Chapter Text
By the time her door creaks open, Inej has given up on the idea that he’ll come see her at all.
She lays on the uncomfortable medik cot, trying not to scratch at the coarse fabric of her bandages. Above her, a flickering oil lamp swings back and forth in time with the rocking of the hull, throwing long shadows around the cramped, dank room. Inej imagines the glass cracking, a drop of simmering oil spilling out and landing on her skin. She imagines Kaz, standing on the lookout or sketching maps on the bow, wincing, and knowing full well why.
Inej hardly remembers the harsh moments after she was stabbed, but there are some things she cannot forget. Strong hands lifting her from the ground; an uneven gait pounding against the slick boards of the harbor; the almost imperceptible underscore of terror in that gravelly, familiar voice.
Not just yet, Inej.
She had been prepared to die. She had accepted her end, all but welcomed it. Anything was preferable to more torture and rape; almost anything was preferable to the empty, violent, loveless life it seemed she was damned to, the one Kaz refused to let go of. The shell of a man that she knew would never have come back for her, wouldn’t have even known where to find her. If she’d died, broken the tether between him, then the man that Kaz insisted he was would have been glad to see his soul finally left alone.
But Kaz has always been too good at putting up a front. So good that sometimes, he begins to believe it himself. So now the question remains: will he give into that lie? In these uncharted waters, will Kaz let his heartless reputation take root in his spirit, cement over his eyes and mouth and heart until it’s all as hard as stone, as devoid of feeling, as close to dead without ever being truly alive? Will he come to her bedside finally relinquish that terrible armor that she felt crack when he saved her? Or when she is well enough to walk again, will she see him standing silently at the wheel, staring at her with crow-black eyes and all but telling her he wished he’d left her for dead?
As the days tick by without hide nor hair of him, Inej fears she may already know the answer.
Nina tries to reassure her, distract her, and truly, Inej is grateful. It’s not as if she can dress her own wounds, sing herself to sleep with horribly out of tune Ravkan shanties. But her only constant companion is that damned lamp overhead, and like a magician’s swinging pocket watch, she thinks it may be starting to hypnotize her into a state of delirium. Maybe none of it was ever real. Maybe she made the whole idea of soulmates up to justify her own terrifying pain, to graft herself onto the soul of a ruthless man so she could convince herself he alone was a pillar of violence, never her. Maybe she’d given up on her faith long ago.
A knock at the door.
Inej turns her head, wondering if it was only her imagination. Nina’s knocks are slower; Wylan’s, more gentle. Matthias doesn’t visit her, and Jesper’s never knocked on a door in his life. So that only leaves one impossible option.
The knock comes again. This time, Inej feels her knuckles sting.
”Come in,” she calls. Croaks, more like, but she thinks she can be forgiven.
The door creaks open, and there he stands.
Sheepish has never been a word Inej would use to describe Kaz, and perhaps she wouldn’t even now. But she can’t deny something has shaken in him. There’s something off about the way he holds himself, the firm line of his lips, the strict fit of his coat around his shoulders. Now more than ever, Dirtyhands seems like a costume.
There’s any number of names she could call him in the terse silence, but in the end, she settles simply on, “Kaz.”
Nothing changes in his demeanor, but when he speaks again, she knows the roughness of his voice is forced. “Wraith.”
Inej bristles at the name. “Building a wall even now, Kaz?”
Kaz doesn’t respond, and Inej didn’t expect him to—she just had to say something before her anger took a worse, sharper form. Instead, he steps in and shuts the door behind him, heading for the supply shelves.
”What are you doing?” Inej rasps. She wishes she could keep some small shred of dignity with her voice, but she can hardly even lift her head, so she follows Kaz with her eyes. Look at me, she hopes her stare whispers into the back of his head. Look at me.
He rifles through the needles and rags and bottles of herbs until he produces a numbing poultice and a roll of bandages. Slowly, he plucks up a bottle of pure alcohol. It could just be a trick of the faltering light, but when he turns back to her, she thinks he might be shaking.
”Kaz?” She asks. He starts approaching her, and something sparks in her chest. It could be elation; it could be fear. “What are you doing?”
He sets his bundle on the little table next to her, sitting in the rickety wooden chair drawn up by the bedside, and starts unwinding the roll of cloth. “Nina said your bandages need changing,” he says simply. It’s anything but simple.
”So why isn’t Nina doing it?”
Kaz meets her eye. She can only imagine what he sees when he looks at her: limp limbs, cracked lips, a ratty braid and exhausted eyes. But he’s seen her worse. After all, he met her at the hands of Tante Heleen.
“She needs rest.”
”And you?” Inej asks. “What do you need?”
