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Something is steaming in the bathroom.
Franziska can see hot condensation coating the foggy glass of the sliding door windows. Beads of moisture gathering, trickling down in imperfect lines. She’s sure if she were to poke her head out around the side of the quaint little Japanese cabin, she’d see it billowing up out the cracked window, toward the pure-white mountain skies.
Frowning, Franziska scratches absentmindedly at her sudoku puzzle. Under typical circumstances, a steamy bathroom is a perfectly unremarkable fixture of any lodging space. Were it anyone else showering in there right now, she would pay the thought no mind.
This was Maya, though. And Maya had made one thing abundantly clear in her domestic time alongside Franziska: she did not take anything other than cold showers.
The young medium’s passion about this particular topic matched her passion when it came to just about anything else. She was insistent that the health benefits outweighed the discomfort of it—she’d prattle on and on about improving circulation and bolstering her immune system and shocking herself awake in the morning and whatever else, and Franziska would (very politely!) pick her battles carefully. Quite frankly, she had nothing in her arsenal to disprove any of what Maya was saying—but there was no health benefit on earth that could convince Franziska to give up one of the few pleasures in life she had. None of it appealed to her, anyway—her immune system was bulletproof, her circulation was fine, and she rose long before the sun did with little effort on her part.
Point being, Maya did not take hot showers. Maya did not even take warm showers. Maya barely nudged the nob, enough to get the pressure high and on, and kept her hands off the water heater at all costs. In their many years together, there had never—not once—been an exception to this rule.
Until now. Franziska jots down a six, filling out a box, and Maya emerges from the bathroom not long after in a cloud of tepid vapour. Even out of the corner of Franziska’s eye, she looks awfully beautiful—her features all pink from the heat, flyaway hairs sticking out of her headwrap, her eyes still a bit droopy from a long night of rest. It’s honestly no wonder it wasn’t enough to recover—all the rigorous work she’s been doing, she’d likely need far more than a measly nine hours.
The purpose of these mountain retreats still eluded Franziska, a bit. From where she was standing, training in Kurain seemed more efficient and cost-effective. It had forests. It had freezing waterfalls. It had a wealth of spiritual power rumbling through every grain of dirt and blade of grass, an undercurrent of paranormality that even a commoner like Franziska could feel simmering beneath her heel as she tread the path to and from Fey Manor. Maya, though, was insistent on expanding her horizons—I focus better away from home, she’d say, and it’s good to study wherever I can and learn everything each school has to offer.
Franziska could certainly relate to that. Still, though, if you asked her, Maya deserved a full pass to never have to sequester herself on top of a mountain ever again, after everything that happened at Hazakura.
The best way to forget all that, Maya would say, is to keep trying. One day, I’ll have more good experiences than bad ones!
No wonder her people admired her so. So, too, did Franziska.
Swaying a little on her feet, Maya makes her best attempt to sit criss-cross at the kotatsu. Its heat kisses her toes, though, and today her self-control cannot best the temptation of it. Legs untangling, she relishes in the warmth of it, leaning back on her palms for a moment before snapping back forward to grab an orange from the fruit basket.
Franziska curves the serif on a one, staring sidelong at the way Maya clumsily tears the skin off the thing. It’s noncommittal, shaky, telling of spiritless process rather than proper hunger. She observes for a moment before breaking the comfortable silence.
“So,” says Franziska, “hot shower?”
Maya freezes a minute, but it’s not quite deer-in-the-headlights as much as it’s hungry-raccoon-in-the-dumpster. Her fuzzy brow scrunches defensively, in that way it sometimes did when she’d rehearsed a conversation in her head.
Interesting.
“Yeah, yeah, rub it in.” Maya pouts, still picking at her food rather than looking at her girlfriend. “You win, little miss perfect. Tell me all about how your opinions on water temperature reign supreme.”
“Let the record show I have never said a word on this matter.” Franziska sets down her pen and crosses her arms. “Beyond that I admire how we can coexist so wonderfully despite our many differences.”
“Yeah, but you’re thinking about how bad you wanna argue with me,” says Maya. “I can tell.”
“How can you tell something like that?”
“You do the sleeve thing.” Maya nibbles at a torn-off orange slice. “You’re doing it now.”
“The—” Franziska looks down at her fingers, buried in the fabric of her sweater sleeve. “Sleeve thing?”
“Edgeworth does it too when Nick pisses him off. And then he shows up to our toku hangouts and complains in my ear for an hour.”
Was she that easy to read? There’s a foggy memory in the back of Franziska’s head, one where she had a shockingly similar conversation with her papa, and he had looked just as scandalized as she feels now, and she’s pawing to try to remember who won that argument for a moment, but—
“You’re deflecting,” Franziska says, a statement that often comes with the territory when one knows Maya Fey. “Why the change?”
