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Mr Wright places the final plate of the breakfast, one piled high with layers of buttered toast, onto his dining table, and claps his satisfied hands together.
“Bone apple teeth!”
Apollo, Trucy, and Athena all groan in instant unison. Mr Wright’s grin only widens.
“Daddy, that meme is quite literally over a decade old, please,” Trucy complains. As if she has any right to, Apollo thinks- it’s her fault her dad knows about memes, expired ones or not.
“What? It still works for this, though, right?” Mr Wright asks, and christ, he actually sounds serious.
“Wrong, actually, boss- you’re supposed to use it for gross, weird, inedible food, and...” Athena says, looking down at the plates in front of them. “This isn’t that."
“Don’t boost his ego, ‘Thens-” Trucy starts, and although Apollo agrees, he also doesn’t, because Athena was right. The eggs Mr Wright had made for breakfast look annoyingly delicious.
As if letting Apollo crash after his longhaul flight back from Khura’in, and then letting Athena also crash for an impromptu WAA reunion when she’d heard Apollo was crashing, hadn’t been enough- Mr Wright had made three different kinds of eggs that morning, after insisting to make the three personal favourites of his guests. Apollo just assumes it’s his old boss’s weird dad instinct kicking in. Scrambled for Trucy, the pale yellow clouds seasoned generously with salt and pepper. Poached for Athena, because she’s a fitness freak, and had to have them done in line with her current macros, whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean. And finally, for Apollo, fried. Sunny side-up. Because he keeps things simple, thanks.
Nestled in between their own requests are mounds of toast (white and brown, because apparently the Wright-Edgeworth household is a divided one), ketchup at the heathenous ask of Trucy, and a rather sad-looking salad for Athena, because although Mr Wright could whip up a mean breakfast, apparently his talents didn’t extend to making leaves look appetising. Maybe because salad in the morning was almost as bad as Trucy’s ketchuped eggs.
Athena didn’t seem to mind, though, as she piled said leaves onto her plate. “I reckon Mr Wright is allowed as big of an ego as he wants when it comes to this- you’re an egg savant, boss!”
Mr Wright clutches his chest. “Athena. I think that’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.”
“Hm. I dunno.” Trucy pipes up, holding a forkful of her own up and staring at it with fierce scrutiny. “Mine look a bit more rubbery than usual.”
Mr Wright steals a piece of toast from her plate, ignores the indignant squawk he gets in response, and turns back to Athena. “See, this is why what you just said is the best compliment I’ve gotten about my cooking. I live with two people who apparently moonlight as Michelin star food critics.”
“I... can’t say I’m surprised Mr Edgeworth is picky about his food.” Apollo says.
Mr Wright shudders. “You don’t even know the half of it, Polly,” he mutters, darkly, and for that reaction, Apollo really wishes he did.
“Will Mr Edgeworth be joining us?” Athena asks, which Apollo shares an amused look with Trucy over, because they’d both heard- or, moreover, felt- the nerve twinge in Athena’s voice. And he can’t say he blames her. Even after all this time, the Chief Prosecutor was still pretty scary.
“Hm? Oh, probably not. Sleeping beauty won’t be awake for another hour or so.”
Athena blinks. “But it’s gone nine in the morning.”
Mr Wright gets that annoying smug smile of his on his face. “Yeah. And so, he won’t be awake for another hour or so.” he says, expounding on literally nothing.
Trucy rolls her eyes at her dad’s crypticism. “I’ll explain, since I’m safe from being burned at the stake from revealing it, and daddy isn’t- papa’s not a morning person when he doesn’t have to be.” she says, simply.
Mr Wright nods, still wearing that smile. “Contrary to popular belief.”
Apollo looks between Mr Wright’s and Trucy’s faces. “...Why do I feel like I’ve just learned a secret I should take to my grave?” he asks.
“Yeah. Same.” Athena mutters.
Mr Wright cackles. “Just eat your eggs, and when you see him eventually shuffle into the kitchen wearing limited edition Steel Samurai pyjamas for his Saturday morning omelette, don’t say a word.”
