Work Text:
The Feys slumber together, hands linked and bodies close. He smooths down the duvet, sealing them in from the cold and fusses with the thermostat just to have an excuse to hover. They hardly move. Still and silent in a way that sours his mouth. The ashy taste crawls all the way down the length of his throat and Phoenix has to get out get out get out suddenly.
He closes the door behind him. Shakes his head to rid his mind of skeletons and snow.
Edgeworth greets him as soon as he looks up. Softly lit by the half-moon hotel nights, gold and plush carpets framing him with thick acrylic petals. Phoenix freezes. Like he’s been caught sneaking out and Edgeworth is there—is always there—when he’s in trouble.
“Wright,” the man says. Phoenix has half a mind to call him a spectre. There’s no way Edgeworth would have crossed the Atlantic because of a phone call and Hazakurain made the layers between the dead and living seem rice paper thin.
“They’re asleep,” Phoenix says when Edgeworth’s gaze slides to hover over his shoulder. The detailing on the door must be very nice and intricate to avoid staring at him head-on for that long.
Phoenix sighs. “Are you coming?”
Edgeworth jolts. Phoenix doesn’t wait for a response; he’s tired of that. Wants to go to bed as much as he wants to stay up and drink something strong enough to make everything else seem floaty and light in comparison. It’s a few seconds of his heart beating double fast before softly clipped footfalls follow after him towards his own room a few doors down.
He’s not alone. It’s a novel thought, but less so now. A more comfortable truth fashioned from all the fun memories he’s been building with Maya, Pearls, Gumshoe and the rest of Los Angeles’ colour palette of citizens every chance he gets. Things have changed. They always will. Phoenix cannot hold onto everyone more than he can stop the merciless progression of time. He does what he can anyway, casting a line into the fog and waiting to see what’ll bite next.
Phoenix kneels down by the minibar. Examines the labels and pulls out the fanciest bottle he can find. Shiny gold text in sweeping calligraphy and a year he’s sure means something but supposes it doesn’t matter in the dark.
Edgeworth frowns at him, taking a step further into the room. “Are you certain that’s a good idea? You were just recently discharged from the hospital, Wright.”
“I just exorcized my ex-girlfriend in court and saw my best friend collapse at the stand,” Phoenix says, more absent than he wanted it to be. “I think I deserve this.” There’s not much to say after that. He stands up, trying not to wheeze audibly. The ache persists after he rubs his back.
They settle in some chairs and split the bottle. Phoenix squares his shoulders, trying to fill out the ridiculously high backs with his shoulders without making it too obvious. Edgeworth pours, divvying up the contents in his favour, but Phoenix is too tired to protest.
He focuses on the glass instead. On the table. Even the dark view of the sky and the city streets still linger with activity. He sips slowly, but the little portion Edgeworth gave him still melts away too fast.
Edgeworth reluctantly pours him another. Watches him, brows furrowed as if he’s trying to figure out something very important. Phoenix has seen it enough times from his side of the bench to know what to look for. That half-lidded look as Edgeworth draws into himself, finger tapping in sharp cut time. It usually appears just before the trial turns against him again.
It’s nostalgic.
He wonders what it might have looked like to have had Edgeworth across from him again. Phoenix wasn’t really thinking of anything beyond Maya and Iris at that point and Edgeworth remained a distant asteroid hurtling through the astral sea. Phoenix had suffered in the cruel monotony of the hospital. Kept looking up at the flecked ceiling, wondering about what was going on now that he had handed the baton over and was forbidden from even thinking about getting up again.
He had trusted Edgeworth to stall. To do as he asked with the highest degree of diligence and professionalism. He hadn’t actually expected Edgeworth to play his part so well.
Did he wear it? Phoenix looks over at Edgeworth who has barely moved and hasn’t even touched his glass. He thinks of a smaller version of the prosecutor washed out in sepia, cardboard pin on his lapel and a finger stretched out in defiance. Nah. He doesn’t even wear his own badge.
