Chapter Text
It was 2031 when Simon Blackquill found himself at an execution. It was not his own.
Four years had passed since he’d anticipated the bite of cold metal shackles, strapping him to a gurney with veins long-ready for the potassium chloride he’d awaited since seeing death’s crimson stain upon his mentor, her daughter, and the katana that lay on laboratory floor; and yet, part of him was surprised to be on the opposite side of the glass. Never would he have considered his presence in the witness room, with its walls of stark white brick and the rows of stiff plastic chairs that nobody dared to sit in. Yet, there he was.
They had been in the prison for two hours. The curtains over the window had not moved since their arrival. The sound of boots against tile echoed in quick, apprehensive rhythm.
“Klavier.”
Leaning against the wall, he lifted his head. “Hm?”
“You’re tapping your foot,” Simon stated. “Were you not the one who insisted we be early, rather than fashionably late?”
“Ah. Yes. Well.” Klavier lifted a hand to his hair, twisting a golden lock around his finger, a habit that had only intensified after cutting it short and shagged, the wispy layers just barely brushing against his shoulders. Two years ago, he’d claimed to have liked the lightness of it.
Simon knew that the reason Klavier could meet his reflection’s gaze easier than he’d once had, when his hair was long and curled over his shoulder, was the same reason he had tensed upon entering the prison. It was not only the prison’s harsh, penetrating fluorescents that had drained his warmth to a sickly pallor.
“Well, it’s not a crime to regret decisions, is it?” Klavier said with a smile, palpably forced across his features. “There’s a reason why so many prefer to be fashionably late. Making an entrance is crucial, of course, but I forgot how unbearable being early was.”
Simon frowned. His eyes flitted to the lone silver ring that glinted on Klavier’s hand as he snapped his fingers.
“Kristoph certainly wouldn’t mind. He’s not at liberty to. Regardless of what time I arrive, he’ll still be another one biting the dust when the state decides.” He swept a hand through his hair. When his bangs fell back to his forehead, he spoke again; as if the forced air of nonchalance made his words sound any more truthful. “I just assumed that there would be a hefty amount of paperwork waiting for me, considering our relation.”
“You do not merely have a relation to him,” Simon said firmly, brow furrowed, “he is your brother. Don’t think your flippancy can fool me.”
Klavier gave a wry chuckle. “I know I can’t fool you, mein Liebe,” he said, flourishing a hand toward him. “I wouldn’t dare dream of it. I’m not being flippant about anything.”
“We must have vastly different definitions of ‘flippant,’ then.” Simon shook his head, crossing his arms. “Your brother is to be executed soon and you choose to reference yet another rock song?”
“It’s Queen.”
“Yes, I bloody well know that,” he said brusquely. “Whoever the singer is—”
“Queen is the name of the band, not the singer.”
“—makes no difference. You can prance about like you haven’t a care, but I know you well enough to know it’s nothing more than a peacock’s rouse. Your performance is falling flat, despite all your squawking. You can’t tap your foot with the incessant anxiety of a rabbit being hunted for sport, then speak as if this is a matter no more trifling than waiting in line for an overpriced coffee.”
Klavier hesitated a beat too long. Then, quickly, “Three analogies at once? Really, Simon—”
“You are being willfully ignorant of my point.”
He hesitated again. Then, he let out a slow, heaving breath. The weight of it leaving his lungs was palpable as his chest rose, then fell, beneath his button-up, its fabric darker than the early morning outside without the jewelry that so often shone from him like stars.
Those stars had long since collapsed in on themselves. They had begun their collapse following the implosion of a band and the disappearance of a brother, but clung to themselves in years of precarious desperation. Finally, upon receiving a letter from the state, they had lost their grip.
Simon had not read the letter. Yet, he could tell what its contents were even before Klavier had requested his company. He read not the words on the paper, but the infallible signs of the body—the almost imperceptible tremble of his guitar-scarred fingers as he clutched the letter; the light fading from his eyes, blue skies darkening as rain clouds conglomerated; the curve of his perpetual, easy smile hardening into a flat line.
