Work Text:
Perfectionism. That is the ideal—the only thing that truly matters in this world, and no man but Klavier Gavin knows it as intimately, as inside out and upside down, like a lover or an enemy; perfection is what the world is founded on, right down to the golden ratio. Everything, if not perfect, is nothing. It’s something that his brother, who had achieved the next best thing after perfection— imitation of perfection—had taught him, and then he had died a monster, and had been terribly ugly for it. Now, whenever Klavier looks in the mirror, he sees the marred curse of a Gavin face, cheekbones carved from evil and so utterly imperfect, but he does not hate himself for it. After all, he is the third best thing after perfection and imitation—he is an artist. A man with hands that can work tirelessly, crafting the ideal of a universe in harmony into smooth marble. He will give up an unreal life for something so much more real, so much more tangible; perfection that you can touch. That you can love.
It’s a compulsion. A frenzied desperation of legacy that haunts him from the moment he wakes up until the moment he goes to sleep, and even when sleep does come—fitful and infrequent—his dreams are those of chasing, running wild and barefoot through some Ancient Greek grass, screaming oh, joy to a sky with the most beautiful clouds of watercolour.
And yet, for all his madness, he is poised and well-practised. There is not a single inch of marble left upon his sculpture-in-progress that is not absolutely necessary; to chip away at the imperfections is to lay testament to the beauty of the world itself. If it is not wholly needed, then it is not needed at all, and the moment he begins to deliberate over whether a certain curve should stay, it is gone. The inimitable goal of true excellence is not something that can be doubted, and once such a doubt creeps in—however minute—it must be taken away before it poisons Klavier’s hands and ruins his still lover. But oh, how beautiful such a thing is; not perfect by virtue of not being finished, but beautiful nonetheless. Before him, carved to Klavier’s exact mental image, is half of a man, almost made real by expert craftsmanship, so close to coming alive, loved enough that it would be impossible for him not to have an eventual heartbeat. Klavier is sure of it—his sculpture, when completed, will be more of a man than he or his brother ever were.
It drives him wild. For days on end, without sleep, he kneels in front of the half-complete statue, his legs aching with the coldness of prayer, and he worships the marble. When he crafts the intimate details of its hands, he holds them the way he would hold onto a lover, spending painstaking hours carving out knuckles and fingernails that, by virtue of some aesthetical placebo, feel warm to the touch. Some nights, Klavier lies at the base of the marble, rendered immobile himself, and allows the delicate hands of his statuesque lover to brush over his hair; they move as if human, and comfort as if angelic. There is nothing so real and perfect as this, two frozen men of Pompeii waiting to move again; one bound by obligation and humanity, the other cursed to forever wait. It is the tale of King Midas, of anathematic touch, and yet the man is so blinded by Justice that what can he do if not follow through his creation to its completion? It is the tale of Victor Frankenstein, of transgression and upside-down narcissism, and yet the creator is not so naïve as to abandon his life’s work. It is the tale of Dorian Gray, of the superficial becoming the supernatural, and yet what is there to worship if not art, the answer to the prayer of life?
Slowly, and without human realisation, Klavier begins to mirror the pose of his beautiful statue. His work is sleepy in its silence, and the hours drag on into contorted days, viewed as a reflection in a lake; to craft testament to life is to sacrifice all the parts that make it messy, and view it as a mirror into which the Lady of Shalott sees the almost-art. If not a false imitation of the aesthetic, then life is meaningless, and Klavier knows this. And yet there’s something so utterly terrifying about bringing his creation to an end, about making it finished and then—heaven forbid—putting it out into the world. There is far too much of himself in this sculpture, which is blasphemy in itself, for how could he—so imperfectly human and so cursed by his name—claim to be anything at all like the divine man before him? But there is still some part of him that remains in the delicate authority of this marble devotion; perhaps it has a heart, after all, for Klavier must have given it his own.
Now, when he looks in the mirror, he does not see Kristoph. He does not see the statue, either, but his eye for art allows him to pick apart the tiny details of his appearance that make him look lifelike in his tiredness; of course, his eyes are ringed with dark circles like halos, and when he brushes his hair out of his face, he does so with marionette-hands, so unfamiliar to him, for they are attuned to fervid, stable marble and not the soft skin that feels wrong against his face. His shirt is stained with old paint from his previous lover of a medium, and his suspenders fall lazily, like water across his shoulders. His trousers, once so in style last decade, say nothing of the 1890s the way he would normally care for them to, but fashion means nothing to him any more—it is simply a painting on an already mediocre canvas, and he pays no mind to what is expected of him, so flawed and finite. Instead, he looks at the way his jawline connects down to his neck like a waterfall; the way his eyelashes separate, so affected by the air itself, and flutter when he blinks the way hummingbird wings do; the way his hands rise and fall, conducting a silent melody, as behind him, the statue in the mirror looks as perfect as it always does, unaffected by reverse.
