Chapter Text
May 30, 2002
“Mr. von Karma,” the night nanny mentioned one day as she was leaving, “I think I should let you know that Miles has been woken up by nightmares quite often since I started working here.”
“Oh?” Manfred von Karma looked up from his breakfast. He had to know more— nightmares, after all, reflect the fears of the dreamer, and knowing a fear of Miles Edgeworth’s might provide Manfred with a sharp new weapon. “Has he described the content of these nightmares, Miss Nacht?”
“Not really. I didn’t want to pressure him to explain, sir. He’s always really distressed when it happens.” Manfred sent a look the girl’s way to indicate that this was not a sufficient answer, that no secrets would be tolerated. Understanding the meaning of the glare, she continued. “…But it seems like it’s the same nightmare most of the time, and I think it has something to do with the death of his father.”
Klaxons blared in Manfred’s mind. His shoulder was suddenly in agony. Kendra Nacht kept blathering on about how the boy having nightmares was understandable, she had heard about the incident on the news, she could only imagine how something like that would affect a child, but Manfred didn’t absorb a word of it. What did Miles Edgeworth know? This was a potential security risk of the highest degree.
Despite this internal state of emergency, Manfred externally maintained his perfect composure. Only a behavioural savant would have been able to pick up on any meaning from the momentary widening of his eyes. “Hm,” he nodded when the nanny finished her spiel. “Well, the next time he is woken by this nightmare, you will fetch me.” He did not explain further— did not need to; it was an order.
The next time came that very night, and Kendra followed her orders. Clad in his nightshirt and cap (carrying a candle would have completed the aesthetic, some part of his brain joked— but there was no need for such an impractical anachronism; switching the lights on as he went was much more convenient), with the nanny walking in lockstep beside him, Manfred made his way to the opposite wing of the mansion, where the children’s rooms were located.
The faint sound of sobbing became audible when a stretch of hallway still remained, originating from the half-open door of Edgeworth’s room. Manfred instructed the nanny (if anything to keep her prying eyes away), “I will speak with Edgeworth. You check on Franziska in her room— confirm that this has not woken her up, and if it has, help her get back to sleep.”
Kendra nodded and obeyed.
Manfred entered Edgeworth’s room and shut the door. The light of the full moon shining through the window was the only source of illumination in the large, neat, mostly-empty room. Miles Edgeworth looked incredibly small, curled up crying at the head of his oversized four-poster bed in his little pink pyjamas.
Manfred sat in the chair beside the bed (presumably put there by Kendra) and switched on the lamp to see the boy better. “Edgeworth. Miss Nacht told me that you have been troubled by a recurring nightmare. Was this the same one to which she refers?”
Between sobs, Edgeworth answered, “It— um— yes.”
“What are the events of this nightmare, Edgeworth?”
The boy did not answer; he appeared reticent to explain, burying his face deeper in his arms.
“Edgeworth,” Manfred said, a calculated hint of disappointment creeping into his voice. The night nanny could return any moment; he would have to use a light touch— subtle rather than overt intimidation— to extract the information he needed. “This has been interrupting your sleep regularly. A growing child needs to sleep well if he is to learn well and succeed. Explaining the content will excise it from your mind, allowing it to trouble you less in future.” He had just made that last bit up— he did not know of any research to that effect— but stating such a promise in an authoritative tone seemed like it may convince the boy to explain.
“I— um— b-but, sir— I don’t— I can’t—” Edgeworth stammered through tears, still somehow conflicted. He glanced up at Manfred— this revealed both that the boy’s neck was flushed blotchy red with anxiety, and that there was a strange mixture of terror and guilt(...?) in his eyes.
Manfred initiated eye contact with an ice-cold gaze. “You don’t remember, or you don’t want to tell me?”
Edgeworth’s mouth opened and closed wordlessly. Manfred knew the answer was obviously not the former, and it seemed that Edgeworth could see this knowledge on his face; he glanced down in shame.
“It is only a dream, Edgeworth,” Manfred said, pre-empting the worst case scenario, the possibility that Edgeworth knew something damning. “I do not see how explaining it could hurt you.”
The child was cornered now and he knew it. “S-sorry. I— okay.” Edgeworth wiped his eyes and took a shaky breath in and out. “Like you said, it’s just a dream! But it feels like… like a memory. A memory of… of…”
“Of the DL-6 incident?” Manfred had no patience for the boy’s struggle to phrase this simple thing. He already knew this much from Kendra, anyway.
Edgeworth nodded, still not meeting Manfred’s eyes. “It’s… I’m there, in— in the elevator,” the pace of the boy’s speech started accelerating as he relived the nightmare, “and the lights are out and the air is almost gone and I hear Father fighting with the bailiff, and— and—” The boy’s rapid babbling stalled as quickly as it had begun, as emotion seemed to overtake him once again; he held his sleeve to his face.
