Archive of Our Own ^beta

The apartment that Miles Edgeworth rents is far from a home.

If any place is a home to him, nowadays (if he indulges himself in the childish notion for seconds, even a minute or so of his time, bi-monthly), it’s the Chief Prosecutor’s office, where he spends upwards of eighteen hours of his day. Even weekends, sometimes, take on a spillover role, where he moves on from the most urgent of cases to catching up on backlog while the office is quieter. He sips tea and watches the sun set from his big window in the middle of the historic downtown district and is overall content not to think about things outside of the courtroom. 

Miles is in and out of his office constantly--out of office, out of state, out of country, out of cell phone range. When he rolls back onto the tarmac at LAX, it isn’t his apartment he looks forward to returning to. With jetlag as his excuse, Miles will take a taxi to the office, and re-settle amongst his comfortable sofa and custom chess set and the antique wine cabinet that he paid to convert into a tea cabinet. 

(Now that there isn’t that infernal racket of a prosecutor slamming basketballs around in the hallway, Miles sometimes puts on a record to play at a low volume. Lets it leak out of his room into the hall, even. Takes up space, in a small way, if only to push back against the encroachment of Prosecutor Gavin’s thrumming basslines. 

He plays Frank Sinatra, or Etta James. Or Miles Davis, when he’s the most nostalgic--when he lets himself remember the shelf of records his father saved after his mother died, the big discs Miles would reverently pick up and stare at and never ever ever dare scratch.)

Following the murder in the parking garage, and the murder inside his own office, and even the murder that happened a floor below in the auditor’s overflow office last year, Miles doesn’t have any illusions of the office being secure. Still, it’s the closest to a haven he has, even if it is a haven he’s had to install extra deadbolts on.

What is a home, if not a museum of locked cabinets--where sentimentality is banished to the margins, so that no one will trip over it?

The closest his apartment comes to real living space is what Kay Faraday makes it into while she crashes there for a night. She finds him in his office and tells him that she mis-booked her motel, just for a night. It’s not as though he has a lack of space. 

Miles makes up the bed in his guest room and lets her wreak havoc on his kitchen. Kay has picked a Wednesday night to disrupt his routine, which means that Miles has to skip a dose of his new sleeping medication in case an emergency should arise. It also means that Kay throws herself onto his couch and turns on a TV channel that Miles has never heard of, and complains at him until he sits down with her to watch the new episode of Survivor. 

“Who’s that?” Miles asks for the eighth time.

“That’s Preff Jobst,” Kay says, and throws popcorn at him. Miles wasn’t even aware he had popcorn in his pantry, but Kay has found some. She’s also dumped a bunch of M&Ms into the bowl, and they’re melting into a brown sludge and staining her fingers with red dye. Miles keeps half of a nervous eye on his white couch cushions, knowing they’ll be marked with fingerprints by the end of the night. “His name is literally at the bottom of the screen!”

“Oh,” Miles says. He adjusts his glasses, squints dramatically. His television is more than big enough for him to read this. However, he thinks it’s endearing how Kay will laugh at him before still telling him the answers to his inane questions, every single one of them. “And you…enjoy this show?”

“What does it look like? Obviously!” Kay gestures around with her sticky fingers. “I’m having a blast! Now shush. We’re gonna miss the rules.”

Miles turns down the popcorn that’s offered to him again, and does his best to keep up with the show. Most of it goes over his head. He was never much taken with reality TV as a medium.

Despite her insistence that she’s invested in the program, Kay’s attention wanders. She even gets up a couple of times to walk around Miles’s apartment, leaning in and squinting at the sparse bookshelves, going so far as to examine the single piece of hung art in the entry hall. She stops there, with her chin held pensively between her fingers.

“What do you think?” Miles asks, feeling unexpectedly vulnerable as Kay stares expressionlessly at the painting. The wall art was chosen by the interior decorator who picked out the rest of Miles’s decor. It matches the apartment’s color scheme, but also depresses Miles if he looks at it for too long.

“Who painted it?” Kay asks. “Da Vinky?”

“Cézanne, actually.” Miles belatedly realizes, “I’m sorry, Da Vinky?”

“Leonard, yeah. He was one of the turtles,” Kay says, and turns her head to look innocently in Miles’s direction. “Did I say something wrong?”

“Please tell me that you know who Da Vinci is.”

“Wow. I-I’m glad you said that in front of me, because I care about you,” Kay says solemnly, “and I wouldn’t want you to humiliate yourself, if you mispronounced ‘Da Vinky’ in front of a stranger.”

“Wh-- no, I said it correctly!” Miles exclaims. He sits up, sets his cup of tea and its saucer carefully on the coffee table, and then stands to retrieve his laptop. “I’ll show you.”

“This is going to be so embarrassing for you when you go to all the trouble of looking it up and I’m the right one.”

It’s at this point that Miles knows she’s messing with him, but he’s already upset and so he still has to get out his laptop and boot it up and connect to the internet and type in ‘Leonardo da Vinci.’ By the time he gets an online pronunciation tool open, Kay’s back on the couch watching people hit each other with pool noodles for money.

“Leonardo da Vinci,” the text-to-speech says.

“Ha!” Miles says. “See?”

Kay looks over her shoulder, grimacing like he’s the embarrassing one. “No offense, but are you in love with him or something? Who cares?”

“No! I’m-- you just--!”

“Oh, and your best friend Sariah just got eliminated,” Kay says, turning her attention back to the TV. “I knew she didn’t have the champion’s spirit. Remember, I told you?”

Miles, seething, shuts his laptop and returns to the couch. He stews in anger until he looks out of the corner of his eye and sees Kay covering her mouth with both palms to hold her giggles in, at which point his irritation evaporates. 

To have someone filling his apartment with sound, with laughter, with energy--it transforms the place. Miles watches the whole dumb hour of television, and even sits through most of the show that follows it, just absorbing the spirit that Kay brings to his life. 

She loses steam rather abruptly at around ten, her yawns coming fast and furious. Miles looks over after she stops talking halfway through a sentence, and finds that her eyes are closed.

She emits a loud snore.

“Kay?” Miles asks in an undertone, thinking she’s pretending. 

Kay doesn’t respond.

“Kay, I’m going to sell Little Thief on eBay for thirty dollars,” he says. When she still doesn’t react, he realizes she’s actually fallen asleep mid-word. 

He stands up carefully so he doesn’t jostle the couch. The guest room is already set up, so he finds a clean towel and washcloth for her, as well as some pajamas--she didn’t come in with any luggage, which he’s only realizing now. In the morning, he’ll need to ask her where her things are. Likely, she rented a locker at the airport or something.

As much as Miles wants to leave her undisturbed, Kay won’t get very good rest on the couch, and he thought that the whole point of her coming to his house was for her to get a normal night’s sleep. He crouches a short distance away and reaches out to poke her arm. 

“Kay,” he whispers.

Kay stirs, her eyelids fluttering. She mumbles some garbled words, maybe the end of the sentence she started before she dozed off. Then her eyes open, and she looks around sharply, frightened until her gaze lands on Miles. When she sees it’s only him there, she relaxes.  

The progression of her emotions is fast, so fast that he almost misses them. Miles sees them, though. He sees them and he never wants anything bad to happen to her ever again. 

Instead of making such an overly emotional declaration, Miles says, “I thought you’d like to move to the guest room. Did you bring a toothbrush?”

“I forgot mine,” Kay mumbles. She rubs her eye with one of her wrists. “Sorry. I’m a needy guest, huh.”

“No, no need to apologize. It’s the least I can do as a host.” Miles stands up again. “Let me find a spare. I left some pajamas on the bed for you, should you need them.”

Kay emerges from the guest bedroom a few minutes later, wearing satin sleep pants that are far too baggy on her and cinched tightly at her waist, along with one of the two t-shirts Miles owns. This particular shirt was included in a prize package Miles won at a Steel Samurai screening, five years ago. Miles didn’t think it would ever see the outside of his drawer. He finds himself thinking he should order a Jammin’ Ninja one for Kay, at which point he mercilessly crushes the sentimental idea with his heel. 

This is a one-time, emergency scenario, and Kay won’t be back. Miles will just have to wait for her birthday or some other silly occasion.

“Here’s a toothbrush,” Miles says, and holds it out to her. “Are those pajamas alright?”

“Yup,” Kay says. She yawns. Her hair has been taken down. It’s even longer than the last time Miles saw it like this, and Miles can see frizzy split ends galore floating around her elbows. 

He doesn’t do anything overbearing, such as demand to book her an appointment with his barber. He isn’t her father. 

Miles says, “I will leave you to it. Have a good night, Kay.”

“You too, Mr. Edgeworth,” she says. She hugs him, arms locked tight around his back, face pressed to his chest. “Thank you for the sleepover.”

“Of course,” Miles says. He pats her head, horribly fond. “I’m only just down the hall if you need anything.”

“Anything?”

“Yes.”

“Could I get a bedtime story?” Kay asks. “With dragons and everything?”

“No,” Miles says firmly. 

“Whaaat! Oh, do you want me to tell you one?” Kay lights up, her exhaustion disappearing for a moment. “I can do voices!”

“Goodnight.” He turns and strides towards his bedroom. Her laughter chases him down the hallway. 

In the morning, it’s hard to deduce whether Miles screamed in his sleep. 

He can sometimes tell, if there’s a rasp in his throat or even a certain coppery taste on his tongue, but there’s nothing like that when he rolls out of bed at seven and staggers to the shower to resuscitate himself from the nightmare realm he’s escaped from. Perhaps it doesn’t matter if he did, or not. His dreams weren’t pleasant, but they didn’t wake him up, and that’s the best he can hope for, on these days when his schedule doesn’t allow him to take sleeping medication.

He makes subpar omelets, because he has a guest over and he wants to give her the impression that he’s a real adult who eats proper meals. His rattling around with the frying pans wakes Kay up, or perhaps it’s the whistle of the kettle that reaches her. Either way, when she stumbles out of the guest room with puffy eyes and rat’s-nest hair, he points her towards her plate on the bar.

“Did you cook?” Kay asks, delighted enough to open her eyes all the way.

“Yes,” Miles says. “Would you be amenable to coming to my office? You can finish sleeping on my sofa there. I know it’s early.”

“That’s so nice,” Kay says. She almost sounds uncomfortable about the fact.

“You don’t have to, of course--”

“I’d love that!” Kay interrupts. She looks down at herself, and then says, disoriented, “I can be ready fast. Do you have a hairbrush?”

“I think I do,” Miles says, but he’s not sure. “It would be in a bathroom drawer.”

Kay nods, almost just to herself. She rubs her eyes, makes a few mumbly noises, then trips into the bathroom and shuts the door quickly behind her.

She wasn’t lying about being ready quickly. Five minutes later, she pops back into the kitchen in her street clothes, hair tied up, teeth brushed. She horks down her omelet and accepts the to-go mug of chamomile tea that Miles offers her, and the two of them walk down the stairs to the parking lot in companionable silence; she’s still waking up and isn’t chatty yet, an energy that Miles is more than equipped to match.

It isn’t until they’re approaching Miles’s building that Kay suddenly speaks up and says, “Mr. Edgeworth, do you ever have bad dreams?”

Miles swallows, trying again to ascertain if he shouted anything in his sleep, anything Kay would have heard. He still can’t tell. “Ah, well…sometimes. Doesn’t everyone?”

“Mm, I guess so.” Kay holds her tea close to her face, not quite hiding behind it. She has her seatbelt on, but her feet are up on the dashboard; Miles has already lost a battle about that. 

Nothing follows. Miles, feeling antsy, goes against his better judgment and asks, “Why?”

“I was just wondering,” Kay says. Steam curls around her face, seeping out of the tiny ventilation hole of the mug. She looks away from him, out at the morning traffic. “Never mind.”

Kay stays on his couch until ten-thirty, at which point she chirps a goodbye and disappears from his office. Miles misses her almost immediately, but sternly redirects this emotion to his work.

These days, there’s no one around in his building with the authority or spare time to order him to go home already, even when it’s glaringly obvious he’s overstaying his welcome. His odd, lengthy hours are easily explained away by an imagined flexing of his schedule. It’s common knowledge that his work has him in contact with people around the world, after all. When Miles comes under scrutiny for staying past seven at night, he only needs to mention his need to talk to them.

Really, these calls make up a negligible amount of his late-night hours, but they come from the people who are dearest to him: Franziska in Central European Time; Lang in China Standard Time; Wright in…Wright Time, which involves night shifts but also wandering around in the daytime to shepherd his daughter to and from school.

Miles’s global network of business contacts is a flimsier excuse month-by-month, as most of the others in his office are in touch with people across the ocean too. It’s only a matter of time before somebody has the courage to ask Miles why the hell he just sits around here all the time when he could be finishing his reports in the warmth of his imagined home.

“Good evening, Prosecutor Edgeworth!” someone says from his doorway. Only after this greeting does the visitor knock on the open door.

(It’s the Debeste kid who actually says something. Or…Eustace, as he's been trying out, recently. A new name, along with a new start--no one knows if the former will stick, but the latter is never as tenuous. 

It shouldn’t surprise Miles that the youngest and least-aware employee here is the only one with the guts to ignore rank and ask the direct question. Eustace is practically a file clerk, an intern at best--but working his way back up to a prosecuting position isn’t holding him back.

This is the same quality that inspires Miles to include Eustace in meetings that the kid otherwise would have no need to sit in on; nobody else can interact with the Paynes in such a perplexing way.)

