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The world is full of small blessings, Klavier thinks. And sometimes—no pun intended about his courtroom rival’s height—small blessings come in small packages; the most minute and inconsequential things have the ability to open up a whole world of happiness. Like hangover-free Sunday mornings, or getting to Starbucks before the morning queues hit, or, in this case, gas leaks. When Chief Prosecutor Edgeworth walks into Klavier’s office and informs him that there’s been a problem with the pipes at the Wright Anything Agency, putting a small band of lawyers out of an office for at least a week, Klavier initially wonders what in the world that could possibly have to do with him. But he catches on a moment before Edgeworth informs him of the ramifications—while Phoenix and Trucy Wright will be working remotely out of the Chief Prosecutor’s office (or, as Klavier suspects, his house), and Athena Cykes has high-speed internet at the apartment Simon Blackquill inherited from his recently-imprisoned sister, Apollo Justice has nowhere to go.
Edgeworth is midway through explaining that he’ll be compensated for the inconvenience, and that it’s truly a last resort as Apollo’s apartment doesn’t have reliable WiFi, when Klavier jumps up from his chair and, rather less-than-formally, accepts with a loud and bright ‘ja!’.
An hour later, Apollo turns up at the door, looking everything but pleased about the arrangement. It’s only when Klavier notices the distinct droop in his hair-horns that he realises it’s raining outside, and Apollo hasn’t, in fact, changed into a darker red suit—he’s just soaking wet.
“Ach, welcome to my humble abode, Herr Forehead,” Klavier stands up to greet him, extending his hand for a handshake in an effort to mask his excitement with formality.
“Uh, thanks for letting me work here,” Apollo says, grumbling something further about the rain as he shakes himself dry.
“It’s no problem at all. It’s a bit of a big office for just one person, ja? I’ve had a word with my manager and she’s headed to IKEA to get you a desk and a chair right now.”
“Manager? Or personal assistant?” Apollo scoffs.
“I pay her very well all the same.”
“I suppose I can’t complain. I don’t like the idea of working on your… can you even call that a desk?”
“I like to call it modern art.”
“You rich people will call anything modern art,” Apollo says. “Where should I put my stuff?”
“I cleared out a drawer for you, just over there,” Klavier points. “Is that enough?”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
In the absence of having any new cases to work on, Klavier makes some excuse about catching up on post-trial paperwork, while he actually busies himself behind an empty folder and watches Apollo unpack his briefcase of notes. Every so often, Apollo will pause what he’s doing to write something down, evidently having just remembered an important detail; after a few times, he stops putting his ballpoint pen back in his briefcase and starts putting it behind his ear instead, a detail which Klavier finds both beautiful and endearing. Oh, he could look at Apollo all day, he thinks. The way he pushes his sleeves up every time they fall past his elbows, the way his shirt rides up whenever he stands on his tiptoes to reach a high shelf, even the squeak of his shoes that betray the fact that he must shine them every morning.
He’s beautiful.
And Klavier is in love.
But that’s hardly news; he’s known it for a while now. He supposes that he probably knew it back in People Park, but he’d been so scared of actually being human and having all those subsequent messy emotions that he’d buried his true feelings behind trying to get Apollo flustered and enjoying being ahead of the game, as usual. After Kristoph’s second trial, though, Klavier had realised that he has never been a step ahead of Apollo, nor does he want to be—Apollo is different like that. He seems to see right through Klavier in an almost supernatural way, and Klavier would let him do so even if he was the ghost-echo of a man neither of them ever truly knew, but by whom both were terribly and irreparably influenced.
“Earth to Prosecutor Gavin?”
Apollo’s voice snaps Klavier back to reality, and he looks up, dropping the blank case file that he’d been using as a disguise through which he could watch Apollo.
“Oh, ja? Sorry, I was zoning out.”
“Yeah, no shit. Your manager’s here.”
Klavier opens the door to his manager, who, as promised, has picked up a flatpack desk and chair from IKEA. With the extent of her duties done, she leaves with nothing more than a reminder for Klavier to send her his rough draft of some lyrics that he’d promised last week and has yet to deliver on, for no reason other than writer’s block (which, to him, feels like the end of the world).
