Chapter Text
The Couch
When Phoenix was looking for apartments, it didn’t occur to him that he would ever have need of a guest room. It’s not like he could afford anything more than a cramped one-bedroom anyway, and he was not one for entertaining. The only friend he could even think of setting up for the night was Larry Butz-- but there’s that saying “if you build it, he will come”-- and quite frankly, Phoenix doesn't really want to “build it” because he doesn’t really want Larry, with his perpetual carousel of girlfriends, “to come.”
Therefore, in selecting a place to live and furnishing it, Phoenix was only thinking about the bare bones of what he and he alone would need.
Bedroom: mattress, dresser.
Living room: couch, coffee table, TV, bookshelf.
Kitchen: a pot? What do you put in a kitchen? He’d never really cooked so he didn’t really know.
Bathroom: toilet paper, soap, towel.
Thus concludes all his earthly possessions upon moving in. It isn’t much, but it's functional. Granted, he is hesitant to invite anyone over, but it isn’t like he has very many people to invite. He spends a lot of time at Mia’s apartment: going over cases, having dinner, the occasional movie night; but whenever she mentions stopping by his place to drop off a book or a file, he shrinks away from the offer, suggesting instead that they meet at a coffee shop or the deli a block away from his place.
It’s not like he DOESN’T want Mia to see his apartment or anything. It’s just that he doesn’t WANT her to see it, which is a completely different sentiment.
Immediately following Mia’s death, however, he finds himself walking the six flights of stairs up to his apartment with Maya in tow: the pair too exhausted from the hard-won acquittal to care too much about anything other than their bodies immediately colliding with blankets and a padded surface. Groggily, Phoenix throws the flat sheet and comforter from his own bed over the sagging couch in the living room-- which Maya promptly collapses upon-- before staggering back to his room and falling asleep under a throw blanket on his frameless mattress. He expects the arrangement to be temporary, she’s just crashing here after the case, and she’ll be gone in the morning. They’ll inevitably part ways: becoming if not strangers, then at least awkward acquaintances bound only by mutual closeness to the deceased. The only time Maya will come up is if he’s recounting the one time he accidentally implicated himself in a murder while trying to defend a client. Maybe he’ll contact her when he needs to channel a spirit, like calling in a favor. He wonders if they'd even say hi if they encountered each other at a grocery store: would awkward small talk ensue? Or would she just give a pert smile and look away, her hand lingering on a box of pasta until he walks past? As much as he likes having her around, she probably doesn’t want to hang out with a mess like him; why would she; they’ll likely shake hands and part ways.
But this isn’t what happens. Maya sticks around and, for some reason, she insists on sticking with him. At first, of course, she has a clear enough motivation: there’s simply a lot that needs to get done. When someone dies, you have to take care of more than just convicting their murderer. There’s the burial, the funeral arrangements, the reading of wills, the transferring of assets: things that Phoenix is not exactly proficient in, but at least with a law degree, he’s way more prepared to handle than a 17-year-old spirit medium.
They also had to tackle the issue of Mia’s belongings. The sadder underbelly of the saying “you can’t take it with you,” is that, ultimately, the dead leave behind a lot of stuff. There’s a whole life’s worth of objects that the living have to sort through: their storage units, their cars, their closets, their desks. It’s only a day after the funeral when Phoenix receives notices explaining that he either needs to immediately post next month’s rent for Mia’s apartment or he needs to move everything out by next week. In normal circumstances, he can hardly make his own rent and is struggling to additionally cover it for the office as well, but he offers to take out a loan to keep the apartment for an extra month if Maya would rather stay there than on his disgusting couch while they settle her affairs.
Mia’s apartment is nice, and while by no means bougie, it's certainly nicer than Nick’s. While his furniture is a piecemeal collection of things he’d found on the side of the road or purchased off Craigslist for $5 apiece, Mia’s furniture is from IKEA. Granted, it’s from the cheaper side of IKEA-- a lot of particleboard and a kitchen table that wobbles a little from a failure in confusing Swedish construction-- but nice. A definitely more well-kept and mature aesthetic than Nick’s place. Mia’s apartment says, “a grown-up lived here:” she has a neat kitchen and plates that all match each other; basil and oregano grow on the windowsill and other potted plants that she actually kept alive flourish in pots around the flat. There's a guest room that Maya is used to sleeping in on her somewhat regular visits.
