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It’s snowing in Munich.
Miraculously, it waits until they touch down to become a problem. Though, the scattered chit-chat Miles had heard from staff suggested they had cut it pretty close. It takes a good half hour for them to disembark, and by the time they make it into the airport proper he feels damn near ready to fall over. The only thing stopping him from doing so at this point is…
In front of him, Franziska pitches to the side and smothers a sneeze into her handkerchief, its force so intense that he fears she may slip and tumble off the airstep. A chorus of well-wishes drift up around her, and Miles cannot help his instinct to place his hand firm on her shoulder in an attempt to steady her. There’s no thought behind this action, of course, it’s simply what the love itself moves him to do—but as she’s swiveling around to bare teeth at him, he considers it a favour to the well-meaning patrons of the flight who would otherwise inspire her ire. The nerve of them, to acknowledge her current state. The state that they’ve been more or less forced to exist around for the better part of twelve hours.
Twelve hours of her habitual sniffling, a stubborn impulse she followed time and time again because she was pathologically scandalized at the idea of blowing her nose in anything resembling a public place. Twelve hours of her fitful attempts at napping, where she’d toss and turn in her seat, causing the thing to rumble on its cradle. Twelve hours of her clearing her throat, attempting to shove it into some sort of high register and make it sound dainty, ladylike, when all the forced tenor did was aggravate her quickly-failing voice more. Twelve hours of what was shaping up to be a miserably sick Franziska von Karma, the worst kind of Franziska von Karma one could be forced to share a space with.
Miles is honestly kicking himself for it, now. After the events of Hazakura, he’d taken a few days off any work or otherwise stressful projects to rest. The whole thing was hand-made in some sort of lab to get him ill, after all—the freezing mountain, the hours spent trudging through the snow until he was soaked down to his socks, the wretched state of his sleep schedule, the jet-lag that caused it… most of all, Phoenix Wright, sick as a dog and coughing up a storm the whole way through. He figured if he could get the jump on things, the illness would run its course quicker—and so, he holed up in his LA apartment for a few days, sipping at his more medicinal tea blends and catching up on plenty of rest. All the while, hosting Franziska—enjoying spending some time with her in between her own cases before the two of them were to fly back to Germany.
How fortuitous, then, when this proactivity resulted in no illness at all. With Wright’s tendency to only catch superbugs, and Miles’ own… lacking constitution, he was absolutely certain he’d be miserable in a few days’ time, yet here he was, unscathed. So grateful to be home free, in fact, that he didn’t notice Franziska beginning to fall.
Miles had a pretty good nose for his sister’s various moods. He’d not seen much of her in that short time before their flight, though—she’d been holed away in his office, working remotely, morning to night. Only ever pausing to stomp out into the kitchen, make herself another cup of tea, and go right back to what she was doing. When they’d boarded their flight, even, she seemed fine—a little tired, a little quiet, but nothing that had made alarm bells ring in Miles’ head. Not until that first sniffle hit his ears, an hour into their time airborne. Then and only then did it hit him all at once what was to come.
Franziska didn’t sniffle. Rather, not for no reason. Only when she was about to bawl her eyes out, or complaining of the dust in some office, or shoving her face into his dog’s fur, or nursing a stubborn head cold. Process of elimination provided only one answer, and Miles felt its clarity like a rock in his gut.
The first few had been irritated, errant, near silent. The next gained a watery sort of quality that told of something moving. After that, irritation and inflammation, a jutting of her jaw and angry ridge in her brow to punctuate them, as if she was furious with her biology for its insubordination. By the time she started sneezing, the things were ceaseless and miserably liquid, and her nose was a scarlet beacon on her face that warned everyone around her to keep their distance.
Miles would describe that nose as… expressive. Franziska never really had any hope of hiding an illness or allergy with the way it wrinkled and twitched and quickly went pink. It was pretty clear from the way she’d been glued to her poor handkerchief that she was making some attempt to conceal that fact, but all it really did was make her look sicker.
Here they were, then. Beneath the gorgeous, sprawling arches of the Munich International Airport, bathed in the strange ethereal glow of the snow as it lights the night. The skylight is pure white, as is the expanse outside as flights begin to drop off the readerboard one by one, and Miles has a bad feeling about things as soon as he hears Franziska’s phone ring. She’d barely gotten her sim card in—her hands slipping and faltering all the way as she periodically went one-handed to tend to her dripping face—when the thing started making noise. Never a good sign, that sort of urgency.
