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One: The Elevator
He should have been so lucky, that the dreams would stop.
I did not kill my father, Miles thinks, sitting atop his sheets in a cold and shaking sweat. I did not shoot my father through the heart. It’s not a baseless denial anymore. He knows the truth. Everyone knows the truth. Wright—
I did not kill my father.
Doesn’t feel like it, does it?
He gives in eventually. He doesn’t have much of a choice. Even with the case closed and his past smeared across the public record, as sick and messy as any child’s mistake, there are apparently parts of himself that will not change.
He drops his bedside clock into a drawer with his phone, as is the usual routine, and lies back on the bed. The curtains are drawn but the lights of passing cars sneak over their tops. He tracks their irregular flicker across his ceiling and begins to name appellate justices, working his way down each circuit bench in order of seniority.
He’ll either sleep or he won’t. He did not kill his father. So it is.
Two: The Elevator
Manfred reaches through the elevator doors, body straining, hard fingers closing around Miles’ arm. Miles screams and—
“Miles, you— oh, fuck me! Christ, Miles!”
Miles gasps, ragged, and shoves himself back, feet scrabbling against the mattress as Phoenix thumps onto one elbow and rubs at his jaw.
“What—“ It’s grey, before dawn, and his hand—?
“You clocked me!” Phoenix yelps, as if the shock is ongoing.
Miles pants, slumped against the headboard of Phoenix’s cheap Ikea bed and waits for the whole of this to make sense. When it does he screws his eyes shut and pushes his palms hard into the sockets. “Sorry,” he says. “I… didn’t mean to.”
“Yeah, I should hope so!”
“It’s— I’m sorry. I had a dream.”
“About what?”
Miles drops his hands, staring. Phoenix blinks at him one or twice and then his eyes, already wide, get bigger. Then he winces. “Oh,” he says. “Sorry.”
“Mm,” Miles replies, flexing his hands. Both of them are stiff— he must have been holding onto the sheets for a while— but one certainly smarts more than the other. The red shadow on Phoenix’s jaw glares at him accusingly, although Phoenix himself is watching Miles with eyes too large, as if he hopes to somehow divine a solution to the problem of Miles’ psyche by gazing at him with enough loving terror.
...That’s not quite fair.
He sees Manfred again, sleeve stained red, reaching for this throat.
“I didn’t realize you still got them,” Phoenix says, quieter. The room feels more dreamlike than his nightmare, with no traffic outside the windows and the shadows indistinguishable from the flat light. “It’s been two years. Longer, even, it’s almost April.”
“I am well aware,” Miles replies, shorter than he intended, making Phoenix wince again. He sighs. “I’m sorry. Again. Yes, I still have dreams about being in that elevator with my father. No, they didn’t stop. No, I don’t know if they ever will.”
“You were shouting,” Phoenix says. “In your sleep.”
“Yes,” Miles replies. “That happens.”
“Should I not try to wake you up?”
“I don’t know. This is new to me.”
Phoenix frowns. “New?”
Miles flushes, feeling it like a rash. “Sharing a… sleeping together with someone. I haven’t. Not since before my father died. No one’s ever tried to wake me before.”
That makes Phoenix frown harder, though Miles isn’t sure why he assumed the situation would ever have been otherwise. He looks younger in the unfeatured light, despite his grimace. Something about his eyes.
Miles touches his fingertips to Phoenix’s jaw before he can stop himself. It feels like a transgression, up until Phoenix smiles at him.
“We’ll figure it out,” Phoenix says, shrugging, though not so hard that he dislodges Miles’ fingers from the crooked corner of his mouth.
“Hmm?” Distracted.
“Your nightmares. How I should wake you,” Phoenix says, patient. “We’ll figure it out. We’ve got the time.”
Miles smiles. The room gets a fraction brighter. “I suppose we do.”
“After you get back from your next trip, of course. And assuming I get literally any cases while you’re gone. I know you’re not coming back to me if I get evicted and have to live out of a box on the street.”
