CHAPTER 2 PART 1
Phoenix lay in his stall awake, listening to Larry's snoring. The blankets they were issued were about the equivalent of a single piece of tissue paper when it came to covering you and keeping you warm. He just began to think; he thought about the pretty little redhead he had left back home. He hadn't heard from her once since he had been deployed, but he kept his hopes up and he wrote her a letter every other day. It was mail day tomorrow, and he really just wanted to get some sleep. He sat up and looked at the moon through a small hole in the barn's wooden wall; "Goodnight, Dahlia."
Larry started sleep-talking, causing Phoenix to jump;. "My name's not Diarreah! ..it's...pickled...mayonaise...paste..." He drifted off and started snoring once again. Phoenix just sighed and lay back down on the hay in the floor, and dozed off into a sleep himself.
He woke up the next morning to hear the rooster crowing; he sat up and found Jean Armstrong cooking their breakfast. Ughh... He rubbed his eyes and saw that Lt. Edgeworth wasn't out yet; besides Armstrong himself, he was the first one up, with a cigarette pressed between his lips. He figured that since they were childhood friends, it'd be alright to knock on his stall door to tell him the sun had rison to signal the begininning of the day.
He knocked, and almost immediately, Edgeworth opened the stall door slightly. "Hey, Lieutenant...I was just worried that-"
Edgeworth pulled out his Zippo and lit a cigarette during the time Phoenix was talking, and then he leaned his elbow against the wall separating his stall and the stall they used for storage; the sleeve of his army green jacket rolled up to his elbow as he did this (He, Larry, and Pvt. Lang were the only ones to wear them, and Pvt. Lang was the only one to button his up. They all had one, though.) He spoke up, stopping Phoenix mid-sentence. "Wright, don't be disrespectful to your superiors. Don't you think I would have been out there by now unless I had a very good reason not to be?"
Wright had been caught off guard by this; everything he had said had been the truth. "No, Lieutenant..."
Edgeworth sucked on his cigarette a bit, and then spoke up. "Good, Private. And tell Armstrong to cook something decent for breakfast this morning and bring it to my stall door. I won't be joining the rest of you for breakfast this morning."
Wright nodded in compliance and went to see what Armstrong had already started cooking; luckily, it was bacon and eggs, although with Armstrong's cooking, he still absolutely ruined the breakfast duo; it was just his best dish.
"Armstrong, when you're done cooking, Lt. Edgeworth asked to have his breakfast taken to his stall." Armstrong looked up with a nod and got right back to cooking; his eyes sparkled with a passion when he cooked everyone their meals, and, unless Pvt. Lang was involved, he did not pay any attention to anything else. Phoenix went back into his stall to grab a pen and paper to write Dahlia a letter; he just knew he'd get something in the mail from her today.
He sat on one of the haybales, and pressed his pen to his forehead to think of what he wanted to say to her; nothing that he hadn't already told her came to mind. He saw Pvt. Justice come out of his stall wearing his Army jacket; Phoenix had never seen him in it before, just the t-shirt everyone had to wear under it. "Hey, Phoenix." Wright nodded; Phoenix maintained an overall friendly relationship with everyone in his unit; Apollo didn't like anyone other than him and Gumshoe, it seemed. "Hey, Polly." Apollo turned red in a bad way. Maybe that's why he doesn't like the others.
They made conversation; Apollo was always very open with Phoenix about things, particularly Ema; until Larry and Lang woke up, and they joined in. After that, the conversation turned idle.
Larry talked about his favorite subject: The nurses, much to Apollo's dismay. "Man, Polly, you know your nurses at the South medical tent, right? Have you seen the tits on that brunette one? Wowza. But I'm telling you what, Polly, if you think she's great, you should see the ones in the tent North of here; there's this sort of pinkish one who makes the girls in your tent look like total dogs." Apollo turned a violent red with anger, and began gnashing his teeth together. Phoenix made it a point to grab the back of his collar to keep him from jumping over the card crate and strangling Larry to death.
Phoenix felt a deep breath in his wrist that was rested on Apollo's back. Justice maintained a straight face and calmly told his arch-nemesis: "Larry, I'm going to kill you, dissect you, and then feed your intestines to the pet rat Sgt. Gumshoe keeps in the stall with us." Well, Phoenix thought to himself, I've never seen something escalate and decline at the same time like that.
Larry just smiled and scratched the back of his head. "Hah! Polly, you're such a joker! That's probably why you're one of my favorites here; you make me smile."
Apollo just replied through clinched teeth "Believe me, it's not intentional. At All."
