Chapter Text
It’s late when the celebratory dinner is over. All you want to do is go home and crawl into bed. It’s been a tiring few days, with the trial and the investigation (not to mention being tasered). And the stress of seeing someone you care about on trial for his life, knowing that whether he escaped the death sentence for crimes you were sure he hadn’t committed all came down to how well you performed in court.
But you know there’s something you have to do first. You remember how it felt when your world turned upside down.
You’re not sure exactly what kind of relationship Edgeworth had with Manfred von Karma. (Friends? Adoptive father and son?) At the very least, though, they were mentor and mentee, teacher and favored pupil. You try to imagine what it would be like to find out Mia had only been using you all along and was callously trying to get you killed to further her own interests. It’s maybe not an exact parallel, because the two of you were (still are) good friends. More than just boss and trainee. But you can sort of tell that even if that’s all they were to each other, what von Karma did would hurt bad enough.
Gumshoe told you towards the end of the party, shortly before he was rendered temporarily speechless on receiving the check and seeing how much it all came to, that Edgeworth had just been let out of detention. He’ll be back at his place by now. You have his home address from the trial paperwork.
You’re not surprised that it takes repeated sounding of his buzzer before he picks up the intercom. But when you identify yourself, he invites you up after only a brief pause. His voice sounds resigned and weary. You think maybe he only asked you in because persuading you to go away would have taken more effort.
He doesn’t say anything when he opens the door to his apartment, just heads back inside leaving you to shut it behind you. He’s still fully dressed; he hasn’t even removed his jacket or his cravat. Maybe he’d only just got back when you turned up. Or maybe he knows there’s no point going to bed. At least you don’t have to feel bad about waking him. You imagine he badly needs any rest he can get. He looks as tired as you feel—tireder, maybe.
You follow him into his living room and sit at the other end of the couch from him. The main lights are off; the room is lit only by a lamp at your end of the couch. Classical music is playing on the hi-fi; something angsty sounding, you’ve never been terribly good at identifying composers. There’s a bottle and a half-drunk glass of some kind of spirit—whiskey, it looks like—on the coffee table and you accept his offer to pour you some, even though you had plenty at the restaurant. You’re glad of something to do with your hands, and could use a bit more courage.
Now that you’re face to face with Edgeworth, you don’t actually know how to start the conversation you came here to have. “How are you doing?” seems pathetically inadequate (how do you think he’s doing?). You both sit there in silence for several minutes, Edgeworth ignoring you and slowly making his way to the bottom of his glass, while you sip your drink and rack your brains for some kind of opening.
“I know what you’re going through,” you blurt out in the end.
He starts slightly, probably not having expected you to speak, but carries on staring into his whiskey.
“Don’t be absurd, Wright,” he says.
“I do, though! My girlfriend in college. Dollie—Dahlia.” It’s hard at first to get the words out—you never wanted to talk about this again, with anyone; never wanted to think about it, even. You wanted it to stay safely in the past. But he needs to know someone gets it, that he’s not alone. (You remember how alone you felt.) You force yourself to speak, and it gets easier as you go on. “She only started dating me because she wanted to hide the evidence from a murder she’d just committed. We spent eight months together, me thinking we were both blissfully in love with each other, but all the while she was just trying to get it back. By the end she was planning to kill me too to recover it, but as things worked out she bumped off her ex-boyfriend instead, and framed me for his murder. So yeah, I know. I know what it’s like to think someone cares for you when it turns out they were just using you. I know what it feels like to have them care so little for you they’re prepared to see you be put on trial and then die for their crime.”
“I’m sorry. I had no idea.” He’s looking at you now, apparently genuinely concerned for you, and slightly shocked. You suppose the whole thing was quite shocking.
“I know what it’s like to receive an acquittal at the expense of sending someone you cared about to their death,” you press on. “Even when it’s their own fault because they’re guilty of the crime. Even when they were trying to do the exact same thing to you first to escape their punishment.”
He doesn’t say anything, just turns his head and looks away again.
(You also know what it’s like to be prosecuted by someone you cared about, for a murder they probably knew full well you didn’t commit. You’ve already, on the first day of the trial, had the uncharitable thought of ha, at least Edgeworth knows how that felt now. You didn’t bring that up then, and you aren’t going to now, either.)
You try to think of what else to say, what might help him, but you’re not coming up with anything. In the end, he’s the one to break the silence.
“How did going out with you help your girlfriend hide evidence?”
You tell him all about the necklace and how Dahlia planned to kill you and what happened with Doug Swallow’s murder, and your trial. He listens attentively, but without saying anything.
When you’re done, the silence rolls in again.
“Anyway,” you say, awkwardly, “I know it’s not exactly the same. At least Dahlia didn’t kill anyone I loved. And I didn’t have your nightmares.”
“And there’s Franziska," Edgeworth murmurs, so quietly you’re not sure if he meant to say it out loud.
“Sorry? Who?”
“Franziska… she’s von Karma’s daughter. Losing my father was devastating… and now I’m doing the same thing to her.”
He looks anguished. You don’t know what to say. The whiskey is catching up to you by now and it’s getting harder to think, but it’s not just that. Even sober, it would be hard to come up with anything comforting.
“Maybe you should have done a worse job defending me,” he continues with a small mirthless laugh. “Then she’d still have her Papa.”
You can’t let him go down that path. You’re sure he’s wrong about that, anyway. You don’t know what this Franziska is to him, girlfriend or crush or friend, only that she’s somehow been able to break through the shell of this sealed-off adult Miles and get close enough to him for him to feel concerned for her. And you don’t know what he is to her, but that can’t be what she would have wanted.
“Look,” you say. “You clearly care about her. Does she care about you?”
You understand what you see in his face only too well. You remember that feeling vividly.
