Work Text:
- november 17, 2021
"Mr. Edgeworth!" Miles heard a child's voice shout from across his study.
"Yes, Miss Wright?" Miles set down his pen. A giggle drifted toward him, then footsteps, then Trucy herself, a picture frame cradled in both hands. "Is everything alright?" He asked as he noticed the object in her hands. He stilled as he realized what it was, but was careful not to raise any suspicion in the girl.
"I found this on your shelf," Trucy started. "Who is that man beside you? Is that your daddy?" She asked, her eyes curious and innocent. Miles examined the photo in her hands for a long while, though he didn’t need to. He had spent many nights hiding in his room, away from Von Karma, in order to relive the memories of his father.
"Yes, Miss Wright. That is my father, and judging by the looks of it…" he trailed off, feigning to be deep in thought, "I was around seven years old. Just a bit younger than you are now," he smiled at the girl, who smiled back at him.
"What was he like?" Trucy asked, settling herself onto the arm of the chair beside his desk without waiting to be invited. She had never waited to be invited, for anything, since the first day Phoenix had brought her by. She held the frame carefully, like it was something sacred, the same way she held her father’s case files when she thought no one was watching, like something might break if she wasn’t paying attention.
Miles considered the question longer than it warranted. He had answered variations of it before, to himself mostly, in the dark, in the years when answering it out loud had not been an option but he couldn’t stomach the thought of forgetting any detail about him – but rarely to anyone else, and never to a child.
"Kind," he said finally, and barely above a whisper. "Patient, in a way I don’t think I inherited." A small, dry huff of breath, meant to be a laugh. "He had a habit of explaining things twice. Once plainly, and once again as though it were the most fascinating puzzle in the world, so that even the dullest and lifeless afternoon at the courthouse felt like an adventure." He tapped the edge of the frame, near his father’s shoulder, where his own hand rested, seven years old and small in the photograph. "He believed, very deeply, that everyone deserved to be heard before they were judged. It was not a popular opinion, even then. He held it anyway."
Trucy was quiet for a moment, studying the photograph with the particular seriousness she reserved for things she’d decided mattered. Her brow furrowed as she stuck her tongue out just slightly, and Miles couldn’t help but chuckle at the sight. She looks a lot like Phoenix, that’s for sure. "You’re smiling in this one," she observed. "Like, a real smile. Not your lawyer smile."
Miles blinked. "I have a lawyer smile?"
"You totally have a lawyer smile. It’s very, um…" she pinched her lips into a thin, polite line, chin tilted, and it was mortifyingly accurate. "This one’s different. You look… happy."
"I was happy," he replied, and was slightly surprised to hear how simply it came out. No buffer, no qualifier tailing after it like there usually was. "That was… before." He did not elaborate on what before meant, and Trucy, at ten years old and already fluent in the language of things adults did not finish saying, didn’t ask him to. She only looked at the photo for a moment longer, then up at him, her expression softening into something that was not quite pity, as he would not have tolerated pity from a ten year old, but something adjacent to it. Something much gentler and much less condescending.
"Can I ask you something else?" she asked.
"You may."
"Do you have more pictures like this? From when you were a kid?"
"I do," he said. "Somewhere."
Trucy’s whole face lit up. "Can I see them?"
He should have outright said no. He very nearly did.
"Perhaps one day, I will share them with you. There cannot be much harm in it," he replied instead.
He was, he would reflect much later, spectacularly wrong about that. There was a great deal of harm in it: old, familiar, worn-smooth-with-handling harm, the kind that came from being asked to remember things he had spent years training himself not to. But there was something else in it too, something he had not expected and did not yet have a word for, and it was that second thing, he suspected, that made him willing to show them to her.
- december 03, 2021
Miles arrived at the Wright Talent Agency a few minutes past six, as arranged, his coat still damp from the walk over. Phoenix met him at the door already halfway into his own jacket, his once spiked hair now covered with his usual blue knit beanie. His keys dangled from one hand, the particular hurried energy of a man running late for a job he'd never expected to need.
"You’re a lifesaver, Edgeworth," Phoenix said, not quite meeting his eyes. He still did that, sometimes, when the topic of the Borscht Bowl Club came up, a flicker of something he didn’t want examined too closely. "She’s had dinner. There’s more in the fridge if she says she hasn’t, because you and I both know she’ll say that regardless," Phoenix rambled. Miles took note of there being leftovers in the fridge, curious if Phoenix had eaten anything himself.
"Go," Miles replied. "I have this handled."
Phoenix hesitated in the doorway a moment longer than necessary, and Miles understood, without either of them saying it, that the hesitation had nothing to do with Trucy.
"Go, Phoenix."
The door closed, and from the sofa, Trucy did not look up from the deck of cards she was shuffling with a fluency that seemed, to Miles, faintly unnatural for someone her age. "He hates it there," she said, matter-of-fact, not unkind. "The piano's out of tune and the manager makes him wear a hat with a plastic mustache glued to it."
