Some chapter four. THere's probably about one or two chapters left to this at most (and this is probably the last one before overwhelming amounts of gay.)
Enjoy! I have too much fun writing Fran's temper tantrums.
Some 3-4 spoilers very briefly, if you already don't know what goes on in that case it's very vague.

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“Where are you going?”

On occasion, Franziska could look and sound more like a six year old than a sixteen year old. Her pouting lip had not changed a bit, and in a manner no different than she would have ten years before she had stormed into his room unannounced. Her detecting eyes hadn’t missed the half-packed suitcase opened up on his bed. Miles was sorting socks and barely even noticed her demand.

Franziska von Karma, although stubborn and a perfectionist, had grown up in court. She was sharp, cruel, and eternally frustrated but around her peers, the public, and her Father, she was an adult. Only around her “little” brother did she become a child once more.

“Tell me!” She reached for her whip with one hand, grabbing the suitcase with the other and pulling it. Seeing her intent, Miles saved his carefully folded clothing by grabbing the opposite end, pulling it back towards him.

His eyes met hers as he placed the pair of black socks into the leather suitcase. He’d learn to become expressionless.
“I’ve received a job offer.” He explained no more than he felt he had to. As usual, it wasn’t enough for Franziska.

“What sort of job?” She growled, crossing her arms. “Are you working for a firm?” She didn’t have to add that Von Karmas were too good to work underneath anyone…inferior.

He shook his head and began to zip the bag. “I’ll be working for myself. It’s not an official position, only one case that I’ve been requested for....”
Only one case…then he wouldn’t be gone for very long. But he had packed too much to be going only for a few days! Nearly all of his drawers had been emptied and his closet was bare.
“The case is local, then?” It wouldn’t be in Frankfurt, a city only a few hours away. “Vienna?”

This was what he had expected her reaction to be. “No, Franziska.”
She frowned and wrinkled her nose, despising being wrong. “Further? Did you take the case in London? Or perhaps Paris?”

When it looked like her brother would refuse to respond, she whacked him as hard as she could. Her hands reached for his neck and she shoved him against the wall. Miles had grown up as well, trading in his nervous boyish personal for a sturdy, full body that could have easily pushed his sister away – but he was not one to rely on brute force, a primitive way of defense. Looking into her glare he raised his eyebrows and responded with the only word that he knew would make her recoil.

“America.”
Just as he predicted, the girl was shocked. As the rage boiled inside her, she let go of him and allowed her eyes to grow wide.

“America?!” As he went back to give his suitcase more attention, Miles winced at the sting of the whip that struck his back. “What is in America? It is a country of fools! What could possibly call you back there?”

Edgeworth shrugged, still not expressing much through his face. “I was asked to take a case.”

He was prepared for her next question, feeling more and more like one of the witnesses that had to suffer through her. “Where in America?”

His lips formed the words Los Angeles before he winced again. Her weapon had come down on his body.
“You idiot!” Franziska snarled at him. “Papa feared you would end up this way! A stupid romanticist who can’t forget the past!”
Miles raised his eyebrows and went to retrieve his bag, looking at the clock. Silently he began to brush past her.

“Especially your past, Miles Edgeworth! Your past isn’t worth even remembering.”

Silently, he turned around and reached for his magenta jacket, the only thing left in his small closet.
“I have no intentions of bringing up my past, Franziska.” He said sullenly, dragging the suitcase behind him and heading out into the hallway. “I received a case I wanted to take. That is all.”

The door closed behind him, just to burst open again as she followed, hanging on to his arm with a clenching grip.
“You’ll be back, Miles Edgeworth. When this case is over, you’ll come back.” She hissed. “But you won’t be welcome here. I’ll make sure of it.”

Bemused, her brother turned his head, stopping for only a split second.
“That’s where you’re wrong, Franziska. I’ve gotten an apartment there. I intend to stay in the states long after the trial is over…”
Her face was made of frustration and she made no effort to hide her anger. A voice couldn’t even escape from her throat as the fury made her way up her round cheeks.

“You won’t stay there long! When you lose your first case, you’ll be the laughingstock of the most foolish country a man could ever reside in!” Edgeworth did not intend to lose his case. He had read up carefully on the trial, due to start in several days. An escaped criminal running away to brutally murder the witness to his last crime? He was almost tempted to select a less open-and-close case to mark his debut.
He had no words left for Franziska and was almost out the front door when she pulled out her trump card.
“What did Papa say?” She hissed at him as he made his way down the front steps. This was a point where he had to respond. Giving up his cold shoulder act, he sighed and looked back up at her.

