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Miles Edgeworth introduces them.
"Gavin, this is -"
Klavier smiles, a soft curve of the lips. "We've met."
Edgeworth is, understandably, surprised. "Oh? When?"
Simon extends his hand, which Klavier pretends to consider before taking it. They shake, a thin mockery of their other first meeting.
"When I last worked here," Simon answers because Klavier is just smiling; his eyes don't give anything away.
They drop the contact. It's not frigid, but it's obviously not the reaction that Edgeworth was hoping for. Klavier slides his fingers through his bangs.
"We were different people then," Klavier says, and it reads like an explanation but doesn't explain anything.
Simon nods. "Yes."
When they first met, Simon Blackquill was twenty-one and Klavier Gavin was eighteen. Their superiors considered Simon's docket too ambitious for a greenhorn and no one ever seemed to know what to think of Klavier. Simon had been stressed out but happy with the excitement of his investigations, and Klavier -
Well, he used to smile like he meant it sometimes back then.
"How well did you know Prosecutor Gavin?"
Edgeworth is giving him a ride to his apartment. He'd offered Klavier as well, but Klavier had had somewhere to go. From the way Edgeworth had told Simon this, it seems Klavier often has somewhere he's going.
Simon looks out the window, at the wide streets packed full of cars with one or two people in them. "We were close."
"That's surprising," Edgeworth says, and Simon looks back, watching the way Edgeworth drums the fingers of his right hand on the steering wheel, his concession to traffic impatience. "It's been a long time since I met anyone so resistant to developing anything beyond a professional relationship."
It doesn't surprise Simon, but he can't entirely suppress his grimace. "He wasn't always like that," he says, watching the driver in front of them adjust the dashboard radio.
"What was he like?"
It takes a great amount of effort not to shut his eyes. The memories have been so well-loved they've gone gold around the edges, shined to perfection in an otherwise dank psyche. Simon looks at the road and can see Klavier as he'd known him seven years ago, made entirely out of taunt muscle and eyes he preferred to keep hidden because they made him older than his years.
"Full of life. A little wild. I used to think that he was short-changing himself, staying here."
Edgeworth keeps his eyes on the road, but Simon can't help but notice he isn't drumming his fingers. They're quiet for the rest of the ride home.
Simon doesn't see Klavier again until just over a week later. This apparently isn't unusual. Although Klavier is based in the Los Angeles Prosecutor's Office, he seems to go in and out not just with investigative work but something to do with archives. The latter doesn't surprise Simon as much as he thinks it probably does anyone else who hears about it. The Klavier he'd known seven years ago had been intense and occasionally borderline manic, but he had very much enjoyed hands on work of any sort, even if it was going through old papers.
He meets Klavier waiting for the elevator in the parking garage with three large file boxes bound by two bungee cords. Not exactly the proper care for such boxes, but, as Simon glances back at Klavier's motorcycle, probably the only way to make them stay on it.
"None of them are originals or confidential."
Simon turns back around. Klavier has a nutrition bar of some sort in hand that he's taken a bite from, and he chews it with a curious lack of expression. The elevator is taking its sweet time.
"Is it safe?"
Klavier swallows, shrugs. "It doesn't break any laws."
Simon feels his eyes narrow. Klavier's lip twitches, like he wants to be amused, but then the elevator arrives and he shoves the wrapper end of the nutrition bar in his mouth, leaning down to drag the boxes by the bungee cords into the elevator.
"Do you want help?"
Klavier does laugh then, and it's the distinct impression that Klavier is laughing at him that makes Simon step into the elevator without waiting for any further response. Klavier and his boxes make it in just fine. Simon stands with his back to the mirror, facing the door. Klavier sits on top of the boxes, taking the bar out of his mouth and setting it on his knee as he uses the mirror to fix his hair. It reminds Simon.
"When did you grow it out?"
"Ages ago."
He twirls a few stray hairs, tucking them back into the curled mass over his shoulder. He tilts his head slightly to the left, right, upward into the light. He licks the pad of his thumb, flash of red tongue, and uses the moisture to rub in something he'd deemed uneven along his jawline. Simon wants to look away.
Blue eyes slide, head still tilted upwards. He isn't smiling.
"Do you still think of me with short hair?"
Simon breathes in. Klavier holds his gaze for a long moment before flicking to the overhead numbers. Something flashes across his eyes, so much like when he was eighteen and uncontrollable, and he spins around, jamming the emergency stop on the elevator just as the display shows 11. There are three elevators in the building.
"Answer me."
