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Trial ends, and with it goes every last speck of energy that previously lingered in Franziska’s body.
Granted, there wasn’t much of that to begin with. Getting out of bed that morning had been a struggle all its own, every mundane step of the routine like pulling teeth.
Three days ago, her alarm had gone off, that was the first sign that the fates were not intending to play nice with the feeble puppet strings they’d attempted to tie around her ankles long ago. That alarm was an emergency precaution, one Franziska rarely found herself utilizing, and its urgent cacophony was more of a dirge than a reminder, spelling out some sort of amorphous doom on the horizon.
Old age swiftly approaching? A few poor nights of sleep catching up to her? The onset of some insidiously inappropriate springtime illness? It could be anything, and the vague cloud of it hanging overhead made Franziska’s skin prickle in anticipation.
Each morning since then had left her no answers, nothing but the same. Not rising to calm silence and scattered birdsong, but to that infernal screeching from her cellphone. She’d crack her eyes open only to find they burned—sore and heavy and begging her to shut them again, like she hadn’t slept a single second, let alone her proper eight-to-ten hours. Every inch of muscle and bone within her ached as she attempted to crawl out of bed, down to her very fingertips as they clutched the downy black comforter, folded it over itself. A foggy miasma of something inexplicably leaden seemed to waft around the inside of her head, right behind those tired eyes, and the scald of the shower did not chase it away, no matter how she cranked up the temperature in an attempt to boil the fatigue from her body and mind.
Unbuttoning her pyjamas aggravated her joints. Shuffling out of her pants, opening the door to the walk-in shower. Standing there hurt, so much so that she bypassed her own precision and took fifteen minutes instead of the necessary ten. How horribly embarrassing. Getting into her regular ensemble was a nightmare even in theory, but in practice the results saw her nearly collapsing in frustrated tears—untying and retying her imperfect bow before eventually she gave up entirely and just pinned it in such a way that hopefully no one would notice that it refused to lay flat.
The whole ordeal of it left her little time for breakfast, which was fine considering she had no appetite anyway. Food had always been something she ate on a schedule, out of necessity rather than pleasure—but this was the first time she found herself unable to stomach much of anything, her big important breakfast replaced with a protein bar, caffeine pills, and tea in the biggest thermos she can locate.
Just keep moving, Franziska would spend the whole day screaming at herself. Lapses in momentum to file paperwork or sit down in detention or even just have more tea in the afternoon saw to it that the weary beast stalking behind her would wrap its claws around her throat and squeeze until it was satisfied. Franziska refused to give it the chance.
I’ll be rid of this tomorrow, she’d said as she finally collapsed into bed that night. In her head, this moment was to be gloriously satisfying—finally, blissfully horizontal after fighting to stay awake all day. In actuality, Franziska found the sheets felt abrasive and heavy as they touched down on her skin, stealing the breath from her lungs as though she had cinderblocks sitting on her chest. Their minky softness felt like a bed of cold thumbtacks, and sleep refused to come.
Tomorrow, repeated that voice in her head. And, of course, tomorrow did come—and with it, the malaise struck ten times as hard.
Tomorrow was not only more of a struggle in the way it seemed to hammer the exhaustion into her, but in that work would, regrettably, have to wait. Because her foolish brother had insisted she go in for her foolish yearly physical, and her foolish American doctor had insisted she was underweight, as if she could help that, and after asking some horribly foolish questions insisted they do full bloodwork. And of course they were fully booked up on 99.9% percent of her non-trial days, which wouldn’t have been a problem since she was currently living in that marvelous .1%, except it was very much a problem now given her current state.
Oh, the humanity. Fighting her every whim not to fall asleep in some shoddy hospital waiting room. Fluorescent lights screaming their staticsong above her head, loud enough to irritate but not enough to keep her from toppling over. The thought was mortifying, which is why she had elected to stand as ramrod straight as possible instead, filling out her check-in form with every tendon in her fingers yowling, their agonized pleas only drowned out by the far more intense ones coming from her legs.
For the first time in all her years, Franziska regretted her choice to wear heels.
