Work Text:
For Phoenix, creating art is like riding a bike. You don’t forget how to do it, no matter how many times you ride around in your lovers’ fancy European sports cars instead of pushing the pedals on your own. Similarly, he can go months – years – without painting; it isn’t important to his daily life until, for multiple days at a time every quarter decade or so, he cannot do anything else. The last time he painted with such emotive intention, he ended up not eating, drinking, or sleeping for almost a week, until his apartment was burning wall-to-wall with dahlias and vines ensnaring every corner. He made his sanctuary an impossible place to live, his paranoia whispering in acrylic from behind the doors in the dark, and he has not painted since.
Until now. He feels the charcoal sitting loosely between his fingers. His linework is so fluid that even though the canvas seems to be nothing but a collection of childish scribbles, there is clear technical skill in the strokes. He’s already shaken off the rust of being out of practice, and he’s warming up the way he always does. Sketching something out; seeing what his hands have to tell him.
Another thing about Phoenix’s relationship to art is that it is an unconscious act. He never knows what he wants to create; only that his fingers are itching, and there is something in his body that can no longer lie dormant. Like an orphaned animal giving birth with no mother to guide it, he vomits his art out on instinct alone. He looks at the stretched canvas on its wooden easel legs, and finds that his hands have warmed themselves up with charcoal renditions of Miles Edgeworth’s features. Not his face – never his full face. Just parts of him, scattered across the fabric, away from each other and always away from Phoenix. A fragmented, fractal, familiar warm-up; Miles’ nose, Miles’ lips, Miles’ forehead.
He’s given himself a base layer; something to ground him. Something, ultimately, to be hidden and painted over – an uncomfortable fact, because although Edgeworth is in Europe, it’s not like they didn’t part on good terms, with a kiss in the privacy of the apartment. A wave and a promise of getting in touch when their paths cross again, as always. It’s as good as Phoenix gets from Edgeworth, and for so long he was willing to take it as long as he was still eating out of the palm of Edgeworth’s hand, but things have changed far too much for him to be that man again. He’s been disbarred, for one. And Edgeworth is not his muse; not the subject that he has sacrificed his day to painting.
Phoenix takes a deep breath and picks up his palette. He faces the canvas like a fighter entering the ring, ready to ruin himself.
Marigolds of yellow spill out from the tube of acrylic; a beautiful colour, but far too simple and harsh in a completely garish way. This shade of blonde needs to be subtle; not sunlight, but not starlight either. It needs to contradict its nature, absorb the light of the small room and eat it whole; it cannot shine, but more importantly, it cannot allow itself to be outshined. Phoenix plays with his paints like pawns, moving the tubes between each other and expressing no kind of care in conserving supplies when he squeezes out generous amounts onto his palette. He’s overindulging himself already in the half-alive image of Kristoph Gavin, becoming actualised over the charcoal, so vivid on the canvas even in the places he has not yet been painted onto. Next, the piercing glare of his eyes – Viking blue, greyed out a little and then made vibrant again with a tiny dot of blood red paint, highlighted carefully. Phoenix erases the tiny white strokes over and over until they’re just perfect, like Kristoph’s eyes are staring out at him from every possible angle, and he suddenly wishes that he’d bought a bigger canvas.
He wants to be completely swallowed by this thing of his own creation, because it is beautiful, and gives him a taste of power. A taste of, maybe, what it would be like were he not disbarred, and were he able to meet Kristoph on a level playing field. It had been easier before they had gotten to know one another, when Phoenix could shrug off the vote in his favour at the disbarment hearing and the offers to pay for dinner as the kind of good-samaritan-pity that comes from a religious upbringing. But now, he’s in too deep.
He’d kissed Kristoph last night. Or maybe Kristoph had kissed him; he can’t really tell. There was a lot of red wine involved and the Borscht Bowl Club hallway was very dimly lit. They’d ended up parking on a deserted dead-end street with no foot traffic, in the heated back seat of Kristoph’s expensive car with the windows steaming up. And then, this morning, he had gotten into the apartment at six in the morning and Trucy had just been waking up for school, and he’s not sure how to feel about the whole thing. For some inexplicable reason, Phoenix wants to pick up the phone and talk to Edgeworth about it, but that’s the last thing he can do right now.
For a start, Edgeworth is in Europe, and considering the time difference he’s probably still asleep. Then, there’s the issue of Phoenix still being unsure where he stands with Edgeworth; what they can talk about, reference, and share, and what still remains ripped from them in the darkroom of Miles’ youth. And, lastly, his guilt simply won’t let him. Yes – he and Edgeworth haven’t exactly labelled themselves beyond giving each other time to figure things out, but whenever Phoenix thinks about him having a lover in Europe, he always closes his eyes and shakes the image out of his head. So, they’re not official, and they never really discussed exclusivity or labels, but… kissing Kristoph still feels like cheating. It’s something he wouldn’t want Edgeworth to do to him.