It's harsh and bald and sounds exactly like the Klavier Simon used to know. The one who Simon used to shut his eyes and hope to dream about when he couldn't take the waking world any longer, and the one he would wake up wishing he hadn't seen in his sleep. Eighteen wasn't so far away from twenty-one, but even as Simon got older, Klavier stayed the same inside his mind.
"Yes."
Klavier's lips twitch, but it's not amusement. It's not anger either.
"Why didn't you accept my requests to visit you?"
Simon reaches up and scrubs his hand over his face, sighing heavily. He'd wanted, so badly. He'd wanted to accept visits from Aura, too, but he'd made the mistake of doing so once and that had been enough to fester that seed of desperate doubt. If he had let Klavier -
"I couldn't let you figure it out."
The expression on Klavier's face is something that will come to Simon in nightmares. It's not much of an expression. There's very little in it, just a thin exposure of teeth and an unforgiving ice to the eyes. It's the simplicity of the disdain that's terrifying.
"I'm not surprised."
It makes Simon feel condemned.
There are ways to die that are not physical.
That was what Klavier had said, in the only letter he sent Simon in jail. It had come about two years after the last time a guard had appeared at Simon's cell door to ask he wanted to accept a Klavier Gavin, forever mispronouncing his first name. There had only been that line, written on a sheet of hotel stationary from the InterContinental Hong Kong and mailed with too many stamps. Simon suspects Klavier was inebriated in some way for the whole process. It was too honest.
It had worried Simon as much as anything worried or upset him at that point, which is not much and certainly not enough for him to attempt to write back. He made up excuses to himself. That Klavier sober wouldn't want to hear from him. That Klavier drunk or high always seemed to like to have fun rather than be dragged down. That Klavier himself just needed time, like all people do, to get over what was bothering him, and he'd be fine. The best thing Simon could do was stay away.
They were all lies, of course. Lies that Simon made up to make himself feel better about the fact he was going to die for something he didn't do. He'd accepted it, accepted it aggressively and taken it in to make himself into what he needed to be. The young, hopeful, naïve person he used to be couldn't exist. If he kept the letter, it didn't mean that he'd failed. It was to remind him of why he needed to make sure the truth didn't get out.
Unfolding it in his new apartment, from the single box of things from prison, its edges gone soft from how many times he's handled it, there's a whole other meaning that Simon realises he didn't see.
He's suddenly very sure that Klavier was entirely sober when he wrote it.
Simon manages to catch him on the way out, the following Thursday.
"Are you in a hurry?"
Klavier stares at him. His eyes don't move, but Simon knows that he's cataloguing, judging. At least he isn't faking a smile like he almost always is. It works on everyone else, but Simon remembers what Klavier looks like when he's really happy. He knows that's why Klavier doesn't use it on him.
"I can take the stairs."
Simon nods, glancing behind briefly to Edgeworth's door. It's closed, so he must either be working on something really intensely or in a confidential meeting. When Simon turns back, Klavier is watching him, eyes half-lidded.
"What?"
"He's looking for a chance to save his soul," Klavier says, and Simon has no idea what reputation Klavier has, but if it isn't terrifying, then something has gone very wrong, "but aren't we all?"
He turns away, towards the fire escape that sees at least as much use as the elevator on this floor. Simon follows, hand in his pocket with the four-year-old letter that he pulls out as the fire door falls shut behind them. Klavier stares at it. The landing is just enough space for it to be an offer. Klavier doesn't take it.
"You kept it," he says instead.
"I didn't intend to."
Klavier raises an eyebrow. "So you want to give it back?"
Simon opens his mouth. "No. I -" and he lets his hand the letter fall back to his side. "I wanted to talk."
"We're talking," Klavier says, less sarcasm than a flat statement.
Simon stares at him. He didn't really come here with a plan on what to say. He'd hoped that the letter might get a reaction out of Klavier, which it technically had, but more of a reaction, enough to start a conversation off on. He tries to remember what making conversation was like before.
Across the landing, Klavier breathes out a long sigh. "Your line was some variation of 'what kind of person sends someone on death row a letter about death'? And mine is, 'Someone who was angry and tired of being ignored even after three years and only half a year of romance.' I should say it either like I'm still secretly, passionately in love with you or like I've spent the past seven years self-righteously angry. But this isn't a drama, so you didn't ask, and none of that is true. I sent you the letter because it popped into my head instead of lyrics, and I needed lyrics instead."
He says it all in the same flat tone of voice as his previous statement. Against everything that Simon wants, his brain kicks up the thought that Klavier's grown up. The problem with that thought is Klavier was always grown up. He was always older than Simon because of the way he thought and what he'd done. Simon just happened to be born a few years earlier.
