#is it obvious that fran is my favorite character in this entire damn au? PROBABLY IS.

[wardencommanderrodimiss]

Struck with a sudden major desire to write stuff for the Bullshit Defense AU even though that’s not my NaNo project, but I’m mitigating that somewhat by rereading and releasing into the wild this technically-finished piece that at the time I wasn’t quite happy enough with it to post, but now I’m just like, sure, here you go. I like it more than I don’t, so up it goes.

---

Miles texts her when the jury reaches its verdict on Vera Misham: Not Guilty. Franziska thanks him for telling her and ignores further attempts to engage her in conversation, returning to work that seems suddenly less important than the prospect of overhauling their entire legal system, putting an end to the madness that has plagued her entire lifetime. She could have consulted on this project, on the committee, had the offer, and refused, recommending Simon instead. He refused, also; the phantom is the only thing with his undivided attention, as much now as six years ago. She had guessed that would happen but still thought that he would be a better prosecutorial consultant than her, she who can barely connect to people and has no idea what should go into the selection and mechanics of a jury, versus he who has made his bones on cracking open the heads of everyone he ever crosses paths with.

Mia texts her later, telling her where they “all” – who is all? All of the defense attorneys in the family? All of the lawyers in the Edgeworth-Fey family but Franziska? – have gathered to discuss the trial and the system. Her father’s office – no, Ray’s now, Ray’s since her father’s retirement – is the biggest of all of them, the best place for going on ten people to have a rousing debate. She’s curious what happened in the trial, too curious, and finally by four she gives in and packs up for the day. Sebastian is in his office when she swings by, telling him she is leaving; he asks her if she has seen Gavin. She hasn’t, wonders if he just didn’t come back after the trial, but his car is parked a few spots down from hers in the garage. In hiding, then? For the loss, or something worse?

The Justice-Shields Law Office on the window still takes her by surprise. She was never even used to seeing Shields Law Office before it changed, again, and she won’t admit it to Ray but he was right and that is very much a badass name for a law firm. 

The conversation hits her before the door is halfway open, and then when it is closed behind her, a pen hits her, flung loose from Lana’s hand while she was gesturing and yelling at Diego. He probably deserves it. Miles steps in, on Lana’s side, and Mia tosses them all a Look before she resumes talking to Ray. Trucy is bouncing around all of them; Gregory and Phoenix are off to the side, deep in conversation, both wearing deeply serious expressions. Apollo is perched on the couch closest to the door, looking dazed. Franziska sits next to him.

“You should see our full family dinners,” she says. “Louder, and so many more flying objects, but just as much legal debate.”

“How much more family do you have?” Apollo asks. “I thought mine was chaotic, and it’s just six of us.”

“This is only half,” Franziska says. Apollo swears under his breath, a word or language she doesn’t recognize. “Just the lawyers.” And ex-lawyers: one retired (sort of, mostly), two stripped of their badges. 

They sit there in silence for a while, listening to the conversation that bounces about the office, over to them. Lana, with her jaw set, is speculating on what she thinks about the ability of prosecutors to adapt to or accept the new system. She might be a decade removed from the office, but not much about it has changed. Franziska is glad to have Simon and Sebastian on her side for the uphill battle that it will be. Miles, listening and saying nothing, keeps glancing over at Franziska. Mia is wrestling another cup of coffee out of Diego’s hands. 

“Aren’t you a prosecutor?” Apollo asks. Franziska nods. “I was surprised that Mr Wright didn’t pick you for the trial – at first anyway. Then it made sense that he got Prosecutor Gavin, but…”

“Phoenix Wright and I are not on good terms,” Franziska says, stiffer than she meant to, but there are no good ways to say any of this. “Not at this time.”

Apollo suddenly looks like he regrets asking. “Oh.”

“I haven’t heard the details of the case,” Franziska says. She might not be good with people but even she can tell that Apollo is eager for a conversational redirect and has no idea what to do. “I am surprised that he requested Klavier Gavin for the case, as well.”

So Apollo explains a story seven years old, and it seems to her a final nail in the coffin that she learns Phoenix’s story from someone who is not him. Seven years that he could have sought help, seven years of isolating himself – now he has burned that bridge and Franziska is happy to leave it broken.

No. Not happy. But what else is there to do?

She is about to stand, maybe leave, maybe talk to Miles, when Trucy comes over, and without greeting or preamble, her smile falling off her face, flings herself onto the couch next to Franziska, leaning her head against her shoulder. Franziska leans back. Now she is stuck.

She lingers for a few hours, speaking with whoever comes over to her, Trucy, and Apollo. Phoenix is not one of them. An email from Simon finally jars her back to the reality of the work she is neglecting, and she gently nudges Trucy off her shoulder. Phoenix calls out to her as she is leaving, but she lets the door swing closed behind her and starts down the stairs.

“Franziska!”

She doesn’t stop until she is at the bottom of the stairs and she turns, waiting for Phoenix to hurry down after her. “Franziska, wait.”