Miles raises his head. Eustace stands with a manila folder clutched to his chest like it’s body armor.

“Ah,” Miles says, removing his reading glasses. “Hello. Are you done for the afternoon?”

“Y-yes. It’s five-thirty, and I know my contract says I should leave at five, but…” Eustace is breathing like he sprinted up and down thirteen flights of stairs just now. He has to take a break in the middle of his sentence. “...But I wanted to finish this! Such a thing was, of course, a breeze for me.” He scratches his nose and tacks on in a mutter, “And also Verity said I had to wait to get picked up because of a thing she had at the courthouse.”

“You’re settling in with her alright?” 

Eustace assures him, “She’s nice to me!”

Miles didn’t expect anything less from her. 

Yet, he still hasn’t recovered from the skin-peeling-painful shame of realizing he’d been calling Judge Gavèlle by the wrong name for upwards of two months. It wasn’t until she presided over one of Miles’s cases and he questioned aloud who the hell Verity Gavèlle was that someone took pity on him and let him know that the woman left him uncorrected this long because she is extraordinarily polite. Or perhaps because she’s superhumanly passive-aggressive.

(Or both.)

Miles looks down at the manila folder that is extended to him, which he has accepted into his care automatically. Eustace, true to form, has handed Miles a paper-clipped folder that’s creased in an odd way, with the defendant’s name misspelled on the label and corrected messily with white-out. Eustace hands it to Miles like it will explode if he moves incorrectly, his entire frame shaking.

“Thank you,” Miles says. He offers a smile, hoping that it will do something to stop the kid’s violent tremors.

His calm reaction helps. Eustace stands up straight again, and says, “No p-problem! It was, uh…I did my best to expectorate the process, like you asked.”

“The word is ‘expedite’,” Miles corrects him. He opens the folder and looks inside. The brief is correctly formatted and lacks obvious typos, which is the least he can hope for. “This looks much better than the last one already. Thank you.”

The words are worth their weight in gold, it seems. Miles looks up to find Eustace suppressing one of his real smiles, which are becoming more and more common the longer he spends outside of his father’s shadow. The expression still leaks out around the edges of his weak poker face, sunlight blocked by tissue paper.

“It was no problem for me, of course!” Eustace brags. The proud lift of his chin reminds Miles of Kay, though the expression quickly disappears and Eustace shrinks again, posture folding and confidence evaporating. It’s going to take more time for him to bounce back, but the seeds are planted, at least. “I was, uh, just going to put it under your door, like Prosecutor Gavin said to. But you were here, so I didn’t have to. If I interrupted, then I didn’t mean to. Do you ever go home?”

Miles blinks. “Pardon?”

“Well, you’re always here when I leave, and also when I get back in the morning.” Eustace fidgets. “So…using the deduction process thing you taught me, that means you never leave.”

“Excuse me?” Miles says, with more umph behind it this time.

“Sorry!” Eustace squeaks. He backs up towards the door and says, “I didn’t mean it! It was just a joke, actually, and you fell for it. April Fools.”

“Hold it,” Miles says. “No, stop running. If you’re going to deduce something, you need to use complete facts.”

Eustace pauses mid-stride, not willing to completely abandon his escape. “Huh?”

“Tell me the facts you have gathered.”

A deep, steadying breath is taken. Then, Eustace takes another stab at using coherent reasoning, with his brows all knit together. “I usually come in at nine, and you’re already here. Then I leave at five, and you’re still here. And today you’re here past five, even though the office is closed and everybody else is gone.”

“Have you ever come in before nine?”

“One time. Prosecutor von Karma made me get up early and come in at seven, to hold the files she was collecting from your office…oh!”

It takes Eustace longer than most of Miles’s colleagues, but few “aha!” faces are quite as delightful to see as his. Eustace lights up again, proud to have grasped something on his own. “That’s right, you weren’t here! So you must come in after seven, but before nine!”

“Good,” Miles praises. He sees no reason to bring up that Franziska showed up only because Miles was battling laryngitis, and his big sister had promised to murder him if he spread his germs throughout the office. The files handled by Eustace were dropped off in the hallway outside of Miles’s apartment, after which Franziska ran back to the elevator and disappeared before Miles could open his door and cough on her.

In short, a thirty-nine-degree fever and threat of bodily harm combined were all that kept Miles out of his office for a single workday. 

Otherwise, Eustace’s theorizing is more or less accurate. 

“Please don’t concern yourself with my schedule,” Miles says, in a way that he hopes is kind but firm. He stands, and steps assertively to herd Eustace towards the door. “You’ve stayed late today, anyway.”

“Right,” Eustace says, going to the door at a pace that maintains the same distance between them step-by-step. “Well, okay, goodnight! See you tomorrow! I have some new theories about the KVX Bank case that I think will really turn it all around.”

“I can’t wait to hear them,” Miles says. He wishes that Eustace had brought up the bank case instead of inane questioning about Miles’s work-life balance. One of these days, he’ll introduce Eustace to the concept of “burying the lede,” and everyone in Eustace’s email directory will rejoice.

“Oh! One more thing,” Eustace says. He plunges his hand into his pocket, and then draws out a ring of keys. “Here!”

Dumbfounded, Miles takes his keys back. “Where on earth did you…?”

“Kay said earlier that I should give these back to you, but I kinda forgot,” Eustace says. “She said she stole them on accident.”

Miles will get into what stealing something by accident means, but he’ll do that with Kay when he doesn’t feel like he’s about to lose his patience. For now, Miles says, “Thank you for returning these, Mr. Winner. Please give my best to Judge Gavèlle,” and then he shuts the door before the kid can chatter at him any more.

By the time he gets to his apartment that night, it’s nearing eleven. 

Days like these are only more evidence on the scale that Miles is not fit to be a dog owner, no matter how much he may long to be one. His odd hours, many spent stationary and quietly reading, his lack of coherent routine as he bounces between timezones…

(Not to mention your utter lack of any nurturing qualities whatsoever, his brain reminds him.)

Sleep was never a close acquaintance of his. 

…Maybe long, long, long ago, when he could get up in the middle of the night and leap away from the bed fast enough that nothing underneath could grab at his ankles, and he could run all the way to his father’s room down the hall and fall asleep there instead. At least then, sleep wasn’t a bitter enemy.

Things are better than they were. It’s what he has to remind himself, over and over, on the weeks when it’s hard to keep his mind on track. No longer is he in the throes of that foggy, irritable, pinching haze of sleeplessness--of snatching brief moments of half-sleep during court recesses--of hiding under his desk to hyperventilate, only to then doze off and subsequently scramble back out when someone knocked on his door--of hiding sleep with the same shame that his colleagues hid intraoffice trysts.

Miles and sleep are on cordial, distant terms. The difference now is that he’s been prescribed a sleep aid, so it’s not sleep’s choice whether it wants to find Miles or not. It has no choice but to find Miles. In turn, Miles has been promised that he no longer has to approach sleep like a gladiator stumbling into a den of lions.

Without nightmares, he barely experiences sleep at all. He’s out like a light, and then snaps back to attention to find himself already brushing his teeth, or brewing tea, or already walking down the stairs of his apartment building. He takes a cab to work on those days and spends the morning groggy but arguably “well-rested.” Better-rested than he has been in years, even if he only takes the medication a few times a week.

Appealing both to Miles’s logic and his vanity, his doctor had listed out many, many benefits to getting just a little bit more sleep, with very few downsides. Ambien won’t interact poorly with the other prescriptions he already takes to balance his brain chemistry, and so Miles took the bottle of meat-colored miracle pills home and waited for the other shoe to drop.

There’s no such thing as a cure-all, after all.

Miles lets himself into the lifeless space, and notes dully that his monthly cleaning must be coming up. Every third weekend, a woman recommended by Kristoph Gavin comes by and puts Miles’s apartment back in order for a reasonable rate. It only takes her a couple of hours--usually, Miles doesn’t leave much of a mess for her to reckon with.

His new Ambien prescription has taken a toll on his tidy habits. From the front door, Miles notes with chagrin some couch cushions left crumpled, a mug left on the coffee table, dishes in the sink. Through his bedroom door, left ajar, his bed is visibly unmade. It's obvious that Miles has been spending several mornings a week in a confused haze.

Miles takes the pill tonight anyway; despite the fatigue weighing him down, he knows his mind is moving too fast to let him fall asleep peacefully. With his consciousness on countdown, Miles has no time to cook or order food. Instead, he puts toast in the toaster, sets the kettle on to boil, and goes to take a shower.

The short shower turns into a long one instead, with Miles too tired to do anything but lean his head against the tiles and feel water fall over him from the neck-down. He’ll just wash his hair in the morning. This is getting him nowhere. 

Once dry and wearing his pajamas, he eats the toast plain and lukewarm over the sink, then takes his tea to bed with him.

It’s a normal night, a bedtime routine squeezed into the final sliver of his day. Miles is perfectly content. This should be obvious, given how dry his throat is from the toast, and how greasy his unwashed hair feels on his scalp, and how tense the center of his back is, and how he needs a controlled substance to sleep without bolting upright in tears at three in the morning.

He is content, Miles thinks, staring at the ceiling far above. He has to be.

The side-effects of his sleeping aid are more plentiful than Miles hoped. There are those that he can counteract, and those that he cannot. The one that becomes an issue sooner rather than later is also the one that Miles found the most absurd back when he spoke with his doctor: sleep-eating.

There is no other explanation for the rate at which Miles’s pantry begins to empty. Nothing is left unscathed--not the untouched stock of canned vegetables and soups in his pantry, not the milk he thought would go sour, unopened in his fridge; not the sad collection of apples delivered with his grocery order that were just wishful thinking on his part. 

When he wakes up in the morning, still too fuzzy to safely drive, he finds empty cans, wrappers, milk cartons, everything in his trash can. Miles never feels fuller, though. When he wakes up, he’s still hungry. It’s as though these late-night snacks are just being thrown into a bottomless pit and disappearing.

Miles has a fair amount of alarm about the fact that his subconscious seems to crave massive amounts of food, when he hardly ever finds himself enjoying the act of eating whilst awake. It’s not an uncommon side effect of his medication, but he would have thought he was disciplined enough to know better, all the way to his core.

He gets home after work one day and finds that his planned snack will be impossible, because both the hummus and crackers he had been looking forward to have disappeared--and this is the last straw. He must have eaten an entire package of rice crackers in his sleep, and woken up still hungry for more.

Is he not eating enough? This has never been a concern of his before. He thinks he has the art of a normal eating schedule handled, but this development suggests otherwise.

Finding himself with a spare five minutes while his kettle boils, he forces himself to examine his eating habits and find the mistake therein.

There’s a cafeteria in the courthouse, and he frequents it for a light breakfast whenever he has to be there instead of his office--there he has an egg and cheese, or something else with protein that he can eat in the lobby alone, in as little time as possible. His tea tides him over until he can finish in court and go back to his office, where he pushes his lunch to two or three after the post-trial paperwork has been completed. At three, he gets a sandwich from the cafe next door, and that’s his lunch and dinner all in one. Before bed, he’ll have a cup of herbal tea and a small snack so his stomach doesn’t hurt as he tries to fall asleep.

Miles finds it a perfectly efficient schedule--by definition, he’s eating regularly--but he admits to himself that combining lunch and dinner into one meal isn’t something Miles would recommend to anyone who asked him for advice. It isn’t a shortcut that he takes when he spends a day in someone else’s company.

A secret habit…and one he’s hypocritical about, at that. Miles has found his problem.

He’ll need to take measures to fix this. If the situation doesn’t resolve itself, he supposes it will necessitate a padlock on his fridge to keep himself from getting sick. A combination lock, even--Miles may be capable of unlocking a keyed lock in his sleep.

Whistling from the kettle stops him from considering the issue further. His Ambien kicks in five minutes after that.

He finds his tea cold on his bedside table the next morning, undrunk. In a way, Miles is grateful for that, because it’s such a disconcerting sight that he remembers his late-night resolution to fix this small part of his life. 

To get the fastest results, he’ll need drastic measures. In addition, something about Eustace’s remarks still smarts. Who is that child to tell Miles he’s a workaholic? 

Miles leaves his office all the time for work-life balance purposes, and he’ll prove it.

He’ll prove it today.

“W-Woah, hey! Good to see--hey. What? Is that for me?” 

“It’s the least I can do for you,” Miles says. He pushes the wrapped sandwich into Wright’s hands again, with an urgency that tells Wright to just take it before Miles drops it on the ground. Thankfully, Wright accepts the food this time. “Are you going to invite me in? I brought lunch for Trucy as well.”

“What do you mean?” Wright asks, still playing dumb. 

“What do you mean, what do I mean?” 

“I mean-- argh, Edgeworth.” Wright barks a laugh. It’s such a tired sound. “Stop and look at me. What’s going on?”

Miles rolls his eyes to the heavens, but he acquiesces to stay put on the threshold of Wright’s apartment, submitting to the weird investigatory gaze that Wright fixes on him. When the silence goes on for a beat too long, Miles tries to explain himself with, “I assumed that you had not taken a break for lunch, and thought that we might…catch up.”

“Catch up?” Wright asks, eyebrows raising.

“Are you deaf?” Miles snaps. 

Wright holds up his hands, soothing Miles like a spooked horse. “Easy, easy. I’m not complaining. I guess I’m just…confused.”

“Can you be difficult about this after I sit down?”

“Fine,” Wright sighs. He steps aside. “Thanks for bringing something for Trucy, but she’s at school. I can put it in the fridge for her for later.”

