Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“I just cannot comprehend why you wouldn’t tell me, Wright,” Miles bites. It is louder than he intended, when he considers it a second later. And it is foolish, for a plethora of reasons, that he is sitting here right now at all, let alone making such a fuss. Things are too muddled and murky for him to have said anything he had actually planned on saying—to offer a shoulder, to offer an apology. Perhaps this is just what the aftermath of receiving some of the worst news of recent years and then your following string of frantic phone calls going blatantly ignored is like.

“Because it’s not really any of your business, Edgeworth.”

“But if you had, I could have done something, surely. I could have pushed for an appeal with the bar association board, or–”

“You couldn’t,” Wright cuts in. He is calmer than Miles—bordering on frustratingly so. “I told you. It was over from the second I presented forged evidence.”

Miles barely even registers at first the little flicker of pink satin that peeks around the doorway. He sees the flash of colour in his peripheral vision, but the visceral dread pooling in his body is almost too distracting to follow anything else occuring around him too closely. Wright must also notice it, however—he gives Miles a look that is unplaceable. Not quite apologetic nor anxious, though anticipating a negative reaction, perhaps?

Miles shifts uncomfortably, still perched too close to the edge of the couch as if it (or he) may snap if he relaxes. Wright runs a hand through his own hair in turn, a futile attempt at making himself look more composed than he quite clearly is not. Miles arbitrarily decides that he cannot look at the man for a moment longer, so he looks towards the doorway across the room.

He finds himself staring into a pair of big, dark blue eyes. His brain, still, cannot seem to catch up.

“Wright,” Miles begins, and the girl seems to start. She dodges into the room she must have come from.

“Give me a minute,” Wright says inexplicably, and he stands just as Miles looks back at him. “She– I won’t be long.”

Wright, much against his word, takes quite some time. Miles listens to the steady tick of a rather loud clock that he can’t quite make out the time on from where he is sat (he’s been vehemently avoiding the prospect of wearing glasses for reasons he is trying not to dwell on), and he dare not move to check. It does, however, give him some time to scan his surroundings—something he had not yet had the chance to do through the sheer urgency he had felt upon a dishevelled caricature of one Phoenix Wright opening the door. The apartment is in disarray, which in itself is not entirely unusual if Miles recalls correctly, though this evening it is with a rather eccentric variety of seemingly well loved yet newly acquired items dotted here and there. There is a small pink satin top hat placed atop the low bookshelf by the window, adorned with a scrape or two along the brim. A strange wooden puppet garbed in what appears to be that same signature shade of pink is propped sitting against the wall. An indecipherable number of decks of cards—certainly more than one—are scattered around, and a string of colourful handkerchiefs is draped through a lampshade. Surely the latter is a fire safety hazard in some capacity.

Miles listens to the clock tick. He fights the urge to run. He listens some more.

“It’s really okay if you don’t wanna,” he hears Wright’s muffled voice say through the wall. The softness in it is such a stark contrast to before that Miles doubts his hearing for a moment, until a much smaller voice tells Wright in return, “It’s fine, Daddy. He seems scared too.”

Miles closes his eyes. Something clicks into place in his mind and it drowns out the tail end of the conversation he was unwelcome to in the first place.

When Wright finally walks back into the room he is holding a girl no older than ten in his arms. She is wearing a cape identical to the one on the doll. Miles feels freshly nauseous, the same way he did when he had initially heard the news of Wright’s disbarment.

“Wright,” Miles tries again. It leaves his mouth a whisper. The girl nervously glances at Phoenix.

“Say hi,” Wright says to her.

She puffs out her cheeks and nods with a sudden confidence before she whispers something into Wright’s ear, presumably prompting him to put her down. Once firmly on the ground she holds her hand out towards Miles. “It’s nice to meet you,” she says. Miles shakes her hand gently and wills his own not to tremble as he does. “My name is Trucy, um, Trucy Wright and I’m 8 years old. Do you want to see a magic trick?”

Wright’s eyes, too, are so soft when he looks at her. Softer than Miles has seen them in years, in fact. “Don’t get ahead of yourself, Truce,” he says.

She looks up at him sternly. “Impressions are everything, Daddy.”

Miles knows he has already made a horrible first impression, not to mention he is drastically out of practice when it comes to personal introductions. Nevertheless, Trucy turns back to him and beams with what he assumes to be a practised smile. She is a performer. Miles was—is—not. “Miles Edgeworth. It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

“No need to be so formal,” Wright says.

“Yeah, Mr. Edgeworth. No need to be so formal!” Trucy parrots, and finally pulls her little hand away from Miles’ own. He doesn’t remember his hand ever being so small. He hates the concept of a hand so tiny shaking the hand of an acquaintance of Manfred von Karma, though he has no clear memory of any such instance.

“‘Mr. Edgeworth’ is pretty formal too,” Wright teases.

Trucy hums in thought. “I guess you’re right, Daddy,” she says after a moment. “Uncle Miles it is!”

Miles reacts somewhat viscerally to the sudden change in tone. “Mr. Edgeworth is quite alright,” he finds himself saying, and Wright laughs in response. He really laughs, rather to Miles’ dismay, and then practically collapses back into the seat opposite to him. Trucy begins excitedly chattering at Wright as his laughter dissipates and the creases from his furrowed brow appear to properly smooth over for the first time since Miles set foot in the apartment and that feels, well, rather bad.

Trucy Enigmar, Miles’ brain supplies now that he has a moment to consider the facts, daughter of the man who was effectively the catalyst of Wright’s disbarment. He had read something about her in the news, too. The way they discussed her involvement had felt awfully familiar to what he recalls from the perspective of his younger self in a library in Düsseldorf circa 2007, pushing back uneven waves of nausea to dig through sparse California newspaper archives from the better half of a decade prior. He absentmindedly hopes that she doesn’t find herself rummaging through the same archives in five years’ time.

“Mr. Miles,” Trucy says rather suddenly, back in front of him, and crosses her arms. “You never told me if you want to see a trick.”

Her top hat falls down a little, further misplacing the auburn hair strewn across her forehead. Miles glances to the bookshelf to find that, indeed, it is the same hat he had been distantly inspecting minutes earlier. He has no idea how she grabbed it without him noticing, and already she is so charismatic that it’s hard for Miles not to be taken by her. He almost wants to chuckle at being addressed as Mr. Miles. He wants to tell her, “Why, yes, I would love to see a magic trick.”

This whole predicament hits too close for comfort, however, despite a blatant contradiction: Trucy Enigmar is not Miles Edgeworth and Phoenix Wright is certainly not Manfred von Karma.

Miles gets hung up on this as he thinks it—Enigmar? Gramarye? Had she introduced herself as Trucy Wright?

She had paused before she said it. Wright had told her not to get ahead of herself and Miles had assumed it was in reference to putting on an impromptu magic show for a stranger. This, for some reason, is the final straw.

“I do apologise, Miss Enigmar,”—a glance is passed to Wright, who certainly saw this coming but looks moderately hurt nonetheless—“but I have somewhere to be. Perhaps another time.”

She says nothing. Miles stands. His knees crack as he does; he has been positioned stiffly in Phoenix Wright’s apartment too long for his joints to take it particularly kindly.

“Wright,” he adds with a curt nod. He means it as a goodbye, yet instead is halted by a firm grip on his coat. Small fingers twist, agonising, into the heavy wool.

“You’re lying,” Trucy says, at the same time Wright asks, “Just one?”

Miles stays for more than one trick. He picks the six of hearts twice in a row and Trucy insists Wright fetch her a fresh deck of cards to prove she’s not cheating, though Miles would accuse her of no such thing. He comes back with a new pack (still plastic wrapped), apple juice in a glass decorated with fading white rabbits, and a cup of tea which is wordlessly pushed towards Miles. Trucy holds the glass with both hands to drink.

“Want me to open the cards?” Wright asks her. She shakes her head and motions incautiously towards Miles, splashing juice onto the floor as she does. Wright nudges the pack towards Miles, who is hesitant as he removes the plastic and puts the box back down onto the coffee table.

Trucy puts her juice beside the cards, quite pointedly not onto a coaster despite there being one available to her. “Shuffle them, too?” she says.

“I… am not sure how to effectively shuffle cards,” Miles admits.

She pouts. “Then how will you know I’m not cheating?”

“I am not a particularly sceptical man in my daily life, despite what my job may entail.”

Trucy looks to Wright for clarification as to what exactly this must mean. “He’s a lawyer,” Wright says.

“Oh,” Trucy says. “Like you were?”

“Nah,” he tells her, and doesn’t elaborate. Trucy nods as if this makes complete sense then says, “You shuffle the cards, Daddy.”

As Wright shuffles Miles reluctantly takes a sip of his tea. He finds that it’s his favourite store-bought blend, made slightly too weak, and he is so overwhelmed by the revelation that he puts it aside to go cold.

Trucy messes up half way through her next trick when she asks Miles to confirm that the card he picked has been placed on top of the deck, and she picks up the jack of spades when Miles’ card had been the eight of diamonds. Her mask slips to reveal something puzzled, then she picks up the second card in the deck (notably the eight of diamonds) and makes a discontented noise before announcing she’s going to start over. She gets it correct on her next go and successfully makes the three of spades ‘jump’ to the top of the deck. The mistake had allowed Miles to figure out the trick, at least in part, but nonetheless he gives a small round of applause. Trucy giggles and bows with a flourish of her cape, and tries to catch her hat on her sock-clad foot when it falls off of her head. That explains why it’s scuffed, Miles thinks.

“Very impressive,” he says. “I believe you will make a great addition to the stage some day.”

“I’m going to have my own show,” Trucy agrees.

“You will,” Wright says to her. He reaches out and pokes a finger into her stomach which wrenches a giggle through her faux-serious demeanour. “And don’t forget I expect to be in the front row at every single one.”

“Yup,” she says. Then, to Miles, ever so innocently, “You should come too! Daddy would like that.”

A ridiculous noise that is in part embarrassed and otherwise surprised worms its way out of Miles’ body. He turns to Wright, who bashfully runs a hand over his face and clears his throat, and Miles puts what seems to be a flush over Wright’s cheeks down to a trick of the light—if only for his own sanity.

“Edgeworth is really busy, Trucy. He works in Europe a lot of the time now,” Wright says.

“Yes, well,” Miles cuts in. “If ever you are performing while I am in the city I, erm, assure you I will put in my best efforts to attend.”

Trucy throws a fist into the air in celebration.

“Tons more where that came from, promise.” Phoenix grins and she dives into his arms with a gleeful shriek. He mouths a little thank you at Miles, who can only watch quietly as his heart pounds; threatens to split his rib cage open. This is something past his comprehension, he realises. Something so far out of reach of any version of him that has existed. And maybe that’s worse: to witness so closely what he couldn’t have received even had it been offered to him.

Then Trucy yawns from Wright’s lap and Miles, typical Miles, jumps at the opportunity to be anywhere else. “I really should head off,” he says.

“Sure,” Wright hums. Trucy rubs her eyes and quietly mutters something about not getting to teach Miles how to play bullshit or gin rummy even though they already have the cards out as Wright lifts her off his lap and manages to somewhat smoothly manoeuvre her to stand up again. “Go get ready for bed, okay? I’ll be there so we can read together in a sec,” he tells her. “Pick out a story for us and then yell at me if I’m taking too long.”

“Night, Mr. Edgeworth,” Trucy says, and hugs him with all the force an eight year old can muster before he can even attempt to object. He pats her shoulder rather awkwardly and Wright’s smile reaches his eyes as he watches and Miles must leave immediately.

Wright walks him to the door, though it is not far enough to warrant being walked to. He stands in silence as Miles puts his shoes on (and pretends not to notice the singular pair of worn dress shoes clumsily shoved to the back of the shoe rack, nor how they are already collecting dust).

“How did she know I was lying?” Miles asks as he hovers in the entryway.

“I have no idea. Found out pretty quickly there’s not much you can hide from her. Smart kid. Super perceptive.” Phoenix scratches the back of his neck and a sigh slips unconsciously. Miles wonders if his own gaze is too harsh. “To be honest, Edgeworth, I don’t know what I’m doing. But she’s getting me by, you know? Can’t exactly rot in bed when you have someone to provide for.”

Miles hums noncommittally. He ignores the implications—is too at risk of saying something disastrous. “Well. If you ever do need, ah, assistance, I urge that you get in touch.”

Wright grimaces slightly. “We don’t need your pity, Edgeworth.”

“This is not–”

Wright leans past Miles to open the door. “You should probably get going or she’ll never settle,” he murmurs.

Maybe it is pity, or perhaps guilt, in part.

Miles looks up at the ceiling, just briefly. There is a patch of awfully chipped paint above him—crumbling just as a small piece of himself seems to as he tells Wright, “I am due to return to Europe in a few days.”

Part of him, the part that is so inclined to running, wants to bolt. It grips at him with hasty hands, pulling at him harshly in a way that is far too easy to give in to. Another part, though, some minuscule nagging voice elsewhere, hopes for something to cling onto. A sign to stay.

It doesn’t come.

“Okay,” Wright says.

And Miles concedes.

It’s raining when he steps back out onto the street, and he promptly realises he left his umbrella in Wright’s apartment. He does not so much as consider climbing back up the stairs, rather pulls his coat tighter around himself and pops the collar to provide himself with the slightest bit more shelter. When he shoves his hands into his pockets for warmth he feels something foreign there.

He removes a small piece of paper—unfolds it and holds it towards the streetlight. 1 tickit for Trucy land is scrawled on it, accompanied by a drawing of a smiling face wearing a pink top hat. The sparkly ink immediately begins to bleed in the rain.

He calls a cab to take him to his apartment and turns off his phone during the journey over. The driver accepts a bribe to wait twenty minutes while Miles packs a bag as opposed to him having to wait for another taxi to take him to the airport. There he will catch the next possible flight to Amsterdam, current schedule be damned, and anticipate a time where his ticket to Trucy Land can be tucked away in a place he will not accidentally stumble back across it.

It’s not running if it was going to happen regardless, he tells himself.

Chapter Text

Miles’ correspondence with Wright quickly fades to something few and far between. Emails and text messages are exchanged here and there, sometimes with candid photographs of Trucy attached to them. Once, during a particularly memorable week late in spring, Miles had visited Musée de l’Orangerie while briefly in Paris and sent Phoenix a photograph of part of Claude Monet’s Water Lilies because he recalled that the man had mentioned it being something he’d come to appreciate while taking an art history elective at university. It was a little hard to make out the beauty of the piece through Miles’ lacklustre photography skills, though even with the careful arrangement of the room and the way the sunlight bleeds bright across the oil flowers it would be difficult for anyone to capture its essence in entirety in an image. Phoenix had replied two days later: a photograph of the much smaller, more vibrant Water Lilies at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, Trucy’s pointing hand just barely sneaking into the frame, and no accompanying text.

Then there is the occasional spontaneous phone call when communication becomes really sparse—a check in, a please talk to me—but nothing between them is concrete nor guaranteed. Like the smallest wrong step could bring it crashing down for good. Sometimes the uncertainty throws Miles back into feeling as though he is tiptoeing through the halls of the von Karma estate in the midst of a sleepless night to escape, to redirect his thoughts, to remind himself he is no longer a boy in an elevator with an inevitable tragedy on the horizon. But he tries.

It is not until he is awoken by a call at 2:27am in mid-September of 2020 that he finally convinces Wright that he could use some insight on a case, properly, and that he would be perfectly happy to fly him out to aid in the investigation.

“They disbarred me, Edgeworth, remember?” Phoenix had said.

“Yes, however, that does not mitigate the fact that you are one of the best legal minds—minds, generally—of our time. I think your assistance would be incredibly beneficial.”

“Beneficial to who?”

“Me.”

The following hours pass at a gratingly slow pace. Miles struggles to get back to sleep. He gives in trying shortly before 5am and makes himself a cup of horrendously strong coffee. He gets a headache a few hours later from—he assumes—a combination of lacking sleep and the abundance of chemical-scented cleaning products that had been used prior to his arrival at the local police station and consequently goes back to his apartment at lunch though he had planned on staying to help see to the reassessment of the forensics results when they arrived in the afternoon. There he sits, books the flights he has thought about booking all day, eats a pleasant but overpriced sandwich from a nearby deli, takes two ibuprofen, and looks up how to play bullshit and gin rummy.

He gets a call from Wright a few hours after forwarding him the flight details and answers almost embarrassingly quickly, despite having only just managed to focus properly on his paperwork again. A bright voice that is quite clearly not Phoenix Wright, but rather the magician he is now the legal guardian of, speaks before Miles even manages to say hello. “Mr. Edgeworth!” she half-yells down the line, tinny over the distance of two continents, and Miles instinctually jerks the phone from his ear slightly to avoid potential hearing damage.

Miles taps lightly at his laptop’s keyboard with his free hand, stalling for something to say. His unanswered emails stare at him quite threateningly. “Good morning Trucy. It’s nice to hear from you, though I am currently working,” he settles on. “Was there something you needed?”

“Oh, sorry,” she starts, and then hums. “But you did answer really fast for someone who says they’re busy.”

“Ngh.”

“It’s okay if you thought I was going to be my daddy, since I did steal his cell phone to talk to you. But you know what? He told me we’re going on vacation because of you, and he always says I should make sure I remember to say please and thank you.” There’s a brief pause where Miles hears little muted footsteps pad across the floor followed by the sound of something falling. “Oops,” Trucy says. Miles hears a distant indistinct yet concerned shout and Trucy muffles the phone with her hand as she shouts back, “It’s okay Daddy! One minute!”

“Anyway, thank you, Mr. Edgeworth! Daddy’s really happy and I’ve never been to Europe before and I’m really excited to miss six whole days of school in Edin– um, what’s it called again?”

“Edinburgh,” Miles fills in.

“Yup, Edinburgh. I think Daddy was saying it wrong.”

“That would not surprise me, though I do suggest that even if his English is somehow lacking you don’t underestimate the legal skills your father possesses,” Miles says. “I imagine he will provide a completely new angle on this case, or perhaps even lead us to a breakthrough. I look forward to seeing him in action again.”

Trucy giggles. Miles feels his face heat up and is momentarily grateful that this is merely a phone call.

“Also, you are very welcome,” he adds, redirecting. “It only made sense to extend my invitation to you. Besides, I think we may have time and card games to catch up on.”

“Right, we do!” Trucy says. “See you on Friday, Mr. Edgeworth.”

“I shall see you on Friday. Thank you for the call.”

