#alt title that i was too cowardly to use: gourd lake arrest speedrun [6:28] (WR)

[charlieknighte]

in media res

Miles Edgeworth & Dick Gumshoe

3,110 words

content warnings: implied off-screen gun violence, cop pov character (sorry)

Detective Gumshoe has been awake for sixteen hours straight. When he responds to a midnight noise complaint at Gourd Lake and finds Prosecutor Edgeworth holding a recently fired gun, drenched in lake water and demanding to be arrested—well, he has to genuinely worry that he may be hallucinating.

It’s been a long day. 

It seems like these graveyard shift patrols always fall to Detective Gumshoe, the least likely to protest and the most disposable in daytime investigations. He’s working overtime for the third time this week, and the battle to stay awake is a fierce fight. By the time he gets the call, he’s been awake for almost sixteen hours, and every bit of the piddling mental fortitude that he has left is being used to debate which dirt-cheap konbini he should stop at for a midnight meal when he finally gets to take a break. 

Unfortunately, there’s no time to reach a conclusion. There’s been a string of noise complaints around Gourd Lake, dispatch informs him. Shots fired, allegedly, but no one’s been able to confirm a disturbance. Could be teenagers playing with fireworks. Could be something far worse. He’s to scout around the lakeside, call for backup if necessary. He turns down his midnight talk radio to reply in affirmative, sighs deeply, changes lanes to turn off of the main road. 

It’s been a long night. He tries to keep a happy thought that he’ll be back in his car in thirty minutes’ time, confiscated fireworks in his glove compartment, his phone plotting a route to the nearest twenty-four hour store that sells Mr. Noodle.

At this time of night, there’s no need to turn the siren on. The small parking lot of the lake is dead empty, its gravel surface crunching loudly under his tires as he turns in. Even with his high beams on, the forest around the lot is dark in a way that LA’s light polluted streets never seem to be, and he has to squint and blink to adjust to the shadows. When he can finally make out shapes with reliability, he comes to the slow, dreadful realization that between the knee-high chunks of rock lining the end of the parking lot—presumably to discourage parkgoers from driving their cars directly into the lake—someone is standing at the edge of the gravel, eerily still. Looking directly at him.

Gumshoe has a sinking feeling that Mr. Noodle is no longer a priority tonight. 

He brings his squad car to a stop in the center of the lot, gripping his steering wheel, regretting every decision that wound him up in this B-movie horror protagonist scenario. The figure at the end of the lot doesn’t move. Gumshoe can’t stand the tension creeping into his shoulders anymore. He fishes his flashlight out of his glove compartment and opens his driver side door. He puts a hand on his holster as he steps out—more out of instinct than the belief that it’s necessary. He wants to stay optimistic here, despite the circumstances.

“LAPD!” he calls out as he walks the length of the lot. The air is humid and frigid to his Californian sensibilities, which is to say that it would be lightly cool to anyone else. “You alright, pal? You, uh—you call in the complaint?”

In response, the figure wordlessly tosses something into the gravel. It lands with a harsh noise. Before Gumshoe’s uneasiness can calcify into any real suspicion, they slowly raise their hands above their head. That wasn’t at all what he was expecting, but then again, nothing about this call has been. Fumbling, he turns on his flashlight and raises it, pointing it straight at the figure’s face.

It’s been a long night. That’s why he genuinely worries that he might be hallucinating when the beam of his flashlight illuminates Prosecutor Miles Edgeworth—drenched in water, bangs plastered to his face, shivering violently. He flinches visibly at the sudden light, blinking hard and grimacing.

In a panic, Gumshoe nearly considers clicking off the flashlight as if someone else will be standing there when he turns it back on, and the night will go back to normal. It makes sense for a moment, because this is a bad dream. It has to be.

