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housetyrellian · 7 years

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26. What does your character’s home look like? Personal taste? Clothing? Hair? Appearance?

ArthamirHome:His ancestral home, Manor Tyrellian, sits on the southern end of Lancer's Valley in the Thalassian Southern Marches, a couple dozen miles or so west of Thalassian Pass. Manor is something of an misnomer for the place, which is a fortress that was converted into a well-fortified residence. It is built on top of the road that passes through the valley and terminates in the Ghostlands a few miles south of the Manor itself. The east gate opens onto a barren stretch of rocky soil that leads to a narrow road magically carved through the cliffs by Arth's ancestors. The west gate's view is more scenic, being at the top of a hill overlooking the lower part of the valley, including the small village of Dawnhallow (and the tenements and other hastily-built structures thrown up by camp followers in recent crowded around it and packed with five times as many people) and three small wooden forts protecting the other side of the village. The panorama is idyllically rural. Livestock (mostly sheep, goats, and pigs) wander about under the watchful eye of their keepers, carefully guided away from damaging orchards and patchwork farmland, some of which is built on tiers to make the most of the hilly, uneven ground. The further one looks, though, the more rugged the landscape gets, as agriculture becomes sparse and isolated in a sea of evergreens broken up by islands of granite rises. Inside the walls is much less idyllic. A library, citadel, infirmary, and manor house are the only large buildings, the former three on the lower eastern bailey (or courtyard, ward, etc) and the last on the higher western one. If anyone wants to hear about the size of the place or arrangement, buildings, fortifications, or why things were built the way they were, send an ask about that - this seems mostly concerned with aesthetics, so I'll focus on that.Oddly enough, Arth and his immediate family life in the citadel, not the more luxurious (by Tyrellian standards) manor house. By the standards of the nobility, the rooms are almost spartan: one first enters the parlor, a homey room with a large hearth and fireplace, furnished with a darkwood couch or two and a number if chairs, all comfortably padded. His favorite is his armchair, which sits by the fire. Seat cushions and other textiles tend to be made in Tyrellian black-and-gold coloration. Elegantly arranged paintings, vases, and the like are strategically placed to ensure there is no tackily bare areas, but conservation of decoration is definitely in use. Off of the parlor are his office, solar, and bedroom. The office is far less conservative - patriotic memorabilia, captured banners, weapons, armor and other trophies, and things of that nature abound. The furniture is similar, though, including a large desk covered - COVERED - in a chaotic mess of paperwork, a problem cured only when his far more organized adopted daughter Jaira finds the mess to be too egregious to bear and goes to clean up. She avoids this, however, as Arthamir's absentmindedness and workaholism has resulted in more than a few half-finished meals buried under the dread Mount Paperwork after having been set down "for just a moment."The bedroom and solarium are much like the parlor, the former being dominated by a large four-poster bed.Personal taste:In general, Arth likes things simple and functional, but finely-made with quality materials, and usually old-fashioned. Any adornment or decoration is usually either very subtle or significant in some way, and often both.Clothing:His usual clothing amounts to three outfits, with copies or variations for when clothes must be laundered. Naturally, one includes his Blood Knight dress armor - fully functional, of course, and custom-made for his body. Milanese plate armor is a good reference.His usual field wear, though, is reminiscent of the armor of his family's traditional Cavalier Guard. Over his arming-coat is a long-sleeve ringmail shirt that ends at the hips, over which a cuirass, vambraces, rerebraces, robust pauldrons, and a gorget are worn. His gauntlets - half-gauntlets, anyway - are only armored on the outside of his hand; the grip is only the leather of the glove, to help offput the limits imposed by steel grip