“Not a single word.” Trucy echoes.
Dear god. Apollo wonders if breakfast at the Wrights’ has always been this dangerous.
“Nick, has breakfast at yours always been this dangerous?” Maya asks, positively miserable as she looks down at the burnt-to-a-crisp pan. Only five minutes ago, both it and Nick’s attempt at fried eggs had been on fire, and both her and Nick had been screaming bloody murder.
Now, he has a hand clasped to the back of his neck, and the sheepish grin he’s wearing is doing nothing for Maya’s confidence. “This was the first time I’ve actually made a breakfast that went beyond toast, so... I’m not too sure, yet. Needs more investigation.”
“Well, as much as we’re good at that, I’d rather not investigate your cooking skills again. You can totally do so on your own though, because, bud? You’re twenty-four. Please learn to look after yourself.”
Nick scowls. “Are we a pot and kettle right now, or something? All you ever eat is burgers.”
“Yeah, and burgers have meat and green stuff in them, so compared to toast, they’re absolutely a balanced meal! Nice try, though.”
“Whatever.” Nick says, and Maya immediately knows she’s won. As usual. Numbnuts over here is supposed to be a lawyer, and he still manages to let a 17-year old best him. “You wanna grab something from Starbucks on the way into the office?” he asks.
Maya grins at him. “What happened to saving our pretty pennies?”
“My pretty pennies, you mean, and- Maya.” Nick deadpans, and lifts the arm she’s still holding the dead pan in.
“Okay. Yeah. Fair enough, Starbucks it is.”
“Hey, Larry?” Nick’s voice greets him, sounding a little unsure, when he picks up his cell.
“What’s up, Nicky?”
“Uh- you’re not busy, are you?”
“Huh? Nah, I’m just walking back from Starbucks. It’s a lovely morning for a Friday frap, baby.” he replies, taking a loud sip from his drink right into the phone receiver to prove it. “Whaddya need?”
“Right. Cool. Um, you don’t by any chance know how to scramble eggs, do you?”
Larry frowns. “I mean, yeah. That’s like, culinary basics, dude.”
Nick makes a strangled noise down the speaker that totally sounds like a dying dog, and Larry doesn’t even know what that sounds like.
“Please- just tell me how to make them, I’m literally begging you right now-”
Larry smiles into his phone. “Who’s this for? You had a laaaady friend over that you’re tryna impress the next morning? Because trust me, dude,” he says, his voice turning serious, “just let her leave. I speak from experience when I say that most girls just want to cut-and-run.”
“Just because you still go out and pick up girls even when we’re going on thirty, doesn’t mean I do, Larry.” Nick says, and then makes another one of those funny pained noises. “Why can’t Edgeworth live in a respectable time zone? I knew asking you would be a mistake.”
“What, and you think asking Edgey would be any better? The dude’s grown up living as prosecutor royalty, there’s zero way he knows how to cook.”
“Okay. Fair point. Still, he wouldn’t make out that I’m doing this for a one-night stand of all things, which is much preferable right now-”
“Well, who is it for, then?”
“Trucy.”
Trucy... oh, that was Nicky’s new kid. Damn. Larry’s still trying to get his head around that one, but then again, it has only been three or so weeks since Nick had started looking after her. He’d never thought about his old childhood friend being a father figure before, but honestly? He’s glad the kid’s got Nick for a stand-in dad. He can’t articulate why, but he just gets the feeling that the pair work, to the point that he sorta, guiltily, hopes her real dad doesn’t come back. The guy’s a total ass for abandoning her as it is.
Larry hums in thought. “Can’t you just google it, dude? Would be waaaay easier than me tryna explain it over the phone.”
