They burst through the door side-by-side and as soon as Apollo has it shut behind them, Klavier feels for the first time as if he can feel his feet underneath him. Which is good; it’s an improvement from what he was feeling before. But it still doesn’t fix the larger, more pressing problem, which is his current difficulty breathing.
He puts his hands on his waist. His shoulders rise and fall and rise and fall.
He stares at the living room area of his home. Thankfully, even after being kidnapped, beaten up, and brazenly rescued, it seems nothing of note has changed. This is still his place, only filled with shadow. He has yet to turn the lights on, but he knows where everything is. Here, at least, things are familiar. Here, at least, he is in a place he has known inside and out better than he knows himself and—
“—Klavier, can I get you anything?”
Klavier spins around and doesn’t know what he should say because half of him doesn’t know what he is looking at anymore.
It should hurt. He has been betrayed before by secrets. He has been hurt before by the not-knowing and the deliberate hiding-of-things. But somehow, this feels different. Somehow, this doesn’t feel malicious.
Is he mad? Angry? Hurt? Bewildered?
Perhaps none so much as speechless and that leaves the room in tense silence.
The crime scene at the ruins of the bank is as frigid and cold inside as it is beyond the crumbling walls. Klavier shivers and shudders underneath his heavy coat and scarf and mittens, cradling a cup of hastily bought Starbucks he successfully nagged Detective Skye into purchasing for him, and wonders why and when and how he became the unlucky sod saddled with prosecuting this particular robbery.
And then he sees the flash of red poking around among the rubble and remembers that it was he who begged to be let on to the case and why. He scurries over.
“Why, Herr Forehead! Are you not cold?”
Apollo jerks upright. He blinks at Klavier, both of his angular eyebrows high on his broad namesake. At first, his eyes skirt around Klavier and all of the detectives still pouring over the wreckage, but then he looks to Klavier again. Some of the tension in his small form ebbs.
“Ah,” he says, somehow not shivering in the middle of January in only a windbreaker. “No, I’m fine.”
“Yeah, Polly’s like a walking heat generator!”
Out of nowhere, as if it were one of her signature magic tricks, Trucy Wright appears and tackles Apollo from behind with a giant hug. Both of her arms wrap snugly around his middle. Apollo squawks.
Klavier is so very, very fond.
“Is he, now?” Klavier hums and flicks his eyes between the two. He enjoys perhaps all too well the way Trucy grins with her cheek pressed against Apollo’s side under his arm and conversely, how mollified this makes Apollo—as he always is at the slightest gift (inconvenience?) of physical affection.
“Mm-hmm!” Trucy rubs her cheek against Apollo’s side.
Apollo’s face tomatoes further. “Trucy, stop that!”
“Oh, now I simply have to see this for myself,” Klavier says and takes a teasing step forward because he can’t resist. Immediately, Apollo shrieks just as loudly as Klavier was hoping he would.
“I’m normal! I’m FINE! Would you guys cut this out, already! I’m not that hot!”
“Oh ho ho ho ho!” Klavier laughs at the same time as Trucy, but for entirely different reasons. “Are you sure about that? Some of us would beg to differ here, Herr Forehead.”
“You, shut it,” Apollo says and points at him, as red as his dress pants.
Trucy releases Apollo to cover her mouth with a gloved hand and gives a great big, extended, “OHHHHHHH” that perfectly illustrates how very much still in high school the young magician is. Apollo spins on her, shrieking, “That wasn’t an insult!” “What, your boyfriend’s hitting on you! Can’t I be happy for you, Polly?” “Is that what actually being happy for me sounds like? I couldn’t tell,” and Klavier begins laughing all over again. The steam from his coffee wafts up his face and into the chilly winter air.
After a moment, Apollo sighs and turns to Klavier. “I bet you can’t tell me anything about what your guys might have found, huh?”
Klavier hums and pops his lips, considering the question. His eyes drop to the white lid over his coffee. “Unfortunately, schatz, I’m afraid not. As usual, you will have to do your own sleuthing here and there.”
“I figured as much.”
“But.” Klavier tilts his head to the side and spins his cup side to side between his moving palms. Round and around and around it goes. The steam curls upward like a baton ribbon. “I will say this: I do find it strange that the police have arrested who they have on account of the bank robbery.”
That makes Apollo and Trucy blink.
Apollo frowns. “What do you mean by that?”
Trucy elbows Apollo in the side. “He means our client probably didn’t do it, Polly! Even Prosecutor Gavin agrees that Mr. Taketo’s innocent!”
“Yeah. I kind of figured that, Trucy.”
Trucy rolls her eyes.
Apollo turns to Klavier and frowns. “What I’m curious about is why. You must know something if you’re able to decide already that your case isn’t a good one. Can’t you just release the defendant if you’re struggling to convict him?”
Klavier sighs. “I’m afraid you’ll find out well enough tomorrow, mein schatz. And that’s all I am at liberty to say on the matter, most regrettably.”
Apollo frowns and grudgingly nods.
Like most things in his life, Klavier had heard about Apollo Justice before he met him.
In the few, infrequent correspondences with his brother that he had every other week—usually for polite appearances and the occasional, “How goes things in LA, brother dearest?” only to be answered with, “Fine, Klavier. And the performances of your small garage band?”—he was told about the new intern. Kristoph’s intern who didn’t know how to dress properly in order to impress a client before he opened his mouth; an intern so green-horned and eager to please that it only somewhat made up for whatever behavioral deficiencies he had.
Was it strange, even across the world, to feel for someone he had never met?
Klavier would read the brief descriptions sent along by his brother, only to be reminded of polished, trimmed, painted fingernails digging into his shoulder and heated words hissed into his ear and sometimes he wondered if he should pity the boy his brother decided to take on as an apprentice.
