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1.
The day Miles Edgeworth disappears from the classroom is the day he appears in Phoenix’s notebook.
It isn't the first time his desk has been empty. After all, Miles is human like the rest of them, no matter how often Phoenix has to remind himself of this fact. He has sick days and doctor’s appointments and car troubles like they all do.
Something is different today. Something is off. The desk feels more than simply unoccupied. It feels abandoned. Deserted.
When he looks down at his page of fill-in-the-blanks sums, Miles stares back. A pair of sevens form his bangs, an equals sign his disdainful eye, a blank answer space his pressed lips. Maybe Larry just made a bad joke. Maybe he's scowling because his face is sharp and edged and unfinished.
Phoenix fills in the blanks, but not with numbers.
The teacher marks their work that night. It's the usual mix. Eleven times NINE equals seventy-seven. Eighty-four minus fourteen equals SIXTY. EYE plus HAIR equals the boy whose desk will stay empty.
She calls Phoenix to talk to her after class the next day and tries not to cry when he does.
2.
He gets his paper back today, and it's the same as always. For someone whose aptitude lies in theatrics, his brushwork isn't bad; his pencil strokes are clean. But next time, Wright, branch out. Try a new model. I have seen this boy before.
Good, thinks Phoenix. Good. You can tell me what it’s like. Because I haven't.
The Miles Edgeworth on his paper has grown up alongside him, changes as he does. Miles smirks now, but it’s a kind smirk, a fond one, with a sparkle in his eye. His jaw has sharpened into a strong line. His hair is long, pulled back into an elegant ponytail. Sometimes he has glasses. Mostly he doesn’t. The frames change every time. He always gets new ones, because he doesn’t like having to wear them, doesn’t like the way they sit on his face.
Phoenix does. There’s nothing Phoenix doesn’t like when it comes to Miles. But his favourite parts of his Miles are the parts that stay the same, familiar to the Miles he knew. His red bow tie, his grey suit. The soft bangs that frame his face.The defense attorney pin that Phoenix and Larry made for him out of clay, the one he never took off. It’s morphed into a real one, now, glinting on his lapel like a smile.
The warmth you would find in his cool grey eyes if you searched deep enough. The conviction in his point, in his shout, in his stance. The bare earnestness. The passion. The heart.
Turn to page three hundred and ninety-four of your textbooks, says the visual art teacher, and he does. He’s glad he does. It’s the only page left where Miles doesn’t smile up at him, doodled absently in a moment of silence or chatter, quality fluctuating wildly as his attention does. The face that his hand turns to when his mind is idle, more instinct than anything else by now, his equivalent of that strange “S” that all middle schoolers somehow knew to scribble over their papers.
Page three hundred and ninety-four is as yet unadorned with Miles Edgeworth, and he amends this quickly.
3.
His margins have slowly cleared since his earlier college years. They’d come to a sharp, rather harsh stop, drawing blanks for the first time ever since the first time he had seen Edgeworth in the papers.
No glasses, no kind smirk, no soft glimmer in his eye. He’s edges, all edges, sharp and edged and worthy of his name and miles, miles from the Miles that Phoenix had seen in his mind’s eye. Sharp eyes with a cold glint, mouth turned down and disapproving. What appeared to be a rabid napkin escaping from his neck.
A lapel adorned with garish golden buttons, but nothing else.
Phoenix wonders what happened to the clay pin.
He gazes into the cool eyes that stare disdainfully up from the paper, and feels a shard of his heart harden into ice. Shifting uncomfortably whenever it beats.
He wants it to melt.
He starts to frequent the courthouse library. There, he meets Dahlia Hawthorne and falls head over heels into her hands, and her warmth doesn’t melt the ice, but does leave a scorch mark beside it.
He is acquitted for murder by defense attorney Mia Fey and switches his degree that afternoon. The new Miles Edgeworth appears in the margins of his first paper.
4.
A slow day, Mia calls it. It has been. He’s watered Charley, and again, until Mia yelled at him to stop lest he become a murderer.
Phoenix doesn’t think drowning a plant counts as murder. But then again, Charley is a trusted coworker. So he allows himself to be delegated to file-sorting duty and tries not to inhale too much dust as he yawns. The sun filters through the blinds and glints off the shiny new badge on his lapel that has seen neither hide nor hair of the courtroom - nor, Phoenix reflects regretfully, of its inhabitants.
The sun’s trajectory continues. Bounces off Mia’s new penholder and hits him in the eye.
Mia comes back to fetch the recycling, and all the scrapped files hold the face of the upstart young man who called her a novice bimbo, and Phoenix has more than a little explaining to do.
5.
He’s never been less invested in a case.
Warmth drifts in lazily through the glass window; sunshine illuminates the polished desk, the shelves, the floor, until they glow.
It brightens the paper a little too much. The freshly printed ink reflects into Phoenix’s face. He squints, shifts on the sofa, thinks about finding a spot where the sun doesn’t assault his eyes before realising that he just doesn’t care enough to try. He flips the case notes over and adjusts the position of his arm, flexes his wrist, stretches his fingers.
The pen glides smoothly, uninhibited by the hesitation that had jolted his lines and halted his mind for twenty-five years. There was no cause for uncertainty when he was no longer responsible for the curve of a cheekbone or the bounce of the bangs or - finally - the soft glint of an eye.
Miles Edgeworth glances up from his desk, glasses perched on his nose.
“Are you drawing me?” he asks, his lips arching slightly into a fond smirk.
Phoenix smiles. Warmth (the kind that had nothing to do with the frankly oversized windows) had pumped through his heart long ago, wearing down the ice until it shattered and melted away.
“Needed the practice,” he says.