Nick’s apartment, on the other hand, screams, “I’m living in squalor” and “I don’t know how to take care of myself.” He has a few, random ceramic plates and bowls from his brief stint in the ceramics department, but he mostly eats take-out off paper plates. The succulent Mia got him as a congratulatory gift when he’d passed the bar exam “because even you can’t kill a succulent,” sits in its sad, shriveled grave on his windowsill. While Mia’s couch is humble but mature (cotton upholstery in a dark, charcoal grey that was visibly well-loved, but also visibly well-maintained), Phoenix's couch is a depressing little goblin of a thing. He is not into smoking, but the couch still reeks of cigarettes from when he dragged it off the roadside and duct-taped the sear marks burnt into the cracking pleather: evidence of its previous owner’s bad habits. While Mia’s walls have tasteful prints, a few framed movie posters, and the occasional lushly painted scroll bearing wisdom of the Kurain channeling method, Nick’s walls are bare except for his framed diploma from Ivy university, the legal certificate that officially designated him as a lawyer, and-- haphazardly pinned next to his mirror-- the front page of a newspaper article bearing a photograph of Miles Edgeworth looking exhausted, miserable, and wildly successful.
In spite of all this, Maya turns down his offer. She prefers sleeping on his cracking, ratty couch that smells like cigarettes and stale Febreeze over sleeping in her tidy and comfortable bedroom in Mia’s empty apartment. Without her sister sleeping in the other room, making coffee, and offering cereal in the morning, the apartment feels too quiet, too open. Her absence is too crushingly apparent. Nick, who similarly feels the crushing Mia-lessness of the law office, can’t find it in himself to turn Maya away, can’t tell her to stay anywhere else, and certainly can’t just send her back home, where the community members viewed Mia’s abdication as a betrayal of the community. To Maya’s family in Kurain, Mia had died a long time ago. The only person who understands what Maya is going through is him.
So he and Maya-- before either of them are even remotely ready-- approach Mia’s apartment with sturdy boxes from the liquor store and trash bags to sift through everything. Fueled by hot, greasy take-out, coffee, and energy drinks, they spend two days holed up in the flat: folding up her old clothes and bringing them to second-hand stores; sorting through her belongings: Maya taking her sister’s DVDs and board games and Phoenix claiming her law books. Maya insists that Nick also take Mia’s huge, fancy expresso machine-- which is by far the most expensive thing in the apartment-- because ‘caffeine is just as much a work requirement as the law books,” and “she would have wanted you to drink something other than instant coffee during cases.”
Slowly, the apartment begins to look less and less like her. With every piece of furniture sold and hauled away, Mia’s presence in the space lessens. Without a table, the corner by the window where Maya and Mia used to eat cereal and discuss celebrity crushes becomes just a corner and a window. Without the couch and the TV, the living room where Nick and Mia used to watch Spaghetti Westerns and look over evidence just becomes an open space of floorboards enclosed by drywall. Eventually, Mia’s apartment stops being Mia’s apartment at all. It just becomes an impersonal piece of real estate. Somewhere that someone else will move in and make a life inside. It feels, somehow, an awful lot like forgetting. Their packing and cleaning are Lethe-like in their annihilation of Mia in a way that feels more like violence than closure.
When they move the last box of stuff out, Maya feels as though a taught ribbon in her chest is severed and goes slack. She can tell, then, that unless something huge changes, she won’t be able to call her sister’s spirit. She wonders if she can justify her presence in Nick’s life anymore. Does she have a right to keep bothering him if she can’t help via her sister? He’s done so much for her, maybe it would be better for everyone if, with everything settled, she just goes back to Kurain. If she doesn't speak to him anymore. If she ignores him should they ever encounter each other awkwardly at a grocery store. They stand in the hallway of Mia’s apartment complex for the final time, and Nick locks the door to the empty flat. He gives her the key. The landlord will probably change the locks soon, but he wants her to have it. Neither of them cry, but Phoenix wraps an arm around her and squeezes her shoulder. She headbuts his chest lightly with a small huff of air. They go home.
