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The last time Phoenix sees Kristoph, everything is wrong.
Just a little bit. Everything in Kristoph’s cell is — off. Phoenix himself is off, wearing his old blue suit for one last hurrah. He’s not sure why he put it on. He supposes he wants to feel like he can be that person again. He supposes he wants to tell Kristoph, without fumbling for the words he always misplaces when he’s around him, that he can be that person again. He’s not sure if Kristoph will believe it.
Still, though. Kristoph pauses halfway through putting trinkets in a box neatly labelled for — Phoenix squints, then regrets it — Klavier. He looks small. No less well groomed than he was, that first day Phoenix had met him, but small. Circumscribed by the emptying shelves around him, by the quiet calm he has as he sits.
“I hoped you’d come,” Kristoph says.
Four words, and already Phoenix is ready to swing at shadows again. Pick apart his meaning. But Kristoph sits, and his hands are empty and neatly folded in his lap, and he smiles at Phoenix, and:
“I never loved you.” Phoenix says it, and suddenly it’s true. It’s important, in some desperate way. The ace up his sleeve, no blood this time, four words in turn. He never loved him. Kristoph never had him fully under his control, not really.
“Didn’t you?”
“No,” Phoenix says, and believes it.
“I see.” Kristoph unlaces his fingers, then laces them the other way, the other thumb on top. He doesn’t look at Phoenix as he does it. “I did. Love you, that is.”
Phoenix buckles himself into the passenger seat of Edgeworth’s rental car and suddenly — here of all places, a sunny Paris morning, so far away from anyone who would know what’s been done to him — he has to put his head between his knees and force breath into his body, one heaving inhale at a time.
“Wright?” Edgeworth’s hand skims his knee, then hovers, a smear at the periphery of his vision.
“I don’t know why he hasn’t killed me,” Phoenix says, apropos of nothing. He hadn’t quite put this together before now, though the pieces were there. The capacity for murder, the knowledge, the stomach for it. The hands he’s had in his hair. “He’s certainly had the chance.”
The Mishams and Brushel feeling like they’re being watched. Trucy’s uncharacteristic reticence about the man who gave her the note: I don’t know, Daddy. I don’t remember. Like her profession doesn’t depend on remembering everything. On reading people, and reacting to them appropriately.
Everything slides into sickening clarity. He’s been so stupid. The sunlight streams through the windshield, catching on the clear gloss on Edgeworth’s fingernails.
The hoodie comes first. It’s entirely deliberate, at first; being disbarred doesn’t mean his suit vanishes into thin air, after all. He has his blue suit. If he didn’t want to be recognized quite so easily, he has a black suit, somewhere in the back of his wardrobe, the one he’d worn for mock trials in law school. He’d found it at the back of a thrift shop with a sachet of crumbling potpourri in a pocket. The label marked it as a uniform for hotel staff; the price tag said it was twenty dollars.
It would have been enough to meet Kristoph in that suit, appallingly fitted as it is. But Phoenix reaches into the very depths of his wardrobe and finds that hoodie, one Larry had bought him in a rare fit of generosity. You need comfy clothes, he’d said. Then you won’t become the kind of lawyer who’s an asshole cause you’ve forgotten how not to wear a suit.
It’s the first time he’s worn it, but it’s somehow already fuzzy with pilling. Kristoph raises an eyebrow when Phoenix slides into the seat across the table. There’s a flicker of distaste there, before he busies himself again with the menu.
Push and pull. Testing the waters. Kristoph is a mystery, still, but it’s easy to aggravate him enough that he shows it. Aggravate, verb: to annoy. Aggravate, verb, legal: to make worse, both action and consequence.
