#i wonder if she passed the pin phoenix wears in his beanie through kristoph. just to remind him she was still there if he ever needed her | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

browniefox · 3 years

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Waking from the Long Winter

Ace Attorney - 5K Words

Phoenix Wright and a few moments during the ten weeks it takes to receive results from the Bar Exam.

A one-shot written solely for the half-joke I make within the first couple paragraphs lol. Character exploration of Phoenix finding himself again. Hinted narumitsu but just hinted.

oOo

Phoenix is sure there’s a joke here, somewhere.

Something about a lawyer walking into a bar, and then knowing to duck the second time. Or maybe not ducking, but running into it at top speed. Or trying to vault over the bar and getting his feet caught on it and falling on his face instead. There’s something there, he’s sure of it. More than anything, however, Phoenix wishes his brain would focus on the Actual Bar Exam instead of trying to make this stupid joke work.

He took the bar once before, of course. His memory of having done so, however, is shaky at best. Trying to look back at it, it’s nothing more than two days of pure stress. If he tries to pin the experience down to a word, it's just a really long and drawn out scream.

Taking the bar the second time, ten years later, is… different.

Phoenix studied, of course. Apollo had still had his flashcards and big binder full of notes. Slow days in the office were often punctuated with spontaneous quizzing on terms and laws and procedures. He’d spent late nights reading big law books and then falling asleep on top of them like he was in college again. He sat in on a lot of trials, reviewing the roles of the people in the court.

Now that he’s finally actually taking the Bar, it’s like a math test.

Obvious not as far as subject matter went. But it reminds him strongly of what taking a math test back in middle/high school had been like. Going into it scared and then being surprised by how quickly and easily he seemed to go through the questions. Of course, that also always ended with him getting the test back with a million red marks that revealed the test hadn’t been easy, he’d just been dumb.

For the first five minutes, nerves making Phoenix fidgety, the Bar exam had been scary and the words had refused to form comprehensive sentences. He’s pretty sure he almost had a panic attack. But then the five minutes pass, and Phoenix takes a few deep breaths, and when he opens his eyes again, he realizes he actually does know this stuff.

He was a lawyer, once, seven years ago. It feels like that should be more than enough time for him to have forgotten what being one was like, for all of the words to have become greek to him once more. And yet, his previous cases stick out to him on the page. Yes, he remembers using evidence law for the Skye case, he knows this. Ah, yes, he remembers studying this case because it reminds him of the Powers one. There’s even a question about spirit mediums at one point and Phoenix almost laughs out loud.

It probably also doesn’t hurt that he’d kept his enemies close during his disbarment, as well as working on MASON.

Kristoph had often asked for Phoenix’s opinion on cases, setting out the evidence and asking for the ex-lawyer’s input and expertise. He wonders if it was supposed to sting, if Kristoph had been trying to rub salt into the wound. If so, he had succeeded, sometimes. Other times, it’d been nice to fall back into those familiar ways of thinking, of trying to piece together a story, of trying to find justice.

Phoenix would never ever thank Kristoph for anything ever, but he did admit there were unexpected rewards for having put up with him for so long.

oOo

Paying for a barber hasn’t exactly been in the budget for years.

Not that there weren’t places you could get a haircut at fairly cheap, but every single dollar and penny counted. Even the months where things looked alright, where there was a comfortable sum left over after rent and taxes and food, most of it was set aside for when the rough times would return. They always did.

“Just a trim?” Trucy asks. She wears the fake mustache she insists on wearing every time he asks her to cut his hair. Her own was just trimmed by him, the floor littered with split ends. There’s layers throughout it, and now that it’s started to dry back out he can see his handiwork and nods to himself. The days of terrible and uneven cuts while trying to watch a video tutorial are well behind both of them, years of practice instead showing through.

The swivel chair from the desk has been moved into the bathroom and Phoenix looks at himself in the mirror, his hair for once not bunched up inside of his beanie. It’s long enough to pull back with a hair tie. Trucy is already gearing up to cut off an inch, the same inch she cuts off every time to keep it from getting too long. For years, that’s been the only reason to cut his hair. He runs his fingers through it. It’s to his shoulders right now and he blinks when he realizes that he hates it.

