Chapter Text
The world blurred as Miles stared out of the taxi window. Rain poured down, the refraction of the droplets smearing together the lights of the street lamps and traffic lights until the passing environment was indistinguishable.
Miles studied the phenomenon without seeing anything at all. His mind felt stuffed with cotton, thoughts jumbling and unravelling as they came and went.
In his hand, his cell phone laid limply. He didn’t remember getting it back at the detention center, nor did he remember calling the taxi, but it must have happened at some point. He glanced down at it, seeing the text Wright apparently sent earlier that night. It invited him to the dinner the rest of them were having — Miles couldn’t recall who else at the moment — in celebration of his ‘Not Guilty’ verdict. Not guilty, hah. The irony of that flashed across his mind before melting into the overwhelming numbness that occupied the rest of him.
He moved his thumb to answer Wright, only to see that he had already declined. Oh. He didn’t recall doing that either.
Miles stared at the message with unfocused eyes, the text blurred beyond all meaning, until the taxi pulled to a stop. The driver might have said something, but if he did Miles didn’t know what it was. He fumbled for his wallet — when did he get that back? — and pulled out a random bill to hand to the driver before leaving the car. He didn’t register a complaint, so it must have been enough.
As the taxi pulled away, Miles stood in the rain, staring up at the apartment building before him. It was his apartment, which was probably a good thing, but Miles didn’t particularly care right now. After a moment, he made himself move, one foot in front of the other until he stood before his front door.
Miles blinked, and he was standing in his kitchen. He looked behind him, then down at his hand. The front door was closed and his keys rested in his hand. He dropped them unceremoniously on the counter, the jingling of the metal conspicuously loud in the dull quiet of his apartment.
Could he even hear his own breathing? Was he breathing? Did he care if he was?
Another blink and he was at the top of stairs, standing before his bedroom door. He pushed it open, stumbling inside. The room was exactly as he had left it before his arrest, which was strange. Miles had been irrevocably changed, so why hadn’t everything else?
A buzz against his leg interrupted his thoughts. He pulled his phone out of his pocket — did he put it there? — and looked down to see a message from Franziska. His phone history revealed numerous missed calls and messages from her over the past several days, all demanding information while calling him different derivatives of ‘fool’.
Oh. Franziska must have learned of his arrest. It was odd that she would try to contact him, however. She was a prosecutor, she must have known that suspects didn’t have access to their phones. How… emotional of her.
The thought of his sister, Franziska von Karma, cleared away a bit of the mental fog. Miles sucked in a breath. She didn’t know what had happened to her father. Or what he had done.
Was she still his sister? Miles didn’t allow himself to think. Was she ever?
She needed to know. Without further ado, Miles pressed call, dread swirling with the numbness and exhaustion in a sickening concoction deep in his stomach.
Either a moment or ten years passed before she answered. “Miles Edgeworth!” she shouted, multiple stressed emotions underlying her voice that Miles didn’t have the mental presence to read. “What in the foolish name of all the foolishly foolish things in this foolish world happened, you foolish fool?!”
Any other time, Miles would be tempted to smile at her antics. Now, the fondness panged in the hollow cavern of his chest so hard it hurt. This very well might be the last time she ever spoke to him.
“Franziska,” he said hoarsely, “I was framed. For murder.” Suddenly there was a lump in his throat, preventing any more words from getting past.
“I know you were framed, you foolish fool! You are not a criminal!” If Miles didn’t know any better, he’d think Franziska was on the verge of tears. “I will fly from Germany and reopen your foolish case myself to prosecute the foolishly foolish fool who actually did it!”
Miles swallowed down the lump. “No, Franziska. I… was proven innocent. I’m no longer in the detention center.”
“What? But Papa prosecuted your case — you should be sitting in a cell. Was there a different prosecutor?”
“There wasn’t.” Miles swallowed back a sob, hanging onto his composure by his fingernails. “Y-Your father lost the case. The true criminal… confessed.”
“Impossible,” Franziska refuted, shaken, “Papa doesn’t lose. He is perfect.”
“Franziska…” His voice felt like gravel in his throat. “I’m so sorry.”
