Fic: The Death of Antone Garcias and the Myth of the On Your Honor Clause, Phoenix Wright
Title: The Death of Antone Garcias and the Myth of the On Your Honor Clause
Fandom: Phoenix Wright
Pairing/Characters: Ensemble
Word Count: 8600
This is the Aka Why the Characters of Phoenix Wright are Not in the Fourth Phoenix Wright Game, and as thus, takes place during Apollo Justice. We'll say it's AU, too, because I know Apollo Justice will not go like this.
It begins, as these things tend to, with a dead body.
These are the facts, outlined for her by Dick Gumshoe in a fading ballpoint pen. Mid-morning, he went to answer a hysterical housewife's phone call from the middle of bourgeois suburbia hell. They found bones, she said; the construction workers who were digging a hole for a new Jacuzzi put their shovels right through the skull.
By lunchtime, he holds the pieces between his hands. It comes complete with the rest of the skeleton; long, rank, yellow bones, still knit together and sounding off like wooden wind chimes when they were lifted out.
"Male," says the youngest detective from behind him, pushing his glasses up on his nose and peering close, finding the minute details that Gumshoe never had a prayer of deciphering. "Real young, too; look, his wisdom teeth aren't fully grown in yet."
They bring the black bags and Gumshoe keeps his eyes on the bones until every last one disappears in it.
"Hold up, Chief," goes the detective, still kneeling over the would-be-Jacuzzi-turned-grave. "What's this?"
He leans in, pulling out a small, smooth stone no bigger than a business card. He brushes the dirt off, revealing a swirl pattern not unlike a conch shell; when he tilts it up to the light, it almost looks faintly green, like it had once been glowing and now was long dead.
Gumshoe throws up spectacularly onto the housewife's rosebushes.
&&&
"It was a long time coming, pal," he tells his wife later, after bringing home barbeque from Shank's and announcing that he'd resigned from work today -- unemployment wasn't unfamiliar with the Gumshoe household; it just usually wasn't a voluntary state. "This is one murder I will not mix myself up in." He rubs a hand haggardly down his face. "I'd hoped they'd never dig it up."
"What was it?" his wife sits on the arm of his chair, resting a patient hand on his shoulder and keeping her voice level, and this was why he married her. "What did he die holding?"
Gumshoe stares blankly at the fireplace. "Maya Fey's megatama."
&&&
Miles Edgeworth learns about the murder via scrolling marquee on some local news station at Heathrow; it'd been a slow news day, he guesses, tossing the remains of his breakfast into the trash and continuing on his way.
He passes Ema Skye going the other direction, and momentarily catches her profile in his peripheral, burning quick and fast onto his consciousness; he turns, her name leaping to his lips before he ever really remembers who she was, but she's concentrating on finding the right departure gate, cell phone to her ear, and slips away into the crowd before he can catch her attention.
She removes her plane ticket from her billfold, tucking her phone into the hollow between her shoulder and her ear. "Have they identified the victim yet?" she asks, leaning against the console that announces she's at Gate B14, departure non-stop to Detroit, service on to Los Angelos.
"Yup," buzzes the young detective's voice from half-way around the world. "His name's Antone Garcias. He was sixteen years old when he was hit over the head with a blunt, heavy object -- or, at least, they think so. It was pretty hard to tell, what with the shovel cracking his skull to bits and all."
Detective Skye absorbs this information, and then, with natural curiosity, "Why did the previous detective resign?"
"We don't know," his voice became hushed. "He just dropped everything, quick as a hot potato. I heard he and his wife hopped on the first outbound plane going out of the country." He whistles the theme from the Twilight Zone to her. "Suspicious, huh? Then again, Gumshoe was never one for his subtlety."
&&&
Adrian Andrews makes a pathetic picture when she's on no sleep; hunched in the interrogation chair, teeth grinding together. They didn't give her the opportunity to change out of her cocktail dress before they arrested her, so her hair is falling out of its impractical style and her make-up is running. She'd been formidable and angry the first thirty-six hours they held her, her head held high and her lips firmly sealed, but the one thing the police precinct and the prosecution office banks on is for loyalty to always crack.
"Oh, God, forgive me!" she sobs into her hands, goosebumps quivering all along her bare arms. "Forgive me!"
She wipes her eyes with the back of her hand. "Yes, I know what you're talking about. The night you say ... the night this young man went missing ... I had two visitors at my house, early in the morning. They needed somewhere to hide, because a friend of theirs was arranging plane tickets and fake passports for them for the earliest flight the next morning. They told me as such, too; obviously they've forgotten how unreliable I am.
"You need to understand; I owed them everything. It occurred to me, of course, that something awful had happened, but ..."
"We need those names, Ms. Andrews."
She sends them a dark, smudged, scathing look, and then swivels in her seat to send the same look to the two-way mirror, behind which the head detective of the Antone Garcias case clenches her nails around her sleeve. "You already know what I'm going to say since you have me here."
"Aahh -- um, right. Yeah. We need you to say it for the record, though."
She drags a deep, rattling breath into her lungs. "Forgive me," she says one more time, and this time, they know she isn't talking to them. "It was Phoenix Wright and Maya Fey."
&&&
The head detective slowly puts her fork down on top of her salad, taking her napkin and wiping her mouth with deliberate control. "Can you tell me how nobody even noticed that Larry Butz has been missing for the past seven years?"
Being one of the few members of the male race unperturbed by her stare, the Chief of Police shrugs off-handedly. "Nobody filed a missing persons report. According to his landlord, Butz has a history of not paying his rent, so he never bothered to track him down; just sold all his stuff on eBay. Same for his boss. Well, of the week," he amends. "Frankly, Detective, the police force of California have more to worry about than the disappearance of a scatter-brained deadbeat."
The head detective has to admit he has a point. "You'll find that the suspects' pattern is very easy to trace, sir. They rely on the people who owe them. Larry Butz owes them a lot --"
"But unlike the others, who have money and influence, Butz is of no particular benefit for them."
"Nothing outside of his loyalty."
The Chief of Police flips briefly through the notepad in front of him. "Seven years ago, a couple months after Antone Garcias's murder, Butz left the country. The last person to speak to him was a girlfriend, and she said he was looking for an old friend of his: Mr. Phoenix Wright."
She sits up a little straighter. "Did he find them?"
"She doesn't know. He never contacted her again. He lived in Germany for three years, and then he got married and took his wife's name and that's when his paper trial ends."
Starlight hits the head detective's eyes. "Oho!” she slams her palms on the table. “Think, sir; who do we know who both lives in Germany and is connected to our suspects?"
&&&
Later, in complete darkness, with no company but the slow, sickening swoop of her stomach, Adrian Andrews hugs her knees to her chest and fights the emptiness that always comes with betrayal. I held out long enough, she tells herself, over and over again, trying to drag strength from this one hope.
She remembers, clearly, watching the discovery of the body on the news -- the slender bones all jumbled and the megatama they'd found in its cold, dead fingers -- and she remembers taking one long gulp of her wine and setting the glass on the side table. She got up, stepped over the prone figure of Matt Engarde's cat (to this day, she cannot think of it as her own) and found her date book, locked in its letter box. She flipped through the dates until she found a phone number, the numbers even and clear, printed carelessly over November 8th, which wasn't significant in anyway, just the first page she'd opened to when the number was offered. She dialed it with hands as light and fluttering as a butterfly.
The voice that answered her was thick with sleep, and cross, and greeted her with an oath in a language she didn't know.
Get them out, Adrian Andrews said.
&&&
A wave of dizziness overcomes Franziska, and she abandons filing papers into her briefcase in favor of sinking down into her chair, fingertips pressed to her temple like it would have even the slightest damming effect against the heat that rushes up underneath her skin and the sensation of rolling her brain up in burs.
When it passes, she discovers that she has company; her husband beams at her from behind a riot of the most ridiculously-colored flowers she has ever seen.
"Good morning, Your Honor!" he says with a cheerfulness that makes her head pound in protest.
She reaches out to him, pressing one gloved hand against his wrist to tell him she returns the sentiment. Out loud, she says, "What are you doing here? You never visit me at work."
Clueing into her mood, he sets the flowers down next to her briefcase and kneels beside her chair, making a face at her. "I'm bringing my wife flowers is what I'm doing. I'm always getting told that husbands never appreciate their wives, so I decided I'd better come up here right away and tell you I appreciate you."
"I wouldn't keep you if you didn't," she informs him, tone wry, and, as usual, he doesn't notice the underhanded insult and his smile is back on his face in full wattage. This is why she married him, she remembers with sudden fondness; his ability to constantly surprise her, to make her laugh, and her own need to keep somebody in check and his willingness to be kept in check. He's besotted with her, and it's a wonderful thing to see every day; it's one of the things that keeps her in love. She rests a hand on his cheek, and he presses a quick kiss to her palm, as if he's afraid that the sudden display of gentleness is fleeting.
"I got a phone call really early this morning," she says, and his face grows pinched.
"The kids haven't done anything wrong, have they?"
She grins wolfishly, moving her hands to the back of his neck. "Nothing their father hasn't already told me of. No, they weren't even awake yet."
He touches their foreheads together, so that the bridges of their noses brush and she could feel every breath he took rustle against her lips. "Who was it?"
"Adrian Andrews."
She can instantly tell the gravity of this is lost on him, because nothing about his demeanor changes. "We need to call a babysitter for a couple nights," she continues, an element of briskness and business entering her tone. "Remember? We made a promise, a long time ago. Von Karmas never forget their promises, and never leave them unfulfilled. Phoenix Wright and Maya Fey need us."
The light bulb in Larry's mind goes on, and he reaches up to urgently grasp her hands in his. "Then we need to get going! It'll take us at least a couple of hours to drive to France and --"
"Come here," she demands, and his smile curves against her lips when she kisses him, because if anyone understands the consequences of aiding international felons, it’s her, the prosecutor-turned-magistrate, and she has more to lose than anyone. But first and foremost, she is a von Karma, and she made a promise.
&&&
"Howdy, boss," Samuel shrugs his coat off and hangs it on the hook by the door, where it stays for approximately thirty seconds before sliding to the floor, to the general annoyance of its owner.
Rolling his eyes, Phoenix plucks two tickets down and drops them in the recycling, a skillet of hissing eggs in his other hand. "Morning, Samuel; I'm glad you finally decided to show up. Did you catch up on your beauty sleep?"
"'Ey now!" the young chef balls up the closest cleaning rag and pitches it at him good-naturedly. He grabs his apron from its peg beside his coat and ties it around him in a long-practiced movement. "I'm going to send you home to get some yourself, boss, if you're going to harp on me like my ma. What're we doing?"
