#i hope u appreciate how pretty klavier is here | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

wardencommanderrodimiss · 5 years

Text

Chapter 17: still not a date because if it was it would be pretty bad and also too much fae magic to be valid

Chapter summary being a very belated callback to the title of Chapter 2; anyway you don’t want to read any note from me, you’re just here for the boys

[Beginning] [Chapter Masterlist] [ao3]

Going down in the elevator, Apollo realizes first that he doesn’t know what Klavier’s car looks like and won’t know how to find it – and second, that the prior realization is ridiculous, because it’s Klavier Gavin and he has a damned aesthetic. What is Apollo thinking, that he won’t know on sight?

Except that all prosecutors, not just the rock star, have a big salary, and a lot of them seem to like flashy cars (not that Apollo knows anything about cars). He wanders through them, stopping by a bright red one, before deciding that red isn’t Klavier’s color and continuing on.

And he’s right, because Klavier’s car is obvious. It’s a few shades darker and more purple than his bike and his jacket, but similar enough that Apollo wouldn’t feel remiss in saying that apparently, Klavier only really likes one color. The the license plate reads “G4V1NNR” and the band’s logo is emblazoned in white on the trunk. “Classy,” he mutters to the empty lot. He’s not sure why he’s surprised, but he is – Klavier has been at his most reserved, lately, and that is what has been at the forefront of Apollo’s mind.

He wonders where Klavier will go from here, without the band.

He gets a text from Klavier with the address. Some forty minutes outside of the city, in the same direction as the mountains, but they’ll be much further away than he was with Trucy. Safer? Doubtful. He can’t tell if there’s actually something there, some house, or if they’ll just be trekking into the woods again. It’s a strange picture, to imagine Klavier Gavin going hiking. It’s all a strange picture, Apollo here next to this car, their entire little quest, and there are no words that aren’t strange when strung together in an attempt to explain to Clay why he doesn’t know when he’ll be back “after work”. Definitely he’s leaving out the part about the faery ring, but then it sounds like a date, and there is no way that Clay will ever let him live if he makes it home without dying of curses.

Vongole arrives first, a misty white bullet streaking toward the car and then leaping, passing right through it and materializing inside the vehicle. “Nice vanity plates, Narcissus,” Apollo calls.

“Ja, but we can’t all be gods.” Klavier grins, twirling his keys around his finger. “Shall we be off?”

“Does she do that often?” Apollo asks, pointing to the hound that has settled in before either of them have opened the doors. The interior seats and dashboard of the car are lavender. God help him. The nicest car he’s ever sat in is an aesthetic monstrosity. Vongole stretches her neck forward between the seats.

“If I don’t open the window for her, she just sticks her head through the ceiling,” Klavier replies. “Quite unnerving.” Vongole swings her head about and knocks the top of her skull straight into Apollo’s face. “You’ve stolen her seat.”

“Uh-huh.”

This is going to be a long ride.

They are both quiet on the way out of the city, through the streets under the bright afternoon sun. Klavier hums with the radio, and when one of the Gavinners’ songs comes on, he sings along but with words that are not always the ones on the recording. It makes for the weirdest duet Apollo has ever heard, breaking apart and then coming back together, the overprocessed voice from the radio and the Klavier next to him.

His phone buzzes. He braces himself for whatever Clay has to say, squinting down at the screen through one eye, like that will make his best friend more comprehensible or less embarrassing.

“My roommate has a message for you,” Apollo says. “That he’d rather I not die, because he doesn’t want to have to find a new best friend, or more importantly – wow, priorities! – someone to cover my share of rent.”

“Tell him I will do my best to return you home before your curfew,” Klavier says.

“Shut up.”

Apollo doesn’t write that, because the only response Clay deserves for both the rent remark and his other instructions for specifically Apollo, which were “u know u gotta hit that now” and “use protection”, is FUCK YOU. He shoves his phone back in his pocket, deciding now that he will not design to respond to or even check what Clay next has to say, and looks back out the window at the city outskirts. Vongole has indeed stuck her head through the ceiling. Klavier is still humming.

“My high school is somewhere off one of these exits,” Klavier says after the twenty approximate longest minutes of Apollo’s life. “I forget which.” He straightens back up from craning forward to look at the signs above the highway. “Themis Legal Academy – you’ve heard of it?”

“Yeah.” Who hasn’t, really? Most of them at Kristoph’s office hadn’t had that head start, though; Kristoph had rolled his eyes at mention of the school and called it “pretentious.” Pieces, coming together again. “But then didn’t you get your badge abroad?”

Klavier glances at him out of the corner of his eyes. “Yes,” he says slowly, dragging the word out, apparently assessing what Apollo knows, and how. “Two years at Themis, two in Germany via Themis, came back, started a band, fucked up my first case, the rest is history.”

“Ah,” Apollo says. Klavier fiddles with the radio. “Yeah, I did, uh, regular public school, college, those things for ordinary average people.”

Klavier looks right at him to raise his eyebrows in disbelief. “Ordinary?” he repeats, his tone pushing toward sarcastic. “And average, nein, my brother would never settle to hire average.”

Apollo shakes his head. “Yeah, I thought I had it made right out of school, and look where I’ve ended up.”

“In a cool car with the world’s most gorgeous rock star? Still not doing too badly for yourself, I might say.”

“Do people often tell you you’re insufferable?”

Klavier drums his thumbs on the wheel. “Besides you and Fraülein Detective, no, so I find the pair of you a nice change of pace.”

He’s impossible to even insult properly. (Except he did offended when Ema called him a “diva”, so Apollo has that one stored away if he needs it.)

“Not that my brother’s approval should be a litmus for measuring anything,” Klavier adds softly. He looks at Vongole in the rearview mirror and smacks her in the approximation of her chest area. She pulls her head back down inside the car, her ears pulled back in surrender. “Do you think it strange?” he asks. “That I should still call him my brother?”

