mon, Edgeworth. You’re the smartest man I know. Don’t pretend to be stupid.” They may as well be back in the courtroom for how quickly it’s fallen apart. The only thing that keeps him here is Murphy snuffling curiously at the couch cushions. “Placing the wiretap? Seriously?”

“You were on trial, Wright,” Edgeworth says, hands curling tightly around his upper arms.

“That’s never been the issue,” Phoenix replies quietly. He still remembers the smell of ozone. The vitriol from most everyone in the room. His mom’s outraged screams where only he could hear them. And Edgeworth stopping all of it with a single objection. “It’s not exactly the first time. Not even the second. You didn’t think that might have been a clue I was telling the truth?”

“I’ve noticed defence attorneys seem to have a very loose grasp of the concept, but neither myself nor the detectives I work with are vindictive, mindless idiots,” Edgeworth replies, scathing. “I’ve prosecuted men and women who were caught red-handed, and contrary to what you might prefer to believe, they rarely put up their hands and admit to anything, even when it’s screamingly undeniable. So no, under the circumstances, I had every right to think not that you were telling the truth, but that you had gotten very good at lying,”

Gregory coughs and turns away. Phoenix just laughs. What else is there to do? What else is there to say? Hurting someone is the easiest thing in the world, and they both know it. Edgeworth, because somewhere along the way he learned to be the inflictor. Phoenix, because he’s been the subject of it, again and again and again.

“So you’re never wrong—”

“It doesn’t work like that—”

“And you always win—”

“I have to—”

“Except for when you are and you don’t,” Phoenix finishes.

“You are deliberately misunderstanding the point,” Edgeworth hisses, his palms hitting the desk. “Not all of us have Mia Fey waiting to swoop in and save us at the last second. Don’t you see? It doesn’t matter what you want to think. Everyone has their own agenda. The witnesses, the defendants, their attorneys—all of them want something different. People lie. Evidence doesn’t. If you don’t understand such a basic concept, what are you even doing here?” Edgeworth shakes his head, and the worst part is, he doesn’t sound condescending, he doesn’t look dismissive—just frustrated. As if he found something to sink his teeth into only to have it ripped away. “What do you think you’ve been doing the past fifteen years?”

Everything, Phoenix thinks. I have been doing absolutely everything. You don’t get to make that choice about me.

Of course, he says none of it. “You think I was busy becoming a killer?”

“Time doesn’t make you a killer, Wright,” Edgeworth says, cold and dark and drowning in the shadow of his father. “Killing someone does.”

(Phoenix remembers. He remembers sobbing into his hands in the bath, trying to get it all out of him before he left the water. He remembers staring blankly at a wall for hours as his stomach growled in an empty apartment. Remembers looking back at Miles Edgeworth through the rain and thinking, you will be the death of me.

It’s funny how foreshadowing works. Sometimes we fully figure it out in hindsight. Sometimes it’s worse.)

“I’m not scared of you, Edgeworth,” Phoenix says tiredly. “Stop trying to tell me I should be.”

Edgeworth flinches as if Phoenix yelled it right in his face. He’s a hard man to read at the best of times, especially since his new default reaction to emotions is seemingly to deny they exist immediately after the fact, but Phoenix has been at this a long, long time. He’d have to be blind not to see how sad Edgeworth looks when he thinks no-one’s looking.

“Are you done?” Edgeworth asks.

His hands are shaking.

“No. It was still an asshole move.” Phoenix rubs at his neck and looks away. “But I’ve had people do worse.”

“That isn’t an excuse.”

“Guess you and Larry agree on something other than cars.”

Edgeworth’s eyes flare the colour of wildfire smoke. Then he jumps, rolling his seat back a few inches. Phoenix thinks it’s a delayed reaction to the revelation he has anything in common with Larry Butz (understandable, but still, rude) until the flop of Murphy’s ears pops up between his legs. She tilts her head at him. He blinks back. Carefully, after a moment of very serious consideration, he offers the back of his hand for her to sniff. Instead, she licks it, then stubbornly nuzzles her way into a pet.

For a single moment, so quickly Phoenix can’t tell if he imagines it, Edgeworth’s mouth trembles on a smile.

Something inside Phoenix’s chest thrums.

He shudders in a quick breath and steals the opportunity for what it is. The binders are in danger of splitting his old bag at the seams, and it takes a few tries to get a proper grip.

“Mia coloured-coded them,” Phoenix explains as he sets each of them on Edgeworth’s desk. “Red binder has everything with concrete evidence. Yellow’s for circumstantial, but hopefully you can find out more with your—what was it? Vindictive, mindless, idiotic detectives.”

“You’re not funny,” Edgeworth informs him, fingers stroking down the silk soft curve of Murphy’s ears. The smile, if it ever existed, is gone.

Phoenix didn’t realise until now how much he missed being able to make Edgeworth laugh.

“I know,” he replies. He sets the last binder down. Charlie Parker’s name sits right at the top. “Blue’s for the one’s they haven’t found a body.”

Edgeworth’s hand slows to a stop on Murphy’s head as he takes it all in, jaw shifting back and forth the barest amount. “I wasn’t expecting there to be this much.”

“Mia’s been doing this a lot longer than me. You have questions, ask her. Cognitive impairment or not.” He turns away. For once, he wants to be the one to leave first. Someone always has to leave first. There is no other version of this story, or so the poem goes. Whatever. Diego’s the one who’s better at literature, anyway. “C’mon, Murphy.”

They’re halfway across the office when Edgeworth stops him. “Is she recovering?”

Phoenix swallows. He doesn’t think about bells. “Well enough to do that.”

“All of this will have to be thoroughly vetted,” Edgeworth says, shifting in his chair like he can’t find a comfortable way to sit. He uncrosses his leg. His hands lie empty on his desk. “I’d have to do that with or without her… injuries.”

“You can say she was nearly killed, Edgeworth,” Phoenix says, sharper than he intends. He lowers his voice. “It won’t hurt her any worse than she already is.”

“That isn’t—” Edgeworth starts. Stops as if someone snatched the words out of his mouth.

Behind him, Gregory tips up his glasses to rub his eyes.

Phoenix holds in a sigh as he turns away. He doesn’t understand why people can never just say what they mean. It’s what makes them so hard to talk to. The dead don’t care—they say whatever they want, exactly what they’re feeling when they feel it. But living people, they always talk around it, or say something that seems like it’s important then immediately backtrack, like they’re hiding their hands behind their back after accidentally showing how many fingers they were holding up. You’ve already said most of it, Phoenix thinks. Why don’t you just go through with it?

(And yeah, he’s perfectly aware he’s not a paragon of transparency, but he doesn’t talk circles around it. He just doesn’t say it at all.)

“Why did you do it?”

Phoenix stops again. Murphy presses against his leg. “Why did I do what?”

“In court.” Edgeworth slants and shifts and struggles. He touches the blue binder like the colour might stain his fingers, some weird intensity in his voice that makes Phoenix lose his breath a little. “You… The names.”

“I told you to look them up, didn’t I?” Phoenix asks, scrunching his nose in honest confusion.

Edgeworth looks at him. He keeps on looking at him. “But why did you tell me?”

This high up above the city, there are no sounds except the autumn wind against the glass and the gently flow of Murphy’s fur inside the office. Phoenix can’t breathe. In the distance, the ocean glitters against the sky, close enough to reach out and touch, but it may as well be from a different world. Gregory fades inside the light of it. There’s only Phoenix and Miles, looking and not looking at each other, boys who are no longer children, lawyers who will never be on the same side. Summer ended too long ago.

But still.

Still.

“Nobody else would’ve listened,” Phoenix finally breathes out. “Not anyone who could do anything about it, at least. But you said it yourself. You always get your guilty verdict.”

“Not anymore,” Edgeworth says, and his body curls into it, like he’s covering a raw, bleeding wound. Bent over like that, he reminds Phoenix of that Van Gogh painting: the man in the chair, his hands over his eyes.

“Yeah, well.” Phoenix looks away first. “Everyone wins until they don’t.”

One more time, Phoenix turns to leave. One more time, Edgeworth stops him.

“Wright—”

“Okay, can you tell me when you’re done?” Phoenix asks. He thought leaving was supposed to be easier than this. He thought it was supposed to be so much harder. “I can’t keep walking back and forth across this office.”

Edgeworth still takes a while to say it, long enough that Phoenix snatches a glance at Gregory, but Gregory seems similarly lost. He’s staring at his son, his hand pressed to his mouth. Keeping all the words locked tightly away. It’s not a fair thing to think, maybe, but Phoenix has been furious at him for over a month. The anger makes his ears ring.

Then, quite abruptly, Edgeworth says, “Happy birthday.”

“Oh,” Phoenix says. That's—absolutely not what he expected. Not for… not because… not for good reasons.  “You—You remembered that?”

“Of course,” Edgeworth says, but he falters at whatever expression is on Phoenix’s face.

Phoenix wishes he could say he knew what that expression actually was. He blinks. Opens his mouth. Blinks again. “I,” he says, and doesn’t know how to finish.

Edgeworth suddenly looks like he wants to hurl himself out the window—or maybe hurl Phoenix out the window. “I didn’t mean to overstep. I shouldn’t have said anything, forget it—”

“What? No, it’s not that,” Phoenix assures, waving his arms wildly enough to startle Murphy into a play bow. “It’s really not that. It’s just.” He casts his gaze around the office, very deliberately skipping past Gregory, staring at the evidence of a whole life lived without him. “Just, uh, thanks.”

“I didn’t expect it to make you emotional.” If it were anyone else, Phoenix would almost say Edgeworth sounds genuinely panicked.

Phoenix smacks a hand up to his face to make sure that no, he’s not actually crying, and then he just leaves it there, half covering up the grin he really can’t make any smaller no matter how hard he tries. “Yeah, I have no idea what’s happening either.” Not entirely. Only that it’s different from Mia’s casual offerings, Maya’s bewildered indignation, Diego’s quiet understanding. Phoenix can feel his cheeks burning, not really out of embarrassment, but out of gladness, because Edgeworth—Edgeworth said it, and the idea that Edgeworth was thinking about him enough he had to say something is nothing short of baffling. “Thank you,” Phoenix says again, softer.

Edgeworth has gone from looking ready to commit violent murder to looking quite seriously ill. “Do you react like this every time someone shows you the barest amount of social decency?”

“I don’t know. No? Maybe? People usually don’t.” He scrubs his hand over his face, trying to pull himself together. “I’m, uh—I’m going to go now.”

“Yes.” Edgeworth turns his head to the side. In the sun, his cheeks tint the same colour as his suit. “You should—do that.”

“You’re definitely done speaking?”

“Wright.”

“See? There you are, saying my name again—”

“Get out of my office,” Edgeworth snaps.

Phoenix laughs. He doesn’t quite drag his dog out of the office at a run, but it’s a close thing. Before he shuts the door, he calls back, “I’ll see you around, Edgeworth.”

He thinks, despite everything, he manages to make it sound like a promise.

(The cruelty. Does it help?

You want to answer. You know nothing. It is our role. You don’t get to make that choice about us. Of course it doesn’t.

Try painting this: you are standing in the spot you have stood a thousand times before and someone has broken your heart.

Try painting this: fire has followed you there, and for the thousandth time he demands everything. Absolutely everything. Every time he has asked, you have given it to him.

But this time, you falter.

You watch him fall, bleeding and sputtering sparks, and you are beside him without realising how quickly you were pulled. Time is no obstacle. There is fear and shattered glass and the splitting silent scream of an accusation pointed in the wrong direction. There is there and there is here, and here is the blood on your hands. Contrary to how it should work, when you reach out, it is the fire that pulls away first. It flutters and trembles beneath your touch. It is very, very cold.

And there is something that is not quite fear trickling down your spine. Something, you only realise now, you convinced yourself you had forgotten.

Someone has broken your heart and now you have hurt your fire. You were supposed to have gotten better, but you are what you have always been.

There, you made no difference. Here, despite yourself, despite everything, you find yourself lifting him into your arms. You carry him away and clean the blood as gently as your hands allow. You wish, like a boy, that it will be enough to keep him safe.

Others gather around the fire. One you recognise flickering brightly next to the flames, one you have stood across from once before, and one you do not know. You stand on the edge of the flames, even if the heat that tugs at your insides makes you feel sick when you don’t continue to follow. I’m used to it, you think. He has gone where you no longer can and you have to get used to it. So you stay back. The storm passes and you fall away with it, away from the court you never thought you would share, that you now can’t picture without him standing opposite.

The fact of fire is that no matter how hard you try to shove it down and drown it out, it always finds a way to light again. It spreads its wings and laughs as it falls. But the thing about your fire is that it isn’t an immortal creature of feather and flame, no more than you are the sky it beats against, no more than you are the ocean waves it plummets beneath.

Your fire is a boy. And you are also a boy.

And people lie. They say they will live forever and then they die. They say they will be with you for every step of the way and then they are gone, leaving nothing but a scream to haunt your every nightmare.

I’ll see you around, your boy says.

But you remember. Out of so many things, you did not forget this: your boy only ever says a fraction of what he wants to. There are so many things he never says at all. You have to be listening for them.

I’ll see you around, is what he says.

I’m here. And I will keep on being here, is what he means.

And you think, Yeah, right. Heard that one before.)

Chapter Text

Whatever the Chief Prosecutor or Gregory Edgeworth’s opinions of him are as a person, Phoenix isn’t being flippant: being a lawyer really is a very similar process to helping ghosts. He picks through the pieces of people’s lives, who they loved, who didn’t love them, finding what they lived for, what they died for (whether they were willing to or not), drawing it together and pretending it’s the same as everything they were. Line up the images close enough, the before and the after, and it may as well be. Like any sketch, you make up the pieces that don’t fit with enough of the pieces that do.

And then you call it human.

Or, if you’re Diego Armando (and very few people are), you start calling it the exercise for the exorcism. It’s another one of those good-a-name-as-any’s, even if Phoenix will never willingly say it out loud, ever, where someone else can hear him. Before Diego, Phoenix didn’t have a reason to call it anything at all. You have a word for something so you can explain it to someone else. So you can ask, do you see it the way I do?

(Here is a short list of Phoenix’s words:

The I’m-sorry’s.

The I-promised’s.

The I’ll-help-you’s.

The It’s-not-your-fault’s.

The Pleasegoawaypleasegoawaypleasegoaway.

Well.

That last one’s not quite right.

That one he called Kaa-san.)

And it’s hard a lot of the time. It’s so, so hard. People are stupid and sad and angry and complicated, and dying is never going to be enough to change that, no matter how easy it is. Sometimes they take and take but can never give, and still can’t understand that the end they want is already waiting for them. That everything worth having is already split and free and gone to somewhere better. They’ve always got some story going on that only they’re the heroes of. Everybody else just has to live here, hovering around the edges, left out of it all, for the most part.

Having said that, it’s startling the things that end up making you a part of the story. The things that answer, yes. Here I am. And here you are, too.

“I’m not sitting around watching a children’s samurai show instead of doing my job,” Phoenix says.

“Bold words from someone who carries around a keychain from a children’s samurai show,” Maya says, very decisively. She folds her arms and tilts her chin like Mia does it, as if that’s all it takes to settle the matter.

Phoenix resists the urge to slam his forehead into the desk. He drops his keychain one time— “Yeah. That I watched when I was a child.”

“And you still have it.” Maya straightens herself out and turns, half-leaning into a bow. “I’m so sorry about him, Mr Powers.”

“I-It’s alright,” the man responds, more than a little bemused—which nobody can really fault him for. There probably aren’t a lot of detention centre visits the devolve into discussions like this one, no matter how relevant it might be to the matter at hand. Which, Phoenix will stubbornly maintain, it isn’t.

Will Powers is a hulking brute of a man at first glance—and also second glance, and probably third. A mane of golden-brown hair circles his face and jaw, sliding out like it just can’t wait to feel the wind, his eyes the same wild shade and manner, made worse by the raw redness from his crying. It’s almost fascinating how well he folds in his muscle mass, half-sunken into his tracksuit jacket, thick fingers delicately yanking the stitching of a handkerchief. Rough-hewn and leaking as he is, he isn’t what Phoenix pictured for the titular character of the Steel Samurai in the slightest.

Behind him, the floor is wiped clean of sick and blood, the guard still and silent and unfamiliar, the light blinking on the camera the way it’s supposed to. The ghost of Jack Hammer isn’t spitting or snarling or howling at his back, the light sedate, the air crisp and forgiving, and Powers leans against both as if waiting for them to finish him off. Forget samurai. In the history of killers everywhere, he’s surely one of the most pathetic.

Something about cages, though, always forces people to bend until their spines crack.

(And Phoenix finds himself wondering. Quietly. Because his mom was a killer. Dahlia Hawthorne was a killer. Frank Sawhit. Redd White. Women and men, young and old, bullets and knives and time. Time doesn’t make you a killer. But something made them kill.

Like Theo, almost.

Like Phoenix almost, too.

Maybe it shouldn’t be that way, but it is.

So he wonders what killers are supposed to look like if not like them.)

“Um, that other show you watched,” Powers ventures hesitantly. “You don’t mean the Signal Samurai, do you?” At Phoenix’s slightly wide-eyed look, he cringes a little. “I-It’s just, I watched it too. If you’ve seen that, the Steel Samurai is more or less the same concept. It’s, um, more focussed on the battles between the Steel Samurai and the Evil Magistrate, b-but its core message is the same.”

“Simple,” Phoenix says, speaking it up from a memory he barely knew he had, and has no idea where to place. Only Edgeworth and Larry’s faces somewhere inside it.

Maya squawks in protest, but Powers nods. “I understand what you’re saying, Mr Wright. It is a show made for children. B-But that just means its straightforward in its message. It wants to give kids the right values to carry on throughout their lives, and there’s no harm in giving adults a reminder. There’s more than one kind of Evil Magistrate in the world.” His face sags as if it might start spontaneously moulting and melting away. “Though, I suppose in this instance, he was finally defeated…”

Phoenix still has the Signal Samurai boxset Larry gave him for his ninth birthday. It’d be worth a surprising amount of money if Phoenix hadn’t worn half of them out on so many repeated replays. His old laptop still churns away at the rest the best it can, usually when he’s drawing, sometimes when he doesn’t want to fall asleep alone in the dark.

“What colour was yours?” he asks.

“Red,” Powers says, his handkerchief in knots and his smile twisted much the same way. All Phoenix can think is shit. “I know, I know. It’s what most people say, right? But Blue and Yellow were always a bit much for me. The funny thing is, nowadays I try and put what I can of all of them into the Steel Samurai. It—It meant a lot to me growing up. I just want the kids to feel the same way.”

Fuck, Phoenix thinks next. He definitely doesn’t say joder.

“See? I keep trying to tell you, Nick. You’d understand if you gave it a chance.” Maya leans down, hair sweeping past her neck and shoulders, amplifying her grin. “People who insist they won’t like it are usually the ones who become the biggest fans, y’know.”

“Emotionally I could maybe manage,” Phoenix sighs. “Financially? Imagine the toll.”

Powers snorts—which is honestly kind of disgusting what with all the crying he’s been trying not to do, but Phoenix has seen a lot worse spurting out of much weirder places. He turns away, frantically trying to clean up the mess through stuttered apologies, which is also a nice change of pace.

Maya grabs Phoenix’s shoulders and shakes him lightly, maybe to give Powers the illusion of some privacy. “You can borrow the episodes from me, duh. We can watch them together! And the trading cards aren’t that expensive, and there are loads of places you can get good quality figures at a decent price. Oh, oh! And you have to watch some of the lore videos. There’s this guy who does these amazing character analysis essays—”

“Alright, fine,” Phoenix interrupts, mostly to get her to stop talking. “I’ll watch it with you. Happy?”

“Yep!” Maya says with far more cheer than the walls around them usually see. They lean away, perturbed. Bent back against one of them, their uniformed audience peers at her suspiciously under the brim of his cap.

“Great,” Phoenix says. “Now can we maybe talk about the murder?”

Maya opens and closes her mouth, one, two, three times. Covers it with her hand and whispers, “Oh my god, I forgot about that.”

Whether or not Powers hears her, his reaction, surprisingly, is not to make his excuses and politely return to his cell. Rather, he leans forward, looking far more intent, and far more like someone Phoenix could maybe believe is the hero of the most popular kid’s show today. “So you’ll—you’ll help me?”

(There is a story Phoenix knows about a bird and a mountain. More often than not, he draws it in the mouth of a boy with silver eyes. The problem with stories, of course, is the exact same problem with want. They always leave out the truth of the matter:

There is no end.

Here is after the ending, right as it’s happening: he is Phoenix, and he doesn’t know what that word means. If he’s allowed to have it, or even want it. But when someone says

Please

says

Help me

he is always going to respond. Because, put very, very simply, he is Phoenix.)

“Yeah,” he says. His throat’s a little dry, so he clears it and tries again. “Yeah. I’ll help you.” He flattens his new sketchbook against the desk and readies his pencil inside an aching hand. Feels the indentation his keychain always makes against his thigh. It stings. It burns. It itches. He makes himself take a single full breath. “Tell me what happened.”

The prompt to describe the Evil Magistrate’s defeat, as told by the Steel Samurai:

He was struck down by the Samurai Spear, skewered through his chest, and the city of Neo Olde Tokyo was saved for the final time.

The Steel Samurai slept through all of it.

The painting created, in five strokes:

“What the hell d’you think you’re doing here, pal?”

It’s the coat Phoenix recognises first; moss green, overlarge and as enveloping as a second skin, like it’d remain upright and continue working on its own if its inhabitant somehow extricated himself and walked away. The man in question seems perfectly at home in the symbiotic relationship, as scruffy as the last two times Phoenix has seen him, his dark hair a certifiable mess, his chin littered with scraggly wisps of hair that avoided the razor’s edge, and a bandage on his cheek where his skin wasn’t quite as lucky. He’s got a pencil tucked behind one ear, a seriously banged-up cigarette clinging to the shell of the other, and his slack suit and tie hang off him like they both need a doctor’s note prescribing a six-month stay by the sea to recuperate.

He's not exactly threatening as these things go, but Phoenix grips his handlebars a little tighter anyway. Most of his interactions with the police have started with a similar question, quickly followed by, “Show me your ID,” if not, “Sit down and shut the fuck up before I find a way to make you.” He’s not sure which the man intends, but given his heaving expression, it could easily be a volatile mix of the two.

Murphy leans to the very end of her lead to sniff at his coat—probably searching for a heretofore undiscovered life form inside the fabric. The man responds with a single sniff of his own as he stops in front of them, though his conclusion turns out not to be of the olfactory kind.

“Butz, right?”

“Wright,” Phoenix corrects, only to hear how it sounds and trip over his tongue trying to clarify. “I mean, my name’s Wright. Not Butz. Phoenix Wright.” He flexes his hand against worn rubber, fixing his grip as Murphy’s lead digs into his wrist bone. “You’re that detective, aren’t you?”

“Oh, I remember you,” Maya says. She’s still perched behind Phoenix, arms wrapped too tight around his tender ribs and fingers curled into the folds of his hoodie. “You’re the one who kept trying to accuse Nick of hurting my sister.”

The detective folds his arms, his coat snapping shut on Murphy’s head and causing her to scrabble back to Phoenix’s side on the tail-end of a sneeze. He puts his hands on his hips afterwards, then reaches up to fiddle with the cigarette beside his stuck-up hair. “Yeah. Right. Sorry about that, pal. Just trying to do my job.”

“I’m not your pal,” Maya says. The steel in her voice knocks against Phoenix’s spine. “And I thought it was your job to find the culprit, not arrest whoever’s most convenient.”

That gets her an honest-to-god pout, the detective’s head hunkering down like she reached out and cuffed his ear. On a different face, Phoenix would’ve though the detective was just playing it up for their sake, forcibly trying to loosen the tension (and maybe their lips while he’s at it). There might still be an element of that, but something about his wide-open eyes, his haggard look, or maybe just the permanently bewildered lines around his face—whatever it is, it forces Phoenix to consider the man might actually just be like that. The pleading look he sends Phoenix only adds more evidence to the theory.

His eyes are brown and sweet, like soft chocolate, melting.

Phoenix looks down and smooths his fingers over Murphy’s twitching snout. “Don’t look at me. She just came that way.”

Maya nudges him with the inside of her elbow. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means I’m not going to stop you picking a fight with a detective, but I’m not going to help you, either. Call it plausible deniability.”

“Spoilsport,” Maya grumbles. “Aren’t you angry, too?”

The detective coughs, shuffling back and forth on his shoes. The soles threaten to peel off on the sidewalk with an ominous creak of cracked leather. “Okay, I get it. I messed up. You’re still gonna have to tell me what you’re doing loitering around here. You got a thing for hanging around crime scenes?”

“I’m trying to,” Phoenix says. He nods his head towards the entrance to the studio. “You’re not exactly rolling out the welcome mat.”

Global Studios, despite its grandiose title, holds claim to only a single lot for the Steel Samurai. It’s encircled by a wall high enough to be intimidating if it wasn’t serving life to protect grown men (and presumably women) pretending to hit each other with big sticks. They could pick them right off the ground the way children make swords. What seems to be half a forest cascades over all the spots the wall doesn’t reach, layering the whole of it in battered greens and cracking golds and uneven reds, the season sending out its toughest soldiers to ensure nature runs its course amidst the stubborn evergreens.

Autumn always makes Phoenix’s hands itch: the fire of it all.

There are more than enough onlookers ready to watch the studio burn.

Some look to be reporters, ready to beat whoever they can find over the head with cameras and microphones, already with a few hapless victims in their grasp. For the most part, though, they appear to be spectators and supporters looking to make their mark. Or have a mark carried over to them from beyond the singular gate valiantly holding its ground against the horde. In front of it are a pair of uniforms doing their diligent, sacred duty with all the gravitas and solemnity required when standing around all day telling people to, quintessentially, fuck off. Whether they’re aware of the irony of performing the old nothing to see here routine outside of a TV studio where a murder just occurred is curiously difficult to ascertain.

Technically, Phoenix could go right up to them and request entry. It wasn’t ever hard with Mia. All she had to do was smile. All Phoenix had to do was lie by her side. It proved a frighteningly effective method of getting into crime scenes the few times he shadowed her, but he doubts he’d get a similar reception on his own, even with Maya beside him.

Well, maybe with Murphy, still restless on her paws despite the run, and getting more than her fair share of soft looks from the crowd. She pants and smiles. Her eyes flash in the sunlight. She laughs at all of them between her teeth.

Shifting in and out, Diego’s got his own group forming. His gaze tracks back to Phoenix from time to time to make sure he isn’t in the process of getting arrested again, or into any other kind of trouble. Whether the ghosts he’s gathering will have anything useful to say isn’t particularly likely, but it never hurts to try. And it’s probably a good thing to get him away from Mia for a while. She was sleeping on the couch when they picked up Murphy, Diego hovering over her like shy steam, and as worried as he is about her, Phoenix knows he doesn’t like watching her sleep. It didn’t take much convincing.

They left a sticky note to explain what Phoenix had gone and done. Maya stuck it to Mia’s forehead.

Phoenix feels like he’s missing something important.

“Yeah, well,” the detective says, glancing over his shoulder, “You wouldn’t believe how many people have been trying to get a look inside. Kids and all sorts. It’s a mess.” He brings his gaze back to Phoenix. His eyebrows fiddle with themselves. “Wait. Don’t tell me. Don’t tell me you’re here for Powers’ sake.” He huffs a huge breath of air, and just like that, his eyes go from melting to scalding. “Haven’t you upset Mr Edgeworth enough already?”

Apparently not, though it takes Phoenix one more second than it should to understand why. “Edgeworth’s prosecuting?”

“You didn’t know?”

Phoenix, already very aware of Maya’s arms around him (holding him steady, the soft side of her cheek resting on the tip of his shoulder blade), hopes to every god he doesn’t believe in that she can’t feel the thing in his throat suddenly scratching madly at his chest. “No. I’m Powers’ attorney. That’s true whoever I’m going up against.”

(Like he hasn’t spent half his time the past few days resisting the urge to look up, to maybe glance over his shoulder, to open his mouth as if to speak.

We never celebrated your birthday. It had passed before we were we, he almost says, doing his best to keep the side of his hand from smudging the ink as he pens in the current date for an invoice. Do you want me to say something when it comes? Would you maybe want to—

I’ve less faith in her tastebuds than yours, he almost says, watching Maya dig into a fully loaded burger while he picks at a chicken sandwich. Yeah, I still remember you like ketchup on macaroni cheese, you weirdo, you—

Hey, Edgeworth. Miles, he almost says, so many times. Look where I am now. It’s not much, I know, but I’m still here. Do you see me?

And then, inevitably, he remembers. Mia curled up on the couch, tucked into herself, chalk powder painkillers dusting the coffee table, Diego holding onto his useless hands, Murphy flat-eared on the floor, Maya hugging him close, hugging him close, her palms pushing into the spot he breathes from, right where it aches the most. He presses into them every time. He breathes against them and thinks I’m sorry, and quietly, and selfishly, so selfishly, wow.

Edgeworth’s not ahead of him, but he’s not behind him either. Not in these moments. They’re both somewhere else now.

That makes the thing in his throat shut up. The words. The bullet beside them. They’d kill him if it never did.)

“You’re outta luck this time, pal,” the detective says, quirking up a smile that has no business being as smug as it is. “There’s nobody else who could’ve done it except Powers. We’ve got concrete evidence to prove it, and a witness to back it up.”

“I’ll… take that under advisement,” Phoenix says, stomach sinking even as the rest of his body floats above it. “Do you mind if we look around anyway?”

To his surprise, the detective chuckles and shrugs and says, “Sure, why not? You’re not gonna find anything we haven’t already. Just keep your pup away from the crime scene.” He crouches down and frees his hand from his sleeve, offering it out. Murphy approaches cautiously, then far more happily when she gets a chin scratch for her bravery. The detective smiles fondly. “Don’t want any cross contamination, eh, puppy?”

Maya isn’t wholly convinced. It’d be kind of weird if the detective tried chin scratches on her, Phoenix supposes. “That’s awfully nice of you.”

The detective looks up at them, smile fading to something serious and hard-earned. “You see what they were writing about him after he lost to you? All that sh—I mean,” he corrects with a glance at Maya, “All that crap about forged evidence and leading witnesses?”

“Once or twice,” Phoenix replies quietly.

“It’s bullshit,” the detective says, and he sure as shit doesn’t censor it this time. “Sorry, but it just is, ya know? It’s our job to find the culprit, like you said, pal—uh, Miss Fey.” He lifts himself back to his feet, puffing out his chest past the coat. “That includes the evidence to go with it. Not once since I started working with Prosecutor Edgeworth has he used anything but what was handed to him, fair and square.” He sticks a finger towards the crowd. “So any of them start asking, you tell them we gave you a fair shot, and the only reason you lost is because Powers did it.”

It's a nice speech, and it’d mean a hell of a lot more if Phoenix hadn’t watched Edgeworth lead multiple witnesses right in front of him. But he understands what the detective is saying. He feels warm all over, and not in a particularly pleasant way. His hands, already twitching, are desperate to reach for his sketchbook, a wish so vehement it almost hurts to force them still. He understands. He needs to colour it in. He needs to see it bleed. He understands too well, and it’s far too kind an interpretation of the truth, and worst of all, none of it—none of it is an outright lie.

But he wouldn’t be drawing anything new. It’s nothing he hasn’t thought to himself a thousand times before.

You always become what other people say you are. Sometimes, they only ever say you’re wrong.

The problem is this: what about when they only ever say you’re right?

“C’mon,” the detective says, still grinning like there’s a joke only he knows the punchline of. “I’ll get them to let you through.”

As they swing off the bike to follow, Maya tilts her head up to Phoenix. “Nick?”

“Yeah?”

“… I think I kinda like him,” Maya admits sullenly.

“Yeah,” Phoenix sighs. “Me too.” He leans closer to her and asks, at a much lower volume, “Stupid question, but do you remember his name?”

Maya blinks a couple times, then looks to where the detective and his coat have started parting the crowd like the sea. “It’d probably be awkward to ask him now, huh?”

There must be worse ways to start off an investigation than an overconfident lead detective running against you whose name you have no idea of. Phoenix isn’t sure there are many, though.

“Do you like Will Powers?” Phoenix asks.

He regrets it as soon as he does, and not just because of Diego’s snort sounding pointedly in his ear. It’s not really what he means to ask, either. It’s just the first words that came to mind, and after five minutes with Wendy Oldbag, he’s learned it’s best to get anything you want to say out in the brief window she pauses speaking to take a breath, no matter how stupid it sounds.

“Like?” she repeats, enunciating the word like it’s a bad tasting pastry. Sticky and full of salt. She’s a few inches shorter than him, straight-backed despite her age, and entirely too many levels of terrifying. Her eyes are sharp and her pupils are thin, which, combined with the too-many teeth of her smiles and sneers, makes Phoenix wonder if her guard uniform is the only thing keeping her in containment and the rest of humanity at peace.

“Uh, yeah. Kind of. I just mean—”

“Like?” she says again, more baffled, as if it’s never struck her before that she could be capable of forming such an ordinary judgement about someone. “What kind of question is that? You think I stand here all day writing down my opinions about every whosit and whatsit that walks in and out of that gate? Sure, he’s not a bad kid, but god knows he’s nothing special, and that’s probably the only person you could go to ask if you wanted to know what was going through his head when he decided he had any future on a screen. No wonder he thought the Steel Samurai was his big break…”

And so on. And on. Honestly, Phoenix stopped listening a while ago. He’s more focussed on his pencil moving up and down the page. Maya catches sight of the sketch and ducks away to hide a snicker behind a cough. Diego lets his own laugh run free, and Murphy, desperate for a break (her poor ears), takes that as permission to bark in protest.

“Murphy,” Phoenix murmurs, not so much a chide as simply saying her name. He takes his hand off the drawing and clamps it down gently on her snout. She licks his fingers between her teeth.

The noise snaps Oldbag off her tirade, a fresh snarl digging into the creases across her brow and mouth. “Mind your manners,” she tells the dog, under no uncertain terms, before finally coming to her point on Phoenix’s behalf. “Why would you ask me something like that?”

“I have an enquiring mind,” Phoenix says. “Also, I’m wondering whether you were surprised he’s been accused of murdering Jack Hammer.”

She releases a veritable chitter that might be laughter and nearly sets Murphy off again. “How could I be? I’m the one who saw him on his way to do it, after all.” When she shakes her head, not a single strand of her tightly wound hair slides out of place. “It takes a lot to surprise me, boy. You have no idea the things I’ve seen happen in this studio over the years. Oh, the stories I could tell...”

“I’ll take that as contextualisation,” Phoenix says quickly. “But I mean aside from the fact you saw him. Before you saw him. Would you have considered him capable of something like this?”

Oldbag takes a step back and folds her arms, looking him up and down. Slivers of light, fragmented by the trees, cut down one side of her face, only lighting up one eye. He’s starting to get tired of everyone trying to find something in him he doesn’t have to offer. “Then, within the context… yes, I suppose I was surprised,” she replies. “Jack and Powers weren’t exactly bosom buddies, but I’d never have guessed Powers had it in him. Just goes to show, doesn’t it? You never know what people are hiding under the surface. Give a man a mask and he’ll tell you the truth, or so they say. Girlie!”

Maya jumps about a foot in the air, reluctantly revealing herself from her refuge behind Phoenix’s back. “Um, yes, uh, Ma’am?”

“Stand up straight!” Oldbag snaps. “And quit your hiding! Honestly, what are they teaching kids these days? Too much nonsense going in one ear and out the other, and what do you expect for it? Everything!” And then, at last, the time-honoured, “Back in my day—”

“Do you think she has an off-switch?” Diego wonders, and for once, Phoenix isn’t going to complain about him adding to the racket. “Or medication she’s supposed to be on? Medication we can put her on?”

“A really big stick,” Phoenix suggests, the sound mostly lost beneath Oldbag’s ranting (something about hippie clothes and her son? He’s probably better off not knowing). There are more than enough trees around to make the thought a temptation tantalisingly close to reality.

There is, in fact, someone already lurking along the treeline.

“Listen to people when they talk!” Oldbag screeches, nearly deafening Phoenix in the process.

“Sorry,” Phoenix says, futilely trying to tug the ringing out of his ears. He’s pretty sure he can feel his earrings vibrating. “I thought I saw someone.”

Diego perks up immediately. “Who?”

“Uh, I was probably just seeing things.” Phoenix scans the foliage again, repainting the small shadow in his mind and realising how strange a presence it would be. “It looked like a kid.”

Oldbag’s eyes bulge. “Whippersnappers!” she snarls with such ferocity even Diego takes a step back. “Today of all days. Those brats are going to get themselves into a world of trouble. You two! Stay here! Don’t move a muscle. I’ll deal with you when I’m back.” She points a bony finger at Phoenix and Maya in turn. “Not a single thing goes on here without my knowing about it, and you better remember that!”

With that menacing declaration delivered, she takes off slightly to the left of where Phoenix was looking and disappears into the trees.

“Her, I don’t like,” Maya decides.

“I don’t know,” Diego says idly. “Must be nice to have such clarity of purpose.”

The BANG echoes beautifully, lifting a pair of pigeons from the sagging drainpipe above and probably traumatising at least a few woodland creatures lingering on the other side of the open drain in the wall behind them. Maya keeps her composure for three riveting seconds before groaning and bending over to grip her toes.

“Was that supposed to help?” Phoenix asks.

“It usually works better on TV,” Maya answers, her watery eyes peeking through the dark curtain of her hair. “So yes.”

The employee area is thankfully empty of people to demand they cease and desist (as is most of the studio, as far as Phoenix has seen). There’s little to it: half-finished backdrops leant against the wall, weather-beaten tables and chairs that look cheaper than the set on his own balcony, leftover plates with sauce and shards of bone for the local animal population to feast on, and a few buildings that may as well be made out of paper for how thin the walls and roofs are. Most are closed by doors, but a few are battened down by metal shutters, metal eating up the rough dirt and rust completing the cycle.

Someone better be giving whoever’s responsible for Global Studios’ upkeep their well-earned money. Everything is really driving home the notion that you’d better make it big quick or you’ll slowly start decaying into obscurity alongside everything else.

Diego sticks his head through the stubbornly persistent door of Will Powers’ dressing room and raises an eyebrow at Maya’s predicament. “At least wear boots if you’re going to try breaking stuff, spitfire,” he tells her.

Spitfire, Phoenix mouths. Out loud, he says, “Maybe wear boots instead of sandals the next time you try it.”

He’s never quite as good at imitating Diego’s specific blend of sarcasm and scolding, but Maya whacks him on the arm for it anyway. “Don’t you start on my clothes. I’m going to see that old lady hovering over my bed tonight.”

Diego snorts at the idea while waving a hand to Phoenix. “Empty on all fronts, pajarito. Do your thing.”

Phoenix pulls out his pick and tension wrench from his jacket. He hesitates with them in his palm before holding them out for Maya to see, old and scuffed as they are. “Mind keeping an eye out for her right now?”

“Is that a lockpick?” Maya asks, straightening upright so quick it’s a wonder she doesn’t pull a muscle. “You know how to pick locks?”

“A friend taught me.” He kneels down, nudging Murphy away with his chin when she presses her nose against it, nothing but fondness between them. He does the same to Maya with his shoulder when she hunches closer to watch, far more of a rebuke. “As far as anyone else is concerned, the door was open when we found it, okay?”

Maya nods forcefully, unable to smother the rising sparks of her grin. “Think we’ll find any cool merchandise in there?”

“Please don’t steal things from an active crime scene.”

“Try telling me that again when you’re not actively breaking into part of the crime scene.”

“I’ve no idea what you’re talking about. It was open when we got here, remember?” Phoenix replies mildly, and Maya leans on him when she laughs.

Lockpicking is a simple enough process, if finicky and easy to mess up. He used to be sweating buckets, hands shaking and the rest of him over-tensed to run at the slightest hint of a witness. Anything works like a muscle, though. With enough practice, he doesn’t have to be aware of his possible mistakes.

It’s been a long time since he let himself be new at something.

He focuses on his hands.

White strips are all that remain of Jack Hammer inside Studio One. They trace the outline of the Evil Magistrate’s costume, leaving empty space to peer out from the floor, practically with its own gravitational pull as it seeks to reform the dead weight it’s meant to hold. Left alone. There’s no point in trying to paint something from the inside out. The colours will never come out right. The best anyone can do is paint a mask, but that’s boring. That’s been done a thousand times before.

Phoenix crouches down beside the outline, hands in his pockets the way Mia taught him to help resist the urge to touch something. It was clear before they were anywhere near the soundstage that Hammer’s ghost was nowhere nearby. There’s always the possibility no part of him wanted to stay—but Phoenix would gamble everything he owns that isn’t the truth.

(Remember, Death whispers. What is a ghost? It’s something dead that seems to be alive. It’s something dead that doesn’t know it’s dead.)

Diego has flickered off to try and hunt down the-man-the-myth-the-legend turned rotted, and Maya is outside with Murphy, strangely willing to remain despite the way she’d been practically frothing at the mouth in Powers’ dressing room. Looking around the silent soundstage, feeling the chill that’s nothing but wide space and autumn air, the only thing Phoenix can conjure up to think or feel is that he’s mildly glad he chose paint over performance. He doesn’t think he’d have survived any more divides to his personality, the pretty and the ugly, the things he knows are inside and the things he doesn’t dare turn around to look at, the him that has to just live with the rest of the world and the him drowning in old stories and starving mouths. He wouldn’t be able to recognise himself in the mirror.

How much can you change and get away with it, before you turn into someone else, before it’s some kind of murder? Give a man a mask and he’ll tell you the truth. It still won’t make Will Powers a hero any more than it makes Jack Hammer a villain.

But it’s someone’s fault. Maybe Powers’, maybe not. It’s always someone’s fault.

The white strips peer back at him and say, hungrily, this is not what we meant to be.

(“What do you think you’ve been doing the past fifteen years?”

He doesn’t have to stop himself opening his mouth to speak this time, hunching into his hoodie, curling his fingers around his keychain. He just thinks, I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know—)

There’s nothing here. No evidence, damning or otherwise. Empty inside and out.

So why does it feel so much like he’s standing on a cliff?

The final stroke brings them back to where they started, only this time with a fidgeting assistant instead of a terrifying old lady. The guard station at the main entrance is actually kind of peaceful without the latter around.

“You really think this’ll help WP?” the assistant, one Penny Nichols, asks, nervously squeaking the office chair back and forth as she types into the computer. “I have no idea what’s actually on the photo. I just know Miss Oldbag was desperate to get it to that detective.”

“Honestly, anything would help us at this stage,” Maya replies with far more candour than Phoenix would prefer. She hit it off with the assistant while waiting outside Studio One, and they were gushing over the Steel Samurai like old friends when he came back to find her. Or he’s assuming it was the Steel Samurai they were talking about. He heard the words ‘dried serpent viscera’ and decided he just wasn’t going to ask. “We need to know what the prosecution’s going to hit us with in court tomorrow, at least.”

“There’s a lot of ‘we’ and ‘us’ in there,” Phoenix says dryly.

“Ignore him,” Maya says, patting Nichols on the shoulder in a manner that’s probably meant to be comforting. “He’s as new to this as I am. He has no idea what he’s doing either.”

Phoenix glares, straining against the impulse to pull his hood up as his ears flare in embarrassment.

“Uh, right.” Nichols looks out of her depth for the split second it takes her to realise the computer is the safer conversation partner. “I’m just gonna, y’know… do this. It’ll only take a minute.”

While Nichols looks through the security camera files, Maya pokes and prods around the square tile of office. She rifles through a lost and found box gathering dust in the corner, peers at the flashy magazines and flashier romance novels piled up beside small collection of crisp folders, and finally creeps back to the desk to snatch two donuts from an open box. She crams half of the first into one bite. It hangs out her mouth as she tears a generous piece off the second, then offers it to Phoenix, raising it high to keep it away from Murphy’s watering mouth. Phoenix watches her struggle to chew for a moment, then takes it.

“Seriously, though,” she says, holding her remaining half against her lips as if to muffle her words, “Do you know what you’re going to do tomorrow? What are you going to tell WP?”

Phoenix tears a smaller chunk off his piece and chews it slowly. Sugar and sweetness fizzle pleasantly against his tongue. It’s a struggle to swallow it down. “Let’s just see what the photo shows.”

Murphy’s gaze suddenly slides past the food in Phoenix’s hand, her fixed intent breaking into a happy, tail-wagging wiggle. Maya coos and crouches down to let her lick the sugar off her fingers, and Phoenix briefly turns his head to the side to greet Diego with an overflooded smile while she’s distracted.

“I’d enjoy that little sugary treat if I was you,” Diego says by way of greeting—not ominous at all or anything. “I found Hammer. At least, I’m pretty sure I found Hammer. I don’t know who else would be hanging around looking like that.”

Phoenix tilts his head in a silent, looking like what?

Before Diego can work up a reply, the printer springs to life and Nichols rolls her chair over to snatch what it spits out. “Here we go.” She peers at it, nudging her glasses further up her nose. “Oh. Weird.”

“What’s weird?” Maya demands, eagerly springing to Nichols’ side. She stops as soon as she gets a look at the photo. “Oh, that’s… Yeah, that’s weird.”

“What?” Phoenix asks, caught between both Maya and Diego, needing at least one of them to make sense.

Maya plucks it out of Nichols’ slack grip and holds it up for him. Phoenix squints, but it’s Diego who leans closer, dipping a tingling line of fire through Phoenix’s shoulder as he takes in the photo of the Steel Samurai dragging himself and the murder weapon towards Studio One. The actual Steel Samurai, in full fighting-fit costume.

“Well,” Diego says, his tone conveying he has no more idea of what to make of it than Phoenix does as he pokes a finger through the Steel Samurai’s chest, “He looks exactly like that.”

Looking through the meagre composition Phoenix has managed to scrape together, grey-scale smears and scribbled outlines bled by white, Mia asks, tough and tender, like measuring a bruise, “Do you trust Will Powers?”

Phoenix leans further into his chair’s creaking back, scraping the flat side of his pencil back and forth across the pad of his thumb. It’s her and him—or it may as well be, because Maya darted out to grab dinner on Mia’s request, and both Murphy and Diego are smart enough to stay away from a conversation not meant for them. The dog is closed-eyed and content beside Diego on the couch, the man’s respectful silence not enough to distract his dark stare. He’s quiet, but he’s watching. Waiting.

“I don’t think he did it,” Phoenix tries.

Mia’s movements are sleep-clogged, fingers fumbling where they trace the sketch of Wendy Oldbag brandishing the Samurai Spear with thunder in her eyes and fangs for teeth. Her smile barely manages to lift past the fresh taste of painkillers. “You don’t think?”

Phoenix slumps lower. In his hand, the pointed lead catches his skin, leaving a flat line of white raising red through the graphite stain. He puts the pencil down and wipes his fingers on his pants. “Chief, I only met the guy today. All I’ve got is his word he was sleeping, and a picture of someone wearing his costume. Cut me some slack.”

Without looking away from his sketchbook, Mia hooks her hand under his shirt collar and hoists him upright. “But that isn’t what’s bothering you.”

“Edgeworth’s prosecuting,” Phoenix says, and Mia flicks him a look that says something like ah—but he isn’t finished yet. “Powers doesn’t know anything about it, only that all the lawyers he tried before me turned him down. I don’t know if they turned him down because they didn’t believe him, or they heard who was prosecuting and decided it wasn’t worth trying for. And that’s—that’s the point, right? That’s what we do. That’s why we do it, but—”

Being a lawyer has turned out to be a very similar process to helping ghosts. Before Phoenix was much of anything, though, he was an artist, and that’s not like helping ghosts at all except for one very important thing: if you mess up, you can just try again. If a painting doesn’t come out the way he wants, nobody’s going to die. If a ghost thinks they want one thing, but actually wants something completely different, he just has to help them work out what that is. He’s the only one who can. That’s been true his entire life.

But Will Powers is alive. He has so much more life to live. And his colour was Red, and he said please, said help me, and Phoenix will, he will, he’ll try until his heart gives in and his lungs give out—but he’s just—he’s always just been Phoenix, and that—

That’s never been anything worth living for before for anyone but himself. And sometimes not even that much.

(The problem is this: turn yourself into a story, and you can change it to mean anything you want. In the end, you’ll only ever tell yourself whatever you want to hear.

The problem is this: three years ago, Diego made Doug Swallow go away. But he wasn’t there when Swallow came back.

“I think I died because of her,” Swallow said, brutal and pouringly electric. He pressed Phoenix down against the floor and burned right through his spine even as Murphy raged against every fractal spark. “And I think I died because of you.”)

“My mother used to say,” Mia says, startling Phoenix into looking at her whether he wants to or not, “That taking the easy way out might save you, but taking the harder way might save a few others.”

Not one single sentence between them has ever started with my mother or my father. Mia straightens and rests her hip on the edge of her desk, arms folding loosely around her cast, and for a single, solitary moment, as she stares at him, she looks utterly, completely, violently sad.

“Phoenix,” she says—but then something shifts. Her head dips, softening the tilt of her eyes, and her mouth slants to a sunset-purple smile. “Do you know what the prosecution’s biggest weakness is?”

“Uh…” Phoenix replies, grandly. “Their fashion sense?”

Diego snorts, the noise briefly raising Murphy’s head before she settles back down with a huff. Mia’s reaction more or less matches Murphy’s. “Phoenix.”

“Sorry.” He rubs the back of his head, trying to find something to fill it. “No, I guess. What?”

“It’s speed.”

His hand stills. “Like… the drug?”

“No—what? No. That’s the first place your mind went to?” Mia demands, coughing up a laugh. Phoenix curls his fingers tighter into his spikes and offers a sheepish smile. “We’re talking about the verb here. Quickness, conciseness. It’s what makes the best prosecutors so difficult to go up against, but it’s also how you beat them. They only have three days to prove the defendant guilty.”

“So do we,” Phoenix says. “Worse than that, even. They’re practically guilty the moment they walk into the courtroom.”

But Mia shakes her head. She has this way of talking about standing in court, this thing that seems to make her necklace glow a little brighter, her words come a little faster. It’s what people always look like when they’re talking about something they love.

“No. We get three days to prove them innocent. I know it feels like you have to rush straight to the verdict, but if you go too fast it’ll narrow your view. You’ve said it yourself you don’t have the whole picture. You don’t have to fill it in one day. You just need one more. At the end of which, you’ll be following the leads you still have and chasing up new ones, while Edgeworth and the police will be fumbling around wondering why the hell Powers hasn’t already been convicted.” She slides his sketchbook in front of him and cocks another grin. “Old women wielding spears aside, obviously.”

“Obviously,” Phoenix echoes, and finds himself grinning back.

“It still doesn’t make things easy, pajarito,” Diego says, though not like he’s being an asshole about it. “It’s not supposed to be easy. It’s a choice you have to keep making.” He tips his head back and lets loose a flash of his teeth. “And you’ve already got an advantage nobody’ll see coming.”

A photo of someone wearing the Steel Samurai costume and a ghost hanging around an entirely different part of Global Studios apparently wearing said costume. One and one equals two. Of course, things might actually be easier if he could go into court tomorrow and say that—or, at the very least, if Phoenix understood why. He couldn’t exactly head over to chat with Hammer while Maya was with him, and from how Diego described it, Hammer’s just as twisted up as Nicholas was inside the warehouse. Angry enough to wrench off the remaining struts of Global Studios’ resident monkey mascot (though the damage was once against attributed to last month’s storm. Very prolific, these thunderstorms).

So yeah, Phoenix knows why Diego’s been glaring at him. And yeah, maybe what he’s thinking of doing is dangerous, and kind of stupid, and probably a little insane, and Diego absolutely knows he’s going to do it anyway, because Phoenix wouldn’t ever do anything else. It reminds him too much of a day in an old playpark, overlapped by a hundred iterations of the same boys; of brighter and better things, and worse things, too, when every moment felt enough to last their entire lives.

(“If you didn’t want to be a lawyer when you grew up, what would you be?”

Exactly what the boy was thinking when he asked it, Phoenix no longer remembers. Fifteen years will change a lot of things. But Phoenix is certain, somehow, that it hasn’t changed Edgeworth’s response. The answer has always been in the asking, and maybe some part of him knew it even then.

How does it go again?

It’s finding a way to live that’s the hard part.)

He places his hands down flat on either side of his sketchbook, taking in the hazy starts to an image he can’t begin to guess the ending of. Not his part in it, anyway. Hammer’s face is a vague interpretation from the pictures Maya has shown him, but it’ll grow and change and form soon enough. It’s more manageable like that—on paper—when it comes to other people. It never stops making him feel like a liar, though. He supposes that’s what he’ll always be in a courtroom.

Maybe that’s why he says the truest thing he’s able to now.

“It still feels weird doing this without you.”