He hates how the long strands get in his face. He hates how sometimes he pulls his beanie off and his hair is staticy. He hates how if he doesn’t pull it back while cooking, if he has something on his hands, he has to awkwardly flick his head in usually-futile attempts to get the hair out of the way.

He hates it and he’s hated it for a while. But for some reason, every time before now, it’s felt easier and safer to keep it long and annoying.

“Actually,” He says, and then hesitates. He’s had his hair like this for so long now, and shorter hair… He steels himself and straightens a bit, “Actually, Truce, could you go a little shorter this time? Just, you know, a little-”

“Don’t worry, daddy, leave it to me!”

There’s a mischievous little glint in her eyes and Phoenix almost changes his mind, but she’s already spun the chair around and started cutting. Phoenix closes his eyes and waits. Trucy hums as she cuts his hair, and usually she does little tricks with the scissors, but this time she’s just cutting. He tries not to think about how close to his head the scissors sound, how much she must be cutting off. He’d asked her to, and he hates how long it was, and yet now that it’s too late to change his mind he’s nervous.

“Alright!” Trucy chirps and spins him back around to face the mirror. Phoenix opens his eyes.

A young lawyer, full of hope and trust and pure stubbornness, stares back at him.

And then he blinks, and the man has little tired wrinkles around his eyes and at the corners of his mouth and prominently between his eyebrows. He still has the couple-day-old stubble that he had yet to shave. There’s dark shadows under his eyes. He runs a hand through his hair. It spikes up in the back, just like it used to, just like it always has, like how his mom used to hate and try in vain to flatten down.

“Well, what do you think?” Trucy beams at him.

“It’s perfect.” He says.

And it’s true.

oOo

Phoenix has never owned a perfectly tailored suit in his life. He never found an issue with this. Off the rack was just fine, and a lot cheaper, and you didn’t have to worry about anything happening to it.

Apparently Miles thought that this was an issue.

Two weeks after Phoenix took the bar, Miles drags him to get a new suit. Phoenix stresses that his old suit was perfectly fine. He at least assumes it's fine. It is shoved somewhere near the back of his closet and by now is probably made up of as much dust as fabric. But it should still looks like a suit, and he can probably send it to the dry cleaners or something if he ever needs it.

Still, Miles insists on dragging him to get a new suit.

The people there all recognize Miles right of the bat, greeting him as ‘Mr. Edgeworth’, with a lot of ‘So good to see you again’ and ‘Are you here for the usual’ and ‘How is dear Ms. Von Karma doing’. His answers are amicable enough: ‘It’s nice to be back in the country.’ ‘No, not today, I’m here for my friend.’ ‘Franziska is doing well, thank you.’

Phoenix sees how they look at him when they don’t think he can see them. They don’t know that Phoenix is well used to being on guard constantly, no matter the time or place. He cedes that maybe he should’ve worn something today other than his hoodie and beanie and flip flops, especially with how the ‘flip-flop-flip-flop’ is just shy of echoing throughout the large store. He knows they must look an interesting pair, prim and perfect well put together Prosecutor Miles Edgeworth next to disbarred pianist and poker player Phoenix Wright. He doesn’t let it bother him as Miles picks around the room, finding suits that he approves of.

There’s too many shades of blue. Half the time, Miles holds up two and asks which one Phoenix likes more, and they look exactly the same. Still, they eventually end up with a few different ones for Phoenix to try on, and Miles and one of the men - the tailor? Maybe? Or the owner of the store? - walk around Phoenix and critique how it looks on him and then send him back to try on another. It reminds Phoenix how much he hates shopping. The whole process of having to try things on and take them off and then repeat is just a bit too tedious for his sake.

Miles more than Phoenix decides on which suit is best out of the ones he’s picked out, and then Phoenix's measurements are taken so that it can be fixed to fit him just right.

