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Franziska clears her throat—far more fiercely, this time. All attempts to remain polite and ladylike have done her little good in way of moving the unfortunate lump that’s sitting there, a fact that she’d surely loathe were she not in the privacy of Miles’ empty car. This forceful scraping of her voicebox against itself proves no more effective than the last thirty, and so with a scowl painted on her lips she digs through her briefcase, in furious need of relief.
Nothing about it makes any sense to Franziska. Nothing about it ever has. The human body was built of blood and bone and tissue and, most importantly, muscle. Muscle grew stronger when one flexed it, and the same was true of countless other aspects of biology.
So why, pray tell, the fuck was she still playing this game with herself?
Catching her seething reflection in the rearview mirror, Franziska unwraps a cough drop and nearly chokes the thing back with the ferocity with which she shoves it in her mouth. It’s like the powers that be playing a damned joke on her—what an amusing thought it must be to them, a trial lawyer whose voice begins to give after mere hours in the courtroom.
For as long as Franziska’s been practicing, this has been the case. Her throat begins to ache a mere two hours into trial—or trials, she usually did not need more than a half hour to prove the defendant’s guilt—and by sundown it starts going croaky and languid. Hydrating does little, her morning and afternoon tea regime keeps her voice hanging on but dreadfully imperfect. Something about the rasp that creeps in despite her best efforts makes her feel weak and exposed, like the defense and the judge and everyone in the gallery are peering down at her, recognizing her not as a thundering goddess of divine justice, but as a mere human.
Revolting.
She was growing to hate how much she relied on those miraculous little lozenges. This country was softening her, Americans and their obsession with taking pills for every unremarkable ache and pain. If it helped her be more efficient in her work, though, she supposed it wasn’t that big a point of personal shame.
More than anything, she was just annoyed she still needed it here, far across the sea and living in English-speaking courtrooms. German was far more taxing—all in the throat and constantly aspirating, if this is how she’s faring in her second language, Franziska is not particularly keen to go back to her first, which is certainly a very strange feeling.
Waiting for the medicine to melt on her tongue, she sits up straight in the passenger seat and re-evaluates everything—her surroundings, her emotions, her circumstances. Summer in LA is, of course, the most wretched cesspit of heat and smog imaginable, but she is safe in the oasis of her brother’s equally wretched sports car. Miles was ever so kind enough, of course, to roll up all the windows and blast the AC when he made the executive decision to abandon her and check out the dinky little cafe across the street from the campus.
Which brings her to, of course, the campus. Truthfully, it is quite nice. Though Franziska loathes California more than she thought a person could loathe any place, she isn’t too proud to admit that she could definitely enjoy attending this university. She’d heard its name spoken even across the pond, and if that hadn’t been enough to convince her of its prestige, then seeing the breadth of it in person certainly could have done the trick.
The thick, cherry-flavoured outer shell of the cough drop finally, blissfully cracks, spilling mentholated syrup across her tastebuds and coating her throat in much-needed respite. The menthol has the added bonus of shocking her senses awake, steeling her focus out of where it melts in the summery, liquid heat that blurs above on the pavement outside. This particular brand, this particular flavour—it’s honestly a miracle that it’s gone so wholly unchanged throughout the years, always there for Franziska in her time of need. The comforting sting of it there in her mouth, paired with the sprawling parking lot and towering campus all around her, immediately transports her back to another time entirely.
College was something she’d noticed that people tended to look back upon with a sense of freedom and fondness. The general public seemed to have that opinion, but her peers were very different. All of these facts made perfect sense in tandem—for the average individual, university was an escape from the stifling conditions of being a teenager. And for the law student, university was a special kind of hell designed to break the weak and turn their brains into mindless jargon machines that did nothing but process gruelling paperwork in between long hours with little time to eat or sleep.
Well, none of that really resonated with Franziska. For one, she’d already memorized most of the nuances of German criminal law by the time she was nine, purely out of sheer interest in the topic. There was little that university could teach her, and her Bar score certainly reflected as much. College, then, was just very unremarkable altogether—just another meaningless step in getting her to the trial work she had longed for. She had no strong feelings about it, one way or another.
