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Franziska did not dislike Klavier Gavin the first time they met. In fact, she had no strong feelings about him one way or the other. She had just returned to America to prosecute a case again Miles Edgeworth (a Von Karma and an Edgeworth standing opposite each other in court for the first time since the day Franziska’s father sullied the Von Karma name irreparably) and had swung by the office only briefly to grab some paperwork from the Chief.
Gavin was in one of the shoebox offices that Franziska had never deigned to dignify with her presence, had yet to prosecute a single case, and at the sight of Franziska, he stared with wide-eyed amazement, as if she was a celebrity, before blurting out, “I thought Herr Godot was taking the Hazakura Temple case.”
“I have seven years of seniority over that fool,” Franziska said. She had never met Prosecutor Godot, but she was familiar with his humiliating defeats at the hands of Phoenix Wright. “And, more saliently, he has not chosen to make himself present today.”
“Ja, of course. But I would have tried to clear my schedule if I knew you would be prosecuting. I have not seen you in court since I was thirteen.”
It was a very good thing he had not cleared his schedule. Any fool who worked in the Prosecutor's office would surely recognize why Miles Edgeworth should not be standing on the enemy’s side of the courtroom.
“This is another foolish case with the foolish Fey family. If you wish to see me in court, do so when Phoenix Wright is not involved.”
She meant that cases involving Wright inevitably stretched the bounds of possibility to such an extent that they were no place for an aspiring young prosecutor to learn. Instead, it appeared, he took from this that Phoenix Wright was not to be trusted.
Franziska saw him next under a headline so blatantly false that it made her throw the newspaper directly into the fireplace, sending sparks flying.
--
They said to never meet your heroes. Klavier was perhaps more familiar with the truth of this than most, by the age of nineteen. He had already toppled the Turnabout Terror, paragon of the Los Angeles legal world. Wright was never a personal hero of his, though. Franziska von Karma, on the other hand…
Klavier was once a pre-teen who already knew he wanted to be a prosecutor, and he wanted to do it fast. He wanted to stand in the courtroom and have such a brilliant and commanding presence that nobody could look away. He watched Franziska Von Karma, when she was fourteen and fifteen and sixteen, and he was only a few years younger, and thought: if she can do this, so can I. She was the first hero he ever had who seemed real and achievable.
When he started at Themis, his classmate Sebastian asked him who his legal heroes were. “Franziska von Karma,” he said without hesitation, “and mein Bruder.”
At nineteen, Klavier swaggered into a hotel bar in Frankfurt after an eight hour flight, and mustered up his most charming smile for Franziska Von Karma, who was drinking beer with a man who bore an uncanny resemblance to a dog.
“Fra–”
The whip sting across his chest cut him off. “I have no time for arrogant fools who dare to grin their foolish grins at me. Do not open your lying mouth in front of me, Klavier Gavin.”
“Whatever offense I have caused–”
He expected another blow from the whip and instead flinched when she emptied her companion’s full glass of beer in his face. It soaked his hair, leaving droplets on his sunglasses and dripping down his shirt.
“Hey!” The man said.
As an aside, ignoring Klavier completely, she said, “this fool does not deserve the honour of being treated as a worthy opponent.”
“Lang Zi says, discipline is wasted on the hound that bites for pleasure.”
She pulled out her wallet, left thirty euros on the bar, and they both walked away, leaving Klavier standing there, sopping wet, tired, and never more miserable or confused.
So, Klavier only had one hero and he tore down other peoples’ all the time. He didn’t take any comfort in the fact that Sebastian’s own hero in that conversation had been “my father.”
--
The third time Franziska met Klavier Gavin, she was sober and in a professional context that necessitated their interaction. He irritated her tremendously. The accent was one thing, as she knew he played it up as part of an irritating persona. The refusal to give the law the seriousness and respect it deserved was more irritating again. Then there was the flirting, the patronizing ‘Fräulein,’ which she would have happily banished from his vocabulary if she could.
