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No less than five hours after the conclusion of Ron DeLite’s trial, Larry quits his job. It’s an informal little thing; he doesn’t give a notice period, nor does he care enough to stick around and help find a replacement. He’s got no doubt that the security firm will pick up another loser to replace the one they just lost, and he doesn’t feel obligated to them the same way he has never felt a sense of belonging to any of his past jobs. For a while, now, he’s been floating in the in-between—between jobs, between girlfriends, between shitty apartments, the only consistency in his life coming from the takeout place he frequents every Saturday night. One large pepperoni pizza, a case of Bud Light, and a Sunday morning headache that started to feel like a routine long ago.
He sits on the floor of his apartment, staring intently at the crumbs on his floor. He hasn’t vacuumed here in months, and he doesn’t intend to start now, not on a Saturday night with his laptop open and unmoving on his resume; tomorrow, he’ll try and polish it, send it off to wherever it needs to go, and he’ll no doubt end up in another dead end job, fated to cross paths with his old best friends if only to serve as a cautionary tale of disappointment for them. Whenever he thinks about those days— the good old days, he calls them—he’s hit with an intense pang of something that feels bitterly close to nostalgia, without the silver lining of knowing that, in a way, they all made it out of there. He won’t claim to know everything Edgeworth has gone through, and the last time he saw Phoenix before college, he was off with grand dreams of becoming an artist. They’ve changed. And what of him? Has he changed, too? Or is he just stuck, the same old Larry Butz, most likely to go nowhere in life?
The pizza tastes of nothing, the beer gives him an uncomfortable buzz, and he’s forced to think about who he is and where he fits into the world. He had a real chance back there, in that trial, to finally be helpful to someone he still regards as a very dear friend, but he’d ruined it all again—he has a habit of doing that. Sometimes, he thinks that there are people who try so hard to be good that they don’t end up being bad, they just end up being pathetic, and if there’s ever been a poster boy for failure, it’s him. If only he could have been better at a job that didn’t mean anything to him, he might have been able to rush in at the last minute with the evidence that Phoenix needed, not to steal the spotlight per se, but… oh, he doesn’t know. To be useful? To be needed? To be anything other than a dead weight being carried along by those who have already moved on from schoolyard fights and old television shows with matching keyrings?
Maybe he should vacuum after all. It might give him a sense of clarity to sit in a clean apartment, instead of one that smells of lukewarm pizza and dust. He’s not even sure where his vacuum is, but it can’t have gotten far in a small studio apartment, and it only takes him five minutes to find it, tucked away in a closet. It’s a heavy, cumbersome thing, and he has to root around in the closet to pull it out. His hands are clumsy as they pull at the body of the vacuum, and something in front of it, blocking it off, becomes dislodged; it’s a wooden box, and the contents spill out across the floor.
He knows what it is instantly.
Forgetting about the vacuum entirely, he carefully picks up the items that have fallen out, trying his hardest not to look at them as he puts them back inside. It’s a time capsule, one that he’d made in elementary school before Edgeworth had moved away; the three of them had sat together in the sunshine, promising to meet up at this exact spot after graduation. That had never happened—especially not for Larry, who hadn’t even graduated high school in the first place. But here it is, clear as day, a box full of memories that was supposed to be something so happy, and now just sits in a closet, gathering dust, a bitter reminder of his existence as a disappointment.
He can’t not look at it, though. Bringing it back through to where he has been sitting since he quit his job, he just holds it for a moment, running his hands over the lid, scared to open it again after he hastily closed it only a minute ago. What is in there that he has to fear? Memories of a childhood that he looks back on with fondness and wistfulness alike?
