Chapter Text
To his own surprise Miles wakes up.
There’s a needle in his arm, tubing in his nose, a thin hospital blanket over him. In the background the hiss and beep and rumble of the machines. For a moment he thinks it’s yesterday; then he knows it isn’t, because the only body he’s in is his own.
He tries to sit up and fails completely. Part of this is because he’s forgotten to open his eyes. He does this first. That’s the familiar and loathsome ceiling of the Shatterdome medical wing. The backlit blur leaning over him is his daughter. The figure slumped in the chair behind her is Apollo. Is that a bandage on her cheek? He reaches up laboriously to touch it, and seeing this she catches up his hand and squeezes it, touches it to her face, scratchy with salt. A nameless fear inside him dies out and in its place comes a flood of relief.
His relief. No one else’s.
It hurts too much to examine and is impossible to lie to himself about. Looking at Trucy it’s unmistakable: no one’s in here with him.
It makes sense. If he thinks about it it makes sense. It was so unlikely that one of them would live. Two would be unreasonable.
“Where did you put him?” he says. His voice sounds even worse than before.
“What?” she says, and her eyes widen as she figures it out. New tears are starting in them. “Oh. Oh. No, Dad, he’s in the next bed over.”
Miles blinks at her for a moment and then with a superhuman effort lifts his head enough to separate it from the pillow and realize that he does hear something—literally—a sputtering sound he’d discounted as a mechanical failure—Phoenix snoring. As Miles turns to stare at him it gutters out in favor of a somewhat obstructed, “Shit,” and Phoenix reaches up and pulls the tubing from his nose with much more energy and impatience than Miles could muster. His face is a mass of bruises and there’s a slash halfway across his cheek that is covered in butterfly tape. “What did you do with M—” he’s saying, and then his eyes come open the rest of the way, and they lock onto Miles, and immediately he says in raw shock, “We’re not dead?”
“You're not dead, Daddy,” Trucy confirms, wiping her eyes to no effect with the back of Miles’ hand. She realizes what she’s doing and lets go apologetically.
“Oh, God, are we dying?” Phoenix says, struggling the rest of the way upright. Miles is forced to confront the possibility that he and the love of his life are melodramatic people.
“Only the normal amount,” Trucy says. “Stop yelling, you’ll wake Polly. And Maya. She drove twelve hours back here to see you and I think it really—took it out of her, Polly, no, go back to sleep, they’re okay—”
If he pushes himself a little further he can see over Phoenix’s shoulder—a mass of hair, a purple robe, an ungainly and exhausted sprawl. Maya Fey back in the Shatterdome. Almost the most impossible part of all. Exhausted but unhurt, some hindbrain part of him says, just counting: Trucy alive, Phoenix alive, Maya alive, Ema alive. All of it over, and all of them standing.
Phoenix laughs, helpless and a little unhinged, and everything else drops out of Miles’ attention. It's been seven years since he heard that sound as a sound. Phoenix has a handsome laugh. He catches Miles looking at him and turns to share the joke, and the smile that spreads across his face is wide and absolute. There are freckles and burn scars patterning the skin over his nose. And lines around his eyes. Not as many as it felt like from the inside. With shock Miles realizes they're only thirty-three.
It should feel less intimate, watching him from the outside. It should feel like a loss. It feels vertiginous, frightening and joyous, weirder than he could have imagined: like he's meeting him for the first time.
“I think,” Phoenix says reflectively, “my cartilage hurts.”
“They still have all the cancer,” Apollo yawns, and then wakes himself up the rest of the way a spasm of guilt. “Shit, sorry. Sir. Sirs. Trucy, did Ema already—”
“Of course your cartilage hurts,” Miles says to Phoenix, trying for a magisterial note. “You were exposed to a direct nuclear explosion.”
“No, Ema did not, and Ema suggested we not get into that question or the question about the ain-damage-bray until they’re off the painkillers,” Trucy scolds her brother, wrapping her arm tighter around his. “And if you’re going to affect their recovery, you can go pester Ema about Klavier some more, mister—”
“So were you,” Phoenix points out. He sounds almost drunk. “You look good.”