Finally, Armstrong rang his little bell, waking up Gumshoe; completing the unit, barring Lt. Edgeworth.
Everyone had started eating while Armstrong took Edgeworth's breakfast to him; Phoenix noted how the Lieutenant stuck one arm throught the door and grabbed the plate. He wondered what Edgeworth was hiding in there, but he just shrugged it off.
Once they had all finished eating, Larry was talking to Apollo while Lang dealt everyone their cards. "You know though, that nurse with the key in her hair? I've seen better at the North tent, but lordy, does that nurse's outfit do wonders for her legs. I don't know about the mousey one, though...she's pretty, but I think she'd be last in line of all the nurses I've seen..."
Phoenix was proud that Pvt. Justice was keeping his cool with Larry; until Apollo just calmly hurled an insult towards the main source of his irritation. "Hey, Larry, if you looked up the word stupid in the dictionary, do you know what you'd find?"
Larry just grinned and let his sleeve fall down off his wrist, concealing his hand. "A picture of me?"
Apollo snapped at him; "No, the definition of the word stupid, you idiot!" Larry just laughed, not in a mocking way, but in a 'Good one, buddy' way, which irritated Apollo even further. "Hey Lang, can you bum me a smoke?"
This question caught everyone off guard, as Apollo was sort of the goody-two-shoes of the group. Lang slowly and sheepishly pulled out his cigarettes from his pocket and handed Justice one, giving him a light as well. Apollo then thanked Pvt. Lang and everyone watched him as he inhaled and exhaled the smoke, choking back coughs.
All attention shifted off Apollo, however, when the Barn doors opened and an overpowering fragrance of dark coffee filled the barn. Phoenix had only seen Intelligence Officer Diego Armando through the window in the farm house; never up close. His Army jacket had a few medals on it and was unbuttoned with no shirt beneath; he carried coffee and cigarettes with him at all times, yet, his teeth maintained a sparkling white tint to them. His step had confidence in it, although it was a confidence you could feel, not see. A solid white cup of black coffee was being held loosely in his right hand.
He ignored them all as he made his way towards Lt. Edgeworth's stall, and knocked on the door. Edgeworth opened and gave him a quick salute. "Officer Armando, this is quite a surprise..."
Diego took a sip of his coffee. "Yes. I did not plan on visting this pigsty for idle chat though, Lieutenant. I just thought you needed to be informed that I saw an intruder enter the barn last night, and I came to strongly recommend that you nail the windows to the barn shut."
He turned his attention towards the men seated at the crate. "I suggest all of you start searching the premises of this barn for any...unwelcomed guests." He snapped his fingers and they all shot up to do as they were instructed to.
All they found were a few missing food items from the storage stall, and they reported this back to Officer Diego. He nodded at the report and turned his attention back to Lt. Edgeworth. "Lieutenant, I don't like watching people in command allow things like this to happen. You should do your job better, or one of these men might be dethroning you soon, if I have any say so."
With that, Armando turned away from Edgeworth's stall and made his way back to the farm house. Lt. Edgeworth shut the door to his stall and retreated back into it.
With that, the rest of the squad took there seats around the card crate, but before Lang could start dealing out the cards, Edgeworth's stall door opened. "Wright! Justice! Nail the barn windows shut."He went back into the stall after giving this both trudged their way to the storage stall to get some hammers and nails, and they made their made their way up into the loft.
Phoenix listened to Justice talk about Ema and tried giving him his take on how to handle the situation, but he kept on ignoring his advice, and talked about the nurse with a certain sparkle in his eye; similar to the one he had when he talked about Dahlia (or so he thought) or the one Armstrong had when he was cooking. They came to a creaky, unstable section of the loft that was directly below one of the windows they were to nail shut. "Phoenix...we really, REALLY need to watch our step over here...even I won't come to this part of the loft, because it's too unstable."
Phoenix smirked; "Point taken." They got down onto a knee and began hammering the nails into the window; Phoenix missed and hit his hand, causing him to jump.
The sudden movement caused the floor to collapse beneath them. THUD! "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGH HHHHHHHH!"
He blacked out for a second. He came to for a bit, and saw the entire unit, including Lt. Edgeworth, standing before him. He look down at his legs; the bone had cleanly snapped in half and had exited his skin, therefore he was laying in a pool of his own blood. He passed out once more.
When he came to once again, he was in the medical tent; he looked over and saw Apollo in the bed next to him, sleeping. His own leg was in a sling. He felt someone approaching him to see if he had awakened from his blackout yet; he looked up and to the other side of his bed and lost his breath.
"H-Hey, I'm Phoenix."
The girl looked up and lost her color. "I-I'm Maya..."