Dear Mr. Gavin. It is with empathy that I must inform you that Inmate Kristoph Gavin #13041207 is scheduled to die by lethal injection…
Klavier raked a hand through his hair, eyes drifting off to an empty corner of the room. When he spoke again, his voice was low, quiet. “I’m not trying to prance around, or do anything else of the sort,” he said. “You know… why I asked you to come with me, Simon. It’s my brother’s execution. Believe me when I tell you that you have no reason to worry.”
Simon let out a short laugh in disbelief. “‘No reason to worry’? Do you hear yourself when you speak? I have every reason to worry.”
“Nein, tust du nicht, Liebe,” Klavier said, shaking his head. “After all, I do have you with me.” A smile crept weakly across his features; it was too faint to serve as the reassurance he’d intended it to be.
After three years, Simon could identify both the attempt and the truth behind the performance. Klavier would not relent. And Simon could not, even after three years of warm touches replacing prison’s cold steel, say anything that would help. He had forced himself to forget the words that could have granted him the emotional support he needed, the strength to smile at full capacity, sparkling and shimmering and beautiful; and so all he could offer was his presence and a hollow return of reassurance.
“Yes, I suppose you do,” he said. The words hung like a noose in his throat.
Acutely, he felt the weight of metal—not clenched tight in shackles whose chains clanged a death knell as they bound his wrists, but curved around the finger he’d once accepted as remaining barren till his hands became those of a cold, lifeless cadaver. The shackles had etched scars into his skin where metal had bitten and electricity had coursed. For all their torment, however, they had been familiar. Simon, alone, had been the one to suffer. Nobody else.
The ring now on his finger would drag more than him down with its proposal. His shortcomings would be the downfall of them both.
When shadows began to creep behind the curtains, he could only stand there by Klavier’s side. Quietly, people trickled into the room, some assortment of prison officials and reporters that Simon could not care to look at as he heard them shuffle inside and fill the back row of chairs. It did not matter as Klavier drifted to the front of the room and Simon trailed behind him.
They were the only people there. Two rows of chairs for two people.
Then, three shadows, solidifying behind the curtain.
Simon recognized it: the slow trudge of a convict flanked by guards, one dragging from the front, one shoving from the back. Chains still rattled in his ears, even now in the silence that suffocated the room. He could see the vague form of wrists shackled together, palpable within the blur of straight, extended lines. He could feel the clamp of metal in his own wrists, feel it linger in the scars that had yet to fade from his pale skin.
It should have been him, chained behind that curtain. But December 20th, 2027 had come and gone.
Simon did not recognize the motion of the three shadows as they stopped at the stark black line at the curtain’s center. They congealed into an unrecognizable mass, replacing what had once been three individuals as it lowered itself down onto the line, rising and falling like waves on each side until, finally, it stilled.
When the mass separated, only two shadows emerged.
Slowly, with a spill of blinding light, the curtains parted. Like the beginning of a theatre performance.
Against the stark white walls of the execution chamber stood a gurney. Strapped to the gurney was Kristoph Gavin.
Simon had heard of him from the whispers that passed through the prison: the lavish decor he’d paid to have within his solitary confinement cell, the forgeries that had stolen others’ lives, the atroquinine that had marked the demise of his own. He had heard of him from the halls of the Prosecutor’s Office: the disbarment he had orchestrated, all inscribed within the State v. Misham court transcripts, the era of corruption his vanity had ushered in—the Dark Age of the Law, whose shadows clung to all Simon knew and refused to dissipate.
He knew the man before him—his unmoving frame draped in the same orange prison scrubs that he had been his for nearly a decade—as a cold, calculated killer. One willing to wait however long it took to see the restoration of his pride, even at the downfall of the legal system he deemed so absolute.
But he also knew him as Klavier’s brother.
Simon had heard of him in fragments. They slipped from Klavier’s mouth only when nightfall waned his flamboyance into sobriety, or when his tongue had been loosened by liquor, each fraternal fragment smoothed sharp by time’s sands and, as quickly as they’d come, silenced by a smile that never reached the blue eyes that were mirrored from the glass now. His composure refused to let them linger any longer. Each passing moment comprised a show to perform, and Klavier was not to reprise the long-tired aches of the past, clawing at wounds that had bled since childhood and would bleed all too easily upon the stage, lest he dared pry at his scars again and stand before the world drenched in those clinging crimson stains.
