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For some reason, Franziska is thinking about her father right now.
Which isn’t that odd. Franziska thought about him often. Nowadays, it was mostly with scorn, but she certainly was not above fonder ponderings, too. She doesn’t really know what to classify this bout as—it’s supremely inappropriate, and yet she cannot stop the thoughts from feverishly manifesting. The human brain was absolutely infuriating.
It’s just that she remembers one cold winter night, where Papa got to Miles before she could. Where the two of them were alone in his study, sitting somberly in front of the crackling fireplace, in two ornate chairs with towering backrests. Where Miles was wearing the same look he often wore in December, and where Papa was espousing tales of the boy’s late father in an attempt to keep his memory near.
He was a legend in his own right, Papa had said, a man who kept my tunnel vision in check.
Franziska had felt something, that night, as she lurked silently outside the cracked double doors. A stirring in her heart she could not explain.
The heart to my fangs, as it were.
In retrospect, she didn’t know what to make of this conversation—the natural end of it being, of course, and so I murdered him in cold blood.
Perhaps every consonant and vowel of the sentiment was a lie. Papa had proven that he could certainly lie, and lie well. But times like this, Franziska could not help but believe that all of these statements somehow coexisted—that Papa had a great deal of respect and admiration for Gregory Edgeworth (despite his revolting career choice), that Papa had missed their courtroom back-and-forth, and that Papa had mercilessly slaughtered him and nearly gotten away with it.
But in moments like this, with the heavy-handed parallels laid out in front of her, Franziska could not help but draw the comparison herself. Hearing Papa talk about what his overseas courtroom battles were like in those days Before, she came to a conclusion she foolishly believed to be everlasting and universal: if von Karma was a ruthless beast, then Edgeworth was the more laid-back and quiet creature you plopped into their enclosure to keep them from growing bloodthirsty.
She’d heard of these strange pairs in nature. Cheetahs and golden retrievers. Crocodiles and capybaras. They lived on this precipice, with this bond of unshakable trust—where one knows wholeheartedly that the other could at any point snap and devour it, and yet it stays regardless.
So, Papa was a ravenous crocodile, it seems. And the late Mr. Edgeworth, a particularly unfortunate capybara.
Anyways, Franziska wants to fucking kill her brother.
Perhaps that’s a little harsh, but the phrase DL-6: The Sequel will not stop repeating, unseemly, in her head. To know and love Miles Edgeworth is both a once-in-a-lifetime pleasure and a heartbreaking ordeal, and Franziska had thought to have made her peace with this back in 2018—after several long, drawn-out sessions of her crying and screaming and falling to pieces in his arms, demanding he answer for the betrayal he put her through during the most impossible year of her life.
Her reflection is glaring back at her in the bathroom mirror, and her eyes—the ones she stole from her father—are burning with the same murderous shade of icy blue he probably wore once upon a time in a blacked-out courthouse. She’s white knuckle on the bathroom counter, bitten-down nails sunk into the unnaturally pearly-white grout, and she quickly realizes that no amount of makeup is going to be able to fix this.
An attempt to apply foundation and eyeliner had been made, but her eyes are watering too much and too frequently for any of it to take properly. Poking and prodding at her skin is not helping any of it, intensified with how often the overbright lights of her apartment bathroom keep making her sneeze. She’s been sniffling through this futile attempt at making herself presentable for hours, now, one more smudged wing away from sinking to her knees and wailing into her shirt collar.
She’s really going to do it, this time. She’s going to march right up to Miles’ office, or his apartment door, or whichever of his hotel rooms across the sea—Franziska is going to find Miles, and she’s going to strangle him with her bare hands, but right before she does she’s going to cough directly in his face so he knows precisely the crime he’s being executed for.
Thank you for covering for me, he’d said.
I’ll just drop the case files off in person, he’d said.
Come now, Franziska, it’ll only be a minute, he’d said, rolling his eyes at even the thought that any part of him could be contagious.
Only a minute indeed! A minute she’d spent hovering 2 meters away from him, a single hand covering the lower half of her face. Even this, it seems, was not enough—for Franziska had caught every bit of his foolish virus, the one that was nasty enough to crush even his bullheaded tendency to work through the pain.
She’d gone out of her way to take his case, and this was how he repaid her?
There in the present, an erratic blink intensifies the lights that silhouette her. Their buzz crawls behind Franziska’s eyes before she can chase it away, and the sneeze comes too fast for her to move her hands. She feels the eyeliner pen skid across one cheekbone as she’s lurching forward, into her elbow, and then zigzag again when a second sneeze follows.
She’s going to fucking kill him.