But at the heart of it all there was the Phoenix Wright of the matter. Because Franziska was a good prosecutor, though she knew now that she was not perfect, and she would not have been defeated by anything other than the truth. The same went for Miles Edgeworth, and doubly so for Papa. He did not fake the bullet in Papa’s shoulder, devastating proof of his guilt that he carried with him always.
The victim in Gavin’s murder case was a middle-man working for an international trafficking operation. The killer, it turned out, was the man one up on the chain. Both of them had their cases settled and Gavin had learned to call her ‘Prosecutor von Karma’ by the time he finally understood why she hated him so much.
“A fool,” she said to her suspect, who accused her of falsifying his fingerprints on the cell phone that arranged his meeting with the deceased, “accuses those who defeat him fairly of dishonesty and fails to instead learn the error of his ways.”
“Oh,” Gavin said, becoming a textbook illustration of the phrase ‘understanding dawns’. “This is about Wright.”
Her whip cracked just a hairsbreadth from his ear. “Stay on task, Klavier Gavin.”
--
Phoenix Wright was never Klavier’s hero, but somehow, he managed to take both of them away from him. Like the ashes of the burnt guitar which crumbled at his touch, the rest of Klavier’s life fell away after.
--
“Why did you not tell me that Kristoph Gavin was the true mastermind behind his brother’s scheme?”
Miles Edgeworth covered his eyes with his arm, blocking out the harsh light from the hallway. It was still dark outside and his bedroom in the von Karma mansion had blackout curtains that eliminated most external light. They were a gift when Miles had difficulty sleeping as a teenager, but Franziska wondered now if the dark hurt rather than helping matters.
“It’s the middle of the night, Franziska.”
“And I only heard the news from America when I landed. Why are you even still in Germany, little brother? Should you not be in America, with that fool of yours?”
“I have a flight tomorrow at ten. Which I may not make if you do not let me sleep.”
“You may sleep when you have answered my question, Miles Edgeworth.”
“Which is?”
Fool. “Why did you not tell me that Klavier Gavin was merely an agent for his brother’s schemes?”
He finally let his arm slide from his face and pushed himself up. “He wasn’t an agent at all, as far as Phoenix and I are aware. Only the two of us and Trucy knew about Kristoph’s involvement.”
“You cannot honestly expect me to believe that vainglorious fool did not see what was happening right before his face.”
“I didn’t.” Franziska’s hand drifted up unconsciously to her shoulder, where the scar of a bullet wound still rested below her blouse, just like her father’s. “Gavin’s brother was his guardian, after their parents died. He had far more reason to trust him than I ever did Manfred, and yet.”
This was a recent habit of his, calling Papa by his first name. The disrespect annoyed her, but it went along with Miles’s tendency to address her in the third person as “Prosecutor von Karma,” without clarifying which one, as if there was no other worthy of that name. She was von Karma, now, and he was nothing.
“And yet?”
“Both of us needed Phoenix Wright to see exactly how thoroughly we had been used.”
She went back downstairs to the kitchen, and half an hour later Miles Edgeworth abandoned all pretense of being asleep and trailed down after her.
“Nightmares?”
“I trust the noise isn’t what kept you up?”
Franziska shook her head. His bedroom was soundproofed, too. Maybe next time he came to Germany, she should make up Mama’s room for him instead. Maybe there wouldn’t be a next time he came to stay, if she could sell this house first. An international prosecutor could be based anywhere in the world, and, if Phoenix Wright was going to return to the courtroom, then it was only fitting that he have someone to stand against other than the usual parade of fools. She thought Miles could use the company.
--
It wasn't that Klavier was avoiding Prosecutor von Karma. For one thing, that phrasing implied a level of success. Klavier wished that he was avoiding Prosecutor von Karma because every time they so much as passed each other in the hallway, she stared at him, and her gaze was as sharp as her whip.
Did she see guilt? Had she always seen guilt in him? How did she know so long before he himself did? How did she lay eyes on him immediately, in that hotel bar, and see through him?
