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A week after the Misham trial ended, Klavier decided to cut his hair.
He decided, with no small amount of trepidation, to cut it himself. He still had the clippers from the last time he’d tried, eighteen years old and only thinking about how cool he’d look with an undercut. He’d fucked it up of course, hadn’t used a guard and brought the blade far too close, and had ended up asking Daryan to come over at one in the morning to clean up the mess he’d made. He’d been so nice, Klavier remembered, his hands gentle in Klavier’s hair as he’d spoken calming words, ignoring the way Klavier had cried at the sight of his beautiful golden locks in a heap on the floor.
All these years later it was almost a good memory. Klavier almost missed it.
He was alone now, seven years older and his hair several inches longer, shining pale yellow beneath the bathroom lights. He had it tied up in a high ponytail that he couldn’t help but tug at, twisting the strands tight around his finger and pulling just hard enough to hurt. It was hard to remember the last time his hair hadn’t fallen past his ears. As soon as he’d had the words he’d asked to grow it out, to have pretty hair just like mom, just like Kristoph. And he’d loved it—he’d loved the weight of it between his fingers, the way it spilled over his shoulders, the colors it shone when it caught the light. He’d grown up and discovered that he liked the hungry eyes that lingered on it, liked the way a turn of his head could draw the attention of a room. He’d liked it, and it’d suited him. It still did.
But, well. He needed a change.
So here Klavier was: standing alone in his bathroom at six PM on a Saturday, in sweatpants and a tie-dye t-shirt that hadn’t seen the light of day since high school, as ready as he’d ever be. He had everything planned out—he’d found a free evening in his calendar and the clippers he’d never tossed, making sure to plug them in the night before; he had a broom and vacuum standing nearby, ready to clean up the inevitable mess he’d make; he’d spent the last hour and a half watching the same “how to shave your own head” tutorials on repeat. Despite what his brother or the tabloids might say the next day, Klavier wasn’t doing this recklessly. Klavier was not a child, nor was he the bad boy he played on stage. Klavier was a man who woke up at the same time every day and followed the same ten-step skin care routine every evening; he organized his concerts down to the second and knew every case he’d prosecuted down to the last speck of evidence. If a file lay half-open on his office floor or a strand of hair fell into his eyes, it wasn’t a matter of carelessness. No, it was because Klavier put it there, because that was exactly how he wanted it.
Klavier was not a man flung out to sea by a tide of grief, nor was he another tragic pop star melting beneath the limelight. Klavier was a man acting out the logical conclusion to a series of events. Namely: a week ago Vera Misham had looked at him and seen the devil, and Klavier had spent every day since searching for himself in the mirror and only ever finding her terror reflected back.
Put simply: Klavier had an image problem. Cutting his hair was preferable to crawling out of his own skin.
He took one last look at himself. He thought of family portraits and scrapbooks gathering dust, of an aunt he hadn’t seen in years pinching his cheek and smiling as she said: oh, don’t you look just like your brother.
He squared his shoulders and reached for a blade.
It was best to begin not with the clippers, but like this: holding his ponytail above his head and pulling up so that it stretched taut, scissors positioned below the hair tie, their maw open wide. Just a press of his fingers (too easy, almost) and each blade was drawn back to its twin. Hair caught against metal, and then, with a long, terrible snip, there was suddenly no resistance at all. In one hand Klavier held ten inches of blond hair, bound together like a bushel of wheat. What was left fell down around his face in awkward, lopsided pieces, shorter than he’d had it in years.
Klavier blinked. He cast his eyes down to the severed ponytail, seven years of his life now resting like a strange, dead thing in his hands. He laid it gently on the counter and in the mirror he saw himself once more, his struck expression and, quite frankly, the ugliest fucking haircut he’d ever seen.
He laughed. He couldn’t help it. It rang from his lips like a melody from the strings of a long-forgotten guitar, out of tune and delighted to be played at all. He looked ridiculous—a twenty-four year old man having a quarter-life crisis in the oversized bathroom of his LA apartment, hair too-short in some places and too-long in others, an undeniable, uncontrollable mess. He was smiling harder than he had in weeks.
