Miles Edgeworth chooses death, but Phoenix Wright brings him back.

Again.

And.

Again.

Excerpt:

“I didn’t have my head screwed on back then. I ate a glass bottle to prove my lawyer wrong about her. They said it was a miracle I didn’t tear my esophagus, or poison myself. — Poison was her preferred murder weapon.” He gazes up at the constellation he calls Gant’s Swimming Pool. Its stars shimmer and glisten, making it look more like a body of water than the lake ahead of them. “I heard that she was executed, about three weeks ago.”

Edgeworth hums under his breath. “Is that why you’re so…”

“What?”

The rest remains unspoken. His friend merely shrugs his shoulders. The pair keep lying there for half an hour more, as Phoenix describes more constellations with his index finger: Butterfly, Parasol, Beautiful Woman With Ill Intentions Who Doesn’t Really Love You After All.

Chapter 4 on AO3

Miles Edgeworth chooses death, but Phoenix Wright brings him back.

Again.

And.

Again.

Excerpt:

“I really lucked out there,” Phoenix lies graciously. He leans forward to point at his rook. Again, the vessel pitches. “If I hadn’t moved this to 4E, you would have swooped in with the queen, and I would have been a dead man walking.”

A shadow passes over Edgeworth’s face. “Spare me the pity party, Phoenix Wright.”

He sounds so much like his old self that all of Phoenix’s misgivings are dispelled. He has to consciously refrain from pumping his fist. “Want to play again?” he asks.

“No,” Edgeworth replies, a trifle too fast. As if embarrassed by his own hesitancy, he corrects, “Later,” and busies himself with collecting his chess pieces. What color are they? Red? No, magenta. The pieces look tiny in his palm, like plucked and withered rose petals.

Chapter 3 on AO3

Miles Edgeworth chooses death, but Phoenix Wright brings him back.

Again.

And.

Again.

Excerpt:

Past the halfway point between the shack and the park entrance, Edgeworth stops and leans against the railing. He looks chic as always in his pea-coat-and-wingtip-boots ensemble, and closer to the 21st century than usual. Phoenix joins him and makes small talk about the Berry Big Circus that’s in town.

“Sea gulls,” says Edgeworth out of nowhere.

Phoenix blinks. “Oh, yeah.” He hadn’t even noticed them until now, but there they are: two of them wheeling over Edgeworth, and a third one making a water landing, taxiing slowly toward them. “Hey, they seem to like you.”

Edgeworth kneads his elbow. “They’re carrion birds.”

Chapter 2 on AO3

Miles Edgeworth chooses death, but Phoenix Wright brings him back.

Again.

And.

Again.

Excerpt:

The Wright & Co. Law Offices haven’t taken on any clients since Skye: Ms. Co. is busy with her spirit training in the mountains, and Mr. Wright cannot work in this state. He is a husk, barely functional. He drags his feet to the toilet when he needs to take a piss, and to the post-it note with the Whet Noodle number when his stomach growls, and back to his bed at night — and when all that shuffling wears holes into his socks, it is not a wake-up call but a point of pride. It is proof, physical proof that Edgeworth matters to him; that his soul bears matching apertures.

It only stops when Phoenix finds out about the Kurain artifact.

Chapter 1 on AO3

Glissando (ace attorney, 4308 words, one-shot)

On the evening Phoenix Wright proved himself to be more than an addlepated ingénue, there was a great commotion in the foyer of the singers.

On its face, this was nothing new. The place always stank with gossip after gala night. However, this was a different commotion than usual — unrelated to Trucy Gramarye’s vanishing pointe shoes or Klavier Gavin’s malapropisms auf Deutsch.

One of the chorus girls had seen a ghost!

AA / Phantom of the Opera fusion.

Available on AO3

How the Other Half Lives (ace attorney, 2398 words, one-shot)

This is for Miles’s own good. You understand that, don’t you?

Excerpt:

Let’s get one thing straight: I don’t need to justify myself to you.

I love him. That was enough of an explanation for the Trojan War, and Lamiroir’s hit single, and a good deal of Shakespeare — I mean at least half of the sonnets — and the latest government scandal in Zheng Fa, and Dee Vasquez’s whole bougie femme fatale shtick.

But you’re wrapped up in this, too, now. And maybe you deserve to know.

So let’s take it from the top.

Available on AO3

L’amour et la mort (ace attorney, 1205 words, one-shot)

Edgeworth gets a guilty verdict in Turnabout Goodbyes. Phoenix fixes it.

Excerpt:

In a prison in Los Angeles, a pair of childhood friends face off across a pane of plexiglass.

The inmate looks startled to see the other man, but — as is often the case with him — this surprise is wedded to belligerence. Holding the receiver close to his mouth, he fires off facts, rattles out reproaches, spits out censure. He presents his situation as a fait accompli, charging himself with not one but two murders, and rehashing his jeremiad about crime and punishment.

The guest listens to all of this, expressionless. He winds the phone’s corkscrew cord round and round his wrist, periodically pausing to observe the skin below, which is beginning to look like a barcode. But at the mention of the thrown gun, he jumps up and slams his free hand on the desk.

“No,” he declares. “I still don’t believe in your nightmare.”

Available on AO3

Heart Sticker, Heart Sticker, Rainbow Sketch (ace attorney, 1564 words, one-shot)

Pearl Fey’s Correspondence to Maya Fey in August 2020, in Which She Rides the Funicular and Learns About True Love.

