#just like how Franziska says she’s perfect despite perfection not existing

[snezfics-n-shit]

Sicktember Day 24: "Did you just sneeze?"

Fandom: Ace Attorney Characters: Franziska von Karma, Larry Butz Notes: Can’t get enough of Larry and Franziska being besties? Me neither! If you have had enough, I’m sorry but not really. This entry is actually somewhat of a follow-up of last year’s “Excessive Use of Tissues” entry you can find in my Sicktember 2022 collection. Franziska and Larry get together as they usually do, with Franziska reluctant to allow Larry even a glimpse of the imperfections her life has accumulated in recent weeks. Set early in the 7yg, just like the entry this is following up on, but this time with references to one of Shu Takumi’s short stories from 2020. Just like said entry from last year, there are mentions of very recent past franmaya. Also, Larry has no room to tease Franziska’s girly sneeze because, as some friends and I have decided (and therefore made true and canon), he has his own cutesy pixie sneezes. Maybe a future entry will give Franziska the chance to send the teasing back into his court (hint hint) hehe. If you like the things I write, I always appreciate reblogs and comments; they really make my day!

     Franziska von Karma refused to consider herself unlucky in anything. She was not unlucky in her career after several losses in American courtrooms. She was not unlucky in love after the recent end of her very first romantic relationship. She was most definitely not unlucky in health after that foolish little brother of hers gave her this dreadful cold that seemed to wait for the worst moment to strike once she returned home. Everything had to have happened for a perfect reason; that’s what her older sister once told her. 

A perfect reason for her cold to be at its worst on the day Larry Butz was to visit, no matter how much she refused to believe it, may as well have not existed. It was too late to cancel the plans made months in advance, leaving her pushing herself to appear at her best, even if she was feeling close to the worst. 

“How was your flight?” She asked as she poured tea for both herself and Larry. Tea was a wonderful thing, both for serving to houseguests and soothing an ailing body. Franziska could have easily been upfront about her choice to serve tea instead of her usual offer of a wide range of beverages when Larry arrived, but what good would it be for Larry to know? His occasional obliviousness was a gift that anyone would be a fool not to take advantage of once in a while. 

“It was pretty exciting! I’ve never been on a private jet before.” Larry smiled and made a soft, gleeful noise as he picked up the teacup to blow on his tea, ignoring Franziska’s look of irritation towards his unwillingness to burn his tongue. “I’ve been on a lot of planes, but they were always crowded and I usually ended up with the seat in front of a really fidgety kid who would kick my seat for the entire flight. I don’t blame the kid, though; I probably would’ve been just like that if my parents could afford flying when I was growing up.”

“What about those first class tickets I recall you purchasing?” Franziska asked as she savored a breath of the steam emanating from her teacup, careful as ever to be quiet in doing so. 

“Oh, those weren’t for me! I can never afford more than one of those, but my girlfriends have deserved nothing but the best. Take Bennifer, for example. She really wanted to visit Tibet, so I thought it’d be really nice to travel there with her.” Larry’s expression fell. “When we got there, she thanked me for the first class flight and then immediately told me she wasn’t interested in me anymore.” He sighed. “I guess it wasn’t all bad. I got my miles from the flight and a new place so say I’ve visited.” 

“It still sounds like a shame, though.” Franziska took a small sip of her tea. “To go out of your way for someone, only for her to tell you that a relationship is something that no longer fits where she wants her life to be right now.” Her voice shook despite her efforts to separate herself from this particular topic. For Larry to find out she was just as impacted by the pits of heartbreak as any other human might be even worse than if he were to find out she wasn’t feeling well.

“Did I strike a chord or something, Franzy?” Larry tilted his head. “It’s not like you and Maya– No way!” He leaned forward with wide eyes.  “You got dumped!?” 

“I did not ‘get dumped!’” Franziska growled, taking her throat by surprise and triggering a good few seconds of coughing. “E-Excuse me.” She sniffled as she struggled to regain her composure. “The relationship may have ended, but not in a way I would describe as ‘dumping,’ even if it was her decision.” 

“Woah, woah. Sorry.” Larry laughed nervously. “It’s just a, uh, figure of speech, really. When you get dumped as much as I have, you start to realize it’s not a dirty word. It is the hardest the first time around, though, and I’m here for you. You know that, right?” 

