part two: shatter

She didn't know her mother's name for a long time; her mother, whose absence was as eternal and accepted a factor in her life as Miles's presence. Walking along the halls of the estate, eyes flickering past the rows of old portraits and photographs, she was able to identify those in her father's line by face and accomplishments down to centuries past. She could not recognize her mother.

She never asked her father about it. A von Karma did not ask questions, for it was expected that they already had all of the answers.

And yet she could not say in honesty that this fact bothered her that much. What was never there could not be missed, and the existence of a mother was not a necessary burden for a prodigy to bear.

So it had confused her, the night when she had learned of the suicide of Miles Edgeworth, when she woke up far before the break of dawn with the word mother on her lips and an unfamiliar ache deep in her chest.

---

But the truth of it was that she'd known everything had begun to fall apart long before that. She had seen each distortion of the way things were meant to be, the way things had always been, unfold before her eyes--but found herself powerless to stop it. She was a little girl watching her world rust and disintegrate and was left to count her blessings; first on both hands, and then left only with one, and then clenching her fists around emptiness and wondering how everything could have come to this.

Shortly after the bar exam and Miles Edgeworth's first spectacular sham of a trial, he had left the house with little in the way of announcement. She could remember that day--the same routine before their knowledge of law had been canonized, slipping on shoes and moving to his room to collect him for morning lecture (there would always be lecture; there would always be lessons, so long as there was Papa, and Papa was eternal)--and had found that he was gone.

She had stood in his abandoned room, playing chess games alone, reading to an empty bed, clutching the glass frame that held her certification as public prosecutor. She could not help thinking that she had traded one for the other, and as shameful as it was, she could not quiet the voice begging for someone to let her take it back.

He had moved not particularly far away; in a modest apartment only a few blocks from the old mansion. She could not help thinking (wishing) that he had done it out of consideration for her. Nonetheless, she was there often, checking on him and making sure he was continuing to fall in line, as an elder sister ought. She expected that without her guidance he would fall apart in a matter of hours, really. It was one of the fundamental truths upon which her world was built.

The first time she had stepped into his apartment she had left him with a three-page long, perfectly organized list of what exactly was wrong with his arrangement of personal items and where exactly he needed to replace them. On her next visit she'd added another four pages, in neatly spaced columns; certainly too professional and elaborate to have been written by someone merely trying to fabricate a sufficient excuse to see another person.

"This is disgusting," she had said. "Disgraceful. Despicable. Unacceptable." Her fingers had tightened against his, unreciprocated, as she pointed out with the other hand everything he had done wrong.

He answered, softly, as a mantra: "All right, Franziska."

As far as she knew, he never bothered following the written instructions--but she knew where he kept them, pinned to the wall over his desk where he could look at them at anytime and, perhaps, smile. When she told herself that, it didn't seem so terrible that he now thought himself capable of discarding her advice.

They continued to play at that game: far-away household, far-away family, far-away brother, distant but still pretending to be just as close--for a few weeks. That was all they had to establish their new rules, before Papa had met her in a lonely corner of the house and informed her to begin to have the attendants pack her things in preparation for her taking leave to Germany. Her eyes had widened. She dared to retreat a half-step and let herself gasp.

Her father wanted her to begin her career (life) as prosecutor, as he had, in the home country--to further mold her in his image and better initiate her into the practice of fulfilling the expectations that had already defined every aspect of her existence. When he had finished speaking the words, she felt a strange twist in the bottom of her stomach; a reluctance, an extra half-second of hesitation that could have been fatal. Ordinarily, it was understood that for her father to wish her to take leave to Germany simply meant that she was taking leave to Germany, and there was nothing beyond that--but she found herself only staring when she was called upon to answer.

She would not openly deny him. That would be tantamount to suicide. And yet--

Franziska closed her eyes; crossed her fingers beneath her sleeves, and prayed.

