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When Apollo tells him about the bracelet, Klavier buries his panic beneath a smile, says would it be too much trouble for you to take it off when we are together, and braces for the explanation he will inevitably have to give.
Klavier’s father is one of those Germans—European old money who harps on about ancestral lands and proper table manners and the volk. “The great composers were German. Bach, Handel, Mendelssohn,” he’d say. “Beethoven is in your blood.” So it wasn’t a question that Kristoph would play violin and Klavier would play piano.
“Imagine there is an egg beneath your fingers,” his father says, hovering over Klavier at the bench. Klavier can feel every hour they’ve been at the bench in the strain of his tendons, the bruised ache of his fingertips. When he lets his fingers drop a millimeter, his father raps a rod over Klavier’s knuckles, unsympathetic when Klavier hisses in pain.
“My hand is cramping,” Klavier says. His hands are still growing, but his father wants them to stretch an octave wide. They feel like they are going to rip in half down the middle. “Please, can we end early today? I will do twice as much tomorrow.”
His father frowns.
“Don’t twitch, Klavier,” is all he says.
Don’t twitch. Back straight. Don’t breathe too deeply. The piano is an instrument of class, Klavier. It is imbued with heritage and history. If you want an instrument that is easy, go play the guitar with the uncultured hicks.
“Shoulders back,” his father says.
Their house is old and grand and hollow; music flows quite nicely through halls lined with paintings of austere men in stiff clothing. In the morning, it sounds of violin and in the evening, the sweet plinks of the piano hold court. This was never formally arranged.
Though, Kristoph once let slip that he had asked for the morning slot, because their father was more cross in the morning, and Kristoph could protect Klavier from him that way. Brothers protect brothers.
There is a display case dedicated to their musical accolades, all the ribbons and trophies from contests and recitals. Kristoph occupies three shelves, Klavier one. Klavier doesn’t mind. Klavier loves his brother, and he loves to watch his brother play: Kristoph, and the delicate movements of his wrist as he draws the bow; Kristoph, who can stand straight-backed for hours without twitching, and isn’t that wonderful of him.
“That’s my son,” his father says, and smiles at Kristoph.
It later occurs to Klavier that Beethoven died in 1827, over half a century before Germany was unified into a country—that his father was fitting him into an ideal that never really existed—but by then, his father is dead and his mother has moved them to America, and there is nobody to deliver the rebuttal to.
The first time Klavier meets Apollo, the other man looks at him like he’s a god. Words tumble from Klavier’s lips—this is the first time I’ve felt this way with a man. It feels true in the moment. Klavier doesn’t stay long enough for Apollo to get used to him.
Though, as he drives off, wind roaring in his ears, Klavier returns to that moment, turning it over like a stone in his hand. The afternoon sun practically bakes him in his leather. At some point, he connects the man trying to finagle his way into People Park to the antennae-haired apprentice Kristoph offhandedly mentioned once, and who became his eventual downfall. Apollo Justice. Apollo’s gaze was different from his fans’, but Klavier doesn’t bother with the cognitive effort of parsing out why. He’d like to bask beneath other man’s attention again, that’s all.
Klavier’s memories can be divided into a before and an after. The before is muted colors and muted sounds, mock trials and afternoon jam sessions. The after begins with the first flash of the camera in his face; one camera becomes a swarm becomes a cavalcade, and then all his memories are filtered through the curved lens, the cicada-chirp of shutters clicking. Suddenly, Klavier understands light pollution. Who needs constellations when the cameras are bright enough to blind.
“They’re always watching, Klavier,” his agent Marcia says.
“Yes, yes.” Klavier curls a strand of hair around his finger. “I have been on stage, Fraulein Agent. I know the song and dance.”
She gives him a hard look. “Your fans think you’re God’s gift to Earth—”
“This is very astute of them—"
“The awards show isn’t made of your fans. You’re not a garage band anymore. You are going to walk into that auditorium and you are going to be surrounded by people who want to see you fail. They don’t know you and they hate you.”
“Ah,” Klavier says. He’s sixteen. In a few years, he will think sixteen is a dangerously young age to bare yourself for millions of people who think they know you, and he will let himself admit that he should never have made himself so vulnerable at sixteen.
