Work Text:
December 28th, 2017. It has been a year since Franziska von Karma last cried. She does not have the time to today, though— as always, the case is the priority. Between intensive talks with witnesses, though, she cannot seem to focus on anything. Someone else would have let another prosecutor take the case, but Franziska could not let that happen. Phoenix Wright was to be her opponent in the courtroom, she was to be the one to defeat the man who had taken everything from her.
Learning that her father had killed Gregory Edgeworth should not have brought Franziska to tears, she tells herself. She knows her grief is in vain, why care for the man who has not called her once since his imprisonment? Why grieve the loss of someone whose heart beats to this day? He has disappeared from her life in an instant. She never knew how to feel about him, no one was there to teach her how. Edgeworth was long gone, and he was her only hope.
She told herself he was alive. She had to believe that, no matter how much pain he had caused her, she needed him to be alive. The note he left behind was too vague, too short, too painfully, unreasonably different from everything else she had ever known her little brother to say and to be. He was long-winded, rambling on and on about things that no one else in this world gave a damn about, not to the extent that he did. He was vague sometimes, yes, but never this much so. To choose death is an idea Franziska has been thinking about constantly for months now. Was it simply career suicide? He had his reputation destroyed as a prosecutor by Mr. Phoenix Wright, that man Franziska sought to destroy herself. Perhaps Miles considered this so-called death to be his only option after his humiliation at the hands of such a pathetic man. She knew it could not be anything else. She would not let it be anything else, would not let herself believe her brother, her only lifeline, was gone.
To lose what little you have in a year's time is a curse Franziska would not wish on anyone. With every coming day, the rot seeps into your skin more and more and you begin to wonder: Is this all you can be? The lone survivor of a grim legacy?
But Franziska cannot cry today. After all, the case is always the priority.