kokoro no yoroi

Advent Calendar 2009!

2009-11-30T17:51:52Z

eider has already posted and I've posted on y!gallery, but I want to cover all bases! It's been a long time, but tis the season and we couldn't resist! Proudly presenting the Odessa Castle Advent Calendar 2009!

For those who might not remember the old bishink calendars, each number on the image will go live with a holiday treat on the corresponding day, starting December 1st and going right up through December 24th. What will be behind each door? Festive Fanfic? Frosty Fanart? Other Holiday goodies? Check in every day to find out!

But you don't have to wait until tomorrow to get started. We've also compiled a list of the best of Christmases Past to tide you over in the meantime.

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and enjoy our smorgasbord of yuletide treats!

[musepost] oh god it's late. and I'm tired.

2009-11-20T03:50:12Z

Headspace. Bar. Late evening.

a small, door-sized wormhole appears in the middle of the common room, from which emerge an assortment of tired, cranky, and exceedingly well-rendered figures.

Zax: *at bar* Well well well. Looks like the breadwinners have come home at last. What'll it be, guys? *slight nod, at Terra* ...and Ma'am.

Light: Evian.

Firion: Iced chai.

Onion: Strawberry milk.

Cecil: Stoli vanilla martini.

Bartz: Guinness.

Terra: Pom and ginger ale.

Squall: Diet coke.

Zidane: Whole-milk half-caf tripleshot latte no foam double whip.

Tidus: Gatorade.

Zax: *making notes* ..flavor?

Tidus: I dunno, blue?

Zax: Sure. *turns to Cloud, who has been sitting at the far end of the bar all this time, with his head on his arms* ...Cloud? What do you want?

Cloud: What do I want? What do I want? *rising* I'll tell you what I want. I want a day off is what I want. I think I had one after doing tactics, and then Ehrgeiz--

Zidane: I don't remember that one.

Zax: Be grateful.

Cloud: but then it turns out that I'm the new company security blanket, and they can't make a game without me. Pretty good gig, right? But I didn't realize that it would mean having to chase and kill Sephiroth umpty million times over and over again. I mean, seriously-- *glances out at the common room, at whomever happens to be passing by* Hey, Riot. You're a square guy. How many times did you have to kill your boss fight?

Ashley: *half-awake, with his antennae going in the wrong directions* Uh, you mean for plot, or you mean for game completion? Because technically I had to defeat him at least thirty seven times with different weapons and not counting the Iron Maiden--

Cloud: For plot. How many times did you have to kill him for plot?

Ashley: Once. Please let go of my shirt.

Bartz: That's a shirt? Where's the rest of it?

Firion: You haven't got any room to talk.

Cloud: *vindicated* See? Nobody else has to do this--

Squall: Yeah, and none of us get paid what you do, either.

Cloud: Do you think I need to get paid? Come on! I've won the gold saucer chocobo tournament approximately nine thousand times.

Onion: ...I thought it was over nine thousand.

Cloud: ...I am loaded. I have a villa in Costa del Sol but I haven't even seen it in ten years, because I go to bed in traverse town and I wake up in goddamned Ivalice--

Ashley: Hey!

Cloud: Seriously. Look at my eyes. It's not mako, it's jet-lag. I don't know what dimension I'm in, let alone what time zone. And you ask me what I want? What I really want?

Zax: ...Pretty much, yeah.

Cloud: *bitterly* Yeah, well maybe I want Sephiroth to maybe pay attention to my restraining order and quit stalking me for five minutes. Maybe I want to be able to win my own game. Maybe I want to settle down with the kiddos and go snowboarding with my friends and sleep in and you know? All that stuff. Like whatever it was you guys were doing between your games and now.

Firion: *startled* ...what... we were doing?

Light: *quietly, over his water bottle* ...You mean barely existing, little more than four pixels of color and shadow, nameless puppets soon cast aside for brighter toys, prettier faces, and deeper stories? Is that what you mean?

*a sudden pregnant silence at the bar*

Cloud: ...um.

Light: *shrugging* It is the nature of the child to surpass the father, Cloud Strife. Your efforts... have given me a chance I would otherwise have not have had. You have worked hard, but it is better than the alternative. *he drops a few gil on the counter* Thanks for the water. See you all in the morning.

Onion: G'night, Light.

Light: *ruffles Onion's feathers* Goodnight.

*Squall wordlessly slides off his barstool, offering a Seed Salute as the Warrior of Light walks by. The others follow suit, offering bows, salutes, blitzball victory signals, each in the manner of his or her own world, until Light vanishes down the corridor to his rooms*

Zax: ...We wouldn't be here, if not for him. Not any of us. Not from any world. Maybe he seems simple to us now, but-- *shrug* What do we really know?

Cloud: ...

Zax: So! What'll it be, Strife? I ain't got all night.

Cloud: *leans his buster sword against the bar, and spills out a pocketful of gil on the counter* Champagne. For everybody. On me.

~o~

[FFD fic] the boys are back in town

2009-11-16T00:32:07Z

Last night I wanted to play some game. Something cool and awesome! Something that would make me write fanfic! something with characters I could love and worlds I could devour and details to sniff out and tiny fiddly gameplay and oh, everything. But I looked at all the games we had and realized that what I didn't want was a replay. No matter how old and dear (and they are all very dear) I did not want to take the SeeD exam again, or march in the ShinRa parade, or jump up and down Babel tower.

I was put-out, to say the least.

Until Joy checked in the proverbial biscuit barrel and declared that we might, maybe, have $40 worth of fun-money left from weekly budgeting.

which just so happens to be the going price these days for a copy of Dissidia.

Of gameplay plot etc, I will say nothing, only that it really isn't well-suited to the PSP, and should have been a real console game. (Joy says this makes me sound old. I think it makes me sound like someone with very cramped thumbs.) It is very much gorgeous and frustrating by turns.

But it's worth it all for the feeling of walking up on a Sunday morning and knowing you have to get to a word file right now.

Cloud and Squall, doing what Cloud and Squall do best. No spoilers, but a few fond and wistful references to my first Final Fantasy slashfic ever. Assuredly not work safe.

Very rough-cut, and I will clean it for y! posting once I've played more than one tiny fraction of the game, so I can make sure I don't have any contradictions. Dispensers of spoilers in the comments will be shot at dawn.

#

Coupling, Light and the others called it, in their archaic accents. Firion always phrased it delicately, as though it was some kind of dance; for Cecil it was the warm camaraderie after battle, something done in the midst of shedding armor and rinsing monster ichor off his skin. Squall always expected them to launch into some sort of heroic twenty-verse ballad in mid-fuck. Bartz and Zidane were a little more crude about it, their old-world version of slang closer to Squall's, but even that had its odd turns.

Squall supposed he had a few oddities of euphemism himself. After all, in Balamb Garden, it had been training. Something you did in the Training Center after hours, something that could excuse ripped jackets and grass stains on the school uniform, something reasonable to put forth to the faculty when they inquired just what, exactly, had been the cause of that godawful racket back in the patch of sylkis giant ferns.

"Leonheart, #41269. Again. I trust you have a good explanation for this?"

A bland expression, a deadpan tone leavened just so with boredom. "Training, instructor."

It worked every time.

After so long, of course, the code degenerated even further, invitation conveyed entirely by a lift of the eyebrow, a slight shift of the hips. At that point, the language employed became irrelevant. He could have asked any of his comrades for the same thing the same way, and it would have been clear enough what he was offering. All the same though, Squall stuck to the familiar. You never knew when one of the armor-boys would turn around and vow everlasting brotherhood to you on his sword or some kind of bullshit. There was no chance of that, not with the sullen figure sitting in the ruined doorway, his gaze a thousand miles away and his massive sword resting lightly against his thigh.

"...You wanna go a round?"

Cloud glanced up from the blank, shattered screen of his cell phone. One day, Squall supposed, he would ask him why he still kept the thing. It would never work again, and even if it did, the person he wanted to answer would never pick up the line. Cloud raked Squall over with his eyes: too-bright, too-pale, with pupils that never seemed to dilate. They made something inside of Squall shudder with an unspoken fear, somewhere where he would never admit it.

"...Yeah, all right," Cloud said, flipping the broken PHS closed.

They had not quite made it out of the circle of firelight when they were noticed. A burst of white chocobo plumes appeared around Squalls' belt buckle, bouncing with the impatient curiosity of their owner. "Hey," Onion said, peering up from under his helmet. "Where are you two going? Are you going to practice? Can I watch?"

"It's not practice," Squall grumbled, turning away. "And no, you can't."

The tiny knight's eyebrows drew together in annoyed hurt. "What? Why not? That's not fair!"

Squall snorted. "Never said it was."

Cloud broke in before Onion could put forth another objection, and ruffled the fountain of plumes on top of the boy's helmet. "I'll go one with you later, okay? You can show me that new finisher you were talking about."

"All right," Onion said, mollified but not quite vindicated. Nevertheless, he stopped walking after them, hanging back as they descended the floating steps to the ruined valley floor. Squall suppressed a mild burst of surprise. He never knew Strife was good with kids.

It took him a minute to remind himself that he didn't care.

Neither one of them wasted any time with conversation. It was a ritual they had gone through scores of times, when the day's work against Chaos was not enough to give them dreamless sleep. They were matched almost perfectly, which made them ideal to exhaust themselves against one another. Steel grated on steel, and the retort of Squall's gunblade bounced of the stone ruin of that vast, empty place.

Squall won against Cloud as often as he lost. In truth, the fight was a mere formality, a question of odds that could be settled just a simply with the flip of a coin. The only thing it decided was who would kneel first.

Cloud was unfocused, a slight distraction that would have made no difference against a weaker enemy. Squall was not surprised to see the tiny gap in his defenses; he let his guard down more often on nights when he lingered in the past. Gunblade scraped past Bustersword with a squeal of sparks, Cloud doubled over in the middle of his dodge, a half-second too slow, and it was over. They fell to earth like a pair of clashing meteors, but Squall was the one who landed on his feet.

"All right," Cloud said, rising up to his knees and spitting into the dust. The tiny fleck of his blood was vivid against the colorless ruin of the place. "It's yours this time. Let's get this over with."

Squall offered him a hand up, but Cloud shrugged it away. He picked himself up off the ground and shouldered his weapon, following Squall down into a cluster of broken columns, jutting up from the ground like broken teeth. Squall put his back to one of them, and Cloud moved against him, pressing him between his heartbeat and the cold pillar of stone.

"You should have just said something, Leonheart," Cloud muttered, his hands creeping under the hem of Squall's jacket. "We could have skipped the prelude."

"Thought I'd give you a fighting chance." Squall's breath hit hard against the back of his teeth, nothing to do with the fight and everything to do with the motion of Cloud's fingertips over his spine. Squall had learned a long time ago that Cloud didn't kiss, but his mouth moved quick and fast along the fur of Squall's collar, tracing out the line of visible skin. His fingers hooked into Squall's belts and brought their hips together, grinding together in a manner not unlike straining swords, and producing an entirely different kind of sparks.

Squall was past pretending he didn't want it, but he held on a little bit longer, just enough for Cloud to make that faint noise of exasperation.

"Always so goddamned proud," Cloud muttered, and went to his knees for a wholly different reason than surrender. Squall's belts clattered open and Cloud nudged the hard line of his cock under the leather, mouthing the shape of it until Squall swore under his breath, his hips bucking forward against his will. Only then did Cloud pull down the hot metal tab of his zipper, releasing Squall's aching cock into the cage of his gloved hands. He kissed it, cradling it against the hard leather palms of his gloves, but Squall knew he would do no more than that until he was ordered to.

It was why Squall sought him out, above any of the other reasons. Soldiers understood one another. Squall fisted his hands in the soft spikes of blond hair, trying not to remember other times, before he the end of everything. The hair had been a different shade of blond, the spike a careful crest, and the heady smell of the training center plants had not been enough to obliterate the scent of Quezecotl's ozone and oranges. No matter what else Squall forgot, he could not manage to forget the things that hurt the most.

"Do it, Soldier."

Cloud took him in one easy motion, and for a moment every other fucked-up, broken thing in the world no longer mattered. Nothing but need and release and a split-second of absolute trust, nothing but the ache in Squall's belly as it resolved into a problem easily solved. Cloud Strife was exceptional at doing what he was ordered to do. His mouth was hot, and hungry, and it dragged on Squall's cock in a relentless rhythm. Squall shuddered, arching into the inevitable, and while Cloud swallowed, Squall swallowed all the names he no longer said.

#

"You good?" Cloud asked, sitting back on his heels and scrubbing the back of his glove over his mouth. He needn't have asked, really. Squall had clawed the column behind him hard enough for the stone to shred the fingertips of his gloves.

"Yeah," Squall said, his hair a ragged screen over his eyes. "Now get up here."

Cloud arched an eyebrow. This was a new development. "...Why?"

"Just do it," Squall said, pushing away from the pillar. He wrapped his hand around one of Cloud's suspenders and pulled, strength enough in him to haul the other man to his feet. "It's your turn."

Cloud thought about arguing; usually the loser settled for a furtive hand-job in the dark. But Squall was suddenly the one on his knees, his tongue making a hot trail down from Cloud's navel, his thumb flicking the top button of Cloud's pants open.

"You don't have to do this," Cloud said, but as Squall went on, it became more and more obvious that he did.

"Just what kind of guy do you think I am?" Squall said, and it was as though he was speaking to himself, reciting a line long since said. "That I wouldn’t return the favor?"

"Yes, actually," Cloud said, but got no further as Squall buried his face between Cloud's legs. Whoever taught Leonheart to suck cock, he had been someone who liked it fast, precise, and brutally efficient. If Squall fought in battle the same way, Cloud knew he would be on his knees a whole hell of a lot more often. He clenched his fists in the soft tufts of white fur, and rode out the storm into the only calm either one of them ever knew.

When it was over, they paused for a moment before going back to the others, looking up at the empty sky and both trying to remember different sets of stars.

"Here." Squall produced a vial from his jacket pocket, and rattled a white tablet into his hand. "Want one?

Cloud eyed it, uneasy. Squall's pockets were stocked with a whole apothecary's worth of pills: summon-balance drugs and tiny capsules of para-magic that would be hardly street-legal in Midgar. "What is that?"

Squall blinked at him. "...breath mint." He flicked the lid of the vial and tilted it back into his mouth, crunching the mints in his teeth.

Cloud felt something stir underneath his breastbone, he thought at first it was some kind of bizarre itch until the laugh trickled out of him. It could hardly be called such, really, little more than a chuckle, but it warmed some of the cold Shiva-frost behind Squall's eyes.

"We should get back," Squall said, rising.

"Before Light comes out here looking for us." Cloud let Squall drag him to his feet this time, locking forearms to pull him up. "He's all right, you know, but I don't think I could stand another lecture about how we don't have time for coupling now. 'What with the lateness of the hour and the dire quest we find ourselves upon' or something. It's like being chewed out by your dad."

It startled a smile out of Squall, or at least a rapid blink and a quickly-stifled twitch of his lips. "Well, not my dad," he said, with a shrug. "But yeah."

"I never heard you talk about your family before."

"I've never heard you talk about yours."

They paused, staring at each other as the otherworldly wind rushed between them, carrying with it the memories of too many destroyed worlds.

"Maybe later, sometime," Cloud said, and for a moment he believed it was true, that he could find the words.

"Yeah, whatever," Squall said, but not as indifferently as he could have. It sounded as though he meant it, that sometime they would sit down and talk about such things, that sometime there would be a time to do it, at all. They made their way back to the distant light of the fire, their strides even, shoulders not quite as far apart as they had been on the way down.

~o~

bishonenink

2009-08-11T02:13:39Z

for your consideration:

Restored, and lacking a number of tertiary elements like shrines, dollstuff, advent calendar pages, fanart, and a few select stories which we stuffed in black plastic bags and buried in an undisclosed location, never to be seen again.

It will sit as it is; we're done with it. It's a slice of time, and a good one, but we've got other things to do. Now that we've cleaned it up, we can leave it alone.

And I need not be ashamed, praised be god, so long as your majesty is an honest man.

it's possible I'm entirely smug.

2009-06-30T01:47:19Z

Not only have I just uploaded some more fic to y-gallery, but I also made a big fancy graphic to go with it.

I'm utter crap with stuff like this, so I'm really pleased that it came out looking so nice and bold. It was just a line art thing I did at work, and then scanned, and colored with a mouse. No layers, either. eegh.

I think my favorite bit is the bumpy shadow from the badge.

Y-gallery Bishonenink club, taking requests for the dearly departed.

2009-06-27T22:07:43Z

We've gotten a lot of emails about our old fic. Until we sort out what to post again and what to keep buried in the basement forever, we've got a y-gallery club for Bishonenink fic.

Comment on the profile with any old fic you'd like to see posted again. ^_^ If it's horrible terrible sticky ghastly YYH fic, I eeeeh, can't promise anything, but as long as it doesn't make me want to move to Tunisia and take up a career as a goat, it's likely to be posted again.

Please spread the word on this one, guys, I'm no longer in the usual channels and I think, astonishingly enough, people might actually want to know about it.

shut fast your painted eyes

2009-06-26T13:37:42Z

When I was a kid, my elementary school had a tiny supply store in a spare closet next to the gymnasium. It was stocked with pop-point pencils and shaped erasers and those little plastic fruits full of flavored sugar, and it was open for a little bit in the morning and afternoon. There would be an afternoon run made by one lucky member of the classroom, to purchase delights from the fantastic smorgasbord.

Once, in third grade, when I was allowed to go up by myself, I spent fifty cents (an outrageous sum) for a simple file folder with a handsome rock star on it. It was a daring thing to do, really, because he was black. I grew up in a tiny town in the mountains of Kentucky. There were no black kids in my class. There were, in fact, only four or five black kids in the whole of my school. Even then, there was music they listened to and music we listened to, that line had not blurred yet. But it was about to, and the man who did it was the one smiling coyly out from my file folder, dancing in the videos that showed on our brand-new cablebox MTV. Michael Jackson. I think the folder cover had an image from thriller, but on the inside he had on a white suit. He looked so cool, lording over my spelling worksheets and math quizzes. At school talent shows there was lip synching to "we are the world" and "beat it." Every boy in my class wanted a studded red leather asymmetrical zip jacket. None of us could manage to moonwalk even a little bit, though we tried every recess on the parking-lot asphalt.

But I grew older, and his life grew sadder. By the time I got to Epcot to see Captain EO it was already a relic of the Michael that had been, the simple storyline a candy-coated version of the same things he had done in the music industry. He summoned dark, sad creatures out of their husks, he dressed them in rainbows, he taught them to dance.

And he could dance. He could always dance.

People might think that his crazy life will be his legacy, and will overtake that fact. But I know where his legacy is, and it is right here.

These kids are all too young to remember Michael Jackson the way I do, and the same goes for most of their fans. By the time they noticed him, he was already an eccentric star, neck-deep in scandal and tabloid covers. But watch them dance, and listen to them sing. They know Michael Jackson just like I did. And in them, and those after them, that is where he will endure. In motion, in music, in memory.

Someone singing "I love you"

2009-06-26T01:17:33Z

Who wants some cheezy wedding fic? that's right, you do!

ahahaha the worst of it is, I'm not even ashamed a little bit.

[open] to seek out new life and new civilizations

2009-05-30T17:40:04Z

eider and I are trying to shift our tactics, in the interest of trying to figure out how to have fun on the internet again. In that course there is this:

http://yaoi.y-gallery.net/club/8339/

We will be posting original stories and relevant art here, with what I hope is regularity. It will contain stories designed especially for y!gallery, and for once it'll be writing of mine that you can talk about publicly as soon as you read it. >_> I don't really expect it to take off for a bit, but it's an outlet we both seriously need.

