Work Text:
When Klavier comes out of the courtroom for the day, there is a bird sitting on top of the vending machines.
He doesn't notice it at first. His thoughts are too preoccupied with the trial at hand - not the actual case itself, despite how it has grown more convoluted the more Justice pressed at it, but Justice himself, the puzzle for whom Klavier came back to Los Angeles. It had seemed, when he first heard of Wright's involvement, clear-cut: Wright was back to his tricks to take down his brother, as though he knew Kristoph was the one who ratted him out, and he had found some baby lawyer whose badge he could use to do the job. But giving it any more thought made him wonder - about that trial seven years ago, about his brother, about whether Kris was capable of murder (yes, he decided, yes), about whether Kris would be sloppy enough to leave evidence behind (debatable, leaning toward no, not evidence that a newbie attorney and a man disbarred longer than he had his badge could put together to seal the verdict in just one day). He only has more to wonder about now, but the arm of the law is long and in time truth will come.
In the moment, he is preoccupied with those thoughts, and getting a pack of Swiss rolls from the vending machine, when the bird screams at him, and that is when he realizes that the bird is there at all.
His thoughts unfold as though singular entries on a list, with a delay of what feels to be a second in between, because the situation is just bizarre enough to take this amount of time to register as reality.
- There is a bird, in the courthouse, sitting on top of the vending machines.
- It is not the kind of bird that would be expected to fly into a building and get stuck, e.g. a sparrow or other tiny songbird.
- It is a large bird.
- It is a large bird with a hooked beak and sharp talons; thus, a bird of prey.
- It is ruffling its wings, as though about to take flight.
- It has very yellow eyes, one of which is very focused on Klavier.
The conclusion that he reaches - he is about to be attacked by a raptor - comes a second before the bird flings its wings wide and launches itself from its perch. It makes one circle in the air above his head and then it dives - not towards his face, as he most feared, but for his hands, and that gives him about half a second more time to react, springing back and pulling his hands out of sight of the bird and dropping the pack of Swiss rolls on the ground.
The bird follows the package to the floor, striking with its talons and letting out a sharp, angry shriek before it begins plucking at the plastic packaging with its beak. Klavier's heart rate takes a moment to recover. It wants food. That was all it wanted.
He steps back toward it, cautiously, leading with one foot so that if it attacks him, it will be tempted to rip apart his shin and not mangle his hands or tear up his face. Its head snaps up, turning about so that it has one eye on him. "I do not think that birds can eat chocolate," he tells it. It hops towards his foot, away from the Swiss rolls, and flutters its wings. Klavier takes another step forward and, holding his breath, snatches the package off of the ground. The bird does not seem to be readying itself to attack again but it looks almost indignant, if possible for a bird to appear such. It turns its beak toward the vending machines almost pointedly, as though trying to tell him something.
"There are probably enough squirrels outside for you," Klavier says. "Outside. Why are you inside?"
It stares at him and flaps into the air - he flinches back at its flutter of wings - and alights again on the vending machine. It stares at him. He stares back. He vaguely registers that he is caught in a staring contest with a bird and this is stupid. He doesn't even know if birds blink.
"You could probably eat beef jerky," he says. "A safer bet than the hot dogs, ja? Probably more meat."
He should probably not be feeding the wild bird stuck in the courthouse, because that will only encourage it to stick around. He should probably try to lure it back outside with the jerky, but the way it stares at him gives him a suspicion that it is smarter than the average witness and would be offended if he tried such. Instead he offers it a strip of jerky, which it yanks from his hands with a terrifying speed - he would not want that beak to hit skin - and tucks the rest of the package into his briefcase and decides that getting the bird out of the courthouse will be a problem for the baliffs, the judges, or any lawyer other than him.
