Chapter Text
The gesture fails almost immediately. He should have thought of it - that removing the key from the ignition would stop the warm air blowing from the vents. The fan's calming sound sinks down from quiet to no sound at all.
He says nothing else before exiting the car, and the damp, woody chill and the thump of the door closing strike his nerves as syncopated rather than simultaneous shocks.
From the asphalt he steps up onto slippery grass, then onto the dark packed soil under one of the trees. His ring of keys falls against the smaller one from Lang when he slides it into his pocket.
He pulls out the phone instead. Opens the long list of contacts - so many more acronyms than people - and feels a dull, dissonant swell of unpreparedness like the beginnings of a toothache when he reaches the bottom of it without having found one that he wants to dial.
Stares at Zurich, Kantonspolizei until the meaning of the words starts to fade and the hairs stand up on the back of his neck. From the cold. Certainly from the cold. The sky is going grey in earnest.
Wright, what have you left me with?
I don't know, you offered.
He has never admitted to Wright, the real man in Los Angeles (real and reckless and obstinate), that he does this, that he has internalized part of the man's persona to this degree: the older, younger persona, blue suit and some measure of faith in humanity, as a kind of imaginary debate partner. A crutch. Franziska's diagnosis had been Third Man syndrome.
The legal situation is clear. More than clear.
What clarified it?
There was nothing to clarify! They told me the entire story. You don't need me to argue this case. Winston Payne could argue this case.
Did you get the feeling he wants to? And do you think that was the whole story?
I may not be in possession of a magical paperweight, Wright, but I don't believe they were lying.
But they could have been. They've had time enough to concoct a detailed account - though remove the account and you remove the motive -
It's possible that they've been lying.
It may be the middle of the night in California, but there is one call that he can make.
---
They'll have to get back to him, the sleepy officer says.
He lowers the phone and tilts it toward his chest, gaze drawn the ten yards back to the car.
It's not as though they can run.
Not as though, given a kind of chance, they had.
If they had turned on each other it would have been simple; I gave them the opportunity! Why -
You're asking why they couldn't have had the decency to be unprincipled? You know why, Miles.
They'd only each tried to take the blame.
And he'd hoped otherwise because it would have been easy to send them away, with his blessings, if -
They love each other. Simple, terrible, no matter how meaningless it is. It has no bearing on the case but that the case makes no sense without it.
They love each other, and he could hate them, for their clumsiness and selfishness and the unimaginable mess they've left behind, and he doesn't -
He doesn't.
What happens to them, if they're tried?
You know the answer to that too. Come on.
Spectacle, scandal, conviction. Prison. Separation, of course separation.
I told you you knew.
And in prison?
What about it?
They'll. They'll be destroyed, Wright.
Lana Skye hasn't been killed in prison, you know.
Not for any shortage of attempts.
Did they not recognize that in acting the way they have, they would be tying the hands of legitimate assistance?
But then, what kind of faith could they have been expected to retain in legitimate assistance?
Neither of them would have done this alone. If they hadn't met -
He laughs without feeling like he's laughing, a defeated, breathy up-and-down-the-ladder. If they hadn't met.
Klavier Gavin, dead in full color on the entertainment industry's front lawn, the center of a maelstrom of television exposés and tribute events and zeitgeist moments, marketing from the start to the finish. And Apollo Justice dead unofficially, merely missing, and that only if anyone noticed his absence at all. A nightmare equal parts Tiger Beat and Drano. No one aware -
He could give them the car.
He could give them the car and tell them to go to - Greece? The Baltics? Xanadu.
Their running off - farther, again - is no solution.
Because that's not justice?
Well. It isn't.
Is that the only reason?
It's the most significant -
Is it the only reason? If you don't want to deal with this, why were you so quick to volunteer?
He could ascribe that to a desire to be helpful.
And Franziska would laugh at his saying so and Wright wouldn't even be able to.
So much for the claim that he'd taken it on to spare Wright the trouble.
Possibly because he didn't trust Wright to do it. Possibly. But the jury system will have other, better opportunities. Surely any desire to pick up the pieces of the whole damnable project is dwarfed by the fact that if the man has been making this bed for the better part of a decade he ought to lie in it. So.
It would be simple enough to say - another argument that could be made - that the offer had been purely a pragmatic one.
If: Wright's goal is worthy,
if: his knowledge of events might endanger that goal,
then, exploration would best be left in the hands of a third party.
But it hadn't been practical any more than it had been cooperative. Not from the first moment he'd felt Wright's contagious qualms and entirely not, once he'd been made aware of the bag under the bed and the demure horror of its contents, not once he'd seen the dispassionate camera images of the second young man. It had been apprehension; wordless, organic dread.
Recognition in one case: a boy or close to it, with no family and a mentor like that one -
And in the other, memory failing, failing, infuriatingly and repeatedly failing. Two and a half weeks seven years ago when Klavier Gavin had been the new boy in the office, and whether there had been anything he should have noticed, then?
You don't owe them anything.
Only due process. And as Gavin said, the barest decency. But that isn't...I don't feel indebted.
