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Miles Edgeworth has known Franziska von Karma for more than half his life. He might daresay that she alone knows him better than anyone or anything.
There is a certain level of familiarity that comes with cohabitation that Miles certainly did not ask for, but nevertheless, he is saddled with it now, and whether he loves or hates it, it is his reality. If you’d asked him twenty years ago if he’d wanted a sister, he’d take a long pause to measure out the pros and cons before uttering out a blunt, succinct no. No, he did not want a little girl following him around and seeing him in all manner of being—tired and bed-headed in his pyjamas, sobbing his eyes out watching toku, passing out in public because the ground dared to shake a bit. Miles would rather no one in the complete history of the universe ever saw him in any of those situations.
Nevertheless, here she was, and she had seen him in all three, and the both of them had survived just fine. There was a certain equivalency, too—he, of course, had also seen Franziska through all her lowest. Once upon a time, with a bullet lodged in her shoulder, she’d bled like a stuck pig on his car upholstery, and the ups and downs of life didn’t get much more embarrassing than that. Needless to say, Miles figured he knew Franziska pretty well, and vice versa.
And, yet still, there was always something new.
“For the love of god,” says Miles as he’s drawing the hotel blanket around himself like a child, “you cannot be serious, Franziska.”
“I don’t recall asking for your input.”
The window is open. It is below freezing, and there is snow blanketing every rooftop and cobblestone of the Basel skyline, and Franziska von Karma has opened every window.
“Might I remind you that we are sharing this room?” Miles says as she’s admiring the scenery. There’s not a cloud in the sky, and the winter sun does look quite lovely as it casts the world outside into a glittering winter wonderland.
“Then you ought to thank me,” Franziska barks back at him, hands on her hips, “Without my intervention those foolish lungs of yours would be full of deadly mold spores, and we certainly don’t need you getting any stupider.”
“It was one shower,” Miles throws his hands palm-up in front of his chest, as if to guide her along his logic. “I highly doubt Swiss architecture is so amateur that it matters!”
“You took one shower, Miles Edgeworth.” Franziska walks imposingly toward his bed, expression as sour as always. “Are those spores poisoning your brain already? Surely you understand the concept of a hotel.”
It’s only been a few minutes, but the wintery draft is already curling Miles’ toes, rankling at his regrettably Californian DNA and making him shiver like a sopping wet chihuahua. There were late nights in his childhood, whispered secrets beneath the stars, where he often trembled and shook and cried and didn’t mind that Franziska was there to see it, the way she held him, the way she promised to vanquish his pain herself. This is, decidedly, not one of those times.
“I don’t understand where you got this from,” Miles all but seethes through chattering teeth. “What was it your father always said? ‘Es zie…’?”
“Es zieht!” She shouts it, sharp and concise, much in the way the late prosecutor would before he’d throw the door open and stomp down the hall, desperate to find the source of the draft. “But yes, of course, Miles—as I’m sure we both know, Mr. Manfred von Karma was correct about everything, all the time.”
That is often what you said about him, yes, Miles wants to say, but that’s a little too deep of a wound, and so instead he mutters, dryly, “He was correct about that.”
“He was old-fashioned to a fault.” She waves a hand. “Always bemoaning the killer draft. Bah.”
“Killer is a strong word to use, perhaps,” relents Miles, hoping to pull her in alongside him, “but your insistence on airing the room out in this weather is likely to see both of us contracting pneumonia.”
“Good lord, you sound just like him sometimes.” Franziska rolls her eyes, lips curled into disgusted scowl. “Schleimer. No wonder you were his favourite.”
“You’ll recall I was framed for murder.”
“Regardless!” She moves right along, sitting down on her adjacent bed with a needlessly forceful plomp. “Lüften is crucial, Miles Edgeworth. A two-person unit can create up to six liters of moisture per day. Think of how many countless others have stayed in this room before us, likely too foolish to be as proactive!”
“Just use the kipp, that’s what it’s there f—”
“I refuse to spend the rest of my days having this meaningless squabble with you as well!” Franziska snarls across the divide. “Tell me, do you have a brain in there, or is your sad little skull packed to the brim with your foolish samurai men? We are not using the kipp! Opening the window fully is far more efficient!”