Franziska pays Miles an impromptu visit the same evening. “Do not get the wrong idea, Miles Edgeworth, Interpol are merely coincidentally investigating a different case in the same city,” she clarifies, but simultaneously pushes a golden tin of German hard candies he can never manage to get hold of elsewhere into his hand. She beats him at both of his newly learned card games over a bottle of wine, and it’s not until she leaves that Miles realises that he has slipped into referring to Wright as Trucy’s father. A wisp of anxiety curls inside of him, though it does not wrap itself around his lungs nor constrict as he had anticipated it would. It is just something that needs time, he reasons to nobody but himself, and time will pass whether he likes it or not.

So Trucy is almost ten the next time Miles sees her. He notices, now (perhaps because he’s so nervous), the bundle of excitement that bounds towards him when she spots him through the rapidly dissipating crowd in Edinburgh airport. She is not wearing her cape but her sweater is a pink just a few shades lighter, adorned with little white pom-poms. She immediately beckons him to bend down when she approaches and wordlessly pulls a pound coin from behind Miles’ ear, then another. She closes her fist around both then opens it again to reveal her hand is empty. “In your chest pocket,” Trucy says, and beams when Miles is clearly rather confused at the singular two pound coin he pulls out of it.

“Hi,” Wright says from behind her just as she concludes the trick with a ta-da! The man is pulling a suitcase in either hand, a small, brightly coloured backpack slung over one arm. A plush red panda keychain dangles from the zipper.

“Wright,” Miles greets, raising back to his full height. The two centimetres Miles has on him feel like they could be misconstrued as mocking. “Good afternoon.”

I missed you, he doesn’t say. It gets intimately tucked away with all the others: I miss you and it terrifies me. I miss you and I don’t know what I can possibly do about it. I shouldn’t miss you but I find myself doing so anyway. I am pulled down by the weight of missing you—it clings to me in a way nothing else ever has.

Wright nods and Trucy bounces in place between them, surveying the sights of the airport. “And hello to you, Trucy,” Miles says to her.

Trucy giggles and pauses her visceral excitement to curtsy. “We missed you!” she says, and then puts her hands into the well-hidden pockets of her skirt.

Miles gently bows his head in return, adjusts his glasses, hopes her perceptiveness cannot pick up the hesitancy in his manner or the omitted confession in his mind. He opts to quickly change the subject. “I assume you looked over the case file during your trip, Wright?”

Wright tugs at his hat. His nails are painted a soft powder blue, messy around the edges. Miles pictures the pair of them sprawled out on an old towel on the floor of their little apartment, Trucy holding Wright’s hand (not quite) steady with one of her own, her tongue poking out in concentration as she tries to keep the polish off of his skin to the best of her abilities. Some of Miles’ trepidations easily melt away at the thought then swiftly freeze over again when, just for a moment, he carelessly inserts himself into the image.

“I got the basics,” Wright says.

“Daddy fell asleep for most of the flight,” Trucy adds.

“But I had already read the file in the airport.”

Trucy looks up at her father and back to Miles before shaking her head. A smile tugs at the corners of his mouth despite himself. “I don’t think he did,” Trucy says.

Miles looks sceptically back at Wright, who huffs a laugh, a dimple appearing in its wake. “Okay, she got me,” he says, and ruffles Trucy’s hair briefly. “I skim read it when you first sent it over but I’ve been kinda busy since. I was hoping you could fill me in when we get to, uh, wherever we’re staying.”

“Well, it’s no hindrance. I cannot say I expected us to crack the case in its entirety this evening either way. There is, however, a car waiting outside to take us to my current residence. We best make haste.”

Trucy takes Miles’ hand as Wright pulls the cases. Miles lets her. She tells him she likes his new glasses and he holds her hand almost too carefully in return. He is only distantly concerned that strangers ought to think that the three of them are a family when Miles feels so far from the concept.

Miles’ current residence is a ground floor apartment not all that distant from Edinburgh city centre. The building itself is old and, rather delightfully, retains a good number of its original features. While the view isn’t so interesting (he’s just too far out to spot any major landmarks) the building gets a pleasant amount of sun in the mornings, the sort of flood he assumes a dog would stretch out to bask in if he were to have one. It’s a fairly small place—open plan aside from the bath and bedrooms—but it has served him well thus far. Technically by still being here Miles is overstaying his initial welcome, but an intriguing murder under suspicious circumstances barely thirty minutes away means Miles is no longer just in the city to deliver two guest lectures on United States criminal law. He can only be thankful to the sweet lady renting the place out and the coincidental eleven day opening between his own booking and that of whoever is scheduled to stay here after he leaves.

“Always took you as more of a fancy hotel guy than an Airbnb guy,” Wright says as he puts a hand on his hip in the open entrance, effectively abandoning a suitcase on the doorstep. Trucy squeezes past him and spins around to take the whole front room in, skirt swishing with the movement.

“Where I stay depends on a multitude of factors,” Miles says. “Sometimes I stay in hotels.”

For some reason or another Miles feels a little self conscious under the scrutiny of the Wrights. The place isn’t his and he has barely been here for more than a week but even so it feels—looks—lived in. There are signs of life delicately scattered around which are so obviously Miles Edgeworth, when he thinks about them. He belatedly wishes he had properly tidied them away before leaving to meet the pair at the airport, though it hadn’t seemed necessary at the time. His case file sits still open on the coffee table and a not-quite-empty cup of rosehip tea has gone cold beside it. The sofa cushions are arranged comfortably around the dent he has clearly been sitting in and his scarf (a Steel Samurai scarf of all things—it’s discreet from a distance!) is hung haphazardly across the back of a chair at the dining table.

Miles clears his throat. “Shoes off at the door, please,” he says, and Trucy scurries over from where she has begun to wander to kick off her scraped white mary janes, then runs back again to throw herself onto the sofa. Wright bends down to tidy up behind her; her shoes are neatly placed together by Miles’ oxfords. When he stands again his back cracks loudly and he winces as he kicks off his own sandals. “Daddy’s getting old!” Trucy sings from across the room, and Miles abstains from informing her that his own birthday is not far behind Wright’s (so really she’s insulting them both) and the pair aren’t even thirty yet.

Wright goes to join her, depositing her backpack onto the floor as he does. It falls red panda down and Miles momentarily feels sorry for the poor thing. “Cosy in here,” Wright says. “It looked bigger from over there.”

“Yes, well.” Miles pulls the abandoned suitcases a little further into the flat so that he can shut the door. When he turns the Wrights are both staring at him in silence and he fixes his posture on instinct—a habit carved into him from youth. “I was only supposed to be here for five days, and alone at that. I would rather not spend excessively to stay somewhere large and extravagant on my own when somewhere like this is perfectly pleasant and homely. You’re lucky that there happens to be two bedrooms.”

Wright throws his arms out in front of him in some sort of shrug that looks almost as if he’s welcoming someone in for a hug. Trucy takes the opportunity to crawl the short distance to his lap and he wraps around her small frame. “Almost like you planned it, Edgeworth,” he says into Trucy’s hair.

“You caught me,” Miles replies flatly. “I committed murder in hopes it would convince you to come visit me in Edinburgh. I didn’t think you would crack the case in such a swift and efficient manner. Now I can only hope that you will help me cover up my crime.”

Phoenix smiles in that stupid way he does (the one that makes Miles feel a bit delirious) and asks, stupider, “Was that a joke?”

Miles has to look away to effectively push back against the the way his heart urges him into a fluster.

“Of course it was a joke, Wright. I’m almost offended that you would consider me even hypothetically capable of such a thing. It was also a segue”—Miles gestures to the papers strewn across the coffee table—“into you actually reading the case file.”

“Okay, okay, I surrender,” Wright says. “C’mon, Truce, big bad Miles says no more cuddles.” He places a kiss to the crown of her head with an exaggerated muah and she swings her legs over to the floor.

“You owe me, Mr. Edgeworth,” Trucy says, and gathers the papers on the table to tap them into a neat pile which will surely be haphazardly spread out again soon enough. Wright is still grinning as she presents the stack to him.

Wright settles into reading through the case as Miles pulls his laptop out and takes a seat at the small dining table by the wall. Trucy lies next to her father (upside down, legs up the back of the sofa and head dangling from the cushion) as she plays a game Miles cannot identify on a beat-up black Nintendo DS using a plastic pen cap as a replacement stylus. The only constant sound, for a while, is the little hum of its OST.

She abandons her game to clamber onto the chair beside Miles after an indeterminate period without conversation, and leans over to look at his computer screen just as he closes a new email containing several rather graphic photos of the victim. Bullet wounds, unsurprisingly, are not a pretty sight. “Mr. Edgeworth, what’s the case about?” she says, resting her squishy cheek against her fist.

Miles pulls his laptop closed ever so slightly. “I am unsure whether I should divulge to you the details, Trucy, though they are certainly curious.”

“Just cut back on the gore and it’s fine,” Wright says from the sofa. At some point he has lost his hoodie and produced a notepad, which he stops scribbling something down into as he speaks. “You’re smart enough to take on a mystery, right baby girl?”

Trucy nods enthusiastically. “I want to help too!”

Miles opens his mouth to speak then closes it again. He taps his nails against the table in a subconscious beat that he belatedly realises quite embarrassingly resembles the opening theme of Powerful Rangers: Rainbow Samurai.

“Seriously, Maya has told her stuff about cases we worked on together before, and at least half of magic is people risking their lives to look cool,” Wright says. He pushes the notepad from his lap and stretches his arms above his head in a large, uncareful motion. His shirt is too small. Miles wants to throttle him. “Maybe she’ll give you a new lead.”

“How irresponsible. Just a moment, then.”

“How irresponsible,” Wright echoes, and Miles can’t quite catch himself before he smiles at the remark.

Miles repositions his laptop so that he can pull up the victim’s profile, then shuffles his chair closer to Trucy’s and turns the screen so that she can see. Her eyes narrow in feigned concentration as she scans over it, quite clearly not reading but rather pretending to. “Your opening statement, please!” Trucy says after a few seconds. When she turns to Miles with a smile it, alone, is far bolder—far more unguarded—than he has ever felt. It makes him want to play along, so he does.

“Of course, Your Honour.”

“That’s Your Magicalness,” Trucy refutes, and scrunches her nose. Her inflection reminds Miles a little of Kay.

“Your Magicalness,” Miles corrects, and Trucy nods for him to continue. “The victim was a forty-two year old man named Casey Waters. His body was found along the coast about thirty minutes from here in Portobello, on a stretch of beach that is out of the way and hence less commonly used. Foul play was not immediately obvious due to the fatal wounds being covered by Mr. Waters’ jacket, though once these were discovered it was quite clear from the condition of the surrounding sand that the body had, in fact, been moved at some point after sustaining his injuries. Forensics later determined he had also swallowed a considerable amount of saltwater prior to his death, so it was initially assumed that he was dumped into the sea while he was weak and thereby washed up shortly after.”

Miles had been to the scene the day the body was discovered, and could have gleaned most of these facts—or lack thereof—himself. A sweep of the scene provided him and the local police alike with very little. No blood trail, no shoe prints in the sand, and hence no evidence of which direction the victim was brought from. Nothing particularly out of place with the body itself, either, aside from the inconsistency later discovered by forensics and the obvious lack of pooling blood. It had been so far from cut and dry that it almost felt nostalgic.

“Mhm,” Trucy hums. She seems wholly unfazed by it all, which Miles frankly finds quite disconcerting.

“The police’s prime suspect is the man’s father, seemingly the only party connected to the victim to possess a gun license, though he is continually denying that his son even showed up for their meeting that evening at all–”

“Were his clothes wet?” Wright interrupts.

“It’s in the file, Wright,” Miles says.

“Oh, it is?” Wright asks. He picks up the folder and begins to flick through the pages again.

Miles clears his throat. “Aside from the cuffs of his trousers, no, his clothes were not wet. However, the victim was not wearing footwear upon the discovery of his body, nor have any been found, so it is impossible to say if his shoes and/or socks were wet.”

“Maybe he did a quick change trick?” Trucy suggests. “But he forgot extra shoes.”

“Interesting. And what do you suggest he did with the original, wet clothing, Your Magicalness?”

“Put them in the sea?”

“‘The items of clothing Mr. C. Waters was wearing were analysed and only trace amounts of salt were found present on them, equivalent to that which occurs through prolonged exposure to coastal air as opposed to having dried after being submerged.’ Huh,” Wright reads aloud.

“Um, actually, Mr. Edgeworth?” Trucy says, arms crossed over her chest. She looks to her left in thought, almost as if she’s hesitant to continue. “If you know his body was moved, are you definitely sure he was found in the clothes he got hurt in?”

The suggestion borders on ludicrous. Changing the clothes of a dead person is difficult enough, particularly for a single person to achieve, but to recreate the blood splatter on top of doing so is an entirely different ballpark. “I am fairly certain that…” Miles begins, but he trails off as he flicks over the details in his head. Trucy looks back, pushes her hair out of her face using both hands, and raises her eyebrows at him, inquisitive, hope simmering in her big bright eyes.

And, oh, like father like daughter, Miles realises, because that is a rather Phoenix-like expression, which followed a rather Phoenix-like suggestion. Miles supposes he should have expected that she would pick up on some of Wright’s absurdities sooner or later. It is only logical that he would be a good influence, obviously. It should have been obvious.

Then, oh!

“Clever,” Miles murmurs.

He moves quickly as he turns his laptop towards himself again and clicks through to an evidence folder that includes photographs of the victim’s clothing. In quick succession Trucy leans into Miles to look at the pictures and he mutters my god at his screen and Wright slams the case file down onto the coffee table, which makes Miles jump and Trucy almost fall off her chair. Miles reflexively wraps an arm around her back to catch her and consciously pulls himself away the second she is steady.

Wright falters at the action for a split second, then shakes himself off.

“Trucy!” he half-shouts, also much in the way that she does, “You are the most beautiful, smart, incredible daughter in the world, do you know that?” Trucy absolutely beams at the praise, all ten-year-old toothy grin and huge sparkly eyes, and bounces on her chair with enthusiasm she cannot contain. It takes Miles a moment to notice that he is bouncing his leg under the table in a similar fashion.

“Edgeworth, could you have them analyse the tears in Waters’ shirt? I kept feeling like something was missing and I couldn’t put my finger on it, but that’s it. The bullet that was shot at point-blank went all the way through the guy, and the team assumed that it had been fired at him from the back, like the other two had. The gunpowder burn was on the back of the shirt he was wearing, but in the second autopsy yesterday they found that the bullet shot at point-blank actually entered from the front. He was killed in different clothes and someone, for some reason, tried really, really, hard to cover it up. My bet is that they wanted to make it look like the victim had time to go home and change after being spotted at some point earlier in the day.”

“My god,” Edgeworth repeats, louder this time. “Yes. Yes, of course, I’ll email them now. Additionally, I will add it to the agenda that we visit Portobello tomorrow morning in order to get a proper grasp on the scene with our new information—both that provided by the updated autopsy report and Trucy’s potential discovery.”

Wright insists Trucy pick their dinner as a reward for her hard work once Miles has concluded his email exchange with the local police sergeant. She decides on having Chinese food delivered, which Miles is semi-reluctant to accept (he would rather go out to eat, if he were treating himself), but once he bargains that they eat from proper plates instead of directly from the containers he settles. They eat on the couch while Trucy happily waffles about how she might be allowed to start doing magic shows at the Wonder Bar back in Los Angeles soon, but at present she has no assistant and her father says she’s not allowed to request the help of a ‘Mr. Gavin.’ Miles does not ask and Wright does not explain.

There’s a brief, sharp knock on the door just as Wright begins to wash up. “Gonna get that?” he asks Miles, who was about to propose a card game before Trucy goes to bed. “I suppose I am,” Miles says.

When he opens the door his sister is standing there. Trucy stares up at her from a short distance behind Miles, and happily waves a little hand. Franziska looks from Trucy to Miles, an eyebrow raised, and then back.

Hallo, Franziska mouths to her. She holds up a gloveless finger. One minute.

“Das muss eine Art Witz sein," Franziska says, deadpan. “Es sind zwei Tage.”

“Nein. Ich–” Miles starts, then, correcting himself, “No. I do not recall ever being the type to pull pranks, Franziska.”

Franziska half scowls at him. “And I’d say it’s rather uncouth of us to speak German with one another in the presence of our English speaking guests,” Miles says.

“I’m learning French at school,” Trucy asserts. “Not German though.”

Miles looks at her curiously. “Vraiment?”

“Oui,” Trucy says, and holds up both hands, fingers outstretched. “Pendant dix mois.”

“Depuis dix mois, since you’re still in the process of learning,” Miles gently corrects. “Pendant suggests that you stopped.” Trucy gives a determined little nod.

“Anyway, Miles Edgeworth, as I was saying: you did not inform me you were to have company so soon,” Franziska says. Her heels click against the floor as she walks past them in the entrance. “I assume that dastardly–”

“Hi, Prosecutor von Karma,” Wright says, wrists deep in a sink full of warm water. Franziska startles microscopically—unnoticeable to the untrained eye. Miles, of course, is not the untrained eye. “I know I can be a dick but dastardly’s a bit unfair.”

“I am not currently working as a prosecutor,” Franziska says, ignoring the additional statement. Her posture remains harsh and purposeful. Miles gives her a glare and she rolls her eyes at him. “However it is not entirely unwelcome to see you, Phoenix Wright.”

Wright huffs something that is almost a laugh and Franziska crosses her arms in a way that seems half-manufactured to hide that she is not dressed quite as formally—perfectly—as Wright is used to. She scans him critically; glances to Miles then back to Wright only to find that he had followed her gaze and is now staring in Miles’ direction. “Does Maya Fey know about this?” Franziska snaps.

“Does Maya know about what?” Wright asks. He turns to continue to absentmindedly scrub at a plate.

Franziska gestures at the room with one hand. “This, you insolent fool! This– predicament!”

Wright smiles, just barely, as if he is waiting to drop the punchline to a joke. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“It seems that my brother has foolishly flown you and your daughter halfway across the world at exceedingly short notice to ‘consult on a case’ and you are telling me there is no predicament, Phoenix Wright?”

“Yup,” Wright says. He pops the ‘p’ and Franziska hits the floor beside him with her whip. Miles scowls. “Franziska, I request that you do not damage the floor. This is not my property.”

“Be quiet! I am talking!”

Miles does, in fact, fall quiet. He moves to the sofa, crosses one of his legs over the other, and restrains himself from grumbling at being told off.

Franziska points toward Wright. “If there is no predicament already, there will be one soon. I will be informing Maya imminently, given my assumption you do not want to pay overseas telephone fees to call her yourself.”

“Since when are you on phone call terms and first name terms with Maya?” Wright asks.

“Perhaps you would be aware already if only you were to telephone her more often, Phoenix Wright. This is a tidbit of advice from another who cares for her.”

“You’re close with Miss Fey?” Miles cuts in. “I do telephone you often, and I too was unaware of this fact.”

“Hmph. You never asked.”