He could not linger, and he would not listen to the encores wrought by memory. Not when there was a future bringing pains far more excruciating than those already borne. Not when that future had already arrived by state’s letter.
Klavier stared through the window in silence.
In that silence, Simon could hear his reprisals of the past.
Unattainable approval. Standards never to be met. A throne of lies that Klavier had been too naïve to see Kristoph’s manicured hands construct, even as his own—scarred from guitars and stained with ink—followed in their act, desperate for cheers and applause as they used the tools forged before them. And all of it, he had done with an eager, show-stopping smile.
Klavier did not smile now. He only continued to stare with a severity that hardened his eyes and cast shadows, starkly unnatural, upon his features.
Kristoph Gavin stared back. A smile pulled at his lips. It did not fit among the gaunt features of his countenance, his frigid blue eyes shadowed by hollows, his cheeks sunken into the bone beneath; but then, none of his physical appearance corresponded with his demeanor. He lifted his head, just barely, pale hair streaming down in a perfect, precise curl onto the gurney whose straps bound him. Then his voice crackled over the speakers. “My, my, what a surprise… It’s been four years too many,” he said, “Klavier.”
Klavier’s hands curled into fists at his sides.
Kristoph Gavin spoke with a lightness, as if he were not sentenced to death; as if his arms were loose and free and not bound to his sides, IV tubes looping through the room’s walls, trailing the blue lines beneath his flesh, and ending at needlepoint to his veins. “You won’t join me for tea, but you’ll join me for my final moments?”
I didn’t like tea until being with you, Klavier had told Simon two months after he moved in.
“Why, it’s been so long, I almost didn’t recognize you. Look at you,” he said, his eyes cold and scrutinizing despite the smile still upon his lips. “Your hair is short again, just like when you were seventeen and playing guitar in your bedroom.”
I can’t stand to see myself anymore, Klavier had uttered, mascara streaking lightning down his face beneath the bathroom lights, a pair of hair shears clutched like swords in his shaking hands. Simon had taken it into his hands and cut it, that first time, if only to keep him from wounding himself—if only to do something for him.
“I suppose that even if I won’t be present for your final performance, I was still there for your first,” he mused.
There was a pause. Kristoph Gavin tilted his head to the side, his lips pursed as if analysing a case before him.
“What do you consider your first performance? When you released your first single, all those years ago? Or when I taught you the violin?”
I’d like to play again, with you as my muse; but how can I, everything considered? Klavier had contemplated with an airy, humorless laugh, staring at the rows of guitars upon the penthouse walls. Simon had stood silently beside him, unable to provide him with an answer.
“I suppose it doesn’t matter. It’s the guitar you went on to play… and that for what you shall be known for. The rock star.” He clicked his tongue. “It isn’t much unlike us, is it? You first knew me as your brother, but now I’m merely another criminal to you.”
Klavier’s breath hitched in the quiet. His eyes bore through the glass, prying through it as if its shatter would bring the answers that his brother refused; as if it was the fault of the glass between them that he could not decipher his own flesh and blood, and nothing more. Yet, he was met only with that same unwavering stare. Behind the glass remained that same continuing calmness, despite the needle stabbed into his veins and the death looming within its point.
Simon wondered if this is how he had sounded to Aura, all those years ago.
Then, Kristoph Gavin said, “Take care of yourself without me.”
Klavier tensed.
Simon brushed his hand. When he glanced to him, his eyes were glossy with unbidden tears, struggling through a performance he could no longer maintain, no matter how dire his attempts. He could hear the waver in his breath beside him, and feel the tremors in each of his fingers; yet, his hand remained clenched at his side.
Klavier’s lips moved. No sound came out.
Kristoph Gavin continued. “I won’t be there to ensure you’re eating your vegetables or flossing your teeth anymore… Ah, but you’re much too old for that now, aren’t you?”
I never used to eat before shows—and what is this if not another performance? Klavier had said that morning as he declined Simon’s offer to make breakfast. He did not turn to look at Simon now. Nor did he take his offered hand.
“Hopefully, you’ve also grown out of biting your nails by now.”
Klavier flinched.