All that said, the one thing about school she did not miss was Fresher’s Flu. A miserable name for a miserable virus, and it somehow consumed her every year. No matter how she tried to prevent it, she could not control the foolish choices of her foolhardy peers—their penchant for binge drinking, their meaningless inability to get a proper night’s rest, their constant mingling and dreadfully sloppy festivities every damned night of the week. University students, even stuffy law students, seemed dedicated less to their work and more to tanking their own immune systems in every conceivable way. The fools even had the nerve to act surprised when they’d spend half the season ill with some horrid bug, which they’d then take to class and share with everyone unlucky enough to be forced to share a space with them.
With pun wholly unintended, it was some sort of sick joke, really. Franziska herself did nothing to welcome germs into her body. Far ahead of her peers long before she even hit double digits, she felt no need to lose sleep for her workload. Nor did she feel the need to distract herself with parties, or substances, or any of those trite earthly pleasures. Her constitution should not have been so weak to the undoubtedly meager viruses that took hold of her peers… and yet, there she would be, only two weeks into her studies and fighting to hold her pen through the haze of a climbing fever. Bleary-eyed and sniffling wretchedly behind a quickly-failing medical mask, subsisting entirely on tea and foolish, bullheaded hope.
Mock trials, of course, were the worst of all. Shouting those passionate objections through the tear in her throat would see her going laryngitic in record time, and she would skulk miserably back off to her apartment and convalesce alone in bed, surrounded by all the lavish interior her papa’s money could buy. An atmosphere that screamed his silent love, no doubt, but that love did little to balm its cruelly perfect serenity.
It’s not that Franziska… wanted people to see her ill. Even the thought of that made her gorge rise, eyes on her when she was so vulnerable and lowly and imperfect. But perhaps a house with people in it would be nice from a distance, still… the hum of voices on the other side of her door, the occasional bowl of soup left steaming on her nightstand. Anything was better than the solitude of those lonely college days spent sore and uncomfortable in the world’s softest bed.
In that regard, nothing had really changed. If she were to take a sick day, she’d most certainly spend it alone. The only difference between then and now was that her constitution was far stronger, never felled by something as puny and insignificant as whatever hapless microbial miscreants were floating through the stale indoor air.
Thank goodness for that much, she thinks as the last remnants of the lozenge dissolve, sickly-sweet on her tongue. She’s going to give her grand lecture to all these wet-behind-the-ears lawfolk, and though the majority of them will likely be sick as dogs in a week’s time, Franziska remains secure in knowing she will not suffer the same fate. Even if her bulletproof immunity were to fail, she’s quite certain she’d already caught every deplorable iteration of the fresher’s flu that existed, leaving no more room for any germs to wriggle in. On that note, she catches Miles in the rearview mirror—wearing his ridiculous transition lenses and his even more ridiculous sunhat.
Setting her jaw, she gazes at the clock. Twenty til, perfectly on time. A rarity for him, especially as of late.
Swatting at the uncharacteristic butterflies in her stomach, Franziska begins to gather her things and clicks her briefcase shut.
There’s an omen in the way it’s her sore throat that wakes her, not Miles’ car coming to a rumbling halt. Franziska blinks languidly at the iridescent blur of traffic all around her, runoff from the sprinklers trickling onto the still-steaming blacktop and turning them to mirrors in the newborn night. In the last flash of sunset, the palm trees look black against the sky.
She sniffs sharply and suddenly, the nonspecific area behind her nose and eyes feeling uncomfortable and buzzy. The California dusk slowly crystallizes around her—headlights and streetsigns, the overpass across the way, the undefined purr of engines idling in the… parking lot. They’re in a parking lot.
To her left, Miles pulls his keys from the ignition, and the system clicks off with a quiet beep. Franziska realizes she’d been sleeping with her arms wrapped around her waist, and she tightens her own grip on herself, as if trying to hold it all together.
Her voice scrapes against itself as it tries its damnedest to manifest, “Where have you taken me?”
Miles looks unbothered, pawing around his pockets for something.
“Creme Royale parking lot.”
Narrow-eyed and exhausted, Franziska blinks owlishly at him.
“Why,” she croaks, “are we in the Creme Royale parking lot.”
“Because the drive-thru line was too long,” says Miles. “Do keep up, Franziska.”
