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It wasn’t really something he ever thought about. It certainly hadn’t been a conscious decision, and even if it had been, well, his state of mind is very different to what it had been, back when they first reunited. Besides, it was… reciprocated.
It wasn’t even that unique among their friendships. Maya called him Edgeworth, too, no doubt because they’d met through Wright. And he himself often forewent the “Detective” and just called his investigative partner Gumshoe, though that had the bonus of doing triple duty as a nickname and job title, as well as just being the man’s name. It certainly didn’t stick out to anyone else, or, at the very least, they hadn’t asked about it, and he knew if there was one thing his friends and coworkers delighted in, it was sticking their noses into his personal life. There was nothing to notice.
He was Edgeworth, and his rival was Wright, and there’s nothing strange at all about them calling each other as such.
At least, there hadn’t been anything strange about it until Wright had him up against the wall of his dingy little office with the flickering fluorescents and the untouched single bookcase, hands at once urgent and hesitant on his cheeks, his mouth hot against his own with a quiet moan slipping from Edgeworth’s mouth.
“Wright…”
And then it’s all very strange indeed. He’s suddenly incredibly conscious of everything: the plasticky feel of Phoenix’s embarrassingly cheap suit, the pressure and weight of a whole other person against him, the taste of their abandoned coffee on Wright’s breath, the fact that he could taste Wright-
He ducks his head down, breathing heavily, and their kiss ends abruptly. Wright’s clammy hands still cling to the sides of his face, his own hands still dance against the jacket at his hips, and for a moment nothing happens. The clock on the wall counts the seconds, a strangely heavy tick seeming to echo through the office. And then Edgeworth finds his voice – the one he has control over, not whatever it was that had him gasping his coworker’s name.
“Wright-” and there it is again, just as alien in this situation as before, “don’t you think this is rather… odd?”
“I…” Wright seems to still be out of breath, despite the pause. “Which part?” It’s as if he’s on the edge of both a laugh and a sprint out the door at the same time. “The- this? Us, at all? The fact that we’re in my office and yet you’re not demanding I get back to work? That it’s like 6 PM on a Tuesday? That-” and for a second his eyes dart to the side, like he’s somehow expecting someone to be watching them in this locked and empty room “-that this isn’t even the first time this has happened?”
He’s blushing as he says it, the same way he kisses, the same way Phoenix Wright does anything, with all his body and all the energy within. Edgeworth can’t deny that his face is no doubt just as red, and yet he isn’t embarrassed. Overwhelmed, maybe, but not ashamed. Wright is – his mind twitches at the internal pun – right, this isn’t the first time they’ve ended up like this. And maybe the first few times can be blamed on the wave of emotion that comes with acquittal and reunion and relief, pure and simple, easy to discard when it’s over and not to be discussed – thought of, at all – while it was happening. But this? This was, like Wright said, 6 PM on a Tuesday evening when they hadn’t even had a case that day. They didn’t have one scheduled for a whole week. Edgeworth hadn’t needed to come over at all except that he wanted to, and Wright hadn’t needed to let him in, but he did and they talked and moved closer and then closer still and then for some stupid reason Edgeworth had thought the best way to express how much he was enjoying himself was to moan Wright’s surname…
“I’m not very good at this,” he mutters, and Wright snorts.
“Well, the defence has some testimony to contest that assertion-”
“Oh, aren’t you so charming?” Edgeworth drawls, but he can’t help the smile on his face. “I meant, I…” Ugh, why had he brought this up? “Me, calling you ‘Wright’…”
Wright’s brows knitted in confusion. “That’s what you always call me.”
“But it’s your surname, and we were…”
“Kissing?” Wright offers. “You can say it, you know.”
Can he, though? He’s never talked about it before, never even tried, and neither has Wright. Despite the fantasies he allowed himself ever so rarely, he’d come to accept that things between them weren’t really that deep, not to the extent that he thought of them. That he wanted them to be. But here they are. Talking about it. Or, at least, something close to it.
“Do you find it strange, that I only call you by your surname?” he asks at last, aching for the conversation to turn somewhere else.
“I never really thought about it, to be honest,” Wright replies.
“Me neither,” Edgeworth mutters. “Until, ah… this.”
“Do you think it’s weird?” Wright prompts, and he’s somehow relaxed into their all too close, leaning against the wall and keeping one of his hands at Edgeworth’s face, his fingertips brushing the early grey hair.
“It’s hardly how one pictures this sort of affair,” Edgeworth says.
“Affair?” Wright laughs.
“Oh, come on, you know what I meant.”
“No, no go on,” says Wright, back in his space once more. “Tell me what you pictured.”