Phoenix smiles despite himself, serving up the eggs and a couple steaming biscuits onto a plate and hitting the bell. "If you'd get the hamburger out of the freezer and work your magic with it, it'd be great; we're about to start the lunch rush."
"You got it! Some immensely authentic American hamburgers, coming right up!"
One of the waitresses pokes her head in, lifting a couple tickets so she can peer around the kitchen. "'Ey, Will," she goes upon spotting him, and as he is a creature of habit, it sends an unpleasant jolt down to Phoenix's toes to remember that's his name now. He never could get used to it. "There's a man up here asking for you. First time you ever got a personal visitor at work, innit?" Her face drops into a mocking leer. "Mikaela owes me five euro now, she does. She'd been so sure you're the only man in all of Limerick who owns a restaurant but don't have any friends."
Phoenix laughs, stripping his gloves off and lobbing them towards the trash. "It's probably just Mitch, come to argue with me about the latest mutation in the artificial cow stock and rising meat prices," he snatches at the stray wisps of his hair, tucking them back up under his hairnet.
"Dunno why he bothers," says Samuel from across the room. "Nobody's ever won an argument against you yet, boss."
"Some people stay extraordinarily hard-headed," Phoenix's voice is dry. "Hey, watch the timer, will you? There's a set of buns due to come up soon."
The boy waves a spatula around in acknowledgement, and chuckling, Phoenix pushes his way out into the diner main. It's at least ten degrees cooler out here, is the first thing he notices. The second thing he notices is Miles Edgeworth, sitting at the counter, plucking nervously at his cufflinks. The smile freezes right on his lips.
Edgeworth catches sight of him; he pauses a moment, eyes raking him from head to toe, taking in the long hair he has bunched into a ponytail at the base of his neck and his grease-stained apron and his startled, open-like-a-book expression. His answering smile is sympathetic.
"Order's up," he says sadly, and raises a sardonic eyebrow when Phoenix’s knees give out.
&&&
She paces the length of the room once, letting the silence gather at the ends of her fingers and tremble around her shoulders until she is certain everyone is aware of it. Then she turns, laying her palms flat on the table. Her patience frays around the edges of her mind, but still she manages to keep her voice level.
"Mr. DeLite," she closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. "I don't think you quite understand the severity of your situation here."
Ron DeLite tilts his head, letting his eyes linger carelessly on the set of her face, gauging how close she is to breaking. "I'm pretty sure I do ... ah, um, yes," he bobs his head in a firm nod. "No, I understand."
"But you're not telling us anything at all!" blurts one of the other interrogators, rough with frustration, and the head detective shoots him a quelling look, before leaning across the table to stare Ron DeLite right in the eyes. He smiles a dippy smile, refusing to be cowed.
"Adrian Andrews confirms that the morning after Antone Garcias was murdered, you dropped by her house to pick up Mr. Wright and Ms. Fey. She overheard them talking about a friend who was going to provide them with plane tickets and passports to aid their escape."
"Oh! Sounds dramatic."
She turns her palms up to him beseechingly. "You have to understand how this looks, Mr. DeLite. The evidence is stacked against you. You and Ms. Andrews both feel like you owe the suspects. You're rich; rich enough to afford two last-minute plane tickets. You're a security guard with connections in the court system; you could easily procure fake passports on short notice. And you have a history of ... thrill-seeking, shall we say. It would appeal to your most romantic nature, the idea of helping Mr. Wright and Ms. Fey flee the country."
"Mmm, yes, I ... think I might possibly see where you're coming from," he tugs thoughtfully on a lock of his hair. "But isn't forging passports illegal? So if I tell you what you want to hear, regardless of its truth ... well, then I'd be incriminating myself. That's my fifth ... ah, something, right? My right to silence."
And she would be damned if he didn't clam up right then and there. It doesn’t matter what she said, he just smiles at her, faintly confused and uncooperative.
"He did it," she says fiercely, the moment she leaves. "That smug son of a bitch smuggled them out, I know it."
"I don't get it, detective," Ema Skye scratches the side of her head with her pen. Her face, if the head detective bothered to look closely, is white with conflict. "I feel like we're missing something big. You'd think Ms. Andrews and Mr. DeLite would know better than to help them if they're really guilty; why would they risk it? It has to be more than gratitude and loyalty."
"I know. They'll tell me. If it's not Ron DeLite, I'll find someone else who's willing to cough up for me," her smile is thin. "I've come too far for Phoenix Wright and little miss Maya to take it all from me. I'll put them in an isolation cell for the rest of their lives; you have my word."
Detective Skye grows paler.
&&&
Having Miles Edgeworth standing in the middle of his living room is highly disconcerting; kind of like coming home and finding a piece of furniture moved to the complete opposite end of the room from where it was and having no recollection of having ever moved it. It gives Phoenix a start every time he comes out of a room and Edgeworth is right there, examining the artwork on his walls and the stack of mail with his fake name on it.
They'd made extremely stilted, civilized conversation ("Is the restaurant yours?" "Hmm? Oh. Yeah. Best burger joint in all of Ireland; we even have a little plaque that says so. Won it in 2024! What about you?" "Pilot." "Ohhhhh. So that's why you have all that ... flair all over your coat. So, wait, you're not a ..." "Of course I am. Just on my days off, though; in Germany, they treat being a lawyer kind of like a hobby.") and there's a cab waiting for them outside. Phoenix throws things indiscriminately into a suitcase; he should start taking people's advice and just have one ready, constantly.
"One last thing," he says to Edgeworth, flipping the latches on his suitcase shut. He gestures for the other man to move and unhooks the picture from the wall from behind him. He removes the backing; sandwiched between it and the photograph is another smaller, more yellowed picture. He slips it into the pouch in his apron, and puts the rest back onto the wall. "Now we can go."
"Wright..." Edgeworth reaches out, half-impulsively, and then checks himself.
Phoenix flicks off the lights in the bathroom and takes one last, cursory glance around the flat. "What?"
"It never seemed prudent to ask this before ... but why are you here? You're not the one who smashed Antone Garcias's skull in. In fact, you've done nothing wrong; you could have easily just sent her to Europe and gone about your life. Not a single mark on your record." He wets his lips. "So why did you give up ... everything and come with her?"
Phoenix pauses, blinking owlishly in the muted light coming from the hallway. "She asked me to," he says with the blank tone of those telling the absolute truth.
It takes Edgeworth a moment to understand, but when he does, his stomach gives a startled leap of realization; in Wright's mind, this was enough. It was the only excuse he needed.
Because she asked him to.
&&&
"And how about we stick one right here!" Maya Fey laughs, pressing a stamp right into the center of his forehead. "Oh, no! You look like you're ready to be mailed! You better get out of here, before someone mistakes you for a package and sticks you in the outbox!"
The little boy squirms, peeling the stamp off and glancing around furtively. She laughs again, and helps him down off the counter. "Run along, then, squirt. And watch where you're going!"
"I am sorry I got blood all over your clothes, mademoiselle," he mumbles morosely out of his bee-stung mouth, and she looks down at herself, surprised to find his blood was splattered all over her slacks. She did not know skinned knees could bleed that much.
She waves it off. "I'm used to washing blood out of things. It's a lot easier to get it out of this fabric than it was what I used to wear, I'll tell you that. Here, have a lollipop. I got it out of your mom's lunch, but shhh, don't tell her!" She beams in response to his lightning-fast smile and shooes him out the back door, before brushing her hands off and returning to the front counter.
"Really, Maya Fey," Franziska von Karma drawls, leaning onto her elbows and fixing her with the smallest of condescending smiles, and Maya's heart shudders to a stop inside of her chest and she barely quells the urge to shush her -- in her more immature days, she would have, and effectively given them both away. "Your friends go to all this trouble to weave you a new identity, and what do you choose to do with it? Work in a Parisian post office."
"Don't knock it till you try it, von Karma," Maya works her mouth to try and get rid of the dry, crumbly taste of fear.
"Mmm," Franziska wrinkles her nose distastefully. "Funny thing happened in San Francisco yesterday. They dug up a body of a teenage boy, seven years dead. And they found your megatama at the grave site. Incredibly sloppy of you, wasn't it?"
Maya sways on the spot, and grips the counter to keep herself steady. "Are you here to arrest me?" she asks, very quietly. The notion fills her with a quiet, cold calm.
She straightens, planting a hand on her hip. "I am not. You see, unlike those American fools you left behind, I know the whole story. I am here because there are those who care about you and who want you safe. An amazing amount of effort has been put together for your sake, little girl."
"I killed a man," she says bluntly, bristling at the 'little girl' comment. "You don't think I deserve justice for that?"
"I know the whole story," Franziska repeats, gravity heavy in her voice and her eyes, and she waits until she is certain Maya is listening. "And I would not prosecute you. I pity the fool who tries."
It's strange, Maya Fey thinks, that in a roundabout, underhanded kind of way, that is the nicest thing anyone has said to her in years.
&&&
"The problem with this case is that nobody is unbiased towards the suspects," Godot leans back in his chair, and she can only see his lips move around the rim of his coffee mug. "It's been a long time since I've seen the precinct handle a murder so sloppily."
"Are you going to take the case?" Ema Skye asks, flipping through his address book idly with her free hand. Her glasses slip down her skull.
"I will not take the case until they give me one to take," the prosecutor says dryly. "There's no murder weapon. It's not even one hundred percent clear that the victim was clubbed over the head. Or who did it. They just have the Fey girl's rock, found in proximity, and the fact that Phoenix Wright and Maya Fey left the country with fake passports the very next day, but unless they confess or unless they find the murder weapon with their fingerprints, it'll be hard to prosecute that. Maybe they were just eloping."
Detective Skye's eyebrows go up, but Godot doesn't correct himself. She can't be sure, but she thinks he furrows his forehead thoughtfully.
"The only thing I know for certain is that there is a lot of protecting going on. Only one of them could have committed the murder; the other one's willing to take the fall as well. Then there's Ms. Andrews, Mr. DeLite, your incompetent predecessor, Detective Gumshoe -- everything they're willing to go through to keep mum."
He takes another long swallow, and wipes his mouth on the back of his head. "I don't like where this is going. So, good luck, Detective, with finding a prosecutor who will take this case, for it will not be me."
&&&
Gumshoe's wife tells him, ironically but without bitterness, than when she finally saw Europe, this wasn't how she envisioned it. He's just glad they could afford plane tickets on his salary. She's right, of course; sitting in a hotel lobby in northern Wales could not be anyone's idea of the ideal European vacation.