They stand in silence for a long time. They used to be made out of sharp edges. Simon honed himself, whetted against prison stone, and he came out twisted but still usable. The edges grew longer and multiplied with time with Klavier, but the core remains strong like a morning star.
Klavier touches his fingers to his hair, pushing his bangs out his eyes. "If you didn't intend to keep it," and he sounds tired now, in a way Simon can never remember him being, "why did you?"
Simon breathes out. He leans on the railing, looking down the stairwell. He remembers craning his neck to look up at the other cells that lined death row when he first arrived and how he tried his best to ignore how many were there with him as the years went on.
"It was a good memory."
Klavier breathes out. Simon doesn't look over; he's quite sure that Klavier wouldn't like anyone to see whatever he might have showing right now. They're both very private people, Simon by nature and Klavier that strange mixture of nature and nurture.
They remain there for a very long time.
They never had sex.
They knew each other for a little bit over six months and dated for less than four. It had come up only once, Simon loathe to admit his inexperience. He remembers the way that Klavier looked at him that evening, sitting in the passenger seat of Simon's secondhand Camry. He'd looked, Simon always thought, so much older than he had any right to be.
"That's good," Klavier had said, and he had smiled, which aged him even more. "I envy you."
It's a moment that Simon mulled over in prison. Twenty-eight and on death row, he'd thought of that night and wondered at it. He would die a virgin, but he felt no shame of it, not because he was holding a candle to the vague what if with Klavier but because of that admission. Envy.
He didn't want to be just another thing Klavier lost.
"Where were you going originally?"
Klavier's apartment building is a high-rise in Downtown. Just from the façade of the building, the fact it has a front desk and foyer, the rent is probably at least three or four times that of Simon's current hole in the wall. Klavier sighs as he waves the electronic key card for the elevator a second time in front of the scanner. Whether the sigh is for the apparently finicky technology or for Simon's question are both equally probable.
"I had a therapy appointment."
The elevator opens. Klavier gets in, and Simon follows like an automaton. It smells like Lysol, much like most well-kept elevators in Los Angeles appear to smell.
There's about ten different questions Simon wants to ask. "Is it really okay to miss it?"
Klavier's lips twitch. "The worst they can do is withhold my prescription."
Fifteen questions. "Will they?"
This makes Klavier laugh, the real laugh, the one that Simon fixated on in jail and polished to perfection. "Considering the last time they did that, I wrote an album, planned a world tour, and convinced the label to start selling tickets before anyone in the band found out," he muses, eyes bright like this is somehow a good memory, "probably not."
Simon only has one question for that. "What happened?"
The elevator comes to a stop. The hall is short. It has windows that show off the view and a fire door at the end. Klavier fishes out his keys for the only other door on the floor.
"I suppose everyone was rather pissed off," he says, shaking his head, amused. "The album went double platinum, though, so everyone forgot."
The door opens to a very modern, very large, very un-Klavier living space. That's about all the impression Simon gets before a very large mass of dog and fur comes flying down the stairs, barking loud enough to wake the dead. Simon, despite himself, takes a step back, and Klavier -
"Vongole!"
There's a sound of Klavier taking the impact, a strange, hollow sort of thud, and he's got the golden retriever in his arms like one would a particularly large, over-energetic, but utterly beloved child. The smile on his face when he turns to Simon is real, small and in his eyes. It peels away years. Simon doesn't try to stop himself from smiling back.
The moment breaks as Vongole flails, vocalising a long warbling parable that gets Klavier to put her down. Klavier keeps a hold on the scruff of her neck, leaning down to do so. It means he has to look up at Simon. His jacket and shirt are already covered in fur.
"Is -"
"It's fine," Simon says; he never developed an aversion dogs, despite all the ones in prison being trained in ways he logically should have feared.
Klavier releases her. Interestingly, Vongole doesn't barrel up to Simon like he expected but approaches with the kind of caution that he remembers in shelter animals, head low and ear back, careful and wary. Simon extends his hand palm up for her to sniff, lets her take her time on it until her tail starts wagging again. The fur on the crown of her head is smooth and soft.
"Simon," Klavier says; Simon looks up and sees him with his phone. "I need to make a phone call, but do you want anything to drink?"
This is something that is very familiar, even after all these years. Simon wonders if Klavier realises this, that this is an exact mirror of their handful of dates over seven years ago, and then he hates himself a little bit more than usual for it. Klavier's eyebrows furrow slightly, mouth opening in confusion, but Vongole makes a noise of protest at the momentary pause in petting, so Simon starts again.
