partner

i like klavier and klavier/daryan too much for my own good

[shuzonijimura]

(7) klavier (and the aftermath)

sleep no more — 29k

charastudy, klavier-centric. post-aa4. ignores the existence of aa5/6. klavier deals with the aftermath.

very lightly implied klavier/apollo and past klavier/daryan (sorry)

ao3.

Klavier’s first memory of blood went a little like this: the turkey at the family dinner, the worn handle of the knife, and Kristoph’s brown hands

In retrospect, it was those details that stuck out at him above all else—the family dinner, because it was the first and last of its kind, the worn handle of the knife because it made him think of how it looked like it was made for the grooves of Kristoph’s hands, and Kristoph’s hands because they moved in a way that made him think he was born for the kitchen, not the courtroom.

(Of course, as a child, it had slipped his mind that knives weren’t just used for cooking.)

The details, Klavier thought, hand sharp with a phantom pain he hadn’t felt for months, were more telling than anything else he could ever remember. Memory was a fickle thing that took and gave of its own accord. He couldn’t remember how old he was, or even how old Kristoph was: only that it was the two of them, standing at the kitchen table of the turkey like it was some kind of god-washed sacrifice, and the knife, simultaneously in Kristoph’s hand and somehow stuck in Klavier’s throat where it stopped him from speaking.

The next thing he remembered was Kristoph (because even in memory every damn thing led back to Kristoph) tilting his head to look at him, knife in his hand. Even then, he’d grown his hair out.

“What?” Kristoph had said, giving him the kind of unreadable look that made Klavier scrunch his face up. He held out the knife. “Do you want to cut it?”

It. He shuddered, looked down at the turkey, and then looked back at Kristoph and the knife in his hand. “Not… particularly.” He scratched the back of his head. “It’s messy.”

“Messy,” Kristoph repeated. He snuck a look at the rest of their family in the dining room, and then looked back at Klavier. It was one of the few days he hadn’t boarded himself up in his room with a stack of law books and the last three croissants. Klavier eyed his casual clothes and the way they fell at his shoulders, fitting so much better than his suits.

“That’s what I said.”

“It really isn’t that bad. It’s dead, Klavier.”

He sniffed. “Ja, that’s the thing. I don’t want to deal with dead things.”

“It’s dead, and you’re going to be eating it as soon as I cut this.”

“Just—“—Klavier reached for Kristoph and then let his hand fall at his side—“—do it, already.” He tried a different tactic. “You’re making everyone else wait. Quite rude of you.”

Kristoph had eyed him, then, and he had felt a warmth only in the very tips of his fingers, the kind of pulsing heat that was more felt than known and that he had not remembered since Kristoph put down his guitar for suits and ties. The look continued, and Klavier tried not to flinch away from it.

Finally, Kristoph said, “You’re afraid of cutting a dead turkey?”

Kristoph’s voice rang in his ears, high on amusement and something else he couldn’t name, and he felt every part of him burn. Kristoph—and fuck Kristoph, he thought gloomily, even though Kristoph had told him not to use that word especially in the vicinity of his name—was just making fun of him. Trying to tease the worst out of him.

“Of course not, are you mad?” He made a sweeping gesture at the rest of the room, then at himself. “I’m a rock-star and a soon-to-be lawyer. Cutting a dead turkey is the least of my trials.” Pausing, Klavier looked at him. “I’ve dealt with worse.”

“Piercing your ear doesn’t make you an Armageddon. Also, it was one ear, Klavier.”

“It was Daryan,” Klavier snapped, and then regretted it as soon as he said it because Kristoph fired back immediately with:

“Daryan’s ear?”

They stood there for a moment, the both of them, Klavier looking up at Kristoph’s eyes that were still so blue behind the glasses, Kristoph looking down at him from behind the frames. A part of him felt, ever so slightly, like it had been pulled out of a room of fog and into subtle clarity.

“No, not Daryan’s ear.” He jabbed at Kristoph’s arm, paused. “Okay, ja, Daryan’s ear is pierced. Both of them, actually.”

It was too easy to forget, really, that they were both standing in front of a turkey that was to become the centerpiece of a family dinner in the room over.

“He isn’t the best influence. I’m a little disappointed in the company you keep.”

Klavier shrugged and said, “Me too.” Once Daryan had recommended they both pierce both their bellybuttons with a sewing needle, an ice cube, and one cotton ball.

Whatever snarky comment Kristoph had in regards to Daryan’s strengths and weaknesses as both a friend and a person died, because the next thing Klavier knew, his dad looked right at them from the kitchen table and asked if everything was alright.

“Yes,” Kristoph said, around the same time Klavier said “no.”

Looking back at Klavier, Kristoph put the knife to the turkey again.

And of course it had been the most irrelevant action ever to happen, or quite possibly the most irrelevant thing that he would ever remember in Kristoph’s presence (somehow whatever family memories they had before that were compressed into two meetings, the one there in the kitchen and the one that was to come years later in a courtroom)—yet at the same time it had been, if not an ending, a beginning.

It happened so fast he scarcely remembered it happening at all. In one moment, Kristoph’s hand held steady around the knife. In the next (or in the one after the next, because it was like watching the first and last scenes of a movie without anything in between), the knife was on the floor and Kristoph was reaching for a paper towel.

What he saw then was red. Red, on Kristoph’s pants and on the curve of his hands; on the tablecloth and on the hardwood floor; in front of his eyes when everything else seemed to go quiet.

“Give me that,” Kristoph told him, jerking his head at the paper towel roll, and everything had stopped.

Memory was a fickle thing that sometimes took and sometimes didn’t give. Something had washed all over the room in mute, then, leaving only Kristoph and the blood sweeping through the paper towel he pressed to his hand. He hadn’t said a single word.

Klavier said, suddenly still, “Does it hurt?”

Kristoph didn’t look at him, only at the garbage where he threw the paper towel and then at the sink where he washed the red left behind.

(And some nights—most nights—where he couldn’t sleep, he thought of that. It was the strangest scene, was somehow worse than that: and yet it still flickered in and out of his mind like a flame bent on leaving ash and smoke and the faintest taste of a burn.

Kristoph would spend the rest of his life on the prosecutor’s bench, in his office, and behind bars, running water on blood that would never leave.)

“Of course not,” Kristoph told him.

When they were both called back to the dinner table, turkey safe and sound and blood-free, Kristoph declined. He had, he informed everyone at the dinner table, work to do.

The door to his room swung shut in his absence and then it had been louder than ever.

 ii.

The day after the police take Kristoph away in handcuffs, Klavier retreats to his office.  He doesn’t tell anyone, not Daryan, not his bandmates—just goes to the office and closes his door. For all the thoughts taking up the space in his head, he can’t name a single one. Only the tick of the clock on his wall remains, a movement/sound he feels in his own ribcage. He shuts his eyes.

Closing the door is different from locking it, and when Daryan opens it (of course, he hears his mind say, ahead of everything else) he slams his laptop shut and gives Daryan his brightest smile.

It doesn’t seem to work (Daryan, he notes, has always had particularly tough skin), because Daryan is walking towards him, Daryan is in front of him, and then Daryan is saying: “What gives?”

Klavier only looks at him. For all his years of knowing Daryan, not a single moment emerges that lets him name the look on Daryan’s face.

“Sorry,” Klavier tells him, shrugs. Daryan’s hands are on his desk, only centimetres away from his own and the laptop beneath them. He scrunches his face up. “Didn’t mean to worry you. I know how protective you get.”  He draws out the last part of his sentence, hoping Daryan will either a) get the message and just leave or, which is probably more likely, b) get annoyed with Klavier’s teasing and leave after presenting him a marvelous string of colorful curse words.

Daryan, unfortunately, is as thick-headed as he is tough-skinned, and says: “Hell fucking yeah I’m worried, Gavin.”

Klavier blinks. There are a million responses he can think of Daryan giving him here, most involving some combinations of the words fuck this, fuck that, and fuck you. He makes the mistake of looking at Daryan, who hasn’t budged a single inch and probably won’t until he gets his answers.

“I’m fine, really.” He gives a wave of his hand as if it makes his point any more convincing. “I just—“—and he’s almost positive Daryan can see the wheels turning, here, as he comes up with some other elaborate lie—“—caught whatever bug was going around.” Klavier feels at his throat. “I don’t think I can sing.”

“Don’t care,” Daryan says. He takes his hands off of Klavier’s desk to pinch the bridge of his nose before they press into the desk again, hovering above Klavier’s own hand for only a moment.

“Do you not care enough to run down to the pharmacy and grab me some flu medicine?” Klavier offers, batting his eyelashes. He isn’t sick—with the flu, anyway—but any opportunity to get Daryan out of his office is both needed and appreciated.

Daryan cocks his head, never taking his eyes off, and Klavier feels himself squirming in his seat. There isn’t anything stopping him from just kicking Daryan out and locking the door, really—but Daryan is thick-headed and Daryan is tough-skinned, and Daryan will be back the next day to ask him all the same questions.

(Questions, Klavier notes without really thinking about it, he most likely already knows the answers to.)

A silence takes over that the both of them just stand in, until Daryan says, looking physically pained: “You can.” He pauses, looks at the floor, and then back at Klavier. “Talk to me, I guess.”

He is reminded of doctor visits and the little hammer they hit his knee with to test his reflexes. Without thinking and without hesitating, Klavier shoves his laptop into his bag and stands up: “No need for that, really. I was just heading out.” His mind runs a million miles a minute, all in a direction away from Daryan. And all of a sudden, the light overhead is too bright, the hum of the air-conditioner starting months too early too loud, Daryan’s presence too much: “As in right now, Herr Crescend.”

(He’s known Daryan for seven years, seven years wrought with guitar-playing and case-solving. He’s solved cases with other people, before, but it’s Daryan who’s his right-hand man, Daryan who’s played music alongside him and Daryan who holds more parts of him than possibly anybody else.

And it’s precisely why Daryan is the last person he wants to see right now.)

Daryan grabs his wrist and all of him stops, from his heart to his head. “I meant it,” says Daryan, and Klavier is thinking: I know. And that’s why I can’t take you up on that.

 iii.

Daryan visits him the week after. He comes by this time with Geeter and a coffee that he grumpily explains is decaf. “You don’t need any more of that caffeine shit,” he says when he puts the coffee on Klavier’s desk. It’s a little too close to his laptop for comfort.

Daryan has no reason to know that caffeine is the reason Klavier drinks coffee in the first place, so he thanks him and picks the coffee cup up, bringing to his lips. They sit like that again, Daryan drumming a beat into the surface of Klavier’s hardwood desk.

His eyes catch on the laptop screen, and Klavier feels every part of him stop. He puts the coffee cup back down.

The expression rises in Daryan’s face again, the one he can neither recognize nor name. Klavier shuts his eyes, finds them almost painfully dry.

All Daryan says is: “Why are you researching that?”

He wills the colour to stay out of his face and he slams the laptop shut. Daryan doesn’t need to know. Daryan has no business knowing.

Klavier says, “For me,” and it isn’t exactly a lie.

Daryan sees through it nonetheless. “Like hell it is. It’s for—“—He stops in his tracks, the expression the only thing Klavier can read in his face. He looks away. “It’s okay if you want to take some time.”

He shakes his head before he realizes he’s even doing it. “No need,” and for a brief moment Klavier wonders how many people he’ll have to recite this to, how many people he’ll have to reassure before he finally gets to himself. “I’d like to be prepared, is all.”

“Holy shit, Klavier, it’s been two days.”

And every day feels a little longer. There are things he feels without really thinking, one thing impossibly loud over the rest: the crowd loud and silent all at once, and everything else in the courtroom giving way to a single word: Guilty.

He jolts a little when Daryan scoots his chair closer to the desk. “Klavier?” he says again.

“Right,” says Klavier. He shuts his eyes, opens them again. Then: “Humor me for a little?”

Daryan squints at him. Probably looking for, Klavier thinks, a little gleefully, some kind of ulterior motive that he won’t find. “Whatever,” he says, shaking his head. Klavier knows him well enough to tell that means yes.

(It isn’t that he wants to drag Daryan into whatever this is, but Daryan is there, and there is a part of Klavier that tells him the more he talks about it, the less real it becomes.

Or: the sooner it goes away.)

“Ja, then,” Klavier says. He has to remind himself to breathe. “What’s the penalty for first-degree murder?”

The expression (and he still doesn’t know what it means, only knows that the more he looks at it the less he feels) reappears on Daryan’s face, but he still says, automatically: “Death.”

Somehow, Klavier notes, it’s different in Daryan’s voice—rough and warm at its edges.

“Ja,” Klavier says again. He doesn’t miss how Daryan looks away from him. “And they use—“

“Hanging,” Daryan says before Klavier has to complete his sentence. He’s still looking at Klavier in the way that makes him feel raw, every part of him bared for Daryan to take. It isn’t a good feeling.

“Ja,” Klavier says for a third time. He waves his hand at the open laptop, and prays that Daryan doesn’t see how it shakes.

If Daryan does, he doesn’t say anything about it. “Don’t look at that.”

Klavier’s eyes go from Daryan’s face to the clock, then back at the screen. He closes the laptop, hand burning where screen met skin.

“I guess it’s a little better,” Klavier tells him, looking at the closed laptop instead of at Daryan’s face. “At least then, there’s no blood.”

“Of course it isn’t,” Daryan snaps, and the expression from earlier fades to reveal something so dark and pained Klavier wonders if he saw it to begin with, wonders who, exactly, Daryan is angry with—

And after he’s had a few glasses of wine, pressed shoulder to shoulder with Daryan on the couch in his penthouse, Klavier says, “It doesn’t make any sense at all. My brother was a thorough man. I di—no one thought that he would do that.”

There is silence.

“That he would get caught,” Daryan corrects.

He leaves after that.

 iv.

Klavier visited him exactly two months after the conviction. Two months was a long time, he thought the entire time to the prison, both hands gripping the steering wheel so hard his knuckles went white. It took the both of them two months to compose and perfect the Gavinner’s debut album. It took Klavier two months to get over the stinging pain in his earlobe, when Daryan had slung his arm around Klavier’s shoulders, said, “Wow, you’ve got it in you anyway.”

The yellow light ahead of him flashed red and he slammed hard on the brakes. Everything went quiet with the sound of nothing, drowning out everything save for his own breathing and Daryan’s voice in his head on a loop: Wow. You’ve got it in you anyway.

There were a lot of things he had in him that he hadn’t realized before. He felt at his earlobe, found it bare. And of course it was the same for others. He swallowed around the bitterness in his throat. He wasn’t stupid, not by any semblance of the word, but some aching part of him said (and it was on one-part Daryan’s voice, one-part Kristoph’s): Slow.

(The word tasted like blood on his tongue, drying up whatever other words lay in his throat. He’d been slow to recognize things. Slow to act on them. Slow to open his eyes.

There was Daryan’s voice again, warm and low: But you had it in you anyway.)

He hadn’t realized the light had turned green until the car behind him honked, and Klavier put his foot on the pedal, taking a moment to find where it fit. Most days, for most purposes, he used the hog. It was faster and smoother and easier, anyway—easier to let the rest of the world melt into the backdrop until it was just you and the wind stealing your breath and giving it back in the breeze on your cheeks.

His mind moved before he could stop it, rushing back to a place he shut out two months ago: Daryan liked the hog too. Suddenly, it was like everything he had ever known, everything he had ever touched or seen or remembered, was stained red with the smell of Daryan’s cigarettes, Daryan’s cologne.

His throat went tight, and for a long moment he saw nothing but white in front of him, the breath he couldn’t let go rising so high he was suffocating—

The prison came into view and Klavier yanked hard on the steering wheel, skidding his car into a parking spot. Prosecutors had special parking places and passes (and so did Interpol Agents and detectives), but he hadn’t thought about that in a while.

A quick look around him told him there was no one else in the parking lot he could see him, and he pressed a shaky hand to his forehead, pushing his bangs out of his face. In the empty passenger seat next to him, there was Daryan and the low laughter that came from somewhere between his throat and lungs, calling him a pretentious bastard and reaching for the buttons of the car radio—

It was as if something from outside smashed the car walls together, forcing him into the space the ghost of Daryan’s cigarette smoke lived in, so alive it stopped him from breathing. Hands fumbling on the car door, Klavier forced it open.

He was alone again.

Two months was a long time, he knew. But it wasn’t long enough.

 v.

The first time he meets Daryan, he doesn’t know what to say. Starting conversation with others is easy—a game, even, one that he happens to win every time. Sometimes it takes a certain angling of his head, looking down or up through his lashes, the tail-end of a phrase or word or sentence hanging in the air with the aftertaste of his cologne.

But Daryan is different. Daryan is indifferent. Daryan is the body in the chair metres across from him and still miles apart, shut down and clocked out.  There is a small part of him that envies Daryan for it (for being able to just check out of his own accord), and there is a part of him that resents Daryan for it. The overwhelming rest of him doesn’t know what quite to think.

Klavier takes his sunglasses off and folds them on the table. When Daryan doesn’t look at him, the sunglasses, or the desk, he scoots closer to him and taps his thigh. Daryan looks up, headphones still in. There are the beginnings of a scowl, there, and Klavier bites the part of him that wants to draw all of it out.

“What are you listening to?” Klavier says. He flashes Daryan his brightest smile, all-white and all-sharp.

“None of your business,” Daryan says, drawing out his last word. Klavier doesn’t miss his hands on the table, drumming out a beat. He sees if he can match it. “And there’s something stuck in your teeth.”

“Except there isn’t,” Klavier informs him. He gives him the same smile, but it’s genuine this time. He doesn’t really care if Daryan (and God, where did he come from, anyway?) hates him, but getting along will be better for a long list of reasons that he doesn’t particularly care for in this moment.

First, Daryan plans to go into the police force. He isn’t sure how he knows this, only that he does, and that Daryan’s eyes go up from the phone screen to Klavier every time he makes the slightest movement. There’s a lot of time to be spent there, Klavier thinks. Then there is Daryan’s voice in his mind, tinged with an accent he can’t quite name: There’s something in your teeth.

Daryan rolls his eyes (and wow, Klavier is thinking in spite of himself, smile growing a bit larger, there is no need to exaggerate an eye roll that much) and clicks at his phone, no doubt turning the volume up. No real loss, Klavier tells himself.

Then Daryan says: “Arctic Monkeys.” His eyes haven’t left Klavier’s face, and Klavier’s eyes go down when his phone lights up: the music’s paused.

Klavier hums, tapping his foot to the rhythm Daryan beats into the hardwood desk. “Ja,” he says from somewhere low in his throat. He leans forward and uncrosses his legs, reaches for his sunglasses. “Not bad at all.”

Daryan snorts. “Not pretentious enough for you?”

“No,” Klavier says. He unfolds his sunglasses. He wants to know, more than anything, what there is that Daryan buries behind the music loud in his ears and the music he drums into the desk. “You’re just right.”

 vi.

The police guards nodded their heads at him, and Klavier found himself looking at their faces for a little too long, searching for the kind of expression he knew he’d find. In spite of everything that had happened (and what had happened? Klavier thought, a burn he knew too well rising in his throat), he was still Prosecutor Gavin to them, was still Prosecutor Gavin to most people. Sometimes it was a relief to know that he still had that if nothing else, and sometimes it was a burden he felt like he’d outgrown months ago.

There were things about being a prosecutor that he understood in ways that no one else would, things that he felt and tasted and knew in the beat of his heart. On one hand, prosecutor was what his seventeen-year old self understood and had always understood. That was good, was familiar. That was standing with everyone’s eyes on you, knowing that the case was in your hand so was the truth. That was bringing justice to the dead and to the innocent. That was putting the guilty behind bars.

And on the other hand, prosecutor was what he had come to learn all too well. It tasted like bile, that word, like a poison that bled him dry from the inside out. Prosecutor was finding the truth even though you didn’t want it. Prosecutor was the breath you couldn’t take, the breath you couldn’t keep, all eyes on you—and it was that facial expression, wasn’t it, it was the look on their faces that made you want to—

He stood there behind the wall of glass, thumbs hooked in his pockets. The room ahead of him was still empty, and he guessed that it would take another five minutes before the guard returned with Daryan. He shut his eyes and the room closed in, walls pressed tight to his chest. There was only him and the glass wall in front of him, the taste of blood and salt, one gunshot—

He opened his eyes and saw the world in front of him again, spinning until it stilled. They’d understand. There was still time. If he left now—told the guards he had a case to work on, that they needed him back at the precinct, that they needed him down at the prosecutor’s office, and all it took was the tilt of the head and the slight shrug of his shoulders—he still had time to make it out and leave and never come back. But he knew that wouldn’t happen. There was something, alive and insidious in the walls and in his bones, that kept him in place, cementing his feet and eyes to the floor. There was a voice: you had it in you. He tore his eyes away from the glass and looked at the door.

Daryan stood there when he looked back. It was like all the words and breath he’d saved for this moment, every splintered memory from 9 years back that he could save, had been forced out of his body with a single word:

“Hey,” Klavier said. He took a step towards the glass and then stopped, hands playing with his belt loops. His heartbeat surged in his ears. It was alright, he told himself. It was Daryan. He knew Daryan.

(Knew. He knew Daryan, once.)

In front of him, Daryan said nothing. They’d cut his hair, and God it had only been two months, but two months was too long and two months was not enough and it had hollowed him out. The orange stood out bright against his skin. He was paler than Klavier remembered. He stood tall still, his chin up, looking right into Klavier’s eyes without seeing. Daryan was that kind of person. He’d known from their first meeting and he knew it at their last. Always fighting. But somehow it was like they’d drawn the fight right out of him, replaced it with a jumpsuit that hung too loose on his shoulders.

