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Klavier’s seventeen, and his band is taking off faster than he could have ever expected.
His life is immeasurably busy, between rehearsals and recording contracts and studying for the bar exam that he’s determined to pass first try, even though he’s among the youngest to ever take the test. He hardly has time to eat, to sleep, to run into his brother in the hallway and pester him about the details of his latest case.
Music is what’s consuming his time right now, but he knows, deep down, that his true passion is law. That when the buzz around the Gavinners has died down (and he’s well aware that fame is fleeting, that the public is fickle, but that’s hard to remember when he’s right in the thick of it), he’ll always have the solid reliability of the prosecution bench, steadfast in the courtroom where he’s dreamed of standing for years.
In an act of teenage rebellion, he sets up a brand-new bank account, one where he’s the sole owner. He deposits his first cheque from the band’s first really successful gig into it, and keeps the knowledge of the amount of money he’s got access to a closely-guarded secret.
After all, Kristoph would only disapprove of the small indulgences he plans to spend it on.
Klavier is six, and his entire life’s just been uprooted.
Moving across an ocean to an entirely different continent is hard to comprehend at the best of times, but it’s especially difficult when you’ve just started making friends and going to school, only to suddenly find yourself on an airplane, flying far above the clouds and far away from everything you’ve ever known.
It’s not that he doesn’t like LA. It’s not even that he doesn’t like America, in general. He certainly adjusts faster than Kris, who struggles with fitting into a high school where all the social dynamics had long ago been set in stone.
But Klavier still feels an odd sense of being misplaced, in a way. It’s in the little things—when the children on the playground ask him to repeat a word over and over to point out the differences in the way he pronounces it compared to them; the way that his favorite chocolate bar can’t be found and he has to settle for a different brand entirely.
It’s the way his mother suddenly becomes the embodiment of patriotism, adorning their house with any trinket she can find that sports the German flag and makes disdainful comments about the ways in which Americans as a whole differ so greatly from the occupants of the country they’d left behind.
Klavier can’t put a name to it, yet, this feeling of subtle otherness; but he continues on with the new life he’s expected to lead, and finds himself fitting into a routine all the same.
Klavier Gavin is twenty-three, and if anyone accused him of avoiding the courtroom, he’d say they were lying.
Well—that’s not entirely true. He can’t go around throwing out accusations like that, not with the eyes of the world upon him after the latest Gavinners’ single went multi-platinum yet again. But he would certainly smile for the camera, brush off the allegation with the rehearsed wink and hair-flip, divert the line of questioning to something safer—Klavier, how’s your love life these days? Klavier, how do you feel about the new music video? Klavier, will you sign my T-shirt?
He’s gotten good at that, over the years—avoiding the more personal questions. It’s a vital survival skill, when you’ve been in the spotlight for as long as he has—and Klavier is nothing if not somebody who’s determined to survive the wringer of fame.
Still, though—there’s a reason he’s not set foot in a courtroom since his first trial; a lingering doubt that eats away at him when he’s lying in bed at night, with only the silent dark as his witness. The forged evidence...and the look on Phoenix Wright’s face when Drew Misham’s testimony had exposed him to the court.
Klavier has always felt that finding the truth is the most important aspect of any trial—but he himself is terrified of what truths might be revealed if he returns to the LA courthouse.
Klavier’s twelve, or just about. He’s spent half his life in a country where he wasn’t born, and has assimilated so thoroughly that it surprises his classmates when he mentions that he hasn’t seen his grandparents in a couple years, or that he doesn’t yet have an American passport.
Kristoph has long since found his own means of fitting in—he’s rehearsed his American accent to perfection, leaving him with a way of crisply enunciating his words that at first seemed unnatural, but now comes off as sophisticated. He doesn’t talk about his past, and has thrown himself into his studies—he’s aiming to graduate law school by 24, and Klavier dreams of the day when he can sit in the gallery and cheer his big brother on at his first trial.
Their mother has become even more obsessed with embracing their nationality, somewhat to the embarrassment of their father. Klavier can almost point out the parallels between his mother and father in relation to him and his brother—and makes a decision that’s partly influenced by parental example, partly by the adolescent impulse to make oneself unique in any way possible.
He takes care when speaking, using words that highlight the remains of his accent whenever possible. He watches television shows, movies, all in German—letting the language seep back into his brain and color his phrases. Klavier, in essence, makes himself stand out by using his place of birth as his defining characteristic, and making sure that everyone knows that he’s different, but on his own terms.
