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feelinglikecleopatra · 2 years

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Chasing the Jackpot

fandom: six of crows / jesper fahey x kaz brekker / kaz brekker x inej ghafa / jesper fahey x wylan van eck / polycrows

word count: 12,954

rating: teen (for sexual references)

summary: kaz and jesper try something new.

The wall between Kaz and Jesper’s rooms is unbearably thin. Every sound carries, they may as well be living in a cathedral. In moments of particular weakness, Kaz has considered increasing the thickness of said wall. As yet, it remains an expense he cannot justify no matter how much the sound of Jesper’s cracked vinyl grates on his paper-thin nerves. But maybe he should reconsider his priorities, the flat is more of an investment and less a hole to stay dry in, these days.

It’s the same more-or-less deserted building Kaz has been squatting in since he was twelve. In that time, any and all attempts at repurposing or condemning the building have mysteriously failed. The reasons for such range from a bad environmental impact report to the tragic death of a major developer. Because the latter had required Inej’s skill set, Kaz had been reduced to bribing his own girlfriend. The price, a week-long holiday spent together in a remote location. It was, as she put it, a good deal for the moral debasement of her soul. Apparently, the fact that the developer was a known sex offender was not sufficient grounds for murder. The woman was and remains a quandry.

It has all been worth it, of course. Since last year, the land on which the building stands is owned by one Kaz Rietveld—a name pulled out of thin air as far as anyone but Inej is concerned. Now, no one living under his roof need fear eviction by the state. Whether or not Kaz sees fit to evict anyone depends entirely on their usefulness to him. (Or, on occasion, Inej’s determination to undermine his authority). That said, Kaz is a tolerable landlord with a healthy portfolio of properties scattered across the city. One of them, leased under Inej’s name, currently houses undocumented migrants while they get their papers in order. A deeply unprofitable venture that makes Kaz’s teeth itch. Out of some misguided sense of balance, Kaz had initiated a protracted extortion campaign against a local councilman just to make himself feel better.

One of the people living rent free in the Squat, whose usefulness Kaz has cause to question on a near daily basis, is Jesper. He lives part time with Wylan in the nice part of town and part time at the Squat, shuttling between the two—probably just to piss Kaz off—as and when he deems appropriate/necessary/desirable. At present, there’s a job nearer, relatively speaking, to Kaz’s squat than Wylan’s mansion, keeping him in the dank alleys of the Barrel. Keeping him in the adjacent room, listening to the same five stuttering notes.

Kaz is contemplating how best to murder Jesper while mitigating his girlfriend’s wrath, an eventuality he hopes to avoid for as long as humanly possible, when a message from the girlfriend in question arrives.

The alert lights up his phone, which is turned face up on the bed beside him, in a rare empty spot between the customs reports and lease agreements he has fanned out across his sheets. The light is fluorescent and off-putting compared to the soft-hued energy-saving Edison light bulbs Inej installed the day she moved in. Kaz had never given much thought to how he illuminated his space—working or sleeping or whatever—but after Inej made the change he had to admit, however begrudgingly, that living in full technicolour is strenuous. Sepia tones are much easier on his eyes.

The message is short.

Talk to him.

She doesn't need to elaborate, they discussed it before she left. By “discussed”, Kaz means that she gave him an earful of what she thought and the many ways in which he was failing as a man and a boyfriend while he sat placidly, accepting her criticism with little to no intention of doing anything. What the hell is there to do? He certainly isn’t going to talk to Jesper about it. Just thinking about that makes him want to hurt someone.

No, this custom’s declaration form on a shipment of jurda he’s expecting in the next week is far more interesting. Well, maybe not interesting exactly but at least fathomable, actionable. That’s what he needs, actionable. Something to do that doesn’t involve disclosing his deepest vulnerabilities. Especially—and now this is something Inej outright banned him from saying though he still holds it to be true—with someone he doesn’t trust. For no reason Kaz can fathom, Inej simply doesn’t believe him when he says he doesn’t trust Jesper. When Kaz reminded her, none too gently, that he almost got her killed a couple of years ago she’d simply said, “stop using that as an excuse, Kaz. He’s your best friend.”

Whether or not Jesper is his best friend, an issue Kaz himself has not come to any meaningful conclusion on—what is a best friend, anyway?—is in Kaz’ not so humble opinion, irrelevant. Jesper is a gambler, a born risk taker. Sure, Jesper has made several attempts at recovery—has, in fact, not stepped foot in a casino or betting shop for almost eight months—and sure, he has dedicated himself to one, two, now three separate apprenticeships/online degrees/jobs that he promises will keep him “on track”. But he is, at heart, still a gambler. If the opportunity arises for him to experience that rush, the particular high that comes with a run of good fortune, Jesper will take it. Of that, Kaz is certain. How could he ever trust such a man? For whom everything, every relationship and bit of information and spare kruge, is just a means to an end?

When he said as much to Inej, she pointed out that the person he was describing sounded an awful lot like Kaz Brekker and that maybe that was why he found these aspects of Jesper’s personality so untrustworthy.

The conversation had ended swiftly thereafter.

His phone is dark again. The figures he’s bent over blur across the page as he stares at them. In a vain attempt at fixing his sight, Kaz presses the heel of his hand into his eyeball but all this accomplishes is putting different coloured dots in his vision. It is a sign of his rapidly advancing age that he can’t even make it past—Kaz glances at the clock on his bedside table—three a.m. without losing the function of his eyes.

But by far the worst part of losing focus, being drawn inexorably away from his work and the pleasant numbness of it, is the fact of being drawn toward other things. The weight of his limbs, heavy with the sleep he’s deprived himself of, the smell of burnt toast coming from the kitchen a floor below (probably the fault of some new recruit adjusting to the truly obscene level Jesper sets the toaster to in order to achieve his desired salem-witch-trials-burnt toast), and most upsettingly, the sound of Jesper’s broken record.

Thinking about Jesper awake, foot tapping idly to no perceptible rhythm at all, a gameboy or crossword puzzle or thriller pulp magazine in his elegant, marksman’s hands is making Kaz twitch. Ghezen, he’s probably wearing those fucking glasses. (Jesper has the sight of a predatory bird over long distances but hold anything up close to his face and he’s reduced to squinting and guess work.) Now, Kaz is picturing Jesper sprawled over his queen-sized bed, with a smutty magazine an inch from his face in those ridiculous wireframes that fog up when he gets excited.

These thoughts are precisely why Inej is wrong: Kaz cannot ask Jesper for help. They are precisely why she is right: Kaz, like Jesper, cannot be trusted.

The sound his head makes when he lets it drop against the headboard is louder than he intends, much louder. So loud in fact, it echoes a little and must, must be audible in the other room. The room Jesper is in.

Despite the fact his eyes are screwed shut and he’s doing his damndest to ignore every input his body is receiving be it aural or visual, Kaz sees his phone light up. That harsh white light cutting straight through his mashed shut eyelids.

It’s nothing. Probably a message from Pim about today's takings at the shop, or Anika reporting movements at the docks, or… something. Nothing. It’s nothing. There’s no force in the universe that can compel him to look at his phone right now. In fact, Kaz is going to open his eyes, get off the bed, clear all his paperwork away, brush his teeth, get changed, and go to bed. Any moment now. This whole day and his argument with Inej and the thought of her a hundred miles away, standing in the cold, shouting obscenities at customs officials rather than here, beside him will be over just as soon as Kaz goes to sleep, which he’ll do. Tomorrow is another day.

The phone lights up again. His eyes are still mashed shut so he doesn’t know who it’s from or what it says but it’s followed shortly by the rhythmic vibration indicative of a phone call. Then, someone bangs on his wall.

No, not someone. Jesper. It can only be Jesper because the bang comes from the wall behind him, the one adjoining Jesper’s room, which means it’s exceedingly likely it’s Jesper on the other end of that phone call. It wouldn’t be the first time Jesper’s called him from the room next door but it would be the first time he’s answered. If he were to answer, which he isn’t.

Kaz isn’t truly worried until both the banging and the phone call stop. Not for the first time he thinks he really ought to move out, find a new place, somewhere he can sleep and work undisturbed by the scuttling barrel rats he surrounds himself with. Really, it wouldn’t be so difficult. Any number of his properties would make suitable replacements, and it’s not like he’d evict anyone from the Squat he just—

Without knocking, because why observe such a common courtesy, Jesper barges into the room. The sight of him in nothing but that ridiculous lime green silk dressing gown, tied loosely around his narrow waist and yes, those saints-damned glasses, makes Kaz’ mouth dry. He swallows vainly, attempting to rectify the situation, but Jesper’s already talking.

“I don’t know if you noticed. I’ve been trying to call you.” He doesn’t even seem upset. Not that Jesper ever really seems upset. Reading anything beyond the jittery, borderline angry energy Jesper always carries, Kaz has learned, is an exercise in futility. Upset in the sense of sad or disappointed or frustrated is not in his vocabulary, Jesper is always spectacular.

Since Kaz hasn’t deigned to dignify him with a response, Jesper slumps onto the bed beside him, a careful inch between their shoulders. Without thinking, and almost immediately regretting it, Kaz looks down at that inch of air. How small, how vast the distance feels. Of all the things he’s accomplished in his meagre twenty-something years of life, he can’t traverse this distance. But Jesper hasn’t even noticed, he’s talking again.

“I got a text from Inej.” Jesper isn’t looking at him, his attention trained on untying and retying the silk cord around his waist. The mention of Inej makes Kaz’ palms sweat and his gloves are all the way across the room, on the mantel. He feels naked without them. “She said you wanted to talk to me about something.”

This feels like a betrayal, though the fact that she did it means she thinks this is a conversation he both needs to have and will survive having.

Jesper is still talking. “She didn’t say what about but I thought I’d come in here and find out. I’m sorry if you were sleeping—” a profoundly stupid statement since he found Kaz awake, with the lights on, and work spread out all around him, “—it just seemed kind of urgent.”

“It’s nothing urgent,” Kaz says, eventually. “It’s nothing.”

Quite suddenly, and without attempting to clear anything from the bed, Jesper flops onto his belly, takes off those glasses, and puts his head down on his arms. “I’m all ears.”

It’s infuriating, really, being surrounded by people who know him better than he knows himself and insist on playing shrink at every available opportunity. There’s nothing he wants to do less than expound on his inability to be physically intimate with his girlfriend, with Jesper, who’s now looking up at him with big, almost doleful eyes. Infuriating.

“Jesper, stop sticking your nose where it’s not wanted. Don’t you have a boyfriend to piss off?”

He doesn’t mean for that to come out quite so sullen, almost jealous sounding, but now that it’s out, there’s no reeling it back in. By the twinkle in Jesper’s eye, he noticed. Kaz isn’t jealous, however it sounds. Inej is all he wants, all he could ever need. So what if he sometimes watches the way the tendons in Jes’ neck move when he stretches, or the length of tricep that’s revealed by the fall of his gown, or the way he takes up easily two thirds of the bed. Unapologetic, decadent, beautiful. These are things any seeing person can observe about Jesper, things he encourages people to see.

“I do, I do,” Jesper agrees, amiably. “But he’s not here. You are.”

It’s as if, with the mattress dipping under Jesper’s weight, Kaz is being pulled toward him. There’s a gravity to him Kaz hasn’t noticed or paid attention to or thought about before. Except that isn’t entirely true. Kaz has been falling into his orbit for almost a decade now and it’s frightened him for just as long. It frightens him still. But none of this is why Jesper came up in his argument with Inej. It can’t be.

Kaz recalls the terms of their engagement, because of course there are terms. A romantic, if not always sexual, relationship is like any other—an arrangement between individuals with certain rights and responsibilities. Theirs is predicated on a singular attachment, a commitment made to each other and only each other. The word he’s heard used is, exclusive. That is how relationships are done. That is what love is. That is how Inej will have him and anything that jeopardises that is out of the question.

Even if, maybe, Kaz wants something more… He’s always wanted more than he can have, more than he deserves, more than he gets—in the end. Kaz is greedy and selfish and cruel. This wanting is Dirtyhands, back to haunt him. In loving Inej there’s no room for error, no room for all this useless wanting. No room for greed.

“I know you bore easily, but you’re not a child and I’m not your parent. Get out, Jesper.”

After a moment of silence, Jesper just blinking up at him, Kaz bites his tongue and pinches the bridge of his nose.

“Shit, I’m so tired—I shouldn’t have snapped.”

Jesper tilts his head slightly, an eyebrow climbing toward his hair line. “Was that an apology?”

“No.” It wasn’t. He isn’t apologising, only acknowledging a misstep. With dawning horror, Kaz watches Jesper rise onto his elbows and grin at him. Oh Saints, this is worse. “No, I’m not apologising. It’s late.”

Even Kaz doesn’t know what he’s trying to say now but Jesper only sits up on the bed. Sitting like that, legs crossed, one of his knees presses into Kaz’ thigh. It’s a firm, warm pressure—nothing scary at all. Actually, it reminds him of Inej, of the way she broached touch with him in the early days. Firm, decisive, clearly telegraphed.

This whole situation feels so wildly out of his control and he desperately wants to blame Inej for springing it on him, except he agrees with her about the work he needs to do and he almost agrees with her about how to go about it. Now, though, with Jesper sitting there, calves out and dark skin accentuated by lime green silk, that work seems impossible. Jesper is so unseemly when he’s like this. It makes it hard to think.

“You know, I was talking to Patrik—I told you about Patrik, right? The guy who works over in the deballasting station, but comes in every now and again? Anyway—he mentioned this skate park over by Sweetreef and how a bunch of the people from the yard go there Fridays after they clock out. Well, I was thinking I could join them sometime. It’s been a while but I figure I’ve got some skills left. If not, I can always quit my job, change my name and move to another city.”

“All you’d succeed in doing is hurting yourself.”

“Oh, I don’t mind a few cuts and bruises. You know me,” Jesper shrugs. “Always up for a challenge.”

At some point while speaking, Jesper clambers off the bed and begins moving around the room, trailing his fingers over the assortment of things Kaz has out. Between haphazardly stacked books and plant pots without plants in them, he finds a bronze knuckle duster, a battered old cigarette case, a ceramic dish of seeds (for Inej’s bird feeding habit), and a votive candle (for Inej’s religious inclinations). Neither of them says anything for a while. Jesper’s record can still be heard skipping in the other room, an inharmonious companion to the rough burr of the city.

Always up for a challenge.

In the silence, watching Jesper, Kaz gathers himself. He owes it to Inej. If she wants him to try he must try. And, despite his misgivings, Jesper is the only person he can even imagine himself broaching the topic with. It doesn’t have to mean anything—it’s only a matter of will. If Jesper is the key to this part of him then, sobeit.

“There is something I wanted to talk to you about.”

“Oh?” Jesper doesn’t look at him and Kaz is pathetically grateful for the kindness when, for a moment, the words do not come.

Where to begin?

Even in the years he and Inej have been doing this, Kaz has never been very good at verbalising his thoughts. The only language Kaz knows is the one he taught himself to survive, confidence and cruelty. He is ill-equipped for vulnerability.

“Something happened—to me—when I was younger, when I was young.” Jesper draws breath as if to say something but Kaz barrels on, “the details don’t matter. I was young and it left me with scars.”

“I happen to love scars.” Jesper has reached the part of his room where the desk meets the wall. There’s a window there, the same window from which Inej feeds the crows. Soft orange light, the alchemical flicker of city streets, limns Jesper’s high cheekbones and casts his eyes in shadow as he speaks. “Yours in particular.”

Kaz is of a mind to object. For one, he isn’t referring to his physical scars. Second, scars is a euphemism in more ways than one. His “scars” are open and unhealed, wounds fresh from the making. Before he can object, however, Kaz notes something about the tilt of Jesper’s mouth or the slough of his breathing. He loves Kaz’ scars. If Jesper loves his broken edges…

Kind lies and terrible truths, which of these is this?

“Ever since, I’ve found touch, especially skin-on-skin touch, unbearable. Repulsive.” Kaz hadn’t used that word when he described this to Inej. The last possible thing he wanted her to think was that he thought of her as repulsive when the very opposite is true. Apparently, he has no such compunction with Jesper. “I don’t want to be this way.”

That hasn’t always been true. In the immediate aftermath of his brother’s accident, not being able to touch others had felt like a curse. Passing from institution to institution, in and out of too many foster homes to count, Kaz came to think of himself as unlovable, undesirable, untouchable. Too broken even to accept human affection. It seemed appropriate that so loathsome a creature be incapable of touch, God’s cruel humour. Kaz grew into it then, embraced and glorified his aversion. He became untouchable. Developed a reputation among the other lost and abandoned children of his city for being violent, unpredictable and cold, utterly, utterly cold.

Over time, a series of terrible events changed his mind. The first time Inej laughed at something he’d said; the first time he laughed at something Jesper said; Nina’s eighteenth birthday party, watching her and Inej play giant Jenga with a stack of waffles; seeing Wylan kiss Jesper after he landed his first kick-flip; sitting in the glow of a fire Kuwei made out of the remains of the Van Eck yacht.

Realising he didn’t want to be untouchable anymore was another kind of breaking. Kaz had forgotten what it meant to be safe and dismantling the person he’d become in the absence of safety struck at the core of what it meant to be Kaz Brekker. He will never again be Kaz Rietveld, no matter the fantasies he spins in the pages of his investment portfolio, but perhaps he can become someone new.

“With Inej being gone so often, we don’t get a lot of time.”

Now, Jesper is looking at him, still standing across the room. “To practice?”

Kaz can’t make himself nod. Fear has a hold of him now. Jesper will touch him, he will allow Jesper to touch him and, in all likelihood, see him at his worst—armourless and vulnerable.

“Are you asking me for help? Is that—do you want me to help you with that?”

A myriad glib, cowardly responses come easily to mind. I want you out of my room. I want to be able to hold my girlfriend, touch her, fuck her. I want some peace and quiet. But all he can hear are the words “you want me” out of Jesper’s mouth. All he can think is, I want you.

This is a terrible idea.

“Yes.”

Jesper would be lying if he said he never imagines himself like this: Kaz perching next to him on the sagging sofa, doing his best impression of relaxed while he holds one hand (ungloved) in Jesper’s lap and taps the armrest anxiously with the other (gloved). How he ended up here, now, that he couldn’t have predicted. That the Bastard of the Barrel, Dirtyhands himself, would ask Jesper to hold his hand (among other things) in a bid to rid himself of his touch aversion, Jesper would have bet against no matter the odds anyone gave him.

“Relax, boss. I’ve got you.” Yet again beating the odds, Kaz does.

After their conversation last night, which was mercilessly brief—Jesper left positively brimming with questions he knew he could never ask—they both agreed to speak to their SO’s before doing anything else. For Jesper, this was a matter of calling Wylan to spill the beans on this shocking development while painting his toenails.

Sidestepping Jesper’s attempts at levity with practised ease, Wylan had asked, “do you love him?”

“You know I do.” They have no secrets from each other and although Jesper had spent many a year in denial about his attraction and attachment to Kaz Brekker, those days are over. “That doesn’t mean I don't love you.”

“I know.” Wylan had seemed to consider. It was a shame they couldn’t have had the conversation in person. Jesper had wanted very much to see Wylan’s face, that divot between his brows. “Is this a good idea, Jesper?”

“Probably not!” He’d laughed around the words as if they were a joke, as if his heart were an object of ridicule.

“Why are you laughing, my love?”

“Wy, don’t worry about me. It’s just Kaz.”

“That’s exactly why I’m worried. He’s your one-that-got-away.”

There was an edge to Wylan’s voice then that made Jesper pick his phone up from where he’d laid it down on the loveseat beside him. “Wylan van Eck, Kaz is not my one-that-got-away. I never expected—He isn’t—Wy, he’s not even an ex. You have nothing to worry about.”

“I’m not worried for me.” He heard Wylan sigh. “You love him. If I were sure he loved you back I would welcome that bastard with open arms but as it stands I don’t entirely trust him with you.”

At that, Jesper had frozen, nail varnish brush halfway to his glittering toes. There was an ultimatum in there, he could feel it. A choice between the love of his life and his best friend.

Jesper wants to be all things to all people, always. If Kaz needs him to be easy, to make himself available for whatever experimentation this proposition entails, that is what he will be. If Wylan needs him to be careful, needs him to guard his heart, that is what he’ll endeavour to do. But this, he knows, is an impossible thing.

The nail varnish brush had begun to shake along with his hands, still poised halfway to his toes. In his upturned palm, the phone was fizzing with the sound of silence.

Jesper plans every second of every day.

Jesper has never planned anything in his entire life.

Both these statements are true insofar as Jesper is near constantly expounding on the thousand thousand different things his day might entail. Cereal with milk for breakfast is fast but complicated because the Squat has ten different kinds of cereal and four different kinds of milk. The decision-making process such a breakfast entails will likely keep him busy until later than he can afford, pushing his bus ride to the ‘Reef back by up to an hour, which means he’ll clock-in late—best case scenario this means he just starts and ends work late, worst case scenario he loses his job because this would be the fifth time he’s run late for reasons not deemed sufficiently justifiable. Being fired means falling behind on his various loan repayments and, more significantly, failing again to do something as simple as holding down a menial 9-to-5 job.

