As my friend the Princess Prosecutor says, "Oh God. Not your boyfriend again."

Here it is, the last chapter of "Fallen"…and the only way to go out is with Godot. I kind of want to cry, now that this self-challenge is over. But I hope you guys have enjoyed my ridiculousness. :3

~~ 11.11 Whisper ~~

He'd gone through withdrawal symptoms before, but nothing like this. The hangover-like pounding headache of denial had been infinitely exacerbated by the horrors of two nights ago. Toward the wee hours of dawn yesterday, the one thought that kept pre-empting all the others was You should have rationed your coffee better.

The secondary thought, one he barely gave any credence, was just how much he wanted to leap straight off the gorge onto the rocks below. Clasping his arms around himself, he tried to control the furious shivering.

The pounding headache intensified as he stood up: the sun was well above the horizon now. It had to be at least eight o'clock, and he could hear vague shouting from across the gorge. Men's voices: that meant it was no one from Hazakura. There would be others coming soon. The pain finally faded back to one dull, monotonously excruciating throb, and he cautiously stepped out of the storage shed.

He'd thought the first night had been long: for almost the first time since awakening, he'd actually fallen deeply asleep. Since that day, waking without Mia there, he'd refused to sleep, half maintaining it with caffeine and half through sheer stubbornness. But he'd run out of coffee for literally the first time in a year… to be honest, probably the first time ever. Waking up had been even worse than a hangover, since the pain hadn't gone away yet. Besides that, he didn't even want to start reliving the nightmares he'd seen in the darkness.

Last night had been even longer. Too exhausted to function, yet in too much pain to sleep, he'd lay in a sort of half-stupor, visions of Misty Fey's dying face before him, the truth of what he'd done driving him halfway to madness. He'd kept one of the garden torches burning all night, occasionally getting up to pace back and forth to keep away the dark visions. It had kept away the cold, too. He found himself pacing now, to drive away the constant shivering—why, oh why, hadn't he thought to bring a coat?

A memory had kept recurring to him: one from over a year ago, when he'd first woken up in the clinic. Weak as a kitten and unable to see a thing, he'd had to ask the nurse to dial for him.

"Grossberg Law Offices." To his surprise, it had been Marvin himself answering.

"Mia Fey. I need to speak to Mia Fey."

There had been a pause, a familiar clearing of the throat. "Er… who, may I ask, is calling?"

"It doesn't matter. Mia. Fey. You know her. Brown eyes, long hair, beautiful."

"Well, yes…" There had been such a long pause that he'd wanted to scream into the phone. He wondered if Grossberg had recognized his voice. Doubtful.

Then finally, "Ahem. Well, you see… Miss Fey is no longer with us."

Good, she'd gotten her own firm. The words Give Me Her Number were on the tip of his tongue, but Grossberg continued, with almost no pause whatsoever. "That is to say, she passed away more than a year ago."

It wasn't really the conversation that struck him, so much as what happened afterwards. He'd been incoherent, and didn't have many clear memories, besides the nurses freaking out as he wept.

"My God, what—what—are those tears?"

"I don't know! Bring more gauze!"

"Sir, please lie down!"

But he did have one clear memory of that time, and it was of asking the doctor a question. The man, invisible, had said nothing for a moment.

Then his hand had been grasped abruptly. "Sir, this clinic is used almost specifically for police victims and victims placed in a witness-protection program. If anyone came to visit, it was a detective assigned to your case. As of right now your identity is a mystery even to me."

The implications of that had not been lost on him. Mia had been killed without ever having learning he wasn't dead.

He reached up to touch his face now: the blood was still sticky under his mask. Gritting his teeth, he willed himself to forget.

Godot knew that somewhere nearby was the dressing room the acolytes used before meditation: there was also a tiny kitchen—it was more the size of a broom cupboard—stocked with a small amount of food. But every time he thought it might be prudent to consume something, if just to stay functional… his stomach wrenched again.