They're all in a row on a bench by the door: Gumshoe on the end, staring at his loafers; his wife, who is keeping track of developments back home through a satellite link he installed on her cell phone; Maya Fey, her face white as a sheet and her hands fluttering at her throat as if searching for something; Larry von Karma and Franziska on the opposite end, holding hands. Nobody talks much, except to ask questions about time and travel conditions.
Maya is the first to see them; Larry feels the deep, shuddering gasp go through her whole frame, and goosebumps prickle along his arms from the energy of it.
"NICK!" she cries, and this is the Maya everyone knows; the one who will break decibel levels and rupture something in her own throat without batting an eyelash, and she closes the distance between them in a couple bounds before anyone's really aware that she's left her seat.
Phoenix Wright and Maya Fey collide in the entrance of the hotel lobby, tangling and staggering in their enthusiasm to get their arms around each other and hold on tight. Their exclamations are loud and explosive ("Oh my god, Nick, your hair!") and within no time, they've made a bubble of spectators around themselves, but of course, neither of them are paying the slightest bit of attention to anyone but the other.
Behind them, Edgeworth catches his sister's eye, and she releases Larry's hand to stand and move to his side. He smiles at her, not warmly enough to show his teeth, but smiling nonetheless. Their reunion doesn't have a tenth of the emotion of Phoenix and Maya's, but she loops her arm through his, and it's enough.
"Maya," goes Phoenix, sounding slightly perturbed and more than a little worried. "Why do you have blood all over your pants?"
Maya throws her head back and laughs too loudly and too forcefully, and she leans against him, head dipping into the hollow of his shoulder, and Edgeworth and Franziska know that whatever decisions they made, whatever situations they manipulated, it was worth it, just for this moment.
&&&
Pearl Fey, age seventeen, is a singularly plain, uninteresting girl to look at. She sits low in her chair, foot cocked out and arms folded in a way that mediates between defiant and bored. Her hair hangs long and straight around her face; it's parted down the middle and an unflattering shade of doe-brown. From a ribbon tied around her throat hangs a megatama, resting heavy on her collarbones. She's too busy worrying at what little thumbnail she has left to notice the head detective enter the room.
She tosses a thick file down onto the table in front of Pearl with a sharp smack; the girl jumps, chair screeching on the linoleum, and she gives her a moment to take a good, long look at her own name printed neatly on the file tab, and to understand the significance of its thickness.
"Pearl Fey," she drawls, perching herself on the corner of the table, leaning forward enough to touch the megatama with her fingertip. "You're a spirit medium, right?"
It becomes immediately transparent that this was the wrong thing to say. Pearl straightens up, pushing the head detective's hand away politely but firmly, strength flooding her broad features with a cold steeliness. "No," she answers. "I'm Pearl Fey, and my occupation these days is high school student."
"Well, yes, of course, but you have an almost prodigal spiritual power, don't you?"
"No," Pearl answers again. "I left medium training to dedicate myself full-time to my studies. Maybe I'll go back when I graduate from college, but my family has remained uneducated for too long, and if I'm going to be a good future Master of the Kurain Channeling Technique, then the change has to begin with me."
The head detective drums her nails on the table. "What a noble speech. Was it your own decision?"
Pearl smiles, half-fondly, half-bitterly. "It was a promise I made to my cousin, who practically raised me."
"Ah, yes, Ms. Maya Fey," she interjects, tucking a lock of her blonde hair behind her ear; this was what she was trying to get to. "Isn't that the same cousin who left you for Europe when you were ten years old? How could she have raised you?"
"By being the first to take me to the outside world; without her, I never would have made that first step. I wouldn't even remotely resemble the person I am today," a certain passion enters Pearl's voice; she locks her jaw. "And she loved me. That was who she was. Everything she did, she did for someone she loved. I trust her. That was the decision I made a long time ago, and my loyalty will not be shaken."
Where have I heard that before? the head detective sighs. She folds her arms. "Okay, then," she says peaceably. "Then what do you know about Antone Garcias?"
"You don't really want to hear what I know about him," Pearl is simply being eerie now, her head tilted slightly to one side and her voice distant. "You just want to know why he's in a body bag downstairs and not getting drunk on a college campus somewhere. You want to know what my cousin and her best friend, the best defense attorney in San Francisco, have to do with it. You want to know who killed him, with what, and why he was buried by the rosebushes."
"Can you answer these questions?"
"I can."
"Okay. Why, then, Pearl Fey, to all of the above."
"Because of me. I'm the key to the murder of Antone Garcias."
&&&
Hold up, Nick. Wait a moment. Where'd Pearly go?
She was right behind us...
Let's backtrack. She probably got distracted.
Hey, yeah -- wasn't there a great, big hedge of roses back around the corner there? She probably thought she could pick some and surprise us with them later; you know her ... um, romantic notions about us.
Ha. I can see your blush from here, Nick. Pearly!
Pearls!
Pearly! Come on, little Pearly, it's getting dark -- hurry up! Whatever your mission is --
Pearls! Where are you?
-- it can wait. I want to go home. My feet hurt and we've got court tomorrow.
Hang on a minute...
What is it?
Hey. HEY. HEY, what are you DOING? Is that Pearls?! Pearls!
STOP!! Pearl! Let her go! That's my cousin you've got there! Oh my god, what are you .... GET YOUR HANDS OFF OF HER!
.... !
Maya! No, don't -- !
Mystic Maya! Mystic Maya! ... !! AHH!
.......
Maya? Maya, here. ... Pearls, are you okay?
Yes, Mr. Nick. But ... Mystic Maya .... is he dead?
I think .... I think .... I think he is. Oh, god. Ohh ... this isn't happening!
&&&
The hotel room might be big enough for all of them, but it certainly is not big enough for them and all the nervous tension they've collected around them. Anytime someone speaks, everyone else jumps a little, like they'd forgotten the sound of each other's voices.
Maya folds the coffee filters; the results all have the same vague shape, and no one's really certain if she's trying to do origami and no one wants to ask in case she isn't. Gumshoe bustles back and forth around the kitchenette, obviously trying to do something before remembering he has no supplies to work with. His wife drums at her laptop, but her eyes keep drifting to each of the faces around her.
Franziska sits on the edge of one of the double beds, wrapping the phone cord around one of her fingers. She only seems to be listening to half of what the babysitter on the other end of the line is saying. "There should be an extra pack of nappies in the basement beside the washing machines ... and is she? She felt a little hot when I put her to bed last night. Make sure she drinks her tonic, and don't believe her when she tells you she has and shows you an empty cup; she just likes to pour it down the sink while your back is turned. Yes. I know. All right. Thank you. You too."
When she hangs up, her husband, leaning against the bathroom doorframe, blurts, "What are we going to do?"
Glances are thrown around, because Larry voiced what they were all thinking.
"Well, you found us. That's the first step." And even though he's trying to be aloof, the gratitude shines clear in Phoenix's face. He set his expectations really low, so he had a tendency to be easily overwhelmed; everyone present knew that too.
"The police are officially looking for you now," Maggey says bleakly. The San Francisco Chronicle is pulled up on her screen.
Franziska crosses her legs at the ankle. "And if they have Adrian Andrews, then they have Ron DeLite, and no matter how tight lipped they remain with their testimonies, they'll say enough. It won't be that hard for the police to find out what plane you were on that morning, if any of them have even half the efficiency of Gumshoe. They'll figure out where you are."
"They'll come after me," says Edgeworth from in front of the window. "And they'll go after Larry, and from us, it's just a short puddle-jump to you."
"So first things first, pal. We need to get you and miss Maya out of the country."
"Canada's a great place," Larry says brightly but unhelpfully. "I always liked Canada."
Phoenix looks from one to the other, and thinks they resemble something straight out of an old "how many [blank] does it take to screw in a light bulb" jokes. How many people have been blindly dragged into this mess? Nobody looks comfortable, except maybe Franziska, but she didn't really count because she's comfortable around death in any way, shape, or form and will probably go home and laugh at them.
Edgeworth pulls his cell phone from his pocket and flips it open, his face set in the half-scowl, half-flinch he wears when he's thinking particularly hard. He doesn't look at them when he says, "Wherever you decide to go, I can get you discount tickets."
"Money's not a problem, Edgeworth; we can pay full price --" begins Phoenix testily.
"Wait," Franziska looks at her brother sharply in disbelief. "Is that why you became a passenger pilot? For Phoenix Wright?"
Edgeworth remains scornfully silent, which effectively gives everyone their answer.
"Mr. Edgeworth!" exclaims Gumshoe, his face transfused with a surprised warmth. Maggey claps her hands together, like her heart was threatening to burst out of her chest. Phoenix stares hard at the side of the Edgeworth's face, until the latter glances away from his cell phone long enough to meet his eyes.
"You became a lawyer to find out what happened to me," he says baldly. "I am only repaying a debt."
"I see," says Phoenix, who doesn't really.
"I think," whispers Maya, who has been uncharacteristically silent and subdued thusfar, and instantly all attention is on her. "I think we should go back to San Francisco."
"What!"
"Absolutely not!"
"And do what, exactly, little girl? Turn yourself in?"
"Exactly that," A flush rushes to Maya's face, and she balls her hands into fists. "Yes. Yes! Exactly that. We used to put criminals in jail; all of us! Except you, Larry, but whatever. And now you're helping me run. When I'm guilty. I'm guilty!" She flings her arms out. "I killed him! I killed that man, what's-his-name, and I know more than anyone that I should rot in jail and instead, I'm working in a post office in Paris and I ruined the lives of everyone connected with me and I don't want to do it anymore."
"Maya --" starts Phoenix, and she turns to him, face burning and eyes alight.
"And you. Most of all, I'm so sorry, Nick. First to ask you to leave everything and then when it was so easy for Larry to find us, I had the gall to tell you that it'd be better if we had nothing to do with each other; I'm so ... so selfish." Tears bead up at the corners of her eyes. "I'll go back and I'll confess to everything, and it will clear your name and you can go back to what you love to do so you don't have to flip burgers in Ireland anymore --"
"No! Don't! They're really good burgers!" objects Larry, earning him a dirty, silencing look from Gumshoe, who's buried in the fridge, still looking for something to do with his hands.
Maya leans forward, wrapping her arms around Phoenix and burying her face into his chest so that her words were muffled, "-- I'll make it all right. For everybody. I will. I promise. And … and … " Her voice drops so that it’s barely audible. “I want to see Pearly.”
Phoenix returns the embrace. He puts his mouth close to her ear and says, almost nonchalantly, "I think you should marry me."
