#(a la the defense bullshit au linked above and that one thread about kristoph you know that one)

[wardencommanderrodimiss]

The Turnabout Prosecutor

It was suggested to me that in my "everybody lives/defense team shenanigans" AU, Gregory should adopt Franziska after von Karma goes to jail for attempted murder. I liked this idea and so I have written 5.9k words of it.

"Do you know what the von Karma family motto is?" Franziska asks and Miles does not ask her why she thinks he knows or wants to know anything about the man who tried to kill their father. He does not ask her why she concerns herself with that legacy more than that of the man who has raised her for most of her life. "It is 'to be perfect in every way'." "And what does that mean to you?" he asks.

Franziska is seven when she tells Miles that she wants to be a prosecutor. He is fourteen, lying on the floor reading his textbooks, and she is sitting on the couch with her latest weapon of choice in hand, a flimsy length of plastic with a trigger at one end and a chomping dinosaur head two feet down from it. Without getting up, she can reach him to prod him and make the scientifically-inaccurate featherless tyrannosaurus rex chew on his hair. It is an almost absentminded habit of hers, annoying but not as annoying as the year and a half starting when she was five when she was never found without a flyswatter which she used exclusively, constantly, to slap Miles in the face. She gets annoyed if Miles tries to acknowledge it every time she starts poking him, so he waits until he hears his name before pushing the dinosaur away from his head. "Miles. Miles."

"Yes, Franziska?" he asks, not taking his eyes from his reading.

"I want to be a prosecutor."

He looks up at her. "Why?"

She removes the dinosaur from his face and sets it carefully next to her. "Because," she says, "you want to be a defense attorney, and I..." She pauses for dramatic emphasis. "...want to beat you." She lunges from the couch, landing sprawled across Miles' back. He yelps, trying to roll over to shove her away, and she manages to reposition and remain sitting on his chest. "I am victorious!"

"You win," he gasps out over the sound of her laughter, "you win! The defense acknowledges the prosecution's victory!"

-

He was nine when Franziska entered his life, at a time when his world had already been upended. He remembers, clearly, he will always remember, lying curled up next to his father on his hospital bed, as his father, recovering from being shot by Prosecutor von Karma, worried about what would happen to von Karma's young daughter.

Franziska shouted at anyone who came near her and Miles already had enough trouble interacting with anyone smaller than him even if they weren’t an authoritative German toddler. Suddenly he was no longer the only attention of his father, his father who looked different with bandages around his head and when he took them off there was a huge ugly scar across his forehead that made Miles cry the first time he saw it. Suddenly there was this little girl who didn’t speak the same language commanding his father to spend time with her. Suddenly the house that had felt warm and comfortable with two of them had a third and suddenly it wasn’t. Franziska communicated with Miles by smacking his arm in different rhythms and then barking words he didn’t understand. They found common ground in pointing at objects and each saying their word for it. By the time he went back to school, near the end of February, his sentences were jumbled together in two languages and Phoenix and Larry looked at him funny when he tried to talk to them. Everyone looked at him funny all the time, especially when in May they took a class trip to a museum and he started crying when they got on the elevator. 

The teacher let him take the stairs when they went back down and Phoenix went with him. 

-

He is sixteen, and he is sitting at his kitchen table pouring over college websites and applications, Phoenix next to him grumbling at the edits that Miles has made to one of his application essays. "You know what?" Phoenix says finally, the first thing he has said at a regular volume in half an hour; the rest has been curses under his breath at rules of grammar. 

"What?" Miles asks.

"I am done with this, all of this. I am going to become..." He waits for Miles to look at him before he finishes his sentence. "...a bridge troll."

"No," Miles says.

"Yes. I am going to drop out of high school -"

"We're so close to finishing it. Please at least graduate."

"- and then I'm going to... abandon my fashion sense -"

"Implying that you have any to begin with."

"- and then I'm going to, uh... make my living by..." He pauses, his eyes searching Miles' face like he's trying to figure out what will get the best reaction. "Illegal gambling," he says firmly. "I'm going to drop out of school and become a gambler."