"I’m aware." He was also aware that Phoenix wasn’t really playing the piano when he went to work.
"He thinks I don’t notice he hates it."
Miles hung his coat on the coat rack and said nothing to that, because there was nothing useful to say. Only that he understood, better than most, what it was like to smile through something and hope the people you loved wouldn’t look too closely.
Trucy fanned the cards, considered him for a moment with the particular directness that she seemed to reserve just for him, and then sat the deck aside entirely. "Did you bring any pictures?" she asked, kicking her feet where they hung off of the couch.
He had, in fact. An envelope that contained only a few photos, tucked neatly into the side pocket of his coat where he'd told himself it was simply more convenient to keep it, and had not examined that reasoning further than that. He retrieved it now and set it on the low table between them, and Trucy was across the room and settled beside him before he'd finished lowering himself onto the sofa.
She went through them slowly this time, without being asked to. She seemed excited at there being more than one photo, and wanted to be careful to notice as much as possible. She also noticed that rushing Miles only made him more careful, and stillness got further. It was the third photograph that she completely stilled on: a school portrait, rows of children squinting into the overexposed sunlight, a small imperious boy in the front row with his arms crossed as though he were already presiding over the proceedings.
"Oh my gosh," Trucy giggled, "you were so serious."
"I was nine."
"Yeah, a nine year old who looks like he’s going to give someone detention." She peered closer, then went very still, one finger hovering just above the photo without quite touching it. "Wait, is that-" She looked up at him, her eyes wide with the glee of a detective who had just found the missing piece. "Is that Daddy?!"
"It is," Miles admitted.
"You knew him when you were nine?!" She turned to face him fully now, photos laying discarded in her lap, the whole of her attention narrowing to this discovery. "He never told me that. He tells me everything, and he never told me that."
"I suspect," Miles said, "that your father has his reasons for leaving certain chapters out."
"What happened? Tell me. Tell me everything."
And Miles, who had spent the better part of a decade refusing to discuss this particular chapter with anyone, who had walked out of rooms rather than revisit it, found himself, for reasons he did not fully examine, settling back into the sofa and beginning to explain. "It started," he began, "with Larry Butz, which should tell you most of what you need to know already."
"Uncle Larry," Trucy said, nodding gravely, as though this alone confirmed the story would end badly.
"Uncle Larry," Miles agreed. "There was a… a boy in our class whose lunch money was stolen. Larry was out of class that day, so the boy blamed Phoenix." Trucy gasped, mumbling something about how her Daddy would never. "The whole class wanted to put him on trial. The next day, we held a mock trial, with Phoenix as the defendant."
Trucy had drawn her knees up onto the sofa now, chin resting on them, fully abandoning any pretense of doing anything but listening. "Who was the judge?"
"The teacher, as I recall. Propped on the teacher's desk. We took it very seriously."
"Wow..."
"I stood in the back and listened to those kids say very mean things to Phoenix. I waited a while before I interjected, so long, in fact, that your father had begun to cry." Trucy gasped again, covering her mouth. "I shouted that evidence was needed before your father could be demanded to do such things. When I got up to defend him, I knew he hadn’t been the one to steal my lunch money," he said, Trucy’s eyes widening at the admission. "I declared him innocent, and the class could not believe it. Everyone began shouting once again until Larry interrupted, saying that everyone should believe Phoenix." Miles shook his head slightly, something almost fond creeping into the memory now that he'd let himself back into it.
"So… who did it?" Trucy asked, eyes wide and curious.
"Remember how at the beginning, I said it all started with Larry?"
Trucy giggled. "Of course it was him!" Trucy was quiet for a moment, turning the photograph over in her hands as if the story might be printed on the back of it. "Wait," she said slowly. "So the very first case you ever did was a defense?"
Miles allowed himself a small, wry exhale. "Not one I'd expected to make. I recall standing in the back of that classroom fully intending to say nothing at all. It was not my fight. I had no stake in it beyond the fact that it had been my lunch money in the first place, and even that felt, at the time, entirely beside the point next to watching an entire room decide someone was guilty before anyone had asked him a single real question."
"But you said something anyway."
"I did." He looked at the photograph in her hands rather than at her, which she seemed to understand, by now, was simply how he told the parts that mattered most. "I don't recall deciding to. One moment I was watching, and the next I was on my feet, telling a room full of nine-year-olds that they hadn't proven anything yet, that they were simply agreeing with each other very loudly, which is not the same thing as evidence."
"That's so… that's such a you thing to say, even now."
"I was insufferable then as well, if that reassures you."
"It does, actually." Trucy grinned, then sobered slightly. "Was Daddy okay? After? You said he was crying."
"He was," Miles said, quieter now. "By the time I stepped in, I think he'd nearly given up defending himself at all. I remember that more clearly than almost anything else from that year, the exact moment he stopped looking like he expected to lose." A pause. "He looked at me like he couldn't quite believe someone had bothered."
