#aa3r

[star-light-shadows]

Narumayo Week 2025 : Day 5 : Healing / AU

It felt like forever. Phoenix truly thought he would never love again. Not just because he thought Dahlia was "the one," but because the more he looked back on their relationship, the more it hurt... the more he realized that Dahlia wasn't a good person... that Dahlia hurt him more than she made him happy. Phoenix was young, and dumb, and it was his first real relationship... How was he supposed to know what abuse looked like? It felt so unfair that Larry and Doug recognized it when he couldn't. And Phoenix was supposed to be a lawyer. If such beautiful love could be so twisted, how was he supposed to trust anyone again, let alone love again? . . . He tried his hardest to separate himself from it all. "Trust" was a resource a lawyer built with his clients, and nothing more. He appreciated how casual everything was with Maya. She stuck by him during his cases but never tried to push a relationship. He didn't even realize she really meant anything to him until she left for her home village after the Miles Edgeworth case. Before Phoenix could realize it, he found himself caring for Maya. Her just being there gave him the strength to fight. When she wasn't there because she was in danger, it devastated him. Eventually, it started to scare him again. He was seeing romance everywhere: The DeLites, The Tigres, The Richmonds. The very concept of love twisted his stomach in knots and filled him with dread. Phoenix could never have expected to encounter Dahlia Hawthorne at Maya's training retreat, but when he confronted her with his past feelings, the brutally honest response she gave. . . was freeing. Dahlia really didn't love him. He didn't need to be afraid that love and pain went hand-in-hand. And when all was said and done, there she was... Maya Fey. The woman he had fought so hard to save more times than he should've had to count. The pain Dahlia inflicted on them both left their visible marks, but he thought they were beautiful marks. He hadn't even realized it; He was already healing... And it was all thanks to her...

I don't have the artistic speed to make multiple art pieces for Narumayo week, as much as I love this ship, but when I saw the 5th day's prompt being "Healing / AU", it was like it was personally calling out to me.

For those who don't know, I've been working for the past 2 years on a whole-sale Trials and Tribulations rewrite (AU), currently titled Chronicles and Culminations. The purpose of which was to fix the extensive list of issues I had with the last 2 cases of the 3rd game, and add more overarching connections to the prior two games, to create what I believe would be the ideal finale to the Phoenix Wright trilogy.

One of the biggest changes to the overarching plot is exactly as the story in this post depicts: Narumayo is made canon as the culmination of the rewrite's underarching plot of Phoenix's complex and tumultuous relationship with the concept of love.