"Please don't."

"Well, it'd be better than this!" he says, throwing his hands in the air and flinging two pencils and a few stray university pamphlets aside. "I don't even know what I want to do!" 

The tea kettle on the stove is whistling behind him and Miles turns only to see that Franziska has swept in. She is barely ten and her handling hot water and hot cookware makes him anxious but she has an angry independent streak of pride that was not born anywhere in the Edgeworth household, and she will yell at him if he tries to help. She has before.

"You should be a defense attorney," she says to Phoenix.

He turns around, sits with his arms draped over the back of his chair. "Hey, Fran!" he says cheerily, and then his face drops. "I'm dying. Don't grow up. It's a trap."

She laughs. Phoenix is good at making people laugh - sometimes at him, but mostly with him. Miles has never been personable like his father or Raymond, or like Phoenix or Larry. He envies the ease with which Phoenix converses with people. "Why do you think I should be a defense attorney?" Phoenix asks Franziska. 

"Because I am going to be a prosecutor and I want to beat you!"

Phoenix laughs and Franziska's face falls, hurt flashing across her face before she replaces it with her usual kind of anger. "Why are you laughing, Phoenix Wright?" she demands. Miles hears the real question beneath that: are you laughing at me?

"Me, a defense attorney," Phoenix says. "Can you imagine? Fran, you'd kick my butt in court."

"Exactly!" she crows, triumphant, bright again now that Phoenix has assured her that he's laughing at himself. "That is why you should! So that I can beat you as well as him!" She jabs a finger at Miles. 

"You know it's not just about winning," Miles says, and then he cringes at himself. Why can't he just roll with the joke like Phoenix does instead of getting so pedantic? Is it the scar on his father's forehead that makes him as scared of a von Karma talking of winning as he is of earthquakes? "It's about -"

"- finding the truth," Franziska finishes. "Yes, I know. But I will find it better, and faster, than you, and that way, I will win." She hands him his tea cup and then prods him in the forehead with her finger. "But you have to study and be the best defense attorney, because I will be the best and I refuse anyone but the best for my rival."

"So then what would I be?" Phoenix asks. "Your punching bag?"

"Yes," Franziska answers, and then she smacks Miles, not Phoenix, on the shoulder.

-

Miles attends his father's alma matter with three semester's worth of course credits already completed from doubling his work load in high school. Phoenix goes to the general university thinking he'll either major in theater or comics art, and maybe he'll study to be a defense attorney on the side. Larry decides he wants money first and dives into whatever odd jobs he can find. For the first time in nearly a decade, they are split apart.

Miles takes the stairs to his classrooms alone.

-

He is twenty when one day he drops by his father's office intending to peruse his books there instead of the ones in the courthouse library. His father is out, but Franziska is there, sitting on the floor surrounded by books and old case files, studying with more careful concentration than Miles has seen in many of his classmates. Gregory has kept Miles updated on her, with more than a bit of worry; she is thirteen and has already tried to throw herself full-time into studying law. She is enrolled now in extra classes on evenings and weekends, she is applying to Themis for high school, her teachers call her "a prodigy", and Gregory wonders to his son why she is putting this pressure on herself, why she is pursuing her goals with more fury than enthusiasm.

"What are you reading?" Miles asks. Franziska flinches like she didn't hear him come in, too absorbed in the pages. He carefully navigating the minefield of open books and binders to where she is. "What kind of cases are -"

In an almost guilty motion she pushes together all of the papers in the open file in front of her and shoves it around to her side, away from Miles' eyes. "What?" he asks. 

"Nothing," she says, her voice clipped, and Miles steps close and leans over her head. 

"What are you trying to hide -?"

He sees, scrawled in pen across the manila folder, a label that she does not manage to place her hand over quick enough: DL-6.

His mouth is dry. "Franziska?" 

She looks up at him, raising her head defiantly. "I wanted to know," she says.

"Know what?" he asks, trying to pull his father's chair out from the desk and sit down, but he ends up sliding to the floor instead. "What happened? You know what happened."

