#kaz when van eck thinks he conned him:
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im so sorry but kaz brekker looks like this
i would be offended but...yeah you're right he does
#my first thought was#'scheming face?' 'definitely'#kaz when van eck thinks he conned him:#but it was all part of the plan#kaz brekker#six of crows#shadow and bone#soc duology#shadow and bone netflix#ask tag
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I was just thinking about how Kaz built this heartless persona for himself and how everyone falls for it to varying degrees: He's widely regarded as a monster and as "not made right"; Inej thought he wouldn't come for her and that once she was useless to him that he would discard her; Jesper never knows where exactly he stands with him; Nina "doesn't want to know what dark hole he crawled out of"; Wylan calls him "the most vengeful creature he had ever met"; Matthias believes he's a demon. But in reality his true motives for most things are love and grief and loss of family.
Kaz only wanted money for revenge, he didn't want to try and build a meaningful connection with Imogen because she would distract him from pursuing his vengeance, he only mentions how Pekka conned them out of money to explain how they ended up on the streets, how it was never about the money but about Jordie.
Kaz says that he and Jordie were such easy marks because they missed their dad. Kaz's biggest gripe was not just the loss of Jordie but the illusion of a home and family that Pekka had snatched away before the plague snatched Jordie away too.
It all always leads back to Jordie and his loss and avenging him and about never wanting to be that vulnerable again. Kaz created Kaz Brekker to protect himself, to hide his vulnerabilities. His grief is hidden behind a fake name, his naivety is hidden behind violence, his touch aversion is hidden behind the gloves.
Kaz pushes people away because he fears what will happen if he lets them in. He gets mean when he's vulnerable to hide said vulnerability. He did it in the clocktower, he did it in the bathroom. After he accidently calls Jesper Jordie he lashes out verbally and physically, when Inej asks about Jordie and Pekka's involvement in what happened he recounts how he tortured someone. In both incidents it's again Jordie that he's hiding, that is causing him to be vulnerable. It always leads back to Jordie. Even with Van Eck! He's again angry that he fell for what he fell for before, the thing that made him lose Jordie making him temporarily lose Inej.
In both the Jesper and Inej examples he hides behind violence - by brawling with Jesper and recounting a time when he tortured a young boy. He does this because he loves Inej and Jesper, and it scares him, and he doesn't know what to do with it. Because everyone he's ever loved has died in horrible ways (his father was torn apart by a plough, his brother died from a horrible sickness) and he doesn't want to go through it again - especially since he still hasn't let go of Jordie, although it has been eight years.
Kaz is a person who loves so deeply. Who is mainly motivated by love. Who, when Pekka asks him what he wants, replies "Bring my brother back from the dead." because he never cared about money, nor power, nor anything else. He just wants his brother. All he wanted this whole time is his brother, and since he no longer has him he lashes out, all hurt and grieving. He's hurting so badly that he destroys everyone even mildly involved in what took Jordie away from him. But he only did that because he loved Jordie. It wasn't revenge for the sake of money it was for the sake of love. It was for the sake of Jordie.
Kaz loved Jordie so much that he became the most feared person in Ketterdam, that he took down the King of the Barrel and a merchant from one of the oldest families in Ketterdam (because even if his gripe with Van Eck was unrelated, it's because of Jordie's loss that life snowballed into their interactions and the consequent betrayal and destruction of everything Van Eck held dear). Kaz loved Jordie so much that it changed the entire course of the narrative.
If not for Jordie's loss the heist wouldn't of happened, all of the Crows lives would've been different, some of the Crows would even most likely be dead, and this extends even further to much more major things. The King of Ravka managed to steal the titanium because of his help which will aid Ravka in wars, the path to jurda parem is no longer in the hands of the Fjerdans and a cure is being safely developed in Ravka because Kaz rescued Kuwei, Wylan took over the Van Eck empire because Kaz tampered with Van Eck's will and papers, Inej is working on taking down the slave trade which is only possible because Kaz freed her from her indenture, Nina became the queen of Fjerda because of things that Kaz started (her joining the Dregs instead of being indebted to the Dime Lions, him freeing Matthias, him organising the heist, Matthias dying in the aftermath, her going to Fjerda to bury Matthias and the results which ended up being her and her new lover on the Fjerdan throne trying to fix prejudice against grisha, and women, in the most conservative country).
All of it leads back to Kaz. And he did all of it for Jordie. It all always leads back to Jordie. Jordie and Kaz's love for his big brother and his grief over having him snatched away from him.
#he makes me INSANE#talk about haunting the narrative#kaz really said: my brother is haunting me and i'm going to make that everyones problem#kaz brekker#jordie rietveld#kaz rietveld#jesper fahey#inej ghafa#nina zenik#wylan van eck#matthias helvar#pekka rollins#six of crows#six of crows duology#grishaverse#my analysis
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It genuinely keeps me up at night that when Van Eck attempts to reveal to the Merchant Council that Wylan can’t read, they all react exactly as Wylan feared they would. (Spoilers ahead!) Of course since they don’t believe him and Wylan’s brilliant memory for Jesper’s words protects him we don’t see the full force of their response, but it is made PAINFULLY clear that they all would have responded the same way Van Eck did - “How could you say such things about your own blood?”. It’s an incredibly meaningful and arguably subtle detail that Bardugo implements to remind the reader that although Van Eck was our main antagonist in this case, there is no singular villain in this story because what the characters are fighting is an ultimately unbeatable source. The system is impossible to truly defeat because it is a hydra, we see that when Dryden’s father died he took on the role of the Council and acted the exact same way he did, and if Van Eck had raised Wylan to one day take over from him then he too would have been forcibly moulded into that shape by the poisonous environment of this governing body. The defeat of Van Eck, had Kaz not amended his will to name Wylan his inheritor, would have been only that: the downfall of a singular man, to be easily replaced by another with the same dangerously capitalistic values and crude methods of implementing them. It would not have been any change in the system that oppresses the main characters - I think it’s kind of similar to the Hunger Games (spoilers ahead) when Katniss chooses to kill Coin instead of Snow because she realises that killing Snow doesn’t actually change the system if someone else will simply step into his shoes. We also see this reflected in Kaz and his mission to destroy Rollins, since by doing so he too has taken the actions Rollins did. When Inej points out their similarities he denies it, saying “I don’t sell girls, I don’t con helpless kids out of their money”. Inej replies with the gentle, HEARTBREAKING sentence: “Look at the floor of the Crow Club, Kaz”. And this is so important because Kaz has no consideration for what happens to those people once they step outside his door. How do they fair after he scams them? How many of them have had no other money to fall back on? Did one of them sell their daughter to be able to pay off their debts to him? He’d never know, he just had the money and that’s all he thinks about. But if that girl survived long enough to want revenge, who would she blame? Say she didn’t want to blame her parents, like Kaz doesn’t want to blame Jordie, then who becomes the manifestation of all her hatred, the one thing she has decided that destroying will cure her? Kaz does. Just as Rollins has for him.
Every system of this city is a hydra, and there are so many beautifully written reminders of this without forcing it down our throats, but there is also the hope of genuine, real change. In Wylan, joining the Merchant Council as someone opposed to its views, as someone who has lived in both sides of this city and been abused by both of them, as someone who understands that real change is hard to implement. In Inej, as she journeys against the system that abused her not for revenge, but for the protection of all the children who have been hurt and killed, of all the children being hurt and killed, and of all the children who would have been hurt and killed if she didn’t stop the slavers who sought them, as someone who knows that real change is action. In Jesper, as someone raised far from the suffocating closed-minded atmosphere of the Merchant Council and who can support Wylan through it, as someone who knows that striving for real change is messy and chaotic, but that it’s where he thrives. In Matthias, who died believing that the world could truly change, who died believing in Nina, believing in himself, and believing that his death was a necessary sacrifice to real change, even though he wanted it to be peaceful. In Nina, as someone who had learned that real change cannot always be won with violence, as someone who will learn to use her new power to restructure a civilisation, as someone who will spend the rest of her life striving for change because nothing could ever be worse than her beloved having died in vain. And in Kaz, in the small ways, in the fear of what he could become that will hold him back from becoming the next head of the hydra, in his love for Inej shifting his perception of the world, and in his slow journey of healing, maybe one day killing Rollins will be enough. And if that doesn’t work, he’ll burn the world down and start it all again.
#every so often I start to think I’ve run out of posts for you guys#then something like this hits me#there’s always something new to say#i love it#grishaverse#six of crows#leigh bardugo#crooked kingdom#inej ghafa#kaz brekker#nina zenik#jesper fahey#wylan van eck#matthias helvar#kanej#wesper#helnik#book analysis#fantasy books#soc analysis#soc analyst#soc meta
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I'll never get over that when Kaz realize that Van Eck conned him he goes back instantly to the first time he was conned it's "It was Hertzoon and his coffeehouse all over again, only now Kaz was old enough to know better." and he tries to trick Van Eck back but he ends up losing and it's "He felt as he had looking into the darkened windows of the house on Zelverstraat. Helpless once more" HELPLESS ONCE MORE
and then he's saying to Jesper “Saints, Jesper, you really haven’t learned anything in the Dregs, have you? You’re still the same dumb farm boy who stepped off the boat.” but I can't help thinking this is what he is thinking about himself
#i'm gonna lay in bed and cry#this chapter is full of reference to Kaz Rietveld and dumb pigeons and then we have the angry that moved younger Kaz Brekker#after he was reborn#screaming and crying and throwing up#six of crows#kaz brekker#*six of queue#lady a speaks now*
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the hungering hearts
circle III: gluttony
But he feels warm, pleased. He leans against the back of the chair and watches her
He can hear her heart and it’s the rhythm that he can recognize; it’s the melody that sings to him whenever he lowers his mouth to her neck, to her wrist, to her thigh.
kanej vampire au/ read on ao3
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The businesses begin to suffer. Not much, nothing to be concerned about. But he’s more concerned about how unconcerned he is about it. He does the books absent-mindedly, cataloging the losses. Reads the Council meeting minutes and extracts interesting tidbits of information; stores them in his brain for safe-keeping and never uses them.
Pekka Rollins still doesn’t come back, and now he thinks he knows why. The scientist - the Ice Court, the streets talk. Oh, what a job. A dream for a thief. And he would've pulled it off, he thinks. He could’ve extracted Bo Yul-Bayur and given him to the highest bidder on a silver platter if Van Eck was smart enough to ask him, not Rollins. With the right crew: with his Wraith, with Jesper. With Nina and the insider knowledge of her brainless Fjerdan hunk. And with Wylan Van Eck as insurance - he still doesn’t quite believe his insistence that his father would not hesitate before double-conning the crew that holds his son. In and out, quiet like rats in the night. Yeah, he could’ve done it.
But alas, he didn’t. No need to focus on that.
What he is focused on is - ah, Inej. Inej, Inej. They walk into rooms together and people talk, in the corners, behind doors left ajar, and she squeezes his hand, small fingers closing on black leather, her dark eyes unbothered. Let them talk. And he knows why they talk. The walls of the Slat are dry, uneven and cardboard-thin. Every grunt and moan, every laugh and cry reverberates through the bones of the building. There are no secrets in the Slat, except for precious few.
And people have been saying that he’s sleeping with Inej ever since he brought her from the Menagerie. It bothered him then for some irritating, itching reason that he couldn’t put his finger on. It still bothers him now, except now it’s true.
Maybe it’s because he doesn’t want her name on their lips. Or at least, he doesn’t want it spoken with anything less than fear, less than respect. And she holds her head high, still, but whatever respect she has earned with her brass knuckles and her skills for the impossible gets muddled up by the way she moans for him, her face pressed into the bent of her elbow, when he fucks into her and the frame of her ramshackle bed bumps against the wall. He diminishes her worth. Spoils her.
At some point, Jesper stops barging into his office and pestering him for things, giving him moony-eyes. Ever since his Da came to the city and saw who his son became, he’s walking around the Barrel all mopey. Gambles more than ever. Loses more than ever. Takes Wylan to his bed, which was perfectly predictable of him to do, and then they fight for hours, even more predictably, and Kaz can spot him talking to Inej in hushed voice as she’s looking at him with some infinite patience and infinite pity written on her face.
Kaz doesn’t ask her what they’re talking about. And she doesn’t tell. He’s not that concerned about it anyway; Jesper can deal with his shit. He has had more ways out than most and still hasn’t learned his lesson. It’s not Kaz’s responsibility to coddle him any longer. Hopefully, he will have enough reason to leave with Colm.
Besides, there is war. There are market disturbances. There is Inej and the way she bites her lip and tilts her head to the side when she knows he’s looking. Her eyes gleam like twin lighthouses, and he can feel himself crashing against the rocks, sinking deep into the cold sea.
****read more on ao3***
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Expanding the Flock
Fandom: Grishaverse: SIx of Crows
Summary: The five times that they tried to have a baby and the one time that it worked.
Warnings: Trans male pregnancy, miscarriages, mentions of self harm, canon backstories/trauma, brief sex scenes, and childbirth
Word Count: 16,873
Ship(s): Kaz Brekker/Jesper Fahey/Inej Ghafa/Matthias Helvar/Wylan Van Eck/Nina Zenik
Archive link!
A/N: So I'm back on my bullshit when it comes to writing things that only I will like. I love angst, my autistic interest is pregnancy/birth, and Kaz is one of the characters I love to torture here. I hope that whoever else this appeals to enjoys it! Stay sissy and bitchy everyone <3
1. Jesper
He had gone out on a nice date with his husband that night. They had stopped by their favorite cafe and shared a bottle of wine and more pastries than their wife needed to know about before they had gone to the new opera house to watch a show that was a shared favorite of theirs. They had held hands as they walked along the side of the river and giggled together over the jokes that the actors had made. It had been a wonderful night and it was going to be topped off with what he hoped would end up with them both sweating and cuddled up together on their big bed.
That had been before two incredibly stupid looking goons had stepped out from an alley that they were passing by and started yelling at them. The one on the left had long red hair that was brushed out so that it had almost become as fluffy and big as Jesper’s hair, but down to his waist instead of tucked up against his head. He was wearing a pair of mismatched socks that were only on display because his pants had been hacked off at the knee with what appeared to be safety scissors. The one on the right had short black hair and his left arm was such a tight network of scars that it hung uselessly down at his side. They were both dressed in a very distinctive pink and orange polka dot pattern and they were both holding guns.
“Don’t resist, come with us quietly!” the one on the left almost screamed. Jesper would have felt bad for him if the wasn’t threatening his husband.
“Are you attempting to kidnap us?” Kaz asked, raising a brow as an amused smirk began to pull at his lips. Jesper was so unafraid of what the thugs had to offer that he turned his head to the side so that he could admire the absolute beauty that was his husband. It sent flutters of butterflies up from his stomach to his heart and then down to his fingertips. Kaz was bathed in the flickering yellow light from the oil lamps and the silvery moonlight. His skin almost glowed when he was in this kind of mood and it was addicting.
Jesper snapped his attention back to the attempted fight at hand when the thugs began to move. He flicked his coat back and pressed his thumb to the pearl handle of his revolver just to remind himself that it was there if he ended up needing to use it. He didn’t really want to have to kill the new thugs since they hadn’t learned their lesson, it likely wasn’t even their fault. Whoever had sent them to try and do business with Dirtyhands and his sharpshooter should have told them what they were getting into. Maybe he could convince Kaz to just knock them out and then leave them in the alley they had jumped from, since he was already in a good mood.
They looked towards each other and then turned back towards the duo. “We-we’re mugging you!”
“You’re mugging us? I don’t think that anyone has mugged me like this since I was seven,” Kaz snorted.
“You weren’t even in Ketterdam when you were seven,” Jesper whispered through a snort. He saw the dark sparkle in his husband’s eye and knew that Kaz was enjoying toying with the two thugs.
“We’re mugging you!” the thug on the left replied, though he dropped one of his hands from his gun to itch at his leg.
“Likely,” Kaz hummed. “If you want to get money from people in the Barrel then you should learn how to run a con or pick-pocket. If you can’t manage either of those then you could always attempt to sell yourself to one of the whorehouses, though they don’t take the extra guests.”
That got the thugs angry enough that they actually launched themselves at Jesper and Kaz, which was about the stupidest thing that they could have done other than coming after the Bastard of the Barrel in the first place.
They seemed to have the same idea about how they were going to deal with their new problem, thankfully. Jesper went for the one on the right and Kaz went for the one on the left, neither of them bothering to pay attention to the other because of how many fights that they had endured alongside each other. Jesper grabbed the thug’s wrist and then slammed it down onto the streetlamp that they were next to so that the nerves frayed. It caused the thug to let go of his pea shooter, which clattered noisily down to the ground and shot the lackluster bullet through the night air.
“Damn, you really need to up your weapons if you’re going to try and go after people like us,” Jesper laughed. He wrapped one of his lanky arms around the back of the man’s neck so that he could cut off his air. He pressed a little bit harder when hands began to claw at his skin to try and get him to let go. He counted to ten before he felt the body leaned up against him go completely limp. He dumped the thug down onto the ground and then turned to his husband, fully expecting the other thug to be incapacitated as well.