Then, of course, the day came in which Klavier received the news that Kristoph was arrested, allegedly guilty of murder, and the one who pointed it out was Kristoph’s very same intern, student, and disciple: Apollo Justice.
And Klavier knew, before he even finished reading the news—because apparently the dogsitter was more important to be the recipient of Kristoph’s “one and only phone call” instead of his flesh-and-blood brother—that he must do everything possible to meet this little, unassuming defense attorney who Kristoph had always spoken so irreverently of.
Klavier noticed it the instant he met the young man outside of People Park: the slightly off, slightly unreal quality that surrounded Apollo Justice, who is as handsome and arresting as he is a bit unnerving with that fierce, unwavering stare.
This was the one who unmasked Kristoph after knowing him for merely a year or two.
Incredible.
After their initial meeting, Klavier couldn’t stop thinking about him. Maybe it had something to do with the strange prongs of Apollo’s bangs. Maybe it had something to do with his unyielding, hard eyes that made you feel like they were seeing right through you. Maybe it was the determined line of his mouth and shoulders, or in the way his courage and bolster seem endless, no matter the circumstances and hardships that rise against him.
Maybe it was in the fact that even from across the courtroom, as they handled case after case together, Klavier finally felt relief in finding someone else besides himself who was so keen and intent on finding the truth first to administer justice.
There was something strange about Apollo Justice.
Klavier began to think he might have a crush.
The moment Klavier Gavin finally asked out Apollo Justice—later, far later, one day in mid-December a scattering of weeks after everything had fallen apart and Klavier could begin to think about picking the remains of himself back up again—because that’s what you do after hardship, he told himself; you hurt and you hurt and you hurt and then and eventually and somehow you realize that you have to keep going—Apollo’s face did something funny the prosecutor had never seen it do before. It pinkened and twisted; a thousand and one different emotions seeming to pass over his face and die away in the same instant and Klavier, not for the first time, wondered what was going on beyond that broad forehead of his.
Apollo turned away and cleared his throat. When he spoke, he had a funny little rasp stuck in his throat. “What, as in, like—like a date?”
Klavier’s heart pounded a mile a minute, but he kept his cool. He kept himself calm. Composed. He chuckled and ran a hand through his bangs. “I think that’s what most people mean when they ask someone they are very much interested in to dinner, ja.”
“Wait. You’re interested in me?”
“Well, I was hoping that’d be obvious with all of my attempts at flirtation, but alas, it seems you are impervious to my charms.”
“No, no, it’s just—” There it was: the red, red face that Klavier was half-expecting, half-hoping for. Apollo looked at him and looked away and then back again. He curled a hand in front of his mouth. “—I mean, I—I wouldn’t say they haven’t been working. It’s just…um…”
Ah.
Perhaps Klavier had misjudged.
“If you are already taken, Herr Forehead, you needn’t fret for my hurt feelings—”
“—what?! No! No, I’m not—I’m not seeing anyone! I haven’t—” Apollo shook his head. For some reason, he was having a very difficult time looking at Klavier. “I haven’t been seeing anyone in quite some time. Um.”
Klavier’s heart stupidly took a running jump. It flipped over. Made him forget how to breathe as it dove into a pool of joy. “So is that a yes?”
Apollo flicked a glance to him. For a moment, those brown eyes glimmered near-golden, bronze-like, and for some reason, it made Klavier think of ancient, ageless things that are beyond earthly value.
“Yeah,” Apollo rasped and grinned. “Yeah, I think it is.”
The bank robbery case is somehow extended to a second day. Klavier would say he can’t quite believe it, but he himself was the one who argued for the extension after the questions both he and Apollo brought to light from their opposite sides of the courtroom. Did the van crash into the building and destroy the eastward wall on purpose? Was it by accident? With the driver unconscious at Hickfield, there was no way of telling if that individual had been in on the heist or not yet. More time, please; thank you, Herr Judge.
The two stand shoulder-to-shoulder on the steps of the courthouse now as Klavier breathes warm air into his hands, sorely wishing he had brought his mittens.
“Cold?”
Klavier looks down to Apollo. He cracks a small smile and chuckles through another shiver. “Not all of us are so blessed as to be—ah, how did the little Fraulein word it?— walking heat generators.”
Apollo rolls his eyes. “Trucy exaggerates.”
“Does she? What a pity. I could use a walking heat generator for a boyfriend right about now.”
It’s always the tips of Apollo’s ears that flush first. Klavier loves it, he loves everything about how reactive and responsive Apollo is to the slightest of things. After a moment, Apollo finally sighs and turns around, holding out his hands. “All right, all right, fine. Here,” he says and Klavier gives a happy, pleased hiss of, “Yes!” as he snatches up Apollo’s hands in his own.
The warmth—the relief of it—is instantaneous.
“Ah. Wow.” Klavier blinks and looks at their overlapping hands. “You were completely wrong, Herr Forehead.”
“What? About what?”
“The little Fraulein wasn’t exaggerating. You truly are a furnace.”
Apollo makes a grand, dramatic show of rolling his eyes. “Well, does it help?”
“Very much.” Klavier grins and turns his face. He leans closer to rest his cheek on top of Apollo’s head and enjoys the quiet noise of surprise Apollo makes under him. Somehow, almost impossibly enough, Apollo is warm on the crown of his head, too, and Klavier takes great delight in stealing as much of that heat as he can. “Danke, mein schatzi.”
“You’re welcome,” Apollo grumbles. No doubt red again.
Klavier sighs happily. He turns his face over so that his other cheek can receive the blessing of a little warmth on this cold January day and hums, “I have the best boyfriend in the world.”
Apollo falls quiet and still for a moment. Tentatively, he squeezes Klavier’s hands.
