Reunion
Title: Reunion
Rating: G
Characters: Edgeworth and Wright, other characters mentioned.
Time Period: Before what would be GS4.
Words: Just about 3000
Warnings: Something like spoilers, but not really. Lots of head-hopping.
Description: For chewy_kinzoku's birthday! I asked what she would like and she said this: "I wanted someone to write something based on the alternate ending to 2-4, where Phoenix wins the case and runs away. You know me and that I'm all for romance fics, but what I actually love just as much or even more are really good heart-touching friendship fics. So throw some Edgeworth in there however you see fit." Especial thanks to silverwind9 for beta reading.
It was a restaurant he was unfamiliar with, in a neighborhood he'd never before been to. He'd later think that perhaps he had been drawn there through some mysterious means, but truthfully, even after all these years, he didn't really believe in such things. At the very least, he didn't think of them as things that happened to him. It was called the Borscht Bowl Club, and the name promised Russian cuisine, something he'd not had in many years.
He walked in and got himself a table, staring at the curious ambiance of the place. Despite the fact that it was summer, the inside was decked out as if it were freezing cold, with a canister of dry ice making steam in each of the corners. He smirked despite himself. The waitress recommended the borscht, and he was only too happy to oblige her, considering the heat. The only other person in the restaurant was an informally-dressed man, wearing sandals and a couple of layers of tee shirts, drinking from a bottle of grape juice. There was something in the other man's demeanor that struck him, and he frowned, trying to recognize it.
"What do I pay you for, get on that piano!" came a loud voice from somewhere around the vicinity of the kitchen.
"All right already..." the man's voice was raspy and somewhat flat, but as he heard it, Edgeworth's heart stopped. It- it couldn't possibly be... But as the other man sat down at the piano and twiddled his fingers, he gave a faint but roguish smile that was all-too-familiar.
"Phoenix Wright..." he muttered, shocked.
----
He was just about to start plinking away at his favorite child-like adaptation of "Heart and Soul" (He'd learned more complicated songs since the proprietor had gotten tired of him loitering around the place and given him a job, but he liked to annoy the man.) when a very soft voice at the edge of his hearing stopped his fingers cold. He whirled to meet the face of a man he never expected - or wanted - to see again.
"E-Edgeworth." His heart pounded and his hands fell on the keys, creating a dissonant, foreboding sort of tone.
"You're alive.” Edgeworth’s hands were slack on the table, his eyes wide and round. He was wearing unfamiliar clothes, a slate grey pinstriped suit and a magenta tie. Then again, Phoenix didn’t look much like he used to, either.
He looked down, placing his hands on the keys. “Didn’t you get my letters?” His voice was quiet.
He heard heavy footsteps and looked up just in time to see Edgeworth’s hands reach back. He braced himself for a slap, but it never came. Instead, he was roughly hauled up from the piano bench and hugged.
“I got your damn letters,” Edgeworth said, obviously forcing gruffness into his voice. He released Wright and despite himself, Phoenix smiled crookedly, rubbing the back of his neck.
Still, the look Edgeworth was giving him was a confused mix of fury and happiness, his eyes shiny. He’d clearly changed a lot, over the years, Phoenix observed.
He was trying to think of something to say, when there was a lilting shout from the kitchen, “I don’t hear pianoooo!!”
“All right already, Ilya. I just got reunited with an old friend, can you let up a little?” He sat down at the piano and gave Edgeworth a worried look. “That is, if you still consider me a friend.”
----
Over the last eight years, Edgeworth had run over and over in his mind what he would do if he ever saw Phoenix Wright again. He had never been able to decide if he’d punch him or hug him, but he figured this showed him exactly what he’d do. Still... “I’m not sure,” he answered.
Phoenix’s face was crestfallen, but he didn’t seem surprised. “I... guess I did really let you down.”
There was the anger. “You let everyone down, Phoenix.” He made sure his voice had all the hurt and worry that he’d saved up over the years in it, “Maya and Pearl especially.”