When he returns for the next day of the trial, the bird is still there. He acknowledges it with a nod when he goes in, and it isn't until after, with the trial over, able to think clearly now that he and Justice have pieced together the truth, that he notices it wears a bandana around his neck. The colors aren't similar - black and white striped fabric against tan and brown feathers - and he isn't sure how he didn't notice before. Well, he does know: he was too shocked about finding a raptor in the courthouse that he didn't take in many of the details, and those details which he did notice are the ones (beak, talons) which would be a danger to him.
The mystery only deepens, to know that this seems to be a pet raptor, accessorized by some keeper, but set loose in a courthouse and apparently not having been retrieved for an entire day. "Who left you here, Herr Vogel - Fräulien Vogel?" He has no idea how to even tell. He knows shit all about birds, and the bird, knowing shit all about human concepts of gender, has given exactly zero response to either term of address.
He still has the jerky package from yesterday in his briefcase and the bird pays more attention to that than anything else.
That evening, when all of his other work for the day is filed away, when he has given the matter of Justice (the man, not the abstract ideal) as much thought as he wants to in this particular moment, he ends up googling about birds. His best guess by the end of it is that it is a hawk of some sort, but there are too many sorts to further match it. Their diet seems consistent across most species - beef jerky not on that menu - and he imagines that if the courthouse has ever had a problem with mice, it won’t soon, and the local squirrel population has a check, if the hawk's owner lives or works close enough to the courthouse for it to have just wandered inside.
He doesn't know what to do with the dietary and behavioral information that his curiosity has now gifted him, because he's positive it will be gone by the next time he is prosecuting a trial. He doesn't even know when that will be. Someone will come back to get their bird, and Klavier will probably only occasionally think about it when he walks by the vending machines.
The following week he is assigned to another trial. He's glad for it; it feels natural, to step back behind the bench after so many years, and it feels better than it ever did back then. Every trial he prosecuted after his first felt like the specter of Gramarye was haunting him, taunting him - gone, no verdict, no verdict. He felt like Kris hung over his shoulder, casting a long shadow. When the opportunity came, in the form of his little garage band rocketing to stardom overnight, to run, he did. Now, back at the office, back at the courthouse, he hasn't exorcised these ghosts - he doesn't know if he ever will - but he can push them aside like he couldn't when he was seventeen.
When he heads for the lobby in the morning, his mind turning over a few new questions for his main witness, the hawk is still there. It shrieks at him. It seems to recognize him, and that is when he gives up. Obviously he does not have enough information to solve this mystery - nor does he know where to begin investigating, nor whom to ask about it. He has not heard any of the other prosecutors say anything about it; he has not heard baliffs' complaints. He is clearly the only one left here who has not just absorbed and ignored this turn of events.
He has been gone a while, he supposes, long enough to miss something like the courthouse getting a mascot. "So, mien Vogelfreund, what ever happened while I was away?" Klavier asks, sitting on a bench and digging through his briefcase to see if he ever got rid of the beef jerky or not. He did not.
"Well, I know what has happened since I was gone." The band was always a hobby; long before they grew popular, he knew what his priorities were. Even on tour (running away), he stayed focused on the news, watching everything that unfolded. He knows what happened since he left. None of it was good. "I just find myself very confused as to how you came onto the scene."
The hawk, which is a hawk and thus even if it is smart enough to understand him it cannot reply in a way Klavier in turn will understand, stares at him. It raises one foot and scratches at its head. It really is kind of cute.
"A riddle for the ages, ja?" He reaches up to the top of the vending machine to place the rest of the jerky there next to the hawk. It waits until he he has pulled his hand away before tearing into it. If the jerky has gone stale or gotten squished, it obviously does not mind. "Don't eat it too fast, or all at once. You might make yourself sick."
The trial progresses to a second day, but the case is much more straightforward than Justice's; Klavier could have called for and gotten his guilty verdict in one day, but there were a few holes he wanted another investigation and a second day to close. When he returns in the morning, he has a tupperware with raw ground beef, which he sets on top of the vending machine. "Are you smart enough to know to not eat so much if you are getting fat?" Klavier asks, and the hawk hops to the edge of the machine and lowers its head so that one yellow eye is closer to Klavier's face. It ruffles its feathers. It really looks offended. "Ach, you may be, but even so, I should not feed you every day, ja? There are mice and squirrels and rats about --"
The hawk screeches indignantly. "You will be upset if I do not bring you a gift every day, and you have a beak and talons which I do not wish to cross. I see exactly where we stand."