There is an air that Miles wears like a veil across his shoulders when he has no interest in elaborating further. Thus far, the only people who seem able to yank that metaphorical garment from its place there are Phoenix Wright, and Franziska on a good day. Today is decidedly not a good day—evidenced by the fact that she somehow fell asleep in Miles Edgeworth’s obnoxiously loud, fuel-inefficient slag heap of a car—and so she lets him be aloof and dodgy, saying no more to him as he goes. The locks shove themselves back into place with a n oddly abrasive sound, and Franziska leans her head against the car window, feeling uncomfortably warm.
When did she fall asleep? The day’s events run together like paint, each so oversaturated a colour that the blend just ends up an ugly grey in the end. No sooner after she exited the car had the discomfort in her throat returned, as if the shameless munching of cough drops she’d been doing all morning had been for naught. Holding a growl behind her teeth, she soldiered on—trekking the campus in razor heels with briefcase in hand, meeting with countless students, giving her two-hour lecture to a circular room of enraptured, bright-eyed kids, relishing in all the attention and praise.
Miles was, as always, incorrigibly kind, and so he’d been right there to pick her up as the sun was dipping, and she remembers the ache had made its way clear down to her legs at that point, and her voice was beginning to become a measly imprint of its usual deep, rich tenor… and she had tried to remain dignified as she more or less collapsed, unceremoniously, into her brother’s car. He had asked something about if she’d had a nice day, and she had mumbled out some manner of insult in response, and then… nothing. She woke up in the parking lot, sweating in the fool’s passenger seat.
Why’s it so damn hot? The only thing that stops Franziska from diving for the AC is the way just lifting her arm pulls hard at her nerves. What the hell is wrong with her? Dark a thought as it is, she feels like she had more arm strength than this the day she got shot.
It’s a useless endeavour, in any case. As she sits there quietly seething with heat and rage, the digital numbers on Miles’ car radio tell her the temperature is already cranked as low as it can possibly go. No doubt he saw her sweating like a maniac and did so in an attempt to spare her the shame, Miles would never keep it that cold on purpose. That thought strikes again—revolting. The idea that he notices at all sits sourly in her stomach, disgust and childish gratitude swirling into a terrible amalgam that unsettles her bones and prickles her skin.
Finally, he is back, with one of those cardboard multi-cup holders braced upon his flowering palm as though he’s a server at a fine dining establishment. If she were anyone else, looking in from the outside into this strange existence the von Karma disciples live in, the whole picture would probably be comical—this grown man in Classical-inspired courtroom regalia, cravat and all, tiptoeing over potholes and buckled asphalt in a fast food parking lot in an attempt to balance his…
Ice cream.
He is carrying several containers of ice cream.
Franziska hears the car beep, and the driver-side lock unclick, and she feigns disinterest by curling further into herself, clearing her throat with great effort in case Miles tries to talk to her again. Maybe it’s a testament to how horrid she’s feeling that she doesn’t make any attempt to hide it. To her incredible chagrin, Miles had already seen her conked out in his passenger seat. There wasn’t much lower she could get than that.
She’s not looking at him when he settles back down in his place, and so he proffers the cardboard tray to her with a simple, “Here.”
Franziska looks over the hill of her hiked shoulder like a bitter queen looking upon an uncouth knight. The slit of her eyes would probably be a little more intimidating, were her irises not so foggy and tired.
“Here what?” she rasps out, desperate—for some reason—to remain combative.
“I know you’re not so ill that you can’t recognize a gift when it’s presented to you.”
“My health is of no matter,” says Franziska. “The day’s events were taxing. Forgive me for being a little out of sorts.”
“Come now.” Miles gives the cardboard a gentle shove, as if to suggest it once more. “Weren’t you always croaking in my ear about Fresher’s Flu as a child?”
“I was young and weak.” Franziska sits up straighter in her seat, hoping to prove her point. “My immune system would not dare make such a witless mistake nowadays.”
“I see,” says Miles. “Well, either way, your voice sounds wretched after all that talking you did today. It would be rather wasteful to let this soft serve melt.”