The apartment is indeed empty. Wright moves a pile of rubber chickens off of one of the couch cushions and dumps them unceremoniously on the floor. He gestures to the new empty spot, telling Miles to sit down. 

Miles gives Wright the sandwich meant for Trucy, feeling rather foolish for forgetting that she would be at school at this time of day. “I won’t trouble you for long.”

Wright tosses the extra sandwich into the old mini fridge in the corner and then flops down onto the sofa opposite Miles. He’s wearing socks and flip-flops at the same time. He gives Miles a grin, though his residual confusion still tinges his expression. 

Sloughing off his wet coat, Miles takes the spot on the couch that Wright cleared for him. He sits still for a beat too long, his sandwich crinkling in his hands. The food has lost a lot of its appetizing quality, now that Miles realizes he’s reached the point of the outing where he’ll be eating it while staring Wright down across the coffee table.

And Wright is staring at him, utterly unsubtle. 

When Miles says nothing, Wright shakes his head and says, “Okay, spill. You’re being weird.”

“How is it weird to bring a friend some lunch?” Miles protests. He meets Wright’s eye, finally remembering where he misplaced his backbone. None of this should be strange. They’ve gotten food together before. Wright has stayed in Miles’s apartment, even cooked in Miles’s kitchen. “Most people would say that it’s quite normal.”

“Not for us, it isn’t.” Wright cocks his head to the side, as though Miles is a Calder mobile spinning enigmatically in an otherwise empty gallery. “I assert that the defendant is hiding something.”

“The defendant is hiding nothing,” Miles says hotly, “and you’re being ridiculous. Eat your sandwich.”

“You first.” Wright raises his eyebrows, challenging him.

“You--what, you think I’m trying to drug you?”

“Who knows? Maybe you are.”

“You’re being silly.”

Wright mocks in a high-pitched voice that sounds nothing like Miles, “You’re being silly.”

Miles opens his mouth to snap back at him, but finds that Wright’s suppressing a smile, even biting down on his lip to keep a laugh in. The annoyance in Miles’s chest turns into something unbearably fond, something that makes Miles want to open his mouth and say--something genuine. Something that would make Wright feel the same feeling.

Why don’t they get lunch more often? They so rarely just sit and shoot the breeze--and they’re busy people, but not so busy that they couldn’t spare ten minutes at the minimum. Already, Miles’s tension from the suffocating atmosphere of the drama-ridden Prosecutors’ office has unwound itself. It just took a smile from Wright. 

“Alright, if you’re gonna be all secretive, fine,” Wright says. He unwraps his sandwich and takes one of his impolite, disgusting, too-large bites, and he talks with his mouth full to say, “Do you want my help with something?”

“Can we…?” Miles hears himself say, and he stops himself far too late to abandon the train of thought now. He grinds his molars together and then forces himself to ask, disproportionately lousy with want, “Is it alright if we take a few more minutes before I have to return to work?”

Wright looks outright nervous now. A stricken expression flashes across his face, there and gone like a summer rainstorm. Wright cautiously responds, “Uh…sure. It can wait, no problem.”

“Thank you,” Miles says, and then he looks down at his sandwich and burns alive in his embarrassment. He has zero interest in eating, now that he’s all but begged Wright for his undivided attention. 

Scraping for something, anything to fill the renewed silence, Miles looks around the cluttered living room and seizes on a lopsided diorama of some sort of Greek architecture, which is small enough to fit in a shoebox turned on its side. “What’s that?” he asks, and points.

Wright twists around to follow Miles’s gesture. “Ah, that’s something Trucy had to make for her history class. She spent forever on it. I think she said it’s the Parthenon…? One of those old buildings, anyway.” Even Wright’s suspicion can’t hold up against his pride in his daughter. His face softens as he talks. “She used clay, n’ toothpicks n’ stuff. She kinda actually blackmailed me into making most of the foundation for her, because I owed her a favor. That kid never forgets an unsettled score.”

Cautiously, so as not to be observed, Miles unwraps his sandwich and takes an unenthusiastic bite.

Wright finds the end of his thought and looks accusingly Miles’s way. Miles freezes, one of his hands springing up to cover his mouth in case there’s any trace of food smeared around it. The two of them regard each other for a long moment.

“I totally think Trucy could go into civil engineering,” Wright continues, breaking the odd tension. He takes another oversized bite of his sandwich, and keeps talking. His gaze wanders away from Miles, taking in the window, the empty desks, anything else--tacitly messaging that he’s not going to go back to staring Miles down. “She’s so good at math, and it turns out she learned a lot about reading building plans from her school’s library. The only barrier, I guess, would be that she doesn’t give a shit about buildings.”

Over the rest of their lunch, Miles only finishes half of his sandwich, pursuing this tactic. It’s better than no lunch at all. Once he’s gotten through all the food he’s going to get through, he even contributes to a real dialogue. 

He’s struck with the mundanity, the safety of just…talking.

At five minutes to one, his phone rings. Miles’s time is up. He sort of startles, leaping to his feet as though he’s been shocked with a cattle prod. The interruption has jolted him from the security he was lulled into, and he’s remembered that he’s been away from his office for over an hour now. He can’t imagine the state of his inbox.

“Thank you,” Miles says hurriedly, even as he hits “ignore” on the call. He picks up his damp coat and pulls it on before picking up the wrapped remaining half of his sandwich. The bread has gotten soggy by now, and the wrapper is greasy. He can’t imagine anything less appetizing than carrying it back to the office with him, but he also can’t remember how to unclench his hand so he can throw the food away. “I should let you get back to work.”

“Ahaha, yeah,” Wright says, rubbing the back of his neck. It’s a tell of some sort, but Miles has no idea what the compulsive movement is supposed to tell him. “I got…a lot going on, as you can tell. Thanks for stopping by. Do you need to borrow an umbrella?”

“I’m fine. Thank you.” Miles can feel Wright’s eyes on him, confused and curious. Even if there’s no way anyone could guess what Miles’s motivation is here--Miles himself is getting confused on that front--the scrutiny makes Miles feel as though he’s scrubbed raw and sliced open for the world to pick apart. “Take care, Wright.”

“Sure,” Wright says, something unidentifiable in his eyes. “I will.”

Every single lunch and dinner cannot be such a mortifying ordeal; Miles will never eat again, if that’s the standard he holds himself to. Still, after eating with Wright, his afternoon passes more pleasantly than he could have expected. As it turns out, having food in his stomach keeps his head clearer, and gives him more strength to remain gracious while answering inane phone calls from the intern in the Criminal Affairs Records office.

Committed to the new leaf he’s turned over, Miles packs up some case files and his thick packet of notes and goes home early, at seven. He has time, so he orders himself dinner and it arrives hours before he has to take his sleeping medication.

It’s mere novelty that drapes the evening in a pleasant velvet. Still, Miles sits on his sofa eating takeout, perusing old files, listening to the rain, and he wonders when he forgot he was supposed to enjoy living. Or when he made himself forget--because his subconscious, for some reason, understood he was hungry, even if it wasn’t just food he was hungry for.

Kay pops into his head out of nowhere, and he realizes he doesn’t have her number to text and ask if she got home alright. He’s fuzzy on where she visits Los Angeles from, or where she goes while she’s here. 

Miles should have pressed the contact information issue more. He just didn’t think it was appropriate for him to demand a teenager’s cell phone number, back when he had the opportunity to do so. 

Due to his prescription’s addictive potential, Miles has been told not to take a dose every night. Not every evening can pass like a blissful fantasy--maybe for the rest of his life, Miles will need to work himself to sleep a few evenings a week. Distracting himself is the only thing that keeps the mounting dread at bay.

On normal days, he’s only half-awake by the time he leaves his office. Tonight, he mistimes it and wakes up with a crick in his neck and his work phone ringing, and he discovers he’s been asleep for so long that the automatic lights in his office have gone out.

Miles sits up. The lights flash on, blinding him. His hand finds his phone and picks it up off its cradle before it can stop ringing.

“Hello?” Miles asks.

“Interesting. You’re free to talk?” asks a bemused but warm voice on the other end.

Miles scrubs at his eyes, shakes his head. “I’m…sorry?”

“It’s ten at night and you’re in your office,” Shi-Long Lang’s voice says, “so I assume there’s some kind of work emergency I’m keeping you from. I was planning on leaving you a voicemail.”

“You keep track of the time in Los Angeles?” Miles takes a gulp of cold tea to wake up before he eases back in his chair, a smile creeping across his face. “Someone could accuse you of being obsessed with my schedule.”

“It’s simple math,” Lang snarls, though Miles knows his intensity doesn’t equal anger. “You should try it sometime.”

“I do, all the--!” Miles stops himself, and takes a mindful breath before he gets riled up for no reason. “...You should be returning to work now instead of making personal calls, given that it’s one in the afternoon for you.”

“Careful, careful,” Lang says. “Now who’s obsessed?” 

Miles huffs. His hand has found the cord to his computer and he’s twirling it around his finger. Perturbed, he drops the cord and keeps his hands to himself. “Did you call for a reason?”

“You wound me, pretty boy.” Still, Lang accepts the change of subject. “I did, but I’ve decided I don’t care to recall it. Now that you mention it, I’ve been meaning to have a word with you about your laissez-faire method of parenting.”

“My what?”

“Do you think it’s acceptable for a diurnal bird to be making international phone calls at three in the morning?”

Miles stares blankly at the closed door of his office. It has been a long day, but he doesn’t think that any amount of rest or caffeine would make Lang’s words into something comprehensible. 

After a long lull, Lang prompts, “Hello-oo? Don’t go playing dead on me.”

“You cut out for a second there,” Miles lies. “What’d you say?”

“Excuse me, but I don’t believe you.”

“A diurnal bird…?”

At a sudden ear-splitting volume from the other end of the phone, Lang screeches, “Caw, caw!”

Miles bolts upright, making a very undignified sound in the process.

Lang laughs at him with his entire chest. Breathlessly, he gasps, “That woke you up! The best clues are the ones that grab you right by the hair on your chest.” In a lower voice, Lang mutters, “Not that you have any of that.”

Grumbling--and ignoring the dig at his chest hair--Miles moves his phone to his other ear to give the abused eardrum a break. “You’re talking to me about Kay Faraday.”

“If there are any other children in your guardianship that I haven’t been told about, I’ll be very disappointed by you.”

“Kay isn’t in my--” Miles backtracks, with some effort. It’s all too easy to let Lang lead him on flights of fancy. “What do you mean? She’s been calling you at three in the morning?”

“Three in the morning, your time.” 

“Perhaps she was trying to reach you during your workday.”

“I’m afraid not. She told me that being a citizen of the night was a vital part of being a Great Thief.” Lang’s voice has a boastful undertone, as it always does when he has information that anyone else doesn’t. Miles wishes he didn’t find it endearing. “I believe her last call came to me from the roof of a moving truck.”

“What!?”

“Don’t tell me the call cut out again.”

Miles’s blood pressure is rising. He’s having terrible, terrible visions of Kay getting smashed against an overpass, or flung over a guardrail into oncoming traffic, or--

This is completely unacceptable.

“I’ll be…having a word with her about this,” Miles promises, through gritted teeth. “Thank you for bringing it to my attention.”

“Naturally.” Lang hesitates. “Don’t tell her I told you.”

“Do you think that international agents get any kind of whistleblower protection under my jurisdiction?”

“You’re going to punish me for giving guidance to your neglected child!?”

“She isn’t my--”

“If you aren’t going to do it, someone’s going to,” Lang tells him. “And that’s either me, or it’s that scruffy detective. Don’t I seem like the lesser evil?”

You don’t seem like any kind of evil, Miles almost says, because it’s late at night and he’s dreading going back to a cold and empty apartment. Where Lang is, the sun is up, and any lingering fog has burned off. The sun has given all kinds of power and insight to Lang’s thought process; it’s true that Miles has no intention of leaving Kay’s wellbeing in Gumshoe’s hands.

“No wonder she’s behaving this way, if you’re still in your office at this hour.”

“I’m--!”

If you want anyone over there to take you seriously, you should be getting your proper rest,” Lang lectures. “Do you think you’ll be able to do a good job, if a job is all you do?”

At least he didn’t try to attribute that turn of phrase to an ancestor. Miles rests his head on his hand, feeling his smile curve against his palm. “Fine. I can take a hint. I’ll go home, and I’ll talk to Kay. Do you have any other wisdom I can take with me?”

“Of course,” Lang says, sounding all too proud of himself. “Lang Zi says, ‘The light of your soul warms mine.’”

“That’s…” The sincerity of the quote has knocked Miles off-kilter. Miles misses him. They don’t see each other enough--don’t even call each other enough--to label what they have a relationship, but Miles has unwittingly come to treasure it anyway.

He doesn’t say any of that nonsense. Instead, he says, “Goodnight, Agent Lang,” and hangs up the phone with an odd fluttering sensation in his palms.

The leftover Thai takeout in his fridge is all Miles can think about during the last fifteen minutes of his commute home. As he dreads whatever nightmares are to come, the Tom Kha Gai soup is what he has to look forward to, so he clings to it.

However, his Ambien-addled self has again worked against him. Miles opens his fridge to find that it’s almost barren, no leftovers in sight. All he has are some cans of sparkling water, a few old containers of various condiments, and the wilted remains of a salad.

How could he have made a mistake like this? Miles could swear he saw the white box in the fridge this morning, when he was looking for jam for his toast. Such memories are fleeting, and clouded by the medication he was on.

