12 October 2011

1.

He read. A weaker student may have given up by now, glazed over the same few sentences too many times, not knowing what came next. A weaker student may have stood and stretched and forgotten, may have closed the book and given up and left. He did not. That would require him being weak. Require him to be like his peers.

He, in fact, had already read this book before. Twice.

He remembered what his father had said: that, as a boy, he too had finished school early, he too had studied to the point of memorization, he too had adored the ruthlessness of court. And often now, seeing his son near pubescence, he added in more secretive, meaningful tones: "Josef, law is no place for romance. Women do not belong in the courtroom -- they would be swept away in its merciless rapids. One must learn to separate romance from profession or sacrifice it altogether." Then, realizing he was a bit flustered, he would continue on with little more than a nod at his son's work. The boy was always shockingly absorbed. Once, realizing the book under his son's nose was foreign law from process to language, he touched Josef's steely hair. Fleetingly. Smiling in the slightest when the boy jumped, sputtering polite German surprise, polite German apologies for not having noticed his father's presence; giving a short pat on the shoulder for encouragement. Once, a visitor commented that though he was nearly always studying, "he will make a fine man."

It was true, and Josef flaunted it. Even young as he was, he made for a sight, a slight, intelligent, beautiful boy. His sister fawned over him like a plaything when she visited. He didn't mind that she combed his hair and cooed over his pale skin as he worked. She filled the mostly empty house with a sense of missing life. She spoke in simpler, more colorful words than their father and lazed gracefully, wasting time in ways Josef and his father could never. She was a minor distraction for which Josef was grateful; though he made noises of arrogant impatience, she could see his smiles.

She was there while he read, though pleasantly quiet. She was stretched out along a decorative couch, looking beautiful and coolly bored and doing nothing more. Humming, maybe. Slight lilts of a voice kept catching his ear. It mingled nicely with his reading, and extended study of evidence law; his father was endlessly preaching the importance of evidence law and had given him this book for his birthday the year previous. She was humming -- she was singing his name to a wandering tune, enjoying the sound of it. Her eyes were closed in the warmth of the sunlight streaming through a window he rarely opened, bringing with it the cool smell of oncoming autumn. Stray breezes tugged at his pages.

Suddenly she swung upright, long tangles of her hair moving around her face and shoulders. "Josef, Josef," she said, "do you never take a break?"

"Never," he assured her, tone flat with irritation, but smirk and cocked brow saying otherwise. He pretended to keep reading, teasing her for her authority.

"I shall have to see proof of that, little brother," she replied, finger wagging rebelliously in front of the sweetest of smiles. "Come, close your book for just a moment, Josef."

"You will put me behind in my studying."

"I'm sure you don't need to know that the chapter on circumstantial evidence begins on page two hundred and ninety one."

"Two forty-three."

"Ah!" she yelped, throwing her hands up. "You've memorized it already! You're too far gone for me to rescue you!" She dropped bodily to the couch in a fit of drama. Josef, rolling his eyes in appreciation of her theatrics, closed his book with a purposeful noise. He crossed to the couch where his sister had already shimmied to one side to make room for him. Her fingers were deep in his hair before he had even settled in the thin cushions of the thing. She pulled the ribbon from the strands and combed them through with her hands.

"You keep this stuff so long," she said absently. Josef noted that her voice mewled like a cat lying in the sun. "It is so becoming of you."

"It is easier to keep long hair out of one's face." He spoke with the sort of dismissive grace he'd learned from his father, but something just by his lungs swelled. He searched it out and realized it was some sort of pride he'd tucked away long before. "You see how father does the same."

She made a noncommittal noise and smoothed his hair under her fingers. Her hair fell down her shoulders and dangled near his, so close in distance and color that he assumed if it touched it would be impossible to untangle the resulting mixture. He felt breath and touch from his neck to his scalp, and the joy of being admired frightened him in a way. His brain struggled to speak, to gain control.

So he said: "Though if it's nothing but temptation I may just cut it clean off."

His sister gave a soft and genuine gasp of disbelief and dropped his hair limply onto his back. He was just letting a lazy smirk of victory slide into place when he felt soft fingers pinch at the small dip of his waist.

"You little devil!" his sister cried. "Scaring me like that!" She twisted and squeezed his side again, forcing a sharp squeal from his throat and squirming giggles from his whole body. Josef jumped out of reach of her snaking fingers, stumbling onto his feet on the echoing wood of the floor. His sister laughed with a full, tonal sound, like he would expect from a fairytale. They shared a moment of the trusting distrust and happy shortness of breath that always follows tickling and other sibling rivalries. His sister let herself fall backwards in the old cushions of the couch, arms sliding behind her head, eyes closing against as clouds moved out of the sunlight.

Then she said:

"You will make a fine husband one day, Josef. You know?"

2.

It's funny, because he always assumed maybe his vision would sway or his throat would tighten. Maybe he'd retch and leave vomit all down his clothes. Though, he realized, with a sick jolt of humor, how very unlike a von Karma it would be to mess himself in public. Yet there were certain dramatic features that seemed missing. Should he not be in breathless tears? Falling all over himself in efforts to get to his room?

It was when he realized that there was a part of him more than his lineage suppressing emotion that he really did start to choke.

He closed his bedroom door on the echoes of his name. It wasn't sung anymore. His sister was saying it so much that it had lost all meaning and he didn't know what a Josef was any longer. It wasn't even a word. Syllables, sick sounds, letters sinking their teeth into him and staying with him like a parasite but how could he shake it, a name, a name, what's in a name he wondered, considering Shakespeare and sucking down warm acidic pre-tear saliva-- the letters swam down his spine and tensed the muscles around his throat and jaw, making him scared and angry all on top of lost.

Lost?

He waited for his stream of consciousness to supply reason. Lost was an empty word, something expected out of those foolish, self-defined misunderstood teenagers. He fumbled for meaning... and, ironically, found himself lost for words. The undoubted onslaught of tears halted in the face of unknowing.

Josef von Karma had no idea how he felt.

Of course, he knew... he knew that the words his sister said in mindless passing tore at each side of him and split him into meaningless pieces. He knew that now he was standing paused in time with his knuckles still white around the doorknob. He knew he felt childish reacting this way.

He didn't know -- ... reacting to what.

It was disarming. Having read always of the intimacy of emotion, the absence of recognition left him stunned.

In a dumb grasp at productivity he began to change for bed. He found the action brought him an odd solace. Remove the jabot, and with it, the choking feeling of helplessness. Unbutton the vest, and with it, the strangling falseness that haunted him. Step out of the pants, step out of von Karma perfection. Not that the last truly happened -- evident by the neat folds in which the dirty clothing lay -- but he felt free of the demand all the same. As he pulled off his shirt (which, for the day of wear, still showed ironed creases spectacularly), he saw something pale flash in the glass of his bedroom mirror. A ghostly reflection. He stepped hesitantly toward it -- something politely simple, not encouraging self-obsession -- and studied what stared back. Slim hips, slight waist, dark eyes, flush cheeks. Standing stark white in modest briefs. He blinked when he connected the image to the system of feelings he knew as his body. He narrowed his eyes, perhaps subconsciously willing the picture to change, and the reflection looked darkly suspicious of him.

Soon he began to think, gears turning with the electricity of the stare caught in both Josefs. He had an odd impulsive thought. An inkling. A compulsion.

He tucked his hair behind his ears and pushed his briefs to a crumpled heap on the ground.

He willed his mind not to censor out the area that had been hidden behind the curtain. His eyes kept sliding from the soft skin under his belly to the pale white of his thighs, as though nothing were ever there and nothing ever should be. As though in a display of perfection, Josef could surpass the human weaknesses that even plagued von Karmas. He set his jaw in a tense painful insistence and looked. Forced himself to stare. Made his eyes drag across the inches -- trudge through tar pits when he wanted nothing more than to throw himself face first into the sludge --

Then there was the deep wrench of confusion of once again not knowing the boy in the glass. Some creature with thin arms clutching across a cold chest, small hollow spots around his hips writing paths to nondescript genitalia, bare feet touching together on the dark hardwood. Jarring was the word -- to expect yourself in the mirror and see a free acting creature pretending to wear your face. Mocking you with its act of weakness.