“You,” Miles tells him, “are a fluid but incompetent liar.”
“No, it’s good,” Phoenix protests, “it’s like—shipwrecked admiral. You have a little drool on your chin, do you want to get that off?“
Miles swipes at it defensively. “That’s none of your business,” he informs Phoenix. “Until we’re back in uniform—”
The thought crashes into him at knee height. They’re all alive. What are they alive to see? If they’re all alive, surely it isn’t over? He’s already stuttering his way into a question, trying to make it sound professional and failing completely: “Trucy, the Breach—?”
“Collapsed,” Apollo says, so quickly that Miles realizes he’s been running the same impossible math. “It worked. I promise, sir. Total loss of coherence at the site. They’re saying the nuclear impact took out the dimensional walls—and set off seismic activity as far as Tijuana, actually, Angel says we’re getting a lot of shit about a reservoir in San Diego which has a cracked wall and we probably gave a lot of tuna a really bad time but—there’s no trace of any extradimensional radiation, anymore.”
“Oh,” says Miles, blankly. After a moment, he says, “Did they check twice?”
“Miles,” Phoenix says. He sounds unbearably fond. “You mean, did they drop a camera down the—”
“Obviously I mean some kind of on-site bathymetric—”
“—sure, and then they can pull up a radioactive claw machine prize and we can get sued again by the—”
“What is your objection to making sure that something of this importance—stop laughing at me,” Miles says, although he is laughing a little himself. “It isn’t an unreasonable position.”
“Ema said the link was gone,” Apollo complains, reminding Miles of his existence and indeed the existence of the rest of the room, something that, for some reason, keeps escaping him. “What are they doing now?”
“It’s gone,” Phoenix says. He’s still smiling, but he looks at Trucy. “We just know a couple of things about each other. Say something in German.”
“I don’t speak—German?” Apollo tries as Trucy says, “Haben Sie einen Gerichtsbeschluss?”
“Yep, nothing,” Phoenix says. “No idea what that means. Ich bin ein Berliner, right? No? Achtung, baby?”
Miles cuts in before this can degenerate further. “How is it gone?”
"The reports say you completed the drift. Ema gave me some charts—" He goes to rummage under the table, as Phoenix lifts inquiring eyebrows at him, and then waggles them. Miles covers his eyes. “—said that you'd been partly in circuit for so long that finalizing the process managed to, I don't know, knock something loose. She said something about normal aftereffects only."
It’s too early to know what’s an aftereffect, and what is the drugs, and what are the side effects of being pulled out of the full blast of an explosion in time. Just in time. The jittering and fantastic halos on all of the lights, the sore point in his chest that’s probably a broken rib, the fact that his eyes keep flickering back to Phoenix’s just to confirm his continued presence a few feet away. He glances back to Trucy. She’s looking at Phoenix too, just the same.
Not just the same. Her expression shifts to nervousness and then to determination. She clears her throat and says, “You knew about me and Polly, right? You had to?”
For a moment Phoenix looks completely blank. Miles feels his own heart lurch hard enough that he half-expects to hear it on the monitors. He knows: Phoenix hadn’t really thought he’d live long enough to have to answer this question. He is almost going to say something when Phoenix makes a gesture at surprise. It wouldn’t be believable even under different circumstances. “Sweetie, what—”
“No,” Trucy says immediately. “Sorry. But. I do actually need to know. Did you know we were related?”
Phoenix still doesn’t immediately say something. It ought to make Miles angry. He’s not sure anything can make him angry right now. Not even sad. They’re going to live. They are going to have this fight and figure out the shape of their family afterwards.
They are, however, going to have this fight. He says, “Yes. We knew.”
“Hey, I knew,” Phoenix says. Oh, this he’ll cop to. “I knew for a few years. Your dad didn’t figure out until you tried to drift. Leave him out of it.”
“A month ago,” Trucy says to Miles. Miles forces himself to nod. “Wow. Okay.” She nods a couple of times. Her cheeks are still wet but her voice is firm. “You should have told me.”