They’re looking at the ties, the last thing to grab before they leave, when Phoenix finally says,

“I haven’t passed the Bar Exam yet.”

Miles pauses for a second, then hangs the white tie back up. He doesn’t turn to face Phoenix but his eyes do glance over.

“You took the test.” He says, and Phoenix can hear the unsaid in there. ‘You took the test, right? You didn’t lie about that? You didn’t purposely sabotage your own test? You haven’t done something incredibly stupid already, have you?’

“I did.” Phoenix nods, and means ‘I really did. I gave it my all. I tried my best, I swear it.’

“Then you’ll need a new suit.” Miles says.

“But I haven’t passed yet.”

“Mm,” Miles hums, grabbing a dark red tie and looking it over, comparing it to the swatch of fabric that matches the color of Phoenix’s new suit, “You’re not going to fail.”

“But-”

“If you fail, then you’ll still have a new suit. There’s more reasons than being an attorney to own a nice suit, you know. If you ever eat somewhere nicer than the Borsch Bowl, for one. Or I have a wide array of incessant events I’m expected to attend throughout the year. They’ll be more manageable if I have someone there with me, but there is usually a dress code. Or perhaps I’ll be in need of a co-council at some point. I could use your eyes, and lord knows they’ll let absolutely anybody co-council, qualifications be damned.”

Miles doesn’t say anything else, and neither does Phoenix. He does, however, pick a wine red tie and add it to the growing stack.

oOo

When he moves the items off of the piano, he’s careful to make sure he remembers where everything goes.

It’s his office, it’s his piano, and while maybe most of the things he takes off aren’t his they also haven’t been touched in weeks, and he doubts that Trucy or Apollo would notice anything different. Still, he feels oddly like a kid sneaking food out of the cupboards while his parents are out. Trucy is setting up for a show and Apollo is out looking at a crime scene. It’s the perfect chance.

He lifts up the covering from the keys of the piano. He sits down on the bench, and a chill rushes over him that isn’t there. He can almost hear the sound of the Borscht Bowl, the clamour of patrons. He’s played this piano so few times, he can count them on one hand. He’d given practice a couple tries when he first got hired, until it became clear that being paid not to play was probably just as lucrative - if not more so - than actually having the skill.

Phoenix rests his hands on the keys, cold ivory under his warm fingers. He’d taken classes, once, years and years ago, when he was small and young. His piano teacher then had been an old and nice woman, but she’d had to stop teaching after a few months due to health problems. He can still find middle C, and that is more or less where his skills end. Usually, when someone requests a song, he plays ‘hot cross buns’ or ‘heart and soul’ or any other classic of the sort.

This time, Phoenix lets himself bang around with wild abandon on the keys, like he had as a kid, caring little for melody or timing or anything at all. The piano is probably out of tune. Not that he can hear that sort of thing, but it's a fair and safe bet to make. The piano hasn’t been played in a long while.

He steps away for a moment and runs a finger over the spines of the books on the shelves until he came across a thin one, so thin that the spine didn’t have any kind of title, just staples holding the pages together. Some hot-shot customer had come into the Borscht Bowl, slapped the ‘Beginner’s Piano Lessons’ book on the top of the piano and declared that Phoenix was going to need it once he was beaten at poker that night.

Of course, Phoenix had won. He got to keep the book anyway. By ‘got to keep’, he meant the customer had punched Phoenix in a fit of rage after losing and had been kicked out, leaving the book behind. Phoenix had kept it.

He isn't any good at reading music, but he has the afternoon to himself. He gets out a pencil, writing the letters above the notes, counting the keys to make sure his fingers land on the right ones. It is slow, and tedious, and not something he has to do. It's something he's doing because he wants to.

oOo

Phoenix has a love-hate relationship with Parent-Teacher Conferences.

He loves to go when the teachers will tell him ‘oh, Trucy is a joy to have in class! Trucy brings such a brightness to the classroom! Trucy is brilliant, what an amazing daughter you have! She’s so talented!’ And then Phoenix gets to beam at Trucy, and Trucy gets to glow under the praise, and then he gets handed her report card that he can place on the fridge so he can look at it every morning and be filled with pride again.