Hopping back and forth from Germany to the US for so long had made school a difficult thing to keep consistent until Ma managed to convince their father that it really wasn’t so strange to leave her behind in Germany. She said things with such honeyed, dripping tones like rich couples do this all the time, dear, and staying half a world away didn’t mean she loved her family any less—and other miscellaneous lies: little sugary treats picked by the handful from an assorted candies bin to hand out by the bulk and keep them appeased.
From then on Klavier and Kristoph stayed in LA. Germany became a distant memory.
But Klavier remembers there were a few short months between all the back and forth that he was in a little elementary school in LA where he became a feverish reader. He got his hands on any book he could and devoured it, reading them under the cafeteria table and under the blanket at home until Kristoph discovered him and stole the books away because he had to “actually focus on important things for once.”
At the same time, Klavier remembers falling deeply in love with mythological lore. He blames this on the combined efforts, however unintentionally, of the campus librarian and Rick Riordan, but mostly it was because of his own unending thirst for knowledge.
He used to talk about it to anyone who would listen. Mostly, the campus librarian; sometimes it was Father. Only when she was thoroughly distracted, it was Ma .
Excited babbles of: “Have you heard about Hera and Zeus?” and “Did you know Apollo killed the snake that was sent to eat his mom?” and “Artemis and Apollo are twins and they’re the gods of the moon and sun! Did you know? Did you know?”
Very quickly, however, Klavier stopped talking to Kristoph about the things he read.
Very quickly, actually, Klavier learned to not have opinions at all when he was around Kristoph.
The day Kristoph told him of his plans—his intentions—his dreams to become a lawyer, Klavier was trying to hide a mythology book under his geography notes. He remembers it well.
“And not just any lawyer,” Kristoph had said with the kind of anticipation in his voice that elongated his shoulders. He had said it as if it was the best thing in the world that anybody could choose to be: “I’m going to be a defense attorney.”
“Oh?”
“It’s a respectable calling, don’t you think? Defending the innocent? Being a voice for others when they have none?”
At the time, Klavier decided to bite his tongue. Now, he thinks back and wonders what an older, wiser Klavier would have said at the irony of Kristoph’s self-ordained benevolence. At ten years old, he couldn’t do much more than watch as Kristoph spun away and faced the window. At twenty-four, he still remembers the firm line of Kristoph’s spine and where it met with his hands clasped behind his back.
“I’m going to be a beacon in this dark world,” Kristoph said. “Shining light onto all who so desperately need it.”
And Klavier’s stomach did—and still does—churn.
History was made on October 9th in more ways than one. Whether or not the first Jury Trial would be publicly recognized for the success it was, at the time, was too early to tell, but Klavier thinks that anyone with half of a brain should be able to identify that at least the bad guy had indeed been caught. Kristoph was lead away with a second murder on his hands and Klavier, meanwhile—Klavier was—
He wasn’t quite sure what it was he was supposed to be doing. Wasn’t there something he was supposed to be doing? There should have been, right? There should have been something you did after the end. Even after it feels like the world has fallen apart, time still goes on, doesn’t it?
So why couldn’t Klavier?
Was it because every time he closed his eyes, he saw his brother’s face? Was it because even though he knew what was right and wrong and now, he knew the truth, he still struggled with his convictions?
Kristoph, did I do the right thing?
A warm hand wrapped around his wrist.
Klavier yanked his head around, surprised to find himself outside the county courthouse, still. Autumn in Los Angeles was and still is his favorite season of all; the perfect blend of crisp and cool without needing a jacket. At night, the effect is amplified. The city is alive, full of little rows of lights everywhere you look. Walking people, all along the sidewalks, shoulder-to-shoulder, chattering away.
He hadn’t realized it had gotten so late.
Yet still he dumbly stood on the top of the courthouse’s front steps like he arrived at his destination without ever fully having left.
Apollo looked up at him. His frown was darling, furrowed deep into his face like his heavy brows. “Prosecutor Gavin?” he said and for the life of him, Klavier couldn’t figure out why he sounded so concerned.
“Ja, Herr Forehead?”
“You’re still here?”
“Of course.”
But there was an awkward silence that settled, something that mutually assured the both of them that that wasn’t something a casual answer could handwave away. It seemed to them, without either of them having to say it at all, that they both knew Klavier had stood there on the front step of the LA courthouse for hours on end, staring out into nothing while the world moved on and his brother was returned to his solitary cell. Perhaps he was now even playing his violin.
God, he hated that violin.
Klavier didn’t know how to read the look on Apollo’s face. “And what about you, hm, Herr Forehead? What are you still doing here? Why aren’t you home?”
Apollo blinked. He looked behind himself, then turned around and shrugged. “Uh. I haven’t been here the entire time.” Unlike you. “Trucy and I went to visit Vera. She’s awake now, you know. Then we went out for noodles. It’s kind of a…tradition of the agency, I guess.”
“Ah, yes. And it is so important to uphold your traditions.”
“I guess so?”
“Do you go out for noodles after every courtroom victory?”
Apollo winced. That strange look was back and darker. His mouth thinned out into a long line across his face. “I…don’t know if I want to call what happened today a ‘victory.’”
“Ah, but why not? You defended your client. Justice was served—”
“—maybe it was what should have happened. Maybe it was the right thing. But that still doesn’t make it a victory.” Apollo shook his head and let his hand fall away from Klavier’s wrist. Somehow, Klavier hated that loss of touch. It was comforting.
“What brought you back to the courthouse?”
“I—uh—” Apollo looked away. His face turned red; the tips of his ears burned. After a brief pause, he cleared his throat. His brown eyes, so earthy, and yet so bright, so strong, stay averted. “Never mind me. Let’s get you home.”
He drank that night. Far more than he ever intended to. Far more than he ever intended to have Apollo see him drink. Somehow, for some reason—probably because Apollo is one of the most wonderful people he has ever met—Apollo knew that that night, he should not be alone.
So he wasn’t.
