Four or five nights worth of pre-sleep writing has yielded my first work for the Ace Attorney fandom. Truth be told, I don't know if I'll end up writing any more, but I just loved Mia/Diego too much not to write something on the pairing. I can't think of anything else to say except, enjoy. Oh, and this mandatory stuff...

Spoilers: to the end of Trials & Tribulations!

Disclaimer: the Ace Attorney series and all of its loveable characters belong to Capcom.

Her Cursed Blessing

"I have somewhere I have to go. Keep an eye on the firm tonight for me, will you, Phoenix?"

"Of course, Mia."

click... click... click...

Mia's high heels click against the linoleum floor while all other footfalls around her seem to shuffle or squeak. She keeps her gaze strictly forward, even as every few steps she hears dreadfully clear beeps, half-hearted protests, or even agonized wails. When, after her next few steps, there are no clear sounds of life, she knows to reach to her left and twist the knob of the corridor's only closed door.

"Excuse me, Miss—"

A jolt takes to Mia's heart, feeling like one of the hospital's doctors had taken a defibrillator to her chest. Like she's been woken from a four-year sleep. Astonished, she turns to the nurse who had addressed her; relief sets into her as she finds that she will not have to say anything. Another nurse, an older woman, has shaken her head at her colleague. She whispers, "That's Mia. She's here to visit the man in the coma," loud enough for Mia to hear. The younger nurse noticeably gapes as she looks from Mia to the door whose knob she still held onto. Mia turns away from them. Something about them knowing her name, knowing who she was visiting... it just reminds her how long it has been.

The room is mostly dark when she enters. Only some parts of the walls and bed and medical equipment are lit under the jittering glow of other pieces of equipment. Some beep, some flash numbers, and others seemingly do nothing at all. Mia turns her gaze to the light switch, but just as swiftly looks back to the bed. No one really needed the light in the room; why spend more electricity? Wasteful.

There are no chairs for visitors. Mia sits on the edge of the bed—not at its foot, but at the middle where she can be closer to its occupant's face. And she can see his face, too, in the unnatural turquoise and crimson mélange glowing from different machines. His eyes are closed, not that she had expected otherwise, and the stubble on his chin is less groomed than it would have been had he been awake. He'd have kept most of it smooth, and he'd have whispered to her, "I can't have that scratch you, Kitten. I'm the one who loves when your nails dig into my skin."

Mia smoothes her hand over the aged white hair that doesn't match the young bronze face. "Happy anniversary, Diego," she whispers, leaning close to his ear.

beep... beep... beep...

The office was dimly lit, the desk lamp not made to provide light beyond sunset. It was far beyond sunset, the sky outside dark but the streetlights keeping one side of the room brighter than the other. Mia flattened a palm over the top of the mahogany desk she was sitting on, legs crossed and her leaning over the case files spread out next to her. Maybe it was the files, pages upon pages of compact text that seemed entirely made up of the same five words over and over—Dahlia, Hawthorne, murder, poison, victim—or maybe it was the dim light and silence of the room... something, regardless, was lulling Mia to sleep.

"Coffee?" she heard suddenly, instantly followed by a chair rolling back over the carpeted floor. All of the mahogany and reds and oranges: it felt like a rustic cabin, not a law firm.

She nodded to her inquirer. "Yes, please." The tan man gave her one of his ladykilling smirks before standing and heading out of the room. Mia watched him go, thinking that his red shirt and hazel complexion fit in eerily well with the cabinesque mahogany-infested room. So did Mr. Grossberg's regular orange suit, she thought, although she would never tell Diego that she was comparing him to their boss. His coffee-charged heart would explode.

Diego walked back in with the fingers of one hand looped through the handles of both cups of coffee. He set hers down before he settled into the chair again, his white mug still firmly in his grasp. Mia lifted her coffee and took a single sip before placing it atop the desk again. "We're getting nowhere," she sighed as she pawed through the case files.

"Don't be ridiculous, Kitten," he said coolly, seeming to address her legs instead of her face.