On bad days, moving from this train of thought to something even vaguely resembling action is impossible. On good days, Jesper uses a number of tricks to by-pass any executive dysfunction quagmires that he’s likely to get trapped in. For instance, that morning, he’d opted for the same cereal as Sacha for breakfast.

Despite having caught him on a good day, the train of thought triggered by Wylan’s, admittedly justified, concern had threatened to overwhelm Jesper entirely. Every choice he pictured himself making resulted in disaster.

Wylan’s voice cut through the shattering world.

“Hey, Jesper, are you still there? If you can hear me, take a breath.” Through sheer will, Jesper drew in a breath and let it out, hissing through his teeth. “Okay, that’s good. Are you in the middle of doing something?”

It is a rare occasion indeed that finds Jesper doing only one thing at a time.

“Painting my toenails.”

“Oh Jes, are you getting all dolled up for the bastard?” There had been a smile in his voice, sly and teasing. A distraction. “I think that can wait. Would you put the nail varnish down, somewhere it won’t get knocked over, for me?”

Jesper did as he was told. He’s good at that.

After a beat, realising Wylan had no way of knowing whether he followed his instruction or not, he also said, “okay.”

“Now, listen to me. I am not telling you not to help Kaz. I’m not making you choose. But I do think we should set some ground rules, okay?”

Ground rules are good. Grey areas were all fun and games when Jesper was writing papers for his moral philosophy class back when he was actually a student but here and now, Kaz’s naked hand in his lap, he’s infinitely grateful for Wylan’s ground rules.

No kissing (for now)

No touching that might result in orgasm (for now)

No sex (for now)

Explain every touch before making it

Above anything else, take care of yourself.

They’re simple enough and simple is good.

He and Wylan have come too far, sacrificed too much for Jesper to throw it all away in a high-stakes game of risk, which is what this is.

It all feels a little like a test, both of his relationship with Wylan and his relationship with Kaz. Maybe Jesper should feel overwhelmed by the responsibility Kaz has heaped into his lap. Ultimately, though, it makes Jesper feel alive. The situation isn’t life or death but the stakes are high enough to get his blood up anyway. It makes him feel like he’s watching his number come around in roulette, like the slots are coming up all aces—the taste of a win in his mouth.

He’s spent enough time with the expensive therapist Wylan found for him to recognise this feeling for what it is, danger. And not the fun kind either. The kind that sucks him down, down, down, never to resurface. Destined to watch his relationships burn from the depths of his addiction. Uncharitably, Jesper thinks, it’s unfair of Kaz to ask this of him. But Jesper understands why he did, intimately. There is no one else. Kaz trusts him and that is the crux of the matter, the reason he had said yes—forgetting for the moment his more salacious desire for a taste of Dirtyhands—without a second thought. This experiment, this plan can (probably, will) fail in a million different ways. A poorly timed joke or ill-considered caress, Jesper’s flirting or Kaz’ bullying. Success is far from a foregone conclusion.

All this and more, Jesper had considered while getting dressed. He has the day off, which means a much longed for respite from coveralls and reinforced boots. Instead, he’d draped himself in a billowy cotton shirt the colour of fresh-caught salmon and a pleated, tartan skirt in red and navy. On anyone else, the outfit would have bordered on offensive. On Jesper, it’s indulgent. He had admired himself in the mirror before choosing earrings, three hoops clutching the shell of his right ear and one dangling gold pendant for his left, and sliding no less than six rings over the joints of his fingers. Jesper had armoured himself against Kaz’ cruelties, against the very real possibility he might still withdraw—deem Jesper unworthy.

Blinking into the mirror, Jesper had applied eyeliner and considered calling the whole thing off. Already, he’d known, he was far too invested, the stakes too high. Wylan’s words rang in his head. He might not be able to stop playing once the game had begun. Of course, this getting ready—Jesper decking himself out in his finest (okay, maybe not his finest but his finest trying-not-to-try-too-hard)—was a symptom of his addiction, the head over heels careen into oblivion. Oh, but what sweet oblivion. Maybe, Jesper had thought, I’ll get to hold Kaz’ hand today.

And now, here he is, holding Kaz’ hand.

The hand in question is pale. Jesper is a little transfixed by the moon-whiteness of Kaz’ skin, the way it kind of glows in the light. It is a porcelain white, unblemished but for one ropey scar. By contrast, Wylan’s skin tends more toward pink flushes and sunbrushed freckles. Kaz’ complexion reminds Jesper of a lovely Kaelish girl he’d once dated, whose thighs had been soft and perfect and milk-white.

They begin easy. Palm to palm. Jesper wants to make this easy for Kaz, wants to be easy for Kaz.

“What kind of touches trigger you most?” He asks, keeping his eyes averted.

“Depends.” Kaz’ rock-salt rasp is clipped, to the point.

“On?”

Jesper hears him swallow. “Whether I can see where the touch is coming from, my mood, where on my body…”

“Okay, well, how about the way I’m touching you now?”

Their palms are aligned so that Kaz’ long fingers are grazing the inside of Jesper’s wrist. Folding his thumb over, Jesper presses a firm line over the back of Kaz’ hand, feeling the skin slide and give over the small bones there.

“This—that’s fine. I mean, Inej and I can hold hands.”

The way he says it sounds to Jesper like he’s rolling his eyes, maybe scowling. Though he doesn’t look up to confirm, he says, “well, we don’t hold hands—hell, I never even get to see you without the gloves. Let me have this.”

Kaz grunts.

Eventually, Jesper brings his other hand into the mix. He traces a vein that meanders across the back of Kaz’ hand, over the bridge of his wrist, and up his forearm.

Kaz’ hands, he decides, are both softer and bigger than he had anticipated. Them being soft is something he definitely should have considered, what with how Kaz wears those gloves every hour of every day so that despite any heavy-lifting he might be doing—which these days is mostly none at all—his hands would stay baby-soft. Their size, however, truly catches Jesper off guard. It’s a combination of his having quite wide palms and long, elegant fingers. How has he never noticed that Kaz would have absolutely no trouble wrapping his hands around his narrow hips? It seems like something he would have noticed. But then, Kaz’ hands have always been off limits.

With his fingers probing the soft skin at the inside of Kaz’ elbow, Jesper looks up to find Kaz staring down at his own arm.

“How’s this?”

“It’s erm—it’s good. Fine.”

“Fine?” Jesper adds a hint of mock offence. “Nothing about me is fine. Try again.”

“Don’t.”

“Don’t what, boss?”

Because Jesper is still watching Kaz, he sees him swallow again.

“Don’t flirt with me.”

That draws him up short and not because he isn’t flirting with Kaz but because he’s always flirting with Kaz. Or, at least, he always wants to, always tries to but Kaz is notoriously difficult to flirt with—that’s what he has Wylan for, and once upon a time, Nina.

“Who says I am?” The look Kaz gives him then—half pity and half disbelief—makes Jesper grin, which is likely the opposite of his intention. “Is it working?”

Jesper watches Kaz’ jaw clench, half-breathless with the possibility that it is working.

Easy, he thinks. “You don’t have to tell me. I know how you feel about your unbreakable stoicism.”

“You’re insufferable.”

“I’m delightful.”

“Inveterate.”

“Enchanti—” Jesper is still smiling when inveterate hits. The only context in which he’s ever heard that word—but Kaz has never thrown his gambling in his face. Well, not never. Realistically, not even rarely. But still, it seems an uncharitable thing to say here and now while Jesper’s chasing the jackpot, the stakes so high and the odds so low, Kaz holding all the cards.

“Maybe this was a bad idea.” Kaz says, pulling away.

“Hey, we were only joking, right?” Who is he asking? “I’m sorry. No more flirting.”

Easy.

“No, I don’t want you to—”

“Whatever you want, boss. Let’s take it slow. Why don’t you tell me what else you can do with Inej?”

By the time Jesper realises what he’s saying, it’s already out of his mouth. Oh God—and now Kaz is holding himself very still, eyes narrowed and mouth open. There’s a response on his tongue, Jesper can almost hear it already. That’s none of your business or that’s not why we’re here or keep Inej out of this or you and I are not the same as me and Inej.

Conversations between him and Kaz, when they aren’t about a job, almost always result in a squabble, the two of them on a perpetual collision course. Jesper’s jocularity and Kaz’ stoicism chafe when brought too close but Jesper is incorrigible and friction means heat.

He is no longer holding Kaz’ hand. There’s a distance between them he’s desperate to close.

“What do you want?” In that moment, he’d give him anything, anything at all.

Easy.

In the knit of Kaz’ brows, the black of his eyes, Jesper catches a glimpse of a fear he rarely speaks aloud. “I don’t want to be like this.”

That, Jesper’s heard before.

“I didn’t ask what you didn’t want. What do you want, Kaz?” Now, the Bastard’s scowling. Good. “You can tell me. I won’t tell a soul, scouts honour.”

Jesper crosses his heart even as he thinks, Inej wouldn’t have to.

The boy’s mouth works over the words soundlessly, testing them. This feels like the point of no return. What if, Jesper thinks, Kaz says the wrong thing? He often does. Not to Jesper, of course, because Jesper is easy but, in general.

Even as he thinks this, Wylan’s fifth rule hiccups for attention. Take care of yourself. Jesper is ricocheting between these two thoughts, between being easy for Kaz and taking care of himself. The sad reality is, he is much, much more practised at the former.

“I don’t know what I want.”

Well, that isn’t the wrong thing. A lie, to be sure, but not so horribly callous or jaded or hurtful that the Wylan in Jesper’s head is forced to make him leave. Kaz, it seems, wants to play.

“Sure you do, boss.”

The scowl comes out full force. “No, I don’t,” he says, through gritted teeth.

Jesper tilts his head, pushes his glasses up a little, and leans forward. Here goes, he thinks, preparing to roll the dice.

The very real possibility that this will push Kaz in the wrong direction makes his skin heat, a small shiver sliding down his spine. There is a place, in the impossible tangle of his relationship with Kaz, where joy becomes fear and love becomes pain. Jumping into this space is like sky diving, like gambling.

(This is not, for the record, what taking care of himself looks like.)

Slowly, returning his hand to the bare skin of Kaz’ forearm, he says, “if it helps, I know what I want.”

For the third time, Kaz swallows, audibly. Jesper watches his Adam’s apple bob and licks his lips. He needs to go slow—rule number one now jostling for space with rule number five in his mind—but the way Kaz is watching him back, eyes on his mouth, is not helping.

“I—” Kaz begins.

“Go on.”

That seems to startle him but he soldiers on, fist clenched. “I want to be able to touch…”

“Inej?”

“Yes, and—”

Jesper’s breath quickens, “and?”

“And I want her to be able to touch me.”

Swallowing his disappointment is like swallowing a mouthful of sand. What did he expect? Jesper silently chides himself. He’s always had rotten luck.

Still, there’s a job to be done. “And how will you go about doing that? Becoming able to do that?”

“Everything I’ve ever been good at, I learned. I practised.”

There’s some certainty back in Kaz’ voice, in his posture. This is the bastard Jesper fell in love with, not an ounce of doubt. Only now Jesper’s thinking it might kill him to love Kaz. He could laugh because there had never been any way this was going to go anywhere or become anything and really he’s only torturing himself by agreeing since Kaz couldn’t be more obviously in love with Inej and has never, as far as anyone knows, demonstrated any inclination toward anything not rigorously heterosexual. Delusional, is what Jesper had been, agreeing to this with some vain hope of Kaz reciprocating his feelings.

But there’s no backing out now, not after Jesper needled Kaz for the truth. It’s his turn to soldier on.

“Then let’s practice.”

They work their way from Kaz’ forearm, shirt sleeves rolled up, to his neck. With his fingertips pressed into the hollow of Kaz’ throat, Jesper can feel the rapid patter of his pulse.

“Good,” Jesper murmurs, when Kaz tilts his head slightly to the side. Easy. “You’re doing so good.”

This is a lot. Too much, maybe.

Jesper is spiralling as he flattens his palm against the side of Kaz’ neck, runs his thumb over the rise of Kaz’ throat. While they were talking, Kaz had shifted position slightly, knees pointed toward Jesper. With the way that Jesper’s leg is folded on the sofa, foot hanging off the edge, they’re sitting very close together and the proximity is making it hard to focus.

Aside from the occasional tremor and one brief break, Kaz has been perfect. It turns out that these kinds of slow, deliberate touches are broken ground, tried and true. But still, with every slip of his hand, every inch of skin covered, Jesper readies himself for Kaz’ demons.

They never come.

When he slides the hand from Kaz’ neck into his hair, dragging his nails, a small sound passes Kaz’ lips. It burrows into Jesper, replays and works itself into bigger, fuller sounds. What other sounds can he get Kaz Brekker to make?

Looking up, he sees that Kaz hasn’t seemed to notice—eyes closed and lips parted. He can also see a slight shimmer on Kaz’ bottom lip, his ink-black lashes shifting against devastating cheekbones.

This is dangerous territory.

Maybe—maybe he actually can’t do this at all because although these are chartered waters for Kaz and Inej, they are pure wilderness for him and he’s going to get lost. He is lost. A man without so much as a life ring, beyond sight of shore.

When Kaz makes another sound, this one low and gravelly, Jesper bails.

The sounds Kaz is making for him—fuck, this is what winning feels like and when Jesper’s winning it becomes impossible to stop, he’ll keep playing until he starts losing.

He pulls his hand away and opens his mouth, only for nothing to come out. This is not how this is supposed to go, this is a disaster waiting to happen, a disaster happening. Jesper is a disaster. Without self-control, destined to flirt and trip his way into heartbreak.

His skin feels too tight, too small for his bones and his blood and his heart and all the things happening in his head and suddenly he’s sure that all the nervous energy he’s been coasting on is going to spill out or spill over (or worse). He has the sudden urge to fight or fuck someone (or both) and he can’t do either of those things with the person in front of him so instead he stands up.

When he does that, stands up and moves away from the sofa, a bruised look crosses Kaz’ features that Jesper could almost interpret as hurt. As if he knows Jesper’s choosing himself—making the selfish choice. As if he can hear the voices in Jesper’s head, the battle between his self-preservation and being easy.

All Jesper wants is to be easy, for Kaz.

This is not an eventuality Kaz had anticipated.

Jesper’s acting in—what looks to Kaz’ mind an awful lot like—revulsion, like impatience and disinterest. It’s something he’s done, his facial expressions or some noise he’s made, and now Jesper’s recoiling.

The chasm that’s opened up between them is big enough to include two recliners and several feet of bright Zemeni rug. It’s filled to brimming with a disappointment too bitter to swallow. Kaz knew all along he shouldn’t have suggested this. Jesper is his friend and one time colleague, they do not touch each other, no one touches Kaz. (Well, no one except Inej). No one ever had and no one ever will and that’s just how it’s going to be—going to stay, forever.

With the way Jesper is tugging on the buttons of his shirt and rubbing his hands on his skirt, it almost looks like—it looks like he’s trying to wipe his hands. Get out of his skin. Climb out of himself and any scenario that requires proximity with Kaz.

Jesper doesn't want him. Jesper doesn't want him. Jesper, his not-best-best friend. Jesper who flirts with anyone—anything—and likes it. Who would fuck anyone. But really, who is Kaz kidding? Of course—of course, he doesn’t want Kaz. A poisonous boy undeserving of love.

The bright flare of humiliation is old but familiar and, knee jerking, Kaz reaches for his anger and reaches for his cane. Cold and hard and real. Unyielding, the cane digs into the palm of his hand until pain flickers sharply. The cold bite of the crow’s head has the desired effect. It snaps him out of the panic. There have been other nights he’d found himself reaching for the cane or his gloves or, on rare occasions, Inej’s hair. Nothing sucks him out of a panic spiral like braiding Inej’s hair.

Thinking about Inej makes him think about their conversation the night before last.

It’d begun oh, so promisingly: Kaz dozing against her, head pillowed by her breast, hips bracketed by her legs. (Fully clothed this kind of position is no trouble at all). Inej had been walking her fingers up and down his arms, taking detours over his shoulders, threading her fingers in his hair. Then, she’d asked a singularly ridiculous question.

“Do you think touch would be easier with someone else?”

“What?” Kaz takes pride in the acuity of his senses, the precision with which he perceives and interprets the world around him, and yet, the syllables and words, in the order Inej had produced them, confounded him entirely. All he’d been able to do was repeat himself. “What?”

He’d felt her sigh as it travelled from her belly to her mouth. “Do you think touch would be easier with someone else? Like Jesper, maybe?”

“Why, dearest, would touch be easier with Jesper?”

Shifting slightly, “don’t sneer. He’s your best friend, why wouldn’t it be easier? You trust each other.”

“Are you saying we don’t?” The suggestion was laughable.

“I’m saying, he’s been there through it all, by your side. He’s seen you at your worst and gotten you out of more scrapes than you care to admit. Plus, there wouldn’t be the same… pressure.”

Kaz knew that hesitation. An old acquaintance from their days being terrified of each other, navigating the labyrinth of triggers they each had. He’d thought he’d seen the back of it, to be honest.

“But I don’t want to touch Jesper.”

“But that’s what I mean—if that were true, wouldn’t it be easier? It wouldn’t matter if it didn’t work because neither of you would be that invested in the outcome.”

This had felt like a trick question.

It isn’t in Inej’s nature to test Kaz, she always speaks her mind, but he knew things had been difficult lately. Since Nina had left—some job at the arse end of the world (Fjerda) stranded her without access to the internet (really, Kaz thought, fucking barbarians)—Inej had been without the company she’d come to rely on. Much of that also entailed Nina’s easy and ready physical affection, which Kaz was still learning to provide. He knew that sometimes Inej herself went to Jesper for such things but the thought of him doing so—

“What do you mean, if that were true?” It had been a hungry kind of question.

She’d gone silent behind him, her hands stilling their movements.

Kaz sat up and turned so he could look at her. “Inej, what did you mean?”

“I guess, I don’t believe you,” she’d said, not breaking eye contact. “When you say you don’t want to touch him.”

There hadn’t been enough air in the room, in the house, in the world. The bed slipped out from under him and sent Kaz careening, spiralling into a darkness he had not visited in years.

“Why would I lie?” Kaz had made no attempt to lighten his tone. This was the way he spoke to the scum he fleeced for a living. “Why would you think that?”

By the startled, wide-eyed look she’d given him he’d known he was, not scaring her exactly but also, not not scaring her. He’d tried to rein in his temper, which was almost always the form his panic took.

They were still walking a tightrope. “I’m sorry, Kaz. I said that poorly.” But Inej knew the dangers. “I wasn’t trying to imply that you’re lying.”

Sometimes, when Kaz begins to panic, his hackles rise. Inej always says it reminds her of a cat, if a cat could be six feet tall and good with numbers. She had been watching him then with that look in her eye, like she’d give him his favourite food and smooth out his ruffled fur.

The only reason it ever worked, the look, was because it was fond. Irritated but fond.

Inej had stretched out a hand to him, beckoning him silently back into her embrace. He went easily because ultimately, he did not want to fight with her.

“Let me say it this way,” she tried again. “You like it when I touch you.”

As if to prove her point, Kaz had very nearly purred as she ran her hands down over his chest and kissed the top of his head.

“You are, in fact, quite tactile—once you adjust to it—and this isn’t about sex, Kaz, because I know—I know that’s where your mind went. When we’re out walking, and you see something you think I’ll like, you touch me to draw my attention. In the kitchen, you always rest your hand on my lower back when you look over my shoulder at what I’m cooking. You are a cuddler, Kaz.”

This was bordering on slander, he thought, even as he burrowed deeper into the warmth of her embrace.

“Go on. Let’s hear the whole thing,” he said, archly.

“I’ve seen you reach for Jesper in the same way.” Her voice was small as she said this, tentative. “And I've watched you stop yourself.”

Without turning around, Kaz had tried to determine how she felt about that. Tried to determine how he felt about that. Her tone hadn’t seemed accusatory. It was not something he’d ever put words to.

“You must never take anything for granted, Kaz. Except how much I love…” She let that word dangle deliberately, for the flush it chased up his neck. “The smell of your cologne.”

(It’s an old joke, a tired one, really. They’ve never said the words to each other but always, only about singular aspects of each other. Kaz loves Inej’s hair and her laugh and the way she rolls her eyes. Inej loves his mouth and his scowl and the way he says her name.)

“That may as well be a lesson out of my handbook, Wraith.” Then, tangling his fingers with hers and resting them over his sternum, he’d said, “I don’t know how to be any other way with him.”

“Why don’t you ask him what he wants? How he wants you to be with him?”

And after all that, what was he doing? He was taking Jesper’s participation in this bizarre experiment for granted. Why should Kaz be the only one with hold ups, with reservations. Just because Jesper had said yes almost as soon as Kaz had posed the question, did not mean he went into this easily.