Perhaps it is a relief. Perhaps after years of throwing himself into fast-moving danger, glass and poison and bridges and rivers, Kristoph setting the pace was a nice change. Perhaps Phoenix would have been… he doesn’t know, really, what he’d be without him. He certainly doesn’t remember a time when he lived a life without crisis. He doesn’t remember not fighting with every breath to swim upstream. Perhaps this was preferable: bobbing, alone in the unfathomable ocean, dragged along by the undertow. Letting it happen. Seeing what happens.
The first time Phoenix sees Kristoph, he’s rocketing to his feet as the heavy doors swing open. The committee filters out of the room. None of them meet his eyes for more than a second — he knows, already, what they’d decided. But the last man out of the room is tall and blond, and he stops to regard Phoenix with distinct sympathy. He looks him in the eye.
“I’m sorry,” the man says.
Phoenix is struck by his largeness. He has maybe four inches on Phoenix; from a distance he’d looked willowy, long-legged. Gangly and perpetually pubescent like so many tall men are. Now he’s drawn close, it’s clear he’s broader than he seems: power and gravity wrapped into an unassuming demeanour, a suit tailored to hide his strength, eyes that crinkle at the corners. There is no chance it’s not deliberate.
So Phoenix makes a choice, the first in a string of them like dominoes. “You know,” he says. He offers his hand. “You’re the first person who’s said that to me.”
“You can’t have loved me,” Phoenix says, because there’s nothing else he can say. “Not really.”
But Kristoph looks up at him, and suddenly the terror Phoenix has been unwinding from his spine blossoms anew, because — “I did,” Kristoph says again, and the twist to his mouth is the self-deprecating one Phoenix has only seen once before, tired and bitter and vulnerable. He’s telling the truth.
“I was thinking,” Kristoph says. He’s sliding his wallet back into his pocket; he’s insisted on paying the bill. “We could do this again. Still my treat, of course.”
Phoenix knows he’s meant to protest. He’s too tired for those loosely-defined rules of propriety and performance. This is what he wanted, after all. Keeping Kristoph close. Finding out what he wants. Who he might be. “Sure,” Phoenix says.
Kristoph’s smile is sudden. Startled, like he hadn’t expected such easy acquiescence. Like he’s actually looking forward to this. It’s almost endearing, if Phoenix forgets the way his intuition is a heavy lump sitting in his throat.
“Trucy,” Phoenix says. “Truce.”
“Yes, Daddy?”
The words dry up on his tongue. This is what comes out: “I need you to stay away from Mr. Gavin.”
“I know,” Trucy says, no sign of the preteen recalcitrance she’s recently put on like a coat. Eyes searching and sincere. “I’ve been trying.”
“I don’t know what to tell you,” Kristoph says eventually. He plucks at the ribbon at his throat, loosening it. He drops it into the box behind him, the one which isn’t for Klavier, without looking. “Think about it. Why wouldn’t I have loved you?”
“Because you’re—” A monster? A murderer? Incapable of love? Phoenix starts the sentence, but every possible way of ending it crumbles to ash. That’s the thing about Kristoph, him and his impossibly specific opinions about printer paper or nail polish. Him and his hubris. Him and his jealousy, kept under lock and key. He’s human, just like every other sorry soul Phoenix knows.
“You see,” Kristoph says, gently.
Two years and six months into their weekly encounters — eleven months into knowing what Kristoph tastes like — Phoenix sits up, reaching for his shirt. Kristoph stills him with a hand on his wrist.
“Stay.”
Phoenix stares. Kristoph is half-undone, still, cheeks flushed and eyes lidded with that incapacitating post-coital glow. Soft; open. Like this, it’s hard not to admit he’s beautiful.
“It’s late,” Kristoph says. It’s hardly nine. But Kristoph has court in the morning, and Phoenix is a father.
“I can’t,” Phoenix says. He wears feigned regret so easily these days it may as well be real. “Trucy.”
Something assembles itself in Kristoph, setting his languid limbs at right angles. He sits up and reaches for his glasses. “Of course.”
They dress in silence.
Kristoph is careful. Meticulous, paranoid. So Phoenix keeps one step ahead of him by being exactly the same, and hiding it better.