He forgot that Kaz was recently recovering from a cold, or at least that was what they had assumed it was. After everything that Kaz had been through when he was a child, it was almost impossible to get him to admit that he was actually sick when he was. The recovering and slowness meant that Kaz hadn’t quite taken down his thug. The man in question was already beat to a near pulp but was persisting on regardless. He had a black eye and several cuts on the arm that was holding onto his gun, but was standing strong. Jesper walked over and grabbed the revolver on his right hip. He made eye contact with Kaz as the two of them communicated silently.
Kaz lurched forward with his cane clasped in his hand at the same time as Jesper, both of them knocking their weapons against the thug’s head so that he crumpled down to the ground. What they hadn’t been expecting was for him to fall forward and onto Kaz, knocking the already unsteady man down onto the ground.
Immediately after seeing his husband on the ground, Jesper jumped into action. He grasped the thug and tossed him off Kaz with no particular care before he offered his hand out. Kaz was already holding his cane so if it turned out that he had been triggered and needed to not touch someone, he would be able to get up on his own.
He had been doing a lot better lately, thankfully, so he was able to reach out and take Jesper’s hand. He used his cane and his husband to right himself properly. His gloved hands brushed over his suit, Jesper helping but really just using it as an excuse to try and reignite the mood that had hung in the air between them at the time. The sharpshooter only paused his ministrations when he smelled the thick coppery scent of blood and pulled his hand away after feeling something damp.
“Kaz, love, did you get hurt in that fight?” he was trying to keep the fear from his voice. It had been a long time since any of them had been involved in something that could be considered deadly, but he still had nightmares about holding the dead bodies of his partners in his arms.
“He only hit me a couple of times and it was mostly in my arms,” Kaz replied, his face grim and a little bit gray.
“Then why do you smell like blood?” Jesper asked, growing more worried by the second. If it turned out that they had misidentified the sickness that Kaz was suffering from and he was far more ill than any of them had anticipated, he wasn’t sure that he was going to be able to handle it. He had already lost someone that was very dear to his heart once and it had torn him to shreds.
Kaz was quiet for a bit, staring down at the ground. He pressed his hand to the lower half of his stomach and then let out a shaky sigh. “I think that I was pregnant, Jesper.”
His mind had been whirling with the thoughts of what might be wrong with his husband and the ways that they could fix it before he lost another person that held his heart. As soon as he heard what Kaz had said, every thought flashing through his mind ground down to a halt. He blinked a few times and then asked, “What?”
“My cycle was late. I didn’t have one last month,” he bit out. He was already limping in the direction of their home, his cane clacking loudly against the ground. Jesper hurried after him, his hands twitching as he wanted to comfort his distressed husband but wasn’t quite sure how he could do it effectively. “I didn’t want to say anything because I know that the Firepox messed up my system. I’ve heard of it causing infertility in people that get it as children.”
“But you had cycles even after you recovered,” Jesper said before he realized that it was a stupid thing to say.
He moved on instinct after that, looping one of his long arms around the back of his husband’s waist so that they were pressed together. He walked them slowly down the streets of their city so that they could find their way back home. Whatever was hurting Kaz wasn’t going to stop soon, so the best place for them to deal with that was back in their own house and away from prying eyes.
They were quiet through the entire walk, Kaz only pausing when they got to the front entrance of their home in Geldstraat. He kept his head bowed down and his body began to quiver, so Jesper tried to pull back. Kaz’s arm tensed from where it was looped over the other man’s body so that he had to stay where he was. “Please don’t leave me,” he whimpered.
“Never, baby, never,” Jesper whispered in promise. He pressed their bodies closer together and then helped Kaz through the front door of their home and down the hall to a parlor. He sat his husband down and then knelt in front of him, their hands still clasped together but no longer quite as close as they had been before. “What did you say was happening, again?”
“I’m having a miscarriage, Jes,” Kaz pursed his lips into a thin white line. It was as if speaking the words into the open air between them had made them all the more real, made them sink low and deep into both of their minds.
They had never talked about children, but it was always kind of understood that they might happen at one point. They had all already opened themselves up to the danger of having something that they loved so adding pets and kids didn’t seem like that far of a leap, not when they were as powerful and intelligent as they were. Still, they hadn’t talked about it and no one had really dwelled on it. Jesper wasn’t quite sure how he was supposed to feel about it.
He didn’t have to try to sort out his own thoughts as quickly as he was anticipating, thankfully, as Nina’s cheery voice rang out through the grand halls of their mansion, “Welcome home!”
Wylan and Nina walked into the parlor to greet their spouses but then stopped when they saw the ashen expression on both of their faces and the blood that was slowly turning Kaz’s pants crimson red through the navy black. “What happened?” Nina immediately asked as she rushed over to her husband.
So that they didn’t overwhelm the poor man, Jesper stood up and tried to brush the blood on his hand off on his pants. He didn’t even know when he had brushed against the part of Kaz that was bleeding to get it, but the idea of keeping it on him made his skin crawl. “We got in a fight on the way back. Just two low-brow thugs that thought that they could get something good out of us,” he explained.
“Did you get shot?” Wylan asked, worry evident across his features.
Kaz shook his head. “I think I was pregnant. Got knocked pretty hard in the stomach and I guess my womb isn’t good enough to hold onto a baby after a little bit of damage,” he pursed his lips again and then turned his head to the side.
None of them knew what to say to try and make it better. None of them had even known that Kaz had the ability to get pregnant, not after they had all spent nearly five years since the Ice Court heist fucking like rabbits with nothing happening. Still, they had to support their husband in the tumultuous time that he was going through before they gave themselves the grace to process their own emotions.
Nina was the first to act, giving him a gentle kiss to his forehead. “Come, let’s get you cleaned up and then into bed. I’ll make you some tea and a hot water bottle for the cramps.”
Kaz didn’t say anything as he took her hand and then limped after her. He kept one hand grasping the head of his cane and the other pressed to the very base of his belly, where their baby might have grown had Jesper just been a little bit faster in protecting him. He winced when he realized what his thoughts were flying towards, so pulled Wylan aside to talk to him so that he could work through his worries. They were going to have to tell Inej and Matthias what had happened soon too, but Jesper had to get his thoughts out of the clump they had formed first.
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2.Inej
She hadn’t seen any of her partners in far too long, which meant that she had been in her room taking a nap with Koshak for nearly two hours.
Inej didn’t claim to be particularly clingy, she thought that she was one of the more distant members of their polycule. Kaz and Matthias had to spend most of their days in a room with one or more of their partners present to feel sated while Nina and Jesper had to be touching someone at least every five minutes or they acted like they were going to die. Out of everyone, she and Wylan probably had the least damage when it came to aggressive separation anxiety.
Still, she missed them and she wanted to spend some time with them. So, Inej rolled over on her bed while trying very hard not to dislodge the cat from where he had curled up in a happy spot of sunshine. She stood gracefully from her bed and then pulled on the slightly uncomfortable trousers that she had chosen to wear that day. She was still getting up as early as she had during her last voyage, but she was staying up later than she had while she was at sea. It made her more tired throughout the day, so she spent a lot of time napping. She had been doing said napping with Kaz more often than not because he had also been struck by some sort of exhaustion that he refused to talk to anyone about.
Inej had been informed of the loss that the polycule had suffered while she was out at sea. It was one of the reasons that she had chosen to face more of her attention to the land persecution of slavers and bad rich men instead of hunting down ships. She wanted to be there if something like that happened again, and she knew that Kaz was going to be more reckless now that he had another tragedy hanging on the forefront of his mind.
Something in the very back of her brain was letting her know that there was a specific reason that Kaz had been so tired outside of him trying his best to match her own sleep schedule. She wasn’t able to track his cycles the same way that she could with Nina, which was how she made sure that her wife wasn’t unknowingly expecting whenever the other woman made something strange for dinner. She was still a spider and the Wraith, even if she didn’t do as many crimes as she had before they had taken down Van Eck.
She felt bad for employing the same tactics that Kaz had taught her back on him, but there was no other way that she could really figure out what was wrong with him. He seemed to be tired no matter how often he slept, often dozing when Matthias read in the evenings or when Jesper and Nina were arguing about something. He was also clingier than he had been, usually choosing to sit on the couch with one of them instead of in his chair to get his requested space. He had been eating a little bit more than he usually did, but Inej was also fully aware that he did that often when she came back into port so that he wouldn’t be caught mistreating his body.
She hadn’t been able to put her finger down on any type of conclusive proof, but she was beginning to suspect with every nap that her husband took that they might have another pair of feet running around their home before the year was out.
The thought both terrified and excited her. She had always wanted children, it had been something that she had clung on to even with her trauma from the Menagerie. She was glad when she fell in love with two other people that had the ability to carry children because it increased her chances to have the huge family that she knew that her heart was chasing after even if she wasn’t ever able to have sex enough to conceive herself. The idea of having children was overwhelming, especially so early into her slaver-hunting career and with what had happened to her. She knew that they were far more powerful and wary than her own parents had been, so no child that they had would ever have to go through what she had.
Inej shook her head to get rid of her thoughts. She noticed that her braid had begun to come undone around her neck, so she started unweaving the strands so that she could replait them. She opened the door to her room with her foot and then slipped silently out into the hall in search of some companionship.
Wylan had a Merchant Council meeting that day and he was bringing Matthias with him so that he could have the upper hand when arguing about why they should handle the shipping of items to Fjerda in a very specific way. Nina and Jesper hadn’t mentioned having anything to do when they had gotten up to pretend to help her with breakfast that morning, so it was likely that they were also somewhere in their home. Kaz was probably either taking his own nap or down in his office.
She decided that she was going to patrol the house until she ran into someone, like she was a ghost haunting her own halls.
Her first stop was down in the kitchen, which was empty other than a long-cooking meal in a pot on top of the stove. Her hand twitched at her side as she longed to lift the lid so that she could see whatever concoction one of her spouses had whipped up that time, but she knew better than that now.
So she continued through the empty dining room to the family room where most of her spouses hung out when they weren’t working or sleeping. She smiled fondly when she finally came across one of her partners, taking in the sight before she let them know that she was even present.
Jesper was splayed out on the couch so that his lanky body took up the entire piece of furniture. Nina was laid out on top of him, wearing only a chemise and a set of bloomers instead of being dressed in her grandeur like she usually was by that time of day. Jesper had one of his arms around the back of her hips to keep her up on the couch and her arms were pillowing her chin. They were looking at each other and talking in soft voices, neither of them paying attention to a single other thing in the world.
“Have either of you seen the others?” Inej asked as she stepped out of the shadows.
She had to bite the insides of her cheek to keep from giggling when they both startled and nearly fell off of the couch. She walked over so that she could kiss them both as payment for frightening them. Once Nina had finished huffing her way into more affection, she finally answered her wife, “I think that Kaz said he was going to work in his home office. He might be taking a bath, I thought that I heard the water running.”
Inej startled slightly at that and worry overwhelmed her. Baths were a rarity for Kaz, both because they took quite a lot of time to get the trouble to be worth it and because being entirely submerged in water often reminded him of the worst trauma that he had ever endured. “I’m going to go check on him, I’ll see you both later!”
“You’re always welcome to join the cuddle pile, Inej,” Jesper said, his words slurred with comfort and sleep now that his surprise had faded.
The warmth from her spouses was enough to temporarily drown out the feeling of panic that she got about hearing where her husband was. She carefully stepped up the stairs of their home, skipping over the boards that creaked despite their higher quality of the building compared to the Slat. She paused when she got to the second floor, wondering briefly if she should check Kaz’s office before she resigned herself to continuing with the main mission. She wasn’t going to allow herself detours if it turned out that Kaz really needed her or something else had gone wrong.
Inej paused when she got to the door, knocking first instead of just entering right away. “Kaz, are you in there?”
“Go away,” he rasped back in reply. His voice sounded worse than it had before her nap, almost like he had been shouting or crying.
That only got her worry to increase so she grasped the handle to the door and pressed it open without asking. She knew that Kaz was going to demand that she leave, even scream or yell at her, but if something was wrong then she was going to help him. He didn’t have to sit alone with his fear and pain, not after so many years of companionship and marriage.
Before she had even had the chance to properly look at him, he did exactly what she was expecting he would and yelled, “Get out!
“Kaz, I’m not stupid, I know that something is wrong,” she snapped in reply. She stepped onto the heated tile of the bathroom and then closed the door behind her so that they could have a shade of privacy, though the rest of their partners could get through the locks in the house or open the doors themselves.
She took in the bathroom then, placing her hands on her hips so that she didn’t look as timid as she felt. Kaz very rarely yelled at her anymore so when he did it reminded her of the time before she had gotten her ship and learned how to be more than just his Wraith.
There was a heap of clothing on the ground between the counter with the sink and the toilet, which was usually where they all tried to hide something if they had been injured. Kaz was sitting in the tub, which was full of rather murky looking water. His hair had been perfectly styled that morning but now it was rumpled and hanging down over his pale forehead into his dark eyes. His shirt was off, which exposed his puffy chest to the open air and made his dark nipples stiff. The most peculiar thing about the whole situation was that he still had his smalls on even though he was submerged into the water.
“Inej, get out,” Kaz growled, doing his best imitation of a feral animal. He then let out something close to a whimper as he wrapped his arms around his belly and hunched forward. His jaw set, which meant that he was in pain, but his eyes also squeezed shut and his mouth twisted, which meant that he was upset about something.
It was then that Inej noticed that his once-white smalls were soaked through with blood in the crotch alone. His slacks were likely stained with the sticky red substance as well.
Her heart sunk low in her chest as she realized what had happened.
Inej cursed her saints for what they had done to answer her prayers. She had asked them to make sure that she was back with her partners if something like that ever happened again, which was why she was staying more in Ketterdam instead of sailing the seas. She was grateful that she had made that decision when she thought that Kaz was pregnant, but now that it was evident that he was having another miscarriage she wished that she hadn’t asked in the first place.
She gracefully closed the space between them so that she was kneeling down beside him. “I’m not going to touch you but I want you to know that I’m here.”
“Inej,” he sobbed. “I don’t want you to see me like this.”
“I’ve seen you vomiting after the first time that we had sex and fainting in a prison carriage, being by your side while you go through trauma is kind of my thing,” she said. He wasn’t going to respond well to gentleness or kindness, she knew that after all of the time that they had spent together.
“I know how much you want children,” he sniffled. His good leg moved so that his knee was almost pressed into his chest, trying to make himself smaller so that he felt protected. Kaz groaned when the shift caused something inside of him to send pain throughout his entire body. He put his leg back down and leaned against the lip of the tub so that he was somewhat close to her.
It was true, he did know how desperately she wanted children. It was so hard for her to imagine herself growing old without a child to take care of, a mind to foster, a baby in her arms. She also knew that this wasn’t something Kaz could control, he hadn’t been in any fights like he had the last time that he had suspected he was pregnant.
Inej took a deep breath so that she could steady her own mind and resist crying. She began to weave her fingers through his hair to put it back where it went, continuing the motion when she saw the shakiness of his shoulders stop. “Talk to me about what happened,” she murmured when his most recent cramp passed.
“Why?”
A small smile played at her lips despite herself. He was always going to be the same bastard that she had fallen in love with, even if his emotional range had expanded exponentially during their time together. “It will make you feel better.”
Kaz was quiet for a while longer before he started talking, “I thought that I was pregnant. I… I know that you noticed the way that I was changing. I was going to do something sweet to tell all of you, but then I was down in my office and I started to feel pain. By the time that I finished up my work and came up here to check what was going on…”
She leaned down and pressed a kiss to his temple. She kept her lips there as she murmured a prayer in the language that her parents had spoken to her, something to send the soul of the child they might have had to their next incarnation. “We will have a child one day, Kaz. It might not come from you and it won’t be in nine months, but one day. This wasn’t your fault.”
He stayed quiet, which made the worry inside of her increase tenfold. There was nothing that she could do about his thoughts, about the way that his mind worked. The only thing that she could do was stroke his hair and remind him that she was there.
---
3.Nina
She felt an arm around her waist twitch and then shudder as the nightmare increased. It was enough that it woke her up from her light doze. It was hailing outside, the droplets of ice shooting against the window loud enough to keep reminding her of what it had been like in the Druskelle ship when Matthias had taken her. She could never sleep well when there were storms, and she knew several of her other partners couldn’t either.
Slowly, she shifted in the bed so that she had turned around to see who was having the nightmare. She wasn’t able to soothe the emotions of people any longer since her powers had changed, but she could still hold them or talk to them when they woke up.
Inej was sleeping directly on top of Matthias, his long arms looped around her tiny frame so that he looked almost as if he was cradling a kitten against his chest. Wylan was sleeping with both of his hands over the top of his eyes and Jesper’s head resting on his shoulder. Kaz was the one that had ended up next to her even though she had come to bed first and him last, which meant that he was also the one having the nightmare.
“Kaz,” she whispered just loud enough that it would be able to rouse him from his sleep. She didn’t want to touch him because there was a good chance that the nightmare was a flashback to the Reaper’s Barge, which meant that he would feel oversensitive and panicked if he woke up with someone’s hand on him.
Her husband’s eyes flew open and he sat up in bed. His chest was heaving to bring in the breath that he needed to survive. His eyes had that wild, panicked look that they always got whenever he was thinking about something that scared him.