No matter how hard he wishes it, the drowned ghost of Miles Edgeworth does not disappear. He looks as if he stepped straight out of a courtroom and into a lake, his cravat hanging limply at his neck, his shoulders hunched into the same woolen coat that Gumshoe saw him wearing as he left the office only hours earlier. Now that he's closer to him, Gumshoe can hear his breath, fast and sharp as a jackrabbit's. The blunt light reflected on his face makes his pale irises disappear almost entirely, turning his stare ghostly as his pupils contract. He takes a moment too long to react to Gumshoe’s presence, staring at him like he can see through him, but slowly his eyes focus on his face above the flashlight. His blank expression wrinkles. “Detective Gumshoe,” he says, distantly dismayed.

“Mr. Edgeworth,” Gumshoe says cautiously. His first instinct is to ask if he’s okay, to offer him his dry coat—but something holds him back. He’s trying very, very hard not to make any snap judgments, but dread is slowly and powerfully starting to seep into his stomach. “What are you… doing out here so late, sir?”

It’s a miserably stupid question, and Gumshoe does feel stupid, like he would be left standing and gaping if Edgeworth decided to take off in a sprint. Edgeworth doesn’t deign to answer him, looking somewhere in the general vicinity of Gumshoe’s face without meeting his eyes. Gumshoe tilts the light down to the gravel, hoping fervently to not find what he’s expecting. Deep down, he knows that he’s not going to be so lucky. A pistol lays in the gravel of the parking lot, wet black metal glinting dimly in the light. Still, he tries not to jump to conclusions, not about the gun, not about the dark, unidentifiable spatter at the cuff of Edgeworth’s pants. It could be mud. It could be anything. He slowly, unhappily pans the light back up to Edgeworth, who squints and blinks at the renewed assault of light but otherwise doesn’t move from his stiff, shaking position. Gumshoe tries to ask him something else, but everything he can think of dies in his mouth.

“Alright,” Edgeworth says finally, voice faint and shaking from the cold. “You took longer than you should have to arrive. I had a lot of time to think. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’ll be easier for everyone if you arrest me now.”

“Arrest you,” Gumshoe repeats. His mind is working more slowly than it should. He knows that there’s a very obvious connection to be made here, but—but he can’t bring himself to believe it.  “Why… why would I do that, sir?”

“On suspicion of murder,” Edgeworth says, not seeming any more perturbed about the idea than his baseline of distant, distraught shock. The brief panic and recognition that had flashed onto his face when he saw Gumshoe is far gone. Gumshoe’s heart sinks to the pit of his stomach like a stone. He’d hoped for fireworks, he remembers miserably. He really had.

“Murder? But no one’s been reported…” he begins to protest, and then thinks better than to contradict Miles Edgeworth of all people. 

“He will be, soon enough.” 

Gumshoe’s stomach turns at the thought of having to walk past this already nightmarish scene to find something worse. He wonders how long Edgeworth has been standing here, dripping wet in the cold, waiting for police to arrive at the scene. Since the call was put in, at least ten minutes. In reality, almost certainly longer than that. "But,” Gumshoe says, stammering, unable to stop himself from sounding completely childish in his panic, “but, but, but, you wouldn’t. You would never shoot anyone. I know you!”

He sees something shift in Edgeworth’s eerily blank expression, a hint of an emotion that he doesn’t have time to identify before it’s covered with tired contempt—an expression that Gumshoe knows well enough to identify in a second flat. “Thank you for the vote of confidence, detective. Maybe you can apply to be a character witness.” Despite the Edgeworth-isms coming out of his mouth, he doesn’t seem all there, like parsing Gumshoe’s appearance in front of him and coming up with biting things to say to him is a distant afterthought. A sudden shudder passes through him, his shoulders lurching up to his ears. “So are you going to arrest me anytime soon, or are we going to stand here until I die of hypothermia?” 

A trickle of sweat pours down Gumshoe's temple, causing him to realize that he’s in a cold sweat himself, shirt beginning to dampen. He can’t believe this. It simply isn’t registering as reality in his brain, or even as a possibility. “I… Sir… You didn't really do it, did you?”

Edgeworth shifts on the spot and finally breaks his uncomfortable stare, glancing at the gun. "No, I didn’t,” he says quietly, almost as if to himself. 