Mia sighed again, though this time at Diego's inability to redirect his stare instead of at the case files—a smile curving on her lips and no attempt to pull her skirt any lower over her thighs. She had planned to insist that Diego take the office's sole chair and that she sit on the desk so that his distractions of previous late nights investigating would not be an issue; somehow, he seemed to have found a replacement for her cleavage that he always was enraptured by. His stares never bothered her for the obvious reasons, really; they were never lewd, just... admiring. Her qualm with them was how much they distracted her, provoking a fantasy in the back of her mind each time.

Mia reached a out and tipped his head upward, prompting him to give her one of those smirks again. "You have a way with subtlety, Mr. Armando," she remarked.

"Ha...! And you have a way with making me feel old."

"Diego."

"That's better, Kitten."

He lifted his coffee mug to his lips and took a sip. With a shake of her head, Mia pushed all of the case files to one side of the desk. "Diego, what are we doing here?"

"We're finding a way to put Dahlia Hawthorne in prison," he answered wryly, propping an elbow onto the desk. The coffee mug swayed back and forth slowly in his grasp.

Mia reached for her own mug and drank from it, although she subconsciously realized that she was no longer tired. Something had woken her up, and she didn't believe it to be the caffeine. "You know what I mean," she sighed yet again, placing the mug back onto the desk and using her then-free hand to flip her bangs from her eye. They quickly fell back over it. "You're too sly not to know what I mean."

He too set his mug down with a sharp 'clack', though he didn't let go of it. "But Kitten, I'm a gentleman." His smirk remained a smirk, yet it softened so that it could almost be called a smile. Mia just watched him, having to put copious amounts of attention into keeping a blank face. In her frustration, she wanted to do so many things to him, not least of all shake him by the shoulders until he made a straightforward statement. "Ladies first," he said. "That's one of my rules."

What did he mean, ladies first? This wasn't quite the same as ushering a girl through a door with a, 'ladies first', or even a double-edged 'ladies first' like when a man and woman each have something significant to say to the other. This was simply a tease, a lure. She didn't want to bite the lure and, looking at Diego sitting solidly in his chair with his eyes nonchalantly focused on his coffee, Mia safely assumed that he didn't want to relent either. But, at the same, she really did want to give in and admit what she wanted from him.

Though she still looked at his face, her peripheral vision caught the movement of Diego lifting his coffee mug again. She caught his hand, coaxed it back onto the desk. His eyes turned to hers, but that was all that he moved; he still seemed to be waiting. "Ladies first," Mia thought as she leaned down and brushed her lips against Diego's. "I think he dropped a few words from that rule." She felt his eyes on hers as she pulled away, then felt his hand against the small of her back, urging her off of the desk and into his lap. The chair rolled slightly under her added weight, though she jabbed a heel into the carpet to hold it still as Diego kissed her neck and jawline and lips until it was clearly no longer ladies first. "It should have been... 'Ladies make the first move'."

beep... beep... beep...

Mia pulls away and sits upright. The hand she uses to support herself is not on the bed's mattress, but on Diego's leg. With much reluctance, she drags her gaze away from his empty face to other things in the room—because that is all he is, really. A thing, an object, inanimate.

Though the visitors' chair is long gone, a table still waits next to the bed with hospital gifts from years ago. There had never been flowers, Mia remembers; no one had been so optimistic as to think he'd wake in time to see them alive.

A dingo plush toy from Maya—after watching a television documentary on canines one day, she had decided that 'Diego' was too similar to 'dingo' to go ignored, so she made it his nickname.

Diego's coffee mug with a bag of one of his special blends next to it left by Mr. Hammond—"If he wakes up, Mia dear," and she never forgets the 'if', "you know he'll be reaching for some coffee."

A note from Mr. Grossberg, never opened—Mia had always guessed that it was a promise that Diego would have a job waiting for him at his law firm.

And another note, this one unfolded and written in large, cursive letters: "I love you. –Mia" and below, in the same writing and the ink of another pen, "We won."