Taking a deep breath, he opens the lid, and the dust near-chokes him. He opens another beer, swallowing half of it before turning his attention back to the time capsule. The first thing inside is a photograph, and he distinctly remembers that they’d taken a bunch of them on a disposable camera; he’d forgotten all about it for two weeks afterwards, and had only gone to get the photos developed after a third reminder from Phoenix. Whether Phoenix and Edgeworth kept their prints, he doesn’t know, but something tells him that he’s the only one of the now-defunct trio still holding onto the glory days of a hopeful youth. But he just looks at them all, smiling, and wonders where it all went wrong. Had it been doomed the moment Edgeworth moved away, or had Larry’s mere presence itself cursed the friendship from the get-go, his innate ability to disappoint putting a finite timer on the longevity of their triad? He realises that none of them smile the way they used to; Phoenix must have gotten braces sometime after elementary school, because he doesn’t have his tooth gap anymore, and Edgeworth’s smile is all but non-existent these days. Carrying the photo with him to his small bathroom, Larry holds it up to the light and tries to smile into the mirror, desperate to match how he looked when he was younger— happier —but it doesn’t reach his eyes and he knows that as long as things carry on the way they are, it never will.
He goes back to the time capsule and fishes out various pieces of cheap plastic. It’s all Signal Samurai merch, and some of it will probably be worth quite a bit in the next few decades, but he’ll never sell it on, no matter how dire his financial situation is. These things—these tiny, flimsy things—might be plastic now, but when he was a child, they were swords, they were cars, they were rocket ships and everything else fantastic that a creative mind could come up with. And where has that child gone, that old Larry Butz who might never have excelled in mathematics or sciences, but who could look at a stupid piece of plastic and see an adventure for himself and his friends? Perhaps he’s trapped like a restless spirit inside this time capsule, a little pocket of a memory in which he was loved and his mind was not an afterthought.
And then, right at the bottom, Larry sees where he is—that bright child who had seen the world in hopeful primary colours. He’s immortalised in one of his own drawings, with his arms around his best friends. The crayon that makes up his features is messy, but there’s an element of technical skill there that Larry feels surprised came from his own hands. It doesn’t feel right that a drawing of him and his best friends should be locked away in the dusty cupboard of a shitty studio apartment, and he smooths out the wrinkles in the paper with careful hands, promising himself that he’ll find a fridge magnet for it tomorrow.
But that’s it, isn’t it? He always tells himself that he’s going to do things tomorrow, or next week, or when the time is right. That time is now, has always been now, and it’s taken him a harsh awakening from his childhood self to realise it. He had been an artist, once, so why not do so again? Why not take an impossible risk on a childhood dream? The alternative is dragging himself along from dead end job to dead end job, so it’s not like he has much to lose.
Suddenly emboldened by the beer he’s been nursing, he starts searching online for any artists looking for apprentices. Most of the listings require either previous experience or at least a well put-together portfolio, but one of them takes his eye—tucked away on page five of some budding artist website, he sees the name and knows that it’s his salvation.
Elise Deauxnim.
Elise Deauxnim is a strange woman to work for. She hadn’t batted an eye at Larry’s suggestion that he should adopt half of her name as his new alias, but she tuts at him in a strange, disappointed-mother kind of way every time he turns up late. To her, Larry realises, the pursuit of art is more important than her individual identity, which is why she was so happy to give it up for her protégé.
A fresh start is nice, though. Elise travels a lot for work, getting inspiration from every place she can, and as such, Larry had signed off on an early termination of his apartment lease, moving all of his important belongings into her van to stay on the road with her and learn on the go. Doing so had forced him to confront that most of the material possessions in his life are just that—material nothingness. He had sold his laptop and bought a new sketchbook and some expensive charcoals, he had trimmed down his wardrobe to just the bare essentials, and had packed the time capsule safely at the bottom of his backpack before leaving everything else behind. Living a non-materialistic life is new to him, but not entirely unwelcome, because he feels like he really has a purpose now; everything that had been holding him back is in the past, and he has the chance to continue forwards as a new man.
He learns everything from her. From the soft, busy nostalgia of John Constable’s paintings of England, to the abrupt modernity of Michael Cheval’s absurdity, he takes dutiful notes on everything that Elise says. But he can never quite replicate the work of the artists that he admires—even his simpler drawings, plucked from ideas right out of Elise’s notebook, fall flat when compared to the originals. And still he tries; late night after late night until he barely sleeps more than three consecutive hours, desperate to create something that will feel not like a legacy per se, but at least something he can be proud of when he faces his friends again.
Of course, Elise, in her otherworldly way, never tells him that he is a failure.