Phoenix turned to the piano and played a few dissonant notes. “Maya was all right, though, right?”
“Aside from the fact that the one person she and her cousin depended on disappeared out of thin air, she was fine!” Edgeworth didn’t pull his punches as the anger from the last few years suddenly boiled up in him. “Why, if I hadn’t been there, I don’t know where she would have gone!”
Phoenix refused to look at him. “...Thank you. For taking care of her.” He paused for a long moment before saying, “I... I just couldn’t face her, knowing that I’d let... that I’d let that bastard Engarde go free.”
Edgeworth crossed his arms, “She didn’t care about that! None of us did! These things happen, Wright, sometimes the bad guy gets away! I know this as well as any of us.”
Phoenix looked up at him. “But... But von Karma was convicted.”
Edgeworth rubbed his forehead, “I don’t want to go over this with you right now, Wright. Suffice it to say that two years of imprisonment and a pauper’s death does not take away the fact that my father went twenty years unavenged.”
Phoenix reddened, his seated pose suddenly defiant, “Is that why you ran, too?” he spat.
“I CAME BACK!” Edgeworth was face to face with Wright, his eyes boring into the other man’s with a feverish intensity.
----
Phoenix bit back tears and turned away from his old friend, plucking out the first few notes of Canon in D. “Not for long, I’m sure.”
“Actually, I stayed,” Edgeworth said after a pause. He reached out and pulled up a chair, sitting down.
“You did?” Phoenix was genuinely surprised. Edgeworth had seemed so happy after living abroad for a year. In the perfect story he’d created of his friends’ lives, Edgeworth had gone back abroad and lived out his dreams.
“Of course I did.” His voice was harsh and cold, “Someone had to clean up the mess you left behind.” Edgeworth wouldn’t meet his eyes. “You didn’t take the whole damn law office with you.”
“Oh.” Phoenix frowned. “So, you... you sold all the assets and gave them to Maya, right?”
Edgeworth sighed, “That was the plan. But things kept piling up, I didn’t have time for it while attending to Maya and Pearl, keeping everything together for the two of them. They came to stay with me when they were in the cities - they helped me look for you.”
“So... what happened?” His shame gave way to curiosity.
“It was just so hard... to think you wouldn’t come back. So we left things as they were,” he shrugged. “As much as I didn’t want to, I ended up... I...” He looked pointedly at Wright, “You never read the papers at all, did you?” Without waiting for an answer, he looked down at his lapel. “Well, it had always been my dream.”
Phoenix focused on the jacket of the pinstriped suit, where a defense badge was pinned. “Y-you didn’t!”
“Well I could hardly avoid it!” Edgeworth’s voice was a confusion of embarrassment and pride that Phoenix had never expected ever to hear from him. “People kept calling! And hardly a year afterwards, there was a case where someone impersonated you, pretended that they were you and you’d come back.” He buried his face in his hands. “God, Maya was so heartbroken.”
Phoenix’s cheeks burned. “I guess that’s why you dropped the cravat, then.”
“It’s hardly traditional for defense attorneys to wear them.”
“You kept in touch with Maya, I hope.”
Edgeworth glanced down at his hands, an amused smirk on his face. “Something like that.”
----
“What do you mean?” Phoenix raised an eyebrow.
Miles gave him an intense look, “She needed someone to be there for her after her mother’s death.” An intense mix of emotions came up. This had always been the hardest part for him, in his imaginings: attempting to explain this whole situation to Wright. He had dreaded it for years, and here he was, at the very beginning, still dreading it.
“They found her mother’s body?” Phoenix blinked.
Edgeworth sighed long and deep, “Her mother was murdered in front of her, Wright...”
Phoenix gasped, his hand gripping the side of the piano, white-knuckled, “WHAT!?”
He wearily frowned. “It’s a very... VERY long story. Suffice it to say I was able to protect the one accused and find the real murderer. And... it was... impossibly hard... for everyone.” He refused to relive it again, Maya’s terror-filled days across the bridge, being tormented by literal and figurative demons from her past. She rarely talked about it.