That was it then, Josef realized. This was certainly not his.

Something down at the base of his skull itched with a reminder that a body was a lifelong curse. There would be no fantasy kiss cure for this, he knew. Though he hadn't his hopes up for that in the first place.

3.

It was strange how very like Josef's father his brother looked. He stood tall in the doorway and stole the sunlight into the thick energy of his bemused downward glance, face cocked sideways in an infuriating show of superiority. He had seen this before from Manfred in court -- victory, a haughty stare. He stood a little straight in his silk pajamas.

"Josef," Miles said. "Don't you think it a little early to retire?"

His brother flicked his gaze across the dark silk and an arrogant laughter crept into his eyes. Most days this would warrant deadpan replies and withering taunts.

Today, mocker didn't even come to mind.

Miles' eyes turned dark after the laughter fled. They mapped Josef's face in quick, short motions; Miles worked rapidly but absorbed information obsessively. He stepped aside neatly. "Come in."

Miles treated his bedroom as a professional might his office. Whilst Josef studied in the open spaces of the mostly empty drawing rooms and sun rooms that made the house so large for three people, his brother rarely left his own small personal space. As a result the walls were mostly bookshelves, and the bed half dedicated to piles of loose papers; the area felt coolly impersonal and adult. Josef made a quick connection between the well-made and occupied bed and the soft dark crescents under his brother's eyes. He sat himself at the foot of the bed and stared at the floor a few inches under his feet. He heard a soft click and Miles saying something that hid concern and the plastic spin of wheels. Polished shoes rested in front of his white socks.

"You know as well as I do that worry is not my expertise," Miles said. The similarity to their father was stunning. Miles had that awkward, shifting expression that came with a von Karma's uncertainty; he aimed for concern but landed closer to discomfort. He settled for looking over his shoulder. "Maybe we could cut to the chase."

Everything Josef could have said died quickly in his throat. That low, tingling lost feeling swelled from the hollows of his chest to the apples of his cheeks. Something burned in him to punish himself for such weakness -- words were all a lawyer had! Words, and evidence -- but there were no fingerprints that could explain feeling. If he could fall prey to inarticulateness at simple emotion, how did he expect to survive the court of law? The words of his father surfaced in his memory. "There is no forgiveness in court ... you must learn not to need it." Something like that.

He swallowed dryly.

"Ah." Josef saw, through the haze of confusion, that Miles' sly smile had returned. "I see emotional ineptitude runs in the family."

"Don't pull the von Karma name down to your level, Miles Edgeworth," Josef muttered -- almost reflexively. Miles watched him over the ridges of his cheekbones. "You may be inept, but a von Karma is-"

"Perfect, as I understand." Somewhere between the words, Miles had become neatly serious. Josef understood that the stab had been a ploy to coax him towards speaking. He tucked the strategy to a place in the back of his mind. Miles leaned onto his knees and bore through Josef with his stare. "What is it, then, that makes Josef von Karma ask for help?"

His mouth was having trouble deciding whether it was wet and sticking like a labyrinthine swamp or dry and creaking as the door to the attic. There was the strangest moment of shivering in his chin.

"I." The voice he was using cracked like it was something he usually kept locked in the dark -- it was, he realized; it was the voice saved for speaking about personal matters. "It's."

There were no windows in this room, he thought. He stared instead at the titles on the many books. He breathed.

"I want to put it into words, but there are no words in any language I know with which to describe it. I want help... I want to know what is happening, but I don't understand the symptoms. I don't... know."

Speaking it to the wall made it that much more bearable. He couldn't understand, though, what about it was painful, other than the teeth driving into his bottom lip. There was that long and horrible silence in which his brother weighed words, and he lost track of things in it. He didn't know: how long he stared there, blurring books into mashes of color; if he was looking even in Miles' room anymore, or if he had left it for some nightmare place; if Miles was actually present in this universe or a well-constructed figment of his imagination.

Something fell next to him with the momentary ruffle of a thick book, and snapped him unexpectedly back to reality.

Miles sat back in his wheeled office chair and crossed his legs at the knee. He gesture lazily to the volume sitting next to Josef. "As usual," he said, as Josef thumbed through the DSM IV, "studying shall set you free."

4.

He read. His sister placated with the offer to braid his hair, the curtains drawn shut, and book spread neatly on a reading desk, he read. Sister mumbling over one shoulder (he noted, now, like a baby gurgling in a happy sleepy way), chill breeze brushing the other -- he naturally sought comfort in the few dog-eared passages but found nothing he assumed Miles intended for him, save the compulsion to smooth the folded edges. As he thumbed the weakened crease over the dark word schizoid, his sister cooed in his ear.

"Such dark stuff for such a little boy, Josef. Don't you ever read for fun?"

At the beginning he found all the subcategories of retardation. Motor skill issues. Communication disorders. Did Miles think he was really that ... unwell? He brushed forward to Delirium, 293.0, and Dementia, 290.10.

"I am not studying for Papa, sister."

--

Routines grew as such. Josef so quietly absorbed into the text he may have been hypnotized; his sister, suppressing her worries in the soft touch of his hair; their father only peering in occasionally, soothed by his son's studies. But it was slow work, as Josef was, by nature, his father's son and took even recreational reading as a serious matter; other than the first section -- the possibilities of which made him sick -- he poured every word of every diagnosis in his sponge of a brain. A weaker student would have skimmed titles, searching for key words (or, knowing his peers, anything remotely inappropriate), ignored obvious non-answers, pushing to meaningful selections.

But Josef, Josef read -- learned -- he studied.

He had only just covered substance-related disorders when his sister left for her own home again, her own family. He vaguely remembered that she had a husband and child to sugar coat and spoil. A little girl who didn't force her nose into books written for adults.

Mood disorders. Anxiety. Somatoform. He learned to keep a set of dictionaries within reach for the words never mentioned in legal texts, to which insanity was clear cut and simple. Dissociative. He grew tired of the word disorder, how it felt like reading hieroglyphs instead of modern figures. He didn't have the blissful distraction of warm touch and sweet nonsense any longer; he watched dumbly as the text dared to turn monotonous in a way the loopholes of law never did. Sometimes he found himself returning to review what he already read and knew was far out of reach for him. The fear of knowing nearly rivaled the fear of the unknown.

In the strangest of ways, however, he learned. He learned to watch his father over the dinner table and understand his habits. He memorized the way schoolchildren passed the house in groups that dotted the streets outside the windows. He made notes in margins to take a brief dip into the waters of psychology, sensing vaguely what it could mean for his inevitable career. Despite all this, he tasted a bitter irritation at himself and at Miles, both having made unspoken promises to Josef about the secrets in the book.

He was so very tired of not understanding.

so very tired of the gross way air got thick as he looked in the mirror.

tired of having no words.

tired.

'Do you never take breaks?' his sister had asked. Just days ago, perhaps, but before he became so hyperaware of feeling. Somatoform. Dissociative. I will find me, he insisted. Please. I will find me.

Please.

5.

When Miles opened the door he spared Josef the wisecracks. Instead he swept a spot of his bed bare of paperwork and rummaged through the bottom drawer of his desk.

The silence that stretched as Miles pressed bandages to the splits in Josef's skin was more painful than the swelling bruises. Josef kept his eyes to his feet as Miles tended to him like a helpless child. Though his hands were soft like Josef's sister's, he lacked the warmth that always surged through her skin. Miles had strangely tender motions thick with fear and pity. Sometimes he touched a hidden bruise or caught the edge of a cut, and Josef would give a weak yelp, and Miles a mumbled apology.