Maya swallows another bit of orange, looking vaguely uncomfortable as she does. This, for whatever reason, unsettles Franziska the most.
“I was cold, okay?” She stares hotly at Franziska, chubby cheeks puffed out. “The heating in this place is hot garbage, or, um… cold garbage, I guess? It’s bad! Sue me for wanting to be warm after spending fifteen hours straight in a mountain spring—”
“Alright, good heavens, forget I asked.” Franziska pulls her arms apart, waves a hand, goes right back to her puzzle. Truthfully, she had just been making conversation, but Maya’s poor mood and defensiveness over the topic now has klaxons howling in her head. She might just be overworked and exhausted, but if there was one thing Franziska knew about Maya, it’s that she only got this prickly when she really wanted a topic dropped.
Over the head of her puzzle book, though, she can’t help but look at that shredded orange in front of Maya. Maya, whose voracious appetite showed in every inch of her body. Maya, who gnashed her teeth and shut her eyes tight in pleasure and slammed one hand down on the table when something really hit the spot. Maya, who looked most beautiful with condiments dotting her dimples and fruit juice lingering on her lips and grease stains decorating her vestments.
Half-finished on the table, the orange quietly rots.
It’s two in the morning when Franziska is jolted awake by the sound of someone trying to break into the cabin.
As a prosecutor, she considers herself to be rather attuned to danger. Similarly, she’s rather proud of her quick reflexes whenever that danger comes knocking—or, in this case, jangling at the lock on the front door. Those reflexes are so quick, in fact, that she doesn’t even notice the empty bed beside her, or take the time to question why anyone in their right mind would try to rob a cabin-for-rent, sequestered in the freezing mountains and intended exclusively for religious acolytes with nary an earthly pleasure to purloin.
No, instead Franziska bursts into the main room with whip in hand, hardening her stance in her best attempt to offset the blue-satin pyjamas and atrocious bed head. Teeth bared, she’s about to open her mouth and bark out a threat to the dastardly fiend who’s intruded upon her beloved’s important work… only to find said beloved at the other end of the room, crouched down in a trembling heap at the door.
No other signs of entry or danger are present. Franziska relaxes as she quietly shuffles forward, curling up and over Maya and making her best attempt to take in the scene.
Collapsed on the floor, Maya’s legs bend and stick out asymmetrically, like two broken twigs upon the forest floor. The quaking rise and fall of her shoulders tells Franziska she’s breathing heavy and laboriously, every other inch of her body language riddled with exhausted, bullheaded frustration as her fingers shake and err across the deadbolt.
Franziska squints. Maya snaps the lock horizontal, moves down to the knob. Struggles for a solid sixty seconds, clicks that one into place, too. Back up to the deadbolt, where she struggles to shift it back vertical. Doing, undoing—just moving her hands with no rhyme or reason, endlessly in the dead of night. It isn’t until Franziska hears the first pathetic whimper escape Maya’s throat that she remembers her role, plods forward to collect her girlfriend.
“Maya,” Franziska whispers, to no avail. A little louder, then, “Maya?”
The effect is immediate. Maya’s hands leave the locks, she twists herself around so that her back is pressed up hard against the door. Palms splayed across the wood, feet struggling for traction on the aging floorboards, she bares her teeth fearfully and tries to look strong despite the tearstains shining on her cheeks. With one hand poised in front of her like an olive branch, Franziska curls her fingers back toward her chest, hoping to look smaller. As soon as she’s close enough, she kneels.
“Dearheart,” says Franziska, softly as she’s able, “whatever is the matter?”
Maya’s breath stutters and skips in her lungs, a childish hiccup that betrays how rigid she’s trying to look. “S-Someone’s coming, Ms. von Karma, I—have to—”
Ms. von Karma. Franziska bites the inside of her cheek, kneeing herself closer.
“Who’s coming, Maya?”
“I don’t know!” she cries, then turns back around—half-heartedly, her legs still facing Franziska as she messes again with the locks. With each passing second her dexterity fails her, the mere act of even holding her arms above her head looking to be too much. “I have to—lock us in—before—before—”
A truly wretched cough rips through her, burying whatever words might’ve come in its violent wake. Maya dips forward, her hair a jet-black jungle as it envelops her, whole body jerking with the force of every horrible, barking lurch of her lungs. Franziska watches with heartsick worry and no small amount of exasperated admiration as Maya’s hands stay on the deadbolt. Connecting pieces in her head, Franziska places a hand on Maya’s spasming back, rubbing well wishes into her sleep-shirt and finding more answers in its sweat-drenched state.
“Maya,” says Franziska once more, remembering late nights in Munich, a little boy’s stifled sobs, the floorboards creaking as she ran down the hall. Germany’s tiniest, most dedicated knight. The words are practiced, perfect, comfortable. They come without thought, as she brushes silver… brushes black hair from her charge’s face.