It occurs to him in a rush that that’s how he’d been thinking of Jesper, easy. He’d thought—was thinking of Jesper as his creature. He doesn’t fight Kaz like Inej or Wylan do, certainly not like Nina or—godforbid—Matthias. Jesper is his. Apparently, to his own detriment.

The sensation that overtakes Kaz then is regret.

The Bastard of the Barrel goes to great lengths, generally, to avoid feeling regret. Like shame, he considers it an altogether useless emotion. Best left to God-fearing men and penitents. What’s done is done. But every now and again, most commonly in his fumbling attempts at cultivating personal relationships, he has cause to regret. This is Inej’s doing.

The only saving grace of this whole debacle is that Jesper hasn’t left yet. He’s still standing, several feet away, across that chasm of disappointment.

It’s a small living room—one of two in the flat. The first, the one they use for hosting, is down on the second floor and opens onto a small balcony-garden only Rotty takes care of. The second, the one they’re in, is on the fourth floor. It was probably intended as an office or nursery. They’ve filled it with three couches, the aforementioned recliners and a seventy-inch flat screen, making a tv/lounge room out of it instead.

Jesper has his back to the TV, a coin he keeps in his pocket skimming over his knuckles, eyes on everything but Kaz.

Breathing deeply through his nose and recalling the several dozen times Inej has led him through the exercises she uses in her yoga practice, Kaz focuses on the fact that Jesper hasn’t left the room. If nothing else, this means he isn’t backing out. Kaz crossed some line, something happened and it spooked Jesper. This, he’s intimately familiar with.

“What just happened, Jes?”

“Nothing, jus’ wanted to… check whether Anika’s added any of my recommendations to her record collection.”

Kaz watches Jesper’s handsome face turn to inspect said collection, a thoughtful furrow appearing between his well-kept brows. He’s agitated and hiding it unusually poorly.

Gritting his teeth and clutching the crows head of his cane for support, Kaz rises from the sofa. Then, as if approaching a spooked animal, he crosses the space between them. Jesper keeps his eyes on the records, foot tapping and humming tunelessly, but Kaz knows he marks his proximity by the tension that creeps into his frame. In deference to that tension, Kaz stops an arms length away.

“Jes.” The boy stands abruptly upright and swings toward the sound, glasses dangling precariously on his nose-tip. “Talk to me. What just happened?”

“I’m sorry, boss. Kaz. I don't know—I don't know what happened, just feeling too—too loud. That doesn’t make any sense. I'm sorry. It wasn’t you—I mean, I wasn't trying to get away from you, just… needed to check Anika’s collection.”

All this tumbles forth in a single breath.

Jesper, who usually stands tall and beautiful and proud, is slouching slightly, glasses now in his hands. The posture looks so wrong on him, Kaz finds himself reaching to touch him, to fix it somehow. His hand, the ungloved one, ends up hovering in the space between them uselessly.

“What’re you apologising for?” Kaz gets a funny sense of deja vu, thinking now of the times he’s apologised to Inej only for her to ask him the same question. “Maybe it wasn’t clear but you don’t have to do this.”

Jesper’s eyes go very wide at that and then, after a beat, he says, “can we go outside?”

The twitchy way Jesper is avoiding Kaz’ gaze makes him think of the dozen—few dozen times Jesper has relapsed since beginning his recovery.

“Let me grab my coat,” Kaz rakes his gaze over Jesper’s bare legs—ignoring what the sight of Jesper's sock-clad feet sinking into the rug does to his pulse—and adds, “it’s quite cold out today.”

The other boy looks down at himself and at the wall where a window would be if the room had any external walls. “Is it?”

“Yes.”

“Ok.”

Kaz swallows a sigh, shrugs and stalks into the hall.

The air outside is brisk, as Kaz expected. It isn’t quite winter yet but the bite is undeniable. The leaves that have been falling steadily for the past few weeks are, at this stage, clogging the gutters and turning to humus between the cobbles. The city is damp and grey—or, rather, damper and greyer.

Jesper looks singularly out of place standing in front of their building, long arms hanging loose at his sides and nose tip already going red with the cold. He looks like a double scoop of strawberry cheesecake ice cream. The kind that comes with little fudge pieces and chocolate sauce and sprinkles, melting despite the cold and dripping down the side of the cone. The sugar rush and tooth decay are inevitable and yet, Kaz finds himself coming back for more.

“Are you sure you don’t want to go back in for a coat?”

“Why would I need a coat when I am the sun’s radiance itself?”

Breath misting in front of him, Kaz waits for Jesper to start walking, to pick a direction but he only continues standing there. “I was under the impression there was a point to us coming out here,” Kaz mused, eventually.

“I just—I needed some air.” Jesper is still not looking at him and it’s putting Kaz on edge. “Let's get a coffee.”

And so they do. Or at least, they head in the direction of coffee.

All the gang’s haunts are spread out across the city, none within a two block radius of the squat. This is mostly for security reasons—not that those are really still all that pertinent—but also for Kaz-stretching-his-leg reasons.

Not long into the walk, it becomes clear Jesper is in fact not in pursuit of coffee. Kaz doesn’t mind that so much as the fact that Jesper has yet to say anything and the inside of his head is beginning to become unbearable. All the worst possible reasons Jesper’s being like this crowd in, begging for attention.

They pass a laundrette exclusively frequented by elderly women all under the misguided impression that Kaz is, in their words, “a very nice young man”, mostly because he actually says please and thank you and ma’am when speaking with them. Jesper just about manages to keep his eyes in his head when one of them waves cheerfully at Kaz and receives a polite nod in return.

“What the fuck was that?”

“That was Arlene. She lives down on Overtoom, across the canal from the Squat.”

“Does Inej know about Arlene?” Jesper says her name in a sing-song clearly meant to be suggestive, which might have worked if Arlene weren’t seventy-three years old and if Inej didn’t in fact know her quite well.

“She does, actually. They exchange recipes on occasion.”

“Well, aren’t the three of you adorable.”

The sky above them is lightening slightly, clouds thinning. White and cold, the light is doing its best to leach the city of colour but flounders in the face of Jesper, the walking strawberry confection. Kaz finds his eye drawn again and again to the gold rings laddering down Jesper’s ear, which inevitably leaves him watching the long line of his neck and counting the goosebumps disappearing under his coral collar. It’s clear to Kaz that Jesper’s fighting the urge to cross his arms, his hands and lips turning dull and near-grey with the cold.

Eventually, Kaz gives in to his itching fingers and wraps a hand around Jesper’s elbow. They stop in the middle of the path, Jesper looking down—thoroughly bewildered—at Kaz’ hand on him. Without hesitation Kaz hands Jesper his cane, shrugs out of his coat and puts it around the other boy’s shoulders.

“Think I can’t tell you’re freezing?” He mutters under his breath. “Stubborn podge.”

Jesper’s eyes are round as saucers, his frame perfectly, unnaturally still. The black is completely foreign on him but Kaz, tugging the lapels closed and smoothing his hands down Jesper’s arms, feels better immediately.

Reclaiming his cane, the cold now stealing under his skin, Kaz says, “don’t punish yourself for having boundaries, Jes. I know I’m a mean bastard but… if this isn’t what you—if I’m putting you in jeopardy, in a difficult position with Wylan, or anything else you need to tell me.”

“There’s nothing to tell.”

The lie is so obvious Kaz is almost insulted. They’re standing a block away from Arlene and the laundrette, the sky opening above them, and Kaz wants to throttle or maybe kiss his best friend. Neither of these things is a new sensation, he realises.

“Ghezen, Jes, just talk to me!” They’re still standing close, a mere handspan apart. When Jesper inhales sharply, Kaz watches his nostrils flair slightly, the sweet bow of his lips press together and relax again. Paying attention to the dart of his eyes, Kaz recalls everything he knows about Jesper. The boy is a fabricator, a dab hand with a paintball gun and terrible with numbers, he sings in the shower and the kitchen to tunes only he can hear, he’s reckless and hopeless and impossible, he loves harder and faster than anyone else Kaz knows. The boy is a gambler. “This isn’t a game.”

“I don’t—“

“No, wait, let me finish. This isn’t a game. There isn’t a right or wrong way to play and there’s no way to win.”

“Sure there is, life’s full of winners, I’m just not one of them.”

“You’re not listening.” Kaz grows stern. He has to make Jesper listen. “There is no way for you to win in this, but that also means there’s no way for you to lose. You aren’t going to lose me or anyone, today. Not today, I promise.”

If he were talking to Inej, Kaz would have taken her hand by now. Or, smoothed a lock of hair behind her ear or taken a hold of the coat she was wearing. With Jesper, he holds himself back. Afraid. Uncertain. Wanting.

“I’m sorry.”

“Stop,” Kaz holds up his hand. “Apologising.”

They breathe white and warm into the space between them.

“I guess…” Jesper fidgets with the button holes of Kaz’ coat.

“What is it?”

“I guess I don’t exactly know—I mean you told me what it is you—what we’re doing or, rather, what you and Inej want but I…” Jesper takes a deep breath, reaching to hold Kaz’ coat closed around his throat. “It’s a lot. I thought I could do it—I still want to and I will, if you want to keep going, I can—will probably, because this is something you and Inej need and you asked me and—”

It occurs to Kaz that he has not been as honest with Jesper as he should have been, as he would have been with Inej, which makes him feel like more of a dick than usual.

“Look Jes, I’m awful at this and I realise I haven’t been totally transparent with you—”

“Understatement of the century.”

If they weren’t standing almost on each others toes, Kaz maybe wouldn’t have heard that but since they are, he did and it lands like a blow because of course, Jesper has noticed this—whatever this is.

“I wasn’t lying, earlier, when I said I don’t know what I want. It’s complicated and it’s more the knowing than the wanting that’s at issue.”

Jesper blinks. “What does that mean?”

“I… This—it’s a con.”

“Your talking nonsense, boss. What’s a con?”

“This plan. This experiment. You and me—this—I didn’t know how to come at it…” he gestures needlessly with his free hand, “…straight on. I do need practice and I want to practise… with you. For you. I don’t know,” Kaz groans into his hand. “This isn’t my finest work.”

He can see the gears turning behind Jesper’s eyes and although this makes things much, much more complicated, in another way it makes everything very simple.

“Are you saying what I think you’re saying?” Jesper is now smiling. “For how long?” Kaz scowls, which only makes Jesper grin wider. “Sorry, sorry—no, of course. That doesn’t matter. Oh, but darling, why didn’t you just say so?”

Kaz turns an utterly delightful shade of pink. Of course, Jesper knows why and he also knows it’s a little cruel to tease Kaz like this but impulse control isn’t a figure he’s acquainted with.

Oh, how he wants to kiss the boy.

Standing there, Kaz’ coat—still warm from Kaz’ body or maybe just warm from his own—draped over his shoulders, all he can think about is kissing the boy’s cruel, beautiful mouth. They’re standing so close. It would take the smallest dip of his chin, just an inch or two.

Remember rule one, Jesper thinks.

Gone is the cold. For all Jesper cares, he could be standing in the middle of the Fjerdan tundra dressed in nothing at all. Kaz wants him, has, it seems, wanted him for a while. This is like winning the jackpot. It’s nothing like gambling at all. Doubts linger, nipping at his heels and chewing on his happiness, but Jesper brushes them aside because Kaz is blushing and biting his lip and looking directly at him.

Only one thought keeps Jesper from sealing the deal and sweeping Kaz Brekker entirely off his feet. “Does Inej know?”

“Yes,” Kaz swallows. “I think she knew before I did. We talked about it—this—us—last night.”

There’s no possible way Jesper would ever be able to stop grinning.

“Us?” His fingers are now tracing the very edge of Kaz’ still-open shirt, ghosting over skin. “I always knew Inej was the brains of the operation.”

The urge to kiss him is strong, especially now that he’s sort of scowling again. Jesper tries not to examine too closely what it is about Kaz scowling that gets his pulse racing. Focusing instead on just standing this close to him, without Kaz pulling away or cringing. Maybe there’s something to be said of intent.

Jesper’s so busy trying to identify what that dark, woody scent is he can smell wafting off Kaz, he doesn’t notice Kaz is gearing up to say something. And then when he does eventually say it, Jesper almost misses it.

“Jes, can I—?” His hand is hovering in the space between them.

It’s also only then that Jesper realises Kaz hasn’t touched him since putting the coat over his shoulders. Standing stiffly, he’s kept his arms by his sides and to himself.

Suddenly, the challenge becomes communicating his overwhelming enthusiasm with this walking frown. Making Kaz understand that Jesper would stick burning pokers in his eyes and memorise pi to a hundred decimal places for the privilege of having Kaz touch him. That in this regard, Kaz’ fumbling, blushing confessions in hand, Jesper has no trouble, no trouble whatsoever being as easy as pie.

“Isn’t that why we’re here?”

“Don’t be a prick,” Kaz murmurs even while raising a gloved hand to the shell of Jesper’s ear. “I like these.”

His touch is feather-light, tripping softly over the gold rings Jesper had so carefully put in this morning. While his focus is elsewhere, Jesper takes him in. His proximity and the rising colour in his cheeks, the outline of the vest he’s wearing under his shirt—an old man’s habit he inherited from his older brother whom Jesper has never met for reasons too sensitive and/or triggering to discuss—and the slight shadow of stubble on his chin. It occurs to Jesper, as Kaz traces his ear and the skin just behind and the sharp edge of his jaw, that this is how they should have begun this whole thing in the first place. Kaz, leading the charge.

“They were a gift from—” the next words out of his mouth were going to be a reference to a past lover, which now that he thinks about it is maybe not the best direction to take this. “Real gold, apparently, though I never actually verified that—which, don’t say it, I’m not planning on selling them so as long as they don’t give me an infection it’s a moot point.”

“You’re forgetting about their heirloom potential, not to mention their value in a pawn-for-emergency-cash scenario.”

“Boss, you see me having kids?” Jesper snorts. “I don’t think so.”

“You’d be a great dad, Jesper, even if that’s not what I said.”

Well, that—the suggestion that Kaz has thought about Jesper and kids and, somehow, considers him a halfway responsible enough adult to ever take care of other human beings despite the fact he’d let Mr. Slowpoke, the tortoise they used to have, wander off the balcony and onto the street below, which he was sure Kaz had never forgiven him for—doesn’t bear thinking about.

“I think the cold is getting to you. Here, will you let me—can I warm you up?”

The jerky way Kaz nods at that tells Jesper that he’s halfway to objecting but forcing himself to submit, probably out of some sick masochistic instinct to find out how much suffering he can endure, or maybe—maybe to find out what it is Jesper has in mind in particular when he says warm you up. Well, Jesper is always ready to oblige both the masochistic and the curious.

Carefully, Jesper takes one lapel of the coat in each hand and opens it to welcome Kaz into his arms. They don’t need to stand much closer, as it is, there is barely enough room for Jesper to breathe without his chest brushing Kaz’ on the inhale. So when Kaz nods again, he only has to drape his arms gently over the other boy's shoulders for him to be enveloped.

They’re touching in five places, five burning spots in Jesper’s perception: 1) His left forearm resting on Kaz’ right shoulder; 2) his right forearm resting on Kaz’ left shoulder; 3) his left knee, bent slightly, pressed to Kaz’ right thigh; 4) Kaz’ left hand fluttering indecisively over Jes’ right hip; and, most brazenly, 5) Jesper’s fingers in Kaz’ hair. He is rewarded immediately with a hiccuping hitch of breath and Kaz’ eyes fluttering shut.

Otherwise, they aren’t touching. Jesper is sure he can almost feel—he imagines he feels the length of his body pressed against the length of Kaz’, mingled breaths and syncopated heartbeats and roaming hands. He does not close the distance between them, the little of it there is, but he should be allowed to imagine.

The air between them warms, gradually.

He still wants to kiss the boy. That is, apparently, not going away and it’s starting to feel a little urgent. The longer he stands there, in the damp autumn chill, watching Kaz’ tongue, wet and pink, dart out over his bottom lip, the more Jesper wants to taste him but in this, Wylan aside, he remains unsure.

“Can I kiss you?”

Jesper stops breathing, he thinks. Or he can’t remember what breathing feels like, what it takes to draw air into his lungs and have it fill him up and then push it out and then do it all again because now he’s full of that question and nothing but that question.

“No—” it’s a blurted protest and not at all what he means, except no, he can’t, not right now, not here, not like this. Kaz is already shaking his head and pulling away slightly and, “wait! You—I have rules. Wylan gave me ground rules. I can’t. Not that. Not unless we discuss it again.”

“Oh.” Kaz is blushing, head lowered and hand opening and closing on the head of his cane. “Right. I didn’t mean to—”

“I want to, very much. All the time. I would, in a heartbeat.” The pink on Kaz’ cheeks—which is maybe from the cold but also probably not because it—is now travelling, staining his neck and the skin around his collarbones a very pretty pink. “But I want to do this right.”

“This?”

Doesn’t he know? Is it not obvious to this man how terribly, horribly, irrevocably in love with him Jesper is?

“I’m calling Wy.”

“What?” Kaz’ eyes grow very wide then.

“I’m calling my boyfriend.” They have to step apart slightly for Jesper to be able to get his phone out of the waistband of his skirt. He mourns the loss of proximity but he can feel the weight of Kaz’ continued regard as he finds the right number.

Wylan picks up on the third ring, “Jes?”

“Hi love, I’d like to renegotiate the rules.”

“It’s going well, then?” There’s a smile in Wylan’s voice. He needs no context.

Jesper catches Kaz’ eye, drowns briefly in the abyssal depths. “You could say that.”

“Which rule?”

“Rule one.”

“Ah, you want to kiss him?”

“Better,” Jesper grins at Kaz. “He wants to kiss me.”

“Can he hear you?” That comes out half a laugh. “I wish I could see the look on his face.”

“Oh, you really do. He’s so pretty like this.”

Now, the blush is spreading high on Kaz’ cheeks and colouring the tips of his ears but he’s not looking away. There’s a challenge in his gaze.

“So, Wy? What d’you say?”

“Well, you said he asked you? Do you think he’s earned it?”

“Love, don’t tease me like this. I’ve earned it.”

“Oh, alright then. But I’ll be expecting a full report, including demonstrations, when I next see you.”

“Count on it. Love you.”

“I love you too, Jes.”

When they hang up, the sound of Kaz’ breathing fills the space left behind.

“What did he say, Jesper?”

He wants to tease Kaz, wants to see him blush again, blush some more, wants to make Kaz work for it, wants to taste him, kiss him, wants to forget how anyone but Kaz says his name.

In the end, the most overwhelming want, to have Kaz’ wicked, wicked mouth on him outweighs all the rest.

“He said you should kiss me, boss. Quickly. Before he changes his mind.”

“Is there a substantial risk of him calling back just to withdraw his consent?” In the time it takes him to say this, the space between them shrinks to insignificance. A fold of Kaz’ near perfectly tucked shirt brushes against Jesper, a whisper of a touch.

Jesper’s face hurts with how much he’s smiling.

“Not substantial but not insignificant either. He’s a fickle man, tempestuous.”

These words have Kaz smiling too. It’s small, almost shy. It feels like the sun breaking through storm clouds, like the lap of a tropical surf. It warms Jesper all the way through.

“Well, in that case...” Kaz’ breath is warm as it ghosts over Jesper’s parted lips. He tilts his chin up and all Jesper has to do is lean forward half an inch to meet him.

It’s quiet and tentative at first, close-mouthed. Kaz kisses him like it’s his first kiss, like he needs to learn the art all over again, like he doesn’t want to do it wrong. They kiss for hours, for a handful of seconds. All teasing breath and tugging lips.

When Kaz cups Jesper’s jaw, readjusting their position to his liking, Jesper can’t help but sigh. His legs are numb with the cold and Kaz’ must be freezing now without his coat but he’s also being fussy and meticulous and thorough in how he kisses.

“So,” Kaz rasps against the line of his cheek, “ground rules?”

“It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“What were you thinking might happen that you’d need ground rules for? Other than—” He can’t even finish the sentence without blushing and it’s so sweet Jesper bumps his nose and laughs breathily.

“Wylan didn’t trust your intentions.”

“My intentions?” Kaz pulls back on a springload of incredulity, eyebrows in his hairline.

“That’s right. He didn’t trust the Bastard of the Barrel, Dirtyhands himself, with the tattered and beaten remains of my heart.”

“I didn’t know that—whether you—” the Bastard shakes his head. “You flirt with everyone.”

“I love you, Kaz Brekker.” Jesper says it because it needs to be said and because it’s true. “Is that clear enough?”

“Say it again.”

A gloved thumb traces the corner of his mouth, following the path of Kaz’ eyes, as he says it again. “I love you, Kaz Brekker.”

They don’t stay in the cold for long. Despite the way Kaz’ heart beats, his pulse an insistent rush in his ears, his knee protests their predicament not long after their lips first meet. A full-body grimace gives him away. Followed shortly by Jesper more or less dragging him back to the Squat.

“Inej is going to kill me,” he mutters under his breath.

“I’m fine.”

“You can barely get up the stairs.”

Kaz’ long look is entirely wasted on Jesper, who ordinarily takes the stairs at a pace that can only be described as alarming and as such, is overly concerned about Kaz’ more sedate measure.