For a moment all Franziska can do is stare at the sweating black lines on her face. She’d probably do numbers at some sort of alternate fashion club with this look, but right now she is trying to get ready for a date and it looks more like some of the artwork she’d attempted as a toddler. Sniffling, then sighing, then sniffling twice more, Franziska grabs another rosewater wipe and scrubs angrily at her face.
Beneath her foundation, the space around her eyes is blotchy and red, irritated from so many failed attempts at hiding how dreadful she’s feeling. This isn’t going to work. Even if she did manage to convince Miss Fey she was fine, to spend time with the girl while she was shedding such a hefty amount of virus would only see Maya catching the damned thing as well. And then she’d be no better than Miles, which was a fate ten million times worse than death.
Oh, but canceling this late is the faux pas to end all faux pas, too. Franziska runs a hand erratically through her silvery locks, already fussy and disheveled and refusing to be properly tamed. She realizes with a pang of hopelessness that there is, on every account, no winning here.
Franziska has never really been good at losing.
Sighing again, she makes her best attempt not to look like a beaten animal as she skulks back into the bedroom, wiping off her makeup the whole way. This cold must really be getting to her, because she sits on the edge of her bed and stares dazedly at Maya’s phone number for what must be at least a solid two minutes before doing anything. Gathering utmost courage and grace, Franziska makes an attempt to clear the grit from her voice and dials.
“Oh, hey Franzy! I, uh, was just about to call you,” comes Maya’s voice after half a ring. That’s… an interesting thing to say, but Franziska has a rehearsed speech prepared that she needs to get through before her brain unlocks into something more conversational, and so she carries on.
“Miss Fey. Good evening,” she begins, and manages to at least sound fairly healthy. “I… would like to begin by offering my deepest apologies. I recognize that the short notice is terribly impolite, but I fear I have no other choice but to cancel our outing tonight.”
“Aw, hey, you sound so bummed,” Maya all but coos, “It’s alright, Franzy. It happens. Did work call you in?”
“Bah,” she scoffs, “I would’ve given those fools an earful. No, truthfully, I seem to be… indisposed, at the moment.”
“Huh? Like how?”
“My foolish little brother,” Franziska spits the words into the receiver, “elected to share his vile germs with me. Physically, it’s nothing I cannot merely ignore, but I’d be positively loath to get you sick as well.”
A beat. Then, to her surprise, Maya is laughing on the other end. It’s scratchy through the phone signal, beautiful all the same, and Franziska hates the way it makes her heart... sink. Oh, she wants to live in this laughter, she wants to spend every second of every day with the sound of it filling her ears, the breeze of it blowing through her hair. It’s right there, a few blocks away, within such perfect distance… and Franziska is barred from its embrace tonight, because her brother is a wretched, revolting, diseased fool.
“Okay,” Maya says when she’s finally composed herself, “so do you want the bad news first, or the good news?”
“...good first.”
“The good news is, I’m sick too, so no hard feelings about having to cancel.”
“That…” Franziska blinks dumbly, “that is certainly… a coincidence.”
“Uh huh. The bad news is I’m on your porch.”
What?
Springing back up, Franziska fights the way her legs tangle and ache and trudges with purpose toward the front door. Out of habit more than anything, she checks the peephole, and, sure enough, Maya is there on her doorstep. Before she can even think Franziska is yanking the door open, forgetting entirely that she looks like a half-finished renaissance painting—clothes perfectly ironed and pressed, but face a splotchy, tired mess.
And Maya—oh, Maya. She, of course, looks as beautiful as always. Swimming in a knitted pink sweater, tucked into a big, loose skirt that falls over aubergine tights decorated in fading glitter. Of course, her skin is a little pale, and her eyes are a little tired—but Franziska’s too distracted by the way the full moon outlines her jet-black hair in its glow to notice.
“Um…” Maya offers a lethargic smile, still holding her phone in her hand. Franziska hears her in surround-sound, holding her own as well. “Hi.”
“Hello.”
Disbelieving, she pulls her phone from her own ear, stuffing it back in her pocket.
“Sorry if I got a little over-eager, I, uhhh…” Maya does the same, and rubs sheepishly at her arm, “really missed you.”
“I’ve…” Franziska mirrors her without thinking, “missed you, too.”
“Do you still wanna cancel?” says Maya. “I mean, if we’re both sick, I don’t think we gotta worry about infecting each other.”
“Certainly not, but…” Franziska fiddles with her sleeve, “it’d be foolish for the both of us to go out, nonetheless.”
“Ugh, yeah. Man, I wasn’t thinking. I just—”
Maya’s struggling to rein herself in as she talks, turning ever-subtly to the side as her eyes narrow and water. Franziska watches her with something resembling perverted fascination as she unleashes a positively violent sneeze into a barely-there sweater paw. Its force sees the girl stumbling just barely forward, and Franziska can’t help but catch her arms as she does.