I've only got one chapter of a story up there now, and it's pretty rusty even after being cleaned, since it's a very old premise. I ran out of pre-existing prose before the end of the chapter though, so further installments, I hope, will not be so fudgey.

tl;dr: we made a club. It is full of handsome boys and indulgent shippy-ness and porn. Your support would be met with gratitude and also a massive uptick in how much stuff we produce for you to read there.

you may all make with the Devo jokes now.

2009-05-28T00:04:46Z

HAY I MADED SOME ARTS.

http://yaoi.y-gallery.net/view/560839/

Not terribly work safe, for all that I DREW it at work. >_> aheh. Which explains why when I drew him I did him with THE WRONG DANG EYEBALL MISSING I swear I can't believe that. Guardian Angels has the wrong profile pic of him up and I thought it was a little odd but I checked there and yeah. grrft. But it's flipped now, and still looks sorta okay I think.

the last submission to the y!gallery xenogears club was in July of last year, so I had to do something. Next maybe I will draw Billy! But if my backwards trend continues, that big green bow might wind up on his ass.

[open] love don't live here anymore

2009-05-25T14:26:22Z

Dear Dreamwidth:

Hey, thanks so much for turning my entire friendslist into a fucking wasteland.

Yeah, that's real awesome. Thanks a fucking ton.

no love and plz DIAF,

Me.

objection, ahoy

2009-05-01T01:57:01Z

...there are piratey lawyerthings going on over in courtroomdance. I'm just sayin'.

it had to be done, really.

2009-04-25T21:34:01Z

I couldn't find a place that was the PW:AA fandom I wanted, so I made one.

courtroomdance

please join, and encourage others to do the same.

STRICTLY COURTROOM DANCING

2009-04-25T01:17:24Z

PHOENIX WRIGHT TAKARAZUKA DVD: GET.

:D :D :D :D :D :D

We're going to watch it again now, and take one drink whenever official PW merchandise is used as a prop. I'm pretty sure that's an Apollo Justice notepad Maya is using and I know that's the Godot mug.

[fic - PW:AA] At the End of the Chase

2009-03-22T16:20:37Z

Edgeworth in Paris, between games 1&2. Work-safe.

At the End of the Chase

It was pouring the rain in Paris, and Miles Edgeworth didn't care. So long as Paris remained firmly rooted to the ground, and Edgeworth was snug in a cafe with his hands wrapped around a mug of tea, the sky could do as it damn well pleased. Outside, the twisting curve of Rue Something-or-other was lost in a mist of rising fog and muted streetlights. The people passing by the cafe door didn't give a damn about Miles Edgeworth, or his crimes, or his tea, or the life he had abandoned. The French were, Edgeworth thought, admirably skilled at letting a man alone to mind his own business.

Unlike some people.

A blue raincoat flashed by outside the foggy window, and Edgeworth flinched. It could not be him, of course. Not here, where Edgeworth had come to lose himself. That man was miles and worlds away from the secluded cafe and the rain-slick cobblestones outside, along with everything else Edgeworth had left behind. Yet Edgeworth saw him anyway, a dozen times a day. Just as he had seen him across the crowded airport, or flickering by in the window of a passing subway train. Edgeworth could not manage to escape the Phoenix Wright in his mind, no matter how far behind he might leave the man himself. He was under Edgeworth's skin, ingrained in the indelible ink of obligation, and there was no rubbing him out.

The blue raincoat was, in truth, occupied by a good-looking German exchange student, quite blond, who was quite busy with the tonsils of a young woman who had rushed out of a cab to greet him. Edgeworth turned away from their ardent bonsoirs, and scowled at his reflection in the tea.

The man was intolerable. What right did he have to invade Edgeworth's subconscious, putting up his feet on the furniture, making himself both at home and an utter nuisance. He was a passing blip on Edgeworth's radar, a static memory. Edgeworth had plunged into the rainy Paris night like a baptism, hoping to emerge new-made, immaculate.

Instead Phoenix Wright clung to his thoughts, just as ardently as he had clung to his lapels the night after Edgeworth's acquittal. Which was, among everything else, another reason for Edgeworth's departure. He had baggage enough without adding in emotional entanglements. That night had been a mistake, and Miles Edgeworth was not accustomed to making them.

Better to call the whole thing a wash, and wash his hands of it, as well. There was nothing for him in LA. It was a ghastly town, with all the culture and charm of an inner-city laundromat. Edgeworth had been considering leaving already, had mulled it over for months. He had stayed only to punish himself, and when the need for that punishment had gone, his need to stay in that repulsive city had gone as well. The debacle with Gant and Lana Skye had only confirmed the matter. Everyone had expected Edgeworth to step into the position of chief prosecutor, with a throne of rumors and secrets to sit upon.

Edgeworth would rather leave than bear the brunt of every whispered insinuation in the district, and so he had. Walking out of the door had been ridiculously easy, and he had not looked back at all the burdens sloughed off in his shadow.

But Phoenix Wright would not leave him be.

Edgeworth's tea had gone cold; the German student and his date had moved on to drier surroundings. Edgeworth wanted to go to the theatre. He wanted a glass of wine, a plate of escargot swimming in herbed butter, the crisp perfection of a proper crème brulee. He wanted a night devoid of his past. Edgeworth had thought that if anything were to pursue him, it would be the vengeful ghost of Manfred von Karma. Not Phoenix Wright, with his loosened tie and his unmade bed, his taut throat and the shivering muscles of his thighs under Edgeworth's hands.

Edgeworth knocked back his tea, swept up his overcoat, and fled out into the darkness as though pursued. Paris moved by him in a blur of elegant indifference. When he came to a stop it was on the lip of some scenic river bridge, empty of the usual tourists. Rain dribbled down the collar of his coat, dampening the back of his cravat, turning the surface of the Seine into a bolt of wrinkled black silk. For a moment he considered letting her soft folds close over his head. It would be fitting, wouldn't it? Javert, undone by accepting a kindness from Valjean. There had been no happy ending for the devoted Inspector loyal to the law, only despair and cold river water.

Edgeworth's hands gripped the wet iron railing of the bridge. Dammit, if Wright had ever seen LeMis, he would understand how things were supposed to work. Edgeworth would not have needed to leave behind a tacky note of farewell. But men like Wright needed lines drawn around things. Otherwise, he would be tracking Edgeworth down, shadowing his every move, not satisfied until he had dragged him back. Only implied death would shake him from the trail.

Edgeworth startled himself with his own laugh. No, implied wasn't good enough. The real Phoenix Wright was dismissible, but the phantom one--even now, for a moment, visible in the distorted reflection of the river--was impossible to lose. No escape would ever be enough, and Edgeworth would always be haunted.

He fingered the sleek outline of the cell phone in his pocket, flipped it open. What time was it in LA? Was the weather as bland as always, the smog as thick, the hills flourishing into their brief, pathetic show of springtime green? Was Phoenix asleep, twisted up in those appalling blue t-shirt knit sheets? Would he wake up at the sound of the phone, would he be angry, confused, relieved, happy?

Would his image leave Edgeworth the hell alone?

Rain spattered on the lighted display of Edgeworth's phone. At last he clicked it shut in his hand, and it vanished again into his coat pocket.

No. The break was clean, as clean as Edgeworth could make it. Better to leave it that way. He would always be pursed by his past, he knew that. And if it chose to take the shape of Phoenix Wright, so be it. For once it would be in the form of a friendly face, and Edgeworth thought he should be glad of that.

Even in Paris.

~0~

[fic - ff7] Bizarre Love Triangle

2009-03-02T22:02:25Z

Prompt: Zax/Cloud/Aerith discovering the permutations of love in the afternoon and how despite Cloud's low self-esteem three is NOT a crowd. ;__;

for fyredancer (and in memory of that diner in SanFran, y-con 2002, where we went with you guys, in our turk-suits. Where has the time gone?)

This was tricky, because I really never thought of those three ever, you know, crossing paths that way until actual game-time. But I think everybody had a good time with it. They might have had more of a good time, if I wasn't writing this at work. ^^; forcing it to be WS. Alas.

(NB for anyone just passing through: I don't follow awkward sequels/prequels or the ridonculous, ill-thought-out surnames that are spawned by them; the man was Zax Darklighter in my head long before square's soft-serve gackt machine urped out the name Zack Fair, and in my stuff, at least, that's how he stays. Conversely, I can't ever get the hang of typing Aerith, try as I might. ;_; And trust me, I have. There are no retconned Turks or spare Jenova clones here. Seek them and their benighted canon elsewhere. If I sound irritable, it's because squenix's sequel virus has forced me to put this disclaimer on every ff7 thing I write now; Zack is everybody's favorite boy even though most of them never played the first game and if they did, they were seven years old AND they missed his scenes; and yet I still don't have my action figure of the boy. Sheesh. It's enough to make anyone cranky. It's also enough to make them quit writing FF7 altogether. Which is just a damn shame, really, because I love him to the point of being kind of stupid, or at least to the point of writing long, hissy-fit disclaimers. SaD.)

Well, Zax thought, his fixed smile threatening to fracture across his face as he summed up the situation, this is awkward.

The neon light of the diner sign flickered in lurid pink and green over the pale spikes of Cloud's hair, his noise of surprised greeting dying in his throat. Aeris' hand had gone suddenly tense in the crook of Zax's elbow, but he had no way of knowing if it was disapproval, or surprise, or some other emotion beyond Zax's ken. There was no telling, with that one.

The Friday night crowd of patrons surged around them, flowing by as they stood outside on the sidewalk, as fixed as Midgar's plate pillars in a flash flood. Zax's brain did somersaults as he tried to work out how to manage introductions. Hi Cloud, this is Aeris, my girlfriend. Aeris, this is Cloud, the guy I've been boning daily in the shower room for the last three weeks. You kids get to know each other, and I'll russle us up some strawberry ice cream sodas, hey?

What came out of Zax's mouth, unfortunately, was, "You're off duty tonight?"

"I moved my schedule around," Cloud said, blankly. "I thought--" He broke off without finishing. His eyes and the set of his shoulders said everything else, guilty little facts ripping through Zax like a silent hail of gunfire. It was a nightmare for a grunt to try and change his duty shifts. Zax was due to ship out to Mideel the next day. This was his last night off until he got back to base. Cloud had braved the wrath of his duty sergeant to take the night off, and from the looks of him, he had run all the way from the train station in the hopes of catching up to his superior.

"Oh," was all Zax managed to say. In his head, it was followed by, Darklighter, you're a dick. In reality, he finished off with a rather sickly sounding, "Right."

Aeris, at least, did not seem to have parsed the situation. Or maybe she had, those eyes of hers unraveling everything around her, knitting it up into a fresh, orderly whole that nobody would ever recognize as the tangled knots it had been before. "Aren't you going to introduce me to your friend?" she asked. She was saintly and unassailable there on his arm, her smile like Shiva, half-summoned.

Zax shook himself. A man couldn't choose all his battles, after all. "Oh, Sorry. Aeris, this is Cloud, one of my--he's a--" Zax failed, completely, to find a way to say it nicely.

"I'm bullet-fodder for the brass," Cloud cut in, his sterile expression ruining any chance of humor in his words. "Like him."

"He's infantry," Zax said, with profound belatedness.

"You're in SOLDIER?" Aeris asked, still smiling.

"No, just a soldier," Cloud answered. "Nobody's hitting caps lock for me anytime soon." He shrugged down inside his uniform jacket, and shrank back against the windows of the diner. "Anyway. I was just passing by. Have a good night, Sir."

Zax flinched. The guy was soft-spoken, but he was a northerner, and under that snowy disguise he could be as sharp and ruthless as Mount Nibel when he wanted. Sir. Brutal.

Not, Zax considered, that he didn't deserve it.

Cloud half-turned to melt back into the crowd, but suddenly Zax's elbow was empty, and Aeris' slim, white hand was on Cloud's shoulder.

"Wait!"

Cloud froze, staring at her. She was, Zax knew, a creature beyond his ken, a flower inexplicably blooming in the urban wasteland of Midgar's Upper Sixth. He looked from her hand to her face, and in his eyes he tried to reason what this fragile, sweet-smelling thing was, and what in the world it wanted with someone like him.

"It's a shame for you to waste a train trip up," she said, her hand moving down to his. "And this place really does have the best burgers in the sector--Zax says so, anyway, I don't eat 'em myself--why don't you stay and have dinner with us?"

"Ah, no," Cloud stammered. "That would be--I mean, kinda awkward--you two--"

"I won't take no for an answer," Aeris said, and steered Cloud back to the diner entrance like a schoolmarm pushing a truant schoolboy back to his studies--a curvy, redheaded schoolmarm in a very short pink dress.

Somehow, under the thrall of her mysterious powers, Cloud found himself squashed together with them in a corner booth of the diner, sharing a platter of cheese fries. As much as she could coax flowers to bloom under the shadow of Midgar's plate, Aeris coaxed Cloud out of his permafrost. In her presence, he uncurled like a reluctant snowdrop, and the first time she made him laugh he startled himself with it. By dessert he no longer sulked back against the taped-over booth upholstery, and with three spoons they did their best by the diner's famed Moogle Mountain: a truly intimidating ice cream sundae. Aeris was still going at it even when Zax and Cloud had surrendered to the greater power of fudge ripple.

Cloud clambered out of the booth to find the men's room; Aeris put down her spoon and leaned on Zax's shoulder with a contented little sigh. "This has been really nice," she said.

"Yeah." Zax thumbed bright-colored 1000 gil bills out of his wallet, leaving them on the table for the waitress to take, before Cloud could come back and try to pay for his share of dinner. "It really has."

She stretched out her arms, silver bangles jingling. "But you know," she said, with mock severity, "You could have told me you had a boyfriend, too."

Zax's arm slipped in the motion of putting his wallet back in his pocket, he fumbled with it for a second. "I--but--Cloud's just... you know, a friend--"

Aeris arched an eyebrow, and Zax's voice dwindled to nothing. There was absolutely no way of lying to the girl. "I'm not blind," she said, and twiddled with her spoon. "In fact," her voice went soft, distant. "I can see you tied up together, all along one gold string through your hearts. It floats in the air between you, shining in the shadows, something I don't understand yet. They haven't told me..." She trailed off, the tip of her spoon tracing curling, elusive paths on the glittery plastic tabletop. There was a hidden light in her eyes when she spoke that way, some green, velvet-deep mystery that always made Zax think of his time in the SOLDIER mako tanks, and of the dreams he had there.

She shrugged it off, laughing. "Anyway," she finished. "I think he's sweet. Cute, too."

"He's not your type," Zax said, with a sudden burst of possessiveness. Whenever Aeris drifted into one of her reveries, he couldn't fight the feeling that she was slipping through his fingers, vanishing like the Mist of legend.

"No," she said, still smiling. "But he is your type." She swept a hand through his dark hair, leaned in to kiss his cheek. "Make sure he comes home with us," she added, in a meaningful whisper. With a wink, she was sliding out of the curved booth, on her way to the bathroom before Cloud could come back and sit down again.

Zax was left with his pulse roaring and his mouth open, staring after her as she slipped through the crowd. She passed Cloud as she went, her wave startling a smile out of him. Possibilities unfolded in Zax's mind, in several different positions, and for the first time that night he forgot that he would be up to his neck in mud and mosquitoes in a scant twenty-four hours. He held up the money on the table, waving it vigorously to get the waitress' attention.

Morning would come early, after all, and time was flying.

[fic - FF8] Escape

2009-03-02T19:23:37Z

Drabbles, from Friday's requests! I will be filling them sporadically and posting them as I get them together. (Actually, eider will be posting for me.) Sorry, in advance, for the post-spamming on your lists. Still, the way it's been around here, I think we could all stand to see a little action.

Request: Squall and Zell, a wind blown overcast day in fall is there anyone out there 'cus it's getting harder and harder to breathe for darthneko

Squall's email in-box was suffocating.

Nida wanted a response to his FH engineering base sustainability proposal. Squall couldn't care less, and tried to say so in a professional, supportive fashion. The result was convoluted, too wordy, and vague. Squall longed to scrabble out "whatever" on the keys and hit send, but Garden Commanders Did Not Do That, so he wound up sounding like a wishy-washy pussy instead. He closed his sent mail and tried not to be disgusted with himself.

Xu had a twenty-page petition from the female students regarding the Garden dress code, and the blatant sexism that forced female cadets to wear skirts. Either everybody had the right to wear pants, her text hinted, darkly, or nobody did. Picturing the horror of Nida's entire FH team going about their business in starched black poplin miniskirts, Squall wrote back that Xu could do whatever the hell she wanted with the Garden dress code, provided he never at any point had to face the prospect of Irvine Kinneas in a kilt. It would be like a bed-ruffle on an electrical pole, and it took three or four bracing swallows of coffee for Squall to get the image out of his head. Irvine would mourn the free visual buffet of legs the current uniform provided, but Squall would rather a moping sharpshooter to Xu on the feminist warpath, any day of the week.

Buried at the bottom of the complaints and suggestions and requisition forms and duty listings was a message from Rinoa.

Sorry, it read. Sorry. That was all.

She hadn't written in weeks.

Squall stared at his laptop screen, and his coffee slowly went cold. He tapped his hand against the side of his mug, and even now, a year later, he missed the sound of a lion-carved ring clinking on the ceramic. He had last seen her in Timber, two months ago, in August. It had been hot enough to blister paint. He bought her a milk tea, they'd gone to a movie to escape the sun, made out in the back row, and left early to go back to her new apartment. The rickety metal fan in the window muffled her soft little noises; her clinging, kitteny hands smelled like teen perfume and sweat and honey tea. She curled against his side when it was over, too-hot in the endless afternoon, and asked if he was going to marry her.

Two months after he had said, "I don't know," Squall was still drowning in her. In her testing silences, in her unanswerable demands, her coy smiles that never met his. It was August again in that stifling, too-pink room, and Squall couldn't breathe. He opened up a reply, deleted it, and then stuffed the "To" field with addresses he could type in his sleep.

Does anybody else want to get the hell out of here?

He sent it, signed off, and yanked his jacket off the back of his chair. His coffee was left behind, his secretary's questioning gaze got no answer. It was October outside, the sky turbulent and unrepentantly gray. The horns and claws on the granite gate-dragons were speared with leaves, and more leaves blew up in heaps along the sidewalk and swirled in little aero-burst tornadoes along the drive.

There was a black and red monstrosity of a motorcycle parked next to the main gate, blue tribal flames detailed along its gleaming carapace, and Lieutenant Commander Zell Dincht was leaning against it. His hands were in his jacket pockets, his sunglasses were on in spite of the sky, and the wind was doing its best, without success, to tear down his carefully constructed hair.

Squall looked at him, and up the empty drive beyond.

"Quisits?" he asked.

"Grading mid-terms," Zell answered.

"Irvine?"

"...Has a date with Quisits, after the mid-terms."

"Selphie?"

"I dunno. Something about trading moogle pixel pets."

"So it's just you?"

Zell tilted down his sunglasses, his frank, blue-eyed gaze framed with black tattoo. "It's just me. Is that a problem, Commander Leonheart?"

Squall studied Zell's compact, triangular frame, the faded creases in his favorite jeans, the padded palms of his gloves. "Only if you call me that again," he said, and Zell grinned.

"Fair enough," he said, and swung one leg over his bike. "Get on. Where d'you wanna go?"

"Anywhere," Squall said, and hooked his forefingers through Zell's side belt-loops. The motorcycle roared to furious life, tearing down the Garden drive. Cold air punched Squall in the face like a blast from Shiva's summon; he swallowed it down and breathed in Zell's scent of oranges, motor oil, and the ozone of distant thunder. The world streaked by in shades of brown and gold. Squall leaned into Zell on a curve and everything else was left behind; Rinoa and all her Augusts washed away under a grey Balamb sky and the promise of rain.

Drabble requests!

2009-02-27T16:26:54Z

I am opening up requests for drabbles! All this afternoon and possibly next week, too. ^_^ I've been slogging through original projects and I'd love to be able to write something easy, and I miss fan characters. So as much as I'd be flattered, no OC requests, unless they are fan-based (i.e.: Reno's siblings).

