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Maya truly hadn’t assumed Franziska would be such a mother hen. Maternal was honestly one of the lowest adjectives on the list when it came to Franziska, if she was being honest with herself.
Like, of course she knew Franziska had the capability to be kind, and devoted, and loving—she wouldn’t have agreed to a second date otherwise, let alone a third! But Franziska’s love roared like a lion, crackled like a blazing wildfire, first and foremost she was passionate. Of course that didn’t mean she couldn’t also be doting and fussy, but it just didn’t seem congruent with the overall image she projected.
Out here in the heartland, with sprawling fields and far-off trees on every side of them, gravel roads and low fences, Maya feels like the powers that be took a chunk of the American South and stuck it in the middle of Northern California. Autumn looks like autumn up here, the way she remembered it from the mountains—with deciduous trees that shift colour and shed, leaving the earth underfoot a mosaic of colour… when Franziska had asked her out on this little weekend trip, Maya didn’t even have to think before shouting yes!
If she never sees a browning palm tree again, it’ll still have been too soon.
Even just the scenery would’ve been worth the trip, but the county fair and all its amusement park additions are shaping up to keep her busy forever. It’s all so much that Maya has no idea what to even tackle first—the rides excite her most, but Franziska doesn’t seem like the type, Maya needs to do more research and today is the perfect time to do it. There’s a dealer’s hall of sorts that’s full of local art and trinkets, and a petting zoo in the Eastern corner, and the food. Oh, the food! It’s calling her name. Maya can hear its little whispers as they soar like dandelion seeds on the wind.
Every greasy, fried fair food known to man swirls in a titillating cloud of pure Americana around the place, but there’s a spiciness to autumn foods that’s distinct and ticklish. That, combined with the Northern chill in the air and it’s no wonder Maya’s sneezing, those two things always set her off even when they’re not in tandem, and yet—
“I knew that jacket of yours was too light,” Franziska tuts, unbuttoning and wiggling out of her own. “Here.”
“Fran, nooo!” Maya says right back. “My jacket’s fine, the air’s just getting to me.”
“I insist.” Indeed she does, pushing the long, fuzzy, black thing toward Maya as it’s hung from her hand. “You’re going to catch your death dressed like that.”
Spirits, she sounds like Nick, but if Maya says that aloud she will no longer have a… girlfriend? Romantic acquaintance? Whatever they’ve decided they are. She might be wearing a skirt, yeah, and it might be on the shorter side, sure, but why did everyone seem to forget that she literally had endurance training when it came to extreme temperatures? A light autumn breeze was really nothing, her nose was just—fussy—
Another sneeze, one that tumbles her forward with its force. Franziska is no longer asking, of course, draping the coat across Maya’s hunched shoulders before she even has the chance to raise her head again. Pitifully, Maya sniffles, angling a look at Franziska as she frets.
“What about you?” Maya tries. “Don’t you need to stay warm too?”
She curls around to zip Maya up, then latch the buttons atop the zipper, then tie the little cloth belt along her waist. And it’s not like Maya hasn’t been close like this to Franziska before, but it still makes her feel just as lightheaded as the first time—breaking through the scent of crisp air and cinnamon-sugar is the sharp florals of her rose perfume that lingers on the coat, and every chaste touch blooms a spilling sort of warmth in her chest, up her neck. Maya really does not need a jacket to beat the cold.
“This is hardly anything of note, Miss Fey,” says Franziska, finishing up and waving a hand. “Winters back home are ten times as harsh as… whatever you’d call this.”
Again, Maya wants to protest to that—ask Franziska if she’s ever sat beneath a waterfall in below freezing temperatures for three hours straight with no breaks. She doesn’t remember how to convert Fahrenheit to Celsius, though, and her will is being quickly weakened by Franziska’s jacket—soft and warm and intoxicating, it smells like a nap on a sunny hill and fingers in her hair and kissing a pretty girl with soft lips until she forgets who she is.