Phoenix looked at his hands. “Ah. Is... she all right now?” he asked, lamely.
“We do what we can,” Edgeworth said, purposefully cryptic.
Phoenix was always too clever for his own good, though: “....We...?”
----
Phoenix’s eyes widened as he realized the import of Edgeworth’s earlier sphinx-like smirk. “You...?”
Edgeworth held up his left hand, the ring finger sparkling with a band of gold. His expression was nigh-unreadable, but there was a faint blush on his high, white cheekbones.
“You... and MAYA!?” Phoenix was stunned. He had never planned THIS in his perfect imaginings.
Edgeworth looked down with a fond smile, twisting the ring around his finger with his thumb. “She needed someone to be there for her, Wright. And I needed... I needed to be there, period. Eventually I realized that I needed her to be there for me, too. The two of us found each other.”
“S-so you’re happy?” Phoenix swallowed, trying to down the lump in his throat.
“We are.” And for the first time in all the time that Phoenix had known Miles Edgeworth, even when they were both comparatively carefree children, the smile he saw was genuine and complete. Edgeworth was really, truly happy.
As much as his heart swelled with happiness from finding out that his two best friends were happy, even without him, he couldn’t help but feel a pang of jealousy. He smothered it with matter-of-factness. “So everything worked out all right, even without me.”
Edgeworth’s blazing smile disappeared. “No. If you had stayed... If...” he paused, “Aside from your friends, missing you... perhaps if you stayed, two people wouldn’t have died.”
“What are you-?” Phoenix dreaded the answer, so he couldn’t finish the question.
-----
“Without anyone to take her part, as I’m sure you would have, had you stayed, Adrian Andrews was found dead in her cell before her trial even began.” Miles forced his expression to be neutral, trying to hide the pain that came from recalling his part in that woman’s death. He had tried to console himself by imagining his statement had nothing to do with her suicide, but...
“Oh.” Phoenix’s voice was low.
“And, though this was less upsetting to all involved, for obvious reasons, Matt Engarde was found dead in his home not long after the trial. De Killer was not pleased when Engarde tried to blackmail him.” Edgeworth noted Wright’s expression turn pained when he said that.
“If only I’d presented that tape at the crucial moment,” Phoenix said. “I...”
Edgeworth frowned, irritable. “It’s in the past, Phoenix.”
“I can’t leave it behind, Miles,” Phoenix said, and then he repeated, “I can’t.”
Miles was silent. Irrationally, he was angry at Phoenix for being so irrational. But he also understood that if Phoenix left that behind him, he’d have to face the weight of what he’d done. Of how he ran away. He felt a strong urge to fix this somehow, and inwardly smirked at how his and Wright’s roles had reversed. “Maya never gave up on you, you know.”
Phoenix looked up, “Hm?”
“She always talked about big events that were coming up as if you would be there. She left a seat open for you at our wedding... Tried to convince me not to choose a best man until the last moment... I ended up asking Gumshoe, of course. She sent an invite to the post office at the place you last sent us a letter from.”
“Oh. I never got it.” He shook his head. “I moved around a lot.”
“Where were you?” Edgeworth asked curiously.
Phoenix perked up slightly, “I went all over the country, mostly walking and taking buses. I made it down to Mexico... spent a few years in Brazil.”
“We sent the invite to Scranton, Pennsylvania,” Edgeworth said with a faint smile.
“Oh, was that when it was. That’s probably four, five years ago.” His grin was brittle. “I’ve been everywhere, man.”
Edgeworth racked his brain for a moment, “Four-and-a-half, give or take,” he muttered. He waved his hand. “I have all those important dates in my computer somewhere.”
“So... so you think she’d want to see me again?” Phoenix said doubtfully.
Edgeworth gave him a withering look. “Phoenix... She named our first child after you.”
----
“YOU HAVE KIDS!?”