“Herr Von Karma hasn’t said anything.” Miles swallowed. “Yet. Although I’m sure when he finds out he’ll have some choice words for me…” His mentor was away on business in Austria. Edgeworth had, quite literally, warned no one that he had accepted his first real case.

Good job. He could almost see her thinking, and she glared with a touch of triumph. Before she could interject, a cream-colored car pulled up to the large mansion and Franziska realized just how serious her little brother was.

“I’ll let you have the honor of telling him about what you believe to be my most epic mistake.” His best-case scenario had been finishing packing in solitude and walking out of the house without Franziska noticing. He hadn’t tricked himself so much to think that it would actually occur so smoothly, and he had no intentions of staying around either way. “But my flight is in an hour. I’d prefer not to miss it.”

Without any sort of formal goodbye, the young man walked up to the taxi, dragging the battered old suitcase behind him.
Eleven years prior, Franziska had watched him drag the very same suitcase up the steps, his head lowered and his body small. Now, she found herself questioning if she would ever see him return.


She had followed every last one of his cases obsessively, tracking his progress through the news and the Internet. Most of the time she had to run searches to American websites to find out the information she desired about his win record. Some of the times, however, all she needed to do was turn on the television. Her little brother occasionally found himself involved in cases high profile enough to be shown on German networks.

His face was seen more often on T.V. after a certain SL-9 incident. The rumors had been broadcast all over the world and although Miles Edgeworth had come out on top, as usual, the term “forged evidence” had been whispered so loudly throughout the media that sometimes Franziska wondered why no one bothered to scream it.

She wasn’t sure whether to delve into delight that he was being questioned or remain jealous that his name was now almost always followed with the words “demon prosecutor.” Concern for her old companion’s ways was never once thought of. He was doing what Papa had taught him – winning at all costs. Even Franziska couldn’t deny his win record was just as perfect as her own.


Except…

“At least I’ve never had a defendant off himself right in my courtroom before…” She would grumble every time her brother’s feared name was broadcast. Nearly immediately after the tragic trial had come to a close she had sent him a scathing letter detailing everything he had done wrong. No reply had ever come, and when the mailbox was empty week after week it occurred to Franziska that she had never expected an answer.

She hadn’t bothered to write to him later. She wasn’t sure if her Papa would entirely approve of her being in contact with him, anyway – he had shown more or less of an indifference to his old protégé’s success since Miles had fled to America. Instead, he had proceeded to show off his only remaining trophy with even more vigor.

One day the inevitable news of the demon’s downfall reached Franziska’s ears. Her mouth had curled into a small grin as she read through the news website, devouring every detail of her little brother’s first real failure. He hadn’t been able to compensate against a rookie, of all rivals, an attorney with only one other win to his name.

Hah. She thought, expecting her triumph to resonate inside her with the feeling of fulfillment she had been hoping for every time she had checked the news.
But there was no echo inside of her as the tale of defeat started to sink in. In fact, she wondered if she had ever felt so hollow before.

As her win record accumulated to record-breaking heights, her brother’s plummeted. The second loss caught her off-guard and she hadn’t even been looking for it. It had come to her, wrapped up with verbose details about some children’s show and the words self-defense. That she didn’t care about nearly as much as the short paragraph towards the end of the report.

Although it seemed for a while that the prosecution had a solid attack, the most surprising thing about the case might be that Prosecutor Edgeworth himself questioned his own witness to the defense’s advantage. Witnesses say that at one point the prosecutor nearly insisted that his witness testify differently. Given this glimmer of opportunity the defense was able to exhume unexamined facts to light and reveal Ms. Vasquez as the murderer. Reporters and officers alike are looking into this unexplained move on the prosecution’s part. For now, Mr. Edgeworth has refused to comment on the matter.

Franziska knew how hard it was to get a witness to say what they ought to in the face of an audience. Too quickly would they get excited and declare something that would lead to unnecessary explanations and diversions and evidence one was hoping not to reveal yet – but it seemed that Miles had gotten himself a perfect witness and ruined it. He’d found someone who’d keep her mouth shut at all costs, and he had used her to drag an already blemished record through the mud...
What is he thinking?
He’d gone soft, that was what it was. If she remembered correctly – and a Von Karma always remembered correctly – he had lost to the same rookie twice in a row. Perhaps her brother was now…could he be? Intimidated by this defense attorney, this stranger? Hah! A Von Karma was not scared of anything.