Klavier talked. The alcohol loosened his lips and before he could stop himself, out tumbled forth story after story about Kristoph. Things that had gathered with dust and sat in the back of Klavier’s mind for who-knows-how-long, only to be cleaned off and brought forward to be recognized for the shit they were.
“Did I tell you that there was a time in which he didn’t let me buy my own clothes?”
“You’re kidding.” Apollo’s bottle of beer sat untouched on the coffee table.
Klavier laughed and let his head loll back onto the sofa. He stared up at the ceiling. Even after all this time, old things, ancient scars he had forgotten about, somehow still hurt. “I’m afraid not. This was before the Gavinners, of course. When I was in middle school, early high school—why, I think this was even before Themis, actually—he used to make me feel so slovenly. He would tell me that’s why no one could stand being around me; I was such an eyesore. That is, unless my hair was cut a certain way. Unless I wore that shirt with those pants. Unless he did my nails.”
“That’s horrible.”
“It was just clothes.”
“It was you.”
Klavier hummed and felt like his eyes were watering. “He used to take great pleasure in reminding me that I had such darkness in me, too. While he…”
He remembered and still does Kristoph’s fingers digging into his shoulder. He remembers how tight it was: how much those pressure points used to hurt.
“Kristoph—“
“How dare you act as if you have any good inside of you.”
Apollo watched him, slack-mouthed. Eyes wide. Almost as if he, impossibly, had heard the words floating through Klavier’s mind and knew the weight and pain of them.
“But…that’s not true,” Apollo whispered.
“Isn’t it?” Klavier gasped a choked-off laugh. “I don’t know, Herr Forehead. My track record of being able to determine who is a criminal and who isn’t hasn’t been that great, lately. All I want to do—all I have ever said I wanted to do—is pursue the truth…but now the truth has taken two of the most important people of my life away from me. And though I know it was right, though I know what they have done is wrong, and I am glad they are arrested for it, I still feel…”
“Do you regret it?”
“Nein.” Klavier didn’t hesitate. “I just…regret not being able to see it in them sooner.”
Later that night, after Apollo helped drag a very drunken, very babbling Klavier to the comfort of his own bed and set a glass of water on the bedside table, Klavier had a moment to himself. He lay over the covers—much too warm to want to somehow navigate his own limbs under the blankets—and stared at his ceiling as the world spun and spun. All around one single axis.
Kristoph really was right. I cannot do anything good. I wasn’t even the one who stopped them. If I had done as I wanted, as they wanted, I would have abetted the both of them without ever knowing.
Some prosecutor I would have been.
Some brother and friend I am now.
Klavier closed his eyes.
He rolled onto his side, pressed his face into the nearest pillow.
The tears, when they started, wracked him surprisingly hard.
“Dear god, but I want to be good,” he gasped into the cotton. He breathed and breathed and breathed. “Why aren’t I good?”
He didn’t and still doesn’t know if it counted as a prayer. Klavier doesn’t know if he has ever prayed in his life outside of that brief stint his eccentric mother had with the local church in Germany that had the handsome usher who walked them to their seats. But he thinks, if there was ever a better time to pray, it’s now, when he feels so very alone and so very awful and so very aimless and uncertain like he had cracks in himself.
But to the god on the other side of his bedroom door, listening with his head tilted back against the wood, it was a heartbreaking plea.
“Do you think you’ll ever get back into music?”
The bank robbery case is over. The defendant has, just as Klavier had anticipated, been found innocent. The real ringleader of the heist has been caught, and that case Klavier will have the distinct pleasure of prosecuting—this time, very successfully.
Apollo sits tucked against the corner of Klavier’s couch with the toes of his feet squeezed underneath the back cushions. He lifts his head from staring at Klavier’s acoustic sitting to the side. His brown eyes, always so expressive, follow Klavier around the far end of the couch and to the extended second mug of coffee. When finally Klavier sits down, without needing to be told or asked anything at all, Apollo scoots closer, up against his side. His unexpected warmth is as delightful as always
Klavier hums and takes a slow sip. “Who said I ever stopped?”
Apollo stares at him with wide eyes. “You still play?”
“Of course.”
“I thought you said the Gavinners were over.”
“They are.”
“You’re going solo?”
Klavier raises an eyebrow. He chuckles and takes another long, slow drag of coffee to think about the answer. “It’s…been discussed. Nothing’s official. Though I’d be lying if I tried to say I haven’t thought about it endlessly.”
“You should.”
“That’s not the point, schatz. The point is, I still do play, but not very often for an audience these days.” Klavier presses his lips together and lets his mug rest over his thigh. With one arm slung around the back of the couch behind Apollo, he gazes at his acoustic. Something fond and kind and soft melts the sharp lines of his face. “Music, my guitar, was the one thing that was my own and that Kristoph wouldn’t touch. Now that he’s gone, I find it has helped me center myself these past few months, too. For a second time in my life, it has been my escape. My coping mechanism.”
“Have you been songwriting?”
“Very much and very often, yes.” Klavier chuckles. “Though, they’re not all very good.”
“I’d love to hear one.”
“Ah, truly? But I thought you didn’t care for my music.” Klavier raises an eyebrow at Apollo.
Apollo’s face flushes. He clears his throat. “I said I didn’t care for the Gavinners. But you…” His fingertips tap an idle rhythm against the ceramic mug in his own hands. “…your guitar, your sound, that’s…that’s not so bad.”
“Not so bad.” Klavier chuckles again and shakes his head. But with an exhale and shift of his weight, he leans forward to set his coffee on the table at their knees and rises to his feet. “A whole lifetime of playing and practicing and honing my passion since my first Mitchell when I was in elementary and now my boyfriend says I’m ‘not so bad.’”
“It was a compliment!”
“Haha, ja, ja, I know.”
Once he sits back down and settles the guitar across his lap, he idly plucks each string, listening and tuning and occasionally humming. “You want to hear one of the songs I’ve been working on?”