“You should be more worried about her plans to turn us all into a family of travelling social justice warriors.”

“And you, Kaz,” Jesper throws him a stern look that might just about qualify as lukewarm, “should know better than to call her an SJW. We’ll be the happiest family of travelling antifa eco-warriors!”

Jesper claps his hands, holding them to his chest in delight, and stops at the top. When he turns to face Kaz a step below, his joy is palpable.

The tableau, Jesper draped in his florid finery, lit from above by flickering fluorescents, and surrounded on all sides by late-stage capitalist urban decay, sends a butterfly swooping through Kaz’ belly. It’s the same feeling he gets whenever he sees Inej. It’s a feeling he’s always thought of as finite, easily exhausted and rare. Inej would probably tell him that’s a lifetime's worth of capitalist propaganda talking, that love—the feeling he is studiously not looking in the eye—is infinitely abundant. Love, she would say in her borrowed econ major’s vernacular, is not a zero sum game. So maybe—maybe it is not greed or selfishness to love Jesper. Maybe he is allowed to have them both, to have it all.

A/N: this was written for @doorsclosingslowly as part of the bastards of the barrel discord server winter exchange! if it reads at all like their fic perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table that is no accident.

it's my first proper kazper fic and it's a work of pure indulgence. i hope you'll forgive me my personal wish-fullfillment <3

due credit to @rainstormdragon's Practice Makes Perfect, the premise of which strongly inspired this fic!

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manikas-whims · 3 years

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SoC Cooking Headcanons:

• Matthias is good at cooking. He isn't gifted or anything but his military life taught him to cook and clean after himself. So he knows how to make a few basic Fjerdan meals. However, he can make other nations' dishes if he takes the time to go through a cook book. One thing he secretly learns to make is Waffles. Nina is pleasantly surprised. Afterall, its her favorite person making her favorite food for her.

• Despite her love for food, Nina is bad at actually cooking for herself. She didn't bother learning in the army cause she was too busy eating and learning languages and training. One time she almost burnt the kitchen at the Van Eck mansion in her attempt to make waffles. Marya Hendriks saved the day!

• Jesper is equally bad. He's tried plenty a times to recreate that one dish that his dad used to make on sunny afternoons but failed everytime. Its then he recalls that he was too busy learning shooting bullets with his mum. Its fine though. Van Eck mansion has an excellent chef. Also Colm comes by to visit once in a while so Jesper just watches Wylan, Marya and his dad prepare loving dinners together. He does assist.

• Wylan recently discovered his talent in cooking. It happened when he acquired all the Van Eck property and re-settled in the mansion. He randomly decided to cook one night. Admittedly he can't read but Jesper gave him instructions as per the cookbook and told him names of the ingredients. Just like his chemicals, its easy to recognize food ingredients by their colors, textures and tastes. Soon enough he even starts improvising Marya's dishes or varying them according to his and his friend's tastes. Jesper is always there to assist.

• Captain Ghafa is an average cook. She remembers a few Suli staples her mother used to prepare in the evenings and can make them well enough. But really the only way she knows to wield knives is to stab and slash and wound. She's no good at cutting and chopping vegetables. She never had the time to learn. As a child, most of her days were spent running in the sun or walking a tight rope with her father. Thankfully, she's saved from the hassle of cooking because some of her crew members are really good at it. When in Ketterdam, she prefers to either dine out at local restaurants with Kaz or have warm dinners with her friends at the Van Eck mansion. The chef their knows a handful of famous Suli dishes.

• To everyone's surprise, Kaz knows his way around the kitchen just as much as he does in business. There was a time Inej decided to help Wylan cooking while Kaz and Jesper chatted. Kaz saw her chopping an onion and he just involuntarily went to Inej. He told her she was holding the knife wrong, took it from her and diced the onions in minutes. Inej, Jes and Wylan watched in fascination cause Dirtyhands is full of surprises. This angsty boy grew up in a farm and even knows some tips and tricks for better flavor and quick fixes for dishes. Its annoying to see his friends watch him in shock everytime he helps in the kitchen. Inej is even slightly jealous and this amuses him. Miss Ghafa teaches him some of her daughter's favorite Suli dishes and they exchange cooking knowledge.

• Soon it becomes their thing. On every reunion Wylan, Kaz and Matthias cook whilst Inej, Nina and Jesper assist. They have drinks afterwards and late night long talks. After quite a number of glasses even Kaz is loose-lipped.

SoC Masterlist

#six of crows #soc headcanon #kaz brekker #inej ghafa #jesper fahey #wylan van eck #nina zenik #mathias helvar #kanej #wesper #helnik

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bleuwrites · 3 years

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Thieves Like Us

Fandom: Six of Crows Series - Leigh Bardugo, Shadow and Bone (TV) Relationships: Kaz Brekker/Inej Ghafa Summary: It’s taken her two years to sneak up on him again, but by the way the smile breaks across his face she thinks it might be the only time Dirtyhands is pleased to have someone get the drop on him.

Chapter 4

The day the Kerch courts return his shares of the Crow Club and the Fifth Harbor to Kaz is as fine a spring day as he can remember. He watches the large, white clouds scuttle across the brilliantly blue sky through the large windows in the courtroom, and all he can think is, A good wind. A carrying wind. The kind that, he hopes, brings his Wraith back to him. She deserves to share in this victory just as much as he does; after all, she was the one who chased Pekka Rollins all the way back to the Wandering Isle.

If not for him cleaning out his accounts at the Gemensbank and fleeing the country this would have been much harder. But Kerch law favors citizens in all things, and Rollins, as a foreigner, was only allowed property in the country so long as his person, and more importantly, his money, stayed in Kerch. After a year of absence, his properties are to be returned to any one who can prove title, and failing that they are to be auctioned off. Kaz very seriously considered buying the Emerald Palace just for the pleasure of tearing it down.

It is a strange sensation to be in a courtroom accepting a handshake and a quiet congratulations from his lawyer as they conclude their business. The only other times he has appeared at the courts is when he was on his way to jail, but he’s a respectable businessman now, not some juvenile thug in need of the rehabilitative powers of hard work and prayer.

He lets the delight of letting the system do his dirty work make a warm little nest in the hollow of his chest. The good feeling lasts exactly until he is stopped by a Stadwatch officer by the name of Visser on his way out of the building. Kaz is well acquainted with him. He has shockingly bad luck at Three Man Bramble and an apparent inability to walk away from a losing hand. Kaz has been more than happy to extend him a not insignificant line of credit at the Crow Club. And to let him pay it off with something other than kruge.

“Speak,” Kaz says shortly, once they are alone.

Visser hesitates for a moment, and Kaz can see the struggle within the man, between decency and duty, and self-preservation. He hands a file over, his lips pinched tightly together like if he doesn’t speak he’s not betraying his oath as a Stadwatch officer. Inej’s indenture documents are the first thing Kaz’s eyes light upon when he opens it. A year, maybe two, he told her. That is how long he estimated they had before the Merchant Council started hunting her. There’s no satisfaction in being right.

#kanej fanfiction #kanej #thieves like us ff #inej ghafa #kaz brekker

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funnyao3 · 2 months

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“Right now I’m heading to check on a recent property investment I made, if you want to come with me.” He stands, collecting his cane where it leans against the corner of his desk

“Stop calling him property,” Jesper says irritably. “If you don’t, I’ll tell Inej, and she can get her saints involved.”

“This is an actual property.” Kaz aims to look innocent. It’s horrible.

- Seizure of property by didoandis

#source:#Seizure of property #didoandis #six of crows #soc #soc fics #wesper #wylan van eck #wylan hendriks #jesper fahey #Kaz Brekker #nina zenik #inej ghafa #matthias helvar #funny ao3 #ao3 out of context

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she-posts-nerdy-stuff · 9 months

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Hey! love your analytical posts! These recent ones... you've really knocked it out of the ballpark! I was wondering whether you'd like to share your take on a few moments in the soc books. Thank you so much:)

How does Kaz know what Inej's tells are? Is it because he "sees everything"? Or maybe because he always looks at her before a fight? What made him look at Inej before the fight with Van Eck?

When Kaz tells Matthias to "watch his tone" with Inej, is it because of her recent injury? Inej doesn't seem surprised by his words, so maybe he's done it before?

If Kaz had known the incinerator shaft was still really hot, would he have still sent her up ("the Wraith can manage it")? Kaz isn't uncaring, especially where Inej is concerned, so why a net for the silos but not a net (or something akin to that) for the incinerator shaft?

Hi, thanks for your question and so sorry I’ve taken so long to answer it!!

On Kaz and Inej’s tells, I definitely think it’s fair to say that he knows hers because he looks at her before the fight; that being his tell. Before the fight on Vellgeluk, Kaz expresses an awareness of this tell and implies that he was trying to stop himself from doing it - “Kaz knew the instant he made his mistake. They’d all known it might come to this. He should have trusted his crew. His eyes should have stayed trained on Van Eck. I est was, in that moment of threat, when he should have thought only of the fight, he looked at Inej.” This is interesting because Inej is entirely unaware of her tell, squaring her shoulders before a move, but Kaz is actively noticing his and condemning himself for it. This probably has a lot to do with Kaz’s self-hatred and his self-destructive nature; if there is any reason to blame himself for something then he finds it, and he takes it out on someone (in this case, Jesper) effectively to jeopardise their relationship as a punishment to himself for ‘failing’. At least that’s how I see it, it’s obviously a very subjective thing and that’s just my interpretation. What I do find particularly interesting, is that Kaz claims no-one notices his real tell because they assume the cane is his tell, revealing an attack against his bad leg to be an easy target, and this is confirmed by Pekka Rollins’ complete failure to acknowledge his tell and/or Kaz and Inej’s feelings towards each other (I’ve talk about that a bit before so I won’t go into major detail), but Van Eck does notice. And not only does he notice the tell, but he immediately recognises what he can do to exploit it - “I wonder what will prove more effective, Ma Ghafa? Torturing Mr Brekker, or making him watch as I torture you” (paraphrasing, I don’t have my Crooked Kingdom on me this second; sorry). I think this is important because this is how Kaz thinks, and there are a couple of parallels between him and Van Eck threaded through the duology as a constant reminder of two things: 1) that Kaz could have been massively successful in Ketterdam as a merchant if only he’d been born rich, meant to highlight the inequity and massive classism of the city/Kerch as a whole, and 2) That Van Eck is just as much a criminal as Kaz or anyone else in the Barrel. He’s Pekka Rollins with a lot more money and a much better reputation, because when you have enough money to outsource you don’t have to get your own hands dirty in the process of scamming people out of their money (secretly bought you jurda farms, kept property off the books, cheated on his taxes, etc), or to buy and se children who are either forced into it or don’t know what they’re signing up for (I’m using his indentured Grisha, the foreign children Inej talks about, and the fact he knows about Vellgeluk as my evidence that he is at the very least wilfully ignorant of a system he’s supporting, and at the worst an active participant in the auction blocks that the other children on the ship with Inej were being taken to or other forms of trading indentures)

When Kaz tells Matthias to watch his tone with Inej, it’s left purposefully ambiguous as to whether his concern is for her or for the general integrity of the group, since this is before the Ice Court Heist and he needs them to trust, or at least co-operate with, each other if he has any hopes of success. I think it’s probably, at least on some level, about both and that could be linked to Inej’s injury - we all know how protective he is of her in the immediate aftermath at the very least. Although I wouldn’t be surprise if he’s defended Inej in this way before, I think it’s also arguable that she has no expectation for the words to be genuinely for her; she always assumes Kaz cares first for the job, second for himself, and third for all others. It’s really only during the Ice Court Heist that she begins to notice the reciprocation of her feelings for him, which is emphasised by her discussion with Jesper in the boat about how uncertain they are that he cares for either of them, and question if it would have killed him to come and see her when she was recovering from the knife wound. We as the readers understand he couldn’t bring himself to see her due to the intensity of his fear and his feelings towards her, but he has thus far given her no reason to think he cares for anyone but himself. Even right before the incinerator shaft climb, she and Jesper express concern to each other that Kaz has set them up somehow and abandoned them to be captured and executed by the Fjerdan guards.

The incinerator is an interesting one, because Kaz never actually mentions the heat. Even when he comments in Inej’s impressive feat afterwards, his exact words are “six storeys in the dark” not ‘six storeys of burning hell in the pitch black with hot coals beneath you’, which is probably how I would’ve categorised the experience. However, having climbed the rope he must have been aware of the heat, so it’s unclear what his real reaction to this is - to be honest I wouldn’t be surprised if her hadn’t noticed at all, since this is in the aftermath of Yellow Protocol being set off by either him or Nina (it’s left ambiguous), him seeing Pekka Rollins, him being chased/attacked by a guard, and him arriving to the others late. I don’t think that any kind of safety feature would have been viable for the incinerator, since they couldn’t have brought anything with them. If they’d known that their clothes would be in the same room then they could have possibly left something with them, but the clothes’ presence was a surprise (“These are our clothes!”) and it would have been nearly impossible to conceal anything or use to her. However, I also think that his insistance on Inej using a net for is important because it’s in the aftermath of him truly coming to terms with his feelings. There’s no denying the way he felt in her absence, the gnawing, empty sensation that came with the fear of losing her, so actually think that his direct quote being something along the lines of “I just spent a lot of time and money on getting my Wraith back, I didn’t do that to lose her again” is a callous way of wording his genuine feelings in this moment. Inej’s refusal to use the net and the restructuring of the plan excluding its presence is also a tension building device, and foreshadows Inej falling from the high wire.

Thank you so much for your question, I am so sorry it’s taken me genuinely forever to answer it!!

#grishaverse #leigh bardugo #six of crows #crooked kingdom #inej ghafa #nina zenik #kaz brekker #jesper fahey #wylan van eck #matthias helvar #kanej #kanej has my whole heart #*cries in kanej*

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mutatismutandisx · 3 years

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Shadow and Bone (Netflix Series Review)

No Spoilers!!!

"Be careful of powerful men" - Genya Safin

Welcome to the Grishaverse!

Shadow and Bone is Netflix's big gamble for young adult fiction mega-success, the kind we haven't seen since Jennifer Lawrence volunteered as tribute almost a decade ago, adapting Leigh Bardugo's popular Grishaverse novels (her debut trilogy Shadow and Bone and serving as a prequel for the Six of Crows duology), anchored by an incredibly diverse cast (mostly newcomers) and a huge production budget, showrunner Eric Heisserer, alongside Bardugo who serves as an executive producer, aim for Hunger Games and Harry Potter level phenomenon with their own fantasy epic.

To Heisserer's credit, he manages a great adaptation of Bardugo's novels, even if he falls prey to the same story tropes that made Bardugo's debut novels seem so derivative, Heisserer brings the Grishaverse to life in a (mostly) successful run of 8 episodes, and even if his grand tour of Ravka isn't the most organized or well planned, most viewers will still fall in love with this world.

Heisserer's boldest creative choice, and biggest deviation from the novels, is the introduction of Kaz Brekker and his Crows, Jesper and Inej, in this opening chapter to the story, characters that did not appear in Bardugo's original Shadow and Bone trilogy. Creatively and business-wise, his decision is an obvious one, Bardugo's Shadow and Bone novels, while a solid debut, are the typical young adult fodder that is bombarded to consumers every year, a largely derivative yet charming "chosen one" story that teens and tweens eat up every year and then mostly forget about when the next one comes around (less Percy Jacson and more Divergent if you will), truth be told Bardugo's Grishaverse only became a phenomenon after the release of her superb Six of Crows duology, featuring Bardugo's very own Suicide Squad, a ragtag group of crimials performing incredible, mind-bending heists in the tough streets of a fictional Amsterdam (and beyond!), all anchored by what is (to this day) Bardugo's best creation: Kaz Brekker, a Batman-meets-The Riddler machiavelic genius with a flair for theatrics, Six of Crows and it's follow-up Crooked Kingdom are surely the main reason Netflix even greenlit this series to begin with. And just like in the books, Brekker and his Crows provide a much needed bolt of manic energy to an otherwise very by-the-numbers storyline. Not to discredit Bardugo's talent as a writer, but her skills had simply not been honed at the time of her 2012 debut, a shortcoming that Bardugo would fix later on, in her follow up novels, through ambition and sheer force of will.

And yet, Heisserer stays extremely faithful to the books, whether it's to Bardugo's best ideas or her least creative ones, he adapts it all, while attempting to add his own flair into the mix (with varying results), take our main protagonist for example, Alina Starkov, to those unfamiliar with the novels, Alina is the Katniss Everdeen of this story, a mostly ordinary young woman who, by a struck of destiny, finds herself thrust into the spotlight in the hero/savior-of-her-people role (a most unflattering one might I add), and thus becomes an unwilling symbol to a cause she hardly understands, saddled with all the responsabilities and power that comes with the job, and with the inevitable political players and adversaries that may take advantage of her power for their own gain ("Be careful of powerful men" one of Alina's confidants warns her in episode 5). And did I mention she happens to find herself in the middle of a love triangle? Indeed Bardugo's original novel isn't the most creative, and yet Heisserer doesn't have much to offer as a way to reinvent the character, the best he can come up with is changing Alina's ethnicity (originally caucasian) to that of the fictional Shu Han people (read: China), and yet, nothing is really done with the change, it just sits there, (similarly to Alina everytime a background character hurls xenophobic abuse at her), it's not explored and hardly touched upon, which begs the question why introduce the change in the first place? While I commend the showrunners for casting a female lead of asian descent on a blockbuster property such as this, I would remind them that true diversity is more than simply ethnic tokenism. Perhaps there will be a bigger payoff for the creative change in future seasons (if we get them, season 2 has not been greenlit), doubtfull but I'll remain optimistic.

Tokenism aside, the diversity of the cast truly is commendable, and as expected with a young adult property, it's a very young and very attractive cast, on the one hand it's understandable, they need to appeal to their core demographic, on the other hand they commit themselves to one of the most glaring faults in Bardugo's Grishaverse series, Ravka doesn't seem to have soldiers, politicians or grisha over the age of 25, it seems like a huge oversight on part of a country (and Leigh Bardugo) to have the entire power of the government and the military reside upon a group of teenagers, but be that as it may, most of the cast, while young, is very talented, even if their characters aren't fully developed, they do their best with what they are given, some of the standouts are Jessie Mei Li as Alina, Mei Li is saddled with a character and plot that's as derivative as they come, and yet she finds nuances in her perfomance that are lovely to watch, she brings a sense of joy and determination to Alina that lesser actors couldn't even imagine much less portray, all that helps her stand out from most, if not all, the crowd of chosen one characters that have come before her, and even tho Mei Li doesn't reach Jennifer Lawrence levels with her performance, she certainly surpasses the Kristen Stewarts and Shailene Woodleys that have come before.

Ben Barnes is a surprise as General Kirigan, at first glance you might think him miscast (too young, too pretty to be believed as a stone cold, battle hardened general) and yet he still manages to make the character his own, a possessive, demanding, controlling, master manipulator who always seems to have the upper hand, Barnes is blessed with a tight script and he never misses a beat giving a subtle and nuanced performance. And then there is Kit Young as Jesper Fahey, sharpshooter, playboy, criminal with a heart of gold, Young is a revelation, he is as good in his role as Robert Downey Jr. is as Tony Stark, and that's all you need to know, Young was simply born to play Jesper, anchored by a strong script, he steals every scene he is in and far overshadows his fellow Crows. And as for the other Crows, Freddy Carter acts his heart out as Kaz Brekker, committing to a very physical performance, from scowl to limp, he embodies Brekker visually, but after the first 2 episodes you get the feeling the writers simply don't know what to do with his character, losing the spotlight to other actors blessed with better material, never did I think Kaz Brekker would be overshadowed by one of his fellow Crows, yet here we are. Carter's talent still shines through and his perpetual, omnipresent scowl as Brekker is a beauty to behold, even if his limping is somewhat inconsistent, which makes me hopeful he will improve when given more to do, still it's a shame to have the master strategist/evil genius Bruce Wayne replaced by a lowly con artist and not a very successful one at that. As for Amita Suman, while perfectly cast as Inej Ghafa, her character is severely underwritten, from her past work in The Menagerie, to her faith, to her interactions with Brekker, it's all done in the broadest of strokes, Suman isn't given much to do and therefore doesn't have the opportunity to excel as The Wraith.

You can feel the writers straining for time between developing this world and the large cast of characters they have to work with, inevitably some characters fall of the wayside, through none of the actors' fault. Daisy Head as Genya Safin is all untapped potential, even more underwritten here than she is in the books, which make later revelations about her character (the color of her kefta and shifting allegiances) barely register, hopefully they correct that going forward. Sujaya Dasgupta is another victim of a weak script and little screen time, Dasgupta is simply miscast as the powerful, acerbic, steely-eyed Zoya Nazyalensky, long gone is the regal, no nonsense, silver-tongued Grisha general, in Dasgupta's hands Zoya is just a watered down Grisha version of a Mean Girl, faltering every scene with the exception of one moment, as she makes her way through party goers at the Little Palace and she corrects Inej's ethnicity to a bystander, (her one good line reading in the entire show) "She's Suli", she declares, with all the strenght and defiance that's sorely missing from the rest of her performance, moving forward let's hope a stronger script can lift her performace off the ground, because right now all the wind is gone from this Squaller's wings. And as for Malyen Oretsev played by Archie Renaux, he is the Gale Hawthorne of this story, the undignified love interest, and Renaux is as boring in his role as Liam Hemsworth was in his.

