Notes – Done for pw_contest, under the prompt "Bad". Set post T&T with major spoilers for that game and AJ. This one also went way over the word count originally, it took loads of editing to shorten it down.

If there had ever been a time when Phoenix was deluded enough to not be able to see the bad in people that view was shattered by the time he'd become a lawyer.

Actually, no, that was a lie.

It had been shattered when his college sweetheart had turned out to have been using him to hide evidence for a murder case then tried to frame him for a second murder she'd committed. That had definitely done it. But despite this even after he'd accepted her for what she was; part of him wondered if there had been anything genuine about her feelings towards him…

Almost as soon as he had moved on the whole affair was brought crashing back to his feet again. Turned out that he hadn't known the full story. She'd had a twin sister. Identical. She'd duped this poor girl into playing the part of Phoenix's girlfriend because she couldn't be bothered to play that part herself.

He was wounded, but old enough to deal with it now. He knew he couldn't blame the innocent Iris, who was as much a victim as he was. And he tried to ignore that part of him that was sort of happy that at least some of what he'd had in college might have been real feelings from an actual person.

Iris was sent to prison too, through a web of crimes that had brought down many people who didn't deserve it.

He knew he shouldn't have gone to see her. Pearl had already expressed a few times that she thought him visiting her was a betrayal towards Maya, but he couldn't help but want to talk to her about back then. He supposed that made him a bad person.

The first time they met was awkward. Here were two people who had been used by this woman but at the core of it had the free will to choose to be used by her. Iris more so than him knew the situation from the start. So that probably made her a bad person too.

So, more accurately, here were two bad people coming to talk about another bad person while avoiding telling one another too much of the details because they didn't want to hurt each other. Awkward to say the least.

When she'd first responded to him by saying, "Feeni-" she'd stopped and corrected it to, "Phoenix."

He'd known what she was going to say, however. "Feenie". That had been Dahlia's nickname for him. He wasn't sure how much of that name had come from Iris, but it was clear enough so that she knew him by it to some extent.

"It's fine, you can call me that if you like," he'd assured her, even though it hurt. It brought back so many bad memories for him but he pretended that it didn't. One more nail in the coffin of him being a good person.

After a while it stopped hurting so much. He was visiting her regularly now, without telling his friends about it, and hearing her say that word transported him back to that happier feeling of being a naïve boy, laughing at sweet nothings just because she'd spoken them. He felt foolish, but it was a good foolish.

Then that fateful day had come that had changed his life.

It had been a strange case, but he was used to strange cases by now. Perhaps it had been in arrogance that he hadn't been more suspicious.

The next thing he knew his badge had been removed from him and he was not one of the most famous lawyers in the country anymore, he was just some guy who had apparently forged evidence to win a case.

He had a hard enough time being honest to his friends about it. Most of them drifted from him. But perhaps they'd been drifting for a while now and he just hadn't realized. When was the last time that Maya had attended a trial with him?

And there was Iris. If he couldn't tell anyone else about it how could he even start to tell her? It wasn't as if they were romantically involved with each other but still…

He didn't know how she would take this.

So Phoenix stopped visiting her. Entirely. He never went there again. Never told her that he was no longer a lawyer. Always knowing that other than one old lady who lived in the mountains he had been the only person to ever visit her.

He abandoned Iris.

The coffin of being nice was buried deep in the ground.

Now he was just Phoenix Wright, a bad person.