Head Games, Law Games

August 23, 2028– 1:15 pm

“How delightful to see you, Nick. I didn’t expect you to visit today. Or ever again, admittedly.” Behind the bars of his pleasantly appointed cell, Kristoph Gavin smiled beatifically outward.

Phoenix scowled, and fought the urge to recoil physically. Instead, he sat down low on the hard visitation chair just out of reach of the bars. He sat slumped with his elbows on his knees, and he carefully unbuttoned the last button of his blue suit jacket to avoid it popping off.

“Yeah, well, life’s full of crazy surprises, isn’t it, Kris?” he scoffed. He hadn’t been planning to visit him ever again. He hadn’t seen him in almost two years– not since the visit on behalf of Vera Misham. He’d been happy enough just to let him rot away in prison, and let the memory of that pretty smile fade further and further into the dark. But circumstances had changed.

“For better or worse, I’ve noticed that it is.” Kristoph’s posture changed to mirror his own, leaning forward toward him. “So what brings you to my humble ‘office’?”

“Hah!” Phoenix shook his head. “Well, I heard you met my newest protege the other day, isn’t that right?”

“Mr. Athena Cykes, yes?” Kristoph leaned on his hands, smiling like a cat. “A very charming young lady. And very talented. Yes, I met her and I have to say I was quite impressed. I can see why Miles sent her particularly.”

Nick grunted. He and Miles had had a fight about it, when he heard that Miles was actually considering allowing Kristoph to become a prosecutor and handle cases from behind bars like he’d done with Simon Blackquill.

The difference of course was that Simon Blackquill had been innocent, and Kristoph Gavin was very much guilty. He had to be guilty. Even if it didn’t make much sense.

At least Edgeworth had the sense to be hesitant about it, too.

‘I don’t think it’s a good idea either, Phoenix. But Lana made her case very eloquently. I told her the only circumstances I’d allow it under were if Ms. Cykes gives him a good evaluation, and the living relatives of his victims agree to it.’

“Yeah, Athena’s a bright kid,” Phoenix agreed, shaking off the brooding reverie. “Usually I trust her judgment pretty implicitly.”

“Usually?” Kristoph asked, cocking his head.

“Yeah. Usually.” Phoenix rubbed the back of his neck. The problem in this case was that Athena was not giving him the answer that he wanted to hear. “Edgeworth showed me the tape of your interview.”

“I see. That’s fine. I already knew that the contents of that interview wouldn’t remain private.”

Phoenix’s fingers itched. There was something about talking to Kristoph that always made him start to want a drink and a smoke. Even now, after he was supposed to be sober.

“Yeah,” he nodded, and smirked at Kristoph. “It’s going around the room like your brother at a party, Kris.”

Kristoph rolled his eyes. “Very funny, Nick. I imagine you have thoughts about it.”

“Yeah, I’ll admit. There was one part that stood out to me.”

---

The camera recorded the session from a high angle in black and white– the security camera mounted in the corner of the hall. It framed Athena Cykes from behind, looking inward, and captured Kristoph Gavin’s smiling but troubled face from where he sat behind the bars. 

The conversation had been going on for more than 20 minutes when Kristoph had seemingly decided to tell Athena a secret he’d kept from everyone else.

His motive.

“You work with Mr. Wright,” Kristoph said, “So you know that he has a daughter. Almost grown now. An adorable, bright little girl with a big smile. Zak Gramarye’s daughter.”

Athena nodded with a slight widening of her eyes as she looked between Kristoph and her screen on the mood matrix, blurry and unreadable in the video 

“Trucy. I know her really well…she’s been a great friend to me since I’ve started working for her agency…” 

“I can imagine,” he said, with a little smile. “I watched her grow up, you know. Being so close with Phoenix. I saw her often.”

“That makes sense…he’d been raising her since that first trial, after all. It makes sense you’d see her grow…” She tilted her head. “you came to care about her, I imagine?” 

“I’d be some kind of monster, if I didn’t.” He chuckled. “She’s very charming. You know– on the day I spoke to Zak Gramarye with the hopes to represent him he said something to me. He said ‘today I am praying my daughter won’t grow up without her father’.”

“….” Athena’s fingers hovered over the screen. “He said that, huh? But in the end she still did, didn’t she?” 

Kristoph’s fingers were laced very, very tightly together. He smiled, brightly, almost like an angel.