They haven’t spoken face-to-face, the two of them, since that day in April in the defendant lobby. She raises her chin and stares him down, unwilling to extend a hand or a single word until he does first.

“Would your father be proud of this?” he asks. He sounds bitter, spiteful, the way he has come to sound more and more as the years without his badge wore on. She is almost grateful for that; she doesn’t have to feel bad about what she said, not when he is bringing it back up with an edge as sharp as hers was.

“Of course not,” she snaps back. “He is like Kristoph Gavin – a superiority complex and a desperate need for control over the course of a trial. He will be disgusted to hear of this Jurist System.”

“Good.”

“Good,” Franziska agrees. “But, if he knew, my father” – she tilts her chin up toward the office at the top of the stairs – “knew, he would not be so proud of this.”

There. That shames him, his eyes falling toward the ground, head ducking just slightly. “Gregory Edgeworth would be ashamed of you if he knew,” she snarls, like a wolf who has seen the throat of its prey and will only tear in deeper with that opening. “Mia Fey would be. All of them.”

“Then tell them,” Phoenix says, and if her eyes were closed when she heard him speak those words, it would sound like a defiant challenge – but he has not looked at her. His stare is haunted, fixed on the wall. “Then go ahead and tell them. Why haven’t you?”

For Miles, she thinks, for Miles, because he loves you. But that is not the answer, maybe the barest part of it – the reason she has forgiven Miles for forgiving him – that cannot explain why it is still a raw open wound in her chest while she stands here. “Because I have no wish to hurt them,” she answers. “Not the way you hurt me and my brother both.”

At that, he looks at her, and raises one eyebrow, doubtfully. “You?” he asks.

Does he doubt that? Does he doubt that her anger was not multifaceted, twisted together with pain? Does he not think that she loves him, has always, at times more than she loved her own stubborn, frustrating brother? The words feel less like she is spitting them and more that they are torn from her. “I believed in you,” she snarls, in a way that is both whisper and scream from a raw, mangled throat. “I believed in you, always! From when we were children, from when you decided that the future you wanted was to wear that badge--!” She jabs a finger into his chest, where the badge should be though it has been lost longer than he ever had it, the ghost of something gold. “From when you lost it, I believed in you! I believed that you would never – I defended you! Against every word in the Prosecutors Office, I argued for you, I defended you, I spent weeks working to convince Sebastian, Simon, that I knew you and you would never, ever, ever do – I knew you and you never could--!”

“I didn’t ask you to do that,” he says, frustratingly blasé, and her mind is still catching up to that by the time she has slapped him, purely instinct driving her, the way she didn’t in April because she had words that could cut him deeper.

“You could have asked me for help! Any of us would have, but I – I would have dropped everything! If you had just asked, you fool!”

Simon asked, eventually, despite the danger, and Franziska did not hesitate. She would not have hesitated for Phoenix, not for anything, nothing more important, not for the world. 

“I know,” he says. “And that’s why I didn’t.”

He holds up an arm to block her slap this time. “You could not have known what Kristoph Gavin was! Not then! That he was willing to murder a child to keep his secrets! You had no reason to be afraid!”

“I didn’t have evidence, no,” he says, “but I was.”

“And I have worked more dangerous cases than that of Kristoph Gavin,” she snaps. Is working, now. “I am not afraid for my life, for the sake of the truth!”

“It doesn’t matter now,” he says.

“It does! It will always matter! Your crime does not go away! Not when you fall to the level of my father, of Damon Gant, of the corruption I have sworn to stand against! I cannot compromise, not for anyone, not even for you, Phoenix Wright, because I--”

– could easily become that. Wouldn’t it be so easy to fall, so much simpler – if she knows of guilt then why fight for every half-relevant shred of evidence when she could just create it? Wouldn’t it be easy to think herself perfect, self-righteous, the sole arbitrator –

Because I am afraid to become what my name bids me to be. What others think me because of that legacy.

She’s crying now, hadn’t realized she was close to doing that until she feels the first tears sliding down her cheeks, watches Phoenix’s face fall. “Do not look at me with that pity, Phoenix Wright! I don’t need that from you – do not pretend that you are sorry for what you have done!”

“I’m sorry there wasn’t another way,” he says. “But now there is, and that’s what I wanted to do. Make sure that doesn’t happen again. Make sure no one is backed into the corner I was.”

“There was another way for you!” she screams. “There always was! I believed in you! My entire life, I was sure! And you – you disappointed me! I was wrong about you!”

And he didn’t even kill anyone. She wonders how close the Gavin brothers were, once, before seven long years – she wonders if what she is feeling is just a fraction of Klavier’s pain.

Thinking about him just unsettles her more.

“Franziska, I--” Phoenix stops. He presses a hand to his eyes. “No, you’re right. What am I supposed to say?”

“That you’re a fool.” She wipes her cheeks dry. “You’re a foolish fool.”

“Yeah, I am. Right as ever.”