His mood ruined, Miles leaves his kitchen without eating anything. He stews angrily through his shower, and is still annoyed when he climbs into bed. 

Sleep-eating is the most obvious culprit of his food disappearing, but Miles is unsatisfied with that explanation. The more he thinks about his morning, the more he’s certain he saw his leftovers in the fridge before he left for work. He had to push aside a box of some sort to find the raspberry jam, and that box wasn’t in the fridge just now.

…Was it?

Miles will do anything to avoid thinking about the unmedicated dreams he’s going to have. He gets up out of bed and goes back to the kitchen. Indeed, there are no boxes anywhere in the fridge, on any of the shelves. 

More perplexingly, when he checks the trash can, he finds his leftover containers discarded on top of the empty jam jar from this morning. The boxes are empty, but that would mean that Miles forgot eating the food himself sometime after breakfast.

Miles considers the question for upwards of five minutes, just staring impotently into his trash can. How could he have forgotten that? Could he have just poured the soup down the sink without even thinking about it? It was good soup. He would remember wasting it.

Wouldn’t he?

He goes back to bed in a stupor. His covers aren’t warm enough; he has to get up again and put socks on. Then, he lies awake for an hour, trying to walk through his morning step-by-step while he fails to put things in order.

His phone buzzes, right as he’s drifting off. Lang has finally responded to him, and he has provided the phone number that Kay called him from. Miles thanks him, and quickly sends off a text to Kay, not wasting any time.

‘Are you alright? Please respond at your earliest convenience. This is Miles Edgeworth.’

He sets his phone down and keeps his ears strained for a ding that would signal a response. When nothing comes over the course of an hour, Miles tells himself that Kay’s call to Lang had been a fluke, not a pattern of continuing concerning behavior.

He doesn’t fall for his own nonsense. When an hour has passed, he sits up and grabs his phone and texts Kay again. ‘I don’t mean to be overbearing. Please let me know if you are safe. All my best, Miles Edgeworth.’

During the times Miles spent luxuriating in his friends’ company every day, he didn’t think about the inevitability he was setting up. Meaning--he didn’t think ahead, and consider just how difficult it would be to go back to starving when he’d known what feasting was like. 

He stares holes in his phone screen, begging Kay to be safe so that he doesn’t spin himself into a panic. The screen times out, but he keeps staring.

Ten minutes later, when every muscle in his body has twisted itself into a pretzel of fear, Kay’s number finally responds. 

‘You do NOT seriously text like that omfg. HIIIII MR EDGEWORTH :))’ 

For reasons unbeknownst to Miles, Kay has punctuated her response to him with a low-resolution version of Miles’s detention center headshot from the DL-6 retrial. She has helpfully followed the image up with, ‘this guys in my house and he wont leave helpppp.’

Miles exhales a profound sigh of both irritation and relief. Kay is alive, and in good spirits. He sets his phone down and passes out, resolving to deal with her messages tomorrow.

Miles startles violently awake, just shy of four o’clock. When the last images of his dream have faded under the relentless nothingness of his dark bedroom, Miles turns over slowly and lets the beating of his heart begin to slow down.

Needing something tangible in his shaking hands, he reaches out to his bedside table and picks up his phone.

A long, long time ago, Miles would check his phone with the grim certainty that nobody had tried to contact him while he was asleep. He would wake up with the sound of a gunshot still ringing in his ears and he would turn over and find that no, nobody was reaching out in his direction. 

Things are better than they were. 

This morning, Miles’s phone holds a text from his big sister. While Miles’s lungs work overtime to soothe him, he squints at his screen to drink in the words as his tether to real life. It’s the least consequential message ever; Franziska has sent him a curt request for him to check his email when he gets to work. As though Miles would forget to turn on his computer otherwise.

The grasping fingers of his dream still dig into his temples. Miles hunches further into his blankets, reading Franziska’s sentence over and over. No greeting, no signature--obviously. It’s just a text, and not a personal one. Franziska could have dictated it to an intern, even.

Miles types out, ‘Do you ever have bad dreams?’

He deletes the text before he can do something stupid, like send it. He rolls his eyes, frustrated with himself, and with the fact that Kay’s identical question to him hasn’t faded from his head since she asked it. To Franziska, such a question would be a blatant admission that he never grew out of the night terrors that he suffered while still living in the Von Karma household. Franziska heard him screaming in his sleep for years, though she hasn’t brought it up since he moved away. 

She’s a grown woman, and Miles is certain that her neuroses manifest themselves enough in the waking world. There probably aren’t any left over at the end of the day when she lays her head down.

Miles snorts. Psychoanalysis was never his strong suit. He settles for antagonizing his sister by texting her, ‘I’ve decided not to answer emails anymore. My apologies.’

‘I BEG YOUR PARDON?’ Franziska texts back within five seconds.

Miles presses his lips together, trying not to smile, even though it’s just him in the room. ‘I hope that your day has been going well.’

‘It has, no thanks to your foolishness!!!’ she responds. Then, ‘Explain what you mean by no longer using email. NOW!!’ And tertiarily, ‘What the hell are you doing awake at this hour?’

He watches a tirade appear on his screen in thirty-character chunks. He imagines each one arriving with the ferocity of a snapping whip. The utter stillness of his bedroom melts away, and while he distracts himself with being an inconsiderate sibling, his heart stops pounding in his ears. By the time Franziska has given up on getting a straight answer out of him, Miles has nodded off again, and he claims a few more hours of sleep before his alarm goes off.

All of Miles’s important mail is delivered to his office. Nothing but junk mail goes to his apartment directly; it makes it easier to be sure that everything he needs will end up on his desk, one way or another. One of the men working at the building’s front desk runs the mail up to the suite of prosecutors’ offices, and so Miles gets a friendly no-eye-contact mail handoff most mornings.

Today, he is handed a stack of bills. He sets aside five minutes to look through them with disinterest while he weathers the storm that is Gumshoe tidying up his office for him.

Gumshoe must have other job responsibilities, but none of them seem to fulfill him quite as much as dusting Miles’s office. Miles doesn’t remember the last time he actually asked the detective to dust anything, but he’s given up on trying to dissuade Gumshoe of it. 

The routine may be soothing. It’s rote enough that Miles no longer watches out of the corner of his eye, teeth clenched, paranoid of any of his belongings being broken or mishandled. Gumshoe no longer feels the need to make awkward jokes about the task either--meaning Miles no longer has to conjure any visuals of Gumshoe in a French maid’s outfit. Thank heavens. 

It’s been a year since Gumshoe had a cigarette. Maggey Byrde has embarked on planting an herb garden, but managed to order stinging nettle instead of rosemary. Missile has passed another round of obedience training, taking him one step closer to being a licensed sniffer dog. 

These are all tidbits that Gumshoe spouts as he makes the loop around Miles’s office. He’s undeterred when Miles has little to no reaction to his information, but nothing short of thrilled when Miles engages with him. (Gumshoe somehow ducks any blame or accusation when Miles demands if he had opened a crime scene to an unlicensed animal.) 

Miles has allowed this routine to continue, up to twice a day, for months now. Oddly, he has no urge to stop it. He’s even occasionally glad that Gumshoe is there, if only so Miles isn’t the only living being in his office for a few minutes.

Miles is glad to have some kind of eyewitness to keep him from committing vicious crimes when he opens his water bill this morning and finds that his usage--and in turn, his bill--has tripled.

“This cannot stand,” Miles says at a sudden loud volume.

Gumshoe jumps like a startled housecat, arched back and all. “S-sorry? What’s the matter?”

“Not you,” Miles snaps. “This is preposterous. In no way can this be possible.”

“I know that you’re doin’ your thing where you complain all vague-like so I’ll ask you what’s bothering you, but I was in the middle of--”

“Detective.”

Gumshoe sighs. “What’s wrong?”

After all that, Miles doesn’t actually feel like explaining himself. He sighs and waves Gumshoe off, feeling rather put out.

A terse phone call with a beleaguered representative of the city’s utility supplier informs Miles that no mistake has been made. Somehow, in the past month, Miles has begun abusing his access to running water, without being aware of it. 

Has he been taking showers in his sleep? Has he been preparing ice cream sandwiches with limited edition Steel Samurai Pop-Tarts as the bookends and then eating those monstrosities in the shower, all without waking up?

(Perhaps it’s a good thing he lives alone in that minimalist grayscale torture dimension of an apartment--nobody will ever have to witness him in such a depraved state.)

He’s furious with the cost he owes, but he’d pay three times that to keep his medication and stop from going back to how bad things were before. What infuriates him is that there’s no way he has some secret repressed need to shower more, which means that he cannot fix this the way that he’s tried to fix his midnight meals.  

“How in fresh hell can I be expected to address this?” he mutters to himself, seething, as he stacks reports into a file folder for safe transport down the hall. “I suppose I’ll just start wearing a bathing cap to the workplace to reassure myself. Wouldn’t that be a sight? You, looking like a water aerobics instructor at all hours, you stupid, imbecilic--”

“Hey, woah,” Gumshoe says. A feather duster gets shoved under Miles’s nose like a traffic officer’s baton. “Watch it.”

Miles recoils, sputtering. “I beg your--?”

“That’s my friend you’re talkin’ about!” Gumshoe cries, chest all puffed out like he has any authority here.

“I am your superior,” Miles says, still reeling from being wrenched from his thoughts.

“Yeah, you are!” Gumshoe encourages. “Superior, as in the greatest! Now you’re getting it! Say it again!”

“No, I meant--” Miles stops and takes his glasses off to rub his eyes. “Detective…”

“I don’t wanna hear any of that talking down on yourself again!” Gumshoe says, waving the feather duster again. He’s glowering. If this was how he bossed around his subordinates, things would be accomplished a lot more efficiently around here. “You’re the best, sir!”

Miles sighs. He also sneezes a bit. “May I get back to my work now?”

“Heh, fine.” Gumshoe salutes. “Plenty more where that came from, though, if you need a pick-me-up later, sir!”

“That won’t be necessary, thank you.”

“It’s no problem! Just say the code word, and I’ve got you! The code word is--”

“Please close the door on your way out.”

He takes lunch to Wright’s home again. 

Miles meets similar suspicion this time, but gets similarly satisfactory results. They talk enough to fill Wright’s living room with warmth, and Miles even eats a significant amount of the prepackaged salad he bought at the courthouse’s cafeteria. 

Wright is still surprised, a little confused about Miles’s change in routine--and furthermore, by Miles’s need to conscript someone else in his routine. The reasons for his behavior cannot all be hidden behind his excuse of I need to stop eating so many rice crackers in my sleep. His change of heart has spiderwebbed into something greater than that.

After he let Kay stay over, Miles has gotten a sample of what it could mean to be at home somewhere. It’s an addictive feeling, and so he’s chasing it wherever it leads. In the sound of Lang’s voice over the phone, in the embrace of Wright’s company, in the delight of Kay’s laughter.

Miles has cultivated a depressing reputation for himself over the past two decades, one of turning away from the sun instead of leaning towards it. Viewed like this, his new behavior could be off-putting.

Wright agrees. He sobers up around minute forty-two of the lunch hour and says, “Hey, so…I’m not complaining about the food, or anything, but, what gives?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean. Don’t be cute.”

“I told you already,” Miles says. He bites down on all comments about what it means to be cute about something. If there was a time when Miles could make those jokes, it’s dead and gone. It will take a lot of rebuilding to get back there, with how much turmoil Wright has gone through in the past few years.

“Nope, I’m not buying it.” Wright looks Miles in the eye and asks, “It’s something else. You’re not planning on killing yourself, are you?”

Miles is so startled that he isn’t even ashamed when he says, with his mouth full, “What kind of a question is that?”

“Uh, well…” At least Wright has the decency to look a little embarrassed. “You’re acting out of character.”

“So, to you, that means I’m planning on…?”

“I mean, not necessarily! But, you’re suddenly in such a good mood, and you’ve never insisted on lunch like this.” Wright rubs at the back of his neck, offers up his charming sheepish smile like that’ll make Miles forget what he just accused him of. His other hand is clenched around something, and Miles doesn’t have to see it to know it’s that accursed magic stone. “...I may have been jumping to conclusions.”

Miles sets his lunch down, his fragile appetite abandoning him. 

“Shit,” Wright says, dragging his hand through his hair. It’s been a long time since Miles saw it styled, and it looks like it’s been a few days since Wright even bothered washing it. “That came out all wrong. I’m just worried about you.”

“Because I’m…happy?”

“No, I didn’t mean it like that.” Wright huffs. “You seem different, and you’re lying about something.” The magatama spins around one of his fingers. “Can you just answer my question?”

Miles works the words over in his mouth before he spits them out: “No, I’m not planning on killing myself.”

Something about Miles is broken, because before he makes the statement aloud, he has no idea if it’s the truth or not. But he finishes saying it, and it feels true. Judging by the relaxed slump of Wright’s shoulders, it looks true.

Things are better than they were. Miles doesn’t think he could have said such a thing and meant it, a few years ago. That escape plan always hovered as a promise in the back of his head, reminding Miles that it was always just two steps away if he needed it. Unexpectedly, it takes Miles’s breath away for a moment as he realizes that at some point, he stopped drafting mental farewell letters every night before he went to sleep.

“Thank god,” Wright mutters. He puts the rock back in his pocket. Louder, he says, “That’s good. That you’re doing well.”

“Apparently, it’s cause for alarm,” Miles says dryly.

“Jesus, Edgeworth,” Wright says, all his prior tension rocketing back, “I can’t be too sure, with you, can I? Maybe you’ll just up and disappear on me tomorrow.”