regardless of how dexterous the joints are. The torso armor is mirrored in the lower body, which is clad in mail chausses encased in all the usual leg plate armor. His helm bears a short white plume (to help identify him in battle) with a cross-hatched visor. The helm is enchanted to hold his hair in place under it. With either suit of armor, he wears the cloak and tabard of the Blood Knight Order, made of finely woven silk, and a scabbard resembling a rifle case for his longsword, Thori'sin. The latter has a shoulder strap that can be worn either diagonally for comfort or over one shoulder for ease of access, with loops that allow it to be tied securely to a saddle or his belt at the hip, if he so chooses. The cloak is usually worn with his civilian-wear, as well, and fastens at either lapel (so it cannot be used to choke him) by black iron pins engraved with the Blood Knight insignia on his right side and his Knight-Champion's insignia on his left. The symbols are painted red to stand out from the metal.When armor is not needed (whether literally or symbolically), he wears his arming-coat alone. The high collar has a black iron pin on either side, with the Thalassian Phoenix engraved on his left and the Tyrellian sigil on his right, inlaid with brass. It resembles a real life Marine dress uniform in most other respects, with brass buttons (or gold, at formal events). He favors tall, sturdy leather boots. At his side, when Thori'sin is not needed and/or would be too large and cumbersome, he tends toward a khopesh, the blunt inner edge painted red. Unlike most models of the weapon type, his has a cross-and-knuckle guard, similar to many rapiers. His sheathes and scabbards tend to be plain black leather, unadorned except for brass end caps and a brand of the Thalassian Phoenix near the top, dyed red. If he is carrying a weapon - and even on the rare occasions he is not, if he can - a misericordia dagger is belted on his right hip. Though it is rare, he sometimes wears a variant of his arming-coat with steel discs sewn into the lining, called brigandine. Hair: Perhaps surprisingly, he takes very good care of his hair. It's long and thick and red like burnished copper, clean and well groomed to excess. He wears it just past his shoulders, with the bangs swept to the side. Magical hair products keep it all in place, barring something worse than helmet hair mucking it up.Appearance:Tall and broad-shouldered, but rather slim. One gets the distinct impression that if he didn't work hard at remaining fighting-fit, he'd be scarecrow-scrawny instead of lean and hard. He is covered in scars from head to toe, some older than others, but most earned in the last decade or so (compared to more than 600 years of relative peacetime soldiering). His build and fine, high cheekbones suggest he was handsome once, but the discoloring scar tissue, ugly slash-lines lines, and irreparably crooked nose have dashed that to pieces. Nevertheless, his lopsided smile and warm, friendly nature somehow manage to make even his mangled features approachable. For funsies, since I wrote it up for an RP anyway, here's Jaira in her room in the Tyrellian city apartments:For how serious she is at... any other time, really, Jaira's room may be a shock. Hell, SHE might be a shock, having changed into what looks like an authentic Imperial Pandaren gown, albeit in a style similar to a Darnassian Lunar kimono, dark purple silk with swirl designs in darker purple velvet and thread-of-gold. In stand nearby designed to hold it over her at an angle a servant might in a more formal situation is a traditional painted Chi'ji parasol - an ancient example, what's more, restored to serviceable condition. Being priceless beyond what any Tyrellian could afford, the only explanation is that she actually commissioned an expedition to find it... just like the countless tapestries, banners, paintings, pottery, statues, weapons, armor, and sundry other trophies and mementoes, all around. Even the furniture is Pandaren, and the tea smells of Jade Forest Darjeeling. Jaira is seated on a cushion behind a - traditional Pandaren, of course - darkwood tea table. Behind the door (having opened it) is Lt Quickbeam, who is very grateful that her OWN traditional Pandaren armor conceals her face. Even her weapon had been replaced by a Pandaren three-ring saber, and her tabard had received a treatment similar to what the Horde colors endured for the Huojin.

