You have been wronged / Tore up since birth / You have done wrong / Others have done worse
Who: Edgeworth and Big Boss. Call him a sandwich, cause he's on a roll!
When: FRIDAY THE THIRTIETH. Dun dun DUNNNN!
Where: Miles Edgeworth's home. And by "home" I mean "office." Did you get the clever thing I did there? Did you?
Summary: They make cookies and decorate heart-shaped valentines with glitter sparkles and then watch Spice World. And, you know, are terrified as specters of past friends return from the dead.
Warnings: TOO MANY SPARKLES?????, tl;dr, serious tl;dr, no really y'all I mean it fo' sho'
The creature outside his window stumbled through the crust of the snow and fell to its knees. Its side was a ruined mess; as it fell and then struggled to regain its feet or paws once more, its blood seeped acridly through the heretofore pristine whiteness, making the snow steam and crumble and buckle. It was the creature's last act of destruction; as it stood once more, letting out a moan or a howl audible through the double-paned windows, the snow was swarmed by scuttling black shadows that cut lightly across the powder and scrabbled and latched onto the not-quite-hound, sharp limbs flashing and coming back darker as they dug into that wounded flesh.
Edgeworth closed his eyes and turned back to his list.
He'd not been home in two days. He'd not slept in one. It was not for an excess of work - indeed, he found himself rather with a dearth, to be quite honest, found himself idle and pacing his narrow office more often than he worked - but rather for simple inability: the roads were blocked with snow and transportation was shoddy, making the former all but impossible, and as for the latter...
As for the latter: when he closed his eyes, his mind did not fall into the needed numb disorder and chaos, but rather tried to order itself into rational lists. He did not suffer the usual strangeness, the usual odd associations and leaps of logic that marked the beginning of sleep, but instead clear delineations: his mind was taken up with naming the dead, again and again, trying to remember each and every one of them, trying to remember details of their lives and their deaths and their circumstances here and what choices he might have made to ensure that they were alive now. And he jolted awake each time, just as he was drifting off, a hypnic jerk that left him clutching at the arms of his chair, trying to remember that solution that had seemed so clear near sleep...In the end, it was simply better to stay awake and watch as things perished outside his window.
And to try to compile this list. It was a collection of names, of everyone he could recall who was now dead, and those who had been targeted by this murderer, and the manner in which they'd been killed. Jack Miles had not been murdered by the same individual; Merlotte - Sam - had certainly confirmed that much. So the differences were nearly as important as the similarities. And the others were important as well - those who had disappeared.
Perhaps there was a mystery that could be untangled from the spaces between those carefully-written letters. He would that he were equal to discovering it.
As he scanned through the recorded messages on his phone, trying to come up with another name, another biography, he listened to the sounds of the office about him. Things were quieter in the Darkness, he found. The comforting hum of the air conditioner or heater, the click of computers, the whine of the odd fax machine all faded out into nothing, so that there was no company save the sound of his breathing, the scratch of his pen, the tap of the buttons on his phone. And so the buzzer on his phone was loud, intrusive, and the shaking of it in his hand was terrifying, and he drew in a breath and for a moment was overwhelmed with fear. Then he got over his stupidity. Hardly the first message he'd ever received by text.
Yet perhaps it was the strangest: Open the window, it said, and nothing more. No discernible source.
He was not, of course, an idiot. An opened window meant certain danger. And yet the message was...familiar. It was the very same terse command he'd been issued so many times before and ignored. So he stood, and turned, and looked out there, to where the monster was laying picked clean. It was dark, but the snow illuminated things, so that he could see a shadow beyond there -
He felt suddenly as though that great epiphany that had eluded him in sleep arrived. He felt as though he were a lock, and upon the turning of some key he allowed a bursting-forth of answers. Light's protestations about his "crime," his mutterings about ghosts, about seeing Jack, the man's own warnings before his death, his obscured nature and person - that text message - And so Edgeworth, shaken by these conclusions, strode to the window and with shaking hands and dry mouth and the greatest uncertainty, the greatest fear, threw it open -
And found nothing. The night was silent and empty.
Darkness roiled beyond the light cast by his office window. He caught his breath, and listened for a moment to that muffled, strained stillness, and heard nothing at all of note. And he hated his foolishness as he closed the window.
And then he turned.
"Jesus - " he hissed, jerking backwards, the profanity spilling unbidden from his lips as he looked upon the heavy, wrinkled, aged face of the man he'd known as Jack Miles.