So, instead, she pulls the fluff that lines the hood closer to her neck, tries to be discreet as she inhales a big, long breath of that scent. It crawls through her airways and down into her heart, overflowing with the shape of the love that wraps around her, fur-lined and jet black and shielding her from harm. Unable to contain herself, Maya leans into Franziska, knitting their hands together and slowing her steps down.
She’s excited—of course she is.
Anything to make this day last longer, though.
In retrospect, Maya probably should have known the rest of the day was doomed as soon as her eye caught the shape of those plushies.
The cliché of the amusement park date—where the significant other dutifully stepped up to bat to win some giant stuffed animal for their starry-eyed paramour—was one that Maya never actually understood. Granted, she hadn’t been to many amusement parks, but every time she had, the notably shit quality of the stuffed animals in question kinda put her off from how cute they were otherwise. They all had a weird sorta sheen to their fur, were weirdly stiff and unyielding, and overall just didn’t look super fun to hug. What was a plush even good for if it wasn’t huggable?
All those factors left the building when she saw that fateful booth down toward the end of the games hall. It almost seemed too good to be true, of course she had to get a closer look, to confirm her suspicions—part of her hoped they weren’t true. Part of her hoped she’d just been seeing what she wanted to see.
Up there in the rafters, the booth was decorated in licensed tokusatsu merch—plush characters of all sizes and colours, hanging there and ripe for the winning. On its own, this is unremarkable, except… Except.
Except Maya, while she can certainly appreciate the whole of the Samuraiverse, would be lying if she acted like she cared about much of anything besides the female characters. The female characters that were underloved and unappreciated by both the fandom and the merchandisers themselves, the female characters that might very well have not even existed to anyone but her. For incredibly biased reasons, she was obviously fond of the Pink Princess… but every character in canon paled to the greatest, hottest, most well-written character of all: Silver Screened Villainess-Turned-Heroine, the Cobalt Crusader.
Despite her relative popularity in the fandom, though, she still suffered the same fate as most of the female characters—when it came to physical merch, she was entirely overshadowed by her male co-stars. Scouring brand accounts and secondhand shops, Maya had her finger to the pulse on everything and anything merchandise-minded, and never once had she seen even a crumb of Cobalt, besides a few scant figures (too overpriced), and blind-bag keychains and pins (too cheap) she wasn’t even guaranteed to get without finding someone to trade with.
And even if she did, who would trade the Cobalt Crusader? The mere thought was unheard of.
Despite everything, though… despite odds telling her that this should be impossible… there, far-off and above her head is the cutest plush of her highest-tiered waifu. Not only that, the style of it is just begging to be hugged—chibified, with a big head and short limbs that reach out at a general nothing as if beckoning Maya to hold her. Oh, and Maya will hold her, if it’s the last thing she does.
“See something you like?”
Franziska’s voice breaks her out of her glittering reverie. Before Maya can answer the question herself, though, Franziska follows her line of sight to where that sparkling gaze is cast. Without a single word being spoken, she understands. She did watch Maya start an entire riot for an effigy of this character’s likeness, after all.
“I’m not going to have to leash you like a hound, am I?” A grin.
“You might have to,” Maya says, not taking her eyes off the plush—serendipitously hanging right beside another of the Pink Princess. “You’ve got your whip, right? Just—Just tie it around me, or—”
“That won’t be necessary,” says Franziska, taking a purposeful step forward. “Come along.”
Shaken out of her relative trance, Maya blinks. She… she wasn’t really going to…?
As though it’s nothing, Franziska slams her card on the game counter, with such a force that the grouping of bottles across the divide all rattle and sing against one another. The poor, underpaid worker and her exchange a few words, and they grab one of the little metal rings from its skewer, passing it to Franziska.
Curious, Maya sidles back up to her girlfriend. “I’ve heard these things are rigged to shit, how are you gonna—”
Before she can finish her sentence, Franziska snaps her wrist at lightning speed, throwing the thing directly onto one of the bottle-tops, where it circles itself a scant few times before it slows down and settles in a perfect half-tilt. Stupefied, Maya looks at Franziska, then back to the rows upon rows of bottles in hushed, open-mouthed awe.