“…What are you saying, kleiner Bruder?” She sounded scared.
Miles felt something damp roll down his face. He didn’t wipe it away. “The person who framed me, he was— he was the same person who killed my father fifteen years ago.”
“Who was it, Miles Edgeworth?” Franziska asked, voice suddenly hard. “I will prosecute them to the ends of the Earth for what they have done.”
This was it. “Manfred von Karma,” Miles said roughly. “Manfred von Karma killed my father.”
“…”
A click and the line went dead. Miles pulled the phone down from his ear and stared at it, feeling the mental fog beginning to roll back in. This time he welcomed it — he didn’t want to know what thoughts his mind might conjure right now.
The phone slipped out of his lax fingers and fell to the carpeted floor with a dull thump. Already forgotten, Miles stepped past it to his walk-in closet. One by one, Miles peeled off every piece of damp clothing and dropped it to the floor, uncharacteristically apathetic to thoughts of wrinkles or imperfection. The fabric clung to his clammy skin, but the discomfort was a far away, intangible thing. It didn’t matter. Hardly anything did.
Once naked, Miles ignored his usual pajamas and shuffled back to his bedroom, exhaustion weighing him down like armor, protecting him from the events of the day. He barely had the passing thought to turn off the light before he crawled under his covers and buried his face in his pillow.
Distantly, he felt his heartbeat start to pick up in anticipation as it did every night as he prepared to relive the worst day of his life. But now Miles pulled the numbness over his mind like a weighted blanket, hoping that it would carry over into his dreams as sleep overtook him.
He should have known better.
Miles hugged his knees in the corner of the elevator, trying to control his growing panic as the oxygen in the small space continued to deplete.
He didn’t know how much longer they could last or how much oxygen was left, but he knew something was wrong. Whenever he moved his eyes, his vision lagged behind as if struggling to keep up with the movement. Coldness permeated throughout his fingers and toes, and they tingled like the time his father took him on a winter trip through the mountains. When he looked, the tips of his fingers looked blue, and no matter how many times he rubbed his hands together it only got worse. It didn’t help that any movement worsened the dizziness that made his head spin.
None of that compared to the vacant feeling in his lungs, and how every breath felt emptier and emptier as the hours passed.
Miles had done his best to keep calm for the past several hours — his father’s support and trust in him doing wonders for his ability to stay composed — but he could feel his apprehension spiking at the sight of the bailiff.
Yanni Yogi had been calm at first, following his father’s advice to slow his breathing to conserve oxygen, but over the past hour he had grown significantly twitchy, eyes darting between the two of them as his fingers continuously yanked on his collar. As if that would help at all.
Miles wasn’t the only one that had noticed the increased rise and fall of the bailiff’s chest.
“Mr. Yogi,” his father said, “please steady your breathing. It’ll conserve the oxygen, and help you feel calmer, too.”
The bailiff looked up at his father, eyes crazed. “Shut up! There’s no air! You’re stealing my air!” At this, the man gave up on any attempt at composure. His hands tore at his collar and he gasped desperately for air.
Against his best efforts, Miles felt his own breathing picking up in response. The colors of the elevator smeared with his staggered vision as his head darted back and forth between the bailiff and his father. The movement made the dizziness worse, but he was too scared to look away.
His father sat up, moving closer to the bailiff with his hands up like he was trying to calm a wild animal. The tips of his fingers as well as his lips were blue as well. “Mr. Yogi—”
“YOU’RE STEALING MY AIR!”
The bailiff lunged for his father, clawed hands reaching for his throat. Startled, his father jerked back, instinctively knocking the man’s hands away before starting to wrestle the bailiff in earnest.
Miles finally lost the battle against his panic. He pushed himself further back into the corner, hugging his knees tighter as he began to hyperventilate. But no matter how much empty air he sucked in, his hysteria only continued to rise.
He lost track of the fight, the movements of the two figures smudging together into an incomprehensible blob. Then he felt something knock into his foot. The bailiff’s gun.
Miles didn’t think — he couldn’t if he tried. He just wanted the fighting to stop.
With that, he picked up the gun. “Stop hurting my dad!” he yelled, hurling the gun at the blurry figure of the bailiff before him.