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goddesslyfics · 7 years

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Chapter 4! Read on AO3 or below:

“That’s impossible. I was just there, I saw him-”

“I am so sorry, Franziska.”

Is that your admission of guilt or a vague stab at sympathy? Franziska wishes to ask, though she finds herself briefly incapable of anything more than muteness, a stone cold stare ahead as her mind processes this string of words which, on their own, she can distinguish quite clearly, yet when put together, seem beyond her capacity to fathom. Your father died last night. Yes, ‘father’ was a word she knows quite well. ‘Last night?’ Where was she last night? She should have been with her father. Yet, she was with Miles Edgeworth. Your father died last night. Does that mean she wasn’t there to stop it when she could have been?

She leans her forehead into his shoulder, and he places one hand over the back of her neck. Miles expects to feel the warmth of tears stain the collar of his shirt, but Franziska sheds none. She reflects on this, this lack of sorrow, and realizes she is more tired than anything, despite just having woken. It is the way one first reacts to having the ball and chain drop from their shackled ankle, the fatigue preceding the intuition of a hard time that has passed. It is the feeling of freedom, bonds laid bare, yet what will she have to show for it? The scars on her hands? The coldness of her heart?

She lifts her head from Mile’s shoulder, their eyes meet as a cloud passes by the window and they are briefly enshrouded in dim cover. Though she longs to ask him, why do I not feel anything? Is it because I’m free now? she retains her silence.

“Hey,” Miles says after some cold beats of silence. “I forgot about this.”

“My birthmark?” Franziska’s gaze drops to his hand, which just grazes the tawny splotch near her collarbone. The sun has returned to the room, reinstilling the brightness of the morning, the reality of its dawn and meaning.

“P for perfect.” He says softly, a sliver of a smile gracing the corners of his mouth. It is a look that, on any other morning, any other day where her father had not passed the night before, would have made her heart pound within her breast. She would have hated it, then, but now, she merely remains affixed in her coldness.

“I should go into work.” She says after his hand drops from her shoulder, fighting back the urge to shiver. “I received a new case yesterday, I’ll need to make arrangements for a new prosecutor while I am away. I assume the funeral will be in Germany?”

Miles nods. “Kalta’s making arrangements for his remains to be flown back to Stuttgart. She and Brendan will arrange for the funeral.”

“I would expect as much. Now, leave me to get ready. We must leave for the office within the hour.”

Yes, she realizes, sometime later, after arriving at the prosecutor’s office, the stonework symphony of her father’s grandest efforts. She does have one thing to mourn.

Her indifference.

Franziska speaks not one word during the overnight flight that shoots her into Germany’s early morning, but to order an espresso from a passing attendant, of which she had downed in one sip after taking a last look at her cellphone before silencing it for the plane’s departure. Miles will be catching a later flight, as he hadn’t felt the same sense of urgency as she to travel cross country for the man who’d forsaken his whole existence.

Kalta has already landed in Stuttgart. She’d taken the plane that transported her father’s body.

Franziska has yet to cry, and she still does not expect to. Since Kalta’s call from the previous week, the hospital transfer, the calamitous visit with Miles, all of it had been warning enough to her, a call to brace herself for the worst. Three days. Three days was all it took for her father to be going, and gone.

Though she does not wish to bear the world without him, it is not as though she wished for this, she knows she could and would have to, eventually. Despite this, her lower lip trembles for the first half of that overnight flight, and she may have to blink away a well of wetness from her eyes more than once, though she will not let one tear fall. And for that, her father would be proud.

“Oh, liebe.” Kalta rises from her seat in the foyer of the von Karma estate with her customary poise, unhooking her knee from where it was propped over her leg and rising like a siren from the sea. Though her brows are drawn close in the way you see in one who holds a constant seal of sorrow, along with the pinched corners of her lips and the limp inactivity that rests in her palms as she brings her arms around her sister.

Franziska leans into the embrace, though keeps her hands at her sides, wrapped into fists, the left around her whip. Kalta is warm and smells like their mother, like rose hips and novels. It is the most comfort she can attempt to gain from their current standing.

Her daughter, Didi, stands a step behind her mother, her raven curls hanging limply over her shoulders as she attempts not to fold in on herself. This is the young girl’s first experience with death, her first personal tremble within the grim reaper’s clutches, stealing away her großvater from her slim sphere of relations. She steps forward and graciously accepts the kiss Franziska lays upon her cheek with not a word in her direction.

“Now that you’re here,” Kalta folds her palm over Franziska’s, who for once has no objections. Perhaps the shock from the morning still lingers in a measure she cannot see. “Shall we go see Papa?”

Manfred von Karma is resting peacefully once more.

Death has softened the lines of his face, making him appear more at ease among his family surrounding him, in the dim back room of the funeral parlor that stayed open late at Kalta’s behest. It doesn’t suit him, nor does the powder masking his naturally waxy pallor. He is dressed in a fine grey suit, the adornments of various badges and awards Kalta had collected from his office at the estate affixed to his lapels like a smattering of sprinkles on cake.