She’s taken Apollo’s hand and is subjecting it to some pressure. Apollo makes a slight protesting noise but squeezes back. Phoenix says, diffident and unsure, “You mad at me, Truce?”
“No,” Trucy says immediately. Miles feels a wave of guilty relief, then her hand tenses in Apollo’s again and she says, “No, because I thought you were going to die for most of yesterday. Actually also for most of the day before. Actually pretty much since summer.” She catches their wince and sets her jaw. “And I don’t want to be mad at you right now, because I’m still riding the high of saving the world, and I’d like to keep that going, but it—but it was all I could think about when I was pulling you out of the breach. How mad I was. That would’ve been the last thing, how mad I was.”
This is something that Miles knows. It’s one of the first things they had in common, he and his daughter: carrying the fury that your father had the indignity to die so soon. He’d spent ten years of his life like that. He is suddenly, blindingly grateful he didn’t give her a second opportunity.
“Truce,” Phoenix says, stifled. “Honey, no, the last thing I ever wanted—”
“I know. It was terrible,” Trucy says. “So can we talk about it? Later?”
Phoenix ducks his head for a moment. He says into his own sternum, “Okay”; having hustled himself over this fence, he lifts his face out a little. “Okay,” he says again. “I promise. We can talk about it.”
“Okay,” says Trucy. Miles watches her do her father’s trick, boxing away her anger for later. She gives him an open-hearted smile. “Later. After I get my medals. Do you know what kind of medals they give out for aggravated world-saving?”
“At least one of those soccer trophies,” Maya says. How long has she been awake? Long enough to prop her head in her hands and smile at him without immediately crying. “Sorry. You seemed busy!”
“Thank you, Maya,” Miles says. “For coming in.”
“Well, you know,” she says. “Doesn’t count if they’re gonna tear the thing down. Hey, Nick,” she says, and Miles realizes what looked like composure was just not making eye contact with Phoenix because she tears up as soon as they lock eyes, her hand going to cover a spreading, out-of-control smile, and then Phoenix reaches out for her and she grips his hand hard. She stares down at him with the twin of Miles’ own incomprehension. Everyone in this room is dizzy and stupid with the vastness of their own luck.
Trucy gets to her feet first, complaining the whole way, then pulls Apollo up after her. “We have to get Ema,” she explains. “Actually I was supposed to push the panic button if you woke up but I forgot. Also, she’s probably asleep.”
“Hey!” Maya drops Phoenix’s hand and wipes hers on his blanket. “What, you’re sweaty and you smell like a coma. Take me with you, Trucy, I want to tell her she’s on her third medical miracle.”
“I can stay with them,” Apollo says, reluctantly, “I don’t mind—I had a book…”
Maya gives Phoenix an appraising look, which Phoenix misses entirely because he’s looking at Miles again. “Nnnno, I think we all go get Ema,” she says. “You, me, and Trucy. All of us. Also, c’mon, Polly, you have to get some sleep that isn’t on Trucy. Her shoulders aren’t tall enough for a good pillow.” She gives him an appraising squint. “Even for you.”
This is considerably faster than Miles thought Maya could be convinced to leave the room. Even Phoenix, who has always been able to follow her train of thought wherever it meanders, looks confused. No—now he looks half-appalled and half-amused. “Maya, no, c’mon. I don’t—” He cuts a look at Miles. “You really do not have to.”
“I do, though,” Maya says, also cutting a look at Miles. She gives him a quick thumbs up. Miles’ confusion deepens. Then in a cloud of terror it evaporates.
“You drove twelve hours to get here,” Phoenix is protesting, not making eye contact with either of them. “Trucy ratted you out.”
“Yeah, because you were dying,” Maya says. “But you’re not anymore. Are you?”
Miles watches the moment Phoenix realizes he is in fact not dying. It’s something to see. “Okay,” Phoenix says. “All right, you tyrant. We have time.”