“So why are you—asking me to arrest you?” Gumshoe almost laughs it out. Of all of the situations he thought he’d be in tonight, his boss trying to persuade him to arrest him for murder didn’t even feature on the list. All of his training has flown out of his head. He almost starts to wonder if this is a nightmare again, but everything is far, far too coherent for it to be a dream, and he isn’t that lucky.

“I’m—I’m just—” Edgeworth shakes his head, his stunned calm receding as he starts to regain some lucidity. The experience of coming back to himself seems to distress him. "I'm only trying to save the investigation the time and effort of—of discovering that my fingerprints are on the murder weapon, and that I was undeniably involved in the… incident, and that the identity of the victim makes me uniquely suited to be a suspect." Beneath his bangs, Gumshoe can vaguely see him grimace, wry but not quite with humor, as if he'd find this funny if he were in less of a state. "If I didn't turn myself in, you'd bring me in soon enough, and I'd rather spare myself the paranoia. I’m the only suspect you have. I’m—I’m in an almost perfectly indefensible position. It’s impressive, if you think about it.”

“But that’s… insane. If you didn’t do it…” Gumshoe pans the light back down to the gun for a moment—the murder weapon, he reminds himself, future key evidence, to be bagged as soon as possible. It sits there perfectly innocuously. It occurs to Gumshoe, as much as he wishes it didn’t, that he can’t think of a single other person who would have taken Edgeworth’s claim that he isn’t a murderer at face value. Anyone else would find his deadpan rationality strange—incriminating, even. Gumshoe knows him far better than that. Edgeworth is in crisis mode, and he’s not going to emerge anytime soon. He angles the light back up and gets another hard flinch. "Who's the victim?" he asks, fearing the answer.

That gets him a typical Edgeworth-like sneer of disgust, at about one third of its usual power. "I’m not going to do everything for you."

“Sorry, sir,” Gumshoe says as a reflex, and then shakes his head in confusion. “I… why are you even telling me all this? Shouldn't you be, I dunno… running?"

Edgeworth looks him properly in the face for a split-second, aghast. "Firstly, I'm going to pretend that you didn't just say that to an active murder suspect.” Despite the fact that he’s still trembling, the force of his voice is starting to come back to him somewhat. Gumshoe has the urge to apologize again. “Secondly, we're in a forest. At midnight. Only one of us has a flashlight or a gun. Do the math.”

Gumshoe remembers the gun in his holster and nearly drops it into the gravel beside the other. "No, I... I wouldn't, I couldn't..." Panic is starting to rise into his lungs. He’s going to have to arrest him. He really is. “Don’t make me do this, Mr. Edgeworth,” he pleads. He’s too sleep-deprived to have any self-control left, and his eyes are getting misty.

Pleading doesn’t help his case even a little bit, and he shouldn’t have expected it to. Edgeworth watches him begin to snivel with mild revulsion. “Would you get yourself together?” he says stiffly, which is a rich sentence to hear from a man looks to be one unpleasant shock away from falling into a catatonic state and is begging to be arrested for a murder he didn’t commit. “You don’t have a choice, detective. It’s your job to apprehend the most likely suspect, and I am handing you probable cause on a silver platter. My relationship to you shouldn’t affect your professional judgment.”

“Of course it affects my judgment!” Gumshoe says, through real tears. “What are you even saying?” 

Edgeworth raises his voice above the sound of Gumshoe loudly snuffling and wiping his nose on his sleeve. “I’m saying that I have no interest in becoming a fugitive from the law. The only thing I plan to do is stand here until an officer places me under arrest." And then he does, water still dripping off of his raised arms even as they falter from fatigue. "That wasn't an invitation to wait until someone more competent gets here," he says when Gumshoe still hasn't made a move towards him. And then, when he still refuses to do anything but blubber into his sleeve, "Detective, if you refuse to arrest me, I will personally ensure that the remainder of your employment is short and miserable."

Gumshoe mops his face with his arm, draws up though his nose, and finally forces himself to move, clicking his flashlight off and tucking it in one of his enormous coat pockets. He takes his handcuffs out with shaking hands and takes slow, small steps across the parking lot to stand behind Edgeworth, who crosses his wrists behind his back without being asked. 