“No,” Apollo says. “Not really.”

(He doesn’t know what Dhurke is, father or fae and thief, doesn’t know what he would say to him if he deigned to make good on that promise of a lifetime ago, but he knows Nahyuta. He knows his brother is his brother, or maybe he only still hopes he does.)

(He’s thought more about them in the past six months than he has in the past six years. There’s too much weirdness, intertwined with too many painful family histories, for him not to think of his own.)

“Hm,” is all Klavier says in reply.

They turn off the highway after another ten minutes, and it feels again like Trucy leading the way, twisting onto roads smaller and smaller while around them the trees get larger and larger. It might be a driveway that Klavier turns them down, and Apollo hopes it is when he idles the car and gets out to lean on the door and stare at the tree downed in their path, the way the asphalt has broken up into cracks that grass and flowers poke through. “This is it,” he says, ducking back into the car and shutting it off. Vongole vaults through the windshield and down, tearing off into the trees with her legs a blur.

“So what exactly is this?” Apollo asks.

Klavier points up the drive. “We aren’t going that way, but my parents’ house was up there.” He slams the door and it rings loud through the bare trees. The wind swirls across the ground, scooping up the crackling fallen leaves and tossing them about. Apollo shivers. It’s colder here. The sun doesn’t quite seem to reach. “That’s where Kris grew up.”

“Wait,” Apollo says, rubbing his arms. “If he grew up there, then that’s – unless – we’re still in our world, right?”

Klavier rests his elbows on the roof of his car and stares at him. “Herr Forehead,” he says, very seriously. “Of course we are. Of course he grew up here. Kris is the changeling who was switched for me.”

It is obvious – it is incomprehensible. It makes sense, of course, and doesn’t at all. “How old are you?” Apollo asks. Two years older than Apollo, according to his Wikipedia page, but that doesn’t mean anything anymore, not in this territory, not with the fae.

“Technically, if we are to speak by strict calendar terms… thirty-two.”

That’s how old Kristoph is.

“But…” Klavier idly snaps his fingers together. “Actually… I have no idea.” He wiggles his fingers noncommittally. “Somewhere between twenty-two and twenty-six, we figured? Time moves strangely in the Twilight Realm,” he adds, quieter now, and Apollo has to strain to hear him over the wind and rustling leaves. “Especially for human children. So Kris stole my life and my name and my place in my family and now I’m the younger brother.”

He pushes himself back off the car. “Shall we go do what we came here for, or would you prefer to have nothing to do with my life and leave now?”

If Apollo’s come this far, some time weirdness and the chill in the air isn’t going to send him running, but he appreciates the offer. “Which way are we going?”

Klavier steps over a fallen tangle of branches and leads him into the trees. There is no semblance of a path, no place where the grass is beaten down just a little bit as a hint. “The house burned down years ago,” Klavier says. He snaps his fingers together and flips them into a point in that same direction. “Lightning and old wires. We’d moved out long before, after our parents died, but we never got it sold. Or Kris never did; he’d insisted on handling that all himself.”

“When did they die, if you don’t mind me asking?” Apollo puts out a hand to stop tree branches from snapping into his face. The uneven ground, littered with more branches and rocks, causes him several times to stumble in the wake of Klavier’s long stride. Several times he stops and turns back to watch as Apollo catches up.

“Kris was twenty.” A branch snaps beneath Klavier’s foot; he kicks at it but doesn’t send it flying far. “So I was… twelve, on my new, fake, birth certificate.” He shakes his head, snaps a twig off a branch that has come too close to his face. “Funny, ja? To be a lawyer and have all of my paperwork be lies?”

(Me too, Apollo could say, and still he doesn’t.)

“To have had my first and most recent cases be so concerned with a forger, and my parents bought my rights to exist in this world from someone such as that.” The shrug of Klavier’s shoulders is a motion of heaviness and sadness. “Or perhaps it was Herr Misham himself, and that is how my brother knew to go to him for his dirty work. Perhaps we just come full circle again, repeat ourselves.”

“But you did have a real birth certificate,” Apollo says.

He trips on a bush that seems to reach out to hook his foot, and Klavier catches him by the elbow to help him back upright. “Yes, and it was being used by someone else.” His words clip dryly. “What – you think my parents recognized immediately one morning that this little blond baby was not the one they put to cradle the night before? You think one day they renamed their eldest son because they realized what he was and that the name they had chosen was his? Nein, Herr Forehead, do you need me to spell it all out for you?”

“You don’t seem to have a problem with doing that in court,” Apollo says bitterly.

Klavier’s grin, hard at the edges, grows a little softer as it shrinks. “My name, or that was mine when I was born thirty-two years ago, is – was? – Kristoph Gavin. And when they took me, my brother took my name, and I became just some nameless lost child in the high halls of their cold Court.”

The trees open to the low grass of a riverbank. The river – no more than a stream, actually – splashes up against the rocks in the midst of its flow. Klavier takes a running start and bounds it in one leap. Apollo could, probably, as well, but fear and the memory of water choking up in his lungs stops him, roots him like the trees into the ground.

(He and Nahyuta are catching frogs, and their river is large and deep and fast, and Apollo knows if you run at the rocks in the middle, hit them right and spring again, he can be a frog and hop his way over. Nahyuta is faster but Apollo has a head start and he lands on his hands and knees on the other side, jumping back up, panting, and calling to his brother. Nahyuta frowns, his eyes recreating Apollo’s path, careful, calculating, trying to see ahead instead of just barreling forward, and then he runs and jumps. The rock is slick with water at its sides, and Nahyuta lands wrong, too far to the side, flails and falls and the bank crumbles as he claws at it. Apollo lunges for his brother’s hand and can only go in after him, with him, for the current to sweep them away together.)