It’s nearly midnight when the sisters return to the estate. Kalta’s husband, Brendan, and Didi have long gone to bed, and Franziska follows suit almost instantly as jet lag catches up with her with its staggered, gaining gait. The following day passes in a bleak blur, dragging like nails down a chalkboard. All the while, Franziska is unable to find comfort in the family she’s long since been parted from. Uncles and cousin, distant and relative, arrive periodically to offer their stone face condolences, the semblance of words sentimental. The viewing is a cluster of embraces and handshakes. They eat meals as a family. The affair is as silent and somber as one would expect from the von Karma name. While the estate has more than enough rooms to hold the lot, Franzsika has spent the last several years of her life reveling in their vacancy. Now they are filled with strangers who bear her last name, and Kalta, despite her self-proclaimed ‘escape’ years ago, finds herself more than content to refer to the estate as her own, even going as far as to bring in Didi’s bloodhound, Phoenix, from their family home in Munich.

Miles arrives the following night, after the cousins have scattered, Kalta has taken Didi to bed, and Brendan has retires to Manfred’s smoking room to look over some of the estate paperwork. Franziska waits for him in the foyer, her legs tucked beneath her on a velvet settee by the door, nodding off into her palm with her elbow propped on her knee. Her whip is coiled beside her, like a snake waiting to ward off unwanted company.

She blinks awake upon the sound of his suitcases’ wheels hitting the parquet and mumbles something that sounds like took you long enough, though part of her is wondering why he is here at all. He is my mentor and he is dying is what Miles had said to justify visiting Manfred in the ward. Some sort of reverence edged with guilt or perhaps just curiosity. Was it enough to extend the courtesy of attending the funeral? She’s already shaken off the notion that he came to comfort her and Kalta, though a vestige of hope she retained wishing for just that.

Not that she needs to be comforted, mind.

“How are you?” Miles asks as she rises from the settee, at a whisper, as though the estate were not so large and wide that his carrying voice could wake all its corners.

“Miles Edgeworth,” She scoffs, though there’s tiredness in her laughter. “What a foolishly foolish question. My father is to be buried tomorrow, and you ask me how I am?” She grits her teeth and bears the sting of tears, of sleep, of something that rises to prick the back of her eyelids. “I am perfectly fine.”

She turns from him, picking up her whip and tensing it between her fingers.

“You’ll be staying in your old bedroom. I trust that is acceptable?”

“Certainly.” He replies with measure. She replies with a curt nod, then sets off to lead him through the house to the wing that holds their respective bedrooms, as if several years in absentia has effaced his memory of his childhood home.

“Not much has changed since I left.” He comments. His old bedroom is just as he’d left it, on a morning as dark as this night. He sets his suitcase at the foot of the bed, reclining on his palms on the end of his bed. Franziska lingers in the doorway, feeling the same pinpricks of memory ebb into her chest as they had two nights previous.

“Do you regret leaving when you did?” She asks at a whisper.

They stand in the darkness of that room, steeping in memory, for some time before Miles responds. “No. However, in regard to how I left, I may hold some regret.”

So he regrets setting out like a thief into the night. Does he regret what came before, then? She’d kissed him, and he’d denied her. Your father would kill me if he knew. That’s what he’d said. As if he didn’t wish to pin the blame on his own lack of wanting.

Franziska takes a step from the doorway, placing herself in the hall. What a fool she was back then.

“Goodnight, Miles Edgeworth.”

“Goodnight, Franziska von Karma.”

It is raining the morning of Manfred von Karma’s funeral.

It is not at all like Franziska’s mother’s wake had been, small and hushed, a black veil blanketing the morning as well as her downtrodden eyes, the eyes of a child which she was no longer.

She is shielded from the rain by a taunt tarpaulin centered over the plot of grave. Beneath it, Franziska stands shoulder to shoulder between men and women whom she is only alike to in mourning. Her mother’s grave is mere feet away, on the fringes of the von Karma family plot. There is no one shielding it from the rain, however, and as Franziska’s gaze slides over as she lapses in the priest denoting her father’s soul, she sees the rain pound against the marble headstone without mercy.

If I am going to cry, now would be the time, she thinks to herself.

She slips the leather gloves she wears like a second skin from her fingers, exposing her hands to the early morning chill as she is passed a dark crimson rose to lay upon her father’s casket. Her knuckles are buckled beneath thick ropes of scar tissue, like a piano that’s been smashed to where its key stick out at uneven ends, indents of her father’s cane boring down on them when she was small and her tendons snapped like glass. She’s grown around the scars, though each strike of her whip bites at the tissue and sends an ache down her wrist. She has long taught herself to ignore this.