“Fran?!?!”
Preening, Franziska sticks both hands squarely on her hips, raises her chin to its usual high rest. “Rigged is correct, Maya Fey. However, every challenge, no matter how insurmountable, has its own solutions.”
She turns back to the bored-looking teenager manning the thing. “How many for the large items up there?”
“Fifteen hits in a row,” they say, running fingers through long, curly black hair, “no misses or the streak resets.”
Geez, Maya thinks, biting her lip, no wonder I hadn’t seen anyone walking around with these things.
“What are you waiting for, then?” Franziska says, holding out a gloved hand. “Top me up this instant”
“Fran, wait, you don’t have to—I don’t need it that badly—”
“Maya Fey. The last time you found yourself in need of merchandise featuring this character—” she tosses another ring, and it lands perfectly, again, “—the end result was a veritable cavalcade of absurd circumstances I’m not entirely keen to repeat, grateful as I am for them bringing me to you.”
“Alright, point, but—spirits, how are you doing that?”
“I told you,” she makes another hit, “there’s method to these little parlor games. Didn’t your guardians in Kurain teach you these things?”
“I wasn’t going to a lotta state fairs, babe,” Maya says, “and if I was, I’m pretty sure Mia woulda attacked the poor game runners before winning prizes the old fashioned way.”
“Hmph. Why waste the energy? Look—”
She holds one of the rings up to Maya’s face, commanding her attention. Mystified, Maya watches, fondness blooming across her features as Franziska speaks.
“When you hold the ring, it’s pertinent to do so in the right place—dominant hand, between the thumb and forefinger, with your thumb on top. As I’m sure you’ve observed, I’m ambidextrous, but my left arm is ever-so-slightly stronger, as I’ve been using it longer.”
She hunches her shoulders, spreads her feet just barely apart.
“The rigged aspect, so to speak, simply comes down to mere physics, yes?” She stares straight forward, and the silvery furrow in her brow looks twice as beautiful as usual. “Simply put, the ring may only land atop the bottle when its mid-air spin does not wobble. It must remain flat, so that the hole in its center remains consistently wide. The best way to do this it to be quick and efficient, like so—”
Another hit. Perfect form. They’re drawing a bit of a crowd, now, people bunching up on the sides of the booth and watching as this lawyer lady dressed like a Victorian noblewoman absolutely kicks ass at ring toss.
Truthfully, Maya has pretty much always had a crush on Franziska. Even when the woman in question was making her feel small and scared in the defendant’s chair, Maya couldn’t help her mind from wandering, marveling at how beautiful Franziska looked across the divide. Dreaming of some alternate universe, where they met under different circumstances, and maybe in that impossible world they could brush hands reaching for the same lime at a supermarket and fall stupidly in love. The fact that this universe, this world, this life was the better timeline… well, that was just the icing on the cake.
Maya has always thought Franziska beautiful, and competent, and hard-working and cool. But right now, as she’s gloating her unorthodox skill at something so childish and benign, Maya thinks she might be falling in love.
“What am I at?” Franziska calls to the worker.
“Twelve,” they say right back, looking mighty impressed themself.
Franziska exhales through her nose, in that way she so often did. Usually, it was a huff of hot anger—one that drew more horse comparisons than she’d like—this time it’s something more pensive, metered. She looks up at the sky, the overcast that’d been painting the world in a bluish sort of grayscale all morning. Like she’s studying its shape for something, like she’s waiting.
As if the clouds themselves bend to her whim, then, the heavens crack themselves open. A single raindrop hits Maya’s nose, one that sees her blinking from the startle in an attempt to regain herself. The grin that stretches its way across Franziska’s face is positively devious.
