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Clay Terran is Apollo Justice’s best friend.
He’s tall and gangly and a little awkward.
His dark hair never seems to lay quite right; his skin is marred with the little bumps and bruises he constantly obtains from moving too fast; his teeth are crooked, yet his smile is nothing if not heartwarming.
He’s constantly wrapped in a jacket from the Cosmos Space Center that he loves more than anything. It’s almost destroyed with age, worn out in a way that, frankly, should make it off-putting, but on Clay, it just looks right.
He talks loud and laughs louder and can light up an entire room just by walking into it.
(Apollo looks around him now, takes in the cruel early morning shadows dominating his room, and thinks that Clay won’t be able to fix this, not this time.)
Clay Terran is always smiling, even when things are bad.
Looking on the bright side of anything is second nature for him. And, if the situation doesn’t have any light to share, Clay will create some himself, whether it be through doing something he loves or telling a joke or even shouting positive things at the top of his lungs.
“Hey,” he said once when Apollo was crying his eyes out over law school, “If man had never looked up at the stars and decided to do the impossible, we’d still have our feet firmly on the ground.”
Though Apollo had hated the statement at the time, he never managed to truly despise it. If anything, it reminds him that he’s not all alone in the world.
(But he is . Apollo is alone, and he thinks he might be dying.)
Clay Terran should be at home right now, in the apartment they share.
Apollo should walk in the door and find him trying and failing to cook a decent meal with his meager paycheck, ultimately burning it to a crisp, and laughing even as the complex-wide alarms go off and the sprinklers destroy half of their furniture.
He should hear muffled voices all the way out in the hallway, only to find that Clay has turned one of his documentaries up to a deafening volume so he can hear it in the shower, despite not even needing to know what's being said; he'll be shouting half of the script in perfect time with the television from memory.
He should check his phone and find a simple reply to a worried text, reading some variant of, “I’M FINE!”, accompanied by a blurry selfie of himself surrounded by technology Apollo could never even hope to name. Then he would know that his friend is just at work late, sucked deep into the rabbit-hole of what he has yet to discover.
And, before too long, Clay should barge in the door, already teasing Apollo for being so concerned.
"I'm fine, 'Pollo, really! You worry too much!"
(But things are very wrong, and so Apollo sits within a massacre of his belongings with all the blinds drawn, and no idiot roommate to comfort him.)
Clay Terran is the closest family Apollo has had in a very long time.
Yes, he’s been taken in by orphanages before, and he knows he shouldn’t be pitying himself after having a place to sleep for so many years. The people he met were never cruel, but orphanage doesn’t mean family to Apollo.
Orphanage means second-rate.
Orphanage means afterthought.
Orphanage means another lonely night curled up under too-thin sheets counting how many days he has left until he stops being young enough to adopt and worrying himself sick that he’ll never ever find a home.
Not until Apollo met Clay did he remember the meaning of the word “brother.”
Before then, he hadn’t known the feeling of calloused hands putting away his things for him, silently understanding that his day had been horrific; he’d never understood how sitting on a broken couch in a dim apartment watching awful television reruns could ever be comforting; he didn’t know the wonders that a bone-crushing hug and a whisper of, “I've got you” could do.
(The sharp, broken remains of what Apollo regrets to call his heart splinter further as he realizes that he’ll never be held like that again.)
As his world collapses in on itself, he lets his hands wander to a balled-up shirt by his knee, and slowly sinks them into the cloth until his knuckles ache with the pressure and he feels his nails threaten to break the skin of his palm.
He wonders absently how long it’s been since he sat down here, how long it will be until someone pulls him away from his demons and back into the sun.
(No one is going to snap him out of it, he realizes darkly; no one is here to help him this time. Clay can’t even wake him up now because Clay isn’t here and Apollo realizes this with an intensity so strong he gasps out loud.
Everything goes numb and throbs with pain all at once and he thinks--no, knows -- that he’s not going to make it out this time.)
“I’m not fine!”
The hysterical half-scream escapes him almost without permission. The words are achingly true, yet it shocks him to hear them out loud.
He hasn’t allowed his mind to wander this path in so long, but he has no reason not to traverse it now. Who’s going to stop him?
(Not Clay. Clay will never stop him from doing anything ever again.)
“I’m not fine, Clay”, Apollo whimpers, curling pathetically in on himself. “I’m not fine.”
Clay Terran is Apollo Justice’s best friend.
But Apollo is lying on his bed and letting grief tear him to shreds because for the first time in so long, he is an orphan once more.
Clay Terran is dead.