He offers his hand. The blond man takes it. His grasp is firm and warm.
“I’d introduce myself, but you know who I am.”
“I do.” The man pushes his spectacles up his nose with his free hand. “I’m Kristoph. Kristoph Gavin, though I’m sure you’d noticed the resemblance.”
“I hadn’t.” Kristoph is pale, his hair impossibly orderly, his shirt impossibly crisp. Klavier, at least in court, had been a barely-contained ball of desperate adolescent energy. “He’s… your brother?”
“Indeed.” Kristoph inclines his head. He lets go, stepping back a half-step. “I hope you’ll forgive him. He doesn’t know what he’s doing.”
It had very much seemed like Klavier had known, more than Phoenix ever had. Phoenix files that thought away for later.
Here is an incomplete list of aggravated felonies:
- Bribery, counterfeiting, or forgery.
- Perjury, or any other obstruction of justice.
- Spying, treason, or sabotage.
- Rape.
- Murder.
“I’m curious, now. Why didn’t you love me?”
“Everything you did was a lie. From the start — from the start I knew you were dangerous. I didn’t trust you.”
“But you kept seeing me.”
“I didn’t know what you would do if I didn’t.”
“What I did to the others, I imagine. Keep an eye on you in ways that are… less complicated for me. Kill you. Save both of us this mess. You didn’t think of that?”
One night, Kristoph’s there when Phoenix puts Trucy to bed. His heart is in his throat; he hopes against hope that Trucy doesn’t say anything incriminating.
Not that there’s anything more dangerous than this, as it stands: Phoenix, smoothing Trucy’s hair back from her forehead. Trucy, looking up at him with absolute trust. Entirely ignoring Kristoph — which, he supposes, is the best thing she could have done. Phoenix can imagine how they look to Kristoph where he’s standing in the living room: silhouetted by the warm light of Trucy’s lamp, framed by the doorway of the one bedroom he’d given to her. Parent and child, loved and beloved. There’s nothing more dangerous than that, to a man like Kristoph. Love.
When he shuts the door behind him, Kristoph’s sitting on the couch. Phoenix sits, just a couple of inches too far away for their thighs to touch. He can’t really be any further away. It wouldn’t make sense for Phoenix-who-is-a-friend-and-maybe-more, and besides, his bedding is wadded up in an indistinguishable mass taking up the rest of the couch.
“You’ve taken to parenthood remarkably well,” Kristoph says. It sounds sincere. Nothing he says should sound that way, much less a statement so easily barbed with condescension.
Phoenix calculates, a split-second deliberation, and lands on vulnerability. “I don’t think I know what I’m doing.”
“Nobody does. Even the people who plan for children — nobody does, I think. Nobody can prepare for everything raising a child does to you. Your priorities, your life, the things you know and live and breathe.”
It’s too much, too telling. Too specific. But Kristoph is a lifelong bachelor, as men like him tend to be. “It sounds like you’re speaking from experience.”
Kristoph is quiet for a very long moment. “Klavier was nine when our parents died,” he says, eventually. “I was, thankfully, newly eighteen. Old enough to petition to keep him in my care.” He looks up at Phoenix, then. Smiles, though the twist of it is rueful and weary and altogether too naked for the house of cards they’ve built between them. “It’s not the same, of course. But I know a little about it, yes.”
“You raised him.”
“I did. He was a lot like Trucy, I’m afraid.”
Phoenix doesn’t know if he wants to know what that means. He asks anyway. “Yeah?”
“He was an attentive child. Sensitive. He felt he owed me a debt, even as he grew into a teenager able to convince himself and the world of his talent. Even now, I suspect. That first year, he told me he’d earn his keep by busking after school.”
In the low light, Trucy’s props cast looming shadows, gargoyles that send guilt rising up his throat. “Did you let him?”