But for now, airlessness is still exhilarating instead of suffocating. A singer Klavier grew up idolizing asks if he wants to feature on his next album. Luxury brands propose endorsement deals. An Oscar-winning actress pinches his cheeks and says, “Sixteen? You’re just a baby.” She whispers her hotel and room number into his ear as she brushes past. It will be years before Klavier realizes how fucked this is.
In the moment, he congratulates himself for achieving the status he’s always dreamed of. Klavier cuts out his magazine covers and pastes them on his walls. Kristoph calls him shallow and self-absorbed. Klavier says thank you for stating the obvious.
Eventually, he gets used to stepping from a limo and into the venue and feeling like he can’t breathe. It’s fine. It’s fine.
It’s easy.
Always stand at the angle your management deemed your best. Flash your practiced smile. Remember the camera adds ten pounds. They’re always watching, Klavier. Look at that pretty actress the wrong way, and social media will erupt. They want you to make a mistake, so don’t give them the satisfaction. One inch to the left, and the photo will come out unflattering; one inch more on your waist and they’ll be blowing up your body on the tabloid front pages speculating about whether you’ve been having too much dessert, whether you’re okay, because they’re very concerned and they care very much.
It’s a double consciousness, the ability to see his body from inside it and outside it at once. It’s only a little bit exhausting.
Klavier takes Apollo to his favorite sushi restaurant for their first date. They laugh over the case they just finished. They point at the window at all the people who aren’t Klavier Gavin and have to wait in line. Klavier remarks on the way Californians take some sick pride in standing in long lines and Apollo retorts: oh, like your fans who line up for hours for your music, which, uh, isn’t even good, by the way. They fight a moderate amount over the bill.
And then, because he doesn’t want the evening to end, because he’s on a date with Apollo Justice and everything is easy and happy and nice for fucking once, Klavier pauses on the balcony of the two-story strip mall and says, “Have you ever been to Wanderlust?”
Apollo joins him, leaning his forearms against the railing. They have a wonderfully romantic view of asphalt and a sunset smudged grey by smog. “Wanderlust is the journey, not the destination, Prosecutor Gavin.”
“I am referring to the ice cream place. They have the most fun flavors; they rotate often, and I hear they are doing white rabbit for the summer,” Klavier says before catching Apollo’s little smirk and realizing the attorney’s pulling his leg. “We can take my car.”
“I have paperwork I told Mr. Wright I would finish by tomorrow.”
“Forehead, even the most economical licking strategies”—here, Apollo mutters only you, Gavin—"cannot make an ice cream last the whole night. We’ll be at Wanderlust half an hour at most. You’ll have time for your very important paperwork.”
“Yes, but Wanderlust is next to an Edwards, and if I agree to Wanderlust, you’ll definitely drag me to a midnight showing of whatever latest horror movie just came out.”
Apollo says it like he’s teasing out a particularly convoluted deduction in the courtroom. Your Honor, the witness intends to lure his date on a nightlong escapade. Klavier is so fond of him.
“You could always say no to Edwards,” Klavier points out. A breeze pulls weakly at his hair, freeing a few strands from the twist.
“You’ll be persistent.”
“Don’t underestimate yourself, Herr Forehead; you can be perfectly obstinate yourself.”
“Yes,” Apollo says, “but I won’t want to be,” and there’s a confession wrapped up in there somewhere.
For his part, it delights Klavier that Apollo thinks of him as the sort of spontaneous person who goes to an ice cream shop and then a movie theater and then maybe a few bars or a romp into fenced-off wilderness until the night is spent. Apollo doesn’t know Klavier as someone who has every minute of every day meticulously planned out for him. Klavier wants to be the person Apollo thinks he is. He’s whimsical! Free-spirited!
He takes Apollo’s hand, tugs. Pink tinges Apollo’s cheeks, impossible to hide beneath the glare of the streetlights.
“Come on,” Klavier says. He’s supposed to be on a crash diet for an upcoming magazine shoot. “Live a little, Forehead.”
It’s his first trial, and he’s nervous.
All eyes on Klavier Gavin, a true thoroughbred in the history of the prosecutor's office. And, the spitting image of the coolest defense in the west.
