The Turning of the Tides

You would stay awake longer. You know you could. And your health would pay dearly, you guess, if the clock weren't always on your desk to tell you off.

Getting ready for sleep in record times was never a foreign experience to you. Yet, even the shortest route to your bedroom is paved with uneasy thoughts. It irritates you to realize how, as hard as you try to improve your schedule, rest is still close to a foreign concept.

You have been working on the whole ordeal – taking care of yourself, being only reasonably tired and so on. But even now, with all the worried faces that linger at the edge of your memory, you still seem to fail.

It must be your fault somehow, you muse, turning over in your sheets. You can't for the life of you figure out how staying idle can be so hard.

And if nothing else happened now – if you were left alone to cope with yourself, as you usually are – you would fall into a light, uneasy sleep, the kind which inevitably follows your nightly reflections.

You are just about to give in to it when the screen of your phone lights up.

I hope everything's fine on your side. Goodnight.

You stare at the text longer than you should, torn between amusement and a fond sort of frustration. What is he writing for? It would be easy to say no, that man is just plain nonsensical, there is no point in wondering. But you know him too well to pretend you don't. He is honest, caring and a little too nervous for a lawyer this renamed. He is hoping to do his best – that you both will do your best. He may even be concerned.

You smile before you realize it, but the frown remains. What in the world is he doing up this late?

Come to think of it, what are you doing up this late?

Silently chasing away any further consideration on the matter, you type a reply in all haste. You mentally add that yes, youare actually going to sleep, you promise.

Go to sleep, Wright. We shouldn't discuss our cases out of court.

When you turn your back to the night stand, you decide you are not moving again. What you need to do is fall asleep, not wait for his response. As if you could hold out for long.

You check your phone, to find the answer is already there.

I know.

He does, yes. You both do.

Even so, the thought which accompanies you in your last waking moments is that neither is going to stop anytime soon.

It is almost an implied pact between you two. That awareness, although constant throughout your existence, grows stronger when you read the conversation again, and settles at the back of your mind well into the morning.

You move in a world of severe rules. You have witnessed the price of breaking them firsthand, then learnt what game you must play to keep going. But with him, in the past years of shared trials, it has become another thing entirely – you enter different grounds, different ethics, and somehow infallibly get the best results out of them.

He is as aware of it as you are, if not more. It is hard to ignore the glee in his eyes, whenever you bring a case to an end successfully. You remember one of your first celebratory dinners, when your occasional tradition started – he said he was happy to work with you, for bringing the truth to light is a victory for both each time. It was as if he was shining in the candlelight, and his smile, while awkward, had not vanished all evening. Everything felt blissfully alright.

It is the reason why you keep up the game, treading with him a ground which was his own from the start. It is the only way that feels right. It involves fleeting talks, at fortuitous meetings you actually plan ahead; it requires dedication, care, and the omnipresent caution of the mundane trials you are thankfully gifted with now.

It is the working method you shouldn't have, but both comply to, in silent agreement. It is the one you learnt together – nobody had a chance to truly understand, if not you.

You are reminded it is true every time you see him. What makes your resolve stronger are moments like this – when he waits for you in the corner of the main hall you have elected as yours, and you spend the walk to his lobby exchanging short messages you can read as open books. You are ever grateful for that quiet time you take to yourself, walking in unison, towards the same direction. You couldn't grow to be this at ease with anyone else.

It would be even better, if fear didn't eventually catch up with you.

It is not the terror of the old days. Unless something even worse awaits you, nothing could possibly revive it in his presence. It is but a trace of the devastating helplessness you once lived in – and yet it returns, strong enough to stagger you, as soon as you are overwhelmed by that sense of security.

You know too well how it works. With all he was able to accomplish, he could not erase the permanent sense of danger which lingers just below your consciousness. It is the scream of terror that tells you it can't be true – that his smile is too bright, his gaze too confident, and he could – but how could he? – leave you behind anytime.

It is not surprising, all things considered. You were not raised to trust anyone this much. You could never erase the feeling that safety cannot last. You retain the uncertainty which made you wary of anyone, forcing you to run and run and run.

