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There are slugs in the bathroom again.
Maya goes boneless against the frame of the door as the light flickers on overhead against the darkness in the window and reveals said little creatures in sterile blue clarity. There’s one against the jamb between the shower and the floor, happily sliming along the rim of peeling yellowed caulk, and another literally in the middle of the room, craning its head up as if it’s lost in a sea of white tile.
Which, of course, it is.
“C’mon, guys,” says Maya, muffled into her elbow. “We agreed you’d be gone this time.”
It’s not like she hasn’t tried. They’ve been showing up for a week now - and she has no idea where they’re coming from, since blocking all the drains hasn’t helped. Even if this is Phoenix’s shitty apartment there’s nothing that sticks out. No suspiciously snail-sized hole in the wall. And no matter how many times she takes them outside (and gently sets them in the bushes downstairs because she’s not a psychopath, and doesn’t fling them squeamishly out the window like Nick does), they somehow reappear.
Honestly, they’re kinda cute - especially since they’re only little ones, smaller than the last joint of a pinky finger, curling in on themselves all confusedly in the pallid fluorescence, with their slow, ponderous movements, and two little inquisitive eyestalks. And only a little slime left behind them in oozy tracks. But they’d be much cuter if they were in a tank, contained, and not in a bathroom soon to be occupied by Maya’s girlfriend - partner? honestly they haven’t hashed out the details yet - who has an eye for perfection and a taste for the higher things in life. A kind of perfection all-importantly sans little invertebrate pals all too happy to accompany her while she brushes her teeth.
A girlfriend who will no doubt be jet lagged and need to shower because she is flying in today - very soon minutes away today, in fact.
Maya is so screwed.
It’s there before she can stifle it - some grown up Master I’m supposed to be if I can’t keep this place not-revolting for less than a week - acid welling in slow rivulets from a voice that was once never hers, but sounds less and less like Morgan these days and more and more like her own timbre, dissolving in close to where the real hurts are. There is a spectre in her, a hand clutched in the roots of her hair forcing her upright, but the rest of her goes limp against the door frame, strings cut; claws constricting and squeezing the space just under her breastbone until her diaphragm trembles just to gasp in a breath.
Her eyes brim with tears. Traitors.
This is so stupid. I’m stressing out over slugs.
But it’s more than that. She knows, with a deeply leaden kind of certainty, that these particular tears have been brewing for some time, collected like pooling rainwater from all the half-formed fears that she shoves away out of sight before they can come fully into being and make her look at what they are. It was bound to bite her in the ass sooner or later - she’s always telling Nick to stop avoiding stuff, and yet here she is - but there are ghosts ahold of her now, and she has learned to do nothing but submit to ghosts.
Maya slides down to her knees. It feels right to, mirroring the way tears track down her cheeks and plink down onto her shirt, forming sad little craters that bleed out into nothingness.
It’s not like she doesn’t have enough to wrestle with even without her girl - her partner? - without Franziska to think about. She’s only twenty-two. Still young, apparently, even if her bones feel ancient. And yet the politics of Kurain are a permanent swirl of confusion in the back of her mind. It looms over her shoulders, and she blocks as much of it as she can before it gets to Pearly, but it doesn’t seem to matter what she does - how much training she tackles with vehemence, or how many times she gives in and slips away on the weekends to her brother’s. And then there’s said brother to worry about. Even this far past the initial shock of Phoenix’s disbarment, there’s still a little hole in his new shape baked into her chest, complete with hunched shoulders and weary eyes. Maya worries after him in the only way she knows how: the way of a little sister, powerless to do anything, but always walking behind him, leaning to catch just in case she’s strong enough to hold on.
Maya’s head tips back against the door jamb, sniffing back tears in a way audibly ugly enough to suit her slimy audience. How is she meant to deal with all that and the fact that someone like Franziska even knows who she is, let alone actually agreed to ‘see how this goes’? Could anyone blame her for being a bit of a wreck, honestly?
Yes, they could, says that same snide little voice, but even mid-breakdown Maya rolls her eyes hard enough to dismiss it.
Maya doesn’t really know what they are to each other, her and Franziska, but she knows she’s in danger - knows that whatever Fran actually thinks of her, whatever lies behind Franziska’s porcelain mask, it can’t possibly match the inexplicable light that blooms with near blinding radiance in Maya's chest whenever she is noticed by the piercing watchlight of those eyes. It’s almost like stage fright, the sheer responsibility of earning a place in Franziska’s mental catalogue of ‘things that are important’. It’s only been three months since they decided to do… whatever it is they’re doing, and Maya knows there is a whole world of things that Franziska is holding back from her - even if it’s not on purpose, and it almost definitely isn't - but it seems like Maya is brimming over with everything, these days, and it’s all she can do to keep herself even vaguely in-check enough not to scare Fran off for good.
God. Let alone that one time Maya actually got to kiss her, outside the steps of her swanky LA hotel, and had felt so close to either barfing or ascending to heaven (probably both) that she’d barely even managed to get home.
Maybe she's felt a mortal kind of fear a lot more times than she should, at her age - she knows there’s something in her a little warped about it, that the one day she can’t respond to everything with laughter is probably the day everything falls apart for real - but it’s scary to Maya just how palpable Franziska’s effect on her is, just how much she spins around the sound of her voice on the phone from whatever far-flung corner of the world she’s been sent to this time.
“Goodbye, Maya,” she’ll say, and then Maya’ll say “Bye, Franzi, sleep well!” in her brightest voice, and she’ll hold onto the phone without hanging up on her end as long as she can before the phone intervenes and goes still, as she buckles against the urge to say I miss you and I think I like you way more than I should.
Maya sighs into the room. The slugs don’t say anything back.
Though, one of them that had been approaching her big toe raises one of its little feelers at her, a distinct little gesture, something resembling a crooked little smirk. It reminds her of Franziska - almost uncannily, the exact same way she’d raise an eyebrow whenever she thought Maya was being stupid.