Nina carefully slipped from the bed and then placed her hand down on the top of the blanket so that it would pull on him and get his attention. “Love, come on. Let’s go to the kitchen,” she murmured. She didn’t want to wake any of their other partners but she did want to be able to break through the haze of post-sleep panic to get through to Kaz.
He didn’t respond for a second before he gave a shaky nod. He moved to the edge of the bed and then waited as Nina found his cane and handed it to him. That was something that they had done a lot during the beginning of their relationship, when nightmares were far more frequent than anyone in their polycule really wanted to admit.
Once the crow’s head was grasped in his pale, bare hand, he stood up and carefully followed after her. They were both completely silent other than the sound of shuffling feet on the wood floor until they reached the kitchen. “Did you have a nightmare?” Nina asked. She didn’t even turn to look back at him as she lit the stove and got out a pot so that she could heat up some water for tea.
“I suppose that you could call it that,” he rasped. He sat down on the stool that had been tucked underneath the counter next to their icebox so that he could ease the pain in his leg.
She was quiet for a bit longer as she searched through the cupboards to find one of his favorite cookies. The tin was almost empty but there was enough that they could share a few while they talked. She still didn’t touch her partner as she knelt down beside him and then offered him one of the sweets.
Kaz turned his head to the side, his pale skin tinting green as he gave a minute shake. “I’m not hungry.”
“Are you going to be able to handle some tea?” she asked then. She wasn’t going to force Kaz to drink if he wasn’t up to it, but the tea usually soothed them both back to sleep when they had a bad dream.
“I think so,” he replied softly. Something was off about him but Nina couldn’t quite put her finger on it. Her powers had changed so much since she had taken the parem, so much so that she barely knew how to interact with other people now that she didn’t have the natural benefit of her Corporalki powers. Luckily, she had been together and married to her partners for long enough that she could read them decently even without the ability to sense their heart rates without thinking about it.
She carefully placed the lid back on the tin without taking one of the cookies for herself. Her husband was acting strange enough that the idea of taking one of his favorite treats made her skin crawl. She tucked the tin back up into the cupboard and then sat down in front of him. That gave Kaz the ability to reach out and touch her if he wanted, but didn’t force him to if he was feeling overstimulated like she suspected. “Kaz, what’s going on?”
“Can you still feel heartbeats if you focus? Without relapsing?” he asked instead of answering her question.
Nina felt even more unsteady than she had before. The distance in his eyes and the hunch of his shoulders told her that he had had a bad dream of some kind, but it wasn’t the type that usually plagued him based on the way that he wasn’t shying away from her whenever her dressing gown brushed against him in their small kitchen. She also knew that he never brought up her powers because he didn’t want to send her back down into the near-depressive spiral that had been triggered when she had gone back to Ravka and was unable to get her powers back to what they were before.
She took a deep breath as she told herself that whatever was going on with Kaz wasn’t something that required her to panic quite yet. She was sure that he would explain himself in time, he always did. “I can sense heartbeats without wanting more parem. I think that it has something to do with my ability to control the dead. They aren’t really dead if their heart is still beating,” she chuckled to try and lighten in the mood but the only thing that it did was make several watery tears raise in her husband’s eyes.
That by itself was rather terrifying and her heart began to beat a million miles a minute in her chest. She wasn’t sure what the dream had been or why it was upsetting her lover so much, but she wasn’t quite sure that she wanted to figure it out yet.
Kaz reached out before she could ask any more questions. Her breath hitched in her throat when she felt the callouses on the tips of his fingers from too may hours holding a lockpick brushing against her wrist. Her arm moved so that it was out straight and her hand was flat against the base of Kaz’s stomach, her fingertips just barely brushing against his hipbone. “Do you feel anything?”
It clicked in her brain then, what he was asking of her.
She glanced towards the calendar and suddenly it made sense. She kept a little red circle that would be filled in so that she could keep track of her cycles, just in case her powers began to interfere with the natural way that her body worked. She had noticed that a blue version of the system had joined her when Inej had come back and then a black one had started to show up two months after that.
That month her dot was right beside Inej’s, but the black was still unfilled. Nina took a deep breath as she turned back to Kaz and asked, “Do you think that you’re pregnant?”
“I wouldn’t be asking you to search of a heartbeat in my belly if I wasn’t, Zenik,” he growled. “I do know basic human anatomy.”
She didn’t respond to his goading this time. Usually when he said something like that it was because he wanted to fight with her and then they would end up falling into each other with teeth and tongues and grabbing hands. This time he was saying it because he was scared, which was understandable if what he thought was happening really was.
Nina moved so that she was kneeling in front of him. She placed both of her hands on his lower belly and then let her eyes fall closed so that she could focus on what he had asked her to do. After she had recovered from the drug, it was harder for her to sense heartbeats, it was much easier for her to feel when there was the absence of one.
Still, she was going to work as hard as she could so that she could meet her husband’s request. She focused on pulling at that dark, empty place inside of her that had been left after the fall. She let out a low breath when the echo was returned to her with nothing, the same way that corpses did.
At the end of the day, no matter what she did, she was still a criminal and a spy. That meant that she was usually very used to having to say hard things to people and was very sharp-tongued. This time, when she tilted her head up so that she could look at her husband, all of the words that were swirling in her mind had completely disappeared. “What other symptoms have you been feeling, love?” she asked, not moving her hands.
“Don’t stall, just tell me the answer,” Kaz replied bitterly. She could tell by the dark look in his eyes that he already knew what it was going to be before she even said anything.
“I can’t feel a heartbeat. I think that you were definitely pregnant but the only thing I can feel is…” she trailed off, unable to say anything. This was the third time that Kaz had conceived that they knew of and the third time that they had lost the baby before they even had the chance to grow. She wasn’t sure what that was doing her spouse if he felt even half as heavy as she did.
She watched the sharpness in his dark eyes dull slightly. Nina kissed his forehead as she pulled her hands away from him, forcing thoughts of a happy pregnancy into her mind to stave off the sadness for a while. She handed him the tea that had finished steeping and then sat with him until the rest of their partners could get up and help her take care of their husband.
---
4. Matthias
After three miscarriages from unknown conceptions in four years, Kaz had finally told them that he was pregnant.
They had all been absolutely overjoyed and nearly exploded all over him when Wylan put together the words found in the notes that Kaz had left all of them in a song. They all knew that the next several months were going to be spent treating Kaz enough like glass to soothe their own worries while not enough that he would snap at them.
Matthias was very careful when he opened the backdoor to their home before he reminded himself that Koshak had gone with Inej and Nina to Ravka. He closed the door tightly behind himself and then walked further into the house. He dumped his exercise equipment where it belonged in the mudroom before he stepped into the kitchen. He was searching through one of the cupboards for his favorite cup so that he could have some water when he felt another body press up against his back. A while ago, that would have made him feel so aggressively overstimulated that he wouldn’t have been able to handle it. Enough time had passed that he knew that it was his husband and what was going to happen.
An ungloved hand pressed onto one of his shoulders while lips kissed at the other. Kaz rasped, “You’re going to drive me insane.”
“That was certainly not my intention, karaste,” Matthias chuckled. He turned around and his hands easily settled down onto his husband’s hips to bring him closer. “I was simply giving you a show to keep you entertained.”
“Well I can think of something else that I would prefer entertain me,” Kaz grinned. Now that they were facing each other, he let his bare hand slowly trail down Matthias’ shoulder and abs down to where his pants were barely clinging to his hips.
The taller of the two men resisted the urge to grin maniacally. That was exactly what he had wanted to happen when he went outside to workout that morning. He could barely contain himself as he reached out and took hold of Kaz’s hips, which gave him the ability to lean down and connect their lips in a very passionate kiss.
Carefully, he let his hands slip around the back of Kaz’s hips so that his palms were pressed to the perky ass hidden beneath another pair of perfectly tailored trousers. He gave a cheeky squeeze before he let himself continue down to hold onto Kaz’s thighs. The other was able to pick up on what he was doing almost immediately, so Matthias lifted his partner up into the air and then turned them around so that he could place his husband down onto the counter. The kiss didn’t break even for a second while he was doing that, both of them meeting together over and over again.
He only stopped when he could feel himself beginning to get lightheaded from the effort that it took to keep the kisses going without taking a breath. “Is it okay if I fuck you right here?”
Usually Matthias was a lot more chaste when he spoke about sex, years of repression and purity culture telling his mind that it was indecent to say such things even though he was already going against those teachings by being married to so many people at once. He was riled up enough that he could barely think about the teachings that had been enforced in him for as long as he could remember, though.
“Of course it is. I would have waited for you to come find me in the bedroom if I was having a bad pain day,” Kaz snarked.
Matthias drank the words in like he was a dying man and Kaz was air. He used to hate the way that the Kerch man spoke, the vile bitterness that was pumped into every word feeling like a poison to his already fragile mind. Now he loved it more than he knew was possible. He longed for the dirty words and bitter musings whenever they were away from each other for a few hours. This time the words made him smirk. His hands moved to begin undoing the front of his husband’s pants as he said, “So ravishing me was an inevitability?”
“Of course it was. I’ve been so horny since you knocked me up that I got off in the office of the Crow Club last week,” he grumbled.
The idea of his dear husband sitting behind his desk, one gloved hand plunged down the front of his pants while lewd noises emitted from his dripping wet cunt was enough to make Matthias speed up the process.
He nearly ripped the fabric when it wasn’t getting off of the pale thighs he wanted to sink between fast enough. Once it was finally off, his breath caught in his throat and he spent a long moment looking at the curls of neatly trimmed dark hair resting just underneath the barely changed curve of Kaz’s stomach.
“You’re not wearing anything under your trousers already? Should have made sure to knock you up when we first met,” he mumbled as he began to work on the ties of his own pants, only to find that his husband’s nimble fingers had already taken care of that. He was sure not to mention the pregnancies that they had lost on the way to getting to where they were now, since it would kill the mood immediately.
“Shit, if I had known that me getting knocked up would have made you this horny I would have let you,” Kaz groaned. They both knew that it wasn’t true since they had hated each other when they first met, but neither of them were going to say that.
As soon as they were both nude from the waist down, Matthias slotted himself back between his husband’s legs again. He curved the leg with the good knee around his waist to keep him in place and then bracketed Kaz in with his hands against the counter. Their lips met in another tender kiss as he pressed forward and into his lover with practiced precision. He gasped when he felt the slick wetness and heat waiting for him with every inch that he pressed inside.
“Oh, oh fuck, Matthias,” Kaz groaned when the other man bottomed out so that he was completely full. He looked debauched already and they had only been going for a little while. It was enough to make Matthias want to go entirely feral, ripping Kaz apart with his teeth and sharp thrusts. That was going to have to wait for another time because he was going to take his time while they fucked, he had already decided that when he went outside that morning.
As soon as they had both adjusted to the new flood of sensations that were overcoming them, Matthias slowly pulled out and then pressed back in. He knew that Kaz liked to be held down against every surface and used almost like a toy when he was having his good days, but Matthias was so excited about the little potential life that had burrowed its way into the famed Dirtyhands that his thrusts were slow and worshipful.
He felt a hand reach up to his shoulder, fingernails digging into the skin and muscle there. He was worried that he was going to lose all control if Kaz ended up begging him like he always did, but his mind was immediately snapped out of that line of thought. Kaz whimpered and said, “I need you to stop.”
Matthias pulled out and took a step back from his lover almost immediately. He knew what it was like to get overwhelmed from touch without a phobia coming into play, so he could only guess how much worse it was with one. He held his hands out to the side so that Kaz could see them and knew that he wasn’t going to advance forward again.
What Matthias was met with again surprised him. Kaz looked down to the space between his legs and then let out a startled sob when he saw the sticky crimson that was beginning to spread between onto the counter.
“Love, what happened? Are you alright?” Matthias asked. He looked down and saw that his cock was also streaked with the sticky material, which reminded him of the time that Nina had started her period in the middle of them having sex. Given that Kaz was pregnant, the period was a non-option, but that meant that the blood was being caused by something else entirely.
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” Kaz whispered as tears began to streak down his face.
They were both aware of what was happening, they both knew it and neither of them were able to admit it out loud. Saying the words would make it all the more real and that felt more damning than the blood that was slowly seeping out of Kaz. All of their hopes and dreams were spilling in crimson, just like they had thought that they would when Matthias had a bullet lodged in his shoulder and broken aspirations in his mind.
This time, he was not the broken eighteen-year-old boy that he had been back then. He leaned forward and pressed their foreheads together. He didn’t bother to try and dress again since it would only ruin his clothing. He was going to have to strip out of it again when he got them to the bathroom. “It’s alright, it’s alright,” he murmured as he pressed gentle kisses to Kaz’s forehead.
He brought them up to the bathroom and then lowered Kaz down into the tub. He took a cloth from under the sink and washed them both off before he got Kaz a pair of the underthings that he wore when he was on his cycle so that they could track the blood, just like they had done with the last three miscarriages.
He had just settled Kaz down into bed when the other turned to the side so that he was looking at his husband. Matthias felt his heart break a thousand times over in his chest and he had to ask, “Did I do this?”
“No, I was having cramps yesterday. I assumed that it was normal, I lasted so much longer than I had with all of the other ones,” Kaz whispered. “I broke the hopes of everyone again… you were all so excited to finally be parents.”
Matthias realized he shouldn’t have brought up his own guilt to the person that was going through the most pain in the situation. He brushed Kaz’s hair to the side with a slightly trembling hand and said, “It will happen, Kaz. One day we will have a child. No one is going to blame you for what happened, it was simply not the right time.”
---
5. Wylan
He didn’t work in his lab as much as he did before. Despite his rampant protestations to the contrary, Wylan did like making bombs and whatever other chemical compound Kaz required for his newest job. The compounds made sense and the rush of being able to control that much destruction was enough to make him forget about the weakness that had been assigned to him for so much of his life. With the combination of his Merchant responsibilities and having as many high-maintenance partners as he did, he barely got the time to spend with the bombs as he used to.
Today was one of the rare times that he was basically alone in the mansion, while also having no work to do for the empire that he had inherited from his father. That meant that he got to do what he pleased, and this time he chose to experiment with some of the powders and chemicals that Kaz had gotten him for his birthday. Nina and Matthias were meeting with some of her old teachers in the Embassy, Jesper and Inej were staking out a new brothel that they were working to take down, and Kaz was going back and forth between the house and his clubs for business meetings. Wylan missed his partners, but he was excited that he got that time by himself.
He heard the door behind him open slightly and assumed that it was Koshak since the cat hated being alone. Inej had originally gotten him to keep the mice out of her vessel, but she became very attached to her little companion. They were in the process of socializing the creature with dogs so that Matthias could have a pet of his own.
He turned his head and then startled slightly when he saw that it was not, in fact, his wife’s cat but rather one of his husbands. Kaz was standing in the doorway to Wylan’s laboratory with a rather pained looked on his face. His suit was still immaculate, tailored lines making him look angular and dangerous in a way that got them all very riled up. He had his gloves securely on over his hands even though they were back in their own home, which meant that it was one of the days were he was feeling too overwhelmed for even his partners to touch him. He was also leaning very heavily on his cane.
“Kaz!” Wylan gasped, adrenaline rushing through his system from seeing a figure much bigger than what he had been expecting. He set down the vials that he had been toying with and then stripped off his work gloves. He also removed the goggles that were not serving a purpose other than keep his red-brown curls out of his eyes. “I thought that you were going to be working today.”
“I was,” he replied. His voice was tight, like he was hiding something that was upsetting him.
Wylan carefully brushed his hands off on the cloth that had been resting next to his chemicals on his work table. He didn’t technically need to be doing that because what he had been working with wasn’t that dangerous and he was wearing gloves when the was touching it, but it gave him something to do. He always struggled to figure out how to move around Kaz when either of them were too overstimulated to be touched. He understood the emotion since he had experienced it enough himself, but he was so awkward and malformed when it came to being in a relationship with anyone.
“Oh,” he nodded. Something about the energy of the room had changed when his husband entered. It was making him feel a lot more like he did when Jesper first came to get him from the tannery so that he could make bombs for them for the job that they did in Ravka. His stomach was tied up in knots and his hands were beginning to get shaky with worry. “Um, not that I don’t love being around you, but why are you here?” He did adore his partner almost more than life itself, but it was rare for Kaz to come all the way up to Wylan’s lab and even rarer for him to come in and then stay there.
Kaz walked from where he had been standing near the doorway to the little seating area that Wylan had next to his worktable. It was supposed to be so that he had more places to sit down when he was being flighty, but Jesper and Nina primarily used it to take meals with him when he was too distracted to come down to the dining room for dinner. Slowly, the man lowered himself down into the seat, though Wylan was unable to miss the wince on his face.
“D-do you need more pain meds?” he asked as he fluttered over to the edge of the table. Something had shifted in his husband so that Kaz felt almost completely unrecognizable to who he had been that morning, his face unreadable and his body language stiff.
“I’m not sure that I can have medication in my present condition,” he replied, tilting his head down towards his lap so that he didn’t have to meet Wylan’s eyes.