“So, uh, you any good at putting stuff together?” Apollo asks.
In response, Klavier nods towards the large speaker that is currently covered in case files which, to the untrained eye, must look disorganised, even though they’re all in place. “What do you think?” He smirks.
“Fair point. But you’re not getting off that easy, pretty boy,” Apollo rolls his eyes, and Klavier has to grip the edge of his not-desk to keep himself upright. “You’re helping me out, and we’re both not getting any work done until this thing has been put together.”
Getting to work instantly, Apollo rolls his sleeves again and tears the cardboard packaging away with a pen-knife that he takes out of his pocket. Whereas Klavier would normally discard the instructions—after all, how hard can it be to put a flatpack desk together?—Apollo lays them out on the floor, creating little piles of screws and lengths of wood and metal.
“Right,” he says. “I assume you don’t have a screwdriver.”
“And why do you assume that?”
“You don’t look like a DIY guy,” Apollo rolls his eyes.
“Actually, Herr Forehead,” Klavier pulls a small toolkit from one of the shelves. “I’ve found that it’s handy to keep these things around in case of wardrobe malfunctions.”
“What possible wardrobe malfunction could require a pair of pliers or a screwdriver?”
Klavier lifts up one of the many chains on his outfit, smirking as he does so.
“Fair enough,” Apollo continues. “Pass it here.”
“What, my pants? That’s rather forward.”
“I meant the toolkit, genius.”
Klavier slides it across the floor and Apollo stops it with his hand, opening it and taking out a small screwdriver. He sits back on his heels for a minute, looking from the instructions to the neatly laid out piles of components, and then he lifts up one of the metal poles and starts screwing something into the end of it.
“See?” Klavier says. “You don’t even need my help.”
“You can pass me things. Get down here.”
“And now you want me on my knees? Are you sure you’re not flirting?”
“Stop being insufferable, Prosecutor Gavin, and help me put this thing together. I’ll probably already have to stay late as it is, which means that you’re going to be staying late too because you’re the guy with the key.”
“I could always get you one of your own cut,” Klavier bats his eyelashes as Apollo fits a screw onto another leg of the table. “If you wanted.”
“What’s the point? I’ll be out of here before the week is up.”
Apollo wipes his—rather large—forehead, and Klavier swoons. Sure, the whole key-cutting-come-on had been a bust, but it wasn’t an outright rejection. Now that Klavier thinks about it, Apollo has never ever given him an outright rejection—only ‘not today’s and ‘I’ll think about it’s— which could either mean that he’s trying to let him down lightly, or that he’s too nervous to accept any of Klavier’s advances. The former doesn’t seem likely, at least if the sarcasm Apollo gives to Ema and Phoenix is any indication of how un-socially aware he is, which means that it’s probably the latter. But why? Klavier has been nothing but upfront and honest in his intentions, save for his obnoxious attempt at his rockstar persona when they had first met in People Park, so…
Oh. That’s it. Apollo Justice—for some ridiculous reason—must think that Klavier is being insincere. Perhaps he’s self conscious, but that just doesn’t seem feasible; he has to know how beautiful he is, how talented, how entirely wonderful. Klavier is sure that if he were Apollo Justice, he would never break down in front of his mirror or when looking at the last name on his driver’s licence again. But here it is, plain as day, and there could be no other explanation.
Well, that isn’t entirely true. There is one other explanation.
Maybe Apollo just doesn’t like Klavier enough to justify him with a response. That would make sense too; Apollo sees everything both in and out of court, and Klavier is all too aware that he’s a flawed excuse of a man. It would be easy for Apollo to—no, it would be impossible not to— see Kristoph in the tiny minutiae of Klavier’s expressions; his face shape, his hair, his mannerisms which are either learned through fear of Kristoph, or exaggerated so far in the other direction that they come across as false.
So that must be it. Apollo isn’t insecure at all, he’s just smart enough to know which poisons to stay away from.
“Aaaand… done!” Apollo says, lifting the table up without so much as breaking a sweat, turning it around so that it rests on all four legs on the other side of the office and putting the also-assembled chair under it. “No thanks to you.”
