Phoenix was still and perfectly silent, eyes blindly following the sounds of Edgeworth sitting back up, then lying down again. Years later. In a numb kind of way, he didn't begrudge the slip. It was the logical conclusion of that thought, and he'd spent too much of his life following evidence and testimony to its logical conclusion to drop the habit in this one instance. Yeahs later, something happened that didn't put anyone's life on the line - something that couldn't be helped. And that would be that, then. There wasn't anything that brought them together, apart from their jobs, and Miles was in LA less and less each year. So one of them would keep chasing the horizon, and the other one of them would get along and raise a child and do who knew what. And they'd be fine. It would be perfectly fine.

Optimism had never sounded colder or more bitter. Home had never seemed more alien.

In a single movement he found Edgeworth again and wrapped his arms around him tightly, without commentary or preface, and breathed the smell of skin and dry cleaning and industrial soap until he was sure he wasn't going to fall off the face of the earth. "It can't be that simple," he finally replied, quiet and dry-eyed and dogged. He'd never believed in fate, not once. It would have been crazy for him to. There was no point in fighting a decided outcome, and there was no way he'd believe that so much of his life had been pointless. There had to be more to it than that.