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Time has always been cruel to lovers. A phrase that he faintly remembers in the rousing of the spectral advent. The dim hallways of Barclay know naught yet retain the haunting echoes of all the ghosts of past misfortune. He can still feel the eerie sensation of warm, oozing blood across his hands. Young, wide-eyed Barok clinging onto his brother for dear life, though within Genshin’s peripheral, sitting in a pool not only of his brother’s, but the blood of all his victims.
He had not meant for his blade to pierce the elder brother, and now the man’s ghost stares at him quietly, wearing an expression of neither anger nor pity. He would have welcomed the former, but the lack of anything is eerily similar to moments just before the man’s death, when he’d picked up a sword in the first place and pointed it at Genshin.
“You weren’t meant to die,” he says to the ghost.
The wispy edges of the ephemeral form flickers back and forth as he tilts his head. Silently. He does not register any disbelief, but those lukewarm eyes permeate a chilly reservedness towards Genshin. Perhaps it is understandable. Nonetheless…
He asks, though knowing fruitless was his endeavours, “What even was your plan?”
Klimt has not spoken since Genshin noticed him in the corner of his cell. Not once sparing words for his killer or his (once) best friend. He was like the liminal lightning that struck without grasping the thunder. The clouds overhanging grey and pressed, like lemon tang without savour. Dismay darkened the low-lit hallways between the cells. Perhaps he is simply going mad, but he dares not approach the ghost lest he find him real and tangible—and it abstains from nearing Genshin as well. Klimt hasn’t left his corner, opaquely clinging onto the opposite wall.
Is this the only expression of anger a ghost is capable of? If he touches those long tendrils of ghostly apparit, a painting of dispersing light that seems to have been put through dreary curtains, and he were to find it tangible, worse than the thought of what it would feel like is the idea that he will have either proved the extent of his mental deteriorating or it is truly Klimt’s ghost haunting him, not simply a fragmented imagination, and he is watching him with that awful, blank nothingness that is nothing like Klimt was in life. It is bad enough that this is how he remembers him, with those dead eyes as Genshin laid out the sins of his brother to him.
Klimt said under no circumstances was Genshin to tell anyone of his findings. Genshin had been in shock. Surely this was not coming from Klimt van Zieks, a man he’d known to be of righteous fibre and more than that, expressed innumerably his displeasure at the English nobility who used their positions to evade justice? Klimt had despised how the most awful criminals could bribe or threaten their way to acquittal, made easier by the judiciary’s affordances of their position.
Barok recounted several times his brother’s fervent clashing with his colleagues. His brother was an idealist who hated the ‘practical realities’ of the court system. (It was one of the stories that had stuck to Genshin—or the way Barok had told it, with a certain edge of disgust and unkindness seemingly towards his brother that had been so uncharacteristic and unheard of for Barok that he’d spent the rest of the evening second-guessing what he heard.)
He’d never truly grasped how precious his little brother was until that moment, when Klimt had threatened to silence him: “Not a soul, Detective Asougi, or you will never see your son or your country ever again.”
He’d said it so simply and detached from everything around him that Genshin didn’t even expect it when he drew his sword. He had underestimated both brothers, and now he is locked in this prison cell, with Klimt’s ghost staring at him like an empty vessel with his soul drained out of him.
“How long have you known—!?”
“You will never understand.”
As though nothing else mattered in the moment. What of their relationship, cut to pieces by both siblings’ actions?
It was not Klimt who drew the victims’ final breaths as Genshin had initially suspected, but he was an accomplice to his brother’s murders, hiding them from the police and even tricking Genshin, his partner. They were meant to trust each other, but Klimt hadn’t for months, and now…
The ghost’s silence is proof enough of when their relationship ended. He hadn’t known Klimt in months. Perhaps he never knew Barok, to have never suspected a killer out of the shyer brother. Klimt told him Barok had killed for his sake, but beyond Klimt’s unconditional resolve to protect his little brother, his feelings remain unknown, and his ghost will not give up the tale.
Does it mean it shall die forever in silence?
Even the confession hidden in the hilt of his sword is a lie written to absolve Barok of all sins. Klimt had apparently prepared it after the professor’s first kill. It arrived in a locked box at Genshin’s doorstep the morning after his body was discovered, as one of the last commands the lord of the manor issued to his servants should he be found dead.
The farce has gone long enough, but there is nothing Genshin can do anymore. That frustrating force that has long since deterred true justice plays out now—the court’s significant prejudices and corruption rife continues.
…
So he entrusts the truth, however tainted, to the future—to his son.
Though there are nothing but secrets and lies that swirl every facet of this sorry affair—two brothers undoubtedly faultless in their loyalty to each other having lied to everyone else around them.
They too belonged to a wronged world.
As he is buried, he feels the ghost of his once lover’s lips pass over his. A treachery that perpetuates, endless and blood-soaked, that curls between his teeth and sucks his soul away.