As much as Franziska could not stand the word, considering it to be far too vulgar for something she felt to be a serious and painful matter, maybe Larry was right. Maybe the first time around simply was the hardest and it would be, dare she say, much appreciated to spend this time in the company of a friend. 

“T-Thank you,” Franziska swallowed despite the soreness it caused, “Larry Butz.” She had to be ill for those words to come out so easily. “You’re far better of a confidant than my foolish little brother has been lately.” 

“Huh? What did Edgey do this time?”

“He hogged the tissue box in my time of need, for one thing!” Franziska started. “Then, I can tell he clearly neglected to disinfect his living space because he… he… Iit’tshhew!! H’hsshhiew!!” She scrambled to find her pocket handkerchief and make quick use of it before Larry could potentially catch a glimpse of being so unpresentable. 

“Did… Did you just sneeze?” Larry asked through poorly stifled laughter. 

“Why would it matter?” Franziska’s voice was muffled by the handkerchief pressed against her face. 

“You’re just so… dainty, Franzy!” Larry held his hand to his mouth to hide his involuntary smile. “It’s cute, like a little kitten!”

“Were we not having a serious discussion right now?” Franziska huffed. “I refuse to let it take such a foolish turn as this!”

“Okay, okay. Sorry.” Larry quickly attempted to calm himself. “I, uh, I’m guessing he gave you that nasty cold, huh?” 

Franziska was about to admit it anyway, so there was no sense in denying when this visit had already led to Larry seeing multiple aspects of Franziska that she would have rather hid. 

“Yes, he did.” Franziska scowled as if Miles had committed a much higher offense than just not spending Franziska’s entire time at his home in a hazmat suit. 

“The nerve!” Larry made a scandalized face, one of his favorite things to do whenever he and Franziska met up to tell each other the latest gossip. 

Franziska wanted to laugh at Larry’s exaggerations, but ended up coughing instead.

“Pardon me.” She cleared her throat. “But now you do see the full consequences of Miles Edgeworth’s foolishness.”

“Yeah!” Larry again played up his reaction. “Hold on, I think I got some cough drops with me.” He dug through his jacket’s pockets before pulling out a couple of cough drops. “I don’t know how well it’ll go with your tea, but it’s worth a shot, right?”

“I suppose I’m willing to try.” This was Franziska’s way of accepting the offer, though she grimaced as soon as the saccharine cherry flavor met her tongue. She mentally reminded herself that Larry was trying to help and instinctively used her tongue to push the cough drop to the side of her mouth. “So, while this melts, why don’t you tell me what you’ve been up to?”

“Really?” Larry blinked. His brain needed to flip through the cards of Phoenix’s rough situation that he didn’t feel right divulging and recent failed relationships he would rather not bring up given Franziska’s opening up about her first heartbreak. “Well, uh, I graduated from my patisserie school program!”

“You did?”

“Yup! And you won’t believe what Edgey told me afterwards! He said…” 

[goddesslyfics]

Chapter 4! Read on AO3 or below:

 “That’s impossible. I was just there, I saw him-”

      “I am so sorry, Franziska.”

      Is that your admission of guilt or a vague stab at sympathy? Franziska wishes to ask, though she finds herself briefly incapable of anything more than muteness, a stone cold stare ahead as her mind processes this string of words which, on their own, she can distinguish quite clearly, yet when put together, seem beyond her capacity to fathom. Your father died last night. Yes, ‘father’ was a word she knows quite well. ‘Last night?’ Where was she last night? She should have been with her father. Yet, she was with Miles Edgeworth. Your father died last night. Does that mean she wasn’t there to stop it when she could have been?

      She leans her forehead into his shoulder, and he places one hand over the back of her neck. Miles expects to feel the warmth of tears stain the collar of his shirt, but Franziska sheds none. She reflects on this, this lack of sorrow, and realizes she is more tired than anything, despite just having woken. It is the way one first reacts to having the ball and chain drop from their shackled ankle, the fatigue preceding the intuition of a hard time that has passed. It is the feeling of freedom, bonds laid bare, yet what will she have to show for it? The scars on her hands? The coldness of her heart?

