Work Text:
01:00
The headache is starting to set in. The familiar throbbing pain Franziska gets behind her eyes when she’s been awake for too long. The blue light from her laptop is definitely not helping. But she can’t seem to help it. In public, especially in court, she’s so fierce, nothing could even begin to faze her. But here, in the quiet of her home, she finds herself occasionally frozen.
Tonight, she’s staring at the too-bright white of the crisis hotline’s webpage. It’s simply asking her to put in her name and how upset she is on a scale from one to five. Her fingers hover over the keyboard. She’s not going to start the chat. She never does. This first page is as far as she ever gets.
Her wife, Maya, is sound asleep in the bed next to her. Black hair braided back, eyes peacefully shut. Franziska has to force herself to not stare for too long. It’s not that Maya would mind, it’s that Franziska would spiral worse.
Maya has always been a very sound sleeper. Which is why Franziska is startled when the figure next to her stirs to life. She quickly closes the open tab, leaving the screen settled on the wallpaper. Maya rubs her eyes and rolls over, squinting at the light from the device.
“Babe? What are you doing?” she asks, yawning.
“Nothing,” Franziska lies. “Just… checking emails.”
Maya glances at the screen seeing just the wallpaper. Franziska’s email isn’t even pulled up. But Maya doesn’t like to argue with her wife. They stare at each other for several silent moments.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. Go back to sleep, hon. I’m putting it away.”
Sure enough, Franziska closes the laptop and puts it in the drawer of the nightstand. She tries to give the most reassuring look she can to her wife, not wanting an interrogation, no matter how guilty she’s feeling.
Rationally, Franziska knows she can talk to Maya about anything. Getting herself to actually do so has been hard. Over the past year of being married, she’s opened up a few times, but there are still times she can’t.
Something as serious as this, though… She knows she needs to. Tomorrow. Tomorrow after work, she’ll ask Maya to talk. The black-haired woman has never said no to that, not to anyone. There’s no worry there.
For now, Franziska shifts to lie down beside Maya. Trying to settle down to get some sleep.
—-
03:31
Franziska can’t sleep.
It’s been two and a half hours, and she’s still wide awake. Her mind has been whirring, gears turning and jumping from one thing to the next. She glances at Maya’s again-peaceful form.
With a sigh, Franziska gently untangles herself from her wife’s loose grasp. Thankfully, it doesn’t wake her.
Franziska pads off down the hallway, grabbing her phone from the nightstand on her way out. She silently opens the back door, stepping out onto the back porch. It’s cold outside, but she can’t seem to care right now.
Her head isn’t on entirely straight as she pulls out her phone, the light giving her face a dull glow.
She clicks call.
The line rings for several moments before it connects.
“Hello?” a tired man’s voice says.
As soon as she hears it, she regrets ever getting out of bed. An impulse inside of her tells her to not say anything and hang up. She cringes at herself, at the silence on the line.
“...Little brother,” she finally says.
“Franziska? Why are you calling at this ungodly hour?”
She hesitates, the sound of Miles's voice making her feel stupid and somewhat small. She has to hold back the tears that want nothing more than to come out.
“Nevermind,” she finally says.
There’s another moment of silence followed by the sound of him shifting to sit up in his bed, trying to orient himself better. He can tell something’s up; his sister has never called him in the dead of night like this.
“You’re not getting off that easy. You’ve already woken Phoenix and I up. What’s going on?”
“Both of you. Of course I did.”
“Of course he heard it, my phone was on our nightstand. You’re deflecting.”
Franziska has no idea what to say. Where does she even start? How does one casually say ‘I’ve been thinking of harming myself for months now and I think I’m about to actually do it’?
She starts to speak, but the words die on her tongue. She doesn’t know what they were, anyway.
Miles is forced to break the tension. When he speaks again, his voice is a bit lower, more awake.
“Do we need to come over?”
“...Yes.”