Miles feels his lips curl up, just a little. “Well. Please do feel free to keep me updated.”

Trucy taps lightly at Franziska’s arm as she opens her mouth to respond. Franziska spins around. Trucy glances at Wright, who pauses in the middle of drying his hands to give her a quick thumbs up.

“My apologies. I have been rude,” Franziska says. Her voice is suddenly softer, though not without direction. “I am Franziska von Karma. I did not expect to have interrupted your evening, for my subordinate over there had not divulged to me the details of your incredibly prompt invitation.”

She had mentioned a few days ago, briefly, that she is due to take her leave this evening. There’s really no telling when Franziska and Miles will end up back in the same country at the same time, which explains why she would pay another visit so soon. Her reason for departure, as Miles recalls, is something about following a lead back to the states and (less formally) something else about wanting to evaluate the legitimacy of now Detective Sergeant Gumshoe’s promotion first hand. Miles had started writing a text message to inform Franziska of his choice regarding flying Wright and his daughter over upon realising he had not given her specifics, but drafted it when he was suddenly informed that one accused Mr. Waters sr. had decided he wanted to share a piece of information he had previously been withholding and forgotten to go back to it.

“It’s nice to meet you!” Trucy says. Then, “You should probably take your shoes off.”

Franziska blinks down at her, baffled, then silently complies. Her boots add to the mismatch of lined up footwear at the door and Miles almost laughs at the sight—he sort of adores how everyone’s shoes look so strange as a little collective.

Franziska hovers near the entrance. She is wearing grey socks dotted with an assortment of small cats over the top of her tights, to which Trucy gives a miniature round of enthusiastic applause.

“You should sit,” Wright says. “We can play cards.”

“Do not attempt to tell me what I should or should not do, Phoenix Wright,” Franziska says. She does not move, instead choosing to glare over at Miles, who has gotten up to dry the clean dishes and return them to the cupboards. “This is why you had me learn the rules of bullshit,” she says. “I was your practice dummy. I do not know if I should be offended.”

“Don’t be,” Miles says. He opens the silverware drawer and it makes an unusual metallic rattling noise. “It was all in good fun.”

“Perhaps if you consider yourself losing every game fun.”

“Great! I’ll go get the cards,” Wright announces, and heads to the bedroom where the suitcases had been all but dumped earlier.

Franziska still does not sit, though she moves closer to Trucy and visibly considers doing so before she speaks again. She glances over at Miles a final time, then procedurally lowers her voice to something bordering on secretive. “Trucy Enigmar. Please bear in mind that my little brother is a ridiculous fool capable of ridiculously foolish tomfoolery. Do not expect me to be lenient enough to clean up after his mistakes, however if ever he causes yourself or your father distress please do not hesitate to get in touch. I will whip him into shape and I do not just mean that figuratively.”

Franziska does not expand any further on Miles’ foolishness, perhaps because she knows he is bound to be listening, but admittedly he has done a number of things that could be described in much harsher ways than ‘foolish.’ It’s difficult to determine if she is referring to anything in particular, even if his lackadaisically announced year-long sabbatical is the event that stands out the most. There certainly will be no repeat of that. Nonetheless, Trucy nods compliantly as her glance falls to the whip on Franziska’s hip. “Can I have your cell phone number then?” she asks.

Franziska is clearly unsettled for a moment, as if she hadn’t expected her hand to be immediately taken so gratuitously, however her expression quickly softens around the edges. “You may,” she says, and Trucy rummages in her backpack for a pink flip phone that must be at least the same age as the girl herself. There are several charms hanging from it—a white rabbit and the titular character from The Pink Princess: Warrior of Little Olde Tokyo among others—and Franziska efficiently inputs her contact details before passing it back. “I will have Miles Edgeworth foot the bill for any overseas telephone charges as further punishment.”

Wright enters the room again, then, intermittently flipping the pack of cards up and catching it again. “Using my daughter to conspire against me, Franziska?” he asks.

Trucy grins and Franziska takes the opportunity to rather dramatically sit herself in the seat Wright had been in earlier before he can reclaim it. Even so, there is a fondness lingering in her voice as she tells him, “Yes, something like that.”

Wright less than gracefully sits himself on the floor by the coffee table and beckons Miles to do the same. Their knees bump together as Miles joins him and it seems to uncomfortably reverberate through his entire body. If anyone notices the way he suddenly becomes far too aware of his limbs and tucks them unnaturally into his personal space as much as he can possibly manage, they do not point it out.

“Won’t sitting down here be harsh on your back?” Miles asks as Wright shuffles the deck of cards.

“I can look out for myself, Edgeworth,” Wright says, mild yet so twinged with bitterness that it could not be anything but genuine frustration.

Franziska looks at Miles with something akin to sympathy and shakes her head firmly a single time. Miles does not let the tension bleed from his limbs.

They do not play either game Miles already has a grasp of—instead Trucy explains to the group how to play palace, something that Miles has never even heard of. She demonstrates a round with Wright as her opponent when Miles fails to comprehend the verbal instructions, and even three games in he still does not quite understand how it is not just down to luck, nor how he seems to be the only player repeatedly having to pick up the discard pile. Wright wins two games, as does Franziska, and Trucy wins the rest.

After losing eight rounds Miles is, to put it lightly, frustrated. He’s not sure how many more losses he can stomach. “Trucy,” he huffs. “Do you know the rules of chess?”

“Sore loser,” Wright and Franziska say in chorus.

(The case is wrapped up officially on Tuesday evening, and they spend Wednesday afternoon at Edinburgh Zoo. Trucy jumps up and down until she wears herself out when she sees the red pandas, and even despite the drab weather Miles does not think he has smiled so heedlessly in years.)

Chapter Text

There are times in between. The first had been in Berlin, and Wright had insisted on forking out the money for his own travel, though Miles had still paid for Trucy to join him. With Miles’ assistance she had picked up bits and pieces of German amusingly fast, and Wright had been pleasantly surprised every time she understood something without Miles’ translation to aid her. Their following visit was in Montpellier: a somewhat ridiculous occasion where Miles had specifically been trying to take a break and the universe had chuckled and somehow wound him up (quite directly, as the last person to converse with the prime suspect) in a thievery-slash-murder across the street from his hotel. Its complicating factors had increased tenfold upon Miles’ request to assist in the proceedings, and he simply had not possessed the energy to get into the bones of it alone, no matter how interesting the circumstances. Besides, the company is quite worth spending his portion of Manfred von Karma’s fortune on.

Then there is Los Angeles, because part of them will always reside in Los Angeles. Miles is back to prosecute—a rarity these days—on the grounds that the case is related to one he worked on several years prior. He has been looking forward to it, even, despite the person he would like to see behind the opposing bench being permitted access nowhere in close proximity to it.

As it turns out, the defence is someone he does not recognise at all. That’s okay, maybe, because the accused is declared innocent anyway, and Miles can feel secure in the assumption that everyone carried out their investigation sufficiently and an attorney who is not the one he would like to have been up against did not fumble to the point of Miles sending an innocent woman to prison.

After the trial and Miles’ following meeting with the judge he stands alone outside of the courthouse and opens Wright’s contact. Though the moon is out already the sun is only just beginning to set, coaxing the clouds into a smattering of dusty pinks and oranges among the typical greys.

Miles squeezes the leather strap of his bag as if it’s a lifeline and consequently a split ring on his keys, carelessly looped around his index finger, digs into his flesh. Wright answers after the fourth painstaking ring. Only then does Miles let go.

“Edgeworth?”

“Good evening, Wright. Do you happen to be at home?”

“Uh, right now?” There is a quiet chatter in the background that quite plainly answers Miles’ question, but he waits nonetheless. He fiddles with a keyring using his free hand now; casually spins a small metal rendition of the fan typically wielded by the Steel Samurai between his fingers. Wright sighs into his ear. “...I’m at work,” he finishes.

“I see. Would it be possible for me to stop by for a short while? I’d like to discuss something, if you don’t mind.”

Wright hesitates again; a beat where there should not be one. Miles almost decides he should just hang up.

“You can’t tell me on the phone?”

“Ah, no. I would rather see you. I can come to your apartment later, if that is more amenable,” Miles says, and apparently he’s rather accidentally earnest, because Wright promptly rebukes him with a quiet no, no now is fine, and sends over the address quickly thereafter.

The Borscht Bowl Club is not somewhere Miles would typically set foot, though the name seems familiar for reasons he cannot quite put his finger on. The sun has almost entirely gone down during the drive over and the restaurant itself is set back out of the way; it’s likely difficult to find even in daylight if you aren’t immediately acquainted with the area. The sign outside is small, too, hanging over the door with a simple font in an inconspicuous dark grey. The name is repeated in Russian immediately underneath.

Nobody greets Miles when he enters, though a woman sitting at the bar peers at him over the rim of her glass and smiles. Phoenix catches it and follows her eyes in Miles’ direction, then stands up from the piano to wave him over. “Any requests?” he says as Miles approaches.

“Genuinely?” Miles asks, and Wright laughs quite inexplicably.

“I got a request,” says someone sitting near the piano.

“Song or otherwise?” Wright asks.

“Otherwise,” they say, and Miles looks curiously between the pair as Wright says, “Yeah, gimme fifteen minutes.”

“For?” Miles asks.

“To talk to you,” Wright says. “I’m on break.”

“Very well.” Miles glances around for a seat to take. Phoenix pulls one out from the table by him and Miles lowers himself rather stiffly into it. The patron after Wright’s non-piano services (whatever they may be) glares at him as he does, and he finds it rather difficult to remember anything he was planning on saying as a result.

“So,” Wright says finally, “I didn’t know you were back in LA.”

Miles nods a single time. “I am not here for long, unfortunately. I just finished prosecuting a case. My departure—ah, the reason I came to talk to you—I know it's rather last minute, but I was hoping that you would fly back to Europe with me on Thursday evening.”

Wright haphazardly plonks a few low keys of the piano without looking, something that vaguely resembles a G chord. Miles can’t tell if the piano is simply out of tune or if it had been played incorrectly, but Wright does not comment on his playing nor the offer, so Miles continues.

“You are already aware that I have been studying various legal systems across Europe, and an event like the one I am attending next week is quite effective for making proper connections. I was led to believe that you, too, were somewhat intrigued by the differences between, for example, Scotland’s legal system and Germany’s, so I would like for you to accompany me as a plus one. It could be a good opportunity for you to somewhat put yourself out there again within the legal world, if that happens to be something you would like to do.”

Wright laughs again and it’s this cynical, twisted thing, not quite his own. “You can’t be serious, Edgeworth.”

Miles furrows his brow and has to look away when Wright almost mirrors his expression. “Why on Earth would you think such a thing?” he says. “I believe I’ve made it quite clear how I feel about your circumstances.”

Wright picks up a bottle of grape juice from the crate on the floor that Miles has found himself staring down and inspects it briefly. “I have to get back to work,” he says.

Miles checks the time on his watch. It has not been anything close to fifteen minutes.

“At least consider it.”

Wright turns away from him on the piano stool and takes a swig of juice. “Might do.”

Miles receives a text message from an unknown number the same evening at two minutes past eight.

Hi mister edgeworth, it reads. Daddy told me about that thing and ive decided he is going

Miles stares at the screen as the three dots that indicate a message is being typed appear again.

He misses you i think since hes been all fidgety since he got home

I see. Before I respond to this message, may you please inform me as to with whom I am talking? Miles types back.

The response comes through immediately: Oh

Then another: Its trucy ^.^

Miles briefly considers asking just who it was that shared his personal phone number with her—only a few people he trusts have it, really—but abstains due to being presented with a much more favourable conversation.

I assumed as much, but thank you for confirming. Shall I get in touch with your father in regard to the details?

No!!! Trucy says.

Alright. Why would that be, if you don’t mind my asking?

When she doesn’t respond as quickly to this question Miles saves her contact number under her full name and puts his phone down. He goes to the kitchen and goes through the meticulous motions of brewing tea. It’s muscle memory to him by now. He picks out a packet of first flush Darjeeling, measures two grams into a strainer in a warm ceramic teapot, covers with boiling water, steeps it for four minutes, then pours it into a warm tea cup—his favourite, burgundy trimmed in gold, a stray piece from a long gone tea set that belonged to his father.

The steam fogs his glasses and the first sip he takes is too hot, as is typical, but the floral notes are exceedingly pleasant nonetheless.

We have a plan! the message he returns to reads. But we dont have money for the plane and stuff

What follows it is two attachments, five minutes between them, both stickers of small illustrated cats. The first has a thoughtful expression, and the second large pleading eyes.

Miles puts down his tea momentarily to type his response. Please do not fret. I will see that everything is properly arranged if you are to let me assist in your plan.

Ok thankyou! :D

Of course. It was my invitation, after all.

Then, fifteen minutes and an empty cup later: P.S. Your stickers are very cute.

Trucy responds swiftly with another little cat, this one with closed eyes and a big grin.

Miles finds out via a phone call the following morning that the ‘we’ in question had been not Trucy and her father but rather Trucy and Maya Fey. Their plan is as follows: with Miss Fey having already planned to visit between periods of medium training, Trucy has easy access to someone to care for her while Wright is away. She has, apparently, stayed in Kurain Village with Maya before, so as much will not be an issue of fear that the scenario will cause the death of either Trucy or Miss Fey herself. Miles is not entirely certain that the latter will not be arrested again given her unfortunate streak of such, but he opts to give her the benefit of the doubt. The pair will convince Wright that it is a good idea for him to attend the event using their self proclaimed masterful manipulation tactics (though Miles truly does not feel manipulation is entirely necessary), and usher him out to meet Miles at LAX on Thursday afternoon.

“Pearly and me want to have girls weekend,” Trucy had whispered on the phone, “and I love Daddy but he is definitely not allowed at girls weekend.”

“Together we will ensure you can participate in girls weekend,” Miles had told her, his best efforts to evade coming across too stiff registered as null when Trucy had laughed and said, “That sounded silly.”

It does seem that all goes smoothly, because when Wright arrives at the airport he is in good spirits—substantially better than Miles had anticipated in fact. The circles around his eyes aren’t quite as dark and sunken, and there is an almost odd spring in his step that threatens to rush Miles back to a time years prior. He is never filled in on what exactly had caused the turnabout behind the scenes, but it does not matter, because soon afterwards they are in Brussels and Los Angeles’ safety and certainty is long left behind.

They had arrived on schedule, everything objectively fine, and yet it had become almost excruciatingly obvious that during their previous excursions Trucy has been functioning as some sort of a buffer between Miles and her father where they are otherwise lacking or out of touch. The last two days have been far too quiet, for there’s so much to say that quite frequently nothing is said at all instead.

Given the current situation Miles is beginning to suspect that this evening is likely to be substantially more boring and stressful than he had initially anticipated, but he does not say—has not said—as much. He has been sitting on the edge of his hotel bed in his tuxedo since earlier than what was really necessary, and at present Wright is standing just past the open door to Miles’ hotel room’s bathroom ensuring that he is clean shaven before they head out. Miles does not even properly grasp the circumstances that meant Wright ended up getting ready in his room as opposed to the one across the hall. Something about a leak, though he isn’t sure if the man’s remark about the room above him overfilling their bathtub and the water soaking through the floorboards was in jest or not. He hasn’t really been able to think straight for the last fifteen minutes, since Wright had knocked three times on his door, shirtless for all to see, tuxedo thrown over his arm.

Miles has even less to say right now than what has been typical of their time in Brussels so far. He had only just managed to find the words to scold Wright for carrying his suit so carelessly (when it had been in a perfectly good garment bag before..!) as he snatched the clothes away without so much as a second of eye contact then shook them out to hang them until the man was ready to put them on.

Wright fills the lack of conversation in a way that feels precise and practised, like mortar between bricks, by softly murmuring the words to a song Miles doesn’t know under his breath. He vaguely makes out a line about a god complex and some sort of gun metaphor, then tunes the words back into meaningless static.

Frankly, Miles is not sure this was ever a particularly good idea to begin with. His decision to invite Wright was a somewhat spontaneous one, out of character for Miles and his usual meticulous planning, but Franziska had to cancel on attending alongside him due to unanticipated Interpol priorities and so he had felt as though it made sense at the time. Fate, perhaps, if Miles were to believe in that sort of thing. Retrospectively it seems a lot less reasonable, mostly due to the fact that Wright is leaving tomorrow and they have barely talked past the occasional exchange. Miles desperately needs to address the elephant in the room.

He wants to address it. He’s wanted to address it since before so much more to address stacked up against his favour. It is practically a Herculean task, though, for Miles to process the times he has repeatedly been broken down and built back up throughout his lifetime, let alone to talk about them. It is practically monumental if he can even concretely identify an emotion on a good day, let alone put words to it. Then there’s talking to Phoenix Wright, of all people, which is something else entirely. There are layers. Ones that must be peeled away so, so gently. I’m sorry for what I did to you. I’m sorry for what happened to you. I’m sorry I didn’t say it earlier. I’m sorry for making this about me, but do you know you tilted my world on its axis and saved me then saved me again? Do you know you might just be the most important person in my life?

It is not something he can undertake only in part.

Then: “...geworth? Miles?”

And Miles is snapped back to the present. He blinks slowly, once, then twice in Phoenix’s direction. There is a haze around his vision that only fades out when Phoenix tilts his head to the side ever so slightly and gives him a smile that is easy to mistake for a grimace. “You okay?” he asks.

“Perfectly fine,” Miles says. The quiet lapses again and he can hardly bear it. Everything that is not a voice is too loud; too distracting. “Thinking,” he adds, if just in an attempt to drown out the buzz of the overhead lights. When had those been turned on?

“Yeah,” Phoenix tells him. “You get this little extra crease between your eyebrows when you’re thinking really hard.”

This uncomfortably heightens Miles’ self-awareness. It’s as if something shifts and suddenly he feels like a bug in a makeshift terrarium with a magnifying glass focused in on him. He smooths out his expression and squares his shoulders. “I see,” he says, then notices, albeit very delayed, that Wright is now fully dressed, and finds himself momentarily disappointed that he had not been witness to fingers fumbling around too-stiff shirt buttons.

Miles stands, then reaches out instinctively and tugs at the shoulder of Wright’s jacket, readjusting. It’s ill fitting—frustratingly so—and not his colour. “This doesn’t fit you,” he murmurs.

“Only so many things you can do with a rented tux,” Wright says. “Tailoring not being one of them, if I even had the money for that in the first place.”

“If you ever need a new suit please let me get it tailored for you.”

Wright’s breath seems to hitch, just the smallest amount. It could be so simply explained away until he asks, shakily, with a trace but still somehow sickening bite, “Why would I need a new suit?”

Miles cannot quite find an answer. Wright steps back and it feels like rejection.

“They just called up to tell us our car is here,” he says.