      She lifts her head from Mile’s shoulder, their eyes meet as a cloud passes by the window and they are briefly enshrouded in dim cover. Though she longs to ask him, why do I not feel anything? Is it because I’m free now? she retains her silence.

       “Hey,” Miles says after some cold beats of silence. “I forgot about this.”

       “My birthmark?” Franziska’s gaze drops to his hand, which just grazes the tawny splotch near her collarbone. The sun has returned to the room, reinstilling the brightness of the morning, the reality of its dawn and meaning.

      “P for perfect.” He says softly, a sliver of a smile gracing the corners of his mouth. It is a look that, on any other morning, any other day where her father had not passed the night before, would have made her heart pound within her breast. She would have hated it, then, but now, she merely remains affixed in her coldness.

      “I should go into work.” She says after his hand drops from her shoulder, fighting back the urge to shiver. “I received a new case yesterday, I’ll need to make arrangements for a new prosecutor while I am away. I assume the funeral will be in Germany?”

      Miles nods. “Kalta’s making arrangements for his remains to be flown back to Stuttgart. She and Brendan will arrange for the funeral.”

     “I would expect as much. Now, leave me to get ready. We must leave for the office within the hour.”

     Yes, she realizes, sometime later, after arriving at the prosecutor’s office, the stonework symphony of her father’s grandest efforts. She does have one thing to mourn.

     Her indifference.

Franziska speaks not one word during the overnight flight that shoots her into Germany’s early morning, but to order an espresso from a passing attendant, of which she had downed in one sip after taking a last look at her cellphone before silencing it for the plane’s departure. Miles will be catching a later flight, as he hadn’t felt the same sense of urgency as she to travel cross country for the man who’d forsaken his whole existence.

       Kalta has already landed in Stuttgart. She’d taken the plane that transported her father’s body.

       Franziska has yet to cry, and she still does not expect to. Since Kalta’s call from the previous week, the hospital transfer, the calamitous visit with Miles, all of it had been warning enough to her, a call to brace herself for the worst. Three days. Three days was all it took for her father to be going, and gone.

       Though she does not wish to bear the world without him, it is not as though she wished for this, she knows she could and would have to, eventually. Despite this, her lower lip trembles for the first half of that overnight flight, and she may have to blink away a well of wetness from her eyes more than once, though she will not let one tear fall. And for that, her father would be proud.

“Oh, liebe.” Kalta rises from her seat in the foyer of the von Karma estate with her customary poise, unhooking her knee from where it was propped over her leg and rising like a siren from the sea. Though her brows are drawn close in the way you see in one who holds a constant seal of sorrow, along with the pinched corners of her lips and the limp inactivity that rests in her palms as she brings her arms around her sister.

        Franziska leans into the embrace, though keeps her hands at her sides, wrapped into fists, the left around her whip. Kalta is warm and smells like their mother, like rose hips and novels. It is the most comfort she can attempt to gain from their current standing.

        Her daughter, Didi, stands a step behind her mother, her raven curls hanging limply over her shoulders as she attempts not to fold in on herself. This is the young girl’s first experience with death, her first personal tremble within the grim reaper’s clutches, stealing away her großvater from her slim sphere of relations. She steps forward and graciously accepts the kiss Franziska lays upon her cheek with not a word in her direction.

       “Now that you’re here,” Kalta folds her palm over Franziska’s, who for once has no objections. Perhaps the shock from the morning still lingers in a measure she cannot see. “Shall we go see Papa?”

Manfred von Karma is resting peacefully once more.

          Death has softened the lines of his face, making him appear more at ease among his family surrounding him, in the dim back room of the funeral parlor that stayed open late at Kalta’s behest. It doesn’t suit him, nor does the powder masking his naturally waxy pallor. He is dressed in a fine grey suit, the adornments of various badges and awards Kalta had collected from his office at the estate affixed to his lapels like a smattering of sprinkles on cake.