Hopefully Maya would eventually make use of that little kitchen, but he was quite certain he wouldn't be able to keep anything down. But now, if he were finally leaving this godforsaken island, he should probably just finish off that last cup of coffee he'd managed to ration, despite himself.

Godot stepped back into the storage shed briefly, picking up the thermos, an odd sensation coursing through him: it felt almost like reverence for the dinky little thing. It probably was reverence, he thought, half-amused. With this fierce of a headache, his brain was muzzily assigning gratitude and adoration to a thermos. Granted, it had gotten him through some rough spots in the last year, supplying the dark nectar of energy when he needed it most.

Stepping outside for the final time, he unsuccessfully tried to spot whoever was talking on the other side of the destroyed bridge, but to no avail. Well, they'd be over soon enough. Hopefully it would be no one brighter than the local police force, no one who would recognize that he'd been here all night. They'd probably almost finished with the bridge, and someone would certainly be over soon.

Iris had called his cell phone yesterday from the prison—the securest line she could manage—and he'd gleaned between her tears that his own disappearance had gone unnoticed, that everyone had merely chalked it up to someone having to stand in for Wright, who was mysteriously sick. It was a reasonable assumption: his public proclamation of avenging himself on Phoenix Wright was pretty much universally known. But to hear poor Iris sobbing for that sap…

Unscrewing the lid of the thermos—a little more roughly than he'd meant—he took a moment to breathe in the half-warm scent of Blend 102, the best he'd ever mixed. Just as he was about to pour the very last of his not-very-carefully hoarded liquid gold into the cap, he looked up, across the gorge, and saw who was coming.

It was a group of city police officers. Even his poor sight could pick out their uniforms, silver badges shining in the cold morning sunlight. But they weren't the problem. Leading them was that awful detective, the prosecution's lapdog. Godot couldn't remember the man's name, but even his distinctive voice carried across the gorge.

Worse yet, there was another with them. Edgeworth. It had been years since he'd seen the man, but Godot knew him. The distinctive color of his suit would have been impossible to pick out, even if Edgeworth hadn't been wearing a coat, but the white cravat made it obvious: so, too, did the fact that the detective—Gumshoe, that was it—followed his every move, practically salivating to do his job correctly. A woman was following them around, tiny, but clearly as in charge of the detective as Edgeworth.

And then, following them, a familiar spiky-haired figure, wrapped in layers of clothing. As Wright bent over, inaudibly coughing and sneezing, Godot felt a spike of hatred run through his chest, matched by a throb of pain so bad it almost blinded him for a moment.

Instinctively he capped the thermos, setting it down at his feet. Well… this was the end.

Edgeworth might not remember him. The detective—Gumshoe, that was it—was just dumb enough to assume he'd vanished because Wright wasn't across the courtroom. But Wright himself couldn't possibly be stupid enough… could he? For him to suddenly appear on this side of the gorge… no.

Despair washed over him, and he stepped up onto one of the broken line anchors, looking down. It was a vertigo-inducing height, much more than the forty feet he'd initially assumed.

For just a moment—just a split second, though one that seemed to last forever—he thought about jumping. It would be so easy: it would solve so many problems. Just to fall… to feel the rock catch him…to see Mia again… Death was always haunting his steps, but right now it was practically lying at his feet.

He reached into his pocket: it was still there, the edges of its tiny cut-crystal bottle still sharp enough to dig into his fingers. The necklace.

Godot didn't know how Mia had gotten the pendant back from that dope Wright—according to the court transcript, the stupid kid had eaten it—but he'd found it re-filed into court evidence, along with everything else from Terry Fawles' case. Only there had been an extra tag on the bag: one with his own name on it. There was no poison left in it, of course, but he still felt a morbid shudder at the thought of his own fate having been locked into this cutesy piece of jewelry.

He held it up to the light now, a beam of weak sunshine playing through it like a prism. He thought of Fawles, hiding the necklace here at Hazakura. Another fallen angel, someone else to beckon him across to the other side. There were lines of them, he thought bitterly: Mia, Fawles, Valerie Hawthorne…and anyone else Dahlia had ever killed. He remembered a line from a prayer he'd learned as a child: Protect us from harm… protect us from evil.