Mia’s short intake of breath makes him cringe. A soft noise follows, as if she’s going to speak—and Phoenix really, really hopes she does, because he might just wither and die before Maya can return to break the stupid reverberation of his words. Instead, Mia hums quietly, slips her way out of her sandals, then lifts herself onto his desk and settles her feet on his knee. Her longs legs, clad in leggings, curl up towards her chest, and she rests her cast awkwardly across them. Phoenix blinks.

She answers before he can even ask. “I didn’t want to be standing over you. So.”

“You’re still looking down at me,” Phoenix points out, but something about the gesture loosens the vicious tug of guilt in his throat, makes his insides go a little mellow besides. Mia just wants to be level with him. “I mean, it wasn’t bothering me or anything. It isn’t bothering me.”

“Stop being an awkward boy for two seconds,” Mia says with no small amount of fondness, and Diego’s answering laugh makes Phoenix kind of want to die a little again. “I’m trying to say—or, I was going to say… It feels weird you’re doing this without me, too.”

Phoenix swallows. Without meaning to, he finds his fingers curling over the rough patch of skin on his palm. Healing, but tender to touch. Every wound he’s ever received has eventually thickened, some aching beneath the surface constantly, some throbbing only in the cold, some fading to numbness entirely. His body usually feels like a still-healing cut, pulsing alongside his heartbeat. This scar on his palm, he thinks, will be something new.

“I didn’t… I didn’t mean to…” He presses his tongue against the back of his teeth, muting himself, because—what? Didn’t mean what?

“It’s okay. I’d rather you said it.” Mia slumps forward a little, her good hand fiddling with the frayed ends of her cast. She looks angry and sad and in pain, and Phoenix—Phoenix just doesn’t want her to be. “I’m glad someone finally did. I feel like I’ve been going insane this past month.” Her words are bitter but clumsy, like she isn’t sure how to enunciate them. She isn’t looking at Phoenix, but at the office folding and fading quietly around them. “I’ll be sitting at my desk, and I won’t remember what I was doing, even if I was right in the middle of doing it. Or I’ll get dizzy, or this sudden surge of pain, and it’s like—it’s like I’m looking for him again. Waiting to see him standing over me. It’s like I never left.”

It's real pain that flashes through Phoenix this time, and all of it comes from his heart. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Diego lean forward, and he doesn’t have a word for the expression on Diego’s face. Only that Murphy raises her head again, gazing at Diego steadily, as if waiting to be there if he starts to cry.

Mia presses her feet into the space between Phoenix’s leg and the arm rest, nudging him round to face her more fully. She forces something like a smile. “But if you’re feeling the same thing, I can’t be all crazy.”

“You call me crazy at least once a month,” Phoenix says weakly.

It helps. Just a touch. Her mouth tilts sideways, her breath shaking its way out of her. “Right. Bad example. But still. I’m glad it’s not just me.”

“It’s never just you,” he says. “It’s me, and it’s Maya too, and—and Murphy.” And Diego, who chose to live for her. Diego, who wouldn’t hesitate to kill for her. This isn’t a metaphor. Phoenix really does think if it came to it, if Diego had to, he’d bloody his hands without hesitating, and he’d do it with a smile. “Take your own advice. Give yourself time. You’re already destroying White. Whoever comes next won’t know what hit them.”

Mia nods, but her gaze remains distant. “You think anyone’s ever actually followed that advice?”

“I don’t know,” Phoenix replies. “I definitely haven’t.”

Her expression breaks open then, pieces of amusement and sadness and fury and fear flung together like shards of glass, and Phoenix wants to—wishes he could—if he could pick them up and carry them away, or redraw it, or rewrite it, or—or something. Anything to make it better. He wants to get better. He wants to go back to a month ago and live it all over again, but smarter this time. He wants to scrub the blood off his skin and keep running.

And he knows that however much he wants all of it, he can’t imagine how much Mia must want it more.

You don’t get to go dying on me, she told him. The memory of it is smeared reddish-white, bursts of feverish pain under the bright lights of the defendant’s lobby. Phoenix breathes.

Mia breathes in time. “Well, while we’re waiting around,” she says, curled up and upright, flaunting her courage for the bare Gatewater windows to witness, “Make sure they call you my protégé.”

“Oh, sure. I’ll start signing all my e-mails with it.”

She snorts softly, resting her cheek on the ragged texture of her cast. When Phoenix risks a glance, Diego’s eyes are stormy, and the dimming light spilling into the room makes him look smudged at the edges. Dreamlike. He meets Phoenix’s gaze, his hand sitting on the centre of his chest, clawing into the coffee mug shattering shape of a fist.

“You can ask.”

“What?” Phoenix looks up to find Mia looking at him again, autumn eyes burning softly. “Ask about what?”

“About my mother.” Sticking out the end of the cast, Mia’s fingers twitch, painting flickering shadows against her chest. “About my family.”

“What’s there to ask about?” Phoenix asks, too quick. Too stale. Too… flighty.

“We regularly channel dead people,” Mia answers, the same way someone might say I drink seventeen cups of coffee during a trial: all the pride and soar of a boast, but also a little like you’re quietly asking for help. “It’s sort of our whole raison d'être. People are usually pretty curious about it when they find out where I’m from.”

“Uh, I mean, i-it’s kind of… um…” He stammers some more before hanging his head and admitting, “Okay, yeah. I might’ve been wondering about it a little.”

Mia sighs and jabs him in the side with her toe. Ignoring his yelp, she says, “It’s not a big deal. Not to me. My family’s important to me, but I haven’t been a Fey since I left, really. Clan politics and all that. You know about main families and branch families, right?”

Phoenix nods uncertainly, rubbing his side.

“I was the heir,” Mia says bluntly. As if she’s trying to bludgeon the words to numbness as she speaks. “But once I decided I was going to leave, that was pretty much it. Maya’s the one who’ll inherit the title of master now. Nobody’s expecting me to come back. Not that I was ever planning to.” Her eyes slide halfway shut, and her mouth, trying again for a smile, turns sharp at the corners. “It would have killed me if I never left. Even if Mom didn’t. Even if I’d never had to hear the name Redd White. Joke’s on them now. I still get to live.”

Phoenix looks at her. And looks at her. And looks at her. Feels that restless, burning, buzzing itch in his hands, curling his fingers into the meat of his thighs, and a beat inside his chest like flying. It’s—It’s so like her. So totally, completely Mia to want something and grab onto it with everything she has. To fight for it to the last breath, no matter how much it bruises and breaks her in the process.

Maybe he doesn’t love her the way Diego does, but in moments like this, he understands completely how Diego can.

“I’m glad you did,” Phoenix says, crooking up his own smile. “I wouldn’t be here without you. And White deserve everything of what’s coming to him. I couldn’t have done that myself. It shouldn’t have been anyone but you.”

Mia lifts her head up, right into the sun, and before Phoenix can blink away the glow of it, she reaches out and yanks his collar again. “You’re an idiot.”

Diego bends to rest his elbows on his knees, scrubbing his hands over his face while Phoenix tries to tug his shirt back into shape. His shoulders are shaking, and Murphy places her head between her paws, nose brushing through his thigh. Phoenix doesn’t know if he’s laughing or crying. It happens a lot when it comes to Mia. It’s like there’s never enough of him to hold it all.

“I’m trying not to ruin this shirt, Chief,” Phoenix says, and wishes he could say, this isn’t a joke. He loves you. He loves you.

“Spend more time not pissing off murderers,” Mia says back. “It’s bad for your health.”

“I didn’t piss off Frank Sawhit,” he points out.

“He through his toupee at you.”

“And I’ll never recover from it.”

“Phoenix.” Mia rubs at her eyes, a sure sign her headache’s bothering her worse than she’s willing to admit. When she moves her hand, though, her gaze is clear and concentrated. “Be honest with me. Does it bother you?”

“No?” Phoenix says, slightly bewildered. “It was a pretty bad toupee. Probably looked better on my face than on his head.”

“Not that.” She taps the stone resting on her chest with her fingernails. “Spirit channelling.”

Ah.

Right. Okay.

So, Phoenix has a bit of an odd relationship with the whole psychic-séance-medium thing. As much as he’d like to, declaring it a load of bullshit would be tantamount to putting on a blindfold and walking repeatedly into a wall whilst stubbornly insisting the wall doesn’t exist. Iris told him bits and pieces about Hazakura Temple and the training offered (mostly by proxy to other things in her life. She hated talking about spirit channelling as long as he knew her, and he hated making her sad for even longer, and it’s not like he particularly wanted to talk about it in the first place. But he wonders, sometimes, has to wonder, just exactly what she… But. Anyway—), enough for him to understand there are people willing to swear their lives by it. That there is, in fact, an entire country practically built upon the concept.

But he’s never actually met a dead person who’s been channelled. Nor has he ever found someone who has to see and hear and touch the same things he does.

And he’s looked.

God, has he looked.

He doesn’t look anymore. If there is anyone, they hide themselves as well as he does. If there isn’t—well, it’s nothing he didn’t already know. Even—even the why of it doesn’t matter as much these days. Not when he has more important things to hold onto. He doesn’t know why he can see ghosts, only that if he doesn’t do something about them, no-one else will. Does he need another reason? He doesn’t want to keep returning to the yawning waves, staring into them, listening to them tell him you are alone and you always will be. They will know you as a monster and a liar and you will deserve it. It’s just what happens to boys like you. Think of the basement. Think of the alley—

“A friend of mine,” Phoenix says, pausing on it long enough to watch the heavy expression on Mia’s face twitch into longsuffering amusement, “Once told me that grief is just love with nowhere to go.”

Her eyes flash like her heart started a fire inside them.

“Doesn’t seem like something to be bothered about when you put it like that.” He shrugs and fiddles with his earrings. Tilts his head to the side. “Unless spirit channelling can help with paperwork. I’d be very interested in it then.”

“There’s a thought,” Mia says, blinking. “I could channel a better lawyer to do all of my work for me.”

“Do you know any better lawyers?” Diego pipes up dryly from the couch, gently sliding his fingers over the tufts of fur sticking out around Murphy’s paw. His gaze a little red and filled with night.

Phoenix looks away.

“Not that it’d work anymore,” Mia goes on, flapping her hand through the idea with a sigh. “It’s like anything. You need to keep practicing if you want to be able to do it at all, let alone do it consistently. But Maya… oh.”

She slams her hand on the desk and nearly slides off it. Phoenix automatically moves to steady her, and she grabs his wrist hard enough she can probably feel his hammering pulse through his sleeve.

“That’s what I was going to say. I knew there was something, I—” Her teeth catch her lip in her haste, then stay there while she forces a breath. “Listen. Maya might not offer. If she does, tell her to talk to me about it. But don’t ask her to channel Jack Hammer.”

“I—wasn’t going to?” Phoenix squirms minutely in her hold. “Isn’t she still in training or whatever anyway?”

“That’s exactly why she can’t.” Mia loosens her fingers enough to give him back feeling in his hand, but only that much. “She isn’t ready. Even if she managed it, it would only hurt her. And chances are, it would hurt you.”

And what the hell is Phoenix supposed to say to that?

(Violence has a body just like his. They are the same shape and size. He digs and digs and digs until there’s a hole big enough for it. He’s always digging down, so far down he can’t hear anyone calling out for him anymore. Sometimes he’s wished it would be the thing that kills him. So far it hasn’t been. He always has to drag himself out with his own bare hands, and only two people have ever asked why he’s bleeding all over the sidewalk.)

Mia’s brow slowly lowers and her eyes flick back and forth across his face, over and over. He wants her to stop. He wants her to go away.

“I’m not trying to scare you,” she whispers. “I just need you to understand.”

“You don’t scare me,” he says, and it’s only once he does that he finds, to his own surprise, that he’s telling the truth. “It isn’t—you’re the—I’m not scared of you.”

Most people won’t know how monumental such an affirmation is, coming from him. People, almost as a rule, have always been something to hide away from. They’ve blamed him for stealing things he never even knew were missing, and they’ve held him down and laughed when he told them it hurt, and they’ve asked, annoyed, What is it this time, Wright? when he needed a permission slip to go to the nurse’s office, even when his face was swollen and his clothes were torn. Some have been all the crueller because they know better, or they’ve chosen the worst thing next to cruelty, which is pity— which is sighing as they shoved him in solitary for a fight he didn’t start, or making off-handed remarks about how terribly his parents must have treated him, or commenting that they thought it was so impressive he could try so hard and do so well despite it all.

Mia Fey has spent a lot of time with him in her bid to help him become a lawyer. Mia Fey is also very, very good at her job, because even though Phoenix has never managed to speak about any of this, sometimes she just seems to know.

Mia Fey smiles—not a forced smile, not her everything is shit but nobody can know smile. It’s such a relief to see it, even if it’s only for right now, Phoenix forgets exactly what it is that does scare him. “I’ll do everything I can to keep that trust safe. So trust me when I tell you it’s not something you have to worry about. You wouldn’t need it to win, anyway.” She lets go of his wrist to tug lightly on one of his spikes instead. “I know better than anyone you’re ready to stand in court tomorrow.”

Phoenix’s chest stings, but this time it’s because of the warmth spreading through his body, smooth and sweet compared to the pain. “I thought you said it’d take three years before I was worth it,” he says, fighting past the sudden tightness in his throat.

“Worth it? Is that how Maya said it?” Mia rolls her eyes and musses up his hair. He feels all the bones in her hand as she does. All the life of her heart and blood and lungs. “You don’t have to be there yet when you’re just getting started. Forget having to be worth anything. Don’t you want this now?”

(All artists, at some point in their lives, will come across a certain saying: the difference between a good painting and a great one is five strokes. That’s all. What they don’t tell you is that it doesn’t mean every good painting can become great with just five strokes. To figure that out, you have to risk ruining the piece entirely.

It’s always a choice. Whether you deserve to be the one making it or not, somebody has to.

“Mostly, though,” Swallow finished, when Murphy had crowded him back and he was watching Phoenix curl and spasm on the floor, fighting to live, fighting to breathe— “Mostly, I’m terrified I died because of me.”)

“Yeah,” Phoenix breathes, and the words taste of blue. They taste of blue and truth. “I do. God, I really, really do.”

Mia laughs with her whole body, but she always smiles with her eyes. They glitter when she does, though it’s not as obvious as you might think. You have to be looking for it. “Go on, then,” she tells him.

So he does.

Chapter Text

“Speaking from the heart, pup, I don’t think this is exactly what Mia had in mind for you.”

Phoenix would reply with an extremely witty and cool remark (no, really? is the current top contender, though tell me something I don’t know is making a strong case for itself), but his mouth is currently full of leaf matter and twig, and he has no idea if the crawling sensation on his skin is psychosomatic or an actual living creature with too many legs. So he just makes a noise between a cough and a retch and hopes Diego gets the gist.

In the dark, the trees inhabiting Global Studios take on a life that only ever sleeps during the day. Woods always seem to. Roots dart out to grab his feet, overgrown brush entangles his ankles, whispering across each other as the branches writhe and strange sounds skitter too close, too far away. The fire is still there, but the hues are different; reds and golds turned scarlet and umber, silver leaking like accelerant in the grinning crescent moonlight. There’s the glow of the city, too, hovering between the bare treetops and the sky like a spray-painted streak of fireflies. Never quite daring to touch.

It was surprisingly easy to break in. Murphy just had to squeeze through the open drain by the employee area, following Diego’s cajoling. Phoenix, not quite as lucky, had to scramble over a wall—a chore already with his still sore ribs, but he managed to get his balance tipped the right way, and sure, his foot caught and he nearly broke his neck in the process, but he managed.

The wall dips in height close enough to the guard station it’d be pointless trying it during the day, even if there wasn’t a police presence (or an Oldbag on the prowl), and the only way to ensure there’d be no security footage was to head into the trees. So here they are.

Phoenix extracts himself from his most recent fight with the foliage, brushing leaves from the edges of his hood and swiping his hands through his hair. There’s a strange texture to the sounds, condensed and compressed inside his ears. It’d be easy, in the woods, in the dark, to feel like the loneliest boy in the world.

But Phoenix isn’t really unnerved. He has his dog shaking needles from her fur, eyes flashing sparks of green, whacking him in the calves with a stick and occasionally tripping herself up with the same stick. He has Diego, effortlessly mixing with the light and shadow, cut in sharp monochrome lines and built like a statue. One of Michelangelo’s slaves. They’d look right at home crawling out of the dirt, marking the path towards the true spectacle they’re here to see. Forever unfinished behind it.

It's strange the way these things can haunt without harm. Phoenix has a thousand unfinished sketches. Probably more. Choices never made. Lives never lived. When Larry first found out he was going to work for Mia, finally and truly dropping art for law, he’d echoed a sentiment he first articulated when they were teenagers: isn’t that kind of a waste, though?

At seventeen, Phoenix had found himself agreeing. He’s had a lot of time to think about it since then. You can’t waste something that was freely given to you, what you choose to dedicate yourself to. And it isn’t like because he chose law he’ll stop drawing. It’d take a lot more than that to tear a pencil out of his hands. Some things are simply meant to be unfinished and left behind. Time doesn’t restart you at the beginning any more than it makes you a killer.

And Diego knows that perfectly well. He’s always liked the fact that Michelangelo broke his nose in his youth—and Phoenix isn’t going to tell him how much Larry enjoys that fact as well.

It reminds you he’s human, Diego said.

It’s like he actually lived, ya know? Larry said.

Unfinished business is humanity’s greatest capacity. The only thing running close enough to contend is the mistakes they make in the meantime.

“There’s a lot of things people don’t think about for me,” Phoenix says, scanning the darkness and finding little. His eyes are as used to it as they’re going to get. He’d love to use a flashlight, but if there are any police patrolling (or, again, Oldbag—Phoenix seriously wouldn’t put it past her), he’s not going to put up a signal flare announcing his presence. “Spirit mediums come to mind.”

“Ha,” Diego says, more a rolling wave of breath than a bitter expulsion. “You know why I didn’t tell you. You don’t even believe it.” His dark eyes slice through the gloom, stark and glaring despite it. “Not enough to kneel in front of someone else’s gods.”

Phoenix leans down to extract Murphy’s stick from a patch of viscous weeds, feeling something crawl up his throat as they drag across his fingers. “I don’t think I believe in anything enough to put my life in the hands of something that won’t answer back,” he says as he straightens, swallowing the strange lump and keeping his eyes low.

“Ay, there’s the rub,” Diego mutters. “What you would kneel for.”

“I know it probably hurts to hear it, but vaguely quoting Shakespeare doesn’t make what you say more impressive,” Phoenix says back. He tugs his hood further down. “As if you wouldn’t do exactly the same for her. Don’t pretend you’d do anything less.”

“I already have my answer,” Diego says, the words soft even if his voice is latticed with sharp edges. “Don’t tell me he didn’t carve yours out of you in court that day.”

He stops in place, then, right where Phoenix is about to take his next step. It forces Phoenix to stop too, because for all that they can and do, there’s a difference between reaching out and deliberately walking through, and that difference is big enough to crack the ground beneath their feet and kill them in the fall.

(Step tender. Don’t run. Avoid the broken mirror. It shows nothing you don’t already know: you on one side and me on the other.

“That would never happen.”

Who was it that said these things are easier with time? Phoenix would like to leave his apartment barefoot in a hoodie with a pocketknife hidden up his sleeve and find out. It wouldn’t prove anything true or guilty, but it might stop the world saying, I will take you or him.

You get to choose.

It might stop Phoenix having to say, over and over, you don’t understand what you’re asking me.)

He looks at Diego. He runs his tongue over the back of his teeth. “It’s not what we do.”

“You can’t fix something that wants to stay broken,” Diego fires back. As per usual, Phoenix doesn’t know whether or not to be insulted by the impression of himself. Hearing it melt back into Diego’s regular tone doesn’t make the answer much clearer. “It’s not your fault if they never want to be saved. I know you have trouble with the difference, but that doesn’t only apply to dead people.”

There’s that word again. It’s starting to leave a bad taste in his mouth. Nothing so bad as sorry or Wright. Not the strange tasteless weight of win. Just enough to make him want to spit it out.

“It isn’t like that,” Phoenix mutters, and turns his head away from Diego’s loud gaze. “His eyes aren’t like that.” The noise Diego makes immediately in response batters against the air, splitting inside Phoenix’s blood. Before he can think any better, he shoulders past Diego (but still not through) and spits, “Yours weren’t either.”

Murphy, oblivious, or maybe just aware of the true fragility of the tension, trots at his side, occasionally tossing her head like her stick is a small rodent instead of a dead piece of wood. It snaps the same way. She picks one half to keep and continues on. The soft pad of her paws on the undergrowth barely rises higher than his own tread, breathing beside it. Familiar and constant. He’s never heard them before, but he still misses the weight that should accompany Diego’s when he follows.

“It shouldn’t be your responsibility,” Diego says, but low enough Phoenix almost doesn’t catch it through his hood. An acknowledgement, however tacit, that Diego’s said that enough about so many other things there’s hardly any meaning to the phrase.

“Shoulds and shouldn’ts are all well and good,” Phoenix says, “But that doesn’t really change what is and what isn’t.”

Diego doesn’t reply immediately. Eventually, he doesn’t reply at all, and Phoenix’s words are left to echo into the woods around them, empty but for the two of them and their dog. A world with a population of three and whatever Phoenix’s words have to bear.

It’s not supposed to be easy, but Phoenix does wish, at least sometimes, it could be simpler. Or maybe he just wishes he could wake up a child again, when the world only had to be one thing without worrying about the other, and so many… so many things hadn’t happened to him yet. Been done to him. Decided for him. It’s been difficult, to say the least, to figure out exactly what he’s feeling: this constant lurch, cold and bitter and flooding right underneath his lungs, making his heart quicken—but he can never quite trace the source.

Mia says fear. Diego says anger. Physical and knotted into his bones and muscles like a cancer. This is different. Part of him, but borne from something different, and no matter how hard he searches his body, he cannot find where it begins and he ends. In court that day, someone walked into that courtroom. Someone else did not walk back out. He’s used to being alone. No-one ever gets used to being lonely. Mia and Diego are here, for all Phoenix’s flaws, for all their own—but they don’t count in matters like this. They fight with the intention to save, lawyers to their core. The only thing Phoenix knows is how to burn up and drag whatever remains forward through the ash.

He can’t keep getting left behind.

All I’ve ever wanted, he thinks, hollow in too many places, is to steal some of his kindness. Is that what makes me a monster? Or is that what made him a demon?

He tugs his hood down, sweeping an agitated hand through his hair. He forces himself to look at the man that’s here with him now. “Listen, it—it freaked me out a little. The whole spirit medium thing. But just because I know about it now doesn’t… It doesn’t change anything, right?” It comes out a question, though he doesn’t mean it to, and he turns a little more towards Diego. “Mia’s the same person she’s always been. I don’t have to believe it.”

“She believes it. She spent half her life living it,” Diego says. His thumb rubs an absent circle around his breastbone. “She wouldn’t miss it the way she does if she didn’t.”

“But have you ever actually seen her channel anyone?”

The silence in Diego’s hesitation says everything. He fills it up with noise anyway. “She wouldn’t lie about that. Not to me. And not to you, either.”

“I’m not saying she’s lying, I just—” Another branch interrupts him, which is good because Phoenix has no idea what he just. He coughs out another collection of crisping leaves. “God, it’s not going to matter if I skewer myself in this stupid forest. Are you sure you know where you’re going?”

“I have no idea,” Diego replies lightly. “I was following you.”

Phoenix stops and stares at him.

Diego grins. “I’m joking. Stop trying to change the subject, baby boy.”

“Stop calling me that.”

“You always do it and you never say why,” Diego presses.

(“P̶͗r̷̰͘o̷̼͗m̶͚̻͝ī̴̻̩s̴͒e̷̘͛̿… ̶͎͙̈́̕m̸̧͉͒ȅ̸…”)

Phoenix lifts his feet and ignores the phantom grasp of fingers around his ankles. He feels like he’s forgetting something when he does. But he hates the way Diego hunts him sometimes. A dog spitting out shards of bone, and the only bones he has to gnaw on nowadays are Phoenix’s. Chasing and clawing like Phoenix is a witness on the stand and Diego is trying to get him to confess to a murder, and as any good lawyer will do, Diego doesn’t stop picking until the wound is bled dry. Phoenix doesn’t lie to Diego because he trusts him, because he’s a shit liar, because if he says it he’ll die but if he doesn’t he’ll be nothingnothingnothing—and also because trying to put Diego off is like trying to put out a fire with more fire.

“Ask me later,” Phoenix says, already cutting across Diego’s vicious snap of a protest. “Diego, I can’t do this right now. It’s not about us. It’s not about me. We’re here for Hammer. Can—Can we just do that and then—”

“Holy crap, do you two ever shut up?”

The speed at which Diego flickers through the foliage would be hilarious if Phoenix wasn’t currently in the middle of having a heart attack of his own. He chokes on wooden air, splinters catching the lining of his throat, forcing him to bend double to cough them back out. Murphy sits by his side consolingly, head tilted, alert, the stick still grasped loosely in her jaws. Tense, but not threatened. Phoenix has an inkling as to why from the pitch of the voice. Raising his head, blinking through his watery eyes, only confirms it.

It's not the police. It’s not Jack Hammer or the Steel Samurai. And it definitely isn’t Wendy Oldbag.

It’s a boy.

(Ocean salt. Love, and love, and love.

They can kill you all they want.

But before they were dead, they were—)

A young boy. Eight at most, a wire frame of skinny arms and boyish legs. Everything but his dark shorts is a walking advertisement for the Steel Samurai hanging off the epitome of a target demographic. There’s even a plastic katana to round out the set. A camera hangs heavy duty from his neck, the strap frayed and the lens cracked. The brim of his cap is pulled oddly low, shadowing everything from the nose up, enforcing his sharp glare and striking violence across the moonlight trying to cradle the softer lines of his face. Maybe, under different circumstances, it would also hide the colour of his eyes.

But it isn’t, and it doesn’t.

And they’re white.

“Hello,” Phoenix says, only a little bit of a croak, forcing it steady even as his blood dries and crumbles inside his veins. “I’m Phoenix.”

“Did I ask?” the boy snaps.

“No. But it’s rude to talk to someone without introducing yourself properly.” The boy crosses his arms, glare thinning to white strips beneath the brim, but he doesn’t dispute it. Phoenix pats Murphy’s head. “This is Murphy. And the asshole behind me is Diego.”

That earns him a jab somewhere in the region of his kidneys—one of the weirder places to be poked, though Phoenix absolutely doesn’t squeak, thank you—and a scoff from the boy.

“Whatever you say, baby boy.”

Diego barks out a laugh loud enough to make Murphy drop her stick. Phoenix shoots him a furiously burning look. “Do you see what you keep doing?” he hisses. He fumbles his hood up over his head again, certain his ears are hot enough to light the entire forest. “Stop making it a thing. It’s not going to be a thing.”

“Ha, still waiting to hear your name, hill hopper,” Diego says. He ignores Phoenix entirely, squatting down to the boy’s level.

Phoenix is absolutely going to kill him one of these days.

“None of your business, old man,” the boy snaps, and okay, maybe Phoenix likes someone here other than his dog after all.

“Great, we all have names now,” Phoenix says, talking over Diego’s hacking protests. “So, care to explain why you’re hanging around the woods in the middle of the night?”

“I should be asking you that,” the boy says in a manner Phoenix would haughty if it wasn’t in the hands of a tiny child. Certainly with far more spunk and flare and surety than Phoenix could muster at that age. “You’re not supposed to be here.”

There’s another tell me something I don’t know. Phoenix hums and tilts his head, considering. Hoping his swallow is hidden in the fabric of his hood, the sight and the sound as it rolls down his throat, sticky, leaving him with that old, dull ache.

He always hates finding children. However much he feels like one, wishes to be one (little more than a creature of want, a boy playing dress up), he knows there are too many parts of him that have expanded and grown. A boy left alone, forced to grow beyond the meagre reaches of his skin, is time sped up. The man he’s supposed to be, appears to be, should be—that is a vivisection. Where he doesn’t fit inside his skin, time floods in the gaps, replacing him with pieces he doesn’t remember choosing to keep and even less how to throw away. Perhaps they killed him, broke him unfixable—but the jagged edges that tore him apart are still the perfect shape to fill the empty spaces the tearing left behind.

He lets out a slow breath, unconsciously rubbing away the phantom press of pressure around his right eye. Whatever he is, the ghost of a child is different. That is dissection. That is something taken. You don’t get better from being dead. They’re frozen, unable to grow into anything more, to fully understand being given more, and it’s unfair. It’s unfair.

All Phoenix knows to do is refuse to take anything more from them. He won’t turn away, won’t abandon their whims or wants, no matter how little time they last. No matter how rarely it’s enough.

And he will not lie to them.

“We’re here to see the Steel Samurai,” he says.

At once, the boy reaches for his plastic katana, eyes flashing against the dark. “I knew it,” he hisses. Murphy startles to her feet, Diego swiftly following. The next moment, the boy’s katana catches in his awkward hold and he nearly falls trying to tug it free of its sheath. Phoenix, Diego and Murphy stare. The boy lets out a yowl of frustration. “I won’t let you!”

“Easy, kid,” Diego says, hands raised in placation even as he subtly shifts himself to stand in front of Phoenix and Murphy. “Nobody’s looking to start a war.”

“I’m not a kid!” the kid yells, giving up on his sword with a violent huff. “I’m Cody!”

Phoenix kneels down to soothe Murphy, taking his own comfort in the feel of her fur and warmth filling his palm. She turns and licks his cheek, once, twice, then lets out a guttural whine through a yawn right against his skin. The sound catches Cody’s attention, stopping him in place, and she shakes out her fur before turning to watch him again. He’s agitated and rippling at his edges, but Phoenix has found children rarely echo the thing that killed them the way adults do.

“Cody,” Phoenix says, waiting for Cody’s eyes to turn to him. “We’re not here to hurt him. We just want to talk to him.”

Cody kicks at the ground, squeezing his camera strap. Not so much angry as awkward and unsure, and with little idea of what to do about it. “He won’t talk to you,” he says, bitter enough it sounds like he’s talking from experience. “There’s something… not right with him.”

“He can join the club,” Diego mutters.

“That’s why we want to talk to him,” Phoenix says. “Maybe if we talk to him, we can work out how to help him.” He leans a little lower down, trying to catch the underside of Cody’s brim and look at him properly. “Is that okay with you?”

“Would it matter if it wasn’t?” Cody challenges.

“Yeah,” Phoenix replies. “It would.”

Cody narrows his eyes and looks Phoenix up and down. There’s something tentative about it, like he’s expecting Phoenix to disappear or suddenly change into something else. It’s not fear, not a flinch, but Phoenix has to wonder about a boy who, when faced with the choice to go anywhere, but with nowhere left to go, did not go home. Instead, he went searching for a hero.

The question is: for what?

Slowly, as if pulling the realisation up from beneath the dirt, Cody says, “You aren’t dead.”

Phoenix wilts a little further, pressing deeper into Murphy’s side. “No,” he agrees. “I’m trying not to be.”

“You’re in the wrong place for that then.” Cody folds his arms again, turning his assessing gaze to Diego, to Murphy, and finally to the ground. “He’s the Steel Samurai. He’ll break you in half. He eats puny little guys like you for breakfast.”

“Yeah, I’m used to that,” Phoenix says, and does his best not to make it into a sigh as his scars prickle with the intent to burn.

He looks up when Diego snorts, meeting his tired gaze. Dim and dark and angry. They’ve seen each other at their worst so many times by now, and every day Phoenix pushes the limits, giving Diego more and more reasons to leave, unsure if the only reason why he hasn’t is loyalty or stubbornness. Both of them choke on the words I love you. But not all dark places need light. And the truth is, despite having done it far longer, he no longer remembers how to do this without Diego there too.

“We’re going?” he asks quietly.

Diego tightens his lips, and maybe his heart beating behind them, a sigh breaking free as he tugs the length of his tie. At the last second, he turns away. “Yeah,” he says, fragile everywhere that isn’t a low, rumbling growl. “Let’s go.”

Phoenix feels it as soon as he steps into Studio Two.

Nothing so mundane as cold. It’s the middle of the night in October—it’s already cold. This crawls under his skin, piercing, pressing as nails would, scraping right down to the bone. He can feel it stinging in the roots of his teeth, tightening around his neck, shards dug into the thin meat of his lungs. A pressure that wraps around his skull and bubbles like water curling over his fists. He breathes out a piece of ragged air, watching it cloud silvery and light. Behind it, the shadows stand to attention.

There is no wind, and yet there’s a whisper of something, swish, swish, swishing out of sight. When he steps forward, the dirt is ice-cold and furious beneath his heels. Murphy hints at a growl, ears flat and paws in danger of entangling his legs from how closely she presses against them. He touches her head with his fingertips, keeping her beside him as he shifts his feet free and flexes against the freezing weight inside his knees.

“Hello?” he calls, soft enough to hide the shake in it. The cold, the dark. He can make out little but the outline of a trailer, every other shape deformed and unfamiliar in the gloom. Still, silent and dead.

Somewhere behind him is Cody, holding back despite every furious insistence he isn’t afraid, and Phoenix is glad. It’s hard enough doing this by himself, with Diego, with Murphy. He doesn’t need the ghost of a boy following him outside of his own dreams.

This is how it goes: Diego steps forward before Phoenix musters the courage to take the next one. He’s raised and untouchable, eyes sharply scanning as he prowls towards the noise, and though it’s been proven time and time again that nothing living nor dead can touch him, Phoenix still has to stamp down on the urge to tell him wait, to say come back, to repeat, I don’t want to see you get hurt, it’s okay, I’m used to it.

“Hammer,” Diego says, a single spark away from a snap. He tries, Phoenix knows he does, but he can never quite stop the anger when he’s afraid, can’t let go of the last thing that makes him feel real. It won’t help. Phoenix doesn’t blame him—but it’ll still only make things worse.

This is how it always goes: Phoenix manages a last breath, and there is nothing there, and then there is something there, a flash of steel and noise and fury. Phoenix barely has time to register it before he’s being shoved. The stars wheel out of sight. His back hits a wall, an impossibly solid weight barred against his chest, crushing into his collarbones, and Phoenix jerks before he can make himself go limp, and Murphy’s barking and Diego’s yelling and—

Hammer

grabs

his

arm.

And here it is, all at once, like the crash of a wave, like being dropped into a river. There’s the shock of the fall and the ripping at his skin and the cold the cold the cold, the burn that follows, the core of him wrenching against the thick fingers latched around his forearm, curling so deep inside there’s nothing he can do to protect himself from it, only feel the icy grip right in the middle of who he is. A sharp split stabbing through his back—like Valerie—but other things too, like Swallow, like Nicholas (the warehouse the warehouse), like the entire world is screaming at him, tearing strips out of him, reaching for parts of him that shouldn’t be touched (the alley), howling to chew, to swallow, to eat (the basement) and—

It's ugly want, angry want, pictures of himself in ways he has to tear out. Violent pictures and bloody pictures and look at me you fucking bitch and Phoenix looks even though he doesn’t mean to, because sometimes he gets caught off-guard and can’t do anything but answer.

The Steel Samurai bears down on him, one hand holding the spear across his chest and the other yanking his arm up, away, the mask a blank visage leaning closer even as a scream builds in the base of Phoenix’s throat, a scream that doesn’t belong to him, was never his, didn’t cut off choking on its own blood and pain. The dizzying miasma of Hammer’s last thoughts and every thought after, and it wasn’t—it isn’t scared, but it hurts and he wants it to stop, he’ll do anything to make it stop, he’ll even—

And there are no eyes behind the mask.

Just darkness.

And Phoenix has seen this before, but—

(G̵ī̴̪̤͖͙̬̑̃̈́͗̇̏͠ͅv̶è̵͗̎̕ ̴̡̛̖̯̫̈́̓̀͌͑͒i̸̔͐̑͘t̶̩̑̀̑̈́̕ͅ ̴͗b̸̛̳̺̠̓͒͑̄͌̿͋͒̚͝á̴c̸͗͗͂̿͆k̴͑͗)

It isn’t the same—

It isn’t—

It’s just—just dark—

(But it was dark then, too, wasn’t it? And no matter what, they were all still—)

And Phoenix yanks at the fire, holds it tight enough to sear it into every part of him, and he shoves the ghost back right as Murphy leaps in with a snarl that’s more like a roar. Her teeth catch the moon as she takes lunging bites at Hammer’s ankles that don’t touch but still make him flicker back, and here’s Diego too, the spitting raging noise of him, words Phoenix feels more than hears, lights he tastes more than sees. It takes several terrifying seconds before he can force air into lungs that have forgotten how to work, but he does do it, leaning over the sharp pain still soaring through his back right through to his chest, the newer pain lancing across his collarbones and splintering up his arm.

“Stop it,” Phoenix rasps, still clinging to the steadily burning core of himself, tempering his voice into nothing but a shape of sound. He immolates every feeling, every sensation, building only the words. “You’re scaring my dog.”

The Steel Samurai looks at him, too tall for itself, the spear’s end planted in the ground and the tip slicing up towards the sky. It looks at him. Hammer looks at him. Nothing looks at him, because how can you have a thing that stares back at you without a face? Without even the memory of life to make it seem like it’s human? Like it was never an alive thing in the first place.

But that isn’t the truth and the evidence of it is blackening and bluing beneath Phoenix’s sleeve, sending his fingers into spasms, the tender nerves of his palm lighting up so much he can almost see the colours in the corners of his vision. He curls his arm to his chest, hiding the motion behind a tug at the collar of his hoodie, still breathing against the weight sucked into his chest. The—the thing that never did(n’t) kill him. That isn’t, couldn’t, hadn’t had to have been him.

Phoenix, he thinks against the words that aren’t, wasn’t, couldn’t be part of him. He thinks it and coughs as his breath catches on something he thinks he can remember a sob feeling like. He holds onto his neck and stops his nails scratching at his skin and makes himself feel the dirty weight of his body. I’m Phoenix I’m Phoenix I’m—

Diego plants himself in front, close enough Phoenix could reach out and touch him, and Murphy presses at his thigh, still growling, and Phoenix doesn’t try to move closer to the—to Hammer. What maybe once was Hammer.

Yeah. Maybe it is a little like the warehouse.

“We want to talk to you,” Phoenix says, still calm, still even, blinking past the feverish heat swelling behind his eyes, saturating down under his skin. Breathe. Breathe. That’s—yes, that’s his heart, wild and furious where it beats in his arms and chest and throat. “Hammer, right? Jack Hammer?”

Hammer shifts, spreading his feet a little further apart, and Diego snarls a shredded, “Don’t,” but doesn’t say anything more—despite how badly he obviously wants to. It doesn’t work like that. Diego can talk to them; he can rage and disparage and convince them the way they’re human. But he doesn’t draw them the way Phoenix does.

Monster meet monster. The mask Hammer’s wearing doesn’t twitch away from Phoenix for a moment.

“You’re not the bitch I’m looking for,” Hammer says, and Phoenix’s hand is at his ear before he can stop it, teeth grating back and forth, chewing at the noise. Murphy’s growls almost become a yelp. “Where is she?”

“She?” Phoenix asks.

The spear tip hits his jugular. He nearly knocks himself out against the wall when he flinches back. Metal seeps into his pulse.

Diego, speared through his breastbone, impales himself deeper. “Try it,” he whispers, and the mask tilts down to meet him. “Watch what it makes me.”

“Stop,” Phoenix says—to Diego and Hammer both. “Please? We’re trying to help you. I know he’s kind of being an asshole about it but he’s like that with everything. Seriously. But if you actually piss him off too much, I won’t be able to stop him.”

“Why should that matter to me?” Hammer asks, the suit’s black, empty eyes peering through Diego. “It can’t be anything worse than what already is.”

“Cool,” Phoenix replies. “I still don’t know who you’re talking about. Who’s ‘she?’”

“Don’t play dumb,” Hammer hisses. It pops against the air like white noise. Scrapes down the length of Phoenix’s neck. He tries to press himself tighter against the wall, but there’s nowhere else to go. “I recognise a mutt when I see one. Tell me where she is.”

“I-I can only do that if you tell me who you’re talking about,” Phoenix says, breathless. He swallows against the sharp edge of metal. Shuts his eyes as shivers crawl down his spine, then forces them back open. Before he can really think through how stupid it is, he grabs the handle, right beneath the blade, and pushes it away from his skin. “And I can’t tell you if I’m dead.”

(This boy, Death says. It’s the only one who’s laughing.)

There’s a second, or maybe a minute, or maybe an hour of tense, muted silence. Diego is still hunched forward, ready to let himself dissolve and crackle and break, and Murphy is still curled in front of his knees, all the soft parts of her turned vicious and violent. Sweat drips between the creases of Phoenix fingers, sweltering and freezing in equal measure. He holds the spear tight enough his knuckles ache. Blinks wet and stars from his eyes.

Finally, with a noise like a spurt of blood, Hammer drags the spear back to his side. Phoenix shudders and squints, but the mask remains as blank as ever. It may as well be a bottomless pit.

Phoenix might as well be the bottomless pit.

“If you don’t already know, you’re worthless to me,” Hammer says. He turns away. He walks with a noise like swish, drag. Swish, drag. “Leave before I change my mind.”

“Wait,” Phoenix tries, pushing himself away from the wall—

But Hammer’s already gone.

It’s only when he’s cycling home that Phoenix remembers what Mia told him and Maya days before. He makes it back to his apartment and staggers inside. Pulls out his laptop and half-collapses on the floor, Murphy crawling onto his crossed legs. She pants all over the keyboard and his aching eyes make mincemeat out of the screen. It takes a few tries and mostly Diego’s suggestions before he finds what he’s looking for.

A hit-and-run outside Global Studios. No name, only mention of an eight-year-old boy. The person responsible found and jailed and awaiting sentencing.

Phoenix shuts his laptop and has to use the wall to drag himself back to his feet. Murphy circles his knees. He sways in place, his brain doing some circling of its own. The fire that carried him this far has dwindled to a sputtering slew of sparks, a different kind of heat flooding in to take its place. His shirt and jeans are drenched, sticking to him. Diego touches through the back of his neck and Phoenix is surprised neither of them melt. His back is aching, his chest roiling like something wants to burst from the inside out, and the pit has eaten its way into his stomach, leaving him feeling hollow and small.

“He wasn’t scared,” Phoenix mumbles. He nearly chokes on the saliva flooding his mouth, sweet and acidic.

“You’re going to have to expand on that one, pup,” Diego says, or maybe Phoenix just thinks he does, or expects him to so much he makes it up himself, because otherwise it’s said so quietly Phoenix has no idea how he’d ever hear it above the ringing in his ears. Like the screech of a bird, black bloody feathers trailing across the floor. Like the howling the sun makes amidst all that void and fire. Like the roar of an ocean.

(After a while, there’s a comfort in pain, a familiarity to it. There doesn’t have to be a way in or a way out; it’s over, it’s happened. And if it’s referring to his grief, that’s just a thing. The shape of a stain, or a bullet. It’s just a thing, cutting another notch beside the others on the bones in his chest. He’s so used to breathing through the ache that he can barely recall what it is to be without it anymore.

Isn’t it better to think he temporarily died than to think he kept on living and can’t remember a thing? He’s filled with ghosts, but he’s not one himself, after all. He breathes, he eats, he walks. But we are able to bury things so deep we no longer remember there was anything to bury.

The body remembers.

You do not.)

“Hammer wasn’t scared,” Phoenix says, remembering, forgetting, a stranger in his own skin. “He was angry.”

Then he pushes away from Diego and Murphy, stumbles into the bathroom, and just barely makes it to the toilet before he throws up.

Maya knows something is up.

Phoenix would like to tell her nothing is up. In fact, everything is completely, boringly normal: his stomach is in tatters, he’s slowly losing feeling in both his feet (these stupid Oxfords-or-whatever), there’s a bruise in the shape of a handprint on his arm, and there’s a weird line of tender skin slapped above his sternum he doesn’t really know what to do with. The noise is making his head pound and the light is kind of killing him behind the eyes—but none of it new. He stuck a cooling pad to his chest, the crinkling edges following the phantom line of the spear like it’s tracing paper, and another to his back for good measure. The fever will keep simmering, but he’ll be upright for the trial, and that’s really all that matters.

Now he just needs to not vomit on any evidence and everything will be perfect.

“It’s a shame people keep ruining your pointing arm,” Diego says, lounging over the defence bench like he’s about to take a nap on it. “After all that practice you did with it, too.”

Phoenix smiles faintly, more for Diego’s sake than anything else. He feels oddly out of practice with the full spread of his mouth, like plastic stuck across his skin, and it makes it uncomfortably warm to breathe. It isn’t… true, exactly. It’s—not exactly not true, either.

All emotions are physical. Even if they didn’t start with him. Don’t belong to him. Were never not meant to live in the same world as him.

He lets his gaze meander around the room, trying to stop his eyes from closing into his exhaustion. There’s a weird shimmery quality to the light he’s mostly sure isn’t real, and it makes the skylights seem more like targeted spotlights; the spectators in the gallery, Will Powers trying to make himself invisible in the defendant’s dock, the empty chair waiting for the judge: players on a stage standing to their marks, waiting to say their lines. The colours float and slide and fade. Dim-lit and over filtered.

Except, obviously, always, for Edgeworth. The silvery light of his eyes. The lurid red of his suit. Clouds shifting across the moon and the rising swell of dawn that follows. Phoenix has to limit himself to the occasional glance before he does something stupid like stand there staring with his mouth open.

It… might’ve been a bad idea. To go exercising for an exorcism the night before a trial. Wasn’t he just think he’d hate being an actor? He’s a terrible liar. Forget the sweat; he must stink of guilt.

“Nick?” Maya murmurs, tentative, her fingers brushing against his where they rest on the bench. “I know I already asked, but… are you sure you’re okay?”

She definitely knows something’s up. Hell, Edgeworth knows something up, unless he’s just staring at Phoenix like he’s trying to set him on fire with his mind for fun or something. Gregory keeps sending his own glances, as if he wants to try the more normal route of coming over and just asking, but Diego keeps stealing his way into the dead man’s eyeline with a grin and a wink. Phoenix doesn’t ask him to stop.

For Maya, though, it takes him a while to come up with an answer. The funny thing is, he can remember feeling a little like this before his first competition, and there hadn’t been a ghost anywhere near him. Larry sat with him in the bathroom after he’d thrown up on the bus on the way to the venue, and somehow managed to make it seem a little less like Phoenix had to die of shame and asked more or less the same thing.

You run better than any of them. What’s there to not be okay about?

He didn’t have an answer then, either, because it’s not—it’s not like he’s not okay. He didn’t get stabbed through the throat, and he didn’t get skewered through the back, and there’s nerves, sure, his adrenal glands are working overtime, he can’t say he’s not nervous, but he’s standing here. And that means he’s okay. Not being okay means not facing Edgeworth, and there’s been very, very few—not many, but admittedly some—times he’d turn away from that.

(But there is something about it. Something about I can’t say I see much else of worth. Something about why a defence attorney, of all things? Something about not all of us have Mia Fey waiting to swoop in and save us. Powers is the most important thing, Phoenix isn’t going to let himself forget that, and if it comes to it, if Diego or Mia feel the need, Phoenix won’t ever hesitate to take their hands.

But winning. But law. But—

I always get my guilty verdict.

Miles.

He just—

He doesn’t want it to be over yet. He doesn’t want to it to be gone when he’s only just getting started.)

“D’you think they’ll postpone the trial if I piss myself?” he mutters, and he’s only half-joking. All that sugar in the three cups of coffee he downed has reformed into a ball of pressure in his belly that means he’ll have to pee the entire time.

“It’d be one hell of an opening statement,” Diego muses while Maya muffles a startled laugh behind her hand. “Go in there. Establish dominance.”

“I have no idea if that’s a yes or a no,” Maya says.

Phoenix shrugs.

Being completely honest, Phoenix isn’t entirely sure how it happened that Maya is standing at the bench with him. Maybe a month ago he would’ve felt self-conscious about having a teenager at his side (Edgeworth’s raised eyebrow at the sight is still smouldering hotly against the back of his ears, certainly), but for Maya’s sake, if nothing else, he refuses to duck his head about it.

It’s another thing he’s had plenty of practice at. Being a teenager in the foster system isn’t rare, nor is aging out of it, and there are always new kids coming in. Eventually, being the oldest becomes a given. You set an example, even if you don’t mean to, one foster parent told him. He’d had a hand in an ice bucket while he tried not to poke at his swollen eye with the other. Whatever you do is going to reflect down to them. Can’t you at least try?

And Phoenix isn’t—he’s still not really sure? How the whole thing is supposed to work? The Butz boys make it seem like the best and worst thing in the world, and Diego makes it seem like the easiest and hardest thing in the world. It means being trampled on and stolen from and crammed into spaces you’d never think you’d fit, and it means being loud otherwise getting talked over, and it means someone always hovering over you, always there, even if you hate them for it. But that’s being a little brother. Being a big brother is just as many different things, but for a great deal of time, it mainly seems to mean this: he gets to the office first thing in the morning and thinks, Okay, we’ve got to get some sunlight in here. Then, We have to cram as much court procedure policy into Maya’s head as possible so nobody can put her down. Then, We should buy her lunch from that ramen place she likes, it’ll cheer her up.

The ‘we’ part kind of happens on its own. You can’t carry all the things you need for this when you’re only one person.

He’s not complaining about it, though. He actually kind of likes it. Trusting himself isn’t something he does very often, but he finds it’s easier to try when he notices other people do—trust him, that is. Be it Larry asking for advice about a girl; Maya asking him to walk her to the train station; Mia telling him to wake her up in five minutes; Diego keeping quiet while a dead man points a literal spear at his throat.

But Phoenix digresses. The fact of the matter is, Maya is here, vibrating with energy and barely able to hold it all still as the judge finally takes the stage.

She nudges him when Detective Dick Gumshoe is called to the stand and whispers, “I knew it was something weird like that.” She traces out the path on the guide map with one of his pencils as the detective explains the timeline of the murder. She audibly winces when Wendy Oldbag is called to the stand. And it’s something of a miracle she manages to contain her amusement when Oldbag’s first act as a murder witness is to take one look at Edgeworth and exclaim, “My, aren’t you a handsome fellow!”

Phoenix watches Edgeworth sputter, mostly bemused. Gregory raises his head as if praying for strength, though god knows what for. It’s not like he’s the one who’s going to have to cross-examine her. If she ever manages to give her name, anyway.

“C’mon,” Phoenix says, elbowing Maya when one of her giggles sneaks past her ferociously pursed lips. “We’re in court—”

“Just call me ‘grandma!’” Oldbag says, dusted in icing sugar.

Phoenix nearly chokes on his own spit.

“You’re laughing too!” Maya hisses, elbowing him back for good measure. “Better to be laughing than scared, right?”

And Phoenix, for a second, sort of feels like he’s falling again. His stomach lurches and his chest goes tight, and he grips the desk hard enough to feel the grain of the wood in each pore, wondering how he jumped without his feet ever leaving the ground. He’s weightless, exposed, and Maya doesn’t notice a thing, because Oldbag’s rambling on and Edgeworth’s ringing out an objection to his own witness, and all Phoenix can think is oh, here we are. Here I am.

(Go on then, boy.

One more step.

One more time.)

After they’ve fought through the whole rigmarole of the photo, the costume, Powers’ injury, the second photo (or first, technically), Maya asks, “Does Edgeworth seem different to you?”

Phoenix, at that moment, is more concerned with who the hell set off the camera before Hammer did. He knows emphatically that neither the camera nor Oldbag could have seen Cody, but they can’t both be lying. Maybe there’s no evidence to prove it, nothing tangible other than Phoenix himself, and maybe he should be spending more time sorting out Power’s verdict, it’s just—it feels important. It feels like something he’s supposed to remember.

For the second time, Maya knocks him back on track. Edgeworth does seem a little mellower. Phoenix isn’t so stupid as to think it’s anything to do with him, and it’s definitely not like Edgeworth is going easy on him. More like if Phoenix asked, for once, he might actually stop and listen.

Phoenix wants to hold onto it, such a thin sliver of time, but the tighter he squeezes, the quicker it slips through his fingers. He’d kneel to catch it. He’d dig up the earth and find the life he knows once grew there. This hand is his hand. He could’ve found a different way, but now it’s too late. He could’ve started better, but there’s too many other things he needs to do.

So, for lack of any other way to ask for it, he accuses Oldbag.

(Hammer did say she, didn’t he?)

Next to him, Maya’s hand catches the sagging end of his jacket. She hasn’t shifted or given up an inch the entire time they’ve fought to here. And she’s tired. It always takes more than you’d think, just to keep on standing up. “Are you sure about this, Nick?” she whispers, casting a quick glance towards Powers. “The way she talks about Jack Hammer… I really don’t think she did this. Isn’t Edgeworth going to jump all over it?”

