I am not a man to hunger for blood...

[taughttolisten]

WHO: Miles Edgeworth bluffing_ruffle and Obi-Wan Kenobi taughttolisten
WHERE: The Jinn Memorial School of Complex Paragraphery
WHEN: Monday evening, July 19th
WARNINGS: Some violence. Possible violation of house sparring rules.
SUMMARY: Things have become... somewhat strained between these two. And on top of the delicate emotional balance of things, swords have become

Comments

Motion carried. Equal measures to be carried out for the opposing attorney.

[bluffing_ruffle]

It was a sensation Edgeworth knew very, very well. First he broke out into an immediate sweat, and then the world in front of him seemed to tilt in a slow, inexorable fashion to one side. Despite the fact that his ears had suffered no damage, his hearing slipped, with all the sounds he should have been able to listen to fading out into so much white noise--such as his scream--and then he began to slump down along the wall.

There were no earthquakes in the City just then. His arm, however, had just been dislocated. Dimly, he registered that his reaction to both was turning out to be quite the same.

At least he wasn't crying.

Consciousness... no. No, he couldn't afford to lose that. His eyelids felt heavy, and his vision was a little out of focus, but he could see the fist that had caused him both injuries waving about.

Edgeworth groped for it, finally clasping hold of Kenobi's forearm in his one still-useful hand and squeezing, using up some last little reserve of stubborn rage and a desire not to pass out on the spot to prevent himself from letting go. It made him sick from head to toe to do it, and he dropped out cold to the floor anyway when his hearing returned just in time to hear it happen, but he let go of his control on the Ruffling. If he hadn't, there might have been no telling what harm the berserk Jedi might have done while he was unable to protect himself.

A few moments of stressed muscles on the lines of a really bad charlie horse, and half a second later the bones in Obi-Wan's forearm shattered down to compressed, uselessly stacked chips and chunks to the tune of thick windshield safety glass cracking apart.

Whatever happened after that, he didn't remember it and never would.

Motion granted. Everyone be back in chambers tomorrow morning

[taughttolisten]

It wasn't the pain that brought him back to his senses. It was the noise.

Edgeworth's scream was the beginning of it, the crack that touched off the avalanche--but then came the sound of bone splintering, crunching, popping, a sound he could feel as much as hear.

You've lost, Kenobi.

Something hot and wet splashed his ruined forearm just below the wrist, and that faint pressure was agony. It happened again, and then his knees hurt and he realized he'd dropped to the floor, cradling his arm against his chest, trying desperately not to see how unnaturally it moved now that the support beneath the skin and muscle was essentially pulverized.

You've lost.

The pain gave him perfect clarity, gave him back the calm he needed to see exactly what he had done. The floor of his studio ripped open, his best friend lying slumped against the wall with one arm at a sick angle, both of them covered in blood and sweat.

lost

Distantly he realized that the thing that had struck his forearm was a tear, and that it had come from him.

He had wept when Fakir died. He had cried along with Sarah when Teddy disappeared; he knew from snatches of memory that he had been a shaking, teary-eyed mess after discovering he'd accidentally survived a Purge. But there had always been firm control somewhere beneath the tears, a knowledge that the moment would pass and leave him still himself.

Now that control was gone, and he was utterly lost, lonely and miserable and responsible for the destruction of yet another positive thing in his own life.

The sound he made was not quite a scream: it was lower, more ragged. It held decades' worth of pain and frustration. It rose like a wave and then broke, leaving him sobbing uncontrollably.

He couldn't breathe; he needed to speak. He choked on half-formed apologies, leaning towards Miles as he tried to say how sorry he was, how he hadn't meant it, how he hadn't meant to cause all the death and the failure and the time lost and love wasted.

It came out incoherent and uneven, a litany of festering hurt that had been buried too long. And each phrase wrenched out of him was both a relief and a further hurt--an admission of defeat and weakness, of shame, of failure to be what his teachers had once believed he might someday achieve.