After that, destruction came easy. He cut away at the remaining length with abandon, making a game of it. How ugly could he make himself, how strange? What kind of art could he create from the scraps of his beauty before it was all shorn away, before he started fresh? If his brother were here, he’d probably say—but no, Klavier didn’t want to think about his brother any longer. He chopped off another lock, and grinned.
When he found himself with only a few inches of hair remaining, he set down the scissors, brushed what clumps of hair he could from his shoulders, and took the clippers in hand. The instrument hummed between his fingers, like a song.
He went to work.
Klavier had nearly half of his head shaved down to only a few centimeters when his phone began to ring.
“Wer zum Teufel…” he swore under his breath, and nearly clipped his own ear. After spending several seconds grappling with the stupid machine in his hands, he managed to rediscover the location of the on-off switch and set the clippers down, pulling his phone from his back pocket. Apollo Justice, the screen read. Klavier’s breath caught in his chest.
The phone kept buzzing. Klavier picked up.
“Herr Forehead,” he smiled, “to what do I owe the pleasure?”
Apollo’s voice came crackling through the speaker. “Uh, hi, Prosecutor Gavin. I don’t know if you saw my text—” Klavier had not , “—but I’m outside with those documents I mentioned yesterday? Did you want to come down and grab them, or buzz me up, or…?”
And— oh.
Apollo had, in fact, mentioned those documents yesterday. He had called Klavier’s office late Friday afternoon to tell him that he’d be dropping by with a few last-minute things related to the Misham case to sign, and then called again an hour later to say his bike got a flat a third of the way over and that he’d be late. And Klavier, who had a meeting-slash-dinner with his manager scheduled for that evening at a restaurant halfway across town to tell her yes, really, he’s taking a break from music for the foreseeable future, and no, he doesn’t think a solo career is a great idea right now, had told Apollo he’d be out of the office by the time he arrived, but—if it was really so urgent, he could swing by Klavier’s apartment tomorrow and drop the files off then?
And Klavier would be lying if he said that he hadn’t genuinely thought it was a good idea, if only for the sake of getting all the Misham stuff done and behind them as soon as possible. But he would also be lying if he said he hadn’t suggested it just because he liked the idea of seeing Apollo Justice in his apartment, or, failing that, hearing him stammer in embarrassment over the phone. But Apollo had agreed, and Klavier had smiled, given Apollo his address and personal cell, left for his dinner and—had completely forgotten to put their meeting down in his calendar, he now realized. He’d thought tonight had been free, and now Apollo Justice was in front of his building, waiting to see him, while Klavier stood barefoot in his bathroom looking like a Barbie doll that a toddler had taken a pair of scissors to.
“…or if this is a bad time, I could swing by first thing on Monday—”
“No, nein, it’s fine,” Klavier interrupted, trying to project a calm that he did not feel. “I’m in 504. I’ll buzz you up, ja? See you in a sec.”
“Okay, where should I leave my bi—” Apollo started, but Klavier had already hung up. He looked back at his own reflection, and brought a hand to what was left of his hair.
Fuck.
Alright, this was—well, it wasn’t ideal. It wasn’t really even fine, but it was manageable. Klavier could manage this situation.
As soon as the alert came through he buzzed Apollo into the building and sprang into action. He brushed as much loose hair as he could from his shoulders and, when that failed to do much at all to the hide the evidence, rushed to his closet to throw on the first clean shirt he found, a several-year-old Gavinners tee from their “Gunna Lock U Up” tour that he used to wear to sleep. Klavier did his best not to look at the logo as he pulled it over his head.
He then went to rifle through the rest of his wardrobe, desperately searching for anything that could hide the state of his hair. There wasn’t much to find. It was evident that he had spent most of his life finding ways to show his hair off, not cover it up—all he came up with in the end were a couple of hats that he regretted ever buying and a collection of wool scarves which were well-suited to keeping him warm during harsh Berlin winters but had no future as hair accessories. As he heard a knock at the door, it was clear he would have to settle on a paisley-patterned black bandana that he was pretty sure he once wore for a cowboys-and-outlaws themed photoshoot and hadn’t look at it since— he hadn’t realized he still owned it at all.