“She did. And do you know what he said to Phoenix Wright in that fateful conversation, Miss Athena Cykes? He told him that he had always intended to disappear. That abandoning his daughter had always been the plan. And that he would do the same that night, without a word.” 

He put his hands on his knees. “I consider it a personal moral failing of a dear friend that Mr. Phoenix Wright was going to just let him walk out of that room.”

---

Phoenix felt a flush of anger and revulsion remembering the moment in the video, and he was sure Kristoph noticed it on his face. The killer– his old friend– leaned forward toward him.

“My motivation, you mean. You wonder if I’m telling the truth. Since every time you’ve asked before I’ve said it was random, and evil. You’ve suspected, I think, that it was out of malice for you. To frame you, specifically.”

“I’ve suspected it, yeah,” Phoenix admitted. “I couldn’t figure out what other motive you might have had. After all, the Gramarye case didn’t ruin your career. Why kill him?”

“Why indeed,” Kristoph drawled blandly. Phoenix watched him lace his fingers together tightly, like he had in the video. “You’ve thought it was my final move in our lovely seven year head game. My checkmate.”

“It was one theory.”

It was the only theory he had. Nothing else made sense. Why would Kristoph kill the man and try to frame him except as the capstone of– as he had put it– their seven year head game. A seven year relationship of entwined friendship, suspicion, sex and romance that Nick couldn’t say he had any less a part in playing that Kristoph. After all, Nick had been the one to enter the relationship with the intention of trapping Kris and exposing if he really had, or hadn’t been responsible for his disbarment.

“I’m not flattered,” Kristoph drawled. “What a poor checkmate. What a terrible game that ends up with the final move flinging the pieces off the table instead of putting them in my lap.”

Nick felt a flush crawl across his face as Kristoph sneered at him, and called back to their silly dominance game of who would be sitting in whom’s lap.

He rubbed his neck again and looked away. “So is it true, then? What you said to Athena?”

Kris got up from his high backed chair, and strode up close to the bars of his cell, lacing his fingers around them and leaning toward Phoenix.

“What does Ms. Cykes say about it?”

“She says it’s consistent with your emotional responses and psychological profile,” he admitted grudgingly. “And that she thinks you’re telling the truth.”

“But you’re not so sure.” Kristoph’s icy blue gaze bored into him like a laser beam.

He looked away again. “I’m not. I trust Athena, but if something like that was your motivation– why try to frame me?”

Kristoph made a choked noise so loud it drew Phoenix’s gaze right back to him, and he watched as the usually composed man’s eye twitched and he grabbed the cell bars hard, as if to shake them, his shoulders straining.

“I never tried to frame you, you nitwit!” he snapped. “I was hoping that O’Rly would take the fall. That would have been the theory I was going to put forward– as your defense!”

Phoenix’s blood went cold and he felt his heart thump like a lightning bolt had hit his chest.

“You were going to send an innocent woman to jail over it then,” he said, staring up at Kristoph’s face, watching the tension in his jaw, and the blond strands of hair over his cheeks.

“Please! Don’t try to pretend Olga O’Rly was some shining jewel of virtue,” he snorted. “If the law found her guilty, then she’s guilty. It happens every day, Phoenix Wright. The law finds innocent people guilty and everyone moves on with their lives.”

“It shouldn’t happen,” Phoenix insisted. The lightning bolt feeling had spread through the rest of his body, tingling through his hands and feet.

“Well it damned well does!”

There was a silence between them for a moment, and he watched Kristoph take a shuddering breath, and carefully fix his hair.

“We’re trying to fix it,” Phoenix said, finally. It seemed like an awfully pathetic thing to say in the circumstances.

“So I’ve heard,” he replied, taking another long, deep breath. He painted the calm smile back onto his face. “And I’d like to be a part of that, Nick. That’s why I asked Lana to talk to Miles. If you’re going to remake the law, I can help. I want to help.”

There was a desperate, cloying tone in Kristoph’s voice. Phoenix didn’t like that it reminded him of when they’d been in bed together.

“Look,” Phoenix said, taking a long breath of his own. “Look, Kris, even if that was the real reason you killed Zak Gramarye– you can’t just kill somebody for being a shitty father.”

“No. No you can’t just kill someone for that,” he agreed. “In fact they put you in jail for it if they catch you!”

