Fic: Yellow Brick Road, Phoenix Wright
Title: Yellow Brick Road
Fandom: Phoenix Wright/Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney
Characters/Pairings: Maya Fey/Miles Edgeworth, Phoenix Wright
Word Count: 1716
Spoilers for all four games.
Phoenix Wright walks her down the aisle. He stands as the groom's best man at the same wedding, much to the congregation's amusement. The pastor just blinks, shakes his head, and asks everyone if there were any objections, they should be spoken now or forever hold your peace.
He looks just a little bit affronted when the bride and the best man fall apart laughing.
*&*
At the reception, Phoenix gets drunk, which isn't the smartest thing he's ever done, but he thinks that Mia just might be proud of him. Then again, perhaps not, since he has to lean heavily on both Maya and Miles in order to get to a chair that wasn't spinning; one on one side, the other on the other, the way it should be.
He laughs and congratulations them (again?), then slumps over and starts to drool.
Maya looks at her groom. Miles looks at his bride.
"Here's to our precious people," Mrs. Edgeworth says, because who else would understand?
"Here's to forever being his babysitter," Mr. Edgeworth says, because why else had he married her?
*&*
Maya is still on her honeymoon when she gets the text message.
She jolts out of her pool chair as if she'd been electrocuted. The seagull that had been trying to inconspicuously make off with the remains of her cheeseburger takes off with a startled squawk. She dashes across the patio, bare feet on the hot stones, holding her untied bikini top to her with one hand and her cell phone in the other. Miles is in the kitchenette, making hot tea, and when she throws open the sliding glass door with unbecoming violence, he says, "What?" in that tone that suggests this had better be good, Gumshoe, or I'm going to highly displeased.
"He just fired me with a text message!" Maya shrieks, color high on her cheeks, holding the phone up. "That's ... that's like breaking up over the phone, only worse! Edgeworth, he just fired me!"
Surprise and disbelief flicker across Miles's face, and he strides over to her to see for himself, even though the shock in her face is too genuine to be faked.
The newspaper sits on the kitchen table, folded over to the movie times, but if either of them had bothered to look, they would have noticed a rather curious headliner about the murder trial of a magician in California that had been bungled by the defendant's mysterious disappearance, apparently into thin air.
*&*
"Yeah. That's pretty much how it went," says Nick, and doesn't look either of them in the eye as he flushes his attorney's badge down the toilet.
*&*
There is no worse feeling, Maya reflects later, than to stand still and feel a friendship slip away.
It's not a conscious thing, merely the accumulation of missed conversations, phone calls that there simply wasn't any time for, e-mails that were just too much trouble to compose. Friendships work both ways, and Maya could do nothing as Phoenix Wright pulled away from them.
It was the most awful feeling in the world, worse even, somehow, than waking up to find your mother's blood on your hands, worse than sitting in the defendant's chair, worse than being locked up in Matt Engarde's basement with no food, no water, no light. Those things, though painful, all had one thing in common: she held onto her hope. Even if everything else was taken from her, Maya had faith in Phoenix Wright.
Within a year, he's a stranger to her.
It's horrible, how easily it happened.
*&*
Trucy Wright is ten years old before Miles and Maya Edgeworth even learn of her existence.
They still live in the same city, but the Wrights are now downtown, close to the park and the family estates that are older than California's statehood. They fall under different police jurisdiction; the Wrights report to Ema Skye, while the Edgeworths are still on first-name basis with Dick Gumshoe. They all have to go to the same courthouse and the same judge, but for obvious reasons, Miles Edgeworth doesn't run into Phoenix Wright in the courtroom anymore.
The first thing that Maya notices about Trucy is her eyes; big, round, and as blue as the underside of a stone, and they follow her around the room without blinking. Maya fights the urge to turn off all the lights to see if they glow in the dark.
"Do you like magic tricks?" she asks.
"I love them!" Maya answers, beaming. "When I was your age, I wanted to join the circus!"
Trucy smiles pleasantly. "You're lying."
*&*
"But I wasn't," Maya protests to her husband later. "I really did want to join the circus. Mia was going to let me, too, if only so she could laugh in my face when I came crawling back home."
Miles looks at her, nails in between his teeth and a picture frame hanging loosely from his fingertips. "Don't you get it?" he asks with difficulty, given the sharp instruments in his mouth. "You were lying. You never intended to be anything less than exactly what your mother intended you to be; a medium, and, by proxy, the Master. And everyone knew it but you."
*&*
Sending him the complete first and second season of the Steel Samurai, the incomplete first season of the Nickel Samurai, and the three Neo-Tokyo movies was Miles's idea.
"I've seen the size of the apartments down there," he says blithely when Maya questions him about it on the credit card statement. "Let's see if he can avoid us when he's got a tower of DVDs looking at him every day."
*&*
It's cold in the Borscht Bowl Club; a fine layer of fog clings to every surface, giving the place the damp, stale air of an unwashed place in wintertime. Maya shivers, pulling the broadcloth of her robes more firmly around her, and says no thank you to the rosy-cheeked girl who offers to take her picture.
