This was the stupidest thing he'd ever done.

He barely fit into the luggage case. It was so tight that Asogi had vowed to fatten him up with the rich British foods they'd find in London.

Two months later, he knew he would have his first pasty. The sweetness would remind him of Asogi's smile and then the pasty would taste like tears.

He knew it would, but before it could, the fox tore his throat open and his mouth filled with the taste of blood.

"It's nothing personal, Feenie. What is it they say in school? Survival of the fittest."

He cried out her name, the roof of his mouth stinging from the shards of glass embedded there, the bitterness of betrayal and the heaviness of grief joining the copper on his tongue. Snow and ice rushed in between his teeth and washed it away.

She was holding him down, keeping him in the river, letting his lungs fill and the fire he tried to summon die before it could be born.

"This'll be easier for both of us if you just hold still, Feenie. Just go to sleep, my love."

He could hear his heart, his weak, human heart shaking his bones with every beat as it fought to stay alive, to stay in this life. He willed it to fight harder. He did not want this life to end.

He pulled him out of the river, gasping and shaking and searching for the silver hair with his frozen hands and the gray eyes with his rolling eyes.

He saw the blue eyes and golden hair and wanted this life to end.

"This is for the best, mein freund. A fool with a sword is ten times more deadly than each alone. But no matter. You are mine now. You needn't ever be anything more."

He didn't know what he said, didn't even know that he had spoken until the nails dug into his skin and his friend, his keeper, his captor, snarled with a voice that was not of a man.

"You are NOTHING!"

He was swallowed, trapped and alone with the darkness and the hunger and the thirst. He tried to scratch his way out from the inside, but his beak and talons were too soft with newness and his body was too weak from starvation to do anything other than brush the lush lining of his coffin.

They took him out into the blinding light and held him, waiting for the pain or the gratitude to bring the tears. If that didn't work, they would give him a few grains of wheat and a few drops of water, just enough to bring the hope that would bring the tears.

Your life will never belong to you, not in this life, or any.

"Shh… Sleep…"

You will be a servant. When you are not a servant, you will be hunted.

"It's all right. I am here. I will not let them have you."

This Promise cannot be broken, not even in death, for death shall never have you.

"Please. Please, hush."

His mother, her feathers shining gold and her breath carrying fire, had told him this as she had held him to her underbelly, away from the driving rain that would chill him and turn to steam if it touched him. Here, perhaps for the only time in any of his lives, he was safe.

"Yes, Wright. You are safe. I will keep you safe."

He slept.

XXX

He woke to darkness.

His belly was an empty pit and he could feel how far his eyes had sunken into his head.

He was back in the box.

Back in his coffin.

Back in his living death.

He was shivering, his quills rattling together in a hopeless effort to keep him warm. It was pointless, his body was holding off an inevitable constant. He closed his eyes, ready to sink back down into the inky blackness of death…

The leathery wing was beautifully warm and horrifyingly unexpected.

Phoenix tried to scream, not understanding and not sure that he wanted to do. The only sound that came out was a raspy cry, more of an avian screech than a call for help.

"I am here, Wright. I will not leave you."

The voice was rough with exhaustion and a stifled, underlying roar. Somehow, this made him even more certain.

"Miles."

"Wright? Are you awake?"

"Miles."

The wing withdrew, leaving Phoenix to shudder in his drenched, useless feathers. There was a sharp intake of breath before a blossom of fire bloomed, reflecting off the wet scales on Edgeworth's shoulders and arms and turning the glistening walls of stone into gold.

Whatever he saw sent him blowing more bursts of fire, the location and reflections of each changing from moment to moment. It was disorienting and Phoenix had to close his eyes to fend off the dizziness it caused. Then there was a clawed, scaly hand on between the back of his head and his bed of stone and cold, fresh water poured into his mouth. Phoenix expected his internal fire to shrink back in repulsion. Instead, his body accepted the drink with an attitude somewhere between apathetic and appreciative. It seemed that he had burned himself out, there was no fire left douse.

The realization of the absence of his internal flame made him uncomfortably aware that his talons and feathers were still here.

Without thinking, he tried to pull them back into himself. The wave of agony that pulsed through him made him choke on nothing.

Another burst of fire, and this time he caught the silver of Edgeworth's eyes. He realized that Miles had left out just enough of the dragon for him to keep himself and Phoenix's warmth-less half human body from chilling. In the same thought, it occurred to him that if Miles was continuously breathing clouds of flame to see by, then they had nothing they could burn for lasting heat and light.

"Where… where are we?"