Even here in the present, she meditates on the small shock she felt when the doctor had frowned at the digital display on the wall adjacent, asked her if she knew she was running a fever. That… made sense in that she was feeling it, but little sense in much else. Why? There was no illness to herald such an affliction—no tenderness in her throat, or congestion in her head, or unsettling of her stomach, or irritation in her airways. Only the horrible lethargy that seems to be marinating her like proper fodder, and a persistently dull headache that was making the light intensity in that dreadful room feel like some sort of legally condemned war crime.
“Psychogenic, I surmise,” Franziska had deduced, and the doctor briefly looked a little offended that she knew that word. “My line of work is stressful by definition.”
That was that, it seemed. She’d let them drain her of time, energy, and at least one of her necessary bodily fluids, and the only thing that had stopped her from running to work was the fact that she was sure if she’d tried, she’d somehow pass out before making it back to the offices.
Investigation. Interrogation. Flitting like an angry wasp back and forth between crime scenes, offices, witness interviews. Moving, moving, moving, so long as she was moving she would not risk giving into the whims of her foolishly lackadaisical biology.
When she did finally make it home that evening, Franziska had collapsed on her couch, mere inches from the door. It was some sort of miracle that her phone did not die in the night, holding on with just enough battery to sound her alarm and get her through her morning commute.
At trial, her throat begins to give. Same as it ever was, though she can’t help but feel that this time it is not simply the product of stale courtroom air and a defense attorney who does not know when to fold. Franziska’s flawless internal clock tells her it’s only been twenty minutes, and for reasons unbeknownst to her she doubts the thought itself, no, that must have been at least an hour.
She denies a recess. The way opposing counsel, the gallery, the judge are all looking at her with that annoying pinch in their brows, she knows they can tell that something is wrong. Attempts to slow the trial are met with a baring of her teeth and a bloodthirsty lashing. And, most importantly of all, she wins.
She wins, and she takes her leave, and the second those massive double doors open and give way to her triumphant march out, gravity seems to bear down on Franziska with twice as much intensity. She scopes the hallway for press, grumbles out a comment about not taking questions today, breathes hard through her nose as she’s making a beeline for the far door, the outside world, the cab, back somewhere where no one is looking at her.
Something is… wrong.
This far into springtime, the heat of the sun beats down on her, blow after horrible blow. Even the five steps to Scruffy’s foolishly pathetic excuse of a vehicle seem to stretch on into forever, cityscapes blurring in the heatwaves around her as they morph and waver into a barren grey desert, as Franziska fights the urge to stare at her feet, ensure she does not fall. Swallowing with purpose (all the while, fighting the urge to cringe at the horrible, raw pain of it) she steps into the shade of the car, telling the incompetent detective to drive and drive fast.
If the absolute state of her doesn’t raise his bushy eyebrows, that certainly has. More often than not, she was barking the opposite at him.
To his credit, he listens without complaint.
Franziska awakens to her brother’s voice.
That fact is very strange, considering she doesn’t at all remember wandering into his proximity. For a moment, she just lays there and listens to the rumbly, syllabic baritone of it—grasping deep within herself to find that steely, unbreakable von Karma will that is her birthright, the one that may have finally met its match. She needs to open her eyes. She feels like she’s been drugged, though, lead sewn into her lids that refuses to allow her even that. Instead, she just listens, trying desperately to ignore the needling pull in the bend of her neck.
“—family, yes. No, no, I assure you, I can take a message for her. At the moment—”
Eyes still shut, her lips pull back, fangs pearly-white in the lowlight of… where is she? Miles is here. She’s definitely safe. Still, that fact alone is not enough to stop the immediate impulse to anger at the fact that he’s probably talking about her.
“—see. That would certainly explain some things. Yes. Well, not at the moment, but I am sure you can expect a follow up very—”
An attempt is made to roll over, off her back and onto her good side. Or, what she thought was her good side? She doesn’t seem to have a good side, anymore. Every nerve and fiber and molecule of her pushes back against the action, and when she winces, the twisting of her features hurts, too. Somewhere vaguely adjacent, Miles bids whoever farewell and places the phone elsewhere. A slow, metered pattern of footsteps travel further from her, and Franziska is finally able to open her eyes.
Burgundy on every side of her. Overhead lights shut off. The warm glow of a desklamp taking its place. The sprawling, everlit blur of traffic twelve stories down. And, of course, the uncharacteristically soft couch cushion that pads her clammy cheek.