“We have time,” Maya confirms. “And you have business. You’ve got like ten minutes before we tell Ema you’re up, act fast—” And turns and propels their daughter and her brother down the hallway.
For the first time in seven years Miles is alone with Phoenix.
The silence would be profound if there were any. Certainly neither of them are talking, but the room hums and buzzes with all of the monitors, and Miles can hear himself breathing, short and shallow, can hear the hitch in Phoenix’s breath as well where he had a cough yesterday. He opens his mouth to speak and Phoenix holds up a forestalling hand. Miles has a flash of affront and realizes he’ll need to communicate it somehow, possibly through some kind of comment; then he realizes Phoenix is smiling, affectionate and maybe a little dopey, and jerking a thumb at the door. Ah. Miles holds still as well. There’s almost no noise from the hallway. There’s a little disappointed huff of air and the sound of three pairs of feet actually departing. Then there is absolutely no noise from the hallway.
“She’s not subtle,” Phoenix says. “We’re lucky she didn’t just say, everybody out! they need to talk!”
“I think Justice would have been less confused,” Miles says. “And myself less surprised.”
Phoenix’s smile has changed a little. More nervous, maybe. He holds up his hand again and puts the effort into sitting up—really sitting up, his legs over the side of the hospital bed, his feet absurd in regulation socks. He invents a new swear word only once. He really has the most incredible pain tolerance. Miles reaches down and tries to raise the bed to a more formal angle.
It is suddenly overpowering, how much he wants to know what Phoenix is thinking. “Well, say something, Wright.”
“Yeah?” Phoenix says. “What did you have in mind?”
“Anything,” Miles says. “It’s one of your core competencies.”
Phoenix gets that ridiculous, split-lipped grin again and then reins it in. “Okay,” he says. “I’ll say it but I’m not sure you’re going to like it.” Miles travels through far distant countries of emotion before Phoenix continues: “I’m sorry. And you were right.”
It takes the breath out of him. Phoenix steals one glance at him and then turns his attention to his own knees, each of his own hands, which are braced and clenching on the side of the hospital bed.
“I wasn’t fair to you,” Phoenix continues, in the tones of someone offering the greatest concession ever granted by a living human. “Part of what you said—part of what you meant was true. We couldn’t—we put too much weight on it. Right? On the connection, on being—there for each other, on being able to, I don’t know, save each other. On us. We put the whole Dome on top of it and it—bent. It wasn’t strong enough on its own, nothing could’ve been, so it bent. I mean—” He lifts his hands, tilts a bit precariously so he can make a hand gesture like he’s twisting a pipe cleaner. “Like—”
“Yes, thank you, I take your point—”
“I mean, wow, Miles, Krazy Straws have nothing on what we had going on there—”
“Phoenix!”
“Sorry, sorry,” Phoenix says. He actually sounds sorry. “My point is. It didn’t break. And you know, up until twenty-four hours ago I knew the answer to this question, so I didn’t ask, but I don’t know, Miles, we already tried the for worse part and I feel like it might be worth a try to see how we do in the for better part. Assuming we don’t immediately die of Ema fucking up our meds because she hasn’t slept in a week. Or cancer.” He makes himself stop. He says, after a moment, “What do you think? Do you want to give this another shot?”
“Would you like to get married?” Miles asks.
Phoenix almost jumps in his seat. “What?”
“Get married,” Miles repeats. He is feeling, on the whole, very good about life and his place in it. For example, he can reach across the little gap between their beds and take Phoenix Wright’s hand. “Yes, to your earlier question. Obviously.”
Phoenix is still gaping at him like a stuck fish, so Miles lifts his hand and kisses it, right on the pad of his thumb, which destabilizes them both, Phoenix falling forward and Miles to one side—Phoenix begins to laugh again, and Miles gives up on stability and sense and keeping the heart monitor on and the drip in and lets himself slide off the bed so he can kneel next to Phoenix’s hospital bed and kiss him, kiss him while he’s laughing, while he himself is heaving these huge, embarrassing, ridiculous breaths in between mapping every inch of Phoenix’s face with his own thumbs.