"What are you having?"
Klavier blinks, expression smoothing out to one of contemplation. "I have some St-Germain."
It means about as much to Simon as most wine lists, but he nods anyways. Klavier isn't paying attention, already turning towards the kitchen with his phone to his ear. Simon shakes his head; he really hasn't changed at all in this way. Simon heads to the larger of the two couches in the living room that Klavier definitely did not decorate himself. Then again, with Klavier being the space case about living space that he tends to be, Simon supposes he should be grateful Klavier has any functional furniture at all. He sits, and the couch makes a slight stretching noise like it's never been sat on before. Vongole jumps up next to him and promptly lies down on his lap, a furnace on her own.
He pets Vongole idly. He isn't entirely sure why he's here. Klavier invited him, but it seemed more to get them off the fire escape than anything else. The fact they're in Klavier's apartment is that Klavier probably couldn't think of anywhere else to go and likely didn't consider Simon's place to be neutral territory. Not that Klavier's apartment is neutral territory, but it's not a personal space; Simon suspects it's really more of a glorified dog house.
Thankfully, Klavier reappears with two Collins glasses before Simon can work himself into more of whatever it is he could be at the moment. He holds out the one in his right hand, the liquid clearly effervescent.
Simon takes it. "What's in it?"
"St-Germain, white wine, club soda." Klavier sits on the other couch, which makes the same unused leather noise. "I see you've made a friend."
Simon glances down at Vongole on his lap at the same time he takes his first sip of the cocktail. The club soda is just enough to stop him from choking. Simon coughs a bit, leaning forward to put the glass down on the coffee table.
"It's good," Simon says, clearing his throat. "A bit strong."
Klavier looks surprised. "Ach, really? I'm sorry about that. Would -"
A shake of the head as Vongole squirms off his lap, disenchanted by the few seconds of not being the centre of Simon's physical attention. "No, I like it," he says because it's true. "It's smells as good as it tastes."
Klavier sips his own drink. Vongole lies down over his feet. It looks like a very normal position for the two of them. A few stray hairs fall over Klavier's eyes, and he pushes them away absently as he sets his drink on the table.
"I lied earlier," Klavier says, and it's slower than his usual diction, heavier. "I was tired of being ignored."
Simon leans back in the couch, looks to the glass doors that lead to the balcony and the marvellous view beyond. He wonders where Taka is hunting this evening.
"I thought about you every day that I was in that damn place," and maybe Simon's voice is rough, but there's no helping it. "I thought of you selfishly, and I put you on this pedestal because you were the one person who wasn't involved with all the things that had put me in there. You were safe for me. I couldn't let that change."
He looks back. Klavier's arms are folded across his body, self-defensive. He doesn't seem upset, but he doesn't really have any expression either. He looks tired.
"I'm not that person," he says, and he doesn't smile, doesn't frown, doesn't give anything away. "I don't think I ever was."
Simon nods. The Klavier of his memories isn't someone the person on the neighbouring couch would recognise. The person that brought Simon comfort for seven dark years was a golden youth, brilliant and chaste, full of all the honest things that Simon thought he would never have again. The Klavier in front of him is gorgeous and handsome, but there's something innately forbidding about him, easily charming but entirely remote. It's not new. He was like that back when they were dating. Simon remembers this now, how it was something he had started to consider a problem. He'd chosen to forget it in the image he cultivated in jail.
Klavier sighs. "What do you want from me?"
Klavier Gavin smiles and extends his hand. "Simon Blackquill, it's a pleasure to meet you."
Simon grasps the hand, knows his face must look as shocked as he feels. "You know me?"
A twist of the grin and a laugh. "Everyone knows some rookie has gotten a hold of the Phantom case," he says as he takes his hand back. "You've got a couple people very cross, you know."
Against his better judgement, Simon huffs and rolls his eyes. "I'm the best one of the job, and I wouldn't have been assigned it if the Chief -"
Klavier shows his hands, an exaggerated display of defence. "Ach, no! I didn't mean it that way."
Simon narrows his eyes. "Then how did you mean it?"
"Many ways," Klavier says, smiling again. "Look, why don't we move out of the lobby? I'd love to have a chance to explain myself."
It's charming in a strange way. Simon finds himself smiling back.
"My office is down the hall."
Simon picks up his drink, inhales the scent of elderflower.
"I'd like us to be friends."
"Friends."
"Yes."
He watches Klavier, the evening in his eyes and the sunset in his hair.
"I think," he says, "I can do that."