She remembers the day she wrote that second message. She had walked in with a smile on her face for once, sat by his side and held his hand. With barely a thought, she had leaned down and kissed his lips, some fairy tale fantasy playing around in her subconscious making false promises that he would wake up to her kiss and to the words, "We won."

The fairy tale still refuses to stop playing. She holds his hand, brings her face near to his.

beep... beep... beep...

Hair brushed, skin washed, suit proper, attorney's badge affixed, Mia looked into the mirror. Almost ready for work, she thought, except for one thing missing. She turned from the bedroom mirror to the bed; the curtains were opened to let the sun shine in at full force, and still Diego slept.

"Diego," she said to him casually, like she was addressing someone already awake. It didn't work. It never worked, and Mia wondered why she didn't just skip the wake-him-by-talking-to-him method altogether. She walked over to the bed and sat next to him, staring at his sleeping form as she considered how to wake him. On some days she grabbed the nearest free pillow and walloped him on the chest with it. On other days she simply took the pillow out from beneath his head. On nicer days she picked out his work outfit and woke him by dumping the clothes over him.

That day, seeing him sleeping not quite on his side, with the back of his head on the pillow and sun beams reflecting off of his skin, Mia thought that he had too much of a sleeping fairy tale princess quality to be woken up too harshly. What other way to wake a sleeping beauty than with a kiss? And she kissed him, though unlike a fairy tale princess, this prince's lips moved against hers before his eyes even opened to check who woke him. His hands found her waist as effortlessly as they could find his own nose if asked to, but she urged them off before she stopped caring for why he needed to get up. "We have to leave in ten minutes," she murmured in his ear.

Diego's brow furrowed before he muttered a, "Shit, okay, I'm up," and followed through by rising and getting ready.

beep... beep... beep...

Her lips stop short of his, though her hand holds onto his even tighter. Mia's forehead softly drops against Diego's, the light clunk of their colliding skulls only audible to her. No hand suddenly squeezes hers back, no eyelids flutter, no voice greets her. Nothing ever happens. Even the beep of his occasional pulse comes at the same interval as it had on her first visit.

Mia hears her heart's pounding answering Diego's heart's beeps. The pounding gets louder, heavier; her head gets lighter. She hates the equipment. She thinks of pulling the plug. It isn't fair to him, being trapped in this limbo. At least the spirits of the deceased could wander, think, and feel the presence of others both living and dead. And what if he did wake to live again? Already anyone could see the aging that the poison had caused, his hair looking bleached white—would he even be able to walk, to hear, to see? Would his mind be altered? To die at your peak or to live at your worst...

And then there is Mia. It isn't fair to her herself, cemented to the past by an artificially living boyfriend. It wasn't fair to them, to have more of their relationship spent with one of them unconscious than with them enjoying a real romance, together, both of them. Her fingers move from the deadweight hand to the tubes that run along and into Diego's arm, pulsing with more life than his true veins. Mia's index finger curls around one, lifting it carefully as though testing how secure it is, how much force it would take to rip it out.

"Oh, Ms. Fey, I'm sorry. I'd thought you'd left."

The finger that had played with the tubes retreats to Diego's real skin. Mia passes it off like she had been stroking his arm, squeezing his hand, all of the normal things a visitor of a coma patient would do. She looks to the doorway and sees the veteran nurse who had worked there so long that she knew just who Mia was. Mia wonders if the nurse makes observations beyond obvious fact.

"I'll let you stay for as long..."

"No, no," Mia says as she breaks contact with Diego and stands. "I was just about to leave. You do what you have to do."

The nurse touches Mia's arm as she walks by. Mia doesn't look at her; she only hears the voice saying, "We'll take good care of this blessing," like the incantation of a curse.

Maybe it's because it's midnight and I've just taken a satisfying break from schoolwork, but... I am very pleased with this. I've done the angsty present-to-flashbacks form before, and I have to say that it's one of my favourites. I'd adore if you let me know what you thought about it.