Still glaring, Franziska holds his gaze as she reaches over, wiggles one of the plastic cups out of its niche. Before her fingertips even make contact, the chill of it seems to waft, a soothing balm to all that ails her. Visions of snowdrifts on a dead-silent night drift lazily in the back of her head.
The soft serve is chemically artificial vanilla, which was never Franziska’s first choice—but the whole brownie shoved in the cup and stuck deep into its swirling shape, that pairs ever so nicely with the sweetness of that creamy white dream. There’s shredded bits of caramel dotting the top of it, melting in the river of thick, hot fudge that trickles a magmatic path downward and warms the bottom of the cup. Overrich, and horribly indulgent, and so sugary that Franziska is getting a toothache just looking at it. Most importantly of all, perfect for the capricious desires of a stubbornly aching throat.
Disgustingly saccharine. Both the physical makeup of the offering, and Miles himself for daring to know every pointless thing about her. It’s exactly what she’d have ordered, and he flaunts with zero shame the extent to which he knows that.
A little red spoon is passed to her. Unwrapped, discreetly, because the fool likely assumes her dexterity is failing to such a degree that she cannot even manage that much. There’s a temptation to grab one of the unwrapped ones from the tray and effortlessly tear it to shreds in front of him, just to put the damn fool in his place. She’s beginning to salivate like a starving beast at the idea of dessert, though, and so just this once she takes the quicker route and begins to dig in.
Perhaps out of mercy, Miles pays her no mind and scoops at his own—a flash of bright red out of the corner of her eye tells her its strawberry, as if he’d ever bother to get anything else. The roar of the AC is loud enough that she can exhale—ever so slightly—in near-reverent relief as the ice cream slides down her overtender throat, as the hot fudge chases the inflammation away. Her body seems to realize all at once it hasn’t eaten since noon, and Franziska doesn’t even have time to feel the slightest bit of embarrassment at the way she stabs beneath the largest brownie chunk, unearths it as though she’s an archeologist exhuming a precious treasure. It’s dense, and moist, and packed with so much horrible American cocoa powder she nearly feels tears spring up in her eyes. The chocolate in this miserable country was an affront to the confection itself, why did she have to love it so much?
At some point while Franziska was lost in sugarsweet daydreams, Miles had finished his own cup. It’s only when she’s scraping the bottom of her cup for every last atom of the now-solidified fudge that she notices him staring forward, arms crossed gingerly, eyes on the citylight and nightlife outside. Teenagers are sitting in their parents’ cars, or on the hoods of them feeding french fries to seagulls that sing out disjointed thank yous. Miles doesn’t move.
“You can drive, you know,” says Franziska, a bit of her vitality having returned to her. For some reason, the bite in her voice makes him smile.
“Always in such a rush to get away from me,” teases Miles. “You know, we finally have all the time in the world to do whatever it is we’d like, and—”
“I’d like to collapse on your unfathomably comfortable futon,” Franziska says. “Post-haste.”
“Fair enough, then. There’s seconds for you in the cupholder, by the way. In case you’re still not feeling well, come morn—”
He’s interrupted, of course, by Franziska cracking the second cup open, jutting her jaw out in defiance as she continues furiously shoving soft serve into her mouth.
“I will be fine tomorrow,” she says through bites. “One uninterrupted night of dead-sleep and Pess cuddles will cure this deplorable ailment immediately.”
“I’m fairly certain pet dander will make you much sicker.”
“Drive, Miles Edgeworth.”
So he does. At some point, Franziska goes from boiling hot to freezing cold, the sweat trickling uncomfortably down her back in a frigid line that makes her shiver. A horribly conspicuous thing—one that sees Miles turning the heat on in the California summer, shuffling out of his coat while they’re stopped at a red light. Franziska doesn’t know when she starts drifting again—the swirling blur of traffic dancing tantalizingly on the back of her eyelids, lulling her to sleep as it wavers and shifts like some backwards urban aurora.
The next time she awakens in the passenger seat, her brother’s coat is thrown over her like a makeshift sort of blanket. Earl grey and aftershave and ink and parchment waft up off the garment, and she inhales deep and thinks about the house back in Munich.
There, outside her bedroom door, she hears footsteps and voices and the patter of a pomeranian’s tiny paws. With little effort, she drifts back off to sleep.