         It’s nearly midnight when the sisters return to the estate. Kalta’s husband, Brendan, and Didi have long gone to bed, and Franziska follows suit almost instantly as jet lag catches up with her with its staggered, gaining gait. The following day passes in a bleak blur, dragging like nails down a chalkboard. All the while, Franziska is unable to find comfort in the family she’s long since been parted from. Uncles and cousin, distant and relative, arrive periodically to offer their stone face condolences, the semblance of words sentimental. The viewing is a cluster of embraces and handshakes. They eat meals as a family. The affair is as silent and somber as one would expect from the von Karma name. While the estate has more than enough rooms to hold the lot, Franzsika has spent the last several years of her life reveling in their vacancy. Now they are filled with strangers who bear her last name, and Kalta, despite her self-proclaimed ‘escape’ years ago, finds herself more than content to refer to the estate as her own, even going as far as to bring in Didi’s bloodhound, Phoenix, from their family home in Munich.

        Miles arrives the following night, after the cousins have scattered, Kalta has taken Didi to bed, and Brendan has retires to Manfred’s smoking room to look over some of the estate paperwork. Franziska waits for him in the foyer, her legs tucked beneath her on a velvet settee by the door, nodding off into her palm with her elbow propped on her knee. Her whip is coiled beside her, like a snake waiting to ward off unwanted company.

       She blinks awake upon the sound of his suitcases’ wheels hitting the parquet and mumbles something that sounds like took you long enough, though part of her is wondering why he is here at all. He is my mentor and he is dying is what Miles had said to justify visiting Manfred in the ward. Some sort of reverence edged with guilt or perhaps just curiosity. Was it enough to extend the courtesy of attending the funeral? She’s already shaken off the notion that he came to comfort her and Kalta, though a vestige of hope she retained wishing for just that.

       Not that she needs to be comforted, mind.

      “How are you?” Miles asks as she rises from the settee, at a whisper, as though the estate were not so large and wide that his carrying voice could wake all its corners.

      “Miles Edgeworth,” She scoffs, though there’s tiredness in her laughter. “What a foolishly foolish question. My father is to be buried tomorrow, and you ask me how I am?” She grits her teeth and bears the sting of tears, of sleep, of something that rises to prick the back of her eyelids. “I am perfectly fine.”

       She turns from him, picking up her whip and tensing it between her fingers.

       “You’ll be staying in your old bedroom. I trust that is acceptable?”

       “Certainly.” He replies with measure. She replies with a curt nod, then sets off to lead him through the house to the wing that holds their respective bedrooms, as if several years in absentia has effaced his memory of his childhood home.

      “Not much has changed since I left.” He comments. His old bedroom is just as he’d left it, on a morning as dark as this night. He sets his suitcase at the foot of the bed, reclining on his palms on the end of his bed. Franziska lingers in the doorway, feeling the same pinpricks of memory ebb into her chest as they had two nights previous.

     “Do you regret leaving when you did?” She asks at a whisper.

      They stand in the darkness of that room, steeping in memory, for some time before Miles responds. “No. However, in regard to how I left, I may hold some regret.”

      So he regrets setting out like a thief into the night. Does he regret what came before, then? She’d kissed him, and he’d denied her. Your father would kill me if he knew. That’s what he’d said. As if he didn’t wish to pin the blame on his own lack of wanting.

      Franziska takes a step from the doorway, placing herself in the hall. What a fool she was back then.

      “Goodnight, Miles Edgeworth.”

      “Goodnight, Franziska von Karma.”

It is raining the morning of Manfred von Karma’s funeral.

       It is not at all like Franziska’s mother’s wake had been, small and hushed, a black veil blanketing the morning as well as her downtrodden eyes, the eyes of a child which she was no longer.

      She is shielded from the rain by a taunt tarpaulin centered over the plot of grave. Beneath it, Franziska stands shoulder to shoulder between men and women whom she is only alike to in mourning. Her mother’s grave is mere feet away, on the fringes of the von Karma family plot. There is no one shielding it from the rain, however, and as Franziska’s gaze slides over as she lapses in the priest denoting her father’s soul, she sees the rain pound against the marble headstone without mercy.

      If I am going to cry, now would be the time, she thinks to herself.

      She slips the leather gloves she wears like a second skin from her fingers, exposing her hands to the early morning chill as she is passed a dark crimson rose to lay upon her father’s casket. Her knuckles are buckled beneath thick ropes of scar tissue, like a piano that’s been smashed to where its key stick out at uneven ends, indents of her father’s cane boring down on them when she was small and her tendons snapped like glass. She’s grown around the scars, though each strike of her whip bites at the tissue and sends an ache down her wrist. She has long taught herself to ignore this.

