#modusoperandi

gant: ah-ah-ah!! “blackmailing” is such a dark, cruel word. I prefer calling it "negotiating with an upper hand"!

lana: ...

lana: when you gained an upper hand in negotiating with me, I was expecting it to be for things such as...executive power over the prosecutors’ office, permission to perform illegal activity, ultimate veto of my decisions and vote.

lana: not...forcing me to play Cards Against Humanity with you.

There was a brief, startling sensation of falling, and reflexively, Miles’s head jerked up once. He caught sight of his surroundings, the familiar shadows of his office lamp and the trinkets around the room, and turned back to the case files in front of him. The eighth one tonight.

There was no such thing as a simple crime, any more than there was such a thing as a simple life. That would be an insult to the dead. But, even if the life of a person leading up to the moment of a crime would always be complicated, sometimes, when someone hit another human over the head with a blunt object until that person died, while another watched–sometimes Miles’s job was simple, at least.

This one, he decided, would be a good case for Payne, and he began to add notes on the side. The name of the witness. Important pieces of evidence to note, to establish the motive. The… name of the witness, and the… murder weapon, which had to be traced back to the killer, fingerprints, which had better not be Gumshoe’s this time… the name of the witness, Ol…db… And his pen began to slip out of his hand, which was suddenly too clumsy to hold it up–and the sensation of falling again, slower this time–

He heard, as if at a distance, the sound of his office door being pushed open, almost as though he’d imagined it. It creaked, like most of the doors did in von Karma’s estate–and there was the sensation of falling again, even as he found himself vividly recalling the most ornate door handle, cast in bronze that had tarnished, the one that led to the von Karma dining hall–

And his head jerked up again, as he accidentally slammed the desk with his hand in his effort to right himself. The pen left a jagged streak on his paper.

“What?!”

Simon managed not to flinch at either his superior’s hand striking the desk or the sudden startled shout. He simply stood frozen in the doorway, blinking heavily in momentary surprise. 

A few seconds passed, and Simon’s lip quirked into an amused half-smile as he shut the door behind him.

That the Chief Prosecutor was still here at this hour was hardly surprising in itself, of course. They all were these days, with only Gavin, Payne, Debeste, and himself having survived Edgeworth’s purge of the prosecutors’ office. Simon had been given a few weeks to secure lodgings and attend to other affairs following his exoneration, but even then he had returned to work five days early to assist with the case load. 

Not that he minded, honestly. Returning to the courtroom, even when he’d still stood behind the bench in shackles, had felt like taking a whetstone to a blade. Once he had been fully reinstated in his position, he had been all the more eager to resume his duties, even if it meant rarely leaving his office until late in the evening.

And after all, with his superior working so hard, it would not do for Simon not to pull his weight as well.

“What’s that scowl for? Couldn’t possibly be directed at me, right?” Although it wouldn’t surprise him if it was. Or perhaps that was just Edgeworth’s default expression. Yep, that was extremely likely, actually.