But mostly, silence.

Miles settled in his chair and searched Josef's face in the way one might reread a question in search of an answer. His brows knitted in a well-done display of concern, Josef noticed. It was when he opened his mouth to speak and looked away in his speechlessness that Josef understood why it was so believable.

Miles made to say something, but cleared his throat. "What happened?"

"I ... went out."

"Out."

"I walked to the park."

It was just next to the von Karma estate and he had only been there once or twice, back when his German was shaky and his reading shakier. The day was crisp with autumn sunlight and cool enough that he hadn't needed to change his long and formal clothing. It wasn't as though he expected to play.

"On a Thursday afternoon."

"I expected it to be empty."

He'd sat on a rusting metal bench at the edge of the park, where he could enjoy the movement of the old swings in the wind. He did expect it to be empty, though the few boys tossing a ball didn't entirely upset him ... the lent a type of quaint, middle class feeling to the day.

"I assume it didn't turn out as such."

Something landed at his feet with a strange hollow sound, and then with a heavy crunch of gravel. A rubber ball, and shoes with a person in them.

'Hey, that's our ball.'

The boy in the shoes had badly cut hair and smears of dirt around his eyes. He was giving Josef a big empty stare like he couldn't just bend down and take the ball. Josef reached down tentatively and offered him the thing, holding it gingerly; the boy gave him a 'winning' smile.

'Thanks. You know, you're really pretty, why are you wearing boy clothes?'

He hadn't remembered it being so cold.

"He asked that?"

Had his throat closed up? He was breathing, but not speaking, and somehow the air tasted metallic.

"What did you do?"

He twisted into anger, feeling his face turn to stone, turn to frost creeping into lungs. 'Possibly because I'm not a girl.'

The look on the boy's face could have been funny had it not been for Josef's sparked temper. Then he too twisted, and a dark mask slid into place, or maybe a light one fell away. Laughter. Laughter of the sort that had been kept in an ice box long after it had spoiled. He called him words that Josef didn't know, but words with sharp edges that Josef could recognize.

'Why do you look like some damn girl then, huh? Are you queer or something?'

'I am a boy!'

"I hit him."

The rock tumbled down the boy's back after the collision with his head. Josef's hands shook as his brain caught up with him. There was no time to flee. The boy snarled. There was nowhere to go. The boy's knuckles were dark with old scar. Men fought, and they didn't back down like his brain screaming to. Knuckles touched his skin. Men fought. Knuckles crushed into his cheekbone. Men fought. His face crumpled around the fist. Men fought.

"I don't want to remember any more."

The artificial darkness of Miles' room shocked him. He loosened his fists from around clumps of Miles' quilt and raised his head. His neck protested from its time staring downward; his teeth chattered with muscle memory.

Miles looked as though someone had pulled the air from his lungs. The tiredness of his eyes looked more pronounced when it framed that wild emotion. He said, "Josef, that book..."

"I could recite that book backwards, Miles Edgeworth." And despite how strong he tried to sound, how much he wanted to prove Miles wrong, his voice cracked and splintered huskily into simmering indignation. It was his turn to search in Miles' face, to dig in the expressions to find just what he assumed he knew. He ignored the uninvited tears burning his vision, because men didn't cry. He pushed aside the need to find his own room and hide in the warm comfort of the covers, because men didn't run. Men fought. He wasn't sick. Men fought. Miles was wrong. Miles was wrong and he always would be.

"Then you will understand when I suggest that I know your problem," Miles said. He spoke to Josef but looked directly through him.

"And you, Miles Edgeworth," said Josef; he was inexplicably angry, blindly infuriated, watching dumbly as disgust aimed at himself spilled out towards Miles -- "you will understand when I say that I know just what you think and that you are wrong and that you are cruel and foolish for having even though of making the suggestion."

How very diminutive Miles seemed. He realized he had stood and was staring viciously down at him in an unbidden fit of superiority. He sucked at the acidic taste the words have left on his tongue and waited as Miles, staring idiotically through his heavy bangs, forced discomfort on him with his silence.

As expected, Miles said nothing. Josef made a noise of disgust and backed to the door, holding Miles in a glare, regarding him as the insufferable fool he was.

"I am not that sick, Miles Edgeworth."

Something in him quivered even though one jaw was set so thickly against the other that they creaked. His back touched the give of the door and he found a doorknob quickly with one hand.

"You are wrong."

He was wrong.

Josef von Karma was not that sick.

There was the deep wrench of confusion of not knowing the boy in the glass.

He was wrong.

So very tired of not understanding.

Josef was not that sick.

He would make a fine husband one day.

wrong.

6.

He wanted to enjoy the dappled shadows of falling snow but lately he couldn’t stop thinking. He blamed Miles Edgeworth with a stark lack of guilt. He had been the flame touched to the gas, that flame which caught fire to Josef’s comfortable life; Josef had easily ignored Miles’ existence for the past few months – had buried himself in the blissful irrelevance of studying – but the self-critical impulsions to which he fell victim distracted him. There was a constant mental return to the unforgiving coolness of Miles’ room. The foolish things Miles said – the unsaid haughtiness in his voice – presumptuousness – he though he knew better than a true von Karma. Josef couldn’t handle the show of weakness that manifested as considering Miles’ thoughts as truth.

So, when he considered them, he laced it with hate. Hate came easy; it didn’t carry the weight of regarding Miles as a human being.

He spent less time in the bare spaces of the mansion, where he had felt the smooth time as an ignorant and untroubled boy. He kept finding himself staring blankly at the rough shadows on the ceiling of his room, finding himself willing the mirror to disappear, finding himself forgetting about the world outside his room, his mind, his reflection.

By all logic he shouldn’t have spent the time he did staring in that mirror. The cold seeped through the aging glass windows and pricked at his skin, but he rarely moved; he merely stared, and he analyzed, and choked.

He didn’t mind that his shirt fell in large folds on the floor anymore, that his pants crumpled messily around his feet. He didn’t mind so much that his skin shrank onto his little skeleton, or that his breath stung with winter ice. There was frost on the mirror, framing the thing in it.

A breeze tugged at his hair and tickled his back with it. Were his sister here she would have made some lyrical and mewling comment about its well-maintained length – and it was getting so long, and so heavy – but he would have ordered her out for his nakedness before she could have. He pulled the small velvet bow holding it in place away and let it fan across his bare skin. It fluttered again, rippling with the sharp wind, making delicate tangles. A few strands lifted over his shoulder and rested on the goose bumps of his chest and caught on the cracks of his lips.

A thought occurred to him that brought about a strange physical feeling from the center of his stomach to the place behind his ribs. It tingled, warmly but coldly, a rush; he understood with a little searching that it was nervousness.

How very strange for a von Karma.

He parted his hair down the back of his neck and brushed it over his shoulders in a soft bluish cascade. The ends dusted the small dark circles on his chest, covered them near completely in a thin curtain; the feathery tips of strands moved lightly over his skin when he breathed. Now a breeze was smooth along the pale clear back, where it touched on his shoulder blades and buttocks. He glanced at his closet and found spare sheets and bedding. He unfolded a light pillowcase and frowned at the floral pattern printed at the fabric, seeing his grimace out of the corner of his eyes reflected in the mirror. Ugly as sin, but it would serve its desired purpose, he conceded. He took a slight shaking breath and assured himself aloud that this was just a foolish test.

He wrapped the flowery thing around his thin hips and tied it off. In the cool air it flapped awkwardly around his knees. He stared at the slight ridges on his feet, willing himself to feel like an idiot, to laugh and go on. He looked up.

In the mirror, a small thing of feminine grace with long hair and a thin skirt providing her modesty. Thin wrists. Slender waist. Legs touching at the knees.