“Herr Forehead, are you all right?”

“Yeah,” Apollo lies. The bottom of the stream is within view. The worst that will happen is that he soaks his shoes and has to wear different ones – not that he has another pair of dress shoes – tomorrow, and Klavier mocks him forever. And that is not ideal, but it’s better than the alternative, and he forces himself to take it at a run – falters at the edge, gets one foot on one of the rocks in the middle and the other straight into the water. If he falls, at least he’s going forward, might make it halfway on the bank, still won’t have any face left to save.

Klaver grabs him by the hand and drags him the rest of the way to solid ground. His hands are calloused and cold and Apollo, trying to kick some water out of his shoe without taking it off, waits for the mockery.

And waits, because Klavier’s attention has been drawn from him across the field they now stand in. The grass is longer on this side of the stream and dotted with tiny wildflowers. The flowers are thicker and all yellow about three yards away and on approaching Apollo can see that they form a thick circle about six feet wide. Inside there is no grass, only churned dirt and chunks of rocks. “Here we are,” Klavier says. He puts two fingers in his mouth and whistles. Vongole appears like a blinding streak of white lightning, sprinting down from between the trees and stopping for barely a second to look at Klavier. In a flurry of tail and legs she wheels about to face the faery ring and begins to dig around it, tearing up grass and dirt in huge chunks and flinging them about.

Klavier steps back far enough to avoid the flying sod. “So we don’t burn the whole forest down,” he says to Apollo’s questioning look as he sprawls out in the grass, his arms folded behind his head and his shirt riding up his stomach. Apollo glances away. Get it together, Justice, honestly.

Apparently it’s not just the glamour that makes him attractive. Unfair, really. Apollo sits down in the grass, knowing he’ll regret it when he has to deal with laundry, and pours water out of his shoe.

“So that’s where they tossed me out.” Klavier’s eyes are fixed on the canopy of trees that doesn’t quite reach out above them and the cloud-spotted sky in between. “Their magic burned itself out around me and dropped me there, and I – got up, crossed the stream, and walked home. I used to come back out here, sometimes, when we still lived at that house, just stare at it for a little while. It freaked Kris out.” He rolls to his side and props himself up on one elbow, a sculpted statue with a weathered and cracked face. Somehow, he only looks more tired. “Then after our parents died, we moved to an apartment in the city, I went to Themis and then off, and I’ve not been back here ‘till now.”

“How…” It’s an intrusive question, but all of this is intrusive, and Klavier invited it; Klavier told him he could stick around. Klavier asked him to come. And all this after Apollo indicted his brother on charges of murder, twice. If there’s a line to cross, Apollo isn’t quite sure where it is. “How long did you know your parents?”

Klavier holds up two fingers. “Not long,” he says softly. His hand falls to the grass, his eyes falling shut.

“I don’t know anything about mine,” Apollo admits. “Never met them. Grew up in foster homes around here, mostly.”

(It’s not a lie, really. He put in the qualifier “mostly”, and more than half his life should count for such. It’s not a lie; it’s just him becoming like Kristoph, like Phoenix, like Klavier, and their faery ways of toying with the truth.)

“I’m sorry,” Klavier says. He looks taken aback, blinking sharply. They’ve never made small talk, closest they’ve ever come was the conversation about schooling in car, and even that looped back to Kristoph, back to the dark shadows hanging over them. Their conversations have been about magic or cases or about Klavier, his band, with Trucy around as facilitator, or his career, or his brother. Klavier didn’t know how long Apollo worked with Kristoph; Klavier doesn’t know much of anything about Apollo.

And he’s still the person that Klavier let find him, not anyone else who was looking, not his coworker the witch who Klavier just seemed to know better than he knows Apollo.

He’s the one who knew Kristoph; he said that about his bandmates. They didn’t know Kristoph. Apollo did, and he had the magatama, and it’s luck that he’s here now. Luck, the magatama, and Phoenix, always pulling strings and counting cards, who told Apollo that he needed it.

(If it’s chance, he’s still glad he’s here.)

“Mine were good people, as I can understand,” Klavier adds. “That they loved us both, that they didn’t just turn me back out into the cold, that they never called Kris anything less than their son even when they knew for sure.”

“What exactly happened?” Apollo asks. “Why did the…” The faery ring so close, dismantled though it is being, stops his tongue. “The Fair Folk, let you come back?”

Klavier laughs bitterly from the back of his throat, making a horrible grating sound that can’t be good for a singer. “They let me do nothing. I won from them my freedom, made a deal with all the brazen stupid confidence of a child who was one for too long. What would they have done had I lost, I wonder? I didn’t ask; I set my terms for freedom, and they agreed.”

“What did you do?”

“I learned to play music there – it’s strange. The whole Court felt like music – their names, among themselves, they are not names but like sounds, birdsongs and bells and whistles – and all that, and they never tried to pick up an instrument themselves. So I was to, instead, and I did, because I was better at that than I was at lying. And one day I got the fool idea that I would stake my freedom on my playing, and however they judged me, they decided I had earned it, and so…” He makes a throwing motion with his hand. “They tossed me out here.”

Vongole trots over to them and deposits a thick chunk of dirt and grass at Apollo’s feet. “Um,” he says. “Thanks?”

She has solidified into a more doglike shape, enough that he can see her tail swishing back and forth. For all the digging she has done, her paws are not dirty, but the proof of her work is clear to see. She is substantive and not, ghostly and not, and though she doesn’t appear to breathe, when she flops down in front of Klavier, it is with a heavy sigh. He buries his fingers in her fur. Apollo wonders how soft she is.

“And I knew where I was to walk to find the home I was stolen from, and I walked there and I knocked on the door, and Kris opened it.”