“Please.”
“If I tell you it’s a Grateful Dead cover, will you judge me?”
Apollo’s eyebrows lift with a delighted hum that he hides behind the rim of his coffee mug. “No, never. That’s exciting, actually. Which song?”
Klavier begins to strum. A shift from an E major to a B and back again. An F# minor sliding up to a C# minor; it resolves when he falls down to an A major. He has always loved that particular sound, that particular progression. The E and B chords are back again and when he opens his mouth, the words come easily. Apollo’s head tilts to the side as he listens, and for one moment, he seems so content, so perfectly happy, Klavier could almost swear he was glowing.
“Just one thing I ask of you,” he sings, “just one thing for me. Please forget you knew my name, my darlin’ Sugaree…”
It was on their first date in the middle of December as Christmas music played all around them at the Barnes & Noble that Apollo finally brought Klavier to a halt. They were somewhere in the religion and social science section when Apollo turned to Klavier with a tight look on his face and mouth and said there was something he needed to tell him.
A million and one things it could have possibly been burst into Klavier’s head. What, did he hate the movie we watched? Does he hate movies? Oh god, he’s straight, isn’t he? He was just being nice to me—
Klavier was more distracted than he should be by the peek of Apollo’s tongue over his lips as he readied himself to talk.
“I’m not human.”
Klavier blinked. He processed that. Slowly, a smile stretched across his face. “Oh?”
Apollo nodded. “When I say my name is Apollo…it’s because I really am Apollo. I’m the Apollo. The sun god. Apollo.”
“I see. So this must be one of these ‘roleplays’ I’ve heard so much about.”
“W-what?!” Apollo’s hushed voice squeaked when it pitched high and shrill. He turned around fervently and then ducked his head closer to Klavier, face absolutely beet red and adorable. “A roleplay? What the fuck, Klav? No!”
“I’ve always been curious about them, but on our first date, too—”
“—it’s not a roleplay! I’m serious!”
“I mean, I usually try not to be too eager to take someone to bed, but if you wanted me to take you home, you could have just asked, schatzi.”
“N-no! I—ugh!” Apollo smacked both hands over his face and made a low groan of mollification.
Klavier laughed and laughed and laughed, loud enough to gather the attention of various other onlookers holiday shopping in that pleasant bookstore. After all, it was all just a very good joke, wasn’t it? “Ah. So then, if it’s not a roleplay, might this be what the youth call ‘kinning,’ then?”
Apollo groaned even more.
The first month or so that they date, before Apollo gave up because clearly Klavier wasn’t getting it, Klavier was never quite sure what Apollo was trying to tell him. There was something, sure—and it was something important, too, or at least Apollo was convinced it was important—but everytime he tried to talk about it, it sounded more and more absurd. Klavier tried to wrap his mind around this talk of “I don’t die; I just get reborn,” and “I heal pretty quickly, too.” He tried to understand.
“So you don’t stay long in hospitals?”
“No? Not usually, anyway—when I do go. I end up not needing to go all that often, though.” Apollo’s shoulders were bunched to the level of his ears as he hunkered over his doorknob, fiddling with his keys.
“Huh,” a slightly buzzed Klavier hummed. “How remarkably lucky of you.”
A funny look passed across Apollo’s face as he flicked a glance to Klavier. He snickered, opened his apartment door, and muttered under his breath, “Lucky. Ha. Nah, luck is much more Tyche’s thing.”
“Gesundheit.”
“…thanks, I think?”
Klavier hummed and turned around to stumble in behind Apollo into his apartment. It was the first time he stepped inside it, ever, and though he was loath to let himself drink more tonight than he should have—again—though this time it was because of the New Year festivities and not Kristoph and that, he thought, was a significant difference—he was grateful Apollo had been kind enough to let him crash at his place instead of driving.
“Mm.” Klavier hummed and meandered towards the ratty couch pressed up against the back of the kitchen peninsula. “Quite a homey place you have here, Herr Schatz .”
Warm hands wrapped around his arms—how is his Apollo always, always, so warm? So delightful? Klavier leaned into the touch of those hands with a happy, slurred hum. Smoothly, they turned Klavier away from the couch. Behind him, Apollo murmured, “Oh, no you don’t. You’re gonna get a crick in your neck on that thing; trust me,” and then pushed and guided him towards the door off to the kitchen’s right.
“What, your bed? I’m flattered.”
“No, don’t you dare. I’m not going to try anything, so you better as hell not try anything either. It’s just…it’s just better than the couch. That’s all.”
Klavier chuckled, which turned into a harder laugh when Apollo opened his bedroom door and swore loudly at the mess inside. So many clothes were scattered across Apollo’s floor. Who knew his schatz lived in such a pigsty? Amazing. He pressed his wrist to his nose as he tried not to laugh harder, watching Apollo frantically kick around his clothes towards his closet and pick up other loose articles to stuff in there. Klavier leaned against the door jam to keep himself upright, laughing too hard to even keep his feet underneath him.
“Don’t look!” Apollo hissed.
“And why not? There’s probably…something to be said here about how we all have dirty laundry to air out…” Klavier lost track of that thought as he watched Apollo pick up and kick over a few other strange items. What are those, horror manga? A CD case? A Walkman, wow, Klavier was a little impressed— wait is that a fucking lyre—
When next he blinked, Apollo was in front of him, hurriedly pushing up his drooping spikes. “It’s fine. You didn’t see that.”
“See what?”
“Exactly.”
Apollo gently pulled him in. Klavier doesn’t quite remember anything else from that first night of the new year other than falling asleep on top of the covers in his jeans, curled in Apollo’s everwarm arms.
The night before he must prosecute the bank heist’s ringleader, Klavier is kidnapped.