Phoenix Wright is not a man with an attractive voice, and yet Edgeworth finds himself drawn to it all the same. In quiet moments like this, with his hands on his rival’s skin, it tends to jump even higher, breathier than usual. It’s unflattering, embarrassingly eager, and perhaps one of Edgeworth’s favourite sounds in the world.
He sighs, rolls his eyes, because keeping them fixed on Wright’s for any longer would take a stronger man than him, and says,
“I simply wanted to make sure you were alright with it.”
“Oh, I think I’m fine with you calling me anything-”
“Wright,” he says, and it’s supposed to be admonishing but he’s gone and walked into the kind of trap that only Phoenix Wright thinks to set and now a laughing mouth meets his own.
He’s sick of leaving his fingers shaking at Wright’s hips, always too timid, even a little distant, in their moments like this. So he moves, wrapping his arms around Wright’s back and slowly pulling him ever closer, tighter, his fingers digging into that ugly suit. In drawing his rival up into that urgent embrace – more focused on the warm weight of their bodies together than their lips – Edgeworth feels himself rising to a better posture, and with it comes a revelation. He’s kissing Phoenix Wright. Again. And it’s different, to the time before but at also to the time before that. And he knows with the clarity of a mothertongue that every time he kisses Phoenix Wright from now on will be different, too. Even if he makes the same movements, if he grips his shoulder blades just like this and Phoenix sighs in just the same way, sending the same goosebumps up his arms, it’ll be different. Because this is how they kiss on a Tuesday at 6 PM on a day without cases. Next they might kiss at noon on a Friday in an urgent recess, or on a Saturday night with no work pretence at all, and it’ll all be different, all new, without even trying.
“Edgeworth…” Wright mumbles, collapsing into the hollow of his neck.
“You don’t have to call me Edgeworth,” he blurts without pause. “…If you don’t want to.”
Wright is silent for a second. And then asks, quietly, into Edgeworth’s collarbone,
“Miles?”
He can’t help it, his shoulders sag. He hadn’t expected it to be that difficult. To hear someone call him by his name, the only name that’s just for him, a name that has nothing to do with the man his father was, or what the law expected, the name that Von Karma had all but erased. It hurts, he realises. In that strange, heavy way of the emotional pain that comes in the night, when he can neither sleep nor read. A bowling ball in his stomach. A black hole, rather. Sucking everything in, down into this dense pit, collapsing in on himself.
“It’s okay,” Wright says, rising from his spot by Edgeworth’s neck to meet his eyes. “I like you as Edgeworth just as much as Miles or the prosecution or high prosecutor Edgeworth or Mr. any of those things.”
Edgeworth smiles weakly, his eyes dripping away from Wright’s gaze.
“I know,” he says, and tries to believe it, that Wright could like him as anyone. “But… I want to want you to want to call me Miles.”
There’s a brief pause.
“Is there any way you could rephrase that, or-”
Edgeworth snorts, pitching forward to bury his face in Wright’s chest. It’s nice there, so warm and musky, and when Wright wraps his arm around the back of his head, muffling all the sounds of the world, from the traffic outside to the buzzing of the neon signs to that chunky clock ticking, he thinks he could stay there forever. But he doesn’t. Maybe he takes a little longer than he should just enjoying their position, but eventually he rises to return Wright’s concerned look.
“I want you to call me Miles,” he says, a sentence too heavy to keep inside.
“Hey, it’s okay. I could tell that was hard for you,” says Wright. “You don’t need to push yourself-”
“But I want to,” Edgeworth replies. “I want to push myself. Not too hard, don’t make that face at me, I more than learned my lesson when I had to deal with you being the one in the hospital bed. I… No one calls me Miles – just Miles – anymore. They haven’t in a very long time. Sometimes when I hear it, even as part of my full name, all I can picture is a little boy, and… I miss it, I think. I want my name back, Phoenix.”
He regrets it, when Wright’s first name comes out of his mouth. He had planned it, very carefully, with all the meticulous care of someone who has studied rhetoric in five different languages. It was supposed to add to his appeal, make Wright aware of how personal an issue this was. Instead, he’d found himself stumbling far too soon into a relationship milestone. If he could call it that. He probably shouldn’t. Normal relationships – real relationships – had nothing akin to this. Regular people called each other by their first names from the get-go, or as soon as they became friends. Certainly they weren’t still stuck on last name basis three years after they had sex. Normal people, real people…
Didn’t have anything to do with them.
Wright – Phoenix, the indominable Phoenix Wright – is looking at him with eyes alight with more tenderness and joy than Edgeworth had thought possible.
“I missed you being Miles,” Wright says, and it’s all too much.
Edgeworth shakes, heaves breath through a drawn tight throat, leans into the hands cupping his face, and can’t bare to look at his – rival? – lover?
Oldest friend.
“I’m sorry,” he says, and even he isn’t quite sure why.