The scene slowed, each movement drawn out as if everything was moving through water.
The gun soared towards the floor between the men, rotating as it flew.
In that instant, his father and the bailiff pushed each other away, both falling back against opposite sides of the elevator. Starved of oxygen from the fight, neither got back up, each quickly falling into unconsciousness.
Miles collapsed back against the elevator corner himself, suddenly exhausted.
The gun hit the ground, discharging with a loud bang that reverberated throughout the elevator, cutting through Miles’s disorientation. The bullet spiraled out of the barrel, slow enough that Miles could track its trajectory through the air, even through the shadows that couldn’t be reached by the elevator’s dim emergency lighting. It shot upward, not towards his father’s chest like he expected, but through the window in the elevator door, where Miles could see a dark silhouette lurking outside.
Then there was that scream. That awful, terrible scream that had haunted him for fifteen years.
This should’ve been the point where Miles lost consciousness himself. The point where he finally woke up from the nightmare. But he didn’t. Instead, he slumped against the wall behind him, head lolling from his neck because it was too heavy to move, but his eyes remained stubbornly open.
Time sped up again, just in time for the elevator doors to open to reveal the enraged figure of Manfred von Karma.
As he stepped into the elevator, the emergency lighting cast von Karma’s face into stark relief against the dark hall behind him. The apoplectic grimace and bright spark of madness in his eyes better suited a demon than a man.
Bloody right shoulder clutched beneath his left hand, von Karma’s eyes roamed the elevator with the air of a predator before they alighted on his father. The sneer on his face was so hateful that Miles’s heart stuttered in pure terror. But no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t move. He could only watch as von Karma’s gaze flicked down to the gun on the floor and his face stretched into a terrible, savage grin.
The man let go of his shoulder, wiping his blood off on his thick coat before reaching into his pocket to pull out a glove. With a hair-raising equanimity, von Karma pulled on the left glove with one hand, his furious joy escalating with every moment he savored. Then, he slowly bent down and picked up the gun.
Stomach threatening to turn itself inside out, Miles was forced to stare unblinking as his mentor straightened and aimed the gun at his father’s chest.
Manfred von Karma pulled the trigger, and Gregory Edgeworth died.
Miles had always been thankful before that his nightmares always stuck to the truth of his memory, leaving his waking mind to be the one to make connections and jump to conclusions. He had investigated far too many crime scenes, seen far too many corpses, and even experienced too many acts of violence in person to not know what it looked like when someone got shot. It would’ve been far too easy for his subconscious to reconstruct that in his dreams, to haunt him with the vision of the bullet entering his father’s heart.
It always felt like he was getting off too easy with his nightmares. He should have known that that fragile barrier would’ve been ripped away eventually.
His father’s murderer, his trusted mentor, and his shining role model stepped over the legs of his father’s still-warm corpse, that predatory grin now aimed at him.
Miles’s eyes widened. This didn’t happen, it wouldn’t have. Von Karma was too intimate with crime scenes and evidence to linger after he committed a murder of his own. Like the man, the murder was so perfect that he wasn’t even connected to it until the day before the statute of limitations ran out fifteen years later. Von Karma did not come for him then.
His train of thought did nothing to stop the man from squatting before him. His right arm still hung limply like a broken puppet’s, but the left shot out to grab Miles’s chin. Von Karma tilted his face from side to side, inspecting him like a show dog. Then his face creased into a smirk filled with nothing but malice.
“Hello, little Edgeworth,” von Karma murmured with vengeful glee. “I know precisely what to do with you.” He chuckled, a deep sound tinged with an edge of madness. “I’m going to turn you into a demon. A demon who would voluntarily eat his own father’s heart out, and enjoy it.”
Miles wanted to scream, shake, sob, anything, but he was stuck. Helpless, as he always was before this man.
The man roughly released his chin and grabbed his wrist, the small bones grinding together under the force of his grip. Then he stood and proceeded to drag Miles’s unresponsive body out of the elevator.
His face was dragged through the expanding pool of his father’s blood. It was still warm.