So if you want to play, please give me a series, one or two characters, and a key for the drabble. Like a song lyric, or a day of the week with a weather report. For example, Phoenix & Edgeworth, an overcast Tuesday in March, an hour in the shower is the best that you've got.

I expect that most of my fandoms are pretty well known on this ickle flist, but basically, all Final Fantasies except for Ffonline/anime and anything retconned/sequeled. (Advent Children is good, but no other ff by-products or the characters in them; I haven't played them and probably won't.) Suikodens 1-3. Kingdom Hearts. Xenogears, natch. Vagrant Story. Certain obscure members of the Belmont family. The lawyers, of course. Loveless, Saiyuki, Weiß Kreuz, Ronin Warriors, Arslan, yadda yadda anime. I am not up on the new and shiny anything, except for how I'm gnawing holes in my desk waiting for Final Fantasy Dissidia.

I woke up this morning missing Squall Leonheart like burning; it was something about the weather. Requests for SOLDIERS and SeeDs may result in eight-page explosions. Do not concentrate and inhale. You must be as tall as Sora to ride. Void where prohibited; results may vary; contents may settle. Residents of Guam will need to answer a simple math question to qualify for prizes. GO.

PW Fic -- Gifts

2008-12-24T21:57:41Z

Man, cutting it close, here. NaNo ran into December (I finished my 70K+ draft uh, yesterday) so I didn't get a chance to do as much Christmas fic as I would like. I also no longer have access to IJ at work, so no posty for me until I got home. But this one is for eider, who really didn't ask for anything else except for some Christmas fic with lawyers in it. So I wrote some today.

Merry christmas, baby. And to everyone else, too. Have some nog on me.

Takes place the Christmas after AJ:AA. there really aren't any spoilers, but there is a bit of the gay, of course. Work-safe! <3

Gifts

Apollo was fairly certain that bunnies were to be commonly found around Easter, not at Christmas. Apart from the velveteen sort, Apollo could not think of too many examples of Christmas rabbit. Nevertheless, the office was swarming with them. Everywhere Apollo looked, bunnies. White bunnies in the wastepaper basket. White bunnies under the sofa. Bunnies overturning coffee cups and chewing on the Christmas light wires. Bunnies mounting a furry, floppy assault on anything that could be called an honest morning’s work.

"I don't understand," Trucy said, rescuing a bunny from under Apollo's chair, after his latest outburst of temper. "I could swear I only got a pair of bunnies for Uncle Valant's present."

Apollo, on the other hand, was trying to rescue the Folderol Deposition papers from the bunny, with somewhat less success. He examined a gnawed corner of the file folder and sighed. "Truce, that was way before Thanksgiving. Couldn't you have picked them up from the pet store tonight? Why did you have to get them so early? Now there's dozens."

"Don't be silly," Trucy said, snuggling the bunny. "Everybody knows it's smart to Christmas shop early." She scooped the bunny up into her hat and went around the office, humming Frosty the Snowman under her breath as she gathered up other members of the white lapine dynasty.

Apollo put his face in his hands, and groaned. It was ten-thirty in the morning of Christmas Eve, and the offices of Wright Whateverthehellitisnow Agency had not been a proper working environment now for days. And not only because of the bunnies. First of all, the offices were also Phoenix and Trucy's living quarters, so even at the best of times they were overpopulated with collapsing magic boxes and unused pianos and hula skirts and screaming monkey slingshots and old DVDs of Steel Samurai and trick birthday candles and empty pudding containers. They also contained an open suitcase on the sofa, which Apollo had been living out of since his old apartment landlord had objected to a general lack of rent payments. The other building tenants called the place a disgrace, but Phoenix had gotten the owner out of a sticky spot with the law a few years before, and he tended to overlook the chaos and random extra tenants.

None of it, however, was as singularly distracting to honest work as the presence of Phoenix Wright himself. Not even the bunnies. The Bar Exam results were to be released at five that afternoon, and all semblance of the cool and collected defense attorney (or even the cool and collected poker shark) had vanished as Phoenix worked his way through roughly nine cups of coffee and reloaded every computer in the office at ten minute intervals. He was like a nervous ghost of Christmas past and Christmas yet to be all rolled into one, going around in his suit and tie, but with his beanie and fingerless gloves still on to ward off the chill of the under-heated office. Apollo was fairly certain now that bunnies were providing more warmth than the radiator, and he had taken to wearing his scarf indoors.

"You already passed it once," Apollo said, and did not add "miraculously" to that statement, though he thought it pretty hard. "What are you so worked up about?"

"I already ordered a new sign for the door, that's what," Phoenix said, reloading again. The site was sluggish to load, probably due to the strain of about a thousand other aspiring lawyers doing the same thing. "Wright & Justice, Attorneys at Law. Pretty nice, huh?" He flashed Apollo a nervous grin, and Apollo had to admit, it did sound pretty nice. Going from photocopying dossiers and making coffee for Kristoph Gavin to junior attorney in his own firm and all in the space of a year, it wasn't half bad.

Apollo yelped as a bunny took a flying leap across his desk, scattering papers. Startled, the bunny took out the collapsible table as he fled, finally hopping into Apollo's suitcase, where he settled down to chew off the few buttons remaining on Apollo's shirts. Apollo sighed. Not half bad, even if the firm was this one.

"Besides," Phoenix said, groping blindly for his coffee mug, gaze fixated on the computer screen, "a lot can change in seven years." Trucy bustled by with a hat full of rabbits, and Phoenix followed her with his eyes, something about his expression going soft and a little bit sad.

Trucy was oblivious to the nostalgia of her adoptive father, flopping down on the dilapidated leather sofa and turning on the TV. "Hey, Polly! Did you know your boyfriend is on TV?"

"He is not my boyfriend," Apollo retorted, but he knew it was a lost cause. When Trucy made up her mind, that was the end of that. And Klavier was on TV, for the solo Christmas Eve concert that had been taking up all his time (not that Apollo cared or noticed, not at all) for the past month. The stage set up in front of the downtown ice rink was decked out with magenta Christmas trees and silver chains instead of tinsel; even going solo, Klavier Gavin knew better than to dump a marketing scheme that worked. The cheering of the audience momentarily drowned out anything he was saying; he must have just finished a song.

Apollo stuck his nose in the nearest file, and pretended it was something that had to be memorized immediately. It happened to be the folder full of takeout menus, so the effect was somewhat lost.

"Danke, Danke," Klavier was saying, on the TV. "Frohe Weihnachten! Or Merry Christmas, ja?"

"He's sooo cute," Trucy sighed.

"You're too young to think boys are cute," Phoenix said, and then looked around the room in the hopes of someone agreeing with him. "Aren't you?"

Apollo just shoved his nose deeper in the file, but eyed the TV over the top of the papers. Klavier was making a big show out of scanning the audience, one hand to his forehead as though he was an explorer on a mountaintop. Diva, Apollo thought.

"Ach, it would seem there is someone missing from the crowd today! I have a friend, you know, he works too hard. On Christmas Eve, even!" Klavier displayed his (magenta) cell phone to the crowd. From the screams, someone would think he'd just unzipped his pants, instead. "Maybe we should give him a call, ja?"

"Don't you dare--" Apollo started, forgetting he wasn't supposed to be watching. It was too late, as the room was shredded with the sound of the Gramarye troupe theme.

"Sorry," Trucy said, without a trace of apology. "I changed your ring tone, Polly. I mean, who has a phone anymore that just beeps and buzzes?"

Apollo yanked his phone open. "I cannot believe you are doing this," he snapped, into the receiver.

"Guten tag, Herr Forehead!" Klavier said, on the TV and in Apollo's ear. "So cranky! Let me guess, you need a song to cheer you up. What do you all think? Should we sing him a song, ja?" The tinny screaming of the audience buzzed in Apollo's ear, echoed in stereo by the TV.

"Klavier," Apollo began, in impotent warning. The Prosecutor and Rock God had already hooked his phone back onto his belt. A guitar riff came up from under his hand and he hummed a few notes under his breath, ones that only Apollo could hear, sighed into the clip-on earpiece of Klavier's phone. It made tiny hairs stand up on the back of Apollo's neck.

"I just want to say," Klavier began, but being Klavier, it came out more like, I chust vant to say.

"No," Apollo said. "I'm hanging up--"

"Merry Christmas, baby!"

The backup band exploded into full swing, the crowd exploded into cheers, and Apollo exploded into a small knot of annoyance and hung up the phone.

But Trucy left the TV on, and Apollo didn't stop her.

By three-thirty Apollo had given up any semblance of trying to work. The office window was already dark with snowfall and the early onset of night. There wasn't really room in the office for a Christmas tree (or money to buy one, either), but Charley the plant had been decked out with blinking lights and chains of paperclips, which winked and glimmered in the dim corner. In spite of its makeshift nature, there was an impressive pile of packages under its humble boughs. They had been arriving all week from all over, with some of the visible labels bearing holiday greetings from famous paranormal photographers and Global Studios and something called De Masque Consulting. A large box of gourmet chocolates from a prosecutor's office in Germany sat on the office desk, a few of them dented by a fingerprint as Phoenix had tried to dodge the coconut ones.

Trucy had whipped up an enormous batch of the famous Wonder Bar eggnog, and for Apollo the biggest wonder of all was how Trucy managed to get all the ingredients for it, being patently underage. It did wonders for Phoenix's nerves, since it was now only two hours from the Moment of Truth and he was lying sprawled across the couch in a festive stupor, a pink streak across his face.

"Pearly will be up tomorrow," Trucy said, tidying the bunnies under the plant. "And Diego and Maya, and Detective Gumshoe and Maggey, and Uncle Larry will probably turn up, and Daddy said Uncle Valant is bringing a guest." She glanced at the door, as she had been doing now several times over the hour.

"You expecting somebody, Truce?" Apollo was using binder clips to hang tinfoil stars and bells made of empty pudding cups from Charley's branches.

"What?" Trucy startled. "Oh, no! Well, not really." She stole a glance at Phoenix, who was dozing lightly on the sofa. "I was just hoping Uncle E would be here already."

"Uncle E?" Apollo repeated. Trucy tended to stick avuncular titles on anyone who would sit still for them long enough, including a few women (Uncle Franny, for example), but Uncle E was a new one.

"Maybe his flight's late?" Trucy muttered to herself, replacing a bunny that flatly refused to stay in his beribboned hutch. Apollo thought it would help if Trucy would shut the door. She shook herself back into a brightness that was a little forced. "Prosecutor Gavin's concert was over hours ago, wasn't it? Is he coming over?"

"I think Klavier has nicer places to go than this for Christmas," Apollo muttered. He caught his fingertip in one of the binder clips and swore.

"I think this place is nice," Trucy said, softly. In the treelight she looked sweet and pretty, her eyes full of childlike wonder.

Apollo stepped back to look at his handiwork, the potted tree rustling with blinky lights and the ornaments Trucy had carefully painted and glittered a week before. "Yeah," he sighed. "Me too, Truce. But I don't know if Klavier would agree. Anyway." He pulled up a smile to match Trucy's fragile one. "How about we make some cookies to go with that nog, huh?"

But after that, Trucy wasn't the only one watching the door.

At four forty-five, the internet went out. Phoenix was not so inebriated that he would shrug off the server timeout screen showing in place of the impending Bar results, and while Trucy and Apollo managed to get some cookie dough onto the pans and not just in their own mouths, Phoenix sat on hold with a service tech in Upper East Darjeeling who barely spoke any English. He had shed his beanie out of pure frustration and the extra warmth from the kitchenette oven, and his hair stuck out at odd angles. Odder than usual, at least.

"Poor daddy," Trucy said, making a vague worried motion with her potholders. "Nothing's ever easy for him, and Christmas is worse."

"Seems like there's a lot of expectation on it all," Apollo said, peering in the oven door. The chocolate chip cookies were still glistening lumps of batter. "But it's not like you ask for any presents or anything, Truce."

"Oh, I don't need presents!" Trucy's eyebrows drew up. "For one thing, I have lots of uncles. I always get surprises. And Uncle E always sends me something really nice from Europe or Japan. But this year I just asked him for-- well." she glanced at the clock, and not for the cookie timing.
"I just--"

"WHEN. YOU. FIX. INTERNET?" Phoenix shouted into the phone, with accompanying hand gestures that were sadly invisible to the tech on the other end of the line. A pity, Apollo thought, since the throttling one was especially effective. "I know it's an older model. That still doesn’t-- Ye--No. That's no reason--fine. Tuesday. Yeah, whatever." Apollo and Trucy stuck their heads around the kitchenette door to see if Phoenix was going to need CPR, but eventually he just hung up the phone and sank back into the chair, his head in his hands.

"Daddy?" Trucy tiptoed around bunnies to touch Phoenix's shoulder. "Are you okay?"

"Sorry, Trucy," Phoenix scrubbed a hand over his face. "I'm sorry everything we've got is broken and old and secondhand." He offered her up a too-bright smile. "Even your dad."

Trucy flung her arms around his neck, potholders and all. "You're the only daddy I've got," she said, sniffly. "And I wouldn't pick a different one."

"I still wish I could get you nice things for Christmas, Kiddo." Phoenix hugged his daughter back, and Apollo went back in the kitchen to check on the cookies. He was just chiseling them off the pan ("ungreased, my ass," he muttered) when there was a knock on the office door and a commotion of surprise and greeting and unfamiliar voices.

Apollo stepped out of the kitchenette, oven-mitts still on his hands, and what to his wondering eyes should appear but the King of Prosecutors Miles Edgeworth, standing in the middle of the office with his arms full of Phoenix and Trucy and packages and possibly one or two rabbits as well. This, then, was Trucy’s “Uncle E.“ The single most amazing prosecutor in the history of modern law. Apollo stepped back a little into the kitchen, not willing to be noticed just yet.

"Have you started up a farm supply, Wright?" Edgeworth said, depositing his load of luggage and boxes on one of the chairs. Even dumbfounded, it did not escape Apollo's notice that most of the parcels were brightly-wrapped. "What's with the rabbits?"

"They're Uncle Valant's present," Trucy explained, pulling them out of Edgeworth's coat with a conjurer's nonchalance. "His all got old and died, so I got him some more. There's plenty if you want one, Uncle E!" She held one up.

"I think I'll pass," Edgeworth said, eyeing the bunny. "But from the looks of it, I doubt Valant will be short on bunnies anytime in the future."

"It's the gift that keeps on giving," Phoenix said, but there was something about his expression and tone of voice that made Apollo want to look the other way. "Damn, Edgeworth. It's good to see you. I thought you weren't due back in town until February?"

"I was convinced to change my plans," Edgeworth said, exchanging a look with Trucy, who grinned. "By special Christmas request. But I thought you'd be glued to the computer screen." He glanced at his watch, which by Apollo's estimate probably cost as much as a month's rent on the office. "Aren't the results due in soon?"

Phoenix's cheerful expression looked a little fixed. "Internet's broken again." He shoved his hands in his suit pockets, a habit left over from years of wearing a hoodie. "I'll have to wait until the results are mailed next week."

"Will you now?" Edgeworth seemed unconcerned. "Then I suppose I should go ahead and give you your present a day early." He pulled one small package out of his coat pocket, and passed it to the man Apollo had always thought was his greatest rival. Standing in the kitchen, spatula in hand, Apollo looked at the way their hands touched and wondered if 'rival' was simply a word to stand in for something else less easily defined.

"I hardly need any fancy cufflinks yet, you know," Phoenix said, undoing the ribbon. "I don't even know if I'm gonna--" Phoenix's voice broke as the lid came off the small gift box, and something small and gold glinted in the light of Charley's blinking lights. "Miles."

"I made a few stops on my way over," Edgeworth said, shedding his coat and looking quite pleased with himself. "I've plenty of friends down at the Bar Association, and I called in a few favors. I thought you'd rather hand-delivery than getting it in the mail."

Phoenix had slumped back against his bookshelf, one hand over his eyes, tiny gold pin clenched in his palm.

"What is it?" Trucy asked, leaning on the top of the reception desk. "What is it, Daddy?"

"My attorney's badge," Phoenix said, opening his hand to show her. "It's even the same number."

"I am nothing if not precise," Edgeworth said, and removed a bunny from the ribboned basket of pears he had brought.

Apollo scrubbed his eyes on the back of the oven mitt.

"Well?" Edgeworth said. "Are you going to put it on that suit, or am I going to have to do it for you, Wright?"

Even from across the room, Apollo could tell Phoenix's hands were shaking. But they were steady enough to secure the pin on his lapel, and then he and Edgeworth were caught up in a kiss that made Trucy cheer and Apollo really have to go check on the cookies right that very minute. Even though they were burnt black on the bottoms and stuck to the pan even worse than the first batch, Apollo couldn't help grinning. He had just heaped the least charred ones onto a paper plate and was bringing them out when there was another knock at the door. Apollo's stammered introduction to the most imposing prosecutor in the world ("Always been a great admirer of your body--of um, work.") was cut short by the arrival of a Rock God Prosecutor, presents and champagne in tow.

"I have heard this was where the party was, and I am not mistaken! Herr Edgeworth, himself!" Klavier heaped a delighted Trucy's arms full of limited edition CDs and what looked like a ball-joint doll in a familiar purple suit, and then clasped Edgeworth by the hand. "Always an honor."

"Gavin," Edgeworth said, in reserved warmth. "I've been following your work--off the stage of course. That last case was most admirable. My compliments to your forensics expert, as well."

"Ach, that one, she does not compliment, but I will try. Maybe if I say it comes from you I will not be pelted with snack products."

"You know," Apollo said, putting down his plate of cookies, indignant. "You could call before just appearing and expecting me to be free--"

Klavier looked wounded. "I did call! Fraulein, did I not call?"

Trucy stopped her happy investigation of the 1/4th scale Klavier's working guitar (it played a tiny recording of Guilty Love). "He did call, Apollo."

"Yes, but--" Apollo looked for backup, and found none. Phoenix and Edgeworth were sharing a quiet glance full of several layers of meaning, and Edgeworth put a hand over his mouth to cover his smile.

"Were we that bad?" Phoenix muttered.

"Worse," Edgeworth said.

"Eat a damn cookie, Gavin," Apollo said, thrusting the plate out. "And shut up."

"Ach, always I say desert first." Klavier took a bite of the proffered cookie. "Mit walnuts, even! Sublime."

"We didn't have a whole bag of chocolate chips," Trucy said, taking three, herself. "So we padded it out."

"But I am thinking, maybe it is time for dinner?" Klavier flung one arm around Trucy's shoulders and the other around Apollo's, who no longer had the heart to protest. "Maybe I have already made reservations. The best sushi in the whole city, I know. Nothing says Christmas like all you can eat fatty tuna, ja?"

"I'll go get our coats!" Trucy said, and headed for the coat closet, dodging bunnies as she went. For a moment It was only the four of them in the foyer of Wright and Justice law offices, Christmas past, Christmas present, and Christmases yet to be. None of them could quite manage to look at the others, there was so much unsaid. Klavier's silver-ringed hand had somehow gotten tangled up with Apollo's, and Apollo did not let go.

"Let's go!" Trucy sang, reappearing with an armful of coats and scarves and gloves, not all of them matching. "I want eel donburi! And tofu miso! and Chocolate green-tea mochi!"

"And because you have been good, you should have them," Klavier said, holding out her coat for her. "You too, Herr Edgeworth. I would hear about the cases you have been working on in England."

"Don't worry," Phoenix reached for his beanie and then paused, taking instead the wool felt fedora that Trucy had dredged up out of the closet. It had a blue band, and made him look a little bit like a gangster. Apollo didn't miss the way he ran his thumb over his badge before buttoning up his overcoat. "I'm not going to let him out of my sight."

