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It’s been ten years, and Lana has a hard time believing it sometimes. She has a hard time believing a lot of things these days. Things like her sister being grown up, thinking of having kids. How far Edgeworth and Wright have gone in ten years, the jury system, her being a detective again.
Her daughter, holding her hand and sucking on her popsicle, is one of those things she can’t believe. Her name is Mara, after Lana’s mother, and she is smart and wants to be a detective like her big sister and her mother when she grows up. And like someone else, although Lana never tells her who. She has bright, bright green eyes and is severely light sensitive, leading to her needing to wear a pair of Ema’s cast-off luminol lollipop pink glasses everywhere, bouncing on her nose with every hop-step. Her favourite colour is orange and it’s a gorgeous summer LA day so she’s wearing her favourite sun dress, orange with yellow flowers, and the pink slides that her Auntie Ema got for her and skipping.
"Can we go swimming tomorrow?" Mara asked, sucking on her popsicle. It was from the ice cream van that had just driven by and Lana had sprinted to catch, holding her heels in one hand. She’s almost forty, but she’s still in good enough shape from her work as a detective to keep up with an ice cream van. "I want to go with Miss Trucy."
"Well, if you want to go swimming with Miss Trucy, you’ll have to ask Miss Trucy. If you want to go swimming with me, that’s all right." Lana took another bite of her ice cream sandwich and looked up at the picturesque neighbourhood they were walking through, the houses and trees, a cookie-cutter suburb but home, in a way that nowhere else was—she had insisted on putting down the downpayment on the house herself, but Ema and Angel and Jake, after he got out of jail, and even Edgeworth from the office had pitched in to help her pay off all the real debt on the house, since as a recently paroled officer and a single mother she really couldn’t.
Her house. Her own. Her daughter, her own. Her little Mara.
As they turned down the next street toward their own house (777 Skybird Avenue, she had nearly choked when she saw it for sale but knew that house had to be hers), Lana stopped dead in her tracks.
There was someone outside of her house.
Instantly, with the instincts of a mother, the instincts of a beat cop, the instincts of a detective of a Prosecutor of a woman damned, she pushed Mara back slightly, behind her. She stepped in front of her little ten year old her little Mara perfect and beautiful in every way. She swallowed.
She knew that haircut. It was whiter, but it’s impossible to miss that particular…kink, to the bangs. The beard, recently re-trimmed. She knows those shoulders, she knows those hands, large, one holding pink sunglasses, one pressed fingers against his temple—it was sunset and the light hurt his eyes. She knew that way that white cotton of his shirt stuck to old muscles.
She knew him better than she knew herself, she had sometimes used to think. She still dreamed about him at night (she had tried dating Jake for about three months somewhere, but then he and Angel had hooked up, and she was alone again. She had almost tried some of the other attorneys but no, nobody, no-one. She has a vibrator and a lot of self control and a ten year old daughter and) she still wanted him she still missed the way he filled her bed, or the way she filled his.
"Mama," Mara’s voice was little and quiet. She leaned around Lana’s legs slightly, her bangs kinked off-kilter to the side with wiry single curl, and continued sucking on her popsicle, "Who is that?"
Lana couldn’t find the words. Her throat felt tight. Fingers curled into the hem of her skirt, tugged.
"Mama?"
Lana stared straight ahead, her heard pounding thudding running screaming in her chest and she let out a slow, shaking breath. She turned around, knelt down, and took Mara’s cheeks in her hands.
"Mara, Mama’s going to tell you something very important. Go down to Mr. Greenberg’s house and tell him that I’m seeing someone special. He’ll make you dinner, okay?" Mara stared at her in confusion, and after a moment, Lana kissed her on the forehead, squeezed her hand. "I’ll come get you tonight at bedtime, or after. I promise. Here." She reached into the pocket of her skirt and pulled out the cell phone, the extra, she always carried—after before, she’s always got a phone. "Take this. I’ll be all right." The words sound paper in her mouth, but Mara finally takes the cell phone and trots off, her sandals clopping on the pavement, and Lana waits until she vanishes safely into their neighbour’s house before she turns back around.
He’s still on the doorstep. Waiting for her.
It’s like a mix of a nightmare and the kind of dream she wakes up crying in longing from, imagining him here again. She takes one step forward and her foot roots to the ground and she jerks herself free and takes another and another and then it’s so easy, so laughably easy, to walk right up to him and stop, still, on the pavement. Her toes are bare against the cement, warmed by the evening sun but starting to cool. She’s wearing a simple white pencil skirt and a blouse, her heels are in her hand. She has the wrapper from an ice cream sandwich balled up with them. Her hair is short now, cut at her shoulders, instead of long. There are grey streaks at the part, on the side of her forehead.