The cryptic way that he was speaking was enough to get the other man to pause. The anxiety began to drain from his system now that he had a puzzle that he could help riddle out. He set the cloth that he had been grasping down next to him and then settled himself at the table. He traced one of the grains in the table just so that he wouldn’t have to look up at his husband as he asked, “Are you pregnant?”
“I might not be for much longer, unless you have something to help me,” he said, his voice rasping even more since he was speaking quietly.
Wylan’s mind stopped and then jumped to the next thought all at once, so quickly that he almost gave himself whiplash. The thought of them getting another chance at being parents when the last pregnancy that had been announced to them had ended far before its time was exciting. He was also terrified of the idea that Kaz was expecting out of the three members of their polycule because he was the one that had been through the most out of them all concerning that kind of loss. It took him a moment to process the fact that Kaz had just admitted that he was pregnant after the fight that he had with Inej the morning before when she had asked him. He then finally caught up to the present when he realized that Kaz was asking him to make something that would chemically stop another miscarriage.
“Oh, love,” he whispered. He wanted to reach across the table so that he could take his spouse’s hand but he knew that it wasn’t the day for that. “I… I’ve never heard of something that can stop a body from rejecting a pregnancy. I don’t think that I have the stuff to make it even if I had.”
“Then just the painkiller is fine. Leave it outside of my room when you finish,” Kaz said briskly. He pushed himself up from the desk and silently walked out of the room, leaning even heavier onto his cane than he had before.
Wylan didn’t take it personally. He had seen Kaz go through four miscarriages before and knew the drill at this point. Even if Kaz was simply anticipating losing the baby before he actually had, he was going to be going through that same cycle of grief that he had every time before. Wylan got up so that he could move aside the explosives that he had been working with so that he could get make what was asked of him.
By the time that he was able to get the bottle up to his husband, there was a pair of blood stained pants sitting on top of Kaz’s dresser with his husband curled around a hot water bottle. The pain reliever was the only thing that he could do to help, so after he dropped off the first batch he went downstairs back to his lab so that he could make another.
---
+1 Kaz
He thought that his partners were never actually going to pack up and leave. They all had something that they were supposed to be doing out of the house that day. Normally that would bother him, but today he wanted them gone. He also knew where they were all going and was sure that they would send someone back to the house to tell him if plans changed so that he could find them if he had need.
Matthias was going to be visiting a local breeder so that he could pick out a puppy or work with the dogs, whichever ended up working out best for him. Wylan had a meeting with a couple of interested investors but nothing serious enough that he had to bring someone else along. Nina was going to be spending some time with the friends that she had made while working at the White Rose, which meant that she was going to be coming home with a new dress. Inej and Jesper were going out on their monthly date to their favorite cafe and then likely to a bookstore so that Inej could pick something new out for her upcoming voyage. Kaz himself was supposed to be heading into work so that he could finish up the tax paperwork for the new Barrel empire that he had been shaping up since the day before.
He knew that wasn’t going to happen. He had been trying to get as much work done as possible before what inevitably was going to happen ended up happening, though it was turning out to be a little different than he had expected.
Kaz hadn’t necessarily meant to keep his pregnancy a secret from his partners. He also hadn’t meant to tell them about it, but he was half expecting someone to force it out of him. Inej had known every other time he had ended up pregnant, sometimes even before he did, afterall. He wasn’t not telling them about his pregnancy out of some sort of malice, but rather because he was terrified of seeing the disappointment on their faces when he miscarried again.
He had been pregnant five times before and none of them had even lasted long enough for him to pass something that resembled a baby when he started miscarrying. Every single time that had happened, he had to deal with the sorrowful looks that his partners wore when they tried to take care of him and the grief that they carried about the disappointment he had handed them. He wasn’t sure that he would be able to handle that again, and so he had actively worked to keep his pregnancy hidden as soon as he noticed that he had missed one of his cycles.
It had started while Inej was out on her ship, which meant that the person most likely to notice that something was off with him was gone. It had been easier to hide the cravings and increase in appetite, especially since he didn’t have any morning sickness. The exhaustion and increase in libido had been harder to pass off but Jesper and Nina were excited enough to nap with or fuck him that they were able to subsconsciously help the others brush it away as well.
He found that even when he passed from the first trimester into the second, his body hadn’t changed all that much. He had put on a bit of weight but blamed it all on Matthias’ increase in baking to put off his stress about getting a new dog soon. Even when Kaz finally got to the blessed third trimester, his belly had only swelled ever so slightly. He had regressed back into not letting his partners touch him more than a few brief kisses or hand holding when he got to that point because he knew that if they felt his belly they would feel the butterfly-wing movements of the baby inside of him or the rounded nature of his torso.
Kaz really had meant to tell them when he finally passed the first trimester. He had been secretly seeing a midwife to make sure that everything in the pregnancy was going smoothly and she had informed him that was when the ‘danger zone’ passed. He had meant to tell them for the last five months, but every time he opened his mouth to say it all he could see was blood covering his underthings and their sad faces.
So he had kept it a secret, trying to figure out ways that he could explain the sudden appearance of a child that none of them had known he was carrying or find another way that was easier to inform them of their upcoming parenthood. Nothing had come up and now he feared that it was too late, though he was also in denial about that.
He had gone to bed the night before feeling a tiny bit out of sorts. It was mostly a foggy head and vague cramping in his stomach, but that also could have been because he had no appetite that entire day and had thus barely eaten anything. When he woke up the next morning he had felt even stranger than he had when he went to sleep, but he wasn’t willing to show any of those symptoms until his partners had finally left.
Once he was alone, he slipped from his bed and walked to the mirror hanging in the corner of his room. He looked himself over to make sure that he was presentable and his belly wasn’t noticeable in the suit that he had had chosen for his meetings that day as he got ready to head down to the club. For a reason beyond him, he was still planning to go to work despite his anxiety around his pregnancy the night before.
He got to the top of the stairs that would lead down to the rest of the house before he had to stop. It was an almost overwhelming feeling when he finally let his brain process what was happening. There was a stark pressure building up along his spine before it spread out through the rest of his hips so that it was hugging his entire pelvis. It shifted into bone-shattering pain only when it wrapped around the front of his stomach.
It wasn’t the first time that he had a contraction, he had several practice ones that the midwife he was seeing had warned him about. They were very similar to what had happened when he was miscarrying but more intense. The contraction that he was currently experiencing was like the practice ones had been ramped up to ten and like the cramps he had with his other five pregnancies times twenty.
It left him winded and leaning on his cane so that he didn’t sink down to the ground. When his mind finally returned to him, the only thing that he could think about was the panic he had felt when he realized that he was losing his pregnancies the last several times that he had conceived. All he could think about was blood and gore and the sorrow that came with knowing that he was too bad and too monstrous to actually bring good life into the world.
He decided against going into work that day. He turned around and slowly made his way back to his bedroom so that he could change into a fresh pair of sleep things. He laid down on the bed with his back propped up with half of the pillows they kept spread out on the master bed. He wasn’t sure what was happening but he knew that he had to be in the safest place that they had in their entire house.
About seven minutes had passed before he got another one of the pains. By that point, his panic had ceded enough that he was able to realize what was happening. It made him anxious to think that he could be in labor before he had the chance to tell his partners that he was even pregnant, but the thing that scared him more was the fact that it was about a month too early.
He had heard of babies being born early and then nursed into full health by their parents, but he had also heard of babies that were born looking raw and red and without breath because they were far too small. Part of him was worried that he had gotten his dates wrong even though the midwife had assured him that everything was alright. He didn’t know what was going to be waiting for him at the end of his labor, but he did know that he was going to be facing everything alone.
Kaz relaxed back into the bed and tried to keep his mind about him so that he didn’t lose himself when his child needed him. His thoughts eventually began to drift over the past few months as he started mourning the things that he could have shared with his partners, the things that he had denied both them and himself from having with his own fear.
He could have been worshiped and waited on the same way that Alys had been when they kidnapped her by Matthias, who was always eager to cherish them. He could have told Nina about his cravings and had her fatten him up even more with her delicious cooking. He could have sat with Inej in front of him while she rubbed that oil that her parents had brought them when they heard that they were trying for a family during one of their visits. He could have slept in Jesper’s arm as the zowa sang Kaelish nursery rhymes to his belly. He could have sat with Wylan while they both worked, helping each other get thing squared away so that they could enjoy the first couple of months with their baby without the panic of work on top of it. He could have watched Matthias build the baby’s first cradle. He could have spent days with Wylan discussing traditional Kerch names. He could have cuddled with Inej while they both napped during her adjustment back from sea life. He could have taken long walks with Nina in the garden while she told him all about the place that she had come from. He could have watched Jesper struggle to make their child’s first soother.
But he had denied himself and them all of those things because he had been too afraid to tell them that he was pregnant simply because he didn’t want to let them down again. By refusing to give them that disappointment, he had offered himself another by keeping the baby a secret to himself.
He was basically writhing on the bed by the time that the noonday sun began to creep over the slanted rooves of Ketterdam. He had started crying while imagining how his pregnancy would have gone if he had trusted that information to his partners, and he hadn’t been able to stop when the pains overcame him.
Kaz had tried to stand up and sway against the bed like his midwife had encouraged when they had talked about what would happen while he gave birth. He found that whatever position his little one had taken was playing games with his hip and he was basically imobile from it, so was stuck in the bed.
Eventually he was overcome with a rush of energy and had to move around. He grabbed his cane and began to pace up and down the hall while leaning heavily on it and the wall on the other side. He paused every time that he had a contraction, letting his head rest on the cool plaster. It was one of the only things that brought him any relief. His entire body felt hotter than a fever, but without the cool sweats that made him feel clammy. His stomach was clenching around the nothing that he had eaten and his mouth was dry with panic. His hand couldn’t stop moving to his stomach when he was having a contraction, trying to feel any movement from the baby that would reassure him that they were okay.
“Shit, shit, shit,” he swore as he leaned heavily against the wall when a particularly strong contraction chose that exact moment to try and make him feel horrible. He leaned so heavily against the wall that he was basically sliding down it. But then there was the feeling of relief that came whenever the pain left him, right before something splashed along the floor and soaked through his pants.
He stared down at his toes that were now soaked with clear fluid, blinking a couple times when the only thing that his brain was able to bring up was blood and viscera.
His labor was steadily progressing now, even though it was a month early and he was completely alone. He certainly wouldn’t be seen walking the streets of Ketterdam while moving into the second stage of labor and he had no one that he could send to his midwife, not that any of them would know where she was working. His water breaking only confirmed the thing that he had half been denying, so he stripped off his pants and his smalls and left them in the hallway over the top of the puddle because he didn’t have the energy or ability to lean down and clean it up properly.
When he got back to his room, he continued his pacing. He was restless, almost like a caged animal in the back of a zoo or a royal palace. He was surrounded by gold and opulence but he didn’t have the one thing that he really needed, companionship.
After his water had broken his labor began to progress even faster than it had before. He could barely walk at all now that the pains were coming less than five minutes apart. He knew what it was to be so sick that pain was the only thing that he felt, and he had been scared that labor would be similar to that every time he had gotten pregnant. Now that he was in the midst of it, he knew that the sensations were completely different and the only thing that he could see in his mind’s eye was his babe.
Kaz hiked himself up onto the bed when his knee began to scream at him, informing him that the pacing had to stop if he wanted to be able to walk normally for the next week. He wasn’t sure that he would be able to do that regardless, but he was okay with laying down because he was beginning to get tired. He leaned back against the pillows that smelled like his partners, allowing his brain to drift off into the thought of them surrounding him like he so desperately wanted.
“Shit, fuck, ow,” he swore when he felt the babe he had been secretly carrying begin to shift lower down inside of him. It was only just then dawning on him that it was all real and happening right then, and that he had no control over it. Fear overwhelmed him so that his breathing was rapid and his heart felt like it was trying to break through is ribcage. He could barely stop the tears that were running down his face as he grasped at the bedsheets with his ungloved hands. He wanted his parents, his brother, his spouses, anyone to be there with him and reassure him that he was going to be okay.
The urge to push started to overwhelm him just as the day began to creep into evening, which was when his partners were allegedly going to be coming home. Inej and Jesper were likely going to come home last unless one of them got worn out. Wylan and Matthias were both a toss up about when they were arriving, but Kaz was honestly surprised that Nina wasn’t back yet.
As soon as he felt the urge he knew that he had to give into it. He was usually so good about controlling his body and what it did that it wasn’t a concern what he wanted, just what he had to do. This time there was no question about what he was going to do, so he placed both of his hands on the top of the headboard and began to push so hard that his body curled forward over his tiny baby bump.
When the urge passed and he had no more strength, he collapsed back against the bed and panted so that he could get desperately needed air. He could feel his arms shaking with the force that it took to keep himself in one place.
He was so tired and so scared. The only thing that he wanted was his partners by his side, to tell him that he was doing well and give him their strength. The images of a happy, gurgling baby and happy spouses interacting with their firstborn had been replaced by angry faces and a limp body. It only served to scare him more. He wanted to go back and correct all of the mistakes that had made, to tell them that he was pregnant so at least he wouldn’t have to go through the traumatic loss of his sixth baby on his own.
He knew that he couldn’t hand them the pain of having missed his pregnancy and helping him through a stillbirth instead of a miscarriage. He hadn’t given them any of the joy of seeing the minute changes of his body as their baby grew or letting them feel the baby move, so he didn’t deserve the comfort they would provide him. The thought of not getting to have them made a pain erupt in his chest that was more intense than even his contractions.
His attention was brought back to his labor and his baby when another contraction wrapped around his belly. He grunted as he leaned forward and pushed as hard as he could to try and make as much progress as he could. He felt the baby inside of him slowly moving down further into the birth canal.
His mind began to scream at him to call for help so that he at least had someone else with him when he heard the door at the front of their home open. He could tell by the pace of the footsteps that it was Matthias, but he was walking slower than he normally did. The part of Kaz’s mind that was always looking for the most information he could get to help keep him safe was able to process the fact that he had a dog with him. He had to physically bite the insides of his cheeks until he tasted hot, coppery blood seeping from his tongue and gums to resist the urge to call out to him. He wasn’t going to ruin the happiness that Matthias had just earned by getting another canine companion with a dead baby.
A sob escaped Kaz’s mouth when he leaned back against the bed so that he could try to catch his breath again. He felt almost as if he were drowning, like he was never actually going to be able to overcome the agony that he was in while trying to birth a human.
He could hear Matthias moving to the living room, his deep voice reverberating through the home while he talked to his new companion. Kaz briefly wondered if he would talk to his child that same way but with different affectionate nicknames, or if he would want to speak to them like an adult.
The contractions kept relentlessly coming and Kaz kept pushing. He heard the door open again before he had made any more progress and then Nina’s voice joined in with Matthias. They were both laughing and shouting at each other and the dog, but in the way that meant they were overly excited and had lost the ability to control their volume instead of being upset with one another.
Kaz’s entire body was shaking with the force he was exerting to not only birth their child but to hold himself back from calling out to them. He could almost feel the way that Matthias would hold him in his strong arms, helping him bend forward. He could almost feel Nina’s calm hands moping the sweat that was running down his forehead off of him. He wanted them so badly that his entire chest felt hollow with the ache and yet he refused to let himself have it.
He had to move to make more progress, so he painfully raised himself onto his hands and knees and then into a squatting position while grasping the rails of the headboard to support himself. “Please, baby, please,” he begged, though at this point he had thoroughly convinced himself that the lack of movement meant that he had once again lost his child. He wanted to wail and scream in pain as he pushed down hard enough to get the head to come to his opening, spreading him wide so that all of the nerves down there burned with the fire of nothing he had ever felt before.
When he gasped and stopped pushing, surprised by the pain, all of the progress he had just made left. He felt like crying when he felt the sliver of his baby’s head slip back into him. His entire body was quivering with effort and aching with hurt but he was going to get no relief. He must have pushed without any change for about ten minutes before he got the entire head to crown. He had collapsed down so that he was kneeling instead of squatting at that point, but he released one of his shaking hands from the headboard so that he could touch the slimy, blood-covered downy hair on the top of his baby’s head.
His heart was already mourning the loss of the child once he did, he knew that it was temporary. This baby was not going to last, just as the other one’s hadn’t. He was doomed to never create anything good, to be a monster that could only bring forth pain and misery. He knew that Inej and Nina would tell him that he was being stupid, that Wylan would reassure him that he could make great things happen, that Jesper would give him that sad look, and that Matthias would just kiss his forehead and say that demons did not look like him. He wanted them with him so badly, but he knew that he couldn’t have them no matter how badly he wanted it.
That pain was amplified to the point that he started crying again when he heard the door open. He wanted the others to be waiting for Wylan so that they could tell him the happy news, that they were moments away from being parents, but instead he had to listen to them ask him about work as if Kaz were an intruder in his own house. He knew that he had to be quieter now that one of the more aware people had returned. Nina was a spy and could hear things easier, as was Inej, but Wylan had had to listen for his father and danger at all times so was more attuned to noises than the rest of the polycule was.
He was trying to push while staying absolutely silent, but he almost felt like the effort that he was expending on keeping himself quiet meant that he was making less progress than he had before. He was in so much pain, he just wanted the entire process to be over with. He couldn’t move out of the position that he was in despite the red hot burning pain that was spreading through his body from where his knee had been bent for too long.