“You seem to be deep in thought,” Edgeworth says softly.
A laugh shakes out of Phoenix’s throat, coarse and dry. “You have a penny?”
“Well.” A shift and the sound of fabric being patted. “Not American ones, in any case.”
Phoenix smiles, suddenly endeared. “You don’t really fit the bartender image anyway,” he comments, trying to imagine Edgeworth with a southern accent asking him about his woes. “Maybe if you ditched the blazer and rolled up your sleeves. I’m sure there’s a pen here somewhere that we could use to draw a beard on you. Grab you a towel from the bathroom and set up the table so you can pretend to wipe down a counter.”
“You can’t be that intoxicated already.”
“To be fair, I did fall off a bridge very recently.”
“That’s hardly something to be proud of.”
Phoenix laughs. The kind of laugh you could only really have at god-knows-what in the morning. “It is what it is,” he says. “Pretty much expect things to go off the rails whenever I walk into court nowadays.”
“That doesn’t sound like a healthy expectation.”
“Most things I do aren’t healthy.”
For the first time, Edgeworth picks up his glass. Swirls the liquid around to stall for time.
“Are you alright?” Edgeworth asks, voice odd.
Phoenix blinks. Something sinks into the bottom of his stomach in fragmented pieces. Edgeworth has never sought him out privately without a reason and Phoenix can’t fathom the magnitude of what must have brought him here. “What?”
“Are you alright?” Edgeworth tries again. “You have gone through something unimaginable today. It’s—it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Anyone would have difficulties after such an ordeal.”
The glass solidifies into ice. He hasn’t really considered how all of this would look from the viewpoint of a stranger. Laying everything out one by one, side by side and his entire sense of balance seems to grow a third, unrelated arm. But then again, it never mattered. Especially not in the heat of it all. The bruises from Redd White hardly throbbed compared to the volatile cocktail that was grief and seething anger at White’s injustices. He could push past the electricity surging through his veins because of Maya and he could hardly afford to pass out from hyperventilation when Edgeworth was doing everything he could to keep the trial going long enough for Gumshoe to come back.
People didn’t usually stick long enough in the aftermath to ask such questions.
Oh, Phoenix thinks. So we’re doing this.
“You’ve changed,” Phoenix says as soft as he can manage. “That’s enough. You don’t have to keep proving it.”
Edgeworth looks wretched. “You can be unbelievably dense, Wright. This isn’t about me—”
Phoenix sighs. “I’m not saying this to be cruel.”
“I’m trying—”
“I know,” Phoenix says, trying not to let his heart rate skyrocket at the idea of talking about what happened. “But trust me when I say that’s the last thing I need right now.”
“But…”
Edgeworth slumps in his seat, the rigid cut of his posture crashing down as he ages twenty years in a second. The lamp by the bed paints him in orange light, deepening the shadows with evening blue. He covers his face with a hand, but he’s too close to take his secrets far. Phoenix can see every single tribulation and difficult expression moving underneath his palm.
Phoenix feels his face softening, something warm suffusing through his skin and calming the storm of ice in his stomach. “Just stay for a while,” he says, making it easier. Because they both deserve that, especially him. “That’s all I need from you right now.”
“I’ll be heading back to Europe in two days,” Edgeworth says like he’s trying to poke the ground for landmines. “I’ll be gone.”
“But you’re here right now,” Phoenix says and Edgeworth has nothing to say to that at all.
Phoenix leans back into his chair and tips his head up. It makes him feel better—the little things always do. The undeniable proof that he can still do something. Save people in small ways and they will matter because those people are important to him.
And Edgeworth, ever emotionally complicated Edgeworth, keeps sitting quietly in the chair next to him. Keeping a silent vigil over a city that will never know about this quiet moment where they’re both just allowed to be a little less than put together.
Phoenix lets out a long sigh and he keeps breathing, slow and steady, long into the night.