There was little point in pretending there was any ambiguity to be had in why she found herself reluctant, perhaps for the first and only time, to follow her father's orders. She had nodded, outwardly obedient as she had always been, and left quickly afterwards for Miles's apartment, breathless and shaking and counting each step to keep herself steady along the way.

It was so hard, already, to pretend nothing had changed with the distance of a few blocks; she could not fathom the distance between borders, the distance of an ocean; the distance at which she would be left alone with no one but herself and the shadow of her father, once and for all. For the first time in her life, she let the ground beneath her give way to irrational thought and irrational hope. If she could see Miles now, surely he would say something--surely he would, against all logic, reassure her that he would still be there and that an ocean was as nothing after all.

Franziska von Karma, during those moments, had considered herself sufficiently grown up to not fall under any traps set for the naïve; cynical enough to mock those who supported themselves on blind trust. She did not begin to wonder, until a few years had passed and she had read the American news for reports of trial after trial run by legal star Prosecutor Miles Edgeworth, if her father might have been relieved to remove the extraneous from his way; sent safely thousands of miles across the sea to quietly uphold the von Karma name while he was at last able to focus his attentions on perhaps the only thing he had, in his own twisted way, ever truly cared about.

During these moments of grappling with loss and despair and the borderline of something like grief, none of this had occurred to her--she was thirteen years old and still bound in a girl's body and a girl's dress and rapping sharply on Miles's door with a girl's tiny white knuckles. She was still single-minded in her drive to continue clinging to that one precious thing--perhaps she wasn't entirely unlike her father in ways she had never imagined.

Miles did not answer immediately; but she could see a light illuminating his study through the window, and entered without bothering to wait for him. It was natural for a big sister to have the unquestioned right to enter her little brother's space. As always, Miles hadn't protested, simply slipped the key into her hands and went on about his business, distant to the world surrounding him. All right, Franziska.

It was much the same as it had been the last time she was here. She would have to give him a stern talking-to again. Crossing into the study, she saw no immediate sign of him--but she knew he was there regardless. Perhaps because she needed him to be; and he had never failed her before when it came to being whatever it was she had needed.

The desk in the study was in an unorganized mess. She had never seen it in such a state before. The drawer was pulled half-open; papers were scattered everywhere--the pen laid uncapped and abandoned above a sheet, inscribed with the single word To. A letter from outside partially unfolded to the left. It was only half-drawn from the sleeve of the envelope; but that was enough for Franziska to see that it was not business-related. The writing was childish, scribbled out in dark pencil.

The feeling that had resembled grief was supplanted with a feeling that resembled fear.

She drew closer. She could see the crease in the corner where Miles had held it; saw the subtle draw of his fingernail against the opening lines.

It's me. Do you remember?

She bent closer, staring at the words, close enough to where her breath might have moved them off the page, reading on in slow, heavy deliberation.

We were friends. I've been worried. Tell me how you've been.

There was a tightness in her throat; she realized that she could not breathe properly.

Write back. Please, Miles, write back.

A return address; two different phone numbers; an e-mail address. A one-sided promise. She fingers braced against the opened drawer; and her gaze flicked down, briefly, fatally--and she saw rows of them beneath her hands, obscured but there to be re-opened at a moment's notice. Letters upon letters, with the same childish writing, the same pleas--bound with red string and the same soft creases along their margins.

She felt the world shift irrevocably beneath her.

"Franziska?"

Startled, she slammed the drawer shut and leapt back, shoulders nearly colliding with the curtains. She cursed inwardly. Clumsy. Stupid.

But it had hit her with the force of a sledgehammer, and she had been utterly unprepared for it. Regaining her balance, she stared at him, her little brother, as though he were a stranger. She felt light-headed and could not decide if it was because of rage or nausea or something else entirely. Her thoughts spun wildly around her, struggling to process what she had just seen and unlocked--and as she watched Miles approach, felt them settle hatefully, inevitably, into a single sentiment.