Kristoph laughs. It sounds miserable. “For a while, I did. Our parents lived a little beyond their means — nothing terrible at all, but the house was still mortgaged, and there were card debts to settle, and I was determined to handle it without introducing a third party who could rob us of what I needed for Klavier’s future. And I did. But at first…” He shrugs. A small movement, a one-shouldered thing. “I couldn’t grieve and figure out property law and keep him from leaving. I knew he needed more from me. But I needed — I needed to get my life under control. You know a little about that, I imagine.”
Isn’t that an understatement. “Something like that.”
“Well,” Kristoph says. His hand is warm on Phoenix’s hand. “If I can help in any way, let me know.”
The thing about spending seven years circumnavigating a person is that they change you. Knowing someone always does. The question is whether you end up better or worse.
“They say to keep your enemies close,” Phoenix says. He’s scrambling, now, breaking open canisters of undeveloped memories to hold them up to this new, awful light. “On some level, I think… it was reassuring, being with you.” Maybe that’s it. It certainly feels as true to say as the first thing he said, that cracked this all open, I never loved you. Except now he’s not sure if that’s true, either.
“You knew where I was. You could keep an eye on me. Was that it?” Kristoph tilts his head a little, considering. “You could guess what I was thinking. Don’t look at me like that — I didn’t mean it as a barb, I promise. I didn’t know I loved you either.”
Perhaps Phoenix is more like Kristoph than he wants to be. He thinks about the chess set Edgeworth kept in his office; thinks about pawns and sacrifices; thinks about the way it takes two to play a game with any satisfaction. He’s starting to enjoy keeping Kristoph on his toes. It’s too easy, really: the man had all but admitted he was unfamiliar with affection. With intimacy. With being out of control.
Phoenix gives, he gives. Pours what he can of his unpredictability and his heart into Kristoph until he’s overfull, ready to burst. Keeps the embers at home warm for Trucy. For Edgeworth and Maya, though they’re further away. He’s glad they are. He’s not sure they’d like what he’s become.
But he’s always been like that, setting himself on fire to keep others warm. And Kristoph sees it and draws closer despite himself, moth to unerring light. Perhaps for once the flames will burn away someone who deserves it. Then again, perhaps Kristoph will put his light out.
“Phoenix. Did I ever lie to you? Put anything related to the courtroom aside. When it was just the two of us, did I ever lie to you?”
Returning to Los Angeles after Paris is an ordeal. Trucy returns from her school trip the evening after Phoenix gets back. He doesn’t ask Kristoph to pick him up from the airport. He calls in a favour from Larry to improvise some way to get Trucy and her bags home.
It’s just him in the office. He waters Charley; he feels a rush of relief when he learns Larry’s car-driving friend for the day is Gumshoe; he sits on the couch amid the detritus of two uprooted lives and tries not to jump at every sound.
It’s not like he hasn’t been alone before. It’s not even like he hasn’t been alone without realising it before, a pawn in someone else’s game. It’s the first time he’s realised it before the game has drawn to a close, its last few steps inevitable. He’s not sure what to do.
That’s a lie, he thinks. He leaves the burner phone Edgeworth's slipped into the lining of his suitcase exactly where it is, zipping the case up and putting it away.
Trucy comes up the stairs in a clatter of freckles and excitement. Gumshoe trails after her; when she’s been charged with getting her grass-stained clothes into the washer with Phoenix’s travel clothes, it’s just the two of them, for the first time in a long time.
Gumshoe presses a tissue-wrapped bundle into his hand. “From Ema,” he says. “I don’t know what it is.” He says nothing else until he bids Trucy goodbye.
Then, on the threshold, about to step out of all of this: “It’s good to see you. Look after yourselves, yeah?”
It’s not a question. Phoenix nods anyway. Gumshoe turns to leave. The goofy-looking badge finds its place pinned to the beanie Trucy made.
“You didn’t know you loved me.”
“No.”
