Archive of Our Own

Three things you know you should have said:

1. To Director Cosmos: “I’m sorry.”
2. To your dad: “I’m really sorry.”
3. To your best friend: “I love you.”

And not in the way that is typically considered romantic or familial. There had always been a largely platonic sentiment whenever you said the words in the past, but they were (are) powerful because the words were (are) important to you and because your friendship had always been (is) important to him— 

—god, you really should have told him.

Three other things someone else told you once that you think would be important to remember:

1. Pulling out the dagger probably will make the blood run faster. Don’t do that.
2. Struggling to breathe probably means something bad. A punctured lung? Don’t breathe in too deep.
3. Mr. Starbuck has to live.

You got this far in your training; this close to everything you’ve ever wanted. Selected to be one of the few to go to outer space and see the stars and you’ve loved the stars since you first discovered you could dream. The HAT-2 mission was going to be everything until it wasn’t. Until it isn’t. Until you’re lying on your back and staring up at the ceiling panels, wondering— 

—wondering—  

Three things that you regret, but you tell yourself there was nothing you could have done:

1. Going into Director Cosmos’s office when he asked to see you.
2. Not getting up or doing something when you first saw the masked guy.
3. Not calling your dad or Apollo one last time before the launch.

Mr. Starbuck isn’t that far from you. 

He’s alive like he’s supposed to be. But he’s not that far. 

You wonder if you can—

—you wonder—   

—just wiggle your finger. You can still do that, right? You can move it? Just reach. Reach like you’ve been doing your entire life. Reach and maybe you can wake him. Maybe you can get help— 

…

And then you wake up.

Or maybe it’s not so much that you wake up, but it’s kind of like you’re dreaming and then suddenly you aren’t.

Or maybe it’s not so much that it’s kind of like you’re dreaming, but more so that one minute all you see is grey and shadow and smoke and all you taste is your own blood at the back of your throat, but then all at once, everything is swallowed up by familiar brown. The brown that is kind of like earthy soil. Brown like deer fur. 

“I was right,” you rasp.

And the brown, brown, brown blinks at you. “What?”

“I always did say you looked kind of like a bunny.”

And Apollo Justice bursts into tears.

He tells you you’re dead and for some reason, you’re not all that surprised. Or at least, that’s not what surprises you. 

It feels like the grief is coming; you know it’s there. It’s in the back of your mind, looming like some kind of cheesy anime villain. But it’s not yet because there’s so much else to talk about in the meanwhile. Just minutes ago, you really wanted to talk to Apollo, anyway. Being dead can wait until you’ve talked to your best friend, can’t it?

He tells you how you died: that you managed to save Mr. Starbuck, but it was while you were trying to get your breath back that it happened. He tells you that with some help, he managed to catch your killer. 

You have to admit: some part of you thinks it’s kind of badass to have been killed.

Apollo doesn’t agree.

“C’mon, Pollo, think about it! It’s kind of flattering, right? I mean, I was a threat to somebody. I was a wrench in their plans. That’s at least a little cool.”

There’s a hint of a smile at the corner of your best friend’s mouth. It’s enough.

Then it gets hard to talk, and the silence is when it really starts to sink in that holy shit, you’re dead.

“So, how am I here?” you ask instead of saying anything about the whole being-dead thing. Apollo explains channeling. You’ve heard about it before, you think, because there was that attorney Apollo always admired and wanted to grow up to be like—the same guy who eventually became his second boss. (Kind of like Mr. Starbuck is to you, you think, and suddenly you find yourself hoping that Mr. Wright won’t be the reason Apollo dies one day, too.) 

“So I’m in someone else’s body?”

“Yeah. I don’t think you ever met her, but she’s a friend of mine. Er, a friend of Mr. Wright’s, really.”

You whistle. “Wowza. So you paid real money to see lil ol’ me, huh?”

“I mean, I’d have paid anything—” 

—that’s not really what you expected Mr. I’m-So-Frugal-I-Reuse-the-Plastic-Containers-Deli-Meat-Comes-in-to-Organize-my-Bathroom-Drawers to say— 

—and you don’t know if you should be concerned about how quickly he says it, either. (Scratch that. You definitely are.)

“—just to see you again.” Apollo scratches at the top of his head, fixing his eyes on some random point on the floor mat to the left of his knee. “But nah, I didn’t have to pay anything. Pearl said she’d do it for free. She said she’d be happy to let me say goodbye. She… she said she knows what it’s like to lose someone like this. So.”

Everyone probably does, huh? Funny how death is such a human thing.

You swallow. 

You’re kind of running out of jokes, here. What are you supposed to say now? 

“So what’s next for you?” Tell me about yourself. I guess it’s been some time for you since last I blinked, right? What have you tortured yourself over, Pollo, without my handsome self to buffer your anxieties for you? Oh god. Is someone gonna take care of him? You really hope someone is gonna take care of him. Apollo is one of those guys who needs some looking-after.

“Um.” Apollo swallows. “I guess… I guess I’m gonna keep going.”

“Good,” you say before he can rethink his candid words. “Remember: you’re Apollo Justice, and you’re fine.”

“Yeah.” He laughs. It’s instinct, probably, that pushes him to say: “And you’re Clay Terran, and you’re—”

—dead.

(Huh. That hurts a lot more than it did three minutes ago.)

He freezes.

You think you can muster a smile for him. Or you try to, anyway. It feels more crooked than you wanted. “You can say it, Pollo. It’s okay.”

“No, it’s not,” your best friend says and the look in his bloodshot eyes is so earnest and angry. He fists his hands in his jeans and his voice squeezes tight when he bursts, “It’s not okay, Clay! Not at all! Fuck, I mean, you should be in space by now! You should be able to see the stars with your own eyes and be able to finally do everything you’ve been working your entire life to be able to go do!”