He realized for what he had been searching all those times he stared at the mirror.

7.

"You were right, Miles."

"Ah."

"What do I do now."

8.

The only thing they knew to do was study. So they fled to the expansive safety of the public library – exploiting the creative von Karma confidence by presenting lies to their father with a haughty tongue with which it was hard to argue. The caste system of wealth and reputation granted the von Karma children special privileges; they needn’t worry about the eyes of passersby or the approaching night, as they were provided a small study room in a corner of the nonfiction section excluded from the regular rules of the library. They acquired seemingly ridiculous amounts of text. Naturally, many were decoys for too-nosy pages and prying librarians; they buried their studies in unrelated law and referred to them by author, often out of embarrassment for the poor choice of titles as well as for the sake of secrecy. They certainly learned, and it aided but unnerved them -- horror stories floated out of the volumes, and recounts of lengthy medical procedures as well. The process was a give-and-take on their emotions. What they read one day amplified their smirking confidence; the next, they would walk home in solemn silence.

Of course, the experience for Miles was something much less painful. He didn't have the daily greeting with a false name that made his throat itch to scream and cry, or the expectation to wear pristine suits that always garnered compliments of attractiveness for the entirely wrong gender. Somehow the more they learned, the harder it got to face the cool winter mornings that undoubtedly held too many instances of all those stinging passing comments, the 'hello there young man's and the 'you look handsome today's. The mirror seemed harsher and blunter with time; the flat chest and waist hurt almost physically. Once, during studies, the smooth prepubescent voice cracked and dropped for half a word; conversation stopped to clap a hand over mouth and let shuddering waves of threatening tears pass at their leisure.

Yes as much as studying heightened the confusion, not studying left them hungry and unhappy. The consensus was that it had to get worse before it got better.

Often the worst part of the pain bubbled from the self-critical von Karma mind. The pain of doubt ... the need for change ...

"I'm tired of waiting, Miles."

Miles made a deliberate show of marking the page before closing his book delicately. How like him to mock in the least appropriate of times. He folded his hands and glanced across the table in the same way Manfred did when he was asked good questions. And there, the horrible smirk.

"Are you," he said. He spoke like he was someone's wise grandfather with words to spare. He only breathed laughter at the rolled eyes across the way.

"If you would believe it, Miles Edgeworth, I am bored of studying."

Miles tilted back his head and gazed down out of the corner of his eyes. The poor lighting of the room cast strange shadows off his cheekbones. His eyes flitted in all directions for a moment. "What do you suggest we do, then, Josef?" He crossed his arms and, with a knowing stare, awaited the response.

Predictably the chair across the way was shoved back and a small noise made at Miles' insolence. He caught a dark glare and a cocked brow.

"You could start by calling me Franziska."

She spread her arms to give a curtsy.

"It's only proper."

She said nothing more before she spun and, with a flick of her hair, left the room. Miles merely laughed with the lift of pride.

9.

The order of things changed some then. Franziska gained the cockiness that her father worked to instill in them both, to the point that she regularly bossed Miles -- often, now, 'little brother' -- around like one of the servants. He didn't complain: rather, he breathed a low chuckle for the change in Franziska's attitude, and left, presumably to follow her orders. Where Josef had been timid and quiet, Franziska was demanding and unafraid; she faced mistakes with brute force and rarely repeated them. Of course Manfred von Karma noticed. He was an attentive man, as lawyers must be, but it would be unlike him to reprimand his son for making him a proud father, in spite of the seeming spontaneity of the change in attitude.

Besides, it wasn't his place to interrupt studies.

And for Franziska, things seemed to have that magical 'everything is better' quality so common in fairy tales (or at least the modernized versions thereof; she had dabbled in originals and grimaced). Admittedly she still was seen as a young boy, and known as Josef, but she had set out her priorities and seen herself as ten years old and somehow found herself willing to wait, if only for a little while. She felt the secluded comfort of home and not the public urge to present -- the calm quiet of a small household over the rush of the courtroom. She knew there was time enough to adjust for that rush, though her father kept hinting that he expected her to be court-ready within a few short years. Years to her that felt like eternities; the last few months, for all their hectic involvement, had dragged painfully on so that she kept expecting it to be spring of 2011.* But snow still fell outside, if only rarely, and usually melting before it touched the ground, and it just barely kept her tied to the present.

And the snow would cast dappled shadows and paint the house in fuzzy grays and, finally, she could enjoy it, and sometimes sit in the warmth of a drawing room with tea too fresh to really drink, and merely watch, and doing nothing suddenly seemed so very perfect. She found she could fall entirely into the perfection of Franziska von Karma without the constant motion of the world. It was strangely enthralling to forget her studies (though she had most of them practically memorized page for page), and she would think fleetingly of Miles, who had the dark marks of insomnia on his cheeks and rarely a clear spot in his room to relax. Outside, the sun was glinting off of thinning snowflakes and it sparkled; she would think of the way her sister laughed over her brother's long hair and her eyes glittered as she planned out Josef's fantastical future. The cool winds blew at the glass and she thought of a day in the park. But mostly she didn't think. Mostly she smiled.

Or screamed.

She stuffed a fist in her mouth but already heard steps punctuated with the staccato of a cane coming to the door. She pulled the thick comforter up so it bunched around her chin and pulled up her knees into her chest so quickly that she knocked her jaw through the fabric. She clutched her chin reflexively and dropped the quilt but then fumbled for it with one hand --

"Josef?"

She abandoned her chin and snatched up the quilt. "Ah - Papa."

"You yelled." As if that was that. Manfred had the look about him of a man who had been awake for hours already and was slightly ruffled for having his work interrupted. He was standing in the open doorway so that the hall light cast a dramatic shadow over his shoulders, lips pursed slightly in an odd irritation. But the pen still gripped in his hand and the strange glint of concern in his eyes betrayed his stoicalness.

"I..." Franziska hesitated. She glanced away from her father, out of nerves and the want to force the bile back down her throat -- she saw, against the dim wall of the corridor, Miles, hovering there and staring at her with questions and a little fear. Suddenly all was crushingly quiet, inversely loud, like sound had been erased and replaced with something that sucked silence out of ears and left the complex rush of breath. She looked to Miles -- looked to Manfred. Her mouth swam with warm and nervous spit.

"Nothing."

Returned were two looks that clearly said that neither part was an idiot. Her father made a short noise.

"A nightmare," she amended, voice quivering in minor weakness. Manfred softened in the slightest, but Miles stayed cold and piercing behind him. She hated the way he looked as though every thought in her mind was available to him -- she looked away, down at her knees.

Her father took a small sight. "No worries then, Josef."

"No, Papa. Could you close the door behind you, Papa?"

He conceded to her a half nod, giving one last, strange fatherly look dampened by the dark concern over his shoulders from Miles. Franziska held her breath until the door clicked with a sharp sound.

It worked as a Pavlovian signal. With the door closed and Manfred's rhythmic footfalls retreating, Franziska choked. Bit her own tongue to force her to stop, but it didn't do much for how her insides were ready to crawl out of her skin. She lifted herself out of bed gingerly, trying not to move in her clothes, trying to not look down. She had turned around the mirror by her bed ages ago, convinced she didn't need it, and it provided the slightest relief that she wasn't forced to face herself then.

She pulled off her clothing slowly, shivering. Didn't touch her own skin, as if afraid of waking old and hidden bruises, didn't watch her own hands fumble with buttons. Juts moved, pre-programmed, blindly. Trying to catch her breath. Trying to get away from the parasitic emptiness slithering from the damp mess in her underwear. Trying to hold back tears though the way everything blurred and shimmered told her it was too late. She stepped naked away from her pajamas and somehow her eyes betrayed her mind and she looked and then, suddenly, it was like being a butterflying turning back into a caterpillar. She left her clothes crumpled on the floor and stared, even as she moved clumsily backward onto the bed, at the dampness on her discarded underwear.