"I know the basic summary and the verdict," she says. "I wanted the testimonies." She has the thick file back in her hands, folding and unfolding one of the corners. "I wanted to know what my father said."

And Miles almost starts to say, our father didn't testify because he was unconscious in the hospital at the time, and then he realizes. She means her father. Some bitter bile rises in his throat, something born of exhaustion from climbing too many extra flights of stairs today, and he snaps, "Our father, who's raised you for a decade, or your father who tried to kill him?"

She carries the surname von Karma because Gregory didn't feel it right that he should deprive her of a connection to her country of origin. He took night classes to learn German and Miles learned it online; they speak it at home so that Franziska remembers her native language. Two summers ago they spent five weeks in Germany. Franziska barely remembers any time lived anywhere but in the Edgeworth household. Gregory takes his daughter to visit in jail the man who wanted him dead. 

Miles read the DL-6 testimony last year. Von Karma broke down into some kind of hysterics that was half laughter and half screams when he finally confessed on the witness stand, and the last thing he said before he was arrested and taken from the courtroom was, "I should have shot him through the heart. The chest is a larger target; I wouldn't have missed."

"I can tell you anything you want to know about what your father said," he snarls. "You don't need court documents to tell you what he was." Ask the scar on our father's forehead, ask me why you have never seen me in an elevator, ask why every time there's an earthquake you come into my room to find me crying.

Her fingers digging into the carpet curl into fists. "Then tell me about my father," she snaps. "Tell me what he was, Miles Edgeworth," and the way she says his name looks like she is biting down on it, the way she spits his surname which she does not share sounds like it is poison in her mouth. "Tell me what he was and what I am!"

The cold knot in his chest shatters and the air rips from his lungs. He can't breathe; there's no air left around him. Franziska glares at him out of gray eyes that somehow look like his. Strangers comment on their resemblance as siblings. Miles blinks water out of his eyes and he sees it spilling down her cheeks. 

"Franziska..." he says weakly. She has gathered the DL-6 files in her arms and stood, about to storm off. "Franziska, wait." He tries to stand but he feels shaky, his head spinning, like he is still suffocating, and he falls back to the floor. She turns back to him, still crying silently, and her expression is stuck halfway in between anger and pity, the former turning into the latter. Damn her father, damn the man for the scars he left Miles with. He tried to shame himself out of these fears, these weaknesses, and when that didn't work - of course it didn't work, and you have nothing to be ashamed of, his father said - he gathered up all of the hatred he had for himself and turned it toward von Karma, let it fester into a powerful bitter rage against a man whom he would never speak to. "I'm - I'm sorry," he says, and no apology has ever sprung from his throat so quickly or so easily. "I'm sorry. You aren't - you aren't your father."

"And what am I not?" she asks. The vitriol is gone. "What is he?"

His father is the one who was shot, the one who was the target, but Gregory has never appeared to harbor this hate that boils within Miles anyway. He is ashamed of it but it breaks loose. "He is a monster, corrupt and a cheat and liar and murderer, and he deserves to rot -"

Franziska is crying harder now, her face screwed up trying to hold back audible sobs. "I have to be better," she whispers. Her voice cracks. "I have to be better than him, I have to be the perfect Prosecutor von Karma because he was not. I have to be perfect and make up for what he did."

"You don't have to be anything because of him," Miles says. He makes it onto his feet, steps toward her. "Franziska, you aren't responsible for -"

She drops the DL-6 files on the floor and the papers fly everywhere, coating the floor, and she stoops to pick up one of the big law textbooks she was studying and in one fluid movement she swings and slams it into Miles' shoulder. She is strong for her age and size and proud of it and has a hilariously evil smirk which she turns on Miles whenever he asks for her help opening a jar; she hits and smacks him all the time but lightly. She always pulls her punches.

She doesn't this time.

Miles yelps, stumbles back and swears - in German, he and Franziska agree that the language is much more satisfying - and Franziska raises the book again, freezing with it high in the air. "Children," Gregory says, from the doorway. Miles' stomach plummets. Franziska drops the book. It lands on Miles' foot. It hurts less than the disappointed gaze that their father has turned on him.