“Well, Jesus, Wright, is it that much of a surprise?” Edgeworth looked a tad hurt at the insult to his virility.
Phoenix waffled, “Well, no, I mean, it’s just... I guess I never...” He pressed his hand to his mouth thoughtfully. “You were always so... cold.” He didn’t want to say straight out that he’d never seen Edgeworth pay any attention to women.
Edgeworth seemed to be refusing to dignify that with an answer, “Nicki is three. She and her brothers are visiting Aunt Pearly.”
Another shock, “Brothers?”
“Our 18-month-old twins: Greggy and Jules.” Edgeworth smiled triumphantly, “I hear twins runs in the family on her side.”
“I’m...” Phoenix shook his head.
“Phoenix.... Maya insisted on making you Nicki’s godfather... Pearl is her godmother, but...” Edgeworth looked tired.
Phoenix sat back against the piano, trying to figure it all out. Somehow he hadn’t really... What he’d thought his friends would do in a perfect, ideal world... well, none of it was like this. Maya would go to Kurain and train and be the Master of the channeling school, Pearly would share the burden with her and the two of them would live up there... Edgeworth would be abroad and Gumshoe would just be pottering along until he retired on a meager pension that was probably more than he was paid when he still worked.
But... somehow they’d taken the friendship he’d had with them and weaved it into a net... They’d become a family. He felt a pang of loneliness in his heart. They spent this whole time banding together, reaching out to him, trying to find him... But he was so ashamed, so afraid... He’d never even looked back. He’d tried to forget.
He felt Miles’ strong hand clamp onto his shoulder and looked up into intense grey eyes. “I won’t force you to come. I can’t stop you from hiding. If you ask me not to, I won’t tell Maya that I saw you here, as much as it’ll hurt me. But we’ll be here for you whenever you need us.”
Even though I wasn’t there for you... Phoenix thought, and his eyes pricked with tears. He rubbed his face hard with his fist. More than anything, he’d missed feeling like he belonged. He got used to being a stranger, got used to doing odd jobs and drifting... But he was hollow when he wasn’t here, where he could feel the echoes of the time he used to spend with his friends. That’s why he’d come back.
“Think about it, Phoenix,” Miles said, reaching out with a business card in his other hand. Phoenix took it without thinking. “That has my phone number on it,” Miles said.
Slightly dazed, Phoenix looked at the name on the card. “You...” He looked up at Miles, his eyes bright, “You never changed it?”
Miles shrugged, “Wright and Co. is still a well-known name. I took all your business,” he gave a teasing, ruthless smile as he said it. “And... We never gave up hope you’d come back someday.” He squeezed Phoenix’s shoulder.
Phoenix stared in dull wonder at the card, and slipped it into his pocket. “Not... not that I’ve forgotten the number. But... thanks.” He smiled a brittle, soft smile, willing his emotions to dull down.
----
Without his noticing it, the waitress had delivered his bowl of borscht. Edgeworth looked at it, trying to muster up some semblance of an appetite. He flagged over the waitress. “Could you bring me a box for this?” he asked. She nodded.
Wright still sat in front of him, seeming to be concentrating very hard on something in an invisible distance. He shook his head slightly and settled his fingers on the piano’s keys, plinking out a faint melody with an unpracticed touch.
The waitress came back with his borscht in a box, and he paid on the table. He turned to Wright, who had gotten back on his legs with whatever song he was playing.
“I’ll let you think, Phoenix,” Edgeworth said. “But know that we’ll take you back, no questions asked, if that’s what you want.”
Phoenix pursed his lips hard, giving a convulsive nod. The tempo of the music changed and suddenly the tune was recognizable to Edgeworth. As he walked out, the song strengthened; it was clearly something practiced over time, something it would take sheet music to learn.
As Edgeworth reluctantly turned and walked out of the restaurant, lyrics to the song surfaced in his mind. He smiled with happiness and recognition as he left the strange ambiance of the Russian restaurant, reciting the lyrics in his head.
Country roads, take me home... to the place I belong.