He doesn’t so much like them when the teachers look at him funny.

Look, Phoenix is an adult, he can admit that his appearance took a pretty sharp decline after he was disbarred. But some days it was all he could do to put on the hoodie and beanie, and he had learned pretty early in how to rationalize it all away as ‘putting on an act’, as trying to get Kristoph to underestimate him. However, an adult man who adopted a daughter, and thus had had someone declare him fit to raise a kid, looking like he was one trip to McDonalds away from being completely broke wasn’t always the best way to present one’s self to other adults, especially ones on high alert make sure their students were in a stable living condition.

One time, Trucy had even had to warn him to clean up a bit. She’d picked up on the worried questions her teacher had been asking her, about how often she ate and what her dad did for a living. Phoenix had put on actual shoes and a button up for that PTC. The teacher had still looked at him suspiciously, but he’d done his best to exude confidence and ‘I’m perfectly capable of raising a child on my own’. He couldn’t risk losing Trucy. If he lost Trucy…

He can’t lose Trucy.

Of course, the days of those sorts of PTC’s are behind them. Now that Trucy’s in high school and has eight different teachers, PTC’s consist of going between the school’s cafeteria and library to find Trucy’s teachers, get told if she’s a good student or a distraction or doing well or doing poorly, and then heading right to the next teacher. Some teachers they just outright skip, like Trucy’s gym teachers.

“C’mon Daddy, you have to dress up too!”

Trucy spins around in her magician outfit. The straplessness of the dress made it against the school’s dress code, so she never got to wear it to classes. She’d been talking about showing it off during the PTC, when school wasn’t technically in session, and Phoenix knew that she was probably going to take the chance to dazzle her teachers with some of her smaller tricks as well.

Put that in the list of reasons why he did like PTC: getting to see people be amazed with Trucy’s close-up magic tricks.

“Trucy,” Phoenix sighs.

“No, please? I always get dressed up, and you never do.” She pouts, crossing her arms.

“That’s because you’re the star of the show tonight.”

“But you’re my assistant! Please, just this once? I know you don’t like getting dressed up, but...” And then Trucy hesitates, which is so unlike her it catches Phoenix’s attention right away, “But I’d like it.” She finishes. For a moment, the room is plunged into darkness that only Phoenix can see as chains shoot out of nowhere and a single psych-lock places itself in front of Trucy.

Phoenix sighs one more time. He’s not going to pry, not unless it becomes a big deal.

“Sure, can’t have you performing with a sub-par partner.” He relents and Trucy claps her hand excitedly.

He goes back into his room, reaching for a button down. Something simple, he figures. Just something a little nicer than usual.

And he sees the suit Miles had bought him.

It’s in a big black bag to keep it safe from dust or whatever. Almost without thinking to, he takes the hanger off the rack and sets it on his bed, unzipping the bag and looking at the suit. It’s so much like to his old one. He runs a hand over it and then almost puts it back. But if he can’t wear it to a PTC, how can he wear it to any of the myriad of events Miles had listed off? He used to wear a suit everywhere. It had been border-line mandatory.

“Hurry up, Daddy, or we’ll be late!”

Phoenix jumps at the banging on his door.

“Just a minute, sweetie!” He shouts back.

It feels… different. He blames that on the light blue waistcoat that Edgeworth had insisted on. That, and the fact that it was a suit that was made to fit him exactly. His old suit had been second-hand, all that he’d been able to afford at the time. The blue, what many people seemed to remember about him, had been due to lack of options rather than real choice.

He looks at himself in the mirror, running a wet hand through his hair to try and get it into some semblance of presentable. He still has his stubble. He hadn’t shaved this morning. It’s not too late to tear off the jacket and vest and go with his original plan of just a button up.

“Daddy!” Trucy calls again.

“I’m coming, I’m coming!” He shouts back, and with one last look at himself, one last effort to convince himself he looks fine, leaves his apartment looking more like the Turnabout Terror than he has in years.

oOo

More of Miles’ things seem to come weekly.

