Chapter Text
Klavier knew even from a young age that unlike many other children he had been fortunate; he had a good home, nice clothing, three meals a day and was sent to one of the best schools in the country for his education and his parents were alive, well and wealthy...he knew he was privileged, to have what he had...but that was only what people could see, they saw what was on the surface and presumed they knew everything about him.
But the truth is much darker and tied to reality than the fiction people saw on the surface.
When Klavier was very young he remembered being attached to Kristoph like many siblings would be at that age; he loved this brother and looked up to him, a trait that he carried with him long into adulthood, and in those early days he remembered his brother's kindness; he’d play with him and read stories to him, he taught him how to play the first keys of ‘twinkle, twinkle, little star’ on their families grand piano, when their parents were too busy to do so; he remembers those innocent times fondly...sadly only a few of the memories from his childhood he genuinely cherished as a ‘happy’ memory.
His parents were not a happy couple; his father was soft-spoken & distant; he was never cruel but he never offered the love or affection a child really needed, their mother, on the other hand, was the opposite, she was strict and harsh; raising her voice and giving them physical punishments when they stepped out of line; she was the disciplinarian of the two and ran the house with an iron fist. In truth, his mother terrified Klaiver as a child; it was so hard to imagine that this strict woman who wore an expression that often looked like she was constantly tasting something unpleasant in her mouth was his mother. if it wasn’t for her platinum blonde hair that was turning grey with age and his father’s soft blue eyes that he recognized in his own features, he would have suspected that he’d been adopted a long time ago.
His mother had been the core reason Kristoph had begun to change as they grew older, their mother was a perfectionist through and through, and she had demanded perfection from her children regardless of whether they wanted it or not; their mother had no time for flaws or weakness, she didn't allow them to remain childlike and innocent for long and when exam results from school failed to meet her expectations or Klaiver broke a vase by accident while playing, they were all seen as mistakes, flaws of him as a person and he was punished for them. His mother was a fan of physical punishment and would often hit him with a thin riding crop on his arms or her favourite place; his lower back; over the years she had hit him so many times in that same spot, he’d developed scars there; there were a few on his arms but they were faded and hard to notice.
Klavier remembered the day when he was around eleven years old, that he realized that his brother no longer smiled and began to look at him similarly to his mother, scrutinizing him and not liking what he saw at all; it made him feel incredibly small, like an ant being viewed under a microscope. Kristoph was around nine when he stopped playing with him, making excuses that he needed to study and such but that was the first time that his older brother looked at him with such cold disapproval...something he grew more and more used to over the years.
Klavier tried to live up to their mother's standards he really, truly did; he studied hard, stopped playing with what few friends he had to try and desperately catch up and improve his grades, even taking after school study lessons...but it was never quite enough; any other parent would probably be proud to see their child getting straight A’s in all their classes, even the ones they despised and struggled with...but not his mother; if he wasn’t the top of his school with 100% on every test then he was still a failure and he didn't have the natural smarts his brother had.
His big brother had always been the genius of the two of them, there was no denying it, the extra studying Kristoph did simply enhanced his genius and propelled him to a place Klaiver could never hope to reach.
So in the end, he gave up.
He stopped trying to reach his mother’s standards and just accepted her punishments which became more severe as he grew older; it was abuse plain and simple but like with most victims of abuse, he hadn’t realized at the time and some small part of him thought that maybe he deserved it for being so stupid, so flawed, so broken. Kristoph didn’t abandon him though, despite the disappointment in his eyes, even after his mother was done with him and he left her office, his back and arms bleeding it was Kristoph who helped him to the bathroom to strip off his shirt and tend to his wounds...maybe even back then it had been a ploy, simply so Klaiver would rely on him or maybe it had been the last genuine love his big brother had ever given to him...but having Kristoph there even briefly behind closed doors was a bigger comfort than he wanted to ever admit.
It wasn’t long after Klaiver gave up trying to reach his mother's impossible standards, that their father killed himself by jumping in front of a train one day on his way to work...there was hardly anything of him left to identify, but his mother hadn’t shed a single tear at the funeral. Klavier was upset at the loss of his father and couldn't comprehend how his mother could be so...cold looking down at the casket of her husband in it as if looking down at an ant waiting to be crushed under her heel.