Forget never meeting your heroes. Klavier should have been worried about letting his heroes meet him.
Kristoph wouldn’t see him, when he went to the prison. Franziska saw him often, and clearly found him wanting.
--
Once, Franziska’s older sister, Ingrid, had said to her, “it must be special, to be the only one of us that Papa actually loves.”
A week later, Ingrid told their father that she was pregnant, was dropping out of her PhD program to become a primary school teacher, and was moving in with her boyfriend to whom she was not married. From then on, they only spoke twice a year, at Easter and Christmas, the way some people interact with their priests.
It took Franziska eight years, and twenty-six declined phone calls to a federal prison in America, before she realized that Ingrid was wrong. The only one of them Papa actually loved was himself.
Franziska inherited the entire estate, and split it three ways. When Ingrid declined her calls, Franziska set up a trust for her niece instead. A von Karma, whether by name or not, should never go wanting.
She still loved her father, all these years later. She missed the rare praise he would offer her after moments of perfect victory. She still sometimes remembered his voice, before her first real trial, when her hands were sweaty with nerves. “You will be perfect. A true von Karma always is.” But she was well aware that those things weren’t signs of love. Nobody whose father truly loved her was so paralyzingly afraid of failing him. No child from a perfect home would be unable, after all these years, to tell her brother that she loved him. Nobody else would have gone back to her hotel room after State V. Fey and found herself unable to breathe, to think, paralyzed with fear.
Maya often said, “you deserved better,” and Franziska was starting to think that maybe she was right. Parenting wasn’t an area where anyone was perfect, but it was also perhaps the one field in which Franziska’s father never tried to be.
--
Klavier’s worst failure to avoid Prosecutor von Karma occured on the day Phoenix Wright swanned into the prosecutor’s office like he owned the place and Klavier, in his hurry to get away, ducked into the first office he could find without checking the name plate. He was hoping for Sebastian, or even one of the Paynes, all of whom would fall for whatever deflection Klavier could come up with when his heart stopped racing.
“Gavin.”
Prosecutor von Karma’s office was perfectly tidy, of course, but it had flashes of warmth Klaver hadn’t expected from her. In between her formidable collection of law books from a ridiculous number of countries, he spotted a number of volumes of the Pink Princess manga and a few coloring books. There was a fluffy purple blanket folded over the back of her couch, and in addition to a gorgeous landscape painting (distinctly German, naturally) her wall boasted what appeared to be a photo collage, lovingly homemade with glitter and a fingerprint in glue on one of the photos. In the collage, Klavier spotted Chief Prosecutor Edgeworth, Sebastian, the man from the bar in Frankfurt, two women in purple robes, the labor law queen Kay Faraday, and, of course, the Wrights.
“Fr– Prosecutor von Karma.”
“Based on your vacant expression, you were not aware that this was my office. Explain your foolish lapse at once.”
“No explanation, Prosecutor. Just a poor sense of direction. I’ll leave you be immediately, ja?”
“Sebastian?” Wright said from the hallway, “where has Miles been hiding you? I haven’t seen you in months. Are you so busy in the salt mines that you can’t even come over and meet the new kids?”
Sebastian was too good-hearted and scatterbrained to think to drag Wright into his office for this conversation. They’d do the whole social dance out in the hallway. Klavier really was trapped.
Sebastian launched into an explanation of his recent cases and how he’d been entrusted with the Prosecutors’ offices new community outreach initiative. Wright’s interjections were inquisitive and friendly, which Klavier would normally count as a good sign. As a rule, he liked people who liked Sebastian. Sebastian never got along with Kristoph or Daryan. Maybe that was a sign, in retrospect. Of the two of them, Sebastian was the better judge of character.
The whip cracked, not in Klavier’s direction, instead striking the side of the bookshelf. “Where is your head, fool?”
“Above my shoulders.”
