Chapter Text
MILES
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Miles’ eyes scrape the scene of the bar, darting between patrons and bartenders, glancing over telenovella reruns and sports highlights, taking nervous sips of his drink, his heart pounding.
He knows, logically, that no one will recognize him. He was never a prolific figure in the German lawscape, and he was hardly even one in the grand scheme of American law. There will be a few select news articles of his reported passing, of course, but provided he maintain a low profile he should be alright. He’s diverted his cash around between enough different banks and debit cards that it should be virtually untraceable.
They won’t find a body, but that won’t matter. There are a lot of ways and places to die that don’t leave a trace, and his parked car at the base of Eagle River should dissuade suspicion.
Miles Edgeworth is dead, again, fifteen years later, though this time legally rather than clinically. Because he’d already died in that elevator, and not just in the melodramatic, metaphorical sense.
He’d gone into cardiac arrest due to hypoxia, and the first responders on the scene had needed almost two full cycles of CPR and an AED to revive him.
He’d been the first priority, Yanni Yogi had been the second, and his father had been deemed the lowest priority. Not because he was in the best condition, of course, but because they had assumed the blood loss had been too extreme for them to have any chance of saving him.
As he would learn in a mandatory first-aid seminar almost thirteen years later—a seminar that would cause him to throw up in the bathroom, the moment it ended—they had been following the principles of triage.
Even given the relatively fast turnaround between his death and the start of resuscitation—the doctors would later estimate that his heart had stopped for almost three minutes before they had pried open the doors—it was a miracle they were able to get his heart to restart at all, or that he wasn’t left comatose or with severe brain damage.
No, all things considered, when he had woken up in hospital ten hours later, on a truckload of painkillers and with five broken ribs from the CPR he’d been given, he had been lucky—though he certainly didn’t feel that way when the next words out of his mouth were to ask where his father was, and the next words out of the doctor’s mouth were condolences.
He would find out much later, at the von Karma dinner table, as Manfred had sat reading over the case file out loud, that his father had only been dead for ten minutes. That they could have saved him, if Miles hadn’t seemed like the less risky option to try to resuscitate. That they could have saved him, if only Miles had been more dead.
He had thrown up in the bathroom then, too.
He knows, rationally, that he should blame the man who had been sitting at that dinner table, reading the autopsy report of the man he killed to the son he left behind, but he can’t help but wonder if that bullet had changed anything, afterall.
It almost turned the gunshot into a mercy kill, something that forcefully closed off an infinite number of doors in his mind, doors that poorly concealed the whispers behind him, wondering, asking, demanding, all the same question over and over: even if Gregory Edgeworth hadn’t been shot, would the first responders have changed the priority at all? Would Miles have been the one to kill him, then?
He’s felt death; he’s known that there is nothing between the bottom floor of that elevator and the fluorescent lights of that hospital room, that the end is a nothingness that the human consciousness can’t conceptualize, can’t begin to understand or peer into.
Maybe that’s why he’s a skeptic. He’s seen the Fey girl do her channelings, watched her mould her own shape like silly putty and shift her voice through octaves that shouldn’t be possible with the vocal chords she has, knows Wright draws some spiritual clarity from the rock he totes around in his pocket, that makes his hair stand on end and a chill pass through him when someone tells him a lie.
Logically, the evidence is overwhelming. Ghosts, or spirits—or whatever they’re supposed to be—are real, probably, but he can’t bring himself to trust in it. Call it survivorship bias, or something.
His life had, inevitably, been divided into two halves: before the incident, and after. It was like a new Common Era, a metric he based everything else in his life off of, like planets orbiting a star. His mother died three years before it; he became a prosecutor ten years after it.
It was all internal, of course, something he kept wound up like a copper wire around a spool, something that ticked like a bomb behind his eyes, always on the edge of exploding and falling from his mouth but that never quite detonated.
That’s why Wright had scared him; he was the only thing that bridged the gap between the two, the only person in his life that was mirrored across the two hemispheres of his life. Everything else could be divided cleanly into one or the other—his mother, his father, and his dream of being a defense attorney on one side, and Manfred, Franziska, and becoming a prosecutor on the other—but Wright was an uncomfortable constant that spanned both halves.
He gave him attention—priority, he had called it, specifically, pressing his hand against that plexiglass sheet and murmuring soft, fond words to him in that grey box in the detention room—and it had terrified him. He hadn’t been anyone’s priority since he was nine years old and being brought back to life, since he was nine years old and that priority had killed his father.
He got scared. He couldn’t face the music, couldn’t look the void in the eye. And now he’s in a bar in Germany, shrouded in shadow so that nobody recognizes him from the missing persons announcement plastered across the only television playing American news.
He takes another long swig of his drink, pushing the thoughts further back in his throat along with it.