“Oh. We had better leave posthaste, in that case.”

They are silent again, then. In the hallway, and as Miles takes off down the stairs at a marginally quicker pace than Wright does, and in the cab except for when Miles greets the driver in German instead of French then seems to forget every language he knows at once.

Almost immediately upon entering the hall the pair are intercepted by someone Miles knows—the daughter of one of Manfred von Karma’s acquaintances, now a respected scholar in German constitutional law—and Wright somehow falls comfortably into small talk with her while Miles makes a last ditch effort to decipher just why he is here. He stands awkwardly, less firm and more ungiving, and the woman asks Wright, “So what do you do for a living?”

Miles clenches his fists. Wright laughs like it’s easy. “These days I’m a pianist,” he says smoothly. “Ex-lawyer, but I’m sure you know how the career can be.”

She smiles, accepting, unknowing. “Quite the change,” she says.

“I guess the keys were calling,” Wright tells her, and Miles is flooded with a surge of anger so strong that he interjects to apologise and promptly drags his plus-one in the opposite direction to that which the woman had been walking before bumping into them.

Three more people within the next hour ask the same question; another two ask Wright and one Miles, in Dutch, and he lies then internally prays to a god he does not believe in that Wright has not coincidentally chosen to pick up Dutch classes in his post-law free time.

Coming out of the conversation he realises that this is worse than the stressful endeavour he had assumed it would be; it may actually be a disaster. Miles may actually disintegrate into the floor, he thinks as he tugs Phoenix further out of the way, then he realises this is not anger—no, his heart is beating too fast and his hands feel too numb. Consequently he strategically begins to do what he has been taught to do, and identifies five things he can see, four things he can feel. It is only here that he notices there is a drink in his hand, a rather cold one, and he has not even taken a sip of it.

“What is this?” Miles asks Phoenix.

Phoenix shrugs. “Just what they were handing out,” he says.

Miles drinks it all at once and abandons the glass on a nearby windowsill. It’s bitter and vaguely citrussy. One thing he can taste, he supposes, though it broke the order. Wright blinks at him, steely, but does not speak.

Three things he can hear, two things he can smell.

“I need air,” Miles says then, and takes off quickly towards the lower part of the room where the bar is, though the bar itself is closed and, as a result, relatively empty. Just past it is a door held barely ajar, an emergency exit leading to the staff parking lot, and Miles slips through it.

There is one other person outside, smoking a few metres away. They mindlessly flick their lighter open and closed with their free hand and Miles considers asking for a cigarette despite the fact that he has never been a smoker, but does not. Instead he leans back against the brick near the door just out of sight of the windows. The temperature must be close to freezing by now and the sky is an uninspiring dark shade of grey coated by a damp winter fog—the remnants of rain not quite fallen. The visibility is so low that the smoke from the stranger’s cigarette cannot be differentiated from the mist, yet when Miles looks for the moon and cannot find it he resents the revelation even despite its glaring predictability.

He realises then, under the lack of the moonlight, that Wright had not followed him out. It could mean a variety of things, really, most of which Miles is entirely unsure of the plausibility of. His immediate thought is that perhaps the man simply does not care enough about his mental shortcomings to get mixed up in the haze of Miles fending off a panic attack. Understandable. Miles would not want to be mixed up in the haze of himself fending off a panic attack, either, if it could be avoided. His ability to concentrate drifts, and he gets snappy, and nothing really helps except waiting for the feeling of static in his chest to pass.

The second thought is that perhaps the pair are not even close enough for it to warrant a little part of Miles wanting to have been followed out. Wright is his friend, he thinks (he hopes), but there is a level to it that is tightly wrapped. Hidden away. There’s a pocket of emotional vulnerability that was just on the border of being cracked open before state v. Enigmar, somewhere in the purgatory of either side of the most ridiculously hectic month of Miles’ life, yet it has since been pushed even further out of reach than it had been in the year leading up to it.

The third is the most logical, Miles tells himself, which is simply that Wright was confused, and unsure of what to do in the moment, and he will come looking shortly. If not out of care—of friendship—then merely because he has no other option.

What Miles does know is that he does not want to be here. What he does instead of leaving alone is go back inside behind the stranger after they flick the butt of their cigarette to the ground, coincidentally just in time to witness Wright trip down the short set of stairs to the bar level in front of a small group of prosecutors that Miles vaguely recognises a few of. Wright visibly tries not to topple over completely and succeeds, but despite his best efforts stumbles into one of the men watching the situation unfold. Miles is close enough to hear the resulting collective gasp and Wright’s immediate apology, but cannot see the damage from the angle he is observing from.

He steps in just as Wright starts to back up as if to leave, and takes him by the arm. “There you are,” Miles says. “I’ve been looking for you.”

This is not quite true and they both know as much, but Wright does not object.

“Miles Edgeworth?” the man says, his accent thick. Miles does not remember his name, nor is he entirely sure if he ever knew it. “Your partner here seems to think it is acceptable to come crashing into me then leave again, like a hit and run.”

“All the wine got on me anyway,” Wright says, deadpan, and Miles glances down at his shirt. It is, unsurprisingly, washed with burgundy.

“This should not matter,” the man says, his voice increasing in volume, and Miles realises that this interaction may never conclude if he does not take it upon himself to disperse it immediately. He grips Wright’s elbow a little firmer, then loops their arms through one another to free up his hands and reaches into an inner pocket of his jacket for a business card. He holds it out two-handed. “If you deem it necessary feel free to contact me in regard to your dry-cleaning bill,” Miles says, then turns both himself and Wright on their heel and makes for the lobby.

“What in the world, Wright?” Miles whispers once he decides they are an appropriate distance away.

“I tripped,” Wright whispers back. “I said sorry and everything. I’m the one covered in red wine!”

“So I see,” Miles responds.

“I think we should find somewhere out of the way,” Wright says. Neither of them make any effort to dislodge their arms from one another. “I need to recover from embarrassing myself.”

It’s an incredibly thinly veiled attempt at courtesy, Miles thinks, because between the pair of them it is clear that he is the one who has been entirely out of it all evening. You shouldn’t let it get to you, Miles wants to say, but instead he says, utterly nonsensically, “I’m perfectly fine, Wright,” accidentally saturated with something acidic.

Wright does not acknowledge it. “C’mon,” he says.

They settle outside of the foyer and wait for a car to take them back to their hotel as the wine, unfortunately, begins to dry into Wright’s shirt. They sit quietly with space between them in the cab, but when Wright rests his hand down on the centre seat Miles finds himself possessed to lay his fingers over the top, so he does. And maybe they have overlooked friendship, Miles thinks, and instead fallen into some unspoken and indistinguishable state in between strangers and lovers.

They stay until one dilemma (the wine) bleeds into another; Wright pulls out his cell phone not five minutes from the hotel to three missed calls from Maya and a text message from Trucy that Miles is obscured from by the glare of a streetlight over the screen.

Wright attempts to call Trucy immediately, and it is only when there’s no answer that he mutters, “Shit.”

A different brand of panic bubbles up, then, and it does not belong to Miles. “What time is it back home?” Wright asks. Miles glances to the digital clock on the car’s dashboard. “Almost four post meridiem,” he says.

Wright puts his head in his hands for a moment, then as if he realises he is running on limited time diverts his attention back to his phone, and tries to call again. There is still no answer.

“Edgeworth,” he says weakly. “You try.”

Miles reaches into his pocket only to find it empty and grimaces. “I must have forgotten to bring my cell phone,” he says, and Wright throws his head back against the car headrest with a muted thud. “I apologise,” Miles says.

When the car pulls up outside of their hotel Wright scrambles to get inside through the rain that has, apparently, become suddenly very heavy in the last fifteen minutes. They take the stairs up to Miles’ room (even still, even with Wright frazzled and anxious, even though it takes longer than the elevator would), and Miles swiftly picks up the phone that had been abandoned on the bed and dials Maya Fey’s number.

Trucy answers on the third ring. “Maya’s phone!” she says, and Miles does not answer but rather puts the call on speaker and hands it off to Wright.

“Truce,” he says on an exhale, and Trucy immediately switches the call to video upon hearing his voice.

“What’s up, Daddy-o?” Trucy all but sings into the device she’s holding. Her hair is tied half-up in a way Miles hasn’t seen her wear before, little bows decorating some sort of intricate twist on either side of her head. “Did you know Auntie Maya has every Steel Samurai series complete box set?”

Wright visibly relaxes, tension draining from him like someone pulled a plug. He practically falls back onto the plush of Miles’ mattress. “You okay?” he asks, not quite processing her question as he’s clearly trying to mask how frantic he had just been. “Not dying and nobody got arrested and Maya hasn’t forced you to stand under a freezing waterfall to see if you’ll gain spiritual powers?”

“Hey! I would never!” Maya says somewhere out of the shot. Trucy laughs and the camera shakes as she does. The picture on the screen is already somewhat pixelated, but it cuts into less definition for a moment every time Trucy moves too quickly. Miles supposes Kurain still hasn’t quite perfected the art of having good signal; they are quite remote, after all.

“She offered,” Trucy says, and Maya adds from the kindness of my heart in the background. Wright looks like he’s about to scold her just as Trucy clarifies, “But it was optional.”

The annoyance softens as if it’s melting. “I was worried,” Wright says.

“Sorry Daddy,” Trucy says. She gives him a little smile that could just as easily be teasing as it could be sympathetic. “We got the timezones muddled up.”

“So just to clarify, you didn’t stand under a freezing waterfall? Maya is used to it, but I don’t want you to get hypothermia.”

“So you’re perfectly fine with Miss Fey getting hypothermia?” Miles jabs. Wright’s eyes cut across to him just as Maya shoves herself into the frame, her hair tied in a similar fashion to Trucy’s.

“Yeah, Nick. What if I get hypothermia?” she says.

Trucy shakes her head in faux disappointment. “Not very kind of you to let Auntie Maya get hypothermia, Daddy.”

“How did we come to this?” Wright asks, exasperated, and Miles muffles a snicker with the back of his hand. Trucy catches it and smiles wide, her eyes curving into crescent moons.

“Anyway,” she says through a sparkly laugh of her own, rearranging herself to lean against Maya to properly allow her into the frame. “How was the party?”

“It wasn’t a party, Truce,” Maya says, and pokes her in the arm.

“Technicalities!”

Wright moves the phone away so that he can pan the camera down to his aptly ruined shirt.

“What the fuck, Nick?” Maya says, only to be simultaneously scolded by all three of the others on the call. She raises her hands in surrender. “Sorry, sorry! I’m so used to him getting hurt in dumb situations that my brain went straight to blood.”

“Red wine,” Miles clarifies. “He has quite the inclination towards ridiculous scenarios whether or not they involve bodily harm. I am thankful this one did not conclude with a visit to accident and emergency.”

It does mean a fee on the rented tuxedo, however, and Trucy says as much. Her father’s face scrunches into something akin to a wince. “Not sure how I’m gonna afford that,” he says, and as Miles goes to interject Maya does it for him.

“I’m sure Miles can cover it, right Edgeworth?”

“Maya,” Wright whispers harshly.

“I don’t mind,” Miles agrees.

“It’s fine,” Wright says, and Trucy narrows her eyes at him as he runs a hand through his hair. “If you’re sure, Daddy,” she says slowly, calculatedly, like she can see entirely through him, and when Wright says nothing she simply speaks again instead. “Oh! Pearly and I helped some of the girls here make the special Kurain strawberry desserts today!”

She steals the show after that—talks about baking and a pressurised can of cream exploding and some disaster involving a huge glass bowl and a melon. Maya jokes that it’s her fault for being there to oversee it (“Something always seems to go wrong when I’m in five feet of a kitchen,” she says), and Trucy tells her that maybe she’s been jinxed by the strawberry gods and Wright chips in to assure them that if anyone is cursed it’s surely him, given his string of bad luck.

“Well, I better make the most of my last day here, Daddy. And you need to get enough sleep to not miss your flight in the morning,” Trucy says eventually. Miles glances at the digital clock on the nightstand and nods.

“Yeah, okay,” Wright says. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“If I decide to give her back,” says Maya, and Trucy laughs, full and genuine.

“You know too well that I’ll fight you for her,” Wright quips, then he and Maya are laughing too, and Trucy asks again?! through the hysterics.

Miles shifts uncomfortably where he is sat; witness to a joke he is not privy to in a conversation he is not part of, and all he can think is have I been unknowingly closing myself off from their lives?

“Love you Daddy,” Trucy says as the giggles subside, “And you too, Mr. Edgeworth. See you soon!”

“Love you. Tell Pearls I said hi,” Wright says, and then the line is dead, and Miles’ cell phone is thrown across the bed towards him again, and Wright is stretching and standing up and saying thanks, Edgeworth, as if he is about to leave, and Miles will not let him do so.

“Wright–” Miles starts, and then his phone pings three times, rapid fire, with his only slightly obnoxious message notification sound.

The first message reads: is nick ok? he looked a little

Then: how can i put this

And then: awful

Miles stares at the screen, brows knit together. His thumbs hover aimlessly above the keyboard.

“Everything okay?” Wright asks.

“Yes. One moment,” Miles says.

I plan on talking to him, so please enjoy your day and do not concern yourself too much. I will let you know if anything significant occurs. Please give Trucy my regards once again.

Then another string of messages in quick succession:

sure

just like. go easy on him?

i know you’re both emotionally stunted old men and you don’t talk about this kinda thing much but i think stuff is taking its toll on him

so being away from trucy is probably harder

and he’s my best friend so obviously i’m gonna worry. if you hurt him i’ll kill you then channel you so you can apologise before your soul is banished to the nth circle of hell or whatever

then franzy will prosecute me for real and everyone will be so sad

or even worse winston payne

Miles huffs in amusement. He sends one final message that reads, …Indeed. and the marker indicating that it has been read appears immediately.

“Maya,” Wright says, not really a question as opposed to a request for confirmation. Miles nods. “Again, everything okay?” Wright repeats.

“Indeed,” Miles says. He does not elaborate; there is nothing to share.

“Cryptic.”

“Well.”

Then there is silence. Silence that has become so incredibly normal that Miles barely notices it’s there until Wright rocks his weight from one foot to the other; opens his mouth and closes it again; says, “...You were gonna say something before?”

Miles inhales through his teeth—functionally an audible wince—and digs manicured fingertips into the fabric of his trousers. Yes, he was. The silence was simply more comfortable.

Alas.

“How are you?” he asks dumbly.

Wright laughs. But it’s entirely different, Miles notices, from how he had laughed with Maya and Trucy. “What?”

Miles clears his throat. “Everything okay?” he echoes pointedly, and Wright raises an eyebrow at him.

“Yeah, all good.”

Not the answer Miles wanted, but he’s concurrently unsure what he had actually expected from such a vague question. He lifts a hand up to massage his temples as Wright stands stock-still exactly where he had been halted. The singular lit bedside lamp washes him in a cold glow and its accompanying harshly placed shadows feel like they are a threat. “I would like for us to talk,” Miles says.

Wright agrees immediately. He agrees like it’s absolutely nothing, like everything is entirely normal, like he does not feel as if he has the weight of the entire Atlantic Ocean pressing down on his shoulders.

“How are you so alright with it?” Miles asks weakly; the only thing that comes to mind.

“Talking?” Wright asks in return, and Miles shakes his head.

“All of it, Wright,” he says.

Wright must catch on, then, because he sighs and lolls his head to the side in order to look away from Miles at the edge of the bed. “How could I be anything other than fine with it?”

Rhetorical or not, this enquiry is entirely nonsensical to Miles, because he is absolutely not fine with it. He is anything but fine with it, and it is seemingly impossible to change the fact. There is nothing fine about law without Phoenix Wright, there is nothing fine about a courtroom that lacks even a whisper of the Turnabout Terror, and there is nothing fine about whatever Miles Edgeworth is trying to gather to salvage the injustice in quiet, on his own.

He has been staring and only notices when Wright finally looks back and says, “Do you think I had a choice, Edgeworth? Do you think I have a choice?”

Miles recoils slightly. “I suppose not.”

“Even if I wanted to, you know I had much bigger priorities.”

“Alright,” Miles says. He almost completely expects Wright to turn back and leave—would not fault him for doing so—but instead the man walks over to the bed and sits again, the mattress shifting under his weight, leaving Miles with only the expanse of his back to look at anymore. If Miles had actually wanted to talk before (he’s already forgotten if he really had or if he just felt obligated to do so), he does not want to any longer.

“I thought you wouldn’t like her, you know,” Wright says, then. He picks at a loose thread in the stitching of his trousers and Miles almost points out that it is probably not the best idea, given it’s rented, but the timing feels a little too awkward to do so. It’s ruined enough already, besides. He waits, instead, for Wright to continue. Lately he feels like he is doing so much waiting.

“I actually thought you might not like me, for taking her in.”

A wash of something horribly unpleasant seeps into Miles’ bones so slowly that it takes him a moment to notice that it’s there at all. Piece by piece he is thoroughly soaked with it; an awful concoction of guilt and uncertainty and regret; already staining.

“I apologise for giving you reason to feel that way,” Miles says softly. Wright stays quiet. He falls back into the sheets and throws an arm over his eyes.

“...If it is any consolidation, I do not think I have a bone in my body capable of disliking you,” Miles adds.

“Miles,” Wright says. He moves his arm from his face to look up at Miles through dark eyelashes, and Miles toys with the idea of looking away. The eye contact aches.

“Miles,” Wright repeats (and Miles holds). “I can’t keep doing this if you’re not going to stick around for good. I can’t keep having no idea if this will be the last time. I can’t let you string Trucy along for something that’s going to come to nothing.”

And here’s the thing: Miles has absolutely no idea what Wright is talking about. It’s frustrating—if not actually infuriating—that he has no idea, too, because Wright always seems to know exactly what Miles means at any given moment.

Phoenix sighs sharply, and in the end he is the one to break the eye contact. He redirects his glare from Miles to the ceiling; he mindlessly puts a nail to his lips as if to bite, then catches himself and runs his hand over his face instead. “I just need you to understand that I love her,” he says. “I love her so much, Miles. She’s my little girl.”

“I am aware of how much she means to you,” Miles says. He is fairly certain that this is true. Despite everything it’s fairly obvious that Wright would do anything humanly possible to keep Trucy happy and well fed.

“She’s my number one priority no matter what, and that also means I would pick her over you if it has to come down to that,” Wright says.

It clicks, then, that this is an ultimatum. A warning. And perhaps it should hurt that Miles is being told quite plainly that there are more important things at play, and that he will not be chased after forever, but instead he almost feels lighter for it. It’s simple. No more running—no more chance of running—or this is done.

So Miles gives the easiest response he ever could, and means it: “It will never come down to that.”