Miles realizes mid-sentence that she is right about one thing—this argument serves no purpose. He’d watched Franziska and Mr. von Karma bicker over it so many times, it was, perhaps, just a smidgen delusional to get it in his head that this time would be any different. The elder von Karma almost always walked away from those spats the clear loser, though to say such aloud would be something akin to blasphemy. Franziska is going to shut the window when she damn well pleases.
“Alright, then,” Miles says, “you’re well within your right to freeze yourself to near death. But I will not be picking up the slack for you when the both of us come down sick about it.”
“Oh, close your foolish mouth, Miles.” She rises from the bed to put the kettle on, a peace offering in the wake of her brother’s pathetic constitution. “You'll be fine. Saccharine as you may seem, you’re not made of sugar.”
Annoyingly, Franziska is right.
When he awakens the next morning he is, in fact, fine. Not so much as a chill—the windows have long since been shut, after all, and the hotel heating and thick comforters have kept him safe from any of winter’s tendrils, trying to creep in through any cracks or gaps in the walls. Miles is fine. Comfortable, even.
The sun isn’t risen yet, and Miles is usually a dreadful oversleeper, but something’s awoken him today. In half-sleep he hears shuffling around the bathroom, and suspects that’s likely it—Franziska’s crawled out of her own bed already, that was just a given. She awoke before even the birds did, always eager to get a jump on her day. Nothing about the scene registers as particularly out of the ordinary, except…
Her bed’s a little messy. The comforter is half-fallen off, a single millimeter away from touching the floor. That’s not like Franziska—she always leaves things neat and tidy, even particularly meaningless things like hotel bedsheets. Miles spends a few lazy minutes contemplating the significance of that change, wondering if maybe she’d always stumbled out of bed tired and scattered as anyone else, but simply done a good job at fixing it up long before he woke.
His answer comes shortly thereafter, in the shape of a high-pitched, desperate sneeze. Two more follow on its tail, and then there’s a smattering of incredibly rude words in German. The part of Miles that wants to be smug about what this sound may herald is immediately shuttered by the part of him that is not, under any circumstances, looking forward to working a case next to a miserably sick Franziska. At the very least, they had a few days until they had to be on the scene, perhaps she’d come around by then.
He watches light spill over the adjacent hallway as the bathroom door opens, and then for some reason they are children again and Miles is pretending to be asleep. He supposes that’s fitting, as Franziska is likely pretending she’s not coming down with something. The both of them always were quite fond of pretending.
Franziska’s footfalls are sluggish, in comparison to the domineering stride he’s used to hearing. What’s more, she’s sniffling a bit incessantly, a clear indicator that she does think he’s still asleep. She putters about the room, near-silent except for this habitual, irritated noise, and Miles keeps his eyes shut until he hears her bed shift beneath her weight. Braving the storm, he lets them flutter open, trying to make it look as natural as he can—but still careful not to shift too much as he “wakes.”
Thankfully, Franziska’s back is to him—she’s sitting on the edge of her bed, facing the covered window. She’s wrapped up in the hotel bathrobe, hunched over in a manner that looks so entirely dejected it’s almost cartoonish. What’s more, her hair’s still wet from the shower, he can see the slickness of it even in the unlit room. It’s hard to see from the angle, but she almost looks like she’s got her head in her hands.
Did she deserve this? Most definitely. Unfortunately, that didn’t really stop Miles from wanting to be the slightest bit compassionate. He’s contemplating what might be appropriate to say when she shudders forward and sneezes again, then again, making an honest attempt to stifle the things so as not to wake him. He’s already woken, though, so he might as well start there.
“Gesundheit,” Miles mumbles, his voice still scratchy from sleep. Predictably, Franziska tenses when she hears it—spine rigid and straight, shoulders at her ears. Honestly, he doesn’t know why she insists upon playing this game every time there’s something even the slightest bit wrong with her.
“How long have you been awake?”
Ah. Well, turnabout is fair play.
“Long enough to hear you quite thoroughly turning the bathroom into a petri dish.” He sits up, wincing at a stiffness in his neck. “Tell me, was your blessed lüften worth it?”
“I don’t—” she struggles to rein in another sneeze, “—appreciate the attitude, Miles.”
You’re one to talk, he does not say, because she loses the battle to her respiratory system the second he opens his mouth. Whatever she’s caught has hit her rather fast, he notes as a tear slips down her cheek, falls onto the bathrobe’s arm. Franziska sniffles bitterly, uselessly, face streaming.