“You told me you did, though.”
“Oh, that was calculated. I wasn’t being completely sincere. At least, I believed I wasn’t.”
Eventually, Phoenix ends up in Kristoph’s bed. It’s almost a relief, disembarking from a train at its final stop. He knows what happens next. He doesn’t know exactly how it’s going to go, but he has some idea; he sprawls in a way he hopes is at least a little bit sexy, and Kristoph’s eyes darken, so it must be working.
But Kristoph settles on the edge of the bed, thumb gently skimming the back of Phoenix’s hand.
“Have you done this before?”
It’s laced with concern. Phoenix flushes, indignant. “Of course.”
“With a man?”
“…No.” There’s no calculation to this admission. It’s true; there’s no point pretending it isn’t.
“Have you thought about it before?”
Steel and scarlet have flickered through his peripheral vision for a decade, at least. “Yeah,” Phoenix says. His mouth is dry. “For a very long time.”
That quiets something in the searching way Kristoph’s looking at him. “We can take it slow,” Kristoph says. “I— well. It’s been a long time for me. I…” He hesitates there, on the cusp of a confession.
Phoenix doesn’t like Kristoph this way, inarticulate and uncertain. He doesn’t know if he can bear hearing the rest.
“Come here,” Phoenix says instead, sitting up and pulling him in by the wrist. Kristoph comes gracefully, easily, willingly.
“It’s too quiet in Kurain,” Phoenix tells Maya, because a half-truth is the best kind of truth these days. “No offence, you know that. These days I just feel like meditation is the opposite of what I need. Like sharks, you know? Like if I stopped swimming I’d die.”
Edgeworth actually meets him at the Arrivals gate, jostling with the crowd at the front, the third time Phoenix flies to Europe to see him. It’s not the kind of thing he does. Not for Phoenix, anyway.
But Trucy sees Edgeworth for the first time looking awkward and thoroughly out of place with his neatly-printed corflute sign reading Mr & Miss Wright, and makes a noise that’s halfway to a squeal, and flies into his unprepared arms. Phoenix tucks his backpack straps over the handle of her suitcase, wheeling them both over. Along the way, he watches Edgeworth’s hands close ever-so-gently against her back.
She talks all the way from the airport to the Von Karma estate. Predictably, she’d been a far better flyer than Phoenix was, sleeping six of the twelve hours from Los Angeles to Frankfurt; she’d been genuinely delighted by the plane food and the white noise of the ventilation system and the awful in-flight headphones and the miserable seat, and she explains to Edgeworth, in excruciating detail, the way the ordeal of long-haul flying is filled with glowing, sensate details she can work into her next act.
He supposes it’s fair. Flying is magic, if significantly less polished than Trucy’s. Phoenix is one of the unfortunate souls who gets motion-sick on planes; his body doesn’t want to be convinced he’s safe and stable, not that many feet above ground. His body doesn’t want to be convinced he’s safe and stable in general, really. Trucy befriends the groundskeeper the moment they arrive, disappearing off into the gardens, and Edgeworth looks at Phoenix.
Edgeworth steps in and unbuttons his top button. Maybe it’s a bad sign that Phoenix just lets him, hands too-still by his side, tilting his chin instinctively to offer him access. Maybe it’s a bad sign that Edgeworth’s lips thin when his cool, blunt fingers reveal the mess Kristoph’s made of Phoenix’s collarbones. But Edgeworth doesn’t say anything, not about his muscle memory, not about the mottled red-blue-black of him. Except this:
“You brought a child into this,” he says.
Before-Phoenix would have been difficult. Before-Phoenix and his attorney’s badge and his willingness to push Edgeworth on every possible subject, what’s this, exactly. Be more specific. But now-Phoenix can’t muster the energy to drag this out.
“I know,” Phoenix says.