(His mind spoke in Daryan’s voice: You did this.)

The silence was the only thing he could taste. Klavier dug his nails into his palms. The guard was still there behind him. He could have left, if he wanted, to work on a case that did not exist.

He saw Daryan’s mouth moving before he heard him speak, like he was searching for how Klavier’s name had once fit between teeth and tongue: “Gavin.”

(There was a part of him that ached, but for whom, he did not know. He sought the sound and feeling of Daryan’s voice, of a hello he knew better in Daryan’s voice than in his own.)

(But this was not a greeting. This was a goodbye.)

All the times he’d run this same moment again and again in his mind on replay and rewind suddenly faded to nothing. In his mind, he knew the ghost hidden in borrowed skin that stood behind the glass; in his mind, it was like the awful moments in the courtroom had never existed, like time and space bent each other out of fabric to put him in this very place; in his mind, he recognized something in Daryan’s face that did not remind him of a wounded animal, teeth bared.

The guard was still behind him: You don’t have to do this. You know you can’t do this.

Whatever he wanted to say to Daryan disappeared like it had never existed to begin with, leaving him with the dryness of his mouth. Klavier bit his lip so hard he drew blood. It couldn’t have lasted more than a minute or so, but he felt like he was standing there on the precipice of forever, searching Daryan’s face for someone who had perhaps never existed.

Finally, Daryan said, “Are you gonna say anything? Because you can just leave.” He jerked his head at the exit. “Right that way.”

His heartbeat rang louder in his ears than Daryan’s voice, and his mouth moved before he could stop it: “I didn’t come here to fight you, Daryan. So cut it out.”

“Then why are you here?”

He opened his mouth and then shut it, feeling older in that moment than he had in years. “I—to talk to you.” He was already bracing himself for Daryan’s answer, but anything was preferable to admitting that he didn’t know what made him drive all the way to the prison, what wouldn’t let him leave this where it lay.

Not that it mattered—Daryan knew him better than anyone, knew that he couldn’t let things go, knew Klavier’s lies like the back of his hand.

“Do it,” said Daryan. He shrugged, and Klavier forced his eyes on the wall behind him instead of the baring of Daryan’s teeth. “Do your worst.”

They were friends, once, and he didn’t know if that made it harder or easier.

“Don’t take this out on me,” Klavier said, but he regretted it as soon as the words left his lips because Daryan was there, landing punches wherever he could:

“I’m not supposed to take this out on you? Really? Gonna pull that card? Because I have no fucking clue why I’m standing right here—”

“You put yourself there the minute you picked up the gun.” His mind went back to case details he’d locked out months ago. “No, before that.”

Daryan looked him right in the eye. “Yeah. I landed myself here the moment I talked to you. God, you always were a self-righteous prick.”

It was like being punched to the gut, and he didn’t miss the way Daryan dropped his eyes to the floor, looking anywhere but at Klavier’s face. Klavier bit his lip again, the taste and feeling of blood stronger than ever.

“Take that back.” In his mind, he felt the two of them on the penthouse couch again, young and stupid and giddy off two sips of wine and the taste of music: We’re going to rule the world. / Hell fucking yeah, we are. / With you as my right-hand man? Who wouldn’t? / Did I ever tell you how annoying that is? That thing you do? What’s it called—oh, right. Flattery. “God help me, Daryan, take that back.”

He wasn’t aware he was yelling until he drew his hand away, only centimetres of glass away from Daryan; until the guard behind him took a step forward; until he swallowed around the burning in his throat and lungs.

“Or what? You’ll prosecute me for it?” Daryan said, but he was shaking his head by then, shoulders dropping. “You know what? Forget it. I said everything I wanted to you two months ago.”

Something in him was aching again, like a wound, raw and bleeding, that wouldn’t close no matter what he did. There were lifetimes, somewhere, somehow, where none of this happened. Where he’d never taken that plane to Borginia. Where he turned down the guitar. Where he stood with Daryan next to him, shoulder-to-shoulder, instead of behind, looking only at the shadows that hung low over his back.  But that lifetime was not this one.

“I’m going to ask you something,” Klavier said, though in whom he sought answers, he did not know. “And you’re going to answer me.”

“Wow. Prosecutor, rock-star, and prophet.”

“You owe me at least that much.”

Daryan spat at the floor. “I don’t owe you shit.”

It was as if his memories of the couch and of Daryan’s hands on the guitar were from a different lifetime altogether. Klavier closed his eyes and opened them again, found them dry.

“Did you know already that you were going to do this? After my brother’s conviction?”

Whatever he held on to melted out of Daryan’s face, and for the first and last time, they were looking at each other again, really looking at each other. His chest closed so tight he thought it would collapse on itself.

“That doesn’t ma—“—Daryan stopped himself and stood there for a moment, meeting Klavier’s eyes again with the same expression he’d known and felt so many times before. There was only awful silence.

“Yeah,” he said, letting out a breath Klavier felt more than saw. “I did.”

He spoke around the lump in his throat and the part of him that wanted to laugh: “Alright.” Klavier backed away from the glass, and already it was like two months had ripped between the two of them again. There was nothing but a sharp pang between his ribs that he could neither name nor recognize, and the lingering taste of regret. He stood alone on the other side of the glass with the space Daryan had once taken, trying to fill it with parts of himself that were perhaps never his to begin with. “Goodbye, Daryan.”

“Alright,” Daryan agreed. He was fight from the head to the toe, had it in his bones and running through his veins—but two months was a long time. Two months was long enough. “See you later.”

Looking from the guard who had reentered a minute ago and the glass in front of him, Klavier took another step back. Something in him clung to the one lifetime, the one universe, where everything he knew was the sound of Daryan’s voice, Daryan’s low laugh, and the space on the couch between never and forever. The rest of him let it go.

He had already turned around, ready to leave for the last time when Daryan’s voice rang out, loud and clear: “No blood.”

He didn’t let himself look back.

“No blood,” Klavier agreed.

 vii.

When he went back to his office, he locked the door. He sat there with the lights off and the door locked and the blinds pulled over the windows. He sat there, alone in the dark, in a space that was at once too large and too small for him. There was the faint smell of cigarette smoke.

He could only think of two things, things that thrummed in his fingertips and the heartbeat he could no longer control. The first was Daryan behind glass and bars in a jumpsuit that fit him in all the wrong ways, looking nothing like the person he’d last seen hauled away. Daryan, head held high, from his first breath to the last.

(Daryan, there one moment and then gone the next, eyeing Klavier in the sharp, lop-sided way he knew Klavier hated: You did this.)

The second was that Daryan, who, even behind bars while Klavier walked free, still looked at him with something he knew all too well: pity.

 vii.

They are on the couch again.

It’s Daryan’s idea, this time, because as prone as Klavier is to working anywhere there is some semblance of a flat surface to write on, he isn’t the one with a penchant for his own couch. He asks Daryan about it once, but Daryan only answers with a shrug of his shoulders.

It’s as much as an answer as he’ll ever get from Daryan, anyway. They are both twenty-two now, still high on the glow of a new, successful career (that, Klavier would not realize until years later, would become shackles on his wrists and a permanent weight in his throat) and each other. The world Klavier lives and dreams in is simple. In it, there is only the feeling of standing on the stage with Daryan at his back and the taste of the courtroom.

(In retrospect, he would realize it had never been made to last.)

Daryan starts the conversation by throwing his arm over the back of the sofa. In the back, Daryan’s radio plays a song Klavier knows only by feeling.

“Not where I expected to be,” he says. He isn’t talking to Klavier, but at the same time, he is. It’s another particular habit of Daryan’s, Klavier notes: building homes in between bones, living in the blood rushing up and down his veins in the heat of a concert.

Klavier shifts on the couch, wonders how many moments like this have weaved their way into the sound of his guitar.

“Don’t tell me you’re complaining?” He jabs at Daryan’s shoulder, which, predictably, does not budge.

“Nah,” Daryan says. A pause, like a breath in between notes. “Not complaining. Just observing.”

“That’s a thin line to walk.”

Daryan snorts. The couch creaks below the both of them as he moves. “Alright,” he begins, looking at Klavier from the corner of his eye. “I got a few other observations.”

Klavier spreads his arms. “Ja, do you? Shoot.” It’s been a while since his first trial, been a while since anything, actually, and he reaches for his glass of water from the coffee table in front of him.

“Alright.” Daryan pauses. “We’re sitting on your couch.”

“No,” Klavier says, but he’s smiling anyway. It takes a sentence from Daryan for everything else to fade to the glass Klavier presses to his lips and the feeling of Daryan’s shoulder against his, the couch beneath his body.

“And—“—Daryan eyes him in that way, and oh no, Klavier thinks without doing anything to stop it, here we go again—“—holy shit.”

When he doesn’t say anything else, Klavier sits up, scooting closer to him. “What?” To Daryan’s silence, he says, “I know I’m good-looking, but this is uncalled for.”

“No,” says Daryan, and then squints. He pulls himself up, leans towards Klavier. The only space between them is the breath between words. “Your hair’s growing.”

Klavier leans back. There’s a moment, and then so does Daryan, and then Klavier tells him: “Oh, ja, I noticed.” He considers braiding it.

Daryan shrugs. He pulls his legs up onto the couch, crosses them. “I just didn’t really think about it.”

“Ja,” Klavier says. He shrugs too. “It’s hair.”

A quick look at the clock tells him it’s half an hour past ten, and he considers moving to his bedroom, the couch feeling a little too small.

Before he does, he says, without really thinking about it, “It makes me look like Kristoph.”

There must be something in his voice that he can’t name (and that makes Klavier more uncomfortable than anything else) or that Daryan notices in spite of it all, because he’s already shaking his head: “But you’re not Kristoph.”

 viii.

Memory was a fickle thing. Dreams were even fickler. Sleep was perhaps the ficklest of them all.

On nights when Klavier couldn’t sleep—nights that happened more often than they didn’t—he stayed in his bedroom with the lights on, the blinds shut. The lights overhead drowned out the dark, the white noise in his mind that was worse than any nightmare. They made it easier for him to stop thinking.

(He liked the light on because without it, he was alone with the black shadows sprawling across his walls and the blacker ones in his mind.)

The first few days after, and the first few days after seeing Daryan were the hardest. He remembered little outside of working, burying parts of him in case details where they would never be found, and sleeping—but sometimes (most times) even that did not come to him easy. Sometimes he was glad for that. He slept but the shadows in his mind did not.

(He never turned off the light, anymore. He did not fear the dark, only what it brought.)

Sometimes—most times—he just sat at his desk, alone in an apartment too big for him, trying to take up space that had long since been empty. One of those times he’d make the mistake of going through his drawer, finding nothing but old song lyrics and old birthday notes that he’d later thrown out.

(He did not believe in the monsters under his bed, only the ghosts. They were alive in every song lyric he’d ever written with Daryan, every birthday wish Kristoph had ever given him.)

And sometimes, he just lay in bed, neither asleep nor awake. Every moment, every time he closed his eyes, another conversation played in voices he would soon forget.

(You didn’t have to be dead to be a ghost.)

It was Daryan’s voice this time. It was always Daryan’s voice, like some part of him, straining against his eyelids, refused to let Daryan go.

[KLAVIER, inattentively. He plays with the ends of his hair.]: It makes me look like Kristoph.

[DARYAN, on the other end of the couch. KLAVIER doesn’t realize he is being stared at until DARYAN looks away.]: But you’re not Kristoph.

[Silence.]

You’re worse.

(He was never sure if it was in Daryan’s voice or his own.)

 ix.

He was in his office when he heard two sharp raps on his office door through the music. His mind went to a name he was trying to forget—Daryan always knocked in twos instead of threes, fast and hard like the backbone of some song he hadn’t yet had the time to write down—and Klavier breathed out, put his pen down. Daryan wasn’t there, he told himself, standing up. Daryan would never be there.

He wasn’t sure what he was trying to convince, the nails he dug into his own palm or the murky mess of apprehension, hope, and guilt that had long since spiraled out of his control. His eyes stung.

Klavier swung open the door and, upon seeing Miles Edgeworth, let out a breath he didn’t know he was holding. “Herr Edgeworth.” Before Edgeworth had time to look at him in a way that would make him regret ever opening the door, Klavier said, “Don’t be too mad at me. I’ll turn the music down.”

Edgeworth shook his head. Klavier ignored the drop in his stomach. “It’s not that.”

“No? Are you a fan, then? Ah, but I hadn’t expected you to have such similar tastes to mine. I could recommend something if you’d like.”

“Can I come in?” Edgeworth said instead, and Klavier nodded around the lump in his throat and stepped aside. With Edgeworth inside, his office felt all the smaller, and Klavier shut the door behind him.

The silence left him uneasy, and the look Edgeworth gave the walls and then Klavier himself made it even worse.

“Is there a problem?” He flashed Edgeworth a smile on instinct and slunk back to his desk, sinking into his office chair.

Edgeworth cleared his throat and took a step forward, stopping. His stomach clenched again. Edgeworth was known for a lot of things, but subtlety was not one of them. His mind reached for the worst case scenario and grabbed it: They’re going to disbar me. They found me guilty. The executions were carried out early for some reason and—

“I heard you visited him last week,” Edgeworth said, not meeting his eyes. Somehow, it was worse than anything else he could have said.

“He’s my best friend,” Klavier said automatically, not bothering to correct himself. The look Edgeworth gave him made him look at the empty walls behind his head instead.

Unfortunately, Edgeworth noticed: “Your office looks different. Did you redecorate?”

“Ja, I undecorated. I took down the guitars.” It was more than he’d ever told Edgeworth about himself, and it was more revealing than he’d meant, so he said, “Is that the problem? Are my walls too clean for your liking?”

“To be honest, I thought it was somewhat garish.”

“I never pegged you for a minimalist.”

“You should go home.”

His chest tightened to the point of pain and Klavier shot up. “What?”

“I talked to the other prosecutors,” Edgeworth said, not looking any more comfortable than Klavier felt, and his mind screamed mercilessly: Traitors. “They agree it would be best for you to take a break.”

“Are you—“—and saying the words didn’t make them any more bearable—“—suspending me?” There were so many things he wanted to tell Edgeworth, anything to make him take it back, and they flooded his throat and lungs where he choked on them.

“No,” Edgeworth said, shaking his head. He took another step towards Klavier and then stopped. Klavier saw him bite his lip. “It will just be a break, like a personal leave of sorts.” As if Klavier cared, he added, “It’ll be paid.”

“I don’t need to take a personal leave.”

Edgeworth looked from the bare walls to Klavier’s guarded face. “I’m asking you to.”

All of a sudden, he couldn’t breathe. He stood there, trying to take anything into his lungs that weren’t the awful words creeping into his veins and threatening to stop his heart like Daryan’s you had it in you and you’re worse and no blood and—

In the same moment, it came together, and he recoiled like he’d been punched in the gut. He met Edgeworth’s eyes. “You don’t trust me with my work.”

Edgeworth took a breath and looked away. “I don’t trust you with yourself.”

 x.

Klavier’s second memory of blood goes like this: he is eight or nine, and the house is empty but the night is full. His parents are out with other people (something he won’t realize until he is fifteen), and without them he sits alone in pitch-black, fevered silence. He doesn’t know what time it is, only that it is late enough for him to be tired.

He crawls out of bed and considers getting a snack or a glass of water, ignoring how heavy his body feels. His hands hurt too without a different kind of heaviness—piano lessons, Klavier thinks. He hates the instrument. There’s a headache, somewhere, and for a moment he considers dropping the whole plan and just crawling back into bed.

Then he turns on the light and sees the blood.

Klavier stumbles backwards, head spinning. The floor and the red in front of him—and his empty stomach seizes, searching for any kind of content to throw up—blurs. He searches his mind for what his parents told him: get the house phone from the master bedroom and call 911. In the moment, it doesn’t matter. All he can think of is red on the floor and the bile rising in his throat. There’s the smell of it too, so rich and coppery he’ll drown in it if he doesn’t run.

He pushes his bedroom door open and runs out, trying to think of anything but the blood and the smell of it, the feeling of it, wet and warm underneath his feet.

(Blood, Klavier thinks, though at that point, it’s more of a feeling. He’s getting blood on the carpet. His mother will be angry.)

His shaking hands find the bathroom door and he throws his full weight into it.

He’s already on the floor, eyes blurry and chest hot and tight, when he realizes two things: one, the light in the bathroom is on, and two, it isn’t the bathroom.

Kristoph whips his head away from his books and stands up, walking away from his desk. In his haze, it looks like Kristoph is miles away. Klavier shuts his eyes.

“Klavier?”

Before he knows what’s happening, Kristoph is shaking him, pulling him off the floor, pushing his sweaty bangs off his forehead and feeling the skin beneath, and Klavier says, because it’s all he can say, really: “Blood.”

Kristoph goes very, very still. “What?” He recovers quickly, picking Klavier up and putting him in his bed that’s still made. He wonders if Kristoh’s been studying all night. “You,” he says, pulling the blankets over his shoulders and frowning when Klavier kicks them off, “have a fever.”

“Blood,” Klavier says again. He presses his face into Kristoph’s pillow and leaves it there. It smells like his brother, not blood.

Kristoph looks from Klavier to the door to his desk, littered with paper and books. He says, “Wait there.”

He doesn’t have the energy to beg Kristoph to stay, so he nods into the pillow instead, reaching for the blankets in spite of the heat that makes him want to claw his skin right off his bone.

He isn’t even aware Kristoph is back until he sees the room go dark as Kristoph shuts off the light and sinks into the bed.

Klavier presses his face back into the pillow. The only sound in the room is that of Kristoph’s breathing, low and even, until Klavier breaks it by saying, “Did you clean it up? I hope I didn’t get it on the carpet.”

Kristoph lets out a breath. “There wasn’t anything there.”

Klavier tries to turn over but he feels Kristoph shaking his head, and decides not to. His head is too heavy to lift. “Nothing? At all?”

“No,” Kristoph says. “It’s probably your fever. I gave you some medicine. Do you remember?”

He doesn’t, so he says nothing at all about it.

“Oh.” Klavier closes his eyes again, sees red, and opens them. He inches closer to Kristoph. The bed is too small and they both know it. “Don’t you have homework?”

Kristoph gets up and closes his books before lying back down. “Not anymore.”

He is still there when Klavier wakes up in the morning.

 xi.

The next time someone knocked on his door was exactly a week later, and it was Apollo who stood there with his hand still raised when Klavier swung open the door to his apartment. He looked from Apollo’s face to the floor, still for all of a moment, trying to remember the last time he’d seen Apollo—and already his mind had wandered back to the cold tang of October air, the heat of the courtroom, and the last goodbye he ever expected to say.

His throat went tight and Klavier leaned in the doorway. “Herr Forehead. What a pleasant surprise. I didn’t know you had home visits in your little toolkit there.”

Apollo rubbed his wrist. “It isn’t really a home visit.”

“Well, this is my home. And this is a visit.”

Normally that would have got him the kind of annoyed look Apollo reserved for courtroom sessions, but something had changed, ever so slightly, and whatever it was kept Apollo two steps back with his hand on his wrist and a look on his face that made Klavier’s eyes keep to the wall.

When Apollo said nothing, Klavier said, “Who sent you?” Apollo didn’t flinch, but he saw the way Apollo reached for his wrist again, like it was something he never wanted to let go. That was enough. He let out a breath. “You can tell whoever sent you that I don’t need a babysitter.”

“I’m not babysitting. It’s just a check-up.”

“So you can decide whether or not I need babysitting.”

“No,” Apollo said, that same look on his face. He took a step forward, nearly bumping into Klavier, and then stopped himself. “Can I come in?”

In his apartment, Apollo made a beeline for the kitchen table where he pulled up a chair and sat there. It was like every part of him had been made just to clash with Klavier’s apartment: his reds against the muted darks and purples of Klavier’s furniture, the way he sat, demanding nearly no presence at all from the empty space. Against himself, he saw Daryan—sharp against the background in all the right ways. Klavier turned away.

He wasn’t sure how long they lasted like that, Klavier on the couch and Apollo at his kitchen table when Apollo said, “Mr. Wright sent me.”

If his chest tightened any more it would burst. “Herr Wright did? Why?”

“I’m not sure. Edgeworth, I’m guessing.”

“Herr Edgeworth is the one who told me to take a personal leave. Emphasis on personal.”

Apollo turned around. Klavier couldn’t bring himself to meet his eyes. “He didn’t really send me. He just gave me the address.” He talked to him the same way Edgeworth had with the same expression the guard had given him: guarded pity, and something else that he could not yet name.

Klavier reached for the TV remote. Anything was easier to look at than Apollo’s face. “That’s quite considerate of him.” He hadn’t mentioned how Phoenix’s name alone was like a person in and of itself, taking up more space than he could breathe.

The TV clicked on (and again there was Daryan’s voice and the edge of his half-laugh: God, Gavin, do you need a screen this fucking big to watch your own music videos on) and he hadn’t so much looked at it as heard the reporter’s voice through the screen: The reinvestigation of former defense attorney Kristoph Gavin continues as authorities…

He didn’t have time to hear the rest (though in retrospect he would suspect that it wouldn’t have mattered—and none of it had, so long as there was the name), because Apollo was next to the couch from the kitchen table in an instant, shutting the TV off. He just stood there, remote still in hand. Klavier saw him bite his lip. The lack of sleep hit him all at once, washing all over him with the taste of a bad dream.