“Coming!” he called out, pulling the bandana over his head and tying it at the base of his skull. With a deep breath he spared himself one final look in the mirror. It—wasn’t the worst. It could maybe be a look, with some adjustments. If nothing else it would, hopefully, hide his newly-short hair for as long as it took to greet Apollo and see him safely back out the door.
He made his way there now, measuring his stride just in case Apollo could hear his footsteps, moving at the pace of a man who had never been rushing in the first place, and had perhaps never rushed anywhere in his whole life. He was cool. Everything was cool. He pulled a smile to his face and opened the door.
And there, in all his glory, was Apollo Justice. He was dressed more casually than Klavier had ever seen him, in a t-shirt and hoodie, well-worn backpack slung over one shoulder. He walked a bike beside him, sun-faded red with a patch on the front tire and helmet hanging off the handlebars. Klavier noted his mild case of helmet-head, a few more strands of his slicked-back hair falling into his eyes than usual. He was wearing that serious, slightly constipated expression on his face, brows knotted over his big, dark eyes, and in that moment Klavier wanted nothing more than to reach out and smooth that tension with his thumb.
God, he was fucked.
“Hello, Herr Forehead,” Klavier managed with a grin.
“Uh, hi,” Apollo replied with his usual gracelessness, and just the sound of his voice sent a thrill down Klavier’s spine. “I brought my bike up with me. I didn’t see a bike rack outside and you didn’t say anything so—”
Klavier waved a hand. “Oh of course, kein Problem.”
Apollo nodded, “Cool.” And there was a half-second then, when suddenly it was no longer just Klavier looking at Apollo, but Apollo looking– really looking–back. And for all that Klavier was accustomed to the weight of others’ eyes upon him, with Apollo it was somehow different. When Apollo looked at him Klavier could never shake the feeling that he wasn’t looking at his hair or clothes or bright-white smile, but straight through it all, to the bone, to his beating heart.
“So, uh,” Klavier continued, “you brought the…”
“Oh yeah, here’s—” and Apollo slung his backpack around to his front, balancing it on one knee as he pulled out a file folder. He held it out to Klavier. “The last of the Misham trial paperwork. Or, well, I reviewed it and it’s more to do with our involvement in the test run of the jurist system than anything else. You can take the weekend to review it if you want, Mr. Wright just wants it filed by Monday. Which you would think would mean he’d get it to me earlier than Friday afternoon, ” he huffed, “but—yeah. Sorry about all this.”
Klavier took the folder. Their hands did not touch. “No, no, alles gut. I appreciate you going out of your way.”
And this was the part where Klavier really should’ve gone to close the door, given a blithe Tschau and said he’d see Apollo around. Instead, he looked at Apollo, at his bike, at the faint sheen of sweat on his brow, at the span of his shoulders and the muscles flexing in his forearms and asked: “Do you want to come in? Rest for a second before you head out?”
Apollo, who had just finished zipping up his backpack, blinked up at him with wide eyes. “Oh. Uh. Sure, yeah.” He looked down to his bike. “Can I…”
“Ja, of course, bring it inside.” And Klavier, idiot that he was, opened the door wide and gestured to a spot against the wall where Apollo could lean his bike. “Something to drink?” he asked, heading towards the kitchen.
Apollo followed. “Just water is fine.”
Klavier busied himself with Apollo’s request, trying not to watch (or, at the very least, not be caught watching) Apollo as he took in Klavier’s apartment. He tried not to wonder what Apollo must see—if he was intrigued by the guitars on the wall or found them tacky, if he looked at the papers spread across the coffee table and saw uncontrollable mess or carefully organized chaos. Maybe Klavier was thinking too much (he was always thinking too much), and Apollo was simply looking, and thinking of nothing at all. But of course he wasn’t. When Klavier turned back to Apollo with a cup of water in hand, Apollo’s gaze was trained on him , sharp and intent, as if Klavier were a puzzle he was trying to solve. After a moment, he spoke:
“Did you cut your hair?”