His voice squawked, both from natural hoarseness and the remaining avian vocal cords that didn't fit in his throat. They were all lumped together, like he'd swallowed a ball of noodles and they'd gotten stuck halfway to his stomach.

There was a contemplative silence that was long enough that made Phoenix wonder if maybe he wouldn't like the answer.

"We're in your cave. The one in the north, in the cliffs over the ocean."

Phoenix wasn't sure what he meant at first, but then the sight of golden feathers and the feeling of a warm chest pressing him into the next appeared in his mind, like something inside him understood what he himself had not.

"You… you remember?!"

Another contemplative silence.

"Do you remember the peak? The one I showed you when I brought you to Italy?"

Phoenix did remember. He smiled at the memory, even though he knew Miles wouldn't be able to see it.

Then the smile vanished when the implications of what Edgeworth had said sunk in.

"Wait - you flew here?! Non-stop?!"

"Technically, you were the one who flew here. I merely followed."

"But that's… that's seven hundred… eight hundred miles! You must have been in the air for hours!"

"And?"

"Aren't you exhausted? When was the last time you ate?"

Miles laughed, a sound that rumbled with an unintentional growl.

"I admit that I might have dozed while I waited for you to wake."

Phoenix did not find this funny or reassuring.

"How long have we been here?"

Phoenix heard the rustle of scales against stone as Miles shifted.

"You stopped chasing me chasing me when the sun was setting. We were over the open sea, and you just… turned back inland. We got here when the moon was rising. By then, you were… flickering… and to be honest, when you disappeared into the cave, I at first thought that you had crashed into the rocks. You've been… resting here ever since."

Phoenix did not believe him. Besides the vividness of his nightmares, he was tired enough to sleep for a week.

The thought of his bed in his apartment made him remember what else he had left behind.

"Trucy!"

"Is fine. I suspected something like this might happen someday. I gave her the number of a friend who will keep her safe."

Phoenix had half a mind to throw himself back into the air and wing his way back to LA. The aching heaviness of his limbs told him he would fall into the ocean before he was even a third of the way there.

"Who is this… friend?"

"Someone I would trust with my own life."

Phoenix had been expecting reassurance, but such open praise quieted any remaining fear for his daughter. The constant parental worry stayed, as it always did.

"Who -"

"You don't know him."

A spike of jealousy lodged itself in Phoenix's chest. He knew there were parts of his life that Miles kept to himself, people he didn't want Phoenix to know, but with the secrecy came questions, and with the questions, unwelcome doubts.

Which were made even more unwelcome by the fact that he did not know what, exactly, he was doubting.

"I don't like it," he grumbled, knowing and not caring that he was being unfair.

"And I don't like being in this dripping hole in the ground hiding from a murderous yokai, but here we are."

"S'not my fault."

"No, but you could at least put in the effort to make it bearable. We have no idea how long we'll be here. Hopefully, not for too much longer, because it seems that the soma has left you."

Phoenix tried to raise his arms, wanting to sit up off the wet and sandy floor of the cave, and found that he was physically unable to her on account of his lack of hands.

"My wings are still here. I can't put them away."

Miles hummed, the dragon's growl clicking beneath his human voice.

"Your body is tired. You likely don't have the strength to make the change."

"I thought low energy made us shrink."

"Yes, but you must also overcome the residual effects of the soma. From what I saw, doing so seemed to cause you considerable effort."

Phoenix did not want to think about that.

Miles must have sensed his loss of interest in the conversation because he said, "Sleep. We can decide our next move once we've rested and eaten."

Phoenix was not sure that he wanted to sleep, not after the dreams or visions or memories or whatever they had been. He realized that the memory of hunger may not have been one because his middle really was throbbing with emptiness.

"I'm starving too much to sleep. Why don't we eat first?"

Phoenix heard Miles shift again - in embarrassment, he realized with surprise and a little amusement.

"We… we have no food. I doubt we could hunt in the dark, especially since your feathers have dulled. We will have to wait for daylight."

"But then where did the water come from? The water you gave me when I woke up?"

More embarrassed shifting.

"There's plenty of fresh groundwater dripping into the cave. It wasn't hard to -"

"What did you carry it in? Did you , like, find a bowl-shaped rock somewhere or fire something out of clay or… or…"

Phoenix's smile was back and he was glad Miles couldn't see it. Instead, Edgeworth seemed to sense his expression with some sixth stimulus.

"Wright -"

"Edgeworth - Miles, you should know that you're supposed to ask before you come in for a -"

"It was not a -"

"An oral transfer of liquids. I believe that is the definition of a -"

"Wright! That is disgusting!"

"Hey, you're the one going around -"

"I will bite your head off your feather body!"