They were outside in the snow a moment later, but it was not until they piled into cabs to go to the restaurant that Klavier leaned in to Apollo and said, "Your present will be coming later, Apollo. But I really have to ask--" He glanced at Trucy, who was drawing snow-fairies on the fogged up cab window. "Has no one told the fraulein that the bunnies, they are for Easter, not Christmas?"

Apollo could only laugh, leaning back against Klavier's shoulder as the cab sped off through the sparkling winter night, his heart full of something that might almost have been love. He would have to open it, Christmas morning, to find out for sure. But for now he was content to weigh it, and wonder, as the world turned slowly towards dawn.

~o~

(NB: It's highly unlikely that the Bar results would be given out on Dec 24, given the current testing format. But since when have the Phoenix Wright games been about legal accuracy, anyway? :D)

[fic - Apollo Justice] Second Guitar

2008-11-03T01:03:53Z

Since I had a head start on my NaNo, I thought the best way to kick off my November would be to write 7,000 words.... of Apollo Justice pr0n.

Ah, well, word count is word count, right? I feel really rusty on this, but I hope it all comes out all right. Quite frankly, I'm tired of looking at it, and I can't do any more tweaking it at work, so here you go.

Klavier/Apollo, first time around. NSFW by any means. Spoilers for the whodunnit of case 3 of Apollo Justice.

Second Guitar

Apollo told Trucy that he had some paperwork to clear up, and she had better go ahead and take the bus back to the office. He usually rode with her as far as the next to last stop before the offices, when he got off and walked the two blocks to his apartment, but this time he made excuses and what he hoped were knowledgeable gestures towards Machi Tobaye's clearance paperwork. Trucy had homework and school the next day. Apollo would see her tomorrow afternoon. No really, he'd be fine to finish up. Really, it'd be very boring.

She agreed at last, looking a bit more hurt than convinced, but Apollo hadn't wanted to tell her his plans outright. The moment he got done in the courthouse, he was going to go to the bar across the street and drink himself right under the table. It was not an admirable goal, but it was the one he had, and he intended to meet it.

Honestly, after the last case, he wasn't sure he could sleep otherwise. His spine had been stiff with stress for the last three days straight, and to his mind the only way to make it relax involved liberal amounts of Guinness.

After spooling off several yards of red tape, and watching an eager Machi Tobaye sign forms as though they were autograph requests, Apollo felt a little bit better. He'd never seen anyone so delighted to be charged as an accomplice to smuggling. But after all, the most Machi would see of that would be a fine. He was likely to avoid any more serious penalties on that kind of offense, and Lamiroir had already posted his new, lower bail without a blink. He would be staying with her in the hotel until the next trial. And after that, well. Apollo had been happy to give Machi instructions for requesting political asylum. He would not be returning to Borginia, but he would not be executed for murder, either.

By the time Apollo came out of the courthouse he no longer felt the need to get absolutely plastered, but he still reasoned that he'd earned at least one beer, and maybe one of those nice Reuben burgers. The street was blurry with rain that felt too cold for July, and he dashed across the crosswalk to the striped awning of the Gavel and Scales. He paused a moment before going in, stomping the water off his shoes. It was only then that he noticed the lean purple contours of a motorcycle propped half-heartedly under the awing, rain plinking on the leather seat in a way that could only be described as forlorn.

"I guess you need a drink even more than I do," Apollo muttered, and stepped into the close, noisy confines of the bar.

The Gavel and Scales had been the watering hole of choice for courthouse employees time out of mind, so much that it still insisted on smelling of smoke even though smoking in bars had been outlawed decades ago. It boasted a long history, no less than three ghosts, a marble bar that had lived through the fires of Prohibition, and small leather-covered booths where people could sit intimately close or be left the hell alone.

For Klavier Gavin, sequestered in a far corner with his back to the wall and several empty shot glasses in front of him, it was obviously the latter. Everything about him radiated unwelcome, and even the waitress bringing over another glass did not linger to ask what else he might want. It was not that he seemed angry, though Apollo supposed he had every right to be. It was more a display of bleak despair, the sort that could drive a man to Jägermeister and leaving his precious bike at the mercy of the elements. The bar was as dim as a cave, but Klavier the rock star had his sunglasses on. They made him look cool and indifferent, but Apollo wondered if anyone else there suspected just how much he was grieving.

Apollo knew he should just leave him alone.

Instead he found himself staging an intervention.

"Hey, Gavin."

Well, Apollo admitted to himself, maybe not very much of an intervention.

Klavier looked up at him over the rim of his sunglasses. He still looked like himself: that is, like Prosecutor Gavin, but something about the alcohol in his bloodstream brought Klavier the temperamental rock star very close up to the surface. Apollo did not need any kind of breathalyzer to tell that Klavier was very, very drunk. He didn't say anything, just stared at Apollo as though just looking at something took all the concentration he had.

Apollo swallowed. "Uh, you okay?"

Klavier blinked, and Apollo could have smacked himself in the face for being so stupid. For crying out loud, Justice. The man's best friend practically confessed to murder and obstruction of justice today, of course he's not all right.

"Ach!" Klavier started. "Herr Forehead! I didn't see you there." Klavier's speech was only a tiny bit slurred, and the way his eyes suddenly focused was enough to convince Apollo that Klavier had not, in fact, seen him. Wherever Klavier Gavin's thoughts had been, they were a long way away from the defense lawyer standing uncomfortably at the end of his table.

"Sit sit sit," Klavier continued, waving at the other side of the booth. "All the paperwork is done for our kleine Puppe, ja?"

"Puppy?" Apollo echoed, and then remembered the fragmented bits of German 101 from his first semester of college. Little doll. "Oh, you mean Machi. He'll be fine, I think."

"Gut, ser gut." Klavier lifted his glass, studied its absence of liquid, and scowled. "I should have had them bring the bottle." He looked up at Apollo, still standing. "You are not staying?"

Apollo sat, awkwardly, and the restless motion of his hand was enough to summon over the waitress. She took his order and returned, shortly, with a beer for Apollo and another frost-coated shot-glass for Klavier.

"Are you sure you should--" Apollo began, but Klavier had already tossed back his drink, and then leaned back bonelessly in his seat with his eyes closed.

"I know how much I can drink, Herr Forehead, and it is quite a bit," Klavier said. "I am German, after all." He paused and opened his eyes, but the only thing he looked at was the fan on the ceiling. "I was not the self-destructive member of the band," he added, softly.

"Detective Crescend," Apollo murmured.

Klavier's mouth went tight, and he groped around on the table for his glass. Apollo scooted his beer bottle into range, and Klavier drank from it without any sign that he noticed the change in taste. "I blame myself," Klavier said at last.

"It's not your fault that he decided to blow away an Interpol cop and pin the blame on an innocent kid--"

"It ist mein fault," Klavier said, bringing the bottle down heavily on the table, and fixing Apollo with his glare. "I knew Daryan had ...problems. I never pressed him to talk about them, and I should have. I might have stopped him. I thought it was enough, loaning him money, looking the other way when he undressed and showed off all those little needle-pricks down his arms. He was a good cop once, Forehead, you must believe me." Klavier looked up at Apollo in something like desperation, and Apollo nodded mechanically. He had, in the last ten seconds, learned way more than he ever expected to know about Daryan Crescend, and his relationship with Klavier. "But he should never have been a star. Never. It was too much for him, the fame and the power and the pressure. I thought anyone who could handle a gun could handle three platinum singles in a year-- I was wrong. I wish you could have known him then, I do. You would have liked each other, I think."

Apollo didn't think it was possible for him at any point to like as colossal a dickhead as Daryan Crescend, but he only nodded again. So maybe Daryan was a murderer and a liar without a shred of integrity to his name. Now. But he had been Klavier's friend, and more than that, if Apollo was reading the prosecutor's tone right. He didn't think that bit about undressing had anything to do with changing costumes backstage.

"Ach, but maybe it is just as well you did not." Klavier pushed up his sunglasses with the heel of his hand, rubbing at his eyes. "I was blind. Blind to what he had become. For you, it was easy to see what he was, was it not? Easy to find him guilty."

It hadn't been easy at all, Apollo thought, and Daryan had very nearly gotten away with his crimes, but all he could say was, "I'm sorry."

Klavier waved a hand, upsetting two of his empty shot glasses. Apollo righted them without thinking. "Ah, well. It is a good thing then, that bassists are so easy to come by. Do you play, Herr Forehead?"

"M-me?" Apollo stammered. For a second he wished wildly that he did, if only to fill the vacancy in Klavier's life that he felt personally responsible for making. "No, I--well, in high school I played clarinet in band, but that really doesn't count..."

"No matter," Klavier said, with a regal gesture. "In fact, I am wondering now if this isn't the end for us. For the Gavinners. We will not easily recover from this blow." He sighed. "So many girls liked Daryan, you know. He had that bad boy appeal, but at the same time, he was a cop and a good guy, or so it seemed. Down they went in droves for him. How it will break their hearts when they hear of this."

"What about your heart, Klavier?" Apollo said.

Klavier looked at him a long moment, almost smiling. "I am," he said, "not near drunk enough to talk about that, mein Herr."

"I think you're drunk enough, period," Apollo said. The waitress approached with his burger, and Apollo gave her a twenty to pay for it, and an apologetic gesture. "I'm sorry, could you bag that to go, for me? I need to take my friend home."

The waitress had been serving hotshot lawyers for too long to be swayed by the latest prettyboy prodigy from the head prosecutor's office, and she nodded. "Good. I didn't want to think about him taking that bike of his home, in his state. They'd be mopping him up off the highway."

Apollo shuddered.

"I can get home on my own, Herr For-"

"My name," Apollo said, through his teeth, "is Apollo, and if you're going to get any drunker than this you can at least do it in private. And before you even think about driving that oversized dildo of yours home, you better remember that a lot more fangirls will cry if you wrap yourself around a tree than they will for Daryan Crescend getting booked for murder in the first. Even worse if it happens on the same night."

There was nothing to break the staredown between the two of them. No judge held court here, and even the waitress had gone back behind the bar to wrap up Apollo's burger. Eventually though, it was Klavier who looked away, fishing in the pocket of his coat for a heart-shaped key ring that Apollo had seen way too many times in the past three days.

"Here then. Much as it pains me to ride bitch on my own bike--"

"I can't drive your bike," Apollo said, picking up the white paper bag that the waitress had deposited on the table. "Besides, it's raining. I'll call us a cab. Keep your keys."

There was a taxi waiting at the curb, the driver preoccupied with the evening newspaper. Machi Tobaye stared out from the front page, his press photo impassive over the words "Acquittal in Bizarre Guitar Murder Trial."

Klavier, sliding into the back of the car, might have laughed under his breath. "I was barely seventeen," he said, "and I once killed a man with a Fender guitar."

Apollo answered, in spite of himself. "I don't remember if it was a Telecaster or a Stratocaster," he said, and was glad for Klavier's unsteady smile.

"So! There is hope for you after all, ja? Ninth and Isaacs," he added to the cabbie, and fell back into the seat. Shut up in the cab with Klavier Gavin, the tiny space smelled of stale leather, Apollo's hot burger, and Klavier's cologne mingled with alcohol. With the downpour outside, it was somehow very cozy.

It got even cozier when Klavier was lulled to sleep by rain, the motion of the car, a respectable blood-alcohol level, and what Apollo suspected was several nights of very little rest. He slid down against Apollo, his head on the other attorney's shoulder, the perfect blond coil of his hair getting caught the golden pin on Apollo's vest lapel. Apollo tried to free it, but instead his hands just got tangled up in fine strands as pale and soft as winter sunlight.

Klavier sighed something German in his sleep and Apollo looked out the window, pretending not to notice what his hands were doing in Klavier's hair. He yanked them away fast enough when the cab stopped in front of a row of respectable brick townhouses, in a part of town that Apollo had no hopes of staying in unless maybe his bus broke down. Klavier woke up and stretched as though Apollo had been no more interesting to nap on than a sofa, and waved aside Apollo's cash for the cab fare.

"No, really, I should just catch the bus from here..."

"Nein, nein. I've taken you far out of your way, and your dinner will get cold. Come inside and eat before you go, ja?"

Apollo didn't really have much choice, as he had to get out of the cab to let Klavier out, and then Klavier made a point of sending the cab on its way at once before Apollo could protest. Apollo stared after it a moment, but Klavier was holding a cast-iron gate open for him, and Apollo had no choice but to follow him up the carefully manicured front walk.

Klavier's house, as expected, was very expensive and very open-plan and very purple. The living room featured a u-shaped sofa like some sort of violet leather-covered wharf, with a glass coffee table of a yacht docked in it. The wall art was all black and white cityscapes with one massive purple modern painting that looked like a bruise. A beautiful, heart-shaped bruise. The kind of bruise inflicted by lost love, the kind of bruise you could write a six-weeks-straight-at-#1 kind of song about. A Klavier Gavin kind of bruise.

"Darjeeling?" he asked. "Cream, sugar?"

Apollo yanked himself out of the purple and gold swirls of the painting. "Eh? Oh! Yes, please. Cream. No sugar."

Klavier busied himself in the black marble kitchen, only a very little bit unsteady on his feet. Apollo thought there might yet be something to those boasts of his alcohol tolerance. While his host hummed and clattered in the cabinets, Apollo took a closer look at the photographs lined up on the mantle.

These, too, were black and white, in modern rimless frames to keep with the room decor, but they were no artsy angles of skylines and fire escapes. Snapshots, as candid and personal as anyone else's, rock star or no. A laughing pair of boys looked up from a half-competed sand-castle, both of them too pretty to be allowed. Apollo himself had always been a pasty kind of kid, but even in the black and white photo, it was obvious the boys were as golden as the namesake Apollo could never live up to. With a jolt Apollo recognized Kristoph Gavin in the older boy's face. He picked up the frame and studied the frozen image of his old mentor, trying to find in his clear eyes the murderer he would become. It was no use. This Kristoph Gavin was just a young boy on holiday, knee-deep in sandy battlements, a band-aid on the back of his right hand. Apollo put the picture frame back with a sigh. Poor Klavier, he thought. All those hit singles must be cold comfort when your brother and your best friend both turn out to be killers.

Kristoph was in several of the photos on the mantle, aging ahead of his younger brother. He was already looking like the Kristoph Gavin Apollo had known while Klavier was still a kid, smiling toothily and decked out in a leather jacket and microphone for some long-lost Halloween.

One of the frames, however, was tilted face-down on the mantle.

Apollo looked around guiltily, but Klavier was doing something arcane in the kitchen with loose-leaf tea and a pot that looked like it belonged in a chemistry set. Curiosity won over, and he tipped the frame up to look at the picture.

Without the outrageous rock-star hairdo and the shark leather jacket, it took Apollo a moment to recognize Daryan Crescend. He and Klavier were seated around a metal table in the police department, at what looked like the end of a very long night. Paper coffee cups and files littered the table, and both of the men looked haggard and yet too young at the same time. But they were smiling, wan and triumphant, at whomever was taking the photo. Daryan was sitting with his chair backwards, Klavier had one hand in his short-cut hair. Apollo flipped the frame around, to look through the clear glass at the back of the photo. Written on it, in Klavier Gavin's unmistakable autograph-hand, was the date, seven years ago. Guilty verdict for murder in the first degree, for all seven perpetrators of the Gutslit Slayings. Underneath it, in smaller print, it said, also, first songwriting session for the Gavinners' debut album.

Apollo flipped the photo back over, and felt his heart contract. They looked so close, in the picture. Tired and overworked but happy, optimistic. Looking at the face in the photograph, Apollo believed what Klavier had said. He would have liked this Daryan Crescend. He slid the frame back as he had found it, face-down on the mantle, like the lid of a tomb.

"Must be nice to have your bike to go back and forth," Apollo said, aloud. "Guess you can come home for breaks in court proceedings, or for lunch or whatever."

Klavier was leaning down into his fridge, drumming his fingers on the door to a rhythm only he heard. "Ach, nein. Traffic, it is so bad around here. I go into work in the morning and don't get back here until late, most nights. But the courthouse cafeteria, it does good wraps. Have you ever had the sesame tofu one?"

Apollo looked at the face-down photo again. Klavier had turned it over, deliberately, before court that day. Before Daryan's confession.

Klavier had already known.

Somehow, that knowledge only made Apollo sad. If you couldn't believe in your friends, in your family, who could you believe in? Nobody but yourself, and the ghosts on your mantelpiece.

"I thought you would already be eating," Klavier said, suddenly very close.

Apollo jumped, startled. Klavier was standing next to him, with an engraved glass teacup in hand. There were small artful chocolate biscuits on the saucer. "Oh! I ah, I totally forgot about dinner."

"A good Reuben burger is not a thing to neglect," Klavier said, tsking. "Here, take this and go over to the sofa--"

"I can't eat on the sofa," Apollo protested. "What if I spill something? It'll get all over the leather and I'll have to buy you a new one and that thing must have cost like a million dollars--"

"Ach, I got it on clearance at IKEA. You would not believe how many people don't buy purple furniture. I'm always getting deals on my decor." Klavier flashed him that rockstar smile of his, and Apollo, diminished under it, picked up his greasy takeout bag and went to do as he was told.

The burger was squashy, and messy, and had oozed sauce and sauerkraut all over the wrapper. There was no way to eat it with dignity, not even if Klavier Gavin had not been sitting right across from him, sipping his sugar-but-no-cream tea and watching.

"Um," Apollo said, doing his best with the one valiant napkin the waitress had packed for him. "Sorry, this is hardly a first date food."

"I'd much rather watch someone eating something that they obviously enjoy," Klavier said. "It's much better than the other way around. Have you ever been on a date with a model? Pick pick pick at lobster croquettes as though they had glass shards in them, nudging a twenty-five dollar slice of gold-leafed cheesecake around the plate, always in mortal fear of eating a microbe of anything that might make them fat. Feh."

"Sorry," Apollo said blackly, wiping sauce off his chin, "I don't have the option of dating models."

"Don't waste your time. Or your money. Find a nice girl and go out for a chili dog and a loud rock concert. It's better all around." Klavier took a sip of his tea, and Apollo chewed at his burger in something like vengeance. Either one of those dates was a cosmic impossibility for him, at the rate he was going.

But all he said was, "Aren't you hungry?"

Klavier shrugged. "Honestly, I'm content to smell it. I've had to lay off the red meat lately. I had a salad back before I went to the bar. At least, I think I did." He looked thoughtful. "I don’t really remember."

"Health nut, huh?" Apollo grinned. "What was that about chili dogs?"

"Open jealousy," Klavier laughed. "Rocks stars have to keep skinny, you know. For that there are two options. You can turn into an ardent fan of tofu, or--" His smile broke into a thousand pieces, like a mirror stuck by a bullet, and his eyes went unconsciously to the face-down photo on the mantle. "Well. Rock stars. You can guess."

Apollo carefully folded up his burger wrapper. "...was it cocaine?"

Klavier's hand tightened on the cup. "...Among other things."

"I'm sorry, Klavier," Apollo said, giving up on his wrapper origami and crumpling it into a ball.

"Ja," Klavier answered, to his teacup. "Me, too."

Apollo ate the delicious little cookies and drank his tea in the awkward silence, and then cleared his throat. "Well," he said, "thanks for the tea, but I really should be going--"

"Or you could stay," Klavier said, in a tone very different from any other he had used all evening. Apollo felt his face go hot just from the sound of it. He wished he'd left himself some more tea, as his throat had just gone quite dry.

"Um," he said, and coughed. "Look, I might be out of the dating models sphere, but... are you propositioning me?"

Klavier shrugged. "Yes. But I know I shouldn't. I'm drunk, to be honest. Daryan is in jail for murder, and you just happen to be sitting on my sofa with your tie undone." He emptied his cup. "And you deserve better than that."