“I’ve tried!” Nick bursts out, and woah, he sounds genuinely anguished- “I’ve literally tried four different recipe sites now, they all use different amounts of- of shit, like, some use milk and some don’t, and all of them end up looking like a complete fucking mess in my pan- and this is like Trucy’s favourite breakfast, and she’s really fucking homesick right now, and I just want to do something for her that doesn’t make her look at me like she just wants me to morph into her real dad, and-” There’s a heaving breath, and Larry immediately stops dead in the street. “God, I can’t do this-”
“Two eggs.” Larry starts, because it really, really hurts to hear his friend like this. He’s supposed to be the one to call Nick crying, not the other way around. “Whisk ‘em with the splashiest splash of milk, whatever kind you have in, and some salt and pepper. Stick a knife’s worth of butter in a pan on a medium heat, wait until it’s fully melted, and-”
He’s interrupted by a sniffle. “W-wait, wait, I can’t- can you just- can you just stay on the line with me while I do this, dude? Please.”
Larry spies an empty bench a little ways down the block he's currently on, and remembers how agonisingly difficult it’s been to get through to Nick recently. “Of course, Nicky. Whatever you need.”
“What do you need, Wright?” Miles asks when his door opens, without peeling his eyes away from his papers, because who else could that sudden, uninvited loud presence standing in his office entrance be.
“Do I have to need something to visit you?”
“Yes, actually. Or my receptionist wouldn’t have let you in.” Miles makes a show of signing the bottom of Prosecutor Blackquill’s most recent case request form. “I’m very busy right now.”
“Yeah, I think your lunch break got that memo, because you haven’t taken one.”
Miles finally looks up, and Wright is grinning in his doorway, with his hands stuffed in his trouser pockets, and a bag of something hanging from one wrist. A bullheaded vision in blue, Miles thinks.
He sniffs. “I don’t have time to.”
“Bullshit!” Wright says, and his grin widens. “You need to eat- and we’ve now circled back as to why I’m here. I did actually need something when I knocked on your door.”
“And what’s that, if I even need to ask.”
“I need the Chief Prosecutor to actually take some time to have lunch. I brought you egg noodles. Homemade, not the salty, greasy Eldoon’s ones I know you don’t like.”
“...I’ve never said I don’t like Mr Eldoon’s noodles.” Miles says, after a pause, because his brain had been and arguably still is hung up on that whole homemade affair. Wright’s offer of cooking always has this unfortunate effect on him.
“You don’t have to. I can tell, Miles.” Wright says, and Miles has to swallow a dry throat. “Why do you think I’ve been suggesting other spots for our lunch dates?” he continues, and for heaven’s sake, he has to be doing this on purpose.
Miles opens and then closes his mouth. Multiple times. Wright watches this happen, his smile growing until it crinkles the corners of those warm eyes, which only serves to make Miles’s guppying worse.
The man waves a languorous hand over to the office couch. “Permission to sit down?...”
Miles sighs. “Granted.” he says, because he’d learned long ago that Wright is an unstoppable force, and has since learned that he himself isn’t as much of an immovable object as he once was.
If he ever was.
“You’re unstoppable today, daddy!” Trucy says, as her daddy folds over the omelette in the pan into a perfect half-moon.
He huffs a nervous laugh. “Thanks, Truce. Anxiety is a powerful fuel.”
“Hey-” she says, punching his arm a little, as if that’ll whack the nerves out of him. “C’mon, we’ve been through this. You’re gonna kick the bar exam’s ass.”
“You sure it’s not the other way around?” he mutters. “And ass is a half-swear by the way, so that’s fifty cents in the swear jar.”
“Goddd, you have a six hour exam today, and you’re still worrying about my language?”
“I’m a father of many responsibilities, bunny.”
Trucy’s eyeroll is rudely interrupted by daddy’s phone pinging. She checks it, because his hands are full from shifting the pan and working the spatula. “ETA ten minutes, he reckons, if the traffic-”
The pan handle slips out of daddy’s hand and crashes back down onto the stove, slipping from its hob ring, and sending the omelette half flying out of the bottom of the pan. “Fuck- shit- a warning would be lovely, Truce-”
“Swear jar times two.” she drawls. “And that was a warning. It was a ten minute one.”
“I meant a warning before the warning,” he says, as if that even makes any sense.
She crosses her arms. “It’s just Uncle Miles, daddy.”