Edgeworth sighs. He looks old. Older than he had with the weight of his father’s death bending him double, so many years ago. “I can’t tell you anything you haven’t told yourself, I’m sure. But…”
He turns away, then. Phoenix watches his hand fly to his elbow and tap out the drumbeat of his thoughts. As always, when he’s composed them, he turns back. Looks Phoenix in the eye.
“I know you’ve always been careless with your own life. I’ve… come to terms with it. I’d be a hypocrite if I said I didn’t understand it. But you’re a father, Phoenix. I hope you’re careful with hers.”
“I try,” Phoenix says, and he knows that’s not good enough. And Edgeworth knows, too. And he doesn’t say anything.
“When you chose Justice for your defense, I realised I had… genuine feelings for you.” Kristoph sighs. The fluorescent lights draw dark, unholy smears in the hollows under his eyes. “I should have been concerned with what that meant for me. Why you’d done it, on a strategic level. I knew you were planning something — I might not have known my own mind, but I wasn’t stupid. Or maybe I was, since the first thing I felt was hurt.”
“You would’ve had me found guilty.”
“That was the plan, yes. But the second thing I felt was relief.”
“Relief,” Phoenix says, flatly. Somehow the old anger — the old anger, and wariness, and pain, and loathing, that dinner and the absolute calm that had settled over him when he’d walked back in and seen Zak dead — he remembers it all, and he remembers the way he’d expected that weight to lift after Kristoph was hauled away by the bailiffs. He remembers that it never did, the uneasy see-saw of terror and strategy and exhaustion, always exhaustion.
But Kristoph doesn’t remember it, not like he does. “Your life was no longer in my hands,” he says. And there — there’s the lion he came to beard. There’s the truth of it, smaller and more insignificant than any of the intricate circles they’ve run around each other. “It’s a messy business, Phoenix. I’d tired of it. Either way, that case would bring it to an end.”
“I’m sorry,” Kristoph says finally. It was the first thing he said to Phoenix. Now, it’s also the last.
“No,” Phoenix whispers. He’s so tired. He turns to leave. “You’re not.”
The first time Phoenix flies to meet Edgeworth, he waves Trucy goodbye as she heads off on her school trip, then pays Kristoph a visit.
He probably should’ve made up an excuse for Kristoph. It would’ve been wise. Instead, because Kristoph finds nothing more unbearable than honesty, he tells the truth.
“I need a ride to the airport.” Kristoph’s pen stops mid-stroke.
“Where are you going?”
“France,” Phoenix says. “To see an old friend. He paid for my tickets; he can’t wait to see me.”
Kristoph’s face darkens. He knows Phoenix’s history well enough, at this point, to know who it must be.
“What will you be doing?”
Phoenix shrugs. “I don’t know. I’ve never been to Europe. I’ve heard it’s lovely this time of year.” Then, to twist the knife, though he doesn’t know he’s holding it yet: “I hear he’s got glasses now. I bet he looks good in them, you know? Like you do.”
Kristoph sets his pen down, studying Phoenix with pursed lips. “I’m sure he does,” Kristoph says. “When do you leave? I’ll see if I can make time.”
He doesn’t ask about the details, though it’s very, very clear he wants to.
When it’s all over, Apollo looks at him like he’s a mastermind. Like he’d crafted this situation, staying one step ahead of Kristoph the whole time. Like he’d pulled Apollo into his orbit deliberately, factoring him into some calculus of crime and complicity. Like he doesn’t know whether to trust him.
That last one is fair. But Phoenix does admit the truth to Apollo eventually, even if he’s not sure whether Apollo believes him: there was no plan. He was bluffing, as he always does, for seven long years.
Phoenix believes this, at least. If there ever was a plan, he’s forgotten what it was. He’s forgotten how it ends.
Kristoph is vocal in bed. Not in the usual sense — he talks and talks, breathless run-ons that belie the composure he has when his shirt is buttoned up to his throat. Tells Phoenix how good he feels, how beautiful he is, how much he wants this. (If they're playing a different game, he tells Phoenix how filthy he is, how needy, how ruined.)