Oh God, why did she say that? They’ll come over, Maya will wake up, and all eyes will be on her. Everyone witnessing how much of a trainwreck she is. All of the work, all of the sacrifices made to cover it up, absolutely wasted.
“Alright. We’re on our way. Are either of you hurt?”
“No.”
“Okay. Good. We’ll be over in about fifteen minutes.”
After just a bit more back and forth, they hang up the phone. Franziska finds herself staring down at the screen, not wanting to click it off. The picture of her and her brother that she set for his contact is kind of comforting.
They don’t get to see each other as much as she’d like. She’d never admit that, of course. She’s too embarrassed about craving that with anyone, much less from the brother she’d been cold to for years. Ever since she came back from Germany, they’ve developed a better relationship, but they’re still at arms length from each other. It’s hard and just plain weird.
This is the train of thought running through her mind when there’s a knock on the front door that snaps her back to reality. She was totally dazed for the past sixteen minutes, she realizes as she taps her phone to light up the screen. They’re one minute late. She pushes that nagging thought away. That’s a bit petty.
She gets up, sliding a hand over her messy hair, opening the door. Miles stands on the other side, Phoenix behind him. They’re both dressed casually, but not in pajamas. Franziska suddenly feels a bit self conscious in her pajamas. In that whole sixteen minutes, she didn’t think to change?
The men don’t even notice. What they do notice, however, is the bags under her eyes and the way she keeps rubbing her wrist.
There’s a slightly awkward moment where no one speaks, no one moving from the doorway. Franziska eventually realizes that’s her cue, so she steps to the side to let them in. She puts the backs of her cool fingers to her cheeks to get the red to die down.
The men sit down on the couch, the room dark and quiet. Usually the radio would be on or something. It doesn't ease their worries. Phoenix is here because Franziska has become part of his family, and he does care, but he stays quiet for now, knowing he's not the one she called for. He's close by in case he needs to help, as usual. His expression is mostly neutral as he looks at his sister in law. There's a tinge of worry in it that he's trying hard to suppress.
Miles clears his throat as he sits down next to his husband, breaking the silence.
“Do you want to talk? Or are we just here to provide company?”
Franziska hesitates.
“I… don't know.”
“That's alright,” Miles says smoothly. He can feel the atmosphere of the house. He's always been a very observant man, picking up on things others don't. He can feel the tension of a silent, suppressed crisis. So he stays calm. “Will you at least sit?”
When he gestures towards the armchair across from the couch, she sighs. She nods and sits down, crossing her arms over her stomach. Staring down at the feet of the coffee table, she avoids their gazes.
Phoenix and Miles have unfortunately done this before. Not with Franziska, but actually with each other. Sometimes words are too hard and all that's needed is a comforting presence. But they share a small glance, silently agreeing that that's not what the woman needs or even wants. Franziska wants to talk but is clearly struggling to.
So Miles murmurs to Phoenix to go grab some bottles of water from the kitchen. The man quietly heads off to do so.
With Phoenix momentarily gone, Miles leans forward, his voice low.
“I know you want to talk, Franziska. You are more than free to. If it's Phoenix that's making you clam up, I can send him outside. To that lovely porch swing we got you for Christmas,” he offers quietly.
“No. No, don't do that. That might be worse.”
“Alright. Is there anything else here holding you back?”
Franziska falters, then sighs. She fiddles with a loose stitch in the arm of the chair.
“I don't know. I suppose it's just me.”
“...I understand,” he says, and he does. He remembers that feeling all too well. How hardened he was before Phoenix and Trucy showed him how it was okay to let go of past demons. It took a long time. Very long. He knows that the process couldn't be rushed, and can't be with his sister, either.
But he's not going to give up just because she has some walls up.
“Just say it, push it out. It'll be easier to talk about it once it's in the air. You know you'll want to start defending yourself. That's still talking.”