Phoenix hears what she’s really asking. He could draw it out Diego’s mouth with the way the man’s gaze hovers on him. And they are asking, when he tries to do you harm, will you let him? If he is on one side, will you put yourself on the other, knowing what it means?

“No,” Phoenix breathes. “That isn’t what’s going to happen.”

This is how it goes, finally: another day stretching out like a mirage in front of them. A director and a producer leading forward to something even less defined. And Edgeworth, standing across, waiting to meet him in the middle. However many times it takes.

Embers relight inside his marrow. Smoke tickles the back of his nose.

It’s a small moment of transcendence, the kind he only feels when he has both feet inside the court. He could do with more moments like it.

Chapter Text

Dee Vasquez has a ghost with a hole speared through his back bursting out through his chest. He’s standing right behind her.

(Death doesn’t laugh about this one, but something certainly does.

It isn’t Phoenix. In case you were curious.)

“Do you understand?” she asks.

She’s a woman of few words, her accent strange; decidedly foreign, but with too much time passed moulding itself to another language for it to be identifiable. Wherever she’s from, she hasn’t lost the habit of pronouncing each word like a taste test, barely extracted from amidst the fog-ridden tobacco she favours. Phoenix has never been great at parsing out the flavours himself—is doubtful there is a difference, truth told—but in this particular case he’s sure he isn’t imagining the thick swathe of contempt, the steaming afterbite of bitterness, and something cloyingly acrid like spilled guilt. It drips out the man’s chest in a steady flow.

Vasquez’s question refers to the mascot head that fell, blocking the path and allegedly anyone trying to make their way to Studio Two. Considering he spent half the night stumbling through the woods, emerging mostly unscathed, if smeared in moss and bruises, Phoenix isn’t inclined to write that down as incontrovertible evidence just yet.

It does give him pause for an entirely different reason, though. Hammer was the one who made it fall, but if Phoenix matches up the time the Steel Samurai passed the camera to when the damage happened, there’s little room in between. Usually it takes time for ghosts to work themselves up into such a frenzy. But if Hammer was capable of that much that quickly, he must have been furious from the get-go.

Rage doesn’t come from nowhere. It doesn’t smash through your door on a whim and break your face against the floor because it’s there and grind your broken teeth into dust because it’s something to pass the time with. Anger is built. It’s made. The amount of energy in the universe can never increase or decrease, but it seems pain and hunger and cruelty multiply like bacteria. Violence is just the seismic matter that inevitably tears it apart, leaving only devastation and a strange, familiar silence.

Phoenix glances at the ghost again, taking in the sharp slices across his arms and chest and neck, the brittle, flickering presence despite his size and solid weight. Like a film reel someone’s set aflame while it’s still running in the projector. The man is tall, dark-haired, strong-jawed and built the same as a house. A little like Will Powers if Powers had a backbone hiding under all his muscle, and the stoicism to go with it.

“He’s acting like a spoiled child,” the man says, deep and rough enough to sound like shifting earth. “He always has. He’ll rage and scream and throw things, then storm away to be by himself. Wait him out long enough and he’ll be back as meek as ever.”

“Is that so?” Diego drawls, hands tightly clenched inside his pockets. He tilts his head back and grins as if he’s about to laugh. “Is that what you think he’s become?”

It might have been true, once, when Hammer was a body and not just the ghost that came from it.

There’s a boy standing at Phoenix’s side. He shimmers at the edges. His right hand curls around Phoenix’s left, metal slipping and tumbling between their fingers. He looks up at Phoenix knowingly, his smile small and resigned. “Dog.”

“Yeah,” Phoenix finally replies, and turns to walk through the apparition. Murphy walks with him, keeping her eyes and the curl of her teeth on Vasquez as she does. Diego lingers behind. Maya has to scramble to keep up. “I think I’m starting to understand, Miss Vasquez.”

Studio Two looks a lot different in the day.

A fair amount of this can be attributed to the distinct lack of Jack Hammer looming over him ready to put a spear to his throat. Diego didn’t bother explaining exactly what he was going to do to keep Hammer occupied, though given his grin before he flickered on ahead, Phoenix can only hope Global Studios won’t suffer any more structural damage—or further cuts to its staff.

Then he checks that thought, because it’s untrue, and unfair besides. Diego is an asshole, and he’s mean, but he isn’t cruel, no matter how many times Phoenix has had to tell him that, and god knows how many times Diego’s had to tell himself. It’s easier said than done, but at the end of the day, the longer he stays using that as a shield—he’s hurt someone too badly, he was raised on it, there are so many things wrong with him—the longer he’ll put of dealing with the actual issue and fixing it. Which means becoming something different.

Hearts weight quite a lot. That’s why it takes so long to grow one. It’s only when you’ve swept away the dead leaves that you’ll be left with a garden.

“So, what exactly is it you’re starting to understand?”

Phoenix blinks back his churning thoughts and the light reflecting white off the trailer windows. At some point between them going to court and leaving, the wind started up, stealing what little warmth the autumn sun has managed to pour into the clear sky. The trees undulate and sway, their bare branches waving like innocent sticks of wood. Even with the cooling pads doing their best to hold him together, back to chest, him pressed between, every step jars his head, and the constant cold grating against his ears is turning the rustling noise into a violent cacophony.

But on they go.

Maya is still sending him uncertain glances, but he’s been doing them both a favour by studiously ignoring the fact, and she seems happy to try and hide it by using it as an excuse to snoop. She’s hovering over a small table right now, two plates left out to curdle on top. The only other things of note are the trailer sagging on its foundations like an overworked piece of flat pack furniture, and a van tucked into the corner next to a small incinerator, its windows dusty and its wheels in danger of drying up.

The whole studio is staring to remind him of those stories of ships found drifting on the ocean, their logs dutifully recorded, their tables set and their pantries full, their hull unbroken and their sails catching wind—only there’s nobody to be found on board. Places, after all, tend to reflect the people who are meant to care for them.

Without the ghosts, though, there’d be too many leaps in logic to explain away to Maya, never mind the uncomfortable lack of evidence. What was it Edgeworth said? People lie. Evidence doesn’t. Phoenix feels a prickle under his skin, adolescent and stinging. Something that wants to prove Edgeworth wrong, but doesn’t know how to do it.

How does Diego do it for him? How does Mia?

“What do you think?” he asks.

Maya blinks at him. “I have no idea. Aren’t we just back to square one?”

“We know a lot we didn’t yesterday,” Phoenix says. Realises she’s already got him saying we too, and lets it go with a sigh.

“But… do we? Really?” Maya frowns and ticks off her fingers, one-two-three-four. “We know Vasquez and the director were here. We know whoever wore the suit had to have known about WP’s ankle injury so they could fake it for the camera. We know the path was blocked for most of the afternoon. And we know… uh, we know there was a kid here. How does any of that actually help?”

Phoenix leans down to scratch Murphy behind the ear. “Mia always tells me if I get stuck on something like this, it means I need to turn my thinking around.”

“But what’s there to turn around?” Maya asks, sniffing like she might catch a clue from the leftover steak sauce.

“Think about what Vasquez told us.”

“Mr Monkey’s head fell.”

“Which means?”

“Nobody from Studio Two could have made it to Studio One and back in time to kill Hammer. And they were in a meeting, so there was even less time to do anything.” She puts her hand to her chin as she thinks, gaze tracking upward to tickle at her fringe. “Do you think she’s lying? That someone was actually at Studio One when they said they were here?”

“It’s possible,” Phoenix admits. “But it’d be easy to find them out. And that’d make it very obvious who it was, especially when the most they have on Powers is that he’s the only one without an alibi.”

Though it does raise yet another interesting question. They couldn’t have relied on the fact Powers would be asleep in his dressing room, so what exactly was their plan if he wasn’t?

He casts his gaze around, more a distant tracking of his thoughts that any attention to reality, so it takes him a moment to realise its stuck to something on the way. There’s a wrought iron fence caging a flowerbed next to the trailer, one of those looping, fancy things that’s more decoration than barrier. Unremarkable but for a bent spike, the metal beneath it warped like somebody took a hammer to it.

It’s also, in a way that troubles him, an event. Something hit the fence, or was knocked into it, or whatever happened, and the fence gave, and nobody’s seen fit to fix it since. And maybe it’s a stupid thing to feel uneasy about, especially when there are signs of neglect everywhere—rusted doors and overgrown woods and dusty windows—but those things are just time, time passing in stillness. A fence is nothing. But breaking is something that happens. Which means there was a time before the break, a time of the break, and a time after the break.

When though?

And, more importantly, why?

He opens his mouth to point it out to Maya, but she flaps a hand at him before he can utter the first syllable. “No, don’t tell me. Not yet. I want to see if I can work it out.”

He shifts his feet, swallows and nods. Murphy presses her head into his hand, standing to attention, the wind rising through her fur.

And that noise again. Swish, swish, drag.

Suddenly, he doesn’t feel much like exploring anymore.

They run into Nichols again while they’re meandering around the employee area. She doesn’t have anything new in the way of information, but she does offer them something to eat, calling it a thank you for what they’re doing for WP. She didn’t come to the trial herself, but apparently a fan in the gallery was liveblogging the whole thing on a Steel Samurai forum. There’s even a grainy photo showing the backs of several people’s heads and a tiny sliver of Powers down in the defendant’s chair captioned: the Steel Samurai himself!!!

“They’re not allowed to take photos like that, are they?” Maya asks, hushed from raw excitement as she grips Nichols’ phone hard enough to creak its casing. Considering she’s been within three feet of Powers and was at the defence bench for the whole trial, Phoenix has no idea what she’s so excited about.

“Yeah,” Nichols says with a wry smile. “That’s probably why the updates stopped right after they posted it. We all get kind of stupid over things like this though, right? It’s part of the fun. You can’t help joining in, because that’s how you feel like you belong. You want to be part of something so much bigger than just you.” She laughs a little self-consciously as she extracts her phone from Maya’s vice-like grip. “Anyway, food. You guys up for that? It’s the least I can do, really.”

Maya voices enthusiastic agreement and Phoenix—well, he’ll never find out what his reply would’ve been. Before he can decide, Diego flickers in front of him and leans right into his face with a look of such abject condemnation he keeps his mouth shut and follows the two girls without protest.

The thing is that Phoenix doesn’t feel hungry? Or, no, that’s not—not really right. He’s always hungry, and he wants to eat, every living thing wants and needs to eat, but if he isn’t actively reminded of it, he doesn’t usually notice if he’s gone a normal amount of time without having food or not. He knows it isn’t healthy. Knows the reason his hands are so bony and his collarbones are so prominent when he can have food anytime he wants is of his own lack of attention, and part of him feels bad for ignoring such abundance now when back on the streets he used to dream about eating full meals, when sometimes he felt a hunger so intense it made him dry-heave.

Diego says it’s not his fault. He’s not the first to say it. Phoenix was subjected to a whole lecture on the topic after a sudden spike in blood pressure caused him to faint in front of everyone the day after he arrived in juvie. He’d gone for too long without eating properly, so long he barely recognised it as a need to be sated, just another dull ache alongside the rest, and the moment his body had access to food, his metabolism went into overdrive. Nothing that couldn’t be fixed with time and a proper diet.

And he does try. He isn’t—he wants to be here. Wants to get better. Death doesn’t fix you. It doesn’t redeem you or unmake you. It just means you’re dead, and that’s all there is to it. As Diego says, bitterly: not everything is like something else. There is nothing like grief, just grief. There is nothing like death, just death.

Nothing like hunger either, Phoenix knows. Just hunger. Sometimes he thinks Diego guesses more than he lets on about the way ghosts affect him, even though Phoenix never says a word about it, regardless of how it leaks through body like poison. Diego would know how that feels better than anyone. But he only sits with Phoenix, pressing featherlight touches to Phoenix’s sweaty neck while Phoenix shivers on the bathroom floor and curls around Murphy. Diego treats the symptoms, knowing he can’t fix the problem.

Sometimes these things don’t get fixed. You just survive them, and eventually, maybe, you’ll survive long enough to remember you have to do something with that.

(Due diligence dictated they track down the director, Sal Manella, to get his side of the story, an experience Phoenix thinks he’ll need to wash off his skin. If there’s a redeeming quality to be found in the man, it’s buried very deep, and Phoenix isn’t the poor soul who’s going to take it upon himself to go digging. Manella is a walking example of that old conversation had with Diego about the difference between artists and successful artists: viz, nothing but luck and the right connections. Somebody at some point dropped Manella a bone, and he’s clearly been savouring it to the utmost ever since.

Savouring is also far too accurate a word. Within about fifteen seconds Manella had leaned right up to Maya, spouting something about cosplay and pink princesses, and Maya stepped back—properly this time, not like the little flinch with Edgeworth—clutching the knot of her hoodie sleeves tied around her waist. Phoenix hadn’t wasted a beat before stepping in front of her. Not that Manella seemed inclined to notice. He was far too busy muttering to himself, chewing on his thumbnail, salivating over most of the words.

It took every ounce of self-control Phoenix has not to react when Hammer flickered into place behind the man.

“Mutt,” he said.

Diego appeared only a moment later, took one look at Manella, and replied, “No fucking kidding.”

Maya’s hand pushed against Phoenix’s lower back, tangling in the fabric of his jacket, and he turned to find a peculiar expression on her face. A naked sort of disgust tinged with something like disappointment, and not entirely unlike fear. Any reassurance he wanted to give died on his tongue.

“Can we go?” she asked quietly, and they did.

Hammer didn’t follow.

Phoenix doesn’t think Manella noticed.)

Nichols has to run off to continue her job despite the dead still stop production has come to without its two main leads, so Phoenix and Maya settle on a low wall near the guard station to avoid the police scuttling to and fro. They watch like a kids TV show. Maya spreads her oversized hoodie across her legs and digs into her bao buns. Murphy swallows down some cold cuts, then curls up to take a well-earned nap on Phoenix’s lap. His stomach’s still queasy, but given Diego’s less-than-subtle glare and the fact he can’t really remember if he slept or not, he picks his way through a bruised apple, one slit of skin at a time.

“Is it because of the time the mascot head fell?” Maya asks, working out a bit of dough from between her teeth with her tongue.

“Sort of.” He finishes chewing a tiny mouthful and adds, “You’re on the right track.”

She bites thoughtfully into her final bun, painfully serious about it.

Phoenix sinks his free hand into Murphy’s scruff and thinks about bodies. How they belong to you, and how people can steal that feeling of belonging away, but they can’t stop them being yours; ours, theirs. How there’s a difference between being hungry for food and hungry for more. How he still has trouble differentiating between the two.

How he thinks, despite the pain in his back, Hammer might understand something of what he means.

“Don’t drift off too far, pup,” Diego says, bringing Phoenix back to himself in time to notice the shadow falling across him.

“Was hoping I’d run into you, pal.”

He blinks up at the detective and takes another bite of apple to try and burn off some of the fog in his brain. “Were you?” he asks wearily.

Gumshoe has got a grin on his face, though it’s not for Phoenix, unless the detective’s planning to compliment his knees. He flaps his coat from the pocket out, eliciting a crackling flurry of rustles. This reaction, thankfully, isn’t an alarming attempt at communication from the coat itself, but from what Gumshoe pulls out of it: a packet of dog treats, already open, half-empty and half-crushed.

Murphy raises her head, immediately alert.

Maya does the same, doubtfully for the same reason. “You just carry dog treats around with you?” she asks, nonplussed.

“I go down by the K-9 unit sometimes,” Gumshoe explains as he crouches down to Murphy’s level. “Most handlers take their dogs home with them, but there are always a few kept in the kennels. I think they like the company.” He shakes a few bite-sized biscuits into his hand and pauses. “Are these alright for her? She doesn’t have any allergies or anything?”

“Yes. And no.” Phoenix digs a knuckle into his eye before holding out the same hand, wiggling his fingers when Gumshoe hesitates. “She won’t take them from you. She doesn’t take food from people she doesn’t know.”

Gumshoe’s expression loses some of its buoyancy, but he only says, “Clever girl.”

“She’s taught by example,” Diego mutters. Murphy’s tail wags as she licks up Phoenix’s palm, more for the sound of Diego’s voice than genuine understanding of the English language, but the bent line of his mouth still softens.

Phoenix tilts him a small smile. To Gumshoe, he tilts a question. “Is that what you wanted to see me for?”

“Nah, just an added bonus.” Gumshoe stuffs his hand into a different coat pocket, another crinkle of plastic heralding not treats, but an evidence bag. He offers it to Phoenix the same way he offered Murphy the biscuits. “Take a look at that.”

There’s enough earnest cheer about the move that Phoenix feels another bite of trouble nipping at his insides. He drops the apple into his own pocket to better examine the contents through the plastic sheen with both hands, holding it up for Maya and, more crucially, Diego to see. “Sleeping pills?”

“Same kind found in Hammer’s toxicology,” Gumshoe confirms. “Turns out he’d been prescribed them a couple weeks back.”

Phoenix will take his word for it. He scanned the autopsy report enough to ascertain Hammer had definitely been on the spine-tingling end of something sharp—predominantly ruling out suicide, unless the man had gotten the very wrong end of the stick about how seppuku is performed—then put it aside. Holding the oversight in his hands does a fair job of injecting some alertness to his brain, not least because of the stinging edge of embarrassment starting a fight with the cold already gnawing at his ears. He can only sit there and hope the latter’s done a good enough job to disguise the new source of increased blood flow so he doesn’t have to deal with the detective’s condescending grin (and by proxy, who he reports to).

While he’s busy with that though, Maya’s thoughts have clearly been on a much more relevant line of attack. “Wait, but WP said he was sleeping in his dressing room.”

“Says he was,” Gumshoe replies. “Hammer’s a big guy. Powers could’ve found out and slipped him a couple extra, just to make sure he had the upper hand, and gave himself the idea for his so-called alibi at the same time. We find the right prints on this thing, or the wrong ones, I guess, from your side, and that’ll be the end of it, pal.”

“Sleeping pills could still show up in the body if Powers had some, depending on the type,” Diego says.

“We’ve got the tests already running on him,” Gumshoe says once Phoenix repeats the sentiment. “Not that we’re likely to find anything. Powers himself said he didn’t take any, so save yourselves asking him.”

“Maybe someone slipped them to WP without him knowing,” Maya insists.

Gumshoe shrugs. “Sure. Maybe.” He grins at her. “But who? And why?”

“Obviously to—to…” Maya flounders for a few seconds, hands twisting into her hoodie as the excitement starts to fade. “Um… well, to knock him out.”

“And then what?” When Maya fails to respond, Gumshoe chuckles, the patronising effect offset slightly by the fact he pushes himself upright as he does so. But it’s still very close. “Keep thinking on it. You remind me a lot of your sister, ya know that?”

“You don’t have to keep trying to be nice,” Maya grumbles, swiping imaginary crumbs from her hoodie before pulling it over her head.

“I’m naturally nice,” Gumshoe protests.

“No, she raises a good point.” Phoenix ignores Maya’s startled glance and holds up the evidence bag. “Why are you showing us this?”

“Same as before, pal,” Gumshoe says, taking the bag back with a nod of acknowledgement. The coat swallows it greedily. “Keeping you on an even starting line.”

“You know that’s not how it works, right?”

From the guileless look on the detective’s face, it seems that no, Gumshoe doesn’t actually know that. Why would he? As far as he’s concerned, the starting line is to do with as he pleases; shift it forward so Phoenix is exhausted by the time he makes it there or yank it back and scream foul at him for trying to cheat his way ahead. Gumshoe probably wouldn’t. But he could. And everyone will still walk into that courtroom expecting Phoenix to do twice as much as everyone else, and he’ll have to do twice as much as that to even have a chance at running at all.

Phoenix isn’t stupid. It’s good to be underestimated sometimes, because it’s easy to break people’s expectations of you when they aren’t very high. It was fun once, seeing people be impressed by what he could do. The fact he could win a race rather than just run one, that he could make someone feel something rather than just draw, that he could fight back with just as much as he got battered into him. But the second he loses, it’s always the same: it couldn’t be helped. What did he expect? Boys like that don’t win. It was brave of him to try though.

Bravery has nothing to do with it. You have to be scared to be brave. And Mia and Diego are all the proof he’s ever needed that in the right place, at the right time, the courtroom is nothing to be scared of. Defence attorneys can win. It’s just harder.

They’re always going to have to put in double the amount of work. That means he can’t just be good at one thing. Sure, he can talk to dead people. So what? Edgeworth doesn’t need to talk to dead people, he’s already spent the last four years leading cases and he has all the eloquent intelligence it takes to not only look completely at home behind the bench, but to make people care when he talks. His mentor-guardian-whatever—von Karma has exactly the same, and he’s been doing it for forty years and he’s never lost.

Against that, what use is Phoenix supposed to bring to the courtroom?

More than anyone, defence attorneys have to know how to do everything. Or they don’t even get to stand there at all.

“Do you know Manfred von Karma?”

Gumshoe raises an eyebrow at the non-sequitur, but, like a certain chief prosecutor, is unable to resist taking the bait. “Who doesn’t?”

“Me,” Maya pipes up. “Who’s Manfred von Karma?”

“He’s a prosecutor. Best in the country,” Gumshoe says, thankfully ignorant of Diego’s pointed snort and therefore a little unbalanced when Murphy sits up from Phoenix’s legs and yawns out an answering growl. “And he mentored Mr Edgeworth. Pretty much raised him, actually.” His fingers drift up towards the cigarette tipping precariously on his ear, as if sensing he might need the nicotine hit any second, but he only scratches the side of his head. “What about him, pal?”

“It’s just funny,” Phoenix says, calming his fingers through Murphy’s fur, “That Edgeworth loses once and suddenly everyone’s trying to work out exactly what’s wrong with me, but von Karma wins for forty years and nobody stops to think there’s something wrong with that.”

Wind tickles the back of his neck almost like a warning sigh as Gumshoe’s expression flickers from confusion to wariness. So many shades of brown. They trigger something inside him: a sudden surge in his stomach. He takes the apple back out his pocket and sinks his teeth in, never taking his eyes away from the pair of flintlocks sighted on him, pupils two small bullet holes. Clashing sparks. For the second time it strikes him—not with the force of a bullet, but an impact all the same—that the detective may be somewhat bumbling, but it doesn’t take a sharpshooter to hit a mark. It only takes the resolve to pull the trigger.

“What exactly are you trying to get at?” Gumshoe asks in a dangerously low timbre. His coat seems to expand, puffing up in response to his tightened shoulders.

Too late to turn around now.

Only—Maya grabs Phoenix’s arm and nearly shakes him out his skin, breaking his line of sight and cutting off his reply. She’s on her feet in the next moment, dragging him most of the way with her, and it’s only Diego’s pre-emptive chuckle on his other side that clues him in on the fact it’s not Gumshoe she’s alarmed about.

“We reap what we sow,” Diego says in his usual, infuriatingly philosophical way, finishing the last breath of it just as—

“Whippersnappers!”

“Oh no,” Phoenix mutters. It echoes outside his own mouth, and he’s startled to find the same dread paling Gumshoe’s face. “What are you so worried about?” he hisses. “You’re not the one who accused her of murder.”

“You’re not the one who had to try and fit her into a spare Steel Samurai costume,” Gumshoe replies hollowly.

“You’re as bad as each other,” Oldbag snaps, thrusting a bony finger into Phoenix’s face, forcing Maya to dodge and duck behind Murphy to avoid the shrapnel of her elbow. Murphy blinks bemusedly. “Thinking a sweet old lady like me could wear a giant suit like that. I suppose you think I was wearing stilts and doing somersaults while I was at it!”

“Um,” Phoenix says, leaning as far back on his heels as gravity will allow. Never mind samurai spears—this lady’s a deadly weapon in her own right.

“Don’t flap your lips at me, boy. I never forget a slight or an insult. You’re lucky you still get to walk around this place after that underhanded trick you pulled just to get Powers off the hook. Don’t think I don’t see what you were doing. Years I’ve put into this place. Years! As if we didn’t have enough brats infesting the place without one of you stitching me up as a scapegoat. And to Jack’s murder! I would never. Never, do you hear me?” she demands, panting enough by the end Phoenix has no idea whether to risk responding or hunker down in preparation for the thrilling second part of her tirade.

Gumshoe makes the decision for him, though his choice to intervene lends about as much credence to his self-preservation skills as Phoenix’s. “Miss Oldbag—”

“And you!” She rounds on him next, finger flying with unerring accuracy to poise itself an inch from the detective’s nose. “All of you, scrabbling around uselessly, upending and upturning everything in sight, missing the obvious right under your noses! C’mon then, where is he? Don’t tell me you didn’t see him dashing off in this direction. And you call yourself a detective, no wonder we’re all having to suffer through this ridiculous trial if you’re leading the charge—”

“Whoa, whoa, slow down. Who are you talking about?” Gumshoe asks, wide-eyed on the fingernail nearly scraping off his nose hairs.

“The boy!”

“What boy?”

“The whippersnapper he saw yesterday,” Oldbag says, jabbing her chin towards Phoenix and leaving him to grapple with the horrifying possibility she’s genuinely psychic. “He’s back. Again! We’ve always got fanboys sneaking in, but this one’s been relentless the last few weeks. Why do you think I deleted the damn photo of him? Useless parents, I swear…”

“She can’t be talking about the little hill hopper,” Diego says, bewildered, snapping Phoenix back to a world that makes at least a modicum of more sense, and with it, the return of one last very important question.

Who did she see?

Phoenix drags Maya and Murphy into a hasty retreat while Oldbag is still targeted on Gumshoe, and Diego flickers off for a second time to search for the mysterious boy dogging their steps like a shy ghost.

“Do you think the kid saw something?” Maya asks.

“It’s worth asking,” Phoenix says. “And we don’t really have anyone else to ask.”

“But that doesn’t have anything to do with what Vasquez told us about the path being blocked.”

“No.”

Maya hums, a lilt and a dance to it like the flowing ends of her kimono hidden beneath the thick fabric of her hoodie, and herself underneath it. “I’ll keep thinking then.”

Phoenix glances down at her. He’s only known her a few weeks, but she seems like a pretty straightforward person. She laughs when she’s happy, cries if she’s sad, yells if she’s angry, gets loud when she’s stressed. Right now, he can see the same restless energy he feels in the tilt of her eyebrows, the stone around her neck jiggling as she bounces through her thoughts and steps. The only difference is that her hands, instead of moving as if holding an invisible brush or pencil, seem to grind around her hoodie tassels, opening and closing like she’s moulding something he can’t see.

He supposes he understands what Gumshoe means about Maya being like Mia. Bits and pieces passed between them, the same way he can see Marcus in Theo in Ant in Larry. She holds herself differently, though, tilting her head forward with her sorry’s and pressing her palms together for her thank you’s. Mia always flinches against the instinctive motions, arms tightly folded more often than not to stop herself. Phoenix isn’t sure how he does it. Usually, he just doesn’t.

The feeling of being other is such a physical thing. But there’s something unapologetic about the way Maya embodies it. Malleable, unformed, uncertain of the final shape, and yet willing to move forward and find out all the same. And that, rather than Mia, reminds Phoenix a lot more of Diego. She’ll like Diego. She’ll take spitfire as the compliment it’s meant to be and match him heart-ridden grin for grin.

“You don’t have to,” he says, absently rubbing the crinkling edges of plastic on his chest. Like an evidence bag, if you peeled both patches away, he wonders, as he often does, what someone would find inside. “I know you’re trying to help, but it won’t help for you to be with me at the bench not knowing what I’m going to do.”

“You can tell me when we’re at the bench then. You can tell the whole court while you’re at it,” she says, nudging him with her elbow. “Let me have this. It’s a lot more exciting than going back to the office to do more paperwork.”

Phoenix snorts. “Ha, yeah. It’s boring as hell.”

“Hell would be a sunny field trip compared to whatever that is.” Maya sticks her tongue out to illustrate her point and smiles, pleased, when he chuckles. Her gaze stays on him, turns appraising, another one of those quick sweeps he’s been turning away from all day, and now is no different. It’s the kind of look he hates; the kind of look that says I know there’s something wrong with you, and I’m trying to work out what. “It’s weird, honestly, seeing you two working,” she says, blatantly casual. “Neither of you seem the type. Mia asked me to look after evidence sometimes, but she never really spoke about work. I’d fall asleep every time she tried, and most of the time it sounded like she wanted to too. And actually doing it… it’s still really boring.”

“It took you a day to decide investigating a murder is boring?” Phoenix asks, watching Murphy wander away into the treeline to try and round up some loose leaves.

“Not this part.” It’s a smack to the wrist this time. He flexes his restless fingers while Maya continues, unbothered. “It’s like two different worlds. All stop then all go. And I guess I never realised… I don’t know. I guess I always pictured it differently. But it’s her life, y’know? She did it all herself, and it’s not like she’s going to come back just because White’s gone. It’d be harder to come back than it was to leave.”

Phoenix risks looking over at her to find her brow briefly pinching and her mouth drawing closed. Her gait is still loose and airy, a giggle pricking at her lips as Murphy snatches at a flurry of floating leaves, and she tilts the same smile to include him in her amusement. He doesn’t like it one bit. He can’t… exactly pinpoint why, but he feels like he’s being lied to. Or, not lied to but—but it’s like before the warehouse when Diego looked weird and acted weird but kept saying he was fine, and, okay, what followed would have made that a lie anyway, but there’s more than one reason Phoenix wasn’t surprised when he woke up to find Diego gone. Hurt and terrified and furious. But not surprised.

Most of the time, when people say they’re fine or act like they’re fine, it’s because they want you to stop asking. If Maya doesn’t want to tell him what’s wrong, there’s nothing he can do. But here she is saying it. Even if it sounds like she’s trying to talk about something else completely.

“Was it bad?” he asks, carefully. “When Mia left?”

“It was a whole thing,” Maya says, smile turning as brittle as the leaf Murphy returns with. Maya bends down to scratch her ears. “Our clan is pretty insular. Very traditional. I used to try and ask about Kaa-san sometimes and you’d think I’d mentioned a serial killer around some of the elders. It was—just, it was kind of a relief for me? When it happened. Rather than having to wait around for it to keep happening. We both knew it was always going to.”

“She said something like that to me,” Phoenix says, and Maya nods distantly. “But it still makes you sad.”

Her eyes jump to him in time with Murphy crunching through the leaf, pieces of it fluttering around her jaws. “Not sad. I miss her and all, duh, but… I’m used to it. I thought I was? Things keep changing now, and—she nearly died.” She bites her lip and sinks her hand deeper into Murphy’s fur, hiding her face in her hair. “I think I’m just starting to realise that at some point, not now, thanks to you, but someday… I’m going to have to work out how to be a person on my own.”

(It feels like lightning crashes instead of heartbeats. It feels like the howling scream of a storm instead of breaths. It feels like fire in the muscles and ash in the bones, sweat-drenched skin immolating from the inside out, that acidic burn that coats the tongue, the back of the throat, stifling the nose.

Too much and too high and too fast.

It feels, put simply, what Icarus must have felt like when he fell.)

“You’re not what I thought you’d be like either,” Maya says, but she says it with warmth in her eyes. Like it’s a good thing. Like it’s something worth having.

Phoenix slips his hand into his pocket without really knowing he was going to. He touches his keychain. The phantom of the bullet that used to clink beside it. “I hope so,” he says quietly. “I’m not sure I get it, though. Not entirely. It wasn’t okay for Mia to leave, but it’s okay for you to stay here?”

“I’m… I’m sort of the only one left. There’s my little cousin, technically, but she shouldn’t—” Maya cuts herself off, straightens and shakes herself, like Murphy does when she’s shaking off seawater. “I’m here looking after my sister. Then I’ll go back. It’s different.”

They’ve wandered up close by Studio One, the roof of the empty sound stage looming up over the gate that encloses it, its shadow swimming over the earth. He slows at the edge of it, skirting his sneakers against the dark, uncertain he wants to enter such a cold, silent space again. He doubts a kid could make their way past the card reader, and there are no convenient drains to sneak in through this time. And maybe it’s just a hope, too, because no child should ever see something like that, even if it’s only the aftermath. Even if they never have to remember the smell of dirt and gun smoke and blood, or hear what their dad sounds like when he’s screaming and begging for her to come back, or know—or know… that nobody could know.

You promised.

So you just have to go on knowing your whole life you’re different, that something inside of you is wrong, because there’s such a thing as doing the unforgiveable, because in order to be forgiven the crime has to be admitted. Leaving is only one part of it. Coming back is another. But the not-knowing—the irrefutable fact that the one place you belong is the one place you can never go back—that’s what will kill you.

It’s why the killing has to happen. If you kill the part of you that went away, there’s no reason not to let what remains back in.

Family bonding, Theo’s way.

But maybe that’s just how boys and brothers love. The real trick is surviving it.

(A small note:

Maya Fey has told a lie.

A simple question:

What lie did she tell?)

Murphy’s ears prick and scraps of leaf puff around her snout, breaking out the start of a bark. It's the most warning Phoenix gets before Diego reappears with a yowling, lightning storm of a boy hacking—enthusiastically, if entirely ineffectually—at his knees. Diego takes it with the cheerful look of a man all too aware that no amount of stabbing will hurt him.

“Whoa, what’s up with Murphy?” Maya asks.

“Missed,” Diego intones to Phoenix.

Phoenix just barely turns a laugh into a cough and his head to the side to hide his smile. Not quite the Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian (to give it its Sunday name rather than that of their dumb renaming game) but there’s certainly an uncanny resemblance.

“You got nothing, old man!” Cody shrieks. One great swing is enough to spin him into the dirt, though of course he’s upright again in half a second, the blunted plastic tip of his katana thrust directly into Diego’s navel. “You can’t run forever so just stop! Go away and leave us alone!”

“How are you at running?” Phoenix asks Maya once he can trust his voice again.

Maya somehow widens and narrows her eyes all at once. “Why?”

Diego reaches out to pat Cody through the head, eliciting another yowl of protest. “Just keep that thing clear of someone it can actually do damage to, si?” he says, then looks down at the dog bouncing paws at his feet. “Ready-set, Murphy.”

Murphy barks, keyed up enough it’s a miracle she waits for the go before she runs.

“That’s why,” Phoenix says, and tears off after her and Diego both.

Cody follows too, and though it makes Phoenix’s head pound worse and his joints shiver like they’re about to be smacked out of their sockets, he runs after his dog. Diego leads them all the way back to the employee area, and Maya—Phoenix will apologise later, but Maya’s left somewhere behind, and Cody’s really getting upset now, voice cracking and shaking like a boy, like some useless thing dashed across tarmac and concrete.

“Stop it,” he’s saying. He chases Diego through the door with a frightened look back at Phoenix, his voice echoing through the wood. “Stop it, there isn’t—nobody’s here, nobody’s in here, it’s none of your business, anyway!”

Murphy scratches at the bottom of the door to Will Powers’ dressing room. A door that was locked. A door that’s supposed to be locked.

“I’m not afraid,” says the boy, shining like he shouldn’t, lit like a star even though the sun’s still up.

Phoenix doesn’t look at him. He just opens the door.

Murphy rushes in, all lolling tongue and wagging tail, turning in a circle and cocking her head when she doesn’t find Diego, and not Cody either. She does such a damn good job of it, every time, it’s hard to measure up beside her. Phoenix stays exactly where he is.

Because Diego and Cody aren’t here, and the boy isn’t really here either, but there’s definitely a child in front of him. Jumping in fright and breathing heavy and backing away, nearly folding into Powers’ costumes. Phoenix just stops. Tries to swallow. It’s hard to tell with someone so young, so much air in their clothes, so much of their cap pulled low to hide their face. Phoenix can understand how the mistake could be made. But from the sneaking glances sent at him from under the left side of the brim, he can see clear as the darkening day that it isn’t a boy, and it isn’t another ghost.

It’s a girl.

“I didn’t do it,” is the first thing the girl says, immediately followed by, “I’m just looking around. Thank you very much.”

Phoenix drowns his instinctive objection. He clenches up the doorway. He wishes he didn’t ignore the boy. He’s used to feeling small, trying to make himself small, but suddenly he’s all too aware of his height, the reach of his arms, the weight built into his shadow. This lumpy, clumpy adult body looming over that of a child trying very hard to pretend she isn’t terrified.

She doesn’t have much to help her act it out. Baggy shorts and wire frames for legs. Trainers falling apart on her feet. An oversized jacket to hunch in and out of, disappearing arms beneath its creases and folds and collapses. Spikes of cloudy blonde hair stick out in short strokes from under her cap, her head tilted down and to the right so all he can see is a single wide blue eye. Murphy pads over, circles her legs, tucks her nose in at the heels. The girl glances down, hand snatching for empty air, as if searching for something that should be there to hold, but just as quickly it curls into a fist and shoves itself into a pocket. Her other hand follows suit.

“You can pet her if you like,” Phoenix says, finally surfacing from the door frame and stepping lightly to the side of it. Light trudges forward to slump over the girl’s toes. She curls them away. “Just let her sniff you first.”

The girl takes another step back, twitching when the empty arm of a hanging costume brushes the back of her shoulder. It’s a familiar kind of flinch: the kind you do when you’re used to having to hide it. “You’re a stranger. I’m not supposed to talk to strangers.” Murphy follows, then sits, panting black and white and brown. The girl’s lips tighten. “Please,” she tacks on as an afterthought.

“I’m Phoenix,” he says. On cue, Maya lands against the doorframe, clinging to it to give her breathing some moral support. “And this is Maya.”

“Hey,” Maya wheezes, blinking her hair into her eyes. “I’m his partner.”

“Eh, temporary assistant,” Phoenix corrects mildly.

“Hey!”

“Are you sure you’re not just both stupid?” the girl asks.

Phoenix smiles and watches her eye follow the curve of it, flick up to meet his gaze before trailing down his cheek, back to his mouth—then down to his hands. He uses them to indicate his dog. “You got us. Murphy’s the real brains of the operation.”

“I thought you said she’s a she,” the girl says suspiciously. “Isn’t Murphy a boy’s name?”

“Sometimes. Could you tell me yours? Then nobody’s a stranger and I won’t have to tell the police or the old security lady I saw a strange kid somewhere she definitely isn’t supposed to be.”

At the mention of Oldbag, the girl’s mouth twists like an overloaded coat hanger. The conversation freezes to a standstill while she battles which way to answer. Maya manages to prop herself up on her own two legs and moves to stand beside Phoenix, glancing between him and the girl, clearly in danger of opening her mouth, but eventually keeping quiet.

Finally, one side loses the fight, and the girl tentatively offers her fingers to Murphy. “Lou,” she mutters.

Phoenix hums. “Isn’t Lou a boy’s name?”

Lou’s eye flickers. “Sometimes.”

He moves a little closer on the trailing spark of it, not fast or far, nudging Maya to ensure she does the same. “It was a friend of mine who named her,” he tells Lou. “You know Murphy’s law?”

“Whatever can go wrong will go wrong?”

“Sometimes,” Phoenix replies. Lou tilts up a narrow look. “But it’s not just bad things that can happen. It’s good things, too.” He takes a small breath, measuring the slight tremor in his lungs, the shock of the run, the slathering insides of his heart. “I never would have thought Murphy would happen to me, and she’s the best thing that ever did.”

Lou gently touches the back of Murphy’s head, watching her tail swish in response. Seeing Murphy look back at her. “She’s pretty,” she mumbles, small hands disappearing into Murphy’s thick coat.

“She is,” Phoenix agrees gently, shifting closer again. Just enough to crouch down and pet the back leg of his dog. To put himself eye-level with Lou, dipping beneath the surface of her cap. She turns away, more than a little to the right, but Phoenix can see the straps now. The eye patch covering her right eye completely, and nearly all of her cheek besides. It does not hide the ragged scars poking out from underneath.

When she isn’t looking at him, his own jagged lines, or Maya and all of her thereness, Lou’s gaze constantly tracks back to the door. With nowhere else to go, the blue sits on him entirely, deep and arresting, shadows swimming underneath. Her pupil is sharp, almost animalistic, like something splayed on a metal table, pried and prodded with no acknowledgement that the intrusion is felt. That there is something else in there awake. That there is something in there starving. Her glare dares him to comment, to ask, to react, and give her the chance she needs to sharpen her teeth.

He offers a faint smile in response.

“What are you doing down here?” Lou asks, more perplexed than scared, just in time for Cody to flicker to her side in a whirlwind of limbs and outright hiss at Phoenix. Diego joins a moment later, thoroughly pleased with himself. As always, nobody notices this but Phoenix. Lou just says, dubious, “You’re not very good at being an adult, are you?”

“Nope,” Phoenix replies, popping the p.

“I’m not even an adult yet,” Maya admits in a conspiratorial tone, crouching down and resting her chin on his shoulder.

He feels her instinctive intake of breath. Cody paces back and forth, harshly stomping over his frustration. Murphy sways with him and Lou jerks her chin down into the motion, mouth a barbed wire line.

“Obviously,” she mutters.

Maya briefly falters, but, as she always seems to, presses forward anyway. “You’re here to see the Steel Samurai, right? Isn’t he the coolest?”

“No.” Lou slices the words right open, bleeding them dry and spitting them back out. “He’s stupid. I hate him.”

“Then what are you doing here?” Phoenix asks. Lou stubbornly attends to Murphy’s ears. “You were here yesterday, too, weren’t you? I saw you by the guard station. And the camera caught you the day before that.” He tilts his head. “Are you sure there’s nothing you want to talk about?”

“I don’t know,” Lou says. She risks another glance up at him. “You found me. You’re supposed to talk, I’m supposed to say thank you and I’m fine and then you’re supposed to leave.”

“Oh, really?” Phoenix says. “But you said thank you all that time ago and I didn’t leave. What do we do now?”

Lou scrunches up her nose. “You’re weird.”

“I’m weird,” Phoenix agrees. “And I’m not a huge fan of the Steel Samurai either.”

Cody rolls his eyes at that and says, “Yeah, you wouldn’t be. It’s so obvious,” but it’s Lou who huffs a soft noise and says, “You’re not supposed to be.”

“Well, I don’t know about that.” Phoenix shifts his weight to settle his feet more comfortably beneath him. He changed back into his sneakers earlier, but his soles and toes are still tender. “People have pointed out to me recently that just because it’s aimed at kids doesn’t mean only kids are supposed to be able to enjoy it.”

“And you haven’t even watched it,” Maya counters, eliciting a few approving nods from Cody. “You have no idea if it’s good or not.”

Phoenix shrugs. He looks at Cody and Lou and feels his keychain in his pocket. “I had a better option.”

“Why does it matter if you like it or not?” Lou asks. “It’s just a stupid TV show. It doesn’t matter. It’ll still be a stupid TV show whether anyone likes it or not.”

“True,” Phoenix says. “But you’d never know if it was worth watching or not if it was never made at all. The fact it was made makes it mean something. It must mean something to you. Why else would you keep coming here?”

Lou frowns heavily, dragging her cap even lower, and looks at Murphy again. Murphy yawns in reply and continues panting at Cody. Gently, Lou touches under her chin, fingers shaking a little when Murphy slits her eyes in contentment. “I’m looking for something,” she admits quietly. “Something my… Something I lost.”

“What is it?” Maya asks. When Lou remains quiet, she adds, coaxingly, “You’re not in any trouble.”

“People always say that when you are in trouble,” Lou says back. “Spare me.”

“Guilty conscious much?” Diego mutters.

“Shut it, old man,” Cody snaps, reaching for his katana again. “Takes one to know one.”

Phoenix scratches his chest as they argue, cool plastic creasing underneath his shirt. The noise catches Lou’s attention, and for once her head tilts in murky curiosity rather than an attempt to hide something. Without seeming to notice she’s doing it, she feeds herself further into the clothing rack and drops to the floor behind Murphy. Cody immediately shuts up and crouches beside her. His hand hovers over hers for a moment, but with a screw turn of his mouth and a quick glance up at Phoenix and Diego, he instead loops his arm around her shoulders. Best-buddy style.

“If I tell you what I saw,” Lou says into the muted hush, “Will you go away?”

Phoenix hesitates, doing his best to send Cody a questioning glance. Diego picks it up and lays it out flat. “Oi, hill hopper. Is she going to be okay if we let her go?”

“What?” Cody says reflexively, fingers scrabbling to hold onto Lou’s arm where all they can do is keep passing through. “Oh. The eye thing?” He rubs under his own, tapping at his unblemished cheek. “It’s okay. They took her away from that guy ages ago. She’s got a new dad now. A foster dad or whatever.”

“That guy?”

“Supposed to be her dad,” Cody says. “I bet he lied about it though. Real dads don’t do that to their kids.” He raises his chin at Phoenix and twists out his elbow to reveal his own thin scar curving over the knot of the joint. “Don’t ask her about it. She stabbed me with compasses the first time I did. There was blood everywhere. It was awesome.”

Phoenix says nothing. And then he says, “Yeah, we’ll go away. And we won’t tell anyone we saw you here.”

Maya traces a cross over her heart.

Lou shifts her knees under her jaw, drawing an absent shape in Murphy’s belly fluff. “Everyone’s all upset about it. All those people outside the gate. The police.” She pulls her hand back, wrapping it around her shins. “Something bad happened, didn’t it? I didn’t… I didn’t really think about it at the time, but…”

She trails off, and she really does just look like a kid. Too little grown and too little to call her own. Eight years old, maybe more, maybe less. Grass stains and scraped knees. Picked fingers and bitten lips. She’d have looked exactly the same standing over Cody, blood dripping off her hands. But Phoenix can already guess everyone else pretended they saw something very different.

He thinks Lou knows it, too. She raises her single blue eye to him, a sudden decision set and sewn into the rigid mask of her body. “All I saw—it was just the same thing as always. The Steel Samurai beat the bad guy. The way he’s supposed to. It’s what he’s supposed to do. He beats the bad guy and he saves the day and then—and then… everybody gets to go home happy. That’s what it means. When he wins, it means you don’t have to be scared anymore. Th-That’s what happened. That’s all I saw. The stupid Steel Samurai—h-he hit the bad guy with his spear and that was the end of it.”

And that, Phoenix understands without having to wonder or guess, is not the truth.

People lie. Breaking happens. He looks at Cody, and the way Lou is still shaking, almost imperceptibly, and hears what she doesn’t say so clearly the boy smiles a sad, small smile, his keychain in one hand, the bullet in the other. He can hear Lou saying that it hurts.

“Can I go now?” Lou asks. “I told you what I saw. Let me go.”

“Yeah,” Phoenix says, settling back on his heels, taking Maya with him to give Lou space. “You can go.”

“Uh,” a new voice says, tripping over itself in the doorway as its owner takes up residence. Even with all the light behind him, Gumshoe doesn’t look particularly pleased about this turn of events. “About that, pal…”

“She might be talking about the run-through,” Mia offers, though without much conviction.

“WP’s the one who fell during that,” Maya corrects. “Not Hammer.”

Mia rubs her forehead, fingers tucking under her newly cut fringe to touch her scar, holding the slight dent as if she’s afraid of losing it. “Right. Two muscly men prancing about in costume twirling spears. Who’d ever get them confused.”

“Sarcasm is a choice,” Maya says sullenly. “They weren’t wearing their costumes during the run-through. She wouldn’t have known who was who. And she doesn’t have a keycard so she wouldn’t have been able to sneak in. There was only one person wearing the costume that day at one time, and the only person left it could be is WP.”

Rather than address (or object to) that, Mia peers at her sister; cross-legged and hoodie-worn, knotted and frayed. She lowers her still only working hand to the gap in the couch cushions between them. “The girl’s bothering you, isn’t she?”

Maya shoots Phoenix a quick look, which only has the affect of making him pay more attention to her than the distant rumbling of Tommy Butz’s auto shop playing on the other side of the phone line. “It didn’t make any sense,” she says, like she’s asking him to answer it for her. “She said she didn’t like it but she talked about the Steel Samurai like any fan I know. Like I would.” She looks at her palm, rubbing her thumb through the middle, then gently touches it to her cheek. “She just… she looked like she needs a hero like that in her life.”

“Phoenix? Still there?”

Phoenix catches his retort and presses the phone back to his ear. “Yeah, I’m here. Are you free for tomorrow?”

“Dad’s having to shift some stuff around, but that’s his problem,” Theo replies. “He’s gonna have to get used to doing this without me again pretty soon anyway. Out of the goodness of my heart!” The last part must be directed across the shop to Marcus if the very distant for fuck’s sake is any sign. To Phoenix, Theo continues, “I’ll be there. Sorry Mia’s still not up for it and all, but it’ll be good for me to get back into the swing of things. Lou sounds like a good kid.”

“They always are,” Phoenix murmurs, and perched on the desk beside him, Diego clenches his hands together and lets go of a tired sigh.

Pain multiplies. It multiplies in little ways, like hands fisted deep into pockets and bloody handkerchiefs left behind and cap brims or hoods pulled low to hide the eyes, and it multiplies in enormous ways, like Jack Hammer’s rage, and the violence of whoever killed him, the aftershocks of which have swept up so many people.

Phoenix listens to Theo’s wry tone, the phone line not enough to filter out the sorrowful understanding at its core. Looks at the pained confusion in Maya’s eyes, at the comforting arm Mia places around her shoulders, at the way they tilt together like two halves of something not quite whole. Feels Diego reach for him, wanting something to hold for himself, and Murphy’s weight pressing on his thighs and stomach and chest.

(There’s one thing about Murphy’s name Phoenix didn’t mention. Diego always says what he means only when he knows you’re listening for it, and Phoenix has had more time to learn to listen than anyone else for a long, long time.

Murphy. An anglicised form of the Irish Gaelic surname Murchadh. Meaning, warrior of the sea.)

And he wonders whether kindness can multiply too.

Chapter Text

Honestly, if any of them had stopped to consider the available evidence for more than a few seconds, Phoenix thinks it would have been pretty obvious something like this would happen.

The waiting rooms for witnesses are tucked as far away from the defendant’s lobby as they can be without being absurd about it, and have about as much character as the Evil Magistrate has nuance (subject to much debate, according to Maya: whispers of a redemption arc in the works, conveniently interpreted subtext, plus the whole thing set up with his father—and yeah, Phoenix stopped paying attention right around there). Magnolia walls suck up the autumn sun, smothering it to a uniform smear, the couches speckled brown and pristine as a catalogue spread, a bored wooden table falling asleep between two identical chairs: the liminal filters of a room that’s only meant to be moved on from. It isn’t going to inspire confidence, but, more importantly, it isn’t going to instil any more fear.

And, at the very least, the window offers a good view of the city. Leaves of red and orange and gold warm cracks in the sidewalks, chasing the soles of shoes, whipped up into a frenzy by the passing wheels of cars. It isn’t yet cold enough for hats and scarves, but the wind carries its own tinge of colour, pinching red into cheeks and noses and bare arms swinging boldly against the hints of oncoming winter. Buildings climb and call out, almost as loud as the streets. Always shouting. Swollen with distant singing.

Phoenix bites down a greeting. The city still replies.

C’mon. I’d tell you if I’d seen her running here.

An obvious lie, but what else are cities made of? You have to care about something to ever go looking for it.

“You’re sure she won’t have left the courthouse?” Theo asks. He’s done—Phoenix graciously assumes—his utmost to dress for the occasion, wrapped in dark jeans and a darker shirt, both woven and bought on a different continent, smelling of something sweet and spicy. They’re working overtime to maintain any sense of decorum what with the way Theo’s slung his arms over Phoenix’s shoulders like a lazy koala, about as liable to let go. Phoenix keeps trying to pretend he isn’t leaning into the touch. He knows Theo isn’t fooled.

“It’s not that easy, pal,” Gumshoe says from his spot just behind Edgeworth’s shoulder. He’s taking a noticeable degree of care not to step out in front, mostly because he keeps throwing longing looks at Murphy sitting patiently by Phoenix’s side.

She’s the calmest thing in the room. Pin a badge to her vest and they’d all be out before lunch. Phoenix leans over to rub her scruff, her tail sweeping up his ankles.

Theo tips forward with him, letting out a low hum Phoenix feels in his shoulder blades. “That’s clearly not stopped her before.”

“We would’ve been informed if she had attempted to leave,” Edgeworth replies sharply. “You made it through security yourself, however questionable the decision. This isn’t the sort of place that allows children to wander in and out as they please.”

Theo flips up his hands in surrender. “Yeah, yeah, pride of your life and all that, Edgey. But I wasn’t really talking to either of you. And I wasn’t asking if she could. I’m asking if she would.”

Edgeworth’s answering glare could cut glass. He seems to be going to great lengths to dislike Theo—which, again, understandable, but still, rude.

“Well now,” Theo drawled as soon as they walked into the room, “If I’d known you were this excited to see me again, Edgey, I’d have brought cake. You didn’t have to show up to the welcoming party.”