"Yikes, Miles, moving awfully fast, aren't we?"

"Gah!"

XXX

Dragon wings made exquisite blankets.

Phoenix hadn't meant to put himself in between the leathery hides, but he must have felt the exuding warmth in his sleep, though he didn't remember falling asleep, and wriggled his way against Edgeworth's back, their spines pushing against each other in a way that made Phoenix horribly aware of their lack of clothes.

Phoenix quickly pushed a fresh layer of feathers across his back to cover up his skin.

There was a hole in the roof of the cavern, too small for anything larger than a rabbit to fall through but large enough to serve as a sky light. Phoenix could hear the crash and sigh of the waves. The tide must have come in, he thought, noticing the sound seemed closer than it had during the night.

His body still hurt, and an experimental tug pulled in the feathers on his arms and the talons of his feet, along with a groan of exertion and deep, thunderous pain.

The soma was gone, but he was still trapped in this half-form, at least for a while yet.

The noise he made must have woken Miles. He heard the dragon-man mumble incoherently, then the sound of hide and scales moving against wet rock.

"Oh."

Like Phoenix's groan, this noise sounded unsuccessfully stifled. He guessed that Miles had seen him now that there was light in the cave. He could imagine what he must look like and he cringed at the mental picture.

"Yeah, I'm not really supposed to be like this. Unlike you, I lose my arms when I turn."

Where Phoenix looked like a man who'd been tarred and feathered and possibly drowned, Miles had more of the appearance of a basilisk, his body scaled and his legs folded, a useless tail trailing behind his and his wings drooping from a skeleton that couldn't hold them. Against his will, Phoenix imagined what it would like if Miles went to his office that way, as intimidating in physical form as he was in spirit.

The thought made him feel an emotion Phoenix was pretty sure didn't exist.

"It seems you are not yet fully recovered," Miles said, his teeth flashing with points as he spoke. "That might be for the best. If your… pursuer is still searching for you, it might be best to lay low for a while longer."

"How long, exactly?" Phoenix asked, raising his wings as best he could and staring at the tufts of feathers where his hands were supposed to be. "I've heard of soma or ambrosia or whatever it is and what it does, but never how long it's supposed to last."

"We'll stay as long as we need to. This isn't my first time discrete. We shan't want for anything."

Phoenix's feathery brows went up as he realized what time Miles was referring to. Edgeworth never talked about that long, terrible year that he had left Phoenix and the others thinking he was dead. Phoenix had told himself, over and over again, that he had forgiven his friend, but remembering the year of sleepless nights and tears shed in the dark always tugged at the scar that wound had left behind.

Miles must have noticed because his expression sobered, turning from blank to empty in the way that only Edgeworth could pull off, and he shook himself, his skin hardening and cracking into scales while his face pushed out of his skull and horns twisted up above his eyes.

Despite being what he was himself, Phoenix doubted he would ever get used to watching the change.

"I will be back with food," the dragon rumbled, his effort to keep his voice low making his tone high, so that the rumble was accompanied by a grating squeal. Then he turned away and shuffled down the sloping tunnel that Phoenix could only assume led to the exit of the cave, his wings pinched to his back with a tightness that made Phoenix want to stretch his arms out in vicarious relief.

Then he was gone and Phoenix was alone.

XXX

Phoenix did not enjoy being alone.

His mind was still unstable, still echoing with memories his mostly human brain couldn't always understand, and those that he could were often wrought with anger and grief and -

Phoenix was afraid of those memories.

They tasted of death.

He couldn't keep them out completely, without Miles there to distract him. When Miles returned with what looked like a shark with its gills sliced out in his talons, Phoenix was going back and forth between forcing his face into a neutral position, squinting his eyes to hold back welling tears, and shuddering with gasping sobs.

Miles dropped the giant fist - yes, that was definitely a shark - and nearly squashed Phoenix in his desperate scramble across the cave to reach him. He knocked his horns on the ceiling, sending globs of clay falling the walls vibrating and earning a tearful laugh from Phoenix. Seemingly remembering what form he was in, he shrank back down so that his eyes, mouth, and torso were unmistakably Edgeworth while the rest of him remained more or less draconian.

"Wright? What happened? Are you hurt?"

Phoenix tried to play it off, tried to crack a grin and a say that he had been thinking of all the paperwork waiting for him in his office when this was all over -

The office was cold, the attic not meant to be used the way they were using it. He welcomed the cold, savored it, because it gave him something to think about other than the fact that he was alone. She had gone back to Nihon and his friend was gone because of a kitten -

Kitten cold mother milk mother -

Mother teaching him to fly, pushing him off the lip of the cave, sending him plummeting towards the ocean, falling into darkness, teeth on his neck and blood in his throat -

Phoenix screamed and threw himself backwards, away from the phantom fangs, away from the memories of darkness and hunger that came afterward. His feathered back smashed into the wall of the cave and his taloned feet scrabbled at the wet, gloopy floor.

