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The warmth of an early September evening clings to Maya Fey as she steps over the threshold of the Borscht Bowl Club.
The frigid atmosphere inside is at odds with the season, and she chills immediately, shivering and pressing her bare legs together. Gooseflesh and unshaven hairs rub against each other, seeking friction and warmth.
Stuffing her hands under her armpits, Maya surveys the scene before her: peeling wallpaper and sticky green tiles and tattered upholstery, all washed out by too-white fluorescents. The handful of people scattered about at tables and perched on barstools are of no interest to her, nor is she to them, even in her Master’s robes.
What she is interested in is the glossy black grand piano, the most well-preserved fixture in the room, and the man currently teasing piecemeal melodies from its keys, folded inelegantly atop a short-legged piano bench.
He doesn’t look up at her approach, despite the distinct clack of her sandals against the floor, creating a distinct time signature for him to ignore with his wandering notes, his noncommittal humming. His shoulders are hunched and tight beneath the shabby gray fabric of his hoodie.
She reaches across him to pluck out a few well-practiced measures of Bach, grand and resounding and out-of-tune from the chilled piano’s strings. For a moment, she doesn’t think of anything but the music.
When she looks down at Nick, he’s smiling at her. A carefully rehearsed positioning of teeth and lips, performing for her, but it rings as hollow as his piano tunes, echoing off the walls of shuttered eyes and sunken cheeks.
“Maya.” The smile is fake, and his eyes are wishing she wasn’t here, but in spite of it all he sounds happy, genuinely, to see her.
“Hey, Nick,” she says, and swallows all the niceties that would sound backhanded: Long time no see! How have you been? You look great! “Chilly in here!” She rubs her upper arms vigorously. “Are they trying to freeze you to the piano or what?”
“What can I say?” Nick grins, stretching his arms behind his head. “I’m just that good.”
They sit at the bar—or, she sits at the bar, and Nick slumps halfway across it and signals to the unsmiling bartender, who grunts disinterestedly in lieu of asking their order.
“Your finest well whiskey, my good sir,” Nick says. His gaze flits to her from the corner of his eye, sardonic cheer falling away in a beat of sudden shame that he stutters over—he’s embarrassed, she realizes suddenly, to drink in front of her.
“Same for me!” she chirps. The bartender doesn’t raise an eyebrow, but Nick does, looking at her sideways and smiling lopsidedly.
“You’re not old enough to drink,” Nick says, propping his chin up on his palm, and she glues her smile in place at the corners before he can see it slip.
“Sure I am,” she says breezily. “I turned twenty-one a few months ago, remember, Nick?”
He doesn’t remember, of course, because he wasn’t there.
The easy smirk hesitates on his lips, and the nonchalant facade cracks enough for her to see underneath it; the regret, the tallying of years, the realization of how long it’s been since—
She doesn’t want him to think about it. And, selfishly, she does, a rush of vindictive pleasure bubbling up in her chest when she sees the guilt dance so plainly across his face. Good, she thinks, that he might feel the weight of his own absence, the sting of keeping her at arm's length; that he might be able to hear the echo of long distance telephone calls, the late nights she’s spent with Miles Edgeworth on the other end of the line, talking themselves in endless circles of who saw him last, and is he going to be okay, he has to be okay.
But—and the bubble bursts inside her chest—but in spite of all that, when she’d picked up the phone and asked him to meet her today, he’d accepted without hesitation. She needs him today, and she thinks that he needs her, too, enough to not let anything else get in the way, and for that she can’t hold all the unspoken things against him.
Not now, when his heart is aching on his sleeve for all the years passed. Not when hers is aching with the slow march of time, bringing her ever closer to a world in which she’s lived more years than her sister.
Two glasses thud-thud down in front of them on the bar, a welcome interruption. Maya pulls hers towards herself a little too hastily, amber liquid lapping at the stout sides of the glass. The desire she thought she’d had to drink it dries up now that it's in front of her, but she lifts it to her lips for a perfunctory sip anyway.
It’s harsh in her mouth and hot going down her throat, and her nose wrinkles before she can stop it. Beside her, Nick snorts into his own glass and tries to pretend he didn’t.