Franziska steps forward and lays her rose of her father’s casket, which is closed as to not take in moisture from the storm above. Her eyes flicker upward for a moment enough to find Miles on the opposite side of the casket, setting a rose of his own alongside hers. She watches his eyes linger over her hands, widen at the sight of her Papa’s handiwork. When he raises his head, their eyes meet, and though she isn’t sure how she knows this, it is clear they have the same thought.

Your father would kill me if he knew.

The statement, now, is laughable. Who was left, then, to follow the suit of their actions from that moment onward but God?

As they shuffle from beneath the tarpaulin, having seen Manfred von Karma lowered into the ground after being imparted with their greatest sympathies and silkiest flowers, both Franziska and Miles brace themselves against the sting of the early cold. They are permitted closeness from the crowd surrounding them, and Franziska threads her fingers through his, a grip that lasts not but a moment before releasing.

The drive back to the estate is silent. Brendan drives, yielding to the rain and traffic at a snail’s pace, Kalta seated passenger, keeping her stony gaze directed at some spot in the distance that the fog does not permit her to see. Miles and Franziska sit in the back row, Didi settled between them. The young girl’s eyes dart between the two of them, the weight of the air among them not lost on her as it settles on shoulders too young to understand the forces of attraction left between Manfred von Karma’s last living victims.

By eight o’clock that night the house is cold and quiet again, just as Manfred would have wanted.

The turnout of the funeral had been larger than what was expected, the reception afterwards swarming the estate beyond what the house’s attendants had planned to accommodate. It had more the feel of a house party than a wake to honor the fallen, the tide of Manfred’s distant family and colleagues, those who loved and feared him, wanted to be like him. Or, like Franziska, a reverent combination of all three.

Miles is upstairs, packing his suitcase in preparation for the nine o’clock flight he’s booked for the next morning. Franziska sits with her sister and brother in-law in the drawing room, sipping on glasses of red wine and speaking of benign things in hushed tones, as if they mattered. Didi is entertaining the few lingering cousins in the music room, the dulcet harmony of notes from the piano forte just audible in the frequent lapses of silence that fell between the three.

As the grandfather clock in the hall strikes the quarter hour, the bloodhound Kalta had brought over from her home in Munich ambles into the drawing room, nosing into Franziska’s side.

“And how’s this one? Phoenix, was his name?” She grimaces as she says it, the not so fond recollection the name draws from her memory.

“A fine breed, worth every penny we paid for him. I do think that Didi is too fond of him, though. She’s been skirting on her lessons to play with the thing. I have in the right mind the idea to take him out back and shoot him.” Brendan replies with a disinterested air.

“Are you alright, schwester?” Kalta asks after Franziska clasps her hand over her mouth following a sound that lies something between a laugh and a sob.

“I was just thinking, if you said that in front of Papa it might just bring him back.”

Kalta stares for a moment, blinks, turn her head back towards the fire burning in the hearth. “Vati always favored you, you know.” She states bitterly, staring hard at the remains of the wineglass in her hand.

“Of course he did.” Franziska replies, not in the assertive righteousness that her sister had expected, but simple indignation. “I did everything he told me to. Unlike you, who ran off when you were nineteen to study numbers and business. You could have been a practicing lawyer by then. Besides, that’s just how Papa was. He spoiled us rotten, so long as we’d earned it.” Her words are true enough. The stables, the library, the conservatory, all filled to the brim with knowledge and music and the topmost indulgences from her list of monetary wants. Even so, there are things one longs for that cannot be put into words.

“We certainly we spoiled, weren’t we? Still, the lengths you went for that. I will never understand how you worked all those murder trials as a child, the violence it caused, where I can’t stand the sight of blood.” She shivers for the effect of it, her eyes fluttering shut.

“Some woman you are, then.” Franziska scoffs beneath her breath, tipping her head back to receive the last of the wine in her glass. She’d poured herself a small measure, disliking the taste but feeling the need for the warmth it might glean her. She much wishes she were upstairs with Miles instead of downstairs with Kalta.