      Franziska steps forward and lays her rose of her father’s casket, which is closed as to not take in moisture from the storm above. Her eyes flicker upward for a moment enough to find Miles on the opposite side of the casket, setting a rose of his own alongside hers. She watches his eyes linger over her hands, widen at the sight of her Papa’s handiwork. When he raises his head, their eyes meet, and though she isn’t sure how she knows this, it is clear they have the same thought.

     Your father would kill me if he knew.

     The statement, now, is laughable. Who was left, then, to follow the suit of their actions from that moment onward but God?

As they shuffle from beneath the tarpaulin, having seen Manfred von Karma lowered into the ground after being imparted with their greatest sympathies and silkiest flowers, both Franziska and Miles brace themselves against the sting of the early cold. They are permitted closeness from the crowd surrounding them, and Franziska threads her fingers through his, a grip that lasts not but a moment before releasing.

       The drive back to the estate is silent. Brendan drives, yielding to the rain and traffic at a snail’s pace, Kalta seated passenger, keeping her stony gaze directed at some spot in the distance that the fog does not permit her to see. Miles and Franziska sit in the back row, Didi settled between them. The young girl’s eyes dart between the two of them, the weight of the air among them not lost on her as it settles on shoulders too young to understand the forces of attraction left between Manfred von Karma’s last living victims.

       By eight o’clock that night the house is cold and quiet again, just as Manfred would have wanted.

       The turnout of the funeral had been larger than what was expected, the reception afterwards swarming the estate beyond what the house’s attendants had planned to accommodate. It had more the feel of a house party than a wake to honor the fallen, the tide of Manfred’s distant family and colleagues, those who loved and feared him, wanted to be like him. Or, like Franziska, a reverent combination of all three.

      Miles is upstairs, packing his suitcase in preparation for the nine o’clock flight he’s booked for the next morning. Franziska sits with her sister and brother in-law in the drawing room, sipping on glasses of red wine and speaking of benign things in hushed tones, as if they mattered. Didi is entertaining the few lingering cousins in the music room, the dulcet harmony of notes from the piano forte just audible in the frequent lapses of silence that fell between the three.

      As the grandfather clock in the hall strikes the quarter hour, the bloodhound Kalta had brought over from her home in Munich ambles into the drawing room, nosing into Franziska’s side.

      “And how’s this one? Phoenix, was his name?” She grimaces as she says it, the not so fond recollection the name draws from her memory.

       “A fine breed, worth every penny we paid for him. I do think that Didi is too fond of him, though. She’s been skirting on her lessons to play with the thing. I have in the right mind the idea to take him out back and shoot him.” Brendan replies with a disinterested air.

       “Are you alright, schwester?” Kalta asks after Franziska clasps her hand over her mouth following a sound that lies something between a laugh and a sob.

       “I was just thinking, if you said that in front of Papa it might just bring him back.”

       Kalta stares for a moment, blinks, turn her head back towards the fire burning in the hearth. “Vati always favored you, you know.” She states bitterly, staring hard at the remains of the wineglass in her hand.

      “Of course he did.” Franziska replies, not in the assertive righteousness that her sister had expected, but simple indignation. “I did everything he told me to. Unlike you, who ran off when you were nineteen to study numbers and business. You could have been a practicing lawyer by then. Besides, that’s just how Papa was. He spoiled us rotten, so long as we’d earned it.” Her words are true enough. The stables, the library, the conservatory, all filled to the brim with knowledge and music and the topmost indulgences from her list of monetary wants. Even so, there are things one longs for that cannot be put into words.

      “We certainly we spoiled, weren’t we? Still, the lengths you went for that. I will never understand how you worked all those murder trials as a child, the violence it caused, where I can’t stand the sight of blood.” She shivers for the effect of it, her eyes fluttering shut.

      “Some woman you are, then.” Franziska scoffs beneath her breath, tipping her head back to receive the last of the wine in her glass. She’d poured herself a small measure, disliking the taste but feeling the need for the warmth it might glean her. She much wishes she were upstairs with Miles instead of downstairs with Kalta.