Rating: G
Characters: Edgeworth and Wright, other characters mentioned.
Time Period: Before what would be GS4.
Words: Just about 3000
Warnings: Something like spoilers, but not really. Lots of head-hopping.
Description: For chewy_kinzoku's birthday! I asked what she would like and she said this: "I wanted someone to write something based on the alternate ending to 2-4, where Phoenix wins the case and runs away. You know me and that I'm all for romance fics, but what I actually love just as much or even more are really good heart-touching friendship fics. So throw some Edgeworth in there however you see fit." Especial thanks to silverwind9 for beta reading.
It was a restaurant he was unfamiliar with, in a neighborhood he'd never before been to. He'd later think that perhaps he had been drawn there through some mysterious means, but truthfully, even after all these years, he didn't really believe in such things. At the very least, he didn't think of them as things that happened to him. It was called the Borscht Bowl Club, and the name promised Russian cuisine, something he'd not had in many years.
He walked in and got himself a table, staring at the curious ambiance of the place. Despite the fact that it was summer, the inside was decked out as if it were freezing cold, with a canister of dry ice making steam in each of the corners. He smirked despite himself. The waitress recommended the borscht, and he was only too happy to oblige her, considering the heat. The only other person in the restaurant was an informally-dressed man, wearing sandals and a couple of layers of tee shirts, drinking from a bottle of grape juice. There was something in the other man's demeanor that struck him, and he frowned, trying to recognize it.
"What do I pay you for, get on that piano!" came a loud voice from somewhere around the vicinity of the kitchen.
"All right already..." the man's voice was raspy and somewhat flat, but as he heard it, Edgeworth's heart stopped. It- it couldn't possibly be... But as the other man sat down at the piano and twiddled his fingers, he gave a faint but roguish smile that was all-too-familiar.
"Phoenix Wright..." he muttered, shocked.
----
He was just about to start plinking away at his favorite child-like adaptation of "Heart and Soul" (He'd learned more complicated songs since the proprietor had gotten tired of him loitering around the place and given him a job, but he liked to annoy the man.) when a very soft voice at the edge of his hearing stopped his fingers cold. He whirled to meet the face of a man he never expected - or wanted - to see again.
"E-Edgeworth." His heart pounded and his hands fell on the keys, creating a dissonant, foreboding sort of tone.
"You're alive.” Edgeworth’s hands were slack on the table, his eyes wide and round. He was wearing unfamiliar clothes, a slate grey pinstriped suit and a magenta tie. Then again, Phoenix didn’t look much like he used to, either.
He looked down, placing his hands on the keys. “Didn’t you get my letters?” His voice was quiet.
He heard heavy footsteps and looked up just in time to see Edgeworth’s hands reach back. He braced himself for a slap, but it never came. Instead, he was roughly hauled up from the piano bench and hugged.
“I got your damn letters,” Edgeworth said, obviously forcing gruffness into his voice. He released Wright and despite himself, Phoenix smiled crookedly, rubbing the back of his neck.
Still, the look Edgeworth was giving him was a confused mix of fury and happiness, his eyes shiny. He’d clearly changed a lot, over the years, Phoenix observed.
He was trying to think of something to say, when there was a lilting shout from the kitchen, “I don’t hear pianoooo!!”
“All right already, Ilya. I just got reunited with an old friend, can you let up a little?” He sat down at the piano and gave Edgeworth a worried look. “That is, if you still consider me a friend.”
----
Over the last eight years, Edgeworth had run over and over in his mind what he would do if he ever saw Phoenix Wright again. He had never been able to decide if he’d punch him or hug him, but he figured this showed him exactly what he’d do. Still... “I’m not sure,” he answered.
Phoenix’s face was crestfallen, but he didn’t seem surprised. “I... guess I did really let you down.”
There was the anger. “You let everyone down, Phoenix.” He made sure his voice had all the hurt and worry that he’d saved up over the years in it, “Maya and Pearl especially.”