When: FRIDAY THE THIRTIETH. Dun dun DUNNNN!
Where: Miles Edgeworth's home. And by "home" I mean "office." Did you get the clever thing I did there? Did you?
Summary: They make cookies and decorate heart-shaped valentines with glitter sparkles and then watch Spice World. And, you know, are terrified as specters of past friends return from the dead.
Warnings: TOO MANY SPARKLES?????, tl;dr, serious tl;dr, no really y'all I mean it fo' sho'
The creature outside his window stumbled through the crust of the snow and fell to its knees. Its side was a ruined mess; as it fell and then struggled to regain its feet or paws once more, its blood seeped acridly through the heretofore pristine whiteness, making the snow steam and crumble and buckle. It was the creature's last act of destruction; as it stood once more, letting out a moan or a howl audible through the double-paned windows, the snow was swarmed by scuttling black shadows that cut lightly across the powder and scrabbled and latched onto the not-quite-hound, sharp limbs flashing and coming back darker as they dug into that wounded flesh.
Edgeworth closed his eyes and turned back to his list.
He'd not been home in two days. He'd not slept in one. It was not for an excess of work - indeed, he found himself rather with a dearth, to be quite honest, found himself idle and pacing his narrow office more often than he worked - but rather for simple inability: the roads were blocked with snow and transportation was shoddy, making the former all but impossible, and as for the latter...
As for the latter: when he closed his eyes, his mind did not fall into the needed numb disorder and chaos, but rather tried to order itself into rational lists. He did not suffer the usual strangeness, the usual odd associations and leaps of logic that marked the beginning of sleep, but instead clear delineations: his mind was taken up with naming the dead, again and again, trying to remember each and every one of them, trying to remember details of their lives and their deaths and their circumstances here and what choices he might have made to ensure that they were alive now. And he jolted awake each time, just as he was drifting off, a hypnic jerk that left him clutching at the arms of his chair, trying to remember that solution that had seemed so clear near sleep...In the end, it was simply better to stay awake and watch as things perished outside his window.
And to try to compile this list. It was a collection of names, of everyone he could recall who was now dead, and those who had been targeted by this murderer, and the manner in which they'd been killed. Jack Miles had not been murdered by the same individual; Merlotte - Sam - had certainly confirmed that much. So the differences were nearly as important as the similarities. And the others were important as well - those who had disappeared.
Perhaps there was a mystery that could be untangled from the spaces between those carefully-written letters. He would that he were equal to discovering it.
As he scanned through the recorded messages on his phone, trying to come up with another name, another biography, he listened to the sounds of the office about him. Things were quieter in the Darkness, he found. The comforting hum of the air conditioner or heater, the click of computers, the whine of the odd fax machine all faded out into nothing, so that there was no company save the sound of his breathing, the scratch of his pen, the tap of the buttons on his phone. And so the buzzer on his phone was loud, intrusive, and the shaking of it in his hand was terrifying, and he drew in a breath and for a moment was overwhelmed with fear. Then he got over his stupidity. Hardly the first message he'd ever received by text.
Yet perhaps it was the strangest: Open the window, it said, and nothing more. No discernible source.
He was not, of course, an idiot. An opened window meant certain danger. And yet the message was...familiar. It was the very same terse command he'd been issued so many times before and ignored. So he stood, and turned, and looked out there, to where the monster was laying picked clean. It was dark, but the snow illuminated things, so that he could see a shadow beyond there -
He felt suddenly as though that great epiphany that had eluded him in sleep arrived. He felt as though he were a lock, and upon the turning of some key he allowed a bursting-forth of answers. Light's protestations about his "crime," his mutterings about ghosts, about seeing Jack, the man's own warnings before his death, his obscured nature and person - that text message - And so Edgeworth, shaken by these conclusions, strode to the window and with shaking hands and dry mouth and the greatest uncertainty, the greatest fear, threw it open -
And found nothing. The night was silent and empty.
Darkness roiled beyond the light cast by his office window. He caught his breath, and listened for a moment to that muffled, strained stillness, and heard nothing at all of note. And he hated his foolishness as he closed the window.
And then he turned.
"Jesus - " he hissed, jerking backwards, the profanity spilling unbidden from his lips as he looked upon the heavy, wrinkled, aged face of the man he'd known as Jack Miles.