      “Some woman I am?” Kalta snaps in the same moment the fireplace crackles and pops as a log splinters in the flames. Franziska sees the same splitting fire in her sister's eyes and knows it was a mistake to tempt the tumult as she had. “I am a mother, and a wife, and the owner of a company I raised from the ground. How do you compare? You’re a prodigy in the courtroom, sure you are. You work yourself to the bone and feel nothing but pride. It’s not even human, let alone womanly. I could succeed on my own, but I choose not to, because I found someone who loves me. When have you ever let someone love you? Have you even thought about love before?” Her cheeks are rosy with ire and wine.

       Franziska opens her mouth to speak and is cut off in the same movement. “And I’m not talking about your cretinous schoolgirl crush on Miles Edgeworth. You never could resist the pretty little things Vati set in front of you. Like that whip I see you’re reaching for. The day it arrived, he told you you may use it once you perfected your aim with the riding crop. You didn’t listen, and ended up tangled in your own snare, your cuts and your bruises. Was Miles any different to you? I can’t doubt it. Given the chance, you’d have taken him like a shot, wouldn’t you?” She shakes her head, as if to clear herself from the imbecility of it. “That isn’t love, schwester. That was a toy you were too young to play with.” She ends her words with a cut, bitter laugh.

      “You’ve had to much to drink, you fool.” Franziska replies with measure. She would sooner throw herself to a stake before admitting it, but her sister’s words pained her. It felt like someone pulled back the collar of her shirt and poured ice down her spine. How could something she was scarcely aware of herself be so visible to another? Was their shared blood enough to make her transparent?

      Even Brendan’s eyes are wide as he looked upon his wife. “I believe that’s unfair. Franziska doesn’t seem the type for such affections, does she?”

     “I never told you because it disgusted me. He was raised as a brother to us, after all, in this house of ours. This house,” She squares her shoulders and reclines in her chair, her gaze at the ceiling sliding out of focus. “I believe there’s poison in it. That’s why I had to get out of here. And I got out happy. That is why, the only reason why, I am able to return to this place with any semblance of fondness. It is also why,” She adds, reaching to refill her wine glass. “I’m going to sell the estate. Liquidate Vati’s property assets, all of them.”

      Franziska rears in her seat, startling Phoenix, who slinks back to lay in front of the fire. “You can’t do that. I won’t allow it. You are not his only daughter, Kalta von Karma. I will have my say in the matter.”

      “Do not call me that.” Kalta barks back in an instant. She purses her lips, as if to stay herself from speaking further. When has she ever done that before? Franziska marvels. “Besides, didn’t you have the design to stay in America, finish the work our dear father could not?”

      “Nevertheless, you cannot allow yourself to make such decisions without my being present.” Franziska returns, feeling a warm anger ebb throughout her chest. It was what she was hoping the wine would do, stay her from her coldness. "Do not think I will allow you to walk over me like this just because we buried our father this morning."

      “We will meet with the executor next week. These matters can be discussed at further length, then.” Brendan interjects, a clear relief at his brow to have found a place to impeded the row. “Kalta, meine perle, why don’t we check on Didi? Her playing has begun to sound rather choppy, perhaps it’s time we see cousin Larson out for the night.”

       “Very well.” Kalta replies airly. She’s led away on Brendan’s arm, her heels making uneven, ambling indents into the rug. Definitely drunk. Franziska scoffs, folding her arms across her chest. She taps her heel against the parquet as she leaves herself to fester in the empty room. It isn’t enough, however, to simmer in solitude. If she cannot prove Kalta wrong, the least she can do is prove herself right.

       She doesn’t bother turning on any lights as she crosses into the estate’s west wing, darkened and devoid of any windows to filter in moonlight. She knows the path well. She could walk this distance in her dreams.

“Miles Edgeworth.”

        The named man’s eyes widen, then narrow, as Franziska crosses the threshold into his bedroom. He had been packing his suitcase in preparation for his morning’s departure, his suitcase and clothing lined up on his bed as he stands at the foot.

        Franziska lowers herself onto said suitcase, crossing one slim leg over the other in a position that claims vacancy. “There are some things of which we need to speak.”

       “Such as?” He replies absently, willing himself to focus on the crease he’s lining in a pair of trousers, rather than the sliver of Franziska’s thigh that became exposed where her skirt had ridden up upon sitting.

        “The estate. Kalta, the fool, wishes to sell it.” She shakes her head, the vestiges of their earlier argument still floating in her skull in an unpleasant disquietude. “Who would want to sell this big, empty house?” She breathes, reclining on her elbows, half in belief and half in bitterness.

