Klavier
You can't pick the people you love, I guess I should know that better than anyone. Why else would I even be here? No matter how much he's changed, no matter who he's become, I have to keep coming back. Because that's the only way I might ever be able to understand why, when I look him in the eye, I have no idea who it is staring back at me. I have to come back. After all, he is my brother.
The receptionist remembers me. A redhead in her mid-twenties with a long nose, wearing enough jewellery to crush a small elephant, she rolls a cigarette between her fingers, puffing at intervals. I tap my knuckles on the desk and she glances up.
"Oh! Prosecutor Gavin!" She flicks the cigarette into the wastebasket and pounds the keyboard of her computer so the screensaver blinks off. She's too late- I've already seen that it's plastered with Gavinners photos, specifically of my shapely visage. If she didn't smoke, I might even give her a try. At least she has style.
I bend over and give her my most charming smile.
"I'm here to see Kristoph Gavin. I know visiting hours are over but do you think you could find it in your heart to give me just a little time with my brother, Fräulein?" She hesitates. Is this woman made of STONE?
"Okay, seeing as it's you..." she falters. "He's in Solitary Cell..."
"Thirteen. I know. Gute Nacht, Fräulein."
The corridor is painted a feeble shade of grey and the lighting is harsh and yellow. The least flattering colour of light. It's remarkably clean for a maximum security prison, full of the smell of bleach. Well, what did you expect? Dungeons? I find the door lettered "13" with little difficulty. The only hard part is going in.
It's just the same as when I last left it: obsessively neat, mahogany bookshelves ranged along the walls, a patterned rug spread out on the cold tiles. All the trappings of a home. He sits, slight and blonde, in an armchair I can tell is antique and when he looks up at me his face betrays no emotion whatsoever.
Kristoph
Hmph. So he's here again. Every Friday, he turns up with that ridiculously hopeful look on his face, as though he is expecting me to say something momentous; as though he is expecting me to display some kind of remorse. To be honest, I'd rather be alone than have to endure another half hour of his tedious company. He pulls out a chair and perches awkwardly on the edge of the seat.
"Soooo...." he trails. "Are you actually going to talk to me this week? Because I'm not leaving until you do."
"I'm talking." I snap back. "Now you can leave."
He rolls his eyes and stretches out in his chair, pushing his hair off his face.
"Y'know, Bruder, I haven't been coming here all this time for nothing. Wir brauchen reden." We need to talk. Don't you consider any clichés beneath you, Klavier?
I sigh deeply. "As amusing as that sounds, I have far more worthwhile things to be concerning myself with. Don't let the door hit you on the way out."
"Ach, it's sweet you care so much." he returns bitterly. I used to. When we were young.
I am fourteen and the excitement of having a younger brother still hasn't quite worn off yet. He is five; clumsy and perfect at the same time, an uncoordinated miniature of me, all skinny limbs and messy blonde hair and I am in constant worry that he is going to wander away and hurt himself. This is why I keep him out of the house as much as possible; the woods just down the lane are much safer for a child with such underdeveloped motor skills. This is why he can never know about it. Usually the bruises are where no-one can see- the upper arm, the back, the top of the leg- but today I have a new one, blooming in painful concentric circles of purple and red on my forehead. I managed to comb my fringe over most of the bruise this morning but as I bend to pluck Klavi back from a patch of nettles it swishes to one side and he looks up at me in puzzlement.
"Krissi, what's that?" he asks, frowning. I hurriedly yank my fringe back to conceal the discolouration, but even he knows his question does not need to be answered. Klavi pouts in his childish way and reaches up to gently pull back the curtain of hair. His probing fingers are less mindful.
"OW! CAREFUL!"
He ignores my protest. "How did you do that?"
Images flash through my head. The paisley print wallpaper in the study seen up close. There's blood on it, why is there blood there? The edge of the massive carved desk that Klavi and I were always forbidden to play near- made of some hard, exotic wood that cracks against my skull. The room blurs in and out of focus and I just want it to stop...
"It doesn't matter, okay! Why can't you mind your own business for once!" I yell at him.
He steps away, tears welling in his eyes, fists clenched and runs with uncommon speed, back, back home.
When I finally catch up with him, he is standing in the entrance hall on the second step of the first floor staircase with my mother, biting his lip and staring at the floor. She is a beautiful woman, statuesque and elegant with flawlessly formed features but her expression of barely concealed repulsion as she looks at Klavi is easily the ugliest thing I have ever seen.
"Don't be ridiculous, Klavier." she hisses. "It's just a bruise for God's sake; he probably just fell over or something..."
She pauses as she catches sight of me peering around the door frame and forces a smile.
"Kristoph, dear, tell your brother he has nothing to worry about." she says with false sweetness.
Tell him you fell is all. Tell him it was an accident.
I want so much to say that and for him to believe it.