Nick makes burgers and Maya watches. Somehow, this guy is now her older brother. Her sister’s best friend and assistant, the guy who defended her in court. This earnest and somewhat bitchy lawyer who only has one suit jacket and who acts like duct tape can bridge the sizable gap between garbage and furniture. She gave him a chance because she could tell that’s what her sister would have wanted. Mia wants her to like Phoenix, Mia talked about Phoenix a lot; Mia loved Phoenix as much as anyone can really love anyone else. But somewhere along the way, Maya realized that she loves him too. It's astonishing, really, the ease with which they are able to slot into each other's lives; almost as though-- unbeknownst to either of them-- they had shared a childhood and were long-lost siblings finally reunited. This Nick guy, she decides, is not just her sister’s friend. He’s hers too. He’s good people. He’s family now. And so after whatever business that’s keeping her in the city concludes, she stays and he lets her stay. The days without her returning to Kurain become weeks.
When Maya eventually leaves after several months of helping manage cases and sleeping on his disgusting excuse for a sofa, Phoenix decides that tossing some sheets over the sagging pleather monstrosity and sparing the comforter off his own bed is quite simply not going to cut it anymore. Maya is no longer a client or his coworker’s kid sister or someone he has a moral obligation to keep an eye on. She’s a permanent fixture in his life. He set her up on the couch the first night she stayed, not knowing that it was going to be more than a one-night thing. By the time he could really regret and feel selfish for not offering her the bed and taking the couch himself, they were already set too in their ways to change things. Maya had already claimed some strange pride and ownership of the couch, naming it “Quasimodo” because “he is ugly but I love him.” While he appreciates this gracious gesture on her part, he knows she deserves something better.
And so with the help of Detective Gumshoe, who mentioned offhand one time that he used to move furniture and mentioned another time that he would perform any sort of manual labor in exchange for a meal, they carry the disgusting couch down the six flights of stairs connecting his apartment to the curb. Together, they restore the couch to its rightful place from which it had been away far, far too long: the side of the road, next to the dumpster. Phoenix buys in its stead his first piece of real, grown-up furniture: a navy blue couch that folds out into a surprisingly comfortable, full bed. He saw it in a catalog in the waiting area in front of the prosecutor's offices and when Edgeworth noticed what catalog Nick was holding, he remarked that Nick had good taste and that he rather liked the designs from that company. Nick-- who did not have particularly good taste, had no idea what he was doing, and who was just looking at the catalog because it was there-- took that as a sign that he absolutely had to order it, even though it would take a while to pay it off.
But it’s not going to do any good to think of Edgeworth. It’s best to sever that connection in his mind. He shouldn’t think of it that way. That man means nothing to him. One apartment can only share so many bonds with the deceased. The couch has absolutely nothing to do with he-who-shall-not-be-named .
He also brings some plants into his home. He and Maya have learned enough from successfully keeping Charley alive at the office that he feels capable enough of not killing them. He takes full custody of Mia’s old plants and eventually starts cooking with her thriving basil and oregano. He also buys some of his own: a large potted Monstera with wide, rounded leaves that he takes to calling “Hobbes;” and a handing macrame pot of drooping ivy he names, quite simply, “Ivy.” He even replaces the rotting succulent with a new, living one that he somewhat darkly but very earnestly names “Mia Two.”
He additionally brings in a few things he feels confident Maya will like: a framed Steel Samurai poster, signed by Will Powers; an as-seen-on-TV skillet that’s also part toaster so you can grill a patty and toast your bun simultaneously, creating what the commercial promised would be “the platonic ideal of a hamburger;” a few lamps and some strings of lights that, while somewhat juvenile, fill his house with warm, ambient light instead of just the cold, humming fluorescent of the bare overhead lightbulb. He decides it’s worth losing the security deposit to paint the ugly, dingy beige of his walls this color Miles suggested called “Cerulean Frost,” which was actually just a nice, sort of desaturated blue color. Miles remarked that it would work really well with the “Prussian blue” of Nick’s new couch. Miles was endearingly insistent that the couch was Prussian Blue, NOT Navy Blue, in spite of the fact that the catalog Nick had ordered from clearly listed the color as navy--
Stop. No. He is not going to think about Miles. He’s gone, he’s not coming back, full stop. It’s no use, it will just upset him.