"Is that when you two became friends?"
"Quite immediately. Even Larry was a part of our trio. It was interesting; I had never defended anyone in my life, and he had never been defended by someone. He seemed faintly astonished at me for doing it." He set the photograph down carefully, the way he always did, as though the memory itself might bruise.
Trucy didn't say anything right away. She just leaned, slowly, until her shoulder rested against his arm, the cards on the sofa cushion beside them entirely forgotten.
"I'm glad you said something," she said.
Miles looked down at her, small and warm and utterly unguarded against him, in a way almost no one had been in a very long time, and found, again, that he had no ready response prepared.
"So am I," he said finally, and meant it more than he expected to.
- december 18, 2021
Phoenix was later than usual answering the door, this time the one to his apartment. When he did, he looked worn thin in a way that had nothing to do with the Borscht Bowl, his shirt half-buttoned wrong, hair more disheveled than usual, a stack of unpaid bills shoved under the couch cushion like he’d tried and failed to hide them when Miles arrived.
"Sorry," Phoenix said, "sorry, I’m– I know I’m running behind–"
"You’re fine." Miles reached out, without entirely deciding to, and fixed the top button Phoenix had missed. His hand lingered a half-second longer than the task required. Phoenix went very still under it, breath catching audibly, and for a moment neither of them moved, the small apartment gone quiet around them.
"Thanks," Phoenix said, too quietly, not stepping back.
"You should go," Miles said, equally quietly, also not stepping back.
It was Trucy's voice from the kitchen, "Daddy, your mustache hat is on the counter, you're gonna forget it again," and that finally broke whatever that had been, and Phoenix laughed, a short, startled sound, and stepped away first, and Miles told himself the loss of it didn't register as clearly as it did.
"I’ll be back by midnight," Phoenix said, hovering in the doorway a beat too long, the way he always did lately. "Edgeworth…"
"Go, Phoenix."
He went. The door clicked shut and Miles stood in the small entryway a moment longer than necessary, willing his pulse back to something reasonable, and did not examine too closely while it had needed willing at all.
He was not, if he were honest with himself, in good form tonight, and the door had only played a small part in it.
The trouble had started three days earlier, the way it always did this time of year. A low static hum under everything, sharpening a little more as the days passed, though he’d told no one why. He had not slept well in over a week. He had, twice, caught himself staring at nothing long enough that Phoenix had asked, gently, if he was alright, and both times he had responded fine in a tone that closed the subject rather than answered it.
Ten more days. He did not need to check the calendar to know that. His body had been keeping the count on its own since he was nine years old, whether he wanted it to or not. "Mr. Edgeworth?"
Trucy was watching him from the kitchen doorway, a spoonful of cereal halfway to her mouth, forgotten. He realized, with some embarrassment, that he'd been standing in the entryway for considerably longer than a person setting down their coat required.
"My apologies," he said, moving further into the room. "I was thinking."
"About what?"
"Nothing of consequence."
She did not look convinced, she rarely did, when he said things like that, but she let it go, for the moment, and returned to her cereal, and Miles was grateful for it in a way he did not say out loud.
He had brought the box tonight, the full one, not the thinning envelope, hauled up from the back of his closet two nights ago in a fit of something he hadn't examined closely and had simply decided to call insomnia. He set it on the low table between them without quite meaning to announce it, and Trucy's eyes went straight to it, wide.
"Is that the whole box?"
"It is."
"Can I-"
"Go ahead."
She was cross-legged on the floor before he'd finished the sentence, lifting the lid with both hands like it was something ceremonial. Miles lowered himself onto the sofa across from her and said nothing for a while, simply watched her work through the layers: school photographs, a handful from Germany he hadn't looked at closely in years, one of himself at a piano recital he'd been made to attend and had loathed.
"Okay, wait, you played piano?"
"Badly. For approximately eight months, until my instructor and I mutually agreed the arrangement wasn't working."
"Was he mean?"
"She was extremely patient, actually, which somehow made it worse." A ghost of a smile. "I don't have an ear for music. I have an ear for objections. They are not, apparently, the same skill."
Trucy laughed, delighted, and set the piano photo aside gently. She kept going, particularly slow with her movements. Miles noticed that she was not rushing to find the next photo, but she lingered for a long while, turning each photograph over as though she were reading something written on the back, even when there was nothing there.
He watched her do this for a while before he understood: she was watching him, gauging by his face which photographs sat easy and which didn’t, and pacing herself based on those reactions. It should have unsettled him, being read so transparently by a ten year old. Instead, it settled something in his chest that he didn’t realize was unsettled.
"You're being careful," he said quietly.
"You've been weird tonight," she said, not looking up. "I figured I should be careful too."
"You don't have to manage me, Trucy."
"I'm not managing you. I'm just…" She considered the word. "Paying attention. That's different."