“Some woman I am?” Kalta snaps in the same moment the fireplace crackles and pops as a log splinters in the flames. Franziska sees the same splitting fire in her sister's eyes and knows it was a mistake to tempt the tumult as she had. “I am a mother, and a wife, and the owner of a company I raised from the ground. How do you compare? You’re a prodigy in the courtroom, sure you are. You work yourself to the bone and feel nothing but pride. It’s not even human, let alone womanly. I could succeed on my own, but I choose not to, because I found someone who loves me. When have you ever let someone love you? Have you even thought about love before?” Her cheeks are rosy with ire and wine.

Franziska opens her mouth to speak and is cut off in the same movement. “And I’m not talking about your cretinous schoolgirl crush on Miles Edgeworth. You never could resist the pretty little things Vati set in front of you. Like that whip I see you’re reaching for. The day it arrived, he told you you may use it once you perfected your aim with the riding crop. You didn’t listen, and ended up tangled in your own snare, your cuts and your bruises. Was Miles any different to you? I can’t doubt it. Given the chance, you’d have taken him like a shot, wouldn’t you?” She shakes her head, as if to clear herself from the imbecility of it. “That isn’t love, schwester. That was a toy you were too young to play with.” She ends her words with a cut, bitter laugh.

“You’ve had to much to drink, you fool.” Franziska replies with measure. She would sooner throw herself to a stake before admitting it, but her sister’s words pained her. It felt like someone pulled back the collar of her shirt and poured ice down her spine. How could something she was scarcely aware of herself be so visible to another? Was their shared blood enough to make her transparent?

Even Brendan’s eyes are wide as he looked upon his wife. “I believe that’s unfair. Franziska doesn’t seem the type for such affections, does she?”

“I never told you because it disgusted me. He was raised as a brother to us, after all, in this house of ours. This house,” She squares her shoulders and reclines in her chair, her gaze at the ceiling sliding out of focus. “I believe there’s poison in it. That’s why I had to get out of here. And I got out happy. That is why, the only reason why, I am able to return to this place with any semblance of fondness. It is also why,” She adds, reaching to refill her wine glass. “I’m going to sell the estate. Liquidate Vati’s property assets, all of them.”

Franziska rears in her seat, startling Phoenix, who slinks back to lay in front of the fire. “You can’t do that. I won’t allow it. You are not his only daughter, Kalta von Karma. I will have my say in the matter.”

“Do not call me that.” Kalta barks back in an instant. She purses her lips, as if to stay herself from speaking further. When has she ever done that before? Franziska marvels. “Besides, didn’t you have the design to stay in America, finish the work our dear father could not?”

“Nevertheless, you cannot allow yourself to make such decisions without my being present.” Franziska returns, feeling a warm anger ebb throughout her chest. It was what she was hoping the wine would do, stay her from her coldness. "Do not think I will allow you to walk over me like this just because we buried our father this morning."

“We will meet with the executor next week. These matters can be discussed at further length, then.” Brendan interjects, a clear relief at his brow to have found a place to impeded the row. “Kalta, meine perle, why don’t we check on Didi? Her playing has begun to sound rather choppy, perhaps it’s time we see cousin Larson out for the night.”

“Very well.” Kalta replies airly. She’s led away on Brendan’s arm, her heels making uneven, ambling indents into the rug. Definitely drunk. Franziska scoffs, folding her arms across her chest. She taps her heel against the parquet as she leaves herself to fester in the empty room. It isn’t enough, however, to simmer in solitude. If she cannot prove Kalta wrong, the least she can do is prove herself right.

She doesn’t bother turning on any lights as she crosses into the estate’s west wing, darkened and devoid of any windows to filter in moonlight. She knows the path well. She could walk this distance in her dreams.

“Miles Edgeworth.”

The named man’s eyes widen, then narrow, as Franziska crosses the threshold into his bedroom. He had been packing his suitcase in preparation for his morning’s departure, his suitcase and clothing lined up on his bed as he stands at the foot.

Franziska lowers herself onto said suitcase, crossing one slim leg over the other in a position that claims vacancy. “There are some things of which we need to speak.”

“Such as?” He replies absently, willing himself to focus on the crease he’s lining in a pair of trousers, rather than the sliver of Franziska’s thigh that became exposed where her skirt had ridden up upon sitting.