Take that, Miles Edgeworth.
She scanned the report again, her blue eyes catching a hold on a name. Phoenix Wright. The attorney who had halted her brother, according to the papers, but somehow his named sounded even more familiar…

A faint memory of the name written in childish handwriting on the back of an envelope crossed her. A letter she had confiscated from her little brother when he was younger, one she hadn’t let him open – he didn’t even want to open it in the first place, but she hadn’t cared. That name on the flap of the envelope, a return address following…

It didn’t matter who it was. As long Franziska was now, finally, on top...

She hadn’t lost a single case, while her brother was off making mistakes to a rookie. Her nights had been sleepless; her spare time spent rememorizing laws and looking up even more cases or scouring the news for tales of Miles. But her shiny, spotless track record was worth it. German defense attorneys declined cases with her name attached to them, tossing them around like a hot potato and casting sympathetic looks at the poor saps that ended up having to face her. People dodged her on the streets and addressed her nervously even as they towered over her. Her father mentioned her in public, on occasion, without any hint of sourness in his voice.

He never talked about Miles Edgeworth. Franziska decided her father had simply chosen to forget about him, and she believed herself for years.

One Christmas, she was proven wrong. She’d woken up alone that morning, left with the damp chill and a pattering of rain beating down on the roof to keep her company. She was unfazed at first; she didn’t often keep strict tabs on her father, who was known to come and go as he pleased. Where he had gone off too wasn’t something that concerned her. It being Christmas, the court was closed – a day of work wasted to the whole Von Karma family. But surely, her father was off doing something career-oriented.

Her day hadn’t changed. She did what she normally went about doing every day that wasn’t some sort of inane religious holiday; she studied, reviewed a case she had taken on until she could recite every last detail of each report. And as usual, she turned on the television in the evening to greet the news, scourging for signs of any legal interest. A genius must keep herself informed, after all.

She met her father’s eyes through the glass box and rushed a hand to her mouth, surprised. The prosecutor leaned forward and turned up the volume to be sure she was hearing correctly.
A young newscaster spoke quick, clear German back to her as the photograph of her father digitally retreated to a corner of the screen.
“Prosecutor Von Karma will be working in America for the first time in fifteen years. Controversy is, of course, surrounding this trial, and many question whether Von Karma will be able to fairly prosecute his old student…”

What?! Miles’s face flashed up on the screen, an unflattering mugshot that he had turned his head away from.

“Miles Edgeworth, a graduate of a local university, spent most of his childhood and career under the wing of Von Karma here in Berlin. Both he and Von Karma have ties to a cold case that has been exhumed as a potential part of Prosecutor Edgeworth’s motivation…”

The television went on to explain, once again, that the lawyer found dead had been the attorney to prove innocent the last suspect in the DL-6 case.
DL-6…that was the death of Miles’s father, wasn’t it? Her mind searched vividly through the hundreds of letters and numbers she had memorized, trying to place a name to a case.

“After a difficult trial, Yogi was eventually found innocent by Hammond. No one else was ever found guilty and the case finally went cold. Today, many question whether anger towards the lack of closure in the DL-6 case caused Prosecutor Edgeworth to viciously murder Yogi’s attorney in cold blood…”

Yogi? She’d seen that name lately. Yanni Yogi, written on an envelope that her father had personally mailed several weeks ago.

“All of Germany will surely be watching this case in anticipation. What this case means for the future of Prosecutor Edgeworth, Prosecutor Von Karma, or the legal system in its entirety is something that at the moment is still unknown.”

During the next few days, Franziska von Karma did not turn off the television. She tore through the World sections of the newspapers, clipping even the articles that told her what she already knew. By the time Miles had confessed to the murder of Gregory Edgeworth, she had done the unthinkable and not taken on any new cases. Instead, she had quickly cleared up every last one she had been working on in order to dedicate all of her attention to the chaos occurring overseas…

And all the while, although she didn’t want to admit it, she found herself questioning as well. Could my little brother…really have killed someone?
Of course, her head told her sternly. Miles Edgeworth was a failure as an attorney and as a man, a waste of her papa’s time. It would be just like someone like him to commit a senseless murder, especially such an incompetent one. He’d gotten caught hours after the man was dead. Even Franziska, had she ever found a reason to shoot someone, could have at least gotten away with it.

But her heart would object ever so slightly, forcing back memories of the kind boy protecting her in a small closet.
“I get scared sometimes, too.”
That was only because he was weak, like all murderers.