A few croaky, barked out strings of angry German confirm his suspicions, and with the weight of everything there on her shoulders, Franziska tucks her phone away and flats a palm against her temple. Index and middle finger rubbing mindlessly at one end, thumb doing the same at the other. As it is wont to do, Miles feels that telltale ache spread liquid across his heart. He reaches an arm out, intent to soothe—
“Don’t touch me.”
“Duly noted.” Lowering the appendage back to his side, he places hands on his knees and faces forward, toward the scattered and evermoving crowds. Switching back to English, he dares the question, “Should I ask what that was?”
“Our transportation,” Franziska sniffles furiously, “is stuck in a ditch.”
“Hm.” Miles just keeps looking at the middlespace. “That’s not great.”
“No. No it is not.”
They sit there for a moment, both unsure of what to say after that. Outside, the snow falls, and Miles can tell from the way she’s living there in her hand that the wintery white of it is aggravating her head all the more. Strong and steely as she pretends to be, Franziska’s never done well on airplanes, not when she is perfectly healthy and certainly not now. The noise, the pressure, the stillness of it… granted, Miles tended to fare almost as poorly, but his various systems of dealing with it seemed slightly more effective than her own.
“Do we have an ETA, or—”
“No, Miles, we do not have an ETA.” She snaps toward him in lieu of a flogging, her every feature red and tired. Here in the pale lighting of winterglow and fluorescents, she looks ten times worse than she did on the plane—white as a sheet where the sickly scarlet doesn’t touch, her makeup dotting at the corners, the bags beneath her eyes burgeoning beneath it as it fails.
“The roads are absolute pandemonium, you would think the foolish fools of this foolishly frigid climate would have honed their foolish hands and learned how to drive in the damned snow by now, but apparently that’s too mu—”
Her voice is high and nasally before it shatters, and then she’s sneezing thrice more. They’re losing their girlishness, sounding far more vicious and urgent—as though her overactive immune system is just as determined and desperate as she is to remove the infection from her body.
“Gesundheit,” he says lamely, offering his own handkerchief, confident in the knowledge that her own is currently the fabric equivalent of a corpse. Franziska takes it with a near-choking sort of growl, a noise of pure despair and indignation that doubles her forward. Her makeup is properly running, now, the illness misting her eyes, and just looking at her Miles can tell that she’s too exhausted to even tend to that, black smudges trailing down her cheeks.
“I am going—” another sneeze, barely contained, “—to kill Phoenix Wright.”
“That old line again?” Miles crosses his arms, does her the favour of looking elsewhere, for now. “If it were his fault alone, we’d both be ill.”
“You got lucky!”
“I’m more inclined to believe you were unlucky,” he says. “Though, I think you’re intelligent enough to know exactly how you wound up this way.”
Out of his line of sight, Franziska grits her teeth. The pursuit of justice, she wants to say, same as you. It just so happened that the pursuit of justice saw her catching a flight on 4 hours of sleep, reading case files front to back for twelve hours, prosecuting a whole trial on the end of it, investigating around a snowy mountain with a miserably sick fool, and locking herself in a freezing cavern overnight in an attempt to—
Another bout of sneezing rocks her forward into Miles’ handkerchief. Her face is clammy and wet. An attempt to save someone in need. She would’ve done it for anyone, no matter who that person was. Sure, she had officers and investigators and men at her disposal, she had people she could have implemented to take care of it all… but Papa always said that if you wanted something done perfectly, you had to do it yourself, and the only time he strayed from that creed… well.
She would have done it for anyone. What is a simple virus as consequence? Franziska has handled far worse, and yet…
Delicately as she’s able, she blows her nose into the (oddly soft) thing, envisioning the racing thoughts leaving alongside all the unpleasantness expelled. The airport is so loud—the rumbling roll of the army of luggage all around, the screech of automatic doors that need maintenance, the swirl of angry phone calls happening as flight after flight after flight goes delayed or canceled. The PA system was clearly invented in the 80s and has not since been updated, the way every new announcement pounds into Franziska’s skull like a landslide as she tries, desperately, to climb the mountain of her life. Pelted by the cacophony around her, she finds her grip on the cliffside slipping, until only her trembling pinky finger remains. Its tether begins to falter ominously, and she closes her eyes and swallows barbs.