He looks up at her and she almost crumbles. It’s slow. He starts at her feet, looks up carefully, taking in every inch of her, like he’s trying to remember how you see, and further up, until he glances past her torso and her short hair and their eyes finally, finally meet.
Lana knows how she looks. She looks tired, but strong. There are lines around her eyes and creases beside her mouth and grey streaks in her hair. She knows how he looks now, too. The grey is all gone from his mop, grown in with white, and he looks like his age finally caught up with him, sagging slightly at the shoulders, leaving wrinkles on his skin. His lips are a thin line, his eyes are tired, but that gaze can still rock her to the bone.
They’re both utterly silent for what feels like a very long time, and she finally opens her mouth—
"Hello, Damon." She knew he would be getting out soon, on good behaviour. Ten years in prison is a long time, it probably would have been longer if she hadn’t appealed over and over again, reminding the court of his surviving family, and her position as the person most hurt by him allowed her some wiggle room. They listened to her, they adjusted his sentence.
He probably knows by now.
"Hello, Lana." He stares back at her. His voice is rougher than she remembers, but she hasn’t heard him talk in ten years. "I hope I’m not…interrupting?"
"No," she says immediately, and then after a moment of pause, "No. You aren’t. I was…wondering when you might find me."
"I’ve been on parole for two months." She should be screaming. She should be running. Here is the man that nearly destroyed her, two months out of prison, and instead she feels warm from head to toe and she wants to punch him and then kick him in the balls and then hug him and hug him until she feels her arms fall off.
Awkwardly, he gets to his feet—he was sitting so low on the step that it takes his joints (he’s seventy-five now and that’s a terrifying thought, and his daughter is so little) and adjusts to get comfortable. He stares down at her, she stares back up at him.
Finally, he pauses, oddly subdued for his usual self, licks his lips like he’s thinking, and—
"Lana…I’m sorry. For everything. I don’t deserve to be able to come back here and see you and think that you’ll talk to me. I deserved a hanging that I never got." Ten years ago, talking about this, he would have lit up like a firework, screamed at her, not looked her in the eye. Now he’s quiet, calm, and staring her dead in the face.
It’s both relieving and weirdly terrifying.
"I don’t know what I can say to make you believe me. Probably nothing, since I’ve been rehearsing this inside my head for ten years and it’s never come out in any way that either makes me out to not be an asshole or sounds like I’m not begging you to forgive me. But Lana…I really am sorry. For Neil, for Jake, for Angel, for Bruce…for everything." He finally can’t stare her in the eye, straight-backed and unbending, any more.
Damon Gant is a very different person. He looks down at the ground.
"For Ema…and for you." For what feels like an age, they stay like that. Damon stares at the ground, slumped slightly. She stares at him, waiting. He finally looks back up at her.
"I know I don’t deserve it and you have every right to run me off your property with your gun for breaking a restraining order—" Which he doesn’t have, she filed the paperwork to end it herself, "But can…—" a pause,
"Would I be able to have a second chance?"
Lana narrows her eyes at him, thinks for a moment (fists clenching shoulders tight) and then pulls back her free hand and punches him as hard as she possibly can, a mean right hook right across the face. Damon takes it because they both know he deserves it, head snapping with the blow, and he’s going to have a black eye later. Lana pauses for a moment, her knuckles ringing with impacted force, and then takes a deep breath and does it again. This time she splits his lip, but he doesn’t bother to move out of the way, and the last time she hits him hard on the jaw and he spits slightly, and she lowers her hand.
Her knuckles scream but her heart is beating like a jackhammer, and she finds herself smiling as he looks down at her, rubbing his jaw warily.
"Come inside," Lana finds herself saying. "Let me fix you a drink."
She knows how much work it’s going to take to fix this. Couples therapy, and lots of it. Strict rules laid down like the law, and understandings of what happens if they’re broken. One-strike-you’re-out. She’s going to need to set him straight. He doesn’t get to jerk her around any more.
But the idea that she gets this again, even with limitations and set rules is incoherently bright behind her eyes and she can’t stop smiling because she has Damon Gant in her house for the first time in ten years, and he walks around the front hallway awkwardly, rubbing his jaw as she gets out an icepack for his aching face, hands it to him while he stares at all the photos in the living room. Photos of people that they know.