It ducks its head and runs its beak through its feathers.
"Did you, mien Vogelfreund, just manipulate me? Have I, ever-brilliant prosecutor, rock star, just been bested by a bird?"
Klavier could swear it looks amused.
"If you start to look fat I will stop - just to be clear on the terms of our arrangement, ja?"
He ends up at a butchers’ shop to buy chicken livers. It becomes a habit over the next month. When he takes Vongole to the pet store to buy her more food - Kris had been on his last bag, probably meant to get more around the time when - he stops and eyes some bandanas meant for little dogs or cats. “This would be about hawk size, do you think?” he asks Vongole, who is a dog, and so simply wags her tail at the fact that he is speaking to her. “I think so.”
He reaches the checkout line with: the dog food he actually came for, a little red bandana (“I think this is a good color,” he said to Vongole, despite never having liked the color red before in his life), a bag of treats (because Vongole dragged him over and whined), and a squeaky toy (which she picked up when his back was turned and refused to set down). He wonders if Kris indulged her like this. He wonders if this damned dog is the only thing his brother ever loved.
Not that she’s difficult to love, and not that he doesn’t feel terrible for even thinking ill-will towards her, but a dog wasn’t his plan. Not for a roving rock star, not anything to keep him grounded; nothing to make him come home. He never meant to come home, for whatever value home is now: a city that haunted him on the road and now has its ghostly fingers threaded through his ribs to dig its pointed claws through his heart? An empty apartment that he took sight unseen because it was a convenient distance between the Prosecutors Office and the courthouse? The boxes of his things that he pulled out of a storage unit, clothes he no longer wears, albums he has on digital, drafts of songs he wrote when he was 13 that he wants to forget?
He didn’t label any of the boxes when he packed up his life to go on the road, and all of Kristoph’s possessions that he has are in unmarked boxes handed to him by investigators. Every time he tries to find something that he remembers from his past life, he ends up opening up his brother’s life instead, everything that was deemed nonessential to the investigation - so nothing, then, that can help Klavier understand what happened, nothing but heavy old hardbacked books that Klavier has no interest in reading, decorations of an aesthetic that Klavier does not like, and a dog that Klavier didn’t know about. When did Kris get a dog? He didn’t know about her until he drove out to his brother’s house after flying back and was handed her registration papers and told he could pick her up at the pound.
She had wagged her tail when he approached, maybe just happy that anyone was paying attention to her, maybe just friendly with everyone, or maybe he looks, acts, sounds, smells enough, like Kris for her to be confused. He doesn’t want to be mistaken for his brother, not even by a dog.
He wonders, just once, if the hawk knew Kris, and he throws that out of his head immediately. Kris would have given a bird of prey a wide berth: too unpredictable, too difficult to control, and with nothing to gain in exchange for his time.
Why a dog, then? It would be much the same. It’s a line of questioning that will bear little fruit, that he would probably object to as a prosecutor, because even as a window to the criminal’s psyche it is too far removed from the actual crime committed. But this isn’t court; this is his brother. “Maybe,” he says to Vongole later that evening after returning from the pet store, sprawled on the couch with her cutting off the blood flow to his lower legs, squishing her fluffy golden face in his hands, “a pet was all there was who could be naive enough to love him.” He sighs. Vongole licks his hands. “Just you and me, a dog and a stupid little brother.”
He falls asleep on the couch that night and Vongole wakes him up with her paws in his face, seemingly trying to suffocate him.
At least the hawk is self-sufficient, even if it is extorting treats from him, and has its own living place. More like a friend than a pet, which makes him laugh almost hysterically, because the first friend he made on returning was a bird.
(No one else is naive and stupid enough to love him, either.)
