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Sometimes, he feels as if nothing truly changes: not the smell of a hospital room, not the awkwardness of that stupid grin, not the clumsiness of this idiotic man, and most certainly not himself, booking the soonest flight to this country at the mere mention of Wright being injured.
"It's nothing, really," Phoenix is saying, fidgeting with the green plastic ID band, "I'm being discharged in a few hours. I mean, it's so nothing, Truce didn't even come in from Vegas. So I'm sorry if you were worried, but..."
His hand is still clenched on his solitary suitcase. He wants to throw it down, to finally shake some sense into Wright.
"Do you have any idea," he asks, hand cramping around the handle, "What it's like to receive a call of that nature? Once in my life was more than sufficient, Phoenix."
"Hey, haven't I already apologized about the last time? Besides, you can't expect me to predict if Larry's going to freak out again. Really, I'm fine. No sprained ankle, no fever. Not even a little sniffle, I promise."
His hand relaxes minutely as Wright rambles on.
"It wasn't Larry," he admits, before tensing again. "Do you have any idea what it's like to get a call of that nature from an eleven-year-old girl?"
As always, Phoenix just laughs. "Well, look on the bright side. At least it shows Elise is a little more serious than her dad, right?"
"I should hope it's impossible to be less so."
"And can't you just chalk it all up to a nice excuse to visit?"
"Phoenix, I could visit any time. You needn't throw yourself in front of a car to encourage me."
But he hasn't, not in a decade, and it's unspoken in the antiseptic air. For an uncomfortable moment, Miles wonders if Phoenix will voice the thought.
The moment passes.
Life is just like this, and Phoenix understood.
You move to Germany. You get up every morning, you take cases, you write papers. Your books are published, picked up by colleges, and students write in complaining about too-difficult terminology. You get a dog. You get another dog, to keep the old dog company. You call and email your friends.
One day, you wake up in the middle of the night. The daughter of some children's illustrator is calling.
You're forty-eight. Your best friend is hospitalized.
You haven't been in America for ten years.
"Well, maybe not," Phoenix eventually says, grinning as goofily as ever, "After all, you shoulda seen the other guy."
The 'other guy' was in an SUV. Phoenix was on a bike.
Nothing, Miles thinks, ever changes.
Miles spends the next few hours trying to let all the adrenaline drain from his system, drinking bitter over-steeped hospital tea and idly catching up on everything that happened since last week's two-hour phone call (which, aside from Trucy's acquisition of a new pair of doves, Miles winning his latest case, and the obvious, isn't much) while the nurses check on Phoenix' IV. It's mid-summer, and while "observation" certainly factors into the hospitalization, the main reason Phoenix is still boredly propped in a clinic bed is dehydration. The SUV had swerved in the bike lane, but Phoenix wasn't as fast swerving out because he was biking in triple-digit heat. Miles is annoyed, but Phoenix is more so.
"Remember six years ago? That heat wave? Same thing happened, and I got out of the way just fine," he keeps repeating, "I guess it's true: you just don't get any younger."
No, Miles thinks, you don't. But he hardly thinks Wright has to worry about aging, considering he still acts as if he's twelve, and he says as much.
Phoenix grins and looks as if he'll say something more, but the doctor comes in and gives him the go-ahead to leave, and before Miles can think of getting a hotel, he's invited to a sleepover.
It's odd to see Phoenix' apartment again, after all this time. All the new furniture he's actually seen before, in photos attached to rambling emails, and he runs his hand experimentally over the end-tables Phoenix scraped his knuckles refinishing, tests the sofa Phoenix forked out five hundred dollars for two years ago. Seeing Phoenix grin and show these things off (still complaining about the price of the couch, but so happy to finally have a proper sofa-bed for visiting "family," still bemoaning the fact that you can see a little blood on one of the tables, because sanding is an art that eludes him) makes something almost unbearably warm and heavy build in his chest.
Those words are there, as they always have been. Three syllables they've never managed, undeniable and inconvenient, and he thinks for a moment that this, being here, is an enormous mistake. But Phoenix is unconcerned and happy, laughing as he explains the glued-together lamp, and Miles can't imagine being anywhere else.