There’s the photo of Ema’s first actual testimony as a detective in court, grown up. There are some photos from her cases with Apollo Justice. There’s Trucy at her first Gramarye show, a year and a half ago, wowing crowds. A candid shot of Edgeworth that she got from her sister, looking over his reading glasses in the Chief Prosecutor’s office and half-frowning, opening his mouth to talk. Gumshoe and Byrde, with their son. Pheonix Wright getting his bar back, a photo from him and Edgeworth’s wedding, Trucy (she’s young there) screaming and throwing flowers in the air. Maya Fey as the head of Kurain with Ema and Franziska, three good friends. Gumshoe getting promoted to Chief Detective, smiling and laughing with his wife.
And, with everything, pictures of Lana from ten years of her life. Pictures of her with her sister, with her friends, and in almost all of them, pictures of Mara. Mara as a toddler, holding tight to her mother or her aunt, staring at the world with wide green eyes. Pictures of Mara as a young girl, wearing Ema’s sunglasses and smiling, missing teeth. Pictures of Mara recently, at a piano recital, in her Halloween costume as Sherlock Holmes.
Damon stares at all the photos. Lana knows he can see it—the strong jawline, the eyes, the light sensitivity, the proclivity for wearing orange, all the photos of her little girl swimming, the kink in her bangs, the way she smiles, wide like her father. The way that she claps.
Lana secretly hopes he doesn’t notice it.
Finally, he turns back to her, and she gestures into the kitchen. “Can I get you anything?”
"Just some water, and lemon if you have it." She was with him for so many years, his partner in more than one way, that she always keeps one lemon in the house, just in case. Just if he maybe showed back up. Sentimentality more than anything. But, she makes the water with mechanical motions for him, and then pulls out a bottle of cranberry juice and pours it for herself, coming back to the table where he’s sitting and handing him the water before sitting down.
Neither of them says anything. Neither of them really need to. Ten years have passed and their lives are completely different and they share so much bad blood it’s a wonder she can even stand to see him any more, let alone long to have him in her bed, as she does, as she knows she does. She’s stopped smiling, so has he.
They’re just looking at each other, trying to catch up on ten missed years, and finally, he starts talking. Asks her how she’s been, asks her about the force, asks her about interesting cases. She fills him in on their mutual acquaintances, what he’s missed while he’s been gone (surprisingly a lot, actually, it’s been a busy ten years), about how she is on the force, a detective for the second time for almost two years. They talk about recent trends that he’s not been aware of, they talk about how jail was (and for a moment he brings up how he got the death penalty and still isn’t sure how he only ended up with ten years, and she doesn’t have the heart to tell him that she spent hours on conference call with Miles Edgeworth and Phoenix Wright, desperately trying to find loopholes to get him out of it until they had compiled an airtight case of specific law-mandated ways to get someone out of a death sentence, many of them involving familial ties) and how she had actually helped appeal his case, which he knew about, and how she had helped him get paroled sooner, which he didn’t.
They don’t talk about SL-9, or the Goodman incident. That’s for later, some dark night. Not for now, when they haven’t seen each other in ten years.
They talk about the weather, and then they’re thirsty and it’s long past dinnertime, and Lana finally gets up and reheats some leftovers, takes out some potato salad from the picnic she went on with Ema and Mara the other day, and brings it over, sets everything down on the table, and they eat quietly, still talking on and off. About recent movies and books (he had been keeping up, even in jail), about some old cases, about what happened to Kristoph Gavin (and how they mutually agree he really deserved it), about Angel and Jake’s baby, about anything and everything under the sun. They just keep talking, trying to fill this empty set of holes in their chests.
Damon doesn’t try anything else, and for that, Lana is infinitely grateful. He leaves at about eight, says he’ll walk to the bus stop (and he’s an imposing man in his mid-seventies, nobody will mess with him) and she sees him out and then when he’s gone she lays on the couch and cycles rapidly through more emotions than she’s felt at once since she was pregnant, anger and sadness and regret and joy and euphoria and desire so much desire it swamps her.
And when she’s recovered, she goes and gets Mara, thanks Mr. Greenberg and his wife, and takes her home and puts her to bed.
Then she calls her sister, and asks for her advice.
It takes three months of couples therapy before Lana feels comfortable doing so much as taking his hand, which she does one day when they are watching some inane movie. It takes four months before she feels really, truly safe about having him in her car or riding in his, or having him in her house or going to his, and then she can do that, and enjoy it. It takes five months for her to be ready to kiss him, and she does so one night after the disastrous yearly departmental get together where Gumshoe nearly ‘knocked his block off’, to use the Chief Detective’s terminology, and was only stopped by his very pregnant and very angry wife and Wright physically holding him back. Jake nearly shot him as well, and had been stopped by Angel, angry, and Ema, angrier.
