Chapter Text
“It’s been what, 15 years?”
“About that, yes.”
“15 years is a long time to wait. You can’t imagine how much I’ve suffered.”
“You… suffered…?”
“And now the perfect opportunity presents itself. At last I shall have my revenge.”
“...What…?”
…
…..
……..
“Merry Christmas.”
Edgeworth watches as the last light that lit up the Gourd Lake flickered away into nothingness, leaving nothing but the stars to illuminate the sky.
A single gunshot rang out, echoing across the moonlit sky.
Staring down at the gun in his hands, there’s nothing Edgeworth is able to do, nothing he is able to say. He… he didn’t fire the gun… he never pulled the trigger… he’s never seen this weapon in his life. Yet here he stands, the gun in his hands, the fingerprints from his hand on the gun, and a fresh body fallen into the lake, the ripples still echoing across the crystalline surface.
It’s dark. Too dark.
Slowly, he moves over to the edge of the small rowboat to stare down into the water, but all the murky water gives back to him is his reflection. A pale, scared, and soulless expression taints his face, his hair still neatly tucked just in front of his ears and brushing against his face.
Should he call the police?
Surely, nobody saw…
No, what if…
His conscience couldn’t let him just leave the body in the lake, despite how much he hated the man, who was now at the bottom of the lake, his lonely, waterlogged body, the bullet wound in his chest leaking blood into the murky waters, staining them a pale red.
He picks up his phone to dial the police. Or better yet, his good friend Detective Dick Gumshoe. Despite the man being quite a bloke, he was sensitive, kind, and would be able to at least get Edgeworth in a reasonable state of mind.
However, just as his fingers hover over the keys of his flip phone, ready to dial Gumshoe’s number, he hears a voice in the distance, shouting towards him, and a bright light illuminating his figure, arched over the edge of the boat, gripping onto the gun with his left hand, and staring into the deep waters of Gourd Lake.
His head snaps to the side, to see about 7 shadows, all grouped up on the east bank, all holding their guns at the ready, illuminated by the tens of flashlights, ranging from average household ones held by those searching the bank for evidence, to the massive industrial ones that could light up the entire lake.
And in the center of it all, he sees…
Gumshoe. Detective Dick Gumshoe of the Japanifornia Police Department.
With his gun trained directly at Edgeworth’s head.
“Police! You’re surrounded! Put the gun down and make your way to the bank slowly,” he shouts, but Edgeworth can hardly hear him over the voices inside his own head.
They think you did it.
They think you’re a murderer.
You murdered this man.
You’re holding the gun.
He can’t move. He can’t breathe. He can’t do anything. He just wants to wake up, wake up from this terrible dream, get up, go to work. He just wants to go to the office and fill out all the paperwork he’s been dreading doing.
This isn’t where he thought he’d end up, not in a boat, clutching a gun, surrounded by people he worked with, and his best friend, all with their guns pointed at his skull. And so, with nothing else that he really can do, he fixes his coat, picks up the oars to the boat, and makes his way to the bank.
The motion must have taken him a minute or two at the most, but it felt like an hour. His muscles felt stiff, as if he had to fight for every jerk of his arm, for every push and pull on the small oars of the tourist boat. The boat rocked gently underneath him, but he barely noticed it, for all he could think about was the fear, the pain, the horrible feeling of being caught, of having everything he ever knew, his life dedication crumble in front of him. He could almost feel everything shattering in his hands as he squeezed the oars more tightly. With one final shove of the oars, he feels the soft sizzle of the sand underneath the painted bottom of the boat, and he’s jerked back slightly as the boat comes to a shaky stop.
The salty, dark water splashes across his carmine red pant leg, snapping him slightly out of the daze he’s in, but not by much. The shock wears off soon enough, leaving him just staring down into the dark, wood flooring of the boat, the paint chipping and scratched from the years of use and waterlogging it’s experienced.
“Why hasn’t the owner repaired this yet?” Edgeworth thinks. Rather, the thought is something random that pops into his head to distract himself from the flood of heartbreaking, life-shattering thoughts that keep on fighting for a space in his mind, ripping himself apart in the process.
“I don’t remember the water being this murky…” he murmurs to himself, placing a finger on his chin. Despite this being quite a cartoon-ish motion, Edgeworth’s motions were all… planned… organized, methodical almost. It wasn’t that he didn’t feel, but that he managed to snuff those feelings out so well that he was even considered a machine by some.