Apollo imagines it – Kristoph, an only child, smart and ambitious and beloved of his parents, looking down at a child who looks so much like himself walking up out of the woods. Would he think that Klavier was the fae child? Did he know before then that he himself was--

She didn’t know. Changelings often don’t.

“He didn’t know,” Apollo says. Klavier looks at him, silently, his jaw working. “Kristoph, I mean.” It is weird, calling his former boss by his first name, but Gavin is both of them. “What you said about Vera, about changelings – you know that because he didn’t know.”

“Now you’re using whatever’s behind that big forehead.” Klavier reaches out and prods him in the forehead with one finger. “Yes. He was eighteen and then – there I was.”

So Klavier was ten, roughly, after eighteen years in the Twilight Realm. Kristoph had already had time to grow up, probably about to head to college, or just had – and Apollo can’t imagine him ever being anything but so staunchly certain. He must have been sure of himself, of who he was and what he wanted to do with the world at his fingertips.

“I suppose now that maybe he resented it,” Klavier says. “That he thought he was human, and found out he wasn’t from his little brother-doppelganger who didn’t have a name or even the faintest idea of what it meant to be human simply appearing on the doorstep. Our parents homeschooled me for those two years, to try and accustom me to what is normal.”

“I don’t think you did a good job of learning it,” Apollo says. “Rock star prosecutor, really, you thought that was normal?”

“Why shouldn’t I have? It used the two skills I learned best from the court – to entertain, and to lie.” He grins a little, and in Apollo’s eyes it eases the red flash in the twitch of his fingers from lie to not well conveyed sarcasm. “Why are so many of the Fair Folk lawyers?”

“Because it’s the closest they can come to lying,” Apollo answers, almost rote now.

He doesn’t stop grinning, entirely, but it falls to a sad smile, his lips pressed together. “Ach, so you heard that punchline from him as well.”

“I was never really sure whether it was a punchline or a serious answer,” Apollo admits.

Klavier’s grin springs back wider. “He did that on purpose,” he says. “The double-take, that was always the real punchline for him.” And there, he looks away, the smile frozen beneath his tired eyes. “I learned how to be human from him, little sense as that might seem to you. Our parents were there, quite certainly, but he was – me. He looks like me, he sounds like me, he has the name and life I should have – so I looked to him.”

Kristoph Gavin may not have grown up with the fae, but he knew, innate or learned, their pettiness, and murdered two men and ruined many other lives for it. Klavier falling apart over missing keys and a missed cue makes more sense than ever.

And their uncanny resemblance, when Apollo always thinks that Klavier seems like his brother – it’s the other way around.

“And that is it, ja?” Klavier sits up. Vongole lifts her head, sighs, and lays it back down. “I came back and named myself; my parents got the papers, somehow, to give me an identity and an age, got their second son; they died, we moved, then Kris packed me off to Themis’ dorms; then Germany, and you know it all from there.”

Yes, Apollo knows from there, and what Apollo knows now of Klavier’s history is more than he knows of his own. Klavier knows where he grew up, that he was stolen and why he was relinquished; Klavier knows how his brother is like and unlike him. Apollo knows none of it for Apollo, and all of it for Klavier.

Well, except for that one new piece.

“You named yourself?”

“Herr Forehead.” Dammit, and he had been doing so well at keeping up with Klavier. “You didn’t think my parents really named me this?”

“I don’t know!” It wasn’t something he dwelled on: it was simply Klavier, like the rest of his tacky showboat aesthetic, and Apollo moved on to more important things. “My name is literally Apollo Justice, so how am I supposed to know what people do or don’t name their kids?”

Klavier is still chuckling, shaking his head so that his hair begins falling loose again. “I named myself,” he says, sounding more serious than he looks. “After the instrument I won my freedom with.” He looks back at Apollo, pale blue eyes peering out at him, and forestalls the question that he must see on Apollo’s lips. “I took up singing, and guitar, after I came back. In the Court, I played the piano.”

“Do you still?” All the things he could say – what is he supposed to say? – and it’s just more questions to distract Klavier from laughing at him about the matter of names. Nothing in his rhetoric classes was meant to prepare him for dealing with an exhausted and broken-down courtroom rival’s life story.

“No.” Klavier plucks up a piece of grass, pressing it between his forefingers and bringing it up to his lips to make a loud, piercing whistle. Vongole scrabbles upright, her ears swiveling about, her eyes burning brighter. The grass falls slowly when Klavier lets it drop and Vongole snaps at it with her long jaws. “I could never make it sound right, the way it did back then, so I stopped trying.” His eyes are glazed-over, half dead, and his words ring with that same level of exhaustion, carrying with them a knife to Apollo’s chest. I stopped trying aren’t words he thinks he should hear Klavier of all people say.

“Lamiroir and Herr Tobaye were the closest I’d ever heard to the music I remember,” Klavier continues. “Of course I had to perform with them, ja? Of course I had to give them the biggest stage I could.” He shakes his head. “Ah, dear Lamiroir – I hope she’s doing well. She doesn’t deserve all that she has been through.”

Apollo might not agree with Klavier’s musical sensibilities for his band, but when it comes to Lamiroir, their tastes align. Her voice still seems like something out of a dream.

“I suppose we should get to what we came here for,” Klavier says heavily, rolling up onto his feet with some visible reluctance in having to do so. From his jacket pocket he takes a box of matches.

“D’you think it’ll be that easy?” Apollo asks. The ring, encircled by the torn-up earth, is made of perky, alive plants. Those don’t burn easily; those aren’t tinder. “Should we have gotten gasoline?”

Klavier shakes his head. “Winter’s things don’t do well with fire.” He strikes the match, crouching to touch it to the thick canvas of flowers, and he springs back, dropping the match into it, as the flowers are engulfed in an instant blaze, like they were dealt with by Datz with gasoline and a flamethrower. Smoke rises from the conflagration, white, almost clear, almost like mist. In some way it resembles Vongole, but when Apollo looks for her, she has retreated halfway to the river, pressed low to the ground, ears back and hackles raised. She, too, doesn’t do well with fire?