Franziska cuts him a look at that last part, but knows he's right. Once she said it, he would start in with the probing, which would rile her up and get her talking.
Phoenix returns quietly, setting a bottle of water on the coffee table in front of her, offering a small, easy smile. He sits back down next to Miles, putting the other two bottles on their side. None of them reach for one. They all know it was to get Phoenix out of the room for a minute.
Finally, Franziska speaks something other than empty nothings.
“Do you remember when I called you in the middle of the night when I was fourteen?”
Phoenix's head tilts to the side just slightly, and he glances over at his husband.
Miles's eyebrows furrow a bit.
“I can't say I do. When was this?”
“I was fourteen, so you were twenty. I called you, regrettably crying on the phone to you. I had just quit my first job after working a very late shift. You had been asleep. I woke you up.”
“...I might vaguely remember this. You asked me to come pick you up, but I was two hours out, right?”
“Yes. You didn't come.”
“...Is this what you're upset about?”
She scoffs quietly.
“Of course not. That was years ago.”
Miles nods slowly trying to grasp at straws, trying to figure out why she's bringing this up. How this is relevant.
“You didn't come,” she repeats.
“I know. I was two hours away and had to be up for work only a few hours after that. And we weren't exactly, ah, close, back then.”
Franziska falls quiet, flattening the loose string down with her pointer finger. The gears in her mind are at full speed, that much is clear. Miles just wants to know why she's bringing this old memory up.
“I wanted to be,” she finally admits, her voice a bit harsher than she had meant it to be.
“You wanted to what? Be closer? Franziska, back then you went silent every time I was in the room. I tried to get to know you. You wouldn't talk to me.”
“I called you! Crying!”
“You did. After a full year of not speaking to me. I was confused and disoriented. I know you understand that.”
“I told you. On the phone. I told you that I trusted you and wanted to be around you when things started to go wrong. That you were the only person I knew that felt safe to be around.”
Miles falls quiet at that. He shakes his head, his eyebrows knitted together.
“You did? I don't remember that.”
Franziska just huffs and leans back, her crossed arms stiffening over her stomach.
She didn't call them over here just to fight with her brother. She didn't want to be yelling at him. It just comes out of her naturally, her well-acquainted defense mechanism.
Phoenix sees them getting riled up, so he gently raises his hands, palms out placatingly.
“Okay. Okay, take a breath. Both of you. Franziska,” he says, putting his gaze on her. “Can you tell us why you brought this up? What has you thinking about that call now?”
“...I was thinking of doing the same thing then.”
“What?”
“Where my head is now. That's where my head was that night. I called Miles for help and he never came. Yet tonight I called him again. For the same reason.”
The room falls silent for a second as the men process her words. For a second, they have no idea what she's talking about. But she gave some pretty forward context clues. Both men are smart enough to pick up on them.
“You're wanting to hurt yourself,” Miles whispers.
The woman immediately averts her gaze. Having it said so openly like that was kind of embarrassing, somehow. Like they've figured out that she's weak.
Miles softens considerably, realizing what's going on. His sister isn't in a good state of mind. He won't take the previous little argument personally. With her, he really never should.
In the back of his mind, he remembers. He remembers her, years ago, crying on the phone to him, talking the same way. Back then, she had even said she wanted to do herself harm. She said that, and that apparently wasn't enough to get him to call out of work. A put settles in his stomach as he realizes how easily he could have lost her. They hadn't been close, he hadn't felt it was any of his responsibility. It's a good thing Phoenix and Trucy have come into his life. Now he's not so heartless.
He rubs a hand over his face, his voice lower now. Phoenix's hand is rubbing his back.
“...I apologize. I do remember now. You said that back then.”
Franziska stays quiet, rubbing at her wrist through her sweater sleeve.
Miles sits forward, stretching his arm across the coffee table. He very gently grabs her arm. He leans down to make eye contact with her, trying to gauge her state of mind. He doesn't want to check without her permission.