He had no argument prepared for that, which was, he was coming to understand, an increasingly common condition around her.
She reached further into the box and paused; he saw her hand still before he saw what she'd found, and something in him went very quiet, bracing, before she'd even lifted it clear. It was a photograph of him and his father, taken not long before. He knew, without needing to check a date, exactly how not long before, outside the District Court, both of them mid-conversation, his father's hand resting on his shoulder, neither of them looking at the camera at all.
Trucy held it a moment, then looked up, and whatever she saw in his face made her set it down, gently, face-up on the table rather than back in the box, like she was giving it room to simply exist between them rather than asking anything of it yet.
"You don't have to talk about this one," she said.
"I know." He looked at it anyway , the last photograph, as it happened, though she couldn't have known that, and perhaps some part of him hadn't fully let himself know it either until just now, seeing it in her hands instead of hidden at the bottom of a box. "It was taken a week before he died," he said, before he'd quite decided to say it. "December, both times. The photograph, and… the rest of it."
Trucy went very still. "This month?"
"Ten days from now, as it happens."
"Is that why you've been weird?"
"Yes," he said simply, because there seemed, suddenly, no point in dressing it in anything softer. "It happens every year, around this time. I don't sleep particularly well. I find myself, hm… distracted, in ways I don't entirely control. I've had a great deal of practice managing it in private. I have considerably less practice doing so in company."
"You don't have to manage it in front of me either." She said it plainly, the way she said most true things, without performance. "You can just be weird. I don't mind."
Something in his throat tightened unexpectedly. He looked away from her, toward the photograph, and did not trust his voice for a moment.
"Thank you," he said finally, quieter than he meant to.
Trucy scooted closer, until she was sitting against the side of the sofa near his knee, and picked the photograph back up, studying it with the same careful reverence she'd given the others. "Tell me more about him," she said. "Not the… not what happened. Just him. What he was like that day."
Miles looked at the photograph for a long moment, at his father's hand on his shoulder, at the version of himself who had no idea, yet, what the following week would take from him.
"He'd just won a rather difficult case," he said slowly, memory unspooling easier than he expected once he let it. "Not the trial in the photograph, an earlier one. He took me for ice cream to celebrate, even though it was the middle of December and entirely too cold for it. I remember complaining about the cold. He told me a good outcome deserved to be celebrated properly, regardless of the weather, and that waiting for convenient circumstances was how most people talked themselves out of things worth doing."
"That's a good rule."
"It is. I didn't appreciate it at nine. I mostly wanted to go inside." A small, unguarded huff of breath, almost a laugh. "He let me complain the entire walk back and bought me a second scoop anyway, because he said sulking was thirsty work."
Trucy was smiling now, soft and a little sad at the edges. "He sounds like he really loved you."
"He did." Miles's voice was steady, but only just. "I don't talk about him often. It doesn't undo anything, talking about it. But it's true, and I find I'd like do it more, lately, than I used to."
They sat with that for a while, the photograph between them on the low table, the apartment quiet except for the muffled sound of traffic outside and, somewhere down the hall, a neighbor's television. Trucy didn't press further, and Miles didn't offer more than he had, and it was, he found, entirely enough: the first December in a long while that hadn't asked him to carry it alone.
"Ten more days," Trucy said eventually, quiet.
"Ten more days," he agreed.
"You don't have to be okay on the actual day. Just so you know. If you're still weird, that's allowed."
Miles looked down at her, small and steady beside his knee, entirely unbothered by the size of what she'd just been handed, meeting it instead with nothing but plain, uncomplicated care, and felt, not for the first time this autumn, that he had done considerably less to deserve this family than they seemed determined to give him anyway.
"Noted," he said, and reached over to set the photograph gently back into the box, not quite at the bottom this year, but near enough the top that he thought he might look at it again before too long. "Shall we keep going, or have we had enough for one evening?"
Trucy reached for the next photograph without hesitation.
"Keep going," she said. "I'm not done yet."
- december 25, 2021
Miles had not intended to spend Christmas at the Wright apartment. He had, in fact, planned rather deliberately not to; he had a standing arrangement with himself, going back years, of treating the holiday as an ordinary Saturday, work left conveniently finished, phone left conveniently unanswered. It was easier that way. It required less explaining.
Trucy had made the plan for him without consulting him at all.
"You're coming," she'd informed him on the twenty-third, with the flat, non-negotiable certainty of a prosecutor reading a verdict, "and you're not allowed to say no, because I already told Daddy you were coming, and if you don't show up he's going to think it's his fault, and then he's going to be weird about it for a week, and I don't have the patience for that this year," the ten year old, who sounded much more mature, explained.
He had not, in the end, said no.
Now he stood in the entryway of Phoenix and Trucy’s apartment at half past eleven in the morning, two wrapped packages in his hands, both of which he had agonized over for far longer than the gifts themselves warranted, and found the apartment already warm with the smell of something Phoenix was very obviously improvising in the kitchen, and the sound of a small artificial tree’s lights humming faintly where it had been set up in the corner of the living room.