On the way past, he glanced at Yanni Yogi. But instead of a face slack in unconsciousness, his eyes were open and glaring at Miles in utter loathing.
“I’m innocent, but you blamed me all this time because you were running from your own guilt,” Yogi sneered. “I’m innocent, and you would’ve declared me guilty!”
Before Miles could formulate a response, he was dragged out of the elevator and into a courtroom.
In a blink, Miles was standing behind the prosecutor’s bench, grown now, with Manfred von Karma standing beside him. Across the courtroom, he faced the familiar determined expression of Mia Fey. And standing next to her was his father.
Unlike Mia, who appeared in full health, his father’s appearance had not changed from the elevator. The bullet wound seeped viscous blood from his chest, yet despite that the man was standing and awake, as if nothing was wrong.
A loud slam caused Miles to jump. Mia Fey glared at him from the opposite bench, both hands palm down in an obvious mirror to Wright. “Terry Fawles is innocent! Dahlia Hawthorne is the true murderer!”
It was then that Miles noticed the petite figure of Dahlia Hawthorne behind the witness stand, the usual innocent smile on her face as she twirled her umbrella. Beyond her, Terry Fawles sat in the defendant’s chair. The judge’s seat was empty.
Looking at this scene now, Miles knew Mia was right. He couldn’t allow himself to admit it before, not with everything riding on his first trial, much to his current shame, but now he could. The evidence was more than enough to prove Dahlia’s guilt, and if he had bothered to do anything about it before, perhaps she might have been put away before she harmed anyone else. Those casualties were on his conscience.
Miles opened his mouth to speak, but before he could get a word out, von Karma slammed an object on the table in front of him. He looked down at it and his breath caught.
It was a gun. The same gun that had killed his father barely a moment before.
Miles jerked his head away and ended up meeting von Karma’s hard gaze.
“You made a mess out of your first trial,” von Karma said, “but here is your chance to redeem yourself. Prove yourself worthy of the name von Karma and pick up the gun.”
Miles blanched, eyes darting to the side to look for his father. Gregory Edgeworth was glaring at von Karma, not reacting to Miles’s panicked gaze at all.
It wasn’t a nice glare. It was one filled with profound anger and disdain, the harsh lines of his face and the furrowed brow proving to be deeply intimidating, even as Miles narrowly avoided being its intended recipient.
Seeing it felt like a shock down his spine. Miles wouldn’t say that he saw the memories of his father through rose-tinted glasses — rather, he had avoided thinking of the man at all after his death; the comparison would’ve broken him — but he truly forgot that his father could be terrifying if he so chose. Miles had only witnessed it a few times, and each left him thoroughly shaken: once, at the parents of one of the children who had habitually bullied Miles before he met Phoenix; the next at his fourth grade teacher following that sham of a class trial; and lastly, at Manfred von Karma himself at that last fateful trial, just before his father earned von Karma his first and only penalty.
He had never been the subject of it himself, but seeing it directed so closely to him made his heart freeze in his chest. Both from the soul-crushing sensation of feeling like he was about to disappoint him, and the uncanny similarity between it and his own glare that he saw whenever he looked in a mirror.
“My job is to find the suspect and prove their guilt,” Miles said, voice embarrassingly small. He didn’t look away from his father. “It is the judge’s responsibility to pass down the sentence, not mine.”
Von Karma scoffed. “I did not teach you to wallow in denial. You control the judge’s thoughts, thus you control the sentence. You are judge, jury, and executioner. You always have been. Now take it.”
Miles steeled himself. “I will not.”
A sneer. “You will. You are the Demon Prosecutor, after all. It’s far too late to change your true colors now.”
With that, Manfred von Karma raised his hand and snapped. At the sound, Miles’s right arm rose against his will and wrapped his hand around the handle of the gun.
Miles stared down at his arm in horror. “No, no, no! I refuse to play your games anymore! Don’t make me do this, please!” he pleaded desperately, but his arm continued in that terrifyingly smooth motion to point the gun directly at Terry Fawles. His body was locked in von Karma’s control.
Shuddering breaths racked his frame, and yet that damned arm remained steady as his thumb flicked up to disengage the safety.