He leaves out, though, that he quite regularly receives invitations from LA’s chief prosecutor to resume a full time position prosecuting in the city. He leaves out that he never fails to assure Miles will always be properly welcomed back to the prosecutor’s office at even a moment’s notice, that really there was never a time where he had been considered out of it, and that he shall not be unless he formally insists. He leaves it out because it feels contradictory; leaves it out because it would simply be adding insult to injury to say any of this to Phoenix Wright, considering it demonstrates one thing loud and clear. I do not want to go back. At the very least, not yet.

Wright moves to sit cross legged. He faces Miles head-on in a way that is a crushing mixture of intimidating and intimate. “I need you, Edgeworth. I need to be able to trust you completely,” he says. “I need to know that you aren’t just going to up and disappear again. Do you know how fucked up that was?”

Miles sighs. “I do. I realise, now, that I made a horrible mistake in leaving you in the dark. It is not something I would dare repeat. You have me.”

Wright shakes his head. “I’m not just talking about that. Not just the whole… choosing death thing, even though, yeah, that was definitely the most fucked up time. You’re always running.”

“I am?” Miles asks before thinking, a little taken aback.

“Uh, yeah? Even tonight you ran, Edgeworth. You just left me standing there surrounded by people who felt like shadows of my past looking like a total idiot in this stupid suit that doesn’t fit me.” He shrugs off the jacket to reveal the full extent of the damage done to the shirt underneath. “I appreciate that you’re reaching out, and I get that you want me around in some capacity, but I still can’t even figure out how much you trust me. I can’t figure out how much I can rely on you when it seems like you don’t want to rely on me at all.”

And, for god’s sake. Of course Miles is running. Even when he doesn’t realise it he’s running. He is programmed to run, to distance himself in a subconscious attempt to lessen the blow of what is seemingly inevitable.

“You’ve been running for so long that I think all I know how to do anymore is chase you,” Wright says with a mopey little smile. It feels almost final—melancholic—and it stings. It sears its way through Miles’ flesh, burns at his organs.

“I’m sorry,” Miles says, but it’s not enough. “You have done so much for me despite my being so lacking in return, and I would like to make it up to you however I can. I’m trying.”

“I know you are,” Wright tells him. “And you’re not indebted to me or whatever, really, but just let me be selfish for once and promise me you’ll try harder to stay.”

“Wright–”

“Please.”

Miles clenches his teeth, takes a deep breath, relaxes. “I promise.”

And then it is late, and Wright has to be at the airport in five hours, and so he promptly leaves Miles’ room to return to the one that may or may not have had a leak in the ceiling. Miles brushes his teeth and changes into his pyjamas in a daze. He puts his head down despite a tiny nagging voice telling him that something is still not quite right.

He is almost expecting the soft knock that comes shortly after he closes his eyes, breaking him out of his not-quite-dreamlike stupor. It’s followed by a softer mutter of his name—a question muffled by the oak of the hotel room door.

Miles reaches an arm out in the dark to flick on the bedside lamp, unsure if the sound was something concrete or else something like hope bleeding through from his subconscious. Another gentle tap on the wood comes, though, and Miles gets up to cross the room and opens the door to Phoenix in front of him, again. (Again, again, again, always.)

“Okay, good, hi,” Phoenix says. “I thought you might be asleep.”

“No,” Miles tells him, which is not really the truth in its entirety, but specifics feel a little misplaced here in the half-light of a hotel room doorway at what must be almost three o’clock in the morning.

“Good,” Phoenix repeats, then shifts his weight back and forth as he scans either side of him in the corridor. “I just wanted to give you this now in case I forget before my flight. She would never forgive me otherwise.”

He leans in to lift Miles’ hand, balled into a fist, and manually unfurls his fingers for him when Miles does not think to do so automatically. Something is pressed into his palm—plastic, maybe, too warm from being enclosed within Phoenix’s fingers—and then the touch is gone again.

“Look after it,” Phoenix says, and Miles finds himself too drawn to the soft crease of his eyes and the tiny lopsided smile he’s given to even look down at what he is now holding. The way he is stunned is only amplified when he is told, quietly, unwavering, “We love you, you know?”

“Ah,” Miles says, and then Phoenix is turning down the hall and saying something like, Night, Edgeworth, and all Miles can do is stare at his back. Phoenix does not turn to look again, and so does not see the way that Miles stands still staring into the empty corridor long enough that the motion sensor lights turn off. Only then does he look at the trinket in his hand. It’s a bracelet made up of red and silver beads with a little white flower nestled in the centre. There is a note wrapped over it and secured with a tiny piece of tape he will have to very delicately cut off.

It says, so we can all match! love Trucy

Chapter Text

“Mr. Edgeworth! Did you miss me?”

Trucy practically skips into Miles’ arms outside of this trip’s apartment building, crashing into him with a hug that quite plainly says it’s good to see you.

Miles sees the scene from somewhere just outside of his own body more than he feels it. “It’s very good to see you, Trucy,” he says aloud, as much to reattach his floating consciousness to his flesh as to make up for the girl’s lack of saying as much.

“Trucy Wright. Officially,” Trucy says once she gives Miles one final squeeze and steps back. She flourishes her cape out to her sides as she bows, a loop of hair not quite securely tucked into the rest of it falling over her shoulder. It’s gotten darker as she’s gotten older—lost a lot of the red in favour of a somewhat less interesting brown—but there’s still strands of auburn pulled through it, caught nicely by the sun. Wright approaches from behind her with a suitcase in either hand as she rises back to her full height, and the taxi pulls away.

“C’mon, Trucy Wright Officially,” he says as if they have collectively declared it a title, and Trucy practically guffaws as she takes her own case from his hand. It is decorated with stickers—Miles notes the tiny Steel Samurai near the handle before he realises some of the larger ones are memorabilia from countries he had brought her to.

“I wanna change before we get dinner,” Wright says, and the group fall into step.

This time is the Wrights’ first visit to Vienna; it’s the first time Europe sees that Trucy’s cape is verging on a reminiscent shade of blue. It is also one of the peaceful times—the ones planned in advance, where there is no imminent case to solve, where a lecture can be attended and a trial can be watched from the gallery, and Miles can take the pair sightseeing and spend slightly too much money treating them to fine dining then obscuring the numbers on the bill.

Trucy is a few months into thirteen now. Miles had sent her a birthday present, though Wright had insisted it was entirely unnecessary. Most importantly she is also Trucy Wright officially, as opposed to just saying it to make a good impression.

(Miles had been told twice before today, or three times if you count the time before it actually happened.

The first was the worst, though he had tried so hard for it not to be. It was prompted by a call to Wright initiated by Miles himself—generally the only kind that takes place at a reasonable hour for the both of them—and casual conversation, or at least as casual as it can be for the pair. Something like an update on Wright’s jury system proposal and its usual following bickering; a rally of suggestions; tweak this, reword that. Miles sharing that an academic journal had agreed to publish a paper he has been working on once it has been proofread and peer reviewed; Wright telling him, if you’re asking me to peer review your article I should probably tell you I don’t think they would consider me qualified at the minute; the way Miles noticed the cynicism had started to drain from Phoenix’s laugh, his old self bleeding through more these days, little by little. Miles asking how Trucy’s parent-teacher meeting the previous week went and Wright singing her praises in turn. Then, with a punch to the gut which Miles knows, he knows should not have registered as such whatsoever: “I’ve been thinking of asking if she wants me to officially adopt her.”

Miles might have said something to that. Perhaps a sorry? or an oh! or otherwise some strangled noise of surprise. He doesn’t remember.

“Just—it’s been on my mind for a while, but I don’t want her to think I’m convinced Zak’s totally out of the picture for good or anything. I’ve been putting it off because I’m kinda worried it might scare her or something, but her birthday is coming up, so… I don’t know. I was thinking it might be a good time. Or a long time coming.”

“I am certain that she knows you love her either way.”

Through the receiver had come a faint drum of uncertain fingertips on wood, and, “Yeah, I think you’re right.”

Miles had gone to bed immediately afterwards and stared at the ceiling for forty minutes in the dark, unfocused, thinking too much and yet not at all, until he was too overwhelmed to even get back up and double check that he had locked his door. He had drifted off shortly thereafter only for his sleep to be permeated with oddities (not quite nightmares, but something in a similar realm), only to get up at six minutes past four and discover that the door had, in fact, been left unlocked.

The second was a text message, woken up to at a reasonable time on a Wednesday morning roughly three months later: she cried.

The third was also during a phone call, though one with Trucy herself. A call to organise this visit, no less, and to allow her to have a say in the itinerary. She had wrapped up the call, then after saying goodbye had quickly interjected with, “Oh, wait, Mr. Edgeworth! You heard I’m officially Trucy Wright now, right?”

Miles could hear the smile in her voice as she said it so he told her, I did, and gracefully left out the staring-at-the-ceiling-for-forty-minutes debacle for Trucy’s sake as much as his own. “It would be rather inconvenient if the name on your boarding pass didn’t match that of your passport, wouldn’t it?”)

“It still feels novelty,” she tells Miles as she climbs the stairs beside him, her father likely ahead of them both in the elevator. She had fobbed her suitcase back off on him in the foyer after about twenty steps at most, with some remark about Miles getting lonely on the long walk up to their floor. “But good novelty.”

And here’s the thing: she has been introducing herself as Trucy Wright, not Enigmar, not even Gramarye, for five years. Why on Earth should it still feel novelty when surely she has grown accustomed to it—grew accustomed to it a long time ago?

Why on Earth is Miles not used to it?

Perhaps it’s that he isn’t sure how he would have reacted, had it been suggested he change his name to von Karma. Perhaps it’s that he cannot imagine a world in which he would have agreed and not regretted every second of it; perhaps that he’s a little glad that it was never even on the table. It’s interesting to be considered unworthy of a name you’ve always considered less important than your own.

Despite the initial frost of unease, the evening is kind. It unlocks something in Miles to see Trucy and Wright together again like this; it’s soft, warm, too mild for the crystals of ice to linger. It’s something that is reminiscent of receiving candy in the likeness of an attorney’s badge on Christmas morning, or like Miles’ head resting against a shoulder while a rerun of Bake ‘n’ Bop plays on the television and his father hums along to the jingle that plays before the advertisements run. And to share a name is something loving, Miles realises, thus just as much as he must remain Miles Edgeworth it is all that makes sense for Trucy to become Trucy Wright. (Officially.)

Miles goes to bed happy.

But then there is a gun in his hand, raised as if to shoot or as if just shot, and it’s hazy so he can’t quite tell where he is or who the person slumped in front of him could possibly be, but he has a sickening idea nonetheless. Part of the metal clicks lightly as his hands tremble, and Miles inexplicably tries to apologise but his words are non-existent; his voice is replaced by what could only be described as the wail of a child overcome with terror. His face is wet, he realises then, and the hand that is not gripping a stranger’s pistol is as well. The liquid is too deep a shade to be water, even in the dark blur—no, it’s blood. A breathless sob breaks from Miles’ lungs so harshly that it is physically painful.

Then he is awake, still in a bed he has not slept in before in a city he does not often visit, crying hard and full, and he can’t quite take an entire breath in to take an entire breath out. He shakily sucks in as much air as he can and holds it there for something other than complete, overwhelming anguish to focus on until it burns, until he physically cannot hold it any longer.

When he finds it in himself to open his eyes again the clock reads 5:32am. And okay, yes, that’s fine. He can get up and have his morning tea and specifically not think about killing himself like he still would have done five or six (or seven, et cetera) years ago, and it won’t be so unreasonable. It’s fine that his hands still shake as he slowly pours boiling water into his cup, fine that there’s still a dull ache in his chest that he hasn’t felt in months and isn’t quite quelled by the warmth of Ceylon.

Trucy emerges on tiptoe, barefoot, just before six. “You’re up early, Mr. Edgeworth,” she says, hushed, her face wholly unreadable in the half-light.

“As are you,” Miles responds, quiet himself and voice far shakier than he had anticipated it sounding. Trucy hesitantly nods from the doorway.

“I’m still not very good at sleeping in new places,” she says, and Miles nods back in understanding.

There is an awkward pause. Miles stands stuck where he had paused upon hearing the tiny patter of feet on hardwood, teacup still in hand and tremor still not entirely settled, until Trucy asks, “Do you have coffee?”

“Your father lets you drink coffee?” Miles asks.

“Usually only decaf, but if you only have regular coffee it can stay between us,” Trucy says, bouncing back up onto her toes and down again. Miles stares at her blankly, then she holds out her hand, pinky finger outstretched, too far away for Miles to even consider accepting it. Her voice falls to its previous hush as she adds, “I’m really good at secrets.”

“...I did not buy any coffee.”

“Oh,” Trucy says, dropping her hand, and pouts a little. “I guess it’s not like we gave you a shopping list. Shame I can only make stuff disappear for now.”

“And a shame I am not much of a coffee drinker,” Miles agrees.

Trucy crosses the room and opens a couple of the cupboards that are low to the ground to survey their contents. One is bare, bar a single box of cereal too sugary for Miles’ tastes, and the other contains a collection of glasses. “Can we go to the store?” Trucy asks, though it’s directed mostly into a shelf of wine glasses and champagne flutes as opposed to towards Miles.

“No local stores open until eight,” he says, and Trucy huffs, almost defeated. “Though if you would like to, we could go on a walk—there is a park nearby—and then visit a local café when it opens at seven thirty. I heard good things about their baked goods from a colleague.”

“Perfect!” Trucy says, her enthusiasm characteristically unbridled, and closes the cupboards with what is definitely a little too much force when considering that one of them holds an abundance of glassware.

Trucy half skips as she and Miles walk together. She will occasionally loop her arm around his to make sure their steps fare in tandem for a little while (and to discreetly let Miles properly lead the way) until she gets distracted by something-or-other and dislodges herself to point it out or run a few steps ahead.

By now they have lapped the park and are walking down the village’s main street to the café, prompt for its opening, and as such this time’s sidetrack goes like this: “Oh, a magic shop!” Then a brief jog up to the door only for Trucy to sink into herself a little upon realising that the little ornate sign hanging in the window reads ‘closed.’

“Can I pick the lock? I’ve been learning how to do that recently,” she asks Miles, punctuating it with a smile and a classic little bounce on her toes.

“Absolutely not,” Miles says, and receives a small disgruntled huff in response.

Trucy begins to walk backwards then, to face Miles, hands linked behind her as she talks. “Did you know, Mr. Edgeworth, that Vienna actually has quite a rich magic culture?” Her voice is put-on a little at the end, and Miles suspects she may be doing an impression of someone. It briefly crosses his mind that this someone may, in fact, be him.

“I did not,” Miles informs her. “I am not particularly clued in on whatever it is that magic culture may entail, generally.”

“Have you heard this before? Zaubern müsste man können.”

Miles looks into the window of the shop as he walks past it himself. It’s a tiny, sort of whimsical place, decorated in bright blues and golds. There is an older man inside who appears to be preparing to open for the day, unpacking and rearranging smaller props onto a shelf behind the checkout. “I don’t believe I have.”

“It means–”

“One should be able to do magic,” Miles interrupts.

Trucy pauses walking for a second and looks up, confused. “I forgot you speak German,” she murmurs, then falls back into her step. “It was said by this Austrian guy who did children’s TV in the sixties and it became a kind of famous quote. I think he meant it more like, ‘wouldn’t it be great if you could really do magic?’”

Trucy glances back over toward the shop and waves at, Miles presumes, the shopkeeper in the window. “He also made a lot of people think magic was for kids, though, which is annoying,” she continues, unfocused.

“You are a child and you do magic,” Miles says.

“I’m a teen now”—Trucy throws her hands out in front of her—“and one child doing magic doesn’t mean magic is for kids.”

Miles opens his mouth to agree with her in earnest but is just not quick enough to get it out, as in what appears to be slow-motion Trucy trips, stumbles one, two steps, and flies backwards to land on the concrete with a yelp and an awful sounding thunk that Miles is fairly sure he somehow feels reverberate through his own bones. A small calico cat with its ears pinned back in surprise darts out from behind her as all of this happens and Trucy looks from the feline, to Miles, and back again in complete silence.

She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. Miles almost frantically walks the few steps between them and crouches down beside her. He tries to subdue the panic in his voice when he asks, “Trucy? Are you hurt?”

Trucy’s eyes squeeze shut a little bit tighter. Another deep breath, shaky this time in a way that Miles only manages to catch because he was listening for it.

“Can you stand?”

A quick shake of the head. “Gimme a sec,” she says quietly—strained—then tilts her head back. Miles places his hand softly over hers. She takes it immediately, rather to his surprise, and squeezes hard. “It’s okay, just gimme a sec.”

Miles nods, but registers only after the action that she could not see him do so. She does not open her eyes again until the ball of black and orange fluff quietly approaches the pair again. It pauses as if to consider before it rubs itself against Trucy’s arm and makes a noise which is indisputably more of a chirp than a meow. Trucy sighs as she looks down and extracts her hand from Miles’ to give it a scratch behind its singular white ear (the left). “I guess we should both be more careful in the future, kitty,” she says, her voice just slightly wobbly.

The cat flops onto its side with a meow—a proper one—and then breaks into a low hum of purrs. “I hope I didn’t hurt you,” Trucy says. She moves from sitting fully on the ground to a deep squat, her pets only pausing for a second as she silently evaluates her pain and winces. “I think I’m going to have a nasty bruise or two but we can call it a truce.”

“You’re certain you’re quite alright?” Miles asks, attempting to evaluate Trucy’s expression. He finds nothing of particular use there.

“Yup, Wright as rain.” Her smile seems a little more like a grimace, Miles thinks, but then she gestures down to the cat just as it rolls over, rubbing its head against the pavement, and he follows her prompt automatically. “Hey, look, she’s sad you’re ignoring her, Mr. Edgeworth.”

Miles looks from Trucy down to the cat. She seems perfectly content, in his opinion, but nonetheless he says, “Hello.” He tentatively reaches his hand out to give a light scratch to her back and she rolls back over again. “I do not think she likes me,” he says, concern obvious in his tone.

“If at first you don’t succeed..!” Trucy sings.

They err on the side of caution when they leave her behind, and go slower the rest of the walk (after Trucy very effectively persuades Miles that she definitely does not need to immediately go back to the apartment) until they reach the café.

Trucy leans against the counter as she scans the menu and Miles waits quietly until she makes a decision. The woman who takes their order is older—patient and sweet—and she watches Trucy softly humming to herself. She speaks quickly in German as she writes down the duo’s order and Miles has to inform her that Trucy only speaks English, fluently at least, at which she apologises and tells Miles that his ‘daughter is cute like a bunny.’ He does not correct her; he politely says thank you then goes to sit by the window where Trucy has already claimed a table.