Then again, he also didn’t want Edgeworth to leave him all alone on the night of his disbarment to catch an important flight. He didn’t want to nearly drink himself to death on the sofa in front of Trucy. He didn’t want to be woken up the morning after by Kristoph Gavin practically breaking into his house to splash him with water and tell him to get up and look after his daughter.
But all of that happened. And then he kissed Kristoph. And now he’s painting again.
Phoenix thinks about the dahlias that ended up rotting the wood of his apartment, growing black mould spores in his lungs that whispered and wheezed her name with the exhale of every breath. He remembers the paralysing grip of her memory, her violent death, her cloying aftermath. The way she stuck in his teeth like a rotten bit of bad food until he had locked himself away and destroyed his house in martyrish exorcism. He imagines that Kristoph’s painting – royal purple and electric yellow, now darkened with deep magenta and mixed with every shade of blue on his palette to make the perfect periwinkle – will be similarly harsh. The beautiful colours will become horrible, the familiarity of Phoenix’s knowledge from art school continuously reinventing itself to terrify him in new ways. But he can’t look yet – he isn’t finished. He is overtaken by the need to condemn Kristoph into stillness; wet acrylic, neat and perfect.
By the time he’s finished, Phoenix is breathless. He’s not sure how much time has passed, but he steps back and there he is: Kristoph Gavin. Only, he isn’t the Kristoph that Phoenix was expecting – the familiar one; the Coolest Defense in the West. The suspicious man with discordant colours and eyes perpetually watching from every corner of the canvas. This Kristoph is… different. He is soft. Somehow, all those colours, the insanity of a crowded palette, have come together to look almost muted. As though the painting is washed out; an image of Kristoph, as seen through a frosty window on a winter morning.
And he’s not terrifying, either. Despite not having a life-model to paint from, Phoenix is impressed at how intricately he has captured a side of Kristoph that he has seen no more than twice; once after the disbarment hearing, and once last night, when they had kissed. On the canvas, Kristoph is sitting down, his eyes soft, lidded, and looking casually out of frame. The undertones of his face are complex; he’s not exactly blushing, but there’s a shine to the apples of his cheeks and his skin is wet with paint and sunshine, golden brown in the light that Phoenix has managed to capture off-canvas. With a great, airy wash of grey shame, Phoenix sees the intricate detail with which he has painted Kristoph’s lips. He reaches forward and presses his finger into the canvas, at first simply smudging the mouth, but eventually applying enough force to rip right through it.
Strangely, the act of destroying an entire day’s worth of work is what Phoenix needs to jolt him back to reality. He picks the painting up and slots it behind the wardrobe, where it will collect dust and dry that way and it will be a problem for him later, when he might know what he actually wants to do with it. He shivers as it leaves his view, the image in his mind falling away piece by piece until he forgets, after only five minutes have passed, what the painting looked like, and has to pull it out again to quiet his questioning mind. Kristoph is still there. Phoenix was half expecting him to have disappeared from the canvas, leaving a scar and a horror story behind.
Suddenly exhausted, he no longer wants to witness his art, and leaves his bedroom. He only makes it a few steps down the hallway before he hears a familiar humming from the kitchen, and his heart drops when he realises how late it is. Well past the end of the school day, at least. Trucy must have gotten home without him while he was still in his painting frenzy.
“Hey, kiddo,” Phoenix says, walking into the kitchen and seeing her sitting at the table, eating a Nutella sandwich. She’s got chocolate in the corners of her mouth and in her teeth, but she still beams at him as he enters, and he feels his shoulders drop in relief. “Daddy got a bit caught up in work.”
“It’s okay,” Trucy says, taking another bite. “I figured so. I popped my head in after I got home from school but you seemed pretty focused. There’s a sandwich on the side for you, too!”
“Thanks. Say – did you walk home all by yourself?”
Trucy shakes her head. “I was going to, but Mr. Gavin drove past and asked if I needed a ride! He dropped me off about… half an hour ago, I’d say?”
Phoenix suddenly feels very concerned. Anything could have happened to Trucy! He can’t keep acting like this; falling into old versions of himself for comfort when he’s got a daughter to keep safe now. There’s only so many times he can use the excuse of having been thrust into fatherhood without a grace period to ease himself in, especially when things have settled now. He should be used to his new routine; his new life. And that includes not leaving his daughter to walk home alone from school because he’s caught up in processing his own emotions. He needs to learn to compartmentalise these things if he wants to continue loving from his blindspot.
“Hey, what did we say about getting in cars with strangers?” Phoenix says.
“Mr. Gavin isn’t a stranger, though,” Trucy raises an eyebrow. “He’s a family friend.”