His eyes someone says. They’re the same blue as his brother’s.
Kristoph has perfect pitch, Klavier remembers suddenly and without cause. Klavier can approximate steps and half steps, but he ultimately needs a tuner; Kristoph can hear any sound—the bang of a fist against the wall, let’s say—and ascertain the precise pitch, and replicate it on the violin.
Klavier offers up this anecdote a lot when he’s asked about natural talent.
He puts on his fuck-you sunglasses, and is it a shame to deprive the world of the stunning blue of his eyes, yeah, but does that get people to stop picking apart all the fascinating ways genetics work, also yeah.
No reason to be nervous. This is a small room full of small people, and Klavier knows how the trial will end. Stand straight. Rile Phoenix Wright up—oh, what righteous anger burns in the attorney, and what an absolute farce, when he has a ticking bomb in his evidence cabinet.
Set the trap, Klavier. Easy, now. Let the bird hop into the cage. The emperor has no clothes.
Two things are true at the same time:
- Klavier Gavin is flamboyant, and dramatic, and full of extraneous gestures. He has stage presence. He takes up space.
- Everything about Klavier Gavin is choreographed.
Klavier picks up Trucy from school because it seems like the kind of thing you do for your boyfriend when his-boss-slash-your-great-prosecutorial-regret is too wrapped up in a case to pick up his-daughter-slash-your-boyfriend’s-sister. He’s chosen his least flashy car for the job, but unfortunately, his least flashy car still has an arm and a leg up over this sea of Civics and Priuses. Kids stare bug-eyed as Trucy prances into his car.
To be honest, Klavier can’t imagine Trucy in the classroom, filing in a neat line for recess or opening a Chromebook to tap out an assignment, especially not in the loud powder blue cape and silk hat she insists on wearing to school.
“You wear chains and flash your stomach in the courtroom,” Trucy says when he comments on this.
“I did my penance—long years of uniforms at Themis, a crime against fashion,” Klavier says gravely. “My extravagance is bought with blood.”
Trucy makes a thoughtful face. “I think we just drove past my favorite donut place.”
Klavier gets the hint and obediently makes a U-turn, cutting off an unsuspecting Subaru and tutting when Trucy sticks her tongue out at the other driver. They pull into the cramped parking lot. Klavier is pretty sure the cars behind them have been following them from the school.
He does an okay parking job. The cars behind him do awful parking jobs.
Trucy makes a thoughtful face when Klavier doesn’t get out of the car. He gestures to the crowd gathering outside the pastels of the donut shop. High school girls—his most ardent fans. Should’ve seen it coming.
“It’s a bit conceited for you to assume they’re here for you,” Trucy tells him as the calls of Kla-vier and omigod and sign my bra! sail through the air.
Her words are unexpected enough to make Klavier break out a grin. “Ach, my apologies—I forget I am in the presence of a world-renowned magician.” He steps from the car, puts on his fuck-you sunglasses like he’s a security guard, and offers her his elbow, which she takes. “Shall we brave the masses of your adoring fans now?”
She nods sagely. “The greatest oreo cronuts require the greatest sacrifices.”
Klavier projects his voice as they near the clot of girls gathered outside SK. “I know you are all excited to meet Trucy Wright, magician extraordinaire, but Fraulein Magician is magnanimous, and she will pose for all your photos, if only you will line up civilly.”
The girls exchange confused looks.
“Plus, Klavier’s buying us all donuts!” Trucy adds, bouncing on her feet when Klavier turns an exasperated gaze on her. But it’s no dent in his wallet, and it’s a bit of a faux pas to deny your boyfriend’s little sister donuts.
They take photos and distribute the goods. If the other girls are bitter about getting a beaming magician girl in their photos with Klavier Gavin, they’re smart enough not to show it. Klavier tries not to look skeptical when Trucy points to a cronut that’s taller than her mouth can stretch, surely. Trucy pulls a dozen box of donuts from her magical panties. Then she makes a girl’s homework disappear. Klavier watches Trucy pose for photos and can’t help but notice she doesn’t favor any angle, her smile is easy and unforced. He’s a little bitter and mostly glad.