"Miles Edgeworth, you're under arrest on... on..." Gumshoe has a hard time spitting it out. "On suspicion of murder." He reluctantly clicks the cuffs into place. Edgeworth doesn’t struggle. He’s no longer panting, but his breathing comes in distant, sharp inhales. Before walking him to the car, Gumshoe takes a breath and asks, “What happened out here, sir?”

"You have to inform me of my rights." 

Gumshoe stares at the back of his head in flabbergasted silence. "You… you know them."

Edgeworth turns to glower up at him through his wet, stringy bangs. “Do you assume that a lot of people know their rights without being told, detective?” 

“No! No, no—”

"Are you aware that if I'm not read my Miranda rights, the prosecution legally won't be able to use any statement I make in questioning?”

“And you want them to?” Gumshoe says before he can think better of it. For the first time since Gumshoe stumbled upon him, Edgeworth puffs up to his full stature, full of indignance, and Gumshoe feels distinctly like a first-year patrol officer about to be subjected to verbal warfare for filing his report a week late. 

“Detective, I will get on that stand and the first words out of my mouth will be that you didn’t follow arrest protocol. You don’t know how much of a living hell I can—”

“You’re right, you’re right, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” Gumshoe sighs and begins to haltingly recite, “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you. You have the right to an attorney. If you can’t afford one, one will be provided for you.” He feels more ridiculous with every sentence, particularly the conclusion considering who he’s talking to. Edgeworth watches him finish stumbling through his speech out of the corner of his eye. They both know he's gaining nothing from hearing it. Gumshoe almost expects him to launch into another lecture, but he simply remains silent when he's done, turning away from him and staring at the forest floor. The fury has leeched out of his body language, leaving him drooping again.

Gumshoe tries again: "What the hell happened—?"

"I'm not answering any questions without an attorney present,” Edgeworth says to the ground.

Gumshoe miserably admits that he’s been played for a fool and takes Edgeworth’s shoulder to walk him around to the back of the car. Edgeworth goes willingly, ducking his head automatically as he’s pushed into his seat. Gumshoe winces at the audible squelch of his coat as he sits down. He’s going to leak water all over the car—Gumshoe’s car—and someone—Gumshoe—is going to have to clean it up later. Gumshoe closes the door after him and blows out a frustrated breath. His tears are cooling on his face, and he tries his best to scrub them off with his sleeve before reluctantly sliding back into the driver’s seat. 

The moment he’s back in his car, the sheer absurdity of the situation sets in in full force. He expected fireworks. Instead, he’s going to have to file arrest paperwork for Miles Edgeworth. He knows that his first priority should be to radio in his report and call for forensics, but all he can do is sits there dumbly, staring through the windshield at the place where he was standing, as if he can will the shadowy figure from earlier back into existence and fashion them into someone else. Someone who would make more sense.

“Are you going to answer that?” Edgeworth asks. 

Gumshoe jumps at the realization that his police radio is alive and crackling with inquiries after his status. He glances in the rearview mirror to see Edgeworth slumped back with his head resting over the top of his seat, eyes closed. 

“I… I don’t know what I’m supposed to say, sir.” Edgeworth cracks his eyes open, his glare withering even through a dusty mirror. Gumshoe gestures helplessly, too overwhelmed with frustration to be intimidated for once. “Station, I arrested my boss for suspected murder. No, a body hasn’t been reported, but I dunno, he said there would be one. No, he says that it wasn’t him that killed ‘em. Do you see how that’s going to sound… a little crazy?”

“I don’t see how that’s my problem.” Edgeworth closes his eyes again. Gumshoe puts his hands on the steering wheel and bangs his head against it softly. 

"I hope for your precinct’s sake that you aren’t always this incompetent," Edgeworth says faintly. 

Gumshoe picks his head up miserably, clearing his throat and reaching towards the radio. "I try my best, sir."

#ace attorney #alt title that i was too cowardly to use: gourd lake arrest speedrun [6:28] (WR) #dick gumshoe #miles edgeworth