Edgeworth had jerked upright from his low conversation as if stuck with a rusty pin. Either a reaction to Theo himself or the old childhood nickname, Phoenix still isn’t sure. He’s met few people who like being reminded of who they were before they became who they are, but Butz boys don’t really lend themselves to being left behind. Things tend to break when they are.

“Geez, he’s perfected his glare, hasn’t he?” Theo said, making a show of hiding behind Phoenix to try and escape it.

Diego took a look at the assembled cast, spared an extra glare for Gregory hovering in the corner, then turned on his heel and said, “Yeah, no. I’m going to go watch Maya try to be normal around Powers.”

Asshole.

“She’s not a daft wee girl,” Lou’s foster father finally speaks up. He’s a stocky man who introduced himself only as Cruikshanks, and if the name wasn’t a giveaway, the deep, easy burr he speaks in would put the matter of his origins unequivocally to rest. “She knows not to go wandering out into the city by herself, even when she doesn’t want to be stuck where she is.”

“Does she run away often, then?” Theo asks.

Cruikshanks takes in his slumped form with a slightly bemused air, but since Phoenix isn’t raising an objection to being used as a leaning post, he also takes it in stride. “It’s getting to be something of an issue,” he admits, then turns to Edgeworth and Gumshoe. He’s got quiet grey eyes, a voice that bends and slides, dancing, and a detached manner that all combines to suggest he finds everything around him faintly ridiculous—but not ridiculous enough to be amusing. “That’s why I don’t want this to be made into a kerfuffle. I get you’ve got yer jobs to do—” Said exactly like that: yer— “But she’s just a scared kid. She’s acting the only way she knows to stop her getting hurt."

Despite himself, Phoenix finds he quite likes the guy.

“Sounds familiar,” Theo mutters.

Phoenix elbows him, digging out a sharp wheeze of breath. “One time.”

Theo flicks one of his earrings in retaliation, though his voice is thoughtful when he speaks, and in no shape or form apologetic. “Probably couldn’t solve this the same way.”

“Is that what you’re calling it now?”

Theo tugs Phoenix’s ear enough to turn his head so Theo can show off the stained edge of his smile. “You didn’t do it again, did you?”

Phoenix pulls himself free only to catch Edgeworth looking at him strangely, silver running like spilled colour down his body to where he’s still hunched forward, where he holds his elbow away from his chest, keeping Theo’s weight from touching his ribs. The scrutiny lights a low-burning flush around his ears, but he doesn’t know whether it’s a match struck from irritation or embarrassment. Or maybe a strange, twisted sort of envy that Edgeworth, in any capacity, assumes a right to judge him for anything.

Murphy shifts at his feet, stretching her paws, and he tears his gaze away. The conversation flits on without him, Edgeworth and Gumshoe trying to seem in control of the situation, Cruikshanks remaining wholly unconvinced, and Theo chiming in to rile everyone up. There’s still a comfortable half hour before court is set to start, but that number seems much smaller when you’re arguing over how to find a runaway kid.

There’s always Gregory, but Phoenix’s reluctant attempts to catch his eye go unheeded, and Phoenix isn’t any more eager to stalk about the courthouse looking for other ghosts who might have seen Lou pass. He could make like Diego and leave, find the man himself and ask him to go look, but that’d require a whole song and dance in front of Maya and Powers, and Phoenix is already getting tired just thinking about it.

Still, it’s the only thing he has to offer, and he’s working his way up to it when he notices a patch of green beside the foot of one of the couches. Halfway crammed under, incongruous not only for the bright shade in a sea of starkness, but for the fact it matches Cody’s Steel Samurai branded clothing exactly.

“Is that Lou’s?” he asks, interrupts really, ignoring Gumshoe’s huff and Edgeworth’s glower.

“Aye,” Cruikshanks says, wary, shifting to stand in front of the bag like Phoenix might snatch it up and run out the door. “But it’s her personal things.”

“I don’t want to look inside. Murphy can use it to sniff her out. I’ll go find her, then we don’t have to alert any bailiffs and there won’t be any—what was it you said? No kerfuffle.” He likes the way the word fills his mouth. He needs to remember to tell Diego about it later.

Cruikshanks blinks at Murphy. Murphy blinks back. “Hell of a dog you’ve got there,” he whistles.

“I know,” Phoenix says.

Despite her professional demeanour, Murphy jumps at the chance to get moving. She sniffs up and down Lou’s bag, lingering on the little collection of badges covering up the Steel Samurai graphic on the front pouch, then explores the couch cushions thoroughly before pulling Phoenix towards the door. Cruikshanks steps up to follow, but before he can, Theo springs into his path.

“Actually, I was hoping to have a word with you in private anyway,” Theo says. “Since Lou’s made a habit of sneaking places she isn’t supposed to be, better leave it to Phoenix. Nobody’ll question wherever he is in the courthouse. And they won’t question whoever’s with him either. He’ll take care of her.”

Cruikshanks shifts his gaze to Phoenix, and Phoenix, one hand resting on the door handle, looks away.

(“It doesn’t always show on the rest of you,” Diego once told him, lounging on the floor of his old living room, both of them sat half-in and out of the kotatsu blanket. “But it always shows in your eyes.”

Phoenix frowned down at the cards atop the table, the single beer bottle leaving a ringed stain in the wood. Realised he was rubbing his right eye and quickly stopped.

“I don’t mean that,” Diego added, unhelpfully, though by his own rules, he refrained from following up with a question. “That’s definitely something. But you only do it sometimes. When you’re reminded of whatever makes you want to touch it, I’m guessing.”

“I thought the game was for truths. Not psychoanalysing.”

“You asked what your tells are and you didn’t expect something more?”

It was a simple game; one they still sometimes play. Phoenix is quite good at card games, though he can’t exactly say how other than that he is, but this is one that, on Diego’s insistence, relies purely on luck. They split the deck evenly and turn over their top cards. Phoenix pulls Diego’s card for him. High card wins. Winner gets both cards, a question, and a truthful answer. If the loser doesn’t want to answer, they give up another card, and whoever has the most cards at the end wins.

Phoenix usually wins. This is not because he always tells the truth.

Night peaked through the curtains, rain dripping languid shadows over the dim-lit walls, hiding the slow approach of dawn under cloud cover. Phoenix still smelled of damp food and cooking oil. He couldn’t be bothered changing when he got back and then couldn’t be bothered going to bed. Murphy shifted sleepily on his crossed legs with a contented doggy sigh. Her heart beating slowly against his palm.

“I don’t think it’s my eyes,” Phoenix blurted, even though it wasn’t Diego’s turn, and Diego didn’t ask. Diego just looked at him like he always does: like he can’t for the life of him figure Phoenix out but doesn’t want to stop trying just because it scares him.

“You can’t know your own tells, pajarito,” Diego said, not unkindly, and not like Phoenix was being stupid. “That’s sort of the whole point.”

“I know. I mean… What you said about where it shows. It does, just—somewhere else first. Not where you can see it. It’s sort of like your hands.”

“What is?” Diego asked, still humouring him.

Phoenix thought about stains. About the feeling in his chest, and how he didn’t have the words, none that would make sense, but it didn’t make the feeling go away. About how not everything is like something else, and saying something aloud doesn’t mean it’s true, and wanting something to be true means it even less.

He didn’t answer. But he thought, it’s my heart. And it’s shaking.)

He forces a breath. In and out. Then he returns Cruikshanks’ gaze. It only takes all of everything in him.

Cruikshanks appraises him, tongue restless in his mouth. Phoenix can see it move around, probing his teeth, his gums, the inside of his cheeks. Haunting them. Eventually, reluctantly, the words spit themselves free. “Sorry ‘bout this.”

“Nothing to apologise for,” Phoenix says. “You or her.”

“If she said at any moment this was something she didn’t want to do, she wouldn’t be here,” Cruikshanks says softly, now completely bereft of his previous wry levity. “And if her running off is a prelude to that, I don’t care what it does to yer case. She isn’t going to court.”

“You’re welcome to contact an attorney about the matter if you wish,” Edgeworth says, making Phoenix jump from the sudden proximity. He receives Cruikshanks’ sour look with his own thinly veiled irritation. “At present, and until then, however, she is my witness, and therefore my responsibility. I will ensure she comes to no trouble.”

It isn’t until Gumshoe steps towards them and Edgeworth shakes his head, halting the detective in place, that Phoenix realises Edgeworth just invited himself along. Cruikshanks folds his arms, giving everyone in the room one more sweeping glance before nodding only at Edgeworth. It seems to bestow the expectation of a promise.

Gregory, of course, flickers out to join them in the corridor, following his son like a walking stamp of approval. He stays silent, however, keeping well out of Murphy’s path, and Phoenix is all too happy to continue ignoring him.

“Shouldn’t your choice of handler be a little more discerning for this situation?” Edgeworth grumbles once they’re halfway down the hallway, just barely out of earshot. “Fey I can understand. At least she has some knowledge of the law.”

A thin vein of anger pulses between Phoenix’s teeth. He doesn’t bite down in time. “Theo’s a social worker. Not that you thought to ask.”

Edgeworth flinches, goes quiet, the only sounds left between them the scrape of Murphy’s claws and the shared sharper clip of their shoes. Phoenix hates how noisy they are. They aren’t so painful to wear this morning, though that might just be because his toes have gone numb. He wishes he could shake them in his mouth.

Sodium on an empty stomach always makes his thoughts go a little haywire, something like a sugar rush without the sweetness, his mouth still tasting faintly of salt. He did remember to take Maya out for ramen last night, shared a bowl with Mia, noren rolling over the amber light in the breeze, the stall empty besides the three of them, Diego keeping Murphy company on the floor, and the old couple behind the counter jostling each other playfully, minding their own business. Green onion, soy and pork. Mia’s head heavy on his shoulder as she complained about painkillers and drowsiness. Maya’s pout when Murphy refused to eat from her hand. His wallet isn’t thanking him, but Maya did, her smile coming back, and that’s all that matters.

By contrast, the morning seems abnormally bright, oversaturated, overloud. Mia said it’d be good to take his mind off the case for a while, let his thoughts put themselves to bed so they can wake up fresh. It’s probably good advice. Another good piece of advice: next time he goes to ask a ghost how they died, make sure not to do it when he has to prove how they didn’t die in a court of law. He’s still learning. He’s getting better. Is he getting better?

God, he doesn’t want to fucking do this.

“Are you alright?”

Phoenix barely keeps his feet as Murphy drags him round a corner, too concentrated on that to look around and make sure he hasn’t fallen out of time. That question, that voice, so familiarly unfamiliar it squeezes at his bones like an old wound he can’t remember getting and can no longer find. Only the ache of it woven into the growth of his skin, like a child’s drawing crossed out and painted over. He takes long enough to answer Edgeworth pulls level with him, then slightly ahead, doing a spectacularly bad job of pretending he isn’t watching Phoenix from the corner of his eye.

“Why are you asking?”

“You look better today than you did yesterday, whatever that was about,” Edgeworth says, the question implicit and which Phoenix refuses to hear. Edgeworth’s breath hitches a couple times as he starts to say something else but doesn’t find the right sounds in time. Eventually, he sighs and says, simply, “But you looked upset. For a moment there.”

“I’m about to cross-examine an eight-year-old in court about a murder she saw,” Phoenix says. He has to side-step two people walking in the opposite direction before Murphy takes him down the stairs. The movement forces him closer to Edgeworth, close enough their shoulders brush. His head turns with it, voice lowering to a hiss that will only reach Edgeworth’s ears. “Today’s going to fucking suck.”

Edgeworth doesn’t smile. He neatly takes his personal space back without a ruffle out of place on his suit and really does turn away. “You’re the one who brought the situation to what it is. Whatever your personal feelings on the matter, I won’t accept you fumbling around it. There’s only so long she can avoid this. Don’t make it worse than it is.”

It’s said in his orator’s voice, distant, self-assured and supple, as if they’re already standing at opposite benches. Somehow, it’s worse than if Edgeworth had pushed him down the stairs.

“That’s why we’re chasing after her,” Phoenix says, stung.

“It’s true of everyone,” Edgeworth replies, watching the windows pass. The light does strange things with his hair. Phoenix’s hands itch. He wonders if Edgeworth would break them if he reached out to touch. Probably not. Violence like that was never, and still doesn’t seem Edgeworth’s style. But he’d probably find another way to break Phoenix anyway. “Nobody can run forever. Eventually, something will give, and she’ll have to confront that fact. I don’t want to be doing this any more than you, Wright. But better it happens now. Even if it hurts in the moment.”

“I’m not saying it shouldn’t happen.” Phoenix scrapes a frustrated hand through his mess of hair. “I know what my job is. That doesn’t mean I won’t feel bad about forcing it out of her. There are kinder ways than this.”

Something about Phoenix’s words seems to catch, and Edgeworth turns, looking him fully in the eye for the first time all day. “Kindness has nothing to do with it. What sort of idealistic nonsense do you think we’re here to propagate?”

Phoenix is five months younger than Edgeworth and has only the vaguest sense of what propagate means, but—okay, it’s like this: there are scars on his arms in the shape of his own fingernails. They aren’t particularly noticeable amidst the others, thin lines that could have been drawn with a pencil. Some days it’s fine. Others, he does something stupid like cut his finger while slicing vegetables and yells for Diego, hysterical, because he can’t convince himself the blood on his hands is actually his own. It’s like this: Phoenix has never been able to dig an emotion out, no matter how physical it may be, but that hasn’t really stopped him trying. The wounds crawl deeper and deeper down. Some no longer close over. He does not know if what leaks out is his or was put there by someone else with white eyes. Questions like that make him keenly aware of it, because not being able to avoid hurting someone has nothing to do with inevitability, and everything to do with not being kind.

It's like this: not being kind is always about not being brave.

This is not something he has the choice of being a coward about. A long time ago, Edgeworth made him feel like he could be brave. He isn’t sure that’s true anymore. But he has to try anyway, because being afraid hurts much, much less than being alone.

And still, he says none of it. He just says, tiredly, “Nonsense, yeah. How stupid of me to want to teach her people can choose to be kind.”

“It isn’t always true,” Edgeworth mutters, half to himself.

“She already knows that. She needs someone to show that sometimes it is.”

They’re talking about two different things. They’re talking about the same thing. Phoenix wants to say something more, but he doesn’t remember how he used to talk to Edgeworth, how he used to exist in the quiet with him. Together. Alone together. If they were children, he’d find a way to say it eventually, and if he didn’t manage it one day, he could always try again the next. He’d be quietly happy with the way Edgeworth looked at him, warm and soft, so warm, warm enough he’d feel it always the way down to his soles.

But they aren’t children. Phoenix is following his dog. Edgeworth walks the way Mia does; upright and unafraid, as much a part of the courthouse as the marble and wood and scales. There’s a dead man behind Edgeworth, and they’re here to argue about another dead man and a dead man walking. Phoenix is a boy pretending to be a lawyer. Edgeworth is a prosecutor pretending to be a demon because otherwise… what? Phoenix doesn’t know, because he can’t know, because he wasn’t there.

Tomorrow is somewhere else. Tomorrow is unimaginably different. Tomorrow will be something new.

And he isn’t—he knows it’s better to keep moving forward. If you don’t, you’re just stuck where you are, and he spends enough time with ghosts. He wants the awful parts of this story to end. He wants to find a better skin. He’s a selfish mutt and he wants to reach out a hand, knot their fingers together, to stop in place and breathe together for just one moment. But every thought of care he musters is clumsy, and he knows he’ll be even more clumsy if he tries to follow through.

Nobody tells you how easy it is to just… forget what it’s like to take up space. It’s all so uncoordinated in his head now. He couldn’t draw it if he had another fifteen years to try. How did he used to reach for Edgeworth’s hand? Or was it always the other way around? What tone did he used to talk about things? Not even about anything—just to him? Just like this, just like that, just normal, just before?

Just them?

Get a fucking grip already, he tells himself.

After, it’s almost funny where Murphy leads them to. The courthouse library is even more familiar, right down to the smell of aging paper and the weighted expectation of quiet waiting in the doorway. It settles on him cleanly, settling the writhing tension ins his stomach. The librarian on the desk raises a hand in recognition, gaze following him and Edgeworth curiously as Murphy leads them into the shelves. Gregory drifts on ahead. Phoenix tugs Murphy closer to his side. Just the same, he knows where they’re going now.

“Do people actually write these?” Cody’s incredulous voice drifts out from the back of the room. “They can’t do, can they? They’d fall asleep after every sentence.”

“I’ve heard it’s actually rather fulfilling,” Gregory muses, prompting a startled yelp and a brief, overzealous flare from the light fixture. Phoenix heads towards it, Murphy straining eagerly at her lead.

“Filling what?” Cody flickers into place at the mouth of a row, scowling ferociously at Gregory. “They’ve got time until they die. Don’t they realise that?”

“It’s memory more than time they’re trying to fill,” Gregory says.

Phoenix tilts his head round the shelves, entirely in agreement with Cody, and absolutely not about to get drawn into an argument about it. Sitting with her back pressed against the wall is Lou, a book spread open on her lap and her finger pressed to the page, tracing the words. She stills at the sound of Murphy scrabbling to reach her, but she doesn’t look up.

Gently, Phoenix knocks on the side of the shelf. “Mind if we come in?”

Lou tilts the brim of her cap up to see Murphy, tightens her grip on the book, and tries for an unconcerned shrug. Phoenix unclips the lead, and as soon as Murphy reaches her, Lou puts the book down to sink her hands into Murphy’s fur instead.

“Hey!” Cody snaps, abandoning the start of what is destined to be a one-sided feud with Gregory to take back his spot beside Lou. “Don’t ignore me like that!”

Phoenix nods an apology as he lowers himself to the floor a few feet away, his back to the shelf, spine to spine. Behind him, Edgeworth hovers, presumably unwilling to sully his standing on the off chance someone sees him hunched on the floor beside a child, a dog, and a defence attorney. He places himself next to the same shelf as Phoenix, his hip half-cocked as if to suggest a lean, but never letting his balance betray him all the way.

“Nice place,” Phoenix says once Edgeworth is done fidgeting.

“It’s alright,” Lou replies, slipping her fingers beneath Murphy’s vest and vigorously scratching. Murphy’s tail thumps steadily against the floor, her nose propping up Lou’s chin. “It’s quiet. It was quiet.”

“Yeah, sorry. We’ve sort of got a schedule to keep. They’re pretty strict about it nowadays.”

Edgeworth clears his throat. “Miss Henley, if you—”

“Lou.” Her jaw locks, eye heavy on the floor. “My name’s Lou.”

“… Lou,” Edgeworth repeats, even more off-balance. “I understand if you’re nervous about testifying—er, telling us what you saw. It can be scary. And uncomfortable. However, certain accommodations, or, well, allowances could be made to make the proceedings… less so. If that’s what you require.”

Cody stares at Edgeworth, slightly open-mouthed. A moment later, Lou raises her head. “Wow,” she says flatly. “You’re really bad at talking to children.”

“Actually, I think he’s just bad at talking to everyone,” Phoenix says.

Lou huffs a laugh out her nose, quiet enough it’s almost hidden beneath Edgeworth’s splutters, though she still raises a hand to smother it. Cody watches her, then shifts a bit closer. Eyeing the rest of them closely. No longer crowding into Phoenix’s eyeline. When he tentatively raises his fingers to Murphy’s snout, Murphy rolls over and spams out a sneeze. It prompts another low laugh, carried and amplified by Cody’s beside her.

“He means it, though,” Phoenix adds, smiling. “You can trust him. He’s a good person.”

“How do you know?” Lou snorts.

“I can see it in his eyes.” Even without looking, even with the distance between them, Phoenix feels the way Edgeworth stiffens. The fact his father does the same. Like a taste on the air, burnt and sticky. He angles his head away, turning into Lou’s pale frown, and relents a little. “And Murphy likes him. She’s a very good judge of character.”

Lou looks down, matching her blue with Murphy’s blue and brown. “She’s got good eyes,” she says. Then, quieter, “She’s got your eyes.”

Edgeworth doesn’t have Gregory’s eyes. He never did. Phoenix only realises it now.

“She already told you what happened,” Cody says sullenly. “Why can’t you both just leave us alone? I was there. I saw it too. Tell them that.”

“It doesn’t work like that, I’m afraid,” Gregory says, oddly subdued.

“Why not?”

“People who are…” He hesitates. “People like us can’t testify.”

“Dead people, you mean,” Cody says, and Gregory winces, and Lou says, “You said I couldn’t wear my hat.”

“Whatever. Baby boy over here can see us, can’t he?” Cody asks.

Mirroring Gregory’s raised brows, Edgeworth blurts, “Excuse me?”

“It’s mine.” Lou presses herself tighter against the back wall, nudges the brim of her cap down with the tips of her fingers. “I get to choose if I take it off or not. I get to choose who sees. Not you.”

“Why can’t he say it for us?” Cody goes on. “Then Lou wouldn’t have to do anything.”

Gregory chokes on a wet cough before he can answer. “We can’t,” he manages, muffled through his handkerchief. “More to the point, we never should.”

“Miss—Lou,” Edgeworth tries. “It’s… It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

“What does that even mean?” Cody demands.

“You don’t know,” Lou says, louder. “They’re not yours.”

“It means," Gregory says, quieter, “At some point, Lou is going to have to leave the library.”

“How about this,” Phoenix breathes.

And breathes.

And… breathes.

Lou looks at him through her fingers, the side of her jaw quivering. At Phoenix. Cheek, mouth, hands. The worn lead dangling, trapped under his palm, against the crook of his neck, his hand stopped before it could clamp over his ear. His other hand similarly redirected, pressed tight against Murphy’s chest. Gently rising and falling. He’s not sure he noticed when she came to his side. Neck, ribs, nothing. Wrapped in blue. Lou stains them with more. He understands her far too well. Why she ran. Why she keeps running. As long as her legs hurt, nothing else does.

“How about this,” he says again. “I’ll show you a cool trick Murphy can do. And then you come back with us to the waiting room.”

“What kind of trick?” Lou asks suspiciously.

Phoenix lets his head fall against the shelf with a dull thump. “So cool you have to promise to keep it a secret.”

Lou chews on that for several seconds, eye narrowed. “And I can keep my hat?”

Once it’s clear Phoenix is waiting for him to answer, Edgeworth says, “Yes. I’ll request special permission.”

Special permission, Lou mouths. She works the words out her mouth with her tongue, then says, “Fine. I promise.”

“Murphy,” Phoenix says, though she’s already looking at him. He just wanted to say her name. With one finger pointing up, he commands, softly, “Sing.”

Her howl breaks apart the quiet in the library, precipitating at least one dropped book, a few startled noises, and Edgeworth immediately hissing, “Wright,” very nearly as it should be said. Whatever Edgeworth might have followed it with falls away with the end of Murphy’s short song, and Phoenix would look, wants to look, but for once his attention is entirely captivated by something else.

It’s unpractised, skewed and starving, borne from surprise more than humour. But Lou is definitely smiling.

“You knew they’d kick us out,” Lou accuses. She’s holding Murphy’s lead, still looking slightly bemused by the responsibility, her eye constantly tracking Murphy padding by her side.

“I knew they’d kick me and Murphy out. You didn’t have to come with us,” Phoenix replies mildly, because it’s important she knows she’s allowed to decide for herself, just as letting her keep her hat is giving her what she needs: giving her a choice.

Edgeworth has walked on ahead, only Gregory shooting the occasional glance over his shoulder, so when Lou suddenly stops, her attention fixed on something beyond the window, they continue on.

By the time Phoenix follows her gaze, it’s already left in a flurry of dark feather.

“You know,” Lou says, very quietly, forcing even Cody to lean a little closer to listen. “I thought about all that stuff you said yesterday… and I think maybe you were right. That it has to mean something more. The Steel Samurai, I mean. Nobody’s ever loved me as much as they love him, you know.”

(It never, never goes away.)

“Don’t be stupid, Lou,” Cody says, stricken. He turns to Phoenix. “Tell her. Tell her she’s—”

“Lou—” Phoenix starts, more than a little lost on what to say next.

Lou drops Murphy’s lead and scurries forward, past Edgeworth and straight through the door to the waiting room. Murphy pauses to pick up her lead in her mouth, then trots after her. Edgeworth, finally, looks back.

“What did you do?” he asks.

Nothing, Phoenix thinks. That’s the whole problem.

“Wright,” Edgeworth says, “What happened?”

“Those are two very different questions,” Phoenix says, a little blankly, forcing his numb feet to move. Cody, he notices, stays close to his side, gripping his camera tightly, his fingernails sinking into the sharp edges of the broken lens.

When Phoenix looks up, Edgeworth is looking back at him.

Phoenix offers a smile that means absolutely nothing. “She lied.”

It’s with no small amount of relief Phoenix ends the cross-examination of Sal Manella. He went through the motions as best he could, but there’s nothing Manella can tell him that Hammer didn’t sum up succinctly yesterday. Mutt, he said. Whose is the real question, one Phoenix is growing more and more uncomfortably aware that while he thinks he knows the answer, he has no means of proving it.

Truth doesn’t count in law. Only proof.

“Do you have any further objections, Mr Wright?” the judge asks.

“No, the defence agrees with the prosecution,” Phoenix replies. “It would’ve been impossible for anyone to make it from the trailer to Studio One in that time.”

Maya gapes at him. “But Nick—”

“It’s fine.” He glances down at her, raises an eyebrow. “Still haven’t worked it out yet?”

“I can kick you under this bench and nobody would know,” Maya mutters, once again highlighting the difference between her and her sister. Mia would’ve just gone and kicked him.

“We’re not done yet,” he assures her, and then wonders why he does. Because she’s scared, he supposes. Of what it could mean. Of what it couldn’t. Of having to watch something she loves being flayed, unable to do anything but stare at the spectacle as each layer peeled reveals something she didn’t want to see. To know the same thing might beat under her own skin. Never meet your heroes, as the saying goes.

Facing forward, he focuses on the silver trying to pick apart his blue and brown. He holds onto it. Edgeworth’s gaze feels different in the courtroom. Concentrated. Distilled. Fully realised. Even now, Phoenix can’t help himself.

He tries to keep it safe somewhere.

(That has to mean something, right?)

Victory of the Steel Samurai, as directed by Louise Henley Lou:

A young girl caught sight of the Steel Samurai whilst avoiding her pursuer. Thinking she had found her hero, she followed him, only to realise he was on his way to defeat a villain.

Of course, he did. Like he always does.

What more is there to say?

“You may begin your cross-examination, Mr Wright.”

The box Theo carried in for Lou to stand on raises her level with the witness stand, and also means she has to lean down to pet Murphy beside her. She’s taking full advantage of that fact, hunched over and face stubbornly pointed to the floor as Phoenix makes his way out from behind the defence’s bench. Even if she won’t look, he doesn’t want to talk to her on her blind side.

He hides a wince at the loudness of his footsteps, wishing for the umpteenth time for his sneakers, or even Diego’s weightless tread. There’s a difference between noise and silence. Noise clatters and aches, trampling over everything and everyone without thought or care. It drags you in, drags you down, you’re a single drop and a single drop is never going to be able to keep a hold of itself when the ocean wants its fill. But silence—silence looks straight at you. Just you. You sink and it watches. You reach out a hand. It does not reach back.

The gallery is silent. The judge, Edgeworth and Maya. Cody, Gregory and Diego. Watching him and Lou. He crouches down and pokes his fingers through the slat in the witness stand, bumping Murphy’s snout, and she hunches down lower, gripping Murphy’s scruff.

(What Phoenix wants is different, too, because what he wants is quiet. Beat and breath. Warmth and skin. The turn of a page. The scratch of a pencil. They float and world floats down alongside, gentle and filled with night. Starbright. There are no screams.

But it’s not about what he wants.)

“Lou,” he says, “You know you’re not supposed to lie in here, don’t you?”

“I’m not stupid,” Lou mutters.

“I don’t think you are.” Phoenix sits back on his heels, letting Murphy focus her attention on Lou. “Can you repeat what you told me yesterday? About why you keep going to Global Studios.”

Lou shifts, chewing her lip as she weighs up her answer. She finds no danger in it. “I’m looking for something I lost.”

“Do you think the Steel Samurai had it? That he would help you find it?”

It’s easy to trip her up. “No, I… No.”

“Then why did you follow him?”

“Objection,” Edgeworth interjects, firm, but not as loud as he usually enjoys shouting it at Phoenix’s face. “What’s the relevancy of this, Wright? Regardless of why she chose to, the fact is that she did.”

“It doesn’t matter if they’re a child or a prosecutor,” Phoenix replies levelly. “Nobody gets to lie in court.”

He doesn’t turn around for Edgeworth’s offended denial, nor Diego’s snort on the other side. Lou gazes back at him, flint scraping the sharp edges of her pupil. A wisp of blond hair has fallen over her brow, marking out a frown that isn’t really there.

“I’m not lying,” Lou says, almost a whisper, and he thinks she doesn’t convince herself any more than she thinks she convinces him.

It would be easier if it could end just like that. He wants to tell Lou he hates it, that he wants her to stop, to leave, to keep her pain small and quiet where it can’t hurt her anymore. But that’s not how these things work. Left alone, a wound only festers.

More than anything, Lou should never have to become a ghost.

So he drowns those feelings. He lets his words claw their way to the surface without him.

“Do you see that man sitting behind you?” Phoenix asks, tilting his head to direct Lou’s gaze.

She briefly twitches her head round. “What about him?”

“That’s the Steel Samurai.”

“No he isn’t,” Lou says, nonplussed. As black and white as any child. “That’s just a guy.”

“It’s the actor who plays him. The guy who wears the costume.”

Lou glances around again. Awkwardly, Powers waves and tries to smile, though his doubt gets the better of him and he quickly stops.

“But he’s not—” Lou starts, then clamps her mouth shut and swings back to Phoenix, almost accusing. Almost pleading. “I don’t understand.”

“He’s not what, Lou?” Phoenix asks, softly now. “What were you going to say?”

(“What did you parents do? To you?” Diego asked, clarifying unnecessarily.

Phoenix fiddled with the edge of his deck. “They didn’t do anything to me,” he eventually replied.

“Truthful answers only, pajarito.”

“You don’t understand.” He looked at Diego’s eyes in the reflection of his half-empty bottle of beer; his first and only of the night. Drinking made him feel grown up when he was a kid, and childish now that he’s supposed to be an adult. Never a grown-up holding a beer. Always a tall child having a conversation he wanted to pretend would go away if he stopped looking at it long enough. The taste stung bittersweet and sour on his tongue. “Diego, they didn’t do anything to me.”)

“You said I wasn’t in trouble,” Lou says, haltingly. “But what if… what if I did do something wrong? Would they…” Her eye flicks quickly to Edgeworth, the judge, then back to Phoenix. She chews her tongue. Leans a little closer and asks, very quietly, “Will you still let me pet your dog?”

“You’ll always be allowed to pet my dog,” Phoenix says immediately.

Lou gently rests both her hands on Murphy, prompting Murphy to look up, turn her nose and lick Lou’s palm. It’s better to look at Murphy. Dogs don’t mind so much if you’ve done something wrong. They just wait for you to come back again.

“I… It was—a friend of mine. His name was Cody,” Lou starts. It trickles out of her, like salt from a wound. “We were… we liked the Steel Samurai. I did like it, before he… before. It was fun. I mean, it’s stupid, but it’s fun and—and…”

“Simple,” Phoenix murmurs. That old echo.

“Yeah,” Lou whispers. The sound feels closed in around them, and Phoenix barely stops himself looking back to make sure everyone in the court is still there. “We’d go to the live shows and everything. Cody always took a picture of the moment the Steel Samurai won. His parents got him this really cool camera. They’re good parents. He deserved to have them.” She shakes herself, but Phoenix doesn’t press or interrupt. “I—I couldn’t always go with him, so he put together an album so I’d get to see it anyway. He said… that good guys always win.” It’s a different smile that cuts across her mouth, bending her scars, just a shape without feeling. “I know it isn’t true. It was just nice to pretend. But Cody—Cody didn’t mean it that way. I think he was angry I thought he was lying.” She blinks once, as if she only just thinks it as she says it. “It wasn’t like that. I didn’t think he was lying, I just—”

Just… what? Didn’t mean what? Phoenix doesn’t know any better now than he did the night before last, or the day before that. If he said it the way it was supposed to sound, or if it came out the way he made it sound. Memories like to play tricks like that. They tell their own story.

“Was Cody with you on the day of the incident?” Edgeworth asks, his voice floating into their pocket of dwindling air. Proof, of a kind, you hear what you need to. You listen only when you want.

“No,” Lou says, blankly. “Cody’s dead.” Her cheek twitches and she looks at the floor. “He’s dead because of me.”

There’s a ripple around the courtroom. The noise catches Lou’s face. It trembles her lip. It fills her eye.

“Tell me what you mean, Lou,” Phoenix says, unsure if Lou understands the words, or just the prompt inherent in the sound of them. It rattles at the back of his throat like a gunshot.

“Me and Cody used to sneak into the studio all the time. Cody wanted me to meet him. To prove it—it meant something. But the last time we went, Cody dropped his album. The one he made for us.” Her fingers grow shaky on Murphy’s fur, but her voice doesn’t rise or change in pitch. Now that she’s started talking, it seems she can’t stop. “We were getting chased by that old bag and it fell out his backpack, so… s-so he went back to get it. I was supposed to go with him. We always went together. But I… I was tired, and it was getting dark, and… and Cody didn’t come back.”

“A hit-and-run,” Phoenix says. His legs are starting to go as numb as his feet. He doesn’t shift or move.

Cody folds his arms, glaring at the floor. “She’s being stupid. I got lost. That’s all. I was hurrying and it was dark and I wasn’t looking and I—I just got lost, okay? It was nothing to do with her.”

“That’s why you went to the studio. Why you keep going,” Phoenix says to Lou, because as much as he wants to, he can’t turn to Cody and touch a hand to his head and say I know. I will never do anything to hurt her. “Cody didn’t find the album.”

Lou runs a sleeve over her cheek, a fast, flinching movement. Murphy licks at the salt caught in the stitching.

“And that’s why the Steel Samurai had to have won that day,” Phoenix finishes, hushed. But the court is once again silent enough it’d only have to strain its ears to be able to hear him just fine. He doesn’t know what he feels about that. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t.

“I was lost,” Lou whispers. “I—I was by that other studio. The one they never properly use. I saw what happened, but I didn’t do anything. And he didn’t get up. He’s always supposed to get up, but he didn’t, and Cody—Cody’s dead because of him!” It tears out of her. Shrill and sudden and so, so scared. “And he’s dead because I wasn’t there.”

(“You’re allowed to be angry. Don’t you want to know why?”

Phoenix slid another card into Diego’s pile. Finished his bottle and smeared his finger across the damp lip as he set it down. Smeared his hand through Murphy’s fur. A minute passed. He counted every second.

And then he answered anyway.

“No.” It came out softer and sadder than he meant. “I know why.”)

“Miss—Lou,” Edgeworth says, an urgent undertow sweeping through his voice. “Would you like to take a break?”

“I’m done now.” Lou looks at Phoenix. “I don’t want a break. I want to be done. I knew he was hurt, but I just ran away. I knew something was wrong but I didn’t want—I didn’t… I was scared.” She digs her fingernails into the pale marks under her eyepatch, shaking. “Nothing else happened.”

“Your Honour, I think we need to—”

“One more question,” Phoenix interrupts. “I promise. It’s an easy one.”

“Enough of this, Wright,” Edgeworth snaps. “You—”

“‘He’s always supposed to get up,’” Phoenix repeats, never taking his eyes away from Lou. Willing her to understand. “And Cody didn’t go to Global Studios for Jack Hammer. He went to find the Steel Samurai.” There’s a beat of nothing in which anything could be going through Edgeworth’s head. Phoenix might’ve known, once. “One more,” he tells Lou. “Swear it on Murphy’s singing.”

Lou swallows. Cradles Murphy’s head. And nods. “One more.”

“Who did you see fall?”

Memory tricks you. It’s selfish with what you know. It shows you what it wants and hides everything it thinks you should forget. When someone dies, the first thing you do is wish for them to come back. The second thing you do is remember them. But memory lies, the world moves on without you, and nothing stays the way it was forever, whether you want it to or not.

“The Steel Samurai,” Lou says. “The Steel Samurai fell. And he didn’t get back up.”

“The opposite was true too,” Maya says, eagerly, repeatedly jabbing Phoenix in the hip, the stone around her neck tinting the whole defendant lobby spiralling shades of orange. “I can’t believe I missed that.”

“Um, what?” Powers asks.

“If nobody could get from Studio Two back to Studio One in time, it meant nobody could get from Studio One over to Studio Two in time either!” Maya says with a flourish. “We’re so close WP. I can taste your not-guilty verdict.”

“Ah. Thank you.”

His lacklustre reply steals a lot of the wind from Maya’s sails. “Are you alright?”

“Just… confused. Not about that,” Powers tacks on hastily when Maya looks ready to defend her deduction—never mind she worked it out once Phoenix had already spelled it out for the rest of the court. “I don’t understand why Hammer would steal my costume. Or—or drug me.”

Phoenix glances at the doors. They’ll come any minute to take Powers away, and Phoenix has so much running still to do to make it to the end of this case, but he’s deliberately stalling on the mark. Wanting Lou to have as much time as possible before he has to take Murphy away. In the meantime, Diego’s keeping a close eye on her and Cody. It’s the only reason Phoenix isn’t watching his deficit grow at her side.

“What kind of person was Hammer?” he asks, while he still has time to do so.

“I-I don’t know.” Powers picks at his fingers. There’s a scrap of tissue caught under one of his nails. “If you’d asked me three days ago… Actually, I still wouldn’t know what to tell you. He was a good actor. Very good. I suppose it sometimes seemed like he thought he was too good for the Steel Samurai.”

“But there wouldn’t be a Steel Samurai without him,” Maya says, folding her arms like she wants to stop herself starting a fight. “Not the way it is.”

“That’s what I always thought,” Powers says, nodding one too many times. “I wouldn’t be nearly half as good if it weren’t for him standing across from me.” He waves his hands suddenly, tufts of tissue fluttering around his wide eyes. “It wasn’t like he was awful to work with. That’s not what I meant. He just—he never talked about his old movies, never talked about anything much besides work. S-Stand-offish, I suppose you could say. But that doesn’t make what he did make any more sense.”

Well, Edgeworth’s definitely in agreement about that fact. He and Phoenix were arguing about it for twenty minutes.

Diego actually kept count.

There is something freeing about it, though; hard to let go. In court, at the bench, like Mia said so long ago, whoever is standing across from Phoenix has to listen to him. And maybe it’s nothing close to what Phoenix actually wants to say to Edgeworth, but he lives with enough noise, hides himself in enough silence—sometimes it feels good to fucking shout about it.

It was only Diego cutting in as Edgeworth insisted, for something like the fifth time, there was no actual proof of Phoenix’s version of events that stopped Phoenix standing there all day.

“Remember what Mia said,” Diego murmured. “It doesn’t have to be today.”

So Phoenix swallowed his fire and said instead, “One more day—”

Right as Edgeworth said, “Another day, Your Honour,” and there was this weird moment where they both sort of stared at each other before Edgeworth finished, slowly, “To ascertain the veracity of the defence’s claims.”

“Yeah, that,” Phoenix said, pointing at him. “Those words.”

He’d almost forgotten it’s possible to be so acutely aware of someone else, but if he’d held his breath, Phoenix is sure he would’ve heard the sound of Edgeworth’s hand closing into a fist. He would have heard his stomach gnawing. He would have heard roaring flames instead of the soft padding of the judge clearing his throat through his beard.

“Well, given the prosecution and defence’s agreement on the matter…”

Phoenix wasn’t smiling. He might’ve been grinning a little. He definitely wasn’t smiling.

“Um, Mr Wright?” Powers says.

“Yeah?”

Powers chews his lip, one step away from chewing his fingers. “That, um, that girl. Lou. Do you think… um, is she going to be okay?”

Phoenix tilts his head, scrunching his nose. “Suppose that depends on what you mean by ‘okay.’”

“I thought…” Powers says, only the slightest tremor in his voice. But it spreads, shaking him down to the core, his huge frame threatening to collapse under it. “I mean, I-I wanted the Steel Samurai to be someone kids could look up to…”

“But he is!” Maya insists. “You heard Lou. She does like him. It made her happy, and it brought her and Cody together. She’s just a kid who lost someone really important to her. There’s no way she’s going to know how to deal with that.” Phoenix doesn’t make a sound, but for some reason she looks at him anyway, frowning at the surprise he doesn’t hide in time. “Spirit medium,” she hisses.

“Right,” Phoenix says, with absolutely no clue how that explains anything.

“They told us about him, you know,” Powers says, unable (or just choosing not) to hear. He’s rubbing his hands together in lieu of any more tissues, once more clearly on the verge of tears. Phoenix kind of wishes he would stop. “There was police tape still outside when I arrived that morning. It hadn’t rained, but there was a big wet patch on the tarmac. And after they told us, I just kept thinking… that used to be a kid. It’s just a wet stain on the ground, but it used to be a boy.”

Maya steps forward, as if pulled there, and she hesitates, uncertain the touch will be welcome, but finally puts her hand on Powers’ arm. Powers offers a brief smile. Maybe that’s a spirit medium thing too. Maybe just a human thing.

“It was Hammer who knocked me out of it. I was a mess during filming. But he told me…” A pause. A gulp. “He told me the kids wouldn’t want a Steel Samurai looking like he’d lost someone. That’s not what he does.”

Maya nods and smiles, and Phoenix… doesn’t do that. He can hear Diego snorting, even though he isn’t here, can see Theo rolling his eyes, even though he’s somewhere else trying to figure out what to say in the face of a crying child. If he looked down and to the side, he thinks he’d see the boy again, too, staring at Powers blankly.

“Sometimes people do,” he says, blandly polite. “It might’ve helped. It never turned me off the Signal Samurai.”

It takes Powers a moment to place the memory, mouth open as if trying to breathe it in. “You mean… when Yellow was cursed, and his light was broken. They nearly didn’t get him back.”

“When what colour’s what was what now?” Maya asks.

“It, uh, makes more sense with context,” Powers says.

“You’re right about kids needing someone to look up to. Something to be honest as it can about the life they’re going to have to live.” Phoenix tucks his hands into his pockets, voice still distant and clear. “But I think the last thing they or anyone needs is more mythologised lives and fake ideals, so that self-assured hypocritical assholes with a little bit of power can blame people for not living up to them.”

Powers gapes at him. Maya, he notes distantly, is doing the same. Phoenix grips his keychain: the first thing that ever made him feel like it was okay to be brave, because that meant it was okay to be scared first.

He can only survive reality as he knows it. He’s doing his best, and he’s promised too many people to stop trying now. It’s not what they do.

Swear it on Murphy’s singing.

Chapter Text

“You know, Mr Edgeworth requested this case specifically,” Gumshoe tells them, curled up in his coat like in the embrace of a welcome friend. His gaze morose on one of the backdrops. It’s blotched and bent in places, stained by the weather and Nichol’s dedicated attention, but that doesn’t seem to stop the detective wishing he could step inside it. Journey to the top of the mountain burning down a sunset and crunch the snow between his hands.

Phoenix and Maya glance at each other, bemusement folding their eyebrows. It’s Maya who takes the step to ask, “Did he? Is that… Does that matter?”

Gumshoe replies with a gentle bob of his head, hardly a sign he’s listening at all. “He’s not picky. Not like some. Once a case has been assigned to him, he carries it through to the end. We gotta trust each other, ya know? We do our work so Mr Edgeworth can get on with doing his. But this one—he’s been on it since the start. It seems important to him.”

“Okaaay.” Maya draws out the vowel with all of her breath, taking another step and pushing herself up on her toes to try and reach Gumshoe’s eye level. She’s about a foot too short for it, but she tries. “Uh, is there maybe something you want to talk about, Detective Gumshoe?”

The detective blinks, finally seeming to realise he’s stuck in the employee area like the rest of them. He slumps, coat propping him up where his body fails, and twists his neck to look at Phoenix. It only takes a moment for his gaze to follow Murphy instead. “This whole case has become a real mess, pal. Mr Edgeworth was going to come down here himself, but, geez, you shoulda seen him after the trial today.” He raises a hand, miming a hold, then a crushing squeeze. “Crushed his paper cup while it was still full of scalding coffee. He had to get the burns sorted first.”

“What kind of idiot does that?” There’s something dangerously thoughtful in Diego’s tone as he presses his thumb to the scars on his palm. Meant to cut to the bone, he told Phoenix. The fact the coffee dregs weren’t burningly hot at the time was happenstance. He’d have let it sear into the marrow.

Phoenix touches his own palm, his own scar, fingers already curled inside his sleeves. The sun is out and the walls around Global Studios protect them from the wind and it’s really too warm to be wearing a hoodie, especially after the bike ride from the courthouse to here, but his fingers are freezing. He doesn’t know how to fix it.

“Is he okay?” slips out his mouth before he can chew it to shreds.

Gumshoe fiddles with the filter of his cigarette, tipping it up and down against the shell of his ear. He releases it with a heavy sigh. “I mean, are you?”

“I’m okay,” Phoenix says, startled, the answer automatic. It’s been filling up his mouth a lot lately. Usually it’s just Diego and Larry he has to convince (with very debateable success every time) but more and more people keep stopping him to ask. He’s not sure what he’s supposed to do with it all. How he’s supposed to live up to it.

“You sure?” Gumshoe presses, glancing down at Maya to include her. That helps. It’s much easier when it isn’t Phoenix taking up space. “That was some pretty heavy stuff in the trial today. You did good with the kid. You too, little Murphy.” Murphy’s tail raises and faintly wags at the sound of her name, though without her vest to keep her focussed, she’s quick to let her nose guide her attention again. Gumshoe raises an indulgent smile. It fades before it makes it to his eyes. “But nothing shows you something’s gone horribly wrong like a kid crying on the witness stand. What the hell happened here?”

Hardly seeming to realise he’s doing it, his hand moves from his ear to his eye, digging a tired knuckle into the socket. Phoenix squeezes his fists. There’s enough fabric bunched between there’s no bite to it. He feels the pain somewhere else.

“It went wrong a long time before Hammer’s murder,” Phoenix says, ignoring the phantom itch around his own eye. “These things always start somewhere else.”

“Mr Edgeworth said something like that too. I’ve never seen him this…” Gumshoe trails off with a shake of his head. “I’ve never seen him worked up like this before. Have you?”

“Why are you asking me?”

“Well, you know him, don’t you?”

And Phoenix can’t say anything to that, because that’s the crux of the whole fucking problem. Or maybe not the whole problem, but a decent amount of it, and the problem is so filled with cold silence and empty rooms and untended wounds that he doesn’t even know where to begin turning it over in his head. There’s nowhere he can reach for that doesn’t hurt to remember anymore.

He’s never been great with words. Tenses are a whole other monster. Are or were. Do or did. Know or knew.

How do you talk about someone gone when they’re standing right in front of you?

Horrifyingly, Gumshoe notices—notices something in Phoenix’s expression. He must do. “Didn’t mean anything by it, pal. Just the way Butz was talking between the two of you, it sounded like there’s a history there.”

“It’s…” Phoenix starts, more to get something out his mouth before he stands there like an idiot any longer. It catches his throat, leaves it raw, exposes metal. Maya’s orange-lit eyes catch his own. He tears them away. “It’s complicated.”

“Yeah.” Gumshoe sighs and his coat heaves with him. “Seems to be the name of the game ever since you showed up, pal.”

“It’s not our fault your police work keeps accusing the wrong people,” Maya grumbles. There’s that our again. We and us. She folds her arms like she’s gathering it up.

“Don’t have to tell me twice. We’ve got people saying we need to keep pursuing Powers, people saying we need to change suspects, throw the whole trial out and start again. That’s what I mean about a mess.” Gumshoe’s gaze drifts to the backdrop again. Whatever he finds on his wanderings, only he’ll ever know. All Phoenix sees is the shift of his shoulders and the tension in his jaw. “Powers’ test came back positive for sleeping pills. And the only fingerprints on the bottle were Hammer’s.”

“But that…” Maya stares at Gumshoe. “That means WP’s telling the truth. That we were right. Hammer must have drugged him and then stolen his costume.”

“Seems that way,” Gumshoe agrees.

“So you don’t think WP did it!” Maya exclaims loud enough Murphy tilts her head and wags her tail again.

“There’s following the evidence and then there’s following the blind.” Gumshoe winces, though his words aren’t said with any bite. He just sounds ashamed. It bristles through him before Phoenix or Maya, or even Diego, muster a proper response. “Look, it’s just the evidence as it is. I’m not on your side or anything. Mr Edgeworth is going to see this through, and if that’s the way we have to carry it, we do it to the end.”

“Better the demon you know than the defence attorney you don’t, I suppose,” Diego drawls.

Once, when Phoenix was eight years old, months before he first heard—and then promptly forgot—Miles Edgeworth’s name, a teacher asked his class to draw a monster. Any kind of monster. When they were done, she asked, Why is it a monster?

Phoenix had drawn a woman with blood dripping down her back and metal clawing out her mouth. He coloured the eyes in blue and brown. His dad didn’t have to ask even when it made him cry. Miles did. Not exactly the same way but close enough Phoenix didn’t know what else to do. So he told a lie.

If someone asked him now, he thinks he might draw a man staring at the ground, empty and cold and alone. He thinks he’d add black around the blue and brown, but the blue and brown would still be there.

He thinks he’d draw him holding a bullet.

“You make it sound life or death,” Maya says, tone light as she strains to reach for a smile.

“It’s murder, Miss Fey,” Gumshoe replies gravely. “It’s always life or death.”

Phoenix can’t say he disagrees. But he does wonder why the only choice is between a demon and a monster.

“You’d think there’d been enough death here already.”

“Yeah.” Phoenix gazes up at the sky, thoughts limping along on their tired feet. Throughout his life, he’s developed a clear distinction between two very different worlds: the world of the dead and the one that turns outside it. Sometimes he drifts between them, caught by the undertow, another distraction that makes off with his breath and swamps his heart and leaves him adrift from those who might call his name. He’s thinking about games of pretend. About an old playpark and the taste of rainwater in summer. About how moving ahead always, always seems to mean leaving something else behind. He isn’t paying attention.

“Hold it.” Diego swipes a hand through his head, fingers poking around the backs of his eyes. “What did she just say? What did she mean by that?”

Oldbag flinches when Phoenix asks, teeth set in a razor-sharp line. “Mind your own beeswax, boy,” she says, and nothing more. Phoenix almost falls into the silence he’s so surprised by it coming out her mouth. It only lasts a grand total of ten seconds before the rest bursts out of her. “You’ve seen what happens when you stick your nose in places it isn’t supposed to be. That poor girl saw something she never should have had to. Nice girls like that shouldn’t be sneaking around, and rotten boys like you shouldn’t be demanding an old woman’s secrets!”

Phoenix sighs. Lying at his feet, Murphy echoes the sentiment. Honestly, he’s not entirely sure how he got stuck talking to her. He was heading for Studio Two, happy to let Maya talk to Penny (“I’ll see if she’s got any insider info—anything that might help!”), and all of a sudden there was Wendy Oldbag, not so much gesturing him to come closer as waving an arm demanding his attention.

It feels a little like when Kaa-san used to run into fellow off-duty officers when they went to the grocery store, and while they talked Phoenix would have to amuse himself by counting the watermelons on sale or practicing Japanese under his breath or listening to ghosts lament the rising price of milk. She’d make sure his hand stayed in hers and knew to leave when he squeezed tight twice. He might have lied about it a few times.

Except in this case, Phoenix is still the kid, and Oldbag’s just chattering away to herself regardless.

“I didn’t know you had any secrets worth the time,” Phoenix says, unable to hide his frustration. “And I don’t think Lou’s a nice girl.”

“Shame on you!” Oldbag snaps. “Of course she’s a nice girl.”

“Sometimes she won’t be,” he says, a tad harsher than he needs to, maybe. “Better to let her make mistakes and be forgiven than expect something she doesn’t have to give. She’s just a kid.” Emotion swells in his veins, burning the curve of his ribs. He can’t swallow it away, so he digs his gaze down instead, bleeding it into the dirt. “She’s just a scared kid who wants to feel safe.”

Scorched metal cracks apart the word.

When Oldbag doesn’t reply, Diego pats her shoulder consolingly. Even entirely invisible and incorporeal, Phoenix is surprised he has the courage. “Don’t get your bloomers in a twist. It’s a compliment. Kids like us don’t need nice.”

Still, it’d be—it’d be nice to know what they actually do need. Food. Water. Space to grow. For things to be different. For it to never have happened. For it to not keep happening. But that’s never how these things seem to work. They grow hungry. They grow bitter, angry. They grow from the hurt, into the hurt.