“Gesundheit, again. That statistic you rattled off about moisture production is seeming a touch inaccurate at this juncture.” He pulls the tissue box from the bedside table, walks it over to her still clad in his pastel-pink pyjamas. “At the very least, in our two-person unit I do believe you’re pulling most of the weight here.”
She grabs a proper wad of the things and blows her nose inelegantly, and as he draws closer he can see more of her in the darkness, the flush riding high on her cheeks. Franziska’s stony features betray entirely how conspicuous her micro-expressions can be. Right now, it’s the way her nose scrunches and wiggles, telling of an itch that absolutely refuses to abate. Poor Franziska, desperate to hide her misery at every turn, always managed to catch the loudest, most emphatic, most attention-grabbing illnesses.
“Don’t act so smug,” she hisses at him. “Don’t the Japanese have a saying? About fools not catching colds?”
“I tried to inform you of quite a few equally relevant sayings the Germans have, if you’ll recall,” Miles says dryly, drawing the curtains. “You didn’t seem particularly receptive.”
“Shut your mouth, Miles Edgeworth,” Franziska groans, tossing her sullied tissues in the trash and falling backwards onto her bed. “Put the kettle on before I drown in my own fluids.”
He, of course, had the thing switched on before she’d finished her sentence.
Mid-way through the day, Miles’ throat begins to feel… off.
In the beginning, it’s subtle enough that he can attribute it to the dry air in their hotel room. Or to empathy pains, listening to Franziska’s squeaky, delicate sneezes gradually turn into something akin to little knives scraping their way out of her. She’s already losing her voice by the time the clock strikes one, hunched over the cheap wooden writing desk and all but dripping mucus onto her case files as she annotates. She’s somehow even more miserable than he thought she’d be, and he’s always been plagued and blessed the same with incredibly high empathy.
An hour after he notices, the congestion sets in. With it comes the headache, and that stiff pinch in his neck starts feeling less like a result of poor sleep posture and a lot like… something else. Franziska is too caught up in working through her own illness to take note, but as soon as Miles feels that telltale tingling in his sinuses he knows it’s all over. One sneeze and she’ll be on him like a hungry lioness cornering an injured antelope.
In the end, it’s the picturesque view that does it. It really is quite beautiful, in the winter—the fir trees shape a rather charming outline amongst the classical, sepia-toned architecture, snow piled thick and high atop their branches. Beneath its weight their branches shift, tumbling and falling and filling the Rhine with foggy slush. For obvious reasons, Miles is not a person that particularly likes winter, not even the parts of it that were undeniably beautiful… but it looks like a greeting card outside their window, and he can’t help but admire that for a fleeting moment.
Fleeting being the operative word. The sun reflecting off the snowfall is also uncomfortably bright, and it’s just the thing his blasted airways need to coax that vague itch into an absolutely insistent prickle. What a fool he was to dare view the winter skyline with admiration—he’d nearly forgotten, he thinks with watering eyes, that he and this time of year had a strictly adversarial relationship.
Unlike Franziska, Miles is not particularly expressive as he makes his most noble attempt to fight off his own biological processes. It’s far more graceful, much to her chagrin—jaw set, eyes bleary and narrowed, tongue pressed against his teeth as he concentrates. If she were in good health, and if she had the mind to turn around and register the scene, she’d have a snappy comment about how pompous he is, that he has to look the picture of seemliness even while he’s stuck there in pre-sneeze agony. Arguably one of the most undignified shades of human dishevelment.
But, also unlike Franziska, the sneeze itself is not a delicate thing. It is not dainty and effeminate and god forbid, cute. No, he’s full-chested and loud despite his best attempts to stifle the things when they come. To Miles’ own ear, he’s actually quite skillful at this, years of practice from absolutely relentless pollen allergies and living in a city where spring starts in mid-February.
To Franziska’s sensitive hearing and short fuse, though, it’s noise all the same. Which is why he isn’t the slightest bit surprised when, in the throes of him crushing back a generous few of the wretched things into his elbow, he hears the scrape of her rolling chair against the cropped hotel carpet. Holding back for so long had been… a rather regrettable idea, in hindsight, because they seem to just barrel out of him one after the other, now, as if making up for lost time.