Lastly, Danielle Galligan as Nina Zenik and Calahan Skogman as Matthias Helvar, are equally terrible in their performances, from their accents to their interactions, none of it rings true, and it's particularly jarring when juxtaposed with the talent portrayed by the rest of the cast, we spent way too much time with Nina and Matthias, for absolutely no payoff to their story (yet! Fans will recognize them as 2 future members of Brekker's murder of Crows), but their little side adventure is so disconnected with the events of the main plot that I can't help but feel their story was better reserved for another time, hopefully with some better actors playing the roles. A lovely moment of playfulness between Nina and Matthias while they tread along in a barren, snowy hill, is the only glimpse of hope for Galligan's and Skogman's performances, maybe there is talent to be tapped but it certainly wasn't in display this time around.

The Grishaverse is simply too large and complex, so understandably Heisserer and his writers room have a lot on their plate, but while the character work is largely uneven, his world building is quite solid, based on the impressive foundation Bardugo set out for them, the showrunners are able to bring the world of Ravka to life, the costume design is stunning, from soldiers to Grishas, to royals and diplomats, the costume department does a fabulous job with every piece and every character, one of the high points in the series.

The VFX team also does a lot of the heavy lifting for Heisserer's world building efforts, realizing the different power sets of all the Grisha in a fantastical manner while still maintaining a realistic quality to them, ("you'll believe a man can fly"), but even with a huge production budget, Heisserer strains with this world-spanning adventure, so even though the set and production design is mostly impressive, some sets simply fall out of range for the show's budget, case in point, both Ravka's Royal Palace and the Little Palace are not fully realized, viewers are given a single outside shot of the Royal Palace (and from very far away at that) and the throne room is only visited once, and as for the Little Palace, it's stripped from many of the books most sprawling details, the training grounds, the Grisha school, the fabrikators workshop, the dining room, the palace's towers, all falling victim to obvious budget restrains. Not to mention both palaces are devoid of the classic Russian influences that permeate Ravka's world.

But Heisserer's skills for world building show the most limitations on the lore of the Grishaverse, the three Orders of the Grisha are never properly explained, with Fabrikators getting next to none screen time, Heisserer is never capable to establish a clear view of the world these characters inhabit, most viewers will be very confused about Ravka's shifting borders, the civil war tensions between East and West, and the adversary foreign nations (an inclusion of a map in the opening credits of every episode would have gone a long way), the sociopolitical elements that Bardugo has infused in her books are decidedly complex and the show doesn't do them justice, unfortunately. Perhaps most glaring is the very clear disagreements on what a Ravkan's diction and accent should be, since every actor has their own interpretation of it, an oversight that I hope is fixed in future seasons.

As the few completely negative points of the show, alongside Galligan and Skogman, the sound mixing is terrible (you will need subtitles to watch this show) and the cutaway flahbacks are quite sloppy.

To conclude, Shadow and Bone is a lovingly crafted, beautifully realized, world building adventure, it has a couple of missteps along the way (like all adventures do), but the final product is strong enough to overcome some of its creative faux pas, with a solid script and anchored by a (mostly) talented cast, Shadow and Bone doesn't reach Catching Fire levels of greatness but it far outpaces the rest of the young adult fantasy competition.

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trassellynn · 4 years

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The Haunting of Kree Manor (SoC Fanfiction)

Okay, uh... I decided to write this AU, I have been inspired by a couple of series on Netflix. Genre: Horror, Ghost Stories, AU Warnings: Scary tales, Canon-typical violence, blood. Couples: Kaz Brekker/Inej Ghafa, Jesper Fahey/Wylan Van Eck, Matthias Helvar/Nina Zenik The Plot: When Wylan inherits his father's uncle's old manor, the Crows decide to spend a little vacation there, but they soon discover there are dangerous, supernatural forces that live into the house and don't want to be disturbed. Each member of the group faces a frightening, personal experience and, on the seventh night, they're all eventually forced to flee. After a week, they reunite in Van Eck's manor to talk about those scary events, telling everything to two of their closest friends and revealing personal details they never shared before. Ao3 link here. Prologue undercut.

THE HAUNTING OF KREE MANOR

PROLOGUE

A reddish light came in from the large windows, painting the walls and the objects in the living room, reflecting on the glasses of the pendulum clock. There were ten people into the room. Eleven, with the baby girl who was sleeping into a white and pink cradle. Four of them sat on the larger sofa, two were on the smaller one and the others had taken a seat on the soft armchairs. A large, white wolf was sleeping on the red carpet and, for several moments, his light snoring was the only sound that could be heard. Finally, Wylan, who was sitting on one of the armchairs, between Jesper and Kaz, cleared his throat, nervously rubbing his pale hands against the expensive fabric of his pants ."Do you... uh... do you want some tea, or..." "We had some tea an hour ago, Wy..." Jesper replied calmly, gently touching his boyfriend's hand. The redhead boy sighed: "True... sorry..." "It's okay." The air was filled with tension. Some stories were... well, they were so hard to tell. Fèran Sahin, sat on the smaller sofa, next to Kuwei, straightened his back and crossed his muscled arms. His long, dark hair fell down on his shoulders, his blind eyes were fixed ahead, in Kaz's direction. He was a Suli young man, of Matthias' same age, who had joined the Dregs the year before. “So... that house in Hanraat Bay...” he started. “An old property of Van Eck's family, situated on a little island...” “Yes,” Wylan murmured. “My father's old uncle lived there. He almost never left it. Only older people, here in Ketterdam, have memories of him and are still used to whisper about... legends and scary tales about him and his lonely house. For the others... Karl Van Eck is just a name like another... and should you ask them about Horen Island and Kree Manor, they would reply with an interrogative glance...” “I have never heard of it before, indeed” Heléna said. “Well... of course, never before you talked me about it.” At twenty-two, she was one of the youngest and most famous doctors on earth. A long, dark braid fell on her right shoulder; her features were slightly sharp and the left side of her face, from the chin to the cheekbone, was covered with scars, that she was once used to hide behind a mask. Matthias, who was sitting next to her, on the larger sofa, along with Nina and his sister Inga, gently touched the young doctor's shoulder: “After what we saw there... I think there's a good reason why people chose to forget Kree Manor...” “It's a shame,” Kaz grunted, his hands clenched on the handle of his cane. “And a waste. That house could be a great investment... an ancient, suggestive manor, on a quiet island... the garden had even a lake and a labyrinth...” “We wanted to make an hotel, or something like that, out of it.” Jesper explained. “And we thought it would have been a good idea, to spend some days there, checking the conditions of the house, writing down some projects... it was meant to be a useful vacation.” “We were all together in the city...” Kuwei added, massaging his own temples with his fingers. “It should have been funny...” “And it ended up being scary and dangerous” Fèran finished. “You have no idea” Nina snorted, crossing her arms . “I still feel thrills down my back, only hearing the name of that house...” “Trassel immediately disliked it” Inga said, shivering. “Guys,” the Suli boy sighed. “Don't feel forced to tell me and Lena what happened, if you're not ready to do it.” The Crows exchanged a series of quick glances, then, Inej shook her head: “No, it's okay. We're here for it. There are even some things we hadn't shared yet... so... who wants to start?” Silence fell into the room. Sighing, Inej relaxed her shoulders: “Fine. I'll go first.”

#Six of Crows #Grishaverse #SoC AU #Kaz Brekker #Inej Ghafa #Jesper Fahey #Nina Zenik #Wylan Van Eck #Matthias Helvar #Kuwei Yul-Bo #Trassel #Original Characters #Kanej #Wesper #Helnik #Haunted Houses #The Haunting of Kree Manor

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kingjesperfahey · 5 years

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Title: The Zemeni-Shu Prank Olympics

Author: @kingjesperfahey

Rating: General Audiences

Fandom: Six of Crows Series - Leigh Bardugo

Pairing: Jesper Fahey & Kuwei Yul-Bo; Jesper Fahey/Kuwei Yul-Bo

Characters: Jesper Fahey; Kuwei Yul-Bo; Inej Ghafa; Kaz Brekker; Nina Zenik

Additional Tags: Canon Divergence; Comedy; Kuwei Centric; Just Guys Being Dudes

Word Count: 6.8k

Summary:

“You got me!” The bed springs squeak with the shift in weight as Jesper climbs back on. “You really got me!” He looks at Kuwei with a newfound light in his rich brown eyes. “I didn’t know you were into pranks - ok, Yul-Bo, you don’t even know what you just started.”

“Wait!” Kuwei says, trying to reign himself in. “I really didn’t do that on purpose! I just-”

“Uh huh. Just wait until the sun comes up, I’ve been holding these pranks back for years.” Jesper says, burrowing himself into the mattress.

As he turns off his lamp and settles into bed, Kuwei wonders just what exactly he got himself into.

Or, alternatively - Jesper and Kuwei have a prank war. Hilarity ensues.

Read Below:

The smell of jurda and summer rain mingles in the night air, warm and sweet. Kuwei sits next to the window, the summer breeze brushing against his warm skin. He furrows his brows and concentrates once more. From his hands a single flame appears, fluttering slightly with the breeze. Then, as he concentrates, he makes the flame grow and shift, until the flame extends into a vaguely log-like shape. Then, carefully, Kuwei takes a breath and smoothens the shape until it vaguely resembles-

“Careful not to burn the curtains.”

The flame goes out, and Kuwei jumps at the sound. When his eyes land on Inej casually perched on the windowsill, he takes a relieved breath. “Has anybody ever told you you’re really good at sneaking up on people?” he asks.

“Once or twice,” she says with a shrug. Her smile widens at the disbelieving look he throws her, and she nods towards his hands. “You’re getting better at that.”

Kuwei looks down. “Thanks,” he says. “Those tips from the zowa we met have really helped.” He looks back up at her. “Is it your turn to patrol?”

Inej nods, looking back out the window at the dark. Staring back at her is nothing but jurda crops and the twinkle of the nearest town some kilometers in the distance. “I just finished. It’s been silent the last couple of nights, but it doesn’t hurt to make sure.”

Kuwei hums understandingly. The past couple of nights they’ve decided to lay low in one of the various Van Eck properties. He knows that the show they put on at the auction was certainly convincing - for a terrifying moment, the charade had even managed to convince him. But still, while there’s still no cure for jurda parem, and while there’s still those who hunt grisha, and while Kaz Brekker still lives to get them all on the target list for the next big bad, and while there’s still a million other bad things that unforeseen forces choose to swing at them for their own entertainment - Kuwei knows that any kind of peace is temporary at best. And so he hums, and he prays that at least for one night the universe decides to give him a break.

“You sure that Wylan’s ok with us using one of his family’s properties?” Kuwei asks, leaning against the windowsill.

“Yeah,” Inej says. “He’s got too much work to do in Ketterdam, what with his mom and everything.”

Kuwei hums. “It’s good that he has some family left.”

Inej nods, a strange look in her eye that Kuwei just can’t place. He likes to think that he and Inej have gotten somewhat close over the past several weeks, both of them liking the comfort of shadows. But he knows there are some things that can’t be rushed, and finding out what haunts each other’s eyes is one of those things.

He clears his throat. “I can take the rest of your shift if you want.”

Inej shakes her head. “No it’s ok, Nina’s on it for the next couple hours. I was on my way back when I saw the light on,” she says.

Kuwei shrugs. “Yeah, I couldn’t sleep.”

Inej makes an amused face. “Huh, I wonder why.”

Kuwei follows her gaze towards the other end of the room. There, on the bed closest to the door lies a bundled up figure, swaddled in a thick blanket despite the summer heat. Peeking out from underneath the mass is a thin brown arm thrown against the mattress, and from the opening comes the loudest snore Kuwei has ever heard in his life. He had almost managed to drown out the sound when Inej arrived, but now that she drew attention back to it, he winces.

“I never would’ve thought that someone that skinny could make that kind of sound,” Kuwei mock whispers. Jesper’s snoring continues, just as loud as it had been last night, and the several nights prior.

“This is why he always got his own room over at the Crow Club,” Inej says, voice low. “Nobody could ever put up with more than a week.”

“I just might have to set up camp on the bathroom floor.”

Inej laughs, covering her mouth quickly so as not to wake Jesper.

“Don’t worry,” Kuwei says back in a normal tone of voice. “When he’s this loud he doesn’t get up for anything.”

As if on cue, Jesper lets out a snore loud enough to wake the dead.

“I’ll leave you to that,” Inej says, getting up from her perch.

“Wait,” Kuwei says, sitting up. “Before you go, I need your opinion on something.”

Inej folds back into her previous perch. The movement briefly reminds Kuwei of a dance troupe he’d seen on the streets of Nanjing. Her voice draws him away from the memory. “Sure, what?”

“Ok so I’ve been trying out something - watch.” Kuwei puts his hands in front of him and concentrates. A flame emerges, and then slowly he starts smoothing out the edges until it’s in the shape of a ball. Then slowly he expands his arms, stretching the flame bigger and into different shapes: a circle becomes an oval, then a diamond, then a hexagon, and then a six pointed star.

“That’s beautiful.”

Kuwei risks a glance. At the look on Inej’s face, his face can’t help but shift into a proud smile. “I’m trying to make a more controlled flame,” he explains, shifting the flame into a pyramid. “That way I can be more precise and form a kind of shield or barrier without tiring myself out, or shoot a direct stream without risking that I might burn anything I don’t want to hit, or-”

POP!

Kuwei loses his concentration, the flame destabilizes and then vanishes in a plume of smoke and a loud explosion of pressurized air and gas.

“GUGH!” Jesper yelps from the other end of the room. Kuwei and Inej turn, and they watch as the mass of blankets shoots up in the air and disappears off the edge of the bed. “Kuwei - Kuwei get down!” Jesper yells, voice still groggy with the last remnants of sleep. “I’ve just been shot!”

Kuwei and Inej burst into laughter. Kuwei slaps a hand over his mouth in a late attempt to stifle the sound, his muffled giggles mingling with Inej’s in the warm summer air. Jesper pokes his rumpled head out from the other side of the bed, bleary eyes landing immediately on them. Inej snorts at the look he shoots them and falls into a fit of laughter.

“Kuwei,” Jesper says, realization quickly dawning on him.

“I’m sorry!” Kuwei gasps, trying to get a hold of himself. “I didn’t mean to wake you up I just-” he catches sight of Jesper’s hands and can’t help the laugh that punches it’s way out of his chest.

In Jesper’s hand is one of his favored pearl-handled revolvers, which he had grabbed on the way down and is now in the process of putting back on his nightstand. As he stands and unwraps himself from the mess of blankets he’d accumulated, Jesper’s face splits into a huge grin and he releases a full-bellied laugh at the situation.

“You-you flew up three feet in the air,” Inej splutters, leaning onto Kuwei’s shoulder for support.

Kuwei snorts, his whole body shaking uncontrollably now.

“Wait!” Kuwei says, trying to reign himself in. “I really didn’t do that on purpose! I just-”

“Uh huh,” Jesper says with a grin. “Just wait until the sun comes up, I’ve been holding these pranks back for years.”

Inej straightens and wipes a tear from her eye. “I’m going to tell everyone about the false alarm,” she tells Kuwei. “Goodnight!” she says to them both.

“Goodnight Inej!” Jesper says, burrowing himself into the mattress.

Kuwei waves, and as he turns off his lamp and settles into bed, he wonders just what exactly he got himself into.

Kuwei’s brows knit in concentration as he presses the end of the pencil against his bottom lip. After a moment, he presses the pencil back onto the surface of his sketchpad, darkening the edges of his sketch. Sweat beads at his brow beneath the heat and he swipes at it, taking another look at his source material: the interior garden of the Van Eck estate.

He leans back in his chair, taking a moment just to take in the view. The foliage of the garden has grown untamed ever since the crows had moved in, though if anyone were to ask Kuwei his opinion, he’d say that it looks better like this. Just a little bit wild. Natural. Unrestricted. Kuwei isn’t a big fan of manicured uniformity as a general rule. But then again, it’s not like he’s had much time to think about interior decoration what with - well, everything.

Kuwei draws himself out of his thoughts. He’ll have time to think about imaginary drapes and equally imaginary futures later.

With that in mind, Kuwei takes a breath and picks up his sketchpad again. Strange, he thinks as he looks at the page. I could’ve sworn I drew that branch already.

Nevertheless, he draws the branch back on, careful to outline the particular shape of the leaves.

Kuwei glances up again and studies them for a moment as he takes a sip of his water. When he turns back to the page, the same branch has disappeared again - or rather, shifted. The branch he had just drawn on the background was now in the foreground of the image. Kuwei frowns down at the paper. “Huh?” he mutters to himself. He sketches the branch again, this time pressing harder on his pencil.

Confusion and suspicion start to swirl in his brain.

When he glances back up, Kuwei keeps track of the page out of the corner of his eye. Just as he thought - Kuwei swirls his head back to the page, fast enough to see the graphite on the paper moving to form the words “JESPER FAHEY IS THE MOST HANDSOME GU”

“Jesper!” Kuwei turns around to survey the room.

Sure enough, Jesper turns the corner from the hall and steps into the room. He manages to keep a straight face for all of two seconds before he starts laughing.

Kuwei tries to keep the grin off his face but ultimately fails as well.

“Wow Kuwei, I wouldn’t say I’m the most handsome guy ever,” Jesper says, pressing a hand on his chest and striking a pose. “But I can’t blame a guy for recognizing beauty when he sees it.”

Kuwei snorts and throws a pencil at him.

Jesper easily steps out of the way and shoots him a shit-eating grin.

“If this is your form of payback for yesterday, I already told you that it wasn’t on purpose right?” Kuwei says, leaning back in his chair.

Jesper places both his hands on the back of a nearby chair and leans on it. “Right, because making gunshot sounds while your gorgeous roommate is sleeping is just what ex-convicts-turned-chemists do for fun, right?”

“Hmm I wouldn’t go as far as to say gorgeous-” Kuwei teases.

“Oh?” Jesper nods his head towards Kuwei’s lap. “But that’s not what your journal says.”

Kuwei looks back down and sees the words “JESPER FAHEY IS THE MOST HANDSOME AND GORGEOUS ROOMMATE IN THE WORLD” followed by a tall stick figure winking at him.

Kuwei throws his head back and laughs.

The next day, Kuwei manages to get up just a little earlier than Jesper, rubbing his eyes and yawning so hard his jaw hurts as he stumbles into their shared bathroom. Getting up before Jesper is a completely unplanned act, because Kuwei is a night owl and he refuses to be up before 10 if he can avoid it. Being Jesper’s roommate for the last couple of days has taught him that unfortunately Jesper’s one of those people who just naturally get up at godless hours of the morning even when he had only a handful of hours of sleep the night before. In fact -

The muffled sounds of Jesper’s movements confirms Kuwei’s earlier assessment. As Kuwei blinks away the last dredges of sleep, a thought slowly begins to take form in his head.

Kuwei stumbles out of the bathroom some minutes later, making a show of yawning to appear like he’s still half asleep. In reality, the nerves under his skin are humming with anticipation.

Jesper shuffles past him into the bathroom none the wiser, shutting the door with a decisive click.

Only two moments pass before Jesper comes out of the bathroom, a disgusted look on his face. “Why is the toilet seat so warm?” he demands.

That was exactly the reaction Kuwei was expecting. He chuckles and plops back down on his bed. “I dunno.”

Jesper’s face goes through the five stages of grief. “Did you just-” his voice breaks. “Just how long were you sitting on that toilet seat, Kuwei?”

“Who said I was sitting?” he snaps his fingers and makes a small flame appear at his fingertips. Kuwei grins. “I don’t just set stuff on fire, you know.”

The tension leaves Jesper’s shoulders in one fell swoop. He turns back towards the bathroom. “‘I already told you that it wasn’t on purpose, right?’” Jesper mocks in a high pitched voice.

“How long were you sitting on that toilet seat, Kuwei?” he mocks right back.

His only answer is the click of the bathroom door closing shut.

“Can someone pass the sugar?” Inej asks. Both Nina and Jesper reach for the bowl in the middle of the table, only to find that Kaz had already grabbed it and was pouring some into Inej’s tea cup.

Kuwei smiles to himself at the sight. The four of them are seated around the dining table in the center of the room, all in varying states of animation. Gathered now, as a group, they don’t look like a group of criminals on the run. As a group, they all almost look ordinary.

Nina spots him lingering by the kitchen doorway and waves him over. “Hey,” she says with a grin. “Look who finally showed up.”

“Sorry, got distracted,” Kuwei says mildly.

Kaz clears his throat. Just like that, he straightens, and it’s like that flash of humanity from earlier vanishes into thin air like it never existed.