Trucy is still dusting cinnamon sugar from her gloves when they get back into the car. “Could you drop me off at the Wonder Bar? I want to do a run-through before next week’s show.”
“I see Herr Wright is an exacting taskmaster.”
Trucy gives him a strange look. “Daddy doesn’t make me practice magic,” she informs him.
“How does he know you are getting better, then?”
“Daddy says better is subjective and I’m already perfect and anybody who criticizes me can go shove their heads into some very unsavory places. He socked an audience member who told me I should dress more like a woman.”
It’s like anvil dropped on Klavier’s ribcage, this truth he knows in theory but stuns him every time he’s confronted by it: Klavier’s childhood wasn’t normal. It’s not normal for a child to wonder their father loves them as a prodigy or as a person. Teenagers are supposed to wheedle their brothers’ boyfriends into buying them ice cream, not study for the bar exam. Some performers have parents who protect them from the harshest aspects of packaging yourself for the consumption of others.
“With that philosophy, it’s no wonder Herr Wright is so immune to improvement at the piano,” Klavier manages. His knuckles whiten against the steering wheel.
Klavier isn’t a perfectionist. He simply isn’t. Perfectionist implies a certain sort of neuroticism. His father was a perfectionist. Kristoph is a perfectionist. Kristoph wages his soft-spoken terrorism on his interns, sending them spiraling over a misplaced line break or slight crease in their shirts. But Klavier—Klavier isn’t like them. Klavier just doesn’t let himself sleep until he can play a song five times through without missing a note, even if it means stumbling into his bed at four in the morning and setting his alarm for two hours later.
And if he snaps when Daryan misses a cue in rehearsal—well, if Daryan practiced as much as Klavier does, he wouldn’t have missed the cue. Daryan should care more. Daryan should care as much as Klavier does, that’s the issue at the meat of this.
“From the top,” Klavier says.
The others groan.
It’s the Gavinners’ first practice since the Wocky Kitaki case; apparently, none of the others thought to practice in his absence. The idea was briefly floated to cancel all remaining tour dates, but Klavier believes too strongly in the social contract between a musician and their fans. So here they are, clock ticking toward midnight, tempers fraying.
Case in point:
“You’re being nitpicky. And for what. I’ve got the song down. You’re just making us miserable,” Daryan says. Klavier and Daryan have been friends for a long time. Klavier thinks it means they understand each other. Daryan thinks it gets him a free pass for mouthing off.
“Then prove me wrong,” Klavier says. “Play the song properly.”
It takes five more run-throughs before he does.
Klavier returns to his room and spends God knows how long in front of the mirror picking out which of his features he got from his father. A knock at the door offers a welcome reprieve, until Klavier calls come in and sees who it is.
“Can we talk?” Daryan says. He’s shirtless, only wearing a pair of loose pants.
Klavier cocks an eyebrow at the other’s dress—lack of dress, really. “Talk, Daryan?”
“Sure.” He pitches his voice in what is supposed to be an imitation of Klavier’s suave one, immediately validating the decision to make Klavier the face of the group: “Please, oh please, Daryan, won’t you suck me off, baby—that’s talking.”
Moonlight strains through the curtains, licking silver down Daryan’s form as he slinks catlike across the room. Klavier pats the space beside him, but Daryan doesn’t sit. Prefers to tower over Klavier, all bluster and shoulders spread just a degree too wide to be believable.
You’re so full of shit Klavier thinks impassively, looking up at Daryan through the sweep of his lashes. Perhaps it is because he has just gotten off a 3-day trial with an attorney who meticulously scraped the dirt out of every piece of evidence and well and truly surprised Klavier; Klavier had almost forgotten what earnestness tastes like, but God, he loves the flavor, and he doesn’t want to return to stomaching Daryan’s too-cool-to-try routine.
“You’re not angry about rehearsal?” Klavier drawls. He leans back into the silken sheets when Daryan plants his hand on either side of him, caging Klavier with his body. They’re almost chest to chest, Daryan pretty much in Klavier’s lap. Sticky memories of warm hands, fervent kisses, slick bodies pressed together—in London, in Bangkok, in Lima—hum between them, electric as any of their concerts. Low moans, smiles smothered in shadow.