This is the day I finally go nuts, isn’t it.
Then the doorbell rings.
Maya shoots upward so fast her head hits the back of the door frame, which just makes more tears spring to her eyes.
Not now, Franziska!! I haven’t even started pretending I wasn’t crying yet!
Maya smears the last of the tears from her eyes with the heel of her hand, shocked far enough out of herself that she doesn’t feel a hand around her lungs anymore, just the newness of a welt on her shin as she barks it against Nick’s stupid dresser that pokes into the doorway because he refuses to buy furniture that actually fits his apartment. Maya swears under her breath (best to get those out before Franziska is there to hear her) and hurtles fast enough through the kitchen that she nearly stacks it on the tile, skidding to a stop at the door in her socks.
In that one slow moment, as the door yawns open, Maya almost believes there is some kind of cosmic order to things, because the contrast is almost hysterical.
There’s Maya, who is in her old Steel Samurai boxers and definitely looks like she was crying less than two minutes ago. And then there’s Franziska, who, despite being on the tail end of a twelve hour red-eye flight and an entire criminal investigation overseas, looks flawless. Her hair isn’t even remotely rumpled (though, uncharacteristically, Maya can just see the handle of a comb poking out of her vest pocket) which surely implies she’s a psychopath who stayed rigidly awake for the whole flight. She doesn’t look like she’s been on a plane at all - her outfit is that blend of crisply understated and coolly fashionable that Maya has come to expect, a sleek pantsuit in pinstripe grey and a capelet that would look ridiculous on anyone who wasn’t her. It's all somehow entirely unwrinkled.
Why did you even bother coming, thinks Maya, more with despair than acid this time.
Then Maya’s wayward gaze tracks up to her eyes, eventually, and she sorta gets it. Just past the little edge of exhaustion in the set of her mouth, there’s a softness even in the stark beauty of Franziska’s abrupt, aquiline features. The kind of softness she’s only seen there in the early morning when she thinks Maya isn’t quite awake yet, or when she’s just about to leave and it looks like she’s trying to figure Maya out - trying to fit all the pieces of her together in her mind and hold them there, until next time.
It’s a losing battle, surely - Maya can’t even figure herself out - but she loves her for trying.
She loves her. Oh, god, she loves her.
The intervening silence has been stretching on way too long while she’s been trapped in a web of her own making, and Franziska’s starting to get that look on her face that makes Maya remember she was raised in an intricate mess of politeness very different to hers, and she should probably say hello first before Franziska’s brain explodes.
“There’s slugs in the bathroom,” is what falls out instead, Maya’s voice still a little shattered around the edges, and her throat thicker than she can get away with denying.
Franziska has a moment of understandable blankness before her brows furrow - confused, tired, and yet more amused than anything as she blinks, taking Maya in. Maya feels seen - she always feels seen around Franziska, but tonight it’s more of a seeking watchlight than the basking glow of a fireplace, and she shrinks a little further into the curve of the doorway before she can stop herself.
“Hello to you, too, darling,” says Franziska, turning to pick up her suitcase.
“I’m sorry.”
“For what? There is no need to apologise,” says Franziska with her usual no-nonsense clip before turning back with her bag in tow, brows furrowing further past disgruntled and into a hard floor of concern as Franziska actually gets an actual good look at her. “Maya,” she says, slowly, feeling outwards but still clumsy, as if in a language she can read but not quite speak yet. “Are you alright?”
I don’t know how to say ‘not really, I just had a mental breakdown about slugs’.
Maya has to physically stop herself from scratching the back of her neck like Nick does when he’s cornered.
“I was just - It was sorta - Y’know, it doesn’t matter, I’m good, I promise.”
Despite the lightness forced into her tone - and Maya is very good at that by now - Franziska doesn’t bite. Yes, it does matter is written in a panicked hand across Franziska’s face, letters practically glowing in slate-blue irises.
But it can’t fight its way onto her lips in time before Maya says, “Anyway, come in,” and then they’re already snapping back into a sense of sterile normality by habit, by circumstance, by being two women who have known each other for years but have no idea what they are to each other.
Like so, Franziska does what she was bidden, her posture going rigid as she hauls her suitcase over the lip of the door frame and stalks into the apartment proper without so much as a kiss on both cheeks.
Maya’s put her off.
Something curls like a fist in the very base of her gut, at the fact that Franziska’s come all this way to see her, and she’s already managed to ruin it in what must be record time. Though everything in Maya aches with the weeks Franziska’s been away, and with the sort of wrung-out yet pent-up jitters of a good cry gone interrupted, she ignores the hunger of her own skin and turns away with the last of her strength, making a beeline for the first thing in the kitchen she can use to distract them both.
“You want tea?”
“Please. The airplane’s offerings had the aroma of moistened cardboard.”
“Gross,” says Maya mildly, reaching for the canister of teabags. “Not that I can guarantee this is any better, but your brother comes here a lot, so it’s a fair guess.”
I know for a fact he bought Nick not only the tea but this kettle as well.
“I assure you, anything would be an improvement,” calls Franziska over her shoulder as she continues past the dining table and into the hallway, probably wheeling her suitcase into the spare bedroom out of the way - it’ll no doubt be in the same spot as always, next to the dresser and parked at an unnecessarily precise right angle to the wall.
Maya wants to peek around the wall to be sure, but something in her can’t be too needy, won't bear the risk Franziska of thinking she can’t bear to be a room away from her for more than a minute. Whether or not that’s true is wholly irrelevant. So she waits, having to shepherd herself closely just so she can appear to wander through her task as easily and idly as she would normally. She doesn’t even look up as Franziska pads back into the room, in that near-silent way she adopts once the click of her heels are gone, and comes to stand behind her, just close enough that Maya can feel warmth prickling in the air between them.
“How was your flight?” says Maya without looking back, her voice betraying her in falling dangerously soft, reverberating in the bubble of space around them both.