“I’m sorry, too,” says Phoenix, and that makes even less sense. “I’m sorry I didn’t call you Miles from the start, that it took me so long to find you, that I played along-”
“No, no, that was good,” Miles says, holding a shaking index finger between their faces. “Do you really think I could have become this comfortable with you if you’d come out in full force from the start?”
Phoenix grins, sheepish and too bright to bear. “Yeah, I was gonna say I should have swept you off your feet and into a kiss the first time I saw you at the courthouse, but-”
“No, good call on avoiding that one, I almost definitely would have stabbed you.”
Phoenix snorts and lurches forward to bury his face in the hollow of his neck again, laughing as if it was all some joke and not like Edgeworth had been trained to do serious harm from too young of an age. And it almost seems like it could just be a joke now, when Miles Edgeworth hasn’t owned a knife in years, when he rarely even raises his voice these days.
Maybe he is ready to be Miles again.
“Do you think you could call me Phoenix, then?” Wright mumbles to his jawline.
“Phoenix,” Miles obliges, and feels him shiver in his arms.
“I meant, like from now on, but please absolutely do that at the same time as the hair thing again,” Phoenix gabbles.
Miles laughs at that, because that’s how their relationship works, but something within him clenches.
“In front of other people?”
Phoenix lifts his head again – they sure are doing a lot of rising and falling tonight, and Miles wonders if maybe this conversation would have been easier if they were lying in a bed or something, but that impulse brings with it more baggage than could ever be described – and he watches Miles’ face as if reading it.
“I guess they might think something’s up, huh?” he says.
“Well, is something… up?”
There’s a breath of a moment, both of them trying to size the other up, to find the ideal solution.
“I didn’t want to freak you out,” Phoenix says eventually. “I was worried that if we started talking about this – us – then you wouldn’t want to, y’know, uh, do this anymore. I was worried we wouldn’t even be friends anymore. That I might scare you out of my life completely, and I just couldn’t risk that. So I know this is kind of a long overdue conversation, but I’m still really afraid of it, if I’m being honest.”
He gives that same sheepish smile he uses to diffuse all situations, and it pulls at Miles’ heart that he thinks he needs to use it.
“Phoenix, I have no idea if I’m ready for anything, if I ever will be, and to be frank I honestly don’t know how to tell how ready I am, if indeed that is something that can be quantified. I know I don’t want people knowing anything about my personal life but as for what I want that life to look like, I just don’t know.”
Phoenix is nodding, doing his best to keep the fear from his eyes, fighting it back with earnest sympathy. It doesn’t work, of course, not for Phoenix Wright, who felt everything with an openness and intensity that – when Miles thought about it – was almost scary to behold.
“But I want you to know this,” Miles continues, “one of the few things I can know for sure about my life is that you’re there, no matter how far ahead I look. Always. In any way you’ll have me.” He glances aside for a second, taking a breather from the intensity that is eye contact with Phoenix Wright. “In every way you’ll have me.”
When they kiss again, Phoenix has a grip on his cheeks as if he’s afraid Edgeworth will drift away. Miles tries to relax into it, to reassure Phoenix that he meant what he said, that he wants something, at least, but Phoenix is so urgent, almost feverish in his desperation, that it isn’t really the sort of kiss for relaxing. Phoenix bites down hard on his bottom lip, his legs wavering, and it hits Miles like a bullet: Phoenix isn’t afraid of losing him, he’s afraid he’s inadequate. It’s ridiculous, insane, for Phoenix Wright of all people to think he isn’t enough, but when Miles lets his eyes open a crack, he sees that determined desperation writ plain across Phoenix’s face, that intense and tender strain behind his closed eyes. Miles smiles into the kiss, running and hand through Phoenix’s hair and matching his sigh with one of his own.
“So…” Phoenix jumps into the sudden quiet between them. “Does this mean we’re like dating now?”
Miles blinks.
“Don’t you think that sounds a little… juvenile?”
“Geez, what is it with you and the way things ‘sound’?” Phoenix asks. “You told me you don’t want anyone poking into your personal life – totally fine – so why does it matter what our situation would sound like to other people? This is just for you and me, y’know?” He licks his lips, and Miles feels his heart race as he realises Phoenix can probably taste him on them. “So, do you want to date me?”
There’s a strange twinge in his heart as Edgeworth realises that he’s nearly thirty, and yet this is the first time someone has asked him this question. But who else could have ever asked him this question? Who could ever come close?
He wants to just lean in, let his tongue do the talking, but Phoenix deserves to hear it properly. And if they’re going to actually turn this into a real relationship with life and meaning, he’s going to have to get used to putting his feelings into words.
“Of course,” he says, and everything else he planned to say is lost when Phoenix steals his idea and smothers their conversation in a kiss.