She doesn't protest, so he very gently peeks under her sleeve. Thankfully, there's nothing there. Her porcelain skin is untainted all the way up. He lets out an inaudible sigh of relief. When he drops her sleeve back down, she quickly retracts her arm.
“You said you want to, but you haven't done anything? No other, ah… method?” Phoenix whispers, truly concerned for his sister in law. Situations like these always tug at his heartstrings, no matter who it is. It being someone in his family makes it even harder.
She shakes her head without looking up. She doesn't want to see the pity on their faces.
“What was your plan?” Miles abruptly asks. It makes Franziska tense up slightly, and Phoenix cuts him a glare. He continues. “I know you, Franziska. You always have a plan for everything. Talk to us.”
“...Pills. No mess.”
Phoenix's breath hitches, but Miles nods quietly. Franziska is close to her breaking point, but not wanting to accept it. She can't let that happen.
“No mess?” Miles scoffs. “What about your wife? She'd be a mess. She couldn't stay at her village after the incidents there; there's no way she'd be able to stay here if you did that. She'd be forced to move and uproot her life. Again. What about the von Karma reputation? You hold that close to heart. You would wreck everything you've ever worked for. Hell, Trucy would be hysterical. She's constantly asking to see her aunts. Gumshoe would go back to making even less than he does now. Everything would change if you weren't here.”
Franziska shoots up out of the armchair at the end of his little speech. She wipes at one of her eyes with the back of her hand, starting to head off out of the room. Phoenix stands, too, gently grabbing her by the arm.
“Don't go. You don't have to hide to cry. That's why we came over…” he says softly.
It's at this time that Maya wakes up and notices her wife not in bed with her. She rubs her eyes as she pads down the hallway, stopping in surprise when she sees the men. She hadn't even heard them come in.
“...Hey. What's going on?” she asks, her voice this with both sleep and concern.
When she sees Franziska's tears, she's on high alert. It takes a hell of a lot to make her wife cry, so she knows something's really wrong. She gently grabs the paler hand, guiding Franziska towards her. They wrap around each other in an embrace, Franziska's head coming down to hide in the other's shoulder.
With Franziska backwards to the room, Maya gives the men a quizzical look, wanting someone to explain.
For a long time, no one speaks. Franziska and Maya melt to the floor, neither letting go. Phoenix and Miles do feel a bit awkward just staying there silently, but they wouldn't dream of leaving. They sit down on the couch, respectfully not staring at the women. Their hands are intertwined, sitting with their thighs together. Quiet but ready.
Maya rubs Franziska's back as the other woman cries, her free hand smoothing back blue hair rhythmically. Franziska is in real distress, the sobs coming from the bottom of her heart. It's agonizing for any of them to listen to. The woman has never in her life cried like this. It's good for her to get it out, but still.
After a while, Franziska shoots up to stand on wobbly legs. It's a bit sudden, taking everyone by surprise. Maya, still on the floor, shoots her arms up to her wife's waist, wanting to guide her back down. But Franziska heads off down the hallway, right into the bathroom.
With it being the dead of the night, the house is pretty silent. So they hear when she turns the sink on, washing her face.
Inside the bathroom, Franziska now finds herself staring at herself in the mirror. Her eyes are puffy, her whole face blotchy. She looks like the definition of a mess.
Something about that really upsets her. She huffs angrily as she pushes her hair back behind her ears. In a moment of pure panic, she opens the medicine cabinet. One of those mirrors over the sink that opens into a small cabinet. In her mind, she's already ruined everything. Those closest to her have now seen her in such a state. She can't just disappear and avoid them forever. Not this time. But the thought of facing them again after this is agonizing.
Maya is already on her way down the hall when she hears the familiar squeak of the hinges from the medicine cabinet. Her heart drops.
“Franziska!” she yells, a rare use of her wife's full first name. She knocks loudly on the door when she finds the handle is locked. “Babe, let me in! Open the door!”