“I’m… sorry,” Klavier says. “I should have helped.”
“Nah, don’t sweat it. No offence, but you don’t seem like a flatpack sort of guy. I was fine on my own, really. And, uh… t-thanks. For letting me work from here.”
“It’s really nothing, Apollo.”
“That’s new,” Apollo says. “You called me Apollo. Are you feeling alright? Do you have a fever?”
“I’m fine,” Klavier smiles. “Is it that hard to believe a man can be cordial and formal?”
“When it’s you, yeah.”
Stab. Right in the chest. That’s how it feels.
“O-Okay,” Apollo says. “That came out wrong. I don’t mind the nickname, honestly. But you just seem… off. Like something’s upset you. If you’ve got a thing about personal space, I can suffer through the shitty internet at home, it’s fine.”
“It’s not that. Not at all. I just… well, Apollo, do you like me?”
“What?”
“Do you like me? Are we friends?”
“I mean yeah, I guess we are. Or, y’know, roommates, at least,” Apollo gestures to the office around them.
“Oh. I see.”
“Do you… not want to be friends?”
“I do! I really do. I just think that we got off on the wrong foot and I never really righted that.”
“Sure, you were a little insufferable when we met, but it’s nothing that would make me think less of you as a person. Tell you what, Prosecu— Klavier, pay me back for those concert tickets and we’re even.”
“How about I buy you dinner, instead? Eldoon’s delivers right to my office, and you can have unlimited noodles for the entire time you’re working out of here.”
“Don’t say that, you’ll never get rid of me.”
“Maybe I don’t want to.”
As the day stretches on, they both get on with their work, pausing only to order dinner together, which Klavier says he’ll go downstairs and pick up. Normally, he wouldn’t feel comfortable leaving anyone in his office when he’s not there—since Kristoph, he’s worried about anyone tampering with evidence, but he trusts that Apollo won’t even go looking, not even if it benefits his case. There’s a special kind of faith that he puts in Apollo, and only in Apollo.
When he brings the food back upstairs, Apollo is so hard at work on the new IKEA desk that he doesn’t even register Klavier’s reentry. It takes a little prompting (and one container of noodles deposited right in front of him) to get him to look up, and when he does, he smiles.
God, he smiles. And Klavier could live in it, he thinks.
They eat together, putting the paperwork aside for a moment. As much as Klavier wants to ask more about why Apollo considers him a friend, he just lets his coworker— friend?— eat, and when they’re finished, they go back to work in silence and the moment is lost.
But maybe this is nice, even if it does feel like the calm before the storm. It’s a privilege just to watch Apollo work, and Klavier wonders, as the clock ticks over to 7pm, if he usually stays this late at the Wright Anything Agency, or if he’s been distracted enough by an irritating coworker that he’s now trying to catch up on a regular day of work.
Deciding that it’s best to remain silent and let Apollo get on with it, Klavier takes out his post-trial paperwork and begins to type up a report. Normally, he would blast his music and thank the bonus he got a few years back that his office is soundproofed, but he’s made a resolution in his mind not to annoy (and consequently alienate) Apollo even more, so he puts his headphones on and just gets on with it.
Getting lost in his work is easy. It’s not the same as getting lost in a stage performance, because he feels far more authentic in a courtroom, but it’s a pleasant distraction from the anxiety that his manager insists he should see a doctor about. He barely even notices that two hours have passed, and by the time he registers that it’s past 9pm, he looks up and sees that Apollo is hunched over his desk.
Fast asleep.
Falling asleep in a strange place is a completely alien concept to Klavier, but it’s endearing that Apollo can do it; and what does this mean? That Apollo feels bored? Safe? Comfortable enough to let his guard down?
Either way, Klavier doesn’t want to betray the trust that Apollo has potentially put in him, and when he gets up from his desk, he does so silently. Reason tells him that he should wake Apollo up, but he’s sleeping so soundly, and if he needs rest, then Klavier will happily stay late at the office until he wakes up.
Slipping off his jacket, he rests it on Apollo’s shoulders.
“Sleep well, Apollo,” he whispers. I love you. I hope tomorrow, you might love me too.