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Miles Edgeworth comes into the office feeling rather out of sorts. A million things seem determined to go wrong today, the top three of which are, as follows:
First, some ill-intentioned prankster has changed his alarm to a recording of him objecting in court, which had been not only very startling, but loud- and illegal, to boot, on at least three different counts.
Second, for the life of him, he had not been able to find his newer jabots and was using one from several years ago, which had not been ironed, and as a result, it’s wrinkled instead of properly ruffled. Try as he might to pull it back into shape, it refuses to sit neatly at his throat, and his iron had conveniently chosen to break down four days ago. In any case, none of it meant anything, because it’s so humid outside that the starch in his clothes had completely wilted, and his hair, damn his genes, had frizzed in a half dozen directions and is doing its very best to imitate a particularly angry cat atop his head.
Third, as he walks into the office, he finds a great many things on his desk.
Now, it’s not particularly unusual for him to find items on his desk. Usually paperwork, or files, or a note from some other employee asking him to meet with them or email them. But the assortment arrayed on his desk this morning is completely out of the norm.
To the left of his lamp sits a mug. Specifically, a limited-run Steel Samurai mug for its tenth anniversary, shaped to look like the Evil Magistrate’s head, complete with a ponytail poking directly upward from the top of the handle. It's empty and has a red ribbon poorly fastened around it.
Next to his nameplate sits a fancy-looking fountain pen, with a barrel that matches his suit and an extra set of nibs, along with some ink- red and black. A second examination reveals that the ink is expensive, high-quality Diamine brand, in the colors oxblood and onyx black. They sit upon what appears to be a handmade card that reads Happy Father’s Day!
This is primarily suspect because Miles Edgeworth is not a father.
The third thing sitting on his desk is one Phoenix Wright, hoodie-clad, who flips that ancient phone of his shut as soon as he sees Miles in the doorway. “Hey, Edgeworth! Happy Father’s Day!”
“Er,” Miles says, eloquently. “...isn’t it I who should be wishing you a happy Father’s Day? How is Trucy?”
Wright waves this off with a hand. Miles isn’t sure he’s ever seen him so unperturbed, though to tell the truth, he hasn’t seen him much in recent years. “Trucy’s great, and you’re a dad, too, remember?”
“No?” Miles tries, wondering briefly if perhaps he’s acquired a rapid-onset, symptomless case of acute retrograde amnesia. “I-”
This thought is interrupted by a figure bursting through the door behind him, which Miles never actually closed, so he can only assume she shut the door very quietly for the sole purpose of making an entrance. “HAPPY FATHER’S DAY!” Kay shouts, directly in Miles’s ear, as she catapults herself onto the rug in a pose that vaguely reminds him, for some reason, of the playground. He shakes his head to clear his mind of it.
“Er, Kay, I hate to inform you of this, but I’m not a father?” Miles says. He is considering again the amnesia theory, and possibly mentally charting out the closest path to the hospital to get an MRI.
“Not yet you aren’t!” She’s beaming as she reaches into her little hip pack and retrieves a folded paper, which he takes gingerly, opens, and then drops, feeling a little like he’s been shot.
“Wh-?” All his eloquence has left him- all his training to never be caught unawares by opposing counsel, all his perfect counterarguments, drained out of him by the big black text at the top of the page, which has landed upright. ADOPT-215, it reads. Adoption order.
He recognizes them, of course. They sat in the files in his room, labeled M. Edgeworth, sorted neatly between Grundbesitz and Rechtsbehelfe. Perfectly filled out with Manfred von Karma on the first line and Is under twelve on the last checkbox.
Miles stumbles backward to the couch and sits heavily on it. He’s not sure whether he’s still stammering or not, but that’s less important than the eyes trained on him- Kay’s are dark but shining, clear with purpose. He’s only known her two months. Heilige Scheiße.
It takes him several deep, grounding breaths to regain his composure.
“Kay,” he says, certain of his words until the rest comes out as, “I- why? That is- not to say that I don’t- that I- I don’t mean to-”
“What he means to say,” Wright says, making Miles jump- he had genuinely forgotten the man was there- “is that he’d be delighted to, he’s just doing his thing where he doesn’t realize how much of an impact he has on other people.”
“Wright, did you set this up?” Miles demands, instead of asking how did you even get into my office or since when did you two know each other or what the fuck, all of which are also highly pertinent questions.
“Well, someone had to get the papers and act as an attorney for the ‘child’ in question, and there’s a new court clerk who doesn’t know I’m not really an attorney anym-”
“Wright, that is illegal!” Miles feels faint. It’s lucky he’s already sitting down. “If you weren’t already disbarred, you’d get disbarred for that, you-! And not to mention the fact that I would be disbarred for submitting false paperwork!”
“I mean, the PIC owes you one,” Kay says cheerfully. “Maybe Ms. Courtney would be willing to overlook it.”