He’s misty-eyed when he comes out of it, his laptop half-fallen off his legs. Franziska’s lethargically skulking around in his still-blurry vision, a silverblue silhouette that shapes itself slowly as Miles fights back control of his body. An afflicted-sounding sniffle, and then Miles is attempting not to shudder at the swollen, cold feeling of mucus scraping down the back of his reddened throat. With an incredible sense of dread he realizes that there’s only one tissue box in the room, and the chances of her sharing it with him on a good day are absolutely abysmal.
“Are you quite finished?”
Miles is still just stuck there, running nose pressed against his arm. He probably looks pretty damned pathetic, eyes wet as he stares up at his equally-addled sister, but to pull away at this moment would likely put him in an even more compromising position, and though Franziska has seen him in all manner of disorderliness… it’s still just a little too much to fathom.
“Judging by all the noise you’ve been making this morning,” Miles says, “no, I don’t anticipate I am.”
She rolls her eyes with a pronounced scoff, tossing his jacket at him. He’d registered the vague shape of her shambling over to the coatrack to grab it, but hadn’t really gotten further than that. It’s only as she’s sitting back down and continuing her mission to gut the tissue box that he remembers his handkerchief in the breast pocket.
Typical Franziska. All kind gestures wrapped up in spite and venom. I will not be sharing the tissue box with you, but I will throw an alternative at you as though I am tossing a starving hound a bone. Go fetch, Miles.
She’s still got the unfortunate-looking mound of paper pressed to her chapping septum as she rolls back around to face him. “You are just cranky because I was right.”
“Right about what?” He mirrors her, cloth pressed to his own. “We’re both ill, as I said we’d be.”
She tosses the sullied things in the overflowing bin, waggling her finger at him. The condescending grin that tugs her lips should be offset by how pink and sore her whole face is, but she is Franziska, and somehow the sheer magnitude of her outweighs it.
“Correct, Miles Edgeworth, we are,” she says, “but far too simultaneously. The most logical conclusion is that in our close proximity traveling, we were exposed to the same thing at the same time.”
“Yes,” he agrees, whole face leaden, “the draft.”
“No, you blathering fool!” She throws an arm out toward the wall, a gesture Miles knows as whip is across the room in my suitcase and I cannot be bothered to grab it so please pretend I just cracked it, thank you. “Honestly, Miles, you are incorrigible. If the killer draft were to take us in any order it would’ve taken you first, dripping water all over your bed post-shower. Shivering like a child with your hair still wet, you were just asking to catch a chill.”
“That’s an old wives' tale.”
“AND THE KILLER DRAFT IS NOT?!”
Her hands travel to her greying hair as she says it, fingernails in her scalp as if intent to pull it from its roots. Truthfully, Miles expects it to fade a few more shades right then and there. Instead, though, the exertion of shouting hits Franziska all at once—her voice, already so hoarse it hurt to listen to, breaks in the middle of the sentence. She’s forced to swivel to the side to cough, and cough, and cough—a productive, heavy thing that sees her curling into herself. Feeling a twinge of sympathy for egging her, Miles scoots himself off the edge of the bed and glacially makes his way to the little booklet living atop the TV stand.
Franziska gets a handle on herself, sucking in a laboured breath. The fit seems to siphon the rest of her energy away from her, because her ever-present urge to keep arguing does not rear its head. Instead, she simmers, as she so often does. Once she’s back in her desk chair, pretending like she’s managing to get any work done, Miles figures it’s safe enough to drape one of the throw blankets across her trembling shoulders.
She pretends not to care nor notice, lips pursed and brow furrowed. Miles sees it, though—the grateful, nervous flush that stains her ears. She always got just a touch flustered in the wake of kindness.
“There’s Fidelisuppe on the room service menu.”
“Then you ought to order yourself a heaping helping and focus on getting over that foolish virus,” Franziska rasps, trying to be subtle as she draws the blanket closer. “I doubt I’ll be able to concentrate with you sneezing like that.”
Instant karma, then, she sucks in a sharp breath, pitching forward into a fit of her own. Rolling his eyes and stealing a few of her tissues for himself, Miles walks away from his incurably stubborn sibling and towards the hotel phone.
“But of course, Franziska,” he assures her, “I’ll make sure to order enough for two.”