Edgeworth's head whips around, Maggey's hands fly to her mouth, and Gumshoe bangs his head on the door of the fridge when he looks up too fast. The next moment is electrifying.
Maya pulls back, staring at him like she's positive she hadn't heard him correctly. Her face is still pink from her outburst and her eyes are moist. He looks right back, as serious as he could ever get.
"Okay," she says, like he had offered her pancakes and she was agreeing even though she wasn't too fond of pancakes. She glances around at the faces around her -- Maggey's the only one who looks happy with this development; Larry catches his wife's eye and mouths, "is he serious?" and she shrugs helplessly -- and energy fills her from head to toe. "Yes!" she says more emphatically.
Phoenix's face cracks into a grin, and she returns it, and they sit there, smiling sloppily at each other. Then, like it had just occurred to him, he grabs her face between his hands and kisses her. It's a kiss without passion; more childlike in its joy and earnesty. Her arms go around him, and as one, they break apart to look expectantly at Franziska.
"Oh!" she blinks, caught off guard, and then looks around distractedly. "I guess, yes, I could ... I don't see any reason why I couldn't. I am a magistrate, after all, and we have the required number of witnesses ... only I don't have a gavel."
Gumshoe immediately produces a strainer from a cabinet under the sink. He's in such a good mood that he doesn't even balk under the withering look she gives him, but she takes the strainer. Phoenix and Maya get up, hands falling away from around each other so that their fingers could twine together. Larry leans across the bed to reach the telephone so he could laughingly order a bottle of champagne from room service. Edgeworth edges around the bedlam to stand by the window, cell phone to his ear.
"Yes, please," he says into the mouthpiece. "I'd like to purchase two tickets for San Francisco ... yeah, I'm Captain Miles Edgeworth, so if I could use my discount ..."
"You know," Maggey murmurs in an undertone, looping her arm through her husband’s. "When you took me to Europe, I never thought I'd wind up attending a wedding."
.....
Pearl picks at a loose thread at the hem of her blouse. "I had just stopped to smell the roses, that's all. They always say on PBS that nothing ever smells quite as good as a rose, but I remember very clearly that those roses didn't smell like much of anything.... Then he -- that man, that Antone Garcias - he grabbed me from behind."
"You don't have to talk about it if you don't want to," the head detective tells her without any particular sensitivity at all.
"I was ten years old," Pearl continues like she hadn't said a thing. "And sheltered. I didn't know what his intentions were. Maya and Mr. Ni -- Phoenix, I mean, they weren't very far away, and they came before anything happened, I guess. He had me by the elbow, and he tried to hide me behind his body, but Maya saw me, and she ... she started screaming, I think. She flung herself at him, and they grappled. He got a hold on her neck and tried to choke her with her own necklace, and that's when Nick intervened. The necklace broke -- that's how he wound up buried with the megatama, I assume. Maya kind of ... fell to her knees and the man went after Nick. Finally, Maya got behind him and gave him a shove, and he stumbled and tripped on the curb. His skull cracked open on the asphalt."
Silence follows this proclamation, and the head detective slowly slides off the table, smiling victoriously. "Thank you, Ms. Fey," she says emphatically. “That’s all we needed to hear.”
Pearl holds up a finger; just a single finger. Somewhere in the middle of her speech, she had rolled up her sleeves, like she was about to tackle a large pile of dirty dishes. "I think you're forgetting something, Detective Starr," she says in that low, level voice that makes her seem so much older than seventeen. "I know a little something about law. It's justified self-defense; he tried to kill her and Nick, so she pushed him with no intent to kill, and that's what I'll testify to."
Angel Starr realizes with a surprised bat of her eyelashes that Pearl had just told her more in that one sentence than she had in her entire testimony thusfar. "If it was so justified, then why did they flee?"
"Because they loved me," Pearl says with pure, plain devotion, and nothing more. "Both of them, since the moment they met me. They couldn't ... their consciences wouldn't let them ... let them stay. Maya had already proven she valued her own life and mine over another human being's, and if I know her, she would have believed she was tainted by that. All she wanted for me was to grow up in a happy, stable home. Feys have this bad habit of dreaming impossible things."
To her mounting frustration, the head detective begins to find that it makes sense, in a twisted, sentimental kind of way.
Seven years ago, Antone Garcias tried to rape Pearl, or kidnap her or whatever, and in the fight that followed, Maya Fey accidentally killed him. To ensure that Pearl wouldn't have to grow up with both a mother and a cousin in jail -- or worse, out free to interact with her with their blood-stained hands -- Phoenix Wright got them both out of the country, using Ron DeLite's money and Adrian Andrews's home and the loyalty and selective forgetfulness he manages to aspire in everyone he meets.
Lastly, Maya Fey had made Pearl promise to immerse herself in the world outside of Kurain, to wash the spirit medium from her, to -- Angel feels a shiver run up her spine -- to ensure that Pearl would lose the power, so that Antone Garcias could not haunt her dreams.
She opens her mouth to speak, not knowing exactly what was going to come out, but a soft, deep voice from behind her interrupts her.
"That's enough, Detective," Godot puts a hand on her shoulder and moves her to the side, pressing one finger onto the "stop" button on the tape recorder. He smells like chilies and coffee beans; she hadn't even seen or heard him enter the room.
"I'm not done talking to the witness, prosecutor. You have no place here," she states coolly.
The lawyer's smile is smug to the point of pain. "On the contrary. Pearl is still just a minor, and as her legal guardian, entrusted to me by Maya Fey and the state court of California, I say we're done here."
Pearl stands, pulling her sleeves back down to her wrists and coming to stand beside Godot with ease and familiarity. “It was nice talking to you, Detective.”
Later, alone in the interrogation room with no company except a slow, sinking sensation in her stomach, Pearl Fey's file, and the tape recorder, Detective Angel Starr stares at her hands and says, wonderingly, "And all along, here I was, thinking it was Wright who had the whole law enforcement of this city in the palm of his hand. But I was wrong -- it's his assistant."
.....
Ema leans back so far in her chair that it's in danger of falling over backwards, chewing steadily on her fingernails to get them all an even length. Eventually, she says into the phone, "I'm sorry to hear that, ma'am, but Detective Starr isn't here right now. I can direct you to her answering machine if you want, but I don't know when she'll be back. Yes. Uh-huh, you too. Good-bye."
She puts the receiver back into the cradle and heads down to the main floor of the Criminal Affairs Department for no other reason than she's bored and she can. It is, as she hoped, a flurry of activity.
"Detective Skye!" Gumshoe calls out to her from behind a precarious pile of boxes. "Where do you want these claims?"
"13A, please, and make sure they're organized alphabetically!" she eyes its haphazard lean distrustfully. "And in case I haven't said it yet, welcome back. It's good to have you on the force again, Detective."
"Thanks, sir!" Gumshoe beams. "It's good to be back." Just as quickly, his countenance falls. "It also probably won't be the last time you say that, given my track record."
"There's a reason you're still here," Ema assures him warmly. She hasn't asked him how his trip was, because if there's one thing she thinks she might have developed in the ten years since she's been here, it's some tact. She spends so long standing there watching them all move around -- the young detective who'd been with Gumshoe when they found the Garcias corpse complaining bitterly about being unable to find the file tabs when he'd just put them down right here, the newest prosecutor who thought it'd be jolly fun to bring in a radio and play rock 'n roll from over eighty years ago, policemen and secretarial aides alike -- and thinking, happily, what a big mess, that she doesn't see the couple walk in until they're standing right behind her. She turns.
"We're here to turn ourselves in," the woman tells her very seriously and dramatically, in the same breath Phoenix Wright says, flabbergasted, "Ema Skye?"
Her hair is shorter than in the pictures Ema has seen in old case files, she's wearing casual clothing, and her throat is bare of any glowing conch-shell stone, but Maya Fey is unmistakable. Her face is worryingly pale, but as she glances between Phoenix and Ema, a little bit of color rushes back to her cheeks. "Wait," she goes. "You know her?"
"I'm Detective Ema Skye," she says with the lilt of a new accent similar to their own, and Phoenix soundlessly mouths, "detective?" in a manner both astonished and proud. She stares at his hair.
"Maya F-- Well, no, Maya Wright, as of about three days ago," the animation comes right back to her face, and only then does Ema notice that they're holding hands.
Still a romantic at heart, she can't control the smile that spreads about her face. "Congratulations. So what was this about turning yourselves in?"
"I did it," Maya says instantly, before she could lose her resolve. "I confess to murdering Antone Garcias."
"And I'm her accomplice," Phoenix interjects, earning him a fierce frown from his wife; it had plainly been a sore topic of argument between them for quite some time. "We've been running for too long. So we're here to talk to the fine men in blue."
Ema makes a show of tapping her chin thoughtfully. "Antone Garcias, hmmm?" she chews absently at her thumbnail. "Now, as you can see, we're a little bit messy right now --" she gestures behind her to the hustle and bustle of reorganization the Criminal Affairs Department is undergoing. "-- so I may be completely wrong, and it will take me awhile to find the file, but I could have sworn the detective in charge of that case ruled that Antone Garcias was running too fast and tripped. No foul play involved."
Maya and Phoenix exchange disbelieving looks.
Ema shrugs. "Now, if you insist, I guess I could find you a lawyer and you could plead guilty, but frankly, there'd be no point. Everyone’s better off this way."
She sees the light bulb go on above Phoenix's head. "Why would you do something like that?"
Her glasses slip down her skull, and she pushes them back up. "Let's just say that once upon a time, I was in a situation very much like yours, and someone did a very kind turn for me. I guess I'm just loyal." She looks past them, through the sliding glass doors to where Godot loiters in front of the Blue Badger, drinking from a styrafoam cup. He says something sarcastic to the brown-haired woman at his side, and she laughs. "Now unless I'm mistaken, there's someone who has been dying to see you."
Slowly, and still a little disbelieving, Phoenix and Maya turn to follow her gaze.
It’s unclear who sees who first. Pearl smiles slowly and explosively and joyfully all over her face, her lips forming their names kind of like a woman praying.
And Ema Skye knows everything she's done is worth it, just for that moment.
&&&
When the owner of Limerick's best and most authentic American burger joint finally retired, his successor found only two things left in his office. He assumes they'd been left by accident, and mails them on.
One was a photograph that obviously had spent a long time locked away from the sunlight, as it was still rich with color. It was smudged like it had been tucked into somebody's apron pocket for too long. A man and a woman stand arm-in-arm in front of what looks like a fine-end restaurant, wine glasses in hand and smiling silly. Phoenix Wright and Mia Fey, is written on the back. circa 2015.
The second is a calling card whose shell design has been doodled over in Crayolas. It too has writing on the back.
