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Statistically speaking, most little girls are likely to be afraid of their homes being haunted.
Most little girls are likely to shriek at the floorboards creaking under an weight that's not there. They’re likely to hide beneath their covers in the dead of night, cowering from the phantoms that giggle and shift in the shadows on their walls. For most little girls had the instinct to survive, to run and hide from any specter that might try and harm them—and most little girls understood, intuitively, that there was no such thing as a benevolent spirit.
Well, most little girls were notably not Franziska von Karma. In fact, Franziska’s complete inability to act her age was easily the most distinct thing about her. Case in point, Franziska was not afraid of ghosts. Franziska was not afraid of anything. What on earth was there even to fear? Even if ghosts were corporeal to begin with, there was no phantom in any realm that stood a chance against Franziska in a fight. She was armed and dangerous and knew how to hit, and hit hard, and Papa had taught her as soon as she could crawl to never go down without clawing and screaming.
Furthermore, Franziska knew better than to rely on intuition. Intuition may have been helpful in the most extenuating of circumstances, sure, but it certainly would not hold up in court. Regardless of if her flawed intuition said that spirits were to be feared, there were countless pieces of literature to the contrary—many such cases of those same spirits being channeled for the purpose of solving cold cases. And while results certainly did vary in their helpfulness, there were next to no examples of ghosts ever misusing their hosts or trying to do any harm to the still-living.
So no, Franziska is not afraid of spirits. Evidence suggests there is simply no reason to be. And if this house is haunted—she’s always suspected it was—then it is haunted by the ghosts of von Karmas long passed, flesh and blood and bone and heart, specters made of the same starstuff as she. She knows, more than she knows the grey of the autumn skies outside, that she is safe among their company.
There is something… different about The Golden Man, though.
The Golden Man’s visits are scarce, few and far between. Or, at least, Franziska thinks they are—he’s almost never fully realized, a floater in the corner of her vision, gone as soon as she turns her head. Some days, she feels like perhaps she is imagining him—until it’s late at night, and Franziska’s wandering to the kitchens to get something to drink, or awake in a panic because she'd heard crying, and she sees him outside Miles’ bedroom door.
Always Miles. Never anyone else. Certainly never her.
And yet still, she feels ever-drawn to him, desperate to know who he is, who he was, what he’s seen with those ever-hidden eyes that lie in the shadowy rim of the fedora he’s always donning. What shade do those eyes live in, she wonders? Are they grey like her papa’s, icy blue like hers? Framed by that downturned brow that was so distinctly von Karma, that lazy-lidded rest that almost contradicted it?
Franziska wants to know, more than anything she wants to. But he’s gone before she can even blink, and so she is left wondering.
Truthfully, she hasn’t thought about him in quite a while the next time she sees him. But, in Franziska’s defense, there are much more pressing things to think about, right now—namely, fighting back against the tears that are remaining steadfast in their mission to crawl up her throat. It’s already dreadfully embarrassing and inconvenient to cry, but more than that it’s not going to make her aching head feel any better, it’s certainly not going to bring her fever down.
One of the downsides of having such a steely constitution was that when illness took Franziska, it took her hard. Flattening her, taking no prisoners, the virus she’d managed to pick up as the fall budded new around her was utterly wretched in its brunt. Because nothing could ever be easy for a creature such as her, it came at the absolute worst time—when Miles was abroad studying, when Papa was utterly swamped in work that saw him keeping unreasonably long hours, when Franziska had a million other things she wanted to do besides lay there convalescing.
And… if one caught her on a night where the fever blazed hot and the stars twinkled bright, when she could not shake her chills nor the tears from her eyes… she might—might!—let it slip that she was lonely. After all, who wouldn’t be? Even the strongest, most iron-willed, most powerful people in the universe got lonely sometimes! And so it stood to reason that Franziska could get lonely, too.
Tonight, the world outside her massive windows seems to twist and bend in tandem with her feelings. A swirling autumn thunderstorm had kicked up the same day she’d first fallen ill, and just like her temperature, it hadn’t faltered since. The rapping of shedding tree branches on the glass already did nothing for her pounding head, and when the whole house starts shaking with the force of the winds, Franziska feels like she might simply perish.
Curled around her is a blanket, one that’s soft and special and a balm on any other darkened night—but today her skin is prickling, oversensitive, rejecting the thing like a transplanted organ. It takes everything she has to not toss the covers off, but the tug-o-war that her biology has her in is making that difficult, too—though her head’s on fire, she can’t stop shivering, useless immune system refusing to decide what it wants from her.
