without armor (or not at all)
After a year away from Ketterdam, Inej Ghafa comes home. Kaz waits for her at the Slat, even though every part of him has been wanting to camp out on the docks of Fifth Harbor for days, waiting for her. If it were only for her, he might have. But he has a reputation to uphold with the Dregs, and so he stays in his office.
(And if there is a small, childish part of him that wants Inej to come to him, to reach out first and prove... something ...well, no one has to know.)
He feels her presence while staring at records that might as well have been written in Fjerdan for all the sense they make to him, and it takes more effort than he’d like to stay where he is.
“Hello, Inej.”
“Is that all the welcome I’m going to get, Kaz?”
He stands, turns around. Stops breathing.
Inej is just as beautiful as she always was, but a little differently now. Kaz can’t exactly figure out what it is. Clearly her year at sea didn’t change her style much, though she doesn’t have her hood anymore. He spots a new scar, small, on the left side of her head, just under her ear. She steps closer to him, silent as ever, but there’s something new in the way she walks, too. Then it hits him.
She’s settled. At peace. Satisfied with what she’s doing and with herself, for maybe the first time. Hunting down slavers and saving kids like her.
“Aren’t you going to say anything?” Inej asks.
“Welcome back,” Kaz says. “Jesper missed you.”
“Just Jesper?”
“Well, Nina’s in Fjerda, but I’m sure she misses you too.”
“What about you , Kaz?”
He turns his face away. Inej sighs. “And here I thought you’d actually be different this time around. I’ll be in my room, if you change your mind.”
And she’s gone before Kaz can even start to think of what to say, or how to process the fact that she just assumed her old room would be empty and waiting. It is, of course, despite a dozen Dregs attempting to move in over the last year, but still. Inej didn’t know that.
If Kaz was a better person, he’d collect himself, strip off the gloves, and follow her. If he was normal, he could kiss her instead of standing halfway across the room.
But he isn’t better and he isn’t normal , so he sits back down and lets time slip away.
Two days pass. Inej and Kaz talk, but she stays distant. Kaz can’t reach her if he wanted to.
(He does want to. Doesn’t he?)
He finds her in her room on the third night. It’s unfamiliar territory. Before, she usually came to his office, and he respected her fiercely defended personal space. Afterwards, he avoided this floor of the Slat entirely.
It’s only when he’s knocking on the door that he realizes she might be asleep, and prepares to disappear. But Inej says, “Come in, Kaz,” and he pushes the door open to find her curled in her window. This one is smaller than the one in his office. Less room for perching.
Kaz shoves the thought away and tries to find a way to stand properly in Inej’s room. He’s always been conscious of his body language, his position; has to be, when it screams so much about him. But usually he’s doing it with his enemies. He doesn’t know how to use his body to convey anything other than weapon, warning, stay back.
“Is this about a job?” Inej asks. “Because I won’t do it.”
She would if he asked, Kaz knows. But he won’t. “It’s not a job.”
“What is it, then?”
Kaz is certain he had a plan before coming in here, but Inej’s sharp eyes are cutting it all away. “I came to talk.”
“I meant what I said before, Kaz. I will have you without armor, or not at all.”
Ghosts press at his sides and already Kaz can feel bloated flesh on his fingers. He swallows once and strips off the gloves. “I know.”
Inej raises a careful eyebrow and holds out her hand. “Prove it, then.”
Kaz steps forward. His skin crawls, roiling like ocean waves, nausea churning more and more violently in his gut the closer he gets to Inej. He has to do this.
He hesitates, and Inej sighs, withdrawing.
“Wait.”
“I’ve been waiting , Kaz,” she says, not entirely unkindly.
“Don’t pull away. Don’t move. If it takes me a minute...just wait.”
Inej looks skeptical, but holds out her hand again, perfectly steady. A rock in the center of a stormy sea. The room is spinning, blurred and black at the edges of Kaz’s vision.
He can do this. He can best this. He can.
Dirtyhands, the Bastard of the Barrel, pauses again.
Their hands are hovering inches apart. He just has to move.
He can’t move.
“Take my hand,” he says, and it comes out a shaky growl.
“You said not to move-“
“ Inej. ”
She takes his hand and Kaz closes his eyes, breathing shallowly, trying to force the memories of rotting bodies and a sucking ocean away.
“Kaz. Look at me. Look at me .”
He looks at her. At the new scar below her ear. At her careful, warily pleased smile. At her eyes that have always seen more than he wanted to give away.
The waters recede. The spinning slows. It’s not gone, not nearly, but Inej is some kind of magic that makes even a demon’s demons bearable. Slowly, she rubs a thumb back and forth over his hand, and he simultaneously wants to tear away and ask her to never, ever stop.
Her other hand touches his free wrist and Kaz doesn’t think, just reacts. He’s three steps across the room before his cane has even started to tip over; Inej’s hand snakes out and grabs it. His gloves are forgotten on the floor, limp and deflated like dead birds. Fear and revulsion and shame are a deadly cocktail in the back of his throat.
“Right,” Inej says, disappointment a black smear on her words. “That was too fast.”
“I’m sorry,” Kaz says. It tastes all wrong in his mouth, like gunpowder and Inej’s blood.
She shakes her head. “No, I should know better. Here, do you want-“
Kaz takes half a step back from her outstretched hand before he realizes she’s holding out his cane. She doesn’t say anything as he stands there like a useless fool, but her eyes are waiting. Challenging. He reaches for the cane. Their bare fingers brush in the handoff; the best reparations he can offer. His gloves still lay at Inej’s feet, and her face says she isn’t going to make it any easier for him, but she won’t make it harder, either. Fumbling forward, he crouches down in front of her. They’re barely a breath apart, and he can’t even attempt to mask his shuddering. Usually, being this close with the armor of clothes between them would be fine. Not good, but fine. But his bare hands feel weightless and unmoored, stinging with the memory of her touch, of Jordie’s body.