(When his brother comes home for winter break from university, he observes Klavier’s behavior with a raised eyebrow, but doesn’t comment further. Klavier finds that something in his heart aches at the dismissive response, and wonders just how Kristoph must have felt as a true foreigner in the country that’s become as much of a home to Klavier as Germany once was)
Klavier is nineteen, and is singing his heart out underneath the spotlights at Madison Square Garden. He’s out of breath, his hair falling in his eyes, and he swears he’s somehow never felt quite as alive as he does now.
Daryan strikes a final chord on his guitar, somewhere to Klavier’s left, and the stage falls into darkness. The screams of their fans echo in the sudden silence, amplified by the adrenaline that’s running through his veins and the blood rushing in his ears. For a moment, Klavier is frozen—and then he shrugs the guitar strap from his shoulders, places the instrument down on a stand, and throws an arm around his bandmate’s shoulders, laughing with exhilaration.
The detective stumbles, shaking his head, but he’s just as high-energy as Klavier, the combination of nerves and exhaustion leaving them all jittery and strung-out. Daryan throws his guitar down, pulls Klavier into an embrace, and they find the rest of the Gavinners piling onto them, a tangle of sweaty limbs and damp hair.
It’s a dream come true, it’s like living out a fantasy, and yet Klavier still feels like there’s some part of him that’s not as genuine as he pretends, as if he’s squished himself into this glitzy rockstar image and can’t break away from the face he shows the crowds.
As much as being the “Rockstar Prosecutor” is his brand, he’s not sure he has the right to all the legal-themed lyrics he’s been entertaining the world with.
Klavier is twenty-four, and his brother has been arrested for murder.
He gets the news at two in the morning, halfway around the world in the back of a tour bus. He’d planned on ignoring the phone call, reminding whoever it was that he had made it very clear that his sleep wasn’t to be interrupted for anything, but with one eye cracked half-open he’d squinted at the caller ID and found his blood turning to ice—his father didn’t ever call, had hardly acknowledged his youngest son since the beginning of the Gavinners’ fame.
And so it is that in the middle of the night, Klavier discovers that Kristoph had been carted off to jail, betrayed by his own apprentice, in the middle of said apprentice’s first trial. That he’d been helped in this accusation by Phoenix Wright, and at the man’s name, Klavier’s grip tightens on his phone, all the muscles in his body tensing. So this is it, then—his first trial come back to haunt him after all these years. Seems that he can’t run forever—and this time, it’s not just him that’s affected by whatever had really happened, seven years ago.
(A voice at the back of his mind whispers to remind him that Kristoph had been involved since the beginning, that it had been Kristoph who had known about Wright’s intent to present forged evidence, and that maybe it hadn’t only been him who had been running ever since)
Klavier shakes his head, snaps himself back into reality, and terminates the call—and begins the series of emails that will allow him to return to LA as soon as reasonably possible.
It’s time to face this, head-on. To stop running.
Klavier’s sixteen, and it’s just dawning on him that it might be too late to drop the overly-exaggerated German accent.
He’s formed a band with some of his classmates from Themis, and the legal-themed schtick and their unusual talent for their age had attracted them attention within a few months. Now there’s a producer involved, and a record label, and at some point the studio execs had asked him about his citizenship and if he was really German, and after an extra-emphasized “Ja,” half their branding seemed to revolve around Klavier’s heritage.
He hadn’t minded at first, but as time goes on, it starts to feel less and less genuine—as though he’s turned what used to be a natural part of himself into part of a costume, and does he even have the right to embrace the strange, mixed-together accent that characterizes his way of speaking? He’s not lived in Germany for a decade, and yet it’s suddenly become his whole identity.
But when Klavier brings it up with his manager, haltingly, hesitating, he doesn’t know how to phrase it—and the response she gives him, that “All celebrities have something they play up for the cameras, Gavin, just think of it as part of the performance,” leaves him wondering if she’d even listened to him at all.
Klavier is eight, and Kristoph is teaching him how to paint his nails. Smooth, precise strokes; a swipe of a touch-up brush around the edges where a little polish has bled out onto his cuticles, the scent of acetone and chemicals hanging in the air. Klavier looks at all the bottles lined up in a row, their multicolored contents shining like jewels in the afternoon light, and thinks about how some precious things are intangible.
Klavier is twenty-four, and he hadn’t gone into this trial intending to like Apollo Justice.
He’d known, before heading down to People Park, exactly who the defense attorney was going to be. He’d gone into the investigation expecting to encounter some coldhearted rival, someone calculating who had orchestrated Kristoph’s downfall from behind the scenes even as he’d worked under the man.