"Maybe," Apollo said. Klavier’s hair was mussed against the golden line of his throat, and Apollo couldn’t help remembering how it had felt in his hands. "But you know, what good is it being twenty-two if you can’t sleep with someone even when you know it’s probably a bad idea?"

"I don’t know how much of a bad idea it is," Klavier said. "Just that you deserve better."

Apollo couldn’t believe how calmly they were discussing this, as though it was only a matter of court procedure. "Deserve? Come on. You’re Klavier Gavin. You’re a million miles out of my league."

"Nein," Klavier said, hollowly. "I just realized I don’t want to be alone tonight, that’s all."

"That’s all," Apollo echoed. There it was, out on the table, perfectly reasonable. Klavier was lonely, Apollo was there. No more than that. Apollo looked at Klavier's wrists, and the thick silver hoops in his ears, and the folds his pants made at the top of his thigh. He wished he'd had more than a sip of that beer.

"Will you stay?" Klavier asked, leaning forward, teacup balanced in his fingertips and dangling between his knees. "I can tell you right now, I don’t want to talk. But if the answer is no," Klavier lifted one shoulder. "That’s fine, too."

It wasn’t fine, Apollo thought. It wasn’t fine for Klavier to spend the night alone in his expensive, echoing house, it wasn’t fine that his brother and best friend both would probably swing for murder. "I’ll stay," he said. "If you’re sure you want me to. I’m sure you could go out on the street and have your pick of any--"

"I do not," Klavier said, "want to be Klavier Gavin the rock star tonight. And that is all I am to them. Trust me, I am sure, or else I would not have asked." Klavier put his teacup down on the edge of the table, and stood. Apollo thought he should stand up too, to be on at least somewhat even footing, but he didn't think his knees would hold him. What was he doing here? How had this happened, exactly? Did he really want to get fucked, by Klavier Gavin, on what obviously was nothing but a rebound?

Well, said a tiny, malicious voice inside him, you've got to take what you can, Justice. It's not like you're going to get it any other way. And if there's no promises, there's nothing to lose, right? Apollo tried to swallow. Well, nothing except for the one really obvious thing...

Klavier was standing next to him now, but Apollo could only look at his empty teacup on the tabletop. His hands were twisted together in a tight knot, and he was wildly grateful for those chocolate biscuits to leave a bitter cocoa sweetness in his mouth instead of burger aftertaste. Because if Klavier was going to-- if they were--

"Ach," Klavier said, and Apollo could hear him smiling. "You look like a scared rabbit, Herr Forehead."

Apollo opened his mouth to protest, but nothing came out. Klavier had brought his hand down on top of Apollo's head, and ruffled the spikes of his hair that wouldn't stay down with the rest. "See? You even have the ears. But I am no wolf, you know."

"Stop that," Apollo said, reaching up. "You don't have to treat me like a little--" Apollo's voice broke off, mid-protest. Klavier was not treating him like a little kid, after all. Klavier had in fact caught Apollo's hand in his own, and lifted it to his mouth to kiss his knuckles. Apollo felt his face burning, and wondered if Klavier was really so hard up for company that he would pick a weedy little defense lawyer to ease his loneliness.

"I can hear you now," Klavier said, "You don't even have to say anything." He sighed, and it tickled like ghostly fingertips over the back of Apollo's hand. "Do you think I think so much of myself? That I will only have, I don't know, other rock stars in my bed with me?"

"Frankly," Apollo said, "yes."

"Ah, you wound me, Herr Forehead." There was something in the annoying nickname that was almost endearing. "Perhaps it is that I will only have other lawyers in my bed. Would you feel so underqualified then?"

"I think I'd still feel underqualified even you said you only liked to sleep with short, brown-haired defense attorneys who have a penchant for red vests."

Klavier laughed, and sprawled down on the sofa next to Apollo. "You are a tough one, you know that?"

"Maybe I just think if something seems too good to be true, then it probably is."

"Or maybe," Klavier said, sliding one hand against Apollo's face, "I will just have to come up with some evidence to prove my motive?"

Apollo shivered. Klavier's hands were warm, and there were tiny calluses on his fingertips from the strings of his guitar. Apollo was going to say that it would have to be some damn good evidence to prove such an unlikely theory, but Klavier leaned forward and presented something that was pretty much irrefutable.

Apollo was not so virginal that he had never been kissed. He'd had his share of teenaged makeout sessions, and plenty of groping around in college, and he liked to think that there really wasn't anything in the mouth-to-mouth department that he would find too surprising. But then, he'd never been kissed by Klavier Gavin before. For all that he protested that he was really a lawyer at heart, there was no getting around the fact that the man kissed like a god damn rock star. He was used to getting what he wanted, and not having to ask for it. He knew he was hot, knew he was good in bed, and had no problems with letting Apollo know that, too. He was greedy, he was ruthless, but not in any way that Apollo could bring himself to mind.

Apollo could not, in fact, get very much beyond Oh god. But then somehow his hands were ravaging the smooth perfection of Klavier's hair, Klavier's perfectly indecent mouth was moving down Apollo's throat, and Apollo made a growl of want that he didn't even recognize as his own.

Klavier chuckled, ticklish at his ear. "Maybe the rabbit is a wolf underneath, hn?"

"I'm no wolf, either," Apollo panted, and felt a current of motion around his neck as Klavier pulled Apollo's tie free, shirt buttons giving way under the onslaught of his guitar-quick fingers.

"Nein? What are you, then?"

"I'm a--ah--defense lawyer..." Apollo managed, but nothing else, as Klavier's mouth had just closed hot and hungry over his nipple, and Apollo's case was completely forfeit. He had no argument to make, no objections, and could only fall back into the yielding purple leather of the sofa with Klavier's heat pressing down on top of him.

Klavier was not so desperate as to rush things. For a long time they lay tangled up together on the couch, mouths meeting and then wandering away some distance over ears and throats and shoulders before meeting up again. Klavier's thigh was wedged up between Apollo's legs, and in Apollo knew he should be mortified at how he ground up against it, trying to ease the burn Klavier had started. At the time though, he could only think that as close as they were, it wasn't near close enough.

When they paused a moment, Apollo was shocked to discover that Klavier's shirt and jacket were gone, shoved off in a wad of designer tailoring on the floor, and Apollo's own hands were frozen, caught in the act of undoing the prosecutor's belt. His thumb, by some other will than Apollo's, clearly, was stroking the thin, groomed trail of gold glittering faintly under Klavier's navel.

"And he says he is such a poor lover," Klavier said, his ragged breathing taking all the mockery out of his words, his lower lip swollen from Apollo's attentions a moment before.

"Er," Apollo began, looking down at his hands as though he wasn't sure how they got there. He was still mostly wearing his shirt and vest, though both were unbuttoned completely and shoved back off his shoulders. Klavier brought one fingertip down over the taut muscles of Apollo's belly, and hooked it into the as-yet still fastened waistband of his pants. "Well?" he prompted. "Are you convinced yet?"

In the purple shadows of the living room, Klavier's belt buckle flashed in Apollo's hand like a star. "Almost," he said, and undid it. The zipper purred open, Apollo's fingers moved past crumpled silk boxers, and then Klavier was arching up in a catlike stretch, a long, low growl in his throat as his swollen cock slid into Apollo's hands.

It was like a shot of the drug that had been Daryan's undoing, that kind of heady gratification. Apollo's breath caught even as his hands remained greedy, stroking the rigid weight of Klavier's need, moving his hand down to cup the heavy softness of his balls. He had a ring in the tip, a hot little band of thick silver, and Apollo's fingers couldn't leave it alone. Apollo remembered the way Klavier's earrings had tasted in his mouth, and wondered if this one would taste the same: warm metal and salt.

Klavier swore, some phrase in German that Apollo did not know, and fell forward on top of him. He could no longer spare his hands to hold himself up; they were needed instead for the very vital task of ripping into the front of Apollo's pants and freeing his cock from its confinement. Apollo pressed back into the sofa with a groan, his hands tightening on Klavier even as his own hips lifted upwards.

"We will have time later for the pretty things," Klavier said, freeing one hand and fumbling for an ornate wooden box on the glass coffee table. "But I'm not very patient right now."

It occurred to Apollo that any man who kept condoms and lube so handy was a man used to fucking on his couch, and that he, Apollo, should be scandalized to just be one among the many. All he cared about at the moment, however, was that Klavier kept pumping his cock in his silver-ringed, guitar-callused hands. Warnings tried to surface as Klavier shoved Apollo's pants down, but Apollo ignored them. He knew what he was getting into, and more importantly, what Klavier was getting into, and quite honestly the sooner the better.

"You've done this before?" Klavier asked, flipping down the lid of the box, pump-bottle and foil wrapper in hand.

"I'm very good at faking expertise," Apollo said, admiring the way Klavier's cock jutted up just so in the frame of his pants.

"Nein, Herr Forehead," Klavier laughed. "I won't have you faking anything with me. Not evidence--" there was a quick motion in his teeth and then the foil packet was torn open, and his cock sheathed in a coat of iridescent violet latex, "and not in the noises I want to hear you making."

The lubricant on Klavier's fingers was cold, and the sudden invasion of them in Apollo's ass was enough to wake up a fleet of butterflies in his stomach. There was a split-second of panic, of almost saying no, of Jesus Christ, Justice, are you out of your mind, but then Klavier's slick fingers had pushed up and in, stretching a ring of muscle that Apollo had never taken much notice of before. He noticed it now. Noticed it like there had never been any other part of him but this, and the way it was suddenly compromised, and the sweet explosive pleasure of Klavier's fingertips pressing just so up inside him.

He made a sound of some kind, he wasn't even sure what. But it was wild and it was desperate, and Klavier's grin was almost feral. "Ja, noises just like that."

Apollo's only answer was the sound of his fingernails dragging over the surface of Klavier's couch. He thought he was going to be fucked like that, on his back like the proverbial virgin, but Klavier fell back against the couch cushions and pulled Apollo with him, so that Apollo found himself suddenly on top. Klavier was tousled and beautiful, his hair scattered in a pale wave on the leather, his thumbs pressing little circles above Apollo's hipbones. "Now," he breathed. "Let's see if you can take what I give you. It will be up to you if it's too much, this way."

Apollo shifted his weight, and the slick, latex-covered tip of Klavier's evidence nudged up against his asshole. The metal ring was hot even through the latex, a tiny ring of hardness. "I can take anything you can dish out, Prosecutor Gavin," he said, through his teeth, and let his weight push him down, impaling himself on the cock underneath him. Klavier's breath hit hard against the back of his teeth, and he couldn't stop his own answering motion, shoving up as Apollo moved down, every bit as eager. Klavier's hands were twined together around Apollo's on his cock, pumping in time to the rhythm Apollo chose.

It was too late now to take things slowly. The sofa creaked underneath them as they rocked together on top of it, and Apollo felt the dull ache building into a wave, one that threatened to overtake him, to pull him under and drown him. He was fighting it, on instinct, until Klavier canted his hips at a slightly different angle. He was after his own pleasure, evident in the desperation of his thrusts, but it was Apollo's undoing. He said Mein Gott and he said Ich kommen, but it was the broken sound of Apollo's name--his own name--that ended it. Apollo spilled himself all over their tangled fingers and the shivering planes of Klavier's belly, falling forward and gasping Klavier's name, confessing to crimes long held silent in the crashing aftermath of their release.

Apollo woke up in a twist of violet silk sheets, wondering blearily why his ass was cold. It took a few seconds of intense concentration for him to realize that it was because there was nothing on it, not even his boxers. That was because there was nothing on Apollo at all, nothing but the slipping-away sheets and the smell of Klavier Gavin all over his skin. The man himself was asleep on his side next to Apollo, the bedside table clock read twenty minutes after nine, and Apollo lay there and tried to reconcile the morning with the vivid memories of a one-night stand with a rock star.

What was the proper way to do things, anyway? To creep out of bed, gather up his clothes (from their various locations in the bedroom, on the stairs, and by the couch), call himself a cab, and try not to look Klavier Gavin in the eye for a month or two? Or should he go downstairs, make them both coffee, and assume Klavier would still want to admit to his crimes in daylight? Apollo swore, silently. This was why he was a lawyer, dammit. There was a process for everything. But in real life, he couldn't just go look up the previous court decision and go by that. He had to wing it on his own.

"When you are done making up your mind," Klavier said, without rolling over, "maybe you would like to go out for breakfast?" He eyed Apollo over one perfectly golden shoulder, smiling drowsily. "As thanks to you, I have to go and get my bike back, you know. The deli two blocks from the courthouse has good bagels." He stretched. "Or, we could get crepes instead, maybe?"

"I thought I was supposed to write a lipstick note on the mirror and sneak out," Apollo said, tugging up the sheet around his hips and wondering why he was being so modest. The night before Klavier had been face down in everything Apollo was trying to hide. Several times.

"Ja, well, if you really wanted," Klavier flashed him that sleepy, sexy grin, and Apollo punched down the sheet a little more firmly between his legs. Dammit, even first thing in the morning, even with his hair going everywhere and the pillow creases leaving a red stripe across his face, why did he have to be so damn hot?

"But," Klavier continued, "you don't seem the type to carry lipstick."

"Well, uh. No," Apollo admitted.

"Want to borrow some of mine?"

"No! I mean, It would be sort of pointless now--" Apollo checked himself. "You have lipstick?"

"Got to have something to go with the eyeliner, ja?" Klavier kicked one leg free of the blankets and sprawled back in the pillows, sheet riding low around his hipbone. Apollo tried to find somewhere else to look, without any luck.

"Look, Prosecutor Gavin, I know you're trying to be gallant and all but--"

"Aaaach, it's Prosecutor Gavin now, is it?" Klavier lifted both his eyebrows in mock-alarm. "Now who is it who's trying to be gallant? Do you think I kick lovers out of my bed in the morning, and never speak to them again?"

"Truthfully," Apollo said, "yes."

Klavier put a hand to his heart. "You and your fatal barbs, Herr Forehead! Have mercy. Have you forgotten what I told you about my guitars?"

"Your guitars?" Apollo said, trying to follow this apparent non sequitur. "When? After it burst into flames?"

"Nein, no more of that one. I meant, when you came to visit me in my office, a few days ago. You recall?"

Apollo did recall the Prosecutor's office, and how it looked like it belonged to a music executive instead of a district attorney. There was the sleek expensive furniture, and the walls full of guitars, that Klavier had said were like...like... "your lovers," Apollo said, mostly to himself.

"You do remember! My instruments, they are like lovers. To be handled carefully, to be chosen carefully." His voice pitched deeper, and a dozen memories came along with the sound of it. Apollo was blushing even before Klavier put his hand on Apollo's thigh, underneath the sheet. "Do you think I would play an instrument once, claim I knew all there was to know of it, and never put my fingers to its strings again? Ach, nein. I am an even more devoted musician than I am an attorney, you know. And that should tell you enough."

"It doesn't tell me anything," Apollo grumbled, but his sulk came out muffled, as Klavier leaned over to kiss the corner of his mouth.

"Then you are not listening," Klavier whispered. "I'm asking you, do you want crepes for breakfast, or do you want bagels?"

"I, uh." Apollo looked down, at the motion of the sheet between his legs, where Klavier was doing something very interesting with his fingers under the covers. "Maybe... maybe I'm a crappy guitar."

Klavier laughed against his ear. "I may have only played you one night, but it was enough to know that that is not true." His fingers tightened, and Apollo hissed at the pleasant wave of warmth Klavier was squeezing into him. "Your sound is sweet. All you want, mein Herr, is a little bit of playing."

Apollo's answering noise was mingled disbelief and surrender. The sheets were shoved back, Apollo's cock was enveloped in the wet heat of a slow, hungry mouth, and Apollo found himself headfirst, literally, in another jam session with Klavier Gavin.

Before the pleasure disconnected coherent thought, it occurred to Apollo that really, it was only the natural order of things. When one guitar was destroyed, Klavier had to pick up another one. No matter how much he had liked the first, there would be no getting it back. Another would have to be found that would service, and at once. He couldn't be a rock star without an instrument.

Klavier started to hum one of his own melodies, a thrumming vibration down in the back of his throat, and Apollo sprawled back in the sheets and let himself be played.

~0~

[fic - Phoenix Wright] Foolish Mortals

2008-10-31T18:21:01Z

ahahah, okay, clearly one Halloween fic is not enough for me. This one is worksafe, short, 99% spoiler free (I suppose there are spoilery hints about Edgeworth's childhood but that is all) and mostly just an excuse to shove Phoenix and Edgeworth into a doombuggy together.

Probably after the end of the fic they go around on the ride again and make out the second time. Then they all go to lunch in the castle. That's what I think anyway.

I only just dashed this out this morning, so it may be messy. Apologies to Disney Imagineering.

EDIT for a curiosity note I just found in the ride tour section of Doombuggies.com: By the way—if you were to check out some of the real books used as props from the Walt Disney World Haunted Mansion's library, you might be led to believe that a lawyer was haunting the halls. Among the titles of the law books that sits on the dusty shelves are Corpus Juris (which is translated to "The Body of Law") and Modern Legal Forms. There are also some medical books in the collection as well.

:D :D :D

Foolish Mortals
2,000 words
Worksafe
Happy Halloween (again!)

NB: hey, they're supposed to be in LA.

Foolish Mortals

"Wow, after that, I think I could really go for a hamburger! You know they have them here shaped like mouse ears?" Maya stretched, as though the amusement park ride had been some sort of mild, energizing workout. "How about you, Nick?"

Phoenix was clinging to the railing by a excruciatingly well-landscaped lake, and trying not to be picturesquely sick right in the middle of it. "Ugh. Maya, I don't know how you can even think about food right now. Much less food with mouse ears in it."

Maya put her hands on her hips, pouting. "Not in it! Just shaped like it! Like the ice cream, and the cookies, and the chicken fritters--"

"Urp," Said Phoenix.

"Really, you're such a baby," Maya sighed. "We had like the slowest teacup out of the entire batch."

"I want to go in the cups again!" Pearls piped in, tugging on Phoenix's hand. "Can we go again, Mr. Nick? It was so fun, the way it kept going around and around and around and--"

Phoenix kind of whimpered, and wondered if they would throw him out for vomiting on cartoon-character shaped topiary. If he did, surely he wouldn't be the first person to do that?

"Sorry, Pearls," Maya said, in an overly-loud confidential whisper. "Nick's kind of a wimp about rides. We should do something more sedate. Like the Tower of Terror! It takes you waaaay up in the air in a haunted elevator and then--"

"Please," Phoenix said, going weak kneed at the very thought, "have mercy, Maya."

Maya took Pearls' hand, and set off down the walkway in a brisk, businesslike manner. "Fine," she said. "If you're going to be a total pansy about it, we'll go on a boring little old kiddy ride."

Phoenix lurched after them, too relieved to feel the barb about his masculinity. Right now, happy singing puppets on a boat ride were right about his speed.

"Here we are!" Maya announced. "Oh, look, the line's even short!"

"Maya," Phoenix said, staring up at a facade of gothic horror, "This is the Haunted Mansion."

"What's the matter, Nick?" Maya asked, coyly. "Too much for you to handle? I hear at one point the ride carts tilt back a whole two inches, and it goes at an amazing speed of one mile an hour--"

"I can hack the ride just fine, Maya!" Phoenix snapped, even though after his last case, he had quite enough dead things popping out at him to last the rest of his life. "It's just that... Just that, uh--"

"Well?" Maya prompted.

"Pearls is too young to go on it," Phoenix concluded, triumphantly. "All the ghosts and things. It'll give her nightmares."

"Mr. Nick," Pearls said solemnly, "I'm a spirit medium."

"Yeah, Nick," Maya said. "We deal with dead people all the time, only these are made out of fiberglass. This is like for us what 'Lawyer Mountain' would be for you. If they made one." She paused to consider. "Which they wouldn't. It would just be a giant pile of paperwork with one ride cart on top of it that you sit in and you don't go anywhere or do anything--"

"Until suddenly it takes off and you have no control over it and it carooms through the entire park before falling off a cliff?" Phoenix suggested, bitterly. "I'm telling you, Maya, we're not going on--"

"Someone's waving at us from the line, Mr. Nick!" Pearls said, waving back in delight. "Look, it's Mr. Edgeworth and Miss Franziska!"