“That is completely correct,” Miles says, and watches Phoenix grin and shift and kiss the clammy tips of his fingers.
Three: Manfred (Alive)
His first, irrational thought once he’s shouted himself awake is that he wants to call Phoenix.
He hasn’t spoken to Phoenix in months. He won’t see him for at least another two, until that symposium Miles bought him flights to and a ticket for. He’s not going to call Phoenix.
The dumb, animal part of him still wants to. So it is, so it is.
His phone chimes on the bedside table. When he thumbs it open, Franziska has sent him an angry, frowning emoji.
Within seconds it’s followed by a single question mark. Miles’ eyebrows rise.
“I’m fine,” he says aloud, low but clear. The walls in this hotel are particularly thin. He heard her having passionate phone sex with Adrian last night. “Just a nightmare. I’m sorry to have woken you.”
She sends another frowny face.
Then: you didnt
Then: i was already up
Then: you presume you are loud enough to disturb me??
Finally, after a pause, as if to consider the limits of one upmanship against an opponent who is half-asleep and not responding: your father?
“No,” Miles says.
Another pause, then: my father?
Every muscle in Miles’ back tightens, still too close to sleep to escape remembering. This was easier when she lacked the emotional intelligence to ask him follow-up questions.
She sends another frowny face when he doesn’t respond in time. This is followed, long enough after the previous message that the typing bubble lives, dies, and lives again, by: The Level 1 study67 demonstrated that Imagery Rehearsal Therapy (IRT) is a brief, effective, well-tolerated treatment for chronic nightmares associated with PTSD. This RCT of 168 women with moderate- to-severe PTSD symptoms demonstrated that IRT significantly improved disturbing dreams, sleep quality, and posttraumatic stress symptoms (60% reduction)...
She copies in most of the abstract. Miles smiles, unable to help himself. “Thank you, Franziska,” he says to the empty room and his listening sister. “Have you been conspiring with my therapist again?”
do you think i do not have my own therapist with which to conspire, miles edgeworth? always you underestimate me.
He laughs, loud enough for her to hear. The frowny face this time is purple and horned.
i will speak to you in the morning, she texts. do not wake me again.
“Of course,” he says. “Good night, little sister.”
and do not call the american!!
“Good night, little sister.”
Four: Phoenix (Dead)
When was the last time he woke himself sobbing? He couldn’t have been more than twelve.
“Miles, hey.”
He can’t seem to retake control of his own lungs. They shiver and heave like, perhaps ironically, two things half-drowned, wracking his body, his spasming throat.
“Miles, come on, if you wake Trucy with this, she’s gonna ask me some weird questions.”
He’d love to stop. Any day now.
“Okay, well, hope your right hook’s gone to shit.”
Phoenix touches his cheek.
When Miles opens his eyes, hiccuping like a kid, Phoenix is crouching at the side of the bed, more concern across his stubbly face than Miles has seen in all the weeks since he got back to Los Angeles. The room is dark but the hallway bright, a lamp beside the couch just visible. Was Phoenix sleeping out there?
“Hey, much less violent than the old days,” Phoenix says. “Your dad, still?”
Miles lurches up and drags him into a hug.
“Okay! Uh— okay!” Phoenix manages, with Miles’ face buried in his neck, two hands hesitantly patting Miles’ curving spine. “So, not your dad?”
“You,” Miles growls, still too shaken to keep from crying. Phoenix’s hoodie is a disease vector anyways, Miles can’t be making it that much worse. “Idiot.”
“Is this my fault? Are you saying your fucked-up trauma dreams are my fault?”
Yes, Miles wants to say, if only because he’d love to start a minor fight with Phoenix and make this situation 10% less hideously intimate. “No,” he says instead, in a tone he acknowledges as achingly sincere, while he cries on Phoenix’s collarbone. Sometimes there’s nothing to be done.