Mostly, Phoenix ignores it. He arches his back, or scrapes his teeth along Kristoph’s jaw, or lets the tears that have always come too easily to him spill until Kristoph spills, too. He’s gotten good at pretending to be there, one ear still tuned to any secrets Kristoph might set free in a moment of hot-blooded indiscretion, other somewhere else entirely.
But Kristoph is only quiet when he comes, mouth open in a voiceless gasp, and it’s the sudden silence that always reminds Phoenix where he is. Who he’s with. What he’s done.
“But you weren’t about to confess everything.” Kristoph, amiable and paternal at Apollo’s side. Smiling reassuringly at Phoenix in the defendant’s dock.
“Of course not.” A wry smile. “I keep my cards close to my chest. Isn’t that how it’s always been, between us? You, ready to rise to any challenge. Defending Zak Gramarye at such short notice. Shepherding my apprentice, who you’d never met, through somehow indicting me. Phoenix Wright, worker of miracles. And Kristoph Gavin, by contrast… I’m rigid, as you know. Controlling. Obsessive, perhaps, in that I saw you and wondered why Gramarye chose you. By the time I was close enough to you to see what he saw, it was too late for me. We had been cast in our parts. I had to see it through to the end.”
Phoenix has to ask. “What did you think he saw?”
“A better man than he was. A better man than I am.”
“Edgeworth,” Phoenix says.
Edgeworth looks up from his paperwork and waits. Phoenix hasn’t touched the stack in front of him.
“I’m trying.”
“I know.”
“I’m in too deep.”
“I know.”
“If something happens to me. Will you make sure Trucy’s looked after?”
Edgeworth exhales. He takes his glasses off, folding them carefully and setting them on the coffee table between them. “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”
“Miles.” He knows it’s a big ask. He knows it’s — not just big. Huge, straining at the edges of everything Edgeworth’s become since his life could be read between the lines of precocious child of dead defense attorney taken in by rival prosecutor. He knows securing Edgeworth’s agreement won’t fix the fact that once they fly back, Kristoph will be much, much closer than Edgeworth will be. He still — he still has to ask. Has to have an answer.
Perhaps Edgeworth hears it in his voice, that he’s as close as he can be to begging. He slips from his seat onto his knees, where he can reach to put one broad hand on Phoenix’s.
“I’ll do everything within my power to keep her safe.”
Phoenix looks at him. Edgeworth attempts some facsimile of a reassuring smile, except it comes out a little constipated and a lot concerned. Soft around the edges, like something that’s about to disintegrate. “You promise?”
“I promise.”
That first time takes forever. Phoenix had expected Kristoph to be a selfish lover. To take what he wanted, to gloat about Phoenix under him and take him apart.
He could have endured that. It wouldn’t have been the first time he’d slept with someone who wanted to kill him, or who just didn’t care what he wanted.
But Kristoph is excruciatingly careful with him. Tender. Cautious, like he’s scared Phoenix will fall apart at the slightest touch. Kristoph noses at the line of his jaw, skims warm hands reverently down his ribs. Kristoph pulls away, all too often, to check in with him. Spectacles sliding down his nose, half-fogged by his own breath, eyes still sharp and attentive behind them: talk to me, Phoenix. I want to know how you feel. I want to make this good for you.
It’s the worst sex he’s ever had in his life, because it’s good. Because Kristoph is so gentle he begins to believe he’s about to break. Because Kristoph insists on being face to face, skin on skin, voice low and honeyed and unmistakably his. There’s nobody else it could be. Nowhere else for Phoenix to escape to. No way to lie back and think of England, when he’s tethered by Kristoph’s hand around them both, Kristoph’s eyes on his, so thoroughly here. Overwhelmed by cruel kindness, brimming over.
