#beneaththefullmoon

[assan08]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Contains spoilers for Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy!

Rating: M for violence and dark themes

Relationships: Phoenix Wright/Miles Edgeworth; Mia Fey/Diego Armando

Characters: Phoenix Wright, Miles Edgeworth, Mia Fey, Maya Fey, Pearl Fey, Diego Armando, Manfred von Karma, Gregory Edgeworth

Tags: AU - Vampires and Werewolves, Miego, Narumitsu, Blood and Injury, Violence, Scars, Hurt/Comfort, Character Death, Angst, Everybody is having a bad time, kidnapping, magical beings, post AA3, Bingo Prompt: AU: Vampires and Werewolves

This story has been written for the @aceattorneybingo event! The prompt was "AU: Vampires and Werewolves"

Summary:

When he is faced with an old foe he believed to be long dead, Phoenix decides to take the burden alone.

His friends and loved ones, however, decide otherwise.

But in the end, it will come down to one question: when faced with true evil, how much are you willing to sacrifice to protect the people you love the most?

Excerpt:

The moon stood high above the trees, here and there shot a dark shadow of a bat or a night-time bird past its silhouette. Somewhere deeper in the woods, an owl hooted, another animal rustled carefully through the undergrowth.

Phoenix was doing his best to sneak ahead noiselessly – which still meant breaking through the bushes like a boar, but he was a townie, always had been, and stalking through bushes and undergrowth didn't suit him. His suit jacket had caught in branches multiple times by now, his shoes had tripped over roots, his pants got ruined on thorns. Not to speak of the wet leafs that stroke over his hair, letting the water drip over his neck and into his shirt, like it was their way of a handshake.

Phoenix stumbled on. He didn't even know what this whole thing was about, if it was a prank or an idiotic dream or just another lecture from somebody from his past. He had always been of the opinion, back at university, that a defence attorney would make himself less enemies than a prosecutor would, yet he had not taken into account that things could lie differently if you were a defence attorney who still arrested people, thus doing the prosecution's work in one go with his own.

So, in theory, it could have been anybody to summon him here. One of the witnesses who turned out to be the culprits. An angry relative. Or maybe even an angry relative of one of the people he had been unable to save during the last years.

Or …

Or it was just as the letter had said. The reason why he was here could also be …

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[assan08]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Rating: M

Excerpt (tw blood, dead bodies)

Phoenix didn't know how long he sat there, petrified, staring at the body in front of him, and he didn't know how long it took him to realise that said body was changing.

Manfred von Karma wasn't getting back up, no.

He was slowly dissolving.

He probably only recognized it as, with a sudden, blunt sound, the knife in von Karma's chest was getting loose and falling to the ground as the body beneath it turned into ash. Phoenix didn't want to watch, but he couldn't move away either, unable to avert his stare as the bloodstained fingers were rippling down on the grass, where the rain washed them into the earth quickly.

Something touched his side, and he jumped, causing the dark wolf that had carefully brushed him to flinch back and almost keel over.

Miles.

Phoenix blinked.

The others.

The wolf locked eyes with him for a moment, and even without words, the message was clear.

Get yourself together, Wright. This is not over.

And when he heard the painful whimper that emerged from the white-red heap on the ground, he knew that the horrors of this night were indeed not over.

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[assan08]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Excerpt (TW: blood and injury)

Suddenly, von Karma stumbled as if pushed, his foot slipping off Phoenix's throat, and he sucked in air with a greedy breath he couldn't remotely control, filled his lungs until he thought they'd explode, and immediately choked on it.

Von Karma swore, and he heard him stumble, hiss and curse, barely understandable over the blood roiling in his ears and his desperate attempts to breathe without dissolving into the next agonizing fit of coughing.

After a few seconds, he managed his first full breath that went down like fire, but it went down in a more controlled way. And then the next. And the next.

He lived.

It took a few more moments before anything else trickled through to him, but then, it was like a breaking dam and everything flooded his brain.

The wolfs were still howling. The rain was still falling. He was shivering, his finger were hurting were he had scraped them bleeding on the ground, his chest was burning, every breath still a painful tremor, his eye was still blinded with blood, his vision blurry, his face burning with the new found pulse of his heart.

But there was something else.

Hissing. Cursing. A sound like a dozen cats spitting and fighting with each other.

“Get off me, you pathetic -”

Phoenix turned his head, and what he saw made him almost forget his helplessness and confusion for a moment.

Manfred von Karma was attacked.

But not by wolves, as Phoenix would have imagined, had he had the capacity to do so. They were still howling, the voices ebbing and flowing over the clearing.

Manfred von Kara was attacked by … ghosts.

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[assan08]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Excerpt

Mia took a breath, like she could wipe the feeling of dread away with a gulp of the fresh air.

“Do you have a plan?” she asked.

“No,” Miles admitted outright, and decided to pass on all the things he had meant to say to her. None of them would help her now. “But I need you to do something for me.” His hand slipped into his vest pocket, pulling something out.

