Roll for Initiative

Session 4

"Hey Edgeworth. It's me, Phoenix."

No, no, no, no. Way too many things wrong with that.

"Hi Miles. I hope this is still an okay number to text you."

Yikes. If I'm going to be passive aggressive I may as well do it properly. He deletes the message and tries again.

"I heard you weren't actually dead. That's awesome, wish you had told me."

He really wants to send that one. It's not even technically that rude. Sarcastic, maybe. But you can't prove I'm angry , he thinks darkly. Very difficult to prove intent from a text. You should know that as a prosecutor.

Delete.

"I miss you."

God no. Delete.

He puts his phone away and pours himself a glass of water. The clouds outside promise spring showers, and the speckled sun coming through Gumshoe's kitchen blinds casts faint shadows on the linoleum floor. His refrigerator is full of tacky plastic magnets, flamingos from Florida, cacti from Arizona, croissants from Paris. He searches for one from Germany, depicting....sausages maybe? Lederhosen?

I don't even want to be here , he realizes.

The people seated at the table, his friends; they feel like strangers. He watches them talk and laugh with each other like they're in another dimension.

"Just delete his number," Larry says, walking over and pulling open the fridge. A lump of red rock from Arches National Park nearly hits him in the elbow. "Face it, Nick. He doesn't want to talk to you and he isn't going to. I couldn't believe it either, though! I mean I'm happy he didn't actually..." He trails off a moment.

Kill himself. Phoenix finished in his head. He doesn't want to revisit this, through it's basically all he can think about.

Miles Edgeworth chooses death. What else can you think from a note like that? He remembers the sleepless, nauseating hours - well days really - he spent after he heard. Crushing disbelieving waves of grief followed by a sort of morbid curiosity. How did it do it? Jumped off a cliff into the ocean? That would explain the lack of a body. But no one saw? His car's still parked at the office apparently. How did he get there? But all that was short lived. Miles Edgeworth solved his own mystery by politely requesting a leave of absence from the prosecutor's office some days later and leaving a set of contact details for an address 30 km outside of Berlin.

"It's just plain ridiculous, you know? He needs to get his head checked. Who does that? Why would you go so far as to try and fake your own death? Why couldn't he have just rejected you cleanly like a normal human being?"

"Larry," Phoenix says, rubbing his temples. "He's obviously going through a lot right now. He's had to relive some really horrible stuff recently. Give Miles a break." Also, this almost certainly has very little to do with me.

...right?

"Can you tell me something, Nick?" Larry leans against the fridge door, carefully placing his shoulder between shells from Myrtle Beach and bagpipes from Scotland. "Why are you always sticking up for people who treat you like shit? And yes, I'm including myself. Don't worry."

He doesn't have a good response for that. "I wasn't texting him," he eventually says.

"Bullshit." Phoenix finds himself yanked towards the table. "Come on, we've got lots to do. Face down the Bloodleaf Bortherhood's leader, get rich and famous, give Maya crap for not being old enough to drink..."