Klavier
"Tell your brother he has nothing to worry about." Mama smiles, but I don't believe her. I have heard the sounds coming from the study. Krissi's moment of hesitation is all I need. Nobody can make a scene like the five-year old me. I let the tears fall, hot and bitter and all I can hear is the sound of my own crying until my head spins. The faces around me are indistinct as if seen through a sheet of tracing paper- but I can still pick out Mama, aloof and thoroughly irritated, Krissi shaking me to stop and another. Daddy. I turn off the waterworks as quickly as I started them; even I know this is A Bad Thing. But strangely, it's not me he's mad at. He takes Krissi roughly by the arm and yells something angry that makes no sense to me.
"You just never learn, do you Kristoph?" he growls, his voice low and threatening like a bear.
Krissi looks confused. "B-but what did I...?"
"Always causing trouble; upsetting your mother, your brother. You know what this means."
There is something else mixed with the confusion in Krissi's eyes, the eyes which are the same as mine. He is scared. He swallows, his throat convulsing and holds his head up.
"Okay. But you know what it means too." His gaze flickers to me. "You leave him out of this."
Daddy nods briefly. "As we agreed. Though you seem to have been breaking our agreement slightly."
I look imploringly at Mama- surely she will say something; surely she will stop this? But her expression is cold and unfathomable and she just waves a hand at Krissi, ushering him up the stairs.
When I see him later, just before bedtime, when we are brushing our teeth silently in the cavernous bathroom, he doesn't speak to me. His eye is swollen shut and there is a bandage wrapped ineffectually around his hand which does little to hide the blood seeping through its layers. Today is the last day I ever let anybody see me cry.
Kristoph
So. He does remember. I can almost feel my carefully constructed shell of indifference closing in on me, cracking, splitting, slicing my skin. Klavier chews his lip; a gesture of the little boy who was everything to me nineteen years ago. The only way you can protect something is to shield it with something else and I, I had nothing apart from myself with which to do so. People wondered why I was so quiet, so introverted, so intent on my studies- soon the only adjectives used to describe me were "clever" or on occasion "unsettling".
Once somebody came close to suspecting- our family doctor, the day he told me I would need glasses.
"There shouldn't be any reason for your vision to be this poor, Kristoph. You've never shown any sign of deteriorating eyesight until now. I can only think that maybe this results from serious head trauma. You haven't been in an accident or anything, have you?" Of course I said nothing. And that was how things stayed for the longest time.
"Kristoph?" Klavier's voice jerks me from my maudlin remembrances. "What was it, that agreement you had with.." He cannot bring himself to say the last word, even now.
Should I tell him?
He has to find out sometime...
And I won't be around much longer...
It could die with me and he would never have to know....
But I have had enough of keeping things from him; of trying to protect him still.
I take a deep breath. "I said that if he left you alone, that I would never...tell anybody."
Suddenly, his face scrunches up in anger.
"Was zum Teufel?! What the hell?! You did that for me? You had to go through all that because of me?" he whispers.
"There are a thousand ways to hurt someone, Klavier, but only a few to make them happy. I suppose that was the only time I picked the right way. You were happy- for a while, at least.", I muse.
Klavier
He's right. I was happy, for a longer time than anybody in this world has any right to be. How could I not have been? I had everything- talent, two jobs that I was crazy about, good looks and the adoration of about every female on the planet. I had Kristoph. Until one day- that day where everything I knew came crashing down in splinters.
You're not needed any more.
My own words echo in my head- I almost think they hurt me more than they did him. That day, the brother I knew disappeared and I was left wondering whether I would ever be able to find him again; whether this was just the person he had become while I wasn't looking. But love is not rational in any way. He could have killed a hundred people and I would still have loved him. It was the gleam of insanity I saw in his eyes that terrified me- Kristoph, who was always so calm, so controlled. But I can see him again, for the first time in nearly a year and he looks... sad. As though he has seen every tragic thing in the world, swallowed everyone's sorrow.
"Well?" he prompts me, lacing together his immaculately manicured fingers and cracking the knuckles, a sharp, unpleasant sound.
"Aren't you going to ask me why I did it...Bruderlein?"
Little brother. He hasn't called me that since we were children.
"Nein. Ich werde nicht anfragen." I reply.
"You...won't ask?" he says warily. "Why?"
Because I don't need to. I don't need to know why you did it. i just need to know who you are again and now...I think I do. Krissi.
Kristoph
I am going to die. We both know this. In a way, I think I have been dying for so long now, I do not really remember what it felt like to be alive in the first place. I think it felt something like this. Something like talking, something like forgetting, something like reuniting. Maybe one day, I will tell him why.... why everything happened the way it did. But that day is not today. There is something I have wanted to tell him for years, all the years I closed myself off to everyone.
"Klavi?"
"Mmm-hmm?"
"I...missed you."