After this event he and he began to full-on rebel against his mother in the hopes of seeing something other than a cold dislike or anger; he cut his hair short, had posters of rock bands plastered on his walls, took on a part-time job and bought his first guitar, and when he signed up for Themis Legal Academy, he chose the prosecutorial course rather than the defence course that Kristoph had attended during his time at the academy.
He started his own band at school, taught himself how to play the guitar and began to write his own songs, he loved music despite the strict absence of anything but classical at home for most of his life, and playing with Daryan and his other bandmates Drake & Silas, gave him an escape from his life; music helped him forget shit at home, helped him forget his brother’s coldness and just revel in something he made and came from the hearts of himself and his band.
Despite everything he’d already been through, a part of him loved his mother still did despite her actions...but what she had done to him and his brother was not love, it wasn’t even just discipline, it was mental and physical abuse and the best way to stop it was to have her pay for her crimes like any other criminal, to show the truth to the courts and let her be judged, it was part of why he was going to be a prosecutor...but sadly that day never even came.
Klavier had once mused that if he believed in a God that perhaps he or she had a dark sense of humour, as before he could graduate from Themis a few months before his final exam and graduation, in fact, his mother had a heart attack and died in their home office. It was Kristoph who found her and filed the report, as he had been practising with his band well into the evening and Klaiver only arrived in time to see her body being pulled into an ambulance to be taken to the morgue for a full autopsy which concluded a mixture of a blocked valve that hadn’t been detected in her heart and stress, had caused her demise.
A part of him hated the fact that he’d cried himself to sleep that night, that despite everything he still CARED about her. Klavier should have been happy, relieved or SOMETHING in knowing his cruel, overbearing mother was gone, that he was now free of her and could live the life he wanted, and yet his heart still ached at her passing. He was unable to truly hate her despite everything she had put him through, her death still pained him, it stung far more than he wanted to admit. Another part of him was angry and bitter, that with her untimely death he realized his chance and getting justice for himself and Kristoph in the courts for what his mother had gone had died along with her.
Of course, he could still make claims against her, tell the people who had supposedly known his mother the truth at last, but it felt hollow after her passing and most would see it as spiteful and spitting on her memory, and so as his mother was buried, the truth was buried with her.
It had been a sunny day when his mother was buried, it was ironic; his mother had been cold and bitter to the core, he watched almost in a daze as people stood up and said some nice words during the ceremony about her, none of which were actually true. Kristoph was the one to make the final speech before the ceremony came to a close, his words just as hollow as anyone else's and his mother's casket was lowered into the earth.
He needed to leave.
After the funeral, he told Kristoph he was leaving home and living in the dorms while finishing his studies at Themis, the house even with her death still held her presence, it was everywhere in every piece of furniture and picture...it was unbearable. His brother didn't say anything but he nodded in agreement at Klaiver's proposal and there was a glimmer of something...understanding perhaps? That his younger brother needed time and some space to do his own thing for a while.
It was the best thing that ever happened to him.
Being away from home meant he could truly start to express himself; his taste in fashion changed from the stiff suits he’d been forced to wear to jeans, dress shirts and flashy jackets, he began to buy and wear jewellery, he got piercings in his ears, he flirted with men and women alike in ways he never could have done in his younger teen years but was never truly brave enough to move beyond kissing and heavy petting, a knot in his stomach always a warning him that it was wrong, that it was somehow crossing a boundary.
Even in death his mother's strict rules haunted him and was scarred into his flesh...it prevented him from being truly intimate with anyone.
He couldn't tell people the truth about his upbringing, he didn't want peoples pity, he wanted to be understood; so he did the next best thing; he poured his pain, love, heartache and relief, into his songwriting and composing; the songs wound up being a mixture of bittersweet melodies and love songs, some were sweet others were angry and full of betrayal; he poured his soul out onto the pages of his notebook and with his band and he helped compose a melody to go with his words.
Writing out his feelings being able to sing them on stage made him feel free; to say what he truly wanted to say without the threat of backlash aside from someone saying the song sucked, but nothing made him feel alive quite like being in court. Something was comforting about knowing that he was doing the right thing, battling against the defence to find the truth; he would do what he’d been unable to do for him and Kristoph; he’d find the truth and bring justice to those who broke the law and abused their power.