“A flight,” says Franziska, effortlessly noncommittal. “I am glad to be free of it.”
Maya doesn’t know what to make of that, so she just pours from the kettle and stirs, like looking down into the whirlpool in their cups will steady her any, and takes them to the poky little kitchen table - peppermint tea for Franziska, since that’s what she likes if it’s past 11pm, and coffee for her, because she’s lost the ability to make any good decisions at this point.
She sees out of the corner of her eye as she goes that Fran’s suitcase hasn’t moved after all. Maya doesn’t have time to think about how that makes her vaguely nauseous.
Instead, she flops into one of Nick’s rickety chairs - definitely found on the roadside, but Maya’s sort of fond of them, since they’ve lasted this long. Franziska doesn’t sit, hovering at Maya’s elbow with some kind of discomfort crackling off her in waves.
“You wanna unpack, or go straight to bed?” says Maya into her coffee, a little smugly, because knowing Franziska she’ll probably say I’ll unpack, of course, and then sniff at the very prospect of leaving her clothes to wrinkle in her suitcase for any longer than strictly necessary.
But she doesn’t.
Franziska sits down across from her ever so carefully, with the teacup forgotten at her fingertips and her eyes practically lit from behind with the way they’re studying Maya. Franziska is focused with the kind of even-keeled openness she is usually too frozen to feel at a time like now, when they’ve only just met each other again - each time, meeting over and over again like acquaintances.
“Maya,” says Franziska, head cocked to the side like an admission of fragility. “Are you alright? Truly?”
Maya reels backwards into her chair, the force of it percussive.
“I mean,” she says, the note of would-be cheer in her voice mangling itself into near hysteria, “probably not! But nothing happened. I’m fine, I--”
“You’re not,” barks Franziska, some kind of concern warping her face into that same kind of courtroom steel as Maya remembers. Utter conviction that she is right. That something is incorrect in the world and it is her job to fix it.
Which. Some of that is right, but Maya’s hackles flare in response, her own habits drawing in close.
“I am, Franzi. Shit just... got on top of me, that’s all. It happens. A-And then there were slugs, and I just--” Maya’s mouth snaps shut by force as her throat goes thick, a sob trapped like storm clouds in a bottle.
Maya, get your shit together, Mother’s oath.
Franziska doesn’t flinch. “You just what?” she says.
Maya buries her head in her hands so she doesn’t have to see that liquid warmth pooled in Franziska’s face, something she usually longs for, but not like this, not when she’s only earned it by being a petulant child.
“I just wanted things to be nice for you. Y’know, after your flight, a-and coming all this way out, and…”
...and you’re used to nicer things than this, nicer things than me, she finishes but doesn’t say.
Maya leaves her face smushed into her hands for as long as she dares, but there is no sound across from her for far too long, and eventually she looks up, half out of fear.
But she hasn’t moved - Franzi is still there across from her, still as open and unfettered as Maya has ever seen her, but almost bemused in the way her mouth curls at the edges. She holds her there, steady, as if it takes no effort at all.
“Maya Fey,” she says, almost sternly, but couched in softness. “I did not board a twelve hour flight to see Phoenix Wright’s bathroom. I came to see you.”
Maya laughs, tearily, snottily, and with the openness it lends her bursting in her chest, she reaches across the table for Franziska’s hand in a fit of bravery.
“Why are you laughing,” says Franziska, more than a little vexed.
“I’m not laughing,” laughs Maya.
“Yes, you are. Was I being funny?”
“No, Franzi. You were being very sweet.”
“Oh,” says Franziska, posture stiffening for a moment as her cheeks flood with colour; a blend of embarrassed and awfully pleased. The hand in hers trembles, until by force it flexes into ease as she threads their fingers together.
Maya remembers, as awe-wrapped as if she could have actually forgotten, the fact that nobody else has the privilege to see Franziska like this - nobody is willingly made privy to the little slivers of humanity underneath it all, not even her brother. Nobody except her.
And to swallow back everything that brings up, because she still feels a little too fragile to contain it all, Maya actually takes a sip. Franziska mirrors her, exactly, as if she’d been waiting for instruction.
“C’mon,” says Maya, when the minutes of companionable silence grow too flush and comfortable to bear, when something still seethes in electric jitters under her skin, “let’s sort out your stuff and go to bed. I know you’re itching to unpack.”
Franziska’s left eyelid twitches. It’s Maya’s favourite of her tells.
“Am not.”
“Are too,” grins Maya, because they are both in on the joke whether Franziska will admit it or not - and the way she lets their shoulders brush at the sink and in the hallway is as obvious an admission as Maya needs.
The trio - Maya, Franziska, and her jet-black behemoth of a four-wheeled suitcase - roll down all two feet of hallway crossing the apartment and into the spare room slash office slash “magic room” that Nick insists Maya call her own.
It’s more hers than anyone else’s, at least, so there’s that. The proof is in the bag of her spare clothes hanging on the doorknob, where they’ve lived for years, and the toothbrush and deodorant she’d shoved into the mostly empty filing cabinet. She’d helped him haul that thing all the way up here back when the room was actually his, in theory, because for a while there he hadn’t been sure if he could keep the lease on Mia’s old place.
(Trucy’s magic supplies are also balanced precariously on top of the cabinet and strewn across the desk, but that’s normal for this apartment, so it doesn’t say much at all.)
Franziska, having finally parked her suitcase at that perfect right angle, slides her toiletry case from where it had been slotted in at the top next to the zip for maximum efficiency, and disappears back through the hallway toward the bathroom (which pretends to be an ensuite by also having a door into the similarly tiny master bedroom).
Maya doesn’t follow. She might have, if she felt any wobblier. There’s an itch to, but she doesn’t allow herself acknowledge it - she’s been the younger sister, the pesterer, the helicopter companion, for long enough.
Eventually you get a clue that buzzing around people you love like a mosquito makes them wanna slap you out of the air.
