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Phoenix knew today was going to be shit long before he found out Franziska von Karma had somehow acquired his house key.
That bit certainly didn’t help the day he was having, though. In the wake of everything he’d elected to just sit in his apartment and mope about it, and that had more or less been working pretty well for him. He could’ve spent his wasted afternoon on that, let the daytime television distract him from his woes while he dozed fitfully in the dark to the struggling whirr of the humidifier. He’d resigned himself to it, really, centered his whole schedule around the fact.
But of course that would’ve been way too convenient. That would’ve been a normal person’s sick day. And he just had to have been born with the unfortunate luck of being Phoenix Wright.
To Franziska’s credit, she had knocked. It was always so bizarre, her conditional sense of manners—she seemed to hold etiquette in such high regard, but it followed little rhyme or reason. She’d scold him for yawning too loudly, or not folding his napkin in his lap, and in the same nanosecond she’d decide the proper method of conveying this information was through persistent flogging. Weird details to get hung up on for a woman who yelled half her sentences and bit before she barked.
So, yes, she had knocked. Phoenix had blearily jerked awake to its short, strong tenor, crawled weakly over the backrest of the couch in an attempt to get a good look at the door. When he heard the muted scratch of key tickling lock, there’d been an almost shameful feeling of joy and anticipation that rose like a towering fountain in his chest. Had Maya and Pearl come home early? Had they missed him so much on their outing that they turned back around, hit the grocery store for soup and tea, and come to waste away in TV-Land with him while he spent more time sneezing than breathing?
What a pipe dream. He honestly should have known it would instead be some absurd nightmare.
There at the threshold Franziska stands, eyes narrowed to their usual rest, telling only of contempt and disgust as she surveys the space. Honestly, he feels kind of like a bug in the wake of her, which isn’t exactly new, but it’s intensified today by just how little she regards him. It’s like she sees right through him, caring about nothing besides the off-center décor that she’s no doubt judging with all the usual haughtiness she wears.
Then, finally, she looks over to Phoenix, haggard and ill as he peers over the back of the couch. If he were anyone else he’d have half a mind to be embarrassed—the dreadful state of what was once his hair, the way he’s got two tissue wads jammed unprettily into both nostrils—but she, much to his chagrin, has seen him in worse situations. Behind him, the television drolls on, some sensationalized art docuseries he can barely hear through his stuffy ears. By all accounts, Franziska is the one who looks out of place here, but she hardly seems to care, donning the same confidence she would in any other situation.
“Phoenix Wright,” she says, in lieu of anything resembling a normal greeting. “If I may say, you look especially pathetic today.”
“Okay,” he says right back. “Hi to you too, Franziska. Why and how are you in my house?”
“I was informed you’d fallen ill and were useless to yourself.” She strides over to his dopey little kitchen bar, placing a black, brandless tote bag atop the counter. “I elected to try my hand at remedying this situation.”
“Uh. Am I asleep?” Phoenix asks, mostly to himself. “Is this some kind of horrible, feverish nightmare?”
“Pleasant as ever.” She scowls at him, throwing open his double-cabinets and squinting furiously into their disorganized depths. “What on earth am I looking at, here?”
“Can you please tell me how the hell you got my house key?”
“To think that a foolish fool so foolishly deprived of deductive reasoning or any critical thinking skills could possess the foolish fortitude to best me courtside.” Shaking her head, Franziska all but slams his cabinets and moves onto the next set of them. “Let’s put our thinking cap on, yes? Who is the only other person who has access to this unit, and what is their relationship to me?”
These pieces of critical evidence swirl around his disease-addled head, turning into something more closely-resembling slime as they connect and crystallize.
“No…” he murmurs, disbelieving, betrayed, “why would Maya do this to me?”
Franziska doesn’t hear him. She’s too busy blazing a furious path through his kitchen, increasingly unhappy with the circumstances. This time, she does slam the cabinet, with such ferocity it’s a miracle that the weak little things do not splinter and fall from their hinges.
“Where! In God’s name! Are your cooking pots!”
Oh, so she did have her whip. That was comforting, of course. Phoenix was super fucking stoked to hear the sound of that thing cracking like thunderclaps against his (admittedly pretty sticky) kitchen floor.
“Dishwasher,” he mutters weakly through the tear in his throat, and Franziska holds a scream behind her teeth that can only be described as guttural.
“Of all the foolish—” she stops herself, “nevermind. I don’t want to know.”