With a great surge of grief, he pulled his arm back and threw the necklace into the gorge, feeling his stomach follow it as it plunged into the rushing waters of Eagle River. He leaned forward, wondering if, with a running start, he could get far enough to make it into the river, and what the flight would feel like.

Then he froze.

At first it made the hair on the back of his neck stand up: an eerie wail, it sounded like a high voice singing. Reflexively, in a movement so unconscious it was almost genetic, he crossed himself. But he immediately realized what he heard. It was someone sobbing, a high-pitched voice, carried on the wind.

Immediately he felt idiotic. Any ridiculous thoughts of suicide—and the coffee—would just have to wait. So would his worries about Edgeworth, Wright, and the detectives. There was no point in trying to hide. Maya had awoken and found out what he'd done. He'd cleaned up the garden as well as possible, but for her to find the bridge burned down and herself alone… should he try and comfort her?

Godot picked up the thermos again—at least he had enough wits left to keep from kicking the damn thing over the cliff, he noted vaguely—and slunk to the garden, trying to stay unnoticed. There was no one there, of course: the voice had come from either the acolytes' dressing room or the Inner Temple, but he'd had to make sure.

There was no subtle way to enter the dressing room, but it didn't matter: no one was inside. To his astonishment, there was a pot of water on the stove, and the scent of ramen noodles was clear in the air. Maya had obviously been in and had eaten.

Wincing, he moved toward the Temple. Maya must have seen him behind Dahlia, though, and had to have known that he'd carried her into the Inner Temple. If he came in and she saw him... oh well. The pain stabbed just once as he pulled open the temple's door, almost enough to make him exclaim aloud, and then resumed its general thudding.

To his surprise, there was an acolyte inside the small antechamber: but it wasn't Maya. The girl who looked up at him with huge, red-rimmed eyes and a tear-stained little face was her cousin, Pearl Fey. The recognition—and the realization that went through him, that she'd been over here since the murder too—rendered him quite literally speechless.

She sniffled, hastily drying her tears. Vaguely he noticed that the room smelled strange, that the portrait of Misty Fey was covered by something runny and bloblike.

"Are you... you're that p… pros-ah-cute-er," she said unsurely, huge eyes wobbling a bit. "That's what Mr. Nick and M-M-..." And she abruptly burst into tears again, this time turning away to hide her face in her hands as she sobbed, indistinctly wailing, "Mystic Mayaaaa!"

In another situation, he probably would have had absolutely no clue what to do. The daughter of Morgan Fey, sobbing her eyes out about Mia Fey's younger sister. It boggled the senses.

But here, his head throbbing and his brain still reeling from the past forty-eight hours, Godot sat down next to her, put a hand on her thin shoulder. There was nothing much to say to someone who thought her beloved cousin was dead: but then again, as far as he knew, he was probably the only person who could say with any assurance that Maya hadn't died. There was no reason to think she would have, unless she was unreasonably susceptible to the cold.

"Yes, I saw you in court, Miss Fey," he finally said. Her crying was drying up once again, and he added, "Are you all right?"

It might have been a stupid question, but she seemed to understand, and nodded miserably. "Uh-huh. But… but Mystic Maya is locked in the cavern!" The tears threatened to take over again, and she sniffed them back to finish in a tiny voice, "And it's my fault."

Obviously she had Morgan's note on the brain, and thought it was her fault she couldn't channel Dahlia Hawthorne. Godot cursed both women under his breath, the greedy, terrible creatures.

Abruptly, he realized what the little girl had just said, and looked up at the Sacred Cavern. There was a large, strange-looking padlock chained across it, one that had clearly not been there before. Godot stared at it for a moment, completely bemused. How had it gotten there?

It occurred to him just how distressed Pearl Fey must be now: he felt grief tear into his heart. Could Maya really still be all right, locked in that tiny cave? It was freezing in this antechamber; it must surely be below zero in there. He'd assumed she would be out and wandering around by now.