Phoenix turned to the piano and played a few dissonant notes. “Maya was all right, though, right?”
“Aside from the fact that the one person she and her cousin depended on disappeared out of thin air, she was fine!” Edgeworth didn’t pull his punches as the anger from the last few years suddenly boiled up in him. “Why, if I hadn’t been there, I don’t know where she would have gone!”
Phoenix refused to look at him. “...Thank you. For taking care of her.” He paused for a long moment before saying, “I... I just couldn’t face her, knowing that I’d let... that I’d let that bastard Engarde go free.”
Edgeworth crossed his arms, “She didn’t care about that! None of us did! These things happen, Wright, sometimes the bad guy gets away! I know this as well as any of us.”
Phoenix looked up at him. “But... But von Karma was convicted.”
Edgeworth rubbed his forehead, “I don’t want to go over this with you right now, Wright. Suffice it to say that two years of imprisonment and a pauper’s death does not take away the fact that my father went twenty years unavenged.”
Phoenix reddened, his seated pose suddenly defiant, “Is that why you ran, too?” he spat.
“I CAME BACK!” Edgeworth was face to face with Wright, his eyes boring into the other man’s with a feverish intensity.
----
Phoenix bit back tears and turned away from his old friend, plucking out the first few notes of Canon in D. “Not for long, I’m sure.”
“Actually, I stayed,” Edgeworth said after a pause. He reached out and pulled up a chair, sitting down.
“You did?” Phoenix was genuinely surprised. Edgeworth had seemed so happy after living abroad for a year. In the perfect story he’d created of his friends’ lives, Edgeworth had gone back abroad and lived out his dreams.
“Of course I did.” His voice was harsh and cold, “Someone had to clean up the mess you left behind.” Edgeworth wouldn’t meet his eyes. “You didn’t take the whole damn law office with you.”
“Oh.” Phoenix frowned. “So, you... you sold all the assets and gave them to Maya, right?”
Edgeworth sighed, “That was the plan. But things kept piling up, I didn’t have time for it while attending to Maya and Pearl, keeping everything together for the two of them. They came to stay with me when they were in the cities - they helped me look for you.”
“So... what happened?” His shame gave way to curiosity.
“It was just so hard... to think you wouldn’t come back. So we left things as they were,” he shrugged. “As much as I didn’t want to, I ended up... I...” He looked pointedly at Wright, “You never read the papers at all, did you?” Without waiting for an answer, he looked down at his lapel. “Well, it had always been my dream.”
Phoenix focused on the jacket of the pinstriped suit, where a defense badge was pinned. “Y-you didn’t!”
“Well I could hardly avoid it!” Edgeworth’s voice was a confusion of embarrassment and pride that Phoenix had never expected ever to hear from him. “People kept calling! And hardly a year afterwards, there was a case where someone impersonated you, pretended that they were you and you’d come back.” He buried his face in his hands. “God, Maya was so heartbroken.”
Phoenix’s cheeks burned. “I guess that’s why you dropped the cravat, then.”
“It’s hardly traditional for defense attorneys to wear them.”
“You kept in touch with Maya, I hope.”
Edgeworth glanced down at his hands, an amused smirk on his face. “Something like that.”
----
“What do you mean?” Phoenix raised an eyebrow.
Miles gave him an intense look, “She needed someone to be there for her after her mother’s death.” An intense mix of emotions came up. This had always been the hardest part for him, in his imaginings: attempting to explain this whole situation to Wright. He had dreaded it for years, and here he was, at the very beginning, still dreading it.
“They found her mother’s body?” Phoenix blinked.
Edgeworth sighed long and deep, “Her mother was murdered in front of her, Wright...”
Phoenix gasped, his hand gripping the side of the piano, white-knuckled, “WHAT!?”
He wearily frowned. “It’s a very... VERY long story. Suffice it to say I was able to protect the one accused and find the real murderer. And... it was... impossibly hard... for everyone.” He refused to relive it again, Maya’s terror-filled days across the bridge, being tormented by literal and figurative demons from her past. She rarely talked about it.