Miles’ office. Unmistakably so.
Franziska clears her throat, intent to announce her presence, demand he tell her what she’s doing here—but the rawness that meets her is unlike any sore throat she’s ever had, the horrible feeling of having washed her mouth out with unfiltered, chemically spotless acid. Her gaze briefly slams itself shut again in a bid to will away the pain, and though she can’t see it happen, she feels the cropped carpet shift underfoot as Miles swivels around to face her. Before Franziska can even register it, he’s kneeling beside her, with that horrible kicked-puppy look on his face that he’s trying so hard to school into something harder, braver, more strong-jawed and unbothered. As if it were his job to be the older sibling, instead of the small and sniveling thing he was.
“Why,” says Franziska, her voice scratchy from both unconsciousness and illness, “am I here?”
“Pardon?” Miles raises an eyebrow. “How should I know that? I found you here. You were sleeping like a corpse on my couch.”
Ah. Well.
Franziska scrunches her whole face up, as if the action will somehow hone her memory. There’s a… vague recollection that comes to her as reality continues to blur into focus around her. She’d made it back to the offices, and shooed off Scruffy with a snap of leather (his fault for hovering so close, big hands poised out as if to… catch her, like he thought she’d be foolish enough to fall) and… for some reason the memory sort of just stops, there. What takes its place almost feels like a dream, ephemera slipping through her fingers as she wakes—the offices… turn older, sepia-toned, big and vast. Franziska is small as she wanders through them, the ceilings high above her head and looking like a sprawling cathedral. She’d feel just as reverent beneath them, were she not so cold and small and sick.
And lonely. And lost. She knows her way to one place, though—and so she wanders forward, skulking weakly to…
Papa’s office. The second best thing to home.
Something painful and distinctly waterlogged crawls up her throat, there in the present. Her feverish brain, trapped in the past, combined with her proper sense—and here she was, one room off.
“Whatever,” Franziska says, trying to hide the shake that errs in her voice as she slides sluggishly upward. “I’ll be making my—”
“Where to, exactly?”
The nerve of him to interrupt her. She shows him her teeth.
“Back to my office.”
“I wouldn’t.”
“How fortuitous, then,” says Franziska, “that you and I are so different.”
Any second now, she’s going to get up proper. Swing her legs around the edge of the couch, touch her heels to the floor, sit up straight, powerwalk out the door. Franziska finds she’s frozen, though—weights glued to her torso, her shoulders, her pounding head. The neurons don’t connect when she tells them to—directing an arm to move merely sees a noncommittal nudge. Lost and furious, she stares derisively at the appendage in question, making her best attempt to glare it into submission.
“Well?” Miles says, rising to his feet, seemingly for the sole purpose of crossing his arms in that obstructive way. “Whatever is taking you so long?”
“Is it not enough that I have to be trifled by some miserably ambiguous malady?” Franziska makes her best attempt to kill him with her eyes. “I must also deal with a germ of your horribly imposing size and stature?”
“Yes, well, I can at least help on the matter of ambiguity.” He pulls her phone from his pocket, placing it on the coffee table to his left. “That was your GP I just got off the phone with.”
She stares up at him with magma bubbling all across her expression. Seething rage, or perhaps just the fever. “And you could not simply let it ring? You had to invasively pry into my personal medical business?”
“Under normal circumstances, I would not,” says Miles, “but you had your ringer turned halfway up.”
“So?”
“So, I thought it best to,” he continues. “Your phone is always on silent, as long as I’ve known you. For what reason would you dare to turn the thing up, risk the social faux pas of it all? Only if you were waiting on a particularly important call, one you could not afford to miss.”
Oh, how she wants to claw that smug grin off his face. In her mind’s eye she can see him there, staring down at her sleeping form as the default ringtone she’s heard maybe twice emanates from the briefcase she’s haphazardly toppled on its side. Muttering some foolish phrase like eureka beneath his breath, and thinking he is some sort of genius for it. One of these days, Franziska is sure she will in fact snap and tear this man limb from limb. Today, though, she just keeps on glaring, feeling like her arms are shoved firmly into some sort of straitjacket.