Dirtyhands would say, A spider than can walk. The boy she wanted would say, You. Kaz, part and parcel that he is, has the right mind to stay quiet.
Once Kaz has prepared a few bandages with the scissors Nina left, he looks to Inej, then to the spot on her abdomen by her shirt. It takes a moment for Inej to realize that he needs her to lift it up for him. Sparing a glance at his trembling fingers, she supposed she can’t begrudge him this.
When the fabric pulls up past her worn, bled-through bandages, she hisses in pain. A small puff of air escapes Kaz, and Inej’s brow furrows.
”So now you’re not afraid to show it?” She asks through gritted teeth. Kaz doesn’t respond. His eyes are stuck on the edge of her wound, peaking out from beneath the cloth around her stomach. Kaz has never been one to blanch at a gash, but this is different, and they both know it.
He leans forwards. “I’ll need to get to your back for these.”
”Yeah,” Inej breathes.
He reaches out for her, and she lets him. His hands are hesitant and testing, stopping in the air a few times before they finally land on the skin of her shoulders. For a moment, Inej is back in the Menagerie, the firm hands pinning her down, the medical cot beneath her a plush bed designed to confine as much as to comfort. But she focuses on the leather seams digging into her skin, and it draws her back. Kaz is not comfort, and Kaz is not confinement. Maybe he can be something more.
With Kaz’s help, she slowly curls into a sitting position, gritting her teeth against the noises of pain trying to escape her. It doesn’t matter, though, because Kaz groans next to her, and it pulls a quiet whine from her lips. When she spares him a glance, there’s a twitch at the edge of his brow.
Kaz Brekker is in pain. It’s a sight that could collapse civilizations.
She can feel his hands shaking on her back, can feel him fighting not to pull away. Inej can only imagine the battle he’s raging against himself—or perhaps pain, as it always does, has drowned out all else.
Inej leans her shoulder against the wall while Kaz cuts through her old bandages. The first brush of steel against skin makes her jump, then wince. Kaz doesn’t apologize. He just tightens his grip and moves on.
Kaz cuts through one layer, then another. Through heavy pants, Inej asks, “Why are you doing this?”
Kaz’s hands pause. Inej can feel the scissors, the loose bandages, the sticky congealment of her own blood. She can feel the pain. And from it, she thinks she can almost feel hope.
“I don’t want to be in pain anymore,” Kaz says finally. His hands resume their work—cold air hits her as the rest of the bandages fall away, and it feels like a release. “I don’t want you to be in pain anymore.”
The admission punches the breath out of Inej. The Bastard of the Barrel is ready to spit out the taste of suffering.
Kaz presses his lips tightly together and holds up the cloth and alcohol. His black eyes ask her if she’s ready. She wants to be strong, to give him a firm yes and face the pain with the same armor he would.
But she is not Kaz, and she never will be. So she takes a moment to close her eyes, brace herself, then meet his gaze and nod.
Kaz pours some alcohol methodically on a cloth, caps the bottle like a bartender. When it touches her, she gasps and jerks away. Kaz has to close his eyes and measure an even exhale through his nose before he can continue.
“So much for ‘investment’,” Inej gasps against the burning in her gut.
”I shouldn’t have said that,” Kaz tells her. His stone-on-stone voice is softened. Shaking. “I shouldn’t have said a lot of things.”
Kaz presses the cloth into the deepest part of her wound. Inej balls her hands into fists. “How much are we admitting tonight, Kaz?”
Kaz is silent as he finishes cleaning her wound, the last of the blood and loose bandage threads. He is silent as he disposes of the cloth and takes his own swig from the bottle of alcohol. It isn’t until he begins spreading the numbing poultice over a fresh bandage that he says, “I was wrong.”
Inej knows that it’s probably not the brightest idea to press the man whose hands are hovering over a gaping wound in your stomach, but tonight, she’ll trust Kaz’s gentility. “About what?”
Kaz takes a breath. “You. Me. The—the…”
”Saarahkt,” Inej breathes.
”The saarahkt.” For the first time, Kaz isn’t using Inej’s language to mock her. “I was wrong. You were right.”
Inej huffs. “There are people who would kill to hear you say those words.”
”There are people who have tried.”
”So what?” Inej asks. “You wouldn’t take me at my word? It took me being run through for you to care?”
Kaz applies the first numbing bandage. The relief is so sudden and intense that Inej hardly hears Kaz murmur, “I always cared.”
Inej forces her eyes to Kaz. He looks like he’s fighting not to relax into the numbness. She almost forgot he was hurting as much as her.
”I always cared,” he repeats. He spreads the poultice over her wound with a care she never would have accredited Dirtyhands. “I didn’t…I’ve never been able to…do things with it. Not like you do, with stories, myths.”