On the floor below, the door opened and his last two partners came home. Everyone that he loved and cherished that was still loving was now in his home and he had no way to reach out to them for help. He knew that he could scream and shout and they would come running, but the pain was swirling together with the panic in his brain so that he felt so vulnerable he thought that he would disintegrate into nothing. He also couldn’t ruin the joy that Jesper and Inej had brought with them, both of them laughing happily. It was the laugh that he could get drunk on, the one that made him feel safe and warm and happy, the one that he would sooner kill himself than cause to disappear.
He was certain that forcing Inej to see him go through another grisly, bloody loss like the one he was sure he was about to face would be enough to strip the rest of the joy from her life. So he kept his jaw clenched so tight that he was going to crack his teeth and kept pushing to try and finish the ugly process that he was embarking on.
Kaz gave a grunt of discomfort as he pushed again and the head slipped entirely from him and into his waiting hand. He kept it there while he shifted positions so that he was laying back against the bed. He wracked his mind with the panic of a man being hunted for sport while he tried to remember everything that the midwife had said about that stage of the delivery.
Finally, he was able to connect what it was and ran his fingers around the base of the baby’s neck to check for the cord. There was nothing, but he was given the overwhelming sensation of feeling their little face for the first time. His hand moved almost reverently down across a tiny nose and a little puckered mouth, then two eyes that were still closed.
He was barely aware of the sounds out in the hall where he had left his bottoms when his water broke and then hurried footsteps coming towards his office. He jumped slightly when he heard two doors bang open and his partners calling his name throughout their massive house. He had to ignore it as the urge to push overwhelmed him again and he had to listen to it. He kept his hand underneath the head of the baby as he let out a small, strangled noise.
The door to the grand bedroom opened just as he gave a final push and the baby was born. He was quivering like a leaf in the world’s worst storm, his hair was caked to his forehead with sweat, and fluids from the delivery a babe were now covering his bottom half and their bed. He could barely think about any of that as he held his tiny little one in his hand and stared straight ahead at his partners.
Inej was leading the charge with Nina right behind her, peaking over her shoulder at what was happening. Wylan was standing beside Inej with his face as pale as paper and his mouth covered with one of his delicate hands. Jesper was holding onto Matthias like he was going to fall over, his eyes as wide as saucers.
“What is that?” Jesper asked, astounded and terrified.
“A baby,” Kaz replied weakly. There were no cries, no movement from the little limp body in his hands. He had known that it was coming, but it was still too much. He didn’t know how he was supposed to handle the overwhelming surge of energy in the room when his partners had piled into the space and the death of the fist baby that had actually been able to hold.
“Kaz-” Inej started.
She was cut off by their wife shoving past her and into the room. Nina stopped by the edge of the bed and then carefully reached down so that she was holding the baby. “Matthias, go and get me some hot water from the tap in the kitchen. Wylan, I need you to find as many towels as possible. Inej get me the suture kit,” she commanded as she took the baby. She sounded every bit the trained soldier that she had been when they first met her.
“She’s not crying, Nina, she’s not crying,” Kaz sobbed. He had lost so many people before, and yet he hadn’t known that it was possible to experience grief like the kind that was currently washing over him. There would have been a time that he wouldn’t have thought twice about a dead baby in the streets, just focused on his own rage. It was so different when it was his own child, the one that he had longed for with his entire heart and soul.
“Shh, shh, it’s okay. Babies take a little bit of time to perk up sometimes,” Nina soothed easily. She knelt down on the edge of the bed so that the cord didn’t have to stretch between Kaz and the baby quite as much as before. She then placed one of her fingers into the baby’s mouth with a scooping motion towards her little throat.
The entire house went completely silent as they heard the tiniest cough and then the shrill cry of a baby who had been through something terrifying.
Wylan had stopped in the doorway, his pale face flush with exertion as he looked on to their eldest daughter taking her first deep breaths. Inej had returned with the suture kit and was smiling so wide that her cheeks had to hurt. Downstairs, Matthias could be heard whooping loudly as he no doubt cued in to what that sound meant. Jesper let out a little broken noise as he staggered over to the edge of the bed and looked down at the tiny face of their babe.
“There we are, there we are,” Nina crooned as she carefully cradled the newborn in her arms. “Kaz, we’ve gotta put her on your chest while we get everything settled out. Are you okay with that?”
“Please,” he nodded so quickly and eagerly that his head actually dizzy because of it. He barely registered what was happening when he got pushed forward by Jesper’s calloused hands so that they could remove the shirt from his pale body, which revealed the tiny bump that he had been sporting in secrets for months. Neither of his present partners said anything about it as Nina carefully moved the newborn so that she was laying against Kaz’s chest.
His entire world shrank down to her like he knew that it would if he ever got the chance to have an actual child. She was grimy with mucus, blood, and vernix, but she was so utterly perfect that he couldn’t believe that she was really there. Her skin was as pale as his had been, but there was the chance that it could darken as she got older. Her tiny body was still curled into a tight ball against his skin even though she had already been born. Her little legs were tucked up into her stomach and he could feel the feet that had been battering his kidneys for months pressed against his lower belly with ten perfect little toes in a line. Her arms were close to her face, wiping at herself while she cried. She had wispy black hair and likely blue eyes, but those were also things that would change when she moved out of the newborn stage. Even the idea that she would eventually move out of that phase of her life sent a thrill of joy throughout his body.
“I’ve got you, Papa’s got you,” he whispered quietly to the newborn now cradled in his arms. She soothed when she felt the vibration of his voice against her tiny body, likely remembering it from when she was inside of him only moments prior.
“Love, this is very important, have you been going to see a midwife?” Nina asked. She had taken the suture kit from Inej so that she could tie the cord off in two spots and then cut it, which allowed Wylan to carefully take the newborn so that he could wash her with the warm water Matthias had just brought upstairs in their biggest pot.
“Yeah,” Kaz nodded sleepily. His entire body ached like nothing else, but he knew that he was safe because his partners were there and his baby was crying.
“Thank the Saints,” Jesper whispered from the spot that he had taken up behind his husband. Kaz barely even remembered him moving back there but he was so happy that he had. He wished that was the place that Jesper could have been during his entire labor and birth process. “Hate to think about the pain you might have gone through all on your own if you actually hadn’t told anybody.”
“I’m sorry,” Kaz whispered morosely. He was, truly and deeply. He had wanted them to share the moments of his pregnancy that he had rejoiced after, but he had let fear reign over him the same way that he had after Jordie’s death. He whimpered and shied away from his own body when he felt another small cramp and then something wet and slippery move out of him.
Nina soothed him with a gentle hand on his knee. “Just the afterbirth love. The entire thing is out now so this is really over. I’m going to check to make sure you didn’t tear anything too badly and then have Nej sew you up,” she explained. The two woman worked in tandem like a well-oiled machine as they got him fixed.
As soon as they had finished, Jesper’s lanky arms wrapped around his knees and his back as they shuffled towards the edge of the bed. “Come on, my love, we’re going to get you into something clean. Do you want a bath?”
The idea of having to be submerged into water after thinking that he was to be surrounded by death in the same way almost made him vomit. He focused on swallowing down the bile and giving his head a strict shake. “Okay, no bath,” Jesper said softly. Instead, he settled his lover down on the chest at the end of their bed. Matthias and Wylan worked together so that they could strip the bed and replace the sheets with the emergency set that they kept just under the frame. Kaz felt bad for ruining such expensive items with his ignorance of just how messy birth was, but he could barely focus on that.
Jesper took a wet towel and began in the messiest part of his lover. He cleaned off the blood that was caked between his legs, along with all the fluids that had dribbled through his smalls when his water broke. As soon as he had done that, Inej appeared with a pair of the period smalls that belonged to him. She and Jesper worked together to get Kaz’s hips tilted up enough that they could slip the garment over his wrecked body. They were soft and compressive enough that he felt grounded, to the point where he began listening for the sounds of his baby.
Kaz had turned his head to the side so that he could look for the newborn girl while Jesper finished up his work, ridding Kaz of the sweat that was sticking to his skin. He smiled and relaxed softly when he saw Nina speaking delicately to the baby in hushed tones that he couldn’t hear from his distance as she got the makeshift nappy pinned into place.
He was dressed in a soft pair of cotton pants and then one of his sleep shirts before he was placed back down onto their blissfully clean bed. The others were still whirling around the room as they got into the process of soaking the blood and fluids out of the sheets, as well as disposing of the suture kit that they had used to clean him up. He could barely pay attention to any of that as his body finally got the chance that it needed to relax.
His world turned miniscule again when his daughter was carefully placed back into his arms. Nina knelt beside the bed so that she was looking over her husband’s shoulder at the baby. “She’s going to need to be fed. Are you comfortable with doing that?”
Despite the panic that he still got at times when his own partners touched him, there was something different about having his baby pressed up against his warm skin. He hypothesized, in the back of his very tired mind, that it was because she was a part of him. He had wanted her so desperately when she was growing in the safety of his belly that all he could think about was how much he wanted to keep her safe. The lapping of water at his ankles wasn’t something that even crossed his mind.
“I can do that,” he mumbled. Awkwardly, he shuffled forward so that he could lift up his shirt and help his babe find his nipple. By the time that she had gotten the hang of suckling and was greedily drinking down her first meal, everyone else had finished what they were doing. Inej and Wylan were sitting at the end of the bed, their hands clasped together but every other part of their body separated from the other. Jesper and Matthias had made their way up onto the bed so that they bracketed Kaz and their baby in, keeping them both safe from the outside world. Nina was fussing slightly but eventually got dragged down into the bed by their husband so that she also had to be still.
“Why didn’t you tell us, Kaz?” Inej asked, her voice small and slightly scared. Kaz wasn’t sure what she wanted the answer to be or what she was expecting, but he was so tired that the only thing he could say was the truth.
“I wanted to. I wanted to tell you all the second I noticed that my cycle was a week late, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t bear the thought of you all getting to excited about the potential to be parents just to have my body kill off that hope because nothing good can ever happen to me. I… I wanted you to be there for all the parts of the pregnancy but then I was just so scared,” he didn’t realize that he was crying until his daughter let out a tiny, fussing noise.
“Sorry, sorry baby,” he mumbled as he wiped the tear from her head. He leaned into the touch that Jesper offered to him, curling into the warmth and protection that it offered.
Wylan reached out to offer Kaz a blanket so that they could burp the baby as he said, “We’re not mad at you, Kaz. We’re all a little bit scared and shocked that this suddenly happened because I don’t think that anyone even realized that you were pregnant, but we’re not mad.”
“We could never be mad when we have this,” Matthias whispered reverently. Kaz had always known that Inej and Matthias were going to be the best parents out of all of them since they had the longest to go without trauma and the nervousness that came with everything Jesper did. It still made him feel like he was melting when he watched his husband’s huge hand brush over the top of their baby’s head, though.
The others gave a murmur of agreement. As soon as the baby had finished her first meal and been burped, he wrapped her up in the blanket that Jesper had found in between helping Kaz get cleaned up and settling into the bed. Matthias was the first to hold her, but she made her rounds with every one of her parents so that they could all meet her for the first time. Kaz kept himself awake so that he could savor those first few moments of her life, reassuring himself that she was okay every time he saw a blissfully pink nose or heard a little gurgle of discontent when she was shifted the wrong way.
She had finally landed back where she belonged in his arms when Nina asked, “What are you going to name her?”
Despite having thought about so many things when she was carefully hidden away in his belly, a name had never crossed his mind. He had so many names that were assigned to him through his life, from the one that his mother had given him to the one that he had chosen when he was five and figured out he was a boy, to the last name that he had chosen after Jordie died. “I… I like the name Posey but if any of you have something that you need to name her then we can also do that.”
“I like Posey. It’s a good Kerch name, in between the stupid upper class names and the peasant ones. Gives her opportunity to do a lot in her life,” Wylan grinned.
“Posey,” Inej whispered softly as she moved forward to look over their daughter. She placed a gentle kiss to the baby’s forehead and murmured a prayer to her, the only word of which Kaz understood being the newborn’s name.
He fell asleep with his partners carefully tucked around him and his daughter steadily breathing in her sleep. They had wanted that for so long and they finally, finally had it.
#fanfiction#fanfic#writing#ao3#archive of our own#soc#six of crows#shadow and bone#sab#polycrows#pregnant kaz brekker#trans kaz brekker#pregnancy#tw miscarriage#tw birth#kaz brekker#jesper fahey#inej ghafa#matthias helvar#wylan van eck#nina zenik#expanding the flock fic
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From Assorted Short Stories:
Inej turns around, her back to him, and scrubs at her eyes with the heels of her hands. She’s not going to cry. Not over something that hasn’t happened yet.
“You know what the difference is?” Kaz says, his voice still strained, but soft. “Between me and Rollins?”
He waits for her to reply, but she doesn’t. She just waits for him to tell her.
“I remember.”
She turns to look at him, cataloguing the far away look on his face.
“I remember every person I put in the ground on my way up. Everyone I hurt. I remember their names. Their faces. I can’t forget them, I’ve tried. So when that kid puts me on his knees and demands I say that name, I promise you, I will say it.”
Now the tears are at the back of her throat, unbidden. She knows he has ghosts, they both do. But it suddenly strikes her just how haunted Kaz really is.
“All of them?” She asks, reaching down to take his hand
He doesn’t flinch away, just lets her lace their fingers together as he nods.
“Trust me,” he whispers. “I remember everything.”
I chose this one because I concur with the idea that Kaz would remember.
Ooooh very interesting choice!
(Get yourself a DVD commentary)
So my first instinct with this prompt was just to straight up plagerize Not So Righteous by 13agota (explicit, mind the tags) in which Inej is worried that Kaz will have forgotten what they had outside of Ketterdam when they go back. I decided not to steal their idea, but it was a temptation.
I don’t think I outright state it in the fic, but I imagined it happening in the Van Eck mansion, surrounded by opulence. He gets shot on his way home from there and turns around and goes back to bleed on their damask sheets.
I think Kaz has a hyper vigilance born from his PTSD but also from the specific nature of waking up on the barge- he and Jordie dropped their guard and he ended up there. So if I ever write a “without your armor or not at all” fic, Kaz letting go of that need to be on guard would be part of it. But that hyper vigilance is why he remembers so much- he has the kind of trauma response that won’t allow him to forget, and I am projecting.
Literally my first thought after finishing CK was that Kaz was building his own downfall the same way Pekka did, because you can’t live the lives they do without destroying a few people. I also think book Pekka is kinda a little bitch who honestly was not to blame of Jordie’s death. He absolutely wronged those boys, but he isn’t responsible for any of the choices they made after- they could have left Ketterdam. They didn’t have good choices, but they did have some. And I think the cruelest thing he did was give Kaz a sense of belonging and family that was an illusion.
I also don’t believe Kaz will be able to say the name when a person does get him, because Kaz is somewhat willfully blind to the scope of the damage he does. He might remember everyone he cons or hurts personally, but what about rival gang members who die in a shootout with the Dregs? What about someone who bets their life savings at the casino and whose kids go hungry? Indentures at pleasure houses he doesn’t save? Any of the people who love those people could blame him the way he blames Pekka, for creating an opportunity even if Kaz is functionally blameless. He is haunted by knowing names, not his actions, and those things are very different.
I don’t know if he knows they’re different, or if Inej does. I doubt it. They’re still felonious children in this story and that kind of nuance comes with age.
The very next thing that happens in this scene is that Inej crawls into bed with him and he lets her be the big spoon for like the first time ever. Kaz very much wants to be held and very much cannot let himself acknowledge that want. But being hurt is a good excuse.
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Crooked Kingdom Reread
Chapter 4: Inej
I like that this chapter starts right off with Inej trying to escape on her own
She’s not a damsel in distress sitting around waiting to be rescued
She’s going to try escaping on her own first
The room was pitch-black, and all she could hear in the silence was her own rapid breathing as panic seized her again.
She’d leashed it by controlling her breath, in through the nose, out through the mouth, letting her mind turn to prayer as her Saints gathered around her. She imagined them checking the ropes at her wrists, rubbing life into her hands.
My heart aches for her
But what I love is how she leans into her faith
Her actions and her Saints aid her 💕
She did not tell herself she wasn’t afraid. Long ago, after a bad fall, her father had explained that only fools were fearless. We meet fear, he’d said. We greet the unexpected visitor and listen to what he has to tell us. When fear arrives, something is about to happen.
I think about this quote from Inej’s father a lot
Whenever I find myself feeling afraid it comes to mind
Well either this quote or Yoda’s quote about fear
Fear isn’t bad, but we can’t let it control us. Sometimes it can guide us to make slightly better decisions, but we can’t let it stop us in our tracks
So far Inej has thought of:
Her past kidnapping/trauma
Her saints aiding and protecting her
Her father
And finally how Kaz would already be free of his bonds if he were in a similar situation
Van Eck could not have chosen her jailer better. Bajan was Suli, only a few years older than Inej, with thick black hair that curled around his collar and black gem eyes framed by lashes long enough to swat flies. He told her he was a music teacher indentured to Van Eck, and Inej wondered that the merch would bring a boy like that into his household given that his new wife was less than half his own age. Van Eck was either very confident or very stupid. He double-crossed Kaz, she reminded herself. He’s leaning heavily into the stupid column.