Miles shuffles around at her side, never one for mercy when she’s at her lowest. He adds to the noise—the velvet of his suit touching itself, the prickling crawl of whatever he’s unzipping, re-zipping, the annoying way he always clears his throat, Franziska’s going to—duck back into his stupid handkerchief and sneeze again, apparently, because that’s the only thing her biological processes seem capable of doing, at the moment. She’s damn near certain she’s never caught a head cold so miserably relentless before, barely allowing her a moment to breathe before her foolish respiratory system is throwing another one of its fits, and the rocky cliff is crumbling, and her fingers are slipping, and the crowds are so loud, and—
Something falls across her shoulders.
Impossibly soft. She feels the texture on the small amount of neck still exposed, has to fight the urge to loose a wheezy sigh of relief at the balm of it. Miles ought to be whipped for even the thought of digging around a lady’s luggage like that, but it’s something she files away for a later date. Right now, all she can think about is how badly she wants to throw what’s left of her dignity to the wind, fall asleep right here in this dimly-lit, horribly noisy airport.
The fuzzy feeling behind her eyes begins to win out. There on cliffside, Miles reaches out a hand from the mountaintop—same as it ever was. The will to be angry, resentful, to hiss upward and slap him away leaves entirely. All that remains is the fatigue that runs through her arm, and the vast chasm below that threatens to swallow her whole.
A healthy Franziska would, most likely, choose the abyss over the foolish pity.
She draws the throw tight around her shaking—shaking?—shoulders, just ill enough to find little reservation in, ungracefully, tipping her head to a lean on his own.
They’re stuck there for another hour and a half, waiting for transportation. Miles spends the whole thing mindlessly doing sudoku, scratching numbers down in pen, in Franziska’s dreadfully indisposed honour. It’s not until he notices she’s asleep that he begins to genuinely worry—regardless of the circumstance, he knows she’d rather die than ever suffer the fate of napping in public. And yet there she was, her noisy breathing at his shoulder, not even moved to wake by the movement of his arm as he turns pages.
When the driver does arrive, she moves silently and zombie-like beside him—lidded eyes, laboured lungs, sickly pallor. No thought to her appearance, a horribly uncanny note to take—her clothes are wrinkling, her hair is frizzy, she must feel dreadful. He takes the handle of her luggage, and she doesn’t even glare. Miles starts to wonder, at that moment, if Wright calling this a cold was, perhaps, misguided paraphrasing.
In the back of the car, Franziska continues to lean into her brother’s warmth, her hands lain across her torso as though she’s trying to protect herself from something. The chill outside? The oppressive air of exhaustion? The emotional vulnerability of being seen like this? In lighter times, Miles might remind her that he’s seen her in far more compromising positions. She hardly needs to be teased today. He wraps an arm around her, instead, and this time she does not bark at him to keep away. Just a hefty sigh as the circumstances sink in—empty house, winter illness, nagging little sibling who’ll try everything in his arsenal to get her to lie down.
Perhaps, if her throat’s not hurting too bad just yet, venting those frustrations will allow her a smidge of peace.
“We’re nearly home,” he says as the carlights dance across their faces, “what’s on your mind?”
To his surprise, Franziska doesn’t fire off on some tirade about how slow-going work is going to be or how wretched she feels or how saccharine and foolish he is. Half-awake, walls crumbling, eyes shut as she slurs her words… what she says instead is, “I wonder how Maya Fey is doing.”
Cute.
Miles would be lying if he said he understood what was going on… there. What he did know was that it only took one dinner with the two of them to come to the realization that Franziska—who was very good at hiding how badly she craved external validation—was completely and utterly obsessed with impressing Maya Fey. Things begin to click into place—Franziska’s insistence that she be the one working the trick locks, her ever-burning devotion somehow blazing twice as hot, personal comfort and wellbeing be damned.
“That’s a solvable problem,” says Miles, shuffling performatively as if to look for his phone. “Here, I’ll get her on video conference right now—”
At once, Franziska seems to slot back into herself with a satisfying snap. She dives for his (proverbial) phone, and when it becomes clear that he’s not holding it, she takes to punching him hard in the arm instead. He definitely deserves it, and maybe he cries out in pain a little louder than he would otherwise, just to make her feel a bit better.
“If you dare make me show my face to anyone in the condition I am presently in,” Franziska croaks out miserably, “I will make you sleep in the hedge maze tonight.”