Trying to introduce the new bandana to the hawk is slow work. Klavier can sit and pet it for any length of time now, if he doesn’t feel like promptly returning to the office after a verdict is declared, but reaching for its old bandana is a step too far. It throws its wings out and knocks his hand away and hops twice away from him, continuing to flutter its wings indignantly. “I am not trying to steal it,” he says to the bird. “An exchange, if you would, as I imagine that bandana of yours may require some washing.”
The bird glares suspiciously at him. “We will try again later, then,” Klavier says. “You may have outmatched me to get your way with food, but I will win this one. Perhaps you would like a Gavinners bandana someday, ja?”
Someday soon would make sense, what with the concert soon - soon, back playing in his home city for the first time in seven years, then from there he doesn’t know where the band will go because he wants to stay put - but he thinks it will be too difficult to try and rush a hawk (with those talons, that beak) into doing anything it doesn’t want to.
Or it doesn’t have strong feelings one way or another but wants to manipulate more chicken livers from him.
The first time he forgets to bring a bird snack at all is the second day of Machi’s trial. He is too frazzled, with too much else on his mind. When the hawk stared him down at the end of the first trial day he dropped the open plastic container on a bench and fled the courthouse with an indignant shriek echoing in his ears. It thinks him rude, he’s sure, a bird too damn smart for its own good, and then he forgets about it entirely with the accusation against Daryan that he has to shake. Lamiorir wouldn’t lie, would she - mistaken, then, somehow, wrong in any regard, because -
Klavier has to give the charges their due process. He suspends Daryan from investigating, weathers the argument that they have about it, thinks with this and the missed cue he has given his best friend a lot of shit in the past two days, but their friendship has always come through storms like this, and this time will be -
- no different.
He doesn’t think about the hawk until he is back at his office, door locked, head in his hands. Face the fucking music, Gavin; Justice put someone else he loves away behind bars. When he dumps the contents of his briefcase on the floor, he wonders where the empty container is. There always should be one when he comes back from the courthouse.
The hawk does not lower itself to him next week when he returns for a new trial. It sits on top of the vending machine preening its feathers and haughtily looking away from Klavier. If he pretends to ignore it, though, then it looks at him, ruffling its wings; how dare he do the same to it. It’s the first thing that has made him laugh for a while.
He works them through a bandana exchange over the course of three trials; the hawk tries to peck him when he attempts to put its old bandana in his briefcase. “I will return it to you,” Klavier says, pantomiming several times the process of taking and then giving back the striped bandana. “It needs a wash. You look very handsome with this new one.”
He snaps a picture even though he doesn’t know who he has to show it. Sebastian and Kay? Kay would be inspired to acquire her own pet bird and that could only end badly.
The next week of trials he shows the hawk that he still has its original bandana - now spent a few hours soaking in soapy water before being run with two separate loads of laundry - stashed in his briefcase for easy access. By then he has acquired some more bandanas in other colors during a pet store trip that also ended in more treats for Vongole because he is a weak, weak man; and with that he can start a rotation of colors and patterns every week, like a pre-trial ritual, something grounding.
The second time he ever forgets to bring in food for it is the second day of the Misham trial.
He doesn’t leave the courtroom after, doesn’t leave the room where his brother’s sick laughter still echoes, and instead he sinks to the floor behind the prosecution’s bench, shaking. Does time pass at all or is he frozen in that moment when the jury’s verdict was read, when Kris, a broken down shadow of himself, unhinged at every edge, finally cracked to pieces? A weight settles on his knee and he opens his eyes, blinking away tears that he hasn’t managed to shed, not for Kris, not for Daryan, not for himself, to see the hawk perched there.
“I didn’t know you came into the courtrooms,” Klavier says. His voice sounds like a singer’s nightmare, the croak of a man who has run out of words. “Are you looking for a treat? I don’t have anything.” It ignores him, hopping to his shoulder. “What?”
It starts combing its beak through his hair, and he laughs, and it sounds nothing like his brother’s laugh.