“You want to marry me,” Phoenix says against his mouth. “You don’t want to get divorced. You want to get one of those stupid certificates that cost a hundred and twenty bucks and a date at the courthouse and you want to make it official.”
“I was thinking more,” Miles begins, realizes Phoenix isn’t going to immediately catch him in his most embarrassing and lurid fantasy, which only makes him feel more reckless: “A larger ceremony, in the mountains—possibly doves—”
Phoenix lets out a crack of laughter, kisses his eyebrow in apology for being so loud this close. “Doves?” There are alarms going off on both of their beds that ought to wake the dead. The fluorescent lights pick out all the grey in Phoenix’s hair. No one has ever been this happy. “Can we do this? No, I guess if we can get off this floor eventually we can do anything. You really want to do this?”
“I do,” Miles says. He touches the side of Phoenix’s neck, the top of one branching scar. “If you want to. I want to.”
Later Phoenix will swear that Miles was the first one to start to cry. In the moment Miles isn’t sure; only that he doesn’t let it stop him.
Apollo finds Klavier at the top of the fire stairs outside Ema’s lab, long and grey and propped against the side of the Dome like a lean-to lacking much of that Eagle Scout spirit. The afternoon sun is in his face, the metal stairs popping like cookie sheets under Apollo’s feet, the wind blessedly mild. The breakers protest the rocks two hundred feet below. Klavier is checking his phone.
“Hey,” Apollo says, a little out of breath, many muscles sore. He wasn’t asleep in the chair in the Marshal’s room for more than an hour and still his shoulders ache like an overcooked pretzel. “There you are.”
Klavier looks up. His hair is loose and long and a flattering gold in the sun. A bit flat, sure, kinda oily at the temples, but Apollo can’t throw stones, and, frankly, would never want to. He likes how Klavier looks, pretty much always. “Apollo,” Klavier smiles. His face creases tiredly, but not unhappily. “Am I needed?”
“Needed?” Apollo says, and then, “Oh, no, god, no. I’m trying to hide. Can I hide here?”
Klavier’s smile deepens profoundly, ease softening him in a rush. “Of course, please,” he says, scooting towards the far rail, “my death trap is your death trap.”
Apollo settles beside him, careful not to jostle. Klavier’s left arm hangs in a sling against a chest, his fingers and hand densely swaddled. More burns, shiny and straight and unnaturally even, peek up over the collar of his shirt. He’s actually wearing a shirt, for once, with sleeves and button and everything—Ema had fetched it for him before the interview with the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department. Their hips bump as Apollo draws his knees up, settling his chin on his arms.
“Catching up on the news?” he asks. Klavier’s phone, resting in his lap, shows talking heads and scrolling chyrons. The sound is too low to hear their commentary.
“Yes,” Klavier replies, voice calm, and when he picks up the phone again Apollo sees the image change, one of the in-picture feeds filling the screen. It’s their loading dock, he realizes, just around the curve of the Dome. Two cops have their hands on Kristoph Gavin’s shoulder, pushing him into the back of a squad car. A third tries to fight off the cameras, whole flocks of them and their attendant reporters pushing forward for a view. Apollo realizes that he can hear the shouting, not from the video but on the air, carried around from the front of the Dome.
“Oh,” Apollo says. The station they’re watching, the cameraman can’t get a clear view of Kristoph’s face—just flashes of white-blond hair and an occasional cuffed fist. “Uh, wow. And you’re—” The stream cuts back to the news anchors, looking professionally grave. Apollo glances up.
It took him and Trucy twenty excruciatingly long minutes to make it to the surface of the Pacific after they’d fished her idiot fathers out of a nuclear explosion in an alien dimension. The glimpses Apollo got of the far world—the whole world—the entire real and living world beyond the Breach—will live in him like a vapor for the rest of his life, substantial and graspable and discernible only when he’s done enough LSD to understand what the fuck that was. Until then: hallucinogenic. A fever that nearly killed him. Anyways. On the surface he and Trucy had disentangled their tow line from Steinway Bravo and levered her from the frothy, turbulent water of their ascent. In her cockpit, they’d found this: Kristoph unconscious against the console, his long hair wrapped in Klavier’s right fist. Klavier’s left fist still limp and smoking, his face like a wall against which there would be only breaking. He’d smiled up at Trucy and Apollo, the rescue copters whirling overhead, and even managed a wink.