The flames burn themselves out in a few minutes, crackling until there is an abrupt silence, almost as quickly as it began. It leaves no ashes behind, but the ground looks wet, like something melted there instead. “It seems quite silly, now,” Klavier says. “That it should be so easy, after it haunted me for so long.”

If he was any good at reassurance, Apollo would have said something profound and helpful long before now. Of course, the one person to manage to get through to Klavier had to be the worst one for the job, probably.

“No changing that now, I suppose,” he continues, offering Apollo a weak grin. He puts his back to the ruined ring first, striding away with a feigned confidence that almost succeeds. Apollo casts one last look at the damp, destroyed earth, and follows. Klavier has already stopped, one hand in his hair, staring up at the trees. “No going back, quite sure as I am that we might like to.” Another weak grin that holds out a second or two longer than the first. “Just not sure where to go from here.”

“Story of my life,” Apollo mutters.

Klavier laughs. “Ach, well, we have each other’s good company for it, ja?”

“Not exactly the way I’ve wanted to be in the same league as a rock star, but sure, I’ll take it.”

“You are near my level in the courtroom, how about?”

“Near?” If Apollo is good for anything, it seems to be as a distraction from the harrowing distant and recent pasts, which could almost be okay if it wasn’t Klavier’s particular brand of carrying on an irreverent conversation that he has to deal with. “I’ve beaten you three times in court, Gavin!”

“I should hope you did; your clients were innocent of the murder charges.” That he specifies murder charges stings: Vera the forger, Machi the smuggler, Wocky the gangster. My kingdom for a client who was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, no other weirdness. But Klavier is near-impossible to argue with outside of court, so Apollo will just settle for the next time they face each other in court and Apollo kicks his ass, again.

On reaching the stream again, Apollo takes the jump at a run, and doesn’t hesitate.

“Have you ever heard it alleged that the fae can’t cross running water?” Klavier asks. He plucks a stone up from the dirt and tosses it into the water. The ripples momentarily interrupt the flow but the water soon comes back together like nothing ever parted it.

“No,” Apollo says. “Isn’t that vampires?”

“Vampires aren’t real.”

“I know they aren’t. I’m just saying, isn’t that what—”

“Perhaps. I did hear it about the fae, once, though.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Apollo says. “How could they not? Like, what counts as running water? I don’t think Mr Gavin ever had trouble walking out on rainy days because, oh no, there’s water running on the sidewalk—”

“Forget I asked,” Klavier says, but even with a hand over his mouth he is unabashedly snickering.

“No,” Apollo says. “I won’t, because that’s stupid, and I’m going to argue it.”

“I didn’t say it was true!” Klavier throws his hands in the air. “I asked if you had heard it, and I did not say that I—” He stops, folding further over himself, hands on his thighs and shoulders shaking with laughter.

“What?” Apollo asks.

“Imagine Kris, stranded on the street in front of his office, all because he can’t just step across the gutter.”

“I told you it’s stupid,” Apollo says, but Klavier only looks up at him, wheezing with laughter again. “I mean – you have the water right here, your house wasn’t too far, didn’t you ever…?”

Klavier straightens back up. His hair is falling loose and he pulls it down entirely, again, slipping the hair band onto his wrist. The shadows cast by the sun are lengthening, the light spilling golder on them both, and it breathes a bit of colorful life back into Klavier’s hair. Vongole, too, seems to take on a lesser yellow-gold hue. “Oh, he came out this way after me, certainly, but he just stood on this side and yelled at me to come back. Never crossed, which is why I thought about it. I suppose maybe he was afraid to get too close.” With a flick of his head, he tosses his hair back behind his shoulders. “He was certainly afraid I would get snatched again. Sounded frantic every time he called me back, if you can believe that.” His eyes harden. When he speaks again, he has abandoned his accent entirely, and if Apollo has thought he sounded like Kristoph before, he was wrong. That was Kristoph breaking through an accent faltering with stress and anger. This is intentional. “‘You know how worried I am that one day I’ll come out here and you’ll be gone, Klavier? That I’ll be too late to get you home again? What do you think you’re doing?’”

The tone he puts to Kristoph’s voice is half-scolding, half apparently-real concern. Was that how Kristoph really sounded, or just how Klavier remembers him? Apollo can’t square away the way Klavier’s imitation borders on frantic with the Kristoph he saw speaking to him in that trial – the Kristoph that Phoenix implied existed further behind closed doors, further belittling and dismissive.

Maybe the changeling was just like the fae of the court, in wanting a human child who had the ability to lie.

Or maybe that was before something shriveled up inside his heart. Maybe once he loved his younger twin.

“I’m sorry,” Apollo says. “I can’t imagine…” Imagine what? To be stolen away? (Wasn’t Apollo?) To find out what someone he clearly loved and admired was truly like? (Apollo admired Kristoph. Apollo loved Dhurke, but he doesn’t know what he truly was.) To so painfully lose a brother?

(He wonders who Nahyuta has grown up to be.)

Klavier doesn’t say anything. Maybe it’s better when Apollo distracts, redirects, argues. Maybe it’s better not to try the emotional stuff, the comfort, the condolences, now that he’s not a kid anymore, sitting next to Clay and screaming “I’m fine!” at the stars. He doesn’t think Klavier would take to that so well. It’d get him smiling again, but only to make fun of Apollo again.

They walk back to the car with no sound but the rustling leaves. When Vongole streaks between the branches, she is silent, and nothing moves with the breeze of her passing. Apollo expects the walk to take longer, the way he got lost with Trucy, Clay, and Ema, but Klavier cuts a confident path back through the trees and the driveway and the car appear before them. Vongole is nowhere to be seen; Klavier whistles again, and she materializes, still but for her wisping feathery fur off her legs and tail, on the hood of the car.