Excerpt:

Mr. Edgeworth and I ordered apple pie with vanilla ice cream, and even though Mr. Nick said he didn’t want dessert, he was clearly very jealous! In the end Mr. Edgeworth took pity on him and forked up a piece, then held it out for him to eat. They seem to be very good friends.

Available on AO3

Blanket Friends (ace attorney, 2472 words, one-shot)

It hadn’t escaped Miles’s notice that lately, he’d only slept when Wright was there.

(Five times Miles and Phoenix shared a bed, at ages 10 and 26.)

Excerpt:

Miles had a vision of the intervening years lined up as on a bookshelf: his ten-year-old schoolmate on one end, his twenty-six-year-old colleague on the other. It seemed, briefly, as if he might be able to gather up all the darkness in his life, bind it in pulp and leather, and shove it twixt the bookends of Wright’s bedtime caresses.

Available on AO3

Artisanal Chocolates (ace attorney, 2128 words, one-shot)

Phoenix will not rest until he finds out who gave Edgeworth those Valentine’s Day chocolates.

Excerpt:

Phoenix followed Edgeworth’s go-on-then-you-absolute-potato gesture.

He picked up the box gingerly.

He blinked.

“Bwuh,” he contended.

Available on AO3

Tight Leash (ace attorney, 1441 words, one-shot)

It’s a beautiful day in Los Angeles, and you’re a corrupt defense attorney taking your golden retriever for a walk.

Or: Miles runs into Kristoph in the dog park.

Excerpt:

Gavin made a gesture of dismissal, rotating his wrist in an affected manner. “Sometimes a dog can be disciplined,” he said, “but sometimes a dog is so ill-bred, so rabid, Mr. Edgeworth, that there is no alternative but to put him down.”

He was not talking about Axl anymore. Miles had been watching the dogs play, but his head whipped up at that remark, while Gavin turned to him with an unhurried air. Their eyes locked.

Available on AO3

Came in Eighteen to One (ace attorney, 2307 words, one-shot)

Phoenix organizes a Secret Santa gift exchange — the first one in the newly minted Wright & Co. Law Offices — and gets a most unexpected present.

Featuring holiday traditions, Steel Samurai references, overdue kisses, and a very special guest star.

Teaser:

He got up and crossed to the light-festooned, star-studded tree. The agony of choice, he mused, reaching for the only present left: an oblong pink parcel that looked even more badly wrapped than his own. If he hadn’t already known — by process of elimination — whose gift this was, he could have guessed from the uneven folds held tremblingly in place by jagged strips of sellotape. He hasn’t gotten any better at this, has he? Phoenix thought fondly, recalling his friend’s grade-school struggles with origami.

Available on AO3

Sublimation (ace attorney, 300 words, drabble)

They have an understanding.

Edgeworth leaves the office an hour earlier on Thursdays, pulls ahead of the evening traffic, and drives to a studio above a nail salon. The walls are peeling plaster and there is a note taped to the door: ‘Bell broken — knock five times.’

No matter how often they’ve done this, Iris always greets him with a grateful, startled gasp. She looks the same as she did before prison, only her hair is shorter, and she has a tattoo of a bee on her left arm. He’s gay and she’s uninterested, but that’s the entire point. And when their clothes are off, they avert their eyes politely and think about somebody else.

They talk about somebody else, too, after the act:

“Feenie used to wear pink in college. An even brighter shade than yours, Mr. Edgeworth.”

“How long did it take you? To realize that you… felt this way.”

“Um. Only an hour or so — that’s how long our first lunch break lasted. What about you?”

“Longer.”

They do this and more on Thursdays — chiefly so they can both get through the Fridays.

It’s Edgeworth’s turn today.

Having now aired his ‘deep, dark secret,’ he can endure… all of this nonsense. He can agree to spend an evening with Phoenix and his boyfriend. He can nod cordially at Kristoph Gavin. He can compliment him on his choice of restaurant, his taste in Chardonnays. He can hold Phoenix’s hand platonically. He can bite down You deserve better and He’s not what he seems and I was here first, dammit. He can watch them kiss without flinching. He can smile, not too tightly.

He can let drop, “I talked to Sister Iris yesterday” and peer at his old friend, scouring his face in search of kinder, more sensible heartbreaks.

Also available on AO3

Parents’ Evening (ace attorney, 623 words, one-shot)

“Two Psyche-Locks? Edgeworth! What aren’t you telling me?”

Or: Edgeworth goes to a parent-teacher conference in Phoenix’s stead.

Teaser:

Edgeworth had hardly even crossed the threshold and his boyfriend was catapulting his smelly, sweatsuit-clad body at him: “How did it go? What did she say? Is Trucy getting along better with Horace now?” Phoenix’s fingers latched onto his arm, and Edgeworth extracted them one by one: this little piggy went to the local grade school… this little piggy stayed home…

“Phoenix, if you’re going to be like this, perhaps you should be the one to go to these parent-teacher conferences.”

Available on AO3

Found Wanting (ace attorney, 674 words, one-shot)

Phoenix cannot fantasize about his girlfriend without him interloping.

Teaser:

“Oh!” Dahlia notices the newcomer almost right away, cranes her neck to take him in. “Feenie, you naughty boy! Have you been keeping things from me? Who the hell is this?”

Available on AO3 (NSFW)