”It’s not a myth, Kaz.”
Kaz shuts his eyes. “I know. I know.”
Kaz lifts the clean bandage from the tray. But the edges are clean and delicate, and rip on the seams of his gloves. He curses.
Inej eyes his gloves, the sliver of bare wrist beneath them. Kaz follows her gaze, and she knows he understands the question it poses. The choice he has to make.
Them, or me?
Wordlessly, Kaz undoes the clasps, slides them off, folds them and tucks them beneath the used numbing poultice. Inej stared at them, the blood-stained things hiding under healing. It feels like they’re watching her, watching him, watching every second as they inch by. All-seeing, just like her saints.
Deliriously, she wonders if they are what Kaz prays to.
Kaz’s bare, pale hands take the bandages back up. They’ve resumed their shaking. Inej wonders if he can quell it to help her.
Maybe he doesn’t need to.
He winds the bandages around her once, twice, and she can feel him wince each time. A burn starts up in her lip. When she looks up, Kaz’s teeth are digging in so hard he’s starting to bleed.
”Kaz,” she says, exhausted and trying. “Breathe.”
And Kaz, just the same, does.
“I was scared,” he says. The words sound like they’ve been wrenched from him, lurching and shaking and small. He barely sounds like the man who told her to leave when she gave him the truth. “I’ve been—“ His hand presses flat against her side to undo a twist in the fabric, and his breath hitches. But he does not pull away.
”I’ve been a coward. All my life, Inej, I’ve been a coward and a fool, pretending he wasn’t. And I can’t keep pretending forever. Not if it means…” His eyes flick to the bloody rage on the table. “Not if it means this.”
It—the bare hands, the admission, all of it—feels as grand as a tidal wave. Inej can hardly speak on what it does for her heart. The little girl within her can hardly believe her soulmate is the Bastard of the Barrel; the hopeless lynx can hardly believe he’s here at all; the woman she is today can hardly believe he’s here, and touching her, and trying to tell the truth. All she knows is that she’s in less pain than she’s been in in days, and Kaz is the reason why.
“And what’s your plan?” Inej asks, because she will not settle when her heart is soft. “Waltz back into the Barrel when this is all done and proudly proclaim that you’re saarahkt?”
Kaz finishes tying the knot of her bandages, helps her lay back down. Inej watches him pull back his hands, close his eyes and take a few steadying breaths. The gloves stare at them from the table. Watching, watching, watching.
Kaz doesn’t spare them a glance.
”I don’t know what I’ll do,” he finally admits. “We have a lot of ground to cover before we go back to Ketterdam. And I’m…I’ve never done this before. I don’t know how…” Kaz trails off.
Slowly, so he can see what she’s doing, Inej covers Kaz’s hand with her own. He stiffens, but he does not move away.
“That’s the secret, Kaz. Nobody knows.”
Kaz’s shaking still doesn’t stop. Slowly, like a concession, he pulls his hand away. “Can you have me like this?” He asks, clenching his trembling fingers. “Will you have me?”
Inej reaches for him again, then stops herself. Instead she takes hold of his sleeve, and guides his hand to the bandage covering her wound. “As long as you can keep admitting that you’re wrong.”
Finally, Kaz conjures what may be a smile. “That’s quite a challenge, Wraith.”
”Can’t shy away now, Brekker.”
Kaz rubs his thumb over her bandages, and finally, just like her family always said it would, the sting brings her comfort. Inej imagines showing this moment to the eight year old on fire in her caravan, the fourteen year old screaming in the cabin of a ship, the Wraith lying broken and bleeding on a pile of crates in the harbor. But she’s not sure any version of her would have believed it until now.
But, no. No, that’s not true. Because Inej has always been a believer, an optimist, a woman who looks to the stars even when the ground is crumbling beneath her feet. She’d tried to tell herself long ago that Kaz was not worth her soul, but even then, it hadn’t been true. She had always known it; now he does, too.
“So,” Inej asks. “Now that my stomach hurts as much as my leg—still need me to climb an incinerator shaft?”
Finally, a smile breaks through the cloud cover of his face. It’s as sharp as it’s always been—so is she. Perhaps he’s not the only one who’s changed.
”As long as you’re careful,” he says. He starts putting away the alcohol, the cloth, the old bandages, bloody as a past. He leaves his gloves exactly where they are. Before he sits down next to her, he stills the oil lamp’s swinging. “The last thing I need on a job is two sets of burns.”
Inej smiles. There’s still a million things to talk through, she knows. A million men to outsmart and thirty-million kruge to find, to take. But her soul is complete, and so is his.
She thinks they might just be up to it.
Slowly, the both of them shaking and new, Kaz takes her hand.