“Where did she come from?” Apollo asks. “Like, originally?”

“Kris summoned her, I would presume.” Klavier watches Vongole step through the windshield and into the passenger seat. “What he sold, when, and for what exactly he wanted a hunting hound, I don’t know.” He leans against the hood, propping a foot up on the bumper. “She met me off the plane. I wasn’t sure if she was an omen, I was about to die, or what.”

“Yeah,” Apollo says. “Me, too, when I saw her outside my apartment the first time.”

Klavier frowns. “I suppose she had to be up to something once Kris was behind bars, before I was back.” He says it more like he is musing to himself, not trying to pull Apollo into that thought at all. “She still does wander off sometimes,” he adds, louder, “but she’s so decided I am her handler and sticks around.”

“She’s turned up at the office, too. Mr Wright was the one who told me that she was yours.”

Vongole’s head emerges from the car roof. Apollo jumps.

“I hope she hasn’t made too much of a nuisance of herself,” Klavier says, his voice low and dangerous and clearly a warning to the hound, who lowers her head and shrinks back down into the car. Klavier tilts his head back up toward the sky.

“Could you see the mountains from your house?” Apollo asks. He’s noticed all afternoon that Klavier keeps casting glances to the sky, looking for something.

“No, fortunately.” He pushes himself up off the car and moves around to the driver’s side door, shooing Vongole into the back as he does so. “About fifteen minutes up the road there’s a spot along the shore where you can see them. Kept coming back there even after we moved.”

He doesn’t ask. He leans on the door for a moment, looking at Apollo, twisting a few strands of hair around his fingers. Apollo pops his door open. Then: “Sure.”

Even with the magatama’s steady glamour-breaking effect, Klavier’s eyes still seem to light up.

“Oh, hell no,” Apollo says.

“That’s quite a bit more protestation than you gave the faery ring.”

Apollo crosses his arms over his chest. “Yeah, because I trusted you that it really was dormant or whatever. I don’t trust high cliffs or bottomless expanses of water!”

The “spot” that Klavier mentioned is a high, steep cliff overlooking a rocky beach. If it weren’t October, with the chilly wind biting with more strength at them, they probably wouldn’t be alone. It would probably be beautiful, for anyone who isn’t Apollo. But he is Apollo, standing at the side of the road next to Klavier’s car, and Klavier is halfway up the slope, grinning down at him.

“You don’t have to stand at the edge,” Klavier says. “I used to come out here a lot – brought Daryan too, sometimes. Stood on the edge and neither of us died, ja?”

Apollo huffs but follows him up.

If he looks back out at the road or toward the land, he is fine. If he doesn’t look down, he is fine, until he looks out over the ocean and thinks about how easy it would be to drown, to plummet down and down and get swallowed up by the horrible maw of the dark waters. He plants himself ten feet from the closest edge and ignores everything that Klavier says to coax him up higher.

The mountains jut out of the shore, in the same direction of the sinking sun that glitters coldly across the water, in the far distance along the coast. They look small, even though Apollo knows otherwise, having stood beneath their shadows less than a week ago. “The big one right along the water is Mount Mitama,” Klavier says, pointing, though it is obvious which he refers to.

“Do you think they keep people’s souls stored there or something,” Apollo asks, “or d’you think it’s just a name?”

Klavier brings his hand to his face to block the sun, frowning into it. “I have no idea,” he admits. “I wouldn’t put it past them, but I don’t know why they would keep them here, and not with them.”

“What was it like there?” Apollo asks. “If – if you want to talk about it.”

Klavier laughs softly. “After everything else, Herr Forehead, this is easy: I don’t remember.”

“You don’t—?”

The sunlight glints off of Klavier’s jewelry and puts something of a halo around him when he turns to face Apollo again. “I remember it in broad strokes, the way I’ve told the story to you, ja? Me, the piano, my bargain – and so very little of them. What did they look like – what did they wear – how did they decorate their halls – how was their very world arranged? I don’t know. I remember mountains, mist, and snow.”

“Was it cold?”

He shrugs. “Not as I recall. I’ve heard that, of course, that they live amongst the ice, that they are the ones who change the weather—” He shrugs, again. “But whenever they bring their cold snaps, neither my brother nor I ever seemed to notice, so I would not be the person to ask.”

As Apollo wondered. “You adapted,” he says. “And he was meant to be there.”

The wind buffets against them again, straight into Apollo’s face as though straight from the mountains. “Like that,” Apollo says. He reaches up to find that his bangs are now stuck backwards at a more-or-less 45-degree angle. “It’s freezing here. Do you just not—”

“It’s quite windy, ja,” Klavier interrupts, dragging his hair away from his face, “but the cold, no, I’m not really noticing.” His mouth twists and, still holding his hair back with one hand, he sticks out his tongue, making the most undignified picture of him that Apollo has ever seen and he can’t help but laugh. “Oh, see how you like getting hairs in your mouth,” he says irritably.

“I don’t really have that problem,” Apollo says, and before his brain can unhelpfully supply anything further on any of this, he adds, “That cold thing would be useful if you lived somewhere where it snowed more than three times a year at the whim of the fae.” Hell, it would be useful to Apollo here, now, always.

“Ah, but I do like the sunshine far too much to retreat off to Michigan or what-have-you. You can’t get rid of me that easily.”

“With my luck, I’d just keep finding prosecutors who are worse and worse than you. Like…” What was the name of the first prosecutor he faced? He knows he’s forgotten it before. The handful of other cases he’s stumbled into, the ones that leave no real impression on him besides the paycheck, nothing else weird, he’s not surprised he forgets – but the rest of Phoenix’s trial is so burned into his memory. “The prosecutor on Mr Wright’s case. He had a really screechy voice?”