“Please, I- I don’t—”
“Enough,” von Karma snarled. “This is the only way you win. Shoot him!” He snapped his fingers, and in response Miles’s finger moved as well.
Miles Edgeworth pulled the trigger, and Terry Fawles died.
It shouldn’t have happened like that, part of Miles’s mind noted. He had never shot a gun before, he shouldn’t have been able to absorb the entire recoil with a single hand, he hadn’t even been aiming down the sights… and yet the bullet had struck Fawles’s heart with military precision.
That part of Miles’s mind was stuck in denial. The rest of it was screaming.
Terry Fawles fell to the ground, crumpling out of the defendant’s chair in a way that was far too similar to how his body had collapsed on the witness stand, all those years ago.
No matter how much he tried, he could not drop the gun.
No matter how much he tried, he was still responsible for Terry Fawles’s death, yet again.
Then his arm swung so that the barrel of the gun now pointed at Mia Fey.
“Wh-What are you doing?” Miles stuttered, horrified.
“You,” von Karma emphasized, “are going to shoot the defense attorney.”
“What?”
“Defense attorneys are just as morally corrupt as the criminals they defend. Do you not remember a word of your education, you ungrateful boy? They want those dangerous fiends to run the streets, and they will humiliate you to do it. They are each guilty of aiding and abetting every crime that comes across this court, and as such they deserve to be put down like the flea-ridden dogs they are.”
Before Miles could protest, von Karma snapped his fingers again.
Miles Edgeworth pulled the trigger, and Mia Fey died.
She stumbled back, hand shooting up to her chest to instinctually cover the wound. Then she fell, the blood loss too severe to continue holding herself up. Collapsing to the side, Mia didn’t have the courtesy to remain hidden behind the defense’s bench. Instead, her upper torso was unobscured, allowing Miles to meet her panicked gaze as she choked on blood.
Miles thought he had shot her in the heart, that her death would be instantaneous like Terry Fawles’s. That updated autopsy report crossed his mind — ‘may have lived for a few minutes after death’.
Eventually, her movements slowed, her blood covering the floor of the courtroom, yet an invisible line seemed to prevent it from crossing over to the prosecution’s side. In her last moment, Mia’s panic faded and she looked at him with that same resentful glare she had used against him in court. Then that face was frozen in rigor mortis, continuing to glare up at him evermore.
Miles couldn’t breathe. His heart threatened to beat out of his chest, its palpitations growing faster and more unsteady. In childlike desperation, Miles looked to his father.
If he was searching for a rescue, he didn’t get one. Rather, that signature glare was now aimed directly at him.
His hopes for a savior crumpled. If ghosts were real like that fraudulent spirit medium had claimed, then this must have been how his father had looked at him throughout all these years. Like he was staring down a demon.
Tears finally broke through, running down Miles’s face in unending torrents. Sobbing, he begged desperately for it to stop. He apologized endlessly in a messy flood of pleading words. Who he was trying to apologize to, he didn’t know — his father, Mia Fey, Terry Fawles, or Manfred von Karma himself — and it didn’t matter. Not a single one of them offered him understanding or reprieve.
Von Karma snapped, and Dahlia Hawthorne disappeared, replaced by the defense and defendant of his second case standing in their respective spaces. The bodies of Terry Fawles and Mia Fey remained.
Just like last time, Miles wasn’t given a choice. His father didn’t care, continuing to destroy him with that soul-consuming glare.
SNAP. BANG. SNAP. BANG.
Two more bullet-ridden bodies joined the floor, staring up at him with glassy, resentful eyes.
His mentor snapped and the scene of his third case was set.
SNAP. BANG. SNAP. BANG.
The defendant and defense attorney of every single one of his cases appeared before him and died by Miles’s hand. Even in the cases where he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the defendant was guilty, it was irrelevant. He sobbed for all of them, but the gun remained stubbornly stuck to his hand with one finger always on the trigger.
With every gunshot to the heart, Miles could see the wound in his father’s chest spurt blood in gruesome symphony. It drilled in the fact that while he might not have directly murdered his father, he had still sent many more to death row. His hands were covered in blood, and it didn’t matter whether they got that way at nine or twenty. Blood was blood regardless.