She takes another swallow out of spite, and she’s proud when she doesn’t cough.
“Hey,” Nick says, with a gentleness she hasn’t heard from him yet tonight. He slides his half-empty glass up next to hers, bumping them together with a dull clink. “To Mia.”
She swallows, hard, trying to keep more than the alcohol down. “To Mia.”
Nick looks at her, then; really looks, the way he used to look at everything, shrewd and omniscient, picking out the parts he needed. She wonders what was in her voice that makes him look that way, that makes him sigh a tired old man sigh and take his beanie off and rake his fingers through unkempt clumps of overgrown black hair.
“You know you can talk about her, if you want,” he says. “I know that’s why you wanted to see me.”
Maya looks down into her glass, through the whiskey to the scratches and whorls of the wood beneath, distorted by the liquid and the glass and time.
“I know I can,” she says. “I want to talk about her. I’m just worried you’re not gonna like what I have to say.”
He’s silent for long enough to make her want to knock back the rest of the whiskey and run for the hills. When he does speak, it’s quiet and stumbling, aiming for casual and missing by a mile.
“If you want to say that she’d be disappointed in me, you don’t have to. I already know that.”
For a moment, Maya feels so bitterly sorry for him that she thinks she might cry. In the next, she’s so angry she can barely breathe.
“Jesus Christ, Nick,” she snaps, before she can stop herself. “Not every goddamn thing is about you.”
She revels in his wide-eyed, open-mouthed bewilderment for a few self-righteous seconds, until the furious heat inside her peters out and leaves her slumping over her drink, extinguished.
“Sorry,” she says, small enough to sit inside her whiskey glass. “I didn’t mean—”
“No, you did,” Nick says, not unkindly. His knee knocks against hers, and a lump rises in her throat. “It’s okay. I, uh.” He lets out a sound that’s half-laugh, half-cough. “I deserved that.”
“No, you didn’t,” Maya says, regretful. “I’m not mad at you.”
“No?”
“Not—right now. Not for this.” She squeezes her eyes shut, trying to forget where they are, and why they’re here; trying to banish the image blazed into her mind of Nick hunched defeated over the piano, his gray-circled eyes and oversharp smile. “I don’t want to talk about—that. I want to talk about her. It’s—it’s her day. I need to talk about her before I freaking explode.”
“Okay,” Nick says gently. He leans back in his seat, arm splaying out behind her onto her own chair. She can’t overlook the way he’s positioned himself, like a human shield, between her and the rest of the room. Even now, even here, he’s still trying to protect her.
She fixes her gaze over his breastbone, studying the pilled fabric bunched over the place where his badge should be.
“Do you think it’s bad luck to speak ill of the dead?”
She’s only ever asked herself this question before, in private and in the dark, at her most wounded, and every time it makes the back of her neck prickle, like someone’s listening.
Nick sucks a breath in through his teeth, and doesn’t let it out.
“They don’t teach us that as spirit mediums,” she says. “It’s not up to us to speak on the dead. The dead speak through us. We’re just the mouthpiece. And, when I talk about Mia now, even though her spirit has moved on…I still feel like her mouthpiece. Like it doesn’t matter what I think about her at all.”
“Of course it matters,” Nick says, level, perfectly at ease in his conviction. “You’re her sister.”
“I’m her sister,” she echoes helplessly. “God. I don’t even know what that means .”
In the abstract, her sister is the warm body next to her under the same quilt, two hands patching her skinned knees and scraped hands, a gentle voice soothing her tears and chasing away nightmares. Her sister is glue between shards of ceramic, whispering don’t worry, you won’t get in trouble, don’t cry. Her sister is the piece of her mother that Misty forgot to take with her. But more than that, in reality, her sister is the girl who was always just a bit bigger, and a bit faster, who Maya could never quite grow up quick enough to catch.
“Everyone talks about her like she was a hero. Like she was this guardian angel, this—this untouchable thing who I should feel lucky I knew. But all that’s done is make me realize I didn’t know her. I didn’t know anything about her.”
