Chapter Text
"-be sure to reread the case file, Nick, I'll be quizzing you during the recess," Mia sticks a manicured finger in his direction as they walk briskly towards the defendant's lobby.
Phoenix nods his head, flipping through the papers in his briefcase. "I got it, I got it, chief." He looks up as he pulls out the case file and they stop walking, standing beside the grand double doors and a potted plant.
"I'm going to ask for your second opinion during the cross examinations so don't go spacing out, alright?" She smiles and Phoenix rolls his eyes.
The courthouse is packed today, more so than usual. Some people weave around them expertly. Some trip over their feet. Someone brushes shoulders with him, barely hazarding a glance back, and Phoenix just sighs. His nerves aren't wired, he's only playing co-council for today's trail, but the crowd and the noise make his muscles tense.
He scans the hallway, over the faces and suits and balding heads when his eyes catch on red and silver. He blinks when he sees it down the hallway, breath catching. A pair of broad shoulders, silver hair combed neatly back, and that eye-sore of a suit that borders between red and fuchsia—it's him. It has to be him.
Phoenix's eyes trace the lines of his neck, the waves in his hair, the rigid posture in his back, and then he turns, revealing the strong line of his nose, a tense jawline and hooded eyes.
When Phoenix had first seen the newspaper clipping, he’d been convinced it was a doppelganger for at least a full day. What in the world would his childhood best friend be doing as a prosecuting attorney? But as he poured over articles and news coverage of the famed "demon prosecutor”, reality finally started to set in.
There weren't many photos from his debut, poorly developed things found in tabloids, but that self satisfied smirk and the little quirk in his brow was unmistakably his old friend's. Even as his scowl deepened, even as his face grew longer and wider, even as he became the antithesis of his childhood dream—the one Phoenix was intimately familiar with since he would never shut up about the damn thing—somehow, this demon in the newspapers was the same Miles. The same Miles who held back tears over a scraped knee, the same Miles who would get way too competitive during a game of hide and seek, the same Miles who would read passages from law books aloud to him late into the night after Larry had dozed off during their sleepovers. It seemed like that boy Phoenix loved on the playground all those years ago had died, like he feared, and came back as a reanimated corpse.
And while Phoenix progressed through his double major in law and performing arts, he found that his old friend continued to change. As his convicted cases increased, the wry smugness of his smiles seemed to all but dissolve. The flair and pride that dripped off him after his debut melted away, revealing something all the more reminiscent of a true “demon.” That scowl drawn tight across his face, guilty verdict after guilty verdict, death penalty after death penalty. In nearly every photo, his mouth was set in a solid frown, immovable.
Miles says something to a large man in a green jacket standing next to him, mouth moving mute from across the crowd, scowl stern as always. And then, his grey eyes flick to the side, and catch.
Surprise looks strange on his friend’s new face. His eyebrows fly up, one quirked higher than the other, eyes open wide, lips clamped shut in a tight frown. His entire posture somehow gets stiffer, more uptight and he swivels a little, to get a clearer look. Recognition and confusion and a strange fear pass over his expression, and his mouth opens slightly as if to say something.
Phoenix feels his lips twitch into an odd smile as lightning prickles down his spine.
The man in the green jacket follows Miles’ gaze, his thick brows furrowed up in confusion. He says something that makes Miles jump and contort his face in anger, and even from this distance, Phoenix can spot the flush that crawls up his neck as he snaps his head to the side and bites something out that makes the man flinch. He turns away then, and disappears from sight as people pass in front of Phoenix's vision.
“Nick?” A voice calls his name. Then there's a manicured hand snapping in front of his face and he startles back a step. “Earth to Phoenix Wright!” She says, moving into his field of view as he blinks at her. “You look like you just saw a ghost.”
“W-what?” he stammers, eyes flicking back down the hall where he spotted Miles, searching, hoping, but he's long gone by now.
Mia follows his gaze and scans the hall. “What is it, Nick?” She turns back to him when she doesn't see anything of interest.
“Nothing,” he lies, wrenching his gaze back to her, “nothing, sorry, spaced out again.”
Mia crosses her arms over her stomach and cocks her head to the side in that familiar way, assessing him, solving the puzzle. She squints for just a second before closing her eyes and sighing. “No matter how many times I tell you to keep your head in the game, rookie, you always seem to drift away.”
—
Miles tips the metal pin over his fingers, watching its glossy sheen reflect the hospital lights. He never thought he'd be holding one of these again.
“You’ll do it, right? For me?” Phoenix’s scratchy voice mumbles out from where he sits in the bed.
Miles looks up from the pin and nods, short. His brown eyes are watery and large, if not from the congestion then from when he'd been begging. Miles remembers when he feared that gaze, all those years ago, feared the thought of them resting on his broken pieces, shattered after bearing a fifteen year long weight. Fearing what Phoenix would think, fearing what he'd see if he laid his eyes upon him. Disgust or disdain is what Miles had been expecting, shame that they’d ever known each other. Or even worse, that he’d see nothing, express complete indifference to the man he’d become compared to who they’d been as children.
But instead, what Phoenix had found hadn't deterred him from planting himself as a thorn in Miles’s side for the better half of a year. He had flayed Miles open, down to the marrow of his youth, back into the foolish child he’d been, and Miles had ran. And now, after the threat of his death, the flashing panic that nearly tore Miles open as he sat, hunched over himself on that private jet, a fire caught in his chest. A fire that flung him back across the Atlantic, through hospital corridors and bursting into his room, panting and fatigued and furious that he’d ever let that imbecile out of his sight. Into the careful and slightly bewildered eyes of Phoenix Wright, who, even after his forty-foot tumble into a freezing river, was not dead.
“Thank you, Edgeworth,” he says, and Miles flinches as Phoenix grabs his forearm again, “thank you, thank you.” He has that foolish looking white hood pulled over his head, making his hair fall forward and stick to his skin, slick with sweat.
This man is not dead, and he is not dreaming, Miles reminds himself for what must be the tenth time in the past half hour. He didn't cry on the flight over, he hasn't cried since relief had struck him like a punch in the face last December. And he won't cry now, not when he isn't dead, when he's only caught a cold, and is blubbering about Maya being trapped, a burning bridge, and a murder in the mountains. Miles pinches the badge between his fingers and takes a deep breath.
“Of course,” he tells Phoenix. Of course, because there is nothing he can do to repay the man sitting in hospital blue, sniffling and sick and very much alive. Of course, because he’d do anything he could to keep Phoenix in his life, even at an arm's length. Of course, because he has everything to atone for, a mountain’s high stack of sins, that he had realized on the edge of that rooftop, could not be paid for with his life alone.
And maybe saving Iris will be his first step on that path of light, guided by Phoenix’s hand–Phoenix’s badge.
“I’m so glad you’re not dead,” he huffs out with a choked laugh and rests his head back against the pillows.
“I-” Miles clamps his mouth shut, unable to meet Phoenix’s eyes now as he smiles, too bright, too warm. “I am glad that you are alive,” he says, “as well.”
Phoenix giggles, still a little delirious from the medication, and squeezes Miles’s arm. “Thank you, God,” he shakes his head and closes his eyes and swallows, throat bobbing. “Fuck.”