“Mr. Edgeworth, I’ve been wondering something,” Trucy says fifteen minutes later as she leans forward to sip her cappuccino (decaffeinated, for Wright’s peace of mind), and Miles waits patiently for her to share what’s on her mind. He tears off a piece of his croissant. “And you don’t have to answer but—why do you take your glasses off so much?”

Miles stalls immediately with the bite of pastry halfway to his mouth. He blinks wearily at Trucy, who is admittedly a little fuzzy in his vision when it comes to the details, and puts his other hand over the pair of glasses on the table. By the time he has fully comprehended the question he has already hesitated too long for a lie to convince even someone who does not have some sort of lie detecting gift. His options are limited, then: he can tell the truth and hope she does not see it foolish, or tell a lie and hope she does not point it out.

Miles opts for the former. The latter would likely conclude in the same way anyway, ultimately.

“Two main reasons. Firstly, it does not fit with the standard of perfection I was raised to encompass. Secondly,” Miles tries, then takes a staggered breath, and Trucy makes a curious little noise.

“Secondly, I look… a lot like my father when I wear them.”

He can feel that Trucy is swinging her legs by the way the table subtly shakes as she rests against it. “What do you mean?” she asks.

“Just that,” Miles says. “I look a lot like my father, and it can be– it can be somewhat overwhelming.”

“Was your daddy not very nice?”

“No, no. That’s certainly not it. He was a wonderful man, from what I recall. From what I’ve heard from others. I wish I had gotten more time with him.” Miles has gotten a lot better at this (the talking about it) in the last five years or so, in part thanks to Fender, but nonetheless he runs his thumb up and down the length of his index finger—soothing, distracting—as he speaks. Trucy’s eyes fall to the motion briefly. “It’s merely that I lost him when I was young under quite harrowing circumstances, so the reminder can be less than ideal when I am not anticipating it.”

“Oh. I get it,” Trucy says. Then, “Well, I don’t really.”

Miles finds himself quite refreshed by the straightforwardness of it. No empty words of sympathy he doesn’t quite know how to respond to, no odd comments about how he must have been so brave to have gone through such a thing (when in reality he had misconstrued, he had ruminated, he had suffered, and he had dreamed and dreamed and dreamed). No, now something within him unfurls a little and he finds it in himself to laugh, which in a moment of vulnerability is exceedingly unusual. Trucy grins back.

He has to remind himself, from time to time, that he is not the only person in the world to have lost a parent—far from it, in fact. It is not so much a lack of empathy as the way the concept of losing his father has felt so all consuming for the last twenty-some years that it occasionally seems that it’s the sole thing that defines both Miles himself and the world surrounding him. There is a lightness around him in this moment, however, in the way that he is forever growing older and will continue to do so for longer than he had imagined ten or twenty years ago. In the way that Trucy says oops! and snickers at him as he shifts in his chair and accidentally nudges her foot with his own as he crosses one leg over the other. Then in a recollection of himself aged eight, sitting across from his father in a café much like this one (though in Japanifornia, as opposed to halfway across the world), sipping a cup of milky breakfast tea with one sugar.

“I have always thought that you and I are relatively similar,” Miles admits. “After I lost my father I was taken in by someone who was related to the case. He was the man who mentored me—that is, the man who steered me down the path of becoming a prosecutor. For better or for worse, he shaped the person I am today.” Even he and Franziska don’t talk about Manfred von Karma often, so Miles supposes this, if any, is a good opportunity to tack on, “He was a man of a particular renown, though as it turns out, he was not particularly nice, if I were to simplify it. Nothing like your father at all.”

Miles doesn’t have it in him to tell Trucy how his brain had twisted her own situation to fit the narrative of his own life, at first, but he thinks it may be implied. The fear he had felt upon meeting her for the first time; how he had barely been able to recall the finer details of the occasion by the time he was on his flight early the next day. It’s not something she needs to know the extent of. It’s something that added to the ever growing Miles Edgeworth’s Reasons to Feel Guilty catalogue he might never quite be fully suited to make amends for but is increasingly attempting to become content with the existence of.

Trucy stops kicking her feet and flops her head against her hand to prop herself up. A small line creases between her brows as she thinks. “I guess we switched. You went from a good daddy to a bad one and I went from an okay daddy to a better one,” she says after a moment. “I think I got the better deal. Sorry, Mr. Edgeworth.”

Miles does not criticise the implication that he ever truly saw Manfred von Karma as a father figure. Instead he takes a sip of his tea, leans back in his chair, and asks something he would not have had Wright been here to bear witness: “Do you ever miss him? Your biological father?”

Trucy hums quietly and Miles worries, just for a moment, that he is being far too invasive towards something a lot fresher to Trucy than his memories of his own father are. Admittedly he has never been overly good at identifying the boundaries of what is or is not socially appropriate.

Thankfully, as it turns out, Trucy doesn’t seem to mind. “Sometimes,” she says, intonated like it might be a question. She smiles up at Miles and it seems odd, though perhaps not as out of place as he thinks it probably should. His mind drifts to the creed Wright’s mentor had passed down to him, something about forcing your biggest smile at the most difficult times. Trucy looks away and starts to swing her legs again. “But I know he’s alive, and if he wanted to come back he could find me really easily. I’m pretty sure he just never cared that much, at least not like Daddy does. Sometimes I feel like I would have made him leave at some point no matter what.”

“You would have..?”

“It was my fault, I think,” Trucy says, all too casually. Miles takes a sharp breath in and subconsciously scrunches his face up a little. He digs little crescent moons into his palm under the table to force himself to keep from drifting. He focuses on each point of contact, counts down from five as he does and then up again.

“I got in the way a lot, and cried too much at the bright lights and loud noises because I didn’t know how not to yet. And I was hard to lie to because I knew all of his tells. He tried to lie a lot, especially after my mom disappeared, and it took me a long time to learn that I’m not supposed to say every time someone lies.”

“Trucy,” Miles says.

“So then I tried my best to just be helpful or entertaining because that’s when he would pay attention to me, and be nice to me, and when I wasn’t being either I wasn’t really being anything. Sometimes he would forget about me for a little while, and that was okay because I could take a break. And then eventually I helped him disappear in the trial about my grandpa, too. I guess I saw it coming and didn’t try hard enough to keep him around.”

“Trucy,” Miles repeats, and Trucy looks back at him. He picks up his glasses from where they rest on his handkerchief; unfolds them and turns them over in his hands; considers. “Have you told your father all of this?”

She shakes her head. “I don’t want him to think it’s his fault that I still think about it, or that he could have made things different. He can be a little…” Her voice trails off.

“Firstly,” Miles speaks slowly, “I know our circumstances differ, and that perhaps you do not know all of the details of my youth, but you should know that I also thought that way for a long time. I lost so much time believing that the misfortunes of my childhood were my own doing. Please don’t fall down the same path. You were so young. You still are. Do not blame yourself forever.”

He puts his glasses on.

“Secondly, perhaps you should tell him. He is a lot more understanding when it comes to these things than you may give him credit for—he had to deal with me, after all,” he says, and Trucy smiles at him in a way he might not have been able to see without the aid: small and lopsided. Genuine.

“These days I mostly feel lucky that Daddy was there to pick up the slack,” Trucy says. “And he loves me, properly, even though he’s way worse at helping me get better at magic tricks. You might tell me it’s just because I’m older, but I think I feel more like Trucy now than I did when I was seven.” Trucy picks at her pastry in the same way that Miles has noticed Wright is inclined to. “Maybe he should know that,” she adds, and Miles hums in lieu of a proper response.

He thinks she’s lucky, too.

Wright has continually demonstrated that he would go to the ends of the Earth for Trucy. She is at the centre of everything he does, every decision he makes. It’s obvious even to an onlooker that they had both saved each other in some way or another, back then. Miles knows Phoenix, and by extension knows the extremes he is willing to seek out for the people he cares for and the extent he is willing to go to for justice, even if it means putting his life on the line. He had been the one there to pull Miles from the dregs of guilt that he could never quite wash off—the one who believed in him from the very beginning. He is a brilliant father, and a brilliant friend. Just as Trucy is a brilliant daughter, and more than that a brilliant young woman. It’s difficult to say if she gets it from him or vice versa.

Miles will be there for the both of them in turn, even if it crushes his fragile heart to metaphorical pulp.

“Uncle Miles,” Trucy tries, her voice caution riddled, and it drags Miles back to the room as though she had grabbed his hand and suddenly pulled. She pops a little (possibly celebratory) forkful of apple strudel in her mouth at his lack of physical reaction then says, before swallowing, “Do you miss your daddy?”

Miles takes a deep breath; taps at the side of his tea cup. His answer is much simpler.

“All the time.”

Trucy hits his leg gently with the toe of her shoe. Miles can’t quite work out if it was purposeful or not, but when he looks up to meet Trucy’s eyes she says, resolutely, “He would be happy that you look like him.”

Just then, the door leading to the back room swings open at an alarming pace and hits the counter behind it. Miles looks over, Trucy does not—not in time to see the scene before the door closes again with a jarring thud.

“Christ,” Miles murmurs. He stands almost automatically and steps in front of Trucy, crowding her closer to the wall.

On the other side of the café the older woman who served them is now babbling in a panic. She wipes the blood on her hands off onto her apron then looks up and makes eye contact with Miles. Fear is blatantly plastered across the way she carries herself but becomes even more obvious when she falls back against the door she came through, closes her eyes, and mutters something that Miles cannot quite hear but looks awfully like bitte, nein.

Miles considers up and leaving for Trucy’s sake, but no, that won’t work. Including the two of them and the panicked worker there are now only seven (living) people in the building, so if this scenario turns out to be anything like the one Miles has quickly configured in his mind the local police are bound to see something suspicious in his fleeing. Instead he turns to the petrified looking man who has practically only just sat at the table closest to them, seemingly the only other person who has noticed as of yet. “Deutsch? English?” Miles asks.

“English,” the man murmurs, barely taking a moment to glance over at Miles. “I don’t know what’s happening.” Another patron seems to have noticed by now that the situation is quite dire, and is gathering their belongings in a blatantly swelling panic. “I don’t know what’s happening. My German is–”

“Just take everyone outside,” Miles tells him. “Do your best to not let anyone leave until the police get here. I’ll follow you in a moment.”

“Uncle Miles,” Trucy whispers from behind him, and Miles is startled at the sound of her voice despite the gentleness in it. “I don’t think she did it.”

Miles does not have time to ask her to elaborate at present, so he does not. Instead he asks, “Do you feel safer staying with me or going with the others?”

“You,” Trucy says without leaving a single beat to consider. “Besides, it wasn’t her.” She takes a deep breath, then adds, “Do you want me to call the cops?”

Miles looks between Trucy and the worker, tight lipped. The woman in question is now hunched over against the back counter, shaking, one foot pressed up to the door at the floor in what appears to be an attempt to stop a hypothetical person on the other side from crashing through it. “I feel inclined to trust your judgement, so yes, please do. In the meantime I will attempt to… calm our acquaintance’s nerves.”

Rather to his own surprise, Miles manages to do just that before the police arrive on the scene sixteen minutes down the line. The woman—Adeline, he comes to learn through his efforts to ground her—is back to being relatively comprehensible (though her hands still shake) by the time she is led out of the establishment by a policewoman whom Miles assumes to be around Franziska’s age.

Once they are safely outside Miles’ relays his details to the authorities in case of the event that they would like to call him in for further questioning, and then Trucy says, “I guess we should get back to Daddy, huh?”

“We should, however…” Miles holds out his arm for Trucy to link with her own, and she takes it without question. “I would like to buy you a souvenir first. One of the magical variety, if that sounds amicable.”

“Oh! Are you sure?”

“Of course. The store I disallowed you from lockpicking should be open by now, and perhaps we will bump into our apologetic little friend again on our way.”

“Hopefully not literally this time.”

“Indeed.”

They do bump into the cat again, though she shows herself in a much less dramatic sense, lounging in a plant pot outside of the shop. She stretches out and makes a little noise when she sees them approach, but promptly repositions herself into a neat loaf and stays put among (on top of) the flowers.

A little golden bell above the door chimes as they enter, and the shopkeeper looks up from a newspaper he has spread over the counter. Trucy greets him and punctuates it with a polite bow (in part for the showmanship, Miles is sure), and the man forgoes a hello to ask, “Did you notice my Maus outside?”

“Mouse?” Trucy says. “No mouse, but there is a cute little cat.”

The shopkeeper chuckles. “Maus, die Katze. Maus is her name. Is she in her flowers?”

“Yes,” Miles says. “We had a bit of an incident with her earlier, actually, however I hear all has been resolved between herself and the affected party.”

Trucy giggles and Miles feels himself light up a little at the sound.

“Ach, a troublemaker, I know. My husband says she was designed for mischief. Even so, she is charming. Anyway, do not let me keep you from browsing! Let me know if you need anything.”

Trucy spins on her heel to make for the back of the store. Slightly bigger, more intricate props are lined up on a high shelf and she pushes herself onto her toes then balances on one foot in an attempt to get a better view. Below them is a glass case containing a variety of knives, which Miles shoots down the suggestion of before Trucy even manages to vocalise it. She barks a laugh and says, I think you know me too well now, and warmth bubbles inside of Miles, because he supposes that must just be the case. Something has shifted this morning in particular; it’s as if Trucy has been delicately sculpted into something new—evolved—before Miles’ eyes over the space of the last few hours. Or, no, something like the mish-mash of raw vulnerability and today’s whirlwind of emotions has forged a key to unlock a part of Miles’ conceptualisation of her he did not realise he had even locked away. It makes her seem impossibly brighter, impossibly more Trucy.

She wanders the short aisles of the shop on tiptoe, Miles close behind. Occasionally she will pick something up and bounce in place as she turns it over in her hands, observing the details and assessing the weight. When they enter the third and final section Miles has an item in each hand himself, and is entirely clueless as to what either is for. Trucy picks up some sort of small, silver box and briefly surveys each face. She taps the top and hums something like contentment when it sounds hollow and metallic.

“What sort of thing is this used for?” Miles asks.

Trucy sticks her tongue out but does not turn to look at him. She picks up another incredibly similar (though slightly larger) cube and says, “Magic, silly. A magician never reveals her secrets.”

“In the same vein,” Miles begins, and Trucy turns to him sternly and repeats, “Never reveals her secrets!”

“Please grant me one answer,” Miles says. Trucy holds out the cube—a question of her own—and he nods.

“Okay,” she says, then puffs air into her cheeks. “Just one, as a thank you, okay?”

“One is adequate. I was simply curious as to why you seemed so certain that Adeline did not murder her colleague.”

“Oh,” Trucy says, and turns back to face the shelves. She leans in to get a closer look at some sort of small metal ring. “That isn’t magic. I thought you were going to ask me how to do a trick.”

Miles’ hands fall to his sides in some semblance of what may be defeat. “Would you perhaps be able to inform me anyway?”

“He was lying when he said he didn’t know what was happening, that’s all.” She holds out her empty right hand in an inexplicable demonstration and clenches it into a fist as if gripping the handle of something, then allows her fingers to unfurl slightly before clenching them tight again. “I might not have picked up on it if he hadn’t repeated himself, but he did, and he was lying.”

When Miles unlocks the apartment door to let the pair back in, Wright stretches himself out, leaning over the back of the sofa. There are papers strewn across the cushions and the coffee table alike. “Happy adventures?” he asks. Trucy hums joyfully and holds out the little navy paper bag decorated with the magic shop’s logo.

“I shouldn’t be surprised,” Wright says, then turns to Miles as Trucy lines up her new assortment of props on the breakfast bar. It seems he is about to speak (perhaps in regard to Miles’ purchases) but instead he scans Miles over once, slowly, rather sceptically. “...Unhappy adventures?” he says.

Miles begins to take off his jacket and shoes. The warmth, now that he’s back indoors, seems to elevate just how sleepy he is. “Not unhappy adventures, as such. Trucy is delightful company.”

“But?”

“Who says there’s a but, Wright?”

“Your face? ‘As such’?”

“Touché,” Miles says. “I truly did enjoy myself this morning, but we did run into a couple of unexpected mishaps, and as a consequence I am rather exhausted.” (A purposeful omission of the fact that his exhaustion is, in part, down to that horrible iteration of his old nightmare—it’s all pedantics.)

“Nothing Trucy Wright and her Uncle Miles couldn’t handle!” Trucy comments as she falls against the arm of the couch closest to her father. Wright smiles and then confusion flashes across his expression for a second. He turns his head at an unreasonable speed to look at Miles and laughs something that sounds like disbelief.

“Uncle Miles, huh?”

“I suppose so, yes,” Miles says to the shoe rack. (He tries to hide his smile and fails horribly.)

“You could take a nap,” Trucy says. “I want to bother Daddy by making him guess how my new tricks work, anyway.”

Miles hums in thought. “While I would appreciate some rest I believe it to be exceedingly rude to leave my guests to themselves while I sleep in the middle of the day.”

Trucy shakes her head. “We don’t have plans until tonight,” she says, and Wright points at her in agreement. “What the kid said. Plus I heard you up at like 5am this morning, which is crazy. Go back to bed for an hour and I promise the world won’t explode.”

Miles groans (and hopes Wright only heard him get up, and not what came before that) but retreats to his room with no further arguments. Just before he drifts off he hears Trucy say, rather sternly, “Daddy, what if the world does explode after you promised it wouldn’t?”

Thankfully, the world does not explode. Miles does not have another nightmare. The rest of their day goes by without so much as a hitch.

Later, as they are winding down for the evening, Trucy having gone to bed not too long prior, Miles tells Wright, “They’re saying the old woman was, at the very least, a co-conspirator. Though I must say she was awfully kind when she served us. She gave us a free croissant. She seemingly didn’t speak a word of English but told me, ‘Your daughter is very sweet. Reminds me of a little bunny rabbit.’”

Wright laughs warmly, though not without a hint of teasing. “And how would you rate your judgement of character, one to ten?”

Miles grumbles something that resembles, “Six at least.”

The night is clear—the stars exceptionally visible—and the pair are sitting at the little table on the apartment’s balcony. It’s just nearing eleven, and still Wright is half-heartedly looking over research notes he claims to have already read earlier in the day. They are mostly chatting, however, and Miles has been watching the last dregs of wine in his glass spin as he swirls it repeatedly for the last five or so minutes instead of reading critiques of some newly implemented jurist system or other like he said he would.

“So they didn’t put you on it this time?” Wright asks as Miles brings the glass to his lips.

“They are not much at liberty to ‘put me on’ a case, Wright, this is not Japanifornia. I am working here for majority research purposes at present.”

“Right, I forgot. You request to assist here instead of being requested to assist.”