Then what do you-
The phone rings and he drops it into the dirt.
It continues to burble as he bends to get it, pulse leaping, and brushes flecks of bark and grit from the screen. The number is a Los Angeles one, a familiar prefix only.
"Mr. Edgeworth."
"Yes?"
"This is Detective Warren from the LAPD, the Captain passed your request along. There was a phone number registered with that name on the right date. But there weren't ever any calls placed from it, and it's no longer active. Sorry not to have more for you."
"Thank you, Detective. Pass my thanks on to the Captain."
"I will, sir."
He hadn't thought the phone in the sock was a lie. But he's not quite ready for it to be true, judging by the electrical tremors below his lungs. The last chance for this to be straightforward.
He stares down at the screen and dials from memory, again after he taps in a six instead of a three in his rush.
It's not a number he's really needed to remember, not when it's in the alphabetical list, not when Wright calls him, not when they'd gone such a time without speaking.
---
"This is your plan, Wright? Keeping your enemies closer? Protracted private revenge?"
...
"It isn't perseverance, it's -"
...
"It's sick, single-minded retribution, and you are capable of better than that, disbarred or not!"
...
"Only that if you're truly determined to carry on in this manner you and Kristoph Gavin deserve one another!"
---
This time it's Wright, across the Atlantic and North America, who answers the phone midscrabble as though he's dropped it.
"Miles. It's late. Early."
"Let me apologize if I woke you."
"You didn't. I was up, I'm...do you know anything, did you find them?"
"Wright, I want you to look for something for me. In your storage room."
"...that goddamn doctor's kit again?"
"No. Or at least probably not. More likely on a shelf or under the pillow -"
"What am I looking for?" The faint scuff of sandals.
"An item of jewelry. Someone mentioned -" A door opening. Springs.
"He had that bracelet on when he left, I'm sure of it. Did he not have it, in the LAX photos?" Something heavy sliding.
"No, not that. Something silv-"
"...A ring? I just found it. This has got to be Gavin's. It almost fits me." A heavy exhalation. "Miles."
"Yes?"
"All those years, fending off the jokes, and the Wright Agency is in bed with the prosecution after all?"
He says nothing.
"Never mind. I wasn't really expecting an answer...let me tell you something." The door closes again and it's impossible to know which side of it the man is on. "It was never just because they were talented. I admit it. I...I wanted it to be them so he could feel it. It was revenge like you got so righteous-wrath at me for. Get as mad at me now as you want to, too - but I needed to, once I had the idea, I...his monkey-see-monkey-do little brother. His apprentice. I needed to see him lose them and know he'd lost them, God knows he never seemed hurt by anything else I did. Maybe it's why I hired Apollo in the first place, I don't know -"
"Your motives were...heterogenous, Wright, put it that way and don't overstate the case."
"Miles, this has gotten...if I could just backtrack... You'll tell me if you find them?"
He takes advantage of the broken rhythm to delay his own reply. "I'll pass along any helpful information as I have it."
"I can't ask fairer than that, can I." The springs again, possibly. "Thanks."
"Say nothing of it. And go to sleep."
A muffled click and the silence on the other end of the line compresses from hollow to flat.
They haven't been lying to him. He knew it; now he knows it.
Wright has asked for them, he thinks he wants them back. And granting his request would give a kind of symmetry to their history, perhaps. More understandable than the sudden break, the dissipating awkward silence and fraught, combative reconnection.
According to those mathematics, all he has to do to pay Wright at last, for disappearing, for his own rescue all those years ago, is sell two other young men away. Liars. Menaces to the collective belief in law and order. And complete strangers.
He looks back to the car, and notices that something about the silhouettes has changed. He moves closer without thinking, and his steps start to cover more ground as he reaches the flat surface of the parking lot.
And the voice rises up, still sounding twenty-four despite the reality, despite the conversation he's just had.
You need to make up your mind.
There's nothing to "make up." They're guilty.
Then call the Bundeskriminalamt like they think you already did.
As soon as you tell me what good is going to come of punishing them! Just tell me that!
He's still fifteen feet or so from where the Audi is parked, and as the shapes become more distinct through the glass he calms, slows down. Still two of them there, and not limp like ragdolls after all, alive, awake -
You shouldn't keep talking to me so much.
He's facing the passenger side of the car.
Why?
Wright's apprentice is leaning against Gavin's chest, their arms curled awkwardly between them. He can't see their faces.
Because it makes you sound crazy. And because it makes you think like a prosecutor.
I'm -
The blond boy's shoulders shake all of a sudden, as though he's laughing.
It's believable, until they continue to shake longer than even hysteria could make him laugh.
The cold air shifts around above the asphalt and the paint, a suggestion of helplessness as false as it is implicit.
Gavin lifts his free hand; a quick, uneven gesture.
Strokes Justice's brown hair, in irregular semicircles.
Tilts his own head back against the glass as his shoulders quake because he's weeping as though his heart has once and for all been broken.
A silent film, viewed from the outside.
I'm not a prosecutor anymore.
No. So think like what you are.