Now, Klavier doesn’t wink. But he does keep smiling with that same sense of implacability, like the ocean will erode the rocks before he gives up his calm again. A siren sound carries around from the road, faint and whining and then fainter as it peels away. “Are you okay?” Apollo asks.
Klavier takes his time, looking at the waves, then looking at his bandaged hand, then looking at Apollo. “I will be,” he finally says, with the sun in his hair and his unflustered eyes. “Thank you for asking.”
“Your arm?” And his neck, chest, and shoulder, most likely.
“Second degree,” Klavier replies. “Not as bad as Commander Wright’s old injuries, although I may have some scarring. I’ll have to adjust my skincare routine, perhaps.”
Apollo had been just outside the door when Ema spoke with Klavier, trying to impart as much information as she could before the cops came in and the questioning began. She’d said nerve damage, potentially severe. A thorough abuse of the drift and the consequences thereof. If Klavier doesn’t want to mention that now, Apollo won’t ask.
“And,” Apollo says, then peters out. A coward’s move, probably, but he’s happy being a coward here.
Klavier picks up this thought anyways. “I told them what I saw,” he says. “I’m done protecting my brother.” He shifts a little against Apollo’s side, scratching with his good hand at the light brown stubble under his jaw. Apollo, possessed of the insane notion that he could offer to scratch it for Klavier, doesn’t do that. “He had no good reason to do what he did. That’s what I told the nice men in their uniforms—it never could have made sense to anyone but him. He killed our colleagues because they were better than us and he couldn’t bear anyone to be better. When the Marshal and the Commander didn’t acknowledge us as the supreme overlords of Kaiju-killing or whatever it was that he wanted, when they kept treating us like the second-rate professionals we truly were—he tried to kill them, too.”
Jesus Christ. “So, the seizure they had in the cafeteria?” Apollo asks.
“Incidental, though he certainly didn’t mind the results,” Klavier shrugs. “Quite a few other things were him, which I’ll speak with them about later. Certainly not now,” he adds with a snort.
Apollo considers the state in which he last saw Commander Wright—deeply frenetic, profoundly crazy-eyed, looking at the Marshal like he might spontaneously regenerate the brain link at any second. “Yeah, that’s probably for the best,” Apollo says. The wall of the Dome hums against their backs, some hangar door opening or closing out of sight.
“So,” he looks back at Klavier, the tarry circles under his eyes, the firm curve of his mouth, “you’re really okay.”
“Yes,” Klavier replies. He’s not begrudging Apollo the follow-up question but he answers with a tone like he’s going to make sure Apollo understands: “I am. Kristoph—all those things he did, it was incredible to see. All of it was for him. If he could have piloted Steinway with a reacher grabber in the secondary harness he would have. It was—”
Klavier grins again, stretched and wry. “I didn’t even factor in. I had not an inch of space in his brain. Which I should have known, for years, and I didn’t, but now I do. Thank you, Apollo.”
Apollo jumps, eyebrows headed for the upper atmosphere as Klavier’s big smile refocuses on him. “Me?” he stutters. It’s not as high as it could have been. It definitely could have been higher.
“You,” Klavier agrees, patient and deeply amused. “The footage Ema turned over to the sheriffs—you and Trucy found it, didn’t you? She told me what the both of you did, investigating Kris even though I know it must not have been pleasant. Especially for Trucy. But you knew something was wrong, you took action, and you even,” he smiles, creasing happily around the eyes, “tried to warn me before the launch.”
Oh, Apollo—sure did. He sure did do something along those lines, and several other lines, in the hallway on the flight level before the launch.
“Uh,” Apollo says, what the sea birds jabbering below and the old end of a blunt skittering against his shoe. Klavier’s body is pressed close and hot to his, Klavier shifting only to free his good arm, skating up Apollo’s side.