Klavier and Daryan have been friends for a long time.
Daryan feathers kisses against Klavier’s collarbone. “I can separate the music from my personal life.”
Klavier doesn’t bristle at the accusation. Klavier is Prosecutor Gavin is Klavier Gavin, rock god. “You must be very proud of yourself,” he murmurs, making obligatory appreciative noises as Daryan drags his mouth down his chest.
“Don’t take that tone with me.” Daryan rips Klavier’s shirt open, and then it’s soft lips, hard abdomen. Klavier remembers liking when Daryan did this in Paris. “Not when I know how you sound when I’ve got you on your knees. Begging, Gavin.”
Klaver briefly mulls over the implication of this statement, that Daryan has catalogued every sound Klavier has ever made for later reference. Klavier should be more careful about that.
“And if I beg you to become a better guitarist?” he snips, vaguely aware he’s being dragged down to Daryan’s level.
“I’m a good enough guitarist.”
Klavier wants to slough off every inch of skin Daryan has ever touched until he’s raw and bleeding out. He straightens, shakes Daryan off of him, the other making a noise like a disgruntled cat.
“What the fuck, Gavin.”
Klavier tilts his head up; a strand of hair falls from his eyes. He must look a mess, shirt halfway unbuttoned, hair halfway to sex-wild. “You changed your cologne since we returned to LA. It is giving me a headache.”
Which is true. He probably still would’ve fucked Daryan if the other hadn’t made such a mess of rehearsal. Daryan has known him long enough to deduce this. They understand each other. It doesn’t mean they agree.
“You’re so fucking neurotic, has anyone ever told you that?”
“Many people would’ve commented on the cologne. It’s pungent.”
“You know what I’m talking about. There’s something, like, pathologically wrong with you, Gavin. We were up until 3 am because you couldn’t get over one note. You get mad at us because we can’t keep up with your neurotic perfectionism—but who would want to? You’re obsessed with making yourself miserable.”
Not really. Kristoph said Klavier was inattentive and a bit sloppy, and for all his faults, Kristoph was better at assessing reality than Daryan will ever be. He was right, in any case. Klavier cares about seeing things done thoroughly and well, but that’s a conscious effort, not like Kristoph’s natural perfectionism. The egg that become Kristoph probably did a perfect somersault down the Fallopian tubes to the ovaries.
Still lazily propped up on his elbows, Klavier watches Daryan take a meandering path to the door. He’s giving Klavier time to change his mind, say I was wrong, I’m so sorry baby, won’t you stay?
“I hope this won’t affect your music,” Klavier says, because if he’s going to be a little shit, might as well commit to it.
“Fuck you, Gavin.”
Still, Daryan lingers a moment in the doorway, backlit by the cheerful hallway lights. Something hardens in his gaze. Some decision calcifies. Klavier can’t bring himself to care. As long as Daryan gets on that stage tomorrow night and plays, he can go fuck himself however he wants.
Klavier is in his dressing room when he gets the news that Kristoph has been arrested for murder. He stares at his phone. The openers’ good-but-not-quite-there-yet music leaks in through the speakers. Unreality washes over him. He’s not sure it ever washes off.
He sends a message to his agent, because they should get a jump on the press. Marcia says she’s handling it.
Don’t worry about it she texts. Just go give your fans a show. You’ll be on the Jumbotron soon. Get that smile on.
A stagehand pokes his head into the dressing room. “Five minutes,” he says.
Apollo is a night person. Klavier is a morning person and a night person.
“You can’t be both,” Apollo says, exasperated.
“I do my prosecutorial work in the morning,” Klavier says, “and in the evening, I become Klavier Gavin, rock god.”
He winks. Apollo scoffs, but ah, there it is—the slight upward quirk of his lips. He’s charmed.
The attorney crosses the room to where Klavier hunches over his guitar. Klavier tilts his head up to meet Apollo’s eyes, delighted when the latter’s gaze flicks to the delicate columns of his throat, his cheeks flushing a lovely color to match his firetruck red sweater. Klavier wants to ravish him.