“I know,” you say hastily, before he can reply. “You don’t feel like you can answer that question about anyone right now. Believe me, I’ve been there too. After Dollie, I didn’t know if I could really believe anyone when they said they liked me. Or even if they just acted like they did. I was so sure she loved me, and I turned out to be so very wrong about that. And, well, if I’m being completely honest, it brought some old insecurities to the surface. When you went away without even saying goodbye, and you never wrote, you just vanished from my life one day… I thought we were good friends, I couldn’t understand it. Most of the time I figured there was some reason for it that I didn’t know about, you were going through some stuff or you’d lost my address or something. But sometimes, when I was feeling a bit low anyway, I did wonder if maybe the simple explanation was the right one, that you’d just never liked me that much, you’d only been pretending, hanging out with me because you didn’t have anyone better, and you’d been glad to go off into your new life with your new friends and you’d forgotten all about me the day you left. And then when you reappeared, when I saw an article about you in the paper and I tried to get in touch with you again, but you wouldn’t return any of my letters or calls… I knew you’d changed a lot, the person I read about didn’t sound like you at all, so I put it down to that, I told myself the Miles I knew would’ve at least talked to me even if it was just to say he wasn’t interested in picking up our friendship again. That something had happened to you and you were shutting everyone out, that it didn’t mean our friendship when we were kids hadn’t been real. Most of the time, I believed it. Until what happened with Dollie. I think probably that would have been enough on its own to make me doubt how anyone felt about me. But, putting it together with what happened with you… twice is a pattern. I wondered whether I was just unlovable, whether I was going to go through life falling in love with people who didn’t love me back, who at best pretended to like me out of pity or because they were making do or for their own twisted reasons, or—”
Edgeworth is staring at you with an odd look on his face, and you belatedly realize that not only have you veered off course from the point you were trying to make and started rambling about yourself when you should be focusing on comforting him, but in your unaccustomed rush of openness about your personal history you’ve let slip rather more than you intended. You’re horribly worried he might be reading between the lines, accurately.
“Erm,” you say, “forget that. What I said about falling in love, that is. It’s not important, I shouldn’t have, it’s just late and I had quite a bit to drink at the party, I wasn’t thinking, but now is not the time, and… Anyway. The point is, I went through a period where I couldn’t really trust that anyone cared about me, and it really messed with my mind, but I got through it, and I realized that most people aren’t like Dahlia, and when they seem to care about me that’s because they really do. So, did you think before all this that—Franziska, was it?—cared for you? Because if you did, she probably does. And if she cares for you, then would she really have been so much happier keeping her father but losing you?”
Edgeworth doesn’t have a reply to that, but he seems to be considering it.
You press your point home. “This is a shitty situation for her too, but von Karma put her in that situation. When he made the choices he made, he made it so that she would end up losing one of you. Yes, it’s going to be really hard for her, but it’s his fault, not yours. All you can do about it is be there for her, and you can’t do that properly if you’re beating yourself up about this.” Or if you’re dead.
“I haven’t told her yet… I need to do that. I was about to call her when you showed up.”
“It’s the middle of the night. Let her sleep, you can do it tomorrow morning.”
“She’s in Germany. It’s already morning there.”
“Does she at least know that you were found not guilty?”
“She doesn’t know I was on trial.”
“You didn’t tell her…? Okay, never mind. If she’s not going to be worrying about that, you can leave it till it’s morning here to tell her the news. It’s never going to be easy, but you’ll feel more up to it tomorrow, during the daytime.” And probably a better idea to do it when you’re sober. “Get some sleep, if you can.”
The look he gives you is scathing.
“Yeah, I know, that’s probably a tall order.”
It feels like it’s time to go. You’ve said what you wanted to, and you’ve finished your drink. Any longer and you’ll probably outstay your welcome; knowing Edgeworth, he just wants to be left alone. But you can’t bring yourself to make a move. You don’t want to leave him like this. You want to make sure he’s okay, that he isn’t going to do anything… unfortunate. And you want to keep him company, if he’ll let you. (Also, your apartment might as well be on the other side of the world with how far away it feels right now. The idea of going out into the chilly night and pushing the pedals of your bike with your weary feet—or wheeling it home, given how much you’ve had to drink—is not appealing.)
“How about I stay with you overnight?” you suggest. “We can talk, about whatever you want, or just be quiet and try to rest, or watch TV or something. Whatever you need. Just let me be here with you.” Here for you.
You’re sure he’s going to refuse, force himself to be strong and self-sufficient and solitary. You can’t tell what he’s thinking this time; he looks like he might be about to say several different things before he finally settles on one.
“I suppose you might as well. You’re not exactly in a fit state to be seeing yourself home; and I’m not in a fit state to give you a lift back.”
You’ll take that as a yes; it looks to be the best you’re going to get.
The two of you end up watching Edgeworth’s Steel Samurai Blu-rays. It could almost be one of the sleepovers you had when you were nine, except the mood is completely different; and there’s no Larry. You hope the show is engrossing him enough to give him a break from his thoughts. He certainly seems to be engaged in the action on screen, even though he must have seen it a million times before, until finally he dozes off. It’s not much longer before you follow.
In the morning, you offer to ring Franziska for him, but he insists he needs to do it himself. He doesn’t ask you to leave his apartment, though, so you just go into the next room while he makes the call. Afterwards, he still looks haggard, but some of the tension seems to have left him.
It’s almost nine o’clock by the time you go home. You still don’t really want to leave him, but you can’t just camp out at his place forever. Besides, he says he has some work he needs to get done, a not-so-subtle hint that he doesn’t want you there any more. All you can do is give him some space for now, and keep calling round from time to time. You’ve had enough practice at badgering Edgeworth to talk to you about what’s up with him. You can only hope you’ll be more successful now than you have been over the past few years.