Mia's lips turned into a firm line as she looked down on the little, folded knife in his hand.

“Are you being serious?”

He nodded. “Be careful, the blade is silver.” He knew he didn't need to say that, but he still did. Silver was deadly for magical beings of all kind – werewolves, vampires and summoned spirits alike.

“If von Karma gets me,” Miles whispered, feeling the lump in his throat grow. He didn't clear his throat to get rid of it, simply speaking around it with force. “Make sure I won't hurt anyone.”

“If Diego can't stop him, neither could you. He has shifted, Miles. He is a wolf, and you are …,” she halted.

He looked directly at her, then at the brightly moonlit clearing, and when he returned his gaze to her, he saw how the determination in his heart must have made its way to his eyes. He saw it in the way Mia blinked, took a half step back.

He saw it in the way she understood.

“Edgeworth,” she said sternly. “You can't be serious.”

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[assan08]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Chapter One on Ao3

Excerpt Chapter two:

Armando shrugged. “Seeing as he is supposed to be a vampire mighty enough to climb out of his grave after such a long time, and seeing how, due to the latest events, I have missed a few opportunities to shift lately ...” He shrugged again, grinning slyly. “I'd say he'd probably tear me in half with those claws of his, but you never know, right? Maybe I'll get a lucky punch in. Maybe he's highly allergic to dogs.” His dry humour didn't help Phoenix, in fact, all it made was making him sick. Like he was searching for help, he was turning to Miles – he knew that he for sure wouldn't help himself to some gallows humour.

He didn't. Miles looked dead serious, so serious he felt even more sick.

“I'll come with you, Wright,” he said, suddenly blinked, as if he had realised something he hadn't thought of before. “If … you want me to be there with you,” he added quietly, and something about it sounded a lot more like he had asked him to go to a ball together than on a dangerous rescue mission. “I mean, I could … I'm not sure if I can be of much help as soon as I see him, but … I could try.”

“Edgeworth ...” Come with me, he wanted to say, stay with me, be with me.

But he had the dreading feeling that, knowing von Karma, it could also mean die with me. And this, he could never say, never even think.

And so, after a horribly long pause that was filled with nothing but the sound of rain falling on leaves, and Miles' painfully hopeful eyes, he only managed to say:

“You know I have to do this alone.”

Miles hissed something that might have been a laugh in an entirely different situation, and his eyes shot over to Armando.

“Edgeworth ...”

“It's fine, it's fine.” Miles backed off, like the thought of an upcoming hug was causing him pain. Phoenix froze mid-step. “I'd be too weak to face him anyway. There's no need to burden you with somebody else you have to rescue.” He looked away, avoiding eye contact. “Get lost, Wright.”

Phoenix stared, the utterly irrational feeling of hurt rising in his throat like bile.

This is what I wanted. I wanted him to stay behind.

But not … like this.

[assan08]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Excerpt (tw mentioned blood)

The memories did not flood him, not yet. It was more like a trickling, one after another. Full moon. A letter.

Blood.

Dread.

Unable to lie still, both because the sun was burning through his brain and because the hard to place feeling of terror did, Phoenix hoisted himself up into a seated position. He was rewarded with dizziness and nausea, and this time, the memories did come like a tsunami.

The clearing. Von Karma. Mia. The girls. Armando. The images flashed in his mind like a viciously used slide show, projecting onto the clearing around him, like ghosts.

Ghosts …

Phoenix closed his eyes, fled into the dark, taking one deep breath, than another. And another.

It's over, he told himself. The night is over. Von Karma is gone.

He opened his eyes again.

The images of last night had vanished, and the clearing looked like an almost treacherously peaceful place again.

Something next to him shuffled slightly, making him jump, his vision blurring as his head whipped around.

Maya and Pearl.

The two girls were still cuddled together, only two steps away, right were they had been. They seemed to be unharmed, as far as he could tell, their breaths slow and peaceful. Somebody had draped another suit jacket over his – a dark red he would recognise everywhere.

Miles …

He remembered his last waking moment … they had sat there, cuddled together, he and Miles, in his wolven body …

He's a wolf, Phoenix suddenly thought, a thought he didn't have time to ponder last night. Miles is a werewolf. Maybe this should have alienated him more, but somehow, it didn't. Maybe because the events of last night left a lot more room to be scandalized. But perhaps it was just that some part of him had always known that there was another secret Miles had kept from him, like he had tried to keep the events of DL-6 from him years ago.

DL-6 … Gregory Edgeworth … has he really been there last night? And … Polly?

Phoenix looked around the clearing in an attempt to push those thoughts deeper into the back of his mind, when he noticed something.

The spot where Mia and Armando had died was still soaked with blood, the grass painted red. He quickly averted his gaze – and stared right at Diego Armando, who stood frozen on the rim of the clearing.

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