Work Text:
The library had a smell that Kristoph Gavin found almost meditative—old paper, lemon polish, the faint ink of the circulation desk's ancient date stamp that the head librarian refused to replace. It was a modest building. Two floors, a reading room with south-facing windows, and a law section that ran all of nine shelves. Kristoph knew it better than the reference cards did.
He shelved Federal Procedure, Vol. III with care, settling into the rhythm of the work. How people failed to find books when they were this well organized was beyond him.
"Mr. Gavin?"
He turned. Mrs. O'Wisp, the head librarian, hovered with a stack of returns and the same apologetic smile she always wore when asking him to do anything, as if a former attorney might take offense at being asked to tape a spine.
"The genealogy group's in the reading room again," she said. "They've got a question about probate. I told them you'd know better than I would."
"I'll be along in a moment." He took the returns from her. She left looking relieved, and Kristoph allowed himself the smallest private thing—the way his chest eased when someone needed him for something. Three years of a cell had taught him the texture of being useless, and the library had given that back to him in increments. A question about probate. A high school student's citation format. It was enough.
He was halfway through organizing the returns on his cart when the front door chimed and someone entered with the harried energy of a person who had a deadline and no money.
Kristoph didn't look up. He didn't need to. The footsteps were brisk, the breathing slightly too fast, and the soft thump of a satchel landing on the study table by the law section told Kristoph that its owner had already decided he'd be here a while.
But the voice—that he knew.
"Excuse me, do you have a copy of Turnabout and Precedent? The agency's, uh, ours, we don't—"
The voice stopped.
Kristoph looked up.
Apollo Justice stood at the end of the shelf, red suit slightly rumpled, the two horns of his hair crooked, and his face cycling through something complicated—recognition, guilt, a flush climbing from his collar that he clearly couldn't stop.
"Mr. Gavin," he said. Then, quickly: "Hi. Hello. I didn't know you—I mean, I knew you were—I heard you were in town, but I didn't know you worked here—"
"I volunteer," Kristoph said. The correction was automatic, gentle. "Good afternoon, Justice."
It became a habit within a month.
Not on purpose. Apollo simply needed the law section—the Agency's own shelf was a scattering of dog-eared paperbacks and whatever Mr. Wright had failed to return—and the library was the only place within walking distance that held a current reporter. So he came. Twice a week, then three times. And every time, Kristoph was there, in his shirtsleeves with the cuffs rolled, reshelving or processing returns or sitting at a table with a student bent over a research paper.
At first Apollo avoided him. He'd nod, take his books to the far table, and read with his back to the circulation desk.
But the far table was drafty. And the desk closer to the front had a better lamp.
The first time he sat down across from Kristoph, neither of them said anything for forty minutes. Then Kristoph slid a bookmark—a real one, leather, because of course—across the table and said, "Your page is dog-eared, Justice. It offends me."
Apollo laughed before he could stop himself. "You're volunteering at a library and you brought your own bookmarks."
"I am a man of standards."
"You're a man of something," Apollo said, and the joke landed softer than he meant it to, and they both looked at the table.
They talked, after that. Not about the trial, not at first. About books, about the students Kristoph was tutoring (a girl named Allie who wanted to be a prosecutor; a boy named Bert who could not grasp torts and whom Kristoph found, in his own words, "an instructive challenge"). About Apollo's cases, which he recounted in defensive detail, as if Kristoph might grade them.
Kristoph listened the way he always had—completely, with his chin on his knuckles, his eyes steady. It was the thing Apollo had forgotten, and remembered with a jolt the first time it happened: how seen it felt to be listened to by Kristoph Gavin. How you wanted, badly, to be worthy of that attention.
"The cross-examination was sloppy," Kristoph said about one. "You let him lead you into the alibi before you'd shaken the witness's timeline. If he'd been competent, you'd have lost."
"I won."
"You won," Kristoph agreed. "It doesn't mean it was good."
Apollo opened his mouth to argue, and found he couldn't, and sank back. "It wasn't good," he admitted.
"Next time it will be." Kristoph turned a page. "You've a fine instinct, Justice. But instinct is only half. The other half is discipline, and discipline can be taught." A pause. "It could be taught."
Apollo looked at him for a long moment. It could be taught. It could be taught.
The guilt came out on a Thursday.
Rain on the windows, the library nearly empty, Kristoph at the desk with a stack of catalog cards he was rewriting by hand because the new system was, in his assessment, "a crime." Apollo had been pretending to read for twenty minutes when he finally set the book down and said it, flat and fast, the way you pulled off a bandage.
"I'm sorry."
Kristoph's pen stopped.
"For the Shadi Smith trial. For—" Apollo's hands fisted on the table. "For accusing you. I sat there, and I perceived you, and I was so sure, and I put you in prison for three years when it was Gramarye the whole time, and you'd trained me, you'd given me everything, and I—"
"Justice." Kristoph set the pen down. "Look at me."