He had not been prepared for the sight of the short, brown-haired man in the loudest suit Klavier had ever encountered to set his heart racing, his mind spinning into confused circles, knowing that he should be furious but only being able to feel an odd swooping in the pit of his stomach.
So instead of anger, it was with full-on flirtation that he greeted the man who had sent Kristoph to prison, and Klavier found himself caught up in a trial so different than his first that it felt as though the rug had been pulled out from underneath him. Working with Justice to uncover the truth was comparable to the exhilaration of a sold-out concert, of watching the album sales of their new release skyrocket. It was as though he’d been living his life afraid of a fictional version of the courtroom, when the reality was so much better than he could have ever imagined.
He’s reminded of his childhood dreams, the fantasy of becoming a rockstar twinned with that of being the kind of prosecutor who brought criminals down, whether that was by working with or against the defense.
If this is still a dream, Klavier hopes he doesn’t have to wake up.
Klavier is twenty-five, and his high-school mentor has been murdered on the very stage where he had been set to perform. The grief this time is dull, familiar—he’s beginning to think that he’s bad luck, that Professor Courte’s relationship to him is to blame for her death.
(Backstage, after the trial’s been resolved and he’s managed to make it through the concert, Apollo finds him in the dark and holds his hand, whispers that it’s not his fault and that he can’t think that he’s to blame. Klavier doesn’t respond, only buries his face in Apollo’s shoulder and tries to focus more on the way the shorter man traces calming circles on his palm than on the hot tears escaping his eyes)
Klavier’s fourteen, and his mother sobs into his shoulder, telling him between gasping breaths that his father’s moving out, that it’ll just be them from now on. He circles his arms around her, unsure how to offer comfort, if he should be the one to comfort her. He’s nearly taller than she is, now, and she seems so frail in his embrace.
“Did you tell Kristoph?” he doesn’t ask, because he has a feeling that his brother had seen this coming for far longer than he might have let on.
So all Klavier can do is stand, letting his mother lean on him as though he could support her indefinitely, and box up his own swirling emotions to avoid them both collapsing.
Klavier Gavin is twenty-six, and he’s reviewing case files halfheartedly while rummaging through the bottom-drawer purgatory of his desk. He pulls out a few, mostly-forgotten items: a box of paperclips, a pad of sticky notes, and a cool glass bottle. The paperwork calls, but it’s only got half of his attention—the other half is dedicated to the way he opens the screw-top of the bottle, pulls out the brush, and absently runs it over the fingernails of his left hand, the cool wet sensation somehow pulling his mind back into focus.
And then, the scent hits him, and Klavier freezes, nail polish brush caught mid-way along his nail, a bead of polish running down its length and pooling in his cuticles. It’s as though the world has narrowed to a single point, all other sensation forgotten apart from the overwhelming sharpness of the smell, the cool liquid on his fingernails, and the icy sensation of the bottle-lid in his hand.
Distantly, he recalls the sight from the trial—Vera Misham, painting her nails in the lobby. The familiarity of the blue Ariadoney bottle, the same as the ones Kristoph had lined up along the edge of his desk as a teenager. The heart-stopping moment when Vera had collapsed on the stand, bitten fingernails revealing the deadly secret that the polish had contained.
It takes the rest of the day before Klavier can compose himself enough to pack up his paperwork, to shove the files in a briefcase and practically run out the office door, having to backtrack twice at least to grab his jacket and his car keys and turn off the lights when he gets halfway down the hall and realizes he’s left them behind.
(The nail polish bottle ends up in the dumpster behind the Prosecutors’ Building, and the stash Klavier had been so proud of keeping on his bathroom sink gets shoved into the kitchen garbage as soon as he gets home)
Klavier is twenty-five, and the courthouse has just exploded, and the news anchor’s face is grim as she reports that “Several people have sustained injuries and there have been a few suspected fatalities; the trial in session at the time was being prosecuted by Simon Blackquill, against defense attorney Apollo Justice--”
And all he can think about is how Apollo was wrong, that day at the concert, that he has to be the correlation here, the link between everything, because he’s going to lose somebody else, for the fourth time in two years, and Klavier paces his office for what seems like an eternity, thoughts circling, before Chief Prosecutor Miles Edgeworth walks through his door and grasps him by the shoulder, escorting him out of the building and into a fancy red sports car, and he doesn’t realize what’s happening until they’re at the hospital and he’s faced with the motley assortment of the members of the Wright Anything Agency and somehow the phrase Apollo’s going to be alright is the only thing that sinks into his brain before he starts sobbing, right there on the sterile tile floor.