It’s like this: he tries to build a space that loss won’t occupy. There are drawings and spray paint and carvings on the walls. Someone enters, uninvited; looks at them and says, you shouldn’t be doing that, why are you doing that, what is wrong with you? Whether it was a stupid mistake, or something he did without thinking, realising, or felt like he had to because he forgot he ever knew anything different. It clings to him. The paint stains his hands. Nobody can see it but him.

Phoenix is trying. Mostly, he fails.

(He tries again anyway.

Selfish boy.)

“It isn’t her fault,” he says, flexing his fingers under his sleeves, open and close, open and close. Ink and graphite are smudged over his calluses. A shred of cyan is caught under his wrist. The smell folds itself into the cracks and lines of his palm.

“Why are you telling me that?” Oldbag snorts, glaring just south of his face, and slightly to the side. Like she’s threatening something standing behind him instead. “You want to start a crusade about it you should go and tell her yourself.”

It takes him a second to catch the implication. When he does, his heart jolts into a rhythm that matches Murphy’s paws when she runs. “She’s here again? Already?”

“Of course she is. I should let her take over for me at this rate. She seems to be here more than I am nowadays. Even for Jack, in his last moments…” Oldbag clicks her teeth together, blinking harshly against the sunlight. “It’s all drivel and nonsense. It always has been. As if this studio would be anything it is without him. And what did Vasquez do? Paid petty change for his talent, wasted his face behind a mask, ran him so ragged there were times where he would—where he—” She grabs her jaw to stop it shaking. Spits out, “And you.”

But when she looks at him she’s paper thin, trembling in the wind, as if the weight of her years has come down on her all at once. She doesn’t crumple into something unrecognisable. It isn’t like that. It comes out all in edges.

“Would you forgive him?” she asks, tone grown breathy. Almost desperate.

“I… I don’t know,” Phoenix says, mildly alarmed and more than a little glad when Murphy picks herself off the ground to lean against his legs. Her head tilts at Oldbag. Ears lifting and flopping. Asking, why? “I don’t know him. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“No-one really does, do they?” Her face twists. Every time-worn line sags. It makes her look ancient. It makes her look so, so sad. “No-one really did. Maybe that was the problem.” Her eyes fall next, a murmur passing her lips that Phoenix reads as a prayer. “You’re sure about it, then. Jack stole Powers’ costume, dosed him up and all?”

“I, uh, can’t really talk about the details…” He hesitates when Diego flickers round to catch his eye, dark and intent. “But—yeah. There’s evidence that proves he’s the only one who could have.” The back of his tongue feels ashen, like he swallowed one of Vasquez’s cigarettes. “I’m sorry.”

“None of your pity, boy. I’ve no need of it,” Oldbag says, a rebuke, but not as quick as they usually come. She nods once, then opens her eyes. “Go on then. Ask me. I’m tired of all this. I want it to be over. I want to mourn him in peace.”

(It’s worth noting, Death says, for once sounding very tired, that she will get her chance to do so. At least, it’s worth it to me.

She does not have a shrine, is too old to bring the death of a man she never truly knew into her home, but there is a signed photo from a time before the beginning, and a candle she carries from the store in an old carrier bag beside a fresh packet of peppermint tea and an indulgence of strawberry cheesecake mochi. Once home, she realises she’s out of matches and lights the lone candle on the burner. She sits with the photo and hums what her mother used to sing her to sleep: a melodic reciting of the bones in the body, to the tune of an old lullaby. Its rhythm soothes her. Her hands are clean, dry, and she is thinking about the way light bleeds.

These stories happen without us. They do not need us to be there. Phoenix will never know any of this, nor will he make it his business to ask only to hear her refusal. His eyes are too familiar. Not the glow of them; that wrong light inside. That’s something else she instinctively does not touch.

It’s the darkness waiting underneath.

Wendy Oldbag watched two men and a woman immolate themselves on each other. They bled light everywhere; guiltily, she keeps trying to search for the remains. It was beautiful. She wishes she’d never seen it. It was beautiful. She hates it so much she wants that part of her to die.

But it does not. She will carry it in her arms like a child, the stupid, selfish, simple burn of it.

She will let the light bleed into her.)

The trick, Phoenix has found, has always been to keep the world he sees and the world everyone else lives in apart. He talks to the dead. He only talks to the living at the end. But he’s losing his hold on that luxury, slipping into a current between looking forward and behind. Law won’t accept anything less.

He asks, “What would I need to forgive Hammer for?”

When Oldbag hands him the photo, he feels himself sinking one step deeper.

A trailer. A woman. A man. And another man curled over a wrought iron fence beside a flower bed, the metal spike bent right through his chest.

“Take it. Keep it. Do whatever you want with it.” Oldbag waves a hand, a clear indication to leave her to her own. “But I’ll tell you now, Jack never meant to hurt anyone. And if he’s done it in the five years since… it was only because Dee Vasquez made him.”

Phoenix holds it for a moment, giving Diego time to examine it, then tucks it into the inside pocket of his jacket. “I’ll go and grab Lou for you,” he says, already turning away from her narrow-eyed scoff.

“What did I say about pitying me?”

“I’m not.” He tilts back a smile over his dog’s paws. For now, it feels like his own. “I just don’t want to owe you anything.”

So.

He’s pretty sure Maya is sulking.

He doesn’t know what to do about it other than to keep an eye on her to make sure she doesn’t trip or walk into any branches, lagging behind as Murphy nimbly leads them through the trees. The sun is far enough west that all the light comes in slanted, and Phoenix keeps manoeuvring out of the way so it doesn’t hit him in the eyes. It falls through the trees and the trees cast shadow, and it makes the ground look shattered, cracks criss-crossing through the grass. Maya takes care not to step on any.

Superstition isn’t something Phoenix thinks much of. Tradition—that’s fine. That’s generations of memory neatly rolled up and easy to carry. Harder to put down when its time has come, but that’s true of any dead thing when the living have to move beyond it. Like Theo’s accident, and now, apparently, Hammer’s Accident.

Maya said it that way, capital letter included, before the—whatever mood she’s in hit once he told her he’d not only heard the story, but had both a much more detailed account and a photograph. A lot more than the echoed whispers Nichols had to offer. Oldbag said it the same way, now that he thinks about it. She seems the type to get lost in titles. He wouldn’t have said Maya was, but then, he wouldn’t have thought she was the kind to sulk, either. That doesn’t mean she doesn’t complain or never gets sad, she’s sad all the time (when did he realise that?), but she doesn’t waste her time lingering on something she can’t do anything about. She gets up and finds a way to retaliate.

Maybe he’s wrong then. He’s only known her a month, and the only reference he has to compare her to is Mia. If Mia has ever trailed around sulking, she hasn’t done it where Phoenix can see her. Does she avoid cracks on the ground too? Does she hold her breath when passing graveyards? Would she hide Jack Hammer behind a title?

Give a man a mask and he’ll tell you the truth. Give a man a title and it’s all you’ll ever see. You can sweep anything behind a title and forget the person who bears it.

Phoenix isn’t good at forgetting. It’s something he’s taken the time to practice. The problem, for him specifically: it doesn’t mean he’s actually that great with people. Mostly they tire him out, but without them he feels so desperately lonely that he’s afraid his chest might cave in.

It doesn’t, though. It never does.

(Is there something to be said about identity issues if he’s not sure how to define himself if not for the people around him?

… Yeah, probably.)

Listen, he isn’t an introvert like Diego, it’s not like that, he just—he pays attention. He has to pay attention. When Diego’s social battery is zero and any attempt to communicate makes him spit like a broken machine spraying out boiling coffee, when Mia’s in pain and any noise or inconvenience makes her grip her head like it’s being smashed in with another clock. Every time he walked into a new foster home and had to work out the routines and expectations and tempers before they had a chance to unleash the last on him, every time—when his mom wasn’t—wasn’t right, was worse than usual, and he had to somehow keep himself, his dad, and any wayward ghost from making her break something, again—

He's learned. But it’s so, so tiring. Having to be on guard all the time, to drown his own emotions and somehow predict everyone else’s. And he isn’t a fucking mind reader. If Maya doesn’t want to talk, fine. He doesn’t have the energy to be the bigger person.

So it’s in silence they round a tree to find Lou glaring back at them. She’s leaning against the bark, her eye red-rimmed and swollen where it peaks out from under her cap, and one of her backpack’s straps has slipped off her shoulder, making the whole of her seem askew on the uneven ground.

“Old man,” Cody greets, nodding at Diego like welcoming him to a business meeting. His shoulder fades into Lou’s where the strap is hanging, his dead gaze distant and subdued.

Diego responds in kind, sticking his hands in his pockets, keeping a careful distance. “Hill hopper.”

“Shouldn’t you be with your foster dad?” Phoenix asks. He has to shake stray needles out of his hair. He thinks he misses a few.

Lou watches him struggle, then lowers her head and toes the edge of a crack of light. Moss and dirt smear over her ragged trainers, staining them further. “I was. He was being all quiet and weird. Then Cody’s parents came over and started being weird too. So I said I had to go to the bathroom and then I left.”

It paints a vivid family portrait, though not one anyone would think to pin on a wall. Three parents and a girl belonging to none of them. A boy unable to touch or speak to his own.

“They’ll be worried about you,” Maya says, and she reaches up as she does, snagging a leaf the colour of fire from the wind and twirling it around her fingers. The ends nip at her nails, crackling gently.

“They’ll get over it. Or they won’t and I’ll go somewhere else again.” Lou’s gaze skirts along Phoenix’s sneakers, and her mouth opens as if she’s going to say something more, but her teeth get in the way, sinking into her lip, and it never makes it out.

Phoenix squints at the sunlight and shifts his weight into shadow. “Do you like Cruikshanks?”

It takes Lou a while to answer. She focuses her efforts on Murphy’s ears instead, watching them twitch and flop over her hands. “I like the way he talks,” she says eventually, reluctantly. “Did you hear him? He says aye instead of yeah, but not like a pirate. Not like he’s making fun of me. He just talks like that. He says doon instead of down, and he says shops instead of store. ‘Aye, I’m going doon the shops,’” she attempts to mimic, with very limited success, but she twists her mouth like she knows it.

“First people she went to put locks on the fridge and cupboard and made her go to bed at seven,” Cody bursts out, strutting into a pace like staying still would be too much to bear. “Better than her supposed dad, I know, but c’mon. That’s not exactly a high bar.”

“You’d be surprised how many people still don’t rise above it,” Diego mutters.

He meets Phoenix’s eyes, and Phoenix can’t think of a single response that isn’t edged in razor blades. The memories hurt to touch. If he tried to draw it, it’d be stitched from different canvases, paper and cardboard and wax and clay, all a different size, colours broken off, restarting, clashing harshly, pencil mixed with watercolour mixed with acrylic. Splotched mistakes. Crisped edges. Kids built from mismatched pieces doing their best not to fall apart.

When he crouches down, he makes himself go a little less than limp. Locks the tension in his knees and the seriousness in his eyes. “Lou. What happened to Cody wasn’t your fault.”

The leaf crunches brilliantly when Maya squeezes it in her fist. Lou doesn’t even twitch. She just keeps petting Murphy.

“It’s not a kid’s job to be brave. And it’s never a kid’s responsibility to make up for a stupid adult’s mistake. It wasn’t your fault. And it wasn’t Cody’s fault either.” At this, Cody spins around and looks at Phoenix, startled. “It was a stupid man who was driving too fast and wasn’t looking when he should’ve been.”

Lou’s hands tighten around fur. Tense and white-knuckled without any of it transferring to Murphy. “Before he left that night, he told me, ‘We should keep going, even after I get the album back.’ I didn’t know he was going to go right then, so I just said we would, for as long as the Steel Samurai kept winning. And Cody said—” Her breath hitches. “C-Cody said, ‘Good. That means we’ll get to do it forever.’ And I just said sure, because that—that’s how it works when it isn’t real. So I promised him we’d do it forever. I only met him eight months ago.” She makes an ugly noise from the back of her throat, like a wounded animal. “I counted. Forever ended in eight months.”

“Lou.” Maya crouches down beside Phoenix, her chin crash landing on his shoulder, her hand fisted tight in the loose fabric of his jacket. “Lou, Lou, don’t get his album back because you think you have to make up for something. Do it because he’d want you to have it.”

“Everyone keeps saying that,” Lou replies, bitterly. “They said at school he’d want us all to work hard and focus on our studies, but Cody wouldn’t care about that. The principal just said it because it’s what he wants us to do. You don’t know what Cody would want. And he can’t say it because he’s gone. I don’t want to keep it. I just want to—to get it back. For him.”

“I do want you to keep it, dummy!” Cody snaps over her. He flickers in front of her, shoving his broken camera in Phoenix’s face, letting the strap pull at his neck. “The memory card got busted when I—when the lights came and I—” His words scramble, his face screwing up with the mess, and he lets it go with an inarticulate noise of grief. “I made it for us. Everyone’s just sad all the time now, and when I saw the Steel Samurai was here I thought he could help us, but he just yells at everyone and tries to hurt them and—and—”

Cold leaks its way through Phoenix’s skin. He feels the way Maya tucks herself tighter against him, unconsciously; watches Lou shiver and lift her arms to hug herself. Murphy shakes out her fur and regards Cody’s juddering form with a slit of fang.

Diego, not quite the worst of them, steps forward and places his hand on Cody’s head. Sinking through the cap to the dark threads of hair underneath. The camera thuds against Cody’s chest when he makes a violent mess of crossing his arms, though he makes no move to duck away from the touch. As close to touch as he’ll get without Phoenix or another dead person.

“Everyone’s sad all the time,” Cody repeats. “But the album… It always used to make her smile.”

Phoenix can’t know what Cody thinks about it. Not without asking. But all he can think by himself is that not only did the boy never stand a chance, but when he died, he died completely alone.

He reaches for his keychain. Holds it in his scarred palm. He ignores the dull pain. “You were his best friend,” he tells Lou softly. “What do you think he’d want?”

Lou furiously wipes her face. Her backpack scrapes against the tree as she pushes herself back against it, extracting a crackle of protest from whatever’s inside and a rustle from the burning leaves still clinging to the branches above. “Why do you keep doing that?” she asks. “You don’t even know me. Why do you keep coming after me? Why do you care? Why do you look like—”

She cuts off abruptly, but Phoenix hears the end of the sentence anyway, spoken in his own voice, in a boy’s voice holding a bullet and a keychain in his hands and Miles Edgeworth in his eyes.

Like I matter.

It isn’t what Phoenix wants the sound to be. He knows, to some degree, that there are people who care about him, and he isn’t brave enough to risk telling them exactly why they shouldn’t. But he just doesn’t… know. On an instinctual level, he supposes. The way the Butz boys and the Fey sisters take it as a given. Phoenix knows it in his head. His scars still itch. His heart still shakes.

What a terrible, stupid, messy thing it is to have a heart.

“The album’s in the guard station,” Maya says, suddenly, startling everyone. She grins though she can only see half of them, and only Phoenix is close enough to see the strain. “It’s in the lost and found box. I saw it the other day. We could probably just go and ask for it right now. Miss Oldbag seems to be in a sharing mood.”

Lou stares at her with a wide wet eye and shifts on the balls of her feet, hesitating. Phoenix has an idea as to why. He’s learned—like a dog crawling back to an open palm and struck, but he’s learned. They won’t tolerate handouts, not even from a tired, grieving old woman. And if it cannot be traded, if the debt cannot be repaid, the only option left is to steal it. Stealing it, in its own twisted way, feels like earning it.

“Or,” he says, a swoop in his stomach and a charge lighting in his muscles, “You need someone to distract her while you go in and get it.”

Diego throws his head back and laughs. “You’re a terrible influence.”

Maya huffs against his shoulder. “Why are you looking at me when you say that?”

“It can’t be me,” Phoenix says. “I already told her I’d be going after Lou. She won’t suspect you.” He tilts his head closer and lowers his voice. “And it’d be good if I could poke around Studio Two again without interruptions.”

Maya’s mouth twists to the side, but her gaze faces him full on, and he’d be lying if he said he didn’t feel caught out. The back of his neck and his right eye tingle uncomfortably, but Phoenix doesn’t move to scratch them. Maya doesn’t look particularly offended, like Diego might, or quietly relieved, like Larry would; not even with that lingering sadness so often badly hidden by Mia. She just looks like she’s understood something Phoenix doesn’t know.

“Fine,” she says, lightly. “But you owe me one.”

He doesn’t have time to work it out. Stealing is yet another bad habit, but it’s something he already knows. You need fewer things than you’d think: daring, opportunity, luck. He’s sure the Steel Samurai would say the same about a great many more things.

Time to make their own heroes.

“Hey, hey, baby boy,” Cody says. He’s back to himself, leaping out from under Diego’s hand to Lou’s side and grinning bright enough its infectious; that honest boyish smile. “Did you know? I know someone who’s braver than the Steel Samurai.”

And what a look in Lou’s eye.

The fire of a starving child.

On his way to Studio Two—and away from any possible minor misdemeanours committed by an eight-year-old—Phoenix pulls out his sketchbook and contemplates, in no particular order: forest fires. The taste of metal in his spine. A slouching sunflower and butterfly stitches. The weather forecast predicting clear skies for the rest of the week.

Then he mentally smacks himself, so to speak, and makes himself pay attention to the collage of sketches and notes he’s made over the past three days. He’s stared at it enough already most of the lines don’t mean anything, drawn or written, the same way repeating a word over and over takes away all of its reality. Bottom line is, he’s tired, and trying not to be (not that that’s ever worked for literally anyone). Mia might be right about prosecutors relying on quick trials, but Phoenix has always been a much better sprinter than a long-distance runner. Endurance is something beaten into him, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not. That doesn’t change the fact there’s been more than a few times he’s dragged himself to the finish on his hands and knees.

“How’s your arm?”

Phoenix breaks stride, slightly bewildered with how far the scenery has changed around him when he looks up. They’re well into the trees that mark a corridor to Studio Two, a horde of little light cracks winding around them before the bare canopy breaks into the downy orange blue of the approaching twilight. Murphy steps on all of them right beside him. It won’t be fully dark for a couple of hours, and it takes a moment for the question to settle comfortably. He pulls back his sleeve, offering up the splotched navy handprint. In the low light, it seems almost black.

“Looks worse—”

“Than it is,” Diego finishes for him. “I know.”

Diego’s fingers drift underneath the skin, gently, gently, and Phoenix lets him for a moment before tugging his sleeve back down. “My hands are cold. There isn’t really a lot of pain.” He cuts a glance over, trepidation tingling under the bruise. He really isn’t in the mood for Diego’s grilling right now. “Do I want to ask why?”

“You seem distracted,” Diego says, wry enough it’s like he’s willing to admit it’s an everyday occurrence and hasn’t gotten Phoenix killed yet. Shot point blank like he thinks it will one of these days. “Not a good idea to walk into this thinking of something else.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I know. I’m not going to do that.” Phoenix spreads a hand over his eyes, rubbing their tender corners. “It’s Vasquez I’m looking for, though.”

“Same difference.”

“So, we’re agreeing it was Vasquez who killed Hammer? And we’re agreeing he tried to kill her. Planned to kill her, at the very least.”

“It’s what makes the most sense from everything we’ve heard.” Diego rubs his chin, thumbing over the short dark bristles. For whatever reason, they never turn white—not on the man in front of Phoenix or the man lying in bed. “Don’t get too far ahead of yourself, pup. You’re working on dead things and hearsay. You’d need something more if you wanted to stand with it in court. Leave aside the ghosts for now. You job is to prove Powers innocent.”

“If I don’t mess it up,” Phoenix mutters. Not really meaning to.

“What the hell are you talking about?” Diego doesn’t smirk or snort or scoff, like he would if they were just playing; his tone is genuine, serious. “You don’t seriously think that’s going to happen.”

“No, I just—” Phoenix fumbles over his backtracking before giving up with a sigh. “I just… thought I’d feel like I’d have some idea of what I’m doing by now.” He waves his sketchbook, letting it flap over Murphy’s head. Raising it higher when she tries to snatch it in her jaws. “It’s all here, it all makes sense, but—you know me. I’m terrible at putting things into words.”

“The only thing I can rely on with you is that you’ll run your mouth when you get something to chew between your teeth. You don’t stop,” Diego says, staring at him with eyes like a sandstorm, all heat and wind and flaying particles. “The only way you could lose tomorrow is if Powers loses his head completely and confesses for the infamy the murder might bring him. And we both know the guy doesn’t have the balls even if the thought crossed his mind. Where’s this coming from?”

Phoenix slows to a stop. Not because of the question. They’ve simply arrived at Studio Two, and for all the walls can’t keep Hammer contained, to Phoenix they’re still a barrier. A final chance to catch his breath before he sinks everything else beneath the waves. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Diego tug at his tie before smoothing it down and crossing his arms. Phoenix just shoves his sketchbook in his hoodie pocket and runs his fingers through Murphy’s fur. She twists her head and licks him.

“It still frightens you.”

Said like a sad, quiet revelation. Diego’s always so careful with his words. He doesn’t say it scares you, doesn’t say you’re afraid of it. Phoenix thinks he’d be able to smile and shrug at those.

At the bottom of philosophy, there is a simple truth: everyone is hungry. Everyone is starving. At the bottom of Phoenix’s inexplicable, insane, and mildly pathetic existence, there’s something else that’s very simple and very true: he’s never stopped feeling like an eight-year-old boy. He can’t find his footing, regardless of what he is or is not.

With ghosts, he’s learned where to stand, because if he doesn’t, they’ll break his knees and eat him alive. The ground isn’t solid, but he’s spent enough time on it to know how to run anyway. He thought he’d spent enough time in the courtroom to feel the same, and it’s only now he’s realising he’s barely scratched the surface. He didn’t see the cracks splintering underneath him until his feet were already toeing the broken edge.

(I always get my guilty verdict.

Or, to put the truth aside for a moment and speak honestly:

He is standing on a cliff.)

“I don’t want to mess it up again,” is the only way Phoenix can think to articulate it. “If I do, I… I know you’ll help me, but if I—”

Diego’s hand swipes through his hair. “Forget the ifs. Say what you know, never mind what might happen. That’s all it means when we say to trust in your client. That’s exactly why you have to do it. Because it frightens you.”

And Phoenix—Phoenix wants to.

That’s what scares him.

That’s what he can never, never say.

Are you frightened, Miles? he almost whispers. Is that what made you a demon? It’s always made me a monster and I have no idea how to stop it.

“You run straight at it, pajarito. Hell or high water,” Diego says, and Phoenix feels a jolt under the surface at the thought he did actually say it aloud. But no. It’s just Diego talking. It helps him to say things, to put them into an order organised by rules everyone has to follow if they want to be understood. He writes and talks the way Phoenix draws: in order to remember it. In order to make sense of things. It’s useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way any compulsion tries to justify itself.

Phoenix flexes his stained hands and says, “One of these days you’re going to run out of idioms.”

“Then it really will be the end of the world.” Diego falls to his haunches to capture Murphy’s wandering attention, her blue and brown shining brightly as she peers between the two of them. Diego’s eyes flicker with a different light. “You make me wonder about it sometimes.”

“The world ending?” Phoenix tries to muster some bravery from the water, for Diego’s sake. Always for someone else’s sake. “We’d outrun it, you and me.”

Diego laughs. Phoenix doesn’t try to pretend he doesn’t hear how sad it sounds. “I mean how you’ll do this without me.”

“Same way I did before, I guess.” He doesn’t like thinking about it. Mostly, he just doesn’t. “I’ll be okay. It’s not like you won’t be there. That’s... that’s not nothing. Not to me. You know that, right? It’ll just be something different.” His gaze trails away from the doors to Studio Two, skirting the treeline. Looking, at least partly, for a flutter of pink. “Something new.”

“Once more unto the breach, then,” Diego mutters, rubbing his hands on his suit pants and getting to his feet.

The message is clear.

Let’s get this over with already.

“That’s another one gone,” Phoenix says. “It’s like you actually want to talk like a normal person.”

“People really need to tell you you’re an asshole more often.”

“I don’t need people.” Phoenix dusts the sunlight out of his hair, feeling it trickle down his back as he finally breaks out of the trees. It’s cold. The water is cold. “I’ve got you.”

It’s warmer inside the trailer. The sun is in the right place to leak through the windows, the wooden walls breathing in the heat and the stench of smoke, yellow stains leeching up the ceiling corners. The air is still, stagnant and solemn, hovering around Jack Hammer’s ghostly figure like a shroud over a statue. His back is to the small entry way, a stretch of barren floor spreading out around him, interrupted by a lone, abandoned table. A series of posters look down from the wall, stoic and distant, showcasing a series of old samurai movies. From the tilt of his head, Hammer seems to be staring back at them.

Phoenix hesitates on the threshold, cataloguing the barren scene warily as he slips his lockpick back into his pocket. He plants his feet and feels his breath, Diego close by his arm, Murphy somewhere between them. It’s her that breaks the silence, snarling. Edging forward.

“Murphy,” Phoenix says, calm and mean. She stops and tests her teeth with her tongue.

“Let her bark,” Hammer grunts, not shifting from his spot, not turning around to look. Calmer, but barely contained. Not so much something unmoving as something choosing not to move. “For all the use it’ll do us.”

“I was actually looking for Vasquez.” Phoenix raises his hands when Hammer’s grip tightens on the spear. “I know she killed you. And I know you tried to kill her.”

He’s expecting it, so he doesn’t flinch when Hammer flickers to a spear’s length in front of him. “She deserves it.”

“Did you?”

Hammer twitches, the end of the spear digging a furrow in the thin flooring as he struggles to hold it steady beside him. Phoenix watches over Diego’s shoulder, slightly irritated by that fact. He gets it, he really, really does, but he still moves to the side, letting Hammer survey him as he is rather than whatever Diego wants to make of him.

“Yes,” is the eventual reply. Thoughtful. Matter-of-fact. It slides left and right like the rocking of a ship at sea. “But not before her.”

And it’s the end of it, as far as Phoenix is concerned. There’s only ever so much he can take from and give to ghosts. He can’t rip them from the air itself any more than he can burn water to make it breathable. Hurting them—that’s another thing he does his best not to think about. It stands to reason that if something can be touched, it can be burnt, bruised, bled. They’ve done it to him a thousand times. He’s returned the favour once.

Only once.

(“P̶͗r̷̰͘o̷̼͗m̶͚̻͝ī̴̻̩s̴͒e̷̘͛̿… ̶͎͙̈́̕m̸̧͉͒ȅ̸…”)

Words are a different sort of weapon. “If you’re just going to lie to me, then you’re right. There’s no use to any of this.”

“I’m not lying.”

Is it really a surprise that out of everyone Phoenix has spoken to, Lou and Cody included, it’s Hammer that sounds the most like a petulant child? Maybe he deserves the chance. There’s little more for him to hope for, and there is nothing in the world that wants more than a hurt, hungry child.

“If you really believed that, then why did you try to frame Powers?” Phoenix asks. An empty mask is all he gets for an answer. “I want to help, Hammer. But I can’t do that if you don’t know what you actually want.”

To nobody’s surprise, not even the dog’s, Hammer spits, “I want her dead.”

“Great,” Phoenix says with bland cheer, and Diego forces out a snort. “That’s not happening. Not any way you imagine it. So if that’s all you have to tell me, I’ll leave you to your brooding or wallowing or whatever it is you were doing.”

He turns to leave, and there’s Hammer, right there, looming in the doorway with the light slanting across the twisted metal edges of him. Phoenix throws up an arm instinctively, stopping Diego from lunging forward again. Murphy coils in front of his legs and barks; a short, sharp warning. He doesn’t—he absolutely does not take his eyes off the spear.

It might be that. It might be Murphy’s bark after all, or it might be the teeth-chittering crackle of energy lighting Diego’s eyes, forcing Phoenix to squint his own as his breath clouds between his lips. It might be the way the black holes in the mask swallow the sun. It might be as Vasquez’s ghost said: only ever a matter of time.

Whatever.

What happens is the spear tip sags, and the costume follows suit, as if draping over muscle and bone. It’s obvious once it does that it doesn’t fit properly. It wasn’t made for Hammer’s body shape, something else that was hidden when he hunched over to fake the injury for the camera. White eyes peer at him from behind the drooping visage of the Steel Samurai. He may as well have tumbled out a costume rack or appeared from under the bed: a meek and mixed-up monster.

“What I want…” He sounds different, too. Muffled and yet exposed. His voice full of shavings, a fence post in his throat. “That hasn’t mattered for years.”

“Since you—” Phoenix cuts himself off, but Hammer’s gaze has drifted away to the back wall and the posters. Phoenix still takes a step back and reassembles the sentence before he tries to speak again. “Since the accident.”

Hammer curls himself around the spear, leaning his weight on it like a crutch. “I didn’t mean to do it. He was a bastard, but so are half the people in this business. Always looked at me like he couldn’t wait to scrape me off his shoe. But when he fell… he didn’t even scream. He didn’t move. Just… lay there.” There’s a stutter of breath, almost like a bitter chuckle. “Nothing like the movies.” He lets the statement hang for a moment before turning back to Phoenix and Diego. He has to pull at the mask to let him see them better. It pulls the Steel Samurai’s face into a furious frown. “How did you find out about it? Vasquez can’t have told you.”

“Oldbag,” Phoenix and Diego reply in tandem.

“Ha. Ha, ha, hell of a woman, isn’t she?” He doesn’t wait for a reply, and Phoenix doesn’t try to give him one. Only takes another step back, pulling Murphy with him. “Kept her mouth shut all these years, in a manner of speaking, but I suppose it doesn’t matter now. It never stopped anything, never did anything of use. She never saw it that way.” And it’s clear from the sun in the white of his eyes he’s no longer talking about Oldbag. “Word of advice, boys? You ever kill someone, make sure it’s not someone important to a mob girl.”

“Worked that out for ourselves, thanks,” Diego says stiffly, all pins and needles. “Worst thing you can do in this life is underestimate what someone is capable of.”

“What life?” For the first time, Hammer looks down at himself. He pulls at the costume, stretching it out like a second skin he’s preparing to slice off.

And Phoenix realises he doesn’t want to know what might be waiting underneath.

But Hammer isn’t done yet. “I thought about running away. I really did. Any number of times. At a certain point the want just… leaves. Have you ever felt that? No lights, no cameras, no film. Just a house somewhere. That’s all. Maybe near a city, but still so far away. I’d grow a garden.” He huffs out another mirthless laugh, nearly choking on it. “I must have told her once. I don’t even remember doing it. The moment I sobered up she—she told me that once they’d hunted me down, they wouldn’t kill me. Hurt me a little, maybe. But mostly they’d just bring me back. What kind of life is that? What are you when all you can be is what someone else moulded you into?”

They talk like this sometimes, once they let themselves get going. They clutter up Phoenix’s head in a different way than their touch and their pain and their death. All too frequently people feel it necessary that things should not be lost altogether, like someone who wants to get rid of something but doesn’t dare burn it and leaves it in the street for someone else to pick up. As if destroying it would destroy something of themselves with it. As if pretending it’s alive will make it hurt less somewhere along the line.

He says people. For once, he has to include himself in that.

“Nothing worth forgetting,” Hammer says, so quiet as to be as distant as a star. “Nothing that deserves to be remembered.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” Phoenix says, after a few seconds of silence. He’s breathless, palms clammy, Hammer’s voice ringing in his ears. He doesn’t even know what to focus on. The corner of the table digs against his skin, hollowing out the cold in his bones. He says it anyway. There is no other version of this story. “What Vasquez did to you wasn’t fair. And I’m sorry. But you’re the one who made it about dying, Hammer.”

Hammer pins him back with a slam of the spear’s shaft into the floor. “She killed me.”

“Killing her won’t change that,” Phoenix fires back. “Or is that all you want to be remembered for? A killer and an almost-killer?”

“No,” Hammer replies, almost gentle. Until it suddenly isn’t. “But maybe it’s how I should’ve started.”

Diego flickers forward and Phoenix doesn’t stop him this time, doesn’t wait to watch what might happen. Instead he grabs Murphy by her collar, holding her close and searching the space for a way out. He doesn’t give himself time to feel how scared he is.

And then—

“Don’t.”

A single human.

A boy called Cody.

There’s no drowning the fear for that. It rises too quick.

“I won’t let you hurt him,” Cody says. Standing between Phoenix and the rotting imitation of the Steel Samurai.

“Cody, no.” Phoenix reaches for Cody’s shoulder. His mind spins with questions (is Lou okay? Is Maya? Did they do it? Did Cody come to tell him?) but he bites them down. The threat won’t work. The fact Cody is a boy won’t change anything.

Try and scare a murderer—

Cody twists away from his grip, hand fumbling on the handle of his plastic katana. Diego tries next. Cody flickers in front of him too.

“This isn’t you,” Cody says, pitched high and wavering like a boy, but visceral in its certainty. “You can’t keep doing this. You’re not meant to hurt people. You’re meant to protect them. You give them hope.”

Hammer stares, and the mask stares, and the Steel Samurai stares, and there’s nothingnothingnothing but the cold and the spear and the anger.

“E-Everyone’s waiting for you to come back.” Cody takes another step, almost too far. “You have to come back. You’re the Steel Samurai, you—”

And Hammer lunges.

But Phoenix moves first. He yanks the boy out of the way and barely has a moment before he’s shoved. This time the push doesn’t end. It thickens around his throat. He tries to breathe in but can’t, Hammer’s fingers melting through the gloves and squeezing his neck, crushing at the sides, his lungs shrinking and shrinking and his mind sliding sideways, down, and down, and—

(He is clawing at the water, desperate for another breach, those scant few seconds between waves where he can taste the sky before he’s swallowed, but he is shaking so badly each lungful grows less and less, gripped by something freezing and endless and—)

“Nothing, nothing,” Hammer is saying, another voice is saying, to him, through him, part of the mask, part of everything decaying beneath it— “Nothing. A mutt, a filthy mutt, nothing—”

Panic overrides everything. All semblance of logic or control. Phoenix kicks out wildly, claws at the arm holding him, and Hammer only squeezes tighter, and Phoenix can feel himself throwing up but there’s nowhere for it to go and he can’t breathe and all the lights and colours are flowing together and—

(He kicks and heaves, not daring to think this might be the last time, not able to think of much at all. Only the terror of it, as wide and crushing as the tide. It spins him in its currents, steals any sense of up or down or light or dark, a surge gripping and dragging him deeper, teasingly asking him to open his mouth, to fill it with ice and salt, and it hurts, he’s scared, he’s tired, tired, it hurts it hurts and he’s sorry, he’s so, so sorry and he’s—)

And the hand is ripped from his throat with such force he hits the floor before he can find the weight to hold up his knees. He still doesn’t breathe and he still doesn’t throw up, locked between the two as he claws at his own neck and pressure screams along the curve of his skull. Finally he manages something like a swallow, sending the sick back down the right way, and he takes a huge gasping breath that makes him cough like he’s never going to stop.

Through his smeared, blurry vision, he sees Hammer and Vasquez’s ghost crashing against each other, making such an unearthly noise of it that Phoenix lets go of his neck to clamp down tight over his ears, and he breaths and coughs, breathes and coughs, dribbling spit and warm bits of bile down his chin.

It’s like breathing in a drug: his heart pounds in his chest, his nerves screech, his blood opens itself to their noise and fury, and in the middle of it, with sweet air crashing in and out of him, he enjoys its flavour.

A twist and grip and shatter and one of the figures is thrown out into the air, leaving a stain on the wall that fades in seconds. The other follows, their fight continuing beyond the shuddering confines of the trailer. Phoenix wipes his mouth with a trembling sleeve, still coughing, still thinking it’s never going to stop, still—

(Drowning.

And—

“It’s okay.”)

“It’s okay.” Hands cup the side of Phoenix’s head. They slide right through and make him look. “You’re here. I’m here. Murphy’s here.” Fizzing warmth spasms against him, inside and out, tugs him forward trying to hold. “Ease it out. One step at a time.”

Diego. His voice and his hands, rough and scarred and deep and kind. It saves Phoenix, lifts him from the horror enough to feel his scalp and soles and know that he’s cold and scared and full of rage—

And the breathing hurts, stabbing right through him, cracking apart his tender ribs—

But he can feel them. And as long as he can feel them, he can count them.

“I’m going to go take a look,” Diego says once Phoenix has found a rhythm, a promise crackling around the edges of his stormy pupils. “I’ll be right back.”

Phoenix sits there and breathes, tangling his fingers in Murphy’s whining fur, swallowing and swallowing the dark, oily contents of his festering core. He coughs. Tries to stop. Blearily looks around for Cody, blinking the colour from his eyes. There’s no sign of the boy which is… good. Probably. It means he doesn’t have to stand up. It means he doesn’t have to be a part of any of this.

He just reaches for more breaths until he isn’t coughing so many out.

What a stupid fucking day this has been.

And just as he thinks it, Diego flickers back in to remind him it’s not over yet.

“Get up.”

Phoenix doesn’t waste time asking. He hauls himself up and leans against the wall when his weight threatens to tremble out beneath him. Diego flickers to the window, halfway in and out the glass, leaving another smear of colour across the room in Phoenix’s mind. White and red and brown.

“Vasquez,” Diego growls. “And she didn’t come here alone. Just, joder, keep her busy, will you? I’ll tell you when it’s safe to leave.”

The windows rattle when he leaves and there’s no chance to tell him wait. The door to the trailer snaps open and Phoenix straightens, letting the horror drown in the worst parts of himself, promising the sickening ache of it time and alone and later just not now. He watches Vasquez walk in with blank eyes and a shiver in his chest.

She slows at the sight of him, gliding to a stop. Surprised, but not threatened or interested. If she even feels a charged atom’s worth of the fight howling beneath the sun outside, it doesn’t show on any part of her.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” she says, succinctly matter-of-fact.

“Yeah,” he tries to reply. Most of it gets out. Enough to arch a fraction of her pencilled eyebrow. “I get that a lot.”

There’s another crash outside, a noise like an animal lunging through Phoenix, to chase, to hunt, and it takes him a moment to realise it’s Murphy, curled against his shins, and not him baring fang. She might be growling. Phoenix can’t hear it over Hammer and the man he killed.

The woman Hammer tried to kill, though, also turns her head, a flash of irritation briefly stirring the placid water of her expression. The glass is the right angle for the sun, but not to see what’s going on beyond shadows scuttling out of the way of the light. A thin crest of blue presses against the window frames. He clings to it for all his featherweight lungs are worth. Old ozone sticks to his tongue.

He breathes in as much of it as he can stomach. “I’ve got some questions for you, Miss Vasquez.”

Whether she hears him is difficult to say. Her gaze, still and serious once more, remains on the windows, and rather than part her lips for a reply, she slots her cigarette holder between them. She lights the tobacco with a strike of a match and kills the flame with a careless pinch of her fingers.

Anger tries to punch a hole through Phoenix. He tries to fill it with seawater instead. It’s not his. It’s never anything to do with him. It hangs off his neck, hot and suffocating.

“I know what happened five years ago,” isn’t really what he thinks he means to say, but there it is.

Vasquez sucks in a lungful of smoke. “Do you?” she asks in much the same tone you might say how quaint.

“And I have proof,” Phoenix snaps. “I have the photograph.”

Her gaze lights upon him through the cloud of smoke, the shine reflecting the orange sun. She plays with the haze, twirling shapes with agitated fingers reaching through, curling in murky grey against the ceiling.

(This is how it always goes. He spends every waking moment trying to build up some kind of skin after it’s scraped away, so he doesn’t drip blood every time he brushes up against something. After all, why does tragedy exist? Because one is full of rage. Why is one full of rage? Because one is full of grief.

Phoenix doesn’t have to be a poet. Plenty of others have already said it for him.)

“Oldbag,” Vasquez mutters in the vein of an answer. Her mouth curls around the tube. “Old fool. She thought taking that photo would somehow protect Hammer. Save him.” She sneers the word, the movement splitting open her face into something ugly and festering. It passes in an instant, as a deformed mask snaps back into place, and her cool eyes regard him through the heat of the room and the anger that is and is not his own. “I should thank you for bringing it to me. It’s the only one of its kind. And now I no longer have to worry about it.”

The words land clunkily in his ears before crawling their way through. “I’m not here to give it to you,” he bites out. “It’s evidence for tomorrow’s trial.”

Vasquez sighs like he’s a child throwing a tantrum. “Then it’s a shame you’ll have to attend without it.” She tilts her head over her shoulder. When she calls, she barely has to move her lips. “Boys! I’m in need of assistance here.”

The men that answer her beck and call are most definitely not boys. Four in number, filled out suits and dark glasses, their smiles slanted and cruel when they fall on Phoenix and find nothing worth remembering. Murphy’s growl kicks up a notch. Against all odds, Phoenix smiles back. He can’t help it. The situation is so insanely stupid it makes his teeth itch.

“And who are they supposed to be?” he throws out, all bluff and barely bravado, his eyes betraying him, like always, with a desperate glance to the windows. There’s not much Diego could do, but Phoenix has to stop himself yelling all the same.

Vasquez doesn’t deign him deserving of an answer. “The lawyer has a photograph I would prefer to erase,” she says with a touch to one of the men’s arms. Phoenix is surprised it doesn’t leave a smear of soot. “If you would.”

“My pleasure,” the man replies, smooth as lacquer, his movement much the same. The room seems to shrink around him, a single land mass, immoveable, unstoppable.

A world of wall and smoke.

Of grainy air and the scent of inevitable violence.

The sky is good and blue. The wind is blowing, though it’s hard to hear over all the reckless screaming outside. The sun smiles down serenely as it passes over another day.

And here he is, here’s Phoenix, still trying not to cough or snarl, still tired and sore and sick of hurt children and the adults who never think of them, still messing everything up because he can’t keep his mouth shut. The thoughts just come. He’s just thinking. But the fury of it makes him want to scream without calling anybody for help. He can’t make himself move through the ROARROARROAR of it even as the man comes closer and closer.

So he’s right in front of it when Murphy says enough and pounces.

It’s no blaze of glory, no melody or poetry. She latches onto the man’s wrist with a ferocious growl and tries to yank at the flesh beneath the sleeve, but the man watched the whole start to end, like a whip already mid-lash, and his other fist crashes into the side of her head with enough force and pain to make her yelp. Keening and heartbreaking. She thumps against the table and cowers beneath it, fleck of foamy blood on her chin.

Phoenix doesn’t realise he’s moving, doesn’t know what for, hardly hears his own voice cracking out of him until it’s cut off by a hand shoving him back, again, and he hits the wall right as a thumb pushes into the bruises tenderising his collar bones. His ribs sting and he tries to bend double to heave another wave of bile all over the floor, but he’s shoved upright by his neck, again, and coughs it right into the guy’s face.

There’s an awkward moment while Phoenix stares in bewilderment at the slime sliding off those dark glasses, half-expecting it to disappear. It doesn’t. It drips off to join the rest of the mess on the man’s cheek.

And—

“Let him go.”

Phoenix shuts his eyes. Diego’s light beats against the cracks. Twin pinpricks. Another second of stillness and the hand around his neck slackens, just a little, enough for gravity to set Phoenix’s weight forward just so the man in front of it can ram him into the wall hard enough Phoenix might genuinely black out for a second.

There’s little he finds in the blackness of it. An onslaught of fists and impacts, maybe in here, maybe from the horror show outside. He’s losing track. He barely has the wherewithal to lift his arms to protect his face let alone tell the guy it was kind of an accident.

“Enough,” Vasquez’s voice rings out, eventually, distantly amused somewhere amidst the haze of red and pain. “The photo first. Then do whatever you wish to him.”

The man releases an ugly noise that Diego, under no uncertain terms, imitates perfectly. The next thing Phoenix feels is his sketchbook being yanked from his hoodie pocket, and he grips the wrist pinning him to the wall. It’s tossed carelessly to the floor and the man reaches for his pockets. Phoenix squints his eyes open and fists his other hand into the man’s shirt.

He has death and ocean water freezing his entrails and a murderer’s fury pounding hotly through his blood, the taste of it on his tongue, fresh and sweet and smoke-filled. This time he doesn’t have to think about it. At the end, it won’t be him who dies. It’s not much, honestly. It’s simply enough.

And with his grip holding the man to him, he jerks his knee up as hard as he knows how into the man’s unprotected nuts.

The man’s eyes bulge behind the glass, as if caught mid-explosion. A choked noise and his hands slacken, and when Phoenix shoves him off, he collapses onto the floor.

Phoenix could leave it there. The whining curled up figure pierces the smoke, hurt, hurting. He doesn’t like hurting. Then Hammer howls again outside, the sound gnashing its way into Phoenix’s trembling core, clashing harshly with Murphy’s whimpering barks. He swings his foot with full intent and hits the man a second time. The same place, only from the back.

“Don’t touch my dog,” he snarls, the noise of a wounded frightened thing. He glares at the men through Diego’s sweltering form as they’re stepping forward, watches them hesitate a beat and thinks do it.

He doesn’t know why.

The memory bubbles and melts.

And the man on the floor is lifting himself on an elbow and the other three are moving towards him, all of them, Vasquez a smoking statue behind, and—

“What the hell is going on in here?”

Just like that, the room opens back up: a room inside a trailer inside a studio in the middle of a murder investigation. Phoenix chokes on surprise as much as his next breath, staring wildly at Detective Gumshoe as he strides in with the open door at his back.

“What are you doing here?” Phoenix rasps.

“My job.” Gumshoe gives everyone in the room an equal appraisal before settling on Phoenix’s hunched form. “Which means it’s time for you to leave, pal. And time for Miss Vasquz to do some serious explaining down at the precinct.”

Vasquez tilts her head and answers on another mouthful of smoke. “As you wish, Detective.”

“Right,” Gumshoe says dubiously. He jerks his head at Phoenix. “Go on then. Get out of here before I take you too.”

“I need to get my dog.” Phoenix forces himself upright. Leans only slightly into Diego’s shaking hand.

If Gumshoe was bleeding on the effects of Hammer and Vasquez’s ghost outside, he’s fuming when he catches sight of Murphy still huddled under the table. He grinds his mouth shut and keeps his heavy presence by the exit, forcing it open amidst the unhappy glances traded between the men. None of them try to stop Phoenix as he stumbles his way into a crouch and gently coaxes Murphy into the safety of his arms. He gathers her up and holds her to his breaking chest.

“Phoenix—” Diego starts, alarm ratcheting up his voice.

Phoenix turns just in time to let himself fall away from the furious man making another lunge for him, the presence of police clearly not enough to dissuade him over the sick on his face and the pain in his groin. Gumshoe yells out on the heels of Vasquez’s sharp order just as Phoenix hits the floor again, and Murphy’s twisting in his arms, and he lashes out blindly with his foot, hoping just to hit something—

And he hits something alright. The punched-out squeak of breath tells him all he needs to know.

That’s three for three.

“Wright! Out!” Gumshoe bellows.

Phoenix doesn’t need to be told twice. He clutches Murphy and scrambles to his feet. As he passes Gumshoe, for a moment he and Vasquez are inches from each other. Close enough to share a breath. To fill each other with smoke. She’s smiling at him. She laughs with fear in her eyes.

Then he’s clattering out into the open air, desperately holding in all he can as he searches for Hammer and Vasquez’s ghost.

He skids to a stop when he finds them.

Hammer is pinned over the fence, the metal shrieking and sinking, the spike splitting right through his chest. It scratches at his empty body as he flickers between mock steel and skin, mask and man. Beneath the costume, his form flakes and flickers like snow.

Standing over him is Vasquez’s ghost. The Samurai Spear abandoned upright in the dirt behind. It towers over them both, casting a slit of light bent and knotted, inextricable between them.

“Do it,” Hammer wheezes, over and over. “Do it. Do it. Do it…”

Drawn by Phoenix, as they always are, the other ghost turns. His wounds number far below Hammer’s, his body solid, unyielding. His eyes as bright as the sun shining down a well at midday when seen from the pit at the bottom. Throw a bucket down from the top and it’ll be dark again by the time it hits. You will hear it, but what it finds down there is beyond the realm of the body. The water you draw is black.

“As I said,” the ghost tells him, gaze shifting to Murphy. “Patience and a firm hand. You understand.”

Phoenix flinches, curling his dog tighter against him.

The ghost smiles at the movement. Too wide. Too many teeth in too many wrong places. “Or maybe not.”

“Phoenix,” Diego growls, barely himself at all. “Move.”

The ghost’s laughter rings true as Phoenix obeys, the sound following as surely as his hungry eyes, Hammer’s whimpers, Gumshoe’s distant orders, the clatter and stomp of approaching police down the path.

It clings.

It does not let go.

Chapter Text

It’s raining again.

The night flares gaudy and inhuman beyond the window, dripping shapes that twist and collide and merge, dancedancedance, flowing like a tune he can’t remember between the wrinkles on his brain. He’s very drunk and there’s powder spilled somewhere on the floor but he knows the flashes between his closed eyelids are real, somewhere, somehow, beating and whipping his racing heart to the finish line: dead butterfly on the surface of a pool; audible machine hum; giggling laughter; a flaring match burning the fingertips of everyone trying to touch it; mulch pit; vomit and spit; a fence post and the shock of the fall and sweaty gripped leather and Manuel, Manuel, Manuel—

He jerks upright, hand reaching for a weapon that’s never been there. This isn’t his room, which makes it strange he’s lying in its bed. Impersonal as a panic attack, stretching out in a thousand directions around him, imitation, isolation, a toy box cacophony of rooms. Squint and there are hands reaching down to pluck strings, manipulate limbs, twisting the body this way and that.

Smile.

You’re on camera.

“There’s a story about a bird and a mountain.”

He turns his head, briefly distracted by the feeling of his eyes rolling independently of their sockets before she comes into focus. She’s perched on the room’s single lounge chair, straight backed despite the lazy curve, one leg folded over the other—her limber, needy adultness. Smoke trails off her lips, the cigarette holder perched between them like a wooden stake.

“There was a mountain of pure diamond, and it was time itself. You could wander its caves and see your life played out in its reflections, from the moment of your birth to the very date of your death. It could show the rise of empires and their fall, which stars would be in the sky the night you fell in love, what songs they would sing when you were finally forgotten.”

The blood makes a strange noise as it dripdripdrips from his nose, discordant, twitching clammy palms unable to keep the melody now that the amphetamines are wearing off and the comedown’s sucking through him like a creeping black tide. It strikes him, a pop of chemical cheer, there are more pills stashed in a jacket somewhere, but the room is spinning too much for him to reach out a hand, let alone get up.

When he tries to tell her shut your fucking mouth, instead it comes out through grinding teeth, “I’m not going to remember any of this.”

“Every hundred years,” she continues, ignoring him, as always, “A little bird would come along and chip a piece from the mountain. It would swallow it down and leave. Nobody knew where it went nor why it came back. Only that it always came back. But still, nobody ever tried to prevent this from happening. They did the opposite. They held festivals in its honour. They sang songs about its wings. They searched the caves and tunnels for its beginning and its end, so they could pass on the story to their children, and their children’s children, and it became a rite, of sorts, to search for the bird even though nobody had ever found it inside those crystalline walls.”

She speaks like its unfurling from her, like it’s something reaching down and speaking up through her. If he tried to tell anyone she could speak this much in one sitting, he thinks they’d laugh at him for such a pathetic lie.

He covers his eyes with his hand. It doesn’t stop the spinning. His time is someone else’s time. Tick-tick, click-click. All his breath comes back at him, sticky and smoke-filled, because there’s a man who doesn’t ever stand up with snarling teeth and furiously alive eyes and he doesn’t have to wonder why it feels as though he’s running in circles, constantly chasing something that flies a different path.

“This is a shit story,” he croaks.

“Shut up, you filthy mutt. They were so wrapped up in themselves, they didn’t notice how the mountain groaned and wept. Every hundred years it would think, maybe this time the bird will not come. Every time, the bird did. And the mountain said—”

“Mountains don’t speak. Or think. They’re giant fucking rocks.”

“I will gut you. Shut up. The mountain said, stop coming here, I do not wish to see you. I do not want to be eaten. And the bird said, I go where I please. And I need to feed. The mountain could not move, could not run. The people did not weep, because time was devoured too slowly, their lives too quickly, and they didn’t remember what the mountain was supposed to be. They forgot. And the bird ate it up. The bird ate it all up. Do you understand?”

She finishes so abruptly it takes him a few seconds—or an hour—of silence to understand she asked him a question, not just spoke giant fucking rock language—which bears an uncanny resemblance to English now that he thinks about it. He isn’t thinking about it. He’s thinking about the rain. Bleeding, the sky, draining cloud cover, dripdripdrip, sliiide—

“Do you understand?” she asks, harder, harsher, frenetic in the wild rainbow smoke burning up her lungs. She’s standing over him, her face running like wax or paint or blood. When did she get there? What did she ask? The question shudders inside his eardrums, reverberating like a voice chopped up inside a fan heater.

Do you understand?

Here’s what he owns: a dying star and yes for a reply.

Here’s what’s missing: the life that comes from it and the meaning meant by the answer.