Maybe it’s actually good that she practice independence right now. Solitude. Insight. Serenity. The kinds of things you’re supposed to find under waterfalls, but she never does.
She flops back on the unrolled futon, chest heavier than even before all this.
“Oh,” wobbles down the hall in an echo.
“What,” Maya yells back.
“You were not joking about the slugs,” comes the cool silver edge of Franziska’s voice, but warped at the weld line, like Damascus steel.
Oops.
And once she comes to the doorway, there they are. The pair of smaller and objectively cuter slugs she remembers from earlier have been joined by another, much larger comrade. Grey and chunky, closer to the length of Maya’s thumb, it's seemingly hell-bent on climbing all the way up to the ceiling, having already reached a foot up the wall next to the shower.
Franziska is across the room next to the basin, the other two little guys wedged between them on the tiles, and if Maya didn’t know any better, she’d almost say she looked stuck.
“What,” says Maya, because she never learns. “You scared?”
Franziska’s eyes narrow, but Maya doesn’t believe the malice for a second. “I just was not expecting... an audience.”
And it’s only now that Maya can see past the unwrinkled capelet and severe fold lines of her pantsuit. That’s pretty bad, for her average, but with the event of the Sluggening she can actually recognise that there’s an edge still missing in Fran. She hasn’t retreated all the way back from earlier. And even while pretending to be affronted by Maya’s question there is a little droop to the corners of her mouth, and a little smudge of toothpaste on her chin.
She’s tired. Maya doesn’t even know where she was coming from this time, but it was a twelve hour flight, for crying out loud. Maybe she isn’t a superhuman after all, if she actually does experience jet lag like mere mortals do.
It’d be worrying, if Maya wasn’t so overwhelmed by it, that Franziska can be so human right now. That either the flight and the slugs really have shaken her, which would be a relief considering Maya’s eyes still feel sore from crying about the exact same thing… Or, that she doesn’t feel quite the same need to try for distance, as before.
Whichever is true, it makes Maya’s next steps very obvious.
“I’ll - “ look after you, I’ll take care of you, “I’ll get rid of the slugs, Franzi.”
Franziska winces. “You do not have to. Really. I’m not -”
“I know I don’t,” Maya butts in, because Fran thinks it’s the same as before, when right this minute she actually isn’t thinking about how ludicrous it is that Fran is actually here, for once. Maybe it’s because she’s trapped by the slugs and physically can’t leave. “You’re a big brave Interpol prosecutor. I know I don’t have to. But it’s polite.”
There is a little twitch in the corner of Fran’s mouth, and Maya leans right into it, because she’s so close to falling through it - falling in where they both only usually tread in glimpses, their forays into the lands beyond only ever experimental out of fear they’ll lose themselves to it. That's the kind of fear Maya is just too wrung out and desperate and starved to remember how to feel, tonight.
“And I don’t mind,” says Maya, relaxing into the doorframe, “especially when I get to rescue my girlfriend doing it.”
The lean against the door gets abruptly less relaxing then.
Because - and bless her for it, but Franziska doesn’t freak out, exactly. There is no explosion. And no whip crack, though even in this apparent ‘blind guessing and feeling around about each other’s hearts and brains’ stage they’re in, Maya knows better than to expect one of those directed at her.
But the silence goes brittle in Maya’s hands, and she can see it so clearly it sinks like an anchor in her own chest, the way Fran has to clamp down around her own features to let nothing past. Nothing but an audible hiss of breath, and something invisible brimming high behind it, liquid and heavy and nearly spilling over. And whatever it is, it isn’t bad, but it isn’t good either. Fey intuition isn’t good for much, but it tells her that, at least.
Foot in mouth Fey at it again.
“I’m just gonna… go get a container,” is all Maya can trill out in her best ‘this is fine’ warble before she slinks away from the scene of the crime. Rather like a slug. Maybe that kind of thing is contagious.
She takes longer than she should rooting around in the backs of Phoenix’s kitchen cupboards for a tupperware. Too blindly to really appreciate that it’s nice she knows exactly where they are, nice to have an obvious reassurance of just how well she knows her brother through her unconscious knowledge of this place. And yet not blindly enough to actually slow down and think about the truth sucking her thoughts inward, about how she just keeps ruining Franziska’s life by pure proximity, in huge and tragic ways and in tiny plain stupid ones. Over and over without fail, and without ever actually getting close to Fran at all.
Her mere existence is a lodestone for bad luck. Which makes her more of a sister to Phoenix than she ever has been to her blood relatives, living or dead.
She doesn’t think about it. Any of it. She just exists around it, in whatever brain matter is left skirting the event horizon. Stares blank sandpaper grit holes into the grime stuck to a lunchbox lid someone had missed, and then looks without seeing at the seamless airbrush of a glossy purple leaflet for some kind of band gig. She swipes it from the pile of mail on the counter, and so armed, she oozes in a belligerent drip back toward the bathroom.
Maya isn’t sure why she never expected Fran to take matters into her own hands.
But by the time she gets back, there is one less of the tiny guys sliming around, and her longsuffering girlf- prosecutor is staring down at her own compact mirror with poorly hidden revulsion.
“Didn’t that thing cost like eleven million dollars?” says Maya. It must have. It’s like everything she owns - branded, but subtly, in a flash of gloss on matte. Labelled with the kind of chic restraint that means it’s leagues above what Maya used to imagine rich people stuff looked like.
Franziska grants her a withering eyeroll. “Thank you for the hyperbole. Very helpful.”
“You’re welcome. It’s my special talent.” Better than nothing, says a ghost darkly, and quietly, which is almost worse.
“Anyway, I got one of them.”
“Yeah, I figured. You didn’t need to put it in your fancy whatchamacallit. You could have just waited for me to get back.”
Franziska’s eyes go narrow, steel leaping back behind frosted glass. “I wanted to be helpful.”
The air echoes with unsaid things, then.
And it’s only in that echo that Maya finally notices the big slug has reached the ceiling.
“Shit.”