Apparently Franziska is doing a deep and thorough cleaning of the Von Karma estate. She keeps finding more things, and so boxes and boxes turn up on Miles’ doorstep.

Phoenix finds himself spending a lot of his time in Miles’ office, and it means he ends up spending a lot of time helping Miles unpack boxes. Some of them are things that really shouldn’t have surprised Phoenix, like Steel Samurai manga and dvds that Franziska has unearthed from hidden corners of the estate. Miles had admitted he’d kept them anywhere he thought Manfred wouldn’t look. Other little things like that showed up - small mementos or notes, most of which seem innocuous, but that Miles insists would’ve been disapproved of.

There are also other things, like pens or books or pictures. Some of these do belong to Miles while others of them are items Franziska 'didn’t wish to hold on to any longer’. While that seemed to be the case with some, it only took looking at Miles face to confirm for Phoenix that a lot of them had secret sentimental value.

He never understood their relationship. He’d been an only child, and while there were people he was close to, he’d never grown up in the same building with them, nor under the harsh condition Miles and Franziska had. He's glad he doesn't have to jump through the weird hoops and unsaid rules that Miles and Franziska do when navigating anything to do with the other.

“Okay, you can’t tell me these are important.” Phoenix holds up a pair of scissors. They’re cold and pure metal, no plastic handle like the three pairs Phoenix himself owns. All three of them always go missing at the same time too, which completley defeatst he point of having so many pairs.

Miles sighs and rolls his eyes. He’s sitting on the ground in front of the bookshelf. With the most recent influx of books, alphabetizing them means that the previous books need to be pushed to the next shelf, and it has created a chain of necessary rearrangement to every subsequent shelf as well. Phoenix has seen Miles force the work onto some younger prosecutors or even unlucky detectives, but with Phoenix here he does it himself.

“Open them up.” He says and Phoenix does just that. There are initials welded into the metal, M.E.V.K. Phoenix raises his eyebrows.

“Miles Edgeworth… Von Karma?” He says, just to be sure, and Miles nods.

“Mm, yes. Those are my shears. Franziska insisted on the initials so that if I ruined my pair, she’d be able to tell they were mine right away, and I wouldn’t be able to try and steal hers. She took them to get initialed herself.”

He speaks of the event with the calm and cool that is so Edgeworth, but Phoenix has learned to read between lines. He runs a finger over the four initials. Von Karma. The household Edgeworth had lived in and belonged to in all but the official name change. The name that he was able to carry on these shears.

“I’ll put them in your desk.” Phoenix says instead of the millions of other responses running through his head. He’s standing in front of it anyway. He pulls open the first drawer as Miles says,

“No, I’ll be taking them home. They’re fabric scissors, Phoenix. Using them on paper will ruin them.”

Phoenix’s response to that completely leaves his head when he sees the small golden pin in the drawer.

“What’s this?” He says, more to himself than Miles. He knows what it is, and yet he asks anyway. It’s a defense attorney pin. He can see the petals, the image of scales in the center. It’s not as if he hasn’t seen one recently, he has defense attorneys working for him, after all. But it’s so out of place to see one in Prosecutor Miles Edgeworth’s office that it takes him completely by surprise. He picks it up, turning it this way and that.

“Is this... your dad’s?” He asks, the first answer that comes to mind.

“Is what- oh. No. It isn’t.” Miles is looking over now, and there’s something in his voice that makes Phoenix’s brow furrow. He sounds… hesitant? Scared? Nervous? None of those seemed quite right, but Miles didn’t seem completely at ease. Phoenix returned his focus to the pin.

There are teeth marks in it, like someone had bit into it at one point. The edges of it are worn slightly, softened with time. It’s nostalgic to look at.

It’s even more nostalgic to turn over and see the number 26381.

“Wait, this is…!” Phoenix stares at the number, the number that is burned into his memory. He’d memorized it soon after receiving the pin. It was his number, the number that meant he was really a lawyer, that he had done it.

“... yes. It is.” Phoenix looks back up. Miles is still looking at him, the odd expression still there. Not hesitance, not nervousness, not fear.