“Do you hear me?” The room is spinning, spinning, the smearing lights of the city carrying him away, blood on his teeth, on his hands, the water soothing and deep, and her voice gloriously muffled inside the yawning waves. Slap, smack, grind. He crawls away laughing into the dark. “Don’t you dare pass out, don’t think you can escape this, not ever, there is nothing, you are nothing—"

“I think we’re good, pup.”

Tangled roots, branches darting, ducking, Phoenix runs through the trees, barely glancing down or around despite the unfamiliarity of the uneven ground. He trusts his feet, trusted them when they turned into the trees to avoid the police, not for reason, just instinct, sixth sense, bloody battle scars, maybe a reason, he did kick a guy three times and it’s not like they’ve ever listened or cared about why.

“Oi, pajarito.”

He spies a gap, empty of bodies, and bursts back out of the foliage, the footpath a solid force of anatomy, helping to keep Murphy steady in his arms. He takes hold of the worn dirt straight. There’s sweat in his eyes, itching, but he runs, pushes away from phantom fingers and laughter no longer close enough to hear but still crashing against the sides of his skull, frothing high and wavering, the rising tide tightening his chest, heart beating frantically to outpace it. His lungs pound the track harder, sharp, painful blows like a fist striking outside in. Murphy pants fresh waves spitted with blood into the crook of his neck.

The light slants. For a moment he can picture it in dizzying doubles: open sky and lashing rain; knotted foliage and alleyway clutter; flat road and basement stairs.

Is he ever going to get off this fucking path?

“Phoenix.”

Diego flickers in front of him so suddenly he barely keeps his feet as he skitters to a halt. There isn’t a trace of a frown or scowl in Diego’s expression, and it’s so disconcerting that it works to help Phoenix swim up from the throes of panic, enough to focus on what’s actually happening around him.

Murphy twists and wriggles between his hands, and he lets her go, follows her down into a collapsed squat. He tries to get his breath back. A mad scratch in his throat makes him cough, and keep coughing every time he breathes in, like the fingers are still there, scraping through, scraping in, shredding away the lining, leaving bullet metal and bone. It tastes like acid and warm memories.

In front of him, his dog paces back and forth, the hairs on her neck erect and bristling. She’s holding her left eye shut and patches of red stick to the side of her mouth. He reaches for her and she comes, but when he gently touches her snout, wanting to tilt her head to see the damage, she flinches and nips his fingers. Immediately, she licks him in apology, which is silly, because she’s in pain and she can’t help it, and she’s got nothing to apologise for at all, and he only pulls away when her jaw shudders and she bites again, stronger.

“Sorry, Murphy,” he says, voice as torn up as the rest of him. “It’s okay. You’re okay.”

Her tail uncurls to wag at the sound of him, just a little, and she presses to his side, little shells of whines coming out mostly as coloured breaths staining the sides of her throat. She’s never been hit before. Not even a clip on the ear for chewing up his shoes or nosing at his food or barking when she doesn’t want to listen. The shock of it: the sudden start and stop, heat thrumming under the skin, cold everywhere else. He can feel her shivering, and she looks so shaken and so small that Phoenix hugs her to him and just sits, under the bushes, out of the sun and wind.

Silently, one eye on the path behind them, Diego crouches down and wraps his hand around a single mottled paw.

Nothing is following. Not a hint of sound carried on the wind. Any recollection—smoke and sweat, snow and starlight, do it do it and that manic, mocking laugh—is just that: memory. Scraping over his spine and ruptured nerves. He digs. Finds only more deathless cold. The rage that gripped him, lashed out of him, tantalisingly hot, steaming up his veins—did it really come from Hammer? That terrible yearning for the man to get up, for the rest to come within arm’s reach, like they were teenagers standing in the centre of an abandoned track field, shoes and bare feet, shorts and tank tops, grass and sun and dirt and dust. Pain was joy. Anger was peace. Violence was love.

Theo’s training.

Shouldn’t he have outgrown it by now?

Diego’s head dips, a thick tousle of white, and Phoenix realises with a jolt he’s trying to see into his eyes. He turns away. Buries his face in Murphy’s fur and smells the familiar warmth of her. Sweat scrunches up his eyelashes. He blinks hard several times, fighting the lump in his throat swelling beneath the raw red from where Hammer gripped him, then Vasquez’s man after.

“I know,” he says, hiding the tremor beside his dog’s rabbiting heartbeat. “Can’t save people who don’t want to be saved, not my responsibility, drink black coffee and smile to stop the world from ending.”

Phoenix isn’t good at mimicking people, but not being good at something isn’t the same as not being able to do it. When Diego’s like this, steady and deliberate, as if he’s barely holding back a storm, it doesn’t take much to tip him over the edge.

(Like mouthing Mom’s words back at her to watch her sputter and spark, or butchering Dad’s I’ll-count-to-ten-and-start-again tone so he never made it past five.

Like Phoenix has ever made it easy to be loved.)

Except—Diego doesn’t take the bait. He only hums a soft, distant noise that could mean anything, and Phoenix nearly melts into a puddle from the shame.

“All true,” Diego says, casual as you please. “But don’t take it out on me and you. Take it as a lesson you’re still struggling to learn.”

“Which one exactly?”

“That wasn’t fucking nuts. That was just fucking stupid.”

Rather than fight out another reply, Phoenix curls tighter around Murphy. Maybe it’s the crashing adrenaline, but he feels so close to tears it’s almost unnerving how they just… don’t come. Stinging salt in the backs of his eyes and his body aching in places he doesn’t remember being hit and Murphy alive and breathing against him, knowing what he has to get up and do tomorrow, grief for a boy he can’t afford to keep being and another boy he never was, a girl he will never see again—but still. But still. It burns and flickers and he cannot touch it. He can’t stop shaking. Every time he tries it just makes it worse.

“That wasn’t just stupid.”

Stunned past the weight of it, Phoenix raises his head to find Cody fizzing in front of him, breathless and wide-eyed, bouncing on the balls of his feet so much he’s almost hopping in place.

“That was awesome!”

“Ay, Dios,” Diego mutters, pinching the bridge of his nose.

“You kicked him in the balls!” Cody crows, twisting round to reenact the scene, blissfully unaware of Phoenix and Diego’s horrified glance at the information Cody was anywhere near it, let alone close enough to inspire a spectacularly inaccurate rendition of it. If you only looked at Cody, you’d think Phoenix had been jump kicking and Samurai chopping all over the place. “And you already knew that guy wasn’t the Steel Samurai, didn’t you? I knew there was something weird about him. But he was just pretending. You even got him to give you his whole villain sob story!”

More than a little dazed by the whirling display, Phoenix barely pushes through his sore throat enough to ask, “His what?”

“You know! When they want you to feel sorry for the bad guy even though he’s done all this awful stuff, and it’s like, cool, okay, you feel bad about it, but just saying you feel bad about it doesn’t fix anything. You gotta actually do something to make it right.” Again, this single human boy. “Aw man, wait until I tell Lou—”

He goes quiet, and for a long moment looks as lost as Phoenix feels.

Then his eyes find Phoenix’s, and he perks right back up. “Hey, baby boy, you could tell her right? She’ll love it. All you needed was the Samurai Spear!”

Diego drops his head all the way into his hands. “That’s not helping, hill hopper.”

Cody frowns heavily enough to shut his eyes, hand resting thoughtfully on his chin like a practised pose. “Yeah. Suppose you’re right. He’s too skinny for a spear. A sword would suit him better.” His eyes spring open and he reaches back to unsheathe his own with a flourish that’s only slightly ruined when the tip, as usual, gets stuck. “A katana. That’s what boys like us use.”

And there’s that grin again. The same one he showed off for Lou. It doesn’t fix anything. It barely fixes anything, really. Simply knowing a wound is there does nothing to sew it back together.

But if Cody isn’t afraid of Phoenix, that’s—that’s something. If Cody isn’t afraid of him, he can’t be too monstrous.

Murphy rattles up a yelping bark, startling Phoenix enough he nearly yelps himself when Gregory Edgeworth appears, glasses askew and tie curling out the confines of his jacket.

“Good god, Phoenix,” he says, taking in far more than Phoenix has ever been willing to let him see. “Are you alright?”

“Oh great, it’s you again.” Cody finally gets his sword unstuck and jabs it at Gregory. “Talk to me like your frilly-necked freak son talked to Lou and I’ll break your shins.”

It might be the way Cody says it, or Murphy barking again in agreement. It might be Gregory’s dumfounded expression in response. It might be Diego starting it with a snort spiralling all the way into a helpless, groaning snigger.

Whatever it is, rather than burst into tears, Phoenix laughs so hard he pukes.

When he finally drags himself back to the guard station and sees Maya rushing towards him as soon as she spots him, the first thing Phoenix does is close his eyes and prepare for a good right hook to the jaw. Then he opens his eyes again because he feels faint, and as intoxicating as the pull of unconsciousness is, he doesn’t want to find out what will happen if he passes out right now.

Besides, it’s not Mia, Phoenix reminds himself absently as he slows to a stop. Ghosts drift between him and the living, but it’s more eerie to see so many people around the guard station; a mix of studio employees and lockdown police. Through Diego’s tight shoulders he sees Oldbag, banished from her own guard station and seething as she rightly should. In the direction Gregory’s gaze automatically gravitates to is a flash of red and silver, almost blinding. Over Cody’s head there’s Nichols, anxiously watching after Maya, quickly turning away when she sees Phoenix looking.

It's Maya who dashes straight through it all, spitfire and something like fury chasing close behind. His skin jumps when she grabs him with all the force and weight and fire of a crashing plane. “Nick! What the hell?”

“I’m okay—” He cuts off with a strangled grunt when she shoves his chin up, fingers driven a little too close to the tender skin. “H-Hey—”

He sways back, too far. She catches him by a fold in his hoodie, leaving his hands to grasp at empty space where he’s still trying to fend her off his neck, and the world doesn’t get a chance to right itself before he’s being dragged to a low wall and made to sit. Murphy settles herself firmly against his legs and turns her bloody teeth for all to see. Maya doesn’t look down. She tries to find her way to his neck again, and only stops when his protests turn into a hacking cough that has him bending over and spitting out the rancid slime of it.

“Gross,” Cody surmises cheerfully.

“I didn’t know what was happening,” Maya says while Phoenix drags his sleeve over his mouth, too used to the lingering taste on his tongue to grimace. “Everyone started freaking out, ordering us back here, half the police went running off and you were—I thought you—”

He grabs her hand. Clutches it tightly. “Maya.” Her eyes swim up to him, and he waits a moment to let her breathe surface air. “I’m okay.” Her lip trembles. He says it again, forcing as much solidity to the ragged texture as he can stomach. “I’m okay.”

See, here’s the thing about not being a good liar: nobody knows what a lie looks like on you. They’ve not seen it before, so they have no way to recognise it. Diego and Larry come close, can guess with frustrating ease when to remain unconvinced, but there’s too big a difference between what they mean by okay and what Phoenix means. It’s involuntary, by this point.

Any lie becomes such when you’ve kept to it your entire life.

Maya squeezes his hand and releases a quiet burst of air. “Then just… just let me see, Nick.”

He’s pretty sure there’s sick on his collar, though he tried to wipe the worst of it away. The only blood is Murphy’s, and there’s hardly any, really, even if the minute amount is more than enough to make his stomach churn. He doesn’t want her to see the stains. The rot inside.

By accident, his eyes meet Diego’s dark gaze over her shoulder. Diego hasn’t asked to see, not yet—ask me later—because he trusts that Phoenix will show him, and the whole stupidity of it is, he’s right to. Phoenix will bear his throat for the touch of hands he’s never truly felt and soothing words pressed into his ears and a calming presence by his side so many times he could get sick of it, and yet never does. Diego hasn’t asked. He isn’t asking now.

Fumbling, vividly aware he can’t hide the fact he’s still shaking, he tugs his hoodie collar out over the unbuttoned top of his shirt and his slack tie beneath, and lifts his chin.

Maya doesn’t try to touch it again. Small mercies. She keeps her grip tight around his hand and leans close, hopefully blocking the worst of it from Gregory’s unsubtle glances. Not that Phoenix has any idea of how it actually looks. For once, it must not be as bad as it feels, because Maya’s shoulders sag, blood flowing back into her lips, and she speaks lowly under the guise of peering closer at his neck.

“Lou got the album. She was going to wait for you, but as soon as the radios started blowing up, she got out of here. We worked out it wasn’t about her pretty quickly, but it’s better she didn’t get caught up in it.”

Phoenix already heard the story from Cody (a stand-off over donuts quickly devolving into a shared appreciation of Hammer’s acting skills, somewhat at cross purposes, Lou sneaking in through the gap, Cody certain Oldbag noticed and can’t work out why she didn’t say a thing), but it’s worth hearing it again. Knowing that Lou’s far away, running towards something safe.

“Maya?”

“Hm?”

Phoenix touches his chin to the soft threads of her ink black hair. “Thanks for doing that.”

The tilt of her head softens into him. Her eyes are a collapsing shade of brown. For a long moment, she’s silent. Then, “Please don’t thank me for this.”

His head is too full of static to ask what she means, even if it wasn’t the same moment somebody walks close enough for their footsteps to register. Well. Not somebody. Phoenix knows who it is. He’ll always know. But he doesn’t turn, and it’s not because he wants to hide that fact, nor because he doesn’t want to see and be seen in return. It’s because Phoenix wants to hear his voice. He’s shaking and exposed and unable to breathe right, cold and hungry and scared.

He is so, so scared.

And he wants to hear Edgeworth’s voice.

“Again, Wright?”

Only then does he twist to look past Maya. Edgeworth’s gaze rakes over him, following the same lines as Gregory, and if it weren’t for the dark circles under Edgeworth’s eyes, the white gauze curled around his palm, and fifteen years chipping them both down to the marrow, it’d be like nothing at all happened.

“Like you can talk,” Phoenix says, staring pointedly at the bandage.

Edgeworth makes an abortive movement, like he was about to try and hide it, then realised the futility. “A minor accident, that’s all,” he coughs out, stretching his fingers as if to say see? They clench again right after. Every word that follows is folded out like the crisp edges of a court order. “Accidents don’t happen this many times.”

It makes Phoenix crack a genuine smile. The action pulls at his skin, but he’s loath to let it go, even if it’s just shallow amusement. “I told you today was going to fucking suck.”

“That seems to be entirely your prerogative.”

“I’m way too far into an adrenaline crash to remember what a prerogative is.”

Edgeworth’s face does something strange, briefly twisting as if he’s in pain, but can’t find the source. It smooths out when Murphy, the best dog in the world, pads over to yawn out an anxious, but sincere greeting in the upright tilt of her tail. Edgeworth leans down, softened all over, taking care to avoid petting her face, his touch light and smooth down her back.

“There you are,” he murmurs as she situates her rump over the entirety of his right shoe and curls her lip at Gregory. Wisely, Gregory takes a step back. “There’s nothing to be afraid of here.”

Phoenix listens, watching it happen with his eyelids drooping halfway shut. The air is dry, not exactly cold or warm. He misses the rain. He thinks of a freezing ocean in spring. He thinks of blue. He thinks of something else.

Maya’s still studiously examining his throat, maybe just to make a point of ignoring Edgeworth, but it tilts into something else entirely when she reaches to tug his hoodie further away, stretching his shirt, feeling out the depth of the overlapping handprints, and her fingernails find roughened skin and—

“What the—”

Phoenix jerks back, yanking his collar up so fast he nearly punches himself in the jaw.

Maya flinches, rocking onto her heels. Startled. But not in the least bit cowed. “Nick, is that a bite?”

Edgeworth straightens and pulls his foot clear to move closer, alarm blazing as fast and furious as a siren. “What?”

“It’s nothing,” Phoenix says. Thinks he says. “It’s old.”

“It’s not nothing,” Maya protests. “You look like you had a chunk taken out of you.”

A shiver takes hold of his spine, something far more insidious than leftover panic and adrenaline. He bites his tongue to stop his teeth chattering. “I did. A long time ago. It’s nothing now.”

Diego is already by his side. Murphy comes back as well, too worked up to stop and sit again, too many ghosts still too near, instead putting her paws on his thighs and panting right in his face. He sinks his trembling fingers into her fur, feeling the tapering whine easing out another yawn, his other hand gripping the crook of his neck hard enough to leave another bruise to feed the old ring of teeth.

“Nothing,” Maya echoes blankly. She looks around them, maybe checking for prying eyes, maybe just for the sake of something to do. “You’re aware you’re not explaining any of this at all, right?”

Phoenix hums, focussing on Murphy—no cracked or missing teeth, probably just a split against her gums, oozing underneath saliva, nothing broken, nothing unforgiveable—and on Diego’s hand curled over his. The low voice murmuring, “Cálmate.”

“C’mon, Nick—”

“I don’t want to talk about it.” What he wants doesn’t matter. It spits like a gaping wound. “It sucked, and there was blood everywhere, and I didn’t leave my apartment for a week after it happened.”

There must be something of it in his voice, in his eyes, some kind of crack or keen, because Maya finally takes a step back, as if retreating from a wild animal. He definitely feels like an animal, he thinks, wildly, a newly risen swell pressing at the sides of his vision. Only a cornered one, a mangled and pathetic one. Not the kind of dog that would growl and snap and fight him for trash on the streets, but the small sickly ones he’d find in back alleys, skin and bone and whimpers, so starved of everything they’d curl up by his ankles when he sat and shiver with him through the night. 

He feels—he’s shaking. Shaking, shaking, and there’s a dead boy beside him raising an arm and… tapping the elbow?

Cody is tapping his elbow, Phoenix notes absently. There’s a wry sort of twist to his mouth that doesn’t suit his young face, and his eyes are sad. “Don’t ask, right?”

“Sorry.” Maya. Biting her lip. Hands tugging fitfully at the frayed cuffs of her hoodie and eyebrows scrunched up. “It’s just… you have a lot of them.” Her gaze trails down his cheek, resting on his hand. “Scars, I mean. Scary stories to go with them.”

“Another ghost?” Gregory asks, though it’s hardly a question, pointed solidly at Diego, and god, Phoenix really needs everyone to stop talking right now.

“Hey, what’d I just say?” Cody demands, springing up to try and reach where everyone is staring over his head.

Diego remains silent. And it’s such a relief that someone does, that all Diego chooses to do is sink his hand deeper into Phoenix’s. The memory of it hits Diego just as heavily, differently, perhaps, but no more bearable. And Phoenix is a sick, selfish thing because he’s more grateful for that fact right now than he could ever say.

How to explain it? How to make it make sense to someone who wasn’t there, has never felt it, will never be able to? It’s like trying to explain a dream. You can’t. Too many things don’t make sense, the memories too brittle, flashes of stuff that doesn’t have a story; damp metal and spinning light, blood, cold, teeth, ripriprip, and then the numb blanket of rain. He’s sure there was a middle part, he must have gotten to his feet and walked out of the warehouse, but he wouldn’t admit to it under oath. Diego’s voice, just the two of them, and then just him, because Diego went back to see—whatever he wanted to see, and never got to, and Phoenix was left alone, calling an ambulance because Diego told him to, and maybe if he did what Diego said then Diego would come back, like a dog waiting for someone to praise them for a trick, and he’d thought of the alley, except at least then he’d had Davy, even if she was dead, and also had just sort of set him on fire, and—

Look, it—it’s not like it’s not nice for them to worry, to be upset, to be angry on his behalf, but he knows he doesn’t deserve it and—worse—he can feel the shift in their eyes on him now. Even if he could find the words, he’ll always be hesitant to say much about what’s happened to him for this exact reason: he stops being a person and becomes an object of violence. Here, the body contains nothing until it’s prepared for more hurt; until something has happened or will happen to it. The intact body is just empty space. When it’s broken, violated, stolen—that’s when people stop and look.

The body as a warehouse. The body as an alley. The body as a basement.

A bullet.

An ocean.

(An ocean is a body of water: it has veins and a mouth. It runs, it waves, it lies on a bed. It remembers. And it hungers.

Not-living, but never-dead; how can something that moves and eats and wants be called dead?

The ocean has always been alive.)

Phoenix knows more than enough about all of those. In the back of his eyelids, there’s a hand reaching out, and he can never bring himself to move out of its way. He’s tired. He’d like them to leave him alone now.

When did he close his eyes again?

Someone’s calling his name.

He doesn’t want to look up, to be hunched low to the ground while they keep standing, because it’s such a vulnerable and degrading position to be in. But then, through his eyelashes, he catches sight of the ruffled fabric in front of him, next to Murphy, the burgundy around it surely getting spoiled by mottled fur and dirt.

Edgeworth is kneeling. He’s down on one knee, hands braced on his thighs; he could be the picture of composure if not for the way his pants are stained with dust, the white gauze strains around taut knuckles, the almost wild look on his face. His eyes are cracked diamond and his mouth is a pale, bloodless slash, and he looks—so concerned. Phoenix almost wants to ask him what’s wrong. To reach out and wipe the expression away.

But Edgeworth is kneeling. He brought himself down to Phoenix’s eye-level because Phoenix can’t stand.

“Edgeworth,” Phoenix says, stumbling over his numb lips. “Stop that, your—Edgeworth, your suit, you’re getting dirt on it—”

“My suit can be washed,” Edgeworth says, a note of incredulity underpinning his tone. He doesn’t try to move closer, just leans his head a little forward. “Wright, I… you’re not well. You shouldn’t…” He trails off. For a second, he looks achingly lost, eyes wider than Phoenix has ever seen them.

But that, Phoenix realises immediately after the thought hits him, is not the truth.

(Somewhere, always, many years ago, there was a bridge and two boys. One climbed and held out their hand for the other to take. He smiled and laughed, dizzy on fear and excitement, thinking nothing of the fall, only the infinite stretch of time he waited for the boy on the ground to reach for him.

This, he’d thought, is going to be what kills me.

And Death whispered yes. Yes of course it is.)

He unclenches his hand from his shoulder, one finger at a time, and tilts his head to make sure Maya can see him past Murphy’s fur. He doesn’t close his eyes again. They’re stinging so bad, but nothing will come out of them, like his insides have dried up. Clumsily, he taps the scar splitting the side of his mouth. “This one isn’t scary,” he croaks, smothering his shallow breathing behind the bruises. “Larry just elbowed me in the face.”

“Really?” Maya ventures when Edgeworth keeps himself to a silence that could hide a whole world inside it. There’s a surprising lack of judgement on her face when Phoenix finally risks glancing up.

“Yeah.” He presses his fingers into his cheek, tracing up a smile. “You know how his nose is crooked?”

She smiles back, as if helpless against the motion. “You didn’t.”

“I kinda did.”

It’s a last gasp kind of levity, skirting the depths of dark humour. The trick is in the surprise of it. A backwards dedication to Mia and Diego that Phoenix learned long before either of them; if you’re smiling when everyone thinks you shouldn’t be, it can’t be that bad.

It must look worse than it is.

“You really haven’t changed at all, Wright,” Edgeworth mutters. There’s a tick in his jaw, a flicker of true anger over the sharp cut features of his face, and it isn’t…

That also isn’t the truth.

Because Phoenix may be a little crazy, and he may do stupid stuff a little too often, but he isn’t actually stupid. He’s many things. A coffee addict by proxy, an artist who chose law, Mia Fey’s protégé in the making—even if he doesn’t quite believe in that last one. He was someone’s son, and he was Miles Edgeworth’s best friend, and he’s now neither of these things, but he’s never been anything else. And if there’s one thing he knows, it’s that some things in this world simply aren’t unconditional.

Miles Edgeworth is one of them.

Not for Phoenix, though. Never for Phoenix. He doesn’t think he’s able to care about anything if it’s not with everything he has. If it’s not enough to drown in, what’s the point?

But Phoenix also knows he isn’t most people.

(What do you think you’ve been doing the past fifteen years?)

“You have,” he says, vehemently, leaning back from Murphy, shrugging off Diego. He feels torn open and his throat tastes of metal, like he opened his mouth and swallowed a star. He needs Edgeworth to leave. He wants him to never go away.

(He reaches back and snarls, not this. But I’m here now, and you can’t get rid of me. You won’t.)

Edgeworth flinches, his glare chopped up and wrong, wound taut like it’s taking everything in him to hold something else back. It takes too much. His gaze flinches to the side, and the rest of him backs up with it. He stands and his father is standing behind him. Everything about his posture is closed off, and Phoenix pretends the sting of it is part of everything that already hurts.

“You,” Edgeworth says, rough and jaded, burned fist curled so tightly at his side it must be killing him too—it would only be fair, “Were never supposed to be here.”

An ugly burst of laughter makes its way up Phoenix’s throat, and he has to bite his tongue to keep from choking it out. It’s not like anything’s funny; the sound is all hysteria. “I know you forgot,” he rasps, baring his teeth beside his dog’s. “I didn’t.”

It’s a bluff. There’s no evidence to present, nothing tangible that could have proven it before now. The unwilling tilt in Edgeworth’s brow is all Phoenix needs to see to know he’s hit the mark dead on.

He stands, then, gathering the weight. All of its deadness. He’s shaky on his legs, wavering as a newborn fawn, but he only needs his feet beneath him. For the rest, he pushes a hand back into his sweaty hair and pulls the spikes hard enough to feel the bite in his roots.

“Dee Vasquez killed Jack Hammer,” he says, and it’s worth it just to hear Diego bark out a startled laugh. He doesn’t wait for Edgeworth’s reaction. He pulls Maya with him, feeling her fingers tangle tightly with his own, watching Cody walk backwards at their side to pull faces at Gregory, trusting Murphy and Diego to follow. It’s not far to the gate, nothing compared to the cycle back to the office, but they help carry him anyway.

“Nick,” Maya whispers. “Nick. Let me help. Doesn’t it hurt?”

(There’s a thin layer of molecules that keeps people from touching each other. That stops anyone touching anything. Humans are ninety-nine per cent empty space. Larry told him that, passing a lighter back and forth over his fingertips. Phoenix watched him, knowing he should stop it. It wasn’t the kind of night for stopping things. It was the kind of night when they were both the bad kind of quiet.

Larry unfolded his free hand and held it inches from the flame. “The further I get, the less it hurts,” he said.

Across the room was an empty bed, a dusty desk, a closet of unworn clothes. Phoenix didn’t look up. Larry put the lighter on the floor. It felt like they were too close to an emotion to speak of it, but Phoenix knew what he was saying.

“Doesn’t make much sense to me,” Phoenix said, his thigh pressed against Larry’s. Sweltering through the night in their boxers. “I’m touching you right now.”

Larry snorted and dropped his head onto Phoenix’s shoulder. “Yeah. Ant’s always full of crap like that.”

Phoenix thought about the lighter and the hand he wanted to hold. How both of them were running before the cement in the ground could take them. He thought of water and vomit and a dead brother on the bathroom floor downstairs. Pressed his cheek to Larry’s blond tufts and whispered, “It’s okay. I miss him too.”

Distance doesn’t make a difference, he almost added. It hurts everywhere. All the time.)

“Nothing that didn’t already happen,” he says, staring at the fire of the sky, metal and plastic digging into the itching skin of his palm. “C’mon, before anyone else tries to kill me today. I’ll explain when we’re back at the office.”

Beyond them, the studio has gone to hell in the setting sun, and there’s no regret he’ll never see this place again. Whatever happens tomorrow, everything he needs he already has with him. 

Edgeworth has his own stories. They come in and go out, and the tide fills the space between them, sparkling like it’s filled with shards of glass reflecting the light.

He knew the right hook would come eventually.

He wouldn’t have guessed Maya would be the harbinger of it.

“I still think you should’ve worn something around your neck,” she says once all the oh my god’s and what happened’s have fumbled their way out of Powers’ mouth—still hanging open in slight horror. Phoenix knows he’s an actor, but the teary-eyed dramatics are a little much. He tilts his head towards Maya instead, where she’s running a finger over the edge of his collar. As if she could strip the darkening bruises away, and the pain with them. “There’s still time. We could find you a cravat. A bigger cravat.”

“I think it’s called a jabot,” Phoenix croaks, his voice as black and purple and strangled as his throat.

He doesn’t get the chance to hear Maya’s opinion on the subject before Mia swings her fist into his shoulder. All the strength of one working arm and near-death recovery—which is still leagues stronger than Phoenix is.

“No talking until the trial,” Mia says, settling back and ignoring his pained whines as he clutches his smarting arm. “Nope. Shut up. I told you to stop pissing off murderers.” She looks him straight in the eye when he opens his mouth to protest, looking half infuriated beyond all measure, and half sad. “You’re going to need your voice in there. We’ll see how you feel after the trial and decide if we have to call Ant.”

“Should probably call him anyway,” Diego says, absently rubbing his jaw where Mia once hit him. He strokes the spot the same way you’d pet a wild animal.

Phoenix slinks back to Maya; her warmth and her safety. He nudges her, holds up his untied tie—left loose to air out the bruises a little longer—and tilts his head. It’s the most peace he can offer her.

She rolls her eyes, fighting back a grin, and accepts the dangling ends. “Suppose this’ll have to do until we can buy you a jabot or whatever.”

Mia watches them, her punching hand laid to rest over her cast, something fluttery and soft about the motion. It tightens and falls the next second when she straightens, turning towards their unwilling audience member with a grimace. “Sorry about that, Mr Powers.”

“Oh, i-it’s fine,” Powers says. It sounds a little like please don’t hit me next. “I should’ve expected it, I think.”

Mia raises an eyebrow.

“I-I just mean—” He sends a nervous glance towards her arms. “The—The Blue Corp scandal? Redd White? There was a rumour going around set that’s what the meeting in Studio Two was about. Just a rumour, though,” he says, raising his hands in pre-emptive surrender.

In the midst of cinching up Phoenix’s tie, Maya’s hands falter. She doesn’t interrupt, though, and when Phoenix sends her a questioning glance, she minutely shakes her head.

“I don’t know what it was actually about. Budgeting, planning—that sort of thing. But it’s true there are a few people in the industry starting to act pretty nervous about the whole thing. Some of them. Others think it’d be cool to be on one of the lists. Make it out like they have something worth being blackmailed, I guess? It’s how the rumour started. Just a joke.” Powers forces a smile. It quickly fades when Mia doesn’t even try to pretend she thinks it’s funny. “Um, I-I don’t really understand it myself. But that’s how I know about you. So, when I needed a lawyer… Not that you haven’t been doing a good job, Mr Wright,” he tacks on hastily.

Phoenix waves a tired hand, barely paying enough attention to notice the other man looking away as fast as possible. He doesn’t blame Powers; he’d pick Mia over himself any day. Powers has only followed him this far because he has no other choice, because someone better couldn’t step in. Phoenix won’t ask to be trusted. He’s just trying to do what’s right.

“I’ll keep that in mind, Mr Powers,” Mia replies. Her hands don’t tremble as she straightens out her jacket, but they don’t need to for Phoenix to know there’s something so tense about her she’s ready to snap in two. She turns away, masking it in the autumn sun. That flickering fire. “I’ll see you back at the office when it’s over, Maya, Phoenix.”

“You’re not staying?” Maya asks, surprised. Maybe a little disappointed.

Phoenix stays silent. Because he can’t talk. Because he can’t find anything to say. If Powers weren’t here, he might risk another punch, but the fact Powers still seems ready to burst into tears any moment doesn’t bode well.

Still, Mia turns, smiling at her sister, then eyeing him through the light. He can only hold her gaze a second or two before he breaks. He listens to Mia’s soft sigh, the deep breath that follows, and there’s only the slightest shake in her voice when she next speaks. “I’ll watch when I know I’ll be able to remember it properly.”

Phoenix looks up. All he manages to catch is Mia’s back, her hand waving over her shoulder as if there’s not a care to be had in the world.

“Don’t look so much like you’re going to cry, Mr Powers. I’ve known Phoenix three years and I still find myself underestimating him, every time. You’ve got nothing to worry about.”

She doesn’t say goodbye as she leaves.

By the time his feet hit the courtroom, Phoenix is already exhausted, his mind wrung out. Turning over Mia’s words as if he’ll find a way to latch onto the meaning of them. To calm the way they make his chest thrum and his palm tingle and his ears heat. He tugs on his earrings, the glint gold of them, just to give his hands something to do.

“Another door, Mr Wright?” the judge asks dryly.

Phoenix manages a bland smile. The metal reflects off the judge’s bald head back into his eyes. “Not quite.”

He forces himself to blink it away when Edgeworth speaks up from the other side of the room. “There was an incident at Global Studios yesterday involving Mr Wright.” Edgeworth glares at him the whole time, daring him to interrupt, to keep smiling, or maybe to say, It’s okay, I’m used to it. “The culprit is currently being held in custody. Though I would like to emphasize this is a separate matter to the one we are here to discuss today.”

“Joder, pues menos mal,” Diego breathes, scrubbing a hand down his face to smother a shudder. “For a second there I thought he was being nice.”

“I see,” the judge says, slightly over Diego. “May I ask on what charges, exactly?”

“Assault and battery.” Edgeworth’s jaw ticks. Beside him, Gregory makes a meal of folding his arms, deliberately grabbing Phoenix’s attention for the pleasure of being next in line to chastise him today through the medium of eyebrow crunching. It’s a nice few seconds spent wondering if Gregory’s right hook is as good as Mia’s (enough time to clearly dismiss the notion) before Edgeworth finally decides to finish. “And… unlawful possession of a firearm.”

The judge’s eyebrows spring to the top of his non-existent hairline. Murmurs rumble in the gallery. Phoenix slowly tilts his gaze up from Gregory’s pointed frown and squints at the sky. There’s no crow. Only the feeling of the boy that doesn’t exist wrapping his arms around himself and shaking. Shaking. Curling and bending and gasping over the bullet.

“Uh, Nick?” Maya asks tentatively, standing on tip toes to wave her hand in front of his face. “Still with me?”

“Just thinking,” Phoenix says, very calmly, “That if I knew they had guns I probably wouldn’t have kicked one of them in the nuts three times.”

“Just once then?” Diego mutters, dark eyes bright and glassy, hands clenched tight like he’s riding out a wave of pain. “Or would you have risked a second to see if you like the taste of gun metal?”

It isn’t a joke. It isn’t supposed to be funny. Phoenix shuts his eyes and bites his tongue hard enough he tastes blood trying not to laugh.  

“Well, as long as it’s under control. In future, however, Mr Wright, I would prefer you to attend court unscathed,” the judge says sharply. When Phoenix can only offer a shrug in reply, he sighs, but dutifully reassembles his robes and continues on. “To the matter at hand, then. Mr Edgeworth, your opening statement.”

Give credit where it’s due, Diego did try to warn him.

“A possibility,” Vasquez says, twirling her unlit cigarette holder in a circle between her middle and index finger—an inescapable knot. “That is all you have proven, Mr Wright. But proof is another thing altogether. I suppose that fact might still be missing on a rookie such as yourself.”

He swallows around his bound throat. His teeth are tender from how hard he’s been gritting them. “Is that why you didn’t tell them to shoot me yesterday?”

Vasquez hums a vague, tuneless noise. “If I knew what you were talking about,” she says, dark eyes disinterested on some unspecified spot on the wall, “I’d ask if you truly thought you were worth the bullet.”

He smiles like a cornered animal.

It’s the only thing he’s ever been worth.

But he promised he’d never tell anyone that.

“I was under the impression that was a separate matter,” the judge interjects, his gaze landing on Edgeworth in lieu of the heavy weight of his gavel. “Mr Edgeworth, what is the meaning of this?”

“Miss Vasquez was also present,” Edgeworth says. “As she… as she has testified, Your Honour. While it may seem likely—rather, extremely likely she did it… the defence has provided no definitive proof.”

The objection slips out instinctively.

The judge blinks as the court watches it trip and teeter. “Yes, Mr Wright?”

“I was hoping to come up with something while I was objecting, Your Honour,” Phoenix says slowly. Dragging out the fall as long as possible.

“And?”

“… I didn’t.”

“That’s unfortunate,” the judge murmurs, as if he meant to speak only to himself, and the weirdest part of all is he sounds like he means it. Somehow, that’s the most painful thing. To be so, so close, only to have it ripped away, because people lie, and evidence doesn’t, and Phoenix just isn’t enough to find a way through regardless. “Then, if there are no further questions, I would like to end the cross-examination of—”

“Objection!”

Phoenix jolts, almost looking to Maya, almost looking to Diego. The voice echoes up and on and on, elasticising it into a furious, twisted fervour. It sounds familiar. Eerily so. It climbs out the walls, and it sounds like shattered glass and ozone and it’s time this ridiculous excuse for a trial—

“Yes, Mr Edgeworth?” the judge prompts, warily.

Edgeworth lets the silence build to an almost impossible degree before his flickering silver eyes find Phoenix’s across the room. His mouth parts slightly. “I… was hoping to come up with something while I was objecting.”

Phoenix feels his own mouth drop open, a short wheeze breaking free before he clamps down the rest of the laugh. It’s not funny. He has absolutely no idea what’s happening, can’t answer Maya’s hissed, “What is he doing? What happened to I always get my guilty verdict?” Given more of a chance, he could probably decipher Diego’s sharp intake of breath, but he’s distracted. Always. It’s the look on the Gregory’s face. How intently he’s staring at his son like it’s someone he doesn’t recognise—like it’s someone he hasn’t seen for a longer time than he can remember. It’s not happiness. It’s not unhappiness. More like regret for things never said, knowing there will never be another chance to get to say them.

Maybe.

It isn’t like that for Phoenix. It isn’t like a month ago, when he heard Edgeworth say jump and set the court aflame in reply. Not even like two days ago, when he looked at Edgeworth and thought this is how it doesn’t end. It’s more like yesterday, when they’d spoken in tandem, when the only thing in both their minds was one more time.

In this moment, just in this second, it sounds like

I’m here.

(“You can tell me, Phoenix.”)

And Phoenix doesn’t know what the hell he’s supposed to feel. He and Edgeworth aren’t friends, nor exactly rivals, but they aren’t strangers. You never stop knowing someone. You can never stop their face being the first thing you think about when someone says home. Time doesn’t make you a killer. It simply erodes until nobody knew there was anything that once stood there worth killing. Fifteen years and it’s left Phoenix and Edgeworth, at best, bitter colleagues not meant to get along with each other. And even that doesn’t make sense, because when they’re in court, they do.

Edgeworth pulls out another testimony from Vasquez. He finds what Phoenix can’t. The judge calls for the cross-examination, and Edgeworth looks at Phoenix—glaringly furious—and Phoenix thinks about a lot of things, then. There’s Maya, curling her hands atop the bench, just barely restraining herself from calling out, and he knows she heard it too. There’s Diego, half a step behind and between them, his hands loose and relaxed, and his head tilted back like he’s about to laugh. Gregory touching a hand to his own hair, then gently finding the grey light of his son’s. Vasquez examining her smokeless cigarette, waiting. Waiting. Never moving forward.

When it comes down to it, the only thing Phoenix can think to do is the same thing he’s always done when it comes to Miles Edgeworth:

He finds a way to answer.

After he points out the contradiction (and even that happens on the heels of Mia’s retreating back, a simple mix up between Hammer and Powers, an injury to the leg, swish, swish, drag), Phoenix doesn’t let himself stop. It’s been nothing but mix-ups and masks from the beginning. Hammer drugged Powers. Hammer stole the costume. Hammer faked the injury.

Hammer tried to kill Vasquez.

By the end, his voice is hoarse enough to crackle on every second word, wavering in and out. Maya has to repeat it for him more than once. But when he finally breaks down into a cough harsh enough to make his ribs ache, it’s Edgeworth who carries on.

It doesn’t feel strange. Not in here. Art is the only language Phoenix is fluent in. Law has always been Edgeworth’s.

“Hammer’s prints were the only ones found on the bottle of sleeping pills,” Edgeworth says while Phoenix gulps down as much air as his stripped throat can stand. It’s not spoken with his usual flare. Only a quiet sort of thoughtfulness, grim without the anger, as if sliding the final piece of a puzzle into place. “He was trying to frame Powers.”

“Free himself of the accident that happened five years ago,” Phoenix rasps, trying not to sway in place.

“Ensuring the chance to start afresh.” Edgeworth clenches his hands around the sleeves of his suit, crinkling the tailored fabric. “It must have weighed on him heavily. All this time.”

“And he decided there was no other way out.” Phoenix can’t say everything. But he can say this. He rubs his throat ruefully, tugging his collar looser, probably permanently skewing it. One of these days he’ll make it through another trial without ruining a shirt in the process. “Not with Vasquez’s resources. She’d just find a way to bring him back, if she didn’t do something worse.”

“Even without the worst of it,” Edgeworth says, lips twisting downwards, “All she’d have to do is reveal the accident from five years ago.”

A snap interrupts them. Breaking wood and words.

“If the two of you are quite finished.”

Phoenix turns, slightly surprised to find other people standing in the room with them again. On the witness stand, Vasquez is holding the broken ends of her cigarette holder, staring at the jagged ends as if trying to decide what would be most worth it to stab.

“Accident,” she says. She shakes with it. “Accident. You keep saying accident.”

“You think he did it on purpose,” Phoenix states, because it’s true. Because it’s obvious. “But why would he—”

“Why?” It trills out of her like an ugly laugh. Splinters catch her gloved fingers. She drills them deeper down. “What does the why matter? Manuel died because of him. The intent doesn’t matter. Only the death.”

(Mix-ups, masks and monsters. Three different people. Three different interpretations. A murder—or an accident? There’s a difference, isn’t there? Of course there’s a difference.

What it isn’t is justification. By its nature, the act itself obviates the need for justification. And the act itself is about power.

It only takes a small step forward to make it cruelty.)

“And he knew it. He knew it was exactly what he deserved.”

Cold needles the tips of Phoenix’s fingers. But it isn’t a ghost that’s doing it. Only Vasquez’s dead-eyed stare boring into him, her hand dropping, the broken cigarette holder falling to the marble floor with a careless, oddly quiet tap.

There’s a saying in the Fey family, in the poet’s choice: grief is just love with nowhere to go.

Here’s what they don’t tell you: all too easily, love with nowhere to go gets twisted.

“Why else would he let me do everything I did to him?”

That’s how ghosts are made.

“Do you think they’d let us put locks on the defendant’s lobby doors?” Maya asks.

She’s uncaringly loud about it as said doors open, unprompted, to reveal Edgeworth. She tucks her hands behind her back and bares a grin halfway to a snarl. It should be an alien expression on her, but with all the giddy light flaring off her necklace, Phoenix swears, somehow it isn’t.

Edgeworth apparently uses the second it takes to walk across the threshold to become wilfully deaf. His gaze sweeps across Maya, then Phoenix, resting on Powers and commanding his full attention.

“Um, hi,” Powers says grandly. Considering he’s been crying nonstop since the not guilty verdict was read, it’s actually far more than Phoenix would have expected from him. Less like an actor standing in the spotlight and more like a sopping wet cat staring blankly at a pair of headlights. “It, uh… t-thank you for your help, Mr Edgeworth.”

He doesn’t see the look Maya flashes at him. Again, when Phoenix nudges her, she shakes her head. This time, she mouths later, the heat in her eyes cooling as she watches him read her lips. She does it again. Where’d you learn how to do that?

Phoenix shrugs, gaze dipping and ears reddening. Behind him, Diego quietly snorts.

“Yes.” Edgeworth says to Powers. It takes him a moment to find more than that single syllable, his shoulders hunching before forcibly straightening. “I… I’m a big fan of your work, Mr Powers.”

Phoenix doesn’t have to try to hide his laugh inside a cough. His throat is finally too raw for it. He waves a hand at the army of concerned gazes suddenly turned his way, pressing his mouth into his elbow. “Ignore me,” he wheezes, slightly muffled.

“W-Well, thank you for saying.” Powers fiddles with his latest handkerchief, but thankfully, thank god, doesn’t try to offer it to Phoenix. He crams a smile into his cheeks for Edgeworth instead. It’s only a marginally better outcome. “I know you just had to get your work done as well. N-No hard feelings.”

“Excuse me, Mr Edgeworth,” Maya says, toxically pleasant. “But can we help you with something?”

Edgeworth gives a tight-lipped nod, several times. In a jerking motion he seems to reconsider too late, he throws something, underhand, towards Phoenix, leaving just enough time for Phoenix to scrabble to catch it, but only register exactly what it is when he has it in his hands. The corners are slightly bent, creased as if they were retroactively flattened out, the soft cover sun-warmed and swept clean. His sketchbook. He’d forgotten he needed to ask about it.

“You dropped that,” Edgeworth says shortly, flexing his fingers like he’s trying to rid himself of an unwanted sensation. He doesn’t give Phoenix a chance to respond before he turns back to Powers. “There’s someone here who would like to see you, Mr Powers. If you’d be willing.”

“R-Right now?” Powers asks, voice cracking like a boy’s.

Edgeworth glances over his shoulder, and Phoenix feels his breath catch in a way that has nothing to do with ghosts when he sees who’s lingering in the shadow of the doorway.

Visibly caught out, Cruikshanks steps into the room, his usual amusement dancing in his eyes as he takes in Powers with a permanently unimpressed sort of scrutiny. A certain feeling lights the air as Lou enters behind him—or maybe it’s all from Phoenix, trying desperately to catch her expression despite the low tilt of her hat. Grim, but not like she’s angry. Lonely, but not like she’s sad. She has her hands shoved in her pockets as she keeps pace behind Cruikshanks, never quite walking in stride with him.

Powers hastily mops at his face, clearing the worst of the mess, but still leaving him blotched red and swollen. Hardly a hero in any light, let alone Steel Samurai material considering all of Phoenix’s scant experience.

Phoenix turns his gaze towards the window and tries not to think of dead things.

But the difference here, one small difference, is despite how he might look, or what he might seem to be, Powers doesn’t turn away. He doesn’t try to hide. He takes a breath, big enough to fill his heart to his lungs, and when he crouches down to Lou’s level, he does so with a smile.

“Hello,” he says, as any one person says to another. “My name is Will. It’s very nice to meet you.”

“Lou,” she mutters in reply, not looking at him yet. Not looking at anyone. She swings her backpack off one shoulder and catches it in her hands, unzipping it the same way you’d rip a band-aid off a cut that refuses to stop bleeding. “I have something I… I hope you could take care of. For a friend of mine.”

Maya stiffens as soon as she sees it. For Phoenix, it takes a second to understand. The blue sweeps right through him. A hard cover baby blue with sheets of white card filling it front to back, scraps of colourful paper peeking out, overflowing the space between, and a child’s font scribbled over the front in stark marker beside a lopsided drawing. It reads: Samurai Scrapbook. It shows: the head of a samurai.

Oh, Phoenix thinks, understanding all at once why Cody isn’t at Lou’s side. We’re not supposed to be here.

But here they are, and here’s Lou, holding out the album, once lost and now stolen. Her fingers are grey at the nails. They hold onto it so tightly.

Powers doesn’t take it, just takes it in silently. He bends a little more to try and see under her cap, then catches himself, and searches the rest of the room instead. Phoenix has no idea what expression is on his own face, let alone anyone else’s.

It’s like a car crash.

You can’t look away.

“Lou,” Powers says, a little scratched. He sits in the sound of it for a moment. “It would be an honour.” His knees press together, and he rests his wrists in the divot between them. “But… I-I think it would be wasted on me. I wouldn’t know how to take care of it properly.”

“This isn’t for me,” Lou says. “It’s for Cody.”

Briefly, Powers closes his eyes. “If it’s for Cody, then…” He takes a breath. In and out. And opens his eyes. “Then I think I would like to do what makes him happy. I’ve heard you were very good friends. And very good friends know that their happiness, your happiness and his happiness, won’t always look the same. So he started with this. And he trusted you to work out the rest from there.”

A sliver of dulled blue bleeds out from Lou’s cap. She hunches her shoulders and shakes her head. Puffs of blonde drift back and forth over the dark of her eyepatch. “Happy is too hard without him.”

“Yes,” Powers murmurs. “It’s very, very hard. Probably the hardest thing anyone can do in their life.” The surprise opens itself up wide in Lou’s silence, and Powers lets out a watery chuckle. “It really is. I won’t lie to you. You always have to find a way to get up and head towards it. But getting up doesn’t always look like standing over someone else. And I can say, w-with some certainty now, the falling itself isn’t what’s important.” After another shaky breath, his smile is clear. “It’s how you get back up again.” He lifts a hand, only to press the album deeper into her hold. “It’s not okay. It probably won’t be okay for a long time, and I-I honestly can’t say it will ever be easy, but—” His voice wobbles, and so does Lou’s chin. “But that’s why we have people to help us.”

Lou fully raises her head. Gently holding the album to her chest. She blinks hard once, twice, then breaks on a small sniff. “I’m sorry I didn’t believe you’re the Steel Samurai.”

“Oh, no.” Powers scratches his cheek sheepishly. “I’m not really. I’m just a guy. But we don’t really need to be anything more than that, do we?” He tilts his head. “Well, um, girl, in your case.”

(Five years. Five strokes. The difference between a good painting and a great one. But what does it show after the choice has been made, run straight through to the finish line?

An old woman with steel for skin and daggers for teeth; bottled bravery, all fluff and brittle bone underneath. An assistant merging into, or perhaps out of, the very background she paints. A man splayed back over a fence, features blurring between two faces, the universe cackling at the edges of the woman forced to stand and watch for eternity. A girl with her face tilted away to the right, the scars almost but never quite hidden, violence cut into her core but for the hand she holds out for a boy who once was, now isn’t, and will never again be there.

There’s no moral or story. There’s no resolution. All paintings lie as much as they tell the truth. The thickness of paint, the bristled curves of the brushstroke; weight and movement and sinewy skin. Feel the metal and the blood sunk into its iron twice over, the blue sunk shadow of the girl’s eye, the softness and texture of it. And yet it’s all only colour and light. A single voice whispering out into the dark:

Yes.

Here I am.

And here you are too.

What a glory and a privilege, to love something that Death cannot touch.)

“I take it back,” Phoenix mutters to Maya. “I’ll watch the Steel Samurai with you.”

Maya leans up into him, waving her confusion through her fringe. “But you already said you would.”

“Yeah, those were definitely just words coming out my mouth.”

She huffs something that could almost be a laugh and leans round to peer at him, a calm, even stare into his eyes. They shine like summer’s waiting inside them. “Y’know something, Nick?”

What? he mouths in reply.

“You’re kind of an asshole sometimes.”

Phoenix smiles, slow and crooked. It barely weighs a thing. “Yeah. I know.”

Maya raises her fist and taps it gently against his shoulder. “You’re paying for ramen after we go see Ant,” she says and pushes off him, layering the shape of her fingers in a burning mark beneath his suit. “Hey, Lou? D’you think I could sneak a peak of yours and Cody’s album? I’ve never been to a live show. Yeah, not even once.”

“Oh, spitfire,” Diego says, drifting after her with a wistful sigh. “I can’t wait to meet you.”

Phoenix lets them go, looking down at his sketchbook. So much smaller and emptier than the forever Lou holds in her arms.

But it’s a start.

It means he gets to keep going.

When he looks up, he catches a slant of silver from the corner of his eye, bracketed by white, and he turns to find Edgeworth staring at him, Gregory hovering a safe distance behind. There’s a strange expression on Edgeworth’s face, one Phoenix truthfully doesn’t know the name of this time. He can only tilt his head and offer a quizzical look in response.

Quickly, as if caught doing something he wasn’t supposed to be, Edgeworth turns away. “I didn’t look,” he says, and after half a beat, he steps closer. Speaks lower. “I made sure nobody else did, either.”

“You didn’t have to do that,” Phoenix says after a bewildered moment to understand what Edgeworth is talking about. He raises the sketchbook between them, letting the pages flip partly open. “It’s not like there’s anything in here you didn’t already know.”

Edgeworth works the stiffness in his jaw, curling up his right arm to hold his left. It’s an odd motion, quietly self-soothing and raw. “You… don’t like people looking before it’s finished.”

Warmth spreads through Phoenix, a different kind of burn from the residue left over from Hammer. He didn’t bother with the cooling pads today, and it’s left him something of a light-headed, simmering mess in more ways than one, but he’s glad of it now. As small a gesture as it is, he wants to feel it with all of him. He wants there to be enough to share it. “You know, Powers' favourite was red too.”

The moment stretches out, clumsy between them. Edgeworth marks it with a narrow glare. He almost squints his eyes shut. “That was years ago, Wright.”

“Yes,” Gregory murmurs, and though he’s clearly speaking to his son, his eyes find Phoenix’s. “I suppose that’s why you still keep the keychain in your office drawer.”

Phoenix feels his smile widen and makes himself turn away before Edgeworth can see the disbelief muddying the corners of it. That’s… something. Without more proof for context, Phoenix isn’t sure what, but it’s something more. Something new.