Phoenix looked at his hands. “Ah. Is... she all right now?” he asked, lamely.
“We do what we can,” Edgeworth said, purposefully cryptic.
Phoenix was always too clever for his own good, though: “....We...?”
----
Phoenix’s eyes widened as he realized the import of Edgeworth’s earlier sphinx-like smirk. “You...?”
Edgeworth held up his left hand, the ring finger sparkling with a band of gold. His expression was nigh-unreadable, but there was a faint blush on his high, white cheekbones.
“You... and MAYA!?” Phoenix was stunned. He had never planned THIS in his perfect imaginings.
Edgeworth looked down with a fond smile, twisting the ring around his finger with his thumb. “She needed someone to be there for her, Wright. And I needed... I needed to be there, period. Eventually I realized that I needed her to be there for me, too. The two of us found each other.”
“S-so you’re happy?” Phoenix swallowed, trying to down the lump in his throat.
“We are.” And for the first time in all the time that Phoenix had known Miles Edgeworth, even when they were both comparatively carefree children, the smile he saw was genuine and complete. Edgeworth was really, truly happy.
As much as his heart swelled with happiness from finding out that his two best friends were happy, even without him, he couldn’t help but feel a pang of jealousy. He smothered it with matter-of-factness. “So everything worked out all right, even without me.”
Edgeworth’s blazing smile disappeared. “No. If you had stayed... If...” he paused, “Aside from your friends, missing you... perhaps if you stayed, two people wouldn’t have died.”
“What are you-?” Phoenix dreaded the answer, so he couldn’t finish the question.
-----
“Without anyone to take her part, as I’m sure you would have, had you stayed, Adrian Andrews was found dead in her cell before her trial even began.” Miles forced his expression to be neutral, trying to hide the pain that came from recalling his part in that woman’s death. He had tried to console himself by imagining his statement had nothing to do with her suicide, but...
“Oh.” Phoenix’s voice was low.
“And, though this was less upsetting to all involved, for obvious reasons, Matt Engarde was found dead in his home not long after the trial. De Killer was not pleased when Engarde tried to blackmail him.” Edgeworth noted Wright’s expression turn pained when he said that.
“If only I’d presented that tape at the crucial moment,” Phoenix said. “I...”
Edgeworth frowned, irritable. “It’s in the past, Phoenix.”
“I can’t leave it behind, Miles,” Phoenix said, and then he repeated, “I can’t.”
Miles was silent. Irrationally, he was angry at Phoenix for being so irrational. But he also understood that if Phoenix left that behind him, he’d have to face the weight of what he’d done. Of how he ran away. He felt a strong urge to fix this somehow, and inwardly smirked at how his and Wright’s roles had reversed. “Maya never gave up on you, you know.”
Phoenix looked up, “Hm?”
“She always talked about big events that were coming up as if you would be there. She left a seat open for you at our wedding... Tried to convince me not to choose a best man until the last moment... I ended up asking Gumshoe, of course. She sent an invite to the post office at the place you last sent us a letter from.”
“Oh. I never got it.” He shook his head. “I moved around a lot.”
“Where were you?” Edgeworth asked curiously.
Phoenix perked up slightly, “I went all over the country, mostly walking and taking buses. I made it down to Mexico... spent a few years in Brazil.”
“We sent the invite to Scranton, Pennsylvania,” Edgeworth said with a faint smile.
“Oh, was that when it was. That’s probably four, five years ago.” His grin was brittle. “I’ve been everywhere, man.”
Edgeworth racked his brain for a moment, “Four-and-a-half, give or take,” he muttered. He waved his hand. “I have all those important dates in my computer somewhere.”
“So... so you think she’d want to see me again?” Phoenix said doubtfully.
Edgeworth gave him a withering look. “Phoenix... She named our first child after you.”
----
“YOU HAVE KIDS!?”