That one hurts. Miles tries to roll with that punch, tries to absorb it to think about later, but he only succeeds in the latter. He’ll be curled around that sting for a long time, and it’ll come right back up to the surface when he needs it. Or doesn’t need it. Or needs anything but it.

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” Miles says, with as dark of a glare as he can muster up at such short notice. 

“Do not try that with me.” 

Despite the sharp words, Miles can’t get a good read on him. Wright’s face is so infuriatingly impassive these days. More and more, each expression he lets slip is a calculated one. Miles didn’t appreciate the days when Wright was forthright while he was still living in them. 

“Have you been sleeping poorly?” Miles asks suddenly, abandoning their mounting argument.

This move is worthwhile, for the way it actually makes Wright’s mask break, for just a few seconds of precious speechlessness. 

“What’re you talking about?” Wright tries to salvage, which confirms Miles’s suspicions. 

“You’re just being…uncommonly fussy.”

Wright snorts. “Don’t lecture me. I work nights.”

Miles knows this. He’s offered help, and been categorically rejected. 

“You’re a piece of work, sometimes,” Wright mutters, in one of his asides that he almost certainly doesn’t mean for Miles to hear. More and more often, he lets Miles hear them anyway, which could mean nothing. He raises his voice back to a conversational volume again to say, “If lunch is all you came for, I gotta…go, do things. Today. All afternoon. Very busy. Thanks for stopping by.”

“It was my pleasure,” Miles says quietly. He’s not lying, but he understands why Wright may not believe him.

When Miles arrives back at his apartment and finally gets around to putting some bread into the toaster, his patience finds its limit. He presses down on the lever and the entire right half of the appliance springs loose, dissolving the toaster into four or five metal chunks and startling the hell out of him.

He lets out a cartoonish exclamation of surprise. The untoasted bagel drops from his grip and half of it rolls onto the kitchen floor. 

The toaster, now in useless pieces, emits a terrifying burst of sparks.

“What the hell?” Miles exclaims, the genuine surprise managing to knock all manners out of him. His hand darts out and yanks the plug out of the socket, killing the electric current and thus the sparks that threaten to burn his building down.

It takes him a moment to catch his breath again. Miles then uses a wooden spoon to poke at the remains of his toaster, sifting through them for some kind of clue as to what happened there.

The appliance had appeared intact when he set out on using it, but he can now see that the fault lines are more indicative of a violent impact or someone smashing it. Miles has no memory of any toaster-centric altercations, but…it seems farfetched to assume an intruder could have done such a thing.

Before Miles can catastrophize his thinking, he takes a short walk through the apartment. None of his valuables are missing, not even any electronics. The only thing out of order is the guest room--and he remembers after a panicked moment that the bed is unmade in there because Kay slept here a week ago and the cleaning woman hasn’t showed up yet. 

If Miles calls this in as a potential breaking-and-entering, and his fingerprints are the only ones on the toaster, he’ll never live it down.

Miles returns to his kitchen and has a stare-down with the toaster in shambles. He feels uneasy, but what is there, really, to do?

He sprinkles baking soda on the floor of his kitchen in front of the refrigerator and then takes his sleeping aid so he’ll stop panicking. 

In the morning, there are no footprints leading to or from the fridge tracked through the white powder. Awake-Miles steps in the baking soda, however, so he has to stumble around and sweep up the mess while cursing to himself all the while.

Lack of sleep-walking does not equal lack of any embarrassing behavior whatsoever, though. Miles, subconsciously avoiding a mess in his kitchen, has done something else, which is made apparent by the phone call he gets at seven.

“Hello?” Miles asks, more than a little worried, having seen Wright’s name on the caller ID.

“Morning,” Wright says. His voice is rumbly; he must be fresh from sleep. Wright sighs into the phone, exhausted but fond in a way that makes Miles’s face warm. He shouldn’t be awake at this hour, especially if he worked last night. “I’m actually awake now, so you can tell me what case you wanted my notes on.”

“I’m--uh, pardon?” Miles asks, pausing in his mission to put his broom away again.

Wright sighs again, more forcefully. “Edgeworth, I don’t have time to talk, talk, but I can get the file for you and drop it off at your office. Tell me the name again.” 

“I--I don’t, er…” 

“Chop, chop. I’m leaving my house in five minutes.” Muffled through a poorly-covered phone speaker, Wright shouts, “Trucy! Did you grab your new bus pass?”

In the brief window of opportunity, Miles wracks his brain for context that doesn’t exist. “When did I ask for that?”

Wright’s voice returns to a normal volume, and he sounds even less amused than before. “Are you serious? We talked four hours ago. I was having a good dream and everything when you called.”

Miles takes his phone away from his ear and checks his call logs. Indeed, his phone called Wright at three this morning, and the call lasted for almost half an hour.

It seems that Miles’s parasomnias do not stop at midnight snacking.

He lifts his phone back to his ear, feeling very odd and, most of all, embarrassed. “My apologies, Wright,” he says, “but I…found the information in another way. I won’t disturb your sleep like that again.”

“Wh--huh? Wait a second--”

“I have to go,” Miles all but shouts. He hangs up, and tosses his phone across his kitchen counter so he has room to bury his face in his hands and exhale a sigh that’s so violent it’s basically a scream.

There’s no time to dwell on this. If Miles dwells on this, he’ll collapse into a dying star of despair and humiliation. All that there is to do is get ready to go to work, and work until he’s too tired to think about anything going on in his life.

Miles buzzes the cleaning woman, Julie, into his apartment when she shows up on Saturday morning. They trade pleasantries, and then Miles goes out for groceries and to poke around in the Criminal Affairs records room for a case he’ll want to have reference of on Monday. The woman who runs the records room tells him that they’re doing an audit and he’ll have to come back later, so Miles gives her his number and then returns home disgruntled and with no files to show for it.

He didn’t sleep the night before. Miles is running on fumes, and he doesn’t appreciate the way that his schedule isn’t going according to plan.

When he returns to his apartment, near noon, Julie is just barely finishing up. Miles expects a polite but friendly goodbye on her way out, but she actually waves to get his attention after she’s slung her bag of supplies over her shoulder.

“Yes?” Miles asks, nervous that she’s about to deliver news of her moving away or leaving the industry. He cannot fathom coming to trust someone else with his home, not right now.

“I wasn’t sure if you wanted me to leave the guest room alone like normal,” she says. “It looked like someone used it. I couldn’t reach you by phone earlier, so I cleaned up in there just to be safe. Is that alright?”

“Oh,” Miles says, flustered when he checks his phone and finds he did, in fact, miss calls from her. “My apologies. It’s…I’m sure it’s fine. Thank you for doing that.”

“It’s no trouble.” She smiles. Then her face changes. Miles tenses. “There’s one other thing.”

“What is it?” he asks, dread mounting.

“Scuse me if this isn’t my business,” Julie says, “but if your lady is going to be staying over and using your shower so often, there are these little drain traps you can get to catch her hair so the pipes don’t get clogged.”

“My…who?” Miles asks. 

“Oh, ‘scuse me. Is she your daughter? I shouldn’t have assumed anything.” Julie gives him a nervous smile. “I just found all these long black hairs when I cleaned your drain out. That’s why your shower was flooding.”

“I see.” 

All he can think is, Kay didn’t shower here, when she stayed. 

Miles is so far beyond disturbed that he can’t express any of it. He had noticed it was taking longer than normal for the shower to drain, and had been avoiding cleaning it out himself, but he didn’t think the cause would be something so disturbing. He says, “Thank you for bringing that to my attention. I’ll have to order one of those.” He clears his throat. “What are they called?”

“I think they’re called hair catchers. You can get ‘em online.” Julie gives him one last anxious smile, and she then bids him goodbye and flees. 

Maybe his face looked a little scary. Miles cannot find the presence of mind to care--he’s about to have a full-blown panic attack.

The weird occurrences around his apartment--the toaster, the water bill, and now this-- have added up to the point that Miles has a right to tell someone else about his predicament. He cannot call Wright without this spinning out of control; considering the way Wright operates, he’ll find a way to get Miles to admit that Miles called him in his sleep a few nights ago. Franziska, the last time Miles checked, is outside of the country--but she’s worth a try anyway.

A better contact occurs to Miles only after he texts Franziska, “Do you happen to be in Los Angeles right now?” There is one person who Miles trusts to have informed opinions on security matters, and she’s even seen Miles in an emotional state like this before. Though Miles doesn’t hold any memory-loss events against her, Kay has hinted that she owes Miles a favor.

He doesn’t let himself overthink it. Franziska has already responded with some urgent question marks and an over-concerned, “What’s the matter with you?” but Miles ignores those messages for now and texts Kay instead.

“Do you have a few minutes to lend me your thief expertise today?” he types, but then gets distracted before he can send it because his phone screen darkens. It’s not Kay who’s calling him, unfortunately. 

“Franziska,” Miles greets her, though he’s still too rattled to really pull it off with any indifference. “Good morning.”

“What’s going on?” Franziska demands.

Miles clears his throat. He clears it again. Every shadow in his kitchen and his living room seems to stretch, enough to hide a burglar in. It’s midday and yet Miles cringes as though he was still eight years old and afraid of the dark.

“Miles Edgeworth,” his sister says, sounding furious. More furious than normal, anyway. “What is the matter?”

“Someone,” Miles starts to say. He starts over. “Someone’s been. In my home. They’ve been…”

“What?”

“Can you…?” Miles doesn’t know what he needs. His chest feels so tight.

“Start at the beginning,” Franziska says. Her tone has flipped one-eighty, going from irritated to even-toned and authoritative. It helps, knowing she can take the reins while Miles remembers how to catch his breath. 

Haltingly, Miles briefs her. He starts from the sleeping pills and works forward, telling her clearly and honestly that he doesn’t know how much of the missing food can actually be attributed to him. She listens while he recounts the toaster incident, and she doesn’t speak until after he’s told her about the water bill and the hair in the drain.

“I see,” is all Franziska says, once he’s completed his explanation.

The two words make Miles feel like a complete and utter buffoon. His face is painfully warm. “Forget I brought it up,” Miles says. “I shouldn’t have overreacted.”

“Would you get a hold of yourself?” Franziska hisses at him. “I was only taking a moment to get my thoughts in order. As it so happens, I am in the Japanese consulate in Los Angeles today. I can be at your home within the hour. Is that what you want?”

Miles’s pride won’t let him ask for such a thing. He doesn’t answer.

“An opinion from an internationally renowned investigator will only help you,” Franziska informs him. He can imagine her finger wagging condescendingly. “You need an outside perspective. The only non-circumstantial evidence you have is the hair, correct?”

“That’s correct,” Miles manages to say. “Though, I think the hair was thrown away by the housekeeper.”

“Hmph. Well, I’ll get to the bottom of this. Same address as last time?”

“It’s…yes,” Miles says. He drops his face into his free palm, some of his paranoia fading now that he knows he won’t be alone much longer. He mutters, “Thank you.”

“Think nothing of it,” Franziska tells him tersely. It may be wishful thinking, but she sounds just as uncomfortable with the situation as Miles does.

Franziska arrives thirty-four minutes later. Miles buzzes her in, and she arrives at his door two minutes after that with two white to-go cups from a cafe in her hand.

“The ambassador wouldn’t let me leave without bringing you this,” Franziska says, thrusting a cup into Miles’s hands. “It’s tea, don’t have a fit.”

Miles chooses not to point out that she had infinite opportunities to abandon the cup between the consulate and his apartment. He accepts the cup and by extension the soothing warmth between his palms. “Thank you, Franziska,” he says quietly.

She shuts the door behind her and gives him a dispassionate once-over. “You look like you haven’t slept in a year.”

Miles gives an embarrassed grimace. For all of the extra sleep he’s been getting, he feels a thousand times worse when he doesn’t get it. Franziska, for her part, looks healthier. Over the past few years, she’s come into her own, and the growing pains of her Interpol role appear to have subsided. 

It’s obvious that her stress level has subsided--there’s actual substance to her, now. She’s no longer a pale, sharp shadow. There’s actual color to her face, and Miles wouldn’t be surprised if her iron levels were actually adequate these days.

Despite the constant pace of her flights around the world, the bags under Franziska’s eyes are minimal, and her hair appears well-conditioned, not attacked by dry shampoo in the past day or so. Miles wishes he could emerge from international travel looking half as put-together.

“You look well,” Miles tells her, meaning it genuinely. “How long have you been in town?”

Having finished the process of taking her shoes off, Franziska checks her watch. “About eight hours.” She wavers, then sets her scowl in place again. It’s endearing that small talk still makes her antsy and shy. “I’m not here to make a social call. I’ll have a look around. Don’t get in my way.”

“Thank you,” Miles says, even more quietly than before. Franziska gives him a curt nod before stalking towards his hallway.

Though the process of asking for help was mortifying, Miles feels better now that someone is here with him. Just as Kay made the apartment into a real living space, Franziska’s rattling around keeps Miles from jumping at shadows. 

The tea that Franziska brought for him is a mediocre green blend, and too sweet. Miles can’t fathom enjoying anything else right now, given that the tea is accompanied by his mental image of the very polite Japanese ambassador staring Franziska down until she accepted a drink for her wayward brother.

He eventually follows her down the hall, curious about her investigation. 

Franziska has entered the guest room, and is crouched down by the window. Miles asks, “How’s it going?” and she only jumps a little bit.

“Hmm,” Franziska says, “there isn’t much to go on, given that you let your cleaning woman throw away any evidence.”