"You came," Phoenix said, appearing in the kitchen doorway with flour on one cheek and an expression that was doing several things at once, surprise, and pleasure, and something warmer underneath both that he didn't bother hiding as thoroughly as usual, not today.
"I was informed attendance was mandatory."
"She does that." Phoenix wiped his hands on a towel and crossed the room, and for a moment Miles thought he might simply be reaching for the gifts in his hands, and then Phoenix's hand landed instead on his shoulder, brief and warm, lingering exactly as long as the one at the door a week ago had. "Merry Christmas, Miles."
"Merry Christmas," Miles managed, and he scolded himself for how much effort the two words took.
Trucy, thankfully, chose that exact moment to barrel out of her room in a paper crown that she had clearly made herself and declare the whole affair officially started. She dragged Miles by the sleeve toward the sofa before either man had decided what to do with the several seconds that passed between them.
It was, by any reasonable measure, and to any normal person, a good morning. There were gifts: a scarf for Miles that Trucy had made herself and insisted, with great seriousness, matched his eyes; a set of practice case files that Miles had assembled for Phoenix, tabbed and annotated within an inch of their life, which Phoenix accepted with the particular fondness of a man who understood exactly how much time that annotation had taken and what it meant, coming from Miles, as a gift. A personalized deck of cards from Miles to Trucy, holographic and her signature blue, and a joint gift from Phoenix and Trucy for Miles: a box set of all seasons of Steel Samurai. There was a slightly overcooked ham, and a card game that Trucy invented on the spot (using the cards from Miles, of course), with rules that changed depending on who was winning, and, for a while, nothing at all wrong with the day.
But three days was three days, and Miles’s body and mind did not care what holiday it happened to fall on.
He noticed himself losing the thread of a conversation twice before noon. He noticed his hand had gone still over his cards the third time, staring at nothing, until Trucy's voice (gentle, this time, not teasing) pulled him back. He noticed Phoenix noticing, a line forming between his brows that hadn't been there an hour before, watching Miles with the careful, unspoken attention of someone deciding whether to say something and choosing not to, not yet, not in front of Trucy.
It was early afternoon, the ham reduced to leftovers and the three of them settled loosely around the low table, when Trucy brought out the box again: his box, which had apparently taken up semi-permanent residence at the apartment without his quite agreeing to it — and Miles felt, before she'd even lifted the lid, a familiar tightening low in his chest.
"Trucy," Phoenix said carefully, catching something in Miles's face that Miles hadn't managed to smooth away in time. Clearly, Phoenix had heard of their photo adventures. "Maybe not today, sweetie-"
"It's fine," Miles said, too quickly, and then, more evenly, because it wasn't fair to either of them to lie about it: "It's fine. Truly."
Trucy glanced between the two men for a moment, then sat the box down with even more care than the last time, opening it slowly and watching Miles the entire time. She’d gotten good at that, these past weeks, reading how far into the box was too far. Tonight, all she had to go off of was the set of his jaw.
The photograph she found near the top stopped all three of them at once.
It was a Christmas photograph, clearly, a tree visible in the background, tinsel, a nine year old Miles in pajamas far too big for him, sitting on his father's lap with an expression of pure, uncomplicated delight, both of them looking directly at the camera this time instead of at each other.
Miles did not need to ask himself which Christmas it had been. He had done the arithmetic on this particular photograph more times than he cared to admit, alone, in the dark, in years past. Three days after this photograph was taken, his father had died.
The room went very quiet.
"We don't have to look at it," Trucy said softly, already moving to set it aside.
"Leave it," Miles said. His voice came out rougher than he intended. He reached forward and took the photograph from her hands, gently, and simply looked at it for a long moment, at the tree, at the pajamas, at his own small, unguarded face, entirely unaware that it was the last Christmas he would ever spend with the man holding him.
"This was the last one," he whispered, to no one in particular yet to both of them at once. "The last Christmas. Three days later…" he stopped, then started again. "Even when… Even when I lived with Von Karma… I don’t believe I’ve ever spent this holiday with anyone since my father. Not properly, I found it easier not to."
On the opposite side of the table, Phoenix had gone very still, and when Miles finally looked up, there was an expression on Phoenix's face that he couldn’t quite name: not pity, which he would not have tolerated, but something closer to grief on his behalf, old and unresolved and entirely sincere.
"Miles," Phoenix started. "I’m sorry I didn’t think about it. We could have–"
"Done what, precisely? Made it smaller?" It came out sharper than he meant it to, and he saw Trucy flinch slightly, and immediately regretted it. He exhaled, deliberately, and softened. "Forgive me. That wasn't fair. I only meant there was no obligation for either of you to manage this for me. I've managed it alone for twenty years. I didn't imagine that changing."