How dare you.

Miles crossed the room, passing her by, and sat down at his desk. He paid no attention to the letter lying inches from his right hand, and slid his paperwork towards him. He crossed out the single To as though it were nothing to him; as though she could not see the split second of hesitation and the tightening of his fingers that spoke as well to her as though he had broken down entirely.

How dare you have someone else, when I only have you.

"You should have told me you were coming."

Miles had not noticed her distress; so absorbed was he in his work, in his lingering thoughts of someone outside who was not her. She didn't answer.

"Franziska? Is something wrong?" He looked up, frowning now that the weight of the silence had become too much for anybody to not feel--that same quiet concern. It was the first time she saw it and could have peered through its cracks; smashed it to dust beneath her fists in its hollow falsity.

"Franziska? Are you all right?"

She thought: I wanted to stay.

She told him: "I'm leaving for Germany tomorrow."

---

The day of Manfred von Karma's conviction on charges of first degree murder, word had spread like lightning through all corners of the legal world. She could not have avoided letting it catch up to her; the news was all-consuming like the blaze of a wild fire, carrying with it the toll of inevitability.

It was an instant that she would carry with her for the rest of her life. She had been sitting alone in the office in Germany, decorated in sleek grays and dusty blues; leather whip strung upon the wall to symbolize the fear and power that came with playing the role of Manfred von Karma's successor; clouds gathering outside that promised later snowfall. A black pen scratching against paper in swift, decisive strokes. The waft of a cup of tea forgotten at her side. Another day in a grayscale haze of countless other identical days.

She had fulfilled her duty as her father's daughter; four years later, there was a perfect list of guilty verdicts to be credited under her name--and thus, and more importantly, his. This current case would, undoubtedly, be little more than an exercise in tedium like so many others. Her nerves were filled with the sensation of its repetition, draining what little color there was to be had in her world to begin with. She had long ago resigned herself to it, and told herself she had embraced it instead.

Then came the timid knock on the door; and the secretary had handed her the newspaper, wrung her hands miserably, and fled before she had the chance to so much as read the headline. The door slammed shut behind her. Another glance down.

She read of Gourd Lake, of DL-6, of Gregory and Miles Edgeworth (could there have been another Edgeworth besides hers? --absurd). Of conviction on account of murder. She saw the photograph of her father, ashen and cold, meaningless phrases scattered around the familiar profile of his sneer. She saw the letters, but did not comprehend the paradoxical words.

For Manfred von Karma's name to be tarnished; for Manfred von Karma to be gone, was a basic impossibility. The world could not and did not exist without him at its forefront. She turned slightly, hair falling across her face, and saw still the cast of his shadow stretching alongside the wall.

How ridiculous. He was right here. He always had been. He always would be.

She was not sure how much time had passed; just that her trance had been interrupted by the sound of her cellphone ringing, sharp and jarring against the overbearing silence, and a glance told her that Miles Edgeworth, four years older and four years separated, was attempting to contact her.

The date shone in illuminating numbers alongside his name. New Year's Day--odd, that she could have forgotten. It was quiet, and she listened to the sound of snow falling.

The phone rang on, and on, and on, but she did not answer.

---

It was February, following months of silence and twelve hours after she had called out mother, when she had sat down again at her office and smoothed the single note beneath her fingertips. It was not a newspaper this time.

It was his handwriting.

She could trace the curve of each letter with the tip of her index finger; the sharp, decisive cross of the t, the subtle curve along the bottom of the s. The weight of each black stroke against paper that combined to form the shape of his name. The note he had left behind in his office, two months after both of them had lost the man they were trained to think of as a god.

The forensics lab had not needed her help. Miles Edgeworth had left more than enough hand-signed and written documents in his four years of prosecution to confirm the authenticity of a thousand suicide notes he may have left behind. But she had wanted to see it for herself. To be certain.