It stared at her back.

She was not a stupid girl. Nor was she a particularly hopeful one, and she did not believe in miracles. She had foreseen this, knew it would be, tried not to worry but she had forgotten that she was not her father, and she felt things in ways she never wanted. She had forgotten that it didn't ask permission or grant mercy, or wait for her to compose herself. And having it just happen -- sans fanfare or alert -- she didn't know how to react but ...

Something warm slipped down cheek and, silently, she cursed.

The door moved open and there, idiotic look of nervousness on his face, was Miles Edgeworth.

"I knocked," he said. He closed the door.

There was nothing to say, then. No way to produce words that meant anything that they should, so time stopped politely for them as space stretched between the door and the trembling breathless thing on the bed. Franziska buried her head in her knees and willed herself not to think. Or cry. Or live.

Everything was faint in the sweet velvet of her eyelids and shadows. Miles' half-formed questions fell like white noise, his small gasp was the snap of a twig underfoot. She didn't lift her head. She couldn't bear to face the pale sympathetic compassion she knew was marring his pretty face. At the moment she didn't even feel the pang of gratefulness. She was in control and she didn't need his pity. The soft skin on her cheeks stung but she was not really crying. She was cold and small and angry at what shape her body took but she was in control.

A cool hand grasped her shoulder, and Franziska cried.

And for years she and Miles sat, and she gagged on the salt of her own tears, and he didn't do much else than sit next to her with a soft touch and wait. There were no nothing-words used to coax her to calmness, no quieting noises, no slight motions for the sake of movement. A distant and fleeting piece of Franziska felt silly and foolish -- yet it was overtaken by the cathartic urge to stop thinking and let go. She was certain that by the time she surfaced, her face would be stripped raw and red and Miles would have left like the sun behind the horizon. But the grip on her shoulder stayed consistently firm.

Finally she could breathe again. She searched for the part of her brain that controlled her lips. "Everything said that I had at least a year more." She could form no words more than what the books told her.

"Assumptions are a poor choice, Franziska," said Miles' voice. "To be cliché, it is different for everyone."

"I wanted at least a year more."

A low release of breath. "I know."

And she believed him.

For a minute, nothing; they reveled in the calm.

"This has to stop, Miles."

"I was under the impression that you could wait."

"We were wrong."

Air passed under his hand when she took a long and shuddering breath in a grasp at self-control. She pulled up her head and rested it on her arms. He wasn't looking at her; rather, past her, at the wall. Von Karma eye contact at its finest.

"We can't do much more than we have, Franziska. Our hands are tied."

Her heart was fluttering to a semi-normal pace. "Father's aren't."

Miles looked her way with that odd glow in his face that was like her father's on a particularly fruitful case. She looked back at him like a bull that had just seen a red flag.

"And Miles Edgeworth. What are you doing in my room? I'm not remotely decent, and I suggest you leave before I call Papa and let him know just what sort of manners you've learned from him."

The fool laughed as he exited.

10.

But for all the confidence she put on, the day left a sizzling feeling in her gut. And just moving down the stairs made her simper. But it would be a much worse damper on her day to let herself vomit on clean clothes, and very unpresentable for her father. And she could only hope her father was in his dark lonely study as was frequent, and not meeting with a colleague or client or whoever the men that visited were -- impatient though she was, she was not willing to risk interrupting her father. She smoothed the black thighs of her pants. The uniform-like clothing seemed counter-intuitive to the cause, but what alternative was there -- search the closets for a dress? The thought of wearing someone else's ill-fitting clothing was dreadful, and she scoffed audibly at the thought. Her own noise scared her and she realized she was hesitating on the landing of the main staircase, looking stupidly foolish. Her father would not approve of her procrastination -- a fantastic first step. She instead took to stumbling too quickly down the rest of the stairs.

The foyer could seem immense when it so wanted. It stretched on past the natural limits of the house and went forever. It made a dark sort of sense that her father's door lay at the long and distant end, looming there solidly like the door in a boy's dream from a book she had once read. She paid the door a length of hard attention and, with the slightest echo, heard an unfamiliar voice. She dared inch closer. (Something in the back of her head claimed father would praise her for such detective work, as one never knew, according to Manfred, when one would be supplied with a bumbling idiot for a detective.)

"..can't imagine why you'd consider going back there, Manfred, honestly. Has it at least got unbelievable pay?"

"Your implications wound me. I have higher reasons."

"Call of God?"

"Call of necessity. Scores to be settled, if you will."

"Ah, I assume you mean --"

"Nothing is quite as satisfying as eradicating mutations. Even if they do have some form of higher intelligence." Her heartbeat suddenly amped.

"Smart lad though. Sort of a shame..."

Franziska stopped hearing quite suddenly. Peculiar, she thought, turning; her ears had been quite perfect previous to this moment. Just as odd was the way breathing was no longer a necessary function and how every organ in her chest had dropped to the basement of her abdomen. She was not thinking of mutations and how like a disease it fell from her father's tongue -- not thinking of the smart lad who they pitied -- not thinking of how pitiably mutated she was -- she was

making tea.

She watched the water as it boiled, an old proverb surfacing somewhere in the part of her that still remembered humor. That same part of her expected to turn around and see Miles sipping already at a cup, smirk gracing his face as always -- or for her father to walk in and explain himself -- of course not. The only present were her and the tea kettle.

Another part of her said her father must already know, must have snuck and eavesdropped and spied despicably.

"Hello, kettle," she muttered, "looking quite black today, I see." The kettle, predictably, said nothing.

Mutation. She wondered. She really wasn't a far cry from her father -- as they said, apple didn't fall far from the tree. Just as her father had grimaced audibly around the word, she felt the now-familiar pull in the low of her pelvis that mean a quick and nauseous wave of dysphoria. Mutation. Ah, she identified with the word, had it stored in her bank of relevant vocabulary. Part of her mind -- the one too busy being dusty and distracted to really think -- imagined the word to mean that gross and free acting growth sitting between her legs, the cracking in her voice, and the flatness on her chest. It meant how the body in which she lived was not really hers (she wondered momentarily if there was out there some boy stuffed in her real skin. This illness was her mutation, that part of her knew, and like any other it would be cured, in time.

The other part -- which, cruelly, made jokes at her expense and played with her hopes and fears -- the other part reminded her that she was the mutation, that sick thing her father needed to remove like a tumor. Because she had failed him as a son. He had no true successor because she was disgusting and mutated. A boy parading as a girl. A foolish sketch when she should be a painting. When she had abandoned Josef von Karma, that sly part of her mind said, she had abandoned Manfred von Karma. He was right to loathe her, to leave her. She looked dully into the brushed metal of the stove and saw the vague echo of her face. A little boy looked back into her. A sleepy thing in her heart stirred and threatened to wake, that thing that desired to force her into the noxious boundaries of denial -- wanted her to suck it up and play Josef for the sake of her family name. It told her life would be easier if she just didn't bother.

Of course, it would. But it was never that easy. Even if she shelved Franziska, there was no way to push her identity aside forever.

She wondered if she could suffer through the few years more she expected to be dependent on her father.

Her brain shifted slightly and the whistle of the kettle finally pierced the fog of her internal monologue. She fumbled to pull the kettle away from the heated stove and cut the flames. The metal burned her fingers and she stuffed them in her mouth after calming the kettle. As the sound died she became alert of voices chattering, making the light and jumbled noises of an escort to the front door. The voice from her father’s office rang out with an uncomfortably loud laugh. Then the door shut with a careful noise and all there was was the syncopated thud of steps and a cane. Most days she loved that sound – the familial connotations of the extra wooden note – but today it drummed through her bones with a chill. She brought the cup to her lips, reveled a moment in that she had been able to pour a cup of tea neatly without her conscious sight, and drank. Her father lived by tea; when he felt angry, victorious, the slightest emotion, all was calmed by the stuff. He used to serve it to her when she fell too ill to rise, and he would set whole platters on her bed. He used to let her oversweeten it even though he grimaced at the chunks of sugar swimming in her cup. They would have daily conversations through the rising steam about everything and nothing at all.