“You can’t keep doing this,” Apollo says, his hands finding Klavier’s shoulders, kneading, relieving the tension there. “Also, you’re implying that morning sex is with Prosecutor Gavin and evening sex is with”—he sounds like he can’t believe he has to say this—“Klavier Gavin, rock god.”
Klavier murmurs his thanks, leaning into Apollo’s touch. It’s heavenly. He wants it to last forever. “Some would say you’re getting a bargain deal.” He makes a low noise when Apollo loosens a particularly stubborn knot. “Does it bother you?”
Not taking the bait, Apollo says, “The not sleeping of it all, yeah.”
Klavier’s first instinct is to put on a smile, make a joke of it. Something like: Klavier finds that the less sleep he gets, the more time he gets to do everything else, funny how that works. Morning prosecutor, evening rock god—never formally arranged.
It’s a hard instinct to kick, the kneejerk reaction to cross one’s arms and say yes I can just because someone says no you can’t. But Apollo is not an older brother taunting Klavier that he can’t do both. Apollo is concerned for him. Klavier has come so far to earn that concern, and he doesn’t want to waste it. More than that, Apollo deserves a boyfriend who is not dependent on coffee to have their morning routine over eggs Apollo that scrambles and toast that Klavier proudly toasts.
So Klavier nods. He will ask Herr Edgeworth for less cases. He will tell his agent he wants more time in between album cycles. He will do his world stadium tours, and he will take four-month vacations when he’s finished.
Apollo loops his arms around Klavier, hooking his chin over Klavier’s shoulder, a reassuring, grounding weight. “Thank you,” Apollo says.
Klavier sets his guitar back in its case and makes some innuendo about what they should do with all the time they’ve left in the night. Apollo’s fingers are already at the buttons of his silk shirt, his mouth sucking a bruise over Klavier’s pulse point. Klavier leans into him.
Klavier is hooked onto a lie detector machine and has been in this business long enough not to look directly at the camera pointed at him.
“Ach, if these sorts of devices actually worked, we’d have long implemented them in the courtroom. Imagine, lie detectors hooked onto witnesses and defendants—I would be out of a job!”
“You’re avoiding the question.”
He flashes his megawatt smile. “Remind me, Fraulein Interviewer?”
“Who are your songs written for?”
Klavier pushes down his emotions beneath a dark tide; the clip attached to his finger and the cameras tracking his eye movements transmit his every heartbeat and fidget for the perusal of some faceless stranger in another room. And from there, his biometric data will be available to everyone with access to the internet and the faintest inclination to click on a Klavier Gavin Takes a Lie Detector Test video.
The walls of the room are grey and flat like a prison cell.
Kristoph could probably get away with lying here. Unfortunately, Klavier is not a psychopath goatfucker bitch, so he must be creative. “My first love is the law. All my songs come from that love.”
“He’s telling the truth,” comes a discombobulated voice from a separate room.
“After you launched your solo career,” the interviewer says, “critics have noted that your songs have matured in sound and content. You recently won your first Grammy for songwriting, a category long thought unobtainable for you. Does that mean you’ve found a love other than the law?”
Klavier moves to snap his fingers before remembering they’re hooked up to the machine. “Perhaps the root of the issue is that boy bands are continuously discredited by the critical sphere due to the historic sexism that pervades our industry. Grown men love to hate what teenage girls love, ja?”
“Answer the question.”
Klavier hates lie detectors. Why couldn’t this be Klavier Gavin ranks his favorite German snacks, or a talk show where all the questions are pre vetted by his agent. “I do not believe my songs have come from a new place since the launch of my solo career.”
“He’s lying.”
Fuck.
Klavier pretends surprise. “Your machine knows me better than I know myself, Fraulein Interviewer. Perhaps you could call it the Gavin Whisperer and sell it for millions.”
She’s unimpressed. “Give it another go, then.”
Another chance at life! “My inspiration has and will always come from the law. The courtroom is the most fruitful venue for romance, ja?”
“…He’s telling the truth,” comes the voice from outside.
“How,” the interviewer says.
Klavier gives an enigmatic smile.
Here are two things that are true about Apollo Justice:
- Apollo has never, not once in his life, restricted the way he moves through space. Hasn’t even thought to consider it.
