INBOX (noctiumrp)

[warpspammer]

« JURO » TEXT ✧ AUDIO ✧ VIDEO ✧ ACTION NYX ULRIC ✦ FINAL FANTASY XV
RESIDENCE ✦ Emerald District, Sumarlok
GEMBOND ✦ SAPPHIRE This is Nyx. I'll get back to you as soon as I can.

PERMANENT LOG ✧ PERMISSIONS ✧ KINKLIST ✧ OVERFLOW

Comments

[warpspammer]

[ Nyx's thinks Miles makes sense, honestly. In the wild there's no truth or justice; things just are. A coeurl kills an anak to survive and no one grieves it. But to know the truth of things means deciding what to make right, what to not allow. They do work in tandem.

He squeezes Miles' hand, looking up at him from where he's stretched out, and he can feel the soft affectionate smile that is probably far too dopey for the situation spread across his face. ]

Hey, me and my reckless heart appreciate knowing the truth too. Keepin' secrets has never worked out. Plus I know you're good at your job. If anyone is gonna convince some hundred year old dead guys to not kill me, it'd be you.

[ He hasn't had a chance to see it but he believes it, wholeheartedly. ]

The guy who taught you about justice being in folders - that was your mentor, right? The asshole.

[jurisprudence]

That's right. The man who adopted me when I was nine years old.

[It's the right time of year for men who should've done better by us, he'd said once, not so long ago. The king of Nyx's country, selling out his kingdom for the sake of a scheme he never revealed until it was too late. The leader of Nyx's military unit, secretly a traitor. The head of the police force in his own Los Angeles. The man who'd raised him from a child and molded him into the demon prosecutor he once became.]

He and my father were old rivals. My father was a defense attorney; von Karma prosecuted a number of cases against him. He won, always — in the whole of his career, he had never failed to secure a guilty verdict. That was his creed: perfection. The perfect prosecutor. More a force of nature than a man.

[He pauses, lips pressing together into a thin line.]

My father put the first, and for a long time only, blemish on his record. Not a loss, just a penalty, but still. An imperfection.

[His fingers tighten around Nyx's.]

I think — the murder itself, he confessed, was opportunistic. A chance too good to pass up. He shot my father in cold blood while he was unconscious in a stalled elevator. But the plan...he must've thought it through meticulously, piece by piece. That was how he did things.

A penalty on his perfect record; my father's death wasn't nearly enough to compensate for that. So he took me in and spent fifteen years raising me, all the while letting me believe I was responsible — that I was a murderer, as guilty as the ones that I prosecuted in my career. He orchestrated a plan to have me framed for murder on the anniversary of my own father's death, so that in that way his revenge would be properly complete: the life of the son as well as that of the transgressor, but not before molding that heir into the very antithesis of everything Gregory Edgeworth had stood for.

He must have taken such pleasure in it. Listening to the stories of my childhood nightmares, knowing I spent my youth tormented with the guilt of something he'd secretly done himself. Making me into a von Karma in all but name. Dangling validation just out of my reach to watch me jump for it, knowing all the while how he would send me to my death in the years to come.

He prosecuted the case against me. Forced my own detective to give the damning testimony to convict me. Watching as I accepted the horror of it all because I truly thought it was what I deserved.

[He falls silent a minute.]

It's strange, knowing that in every memory I have of him, he was plotting the trajectory of my death behind his eyes. I suppose that must be how it feels for you to think back on your captain now. How it changes things in retrospect, to learn what the man was all along.

[warpspammer]

[ He listens to Miles tell the story, letting it slot things into place. The pursuit of truth, yes, that's obvious. It makes the moments that Miles has allowed himself to enjoy, the softer ones, all the more precious in Nyx's mind.

There's sympathy, too. Nyx didn't like anything that involved fighting humans, even enemies. But they had met on a battlefield. What would it be like to live with condemning someone to prison or death because you truly believed you were doing the right thing, just to have it yanked out from under you?

He squeezes Miles's hand again when his fingers tighten, shifting a bit. His other hand moves to brush against Miles's leg through the blanket, fingers dragging in a back and forth motion that he hopes helps soothe.

He doesn't tell him it'll be okay because, well, they both know they can't change the past. And Miles hadn't offered platitudes to him. ]

That's pretty accurate, I think. He wasn't Galahdian, wasn't one of my dads and he was a hardass but.. he trained me, y'know? He gave us something to fight for.

[ He sighs. ]

I can't imagine facing something like what you went through. At least he just tried to stab me.

[ A beat. ]

Shit, we need better ment-enemies.

[jurisprudence]

Well. Evidently the powers that be here are fully aware of it. My gemstone is — you've seen where it's located, and its size. And an Emerald's supposed "powers"...

[He's quiet again, just for a minute.]

The stalled elevator. It had stopped because an earthquake had knocked out the power in the building. I was trapped inside with my father for...hours. To this day I'm still —

[...]

Affected. At times. By that.