“Coming from you, that really means something.”

“I am not screechy!” Apollo winces, and Klavier raises an eyebrow, at the way his voice hits an indignant high pitch on the last word. Point not proven. “Okay, fine, maybe a little, but at least I’m realistic about how I sound and don’t get up on a stage and subject everyone to it!”

Klavier actually looks offended. Apollo never can figure out in advance what insults will land and what won’t. “But, ja, I know the prosecutor you are talking about,” he says, clearly having decided that the redirect is the least painful way of losing this round. “Quite horrid hair he has, too.”

“God, how did I forget that?” Being reminded, Apollo can summon up the memory of his reactions to that prosecutor, but none of the visuals. “What’s his name?”

“I have no idea.” Apollo snorts. “I think he’s cursed, personally,” Klavier adds, sounding somewhat defensive. “I do try to know my coworkers.”

“Mr Edgeworth said the Prosecutors Office isn’t a coven but I’m not sure I buy that anymore.”

“No,” Klavier says. “Do not believe him.”

(If Nahyuta didn’t stray from his plans, if through all these years he followed through, would he fit right in there?)

“Though don’t tell him I said that,” Klavier adds.

“Wasn’t planning on it.” He waits to hear why and doesn’t get an answer. Maybe Edgeworth really doesn’t like Klavier much. “I guess I can’t talk, what with the office I work at.”

“You have quite the ratio of magic to employees.”

“Yeah, with Trucy and Mr Wright, and then Vera has been hanging around a lot too now, and it’s everyone but me.”

Klavier is quiet for a few moments, his eyes narrowed, assessing that sentence. “How is Fraülein Changeling doing?” he asks.

Apollo wonders if he feels guilty for what happened. Or responsible. “Better. I think she’s very lonely, and very lost about what to do with herself, but as bad as Mr Wright is at being a mentor, he’s actually pretty good with her. I mean, he’s a father, so I’d hope so, but Trucy’s really different than Vera, but he’s still… seems to have it handled. He knows a lot about art, like a weird amount, and they start talking, and I get lost.”

“Huh. I wouldn’t have expected that.” With an absent gaze away from the sun and the mountains, Klavier fails to wrangle his hair up out from the wind. “I do hope you’re right, that he can help her. It would be nice to see one person somewhere in a changeling story find a happier ending.”

They don’t say much more after that about anything that really deeply means anything. But they don’t leave right away, either, sit instead on the hood of the car and watch the sky turn orange and the sun sink toward the shore. Klavier says that he misses the stars when he’s in LA, and Apollo agrees, mentions that he used to haunt the Space Center planetarium for that reason (doesn’t mention that while Clay loved the science-y technical parts, Apollo liked to hear of other constellations and other stories than the ones Dhurke told but know that these were the same stars that Nahyuta would still see, like he did when he was perched in a tree and calling down to Apollo to climb up to him. It comforted Apollo until it didn’t). They swap stories from high school, Apollo’s the delinquent miscellany of unfulfilled crowded public school kids, Klavier’s half the kind of pretension to be expected from a place called “Themis Legal Academy” and half surprisingly misadventures out of Germany (and surrounded countries accidentally stumbled into). It’s the strangest kind of small talk, to pick up these little inconsequential bits and pieces about Klavier after he has already shown Apollo his heart and the history locked up inside it.

And he still sings along to the radio on the way back to the city, changes the channel when Atroquinine, My Love comes on and then sings Guilty Love differently than he did that afternoon. When Apollo points it out (he thinks he can remember Dayran saying something about something like this, but fuck that guy), he says he’s never satisfied with them, but record labels and bandmates who aren’t perfectionist divas (Apollo’s words, not his) made him put them out before they truly fit what was in his head.

The lights of Los Angeles have swallowed up the rest of the horizon by the time Klavier says, “I’m sorry.”

“For what?” Apollo asks. For ten minutes they hadn’t spoken, and before that their conversation was about Klavier’s (not group-friendly) lyrics process, which is, if anything, a reason to apologize to his bandmates, not Apollo.

“That you ever had to be caught up in this – with Kris, with me, any of it. You shouldn’t have had to. I’m sorry.”

“I’m not,” Apollo says, and Klavier looks at him so sharply that Apollo thinks he should have heard his neck crack, almost yells at him to put his eyes back on the darkening road ahead of them. “Not really – I mean, I got to stop Trucy from losing her other father and being all alone. I got to help her get to the truth about her family; I got to help Vera, and Mr Wright, and… and you, too, I guess.” Apollo stares straight out the windshield as he says it; Klavier isn’t looking at him either. “No going back, so… it’s what it is.”

“I suppose we do all need you,” Klavier says softly. “And better than you resenting that you don’t need us.”

And he leaves it at that. They leave it at that, until they pull up in front of Apollo’s apartment building and Klavier turns the car off. “What are you doing?” Apollo asks. Dread is starting to settle in his stomach – not the real serious kind of dread, but the kind of dread that Clay has a talent for invoking.

“I should apologize to your roommate for making him worry about how to pay the rent, ja?” Klavier says with a wink.

Apollo slams the door. “No,” he says, as Klavier pops out the other side. “You shouldn’t. It will be embarrassing for all of us.”

“I don’t get embarrassed,” Klavier says.

“I’ve noticed,” Apollo says, directing the worst glare he can at the car and making sure that Klavier sees him doing so. “Everything about your aesthetic sense screams ‘I have never felt shame in my life’.”

“That is true.”

While unlocking the door to his apartment, Apollo considers opening it just far enough to rush inside and slamming it in Klavier’s face, but he can hear the TV on and he knows that Clay, just inside, would ask what the hell is going on, and Apollo isn’t getting through this one either way. “You are the worst,” he says to Klavier, yanking the keys out of the lock with more force than necessary and brandishing them in his face.