Phoenix groaned inwardly. A zillion people in the park that weekend, and of course they would run into those two now, of all the times.

"Want to turn around and lose face now, Nick?" Maya said, grinning like one of the gargoyles on the mansion roof.

"Dammit," Phoenix said, and let Maya and Pearls tug him forward to his doom.

"Ah, Mr. Wright," Franziska said, when they got within range. Edgeworth was standing with her, looking utterly incongruous in jeans and a button-down shirt. Phoenix wouldn't even have recognized him, without Franziska there. "It must be tedious for you to be going on so boring a ride for little girls, yes?"

Maya opened her mouth, and Phoenix was sure that whatever came out of it would not be good news for him. "Well, you know, they insisted," he said, before Maya could get anything out. "But uh, if this is a kiddie ride, what are you--"

Franziska made a noise of annoyance, and swatted Edgeworth on the shoulder. Was Phoenix imagining things, or did Miles Edgeworth look... sheepish?

"This man! If he even can be called that! He balked at going on the dropping down haunted elevator ride. Bah! This is as much as he can take. Pathetic, isn't it?"

Phoenix wasn't imagining things.

"I have a medical condition, Franziska," Edgeworth began, sounding wounded. "I can't go on--"

"Medical condition?" Franziska snorted. "What is that that you have? Are you suffering from acute cowardice, or are you pregnant? Answer me that."

"I really wish you had gotten an earlier flight back to Germany," was all Edgeworth said. Phoenix couldn't help feeling sorry for the man. He looked pale and clammy in spite of the warmish day, and Phoenix wondered if it was cruelty, selfishness, or obliviousness that had prompted Franziska to ask Edgeworth to go on a haunted elevator ride, of all things. Probably a little bit of all three.

"Well now we're all here, we can go together!" Pearls said, bouncing with happiness. She knocked off her little pink pair of mouse ears in her excitement, and Edgeworth retrieved them for her, smiling wanly. Her thanks were bubbly enough to bring a little bit of color to his face, and Phoenix felt a rush of affection for Pearls, and maybe a little for Edgeworth as well.

"Hey, we're going in!" Maya said, as the crowd surged forward towards the mansion lobby. "Come on, come on!"

Phoenix had forgotten his own discomfort in the face of Miles Edgeworth's, and found himself standing at the other man's shoulder during the sinking room and the portrait gallery, grateful the girls were all distracted by spooky theatrical effects.

"Hey," Phoenix said, as a stately man in a tarnished frame turned into a corpse and back again, "are you okay?"

"I despise amusement parks," Edgeworth said in answer, and then seemed to remember that he was talking to Phoenix, and not himself. "Nevermind, Wright. I'm just tired. Franziska has had us all over the park today since dawn. She insists on riding every single thing, in order, without exception." He sighed. "She's so German."

"Maybe you can have a nap on this ride?" Phoenix suggested. "It's dark enough."

Edgeworth's mouth tightened in something that wasn't a smile. "Perhaps."

They were at the loading dock now, and Pearls and Maya scrambled eagerly into one of the doombuggies. Franziska shoved Edgeworth away and insisted she was not riding with such a sorry excuse for a man, and she did not want to have to listen to his crying and cowering. Phoenix and Edgeworth looked at each other in something like resignation, and climbed into the next ride seat together.

The restraint bar clunked down, supposedly moved by ghostly hands, and Phoenix found himself squeezed into the seat along with Miles Edgeworth and creepy background narration coming from the car speaker.

"I don't blame you for not wanting to do the Tower of Terror," Phoenix said, in the hopes that conversation would help him forget just how closely they were smushed together in the dark. The cart really wasn't made for as broad a pair of shoulders as theirs. "Maya had me ready to barf just from the teacups."

"They're more fun when you're smaller," Edgeworth said, over the creaking of phantom doors. "Something about the center of your gravity, I suppose. I remember when I rode them with my father--" He broke off, and took a sudden intense interest in an animatronic candlestick.

All at once, Phoenix understood. "You haven't been here since you were a kid, have you?"

Edgeworth glanced at him, something in his eyes guilty at having been found out. "I wouldn't even have come today, but Franziska's flight is not until the weekend, and she insisted on doing the sights."

"Still, they're all good memories, here, right?" Phoenix sat back in the seat as best he could. There was a séance going on in front of them, and from Maya and Pearls' ride car he heard wild giggling at the floating furniture and overblown chanting. "I mean, this place is supposed to be about fun, about being a kid again--"

"And what," Edgeworth broke in, bitterly, "is so wonderful about being a kid? I don't ever remember anything good about it."

Phoenix paused. It was not just a trick of the ride show lighting; Edgeworth's eyes were too bright. "...You mean besides that memory of you and your dad in those teacups?" he asked, quietly.

Edgeworth laughed, just once. The blacklight was turning his hair a wild shade of luminous blue, making him look like a ghost himself. "I threw up," he admitted. "I'd only had four or so mouse-ear-shaped ice cream bars right before."

"Well, if you're gonna throw up, this is at least the place to do it in style," Phoenix said, grinning. "I mean, hell." He gestured to the ride, "They don't even take death seriously here."

"Maybe that's what I don't like about it," Edgeworth said with a scowl, his hands tightening on the restraint bar. "I have to deal with people's violent deaths every day. It's not something to be made fun of, to be turned into amusement like this..."

"Or maybe," Phoenix said, "it's the only way to deal with it? I know murder and mayhem is our line of work, Edgeworth, but... I mean, you've gotta admit this is pretty cool. Look, that one guy's wearing your coat."

Phantom dancers were whirling across a cobwebby ballroom floor, and Phoenix thought he saw some kind of wonder soften Edgeworth's face. "I remember this," he said, softly. "I'd forgotten. I never could figure out how they did it."

"Actually," Phoenix began, as a man who had done a paper on Dark Rides and the Camaraderie of Fear, for his sociology midterm in college, "It's a big sheet of glass with--"

"Don't tell me," Edgeworth said, quickly. "I don't... I don't want to know." He flashed a smile at Phoenix, fleeting as the Pepper's Ghosts flickering in the dark ballroom. "I suppose that's the secret, isn't it? To being a kid. Both of us, in our jobs, we have to know the truth. We have to know how everything works. We can't turn that off, even in a place like this. For someone like Pearls, it's just accepted as it is, and that's the fun of it. The wonder."

"Well," Phoenix said, "Why don't you try it that way? I mean, that's why this place is good for adults too, you know? So you don't have to think. You can suspend your disbelief and enjoy it just like Pearls. Although maybe not the teacups."

Edgeworth shook his head. "I wouldn't know where to start."

"How about here?" The carts were creeping through a dusty attic. "It's the best part of the ride, you know. I always thought so. You remember the bride?"

"No," Edgeworth admitted. "I was so scared of the popping-up heads, I closed my eyes the whole time."

"Here she comes," Phoenix said, leaning forward. "Look at all the photographs and things. She murdered all her husbands with an axe--"

"And there was no evidence to put her away after the first murder?"

"Hey, what did I say about suspension of disbelief--" Phoenix started, but Edgeworth was smirking at him. Phoenix had just been baited.

"Okay, Prosecutor, have it your way," Phoenix said, "But the hitchhiking ghost always goes home with the smartass, you know."

~0~

[icons] don't put words in my mouth, pal!

2008-10-29T19:43:11Z

I'm having a bleak sort of afternoon, so, in an attempt to cheer myself up, I made some icons! Some christmasy, some just silly, and some making unorthodox use of the preview screencaps for Turnabout Prosecutor, or whatever the hell they're planning to call it. I've got blanks for those too, so you can pretty much make Edgeworth and Gumshoe say anything you want. I might even make some more, today, or maybe I'll write that thing I want to write about Klavier and Apollo and the end of case three. Maybe.

If you use any icons, credit would be just dandy. ♥

[halloween fic!] In the Mansions of the Just

2008-10-29T15:14:20Z

I finished it! yaay! ...Now I can start working on that Christmas fic bunny that's been gnawing my leg off all week. Honestly. It has the seasonal timing of a department store's holiday section. (October 15? ROLL OUT THOSE SANTAS.)

7,600 words, worksafe, beware spoilers! and dead things!

Takes place one year after the end of AJ:AA, the following October. Because they only offer the Bar Exam like twice a year and then you have to wait forever to get your results. :3 Not as much survival horror as I might have liked, but c'mon, guys. Survival horror for lawyers does not mean flamethrowers, it means litigation and lots of it.

And okay maybe a few zombies. Provided they have their death certificates signed in triplicate and witnessed by a notary.

In the Mansions of the Just

The courthouse records room was gloomy at the best of times. Phoenix had always thought so, even before a feckless art student had first encountered the murderess of his dreams there. There was something unsettling about the way the small windows were almost always blocked by tall, imposing shelves, or about the muffled hush produced by hundreds of books, all filled with the doom of others. It was impossible to see where anyone else might have come from or gone, and sound traveled strangely. It always made Phoenix feel like there was someone creeping up on him, even when there wasn't; the urge to keep looking over his shoulder was irresistible even in the daytime.

At night it was much the same, only a million times worse.

But Phoenix was going there anyway, on a mission of mercy for Apollo. He'd left the junior attorney in the office, staring down a stack of evidence that was damning in the wrong direction, wearing a bleak expression that Phoenix knew all too well. It was well past regular hours, even in the early dark of the waning year. Cold wind and dry leaves followed Phoenix in at the back door, his footsteps reverberated in the empty hall, and the elevator walls pressed in uncomfortably as it descended to the basement. Phoenix wasn't sure if his claustrophobia was due to the fact that he knew too much about that elevator, or because the night outside had been so crisp and wide open by comparison, red maple leaves rimed with frost. He practically fled the elevator once the doors opened, and as a result almost mowed over Mrs. Riffle: the wizened, diminutive keeper of the court records archive.

"Oh, I shouldn't be surprised it's you," she said with withering fondness, as she adjusted the tiny hat that Phoenix had knocked askew. "Whose backside you trying to save now, eh? Thought you didn't have a case yet?"

"It's a favor for someone else at the firm," Phoenix explained, not sure if that would grant him access, and padding out the tale. "Terrible case, really. We think it's a definite framing, the defendant's a widower, got three kids to feed--"

"It's that pimp that thinks he's a woman, isn't it," Mrs. Riffle said, with no room for argument. "Goes around in a little skirt, wears a green wig or somethingorother."

Phoenix slumped. "Well, I don't think he thinks he's a woman, so much as he thinks he is in fact Sailor Uranus. And he prefers the term 'Brothel Madam.'"

"I prefer the term 'weirdo' but nobody asked me. Out with it, what do you want? You're keeping me from my Mr. Scribbles who wants his kibble."

Phoenix saw no other option but to come clean. Mrs. Riffle might be a crazy old bat, but she would never stand by and let an innocent weirdo go to jail if she could help it. "There was a previous case Apollo's client testified in that would prove a motive for someone else to frame him for murder. I don't suppose you'd let me in for a peek?"

Mrs. Riffle's gaze was penetrating from behind her spectacles. "Got that badge back, ain'tcha? Because I've gotten in enough trouble letting you in here at all hours for that pet jurist project of yours." Phoenix said nothing, but pulled back the front of his coat to reveal a glint of gold on his lapel, shining in the dim light like an evening star. Mrs. Riffle waved her hand, as though Phoenix and his needs were a pack of gnats. He could tell, however, that she was smiling. "Fine fine, but only because Mr. Edgeworth's already down there. I told him to lock up when he's done."

"Edgeworth's here?" Phoenix said, trying not to sound interested.

The librarian, like many of her ilk, was not easily fooled. "You'll go down there and do your research, young man, and then you'll both go home. No sex on the reading tables."

"I uh, I guess you hadn't forgotten about that, huh?" Phoenix said, wincing as he was poked in the chest with Mrs. Riffle's hard, bony finger.

"Hardly. I think it will be burned in my brain until my dying day."

Phoenix sighed. "What can I say, Mrs. R? It was a long time ago. We were young, foolish lawyers, drunk on possibility and optimism, with no more thought of tomorrow than--"

"It was last week, Mr. Wright."

"Oh." Phoenix felt a wave of heat creeping over his face. "...erumyeah. That time."

"Though I think you were right about the drunk part. Go on now and save your sailor anus or whatever it is. Just remember to behave yourself, Mister. This is holy ground."

Phoenix's grin was uneasy, as one would smile at a crazy person on the street while mentally praying that one's bus would arrive and provide escape. "Uh, I think you mean state property. Churches are holy ground."

"Courthouses are, if you're a follower of Justice." Mrs. Riffle whacked Phoenix in the shins with her umbrella, elbowing past him to get to the elevator. "Don't forget it, boy. And no leaving the room a mess, either! If so much as one book is out of place--"

"I got it, I got it," Phoenix said, backing out of umbrella range. "Thumbscrews for me, right?"

"Hmph. If you're lucky." Mrs. Riffle gave him one last baleful look, and then the elevator doors closed. Phoenix was left alone in the dark passageway, the only light coming from the exit sign above the stairwell, spitting and flickering like it was having some sort of electrical seizure.

Shivering in her chilly wake, Phoenix walked down the hall. The door of the records room was outlined in a rectangle of welcoming lamplight, and Phoenix tried not to rush down to it. The darkness in the corridor chewed at the heels of his shoes, and once he got to the door he wrenched it open. It gave too fast in his hand, pulled inwards at the same time by someone else on the other side, and in the resultant collision it was a small consolation that Miles Edgeworth looked at least as startled as Phoenix felt.

"Christ," Edgeworth said, exasperated, and shuffled the papers in his arms in an attempt to compose himself.

"No, just me," Phoenix demurred, bending to pick up a folder Edgeworth had dropped. "He only took three days to come back--I took seven years."

"In that case, you have no business being back in this tomb." Edgeworth tilted up his glasses: a charming addition to his appearance that never failed to delight Phoenix Wright of the perfect 20/20 vision. Edgeworth had said the first time that maybe if Phoenix had bothered to actually read some legal books once in a while that he'd be in need of glasses, too. "What are you doing here?"

Phoenix shrugged. "Apollo's in up to his ears, I thought I'd lend a hand and pick up the records for State v. Bartleby from three years ago."

"The murder trial?" Edgeworth looked thoughtful, connections clicking together behind his glasses. "You think the brothel bookkeeper framed Mr. Transitanni for Justice's current case?"

"Very likely, since his testimony got the bookkeeper's brother put away for murder in that one." Phoenix glanced over Edgeworth's shoulder, at the darkened records room. Edgeworth had turned out all the lights except the one over the door. "I don't want to keep you though, since it is a defense matter--"

"This is prosecutor Gavin's case, not mine." Edgeworth too, might have been smiling, at the hint of a gold lapel pin shining inside Phoenix's jacket. "I was just in that section. I'll help you look."

The shadows retreated from the stacks as Edgeworth flipped the bank of light switches upwards again, flooding the room with light. They spent longer than they planned in the shelves, as it seemed every other file they turned up was full of memories. Several cases were ones of Edgeworth's that Phoenix had missed in his time out of practice; others had played an oblique role in Phoenix's exoneration, but had taken place when Edgeworth was out of the country. It was twenty minutes after midnight when theState v. Bartleby folder was unearthed, and Phoenix and Edgeworth huddled around the photocopier as it duplicated the data.

"It's always so cold down here," Phoenix said, putting his back to the machine as though it were an open fire.

Edgeworth was examining an old crime scene photo with interest: a black-and-white phantom slumped over a winning hand of cards. "It's to preserve the papers. There are records down here that are over a hundred years old, and quite delicate."

"Brr." Phoenix pressed his hands to the sides of the machine. "Feels like a crypt." The copier dinged, and Phoenix looked down at the display. It wanted more dimes. "God forbid we rip off the state by wasteful photocopying practices," Phoenix grumbled, digging in his pockets. "Ah, dammit. I'm out of change."

"Here." Edgeworth put down a handful of coins on the lid of the copier, and scooped an assortment of murders back into their folders. "I'll go put these back."

"I don't suppose you'd be going by my place on your way home?" Phoenix said hopefully, feeding more coins to the copier.

Edgeworth rolled his eyes. "No, but I suspect I'm giving you a ride anyway. Hurry up, will you? Some of us have to be in the office in the morning."

"Yeah, yeah." Phoenix said. "Just rub it in that nobody wants to give me a case yet, why don't you?" The copier chugged on, belly full of dimes, and Edgeworth's rustling in the shelves seemed much farther away than it should have been. Phoenix shuddered again. It must be really cold down here, he thought, to make him shake so hard.

Except he wasn't the only thing shaking. The coins on the top of the photocopier danced and rattled, raining down onto the carpet around his feet, and the hanging planters in Mrs. Riffle's office rocked on their hooks as though they were caught in a high wind. An electric jolt of understanding flashed along Phoenix's nerves, and he whirled around to see the rows of bookshelves swaying like ponderous dominoes poised to fall.

"Miles!"

Phoenix had barely shouted when something collided hard with the back of his head and darkness descended, as indomitable and impenetrable as a final verdict.

He came to again an uncertain amount of time later, choking on dust and blind as a mole. Groping around in the dark he found a landslide of books and the shattered remains of one of the overhead light fixtures-- most likely the culprit responsible for the knot at the back of his head. He shook a shower of glass out of his hair and waited for his eyes to adjust, but the room was as black as ever. The windows must be blocked, he thought, not that they were not generous in the first place, since the records room was mostly underground.

"Edgeworth?" Phoenix called, and tried to reason with himself that the silence he got in answer was not proof of a terrible outcome. Even if unharmed, Edgeworth would probably have passed out from the earthquake. That fact did not keep Phoenix from saying Edgeworth's name three our four more times, still with no result. Phoenix pushed himself to his feet and shuffled along in the dark towards where he estimated Edgeworth had been last, calling out at fruitless intervals. Eventually his outstretched fingers encountered bookshelf, and he breathed a silent prayer that it was still upright, and not toppled. A few falling books might have knocked Edgeworth unconscious, but an overturned bookshelf could kill him easily.

"Edgeworth, are you there? C'mon, I don't want to step on you."

A small scraping sound, like fingernails on a coffin lid, and then light flared in the darkness. Phoenix flinched, momentarily blinded by light as much as by the darkness. Blinking away afterimages, he realized it was only a single match.

"Oh, man you had me scare--" Phoenix's voice died in his throat. The tiny flame did not illuminate Edgeworth's features, but instead it licked over a porcelain heart-shaped face, gleaming dyed-crimson hair, and a perfect, poisonous smile.

"Hello, Feenie." Dahlia Hawthorne said, sweetly. "Fancy meeting you here. Again."

Phoenix went cold all over; a plummet of temperature that had nothing to do with the courthouse thermostat, and everything to do with pure, unmitigated terror. Dahlia tossed her match in the air (was it even a match, really, or had that fire simply sprouted from her fingertips?), and it caught on something above her, something frail and butterfly-like that burned and burned without extinguishing. Phoenix thought he could hear it screaming, dimly, and wondered if he was only hearing himself, inside his mind.

"It's been a long time," Dahlia said, drawing her wrap around her shoulders. It was pale pink, and delicately sheer, but in the ghoulish light of her hellfire it looked like she was wearing a thin mantle of glistening blood. "Look at you, all grown up now. Is that gray hair I see?" She tittered behind her hand. "What will people think, seeing you with a little girl like me? What a scandal."