It could have gone worse. It could have gone better. It went about as badly as Ema’s reintroduction to the man which ended with her kicking Damon, hard, in the balls, with the toe of her shoe. Lana hadn’t done it because (frankly), she was interested in keeping his balls in working condition, but she didn’t blame Ema for it in the least.
He had deserved it, and especially from her, especially after he had tried to purposefully frame her for murder (he had apologised for that, too, but there are some things you just can’t apologise for). She had been nice enough to even give him an ice pack later and talk to him, hesitantly, unsure, but talk to him. And she knows how much Lana (against her better judgment) has loved him all this time.
But this is the night where she makes up her mind, and after he drops her off around eleven to go home, she stops him with a hand on the arm of his orange suit, and he turns back, the front outdoor light making shadows on his skin, where it sags and wrinkles, and refracts through his hair, and she pulls him a step back and kisses him, just hesitant, just once.
He cradles her in his arms like she’s some fragile, perfect, beautiful thing and he loves her (she knows he does, she always has) and kisses her gently back as she sets one hand on his chest and the other on his cheek.
She feels fifteen again, kissing before running into the house. Fifteen and stupid, her heart pounding in her ears, but exhilarated. They don’t go inside, he just holds her and kisses her like he’s never kissed her before, until they are breathless and she can feel her cheeks slightly flushed and her body longing.
Instead, they whisper quiet “Good night,”s and then he leaves, driving back to his apartment, and she goes to bed in a half daze, his taste still on her lips after ten years gone.
It takes six months for her to decide that she’s ready to go to bed with him. It’s hesitant and unsure, one night after they’ve talked about all the variables like confident adults and she’s laid down the law stricter than she ever was before, one night when Mara is staying with Ema because she wants to and Ema said she could that just happened to coincide perfectly.
It’s awkward. It’s hesitant. They bump and laugh and he looks surprisingly young and unsure of himself, and she feels oddly old and cracked. It’s the strangest bout of sex that Lana has ever had with anyone, especially Damon Gant, and when they’re done and his heart is beating even faster than hers, she holds his hand against the bedsheet and finds that they’re both crying after ten and a half years. His tears are few and slow, but eventually she breaks down and holds him tight to her chest, crying into his hair, as soft as she remembers, smelling the same, until his strong hands soothe her to sleep, and she wakes up in the morning to find him still in her bed, wearing just his boxers, his hair an absolute mess and everywhere, reading the morning paper and drinking coffee that he somehow knew how to find in her kitchen, and she gets up and stretches, feels old aches she had forgotten, and she misses him when he has to go.
It’s inconceivable to her, that this is where they are. That she wants to wake up next to him every morning for the rest of her life. That she wants to love him, despite everything…everything. Despite how fucked up their relationship was before, despite what he’s done to her and those she loves. She loves him, just as much.
He’s different now. Subdued, calm, and older. He’s still lively, his eyes still sparkle, he still laughs and claps his hands and goes swimming four days a week but there’s an ache at the core of him that Lana understands.
She felt that same ache for so long after he had left her life. Because she hates herself, but she loves him. Their relationship was as abusive as it came, and it took years of therapy for her to get over that, but therapy never made her get over her love.
Ema warns her, but slowly starts to bristle less. Edgeworth warns her, but Edgeworth warns everyone, and bristles at everyone. Gumshoe continues to threaten to knock his block off, and Lana knows someday he will be Chief of Police, and almost thinks it’s a good thing because of Gant does ever try anything again she’ll have Dick Gumshoe breaking down the door to her house looking wild and ready to kill.
And every day, Mara comments, for the first time in her life, about how happy her mother is. How pretty she looks. How much she’s smiling.
That’s good.
It takes eight months before she’s ready to introduce him to Mara, and finally, she does. Invites him over, sets him on the couch, and coaxes Mara out of her bedroom, pushes her into the living room, and stops there in front of him, her hands on her daughter’s shoulders.
Mara stares at him, in curiosity and awe. She finally looks up at Lana, blinking her big green eyes.
"Mama," she says, tilts her head, "Who is this?"
"This," Lana kneels by her side. "This is Damon Gant. He…was the Chief of Police, here in LA, about ten years ago. Before you were born. Back when I was a prosecutor." Mara nods, hesitant, slow.
Lana has had it as an unspoken rule since her daughter was born that nobody is going to talk about SL-9 or the trial that ended with her incarcerated in front of her daughter. Nobody will mention Damon Gant. Her daughter asked her once who her father was, and Lana had said she would know when she was older. She has kept everything as quiet as he could, to keep from hurting her little girl.
