Work Text:
It has been years since he last had this nightmare — but, he realizes as he looks around the elevator, something has changed.
For one thing he’s in his adult body this time, and there’s no sense memory of suffocation. His father is gone, as is Yanni Yogi, as is the usual narrative of this dream. Normally the scream would be what startled him back into wakefulness, but with the strange and irresistible certainty of dreams he knows that this is afterwards, after the shot and the scream and the darkness.
There’s no one here in the aftermath except for him and Manfred von Karma.
He sees the child version of himself, sitting curled up in a corner of the elevator with his head lowered and eyes fixed on the floor. Von Karma stands gazing impassively down at him — though perhaps impassive is the wrong word: as there had been in life there’s the look of a predator about him, the cold cruel hunger and madness of a large bird of prey shining through the mask of calm.
The boy stumbles as von Karma grabs him by an arm and hauls him to his feet, turning towards the open door to walk them both into the darkness outside.
His younger self doesn’t even struggle, Miles realizes with a sinking feeling. He’ll go with von Karma — if not exactly willingly, then without a fight, because what use would it be? What use was it ever to try to fight him back head on? It had always been like punching a wall with your bare fists; you broke more and more parts of yourself and he remained completely unmarked. Miles had quickly learned to stop trying, to stop wanting to try.
...well, that won’t do.
“No,” Miles says. The figures go still, von Karma’s head turning towards him and the boy’s staying bowed.
Miles steps forward, calmly takes von Karma’s wrist and pulls his hand none too gently away from the boy’s arm. The boy scurries to sit curled up on himself in the corner again, hiding his face against his knees — placing himself directly between him and von Karma, Miles lifts his chin and stares down the man who’d so forcibly carved himself a place in his life as his mentor.
“Leave him alone,” Miles says. “Get out of here.”
Von Karma touches his wrist with the mingled outrage and helpless confusion of men who are not used to being told no and find the experience equal parts threatening and confounding, as if their world view is hard pressed to allow the possibility that such a thing would ever really happen.
In his dream Miles suddenly notices, as he had that last day in court, how much smaller von Karma seems to him now — once he had towered over him, a presence to block out the horizon and cast the world into shadow at his whim. Stripped of that and seen with adult eyes he is only old and grey and withered within his rich clothes, a pathetic shrivelled collection of spitefulness and fragility clinging to his idea of perfection because he is too weak to handle anything realer.
“You dare to — ” von Karma begins, the rage in his voice like an oncoming glacier.
Miles scoffs and breaks him off. “What? What do you possibly think you could say to me now that would make any difference at all?”
Because he is no longer a boy with no means of fighting back. He’s a grown man, one who takes some grim satisfaction in knowing that a great number of the weapons in his arsenal were handed to him by this very man, against whom he would have no hesitation to make use of them if need be.
“Frankly the question here is how did you dare. How can you have taken so much from me and still think I owe you — an explanation, a moment of my time, a single thought, anything?”
Miles moves towards him, forcing him to step halfway out the door and into the darkness beyond; as von Karma startles backwards he clutches at his shoulder, blood spreading in a dark stain over his coat, trickling sluggishly between claw-like fingers.
“You took years of my life,” Miles says, enunciation clipped and clear and precise. He takes another step. “You took the remains of my childhood. You took my faith in the world and my hopes and my innocence. You took — my father.” And perhaps, a couple of years ago, he might have resented the hitch in his own voice and thought it weakness, but now that he knows what he says is true he feels the rightness of it rising from the ashes of his grief to soar into the skies, fierce and irrepressible.
“Most egregious of all: you took the truth from me. And yet he returned it to me, and against that you are nothing. So believe me when I say that there is nothing more here for you. You will have nothing more of me, not even my spite. Leave and never come back.”
There is a pause between them then, a space left where something could still be said.
Without another word von Karma is swallowed by the darkness and is gone, just another shadow among shadows.
For a while Miles stands there in the silence, curling and uncurling his fingers to ease the last of the tension out of them, and then he turns to look at the boy huddled away in the corner. His heart isn’t hammering in his chest like it would be in an elevator in real life. In fact he feels… calm. Distantly fulfilled, in an undramatic sort of way, as if he has finally finished up some paperwork he’s been meaning to get to for a while but kept getting distracted from by other obligations.
The boy doesn’t raise his head or make any sort of move to indicate he’s noticed what’s happening around him. His hands are white-knuckled where they clutch his knees against his chest.
Miles settles next to him, takes his glasses off and carefully sets them down on the floor. They sit there in silence for a while, side by side, the kid with his legs tucked against his chest and Miles’ stretched out a little awkwardly on the floor.