"Wright!"

The dragon-man struggled towards him, his own legs bending the wrong way for upright walking. After a couple of stumbling footsteps, he gave up and dropped to all fours, crawling the rest of the way. Phoenix shrieked, a rough, hawk-like sound as his beak burst from his face and he instinctively tried to flap away.

His body couldn't finish the change. The muscles in his shoulders weren't strong enough to lift his wings, he was grounded, and a grounded bird was a dead bird, his mother had told him, every mother with wings had told him so -

"Wright! Phoenix, it's me! I'm your friend."

His friend was gone.

"I'm your friend and I am here."

There was nowhere for him to go, nothing else for him to do but stare helplessly into the dragon-man's silver eyes.

Eyes that he knew.

"F-fr."

He couldn't form the word without lips.

The dragon-man didn't touch him, didn't raise his talons or grab him or bring out his teeth to bite him. Miles had never been a touchy-feely kind of person, even when they were kids -

He came rushing back to himself, his beak and his wings sucked into him as he remembered who he was, what he was -

His feet were still talons. He fell forward, his backward knees not able to hold him - he didn't know when he had tried to stand - and felt scaly palms and clawed fingers grab his now bare arms before he broke his nose on stone.

Miles let go as soon as he knew Phoenix was no longer falling, pulling his arms back towards himself and studying Phoenix with an awkward concern that was endearingly familiar.

"Miles."

"Yes, Wright? I am here."

"Miles, I… I don't know… I don't know who I am, there are too many… I'm too many, Miles!"

Miles's eyes were round with concern while his brow was wrinkled with confusion as he struggled to understand what Phoenix meant, tried to understand what his friend was struggling with.

A dragon imagining the mind of a phoenix.

He seemed to give up, abandoning what he couldn't manage to focus on what he could.

"You are Phoenix Wright. You are the greatest defense attorney this country has ever seen. You are the father of Trucy and you are my dearest friend."

The flash of blue eyes, giggling as she scared him with that stupid wooden puppet she knew he hated, holding her in the dark when the nightmares came for her and her holding him when the shame was too much.

"Trucy…" It was a mix of longing and confusion as he fought to catch the memories that would give the name meaning, then a sob of triumph when he finally found them, finally found himself, and let himself fall the rest of the way to the cave floor.

Miles waited patiently for the fit to work itself out. When it did, Phoenix sat up with a scrape of skin and a rustle of feathers.

"I can't do this," he said, as if he had only just now realized that he was in a predicament.

"Then don't. Eat and rest. Try again when you are ready."

Miles provided no further advice, choosing instead to turn away and return the dragon so he could use claws and fire to slice and cook the meat.

The cave quickly filled with smoke and the smell of roasting fish. Phoenix was suddenly very aware of how hungry he was.

He didn't realize that his beak was free until he'd ripped a strip of meat with the hooked end and had thrown his head back to drop to piece of fish down his throat.

It was deliciously salty and melted on his tongue.

Miles watched him, a mixture of amusement and relief dancing in his eyes as he blew twin puffs of smoke from his nostrils, then lowered his head and took a hearty bite. Phoenix tore a strip off the dangling end of the dragon's mouthful, an act that made Miles growl in playful annoyance.

It wasn't long before they were pretending to fight over the bloody remains of their dinner.

XXX

He knew they had gone this way.

Direction was the only lead he had. The wind and the sea had long since washed away the scent of sunlight and summer. This did not discourage him. Nothing could discourage him from his search.

He had made his choice. Instinct would be his guide.

It was not so simple for his partner.

Even in as a fox, the extra weight was considerable. He was not a dragon, he did not have the size or endurance to bear a burden on his back, but the fox could not fly and they could not wait to walk. They had only so long before the soma wore off.

There was also the matter of the dragon.

He flexed his talons, imagining Edgeworth's head beneath his claws, skin popping and skull crackling.

Thief.

He felt the fox shift, sensing the desire for violence. He flapped his wings hard enough to clip the fox's ears with the feathered hide. A reminder, that should their quest be in vain, that he would still have a breeder, even if it wasn't his mate.

Wait for me. Flee from me. It makes no difference. I will find you, my love.

You are mine.

Oh noes! Who is the kreeper? Where is Trucy? When will they put on some clothes?!

Tune in next time on "What the hell is this and why am I reading it?!"