Mara knows a bit. She knows her mother was in jail for forging evidence, how could she not? She knows about the parole, about her mistakes. She even knows that she got framed for murder, but not by who.
"He’s an old friend of mine. He…was in jail, like I was. For different crimes, though. He got out several months ago, and now we’re friends again."
"Friends like you used to be with Mr. Marhsall?" Mara asks, innocent and eleven. Lana pauses, and then nods.
"Like I used to be with Mr. Marshall."
Mara stares at Damon, sizing him up. She sizes everyone up like this, Lana thinks she got it from spending too much time with Ema, maybe. Or maybe it’s genetic and she got it from Damon. Either way, she stares him down, eleven and sharp as a tack. Finally, finally, she tilts her head on the side, and looks at Lana.
"Mama, he looks like me."
"I know," Lana feels her throat dry. Damon still hasn’t said anything; she doesn’t blame him, not this far out of his depth like this. They’ve discussed Mara, but not her parentage. Lana knows he’s guessed, knows that, but never—
"He’s your father, Mara. I got pregnant just before we both went to jail, although I had no idea until after I was in. That was why they let me out on parole so early." Mara nods. Damon is staring at her, and Lana can practically feel his heart pounding. "He did some bad things."
"Bad things like you did?"
Mara understands that much. She’ll understand more when she’s older, too.
"Worse things," Damon finally says. He leans forward on the couch, elbows on his knees. Mara looks up at him, and her eyes are the same green as his and Lana feels her heart twist in her chest. Damon smiles, awkwardly. "I did some really bad things. I—" he looks up at Lana.
She nods.
She has to.
"I tried to frame your Aunt Ema for murder." His voice is so quiet, it aches. They haven’t talked about this, past apologies. "I tried to frame your mother, too. I killed two men, both were close friends of ours. I made a lot of very bad decisions and hurt a lot of people that I care about very deeply."
"Why?" Mara asked, intently.
Damon paused, and rubbed his chin, thinking, staring off into space over her head.
"Because…" he trailed off, hesitant. "Because I thought, at the time, that benefiting myself by taking control of the Prosecutor’s office and trying to find ways to gain more power was the right thing. I figured out that it was the wrong thing once it was too late to change anything, except to come back and try again."
Mara pursed her lips.
"You’re definitely an asshole," she said, finally, and Lana gasped.
"Mara—!" she never swore in front of her daughter, and Mara flushed slightly.
"Sorry, Mama. I learned it from Detective Gumshoe. He didn’t notice I was listening." Lana grit her teeth, and was about to say something when Damon started laughing, slapping his knee and clapping his hands, for the first time in months, sounding like he had ten, fifteen years before, head thrown back, a deep belly laugh. Lana and Mara stared at him for a long time before he finally got his composure back and adjusted his sunglasses, identical shade of pink to Mara’s.
"She’s definitely my daughter—" Damon said, still chuckling. "She gave me that straight."
"Auntie Ema would say that you deserve more than it being given straight," Mara said, crossing her arms. "When you do bad things, you get punished for it. If Mama still loves you—" Lana felt a flush on her ears slightly, "Then I can give you a chance."
"Ema gave me a chance too. After she kicked me."
Mara paused, thinking. That had clearly flipped a switch in her head.
"Then I will too," she said at last, and kicked him in the shin as hard as she could with her eleven-year-old-legs, and with two detectives in her immediate family that was hard, and Damon’s expression went from jovial and shining to pained and surprised as he grabbed for his shin, no doubt severely bruised, and Lana glared at her daughter, who smiled. “And now you get a chance.” Damon looked up at her, and they were almost on the same level, father and daughter.
The resemblance was uncanny, and for a moment, Lana almost had to leave. She could feel herself crying, just a bit. Her eyes were burning, and after a moment, she grabbed Mara close to her chest, hugged her tight, buried her face in her little girl’s hair, and felt strong, warm arms wrap all the way around her, and they sat there on the floor, Lana crying, holding Mara, Damon holding her, until she was calm again and leaned on his shoulder, boneless, and Mara got them all orange popsicles.
It took a year and a half of therapy before she asked him to move in, and he did.
Three weeks later, she checked the pregnancy test and found it had the little blue + sign and she sat in the bathroom and cried in some mix of sudden, gutpunching anxiety and absolute complete euphoria at the entire world, because she had everything she had ever wanted and more, right there in her home.
Home.
Home, and a bed that smelled like Damon Gant.