Klavier Gavin is twenty-eight, and the mountain air of Khura’in is so different than what he’s become accustomed to in LA that he finds himself almost gasping for breath by the time he’s made it to the front door of the Justice Law Offices, knowing that he’s showing up unannounced but somehow certain that he won’t be turned away. It’s been long enough since he’s seen Apollo in person that he’s almost surprised by the reminder that the defense attorney is shorter than him, when the door swings open and reveals the other man’s tired expression.
He almost laughs at how Apollo gawks, eyes widening and breath catching in his throat, before Klavier is grabbed by the wrist and yanked inside the office, a stream of questions leaving Apollo’s lips as he stares, what are you doing here and I thought you were in LA and is this why you weren’t answering your texts—a barrage that he effectively silences when he leans down and kisses the other man, wraps his arms around his shoulders and finds himself somehow so, so relieved when Apollo lets the tension leave his frame and curls his arms around his waist and kisses back, soft and disbelieving, in the coffee-scented quiet of the morning.
Klavier is twenty-four, and his brother’s laughter echoes in the silent courtroom as the results from the Jurist System are announced. He stares straight ahead, not meeting Apollo’s eyes, battling with his emotions behind the practiced performers’ mask that’s become second-nature after seven years.
It feels as though he’s lost everything, and he’s not even sure which way is up.
His first trial had been defined by a lie, by faulty information from a trusted source. His brother, and Klavier realizes that even up until this point, he’s been holding onto some faint hope that Kristoph hadn’t really been a murderer, that there was some misunderstanding, because he can’t align his memories of the teenager who had taught him to paint his nails and who had spoken so passionately about law school with the man who stands at the front of the courtroom, blond hair falling wild around his shoulders, eye twitching behind his sensible glasses. It’s the same as he’d felt with Daryan, when the truth behind Romein Letouse’s death had come to light.
He stays, still, behind the prosecution bench, until Kristoph has been led away and the spectators in the gallery have filed out, until the judge has tucked away his gavel and left his place, and only looks up when a shadow falls across his vision, and he raises his head to find Apollo Justice standing in front of him, determination in his eyes.
“Let’s get out of here,” Apollo says, and holds out his hand.
Klavier takes it, movements stilted and automatic, and they leave the courtroom together.
Klavier Gavin is thirty-three, and the sound of raindrops against the window tells him that his grand plans of going out for an anniversary picnic have been foiled by the uncaring whims of the weather. He doesn’t know what time it is—only that it’s dim, and his nose is cold, and he makes a soft noise of complaint when his attempts to snuggle further under the duvet are met with resistance.
“Hmm—Klav, what’re you—it’s too early,” comes the voice from the other side of the bed, sleep-muffled and quiet, and Klavier exhales through his nose, moves closer, wraps his arms around Apollo and pulls him into his grasp.
Apollo shifts, mumbling, and adjusts the position of his shoulders so that he’s not twisted awkwardly. “Morning,” he murmurs, and Klavier buries his nose in the junction of Apollo’s neck and shoulder.
“G’morning,” he whispers in reply, and reaches to thread his fingers between Apollo’s, smiling as he feels the warm metal on his hand. “Happy anniversary.”
A soft chuckle is all he gets in response, at least at first. “Thought that wasn’t ‘til next month?” Apollo replies, all warm and affectionate. Klavier does not know how he’s managed to be lucky enough to be here, curled up under the covers and infinitely happy, with Apollo in his arms for as long as he’ll have him.
“The official one, ja, but it’s been nine years since the Kitaki trial, and that’s the one that I’ll always remember, at least.” Klavier has finally managed to strike a balance between his affected way of speaking and his natural accent, and he’s made peace with the fact that he’ll never sound particularly authentic. Or at least, he tells himself he has, but he knows it’ll always bother him just a little. Thankfully, he’s learned to at least live with that.
Apollo laughs, again, and reaches up, combing a hand through Klavier’s hair. “Alright, yes, that’s important too.”
They fall into silence, listening to the rain. The movement of Apollo’s fingers against his scalp threatens to send Klavier right back to sleep, and he yawns.
He feels, rather than sees, Apollo smile. “Shh, it’s fine, it’s too early to get up anyway. Maybe in a few hours, it’ll have stopped raining—and then you can take me out for that “surprise” picnic you were planning.”
Apollo always knows these things, no matter how much Klavier tries to hide them. It’s one of the things he loves most about him, actually.
But he really is still sleepy, and the double-warmth of Apollo and the duvet is so cozy, that he lets himself slip back down into the fuzzy grasp of unconsciousness, knowing that everything will still be perfectly alright when he eventually wakes.
At thirty-three, Klavier Gavin is happy.