“Okay,” Phoenix says, softer. “It’s okay. Let me up, would you? My doctor says I have the spine of an eighty-year-old.”
Miles consents to release him. Phoenix, unbending slowly and with great complaint, seats himself beside Miles in the bed. One of Miles’ hands he takes for his own, settling in his lap. The lights from the outside window shade him a tarnished halogen orange.
“So,” Phoenix says. “Do I make a sexy corpse?”
Miles guffaws—a stupid, wet sound. Phoenix grins at him.
“I just wanna know if I have anything to forward to, here,” he goes on, over Miles’ snorting. “I’ve heard the pallor of death really evens out your skin tone, you know? Maybe I can finally give up on sunscreen. Maybe I can finally continue to give up on sunscreen.”
“Wear sunscreen,” Miles says. “You looked deeply traumatizing.”
“Damn,” Phoenix sighs. “How’d I kick it, anyways?”
Miles shakes his head, squeezing Phoenix’s hand.
“A fun surprise for later,” Phoenix says mildly. “Is this… one you’ve had before? I don’t remember it from back in the day.”
“Yes,” Miles says, watching Phoenix try not to frown. “Only a few times, but yes.”
“And is that… have I traumatized you?” Phoenix asks, in the confused but earnest tone Miles imagines he adopts when asking Trucy what her SAT scores mean. “Like, more than the obvious. Aside from the break-ups and the professional embarassments and the bad sex.”
Miles pats Phoenix’s hands, which are still holding his own. “The sex was mediocre at worst.”
“Miles.”
“You aren’t von Karma, Phoenix,” Miles says, rubbing his thumb over the smooth tendons of Phoenix’s hand. “Not every nightmare is a symptom of post-traumatic stress. Sometimes it’s just a nightmare.”
Phoenix looks skeptical at this, an appearance helped by the rampant disorder of his eyebrows. Miles thinks it’ll be good to kiss him again. It’s been far, far too long.
Miles smiles at him, softly, hoping it all shines through. “Sometimes you’re just scared for the people you love.”
Five: The Elevator
Phoenix’s hand pats his chest in a heavy, unsteady rhythm.
“Hey,” he says, low and half-asleep, “hey, s’okay. Everyone’s alive, babe, ‘cept for all our friends who’re dead.”
Miles stays flat, blinking too fast up at the ceiling. Phoenix’s hand rises and falls with each quick breath.
“Hey, w’ssup,” Phoenix says, hauling himself up on one elbow. It’s well into the night, Miles guesses, hours before sunrise. “Bad one?”
“...Worse than I might enjoy,” Miles says, exhaling shakily. “My father.”
“Mmph, that is bad,” Phoenix says. He blinks down at Miles like a semi-conscious, unshaven Adonis. “Told you not to have coffee after 3pm. Time t’ spoon.”
“What?” It’s not like Miles is completely awake himself.
“You gotta be the little spoon, ‘m way too hot,” Phoenix mumbles, pushing lamely at Miles’ shoulder until Miles finally rolls onto his side. “Unless you, wait, do you not wanna spoon?”
Miles pulls Phoenix’s arm down around him. The rest of Phoenix follows. “Oh,” Phoenix says, into the back of Miles’ neck. “Good. Want me to talk about the youths?”
“Of course,” Miles replies, though the old, familiar tremors are already fading. Phoenix is an over-warm limpet, sure to become too hot to bear within the hour, but he’s what Miles wants. If he waits a moment more, there again will be Phoenix’s voice.
“Love you,” Phoenix says, sure as clockwork, yawning into Miles’ hair. “Love you all the time, almost every day. Don’t marry anyone else.”
Miles squeezes Phoenix’s arm, smiling for only himself to see.
“‘Kay, that’s good,” Phoenix mumbles. “So, Blackquill. Crystal deodorant? Because legally you have t’ tell me if he does. Don’t need that miasma in my office or my life.”
If Miles has any more dreams that night, he doesn’t remember a one.