“Seriously, why are you here?”
“Do not make me repeat myself.” She begins the process of digging through his drawers, and rather quickly this time (lucky!) locates a knife (unlucky.) “You will regret it if you do.”
There is something very convincing about Franziska von Karma threatening him while brandishing the largest knife he owns, despite how dull it’s grown with use since his college dorm days. “Okay, so how is you destroying my kitchen supposed to fix me?”
“Destroying. Please. I’m doing you a favour.” She doesn’t face him as she speaks, but he can tell from the quick jump of her left shoulder that she’s cutting something up on his shoddy plastic cutting board. “I promised Maya you would only receive the most perfect care, and a von Karma’s word is her bond.”
He realizes he’s already run out of words. It’s barely noon, and he’s run out of words. Balefully, Phoenix groans and flops back onto his side, trying to focus on the offset closed captions as they blur in his spotty vision. Fine, whatever, Franziska’s in his kitchen. Maya’s betrayed him, and now Franziska’s in his kitchen, and she’s probably going to leave leather marks on his ceiling and kill him with whatever poison she’s brewing up in there. The pot bubbles and sings from its rest on the stove, and his stomach churns alongside it at the thought.
Because the gods had willed, long ago, that Phoenix Wright was not just allowed to be sick. He was not allowed the discomfort of a sudden sore throat without it also being a harbinger of some catastrophic end. Was not allowed to simply wallow in convalescence and watch shitty cable. No, every goddamn time he had to be framed for some crime, or convinced his best friend was dead, or stuck in his apartment with a vengeful European demoness who had access to weapons and an insatiable bloodlust for him and him alone.
Said demoness has circled the couch, now. Phoenix doesn’t know how much time has passed, but it was enough for her to make some sort of hot drink, because she’s holding a giant mug in her hands at present, pointing it at his face like a weapon. Honestly, it’s astounding that a gesture meant to be so warm can look so acrid. Then again, Franziska had a talent for drenching even the kindest sentiments in venom.
There is a part of Phoenix, indignant and jumpy, that does not want to take the cup from her hands. He likes to think he’s come around, for the most part, but a more instinctual part of him rejects entirely the idea of accepting anything medicinal that he didn’t buy, make, or prepare with his own two hands. He’s spent the better part of the last half a decade trying to shut that scared, wailing voice inside himself up, though, and in that moment he chooses courage, begrudgingly sitting himself up.
“It seems Miss Fey greatly undersold the problem,” Franziska says, hands planted firmly on her hips as she swipes her gaze across the room once more. “In your indisposed state, I can tell tidiness has fallen quite notably by the wayside…”
Steam billows off the warm mug in Phoenix’s hands, and he relishes in the way it shifts the congestion cracking the bounds of his skull. The colour isn’t particularly rich, which makes him a little nervous, but there’s a big fat lemon slice wedged in there that floats around dreamily, tempting him to drink. He waits a moment for it to cool, clearing some of the rasp from his throat.
“I mean, I’ve only been sick for a day, this is normmmwhy are you looking at me like that?”
Indeed, Franziska’s glaring daggers, as if trying to psychically will back the—tea? Probably tea—she just made him.
“You live like this?”
“Um—”
“You invite proper ladies,” she says, and Phoenix has no idea who the hell she could possibly mean, “into this filth?”
“Okay, well, hold on—”
“Stop foolishly flapping those foolish gums of yours and drink.”
Phoenix sees her left arm moving in that telltale way it always did and can’t help but flinch on instinct. Again, though, she miraculously spares him, electing instead to lash her whip at the floor just beside them before properly stomping off. He supposes that’s a decent request, despite everything, and so he rolls his eyes the second her back is turned and cautiously raises the cup to his cracked lips.
The flavour is completely indescribable—mostly because he can hardly taste it, but its pungency is somehow so sterile and potent that is breaks past the dullness of all his senses, forcing itself to be acknowledged. Phoenix can’t help but choke on the novelty of it as it slides down his throat, a truly rancid cough that he buries in his hoodie collar. Franziska’s gotten to work, um… opening his windows? Which is a bit strange, but everything about Franziska being here was a bit strange.
“The dramatics truly are not necessary.”
“What the hell are you making me drink, here?”
She’s in his cabinets again. “I refuse to believe that even you are too foolish to know what a cup of ginger tea looks like.”