“Well, Jesus, Wright, is it that much of a surprise?” Edgeworth looked a tad hurt at the insult to his virility.
Phoenix waffled, “Well, no, I mean, it’s just... I guess I never...” He pressed his hand to his mouth thoughtfully. “You were always so... cold.” He didn’t want to say straight out that he’d never seen Edgeworth pay any attention to women.
Edgeworth seemed to be refusing to dignify that with an answer, “Nicki is three. She and her brothers are visiting Aunt Pearly.”
Another shock, “Brothers?”
“Our 18-month-old twins: Greggy and Jules.” Edgeworth smiled triumphantly, “I hear twins runs in the family on her side.”
“I’m...” Phoenix shook his head.
“Phoenix.... Maya insisted on making you Nicki’s godfather... Pearl is her godmother, but...” Edgeworth looked tired.
Phoenix sat back against the piano, trying to figure it all out. Somehow he hadn’t really... What he’d thought his friends would do in a perfect, ideal world... well, none of it was like this. Maya would go to Kurain and train and be the Master of the channeling school, Pearly would share the burden with her and the two of them would live up there... Edgeworth would be abroad and Gumshoe would just be pottering along until he retired on a meager pension that was probably more than he was paid when he still worked.
But... somehow they’d taken the friendship he’d had with them and weaved it into a net... They’d become a family. He felt a pang of loneliness in his heart. They spent this whole time banding together, reaching out to him, trying to find him... But he was so ashamed, so afraid... He’d never even looked back. He’d tried to forget.
He felt Miles’ strong hand clamp onto his shoulder and looked up into intense grey eyes. “I won’t force you to come. I can’t stop you from hiding. If you ask me not to, I won’t tell Maya that I saw you here, as much as it’ll hurt me. But we’ll be here for you whenever you need us.”
Even though I wasn’t there for you... Phoenix thought, and his eyes pricked with tears. He rubbed his face hard with his fist. More than anything, he’d missed feeling like he belonged. He got used to being a stranger, got used to doing odd jobs and drifting... But he was hollow when he wasn’t here, where he could feel the echoes of the time he used to spend with his friends. That’s why he’d come back.
“Think about it, Phoenix,” Miles said, reaching out with a business card in his other hand. Phoenix took it without thinking. “That has my phone number on it,” Miles said.
Slightly dazed, Phoenix looked at the name on the card. “You...” He looked up at Miles, his eyes bright, “You never changed it?”
Miles shrugged, “Wright and Co. is still a well-known name. I took all your business,” he gave a teasing, ruthless smile as he said it. “And... We never gave up hope you’d come back someday.” He squeezed Phoenix’s shoulder.
Phoenix stared in dull wonder at the card, and slipped it into his pocket. “Not... not that I’ve forgotten the number. But... thanks.” He smiled a brittle, soft smile, willing his emotions to dull down.
----
Without his noticing it, the waitress had delivered his bowl of borscht. Edgeworth looked at it, trying to muster up some semblance of an appetite. He flagged over the waitress. “Could you bring me a box for this?” he asked. She nodded.
Wright still sat in front of him, seeming to be concentrating very hard on something in an invisible distance. He shook his head slightly and settled his fingers on the piano’s keys, plinking out a faint melody with an unpracticed touch.
The waitress came back with his borscht in a box, and he paid on the table. He turned to Wright, who had gotten back on his legs with whatever song he was playing.
“I’ll let you think, Phoenix,” Edgeworth said. “But know that we’ll take you back, no questions asked, if that’s what you want.”
Phoenix pursed his lips hard, giving a convulsive nod. The tempo of the music changed and suddenly the tune was recognizable to Edgeworth. As he walked out, the song strengthened; it was clearly something practiced over time, something it would take sheet music to learn.
As Edgeworth reluctantly turned and walked out of the restaurant, lyrics to the song surfaced in his mind. He smiled with happiness and recognition as he left the strange ambiance of the Russian restaurant, reciting the lyrics in his head.
Country roads, take me home... to the place I belong.