        “I don’t see where I would have a say in the matter. I doubt Mr. von Karma has left me any claim to his possessions in his will.”

        “It’s as much your home as it is mine.” She reminds him, and receives a grimace in return.

         “You know that’s not true, Franziska. I was never part of the family here. Both your father and sister have said as much before, and I know that you agree with them. This household was but a temporary residence for me. I never really lived here, I was simply visiting.” He won't look at her as he speaks, favoring the buttons of his overcoat laid out on the bed, ready to be folded and stowed in the suitcase Franziska has claimed as her throne.

       “Foolish nonsense. This was your home and is your home. We lived here together and therefore must come to a conclusion over what to do with it together.”

      “And Kalta?” He spoke with a rising terseness, not wanting to tether any hopes over the hook of togetherness, the way her rose colored lips shape themselves around the word.

      “She’s given me her opinion. The one I’m waiting on is yours.”

      “Franziska,” Miles sighs under his breath, in awe and in apprehension of the way her eyes narrowed on him, like a sniper lining his next shot. “You’ve grown so much. I do believe you no longer need your little brother in making decisions for yourself, no?”

      “A learned man as yourself should know the difference between needing and wanting.” She speaks too lowly for the context of her statement, too smoothly. Miles chides himself. Property. He reminds himself. We are speaking of her dead father’s mansion.

      He places his hands over her legs and bids her to meet his gaze. “Franziska, whatever you wish to do with the estate, I will support you. If you agree with your sister’s notion to sell the house, I’ll sign whatever I need to designate it so. Should you wish to keep it, then I’ll back you on that as well. You need not sway me on anything.”

      “No?” She possess much too confidence for one who buried her father just this morning. “Miles Edgeworth, you yield too easily.” She tugs on his cravat to bring them too eye level. He’s close enough to see her swallow, see her brow raise. When had such subtle movements become so hypnotic?

      “What would your father say of this?” He breathes. Their noses are touching now, their lips, barely so. Slowly, damningly so, he slides his palms up her thighs, reveling in the hitch of her breath, until his hands rest on either side of her waist, pressing into the front of the suitcase. Caging her or freeing her, such will depend on her next movement.

      “What would he say?” Franziska scoffs, though she isn’t thinking of her father. That isn’t love, schwester. “What can he say? I’ll tell you. Nothing. And damn them all who try.” With that, she rises and captures his mouth with her own, keeping a firm grip on the back of his neck, to hold him to her, the other spread across his chest. Franziska’s lips are soft and cold. She was always so cool, Miles thinks, and so unfamiliar. It enchants him. It encourages him. He realizes that he wants to be the one, the only one, to excavate this girl, for he knows of the fire within her, deep, deep within her. He wants to unearth every feeling she’s repressed, out of respect for her father, her fear of imperfection.

      He traces the seam of her lips with his tongue, willing her to open up to him. And she does, with a charge of energy and fear of the unknown that only serves to draw him nearer. He can taste her urgency, as he had all those years ago, along with the stain of red wine in the back of her throat.

      Franziska’s position from sitting atop the suitcase gives her the vantage to throw her leg over his hip. Her arms twine around his neck as his hands begin to rove the underside of her thighs, causing a friction that is delirious to them both. They pause to breathe after some moments, during which they adjust their grip on one another before aligning once more, releasing a sigh they’ve been holding in for years.

     I want her. Miles thinks. She wants me. Is it really that simple? He’d always thought of love as a dangerous game, set up like a house of cards on an uneven table. What I know of love is what I know of you. She’d told him that once. It’s true, they had little where else to learn.

     Manfred’s wife hadn’t loved him. She had nearly told Miles this much, when she had been living. His own mother had left him just as soon as he was swaddled in his first set of clothes.

     You don’t know what love is.

     Miles also knows love and lust have nothing in common, and were almost always exclusive. He cannot refute that he lusts for Franziska. There is no denying that- not when his lips are moving in tandem against hers, and his head is pounding from the sensation of it. Therefore, there should be no room left for love. Yet, as his tongue dances with hers, and her small hands continue to slide along the plans of his shoulders, his chest, awakening a dormant sense of primal yearning within him that breathes through his heart like a new, essential air.