Kuwei definitely doesn’t imagine the way Inej rolls her eyes two seconds after the sudden shift in Kaz’ demeanor.

“What’s the best way to approach a mark?” Kaz begins in dramatic fashion. Chair legs scrape quietly against the floor as Kuwei settles in.

“Put a-”

CRASH!

The chair crumbles beneath Kuwei’s weight, sending him crashing straight to the floor and landing hard on his behind. Jesper’s laugh tumbles right after him, though he tries valiantly to try and hide it behind a sip of water.

Nina shoots Jesper a bewildered look. “Jes.”

“He started it!”

Kuwei laughs, cutting off Nina’s response. He quickly stands back up, making a show of dusting off his clothes after the fall. He glances back down at the slabs of wood on the floor, some of the pieces which have scattered while others remained in a heap. “The screws?” Kuwei puzzles together, looking back at Jesper for confirmation.

Right on cue, Jesper smugly pulls out a handful of the chair’s iron screws from his pocket.

Kuwei nods to himself, and a newfound resolution settles into his stomach. If he wants a prank war, he’ll get a prank war.

From the other end of the table, Nina towards Inej for an explanation.

“Kuwei accidentally pranked Jesper, so now they’re pranking each other,” she surmises quickly.

“Was that what that bang was a couple nights ago?”

Inej grins at the memory. “Yep.”

Nina hums and looks back at the two bickering at the other end of the table. “I feel bad for Kuwei. You remember the last time he started a prank war with someone?”

Inej remembers the event clearly. The guy had admitted defeat after only two days. “I dunno,” she muses. “I love Jesper, but I think Kuwei’s gonna win this one.” She doesn’t need to look at Nina to picture the surprise on her face.

“You know something about what Kuwei’s got planned?”

“More like a feeling.”

“. . . Wanna put some money on it?” Kaz asks.

Both Inej and Nina turn to him, twin looks of bewilderment on their faces.

Back at the other end of the table, Kuwei nods at the former chair on the floor. “Do you know how to put this back together?”

Jesper peers over the table to look and grimaces.

“You took out the screws without remembering how to put it back together?” Kuwei confirms.

“In my defense, it was a split-second decision to take the screws out. My mind - it just amazes me sometimes.”

Kuwei scoffs. “Ok, I’ll look for another chair.”

“Here, let me make it up to you.” Jesper leans back in his chair and pats his lap exaggeratedly. “I insist.”

Kuwei decides to do just that. Shock colors Jesper’s features as Kuwei sits down on his lap, a smug grin on his face. “You insisted.”

Kaz clears his throat, drawing their attention back. “As I was saying-”

The Zemeni-Shu Prank Olympics officially begins.

Kuwei checks his watch for the fifth time in as many minutes. It’s already noon; they should’ve been back already. He sighs and sits back on his heels, tapping a restless tune with ink and oil stained fingers.

He’s spent most of the morning in his makeshift lab, pouring himself into both jurda stems and his next prank in equal measure. The jurda flowers outside the estate have proven infinitely useful in his attempts to find a cure, though until he gets his hands on a safe testing method there’s not much he can do now other than theorize. It was as he was theorizing that his next prank idea hit him - now he just wishes that Jesper would hurry up and come back from the nearby town.

Just as he straightens, Kuwei hears a voice again: Jesper’s. The tension that had curled in his gut looses. He gets into position behind the corner of the hallway, waiting as the voice is followed by footsteps, and then -

Kuwei shoots a small spark up at the ceiling. The hallway sprinklers spring into life, sending heavy rain down towards their heads. Kuwei turns the corner just in time to see Jesper squawk and try to dive for cover. He grins from ear to ear, careful not to get in the water’s spray. Stopping the hallway sprinkler’s alarm from setting off the rest of the sprinklers in the estate was a little easier than he had expected, which would’ve been a little concerning had it not been particularly useful.

It’s only a split second after he laughs that he realizes his error - Jesper was not alone.

Inej stands on the other end of the hallway, the top of her head and shoulders partially soaked.

Oh no.

“I’m sorry!” Kuwei says, stepping closer to the edge of the sprinkler’s range. “I thought he was alone!”

“It’s fine!” Inej replies. “I’m just gonna-” and with that, she leaves, not even a trail of water drops shadowing her.

Jesper throws his head back and laughs. “She’s gonna get you back for that later!”

Kuwei groans and makes a mental note to be more courteous to her in the next couple of days. He turns back to Jesper. “Having fun?”

“You know it’s actually quite refreshing.”

Kuwei looks closely. In just a matter of seconds, Jesper’s managed to look like he just emerged from beneath a pool of water. His clothes have completely soaked through, the cloth darkening with the water and plastering to his skin, with small rivers flowing from the top of his head all the way down his face and running down to the tips of his fingers to the floor.

“Uh huh,” Kuwei hums dubiously.

Making his point, Jesper opens his arms and starts twirling under the sprinklers. Kuwei laughs but doesn’t join him. As he turns to leave he says, “Oh by the way, Kaz said he needed to see you as soon as you got back. Based on that, I think you might be running late.”

Jesper swears behind him. The sound is followed by the schlup schlup schlup of Jesper’s shoes as he waddles towards Kaz’ room.

Kuwei awakens feeling warm. It’s the kind of warmth that follows a midday nap, with his limbs a little stiff from their awkward position and the afternoon sun dragging him back to wakefulness.

As Kuwei wakes, he takes a moment to collect himself, to assess the stiffness of his neck from being slumped over his work desk and the familiar feeling of a page being stuck to his face. He breathes in deep, and the familiar smells of ink and paper and sterilizing fluid fills his nostrils. For a moment, the smell reminds him of home. He takes a minute to revel in it, to pretend that he’s back home as a little kid and he just fell asleep in his dad’s study again while he did his homework. Slowly, with that memory in mind, he blinks awake.

And screams bloody murder.

Kuwei scrambles off the chair and into a standing position. His heart pounds in his chest and he pushes his arms forwards to get away from -

A very realistic-looking bronze bust of Jesper’s head.

Slow claps draw his attention away from the bust, and he doesn’t even have to look to imagine the look on Jesper’s face. Kuwei looks anyways, and he realizes with a dulled sense of satisfaction that his estimation was pretty spot-on: all the way down to the the wide grin and the particular way his eyes light up with mirth.

“So this is what you’re up to in this lab of yours,” Jesper says, gesturing at the head. He saunters into the room and sits down on the corner of Kuwei’s desk, just a handspan away from the bust. He grins at him. “Well I’ve got to say, you’ve got the likeness down pat.”

Kuwei rubs the last traces of sleep from his eyes. A paper falls away from where it had been stuck to his face, and he glances down to see if it had been something important - nope, just a sketch. “I dunno,” he says, glancing between the two in faux-seriousness. “I wasn’t able to recognize that as you without water dripping down the face.”

Jesper groans. “You ruined my favorite waistcoat.”

Kuwei’s jaw aches with the strength of his yawn, cutting his reply short. He steps around the stack of books he’d miraculously managed not to knock over and plops back down on his chair next to the bust. Now that he looks at it more closely, the bust’s detailing becomes even more prominent. The structure really does capture Jesper’s likeness, from the texture in the hair all the way to the particular curve in his mouth. How the hell did he make this that fast?

“I’ve been practicing.” Jesper replies proudly.

Oh. Well he certainly hadn’t meant to mutter that out loud. Oh well. Kuwei picks up the bust. It’s surprisingly light given the material. He clears his throat. “I’m Jesper, I wear lime green suits and snore like the dead,” he mocks.

“Give me that!” Jesper counters. He pulls the bust away and holds it between his hands for a moment, brows pinching in concentration. When he turns the bust back at Kuwei, he sees his own crafted face staring back at him. “I’m Kuwei, I stay inside a lab practicing science all day, and I think that ranch should go on pizza-”

“-Ranch does go on pizza.”

Jesper puts the bust on his lap. “No it doesn’t you heathen!”

Kuwei laughs and he taps at Jesper’s thigh. “Hey, can you do Kaz next?”

Jesper shoots him a manic smile. “Give me a minute.”

The next day, Kuwei walks into the interior garden to find Jesper already there, a book in his hand. He looks up as Kuwei enters. Their eyes meet, and the air seems to thicken with the tense silence that follows.

Slowly, Kuwei takes note of the room, scanning for anything out of place. Jesper’s proven himself to be creative, so he knows that the next attack could come from anywhere. They stand frozen like this for several moments, Jesper’s gaze tracking his movements.

The silence is broken when Jesper sits up, making Kuwei take in a sharp breath. His heart thunders in his chest and his powers hum beneath his skin, ready.

Jesper notes this and shoots him a pointed look, setting his book down. “I don’t have anything planned for right now. Temporary truce?”

Kuwei nods stiffly. “Truce.”

Instantly, Jesper’s shoulders relax, and he picks up his book again.

The coil in his stomach loosens. Kuwei steps further into the room and sits, taking a relieved breath. He clears his throat. “So, what’re you reading?” Kuwei asks, opening his notebook.

“Just some research,” Jesper says, his voice straining in it’s forced casualty.

He hums. “I’ve heard it’s good to talk to someone while you’re researching. You know, to get the ideas flowing.” he feels Jesper’s gaze rather than sees it. Kuwei turns his head to meet Jesper’s narrowed eyes and quirked mouth.

“Nice try,” Jesper says. “But my lips are sealed.”

“Your reputation is full of lies I see.” Kuwei says.

At this, Jesper raises a brow. “You’ve been looking into me?”

He shrugs. “I’m just good at paying attention.”

“What else does my reputation mention?” The book is set down on the table between them, forgotten for the second time. Jesper wiggles his brows. “My wit? My dashing looks?”

“Your humility.”

A full-belly laugh erupts from Jesper’s mouth, the sound loud and infectious.

This is nice, Kuwei thinks, looking at the other boy beside him. It’s nice, to forget for a little while. To exchange barbs with a friend - that’s what they are now, Kuwei realizes. Friends. It’s been a while since he’s felt that kind of feeling. At least in the last few years. He grabs onto that feeling with both hands, and decides to ride it out and see where it goes.

The soda slides refreshingly down Kuwei’s throat. The day has been particularly hot, and despite his best attempts he hasn’t really been able to fix the air cooling system ever since it broke in the middle of the night. He pours himself another glass, dropping some ice cubes in.

Jesper enters the kitchen then, making a beeline towards the fridge.

“Hey, do you want some?” Kuwei asks, gesturing towards the bottle of soda.

The look on Jesper’s face is like Kuwei had offered him the kiss of eternal life. He serves Jesper some in a separate glass, dropping some more ice cubes in and handing it over to him.

Jesper’s hand reaches over to grab it before he stills. Suspicion glosses over his face. “You drink it first.”

Kuwei’s brows shoot up. “Are you serious?”

“You could’ve put something in it.” Jesper says.

“Isn’t poison Nina’s thing?”

Jesper’s silence and nod at the cup is all the answer Kuwei needs.

Kuwei sighs and takes a pointed sip from the glass and swallows. “Mmm, tastes just like soda.” he offers the glass to Jesper again with an unamused look. “Trust it now?”

“Yes,” Jesper says with a satisfied smile. He takes the glass from Kuwei’s hand.

As the glass leaves his hand, Kuwei heats the tips of his fingertips to warm up the drink. Just as planned, the ice cubes melt less than a moment later, releasing the mint solution he’d frozen in the cubes. Jesper eyes widen into saucers and he realizes his mistake a moment too late when the first spurt of soda comes flying at his face.

Kuwei jumps out of the way as the soda sprays everywhere, bubbling much higher and faster than he’d anticipated.

He cackles at the look on Jesper’s face. But Jesper is a fast thinker, and before Kuwei can dodge out of the way Jesper’s pointing the bottle towards him, spraying his shirt and pants with the bubbly concoction.

“No!” Kuwei jumps away from the spray, running towards the entrance of the kitchen. Jesper chases after him, the glass discarded in exchange for the soda container Kuwei had left on the counter. Kuwei is breathless from laughter which is why he’s not even able to cry a warning when Nina turns the corner and Jesper accidentally swings soda into her face.

Nina stalks up to Inej in the library. She doesn’t even give Inej time to greet her before she says, “How long is this prank war gonna go on?”

Inej smiles as she spots the soda stains on Nina’s clothes. “They got you too huh?”

She nods and plops down dejectedly into the nearest chair. “I just can’t take it anymore, Inej!” Nina cries dramatically.

Inej takes a deep breath. “Yeah.” The knives in her hands twirl absentmindedly. “Yesterday I got hosed down with sprinklers.”

“Seriously?”

“Yep.”

Nina tries to keep a straight face, but fails. Her giggle is contagious, and soon Inej can’t help but laugh too. Nina coughs to try and gather herself together. “Ok but seriously, those two need to be stopped.”

“Absolutely not.”

Nina jumps at the sound of Kaz’ voice. “Just who is supposed to be the Wraith again?” she groans.

Kaz ignores her. “Money was placed on that bet. We can’t stop unless you want to give up your payment.”

Nina might not be Kerch by birth, but the suggestion that she just part with that kind of money is just as bad as if he had asked her to dive naked into the canal during the dead of winter. It just was not done. “Can’t you just make them stop?”

Kaz raps his cane twice. “There’s money to be made, Zenik.”

Inej raises a brow. Her saints have a way of warning her when things are going to happen, and if they’re right this time - which she has a feeling they are - then she’s sure that Kaz’ enthusiasm will end soon.

Kuwei groans as he leans against the sink, his back aching from washing for so long. Jesper stands beside him, practically lounging on the counter as he dries the dishes with a spare towel. The hot pink gloves had been something he’d fought for, and looking at him now, Kuwei begrudgingly admits that the color really does suit him like Jesper had said.

The kitchen is clean now after the whole soda debacle, even though the task had taken him and Jesper the better half of the afternoon. His whole body feels sore and sticky. Looking down at the soap bubbles, Kuwei fantasizes of how nice the shower is going to feel after the dishes are done.

“You know some people would call this karma,” Jesper says beside him, hand outstretched for the next dish to dry.

Kuwei groans. “In my defense, I didn’t know just how much the soda would bubble up.”

Jesper hums disbelievingly. “Right, because you’ve never done the soda geyser prank before.”

“I actually haven’t,” he admits.

He can almost hear the emotional journey occurring on Jesper’s face. Disbelief, followed by shock, followed by - “How could you never do the soda geyser prank before?”

Kuwei shrugs and scrubs faster. Self-consciousness threatens to creep in, but he decides to beat it down with a stick. “I didn’t really get the chance when I was little. Then my dad and I hit the road, and then, well-” he makes a vague gesture in the air. “The opportunity just didn’t come up until now.”

“So does that make me your first?” Jesper teases with a cheshire grin.

Kuwei flicks some soap bubbles at him. “Definitely not my best,” he says.

Jesper slaps a pink rubber glove over his chest. “You wound me.”

Kuwei laughs and looks back down at his hands. It wouldn’t be wise to look too closely at that grin, for a plethora of reasons he just doesn’t seem to remember now. Two moments pass before he feels Jesper step closer, the space between them reduced to less than a handspan. Kuwei ignores him, scrubbing dutifully at the plate in his hand. Heat spreads over his body at their proximity, though he keeps his face carefully composed.

In the next moment Jesper leans against the sink counter, his arm blocking Kuwei from looking at the dishes. He looks up to find Jesper looking at him with a smile that could light up the galaxy. “Don’t get all shy now,” Jesper teases. “You’re a lot more fun to be around when you’re actually talking.”

Kuwei snorts, though internally he is more than a little flattered. “Come on,” he says, shoving lightly at Jesper’s shoulder. “You can flirt later. I’m tired and really want to take a shower.” He reaches over to the water handle as a case in point.

Jesper side-steps away. “Whatever you say,” he says with a familiar twinkle in his eye.

The water turns on, and the fabrikated faucet splashes water directly at Kuwei’s face. He quickly moves to turn it off and tosses soap bubbles at where Jesper had just been.

Jesper tosses his gloves on the counter and saunters away. “You said you wanted a shower!”

The next day is spent in blissful ceasefire. There are no pranks, no jump scares, no interrupting him while he works in his lab or on his sketches. In fact, the only time Kuwei’s seen Jesper that day was in the library when Jesper asked him about the Shu dove-tree market. Botany and local economics are subjects that Kuwei really does enjoy, and the ability to talk about them with someone informed enough about the topic to have some meaningful insight is actually a really nice breath of fresh air. Later on, he and Inej talked on the rooftop and he got some work done on his inferni attempts. Overall, it was a pleasant day.

And Kuwei hated every moment of it.

The constant threat of a new prank looming behind every seemingly innocuous corner wore down on his nerves like a string coming undone. He’s been on guard the entire day, just waiting for the second shoe to drop only for the tension to keep building until he’s all but ready to snap. Peace is agony.

Though slowly, the anxiety manages to cool down just an hour before his usual bedtime.

Kuwei stumbles into his and Jesper’s shared bedroom. Jesper looks up and nods at him. “Hey,” he says, turning his nose back to his book. It’s the botany one Kuwei had been looking for earlier in his lab. He pays it no mind.

“Hey,” Kuwei answers after a moment too long. He makes a beeline towards the bathroom, too tired from being on edge all day to even properly worry any more. Kuwei is so tired that he’s already half-asleep by the time he exits the shower. Standing in front of the mirror, Kuwei absentmindedly pokes at the bags under his eyes and sticks his toothbrush into his mouth.

His mirror image twists his face in disgust and he spits out the toothbrush from his mouth. With his newfound alertness, Kuwei groans and looks at the offending toothpaste he’d used.

Kuwei storms out of the bathroom. “Jesper!”

To his benefit, Jesper makes a valiant attempt at appearing completely innocent. But one long look at Kuwei’s face sends him into a fit of laughter and he tosses the book aside.

“What even was that?”

“Mayonnaise,” Jesper chokes out mid-laugh.

Kuwei scrubs furiously at his tongue, which only serves to send Jesper even more into hysterics.

Neither of them even notice Kaz step into the room, toothbrush in hand. He takes one look at them before deciding to head directly into their bathroom. “I ran out, so,” he mutters as he grabs the toothpaste off he counter.

Kaz emerges from the bathroom with the toothbrush in his mouth and he just freezes.

Kuwei slaps a hand over his mouth. He and Jesper sit motionless as they see Kaz’ face shifts from entitlement, to confusion, to realization, to nausea, and then completely disappears as he runs back into the bathroom.

Kuwei and Jesper look at each other and then both of them howl with laughter.

The next morning, they are all gathered for an early-breakfast-slash-emergency-meeting in the dining room. Kuwei and Jesper didn’t even need to ask Inej what it was about when she told them to come, the memory of the night before was loud and clear.

They all sit in the dining room, Kuwei in the chair that he and Jesper had finally managed to figure out how to fix a couple of hours after the initial incident. He had been the first to arrive, quickly joined by Inej, Jesper, and then Nina. They all sit around the table, waiting for their esteemed leader, Kaz’, grand entrance.

Right on schedule, Kaz enters the dining room, the tap of his crow-headed cane announcing his arrival. He sits down at the head of the table, steeples his fingers together, and takes a breath. “The prank war will stop.”

From across the table, Inej and Nina glance at each other with an amused expression.

Kuwei leans back in his chair and crosses his arms. “Ok but he started it!” he says. “And, in case you haven’t noticed-”

“-Oh, I’ve noticed.” Jesper says, meeting Kuwei’s gaze with a wink.

Kuwei rolls his eyes. “Laying it on a little thick, don’t you think?”

“I’m not the one that sat on my lap.”

“Ok but you offered.”

“And you both put mayonnaise in my toothpaste,” Kaz cuts in.

“You probably shouldn’t have been using somebody else’s toothpaste in the first place,” Inej mutters under her breath.

Kaz glares at her.

Kuwei and Nina cackle while Jesper shoots Inej finger guns in a show of support. Kaz shifts his attention back to them after a moment, and the nausea curving his mouth reminds Kuwei of the memory of the night before. The look of complete disgust on Kaz’ face as he ran into the bathroom is probably - no, definitely - the most human he’s ever seen their resident edge lord. And he can’t help the snort that escapes him then, though he tries to cover it up as a cough at the look that Kaz gives him.

“Ok, but the mayonnaise thing aside,” Nina says, extending her arms placatingly, “Inej got sprayed with water, I got soda in my hair, and there’s this weird smell coming from the garden-”

Jesper’s brows shoot up and he looks at Kuwei.

“That wasn’t me!” Kuwei sniffs indignantly.

Nina sighs. “Can we please just call a truce?”

Kuwei looks at Jesper to find the Zemeni boy already looking at him. He raises a single brow in question, to which Jesper shrugs and flashes a brilliant grin. “No winner?” Jesper offers.

Part of him wants to deny the offer, but Kuwei realizes that the reasonable thing to do would be to put a pause. He shoves the flammable pistol replica deeper into his pocket. “No winner,” he echoes.

Kaz releases a breath and taps his crow-headed cane. “Good.” With that, he stands and leaves in a swish of black cloth.