Van Eck is hoping to lull her into a false sense of security with someone who looks familiar from her past
Her tune will change about Bajan soon
And heck yeah Jan Van Eck is extremely stupid!
He should have never tried hiring Kaz at all really. Conning him is like signing a death warrant
She thought of Jesper toying with his guns, Nina squeezing the life from a man with the flick of a wrist, Kaz picking a lock in his black gloves. Thugs. Thieves. Murderers. And all worth more than a thousand Jan Van Ecks.
They’re her friends. Her family-
Then where are they? The question tore at some hastily stitched seam inside of her. Where is Kaz? She didn’t want to look at that question too closely. Above everything else, Kaz was practical. Why would he come for her when he could walk away from Van Eck with the most valuable hostage in the world?
My heart is being ripped right in half—
They are coming!
He’s coming!!
Just hang in there-
Bajan wrinkled his nose. “Let’s not speak Suli. It makes me maudlin.”
Right before this Inej had called him “Shevrati” Know-nothing in Suli
If you’re like me you had to look up what maudlin means
It can mean sentimental or even sick
This is actually super interesting because for Inej to survive in Ketterdam she clutched onto her Suli culture and her faith
Remembering that is what has helped her survive
It looks like Bajan has done just the opposite by shunning who he used to be
That’s quite sad actually…
She knows Nina will try to come for her, and Matthias will follow because it’s what’s right
And Jesper would want to if he could
But she’s so unsure of Kaz…
…without Kaz, were any of them a match for Van Eck’s ruthlessness and resources? I am, Inej told herself. I may not have Kaz’s devious mind, but I am a dangerous girl.
I love her confidence in herself her though
It’s beautiful
Inej knew better than that. She’d learned from the best. Better terrible truths than kind lies. Kaz had never offered her happiness, and she didn’t trust the men promising to serve it up to her now. Her suffering had not been for nothing. Her Saints had brought her to Ketterdam for a reason—a ship to hunt slavers, a mission to give meaning to all she’d been through. She would not betray that purpose or her friends for some dream of the past.
She’s offered the possibility of freedom and a chance to be with her family, but she won’t betray her friends
Maybe Kaz and the others were coming for her, but she didn’t intend to wait around and see.
That’s my Inej!
Once Bajan and the guards had left, she’d slipped the shard of broken bowl from where she’d hidden it beneath the ropes around her ankles and set to work. Weak and wobbly as she’d felt when Bajan had arrived with that heavenly smelling bowl of mush, she’d only pretended to swoon so that she could deliberately knock her tray off the table. If Van Eck had really done his research, he would have warned Bajan that the Wraith did not fall.
She said she’s not as clever as Kaz, but honestly I think she could give him a run for his money sometimes
Oh gosh
Crawling through the tiny air vent would be so horrible
I never thought I was claustrophobic, but reading Inej describe the experience might be changing my mind-
Like this quote:
Every time she took a deep breath, it felt like the air shaft was tightening around her ribs.
She wished for her knives, for the comforting weight of them in her palms. Did Van Eck still have them in his possession? Had he sold them off? Tossed them into the sea? She named the blades anyway—Petyr, Marya, Anastasia, Lizabeta, Sankt Vladimir, Sankta Alina and found courage in each whispered word.
…Finally, her fingers hooked over a door frame and her hands wrapped around the knob. It wouldn’t budge. Locked. She gave it a tentative rattle.
The room flooded with light. Inej shrank back against the door, squinting in the sudden brightness.
“If you wanted a tour, Miss Ghafa, you might simply have asked,” said Jan Van Eck.
He stood on the stage of the decrepit theater, his black mercher’s suit cut in severe lines.
This scene feels very much like a play. It’s almost comical
But I guess it’s fitting considering the location
It’s also just super rude of Van Eck to just be there waiting in the dark for her to try opening the door like that
Like. It’s so ridiculously dramatic actually
And then she attempts to escape
And she fails…
It does take three guards to hold her though!
Inej is so incredibly strong. I forget that sometimes because of her physical stature
“You are not going to find your way out of this without my help or Mister Brekker’s. As he does not seem to be making an appearance, perhaps you should consider a change in alliance.”
Inej said nothing.
We’re almost to the part shatters me…. and now that I think about it that’s a really poor choice of words because of what almost happens to Inej—
“… Where is Kaz Brekker keeping the boy?”
“How could I possibly know that?”
“You must know the locations of the Dregs’ safe houses. Brekker does nothing without preparation. He’ll have warrens to hide in all over the city.”
“If you know him so well, then you know he’d never keep Kuwei somewhere that I could lead you to him.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“I can’t help what you do or don’t believe. Your Shu scientist is probably long gone already.”
“Word would have reached me. My spies are everywhere.”
“Clearly not everywhere.”
Dab on him
Is that cringe to say in 2023?
I don’t care. This is the cringe™️ website for a reason
Van Eck sighed. “Remember that I have tried to treat you with civility.”
*eye roll*
I hate when the bad guy is like “now remember I used to be nice to you, but since you’re being frustrating now I’m going to be mean and hurt you mentally and physically-”
Like I don’t care how you used to be
You’re being awful Now—
You’re threatening to torture her!
And he was always awful actually
He kidnapped her and kept her bond in a tiny room- that’s not civil—
“Wait,” said Van Eck. He was studying Inej as if he were reading a ledger, trying to make the figures line up. He cocked his head to one side and said, “Break her legs.”
Inej felt her courage fracture. She began to thrash, trying to get free of the guards’ hold.
“Ah,” said Van Eck. “That’s what I thought.”
All she can manage is repeating “Don’t” over and over again but then…
“He’ll never trade if you break me!” she screamed, the words tearing loose from some deep place inside her, her voice raw and undefended. “I’ll be no use to him anymore!”
It hurts
Every single time—
Van Eck held up a hand. The mallet fell.
Inej felt it brush against her trousers as the impact shattered the surface of the table a hair’s breadth from her calf, the entire corner collapsing beneath the force.
My leg, she thought, shuddering violently. That would have been my leg. There was a metallic taste in her mouth. She’d bitten her tongue. Saints protect me. Saints protect me.
Just. Chills.
Horrifying chills
Oh Inej, I’m so sorry—
Inej could not control her shaking. I’m going to cut you open, she vowed silently. I’m going to excavate that pathetic excuse of a heart from your chest. It was an evil thought, a vile thought. But she couldn’t help it. Would her Saints sanction such a thing? Could forgiveness come if she killed not to survive but because she burned with living, luminous hatred? I don’t care, she thought as her body spasmed and the guards lifted her trembling form from the table. I’ll do penance for the rest of my days if it means I get to kill him.
Van Eck made a mistake making an enemy of the Wraith
Bajan moved to place the blindfold over her eyes. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I didn’t know he intended … I—”
“Kadema mehim.”
Bajan flinched. “Don’t say that.”
The Suli were a close people, loyal. They had to be, in a world where they had no land and where they were so very few. Inej’s teeth were chattering, but she forced out the words. “You are forsaken. As you have turned your back on me, so will they turn their backs on you.” It was the worst of Suli denunciations, one that forbade you the welcome of your ancestors in the next world, and doomed your spirit to wander without a home.
Bajan paled. “I don’t believe any of that.”
“You will.”
Bajan is such a sad character
He turned his back on his own people
In her early days at the Menagerie, she’d believed someone would come for her. Her family would find her. An officer of the law. A hero from one of the stories her mother used to tell. Men had come, but not to set her free, and eventually her hope had withered like leaves beneath a too-bright sun, replaced by a bitter bud of resignation.
Kaz had rescued her from that hopelessness, and their lives had been a series of rescues ever since, a string of debts that they never tallied as they saved each other again and again. Lying in the dark, she realized that for all her doubts, she’d believed he would rescue her once more, that he would put aside his greed and his demons and come for her. Now she wasn’t so sure. Because it was not just the sense in the words she’d spoken that had stilled Van Eck’s hand but the truth he’d heard in her voice. He’ll never trade if you break me. She could not pretend those words had been conjured by strategy or even animal cunning. The magic they’d worked had been born of belief. An ugly enchantment.
But it’s not true Inej
Kaz will always come for you
Always. No matter what!
Keep your faith in him
End of Part One
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#looks like I forgot to post last week already…#oops#since jedi survivor came out and now totk I’m pretty video game obsessed right now#I’ve been having a lot of fun with them!#so these rereads might be pretty slow!#I promise I’m still reading though and I’ll post eventually#I’m not stopping just kind of putting on hold#anyways! I really love this chapter!#crooked kingdom#six of crows#inej ghafa#kaz brekker#jesper fahey#nina zenik#matthias helvar#kanej#grishaverse#leigh bardugo#shadow and bone#books#reading#kazscrows#kazscrowsreadsck#ck#soc
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I want to talk about Kaz Brekker as a romantic figure in YA
I think one of the most interesting parts about Kaz is how debatable his sense of morality is. I think I could walk away with a different opinion each time. But right now, I want to focus on the one pure and incorruptible part of Kas Brekker, and that is his love for Inej.
Kaz makes sure to highlight how he views himself as someone broken and irredeemable and we can see some truth to that in his actions. He’s a killer, a liar, a thief and con man. He’s ambitious and vengeful and willing t do whatever it takes to reach his goal. But when it comes to Inej it’s different. Kaz’s feelings for Inej are, at their heart, self-less. He does not want to possess her or own her. In fact, making sure that she has freedom is one of his biggest driving forces. We can see the beginnings of this before the main timeline of Six of Crows, when Kaz is willing to risk his status in the Dregs and his standing with Haskell to buy out Inej’s indenture. This was for his own benefit and to further his own plans, and yet, he doesn’t make her get the tattoo. For everyone else in the Dregs, this isn’t a choice. It’s not a rule Kaz was even willing to bend for himself despite his aversion to touch, but he breaks it for Inej. He ensures that she has full power and control of her body when she has been denied this for so long.
I think it’s also important to note the difference between how Kaz and other YA romantic interests behave towards seeing the one they love being physically close with members of the opposite sex. Inej and Jesper have a close friendship, they hug, throw arms around each other and Inej even kisses him on the cheek. And Kaz is jealous, but this is where he deviates from the toxic, possessive behaviour that is so prevalent in YA. He isn’t jealous because he feels Inej is his, or that no one else is allowed to touch her, he is jealous because he wishes he could have such an easy physical dynamic with her too. Kaz’s jealously is a manifestation of his own frustration at his touch aversion and PTSD, not out of a desire to keep Inej for himself.
But it’s in Crooked Kingdom when we truly see how far Kaz is willing to go for her. Kaz, despite working for years on his plans for revenge, was ready to put it all at risk to free Inej from Van Eck, from her contract with Per Haskell and from anything that forcibly bound her to Ketterdam. Even Kaz’s inward and outward denial of his feelings for her is (alongside fear and trauma) a means of protecting her from people like Van Eck who may use her to get back at him. Its only when he realises that he is hurting her more by concealing the true extent of his care for her that he is able to speak up and finally tell her that he would crawl to her.
At the start of the iconic bathroom scene, he offers her a chance to get out of Ketterdam before the chaos begins. He gives her the option of money and the copy of her contract with Haskell because he doesn’t want to force her into taking part in his plan and into risking her life against Dunyasha even though her absence could jeopardise everything for him. Because her safety and freedom come before revenge and money. It’s the tangible proof that when it comes down to it Kaz would always put her first, no matter what it cost him.
And when it’s all over, he uses the money, the four million kruge he has spent the last two books talking about, to buy her a boat and locate her parents. Not only does Kaz come to peace with the idea of her leaving, but he is encouraging her to pursue her dream even though it may mean she never comes back. And it’s all the more poignant, because we know what Kaz is capable of. We know how he uses secrets and money as leverage to get what his way. We know that if he wanted to, he could keep Inej with him. But that’s the thing, Kaz doesn’t want that, not if it means she will be unhappy. Kaz would rather her be a world away, happy and free, than by his side and miserable. He doesn’t hold it over her that he saved her from Van Eck, he doesn’t make her feel guilty for leaving him behind, he doesn’t ask for anything from her, only that she might come back and visit him.
It seems so simple, to have a character who loves someone enough to prioritize their happiness above their own. And yet, somehow Kaz Brekker - literal murder and criminal - is a refreshing change amongst the sea of toxic YA love interests.
#hope this makes sense#Kaz Brekker#inej ghafa#kanej#kaz x inej#inej x kaz#six of crows#shadow and bone#crooked kingdom#The Goldbergs#jesper fahey
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so i’ve seen far too many comments since s&b came out that are comparing kaz to the darkling. things like, “how come kaz gets to be a hero loved by everyone who hates the darkling when they’re both morally grey murderers?” and frankly i’m sick of every variation of the sentiment.
even though they never meet in the books and their stories have nothing to do with each other, kaz and darkles are foils of one another. just so what i’m saying doesn’t get misconstrued at any point in this point, a foil is “a character who contrasts with the protagonist, in order to better highlight or differentiate certain qualities of the protagonist.”
what we know about the darkling: he dabbles in merzost and the end result is the fold. centuries pass and he doesn’t figure out a way to get rid of it (because he can’t). alina comes along and instead of actually eliminating the fold like he says he will, darkles exploits alina's powers to push boundaries of the fold and sacrifices thousands of lives in order to expand his own power. he quite literally enslaves her for months and puts her through so much psychological abuse—and that’s excluding the torture and deaths of her loved ones. darkles’ ultimate goal is power power and more power. nothing else. he starts by wanting safety for the grisha but delving deeper and deeper into merzost corrupts him from the inside out. by the time we meet him, grisha safety is no longer his main concern; if it was, he wouldn’t have served genya to the king. individual grisha lives are disposable to him. alina is disposable to him, bar her sun summoning powers.
what we know about kaz: he comes to ketterdam with his brother jordie after the death of his parents and, long story short, jordie dies because some rich merchant (pekka) cons them and they’re too young to see it coming. kaz has to use his brother’s corpse as a raft to survive swimming to shore, lest he die too. this all happens when kaz is nine years old. he then becomes consumed with avenging jordie and destroying pekka brick by brick. everything he does somehow serves the purpose of ruining pekka in the long run—or he tells himself. kaz rietveld becomes kaz brekker. kaz brekker is cold and cunning and ruthless and he’ll do the despicable things no one else will but he still has an undercurrent of humanity, which leads me to my point:
out of the two of them, kaz is the only one who is morally grey. darkles is straight up black. there is no actual moral complexity because he feels no guilt or remorse about any of his actions.
in rule of wolves, beloved alina makes an appearance and says to the darkling, “Tell me you regret some of it. Any of it. It’s not too late for you.” and to that he replies: “I didn’t come here to speak lies. Do you really believe this is the life you were meant for? Powerless and pathetic? Wiping the noses of children who will forget you? Telling them bedtime stories that will never come true?”
now. it’s evident how little he thinks of alina’s choices and how much he doesn’t regret his own. the choices that include: putting a collar on alina, pretending to be mal to get in alina’s bed, blinding his own mother and causing her subsequent death, torturing genya more than once, using zoya, destroying novokribirsk and who knows how many cities with the fold, leaving a demon inside nikolai. the list goes on and on and he feels remorse for none of it. and i'm not going to sit here and tell you that kaz is an ethical person who feels guilty and remorseful about the awful things he does, but kaz has an undercurrent of humanity in him. he’s a man driven by revenge, but at his very core he is still human.
in crooked kingdom inej manages to escape getting her legs smashed by telling van eck that kaz would never take her back that way. she’d be no use to him. and she fully believes that. she doesn’t say it to trick van eck; she very much believes that inej with broken legs would be a waste to kaz brekker and he’d simply get himself a new spider. because that is the reputation he has built for himself.
“He was going to break my legs,” she said, her chin held high, the barest quaver in her voice. “Would you have come for me then, Kaz? When I couldn’t scale a wall or walk a tightrope? When I wasn’t the Wraith anymore?”
Dirtyhands would not. The boy who could get them through this, get their money, keep them alive, would do her the courtesy of putting her out of her misery, then cut his losses and move on.