He’s not quite sure how the kidnapping itself happens. He remembers parking his bike. He remembers twirling his keys around and around and around his finger as he checks his texts from his schatz. Would he like Apollo to fetch him a coffee before tomorrow’s trial? Yes, please. How very kind and thoughtful of him. He remembers striding through the parking garage towards the elevator, then—nothing.
The next thing he knows, his sight is cut off and his hands are behind his back and he is very, very, very cold.
Those bastards must have taken his coat.
His captors must know the instant he’s awake. They tease and taunt him—countless things he’s heard before; they are not the first to call him “pretty” and use it as an insult—as meanwhile, Klavier tries to get as much information as possible out of them.
They are not very smart, his captors.
But they are dangerous. The first few blows to his “pretty” face are enough to tell him that their threats aren’t empty: they truly do intend to intimidate him into somehow not prosecuting their ringleader.
If only such a matter were so simple.
Klavier spits to the side and wonders if that’s his own blood he can taste on his tongue. He licks the inside of his stinging cheek. “You are not listening to me. The decision to prosecute someone is not made by myself alone. I cannot undo the process that has already been begun and approved of—”
The cuff, this time, comes from his left side: sharp and hard against his temple.
Klavier sees bright, bursting stars in the darkness. His head rings, knocked to the side. Augh, that one hurt. It’s oddly relieving to be blindfolded; he can’t see how he feels the world must be spinning and lurching beneath the steel chair he’s tied to.
It is so, so cold.
Mein gott. Apollo, if by any chance you really are what you have been joking to me about, please. I could really use some help right about now.
A useless prayer, probably. But it is worth a shot.
“Shut up,” one of his captors snarls. There are several of them, Klavier believes; all of them have been taking turns at saying something and taking a punch at him. If he had any mobility, he would try to fight back and defend himself. The coarse rope around his wrists and ankles is cruel, scratching at his tearing skin. “You’re just making excuses.”
“Nein, but it is the truth. Ah, not that you know what that is, it seems.”
Klavier perhaps deserves the punch to his gut that follows his words.
Air heaves out of him in a coughing choke. He gags and gasps and bends his shoulders as low as he can. His hair, dangling over his shoulder, is grabbed and twisted, used to yank his head back and up.
Whoever it is that speaks to him next has awful halitosis. Is that fish he smells? “I wouldn’t be so cheeky if I were you.”
“Honey, you couldn’t be me even if you tried.”
The man snarls. There’s an enraged cry and Klavier knows that the next hit is coming. He’s anticipating it; bracing himself for it—
—until a familiar voice shouts loud and the entire world seems to shake with it: “Enough!”
Then, when the dust has settled and the earth underneath him is no longer trembling, Klavier is, well, what exactly does he feel, sitting there, stunned, beaten up, and bruising with a stranger’s fingers tangled in his hair, and blood dripping from his nose, all for his boyfriend of two months to see?
“Schatzi?” Klavier rasps.
“Hey. Who’s the punk?” a captor rumbles; not the one still pulling on Klavier’s hair.
“Let. Him. Go.”
Ah. Yes.
If Klavier wasn’t certain before, he is convinced now: that is his Apollo.
The confrontational tone of voice is unmistakable. Klavier has heard it thousands and thousands of times in the courtroom; the pitch of his when he sends his steely glare, when courage lines his shoulders and straightens his spine. He creates such noise and volume and power through his voice alone—it has always sounded a little much, a little amusing, because Apollo himself has always seemed the opposite of intimidating, despite all his efforts.
Apparently, his captors think the same thing.
One by one, they begin to laugh.
“What did he say? Let him go?” The one holding Klavier’s hair finally lets go. “Ha! That’s a riot! Who does this kid think he is?”
“Kid?! Excuse me?” Apollo screeches.
“Did you get lost, little boy? How about you run along back home to Mommy, squirt. Before you get hurt.”
“Wha—”
“—’ey, hey, hey, hey, hey! I think I recognize this guy,” one of them says. The excitement in that captor’s voice grows with every word: “This isn’t a kid. This is that damn defense attorney who got that bank teller, Taketo, off the hook!”
Someone swears; it isn’t Apollo. “What?”
“He’s the guy that first indicted Leavitt! He’s the one who got our boss arrested! He cost us our one million!”
“You’re kiddin’ me…”
There’s something dangerous in those three rumbling words. Like whiplash, the air in this place—wherever they all are—sharpens. The tension hones itself into a knife.
One of his deeper-voiced captors laughs, low and earthy. “Man, what I wouldn’t give to have a word with you, Mr. Lawyer.”
Klavier feels the tension dig into his throat and twist. He jerks forward. “Apollo, leave! Run!”
“What? Why should I?” Apollo’s voice calls back to him easy, projecting without any effort. Chords of Steel indeed; Klavier wonders why he doesn’t sound afraid. Apollo’s emotions are usually so easy to read. He’s an open book. Could it be he really does not feel fear right here, right now, at this moment?
How? Why?
“Kid, you walked into the wrong warehouse…”
“Hey, though, Klavier?”
Klavier swallows. Why is Apollo calling to him? Why now, of all times? Didn’t Klavier tell that fool to run? “Ja, schatz?”
“Do me a favor: keep your eyes closed.”
Is…is that supposed to be a joke? If so, it’s a terrible one. Klavier is blindfolded . Did Apollo forget? He can’t see anything either way, eyes open or shut. Why on earth should it matter either way if he—
The brightness, the sheer heat, that explodes outward, sears against his closed eyelids, even though the cloth.
Klavier gasps and turns away, tucking his chin into his shoulder as it rages around him. He can feel the brightness, hot and scorching, as it licks around him. It doesn’t touch him, doesn’t ever burn him, but he can hear the pained screams of those less fortunate through the fire—if that’s what it even is; somehow, it feels different than normal flames and those of gaseous explosions. The rope around him, tying him to the chair, catches and burns. At first Klavier jumps, afraid, eager to put it out and save himself, but it doesn’t hurt.