On the day he completes his single greatest work, the sun does not shine. And how could it? How could anything of fake-gold dare show its monstrous face in front of his statue, so perfect in its completion, so lovely and elegant and real?
For three whole days, Klavier lies at its feet in prayer. The man above him is not a man, not in the sense that Klavier himself is, but an angel—something dipped in lustre and soaked in honey, something with a strong fragility that makes it all too inherently good by virtue of being inherently beautiful to possibly display to the outside world. But is it not a crime to keep it locked away in the dim light of Klavier’s studio? Nobody deserves to see it, not even Klavier himself, but it is far too exquisite to never breathe the air that it must need to live; it should be displayed, solitary, upon some ancient hillside, touched by the jealousy of Gods and burdened by the knowledge that it is the only thing in the universe. Everything else is reflection, and Klavier is Narcissus, which makes this statue something outside of myth itself—and therefore, its immortality rests upon the fact that it cannot die, and is the only thing to live.
Driven mad with adoration, Klavier holds the statue in his arms. He loves it. And, in some way, he knows that it loves him too—they are two halves of one soul, irreparably and impossibly bound by the circumstance of art, and they must stay together eternally.
And yet, Klavier is driven to the outside world by the obligation of his beating heart, and he must keep up with the goings-on around him, the little tick, tock of the somewhat lives of everyone else. When the newspaper comes in the morning, he does not exchange needless pleasantries with the delivery boy; he has not spoken a word in weeks, nor has he left his studio in the driving whirlwind of fervent insanity, and when he turns the crisp pages, nothing intrigues him. The price of grain is rising, the weather is at an all time high, and some poor man named Apollo Justice has been struck down and killed instantly by a passing cart.
Normally, he would pay no mind, except the sketch of Apollo that he sees is something he knows intimately. He stares into its eyes, and sees his own soul; he sees the dead man in marble, for how could it come to pass that such a beautiful man could exist twice? He can’t—Klavier may be driven to chaos, but he knows that there are some human impossibilities that cannot be overcome. And yet, it is not so much a paradox as he had initially thought, because truly, Apollo Justice must never have existed, not in any real sense. He exists only now that he is dead, and immortalised; the only real thing is art, and Apollo became real upon the moment of his death, and was real before that in perfect marble. Whatever little life he had before that is immaterial, and yet Klavier misses a man that he never knew, and knew so well, oh so sorely.
But… could he have been normal? He wouldn’t change a single thing about his ardent devotion to art, but there’s a part of him that wishes he could be human in the way that a person is supposed to be, and have met Apollo while they both breathed. Could he have loved him? Would he have driven him away with his expectation of more? Would they have had a languid little life in a cottage, away from marble and carts, or would they have become bitter and jaded, hating each other for not living up to perfectly crafted pedestals? He ruminates on the thoughts, while the real Apollo—the actual Apollo, not the sketch in the newspaper or the man who never really breathed at all—watches over him, guarding his breakdown with the tender care of proud silence. Klavier wants to— needs to—fall into his statue’s arms, bind their souls forever with nectar, and eternally yield to warm summer with cool marble.
So this must be it. The great big forever, the culmination of art. Nothing shall ever be created again, no new Old Masters or Icaruses falling in the background of an ordinary nothing; no poems shall be written or songs sung, no gold leaf carefully painted in thick red oils against unfired clay—this is it, this is everything, and he is as much a part of it as he is an observer of the entity.
In a few weeks, they will not find his body. How could they? There is no body to find. When the landlords come to lay claim to unpaid rent, they will not find a dead man, for an alive man never existed here. They will find, instead, a beautiful spiral, impossible to comprehend in its magnitude, more a testament than ever known possible to the life of an artist who transcended into his craft; for this is his. This is Apollo’s. They share it as they do a soul, as they were destined to, and when they are bound in harmonious perpetuity, there will be a glorious, golden rest.
And what will the others find? The rest of the world, with their little infinite lives, when they stumble upon the studio as if it were Eden?
They will find two statues, locked in a marble embrace, not breathing or moving, with no beating hearts or human wants, and they will understand God.