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It was just as well that his first winter back in Germany in a long while had offered only its dreariest holiday season. The liminal space between Christmas and New Years was already so… itchy, was the only way Miles could describe it, an anxiety that seemed to settle under his skin, like for that brief period of time anything could happen, good and bad and all that existed in-between. Miles can’t remember if he felt that way before… Before. Still, it hadn’t left him even when much else did, prickling his senses with a truly illogical feeling of dread.
The storm just had to roll in, though, freezing rain pelting the windows in a disjointed rhythm that contrasted the low crackle of the mansion’s biggest fireplace. Franziska was where he left her—camped out on the couch and coughing so hard she hadn’t even noticed him enter. The sound of it alone had him wincing, even as she tried to keep its noise polite, stifled into her elbow and hiding beneath the covers of her favourite childhood blanket.
As the annual von Karma Christmas party settled down, Franziska had insisted that the rough quality to her voice was simply from talking for long hours without stopping, as was the twinge of pain that lingered in her throat by night’s end. Nevermind that talking for hours at a time was quite literally her job, and that this event hardly strained her in a way she wasn’t used to. Naturally, even with the festivities at a close, she kept finding excuses to be near Miles in the massive house, talking his ear off every opportunity she got, until her voice slipped further and further into a raspy imprint of itself. It was all but gone, now, and Franziska had insisted up until the very end that she wasn’t sick, just overtired and at her social limit.
Now, half-awake on the couch with a scalding fever and barely any voice left, Franziska was running out of alternate theories to propose, or energy to shoo her brother away whenever he hovered near.
“How are you faring?”
As he says it, Miles hands her another mug of tea—still steaming, steeped to perfection befitting. She pokes her hands out of the blanket, shivers fiercely as the cold air hits her arms. “Don’t ask foolish questions.”
More than the ghost of her voice’s cadence he hears utter exhaustion lining every word, and though she puts on the same air as always, Franziska looks like she could stand to nap for a week or two. Despite the crawl of the fire in the hearth she’s still shivering—just barely, careful to keep it under wraps lest Miles notice—and in lieu of a thanks she simply nods at him when she takes the tea. Succinct, strong, one single motion—the von Karmas, Miles had learned over the course of many years, could say paragraphs with their eyes alone.
Outside, there is a flare of something bright, and Franziska’s hands tense around the mug. A wild look in her eyes, something Miles hasn’t seen often. She swallows thickly, trying not to wince, and mechanically raises the cup to her cracking lips.
There’s a rumble that pours over the jet-black skies, a harbinger behind the pattering rain. When she was younger, Franziska loved storms—loved them the same way Miles loved taking the elevator with his father, alright, on three we jump, one, two—
Franziska sucks in a breath. It rattles behind her breastbone, and then she’s coughing again, still trying to stifle the things lest her brother catch her looking so pitiful. It’s a testament to how miserable she’s feeling that she doesn’t shy away when he leans over, too lost in the throes of the fit to notice his knuckles brushing against her cheek. The glare she levels him is positively acid-drenched, but Franziska does not resist in any other way, and just this once Miles wishes she would.
It’s a little bit later when the first true boom of thunder hits. Miles is down the hall in the kitchens, grabbing more tea, when he hears the choked-back cry. The sound of it is wrong, uncanny, something he hasn’t heard from Franziska since… Since. Pieces begin to fall into place in his head, dots connecting to one another as the wind howls outside. He forgets what he’s doing, urgently walking back to her sickbed, all but jogging through the mansion’s winding halls.
On the couch, Franziska is shaking, head pressed into one hand, blanket falling off of her as she balls up and fights tears. She’s clutching at the fabric hanging over shoulder, digits tensed so hard he fears her nails might chip. Miles is careful to make his footsteps audible, though he worries in her fright she might have blocked out the outside world entirely. He’s crouching down beside her before he can register it, knees folded on the velvet carpets living beneath the couch. She was always so good at this, Miles can only hope to do his best impression.
“Franziska,” he says, and her shoulders hike up with a jolt. She peers at Miles through separated fingers, the feverbright fear in her eyes flickering down to something more simmering.
“It hurts,” she chokes out, her gaze far-off and darting. “Miles, my shoulder hurts—”
He knows this pain, of course he does. Being on the other side of it is something else, though, knowing the terror of it himself by no means makes him an expert. The fever has undoubtedly exacerbated the delusion of it, as well, a factor that may complicate things. It’s different, though—she wasn’t scared like this when it was happening, not in any way that showed on her face. Franziska was strong that muggy spring day as she was anywhere else, chin pointed high and mouth set firm as she poured hot blood all over his car upholstery.
Miles forgot, sometimes, how much of Franziska was a mask.
He breathes deep. The thunder rolls. “I know, Franziska.”
“Where have you been?!” The look in her eye turns furious, more familiar. “I didn’t know where you’d gone, Miles. They said you were dead!”
“I’m sorry,” he says, and then his hand is on her hand, the both of them folded over Franziska’s shoulder, just like they were before. “I’m okay. You’re okay, too.”
“How can you sound so sure?!” And then there are tears, big ones that slip from her eyes and onto his sleeve.
“Because you are Franziska von Karma,” Miles says without hesitation. “You do not go down without a fight. You’re strong.”
“I’m tired. I’m tired of being strong. This year has been horrible, Miles, I’m—I don’t want to be strong! My shoulder—it hurts—I don’t want to be strong.”