Everything… everything hurts. Every bone, every muscle, every nerve, every cell. Franziska’s read books—logically she knows a person could hurt like this, but experiencing it firsthand is something else entirely. If she had known this was what would become of the twinge in her throat a mere day ago, perhaps she might have had the forethought to not spend her nights awake and studying. Perhaps she might have gotten some more rest, prepared her body for the onslaught to come.
There’s nothing she can do about it now, though. In any case, that pain is nothing compared to the darkness of her room, the way even if she were to cry out, no one would hear her. Miles’ room is empty, and Papa’s is all the way across the house, far off in the other wing. Even if he could hear her, the whole house is sleeping, anyway. There’s no one but Franziska and her aching head, her aching bones, her aching throat, her aching heart.
Try as she might to hold them back, a few tears slip out around the vice of Franziska’s shut eyes. She’s white knuckle on her blanket, hoping that perhaps if she just clenches every muscle in her body, she can force the virus out. All it does is make her cry harder, and she feels her teeth might shatter from the way she presses them together, muffling the pitiful little sounds of sobbing into the stuffed cat she’s holding.
How long she stays like that is anyone’s guess. Time moves differently when one is ill, outside of its normal bounds and dragging tar-like around whoever may be unfortunate enough to get caught in its cauldron. Franziska cannot quantify how long she cries in any parameter other than too long, the same unit of measurement she uses each and every time she gives into the childish whim.
She knows that she stops, though, knows the exact moment those tears cease. Or rather, the moment she feels them being wiped away.
Papa did this, sometimes—silent and strong-jawed, his ever-stony expression betraying the tenderness laden in every swipe of his gnarled thumb across her cheeks. Moving with careful, focused intent, as though letting even one drop fall to the floor would mean he’d somehow failed her.
But for all the love that Papa handles her with, his touch is notably cold. The both of them run icy, it’s built into their code—a frigid touch to match their cold and calculating minds, the way the air went subzero around their cornered prey. When a von Karma locked their eyes upon that which it sought to defeat, the legends say storms rumbled behind them, eating any warmth that once existed in their world. Miles always did fuss about it, drama queen that he was—Franziska’s little hand would grab his, and his first response always was to shiver at the chill of it.
Because Miles, of course, was always warm. Perhaps she felt a twinge of jealousy at that, but it suited him and his saccharine heart.
So, when she feels the hand on her face, at first she thinks it’s Papa’s. Then, with a moment’s clarity, she realizes it must be Miles—but that’s impossible, because Miles is due to be gone for another week at least, so…
Well. When the evidence one has is not enough to make a case, the logical conclusion is to gather more until it does. And so—despite the fact that even this action hurts, somehow—Franziska angles her head ever-so-slightly and glacially opens her eyes.
At first, he is formless, a fluttering curtain of gilded light that wobbles and blurs like heatwaves, though the sun is nowhere in sight. The glow that radiates from him could rival the celestial hearth of it, though—dispelling her persistent shivering, loosening the taut feelings that rip across her muscles. Slowly but surely, the waver of him stills, fades into itself, and then he is there—The Golden Man, closer than she’s ever seen him, peering down at her with something unidentifiable written on his still-hidden face.
Ever the bookworm, Franziska has questions.
“Why are you here?”
Her voice sounds like gravel when it hits her own ears. It’s weak and struggling, hardly the first impression she wants to make. Though, she supposes it’s not the first—the two of them have existed in proximity for quite some time, now, even if they’ve never spoken proper.
The stranger just smiles, a near-hidden thing like all the rest of him. No matter the light and how it rolls off of him, those eyes of his always remain obscured, dark still beneath his hat. Having finished wiping the rivulets from Franziska’s face, he moves his digits toward her sweaty bangs, curling them back into place behind her ear. He does not speak as he does so, leaving her question unanswered.
“I’ve seen you,” she carries on, hoping to awaken his words. “You only visit Miles. Well, Miles is not here. It’s just me. So why?”
Silent, still. The stranger moves in stuttery half-steps, his every action looking like a video dropping, backtracking its own frames. As though he’s being broadcast through an imperfect signal, the feed struggling against itself to keep up. When he turns away and sits down on the edge of the bed, it sinks beneath his weight despite himself. There at her flank, Franziska can feel the heat that pulses off him still—as though he’s wandered over from the spiritual plane and brought a chunk of the sun alongside him.
She watches enraptured as his lips part, brow furrowed and head aching, feverdizzy still. His voice sounds familiar, but not enough to coalesce into a memory in her sloshing thoughtspace. She’s heard it in a dream, she’s heard it in a home movie, she knows she’s heard it somewhere—and yet, she cannot say.