He hadn’t realized he wasn’t breathing until Apollo put a warm hand on his back and said, “Breathe.” It was the quietest Klavier would ever remember hearing his voice, so quiet he had to strain to hear it.

(It was the first time, he would later realize, sitting there on the couch with nothing but the silence of the room and the noise in his head, that he swore he would sacrifice everything else if only it meant Apollo—or anybody else—would never look at him like that again.)

“Yeah,” Klavier managed. He put his hands in his pockets where Apollo wouldn’t see them shake. “It just caught me off guard.”

“You don’t have to l—“—Apollo swallowed—“—explain yourself to me.” He glanced around Klavier’s apartment, looking hopelessly out of place again. “Do you have a pillow? Do you want to lie down?”

“I’m fine.” Daryan had never fallen for it (and for the record, neither had Kristoph), but Apollo was neither Daryan nor Kristoph.

Somehow, that was worse. Apollo said nothing, only looked at him—no, Klavier thought, saw him—and reached again for his wrist where his hand stayed. The only sound in the room was that of the clock, like a heartbeat counting down.

Apollo was saying something, and he thought he caught something that sounded like “are you” and “you don’t have to”, but whatever it was, he didn’t hear it through his own, loud, “I think you should go.”

“Prosecu—“—he saw the way Apollo breathed, sharp and shuddering, like he tried to remember how air fit in his lungs—“—what?”

“I think,” Klavier said, looking anywhere that wasn’t Apollo’s face or the stupid fucking hand on his wrist, “that you should go.”

“But—“

In one moment, it was the two of them, Klavier with his hands buried in his pockets and Apollo with the remote in his hand. In the next, it was him, speaking in a voice he didn’t recognize as his own: “I won’t bother saying it again. You need to leave.”

There was a long list of things he would never forget. It was a book that he was constantly writing and rewriting, a book in which he spent every waking moment tearing out the pages—but Klavier was no fool. Tearing out pages did nothing to wipe out the words already tattooed into his skin. The first memory: his mother, brushing her hair dozens of times in the mirror. The second: Kristoph’s steel-straight back and his hands on the piano keys.

And the last: the way Apollo recoiled. He couldn’t have stepped back more than a few centimetres or so, but in the moment hundreds of miles spread between them that Klavier wasn’t sure he would ever be able to close without falling.

Already his mind moved a thousand light years a minute: I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to. I didn’t say that. I’m not him (i’m worse)—

—but not a single word he could have said was fast enough to catch the way Apollo put the remote down with slow hands. The way Apollo straightened and took another step back, and another, and another. The way Apollo eased out another breath, because some part of him was afraid it was the last one he would ever take and said: “Okay. I’m leaving.”

He was long gone by the time Klavier’s hands stopped shaking.

 xii.

And somehow, in the way that kept him awake when all he’d ever wanted to do was sleep, it was funny: Daryan had said it and Klavier had said it and they had both said No blood like it was a promise—but all he ever seemed to see on his hands was red.

   xiii..

[A DREAM JOURNAL] one.

-

A.    I don’t think I’ve ever seen him like this. Seven years. You do the math: 2548 days. 61152 hours. 3669120 minutes. 3 million minutes. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him like this. Hey man, be gentle on Geeter. He reaches for the gun. I don’t recognize the song he’s playing. He fires. It’s my shoulder I see bleeding.

 B.     When I look down, I’m the one holding the gun.

  C.    Mom said you were gifted. So did your (my? our?) piano teacher. Our is a shared pronoun in all but meaning; it’s a language thing. English is strange. German is ours. Words aren’t what they mean. This is language, you say. Words lie and haunt, just like people. You are used to teaching me more than any teacher.

“Your” is the chair you tucked in at the dinner table before you went to law school. “My” is the space you left behind. I think I’m good with words (it’s a band thing), but I think you’re better (you’re older). Mom said you were gifted. So did your/my/our/the piano teacher. You said so too. You said you were gifted at playing.

You didn’t tell me you weren’t talking about the instrument.

 xiv.

Klavier’s third memory of blood is: the only thing he sees in front of him, the world washed over in red; the fist he sees from the corner of his eye, flying and landing into something warm and solid; the fist he later realizes is his; the brush of knuckles against a (his?) jaw. Then: the sound of something breaking and a promise in the form of a bruise.

When he retreats back to his house, he doesn’t feel anything but the purple at the corner of his jaw and the rawness of his knuckles, like someone has stripped the skin right off of it again and again. Even those don’t mean anything to the Something, cold and bitter, that he tastes in his fingertips, in his throat, in his lungs. His first thought was to go to Daryan, but finding his dorm room locked (unreliable bastard, Klavier thinks without any real malice, always jumping ship when things got too bad—although through the haze and heat of knuckle and bone he notes that it isn’t Daryan he’s angry with) changed those plans.

And honestly, it isn’t the best idea he’s ever come with—retreating to his house of all things—but it isn’t like he’s left with any other alternatives. The reason he wanted to go to Daryan in the first place, aside from the obvious, is because he’d decided against strutting around the school or his house with a bruised knuckle and jaw. Daryan is no stranger to throwing fists, but he’s no stranger to treating what they leave behind, either.

A whole lot of good that means now, Klavier thinks. He curls his hands into fists, lets them go. It isn’t Daryan’s fault. Logically, he knows this, knows it isn’t Daryan’s anything. It isn’t Daryan’s face or Daryan’s snide comments he hears when he shuts his eyes. It isn’t Daryan who reaches for his fist and tells him to swing.

But that doesn’t do anything to fight the crescents he digs into the palms of his hands, and for all of a brilliant moment, Klavier realizes it isn’t his just his jaw or his knuckles painted in bruises.

All of that brilliant moment freezes when he hears his brother’s voice behind him: “Klavier?”

He’s lived through this moment before. Red on his hands, his back to his brother. Something runs through his mind, quick and hot—of nightmares he hasn’t had since he was a child—and fades just as fast.

Daryan is the first person he can never lie to. Kristoph is the second. (And later, far later, he would realize two trials too late that that hadn’t meant anything. Never lying to them hadn’t meant that they would never lie to him.)

Klavier says, “Brother! Hello. I hadn’t—“—he stops, reaching around for some jigsaw version of the truth—“—expected you to be home.”

“I know,” Kristoph says, and then trails off. He wants to tell Kristoph something, anything, to remind him that he isn’t eight and he doesn’t need his brother to be there to feel okay. He isn’t stupid enough to think it’s Kristoph he’s trying to convince. “What happened to you?”

Klavier lets out a breath, chooses to give Kristoph the truth in the least number of words possible: “I got angry.”

(His hands go cold when he remembers seeing nothing but a red world and a smile he would have done anything to make disappear.)

And of course there is more he isn’t telling Kristoph—more he won’t ever be able to put into words, only the feeling in his knuckles, more than he ever wants to understand in words or anything else, more than Kristoph himself will ever be able to understand. Daryan would have, maybe, but Daryan isn’t here right now.

Kristoph hands him a cotton swab and reaches for the hydrogen peroxide. A childhood of scratched knees comes back to him, and Klavier winces. He doesn’t turn away when Kristoph, hands warm, holds his jaw.

“I need you to talk to me,” Kristoph tells him. As if he is speaking to a very small child. “What did he say?”

Yes, Klavier thinks, in spite of himself. No. I don’t recall.

Instead he says, “It was about you.”

Kristoph is silent. The cotton swab he presses to the bloody scratch on Klavier’s face is cold.

“What did he say?”

He’s cold again, and it isn’t from the cotton swab. Klavier twists his hands together.

“That you bribed the people at the bar.” He looks away from Kristoph, from anything that might remind him of himself.

Kristoph raises his eyebrows. “To get my badge?”

“To keep it.”

He can pinpoint the exact moment the room goes still. Kristoph stands up, reaches for a band-aid, and sticks it onto Klavier’s jaw.

They are both silent until Kristoph says, “You don’t have to defend me. All you need to worry about is yourself.” He stands up again. Klavier doesn’t meet his eyes.

Because it’s the only answer he can give, really, Klavier says, “I was angry.”

“I know,” says Kristoph. “I’ll take care of it.” He puts the peroxide, the cotton, the band-aids away. “I’ll take care of you.”

It’s then that Klavier sees his fists shaking at his sides.

“Were they right?” Klavier says after the silence, but by that point, Kristoph is already gone.

In his dreams, he doesn’t come back.

 xv.

Daryan throws a paper ball at his head and Klavier picks it off the floor and crushes it. For the time being, it’s a suitable replacement for Daryan’s skull. He reigns in his temper and flashes his widest smile, hoping it’s bright enough to scare Daryan away: “A problem, Herr Crescend?”

Daryan grins. “Could have been the world’s next hit song that you crumpled there. Too bad.”

“Except not,” says Klavier, only half-joking. “Because I didn’t write it.”

There’s Daryan’s signature eye-roll, and against himself, Klavier grins too. “Fuck off,” he hears Daryan mutter.

“Need I remind you that you started this conversation?”

“I started a conversation, not Klavier Gavin Worship Time.”

“Same thing.”

“Point in case.”

“It’s case-in-point, my dearest detective-in-training.” He leans his head back and doesn’t miss the way Daryan’s eyes stay for a moment longer. “What am I going to do with you?”

Daryan scoots closer to him. Warm fingers trace the band-aid at his jaw, at Klavier shuts his eyes. “The fuck is this?”

He pushes Daryan’s hand away and sits back up. “Nothing worth worrying about.”

It’s clear that Daryan doesn’t believe him, because he says, “Did you—holy fuck. Did you get into a fight, Gavin?”

“Not a fight,” Klavier murmurs. He traces the lines on his own hand. And then, without saying who taught who what or what was learned, he says: “A lesson.”

Daryan snorts, but there’s something else at the edges of it that Klavier doesn’t miss. He scoots forward again. “Someone insult your shitty rock band?”

He’s known Daryan long enough to tell there’s no mirth in that. Klavier humours him anyway. “Our shitty rock band.”

“No, yours. It’s named after you.”

“It wouldn’t be anything without you.” He jabs Daryan’s side.

“I wonder,” Daryan says, and then goes quiet. Klavier lets it go.

They sit like that for a little while longer, taking in the silence, until Daryan says, “It was about your brother, wasn’t it?”

There’s no mirth there, either. Klavier breathes out. “It wasn’t about anything. It was just a lesson.”

“A warning.” Daryan looks at him from the corner of his eye and says nothing else for a little while. “You don’t have to keep defending him.”

He’s suddenly reminded of what sent his fist flying in the first place. Klavier smiles through gritted teeth. “He’s my brother.”

“And?”

Neither of them say anything after that.

 xvi.

[A DREAM JOURNAL] two.

-

You are sitting with him at the piano.

There isn’t anything significant about the piano, really—only that every key looks like it was made for your brother’s hands, much too large for your own, and that your mother was furious when years of lessons “never amounted to anything.” You don’t have the energy to prove her wrong. You hate the instrument.

And like most things, like suits and glasses and legal books, the piano is better suited for your brother. You prefer leather to suits, sunglasses to glasses, music ones to legal books. If there is a line that connects you and the figure playing piano, you do not know it, and suspect that you perhaps never have. Your brother says it is because you are young; your mother says it is because you are stupid. Again, you don’t have the energy to prove her wrong.

The music stops. Your brother turns to you. You can’t remember how old he is here, only that he is old enough to seem miles away when the distance between you two is only in inches.

“Do you want to play?” he says. He is smiling, like he usually does when he asks a question he already knows the answer to.

You scrunch your face up. The only instrument you want in your hands right now is the guitar he bought for you last Christmas when your mother refused, and right now, it’s under your bed. “I’d rather watch.”

His hands go back to that instrument. They slide through an easy scale that is child’s play for you both. “Talk to me, then.”

You say, “I’m talking.”

Outside, it is black. You stifle a yawn. Your mother would never forgive you if she knew you were still awake.

“Okay,” he says. He is still looking at the piano and not your face when he says, “Three things that are not absolute.”

Something giddy stirs inside you. For all his lines and suits and absolutes, your brother has a penchant for games. You wonder if he likes them because he is good at them, or if it is the other way around. You correctly surmise that it doesn’t matter either way; everything you know, everything you have said, everything you have heard, you know from him.

“Fine,” you tell him, still a little tired, and he hears it in your voice because he smiles at the piano. You shut your eyes. “People.”

He says, “Too easy.”

You roll your eyes and kick the foot he presses to the pedal: “Life.”

“Ah. Death, then.” When you look at him, he says, “You don’t kill someone by taking their life.”

Something about the way he says it and the way his hands continue on the piano keys makes you shiver.

“How?” you ask him.

“Well,” he says. The music stops, then, fades to an echo you hear in your ribcage, not your ears. “You’re still dreaming about me, aren’t you?”

-           

two and a half.

In another dream, you tell him the third answer to his question as you stand behind the prosecutor’s bench and stare at him on the witness stand: “The law.”

 xvii.

Predictably—or maybe it was unpredictably, Klavier really didn’t know—Apollo came back a week or so later.

There were all a number of things that could have brought him back, things that Klavier catalogued and kept for safe-keeping as he got up from the couch and walked towards the door. None of them were particularly convincing. Most obviously, and perhaps most pervasively, there was Phoenix Wright. The name alone made his mouth go dry, brought forth a phantom pain in his hands he could not quite explain. There were many things, Klavier knew, that he owed Phoenix Wright, that he wanted to give without ever understanding how he could do it. Everything came back to the blood on his hands that he tried to wipe off on the front of his pants.

Second, there was his brother. The phantom pain surged in his hands again and receded, and for a moment he tasted ash like the ghost of a ghost and the Thanksgiving dinner countless nights ago. He owed things to Kristoph, too. Kristoph was the body at the piano even when there was no piano in the room. Kristoph was the smoke, the fire, and the grey in your throat and lungs all the same. Kristoph was the living shadow behind every bright thing he had ever known. Kristoph was behind bars and yet at once the presence in every room that made him forget how to breathe. Kristoph was the breath he forgot.

And that left Apollo himself third. His mouth went dry again with the memory of Apollo’s last visit.

And of all the things he could have said to Apollo, not a single one would have made him go away, so Klavier opened the door and forced a smile. He was more used to it than he wanted to be, but like a chord progression or a particular gesture—and he felt the phantom pain again, this time in Daryan’s body next to his on the couch, Daryan’s hand on his hand on his guitar, Daryan’s No, put your hand there—it was muscle memory. He swallowed around the dryness that spread to his throat. The body remembered what the mind forgot.

Instead, he said, “Again, Herr Forehead? I didn’t realize I was so popular with you.”

Apollo looked past Klavier and into his apartment. “Can I come in?”

It was the last conversation he ever wanted to have, playing itself all over again. Klavier leaned in the doorway. “I’m not sure if that’s the best course of action, you see. The place needs a little cleaning up.”

“The place?” Apollo said, and Klavier didn’t know what he was talking about until he took a step forward and then stopped in his tracks. “Prosecutor Gavin, you look—“—and he looked away, then—“—you don’t look good.”

“I always look good.”

The look Apollo gave him could have frozen hell. “Really,” Apollo said, and he couldn’t tell who was talking: the Apollo who stood beside and across from him in court, the Apollo drawn into a seven-year plot his brother had mapped out years before, or the Apollo who put his own mentor behind bars two times over. “You don’t look good at all.”

He bit the edge out of his smile. “Come in, Herr Forehead.”

Apollo obliged. Inside, he went straight for the dinner table again, and then stopped. A quick look around the apartment didn’t seem to satisfy him, and he looked into Klavier’s eyes instead. Klavier avoided the instinct that told him to look away.

“I don’t know how you work like this.” Apollo picked a paper off the floor and put it on the kitchen table. “There’s mess everywhere.”

“Ja, well.” Klavier shut the door behind him and took a step towards the couch. “Order doesn’t exist without disorder.”

“Not my point,” Apollo said, softly. He looked away from the paper. “It’s not really like you.”

“You would know,” Klavier said, and nothing else. In the past, Daryan pointed out his working space too: That a strategy or some shit? Putting all these fuckin’ papers so you look like you’re working?

“That’s not my point. I’m just worried, you know?”

“You, or Herr Wright?”

Apollo flinched away. “What kind of a question is that? Me.”

Klavier let out of a breath, grabbed hold of whatever self-control he had left. “You don’t need to worry about me, Herr Forehead. I can handle myself.”

“I don’t think you believe that.”

He bit back a snappy it doesn’t matter if I do or not, and looked into Apollo’s open face instead. “What makes you say that?”

Apollo rubbed his wrist. “You opened the door.”

Looking at Apollo like that—looking at Apollo Justice of all people, standing at his kitchen table again, was already more than enough—was too much. He’d written out the catalogue of reasons why Apollo was there, and none of them satisfied him anyway. In a courtroom they were Prosecutor Gavin, scourge of the courtroom, and Apollo the rookie; outside of it they were two bodies bound by absolutely nothing. And of course in the last trial they had stood side by side despite being on opposite benches, but that trial had long since been over.

(Or was it? Klavier thought in spite of himself. He stopped himself from locking himself in the bathroom and washing his hands until he could no longer.)

(He wondered if Apollo dreamed, slept, breathed in the same ghosts that he did, but the thought faded as quickly as it came. Apollo wasn’t Kristoph’s brother. He couldn’t tell if he despised or loved him for that.)

“It would have been rude for me to chase you out.” He walked over to the couch at last and sank down into it. Klavier considered replacing it.

“You did last time.”

“Yes,” Klavier said. “Last time.”

If there was something darker at the edges of all of this, he did not know it. Apollo was straight-forward. Apollo was open. Apollo didn’t lie. Apollo was everything he wasn’t. But it did nothing to change what he saw the few times he was capable of meeting Apollo’s gaze, nothing to change the guilt and fear that made him turn away.

Apollo must have noticed, because he stepped back from the kitchen table and cleared his throat: “Do you mind if I clean up a little in here?”

“If this isn’t an elaborate ploy to thieve my case files, then ja, go ahead.”

He’d never been able to name what made Apollo glower at him when he fired off the easy comments that made everyone—and Daryan was there again: mostly everyone—fall into his trap, but now he caught glimpses of it.

“You told me you were on a personal leave.” Apollo picked more papers off the floor and put them in a stack on the table. “You don’t have any case files.”

Klavier smiled at that, sharp. He’d buried the case files that kept him dreaming and awake in his desk drawer where Apollo would never find them. “I might have a few floating around here or there from prior cases. Although I don’t see why you’d have any use for those.”

“Then you answered your own question.” Apollo looked around, stack of papers in his hand, and then dropped them back on the kitchen table. He sighed. “There’s so much here. Even you probably can’t deal with this much.”

Apollo wasn’t exactly wrong, but picking up the papers took energy he almost never had. He lived alone, and no one ever stayed there in his apartment with him (anymore) but there were corpses in every paper on the floor.

“I get by,” Klavier said instead.

“Is that—an orange?” Apollo peeled it off the floor. “Okay, part of one. This is a whole new level of concerning.”

Klavier made no effort to answer him. Kristoph cleaned up his messes; Daryan tolerated them. Maybe cleaning was what Apollo did so he didn’t have to keep looking at his hands. He felt the envy again, sharp and bright in all the wrong ways.

He would have been content with letting Apollo clean up his apartment, and he was until Apollo picked up the garbage and said, “I’m throwing this out.”

Before he knew what he was doing, Klavier stood up and bolted to the garbage. A quick look at Apollo told him he had no better idea on what had just happened than Klavier himself did.

“Don’t—no,” Klavier was saying before he could stop himself, before he could suppress the lurch in his stomach that rose in his throat, “Don’t touch that.”

The pity in Apollo’s face almost made him throw up then and there. “You need to throw out your garbage, Prosecutor Gavin.”

“I don’t care,” Klavier said, and then stopped himself. “I know.” He bit back a laugh and reached for the garbage bin instead, looking at anything but Apollo’s face. His mind spoke against him—what would Apollo think?—but that hadn’t and didn’t matter there. All that mattered were the papers he fished out of the garbage and then put on the table. He didn’t have to look up to know Apollo stared at them.

They were song lyrics and birthday notes and everything at nothing all at once. Apollo would never understand.

Putting it into words didn’t make him feel any better after Apollo left.

xviii.

[A DREAM JOURNAL] three.

-

An observation: You said we were going to rule the world, not that you were going to destroy it and leave me to bury you in its ashes.

A mistake: I should have never let you go.

An ultimatum: I should have never thought I had you to begin with.

  xix.

The prison always had a particular smell to it that Klavier found difficult to describe. On one hand it was ripe with the smell and taste of teenage and childhood memories, as far back as he could find them: Kristoph’s hand in his, the shadow his brother’s back cast on the white walls; the smoke and cologne that followed Daryan wherever he went.

The more time went on, sweeping him in its current all the while, the more he realized it was not a fault of the prison. Those were things that he would always see, things that he would always smell, things that he would carry around with him until the end of his days without any hope of walking free. Memory was a fickle thing, but it was even crueler.

(The worst part of it all, Klavier thought, looking at the white walls that fell around him like a cage, was that he didn’t want the memories to leave. They would leave him behind. They would leave him with nothing.)

On the other hand, the prison was white walls and white floors. Behind everything lingered the scent of cleaning detergent and the faintest taste of salt. Like a rainstorm. Always washing things away. He’d been there countless times before as a prosecutor, but never as Klavier Gavin.