Franziska’s nose wrinkles.
“Scheisse,” she says, with all the venom she has probably held back this whole time. It’s amazing she bothered. It’s amazing she doesn’t think she’s a nice person, because Maya knows exactly what practicing restraint usually costs her.
And it’s not like the bathroom ceiling in this shitty apartment has the loft of the Sistine Chapel, exactly, but the bastard has wriggled its way right between the basin and the shower, where they can’t reach it without forming some kind of late-night two-person human pyramid. Jet lag and the Feys being habitual klutzes rule that plan out.
But they get another plan. And there’s something about the getting of a plan that makes Maya almost understand how it was easier that way for Nick - with her sister, and with his husband, and with her even, when he was twenty four and only barely a person and not entirely prepared for a little sister to be dropped into his lap. How working together on something eases the friction, no matter where the friction comes from, because you’re using it against the problem. The world. Whatever.
It makes the unsayable things between you smaller, quieter, easier to talk past.
And she isn’t dumb. It’s obvious - she knows with Fran on her side she could literally conquer the world. She just has to figure out how to keep her here long enough without scaring her away, and that answer won’t keep eluding her forever if she’s stubborn enough.
That’s all she’s ever been. Stubborn enough to hang on by her fingernails even if it might have been smarter to just let go in the first place. Too stubborn to choose, only hang on in limbo like a limpet until the tide swells to meet her.
But, with their plan in place, they employ the tupperware and the leaflet to sequester the first slug, tip its friend from the compact down in there with it, and keep an eye on their larger cousin until it has ‘repositioned itself somewhere more tactically advantageous’, end quote. Maya doesn’t think she’s ever seen Fran sit on a floor before, and the mental image feels like it should be weird, but she cranes down next to her, cross legged on the tiles so easily Maya feels silly for even thinking about it.
“Aw, they’re making out,” says Maya down into the container, because they are. Or at least whatever the equivalent of smooshing eyestalks together and wriggling around on top of each other is in human behaviour.
“I think they’re fighting,” says Franziska blandly.
“A girl can multitask.”
Franziska raises an eyebrow. “Girl?”
Maya neglects to mention that she’s sort of assigned genders and personalities to the slugs in her head over the past week for some reason. “I don't even think slugs are smart enough to fight,” she sails onward instead. “Snails, maybe.”
“You think fighting makes one smart,” says Franziska, and Maya’s heart squeezes in her chest because she rises to meet her, as Maya didn’t think she quite deserved with all this. She has that little knowing smirk she gets at the corner of her mouth, now that she knows they are doing a bit, and is entirely self-satisfied with being able to knowingly participate having been taught recently what a bit is.
“It’s a developmental milestone for kids, I think.
“That’s less of a compliment.”
“Wait. Maybe that’s lying, actually. Can kids gaslight you?”
“Wait,” mimics Fran, unfortunately yanked back down into herself by confusion. “Why snails?”
“Why are they smart?”
“That.”
“They have houses. It seems smart. Maybe they have a well financed mortgage.”
Franziska graces her with a huff of a laugh, and it settles into Maya’s chest where she can hold onto it, let it glimmer in safety.
And now the slugs really are fighting in there. One of them is moving fast - or fast compared to the other one, at least - and lunging in, while the other one is inching slower and sideways, waggling her eyestalks out in a way that seems almost like a challenge. Or a retort. The snappy kind.
“Don’t say it,” says Fran, because Maya is definitely about to.
“I’m gonna.”
“Don’t.”
“They really are, though.”
Maya sees without looking how Fran pretends to cave, and then feels the little slouch into her side as she is tipped into, just for a moment. Suddenly, even with a touch so brief and featherlight, it’s like Maya has snatched a breath after being underwater for hours. Every vein floods wide, hot and rushing with oxygen.
“You aren’t denying it,” she says, trying not to breathe it, clinging as tight as she can to the normal conversation down on earth where she had been before.
“I am not,” says Franziska, only faintly amused, and not nearly as at sea as Maya feels.
“That means I’m right. They’re just like us.”
There is a silence.
“Then what does it make that one?” says Fran finally, pointing towards the ceiling.
“Oh.”
“Oh, indeed.”
“What about Pearly?”
Franziska’s lip curls despite herself. “What about her?” she replies, as the big one slimes toward the exhaust fan grating at a speed that is honestly startling, considering it is still a slug.
“Fast,” says Maya like it’s obvious, because it is obvious. Though it’s not like Fran has been to Kurain village in a few years. “Stubborn. Powerful. So shy she had to get on the ceiling rather than hang out with the others. I mean, it’s pretty obvious.”
“Perceptive as ever, Maya Fey.”
“You know I hate it when you fullname me,” says Maya, even though she doesn’t hate it, not at all, and Franziska knows that just as well as she does. She really does hate it when it’s anyone else, like her brother, like anyone who insists the two names are a package deal, like her first name isn’t enough by itself. But… It’s like a declaration, when Fran does it. Deliberate. Like a line, scored hard and deep into the earth around all the shattered disparate pieces of herself that Maya can never quite scoop into a human enough shape.
And, luckily enough for her, Fran doesn’t get time to muster a pithy response to that, because the larger slug reaches the grating in record time and abruptly falls off the ceiling - probably overcome with flattery by the comparison to Pearly, just as it should be.
Maya Two and Franzi Two go clattering in their container across the floor as Maya Prime, given that she is the one with arms and legs, springs towards the other side of the bathroom so quickly that when she turns back, the slug captured under an upturned glass Nick keeps in the bathroom to take his meds with, Fran is blinking at her like a sleepy owl sprung upon by a gang of small children in an otherwise dark barn.
Oh, yeah. I keep forgetting the jet lag.
“Sorry,” says Maya, and puts it in the container herself.
“Don’t be sorry. You got it. I’m impressed,” says Franzi, looking up from the floor with only a hint of the rattle remaining. And then she flushes with one of Maya’s favourite smiles - the one she gets that is certain and settled and pleased, and Maya can’t bear to even look at it, because that would mean it’s actually there, and she actually earned a response like that.