Klavier nearly dropped the glass. His free hand darted to the front edge of his bandana where, indeed, a few hairs had begun to peek out from under the fabric, still longer than they’d be when he finished with them but still notably shorter than they were the last time he and Apollo had seen each other face to face.
“Sharp eye, Forehead,” Klavier smiled. He pronounced the nickname with a soft laugh, as if he really didn’t mind Apollo noticing, like it wasn’t something he’d been trying to hide. “Just decided I needed a change, ja?”
Apollo studied him for a moment, and then nodded. “Yeah, I get it.”
And the strangest thing was, Klavier really thought he might.
So, really, Klavier could hardly be blamed for what happened next. It was too easy, to stare a little too long, think a little too hard about those honey-dark eyes and that gaze that pierced right through him, about the serious purse of Apollo’s lips and the strange relief that flooded Klavier just to have Apollo here before him, drinking a glass of water in Klavier’s messy apartment, perhaps the only person on earth who could truly understand the strange tangle of grief and elation that twisted in Klavier’s chest when he heard his brother’s name, who could understand why Klavier had brought a blade to his hair in the first place. It was inevitable, really, that he would slip back into old habits.
Which was to say: Klavier looked at Apollo, and looked at him some more, and as he looked he made to comb his hair back with his fingers the way he always had. But instead of long blond hair they encountered nothing but the folded edge of that fucking black bandana listting loosely on his head, the knot at the nape of his neck already coming undone. And even as he knew what would happen he could not stop his own hand; he pushed the fabric back, not by much, but just far enough to reveal the extent of the mess beneath.
“Scheiße,” Klavier swore. He tried to cover his hair with his hands, but it was no use—Apollo had already seen.
“Oh. That’s. Um.” Apollo was squinting, jaw tight. Klavier didn’t want to know what he was restraining himself from saying.
“This isn’t—it’s not the finished product,” Klavier blurted out, voice strangled by the embarrassment wrapping its hands around his throat. “I forgot you were stopping by this evening,” he admitted. “I’m still in the middle of, ah, everything. It will look better on Monday, ja?”
“Uh-huh,” Apollo nodded. It didn’t feel like a reassurance. He just kept looking, and Klavier felt the weight of his gaze as if in that very moment Apollo were a foot closer, running his fingers through Klavier’s hair, measuring its length down to the millimeter. It would be so much easier if he would just come out and say it, that Klavier looked insane, that this had been a bad idea from the start, that he was out of control just like Kristoph had always said—
“Do you want help?”
Klavier blinked. “What?”
Apollo shrugged. “I used to cut me and my friends’ hair a lot back in college. It’s easier with another person there, especially if you’ve never done it before. So I could clean it up for you, if you want?” It was only as he finished speaking that Apollo seemed to realize he ought to look sheepish at his own suggestion, one hand coming up to rub the back of his neck as his cheeks bloomed red.
Klavier couldn’t even find it in himself to feel stung but the implication that his work thus far had been shoddy. When Apollo looked at him like that it was hard to feel anything but relief.
“Yes,” Klavier said, slightly breathless. “Please.”
He led Apollo to the bathroom, stealing a chair from the kitchen table as they went. When Klavier sat, throwing the bandana to the side, he could see just the messy top of his head in the mirror and Apollo’s face above it, lips in a slight purse as he examined the tools at his disposal. Klavier watched Apollo’s wide and steady hands as he lifted the clippers and weighed them in his palm, as he picked through the guards with the quiet self-assuredness of a man who had done this a million times before.