Truly a remarkable thing, Maya is. Franziska’s patently aware of how she’d be slamming her door in the face of literally anyone else exhibiting this type of plague rat behaviour so shamelessly. On Maya, though, it just makes her ache to care, even though she’s ill herself.
“Bless you,” she says, the palm she has on Maya’s arms crawling itself downward, toward her own fingers. Gentle, then, Franziska laces them together, and Maya rubs with vicious purpose at her sore, chapped nose.
“Thanks, eesh,” she groans, “I was gonna say, I just really wanted to see you. But I’m… probably not very hot right now.”
A half-hearted smirk. “In this weather? Certainly not. Why don’t you come inside and warm up?”
Even the idea is biblically tempting. The clear skies don’t help the frigid darkness of winter, the way Maya’s stuffy mouth-breathing puffs visibly into the air. She’d tried to dress warm, but this was a chill that little could help, one that’d burrowed stubbornly beneath her skin.
“Not what I meant, dorkus, I—oh!” With their hands linked like this, Maya can’t clap her own together the way she wants to—she elects to slap an open palm on her cheek instead, brightening like a streetlamp in the nighttime atmosphere. “Franzy, wait, that’s genius! We can just have our date here!”
She rounds Franziska, tugging awkwardly on their fused arm as she lets herself inside. Franziska can’t offer much else besides a croaky sort of grunt, tripping over her tights as she’s forced to follow.
“I—” Franziska stammers, “hardly think my humble dwellings are well-prepared for a lady of your beauty and status—”
Maya snorts, throwing her whole head back. It catches on the way in and morphs into a hacking cough, and the irony of the whole display is, of course, not lost on her.
“Please. I’m gross and sick. Be gross and sick with me. We can be Plague Pals.”
Franziska scrunches her nose as Maya’s pulling her like a leashed hound through her own house. “I’m not sure if I’m fond of the moniker, Maya Fey.”
“Sick Sweethearts.”
“How many of these do you have?”
“Bug Buddies. Hey, you have stuff for soup, right?”
Absolutely not. Franziska thinks she says this out loud, but the shame of it seems to claw at her already-scratchy throat, silencing her. That’s enough of an answer for Maya, though, because then she’s looking at her phone clock and kicking the door shut behind her like she’s an unruly horse.
“Alright, step one of hot date with my bangin’ girlfriend: grocery delivery.”
Franziska rubs at the beginnings of the headache in her temple with two purposeful fingers, eyes shut in a bid to will away the pain before it starts. “Who the hell is delivering groceries at this hour?”
Maya grins at her phone, unbothered. “Los Freakin’ Angeles, baybeeee.”
A mere hour later, soup is being made.
Or rather, soup is being attempted. There in the kitchen stands a latchkey kid who knows more about corralling the spirits of the deceased than she does proper culinary technique. Adjacent to her is a legendary child prodigy, who speaks upwards of five languages, got a 400 on her Bar Exam, and would probably burn down the whole apartment if ever she was left unsupervised. The hope, of course, is that their collective ineptitude will somehow cancel itself out.
Maya is hunched over the simmering pot with one of Franziska’s countless throw blankets draped across her shoulders like she’s an old, aging king. The soup, of course, is surveyed quite similarly to the way one might look wearily across their crumbling kingdom.
To Maya, the soup might as well be done, but she also has no concept of what done even is. It’s a colour. It’s warm. The spices dancing beneath the surface look a bit shimmery, and she tries not to stare into the swirling cauldron, mesmerized. Was this why all the other ADHD girlies on social media were obsessed with making those glitter jars? Maya thinks she finally understands, now.
Snapping herself out of the weird soup trance, Maya raises the ladle to her lips and takes a small sip. Then she takes a big sip. Then she realizes that with her nose this thoroughly blocked she can taste absolutely nothing. Right. She’d forgotten about that bit, too blissed out at the thought of spending time with her girlfriend to remember she was supposed to be ill.
Hatching a plan, Maya turns around to face Franziska. She’s there across the kitchen bar, plopped into a padded barstool and leaning her cheek on one palm. It’s an uncharacteristically sloppy state of being—with the tired half-lid of her bruised eyes, she looks like a bored teenager in their last class of the day. Her hair’s all flyaways, silver and unkempt, tinsel-like, and in the overhead light she looks especially sick. Pale skin, flushed cheeks, red nose, it’s all just so antithetical, and Maya feels bad for thinking it is so cute.
Most of all, Franziska’s just… staring at her. Just watching. She’s not busying her hands, not saying anything, not taking interest in any other factor at play here. No, Franziska’s just peering lovingly into Maya as she cooks, as if this simple act alone is fulfilling enough.
“You with me, space case?”
Franziska perks up, then, matching Maya’s smarmy grin with an amorous one of her own. “Ostensibly.”