I know the secret of the death of Antone Garcias. It's safe with me. Franziska.
Fandom: Phoenix Wright
Pairing/Characters: Ensemble
Word Count: 8600
This is the Aka Why the Characters of Phoenix Wright are Not in the Fourth Phoenix Wright Game, and as thus, takes place during Apollo Justice. We'll say it's AU, too, because I know Apollo Justice will not go like this.
It begins, as these things tend to, with a dead body.
These are the facts, outlined for her by Dick Gumshoe in a fading ballpoint pen. Mid-morning, he went to answer a hysterical housewife's phone call from the middle of bourgeois suburbia hell. They found bones, she said; the construction workers who were digging a hole for a new Jacuzzi put their shovels right through the skull.
By lunchtime, he holds the pieces between his hands. It comes complete with the rest of the skeleton; long, rank, yellow bones, still knit together and sounding off like wooden wind chimes when they were lifted out.
"Male," says the youngest detective from behind him, pushing his glasses up on his nose and peering close, finding the minute details that Gumshoe never had a prayer of deciphering. "Real young, too; look, his wisdom teeth aren't fully grown in yet."
They bring the black bags and Gumshoe keeps his eyes on the bones until every last one disappears in it.
"Hold up, Chief," goes the detective, still kneeling over the would-be-Jacuzzi-turned-grave. "What's this?"
He leans in, pulling out a small, smooth stone no bigger than a business card. He brushes the dirt off, revealing a swirl pattern not unlike a conch shell; when he tilts it up to the light, it almost looks faintly green, like it had once been glowing and now was long dead.
Gumshoe throws up spectacularly onto the housewife's rosebushes.
&&&
"It was a long time coming, pal," he tells his wife later, after bringing home barbeque from Shank's and announcing that he'd resigned from work today -- unemployment wasn't unfamiliar with the Gumshoe household; it just usually wasn't a voluntary state. "This is one murder I will not mix myself up in." He rubs a hand haggardly down his face. "I'd hoped they'd never dig it up."
"What was it?" his wife sits on the arm of his chair, resting a patient hand on his shoulder and keeping her voice level, and this was why he married her. "What did he die holding?"
Gumshoe stares blankly at the fireplace. "Maya Fey's megatama."
&&&
Miles Edgeworth learns about the murder via scrolling marquee on some local news station at Heathrow; it'd been a slow news day, he guesses, tossing the remains of his breakfast into the trash and continuing on his way.
He passes Ema Skye going the other direction, and momentarily catches her profile in his peripheral, burning quick and fast onto his consciousness; he turns, her name leaping to his lips before he ever really remembers who she was, but she's concentrating on finding the right departure gate, cell phone to her ear, and slips away into the crowd before he can catch her attention.
She removes her plane ticket from her billfold, tucking her phone into the hollow between her shoulder and her ear. "Have they identified the victim yet?" she asks, leaning against the console that announces she's at Gate B14, departure non-stop to Detroit, service on to Los Angelos.
"Yup," buzzes the young detective's voice from half-way around the world. "His name's Antone Garcias. He was sixteen years old when he was hit over the head with a blunt, heavy object -- or, at least, they think so. It was pretty hard to tell, what with the shovel cracking his skull to bits and all."
Detective Skye absorbs this information, and then, with natural curiosity, "Why did the previous detective resign?"
"We don't know," his voice became hushed. "He just dropped everything, quick as a hot potato. I heard he and his wife hopped on the first outbound plane going out of the country." He whistles the theme from the Twilight Zone to her. "Suspicious, huh? Then again, Gumshoe was never one for his subtlety."
&&&
Adrian Andrews makes a pathetic picture when she's on no sleep; hunched in the interrogation chair, teeth grinding together. They didn't give her the opportunity to change out of her cocktail dress before they arrested her, so her hair is falling out of its impractical style and her make-up is running. She'd been formidable and angry the first thirty-six hours they held her, her head held high and her lips firmly sealed, but the one thing the police precinct and the prosecution office banks on is for loyalty to always crack.
"Oh, God, forgive me!" she sobs into her hands, goosebumps quivering all along her bare arms. "Forgive me!"
She wipes her eyes with the back of her hand. "Yes, I know what you're talking about. The night you say ... the night this young man went missing ... I had two visitors at my house, early in the morning. They needed somewhere to hide, because a friend of theirs was arranging plane tickets and fake passports for them for the earliest flight the next morning. They told me as such, too; obviously they've forgotten how unreliable I am.
"You need to understand; I owed them everything. It occurred to me, of course, that something awful had happened, but ..."
"We need those names, Ms. Andrews."
She sends them a dark, smudged, scathing look, and then swivels in her seat to send the same look to the two-way mirror, behind which the head detective of the Antone Garcias case clenches her nails around her sleeve. "You already know what I'm going to say since you have me here."
"Aahh -- um, right. Yeah. We need you to say it for the record, though."
She drags a deep, rattling breath into her lungs. "Forgive me," she says one more time, and this time, they know she isn't talking to them. "It was Phoenix Wright and Maya Fey."
&&&
The head detective slowly puts her fork down on top of her salad, taking her napkin and wiping her mouth with deliberate control. "Can you tell me how nobody even noticed that Larry Butz has been missing for the past seven years?"
Being one of the few members of the male race unperturbed by her stare, the Chief of Police shrugs off-handedly. "Nobody filed a missing persons report. According to his landlord, Butz has a history of not paying his rent, so he never bothered to track him down; just sold all his stuff on eBay. Same for his boss. Well, of the week," he amends. "Frankly, Detective, the police force of California have more to worry about than the disappearance of a scatter-brained deadbeat."
The head detective has to admit he has a point. "You'll find that the suspects' pattern is very easy to trace, sir. They rely on the people who owe them. Larry Butz owes them a lot --"
"But unlike the others, who have money and influence, Butz is of no particular benefit for them."
"Nothing outside of his loyalty."
The Chief of Police flips briefly through the notepad in front of him. "Seven years ago, a couple months after Antone Garcias's murder, Butz left the country. The last person to speak to him was a girlfriend, and she said he was looking for an old friend of his: Mr. Phoenix Wright."
She sits up a little straighter. "Did he find them?"
"She doesn't know. He never contacted her again. He lived in Germany for three years, and then he got married and took his wife's name and that's when his paper trial ends."
Starlight hits the head detective's eyes. "Oho!” she slams her palms on the table. “Think, sir; who do we know who both lives in Germany and is connected to our suspects?"
&&&
Later, in complete darkness, with no company but the slow, sickening swoop of her stomach, Adrian Andrews hugs her knees to her chest and fights the emptiness that always comes with betrayal. I held out long enough, she tells herself, over and over again, trying to drag strength from this one hope.
She remembers, clearly, watching the discovery of the body on the news -- the slender bones all jumbled and the megatama they'd found in its cold, dead fingers -- and she remembers taking one long gulp of her wine and setting the glass on the side table. She got up, stepped over the prone figure of Matt Engarde's cat (to this day, she cannot think of it as her own) and found her date book, locked in its letter box. She flipped through the dates until she found a phone number, the numbers even and clear, printed carelessly over November 8th, which wasn't significant in anyway, just the first page she'd opened to when the number was offered. She dialed it with hands as light and fluttering as a butterfly.
The voice that answered her was thick with sleep, and cross, and greeted her with an oath in a language she didn't know.
Get them out, Adrian Andrews said.
&&&
A wave of dizziness overcomes Franziska, and she abandons filing papers into her briefcase in favor of sinking down into her chair, fingertips pressed to her temple like it would have even the slightest damming effect against the heat that rushes up underneath her skin and the sensation of rolling her brain up in burs.
When it passes, she discovers that she has company; her husband beams at her from behind a riot of the most ridiculously-colored flowers she has ever seen.
"Good morning, Your Honor!" he says with a cheerfulness that makes her head pound in protest.
She reaches out to him, pressing one gloved hand against his wrist to tell him she returns the sentiment. Out loud, she says, "What are you doing here? You never visit me at work."
Clueing into her mood, he sets the flowers down next to her briefcase and kneels beside her chair, making a face at her. "I'm bringing my wife flowers is what I'm doing. I'm always getting told that husbands never appreciate their wives, so I decided I'd better come up here right away and tell you I appreciate you."
"I wouldn't keep you if you didn't," she informs him, tone wry, and, as usual, he doesn't notice the underhanded insult and his smile is back on his face in full wattage. This is why she married him, she remembers with sudden fondness; his ability to constantly surprise her, to make her laugh, and her own need to keep somebody in check and his willingness to be kept in check. He's besotted with her, and it's a wonderful thing to see every day; it's one of the things that keeps her in love. She rests a hand on his cheek, and he presses a quick kiss to her palm, as if he's afraid that the sudden display of gentleness is fleeting.
"I got a phone call really early this morning," she says, and his face grows pinched.
"The kids haven't done anything wrong, have they?"
She grins wolfishly, moving her hands to the back of his neck. "Nothing their father hasn't already told me of. No, they weren't even awake yet."
He touches their foreheads together, so that the bridges of their noses brush and she could feel every breath he took rustle against her lips. "Who was it?"
"Adrian Andrews."
She can instantly tell the gravity of this is lost on him, because nothing about his demeanor changes. "We need to call a babysitter for a couple nights," she continues, an element of briskness and business entering her tone. "Remember? We made a promise, a long time ago. Von Karmas never forget their promises, and never leave them unfulfilled. Phoenix Wright and Maya Fey need us."
The light bulb in Larry's mind goes on, and he reaches up to urgently grasp her hands in his. "Then we need to get going! It'll take us at least a couple of hours to drive to France and --"
"Come here," she demands, and his smile curves against her lips when she kisses him, because if anyone understands the consequences of aiding international felons, it’s her, the prosecutor-turned-magistrate, and she has more to lose than anyone. But first and foremost, she is a von Karma, and she made a promise.
&&&
"Howdy, boss," Samuel shrugs his coat off and hangs it on the hook by the door, where it stays for approximately thirty seconds before sliding to the floor, to the general annoyance of its owner.
Rolling his eyes, Phoenix plucks two tickets down and drops them in the recycling, a skillet of hissing eggs in his other hand. "Morning, Samuel; I'm glad you finally decided to show up. Did you catch up on your beauty sleep?"
"'Ey now!" the young chef balls up the closest cleaning rag and pitches it at him good-naturedly. He grabs his apron from its peg beside his coat and ties it around him in a long-practiced movement. "I'm going to send you home to get some yourself, boss, if you're going to harp on me like my ma. What're we doing?"