She shook her head clear of her thoughts. All that had been when her father had a son. She heard the door shut in the foyer and glanced down nervously, seeing ripples in her tea and realizing her hands were shaking. She waited a few beats – literally hearing the blood pump around her brain – poured another cup of tea from the still hot kettle, and took it carefully to her father’s study. She knocked.

Manfred opened the door and loomed just as Miles always did. His eyes scanned the open space momentarily before dropping the few feet to recognize Franziska; his whole body softened in a slight and relieved way when he saw her, and he took the saucer with a smile before ushering her in.

“Josef,” he said. He glanced over his son once with a look that said a hello for him. The two sat in half-comfortable chairs on opposite sides of the strong wooden desk. Franziska muttered a soft greeting to her papa.

“Papa,” she asked quietly. She had aimed for ‘coolly’ but missed the mark. “Who was that?”

“Hm?”

“That man.”

Manfred tsked in disapproval and glanced out the door in the direction his visitor had traveled. “No one of importance. A fool.” He relaxed back in his chair a little more and contemplated his tea.

Minutes passed. Empty. Quiet. Awkward and rough. Franziska’s breath was dragged ragged across the sandpaper silence. She stared into her tea as an oracle might look for shapes in the waves. She felt her father’s eyes. He was always staring over the brim of his cup at her bent head, and her skull throbbed with his gaze. Skin seemed to have closed over her throat and clogged the path of words. She wondered idly if her father felt the density of the air as well as she did – it swam down her throat, wriggling and thick, an eel in her mouth. She swallowed down its slithering tail.

"Josef." The tone was so similar to her sister's, but the voice was much more like Miles. The teacup came to rest on the desk with a delicate clink. "You are extremely quiet."

"Sorry, Papa," she managed, "merely thinking."

Manfred's lips tightened and his eyes darkened carefully. "Have you something to tell me?"

Yes, the atmosphere had closed down on her. It tasted like the white noise snow on a tv screen. It ran across her skin and squeezed her muscles to pulps. It wrapped around her eyes and pulsed. She looked blankly at her father.

"No."

Something unfamiliar crossed Manfred's face but it was too quick a motion to understand. He took an audible breath to speak, but before he could, Franziska had swept to the door, leaving behind only her teacup and saucer.

Outside she felt sick with herself. Her stomach clenched against her. There was a pain in her cheeks from the crushing tightening of her jaws. Her lungs burned -- anger, at herself, at her father. Emotion bubbled in her throat with the viscosity of tar; her mind said to push it down, her eyes itched to study.

Instead, she went out. It was chill and bright, she in just her daily clothes, and it woke her to blunt emotional balance. It stung her cheeks raw and she felt her skin shrink and redden but she didn't turn for a jacket or scarf. She walked.

She didn't go alone into the city too often. It was such a bustling place, unlike the quiet and almost dead neighborhood near the von Karma estate. But she found herself walking its streets and sidewalks, pushing between impatient strangers in her unaimed path; the storefronts gave a ghostly lagging reflection of her whom she avoided and her feet crunched against the cold concrete. She watched her feet, as if they had forgotten to agree with her brain and were some other moving entity. It was so cold. Her hair alternately froze and blew in the ice and wind, slashing at her face and neck. She pulled snug to the storefronts, which emanated light and warmth, hiding under the overhangs. She stared through the glass as she passed. Many were odd expensive places selling cell phones or luggage, computers or business suits. Every few stops the glass was plastered with restaurant menus and impregnated with the smell of hot food. A few were empty shells in want of business, dusty and blank ... One was crowded with over-colorful and moving things -- toys, she realized, loud and screaming for attention. She wondered if they really so fascinated the other children her age, with all their plastic shine and mechanical whir. She moved on.

Franziska was soothed in the dry and cold monotony of the city streets. She felt the unconscious knowledge that here she was no one, a thing on the sidewalk, an anonymous person passed by anonymous people; the fierce ignorance of communication surprised her with its calm. It was hard to think, if one did not wish to be pushed over. She reveled in the emptiness of her mind. That image of her father -- lips pursed, eyes flared with some alien expression -- evaporated under the focus on her even steps. Blank. Dark. Cold. Peace.

Stars bore down on her when she found home. They followed her in the foyer windows in that dim night glow of bright moons and air thick with frost. They watched her. The whole house was dark and cool, and asleep. Her father had left open his study door.

Inside, the two teacups cast long and dark shadows in the glow ...

She didn't sleep. She again mapped the ceiling's contours. Cursed herself. The goose bumps of the cold still lingered, and so did the cold feeling of disappointment that had sparked unnoticed as she moved through the city. Weak. Some gut twisting remembered emotion stirred up self-disgust at her having run away. Men didn't run ...

Neither did women, she thought. Maybe the time would come.

11.

Spring fit over winter like a glove, setting blossoms on the trees and grass, hiding the frost lingering on the plants. Everything felt damp and fresh and finally the windows cleared and let in not cold wind but the rainy smell of the new season; light took on a new quality, no longer burning in reflected sheets but diluted streams. The warming weather gave way to traveling, and Manfred began anew the routine of bringing the boys to court. It was somewhat fortunate for them that the season also brought new life to criminals, as the von Karmas then were constantly at trials. They were, admittedly, outgrowing the place; the children were learning too well their hypothetical opponents and could strike down their arguments before they were made. It was like finding checkmate no matter the move of the opposing pieces. The way they fidgeted in their seats as the prosecutor on duty missed something vital made Manfred undoubtedly proud; it seemed all they could do to keep from objecting themselves.

For Franziska, the court visits were a welcome distraction where studying could not be. How easy it was to think of insults for the foolish lawyers playing with the game of law, and how easy to forget.

They looked the perfect family with their matching suits and stoic expressions; even Miles made a good show of von Karma values and attitude. The day was pleasantly cool and not irritating in their tailored jackets. The three sat quiet in the one von Karma vehicle, spreading an uncomfortable silence amplified by claustrophobia. Franziska found herself seated behind her father, next to his and Miles' suitcases stacked neatly on the padded seat. She stared at her feet as they moved. The held silence throbbed.

There was some point when her father began to speak, rapidly, voice clipped with the heavy atmosphere of business. He was spitting the details of the case so far, giving in short words the evidence, the autopsy reports -- neither she nor Miles made a specific motion but both were listening in stern and tight attention, and their father showed the same detached focus as any other day. There were no relationships shown between them, naturally; the words dropped an aloof veil over them heavily, and suddenly they were nothing more than prosecutors. The clinical tone became only slightly monotonous, and that was when she and Miles were piecing together the case rather than listen. The car moved unnoticeably over the roads, Manfred's voice fitting the small space of the cabin. Franziska found herself only needing her subconscious attention to absorb her father's words, while the other percent of her mind focused on nothing at all. It was when he stopped talking that her consciousness again met.

"Questions," her father said. He stared forward. Miles ghosted a smirk and leaned back some.

"None," he assured, not trying in the least to hide his confidence.

"Papa," Franziska said.

