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"Edgeworth? Wright? Can you hear us? You have to get out of there, right now!"
Everything in the Drift was always surreal. It made everything blurrier, and it didn't help as Miles desperately racked mind for a solution. There was always a way, you just had to think logically – and then, he was nine years old and in his second grade classroom and Phoenix was there. His empty, tear-filled eyes were glued to the floor.
"In case you haven't noticed, we don't have all the time in the world, Edgeworth," Phoenix hissed, pointedly glaring.
"There's a way," Edgeworth muttered in response, though he flinched and instinctively grasped his other arm tightly.
"Are you fucking serious? You of all people know when it's over, for Christ's sake!” Phoenix barked, throwing his hands in the air.
His shout was drowned out by the raucous screams and laughter of children in the classroom. Larry was there, too. Somehow it still didn't feel complete. The children began to grow restless, flipping chairs and scribbling on the walls and shattering windows.
Miles didn't respond, and merely started to fix all of the overturned chairs. Phoenix's jaw tightened. "It's pointless," he said.
This was wrong. It was always Phoenix who was desperately grasping at straws, refusing to give up even against all odds, and it was always Miles who always knew his limits, prepared and ready with a cool head.
It made Phoenix’s stomach lurch. In fact, he was pretty sure that if Miles wasn't there, he'd be the one trying to fix everything.
At that moment, Phoenix started to realise that despite everything, Miles still felt it. Even though Phoenix was the one crying when someone bullied him, and Miles was the one standing up to his bully, things weren't the same now. They were never the same since Von Karma took him away. There were years' worth of torment that would be part of him forever.
They had drifted at least five times by now. During those times, Miles' perception of 'perfection' had become skewed. He didn't know what was right or what was wrong. Clinging to the Drift was a final act of desperation.
Miles felt the guilt would swallow him whole, and it kept his head down when he knew Phoenix was looking at him.
Phoenix was tired. Tired of seeing Miles like this. Years after seeing him, he didn't acknowledge him. A month and a half later, standing together in a one hundred foot tall robot, they were still miles away.
"It's when you left," Phoenix said quietly.
Miles' eyes widened, and Gregory's smiling image flickered in front of them both.
"I'm not who he wanted me to be."
Miles never said it out loud, but Phoenix could feel it somehow. Vibrating, he could feel the impact of the words in his bones. Miles had always trusted him to some degree, whether he admitted it or not, or they wouldn’t be where they were now. Phoenix wouldn't have been able to drift with him at all.
Still, Phoenix had never seen the face of his father so clearly until now.
"We can't just abandon this, Wright. There's a way," Miles repeated. Phoenix stared in awe, unbelieving that Miles could be stubborn like this. He wondered if Miles and him were that different after all.
At this thought, new images flooded through their minds. It was Phoenix, crying the day after Miles left as he painfully gripped with the Steel Samurai figurine he had given him for his birthday. It was Phoenix in college, writing letters and feeling an empty kind of sadness ring through his body like goosebumps. And then it was Dahlia, whose warm butterflies were poisoned by the sound of a gavel. A spread of black began trickling throughout, wiping out those images entirely before they were back in the classroom again.
Phoenix never knew he was capable of leaving the past behind, and he especially didn't know Miles found it so hard to do the same.
"I can't fail."
Phoenix froze when he felt those words. He closed his eyes, feeling a wave of something pass over him. The Drift wasn't just memories and thoughts – it was feelings, too. Feelings that they both shared, feelings that they didn't share but felt anyway.
There was regret, mostly, but there was also happiness. He knew as painfully nostalgic those memories were, they were invaluable. They could never go back to that simpler time: being a normal kid in school, being normal friends, a future where one was a lawyer and one was an artist.
Phoenix reached for Miles' wrist. Leaving now meant dealing with the pain all over again. Abandoning their jaegar at sea wasn't just waving a white flag of defeat, Phoenix wanted to tell him. They had come too far together.
His fingers wrapped around his in the isolation of darkness and distant echoes of screams.
"It's already gone, Edgeworth. Everything is over," he told him, gripping his hand tightly. "I didn't want to accept it for a long time. I wanted to go back, so so many times." He took a breath, steeling himself. "He isn't here anymore, and neither is she! Those people are gone, and I know I'm not enough, but please. This isn't where we're supposed to be."
Miles said nothing. He had closed his eyes, and there were no tears, but Phoenix could feel the world around him trembling like it was sobbing. A wind blew in through the broken windows, pushing over all chairs again.
Phoenix opened his eyes, pain being the first sensation to ebb from his limbs. He could suddenly hear frenzied instructions from the crew members in his ears again, and someone who sounded like Gumshoe begging for them to hurry. He looked to Miles, and the man nodded in response. The kaiju remained at large.
The Drift was still fading, along with their robot. Doors were closing, and voices were dying down. They initiated the escape pod.
"I'm sorry."
"Don't."