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There is no sense to what she is doing as she shuts her eyes, once, very quickly, and strides out of the courtroom. The curt click she chose her signature heels for does not sound as she walks down the hall, and her steps are not calculated nor controlled as she tries to not flat-out run. She still cannot find the rationality her name is emblematic of when she pushes open the bathroom door (single-stalled and easily locked, a small mercy in this foreign courthouse). There is no rhythm as she turns the tap and begins, in her frenzy, to splash water across her face, and there is no forgiveness for the way its dark droplets are made visible across her shirt, her vest, her neckwear.
She tries and tries to wash the cool water over her forehead, to stop her mind from racing, but nothing can be cold enough to flush out the burning in Franziska’s head. Nothing has ever been enough, in all her years of running, and in her youth she would sometimes be scared of how offensive, how fiery her brain would become in a panic. She splashes water on her face. The thoughts do not stop.
Franziska knows, inherently, that she is the last von Karma left, that there is no one waiting at home to scream at her for the utter disgrace she has become, the way she has dragged her own name through the mud. Franziska knows this, but the little girl that she was denied the privilege of being never stopped believing in ghosts. Her father’s name has been carved into stone, his life neatly tied with a start and end and an entirely too simplified description, one that calls him a father and a colleague but skips the words friend and murderer. Franziska’s father is dead, but he won’t stop choking her— she has become him, and she has failed to be him, and she cannot breathe.
Franziska can only see him when she looks in the mirror, though she tries and fails to look for her brother. She has realized she is at the beginning of their ends, realized it an hour ago, when she first tripped on a word while looking at a man in a blue suit. She was beginning to accept it when the girl on the stand started telling a story about her little sister. She had no choice but to rail against it, thoughtlessly, when the most incompetent man in the room banged his gavel for the last time, and she rails against it still as she begs her eyes to look like Miles Edgeworth’s.
Maybe she would not be running her hands through her own hair in a childish attempt to self-soothe if the girl on the stand had told a different story, or if the man frowning at her from across the courtroom had been a different person entirely. In a different case, a different life, perhaps one loss would not break her brittle composure– but a girl with her own sister’s face stood in court, and a girl killed the man who stole her life, and Mimi Miney was driving the car that killed her sister. Fancy cars bored Franziska, but her brother lit up at them, and he took her for a ride in his red convertible when she was fourteen, and Mimi Miney drove a European car and burned alive and killed her sister and watched the man who took her die. It is this that Franziska thinks about while she screws her eyes shut and gasps for air: Mimi Miney saw her sister’s face in the mirror each day and lived her life in memoriam. And no matter how much she made herself a tomb, she could not move on from a man in a suit who once smiled at her from across the room.
Franziska has held no delusions about being a good person since a chrysanthemum-shaped badge was first placed in her hands. She looks at her face, her father’s face, and she knows that if she was handed a stronger weapon than a whip she would take it. She had been raised to know violent revenge as the action of a vapid, uncomposed defendant. She had learned too quickly of a fifteen-year-old revenge, the action of a self-obsessed, inflexible man. But Franziska’s brother was broken down and torn apart, and he left a note that must have been for her. Franziska would take the gun or the knife or the sword, and she would cut down the man who killed him. She would rend his flesh as easily as Mimi Miney had stood at point-blank range, looked Turner Grey in the eye, and decided to not forgive him for the death of the girl whose face she wore. Franziska watches her hands shake, and she wonders if her brother ever retreated to the dark room she stands in like a specter, if he ever turned the tap in an attempt to wash away the thoughts of a demon.
Franziska does not stop trembling for a very long time. She does not stop looking in the mirror. She takes out her badge from its hiding place in her pocket and presses its sharp edges into her palm. She breathes in, and then out. Justice’s spikes dig into the flesh of her hand. She breathes again. She looks in the mirror. Eyes that are not hers stare back, eyes that belong to her father and Mimi Miney and every terrified defendant who has ever retained the gall to stare at her while their verdict is declared. Franziska shuts her eyes, once, very quickly, and she does not allow any tears to fall, hot, onto her cheeks. She combs her hair with her fingers, puts on her gloves, straightens her bow. She hesitantly pumps out reams of paper towels and brings her face back to a dry glower. She is still trembling. She is still taking shaky breaths, shallow gulps of air.
Franziska von Karma strides out of a courthouse bathroom with a pace imperceptibly slower than usual. Franziska has shaken the hands of hundreds of amicable, losing defense advocates, fair in their oppositions. Franziska hears the jubilance contained in Lobby No. 3, and she walks past it thinking of dead siblings’ returns and girls with the wrong faces.
Franziska gathers her paperwork and steps into the mocking sun, shining its June joy onto her still-damp collar. Franziska stares at the burning sky and tries to burn back at it, to glower and fight, but her hands on her whip stay cold. With her only tool reduced to latent leather on her bitten palms, Franziska wonders when she will be able to stop mourning evil men and kind-eyed boys and devils who took her for rides in convertibles and younger siblings and smug girls who held fire in their eyes.