Phoenix smiles despite himself, serving up the eggs and a couple steaming biscuits onto a plate and hitting the bell. "If you'd get the hamburger out of the freezer and work your magic with it, it'd be great; we're about to start the lunch rush."
"You got it! Some immensely authentic American hamburgers, coming right up!"
One of the waitresses pokes her head in, lifting a couple tickets so she can peer around the kitchen. "'Ey, Will," she goes upon spotting him, and as he is a creature of habit, it sends an unpleasant jolt down to Phoenix's toes to remember that's his name now. He never could get used to it. "There's a man up here asking for you. First time you ever got a personal visitor at work, innit?" Her face drops into a mocking leer. "Mikaela owes me five euro now, she does. She'd been so sure you're the only man in all of Limerick who owns a restaurant but don't have any friends."
Phoenix laughs, stripping his gloves off and lobbing them towards the trash. "It's probably just Mitch, come to argue with me about the latest mutation in the artificial cow stock and rising meat prices," he snatches at the stray wisps of his hair, tucking them back up under his hairnet.
"Dunno why he bothers," says Samuel from across the room. "Nobody's ever won an argument against you yet, boss."
"Some people stay extraordinarily hard-headed," Phoenix's voice is dry. "Hey, watch the timer, will you? There's a set of buns due to come up soon."
The boy waves a spatula around in acknowledgement, and chuckling, Phoenix pushes his way out into the diner main. It's at least ten degrees cooler out here, is the first thing he notices. The second thing he notices is Miles Edgeworth, sitting at the counter, plucking nervously at his cufflinks. The smile freezes right on his lips.
Edgeworth catches sight of him; he pauses a moment, eyes raking him from head to toe, taking in the long hair he has bunched into a ponytail at the base of his neck and his grease-stained apron and his startled, open-like-a-book expression. His answering smile is sympathetic.
"Order's up," he says sadly, and raises a sardonic eyebrow when Phoenix’s knees give out.
&&&
She paces the length of the room once, letting the silence gather at the ends of her fingers and tremble around her shoulders until she is certain everyone is aware of it. Then she turns, laying her palms flat on the table. Her patience frays around the edges of her mind, but still she manages to keep her voice level.
"Mr. DeLite," she closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. "I don't think you quite understand the severity of your situation here."
Ron DeLite tilts his head, letting his eyes linger carelessly on the set of her face, gauging how close she is to breaking. "I'm pretty sure I do ... ah, um, yes," he bobs his head in a firm nod. "No, I understand."
"But you're not telling us anything at all!" blurts one of the other interrogators, rough with frustration, and the head detective shoots him a quelling look, before leaning across the table to stare Ron DeLite right in the eyes. He smiles a dippy smile, refusing to be cowed.
"Adrian Andrews confirms that the morning after Antone Garcias was murdered, you dropped by her house to pick up Mr. Wright and Ms. Fey. She overheard them talking about a friend who was going to provide them with plane tickets and passports to aid their escape."
"Oh! Sounds dramatic."
She turns her palms up to him beseechingly. "You have to understand how this looks, Mr. DeLite. The evidence is stacked against you. You and Ms. Andrews both feel like you owe the suspects. You're rich; rich enough to afford two last-minute plane tickets. You're a security guard with connections in the court system; you could easily procure fake passports on short notice. And you have a history of ... thrill-seeking, shall we say. It would appeal to your most romantic nature, the idea of helping Mr. Wright and Ms. Fey flee the country."
"Mmm, yes, I ... think I might possibly see where you're coming from," he tugs thoughtfully on a lock of his hair. "But isn't forging passports illegal? So if I tell you what you want to hear, regardless of its truth ... well, then I'd be incriminating myself. That's my fifth ... ah, something, right? My right to silence."
And she would be damned if he didn't clam up right then and there. It doesn’t matter what she said, he just smiles at her, faintly confused and uncooperative.
"He did it," she says fiercely, the moment she leaves. "That smug son of a bitch smuggled them out, I know it."
"I don't get it, detective," Ema Skye scratches the side of her head with her pen. Her face, if the head detective bothered to look closely, is white with conflict. "I feel like we're missing something big. You'd think Ms. Andrews and Mr. DeLite would know better than to help them if they're really guilty; why would they risk it? It has to be more than gratitude and loyalty."
"I know. They'll tell me. If it's not Ron DeLite, I'll find someone else who's willing to cough up for me," her smile is thin. "I've come too far for Phoenix Wright and little miss Maya to take it all from me. I'll put them in an isolation cell for the rest of their lives; you have my word."
Detective Skye grows paler.
&&&
Having Miles Edgeworth standing in the middle of his living room is highly disconcerting; kind of like coming home and finding a piece of furniture moved to the complete opposite end of the room from where it was and having no recollection of having ever moved it. It gives Phoenix a start every time he comes out of a room and Edgeworth is right there, examining the artwork on his walls and the stack of mail with his fake name on it.
They'd made extremely stilted, civilized conversation ("Is the restaurant yours?" "Hmm? Oh. Yeah. Best burger joint in all of Ireland; we even have a little plaque that says so. Won it in 2024! What about you?" "Pilot." "Ohhhhh. So that's why you have all that ... flair all over your coat. So, wait, you're not a ..." "Of course I am. Just on my days off, though; in Germany, they treat being a lawyer kind of like a hobby.") and there's a cab waiting for them outside. Phoenix throws things indiscriminately into a suitcase; he should start taking people's advice and just have one ready, constantly.
"One last thing," he says to Edgeworth, flipping the latches on his suitcase shut. He gestures for the other man to move and unhooks the picture from the wall from behind him. He removes the backing; sandwiched between it and the photograph is another smaller, more yellowed picture. He slips it into the pouch in his apron, and puts the rest back onto the wall. "Now we can go."
"Wright..." Edgeworth reaches out, half-impulsively, and then checks himself.
Phoenix flicks off the lights in the bathroom and takes one last, cursory glance around the flat. "What?"
"It never seemed prudent to ask this before ... but why are you here? You're not the one who smashed Antone Garcias's skull in. In fact, you've done nothing wrong; you could have easily just sent her to Europe and gone about your life. Not a single mark on your record." He wets his lips. "So why did you give up ... everything and come with her?"
Phoenix pauses, blinking owlishly in the muted light coming from the hallway. "She asked me to," he says with the blank tone of those telling the absolute truth.
It takes Edgeworth a moment to understand, but when he does, his stomach gives a startled leap of realization; in Wright's mind, this was enough. It was the only excuse he needed.
Because she asked him to.
&&&
"And how about we stick one right here!" Maya Fey laughs, pressing a stamp right into the center of his forehead. "Oh, no! You look like you're ready to be mailed! You better get out of here, before someone mistakes you for a package and sticks you in the outbox!"
The little boy squirms, peeling the stamp off and glancing around furtively. She laughs again, and helps him down off the counter. "Run along, then, squirt. And watch where you're going!"
"I am sorry I got blood all over your clothes, mademoiselle," he mumbles morosely out of his bee-stung mouth, and she looks down at herself, surprised to find his blood was splattered all over her slacks. She did not know skinned knees could bleed that much.
She waves it off. "I'm used to washing blood out of things. It's a lot easier to get it out of this fabric than it was what I used to wear, I'll tell you that. Here, have a lollipop. I got it out of your mom's lunch, but shhh, don't tell her!" She beams in response to his lightning-fast smile and shooes him out the back door, before brushing her hands off and returning to the front counter.
"Really, Maya Fey," Franziska von Karma drawls, leaning onto her elbows and fixing her with the smallest of condescending smiles, and Maya's heart shudders to a stop inside of her chest and she barely quells the urge to shush her -- in her more immature days, she would have, and effectively given them both away. "Your friends go to all this trouble to weave you a new identity, and what do you choose to do with it? Work in a Parisian post office."
"Don't knock it till you try it, von Karma," Maya works her mouth to try and get rid of the dry, crumbly taste of fear.
"Mmm," Franziska wrinkles her nose distastefully. "Funny thing happened in San Francisco yesterday. They dug up a body of a teenage boy, seven years dead. And they found your megatama at the grave site. Incredibly sloppy of you, wasn't it?"
Maya sways on the spot, and grips the counter to keep herself steady. "Are you here to arrest me?" she asks, very quietly. The notion fills her with a quiet, cold calm.
She straightens, planting a hand on her hip. "I am not. You see, unlike those American fools you left behind, I know the whole story. I am here because there are those who care about you and who want you safe. An amazing amount of effort has been put together for your sake, little girl."
"I killed a man," she says bluntly, bristling at the 'little girl' comment. "You don't think I deserve justice for that?"
"I know the whole story," Franziska repeats, gravity heavy in her voice and her eyes, and she waits until she is certain Maya is listening. "And I would not prosecute you. I pity the fool who tries."
It's strange, Maya Fey thinks, that in a roundabout, underhanded kind of way, that is the nicest thing anyone has said to her in years.
&&&
"The problem with this case is that nobody is unbiased towards the suspects," Godot leans back in his chair, and she can only see his lips move around the rim of his coffee mug. "It's been a long time since I've seen the precinct handle a murder so sloppily."
"Are you going to take the case?" Ema Skye asks, flipping through his address book idly with her free hand. Her glasses slip down her skull.
"I will not take the case until they give me one to take," the prosecutor says dryly. "There's no murder weapon. It's not even one hundred percent clear that the victim was clubbed over the head. Or who did it. They just have the Fey girl's rock, found in proximity, and the fact that Phoenix Wright and Maya Fey left the country with fake passports the very next day, but unless they confess or unless they find the murder weapon with their fingerprints, it'll be hard to prosecute that. Maybe they were just eloping."
Detective Skye's eyebrows go up, but Godot doesn't correct himself. She can't be sure, but she thinks he furrows his forehead thoughtfully.
"The only thing I know for certain is that there is a lot of protecting going on. Only one of them could have committed the murder; the other one's willing to take the fall as well. Then there's Ms. Andrews, Mr. DeLite, your incompetent predecessor, Detective Gumshoe -- everything they're willing to go through to keep mum."
He takes another long swallow, and wipes his mouth on the back of his head. "I don't like where this is going. So, good luck, Detective, with finding a prosecutor who will take this case, for it will not be me."
&&&
Gumshoe's wife tells him, ironically but without bitterness, than when she finally saw Europe, this wasn't how she envisioned it. He's just glad they could afford plane tickets on his salary. She's right, of course; sitting in a hotel lobby in northern Wales could not be anyone's idea of the ideal European vacation.