     She’s managed to free the knots of his cravat and is now placing open mouthed kisses along the column of his neck, sloppy and unpracticed, though certainly not unsure. He’s trying to swallow his own moans, rather wishing he had her mouth to do so, yet he cannot find it in himself to complain. Her hands are trailing down his chest, lower, and lower until-

    “Well, isn’t this quite the picture!”

     The two snap apart, Franziska leaping from the suitcase to the carpet, ignoring the flash of pain when he ankle rolls in on itself. Her cheeks are burning red. In the doorway stands her sister, jaw set and chest heaving. Kalta looks neither of them in the eye, rather, the small portrait of her father and an infant Franziska that hangs over the vanity.

     “Cousin Larson is taking leave. I suggest you come to the foyer to say your goodbyes after you make yourself presentable.” She turns to leave, only to halt briefly, her fingers clutching indents into the doorframe with a grip like talons. “I know how much you adore having the last word in, Franziska, but this is going a bit far to prove your point, don’t you think? And next time you want to carry on your incestuous little tryst, keep it out of my father's house.” She hisses, then draws the oaken door shut behind her with a steely twist of her wrist.

     They listen to her heels puncture the tile of the hall until the crescendo drops to silence, and the sound of another door slamming is heard much farther away. Her shock must have gleaned her some sobriety; she hadn’t wobbled as she had before.

     “Franziska,” Miles mutters under his breath. His eyes fall shut. He can feel the flame in his cheeks stretch to his toes, though hurt overtakes shame as the force of Kalta’s parting words make impact. “What point were you trying to prove?”

      “I-”

     That isn’t love, schwester.

      A wetness pricks the back of her eyes. Not sorrow, but shame. So it was not love that motivated her, Miles realizes with a sinking dislocation of emotion. Perhaps he’d been a fool in misreading her fire. Her looks at her now as he realizes she’d only been trying to break a place into his heart. It was to his shame that she succeeded.

     He reties his cravat on his way to send off the cousin, pausing only once to smooth his hair in the hall mirror. Franiska arrives in the foyer not long after, as equally and hastily rekempt as he. Brendan raises a questioning brow between their blank stare and tone, as well as the way his wife’s jaw is set that tells him she’s grating her teeth.

      “Are you sure you must leave tomorrow?” Franziska asks after the cousin has departed. She stares straight ahead and speaks lightly, as if not moments before her sister had discovered her with her legs spread for her little brother. If Kalta's glare wasn't boring holes to the back of her head, she may have dared to reach for him, then.

      “There’s a ceremony being held in my honor.” Miles flinches at the word. They’ve retired to the alcove set aside from the foyer, entreated back to the darkness of the churning night. “The ‘king of prosecutors’ is, evidently, not a matter to be taken lightly, though I do wonder if my nomination was meant to humiliate me more than commemorate me.”

      “I could join you. I still have unfinished business at that office, likely the one reason they aren’t giving that reward to me.” She smirks, though nearly falters when Mile’s face only hardens at her attempt to lighten the air between them.

      “That will not be necessary.” He returns, more hoarse than a moment ago.

      Kalta appears in the archway, clutching Miles overcoat in her hands, which she shoves to his chest before storming off down the hall. Calling over her shoulder, “She's far too cunning for you, Miles, but I'll give you this. I take back what I said earlier about your attractions being incestuous. You are no longer a brother to this household. And if you respect that, you won't ever return to it."

Miles is gone the next morning, much like that day several years ago. No word nor whisper precedes him. Franziska stands in the doorway of his bedroom, ever as always on the outside looking in. A slip of paper lays on the mantel of the empty fireplace; a note.

      Franziska.

               I regret everything except you.

                           Miles.

                          P.S. Call me a fool, but Kalta was right. Please do not ask me to come back to this place.

       Fool! Damn him and damn his poetry. This time, it is Franziska who crumples the note, and, in the absence of a roaring fire, pitches it into the nearest waste bin like some sort of insubstantial annoyance.

      She thinks of the day after she kissed him, back when they were children. He’d never said goodbye, then, as he hardly did today. His plane had taken off that dawn, and a part of her, with it. And she’s stood through it all, ignoring completely the ache and clamor of her defiantly beating heart.