“The estate. Kalta, the fool, wishes to sell it.” She shakes her head, the vestiges of their earlier argument still floating in her skull in an unpleasant disquietude. “Who would want to sell this big, empty house?” She breathes, reclining on her elbows, half in belief and half in bitterness.

“I don’t see where I would have a say in the matter. I doubt Mr. von Karma has left me any claim to his possessions in his will.”

“It’s as much your home as it is mine.” She reminds him, and receives a grimace in return.

“You know that’s not true, Franziska. I was never part of the family here. Both your father and sister have said as much before, and I know that you agree with them. This household was but a temporary residence for me. I never really lived here, I was simply visiting.” He won't look at her as he speaks, favoring the buttons of his overcoat laid out on the bed, ready to be folded and stowed in the suitcase Franziska has claimed as her throne.

“Foolish nonsense. This was your home and is your home. We lived here together and therefore must come to a conclusion over what to do with it together.”

“And Kalta?” He spoke with a rising terseness, not wanting to tether any hopes over the hook of togetherness, the way her rose colored lips shape themselves around the word.

“She’s given me her opinion. The one I’m waiting on is yours.”

“Franziska,” Miles sighs under his breath, in awe and in apprehension of the way her eyes narrowed on him, like a sniper lining his next shot. “You’ve grown so much. I do believe you no longer need your little brother in making decisions for yourself, no?”

“A learned man as yourself should know the difference between needing and wanting.” She speaks too lowly for the context of her statement, too smoothly. Miles chides himself. Property. He reminds himself. We are speaking of her dead father’s mansion.

He places his hands over her legs and bids her to meet his gaze. “Franziska, whatever you wish to do with the estate, I will support you. If you agree with your sister’s notion to sell the house, I’ll sign whatever I need to designate it so. Should you wish to keep it, then I’ll back you on that as well. You need not sway me on anything.”

“No?” She possess much too confidence for one who buried her father just this morning. “Miles Edgeworth, you yield too easily.” She tugs on his cravat to bring them too eye level. He’s close enough to see her swallow, see her brow raise. When had such subtle movements become so hypnotic?

“What would your father say of this?” He breathes. Their noses are touching now, their lips, barely so. Slowly, damningly so, he slides his palms up her thighs, reveling in the hitch of her breath, until his hands rest on either side of her waist, pressing into the front of the suitcase. Caging her or freeing her, such will depend on her next movement.

“What would he say?” Franziska scoffs, though she isn’t thinking of her father. That isn’t love, schwester. “What can he say? I’ll tell you. Nothing. And damn them all who try.” With that, she rises and captures his mouth with her own, keeping a firm grip on the back of his neck, to hold him to her, the other spread across his chest. Franziska’s lips are soft and cold. She was always so cool, Miles thinks, and so unfamiliar. It enchants him. It encourages him. He realizes that he wants to be the one, the only one, to excavate this girl, for he knows of the fire within her, deep, deep within her. He wants to unearth every feeling she’s repressed, out of respect for her father, her fear of imperfection.

He traces the seam of her lips with his tongue, willing her to open up to him. And she does, with a charge of energy and fear of the unknown that only serves to draw him nearer. He can taste her urgency, as he had all those years ago, along with the stain of red wine in the back of her throat.

Franziska’s position from sitting atop the suitcase gives her the vantage to throw her leg over his hip. Her arms twine around his neck as his hands begin to rove the underside of her thighs, causing a friction that is delirious to them both. They pause to breathe after some moments, during which they adjust their grip on one another before aligning once more, releasing a sigh they’ve been holding in for years.

I want her. Miles thinks. She wants me. Is it really that simple? He’d always thought of love as a dangerous game, set up like a house of cards on an uneven table. What I know of love is what I know of you. She’d told him that once. It’s true, they had little where else to learn.

Manfred’s wife hadn’t loved him. She had nearly told Miles this much, when she had been living. His own mother had left him just as soon as he was swaddled in his first set of clothes.

You don’t know what love is.

Miles also knows love and lust have nothing in common, and were almost always exclusive. He cannot refute that he lusts for Franziska. There is no denying that- not when his lips are moving in tandem against hers, and his head is pounding from the sensation of it. Therefore, there should be no room left for love. Yet, as his tongue dances with hers, and her small hands continue to slide along the plans of his shoulders, his chest, awakening a dormant sense of primal yearning within him that breathes through his heart like a new, essential air.