Klavier twisted his hands together and looked into the empty glass. It was the last place he expected to find himself, and at once the only place he wanted to be. What else did the world have to offer him? Kristoph was in every passing mirror and memory. Kristoph was in every word he said. Daryan was in the empty space at his side. Memory, dreams, sleep. They were all fickle and he did nothing to combat them.

He thought of his last and only visit to Daryan and swallowed around the painful lump in his throat. He’d known Daryan for as long as he could remember, and yet in that room, behind that glass wall, it was like they’d never seen each other in their lives. Again, he heard Daryan and a semblance of the Daryan he knew: No blood.

Klavier licked his dry lips. For all that Daryan was, he never broke his promises.

(Almost never.)

The visits to Kristoph were nothing like the visits to Daryan. When he visited Daryan he was trying to salvage the bits and pieces of a person and friendship that had slipped from his fingertips before he could stop it. When he visited Kristoph, he was staring into the pieces of something that had begun to break long before he saw it shatter in court, leaving shreds of the aftermath that cut him wherever he went.

When he visited Daryan, he’d gone with a long list of questions. One for every moment he’d spent leaning against Daryan’s shoulder without the fear that it would someday no longer be there. He’d wanted answers. When he visited Kristoph, there were no questions that he could ask. There were no questions that Kristoph could answer. He only asked them in his dreams. There were no answers, only the hum of the heater and the shine of the glass.

That was more of an answer than he would ever get from his brother’s lips, he knew.

When it came to visiting Kristoph, it made no difference whether or not Kristoph was behind the glass. The room always stayed silent either way. All he heard was the traitor in his ribcage and whatever stories he had to offer. He was no fool. He’d known Kristoph had stopped listening years ago.

The guard finally brought Kristoph into the room, and Klavier watched him dust the seat off before sinking into it. His mind worked against him again, as it often did: How many times before had Kristoph done that before? How many times had he watched his brother do this, as a child, as a teenager, as a prosecutor?

He shook his head, bit his lip. How many times he had done that before mattered not. The outcome was the same every time.

“Hey, brother,” Klavier said, to himself more than to Kristoph. The word on his tongue tasted like poison; he swallowed around it.

His child memories came back again. Kristoph at the dinner table, Kristoph at his desk, Kristoph taking him to and from school. He searched through them again, looking for a sign he knew that he would not find.

Kristoph didn’t meet his eyes, and neither did the guard. Klavier swallowed again. He’d visited Daryan to ask questions and had left with a promise hung around his neck like a noose. Visiting Kristoph was more like routine, something he fell into when he had nothing left.

He cleared his throat, said, “I’m not so sure you can feel it behind bars, but it’s getting cold again.” Klavier wrung his hands together. “Fall and winter makes me think of you. You remember it, ja? Thanksgiving?”

Again, he did not get an answer. History repeated itself. Klavier looked from Kristoph’s face to his own hands.

Then he said: “You have calendars in there, do you not? Surely you know what month it is. Or how long you’ve been there.” He bit back a choked laugh. “Maybe you get by carving tally marks into the wall.”

Not that Kristoph cared, or that he would ever. He knew this: this was routine, this was what he expected, this was what he saw whenever he came by. Memory was fickle. He looked at Kristoph and saw the man who left for law school and perhaps never came back.

He wrung his hands together again and bit his lip so hard he drew blood. Kristoph was behind bars but he was free. Klavier was the one clawing at prison walls he didn’t know how to escape.

The guard made the mistake of meeting his gaze and Klavier forced a smile. Behind the glass, Kristoph’s blue eyes stared at the wall behind him, seeing nothing.

What was it that kept him there? Maybe it was the prospective that one day Kristoph would look away from the wall and meet his eyes instead, that he would say something that, perhaps for the first time, he meant. Those things only happened when he closed his eyes, and they faded when he woke up.

Klavier stood up, said, “I’ll see you later then, brother.”

He wasn’t stupid enough to think he was talking to anything more than a stranger in a cell.

 xx.

[A DREAM JOURNAL] four.

-

He’s at the piano again when you see him.

He looks the same as you remember him, and sitting in front of the piano is the brother you always remember in your dreams; the one who stayed up with you and gave you fever medicine and taught you everything that you know.

(Most things, you correct yourself. There are things that even your brother can’t teach you.)

You can’t remember how long you’ve been staring at his back, broader than you remember: in retrospect it feels like years. In the moment it feels like lifetimes. You’ve spent every waking moment of your life, of your memories of your dreams, chasing your brother’s back. It feels good to finally stop.

He doesn’t turn around when he says, “Sit with me, brother.” Brother. Like most things, it sounds different in your brother’s voice. And like most times, you oblige.

The piano bench is much smaller than you remember, but this is a dream, not a memory. You sit next to him. His hands go to the piano again, drifting through scale after scale after scale until they stop.

Eager to fill the space his playing left behind, you say, “What do you need?”

“You should play for me,” Kristoph says. He draws his hands back from the instrument and you look at his hands, not much larger than your own. Not with, you note. For. It is an irrelevant detail.

“Me?” You say. You laugh at him. “Didn’t you know I hated that thing? I made you buy me a guitar and all that. We should play a duet instead.”

Kristoph shakes his head. He closes his eyes. “For, not with.”

“For what? For who?”

“For us.” He puts your hands on the piano, and even in a dream, it’s like you’re ten again. “This is ours.”

Ours means nothing to you, but your brother means everything. You oblige. Under your hands the piano is something different, unfamiliar, dark. You hear your mother’s voice again until it fades to total silence.

Your brother smiles at you, and because this is a dream and this is the last you remember him before the courtroom, you imagine that it’s genuine. He says, “Show me what you’ve learned.”

You start to play. Rain starts outside, out of sync with your hands, but it doesn’t matter to you: the rain isn’t enough. It’s never been enough.

(For what? you ask yourself, but it isn’t a question you want to know the answer to.)

When you look over your shoulder, your brother’s eyes are closed as he sits in perfect silence, listening to you play.

“So,” says your brother. You strain to listen to him. “Three things that are not absolute.”

The rain grows stronger. It cannot give you what you want.

You don’t answer him and continue playing. Then: you stop. Your brother doesn’t move. You try not to look at him.

“Life,” you say. You’ve had this conversation, before. “Death.”

“Yes,” your brother murmurs. “And?”

You look down at your hands, still on the piano. There’s red on them, dark and fast and spreading farther than you can see. It is especially sharp against the white of the piano keys.

Next to you, your brother is still. You find your eyes dry and you swallow.

“And,” you repeat, “you.”

 xxi.

[THE SCENE opens. KLAVIER stands alone in his apartment, in front of the kitchen table. On front of it are a pile of papers, scraps, and cards—some are ripped and worn at the edges, some are torn.

KLAVIER picks them up and then looks them over, spreading them out on the table like pieces of evidence. He laughs. It is not a pretty sound.]

[KLAVIER, to himself, or maybe to the papers]: I’m trying. I swear that I am. But you aren’t making this any easier for me.

[THE SCENE closes. KLAVIER retreats to his room. He doesn’t leave.]

-

A birthday note, for Klavier, aged 15: Happy birthday, younger brother. Law school is difficult but sending cards out is harder. I would have sent this through Mother, but I’m not sure if she could have delivered it for you. Did you get your present? I sent it through Daryan, whoever that is: I would have sent the card, too, but I’m not so sure I trust him with that. Enjoy your birthday. I love you.

A birthday note, for Klavier, aged 18: Happy birthday, brother. I’ve heard the band is taking off. It’s pleasing to know that giving up on piano paid off for you. I wish Mother was around so you could prove her wrong.

A birthday note, for Klavier, aged 23: Happy birthday, Klavier.

A song lyric, written with smeared ink on old paper: You had the stars in your eyes and the world in your hands. You just needed someone to hold it with you.

 xxii.

Out of the corner of Klavier’s eye, he saw the barista blink at him before he said again: “Sir? Your order, please?”

He bit his lip and offered her his brightest smile, hoping that she would look at it longer than at the dark shadows under his eyes. Of course he’d put makeup on before leaving the house, on principle—it had begun as a rock star thing, a performer thing, but he found himself doing it more and more out of necessity even in the band’s absence—but he couldn’t shake the feeling that just walking outside was leaving him bare and open for everyone to see and to read.

Without really thinking about it, he saw Apollo standing in front of him but never close to him, his hand on that golden wrist. When he opened his eyes again, only the barista stood in front of him. The look in her eyes flickered for a moment and he swallowed.

“My apologies, Fräulein. I wasn’t thinking for a moment there.” When had he fallen into the habit of explaining himself (lying) to strangers? “I’ll have a medium black coffee.”

“Sure,” the barista told him. Her eyes lingered for a moment longer and he forced his eyes to the menu behind her, making pleasant conversation about the weather and whatever else came to mind until she left.

He’d purposely gone to a smaller café on the outskirts of town, mostly because in any of the cafes downtown he was more likely to run into people he knew and people he didn’t want to see. (Then again, Klavier thought, he was famous: it wasn’t like he was trying to avoid a handful of old friends.) There was a smaller reason, too—he and Daryan usually only stayed around in the local cafes or ones nearby where they toured. In a smaller place, in a different place, the ghosts didn’t exist. He didn’t have to be Prosecutor Gavin, here.

(What a joke. His brother would have laughed.)

After the barista handed the coffee to him over the counter, he gave her a bright thank-you and then retreated for one of the nearest seats. In retrospect, it wasn’t the smartest decision he’d ever made, but he couldn’t find it in himself to care. The band was gone and so was Daryan. He’d been forced into a personal leave. His apartment had nothing to offer him anymore.

Klavier’s fingers itched and he swallowed, pushing the coffee cup farther away from him. Between writing songs and booking tours and solving cases and prosecuting culprits, he never had empty time on his hands, and now that he did, he didn’t know what to do with it. Empty time. Everything from the very first moment they’d taken Kristoph away to now was empty time, and he drowned in it. In the time before (before what, he didn’t know), he had Daryan, but Daryan wasn’t here.

(He’d lost count of how many times he’d told himself that. Daryan was behind bars. He had put Daryan there.)

Again, Daryan’s voice, fond in all the right ways, but he did nothing to chase it away: Black coffee? Seriously? What kind of pretentious fucking overlord?

He took another slow sip of his coffee. Two months wasn’t long enough, but already, Daryan’s voice in his mind was fading. Soon he would forget how it sounded altogether.

Up ahead, someone else talked with the barista. Klavier drew circles around the top of his coffee cup, and then nearly tipped it over when he heard a familiar voice say, “Um, three medium regulars. Actually four. Maybe.”

Of course. Klavier swallowed. He waited for the barista to give the tray of four coffees over the counter before approaching, coffee cup in hand: “Hey, Herr Forehead.”

Apollo nearly collapsed, almost dropping all three (or actually four, maybe) of the medium regulars in the process. “Prosecutor Gavin! Hi! Didn’t expect to see you here.”

“Me neither,” Klavier said. Whether he was talking about himself or Apollo, he did not say.

Apollo rubbed the back of his head, looking from the tray back to Klavier’s face. “This is a nice café. It seems a little quiet for you, though.”

“Likewise, Mr. Chords of Steel.”

He was pleased to see Apollo grit his teeth. “I can be quiet when circumstance calls for it.”

“Me too, then.”

Apollo shifted his weight from foot to foot. Klavier didn’t miss it. “Um, anyway, I actually have to get going. It was nice seeing you, though.” Outside of your apartment was what the look Apollo shot at him said.

“Sure,” Klavier agreed. He glanced from the four coffees to Apollo’s face and bit his lip. “Can I walk with you? I’d like to talk.”

He didn’t need Apollo’s wide-eyed look to know they were the last words Apollo had ever expected to hear. “Sure?”

-

The walk didn’t happen, but the talk did. The extra coffees Apollo picked up were for Phoenix Wright and Miles Edgeworth and Trucy Wright (as surprising as it was that she was actually allowed to drink coffee) and the fourth he pressed to his lips as he walked out of the Wright Agency.

Upon seeing Klavier standing outside, hands in his pockets, he shot him a look. “You don’t wanna come inside? It’s a little cold.”

He smiled at the ground. “I’m good, Herr Forehead.”

Apollo pursed his lips. “What made you start saying that on instinct?”

“What?”

Apollo tore his gaze away, said, “Nothing.”

“No,” Klavier said. “That’s not ‘nothing.’ What did you mean?”

“Nothing,” Apollo said again, louder this time. “I meant nothing.”

Klavier looked away. Talking to Apollo too soon had been a mistake, maybe, but he knew it wasn’t Apollo’s fault. It was, of course, Apollo who’d stood across from him in court both times, and Apollo who still stood in front of him right now afterwards. Telling himself that did nothing to shake the feeling he wore heavy on his shoulders.

“Alright. Nothing.” Klavier tried to take a sip of coffee and found it empty. He threw it out and met Apollo’s gaze.

“Do you still want to talk?” Apollo said, perhaps for lack of anything else. Putting it like that made Klavier’s lip curl in all the wrong ways. It didn’t mean anything. Apollo wasn’t a therapist, not in any meaning of the word. All he wanted to do was talk.

(Was it want, or was it need?)

He glanced at the door to the Wright Anything Agency and swallowed his ghosts. “Ja, sure. But not here. My apartment’s walking distance away.”

The walk to his apartment was silent, and for all of his practice in making and keeping small talk, he couldn’t think of a single word to say to Apollo. There were a lot of reasons: Apollo didn’t know him well enough and yet knew him too well at once, and Apollo would see through it anyway. Apollo always could.

In his apartment, he watched Apollo look at the stack of papers still on the table. Klavier made no effort to deny their existence.

“Why do you keep these?” Apollo reached for them and then stopped himself.

“Why not?” Klavier said. The look Apollo gave him told him that they both knew the answer was obvious, but Apollo said nothing about it.

“It’s just…” Apollo stopped. He wasn’t sure what it was in him that prevented him from stopping Apollo, that prevented him from letting Apollo look at them—but he stayed in the doorway all the same. Letting Apollo look at the papers was like letting Apollo look at the parts of himself that he’d hidden away in his ribcage for safekeeping, the parts he’d buried in his throat and chest without ever having to worry about seeing again. But he was tired of choking on them.

“Just what?”

“Maybe it isn’t helping you.”

“Maybe,” Klavier agreed. He forced a shrug. “They’re just papers, Herr Forehead. What do you have against those?”

“I recognize Mr. Gavi—Kristoph’s handwriting.”

He’d forgotten for a moment that Apollo knew Kristoph. They were tied together, him and Apollo, in threads that left scars even when they were cut.

“He was your mentor, wasn’t he?” He could count on one hand the number of times he’d talked about Kristoph, much less with Apollo. Most of those conversations had been with Daryan, oddly clipped and smoke-like and not unlike Daryan himself.

“Yeah,” Apollo said. “Was he yours?”

The Kristoph Apollo knew was probably vastly different from the one Klavier left behind in the prison. He shrugged. “If you want to put it like that. He taught me things.”

The look on Apollo’s face said it all: then how did you two turn out so different? If there was an answer that he could have offered Apollo, he would have already given it, but it was an answer that he only ever found in his dreams.

“Oh,” Apollo said, struggling, “me too.”

“It is a particular habit of his.”

“Is?” Apollo asked.

“I’m still learning things, you see.”

There was silence and he breathed it in, let it tear him from the inside out until Apollo said: “You aren’t your brother, Klavier.” Not Prosecutor Gavin. Not Mr. Gavin. Not something Kristoph had held in his own hands first. Klavier.

No, Klavier agreed, looking at his red hands. I’m worse.

Instead he said, “No, I’m not. But I am the person who helped put him behind bars.”

 xxiii.

Apollo’s visits came by more in tandem, and they happened more and more that they became a routine not unlike visiting his brother in prison. Like his brother’s visits, most times, Klavier couldn’t remember what they talked about, only that they did. He suspected that it didn’t matter. Apollo wasn’t Daryan and would perhaps never understand him in the way that Daryan had, once, but he understood Kristoph, and for the time being, it was enough. It had to be enough.

He gave Apollo himself in bits and pieces, never all at once. They were shreds of conversation that he only remembered in splinters: We met in middle school. He liked the couch. I had nightmares as a child.

(Apollo had pursed his lips again at the word had, but said nothing.)

And during some visits, they hardly talked at all. He spent his time looking over old case files or playing guitar when he felt well enough to do that, well enough not to think about who had played it alongside him. Sometimes he spent it looking at Apollo, wondering what or who Apollo saw when they met eyes. He wondered if it was different from the blood he saw, running through and on his hands, when he looked in a mirror. Wondered if it was different from Kristoph’s smile, Daryan’s easy laugh.

One day Apollo looked him in the eye and said, perhaps what he’d been meaning to say since they’d met: “You can’t blame yourself for that.”

Klavier closed his eyes and didn’t open them. “That?”

“The trials. Daryan. Your brother. Everything.”

“Hm.”

“You didn’t kill anybody.”

He turned around to look at Apollo, and didn’t miss the way Apollo flinched away again, holding his hand over his wrist. “Didn’t I?” he said. Somehow, it was the most honest he’d ever been with Apollo. “Didn’t I?”

He was pleased when Apollo said nothing after that.

 xxiv.

Later Apollo said, “You did what you had to.”

“Didn’t Daryan? Self-defense?”

Again, Apollo said nothing.

 xxv.

[A DREAM JOURNAL] five.

-

He is at the piano where you always meet in your dreams.

It’s an old piano, one that your grandmother owned and played that, one that sits in your living room just in front of the glass window looking out onto the front of your yard. Your mother played it, too, and as gifted as she and your grandmother were, you inherited none of it. This is your childhood. This is what you know.

You suspect that you’re older, according to whatever rules time flows for in your dreams. Your brother is in a suit, but it’s black, not you. He isn’t wearing his glasses, either, and when you meet his eyes, for a long moment you think you’re looking at yourself. He pats the spot next to him on the piano bench and you take a step forward but don’t sit down.

You’ve seen this many times before—in the prison in front of Daryan, at the prosecutor’s bench in court—to know what it is. You breathe in. It moves from your throat to your lungs. It starts a fire and leaves you coughing up ash and smoke.

“Sit with me?” your brother says. It is not a question. It is a demand.

You’ve declined his demands before, and you stand your ground even in your dreams. “No. I want to stand.”

He looks at you for a long time, and you are a kid again, unwrapping the guitar he bought you against his mother’s wishes, sleeping in his bed when the nightmares come back. “Suit yourself,” he says.

He sits at the piano but doesn’t play.

You look outside the window just in front of the piano, and are not surprised to see it raining. It always rains in your dreams. For a moment, you wish it could wash your dreams away, but you aren’t that naïve, anymore.

“Do you remember when you were a child and you skipped piano recital by hiding in my room?” He puts his hands to the piano keys, then draws them away. The black suit makes him look like someone you’ve never met before and you think: I’ve never known him.

“I’m not a child,” you say.

“No,” he agrees. “You’re my brother.”

How many times have you seen this happen? Every night, every moment. You talk to him even when you aren’t asleep.

“I want to talk to you,” you tell him.

“Then talk. I’m not stopping you.”

Why did you do it? Why didn’t you talk to me? Why didn’t you tell me? Why did you change?

“Let me go,” you say. Your hands are wet, sticky, and the air smells like metal and smoke. You wipe your hands on your shirt, on the front of your pants, on your arms—anywhere so that it isn’t on your hands.

When you look up, there’s blood on your brother, too. It stays on his neck. It falls down the front of his chest, sharp against the white shirt he wears under his suit.

You open the window. The rain on your hands feels like glass.

The blood on your brother’s neck is a noose. You wash your hands. You try to make it leave. You try to leave. You try to wake up.

“That isn’t my decision to make,” your brother tells you. He’s in the blue suit again, clean and sharp and blood-free when you look back, and his hands go to the piano. You shut your eyes and force yourself to breathe. You breathe in nothing but the sound of the piano.

Blood is thicker than water.

 xxvi.

He wasn’t aware he was screaming until his mind registered the feeling of warm hands on his shoulders, shaking him awake.

“Klavier?” He shut his eyes and opened them again. The light came into view first, made him flinch away, and then the rest of his apartment. “Prosecutor Gavin?”

He knew Apollo’s voice better than he wanted to, and he knew that tone to it, too. Klavier sat up. “Apollo. Good morning to you too.” He glanced at his hands, found them red, and wiped hastily on the front of his pants.

Apollo only stood in front of him, absolutely still until: “Can I sit down?”

Scooting over, Klavier said, “Sure.” Somewhere beyond the sleepy haze that tempted him to curl up right then and there again, he felt at the familiar leather of the couch. His chest tightened again.

The couch sunk beneath their weight as Apollo sat down. He still hadn’t answered any questions, and Klavier only watched him stare off into the empty space of the apartment and then at the scrap of papers still on his desk, but he said nothing at all. They both owed their fair sure of nightmares.

(Another thing, Klavier thought, ignoring the way his throat constricted and his stomach threatened to turn itself inside out, that his brother had taught him.)

“Do you always get nightmares?” Apollo said.

“No,” Klavier said automatically. The look Apollo shot him drew a sigh out of him, and he added, “Not always.”

It would have been easy to write the nightmares off as a trial thing, as yet another ghost of his brother and best friend, but he wasn’t that stupid, anymore, and hadn’t been for a while. The nightmares went as far back as he could remember, had always been something he took with him wherever he went.

(Memory was fickle.)