"Well, it is now," Trucy said, with the same flat, non-negotiable certainty she'd used to inform him he was attending today. "You're not doing this alone anymore. You have us now. Even on the bad days. Especially on the bad days."
Miles looked at her, a girl so small and fierce and entirely unbothered by the size of the thing she'd just declared, and then at Phoenix, who had reached across the table without seeming to notice he'd done it, and rested his hand, briefly and firmly, over Miles's own.
"She's right," Phoenix said. "You don't have to do the twenty-eighth by yourself either. Whatever that looks like. I mean it, Miles."
Miles looked down at Phoenix's hand over his, and at the photograph still held in his other one, his father's arms around him in a moment neither of them had known was borrowed, and found himself, for once, entirely without the composure to argue.
"Alright," he said, quiet, and meant it as more than agreement to a single afternoon. "Alright."
Trucy, satisfied, walked over to the tree and set the photograph gently upright against the base, propping it there among the lights, where it stayed for the rest of the day. Not put away, not hidden at the bottom of a box, but simply included, the way she seemed determined that everything about him would be, from now on.
"There," she said. "Now he's here for Christmas too."
Miles did not trust himself to answer that. He didn't need to. Phoenix's hand was still over his, warm and steady, and Trucy had already moved on to distributing the last of the cookies with the brisk efficiency of someone closing out a very satisfactory case, and for the first time in twenty years, Miles Edgeworth found that the days counting down toward the twenty-eighth did not feel quite so much like something he was facing alone.
- december 28, 2021
Phoenix Wright had called Miles Edgeworth at four, then again at five, then a third time at half past, and each time it went to voicemail. By six, the calls had stopped, and he mumbled under his breath about how pissed he was that he couldn't take the day off as he sent a quick message to Trucy.
Daddy: Truce go check on Miles. I tried to get out of this shift. Spare keys under the loose brick by his mailbox and call me the second you’re there.
Trucy didn’t ask questions, she knew what day it was.
The first thing she noticed after she hung up with her Daddy was that Miles’s house was dark when she let herself in. Not late-evening dark, but the deliberate kind. The kind that her Daddy did when it got close to the anniversary of his disbarment, or of Mia’s death. His kettle sat cold and unused on the counter, which alone told her more than anything else could have; in all the time she had spent here, she had never once seen it empty at this house.
"Mr. Edgeworth?" she called out, her voice strong for the man who she knew needed it.
No answer. She found his bedroom door slightly ajar, where he was sitting on the floor with his back against the side of the bed rather than in it, still in yesterday's clothes, a single photograph held loosely between two fingers, not looking at it, not looking at anything in particular. He didn't startle when she came in. He barely seemed to register it at all.
"Hi, Mr. Edgeworth," she said, softer than she usually let herself be, and lowered herself down beside him without asking permission, close enough that their shoulders touched.
"Trucy." His voice came out rough, like it hadn't been used yet today. "You shouldn't have come. It's not—" He stopped, started again, more careful. "I'm poor company today."
"I know. I came anyway. Daddy tried to take off of work today, he really did. He said they were mean about it and wouldn’t let him."
He didn't argue that. He simply sat, and she sat with him, and for a long while neither of them said anything at all, the room quiet except for the muffled sound of the building's radiator ticking somewhere in the walls.
"It's the actual day," she said eventually, not a question, and not to anyone in particular. To the darkness of the room, she supposed.
"It's the actual day." He looked, finally, at the photograph in his hand. She couldn't see which one from where she sat, and didn't ask. "Twenty. Twenty years today."
"Do you want to talk about it? Or do you want me to just be here?"
Something in his shoulders loosened, fractionally, at the question, at being given the choice at all, she suspected, rather than either one being assumed for him.
"Just here," he said. "For now. If that's alright."
"That's allowed." She leaned her head against his shoulder, careful, the way she'd learned to be careful with him these past weeks. "I texted Daddy. He's freaking out a little that he can't leave work."
"Tell him not to. Tell him I'm—" He exhaled, and didn't finish the sentence with a lie, which she thought, later, was probably the most honest thing he'd managed all day. "Tell him I'm not alright, but that you're here, and that's enough for now."
She texted it, nearly word for word, and felt her phone buzz back almost instantly.
Daddy: tell him I'll bring dinner when I'm off, tell him to eat something before then, tell him he is loved
Trucy decided not to relay the last part, because some things, she thought, Miles could hear better from Phoenix's own mouth than secondhand through a ten-year-old's phone screen.
They sat like that for a long while. At some point she reached over, gently, and took the photograph from his loose fingers, not to put it away, just to hold it with him, so he wasn't carrying it alone. She found it was the ice cream story he'd told her weeks ago made visible: a nine-year-old Miles, sticky-faced and laughing despite the cold, his father's hand ruffling his hair.
"He looks happy here," she said quietly.
"He was." Miles's voice cracked, just slightly, on the word. "He was always happiest doing something slightly foolish for my sake. I didn't understand, at nine, how rare that was in a parent. I understand it considerably better now."