Regardless of whatever color was what, the blue walls and the blue couch really change the space. They make it feel more like somewhere he’s okay with Maya staying in, and by extension, somewhere he likes staying in himself.
And then it becomes a place Pearls can stay. First, she’s just crashing a few nights after the trial. Her mother was arrested, and suddenly she’s orphaned. He can’t help but feel somewhat responsible. Sure, she has a formidable community of women back in Kurain that would step in to take care of her, but even a long while after the trial concludes, she stays with him and Maya. That first night, they build a blanket fort out of the hide-a-bed and order pizzas. He fixes both girls warm milk with vanilla and honey whisked in. They promise Pearls she can stay up way past her bedtime watching movies, but she falls asleep during the opening credits of the first movie, nestled tightly against Nick. At Maya’s direction, he takes the beads out of Pearl’s hair while she sleeps so it won’t get all tangled and hurt her in the morning. This gesture is new: carefully untangling the strands of hair that cling around the bead. It’s a gentleness that he never would have thought himself capable of before. The whole world up to that point seemed to have been telling him the same thing: you have to toughen up, you have to stop wearing your heart on your sleeve, you have to care less to keep yourself safe. But the Feys are telling him something different. It is okay to be open. It is okay to be soft. It is okay to be gentle and careful and full of care. They’re changing him, and he’s okay with being changed.
Pearls goes home to Kurain more frequently than her cousin, but nevertheless, her presence changes the space. His home was never necessarily what one could call “clean” or “tidy”-- Phoenix has come to terms with the fact he will never be clean or tidy-- but before knowing Pearls and Maya, it would border on unsanitary. Unwashed dishes would sit in the sink long enough to grow their own biomes; garbage used to fester until the whole flat smelt ripe; laundry would pile up on the floor and sheets would go unwashed for months. But knowing how much Pearls hates mess motivates him to keep his home firmly below its former level as a biohazard. Knowing that she or Maya could come at any time means at least taking the trash out before it starts smelling; dishes get done before they form piling mountains; he makes sure to always have clean blankets because he doesn’t know if they when they’ll be needed. Even at his most miserable, when he would think about all he had lost: Mia, who was gone and Edgeworth, who is missing; when he didn’t feel like getting out of bed for himself, he would think about how Pearls or Maya would be worried if they were to walk in unexpectedly at 3 pm to see he was still in bed. And he doesn’t want to worry them. He wants to be someone strong and stable and home-like for them.
As a result, there’s a steady accumulation of small additions to the apartment. He buys a package of fridge magnets: plain round ones and some with letters of the alphabet for hanging Pearls’ (and Maya’s) notes and drawings in a place of honor. The bathroom and kitchen now have a small step stool so Pearls can reach the sink to wash her hands and help with cooking. His fridge does not just hold beer and takeout containers, but juice boxes and the fruits and vegetables Pearls insists on serving with each meal. What was once just a cheap TV stand is replaced with a short, sturdy dresser with enough drawers for Maya and Pearls to each store a few weeks’ worth of clothes. He has his own house slippers, but also a dorky pair of Steel Samurai slippers for Maya and a small pair shaped like bunnies for Pearls. He has a total of three umbrellas; three toothbrushes always on hand; three copies of his house and office keys. There’s tear-free shampoo in his shower, and on the counter are beaded hair elastics, a pink, bunny-printed hairbrush, hair gel, a razor, and a comb. Rapidly overcoming his own library of law books are suddenly an assortment of Maya’s mangas and kid’s animated movies and books for learning how to read and spell for Pearls. Slowly but surely, Nick’s apartment is becoming somewhere that doesn't say “I don’t know how to take care of myself” but “I can take care of myself and others.”
