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Franziska’s got her little hands wrapped shakily around a mug of tea, one that is way too nice an heirloom for a feverish little girl to be left in charge of. Miles is nervously eyeing her every few seconds, making sure her fingers are locked beneath its handle. She sips at it errantly between questions, buried in a comforter and pressed against his side.
“But why does Ms. Orange act foolish like that?”
Miles crosses his arms, watching multicoloured smoke-explosions dance on TV, their fuzzy light reflecting off her pinkened cheeks. “She’s worried if she admits to her feelings for Red it’ll mess up the team.”
“Yes! Yes,” Franziska rasps, and Miles has to stop himself from flinching at the state of her voice. “Foolish feelings. But she is not a fool. She should get rid of them!”
“You can’t just get rid of feelings, Franziska.”
“She could,” Franziska says. “Ms. Orange is strong and pretty. She can do anything.”
She takes another sip of her tea, and Miles finds he doesn’t have an answer for that, nor does he know how to explain to a feverish 6 year old with a tenuous grasp of the English language how romance works. Instead he keeps his eyes on the TV as it paints shadows and lights on the ornate walls of the overlarge living room, listens to the sound of his sister’s stopped-up breathing.
It’s a very new thing, having a sister. Miles isn’t even sure that’s what he’d call her if someone asked, but Franziska doesn’t seem to care—she took to him like fire took to kindling, without question and without fear. Miles wants to say that she’s special—that not all little girls are quite so precocious and bold, but he doesn’t know enough little girls to say for sure. In any case—regardless of whether or not he’s ready to admit it—he enjoys her company quite a lot.
Right now it takes the form of a concern that flowers and aches in his chest. Every few minutes Franziska coughs roughly, and it’s a deceptively small-sounding thing, muffled into covers and crackling in her chest. He knows exactly what it feels like—better than anyone, he’d wager, given the way he still occasionally has to dip to the side to cough a ragged cough of his own.
It had been a little more than a week since he’d come down sick. An unremarkable thing, really—unlikely to be the flu, given that he was up to date on all his vaccinations, but still far too nasty to be a simple cold. Custom tailored to knock him on his backside and keep him confined to his room, swimming in his thoughts and fever-delirious with unpleasant dreams.
Franziska, of course, had shown up almost immediately—demanding her brother get better now, and how foolish could he be to get so sick so quickly? She was not soon after ushered out of the room by the servants, and then eventually her father when their authority didn’t hold up to her stubborn spirit. The master of the house was clear in his instruction, that there was no use in Franziska getting herself sick as well, but she remained bullheaded as ever, sneaking into Miles’ room with snacks and drinks after the house had all gone to bed.
Perhaps it was selfish, but after the relentless boredom that came with being sick in his room all day, Miles was more than grateful for Franziska’s presence. Oftentimes she was difficult to be around—bossy and loud and a brat if he’d ever known one—but when he was this desperate for noise to fill the void of his head, he found her company incredibly comforting. Even if she didn’t know the first thing about proper bedside manners.
Franziska lasted three days—three days of bringing him water, babbling about criminal law, and switching out perfectly-folded washcloths on his forehead—before she started sniffling. She’d fallen asleep on his bed that final night, and he’d braved the freezing cold hallways and the world outside his impossibly stuffy room to carry her back to her own, taking extra care to throw a second blanket on her in an attempt to stave off the inevitable. Because she’s Franziska, she showed up at his bedroom door the very next day—cheeks red, nose streaming, an hour later than usual—and tried to check his fever before promptly passing out.
Now, unbidden by any rules of quarantine, they found themselves situated on the couch past sundown, watching Rainbow Samurai. Franziska had made it previously clear that she had no interest in your foolish shows, Miles Edgeworth, but she had come around as soon as she saw one of the leading ladies morph her signature katana into a razor-whip and throw it directly into an interdimensional alien’s face. Miles knew this song and dance, having experienced it himself several years ago—everyone thought they were above the Samuraiverse, until the moment they were not.
At some point in the night Franziska finishes her tea, and even though she’s the one running a fever hot enough to rival a dying star, she remains with her eyes glued to the action while Miles dozes beside her. It’s a little annoying, frankly—he’s spent the whole week resting, living in the ephemeral divide between his bed and his desk, and still his body folds in on itself, his eyes growing heavy and his muscles going slack. All that keeps him tethered is Franziska’s incessant questions, and he’s caught between the brotherly urge to tell her to rest her voice, and the tantalizingly biblical temptation of getting to run his own mouth with trivia about this universe he adores so much.
“—and how do they get all the pretty people who are also good doing jumps? So many of them?”
“Huh?”
“I don’t know how to call it,” Franziska says, fighting English. “The actors. They look nice. And they’re… how do—sportlich—with the fighting, and tricks. Probably both is hard.”
She’s waving her hands a little erratically as she attempts to articulate herself. It’d be cute if it wasn’t so technically impressive, the way she has consistently swatted away their language barrier like it was a simple bug. Miles couldn’t say his German was anywhere near as impressive as her English.
“Franziska,” Miles can’t hide the way his eyes sparkle, “do you know what a stunt double is?”
She crosses her arms, narrows her brow, slumps against him indignantly. “I know more than you, Miles.”