On one hand, she could tell him that he is foolish, that he is wrong, that she had actually turned her phone up because she was quickly growing narcoleptic and was worried she might sleep through any one of the very important calls she received on the daily. On the other hand, she values what scant dignity she has left, asleep here on her little brother’s couch with her clothes just as crooked as her pride.
“I suppose I should thank you, as much as it makes my gorge rise to do so,” Franziska says, and means it. “Well? Spit it out, then. Am I terminal?”
“Far worse, really,” Miles makes his best attempt to edge something playful into the words. “You have mono.”
Franziska just… blinks at him. Even blinking hurts, a fact she wishes she is pitiful enough to share with him, so that her choice to do it twice has the proper impact. What he says… doesn’t seem correct, some part of it simply refusing to slot into place. Mono. Mono? How did she possibly get mononucleosis, a disease primarily known for… Franziska doesn’t dare even think it. Thankfully, she does not have to.
“Tell me,” Miles fails to hold back the smile that tugs at the corner of his lip, “what sort of salacious affairs are you getting up to in your spare time?”
The audacity of this man is unparalleled.
For him to suggest it at all, he deserves a flogging that would rival the ones she frequently unleashed upon him in their childhood. She’d grown out of the need to dirty her beloved whip with blood as vile as his, but there were special exceptions to be made when his foolishness reached a threshold that she could not combat with mere words. Her fingers twitch uselessly at her side, and she pictures the bones within peeling back, breaking and fraying with a sickening crack of their own.
Instead, she curls her lip, shows more teeth, huffs through her nose.
“You’re despicable, you know that?” asks Franziska, rhetorically. “Even if I were canoodling with some unseen fair maiden, do you really think I would put any part of my anatomy near someone who is ill?”
Miles has a wrinkle in his brow that Franziska knows tells of a memory being combed, snapshots of all the times in their youth when she very much did just that. Boasting of her flawless immune system, which to her credit was not just a brag—she’d do a poor impression of someone with good bedside manner and nurse Miles back to health with nary a sniffle to show for it. He seems to foresee it’s not an argument they need to tread, though, the lines loosening on his face as he journeys down some other errant path.
“It’s one of those things a person can carry asymptomatically, though,” he says instead. “There’s a nonzero chance you could—”
“Read. My. Lips.” Franziska nearly growls the words out, to the immediate protest of what’s become of her tonsils. “The ones that are, in fact, not kissing anyone, Miles Edgeworth.”
“Hm,” he says. “Are you certain? You know, I did hear tell of a certain spirit medium staying the night at your place last weekend.”
“You—I—” Franziska lurches forward, the heat of her rage spurring her into a weak impression of someone sitting up. “What on earth would make you think—Maya Fey is a dear friend of mine and she was in need of a place to—!”
“You’re awfully red-faced for someone who’s innocent.”
“I am feverish!”
“Well, that’s one way to get you to admit it, I suppose.”
Miles wiggles out of his suit jacket. This time, he doesn’t kneel—just bends over slightly to arrange it, draping the thing across her shoulders like a blanket. Franziska takes this moment to stare at a particularly interesting speck on his otherwise spotless walls, petulant as she draws the thing closer around herself. This exchange has happened no less than seven times in their life together, and at no point has Franziska ever refused it, regardless of the circumstances. She hadn’t even noticed how fiercely she was shivering.
With her eyes on anything but him, she doesn’t notice his hand bridging the gap between them. It moves from her cheek, down to her throat, lingering for a moment as he studies the horrible swollen feeling she’s been ignoring all day. Come to think of it, it did feel a bit more angry than the typical sore throat she nurses, the one that comes as an unfortunate occupational hazard.
Franziska takes the moment to accept her circumstances, if only because Miles’ hands are delightfully cool there on her feverwarm skin. Reveling in the feeling, Franziska exhales for what feels like the first time in an eternity, combs her memory for some point of origin in lieu of any—what had Miles said? Salacious affairs?
What she doesn’t tell her brother is that there had been some… lingering touches. Some held gazes. Some almosts, but nothing quite so serious as even the most chaste of kisses. Franziska does not yet feel like unpacking the near-pathological obsession she has had with impressing and befriending Maya Fey damn near since the day they met, but even if she did, the fact of the matter is she was not engaged in anything that explicitly intimate with anyone.
