Work Text:
One deep breath, and it would all come back to him. All he had to do was press his nose into the collar, open his mouth, inhale, and somehow, over the years, beneath the cheap cologne and soap smell of his own skin, the fabric had taken on the smells of wood varnish and copy ink and papers, and files, and cup after cup of late night coffee.
Where his badge used to be, the blue was a little worn, threads smoothed bare and coming loose around the point where the pin had sat. The tie had thinned at the knot. One of the pockets was loosened and stretched by the remembered weight of the magatama. He’d been called cheap a lot in his life; never bought a new one. Same old suit, same old tie. Why throw out what could be mended?
One of the buttons on the white shirt beneath was wrapped awkwardly, diagonally in red thread; the victim of Maya’s attempted repairs.
He was supposed to sell it. Not that it would fetch much, but every little helped; Trucy was growing, mentally and physically, constantly in need of new clothes and new stimulation, and feeding a young girl was a lot more expensive than it looked, for that matter, and she so wanted a pet, and the look on her face when she’d shown him her favourite rabbit in the pet store had proved impossible to resist. White, of course, but with floppy ears, and one black foot.
Naturally, the thing had been waiting for her in her room when she got home from school the next night. He’d sold half the books Mia had left to him to get it, knowing he’d buy them back eventually.
But who would buy an old suit? How did you go about selling a suit like this?
Blue, well-worn. It saw me through
. Or,
one blue suit, somewhat legendary
. He snorted. There went his ego again. He had to watch that, these days. Read enough articles, you start to believe what they say.
This wasn’t the sort of thing you sold, really. You sold books, and DVDs, and old mobile phones. Old clothes went to charity, in black garbage bags.
He closed his eyes, curled his fingers around the very edges of the sleeves against his wrists, and then the lapel, thumbing the patch where his badge should be once more.
Not for sale. Not for donation. Then, what? Because, truth be told, jumbled thought process aside, he needed an excuse to take it out of his closet. He needed an excuse to stop opening the tall doors and seeing blue and red. He needed to stop catching his reflection in bathroom mirrors before and between job interviews and seeing a lawyer where there wasn’t one anymore. If his life was going to be working nights, and little girls, and pet rabbits, this suit and all it meant to him had to be somewhere else, for the same reason Maya, and Pearl, and Miles Edgeworth had to be
somewhere else.
*
He tipped the sawdust and rabbit pellets out of a large cardboard box, and tried not to feel sentimental about the smell the fabric would no doubt lose, replaced by the remnants of animal sweat, sweet hay, pet store. Folded it in. Neat rectangle, blue polyester.
For safekeeping.
For his old age.
For the legendary Phoenix Wright.
(There went that ego, again.)