- Klavier loves him for this.
Apollo touches Klavier so easily, without inhibition. It makes Klavier feel bad sometimes that he isn’t the same, that he can’t stop himself from scanning for cameras, running over a mental checklist—who’s around to see, they’re always watching, Klavier, you don’t want Apollo or any of these people you’ve come to love to know how fame rots you from the inside while you beg for more, you don’t want to ruin the one good thing you have.
Stand, Klavier. Breathe, Klavier.
It's their apartment-warming party. Apollo’s hand rests on Klavier’s back. Klavier has an arm around Apollo’s shoulders. The band on his ring finger glitters in the light of the expensive chandelier that Apollo called a waste of money and Klavier called a necessity not of the body but of the spirit, which Apollo called, to quote, “bullshit.”
By now the courtesy callers and obligatory invites have trickled out. Only their tight knot of coworkers-turned-family-by-nightmarishly-hellish-circumstances remains as the clock edges past midnight. Cards from three different games splay across the table. Nobody can remember whose cup is whose.
They’ve migrated to the couches, where Herr Edgeworth and Herr Wright sit close enough to brush shoulders and Trucy is demonstrating a new trick with a resigned Mikeko while Ema and Athena clap and call for an encore. Blackquill is feeding Taka and cheerfully ignoring Apollo’s pleas to please do not get mouse blood on our new carpets.
The evening is imbued with all the fizz and pleasant chumminess of champagne, but if you concentrate, there’s a thin, desperate string knitting them together, a desire to stretch this night as long as it can go, because time has marched them past the nexus that brought them together and now one of them always needs to consult for the courts in another country or another of them always manages to get falsely accused of another crime—or, the most shocking one yet, Trucy lives on the east coast for college now—and now they are never all together unless they have a reason to be. Klavier knows he can’t close his fist around it, but he wants to, and maybe that’s the melancholy of finding something worth holding onto.
“So, what’s the musical going to be about?” Ema asks him, wine-drunk and jet-lagged. “There’s already a musical about a blonde fop who scams their way through law school and infects the law with their glimmerousness.”
“Ema, I think you took the wrong message away from Legally Blonde,” Apollo says.
“I have been thinking that I could write an electropop rock retelling of the life and fall of Icarus,” Klavier says.
“And I already told you that if you do that, I am going to kill you,” Apollo says. His fingers are drawing absent patterns across Klavier’s back.
Marcia had pushed back a little when Klavier mentioned taking a break from the album cycles to write a musical, a career move allegedly only a last resort of washed-up has-beens, popstars openly salivating over an EGOT, and Max Martin. Klavier, for all his virtues, is no Max Martin.
You have momentum right now, Marcia had said. This could kill your momentum.
Momentum is such a funny thing. The reward of running fast is running faster. On and on.
“Perhaps the stage will one day call to me again, ja?” he’d told a reporter asking about a comeback on the red carpet premier for the Steel Samurai movie, which he’d only attended as a favor to his boss. “But I am building something right now.”
Nowadays, Klavier, for the most part, only sees cameras when he invites them in: when he calls the paps on himself (he puts too much effort into some outfits for them not to be memorialized on cover pages) or his boss begs to be his date for a movie premier he has definitely not been petitioning for for years. He still freezes when he hears the shutter-click. The savage thrill of being seen still licks over him every time.
But time to stop dwelling on the past. He is with people he loves. Sink into the moment, then: Apollo’s easy caresses, Athena saying, “You know, I wouldn’t mind an ode to the sun god.”
She kicks Apollo in the shin, in case he didn’t get it.
As Klavier’s poor fiancé makes a wounded-cat noise, Ema yawns, “Easy for you to say; you don’t work at the prosecutor’s office, you won’t have to hear the glimmerous fop wax our ears off about how his lover is so blinding—"
Klavier protests, “My room is soundproofed—”
“Gavin-dono gets a soundproofed office?”
“I allocate the acoustic adjustments at my own discretion, Simon. My ears are quite sensitive, and—"
“Not true, you asked Daddy to play you that song from the Steel Samurai confession scene last night and you said it was so good too—”
“Trucy, were you pretending to be asleep—"
“Wait, Mr. Wright, is that what you were trying to play when I came in—"
“And why were you sneaking into the Anything Agency at 3 am with a bra hooked around your fingers and smelling of another woman’s perfume!”