They stand together, watching the others pour over the album. Lou seems uncertain with all the attention, but Cruikshanks keeps a steady presence at her back, and she doesn’t pull away from the contact. Powers has taken it upon himself to add a dizzying amount of context to the photos, mostly for Maya’s benefit, if her jabbing questions are anything to go by, and Diego sits cross-legged, his chin in his palm, his softness worn on him where he knows only Phoenix will pay attention to it. Edgeworth seems tense, but Phoenix doesn’t feel it. The end of it is settling in now. He won. He’ll get to do it again. One more time. As many times as it takes.

“Thanks, Edgeworth,” he says, a little breathless. “Next time, though, I’ll beat you without anyone’s help.”

“Wright,” Edgeworth says. And stops.

He turns his gaze down to the distance between them.

Almost nothing, really.

Nothing at all.

“I didn’t expect to ever meet you again. In retrospect, it would have been better had we not. Because of you, I am saddled with unnecessary… feelings.”

If Phoenix were a poet, he’d say the words echoed despite how quietly they’re spoken. He’d say they dripped out of Edgeworth’s mouth like blood and stained his hands. But Phoenix is just a man, just a boy, his keychain in his hand with no memory of having reached for it, and he can only watch as Edgeworth turns to him, and takes his blank silence, and tries to break it completely apart for the last time.

“This is the last time. Do you hear me? Don’t ever show your face in front of me again.”

Edgeworth doesn’t close the door behind him. He doesn’t run out or slam it shut or leave the world cracking open in his wake. Maybe to make sure Lou has her moment without distraction. Maybe to make sure nobody calls after him. Gregory stands in the empty space he left behind, sorrowed, but not surprised. He waits and strains to say, “Phoenix, I—”

If there’s more, Phoenix doesn’t hear it.

He’s too busy running.

“Edgeworth.”

He catches up on the stairwell.

Edgeworth doesn’t stop, clipping down each stair, a ringing aftermath stretching out into the empty halls on every side.

“My dad didn’t hit me.”

Hoarse and painful as it is, it sounds like a stranger’s voice calling out, torn out in such a way Phoenix tastes metal and salt. It runs uselessly into the walls and rebounds to collapse in a tangled heap around Edgeworth’s ankles. Edgeworth falters, grabbing onto the handrail for balance, but he still doesn’t turn around.

Light and colour and sound. Phoenix raised high. Edgeworth down below. But it all depends which way you’re looking at it.

(A week after Gregory Edgeworth was murdered, he watched his son tell law to go fuck itself.

Not in so many words. Not in those words at all, Gregory hopes. But he watched Miles stuff all manner of things into the trash whilst trying to choose what he would take with him. Everything to do with law—books, journals, clothes, stationary, court recordings, even a lamp Gregory brought home from his office—went into a black bag.

Miles gave it up three days later, taking out each piece and carefully placing it back where he found it. Many he took out again. He sat on the floor, one book at a time, and held each one without ever reading them. He put court recordings on for background noise while he filled his suitcase. He smoothed out the crinkles in the suits while his own clothes remained rumpled and thrown. Unable to ask, but with fifteen years to think it over, Gregory thinks it was the only thing left that could be familiar. That could be safe.

But he still didn’t take any of it across the ocean. Instead, he packed them in boxes which were sent to storage and remain there to this day alongside albums and pictures and furniture and cutlery and ornaments and god knows what else anymore. All of it gathering dust. Gathering darkness.

Not that any of it cares. Miles didn’t try to hold onto any of it—everything let go except law. Law does not have hands. Law cannot hold him. Law cannot let him go.

Law can never love him back.

It’s the only thing left safe to love.

One of them knows this is a lie.

The other is still trying to live through it anyway.)

“My dad didn’t hit me,” Phoenix repeats, quieter. He doesn’t mean to do it that way. He wants to say it full of fury; to relight the rage from the trailer, the kind of anger Larry and Diego have wanted from him for years. But it’s sluggish and sticky, ashen in his eyes, and all he feels is tired. “But he wasn’t a good dad. You were right. To try. To—To do what you did.”

“I don’t need you to tell me that,” Edgeworth snarls, rocking himself with the force of it. His knuckles are white in the light.

“I think you do,” Phoenix says, and fuck, he hates the way his voice shakes.

The courthouse folds into itself around them, and Gregory flickers into place as if surprised to find himself there, halfway between. He’s clutching his chest like he’s been shot. He looks at them like he doesn’t know who did it.

Phoenix has known so many people who have died, but maybe he hasn’t been to enough funerals, because he always finds himself forgetting that grief is not a verb, but a noun. That it moves.

Edgeworth’s head twitches round. Not quite looking. Turning only enough to see the sharp plane of his cheek. “You loved him.”

It’s not a question.

“I think I still do,” Phoenix says, helpless against it. “I don’t really know how to do anything else.”

A tremor ripples through Edgeworth. A stone dropped into a river by two boys who chose not to jump. “You,” Edgeworth says, “Need to stay away from me.”

Phoenix slumps. For a moment, the difference in height makes him dizzy, vertigo swimming upside down inside him. By the time it passes, Edgeworth has continued on, and Phoenix doesn’t know how to follow. He steps back from the edge, his hand gripping the back of his hair, and strangely, all he can think is that he needs to cut it soon. He needs to call Theo and make sure Murphy’s okay. He needs to go back and let Diego and Maya find him.

And he will. He’ll do all of that. But he watches Gregory, still standing in place, and wonders what it’s supposed to tell him. What Gregory believes, for whatever reason, he can’t tell him.

“Mr Edgeworth,” he croaks. He slathers on a cheap mask of a smile. “What do you want more than anything in the world?”

Silence.

“Your friends are waiting for you, Phoenix,” Gregory says as he turns away. “Go be with them. Celebrate. You deserve it.”

It’s not an answer. Phoenix doesn’t know what else he expected.

He leaves the stairs empty behind him.

It’s strange walking back, and he finds himself dragging his feet, muffling the sound of his steps, trying to hold onto the solitude for a little more time. As if he could walk slow enough and find a different way, a different choice, and try to convince himself he’s still a whole person at the end of it, even after all he’s been through. To tell himself that at least he tried, at least he went out of his way, even though he knows it would never be enough.

Diego is waiting for him at the door, and Phoenix is too tired to steel himself against the smoothed down relief that waits on Diego’s features as he recognises Phoenix’s arrival. It soothes something in him. It also kind of makes him want to scream.

“Okay, pajarito?” Diego asks. He raises a hand, stops shy of drifting it through Phoenix’s hair, as if uncertain the touch would be welcome.

Phoenix loves him so much it hurts.

“No,” he says, truthfully. “Not really.”

He keeps enough of himself together he doesn’t admit it particularly loudly, so when Lou’s head pokes round the door, her face brightening at the sight of him, she doesn’t ask, and Diego doesn’t get his chance to either.

“Mr Phoenix,” Lou says, reaching back and shutting the door with a quick glance inside. She looks up at him, tracing the new set of bruises, her mouth turning down. “Miss Maya said a bad person hurt you. Do you need help?”

“No,” he lies, and tilts his shoulder into the wall to support him as he slides into a crouch. “And just call me Phoenix. Whatever Maya’s told you, I’m not that old yet.”

Lou frowns, but she doesn’t press the issue. She glances at the door again, shifting from foot to foot, and she looks so much like a kid that Phoenix’s heart aches. “I wanted to say to you, but you disappeared and I wasn’t sure you’d come back. Mr Theo said he’d try to keep an eye on me. Try to visit.” She reaches up to fiddle with her cap, hiding her eye patch with her thin wrist. “He said… he could maybe bring Murphy?”

“Of course he can,” Phoenix says, and as much as it hurts to talk, it’s the easiest thing he’s said all day. “She’ll be happy to see you.”

Lou nods. Hesitates on a second of stillness. Then very quickly, she reaches out and squeezes her small fingers around his. They are warm and worn and thrumming with life. And they pull away before he can reciprocate, but for a catch, the tips lingering around the last knuckle on his middle finger. She holds on to him. “Thank you for letting me pet your dog.”

Slowly enough she can pull away if she wants to, he raises their hands and tugs on a lock of her cloudy hair, parting it to show the blue waiting behind. “Always.”

Her answering smile is all light.

(It’s a beautiful day. The sun is out, the autumn winds brisk, playful and flitting. The light bleeds. It oozes out the cracks. It burns a hole right through his chest, and its colour is silver. Its colour is grey. Its colour is red.

Stop it, he tells himself, and he doesn’t look back. Not once.

Even though he really, really wants to.)

Chapter Text

“Nick, quit moving.”

“Can you see anything?”

“I’m trying to. Just stand effing still.”

“You’re heavy!”

“I am not!”

Phoenix presses his back tighter against the wall, legs shaking from the effort of holding Larry’s weight on his shoulders. “You are. Why’re you up there and not me?”

“Cuz you’re scared of heights,” Larry says.

“You’re not that tall.”

There’s an offended shift and strain as Larry pushes himself up on tiptoes rather than answer, pushes Phoenix down a couple inches, and ends up no higher than he already was. Phoenix grips the slick, gritty surface of Larry’s trainers. It slides off his fingers and under his nails. He clenches his teeth as his knees threaten to buckle.

The street is empty but for the two of them and the rain—a needling sort of drizzle that mists the January afternoon into a hazy sort of silvery dusk. Miles’ street is one of the better off ones, the kind that makes Phoenix feel small and squirmy inside: privacy walls and trees, crossing their arms and standing their ground; sidewalks without grass clawing up the cracks; well-aged, well-built houses looming into their second stories with judging windows and stark paint.

Today, and here, it feels a little forgotten. As if someone didn’t bother to leave a light burning downstairs. Even with his dad’s old jacket swamped around him, Phoenix can feel the cold all the way into his chest. Or maybe that’s just the wet on his hands leaking up his wrists.

“It’s no good,” Larry grunts. “Let me get down. Here, just—whoa!”

He hits the ground and bunches a flailing hand into Phoenix’s upturned collar, barely keeping them both from tumbling onto the solid concrete. Phoenix grabs his wrist, feeling light-headed, light-bodied, in every sense of the words.

“Okay?” Larry asks, a little laughter to it.

Phoenix tries to shake his head clear, concerned for the half second it takes his vision to catch up. He lifts his relieved shoulders. Tugs the jacket more securely around him. “Yeah,” he says. “I’m okay.”

Larry slaps him on the back, mostly hitting cushioned air, then turns back to the wall, and the house waiting still and silent behind it. “It’s no good,” he says again. “The curtains are pulled over. Not all the way, but it’s too dark to see anything inside.” He puts his hands on his hips and cocks his head, considering the problem sideways. “I could climb over and get a closer look?”

The wall isn’t really that big—it must barely reach six feet, if at all. Looking up at it, though, Phoenix feels a lot closer to the ground than he normally does. Short and young and entirely ineffectual. He looks higher, seeking out the windows on the upper floor, their empty glass. A dull reflection of the clouds, and somewhere inside that, two boys waiting down below. He keeps waiting for the third to appear and complete the picture. Open the window and ask what the hell they’re doing. Hurry up and come inside before you get sick.

We can’t, Phoenix answers the boy that isn’t there. You locked us out.

He wipes his hands on his jacket, smearing the water and dirt around without actually getting rid of any of it. He tucks his hands into his sleeves instead, scrunching the ends closed. “I couldn’t lift you up that far.”

“Yah, duh.” Larry heads over to the gate and the trash can placed outside it. A collection of stringy cardboard boxes, moulting in the rain, are tucked beside the drumming metal. Larry ignores them. Phoenix does his best to as well. “Come help me with this.”

The trash can is packed full to overflowing, which makes moving it a whole new task in its own right. They tip and roll it on the bottom rim, one side then the other, until Larry puts too much of his impatient back in and knocks the lid clean off. He dives and wraps his arms around the can, saving the contents from tumbling out. The lid makes an ungodly noise against the concrete. Phoenix cringes, gingerly picking it up as he checks for any overcurious eyes.

When he turns back, Larry is staring into the trash can, his face oddly blank.

“Well,” he says, voice flat in a way Phoenix has never heard before. “There’s your answer.”

It takes Phoenix a moment to find what he’s talking about.

Slowly, then all at once: pull, click, fire.

It’s nestled amongst the black bags, buried and gasping for air. The red is muted and the silver is dull, as if starting to dissolve, and Phoenix knows what that’s like. It’s a feeling he’s felt before. A tired thing. Like sagging, corroding barbed wire. He knows how to feel that.

But that’s how you miss dead things. Not-living things. It’s an end. A hard full stop.

This—this feels slit and turned the wrong way round, back to front, upside down. There are too many questions twisting everything up. How did it get here? Why is it here and not Miles? Does Miles know? He couldn’t know… could he?

Did he?

Where is he?

With a jolt like an engine starting, that rumbling shiver, Larry turns on his heel and starts to walk away. He holds his head down and his fists in his pockets.

Phoenix watches, uncomprehending, struggling to find his breath. “Wh-Where are you going?”

“Where d’you think?” Larry says, still in that flat tone, like he’s trying to crush all the feeling into a box he can shove away and not have to look at. “C’mon. There’s no point hanging around here. It’s freezing, anyway.”

Phoenix swallows. He doesn’t move. He feels like he’s watching himself go by.

“Nick. Come on.”

He stumbles a couple steps obediently before he realises he’s still holding the lid and stops. The metal feels flimsy, easy to crumple between his small hands despite its solid heft. His gaze rises to the wall, and in his veins there’s a shiver of something that isn’t quite fear. Something someone might call fear when they’re scared and want to be rescued.

“I’m… I’m going to go look.”

“Don’t be stupid.” Larry yanks his jacket tight to the back of his neck, stretching the fabric of his pockets. He doesn’t have a hood and his hair is wilting fiercely in the rain. “Wherever the hell he’s disappeared to, he obviously doesn’t care about us.”

“That’s not true,” Phoenix whispers.

“For—” Larry cuts off with his own glance around, too angry to wait on it. “For eff’s sake,” he hisses. “It’s in the trash. What else could it mean?”

And Phoenix can’t say anything to that because the only person who could answer is the person who isn’t here. He hasn’t seen Miles since before Christmas, a fact that has already been making him feel lonelier than it should. It’s just—they’ve barely gone more than a day or two without seeing each other since the class trial all those months ago (eight, to be exact: an eternity to a child). And, okay, yeah, Miles has been kind of weird since he stayed over, and Phoenix knows that he still thinks Dad is the problem, to the point even Larry’s been acting weird about it, and it’s not like they didn’t notice or care before but Phoenix can see the stupid furtive looks they keep shooting each other, which they never used to, and he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to be doing—

(“I don’t think you should spend time with that boy anymore.”

“P̶͗r̷̰͘o̷̼͗m̶͚̻͝ī̴̻̩s̴͒e̷̘͛̿… ̶͎͙̈́̕m̸̧͉͒ȅ̸…”)

But—

Miles has still been there. Even though Phoenix—Phoenix has ruined it, Miles is there, without Phoenix needing to say anything or ask. And if he can’t ask now, if Miles isn’t here to say it, the only thing Phoenix can do is trust what Miles has already said. They’re friends.

They’re always going to be friends.

He looks at the wall and tries not to think of skin cracking open. It doesn’t really work.

“Something else,” he says, taking a shaky breath and reaching for the Red keychain. “It’s someone’s fault. It isn’t Miles’.”

That’s what does it for Larry.

Phoenix only knows it when he has to snatch his fingers away from the briefest touch of metal, because Larry runs back and kicks the effing can to the effing ground. The sound hits Phoenix all in vibrations. Silent and loud. Trash bags spill onto the street and the keychain tumbles away with them, scurrying out the path of Larry’s stomping feet, and Larry gives chase, bucking Phoenix off.

Scrabbling across the ground, Phoenix barely gets his hand over it in time, the lid rattling up a screech, a matching cacophony with the bruising weight of pain. Larry stumbles back with a high-pitched noise; an animal whelp, almost like it was his fingers stamped on instead. Phoenix hears it far away. He hears it right inside his skull.

(He’ll hear it echo for a very long time. He tries to keep so much distance from this moment, along with all the others. A thousand miles when he can run that far.

It simply follows. Along with all the others.)

Slowly, gasping like a street fight, Phoenix gets to his feet and flexes his tearing fingers. Red huddles safely between them. Held right against his chest. The sky is blanket grey, and around them, nothing but suburb and city. A boy with spitting, sputtering hair. A boy with his fire pressed against his heart, and a bullet burning a hole in his pocket.

They stand there.

Neither of them looking at the other.

“Mom did the same thing, you know.”

Phoenix looks up.

Larry hunches into his anger, blond strands curling furrows into his forehead. “She had this whole other life she was making without us. She didn’t even say goodbye. She just—she just left.” He clenches his hands and a fresh bolt of pain shoots up Phoenix’s arm. “She left us for dead. You hearing me? Whatever we were—we can’t be it without her. There’s nothing of it left.” His breath catches. He raises his eyes. “She killed us, Nick.”

Those aren’t Larry’s words. Phoenix knows him well enough to recognise when he’s using someone else’s. But Phoenix can’t deny them, either, because he understands.

She killed us.

He curls tighter into himself. His dad’s old jacket is big enough for the hem to scrape his knees. It still smells like his dad. “Miles wouldn’t do that.”

“You don’t leave behind things you want to take with you!”

Desperate, knowing he has to say something, anything, Phoenix just throws it out. “Maybe he couldn’t.”

“What kinda sense does that make?” Larry rolls his eyes with a scoff—and the movement has so much of Miles in it that Larry stops himself with a snarl and smacks his hands into his cheeks. “Whatever. Forget it. Let’s go to mine. We can try calling again or… I don’t know, ask Dad what to do.”

Again, Phoenix stays where he is. Tightly holding his hand. “I’m going to wait here.”

“For what?” Larry demands.

“You can go,” Phoenix says and tugs his hood further down his face. “It’s okay, Larry. I’ll be okay.”

“Nick, he’s gone.”

Phoenix thinks of the ground rumbling beneath his feet, tree roots cracking apart the concrete and tearing the world in two. Thinks about a summer rain shower and Missile’s fur and Miles’ hand in his and that would never happen.

“He’ll come back.”

Larry throws his arms up, all the more frustrated when they find nothing to hurt in their swing. It explodes out a different way. “What the fuck’s wrong with you?” He definitely doesn’t say eff this time. “Why do you always have to such a—such a…”

Something cracks in Phoenix’s chest. “A what? What?”

“Such a freak,” Larry snaps.

The words splatter out and bleed. Phoenix sucks in a breath like he’s drowning. He chokes and turns away.

Larry kicks the ground and makes a noise like Gah! Water splashes right into his shoe. “Fine.  Do whatever you want. I’m going home. I’ll see you later, I guess.”

Phoenix waits until Larry’s footsteps have disappeared entirely. He waits a little longer. Then he bends down and does his best to stuff the spilled bags back into the can. He gets it most of the way shut and leaves it where it is, stealing its spot beside the gate and settling into an awkward squat against the collapsing cardboard boxes. They squeeze inward to make room for him. He ducks his head and breathes over the freshly split skin on his hand. Carefully unravels his fingers and pulls his arm out the sleeve, into the jacket. He puts Red into his hoodie pocket next to Blue and the bullet.

He pauses when he feels it. Presses his fingers into the lump of misshapen metal, then puts his other hand over both, through the jacket, and squeezes.

Under the bruises, his nerves scream. Bones clutch at themselves. Blood splinters up his wrist. He shuts his eyes and tightens his throat and makes himself feel all of it until he’s gasping and shaking and bent right over, his head between his knees.

After, his hand goes back into its sleeve and burns. The bullet clinks against the keychains. Blue grins at it. Red just glares.

The bullet shrugs, curls up and makes itself comfortable again.

She’s never said it, but Phoenix knows she’s dying.

It’s one of those things he knows without knowing how he knows. Nobody else told him. He doesn’t hear the fact spoken in a voice he can’t remember, disoriented and dreamlike in intonation, that slight clip of accent and words he sees in symbols instead of letters. It’s not a guess either, the way he can guess which brother said she killed us for Larry to repeat, or that Miles has always cared about his father’s losses just as much as his father does.

Knowledge like this settles differently. It speaks up from somewhere inside him, from him, for him, of him. It’s sad and tired and makes him think of a boy that looks like him, but is not him, not really, or—isn’t him yet? He can never paint the eyes right. They always come out looking like something else. And then the noise sweeps in again, because it always does (let’s play! and I keep hearing footsteps behind me and it’s getting so dark now), he can’t think he can’t listen, and so he leaves it be, filled and empty of secrets not meant to be spoken, ignorant and knowing of a world only he can see.

(Isn’t there something else he’s supposed to be doing?)

People have passed by Miles’ stretch of street for a while now. Phoenix has lost track of whether it’s been moments or minutes or hours. Nobody has turned down to pass him, and his heartbeat has stopped accelerating every time he hears splashing footsteps or gurgling tires. He sits curled up like a boy. He keeps dropping his breaths and forgetting to pick them up.

When she arrives, he doesn’t so much hear her as simply become aware she’s there. He raises his head, already smiling. “Hello, Summer Lady. Aren’t you cold?”

“I should be asking you that,” she chides gently. She crouches in front of him and rests her fingers on his knee. It’s always a little strange being touched by her—a touch that tells him how fragile he is. How breakable.

Immediately, he starts shivering.

“You’ll catch your death out here,” she says, trying out a smile for herself. It looks more like a grimace.

Phoenix shrugs and speaks as best he can around his chattering teeth. “I-It’s not s-so bad.”

Her hands fit under his armpits. Light, soft, barely there at all, but there’s strength still in them, make no mistake. It fights to be there and hold on. He doesn’t try to struggle away, his hands grasping at the silk of her kimono sleeves. It feels like Sakura petals, phantom and dry.

“W-Wait,” he says as she settles him on his feet and tugs his hood back a little so she can see his face better. He blinks and squints at her. His thoughts trip and stumble forward in slow motion. “I… I have to wait. Miles f-forgot something.”

“We won’t go far,” she assures him. It seems to take a lot of work to stop her expression from falling down. “Just until you’re warm again.”

Phoenix lifts his smile higher for both of them. “I’m never warm.”

Colours swim in a murky haze around them, most of them grey. The rain hasn’t stopped, only softened to something that exhales, soothing in its presence. Amidst the static hues, she’s so much brighter, a raindrop cut through with sunlight, as if no matter which way he looks the only thing he can see is the Summer Lady and his own body. His own body and the Summer Lady.

Her hands grip his shoulders, and while he doesn’t let his smile dim, he knows she’s only doing that to hide the way they shake. “Until you aren’t shivering, then.”

“Okay.” He reaches up and rubs his numb fingers over hers, searching the slender length of them, the bumps and nicks that his are growing into. “A-Are you sure you aren’t cold?”

She hums, moves her touch to the back of his neck, and simply leaves it there as a gentle pressure guiding him forward. Together, they drift through the rain. He carries his wet, sleeping feet with him, an expert at not tripping over the space between his toes and his too-large shoes. Dad says he’ll grow into them. Phoenix isn’t sure if he expects him to grow into the jacket, too.

He hopes so.

“I’m never cold,” she answers, eventually.

He’s already forgotten most of the question. The weights in his pocket tumble and sink and slide. “D-Doesn’t that get lonely?”

“A little, yes,” she admits, and it’s one of the things he likes best about her. Her answers might not always come quickly, sometimes they might not come at all, but she never, never lies to him. If she doesn’t want to say something, she simply tells him so. “But if I need to, I know I can always come and see you. I can think of you, and I’m not lonely anymore.”

Phoenix chews on that, working it through his teeth as he tilts his gaze up to her. She looks exactly the same as the last time he saw her, and all the other times before that. Which is to say, she looks alive in all the ways a person shouldn’t. Her body is see-through and her skin glows too much. Her eyes shine a different way. She moves too gracefully, soundlessly, and sometimes she just appears where she wants to instead of walking there.

It is, Phoenix thinks, what most people make ghosts sound like: an absence just as much as a presence. Like poetry, they make it rhyme. They sing into the dark.

All of Phoenix’s sound is internal. He cannot keep the Summer Lady alive if he keeps his mouth shut. He cannot keep her alive.

“I won’t tell anyone,” he whispers.

“That’s not what I mean,” she says. The rest wells out of her, like a placid stream disturbed by a skipping stone. The ripples startle and surge. “It’s your choice, Phoenix. It’s always your choice.”

He lowers his eyes, weary of them, and lists into her side. “I wonder if that’s true when I’m awake.”

“You are awake.”

“Y-You know what I mean.”

She places her hand on his head, tries to and drifts through, a distant suggestion of warmth like starlight in summer. A dead woman that isn’t really a ghost (because she is not never-living nor never-dead, and she won’t be the same as a man choking on his hand-built regrets in a courthouse basement cafeteria, because she is dead. She died a long time ago). Whatever she’s become, she still died first, and the rest still followed. Phoenix doesn’t know what it means, what he can do in spite of it. That doesn’t stop him from wanting.

It didn’t stop him giving her a name to swallow.

It’s the dappled light of her. The memory of sweltering fog and steaming petrichor. Heat bonding metal, creating something new. Things that have already grown and settled and become. The pink of her kimono masks her in spring, but when he looks at her, even before it became the first home he’s ever know, even before it was the only place he knew he’d be welcomed back, he has always thought of summer.

Maybe dying is the wrong word. Phoenix knows what it’s like to live between vestiges of the dead, because that’s what it means to be alive. There’s no such thing as a house that isn’t haunted. He thinks bodies must be the same, or something part of the body that isn’t the body, but isn’t the soul, either. Moulded by the places that leave their mark, and the things nobody can choose to remember, and the people that they do.

It’s the death of something. But what do you with a ghost that has come back to life?

Phoenix watches the rain.

A cobalt tarp flaps in the wind, one of its ropes loose. A blur of navy swings its headlights through them and disappears. A dog biscuit sits on the edge of the road, crumbling into an early midnight. The rain bounces off the sidewalk and the light bounces off the buildings, and its colour is blue-grey, blue-green, blue-white. Blue and blue and blue.

“Do you like blue?” he asks.

Her brown eyes shine. “The samurai or the colour?”

He laughs. “The colour. Do you see it?” He points to the sky and its stubborn, shifting, smoky texture. “I think it’s almost that time of day. The blue one.” There’s a smudge of charcoal on his finger. He’s been trying out the charcoal pencils in the art kit Miles got him for his birthday, and he keeps finding it stained in places without any idea of how it got there: on the side of his neck, circling a rib, under his eyes, and once, to Larry’s loud objections, the edge of his lip. From a distance, it made it look like he’d just been kissed. “It always makes me feel like I’m going to fall up into it. Like I’m looking for something, and that’s where I’ll find it.”

Her smile flits like floating sparks. “I think that’s what it always feels like when you choose to love something.”

Which is sort of a strange thing to say, isn’t it? Phoenix didn’t know you could choose to love something. You simply do or you don’t.

He’s heard a story—he can’t remember when—about a man looking up at the sky in the middle of the day because, for some reason, he’s able to see all the stars. The other people in the street see him looking, and some look up themselves, thinking he can see a plane or a cloud, and he can, he sees that too. But it’s not why he’s looking.

When he thinks about love, he thinks about that. He thinks about his dad refusing to look at him. He thinks about Miles who is always, always looking.

He thinks about himself looking up, always looking up, even if it kills him in the end.

“Miles doesn’t see it the same way either,” he confides. “Do you know what ‘incorrigible’ means?”

“Unable to change. Unruly. Unalterable,” she says, recites like she’s reading from a book. The hand that isn’t on his head drifts to her sleeve, twitching along the flowing edge before dropping back down. Her tone softens. “Though from what I’ve seen, and from what you’ve told me, in this case, I believe it means he likes you just as you are.”

“Oh.” Phoenix wipes rainwater from his cheeks, as if checking for stray tears. Sometimes he wakes up crying, so it’s become a habit when he thinks he’s been dreaming. “He should just say that then. That’s too much meaning for one word.”

Her thumb strokes through his hood. He’d like to pull it down, to feel the touch properly in his hair, but that means she’d be able to see his face, and he can’t bring himself to show it.

“It can be difficult for people to say what they really mean,” she tells him, not unkindly. “It makes them afraid.”

“Miles isn’t scared of me.” The certainty makes him feel lighter and heavier all at once. “He gets angry sometimes, but then I get angry too. And it’s not—he’s not angry because he’s scared. He’s angry because he’s sad.” He only realises it as he says it. He only thinks it now. “He’s sad,” he repeats. “But all my angry just hurts. I don’t want it to. I don’t know how to make it better.”

He didn’t tell Miles the night he stayed over (what he keeps trying not to call their last night), after Mom finally got the message and left, and Miles fell asleep, and Phoenix listened to him and Missile breathe for a long time before he dozed off—he didn’t tell Miles he woke up crying again. When his mom came, he said it was a nightmare, and he supposes it was in a way, and that all of them must be nightmares, because when he wakes up he feels like he’s forgetting something really important. But it was still a lie. And then it sort of feels like he lied again. He’s lying now. Lying’s bad.

Phoenix isn’t good.

(At times, surrounded by Miles’ warmth and Larry’s bouncing life, he almost forgets that he’s a sick, rotten boy. A long time from now, he will hear the phrase good flowers have deep roots, bad ones dwell in shallow soil. And he will wonder, but never ask aloud, what about the soil itself? Can something good be grown when the earth itself is poisoned ground? Isn’t it better to simply burn it away, erase the rot entirely, and start anew?

He doesn’t know much about plants, nor will he ever know about many, but he understands the brittle crunch when he stomps on leaves and the shrivelling of petals when they don’t have enough to drink. Death in life. Natures mortes. Maybe you don’t see it at first amidst the beauty and bloom, but if you look closer, there it is.

He curls his hands around his bruises. These tiny specks of rot.)

“You could come with me. You could tell him,” he tries. “He’d like you a lot.”

The Summer Lady tenses herself in all the ways adults do when they’re trying to hide they’re upset. “Phoenix… you know I can’t.”

Rain overruns the rest of the sound. Falling constantly, but softly. A fresh drop runs past Phoenix’s eye, down the curve of his cheek, and he takes a moment to wonder if it’s really rain at all, because it tastes like ash. It tastes like metal.

He clutches the lining of his jacket pocket, but even if the barrier wasn’t there, his hand is too small to hold the blue and the red and the bullet in between.

“He’d like you,” he says again.

“I’m honoured,” she murmurs, and looks up—not at the sky, but somewhere above them.

Without realising, Phoenix has been steadily tracing a circuit back to Miles’ street. It’s not the path he usually takes, and he can’t see any more dog biscuits lining the sidewalk. He could easily get lost. They have to wait for a crosswalk to light their way, and though they don’t have to move very fast to cross the road, Phoenix can see the red-yellow-green slip, gliding out in streaks. It makes it hurt to breathe.

Sometimes it’s green. Sometimes the blue just isn’t there.

They turn down a small side road. Phoenix barely makes it halfway. The Summer Lady stops with him.

“Why does everyone do it?” he asks, quietly. “Why does everyone try so hard to leave me behind? What do I keep doing wrong?”

“Phoenix.” It’s only when she’s kneeling down in front of him that he realises how blurry his vision is. She cradles his face, gently catching the tears when they fall. “Oh, Phoenix, listen to me. You haven’t done anything wrong.”

Sick boy. Rotten boy. “I’m—” He swallows, gulping emptily. “I’m not good.”

“You are,” she says, fiercely enough he flinches. “You have so many good things in you, and I know I’m not the only one who sees it. You’re not bad for things that happen outside of your control. You shouldn’t—” She cuts herself off with a helpless noise, her thumbs caressing his cheeks. “I would stay. I would stay with you forever. But I have to keep you safe.”

“I don’t care about safe.” His voice cracks. He squeezes his eyes shut, afraid she’ll see the lie, and tells a truth to bury it deeper. “I wouldn’t leave you.”

“I know. I only… Can you look at me?” She taps his chin. “Please look at me, Phoenix. You don’t have to be afraid. You don’t ever have to be afraid of me, okay?” Her eyes are wide and wet, and she holds onto him as if clinging for dear life. “You are more than the things that have hurt you. Some things happen. Some things keep on happening. But it’s not because of you. And I wish I could give you so much more, but all I can give you is time. Time to grow into who you are before anyone can try to tell you who they want you to be.”

He pulls back a little, scrunching his nose with a sniffle. “They?”

“Bad people.” The Summer Lady’s voice shakes. “And good people, too. You… You might know one of the latter quite well already.”

Phoenix doesn’t know what a latter is, but she looks sad enough he can guess. “The dead man.”

“The dead man,” she agrees.

“I think he asks about you sometimes. I think he misses you.”

She says nothing to that.

“I can never remember,” he whispers. “It never works right in my head.”

“There is no right or wrong way. You can only live it the way you see it,” she says, and he can almost imagine the warmth her skin must have once bled. It burns when he tries. “When it comes down to it, if you have the choice, choose to live. Even if it’s not the good choice. It will always be the better one.”

Phoenix doesn’t feel better. He feels cold and wet and so, so alone.

“My beautiful boy,” she says, and his face suddenly grows hot in a way that has nothing to do with the press of her palms. “You’re going to have to be very brave now.”

(She wishes she could stay in this moment forever and say everything that needs to be said. Things might not be okay now, but they will be one day, and she knows with all her core, whatever lingering remnants persist of it, she is doing the right thing.

But that would be a lie.

Is it childish of her, to not want the monster to stop being a monster? Because if she stops and thinks, it has never been done this way before and there is no evidence to prove it will be better, if she stops and thinks, they were all once children afraid of the dark, if she stops and thinks, her favourite jokes were puns and he sheltered animals in his spare time, if she stops and thinks, I did everything I could and all of them still died scared and alone—

If she stops and thinks, she can’t do it.)

“What if I can’t do it?” he almost doesn’t ask. “W-What if I do it wrong anyway?”

She dips her head. She makes sure he can see into her eyes. “Then you will still be the only thing I ever need you to be. Don’t you dare,” she says, fingers tightening until he can do nothing but feel them, “Don’t you dare ever think anything could change that. Don’t you dare.”

It still doesn’t feel much like a choice. But right now, it doesn’t feel like it matters either way. “Okay.”

The Summer Lady smiles, and it’s only a little broken. “My brave, beautiful boy.”

He squirms and she chuckles, stroking a hand back into his hair, sweeping the wet strands under his hood so she can press her lips to his forehead. And he tries to believe he’s deserving of it: this love, this life.

He knows it won’t last forever.

The least he can do is love her before she dies.

He returns to Miles’ street alone, absently rubbing his chest. His eyes ache, his bones are hollow, and he’s too exhausted to feel much of anything beyond the numb grasp of his metal coat fingers. The Summer Lady isn’t gone. He can’t see her, but she’s there with him in a way that maybe means he doesn’t need to see her, because he still knows she’s there. The same way he knows a dead man he only meets in his dreams.

The streetlights have turned on, bulbs drifting over the evening in a quiet, gentle mist. Lights and candles in windows add to the floating orange, and it’s like when a wildfire has passed, and the people are left to pick up the burnt parts of themselves and keep moving forward. Phoenix thinks of stars that aren’t actually, and have never been, stars. A sky on fire, fuelled by a million, million lives.

It’s into that ruddy glow, half-delirious from rain and cold and memories already being forgotten, that he turns the corner and sees something new. A pair of shadows hovering over where he was sitting earlier, and an upright figure beside them.

His heart bangs a rising beat against his lungs. He feels a smile, all relief, tremble across his lips, and he almost runs forward, almost calls out.

Then he looks closer.

Funny how the ground can weave back and forth so violently without a crack or quake to upset it. He always thought it was solid.

Be brave, he remembers.

Phoenix stares at Gregory Edgeworth, untouched by the rain, his suit neatly pressed and presentable but for the hole dripping blood right out of his heart, and his white eyes gazing at a son who does not know he is there. Breath clouds in front of Phoenix’s face. It could be the oncoming night. It could be just another dead thing.

I can’t, he thinks. Please. Just this once. Please let me dream in peace.

Paws scrabble at the hem of his jacket, fighting the oversized weight of it before splashing back into the ground. It’s pure habit to sink to the same level and push his hands into the dense Pomeranian scruff, his fingers struggling to lift the thick, sodden fur.

Missile faintly wags his tail, panting his little doggy breaths and licking the rainwater off Phoenix’s skin. Simple and warm and familiar. Phoenix can’t help the flinches that crawl through his spine when Missile’s nose bumps against his chin, disturbingly solid and just the normal sort of cold a dog nose should be. A real kind of cold. An alive kind.

“Phoenix?”

A nearby streetlight throws Miles’ face into sharp relief. Pale yet shadowed. Bruised in a way that has nothing to do with being hit. Worn in a way that has nothing to do with being lived. His raincoat fits him perfectly, his clothes always do, but right now it seems unfitting, as if there isn’t enough of Miles there to fill it. He stands there like everything has happened.

Mr Edgeworth stands behind him, his hand over his eyes.

“Hi,” Phoenix says. Tries to say. He’s not sure how much sound makes it into that single syllable.

“Are you alright?” Miles asks, his eyes lighting a little as his gaze sweeps over Phoenix, hesitating on his bruised hand before swinging up to his face again.

Phoenix stares. “Are you?”

Miles stares back. His voice scratches like he’s been holding back tears for too long. “I asked first.”

“I’m… I’m cold,” Phoenix admits, working his thumb in a circle next to Missile’s ear. Missile leans into the touch, content. Like Phoenix, he’s never minded the rain. “I was worried about you.”

He has to work so, so hard to keep his eyes on Miles’ face. Especially when it creases and breaks and tries to rebuild itself into something okay. “I’m… Here,” Miles says, disconnected. Unsure where the sentence begins, or if it ends, of if he’s even to be found somewhere inside it. “What are you doing here?”

Phoenix makes himself let go of Missile’s fur and pulls his zip down, uses his fingertips to find the bent cross and pulls out Red. Blue and the bullet, tangled together, let it go. “You forgot this.”

"How did you—” Miles jerks forward before stopping himself. “How did you know,” he fights through a breath, “I’d come back for it?”

Phoenix gestures down at Missile. “Did he like the soggy biscuits?”

It’s hard to see in the dim light, and it’s not much of anything at all, really. A slight twitch of Miles’ mouth, a pull at his expression that could pass for something—not soft, not fond, not even amused, but glad. The umber streetlights glisten in the corners of his eyes. It makes them look twice as silver.

Then Mr Edgeworth reaches for his shoulder, passing right through, all white, and white, and Miles falters. He fiddles with his fingers, looking like nothing more than a lost, left-behind boy. Alone.

Phoenix takes Miles’ hand.

He presses Red into it before squeezing tight.

“I knew you wouldn’t leave it behind. We’re friends.” He smiles, no matter how much it feels like he can’t, a crooked little thing the way Miles likes best, because he’d rather Miles remembered him smiling. “The world could split apart, and we’ll still be friends even then.”

Miles’ hand curls up to his chest, bringing Phoenix’s with it as his other hand presses over the top of them both.

“Phoenix,” he says, but not like he’s about to say anything more. Just like he’s saying Phoenix’s name, making a place for Phoenix here that’s his to exist in. Phoenix wants it so much his heart almost can’t bear the weight.

(Is this what she meant about being brave? She didn’t say it would feel this sad.)

With a noise like an open wound, Miles pulls Phoenix to him, hands slipping right into the jacket. Clutching the hoodie. Holding so tightly Phoenix can feel all the warmth and blood of him. The shape of every bone. He hugs Phoenix like he’s done it a thousand times. Like it isn’t the first. Like it might not be the last.

Phoenix jolts, out of surprise, out of reflex, and tentatively folds his arms around Miles’ shaking shoulders. It’s the only useful thing he can ask them to do. The edge of Miles’ hood bats at his cheek and he turns his face into Miles’ hair, where it’s wet and clinging. Water trickles down the crook of his neck where Miles is hidden against him. Salty and sweet. He can’t help it. He holds back just as tightly.

“I don’t want to go,” Miles whispers.

The words beat against Phoenix’s skin, a burning wash of breath. He doesn’t know what to do. How to make it better. He thinks so many things and does not say a single one out loud. He chokes on such longing he cannot spit it out. What he carved into the climbing frame in the old play park, and how he was going to show Miles, how he was going to say, I’m sorry. Don’t say things you don’t mean, don’t look at me like I’m human, don’t pretend what you feel for me even begins to border the monster of want you must know I am. You must know. Did you know? When I’m scared and alone, I look for you, and one of these days you’ll wish I had the decency to leave you in peace.

But I don’t.

So here’s the truth.

He’d give anything to wash the fear and grief away. Not burn it away, no—his mom and dad might have borne him from ash, brought him a bullet that bites every empty wound they’ve inflicted, rotting him from the inside out, but even with blood still staining his hands, Phoenix won’t muster violence when it comes to Miles. He could, but he wouldn’t. Feeling Miles’ tears against his neck, his breath against his hollow chest, his dark clothes shining in the rain, Phoenix never would.

But he is a selfish boy. Sick boy.

Monster.

The sky drips. Fat droplets skitter across his oversized jacket with Miles’ arms tucked inside. Phoenix feels like he’s rocking back and forth from how heavy they fall, but that might just be Miles, shaking, crying, and Phoenix is shaking too. Weightless and collared to the earth. Insubstantial and fragile. There’s nothing keeping him strong anymore. Miles needs him to be brave, but Phoenix does not know how to be brave without him.

Want is so much different when it’s the living that bore you hungry. He could devour anything and still be starving, both the person he is and the fire growing inside him. Miles just—just makes him want to be gentle with it. Miles makes the light want to pour through the cracks.

And Phoenix knows exactly why he is here, why he stayed to wait, because there’s only one thing he would do if Miles killed him: he would do nothing, because Miles never would.

“It’ll be okay,” Phoenix whispers. He holds Miles close and brands the truth of it into himself. “You’re not going anywhere I can’t come find you later. Just give me a little time to catch up, okay? I’ll find you. I promise.”

They stay like that until Miles finds whatever he needs to pull away, and Phoenix stays a moment more before finding, as always when he thinks of Miles, he can be far braver than he ever imagined.

And he lets go.

It takes a lot longer for Miles to compose himself, and Phoenix thinks that might just be because he isn’t used to having to do so. Miles searches his pockets, carefully slotting the keychain inside one, and when his hands come away empty, he clumsily wipes at his face with the edge of his sleeve, turning away.

Phoenix lets him, zipping up his own jacket to give him some privacy. He keeps his gaze on the ground. His bravery extends as far as Mr Edgeworth’s shoes. Distantly, he realises Mom will wonder why he hasn’t come back to the apartment yet.

“I have to…” Miles mumbles, voice shot. “It’s getting dark. I need to get back. My… I—Phoenix. S-Something happened. Something bad.” He swallows hard. Opens and closes his mouth.

“You don’t have to say it.” Phoenix finds another shaky smile. When he looks up, Miles is already looking back, and it takes all of everything in him not to make another grab for that impossible warmth. To keep it safe from the ghost who will follow Miles where, for now, Phoenix can’t. “You can tell me later.”

Miles nods several times before attempting a full breath. His eyes are silver. The shadows cast them a new shade of blue. “When you see Larry, tell him… make sure you tell him he’s an idiot.”

“Tell me that to my face.”

They both jump. Miles whips round. Phoenix peers over Miles’ shoulder.

Larry is crouched beside the wall, half-sunk into it as he scratches Missile behind the ears. Missile lifts his tail and tilts his head, brown eyes shining as if to say, Well? We’re all here now. Aren’t you going to say hello?

“How long have you been there?” Phoenix asks dumbly.

Larry shrugs, looking everywhere but the two of them, and mainly at Missile. “I don’t know. You two were being all weird and crying and stuff. Felt like I shouldn’t interrupt.”

“You’re an idiot,” Miles says, wiping his face again. He chuckles into his sleeve when Larry lets out an indignant squawk loud enough to lift Missile off his paws, and it’s only a little hysterical.

“If I’m the idiot, how come you’re the one who let a dog eat his way through whatever was gonna lead you back to wherever you’re going?”

Miles blinks. Briefly considers his dog. “Ah,” he says.

“Ha!” Larry crows.

“Miles,” Mr Edgeworth murmurs, a colourless sound passing on the wind, as if embarrassed to be caught out.

Phoenix shivers, wrapping his arms around himself. He tries to look. When he does, there’s a weird twist in his chest. It’s rare for a dead adult to come to him without looking exactly how they did when they died. But from what he first saw of him, he doesn’t think Mr Edgeworth died crying. Mr Edgeworth tilts his head up and shuts his eyes tight behind his glasses like it’s just the rain. Only it can’t be.

But Phoenix never gets the chance to ask.

Larry throws an arm over his shoulder, startling him back to the living. As casual and familiar as the gesture is, Phoenix can feel the tightness of it. A squeeze that feels like sorrysorrysorry.

Tears rebuild themselves anew in Phoenix’s eyes. He doesn’t say anything, though. He just leans in a little closer and thinks I would choose this.

I want to choose this for the rest of my life.

“Us samurai have got to stick together,” Larry says with a wink at Miles, like it’s something just for the two of them, but Phoenix doesn’t mind it like this. He’s glad his friends love each other as much as he loves them. “Don’t worry about us, Edgey. Just make sure you give Missile plenty of treats to make up for us not being there.”

“He’ll get fat,” Miles points out, automatically, just himself. Even more so when he sighs and relents. “But I’ll do my best.”

He looks to Phoenix again, then. Phoenix knew he would, but he still finds himself caught a little off-guard. His breath catches. His heart fills his throat all the way up to his tongue.

The answer, when he finds it, falls out so naturally it’s like it was sitting patiently, waiting to be said. He hasn’t spoken a word of Japanese other than Kaa-san since… well, since. Dad has always been a little weird about it anyway (always Dad, never Tou-san, always Phoenix in front of him, never Ryuu), and in a lot of ways, Phoenix has been okay letting it bleed out along with everything else. The wound only persists. It never disappears entirely. The feeling of being other hurts too much to let it scar.

But the truth is, it hurts because it can never again be what it was before.

It has to become something new.

“Itterasshai,” Phoenix says, softly. The word falls out. It hits the ground between them, hard, and it beats.

Beats.

Beats.

Miles’ eyes pinch, and Phoenix can practically see him turning the word over in his hands. Realising he doesn’t recognise it, and in the very same moment, deciding not to ask. He only nods, and that’s the right thing. That’s all Phoenix wants.

(Something important he’s forgetting:

It is someone’s fault.

He’s also nine years old. What nine-year-old couldn’t be forgiven for that? It’s the very worst part of being young. Too many decisions aren’t yours to make. They’re made by other people, for other people. Sometimes they’re made badly. Sometimes they’re made by people who have no idea what the consequences of those decisions might be. And you have to find a way to keep living through it anyway.

But he still has time to catch his breath. Fifteen years is the least the world can do for a boy like him. Just enough time to learn, almost too late, that if the hand that once reached out to him won’t reach back, then he’ll grab it by the wrist, and follow where it’s going. Most would stop and stare and call it a little insane.

Phoenix calls it keeping his promises.)

He and Larry watch Miles and Missile leave. Before turning the corner, Miles looks back and waves, Red swinging from his fingers. Mr Edgeworth doesn’t wave, but neither does Missile. The clouds slide down the surface of the sky like liquid soot, like something rumbling in the distance, like another storm starting somewhere far away. It’s raining. It’s quiet. Phoenix can’t look away from it.

It does not look like a world that has ended. It just looks like a world that’s blue.

“C’mon,” Larry says a final time, arm still wrapped around Phoenix’s shoulders. “Let’s go.”

Phoenix goes. After a few steps, his heart picks itself up and crawls back into his chest. He feels it warm. He breathes in deep to give it space to rest.

Chapter Text

“Are you sure you can’t see him?” Phoenix asks.

The dead man looks at him and raises an eyebrow. “C’mon, danshi,” he says, voice wry. “Surely you’re used to it by now?”

Phoenix snorts. The boy scrunches up his nose at the sound and sticks his tongue out. There’s no ocean clawing at his ankles, no glass slitting harmlessly across his skin—though once Phoenix notices this he wonders why he does. This isn’t an ocean. The boy shifts from bare foot to foot, vapour swirling in reaching tendrils around his calves.

“It’ll be okay,” he says, gently touching his fingertips to the soft ridge of cheekbone below his blue eye. “It’s been like this as long as you can remember.”

Objection, Phoenix thinks, and the boy opens his mouth and laughs. It’s an odd sound. It doesn’t sound like he thinks anything is funny.

Phoenix curls his toes into the fog-threaded ground, lets his knees fall apart and turns his feet to look at the scars on his soles. They’re lighter than he remembers. Maybe there or maybe not. Isn’t that how ghost stories work? There was a boy once, maybe. There was a boy once, probably. He slept in the same bed, and his hands were usually cold, and he just happened to have the same favourite spot on the swings in the old play park. He was like Phoenix, because in ghost stories, Phoenix haunts him by watching him dissolve.

Is that what happened?

“Not here,” Phoenix answers, carefully testing his teeth with his tongue when the words taste sweet and metallic in his mouth. There’s no blood. The boy’s teeth are sharp and white. “Everything feels real here. I can never tell what is and what just feels like it is.” He rubs a thumb over the old scars and shivers, because his feet were never damaged enough to make them less sensitive, and it tickles. “I think I’d know if I was awake, but I can’t really remember being awake when I’m here, and I can’t really remember being here when I’m awake.”

It's a circular problem—insomuch as it bothers to actually be a problem. Given the rest of his life, it hardly carries enough weight worth thinking about whenever it bothers to shift his thoughts at all. He sleeps, then he wakes up and he forgets. Except for all the ways he doesn’t.

From what he’s worked out listening to other people, it’s like everyone has a door that’s supposed to separate their dreams from the real world, always kept shut—but his has cracks in it. Things claw their way through the gaps. They follow him through.

Things claw

                    and follow you through.

Sometimes

                    the

                                                            door

                              BREAKS

open.

It’s

                    then

          they

                                        can

                                                  DEVOUR

                    you.

You don’t think about it.

He isn’t thinking about it. He’s thinking about the word chiaroscuro: the play of shadows and light. A few stars flit down curiously, trailing sparks that drift over his face, impossibly bright in the dark and glow behind them. Four years of college and he still isn’t sure how it’s supposed to sound out loud. Just say it, they say. He wants to. He doesn’t know how to pronounce the word.

The dead man gently shoos the lights away. Some stutter, confused and a little scared. He doesn’t complain. He lets them rest a moment in his arms, and the others laugh and trigger the fire up. They all go eventually.

“May I talk to you about something?” the dead man asks.

No. No. Kind of. Always. No. Call it four out of five then. That’s better than it’s been in a long time then. Phoenix is fine then. “What?”

“You’ve been making a name for yourself.” The dead man touches the spiralling scar on his own forehead, flattening down his fringe in a practised motion to hide it. “They’ll start to see you, if you keep going on like this.” He reads Phoenix’s expression and holds up his hands. “I’m not telling you to stop. It’s your life. You have to do whatever you think is right.”

“Yeah,” Phoenix says. “It is my life.”

The dead man watches him with a face that wants to break out into a smile, and it makes something leap in Phoenix’s chest, like it’s something he didn’t realise he was waiting for until it came. “You should know, though. Leave enough of a mark on the world and they’ll follow your fire.”

“That was always going to happen.” Phoenix remembers, suddenly, something he forgot. “It already did. Diego’s right. I don’t want to just be this forever. I never wanted that.” He frowns, uncertain. “You don’t want that for me.”

“Wanting something else is very different when you know the outcome was inevitable,” the dead man murmurs, his non-smile fading, his gaze distant and haunted. “It never gets easier.”

“I don’t think it’s supposed to be easy.” Phoenix rubs his right eye. He’s surprised when he pulls his hand away to find it clean. He doesn’t know why. “I’ll be okay,” he says, a repetition of something he’s said a thousand times before. “I’m always okay.”

“We don’t have time to be anything else,” the dead man says, an echo, a rhythm, an answering cadence.

Phoenix watches the lights. Stones, he thinks. Stones in his chest, brightly lit and blooming, shaking the dust off themselves. Stones in his pockets. He gathers them in his arms and carries them. Sometimes he remembers them dying because he killed them because he took them to the ocean with him when he meant to leave them behind. When they wash up on the shore, nobody will be able to pick out the glittering shine of this hurt me from the rotten core of what might hurt me.

If he doesn’t move, and if he is very, very lucky, no-one will know what was memory and what was dream. If he never looks, the viscera cannot take a name. Only lie there, ambivalent and twitching.

The dead man smacks his hands into his cheeks. Breathes out slowly and covers his eyes. It’s an oddly childish movement, like he’s trying to pretend he’s hiding. “Ignore me. You’re not here for this.”

Phoenix calms himself out his surprised flinch, sharing a glance with the boy. “I don’t want to be here. I don’t know why I’m here.”

“The same reason you always come here,” the dead man mumbles, still hiding. “You know what they say about dreams.”