All the same, he won't let Phoenix cook or make up the bed. It's true what he says about not wanting Phoenix to tax himself into needing another IV, but more importantly, he doesn't want Phoenix to catch him staring. The kitchen hasn't changed much in ten years, and he finds it comfortable to fuss over the dismal contents of the fridge as he dwells on Phoenix.
Ten years, he thinks again, ten years and Phoenix is as agonizingly handsome as ever. Of course he's been sent photos--Phoenix and Trucy at the MGM Grand, Phoenix and Maya at the Steel Samurai twenty-year anniversary convention, Phoenix and Apollo looking amusingly green outside the Matterhorn--but no photo can capture everything.
He rinses the spinach. He asks Phoenix if there's even a drop of balsamic vinegar in the apartment. But he's really just wondering if his hands will ever stop itching with the desire to twine his fingers in the hair at the back of Wright's head, where those first signs of grey are showing.
He's somehow successful at pulling off a decent dinner, despite the efforts of Phoenix' kitchen and the distracting pound of his heart, and he's thankful for the ease of their banter. Decades have made it automatic and comfortable, and at this moment easier than breathing. Phoenix teases him on his new suit, he complains about Phoenix' mismatched plates, and it's easy to ignore that growing swell in his chest.
They're just best friends, he thinks, nothing more. It's been twenty years since they last let their judgment lapse. He's never regretted those lapses--far from it--but they'd agreed years ago that it was simpler to remain only friends. Between work, his career in Europe, and all the events surrounding Wright's disbarment, life was complicated enough without such a relationship.
They made the right decision, he tells himself, rolling his eyes at some pun of Elise's Phoenix was conveying. It's harder to convince himself without the Atlantic between them. He can't help wondering if it's possible that life is simple enough by now.
Maybe, he considers, his life could do with a little complication.
It's early in the evening, but they're exhausted. Miles would like to think it's not because they're old. Intercontinental flights and traffic accidents would surely wear out a teenager. He rinses the plates and stacks them in the sink, listening to Phoenix yawn and say he should be getting to bed.
"Go, I'll take care of this," he says, but Phoenix just sits at the table. Strangely, it's not uncomfortable, feeling Phoenix watch him. He fills another glass of water, foisting it on Phoenix despite his protests, and remembers how he'd feel disconcerted when his partners would stare at him.
Maybe he was just always waiting for the other shoe to drop. Maybe he was just waiting to be abandoned again. Matters were easier where Phoenix was concerned. If he hasn't dropped the other shoe in forty years, Miles thought, it probably isn't coming, and when Phoenix just forgets he has a bedroom and flops on the folded-out bed with Miles, it's easily the most natural thing he's felt in years.
Rolling toward him, Phoenix leaves a few inches of room, impassable as the years behind them. "Sorry," Phoenix whispers into that space, "but it's a pretty lame sleepover if we're in separate rooms."
"Considering all we're doing is sleeping, it's not as if we're holding a particularly note-worthy party to begin with," he whispers back. It strikes him as completely absurd for two middle-aged men to huddle on a too-small sofa bed, whispering in a completely private apartment, but wherever Wright was concerned, absurdity was never far behind.
"That's true. Hey, we could always do what we did that one sleepover."
Twisting his head back a little, he frowns at Wright, because there are multiple sleepover events to which he may be referring. It's a bit sudden, he thinks, to suggest any of them, and he has the energy for none of it, so he stutters out a question. Which one, and he knows he's been had when Phoenix smirks.
"Get your mind out of the gutter, Edgeworth. I mean the time you had the flu?"
He's had a lot of flus, he thinks.
"You remember? You were home sick, I snuck out--"
"You threw a rock at my window and it had to be replaced," he finishes, trying to hold on to decades-old annoyance and grinning despite himself, "I spent most of the night vomiting, you wouldn't let me sleep, and we watched Some Like it Hot in the basement." Hardly an evening to emulate, he wants to say, but it's actually a pleasant memory. Vomit and broken glass aside.
"Well, you can forget the spewing, and I don't have a basement, but..." Phoenix leans over him, and Miles has to close his eyes, pretend he isn't drunk on Phoenix' smell. The Feys made Phoenix get cable five years ago. He could afford it now, they'd said, and once a month he put up with a few days of the Samurai Network. But cable or not, no one has crazy enough luck for a television station to just happen to be playing the movie they watched forty years ago in a suburban basement, and he says so.