"You don't have to be strong today, you know. Daddy told me that once, about hard days. He said some days the only job is just getting through them."
"Your father," Miles said, with the ghost of something almost like a laugh, "has an unfair number of good ideas for a man who wears a plastic mustache to work all nights a week." Your father has had an unfair number of bad days.
"Don't tell him I told you that. He'll get a big head."
"I make no promises."
She stayed until the light outside had fully gone, until Phoenix's key turned in the lock two hours later carrying a paper bag of takeout and he found them in Miles’s bedroom with an expression that softened the instant he saw them both still sitting on the floor, unhurried, together. He didn't say anything about the state of the apartment, or the drawn blinds, or the fact that Miles hadn't moved from that spot all day. He simply lowered himself down on Miles's other side, set the food within reach for whenever anyone wanted it, and let his shoulder settle against Miles's, matching Trucy's on the other side.
"You're not alone today," Phoenix said quietly. "I know I said that already. I'm saying it again."
Miles, sitting between the two of them in the dark of his own apartment, twenty years exactly since the worst day of his life, found that for the first time in two decades, he actually believed it.
+1. january 1, 2022, 12:00 AM
"I can stay up until midnight!" Trucy had declared at dinner with the confidence of someone announcing a legally binding contract.
Phoenix hadn’t even looked up from the dinner he was making, relishing in having the last day of the year off from his hellish job. "No."
"But it’s New Years!" Trucy protested, dragging out the word years.
"No."
"Daddy," she begged, pulling out the puppy dog eyes that he couldn’t even see.
"No."
She immediately turned to Miles, a stern look on her face. "Mr. Edgeworth."
He raised an eyebrow as he peered over his glasses, his mug of tea warm in his hand. "I fail to see why I am being consulted," he responded as he raised the porcelain to take a sip.
"Because you’re reasonable," Trucy stated matter-of-factly. Phoenix couldn’t help the loud fit of laughter that escaped from him.
"He absolutely is not!"
Miles set his mug down with unnecessary precision. "I am," he argued, a smirk on his face.
"You alphabetized our spice cabinet," Phoenix supplied, pointing vaguely behind him to the cabinet that housed all of the, now organized spices.
"It was disorganized," Miles shrugged, failing to see how that could be considered unreasonable.
Trucy watched the exchange with growing delight, chin propped on her hands. "So... can I stay up?"
Both men answered at once, Phoenix with a flat "No," Miles half a beat behind him with an equally flat "Yes." They blinked at each other over her head, and Phoenix looked at Miles like he'd just switched sides mid-trial.
"You said yes?"
Miles looked faintly surprised himself, as though the word had escaped before he'd cleared it with anyone, least of all himself. "...Apparently."
Trucy pumped both fists into the air. "Ha!"
"I reserve the right to reconsider," Miles added, already regretting it.
"Too late!" Trucy rebutted as she skipped down the hallway to her bedroom. Phoenix knew she would be unable to contain her excitement due to the surprise she’d been working on for Miles, and if he hadn’t said yes, Phoenix knew he would’ve ended up folding.
However, by eleven forty-five, Phoenix was reconsidering, not because Trucy was tired, but quite the opposite. She had somehow become more energetic with each passing minute, narrating the countdown like it was a courtroom verdict. "There are fifteen minutes left!" She announced.
"I know," Phoenix replied, his eyes struggling to stay open.
"Fourteen now!"
"I know," he replied once more, his head now comfortably against the back of their sofa.
"Twelve!"
"You skipped one," Miles announced, not even looking up from the book he was reading.
"I did?" Trucy asked, clearly not noticing that she had done so.
"You skipped thirteen," Miles explained, finally looking up from his book.
"Oh." A beat. Then, at full volume: "THIRTEEN!"
Phoenix rubbed at his eyes, laughing despite himself. "I'm going to regret this tomorrow."
"You already regret it," Miles observed, his eyes glancing back and forth between his book and the man to his left.
"I absolutely do," Phoenix sighed, allowing his head to fall back against the couch once again.
"And yet you still let her stay up."
Phoenix smiled, helpless. "You’re the one who said yes first. If you hadn’t, I wouldn’t have," he argued, knowing well that he would have folded if his daughter kept asking.
"I heard that," Trucy said, from the floor.
"You were supposed to," Phoenix replied, sticking his tongue out at his daughter. A silence fell over the room for the next few minutes, save for the TV playing in the background. Miles found himself being very… content. He had not felt such hospitality since his father was alive, and he was not taking it for granted. He continued to read his book, nudging Phoenix’s knee every once in a while so he didn’t fall asleep.
The television counted down quietly in the background while fireworks somewhere across the city began popping early. Ten... nine... eight... Trucy bounced where she sat between them on the couch. "I'm gonna make it!"
"I should hope so," Miles said. "There's still seven seconds."