He shoots to his feet, glaring her down. “The PIC may owe me one, but the entire Japanifornia State Bar does not, Kay! If we’re doing this, we are doing this by the book! ”
The other two stare at him until he realizes what he’s said.
“I- that is to say-!”
“So we’re doing it!?” Kay exclaims, gleefully.
“I knew you’d come around, Edgeworth!”
“I- yes, well. Er. Quite,” Miles stutters.
“Can I call you dad?”
Miles’s brain exits his physical form and removes itself through the roof of the prosecutor’s office to what is possibly another plane of existence. It doesn’t return for several minutes, during which his thoughts primarily consist of DAD? and oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, and was my father this terrified, and oh god what if I end up like-? That last one is what sticks in his brain for an extended period of time, and what returns with it when it finally decides to re-enter his skull.
“I think we just overwhelmed him, no biggie,” Wright is saying when he snaps back to himself.
“Wright, a sidebar?”
“I-? Sure,” Wright says. His eyes dart momentarily to Kay, who looks a little concerned but not that concerned. She obligingly ducks out of the room, and he waits until he stops seeing her shadow outside the door.
“Wright,” he says. His voice is infuriatingly shaky. The sleeve of his left arm is barely even a grounding force under his right hand. “I- what if-?”
Wright, who has always known him better than he knows himself, looks almost like he used to for a moment- sardonic smile replaced by his usual calm neutral, eyes concerned and clear. The eyes still throw him off, now that he has his brown contact in all the time, instead of just in court. “You’re not going to be the next von Karma,” Wright reassures him.
“But- I, I’m,” he stammers, and Wright sighs.
“All right, walk with me through my logic. What’s your motive for adopting her?”
Miles shocks himself with his own honesty when he answers, “I- because I- she’s amazing, she’s bright and sharp and hardworking, and because I want to give her as good a life as I can.”
“Okay. And what was Manfred’s motive for adopting you?”
“...to hurt my father, post-mortem.” Miles’s knuckles hurt from how hard his fingers are wrapped around his arm; his left pointer is tapping anxiously against his thigh. “And- to… entrap me, I suppose, in the long-term. But-”
“A hypothetical for you- gimme the answer off the top of your head. If she broke a plate in your kitchen, what would you do?”
“Help sweep it up,” Miles says instantly. “Make sure she didn’t step on any of the shards. Ask her to keep Pess off the pieces. But Herr von Karma didn’t-”
“No, he didn’t hit you,” Wright finishes for him. “But he wasn’t kind to you, either. What would he have done?”
Miles stays silent at that. He had broken a plate only once, in the von Karma household, and he’d never done it again. He doesn’t remember the punishment itself. He remembers Franziska, afterward, calling him a dummer kleiner Bruder even while handing him tissues. That he remembers crystal-clear.
Wright takes his silence as an answer. “Even if you’re really frustrated with her, you’d never hurt her,” he says.
“No,” Miles says. It’s the truth. It aches like fresh air in his lungs.
“...Look,” Wright says, after a moment of mutual silence. “If you’re really worried, I can give her my number to call if anything happens.”
Miles starts at that. It- to give her someone’s number, on the off chance that he hurts her, just to need that safety in place, what if- but maybe he does need it, he’s hurt people before, just by not thinking through what he was saying, what he was doing, by thinking he could just take things- but he’d changed, he- he was getting help, he-
“You’re overthinking,” Wright says.
“I-” Miles averts his eyes, unable to continue making eye contact. “I. Yes, it would be- I- I want her to be safe.”
“Okay.” Wright looks uneasy; his eyebrows are knotted together in concern. “You know I don’t think you’d ever do anything, though, right?”
“R… right. Okay. Let me go retrieve her.”
When he goes outside to retrieve her, she’s sitting atop the drinking fountain, trying to see if she can jump from it to one of the fluorescent lights. “Kay,” he says sharply, before she can hurt herself.
“Sorry!” She hops down with an ease that makes his knees hurt. “Er, Mr. Edgeworth, I’m sorry if I made you uncomfortable. I didn’t mean to drop everything on you all at once.”
“Not at all,” Miles says. “I- it’s okay. If you want to call me. Something. I- I just didn’t want to-”
“That’s good!” She perks back up. “Because I decided ‘dad’ didn’t fit you.”
“Oh,” Miles says. For some reason, he feels disappointed, and then he mentally stomps on his disappointment.
“Is ‘papa’ better?” Not waiting for an answer, she darts back inside the office, leaving Miles in the hall.
He startles himself by thinking, she’s going to be a handful, and then again by thinking, nothing I can’t handle.
“Mr. Wright,” Kay is saying as he steps back into the office, “how do I become a defense attorney?”
“I’m disowning you,” Miles says before he can think better about it, and she throws her head back and lets out a true cackle.
Maybe some things are going wrong today. But, he thinks as Phoenix quips back something about there being an abundance of paperwork today, some things are clearly going right, too.