Their father steps into the room and stands aside, leaving the door open for either of them to exit if they wish. Miles does; he can't stand to see his father looking at him that way anymore, he can't stand to see Franziska looking so hurt when he is the cause. He limps from the office, rubbing his shoulder. 

Out on the street, he wants to sink into the ground and disappear; he wants passers-by to stop looking at him, questioning glances at the tears welling in his eyes. He sits in his car and is about to start driving, show up unannounced on the doorstep like they always do to each other, and as he is about to turn the ignition he realizes that girl might be there. There are four numbers set to speed dial in his phone and he calls the fourth. Phoenix picks up on the second ring but Miles hears him saying something to someone nearby, laughing at a joke Miles isn't privy too, before he actually says hello.

"Hey Miles! What's up?"

"Nothing much," Miles says, unsure of what stops him then. "Just... just thought it's been a while since we've seen each other. Are you busy now? Or later?"

"I'm - sorry, yeah, I'm sorry, Dollie and I were just headed out soon." Miles' stomach twists itself into a nauseous knot. "I'm sorry!" Phoenix does sound genuinely apologetic but it doesn't loosen the constricted feeling in Miles' chest. "Are you doing anything tomorrow - the weekend? Do you still take weekends off?"

"Not really," Miles says. "All the tests, and studying - I just had some open time today come up, so I thought maybe..."

"Free time just 'came up'?" Phoenix repeats. "Don't you schedule your days down to the minute like, weeks in advance?" He waits for Miles to answer but when several seconds of silence pass he goes on. "Is everything all right? Is something wrong? Did something happen?"

He could answer honestly: I got into a fight with Franziska. I said some things I shouldn't have. She's hurt and I'm disgusted with myself but I don't think she understands how much her father, von Karma, scarred me, and that hurts me. However infatuated Phoenix is with that girl Dahlia - Miles doesn't like her at all but tries to hide it for Phoenix's sake - he has never not dropped everything to help Miles when he needs it. Miles could answer honestly; Phoenix would probably cancel the date night and tell Miles to come over.

But that probably is not certainly and his heart feels tight in his throat thinking about the possibility of Phoenix choosing her over him. Maybe he wouldn't, but maybe he would, and it's better not to know, for Miles to keep thinking that maybe there's the chance. They are Schrodinger's cat and Miles could open the box right now but he would rather keep his untouchable quantum-state cat than risk finding out that it's dead.

"I'm fine. I just messed up my schedule and only just realized I'd left an empty block when I got to it."

"Okay," Phoenix says. He doesn't sound quite convinced. "All right. I'm sorry. We'll - call me sometime and we'll figure out a time to hang out, okay?"

"Sure," he says. "Sure."

His hands are shaking when he hangs up the phone. In all his memory he cannot think of a time he has ever lied to Phoenix.

-

He is twenty-one when he has his dislike of Dahlia validated in a worse way than he ever thought possible. It is a day when his father and Raymond are out investigating a crime scene in an area with no cell service - Gregory warned Franziska and Miles that morning - that he receives a phone call in the middle of class. He ignores it, but there is a second, and the third time he slips from his front-row seat and into the hallway. It's one of the defense lawyers that his father used to work with, a man named Marvin Grossberg, asking if Miles knows the whereabouts of his father because there's a case just come up that they think he should take on.

"I don't think he'll be back in time," Miles says after he explains. "But why are you calling me about it? Surely your office has someone who will take the case, or..."

"We do, we do - one of my junior partners was very interested once she heard the full details of what is involved - but the defendant is, well..."

Miles' head spins. He nearly drops his phone, his hands trembling as he repeats, aghast, "Phoenix?"

He darts in and out of the classroom to grab his bag and then he is sprinting down the hallway.

By the time he reaches the detention center, Phoenix has signed away his fate into the hands of a young defense attorney named Mia Fey and it's all Miles can do to keep from screaming. "Sorry I couldn't keep from being arrested until after you passed the bar," Phoenix says. Miles is torn between wanting to tell him to take this seriously and being grateful that Phoenix is trying to distract him from the anxiety threatening to consume him, between wanting to hug him and kill him.