Six... five... Phoenix reached over and ruffled her hair. Four... three... two... one...
"Happy New Year!"
Fireworks burst somewhere outside. Trucy laughed so loudly it nearly drowned them out. She threw her arms around Phoenix first, then, without hesitation, around Miles too. He stiffened for exactly one heartbeat before carefully returning the embrace with one arm.
"Happy New Year, Miss Wright."
She pulled back with a grin bright enough to rival the fireworks. "First picture of the year!"
Phoenix frowned. "...Picture?"
"The camera!"
She bolted from the couch before either man could ask another question. A cabinet door slammed open. Another. "I know it's in here!"
Phoenix laughed. "I forgot she got that instant camera."
"You purchased it," Miles smiled, one that actually met his eyes for the first time in years. He listened as Trucy rummaged around her room for the camera, while he looked over at Phoenix.
"I forget a lot of things," Phoenix replied sheepishly.
"So I've noticed," Miles said with a warmth that sounded foreign to him, though it was not unwelcome.
Trucy returned triumphantly, holding the little camera over her head. "Found it!"
"Truce..." Phoenix glanced at the clock. "It's midnight."
"I know!"
"It's midnight," Phoenix repeated, slower this time, as if the emphasis alone might get through to her, and got nothing for his trouble but her cheerful insistence that repetition might help and his own flat admission that it wouldn't. She had already begun fiddling with the settings by the time he gave up, a loud come on! escaping her.
Miles raised an eyebrow. "I don't recall agreeing to this."
"What Trucy Wright says goes," Phoenix winked.
"That is an alarming philosophy."
"It's one picture." Phoenix stood, stretching, already resigned. "C'mon, Edgeworth."
"...all of us?"
"I've learned resistance just makes it take longer."
Miles sighed the long, theatrical sigh of a man fully aware he had already lost, and let himself be herded off the couch anyway. The camera balanced precariously atop a stack of law books on the shelf, timer counting down, ten seconds, and Phoenix hurried back beside them before it ran out. The three of them stood there, awkwardly, with no clearer plan than that.
"...Now what?" Phoenix asked.
"I hadn't considered that far."
"Clearly."
Trucy groaned dramatically. "You two are impossible." She grabbed Phoenix's sleeve with one hand, Miles's wrist with the other, and tugged until they were standing shoulder to shoulder with her squeezed happily between them. "There."
Eight... seven... Phoenix smiled at the camera. Miles stared at it with the expression of someone preparing for cross-examination, which earned him an immediate, unimpressed "Mr. Edgeworth."
"What."
"That's your lawyer face."
"I only possess one face."
"Daddy."
"He does not," Phoenix agreed, laughing, and Miles's dry "I object" got nothing but an "Overruled" in return.
Six... five... Trucy leaned into both of them. "Smile!" Phoenix did, easily. Miles attempted something that was, technically, the movement of facial muscles, and was told, flatly, "Nope."
"I am smiling."
"You look like you're announcing someone's prison sentence."
"I resent that characterization."
"You smiled bigger when Daddy burned dinner."
"I did not."
"You absolutely did."
Phoenix snorted, and Miles turned instinctively toward the sound. Their eyes met, for just a second. Phoenix was laughing, really laughing. The apartment was warm, fireworks painting brief flashes of color across the window, Trucy practically vibrating with happiness between them. And, without thinking about it, Miles smiled back.
The camera flashed. The photograph slid slowly from the front of the camera, and Trucy caught it before it could fall. The three of them crowded together over the tiny square while the image slowly appeared — first the bookshelf, then the couch, then the three of them: Trucy's enormous grin, Phoenix halfway through laughing, and Miles looking sideways at Phoenix instead of the camera, smiling with a softness he'd never once seen in a photograph of himself.
No one spoke for a moment. Finally, Trucy said quietly, "...Well."
"What?" Miles asked.
"Hmm... I think..." She looked from the photograph to Miles. "...I think that's the first page."
"The first page of what?"
"A new photo album." Trucy nodded as she bounced away to her room once more. "For us!" she called out.
Miles’s eyes widened, and he looked at Phoenix hopefully. He took the photograph carefully by its edges. For years, photographs had been relics to him, proof that something precious had already happened, already ended. He looked at the three faces in the tiny frame and understood, without needing to be told, that this one wasn't preserving an ending. It was marking a beginning.
As Trucy entered the room, Miles handed it back to her. "I believe," he said quietly, "every album has to start somewhere."
Trucy hugged the photograph to her chest like it was the most valuable thing in the apartment before sticking it to the very first page of the book. "We’re gonna fill the whole thing."
Miles glanced at Phoenix, who was already smiling at the idea. "I rather hope you do."
Outside, another burst of fireworks lit the sky. Inside, on the first minute of the first day of a new year, a photograph of something real and present, tangible, sat comfortably in a book, and Miles felt more love than he’d felt since before his father died. That was a feeling he was unwilling to trade for anything.