They're all in a row on a bench by the door: Gumshoe on the end, staring at his loafers; his wife, who is keeping track of developments back home through a satellite link he installed on her cell phone; Maya Fey, her face white as a sheet and her hands fluttering at her throat as if searching for something; Larry von Karma and Franziska on the opposite end, holding hands. Nobody talks much, except to ask questions about time and travel conditions.
Maya is the first to see them; Larry feels the deep, shuddering gasp go through her whole frame, and goosebumps prickle along his arms from the energy of it.
"NICK!" she cries, and this is the Maya everyone knows; the one who will break decibel levels and rupture something in her own throat without batting an eyelash, and she closes the distance between them in a couple bounds before anyone's really aware that she's left her seat.
Phoenix Wright and Maya Fey collide in the entrance of the hotel lobby, tangling and staggering in their enthusiasm to get their arms around each other and hold on tight. Their exclamations are loud and explosive ("Oh my god, Nick, your hair!") and within no time, they've made a bubble of spectators around themselves, but of course, neither of them are paying the slightest bit of attention to anyone but the other.
Behind them, Edgeworth catches his sister's eye, and she releases Larry's hand to stand and move to his side. He smiles at her, not warmly enough to show his teeth, but smiling nonetheless. Their reunion doesn't have a tenth of the emotion of Phoenix and Maya's, but she loops her arm through his, and it's enough.
"Maya," goes Phoenix, sounding slightly perturbed and more than a little worried. "Why do you have blood all over your pants?"
Maya throws her head back and laughs too loudly and too forcefully, and she leans against him, head dipping into the hollow of his shoulder, and Edgeworth and Franziska know that whatever decisions they made, whatever situations they manipulated, it was worth it, just for this moment.
&&&
Pearl Fey, age seventeen, is a singularly plain, uninteresting girl to look at. She sits low in her chair, foot cocked out and arms folded in a way that mediates between defiant and bored. Her hair hangs long and straight around her face; it's parted down the middle and an unflattering shade of doe-brown. From a ribbon tied around her throat hangs a megatama, resting heavy on her collarbones. She's too busy worrying at what little thumbnail she has left to notice the head detective enter the room.
She tosses a thick file down onto the table in front of Pearl with a sharp smack; the girl jumps, chair screeching on the linoleum, and she gives her a moment to take a good, long look at her own name printed neatly on the file tab, and to understand the significance of its thickness.
"Pearl Fey," she drawls, perching herself on the corner of the table, leaning forward enough to touch the megatama with her fingertip. "You're a spirit medium, right?"
It becomes immediately transparent that this was the wrong thing to say. Pearl straightens up, pushing the head detective's hand away politely but firmly, strength flooding her broad features with a cold steeliness. "No," she answers. "I'm Pearl Fey, and my occupation these days is high school student."
"Well, yes, of course, but you have an almost prodigal spiritual power, don't you?"
"No," Pearl answers again. "I left medium training to dedicate myself full-time to my studies. Maybe I'll go back when I graduate from college, but my family has remained uneducated for too long, and if I'm going to be a good future Master of the Kurain Channeling Technique, then the change has to begin with me."
The head detective drums her nails on the table. "What a noble speech. Was it your own decision?"
Pearl smiles, half-fondly, half-bitterly. "It was a promise I made to my cousin, who practically raised me."
"Ah, yes, Ms. Maya Fey," she interjects, tucking a lock of her blonde hair behind her ear; this was what she was trying to get to. "Isn't that the same cousin who left you for Europe when you were ten years old? How could she have raised you?"
"By being the first to take me to the outside world; without her, I never would have made that first step. I wouldn't even remotely resemble the person I am today," a certain passion enters Pearl's voice; she locks her jaw. "And she loved me. That was who she was. Everything she did, she did for someone she loved. I trust her. That was the decision I made a long time ago, and my loyalty will not be shaken."
Where have I heard that before? the head detective sighs. She folds her arms. "Okay, then," she says peaceably. "Then what do you know about Antone Garcias?"
"You don't really want to hear what I know about him," Pearl is simply being eerie now, her head tilted slightly to one side and her voice distant. "You just want to know why he's in a body bag downstairs and not getting drunk on a college campus somewhere. You want to know what my cousin and her best friend, the best defense attorney in San Francisco, have to do with it. You want to know who killed him, with what, and why he was buried by the rosebushes."
"Can you answer these questions?"
"I can."
"Okay. Why, then, Pearl Fey, to all of the above."
"Because of me. I'm the key to the murder of Antone Garcias."
&&&
Hold up, Nick. Wait a moment. Where'd Pearly go?
She was right behind us...
Let's backtrack. She probably got distracted.
Hey, yeah -- wasn't there a great, big hedge of roses back around the corner there? She probably thought she could pick some and surprise us with them later; you know her ... um, romantic notions about us.
Ha. I can see your blush from here, Nick. Pearly!
Pearls!
Pearly! Come on, little Pearly, it's getting dark -- hurry up! Whatever your mission is --
Pearls! Where are you?
-- it can wait. I want to go home. My feet hurt and we've got court tomorrow.
Hang on a minute...
What is it?
Hey. HEY. HEY, what are you DOING? Is that Pearls?! Pearls!
STOP!! Pearl! Let her go! That's my cousin you've got there! Oh my god, what are you .... GET YOUR HANDS OFF OF HER!
.... !
Maya! No, don't -- !
Mystic Maya! Mystic Maya! ... !! AHH!
.......
Maya? Maya, here. ... Pearls, are you okay?
Yes, Mr. Nick. But ... Mystic Maya .... is he dead?
I think .... I think .... I think he is. Oh, god. Ohh ... this isn't happening!
&&&
The hotel room might be big enough for all of them, but it certainly is not big enough for them and all the nervous tension they've collected around them. Anytime someone speaks, everyone else jumps a little, like they'd forgotten the sound of each other's voices.
Maya folds the coffee filters; the results all have the same vague shape, and no one's really certain if she's trying to do origami and no one wants to ask in case she isn't. Gumshoe bustles back and forth around the kitchenette, obviously trying to do something before remembering he has no supplies to work with. His wife drums at her laptop, but her eyes keep drifting to each of the faces around her.
Franziska sits on the edge of one of the double beds, wrapping the phone cord around one of her fingers. She only seems to be listening to half of what the babysitter on the other end of the line is saying. "There should be an extra pack of nappies in the basement beside the washing machines ... and is she? She felt a little hot when I put her to bed last night. Make sure she drinks her tonic, and don't believe her when she tells you she has and shows you an empty cup; she just likes to pour it down the sink while your back is turned. Yes. I know. All right. Thank you. You too."
When she hangs up, her husband, leaning against the bathroom doorframe, blurts, "What are we going to do?"
Glances are thrown around, because Larry voiced what they were all thinking.
"Well, you found us. That's the first step." And even though he's trying to be aloof, the gratitude shines clear in Phoenix's face. He set his expectations really low, so he had a tendency to be easily overwhelmed; everyone present knew that too.
"The police are officially looking for you now," Maggey says bleakly. The San Francisco Chronicle is pulled up on her screen.
Franziska crosses her legs at the ankle. "And if they have Adrian Andrews, then they have Ron DeLite, and no matter how tight lipped they remain with their testimonies, they'll say enough. It won't be that hard for the police to find out what plane you were on that morning, if any of them have even half the efficiency of Gumshoe. They'll figure out where you are."
"They'll come after me," says Edgeworth from in front of the window. "And they'll go after Larry, and from us, it's just a short puddle-jump to you."
"So first things first, pal. We need to get you and miss Maya out of the country."
"Canada's a great place," Larry says brightly but unhelpfully. "I always liked Canada."
Phoenix looks from one to the other, and thinks they resemble something straight out of an old "how many [blank] does it take to screw in a light bulb" jokes. How many people have been blindly dragged into this mess? Nobody looks comfortable, except maybe Franziska, but she didn't really count because she's comfortable around death in any way, shape, or form and will probably go home and laugh at them.
Edgeworth pulls his cell phone from his pocket and flips it open, his face set in the half-scowl, half-flinch he wears when he's thinking particularly hard. He doesn't look at them when he says, "Wherever you decide to go, I can get you discount tickets."
"Money's not a problem, Edgeworth; we can pay full price --" begins Phoenix testily.
"Wait," Franziska looks at her brother sharply in disbelief. "Is that why you became a passenger pilot? For Phoenix Wright?"
Edgeworth remains scornfully silent, which effectively gives everyone their answer.
"Mr. Edgeworth!" exclaims Gumshoe, his face transfused with a surprised warmth. Maggey claps her hands together, like her heart was threatening to burst out of her chest. Phoenix stares hard at the side of the Edgeworth's face, until the latter glances away from his cell phone long enough to meet his eyes.
"You became a lawyer to find out what happened to me," he says baldly. "I am only repaying a debt."
"I see," says Phoenix, who doesn't really.
"I think," whispers Maya, who has been uncharacteristically silent and subdued thusfar, and instantly all attention is on her. "I think we should go back to San Francisco."
"What!"
"Absolutely not!"
"And do what, exactly, little girl? Turn yourself in?"
"Exactly that," A flush rushes to Maya's face, and she balls her hands into fists. "Yes. Yes! Exactly that. We used to put criminals in jail; all of us! Except you, Larry, but whatever. And now you're helping me run. When I'm guilty. I'm guilty!" She flings her arms out. "I killed him! I killed that man, what's-his-name, and I know more than anyone that I should rot in jail and instead, I'm working in a post office in Paris and I ruined the lives of everyone connected with me and I don't want to do it anymore."
"Maya --" starts Phoenix, and she turns to him, face burning and eyes alight.
"And you. Most of all, I'm so sorry, Nick. First to ask you to leave everything and then when it was so easy for Larry to find us, I had the gall to tell you that it'd be better if we had nothing to do with each other; I'm so ... so selfish." Tears bead up at the corners of her eyes. "I'll go back and I'll confess to everything, and it will clear your name and you can go back to what you love to do so you don't have to flip burgers in Ireland anymore --"
"No! Don't! They're really good burgers!" objects Larry, earning him a dirty, silencing look from Gumshoe, who's buried in the fridge, still looking for something to do with his hands.
Maya leans forward, wrapping her arms around Phoenix and burying her face into his chest so that her words were muffled, "-- I'll make it all right. For everybody. I will. I promise. And … and … " Her voice drops so that it’s barely audible. “I want to see Pearly.”
Phoenix returns the embrace. He puts his mouth close to her ear and says, almost nonchalantly, "I think you should marry me."
Edgeworth's head whips around, Maggey's hands fly to her mouth, and Gumshoe bangs his head on the door of the fridge when he looks up too fast. The next moment is electrifying.