They press closer, closer, until there’s more than enough evidence that this is going to progress far beyond kissing. Phoenix slips aleg between Miles’ and is rewarded by a gasping sigh that he grins into, so completely unabashed in his joy, in the sheer pleasure he gets from being Miles’… boyfriend, now, for certain. He gets cocky, which Miles will never admit is always an attractive thing to be, if only for how it gets his own blood racing, the need to outdo each other coursing like blood through their veins, and Phoenix pulls on Miles’ hair, practically fucking his mouth with his tongue. It’s too much, it’s almost enough, and Miles finds himself gasping against Phoenix’s mouth,
“Wright…”
Phoenix stops.
“Oh, fuck,” mutters Miles. “I-I really am sorry. I just, that is, things get ingrained in my mind, I’m hardly one for change, but still, still, I am so sorry. You only asked minutes ago, and I already-”
“Miles,” says Wright, and it’s still a thrill to hear that name from his lips. “It’s okay. I know. To be honest, it’s pretty flattering that I could get you of all people to stop thinking for a moment.”
Edgeworth huffs a little laugh, still thrumming with anxiety.
“You do that to me more often than you might think.”
Phoenix practically glows, though whether with joy or a blush, it’s impossible to tell, and he shakes his head as if he’s just seen something mind-boggling.
“Only you could make my last name sound erotic,” he says with a shy grin. “Only you could make me eager to hear me addressed as if I’m about to present my case in court.”
And before Miles can process that, any of that, Phoenix rests his head on Miles’ chest. He wonders if maybe his rival – boyfriend, and oh won’t that take forever to get used to – would like arms wrapped around his head the way he did to Miles so soon ago. But something whispers inside that the monument to strange perspectives that is his defence counterpart wouldn’t like having any of his senses impaired, so instead Edgeworth keeps his arms tight around Phoenix’s back and rests his chin atop mussed black air. For a long, long while, the two simply breathe. Miles wonders if he’s ruined everything, and, if so, why he wants more moments like this, regardless.
“No one else calls me Wright,” Phoenix mumbles eventually into Edgeworth’s chest. “Not as regularly as you do. You’re like casual in your formalities. You throw them around so easily, and all of a sudden I’m stuck with a nickname that’s my last name and also a… a constant reminder of the constraints our job puts on us. The structures it expects us to follow. But you’re at home in those structures, aren’t you? And on your lips I’m Wright, not because of anything about me, but because of you. Because you’re the one and only Miles Edgeworth, the one and only person to call me that.”
Miles has no idea what to say to that, if there even is anything he could say.
“I like it,” he says abruptly. “Even if you think it’s kind of weird that you still call me by my last name, despite everything. When I’m with you, I’m Wright. I don’t think I’m Wright for anyone else.”
Miles can’t even roll his eyes at that. It’s too sincere, it’s so dumb, and he can’t tell if it’s some kind of coping method or if Phoenix really does just want to emphasis the emotion underpinning the pun.
“You said you wanted me to call you Phoenix,” Edgeworth says, and winces when he realises it sounds as if he’s being contrarian.
“I did,” says Phoenix, calm. If there’s one person who’s used to Miles’ nearly too-aggressive attitude, it’s him. “And I meant it. But I also still like you calling me Wright. I just… like you, y’know?”
And it’s silly, such a small confession, but it brings a smile to Miles’ face, wider and brighter than any he’s known before.
“I like you too, Phoenix Wright,” he says, voice following the contour of his smile. “In just the same way, I think, with no regard to what you call me.”
“That’s sweet, Miles,” said Phoenix, immediately laughing at the face Miles must have made. “Though, for everyone’s safety, I think I’ll stick to calling you Edgeworth around other people. I can’t imagine what would happen if Franziska heard me using your first name.”
Miles flinches at the thought and Phoenix snorts, giving a quick placating kiss to the corner of his mouth.
“Perhaps,” says Edgeworth, ducking his head to the side. “I think everything might go smoother if no one else were to find out what we’re doing.”
It surprises him, how much the thought makes him sad. He was never one for public displays of affection, never will be one, for more reasons than he can count. And yet, it almost feels wrong to hide this part of his life away so completely. Until, of course, he tries to think of the realities of sharing it with others, and it’s all far, far too much. Maybe, for once, he should just focus on enjoying what’s happening, instead of trying to overanalyse it.
The way Phoenix is.
“Oh?” he’s saying with a sly smile. “What exactly are we doing, then?”
And Edgeworth smiles, because there’s always more to this – more to them – than the words they use to describe it, the names they call each other. There’s always their actions, and the feelings that drive them.
“Let’s find out, shall we?” he says, and draws his new partner into an ever-deepening kiss.