Miles winces. 

Franziska straightens and points to the open closet door. “Were you the one who removed that mesh from your window?”

Miles leans over to get a look. The mesh screen is, indeed, sitting uselessly in his closet. With a thrill of fear, he says, “No, I didn’t touch it.” He amends, “Whilst awake, I didn’t touch it.”

“Curiouser and curiouser.” Franziska goes over to his window and flicks the latch. It swings uselessly, showing Miles that it isn’t holding much of anything shut. There’s no fire escape outside of his window, and he’s on the twelfth story. It’s unlikely that anyone could have gotten in or out, without being noticed. “I find it hard to believe that someone would go all to this trouble merely to rob you, and then not actually take anything.”

“Did you find any fingerprints?” Miles asks, feeling more and more like a hairy ghost is haunting his apartment. The room smells like fingerprinting powder, and Franziska still has the puffball brush in her hand.

“No, it seems that those have all been wiped away.” Franziska doesn’t give him any false hope, at least. “Show me to the bathroom. There may be something residual there.”

Miles does as he’s told. As they walk the four steps down the hall, Franziska feels the need to comment, “The interior design choices you’ve made are…uninspiring.”

“Thank you.” 

“Are you often here?”

“Not often at all.”

“Hmph.”

Miles opens the bathroom door and goes in first. Franziska tells him, “Check the drain. There may be some hair left behind.”

Miles blanches. He steps back, reflexively, horrified at the concept of putting his fingers anywhere near there.

“Um Gottes willen,” Franziska mutters, exasperated by him. She takes her glove off, then crouches down and reaches in with bare fingers-- Miles stifles a gag--where she wrenches a few residual strands of long black hair out of the drain. The hair goes into a plastic evidence bag she’s pulled from her pocket. The act of her peeling the wet hair off of her fingers makes Miles dry-heave over the sink.

“Miles Edgeworth,” Franziska chides him, “you will stop acting like a child this instant.” 

“Eurck,” Miles says, and keeps his eyes averted until he can be certain the evidence bag has been tucked away. When the coast is clear, he dabs at his nervous sweat with a handkerchief and says, “You seem to…be used to such things.”

“Yes, well, it’s not difficult.” Franziska nonetheless preens. She’s always delighted to find something she’s better than Miles at. She elaborates absentmindedly, “Maya Fey’s hair is of a similar length.”

“I see,” Miles says. He doesn’t, really, until a few seconds later when Franziska reddens, with her eyes fixed on the glove that she’s failing to put back onto her hand. Miles lets out a short, incredulous laugh. “You and Miss Fey have been getting along, then--?”

“Shut your foolish mouth,” Franziska snaps at him, producing her whip from the pocket of her coat. Miles puts his hands up in surrender. “I will not discuss such things with you.”

“You’re the one who brought it up-- nrgh!” 

Franziska has snapped her whip in the air, three inches from Miles’s elbow. “That was my final warning,” she promises him. “I will have this sample analyzed. Hair analysis is often inconclusive, but I will keep you updated should anything come up.”

Miles feels better, though the problem of the mystery person still rattles around his head. “Thank you.”

“In the meantime,” she says, “I would advise you to change your locks, though I suppose your property manager will be the one who can take care of such things. I’m going to speak to them about security footage. Would you like to come?”

Miles nods sheepishly. Franziska loves to wield authority, but the last time it was over something so basic, Miles was probably twelve and she was lecturing him about not absentmindedly stepping out in to the bicycle lane when they crossed the street in Munich.

At least Franziska doesn’t take his hand this time. She merely waits for Miles to lock up his apartment, and the two of them take the stairs together in companionable silence.

Miles explains the situation in the leasing office. Franziska flashes her badge and convinces the woman at the front desk to let her review security footage for the last week, while Miles fills out the form he has to fill out to get a locksmith to replace the lock on his apartment door (they tell him sheepishly that their locksmith doesn’t work weekends, so it’ll be Monday by the time someone shows up). He’s just finished with that when the Criminal Affairs Records department calls him to tell him the record room is available for him to use.

Franziska hears his half of the phone call, and looks up from the computer monitor she’s commandeered when he’s hung up with them. “I’ll be in touch if I find anything,” she tells him. 

“Thank you, Franziska,” he says. She dismisses him with a flick of her hand, and with the ghost of a smile that she unsuccessfully hides by ducking her chin a moment too late.

The case files that he picks up provide a welcome distraction from waiting for Franziska to call him. Miles holes up in his office with them and constructs the better part of an outline for the speech he’ll have to give next month at a statewide conference.

On weekends, he occasionally gets the building to himself--particularly in the evenings, when most normal people have social gatherings to attend. It isn’t a lucky week for Miles, though--there are people rattling around in the hallway, as well as a maintenance team drilling something on the floor above him.

It’s an hour before Franziska calls him with an update.

“Are you alone?” she asks.

Miles looks around his empty office, as though there’s any likelihood that he wouldn’t be. “Yes.”

“I only have a moment, so listen carefully. The hair analysis is submitted, but results will take three weeks to come back.”

“That…is longer than I expected.”

“Yes, well…anyway.” Franziska clears her throat and blatantly changes the subject. “The camera in your hallway did not pick up any unknown entrants to your apartment.”

“What!?” Miles asks.

“Don’t make me repeat myself.” There are voices on the other end of her call, the bustling of a public place like a restaurant or a park. She’s walking briskly, by the sounds of wind battering her phone’s receiver. “As unlikely as it seems, the individual could have found another way in. Regardless, I don’t think they mean you any harm.”

“Excuse me?” Miles asks. “You’re suggesting I just…let them continue this behavior?”

“Well, you’re hardly in your apartment as it is,” Franziska says. It’s very, very difficult to tell if she’s joking or not. “Let me be clear, Miles Edgeworth: you are not in any danger.”

“You think I’m delusional,” Miles says, feeling rather numb all of a sudden.

“Do not put words in my mouth!” she snaps. “Don’t you trust my judgment?”

“Do I what?” 

“It’s a simple yes or no that I’m looking for.”

“I…” Miles is so tired. “I suppose so.”

“Hmph. I would prefer a little more conviction, but I’ll take what I can get from spineless fools such as yourself.” Franziska is out of breath. Miles can’t fathom as to why she would be speedwalking anywhere. In Franziska’s view, the world should know to wait for her, until whatever time she arrives. “I know that you are not in any danger. Go back to your home, and remain there until noon tomorrow.”

“What--?”

“Do as I say,” Franziska hisses into the phone, “and do not inform anyone what you are doing.” Then her voice lightens, and she says in a light, casual tone, “That is all I have to say to you.” In the background, a warm raised voice blurs into incoherence due to the poor call quality. Miles still recognizes the speaker.

“Is that Miss Fey?” Miles cannot believe he’s being brushed off for his sister to go on a date. 

“Have sweet dreams of sugarplums, little brother,” Franziska coos, as though this will give Maya Fey the impression that Franziska is outright affectionate to anyone in her life. “Tschüss.”

“Franziska--!” Miles tries to shout at her, but she’s already hung up on him.

He bangs his cell phone down onto his desk with renewed frustration. Franziska always has to have the last word, and she always has to be cryptic about her intentions. Miles doesn’t understand how she could have been so strangely understanding of his plight earlier, but changed her mind in the intervening hours.

It must have been something about the security footage. While he’s willing to believe that she lied about the hair analysis timeline, it would take longer than a few hours to get the results and match those with someone in the database. Nobody unknown had come through his front door, Franziska said, which implied that there was in fact a camera that monitored Miles’s front door, with comprehensive-enough footage that she could rule that entry out.

Another way in… surely she didn’t mean the window. 

Miles puts his coat on and begins to gather his things, knowing he is too keyed-up to get actual work done. He is not going to go back to his apartment, just because Franziska told him to--even if she invoked the idea of implicit trust, which she rarely does. If he gets murdered with an ax in his sleep, it’ll be Franziska’s fault, and she will live with that for the rest of her days. 

Also, Miles really, really would prefer not to be murdered with an ax.

The first order of business when he gets to his hotel is to pick up the heavy doorstop and go through each nook and cranny of the place, making sure there are no monsters in the closet or under the bed. When nothing appears or jumps out at him, he begrudgingly returns the doorstop to its spot on the floor and accepts that he is, for now, safe. 

There’s a lock on the door, along with a security chain connecting the door to its frame. As far as he’s been able to ascertain, there are also no doors that could connect this suite to its neighbors.

To keep his mind occupied, Miles wastes time deliberating over the room service options. He even orders some wine. The food and drink come up by seven, and he takes them carefully before locking himself firmly back into his hotel room.

Miles changes into his sleeping clothes already, having no desire to move from this room until the sun is up again. Then he settles on the immaculate white bed and tempts fate by pouring himself wine, and then more wine.

In contrast to the rate at which he’s drinking, he only pushes his dinner around his plate. He gets tired of taking tiny sips of soup and gives up and puts the leftovers into the tiny fridge, he moves to the stubby couch instead where he can keep an eye on the door and the window at the same time, in case of ax murderer.

Miles shivers. He drinks more wine. Alone and rather vulnerable for it, Miles’s mind wanders.

Even a few months ago, he doesn’t think he would have been able to label this feeling as loneliness. Until he became acquainted with the emotion’s opposite, Miles thought that the hollow melancholy feeling was his default state, something he would carry with him to his death. It is as he feared--the more he chases the feeling away by imposing on people like Wright, like Franziska, the more that Miles is unable to handle it while he is alone.

He turns on the TV, as though the colorful sounds can stand in for a conversational partner. Reruns of the stupid program Kay showed him are on, and he misses her. Franziska told Miles not to talk to anyone about his predicament, so when Miles sees the text he never sent to Kay regarding apartment security, he deletes his words and starts over.

“How was your Saturday? I hope you are well. Best, Miles Edgeworth,” he types to her.

She responds within the minute with a prompt yet incoherent message: “itwas shrimply divine.not beating the asleep on saturday allegations but slay the vee”.

Miles questions, even though he’s not sure he wants to hear her explanation, “Slay the vee?”

“its french. gtg sry i cant say more rn .”

Miles chuckles aloud. He puts his phone down for a moment and laughs again, a snorting and half-muffled fit that almost sends him to tears, and he then picks his phone up and doesn’t tell her she means “c’est la vie.” Instead, he says, “Thank you for teaching me this,” which she doesn’t respond to. He then googles what “gtg” means and deduces that she’s busy. 

The text from Kay warms him for a few minutes, but it’s a quarter-strength nicotine patch when he needs the emotional equivalent of an entire pack of cigarettes. Hotel rooms are even lonelier than his own apartment, which Miles has tested several hundred times over.

After a breezy mental calculation--eight in the evening plus fifteen hours--Miles decides that eleven in the morning is a socially acceptable time to call someone on a Sunday. He dials the number before he can think better of it. 

(And before he can remind himself that he isn’t the type of person who has the right to bother people like this all the time, just because they’re kind enough to let him do so.)

“This is a pleasant surprise,” says a voice at the other end of the call, which almost makes Miles hang up right then. Lang sounds all too pleased with himself. “A wakeup call, just for me?”

Miles is nothing if not a creature of habit--just as Wright’s just-woke-up voice had sent Miles into a state, Lang’s voice is doing something similar. It’s hoarse from the aftermath of whatever Saturday night plans Lang has just slept off, and--

Miles needs to get a goddamn grip on himself.

“Did I wake you?” Miles asks. He’s searching for reasons to backpedal, before he makes bad wine-based decisions. “It’s rather late in the day for that.”

“I’m not allowed a restful morning?” Lang asks. “I seem to recall that you yourself enjoy a lie-in--”

“Alright,” Miles cuts him off, already horribly embarrassed. 

“It’s what Sundays are meant for,” Lang says, after he’s done laughing his over-loud laugh at Miles’s expense. “Don’t worry, I’ll be back at the grindstone soon.”

Miles shamelessly curls himself closer to his phone, and sets his glass of wine down to refill it. “Did you work late?”

“Horribly late,” Lang confirms. “No rest for the wicked.”

“No rest? Only sleeping in until noon?”

Lang snorts. “It's not noon yet.”

“If I hadn’t so kindly intervened, maybe you would have progressed there.”

“Your pestering me is an act of kindness, is what you’re claiming.”

“Try to contain your gratitude,” Miles says. 

It’s not an unkind turn to the conversation, but it’s definitely a shift of some kind when Lang stops their back-and-forth to ask, “Why did you call me?”

Miles stops, reorients himself. He casts about for an excuse that isn’t I am so lonely that it hurts every joint in my body. Mentioning his departure from his apartment is off the table, too--for all that Franziska dismissed Miles’s concerns, she was adamant that he not tell anyone about his problems. Whether this is her protecting him from spewing his hallucinated problems to professional contacts or a strategy of hers to solve the mystery, it matters not. 

Miles steers clear of the topic altogether and so what he lands on is rather pathetic: “It’s been a while since we caught up.” The words are too honest. He winces. He sets his glass down. “If you’re truly busy, though, I can call another time. In fact, yes, let’s reschedule, for when you’re more awake--”

“Not so fast,” Lang says, though his tone is lower than before. Miles shivers. He’s definitely had too much wine. “We only talked a few days ago, pretty boy. Did you miss me that much?”

Miles cannot be called such things on a Saturday night. It makes him into a disaster of a person, flushed face and tingling fingertips and all. “Ah--you wish that was the case, don’t you?” Miles asks, after he recovers. He’s a split-second too late to really sell it. “I merely wanted to follow up on your email. I thought you’d be hard at work.”