All eyes on Apollo. The room would pretty ubiquitously bet on the heat death of the universe before Apollo cheating, but it’s a room full of attorneys and prosecutors with at least four truth-telling devices—and three bottles of wine gone between them—and they do so like an obvious conclusion that is not the conclusion at all. Trucy presses the witness metaphorically and also literally, beneath a couch cushion, and there are tears as Herr Edgeworth attempts to fish his it’s-complicated-friend from beneath the plush mountain.
Champagne, bubbly and warming.
But all nights must end. Everybody promises to do this again soon, and they mean it, they really do, but they all know it’ll be another few months to a year before they claw out another chance. Klavier gets a conked-out Ema settled in the guest room—that Khura’in time difference hits like a boulder now that they’re older—while Apollo walks the others down.
Klavier catches Apollo coming back up the stairs, Apollo pausing with his hand on the banister, Klavier looking at Apollo cast in the cheap stairwell light.
Klavier leans against the banister. “Did everybody make it into the right cars?”
“I called an Uber for Athena and Simon—that samurai is heavy when he’s got a few glasses in him. And Edgeworth tried to pretend he wasn’t leaving with Mr. Wright.”
“Do they believe the rest of us daft?”
“I think they get off on it, honestly.”
A pause. Klavier smiling down at Apollo, Apollo smiling up at Klavier, well-worn affection.
Klavier says, “Aren’t you glad we bought the chandelier?”
Apollo rolls his eyes.
Then it’s 4 am and they’ve fished out all the plastic cups from beneath the couch and sorted the cards back into their respective decks and thank God they’ll never have to host another apartment warming, they’re so tired they could sleep until next year, what do you mean the wedding will be worse. This is more work than a show, Klavier complains.
It’s a pleasant, domestic tiredness, though, the sort that comes with liking someone for their brilliant deductions, their witty back-and-forths—and also the quiet that settles in between, the stillness before the breeze picks up again. The world is knowable here.
Now, the noise of plastic crinkling, cardboard torn open. Klavier is tying up trash bags and Apollo is trying to figure out if they can make frozen pizza in the air fryer because someone deployed Mr. Hat too close to the oven—the new oven!—and the glass shattered.
Apollo finally figures out the air fryer, then bursts out: “I mean, I just don’t understand how she thinks Reese Witherspoon was in the wrong in Legally Blonde.” It’s the third time he’s said this since the party disbanded.
A smile breaks across Klavier’s face, spontaneous and unchoreographed. He takes the unevenly heated pizza Apollo offers him. “You are my favorite person in the world, you know.”
Klavier is trying to explain to his brother that it wasn’t Klavier’s fault he didn’t ace the mock trial tryouts, the teacher was being a hardass, Klavier doesn’t stutter under pressure.
“You twist your ring,” Kristoph says, “when you’re nervous.”
It is said with concern. Kristoph is the only one who concerns themselves with Klavier these days. Their mother gave up on being a mother a long time ago.
Klavier frowns. “Well, you should not have told me. Now I will stop, and you will not be able to tell when I am nervous.”
“I can perceive all your tells, Klavier. You cannot hide from your brother.”
Some part of Klavier is pleased. Kristoph cares enough to notice. Maybe it is a good, heady, thrilling, intoxicating thing, to be watched. To arrange yourself into a collection of your best parts and then be seen exactly as you want to be seen.
Klavier’s next instinct is to frown, because some part of that makes him sad. But frowning is a tell. He’s suddenly hyperaware of his body, every movement it might make to alert Kristoph to his swirl of emotions that should be only his. He tries to sit perfectly still. It makes Kristoph smile.
So, once more, with feeling:
When Apollo tells him about the bracelet, Klavier thinks of cameras, of lie-detector machines, of Kristoph; he says would it be too much trouble for you to take it off when we are together and braces for the explanation he will inevitably have to give.
But Apollo—Apollo says, “Sure, Klav.” And he slides the bracelet from his wrist.