It’s a second chance, in a way. He does what he should’ve done, that day, what he wanted to do but was too much of a closed-off coward to accomplish. Miles leans forward and hugs his sister—he hugs her the way she deserves to be hugged. With his arms tight around her back, with her tearlogged face pressed into his collar, with a hand tangled in her hair, smoothing out the mess she’s worked it up into while convalescent. Firmly, he holds her aloft, listens intently to the way she wheezes her way back into something resembling a steady rhythm of breathing.
“Then rest, big sister,” he tells her, carding his fingers through silvery locks. “Let me return to you threefold the protection you've given me.”
Another clap of thunder has Franziska clinging to him so hard that they threaten to fuse into one. She’s shaking still, living there against his heartbeat, trying to focus on the sound of it as she fights a darkened psyche with all she has. Her tears sputter out, and he holds tighter for a moment before slowly pulling away.
“Do you know what year it is, Franziska?”
Blinking blearily, she furrows her brow and stares at the wall behind him. “2018.”
“That’s correct.” He nods, once, firm and grounding in that special way only Miles can be. “And do you know where you are?”
A moment of pause. She looks at the fireplace, and then fixes her gaze on him. Only for a second, and then she says, “Home.”
Something deep inside him swells at that. There’s a crackle of flames that sprints across her eyes, one Miles hasn’t seen since they were very young. The thought that he might’ve been one of the forces to snuff it out instills a guilt in him he almost cannot bear, and he decides then and there to do everything in his power to revive its light.
“Home,” he echoes, and regards the mess on her face, and the sickly heat still radiating off of her, and wishes that his handkerchief was not tucked away into his suit pocket and hung elsewhere. The thunder booms, and she flinches, but this time she does not cry.
“We’re safe,” Miles reiterates. “There’s no one who can hurt us, here.”
She nods. There on a couch her father bought, in the house her father owned, red-cheeked and frightened, Franziska looks no different from how she did fifteen years ago. As far back as Miles’ memory stretches, it’s always been her patching him up—talking him through his nightmares, holding his hand on outings, introducing him to everyone at house parties and gatherings, making sure he never felt sad a day in his life. Even when the two of them annoyed each other ceaselessly, even when she was furious with anger at him, at the end of the day Franziska would sooner die than let him go to bed with a tear in his heart. Long before Miles himself believed there was a kinder future, Franziska twined her grip around his wrist and dragged him toward its light.
He hadn’t realized until very recently precisely how badly he longed to return the favour.
She breathes deep. He breathes with her. At their flank, the fireplace lets loose a particularly loud crack. Its sharpness sounds an awful lot like—
“Your whip’s still in the bedroom,” Miles says aloud, to himself more than anything. “I need to fetch more medicine for you anyways, I’ll hurry back as soon as I can with both.”
Franziska nods, not meeting his eyes, fidgeting with her sleeve. She’s starting to look a little less scared and a little more angry, no doubt furious with herself for being frightened in the first place. She’d never blamed him when he was reliving his trauma, never looked down upon him for the unremarkable things that triggered his own flashbacks, but Franziska was Franziska, always so much harder on herself for stumbling than anyone needed her to be.
“There’s nothing to be ashamed of, you know,” Miles says as she’s wiping at her face, and there’s the pointed look he’s so much more used to seeing, threatening to skewer him. “Trauma is what it is. It rewires the mind.”
“My mind is fine,” Franziska spits at the floor. “It’s my body that refuses to snap to, insolent thing that it is.”
“I know the feeling,” he says as he’s standing, and Franziska can’t help but shut her eyes in thought and wonder how he’s done it for so long, how he did it when he was so young. She curls up again, pulls her blankets closer over her shoulders, winces for a moment too long when another thunderclap rattles the windowpane, shakes the whole house. It rolls around the atmosphere and shudders somewhere deep into the earth, and in the sinking of Miles’ heart he feels a weird halfway point between him and his sister, ground meeting heavens.
“It’ll only be a minute,” Miles says, a little shakily. “Can you be brave for me, Franziska?”
She scrunches her nose up, a few pixels of her usual self lighting up behind the fever-haze. “Can you? The whole house is shaking.”
Despite himself, Miles chuckles. “Wait until this blasted storm knocks the power out, then we’ll both be hyperventilating.”
“We shouldn’t be making jokes about this,” Franziska says, pressing a hand to her temple as an exasperated smile crawls onto her face.
“There’s some saying about laughter being the best medicine. And another about comedy being tragedy plus time.” He curves around the couch. “I’d argue my time is in. It’s you who shouldn’t be making jokes, but you did always have a tendency to bolt far ahead of me.”
Something about that statement paints a softer rest across her face. Franziska looks off to the side, her voice a barely-audible rasp above the hissing hearth. “Well, don’t keep me waiting long, little brother. All that time you’ve spent away from home, I’d hate to lose you in this labyrinthine place.”
Home, she says again. Miles had always been reluctant to call it that, of course he had, how could he not? After everything that had happened, he wondered if perhaps Franziska might feel the same—if she could ever look at the portrait of her father again and feel anything other than hollow, heartbroken rage. How she could wander by his empty study, dusty and abandoned, and still think of all that enveloped it as home. For all the strength Franziska projected, Miles knew how it felt to lose a father, and even despite knowing, there was nothing he could say to make the wound of it hurt any less. Franziska could scoff and wave the idea off all she wanted, denounce the hands that carried her from the cradle—Miles knew her, more than anyone. Miles knew it was an act.
Franziska was sensitive, brought to tears easily, at a great many things. Anger, however, did not make her cry.
Home, she’d always say, looking not at the dwellings that sheltered them, but instead directly at Miles. This time, Miles looks at her, and he thinks he understands.