They stayed with him as long as Kristoph did, and was as synonymous with “night” as Kristoph’s back as he studied for law school. But now Kristoph was gone, and in his absence the dreams surged again, a hand on his back and a hand at his throat.

(Sleep was fickler.)

In the days when there had been nightmares, the days before whatever this was, it had mostly been Kristoph who helped him through the nightmares—and when Kristoph was no longer there, Daryan had. But he, too, was gone.

(Dreams were the ficklest of all.)

“Not always,” Apollo repeated. He looked away.

“They were gone for a little while.”

Whatever it was Apollo wanted to say to him, he bit it back and stood up instead. He only glanced at Apollo for a matter of seconds, but it was all the time he needed to see the folds in Apollo’s clothes and the lines they left behind on his arms, the hint of shadows under his eyes. Envy and guilt shot through him all at once.

“Are you hungry?” Apollo looked at him and stretched, padding into the kitchen where he leaned against Klavier’s fridge. He couldn’t remember if there was anything in it. “You fell asleep without eating last night, so…”

Klavier shrugged. There was no gentle way to tell Apollo he hadn’t had a real appetite in months. “Not particularly, but if you’re so eager to cook, surprise me.”

Apollo made to open the fridge and then Klavier remembered, with the sick kind of apprehension that pooled, hot and fast, in his stomach, that Apollo would see there was hardly anything in the fridge and he shot up. “Hold on a minute, Herr Forehead.”

Apollo froze, let his arms fall away from the fridge. “What’s the problem?” One of his hands went to his wrist again.

It was just another performance, he told himself as he walked towards Apollo and the fridge. Just another performance. He’d done countless ones before. (But it was the first time he’d done one alone.)

“You’re a guest in my apartment. It would be rude to have you cook for me.” Klavier reached for his phone and pointed it at Apollo’s general vicinity. “Takeout?”

“That’s not really—“

“My treat,” Klavier said, smiling. He trusted Apollo would know that it wasn’t up for discussion.

Somehow, Apollo did. He took a step away from the fridge, and for one moment Klavier thought of how it would feel to be completely and utterly honest with someone, how it would feel to lay all that he was and all that he had bare—but that moment faded as quickly as it came.

What was there to tell, anyway? The closest he’d ever gotten was Dayan, and what had that gotten him, in the end?

He wasn’t stupid. It was what he kept telling himself, a mantra, a promise, a prayer. The secrets—the parts of himself that he would never give up, not to Apollo or Daryan or his brother or anyone—were like the memories. They would leave him behind. They would leave him with nothing. They were all he had, anymore.

(But memory was fickle.)

And of course they were all he had (all he had ever had, maybe), but they did nothing to make him feel less alone.

 xxvii.

They were eating takeout (Greek, because Daryan had liked Chinese, although Apollo didn’t know and Klavier suspected he never would) when Klavier pushed his untouched plate away from him and said, “I’m sorry.” He didn’t specify what for. It wouldn’t have made a difference if he had.

When Apollo said nothing, only continued eating for another minute, he fidgeted in his seat. Apollo knew him in ways he’d long since given up on trying to understand, but he still wasn’t used to being honest, to Apollo or otherwise.

Apollo put his plate down at last. “You shouldn’t be.”

It was the last thing either of them had expected, sitting on Klavier’s leather couch and eating takeout together. Two months. prior, no one—and especially not Klavier or Apollo themselves—would have expected to see the two of them anywhere near each other outside of a courtroom. But two months was a long time. And of course it would have been easy (easier than easy, Klavier thought), to imagine that they sat there as Apollo Justice and Klavier Gavin, but that would have been a lie.

“Maybe. But I still am.” What did Apollo even want? Klavier picked up the leftover tray and got up, putting it down on his counter. Whatever it was that Apollo wanted wasn’t his to give. Kristoph took his answers to prison and kept them there.

“But you shouldn’t be,” Apollo shot back, breathless. He heard rather than saw Apollo stand up. “I told you. You didn’t do anything.”

What was it that kept Apollo there, all that time? What was it, stronger than the influence of Phoenix Wright and Miles Edgeworth?

(He tasted a name like poison: Kristoph.)

Whatever it was didn’t matter. He would never understand Apollo any more than he would allow Apollo to understand him.

“You didn’t do anything,” Klavier repeated. He turned the water on and washed his hands, again and again and again. “Are you convincing yourself or me?”

“I—“—Apollo stopped, shoulders sagging. He picked up his plate and then put it back down again, looking towards the door. “I’m already convinced. I know you didn’t do anything.”

There was silence. Then, the sound of running water. Klavier scrubbed his hands raw. Apollo didn’t understand. Apollo wouldn’t.

He heard Apollo’s footsteps before he heard his voice. “You said,” Apollo was saying, biting his lip, “that you’re the one who helped put your brother behind bars. Helped.”

Again, running water. In the confines of his apartments it sounded like rain.

“If you’re going blame someone, let it be me. Not yourself.”

Something flared in him, dark and desperate, and he tried to force it down. It was easy for Apollo to say, like it always was. It wasn’t Apollo who’d been destined to face him in trial and had seven years later from a different side of the courtroom. It wasn’t Apollo who’d lost a brother and met again with a stranger behind bars. It wasn’t Apollo who’d always trailed behind Kristoph, only a step too far behind, wasn’t Apollo who’d been too stupid or slow or idealistic to notice that—

He wasn’t his brother, never had been his brother. But he was worse.

“I want to,” Klavier said over the sound of the faucet. Again, Apollo flinched, but he did not think of that, only of the feeling of water on his hands, water that he felt in his throat and ribcage where it threatened to suffocate him. “But blood is thicker than water.”

He did not turn the water off even after the door swung shut in Apollo’s absence.

 xxviii.

There were days, more often than there weren’t, when he was tempted to stand up, get into his car, and drive to the detention center again and talk with Daryan. They didn’t have to talk about the case (and it was the last thing he wanted to talk about, with Daryan or otherwise). It would have been easy. All he had to do was sit in front of the glass and pretend it wasn’t there, to seek out the familiarity that he had once clung to and pretend that it still remained.

Of course the success depended on Daryan’s mood. Somedays, he predicted, Daryan would play along and talk back with him. He’d talk about the prison food, maybe. About how he missed the couch.  About how everything was better because at least there, and Daryan would laugh there, maybe, the easy kind, he didn’t have to deal with Klavier’s pretentious bullshit. About Klavier.

But even that would not last long. He saw it in his mind as he sat there on the couch, rubbing his hands. Daryan would go quiet, look at anything but Klavier’s face, and in the silence he’d be forced to confront the orange that stood out against Daryan’s skin, the hollows of his face that he had once thought of as home.

It was more likely that Daryan would say nothing whatsoever, only look at Klavier like he had so many times before: You’ve got it in you anyway. Pull the trigger. No blood. You’re worse.

In spite of himself, Klavier thought, rubbing his hands again, that even that was preferable to the silence in his apartment. Daryan understood him behind bars or outside of them, and it was preferable to whatever this was, whatever tandem he’d lived and breathed for the last two months. Even after everything, Daryan’s company was better than the shadows in his mind.

But even that was a lie.

There was a time when Daryan was his best friend, but that time had long since gone and left him in its aftermath.

All he was doing was picking up the pieces.

 xxix.

[A DREAM JOURNAL] six.

-

You never have this conversation with Daryan (like Kristoph, you only speak with him in your dreams), but if you did, you imagine that it would go a little like this:

-

(1)

[KLAVIER]: I visited my brother the other day. As you can imagine, he didn’t have much to say to me. Sometimes I wonder if he even listens.

[DARYAN, snorting]: You know how he is. Man of few words and all that shit.

[KLAVIER]: Well, actions speak louder than words.

[They are both silent. KLAVIER leaves after this. He doesn’t come back.]

-

(2)

[KLAVIER]: Herr Forehead came by the other day. He tries to talk to me, but I imagine Herr Wright put him up to it. What does he think I am?! A wounded baby bird?

[DARYAN]: Sleeves kid, huh? Who would have thought.

[KLAVIER]: What are you trying to say?

[DARYAN, laughing]: Don’t be so damn defensive, man. I’m not trying to say anything. Just—nevermind.

[KLAVIER stands up]: No, say it. You don’t have anything to lose, anymore.

[DARYAN]: Same goes for you, then.

[They are both silent. KLAVIER leaves after this. He doesn’t come back.]

-

(3)

[KLAVIER]: Do you ever wonder what it would have been like, Daryan? If I hadn’t gone to Borginia? If this whole mess hadn’t happened?

[DARYAN]: No, because it did.

[KLAVIER looks away. He knows DARYAN is right.]

[KLAVIER]: Humour me anyway.

[DARYAN, sighing]: Alright, let’s say I do. Let’s say this conversation doesn’t happen. Let’s say you don’t break your promise. Let’s say we’re both standing on the same side of that fucking glass. That make you feel any better, Gavin?

[KLAVIER]: I—didn’t. I didn’t mean it like that!

[DARYAN]: Sure. And I didn’t mean to pull that trigger.

[KLAVIER]: You didn’t…?

[DARYAN laughs and stands up]: I didn’t mean to get caught.

[They are both silent. KLAVIER leaves after this. He doesn’t come back.]

-

(4)

[KLAVIER]: I’m not sorry that you’re there and that I’m here.

[DARYAN]: Huh. Me neither.

[KLAVIER]: I’m sorry that I wasn’t able to stop you from making that decision. I’m sorry that I didn’t recognize the signs or—something. [He looks at the floor, then the wall.]

[DARYAN]: What am I, a fucking road? There are no signs. It happens.

[KLAVIER]: People kill people, Daryan? That just happens? It’s a fact of life and I’m supposed to suck it up and walk out of here feeling good about myself?

[DARYAN]: I fucking hate it when you get like this. Maybe it does just happen—to people close to you. You’re like a magnet. A murder magnet.

[KLAVIER]: That’s…!

[DARYAN:]: It always pissed me off when you went off on your ‘hero prosecutor’ tangents. Sometimes you can’t get the bad guy, alright? Sometimes you are the bad guy. Sometimes you’re worse.

[They are both silent. KLAVIER leaves after this. He doesn’t come back.]

-

(5)

[KLAVIER]: I miss you.

-

(6)

[KLAVIER]: I miss who you used to be.

-

(7)

[KLAVIER]: I miss who you could have been.

 xxx.

Klavier’s fourth memory of blood is the dark red welcome mat in front of the door to Kristoph’s office. For all the years that Kristoph’s had his badge and for all the times that Klavier has gone in and out of there himself, he’s never seen the mat.

Its existence comes as little surprise to him; Kristoph is a particular person, a particularly neat person, and being a particular person involves particularly preventing other people from trekking dirt all over your hardwood floor. What does surprise him is that it’s red. Kristoph likes blue, not red. Maybe the intern Kristoph picked up a month or so ago bought it.

In the end it’s just a welcome mat, so Klavier wipes his boots off on it and says: “Hello? Anyone home?” He puts his hands into his pockets and takes a step forward, humming appreciatively at the paintings on the wall and the shiny hardwood beneath his feet. Kristoph has impeccable taste.

“I’m here,” he hears Kristoph say from somewhere near his desk. Klavier tilts his head and hums again: the desk is nice, too. As expected from his brother.

Klavier takes one of the pens out of the cup on Kristoph’s desk and looks it over. It’s an old thing, the writing and letters on the side of it rubbing off, but he recognizes it as one Kristoph had on his desk all those years ago as he stayed up and studied. “You still have this?”

Kristoph gives it a short look, and the look he gives Klavier is even shorter. He holds out his hand. “It’s an old pen.”

“That’s why I pointed that out,” Klavier says. He clutches the pen and hesitates. “Can I have it?”

Kristoph looks at him again, a split-second longer. His chest tightens until Kristoph says, “I don’t see why not. I was planning to throw it anyway.”

Klavier pockets it and looks around for lack of anything else to say or do. “You have a nice office,” he tells his brother, desperate for any semblance of a conversation. “I do like that couch.”

He is rewarded when Kristoph laughs, pushing his glasses back up, and Klavier wonders how long it’s been since he’s heard that, how long it’s been they just stood and talked. He answers his own question: too long.

Kristoph rests his arms on his desk over a pile of neatly stacked papers and leans forward. “It’s a couch, Klavier.”

“Yes,” Klavier says. “And I don’t have one in my office.”

Kristoph’s eyebrows go up. “You have an office?”

“Ja.” He reaches for the pen, a familiar weight in his hands. “I was going to invite you over, actually. I just finished moving in the other week.”

For a moment, he’s unsure of who he’s speaking with, because Kristoph says: “Isn’t that a little too hasty, brother?”

Klavier blinks, but recovers quickly: “It’s just an office—“

“No,” Kristoph says. “That isn’t what I meant.” He leans back in his chair and crosses his arms, and if Klavier closes his eyes he’s a child again, watching his mother brush her hair in the mirror.

“Then what did you—“

“You haven’t even had your first case yet, have you? For now, you’re just playing make-believe. They don’t need to give you an office to make it that much worse.”

His hands tighten around the pen. Klavier takes a shaky breath. “It’s not—make believe. I am a prosecutor. And I’ll be good at it, too.”

Kristoph smiles. “I wonder.”

His stomach drops, and Klavier says, “What?” Understanding his brother has never been his strong suit, but he makes less and less sense day by day.

Kristoph looks at him for a long moment before turning away, running his hands through his hair. It’s a gesture he recognizes from late nights of studying and from the funeral where Kristoph held out his hand, a wordless promise.

“Nothing,” Kristoph says at last. Klavier searches his face for some semblance of the man who’d offered him that promise and looks away. “Nothing.”

There is a question, there, begging to be asked, but Klavier swallows it and keeps it in his ribcage until seven years later.

Doing that is only one of the many mistakes he makes involving his brother.

 xxxi.

He was on the couch when the phone rang, and Klavier reached for it without thinking, eager to grab another distraction. Apollo hadn’t come by for the past week or so. He supposed he didn’t blame Apollo, not in the slightest, but everything still left him thinking. Apollo had no reason to be there and had yet returned, again and again. He didn’t let himself believe that mattered. Maybe in one way it was like why Klavier visited Kristoph or Daryan—but thinking of it like that made his stomach twist, made him think of the way Daryan had met his eyes as he left for a final time.

He’d scarcely said anything into the phone when he heard Edgeworth’s voice saying, “Prosecutor Gavin, are you there?”

“Ja,” Klavier said into the phone. The other line gave him silence. “I won’t be going anywhere. Is there a problem?”

“Not particularly.” He heard the sound of shuffling papers. Edgeworth was most likely in his office. Something ugly coursed through him again, faster than he could stop it. “I need to talk with you. Can you stop by?”

Klavier ignored the part of him that wanted to say no and hang up. Edgeworth put him on “personal leave” (and what a joke that was when Apollo came by babysitting at every turn of the clock) in the first place.

Instead he said, “We’re talking.”

“It would be better to do this in person.”

His heart dropped, low and fast, and for a brilliant moment he forgot how to breathe. “Something the matter?” Klavier said, grabbing his jacket off the couch. He prayed that Edgeworth couldn’t hear how his voice shook through the phone.

The static answered when Edgeworth did not (sometimes the signal in the office was a pain in the ass) and Klavier threw his phone onto the couch, praying that whatever meager dinner he’d eaten last night wouldn’t be the next to go.

By the time he’d made it to the office building, his heart clenched hard like a fist and it took all he had not to pass out in the elevator. He drummed a beat into his leg, on the wall, anywhere so that he wouldn’t have to think—a habit learned early from Daryan—but even that did nothing for him. The weird looks some of the people in the building shot him as he forced his way to Edgeworth’s office were nothing but passing images, and he swung the door open so fast it forced all the breath out of his lungs.

From the corner of his eye he saw Edgeworth hide a bunch of papers under a stack of another. Kristoph did the same thing, once.

He cleared his throat, said, “Good morning, Prosecutor Gavin.” Edgeworth gestured at the open door. “I’d say come in, but…”

“No worries.” Klavier shut the door. Edgeworth cleared his throat again.

“I’m thinking,” he said, sorting the papers again, “of taking you off of your personal leave. But I have to tell you something first.”

But. There was always one of those. Klavier shrugged. “Tell me. I can take it.”

He couldn’t read the look Edgeworth gave him, but he felt every part of his body stop when Edgeworth said, “They’re moving Kristoph Gavin to another facility.”

And standing in that office, with his jacket on his shoulders and the chief prosecutor only metres away from where he stood, he was a child again, taking the hand that Kristoph offered and holding him to his promise and saying: Don’t leave. Don’t go. Don’t change.

(Kristoph never kept his promises.)

“I—“

“You don’t have to say anything,” Edgeworth said, and Klavier hoped he was seeing the prosecutor, not the child—though it had been a while since the two were wholly separate. “He hasn’t been transferred, yet.” He met Klavier’s eyes and Klavier caught the offer there, cradled it in his hands for fear of it breaking.

“How long until he gets moved?”

“I can make it two weeks.”

There was another promise, there, and he took it with everything he had. Two weeks, he thought again, tasted how it felt in his mouth. He had two weeks. No. He’d had two months and two weeks.

“I’ll let you know,” Klavier managed. The child in him had an answer to give then and there in the form of the pen he’d kept even after those long seven years, but he was not a child anymore, and hadn’t been for a while.

Why did Edgeworth help him? Why did Apollo?

“Sure,” Edgeworth said. His expression softened for a moment, and he wondered if when Edgeworth looked at him he saw neither prosecutor nor child but something infinitely more intimate: some part of himself. Klavier wasn’t the only one who carried around ghosts. Then his expression steeled again: “So long as it doesn’t affect your work.”

It was Klavier’s turn to say, “Sure.” He didn’t understand Edgeworth, and suspected that he perhaps never would, but for all that the moment was, he did. “Thank you, by the way.”

Edgeworth turned away, pained. His mind struggled again for case details, for an incident with a gun and elevator until Edgeworth said, “There’s nothing to thank me for.”

Of course Edgeworth was that kind of person. He thought of Apollo’s visits. “I didn’t mean for this,” Klavier said.

 xxxii.

Klavier ran into Apollo on his way home. If it had been any other day, he would have been inclined to think that it was coincidence, but that did not seem to do much for him, anymore. There were only so many places that he could go, and the prosecutor’s office wasn’t so far from the Wright Anything Agency. He wondered if Wright had sent Apollo.

“Long time no see, Herr Forehead,” Klavier said.

Apollo froze in his tracks and gave him a small wave. “Hi, Prosecutor Gavin. It’s only been a week.”

He shrugged. “A week is a long time.”

“It can be,” Apollo agreed. He took a step toward Klavier and then stopped again. It took all Klavier had not to read that as something else, as some kind of fear that he couldn’t even bring himself to blame Apollo for. “So how are you doing? Or is that a stupid question?”

“I’m alive,” Klavier said, and left it at that. Apollo could (and would, most likely) think what he wanted.

“Is that enough?” Apollo said. Klavier could have laughed. Apollo was the last person he’d ever expected to hear that from. The traitor part of him, the part of him that was tired of alive not being enough, that wanted to be honest and tell Apollo the whole of it.

“That’s quite the loaded question there, Herr Forehead.” He looked into the distance, at the grey skyline ripe with the promise of rain. “I guess you’re smarter than you look.”

“You—guess?” Apollo buried his hands in the pockets of his red jacket and glared. “Are you saying I look stupid?”

“You said it, not me.”

“Mature, Prosecutor Gavin. Real mature.”

They stood in the silence that followed, two strangers on the street and somehow intimately more than that until Apollo said, “So is it? Is it enough?”

“Sometimes.” He did not tell Apollo about the times he lay awake in bed, dreaming but not sleeping, about the times where he was breathing but not living, about the times where all he saw was red and a crowd screaming “guilty” like it was a lifeline. The look Apollo gave the floor as he reached for his wrist was more than enough proof that he knew anyway.

“And other times?” Apollo stepped towards him again, close enough that Klavier could see the browns of his irises, open and unafraid. Apollo was braver than he would ever be.

“And other times,” Klavier said, stopped. “Other times it has to be.”

In retrospect, he did not know and would never know what made him say what he said next. He could have pulled out any long list of reasons, pointed his finger at any excuse; in one lifetime maybe it was the way Apollo rocked up and down on his tiptoes, hands still in his pockets; in another it was Apollo being so close he could read every thought that flashed across his eyes; in yet another it was simply the weight of the shadows he bore on his shoulders that finally tore at his foundations, like a building crumbling beneath the weight of itself.

Klavier cleared his throat and said, “Apollo? Do you mind helping me with something?”

 xxxiii.

A part of Klavier had known all along that Apollo would say yes, but it did nothing to stop the rueful smile when Apollo let out a low breath and said, “Wow.”

The office, like everything else, still had the essence of Kristoph living between its walls, and Klavier shut the door behind him as Apollo walked forward. He shook his head when Apollo didn’t even stop to acknowledge the welcome mat, drifting straight for the couch instead.

Apollo reached out and touched it, said, “I remember this.”

He looked down at the welcome mat again and Kristoph’s voice was in his ears, Kristoph’s hand was in his until he let it go.

Klavier said, “Me too.”

“It’s weird,” he heard Apollo say as he moved from Kristoph’s desk to the paintings on his wall to the couch again. “I didn’t know you visited before. I never saw you here.”

“Bad timing, perhaps.” Kristoph was behind bars and he still couldn’t stop making excuse for him.

