Chapter Text
Three weeks.
February 21th 2028. Klavier had prepared himself for the date. He's worked out how to fit his life around the event to cause the least amount of disruption to everyone else's. Meetings rearranged, paperwork finished early, time off work booked.
The Chief Prosecutor seems to already know even though he hasn't said anything in person. Klavier hasn't been given any cases for the whole month, with nothing but a cursive note of “helping with evidence transferrals” placed on his time-sheet.
Klavier doesn't ask how the Chief Prosecutor already knows because if Miles Edgeworth prides himself in anything, it's being efficient.
No one else seems to be aware though, and he realises Edgeworth has given him a convenient free-pass to side-step any awkward questions that might arise from his absence in the courtroom.
The execution will be on a Monday. He knows because he checked the day he was given the date, two years ago.
It had all seemed so far away at the time.
California had once had the slowest-moving death rows in the country – most prisoners were more likely to die of old age than the needle – but much like the court-system, capital punishment had been streamlined to the point that in some states prisoners were executed within 12 months.
Klavier doesn't know if California still having one of the slowest death rows in America is a blessing or a curse.
At some point during the week, it occurs to him that he's over-seeing the official closing of solved cases from two years ago, and alarms several police officers laughing himself into a stupor at the sweet irony of such a task.
-
Two weeks.
Klavier sits in his office with his feet up on the desk, staring out the window wondering if the world will look different to him the day after his brother dies.
He wonders if the world looked different to his brother the first time he killed another human being.
His mobile rings and he answers.
He speaks in German on the phone to Edgeworth because that's the language he was thinking in when he answers, forgetting for a moment that he isn't seventeen any more and it's bad etiquette to pick-up the phone to your boss in any language you feel like on a whim.
But Edgeworth doesn't correct him, barely pausing for breath before effortlessly switching to German. Klavier doesn't even make an attempt to revert back to English or even pretend to be listening all that hard because the call is only a formality. His time away from work begins tomorrow.
The conversation is drawing to an end and there is a pause. Klavier can hear the hesitation in Edgeworth's voice before he speaks.
“Klavier... if you need anything...”
Klavier hangs up before he can say anything more.
-
Klavier visits his mother in Germany.
He doesn't know why he does it. Love he supposes. Although she's been nothing but wretched and unreliable and unstable in the last 17 years of his life, she's his mother and she deserves to know her eldest son is going to die in less than two weeks time.
She's well enough not to be in the unit any more, and that in itself is a relief.
She had been incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital when he was nine for murdering their father. Klavier and his mother had appeared unannounced on the doorstep of his father's house on Kristoph's 18th birthday, after being missing for nearly decade in America.
He'd read the autopsy reports as soon as he was old enough to be able to: she had stabbed his father numerous times in the back with kitchen knife until he bled to death, before pitching it in the back of his head in the soft tissue between his skull and his spine, so only the hilt of the blade was still visible.
She had only escaped a sentence due to Kristoph being a newly-qualified lawyer and willing to defend her. Using the insanity defense and her history of psychiatric illness to vastly reduce her sentence and have her admitted to a specialist psychiatric ward instead.
Why, Klavier never really understood. She had abandoned Kristoph at nine and fled halfway across the world only to return and violently murder their father.
But then again, she'd abandon Klavier at nine to become that murderer and yet here he was, almost two decades later, still visiting her.
Still loving her because she's the only mother he'll ever have.
He would always remember Kristoph crouching down to his level and smiling gently to him with his hands pressed reassuringly against Klavier's trembling arms – one of his hands bandaged from that nasty scar he'd sustained restraining their mother.
He had seemed so much older than he really was back then. “Hello there, dear Brüderchen. I don't think we've met properly.”
He had requested to visit her when he turned eighteen. Kristoph allowed it although he couldn't have stopped Klavier even if he had wanted to at that age, yet it seemed almost like a betrayal not to ask. It felt like the right time – he'd passed the bar and had been working as a prosecutor for a year, and the Gavinners were a roaring success in the States.
Kristoph never did visit her though, and his mother never spoke of him. It was if they didn't exist in each-other's own sphere of reality.
Kristoph warned him though, told him that no good would come of visiting her and she wasn't the mother he had known a child; she was nothing more than a paranoid and delusional fanatic silhouette of her former self.
He was right.
“Your father never loved me,” he recalls her saying one time that he visited, “and I never loved him. It was impossible to; he never loved anyone but himself. He only married me because I was beautiful and talented, and I him because he was successful and affluent.”