Kristoph laughed hollowly and he put his fingers around the bars again, as if it were all some joke.

Phoenix stood up from the little chair, and he walked up to the bars, close enough that he and Kris might have been able to touch. He slid his hands in his pockets instead, and slouched in front of him.

“They sure do, buddy,” Nick sighed. “But that isn’t even the only murder you committed. Kristoph– you poisoned an old man. You tried to poison a child. And for what? Your own ego?”

Kristoph looked away. “You would condemn me for a mistake made in my youth?”

Nick’s ears rang. He’d heard it before, from Kristoph’s brother. On that fateful day in court. He wondered if perhaps it was a family saying.

“Kristoph…” Nick began limply, and he trailed off. He didn’t know what to say, what was there to say?

“Nicholas.”

It got a laugh out of him. Lady Justice help him, it did. That stupid nickname.

“Why do you even call me that?” Phoenix asked, rubbing his eyes.

Kristoph smiled. “Because it’s funny that it isn’t your name.”

“I guess…”

Seven years worth of memories flashed through Nick’s mind, like seven years worth of knives. There were good times. Damn it– there were a lot of good times. Why did Kristoph have to be like this? Why did Kristoph have to be…

Kristoph’s fingers stroked the bar between them. “I’d ask if I’d spoiled our visit, but I don’t think there was really anything to spoil in the first place.”

“Do you think I’m going to apologize for not visiting before?” Phoenix asked.

“Are you?”

He didn’t answer the question. “You have Athena’s yes vote for prosecuting cases, Kris.”

“And what about your vote, Nick?”

Phoenix wrapped his fingers around the same bar as Kristoph was, just above his hand, not quite touching, but lingering. A glance at the man’s fingers told him that Kris had lost weight in prison. He hadn’t had all that much to lose.

“It’s not my vote you need, Kristoph.”

“I’d still like to have it.”

Kristoph’s fingers crawled up the bars, and their skin brushed. Phoenix winced at the contact, but he didn’t move away. He didn’t understand what was happening in his chest. The staccato beat loud, and insistent.

“It’s up to Trucy,” Phoenix said, still not answering the question. “And to Vera Misham.”

Kristoph looked at him pleadingly, blue eyes as stormy as the sea. “Do I have your vote, Nick?”

Phoenix bit his lip, and his fingers came to rest on top of Kristoph’s. “I’ll talk to Trucy, okay? Don’t expect much.”

Kristoph’s calm smile took on an uneasy edge, and he nodded, reaching out from between the bars to put his free hand against Phoenix’s jaw. Nick winced, but once again, didn’t pull away.

“I won’t,” Kristoph replied. “But you know, life’s full of crazy surprises.”

Phoenix made a choked noise as Kristoph, like always, threw his words back at him. He grabbed him by the collar, through the bars– and pulled him into a sudden, tight kiss that just barely connected, both of their faces framed and squished by cold metal.

It was a breathless, thirsty and desperate kiss, even more so than what had once been typical for them. When Phoenix let him go, Kristoph was panting, and his hair had once again fallen in front of his face.

“Yeah,” Phoenix snorted. He rubbed his face, flushed. “Life’s full of crazy surprises alright. I’d better go.”

“Before the guard comes in to break us up?” Kristoph drawled. “Or to decide if he’s going to sell the footage to the papers? Yes, you’d probably better. But… I enjoyed our little visit.”

“I’m sure.”

“Come back soon?” He leaned on the bars, smiling at him, and Nick felt a little sick to his stomach.

“Maybe. I’ll talk to Trucy.”

“Thank you, Nick. My dear friend..”

“Yeah.”

Phoenix turned to go, but stopped when Kristoph addressed him one more time.

“Phoenix– say hello to Apollo for me, would you?”

For the second time it felt like an arrow went through his chest, and he turned to look over his shoulder at Kristoph, framed through the bars of the cell.

“Sorry, Kris, Apollo moved out of the country.”

“What?”  Nick watched as Kristoph pressed himself up against the bars. “Phoenix Wright, you come back here and you explain to me what the hell I’ve missed.”

Phoenix grinned over his shoulder, and waved his hand, walking away down the hall toward the security checkpoint.

“Sorry, Kris. I’ll catch you up on gossip next time I visit.”

The game, it seemed, was back on. And for now, Phoenix very much had the upper hand.