Behind her, something that might sound something like Beethoven if you were deaf in one ear and had grown up in village of people whose professional jobs were to sing off-key cuts off mid-note. The piano bench screeches as it's pushed back.
"Why did you marry him?" Nick's voice carries across the restaurant to her. She stops. "You were nineteen years old, Maya, and your sister's boyfriend had just gone to jail for murdering your mother. Why did you marry Miles Edgeworth before her body was cold in its grave?"
She is silent for a long moment, leaning her weight onto one foot. She looks at him over one shoulder, the thick, brocaded talisman of the Master of the Kurain heavy at her throat, her purple robes long and cut professionally across her figure, her wedding band as warm as her flesh. "You still don't get it, do you, Nick?" she asks, and there is a dull, tired note to her voice that reminds her of her sister. Nothing ages you quicker than a close, constant proximity to death.
She's only twenty-six years old. She is as old as Phoenix Wright was when he quit trying.
It's not hard to find the old him underneath the modified exterior; it's in the eyes. His bright, unclouded eyes, and she is surprised to realize that she had forgotten what color they were. They're the same blue as the underside of a stone, she sees, the blue of the sky after sunset. Like his daughter's.
She fixes those eyes with her own, and her mouth speaks without her, like it's been disconnected from her brain. The pain, throbbing in the center of her chest, tells her where her words are coming from. "You were the best man at our wedding. You walked me down the aisle. There was nowhere else we would have had you; we weren't blind. I saw the way Miles's eyes followed you in court, and he saw mine, and we both saw how you never looked back. It was a simple decision on our part. I had you in the office and during investigations. He saw you during trials. If we were married, if we lived together, we would see more of you. We could pool our resources together -- the Master of the Kurain and a prosecuting progidy. We'd be stronger as a unit than we had on our own; we could guard ourselves and we could keep a better eye on you.
"We loved you, Phoenix Wright, and it made perfect sense to us."
She could see it tally up behind those eyes, the total sum of what he'd done to them.
She reaches into her handbag and tosses something down onto the table closest to her.
"Say hi to Trucy for me," she says on her way out the door, her voice unshaken and strong.
Curious, Ogla Orly edges over to see what she'd thrown down on the table. The overhead fan makes the light pulse against the shiny veneer of Shelley de Killer's calling card like a heartbeat.
Miles Edgeworth had given it to Maya Fey when he asked her to marry him.
Fandom: Phoenix Wright/Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney
Characters/Pairings: Maya Fey/Miles Edgeworth, Phoenix Wright
Word Count: 1716
Spoilers for all four games.
Phoenix Wright walks her down the aisle. He stands as the groom's best man at the same wedding, much to the congregation's amusement. The pastor just blinks, shakes his head, and asks everyone if there were any objections, they should be spoken now or forever hold your peace.
He looks just a little bit affronted when the bride and the best man fall apart laughing.
*&*
At the reception, Phoenix gets drunk, which isn't the smartest thing he's ever done, but he thinks that Mia just might be proud of him. Then again, perhaps not, since he has to lean heavily on both Maya and Miles in order to get to a chair that wasn't spinning; one on one side, the other on the other, the way it should be.
He laughs and congratulations them (again?), then slumps over and starts to drool.
Maya looks at her groom. Miles looks at his bride.
"Here's to our precious people," Mrs. Edgeworth says, because who else would understand?
"Here's to forever being his babysitter," Mr. Edgeworth says, because why else had he married her?
*&*
Maya is still on her honeymoon when she gets the text message.
She jolts out of her pool chair as if she'd been electrocuted. The seagull that had been trying to inconspicuously make off with the remains of her cheeseburger takes off with a startled squawk. She dashes across the patio, bare feet on the hot stones, holding her untied bikini top to her with one hand and her cell phone in the other. Miles is in the kitchenette, making hot tea, and when she throws open the sliding glass door with unbecoming violence, he says, "What?" in that tone that suggests this had better be good, Gumshoe, or I'm going to highly displeased.
"He just fired me with a text message!" Maya shrieks, color high on her cheeks, holding the phone up. "That's ... that's like breaking up over the phone, only worse! Edgeworth, he just fired me!"
Surprise and disbelief flicker across Miles's face, and he strides over to her to see for himself, even though the shock in her face is too genuine to be faked.
The newspaper sits on the kitchen table, folded over to the movie times, but if either of them had bothered to look, they would have noticed a rather curious headliner about the murder trial of a magician in California that had been bungled by the defendant's mysterious disappearance, apparently into thin air.
*&*
"Yeah. That's pretty much how it went," says Nick, and doesn't look either of them in the eye as he flushes his attorney's badge down the toilet.
*&*
There is no worse feeling, Maya reflects later, than to stand still and feel a friendship slip away.