Maya pulls back, staring at him like she's positive she hadn't heard him correctly. Her face is still pink from her outburst and her eyes are moist. He looks right back, as serious as he could ever get.
"Okay," she says, like he had offered her pancakes and she was agreeing even though she wasn't too fond of pancakes. She glances around at the faces around her -- Maggey's the only one who looks happy with this development; Larry catches his wife's eye and mouths, "is he serious?" and she shrugs helplessly -- and energy fills her from head to toe. "Yes!" she says more emphatically.
Phoenix's face cracks into a grin, and she returns it, and they sit there, smiling sloppily at each other. Then, like it had just occurred to him, he grabs her face between his hands and kisses her. It's a kiss without passion; more childlike in its joy and earnesty. Her arms go around him, and as one, they break apart to look expectantly at Franziska.
"Oh!" she blinks, caught off guard, and then looks around distractedly. "I guess, yes, I could ... I don't see any reason why I couldn't. I am a magistrate, after all, and we have the required number of witnesses ... only I don't have a gavel."
Gumshoe immediately produces a strainer from a cabinet under the sink. He's in such a good mood that he doesn't even balk under the withering look she gives him, but she takes the strainer. Phoenix and Maya get up, hands falling away from around each other so that their fingers could twine together. Larry leans across the bed to reach the telephone so he could laughingly order a bottle of champagne from room service. Edgeworth edges around the bedlam to stand by the window, cell phone to his ear.
"Yes, please," he says into the mouthpiece. "I'd like to purchase two tickets for San Francisco ... yeah, I'm Captain Miles Edgeworth, so if I could use my discount ..."
"You know," Maggey murmurs in an undertone, looping her arm through her husband’s. "When you took me to Europe, I never thought I'd wind up attending a wedding."
.....
Pearl picks at a loose thread at the hem of her blouse. "I had just stopped to smell the roses, that's all. They always say on PBS that nothing ever smells quite as good as a rose, but I remember very clearly that those roses didn't smell like much of anything.... Then he -- that man, that Antone Garcias - he grabbed me from behind."
"You don't have to talk about it if you don't want to," the head detective tells her without any particular sensitivity at all.
"I was ten years old," Pearl continues like she hadn't said a thing. "And sheltered. I didn't know what his intentions were. Maya and Mr. Ni -- Phoenix, I mean, they weren't very far away, and they came before anything happened, I guess. He had me by the elbow, and he tried to hide me behind his body, but Maya saw me, and she ... she started screaming, I think. She flung herself at him, and they grappled. He got a hold on her neck and tried to choke her with her own necklace, and that's when Nick intervened. The necklace broke -- that's how he wound up buried with the megatama, I assume. Maya kind of ... fell to her knees and the man went after Nick. Finally, Maya got behind him and gave him a shove, and he stumbled and tripped on the curb. His skull cracked open on the asphalt."
Silence follows this proclamation, and the head detective slowly slides off the table, smiling victoriously. "Thank you, Ms. Fey," she says emphatically. “That’s all we needed to hear.”
Pearl holds up a finger; just a single finger. Somewhere in the middle of her speech, she had rolled up her sleeves, like she was about to tackle a large pile of dirty dishes. "I think you're forgetting something, Detective Starr," she says in that low, level voice that makes her seem so much older than seventeen. "I know a little something about law. It's justified self-defense; he tried to kill her and Nick, so she pushed him with no intent to kill, and that's what I'll testify to."
Angel Starr realizes with a surprised bat of her eyelashes that Pearl had just told her more in that one sentence than she had in her entire testimony thusfar. "If it was so justified, then why did they flee?"
"Because they loved me," Pearl says with pure, plain devotion, and nothing more. "Both of them, since the moment they met me. They couldn't ... their consciences wouldn't let them ... let them stay. Maya had already proven she valued her own life and mine over another human being's, and if I know her, she would have believed she was tainted by that. All she wanted for me was to grow up in a happy, stable home. Feys have this bad habit of dreaming impossible things."
To her mounting frustration, the head detective begins to find that it makes sense, in a twisted, sentimental kind of way.
Seven years ago, Antone Garcias tried to rape Pearl, or kidnap her or whatever, and in the fight that followed, Maya Fey accidentally killed him. To ensure that Pearl wouldn't have to grow up with both a mother and a cousin in jail -- or worse, out free to interact with her with their blood-stained hands -- Phoenix Wright got them both out of the country, using Ron DeLite's money and Adrian Andrews's home and the loyalty and selective forgetfulness he manages to aspire in everyone he meets.
Lastly, Maya Fey had made Pearl promise to immerse herself in the world outside of Kurain, to wash the spirit medium from her, to -- Angel feels a shiver run up her spine -- to ensure that Pearl would lose the power, so that Antone Garcias could not haunt her dreams.
She opens her mouth to speak, not knowing exactly what was going to come out, but a soft, deep voice from behind her interrupts her.
"That's enough, Detective," Godot puts a hand on her shoulder and moves her to the side, pressing one finger onto the "stop" button on the tape recorder. He smells like chilies and coffee beans; she hadn't even seen or heard him enter the room.
"I'm not done talking to the witness, prosecutor. You have no place here," she states coolly.
The lawyer's smile is smug to the point of pain. "On the contrary. Pearl is still just a minor, and as her legal guardian, entrusted to me by Maya Fey and the state court of California, I say we're done here."
Pearl stands, pulling her sleeves back down to her wrists and coming to stand beside Godot with ease and familiarity. “It was nice talking to you, Detective.”
Later, alone in the interrogation room with no company except a slow, sinking sensation in her stomach, Pearl Fey's file, and the tape recorder, Detective Angel Starr stares at her hands and says, wonderingly, "And all along, here I was, thinking it was Wright who had the whole law enforcement of this city in the palm of his hand. But I was wrong -- it's his assistant."
.....
Ema leans back so far in her chair that it's in danger of falling over backwards, chewing steadily on her fingernails to get them all an even length. Eventually, she says into the phone, "I'm sorry to hear that, ma'am, but Detective Starr isn't here right now. I can direct you to her answering machine if you want, but I don't know when she'll be back. Yes. Uh-huh, you too. Good-bye."
She puts the receiver back into the cradle and heads down to the main floor of the Criminal Affairs Department for no other reason than she's bored and she can. It is, as she hoped, a flurry of activity.
"Detective Skye!" Gumshoe calls out to her from behind a precarious pile of boxes. "Where do you want these claims?"
"13A, please, and make sure they're organized alphabetically!" she eyes its haphazard lean distrustfully. "And in case I haven't said it yet, welcome back. It's good to have you on the force again, Detective."
"Thanks, sir!" Gumshoe beams. "It's good to be back." Just as quickly, his countenance falls. "It also probably won't be the last time you say that, given my track record."
"There's a reason you're still here," Ema assures him warmly. She hasn't asked him how his trip was, because if there's one thing she thinks she might have developed in the ten years since she's been here, it's some tact. She spends so long standing there watching them all move around -- the young detective who'd been with Gumshoe when they found the Garcias corpse complaining bitterly about being unable to find the file tabs when he'd just put them down right here, the newest prosecutor who thought it'd be jolly fun to bring in a radio and play rock 'n roll from over eighty years ago, policemen and secretarial aides alike -- and thinking, happily, what a big mess, that she doesn't see the couple walk in until they're standing right behind her. She turns.
"We're here to turn ourselves in," the woman tells her very seriously and dramatically, in the same breath Phoenix Wright says, flabbergasted, "Ema Skye?"
Her hair is shorter than in the pictures Ema has seen in old case files, she's wearing casual clothing, and her throat is bare of any glowing conch-shell stone, but Maya Fey is unmistakable. Her face is worryingly pale, but as she glances between Phoenix and Ema, a little bit of color rushes back to her cheeks. "Wait," she goes. "You know her?"
"I'm Detective Ema Skye," she says with the lilt of a new accent similar to their own, and Phoenix soundlessly mouths, "detective?" in a manner both astonished and proud. She stares at his hair.
"Maya F-- Well, no, Maya Wright, as of about three days ago," the animation comes right back to her face, and only then does Ema notice that they're holding hands.
Still a romantic at heart, she can't control the smile that spreads about her face. "Congratulations. So what was this about turning yourselves in?"
"I did it," Maya says instantly, before she could lose her resolve. "I confess to murdering Antone Garcias."
"And I'm her accomplice," Phoenix interjects, earning him a fierce frown from his wife; it had plainly been a sore topic of argument between them for quite some time. "We've been running for too long. So we're here to talk to the fine men in blue."
Ema makes a show of tapping her chin thoughtfully. "Antone Garcias, hmmm?" she chews absently at her thumbnail. "Now, as you can see, we're a little bit messy right now --" she gestures behind her to the hustle and bustle of reorganization the Criminal Affairs Department is undergoing. "-- so I may be completely wrong, and it will take me awhile to find the file, but I could have sworn the detective in charge of that case ruled that Antone Garcias was running too fast and tripped. No foul play involved."
Maya and Phoenix exchange disbelieving looks.
Ema shrugs. "Now, if you insist, I guess I could find you a lawyer and you could plead guilty, but frankly, there'd be no point. Everyone’s better off this way."
She sees the light bulb go on above Phoenix's head. "Why would you do something like that?"
Her glasses slip down her skull, and she pushes them back up. "Let's just say that once upon a time, I was in a situation very much like yours, and someone did a very kind turn for me. I guess I'm just loyal." She looks past them, through the sliding glass doors to where Godot loiters in front of the Blue Badger, drinking from a styrafoam cup. He says something sarcastic to the brown-haired woman at his side, and she laughs. "Now unless I'm mistaken, there's someone who has been dying to see you."
Slowly, and still a little disbelieving, Phoenix and Maya turn to follow her gaze.
It’s unclear who sees who first. Pearl smiles slowly and explosively and joyfully all over her face, her lips forming their names kind of like a woman praying.
And Ema Skye knows everything she's done is worth it, just for that moment.
&&&
When the owner of Limerick's best and most authentic American burger joint finally retired, his successor found only two things left in his office. He assumes they'd been left by accident, and mails them on.
One was a photograph that obviously had spent a long time locked away from the sunlight, as it was still rich with color. It was smudged like it had been tucked into somebody's apron pocket for too long. A man and a woman stand arm-in-arm in front of what looks like a fine-end restaurant, wine glasses in hand and smiling silly. Phoenix Wright and Mia Fey, is written on the back. circa 2015.
The second is a calling card whose shell design has been doodled over in Crayolas. It too has writing on the back.
I know the secret of the death of Antone Garcias. It's safe with me. Franziska.