“Yeah, I do,” he squints at the foggy liquid again, “which is why I’m asking. This tastes like floor cleaner.”
“Oh, if only it were,” says Franziska, “perhaps then I could actually fix up this beaten down shack you call an apartment—aha!”
She manages to locate the storage closet down the hallway—the one where he keeps the meager smattering of cleaning supplies he owns. Honestly, Franziska would probably have an aneurysm if she knew his methods—that he said to hell with planning and simply waited for a mess to appear before he bothered to buy anything to fix it. All it really amounted to was a few plastic dusters and wet wipes, a graveyard of half-finished bottles of all-purpose cleaner (because he kept forgetting he had some and buying more), and a cylinder of powder bleach he wasn’t sure how to close up, so he’d just stretched a fat strip of packing tape over its holes.
Most tragic of all, she’s found the vacuum.
Phoenix kisses the luxury of watching TV goodbye.
Granted, it takes her a while to get to that point. She spends a good long while deep-cleaning his countertops, rearranging everything on every surface, yelling at him the whole way. There’s little mercy in the way she somehow does all of this angrily—angrily disinfecting his stovetop, angrily loading the dishwasher, angrily hanging his clothes on the paltry line that hangs weakly across his apartment balcony. She’s stomping around, and slamming doors, and clinking silverware and mugs together, and none of it is doing anything for his aching head.
When the vacuum starts, he thinks he might have to kill her. Or, more realistically, just jump out one of the windows to freedom. It would be so easy, the way she’s got them thrown open. He knows he probably—definitely—couldn’t take Franziska von Karma in a fight, but he thinks if he really tried he could at the very least outrun her. His cardio is pretty above-average with the amount of biking he does, and she’s always in those heels which probably aren’t super helpful with speed.
He’s so busy puzzling out the logistics of escaping his apartment and high tailing it down the road that he doesn’t even register the absence of the death rattle of his aging vacuum. At present Phoenix has a yellowing, case-less pillow folded over his ears, and he’s facing the backrest of the couch as he lounges, dreaming of a world where he’s allowed a normal sick day.
“Get up.”
Phoenix turns back over, slowly loosening the grip he has on aforementioned pillow. It falls from his ears, splaying back out, and he fights the knot in his neck to turn around and face Franziska, who had at some point pinned her hair back and thrown his pink dish gloves on… over her leather ones. He finds himself transfixed on the jeweled barrettes in her hair, dragonfly-shaped and encrusted with gemstones, as was her norm.
“Tell me, was your brain so wholly microscopic that this feeble temperature you’re running has cooked it to a charred lump of foolish schlock already?”
“Do you have, like, a word-a-day calendar, or—”
“Get up, Phoenix Wright!”
She yanks the blanket off of him in one fell swoop—practiced, perfect, same as ever. Phoenix knows from cohabitating with Maya that this is a classic little sister move, which could lend some credence to exactly how precise Franziska’s mastery of it is. He doesn’t really have time to appreciate that before he’s shivering, though, pawing pathetically at the thing, which she of course tosses into the corner with little regard for his misery.
“Is it not enough that you broke into my house to torment me?” he whines. “Now you’ve gotta kick me off my own couch?”
“Your couch that I am certain is similarly as fetid as everything else in this wretched hive of sloppiness? Yes. I will be leaving no stone unturned.”
The window is looking evermore promising. It would be above the paygrade of Phoenix’s whole life to tolerate Franziska’s nonsense on a good day, but today every part of him is alight in agony—his eyes are itchy and hot, he can barely swallow without cringing, and he slept a grand total of four hours last night, fighting with congestion so horribly pressing he was considering lobotomizing himself in his apartment bathroom. The headache had given him no relief since then, and he wasn’t expecting it to any time soon with the way Franziska seemed to bark out most of her sentences.
“No.”
“Pardon?”
“I’m not moving.” He crosses his arms and curls back up, the exaggerated pout and wrinkle in his crooked brow making him look particularly childlike. “If you’re so pressed about it, why stick around?”
“Five seconds.”
He looks at her suspiciously. “Hm?”
“You have five seconds,” Franziska seethes, “before I pick you up like a wounded pup and drag you to bed myself.”
“Are you joking?”
“Four.”
“Wait, you’re serious. You can’t actually think you’re gonna be able to—”
“Three.”
“—you’re bluffing! I know you’re bluffing!”
