(no subject)
January 6th, 7:00am
Island of Tabula Rasa
The Beach
For the first time in what seemed like an age, Phoenix Wright was suffering from a serious lack of certainty - in the impossible relationship he'd developed with his dead former boss, in what a disbarred lawyer could possibly offer a population that didn't need any justice. But uselessness wasn't the same as feeling useless, and Phoenix had never allowed the latter to creep up on him, no matter how hopeless things looked.
It wasn't until that morning, on January the 6th, that it began to dawn on him where he'd been going wrong with Mia. Maybe it'd been there before, a little itch of intuition...one he'd ignored because he was Phoenix Wright, a champion of truth, and the reason he'd started losing emotional touch with his mentor couldn't have been that he'd neglected to tell her the whole truth about his past. (I guess we live and learn, though, don't we?)
Early in the day, before the sun had completely banished night from the Island, Phoenix walked along the beach, his gaze slightly out of focus and aimed at his feet as he attempted, with a little luck, to absorb some peace from the setting. The warmth of spirit was short-lived, because soon enough, a metallic flash caught his eye - something shiny lodged in the sand. And, as one cat who'd avoided ever being struck down by curiosity like luck itself, he stopped and bent to pick it up.
He knew what he was looking at even before he'd finished sifting the sand out between his fingers and from around the tiny circular object. It was an attorney's badge, one worn by any professional lawyer concerned with defense work.
Phoenix turned up a corner of his mouth, rolling the warm little disc around in his palm. "Somebody'll be missing this," he murmured. But as far as he knew, there weren't any stranded attorneys who were out a badge. In fact, Mia was really the only lawyer here he'd ever seen wearing one, and she didn't seem the type to go misplacing something like this. When he turned it over and ran his thumb across the back to clear a few clinging grains of sand from the engraved identification number there, he nearly dropped it.
28381. 28381.
He'd seen that same number on the back of a badge like this before. Many, many times. But it had been some eight years. Eight years since he'd had this badge stripped from him under the very serious charge of presenting forged evidence in court.
And in a rare slip of the cool, happy-go-lucky persona he'd built up since his disbarring, Phoenix Wright sank down onto his knees on the beach, held the badge up to the light, and said, "It's been a long time."
[ Anyone welcome. New friends are great, even if he's a bit out of it right now. ST/LT fine, as usual. ]