Even now, when he was sitting in a falling apart rowboat, the waves that skimmed the surface of Gourd lake rocking him gently, with white spots invading the corners of his vision, his eyes blurring, his mind dedicating what little free will it had to snuff out the agonizing flares of thoughts that ran through it, as he lost control of what little he could control, he looked outwardly like a machine.
To an outsider, he would have looked like nothing more than deep in thought, nothing more than an intelligent man that was thinking about a mathematical theorem or trying to decipher a deep piece of poetry, but in reality, what was going on inside of him was less so poetry, and more so a hurricane that ripped every single page out of the book individually and painfully, tugging at his heart, at the corners of his mind. His mind raced, yet stood perfectly still.
However, thankfully for him, Gumshoe wasn’t just an “outsider.” Despite being quite clueless on logic and reason (which is ironic in its own right, considering that he’s a detective), he’s quite an empath, and after working with Edgeworth for a while, could see the whirlwind of agony behind Edgeworth’s empty eyes. He approaches Edgeworth slowly, placing his hand on the prosecutor’s shoulder.
The grey-haired man doesn’t move, even as Gumshoe’s heavy hand rocks the boat. Gently, as not to startle the prosecutor, he places the handcuffs around his hands, trying as hard as he can to not disturb his boss while not providing any more comfort than is the bare minimum that his heart would be willing to let him provide. How it hurt him seeing Edgeworth like this.
Despite the coldness that Edgeworth had exhibited to him throughout his entire life, despite the nights that he’d get ignored, canceled on, despite the times when he was called a “worthless bloke” or a “useless clown of a detective,” he’d grown to care about Edgeworth as a human being, grown to learn his story, and eventually, grown to become the only person who Edgeworth truly trusted with his secret. And now, he was the one arresting Edgeworth.
He didn’t feel how he usually felt during an arrest- victorious, triumphant. He felt angry. Angry at himself for letting Edgeworth fall so far as to kill a man. Angry at Edgeworth for betraying his trust. Angry at.. Life, for letting something happen to Edgeworth.
He was lost in his thoughts again. Edgeworth was the one to snap out of his daze first, shaking his head and flicking his medium-length, fluffy gray hair out of his eyes. He stares up at Gumshoe, and speaks with a hoarse voice, one that sounds like his normal, deep tone, but without the luster of confidence that he usually exhibits.
“Let’s go,” he murmurs, lifting himself off the small, uncomfortable, makeshift “seat” of the rowboat, which, the entire time, had been digging into the backs of his thighs, adding to the numbness that he felt all throughout him. Yet, somehow, the feeling of sharp wood digging into your legs, and the pins and needles you feel all through your lower body after standing up, does wonders of keeping you grounded as a green-coated detective walks you down the shore of a lake.
The entire time, he can’t even dare to look up, afraid of making eye contact with anyone around him, afraid of meeting the eyes of an officer that once testified for him in court or brought him evidence. Yet, most of all, he was afraid of Gumshoe. He was afraid of seeing his gentle, trusting face harden upon seeing him in a mixture of disappointment, shame and anger.
So, he stared down at the ground, feeling the soft crunch and shuffle of the sand under his polished, black work shoes turn into the hollow tapping of the wood deck, and finally into the mild sound of grass blades being crushed under his feet.
His earlier feelings of panic, of anger, of fear and shock and pure desperation were finally gone, but replaced with something almost, dare he say, worse. A numbness to everything, whether it be his vision blurring in and out of focus with every few steps he took, barely feeling his legs as he was walked to the police vehicle waiting for him out in the parking lot of Gourd Lake park, or just the general lack of feeling or desire. If there was one thing he’d always understood about criminals- it was their desire to run away from everything. Yet, now that he was in the same position, he didn’t want to run. He wanted to hide.
But it was hard to hide from all the gazes, glares, and whispers, so all he did was tune himself out. Live in his own little bubble of nothingness.
Even as he’s loaded into the back of the police vehicle- the same vehicle he’s been chauffeured around in hundreds of times as he headed to investigate a crime scene- he barely remembers anything. The only thing he remembers is the cold, hard feeling of a pistol in his hands, the ringing of a single shot, and the lanky, heavy body of his boatmate crashing into the water and staining the reflection red.