Phoenix and Miles hear the commotion, their hearts dropping. They don't want to intervene in such a delicate moment, but they can't just not help. Miles is up off of the couch first, Phoenix following him. They don't crowd the bathroom door, knowing that if Franziska were to open it, it would only serve to freak her out. They stand about halfway down the hall, staying close.
“Babe, please. Please open the door. Don't do anything, please,” Maya begs, sobbing at the thought of her wife locked in there, just on the other side of that door but still not able to be reached.
Phoenix springs into action. He comes up behind Maya, pulling her into an embrace as she sobs. She's still facing forward, sobbing at the door. She hardly even registers Phoenix. The love of her life is in there, but she's stuck out here. She curses her past self for buying indoor knobs that had locks just because they were pretty. She would have never imagined they'd be used like this.
Miles, running on adrenaline, shakes the doorknob harshly. He bangs at the weak spot just above it, grunting as he damages his hand. But he can manage an injured hand. He's not so sure he could handle having a dead sister. Especially not on his watch.
Finally, the weak spot gives and the door pops open. He quickly shoves it all the way open, already stepping inside.
Franziska is on the floor beside the bathtub, three spilled bottles of pills surrounding her legs. Miles grabs her face, under her chin, a bit harsher than he meant to. He brings her face to look up at him, or more so he can look her over.
“Franziska. Talk to me. Now. You didn't take any, right? You didn't take them,” he says roughly, glancing at the medication everywhere. He's hoping she spilled all of it and was too weak from crying to do anything about it.
His prayers are answered when she shakes her head.
He's shoved aside when Maya barges in right behind him, having fought out of Phoenix's grasp. She skids to her knees in front of her wife, crying with both agony and relief. She takes the woman back into her arms, her grip tighter this time. At any little movement Franziska makes, Maya tightens her hold, never wanting to let her up again. She's terrified.
Both women are sobbing, and the men are having to blink back their tears as well. This has been a truly traumatic night for everyone.
No one knows how much time passes. It feels like they're in that little bathroom for eternity. In a somber haze, Maya gets Franziska down the hall and into bed. Both of their heads are aching from such heavy crying; they crash into the bed with each other. They're both holding the other tight as they sleep restlessly.
Phoenix and Miles let out heavy breaths once they see the women asleep. They share a look, knowing this will have to be talked about. Their own faces are splotchy, too.
Phoenix makes quick work of cleaning up the mess of pills, shoveling them into the bottles with his hand. He hangs onto the bottles for now.
Miles, behind him, is inspecting the door where he broke the lock. He'll replace it, get it fixed. Some other time.
Outside, the sun has already risen. People are already on their way to work. But the night has only just ended for them. Maya and Franziska will likely sleep all day. The men are used to all nighters, but not ones like this. Not ones that will haunt their memories for years to come.
Neither of them are in any state to drive home and, honestly, neither of them feel comfortable leaving. They don't know what state either of the women will wake up in later. Their family is the most important thing in the world to them, and they're going to be there for everything they can.
Miles clears off the couch and sits down, rubbing his aching eyes. He tosses a blanket over to Phoenix who is doing the same on the adjacent couch. Neither of them find the words to speak.
Phoenix shoots a quick text to Apollo, simply saying he needs the boy to babysit Trucy for the day. He doesn't elaborate on why. As soon as he sends the text, he clicks his phone off and tosses it aside, not waiting for an answer.
He forces himself to lie down, almost immediately falling asleep. Miles does the same.
Whatever happens, they'll be there. This little family sure is dysfunctional, and they sure have their issues, but one thing they'll never have to worry about is being alone. No one in their little family would ever let that happen. Bumps in the road, like tonight, will come along. And they'll make it through each time. It's not even a question if they'll be there for Franziska when she wakes up. The only question is when she will wake up, and that's up to her. It's a scary situation, but they don't love her any less than before their phone rang last night.