“See! Isn’t she cute, actually?” says Maya, ducking in past the compliment, and wiggling the tupperware closer to Franziska’s face. “C’mon. Look at her. Say hi, Pearly Two.”
And why, exactly, is she trying to fix Fran’s mild dislike of a creature she has every right not to like? For one thing, it’s funny. And it’d be nice if that was all it was, but there is a very big something beneath it. She is desperately grasping for anything like control - of herself, of the way Franziska reacts, of the way she feels like a yoyo about to attempt a full 360 at any moment - and being the center of as long a running joke as she can make… well, it’ll do.
“Y’know what we should do,” says Maya in light of that, something curled tight around her throat again - because Franzi has already been good enough to ignore her wobbles twice, today, and there has to be an end of a rope approaching soon. She has to outshine it as a distraction. It’s the thing she’s best at.
“I don’t, in fact.”
“We should make ‘em race.”
Fran’s back hits the wall, and her face rankles into actual disgust. “Why?”
And just as she has been the whole time, Maya is out on the ledge, and the drop ahead is straight down onto the rocks. “C’mon, Franzi,” she says, the peal of it just this side of shrill, a little too desperate. “It’ll be fun!!”
As though she’s intentionally surprising her, Franziska wilts. “I don’t - Shouldn’t we just put them outside?”
“Not unless you admit they kinda freak you out.”
“And so what if they do,” Fran snips past the tupperware shoved into her face.
Finally. She’s actually irritated at her. The wave of nausea almost feels like vindication.
“Oh,” falls out of Maya like an anchor.
“Yes. Oh.”
And Maya’s tap finally runs dry.
Because Fran takes a breath and steadies herself, and just watching it happen turns whatever is left of Maya’s ability to pretend she isn't falling apart and liquifies it into brown sludge that sloshes around in the bottom of her gut. How dare she. Put Franziska von Karma in the position of having to apologise to her? Knowing full well the effort it takes for Fran to do such a thing at all with everything she’s been through? Maya can already see her trying to muster the courage to speak it, and it’s too much to bear already, before she even gets a word out.
“Fran, don’t,” she chokes out, before the walkback can start. “Don’t. I’m sorry I pushed you.”
Franziska looks up at her. But there is still a silence.
“We’re not doing it in here,” she says finally, through audibly gritted teeth.
…That means we’re doing it?
A reluctant concession under duress somehow feels worse than literally any alternative. But Maya doesn’t know how to do anything but follow, especially not now, and so she does, trailing meekly after the curt clip of Fran’s shoes as they trickle down the fire escape, out onto the sidewalk, and around the back of the block into the weeds.
“What do we do now,” says Franziska flatly, and it isn’t remotely a question.
“Um.”
She has not, in fact, thought this far ahead. Which is quickly becoming a running theme.
Maya puts the tupperware down, and together they start making a little racetrack out of trash and detritus in the empty sliver of lot behind the apartment block. Two of them with their hands buried in the blown-in sand Maya wouldn’t even call soil, not compared to the fertile brown loam in the farmlands under Kurain’s mountains. But it is all still a little too quiet, and when they have little lanes drawn finger-width in the dirt, Maya just… stops.
Suddenly she doesn’t have it in her to be silly anymore. It all… peters out.
Maybe she left her silly upstairs. Or maybe it had never really been here at all, and she’s been holding herself upright on nothing but adrenaline all this time, on the need to be a good girlfriend-or-whatever-they-are. On forcing herself to be enough. Dazzling enough so that Franziska can’t see everything underneath it, for a little while longer, because the thought of her face rankling with disgust - or worse, pity, or the ultimate rebuke of that little backtrack she does when she’s overwhelmed but doesn’t feel safe enough to say it… it would be like the little deaths she inherits from every spirit, all over again, all at once.
Maya’s greatest mistake was, of course, underestimating the famously acute perception that, were Franziska not born with, she would have had it scored into her soul day by day by another hand until the difference was meaningless.
“Maya, you don’t have to - “
“I do.”
She doesn’t even know what Fran is talking about. But she has to. Whatever it is, she has to do it. She’ll turn herself inside out to keep the ball rolling if she has to.
And then Franziska decides something. Visibly. Her jaw firms square at the corner, and her brow pinches in the middle - no fire, just settled concentration instead.
“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the first annual Invertebrate’s Cup Rally, held here at the raceway,” is what comes out of Franziska then, hand curled around an imaginary desk microphone and called in that round bell tone. The orator’s voice she honed for the courtroom, but spun hushed, just for the two of them.
Maya gapes.
“Our racers are just about ready to enter the starting gate,” she continues, and bends all in one move to remove the lid of the tupperware with a courtly flourish, so bright with stagecraft, her own kind of play, it’s hard to even look up at her. It’s like the self she had learned to perform, but retooled. Forged closer to the skin, and for an entirely different kind of performance.
Something floods Maya’s chest and crests in a wave at the back of her throat, threatening to spill over. I didn’t know you knew how to do that.
“In the warmup ring we have Kurain’s Pearl, a newcomer to the field. While an outside favourite, she is a young filly - er, baby… slug - only just aged into this bracket. What do you think, Maya? Will she perform today?”
Franziska mimes holding the microphone down to where Maya squats.
The youngest prosecutor ever to take the bar is playing silly make believe at being an announcer for a snail race. And she’s doing it… for me.
“Um,” says Maya into the imaginary microphone, and she doesn’t know if she’s laughing or crying until she hears it come out of herself choked and wet, and has to scrub the moisture from her cheeks with the sleeve of her sweater.
“Oh,” says Fran, and the microphone disappears abruptly from her hand. She kneels, too, and the dirt on the knee of her crisp striped jumpsuit is just another tally mark on the ledger of all the other things Maya has done to her. Errors, caused by warping her orbit. But then Franziska reaches out and slots her hand around the curve of Maya’s cheek, like it’s easy, like they’ve done this a thousand times more than just the slim count on Maya’s trembling fingers trying to hold each instance close enough to survive on.