It felt like she had known the truth before it came out. Something deep inside of her, paired with having first seen that envelope and the old, knowledge of the wound on her father’s shoulder, had expected what finally occurred.
Franziska watched the report briefly, listening to the outrage, and then stood and turned off the T.V.

Word of the suicide note came to her months after the press had given up, by way once again of the horribly impersonal evening news. Prosecutor Edgeworth had chosen death, the same newscaster had said matter-of-factly. More details at eleven.
With the news came, slowly and finally, one word that crossed her mind.
…Weak…

Miles Edgeworth was, and had always been, weaker than her.
The word sent a sting of heat through her veins, the first emotion she had been able to identify in months. Anger. It melted through the numbness that had iced her up, a heated force that directed her hand to reach for her whip and lash out at something, anything.

Her shouts filled the air, followed by snaps of the whip as she lunged at the walls, the chairs; whatever was unlucky enough to be within the reach of the weapon suffered. Up the stairs Franziska went, shattering glass and tearing any picture that reminded her of what had been before…

You never knew how to do anything!
She kicked at his door, her heel puncturing the wood with a force that had frightened many an attorney in court. Without any care she slammed it open, breaking it against the wall with an ill-gotten strength she had forgotten she had.
And now, you just go and give up…

His room was as orderly as it had been when he left it at twenty. She hadn’t touched it, or even gone in it at all. She had been tempted – but she had to control herself, she would always think.

Who needed control now?
But somehow, Franziska couldn’t bring herself to topple over the small drawer or shatter the lamp. She stood instead on the hard, bare floor, her arms shaking and her body frantic. She could hear her haggard breathing and sat down on the bed, emotion coursing through her small body still as if she was an electric circuit plugged into the wall…

This isn’t doing any good. The anger had somehow turned back on her brain, and with her brain came her logic. Just smashing up my own house isn’t going to help me at all.

The prosecutor caught her breath and leaned back against her brother’s old headboard, trembling enough to make it knock against the wall. The fury did not leave her, but merely dissolved into rational tangency - there were far better ways to express rage, she thought.

Her brother, suicidal idiot that he was, was not around to directly attack. No, she would have to go after his memory. She would have to prove what she already knew – she was better than him, always had been better than him.

Who had proven him weak in the first place? That defense attorney, Phoenix Wright.

Of course.
Slowly and wordlessly, she got up from the hard old bed, able to control her movements. Franziska’s quick stroll got her to her own bedroom in no time, and as she reached for her suitcase she began to formulate her plan.
And still, that doubt had not been quelled. Can I really do this? Can I defeat Phoenix Wright?

It wasn’t a question of whether she logically could triumph over him in court. A Von Karma was perfect. She wasn’t about to lose to anyone. But out of Miles’s memory, could she do it?

You’re not weak like him, are you Franziska? Her conscience sounded like her Papa and it was with certainty that she reached for the phone, her slim hands dialing the airport’s number.
Of course she wasn’t. She was a Von Karma.
Revenge was in her blood.

She hung up the phone some minutes later, the receptionist on the line the first person she had spoken to since her papa had been jailed. She had what she needed – a first class ticket and a layover in New York City, but either way she’d step down in Los Angeles the next day. Once she was there she’d worry about a hotel, which would be no trouble at all concerning who she was.

All that would be left was to secure a case against Phoenix Wright.

Franziska von Karma left two hours later, confidently hoisting her own bag besides her as a cab pulled up to the front drive. She did not look, but could tell that the house behind her had gone dark and empty, as the last Von Karma of the family finally set out for fate.

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Awesome. Thanks. It made my day. I gotta go bye. I'll comment more tomorrow.

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Ok. So this isn't exactly tomorrow. Or even a week. I'm sorry about the late reply. But this Chapter is my favourite so far. Are you going to write more? Because I want to see what happen to Franziska when she loses. Or at least when you write it, because when you do it it's cool. So please, continue! And nice work!

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I am really surprised that this was not continued, this was (and still is!) a great fanfic.

If you ever get time, you should seriously consider writing more!

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More, yes? Yes? YES?!

Okay. Seriously, this is good.

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I love all of your fics, but I think this one is my favourite so far. I like how you've portrayed the relationship between Edgy and Fran, getting in all the disfunctional stuff and also showing how they do need each other. I also like how Manfred isn't abusing them for once, as with every other Edgy/Fran childhood fic I've read he's always beating them up, locking them in cupboards, etc.

Please continue this - I really want to see how Fran reacts to losing.

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I love this story! I really like the description of Franziska and the airport setting. I'm a huge fan of stories about Franziska's and Miles's childhood.