Dozens, hundreds of faces passed before him, blurred by his own tears yet unmistakably clear all at once. The chamber of the gun proved to be impossibly large as the courtroom became filled with blood and bodies, each and every one of them staring back at him.
Then the horrible rhythm came to a stop as the world froze. Phoenix Wright stared him down from the defense’s bench with Maya Fey behind him as the defendant.
The panic that had been continuously running throughout his body ramped up to a new high. He couldn’t shoot Phoenix — his first and only childhood friend, the boy who remembered him after he disappeared, the man who saved him from his mentor and himself. After all that Wright and Maya had done for him, Miles couldn’t betray them like this now.
With desperate, foolhardy hope, he turned back to Manfred von Karma. “Please, sir, they’re innocent! The evidence proved it! They did nothing wrong, please don’t make me do this!”
“A von Karma must be perfect,” his mentor said ruthlessly, “and if that means destroying one’s mistakes before the world can see them, then so be it.”
Miles turned his pleading gaze to Wright as his arm swung toward Maya. Then his heart panged, confused.
Wright did not look at him with hatred or resentment, like so many of the others did. Instead, he stood there, hands on his hips in that infuriatingly confident stance of his, and nodded at Miles. A trusting, hopeful smile graced Wright’s face, reserved just for him and him alone.
He couldn’t look away from that smile, that smile that filled him with such profound hope and longing that he likened it to witness accounts of religious experiences, but in his peripheral vision he saw Maya give him a bright grin and a thumbs up, supporting him in her own distinct way.
Maybe it was because Wright was the one who broke his record. Or maybe because Wright had reminded him of who he once had been and offered him a shimmering glance at who he could still be. Maybe it would always be Wright who reached out a hand to pull him from the darkness, his light burning as brightly as his namesake.
Or maybe it was none of those things. But when von Karma snapped, Miles didn’t move.
Miles Edgeworth didn’t pull the trigger, and Maya Fey lived.
Von Karma growled, and he reached out to force Miles to point the gun at Wright. Miles stared into those trusting eyes, the only ones who had believed in him in far too many years, and dared to trust back.
Miles Edgeworth didn’t pull the trigger, and Phoenix Wright lived.
Maya Fey stepped up to stand next to Wright, and in her place stood Will Powers.
Manfred von Karma grabbed his hand, wrapping his own finger around the trigger. His face was blotched red with anger, spittle flying from his lips. “You are the Demon Prosecutor! My magnum opus! Shoot him!”
For the first time, Miles leveled his own glare at his mentor. “No.”
Miles Edgeworth didn’t pull the trigger, and Will Powers lived.
Von Karma pushed him back. “Fine,” he spat, “I’ll do it myself.” Then the scene changed once more.
Miles stood at the witness stand, where he had confessed to his father’s murder, while Manfred von Karma and Phoenix Wright stared each other down on opposite sides of the courtroom. One side was pristine and the other covered in gore. The only spot untouched by blood was Wright himself, shining as if touched by a divine light.
Miles’s gaze was yanked away from his savior by the metallic click of a cocked gun.
With a triumphant smirk, Manfred von Karma leveled the pistol at Phoenix Wright’s heart.
No! After all that strength he’d summoned to finally resist von Karma, he couldn’t let Phoenix die here. He’d do anything to save him — the debt he owed the man was already too large to ever be repaid.
His hands shot up to clutch at the witness stand, but one banged against the wood with an unnatural clang. Looking down, Miles realized he was still holding the bailiff’s gun.
Oh, he knew what he had to do. The guilty needed to be punished, and von Karma wanted to win. The solution was a simple one.
He didn’t even consider throwing it. No, this time he raised the gun smoothly until the barrel pressed flush against the underside of his chin.
Miles spared a glance at his father. The glare was gone. The look that replaced it wasn’t exactly pride, but perhaps… approval.
The distraction proved successful — Manfred von Karma lowered his gun to stare at Miles with ravenous glee. Then he set the gun down, raised his hand like an emperor of Rome in the Coliseum, and snapped.
Miles Edgeworth pulled the trigger, and Miles Edgeworth died.