“You tried to protect me,” Klavier says, a little quieter, a lot closer. “It was very gallant.”
“I mean, it’s not—,” Apollo says. “You didn’t, I didn’t—”
“Apollo,” Klavier says. The clouds are thin and distant behind his golden head, trailing like streamers in advance of the party. “May I kiss you back?”
Apollo doesn’t say anything intelligible, but Klavier gets the gist.
Their mouths meet soundly, conclusively, Klavier’s unburned hand tilting Apollo’s chin up and into the kiss. Apollo goes hot all over, and chocolatey, and sweet, and passionately insane. When Klavier pulls away Apollo pulls him back, kissing the smile, the lips, all the mouth he can reach and only once a tooth, which makes Klavier laugh. He’s kissing Klavier. Klavier Gavin. Him! On the death trap fire stairs with all the flaky rust and the tetanus and the ground-in smell of Ema’s cigarettes! Forget the dimension full of killer aliens, this is the one his future selves will never believe.
They pull apart. “Ha ha,” Apollo says, not laughing, but like, out loud. With his mouth. “Wow. Hoo—wow!”
Klavier’s face is so close to Apollo’s, a little hard to see, the both of them shielding the other from the wind and pink all over. Klavier snorts, then giggles very unflatteringly, then kisses Apollo again, quick and fleeting. “I think I must agree,” he says. His fingers stroke Apollo’s hot cheek, a development with great promise, and then Trucy shouts from three steps down, “Klavier Gavin, are you kissing my brother?”
Klavier withdraws. He says, in an odd tone of voice, “Brother?”
Apollo rounds on Trucy so fast his ears pop. “Trucy!” he hisses. “For real?”
Trucy, one hand on the salt-pitted side of the Dome, laughs until she nearly tips back down the stairs. “Polly,” she wheezes, “your face! Your face!”
“Yeah, I fucking bet, Truce!” Apollo snaps, before Klavier’s hand lands back on his shoulder.
“Apollo?” Klavier prompts, politely but also like he might want to be let in on the joke now.
“Oh, uh,” Apollo says. It’s not cold on the fire escape, even in autumn and in the wind, all the metal hot from the sun, but still somehow Klavier’s hand is hotter. It is also, Apollo’s brain notes with cruel intent, very large and gentle.
“So, scientifically, we’re half-siblings,” Trucy says, slinging her arm around Apollo’s neck, making him yelp as she shoves her cheek to his. “Or at least probably. Polly, I’m pretty sure you were born before my parents even met, so it’s gotta be that you’re just my mom’s kid. Right?”
“I mean, I don’t know,” Apollo protested, trying to shove Trucy off and receiving a chokehold for his troubles, “your dad—”
“Her dad,” Klavier says, trying to follow along, and then, with much narrower eyes, “wait, her dad—”
“My fathers,” Trucy says, in a deep and magisterial voice and with absolutely no doubt as to which fathers she’s referring to, “lied about many things.”
“Oh, my,” says Klavier.
“And now they’re getting married, so that’s just going to be insufferable,” Ema adds as the stairs creak menacingly beneath her Doc Martens, and Trucy achieves a noise in the dog-whistle register.
“Oh my god!” she shrieks. “Confirmed? Like confirmed confirmed?”
“Nick’s tongue was down his throat when I went to check on them,” Ema says over Trucy’s continued yelling and Klavier’s deep laugh. The sun picks out the flyaway hairs on her neck and the freckles on her bare arms, her old coat left somewhere in the Dome. “It was vile and disgusting to look at. They were crying about rings. I left immediately and hope they choke.”
Trucy screams again, leaping from her crouch beside Apollo to grab Ema’s extremely reluctant arms and pull her onto the little platform in front of the old fire door. Apollo and Klavier laugh, squeezing closer together as Trucy threatens to spin Ema and Ema threatens to smack her. Someone who knew Trucy less might be surprised at her transcendent happiness, following on from their previous topic of conversation, but Apollo isn’t. She loves her fathers tirelessly, will cry without pause for breath at their wedding, and will also wring her apologies from them like Ye Olde England’s brawniest washerwoman. After killing two Kaiju in twenty minutes, Wright and Edgeworth barely even rank.