“Stop it.”

“What?”

“This – this agreement! This not fighting!”

“You want me to yell back at you?”

“Yes! Then perhaps I could hate you! Then I could just be angry that you are a fool instead of just – sad. Sad that you are – this now!”

She can’t hate him; she could never, not Phoenix, who she has known for as long as she has known her brother and her father; who she has spent a lifetime more time with than the father who gave her her name. But she does want to. She wants to very much.

“Fran?”

She doesn’t look back at him.

“Are you going to start coming to family dinners again? Trucy misses seeing you – Miles does too.”

They didn’t talk about Zak – Franziska wasn’t going to bring it up if Trucy didn’t – but she doesn’t doubt that her niece will want to talk about it someday. And their situations might not be identical – Franziska was too young when she was adopted – but she thinks she, of anyone, can understand the conflict best.

Families are difficult things.

“I might,” she says. “For Trucy’s sake.”

-

Gavin’s car is already in the lot when Franziska arrives in the morning, but around noon Sebastian comes by her office to ask again if she has seen him, because he isn’t responding to any knocking on his door. “He might not want to speak with you, or anyone,” she says, then dragging him into her office to give him the abridged summary of what happened in the trial with Gavin’s brother.

“I mean, he still doesn’t have to avoid me,” Sebastian says, looking more worried than ever, fidgeting with a pen he plucked off Franziska’s desk. “He was already working here as well when – my father – he knows that I know that…”

That he is not to blame for the sins of a man whose name and blood he shares. There are three of them in that club, now.

She doesn’t try and seek out Gavin because she knows she will be less welcome than Sebastian, has made herself less welcome. Later in the afternoon she is taking the stairs back up to her office, absorbed in a memo, when suddenly there is someone else in front of her, who she nearly runs into. He springs out of the way and she manages to process who it is who is using the stairwells in which Franziska almost never sees anyone else.

“Frau von Karma.”

Professional conduct be damned, she had nearly slapped him the first – and only – time he called her Fraülein. He learned his lesson quickly. “Prosecutor Gavin. Sebastian Debeste has been looking for you. He wished to speak to you about the Jurist System.”

Gavin’s expression betrays nothing. He has as good of a poker face as Phoenix does, as his brother did. “Ja. I will keep that in mind.” Beneath his eyes are shadows of exhaustion, the kind that she sees often on Miles or Phoenix. Again she wonders how close he and Kristoph were – and even before, several months ago, there was his bandmate, the detective. “Now if you’ll excuse me…”

He presses up against the wall and sidles past her; she nearly lets him go, but something is still eating away at her. I didn’t ask you to do that. “Prosecutor Gavin, wait,” she says.

Looking down at him, she remembers herself and Phoenix, yesterday, a different stairwell at a different office, and a conversation about the same things in the way. The same ghosts linger on all of their shoulders. She hasn’t thought far enough ahead to know what to say. “I… am sorry about your brother.”

He closes his eyes, his shoulders hitching up with a sharp breath. “Frau von Karma,” he says, “I know you don’t like me, and I have made my peace with that. You don’t have to pretend any sympathy. It demeans us both to pretend, ja?”

His smile is gut-wrenchingly sad.

She was wrong. God, was she wrong.

“I…” It is easier to admit it to herself than to speak the sentiment into being. It always has been with anything soft. “I was mistaken,” she says. “In my assessment of you. I thought your brother’s crime was yours, and I – that was incorrect.”

His mouth twists. Is it her failure to properly apologize that is the problem? The words have dried up in her throat, even thinking of how her father, and Ray, and all of them would be proud of her if she can manage to admit wrongdoing, how Phoenix always frowned at the rancor she directed at Klavier Gavin, never joining in, often telling her to lay off him, Fran; there’s nothing to suggest that he did anything wrong.

Not him, but the other. How long did Phoenix know? “I was mistaken,” she repeats. The proper words have died again on her tongue. “And while I cannot say that I understand fully what it is you have gone through, I do know – somewhat, at a lesser amount, what it is to think you know someone and have them let you down. And what it is to be judged on the crimes of another who shares your name.”

He is still silent, looking at her with those sad, tired eyes, like a kicked dog. “That is all,” she says, and it’s not, it’s not, not when Apollo and Ray both clearly think highly of him as a prosecutor, not when she has not uttered I am sorry, not when the matter of Phoenix hangs on her like a shroud. She hated him, for her belief in Phoenix, that he could not be capable of the crime accused – and he proved himself capable of it, and Gavin proved himself honest.

She is almost turned back up the stairs to leave, cursing her own stubborn foolish pride that turns her tongue to lead, she has fought and clawed her way into her position and she cannot admit that she has been so wrong to another much like herself, when he speaks. His voice is nothing more than a murmur, barely audible over the clack of her heels on the steps. “Danke, Frau von Karma.”

“Guten Tag, Herr Gavin,” she says, and she stands there with her back turned until she has heard him leave.