“Still.”
He would protest more, but she’s right. Walking home alone isn’t safe, either, and it’s not like he’d been at the school gates to greet her like he normally is. The fact that she considers Kristoph a family friend is something to be confronted at a later date, when he’s more secure in his own opinion of the man and when there isn’t a four foot square canvas of him in the other room.
“Did Mr. Gavin come in?” He asks, instead.
“Oh, no. I think he wanted to, but I thought he’d better not because you were clearly busy. Maybe next time, though! It might be nice to have him round for tea sometime.”
“He… wanted to come in?”
“Yep!” Trucy smiles, speaking in that typical singsong way that kids do when they want to poke fun at a crush. “I think he wanted to see you. And he asked if you needed him to sort dinner out for us, but I said it’s okay! Me and Daddy have enough Nutella sandwiches to last us a whole winter’s hibernation!”
“You know, Nutella sandwiches actually have all the important food groups. Bread and chocolate.”
“Hehe, you’re so funny!” Trucy says. Her little face is so innocent, so forgiving, so unaware of his inability to be a good parent to her. Phoenix will not abandon her – he won’t put her through that twice – so the only other option is to better himself for her. Keep her safe even if it means putting himself in danger. He will no longer be naïve; he will be vigilant.
“Mr. Gavin’s car is so nice,” she continues. “It’s so fancy! Why don’t we have a car?”
“Your Daddy can’t drive.”
“No way! But Mr. Gavin makes it look so easy!”
“That’s because Mr. Gavin has an expensive car that does it all for him.”
“Why don’t we have an expensive car?”
“Because we’re not Mr. Gavin, kiddo,” Phoenix ruffles her hair. “But we’ve got our bikes. I bet you Mr. Gavin doesn’t get to go on Saturday afternoon rides and have picnics by the lake in his fancy car.”
“Ooh, no way he could get his car down those hills! But we can!”
Phoenix remembers teaching Trucy to ride a bike within the first week of becoming her dad. Apparently, her biological father had had more important things to do with his time than teach her how to, and he’d rectified that immediately, spending the last of his final paycheck as a lawyer on a brand new, bright pink bike with a matching helmet and tassels on the handles. A goodbye to his career; a hello to fatherhood. She’d taken to it so quickly, and had been riding without stabilisers by the end of the weekend. Just like that, he’d made a memory with her and lost a key marker of her childhood all at once.
The time still goes by so fast. He hasn’t spoken to Maya in months. He just locked himself away in his bedroom all day and painted the man he cheated on Miles goddamn Edgeworth with. Is he losing it completely?
“Oh!” Trucy says, interrupting his potential spiral by reaching underneath the table and pulling out her school bag. “We had art class today. We could paint whatever we wanted!”
She takes a folded piece of paper out of the bag and hands it to Phoenix with a smile. He opens it out, seeing the few spots where the paint wasn’t quite dry before it was folded and has subsequently transferred symmetrically to the opposite side, but it’s clear what it is. Right in the middle, there’s Trucy, in a full magician’s outfit, holding a magic wand up to the sky and shooting out streams of squiggles in the basic, unmixed colours of a primary school art palette. To her left side, Phoenix has an arm around her, and his hand is stretched out like he’s waving to nobody in particular. He’s got the same two-dots-and-a-curve face that she has, and as he looks to the right side of Trucy’s painting, he sees another figure. Painted exactly the same as Phoenix, except with blonde, longer hair and a different coloured t-shirt.
“I showed it to Mr. Gavin in the car and he really wanted to keep it, but I said I made it for my Daddy!” She explains. “I promised him I’d make the next one for him, though.”
Phoenix holds the piece of A4 paper like it is the most important document in the world, as though he shouldn’t even be touching it with his greasy, stained hands. He walks over to the fridge and picks out his favourite magnet – one from Mia’s old office, from a little holiday to Italy that she went on a few years before they met. He wonders if she – who always put her little sister first; who died before she could go bad like the rest of them – would be ashamed to know him right now.
“I’ll put it right here,” he pins Trucy’s painting to the top of the fridge, where it won’t get damaged or pulled down by accident. As long as he doesn’t think about the soft, muted image of Kristoph Gavin in the bedroom, and instead focuses on the simplicity of his new life through his daughter’s eyes, he might just be able to survive this.
For now, he is stuck in the middle. Between the hyper-realistic portrait of something that might have been a dream, and the innocent simplicity of a child’s school painting. Were he not responsible for someone else’s life, his desperation to fix things might just lead him back into the back seat of Kristoph’s car, his hands grasping and his needs plain. But he cannot fail Trucy. He knows what a father has to do.
Phoenix takes a deep breath, turns his face into two dots and a curve, and smiles at his daughter like there is nothing in the world to be afraid of.