He feels the same way by the end of the trial, when Dahlia is convicted and Phoenix is acquitted, through absolutely no help of Phoenix's own testimony and actions. Miles finds him in the defendants' lobby when court is adjourned, talking to Ms Fey. He doesn't yet look the worse for wear from his ordeal but Miles has known him long enough to expect a crash to come in the next few hours. Whatever Ms Fey is saying, it's enough to keep Phoenix chatting amiably, giving the impression of someone who still has life left in him. His eyes light up when over her shoulder, he sees Miles.

Ms Fey scrutinizes him closely. They spoke - argued, more like - when Miles met her at the detention center yesterday. He doesn't remember what he said but he's pretty sure it wasn't pleasant or nice, and he forces himself to look her in the eyes and thank her, though he chokes on an attempted apology.

"I think I want to strangle you," he says to Phoenix, who laughs weakly and slumps his head against Miles' shoulder when he hugs him. 

Franziska is waiting outside of the courthouse for them. She calls shotgun for the ride back to the Edgeworth residence and Phoenix lets her have it, sprawling in the back seat like he is made of rubber and refusing to sit up. "Thanks for coming," he says on the walk into the living room, "both of you," but he is only looking at Miles, and then he collapses into the couch. Miles goes into the kitchen to make him some tea and glances out into the living room just in time to see Franziska throw a bottle of cold medicine at his head.

"He is a fool," Franziska mutters under her breath, in German, though really only one or the other would be necessary for secrecy - Phoenix’s German has lapsed some since he left high school. She is fourteen and sullen and their relationship still stands on rocky ground. "A foolish evidence-destroying fool. It is a wonder he was not convicted, after eating the most decisive piece." She snaps her fingers in Miles' face. "Teach your fool some of your courtroom wisdom."

"My fool?" he repeats.

"Yes. And I was a fool to ever believe or suggest that he could ever be a competent defense attorney."

"I think I want to become a defense attorney," Phoenix says when Edgeworth brings him tea in a suitably non-breakable container. 

In the doorway Franziska throws her hands in the air. "Verdammt!" she snarls, loud enough for Phoenix to hear.

"Go verdammt yourself right back," he calls. She storms off and he looks at Miles and says, "I know that's not how you use that word."

"You know, I was just going to let that one slide," Miles says. He sits down on the floor, back against the couch, near Phoenix's head. "Why are you thinking of making that change?"

"I was talking to Mia - Ms Fey - after the trial, and I just got to thinking... it's about helping people who have no one else to help them, right? What she does, what your dad does, what you do - and I could. I could do that too, I could do something instead of just -" He gestures vaguely, helplessly, into the air. "I could - I could save someone, like you did for me, like she did for me. That's got to be worth it, right? All the work it'll take, but to be able to help people when they're in trouble, that's what it's about. And I want to do that."

There are stars in his eyes when he mentions Mia. Miles looks away. "Do you think I should?" Phoenix asks. "Do you think I could?"

"Yes," Miles says. "And yes."

-

He is twenty-four, ready to move from beneath his father's wings to find an office of his own, but he is waiting for Phoenix to pass the bar. They are at his kitchen table like years ago, applying for colleges, Miles certain, Phoenix lost, but now they both have a path - and the same one, again.

Franziska bounds into the room. "Ta-da!" she announces and Phoenix looks up from Miles' old notes to nearly smack his head into her hand, which holds a gleaming gold-and-white badge right in front of his nose. She is seventeen, not just a prodigy but the prodigy. The name von Karma causes whispers to follow in her wake. 

"Am I going cross-eyed or do you have two prosecutors' badges because you're just that extra?"

"Ha!" Franziska sits back in her chair, across the table from Miles and Phoenix. Phoenix's eyes are still crossed. "Of course. Since I earned my badge before you" - she points at Phoenix - "earned yours, I am entitled to two."

"Do you get a third when you beat me?" he asks.

