“Kaz,” a voice says.
Kaz’s head jerks up, too wet to even be angry at the rain anymore, straight into worried eyes and furrowed black brows.
“Jesper.”
“That’s me.” Jesper straightens for a moment to look down at Kaz, the crease between his brows deepening as he takes in the way Kaz is shivering, glove pressed to bleeding bicep, left leg bent at a right angle and right leg propped diagonally.
“You don’t look great,” Jesper says succinctly.
“Do you plan to help?”
“Of course I do,” Jesper says, that concerned furrow deepening. “I’m not here to make fun of you, Kaz. Come on.”
Kaz removes his hand from his bicep to reach out for Jesper, silent and faintly trembling, the leather glove on his left creaking inaudibly as he tightens his grip on his crow’s head. Jesper takes it and pulls him to his feet, letting go the moment their clasped hands don’t help him. Jesper isn’t gentle, not like how a good man would pick up a wounded songbird, soft and fragile, but there’s an echo of care in the motion that makes Kaz itch and keen in equal measure.
“Where are we going?” Kaz asks, voice rough.
“To our place,” Jesper says, clearly talking about the house he now shares with Wylan and Ms. Hendricks. “It’s closer than the Slat from here and I think I’ll get gutted by Nina if I try to take you back to the Slat and those terrible stairs.”
Kaz could refuse. He could tell Jesper to take him back to the Slat anyway and Jesper would probably do it.
Kaz isn’t an idiot, though. Not entirely.
“Let’s go,” he says through his teeth.
“Let’s go,” Jesper echoes, and they begin walking out of the alley. Every step jars Kaz’s knee, his breath tight and controlled, but he can do this himself. Even if his leg shakes, even if his breathing is labored, even if his brows are knitted together painfully in a bitter harmony to his leg.
There’s a small lip between the gutter along the main street and the sidewalk on either side of the road. The gutters are overflowing, making the streets become little rivers, straight and shallow, dirty but cleaner than they would be outside of the Financial District. It’s that same lip that the toe of Kaz’s shoe catches on as they cross to the other side of the road, sudden and startling, and all Kaz can do is curl in on himself as he falls to the pavement with a thud.
And yet, even as he groans at the dull pain blooming in his hip and shoulder, he knows that he should have fallen harder.
“Easy,” Jesper says, and a pressure disappears from the other side of Kaz’s thick coat, his armor against touch and chilling rain, though better at protecting from one than the other. Jesper’s voice is closer than it should be.
Kaz looks up and over, straight into Jesper’s eyes.
“Help me up,” Kaz says, each word clipped and tight. Jesper nods, offering Kaz a dripping hand, and Kaz grabs his wrist with a vice grip as together they get Kaz back to his feet, cane steadying him.
“Fuck the rain,” Kaz says.
Jesper nods, agreeing without mocking even if it still pulls at Kaz’s seams a little. “Fuck the rain, he repeats. “Come on, stay close so no one picks my pockets again.”
They both know that no pickpockets are loitering in the Financial District in the middle of a torrential storm. Kaz hauls his right arm over Jesper’s shoulders anyway, wordless and undefeated—no matter how it may feel to him. Jesper curls their right hands together in a hold Kaz has always known how to break, a hold they both know Kaz has broken before. It picks at the threads holding his twisted heart together.
They walk.
By the time Kaz catches sight of the Hendriks Mansion through the rain-sent gloom, he knows three things: First, that Fifth Harbor has yet to burn, guarded by a few Dregs in case the Gray Bulls try another stunt, the kerosene washing away with the rain; Second, that Floris, Dhamiria, and Jooske all made it back to the Slat with their lives, nursing their wounds and trying to keep dry in the miserable weather.
And third, that Kaz can feel phantom fingers against his sides and curling around his ankles, threatening to drag him into the rushing gutters on either side of the empty street. He has never been so thankful for his thick wool coat than he is now, pressed against Jesper as the sharpshooter all but carries him down the last street out of some number Kaz has lost count of.
Kaz hisses sharply as an unexpected bump jostles his bad leg, a string of pained curses dripping from his lips creating a harmony with Jesper’s murmured apologies and the rain battering the cobblestones around them.
He had lost his hat a ways back. It’s strange that this sticks in his mind instead of the million minute things that could take its place.
“Almost there,” Jesper promises, voice thick with an emotion that might be pain as he hefts Kaz a little higher, their hands curled together tightly by Jesper’s right shoulder. Jesper is taller than Kaz, always has been, and the angle of this position is awkward for the both of them. Jesper almost seems not to mind today.
They lapse into silence again, the third or fifth time since they began this painful, tedious journey. Kaz keeps watching the cobblestones beneath his feet, refusing to trip a second time.
A door opens and a square of warm light shines on Kaz, making the rain glow like gold around him, molten pain where it drips down his nose and into the rivulets between the stones under his feet.
“Come on,” Jesper mutters near his ear, and Kaz can barely manage a husky grunt in reply before Jesper is guiding him into the Hendriks residence. A sharp inhale in a familiar throat meets his ears and he finally looks up, hair plastered against his forehead and skull.
Wylan, Nina, and Inej sit together in the foyer, three distinct shades of skin all glowing gold in the warm glow of wood-fire and lamplight. Inej is the one who had made that sound, her deep brown eyes caught on his rain-soaked, shuddering frame.