“I would come for you,” he said, and when he saw the wary look she shot him, he said it again. “I would come for you. And if I couldn’t walk, I’d crawl to you, and no matter how broken we were, we’d fight our way out together—knives drawn, pistols blazing.”
it’s not an admission of guilt or regret or remorse, i admit, so let’s look at one:
“For the briefest moment, Kaz and Van Eck sized each other up from across the bridge. Kaz couldn’t help but be reminded of when they’d faced each other this way seven days ago. He’d thought too much about that meeting. Late at night, when the day’s work was done, he’d lain awake, taking apart every moment of it. Again and again, Kaz thought of those few crucial seconds when he’d let his attention shift to Inej instead of keeping his eyes on Van Eck. It wasn’t a mistake he could afford to make again. That boy had betrayed his weakness in a single glance, had ceded the war for the sake of a single battle, and put Inej—all of them—in danger. He was a wounded animal who needed to be put down. And Kaz had done it gladly, choked the life from him without pause for regret. The Kaz that remained saw only the job: Free Inej. Make Van Eck pay. The rest was useless noise.”
he kills the part of him that put inej’s life in danger, that compromised all of their safety, and he doesn’t let himself regret that. he does regret having landed himself and others in this predicament. he does regret that inej’s life hangs in the balance because of him. because of his trauma and because of the person he has sort of been forced to become, he might not be able to articulate his guilt and regret and but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t feel those things. those feelings are there because, unlike darkles, kaz hasn’t been corrupted by power. kaz is greedy but not for power over other; he has a one track mind and that’s taking apart pekka’s life brick by brick. kaz is a victim of circumstance; darkles is not. kaz commits violence when he has to; darkles commits violence because, after so long of doing so, he relishes in it. i’d go so far as to say that kaz isn’t even greedy, per se. he wants money, yes, but not for the sake of having money. he wants more and more money because that means less and less money for pekka.
(this is a very good post to read re: kaz’s humanity)
and i’ve seen the argument from occasional showl only fan that kaz is just like the darkling because he own inej (since he’s “buying” her from tante haleen). kaz pays off her indenture to haleen, he does not buy her. kaz gives her a shot at freedom—something she would not have had without him. he doesn’t make her get the crow club tattoo like everyone else because “he wouldn’t be the one to mark [her] again.” in the books, kaz sells his shares of the crow club to pekka so he can help inej. he then buys a ship for inej so she can hunt slavers. he reunites her with his parents. on the show, he essentially liquidates his assets to get inej out from under haleen’s roof. in the books and on the show, at every turn kaz gives inej a choice whenever he can.
try and line that up with darkles sparkles. he isolates alina into the little palace even if he makes it seem like a splendid place. he cuts off her communication from mal and makes her feel abandoned, giving him an easy opportunity to charm a lost girl. who wouldn’t fall for the sexy powerful man doting on you’ve lost everything else? he never gives her any options regarding what she can do with her powers. he tells her what he has to do. when she doesn’t comply, he forces her to. he puts a collar on her. he brands her as his puppet. he perverts her power with his own. he kills the only parent figure she’s ever had. time and time again, he strips alina of her agency, holds her captive, hurts the people she cares for.
to put it succinctly: darkles is the government and kaz is an anarchist. kaz is a byproduct of people like the darkling. darkles is a ruler. his responsibility is to take care of the grisha under his command. kaz is a 17 yr old kid. he has no such responsibilities. his only commitment is the vow he made to avenge his brother’s death, which happened because of a man like the darkling—hungry for more more more. in six of crows kaz says, “When everyone knows you’re a monster, you needn’t waste time doing every monstrous thing.” and like… that directly juxtaposes the darkling, who does feel compelled to do every horrific thing he can do. kaz is mostly bark with an occasional bite; darkles is a feral dog that needs to be put down.
without using thousands of words: darkling is an ancient powerful being and kaz is a CHILD. there should be no comparison of their morals and ethics.
#kaz brekker#the darkling#shadow and bone#this got LONG so im putting her under a cut thank u for understanding and know that i am right and correct abt everything here.#six of crows#seedpost
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kaz, inej, and promises
reading this post got me thinking about the conversation kaz and inej have when she first joins the dregs.
kaz tells inej that he can’t promise her safety or happiness. he can guarantee her nothing with him. he’s scared of his past, how he was conned by pekka rollins. he doesn’t want inej to be haunted by any of his demons.
he gave inej the bare minimum. and yet, after he gets “kidnapped” by van eck:
both kaz and inej are unnerved. both of them rely on kaz’s cutthroat reputation to keep themselves safe. and that’s the kicker.
kaz refused to verbally promise inej safety when she joined the dregs. but he promises it to her right here. he says it won’t happen again, nobody will get the better of me again, i promise you that i’ll keep you safe, i promise you that nobody will be able to get through me to you.
it’s the beginning of the end for him. it’s a subtle way to understand his feelings for inej. he loses his sense of criminal rationality for her. he wants to keep her safe.
and when he doesn’t? he tears down the world to get to her. kaz was able to ensure inej’s safety until he promised it to her. he couldn’t keep her safe at the end of six of crows, even after he promised he would, because he wasn’t kaz “the toughest, scariest thing walking the alleys of the barrel” brekker for her. he was just kaz. he was weak.
this breaks him. in crooked kingdom kaz trades inej for alys. he’s incredibly annoyed with the naïve alys, and wylan, scared for his stepmother, wants to stop him from doing anything too rude. then this happens:
wylan wants to ask kaz to promise him that alys wouldn’t get hurt. kaz couldn’t even ensure that the girl he loved wasn’t hurt, forget his enemy’s wife.
then wylan pulls out the final card:
wylan mentions inej, and kaz immediately considers it his business. and then he goes absolutely feral because thinking of promises and inej reminds him where he failed. that he couldn’t keep her safe, that it was his feelings for her that may have caused her demise.
a promise from kaz brekker, one almost unsaid, cost him the person he loved. kaz and inej’s dynamic is so well written. god fucking damn.
#kanej#kaz brekker#inej ghafa#crooked kingdom#soc#soc meta#six of crows#wylan van eck#shadow and bone#grishaverse#leigh bardugo#is a fucking genius
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Six of Crows Fics by KatyaMorrigan
Any relevant content warnings are included in the tags/notes of each work. Please check tags and full synopses for more details. Inspirations/prompts are credited in the relevant fic.
Ace (15.4k words) [Kaz/Inej, general relationships] - As Kaz and Inej slowly begin to work through their trauma and their relationship becomes more physical, Inej’s thoughts turn to intimacy and sex - and whether the latter is something she even wants from their relationship. A loving depiction of an asexual relationship between an aspec Kaz and Inej. Contains discussions of sex and some on-the-page sensual and sexual intimacy.
A Hotel on the Board is Worth Two on the Geldstraat (23.7k words) [Kaz/Inej, Jesper/Wylan, Nina/Matthias, general relationships] - When the Crows discover a Monopoly board amongst a shipment of contraband, all other plans get postponed. Until, that is, they discover that the Razorgulls have made off with the rest of the contraband. Boardgame hijinks and heists ensue. Written as part of the Grishaverse Big Bang 2021.
A Push In The Right Direction (5.3k words) [Kaz/Inej, Jesper/Wylan, Nina/Matthias, general relationships] - A young boy walks home from school in Ketterdam one evening, pondering what he has learned of the city from his mother’s warnings, and running across a few familiar faces. An exploration of what Ketterdam could become in the aftermath of SoC/CK, and where the characters might be thirty years on from their heist. Written as part of SOFTober 2020.
Blood on Marble Tiled Floors (2.9k words) [Kaz/Inej] - The Bathroom Scene, but reversed. Kaz has rather predictably taken another beating in a street fight, and has made it back to the Van Eck mansion to sort himself out. Inej finds him dripping blood all over the bathroom, and offers to help him clean up. Written as part of SOFTober 2020.
Heterosexual Mercher Function (2.6k words) [Jesper/Wylan] - Kaz takes full advantage of Wylan’s connections and makes both him and Jesper stake out a mercher ball. Turns out that Wylan can fit in among the gentry far better than Jesper had expected. Written as part of SOFTober 2020.
Hope is the thing with Feathers (6.5k words) [Kaz/Inej, general relationships] - Captain Inej Ghafa has returned to Ketterdam for the first time in three years, and reunites with her old gang mates. She has no idea what to expect from seeing Kaz, Jesper, and Wylan again, but it certainly wasn’t an invitation to tea at the Slat with Kaz following their evening meal. Written for the Grishaverse Reverse Mini-Bang 2021.
A 2k word version written specifically for the Mini-Bang can also be found here.
Hotwiring A Van Is Easier In Principle (8.5k words) [Nina/Matthias, Kaz/Inej, Jesper/Wylan] - In a modern AU, the Crows all go on a road trip together. But the van breaks down just a few miles away from the nearest garage. Told in three parts, each following one of the couples until they can get back on the road and continue their journey.
If At First You Don’t Succeed (6.2k words) [Kaz/Inej, general relationships] - Kaz and Inej use flowers as a way to communicate their love for each other without needing to express it verbally or physically. But when a mistake leads to Inej feeling unsafe in their home, it will take more than just flowers for Kaz to reassure her of his intentions.
Love Languages in a Time Of Touch Aversion (3.7k words) [Kaz/Inej] - Incomplete. When trying to be intimate together while still considering their limitations, Kaz is struck by how much he loves Inej’s hair. A new love language is born.
On His Mind (3.4k words) [Kaz/Inej] - As much as Kaz knows he has to let Inej leave, it doesn’t sit right with him. His subconscious makes him confront this decision to let her go through a series of dreams, finally prompting him to reconsider his priorities. Written as part of SOFTober 2020.
Oranges for Breakfast (3.1k words) [Kaz/Inej] - After Kaz buys Inej The Wraith, she feels that it is important to clarify that little gestures mean more to her than grand ones. Kaz eventually gets it right. Written as part of SOFTober 2020.
Reasons To Start A Snowball Fight (2.4k words) [Nina/Matthias] - Nina and Matthias are in Fjerda for a holiday. With most places shut down for the winter, Nina decides to take advantage of Matthias' traditional tastes and buys herself a sweater so that they can embrace the snow and have some fun. Written as part of SOFTober 2020.
Sleepover (3.4k words) [Kaz/Inej, general relationships] - After a lovely meal at the Van Eck mansion with himself, Inej and Jesper, Wylan manages to convince Kaz to spend the night. Inej is delighted. Written as part of SOFTober 2020.
Smile (2.7k words) [Kaz/Inej, general relationships] - Set pre-Six of Crows, Inej realises that nobody has ever seen Kaz smile and so sets out on a private mission to see him do so. Nina and Jesper are incredulous, but apparently all it takes is Inej making accidental innuendos. Written as part of SOFTober 2020.
Sun on Christmas Day (5.7k words) [Jesper/Wylan] - The cold grey winters in Ketterdam are making Wylan miserable, so Jesper suggests that they visit his father and spend Christmas in Novyi Zem. Written as part of SOFTober 2020.
Swings and Roundabouts (3.2k words) [Kaz/Inej] - A Suli carnival comes to Ketterdam, and Inej is permitted to use their acrobatics equipment. Kaz joins her one morning. Written as part of SOFTober 2020.
The Right Fit (5.3k words) [Kaz/Inej, general relationships] - Inspired by some brief dialogue in the Shadow and Bone Netflix show, this is the time in which Kaz picked up a man’s uniform for Inej while on a mission and realised that she was exactly the person he wanted on his side - and perhaps even by his side.
The Time Kaz Made An Innuendo On A Stake-Out (2k words) [Kaz/Inej] - Kaz might be a tiny bit desperate to make Inej laugh, but he absolutely didn’t want it to be because of an unfortunate misreading. Written as part of SOFTober 2020.
Think Less (2.7k words) [Kaz/Inej] - Kaz and Inej work through Kaz's busy thoughts in order to allow themselves a first kiss. Turns out that he thinks a lot less when he’s focused on kissing Inej. Written as part of SOFTober 2020.
Tricks Only A Con Artist Knows (3.3k words) [Kaz/Inej] - While on a business trip in Ravka, Kaz and Inej visit a fair. Kaz finally relaxes, and Inej gets to take advantage of Kaz's softer side as they enjoy the beach, local delicacies, and mildly appropriative magic shows that a Ravkan fair can offer. Written as part of SOFTober 2020.
What Counts as a Love Language? (2.2k words) [Nina/Matthias, Jesper/Wylan, general relationships] - While the Crows (minus Kaz) are drinking in the Crow Club, Nina makes a bet with Jesper over who can make their boyfriend blush the most. Written as part of SOFTober 2020.
White Sheets, Black Hair (1.4k words) [Kaz/Inej] - Kaz and Inej share a bed for the first time. It takes some minor discomfort and boundary setting, but they wouldn’t miss out on it for the world. Written as part of SOFTober 2020.
#six of crows#crooked kingdom#soc#six of crows fanfic#six of crows fic#kanej#kaz x inej#wesper#jesper x wylan#helnik#nina x matthias#fanfiction#fanfic
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@affcgato / ASKED : “ why won’t you even look at me? ” // Jordie, because apparently we’re starting off with a bang
KAZ HAD been in high spirits that night. though he tried to occupy himself with the grueling journey ahead as he walked the lonely canals to the financial district, his thoughts eventually strayed to those of inej. he’d turned her letter over & over again in his mind; though inej never wrote of anything particularly fascinating, he found himself enraptured with her delicate scrawl, the way the words slanted towards the end of a sentence, how she scrawled his name at the top of a letter. thoughts then drifted to the current scheme he had in mind, smiling to himself at the idea of entering inej’s courters at the van eck mansion, how proud she would be of him if he managed to do so undetected, how he might linger for only a moment longer than needed in order to listen to the muffled laughter of his friends coming from below. however, kaz is broken from his daydreams by the steady increase of mist the rolls in from off the coast, nearly obscuring kaz’s view as he walks the harbor.
KAZ DIDN'T truly believe it was them, not at first. the council of tides hadn’t been seen in decades, avoiding even the worst events kerch’s history had experienced ––– what reason did they have for going after a lowly barrel rat? he knew they had no real evidence of kuwei’s faked death ( at least, not if everyone did their jobs right ), so kaz is happy to entertain them & be on his way. –––– that is, until a single member strays behind the rest of his council members for the sole purpose of lifting his mask to reveal himself to kaz.
HIS FACE is one kaz knows even in death. it’s one he sees nearly every night, one that has haunted him since the last moment kaz saw him, his bloated, rotting face as kaz used his body like a life vest forever burned into his memory. ––– JORDIE. jordie, kaz’s older brother. kaz’s brother who had taught kaz how to read while their father worked their farm, who had took kaz’s hand in his own when their father died, who hadn’t stopped holding his hand until the night they arrived in ketterdam, cold & afraid as they slept beneath a stone bridge that shielded them from rain on their first night in town, but at least not alone. jordie, who had promised kaz that things would be alright after jacob hertzoon had conned them out of their money. jordie, who had died seven years ago. jordie, who’s lifeless corpse kaz had clung to for days on end afterwards, who haunted him even after death, whose lifeless face lingers in kaz’s mind each time he’s touched, each time he allowed himself to laugh or feel fondness towards members of his crew.
KAZ WANTS to scream. he wants to raise his cane & attack the imposter wearing his brother’s face, beat him over the head until he was bloody & raw & then toss his body off the harbor & watch him float away just as he had his brother so many years ago. ––– & yet he remains completely still. the ocean of terror begins to seep its way through the carefully constructed facade he had built, starting in his toes & traveling higher & higher throughout his body until kaz feels like he can’t move, can’t breath, can’t feel anything but the ghost of jordie’s flesh under his own, his skin rotting with decomposition, the feeling of jordie’s bloated limbs touching his own.
WHY WON'T kaz look at him? he doesn’t think he can. he’s afraid that if he does, the past seven years he’s spent building the persona of KAZ BREKKER would come crumbling down around him. he’s afraid he’ll be the same frightened boy he was the day jordie died, floating listlessly across the sea, praying to ghezen to take him so that he could be reunited with his brother.
HE DISTANTLY hears jordie’s voice coming from the stranger’s mouth, sees his lips moving, but kaz still can’t make himself face the ghost before him. he only hears the rushing of waves in his ears, drowning out whatever explanation he was trying to give. it didn’t matter to kaz. his brother was dead ––– there was no changing that.
❝ because i don’t know who you are. ❞
kaz brekker turns & walks away from his brother.
#affcgato#WHY WOULD U DO THIS TO ME#if le.igh bar.dugo won't write soc3 then I Will Do It For Her.#verse tbd.#* ––– .• ♣ | IN CHARACTER.
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Kaz and Wylan’s potential to become each other
Wow, you guys were a lot more excited about this than I was expecting! I made a post briefly mentioning this idea and it got way more attention that I was expecting, so as promised here is my explanation and I’ve tagged people who asked for it at the end :)
*WARNING: CONSTANT SPOILERS AHEAD*
Ok so the driving forcing of this comparison is rooted in the similarities of their characters and their backstories. Both of them lost a close family member, were abused by men with power over them, and experienced a form of ‘rebirth’ by nearly drowning in the Ketterdam canals. They also both experience disability; Kaz using a cane for a broken leg that didn’t heal correctly, and Wylan having severe dyslexia that prevented him from learning to read. A key difference that separates them, and arguably is a representation of the difference in the way their experiences have shaped their personalities as well, is that Kaz’s disability is a direct result of his chasing after vengeance, whereas Wylan’s disability was used as an excuse for his father to abuse him for what we as the reader see to be a minimum of eight years. (I’m assuming this because he is 16 in the book and was 8 when his mother ‘died’, which is the point that he describes he father to have “given up on him”)
I’m gonna quickly hop to parallels between Kaz and Pekka Rollins, bare with me I promise it’s relevant, which are quickly established as a key part of the novels. When Inej compares them, Kaz’s reply is “I don’t sell girls, I don’t con helpless kids out of their money” to which she gently responds “look at the floor of the Crow Club, Kaz”. Aside from this being the heartbreaking line that it is, it also does a very good job of highlighting their similarities and a similarity that they share with Jan Van Eck. When they meet the merch at the end of the first book they meet on an island called Vellgeluk, which is described as being popular with smugglers and slavers like those who kidnapped Inej. The other Crows are surprised Van Eck knows about Vellgeluk, but Kaz simply says “maybe he isn’t the upstanding merch he appears to be”. Great subtle foreshadowing for his double cross, and great establishment of the link between these three characters. In fact, Van Eck and Kaz echo each other more than you might think. Just as Kaz states “Greed bows to me, it is my servant and my lever”, Van Eck says “Yes, Chaos will come. And I will be it’s master”. In their first meeting, Van Eck accuses Kaz of murder and gambling with people’s lives, and in return Kaz points out that 1 in 5 of Van Eck’s ships will never return because they will sink or “fall prey to pirates”, so they are both doing the same thing, and that they both have the same motivations for this bloodshed: “profit”.