Suicide. How stupid, how base, how foolish--the pinnacle of weakness and sentimentalism. Papa would have been ashamed on his behalf. She was ashamed on his behalf. To top off his previous disgraces against an insect of a defense attorney with this ultimate gesture of fragility was to spit on everything she used to believe they had both learned to hold dear.

They were Papa's words, forming from her lips, speaking through her: to fail is to sentence oneself to death; to fail means you should have died.

The note was composed of a single sentence, surrounded by an empty expanse of blank paper. She had read it to herself over and over until it had lost its meaning; stripped and shattered and rendered hollow--and she was only left with the signature of Miles Edgeworth.

Franziska von Karma had learned that the emotion of hatred was beneath her; that no other mortal beings on this Earth were worthy of the implicit acknowledgment of equality that came with the investment of such a base emotion. She learned to scorn, to sneer, to laugh and to admonish and to pity. Not to hate.

But the name, strange and alien--Miles Edgeworth--evoked now a sensation that flooded everything in her body so that she could not define it as anything beyond hatred. She had been so terrified, as a child, of the threat of his foreign name and its connotation of other; terrified that it would provide him a gateway in which to leave her to shoulder the burden of "von Karma" alone. She had been terrified because despite her bravado, she knew that she did not have the strength to face the figure of her father before her, consuming everything, without her brother at her side to tell her all right.

But he had done something much worse. Something she could never have guessed, that she could not have predicted in fifteen years of harrowing, filtered dreams and paranoia. He had left her, not just with the weight of "von Karma", but with the lingering humanity of a girl clinging desperately to the only person she had ever truly been able to call family.

He had granted her the burden of dream on top of the burden of perfection--an additional burden which she should have excised from herself the moment she had brushed strands of loose dust from her fingertips nearly fifteen years ago.

Unforgivable. And all through the name. It was not through uncovering that single bullet that Miles Edgeworth had destroyed the legacy of von Karma.

It was his handwriting.

And the sorrow that she had been fighting back, burning at her throat and her eyes and threatening to tear her apart since the moment she had closed her hands around the piece of paper bearing his signature too much too much in so little time with Papa's shadow and an ocean of distance and nothing left of the darkened mansion strewn with subdued but existent color and the hidden glints of sunlight obscured through curtains that shadowed rows of fallen black kings and dictionaries and a bloody fork gathering dust just beyond their reach--burst from her in a mixture of choking sob and hysterical laughter as the note came apart in her hands.

---

It was after another two months of ensuing static and meaningless noise that she moved on from the ruin and saw clearly for the first time.

There was another rumpled newspaper at her side, filled with red pen and criss-crossed lines that told the story on the re-examination of the case referred to as DL-6. Human beings had a way of being able to step back and assign narrative over their lives. From here, separated, she could understand everything.

She narrowed her eyes; pulling the coat over her shoulders; clenching the handle of the whip between her teeth, armed with a fire in her blood and a purpose that had never existed when struggling to fulfill the expectations of her father.

He was alive.

Lost, disgraced, the burden of shame behind the name of von Karma-- but alive. She refused to call it faith, but she had awoken with a frightening certainty that had sparked within her with a life of its own. She had made the familiar calls, the sequence of keys numb now against her skin, and took the responding silence as a sign. Two months, and they had failed to find a body. Two months, and all any of them still had was that note left as little more than a joke in bad taste.

She refused to call it hope. A von Karma does not hope, and Miles Edgeworth was as much of a von Karma as she, even had he lost sight of that path and closed his way to perfection. Papa was still here, lingering always, but somehow eclipsed beyond Miles's reach. So the responsibility had been placed upon her.

And so she would find him, and shape him, and avenge both of them upon him for the horrors he had inflicted upon them both by keeping her grasping for that elusive smile.

This was the promise she made to herself as she booked her flight to America--eyes locked on the red circle on the newspaper article that had surrounded the singular name of the one who had taken everything: Phoenix Wright.