Maybe it is easy. Maybe Fran’s hand isn’t cool against her blazing face out of obligation, and maybe she isn’t wiping the tears away out of pity, so gently it’s like all Maya’s efforts have failed and she really does know Maya is breakable.
As it is, just the touch is enough for Maya to gasp a breath, to come above the surface long enough to reach up and hold her there, as desperately as she’s wanted to all day and then some.
“Is this… not…?” says Fran, uncharacteristically hesitant, eyes dewy and luminous. “Am I helping?”
“Keep going,” whispers Maya, unable to help herself swaying sideways until it’s basically just Fran’s hand keeping her upright. “Please keep going.”
“Do you know who else is in the warmup ring?” says Franziska, gently but with a knowing kind of sparkle.
“I might,” dares Maya, sniffing back the tears with newfound strength, and takes the imaginary microphone from her other hand. “I believe our other contenders are Burgomeister’s Nugget and Blue Topaz, if my jockey’s sheet is right.”
Franziska’s shoulders hitch higher, containing a laugh safely back from the conceit. “Which is which?”
“You tell me, commentator. I’m just the field reporter. You’re the one who used to race on this circuit.”
Franziska’s widen, like oh, did I? but she knows the golden rule of improv as well as anybody - it’s a rule of the courtroom, too, after all.
“Well,” she replies, the sharp edges of her accent so rounded by the smile on her face it’s hard to believe it’s the same person, “you might think that Burgomeister is our German contender, but I believe that privilege goes to Blue Topaz, as that hors - slug only began racing in this country a few years ago.”
Maya nods as sagely as she can manage. “Burgermeister is spelled with an e, not an o, obviously.”
“Ah. Two items of food combine to form an inventive name for a racer. Though why you would need both in the same order I simply could not tell you.”
“Now now, commentator,” grins Maya, because Fran knows her default burger chain order. “No need to stray too far off topic. Our race is about to begin!”
They only barely manage to stay in character as one of the slugs escapes their tupperware warm-up ring and tries to run off (very slowly) into the night.
As they get the slugs moving down the lanes, Franziska continues rattling off commentary (though hardly at the clip of a real raceway commentator, considering their race lasts for several minutes even on a thirty centimetre racetrack and is admittedly vastly less interesting). And Maya supplies the whole joy of a raceway crowd, whooping and hollering in the middle of the night with absolutely no care for the poor neighbours. They’re Nick’s neighbours, anyway. Not her problem.
Kurain’s Pearl wins, of course.
“Should have bet money on it.”
“That would be a conflict of interest for race organisers,” grins Franziska, wolfish, a kind of self-satisfied that glows with her having fully earned it.
Pearly Two earns itself pride of place upon release, the prime real estate of the largest plant managing to cling to the dirt near the sidewalk, far enough away from the other two that hopefully they don’t fight. Maya’s almost sad to see them go - which is a little hysterical given they were the cause of all this, and she still feels raw from the now two attempted cries gone aborted. But the slugs were at least something to do. A problem to solve. Together.
Maybe hanging out almost exclusively with people that problem solve for a living has done something to her brain. Or maybe it’s just that her own problems are always just too big. She always has been at her best at someone else’s elbow, without all the responsibility but ready to chime in, helping to build something with more hands than just her own. A born 2IC. Just like most little sisters.
But there is nothing left to build except what is there between them as they trek back up the stairs and into the apartment, and under the wan blue light of the fluorescents in the ceiling everything has thawed cool. She almost can’t be grateful that Fran pulled her up, just then, because that would mean accepting that she could possibly have deserved it. Even with the slimy danger averted, they pool into the apartment still adrift, with only the room around them in unsettled quiet.
“What?” says Franziska, when Maya has rinsed their cups from earlier and spent as much time futzing around she can justify before coming back to her room - their room. Fran has already unrolled the futon, unfurled her long legs to sit stretching them. Probably still sore from the plane.
“What do you mean, what,” says Maya, even though she knows exactly what ‘what’ means.
Franziska blinks up at her meaningfully until she kneels down, next to her on the other side of the futon, but as far away as she can get without being on the floor. She can’t bear to touch. Not after she has let tonight be such a disaster.
And her skin has hungered for so long that she feels too nauseous to eat. Too seasick to reach across the water and touch, as she has wanted all this time and not brave enough hold the responsibility of asking for.
“Are you,” Franziska begins, eyes boring holes into the side of Maya’s head, “alright?”
Maya doesn’t look over. “Yeah. Of course I am. Don’t worry about it.” You’ve done enough. Way more than enough.
Silence.
She’s worrying about it, isn’t she.
“I do not like it,” says Franziska, finally. “When you do this. When you hide from me.”
“Don’t you think that’s a little hypocritical?” says Maya, her tone bleaker than she’d meant to let escape. She still can’t bear to look over at her. How fucking typical. Once a coward, always a coward.
“Yes,” she replies frankly. “It is hypocritical. But it is what I feel.”
“Sorry,” says Maya. And she is. For a lot of things, so many they well up behind her eyes, but she’s just too tired to really buy into the whole crying thing again tonight.
“I know you are. But you would not need to be sorry if you just told me.”
Tell you what? That sometimes you feel like more of a ghost to me than the ones I let borrow my body? That I’m terrified one day you’ll actually look at me and see what’s there, and not what you imagined around it, and then I’ll never see you again?
Maya flops back on the futon like her strings have been cut.
“Today fucking sucked,” wobbles her voice, entirely without her permission. “I had a shit day. But I know you have too, and it makes me not want to ask anything of you even more.”
“You don’t have to assume I would say no.”
“I’m not.” I am.
“You are.”
Yeah.