Anticipation. Miles is sitting there, watching in anticipation, as Phoenix finds his old defense attorney’s badge in Miles’ desk.

“You have my badge.” Phoenix says. He turns it back around to stare at the face. Yes, that bite mark… that was from Ema, wasn’t it?

“I do.” Miles confirms.

“Why?” Phoenix says. He weighs the small pin in his hand and then tosses it, catching it easily enough. It’s so light and small.

Miles considers both Phoenix and the pin, eyes tracking the movement of the pin as it goes up in the air again and then returns to Phoenix’s palm.

“I didn’t want anyone else to have it.” He says. He’s still anticipating something.

“I see,” Phoenix says. And… he thinks he does, “You never told me. Would’ve been a lot easier to have given it to you personally instead of having to take it off and give it to the board.” He gives Miles a half grin.

“They wouldn’t have accepted that. They’d be upset with you.”

“What would they do? Disbar me?” Phoenix jokes. Miles looks like he’s trying not to crack a smile at the joke. It’s a joke at Phoenix’s expense, but the pain of the event has been numbed by time, and the joke is made to Miles.

“I suppose there wasn’t much they could do at that point, no,” Miles agrees, “It would’ve been easier to have gotten it from you personally. I had to pull some strings to get it.”

“And you didn’t tell me.” Phoenix brings up again.

“No, I didn’t.”

“Why?”

“I thought you’d want it back.” Miles answers honestly.

Phoenix looks back down at the pin, his pin. He can see himself, six or five or even three years ago, finding out that Miles had his pin and begging the man to give it back to him. It had meant so much to him. Its absence had meant even more. It wasn’t as if he would’ve been able to do anything more with it than Miles had been doing; he’d have stuck it in a drawer, and on his worse days he would’ve pulled it out and cried over the small piece of metal.

Maybe if he’d found out a few years earlier, he would’ve been upset at Miles for not telling him, for keeping this from him. It was his badge, after all.

But now, seeing it placed in the top drawer of Miles’ desk where he could quickly open it and look at it whenever he’d wanted to, it fills Phoenix with something warm. This whole time, it hadn’t been locked away somewhere, or handed off to some rookie, or tossed away. It had been with Miles, watched over, polished, kept safe.

“Thank you.” Phoenix puts it back into the shelf, closing the drawer. The anticipation finally leaves Miles to be replaced with relief.

“It was my pleasure.” Miles smiles, and Phoenix returns it.

oOo

A lawyer doesn’t cry until it’s over.

For seven long and painful years, through even terrible twist and turn in the road, Phoenix hadn’t cried. Oh, he’d come close several times. Times where everything had started to get to him, when his chest had shaken with the sobs he so desperately wanted to let out, when he was reminded that he wasn’t a lawyer anymore, that the rule wasn’t his rule anymore. And yet the tears never came. His face stayed dry. And he’d rise again to carry on.

The packet comes in the mail ten months after the test.

It’s thick and heavy. He’s home alone, Trucy at school and Apollo doing some last-minute preparation for a trial. Sometimes it seems like the kid has better luck getting clients than Phoenix ever did.

He knows what the packet is the moment he sees it in the mail slot. He feels numb as he carries it to his apartment. He considers waiting to open it, but that seems like putting himself through unnecessary cruelty.

There’s a knife in the kitchen and he grabs it so he can cleanly slice open the top. It feels wrong to rip into it like an animal.

His shoulders shake as he slips the knife under the flap, his eyesight becomes blurry as he cleanly cuts across the top.

Win or lose, pass or fail, Phoenix thinks he knows how Godot felt at that trial. He imagines that if someone was watching him with the magatama, they’d see a final psyche-lock, placed firmly there when Phoenix had first started to close himself off for the war against Gavin, break apart.

Alone, in his apartment, for the first time in seven years, Phoenix cries.

It finally feels like it’s over.

#ace attorney #phoenix wright #fanfiction #fanfic #browniefox writes #i shall post fic here #as a treat to myself

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