Phoenix passes the bar before Franziska is given her first case; she looks profoundly disappointed when she sees that he will not be her first opponent.

-

On the first trial that Franziska prosecutes, the verdict is a "not guilty". Miles is there to watch on the first day; when Franziska introduced herself as “Prosecutor von Karma”, the judge's eyes grew wide and he did not speak for a solid minute. The defense team immediately began whispering, giving Franziska fearful glances. Miles picks up words all around him, echoing through the courtroom: falsified, corrupt, attempted murder. Franziska stands through it all, waits for the courtroom to quiet, with her head held high, standing like a statue with her hands clasped behind her back, only her fingers twitching.

The trial drags on for a full three days and her thorough, comprehensive analysis of everything that could vaguely resemble a clue at the crime scene leaves the judge, the gallery, and the police all without a shred of doubt that they have finally apprehended the correct suspect. Watching her is something strange: the way she objects to the defense's statements, her gestures when she corrects them with a confident smirk. She points with the accusatory finger that she has used to prod Miles in the face all their lives, but he isn't used to the way that when she finishes laying out her facts, she spreads her hands wide, palms up, inviting the court to consider her words; or the little flourished bows that she makes, or the way she taps the side of her head as thought to say��think about it before she issues a correction to the defense's theories. Miles has his own trial at the same time on the second day, but on the third he is back in the gallery, Phoenix with him. He nudges Miles with his elbow, nodding at Franziska as, palms open, she gestures as though to the words she has just finished speaking, and whispers, "She looks like someone we know, now doesn't she?" Miles blinks and can't quite figure out why Phoenix is looking at him like that.

After the trial is over, the babble that spills from the courtroom into the lobby is infuriating; Miles doesn't realize that he's curled his hands into fists, readied to start a confrontation, until Phoenix's hand on his shoulder grounds him. The perpetrators keep walking, their words still ringing in his ears: "must not really be a von Karma if she lost like that, huh?"

The utterances of her name suddenly, confusedly, quiet, when in the main lobby, Prosecutor von Karma receives a huge embrace from Defense Attorney Gregory Edgeworth. Miles is too far away to hear what is father is saying, but there is obviously pride, and then something apologetic as he is forced to rush off elsewhere, not leaving without a second hug and kissing Franziska on her forehead. She stands there alone after he leaves, looking tiny and lost and alone, but she brightens instantly when Phoenix yells over the crowd "Hey, Fran!" and waves.

"What are you doing here, Phoenix Wright?" she asks, darting over to them.

"I came to see the debut of the prosecutor who's going to kick my ass, of course."

She laughs and looks at Miles, something like doubt creeping into her face. "You did well," he says, studying her reaction; does he sound insincere? Should he give more praise? Will she think more is insincere? The gap in conversation draws longer. He struggles to think of something. "How did you think to examine the last witness' apartment with Luminol? He would have gotten away if you hadn't but how even did you figure to..."

Tension disappears from her shoulders and the anxiety in her face smooths away. Talk about evidence, about methodology, not feelings; they are both better in the realm of the concrete. "On our second day of investigation, I thought I saw blood in the carpet. A small spot." She circles her thumb and forefinger together to form a circle less than a centimeter in diameter. "When Detective Scruffy and I returned yesterday with some more questions, there was none such spot to be seen. I found that odd, given how unnaturally clean the witness' apartment was the first day we spoke with him. If he had already cleaned recently, why clean again, if not to cover something up?"

"Wasn't the carpet that you're talking about maroon, though?" Phoenix asks. "How did you ever see a little bloodstain on a maroon carpet? And who has a maroon carpet?"

"As it turns out, people who are liable to commit murder," Miles says.

"It is my job to carefully investigate any scene that may be of importance to a case," Franziska says. "It is my job, with close observation and decisive evidence, to find the truth, and often the truth hides in the smallest details, so then I must examine the smallest details."

"I'm imagining you crawling around on the floor squinting at the carpet while the detective tries to interview the witness," Phoenix says.

Franziska slowly tilts her head to the side to look at him, her face perfectly expressionless, her eyes unflinchingly fixed to his face, and says dryly, "Perhaps it is so."