Her head flops sideways. And Franziska is there, head tilted down to meet her gaze, warmth dusting the futon between them. Her eyes glow even in the half light, like chips of moonlight borrowed from outside, always something so alien to Maya that it shouldn’t be possible to feel like she knows it so thoroughly; that she shouldn’t feel like they just fit, hook in loop and plug in socket, more than they have any right to. Especially this early on.
But they do. And Franziska is in that set of pyjamas Maya knows for a fact she’s the only one allowed to see, one she’d got in Prague once with little deer on them that she’d said reminded her of Kurain. And she knows, too, they were laundered in the detergent she insists Interpol provide for her at every stay. She always smells familiar. And Maya aches, like pins and needles burrowed bone-deep, like starvation, like coming out of a daze back into yourself and feeling everything magnified.
“I just got overwhelmed. I really fucking missed you, Franziska. I wanted everything to be right, it had to be right to be worth anything, and it wasn’t, and I couldn’t just say fuck everything and ask you to just… hold me. Let me live in your space for a bit.” And the tears spill over again, because of course they do, and Maya just lets them pour over the hump of her nose and down into the hair at her temples, overhot on skin already salted raw. “Because that’s all I wanted. It’s all I ever want when you aren’t here. And it sounds dumb now, saying it. But I felt stupid asking.”
Franziska doesn’t move. She is too focused to comfort her. Which is fair, honestly. “Why?”
“Because you’re not, like… supposed to?”
The corner of Franzika’s mouth sours, petulant. “In what way have either of us ever done things in the way you are supposed to, Maya.”
Lots of them, actually. I still can’t help trying to, sometimes.
“It’s rude! Or presumptuous,” she continues, ignoring her. “Or something. You’re supposed to wait, and let things evolve naturally. And I don’t want to scare you off, Fran. That’s what I hate the most.”
The sparkle reappears in Franziska for a moment.
“You think you,” she says, “can scare me.”
Maya feels the corner of her mouth turn up, but there’s no humor in it. “You think I’m joking, but I’m not.”
“No,” she sobers, leaning back against the wall. “No, I know you aren’t.”
Neither of them are the unscarred plastic-sheen protagonists of a Hallmark movie. They both know the stakes here. Franziska is not her brother, Mr. Flight Risk himself, but she has spent an even longer time pretending to be stone than he has, and her outer shell is made of stronger stuff than his. Maya knows where the wear points are. And she knows that Franziska knows that, but it’s not like they say it out loud. Not yet.
“I’m scared. Not of you. Not like -” not how you make people react, because it’s easier, because it’s predictable and arms-length, “y’know. Not like that. Like...”
Franziska wilts. “I know.”
And Maya sucks in a breath to steel herself, the words like water vapor that won’t condense, a spirit refusing to become corporeal until she twists, by force, tearing them free from the other side.
“Should I be?”
Franziska looks away.
“Part of me is very… afraid. Of you. Of… this.” And Maya’s heart leaps so far into her throat that she can’t breathe, can’t hear or see, but Franziska’s gaze lands hesitant and soft back on hers, and she wills herself to cling on. “I want this very badly, and when you call me girlfriend and I know you also want this as badly as I do, that is what frightens me the most.”
“Then I won’t say it.” It will cost me $0 to not be a dumbass.
“You can,” says Franziska, steely. “Perhaps just not… yet. I want to open myself to you, so badly it warps me, but I am not very good at it, and I am not very good at being bad at things.”
Franziska furrows her own brows at herself. Warmth pools in Maya’s chest in response. “But I like you, Maya. More than I think I should, given who we are, and where we are in our,” she waves her hands, “relationship. And that terrifies me, because the deeper we get here, the more I think you will find something you really can’t stand, and that will be… it.”
“You think you can scare me, Frannie?” says Maya, gently.
Franziska laughs, a little wetly. “I think it’s possible.”
“Nah,” says Maya, and it’s flippant, but soft at every edge. “I don’t think so.”
Fran pauses, gaze pinning Maya to the futon like she has to see down into her soul to believe it.
“In that case,” she says, and shimmies down the futon, reaching to pull Maya closer so matter-of-factly it’s like none of the turmoil that came before it ever existed. She does it like she does everything when she’s made a decision, sharp and decisive, her hands insistent until they are flush together, legs intertwined, and Maya’s head tucked under her chin.
Maya basically blacks out with bliss for a hot second. She is only senses. Everything else goes so very quiet.
“We should have done this earlier,” says Franziska, a number of minutes later that Maya has not kept the foggiest count of.
“Mhm,” mumbles Maya into the skin of her collarbone, mildly delirious. “ ‘S my b. Should’ve asked earlier. Won’t happen again.”
Franziska huffs a laugh, and Maya feels it in surround sound.
“So,” she says.
“So,” echoes Maya. “Neither of us are going anywhere.” She speaks it aloud before she can think better of it, because she has to hear it to even begin to believe it, and believing it was sort of the whole point of discussing this.
“No,” says Franziska into her hair, a flush of warmth that ghosts down Maya’s spine. “We are not.”
Finally, for what feels like the first time that day, Maya breathes out.
“So let’s just agree then, right? We’ll take this at whatever steps and speed we want. It’s not like either of us ever thought this was gonna be a casual thing.”
Franziska’s hand skims idly between her shoulder blades. “Agreed.”
“We’re gonna give this a real shot,” says Maya, shooting for determined, though awe trembles underneath it. “And we’re gonna talk about things that scare us. Before our heads explode and we start making a big deal about slugs for no reason.”
“I thought it was fun, actually,” says Franziska drily.
“Was it, though? Like on the whole, with all the crying included?”
“Yes,” says Franziska, far more seriously than any of this deserves, in a way that makes Maya’s chest clench. “It was. Because I was here with you.”
And, from where she tucked close, placed there deliberately because she is wanted and chosen before all others, Maya lets herself drink it in. There is proof here, concrete under her hands in a way not even her doubts can ignore, and she drinks and drinks, until the hunger is gone and she is, finally, sated.
***