Phoenix doesn’t feel much like laughing, but it’s too much of a habit to be anything but flippant now. “That you should follow them?”

“No,” the dead man says. His eyes, when he raises them, burn inside and out. “Dreams are a knife you never let go. The scars that follow us out become history.” He presses his hand to his hip, curling his fingers around nothing, frowning as he does so. “Violence is one word for it. Really, it always seems to me to be a wound. And this place, this after…” Constellations flash through what should be, or used to be, or once thought itself brown. A million, million lives singing in the dark. “This is its beating core.”

How to tend to it? How to make it better? Where could you even start?

Phoenix closes his hands into fists, trying to ignore the hum silently vibrating his bones. There is a point where you become unforgiveable and he’s still trying to work out how to find it. He isn’t eight years old anymore. He isn’t nine. He’s scared of what that means. He’s scared of what it doesn’t.

(He wants to help people. But the word save has so much inside it that he doesn’t know if his shoulders are enough to bear the weight.)

The boy moves, extending his arm, pointing at Phoenix with his index, thumb sticking straight up above it. Smoke crawls through the rest of his curled-up hand, a twinge of bullet metal peeking out. He carefully lines up the shot with his eye. Traces a circle around Phoenix’s stupid heart. Rises up, tripping over Phoenix’s blue eye to land on the opposite side of his forehead, just above his left eyebrow. Then the boy brings it to his own face, briefly peering down the faux barrel before letting the nail rest against his closed lips.

Right against it he says, “Don’t open the door.”

Phoenix grabs the dead man’s arm, relieved to find that he can. There’s something else he’s supposed to be doing. He can’t remember who first said that to him. He remembers only in sound and colour. He can only tell the truth in dreams.

“Can you please,” he whispers, shakily, “Talk about something else?”

The look the dead man turns to him isn’t one of pity, but it’s hard to ignore the sadness that permeates everything he says and does. “Sorry. I never seem to be able to find the right time for these things. You’d think I’d be better at it after so long.” He still smiles, that familiar crooked grin, and Phoenix breathes a little easier. “There’s only so much you can carry from the musings of a dead man.”

“Not for lack of trying,” Phoenix says.

The dead man chuckles. “I know. Believe me, I know.”

And Phoenix does. There’s little reason not to. The dead man’s face keeps changing in the shade of the lights flickering above them. One moment it’s steady, carved into plains of dark skin and pale scars and shadow. Then it buckles: eyes, nose, lips go roaming, rearrange themselves, and the light of all that fire leaps through the streaks of grey in his hair. It roars out of him into Phoenix.

“I don’t mean to forget,” Phoenix insists. It feels like he has to, like it’s something that will hold him together. It’s important to the dead man. That makes it important to him too. “It always seems to turn into something else.”

“Memory is not the thing remembered.” The dead man gently squeezes his hand. “The part that belongs to you is still alive. The part that is not isn’t. Leave it at that.”

“Do you think,” the boy asks, very quietly, “It’s enough to keep him alive, too?”

Phoenix hasn’t said it aloud before. How he’s given up waiting for a trust that will not be returned. How he’s spent fifteen years chasing something that won’t come back. But he says it now, because it’s the dead man, and the dead man isn’t perfect by any means, but he has always, always understood what Phoenix is trying to say.

“There’s a story,” the dead man says. “A Greek myth that says when we’re born, we’re split in half. We come into the world only half-there, and we have to find that which completes us. A friend of mine—” He pauses, laughing when Phoenix obediently rolls his eyes. “A very old friend of mine always thought it sounded lonely. For a time, I pretended I agreed. But the truth is, it comforts me. It implies our first and most basic purpose is to seek love. No matter how full we are, love always fits.”

“That doesn’t mean you always let it in,” Phoenix argues. He’s not trying to be difficult, but more and more he’s finding it a habit to pick the holes, to pull apart the loose threads, to remove what doesn’t make sense and find—the truth, he supposes. It makes him want to hide his eyes. It makes him want to keep them open until they bleed. “I can’t… I can’t fix something that wants to stay broken.”

His childhood best friend is sleeping somewhere he cannot find him, dying alone.

For now, all Phoenix can do is leave him alive.

The dead man tightens his hold and looks him in the eye. “Do you trust him?”

His heartbeat picks up. His throat feels hot, tight. A few months ago he wouldn’t have hesitated on that answer. It’s not necessarily grief, because how can you grieve for something you never had? It’s just another thing that was already dead when it came to him.

“I can’t just… He’s still… I promised,” he says, helplessly. “I know—I know he forgot, but I didn’t.” He fiddles with his keychain, where it appears in his hand. The boy fiddles with the bullet. Phoenix scrubs his knuckles over his face with a frustrated huff. “I know you think I’m being stupid. I know everyone does. Including him.”

The worn edges feel sharper than they really are, happily chewing when he holds onto them too tight. Enough to feel the nails in his palm and the tremoring bone in his wrist. He only stops when the dead man takes that hand as well, and the dead man doesn’t say I’m sorry, doesn’t say it’ll be okay. For a long moment, he doesn’t say anything at all.

Instead, he pulls Phoenix closer, until his arms are slung heavily over Phoenix’s shoulders, and his fingers are threading through the back of Phoenix’s spikes while the others hold his spine steady and Phoenix knows nothing but the searing heat of him.

When Phoenix breathes, he thinks there should be steam, but there’s only his own breath wafting back to him and the shadowed hollow of the dead man’s neck where he can hide his face and shame.

“I can’t speak for everyone else,” the dead man murmurs. Phoenix hears it move through his throat. “But… all I think is that you care about him so much you can’t conceive of a world where you would keep letting him be hurt.”

Phoenix shuts his eyes. He knows the boy’s hands are shaking.

“Do you think you remember?” the boy asks.

Of course I do. I never forgot.

“No,” the boy says. “I mean… do you think you remember how it felt? To promise that? Do you think you still feel it?”

The silence after feels like shards of glass. Even the cores flitting above them feel eerily still, their passing muffled. More often than not, Phoenix hears rumbling in the distance, like a large crowd screaming. The noise is like a tattoo on the inside of his ears, matching the beat of his heart, what little he can feel of it when he is lost so very far away, and he is not stupid. He wants a better ending, but better doesn’t mean good.

He asks the dead man, muffled against his collar, “In that world, is it still violence if I have to be the thing that keeps hurting him? Or is it just something else that’s inevitable?”

The dead man pulls away a little, just enough he can look at the falling lights as if he’s looking for one in particular. It’s an action coloured in metal, but not that of a gun or bullet. Like when he reaches for the weight on his hip that isn’t there, this has all the sharpness of steel.

“It’s harder like this,” he says, slowly. “You chose it for different reasons than me, but the basic intention was the same. Is the same.” Tenses roll around them, laughing. The dead man lets them hang off his fingers, then gently directs them away. “It’s easier to simplify it. Most people do. They give it a title so they can forget all the humanity behind it and call themselves righteous. Call the act justice. You can’t do that with a name.” He exhales. “But when you’re the one standing there, you know you’re still just a person. And so is he. It’s not one thing or the other, not black or white, because the issue isn’t separate. It’s not you against him. It’s you because of him. Him because of you.”

His voice gets more choked up as he speaks, and Phoenix wants him to stop. The world crackles and flickers, like a classroom light exploding, and he hunches up his shoulders to his ears, eyes stinging. “I just want to go home,” he whispers.

The dead man looks at him, brown eyes dull. “I know,” he says. “But try to remember.”

Phoenix does. And he’ll keep trying.

But he’s terrified it won’t be enough.

“Mia,” Maya whines, almost hitting the exact tone of the TV as its screen sputters static and snow, “Your TV is broken again.”

“It’s only broken when you want to watch the Steel Samurai,” Mia hollers through the closed door of her office. After a few seconds the door snaps open and she strides through, taking up a vicious stance in front of the screen: knees bent, glare squinted, hand raised threateningly above it like it’s an old CRT she can whack into working properly.

“It’s not only broken then,” Maya protests. She’s sitting cross-legged on the edge of the couch cushions, leaning precariously close to falling off as she tries to see around Mia’s body. “It did it during that, y’know, that movie you wanted to show us. That… whatever-it-was-called.”

Before Mia can answer, the TV lets out another aggrieved shriek, a colliding mix of voices and sounds pitched beyond their normal register.

Mia hits it.

This accomplishes nothing.

“You’re going to have to do something before she throws out a perfectly good TV,” Diego says from his spot beside Maya, his feet flung up on the coffee table and his expression amused despite his reproving words. “Or breaks her hand. She just got out of her cast, pajarito.”

Phoenix shrugs, idly watching the scene with his chin in his palm and Murphy flat-eared between his knees. Her nose pokes out between the desk and his chair’s armrest, a low growl trickling into a raised whine as a hand spurts out of the TV screen and claws through Mia’s stomach. Mia jerks and hits the TV again. The TV, Phoenix thinks, is going to start getting annoyed.

The hand is followed by a whole arm, then another, then Cody Hackins’ grinning face. He pulls the rest of himself through—thankfully without his sword catching on anything this time—and flops onto the floor before flickering upright, wriggling in place like he can feel the static crawling through him. As soon as he’s out, the TV lets out a final distorted pop and returns to normal, Gourd Lake filling the screen for the final touches of the news report that had been playing before Cody’s impromptu arrival.

Mia hits the TV again anyway.

Silently, Phoenix raises his eyebrows at Cody. In turn, the boy sticks his tongue out. “Yeah, yeah, whatever. I’ll stop doing it when it stops being fun.”

“Good as new,” Mia declares, flexing her hand and examining her fingers. Apparently satisfied she hasn’t done permanent damage to herself or her electronics, she backs away and makes a beeline for the fridge. Phoenix watches her open it, his mugshot staring blankly at him from across the room, matching Mia’s expression perfectly as she stares into the fridge for a moment, then grabs a drink without another word.

Maya leans back, her hair spilling down the couch before she also catches sight of the interior, and whatever she was going to ask for transforms into an outraged squawk. “Nick! Stop putting the Steel Samurai in the fridge!”

“He’s minding it,” Phoenix says, deadpan as he pats Murphy’s head. She rests her chin on top of his thigh with a small huff.

“Minding it?” Maya squints at him. “Minding what? Your choccy milk and appy slices?”

“Is there—I don’t know, a particular reason you’re saying that like I’m eight years old?” Phoenix asks.

“Big man wants his appy slices,” Maya says with such wide-eyed innocence it almost makes up for the way her lips twitch at the corners.

Phoenix hums and digs the blunt end of his pencil into his cheekbone. “Maybe big man do.”

Maya breaks, leaning over to giggle.

Mia, her cold can pressed to her temple, closes her eyes and sighs. “I’m surrounded by eight-year-olds.”

Phoenix grins on the back of Diego’s laughter. Cody, lounging on the couch on Maya’s other side with his feet sticking off the end and his arms folded behind his head, rolls his eyes.

The Steel Samurai figurine was a gift from Powers, alongside an actual viable pay cheque that still makes Phoenix’s head spin when he thinks about it too long. One of the other benefits of surviving through a three-day trial, plus time spent investigating, and winning to round it all off. He still made Diego and Mia double check the amount three times.

(Two years and one high-profile client and he nearly has enough saved up now. It’s starting to burn a hole in his pocket. He wants it to blister. He knows it’s nothing compared to the life he owes Mia, the monster of a boy she was too kind to refuse, but he won’t take what can be given back. If it’s inevitable, at least this way when she regrets it, she won’t have to regret it completely empty.)

“If you like the figurine so much you can have it,” Phoenix says to Maya. “I think he meant it for you anyway.”

“He belongs here,” Maya huffs. She goes to the fridge and rescues the Steel Samurai from his frigid prison, placing him on top so he can survey the office. “I want him to stay here.”

“Then he can mind the fridge while he’s at it.”

Admittedly, he partly does it to rile Maya up. It’s always easier that way. Whenever someone’s right up in his face, Larry battering at him, Diego swiping at him, Mia smacking at him, Maya huffing at him, all he can think is oh, there you are. But he’s also not particularly inclined to have the Steel Samurai watching everything he does. The show isn’t terrible—as long as you don’t think about it too much—but being pinned to a wall and strangled by a ghost wearing the suit tends to take a lot of the whimsy out of it.

He still hasn’t gone back to Global Studios. Doesn’t know what happened to Hammer or Vasquez’s ghost without Vasquez there to blacken their souls with soot and keep their dead cold around her heart. A week after the trial, Maya finally broke, curled up on the couch with one of Mia’s blankets around her shoulders and her phone held tightly in her hands, and explained the meeting Hammer fatally interrupted was about Global Studios’ future programming. She heard it from Nichols, who heard it from someone else, who also heard it from someone else, and the announcement of the Steel Samurai’s final episode (read: early cancellation) had her upset for days.

Phoenix can sort of remember feeling the same kind of disappointment over something so mundane. He does his level best to replicate it for Maya’s sake, but any real investment on the matter only has space for Cody and Lou, because while Lou still won’t watch the Steel Samurai, she’s cautiously keeping up with the replacement Pink Princess, and Cody makes sure to recount their reactions in exquisite detail whenever he shows up to join Phoenix and Maya’s ongoing marathon.

So the time passes and the past recedes and dumps them here: Christmas day and a rerun of a Samurai special for the holiday and a reminder, however unnecessary, some things are meant to remain buried.

“Hard at work or hardly working?” Mia asks, slotting herself against the side of his desk and peering down at a familiar boy fishing for stars that drift across the spread pages. She smiles down fondly at him. “Suppose that answers my question.”

Phoenix twitches his shoulder into a shrug. “Gourdy inspired me.”

Mia laughs at the same time she groans. “I’m out of commission for a couple months and they start putting creature features on the news.” She touches the page to see it clearer, staining the tips of her fingers with charcoal. “How’d you get from that to this?”

Phoenix shrugs again. “Things under the surface, I guess.” He left out the bodies he was going to draw in the water. He could only picture Diego’s face on them, and he doesn’t like drawing Diego like that. It’s not like he thinks it’d make it more real, but—

But.

Mia keeps looking at the drawing, carefully tracing the boy’s face with her nail, maybe recognising it, maybe not, so seemingly in her own universe she doesn’t notice Phoenix quietly watching her. Quietly wondering if she thinks about the man poking fun at the eight-year-old beside her sister on the couch as much as Phoenix does.

He draws it. Drawing is time spent thinking about it. He never finds anything new, so he stops drawing and tries to do something else.

He’s started taking Maya out to the tracks by the beach for Murphy’s morning runs. She cackles and holds on tight enough to bruise his ribs again as he pedals, both of them struck by flung up mud and their teeth rattled numb despite the best efforts of his bike’s suspension. They’ll walk the beach afterwards and Murphy will battle the waves, springing in and out the surf to catch Diego’s teasing calls. Sometimes Phoenix draws that too. Most of the time he doesn’t.

They go early enough there’s hardly anyone about, Maya one of those horrifying bright-eyed morning people, Phoenix usually just still awake from the night before. Winter mornings hold a different kind of quiet; star flare and frost shine instead of the fire-stained sunrise of autumn. No wonder Diego loves it. Maya, apparently also incapable of feeling cold, will find a good spot on the sand to sit in her paper-thin training clothes, ostensibly to meditate. Phoenix isn’t entirely sure how being body slammed by a dripping wet, salty Australian Shepherd is good for concentrating on spiritual energy or whatever, but he’s never claimed to be an expert. Maya seems happy, at least.

Sometimes Mia joins them, utterly incensed by the fact she’s willing, huddling close to Phoenix as they both try to feel warm. They’ll wander back to the depths of the city, the ocean roaring far behind them, Phoenix pushing one of the sisters along on his bike as they search for a coffee shop that’ll sell to them when one is a soaking dog and two more have mud drying on their front and back.

The injuries lifted themselves away eventually. Like dandelion seeds pulled by the wind, they peeled off in patches, sticky remains in the aches Phoenix gets when he’s been hunched over drawing too long, the spasms that steal his throat when he tries to swallow, the pins and needles in his spine. Mia keeps the blinds in her office almost all the way closed all the time, keeping out the sun, keeping out prying eyes. She weans herself off painkillers—sometimes with teeth-grit hand-fisted stubbornness against the lingering headaches. Sticky notes make sure she remembers. Glue stains her knuckles. Dizziness follows sometimes when she lies down.

Vertigo.

Phoenix shivers and tries to be there for her.

Diego has kept hovering and Maya has kept worrying, but they’re returning to something like equilibrium. Two months was all it took. Two months since the Steel Samurai trial. Two months since Phoenix has seen or heard from Edgeworth at all.

Right. Putting a name to the feeling. Somehow it doesn’t make Phoenix feel any better.

(He tries not to worry about it. Tries to ignore his return to old habits: newspapers he scours for a glimpse, tabs on his phone he closes before Diego can peak over his shoulder, rumours he strains to overhear at the courthouse with Murphy. So many times he has to stop himself asking Diego to go and look, to try asking Gregory, though he knows Gregory will only tell him nothing. And things are—good. Far, far better than he can remember them being for a long time.

But the distance grates on him, his heart always halfway full. There’s always more he can give from his soul. It’s all he knows how to do: chase something that will never be able to come back.

He has to catch up first.)

“Aw, c’mon,” Cody complains as a breaking news bulletin interrupts before the Steel Samurai theme can start playing.

“Do you think there’s a reward for proving the existence of Gourdy?” Maya asks. She presses the pads of her fingers to her mouth as she watches the screen fill with the image of Gourd Lake for the second time this morning.

Phoenix glances at her, narrowing his eyes. “I doubt it. Why?”

“Asking for a friend.”

“Uh huh.” Phoenix turns back to his sketchbook, though there’s little more to add to it here. He just wants something to do with his hands. “You’d have more luck proving it isn’t real. It was probably just a weird smudge on the photograph.” He starts sketching the pieces of an Australian Shepherd puppy lounging on the boat’s bow, tail sweeping off the side and threaded with curious stars. “Why? Are you planning to visit Gourd Lake sometime soon?”

Maya shrugs, a crease forming between her eyebrows. She doesn’t take her eyes off the screen and her words come from a strange distance. “Would you judge me if I gave you a nice, firm maybe?”

“Who, me? Never. Not like it’s my job or anything.”

“It’s absolutely not your job, so strike that argument off the list.” Mia leans over him to scrutinise the screen, her bottom lip pulled between her teeth. “You know what? That’d be a great place to take Murphy.” Her eyes shine with mischief when she straightens again. “I’m sure her nose would be able to turn up all sorts of evidence.”

Phoenix places his hand protectively over Murphy’s soft head. She gazes up at him dolefully then goes back to side-eyeing Cody. “Please don’t involve my dog in this.”

“Uh, guys?” Maya says.

“Didn’t we go there once?” Mia pops her can obnoxiously and raises it to her lips, hiding her smile in the aluminium. “They have a whole cycle path and everything.”

“And are you going to come with us on this investigation of cycle paths and definitely not weird fake lake monsters, Chief?” Phoenix asks.

“Pajarito—” Diego starts, weirdly hushed.

“God no. I’d rather be hit over the head again with a statue. Clock. Whatever.” Mia nudges him. “Don’t give me that look.”

“I didn’t give you a look,” he says, and it sounds exactly like the lie it is.

She flicks him on the shaved undercut of his head. “You absolutely gave me a look. And now you’re not looking at me and it’s weirding me out.”  

“Just thinking,” he says, watching her flex the charcoal spots on her fingers into the shifting, chiming light of the Gatewater, “You should threaten something more original. Maybe fall into that new abomination you call a light stand crowding Charley into the corner.”

“You say it’s an abomination. I say it sparks joy.” The hotel has gone all out for Christmas, and the strings of decadence dye the grey on Mia’s fingers unnatural colours. Phoenix tries to memorise them as she spills a grin bright bruise purple. “Besides, it’d only slice my hand open. And our Steel Samurai is too small to stab its spear all the way through my chest.”

“Not unless you really made an effort.”

“I’d make Powers cry again if I did that. You want me to be guilty of that? Of making a beloved children’s TV hero look like a sopping wet guinea pig?”

Phoenix nearly chokes on his snicker and thinks I need to draw that right now. At the same time, Cody utters out a startled recognition using words he definitely isn’t allowed to say, and Maya yells, “Onee-san!”

“What?” Mia jolts, parsing out the name for herself while Phoenix swallows down his laughter, both of them finally noticing the stock still state of the figures on the couch.

Wordlessly, Maya points at the TV. And nothing of the two months, or the two years, or the fifteen years before all of it could have prepared Phoenix. Not now, even in the depth of winter, holding the buoyancy and the life around him and the glow that comes out it with scarred, boyish hands. Still waiting for the shell to crack. For the quiet stop to restart and things to keep on changing, over and over and over.

Not for Maya to just point at the TV. The TV which is still on its breaking news story. The TV that has Miles Edgeworth’s face staring out of it.

“… where a body was recovered in the early hours of the morning,” the news anchor is saying. “Police have arrested Miles Edgeworth, a well-known prosecutor. Sources tell us he has since been officially charged for the crime of murder, a shocking…”

There’s more. There must be more. But Phoenix has stopped listening.

He’s already at the door.  

“Nick, wait—”

And it’s a testament to what little he is—how much of it he owes to them—that Phoenix stops his ragged run and stands like debris. He watches Maya climb over the back of the couch, fumble the landing, one of his hands on the door and the other reaching for her, or maybe pulling away as she rights herself in front of him.

“I’m coming too,” she says.

Diego is already buzzing at his side, grinning and shaking and grinning. Mia is already sitting in his chair, lifting up his desk phone, telling him, “I’ll find out what I can.” Cody watches him with bright eyes, not moving but for his hand opening and closing, like he doesn’t realise he’s doing it—always reaching for Lou. Murphy is already with her nose in the crack of the door, briefly looking up at Phoenix as if to say, yes, of course, let’s go.

“Okay,” Phoenix says, and again, shaking on the exhale. “Okay.”

Just barely, he remembers to grab his scarf. The same can’t be said for his jacket.

“He isn’t here,” Diego says the moment he flickers into the visitor’s room, nearly losing his words to the movement. “I checked the whole building, asked some semi-coherent ghosts who might’ve remembered. Nobody’s seen him. Don’t think anybody here has even looked at him enough to forget.”

Phoenix feels his eyebrows pinch, nose scrunching in confusion. Murphy noses at Diego’s knees, ears flopping over with the tilt of her head.

“He could be busy somewhere else. The brat doesn’t have any other dead things following him.” Diego crouches down to touch Murphy’s chin. He isn’t brave enough to look Phoenix in the eye. “That might be by design.”

The sunlight hits Diego square in the chest, the kind of bright it only manages before the winter dark. Phoenix looks at it so he doesn’t have to look at Diego either.

“I know,” Diego says, quietly. “You can’t not be stupid about this.”

Don’t, Phoenix nearly snaps. Don’t make this about me.

(It scares Diego. It always has. So much it nearly killed him and he never even knew. Diego isn’t built for fear. He is hard edges refused to be sanded down, strong hands that shake from all he feels and bitter dark eyes that soften and mellow when he is brave enough to look at what he loves. He trusts Phoenix and Mia to keep that safe. Once upon a time he trusted his foster sister too.

But that was a long time ago. As long as Phoenix can remember. And there has never been anyone else.)

“Nick? You okay?” Maya asks.

Phoenix quickly smooths out his expression, holding the struggling thoughts underwater with cool detachment. “Yeah. Just tired of waiting.”

Maya lands her gaze solidly on his face, making him feel the weight of it. She holds him in place like she might be able to understand what he’s doing with his hands. He clenches them shut and tries to remind himself they’re part of him. That he moves through the world and is moved. That this doesn’t mean the world is ending.

It never fucking ends.

His phone buzzes in his pocket, making him think of nothing but the keychain in the other, just as Maya’s phone buzzes in her hand. She quickly scans the group chat she set up for the three of them ever since Mia was well enough to start taking cases again.

She also changed his ringtone to the Steel Samurai theme while she was at it. He still hasn’t worked out how to change it back.

“Mia says she’s heading down to Gourd Lake,” Maya says. Phoenix could pull out his phone and read it for himself, but he supposes he’s not the only one feeling restless. Maya squints at the screen, her pinky twisting the strap around and around. “It doesn’t sound like she had much luck getting information out of anyone.”

“Closing ranks,” Diego mutters. He sounds just as disgusted as he did when Phoenix still put milk in his coffee. With a sigh he stands upright, waving Murphy back to Phoenix’s side. “Listen, pajarito, I’ll head over and meet her there. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe his papá is waiting there hoping you’ll show up.”

Phoenix dips his chin down into his scarf in lieu of a nod. There’s a staticky itch of acid crawling around the back of his throat. Closing ranks, he mouths into the red fabric, tasting the old gun metal tang on his tongue. He isn’t sure how to feel about it. He’s even less sure how to feel about the fact Mia trusts this to go well enough to give her a reason to be at Gourd Lake at all. When he moves his hand, he manages to find Murphy’s fur and not his keychain. He’s not sure what he’d do with it if tried to hold it now.

Murphy settles closer against him and Diego casts him one more lingering look. Phoenix refuses to meet it, breath clammy against his face, and Diego flickers away without saying anything else.

“Is Gourd Lake far?” Maya asks.

“Depends on what you think far means,” Phoenix says. “It’s in a nature park just outside the city. I can cycle us there and back.” He pulls his face up with some effort, lowering his voice. This isn’t the kind of thing meant to be said loudly. “Mia will be fine.”

“I know.” Maya leans against the small desk, tilting her hip into the edge of it. “I do know that. It’s just hard not to think about it when she’s out on her own.”

Phoenix swallows the guilty pounding trying to rattle out his teeth. If he bit his tongue, he doesn’t think blood would come pouring out. He’d just tell her, she’s never been alone.

But there’s no time to be drowning or not thinking or lying, because the door opens with a shiver of breath, and in walks Miles Edgeworth.

Phoenix is so surprised he nearly stands all the way up out of his chair.

Edgeworth is still in his suit, jabot and all, a little rumpled but clean as ever, as if he was plucked straight out of his normal routine and dropped here by accident. Even the guard behind him has some of the creases and slumping you’d expect, but not Edgeworth. He sits as stiffly as he walks, like a mechanism buried inside him, crossed wires and creaking clockwork, and when he raises his eyes enough to see them (but not be seen in return), they’re colder and quieter than a winter morning on the ocean.

They sit there, the only sound their out-of-sync breathing, Maya a silent witness, the guard long forgotten. He’s come this far, and right on the edge of it, staring at the empty space behind Edgeworth’s shoulder, Phoenix realises he has no idea what to say.

“I told you I don’t want to see you,” Edgeworth says.

Well. There was never going to be an answer that could satisfy Phoenix. That’s as good a place as any to start.

“Seriously?” he hears himself ask, hears all the blankness float out of him. It crawls up Edgeworth’s back, hunching his empty shoulders to his ears. “‘I told you so?’ That’s what you came out here to say?”

Edgeworth still hasn’t looked at him. Not properly. Not in a way that doesn’t make it seem like he’s looking through fractured glass. “What else is there?”

“The murder charge, for a start?” Maya demands, incredulous. It always seems to come out as anger in her. She’s more like Mia that way than either of them care to admit.

“And what,” Edgeworth asks the space between them slowly, “Do you think you’re going to do about that?”

“Help you! Duh.” It’s probably the most aggressive offer of help Phoenix has heard in his life, and he’s lived with Diego Armando for three years. He forces away a smile. That becomes very easy with Maya’s next words, all accusation. “Nick didn’t even hesitate, y’know. The second he heard you were in trouble, we came straight here.”

Edgeworth flinches, gaze drifting to the left side of Phoenix’s chest and the badge pinned to his lapel. His lip curls. “I don’t see how any of that answers my question. My case is near hopeless. Every defence attorney I’ve talked to has turned me down.” He fits his shoulder blades against the hard back of his chair. “And you believe the answer to that is a novice lawyer with only three trials under his belt, all of which he won because of someone else’s intervention?”

Phoenix isn’t sure he breathes. He doesn’t want to let the hurt out. He wants to look away. He wants to close his eyes. Murphy licks his fingers and he gently curls them around her ear afterward. Even this—a truth he knows, with every inadequate part of him—he cannot bear alone.

But whatever else he is, he still wants to keep standing in court as long as he can.

He cannot unmake himself hungry.

“Maybe,” Maya says, her eyes flickering between them, her necklace a hearth against her chest. “But we’re here, aren’t we?”

It’s like this: Diego tried to visit Sam, but she refused. Instead she disappeared into a system that lost her and he hasn’t stopped looking for her since. Edgeworth could have done the same. Phoenix has already built his life around it. The guard could have walked to Edgeworth’s cell, and maybe it was the same guard who watched Phoenix shower, or maybe it was the one Charlie Parker coughed chunks of tongue over, or maybe it was one of however many had to clean Phoenix off the floor after White smeared him across it. Maybe.

You have a visitor, they probably said.

And Edgeworth, demon prosecutor, would have pressed, who?

Phoenix, they wouldn’t say.

Phoenix who? Edgeworth would answer, because that’s the game they’re playing—though game is the wrong word for it, too frivolous and uncaring for someone like Edgeworth who cares as deeply as he can breathe, no matter how good he’s gotten at pretending to himself he doesn’t. But there are rules all the same. As bitter and hard-drawn as Diego’s. They do not know each other. Phoenix can never show his face again. He needs to stay away from Edgeworth. He was never supposed to be here.

Phoenix Wright, the guard would answer, sighing, bored.

And Edgeworth would have known he had a choice. Prosecutor is as inextricable from his title as demon. He could have said no. Given all available evidence, he should have said no.

“I don’t need your pity,” Edgeworth says coldly.

“It wasn’t pity,” Phoenix says quietly.

“It isn’t pity,” Maya insists.

But Edgeworth keeps looking at the badge on Phoenix’s chest. Hearing, hopefully, what Phoenix doesn’t say. It wasn’t pity that made him give Phoenix his handkerchief. It wasn’t pity that made him defend Phoenix in the class trial. It wasn’t pity that made him think Phoenix’s dad was hurting him and it wasn’t pity that made him reach for Phoenix’s hand, over and over.

Phoenix knows that. And he thinks Edgeworth still knows it too.

He thinks of Mia going ahead, expecting him to follow, and asks, “What were you doing down at the lake so late anyway? That’s one of the reasons they arrested you, isn’t it?” His mouth feels rotten. “Because you were there.”

“Something like that,” Edgeworth mutters. He’s taken to gripping his left arm with his right again.

“But… you didn’t do it,” Phoenix says. He doesn’t mean it to sound like a question, but he really couldn’t say if it comes out that way or not.

Edgeworth’s eyes briefly flicker upright. Touching blue and brown and just as quickly flinching away. He makes a movement like a shrug or a shudder. “Think what you will.”

“But we’re trying to help you,” Maya says, all of her anger fading out into earnest confusion.

Edgeworth doesn’t look at her either. “I don’t recall asking for your help.” He clenches his fingers hard enough to bulge the red fabric between them. “I’m asking you. I’m telling you now. Go away and leave me alone.”

And here’s the problem with that: if Edgeworth really wanted to make him go away, he’d simply insist he’d done it. But he isn’t. It’s not the lawyer part he’s objecting to, it’s the Phoenix part, which—fine. Whatever. Try telling Phoenix something new.

Violence has a body just like his. He digs. It claws its way back up through the cracks and walks away, upright, without him. And maybe Phoenix really is unfathomably lucky, because there are people who will look at it and know it isn’t him, even when he isn’t sure himself which of them made it out alive. It laughs while it’s being beaten. It digs its nails in and rips its skin open. It bares its teeth and kicks people in the nuts instead of letting them hurt his dog.

Trauma responses. The phrase still makes Phoenix laugh a little. Not because it’s untrue, but because it’s so inadequate. As if it could be folded into a neat parcel to stab a fork through and easily chew. He went back to the warehouse. He doesn’t avoid alleyways. He doesn’t have nightmares about walking down basement stairs. He tilts his face up into the shower spray and the only tightening in his chest is when he holds his breath for too long. It tears and breaks whenever it wants, not when he thinks it should. What is he supposed to do then?

He's genuinely asking. He is honestly, genuinely trying.

“No,” Phoenix says. At his side, his dog yawns and licks her teeth. She grins at him with the echo of blood and bruise.

“Wright,” Edgeworth says, something cracking, his voice strangled around it. “This isn’t something I can ask you to do. It has nothing to do with you. I don’t want you having any part in it.”

Distracted, deliberately, wilfully, Phoenix wonders what he would have done if Edgeworth had come to visit him in juvie. It didn’t happen, obviously, and more to the point, never could have. So in that impossible world, would he have agreed to the visit? Even knowing, in an impossible world, that it was not happening, and could not happen, and he wanted no-one, not even himself, to see him?

Of course he would.

Obviously he would.

(The middle of a conversation, happening somewhere, sometime:

No. You made a choice. Trying to suggest otherwise is just an attempt to absolve yourself of responsibility.

Don’t pretend you can even begin to understand the choices I’ve made.

But we still make them. Surely with great care. Surely with such burden and anguish.

We are not the same.

I should bloody well hope not.

Do you truly believe what you said? You admitted to me once you do not see yourself as human. Is that not also an attempt to release yourself of responsibility?

I suppose this is my way of trying to take back responsibility.

Through me. Penance through a man you despise.

Of course I despise you. You’re the very worst of them. A man of integrity, a good man, a man who knows better—and still chooses to do nothing. It doesn’t make you a martyr. It just makes you a coward. And I’m tired of living my life that way. Penance is the very least of it. I just won’t let you believe you don’t deserve the chance for a better ending.

In such an ending, do you see yourself?

… I wouldn’t have done. Once upon a time.)

Phoenix is glad he’s not alone right now.

“I’d be a pretty shit lawyer if I only cared when it was about me,” Phoenix says. “Look, whatever you were doing there, it doesn’t matter. I know it wasn’t your fault.”

“You don’t get to make that choice about me,” Edgeworth says lowly. “Wright, you can’t.”

“You can hate me,” Phoenix snaps. His chest pulses, his breath turning sharp. “You can wish I went away and never came back, but you can’t ask me not to care about you. I won’t do it.”

“And when you find out you’re wrong to?” Edgeworth asks, and though his face could be carved out of ocean snow, silent and ghostly smooth, corners shaved to perfection, eyes barren and cold and frighteningly steady—even so, something in Phoenix wants to curl up and yelp. Because it’s only once it’s happened that Phoenix recognises this is the first time in fifteen years Edgeworth has said something to him that’s honest.

It’s been like this as long as he can remember. He’s learned. Like a boy with his head held underwater until he breaks and breathes in, but he’s learned. It won’t be okay again until he does something to change it first.

A habit of fostered trauma: if you do not want things, they cannot be denied to you.

And Phoenix is a childish, starving liar. He avoids mirrors, but it’s not because he dislikes his reflection. It’s followed him too often, like a hungry dog desperate for affection, even if it has to lick it off knives. He’s seen it reflected in the face opposite his too many times.

In the visitor’s room, the lights are too weak for the winter sun slotting through the narrow window. Edgeworth’s face is cast in light and shadow, split harshly against the hollow curve where his cheekbone meets his nose. It’s hard to tell what the silver of his eye is trying to do in the dark. But that’s a simplification—a child’s wish. It’s not one thing and then another, because the two aren’t separate.

It’s you because of him.

Him because of you.

And no matter how many times Phoenix returns to it, he finds himself realising, over and over: oh. It’s going to hurt no matter what.

He smacks his keychain down on the narrow desk hard enough to rattle his knuckles. Chipped and faded as it is, Blue can still grin at Edgeworth like it always used to, without thought or condition. Without reservation or fear.

Like any absence, it’s a matter of gravity.

Edgeworth stares down at it like it might open its plastic mouth and tear out his ribs. And then, finally, his eyes find Phoenix’s and stay there.

“Then I’m wrong. And I’ll care about you anyway,” Phoenix says. They aren’t in court, but he damn well makes sure it beats into Edgeworth all the same. “If you’re not going to tell me, I’ll go and find out for myself.” He stands, abrupt enough the chair screeches and Murphy has to scrabble on her paws, whirling around his legs. “C’mon, Maya.”

“You—” Edgeworth says, cutting off so quick it looks like he bites his tongue. He catches Phoenix before he can turn away. “You brought your dog.”

Phoenix gazes at him levelly. Edgeworth’s eyes are wide and silversilversilver, and Phoenix has to crush the storm in his chest before it can swell right out of him. It isn’t fear. Even here. Even now. Even after everything he’s said and spat and tried to break, Edgeworth still isn’t afraid of him.

“Of course she’s here,” Phoenix says. “Where else would she be?”

He doesn’t wait long enough to check if Edgeworth hears what he means by that too. There’s far too much running to do.

So he feels his scarred feet set against the floor inside his sneakers, and then he races.

Chapter Text

Maya’s buzzing with all sorts of questions as they break away from the city, but one of the best things about cycling is the same as running: when you’re doing it, you don’t have time to think about anything but what you’re doing. It keeps him quiet, and it keeps him halfway warm, his scarf and his hoodie and the rest of his suit around them unable to stop the wind chill that’s scraped his ears and hands raw by the time they finally reach the entrance of the nature park.

Only a few police vehicles are spread haphazardly around the parking lot, shoving the civilian cars into awkward corners for whoever decided they wanted to spend Christmas Day at the lake. Compared to the scene in front of Global Studios, it almost strikes as eerie, his breaths heavy and loud in his ears, in his mouth, in the air, as if snow started falling on a perfectly clear day, muffling the world like a secret. The kind of secret that waits and grabs your ankles and drags you down below its surface. There aren’t any officers herding people away, no-one hovering about the entrance in morbid curiosity, nobody else living at all.

But there is someone waiting for him at the bike rack.

“You go on ahead,” he tells Maya, leaning on his handlebars as he tries to force air back into him. Murphy tugs to the end of her lead, tail wagging and nose sniffing, so riled up from the run it’ll be a relief later when she curls out of it into a hot, heaving ball of fur. He flexes his stiff fingers, wiping his stinging eyes, wincing at the depth the cold has sunk into all of them. “I’ll catch up in a second.”

Maya bites her lip as she stretches her stiff arms and legs. “I’ll call Mia,” she decides, frowning towards the expanse of land beyond the boundary wall caging it in. “We don’t want to get lost trying to find her.”

He hums a vague noise of agreement, mostly to push her away. Then he raises his head for Cody.

“You took ages,” is the first thing Cody says, swinging his legs free where he’s perched on the narrow rail.

Phoenix just keeps trying to get his breath back. “I didn’t know you were waiting.”

“I didn’t want to, but Armando was being all weird about it. You’d think it meant something to him, the way he’s acting.” Cody juts out his jaw as he talks, turning the words into a grumble. “Like it was meant for him, I mean. It feels like he’s going to start his own thunderstorm when you stand too near.”

The bike lock is trapped inside Phoenix’s hoodie at an awkward angle. It takes him three fumbling attempts to pull it out, and he nearly jams his fingers against the bike frame when he finally yanks it free. Murphy sits at his side, curious and watching as he shoves it all into its proper place against the rack.

Cody watches too. “Your boss has been pretty busy,” he says, straightening out of his slouch. “She found this photographer lady camping by the lake. She’s got a pretty sweet set-up, like this sensor that’s set to go off automatically. I yelled right at it and the thing practically blew up. And so did the lady.” He snickers, the sound trailing awkwardly in his hands as he reaches up to hold his own wrecked camera. “It was funny. But I probably shouldn’t have done it. Film costs a lot of money.”

“Any sign of Gregory?” Phoenix asks, tucking his hands into Murphy’s fur, watching their breaths cloud and mix.

“Nope. We looked all over, too. There’s nothing for miles in this place. No sign of the new dead guy, either. Ya know, the one who got shot or whatever.” Cody leans forward, voice dropping. “Is that like a thing? Do all adults just run away and hide the second they get the chance? Where do they usually end up? We could probably find them there.”

Going by Phoenix’s experience, they shoot themselves in the head or drunk drive straight into a fatal crash. Neither of these things feels applicable.

“They must be somewhere,” Cody says, volume back to normal but his shoulders still hunched. “I mean. It’s just like before, right? The Steel Samurai trusted you, so that’s all you have to keep doing.”

Great. Phoenix hasn’t even started and he’s already being comforted by an eight-year-old. He forces his expression flat, forces himself not to wonder what it must have shown if it made Cody look at him like that.

“It’s weird when you do that,” Cody mutters. His white eyes fall to slivers beneath the brim of his cap. “It’s like it’s harder to see you.”

“That’s sort of the point.”

“You’re not dead like me, baby boy,” Cody says. Ghosts always seem to. It’s like they might forget they’re dead if they stop saying it to someone who can hear them. “Okay, well, anyway, I gotta go. Lou’s going to the circus later, but Cruikshanks is making a whole day of it and I wanna make sure I can find them before they leave.” He flickers off the bike stand, hesitates on shifting feet. “But if I see the old glasses guy anywhere, I’ll tell him you’re looking.”

“Thanks, Cody,” Phoenix makes himself say. “Tell Lou I said happy Christmas.”

“She can’t hear me, idiot. I just said that.” He folds his arms and looks away. “But yeah. Sure. I’ll tell her. Whatever.”

Phoenix gently taps his knuckles on the underside of Cody’s cap. “And don’t crawl out of any more TVs.”

Cody grins. “Jódete,” he says, cheerfully, then crams his hat back into its proper position and flickers away.

The distant echo of an impact doesn’t knock Phoenix’s thoughts back into any regular shape the way he hoped it might. He rubs his fingers together as he stands, imagining instead he could feel the love Cody has for Lou, the familiar lilt of Spanish Diego’s been teaching Cody all the swears of (the same as he did for Phoenix), and it bolsters him enough to catch up to Maya where she’s waiting by the entrance.

“They’re not far,” Maya says. She’s hopping on her tiptoes trying to see down the path. It stretches out between the trees on either side, littered with leftover leaves and earthy detritus. Like rubble washed away upstream.

“They?” Phoenix asks. He bends down to let Murphy off her lead.

“Mia and Gumshoe.” Maya frowns. “At least, I think it was Gumshoe. He sounded pretty pissed off whoever he was.”

Maya turns out to be entirely correct. Once they’re far enough down the path, all they have to do is follow the yelling. It leads them to Gumshoe, stalking back and forth like a trapped bear, his coat heaving with him, and Mia standing in front, her face lit like steel.

“She’s not even allowed to be camping there,” Gumshoe growls out. “How has nobody gone down there and told her yet?”

“How is that my problem?” Mia asks coolly.

“You’ve made it our problem, pal!” Gumshoe scrapes at his hair, clawing at the shell of his ear and a slightly less deteriorated cigarette straining to keep its balance. “What’d you have to go and dig her up for? And for this of all the—”

“She has evidence,” Mia interrupts, teeth grit, like it’s not the first time she’s had to say it. “What was I supposed to do instead? Stuff her in her jeep and lock the doors?”

“That’d be a good start!”

“Did you learn that technique from Edgeworth?”

Gumshoe’s mouth snaps shut, but his eyes just keep on talking for him, scalding and splattered. Mia does what anyone without the good sense to die would: she steps right into them.

“You of all people should know that that is never how this works. Right, Phoenix?”

She asks it like a challenge. That’s the language lawyers like them speak in: I dare you, prove it, do you understand what you’re doing, what this has to mean, do you know how little time this will last?

And because Phoenix knows exactly what she means, he stops himself. Takes another breath. In and out. Then he steps forward. “Could you maybe start from the beginning? Or at least somewhere that means I understand what’s actually going on?”

Instead of answering, Mia keeps looking at Gumshoe, crossing her arms just to prove she can and raising an expectant eyebrow. Gumshoe hesitates. In the time it takes him to muster up the words, Murphy comes trotting over, spitting shards of wood from between her teeth, crunching more like bits of bone. She finds a safe distance and inspects Gumshoe’s coat with a curling lip.

“She found another witness,” Gumshoe bites out. “As if there weren’t enough problems. Thought those badges of yours were supposed to mean something.”

“Do you seriously think I’m here because I want to be?” Mia finally snaps.

“Then why the hell are you taking Mr Edgeworth’s case?” Gumshoe demands.

“I’m not,” Mia says. “Phoenix is.”

And doesn’t that shut Gumshoe up very quick.

(A quick get-to-know-me guide for Detective Dick Gumshoe: he does not hate the situations life throws at him, even if that does not stop him from resenting, sometimes, the criminals who put him in it. He only has a father, once a mother, and no siblings, but he has enough family to build an army, and what an army they are—men and women with their police uniforms and military boots, eager for a slap on the shoulder and a warm meal at the end of each harrowing day. For most of them, Gumshoe can’t provide the latter, can barely make enough for himself. For all of them, he tries to make up for it.

Chief Prosecutor Skye always says one day he’ll snap if he keeps stretching himself this thin. Gumshoe takes the salary he’s given and assures her he’s made of tougher stuff than that.

Becoming a detective has been his dream since he was a kid. Actually living it has changed the way he sees things. He’s old enough to know now it always will. And he tries to make up for it. It goes like this: whenever Mr Edgeworth has a case, he thinks, Alright, this is how we’re going to do it, pal. We’re going to find the when, the where, the who, the how and the why. Then we’re going to make sure Mr Edgeworth eats something and goes home. Even when he’s alone, it’s always we. It always has to be we.

And it’s strange, with this new kid. Wright is strange. Whenever Gumshoe finds himself in front of the guy, he wants to look away. And Gumshoe can’t say he always catches everything, never all the things he should, but he recognises patterns. Particularly when the matching set is glaring at him almost every day.

From one person who shoulders too much to another, Gumshoe has caught himself almost saying something to Wright more than once. He was going to bide his time, though. Wright doesn’t seem like much, but he’s proven he’s the sort of person who’ll stick around.

So he almost opens his mouth and says an impossible thing to Wright, here. It’s a very close almost. But in the end, he doesn’t.

He isn’t family, after all.)

Diego would be having a field day with all of this. Phoenix swallows and tries to keep his eyes up. “I want to,” he says. “Edgeworth’s got a different opinion on the matter.”

“He was a complete asshole about it actually,” Maya cuts in, bluntly matter-of-fact. Gumshoe gapes at her, and even Mia seems a bit startled. “But we’re still here because Nick’s here. Edgeworth’s just going to have to get over that fact at some point. And I guess you are, too.”

“It ain’t that.” Gumshoe shakes his head then blows out a long breath like for a moment he’d forgotten to breathe. “You know the trial’s tomorrow right? And not a single person is up to take his case? It’s already solid enough without more evidence stacked up against him.” He wrinkles his nose, but he doesn’t point the words at Mia. “I just—I don’t get it. He didn’t do it. He wouldn’t do something like this!”

“I know,” Phoenix says.

“But everyone to hell and back is acting like it’s a done deal, like after everything Mr Edgeworth has done he’s going to throw it all away, like he isn’t—”

“I know,” Phoenix says again, louder. “Gumshoe, I know, I… I tried. He didn’t want me to represent him.” It’s too much to say it aloud. He’s tired. It’s cold. He looks down and speaks to his dog, because she’s the only one he knows would never blame him for it. “Especially not me.”

That, at last, takes all the fight out of Gumshoe. He slumps, defanged, exhausted, his coat sighing at the seams. Just like that, he doesn’t look like something fighting to live, but something fighting to just not die. He pulls the cigarette from his ear the same way Mia touches her necklace, some kind of movement that holds too much inside it for Phoenix to understand. He rubs at the paper with his thumb and stares somewhere between the trees.

“D’you want to smoke that?” Phoenix asks. All the fidgeting is starting to rile his own blood up worse than it already is. He hasn’t had a cigarette since his birthday. It sort of feels like a mistake.

Gumshoe looks down, seeming genuinely surprised to find it in his hand. “Trying to quit,” Gumshoe grunts, shoving it back behind his ear and scrubbing through his hair again. “For all the good it’s doing. You haven’t even heard the worst of it yet.” He takes in a lungful of crisp, fresh air. “Manfred von Karma’s prosecuting.”

The name echoes like a crack in Phoenix’s chest. He doesn’t look at it.

“But… that doesn’t make any sense,” Maya says blankly. “You said he practically raised Mr Edgeworth. Doesn’t that mean something?”

“It means it’s a gross conflict of interest,” Mia says.

Her gaze stays on Phoenix, searching.

But right now he isn’t sure he wants her to find him. He just—he just really wishes Diego was here.

“You know what von Karma said to that?” Gumshoe asks, not waiting for an answer and not looking for one in the first place. It’s like he isn’t even with them anymore, like he’s still standing in the same place he was when he heard the words from von Karma’s mouth. “‘This trial will go the same as any other. A criminal is a criminal. And a murderer is even less.’”

It takes Phoenix a second, and he doesn’t ask because the grim expression on Gumshoe’s face doesn’t want any questions either. But still, he wonders,

What does that even mean?

Mia has never been much of an artist, and she’ll be the first in line to admit it. Phoenix is still semi-convinced she bought the modern art painting for the office (now hanging comfortably over the fridge) just to mess with him. She takes the world in in sharper ways, holding herself against it until the marks reach her marrow. She doesn’t know how to do anything else.

So this is the picture she manages to create for him of what happened:

Two men, a lake, and midnight.

Nobody’s sure which came first.

The fog was thick on the water, and the world began and ended at the shore. On the edge of everything there was a man awake in the boathouse, and further up there was a woman with a camera. They heard and saw nothing but the moment, the deafening crack of a bullet fired, and the boat returning to shore half-alone. The sky was hidden and silent.

And the police were already running.

They have the gun, the testimony, and now a photograph that could show Edgeworth doing anything. What they don’t have is the why. It won’t be enough to take the punishment away. The crime was still committed. But Edgeworth refuses to explain himself and that’s something—because men don’t murder like this, they don’t kill without someone making them. If Phoenix has anything in his corner, it’s just that. If Edgeworth tried to kill him, he would stand there and he would do nothing.

He thinks of the taste of salt on his lips, and the way the rain smells in summer. The handkerchief still dotted with his blood, where it sits tucked safely in his art room, because at least in there the red reminds him he has to give it back someday.

Men like Edgeworth don’t just murder.

“He pretty much spent the whole time insulting us. Insulting Nick,” Maya amends when Mia’s eyes flash a dangerous shade of bright. They made it past Gumshoe with startling ease once all was said and done, and Phoenix even walked away with Gumshoe’s number to show for it. They’re heading down to the shore, because as Mia put it, they have today, and if Phoenix wants to keep going, they’d better make the most of it in case there’s a tomorrow. But still. “He said there was no point in letting Nick trying to defend him.”

“No,” Phoenix says, because Mia’s expression doesn’t lose any of its anger, and it’s fine. Really. He doesn’t need it. “He just kept telling me to go away.”

“Same difference,” Maya says. She looks away when Phoenix doesn’t look back at her, watching Murphy tousle with the trees instead. After a terse silence, she relents. “He looked happy to see Murphy, though. I mean, not happy. The only time I think I’ve seen him happy is when he was accusing Nick of trying to kill you.”

“Maya,” Phoenix snaps.

“What? He’s always a smarmy asshole in court. It pisses you off too!”

“It’s nothing to do with me.”

If anything, that makes Maya hold herself more tense. “What’s the keychain all about then?”

“Okay, first of all, both of you calm down,” Mia cuts in, pushing forward to walk in the middle of them. “Second, back up a moment. You’ve lost me.”

Maya hesitates, suddenly, and Phoenix glares at the ground in front of her. “Nick practically threw it at him,” she says, tentative and unsure as she turns to her sister. Something passes between them. Some language Phoenix doesn’t speak. He grits his teeth and glares at the sky instead. “Edgeworth looked… I don’t know. He was different when he saw it. Is there a way of looking sad and surprised and like you want to kill someone all at the same time?”

If there is, Edgeworth would be the one to find it. It’s angry and unfair and untrue, but Phoenix still thinks it. The distance between the two of them has never felt more terrifying. He has no idea what Edgeworth sees separating their feet. Just the earth, just time—or maybe finally something else.

“We just want to know,” Maya says, and Phoenix wishes he could take that we and rip it apart with his teeth. “You never talk about yourself, Nick. And now we’re just supposed to trust Edgeworth when he’s never—”

“Just drop it, Maya” Phoenix says, metal and plastic skin-warm inside his fist, heartbeat loud and loud and loud where it pounds inside his ears. Maya stops, maybe surprised, maybe a little hurt, but Phoenix—he can’t talk about trust when it comes to Edgeworth. It’d be like trying to explain why oxygen burns the same way as grief: he breathes and it happens. How is he supposed to say that?

“We can’t help if we never know what’s wrong,” Maya mutters.

Luckily, like a set-up joke for the world still waiting for the punchline, whatever she was going to come out with next never happens. They reach the last crest of the path, where the earth starts to dip and fall away, revealing the lake in front of them.