Apollo looked up. His eyes were bright and awful.
"Did you imagine you were wrong?"
"...What?"
"You perceived a tell," Kristoph said. "You had a man dead in a room the defendant had left, and a mentor who lied about where he'd been. You had a bloody ace. You had everything a reasonable attorney needs. You acted on it." He tilted his head. "You were right about the facts you saw. You were simply wrong about what they meant. Do you understand the difference?"
"It's the same thing."
"It is not remotely the same thing." Kristoph's voice sharpened, then eased. "A man who accuses on no evidence is careless. A man who accuses on the evidence he has, and is wrong, is merely early. You were early, Apollo."
The name landed. Apollo had noticed Kristoph said Justice like armor, and Apollo like something he held close. He noticed it every time. He noticed it now.
"Gramarye framed Wright, and Wright spun it around on you," Apollo said. "He used the way I see. He knew I'd perceive you and run with it."
"Yes."
"And you don't—you don't blame me?"
Kristoph was quiet. Rain moved down the window.
"I spent three years," he said at last, "deciding whom to blame. I blamed Wright, of course. I blamed Gramarye. I blamed myself, which was the most destructive of the three." He looked at Apollo, and something in his face went unguarded in a way Apollo had never seen in all the years he'd known him. "And then I decided it was a waste of time. You were someone I taught. You grew. The question was never whether you'd made a mistake. It was whether you'd learn from it."
"Have I?"
"You're here."
Apollo made a sound that was almost a laugh and pressed the heel of his hand against his eye. "That's—you're doing that thing where you make everything sound reasonable."
"Because most things are."
"You're not, though." Apollo dropped his hand. "Reasonable. You never were."
Kristoph smiled—rare, small, real. "No," he agreed. "Perhaps not."
After that the far table stopped existing. Apollo sat at the desk, or beside it, and Kristoph began to leave the good lamp on, angled toward the chair he'd decided was Apollo's without ever saying so.
They fell into it like a habit. Apollo brought coffee; Kristoph drank it black and complained about it. Kristoph set aside the books he thought Apollo would need before Apollo knew he'd need them, and left them at the end of the shelf, spine-out, waiting. Some nights Apollo stayed until closing and walked Kristoph to the bus, and they stood in the dark under the awning and talked about nothing—about Allie's mock trial, about the way the pigeons had declared war on the prosecutor's office, about anything that let them both stand close in the cold.
It was Klavier who noticed first, because Klavier noticed everything and had the tact to say nothing for exactly two weeks before he didn't.
"You're glowing, Bruder," he said one evening, sprawled on the couch while Kristoph made tea. "It is genuinely disconcerting."
"I do not glow."
"You do, and you are." Klavier watched him over the rim of his mug. "Herr Justice comes to the library quite often, ja? For a man who has his own office."
"He needs the reporter."
"He needs something," Klavier said, grinning, and Kristoph elected not to answer.
It happened on a night in November, after the library had closed. Apollo had stayed to help Kristoph reshelve and they'd gotten to arguing—properly arguing, the way they used to—about whether a precedent had been correctly applied in a case Apollo was working, and Kristoph had said something cutting and precise and right, and Apollo had felt the old familiar heat of being out-thought and out-argued and, underneath it, the older, stranger heat of wanting to be.
"You're impossible," Apollo said.
"You're repeating yourself."
"You're—" Apollo stepped forward, into the space he'd been circling for months, and Kristoph went still.
"You're going to do something rash," Kristoph observed. His voice had dropped. "You always telegraph it."
"I don't."
"You do. Your left hand."
Apollo's left hand had, in fact, curled into the front of Kristoph's shirt.
"Fine," he said. "Then stop me."
Kristoph didn't stop him.
The kiss was quiet and unhurried and certain, the way Kristoph did everything, and it tasted faintly of the terrible library coffee, and when they pulled apart Apollo's hands were shaking and Kristoph's were—for the first time Apollo had ever seen—not quite steady.
"You were my mentor," Apollo managed.
"I was."
"You went to prison because of me."
"I did."
"You—" Apollo's voice cracked. "You came back. To me."
Kristoph lifted one hand and set it, cool and soft, against Apollo's jaw, and looked at him for a long moment with that terrible, complete attention.
"Where else," he said, "was I going to go?"
They took it slow, because Kristoph took everything slowly, and because Apollo had spent three years learning to be careful with this man and wasn't about to stop. Kristoph's assets came through in January and he could have moved out of Klavier's apartment, put an offer on a house, begun rebuilding his old life—and yet he stayed another six months, because the library needed its law section and Allie was applying to Themis in the spring and Bert still did not understand torts and, anyway, someone had to leave the good lamp on.
Apollo came to the library every Tuesday and Thursday and most Saturdays.
He never stopped needing the reporter.
He just stopped needing it as an excuse.