The final two seconds of this encounter are spent with Phoenix scrambling backwards a little, awkwardly pulling himself back into something that kinda-sorta resembles a sit. Franziska, still clad in his dishgloves and reeking of bleach and glass cleaner (a scent so potent it somehow breaches through Phoenix’s complete inability to breathe), lunges toward him like a striking serpent.
Right on time. As always.
The instinct to kick and scream like an angry cat in Franziska’s arms is replaced entirely by disbelief at the circumstances. Phoenix just kind of goes semi-limp instead, perplexed at this girl half his size carrying him bridal-style like it’s nothing. Or, maybe not nothing—she’s sweating, Phoenix can see the sheen of it just barely crowning her forehead—but the upper body strength is still pretty impressive. He vaguely remembers Detective Gumshoe saying something about “1000 cracks a day,” in regards to Franziska’s deranged exercise regime, but now that Phoenix is actually in her grip he begins to suspect that number was a lowball.
“Every time I think I’ve seen it all with you,” he says, crossing his arms awkwardly in an attempt to put them somewhere, “there’s always some new bullshit.”
“You were given more than enough fair warning,” she spits as she hauls him through the hallway. “As per usual, you chose foolishness.”
“Cool, awesome. Learned my lesson. You can put me down now.”
“I’ll do no such thing.”
“I’m gonna sneeze on you.”
“I’ve heard similarly foolish threats from a number of foolish fools whose memories I keep alive by dancing on their tombstones.”
His bedroom door was already open—stoppered with his backpack-briefcase, to prevent the draft from throwing it shut. Probably for the best, as he could very easily picture Franziska electing to kick the thing open, shattering it to splinters. Instead, she begrudgingly drags the two of them through the doorway, growling in such a way that Phoenix actually feels it rumbling in her chest before she unceremoniously dumps him atop his unmade bed. The springs squeak for mercy beneath him as he falls, and the sudden shock of it sees him gasping and sputtering for purchase, which in turn sees him curling into himself as his lungs attempt to cough themselves out of his body.
He’s stuck there in the throes of it for a good while, eyes wet with exertion while he’s struggling to get a handle on himself. Franziska thinks she’s going undetected in his peripheral—the way she thumbs purposeful circles over her right shoulder, one eye shut tight in pain. It only lasts for a moment, but Phoenix sees it, curiously noting it down in his mindspace.
Coming back down to earth, he’s finally able to take in the room, now looking utterly sterile in her wake. There’s uncannily uniform track marks on the carpet from where she’d vacuumed, all the piles of clothes thrown over chairbacks and left on the floor have been tucked away in his closet hamper. The bedside table and its wastebasket, previously overflowing with cough drop wrappers and used tissues, are somehow immaculate now. How she managed to get this much done in such a short amount of time was anyone’s guess.
“Didn’t think the bourgeoisie knew how to clean.”
“Clearly the impoverished are similarly unfit.”
Oh, whoops. He’d said that one out loud.
“I’m middle class,” defends Phoenix, weakly.
“Nothing about this living space can classify as middle.”
The high-rise grating that crowns his closet is about seventy-six percent blankets, and so she grabs the thickest one from its depths and throws it toward his bed with little grace or decorum. Phoenix scrambles to stay semi-upright as its whole weight falls directly on him, croaking out a particularly undignified yelp. Not a minute after he’s peeking out of the thing with the same perpetual glare he’s been wearing all morning, and in the fever-haze his mouth moves too fast for his brain to catch up.
“Genuinely,” he says, “what is your problem?”
“You are my problem!” Franziska fires back, brow still shiny with sweat and teeth grit in irritation and something… else. “I thought I’d seen the worst of you, Phoenix Wright, but it seems your foolishly disagreeable nature runs twofold when you’re ill.”
“No one asked you to come uproot my house—”
“Correct!” She stomps forward, closer to his bedside. “No one did! But someone who loves you immeasurably was worried about leaving you alone to wallow, and I was foolish enough to think I could assuage her concern without being driven positively mad!”
He blinks dumbly. “Wait, Maya didn’t—”
“She was beside herself with worry!” Franziska throws one arm out. “I offered to stop by, despite my better judgment, because you are dear to her. Because she is dear to me. I should be working a case right now, Phoenix Wright, but instead I will spend the rest of the afternoon icing my shoulder because you are too much of a petulant child to listen to reason!”