“Of course,” he knows not to argue. “But it’s okay if we know different things. Would you like me to tell you?”
Her shoulders are at her ears, and she sniffles thickly and childishly and mumbles out an affirmative. Despite the ire in her voice she leans close to Miles as he talks, and beneath the thick comforter thrown atop the both of them he snakes his arm around her side and holds her steady, just in case her flawless composure cracks and she needs someone to keep her aloft.
What could feasibly be ten words ends up being a thousand, barely legible through slow lips and intermittent yawns. Eventually, Miles is slumping—head dipping and tilting and eyes barely open as he talks through the exhaustion in his core and the tear in his throat. At some point, Franziska loses the energy to prop herself up and takes instead to rolling herself onto her brother’s lap.
“This scene actually holds the world record for the most stunt actors in one shot…”
Miles is in the middle of the sentence when he realizes, in his half-awake daze, that Franziska hasn’t said anything for a while. Sure enough, she’s out like a light down there, laboured mouth-breathing as even and metered as he suspects it is able to get. In sleep she lowers her guard, carries no veneer, and so it’s only then that Miles is able to really take in how sick she sounds. He knows, of course, having been down with the same exact thing—but Franziska was a master at hiding her discomfort, a dreadfully tragic skill for a young girl to have.
Lazily, affectionately, he cards his fingers through her messy hair, thinking that she’s still a little too warm and he should maybe get her a new cold pack. He’s still got lingering chills, though, ones that are only assuaged right now by the fact that his sister is functionally a space heater, and moving from his little niche sounds like a fate worse than death. Franziska coughs, and whines, and draws the blanket closer to her neck, and Miles sits there and thinks feel better very very hard in the hopes that maybe, somehow, simply wishing for this will ensure it happens. He elects to be more pragmatic once he’s closer to normal himself.
It’s only once he sees she’s drifted off that he allows himself permission to shut his eyes and cease fighting the sleep that’s trying so stubbornly to take him. The nightmares are a concern, of course—he knows he’ll wake up sobbing whether he cares to or not, and Franziska shouldn’t have to tend to her nightly routine of grounding him to begin with, let alone when she’s unwell. That’s a problem he’ll solve in a few hours, though—perhaps his instinct to look after her will override his terror. It’s a very new thing, having a sister, and with it comes all sorts of new solutions to conundrums Miles never thought he’d have the tools to confront.
Peaceful as he’s been in a very long while, Miles leans his head back on the scratchy fabric of the couch and dozes to the steady rhythm of swords clashing in perfect step.
The first thing Manfred notices when he steps out of the car is the flashing of the TV that peeks out through the half-drawn curtains, splotches the perfectly cropped lawn in off-blue light. He drops his briefcase and suit jacket off with the staff, allows himself to wander down into the main living space, and—unsurprisingly—finds his daughter asleep, clinging to Miles like letting go would promise her end.
She had certainly taken to him. It was a wonder, really—Franziska hardly got along with either of her older sisters, but she looked at Miles like he painted the very universe around her. That was more than apparent now, the way she had her little arms wrapped as far around his waist as they could stretch, the way he’d fallen asleep himself with his hands tangled in a mop of sweat-logged blue hair.
Errantly Manfred brushes some of it away from Franziska’s cheek, scowling at the heat that radiates off her before he even makes contact. That headstrong will of Franziska’s would be a marvel someday in court, but right now she was an elementary schooler and it was threatening to drive him to his wits end. He should have known there would be no stopping her from catching whatever wretched afflictions the boy managed to drag in.
On that note he drags his eyes to Miles, studying the way his features shift and contort in sleep. Franziska had said that he suffered from nightmares, through big, worried eyes while she pleaded her papa to be more patient with Miles when he struggled to rise in the mornings. Right now Miles is shivering alongside whatever terrors are living on the back of his eyelids—Franziska’s pulled the blanket off of him and stolen it for herself, and the house is drafty as ever in the budding autumn, even to Manfred’s own taste. Miles makes a noise that’s near-silent and tells of absolutely nothing pleasant, and Manfred can’t help wincing when his shoulder ebbs, a sharp and sudden pain he can’t ignore.
The both of them look a little pitiful, to put things bluntly. He holds a condescending clicking behind his teeth, ducking into the other room to fetch some things.
When he returns the first thing he does is switch the TV off—money’s hardly an object to those of von Karma blood, but that doesn’t mean he’s eager to waste it on electric bills. The second thing he does is pull the thickest comforter he can find around Miles’ shoulders, awkwardly tucking and draping it in such a way that it covers him without suffocating Franziska. The final thing Manfred does is affix her with a new cold pack, and she must truly feel dreadful with the way she doesn’t stir at all. Up close he can hear the whistle in her breathing, and within the walls of his own home with no prying eyes to parse weakness from his love, he leans forward to press a kiss to the side of her head, wondering whatever he’s going to do with this girl.
Already, she seems a little less troubled, her hand instinctively finding Miles’ in half-sleep. The second their fingers tangle Miles’ face seems to relax, the anxious stutter in his lungs all but disappearing.
Satisfied as he’ll be for now, Manfred quietly pulls the massive doors shut.