Kuwei remains seated in his chair, briefly wondering whether to expect an equally melodramatic entrance in a few minutes. “ . . . So is the meeting over?” he asks.

“Yeah,” Jesper says, bouncing up. “The dramatic exit is our cue to leave.”

Both Inej and Nina leave to their respective rooms, leaving Jesper and Kuwei to talk as they head to their respective points in the rest of the estate.

“Hold on, I forgot something in the room,” Kuwei says as they pass by the hall. He enters the room and completely freezes in his tracks.

His whole half of the room - his bed, his curtains, his nightstand, his lamp, his pillow, his books, his floor, his wall, his ceiling, even a discarded sock he’d accidentally left on the floor - all of it is completely wrapped in aluminum foil.

Kuwei whirls around. “I thought we had a truce, Jesper!”

“Ok but to be fair I did this before the truce happened so it doesn’t count!”

THE END.

#jesper fahey #kuwei yul bo #inej ghafa #kaz brekker #nina zenik #six of crows #crooked kingdom

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stcrkovs · 2 years

Text

about me ☀️

— welcome to my multifandom writing blog, i'm belle! i'm 19 years old, and i'm from south east asia. my pronouns are she/her, a scorpio and an infj.

— i love reading books, i love dogs and fluffy animals, i love staring at the skies, listening to music while i do things at home, a hot cup of coffee, libraries and museums, and reading fanfics abt my fave characters

— everyone is welcome here, this is a safe space for you to talk to me or read about fanfics of your fave characters and fandoms and whatnot! <3

— you're welcome to be my mutual, and character anons are welcome as well!

— i won't tolerate hate of any kind towards me, my moots, my works and the characters i write about.

— my fictional bf's and gf's: (grishaverse) alina starkov, nikolai lantsov, kaz brekker, jesper fahey, inej ghafa, genya safin, zoya nazyalensky, (harry potter) draco malfoy, sirius black, remus lupin, (pjo) percy jackson, leo valdez, nico di angelo, reyna avila ramirez arellano, thalia grace. these are my fave characters and i might write for them in the future and i also write characters out of book series :)

— all the characters, fandoms, the story are not mine, except for the fics itself and are property of their rightful owners and authors.

with that said, i hope you have a very nice day and enjoy reading! :)

#about me page! 🏷️

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feelinglikecleopatra · 2 years

Text

Multitudes

Six of Crows // Kaz Brekker x Inej Ghafa

Rated G for Gender

Word Count: 7,792

Summary: She can see it then, the joy of her son’s life unspooling before her. Joy tucked into every corner, hidden in the recesses of this dark and terrible world, unfurling at his fingertips—his to seize.

Exploring race and gender through my most beloved two and their unruly little rascal. A follow-up fic to my Kaz and Inej have a baby fic, Other Than Damage.

S/O to @doorsclosingslowly (Dimtraces on AO3) for their constant support and invaluable beta read.

~*~*~*~

Zero

When their son makes his first cooing, gurgling, burbling sounds Inej tells Kaz about an old Suli tradition she has not thought about for years.

“You know, for the Suli, a baby’s first laugh is an important milestone. It signals the moment they choose us, they choose this life.”

Kaz is rocking the crib absentmindedly, eyes focused on the paper in his lap. “And I thought I’d heard the last of your Suli proverbs.”

“Kaz,” Inej rolls her eyes. “This isn’t a proverb. I’m just thinking, after everything—all we’ve been through—I want his life to be filled with laughter. Joyful, happy.”

“Are we not happy?” His glance is fleeting but Inej sees decades of insecurity in it.

“Of course we are.” Stretching her leg across the space between them, she nudges his foot with hers. “Of course. I suppose I’m trying to say I’d like to celebrate that. His first laugh.”

“If it’s important to you,” Kaz shrugs.

That seems to be it for a while. They don’t discuss it and Matty doesn’t get close to laughing until he’s seven months old.

Then one day Inej answers the door to find Jesper dressed in what she can only describe as, something stolen from a clown's reject pile. His face is chalk white, his mouth a blood red nightmare, and a floppy hat dripping in tiny bells sits at a jaunty angle on his head. Somehow, the assortment of mismatched patterns he’s wearing puts his usual barrel flash to shame. It seems as if he’s wearing every colour under the sun and every textile too.

Inej is baffled.

When Kaz comes downstairs, investigating the commotion, he takes one look at Jesper and groans.

“This is not what I meant, Jes.”

“Am I the only one taking this seriously?” When he gesticulates, Inej realises there are bells on his shoes and his belt too. “Unbelievable.”

“Taking what seriously?”

“Matthias’ first laugh, of course!”

Kaz scrubs a hand over his face, exasperated, but now, knowing the source of Jesper’s buffoonery, Inej can only laugh. “You told him?”

Her husband makes some vague affirmative sound.

“Did you also tell him that the person who makes the baby laugh first is also the one who has to pay for the subsequent party?”

“I can’t think of a better use for five-generations worth of Kerch wealth,” Jesper says, smug. “And you know what, it’s better neither of you are taking this seriously since my victory is basically a forgone conclusion. No child could withstand all this.”

Inej laughs again, tugging on one of the bells hanging off his hat before waving him inside.

Once the challenge is declared, it takes on new life. They suddenly play host to the Van Ecks, their toddler Julia included, for days at a time. Everyone gets dragged in. Inej finds herself pulling silly faces at Matty when Kaz isn’t watching, in ever desperate attempts she even sings songs and climbs the furniture.

Eventually, Jesper gives up on the bells and whistles and opts for simple charm. He hefts Matty into the air, tickles his tubby belly and blows raspberries that get increasingly gleeful gurgles out of him. Nothing, however, that could qualify as laughter.

Inej knows it’s serious when, in the same week, she catches Kaz pulling silly faces at Matty while changing him and Wylan recruits Julia into the competition.

The tactics grow more and more ridiculous until, one Autumn day in Matthias’ eighth month, they’re all out in the garden. Jesper is walking Julia around the edge of the property, picking cherries until his wrists are sticky with juices and both their teeth are purple. Wylan and Kaz sit on the veranda, out of the weak Kerch sun, voices lowered and heads bent together. In the middle of it all, Inej sits with Matty between her legs. Relishing the dregs of the Kerch summer, she tilts her face up to the sky and Matty buries his little fist in the soil.

His first laugh begins as a squeal, a piercing peal that dissolves into unmistakable giggles.

Everyone stops, sits up, turns around, blinks at Matty who, shaking a chubby fist of soil in the air, does it again.

It’s the most perfect sound Inej has ever heard.

“Dove,” she coos, leaning over her boy and pressing her nose into his hair. “What is it? What are you—”

She cuts off when she sees the way he pinches a worm between his fingers and squeals when it moves. A worm. He’s laughing at a worm.

Carefully, she pries the creature out of his baby grip and puts it back on the ground.

“Inej,” Kaz is suddenly right behind her. “Did you make him laugh?” Smiling up at him, she shakes her head. “Our son is a naturalist.”

“It was the worm?” Jesper looks distraught. “Seriously?”

While Julia plops down on her belly in front of Matty and helps him dig, Kaz crouches and presses a kiss behind Inej’s ear. She can see it then, the joy of her son’s life unspooling before her. Joy tucked into every corner, hidden in the recesses of this dark and terrible world, unfurling at his fingertips—his to seize.

Four

The Ghafa-Brekker’s live in a very nice property in the Zelver District. Its pale yellow facade hides all manner of secrets and there’s at least as much of it below ground as above.

Since the birth of Kaz and Inej’s first child, Jesper—determined to be the favourite uncle—spends almost as much time there as at home. Often with Julia in tow. Today is one of the days she is not with him, instead visiting the Kerch countryside with her papa and grandma. Today is for Matty and Uncle Jes.

There’s a spring in his step as he approaches the front door, ready to relieve Kaz and Inej of their parenting duties for the day.

Not even three feet up their front path and Jesper can already hear raised voices and the inimitable squeal of the younger Ghafa-Brekker. Matty’s causing mischief already. Perfect, he thinks, his favourite activity.

Jesper knocks though he isn’t confident they’ll hear him. The sounds stop, silence echoing. Then, Matty squeals again, followed by the sound of two sets of feet on wood floors.

The door swings open to reveal a haggard looking Kaz. His shirt is half-untucked, he’s only wearing one of his sleeve garters and no jacket. Jesper’s never seen him in such a state of disarray except in the middle of a long job. Parenting, he supposes, is the longest of jobs.

“Good morning!” He can’t resist the grin that pulls inevitably at his mouth. “Fine weather we’re having.”

“Shut up, Jes.”

A tiny gasp emerges from the doorway behind him and Jesper watches Kaz’ face crumple. If he didn’t have one hand on the door and the other on his cane, Jesper is sure Kaz would be scrubbing one of them over his face.

Matty’s baby-big eyes are wide and round as moons, shiny as they look up and up and up at Jesper.

“Uncle Jes!” Comes the shout, more breath and excitement than words.

Bulldozing past Kaz, Matty runs out and makes to wrap every available limb around Jesper.

It is only then Jesper realises that Matty is naked. Completely and utterly naked, not a single stitch of clothing. Just soft, brown baby skin and a mop of jet black hair. This doesn’t bother him of course but it does explain the expression on Kaz’ face.

“There you are!” Jesper grasps the rampaging child under both arms and hoists Matty up. “Well, look at—”

Suddenly, Inej is at the door, hiding a laugh behind her hand. “Oh Saints! Jes, I’m so sorry. He refuses to get dressed.”

Jesper frowns at Matty, who is now perched on his hip—he doesn’t carry his guns around the children. “Refuses, huh? You’re just a little rascal aren’t you?”

When Jesper pinches Matty’s sides, wiggling his fingers, the child dissolves into giggles, face buried in the collar of Jesper’s shirt. One tiny fist beats at his chest in a token show of resistance.

“Now, Matty—” Jesper plasters on his serious face “—do you want to play with Uncle Jesper today?”

Matty gulps down several huge breaths, laughter abating, and nods solemnly. “Yes, please.”

“Then, you have to put something on because, I’m very sorry to say, there are all these silly rules about going outside and one of them is clothes.”

As he says this, Jesper notes something more than plain old childhood defiance in Matty’s tearful gaze, sucking a lip and sniffing hard.

“But I don’t want to wear those clothes.”

“What clothes?” Jesper hefts Matty a little, using one hand to smooth back a shock of hair. “Your play clothes?”

Matty nods a watery nod. “I don’t like them.”

“Why don’t you like them?”

The child’s face scrunches up then, an expression Jesper recognises as equal parts contemplation and consternation.

“I don’t like them,” Matty repeats, face reddening. “Why can’t I wear my nighty? I like my nighty!”

“You can’t wear your nighty outside,” Kaz says, gently but firmly.

“Then I won’t go outside.”

Matty returns Kaz’ expression with uncanny accuracy, chubby arms crossed.

“It’s difficult to argue with that,” Jesper muses.

Inej sighs, “he needs to go outside. We’ve been cooped up for days and someone—” she cuts a glance at Kaz “—has been helping Matty build a fort in the main room for the past four days.”

Kaz’ expression doesn’t even twitch, unrepentant.

Hefting a four year old Matty, Jesper purses his lips, considering. There is something in Matty’s resistance that feels familiar, a huffing dissatisfaction with the state of things. Why should Matty wear what is essentially a uniform, to play in?

“I say, bring the nighty!” Jesper exclaims, finally. “Anyone that has anything to say about that can talk to me. What do you think, dove?”

Of course, Matty beams at him, a full teeth and dimples smile.

Five

Sitting between the stoic Benyamin Ghafa’s knees, Matty feels safe. This is their fourth time visiting Ravka, touring its seaside towns and wildflower fields with the Ghafa’s caravan. Benyamin and Matty are braiding each other’s hair before bed, as is tradition. Every time they visit Ravka as a family, Matty and Inej spend long evenings falling asleep to the feeling of Deda’s careful and methodical braiding technique.

That night, however, Matty sits on the rug with a belly full of wriggling eels.

It came out recently that Kerch boys do not, emphatically, do not wear their hair long. And although Matty is part Suli (the Suli do wear their hair long), living in Kerch presents certain obstacles.

Once, this had been one of his favourite things about visiting his deda and the caravan. But maybe it’s wrong for Matty to have long hair.

Maybe Matty is wrong.

“Matty?” Deda’s hands slow as he nears the end of the braid, tying it with a bright green ribbon.

The way Benyamin says Matty’s name it always sounds like the Suli word for echo—a crude imitation.

He bends slightly over Matty, who is sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of him, and tries to catch his eye. They speak only snatches of a shared language so both rely on facial expressions and body language to communicate. It was through facial expression alone that Benyamin learned to call his grandchild Matty instead of Matthias, had learned that Matty loved strawberries but hated raspberries, that Matty felt freest when wearing nothing at all—to the endless bemusement and chagrin of both parents.

Opening his mouth as if to speak, Benyamin watches Matty play with the end of the braid, tugging on it so much it must hurt. He folds a hand over Matty’s much smaller one, palm dry like old paper.

“Dove, what is it?”

This much Suli Matty understands, and shrugging, mumbles, “nothing.”

“It isn’t polite to lie to one’s elders, Matty.”

Matty catches polite, which in Suli is more like honourable or respectful than in Kerch, and catches elders. Deda has heard the lie then, a breach of the respect owed from descendent to ascendent in both cultures.

Contrite, Matty turns to face Benyamin more fully. “My hair,” his Suli syllables fledgling and fumbled. “It’s long—too long.”

“Too long?” Benyamin frowns. “Who said so?”

Matty doesn’t want to talk about the boys and what they’d said the day, together with Papa and Mama, he sailed for Ravka.

“Nobody.”

His deda looks very serious then. “Do you think my hair is too long?”

Deda’s hair is very long, longer even than Inej’s. Peppered with grey-white strands, it’s always immaculately braided. Matty can’t imagine him without it, like imagining a green sky or a family without love.

“No,” Matty says forcefully, slipping into familiar Kerch. Then, more quietly, “of course not.”

“Then?” Deda’s hands move to Matty’s shoulders, the knots in his neck. “Why is it different for me?”

It just is. It is. Because Matty is Kerch too. Has to be. Can’t not be. Wants to be. Despite it all, despite the sneering and the barely disguised laughter. Matty wants to be Kerch, as Kerch as Kaz, as Papa.

But if being Kerch means being… having short hair and wearing those horrid suits and uniforms, if it means having different skin and eyes, if it means climbing into this box, this cage then Matty doesn’t know if it’s possible. If he can.

When Matty starts crying it comes as no surprise. Matty cries a lot. Sometimes, he thinks he shouldn’t, his never seen Papa cry or Deda. Uncle Jes cries though, all the time. He cried once when Matty laughed, which was weird. Ma cries too sometimes, not often but sometimes. There’s nowhere else for this feeling to go, this swelling, clenching, writhing.

At six, Matty is still small enough that Deda can lift him up. He does now. Hands under his arms, he pulls Matty into his lap on the bed. Benyamin rocks slightly, humming and shushing as Matty hiccups and cries, little fist clenched in his shirt.

Eventually, Matty falls asleep in the cradle of Benyamin’s arms, safe from his tormentors, hidden from a world that feels too small for everything he is.

Six

Inej, Kaz and Matty are standing in the middle of a field—the sun sinking behind them. Inej is on her hands, walking smoothly across the terrain. Kaz stands, solemn and watchful, against a lone tree—he and the tree, mirrors of each other. Between the married pair stands Matty, watching Inej as instructed.

“You have to let go. Stop focusing on the weight, on the fall, and just… walk.”

“Very practical advice, wife.”

“I don’t give practical advice, husband. That’s what we have you for.”

Kaz rolls his eyes. “I just think Matthias might benefit from a more straightforward instruction. He’s not a mind reader.”

“What do you think, dove? Do I need to be more precise?” But when she looks over, Matty is frowning minutely, frowning at the tree just above Kaz’ left shoulder. “Matty?”

“Matthias?”

There’s a furrow between Matty’s brows, the beginnings of an individualised countenance. The expression is not, however, entirely unfamiliar. Inej sees in it an uncanny resemblance to Kaz’ in the midst of concocting some scheme.

“It looks like someone’s had an idea.” Her smile softens her eyes and her mouth and her voice.

“I—” Matty hesitates, chewing on the inside of a cheek, blinks and then, the expression is gone. Matty shakes a little, as if shaking off a fly, and turns back to Inej. “Do it again!”

Seven

The house is quiet when Matty steals downstairs. He shouldn’t be there at all, it’s well past bedtime, but there’s someone else in the house. Matty heard them come in and thought maybe Mama had come home finally.

It’s not Mama.

“You look like shit, Kaz.” The voice is laughing, soft and low, probably to avoid waking Matty. Too late, he thinks. Then, gently, “I’m glad you sent for me.”

“I don’t know what I’m doing.” That’s Papa, gravelly and quiet. “Saints.”

The sound of his voice makes Matty want to go in, to climb into his lap and curl up like he used to. But he shouldn’t be up, shouldn’t be down here, so he stays on the landing, clutching the hem of his nighty.

“When’s Inej back?” “Three days.”

Such a long time.

She left three weeks ago, to sail the True Sea, she’d said. It’s not the first time she’s gone away but every time is hard. This time in particular.

“Not long now, then.”

“Someone called Matty a—” Papa hesitates, voice rough as unfinished wood “—a mongrel, yesterday.”

“They said what?” Matty realises then that it’s Uncle Jes in there. He sounds disbelieving, shocked. “In front of you?”

Matty can’t hear Papa answer so assumes he must have nodded, because they did. He’d been there, holding Matty’s hand, when those boys spat the word at him. It didn’t mean anything to Matty but Papa’s hand had tightened almost painfully, squeezing and then tugging.

“He asked me what it meant, afterwards and I—how do I—what am I supposed to say? Jes, I just dragged him away from there and told him not to worry about it, that it was a word for grownups.”

“Kaz, I am so sorry.”

It sounds now like Uncle Jes has gotten up, moved across the room.

“He asks so many questions I don’t have the answers to. Why so few people in Ketterdam look like him? Why he doesn’t go to school like the other children? Why he can’t wear skirts like his mother does sometimes? Why he can’t wear the kind of clothes his grandparents wear, the traditional Suli garb? Why, why, why, why—”

Matty chews the inside of his lip, fingers fidgeting with the nighty. It feels like he shouldn’t be hearing this, like Papa has been hiding this. He always answers so confidently, Matty thought he was the wisest person in the world. Except for maybe Baba, who is much older and must therefore be wiser.

Uncle Jesper is quiet for a moment then, “that last one… Has he been asking any more questions like that recently?”

“I can’t think… What do you mean ‘questions like that’?”

“About how he wants to dress or be talked about? Anything like that.”

“I don’t think so. Why?”

“It’s just—he reminds me of me, when I was younger. I questioned a lot of things but mostly things about my place in the world, about expectations and acceptance. Even when I was a child I knew I liked boys and girls, that that distinction actually didn’t mean very much to me to begin with.”

Now, Papa is quiet. “You mean, you think he might be like you? Like that?”

“I don’t know, maybe not.”

Matty should go back upstairs, the wood floors are cold under his feet and it’s getting harder and harder to stifle the yawning. He’ll go, he will. Soon.

“I knew this was going to be hard, Jes, I did. But this—how do I make sure he knows their hatred isn’t on him? That he belongs here, in Ketterdam, in the world.”

“You love him, Kaz. That’s what you do. You love him and fight for him and listen to him.”

They’re both quiet for a long time after that, so long Matty feels his eyes getting heavy, lids drooping.

When he wakes up in his bed a little while later, Papa is there, stroking stray hairs back from his forehead. He must have found him, carried him up.

“Go to sleep, Matty,” Papa whispers and go to sleep he does.

Eight

The bannister is smooth under Matty’s soft cotton pants, the slide a straight shot to the landing of the Slat. Perfecting this move had been the work of many weeks but Matty has the balance, the agility of a Ghafa. Slick as butter, supple-slippered feet land on the polished wood floors. When Matty pokes a head into the main room, Elke is already there and already shoving bread in her mouth like she hasn’t eaten in days though Matty knows for certain she ate last night.

New to the Dregs and eight years old, Elke is the only other kid under double digits around the Slat. Two weeks ago she’d tried to pick Kaz’ pocket, had gotten her hand all the way in and a bunk biscuit in to replace the wallet too before his hand had closed around her skinny little wrist. Kaz put her on the floor of the Club, watching for other sticky fingers. He doesn’t believe in wasting talent.

Elke is all long orange pigtails, a reckless spray of freckles, and three missing teeth that show whenever she smiles—which she does widely and frequently. She and Matty compare their baby teeth whenever they fall out, compare incomplete smiles in the mirror.

Watching for a moment, Matty plans the best possible approach to make her fall off the bench. It probably won’t take much, she’s very focused on her food and besides agility and balance, Matty has inherited the Wraith’s stealth. Despite all that, it is still supremely satisfying when, having successfully snuck up on her, Elke jumps, bangs her knees on the table, and spits a mouthful of tea over her breakfast.