“What did I do?” Clay, sprawled on the couch, asks.

“Nothing yet,” Apollo asks, tossing his keys on the coffee table and considering whether he should just keep walking and take shelter in the kitchen. “You’ll see in a sec.”

“Now, Herr Forehead, you aren’t going to stick around to introduce us?”

Clay sits bolt upright, upending his laptop onto the floor.

“This is Clay; Clay, you know who this asshole is.”

“Oof.” Clay rolls up onto his feet. “That bad, huh?” His eyes are huge, but all things considered, he’s doing a good job of keeping his voice steady and not horrifically loud. “Hi, I’m, uh, Clay Terran.”

“Klavier Gavin, as you knew, I’m sure.” Klavier glances at the floor, at the well-worn salt line laid down over itself, and gives an appreciative tilt of his head as he steps over it to shake Clay’s hand. As Apollo watches, his eyes shift their hue to assess Clay. “I’m here to apologize for whatever concern you had that you were going to have to put out a missing persons report.”

Clay meets him with a very big grin and a very enthusiastic handshake. “Oh, yeah, no worries.”

“Hey!” Apollo shouts.

“I mean, like, yeah that would be pretty bad, actually, to have to pull his body up out of a ditch in the morning but I wasn’t too worried because last weekend he fell in a faery ring and he’s doing fine, so I think he’s kind of unkillable at this point.” There’s Clay’s nervous chatter, and there is information that Apollo did not want divulged, not least because he doesn’t particularly want to talk to Klavier about the Gramaryes. That’s Trucy’s story, not his.

Klavier slowly turns his eyes toward Apollo, arching an eyebrow. “Did he really,” he says, the words coming out almost like a drawl, and definitely closer to Kristoph-tone than Apollo would like.

“That’s just sort of how his life is now I think,” Clay says.

Klavier’s eyebrows raise higher. Apollo has absolutely no way to signal to Clay to shut the hell up without Klavier noticing. He could and probably should do it anyway.

“At any rate, I should be going,” Klavier says. “A pleasure to meet you.”

Clay gives a soft, disbelieving laugh. “Uh, yeah, you too!”

“See you around, Herr Forehead. I look forward to beating you in court.”

“As if.”

He leaves behind him an unimaginable silence, the kind that leaves Apollo considering the miniscule creaks in the floor from the slightest shift of his feet. “Dude,” Clay says, finally, still standing where Klavier left him, staring at closed door. “He really does have a fucking pet name for you.”

“Yeah you could call it that, but you’d be wrong.”

“So what the hell was that?” Clay asks. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, that was great, you’re turning red and I got to find out that he’s even prettier in person” – the weight of the magatama in Apollo’s pocket tells him they were looking at two different Klaviers, and Clay got the one that Apollo used to know – “but you, like, ditching out of work in the middle of the day to go hang with him, that’s totally not like you even if I’d encourage it.”

“Mr Wright was talking about magic,” Apollo says, “and we had a… revelation. About what’s up with…” He gestures at the door. “Him. So I went to ask him about it.” It seems stupid now that he says it, none of the urgency now that made him commit magatama-theft and abandon his day job. “And he hadn’t answered any of my texts, anyway,” he adds, which sounds even stupider.

“Kicking down his door wasn’t going to be my next recommendation, but I like the way you think,” Clay says. He finally manages to tear his eyes from the door and look to Apollo. “So he’s not a witch?”

“No.”

“Alright.” Clay retrieves his laptop, turning it over to make sure nothing is broken. “We still need to go grocery shopping, so you’ve got about fuck-all for dinner now that you’re late, by the way.”

“Great.” Apollo is in the kitchen before he fully comprehends the turn of the conversation. He sticks his head back out into the living room. “You aren’t asking what he is?”

Clay’s hand reaches up over the back of the couch and waves dismissively; otherwise, he has disappeared entirely from view. “It’s one thing to speculate when he’s like, some celebrity guy who you had a court run-in with, like, twice, but after you dropped everything and had this look on your face when I asked just now, like you thought you were gonna have to explain what he’s if not a witch and were horrified by the prospect. So, nah, as long as he’s not gonna kill you and/or steal your soul, you keep his secret. I’m not gonna pry.”

“Oh.”

Clay’s arm hooks over the back of the couch again and he raises himself up to glare down Apollo. “Dude, honestly, what do you think, I’m a douchebag or some like sleazy tabloid writer?”

“No,” Apollo says. “I’m just – I don’t know.”

“Yeah, you look pretty dazed,” Clay says. “Which, like, fair, you spent a bunch of hours alone with the guy, I would be too.” He folds his arms under his chin. “I’m surprised at you, though, that you would go off to god-knows-where with Herr Not-Really-That-Human. Long way from where you started.”

“I’m already in over my head,” Apollo says. “So what’s more, really?”

“I think you’re head-over-heels.”

“No.”

“It’s a good joke, admit it.”

“Nice turnabout, but no.”

While he’s in the kitchen, digging through the pantry – they really are down to crumbs and scraps, aren’t they? – his phone chimes.

-Vongole made it home before me -ate everything I had in the fridge for tonight - >:(

Apollo snorts.

you should probably stick some iron to it

He returns to the living room with a bowl of cereal, checking his phone for the response. Clay smirks, like he knows, except he can’t know, because Apollo does have other people he texts. Or, well, maybe just Trucy. Maybe that’s kind of sad.

-do you suppose they can make fridges entirely out of iron

or go the high budget rock star solution I guess

In the morning, Apollo finds a text received at 3:27 am.

-thank you

#fic: the seelie of kurain #roddy fanfics #that one part that i know wolf is gonna ask me 'is that a riff on that one scene in castlevania netflix':#yes and no. it was always a comment that was going into this fic somewhere but then it took the shape it did bc of that

7 notes · View notes