“Ready?” Apollo asked, and Klavier nodded. Apollo brought a hand up slowly to Klavier’s hair, as if he might flinch away; but Klavier, having sat in more make-up chairs in the past year than most people would in a lifetime, was still. Even so, when Apollo combed his fingers through his hair, Klavier felt it down to his toes. It was exhilarating; it was so easy . Apollo did not try to make small talk, did not ask Klavier why he’d gone so short or why he was cutting it himself; he never once uttered the sharp and blood-soaked names that Klavier still felt digging into his side. He simply asked: “How short do you want it?” and waited for Klavier’s reply.
“Short,” Klavier said. “Really short. I want it gone.”
So they began with a four and then brought it even shorter, until Klavier could almost feel Apollo’s breath against his skin, until these past seven years were hardly anything at all. Apollo cut hair the way he did anything else, throwing himself into the task with an earnestness and resolve that was perhaps better directed towards solving murder cases, but Klavier could not help but enjoy the attention. He liked being in Apollo’s care, in Apollo’s hands. He liked how he directed Klavier not with words but with tiny presses of his fingers—head up; head down; tilt here, please. They hardly spoke, but Klavier still listened. He listened to the hum of the clippers in his ears, the way it echoed in his ribcage, to the sound of Apollo breathing. The whole world buzzed inside him, the past and future silenced in the single moment of Apollo pressing a blade oh so close to his skin. Klavier’s eyes flit closed. He was laid bare beneath Apollo’s touch, and the strangest thing of all was that it left him almost at peace.
The buzzing stopped. “Okay,” Apollo cleared his throat. “What do you think?”
Klavier opened his eyes, rose from his seat, and looked.
There was a new face in the mirror, and they stared back. They had short blond hair and brown skin and they looked just like Klavier, but Klavier had never seen them before.
He ran his fingers through his hair, over the shorn sides of his head. He felt light, impossibly so. He turned his head to look left and then right, the cool air just grazing his scalp. It almost tickled.
“It’s….weird,” Klavier confessed.
“Good weird or bad weird?”
“I don’t know yet.”
Behind him, he heard Apollo hum. “It was sort of like that for me, too. I think my hair was almost as long as yours was the first time I cut it short.” In the mirror Klavier could see him indicate with one hand the length that it once fell to, well below his shoulders. “It was my idea in the first place, but I still freaked out afterward. I thought, like—maybe I made this huge mistake and the whole ‘being a guy’ thing wasn’t actually for me, you know? But it was just shock, really. It’s a big change. I just needed a second to get used to seeing myself that way.”
“I can’t imagine it,” Klavier exhaled. He wasn’t surprised, per se, but there was some part of him who had only ever imagined Apollo as he was, as if that’s all he ever had been.
“What, me freaking out?” Apollo said wryly.
“You with long hair. Your current look suits you too well, Herr Forehead.” He caught Apollo’s eye in the mirror and watched the symphony of expressions that played out on his face. He imagined Apollo, many years younger, looking into the mirror and wondering who else he could be. Deciding to be someone else, or perhaps just who he always had been. Klavier wasn’t quite sure he understood the difference, but Apollo made him want to try—to turn his gaze back on himself, to really look.
It could only be Klavier staring back in the mirror, but it was hard to accept. Not because he saw too little of himself in the reflection but—maybe too much. He’d been born anew on the tile of his bathroom floor and now, with nothing to hide behind, there was just him. It was just him standing there, and Klavier wasn’t sure who that was. He didn’t know what other people would see. Who was he without his braids and curls, without that toss of his head that made people look? Who was he (and the thought occurred to him with all the shock of a bullet through the heart) if he wasn’t pretty ?
“It’s just—it’s not too masc, is it?” he asked, and prayed Apollo didn’t hear the ugly desperation in it.
But Apollo didn’t laugh, or even look askance. He simply took a step back, hands on his hips, and tilted his head to look at Klavier—to really look at him, and Klavier suddenly felt as though he were a witness on the stand, every minute detail of his person under scrutiny. “I don’t think so,” Apollo said after a moment. “I mean, it could be, if you wanted to go for that sort of look, but you’re so…” He waved a hand in Klavier’s general direction.
“I’m what?”
Apollo shrugged. “I just think it’ll take more than a haircut to turn you into the manliest guy in the room, is all.”