The rain starts slowly before coming all at once, pattering and echoing down upon the fallen leaves that all but blanket the fairgrounds. Roaring across the open fields. Maya’s expecting her date—prim and proper, concerned with appearances, decorated in makeup and hairspray in clothes nicer than anything Maya’s ever owned—to run for cover, to abandon her post. Instead she points her palm flat beneath her chin, instead she begins to laugh victoriously. As though she’s already won.
“This prize is as good as yours, Miss Fey,” says Franziska, holding up several rings in her hand so that the rain douses them the same way it’s dousing everything and everyone else. “Take this!”
She snaps her wrist once more—a hit. Then, without stopping, she transfers the last two over to her left hand one by one, brows sharp and smile sharper as she casts the last two toward the bottles on the edges, cinching the victory.
Finally, Franziska points a purposeful finger directly at the plushie of the Cobalt Crusader, demanding her prize. The small din of noise around them intensifies with chatter and cheers as the onlookers celebrate with her, but in a moment’s notice they and the world they exist in all seem to melt away. Voices fade to white noise beneath the downpour that sings around them, and Maya sees only Franziska.
Franziska, with her hair turning liquid and rivulets dripping down her face, with her boots splattered with mud and her flowy skirt wilting and her soaking black button-down sticking to her like a second skin. Her perfect facade crumbles—the rain blurs it away—and just this once she is too caught up in the joy of this meaningless win to notice or care. When she looks back at Maya, her eyes are brighter than ever, like she too dwells in this serene, stormy bubble where nothing exists besides them two.
And Maya can’t help it—she leaps forward and throws her arms around Franziska’s neck, crushing her in a bearhug and pressing a big, over-affectionate kiss on her cheek. The two of them, wet with rainwater, stick together like velcro.
“You’re so fuckin’ cool!” She's giggling and cheering as Franziska struggles to stay upright on the quickly-yielding ground. “Fran, holy shit, you rock my world!”
“Don’t thank me yet, Maya.” She angles her head back toward the prizes hanging in the rafters. “Aren’t we forgetting someone?”
Once more, Maya gazes curiously at where her own eyes point, dizzy with rose perfume and the icy-hot embrace. Of course—in all Maya’s euphoria at seeing merch of Cobalt, she had completely overlooked the equally adorable Pink Princess hanging right beside her.
“Babe, oh my god, you don’t have to—” Maya looks back to Franziska, still smiling, as if the rain isn’t freezing at all. Honestly, she’d make a great spirit medium, she isn’t even shivering one bit. “Like, this is already so—”
“I insist, Maya Fey,” says Franziska again, swiping the sopping bangs from her eyes. “After all, we can’t separate your little boat, now can we?”
Maya snorts, and stumbles forward again, and hugs Franziska tighter, eliciting a half-choked breath that transforms, on the way out, into a wheezy laugh. “It’s 'ship,' you dork!”
“The terms are synonymous,” Franziska asserts, taking Maya’s prize from the counter with her free hand. She passes it to the girl in question, who stares with big, watery, grateful eyes and a wobbling lip, too taken with the Crusader’s chibified beauty to say or do anything. Instead, she hugs it twice as hard as she’d hugged Franziska, grateful for the plushie’s lack of organs to crush with the unhindered strength of her affection.
There Franziska stands, heeled wedge boots dug into the mud, her intimidation factor hardly offset by the fact that she looks like a half-drowned cat. The skies are grey as far as the eye can see, but to Maya, Franziska’s shining brighter than any sun could ever hope to.
Still smiling, she splays her palm out toward the carnie, flecks of water falling off her hand with the theatrics of the gesture, directly onto the counter in front of them.
“Fifteen more.”
The ferris wheel should have been her first warning, to be honest. The whole thing was incredibly premonitory, looking back. But how could anyone blame Maya for being distracted up there?