It’s weird to think he’ll never drift with her again. Not bad-weird—the drift was intoxicating, but so is a lot of shit that ends up killing you. He and Trucy wouldn’t have withstood it forever, even if he thinks they still would have done better than her dads.
It’s more like, here’s an experience that only a few dozen people on the planet have ever shared. It’s the most exclusive club on the planet and the thing you spent your whole adult life working towards. Now it’s gone. The world is changed. What do you do?
“Okay, Jesus, that’s enough of this,” Ema says and Trucy laughs like a kookaburra as she’s thrown at Apollo, nearly tipping down the stairs before Apollo grabs her overalls and hauls her straight.
“Married, Apollo!” Trucy yells, color high in her cheeks and hands thrown in the air. “Finally! We can watch Love Actually at Christmas without Daddy crying like he’s trying to make a point about it! We’re free!”
“And you get to give them away at their wedding?”
“Yes! Maya and Auntie Franziska will have to kill me for it!”
“You,” Ema says to Klavier. The space between the rails is tiny and Klavier’s legs take up most of it, so she stands between his knees and Klavier cranes his chin up to meet her gruff mug. “You good?”
“I’m good,” Klavier replies. He looks good, despite the sling and the burns and the seven-year lack of sleep. His shoulders fit neatly into Ema’s shadow.
“Okay,” Ema say, then, “okay,” seeming to consider it.
Then she drops to her knees in Klavier’s lap, pulls his body to hers, and hides both their faces in her shaking arms. Klavier grunts once, the pain unavoidable, but grips his good hand in Ema’s shirt and holds her tight. Trucy drops her cheek to Apollo’s shoulder and sniffles unrepentantly. Ema pulls away.
“Ah, Frau Doktor,” Klavier says, laughing and damp as Ema sits back on her heels and fusses with her rumpled shirt. “I promise we won’t make a habit of it.”
“Damn straight,” Ema grumbles, then gives up on the shirt and thumps back on her ass instead. The fire stairs creak threateningly, though don’t yet drop them into the drink. “So,” Ema says, as Trucy settles beside Apollo, squished against Klavier, the three of them and Ema across taking up all the floorspace to be had on this misbegotten edge of the Dome, “you guys wanna leave Los Angeles and never come back?”
“Yes,” Klavier says.
“Yes,” Apollo says.
“I have to be back for the wedding, and to see Maya, and me and Pearls have been meaning to hit up the last remaining In N’ Out for years now,” Trucy replies, and grins when Apollo bonks his laughing cheek to hers, “but sure! Klavier can pay, right, Klavier?”
“The amount of imminent danger pay I have collected over the past seven and a half years,” Klavier says, “is extremely considerable.”
“Great,” Ema says. “Africa? India? If I’m able to see the Pacific, I’m not going to be happy.”
“Couldn’t agree more,” Trucy says, “the more landlocked the better.”
“Eastern Europe?” Klavier says, over the sea lions haggling for their meals. “One of my favorite singers is touring, I got her email just this morning.”
“I love this,” Trucy says, “I love that you’re still signed up for tour emails.”
“Is she good?” Apollo asks. Klavier’s hand fits neatly around his, folded and encompassed between their smushed thighs.
“Lamiroir? I think she’s wonderful,” Klavier replies, in a sweet tone that makes Ema mime a retch over the side of the steps. “But if she’s not to your tastes, I’m reliably assured that Eastern Europe has several, perhaps even dozens of musicians available for our pleasure.”
Apollo smiles. It’s tired and stretchy and was beyond prediction a day ago. He never could have seen it coming. The smile, the guy, the sister, her crazy dads, Ema’s nasty boots kicking against his shins. The wind is growing, the world is alive. “Sure,” Apollo says. “Let’s see what’s on offer.”