"You're dead," Phoenix croaked, forcing out the truth he had repeated to himself after every 2 AM nightmare, or after every glimpse of a pink umbrella in the rain. It was the only thought in his mind, skipping like an old-fashioned record, the thing he clung to in the worst of his dreams. Which is what this was. What it had to be. He was still out cold on the records room floor, and all those old case files had conjured up this subconscious specter from his past. Dahlia was dead, unsummoned and incapable of reaching through to the mortal world again. She was certainly not reaching out to him now, touching the faint hint of silver at his temples and ruffling it with her cold, cold fingers.

"So grown up," Dahlia said, breathing the scent of her cherry-blossom lipgloss on Phoenix's face, her half-closed eyes burning with a perverse, chilly light. "And yet still so stupid." Her icy fingers dragged down over his clenched jaw, across his taut lips. Underneath her artificial sweetness there was the sickening stench of something dead left too long in the sun. Phoenix's stomach twisted with nausea as he realized she was moving in to kiss him.

"Let me go," he hissed, through his teeth.

Dahlia opened her eyes wide: disarming, charming, innocent. "Let you go?" she exclaimed, with a tiny laugh. "Why would I do that?" Her hands curled hard into the sides of his suit jacket, and Phoenix could hear the fabric ripping under her nails. "Now, that I've finally got you?" Her smile distended her face, stretching further than it should have been able to go. "Got you," she hissed, "and will keep you, and tear you into tiny bloody shreds, my darling Feenie. I can't wait to roll around in your crunchy little flesh-stripped bones."

She lunged upwards for his mouth and no amount of lipgloss could disguise the carrion-reek of her. Phoenix struggled to pull away, knowing that he must not let her kiss him, must not let her suck the breath and life out of his body. But his limbs were like molded lead, and would not respond. Her lips were a centimeter from his, and Phoenix a centimeter from his doom, when her movement was suddenly arrested, her cry of triumph interrupted with a little yelp of pain. Edgeworth's hand was fisted in the crimson glory of her hair, pulling her back and twisting up her braids until they looked like horns. Dahlia's eyes were not the only ones that could burn cold.

"Get away from him," Edgeworth said, "you bitch."

He yanked her head back and Dahlia screamed in pain and rage. For the first time Phoenix saw the mangled purple line around her slender throat: the mark of a hangman's noose. Edgeworth flung her away as though she was nothing more than a rag doll. She was no nightmare of his, and she had no power to stop him. Dahlia crashed backwards into a shelf, bringing down a rain of law books around her.

"Edgeworth," Phoenix gasped, his hands to his own throat, as though he had been unable to breathe before. "I'm glad you're--"

"Look out!" Edgeworth shouted, as Dahlia rose up again and streaked towards Phoenix, screaming like a banshee. She had given up any pretense of life, and her form was translucent and ragged at the edges, her features as hollow as a skull. Phoenix flung up his arms in front of his face, but had a glimpse of something else hurtling through the air towards Dahlia, something far more corporeal. They crashed in midair and Dahlia vanished with a gasp of imploding air, sucked back into whatever hell she inhabited. Her baleful light winked out, and there was a deafening silence. Phoenix blinked. On the floor was volume 6 of Boreson and Obfuscatia's case history of the twentieth century, all four thousand pages of it, lying in the puddle of light cast by a flashlight Edgeworth had propped up on the shelf.

"What did you do?" Phoenix gulped, clenching his shaking hands into fists, staring at the carpet.

Edgeworth shrugged. "I... threw the book at her." He shot a fleeting smile at Phoenix, and then frowned, pulling off his glasses to study them. The right lens was shattered. "I should have done it years ago, honestly."

"I'm glad you saved it for now," Phoenix said, testing his unsteady knees. "Are you all right?"

Edgeworth tucked his glasses away, sighing. "As well as can be expected. You can imagine, I'm sure, that I have always known the location of every flashlight and emergency exit in this courthouse."

"Yes," Phoenix said fervently, "I'm sure you do."

"I didn't see any point in groping around in the dark for you, so I went to get a light." Edgeworth's mouth twisted. "...I always suspected this place was haunted."

"I thought you didn't believe in ghosts?"

Edgeworth was staring at the flopped-open copy of Boreson and Obfuscatia. "I slept a lot easier when I didn't," he said, "before that last case with Ms. Hawthorne." He shook himself. "At any rate," he said, "I don't think she'll be troubling us again this evening. Let's get out of here, shall we?"

"Please god yes," Phoenix said, raking his hands back through his hair. "I need a drink of something stronger than grape juice."

Edgeworth had brought a spare flashlight for Phoenix, and the first-aid kit. While both of them had an assortment of cuts and bruises, neither felt inclined to linger long enough for band-aids and tiny packets of antibiotic ointment. The door to the records room was blocked with an avalanche of toppled shelves and books, but the side door by Mrs. Riffle's office was hanging half-open on its hinges, jostled loose in the quake.

"If we can get up the stairs, it's only one flight," Phoenix said, flickering his flashlight beam over the concrete walls. With less to fall over, the damage in the hall was not as impressive. The exit lights no longer glowed, but the door to the stairwell reflected like a guiding star in the light of Edgeworth's flashlight.

"Come on," he said, picking up the pace. "I want out of here."

Without a word of agreement or a pause to retain bravado, they both ran the remaining yards to the stairwell door. Edgeworth got there first, and flung himself bodily against the door, but it only moved forward a few inches before it grated to a halt on the pileup of iron girders and tumbled cement blocks on the other side.

Edgeworth was annoyed enough to swear in German, and Phoenix knew he wasn't doing well. He only resorted to bilingual profanity when things were especially bleak.

"It's blocked," he said needlessly, when Phoenix caught up, massaging the stitch in his side. "And the other stairs are on the far side of the archives, past the cave-in at the end of the hall."

"So we're trapped," Phoenix said, trying to stay calm, for Edgeworth's sake if nothing else. "Is there no way to get out from here?"

Edgeworth's glare was scathing, but Phoenix knew the man well enough to recognize the fear behind it. "Not unless you have a backhoe in your pocket." Even as he said it, he shouldered the door three more times, rattling the debris on the other side and prompting a symphony of ominous creaks from the roof of the corridor.

"Hey, Edgewor--" Phoenix began, but knew before he finished that he had no kind of reasoning to offer in the face of Edgeworth's pure, animal panic. Later (and surely there would be a later), Edgeworth would be humiliated with the memory of losing control. Once free, he would never speak of the way the walls closed around him, the terror that ate at him every single day. He would be Miles Edgeworth the Unshakable once more, and it would be unthinkable that earthquakes and oxygen-deprived places were more of a bother to him than the buzzing of a fly. That was the Miles Edgeworth the world knew, the only one it ever saw.

For Phoenix, it was a different matter. "Miles," he said gently, putting his hand on Edgeworth's, which was shivering with strain as he pressed against the blocked door with all his strength. "Miles, come on. It's all right. Let's try the other way."

"There is no other way," Edgeworth gulped, his breathing ragged. "No way out. No way out. We're stuck in here, oh god, I can't breathe. I can't--" He flung himself against the door again, and Phoenix had to interpose his body between Edgeworth and the door to make him stop before he hurt himself. His hands were already cut from being repeatedly pinched in the latch bar of the door; the metal was slippery with his blood.

"Miles--" Phoenix tried again, but Edgeworth was past hearing.

"Help," he gasped, under his breath, slamming blindly against Phoenix as though he was part of the blocked door. "God, somebody, anybody--"

The elevator dinged.

They both froze, staring at each other, and neither one needed to say aloud that there was no electricity in the building, and no emergency generator to power the elevator or anything else. The wild panic was wiped clean from Edgeworth's face, like a wet cloth over chalkboard. The elevator doors opened behind him, and yellow, electric light poured out into the hallway. Edgeworth still did not turn around, and Phoenix, glancing once over the prosecutor's burgundy-suited shoulder, probably thought that was for the best. Had he been in a poker game he knew he would have lost then, as what he saw in the elevator showed on his face as plain as any tell.

"It's my father," Edgeworth said calmly, as though he was asking a witness a question, and he already knew the answer. "Isn't it."

Phoenix swallowed. A man was standing in the elevator, waiting. He was backlit, but Phoenix could see the twin reflection of his glasses, and the dark, sinister bloodstain shadow down the front of his shirt. Phoenix recognized him, but only from a crime scene photo. Gregory Edgeworth, slumped dead in the courthouse elevator, shot through the heart with a bullet that his son, for many years, believed he himself had fired in a child's accident.

"Yes," Phoenix said.

For a moment Edgeworth didn't move. Then something desperate flickered in his face, full of longing without any fear in it, and he spun around with a choked cry. The figure of Gregory Edgeworth was already fading; there was now nothing more of him than a faint negative-image between the elevator doors. Phoenix thought, or at least imagined, that the thin line of a familiar smile might have lingered a split second longer. But then he was gone, and there was nothing in front of them but the elevator, glowing in silent invitation.

Edgeworth drug a hand across his eyes. "Well," he said, thickly, "I suppose for once I won't be taking the stairs."

"Are you sure--" Phoenix began, but Edgeworth silenced him with a grim smile.

"I'll take any way to get out of here, Wright," he said. "Even this one."

The elevator hummed with benign electric power, supernatural only in its impossibility. Edgeworth pressed the button for the ground floor, and Phoenix saw him suck in a breath that he did not release. His hand, injured as it was, still clung with white-knuckled tension to the rail. The elevator moved upwards with what felt like horrible slowness to Phoenix, even though it was only one floor.

The light above the door slowly crept from B to 1, and Phoenix forced himself to breathe. "Almost there," he said, for a moment forgetting everything he had ever learned in horror movies. He remembered it all half a second later when the elevator shuddered to a halt, and all the lights went out.

"Good going, Wright," Edgeworth growled.

"Hey, I didn't do anything!" Phoenix clicked his flashlight. Nothing happened. "...My light's dead."

A moment of furious clicking from Edgeworth's direction, and some more of the very finest German oaths, but no flashlight beam.

"Okay, this is just too much--" Phoenix began, but he was proven wrong almost instantly, when he could see again.

They were standing in one of the courtrooms. Phoenix couldn't tell which one it was, but both of them were on the defense side. A single light poured down on them from overhead, like a spotlight, and beyond its circle there were only dim, rustling shapes in the gallery, on the bench, and at the prosecution's table.

"Please," Edgeworth said, very strained, "Don't say anything foolish, Wright. Like 'It can't get much worse than this.'"

"Well I'm not sure that it can--"

"This court has come to order," someone said, and Phoenix was trying to place where he knew that voice and why it gave him such a terrifically bad feeling when the judge brought down his gavel, and pinpoints of blue fire burst to life around the courtroom.

The Judge was not the one Phoenix hoped to see, bearded and bald and benevolently daft. The man sitting there had a grin like a smug wolverine, a shock of white hair, and cruel eyes glinting behind the square rims of his glasses. "Well well well, Worthy my boy," Gant said, leaning over his podium. "I always said you'd wind up like me, and how right I was. One might even say that you've outdone me."

"What in the hell is going on here?" Phoenix said, bringing his hands down hard on the surface of his desk. It felt so good and reassuring that he did it again.

Gant sat back in his chair, and put his boots up on the railing. "Now now now, the counsel for defense is already speaking out of turn, and the trial's barely started! Hell, I haven't even said what it's for, yet!"

"If that's the case," Edgeworth said tersely, "then I think you had better get on with the charges."

Phoenix whipped his head around to stare at Edgeworth. "What? You can't intend to play along with this farce of a trial--"

Edgeworth was not looking at him, or at Gant. He had eyes only for the Prosecution's bench, and the man standing there. Manfred Von Karma had looked cadaverous even when he was alive. Being seven years dead did not improve on that observation in the least. Phoenix's first impression was of something that had not been properly buried in the first place, had been dug up by a dog, and needed to have some merciful dirt kicked over it again. It took everything in him not to recoil back against the wall. Only Edgeworth's icy, unwavering calm held him in check.

"Well then!" Gant said cheerfully. "I suppose I should do that! Ha ha! I always meant to retire onto the bench you know, it's such a posh gig, really, but that was before my dear boy Worthy ended my career prematurely. But you've got to admire the man, don't you, folks?" There was a murmur of assent from the shadowy inhabitants of the gallery. "After all, I only was responsible for the deaths of two men." Gant plunked his elbows down, leaning forward like a vulture and fixing Edgeworth with his glittering stare. "While you my boy, you're responsible for the deaths of dozens."

"Objection!" Phoenix shouted, on instinct, as though he had only been in court the day before. "Miles Edgeworth has never been found guilty of any crime in a court of--"

"Overruled!" Gant thundered. "The defense will keep his mouth shut to spare the court the trouble of removing his foot from it afterwards. Miles Edgeworth is a murderer, as every soul in this court has cause to know."

Only then did Phoenix recognize the members of the gallery, and his heart contracted. Some of them he knew only from police dossiers, some from the front pages of newspapers. But others he had faced in the courtroom, all the thugs and murderers that Miles Edgeworth had removed from the streets during his long and glorious career as a prosecutor. Sitting in the front was Joe Darke, arm in arm with a smiling Dahlia Hawthorne, like a king and queen at a joust.

Edgeworth had gotten guilty verdicts for all of them.

And death sentences.

Joe Darke was even still wearing his noose, rakishly, and Dahlia tittered something in his ear as she toyed with the frayed end of the rope.

"Now then!" Gant boomed, thumping his gavel against the arm of his chair. "Is the prosecution ready?"

"Ready and waiting," Von Karma purred, his black eyes glittering in their sunken sockets.

Gant yawned. "Now boy, down. We'll get to the tasty bits of sentencing after the trial, am I right? Defense?"

Phoenix's hands, on the tabletop, curled into fists. It was to be expected, really, that his first trial since getting his badge back would not be an easy one. They never were. "The defense is ready, Your Honor."

"Oh, that's a first," Dahlia giggled. "Are you sure you don't need to look at some naughty pictures first, Feenie?"

Phoenix didn't even look at her.

"Very well then, Manny," Gant said, "Let's have that opening statement, shall we?"

"It hardly needs to be said, Your Honor." Von Karma fussed with the braid on his sleeve, his restless hand like a large white spider. "Why, everyone in this courtroom knows the crimes for which Miles Edgeworth stands accused. You could say," Von Karma's lips pulled back in a dreadful grimace, "He brought all of us here."

"Or it could be said," Phoenix shot back, biting off the ends of the words, "that you brought yourselves here, by being guilty of murder."

"Shut it, boy," Gant said, still in the best of spirits. "You'll have your turn, when we feel like giving it to you. Once we feel like we need the laugh, right, folks?"

Laughter ricocheted down from the gallery, as though somehow an entire insane asylum had been stuffed into the crank of a demented music box.

"Wrong!" Phoenix shot back, bringing up his arm and silencing the crowd. "This is a court of law, no matter how you want to pervert it. You are still bound by its rules!"

"Oh fine." Gant swung his gavel behind him, whacking it idly on the crest of scales behind the Judge's chair. "Go on, Wrighto. Let's see you pull this one out of your little blue ass."

"I don't have to pull anything from anywhere," Phoenix said. Something inside of him was surfacing, some inner core of himself that was unchanged after years of neglect and shame, living in the shadows at the edge of law. Even in hell's courtroom, he was still a lawyer. He always had been. "I'm afraid that is the prosecution's burden."

Von Karma snorted. "If possible, Wright, you know even less about law than you did when I first--"

"Where," Phoenix continued, as though Von Karma had not spoken, "...is your proof?" Beside him, he felt Edgeworth stiffen in surprise, and it gave him the push to continue. "Proof, decisive proof that Miles Edgeworth ever meant any of you personal harm, proof that he was doing anything more than his job to see justice done, proof that he maliciously sought your deaths for his own gain, as you all sought the deaths of others for yours. If you don't have anything...then this trial is over! You have nothing on which to base your charges!"

From the gallery Joe Darke snarled in wordless fury, flicking out a knife from somewhere. Dahlia sighed prettily through her nose, annoyed, and latched her hand around the end of his noose to restrain him.

In the terse silence that followed, Von Karma began to laugh. "You want proof? Then take it." He put his hand inside his coat, as though to draw out papers, but it was no mere police report or incriminating memo that he pulled out. Instead his body jerked and spasmed as he plunged his sharp nails into his corrupt flesh, rooting among his own remains for his prize. "Take this, then, little Miles! Your first gift to me, and I've carried it around too long!" Von Karma yanked his hand free, and something clinked across the Defense's desk, rolling to a lopsided halt against Edgeworth's cuff.

A bullet.

Edgeworth picked it up, smiling faintly as he weighed it in his hand, as though trying to ascertain if it was worth a human heart or a feather. "You do realize," he said softly, "that a person cannot be tried again for a crime once he has been found innocent of it? This ...evidence." Edgeworth rolled the bullet around in his palm, "is nothing more than a curiosity now. If you want your guilty verdict--" He closed his fist around the bullet, and then brought his hand down on the desk hard enough to scatter splinters, "then you will have to do better than this, mein Herr!"

Von Karma's eyes burned with rage, the gallery erupted in spitting undead fury, and Gant hammered his gavel at random all over the place.

"Order! Order! Come the hell to order, you bastards!" He shoved up his slipping glasses. "Bah! Evidence, smevidence! We can invent all the pretty papers and photographs that you like and prove him guilty six ways to Sunday! None of it changes the fact that Miles Edgeworth, Esquire, stands at the top of his profession only because he is standing on our trampled dead bodies--"

"As you all sought to stand on your victims, and failed?" Phoenix shouted back, and in the resultant blur of whipcrack retorts it was Edgeworth's calm voice that brought them all to a halt.

"Are we dead?"

Phoenix went still. Sometime after Dahlia vanished in the library he had convinced himself he was in a dream, as a means to stay sane in the dissolving reality of the courthouse. When the elevator turned into a courtroom, he was certain it was nightmare, and that was all. But. If the records room had collapsed, with them in it...

Edgeworth spared him a glance, and Phoenix knew that Edgeworth had been thinking them dead all along. He was not so optimistic as to pretend he was dreaming. This was, simply, hell. Really, what else could it be?

"Are we?" Phoenix echoed, weakly. Everything he had left undone unfurled in front of him, and in the chaos of regret he found himself clutching the locket he wore under his shirt. Trucy. Apollo. How many parents would they have to lose?

"If we are, then this is fine with me." Edgeworth's smile was grim as he surveyed the galley and Gant and Von Karma, meeting their hate-filled glares without flinching. "Because I would rather be in Hell with the lot of you, than in heaven with all of you still walking free!"

Phoenix struggled to find his focus, envying Edgeworth's calm in the face of the hereafter. "So, we really are dead."

"Not," Mia Fey said suddenly, at his elbow, "yet."

Phoenix had the presence of mind not to yelp, but only just. One would think that after a time, a man would get used to having long-since murdered mentors popping back into being all the damn time, like dead Jedi who had passed the Bar Exam. But Mia, especially on her own and unchanneled, was always startling.

"Come on, Phoenix," Mia said, winking. "You should have called me! This is my kind of court, you know." Her face went serious. "But honestly, even you should be able to deal with a simple framing, which is what this is. There's a contradiction in this courtroom and it's a mile wide."

"I fail to see," Phoenix began, "any contradicti--"

"Phoenix," Mia said, "think about where you are."

"Hell?"

"No."

Phoenix looked around. The specters in the courtroom had gone silent, glaring at Mia with loathing and envy. Only then did Phoenix realize that out of all of them, Mia Fey looked alive, bright and solid. "We're... in a courtroom?"

"And that is?" Mia prompted.

All at once Phoenix saw the face of the wizened archives-keeper, Mrs. Riffle, as she had whacked him in the knees on her way home.

"Holy ground," Phoenix breathed. "Justice's holy ground." His fingertips went from his locket to his badge and then outwards, pointer finger raised, his objection exploding in the court.