“Matty!” Her cheeks are deeply flushed, breath coming in great pants. “You fixing to kill me or what?”

“If I wanted to kill you there’re many, many more efficient ways.” Matty says matter of factly. It’s the kind of thing Kaz would say, though never knowingly in his child’s hearing of course. Swiping a crumb off her plate, Matty continues, “are we still going climbing today?”

Elke pouts, “I can’t. Your Papa wants me over at the Silver Six today.”

The way she says your Papa makes it sound like it’s Matty’s fault, which it isn’t.

“Oh.” There’s no hiding the disappointment in that one syllable. “Maybe you should be worse at your job and then we’d have more time!”

“Does that mean you think I’m good at my job?” She wheedles, smiling a full gap-toothed, dimpled smile.

“Papa never complains about you and he complains about everyone.” This is even true.

Somehow, her smile grows even bigger then.

“Well, well, well, what do we have here!” Simon, a big fellow and older member of the Dregs, saunters in. “Aren’t you supposed to be on your way to the Lid, little lass?”

Elke scoops up her plate and cup, shrugs apologetically at Matty and heads for the door. On her way out she throws a two-finger gesture at Simon’s back. It’s all Matty can do not to break out in a fit of giggles.

“You two seem very cosy.” There’s an unfamiliar glint in Simon’s eye, an odd tilt to his lips. “Quite right, too. A boy your age is not far off discovering these things.”

The bench wobbles slightly as the big man sits down beside Matty.

“I—I don’t know what you’re talking about.” In fact, Matty has some idea of what Simon is talking about.

“I wonder…” Simon purses chapped lips and pushes a big hand through shaggy, mousy hair. “Have the bosses—your ‘rents, explained to you about boys and girls? About what becoming a young man means?”

Matty only blinks, mouth screwed shut.

“It’s only natural. When a boy likes a girl—or mind you, the other way around—” Simon guffaws at that, hand on his belly “—they’re like to get this feeling, in their tummy and lower. It’s a nice feeling, all warm. You’re too young to do anything about that, mind. I won’t have your Da hearing I told you to go—to go experimenting! Only, it’s good to know these things. But be careful with that one, that Elke. I’ve seen her bite bigger men.”

“She would never bite me,” Matty says. There is nothing to say to the rest, Simon may as well be speaking Fjerdan. “Unless I provoked her somehow.”

“Well, better not provoke her then!” The big man laughs all the way through breakfast.

Nine

Kaz doesn’t always like to be touched. Sometimes, when Matty runs to give him a hug, Papa flinches. This had been a problem when Matty first learnt to walk and run and climb because his papa was, it seemed, the perfect climbing frame.

Now, Matty stops and asks, first. It’s better that way and besides, Matty thinks everyone should always ask first cause even Mama and him—who really, really like hugs—don’t want to hug sometimes.

They find other ways to be close.

On nights when Mama is away at sea, as she sometimes is, Papa will braid Matty’s hair. In honesty, Matty prefers it when Papa braids his hair. He’s very careful and patient and, when Matty was six, he spent time with Deda learning all kinds of cool braid styles Mama never learnt so he is more adventurous too.

It’s usually quiet when Papa braids Matty’s hair. They sit on the bed, one behind the other, surrounded by the sounds of their breathing. Sometimes, Matty keeps a hand on Papa’s stretched out leg.

Occasionally, Papa will ask Matty to help him practise his Suli, which is not very good. They (try to) talk about Suli generosity and faith and community care because these are things Kaz cares to discuss even though he only knows the words for different food groups and a handful of farm animals.

On the day Inej is set to return to Ketterdam, Kaz dares to suggest he pick her up by himself. Matty only stomps his little feet and scowls up a storm.

At Fifth Harbour, Inej kneels on the planks and opens her arms, rocking back as Matty barrels into her arms.

“Your son,” Kaz says, once he catches up, “Would have scaled the rooves of this city and followed me all the way here one way or another, so I decided it would save everyone a headache if I simply brought him.”

“Prudent,” Inej nods in between showering Matty in kisses. He squeals when she runs her hands over his sides and pinches his ribs. When he turns his head to escape her assault, she gasps, “Your hair!”

If they were to look up now they’d see Kaz glowing pridefully. Instead, Inej turns Matty around and traces a finger along his braids, two of them, threaded with a yellow ribbon.

“Papa did them,” Matty says, reaching to wrap a hand around Kaz’ gloved forefinger. “This morning.”

“Is that so?” Finally, Inej stands and steps closer to Kaz. “A man of many talents, it seems.”

“We missed you.” Kaz’ voice is quiet, his gaze trained on Inej. “I’m sure you can tell.”

“It’s nice to be told, anyhow.”

Seizing both their hands, Matty begins the arduous process of dragging his parents back home. There is so much to be done.

Ten

The rug Baba prefers for the floor of the trailer is a riot of warm colours, some reds and greens and many deep sea blues. It is always pristine, cleaner even than their home in Ketterdam despite the open door and inclement weather.

There it is that Matty is curled up between Baba’s knees listening to her tell a bedtime story in her lilting Suli.

“We Suli draw our faith from a great many sources. Your papa’s people, the Kerch, have only one god.”

“Ghezen,” Matty supplies easily, “god of trade and commerce.”

“That’s right. Though it might surprise you to hear it, I believe the Kerch are a people of extraordinary faith. To worship, to venerate only one god?” Baba chuckles, the sound like a brook babbling. “They expect much from this Ghezen. We are not so single minded. The Suli acknowledge the hugeness of the world, the very many things that need a nurturing hand, a symbol. So we have our many saints. Has your mama ever told you the story of Sankt Darezljiv, the bountiful?”

Matty shook his head, glancing up at Baba’s wizened feature. “I don’t think so.”

“Sankt Darezljiv is a very prominent figure in our stories, though he often appears by other names. You see, Matty, sometimes when Sankt Darezljiv intervened in ordinary affairs he appeared to the people in other forms, other bodies.

Once, to prevent two feuding tribes from fighting over access to a wellspring he appeared to them as a woman—Sankta Karmina, as she came to be known. For a time, she appeared only as Karmina. In fact, she remained Sankta Karmina for seven years, patron saint of twins and things that come in multiples.”

“Which was her—his,” Matty hesitates because the words don’t fit, “his true form?”

“Neither,” Baba answers, a hand tangling in Matty’s unbound hair. “Both. Many consider Darezljiv the patron saint of the dare—who take their name from him. The dare are those who are neither one nor the other, man nor woman. Though officially, he is patron saint of farmers and bountiful harvests.”

The words ring like a bell. Matty feels bottomless, endless. He’s a vast, unfathomable ocean of being, abruptly fathomed. It turns out, there are words for this feeling. Dare. Neither. Both. Everything.

Matty whispers it aloud, “dare,” testing it, tasting it. Looking up at Baba, he says, “why did you tell me this?”

She hesitates a moment, hand moving slowly though Matty’s hair, “I told you because stories are important for self-discovery. We find ourselves through the stories we tell, through the stories others tell us. I wanted you to have this story.”

“But why me?” Matty doesn’t know what he’s getting at, why he keeps digging this hole. Maybe he wants someone to have noticed, to have seen him… to have seen them. For this to be evidence of this witnessing. An ache builds between their eyes, tears threaten. “Why me, why now?”

“Because I have seen you fit yourself into a small world,” she smooths their hair back, a smile on her mouth, in her eyes. “I wanted to widen it for you. The world is not so small.”

Twelve

The climbing lessons began the moment Matty first pulled themself up on two legs. A chubby armed baby grasping at shelves and stools and trouser legs. Inej tells them she was climbing into Kaz’ window on the top floor of the Slat when she was fifteen. Matty is the height she was then, now. Has all her dexterity, tenacity, grit. Of course, she warns them emphatically against climbing buildings. It’s dangerous, reckless, and, worst of all, needless. There is nothing Matty can get from climbing the building that they can’t get some other, safer way.

The Slat is different. It’s Papa’s building.

Despite her warnings, scaling the Slat looms large in their mind—a rite of passage. The temptation is made worse by the fact Kaz just changed the locks on the windows.

He’s been teaching them how to nurse a lock into submission, how to listen for the clicks and tells, what it should feel like when a lock comes apart in your hands. Papa is never so patient or calm as when there’s a lock between them, a lesson to be imparted. Matty could crack the one on the window, they’re sure of it. They just need to get up there.

Looking up, Matty can see at least three routes they could take. Four storeys, rain-slicked plaster, and decades of urban decay stand between them and—and… Something. Rightness, a spot in the Dregs that feels earned not given, perhaps. All they have to do is climb.

Easy.

Matty is supposed to meet Kaz—Papa—in fifteen minutes, at a quarter bells. They’re pretty sure they can do the climb in less.

Approaching the east side of the building, Matty doesn’t even think to check who else’s in the alley, who might be lurking at the alley’s mouth. The climb begins like most, difficult. Close to the ground are the fewest potential handholds—precisely to put off any would-be burglars. But once they’ve cleared the ground floor, Matty thinks, the going gets easier.

Despite rain earlier in the day, the wall and its various sills offer more than enough purchase for Matty’s nimble fingers.

The thrill of the climb takes them at the second level. Looking down they realise they’re maybe twice their own height above the ground, only rain-slick cobbles and a gutter to welcome them should they fall. They won’t, Ghafa’s don’t fall. If they do, Brekker’s get back up.

With the wind in their hair—which is tied back in concession to overcautious parents—and all that hungry air at their feet, Matty feels invincible. This is their city, their home, and no one’s gonna take that away.

The cobbles grow distant and Papa’s window gets closer. Clouds scud overhead, releasing the occasional smattering of rain. Adrenaline and righteousness keeps them warm.

Perhaps, if Matty had chosen another month to make this climb, had waited for Captain Hoedt to grow bored of his Clean Ketterdam campaign, things would have gone differently. As it is, Matty reaches the window beneath Kaz’s when the call goes up.

From the street below, Matty hears someone cry, “Stop that burglar!”

They don’t dare glance down, their hold sure but not infallible. They want to shout back that they aren’t a burglar, that if they were they’d be far more discrete. But that, they think, is exactly what an incompetent burglar would say.

Suddenly, their hold seems very precarious. Matty begins to shiver. Fear and something else, something queasy and oily, douses their confidence. This isn’t right. They aren’t doing anything wrong.

The sound of boots tromping down the alley is off from this height, echoing dully. Still, it fills Matty with dread. The Stadwatch are not friends, this much their parents have made clear. Quickly, the alley fills with their purple uniforms. Two then five then seven officers in the alley. There’s too many of them for the middle of the day, in this part of the Barrel.

Matty cannot catch their breath.

“You there, get down right now!”

Their heart is in their mouth, their breath sawing out of them and into the damp air. “I’m—” They try to answer, to explain but the words won’t come. What can they say?

“Son, don’t do anything you’ll regret.” When Matty looks down, they can see a moustachioed officer standing with his hands on his hips, frowning up to the third floor. “Just come back down.”

“But I—” The prospect of getting down is too daunting to contemplate. A climb like this is not reversible. They had counted on getting back down the normal way, via the stairs. Though there’s no way the officer can hear them, Matty says, “I can’t.”

“Stop playing around, boy.”

Everything feels off-kilter.

Boy.

With sudden clarity, Matty sees what they see. A boy with brown skin, clad in black and grey, scaling this building at dusk. Nimble hands and nimble feet. Sly, furtive, suspicious. A dark smudge on Ketterdam’s facade. A stain. A mistake.

Of course, the officers’ shouting draws Kaz’ attention and his window clicks open just as Matty’s grip grows weak. They’re going to fall. Papa looks down and Matty thinks, he’s going to watch them fall.

The anger that crosses Kaz’ face as his gaze cuts from Matty to the officers below is frightening. It’s fleeting, there and then gone. When Kaz returns his gaze to Matty, who can feel tears cooling on their cheeks, it’s clear he’s not angry at them.

Briefly, he turns his head back to shout something at someone inside then he’s looking back down at Matty.

“Dove, climb up to me.” His voice is rough in the growing dark.

Looking around, Matty tries not to sob. Their arms are shaking and they’re so afraid. “I don’t know if I can.”

“Look at me, Matty.” They do. “You can. You’re okay. Your mother trained you well. Now, climb.”

Papa is so sure, steel in his eyes.

Matty swallows and climbs.

They’re unsteady at first, unsure of themself. Slowly though, all those lessons with Inej—Mama—come back. Using their legs, tightening their core, scouting ahead, moving deliberately.

The officer’s have gone quiet. Matty ignores them regardless and makes it to Papa’s window despite shaking arms and shaking knees.

Kaz leans out and has Matty under both arms, hauling them into his office without hesitation. Where his cane is, they don’t know. They’re too occupied clutching at his suit, pressing their face into his neck. Papa holds them tightly and spins his chair so he can sit in it, Matty in his lap.

At twelve, they’re too old for this. Too old to cry, too old to sit in Papa’s lap. Matty should get down, should grow up but Papa only holds them, murmuring into their hair. “You made it. You’re safe, I’ve got you. No one’s going to hurt you.”

“I—I just want—wanted to show you… I’m sorry, Pa,” Matty sobs, snotty and shivering and confused. Everything went wrong so quickly. “I’m sorry.”

“Shhhh, dove, you have nothing to be sorry for. I’m going to kill them. I—” Kaz shudders. Matty can feel the way he shakes his head, the way he holds them tighter. “Don’t apologise.”

They stay like that for a while. At some point, Matty hears a commotion down in the alley. Someone that sounds an awful lot like Anika raising her voice and then one lone gunshot followed by the hasty stomping of Stadwatch boots.

Kaz has just set Matty down in another chair when someone knocks on the door to his office. This turns out to be Anika. She peers over Kaz’s shoulder when he opens the door and smiles at Matty.

“How’re you doing, Sweets?”

Their lip wobbles but they lift their chin and say, “Very well, thank you, Anika.”

“That was a fantastic climb you did there,” she adds, even as Kaz glares at her.

“Did you send those lousy pigs on their way?” Papa growls, not even trying to mask his language or his tone. “Or am I going to have to clean out some stalls tonight?”

“I wouldn’t worry about that, boss. Keeg and a couple of the boys went after ‘em.” Then, voice lowered, “They’ll be sleeping soundly tonight.”

Kaz nods. “Get a message to Inej. I’m taking Matty to the Van Eck’s.”

Thirteen

Matty spends almost half their time at the mansion on Geldstraat. Now that there’s a tunnel connecting The Crow Club to it, the temptation to sneak in whenever possible is too great. Besides, since they started taking music lessons with Uncle Wylan they have to be there all the time anyway.

They love music. There’s an inherent illogic to it they find alluring. It cannot be explained. Why, for instance, certain sounds harmonise while others don’t remains a mystery to even the most accomplished musicians. What it is about melodies that stick, that burrow into the mind and replay themselves over and over again, is similarly illusive. And yet, music remains profoundly meaningful, a pursuit treasured above many others, uniquely valuable across the world’s cultures. Music, like Matty, transcends explanation. They have found themself in it.

It is fortunate, then, that Wylan is an excellent teacher. He is attentive and knowledgeable. Matty is surprised to discover he is not… patient, like Kaz is. When, on occasion, they find themself too busy (or too lazy) to practise, when Uncle Jes distracts them with his latest obsession, Uncle Wylan has been known to grow stern. He never shouts and often, when this happens, Matty watches him retreat into himself and swiftly apologise. There is a history there Matty feels on the edges of, a history they are too afraid to probe.

Most of the time though, their lessons are great. They began on the pianoforte, which uncle Wylan insisted was the best instrument to learn music on, and have since progressed to the flute. Sometimes, they play duets with Julia, who has been playing the flute since she was seven and is a far more accomplished musician.

Matty also has a passable singing voice.

They don’t sing so much anymore.

Recently, the physical changes associated with puberty, have thrown their singing into disarray. They can hardly be expected to hold a tune when their voice cracks on every second word out of their mouth. On their own, the changes would be bearable, tolerable. The trouble is, Matty knows what they’re supposed to be becoming, a man—whatever that is.

They like being taller than their ma, whose hugs will always be wide enough to encompass the whole of them regardless of height differences. Watching Papa shave in the mornings makes them curious about doing the same, about whether they’ll be the kind of person who wears a beard one day. These things they can stand but there are other things that frighten them.

The things that frighten them have nothing to do with the changes or their family and everything to do with everyone else. Matty has noticed a shift, among the older boys in the Dregs and how they treat each other, the way they tease and rib and challenge each other. It’s charged and temperamental and increasingly centred around their relationships with girls. In all this, the boys seem to share an easy camaraderie based on a mutual experience Matty simply does not share. They have stopped being children and started being young men while Matty languishes in this unfinished state—not a child but not a man.

In this sense, Geldstraat is safe.

There Matty will not be teased for singing or playing the flute, for braiding their hair or going barefoot or crying over little things.

There, at thirteen years old, they tell Jesper about being dare.

The conversation happens after a morning lesson. While Julia moves to the drawing room, transmogrified into a rumpled, unruly pile on the sofa, her edges curled around a book, Matty meanders toward the kitchen. They are always hungry these days. Sometimes, Inej sends them to Geldstraat so that the Van Eck’s stocked larder might feed them in exchange for the many years the Dregs larder fed Jesper.

It’s Jesper who finds them with half a cold croquette in their mouth, stooped over the sink to avoid getting crumbs everywhere.

“You know no one’s going to take that away from you, right?” When he speaks, Matty jumps a half-foot backward and slams into the kitchen table behind them. Jesper only laughs, hands on his hips. “One of the wealthiest kids in this city and you eat like a canal rat.”

Matty swallows the remains of the croquette with a grimace, shrugs and says, “What do you expect? I was raised by canal rats.”

“Don’t let your mother hear you say that.”

Matty grins, an impish, toothy thing they have not yet learnt to hide. “I trust you to keep my secrets, Uncle.”

“Always.” Jesper crosses his heart and holds out his little finger. “I promise.”

Twining their little finger with his, Matty accepts the promise. They do trust Jesper, have always trusted Jesper, would trust him with anything.

Standing there in the middle of the Van Eck kitchen and listening to the wind sweeping in off the canal, Matty comes to a decision.

“I want to tell you something.”

Jesper turns from where he’s filling the stove-top kettle in the sink, his movements practised and familiar. A man at home.

When he notes the sincerity in Matty’s stance, he stops. “What is it?”

“I—” Now, this is the tricky part. How to explain the snarled mess of a being they’ve become? “Do you know about the dare?”

“No, never heard of it.”

“Not it—them.”

“Oh?” Jesper crosses his arms, leaning back against the sink. There’s an ease to him, a languid grace, Matty dreams of one day possessing. “Tell me.”

“My baba told me about them. They’re named after Sankt Darezljiv, who is the saint of farmers and bountiful harvests, and was sometimes a man, sometimes a woman.”

When Matty had asked Inej about Darezljiv, about the dare, she’d smiled at them and laughed a little. Is that it then, my dove? Matty had nodded and that’d been that. Not long after, Kaz had started referring to Matty differently and they knew Ma had spoken with him.

This feels different. It feels the same. They trust Jesper the same way they trust their parents. In some ways, with this, they trust him more. And yet…

“And these dare, they’re farmers?”

Matty sees the opening, the glint in Jesper’s grey eyes that means he’s making trouble. He knows.

Laughing quietly, they aim a punch at his bony shoulder. “No.”

“Then what, Matty?”

“They’re—they take their name after him because they aren’t just men or women. They’re both. They’re neither.”

“Is that so?” The glint is still there, flaring to something brighter. Jesper’s eyes crease as he smiles, the lines around his mouth deepening too. Stepping closer and wrapping one broad hand over Matty’s shoulder, he says, “And?”

It’s work, saying the words, and Jesper is making them do it. He watches them patiently, waiting for them to articulate themself using the words they have chosen. The words that chose them. Matty is grateful, even as the words stick in their craw.

“And… I am dare.”

The smile Jesper gives them is as bright as the copper kettle singing on the stove, as warm as the tea he pours from it.

“Yes, you are,” he says, holding out a hand. Matty takes it and they shake. “It’s fantastic to meet you.”

Their hand is swallowed by Jesper’s and he towers over them but in that moment they feel metres tall, like if they stretched up they’d touch the ceiling, the roof, the sky. There is so much space in the world. In this moment, it feels as if they’ll never need to hide again, never need to contort themself again. Why would they? Why should they? When there’s a word for this, a time and a place for this, a people for this.

Matty is all things at all times. Matty is white and brown, a charmer and a scoundrel. Matty is trouble. Matty is a heart the size of Ravka and a fine vein of greedy, cheeky, willful. Matty is a boy and a girl and a four-legged spider on the face of the world. Matty is Kerch and Suli and dare. Matty is Matty. That's all they want to be.

A/N: This is so self-indulgent I can't even justify it. Did I just want to write about being a biracial, gender queer little menace child? Maybe. Did I shamelessly use my Kanej baby to do it? 100%. Other Than Damage is my most successful fic on here but I'm not expecting anywhere near those numbers. If you do like this though, let me know. It would make my day!

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