“A likely story,” Lang says. Miles wonders if the other man is still in bed, underneath the covers. “If you’re going to lie to me, at least do it with some passion behind it.”

“I’m not lying.”

“I’m sure that you’re very on-task, and hard at work. What was my email about?”

“Er,” Miles says, lost in the feeling of the flush across his cheeks. He should drink some water to counteract this.

“It’s as I feared,” Lang says with some dramatic melancholy. “The prosecutor once again turns to lies and deceit, rather than share his innermost desires.”

“Nrhgh-- You--I’m--I don’t have innermost desires,” Miles sputters.

Lang’s laugh rings out on the other end of the call again. “Alright, I’ll play. Want to hear my lie?”

He’s too far into this to speak with hesitation. Miles asks, eager like he’s at one of the fabled college parties he never went to, “What?”

“My lie is…” Lang pauses, his sharp-toothed grin audible as he makes Miles wait for the rest of his sentence: “I’m not at all hard right now.”

In the morning, with only a slight headache, Miles re-packs his bag and checks out from the hotel. 

With his new, well-rested state of mind, Miles is embarrassed about many of the previous night’s actions, but he decides to try something new and doesn’t berate himself for shortcomings. Those shortcomings being: mixing zolpidem with alcohol; wasting money on a last-minute hotel booking instead of trusting his sister; not charging his phone overnight; and having impulsive phone sex with a colleague halfway across the globe.

…Now that he’s listing them out, there are more than he thought. This “positive inner dialogue” thing must be easier for people who make good decisions, who care for themselves in normal ways.

(Other than aforementioned mistakes, Miles did do some things right. After he hung up the phone, Miles’s body sought out what it needed, which was food and a glass of water and a thorough scrubbing. He took a proper shower and even ate more of his dinner in the wake of his dopamine boost. The final creature comfort--sleep--came soon thereafter; he ensured that by taking the Ambien he grabbed on his rush out of his apartment.)

Miles shuts his car door with more force than is necessary, then redirects his focus to driving through Sunday morning traffic.

It’s ten in the morning when he gets back to his apartment. Armed with some solid hours of sleep and also a kitchen knife, Miles goes through his apartment in the same way that he secured the hotel room last night. 

No threat presents itself. As far as he can tell, nothing has been disturbed since he was last here--though, if he’s invented the intruder wholecloth, his absence last night explains that much.

Marginally reassured, Miles puts the knife back. He unpacks his bag, and then takes the time to properly shave his face.

All things considered, he’s lucky he doesn’t have the razor pressed to his jugular when a key sounds in the lock of his front door. Had the timing been just a little off, Miles could have slit his own throat. 

As it is, he’s midway through splashing his face to rinse it off when he hears it. His hand shoots out to shut the water off, as quick as he can go. Slowly, silently, he lifts a small towel to pat his face dry, and then eases the bathroom door open as someone down the hall comes into his home.

Miles hears footsteps. They’re not shy--but why would they be? At this point, based on the water bill, this person has spent more collective time in this apartment than Miles has. 

Keys jangle, then are silenced. Probably going into a pocket. A heavy thud sounds near the door, perhaps a bag dropping. The footsteps come nearer, and Miles sees the shadow of the person nearing him.

His overactive nerves make him step out a moment too early to catch them. 

Miles’s appearance rightfully startles them. At the first sign of Miles, they move so fast that they’re a blur, and they bolt past and slam through the guest room door. Miles only sees dark sweats and a hoodie and socked feet before the door rebounds off the wall behind it and swings back closed to cut off his sightline.

He does what he probably shouldn’t--he runs after them.

With his instincts being what they were, any assassin could just hold a knife straight out and Miles would do all the murdering for them as he ran into it. 

Thankfully, today, it’s not a knife he finds, but rather, the intruder with one of their legs sticking out his guest room window, halfway through an escape.

“You! Stop right there!” Miles shouts. The door bangs against the wall again and bounces back to hit him in the funny bone.

The intruder boosts themselves up and starts trying to slither over the windowsill, despite the fact that they are twelve stories above the ground. 

Miles leaps forward and grabs their arm, wrenching them back before they can fall to their death. As they hop on one foot and fail to get their balance, Miles takes hold of the back of the intruder’s hood and wrenches it off of their head.

They do, as the shower drain suggested, have extremely long black hair, which is gathered into a ponytail high on their head. They also have a very sheepish expression on their face as they cringe away from Miles’s dawning realization.

“Kay?” Miles thunders.

Kay gets her other leg back off of the window sill and onto firm ground. Then, all she has to say for herself is “Ahaha, heyyy.”

Miles’s brain has stopped all function. He stares uncomprehendingly at her face for upwards of ten seconds before he stutters, “Wh--You-- Kay Faraday.”

“That’s my name, don’t wear it out,” Kay says, though her normally brash voice is thin and unsteady. She leans back, trying to pull free from Miles’s hand clamped around her bicep. Miles doesn’t let her go anywhere, lest she try to spring out of his window again and fall to her death.

“What are you doing here?” Miles demands.

“I’m--is that supposed to be a trick question?” Kay asks. She tugs again, but he doesn’t release her. “I’m just, you know, visiting.”

“Visiting?” Miles asks. “And-and---and, that requires you breaking and entering?”

“It’s not breaking and entering!” She scrabbles at a pocket in her sweats and pulls out a couple of keys on a ring. Kay presents the keys like they’re going to make Miles less perturbed. 

Miles’s voice keeps rising--he isn’t in control of it anymore. “You stole my apartment key?!”

“No, of course not,” Kay gasps, scandalized. “I have a copy of your apartment key. And I didn’t break anything.” 

“You broke my toaster,” Miles says, as he puts the clues together. 

“The toaster and I may have had a difference in opinion,” Kay concedes. “Sorry.” She looks from Miles’s face to his hand on her arm and says more desperately, “I won’t run. I promise.”

Miles swallows, still failing to get his bearings. He manages to make his hand unclench, and watches with uncomfortable guilt as Kay scoots several feet back and plasters her back to the wall opposite him, next to the open window.

With this extra breathing room established, Miles sinks down onto the edge of the guest bed. He presses one palm to his chest like that’ll help the pulse bruising the inside of his ribs.

“Why are you here?” Kay asks him.

Miles’s look must be severe, because Kay flinches at the sight of it. Feeling guiltier by the second, Miles tries to soften his face by taking another deep breath. “What do you mean, why am I here? This is my home.”

“Well, yeah, but you’re barely ever here.” Kay worries the hem of her sweatshirt between her hands. It says LAPD CRIMINAL AFFAIRS on the front, and it’s several sizes too big. The garment probably originated with Badd or Gumshoe, though Miles supposes that doesn’t matter at the moment. “Um, even on weekends, you know? You’re not around. Much. And Franziska said--”

She shuts her mouth too late, slamming her palm over her mouth.

“Franziska?” Miles breathes, though his low volume does nothing to hide his fury.

“Wait, no no no,” Kay hurries to say, waving both of her hands, flapping her fingers. “Nuh-uh, no, she didn’t say anything.”

It’s sweet that she wants to keep Franziska out of this, but it’s too late. Miles has already heard her.

Franziska was interested in investigating the burglary(?) until she saw the security footage, after which she reported that nobody went into Miles’s apartment while he wasn’t there.

Ah. No, she said nobody unknown went into his apartment while he wasn’t there. 

God damn it. 

This has been choreographed from the start. Franziska knew that Miles wasn’t in any danger, and yet she tried to make him spend a terrified night of anticipation in this apartment. It’s likely that Maya Fey heard all the details of this plot and giggled the whole time, and by extension, Phoenix Wright will know about this by tomorrow morning at the latest.

Miles takes off his glasses and pinches the bridge of his nose, seeking to rub out the indents his frames always leave there. “How did you get a copy of my apartment key?”

Hesitant, perhaps not sure if he’s done being angry, Kay says, “I kinda…borrowed your keys and made a copy. And. Um, then Sebby--I mean, Eustace gave them back to you.”

Miles remembers that bewildering exchange. It was a huge oversight on his part not to investigate further. Kay had assumed correctly, if she counted on Eustace irritating Miles out of asking follow-up questions.

“Basically I just was gonna crash here to sleep once while you were at work, but I guess I just got used to it after a couple days?” Kay pats at her cheeks with her hands, betraying her embarrassment. “And, uh, you had so many groceries that you weren’t eating, so...”

Now that Miles has stopped seeing red, he takes a better look at Kay. She has deep circles under her eyes. Her hair is unbrushed, even though it’s been banished to its customary ponytail. Miles remembers her split ends from the last time he saw her, and remembers that he never asked her where she goes when she’s not following him around.

The guiding voice in the back of his head--that man--tells him to turn his thinking around.

Over the past few chaotic minutes, Miles has been operating on the assumption that Kay lied about mis-booking a motel in order to get close enough to steal Miles’s keys. But what if gaslighting Miles into shallow insanity hadn’t been the sole reason she did all that? After all, Miles doesn’t know where Kay would have gotten the funds for a motel in the first place.

Miles puts his glasses back on and slowly asks, “Where do you live?”

Kay’s eyes catch a glint of light from the open window, new tears beading on her lash line. “Um,” she says. “Well, I…” She stubbornly forces her old smile onto her face. “Aw, are you worried about me? I’m just between places right now. The whole…um, staying with family thing didn’t work out, so I’m spreading my wings.”

“When did it stop working out?” Miles asks.

“...Six months ago.” Kay sets her jaw, and her smile strengthens. The wavering that was only barely present in the first place is now fully banished. Kay insists, “Don’t worry! It was always gonna be like that. I’m on the move so much, it doesn’t work for me to have a spot like that anyway. And--I didn’t mean for this to be…I didn’t mean to rely on it so much. You can have the key back, okay? I’ll get out of your hair if you promise not to arrest me.”

“Kay,” Miles says.

“I’ve got a couple of jobs lined up soon. So, I only needed your place for a couple weeks. And you have so many Pop-Tarts that you never touched, so I figured…” Kay is on the move again, thankfully not springing out the window, but instead inching around the perimeter of the room to get back to the door behind Miles. “I can pay you back for the toaster, and for some of the food, but it’ll be a couple weeks before I can afford it. And here’s your key!” She holds it out. “I won’t ever do it again!”

“Kay,” Miles says, more emphatically.

Finally, she stops talking, and shuts her mouth with a click of teeth. The keys dangle on their little silver ring in the air between them.

“You can keep it,” Miles tells her. He wishes he could present brilliant smiles at times like this, like Kay and that man seem to be able to do so effortlessly. Miles’s smile is still a work in progress, even when he’s not feeling so many overwhelming feelings all at once. Still, he tries. He stands back up and he tries. “I’m just relieved that I haven’t completely lost my mind.”

Kay’s eyes are wide. She looks from his face, to the keys, to the open window, then back to his face. “...What?”

“I thought I’d been sleepwalking,” Miles says. “I confess, I’m still not certain how I convinced myself I’d broken the toaster without waking up.”

She’s still just staring at him.

Miles hasn’t been a very good friend to Kay. All he’s given are a couple of check-in texts, and negligence as to her safety and well-being, and unwitting lodging in his home. He slowly, uncomfortably extends a hand for her to shake.

Kay says, “Uh, Mr. Edgeworth…?”

“I’m not angry,” Miles tells her. He can--and will--be angry with Franziska later. “Would you like to be my roommate?”

Slowly, Kay acknowledges the hand extended to her with a blank look. Then, before Miles can register her movement, she’s leapt forward and flung her arms around his neck with bone-crushing force.

“Nrgk!” Miles says. He’s yanked into an uncomfortable lean, Kay dragging him down to her height.

“Are you serious?” Kay asks. She only squeezes tighter. “You--I mean, if you’re pissed at me, it’s okay! I didn’t think--”

“I’m not angry.” Miles slowly raises his hand to pat her back, between her shoulder blades. She’s too thin. “...Not that angry.”

Kay snorts. It’s a watery sound. 

Oh, god. Miles didn’t mean to upset her. He keeps patting her back, feeling completely useless while her back begins to shudder. “It’s alright,” he says, “it’s all alright.” 

He’ll pry more into the details of Kay’s family later, when he can extract information from her without feeling guilty about her emotional state. She’s always wandered about with too little supervision. Miles always assumed that, given how brilliant and wonderful the child is, someone would be upset if she didn’t come home at the end of her wanderings.

It’s a crime that that isn’t the case. If Miles has to be that person, so be it.

“Ugh, sorry,” Kay says, and releases him abruptly enough that he gets a dizzying rush of fresh oxygen. She reels back and scrubs her eyes with her too-long sleeves. “Do you…well, okay. Whew. Okay. Got it. No problem.”

“It’s alright,” Miles says, feeling unbearably tender at the sight of her self-directed encouragement.

Kay gives him a teary-eyed version of her normal grin, and then reorients herself with impressive nerves of steel--not that Miles expects less from her. “If you need to think about this a little bit more, that’s okay. Don’t rush into anything.”

“What could you mean?”

“What could you mean?” Kay echoes back at him, in an unfortunately accurate portrayal of Miles. She snickers at the look on his face. “I meant that it’s okay if you decide this doesn’t work, and you want me to leave.”

Miles frowns so deeply he fears his face may get stuck in the expression. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

Kay blinks.

“You’re the most qualified individual to occupy this room going forward,” Miles tells her sternly. “Besides, anything is better than thinking some kind of…raccoon has found a home in my linen closet.”