Maya learned, quickly in the day, that her suspicions were correct—Franziska von Karma did not like carnival rides. What Maya didn’t expect, however, was for Franziska to be afraid of them. It was honestly pretty damn adorable, to see her big, fierce, intimidating girlfriend shrink in the wake of a rollercoaster queue. She had ridden exactly one such coaster with Maya and spent the entire thing with her nails dug into the borrowed sleeve of the girl’s arm, features strung tight and eyes screwed shut. When they’d stumbled off the ride, Maya was giddy with adrenaline and excitement, and Franziska had a death grip on her own shoulder while she stared a thousand yards into the crunching gravel underfoot.
(Of course, Franziska would not sink so low as to admit she was scared, and so Maya very carefully made a point to complain of having to take her bag and various swag and foodstuffs on every ride, if only there was someone to stay on the ground and hold them—!)
It was a fun little puzzle, dating Franziska. Quite enriching, even.
So, naturally, Maya was a little shocked when Franziska suggested, at the end of the night, that they ride the ferris wheel. And then less shocked when she demanded they wait a rotation so that they could get the only non-shaking gondola.
This ended up being a wonderful decision, of course. The day had already been full of romcom cliché after romcom cliché, so it only made sense to tack on one more—except that Maya was immediately distracted from her hot girlfriend by the graffiti lining the interior of the thing. Her favourite piece by far was the safety warning sign stickered on the door, normal in all regards except at the end where someone had taken a fat, black, permanent chisel-tip marker to the sentence’s end—Keep hands and legs inside the gondola at all times, bitch.
She spent a good portion of the ride just snort-laughing like a maniac at that. Franziska didn’t seem to mind, though—when Maya calmed herself down, wiped a tear from her eye, finally looked over at her forgotten date… Franziska was just gazing at her, the smile on her face more fond than Maya had ever known it to be. In the dark of the night, flanked by the dappled, blurry, multicoloured glow of the fairlights below, Franziska’s silhouette was illuminated in soft, glistening lines, shapely and golden. Maya felt her breath catch in her throat from how beautiful she was, even with her features still drooping from the rain.
Neither of them said anything as the wheel began its second rotation, as they climbed ever toward the unseen stars. Even out here in what could ostensibly be called country, the light pollution obscured the sky that Maya loved—but when Franziska cupped her jaw in one hand and drew their lips together soft and slow, Maya felt her lovedizzy head swimming through those stars regardless.
Oh, it was so unabashedly romantic, Pearly would’ve had a field day if she’d been there to see. So romantic, in fact, that Maya was too smitten—with Franziska and with life—to notice her date’s habitual, persistent sniffling.
Only in retrospect does the frequency of it really stick out. The two of them had spent the remainder of the ride leaning against one another, dreamy-eyed gazes cast across the glittering expanse of nightlife and plains and trees as they shared one another’s warmth. And Franziska had been sniffling, and clearing her throat a bit, but all of it was background noise to Maya—who was just so flabbergasted by the fact that she got to hold this wonderful thing in her arms, she forgot how to breathe, let alone how to notice how anyone else was breathing.
Well, she’s noticing now. In fact, she could not ignore it even if she tried.
Back in their hotel room, Franziska’s attempting, with all the fortitude she possesses, to get through a full English sentence without stopping in the middle to sneeze. They’re obtrusive things, an almost comical symptom, less like a real illness and more like something from a cartoon. The absurdity of this fact doesn’t stop it from being the truth, though—barely awake for an hour, Franziska finds herself clutching her handkerchief like a lifeline, muffling ailing noises into the thing and desperate not to drip snot all over her laptop as she checks her email.
Standing at Franziska’s bedside, Maya eyes the (now-hanging) thick winter jacket she’d been wearing all day yesterday, and then her pink-nosed paramour. Eyes watering on the tail-end of another sneeze, Franziska keeps up her furious, one-handed typing.
“What was that you said about me catching a cold?”
“I dodn’t know why you’re acti’g so smbug,” says Franziska, giving her nose another emphatic blow in an attempt to fix her voice. “I gave up my jacket. That exact fate befell me. This malady merely proves my assertion.”