Space.

Oh god. Space.

Uh— 

—this is getting harder to deal with, isn’t it?

(Oh god.)

“You should be able to live your dream and have it fully realized just like mine is!”

God. 

You love how loud Apollo is. Sometimes, he screams like he thinks his sheer volume is enough to drive the darkness, the sadness, that cloying something that’s always dormant in the back of everyone’s heads away. If he could, he’d make his entire voice the sun. Boom and project it until there’s no room left for grief or sorrow.

“Yeah,” you rasp because there’s no way you can say no. Because you do agree. You agree with everything he’s said. You wanted one thing so badly, and now it’s never going to happen. And you’re mad about that, but also really, really damn sad about it, too. “I should, shouldn’t I?”

Silence fills the dark room.

You take a deep breath. “Wow. Uh. So that… that kind of sucks.”

“K-kind of?”

Apollo’s crying again, but it’s a different cry than before. It’s quiet, with both eyes open. Tears trickle down his cheeks. 

You look down at your hands for the first time. The robes you’re wearing aren’t familiar. They aren’t yours. Hell, the skin you are wearing isn’t even yours, and suddenly you realize (remember?) that nothing is yours; not anymore. 

You don’t even have a life. 

You’re just borrowing it and borrowing someone else’s time for this moment with your best friend, and then after that—what—after that, it’s nothing, right? And the wildest thing is, it really was like you blinked. You died and you blinked and then somewhere in the between, time passed on without you. And time will continue to pass on without you. And everything and everyone is going to go on without you. And other people will take your place on the next HAT missions and they’ll all get to go to the stars, taking the opportunities and seats that you always wanted. All while you are—

—dead.

(And you won’t even be able to dream again. You won’t be. You aren’t, now.)

“I don’t think… I don’t think I have a joke for this.”

“I’d be surprised if you did.” Apollo wipes at his face. 

“I mean, I guess the one really nice thing about it all is that I won’t—like—even know I’m dead, really.” You lift your eyes. “Like, after this, I’ll just stop. I won’t even be able to be sad about it. I won’t be able to think about anything at all. That… that’s kind of nice: that the grief only has to be temporary.”

And then Apollo laughs.

It’s a horrible sound. 

“It should be temporary for you, too, Pollo,” you say and suddenly, more than anything else, you want him to know this. You want him to say that. “Hey. Stop that. Look at me—” 

—are you listening to me?

You have to listen to me, you want to say. You have to. These might be my last words, Apollo, and damn it, I want you to listen to me.

You take Apollo Justice by the shoulders and you look into his brown, brown, brown eyes and you say, “It has to be temporary for you too. You can’t be sad forever. You can’t do that to yourself. You have other people to save and other people to help, so you can’t stop for me. I won’t even be aware of anything, so it’s not like—it’s not like—” Steam runs out of you and you feel kind of pathetic, but this is so important that you feel you may as well keep going. “You tell yourself all sorts of weird things in that head of yours, but don’t let grieving me be one of those things that you feel like you have to do for the rest of your life.”

“But it’s not fair.”

Of course, the lawyer of the two of them is concerned with what’s fair and not in this fucked up mess.

“No,” you agree. “It’s not.”

Apollo takes a deep breath. “How am I supposed to be okay with it if it’s not fair? How are you okay with it?”

“I’m—uh—okay.” You have no idea what to say. There’s supposed to be something wise and cool that the dead guy says to bolster the hero, right? There usually is. But that guy’s always the old mentor character and you’re only 23, and god you really, really, really didn’t want to die. 

Is there anything that’s right to say here?

“I’m not saying you have to be okay with it. I’m not.” You clear your throat. “I don’t want to be dead. But sometimes you just gotta keep going anyway. I… I don’t even have anything really cool to tell you. You’ve just gotta keep going, man. I mean, look at us. You’ve just gotta—you’ve—”

Apollo’s face crumbles.

You think yours does, too.

You don’t know when your hands moved from his shoulders to cup the back of his head and pull him in, but at some point, they did because the next thing you know, your foreheads are pressed together.

“I’m sorry—” he says.

—it’s okay— 

“—I love you,” you say back.

“G-god, I love you, too, Clay,” he says through jagged inhales that sound like they hurt.

You squeeze and you squeeze and you squeeze him as tight as you can. His arms wrap around your back and when you hold each other, for the first time since dying, you really do allow yourself to grieve. For yourself and for everything you will never get to have anymore. 

It really, really isn’t okay.

But at least you have this chance to tell it all goodbye.

You tell Apollo when you’re ready. 

It feels a little oxymoronic. You don’t think you really are ready. You never wanted this. You still don’t. But there’s nothing that can be done about it. 

The worst part is that Apollo will have to carry this.

That’s the part that’s gonna suck the most, you think—besides the whole obvious being-dead status update—that after this, your best friend is going to have to stand up, dust off his knees, and somehow go on. And it’s not okay. But maybe one day, it will be okay. 

You tell him that you love him. Again.

He says it back. 

And you say, “Hey, if this channeling thing ain’t too expensive, feel free to hit me up whenever, alright?” You shake your hand at him, pinky and thumb extended in an imitation of a telephone, or maybe it’s the hang loose sign. Whatever. “I’m officially available for a call or consultation whenever.”

There are three things that you think you’re proud of, that you think must mean you’ve lived at least a pretty good life with the cards you’ve been dealt, in no particular order:

1. Saving Mr. Starbuck’s life.
2. Being selected for the HAT-2 launch. (Hey, most people don’t even make it that far. Not at 23. That’s nothing to sneeze at.)
3. Making Apollo laugh one more time.