She hadn't meant it. Something pushed her tongue back against her throat and used it for her, remodeling the words stocked on her tongue to what it so desired. She had intended a meaningless and showy inquiry about some unnecessary detail, one that would return little by way of useful information but hopefully a proud noise made at her search for the facts. But by the time they'd touched her soft mouth the words felt full and solid, pregnant with wet and undiluted connotations. They dropped so heavily from her mouth; she swore she could hear them bounce dully on the padded floor. Her mouth was swimming with cool spit and a foreign tongue even after the sentence dripped off her lips like too much acid. The strange and swirling stuff slid into her stomach as she swallowed and her gut tightened in sudden consciousness of her words. A trail of quivering nerves climbed from her navel to the nape of her neck. Her eyes widened and searched the rearview mirror. There, her father -- who, in an inverse of his child, had squinted his eyes and pressed his jaws together. She saw Miles with the slightest turn of her head, the dilation in his pupils, the catch of breath in his throat. Her own breathing pulled hard over her parted teeth. It seemed a cruel joke that the space outside of the cart was still moving, not stopping in respect for their need for time.

There was a moment in which nothing was said and her father just drove. The moment was cancer, was static on the radio, was the way the door closed on a mother leaving for the last time. A moment of echo. One moment in which a warm something dared to swell hopefully in her chest. All in the dying sounds: "Papa, I am a girl."

Her father kept driving.

"This is neither the time nor the place," he said stiffly. His voice had a dry and forced quality, a shade too dark and quiet for her liking. Franziska's warm thing burst and punctured her lungs. Miles made an awkward motion.

"Sir," he said, "I beg to differ..."

"Your opinion was not requested, Miles," said Manfred sharply. Miles almost visibly bit his tongue and looked nervously out the window. Franziska's pulse was magnified with the disappointment in her father, and the fear that she may have confirmed some horrid nightmare of his ... in which his family was destroyed by a mutation.

Then she felt the strange lump in her throat. And with an odd shiver, her jaw moved for her. "Then where do you suggest we go, Father?" Her hands tensed somewhat, daring him. The structure of the sentence was not arguable, was assertive in a way she had not previously tested around her tongue. When she took her long breaths they were collapsing in on themselves. Meanwhile, the dare hung between them like a spider on a string of webbing.

Then the steady click of a turn signal and the car was moving in the opposite direction. Some part of Franziska awoke to surprise at the dominance she had exercised, especially over her father, but it was muffled by the unexpected urgency of the situation. For something she hadn’t intended to say, the attention it demanded was astounding.

She waited quiet for some time, allowing her father a space in which to compose his argument. The vague concept she had of what could be passing through that mind made her insides twitch and flicker. She had seen him in court when he had been provided time to think – sometimes it was a wonder the defense didn’t exit court physically limping. But the very curve of his shoulders was different from those days in court and there in the car; she watched the muscles of his eyes in the mirror and they were used in a way totally separate. She could make no predictions.

The streets grew more suburban and between the trees was an odd sense of déjà vu; the roads meant something but the meaning was just out of reach. In her unclear memories, the angle, the speed was all wrong.

She spoke: “Where are we …”

But Miles was the one who answered, looking for all the world like a boy told he’d received the throne. The absent half-smirk that crept on his face was directed nowhere and everywhere. “The library.”

How terribly fitting. Her father didn’t speak – or, practically, breathe, as if any noise would cause a collapse of his control – until the car slowed into a marked space at the library and for a moment the artificial click of seatbelts was far too loud. The awkward clumsiness seemed halfway deliberate, but she forced herself from the measured air of the car to the honest coolness of the spring. Her father walked briskly ahead of her, and behind him, Miles; she made a short sprint to catch up, quickly reorganizing her clothing and matching her father’s steps. She kept her eyes on the cracks in the pavement. She needn’t see him to know his face was tight with his mind full of words.

They passed the sensors and Manfred waved Miles off with a dismissive motion before leading Franziska silently to a room buried deep in the nonfiction section. Its familiarity almost forced a laugh from her with its foolish irony. She sat, but Manfred immediately disappeared again to the shelves of books; she was left there to contemplate her mistake. Nausea had settled in her chest, churning at her heart and lungs. The poor lighting seemed to color her nervous breaths with the harsh paint of fear and need. Her father’s absence squeezed down on her organs so that she felt it may have been better if he had stayed and shouted.

She waited for ten minutes before he came back. He only had the few books in his hands but that provided him room to carry the sort of aura an unhappy teacher might when calling you to his office. Manfred set the books on the tabled and looked at her.

He looked so intensely she had to avert her eyes. And for minutes they held their breaths.

When he spoke, it was missing the usual complexity of a von Karma’s vocabulary. The sacrifice of syllables made it that much more significant. “At least … you were born at a better time than most.”

She saw him work his jaw and swallow and the realization that he was standing and not sitting because he was as nervous as she almost made her gasp. But his face didn’t take on the distant, pathetic look hers did; he, despite the struggle for control, looked… perfect. He set his jaw, then thumbed through the books. Their titles reminded Franziska of quiet days and Miles’ tired eyes.

Manfred finally continued. “It hasn’t been long since being … since it was a criminal offense.” Text flashed in her eyes. Paragraph 175. 1994. Her father would have been 43. Neither of them was looking at the other. He said, “I’ve brought you some books on … the subject. It might be good to study it.”

He was speaking slow, picking and choosing his words, not for her but for himself. Franziska glanced at the reading and said, voice breaking, “I have.”

Manfred blinked.

“Ah,” he said. “I should have … known.”

But all the same he turned pages, looking at them rather than the printed sentences. His fingers were tense on the paper corners. She waited.

“I’m sure you understand,” he said, finally, lamely. “I cannot say the world is a safe place. I make a living on its danger.” A half noise; a low laugh? “I … worry. There was a time when it was reason enough to attack someone.”

Franziska set her hands on her knees. Her voice was almost a breath. “I was under the impression it still was.” And, inadvertently, the old long-gone bruise twitched on her cheek.

A quiet sound. The hard noise of book covers closing on the wood of the desk, or the desk as it intruded in the dropped book’s path to the ground. Her father struck her with a disarmed look, his breathing tweaked or caught; the room was suddenly colorless. She couldn’t understand what the movement in his eyes implied, the language in his slackened face. She coolly observed his statuesque pose. How his fingers held an invisible book was almost comical. But his body made up a shaking code that set his thoughts on a painful chain of connections. Her face still throbbed from a stranger’s fist.

Then there were swift and measured steps and the strong smell of well pressed fabric and this appealing rhythm of her father’s breath and blood. Franziska froze, stiff, despite the promised comforting warmth. It wasn’t until her father spoke that consciousness and body realigned.

“I wish I had known.” And in the low sounds, honesty; that thing that slid from her ears to her heart and eyes. She relaxed. She hugged her father.

Then they didn’t talk, or at least nothing of importance; Manfred, in a show of something he labeled weakness, muttered odd but calming things over her head, voice tangling in her hair. She meant to listen, to tell him how very unnecessary were his sympathies, as a von Karma would, but that piece of her again rose and told her to stop. Instead, she let herself cry. And there was a time that despite how things were nonsensical, Franziska didn’t mind, and the salt on the corner of her lips was a welcome taste. Her head was tucked into the folds of her father’s jacket. She was supported by his embrace.

Finally: “You didn’t tell me earlier.”

Some small disappointment clung to the edge of what he said. She swallowed, pushing her heart back out of her throat. But even then the too-recent tears were drowning her voice. “I-it’s weak. Such emotion is weak. I d-didn’t want to bother you with it.” Just as the von Karma perfection dictated.

A quiet sigh blew down. “That … is my fault, I suppose.” A hand smoothed her long hair idly. Franziska shifted her head against her papa’s body to listen better. A preparatory breath.

“There will always be exceptions to the … rules, for lack of better term.”

She breathed. “Papa, I was pathetic.”

“You are strong in a way most people will never know.” He set a hand on her shoulder and sat her down, and stood over her with a certain sort of color in his eyes. Some look that made her feel like she was standing higher than him. Oh, she thought; respect.

Manfred sat in his chair across the table. A transparent smile was growing in the corner of his mouth. Like the gold glow of pride and the watery breath of sadness mixed together. He folded his hands on the table.