The rope is turned to ash and he is free. Never once, not at all, is he harmed.
In fact, around him, every touch of the fire is almost…gentle.
When it is gone, when just as fast as it burst to life, the strange light and fire are wisped away, Klavier still doesn’t dare open his eyes. Not until the blindfold is torn off of his face. Then, blearily blinking, even though he never once opened them, Klavier still has wide, luminescent black spots swimming in his vision.
Rather annoyingly, they eclipse Apollo’s bright, concerned face over him.
“Apollo—”
“—c’mon, Klav. We should go.”
Klavier doesn’t have the strength or voice to do anything else but nod.
And now they are here, in the silence and shadow of his apartment, and Klavier is struggling very much with maintaining his breathing. He leans on the nearest media table and bows his chin to his chest. He covers his face with a hand.
After a moment, quick-footed and quick-thinking as always, Apollo skirts around him. With the familiarity that is born after a few months of partnership, he invites himself into Klavier’s kitchen and flicks on the lights. Cupboards swing open and slam back shut. There’s the whine of the faucet and a rush of water.
Two seconds later and Apollo is pressing a lukewarm glass, half-filled, into his hands. “Here. You should probably drink something.”
He is thirsty. He wonders how Apollo knew that.
Actually—
Klavier downs the water in two gulps and with more force than he intends, sets the glass on the media table. He bows over it. His head pounds. “That fire back there…whatever that was. That was you?”
“Yes.”
Apollo doesn’t hesitate and doesn’t try to deny it.
At least, with whatever else he is, his Apollo is honest. Perhaps—and maybe Klavier never should have doubted this—he always has been. “Did you kill them?”
“No.” Apollo pauses. And it’s a strange relief Klavier feels, like ice cubes dropped down his spine: he isn’t Daryan and Kristoph. “But I did hurt them. They’ll see again in a few hours. Their burns will heal after some ointment and rest that hopefully the detention center will give them once the police arrive. But I won’t apologize for what I did, hurting them. I won’t. They hurt you first, Klavier.”
“You needn’t tell me, schatz. I am very—” Klavier winces as he straightens up. Now that the adrenaline has passed, all of his aches and bruises remind himself that they exist. “—I am very aware of what they have done to me.”
When he turns, Apollo’s eyes rake over his face. He takes Klavier’s wrist. “You should sit.”
“Apollo, I’m alright—”
“—you look like you’re about to fall over. Sit down, Klav.”
Have things always shaken around his apartment when Apollo raises his voice? When he lets his words boom and echo, has he ever noticed how the environment reacts? Or is that a recent thing?
Klavier falls into his couch gracelessly.
Apollo perches himself on the coffee table. Immediately, he reaches out over his knees, palms up. “Give me your hands.”
“Apollo—”
“—it’ll be over in two seconds, then you’ll feel a lot better. Trust me.”
“Trust you?”
There’s a moment that their eyes meet and everything that has been building snaps taught as a thread. It’s fragile, breakable.
And for a moment, for the first time all evening since he stepped into the warehouse and whisked Klavier away to safety—since he rescued him— Apollo looks nearly cowed. His fingers curl. He withdraws his extended, waiting touch. His eyes avert to the floor.
Silence descends between the two of them, gaping open like a rift.
Klavier’s chest squeezes. “You really aren’t human.”
“No.” Apollo drops his hands to his knees and fists them. His bracelet gleams under the light coming in from the kitchen. “I don’t know if you remember; I was trying to tell you as much back in December.”
“You’re a god.”
Apollo’s face twists. He chuckles, but it sounds awkward and full of revulsion. “Some people call us that, yeah. They have for thousands and thousands of years. I don’t know…if you ask me, I think it sounds weird.”
“What would you call yourself, then?”
“What I always have.” His eyes have never been so little brown and so much bronze before when they lift to meet Klavier’s bewildered blues. “Apollo.”
Klavier blinks. Then, perhaps a little deliriously, he starts to laugh. He leans back against the couch cushions and places a hand over his eyes. He laughs again and a whole string of it tumbles from him. “Just Apollo, huh? Just the god of the sun. No big deal. You’re just the stuff of legends and myths and you’ve been around for thousands of years and you’re everything I’ve ever read about. Just the exemplary god of moral virtue and justice. Apollo.”
“Klavier—”
“—and yet you let me ask you out.”
Apollo blinks. “Y…yeah?”
Klavier sighs and hides his battered face in the crook of his elbow. He breathes in as deeply as he can and out. Why is he more affected by the confirmation of this strange reality than he is at literally just getting kidnapped? God, but his anxieties and insecurities pick the worst of times to rear their ugly faces. “You must have had quite a few laughs at my expense.”
“What? Why would I do that?”
“Because you’re a god. Why should you ever be interested in me?” Klavier swallows tightly. “Why should you, god of a celestial body, god of justice, god of light, ever look my way—”
“—how could I not have?”
Slowly, Klavier’s arm falls from over his eyes. He looks to Apollo, and coolly, calmly, arrestingly, Apollo stares back.
“What do you mean?”
Apollo holds out his hand again.
Klavier settles his fingers against that open palm. He watches as Apollo’s fingers of his other hand drift towards his wrist, where the rope burns are red and angry against his brown skin. There’s a glow, a soft warmth that follows it like a kiss, and then the indentations vanish—as do all of his other aches and pains.
Ah yes. God of healing, too, isn’t he?
“Like you said, I’m the god of justice. To, uh, put it lightly, it’s important to me. It’s half of the reason I’m here, doing what I do in the form that I am: to make sure justice is accomplished. There’s been too little of it recently in this ‘Dark Age of the Law.’ It hurts.”
Klavier’s chest seizes tight.
He looks away.