Not now, you think over and over, struggling to control the thunder of your heartbeat. Not now. That was true, once – but now you are here.

And you stop thinking, safe in your customary spot, just before you can get to the reason which brought you back.

It isn't like you do not know. Your soul sings it to you with every repetition of this ritual. If you were given the gift of a longer life, the best you can do is devote it to your purpose. You rush towards the truth with all the power of your intellect, words and voice and burning gaze – but you find no greater joy in it than raising your head, at the end of an intense fight, and meeting the eyes of whom you owe it all.

That is where you must halt – where you get, sudden and powerful, the distinct impression that you don't know everything. There you grow confused, and your veins burn in abandon and terror.

Once again, you find yourself frozen by dread.

You are not sure why it doesn't just end there. You may suspect – you wouldn't want to wonder, but you do. It is like breathing fire, on the edge of a precipice, trying to guess what would happen if you just moved a step beyond. What novelties chance could throw in your way, if you dared plunge into the abyss. What you could discover.

Although afraid, you are curiously torn between the two. As if you had always known, and yet would never dare. A contradiction, you vividly assert in the white noise of your mind.

You cannot deceive yourself, you ponder, looking at the lone figure on the other end of the courtroom. You were taught well – there is only one truth. What will it be, then? How much longer till you find out?

Not forever, that is for sure. These matters cannot just stay up in the air. Like every trial, infinite as they may seem, they end.

And you have watched too many contradictions come undone, for sure, to ignore the fact that they cannot last.

With your tough training ahead, it is unusual for you to be both this mistaken. It does happen, however – it reminds you how fragile, how temporary, all certainties of life can be.

The times when he looks so miserable, just beneath the kind facade, are as rare as they are powerful. You drive him home, in near complete silence, and do not have the heart to watch him climb the stairs to his apartment alone.

Part of your pact, more established by empathy than open agreement, is drinking a final cup of tea to end the evening. It never fails to be honoured, with all the serenity you can muster.

It startles you to recall how difficult it would have been for you, not so long ago. The road to this state of mind was not a peaceful one.

Your experience in the courtroom has brought along many faces. You have learnt to scan and deconstruct the emotions of each, seeking symptoms of lies and sincerity in the complex architecture of their expressions. But out of them all, as far as you can remember, the sadness of none is more eloquent than Phoenix's.

Albeit shaded by steam, you notice it so well in his humid gaze. Betrayal hurts him as much as it scares you.

His suffering has a sharper edge if it comes from his clients. You sympathize with him, as what you share is something close to a sacred mission. And yet, despite having seen of what else the world is capable, you cannot bring yourself to comprehend how anyone could take advantage of someone like him.

But to people of that sort, you observe, he is a tool, like anybody else can be. A useful one as well, because of his reputation. To them, he is not the person you know him to be.

The pang in your chest hurts with unusual cruelty.

It is your turn to remind him that failure is natural, and he couldn't do anything wrong enough to break your trust. Even your ancient uneasiness, so deeply rooted in you, must bend to that certainty. You see it at times like these, more than ever – you could doubt just about anyone but him.

For his sake, you challenge your entire history of manipulation. Whole years flow away in a heartbeat. You don't care what happens, you say with decision – you are forever going to help him.

He already knows, he answers, and the way he does breaks something inside you.

A vast universe of barriers crashes to the ground in that small instant. A lifetime of prohibitions and holding back and tied strings, all coming loose at once. The frontiers of your world blur into softness and flexibility, reaching out, taking in. Your soul is open.

If you ever got a chance to make it all clear, it is now.

You listen to him, almost from a distance, yet more present than ever in the dreamlike cadence of his voice. He is speaking of the day he almost died – or one of them, to be precise.

He survived the fall, and his memory was a blank. But Larry, he says, smiling. Larry told him afterwards. And all Phoenix could say in between the shivers was your name – your name, over and over – to call the only one who would ever rush to his aid, no matter what.

He breaks down in tears, as quietly as he can.

This is why, you manage to tell yourself, trembling. This is what dragged you back, journey after journey. What forced the long sojourns abroad to grow paler and more meaningless with each passing month. What made you return to a desk you had left behind for good, more than once, and almost inexplicably find you wouldn't leave it again.