“How nostalgic…” Miles grins warmly, thinking on stolen nights beside her, beneath what few stars peaked through the light pollution. “I might rather enjoy that, you know.”
“You won’t be saying that when your extremities begin turning to charcoal.”
“More likely I’ll just end up sounding the way you do right now,” says Miles. “If Frau Wagner doesn’t unbolt the door and let me in the second you’re asleep.”
“All the staff will be briefed,” warns Franziska. “Meine Damen und Herren! The Edgeworth boy has finally done it. Allow him to nest here under no circumstances.”
“I sincerely doubt you’ll last long enough to brief anything other than the pillow you’ll be drooling on.”
“You’re revolting, you know that?”
“You’ve told me once or twice.”
Franziska levels a glare at him, her whole face seeming to drag with the congestion that’s beginning to crawl its wicked way into her languid voice. The wretched fluids responsible for that had begun to needle at her throat at some point, and by this point it’s far too tender to argue further. In place of any tongue lashing she falls back with a huff, leaning her head on the lowback of the car’s seat and tipping her chin as high as she’s able. Begging the flow of mucus in her face to spare her its onslaught for the remainder of the ride, she stays silent and lets Miles fiddle with whatever he’s fiddling with. Even if she can’t fall back asleep over the buzz of the engine, her eyes feel hot and itchy, and closing them and turning her brain off almost feels nice.
When they finally pull up to the manor—a struggle all its own, Victorian gates and long, serpentine driveways and proper kilometers of land—Franziska uses the last of her energy to sprint to the doors like it’s her life’s mission. Throwing money at the valet, her heeled boots stabbing what’s left of the snow as though its sparkle has somehow wronged her. Miles lets the staff keep their tip, silently pulling his and Franziska’s suitcases to the step as he lags behind her. There’s really no rush.
By the time he’s inside, she’s through the main room, up the winding staircase, down the massive hallway, to the Western bathroom where a hot shower and a wellspring of cold medicine and a stack of freshly laundered towels and her favourite satin pyjamas will be waiting. He is sure of it the second he sees Herr Engel, living up to his name as he nods at Miles once, brow deceptively stern as ever. That much done, he pulls their luggage up the stairs and enjoys the leisurely trek to her bedroom.
The shower roars as he gets to it. Laying her suitcase flat on the velvet carpet, unzipping the tower of pressed blouses and waistcoats in vacuum-sealed bags, puzzling out the system of her massive walk-in closet, which may as well be its own room at this point. When Franziska notices that this has been done, he’ll likely get an earful—for snooping through her things, or for taking away a chore she was looking forward to, certainly one of the two—but Miles, as always, would rather she be angry and looked after than pleasant and overworked. There’s a plethora of tasks she will not allow him to wrest from her hands, and so he takes what he is able, surveying the end result with a satisfied nod.
That done, he’s off to the kitchens, where a veritable cauldron of homemade ginger tea is sitting on low heat. There’s hypothetically more value in the idea of Miles making this foolproof concoction himself, but he fears that the hands of a skilled American can’t match even the clumsiest digits of a proper German. He ladles the panacea into the biggest mug he can find, sprinkling it with cinnamon and overloading it with honey once it’s cooled a bit. It’s hard not to become nostalgic as the scent of it floods his nose—bittersweet images of a steaming mug placed at his work desk by a strong, heavy hand. The wordless exit that followed, the tap of a cane disappearing down the long hall.
As he’s bringing everything back upstairs to Franziska’s room, he feels the spectre of that feeling at his back. The kinder vision of the good prosecutor—before everything splintered into a twisted, grief-stricken vision of events. At the best and worst of times, despite how her own identity grew and crystallized, Miles still saw all his favourite parts of Him in Franziska herself. There in the darkened halls with ginger tea in hand, he wonders if she feels the same.
Her bedroom light is still on when he nears, and so he raps his knuckles gently against the aged wood so as not to exacerbate the noise of the universe. When there’s no response, he figures that must mean she’s decent, and so he pushes the door open and braces for the onslaught if she chooses to take her usual offense.
There is no snapping of fangs or leather on the other side, no cacophony of insults and iterations on the word fool—only Franziska, still as can be with her stomach on the mattress, her face all but shoved into the silky pillowcase she’s hugging. Arms braced above her head and hooked beneath it, her hair a still-damp mop of silver—she’s going to kick herself for it in the morning, but Miles supposes she hasn’t the strength to even hold her blow dryer up in a state like this.