Over time, he starts to think that he might have some promise as an artist, after all. Even if he still struggles to produce work inspired by any other artist, his original drawings are better than ever. He tries every medium, draws everything he can see, but he always returns to the same old coloured pencils and the familiar format of three things against a vast background. Three vases, two together, one teetering dangerously on the edge of a table. Three flowers, two tall, one growing underneath them. Three people without faces.
Elise praises his unique artistic eye, and he feels something he’s never felt before. A sense of pride; not the childish pride of his youth, when he would be proud of his ability to shout the loudest or run the fastest, but something different. Something innate. Something that he’s worked for, for the first time in his life, and now he has things to show for it—a wall of drawings at the back of Elise’s van, fluttering in the wind every time they drive down the highway with the windows down.
He had learned, right back when he met Elise, not to question her flights of fancy. If Elise says they are going to Paris, Larry nods, and they are at the Louvre within the week. If Elise says they are undertaking a vow of silence to better understand their muses, Larry nods, and they do not speak a word for three days. It’s a shock to his system to be dragged along with the whimsy of a creative mind, but it’s a welcome one. They have a routine these days, where Elise will write and Larry will look over her shoulder, doodling scenes from her stories until he settles on one that he will make into a bigger piece. And they travel. A lot. Always moving forward, never leaving a trace behind. He feels like a living ghost, observing without affecting, drawing without writing, growing without changing.
So, when Elise tells him that they’ll be taking a trip to Hazakura Temple, Larry doesn’t question it.
The Temple is high up in the mountains, a place of sanctuary for spirit mediums. He’s never been too good with the cold, but where the old Larry Butz would have complained until he found a warm bed somewhere, the new Laurice Deauxnim considers the below-freezing temperature to be another tool for character building. Within the first three days at Hazakura Temple, he’s already burned through a full sketchbook, filling each page with sketches of the scenery or Elise, hiding three figures in the background of each piece. They’re closer these days, the three figures, and in some of his art pieces, they even touch hands. If they had faces, they would smile, but drawing faces is beyond his skill level—not because he doesn’t trust himself to accurately replicate the human bone structure, but because he doesn’t feel confident enough in his old friendships to try and portray their souls.
Just as he’s settling in fully, having spent the past few days getting his bearings around the Temple, Larry spots someone out of the corner of his eye. A mirage. A muse. A phantom from the past, here to either taunt him or praise him for his progress.
Phoenix Wright.
Squinting in the harsh mountain sunlight, Larry focuses on the form until it becomes more visible. Phoenix is approaching, with two spirit mediums in tow, and Larry realises that it isn’t a trick of the light at all—his old friend really is here.
And Larry is unsure if he’s ready for it.
After all, he’s imagined meeting Phoenix and Edgeworth again many times over the past few months, but it has always been a fantasy set in the far future, when he’s an established artist of his own merit and has built a name for himself. Not here; not now. Not when he still has so much to learn, and so much growing to do to be anywhere near the level of those who left him behind.
Phoenix is saying something, shouting his name maybe, and Laurice becomes Larry once more—Larry Butz, the coward, always running away from things he’s not quite ready for. No matter how many times Elise has told him that a true artist is never ready, that the making of the man comes from how he deals with unforeseen situations, he just can’t deal with this right now. But he’s too slow, no longer the lightning-fast child who could beat his friends in a race, and he collides headfirst into Phoenix’s chest in his attempt to scarper.
“Sorry!” He says, trying to hide his face. “Gotta run!”
“Hey, wait a minute,” Phoenix says. “Larry?”
Taking a deep breath, Larry tries to remember all the good he’s done in these past few months. Everything he’s learned. The changes he’s made not just for himself, but for Phoenix too; his vow to become a better man. Whether his best attempts bear any fruit, he doesn’t know, but he can’t run any longer—he has to stand up and try to make something of the friendship he’s been trying so hard to salvage.
He sticks his hand out for Phoenix to shake.
“Nice to meet you,” he says, locking eyes with his former best friend and hoping that he’s done enough to be recognised as an equal. “I’m Laurice Deauxnim.”