“Yeah... I dunno about that.”
Maya leans down a bit to meet her where she is, drawing her eyesight away. She doesn’t know why it’s so… weirdly delightful to see Franziska von Karma sick. It’s not that Maya’s enjoying the fact that the girl she loves is miserable—certainly not that—it’s just that she looks so beautifully plain right now. Lower half buried in blankets (with a scratchy hotel-room throw across her shoulders to match), features flushed an irritated red, hair a touch unkempt, voice low and stuffy… she’s just human. Not a force, but a person—a person who’s chosen Maya.
Opportune, then, Maya slowly closes Franziska’s laptop, as if to wordlessly stay no more working. We’re on vacation. For a moment, Franziska’s too distracted by the wistful eye-contact to notice much of anything… and then her features crumble and she’s pulling away from Maya to sneeze four more times.
“Eesh. I don’t think you woulda crashed this hard if you hadn’t busted your ass at ring toss in the pouring rain, baberoni.”
Still holding her handkerchief to her face, Franziska huffs indignantly. “I implore you to call me anything else. In any case, better I than you.”
“Yeah, yeah, you’re so chivalrous and romantic and hot,” Maya gives her a pat on the head, kisses her forehead as she does. “You won our dumb little argument. But now I gotta leave you all alone and go on a perilous journey for sick day supplies…”
“I’m sure I’ll survive.” Franziska crosses her arms. “I can see the convenience store from our window, Maya Fey.”
“A perilous journey!” Maya reiterates, balling her fists up at her chin. “No working while I’m gone, okay?”
“I shan’t—” another sneeze, “—ugh. Let you down.”
“There’s my Fran.”
To prove her point, Franziska sinks back down into bed, abandoning the blanket over her shoulders and burrowing instead beneath the thick, serviceable hotel comforter. Softhearted and sweet, Maya lackadaisically tucks her beloved in, loose fingers dancing atop the blankets to ensure Franziska stays as cozy as can be while she’s gone. Satisfied with her work, she leans down and presses one final kiss to Franziska’s crown—lingering, warm, and with the promise of a quick return.
Every room that Maya leaves seems to dim as she goes. Franziska took note of this early on, thinking it was some manner of sorcery, something tied to the powerful spiritual prowess that ran through the blood of the future Master of Kurain. Maya was quite literally magic, and the mere thought that it could be anything else hadn’t even occurred to her.
She knows, of course, what it really is now. Something far more beautiful, more enchanting, more resplendent than a vessel for the undying, a halfway-home for those long gone. No, Maya is made of forces greater than any phantom could ever hope to be. Were she to lose her channeling powers tomorrow, were she born into any other life, Franziska knows she would shine all the same.
Juvenile and fun-loving and silly as ever, Maya’s last gift to Franziska before trekking to the store had been to place the Pink Princess plush beside the sick girl. To keep you company, she did not say, but if she had, even Franziska would not have the heart to call the action foolish.
Laying down has made the pressure shift in her sinuses, and her eyes are beginning to feel itchy and uncomfortable as well. There’s truly no part of her that wants to take a nap—she’s only just woken up, after all—but perhaps a quick lie-down to rest her eyes while she waits for Maya to get back isn’t the worst idea. Rolling onto her good shoulder, she makes meaningless eye contact with The Pink Princess… and cannot resist the urge to wiggle toward the heroine, taking her in her arms.
Maybe it’s this foolish illness making her hypersensitive, overly sentimental, soft. Whatever it is, Franziska finds herself compelled to hug the massive plush close to her chest, press her face into the cropped fuzz that covers its armor and squeeze tight. She’s stuffy on one side, but the sugary-sweet aroma that sticks to Maya finds her despite it.
As Franziska’s closing her eyes, pretending that it’s Maya she’s holding, she pays little mind to her aching throat, or the chills she’s fighting, or the way her head pounds. All she can think about, inhaling the scent of this beautiful girl, is how quickly she’d do it all again.