Apollo squeezes his hand. Then, with his other, he reaches forward and gently turns Klavier’s face back to him with a slight pressure on his cheek. Another glow, another small flush of warmth, and the bruises and headaches that line the sides of his head slowly fade away. “And then I met you, Klavier, across the courtroom. And I expected you to be angry with me for indicting your brother and later your best friend, but you never were.”
“You are too gracious with me. That’s not quite true.”
The corner of Apollo’s mouth quirks upward. His thumb on Klavier’s cheek swipes away a cut. “It was never as bad as I was thinking it would be. You always said that what mattered to you most was the truth, and you stuck by that. You meant it. You pursued truth and justice, even at the cost of your own comfort and happiness. No matter what cruel truths I had to dig up and show you, you were always brave enough to face them. You know how many mortals I’ve met who stick their head in the sand the instant I have to reveal something they don’t like?”
“You…” Klavier grimaces. He blinks slowly. “You’re praising me for common decency.”
“I’m praising you because of your values, Klavier. Your integrity. Because of who you are. You have no idea how incredible you seem to me because of your conviction to do what is right.”
How dare you act as if there is any good inside you—
Could that really have been said so long ago? Sometimes, Klavier remembers it as clearly as if it was yesterday. “I…”
“And not to mention your music.” Apollo’s cheeks dust a light pink. His hands fall away from Klavier’s face and return to his lap, their duty complete. His eyes shift to Klavier’s guitar, still sitting in its stand by the couch as it always has. “I’m not just the god of justice, you know.”
Ah.
Klavier’s breath hitches in his throat. Could it really be so simple? Could he really seem that wonderful in someone else’s eyes—in a god’s eyes?
Kristoph would hate this. Kristoph would be livid.
But Klavier… “Do the others know about you?”
“You mean at the Agency?” Slowly, Apollo nods. “Mr. Wright knows. Trucy, well—I’ll have to let her tell you about herself. That’s not my story to tell.”
“And you have a lyre.”
Apollo laughs and scratches the back of his head. How human that motion is of his. He must have been living among people for quite some time. Klavier had no idea. “Yeah, that’s who-knows-how-old by this point.”
“How old are you?”
“I get reborn every now and then.” Apollo tilts his head as he thinks about it. “This current form is…twenty-two years old? Almost twenty-three.”
“So you can die.”
“But I’ll always come back.” Apollo meets Klavier’s eyes. “That’s kind of what a god does, y’know. We exist forever. Even if the physical part of me eventually ends, I’ll just come back again in a different form and do it all over again. Keep trying to keep justice alive, keep the sun burning in the sky, until the end of time.”
“And you remember it? Each of these lives of yours?”
Apollo nods.
Amazing how infinitesimally small that makes Klavier feel. He aches, with a grand and awful sort of sadness in his chest and tilts his head at Apollo, watching how in the darkness, he still seems to hold such presence. “Why should you ever trifle with me, then? Why humor me? You have had other lovers.”
“As have you.”
“But surely I cannot be worth your attention for so long. Surely I must seem…”
Something like hurt and ache echoes in Apollo’s eyes, too. He leans forward, slipping down from the coffee table and to the carpet, kneeling by Klavier’s feet. “You’re so hard on yourself, Klav.”
“Is it not the truth?”
“No.” Apollo shakes his head and sets his cheek against Klavier’s knee. “Your heart is what draws me to you, Klavier. It is in everything you do, and I can’t help but see it. I can’t help but love it, love you—because there, in everything you do, is everything I am, too.”
Klavier’s breathing gets a little funny. He’s not quite sure why until the world starts to burn. Until his vision warps and he recognizes the tightness in his throat for what it is.
“That is…the strangest, but sweetest ‘I love you’ I think I have ever heard.”
“Good.”
Slowly, Klavier sets his hand into Apollo’s hair. A couple gentle strokes, few gentle touches, and then he puts his hand on the back of Apollo’s neck. “Kiss me?”
And Apollo does.
He rises from the floor. Sets one knee on the couch cushions beside Klavier’s thigh and sets his hand on the armrest on the other side of Klavier and kisses him slowly. It lingers, the heat that slides into Klavier and down his throat. A bit like tasting the sun. He drinks in light on his tongue, moves his mouth against Apollo’s, and digs his fingers into his hair.
Apollo is the first to pull back, seconds later, and it still feels too soon.
“Mein gott, but I cannot believe…”
Something like a shiver passes through Apollo. Interesting. Klavier takes note of it as quietly, huskily, his Apollo laughs. “Are you alright with this?”
“With…?”
Apollo’s fingers, when they brush back Klavier’s bangs, are warm, warm, warm. And Klavier knows why now, too. Walking heat generator, indeed. “With me, being who I am. It’s why I tried to tell you in December. I wanted you to know. That way, you could really decide if you wanted this, if you wanted to be with me, and if you wanted to…love me. Not every mortal does once they know, and that’s okay. Comes with the territory.”
Apollo shrugs and leans back. With the absence of his closeness, Klavier feels suddenly cold.
“But now you know how I feel. So the ball, as they say, is in your court.”
Klavier blinks. Slowly, he smiles. “Mein schatz, is this you asking me out?”
Apollo laughs. “For the second time, but also, for real this time. Now that all of our—uh—’dirty laundry’ has been aired out.”
Klavier hums and sets his hands on Apollo’s hips, hooks his fingers into the belt loops of Apollo’s jeans and pulls him over his lap. He is very, very conscious of the heat of Apollo’s legs on either side of his. “My answer now is the same as yours a few months ago. Yes. I think I’d very much like to date you—even if you are a mighty god, Apollo Justice.”
Apollo’s face reddens.
He leans in for another kiss.
And it’s funny, because in the darkness, just out of reach from the kitchen’s light, doused in shadow, Klavier thinks he can see Apollo glow.