“Josef,” he said. “I’m afraid any more of those foolish thoughts of weakness will have to stop.”

“Yes, Papa.”

“If I find you keeping any more important secrets from me, I will be forced to torture them from you.”

She stifled a laugh. “Yes, Papa.”

“Very good, Josef.” He stood and brushed of his suit. “Collect Miles, please, and we shall go home.” He walked to the door, and Franziska stood to follow – but she stopped short, and called out “Papa.”

Manfred stopped in the door.

“Papa,” she said. “Franziska.”

From her angle, the smile on his face was unperceivable.

“Of course.” He took up his cane from its place leaning against the door frame. “Now, we’ve wasted enough time as it is, Franziska.”

They were the perfect family.

12.

It is very easy to be a child, but it is very difficult to be a woman. Her sister teaches her this one long, hazy Sunday, a surprise visit spent braiding stories and admonishments into Franziska’s hair, fingertips twirling in and out of the strings as though playing a song on her. It is very easy to be a child, her sister says, a warm sigh slipping into the braid. Franziska makes a small sound of acknowledgement into the pages of her book. Children have very little by way of responsibilities and they are so very good at getting away with anything they want.

“Even if,” her sister says, and Franziska can feel the sly smile in a curve of breath against her neck, “the child decides to waste all that opportunity by reading very boring books.” Her sister is becoming very spry, what with how many times she must avoid Franziska’s hand.

Fingers tug in her hair and the hours come tumbling down in a feather-brush against her shoulder blades as the braid releases. Her sister says, “Women, though,” and draws hair in wide, silky sheets woven through her knuckles. “Women lead terrible, difficult lives. It’s horrid.” Her sister rests her head on Franziska’s shoulder, fingers still tracing along the thin lines of hair.

“I don’t suppose you expect me to ask you why that is,” Franziska says after a time, and her sister throws up her hands.

“Men!” The couch lets out a soft plush sound when her sister falls dramatically back into it, pulling her feet up and draping them across Franziska’s lap, and across the book that lay open there. A page folds under her sister’s ankle. “Women must do everything for them and they are such bores! All they want is to be fed and to be agreed with and to sleep at odd hours. Women are left to drag them around and sacrifice all the things they might want.”

Franziska considers idly taking notes. There is never a negative consequence to note-taking, she thinks; either it becomes useful at some point in the future or her sister takes offense and changes topics. She’s nearly reaching for her pen when her sister speaks again, voice heavy with dramatics.

“And I fear terribly that you may become one of those men, Josef. Always with a book in hand, never a thought for fun.”

The sound in the air vibrates solid against Franziska’s ears, letters curling down her spine to fill spaces in her chest. Her teeth ache; they’ve pressed together, molars fitting forcefully into each other. Josef, Josef, she has to close her eyes and breathe slow to calm her muscles and keep in the tears, and her sister is still lounging with an arm tossed over her eyelids and for all the space that her home provides there is a distinct sense of claustrophobia.

It is much like something on the inside clawing to get out.

“Josef?” her sister repeats, and in the space between syllables comes the sound of the front door opening. Whatever was to be said next is swept under the click of their father’s footsteps.

Manfred von Karma steps into the room. (Behind him, Miles Edgeworth considers the threshold — but he studies Franziska’s face, and the woman lying next to her, and decides instead on a tactical retreat to his bedroom.) He is endlessly stoic, decades of prosecution against twisted criminals and emotionally manipulative defense attorneys dampening expressions, but Franziska reads the surprise in how his brow quirks.

“I did not expect a visit,” he says. Her sister stands — each of her movements is like the motion of the wind, big graceful curves and sweeps topped with a flourish — and leaves a trail of vibrant energy when she moves to hug her father.

“That is because it was a surprise, Papa,” she coos, arms wrapped around him. He wears a distinctly von Karma expression of discomfort. “I always enjoy my time with my family — oh, and we were just having the loveliest conversation when you came in!”

“Were you.” His eyes find Franziska over her sister’s shoulder, and she is attempting to focus all her energy on smoothing out the page that had been bent under her sister’s heel. She is smoothing out the crease with the side of her thumbnail when her father calls to her, “I was under the impression you were to be studying at this hour, Franziska.”

She does not realize her sister has been moving until she stops stiff with her arms still around her father. There is a moment which stretches taut and is too long to fit the room and pierces Franziska through the navel, twisting in her gut; her fingers shake like moth wings on the paper. Her sister’s wide smile shifts to confusion. “Who, Papa?”

Over her should, Manfred von Karma nods at his youngest child and says in return, “Your sister.”

The rustle of fabric against fabric when her sister pulls her arms away and looks hard at their father holds more meaning than words, crisp but muted sounds of discontent. Her smile no longer fits her face, but she twitches to hold it, blinking too many times as if to accommodate.

“Papa, you are not going senile already, are you? You are far too young.”

“Are you questioning me? I believe that I have made it clear how I feel about such things.”

Franziska’s father is a very good lawyer.

“There is nothing to question, Father, when the only person in the room aside from you and me is Josef.” (Here a nervous laugh and Franziska has never heard such a noise come from any of her family.)

“The evidence suggests otherwise.”

Franziska’s father is good at a great many things.

“Oh, Father, don’t start your law analogies now—”

“The prosecution would like to ask any present Josef von Karma to please rise.”

Franziska’s feet fidget but her father fixes her with a look that reads as many words as one of the volumes in his library. They are dark with restrained irritation and burning determination and a bright sheen of fatherly protectiveness, clear in the shadow cast by his brow. They read ‘don’t worry’ and ‘I’m here’ but most of all ‘don’t stand.’

She turns her fidget into a motion and crosses her ankles. Manfred turns back to her sister with his eyebrows raised, a look of satisfaction and superiority. “The prosecution rests.”

“This is nonsense, Father,” her sister bites back, and she rounds on Franziska like a hyena on its prey. “Josef, what on earth is he talking about? Do talk sense into your dear Papa.”

Franziska tries not to chew on her lip, because it is something her father disapproves of. Instead she looks back at her father, at that bright sheen, and says, “Papa is making perfect sense, dear sister.”

There is quiet.

Then her sister narrows her eyes, takes their father by the sleeve, and pulls him out to the foyer. The door slams behind them — Franziska finds that rather over-the-top — but she can still hear their voices.

“I don’t know what you’ve taught him—”

“I imagine I’ve taught her quite the same as I have taught the other one.

“Yes, you’re hilarious, Father. Now please explain before I go and ask him myself and I do not want to have to do that.”

“I believe I have explained all I need to explain. Don’t trouble your sister with this.”

“Father—”

And then hushed words, not quite leaking around the door, serious words with many syllables and her sister doesn’t interject very often. And then there are no more words at all.

Until, finally, her sister says, “You’re lying.”

“Why would I lie to you?”

“Because that is not a thing that would happen to my little brother, Father, and you should have stopped it.”

The door swings open again. Her sister takes long strides into the room, gathering her coat and purse in her arms hurriedly. There is a long second in which they meet eyes, and the breath in Franziska’s lungs presses against the inside of her ribs and squeezes into her throat and then her sister tears it out of her by spinning on her heels, hair whipping out from behind her. She drags the oxygen out of the room with her. A door slams in the muffled depths of her head. Through the open door of the living room, she sees her father blinking impassively at the empty place where her sister had been.

What just happened creeps up the back of her neck. Her skin sears and crinkles under it. But just as it reaches her scalp, takes hold with long needle-claws to dig through the sutures of her skin —

Her father tsks as though reading a particularly disappointing paper. “There is always one,” he says. “I cannot expect every child I raise to become a prodigy. She will come around, I suppose.” He glances sideways at Franziska and she finds that her eyes are prickling with something warm that bubbles from her chest.

Franziska’s father is a very good lawyer.

“Franziska,” he says, “I believe you’ve something in your eye.”

And he is a very good father.