“Indeed. Even if I was interested they are likely to call me to make a witness statement, which would surely make things unnecessarily complex if not present some sort of conflict of interest,” Miles says. He takes the final sip of his wine and immediately mourns the visual stimulus of the burgundy liquid swirling against the curves of the glass. Wright flips to the next page of the haphazardly stapled together academic journal he’s reading and hums to indicate he is still listening. “In addition, I am not the only intelligent person working with the police in the entire continent of Europe.”

“Oh, really?” Wright’s tone is low and rough, and despite not looking up from his lap for Miles to see his expression in full it is clear he’s smiling. The cocktail it makes up is almost nauseatingly pleasant. “I just assumed, since you insist on flying out your ex-lawyer friend and his little girl to help instead of asking the professionals.”

“I trust you more than I do them,” Miles says. It’s a slip, really, some result of sleep deprivation and the subtle buzz from top shelf red wine. “Besides, my existing connections here mostly lie with the courts and Interpol, and in this case the latter seems to think it is an isolated incident while I think it is simply not that interesting. Not that I won’t step in to impugn their hypotheses if I feel that justice is not being properly served.”

“Impugn their hypotheses? Really? How do you talk even stupider when you’re drunk?”

The bottle of wine, shared between them, is now empty. Miles may not have an outstandingly high alcohol tolerance but two glasses of red is not sending him tumbling headfirst into drunkenness, just as it is not Phoenix.

“I am not drunk. Don’t be so preposterous.”

“Objection. You’re so drunk.”

“Overruled for conjecture. You do not have a single piece of evidence pointing to this conclusion because it is not true.”

Phoenix laughs. It’s soft. It makes Miles want to melt into him. “Tipsy, then,” he says.

“I plead the fifth.” Miles leans forward to place his empty glass beside the bottle on the table. A tear on the cushion of his side of the small rattan sofa has been digging into his leg for the last ten minutes, and the research laid out on the uncomfortably low matching table in front of him has gone untouched for longer. He focuses on the sharp pressure against his thigh until he realises there is another issue, too: that unique sort of summer evening chill is coming in properly now, and Miles is wearing uncharacteristically short sleeves—he can’t even roll them down.

“It’s cold,” Miles says. Phoenix had broken into sharing an anecdote, apparently, because he abruptly stops mid-sentence-Miles-hadn’t-heard and says, “You wanna go inside?”

“Ah. Not particularly.”

Phoenix looks at him, puzzled like a puppy hearing a squeaky toy, and Miles unceremoniously shifts off of the rip he has been sitting on and slightly towards Phoenix. “Lend me your body heat,” he says. “You’re less sensitive to temperature than I am.”

Phoenix stills for a split second but seems to mentally shake himself off quickly; he pats the cushion beside him using the hand that is not otherwise occupied and Miles moves to sit closer.

“...You’re still not really close enough to get warm,” Phoenix says. He outstretches his arm to welcome Miles in. Miles freezes momentarily, a mirror image, until he sees Phoenix falter, then all at once (before he can really allow himself to consider the consequences) he shifts closer again. Phoenix wraps his arm around Miles’ shoulders and asks, “Better?”

Miles subconsciously tucks himself into Phoenix’s weight like a cat. He hums. “Better.”

This sort of thing has become more frequent, Miles has noticed. The touching. The casual domesticity. He actually misses it when Phoenix leaves, completely unlike himself, though he won’t say it aloud. There is a quiet—a stillness—there he does not get elsewhere. One that radiates trust.

Phoenix continues to use his free hand to flick through the pages of the paper he’s reading. Miles would likely automatically have begun reading along if he had his glasses on and could actually see the words, which raises a slight inconvenience when Phoenix points to a line and asks Miles his thoughts on the author’s interpretation. Miles leans in (impossibly) even closer to try and focus on the letters, to no avail. The wobbly grey lines do not become any less blurry.

He considers moving to put his glasses on again just as Phoenix knocks the thoughts from his head with an, “Edgeworth, I…”

Miles’ concern is piqued; he makes a weak attempt to shuffle away ever so slightly only for Phoenix not to budge.

“I really appreciate you looking out for Trucy today,” Phoenix says quickly, then sighs. His hand tenses against Miles’ arm, barely perceptible. “I don’t know what I would have done if it had just been me there.”

“I can only imagine you would have done the same. You are her father, Wright, and a splendid one at that.”

The hand relaxes again. A fingertip draws a featherlight circle over the cotton of Miles’ sleeve. “You’re sweet.”

Miles breathes an almost-laugh, and when he looks up at Phoenix he is already being looked at in return. Maybe he should have expected it with the close proximity (even aside from the hand they’re touching at the shoulders, the hips, the thighs, the knees) but it takes him off guard. To be seen.

“Really,” Phoenix says. There’s a finality to it, and a soft smile on his lips that makes Miles feel a little like jelly.

That’s why he takes Phoenix’s jaw tentatively into his hand, why he leans in the tiniest amount, lips silently parted in a plea, like it’s normal. Phoenix closes the distance, accepting like he thinks it might be. It’s this lovely, unhurried thing initially; restrained as if someone might break if they let it slip into something more. Then, ridiculously, Phoenix pulls back and whispers, hi, and then, after a second of consideration and a less than subtle blurring of the smile that had been there a moment ago, “Miles. Are you okay?”

“More than,” Miles says just as quietly. Phoenix has not moved away, not properly—their breath is still muddled as one in the tiny space between their mouths—but Miles is washed with a wave of a prospect sickeningly uncomfortable. He scratches his nails softly through Phoenix’s stubble in an attempt to ground himself instead of giving in to the notion that he should run. He is past running. “Are you– am I misinterpreting this?” he asks.

Phoenix rests his forehead against Miles’. He shakes his head. His breathing trembles ever so slightly. “No.”

Miles exhales. “Then could I–”

“Yeah,” Phoenix says, and leans back in hungrily, effectively killing the kiss you again? on Miles’ tongue for him. He wouldn’t have finished the sentence anyway.

And this time is heavy but all the more charming for it; it is heated, charged with something that has been building for longer than Miles could possibly begin to determine. When Miles pulls back to catch his breath he is greeted with another tiny, hi, and he kisses it out of Phoenix’s mouth despite himself.

The impulsive part of Phoenix comes out after that, Miles can tell, because once they are no longer completely entangled and abandoned research has been tidied up in favour of softer touches, he asks, “So are we..?”

And Miles’ answer is not the one he wishes it could be. Because even tipsy (on both wine and the fuzziness of the endorphins that come with kissing Phoenix Wright), his logic wins out over his heart.

He takes Phoenix’s cheek in his palm. “Not now,” he says, and Phoenix blanches. Miles can feel him burning under his touch. He rushes the next part to salvage whatever disaster seems to be preemptively unfurling in Phoenix’s mind: “Not properly. I want to do this properly. Right now there is too much– you know there is too much going on, and we are so close to–” Miles sighs. “Not now.”

And it works, Miles thinks, because as his eyes flick across Phoenix’s face, surveying, the harsh guardedness falls back just as quickly as it had built up. He goes soft again, washed out in the edges of the warm, orangey light, and leans his weight against Miles’s hand. “Not now,” he says.

“Soon,” Miles tells him, and he has never meant a single word with as much sincerity in the entire thirty-three years he has been alive. He aches with how genuine it feels on his tongue. He’s not surprised that his voice falters when he adds, “I promise—soon.”

“Soon,” Phoenix repeats again. He takes a deep breath, then breaks into a laugh. He seems about as dazed as Miles feels; sounds about as giddy when he finally says, rather uselessly, “You’re making bold assumptions here, Miles.”

Miles rolls his eyes. “Apologies, Wright, I didn’t realise you were set on keeping our relationship strictly business-and-kissing. I will bear that in mind for the future.”

“Good idea. You wouldn’t want the general public thinking we do anything more than that, right?” Phoenix tucks an out of place piece of hair back into Miles’ bangs—manoeuvres it oddly to rest behind his ear where it doesn’t belong. His gaze is scalding. He is looking at Miles in a way Miles has, to his knowledge, never been looked at before. It’s somewhat jarring. “Miles,” Phoenix says, biting back a grin.

“Wright.”

“Miles,” Phoenix repeats, and Miles has to turn away to tuck his head against his shoulder where Phoenix can’t see him.

When they go to bed, it is together—in the double Miles had slept in alone the night before.

There is an awkward little moment of something like afterglow, despite them not having sex, as they change into their pyjamas and brush their teeth side by side. Wright gets under the covers first and it just so happens to be on the opposite side that Miles tends to sleep on (fate, if he were to believe in it, and these days maybe he does. Just a little).

When Miles flicks off his lamp and gets into bed he is reached out for immediately, and almost jumps out of his skin. Wright snickers, but then he softens and tucks his arm back up to his body, and asks, “All good?”

“Just warn me, would you? Your hands are cold,” Miles says, and it’s half an excuse but the vulnerability of the situation is bordering on too much. Miles is on the verge of coming out with something as ludicrous as if you’re too affectionate without me expecting it I might tell you I love you, or else I might tell you this was all a mistake, and I have had enough of a day as it stands, so an excuse it is.

Phoenix laughs properly, then. “So you can touch but I can’t? Not very fair. Lady Justice is crying.”

Miles rolls his eyes, obscured by the dark. “You can. Just warn me beforehand.”

“Okay. Warning you,” Phoenix says, and touches slower. It is reassuring, steady.

Miles only really notices later—after (because now there is a before and an after kissing Phoenix Wright, he thinks, and does not have the energy to refrain from grinning at the ceiling as if out of his mind)—that he had been going a little stir crazy when the two of them were together. All of the keeping just the right amount of distance, the feeling held back from what he really wanted though he couldn’t quite pinpoint just what that was. It’s actually comical, really, that he had thought the possibility of change was irrefutably an awful one. He turns his head to Phoenix, dozing beside him, one arm thrown over Miles’ chest.

“Soon,” he whispers to himself, and Phoenix stirs at the sound of his voice. He reaches out for Miles with his other hand, dopey and sluggish, and interlocks their fingers loosely when he manages to locate Miles’.

“Yeah?” Phoenix murmurs. He’s half asleep and Miles can tell he won’t even be confident that this wasn’t a dream tomorrow, but there’s a slow rising smile on his face and Miles feels as though there is electric thrumming through his own body.

“I’ve waited this long,” he says, because the reality of it is that he has—before he even realised he was waiting, he was.

Phoenix has Miles adjusting, readjusting, always. He’s not sure why he assumed it would ever stop once they settled into a routine of knowing one another again; not sure why he assumed that getting older would not bring about irreparable change no matter what. There was a period in which every year that ticked over felt like another year Miles was cutting it all too fine, getting closer and closer to pushing it too far. Every birthday felt like a sinister taunt to quit while he was ahead. But now Miles is approaching his father’s age quicker than he could have imagined—he is soon to outlive him in years, years which a decade ago Miles would be shocked if you told him he had lived to see the better half of—and just maybe that’s okay. It’s easy to believe, as a child, that your parents understand the world in a way which is all-encompassing, and that once you get there you will understand it too. Miles does not quite understand everything yet, and perhaps the truth is that his father did not, either, and just maybe that’s okay. Just maybe Miles will live out the rest of his years for the both of them.

In the morning things are still grainy, like none of this is quite real, but it’s lovely all the same. Miles stares at Phoenix for what is perhaps (definitely) a little too long after he wakes up before the man; he watches the way a sliver of sunlight from the gap in the curtains ever so slowly shifts across his face as the minutes tick by. When Phoenix’s eyes flutter open and sparkle as he blinks against the light Miles holds eye contact with him practically nose-to-nose until Phoenix smiles silly and molasses slow and leans in for a kiss.

“You need to brush your teeth,” Miles says afterwards, as if he has brushed his own yet, and Phoenix says, yeah, right, sure, and kisses him again (and that’s the better outcome, even if Miles won’t admit it).

And then Miles’ routine repeats again, like it always does, but it’s different. They brush their teeth together. Miles makes the bed while Phoenix goes to boil the kettle for Miles’ tea, and there are already tea leaves measured out in a strainer when he wanders through to the kitchen. He doesn’t bother getting changed before he starts on breakfast, even though usually he wouldn’t even consider leaving his bedroom anything but fully dressed.

Trucy pauses as she plods through from her room not too much later. She shields her eyes from the sun as it floods through the French doors and gives both Miles and her father a sceptical once-over. Wright notices her just after Miles does and laughs into his tea—Miles’ favourite tea—as she scrunches her face up a little. “What is up with you guys?” she says. “I feel like I’ve missed something here.”

“Your hair looks lovely,” Wright tells her as opposed to giving her any sort of explanation. She has quite clearly only just rolled out of bed with the precise objective of coming to the kitchen; her bangs are sticking up and outward like little antennae (or perhaps bunny ears). She scoffs and drops her hand to her side then squints against the light, as if she had forgotten it was there. Her eyes glisten as she does. “I smelled pancakes. That was a higher priority than making my hair look nice this early on a weekend.”

Wright kicks out the chair opposite him. “Sit with me, daughter,” he says. Miles puts a glass of fresh apple juice in front of her as she does and Trucy quite pointedly looks him up and down—not judgemental as much as contemplative. He distantly wonders if she appreciates his Steel Samurai pyjama pants or finds them abhorrent.

“Oh, I get it,” she says then, and that’s that.

Chapter Text

Freshly thirty-five, on the verge of stepping into the position of district Chief Prosecutor, and far less afraid.

It’s a November evening—barely warmer than fifty degrees—and Miles is currently one glove down as he stands alone in People Park and taps out a single-fingered text message to Trucy. She sends back a Yep! faster than Miles can replace the glove and he immediately foregoes putting it back on in favour of shoving his bare hand (along with his cell phone) into his coat pocket.

A few minutes later he is opening the door to the Wright Anything Agency, and a few seconds after that he has a very enthusiastic fifteen year old in his arms declaring her excitement at his presence. Her voice is a little muffled by the way her face is pressed into the wool of Miles’ coat.

He’s still not great at the hugs. He’s too stiff, too unnatural, he knows, but he’s grown to like them on some odd and unplaceable level. He appreciates them for the sentiment. Perhaps he’s growing ever soft as he approaches forty.

Miles strokes Trucy’s hair briefly and ignores the way his glasses steam up from the shift in temperature. “I am also rather excited, if I’m being completely frank with you,” he says, and Trucy pulls away from him with a grin.

“Daddy’s at work, so hope you’re happy to stick around with little old Trucy for a while,” Trucy says as Miles removes his remaining glove. Before he can tell her of course I am, she gestures vaguely to the office in the back and adds, “Oh, and Polly I guess.”

The door is ever so slightly ajar and the lights are on, but it appears to be entirely silent.

“He’s working late?” Miles asks. He removes his glasses when they don’t wholly defog quickly enough for his liking and Trucy pulls a pink handkerchief from god-knows-where and holds it out to him. She does not acknowledge the gesture but Miles nods in thanks nonetheless and wipes the condensation from his lenses.

“Daddy? No. He’s on an earlier shift today so he should only be an hour or two,” Trucy says.

“Mr. Justice,” Miles clarifies.

“Oh! He insisted on staying back to reorganise his filing system or something.” She raises her voice a little. “Right, Polly?”

“I would be done by now if someone hadn’t been distracting me,” Mr. Justice calls back (significantly louder than necessary, given they’re only a room over) and Trucy throws her head back with a barked laugh.

“Maybe you shouldn’t be so easy to distract,” she yells back. A hushed grumble floats through the crack in the door in return.

Trucy steps back, then. She glances away from Miles and then back again in a way that says something like I don’t know why we’re still standing in the entryway. “Do you want tea?” she asks. “Water? Juice?”

“Tea would be lovely, please. If you wouldn’t mind,” Miles says, and begins to unbutton his coat with fuzzy-feeling hands.

Trucy makes tea for Miles and mixes a packet of cheap instant coffee for herself. She puts the DVD for the first Steel Samurai movie into her laptop (the one Miles had accidentally heard about before the official announcement) just as Miles asks, “Is that decaffeinated?”

“Um,” Trucy says, fiddling with the laptop’s volume buttons. “Sure.”

“You won’t sleep,” Miles says. “It’s past 8pm.”

Then Trucy does something sort of absurd: she turns around to face him with a tiny, incredibly unreadable smile, and she says, “Whatever you say, Dad.”

Preposterous.

Kay had called Miles Dad, once, accidentally, and it did not sound like the way that Trucy had said it. She did not react, in the aftermath, how Trucy is reacting now—which is to say, not at all. This, Miles deduces, can only mean it was not an accident.

The movie’s dramatic opening scene rolls on the small screen behind her, and she stands to throw herself down onto the beat-up agency couch beside Miles. They don’t speak any more for almost the entire run time, save for the occasional brief one-liner of commentary from Trucy.

In fact, it’s Mr. Justice that breaks their lapse in conversation, and it’s during the film’s penultimate scene of all moments.

“Okay, Trucy, I’m done, so I’m gonna head out,” he says as he walks through from the office, rummaging for something in his backpack. It is haphazardly slung over one shoulder, barely clinging on, and then he pulls out what seems to be a small bundle of keys. Four, if Miles had counted correctly. “I’ll see–”

Mr. Justice looks up to where the pair are sitting on the couch, then cuts himself off and his hands drop to his sides. The keys he is holding lightly rattle against each other, and the light from the movie catches the glitter on a small GYAXA souvenir keyring. Three keys, then.

“Oh my God,” he says. He ridiculously swivels his entire body to Trucy and his voice falls to a volume Miles can only deduce is incredibly uncharacteristic of the man.

“Trucy. Why wouldn’t you tell me your guest was Prosecutor Edgeworth?” Mr. Justice hisses, as if Miles somehow cannot hear him if he is not being spoken directly at.

Trucy shrugs playfully. “What are you talking about?” she says, the faux innocence Miles has become quite accustomed to thinly spread through her voice. “This is my uncle Miles.”

The rather angry seeming attorney opens his mouth but then closes it again and turns to Miles with this half-hearted little bow. “Sorry,” he says. “I’m Apollo Justice, uh, Apollo’s fine if you want. The formalities kind of trip me up. It’s great to meet you. Big fan of your work. Read all of your papers.”

Miles smiles. It’s real; easy. “Miles Edgeworth, though it seems I do not have to tell you that. Thank you, though I couldn’t have achieved the position I am in today without the support of others. I shall hope we get to work alongside—or against—one another at some point, as well.”

“Yep. Well,” Apollo says (shouts, if Miles is honest), and in record time he is across the room and opening the door to where an all-too-casual Klavier Gavin is standing, leaning nonchalantly against the wall in the alcove the entrance is set into.

Miles lifts an eyebrow.

“Hallo,” Prosecutor Gavin says into the room with a curt two-fingered wave. Trucy waves back enthusiastically with both hands and Apollo promptly slams the door, which is notably not soundproof enough to avoid Miles hearing him scold, “I told you to wait down the street!”