Klavier walked towards the desk and stopped in front of it, putting his hands back in his pockets where they stayed. He looked ahead at the empty office chair and the window with the blinds drawn behind it. For a second he saw his brother, sitting in the office chair with his arms crossed and the edge of a smile Klavier didn’t recognize anymore. When he opened his eyes again, he was gone. He let out a shaky breath, and when it was gone there was Kristoph’s voice in his ears: Three things that are not absolute.

He’d been too hasty in deciding to clean out Kristoph’s office, he thought as he walked behind the desk and opened Kristoph’s drawers, but it was too late to think about that now or ever.

“I didn’t think I’d ever be here again,” Apollo said. When he saw Klavier at the desk, he jogged over. “What should I do?”

“Help me clean this out.” Klavier jabbed his thumb at the desk and its drawers.

He stood up. Papers covered the top of Kristoph’s desk, still, each organized into their own neat piles. Near the edge of his desk, away from the papers, was an empty blue mug. He traced his finger around the top of it. He’d gotten that mug for his brother the night before Kristoph went off to law school. He’d thought that he would be okay—that he had to be—but looking at Kristoph’s desk again, looking at his anything again, was like another punch to the gut that had him recoiling. Everything was so clean, like Kristoph had only gotten up for a lunch break and simply had yet to return.

(Something about that made him angry behind words. Everything had gone on, even in the event of Kristoph’s arrest. He was the only odd one out.)

He knelt down and glanced at Apollo, who sat in front of one of the open drawers and fished out a heavy stack of papers. A small box on the very top slid off and Apollo hissed, offering them towards Klavier instead. “I think you should look at these.”

Klavier picked them up and hesitated for a split second before dumping them on top of Kristoph’s desk. The only sound in the room was his breathing and the closing and opening of drawers as Apollo looked again. He remembered when it was alive with the sound of Kristoph’s voice.

Feeling the top of the box first, Klavier pried it open. A stack of albums lay inside, and he felt all of him stop. He remembered mailing them to Kristoph, remembered writing letter after letter, remembered the look Daryan shot him as he bit his tongue and then looked away. The album cases were smooth and hard under his hands (Kristoph was, after all, a very particular man), but inside, the CDs were worn with use. His chest tightened again, almost collapsed in on itself, and he forced himself to look away.

He heard Apollo stop and couldn’t bring himself to care. Looking into the CD cases was like finding the brother he remembered, seeing the one he met with in his dreams, the one that wasn’t anything like the one he met in the jail cell or even the one he put there. Every emotion he’d forced himself to stop feeling after that first fateful trial came flooding back and he drowned in them, gasping for air.

(What was it that had taken Kristoph from him? What was it that had eluded him until it was far too late?)

“Prose—“—and then Apollo was there, Apollo was rubbing his back, Apollo was pushing him gently away from the desk and towards the couch where he let himself fall. “Klavier?”

He turned onto his side and buried his face into one of the pillows on the couch, imagining that it was Kristoph’s chest instead and that he was ten instead of twenty-four and that his brother was there, breathing and alive, instead of behind bars where he’d put him.

He stayed like that for a while.

 xxxiv.

It was already raining by the time they made it back to Klavier’s apartment (the sky, at least, he thought, kept its promises), and when Klavier opened the back of his car and reached for the last of his boxes Apollo said, “Are you going to be okay?”

The rest of the time they spent cleaning up the office and the time that followed during the drive home was quiet and awkward. Apollo asked no questions, and he didn’t mind. Even the silence was preferable to the way Apollo would have only rubbed his wrist and frowned.

When the spaces between conversation became too large than was comfortable, Klavier tried filling it with small talk, but even that did not last long and for most of the ride home they’d both sat in complete silence, Apollo looking out the window and Klavier looking straight ahead with his hand on the wheel. He’d turned on the radio once, if only for something to distract Apollo from looking at his face, and then turned it off when a Gavinner’s song came on.

Klavier shrugged, offering Apollo an easy grin. “You don’t give me enough credit, Herr Forehead. They’re just boxes.”

“I wasn’t talking about that.”

Of course. He resisted the urge to grimace, feeling like Apollo had pried apart his ribcage and looked straight at what lay inside, and forced a smile instead. “You shouldn’t worry about me.”

“Then give me a reason not to,” Apollo said. He raised his hands. “I can take a box, by the way, if they’re too much for you.”

“Like I said. They’re just boxes.”

“You won’t let me take any other weight off your shoulders.”

“What?”

“Nothing,” Apollo said, tearing his gaze away from Klavier’s face. “Just give me the boxes?”

He ended up giving Apollo one, and like the car ride and the time spent in the office, the wait in the elevator and the walk back to his apartment was silent. Apollo had visited so many times before that he didn’t need to look at the numbers or trail after Klavier.

Klavier watched him go ahead instead, arms wrapped around one of the many boxes that held what he had left of his brother. It had taken Daryan all of half a year to memorize the way to the apartment. In the end he always complained about there being too many hallways. He tried to feel something and was not surprised when he could not.

After Apollo put the boxes down inside, Klavier said, “It seems all I do nowadays is thank you, but…” He paused. “Thank you.”

Apollo scratched the back of his head. “Really? It’s okay. I mean, I offered to take the boxes.”

“I wasn’t talking about that.”

The scowl Apollo shot him made him laugh, and he moved the boxes to the corner of his apartment by the window where they stayed. He wasn’t sure when he would go through them, if ever (looking at the CDs alone had been too much for him), and for now they sat in the corner, a reminder of what he’d somehow lost.

“Apollo?” When Apollo looked at him, Klavier stretched out onto the couch and said, “You can tell Herr Wright I’m doing fine.”

Apollo furrowed his brow. “Mr. Wright? What does he have to do with any of this?”

“He’s the one putting you up to this, correct? And you have to report off to him and such?”

“Oh,” Apollo said, sinking down onto the couch. Klavier made no effort to tell him to move or leave. “That’s not true at all. He didn’t even really send me the first time. He just gave me the address when I asked for it.”

“Why do you keep coming back, then?” He turned and looked into Apollo’s face again, found it as open and honest as before.

“You’re not as smart as you look, Prosecutor Gavin,” Apollo shot back. Klavier bit back a grin at the jab. “I was just worried. That’s reason enough for you, right?”

I was just worried. How long had it been since he’d settled for an explanation like that? Since he’d started searching for some kind of ulterior motive he wouldn’t always find?

“For now,” Klavier said honestly. “But I think you should stay and watch a movie with me just to be sure.”

He didn’t need to see Apollo rolling his eyes to know it was a yes.

 xxxv.

In the end, he wasn’t sure what had made him ask Apollo to suddenly stay like that. Part of it was the want, the need, to tell someone about the shadows he’d chased in and out of his mind for the past two months, but another part of it was that he didn’t want to be alone again with those boxes.

Yet another part of it, the part of him that laughed at the rest of him, was that it was easy. Apollo was there. Apollo was offering. Apollo was there, and Daryan was in prison and so was his brother, and the solitude he’d grown used to was a skin he couldn’t peel away, even when it stopped the rest of him from breathing.

He didn’t remember what was going on the movie or even what they’d picked (some weird foreign film, maybe), only that he got up and went to the balcony. Apollo didn’t follow him.

Klavier leaned over the edge of the balcony, letting out a shuddering breath where the cold night air met the rest of his body. He felt around in his pocket for a half-filled pack of cigarettes and a lighter.

From the balcony, the entirety of the city was nothing more than a collection of lights among blackness. Looking at it from the safety of his high-rise apartment made him ache for something he couldn’t name, for an existence simpler than the one he tried to make sense of armed with a cigarette and a lighter. He wondered what it would have been like to be one of those lights, flickering in and out in the face of darkness with no care in the world.

He didn’t turn around when he heard the balcony door open, only moved over to leave a space that Apollo soon took up. Minutes passed with the two of them standing like that, and he focused on the lights, watching them fade and flare again.

“You have a really great view,” Apollo said. He leaned against the balcony.

“Ja,” Klavier said. He drummed a beat into the side of the railing. “Daryan appreciated it, too. He stayed here more often than in his own apartment.”

“Oh,” Apollo said, struggling again. “You two were close, right?”

“Best friends.” He took a cigarette out of the pack and lit it without moving it to his mouth. Before, he always got on Daryan’s case about cigarettes. Now he was using them himself, as if cigarette smoke could fill the spaces inside of him that Daryan had left behind.

He felt Apollo shift next to him. “I didn’t know him very well, but I’m sorry.”

“That he got arrested?”

“That he had to get arrested.”

Klavier put the cigarette to his lips and breathed in, let the smoke push past his lips when he breathed out. “Me, too.” When Apollo didn’t say anything after that, he said, “Can I ask you for another favor?” He reached for the cigarette tray (another thing Daryan left behind) and put his cigarette out.

“Anything,” Apollo said.

Klavier looked away from his face and at the city below him. For a while, he said nothing. Then: “What was my brothe—Kristoph Gavin like?”

“I thought you would know better than me?”

“I thought so too. But I’m not so sure anymore.” Maybe, after all that had happened, that was why he kept talking to Apollo in the end. The overwhelming rest of him was still searching for any part of Kristoph to cling to.

“He was,” Apollo said carefully, “my mentor. He helped me with a lot.”

“That isn’t what I meant. I mean—what was he like? How did you remember him?” Against himself, he saw his own memories of Kristoph, washed over in red and gold.

Apollo struggled again and pushed himself away from the balcony. “He didn’t talk very much outside of work. But he helped me with a lot. He kept extra lunch in his office for when I forgot.”

Klavier fought the urge to reach for another cigarette and laughed. That sounded like Kristoph, at least the one that he always returned to in his dreams. He said, “Thought of everything, didn’t he?”

Apollo zipped his jacket up and let out a small breath. “Not everything.”

“No,” Klavier agreed. “Not everything.”

Where all the emotions he’d felt before had been, there was only the kind of dull numbness, like trying to feel with a limb right after it’d been broken. Beyond that was only something hazy that he breathed in like the lingering cigarette smoke, something that he could only vaguely recognize as a mix of grief and longing. But who he grieved and longed for he could no longer tell.

“Prosecutor Gavin?” Apollo said next to him. He looked over and met Apollo’s eyes again. “What are you thinking about?”

“I’m looking for something.” Whatever it was, whatever answer he wanted, he knew he would not find in the city lights.

“What would that be?”

“The moment he stopped being my brother.”

He felt Apollo go still. All the emotions he’d swallowed for as long as he could remember came back, a storm of city lights and smoke, and he felt his ribs constrict around the heart that beat heavily against them, crying: Do you see this? You are here. You are alive. In front of him the world blurred in black and gold, and before Klavier could register that he was falling, there were warm arms around him and a small hand rubbing circles into his back.

“No,” he heard Apollo murmur. The arms around him tightened and he buried his face in Apollo’s shoulder so that he didn’t have to focus on the pain in his chest. “No, Klavier. No. That isn’t fair.”

If there was anything he could have said, it was overtaken by the choked sob rising high in his throat and Klavier bit his lip so hard he drew blood. The taste of it was copper on his tongue, another memory: his mother’s voice, shrill and loud in the hallway. Kristoph’s eyes on the grandfather clock behind her. Kristoph’s warm hands on his face afterwards, wiping his tears away in his mother’s absence and saying: This is how you live. This is what you are. Endure.

But Kristoph wasn’t there anymore. The voice he heard did not tell him that this was how he lived, that this was what he was, that he had to endure. Voice shaking, Apollo said, “That isn’t fair. That isn’t fair to you. Haven’t you had enough? Aren’t you tired? That isn’t fair.”

The copper in his mouth stopped him from speaking and he only shook his head and pressed himself closer to Apollo, saying nothing. He was afraid of what he would say.

Apollo held him like he would never have to let go. “It’s okay,” Apollo said, and Klavier could only wonder if this is what it felt like being forged again from fire and ash. “It’s okay. You’re okay. You can cry.”

For perhaps the first time in years, Klavier did.

 xxxvi.

The day before Klavier’s first trial, Kristoph calls him to his office. He remembers the exact moment he gets the call—it’s about thirty-minutes past five, and Klavier is about one song away from closing the door to his soon-to-be office and heading him.

The hours between five and seven are a golden haze muddled with humid air and the taste of spring, April wrought somewhere deep in his bone, and they do nothing to make him feel any more awake. The trial is tomorrow, Klavier thinks even as he reaches for his phone, but the thought comes as another fact, another stipulation buried beneath case files. Kristoph’s voice on the other line is a second fact: “Come to my office.”

He doesn’t surprise himself by saying yes. Kristoph’s office is the same as he saw it last, six days ago, but he isn’t sure if the man who owns it is. His brother has no business facing a pretender in court. Something tells him, in Kristoph’s voice: You are just playing make-believe.

Klavier crushes it and says instead, “Afternoon, brother.”

Kristoph doesn’t look up from the papers. The pang in Klavier’s chest is a familiar throb. “Sit down,” Kristoph tells him.

He pulls the chair out and sinks into it. For all that he is, for all that he has, for all of Kristoph’s distant stares and paintings on the wall, it’s easy for him to imagine/wish/pretend that it’s a talk like another. The desk between him and Kristoph feels like an ocean he can’t cross.

He breathes out. The curtains normally covering Kristoph’s windows aren’t drawn, today. All Klavier can look at is the gold beyond it, spreading everywhere and nowhere all at once.

When he glances at Kristoph, he only sees Kristoph looking over the papers again. He hasn’t looked up. It’s been a while since Klavier expected otherwise, the pang in his chest grows into the ringing in his ears and mouth, so Klavier says, “I like the paintings you have up. They remind me of the ones at home, in the hallway near mother’s room. Do you remember?”

He isn’t sure if he’s talking to his brother or the gold he’s slowly losing his brother to. Kristoph looks up and smiles, small. Klavier watches his eyes catch on the gold behind the windows. “It’s not quite the same.”

Nothing is, anymore, but the wounds are dull and he has no interest in changing his scars into tattoos. Klavier says, “I guess not.” The paintings are the only bit of colour, welcome mat aside, in Kristoph’s entire office and again Klavier swallows around the pang in his chest. This is his brother’s life, has been his brother’s life. He has no place in it. “Who painted it?”

Kristoph gives the little smile again, more at the window than at Klavier. “Misham. Drew Misham.”

He’s heard the name, once or twice. Musicians are more of his things, not painters. “Ah. He’s a talented artist.”

Kristoph puts his papers in the drawer and locks it. Klavier will only realize in retrospect that he has locked something else in there, too, something that he will never give up. “Yes,” Kristoph says, pushes up his glasses. He crosses his arms on the desk. “Yes, I suppose.”

The pang in his chest is like a heartbeat bringing him home. Here, this is what you are. This is what you’ll be. You are alive. He wants to understand whatever it is that Kristoph is offering him, wants it more than he’s ever wanted anything—but he isn’t 12 and Kristoph isn’t 20 and they both haven’t for a long time. He isn’t Klavier Gavin in front of his brother. He is Prosecutor Gavin, and Prosecutor Gavin lets it go. The gold outside the window sweeps by, an April storm, and he lets it take him with it.

(He thinks it’s funny, somehow. Spring is revival, the calm after the cold, but as he stands there, hands in his pockets, he knows this is a funeral, a burial for someone who perhaps never existed in the first place.)

Do you want to talk about it? Do you want to talk to me? Do you want to be my brother again? Klavier almost asks, but they are questions to which he already knows the answer. He shuts his eyes and opens them again, and says instead: “What did you want to talk about?”

Kristoph doesn’t hesitate. Klavier tells himself that he won’t, either. “Are you aware of the rules regarding forged evidence?”

At seventeen, it is a beginning.

At twenty-four, it is an ending.

 xxxvii.

The visiting area in the prison wasn’t much larger than his office, but sitting there, he felt like all the weight of the world had been compressed into that tiny space and all he was doing was trying to hold it up. The guard nodded at him and Klavier returned it with an easy smile. The guard had seen him enough times before, he was certain. But he would have to worry about that no longer.

As the guard disappeared around the corner, Klavier swallowed and focused his eyes on the white walls. It was the last time he’d ever see them again, the last time he’d ever look at them for the sake of looking at something other than his brother’s face.

The rest of him laughed and Klavier let it, digging his hands into his pockets so that he wouldn’t be able to look at them. Kristoph was only being moved to another facility. He wasn’t dying (No blood, he heard someone say before he was able to realize it was himself), wasn’t disappearing, wasn’t doing anything but moving where Klavier couldn’t see him. And even then, that was nothing. Edgeworth hadn’t said how long he would be gone or even where he was going. To anyone else, it didn’t matter. To anyone else, it shouldn’t have mattered.

But to him it was enough. To him it had to be enough. He glanced at the space in front of him again, and relief flooded him when he found it empty. Klavier was no fool. He wasn’t doing anything new, wasn’t doing anything—only saying goodbye to someone he had already lost long ago.

And it had to be enough, but he already knew that some nights it wouldn’t be. Some nights (most nights, even tonight), he wouldn’t be able to sleep. Some nights he’d still dine with his ghosts. Some nights he would have to fight the nothingness that spread from his fingertips to his lips, threatening to pour out and take with it everything he ever had or ever was. And some nights, he would let it win.

(Klavier drummed his finger again on the edge of the counter and then stopped it. He’d learn how to deal with those some nights. Apollo came to mind, loud and the only warmth next to him on the balcony, and he shook his head.)

From the corner of his eye, he saw the guard approaching, Kristoph in tow. Klavier swallowed. Whatever words and questions he still had left were, at least for as long as he needed them to be, gone.

Slowly, Kristoph sank into the chair in front of him. The only thing separating the two of them was the glass, and he wondered how easy it would have been to pretend that it wasn’t there, that the prison wasn’t there, that they were only sitting across from each other, brother to brother, like they had done so many times before.

He was through with pretending.

(Kristoph didn’t meet his eyes. In the blue suit, he looked like every bit the man Klavier remembered leaving. He thought of the orange Daryan had worn and swallowed again.)

Somehow, the silence was the most meaningful conversation they’d ever had. He forced himself to look at Kristoph again, to remember the lines on his face that he’d never noticed before, the sinews and ridges of his scarred hands, the dips in his throat where the answer to every question Klavier had ever thought of stayed. A sharp pang rose in his chest again and dulled just as quickly to a heartbeat, a drum, a promise in the form of a fist.

He could remember every visit and every moment he’d spent there, talking about everything and nothing in particular. Did Kristoph notice them? Did Kristoph listen? He knew the answer before he even asked the question: probably not. The heartbeat sang in his chest again. He only wished that he could see whatever it was that Kristoph saw.

It made his chest tighten a little. In his dreams and in the recesses of his mind, it was easier to remember that the man who sat in front of him, seeing and saying nothing, was his brother, but in person it was a different thing altogether. Did he know that there was anything different about this? Could he tell? Could he care? Again, probably not.

But the visit was the only thing he had left, if not of his brother then of anything, and he grasped it with both hands.

Klavier swallowed and said, “Hello again, brother. How long has it been? A few weeks? It’s definitely colder now.”

Again, nothing. He’d grown used to it. Kristoph was a monument in front of him, a memorial of what he’d lost and what he was learning to let go.

“Do they tell you things in there?” he found himself saying, twisting his hands. “Do they keep you updated? News or the like?”

His chest went tight again, almost to the point where he couldn’t breathe. Klavier shook his head. “It must be a weird thing for you, knowing that you’re sitting in here while the rest of the world goes on outside these bars.”

When Kristoph met his gaze, it was like looking into the eyes of a stranger. No, Klavier thought. His throat closed. It was like looking into the eyes of a stranger and seeing for, perhaps, the first and last time.

(His mind went to when Kristoph had come back in the blue suit and then retreated upstairs, never to return: That is not your brother.)

Everything else he’d wanted to say became six words: “They’re moving you to another facility.” The silence Kristoph answered him with was painfully loud.

From a young age, for as long as Klavier could remember (but again, memory was a fickle thing), Kristoph excelled at keeping his back steel-straight and his eyes straight ahead. He searched Kristoph’s face in vain for any sign of any feeling again.

(That is not your brother. No, this was his brother, and this was the man he was letting go.)

(He wasn’t letting go of his brother any more than he was letting go of a part of himself.)

“They’re moving you to another facility,” Klavier said again, the words poison in his own mouth, “and I am letting them.” The visits of the last two months came flooding back to him again, of I’ll see you laters that happened even when he wished they didn’t and silences he couldn’t erase from the farthest part of his mind. Of things that he would never see or feel again. The fist in his chest clenched hard again, a heartbeat he didn’t want to let go, and he let it.

He stood up abruptly, and his vision blurred and then cleared again. An apology burned somewhere and he buried it again with the rest of him. It was a small step, an impossibly tiny one that made him ache for something he could not name nonetheless, but it was enough. It was enough.

(Daryan would have laughed.)

“Goodbye, Kristoph.”

He thought he heard Goodbye, Klavier in Kristoph’s voice, but perhaps, like everything Kristoph said, it was only in his mind.

 xxxviii.

[A DREAM JOURNAL] seven

-

You recognize the song he plays immediately when you walk into the room, almost as quickly as you recognize the back you stare at as he plays. It’s your mother’s favourite song, one of the first ones you learn with the instructor—and the first song you learn how to hate. It sounds different and alive under your brother’s hands, like most things. But you are not your brother. You have never been your brother.

It is also the song your brother played at your mother’s funeral.

In your dream, the piano keys bone-white beneath your brother’s hands, you force yourself to look out of the parlor window. Again, there is rain. Like most of your dreams/memories with your brother, everything is washed in gold, as if someone—you, most likely—is desperate to save this moment in amber.