“And then what happens? In the nightmare?”
“And then— th-then—” Edgeworth swallowed dry, averted his gaze— why was this child showing all the body-language hallmarks of a guilty suspect?— “then something falls at my feet. Something heavy. And I just want them to stop fighting so I pick it up and throw it at the bailiff and— and then there’s a gunshot and a scream, this horrible scream, and that’s when I always wake up, and when I try to remember what happened after that the next thing I remember is— is waking up in the hospital and they tell me that he’s dead—” and Edgeworth broke down sobbing once more, bringing his knees to his chest in an apparent attempt to make himself as small as possible.
“So— if I understand correctly— this nightmare tells a version of events in which you accidentally shot your father?”
This question seemed to worsen the boy’s state, but he answered it with a small nod.
Several interlinked thoughts came to Manfred in the few moments of relative silence that followed, the only noise in the room being the quiet sobbing of the child.
The first among them was a sense of relief. Edgeworth didn’t know anything to incriminate Manfred; the security risk was a mirage. This made perfect sense; he had been unconscious for the main event, so why would he know anything?
Then, it occurred to Manfred that Edgeworth did know one thing. In the narrative he described, the boy had thrown the gun, which had then gone off, resulting in a shot and a scream shortly before the air had run out. Manfred’s left hand unconsciously moved to clutch his aching shoulder. Eureka.
His previous working hypothesis was that the bailiff and lawyer had fought, then one of them had grabbed the gun, shot at the other, and missed, shortly before both collapsed from oxygen deprivation. The bailiff having done it seemed more probable, as he was the gun’s owner, and that version of things provided retroactive justification for the frame-up. (If Yogi had actually committed attempted murder, what right did he have to complain that his aim had been corrected? Perhaps the suspect himself did not even know the charges against him were false; his attorney certainly didn’t.) However, the lawyer having done it was what Manfred had assumed at the time, in his rage— that Gregory Edgeworth had added injury to insult, and the perfect crime that had been served to Manfred on a silver platter would be his perfect revenge for both infractions.
But now he had a new theory, supported by the evidence of Miles Edgeworth’s memory.
Adopting this child had originally been about indirect revenge. Death was not sufficient retribution for tarnishing perfection; Manfred was going to spite that man beyond the grave by erasing his legacy, by moulding his son into something he would have hated.
Now, however, it was about direct revenge too.
The next thing that occurred to him was that this nightmare had provided him with a more powerful new weapon than he could ever have anticipated, and it was a weapon perfectly suited to his new goal. The initial sketches of a plan to execute his direct revenge began to form in his mind.
But, before he could flesh these sketches out any further— light flooded into the room from the hall, indicating that Kendra Nacht had finished her assigned task and was now watching from the doorway. By any normal standard of parenthood, Manfred would appear incredibly suspicious if he did not offer comfort to the sobbing child.
“Now, now, Edgeworth,” Manfred muttered haltingly, in a quiet tone, devoid of venom and containing a hint of warmth (his best approximation of ‘soothing’), lifting himself from the chair to instead sit on the side of the bed. Comforting a child was not a skill he had ever previously needed to learn. “It is only a dream. Your mind is playing tricks on you. Everyone knows the bailiff killed him.” Manfred continued to repetitively mutter words to this effect— a few repetitions in, he remembered that physical contact was typically a component of comfort, so he reached out and began to pat Edgeworth on the shoulder at a mechanically regular pace.
The boy seemed to calm a little; he stopped crying, at least. “Y-yeah,” he said. “You’re— you’re right, sir.”
“Yes,” Manfred smiled. “If even the man’s attorney could not dispute that he did it, there isn’t much reason for others to dispute it, is there? Now, I hope you will be able to sleep well. You have class tomorrow.”
“Okay.” Edgeworth tucked himself in, though his eyes still had a certain troubled quality. “Good night, sir.”
“Good night, Edgeworth.”
On his way out of the room, the nanny quietly informed Manfred that Franziska was sleeping soundly. Manfred silently praised his own decision to give the children separate rooms; his daughter’s sleep would not be disturbed by the boy’s damage.
As he walked back across the house to the master bedroom, the vague inklings of a plan began to take concrete form. Alongside moulding Edgeworth into a prosecutor and instilling the need for perfection, Manfred decided he would also spend the coming years encouraging this nightmare to continue recurring, and subtly manipulating Edgeworth to believe in that narrative’s truth, so that it could eventually make the boy catalyse his own downfall.
Manfred looked forward to seeing where the path of pain would lead.