“Please tell me where you are right now.”
Maya takes a deep breath, wheezing the whole way—Franziska feels the whistle in her lungs before she hears it. Her digits do not leave the lock overhead, though they do stop moving, as she thinks.
“H-H-H—”
“Deep breaths,” instructs Franziska. “Push out your stomach as you breathe in.”
Weakly, Maya nods, trying her best through the fit her lungs are throwing. Carding fingers through her long hair, Franziska gingerly breaks up tangles, guiding her through it.
“Good girl,” she says. “I’ll talk, yes? You can just answer yes or no.”
Maya closes her eyes, breathes purposefully through her mouth, and nods once more.
“Just now, when I asked you where we were,” says Franziska, “were you going to answer… Hazakura?”
Fingers going white-knuckle on the locks, Maya clamps her free hand over her mouth and swallows another pained wail. She nods, clunkily, like the action is fighting her every step of the way.
“And these… lodgings, you are in,” she continues, “the training hall? More specifically, the inner temple?”
This time, Maya squeaks out a quiet little mhm as she nods. Franziska’s hands move on their own, fixing whatever it is they can find—the knots in her hair, the tremble of her shoulders, the tears that spill over her eyes.
“I can assure you that is not the case,” says Franziska, calmly and succinctly. “Only acolytes are allowed in, remember? Yet here I am beside you. I doubt they’d let you bring the kotatsu in, either.”
As she’s saying it, she gestures to the thing, and something resembling clarity begins to break across Maya’s foggy-black eyes. Her fingers go limp where they rest on the lock, and Franziska keeps on.
“It makes sense you’d get turned around,” she says. “We are atop a mountain. And you have been training quite rigorously. The inner temple was quite frigid, and you’re shaking like a leaf.”
Franziska curls herself around Maya, then, wrapping the whole of one arm around the girl and holding her close. The feeling of her darling’s muscles relaxing is just as much of a balm to her as it must be to Maya.
“I’m—” Maya chokes out, “—s-so cold.”
“Well, that stands to reason.” She slings her whip around one shoulder, and her free hand finds Maya’s clammy forehead. “As I suspected… you’re burning up, my dear.”
“I—” tries the addled medium, “I’m—Franzy, I’m s-scared.”
“Shh,” Franziska soothes, the nickname sounding like home on Maya’s chapping lips. “Fret not, Schatzi. As long as I am here, nothing will do you harm. I swear on the von Karma name.”
Finally, slowly, Maya’s fingers slip off the deadbolt. Millimeter by sluggish millimeter, her palm traces its way down the indents of the door. Then, with little fanfare, Maya slumps her whole weight onto Franziska, all but collapsing in her girlfriend’s arms.
“There we are…”
Maya’s arms wrap around her midsection, clinging for dear life as she cries. A sputtering inhale turns into another painful-sounding cough, and all Franziska can do in the wake of it is keep her steady rhythm drawing invisible ciphers into Maya’s ailing frame. Franziska can’t say which part of her chest aches more as she listens to the unfortunate noise—her lungs, or her heart.
“How on earth did you manage to get yourself this ill, hm?” Franziska nudges the both of them upward, intent on carrying Maya if she must. “What timing… the closest doctor is likely hours away from here.”
Footfalls heavy, Maya buries her blazing face into Franziska’s neck and shudders back more tears.
“I’m sorry,” she whimpers. “I’m so sorry.”
“Hush. None of that.” Franziska brings up a hand to scratch lovingly at her scalp. “You’ve nothing to apologize for and no need to worry yourself. As I said, I will keep you safe.”
And she does. Maya is guided back into bed, with the covers pulled up to her nose and the space heater cranked up high. As soon as Franziska is certain the horrors rattling around the poor girl’s head have quieted down, she moves—to the kitchen where she watches snowflakes melt on the window, waiting for the whistle of the kettle on the stove. In the interim, there’s plenty of time to fill up a proper basin, wet the softest washrag she can find, and make her damnedest attempt to be someone with a decent bedside manner.
She’s kneeling beside Maya and wringing the thing out when it happens—the girl stirs from her feverish half-sleep, cracking her sore eyes open to look at the worried face of her angel on high. There on the futon, behind those sweatlogged, raven-black bangs, Franziska watches with grateful amusement as Maya kicks back up behind the weight of the illness—a mischievous spark in feverlit eyes, a ghost of a grin to match that pulls just barely at the corner of her mouth.
Her voice is hoarse and languid when it comes, “Sure you don’t wanna just spray me with the hose? Spook the illness outta my dumb head?”
“I don’t think I can attest to the medical efficacy of such an act, however…”
Franziska smiles down at her, gently pushing back her hair and splaying the washcloth—as tenderly as she is able—across a sighing Maya’s fevered brow.
“Freezing cold,” Franziska says.
“Just the way you like it.”