“Aren’t you lonely?”
Reflexively, Franziska feels herself tense, and then another wave of pain tears across her body. It comes so quickly and intensely, she almost doesn’t register—
English. He’s speaking English. Perfect English, like Papa’s. American English, like Miles’. For a moment the words sound like nothing on the air, gibberish that refuses to translate as it passes through her.
She swallows through the fire crackling in her throat, sniffles a bit indignantly, switches to English herself. “And what if I am?!”
A pause. His smile looks as uncanny as the rest of him, but something beyond Franziska’s own perception tells her that grin is safe.
“You’d never let someone else stay lonely,” whispers the soul, “right?”
Franziska puffs her cheeks up. “Of course not! That’s not something an arbiter of justice would do!”
The Golden Man tilts his head to the side, the cut of his strong jawline pointing toward Franziska. “An arbiter of justice, you say?”
She clutches her stuffed toy tighter, fidgeting with the lace on its dress. There is a part of Franziska that is just so tired. That doesn’t want to sit here and have this meaningless conversation with this stranger she does not know. But, he asks all the right questions, and though her eyes droop and her chest hurts and her throat aches… she cannot help but give him answers.
“Mhm,” says Franziska, a murmur where its normally a declaration, “when I grow up I’m gonna be a famous lawyer just like Papa.”
“Is that so?”
There’s an upturn of sorts in his voice—something longing and bittersweet, something that makes Franziska’s heart feel heavy and sad. It needles at her insides, distinct from the fever, and suddenly she feels like crying all over again. The Golden Man carries on, and that sadness in his voice grows wings, goes alight—its weights turn to dust and his words to something that soars.
“Then I’ll look out for you,” he says, “so you can keep on looking out for others.”
And Franziska cannot tell him, that dream is yet to take shape. She cannot tell him how she aches to move faster, how she chases and chases and falls in the dustcloud her brother leaves behind. She cannot, with her stumbling tongue and imperfect English and feverish head, tell him that on cold, dark nights like this one, she fears she’ll never catch up.
Instead, the words are a tearlogged whisper, “I look out for no one but myself.”
And without hesitation, the stranger responds, “That isn’t true.”
Because he’s seen her, of course—in the dead of night, sprinting down the halls in an attempt to get to Miles’ room as fast as she can. Running as quickly as her short little legs will take her, as if the mere thought of him spending even one millisecond without her will choke him from the inside out. Miles Edgeworth awakens in terror, sobbing and screaming and curling in on himself, and when he does, Franziska von Karma is there, pulling him from the wreckage of that gunsmoke-choked elevator.
The stranger says none of this. Somehow, Franziska hears it still. It’s there in his silence, in the love that pours off him when she sees his careful steps toward Miles’ door. Most of all, she sees it in how he fades on those late nights—as though Franziska’s presence reassures him, someone is here to help.
A protective spirit, then? What a lovely thought. She ignores the twinge of resentment that tries to gain a voice in some more indignant part of her miserably sick headspace—why is it always Miles, even when it comes to her own flesh and blood?
But when The Golden Man outstretches his arm once more—when he draws the covers up from where they’ve fallen off her shoulder, seeming to infuse their powder-blue hue with the warmth that falls off his glowing form in waves… only then does Franziska’s heart settle, the blizzard inside it fading into gentle, calming snowdrifts. Only then does she remember her namesake, her creed, how the thought kept her similarly warm, on similarly frigid nights. That all things, good and bad, stored themselves in the cosmos until it was their time to come back around to where they first breathed life.
On that thought, though…
“But if you stay…” mumbles a sleepy Franziska, quickly drifting as the illness calms itself, as the world begins to regain its comfort, “you’ll get sick too.”
In lieu of any response, The Golden Man simply lets out a chuckle, unbothered entirely at the thought of it. Though Franziska’s nodding off—lulled even further by the mystical tenor of this laugh—she finds the strength to crack her eyes just barely open, get one last look at this benevolent phantom that lovingly haunts her home. For the first time ever, she sees him without his hat—he’s taken it off, pressed its cavity to the chest where his heart once beat. Squinting blearily against the fever, Franziska uses every ounce of her waning consciousness to stare long and hard at the ephemeral shape of his face.
Square jawed, strong-nosed, his face all hard lines… no von Karma she’s ever seen, none except—
“I anticipate I’ll be just fine.”
When he smiles down at her, he does it with Miles’ eyes.