It's not a conscious thing, merely the accumulation of missed conversations, phone calls that there simply wasn't any time for, e-mails that were just too much trouble to compose. Friendships work both ways, and Maya could do nothing as Phoenix Wright pulled away from them.
It was the most awful feeling in the world, worse even, somehow, than waking up to find your mother's blood on your hands, worse than sitting in the defendant's chair, worse than being locked up in Matt Engarde's basement with no food, no water, no light. Those things, though painful, all had one thing in common: she held onto her hope. Even if everything else was taken from her, Maya had faith in Phoenix Wright.
Within a year, he's a stranger to her.
It's horrible, how easily it happened.
*&*
Trucy Wright is ten years old before Miles and Maya Edgeworth even learn of her existence.
They still live in the same city, but the Wrights are now downtown, close to the park and the family estates that are older than California's statehood. They fall under different police jurisdiction; the Wrights report to Ema Skye, while the Edgeworths are still on first-name basis with Dick Gumshoe. They all have to go to the same courthouse and the same judge, but for obvious reasons, Miles Edgeworth doesn't run into Phoenix Wright in the courtroom anymore.
The first thing that Maya notices about Trucy is her eyes; big, round, and as blue as the underside of a stone, and they follow her around the room without blinking. Maya fights the urge to turn off all the lights to see if they glow in the dark.
"Do you like magic tricks?" she asks.
"I love them!" Maya answers, beaming. "When I was your age, I wanted to join the circus!"
Trucy smiles pleasantly. "You're lying."
*&*
"But I wasn't," Maya protests to her husband later. "I really did want to join the circus. Mia was going to let me, too, if only so she could laugh in my face when I came crawling back home."
Miles looks at her, nails in between his teeth and a picture frame hanging loosely from his fingertips. "Don't you get it?" he asks with difficulty, given the sharp instruments in his mouth. "You were lying. You never intended to be anything less than exactly what your mother intended you to be; a medium, and, by proxy, the Master. And everyone knew it but you."
*&*
Sending him the complete first and second season of the Steel Samurai, the incomplete first season of the Nickel Samurai, and the three Neo-Tokyo movies was Miles's idea.
"I've seen the size of the apartments down there," he says blithely when Maya questions him about it on the credit card statement. "Let's see if he can avoid us when he's got a tower of DVDs looking at him every day."
*&*
It's cold in the Borscht Bowl Club; a fine layer of fog clings to every surface, giving the place the damp, stale air of an unwashed place in wintertime. Maya shivers, pulling the broadcloth of her robes more firmly around her, and says no thank you to the rosy-cheeked girl who offers to take her picture.
Behind her, something that might sound something like Beethoven if you were deaf in one ear and had grown up in village of people whose professional jobs were to sing off-key cuts off mid-note. The piano bench screeches as it's pushed back.
"Why did you marry him?" Nick's voice carries across the restaurant to her. She stops. "You were nineteen years old, Maya, and your sister's boyfriend had just gone to jail for murdering your mother. Why did you marry Miles Edgeworth before her body was cold in its grave?"
She is silent for a long moment, leaning her weight onto one foot. She looks at him over one shoulder, the thick, brocaded talisman of the Master of the Kurain heavy at her throat, her purple robes long and cut professionally across her figure, her wedding band as warm as her flesh. "You still don't get it, do you, Nick?" she asks, and there is a dull, tired note to her voice that reminds her of her sister. Nothing ages you quicker than a close, constant proximity to death.
She's only twenty-six years old. She is as old as Phoenix Wright was when he quit trying.
It's not hard to find the old him underneath the modified exterior; it's in the eyes. His bright, unclouded eyes, and she is surprised to realize that she had forgotten what color they were. They're the same blue as the underside of a stone, she sees, the blue of the sky after sunset. Like his daughter's.
She fixes those eyes with her own, and her mouth speaks without her, like it's been disconnected from her brain. The pain, throbbing in the center of her chest, tells her where her words are coming from. "You were the best man at our wedding. You walked me down the aisle. There was nowhere else we would have had you; we weren't blind. I saw the way Miles's eyes followed you in court, and he saw mine, and we both saw how you never looked back. It was a simple decision on our part. I had you in the office and during investigations. He saw you during trials. If we were married, if we lived together, we would see more of you. We could pool our resources together -- the Master of the Kurain and a prosecuting progidy. We'd be stronger as a unit than we had on our own; we could guard ourselves and we could keep a better eye on you.
"We loved you, Phoenix Wright, and it made perfect sense to us."
She could see it tally up behind those eyes, the total sum of what he'd done to them.
She reaches into her handbag and tosses something down onto the table closest to her.
"Say hi to Trucy for me," she says on her way out the door, her voice unshaken and strong.
Curious, Ogla Orly edges over to see what she'd thrown down on the table. The overhead fan makes the light pulse against the shiny veneer of Shelley de Killer's calling card like a heartbeat.
Miles Edgeworth had given it to Maya Fey when he asked her to marry him.