You were brought back in the face of all the rest – never mind your fear and your doubts, your terror to attach yourself to anything. You stayed in the name of a creed, of a meaning worth keeping for your life.

The reason is crying in front of you, and each and every day of your joined stories says you will not let him.

You kiss him lightly, for, in that moment, you wouldn't be able to do anything else. There isn't even a trace of surprise. He leans against you as if to begin the next verse of a song you sing together. While you have no definition for the stinging pain which rises in your chest, you must let it rush forward – elation and relief, endless fear of the future, and the idea that, finally, your lives are starting to flow in the direction where they were headed all along.

When your breath unfreezes, you have no choice but to speak. You tell him everything. You tell him of the doubt and the nightmares that return in the light of day; you tell him of what things are worth, of what he is worth, and all things of yours that will never be enough, and that you don't know what to do, don't know anything –

All he does is rest his forehead against yours. The uproar in your head fades to silence. Nothing is left but his voice.

"I love you the way you are," he says – only able to be honest, as he always is. "We are going to figure it out."

At last, you don't have to worry about the answer you'll give. He has never been anything but sincere to you. You could get used to doing the same.

It is only natural, for once, to be afraid. It is true – you know nothing of this. Nothing at all.

Still, if it is about the two of you, it is meant to be fine.

You learnt for sure it couldn't be any other way.

Whoever knows me well enough is probably jaw-dropping in surprise. For everyone else, it is essential for me to explain things better. Writing about these characters and their relationship – which I love more than I can say – in a romantic sense has always been impossible to me. And I can assure you it isn't because of bias or other absurdities. Aside from it being a secondary option and all, I actually love this pairing dearly, if it meets some very strict standards I have chosen in time. But to try it myself has always had zero chances of success, for I never managed to come up with the remotest idea of how it would work in the first place.

I realize this is sort of a paradox. Even so, I am a person who needs to make sense of everything. I naturally cannot make sense of a feeling I haven't experienced, unless someone else does it for me. To be brutally frank, there is a reason why my romantic stories have always been about canon ships only – they are, in fact, empty and soulless copies of what authors do themselves first. I fail terribly at describing romantic love, despite how much I appreciate and value it. It is just the way I am.

However, needing everything to be reasonable – feelings above all – is kind of a horrible way to live one's life. I can't say I am going to change it completely, because it's my nature after all. I am still destroying at least part of it; and, since writing is a resource and a coping method to me, this story came to me on its own, in the form of a glorious punch in the face of my emotional inflexibility.

It isn't that easy to explain how exactly it worked. I can sum it up, though. This story is something that I believed to be impossible. I believed it would be horrible, nonsensical, and the result of plain bad writing. And heck, it may very well be – I am not the one to , these very beliefs are what I am challenging by posting it.

I am purposely crushing limits I imposed on myself, so that, over time, I can learn to crush the ones which matter. The ones which are, in every way, limiting my life and my happiness.

The story came first, these realizations later. But really, there was no better way to start than writing something about a game, two characters and a relationship which all have a long emotional history and an enormous symbolic value to me. To be more precise, I wrote a difficult story. I wrote something I barely understand on a rational point of view, but also put in it a lot of what I am going through right now.

I have been numb, dissociated and generally dead inside for years. Some days ago, part of my therapy finally kicked in, and I started feeling my emotions, whatever they were, very viscerally and directly. The force of it is staggering. It's like being ill for a very long time, and discovering you had completely forgotten what good health feels like. My emotions give me physical pain and intense fear, but also a desperate, greedy will to live. I want to stop limiting myself. Live, some part of myself commanded me. Do something crazy. While this story is one of the things that match my idea of something crazy, you can recognize of much of all this went into it.

It was the first time, and it's probably going to be the last. But I wouldn't have done it, hadn't it been a step that mattered.

As with every accomplishment, I am starting from the little things, to reach great goals. Enough with fear of failure, self-deprecation, fear of judgement. I have had enough. And I am confident that, after all these years, I am finally, finally starting to leave them behind.

It wouldn't have happened without the ones I love. I will be forever grateful to them all – and to you, who got to the end of this long personal rant.