Relief crashed over him. It was so absurd, so disarming, that Klavier couldn’t help but laugh. “You have a way with words, you know that, Herr Forehead?”
Apollo grumbled something unintelligible behind him, and as Klavier watched him in the mirror he could swear he almost looked fond.
Klavier pulled his fingers through his hair, and more tiny white-blond clippings fell onto his shoulders.“It really looks alright?”
“It shouldn’t matter what I think, it’s your hair.”
“I know, but—" Klavier sighed. “Tell me anyway?” he asked, and it felt like a confession.
But if Apollo saw any weakness in him, he let it be. He just looked at Klavier, catching his gaze in their reflection. Apollo tilted his head, and his rough voice was soft when he said: “I like it. You look like yourself.”
Klavier let out a breath he hadn’t realized had been trapped in his chest. “Gorgeous as always, then?” he teased, and he could feel his heart beat in every limb. Apollo rolled his eyes, but he was smiling. So was Klavier.
It felt untenable then, to continue the way they were, only meeting each other’s eyes in the bathroom mirror. Klavier turned around and leaned up against the hair-covered mess that was his countertop, from where he could look down and see those dark eyes staring right back. “Apollo,” he began, testing the sound of the name on his tongue. It was only as he pronounced each syllable that Klavier understood why he'd so rarely used it before. There was something terrifyingly intimate to it, and if his face was anything to go by Apollo seemed to agree. Klavier wasn’t sure he’d ever heard Apollo call him by his first name alone; he thought it might ruin him to hear it. He wanted to anyway.
And wasn’t it just as simple as that? Klavier looked at Apollo, and he wanted. He wanted, even though every sensible bone in his body told him he shouldn’t, that he was just denying the inevitable: that one day Apollo would look too closely and see Klavier for the mess he really was, and he would leave, and Klavier would be more alone than he ever had been.
But Apollo hadn’t looked away, not yet. And maybe, just maybe, Klavier wanted Apollo to keep looking.
"Do you like Thai food?” Klavier asked.
Apollo’s face twisted into a gentle kind of confusion. “Yeah, why?”
“I was thinking of ordering some takeout, if you want to join me. My treat. To say thanks.”
“I mean. You really don’t have to.”
“I want to,” Klavier replied, crossing his arms and hoping the smile on his face came across as handsome, seductive even, rather than as giddy as he felt. “You see, there’s this very handsome man in my apartment, and I’d like him to stay a bit longer. If he’s alright with that, of course.”
“Oh,” Apollo exhaled. For a moment he just stared at Klavier, searching. For what, Klavier didn’t know, but eventually he seemed to find it. Klavier saw it in the change on his face, tension going soft around his eyes and color flooding his cheeks. “You’re actually serious, aren’t you?”
“Entirely.”
“I—Yeah, okay. Sure.”
“Toll,” Klavier grinned, and it was impossible that Apollo didn’t hear in that single word the embarrassing depths of his breathless happiness, but for once in his life Klavier didn’t mind. He busied his hands with pulling up the menu of his favorite takeout place, and tossed Apollo his phone. “Decide what you want while I clean up, ja?”
Apollo nodded and slowly began to wander towards the kitchen. Cheeks dusted pink, he stared down at the list of appetizers with an expression of such intensity that it took all of Klavier’s willpower not to kiss it off his face right then and there. Instead, Klavier grabbed the broom he’d leaned up against the door frame and began the work of sweeping up the past seven years of his life.
He caught sight of himself in the mirror as he did so, and for just a moment he paused, running a hand through what was left of his hair. It was shorn so close he could practically make out the shape of his skull; between his fingers it hardly felt like anything at all. It was—a breath. A glimmer of some distant light. A halo.
Kristoph would hate it, probably. But Klavier found, for the first time in a long time, that he didn’t really care.
He began to push the locks that had once been his into a pile at his feet. From the other room he could hear Apollo asking if he liked chicken satay.
Klavier raised his head, lighter than it ever had been. He smiled, and called out his reply.