“Yeah. Exactly. I’m making breakfast for Uncle Miles, a world-renowned prosecutor, now the Chief Prosecutor, and then he’s driving me to the bar exam, the bar exam that I happen to be re-sitting, because I got disbarred.” daddy says, and he’s out of breath when he finishes, and staring wide-eyed at the pan.
Trucy winces. “There’s... Hm. That’s a lot to unpack at 7 in the morning, daddy.”
“Yeah.” he mutters, and she catches his hand tighten around the spatula in lieu of where it usually tightens in a fist at his side. It makes Trucy consider, really consider, how she picks her next few words.
“...Uncle Miles is pretty intolerant to things he’s not interested in, y’know.” she opts for. And she’s proud of it, when she spies the hand around the spatula slackening.
After staring down at the pan and its contents for just a little while longer, daddy sighs, but it’s not a bad one, she thinks. “Yeah. Thanks, Truce.” he eventually says. Then he shifts his head, smiles, and kisses her on her crown. “Let’s just hope he’s not intolerant to having his eggs in the form of an omelette, because that’s how I like ‘em.”
“How do you like your eggs, rookie?”
“Oh-!” Phoenix starts. “Um, I don’t mind, Chief. I’ll just have them however you have them.”
Mia considers him for a moment, sitting as if he feels out of place in her kitchen, despite her being the one to invite him here for pre-office breakfast. She thought it would get the kid to loosen up a bit around her, but maybe she needs to just give him some time.
She nods. “Sure. Fried it is, then,” she says, because although fried isn’t really her favourite way of having them, it’s Maya’s, and she’s been missing her little shit of a little sister. It’s not because she also gets the feeling that her new hire would get on like a house on fire with Maya, that Maya’s exactly the kind of person who would bring out the goofiness Mia knows Phoenix has within him.
...Okay, maybe it is that, too. She should get them to meet at some point, and see if her gut’s right. It usually is.
“Fancy meeting you here,” Maya calls out from the main temple door, as one of her favourite sights for sore eyes walks up the path, travel bag in hand.
“Can it, Maya. You were actually the one to not be able to do my first offer of a visit.”
“Hey! I’m the master now, all my time is taken up by masterly things.”
Nick frowns at her. “You don’t sound too pleased about that, either, Master Maya.” he says, pointed, and since when did he actually get good at telling when her bright front was a front? He used to be one of the many people she could fool. She brushes it off, and focuses on the other thing he’d said.
“Oh, please, not you, too- it’s bad enough having Pearly, my own cousin, insist on using that title.” She slaps the back of a hand dramatically to her forehead. “Please call me Maya again. Just Maya. I quite literally beg.”
A smile creeps onto Nick’s face. “Sure, Just Maya.”
Her hand flops to her side. “God, you really are such a dad, now!”
“I dunno,” he says around poorly-suppressed laughs, “I’ve always had a thing for the dad jokes.”
“Yeah, but! They’ve gotten so much worse!”
“It’s part of the dad package, I’m afraid.” he says, shrugging a languid shoulder. “You get better at cooking and cleaning, but a much, much worse sense of humour.”
“Okay, the cleaning I can believe, because you always did have a thing for attacking toilets with bleach and a toothbrush-” Maya crosses her arms. “But cooking?”
“What’s so hard to believe about that?”
“Nick, the first, last, and only time you’ve cooked for me resulted in not food, but a ruined pan.”
He cackles. “You remember that?”
“Of course! It scarred me!” she laughs back. “I couldn’t crack open another egg for weeks!”
“Well, I’m glad to say I make a mean fried egg, now.”
“Perish the thought. Really? How? Trucy’s magic works miracles, sure, but I don’t think even she could teach you how to cook me a good fried egg.”
Nick smiles at her. There’s layers behind that smile. “It wasn’t just for her. I’ve learned a lot since that very first burned pan, I guess.” Then he slaps the bag heaved over his shoulder, and nods towards the hallway behind her. “Now are you gonna let me into your humble abode, or are we gonna spend the next two days reminiscing in the doorway?”
She smiles back, and takes his bag for him with an ease that gives the old man with a bad back a disgruntled look. “I’m gonna let you in, of course. You have a fried egg to cook for me.”