Godot looked back at the little girl. Tears were still rolling down her face, and she too was staring at the giant padlock. He knew nothing, and with a sudden sinking of his stomach, felt that Maya was beyond help.

But this girl wasn't. Well, he might be able to help with that. "Miss Fey, would you come with me?" he asked. She eyed him uneasily for a moment, but the sniffles won over. With a heartbreakingly trusting face, she put a little hand into his and followed him to the kitchen.

A cup and spoon were easily found; there was even milk in the small icebox. Mentally sighing, knowing that this small amount of coffee wouldn't do him much good anyway, Godot poured the last of Blend 102 into the mug for the little girl, offered it to her. "Don't worry, Miss Fey. The police are on their way." He took a deep, calming breath, the pain having finally faded a bit: a half-truth was sometimes better than brutal honesty. "And your cousin will be fine. She's a very strong young lady."

"I know," the girl said, her thin hands wrapped around the mug. She took a drink and stared down into the coffee, suddenly frowning fiercely, as if willing herself not to worry. Godot was filled with admiration: Morgan Fey could hardly know her own daughter's strength. He prayed that Maya would be all right.

They sat in companionable silence for a short while; finally, Pearl Fey looked up at him, eyes still tear-stained, but now thoughtful. "Why," she asked, "do you hate Mr. Nick?"

The question was so unexpected that Godot actually froze for a moment, halfway through nervously screwing and unscrewing the cap of his thermos. He stared at her. She added, "Is it… is it like Mr. Edgeworth? Did you used to be friends?"

His confused brain thought for a moment, Were Edgeworth and I friends?, then realized what she meant. Had Wright and Edgeworth been friends? His headache was coming back again. Coming on the heels of forty-eight very trying hours, and coming from this little girl, this was too much.

Trying to hide the thin layer of disgust that coated his every though about Wright, Godot answered, "Er, no. He… uh… Wright and I have never met except in court."

"Then why?" the little acolyte persisted, taking another timid sip of the coffee.

His mind frantically whirled. Was there any good way to explain this to her? No, of course not… but he certainly wasn't about to tell her a bald-faced lie. Time paused for a minute, as he struggled to frame an answer, and as the girl drained the last of the coffee. This was certainly purgatory;

Some intervening heavenly force must have decided to intervene on his behalf: voices sounded from outside. The muffled sound of a whipcrack sounded from the outdoor garden, followed by a yelp of pain. "Mr. Nick!" Pearl Fey exclaimed, and he just managed to reach out and catch the mug as she leapt up. "That's Mr. Nick! Maybe he brought Mr. Scruffy Detective!" Half-ready to run out the door, she turned back, practically bouncing on the balls of her feet with anxiety. "Um—um… thank you, Proste—Prosec-cute—thank you, sir, for the coffee!" She bowed, then dashed out in a whirl of purple fabric.

Only after she left was he aware of just how many voices there were outside. Rising from the low bench, he stood for a moment and listened: Gumshoe's anxious loud voice, a female shouting (perhaps the owner of the whip?), and two men's voices that blended together, obviously Wright and Edgeworth.

And finally Pearl Fey. He could hear her talking with Wright, yelling at someone, a whipcrack, Wright's voice again… then Pearl began crying. Even from inside, he could hear the name she cried. Maya.

Something hardened again in Godot's heart; he knew it was easy to cling to anger, rather than climbing his way back up to forgiveness. As the little girl's voice wailed more faintly, moving away, the hardness increased—"Here's my little cousin Pearl… she's such a sweet thing. Only two, and she already folds paper cranes for Maya and me."—turning his heart to a hot stone, burning with hatred.

Phoenix Wright. Godot carefully set down the coffee mug, to avoid shattering it in a clenched hand, and stepped toward the door. He briefly turned his face to the sky, calming himself with the hatred: it ran through his veins, holding back the sorrow. This was only going to get worse before it got better, but if he turned his eyes straight to it—focused on the man responsible for all of this—the pain would be bearable.