“Can you come over here for a sec?” Maya says. “Need your help.”
Franziska, of course, nods and glacially scoots herself off the stool. Maya can tell, just looking at the way she’s moving, that she really isn’t feeling great. It’s just like Franziska to have thought she could’ve gone out like this, but then again, Maya was similarly foolhardy in that regard.
When Franziska manages to shuffle herself into the kitchen, Maya draws her covers closer and angles her gaze toward the soup. “Can you do a taste test for me? I can’t taste anything with my nose all—all—”
As if the appendage itself can hear her tempting fate, it chooses this moment to riot for attention. The steam chooses that moment to billow upward at such an angle, the leavings of the spices it carries choose that moment to intensify their prickle, and Maya’s brain chooses that moment to be woefully unprepared to deal with it. She has no time to register that she’s even about to sneeze, let alone wrangle it back, and so instead she ducks forward and nearly smacks her head on the microwave instead. Like the last seventeen (approximation) sneezes she’s been at the mercy of since getting here, it is a ferocious thing, but the scent of paprika amps it up to eleven, dousing all hope of controlling it.
Maya is bad at covering her mouth to begin with, but in this particular instance she hasn’t even the time to think about something so luxurious. She sneezes directly into the soup, the only barrier against the onslaught being one single curled half-fist hovering uselessly in front of her face.
“Good heavens, Maya,” says Franziska, heart hammering in her ears from the startle. “Bless you!”
“I think I just saw the afterlife.”
“You see the afterlife every Tuesday.”
“Let me make jokes like a normal person.” She scrubs at her nose. “If you don’t I’ll never get better.”
“We can’t have that,” Franziska says, then stares down at the contaminated soup with a scowl. “I don’t think it’d be wise to sample this, Schatzi.”
“Fran, pleeeease?” Maya looks at her with big, watery eyes. “I can’t taste anything! I need your autism!”
“You are adorable,” Franziska draws closer to her, sliding one arm around her waist, “but I cannot even fathom the idea of consuming this after watching y—”
At the sound of her breath hitching, Maya turns with a raised eyebrow and no small amount of amusement. Oh, how the tables turn—Franziska’s nose scrunches and twitches in that cute way it always did, a herald to what Maya personally believed to be the most adorable sound in the world. Where Maya is big and loud, Franziska is dainty and high-pitched, fittish and cute. Her sneezes come overlapping and fast, unmanageable and itchy-sounding, even just to listen to. Impossibly endeared, Maya just mirrors the hand on her own waist, holding Franziska steady through the whole ordeal as she, too, ruins the damn soup.
“...after watching me do that?” Maya teases when she’s done. “Gesundheit, by the way. Did you see the afterlife too? Tell Mia I said hi, okay?”
Breathless, Franziska paws at the countertop for something to fix the mess on her face, and is forced to resort to the roll of paper-towels that live beside the sink. She winces from the abrasion of the rough things against her oversensitive nose, and Maya takes the moment to lean in and press a lingering kiss into her shoulder.
Then Maya’s back to staring at the soup for a long moment, her every thought showing on her face. Sure, it’s gross, but they’re both sick with the same thing, anyways—Maya knows, ‘cause she was at Edgeworth’s house for Samurai Night a few days ago, and Franziska had made it very clear that he was patient zero, so there was no real danger in consuming this plague soup, if she could just convince Franziska to—
“No!” Franziska shouts, raspily, before Maya’s even had the chance to verbalize any of this. Damn, she’s good.
Sighing, then, Maya switches off the stove burner and slumps lethargically onto her girlfriend’s shoulder, gently as she can. Franziska, to her credit, leans her head atop Maya’s—creeping beneath the blanket and pulling it across the both of them. There in the intrusive overhead lighting, atop linoleum and flanked by off-grey marble, they become one.
“Shoulda made you sign a contract,” Maya laments. “Application to be my Fever Friend: duties include taste-testing soup that may or may not have snot in it.”
“Again with this.”
“My Ailing Ally.”
Franziska lets out a sigh of her own—heavy, tired, and above all else, completely and totally smitten.
“...your Convalescent Comrade.”
Maya slams a flat palm on the countertop, delighted. “Franzy! You’re making jokes with me! I didn’t think Germans could do that!”
Eyes shut and voice fatigued, Franziska lets out a whispery chuckle. “We’re allowed one per year.”
“And you used yours on me!” Maya swoons, nuzzles her, grabs her phone off the counter. “Anyways, wanna just order ramen?”
Franziska blinks blearily at nothing, silvery brows scrunched. “Who the hell is delivering ramen at this hour…?”
Maya taps at her touchscreen with purpose, voice boastful and proud despite how it aches.
“Los Freakin’ Angeles, baybeeeee!”