She’s managed to free the knots of his cravat and is now placing open mouthed kisses along the column of his neck, sloppy and unpracticed, though certainly not unsure. He’s trying to swallow his own moans, rather wishing he had her mouth to do so, yet he cannot find it in himself to complain. Her hands are trailing down his chest, lower, and lower until-

“Well, isn’t this quite the picture!”

The two snap apart, Franziska leaping from the suitcase to the carpet, ignoring the flash of pain when he ankle rolls in on itself. Her cheeks are burning red. In the doorway stands her sister, jaw set and chest heaving. Kalta looks neither of them in the eye, rather, the small portrait of her father and an infant Franziska that hangs over the vanity.

“Cousin Larson is taking leave. I suggest you come to the foyer to say your goodbyes after you make yourself presentable.” She turns to leave, only to halt briefly, her fingers clutching indents into the doorframe with a grip like talons. “I know how much you adore having the last word in, Franziska, but this is going a bit far to prove your point, don’t you think? And next time you want to carry on your incestuous little tryst, keep it out of my father's house.” She hisses, then draws the oaken door shut behind her with a steely twist of her wrist.

They listen to her heels puncture the tile of the hall until the crescendo drops to silence, and the sound of another door slamming is heard much farther away. Her shock must have gleaned her some sobriety; she hadn’t wobbled as she had before.

“Franziska,” Miles mutters under his breath. His eyes fall shut. He can feel the flame in his cheeks stretch to his toes, though hurt overtakes shame as the force of Kalta’s parting words make impact. “What point were you trying to prove?”

“I-”

That isn’t love, schwester.

A wetness pricks the back of her eyes. Not sorrow, but shame. So it was not love that motivated her, Miles realizes with a sinking dislocation of emotion. Perhaps he’d been a fool in misreading her fire. Her looks at her now as he realizes she’d only been trying to break a place into his heart. It was to his shame that she succeeded.

He reties his cravat on his way to send off the cousin, pausing only once to smooth his hair in the hall mirror. Franiska arrives in the foyer not long after, as equally and hastily rekempt as he. Brendan raises a questioning brow between their blank stare and tone, as well as the way his wife’s jaw is set that tells him she’s grating her teeth.

“Are you sure you must leave tomorrow?” Franziska asks after the cousin has departed. She stares straight ahead and speaks lightly, as if not moments before her sister had discovered her with her legs spread for her little brother. If Kalta's glare wasn't boring holes to the back of her head, she may have dared to reach for him, then.

“There’s a ceremony being held in my honor.” Miles flinches at the word. They’ve retired to the alcove set aside from the foyer, entreated back to the darkness of the churning night. “The ‘king of prosecutors’ is, evidently, not a matter to be taken lightly, though I do wonder if my nomination was meant to humiliate me more than commemorate me.”

“I could join you. I still have unfinished business at that office, likely the one reason they aren’t giving that reward to me.” She smirks, though nearly falters when Mile’s face only hardens at her attempt to lighten the air between them.

“That will not be necessary.” He returns, more hoarse than a moment ago.

Kalta appears in the archway, clutching Miles overcoat in her hands, which she shoves to his chest before storming off down the hall. Calling over her shoulder, “She's far too cunning for you, Miles, but I'll give you this. I take back what I said earlier about your attractions being incestuous. You are no longer a brother to this household. And if you respect that, you won't ever return to it."

Miles is gone the next morning, much like that day several years ago. No word nor whisper precedes him. Franziska stands in the doorway of his bedroom, ever as always on the outside looking in. A slip of paper lays on the mantel of the empty fireplace; a note.

Franziska.

I regret everything except you.

Miles.

P.S. Call me a fool, but Kalta was right. Please do not ask me to come back to this place.

Fool! Damn him and damn his poetry. This time, it is Franziska who crumples the note, and, in the absence of a roaring fire, pitches it into the nearest waste bin like some sort of insubstantial annoyance.

She thinks of the day after she kissed him, back when they were children. He’d never said goodbye, then, as he hardly did today. His plane had taken off that dawn, and a part of her, with it. And she’s stood through it all, ignoring completely the ache and clamor of her defiantly beating heart.

#IFIP #Mitsumei #Franmiles #Ace Attorney Fanfiction

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