Work Text:
March 4, 12:16 PM
Ivy University Campus
Art Department
If she really tries, sometimes she can convince herself that he only calls her Dollie because he thinks she’s as pretty as porcelain.
“Dollie! How was class?” he gushes, leaning into her like he could get drunk off her touch.
“Um - it was nice,” says Iris. She spent the last hour going over Dahlia’s notes about Samuel Taylor Coleridge, turning them from her surprisingly illegible quick scribble into something neat and curved and calligraphic. Dahlia makes her keep up, because you’ve got to be good for something. “We’re studying a poem about an albatross.”
“Uh-huh,” says Phoenix, still snuggling into her. They start moving, arm in arm, vaguely in the direction of the nearest on-campus café. “And who’s Albert Ross?”
“It doesn’t matter,” she stifles a giggle. He’s so dumb. It’s almost adorable.
(It can’t be adorable. She can’t afford it.)
He buys her a strawberry lemonade from the café, just the way he does every Tuesday. She sits in their usual booth, wearing Dahlia’s clothes and Dahlia’s hair and Dahlia’s pet name, drinking the flavour they both agreed on when this plan was set in motion months ago. She doesn’t really like iced drinks.
“And what did you do in class this morning, Feenie?”
“Oh, compositional theory. Which is still kicking my ass. I swear, the second this semester’s over, I’m gonna change my major for real!”
She allows herself to giggle for real this time, although it comes out a touch more simpering than she’d intended it to. “My beautiful lawyer.”
Phoenix gasps, affronted. “Me beautiful? You need to take a look at yourself in the mirror sometime, Dollie, you put a man to shame.”
Instead of further arguing, because boy can Phoenix argue if you get him started, she nuzzles into the crook of his neck and hums happily. The guy’s a real space heater, the perfect accompaniment to the last few dregs of winter while she waits for cherry blossom season to return. Really, it makes total sense with his name.
With that same sort of reverent air he often has towards her, Phoenix kisses the top of her head. In the turn of his body to line up the angle, she sees the glint of the necklace beneath a paint-stained shirt.
“Oh, um, Feenie - can I have this back now?”
Every time, she hopes he might take her seriously. Every time, he disappoints. “You’re such a joker,” Phoenix chuckles, “you know I would never give up the greatest treasure of all.”
“It’s important,” she tries to, well, import.
“Of course it is! It’s the symbol of our star-crossed meeting! I promise I won’t ever let it come to any harm. Not unless I really have to.”
Iris sighs. Maybe next time.
(She’s bitterly grateful that Dahlia isn’t interested in surveilling her behaviour on their dates. If she was, she’d probably have called out by now that Iris’ requests to retrieve the necklace never get any more assertive in tone than the ones that came before. It’s the only reason she’s still sitting here, after all, isn’t it?)
They chat a little more about class. Phoenix will have finally squared all his gen eds away as of this May, meaning that if he does decide to switch to Law like he’s been threatening to all year, there’ll be nothing left standing in his way. Iris congratulates him, calls him clever and revels in the way he blushes at it, pulling her further into him like someone’s gonna steal her.
“I’m excited,” he tells her, in a cadence she never hears him using when he talks about his Art classes, “I really feel like it’s what I should have been doing all this time, you know?”
“Why did you apply to do Art in the first place?”
“Ah - well, I love art, I really do. I guess there was a while where it was kind of like… like, I can’t really make this whole plan happen, being a defense attorney, can I? So in senior year I figured, hey, I should pick a major that I know I’m good at, that I’m pretty sure I can actually handle without becoming a college dropout, and this just made sense.”
“But you turned it around?”
“Yeah! Pretty much right before I met you, I realised, wait, it could be possible after all. Didn’t want to let my kid self down, y’know?”
Some of the times that Phoenix tells this story, there are two friends in it; sometimes there’s only one. Today, apparently, the law career is a solo endeavour.
“I’m so glad you’re gonna shoot for your dreams like that, Feenie. You’re so driven.”
“I have to be! If I’m gonna get into that courtroom in time, I can’t afford to be so casual about it.”
… Iris feels his throat flex, just a little. “But?”
“... But then I remember how hard it is to actually study law,” Phoenix admits. She can sense the embarrassed sweating from here; she pulls away to face him, taking both his hands.
“Oh, come on, Feenie. Sure, it may be hard, but you have so much perseverance! If you want something, you never let go of it!” Like that necklace.
Not sensing the comparison, Phoenix brightens up. “Yeah! Like you, pretty Dollie.”
“I mean, I hope you’re gonna let go of me eventually,” she says, slightly more daring than usual. “How am I supposed to go to the bathroom?”
“I’ll wait outside ‘till you’re done,” he insists.
“Or sleep?”
“Oh, that’s an easy one!” Phoenix beams. “We can always sleep together.”
The way he says it, it’s like there’s no further implications to the words. “So you’re just going to hang around my neck forever, is that it?”
“Nothing would make me happier,” he tells her, earnest. Then pauses. “Except getting back in the courtroom.”
Iris sighs, and smiles, and melts back into his chest again. Their lunches still sit in her bag, unacknowledged; the ice in the strawberry lemonade is (hopefully) reduced to tiny rounded shards at the bottom of the glass. The longer she can spend with her eyes closed, breathing the scent of cheap laundry soap and oil paints, the less time she has to spend being Dahlia.
“Really,” says Phoenix above her, “you’re gorgeous. If I could put you on a chain and take you everywhere, I’d do it. And I’d show everybody just how pretty you were, as well.”
The fact that Phoenix loves to flash around that necklace pisses Dahlia off. She’s been more irritated lately, increasingly insistent that he has to give it back to her. Iris is starting to worry that if Phoenix keeps being reckless with the evidence of her sins like that, Dahlia might do something a little more drastic to get it.
Involuntarily, her mind skips back to the notes she was rewriting this morning. The albatross, praised and plaudited, and then promptly shot out of the sky.
“Oh, Feenie… please…”
“I mean it! I love you. I want everyone I ever meet to know that.”
He loves her. Is madly in love with her. She’s the love of his life. Iris hears this all the time.
Phoenix might be the one with the trophy of death around his neck here, but that wingspan still weighs heavy on Iris’ soul.
Dahlia is not going to let her keep this man.
“Let’s have lunch, okay?” She pulls back and smiles, at once placid and dainty, Dahlia-sweet. Phoenix lights up at the reminder of food.
“Aw, yes! Thank you so much, Dollie, sweetheart! What’d you make today?”
“It’s my special mini-omelettes. I know they’re your favourite.”
“You’re perfect,” he effuses, eyes wide and dark and full of adoration, and digs in. She watches, wearing Dahlia’s clothes and Dahlia’s name and Dahlia’s porcelain smile.
(Iris has never chosen her own wardrobe. She went straight from Mother’s judgement to Bikini’s acolyte costumes to Dahlia’s whites and pinks. Honestly, if she were to pick out her own outfit, she’s not even sure where she’d start.)
Life-in-Death wins the game of dice. Iris will watch everything and everyone she loves wilt one by one around her with the weight of poison choking at her collar, and she will go back to the temple, because there will be nothing else to do once Phoenix Wright is dead. Sister Bikini will hail her, mistake her for anything other than the devil she’s committed and committed and committed to being. Perhaps, in some far off future, a wedding guest will stop by the temple for long enough to hear the tale.
Iris makes the decision to pretend Phoenix is here for her perfection. That he only calls her Dollie ‘cause she’s pretty and refined. That she has forever; that she’ll see him in that courtroom some day.
Iris sips cold strawberry lemonade and ignores the fact that she can never save her soul.