The words feel leaden in her mouth, piercing the corners of her eyes. She feels like she knows Mia secondhand, through word of mouth, clinging to the loose scraps people are generous enough to give her, like she might one day be able to piece together a full picture. Instead, she’s left holding something like a charcoal render of Mia’s left ear: close-up, disconnected, and ultimately meaningless.
“She left me, Nick,” she hears herself say, and her voice is like clotted blood, thick with unshed tears. “I was just a kid, and she left me all by myself.”
She wraps shaking hands around her sweating glass. Her fingers barely fit all the way around it. It makes her feel diminutive, childlike; like the whining, barefoot girl who followed her sister around like a shadow, tugging at the hem of her robe.
Amber liquid ripples like a pond. Circles of effect that go on forever, interrupted only by the edges of the glass.
“I thought I’d understand, when I grew up,” she manages. “Just like I thought I’d understand why our mother left. And I thought when I understood, it would stop hurting, and I would stop being mad at her. But now—I do understand. She had all these dreams and aspirations, and being Master would have sucked the life out of her. I know that. But she just walked out and left all that to me, instead.”
She takes a jerky gulp of whiskey, feels a wayward drop escape the glass, drip down her chin into the collar of her Masters’ robes. Nick is still looking at her, placid and serious, waiting patiently for her to finish.
It’s like being sick, like throwing up and someone rubbing her back in circles, saying, there, there. It’s alright, get it all out. You’ll feel better.
“So.” She sets down her empty glass. “I am mad at her. She was a hero and an incredible woman and I’m mad at her. Sometimes I’m so mad at her I feel like I can’t see straight.”
She swallows hard, like she can push the admission back down into the burning pit in her chest, but she can’t. She can only ask, “Do you get mad at her, too?”
Nick leans forward over the bar, propping himself up on his elbows to roll his empty glass between his palms. To the untrained witness, his gestures are careless, a lazy cat batting about uninteresting prey, but she knows him, and his eyes are the same as they were in court: all-seeing, all-knowing.
“Yeah,” he says, low and dry and sad. “Yeah, I do.”
Maya chokes on her next exhale—she doesn’t want to cry, not here, in front of these strangers and against this backdrop of Nick’s life that she’s not a part of, not like she used to be. But she can’t help it, and she doesn’t so much as sob as she does start to leak like a faucet, hot tears spilling down her cheeks to join the whiskey staining her collar.
“I didn’t know her either, Maya,” Nick says. “Not like you think I did. Not like I thought I did. She—hid things. Big stuff. About Mi—about Edgeworth, and about DL-6, and about Dahlia. And I get that, too. I mean, I was just her mentee. Her employee. She didn’t owe me anything. But you’re her sister. She should have told you the truth.”
His knuckles have gone white around the glass. She slides her hand across the sticky countertop to pry his fingers apart. After a moment’s resistance he lets go, shoulders slumping, and she laces their fingers together, holding fast.
“She liked you, Nick.” Nick closes his eyes and grips her hand tighter. “I know she did. She believed in you. And—I know she loved me. That she trusted that I would be okay. It’s just—hard to know that I’ll never get to hear that from her.”
“Mia was all about reading between the lines,” Nick says, his eyes still shut. “About deduction. So here’s what I think. I think she was brilliant, and fucking stubborn. I think she thought the entire world was on her shoulders. I think she thought she could save the entire world, if she really tried. I think she wanted to protect you and that she hurt you trying to do it. And I think she was lonely. And I think I wish every damn day she was still here with us.”
Maya sobs, then, loud and strangled, and forgets to care about who’s watching and where they are, gulping for breath and scrubbing her face on the sleeve of her robe. Wet, messy, cathartic.
“Me too,” she says. Her cheeks feel slick, like asphalt shiny from an unforeseen downpour. Nick’s smile, small but warm, genuine, is parting the clouds still overhead.
You’re a lot like her, she thinks about him, at him, and she can almost hear him thinking the same thing right back at her.
Nick pushes his glass right next to hers on the counter, just close enough to touch, to catch each other’s reflection.