The comforter is still folded into itself, sitting on one of the chairs at the far end of her massive dwellingspace. Miles can make a few guesses as to why she didn’t grab it—most likely of all, that she saw a bed and all else left her mind, magnetically pulling her toward this single article—but whichever is correct, that simply won’t do. Not with how cold this house gets in the night, not with the fever she’s likely already running. He sets the tea and saucer on her nightstand with a soft clink, right beside the bag of lozenges that Franziska always keeps on her. A brief detour back to the bathroom to grab what she neglected to from the counter—pills, essential oil for the humidifier, the quickly dwindling tissue box. He nudges the last item as close to the bed as he’s able, so that when (not if) she awakens in the dead of night drowning in her own fluids there will, at least, be a life preserver she may cling to.
Finally, then, the blanket. It prickles his own nose as he picks it up, floral soaps and laundry add-ins wafting off it like a right miasma. Not at all to Miles’ own tastes, but Franziska loves flowery things and aromatics, always doused in some designer perfume and scoffing at how it makes his face wrinkle.
(Perhaps, he ponders, the fit her respiratory processes are throwing now is a twisted form of divine karma.)
Careful as he’s able, Miles draws the thing up over her shoulders, frowning a bit as she stirs beneath his touch. A weak-willed, croaky groan leaves her, and she turns her face to the side where he’s standing, an attempt to get her bearings back. Her silvery eyes go acidic when she sees him there—how dare you intrude upon an ailing lady’s privacy, Miles Edgeworth!—but the spark to fight leaves them quicker than he’s ever seen it, overtaken by… he can’t identify what it is he sees, there.
Oddly girlish, then, Franziska ducks her chin into the comforter as he pulls it over her. She’s wordless as she shuts them again, allows all this to happen—completely taken by the warmth on every side of her. As it begins to seep into every last inch of her aching frame, the sigh she heaves this time is one of pure relief.
“You’re not too tired for tea,” says Miles, smoothing wrinkles from the blanket, “are you?”
Only her eyes are visible from within the depths of the little niche he’s made her. They’re narrowed and suspicious things, sharp despite the fatigue therein. “What kind of tea?”
Her voice sounds just awful—blunted with the dullness of emphatic congestion and a sore throat that’s sure to be relentless come morning.
“When in Germany,” he says as he grabs it from the nightstand to hand to her, as she’s sitting up to take it. The scowl she makes after just one sip—as though she’s doing shots of hard liquor, rather than sipping at a tepid drink—is unchanged from the one she wore as a child, time and time again. Refined with age, her face more angular and hard, now… but the press of her lips remains the same, endearing as it’s always been.
“Tell me,” Miles says as he’s doing one final lap around the room, to make sure everything is in order for a proper sick day or three, “does one ever get used to the taste of your miraculous ginger tea?”
“It is medicinal,” Franziska says as she too quickly polishes the thing off, “it is not supposed to taste pleasant.”
“And your little cherry treats, there?”
“There are exceptions to every rule.”
“Not a particularly prosecutorial idea.”
“Exit my bedroom, Miles Edgeworth.”
Once he finishes untying her curtains. She’s always so insistent they stay open—I’ll be awake before the sun, anyways—but Miles has a feeling that she will not be rising before the birds, tomorrow. With that done, he swipes the now-empty cup from her nightstand, watching out of the corner of his eye as she sinks back into bed, shuts her eyes and speaks not a word more of protest. Whenever he sees her like this, the foolish impulse tugs at his chest—to miss her scalding fury, in all its forms. The absence of it feels unsettling, like the very balance of the world has been thrown haphazardly askew.
In the time it takes him to walk from her bed to the door, he can hear her softly snoring. A diminutive thing, oddly cute, like anything else Franziska did whenever her walls wavered and chipped. The room is filled with the scent of florals on her fresh satin, the sheets beneath, melting into something earthy alongside the whirr of the humidifier puffing eucalyptus into the air. Even healthy as a horse, Miles has to admit—the idea of crawling into a neatly laundered bed after an impossibly long trip abroad sounds like divinity given tangible form.
Never in all his years did he expect to take inspiration on proper rest from Franziska of all people. Then again, she always was the undisputed champion at keeping him on his toes.