Now consider how often Wylan echoes Kaz, and therefore whether he echoes his father as well. They both have exceptional memories, Kaz’s being photographic/eidetic and Wylan being able to put words to music in his head to remember pages worth of infomation - this is even emphasised by Kaz being able to count cards when he gambles, saying “he could keep track of the game for up to three decks” and Jesper asking Wylan if he’d be able to apply “that trick to counting cards” to which he replies “probably. But I won’t”. They also both have impressive intellects, which could have placed them far higher up in the world than they’ve found themselves if it weren’t for cruel circumstances - Van Eck even comments on this, saying it angers him that Kaz has so much potential but does nothing with it. Then there’s their tendency to avoid being vulnerable. I think we too often overlook the fact that no-one knows Jan Van Eck hired two men to kill his son, not even Jesper, and that not even Inej knows what happened to Kaz on the Reaper’s Barge. Jesper believes that Wylan left his house as a result of his father’s abuse but that it was still his choice, and Inej has no information beyond “Pekka Rollins killed my brother” and the explanation of the con when Kaz faces off with Rollins in Crooked Kingdom. I genuinely believe that the biggest thing separating them is where they place blame for their situations. Kaz blames Pekka Rollins. Wylan actually blames himself.
Arguably, although he catalysed the events, if Rollins hadn’t conned Kaz and Jordie they still would have suffered in an almost identical way: they would both contract the Queen’s Lady Plague, they wouldn’t have enough money for both medicine and boarding, and Jordie would die. In that scenario Kaz would have still been left penniless and alone with nowhere to go, but he wouldn’t have had anyone to blame. In fact, he may have died as well because it’s really his drive for vengeance that makes him strive for survival. When he’s on the Reaper’s Barge he wonders if it’s worth trying to survive because there’s nothing waiting for him in the city, but then he realises that the chance of revenge is waiting for him, and that thought drives him to stay alive every day that follows. Without Rollins, Kaz probably would have blamed himself for Jordie’s death, and I’m backing that up with the singular moment when he’s first attacked by parem-high tide makers and has a brief “boy’s fear” that they are ghosts. He thinks, for a split second, that a ghost has come to kill him and what does he say? He says “Jordie had come for vengeance at last”. This is chapter three. We have no idea who Jordie is. With the limited information we had at the time and what we’d just seen happen to Big Bolliger, I assumed it was someone in Kaz’s gang that he had backstabbed and who has died because of what he did. But no. This single line leads me to wholeheartedly believe that Kaz blames Rollins, who realistically was only a small part of his suffering, quite so vividly to emotionally avoid blaming himself.
Wylan blames himself until around chapters 14 to 16 of Crooked Kingdom. His experiences with mental, emotional, and physical abuse have actively convinced him that his so-called ‘inadequacies’ caused a change in his father’s behaviour. But Wylan not being able to read didn’t magically turn Van Eck from a lucky family man into someone willing to try “specialists, tonics, beatings, [and] hypnotism” against his child. The fact is that Van Eck, like many abusers, is masterfully manipulative in everything he does. Wylan describes seeing his parents’ marriage as a happy one, but he also says “the argued all the time, sometimes about me. But I remember them laughing a lot too”. He’s quick to defend their relationship as if it isn’t supposed to be marred by argument and he lays blame on himself by suggesting that he was the root of their unhappiness. He also says that around Alys, Jan Van Eck becomes who he once was around Marya; a kinder, gentler man. I don’t think we’re meant to assume that he’s acting any differently with Alys in private right now, but I do think we’re meant to assume that he would have done down the line if he hadn’t been arrested (and presumably she filed for divorce). In chapter 14 of Crooked Kingdom, Wylan learns that his mother is still alive but that his father had her committed and declared insane so he could use it as grounds for divorce and marry Alys instead. And you know what happens? Wylan blames himself. He says, verbatim, to Jesper: “You don’t understand. It’s my fault”. He explains that Van Eck did this so he could have a “real heir”; because Marya produced a “faulty” child he needed a new woman to give him the child he wanted. That’s a messed up thing to think on so many levels, but Wylan doesn’t blame Van Eck because he is still being conditioned by his abuse. He and Kaz experienced different kinds of abuse, and Kaz wasn’t conditioned to blame anyone but his abuser, so that’s what he does. When Wylan does begin to blame Van Eck, he is immediately taken in by this same idea of revenge. Kaz says “you were angry. I needed you righteous” when explaining why he sent Wylan to St Hilde blind in chapter 16. Wylan was angry with his father before, but he wasn’t actively seeking vengeance. Now that he has a cause, someone other than himself to fight for? He tells Kaz “well, now you have me”.
Both of them have this potential to be fuelled by revenge or self-hatred, and although they go about it in different ways and lean towards different sides of the scale they are both balancing between those two extremes for the entire duology. Their past experiences have, and their future experiences could, tip them further either way but right now they are almost playing with the line.
Thank you so much if you’ve bothered to read this far, sorry for the long post but you did ask for an essay, so there you go. Tagging the people who asked - @kazooyay @mikasimaginairyworld @sunseeking-cyptid @moonlit-aura @alexplutoplanet @gandalfsmallnaturals @livsarthaven @goodomenstrack23 @origami-butterfly @flower-biatch @bookworm010307 @thesunniest @wherela @space-ace-thoughts @sixofbabycrows @antisocial-burrito
Sorry if I missed anyone!!!
#grishaverse#leigh bardugo#six of crows#crooked kingdom#kaz brekker#wylan van eck#kanej#wesper#kanej supremacy#wesper my beloved#inej ghafa#jesper fahey#nina zenik#matthias helvar#jan van eck#marya van eck#marya hendriks#wylan hendricks#jesper and wylan#six of crows wylan#kazzle dazzle#kaz rietveld#jordie rietveld#kaz and jordie#pekka rollins
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for the fandom ask - six of crows :)
blorbo (favorite character, character I think about the most)
I mean. Like. My username is kazz-brekker so I think we all know my feelings on everyone's favorite repressed teenage mob boss. No one is doing it like Kaz Brekker and honestly we shouldn't even try to repeat him, he's too iconic.
scrunkly (my “baby”, character that gives me cuteness aggression, character that is So Shaped)
Wylan Van Eck, flutist and bomb maker who took to a life of crime shockingly easy but is still adorable.
scrimblo bimblo (underrated/underappreciated fave)
I think all the crows tend to get their fair share of love so I'm going to be controversial and say Dunyasha Lazareva just because I hate her but she's such a good dissection of the Chosen One character trope that I remain in awe. Plus she inspired some of Inej's best lines.
glup shitto (obscure fave, character that can appear in the background for 0.2 seconds and I won’t shut up about it for a week)
This is cheating because she's not really an obscure character but I lost my MIND when I was reading Six of Crows for the first time and Nina name-dropped Zoya Nazyalensky. She didn't even have to appear for me to be excited.
poor little meow meow (“problematic”/unpopular/controversial/otherwise pathetic fave)
I feel like Kuwei Yul-Bo low-key counts as this because I've seen some people hate on him for kissing Jesper, but I personally think that was hysterically funny and the best con pulled in the whole series, plus he's got an interesting backstory with having to hide his abilities and helping his scientist father.
horse plinko (character I would torment for fun, for whatever reason)
I just think that any scene of Nina making Matthias uncomfortable by challenging his worldview is extremely fun!
eeby deeby (character I would send to superhell)
Tante Heleen is honestly one of the most awful villains I've ever encountered in a YA book and I only want very very bad things for her.
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DEKAPPEL HEIST PART TWO of three
"Three DeKappels?" said Jesper incredulously. "to Visser, Meyer, and Van Eck?"
Kaz gave a nearly imperceptible nod. "That's three merchers the Dime Lions have their teeth in."
"Since when did merchers accept money from the gangs?" Inej asked.
"Times are changing," said Kaz bitterly. He'd have to reevaluate the stocks he held at the Exchange. They could be usurped from him if the dirty Council was paid the right price by any of the gangs. "Every damn share in this besotted city is in jeopardy."
It was the second night of the infuriating heat wave. Kaz's veins were unusually fraught, his patience ran out and his temper unchecked. The cheap clock on his office wall chimed its off-key tune marking twelve o'clock.
"Get to the door, Jesper," Kaz snapped irritatedly.
"I was going," Jesper said sullenly, shutting the door behind him.
Kaz barely registered the look of what might have been hurt on the sharpshooter's face as he got up to pour himself a drink. He slammed a dusty glass onto his cluttered desk and filled it halfway. He threw it back and drained it to the bottom. He poured another one and flung his coat and jacket onto the bed, then slumped in his desk chair.
Inej had moved silently to the window sill. "Bad business on the East Stave again tonight, Kaz," she said quietly, watching the people below.
Kaz took a sip of whiskey. "Look down the street, Inej."
He heard her exhale. "Bad business at the Crow Club."
Kaz's response was the thud of the glass on wood. His leg pained him worse in the cold than it did in the heat, but stress did nothing to alleviate that tension either. Agony was shooting up his taxed muscles.
Inej was still on the sill, gazing outside. She looked like a saint when she sat like that. She should keep sitting like that. But now she was getting up and pouring her own drink. There, a few sips down. Now she was balanced easily on the edge of his desk, despite the drink.
"You know what we need?" Kaz said.
"Business?"
"Money.''
"Lots of it."
"Let's steal a painting."
Inej pushed her drink away. "Kaz, no."
"Yes. Let's steal a DeKappel."
She met his eyes. "Everyone in Ketterdam knows fully well you're a thief. Committing every sin to prove it is unnecessary."
"I want a painting, Inej."
"Buy one."
"But you said I'm a thief. What good is a thief who doesn't steal?"
She looked away, exasperated, and Kaz immediately regretted his words. He gazed at the girl, the phantom poised a few feet in front of him. He wanted to touch her just to see if she was real.
Kaz slid a leather covered hand into one pocket and pulled out a packet of cards. He flipped the deck face up and fanned it out.
Inej turned her head back to him at the sound.
He squared up the deck in his left hand, thumbing four cards over to his right. He showed these to her: the ace of diamonds, the king of clubs, the queen of spades, and the jack of diamonds. "The merchers make a profit the same way we do. They watch and wait. They invest and reap. They steal and they con, Inej, they just do it under a title to justify it." He showed her the seemingly same four cards in his right hand, but this time revealing four aces. "These are the same merchers who exchange human bodies, exploit children, and swindle countries for their personal gain. And the rats have the gall to call it trade."
Kaz flipped over the four cards again, showing four kings this time. "At least I know I'm a thief." In the second it took Inej to blink, he had the set of queens added to his hand. "Let's steal a painting. A DeKappel. Only the best for you, my queen." He set the four kings and four queens down on the desk.
Gingerly, she picked up the king of clubs and queen of spades. "What is this Kaz? You show me a card trick and feed me pretty words and you expect me to go along with your wishes?"
Kaz swept the remaining cards away in annoyance. He was about to take a gulp from the whiskey bottle when she spoke again.
"I know the merchers are cruel men. I know firsthand, Kaz." She set down three cards. somehow Inej had gotten ahold of the jack of diamonds. He almost laughed. Of course. If there was anyone in the world who could have seen around his sleight of hand and done a number on him, it was the Wraith.
"Let's go on a heist," she said.
The fog in Kaz's mind seemed to ebb away. For the first time in weeks, his head space was clear, beautifully, blissfully clear - save for the diabolical plans in formation.
____
Inej watched Kaz find Jesper at his post. At two and a half bells after midnight, Jesper looked exhausted from filling in as the role of a barker.
"Jesper."
"Yeah, boss?"
"We're on a job. I need you." It was Kaz's version of an apology.
"Not the painting?'
"Three."
"Three DeKappels, boss?"
"Three hundred thousand kruge if we’re lucky."
Jesper's smile could have lit all of the Stave. "Does this mean I'm off the door?"
"Better than that. You're on Geldstraat, tonight."
Inej crept around the gutter of the Crow Club and hopped to the ground of the back entrance where she waited for Kaz and Jesper. "Three paintings?" she asked them indignantly.
"You must not know me very well," said Kaz. "When you steal one thing, it’s an endeavor. When you steal two, it’s because you want to. When you steal three it’s just to show you can."
She shot him a disapproving glare. Typical Kaz, withholding the full extent of his thoughts and revealing it only when it pleased him. "And you don't suppose selling three DeKappels would be conspicuous?"
"Oh, Inej," said Jesper, “Ketterdam sees me every day. You think she can’t handle conspicuous?”
"No," Inej responded, "it seems I am the only one who cares for our safety."
"You doubt my ability to lift three paintings in one night?" Kaz asked.
"No," she said again. Why was she reluctant? Was it that the DeKappels were Ravkan? That they were landscapes of home? Was she really that partial to art? Or that she just wasn't eager to steal? Inej pulled her hood over her hair. "I doubt whether your ego could handle it."
Jesper snorted. "His ego is just as expansive as his greed."
"Infinite," conceded Inej.
"Never underestimate the overconfidence of men," said Kaz as they climbed into a rowboat. "With the right amount of zeal and cheating, we can easily accomplish this."
"With the right amount of cheating, we can accomplish anything," Jesper snorted.
"And the locks?" Inej inquired, ignoring the arrogance of her companions.
"Leave that to me," said Kaz.
"No Grisha for the job, or am I the only watch?" asked Jesper. "I hear there's one at the House of White Rose. No demo either, so my ravishing looks must be enough."
"Not this again,” muttered Kaz. “A Ravkan Heartrender at the White Rose, but we won't need her, not for this job."
They moved quickly over the waters, the dust and grime of the Barrel vanishing as they grew closer to the wealthy districts. Kaz explained the plan in his usual fashion - disclosing the least amount of information in the most infuriating way. They tied the boat to a miraculously clean dock.
Inej dismounted, the package strapped to her back incongruously throwing off her balance in a way that was perceptible only to her acrobat mind. The first house was on the left, daffodils sprouting merrily in the front yard. She followed Kaz to a window on the bottom floor, trusting his ample knowledge of the security in all of Ketterdam. She saw Kaz direct Jesper to the same gazebo she'd been in last night, to keep a trusted eye on the street and a steady hand on his gun.
Kaz's delicate gloved hands reached out and slid over the intricate lock at the side entrance of the mansion. "Fabrikator made," he said.
Inej glaced worriedly at him. She knew better than to doubt his skill, but Fabrikator locks required more than just ability to crack. They contained magic. This explained the quick trip he had taken before they'd gone to rescue Jesper from his post.
Something like a stamp appeared in Kaz's palm. "Fabrikator locks are just complicated latches. Extremely easy to pick, if not for the pulley system that lifts the latch. Nothing but a Fabrikator enchanted insignia can budge that pulley."
"Where did you get one?"
"I know every official locksmith and every undercover lock pick in this city. The hard part wasn't finding the insignia - it was determining which of these idiots weren't selling counterfeit ones without even being aware of it."
"Well, did you tell them they were fakes?"
"Of course not."
Kaz's hands passed over the lock on the door. Inej heard a cranking sound, then saw the flash of metal picks in his hands as the door popped open.
She was in and out in under three minutes, her package one-third lighter. Together, they carefully carried the sheet-wrapped painting to the boat.
The process was repeated at the gardenia house, the only difference being the size of the painting.
At the tulip decorated house, Kaz didn't unlock a side door. He left her in front of an obviously unlocked second floor window. "This is Jan Van Eck's house. The man is more prudish than the rest, so his painting is already hung up to be kissed in his office. It's the room to the right of this one. Enter through this window; it appears he doesn't know it's unlocked. Use the insignia to open the office door, then use the picks to finesse the lock. It's very simple, I've taught you this one already. Like I said, never underestimate the overconfidence of men."
Inej nodded, though she found one flaw with Kaz's words. "He's in his office," she pointed out. "I can hear him moving."
"I know," Kaz said. "He's so devoted to his piousness he's not yet asleep like a good little mercher. In ten minutes, you'll hear him leave. At that moment, you'll have exactly four minutes before he renters his office. Be at the barge with Jesper by then."
Inej breathed out. "Okay."
"If all goes well, send Jesper to bed and meet me in my office. We need to fence these as soon as possible."
She raised her eyes to meet his coal-black ones, grim as ever. "No mourners."
"No funerals."
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