“If I’d been found guilty…”
Kristoph smiles. It’s distant, like he’s already gone. In a way, he is. “If Justice hadn’t turned it around, that would have been ideal, in my mind. I would have pulled every string I could to make sure your cell was comfortable. I would have visited you weekly, even if we couldn’t eat together. I would have told you that I was sorry. That I loved you. That I knew you didn’t do it. And it would all be true.”
At the drop-off point at the airport, Kristoph hefts Phoenix’s suitcase onto the sidewalk, then hesitates.
“You and your host,” he says, like they don’t both know who he is. “You’re just friends?”
The question doesn’t sound right in Kristoph’s voice. Phoenix laughs. He steps into Kristoph’s space — not too far, Kristoph’s never liked affection in public — and skims fingertips over Kristoph’s side. It’s as close to an embrace as they can get, automatic doors whooshing incessantly behind them, eyes everywhere. “Yes, Kris. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you were jealous.”
But Kristoph shrugs, stepping back. “He’s known you longer than I have,” he says, like it’s that simple.
It goes like this: Kristoph’s hand on his hand. Kristoph’s hand on his thigh. Phoenix thinks fuck it, I know where this is going and I’m sick of waiting, and leans in, and kisses him.
The day before Kristoph’s execution, Phoenix puts on his old suit one last time.
It’s weird. He looks different in it, though he’s not sure what he expected. Perhaps he thought putting it on would send him back eight years, before the crease in his brow and the bruise-blue of the shadow at his jaw, the beard he hadn’t been able to grow back then and hasn’t been able to completely erase since. He fits it better now, if anything, than he did when the polyester had been shiny-new and the fanciest thing he’d ever seen. He fits it better than he had the day they’d met, when he’d sweated through his shirt while the board deliberated.
Perhaps he’d hoped putting it on would remind Kristoph he hadn’t been able to take anything of value from him.
“You don’t wear your suit any more.”
Phoenix stills, halfway through zipping his hoodie up. “I don’t exactly have anywhere to wear it.”
“Don’t be silly,” Kristoph says.
Phoenix can hear him detangling himself from the sheets, padding near-silent across his bedroom’s hardwood floor. Kristoph props his chin on Phoenix’s shoulder, though he has to stoop to do it. They regard each other in the full-length mirror on his wardrobe door. They look incongruous this way: Phoenix fully dressed, his sweatpants covered in fading stains he hasn’t been able to get out. His eyes dark, unreadable even to himself. Kristoph endless lines of bare skin, the spun silk of his hair whispering at the blunt edge of Phoenix’s jaw. Slim, long fingers settling at Phoenix’s hips.
“It was my understanding that pianists often wear suits,” Kristoph murmurs. He looks like he’s been unspooled into something tender. Something honest. “The staff at casinos do, too.”
“You’re being charitable,” Phoenix says. He hasn’t taken his eyes off the Kristoph in the mirror. “You could have so easily said—” here he makes a passable attempt at Kristoph’s carefully unaccented baritone — “your garish suit would be far less incongruous at your current workplace than in court, or something like that.”
It certainly wouldn’t be out of character. But Kristoph laughs, warm and contained enough that Phoenix feels rather than hears it against his back. “You think so poorly of me. You’re lucky I love you.” Then he stills, half-lidded eyes flying open.
For a moment Phoenix is impressed. He’d hardly thought Kristoph a good actor, not in scenes that are more emotion than control. Then he remembers that his lines are coming up.
“You don’t have to— I don’t expect you to feel the same way,” Kristoph says. He pulls back; he reaches for his robe, tying it tight around his waist like some sort of armour.
“Kris,” Phoenix says slowly. He steps back into Kristoph’s orbit; something slides inexorably into place. “I thought you knew. I do love you.”
“One of us was going to die either way, Phoenix. I’ve made my peace with that.”
“I haven’t,” Phoenix says. It tears its way out of his chest.
And Kristoph looks at him, just looks. And he’s won.