There was no amusement in the thinning of her lips. Wright laughed, out in the hallway at some unrelated joke, and Klavier flinched.
“Sit down.” She indicated the sofa with the hilt of her whip. “This is a conversation long overdue.”
He sat, confusion overtaking fear in his mind for a brief moment. The bit of the blanket he brushed up against was softer than its owner had been in her entire life. “What conversation, Prosecutor von Karma?”
“You went to school in America?”
“Ja.”
“State, as you remember them, the facts of State V. Edgeworth.”
This was some kind of obscure test. Kristoph used to do this, to make sure Klavier hadn’t gotten sloppy. Fortunately, even with Kristoph in prison, this was a case Klavier remembered. He knew exactly why his new boss had reason to hate him, why his firing was only a matter of time.
“Chief Prosecutor Edgeworth was arrested for the murder of a defence attorney. Roger – or was it Robert? – Hammond. Phoenix Wright was the defense. He proved that Herr Edgeworth was, in fact, framed for the crime by the true murderer.” He paused.
Von Karma offered him a bland smile. “Go on, fool. I will correct you if you make any mistakes of significance.”
“It was the fifteen-year anniversary of the murder of Herr Edgeworth’s father, when the statute of limitations expired. Yanni Yogi, the murderer of Hammond, was acting at the behest of the true murderer of Gregory Edgeworth.”
“Say his name.”
“Manfred von Karma.”
He winced, preemptively, but the whip didn’t strike. Instead, she sat it down and folded her hands on her desk. “Now do you know what this conversation is about, Herr Gavin?”
The title, along with the friendly tone, were such a surprise that he stared, slack-jawed, at her.
“Fool?”
“Yes, Prosecutor von Karma.”
“Respond to your name next time, Klavier Gavin, and perhaps I will not be left to resort to insults.”
“Yes, Prosecutor von Karma. But our circumstances are not the same, ja? I was an accessory to mein Bruder’s actions. You were, what, three?”
“Unless your grasp of the law is poorer than befits a prosecutor, you do not fit under the definition of accessory, fool. You had no knowledge of you brother’s forgeries, let alone of his murders. Nor did you intentionally assist him either before or after the fact in disguising them. You were, at your worst, an oblivious fool, and this foolish office is full of fools in their various gradations of foolishness.”
“I could have seen him for what he was. I could have seen Wright for what he was. All the facts were there. Any investigator worth the laces on their boots–”
Prosecutor von Karma interrupted him with a childishly pitched voice, in German. “Miles Edgeworth, Papa says your father was a cowardly defense attorney. Is this true?” She glared, and in her normal tone, in English, said, “all children are gullible fools, some of us for longer than others. You are still not understanding. I will be more blunt.”
He did not know what might happen if Franziska von Karma became more blunt. “Ja?”
“You were a tool, Gavin. Nothing more. Perhaps your immaturity made the crime easier, just as the sharpness of a knife increases its utility, but a madman will wound even with the bluntest blade. The pursuit of prosecutorial perfection demands constant growth. Your task now, as is my task, as is Miles Edgeworth’s task, as is Phoenix Wright’s task, is to be smarter and better than the people who deceived us. Your task, as mine, is to wipe your cowardly, foolish ‘family’ members off the map, until the only Gavin anyone ever thinks of is Klavier. Do you understand?”
“Wright’s task?”
Her lip curled in slight amusement. “You might have known, had you attended the Hazakura Temple trial as you intended to. Read the transcript sometime. Now, do you understand the task at hand?”
“Ja, Prosecutor von Karma.”
For once, the gaze was calculating but not devastating. “Frau von Karma will do, I think. In private.”
Klavier couldn’t keep a smile off his face, at that. “Danke, Frau von Karma.”
“Now leave my office immediately.”
He remembered the taste of the whip well enough not to need to be asked twice. He opened the door nearly into Sebastian, who was loitering alone in the hall. Sebastian, seeing the tears barely clinging on at the corners of Klavier’s eyes, pulled him into a hug without asking why.