He vaguely feels like something is expected of him.
“I, hm.” Miles folds his arms loosely over his chest, leans his head back against the wall while he thinks. He has never had such a lucid dream before, and it appears to be trying to tell him something by its return — or he’s trying to tell himself something on some level, perhaps; who knows, stuff like this would hardly be his field normally.
He glances down at the boy next to him, who is frozen in place, his body barely yielding enough for the movements necessary to draw and release breath.
“Have you been here all this time?” Miles asks. The boy doesn’t answer.
With all the years between them he feels almost like a stranger.
There are substantial portions of that time in his life he can’t remember, and even more he recalls only distantly, as if it happened beyond a cold numbing veil of mist where nothing could really touch him. He’s not sure what he could possibly say to his past self that would help him. ‘Chin up, only fifteen more years or so’? ‘It gets better — well, some of it might’? The truth, in certain ways, and yet not, one feels, the most helpful permutation of it considering the circumstances.
...what would Wright say?
Oh yes, Wright. Even in this dream he feels a pang of something indefinable, a tangled mess of pain and amusement and fear and gratitude and memory and longing unfolding like shamefully inept paper cranes between his ribs.
(That is ever the trouble with Phoenix Wright. He shines like the sun — warm, illuminating, necessary, stubbornly returning sprouts and living things to spring even after the longest, most desolate winter — and, like the sun, trying to look directly at him for too long only ever ends in profound physical pain. Miles still can’t quite bear it, most days. In some ways it’s getting easier with time, and in other ways it just keeps getting worse.)
Miles sighs. He never can predict what Wright will say at any given moment. It rather seems his defining feature, the way he effortlessly takes all of Miles’s certainties and turns them around on him, dizzying and with panache like a man twirling his partner on a dance floor. That someone who seems so perpetually on the back foot should always find perfect balance the exact moment he makes Miles’s world shift and spin around him — well.
Despite it all he misses it, some days, being certain. It had been killing him slowly, but there was a simplicity to the slow churn of self destruction that was reassuring, if nothing else.
For a while he thinks about the relationship between observer and that which is observed, about things that are transformed through the act of being seen. Wright had looked at him with honest familiar eyes and said: “You’ve changed,” and something within him had stirred in recognition, had woken up from a long and dreamless sleep to find itself enmeshed in a seemingly endless nightmare. Wright had looked at him and seen something worthy of saving when he himself most definitely had not.
Wright looks at him and he becomes something different, finds himself wanting things he doesn't understand and believing impossible things.
At his side the boy stays motionless. Miles is not good with children, but he can’t help but feel he owes this kid something. He spent so many years trying to gain distance from him, disgusted with his perceived powerlessness and vulnerability as if they were unforgivable sins — saddling him with blame and responsibilities that, in hindsight, it should never have fallen on him, on any child, to shoulder at all.
This boy who he had almost managed to convince himself he’d forgotten, and who Phoenix had seen so easily, so thoughtlessly, as if he had been there all along.
Disagreeable as it is he tries to remember now, tries to think back to what he desperately needed someone to say to him at that time.
“It wasn’t your fault,” he tells him finally, glancing down at him.
Despite everything he’s learned over the years he’s not prepared for how speaking the truth hits him. He’s heard those particular words in the voices of so many different people now: Wright, of course, because the man seems to take a special joy in arguing for hopeless cases and god knows he never changes, Detective Gumshoe, young Maya Fey, the judge — even, if you know how to listen, in some of the things Franziska carefully does not say. In the past Miles has been grateful for their sincerity even when part of him has been hard pressed to accept the veracity of the statement. But he’s never said it out loud himself, joined in with his own voice. It wasn’t my fault.
It makes more of a difference than he would have expected.
For a moment it’s like the boy hasn’t heard him, still turned in on himself and too still. Then, slowly, he turns his face towards him. His eyes are wide and blank and bright with unshed tears. He looks exhausted.
No child should have to look like that.
Miles feels a stab in his chest like he might upon seeing a real kid in distress. He wonders how long it took him to learn to hide that look, to smooth away anything that would give him away. At which point, exactly, in the absence of truth it had been simpler to become the lie.
...someone should have noticed and done something. I would do something.
Reaching out he puts his hand on the boy’s shoulder, squeezes gently. “It’s not fair that you had to go through this. I’m sorry. You don’t have to stay here anymore, you can come with me.”
When the boy finally starts crying Miles rests a hand on his back, keeps him company in the darkness — thinks about spring.