Phoenix waves to flag down someone else, and over the heads of everyone else in the lobby, Miles spots Diego, presumably with Mia somewhere nearby. "There you are!" Diego says, clapping a hand on Phoenix's shoulder. "Trial's going to another day; we've got to go investigate the scene again and we need all hands on deck. Get ready to get moving - who's this?" Franziska looks comically small in front of him, and frowning, she sizes him up in return, her eyes lingering on his mask.

"This is," Phoenix says, with a dramatic pause, and Franziska groans as has long been her only response to his theatrics, "the prodigy Prosecutor Franziska von Karma, our new greatest rival, dutifully sworn for the past eight years to kick my ass in court."

"Eight years, really?" Mia asks.

"She's my sister," Miles explains. "Franziska, this is Mia Fey, chief of Fey and Co Law Offices, and her partner, Diego Armando. They work with Phoenix and me - or we work with them, if you prefer to be pedantic about it."

"I do, actually," Diego says.

"Nice to meet you, Franziska." Mia extends a hand. "I look forward to seeing you in the courtroom in action."

"Thank you, Ms Fey," Franziska says, shaking her hand. "I do, as well."

"We've got to be heading out soon," Mia says to Miles. "Another few minutes." 

The message is implicit: wrap it up. Miles nods. Phoenix is already asking Diego about the details of their trial and Mia joins them, leaving Miles and Franziska alone on their side of the lobby. He looks at his sister, and then away, and then back again before he finally manages to say, "I'm proud of you, Franziska."

She narrows her eyes. These are words he has never said before. She assesses them carefully for tone, hidden meaning, wary perhaps of something patronizing or pitying, a sorry about your loss that Miles does not mean now and never intends to mean. "Honestly. I am. The whole court didn't know what to make of you." A prosecutor who kept pressing even when the judge was about to hand down a "guilty" verdict, who was sure that the truth was still buried somewhere and would not stop until she dug it up for all to see, who had no concern for a win record.

"Do you know what the von Karma family motto is?" Franziska asks quietly. Even if Miles did know, she does not leave enough time to answer, instead continuing, "It is 'to be perfect in every way'." He thinks she is about to go on, but she doesn't.

"And what does that mean to you?" he asks.

She raises her head to look him in the eyes. "To be a perfect trial, the one single truth must be uncovered. There is no room for stones left unturned, lies left unexposed, or testimony left unspoken. To do anything less is to fail in our role as prosecutors - and perfection leaves no room for failure. What I am is the opposite of my father, and I will be perfect - this, I promise you."

Their relationship has never been one built on obvious affection, but he thinks this - this deserves a hug. "And you" - when they pull apart she prods him several times in the chest - "must be perfect, because I will accept a rival no less."

In her parlance, truth is perfection, and perfection, the truth. "I think I can do that," he says. 

"And since you have your fool, you may have him crawl about on the floors, and escape that fate yourself."

"My fool?"

"Yes, yours; and I believe your crime scene awaits. Remember what I have told you, Miles Edgeworth."

- It is a week and a half after the trial when Miles drops by his father's office to retrieve a case file that Mia thinks may be helpful to reference as a precedent. Franziska is there, sitting on a desk, a plastic ruler in her hand which she is rapping against the edge of the desk with increasing frequency. "Is something wrong?" 

"No," she says. 

"So you're just about to vibrate into orbit for the fun of it?"

"Yes."

He stops noticing the tapping sound but then, flipping through binders to refresh his memory on which should contain this file he is searching for, he notices when it stops. "I am going to visit my father," Franziska says, without prompting, when Miles looks up.

"Oh." He isn't sure what to say to that. She has never told him about those meetings before; he has not asked. 

"And I will tell him what I told you - what is perfection, and that I have attained perfection more than he ever did. I will tell him proudly of my loss."

The final indignity, the final revenge, for what Manfred von Karma tried to do, would be for him to hear these words from his daughter's lips. She smacks the ruler against the desk one last time so that with a sound like the crack of a whip, it snaps in half. "I will tell him what I am."