Though…
Though.
At the time, it was the most peculiar thing… her cup was on the table.
Franziska had a cup. A special cup. A mug, to be exact—hand sculpted by her mother, supposedly at a pottery class she’d dragged a “very unenthusiastic” Papa to. Yes, horribly unenthusiastic, the way he held that ceramic as though it were a newborn, softened his (murderous) hands around its girth. It was misshapen, with shaky forgetmenots lain into it, vines and leaves wrapping around the side. Painted a lovely blue-grey, (which Franziska’s told was Mama’s favourite colour) the precise pantone of Papa’s steely eyes.
It had been Franziska’s birthright, then, when Mama choked out her last breath just as Franziska gasped her first. Every warm drink that Papa had ever served her had lived in that cup, and likewise she had taken it with her when she moved out of his house and into her humble little Munich apartment. It had flown across the Atlantic with her all the same, and through every chip and stain it had endured, Franziska was sure to keep it in good condition, close to her heart.
Franziska was also touting a late-game Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder diagnosis which came hand-in-hand with a rigid sense of organization and tidiness. Every single thing she’d ever laid claim to had its proper place, and when all the work was done and the day was at its end, there was not a single pixel of her life that was even slightly out of place. It was strange, then, when she found her cup on the dinner table, because that was decidedly not where it belonged. It belonged in the cupboard, or the sink, or the dishwasher—anywhere but there, out in the open and uselessly cluttering the otherwise transitory space. A table existed to be eaten upon and then cleared—if not in use, there was never to be a dish on it. And yet, there was her mug.
She should’ve thought better of it. Should’ve questioned it, contemplated the reasoning, done anything other than write it off. Unfortunately, spending an extended amount of time around Maya Fey had… interfered with a great amount of her mental faculties. Brainpower was replaced by girlish images of the two of them cavorting on the beach, in the botanical gardens, at some festival somewhere. Gut feelings and intuition were chased out by the swarm of butterflies that were now beating their decorated wings against the walls of her stomach. Perhaps she’d been coming down sick long before this moment, but either way, she did not question the mug on the table. My head is not operating at full capacity, Franziska had thought of it at the time, I suppose I left it there.
And so… a noncommittal wash of the thing was all that she’d done before taking her morning tea. The tea that, if she is correct, had spelled her doom.
(Honestly, if she had known this is how things would turn out anyways, she may have just... tilted her head a little when her and Maya were gazing at one another, leaned in slowly, shut her eyes...)
As it all clicks into place, she briefly—only briefly—understands Miles’ foolish impulses to shout his foolish phrases whenever the answer to a puzzle of logic hits him. Thinking about that reminds her that she’s still just sitting there, shut-eyed and shivering into his icy touch, which had at some point stopped feeling comfortable. Sick of that, then, Franziska leans back, her head hitting the couch arm with purposeful dramatics.
“There’s no way for me to phrase this that ends with us on speaking terms,” says Miles after the long silence, “but I will be placing you on mandatory leave and delegating your caseload for the next month.”
There’s none of the predicted anger. Instead, Franziska just winces like she’s been hit.
“A month,” she spits into the couchback, only because she cannot sit back up and spit it directly into Miles’ face. “What is one even meant to do for that long?”
“I’ve no interest in what anyone else is doing, but you are to rest.”
“For a month?!”
“I’ll let you back on earlier if you can get a doctor’s note,” he says, setting his expression firm. She, of course, does the same. “Don’t make that face. How many times have we been over this? If you do not schedule yourself a vacation, your body will do it for you, Franziska.”
Exhausted, and aching, and immolating in her own skin from the fever, Franziska curls in on herself, clutching his suit jacket on her shoulders like a lifeline. Toward the crack where the cushions meet the frame, too miserable to do much else besides mumble, her words tumbling out with no filter.
“Maya Fey scheduled this vacation.”
Silence. No sound for miles beyond the bustle of the city far below, the zooming song of airplanes somewhere overhead. Then, same as it ever was, Miles turns on one foot and begins to softly chuckle.
“Eure—”
“Finish that word and I will ensure it is your last, Miles Edgeworth.”