Of course, he’d heard rumours of prosecutors and defence attorneys with supposedly underhanded deals to get guilty verdicts, forging evidence and forcing confessions and the idea of it disgusted him. Klavier wanted to find justice and the truth for people involved in cases, nothing more nothing less, he didn't care about winning as Kristoph did, he just wanted the right people to be convicted and the truth to come to light, perhaps as a replacement for the truths he was never allowed to reveal.
When he graduated Themis with a No 1 single under his belt due to the Gavviners popularity he felt confident that he and Kristoph could work together as he’d always dreamed of, to be on opposite sides of the law to find the truth...but in the end, that dream had only ever been his.
It was what made Khristoph’s eventual betrayal break his already fractured heart.
In hindsight perhaps he should have known that something was off when Kristoph wanted to suddenly speak with him about his official first case now he’d graduated and earned his prosecutors badge but he had suspected nothing; his older brother had not changed one bit since their mother had passed and he’d left home, still as stoic and calm as ever in a way that was sort of cool but ever intimidating.
Knowing his brother wanted to talk with him about the case had genuinely warmed his heart and made him happy; to him, it was proof that his brother did love him and he did care, he was just not good at truly showing it and wanted Klaiver to succeed especially in his big debut...perhaps it was due to that then, combined with his faith in Kristoph that allowed him to be so blinded, unable to see what schemes his brother was planning.
His brother then warned him about Phoenix Wright, someone who Klaiver had definitely heard of when he was studying at Themis, he was almost infamous for his turnabout cases in the legal world after all and he was about to face this veteran and someone prone to finding the truth in most unusual ways. He was genuinely shocked to find out from his brother that Phoenix was forging evidence and that Kristoph had received word that he’d be presenting a piece of said forged evidence during the trial tomorrow.
Perhaps Kristoph planned it this way specifically due to how much Klaiver loathed injustice, especially if it got in the way of the actual truth, and because of this Klaiver went along with his brother's unknown trap. And just as Kristoph had predicted, Phoenix after being driven into a corner by the young blonde, produced the forged evidence, and Klaiver at that moment had never felt so satisfied at seeing justice be done as Drew Misham confessed to forging the evidence and Phoenix Wright was put on trial and disbarred.
That feeling didn't last.
Klavier saw Phoenix not long after he was disbarred in the court’s hallway entrance as he was leaving from speaking to his client; it was only for a few moments but the devastated, confused look on the man’s face was not the one of a criminal who had been caught in the act, but of a man wholly unsure how or why his world had just been turned upside down in an instant and he had no idea what he was going to do next.
It was that look that made him question if his brother had been right...what if it had been a mistake? What if someone had framed Phoenix Wright? Looking into his record was easy, all registered lawyers had records of all past cases they undertook, won and lost and the blonde found that there were no mentions of him producing shady evidence in the past; odd and shady witnesses yes, but no evidence.
So what did it all mean? Was his brother wrong? Had he just gotten an innocent man fired? The thought of a wrong conviction made his stomach twist painfully with a mixture of fear and guilt; there was no evidence to suggest his brother had been wrong, even so, it continued to haunt him for months even years afterwards.
Over time his concern over Phoenix Wright faded but it never fully left him, it was worse when he was given a place in the prosecutor's office, one of his fellow prosecutors, Miles Edgeworth was not unkind but there was a quiet cold contempt for him every time they crossed paths; he found out later that the other was Wright's friend from childhood; it was no wonder the man was so cold with him; even though the two were on opposing sides of the law it was clear his fellow prosecutor did not believe for one second Phoenix had produced forged evidence, deepening his doubts as Edgeworth’s cold gaze bore into him every time they saw each other.
Miles never said anything to his face, of course, the man was a professional through and through and didn't let his personal issues with him affect their work, But the other didn't really have to; his cold steely gaze said everything for him and Klaiver found himself avoiding the other as often as possible, just so he didn't need to endure the others gaze filling him up with guilt he wasn’t even sure was real all over again.
There were at least a dozen or so times he’d wanted to ask Kristoph about Phoenix Wright’s disbarment if his assessment had been correct but the words always died in his throat as he felt ashamed for believing that his brother, the genius prodigy his mother had always been proud of, would EVER make such a mistake; it never occurred to him it was all planned, that Kristoph could scheme in such a way and because of his blind love for his brother he remained silent.
Time moved on and it’d be a few years before he got involved with Phoenix Wright and company again.