You close your eyes and sit next to your brother when he shifts over and offers you a seat. Without stopping (and right now, you guess that the song is about 3/4ths of the way through), your brother tells you, “I knew you would be here.”

You don’t see the need to mention that you always meet him here and shrug instead. “I don’t see why it would be any different today.”

His foot stops on the pedal and you live in the sound of your own echo, the piano a heartbeat you have long since forgotten how to control. “Do you really think that?”

“What do you think?” you ask him instead.

He hums. “Avoiding the question, Klavier? That isn’t a particularly charming habit.”

“I learned from the best,” you say, but all you look at are his hands and the rain you want to feel on your own. From where you are sitting, you can’t see his face.

You hear him laugh. “That you did, brother. That you did.”

The gold spilling in through the window is like a flood, taking everything there is. It takes your brother first, holds him there in the song he plays and the eyes he doesn’t use to meet your own, and all you can think is that this is how you want to remember him.

(But maybe not. Memory, after all, is a fickle thing.)

Instead you say, “Don’t call me that.”

“Don’t call you what? Brother? Are you not my brother?” Against the music and against his voice, you see your brother in the black suit. Your brother’s hand in yours. You look at your own hands and fold them in your lap.

“Not today I’m not.”

“Ah,” he says, and you wish you understood. He looks at you, and you look at the gold rising behind his eyes. “Who are you today, then?”

(You think: Someone who helped put you behind bars.)

“Klavier Gavin,” you say, and it feels like opening your eyes in a room full of light for the first time. The gold dances on the wall, eclipses the both of you. Where it meets your skin, it is warm. Where it burns you, it leaves no scars.  You wish everything else of your brother’s was the same. “I’m Klavier Gavin.”

He stops playing. You realize, dimly, that the song has ended, and that you and your brother are only sitting in its aftermath.

“Are the two mutually exclusive?” he says. “Klavier Gavin and my brother?” You can’t read the expression on his face; somethings are true even in dreams. You have given up on trying to.

“Yes,” you say. You listen to the rain and substitute it for your own heartbeat in the absence of your brother’s playing or voice.

He looks at you, says nothing, and for a moment you think you recognize him when he does. The gold is crying and you ache for it to stop. Soon it will leave you too.

“You said it wasn’t your decision to make,” you say. You take his hands off of the piano and fold them in his lap. He lets you. Already you are reminded of your mother in her coffin, hands across her chest. “So that means it’s mine. And I’m making it.”

“Ah,” he says again. You put your own shaky hands on the piano, trying to remember anything, any song to fill the silence that consumes you both. “You always were a fast learner.”

And when he says that it’s like you are a child again, too short to sit on the piano bench yourself, hands too small to play the keys meant for your brother; like you are always reaching for someone you can’t hold in your too-small hands, like asking him to stay will make him listen.

But this is a dream, and this is yours, and you are not a child. The gold makes you close your eyes. You hear your brother shift next to you but you don’t move.

You are alone when you open your eyes again.

It is no longer raining.

 xxxix.

Klavier’s last memory of blood was the house where he washed it off his hands.

“You’re gonna be okay?” Apollo had said, even as he opened the door to Klavier’s car and climbed into the front seat. It never failed to amuse him, how Apollo struggled a little to pull himself into the car, and the resulting glare Apollo shot him did nothing to change that.

For all that Apollo said, it was a warning, not a question, and like most warnings, Klavier shrugged it off. Closing his own door and turning on the radio (that got him another glare from Apollo, one that was perhaps, this time, warranted), Klavier told him, “Of course I will. I’m not a child. I can do things without breaking.”

In the mirror, he saw Apollo suppress a smile, arms crossed. He made no effort to put his hands to his wrist. That was more an answer he needed than Apollo’s “If you say so, I guess.”

The rest of the ride was comfortable silence or white noise, like something Apollo pointed out (a funny bumper sticker once or twice, and a changing light another time), or the song he heard without really listening to and making sense of it. Other times it was something he told Apollo at a red light or at a particular long stretch down the highway, simply because he could.

(“I lived here as a child,” Klavier said. He reached over and turned up the radio. “Until I was ten, maybe? I can’t remember. It’s been a while.”

Apollo shrugged and relaxed. “Memory is like that, I guess.”

Klavier laughed, not completely without edge: “Isn’t it?”)

He still did not know what it was that kept Apollo returning to his apartment or watching movies or cleaning offices or going on an hour-long drive back into the countryside with him again, but he did not think about that now. Whatever it was, he had all the time to find out. Again, it had been a small step if it was even a step at all, but it was one that he took without looking back. Thinking of Kristoph and Daryan still made him ache and he was unsure if there was a time when that would change. At the very least, he was willing to look for it. To try and make it his own.

(“You said you lived here until you were about ten. Where’d you go after that?” Apollo asked him. He played with his bracelet.

Klavier let the sound of the car between them answer until he said, “Boarding school, after that.” They were small details, irrelevant details, the ones he could part with without wanting them back. That was fine. That was alright. He could deal with that. “What about you? You’re a man of mystery, Herr Forehead.”

Apollo went quiet for a little and then laughed. Klavier made note of it. “Nothing really that… interesting.” He raised an eyebrow at Klavier in the mirror. “I mean, I’m not a rock star or anything like that.”

Klavier was about to open his mouth when Apollo cut him off with a snippy, “If you make any comment about the Chords of Steel, I’ll throw you out of this car and then hit you with it.”)

And the rest of him, the parts that were still more Kristoph than they were Klavier, knew that things hadn’t really changed. Daryan was still in jail and so was Kristoph and he had still been the one to help put them there. The guilt still came to him in waves, still came to him when he least expected it, and then it passed.

He wasn’t alright, not by any semblance of the word. But he could be. But he would be. Every breath he pushed it and out of his lungs was, if not a promise of that, a promise of what was to come.

(“You still didn’t really answer me,” Klavier said, amused when Apollo jolted awake. “About your life.”

“You didn’t tell me what you wanted to know.” Apollo’s shoulders relaxed and he moved a little in his seat, yawning.

Klavier said, “Can I do it next time?”)

By the time he pulled into the front of the house, Apollo tumbled out of the car. Even years later, the house had changed little. The garden, in the absence of gardeners, was nothing more than a mess of dead plants. He remembered everything else in the shame shades. Klavier let out a breath. Since the funeral, his father had left the house, another building full of ghosts that left Klavier holding the keys.

“You lived here?” Apollo said, whipping his head around to give him something caught in between a glare and a stare.

“Ja,” Klavier said. He reached around in his pocket for his keys. “Me, and Kristoph.”

Apollo looked at him for a moment longer before tearing his eyes away. “Right.” As if remembering where he was and who he was with, he added, “You’re gonna be okay with being alone?”

He took his sunglasses off and folded them in his pocket. “I have to do this alone.”

Apollo nodded, a quiet understanding, and said again, “Right.”

Above him, the sky was caught between grey and blue, caught between the promise of a storm and the promise of its ending. There was no rain, only the autumn air he breathed into his lungs and held there.

Inside, the house was empty. The parlour that he’d seen so vividly often in his dreams and memories, a thing he could never leave behind, let almost none of the light from inside through its worn curtains. Dust covered the floor and the piano in the center of the room. He felt his heart stutter to a stop in his chest. He walked to the piano and stood in front of it, still, before wiping the bench off and sitting down.

In his mind, he wanted to understand what drew him back to the house, to its parlour, to the piano. In memory, it had all started at the dining room table or in Kristoph’s office the night before the trial. In reality, it had started far earlier than that, far earlier than he could ever imagine. It had started in this room.

Klavier hesitated for a moment and put his hands to the keys. As a child, he couldn’t fathom how large the instrument had been. Now it was almost too small. He looked at his hands again, found them clean. Where he thought he would hear Kristoph’s voice or taste the smell of smoke, there was only the sound of his own breathing and the quiet echoes running up and down the empty halls of the house.

And sitting there, with Apollo outside and the beating promise of you are alive in his chest, he knew that it was a beginning, too. A beginning of a beginning. He accepted that. He needed that. Everything had started here in this room, and it was only fitting that it was to end here, too. Klavier shut his eyes again and found them dry, and again it was a heartbeat, a reminder: You are alive. Something sharp ached in his chest, a passing regret for what he had lost, but it faded as quickly as it came.

He stood up and walked back into the receding light, locking the door behind him.

[shuzonijimura]

(6) klavier, phoenix

old habits die hard — 1.4k

part 1 of charastudy.  klavier, through someone else’s eyes. aa4 spoilers. non-romantic. 

ao3.

Phoenix Wright is a lot of things—a father, a mentor, a friend, or a foolishly foolish fool depending on who you ask—but he is, above all, a lawyer, and lawyers are used to surprises.

Hell, Phoenix thinks, adjusting his tie and sinking into the couch near the front entrance of the Wright Anything Agency. Lawyers create surprises. Lawyers use them. It’s one of the fundamental laws (and he ignores the part of him that wants to laugh at that, or at himself, or at least at something) of, well...the law.

But even the fundamental law does nothing to protect his jaw from dropping five or so feet down to the ground when Klavier Gavin steps inside and closes the door behind him. 

Already out of his control, Phoenix’s mind maps and charts a list of all the things that are wrong and wrongly surprising about this situation: first, that it is Klavier Gavin of all people who stands 10 feet from his couch; second, that Apollo is not home; third, that Apollo is not home because it is his day off as well as it is Phoenix’s, and fourth: that it is 2 in the morning.

He waits for Klavier to give him some kind of rock-infused, glitter-straddled explanation. Klavier doesn’t.

Phoenix says, because it’s really the only question he wants to know the answer to (that Klavier can answer, anyway), “Why are you here?”

Klavier reaches out towards him and then lets his hand fall down at his side. Phoenix has no idea what Klavier’s reaching for (Apollo, maybe, or some guitar Trucy may or may not have stuck on the wall), but he flinches away nonetheless. His eyes catch on Klavier’s hand and don’t let go, tracing the sinews and ridges of his knuckles, the unbroken and unscarred skin. He swallows.

He’s about to repeat the question when Klavier opens his mouth (and for a moment Phoenix has to shut his eyes, shut his ears, train himself to unhear a voice that isn’t there): “I didn’t have anywhere else to go.”

Well. He looks Klavier up and down for a moment: he’s wearing the same thing he always does, the sleeves rolled a little bit over his hands, the collar a little bit open, the shirt riding a little bit high. Either he’s just changed back into it from his pajamas, deciding that visiting Phoenix (or Apollo?) is worth putting back on his rock-star get-up, or he just hasn’t changed out of it. He really doesn’t think it’s the former.

“I don’t follow. Did someone kick you out of your penthouse?” He adopts people who need it and occasionally plants, not 24-year old rock-star prosecutors.

“No,” Klavier is saying, but Phoenix is kind of there and kind of not, “no.” He scratches the back of his head—and who knew he had humility somewhere, buried ten feet deep under layers of God knows what else? “No. I meant nowhere else where I could find you.”

I didn’t have anywhere else to go. Phoenix runs those words through his mind again, tastes them on his lips. Klavier has lots of places to go—multiple penthouses, multiple apartments, and a singular office—and of all places to go or be, he chooses Phoenix’s office. Klavier isn’t here to ask him out on a date, or ask his protégé out on a date.

And what does that leave? His mind stutter-stops to a beat he hasn’t marched to since before they took Kristoph away in handcuffs—maybe—and he shuts it down. It isn’t Klavier’s fault. He, on a fundamental level, knows it isn’t Klavier’s fault. But knowing is different from thinking.

“Okay,” Phoenix tells him. He fidgets with his hoodie. “Well, you’ve found me.”

Klavier takes a step towards him, stops. It’s the first time, Phoenix notes, that he’s ever (and his mind flashes to a courtroom and a particular murmur in the crowd—secondsecondsecond) seen Klavier look unsure of himself. Unsure of where he stands.

“Can I come in?” He doesn’t give Phoenix any more answers, but he isn’t looking him in the eye and that makes it infinitely heavier than if he did. That alone tells more than anything Klavier could ever say. “More in, I suppose.”

He shrugs. “I’m not gonna kick you out.” Even if I want to.

And it isn’t something he’s thought about (ever, maybe, or at least for a while), but he doesn’t hate Klavier. He hates Klavier for a lot of things—Phoenix lets out a breath he isn’t sure he was holding to begin with—but he doesn’t hate Klavier.

(It doesn’t do anything to change what he sees when he looks at Klavier. Klavier’s face, open and guarded all at once, the arch of his brow and the highness in his cheekbones. He reads them for an apology/answer that isn’t Klavier’s to give. Klavier’s hands, dark and unafraid, washed red with the blood of a sin he did not commit.)

“Okay,” Klavier parrots. He takes three steps towards the couch and stops, looking at Phoenix for all of a second and then tearing his eyes away.

(What are you looking for? Phoenix wants to ask, wants to tear the answer out of the heart beat-beating in the middle of Klavier’s throat. What do I have to give you still?)

“So,” says Phoenix, suddenly very, very tired. “What do you need? What was so important that you couldn’t wait until tomorrow?”

He doesn’t mean to cross-examine Klavier (old habits die hard), so when Klavier swivels around towards the door, Phoenix stands up. Walks towards him. Stops in his tracks.

“I could have,” says Klavier. Phoenix tries not to think of all those things his words could apply to, all the possibilities and pasts alive and burning somewhere he can’t reach. He feels the beginnings of a headache. “Waited until tomorrow. I just—“—he shifts, looks at the floor and then the ceiling and then back at Phoenix’s face—“—got a little impatient.”

“A little,” says Phoenix.

“A little more than a little.”

“A little more than a little.”

“A lot.” Klavier isn’t looking at him anymore.

“Just tell me,” Phoenix says, ignoring how Klavier bites his lip. He’s tired, and he’s angry (kind of, maybe), and he wants to sleep without any semblance of Gavin-infested dreams, and Klavier is impeding every single one of those goals. (Old habits, he thinks in spite of himself, die hard.) “Or I’ll be really angry that you came all the way here to say hi, lie, and then leave.”

(His mind stutter-stops again: maybe Klavier is more used to that than he thinks. The thought fades just as fast.)

“I was wondering,” Klavier begins, fighting against whatever great nothing/everything traps his words in his throat, “if maybe you—”

He is very, very tired, very very angry, and very very wants to sleep. “If maybe I—“

“If you hate me,” Klavier blurts. Phoenix just stands there, unsure of what he is supposed to think or say, and it gives him a little bit of comfort to think that Klavier looks the exact same.

(He has every reason to hate Klavier. He has every reason to blame Klavier, to want to put him behind the same bars that hold his brother. They both know this.

And they both know that he still doesn’t.)

“No,” Phoenix says at last, wondering how much time will have to pass for him to believe it. “No, Klavier. I don’t hate you.”

And honestly, he doesn’t know why he says it. There are so many parts of him—large, biting parts—that want to reach out at whatever Klavier leaves for him, bare and raw, and break it. To tell him every thought that has raced through his head and lungs since that stupid diary page made it into his hand.

For a moment (because really, that’s all it takes), those parts of him are still, instead looking at Klavier’s blue eyes and the eye bags under them. Klavier’s sleeves, rolled down even in the summer.

Klavier’s shoulders loosen a little, but he turns back towards the door, hand resting on the doorknob. Phoenix lets him.

“Ah,” he says, biting his lip again. There’s a little laugh—the kind that Phoenix hates—before he’s out the door, faster than he ever came in. The door swings shut in his absence. Phoenix stands there, a step away from the space Klavier had commanded only moments ago.

He shakes his head and makes for the couch again, ignoring the heartbeat riding against his ribcage.

And he doesn’t hate Klavier, doesn’t think, anymore, that he could: but there is a very large part of him that wishes that he did. 

Hate is easier to deal with than pity.

[shuzonijimura]

(5) klavier/daryan

in the absence of  — 2.9k

prompt: child (from here, but like i ever fulfill my prompts)

implied 4-3 spoilers. 

ao3.

Everything seemed to lead back to Klavier. Everyone seemed to lead back to Klavier. He groped around for the edges of whatever deep resentment he had buried under his fingertips, finding nothing but the beginnings of an ugly emotion that made his throat and ribs collapse in on themselves. For a moment, he was falling.

(For a moment, he’d forgotten that he already had.)

*

He’d known Klavier for as long as he could remember, and that included knowing Klavier long enough to write a damn list of all the things that annoyed him.

Of course doing that would be petty, and he wasn’t about to lower himself to one of those petty over-dramatic ex-girlfriends from a cliché sitcom (firstly, because he was a detective and detectives had pride, and secondly, because that would mean Klavier was the boyfriend protagonist and for once in Daryan’s life it wouldn’t hurt for the spotlight to be off Klavier), but every time Klavier opened his mouth—and Jesus, did he do that often—the list got a little longer.

It always made him laugh in the worst of ways, in the way that Klavier pointedly said made him look and sound like part-hair dryer, part-dog (but fuck what Klavier said and fuck what Klavier thought and above all, fuck Klavier) when fans went up to him with stars in their eyes and said Klavier was perfect. He would have done anything to rip the stars out of those eyes.

His throat tightened in time with his chest when he thought that he, too, had thought Klavier was perfect once. That was before he got past the whites of Klavier’s eyes (that could make you feel like you were everything and nothing at once, and God, he knew that), the straight-edge of Klavier’s teeth when he grinned or smiled or spoke (and Klavier was as good at taking things part as he was at putting them together), the chains around Klavier’s neck and the ones hanging from his belts of his leather pants (and Daryan wasn’t stupid enough to think that they were the things chaining Klavier in place).

He lit a cigarette, let the smell of it seep into his ribcage as he sat there looking like a damn fool. The smoke held onto him, washed over the distinctly Klavier smell of his office: leather and some pretentious foreign cologne. 

He’d forgotten why he was there in the first place, forgotten why he’d kicked his boots up on a paper-covered desk (yeah, Kla—Gavin would bitch and whine about that one, but he’d get over it too) and sunk into Klavier’s leather office chair before pulling out a cig.

It was funny in the dog-vacuum cleaner way. Everything seemed to lead back to Klavier. Daryan put the cigarette out, looked around, and put it in the little dish where Klavier kept his butterscotch candies. He considered counting the candies, just for the hell of it, and then shook his head, grabbing a fistful and jamming it into his pocket instead. 

Everything seemed to lead back to Klavier. Everyone seemed to lead back to Klavier. He groped around for the edges of whatever deep resentment he had buried under his fingertips, finding nothing but the beginnings of an ugly emotion that made his throat and ribs collapse in on themselves. For a moment, he was falling.

(For a moment, he’d forgotten that he already had.)

And it was that, he realized, inside of Klavier’s office, sitting in Klavier’s chair with his feet crossed on Klavier’s desk and a bunch of Klavier’s candies (and as if it was instinct, he shook his head to avoid the feeling dangerous and bright rising behind his eyelids), that annoyed him most about Klavier. That made everything else he’d ever hated grow small. That made Klavier’s perfectionism, or Klavier’s stupidly long eyelashes, or that it took Klavier an hour to shower and do his makeup—and still have the nerve to waltz out of his bathroom in that stupid black bathrobe, perch on Daryan’s lap, and ask if he looked OK—all seem irrelevant.

It was that no matter what Klavier did or Klavier said or Klavier made him do, he couldn’t find it in him to hate him. Klavier was annoying. Klavier was worse than annoying. Klavier was every bad thing Daryan had ever hated packed into one, tan, blue-eyed blond-haired package, and that stupid package drew him into his orbit without any hope of reprieve.

Perhaps there was a time, although he did not know it, a time before—a time before he knew Klavier’s eyes were so blue it made you think you were looking away because they were too bright, not because it made you feel an ugly guilt for a crime not yet committed, a time before he knew Klavier’s smile was so wide it hid every secret he’d ever pressed from his lips to Daryan’s collarbone, a time before he knew Klavier was contradiction after contradiction, lie after lie, fragile piece after fragile piece. A time before he knew Klavier talked about himself to distract from himself.

But that time was over, had not existed for a while, and perhaps never had. He felt around in his pocket for the pack of cigarettes, and found only the butterscotch candies. For a long, dangerous moment, he felt sorry for himself—and sorry for Klavier. The brightness, guilt, and resentment all rose at once, and he closed his eyes, thought that he would drown in it.

Klavier opened the door and Daryan nearly fell out of his chair, gripping the sides of it for support. Daryan looked from his own boot-clad feet to Klavier standing in the doorway of his own office and raised a hand, said, “Hey.”

Shutting the door behind him with his own back, Klavier walked straight for Daryan and then stopped. Daryan’s throat tightened without his permission: a warning, a lesson.

He searched Klavier’s face for any kind of clue, finding none. He was wearing his sunglasses (indoors? Daryan thought for a moment, fists itching to jam themselves into Klavier’s nose, before his throat began to burn), and he had both his hands in the pocket of his leather pants. Daryan squinted.

“Ja, hey.” Klavier took a hand out of his pocket and raised it in greeting before putting it back. He raised an eyebrow at Daryan before making a point to (and God, he didn’t hate Klavier but he sometimes he wished he did) stare at the papers trapped under Daryan’s boots. “What brings you here?”

He gritted his teeth, opened his mouth—are you fucking kidding me, and of course Klavier wasn’t—and shut it. “The fuck, Gavin? You called me here. Band practice, or something.”

He hated it when Klavier raised his eyebrow. “In my office? Herr Crescend, surely you jest.”