“And if not…” He paused. Slowly, his eyes slid from Klavier and passed over Simon for the first time since the curtains parted, his expression unchanging. “It appears as if you do have someone to look after you when I’m gone. Granted, he doesn’t get sentenced to death row, as well.”
Had the words come from any other mouth, Simon would have snickered. But they had not.
Kristoph Gavin’s eyes moved back onto Klavier, smooth and clinical; and as they settled upon him, they seemed to frost over with frigidity, as if he alone was the only one in the room. “Funny.” He chuckled, but there was no warmth to the sound. “I still think of you as the same child you once were. I suppose I always will, even in death.”
Simon knew what prison looked like. He knew what death looked like. Prison hardened one into something hard and jagged for those who roamed free to condemn, even after leaving its cold concrete and metal bars. Any ounce of humanity is stripped away, the soul stained until all that remained was something subhuman—a stain of a former person.
Kristoph Gavin did not look like a man about to die.
He looked untouched. He blinked, staring, still, at Klavier.
Klavier did not move.
Prison made one’s eyes tired and heavy, with dark, heavy bags clawed beneath. Prison forced one’s eyes to flee, to avert themselves from others’ gazes, the line between friend and foe faded; the line between sister and shadow solidified in its wake. What one did not say with words, and what did not slip out through cracks and stutters in between syllables, was said, unbidden, by the eyes.
Kristoph Gavin stared straight ahead. Eyes wide open, icy and clear, in defiance of the hollows that engulfed them. He acted as if separate from his body, separate from the fatigue and starvation that seemed to merely scrape the surface of his soul. His composure remained, criminally calm, without any of the jagged words that Simon had hurled to his own sibling during her visitations, and without any traces of prison’s effect—no agony, no cracks of remorse upon his countenance, no fear of mortality. Just the same self-satisfied smile that failed, perfectly so, to reach his eyes.
Then, he said, “That’s all.”
Simon was unnerved. Ice ran down his spine, chilling his veins.
Kristoph Gavin had not been stained by prison. Nor had he been ruined. Prison was not needed to ruin him; he had already done that to himself, long ago.
He stared.
As Simon stared back, he wondered how he, himself, would have taken Death. For all his talk and wicked, sneering grins, the Twisted Samurai’s assured bloodlust was naught more than a performance he’d chained himself to. He could not escape it, even now.
“Warden,” someone said, “you may proceed.”
Kristoph Gavin did not react. He continued to stare, even as—Simon knew, from studies and experience—the anesthetic began to flow through the IV tubes and into his veins. He stared, even as the light began to fade from his eyes, ice blue melting into cold, dim grey, and the paralytic agent took hold of his lungs, his chest rising, taking in breaths calculated almost in defiance of the chemicals flooding him, then sinking back down. He stared, even as his breaths grew palpable, grasping onto the air and holding it there in his faltering lungs, and the distance between each increasingly labored attempt increased.
One second.
He stared.
Two seconds.
He stared, eyes dulling, but never wavering from the sight before him.
Three seconds.
Klavier trembled beside Simon. His own eyes remained frozen, for if he dared blink, tears would spill over.
Four seconds.
Simon reached for his hand again; Klavier grabbed it, and squeezed.
Five seconds.
Klavier squeezed his hand hard, his grip tightening until Simon could feel each individual tremor of his body and the metal of his engagement ring dig into his skin. He let him.
Then, Kristoph Gavin’s chest fell as he released another slow, dragging breath. The edges of his lips, curved into a forever-frozen smile, paled to blue. No words spilled from them; no answers, locked away by the unwavering, unbreakable locks of a prideful psyche, no musings, aimed with precision; only the silence of the dead.
And still, as an empty, lifeless corpse of the person he had once been, he stared at Klavier.
Five minutes later, a medical examiner entered the room. Their footsteps were silent as they walked to the gurney where the cadaver lay strapped.
Klavier held tight to Simon’s hand during each passing minute.
The medical examiner checked for a pulse on the pallored neck, unmoving beneath their gloved hands. They shone a light into the still, unmoving eyes. Then they looked up from the heap of orange prison garb and pale hair to a clock upon the wall.
“Inmate Gavin died at 6:04 A.M,” someone said. “This concludes the execution.”