“But somehow Sankt Vaska is…” Nina is saying, and her words trail off before she turns to look over the back of the low, velvet couch, breath catching in her throat like Inej’s as she catches sight of the figures in the doorway. By now Wylan’s eyes are wide and worried, and the look makes Kaz bristle like a drowned cat.
“Later,” Inej says, standing and pulling her gaze from Kaz to go fetch a towel.
“Later,” Nina agrees. She stands as well. “There’s a couch right here that Wylan would like ruined with some rain,” she says, and Wylan nods like his chin is spring loaded. “Come on, Kaz, let’s not make a lake right by the door.”
Thank Ghezen for Nina’s not-friendship, pointy and amicable.
Jesper helps Kaz sit on the couch, the seat beneath Kaz uncomfortably squelchy a moment after he sits down, and Inej manages to return just in time to distract him from his throat closing at just how helpless he feels.
“Here,” Inej says. Kaz takes the offered towel with rain slick leather gloves and curses deep in his throat, silent and poison-filled, at the way his hands shake and the way all four Crows look at him with so much worry. He distracts himself by wrapping the towel around his wool coat and layers of fabric. It’s a useless gesture, still dripping with rain and burning pain, but it’s still a gesture. It’s a gesture, kind and thoughtful.
Damn his treacherous, blood-red heart.
“There’s an empty guest room down here,” Wylan says nearly an hour of stewing and drying later. Kaz had bandaged his arm, removing his wool coat with shaking vulnerability as everyone suddenly developed a burning fascination with the fireplace and its warm, roaring flames. Kaz will be the last to admit that the warm air and the towel-mussed dryness of his hair are lifting his mood, as are the ability to finally sit and the way blood no longer drips down his arm.
“For me?” Kaz asks sardonically.
“For you,” Wylan agrees, either not noticing or ignoring Kaz’s bad temper. “I’ll show you which one and you can dry off more there, go to sleep in your wet clothes, whatever you want to do.”
“This towel is dripping.”
“I’ll get you another one.”
Kaz pauses. Wylan watches him with eyes that, years ago, skittered away at the tap of his cane a handful of feet away. Now they watch him unwaveringly, patient and calm, and Kaz thinks there’s something in that change that he’s supposed to be noticing. He wouldn’t be thinking of the difference if he hadn’t noticed it, but he doesn’t have the time now to think about it any longer. He needs to dry off.
“Okay.”
Wylan nods, apparently finding no need to waste words, and Kaz struggles to his feet to follow, every step sending lightning shooting up his leg. The guest room is close to the sitting room, simple and small in the eyes of a mercher when Wylan opens the door, wordlessly heading off to get Kaz another towel.
The door closed soundly behind Kaz, he limps further into the room, eyeing the bed, and slumps into the nearby chair instead, sinking into the plush seat with a quiet groan.
A knock sounds on the door, intimately familiar. It’s been months since he’s heard it, longer still because Inej rarely ever had cause to use it.
“Yes?”
“May I come in?”
“Yes.”
The doorknob turns, and Inej slips into the room, a dry towel in her hands, on footsteps Kaz can hear faintly against the wooden floorboards. What else has changed since he last saw her?
“Floris told us everything.”
“Floris ran all the way here? Not back to the Slat?”
Inej’s lips curl softly. “He said he was a block away when he lost the Stadwatch. He told us everything, Kaz. He said the Gray Bulls were going to burn Fifth Harbor.”
Kaz nods. “And Sankta Marya’s Deliverance.”
“I can get a new ship. You were hurt chasing them off.”
“You shouldn’t have to.”
Inej’s eyes flash. “Kaz, you were hurt.”
A laugh bubbles in Kaz’s throat, dark and humorless. “That’s just business in the Barrel, Inej. I thought you knew that.”
“That,” Inej hisses, “is not the point. Do you think I would really value my ship above the lives of the Dregs? Above your life?”
Kaz stays silent and Inej’s eyes widen. They fill with anger, then with sadness, and Inej steps forward to carefully give Kaz the towel, a silent way to say I’m not mad at you. Not really.
“Why do you think my ship is more important to me than you, Kaz?”
“Your ship is your freedom, isn’t it?”
“You’re not chaining me down.”
Kaz’s mouth snaps closed before he can send her his next retort, hands stilling against the towel. He’s always been taller than her, since the very first day they met, but when he sits and she stands he can look up at her and imagine what it would be like to see her on a tightrope or to see her flying with silks. He can look up and still see them as equals, just like he always has.
“Don’t you see?” Inej asks helplessly. “Ships can be replaced, Kaz, but people... my people? They can’t be.”
Kaz swallows the lump in his throat. “I’m sorry,” he says. For this. For all the things he was undoubtedly an ass about over the last years, over and over again.
“Don’t be. Just be better.”
Kaz breaks eye contact, looking instead at the crow skull on top of his cane, propped up against his thigh.
Inej sighs, and the towel grows a little heavier in Kaz’s hands as she lets go.
“I should let you get some sleep. Now is a bad time for this.”
Inej swivels and pads towards the door, soft and slow, halting in the doorway.
“Goodnight, Kaz.”
The door swings shut.