Miles squints at the laptop screen, bright in the half-light of the agency’s front room. Dramatic music plays from the grainy-sounding speakers as the Steel Samurai looms over the World Samurai, his spear drawn. They have missed his favourite scene and the better half of the monologue that follows it. “Could you–” he starts.

“Rewind? On it,” Trucy tells him. “Couldn’t miss the best part.”

They are about ten minutes post-credits and subsequently ten minutes into Miles’ careful analysis of the film’s ambiguous ending when he is interrupted by clumsy banging outside of the door, and then the rattle of the handle that’s prone to getting stuck in its latch.

“Just me, Trucy baby,” Wright calls. He is delayed ever so slightly trying to get it to open—apparently it has occasionally started catching on an uneven part of the floor and you have to pull up and push forwards simultaneously. “I just saw Apollo and Gavin a couple blocks away. They really aren’t very subtle. Apo…”

The door swings the rest of the way open. “...llo. Miles?”

“Good evening,” Miles says, at the same time Trucy says, “Hi Daddy!”

Wright stays still in the open doorway. He is, frankly, a mess. His beanie is scrunched in his left hand, hair left tousled—it’s too long in the back. He’s at least a few days unshaven. He is seemingly also covered in… something?

Miles, ridiculously, commits the image to memory.

“Look what the cat dragged in!” Trucy chimes.

“Miles,” Wright repeats, quiet and breathy. He turns to kick the door shut, then back to Miles and Trucy.

“Hi. When did you… How long are you in LA?”

Miles hadn’t expected that to be the first question Wright would ask. It takes him a little off guard; he forgets the precise wording of the grandiose announcement he had crafted in his head as a result.

“For the foreseeable future,” Miles says. Wright’s eyes widen and he smiles in this ever so small, held-back way that suggests he needs more clarification.

Miles provides. “I am moving home. I have moved home.”

Wright takes a long, slow breath in, then lets out a quick shaky laugh. “Trucy, you knew?”

“Ma—aybe,” Trucy says, light and playful. “Polly staying here so late gave me a pretty good excuse to stay and get you to walk me home, but it was kind of a happy accident.”

“Why was tonight the night some guy fucking—I mean, sorry, Truce—some guy threw borscht over me? Can you believe that? Well, I mean, honestly now that it’s happened I’m kind of surprised I went almost eight years without it happening. But, still, can you believe that?”

“As you say,” Miles says as Wright takes the opportunity to fall into the couch opposite. He kicks off his sandals and haphazardly swings his feet up onto the coffee table. “I am surprised it didn’t happen sooner, given that you frequently win at cards against people who do not want to lose at cards. In a borscht restaurant.”

Then Phoenix’s smile becomes all-encompassing. It takes over his entire face in the most endearing way imaginable. It always has, really.

“I still think calling it a restaurant is generous,” Trucy jumps in, a snarky grin plastered over her face. “And that’s a quarter for the swear jar, Daddy!”

Phoenix rolls his eyes—affection riddled, though Miles is not entirely sure if it is directed towards himself or Trucy or both—and says, “Yeah, yeah. One quarter coming right up.”

He adjusts the position he is sitting in to put a hand into the pocket of his now borscht-stained sweatpants with a coppery jingle. His hand reemerges with a small handful of coins, then he picks out a quarter and flicks it towards Trucy. She catches it between the knuckles of her index and middle fingers and immediately does some sort of casual flourish of the hand which causes it to seemingly vanish into thin air.

Phoenix shakes his head at her and then turns back to Miles. “I’m so glad you’re here,” he murmurs. “Honestly. How come you’re back?”

Miles hums and crosses one leg over the other. “I do request you don’t go sharing this information with the press or whatnot just yet, but the current Chief Prosecutor is retiring next month.”

“And you’re..?”

“Going to be filling the role, yes.”

Another laugh escapes Phoenix—something like disbelief—and he says, “So you really are back for good.”

Miles nods and it feels, well, right.

“Then I best get to brushing up on my notes to retake the bar, huh?” Phoenix says. “I’d hate to leave you hanging, Chief Prosecutor Edgeworth.”

“There is more information I must divulge to you on that, actually—that is, the dark age of the law—but I do not have the time tonight. I wasn’t planning on staying here too late. Early start tomorrow.”

“Yeah, yeah that’s fine. We should head home so this one can get to bed anyway.”

Trucy groans. “Daddy, it’s not a big deal if I’m late for school one time,” she says. “What if I want to know about the dark age of the law?”

“The principal literally called me personally last week to tell me you need to up your attendance. Do you want to move schools again?”

Trucy shakes her head no and then bursts into a fit of giggles. “I don’t even know if that would work. I’ve been to all three you can get to on a bus ride.”

“Exactly,” Phoenix says, and claps his hands together sharply. The sudden loud noise slightly startles Miles. “So you’ll be at school tomorrow for eight on the dot, which means no late night and no sleeping in. Let me just grab some books from the back then we can head out.”

“I will drop you home,” Miles asserts, then clears his throat. “It’s practically en route, besides.”

Phoenix tilts his head to the side ever so slightly and flashes Miles a grin. He is charming.

Miles loves him, wholly.

Phoenix pushes himself up off of the couch with a wince. “Won’t be a sec,” he announces, and trudges through to the room where Apollo had been sorting files earlier.

“Told you I’m good at secrets,” Trucy says, her voice low. “He doesn’t know what’s about to hit him.”

Miles huffs, equal parts amused and appreciative, as Trucy stretches; her arms go above her head and her legs out in front of her. Her slipper falls off her foot as she points her toes and she fumbles and pushes it further away when she tries to scoop it back up.

“It was weird, right?” Trucy says.

“Sorry?” Miles says, and Trucy bends down, succumbing to using her hand to replace the missing slipper. Miles tries to wrack his brain for what she could possibly be referring to, to no avail. “What are you saying was strange?”

“Seriously?” Trucy asks. She punctuates it with a little tilt of her head, much like her father, as she looks back up at Miles. It’s as though she’s attempting to decipher if he is pulling her leg. He is not.

“Me calling you Dad. It was weird,” she clarifies.

Ah. “A little. It certainly caught me off guard.”

Trucy laughs, then: a brief little thing that rings through Miles with something he is rather certain is unadulterated affection. “I don’t think I like it. I was just testing.”

“Alright.” Miles gives her a small approving nod. He certainly thinks she is jumping the gun somewhat when it comes to his worthiness of the title anyway, but if he recalls correctly she had started referring to Wright as her father almost immediately after Zak Gramarye’s disappearance.

And he loves her, too. More than he ever thought possible.

He taps his finger against where it rests on his thigh. “Whether or not you feel the need to continue to test is entirely up to you. I would not like for you to feel that you are obligated to call me any one thing or another; no matter my relationship to your father, what matters most is your comfort.”

“Thanks, Uncle Miles.”

It is only here that the weight of the situation hits him—once he says no matter my relationship to your father. In reality, things are going to change here. Again. Perhaps irreparably, and perhaps for the worst.

Miles has never been one to take risks, even those that may appear trivial. They pose too big of a threat to everything he has so carefully built himself up to be. Pose the potential to put everything he has worked for (whether it be personally or professionally) on the line.

This isn’t quite the same, he supposes, because he had promised, and Wright had been receptive. Enthusiastic, even. Time has passed, however. Two years have been tacked onto their lives, a breeze in which some issues were taken down and others arose, and they haven’t really talked about it. Miles has only really recounted the details mumbled to his bedroom ceiling, with the odd vague tidbit divulged to an exasperated Franziska. I saw this coming years ago, Miles Edgeworth, she’ll tell him some variation of every time, before I had even seen you fools in a room together.

Still, there is every possibility that Wright could say no. Every possibility that this could ruin them, for good, that it could dissolve the friendship Miles cherishes the most in the world—for what? A chance? A possibility? A hope?

But he does hope. He has hope, an abundance of it, because when has anything ever come softly to himself and Phoenix Wright? When has anything ever been conventional between the two of them?

The drive to the Wrights’ apartment building happens in comfortable silence. Trucy unbuckles her seatbelt and leans over the centre console from the back seat as they pull up the road and says, “Daddy, quick—the keys!”

Phoenix hands them to her without a hitch, just as she’d told Miles that he would. (“He’ll want the extra couple minutes alone with you, Uncle Miles, I pinky swear.”)

They spend a few more moments quietly as they watch Trucy take two steps at a time up to the main door and quickly jab out the keycode to the building. She turns briefly and waves at Miles with a sly wink before she disappears into the lobby.

“Did she just wink at you?” Phoenix asks.

“I didn’t catch it,” Miles tells him, and Phoenix chuckles. “Maybe you need your prescription updated. New lenses or whatever,” he says.

Miles drums his fingers softly against the steering wheel. “I think I am due an appointment to the optician’s office in a couple of months, now that you mention it. I don’t feel as if my eyesight has declined considerably since last time, however.”

“You’re getting old.” Phoenix reaches over and taps once, ever so gently, against the frame of Miles’ glasses with his nail. It makes a little noise that seems to penetrate into Miles’ skull. “These make you look kinda like your dad,” he says. “I remember him having similar ones.”

Miles looks away, out into the street, and Phoenix’s hands retreat to his lap. Miles briefly wonders if Trucy had told her father that Miles thinks so too; almost considers apologising before Phoenix quickly tells him, “I should probably get going. Make sure Trucy isn’t already burning the apartment down.”

“I think we would be made aware of an incident of that kind with haste. Evacuation protocol and such,” Miles points out. “She could be throwing knives at the furnishings and we would be none the wiser, however.”

“Glad to see Europe didn’t make you any less of a smartass,” Phoenix says, and he unbuckles his seatbelt. He moves as if to open the door and then adds, softer, “Alright, well.”

“Before you go, Wright… Phoenix,” Miles says, and Phoenix back looks at him expectantly. His features are blurred significantly by the glow of the streetlight just ahead of them—almost rounded out.

“Would you like to get dinner with me sometime?”

There is a careful lilt to his words because Phoenix should have been expecting this, really, but knowing the man like Miles does means knowing it will take him off guard nonetheless.

It seems it does, too. Phoenix’s eyebrows shoot up and then he asks in a voice a little higher pitched than typical, “On a date?”

Miles looks away again. “Yes, on a date. That is, assuming you would not be opposed to taking our relationship in that direction. Otherwise we can simply get dinner.”

Phoenix laughs, smooth but ever so slightly shaky. “I want it to be a date,” he says.

Miles makes a tiny noise of relief as he looks back that earns him a little squeeze of his hand and a hopeful lopsided smile. A whisper of one of Phoenix’s dimples comes and goes, and then he adds, “I can’t believe you asked me while I’m covered in borscht.”

“You are the one who muddied my plans by getting borscht thrown over yourself on the evening I had prepared to ask you on a date. I am unsure how I am to blame,” Miles says. “If you would prefer I had not asked then we can simply pretend I did not.”

Another laugh from Phoenix, now, like a bark cutting through Miles’ insecurities. He leans in over the centre console then pulls Miles a little closer by the lapel of his coat. “Never,” Phoenix says.

Then he kisses him. (And oh, how Miles has missed that.)

The day swings around quickly. Miles picks out a quaint little Italian restaurant downtown that he already knows Phoenix likes—they had been there together a few years prior and Phoenix hadn’t stopped mentioning how good the food had been for months afterwards. Once in Italy (Como, August 2023, if Miles recalls correctly) Phoenix mentioned that the food reminded him of that little place in LA, and Miles, exasperated, had told him that it should probably be the other way around.

When Miles pulls up outside of the Wrights’ apartment building he has a rather odd nervous bubble trapped behind his ribs. His heartbeat is going faster than what is regular for him, he’s fairly certain. He briefly considers driving away (just around the block once or twice to calm his nerves), but instead he sits, and he waits. Miles runs his fingers over the winter-bitten leather of the steering wheel, his gloveless hands shaking although he is acutely aware that there are gloves in the aptly named glove compartment.

He’s not sure the shaking is entirely down to the cold, besides.

Phoenix appears on the sidewalk sixteen minutes late (which Miles had, thankfully, foreseen and planned a buffer for) and looking a little disheveled. He spots Miles parked down the street and folds in on himself ever so slightly—a relieved slump—before breaking into a light jog across the road.

He is… well. Beautiful, for lack of a better word.

“Hi,” Phoenix says softly when he opens the passenger-side door. “Sorry about the…” He gestures to nothing.

“It’s no concern, Wright,” Miles says. “I planned for it.”

Phoenix huffs an amused little noise. “Right; ever vigilant. Thank you. In some alternate universe I’m punctual, probably.”

“No matter. I am glad to be in this one,” Miles tells him, and Phoenix blushes deep pink.

The date itself is painfully, unfathomably normal. Mundane. Miles loves every second of it—loves every second of Phoenix Wright. That’s why, as they finish their drinks, he asks: “Would you like to come home with me?”

Phoenix chokes on nothing and tries to pass it off. It does not work. “Trucy is at home,” he splutters, a hand over his chest.

The waiter comes back over to return Miles his card. “Then perhaps I could come home with you?”

“Trucy is at home?” Phoenix emphasises.

Miles twists his face up in confusion; tilts his head to the side a little before realising that it is most certainly a habit absorbed from Phoenix himself. “...And?” he says.

Phoenix gestures wildly out in front of him. He looks a little pained as he says, “We can’t– with Trucy there.”

He receives a blank stare from Miles in response. “Sorry? Trucy likes me just fine, does she not? She was perfectly normal when I talked to her on the phone just the other day.”

Phoenix’s face goes from flushed to crimson. Something quiet that Miles finds inexplicably endearing stretches out between them. Then Phoenix says, far too slowly, “You actually just meant come over.”

“What in the world are you talking about? What else would I…” Miles’ eyes snap up to meet Phoenix’s. He places his wine glass calmly, firmly onto the table. He can feel himself burning up.

There is a moment of recognition and then Phoenix says, quite plainly, “Yeah.”

Miles hopes that the lighting drowns out his flush, but given the evidence in front of him doubts it will actually do so at all. He clears his throat. “And I thought I was the one being overly presumptuous,” he mutters.

“Well when you’re on a date and someone says ‘come to my place’ there’s generally only one implication!”

“You should not assume that I am the type to imply,” Miles says, but there is no bite.

Phoenix laughs, bubbly and uncalculated and a little nervous (so like him). “Yeah, no, you’re right. I probably would have agreed to anything you had or had not suggested once the initial surprise wore off though,” he says.

“Wright!”

So Miles drives them back, and Phoenix tries to be chivalrous by opening the drivers’ side door outside of his apartment but Miles doesn’t notice and practically slams the door into him, and they laugh together in the street so hard that Trucy hears it and already has water boiling for tea by the time they get back inside.

“Date went well?” she asks with a little smile.

Phoenix looks at Miles with an unbridled affection that’s almost too much. “Yeah,” he says softly.

“Keep the eyes to yourself, Daddy,” Trucy tells him, and he laughs again before apologising.

“Hot chocolate?”

“Extra cream and marshmallows as compensation, thank you!”

Thirty minutes later they sit in mostly comfortable silence. Trucy is resting her head on Miles’ shoulder, idly tracing the rim of her empty mug with her finger. It has melted marshmallow sludge in the bottom. “I’m glad you’re back,” she says into the quiet.

Miles smiles softly. “I’m glad I’m back, too.”

(And ‘becoming official’ is much the same as all else—uncertain despite the evidence because there had been nothing decisive, really—done slightly awkwardly in the front seats of Miles’ car a few days later.)

Chapter Text

Uncle Miles is very very serious about today’s show. That’s not to say that Trucy isn’t, because she’s always serious about her magic shows, but it’s rare that she sees Uncle Miles this serious.

Trucy is sitting on top of a prop box, the same one she sat on top of with her Uncle Miles the very first time he came backstage at one of her shows when she was ten. She had gotten déjà vu from it earlier: Uncle Miles chatting beside her with his picture perfect posture while she sewed up an unexpected hole in Mr. Hat’s cape. Pearly had taught her how to do that back when they were younger—back when Daddy and Trucy were living in clothes a bit too small and a bit too old. Back when Daddy and Uncle Miles were still walking on eggshells and pretending they weren’t in love.

Uncle Miles is on the phone to Daddy now, at least Trucy is pretty sure, because he is pacing near the curtains and speaking in the (still kind of stuffy, but) soft way he only does when he’s talking to his family. He starts to fiddle with his ring like he does when he’s nervous about something, so Trucy hops up from her station and skips over.

“I swear, Wright, if you are so much as one minute late to your daughter’s first international show, God help you,” Uncle Miles is saying into the phone. And that makes sense, Trucy thinks, because Daddy is chronically bad at keeping time. He has been for the entire not-quite-ten-yet years that Trucy has known him. (Which is longer than she didn’t, she realises in the moment, and it zips a little sentimental ache through her whole body.)

“Everything okay, Uncle Miles?” Trucy asks, her tone bright and expressive in a stark contrast to his. She’s already sort of gone into stage mode just from being in the theatre, which feels a little silly and exaggerated, but Uncle Miles doesn’t seem to mind.

“One moment, Wright,” he says, and then turns to Trucy, who gently bounces in place. “Your father is running late. He took a detour to pick something up—later than he was supposed to, as per usual—and is now caught in traffic near the Seine of all places.”

“That’s not too far away,” Trucy says. “He’ll make it.” It’s fine even if he doesn’t, she omits, because he’s seen her rehearse all the tricks already, and she double and triple and quadruple checked that two front-centre seats will be reserved for them anyway.

“I should hope so.” Uncle Miles sighs. “He is the most incorrigible–”

Then Daddy says something into his ear that Trucy feels a bit jealous that she can’t hear, given the way that Uncle Miles’ face lights up and his scowl dissolves into his nice, real laugh.

Daddy shows up while Trucy is doing her final checks. She knows he’s here before he’s here because he gets stopped by security at the stage door, and they come through and give Uncle Miles an odd little sideways glance as they say, “Mademoiselle, there’s a man with spiky hair here saying he’s your father.”

I thought that guy was your dad? the look says. Yes and no, Trucy’s brain uselessly supplies to itself. “My daddy does have spiky hair, so it’s probably him,” she says. “If it’s not then that’s sort of your problem.”

Uncle Miles has been pretending not to listen but he chuckles from behind her as he counts the handkerchiefs for a third time.

Daddy walks in with the most ridiculous bouquet of flowers Trucy has ever seen. Pinks and purples spotted with baby’s breath and wrapped in a silk bow perfectly colour-matched to her cape. She almost starts crying when she reads the little note in Uncle Miles’ loopy handwriting that says Darling Trucy—we’ve never been more proud. Kill it out there. We love you unconditionally.