“A raccoon that breaks your toaster with a meat tenderizer?” Kay cackles. Miles is relieved, when the sad cast to her expression fades. “If you’re sure. Then, yes, I accept.” She pushes her hand out, and Miles thinks she’s going to fulfill her half of the unreciprocated handshake, but only her pinky finger is extended.

Miles remembers the protocol, even though he hasn’t participated since he was nine. He links her pinky with his own. She coils her finger tight, refusing to let him go for a second.

She stares deep into his soul with sudden solemnity. “You don’t have to do this for me.”

Miles is at a loss for words for a moment. When he recovers, he says, “You are very dear to me, Kay Faraday.”

Kay trusts him. He can sense it, based on the reverence of the pinky promise and also by the way her eyes mist up again.

“This space is yours until you no longer want it, and not a moment sooner.”

“Thanks,” she says, her voice much smaller.

Miles wiggles their joined hands together a bit, then relaxes his grip and Kay finally follows suit. She hugs him again, and Miles handles this one a bit better--he even circles his arms around her fully in return and accepts her sharp chin digging into his shoulder with grace.

When the moment has passed and she’s let go of him again, Miles processes some of Kay’s earlier words and frowns and says, “You broke my toaster with a meat tenderizer?”

Kay sheepishly scratches the back of her neck. “Uh, I already said sorry for that, so you can’t get mad again. Double jeopardy.”

“Double jeopardy has no jurisdiction in my home.”

“It’s my home too, you said! I get to make some of the rules!”

“If the rules weren’t in effect when the crime occurred, then--”

“Pbbttt.” Kay blows a raspberry at him. “Nerd.”

“That is not a proper defense in a court of law.”

“Nerd!” Kay says louder, cupping her hands around her mouth. “No lawyers allowed in here! Get out of my room!”

Miles sputters. He makes a fuss about it but he goes to leave anyway, because something about the look on Kay’s face tells him that she hasn’t had the luxury of banishing someone from her own personal living space in a long time, if ever.

She catches his arm as he turns around to go. Miles stops and looks back.

“What made you call Ms. von Karma for help?” Kay asks. “What gave me away?”

It’s suddenly hard not to smile. “Your hair clogged the shower drain.”

Kay groans and covers her face. 

“Other than that, you were a good thief. A Great one, even.”

“Alright, funny guy,” Kay grumbles. She lets go of him and shoves him towards the door. “Har har.”

Franziska calls him that afternoon.

Kay’s asleep--she’s let him know that the lynchpin of her serial-burglary plot was sleeping during the day and then absconding with food before Miles returned from the office. As such, her sleep schedule is nearly as disordered as his. Following their conversation. she quickly wilts and crashes into a nap.

Miles is, therefore, alone in his kitchen considering recipes for dinner when Franziska calls. He feels well within his rights to flick his phone open and greet her with an icy, “Franziska. A pleasure to hear from you.”

“I take it that I can dispose of this evidence bag, then?” Franziska says.

“You didn’t even submit it for testing?!”

“What would have been the point? I assumed you wouldn’t press charges on that poor girl.”

Miles has to admit that she’s right. He sighs a tortured sigh and puts his glasses down on the counter. “Tell me why you couldn’t have just informed me what you found on security footage.”

“I did more than enough to help you,” Franziska tells him. 

That’s the closest to a real answer that Miles will get from her. He has some sneaking suspicions as to her real motives---the leading theory being that Franziska has always had a soft spot for Kay, and yet Franziska also has strict standards about the investigations that are entrusted to her. 

Regardless of her help or lack thereof, things are alright. Miles will just have to find another way to get back at her. 

There’s nothing keeping him from starting on that now. “How did your date with Miss Fey go?”

“That’s such an inappropriate question,” Franziska blusters, immediately knocked off of her high horse. “You cannot even prove I went on a date with--with anyone!”

“Mmhm.”

“I’m far too busy for such frivolous things.”

“I’m sure.”

“I don’t need this insufferable smugness from you. See if I ever help you again, with anything. Goodbye.”

“Goodbye, Franziska.”

She hesitates. Then she tacks on, “Give Kay my best regards.”

“Naturally.”

Franziska hangs up with one last frustrated grumble. Miles rolls his eyes as he sets his phone back down. He has a dinner to prepare, and he wants it to be ready when Kay wakes up.

The change happens so gradually that even Miles doesn’t notice it until one day, he’s willingly packing up his things and leaving work at five-thirty because he actually wants to be at home when he said he would be. 

He didn’t even have a particularly hard day--he got to the office on time, and both of the Paynes were out sick. But it’s Wednesday, and that’s come to be his favorite evening of the week, and Miles’s brain is working against him today. He’d rather be at home than isolated in his office.

When he opens his door, his home smells faintly like cinnamon. Miles traces the smell to the kitchen, where he finds his roommate boosting Trucy Wright onto the counter.

“What’s up, Mr. Edgeworth,” Kay says. She’s still addressing him that way, after six months of living in the same home as him, and he can’t tell if she does it to make fun of him or not. 

Trucy twists around and waves at him, while Kay fixes her top hat on her head. “Hi, Uncle Edgeworth!” she says. “Aunt Kay said we can have dessert before dinner if we don’t tell anybody.”

“Trucy!” Kay whispers. 

“Sorry!” Trucy giggles and covers her mouth. “I didn’t know he counted.”

“Did you two bake something?” Miles asks. He’s still wary about Kay being left unsupervised around kitchen appliances, but the result seems to have been positive this time.

Kay wiggles her eyebrows and says, “Maybe…”

“It’s my three-quarters birthday!” Trucy tells him, beaming. “I’m a quarter to ten. Hold out your hand.”

With a fair amount of trepidation, Miles walks over to her and extends his hand. 

Trucy sweeps her hat off of her head, reaches into it, and then presents an unidentified sugar-coated brown ball of dough, which she dumps onto his palm. Then she stares at him, waiting for him to eat it.

Miles, feeling as though he’s being held at knifepoint, puts the object into his mouth and chews. Thankfully, it’s not disgusting. It’s just hyper-sweet, and filled with an icing-like substance that’s even sweeter.

“Did you make this?” Miles asks, covering his mouth.

Trucy keeps staring. She doesn’t want him to leave the room and spit out the chewed remains.

“It’s from Taco Bell,” Kay says. “Mr. Wright brought it over when he dropped her off.”

“I see,” Miles says. He swallows with difficulty. It’s been a while since he ate anything so sweet. 

Wright usually brings Trucy over around four, after Trucy’s gotten home from school, so that means that the food has been sitting in Trucy’s…pocket, or hat, or whatever for a couple of hours. Miles still smiles and refuses to make Trucy upset in his house, even as he faces the inevitability of food poisoning. “Thank you, Trucy. Happy…three-quarters birthday.”

“We were thinking pizza,” Kay says, smiling because she’s waited until Trucy was here to say such things.

“Yeah!” Trucy says. “Pizza!”

Kay’s still on Thief Sabbatical, so to fill just a little of her time, Miles had brokered a babysitting job that he himself pays her for. Trucy has started spending the night a couple nights a week, while Wright is at work. The other nights are covered by a rotating cast of other friends, spending the night at Wright’s instead. Miles doesn’t know how the others handle Trucy’s nutritional needs--he has particular concerns about Maya Fey’s eating habits--but Miles normally takes it upon himself to make sure Trucy eats something with lots of vegetables.

“That’s hardly a balanced meal,” Miles tries to argue.

“Come on, please?” Kay says. She clasps her hands together. “We have those frozen ones and they even have peppers and olives on them.”

“That’s vegetables!” Trucy chimes in.

“That’s vegetables,” Kay agrees, knowingly reinforcing Trucy’s poor grammar. This is only one of the obstacles Miles has encountered in trying to encourage bilingualism in Wright’s child.

The oven makes a series of beeping sounds. It’s been preheated.

“It seems that the decision has already been made,” Miles says, a traitorous smile softening his displeasure. 

Kay cheers. Trucy cheers too, seeing Kay excited. 

While Trucy helps tear the plastic off of the pizzas to put them in the oven, Miles unloads from his work day. He sets down his briefcase somewhere where Trucy won’t trip over it if she runs past, takes his overcoat off, and pats down the pockets to find the brochures that were forced on him earlier. The brochures go conspicuously on the kitchen island, where he knows Kay will snoop through them.

Miles goes through his fridge--messier by the day; Julie comes bi-weekly now--to find some baby carrots he set aside for Trucy’s visits. Even if she doesn’t eat them, he’ll feel better knowing he tried. While his head is stuck in there, Trucy slithers off the counter and expresses her intent to fetch something from Kay’s bedroom.

Kay, predictably, takes the opportunity to say, “What’re these?”

Miles stands straight, looking over the top of the fridge door. She’s waving the pamphlets at him.

“You can read,” he says. “Can you not?”

Kay wrinkles her nose, playfully annoyed. “You suck. Are you actually thinking about getting a service dog?”

“Ah,” Miles says. He clears his throat. “I was told I should consider the possibility.”

Miles still takes a sleep aid four times a week, but apparently it’s not ideal for it to be a long-term solution. The nights when he doesn’t take it are still terrible, and Kay has come home from her night job many times to hear Miles screaming.

She’s kind about it. Miles didn’t expect her not to be kind about it. He doesn’t want her to bear the brunt of these episodes, though, particularly the ones where he forgets where he is, that he exists, even that he has a body he’s supposed to be using. Even if Kay is good at such things, Miles didn’t move her in just so that she could boil water and poke him towards the couch and sit with him while she should be getting rest of her own.

When he told his primary care provider this in halting, embarrassed words, she thankfully didn’t revoke his Ambien privileges altogether. She gave him some pamphlets and a phone number to call to set up an information session.

The dog would also be invaluable for the episodes that Miles has when not at home. Which are…most of them. Miles doesn’t spend nearly as much time hiding under his desk and crying as he used to, but it’s not the rare occurrence he’d like it to be.

“You should!” Kay encourages him. 

“I may,” Miles admits. “I wanted to know if you were alright with it.”

“Of course I am!” Kay pumps her fist. “I love doggies. Trucy loves doggies too. Right, Trucy?”

Trucy, reappearing in the kitchen doorway, says, “Aw, YEAH!” at an earsplitting volume. “We can’t get one, though, ‘cause of our LAN lord.” 

“Landlord,” Kay whispers to her.

“Right, him.” Trucy is disinterested in the correction; she may not even hear the difference between the words. “He’s basically evil. Daddy said not to say that he’s a shithead.”

“T-Trucy Wright!” Miles chides her, while Kay doubles over in laughter that will only encourage Trucy to use such language in the future. Trucy’s dimpled smile remains unaffected by Miles’s blustering.

Kay and Trucy set themselves up on the couch, Kay egging on one of Trucy’s stories of the ups and downs of fourth grade. Miles makes himself tea, knowing that neither of the girls have interest in such a thing. 

He brings out the pizza when it’s done. On his way, his toe catches on Trucy’s backpack and he almost completely wipes out, but manages to keep his balance while Kay snickers at him from the couch. Miles ignores her and sets the pizza on the coffee table along with a couple of plates. He’s kidding himself if he thinks either of them will use a plate, or touch the baby carrots at all.

“Just in time!” Trucy says. She claps, and then slides off the couch and zooms over to her backpack. There, she drops to her knees with the exuberance of a youth with rubber bones and starts rummaging through the bag. “I have a surprise for you.”

“What kind of surprise?” Miles asks, with some trepidation. His new toaster hadn’t survived her last surprise.

Kay turns around on the couch to set her chin on the back, peering down at Trucy on the other side. “Is it doves?”

“It’s not doves!” Trucy huffs. She stands up and runs back around the couch to stand in front of both of them, something clutched behind her back. “Close your eyes and hold out your hands.”

Miles closes his eyes. He holds out the hand not holding his cup of tea. A small squishy object of indeterminate shape is placed into it.

“Okay you can open them.”

Miles does so. In his hand is a handmade magnet, a blue foam frame studded with foam star stickers surrounding a photo. The photo has been printed on plain printer paper, the toner running out and making half of the image appear green and red instead of full-color. The photo itself is of the day when Kay and Trucy conspired to get Miles and Wright to take them to Gatewater Land. The photo, taken mid-drop on the log flume, shows Miles staring blankly ahead, Wright in the midst of suffering a back spasm, Trucy screaming for her life, and Kay beaming like it’s the best day of her life.

It’s the least flattering photo of all time. Kay had taken Miles’s credit card and bought too many copies. 

Miles looks over and finds that Kay has a similar magnet, with just as much love put into it. Trucy is standing in front of them with her hands behind her back again, poorly-disguised nerves obvious in her focused gaze.

“This is amazing, Trucy,” Miles says, and means every word. He smiles. “Thank you.”

Trucy’s anxiety melts. She beams at him.

“I love this!” Kay cackles. “Mr. Edgeworth looks so stupid!”

Miles ignores Kay. He gets up and sticks the magnet to his fridge, front and center. It’s the only magnet with personality, and the only one that isn’t a souvenir from a city he barely remembers.

He returns to the couch. Against all odds, Trucy has actually picked up a plate. She’s holding it up near her nose to blow on the too-hot pizza. Kay’s admiring her magnet, held up above her head while she lies upside-down on the couch.

Miles takes a photo and texts it to Wright, hoping it will make the other man’s night easier. Then Miles settles in his corner of the couch and subjects himself to another week of pretending to care about Survivor. 

If consuming confusing television programming is the only catch in having such a wonderful home to return to, things aren’t so bad.