"Enough!" Phoenix wasn't sure, but it seemed to him that the ghouls in the gallery had faded somehow, melting together. Gant, for certain, was unsettled. The precise angles of his hair had begun to wilt. "There is one thing none of you can deny here," Phoenix continued, "and that's the reason for your deaths, and for Edgeworth's sacrifice. He's willing to have blood on his hands because of the innocent blood on yours, and why?" Phoenix kicked over the desk, and it broke like glass against the rising floor. The roof of the courthouse was thinning, gleaming with light like a candle flame shining through a thin wall of wax, like oncoming dawn. "I'll tell you why," Phoenix said. The judge's seat was melting down like the rest of the courtroom, and Phoenix put his foot on the rail, towering over Gant. "Justice!" he shouted.

"Heh, Worthy's--" Gant began, but Phoenix was relentless.

"Justice!"

The inhabitants of the gallery had oozed away, seeping into the dark cracks left in the room, fleeing the oncoming light.

"Justice!"

Mia smiled to herself and began to fade, but in entirely the other direction.

"Justice!"

Edgeworth glared at Von Karma, and the true demon prosecutor desiccated and crumbled, scattering away into nothing like dry leaves on the wind.

"Justice!"

Gant brought down his gavel towards Phoenix, but he was the one that shattered. The courtroom went white, and in the distance, Phoenix Wright heard the sound of doors opening.

"...justice..."

"He keeps on saying your name, Herr Forehead."

"Yeah, I know. It's kinda creepy, I wish he'd quit it."

"Daddy?"

Phoenix opened his eyes.

He was lying on a blanket on the courthouse sidewalk, and the cold night was torn through with the whirling lights of emergency vehicles. He sat up, too fast, and tried to make his head stop spinning along with the sirens.

"Come on, Gavin, give the man some air," Apollo said, shoving Klavier out of the way. "He needs oxygen, and your aftershave would roll over a dead horse."

"Ach, on the contrary. I have been told that Tuscan blood orange and pomegranate is in fact most invigorating! ...And arousing."

"Ugh, god shut up. It makes me feel like I can't breathe, at least, so Phoenix'll--"

"I don't think that is my aftershave that is making you unable to breathe," Klavier purred.

"Daddy?" Trucy said again, with a watery smile. "You okay? You totally got clobbered with like a ton of books."

Phoenix glanced past her to where Edgeworth was standing, his arm in a sling for a sprain but the rest of him completely in command of the situation. He was talking to some of the emergency personnel, and pointing out various angles of the courthouse. Knows where every fire extinguisher and emergency exit is, Phoenix thought, smiling, but what he said was, "I'm fine, Trucy, really. Maybe I needed to get clobbered with books-- it's one way to get me to look at them, right?"

"Oh, I'm so glad!" Trucy exclaimed. Her cheerful expression went all the wrong way for a moment. "I thought--thought I'd lost another daddy," she concluded, and promptly burst into tears. Apollo and Klavier were at her side in an instant, argument forgotten.

"Hey, Truce, don't cry, okay? He's fine! He'll be dodging toilet cleaning duty in the office before you know it--" Apollo turned aside to Phoenix, in confidence. "She's been such a trooper this whole time. I was ready to burst into tears myself, when the quake hit and we found out you were still in there, but she's been such a trooper... C'mon, buck up, Trucy."

"You know nothing about women," Klavier said to Apollo, and produced a violet silk handkerchief from his jacket pocket. "Ach, nein, nein, fraulein! Tears do not suit you! Here, wipe them all away and show us the sunshine again, ja?"

Trucy was suitably cheered at once, not by Klavier's flirtation, but by his hankie. "Oh, wow! This is really nice! Where'd you get it?" She examined it with a professional eye, stuffing it down in her fist and then pulling it out of Apollo's back pocket, nodding with satisfaction at such a fine product. "I could fit seven or eight doves in here! The ones from the magic shop are so cheap, you can only cram in one or two if you're lucky, and then they get so cranky about it they poop all over it..."

"I have them made and dyed specially for me in Munich," Klavier said, gallantly. "I shall send you a case of them, for your magical little doves to fly free."

"Please," Apollo said, in a strained tone that intended to be polite but couldn't manage it, "stop flirting with my sister."

Klavier arched an eyebrow at him. "Hn? Would you rather it was you I was flirting with, then?"

"What? No! I-- Trucy, thanks, but I don't have any doves in my pockets, you don't have to--AUGH! Where did that come from?!"

"From your pocket, didn't you just see me take him out?" Trucy cuddled her pet bird. "What else have you got in there?" Trucy's hands flicked over Apollo's vest, and a pair of white mice made a break for it down Apollo's sleeve.

Phoenix left them in a flutter of falling leaves and dove feathers, to sort things out on their own. Edgeworth must have sensed him approaching, looking up and waving away the policewoman he was interviewing.

"You all right?" he asked, and got a depreciating smile in return.

"Better than the south wing of the court house. It's completely fallen in. Maybe now they'll actually build it to code."

"Phew. Close one." Phoenix rubbed his hand over the back of his head, gingerly. There was a knot there like a goose-egg. No wonder he had been having nightmares of long-dead murderers. "What a night, huh? I've had nightmares that look like birthday parties compared to this. Not the way I want to start off my new legal career, you know?" Edgeworth's gaze was blank, and Phoenix remembered that it had only been a dream. "Oh. Nevermind. Just a dumb dream I had when I was out. There was this court of--" Edgeworth opened his hand, and Phoenix's voice died in his throat.

In Edgeworth's outstretched palm, glinting in the light of the sirens, lay a single bullet.

For a long time there was no noise save the rustling of the leaves, the distant shouts of the emergency workers, and Apollo's squawk as Trucy produced a white rabbit from somewhere on him that was extremely personal.

"Well, Edgeworth," Phoenix said, swallowing.

"Well, Wright," Edgeworth said back, tucking Von Karma's bullet in his vest pocket. "How about that drink you were asking about, earlier?"

"I think that's a good idea," Phoenix said at once, and they walked shoulder to shoulder back towards the others, where Trucy was pulling playing cards and guitar picks out of Klavier's hair, to the prosecutor's delight.

"There's one thing you've gotta admit, though," Phoenix said, with a grin that he knew was too wild, but must have been infectious, the way Edgeworth's mouth went tight at the corners.

Edgeworth slid his eyes sideways. "And what's that?"

"...That was one hell of a trial."

Trucy's impromptu magic show stopped at once as the participants paused to look at something far more extraordinary, as Phoenix and Edgeworth's laughter broke over the courthouse walls, chasing all the phantoms away.

~0~

[fic] Phoenix Wright - Razor's Edge

2008-09-23T19:43:51Z

eider's birthday isn't until Sunday, but we're leaving tonight for a six-day family obligation sort of trip, and for her birthday we will be sharing a hotel room with relatives, and I don't expect we will have much in the way of privacy until we come back home, to say nothing of having internet access.

So I'm posting this early, because there's no other way to give her Phoenix and Edgeworth all done up in ~~neckties~~ ribbons.

Work safe-ish. Spoilers for mostly Apollo Justice, unless of course you are already well-versed in the Hobohodo phenomenon* or if you just don't care! We're all fine with that. Cranky lawyer guys in love, straight razors (for shaving, not for angst), just enough heartache and hope. 2,300 words.

*or, as he is fondly called around here: beaniefeenie.

Razor's Edge

Phoenix once had been uncomfortable entering Edgeworth's apartment complex in anything less than a tux and tails, but those days were long past. The doorman knew him by name, and the cleaning ladies always cornered him in the elevator to talk about their very attractive very single daughters. At first this was due to frequency, as suspicious glares had been won over with Phoenix's ready smile and friendly attitude. Even then, however, Phoenix was still part of the strata, the gentry. But once the crash happened, Phoenix was no longer Mr. Edgeworth's lawyer-friend. He was an ordinary soul like them, and they took his mistreatment by the authorities to heart. Most of them had family members who had been done wrong by the law, or the system; Phoenix was just one more. He was given advice and hand-knit socks and jars of homemade salsa, and learned more than he ever knew before about the kindness of strangers.

So even though Phoenix strolled through the lobby of Edgeworth's painfully respectable apartment building wearing threadbare jeans and a fuzzy beanie, none of the staff gave him any trouble about his presence. The glares of Edgeworth's fellow tenants remained the same as always, shooting daggers at Phoenix over the collars of their two-thousand dollar coats, scandalized that he should dare take the same elevator as his betters. That hadn't changed. The difference was, Phoenix didn't care any more.

They couldn't do anything to him, much less dish out something worse than what he'd already been handed by life. And it wasn't as though Phoenix missed all of it, really. There were no more uncomfortable trappings of respectability for him! No ties, no cufflinks, no dry cleaning bill, no jacket required. He was going to be himself, just as he was, a diamond in the rough! He was going to--

"Shave," Edgeworth said in no uncertain terms, looking at his cuffs and not at the lover that had just come through the door of his apartment. "And shower. You smell like a truck stop."

Phoenix cast a wistful look at the deserted, sterile kitchen of Edgeworth's apartment. It promised snow outside, his feet were tingly ice blocks after the walk from the bus stop, and he had been entertaining a high-gloss fantasy of shepherd's pie and a bottle of Guinness.

"Court must have run late," Phoenix said, shaking the rain--almost ice--off his hoodie before hanging it up. "You usually cook on nights like this."

"It was a bit tedious, but I'm pleased to say there's one less criminal on the loose," Edgeworth held out his arms to inspect his sleeves, and flicked of an imaginary speck from one of them. "But yes, it was nearly five before we got verdict. So I made reservations, instead." Edgeworth looked at Phoenix for the first time, and there was that same flicker in his eyes that Phoenix was used to seeing by now. Anger, surprise, frustration, disappointment, pain. None of it was directed at Phoenix himself, and he knew that it was only Edgeworth's way of dealing with Phoenix's facade. The ragged idler dripping rainwater on the foyer tile was not the Phoenix Wright that Edgeworth had known and that they both had to believe was still there, buried under too many years of defeat.

But Edgeworth only said, "The reservations are for eight, so don't waste time, Wright," and picked up his jacket.

"Where are we going?" Phoenix toed out of his shoes, and raised one eyebrow at the ruby pin in Edgeworth's cravat. "Not the Shake n' Steak, I take it."

"We are going," Edgeworth said, with a note of impatience for Phoenix's slowness, "to the Gilded Lilly, provided of course you get yourself off the doormat and into the shower."

Free of his shoes, Phoenix walked over to examine the deep blue suit laid out for him on the bed. It and crimson tie were made of nicer stuff than Phoenix had ever worn in a courtroom, accompanied by leather suspenders and sterling cufflinks. So much for his freedom from the trappings of wealth. But Edgeworth's shower had two shower heads and a heated towel-rack, and doing as he had been told was no hardship for Phoenix. He stepped into the stream of almost-scalding water and let it sluice over him; thawing his chilled skin and undoing the knots in his shoulders, left from too many hours sitting over a poker table.

Beyond the pebbled glass shower door Phoenix saw Edgeworth as a magenta-colored blur, tutting at the twist of stained blue jeans left on his bathmat. By the time Phoenix came out, freshly scrubbed, his old clothes had vanished, and only his gold locket remained where he had left it on the vanity. He knew from experience his old clothes would be replaced rather than returned. It would take Phoenix weeks to get them properly scruffy again, but he didn't have the heart to make Edgeworth give the worn-out old things back. Instead he tied a warm, fluffy towel around his hips and began rooting in Edgeworth's arsenal of a medicine cabinet for a razor and shaving foam.

"What are you doing?" Edgeworth said, standing in the bathroom doorway, waving away the steam of Phoenix's shower in the hopes that it wouldn't make his hair wilt.

"Razors," Phoenix began, in what he felt was a suitably annoyed tone, as he scooted aside five separate kinds of hair wax. "They're usually a little sharp bit with a handle, you know, you use them for shaving, I'm sure you've heard of them. Unless you've got some fancy electric thing that probably cost three times what--"

Edgeworth interrupted without saying a word, pulling open one of the brass-handled vanity drawers and flicking out what Phoenix took at first for a murder weapon: three inches of sharpened steel with an engraved bone clasp. "On the contrary," Edgeworth said, as Phoenix wondered if Edgeworth had taken a People's Exhibit A tag off the razor when he first got it, "I prefer the old-fashioned method."

Phoenix shut the medicine cabinet. "Yes well," he said, "you would. But the rest of us would prefer not to guillotine ourselves in our daily hygiene."

"Hardly daily." Edgeworth ran one warm thumb over Phoenix's chin, ruffling stubble. "This looks like three or four days' worth, in your case." His chuckle was smug, for someone who had probably been getting laser hair removal since he was five, and lacked anything like the black shadow that reached upwards from Phoenix's towel to his navel. "If you ever wanted a full judicial beard, you'd be doomed to disappointment."

"I'd be doomed to looking stupid if I did have one. Besides, the unshaven thing is part of the look, you know."

Edgeworth was looking at Phoenix's lower lip and the tiny hairs beneath it, a little line of dismay between his eyebrows. "You don't have to do this, you know," he said, softly. "You don't have to lower yourself to this. I could--"

Phoenix pulled his face away from Edgeworth's hand. "Stop it," he said. "That tickles." He smoothed his hand over his face too late for that line to be convincing. The silence in the bathroom strained until Phoenix could almost hear it sing with the tension, like a harp string twisted too far. "Anyway," Phoenix said at last, to his fogged-over reflection in Edgeworth's mirror, "I'll just have to go like this. I can't shave with that thing-- I'll cut my own throat, and that would really annoy me. Not only will I never get exonerated, but the season finale of Pink Princess Neo is on next weekend and I'll never know what happens."

Phoenix's attempt at humor was lost on Edgeworth, who only looked grimmer than ever before. "Sit," he said sternly, pointing at the padded marble bath bench next to the sunken tub. He shrugged out of his jacket, and his cufflinks made high-pitched musical sounds as they plinked on the counter next to Phoenix's locket.

"Why?" Phoenix asked, not sure he liked the way Edgeworth was rolling up his sleeves.

"If you can't use this razor, then by God I can," Edgeworth laid out a small pot and a silver-tipped badger shaving brush, slinging a towel over one shoulder with the air of a surgeon about to perform some sort of desperate, life-saving operation. "Maybe it doesn't matter to you," Edgeworth continued, biting off the ends of his words as though they were bullets, whipping the shaving foam in the pot into a furious froth, all the emotion that he would not let his face show, "what they say about you. That you are broken, that you are beaten. I know it's all part of this grand plan of yours, to let them think they've won, to let them think justice is dead when she is only sleeping. But half of the lawyers in the district are going to be in that restaurant tonight, and I want them to know that no matter what has been done to you, their days are numbered and Phoenix Wright is still a name to be respected by most of them and feared by the rest. Now sit down, dammit."

Phoenix sat.

Edgeworth kept at his shaving soap until he had a small glacier of foam at his command, and Phoenix shifted uncomfortably in his towel. "Well," Phoenix said, after a moment's pause. "I could always go with that scruffy suit look, you know, like the guys on Tampa Vice--" He was interrupted by a hot, wet towel smacking into his face at roughly the speed of sound. "Ow," he managed, under the soggy weight of French terrycloth.

"You will do nothing of the sort," Edgeworth said, peeling away the towel and daubing Phoenix's face and neck with shaving foam. "What you're going to do is sit still, and let me see if I can unearth the man I know is under there somewhere." He stepped behind Phoenix, the soft fabric of his vest brushing up against Phoenix's bare shoulders. The razor clicked as Edgeworth opened it, and it glinted in the corner of Phoenix' vision, close enough for him to read the DOVO Solingen engraved along the blade. The business-end of it was sharp enough that it tapered to an invisible edge. Phoenix swallowed.

"Um," he said, "I suppose it's a good thing I trust you."

He could not see Edgeworth's smile, but he knew it was there, all the same, just by the tone of the other man's voice. "Yes," Edgeworth said, "I suppose it is." The blade slid over Phoenix's jawbone with a soft scraping sound, precise and unswerving in Edgeworth's steady hands. Phoenix looked up at Edgeworth's determined face above him, and closed his eyes as Edgeworth shaved away all that remained of Phoenix's disguise.

I know, Miles. I know you think that this is all you can do for me, to give me back some vestige of what I've lost. But you said it yourself. Justice isn't dead. Phoenix felt the wet towel move over his face to clear away the foam, felt Edgeworth's fingertips trailing the cool tingle of expensive aftershave behind them. It's just sleeping.

"There's the Phoenix Wright I remember," Edgeworth murmured. Phoenix opened his eyes just in time to close them again as Edgeworth bent down and kissed him, hard and hungry, like a man who has been parted from a lover for years and not days. Phoenix caught his hands in the lapels of Edgeworth's vest, letting Edgeworth pull him up until they were standing on even footing, and Phoenix had lost his towel somewhere in the process. He hadn't gotten any further than the top button of Edgeworth's vest when his hands were caught, and the mouth against his whispered, "Reservations at eight, Wright."

"You'd leave me in this state just to make sure you get your lobster thermidor on schedule, wouldn't you?" Phoenix used his nose to nudge down some of the silk wrapping of Edgeworth's cravat, and nuzzled the exposed line of his neck. Edgeworth's breath was startling against the over-sensitive skin on Phoenix's face; the soft folds of cravat brushed like ghostly kisses down his throat.

"I'd leave you in this state because I'd like to anticipate getting you out of it," Edgeworth purred, his thumbs making little circles on Phoenix's hipbone. "Put your suit on. I assume you still know how to tie a tie."

"I assume you'd get more of a charge putting it on me yourself," Phoenix said, but picked up his towel and his locket, and went to complete his appearance of respectability. Edgeworth leaned in the bathroom doorway and watched, without bothering to hide his scrutiny or how much it pleased him to see Phoenix in blue once more. When Phoenix reached for his tie, Edgeworth had gotten there first, and knotted the length of crimson silk around Phoenix's throat.

"You tie a nice noose," Phoenix said, sliding a finger under the knot. "Trying to strangle me?"

"If I'd wanted to kill you, the razor would have been easier," Edgeworth said, with disquieting matter-of-factness, and a faint smile to take the edge off. He held out Phoenix's suit coat for him. "Let's go. I'd like to get Trucy's father back to her before too late this evening, or she'll let me have it next time I see her."

Phoenix shrugged the jacket over his shoulder, and caught a glimpse of a blue-suited ghost in Edgeworth's bedroom mirror. He would have said that Phoenix Wright was long dead, but here he was, alive and well, resurrected in a way that put spirit channeling to shame. Something moved inside his chest at the reflected portent, something long forgotten, something like hope. He turned away from the man in the mirror, while he still could. Soon. But not yet. "Didn't I mention?" he said. "She's baby-sitting little Angelo for the DeLites tonight and sleeping over."

Edgeworth's eyebrow lifted in a tell that would have had Phoenix taking all his chips, if there was a poker game between them. "Ah," he said, a heavy and promising tone settling on his voice, like the certainty of a verdict in his favor. "Well, in that case, we'll have to get dessert."

~0~

Number 436 on things I never thought I'd see

2008-09-23T15:36:57Z

Jesus loves me, this I know
for the fact that they are making OMGTAKARAZUKAREVIEW PHOENIXWRIGHTMUSICALHOSHIT tells me so!

So! Right! Two tickets to Japan then. Pardon me, I'm just going to nip out and become a wildly successful poker shark. Or possibly a prostitute. It's in February, right? that gives me a few months. Now I've got to go back to greatestjournal and see if I can unearth all my old Takarazuka links.

man, I was on court records just this morning and they hadn't updated with this yet. Joy found it first.

Joy's google translation of the news article coughed up lots of "samurai sword of State Rei" which is Edgeworth's Japanese name in literal translation, so of course there's going to be a lots of that. Lots. Of course! This is takarazuka, after all. beautiful rivalry, cravats, gaygaygay, all that. It's tradition. Takarazuka Edgeworth. I think I might die. Nevermind the fact that you know Edgeworth himself has got to be a fan.