“I was a trophy-wife to him; a caged bird; a puppet; a plaything to mould and perfect to his liking, not a person to love! You have to believe me Klavier, it's the truth. That man was conspiring against us! He was poison but I didn't kill him!”
“It's the illness.”
“It's the sickness.”
“It's the drugs.”
“It's the medication.”
“Don't listen, don't engage.”
“She's not well.”
“Please, sweetheart please. I'm not mad.”
“Pity her, Klavier. It's the kindest thing you can do.”
He meets her in a local coffee-house not too far away from the hotel he's staying at.
Her hair has been turned from platinum blonde to a more silvery strain; possibly with age, more likely with stress. But she's still statuesque and regal, and moves with the poise and delicacy of a cat.
She used to sing, he remembers being told once or twice when he was younger. Way back before he was born, she used to sing songs regularly – and was even quite famous – lounge singing and playing the piano in various places in America in her twenties.
She sang a little in America too while they were both there, although nothing professionally and she seemed to much prefer to write. He vaguely remembers her writing a song about a gypsy girl with brown hair and bright, bonnie eyes and a bright, bonnie heart who fell in love and ran away with an older man, but can't for the life of him remember the words or even how it ends.
It's not even important any more, but he quietly hates himself about how little he knows about the woman in-front of him that isn't frivolous or second-hand information from someone else. He hates himself even more for caring in the first place.
He tells her and she seems almost impassive to the information. She nods occasionally, jilting her foot up and down like a nervous tick making an irritating clicking sound with her heel as she glances around at the other customers, but doesn't really engage with him at all.
He grows tired of talking and asks her a direct question about Kristoph; something she can't just brush aside with a nod.
She's quiet for a moment before responding: “Your brother was always a very disturbed child.”
Three guesses as to why.
She excuses herself politely to the wash-room and disappears into the small throng of people in the coffee-house. She seems gone for a lot longer than expected and after ten minutes he begins to worry. After twenty her goes to look for her.
After thirty, he sits back down and clutches his stone-cold coffee, learning against the innermost part of the seating booth hidden away from the rest of the coffee-house patrons, and tries not to cry in a public place.
She's ill, he reminds himself. But it still hurts.
Of masquerades and silhouettes and things that used to be.
Must run in the family.
Klavier tries to pull himself back together. Look up. Smile. Breathe. It's just a bad day. Not a bad life.
He almost believes it.
-
Seven days.
The days were going fast now.
He could visit. One last time. Try for answers.
He doesn't.
-
It hadn't been a clean death.
Klavier hadn't been present at the end. It had been too much, being expected to watch from the witness room as the executioners strapped your only sibling on a gurney, about to die for being a murderer in a small, sterile room and no family to cry to when it was all over.
So he had been a coward and at the last minute opted-out and stayed hidden away in his apartment. And Kristoph had died in a way that was only one-step down from torture for the simple fact it wasn't intended.
“...did not succumb to the lethal dose even after 47 minutes...”
“...was able to speak. Attempted to move during the procedure, despite having been allegedly paralysed and unconscious from the drug...”
“...one report states he convulsed and struggled for breath....”
“...second dosage was administered to complete the execution...”
“...denial Mr Gavin had suffered pain...”
“...autopsy reports indicate the needle had pierced too deep into the flesh...”
“...chemicals had missed the veins and been erroneously injected directly into soft tissue...”
The papers were all over it – an investigation had been opened due to the severity of the mishap and once again Klavier had been unwittingly thrust into the limelight when all he wanted to do was sink away into the shadows.
Improper administration of thiopental was the most likely cause, or so he had been told. His mind had all but blanked-out during that meeting after hearing the news. He was given a report that was floating around on a piece of paper somewhere in his apartment, but the only thing he had done since returning was pull the house phone-cord out of the wall and collapse on the sofa like a man dying of sickness.
Even in death, Kristoph's ghost clung to him like a disease.
“....most likely cause of death was suffocation through the paralytic effects of pancuronium bromide coupled with the intense burning sensation from one of the more controversial drugs used in lethal injections, potassium chloride...”
The whole thing had been a fucking mess and the thought that Kristoph had laid for nearly a whole hour in agonizing pain, likely suffocating, and teetering on the brink of death keeps Klavier from sleeping for the next two nights afterwards.
“... Over two decades ago in 2006, federal courts ruled that manner of lethal injection California carried a danger that 'an inmate will suffer pain so extreme' that it should be considered 'cruel and unusual' and thus unconstitutional...”
Klavier decides to avoid the papers, the TV and the Internet for the rest of forever.