“You have a hundred guitars on your wall. Don’t act like practicing in here would be crazy, or some shit like that.” He paused, reconsidered. “You probably play guitar on the fucking toilet.”

“Only when I’m having difficulties,” Klavier told him without missing a beat. He wriggled his fingers. “You use it or you lose it.”

“Not playing guitar for the five or so minutes it takes for you to take a shit isn’t gonna kill you.”

Klavier laughed at that. He wanted it to last, wanted to press that moment somewhere whatever (whoever whoever whoever) was eating Klavier alive wouldn’t be able to find it. That was before he recognized the burn in his throat. Daryan took his feet off the desk, slamming them into the hardwood floor. The office was alive with the sound of it, of them, of the ghost of Klavier’s laughter.

“Maybe not. But I wouldn’t want to take any risks, ja?” Daryan’s eyes caught on the small dimple on Klavier’s left cheek when he smiled. The burn in his throat caught on the rest of Klavier, just standing there, sunglasses on and hands in his pockets. He could read Klavier’s face. Klavier’s eyes were another thing altogether.

(There were times when he wanted to take Klavier apart, piece by piece, just to see what he would find. There were times when he wanted to, caught in the sweep of an investigation or the heat of the music, take Klavier’s hand off of what it hid and say: You’ve got me, I’ve got you, you’ve got me.)

“Seriously,” Daryan said. Klavier just stood there. He gritted his teeth before he knew it. “What are you doing here?”

The smile dropped from Klavier’s face, changed into something darker, though in reaction to who, Daryan did not know. “Did you not see the sign when you invited yourself in? It’s my office.”

“Okay, check out of whatever little fantasy world you’re living in”—he purposely ignored the way Klavier stopped smiling to flinch before the smile was back before it had ever even left—“—and think for a moment, I know it’s hard. You called me, left one of your cute little messages, and expected me to come running. And now you want me to go.” And now you’re pushing me away.

He ran a hand through his hair, growled low. Somehow, things with Klavier always veered towards the same road.

“Look.” Klavier took his hands out of his pockets, crossed his arms. Daryan squinted again, something brought flaring, before faded just as fast. “I know you’re so eager to see me”—the resentment bloomed in all of its ugly glory, and Daryan bit his lip so hard he drew blood—“—but I have work to do.” He gestured at his boot-pressed papers. “Swing by later if you’re still so needy.”

“No, you look. I’m not here to fit into your own personal agenda.” He stood up, ignoring the way his throat and eyes burned when Klavier flinched backwards and away, talking before he understood what he was saying:

“I don’t know who the fuck told you the world revolved around you, or that people are just here for you to use like a stage prop, but they lied. I’m here to—“—and Daryan stopped looking at the floor to look at Klavier, to see Klavier. The anger and resentment faded and made way for the guilt that never left. He’d seen that look before.

“Frankly, Daryan, I don’t care why you’re here.” Klavier jerked his head at the door, voice even and clear save for the falter at the end that Daryan knew all too well. “All I care about is you leaving.” He flashed his million-dollar smile. “Right now.”

Daryan stepped forward. Klavier blinked (flinched, really), but stood his ground. Then: “You must think I’m really stupid.”

The smile dropped for real. Klavier said, “What?”

“You must think I’m really stupid,” he said, shaking his head and then letting his hands fall at his side in defeat. “I know you better than that.”

(And of course he’d seen that look before. Cornered animals lashed out, bit hard.)

“Know me better than what?” Klavier narrowed his eyes, stepped towards Daryan until they were almost eye to eye, close enough that Daryan could smell, faintly, a mix of mint and cologne. “If this is about—“

He shook his head. “Ain’t about anything.” He paused. “But you.” He let his voice soften. “What happened?”

The air in the room went still, and then Klavier was shaking his head, Klavier was laughing, Klavier was flashing him that mirror-practice time-perfected smile that had everyone else on their knees. “Nothing—happened. I want to work. It’s my job, Daryan. Literally.”

“Take them off.”

“What’s up with you? I said I wanted to work, not play, ja? But if you call me later I’d be happy to—“

“For Christ’s sake, Klavier! The sunglasses! Take off the sunglasses.”

Somewhere along the long, twisted road that was dealing with Klavier, he’d learned to read him. Klavier wasn’t like French or music notes. He had a language of his own, the kind of thing he hid in the subtleties of every performance he put on for every audience, but Daryan knew the cues.

“No,” Klavier said, somewhere between I can’t and I won’t and I shouldn’t. Daryan strained to hear it. The smile again, and for what seemed like the millionth time in his lifetime, Daryan wanted to punch that smile right off Klavier’s face until Klavier remembered smiles were kept for when you meant them. “Nothing’s wrong. I’m just…” He trailed off, and his eyes went bright-blank. Almost, Daryan thought in spite of himself, like looking right into the sun. That was dangerous. You could lose yourself there, go blind. “Tired.” He gave a shrug. “I’m very tired.”

He knew, then, that Klavier wasn’t lying.

“Alright, then.” Daryan stepped away from Klavier’s chair, scratching the back of his head. He’d forgotten every word he’d ever known. All he had was: You’ve got me. I’ve got you. You’ve got me. “Take a nap.”

Klavier bumped his shoulder, and they stood like that for a moment, Daryan ignoring the warmth where Klavier pressed against him. “You’re a bad influence, Herr Crescend. I said I wanted to work.”

“That’s why you wore the sunglasses, dumbass.” Daryan gave him his nastiest glare, but they both knew it had no real bite to it. “To sleep through meetings. I know you.”

“Maybe. Or maybe I just wanted to look cool, although I don’t need the sunglasses for that.”

“God,” Daryan said. All of Klavier was there, and for a foolish moment he wondered if this was where Klavier retreated when he wanted to hide the parts of him that no one else knew existed, if this was Klavier at his core, breathing and open and alive. “Now sleep.” He patted Klavier’s office chair. “I knew this was too comfortable for a reason.”

Obedient for perhaps once in all 24 years of his life, Klavier slid into the chair, resting his head against the back of it. Daryan reached out and then drew his hand back. They stayed like that again, Klavier’s eyes closed (he thought so; the sunglasses made it hard to tell anything), Daryan standing there, the sound of Klavier’s breathing an even tempo between them both.

“One request, Daryan,” Klavier said, eyes still closed.

“Sure,” Daryan said, ignoring the part of him that whispered: Anything in spite of the rest of him. God, Klavier could do that to you. Klavier did that to you. Klavier took you apart.

“Not a word.” He shifted in the seat, stopped. “To anyone. About this.”

Daryan looked at him, and said, as if he’d spoken any louder he’d ruin the moment or yank Klavier out of the cusp between sleep and wake, “I’ve got you.”

He stood up and wandered to the wall near the doorway where Klavier’s light was still on and shut it off before moving to the back of Klavier’s office. The city outside the window was still and everything slept. Daryan closed the blinds.

And hell, Klavier was a goddamn brat more times than he wasn’t (another thing, Daryan thought, that needed to be added to the list), but there weren’t any laws that prevented him from acting like a child every once in a while.

He walked over to Klavier, reaching out for a second time. To hell with it all. Grasping at Klavier’s face, Daryan took Klavier’s sunglasses, folded them, and put them on Klavier’s desk. Even in the dark, he saw Klavier’s eyes were swollen. His heart rose in his throat. Daryan took off his jacket and stopped for a minute before draping it over Klavier’s shoulders. He shook his head, this time at himself instead of Klavier.

Klavier peeked an eye open and Daryan just stood there for a moment, frozen by the pooling in his stomach, before the scowl took over and he jabbed at Klavier’s face.

“What the hell? Go to bed, man. Seriously. Don’t make me babysit you.”

Klavier said, voice thick with sleep, “I’m flattered.” The eye closed again and Daryan stood there by him, feeling every part the fool he had from the first damn day he met Klavier. “I’m going, by the way,” Klavier told him, half-there and half-not, “to Borigina tomorrow, in case you forgot. Try not to be too lonely without me.”

He stilled, then grinned around the lump in his throat. Something in him ached, but he pushed it away. It hadn’t mattered before and it hadn’t mattered now. In the morning, Klavier would wake up, and then he would leave. “Go fuck yourself, Gavin,” he said, and Klavier only laughed.

(He did not consider himself a romantic, and even less an unrealistic romantic, but he knew that in his mind he’d already tucked this moment away. What would it have been like? He knew it would have been easy to just walk out of Klavier’s office and never come back, to change the conversation into goodbyes neither of them knew they were saying. But whether it was for Klavier’s sake or his own, he did not know.

Not that mattered, not that it ever had. He’d made his decision already, and Klavier, without knowing it, had made it too.)

For what felt like hours (but couldn’t have been more than ten minutes—he wasn’t stupid), Daryan stood there, taking in the silence of the room and Klavier’s even breathing. Then, sinking his hands into the pocket of his jeans, he walked towards Klavier’s door and opened it. He took a moment to look at Klavier, knowing full well it was the last time he’d ever see him like that again. There was no regret, only a dull pang of what Daryan could only barely recognize as longing.

“Sorry,” Daryan said, closing the door behind him, but by that time, Klavier was already asleep.

[shuzonijimura]

(4) mayuzumi/akashi

the illusionist  — 566 words

prompt 68: a smudged kitchen window. (not that this answers the prompt to begin with)

ao3.

Seijuro, Chihiro realizes, is a lot like smoke. 

He notices this a total of three times (not that Chihiro is counting, not that there is anything about Akashi Seijuro that Chihiro can place behind numbers and labels), and each time it does not leave him surprised. What Chihiro cannot fathom with emotion he puts into words. Seijuro defies words and all else.

The first time Chihiro notices is the first time he meets Seijuro. (This is because, Chihiro will realize later, without ever really thinking about it, because the story of the next two times was already wrought into that moment.)

(Later, Chihiro will think, this is Seijuro— living and dying in memory.)

 One—Seijuro sweeps up the stairs, onto the rooftop, and behind Chihiro in a single breath. Chihiro closes his book, doesn’t bat an eyelash. Seijuro’s words and the reply he knows Chihiro will give him are already stuck in Chihiro’s throat. Play with me. Play for me. (His throat constricts and betrays him all the same. Chihiro says yes.)

Two—Seijuro kisses him, once and only once (this is the only one he remembers counting, and Chihiro closes his eyes because looking at the sun will turn his eyes to ash and his skin to clay) in the locker room the night after the match against Shuutoku. His lips are hot against Chihiro’s own, sear their own story into the dryness Chihiro licks after Seijuro pulls away.

“I gave you my first kiss,” Seijuro says, nothing more, and dimly Chihiro wonders when he asked. (He didn’t.)

(Even more than that, he wonders why Seijuro says gave when they are both smart enough to know that Seijuro is only taking.)

Three—Seijuro stands behind him on the rooftop at the end of basketball season and the end of whatever Chihiro and Seijuro are. (Was. Chihiro does not bother counting how long they were.) The wind blows his tie out of its usual place. Chihiro wonders how many minutes it will take to sweep away the boy wearing it. Seijuro looks different, somehow, Chihiro notes—like there is a part of him still left behind on the gym floor. Chihiro opens his mouth and closes it.

“Thank you for a good season,” Seijuro tells him. It sounds like a playback of the messages he gives all the other members of the team, and it is. Chihiro counts the dips in his voice and the spaces in between his words all the same. “You were a good phantom player.”

Seijuro looks him right in the eye, twists his hands, and for a single moment Chihiro wants to hold them only to prove that they won’t fade away.

(Phantom. Chihiro runs the word through his mind, tastes smoke. They are not stupid enough to believe that it is Chihiro who is the ghost.)

I felt bad for you, he wants to say—not because they’re the words he needs to speak, but because they’re the words Seijuro needs to hear. Like telling a ghost he can see it.

“Whatever,” Chihiro says instead, but it means the same thing in the end: nothing.

(Chihiro goes home and touches his lips, touches the only time he has ever taken anything from Akashi Seijuro. It burned and still burns, somehow, but it doesn’t change that Seijuro is more smoke than he will ever be fire.)

[shuzonijimura]

(3) klavier/apollo

like clockwork  — 689 words

prompt: friends (although this did not end up fulfilling that prompt at all.)

aa4 spoilers. disregards the existence of aa5/6 basically — my own take on a somehow post-canon Klapollo. 

ao3.

When Klavier waltzed into the Wright Anything Agency (and later Apollo would think of how he hadn’t seen this sooner, how it was somehow so much more like Klavier than it wasn’t), it was on a Thursday that beat on them both like rain.

Klavier was all presence, Apollo knew—every part of him demanded it from the chain around his neck to the leather boots on his feet to the smile/smirk he trained like every performer was meant to—but when he opened the front door and slid onto the couch, it was with a stillness that surprised them both. 

Stillness was the last thing he expected from Klavier. Klavier was movement and presence. Klavier was the space between the walls. Klavier was the tightening of the bracelet, the beat of Apollo’s heart (that if he listened, sounded a little like pity) that came like clockwork whenever Klavier smiled.

The bracelet tightened now when Klavier sat up and looked at him, finger drumming a non-stop beat into the couch. Apollo rubbed his arm.

“Herr Forehead! Just who I wanted to see.”

“Mr. Wright isn’t home,” Apollo said, dropped his umbrella by the door. Not that that really changed anything. Klavier Gavin still sat on his couch. The rain from outside sang into the window panes, matching Klavier’s beat. He reached for the umbrella again and stopped himself.

Klavier turned on the couch, still looking at Apollo.

“I’m not here for Herr Wright.”

With all the brilliance of a defense attorney, Apollo said: “Oh.”

His mind twisted and Apollo opened his mouth, shut it. Of course Klavier could be there if he wanted to—though he knew there was a time he would have dragged Klavier, leather boots and all, out the door and thrown him into the wet street kicking and screaming. Klavier opened his mouth again, and for all of one moment Apollo didn’t doubt that he would have done it again.

(Somehow, something had changed, shifted the moment the judge put down his gavel and the courtroom doors closed. Apollo shook his head. The pity surged and died again.)

“Trucy isn’t here either.”

Klavier stood up. “I’m here to see you.”

“Okay,” Apollo told him, swallowing. All the times he’d stood before Klavier in court couldn’t compare to this, to whatever pulsed between the walls and wormed its way into his ribcage. Again—pity. He swallowed again. “You’ve seen me.”

(In another life, maybe, there was a time when they stood in front of each other as Apollo Justice and Klavier Gavin. In another life, there was a time when he looked at Klavier and saw something other than the smile that now made his eyes ache for the ground.)

Klavier only shook his head, sliding his hands into his pockets. The bracelet tightened.

“You know that isn’t what I meant.”

I don’t, Apollo wanted to say, but didn’t. The bracelet was a noose around his wrist. The room shifted on itself.

“What is it, then?” Apollo said in spite of himself. He pointed at the couch and then let his hand drop at his side. “Maybe I should—sit.”

“I won’t take long. It’s just—“—Klavier stopped, and for a brilliant moment Apollo thought he understood what kept Klavier performing long after the curtains had closed—“—that I’m sorry.”

“What?” The bracelet was silent. “For what?”

Klavier shrugged and looked at Apollo like he was supposed to understand. He doubted Klavier knew himself.

“I’m not really sure myself.” He twisted his hands and then stopped when he saw Apollo looking. Klavier’s eyes were like glass, Apollo thought with the same almost thrumming pity from before. A mirror. “Just needed to say sorry for someone who couldn’t.”

Wouldn’t, Apollo’s mind said, and then stilled. The rain on the windows went quiet.

In another life, Klavier lived without the weight of another’s sins on his shoulders.)

(Did Klavier resent him, somehow? He must have—some part of him, the part of him that stayed where Kristoph was, must have. Apollo closed his eyes and opened them.)

“I understand,” Apollo said, and in that moment, he did.

[shuzonijimura]

(2) klavier/daryan

inertia  — 404 words

prompt: outsider (from here)

implied 4-3 spoilers

ao3.

Klavier’s habit of going after what he wanted was almost annoying and unnecessary in and of itself, but even that did not compare to his habit of getting what he wanted. 

(Or maybe, Daryan thought, fingers itching around his cigarette, it wasn’t really a habit of Klavier’s, but an expectation. Klavier was a jump-how-high kind of guy.)

“Daryan,” Klavier said, breathless in all the right ways, and grabbed him by the wrist. It wasn’t the one holding the cigarette (Klavier knew him better than that) and Daryan let him, ignoring the warmth where Klavier’s skin touched his own. After he looked at Daryan the smile dropped from his face. Klavier furrowed his brow. “Where did you go? I had to explain to everyone there that my—“—he let go to pat Daryan’s wrist—“—second guitarist had vanished into thin air.”

Leave it to Klavier fucking Gavin to make it about himself again. Daryan shook his head, shaking Klavier’s hand off his wrist in the process.

“You’ll live,” he said, although the look on Klavier’s face was making him think otherwise. His hair had gotten a bit messy (that was fine, Daryan thought in spite of himself, more than fine) and his makeup had smudged, but somehow it made him like brighter and sharper at his edges. He pinched the cigarette in annoyance. “Or can you not make it that long without me?”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” Klavier told him, but laughed anyway, and for a moment Daryan felt like he was home. “It’s bad for publicity. The fans will think we’ve broken up.”

He took a moment for Klavier’s words to register and then Daryan shook his head in disbelief, though whether it was at himself or at Klavier, he didn’t know.

“’S just—“—Daryan stopped and then continued, telling Klavier the truth for all of one sentence—“—that I felt weird. Like I didn’t wanna stand with all those snobs.” He opened his mouth, closed it. Klavier did not yet know that Daryan’s hand was more accustomed to holding a gun than a guitar.

“Stand with me, then.”

“You’re one of the snobs.”

“The best one, then.” Klavier leaned against him and looked at him from the corner of his eye, and Daryan didn’t have it in him to lie.

“The very best.”

(Klavier was a jump-how-high kind of guy, but it wasn’t Daryan’s fault if all he seemed to do lately was fall.)

[shuzonijimura]

(1) klavier/daryan

invention 13  — 692 words

prompt: everyone found out (from here) 

aa4 spoilers, specifically 4-3. post 4-3.

ao3.

When Klavier found him again (really found him, Daryan thought, running the words over in his mouth again and again like a pick your poison kind of routine—found him without the protection/knife-in-back of the law, found him without the promises he’d tucked himself behind and into), it was ten years later in a prison cell.

(Of course, Daryan thought in the pick your poison way again—more and more the only words he could think of tasted like blood, hot and sweet—it hadn’t really been ten years. Maybe half a year. He’d stopped counting when it’d stopped mattering. He was careless but not stupid; the centuries tore between them the moment that Justice kid opened his mouth.)

(If Klavier saw Daryan smile, lips yanked back and teeth bared, he did not say.)

“Gavin,” Daryan said, the name always on his lips but not out of, the third poison he found coursing through his bones in that one moment. That was a particular talent of Klavier Gavin, he thought, searching for an edge but finding none.

(There was a time—or maybe really there wasn’t—when Klavier’s name in his mouth was like a song lyric he hadn’t heard or written, only felt somewhere deep where words didn’t matter. Now there was only blood and gunpowder, surging under the surface of his skin from the moment he picked up the gun.)

Klavier looked at him, looked through him, and where Daryan might have felt hurt there was only the recoil of the gun, singing in his shoulders like a prayer. He closed his eyes and opened them again.

“Did you think?” Klavier told him. For a moment Daryan sought out the familiar patterns, the rise and fall of Klavier’s voice, but that moment left as quickly as it had come. “That no one would find out?”

(Klavier had a certain way of asking questions, he knew, knew it more than he’d known anything else. Sometimes he asked like he was cross-examining, the answer he already knew caught in the crossfire of his words and eyes. He left you looking at him, looking without really seeing, all deer in the headlights.)

Daryan licked his dry lips, opened his mouth, shut it. If there was an answer, any damn thing that he could have spat into Klavier’s accusing face, he did not know it.

(Other times Klavier asked like he was writing songs and you were the chord progression he spun himself around, pressing bits of himself into the parts you hid away for safekeeping. It was give-take with Klavier, he thought. Always had been.

But sometimes Klavier gave without taking, gave without thinking. He thought of Klavier in his leather pants and laced-up boots, Klavier’s two-part smile, Klavier’s guitar-calloused hands, the smell of Klavier’s cologne. Now there was only blood. Gunpowder. He drew his hands into fists.)

“Dunno, Gavin,” Daryan said, and laughed, laughed like it could take everything Klavier had ever hid away in him and give it back.

Klavier looked away and then looked back up again, and for a remarkable moment the both of them were without words.

(He wasn’t a deer any more than he was Klavier’s second guitarist. Whatever it was that Klavier wanted from him wasn’t his to give.

Deer didn’t murder, but then again, neither did detectives. Gunpowder, and blood. Klavier’s cologne. Klavier’s hand around the guitar, Klavier’s hand in his own. If there was a time when Klavier’s name fit in his mouth like a song and not a battle cry, he did not remember it, and did not think that he ever would.)

“Were you sorry?” Klavier said suddenly. He pressed his fist against the glass screen as if testing its strength and then drew back, never once looking away. “Ever?”

Daryan closed his eyes again.

(He wasn’t a deer, not by any sense of the word, and he especially wasn’t Klavier’s—and enough had happened that he wasn’t Klavier’s anything anymore. His fingers itched for a song he knew he’d never play again.)

(He had always been too proud to lie. He bit his lip, tasted gunpowder.)

“No,” Daryan told him.