Chapter Text
It’s not scientifically proven, but there can be an overall agreement that plants match the energy of their caretakers. They feed off the energy in the room from their “parents”, relying on not only the basics of sunshine and water—but the love and understanding that comes from the very unique experience of being a human. So vibrant, full of life, and a desire for nothing but truth and justice leaves Mia Fey an embodiment of sunshine itself. Cordyline Stricta, or slender palm lily, or even a narrow-leaved palm lily…until it’s known simply as Charley benefits greatly from such a relationship. Charley is only a little plant when brought home, barely enough to fill in the four-inch nursery pot still sopping wet from the careless overwatering from the big-box store. It was the first plant that Mia Fey purchased for her college apartment, just a short walk away from campus. The little plant sogs through the cardboard of the moving box that it was resting upon, and Mia is sympathetic, telling the newly named Charley that there will be no more of that! No more drowning alongside the other wilting plants at the store—no more threat of rot that draws in gnats like personal reapers. Charley would only have the best from then on.
Charley grows quickly, from the four-inch nursery pot to the six-inch terracotta pot that still fits on the windowsill. Mia is just as dedicated, bringing home several other potted plants that sit beside Charley in their own new pots. She calls them all siblings—a patchwork of different plants, her little children while she’s here working her tail off. Sometimes, she tells them she’s doing it for them, and her tone is light, but there is always something hidden underneath. She tells them everything, from petty drama at school, to what boy has looked at her too weird for too long—and whether or not she should use one of her plants to smack their heads in. She laughs, joking, of course, insisting that she would never drag one of her lovely babies into that world. Her face gets serious sometimes when she talks like that; the clouds dimming the rays that normally emit from her as she tells them she won’t let anything else in her life get dragged into such a thing.
Charley has moved into a pot on the floor by the time Mia graduates law school. Sitting beside the large plastic pot, Mia drinks from a bottle of champagne, lamenting that the real fight was about to start. Even though she’s still experiencing the high of graduating and coming down from partying a little bit with now former classmate, she’s sunk back into reality. She was indeed ever the realist; from here on, the games were done, and the battle had begun. There were to be dozens of internship applications filled out, different job descriptions read out loud to the crowd of houseplants that neither approved nor disapproved of the various jobs that had been applied for. It’s when Mia offers to tip a little champagne into Charley’s soil as her first internship at Grossberg’s Law Offices is approved that she realizes all of her hard work has paid off, that she’s actually done it all, and lets herself cry tears of hard-earned victory.
“It’s a sunflower!” Mia says, showing off the little gold badge that now rested on the lapel of her black suit jacket. She passed the bar with flying colors, not that that hadn’t been expected. She had been studying so hard that there was a little burn in the leaves from her lamp running 24/7. “Good fortune, positive energy, and, of course, good luck. I hate that the good luck part is really needed to be a lawyer these days, but hey, I need all the support I can get.” Mia laughs
Charley hears a lot of the injustices in the legal world, and it seems as though good luck is undeniably needed. The introduced concept of a three-day trial limit leaves Mia weeping bitterly into her palms, and she sobs at the idea that she would have only three days to prove someone's innocence—especially when such things could drag on for months, for years, for a lifetime even. She mentions things like that here and there, a life for a life, a life for a childhood of abandonment and fear. A life of knowing and not knowing until it was time to take it into her own hands. It doesn’t make sense, not at all; it was not until Maya came to Mia’s apartment one day, her face still bright and youthful, and she was interested in sticking her hands into the soil in Charley’s new pot when her sister wasn’t looking.
“What kinda plant is this, sis?” Maya asks, tilting her head to the left as she sized up the large plant.
“It’s a Charley!” Mia teases, ruffling her sister's hair. “Just kidding! He’s a palm lily. I got him when I first started law school, but I didn’t think he would get this big.”
“He’s taller than me!”
“He is! He’s probably more mature than you, too!” Mia teases, poking her sister's puffed-up cheeks, then rushing away from her as Maya turns to chase her in retaliation. From then on, Maya comes and checks her height to Charley’s branches each month she visits. Mia has left little pencil lines on the wall where she measures the two. Charley’s growth is steady, a few inches a month in the summer and less in the winter, when Maya begins to catch up finally.
“Sis talks to you a lot, huh?” Maya says to Charley one evening. She doesn’t wait for an answer, which is good, considering Charley is still just a house plant. “She said you’re a good listener, and I didn’t laugh only because I know that’s true. There are lots of inanimate things that are good listeners. Better than my aunt, or…” Maya trails off and sniffles. “Better than my mom.”
“Does she talk about her?” Mia asks Charley one day, pruning shears in hand as she works to give Charley a thorough haircut. Mia had been otherwise preoccupied with mentions of a case that went beyond the courtroom and into the grave. “Mom, I mean.”
Charley doesn’t answer, and Mia sighs, straightening up with her hands on her hips. “I’m sure she does, now that she knows I’m really doing this to find out more about what happened…and why she left. I know it’s probably going to make her really upset—but I had to tell her the truth eventually. I wish it were easier to explain that I didn’t mean to leave her the sole Fey to end up as the Kurain Head Master, really! But if not me, then who?”
Mia repeats that same line of logic to her boyfriend. He’s sitting on the floor beside Charley with a cup of coffee that is so dark and fragrant that the tips of the leaves curl inward to avoid it. He closes his eyes, thinking for a long time about the right thing to say, or maybe even something to say before sighing. He doesn’t say anything that Mia doesn’t already know; he more or less agrees with her sentiment and allows her to stomp around a few more times—she’s infuriated from a phone call home to her aunt that left her drinking wine from the bottle, the elegant stemware she had intended to use abandoned at the counter.
Diego, Mia’s boyfriend, spends a lot of nights in her apartment. Sometimes, when Mia’s not looking, he tips a bit of his coffee into the soil. He reasons that it’s kind of like a fertilizer and that if they were going to be up late working, Charley may need a little something as well. Mia doesn’t notice, or if she does, she doesn’t say anything about it. It doesn’t impact Charley’s growth of course, and by the same time Diego falls into his coma, Charley has been moved into his new and final pot picked by Mia Fey.
His new home is in the corner of the office Mia has acquired as the new proprietor of the Fey & Co. Law Offices. The “co” is a new addition in the way of a sniffly young man with raven hair gelled back into spikes. Kind of a crybaby, kind of an unstoppable force of determination and blind trust. He doesn’t really talk to Charley and more or less comments about how odd it is when Mia does.
“Are you really a good conversationalist?” He asks, hand on one hip. He had moved from the desk where he had been sitting, standing before the mighty Charley. Phoenix Wright has been studying religiously for the past month for his own bar exam—his law school years were rather uneventful after the thrill of his trial long buried in the vault of traumatic experiences, weaving a spider web in which he has managed to avoid being caught. While Charley hasn’t watched all of his growth throughout schooling, it’s still there in the form of a new burn spot on the same branch Mia had scorched years back. “Mia says you’re great in a pinch. It's kind of like the rubber ducks that coders use. So tell me, do you think I’m fit for this?"
“…”
“…why am I asking you? You can’t tell me anything. You don’t even know why I’m doing this. Not even Mia knows.” Phoenix confesses, reaching over and rolling one of the leaves between his fingers. Mia would surely scold him if she saw him doing such a thing, but… ”You can keep a secret, can’t you, Charley?”