“I…” he curls the blanket around himself, feeling exactly as childish as she claims. That was the look from earlier, right—she’d no doubt strained herself cleaning, and then carrying him too, not to mention she’d only gotten that wound because of—
“Do not make this about you,” she cuts his brain off before it can descend into its spiral. “My circumstances would be the same regardless of who I was tasked to face in court that day. Furthermore, I refuse to sit here and provide free therapy when you have already tested my patience to its limit.”
Right. Right. He kind of hated when she was right, which was often, though certainly less often than she thought. He suddenly feels oddly soft, despite everything.
“Maya really didn’t put you up to this?”
“No.” Franziska crosses her arms, looks off to the side as she notably fights the urge to fidget with one sleeve. “She mentioned it offhand and I took matters into my own hands.”
“...why?”
“Don’t make me say it twice,” she spits. “I enjoy Miss Fey’s company a great deal. Whatever service I can provide to steady her heart, I intend to face head-on and with the same devotion I carry in all else.”
“Huh,” says Phoenix, slowly sinking back into his mattress. Now that he’s actually here, he kinda doesn’t want to go back out to his prison on the couch—the bed’s a lot kinder on his screaming muscles, and he’s slightly more safe in here from the swirling cloud of chemicals and cleaning agents. “Okay.”
Now it’s Franziska’s turn to blink—a much sharper thing, angled and suspicious. “‘Okay’?”
“Yeah, okay,” he affirms, his smile slight and more than a bit dumb-looking. “What can I do to stay out of your way?”
She stares at him for a long moment, before sighing with shut eyes and uncrossing her arms. It’s an almost exasperated aura that she moves with as she gets to work… fixing, rearranging the heavy comforter so it better envelopes him, this strange dichotomy of her. Franziska is, in effect, tucking him in, like a mother might a child, which is inherently absurd as the two of them are anything but. The act itself is, of course, similarly violent to every other typically non-violent chore she’s taken on today.
“You can spend your convalescence in an actual bed,” she says, furiously drawing the covers around him. “Honestly, how do you expect to recover on that mangy couch? It looks like something you found on the side of the road.”
Uh, right, Phoenix thinks nervously, valuing his life far too much to inform her that she is, in fact, one-hundred percent correct in her assessment of that particular acquisition. Instead, he makes the wise decision to keep that bit to himself.
She finishes scornfully wrapping him up, and the whole situation is so completely laughable and inane that he cannot, in fact, resist the urge to comment upon it. Years into the future, Phoenix would wonder what exactly he was thinking in this moment, yes—but here in the present, faced with truly nonsensical circumstance, cooking in his own skin and feeling like absolute dogshit, all he knows to do is quip.
Bound in blankets, he looks up at Franziska. His constraints are loose enough that he can cross his arms beneath the cover, and he makes a foolhardy attempt to raise one eyebrow (he can’t really feel his face) as he struggles not to smirk at her.
“Do I get a kiss on the forehead, prosecutor?”
Franziska jerks forward and headbutts him instead.
It’s well past sundown when Maya and Pearl return with souvenirs and groceries in tow, their excitement stifled ever so slightly when the both of them take in the scene in the living room. Franziska and Phoenix are, miraculously, sharing the couch—they’ve got some low-budget true crime documentary on and are watching half-heartedly, not even breaking pace to argue about logistics like one would expect. That was definitely a red flag, because Nick was the most annoying fucking person on earth to watch anything related to criminal law with—he’d yell about every single aspect of it, from the incompetence of law enforcement all the way down to the production value and editing. Franzy, of course, wasn’t much different, convinced she could solve literally every cold case if left alone with the evidence long enough.
The dead silence is concerning. Slightly less concerning is the fact that they’re both nursing injuries. Franziska’s snatched up the proper ice pack for herself, cyan blue and beaded with condensation, and she’s got it pressed against her bad shoulder. Phoenix, on the other hand, has been consigned to a bunch of loose ice in a sandwich bag, which he’s holding against his temple with a sour look on his face. Maya thinks, for a brief moment, that it’s to bring down the fever he’s no doubt spiked, until he winces a bit and pulls it away to greet her, and she sees the darkening bruise on his temple.
“Franzy!” Maya drops her grocery bag on the floor, throwing her arm out in exasperation. “I thought I told you to go easy on him!”
Franziska looks off to the side, lips pursed and face scrunched ever so slightly in indignant apathy, as if she’s spitting the words themselves into the unseen gutter.
“You told me not to whip him.”