Phoenix clicks through the channels anyway, and some classic movie station is in the middle of The Apartment.
"Close enough," Phoenix claims, and he scoots minutely closer. "Forty years," he repeats slowly, as if trying out the words for the first time.
This is absurd, he thinks yet again. Neither of them like coming in to the middle of a movie, and they're not even really watching it to begin with--Phoenix apparently busy mulling over the passage of time, Miles busy ignoring the warmth of Phoenix' body. "That is what you get when you subtract eight from forty-eight, Phoenix," Miles says, determinedly watching Jack Lemmon try on a bowler hat.
"It's funny. For years, I wondered why your dad didn't notice I was there, and why my parents never noticed I was gone. Maybe I'm just slow, but it took having Truce to realize he must have called them right away."
Miles' throat feels tight.
"He probably paid for the window, too. He was a great guy, Miles."
He wants to whisper that he's not here to talk about his father, but it occurs to him that he isn't doing the best job of admitting why he is here.
Forty years, and it's still just so easy to be with Wright. In his string of failed relationships--architect, anesthesiologist, acupuncturist--he often felt frustrated by the simple, inescapable knowledge that no one would ever know him as well as Wright. Most individuals, he knew, felt as if they had been many people over the years, but he felt it so painfully at times.
Wright was the only connection, the only person who had seen nearly every stage. And surely, each man he dated started out happy enough with the uncomplicated surface of Miles Edgeworth. Each man ended it the same way. Quietly. Unobtrusively. They'd meet for drinks one last time.
"But why," they'd ask, "Aren't you still with the American?"
The same frustrating question, every time, and the same frustrating realization: he simply would never be able to recreate that history with another human being, even if he had the energy and will to try.
Oddly, that realization doesn't seem as heavy now. The movie carries on, and they fall quiet, and Miles suddenly knows, comfortable and assured, that he hardly need worry over such matters any longer. Phoenix rolls in to him when he reaches his arm over.
"It's strange to think that he directed all those noirs, too," Miles whispers against Phoenix' skin when the film ends, remembering twenty years ago when Phoenix would indulge his love of samurai films, and he'd indulge Phoenix' love of mysteries, watching all those films with those decidedly unhappy endings.
Phoenix smiles broadly. He still seems so young.
"He directed those when he was young and angsty. When you get old and boring, you know the truth."
He's running his hands in those graying spikes, and his lips are close against Phoenix' when he whispers back, "The truth about what?"
"As Maya would say, 'duh.' The truth that, no matter how many misadventures happen in the meantime, love always wins out in the end."
It's the most ridiculous line he has ever heard. But he's kissing Phoenix deeply, pulling him in tight, and he knows he's going to put up with all the papers to move his dogs into the country, he's going to go through the inconvenience of shipping his china, he's going to be selling that perfect, meticulously decorated house.
What other option does he have, he wonders, when ignoring this for decades had worked out so poorly?
Phoenix pulls away, and he's never looked more earnest or handsome. "'You hear what I said, Mister Edgeworth? I absolutely adore you.'"
"'Shut up,'" Miles quotes back, pressing another deep, exploring kiss against Wright's grin, "'and deal.'"
"Hey, Miles. You think that's true? 'Nobody's perfect'?"
He was quiet for a moment, thoughtful as ever. "...It seems accurate. No one can be perfect, at least not at everything."
"Yeah, that's what I think, too."
A few minutes passed, and he was almost asleep.
"Hey, Miles?"
"What is it now?"
"Geez, don't be so grumpy just 'cause you're sick. Hey, do you think you'll get married?"
"No."
The answer was so quick and emphatic, it surprised them both. Miles sweated, and not due to fever: he had always been too old to believe in cooties, and Phoenix was too smart to believe him if he pretended.
"Oh, yeah? Me, either! My parents always say it's nice 'cause they're best friends, but I think it's kinda dumb to get married just to have a best friend. I mean, all I had to do was go to school, and I met you."
His stomach felt weird suddenly. He dismissed it. After all, he did have the flu.
Funny, how it never seemed to clear up around Wright.