He picks up the gloves and backs away. It takes more effort to keep from putting them on than it did to break into the Ice Court. He is unhinged, and small, and flayed wide open.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, Kaz,” Inej says, equal parts dismissal and invitation.
He leaves without saying a word. He doesn’t trust himself to open his mouth.
They keep trying. Every night like clockwork Kaz comes to Inej’s room and removes the gloves. Every night like clockwork he tries and fails and succeeds. Inej tries once to talk, to fill the silence; it isn’t a good idea. Both of them are built to thrive in the quiet. Sometimes, he gets a little farther than holding her hand, and sometimes he can barely manage to keep from fleeing the room before they ever touch.
He starts leaving the gloves in his room. Skulking the Slat barehanded is the real test, even if the Dregs have mostly bedded down for the night by the time he does.
Inej invades his personal space in the daylight, in small steps and piecemeal attacks. She walks close enough to touch while Kaz paces the Crow Club; she brushes their shoulders together when they pass in the hall; she touches his shoulder in a movement so fleeting he wonders as she walks away if it even happened at all. But it works. It gets easier, so slowly Kaz doesn’t really notice until he’s sitting in Inej’s room, holding both her hands, her bare leg pressed against a slice of skin at his ankle, and he almost feels okay.
“I’m leaving tomorrow,” Inej murmurs, and Kaz is suddenly not okay for a very different reason.
He filters through several possible reactions, most of which are completely insane, and settles on, “Tired of Ketterdam already?”
“It’s been a month, Kaz. I have a job to do. I miss you, I miss everyone, but I can’t stay any longer. I’ll try to come back sooner this time.”
“Okay,” he manages.
A tiny furrow appears between her brows. “Just ’okay?’ That’s all?”
“Would you prefer I fight you on it?”
She gives him a long, strange look and says, “No. I wouldn’t. I guess I just thought-“
Kaz can’t have this conversation sitting down, holding her hands. He stands roughly, grabbing for his cane. The unfamiliar ridges of the crow’s head on his bare hand bite into his skin, and that more than the cane itself lets him stand steady.
“So that’s it then. You’ve got a big day tomorrow. You should sleep.”
“Kaz-“
He’s already gone.
He doesn’t sleep all night. He’s never been a late riser, but every time he thinks about sleep the fear of waking up to Inej already gone sinks its talons into him. So instead he double- and triple-checks the books that were done perfectly the first time and stares a hole in a map of the Barrel that hasn’t changed since he last memorized it.
(Well. Almost hasn’t changed. He uses up five minutes redrawing the boundaries of the Black Tips’ territory and the line of a street corner that was bombed during the last fight of their territory wars with Harley’s Pointers two weeks ago.)
He senses more than hears Inej coming awake, just after dawn. The same bone-deep feeling that’s saved his life a dozen times on the job has him venturing down the stairs (gloves on, now) just as she slips out of her room.
“No goodbyes?” he asks.
She doesn’t startle; she never startles. But she does go very still and look up at him curiously. “Only if you’ve come to say them,” she says.
“Maybe when we get to your ship.”
Inej seems to consider this, and then continues on her way out of the Slat without a word. Kaz follows. She takes to the rooftops almost immediately (he doesn’t ask himself why she didn’t climb out the window from the start), and he tracks her shadow from the streets. The Wraith sits quietly in Fifth Harbor, protected by her crew. And the Dregs, though that part Inej doesn’t know.
(Who is he kidding? Of course she knows.)
When she runs out of roof Inej drops soundlessly to the ground and walks close to his shoulder. It’s a test. Kaz nudges her to the side, flicks his eyes toward an alley, and Inej follows him into the mouth.
“Afraid to be seen with me?” Inej asked.
Afraid of them seeing me, Kaz thinks but doesn’t say. He strips off the gloves. If anyone, ally or otherwise, saw him without them, it would wreck that part of the mystery he’s built for himself. No demon claws, no brimstone touch. Just an ordinary boy with ordinary hands. And then they’d start to wonder if the rest of him was so soft, too.
“You and your reputation,” Inej says, reading his mind, but he knows she understands. “What’s the play here, Kaz?”
She means to ask how much he’s willing to touch her. In a better world, in a perfect world, he would cup her jaw in his hands and kiss her with years of tamped-down feelings. As it is, he reaches out and takes her hand.
“I won’t come back to Ketterdam and beg for scraps,” Inej warns. “Saints know I understand, but I won’t wait for you, Kaz Brekker. If you’re determined to never hold me, or kiss me-“
“I’m not,” Kaz says roughly. “But I can’t.”
“Promise me you’ll try then, at least with Jesper,” Inej says.
“Jesper?”
“Well, I’m not going to be here. And he’s your friend.”
Kaz sneers at the mere thought of holding hands with the sharpshooter, tamping down on the revulsion that creeps over his skin. “I’m not doing that. You-“
“Can’t be here all the time,” Inej interrupts. “And I can’t&mdashI won’t be responsible for fixing you. You’ve never needed anyone else to solve your problems for you.”
“Inej,” he starts, with no idea of where he’s going to end.
“It’s just another sort of magic trick, Kaz. So practice,” she says. She lifts his hand to her face, the barest kiss ghosting over his knuckles, and she’s gone before he can process that it happened at all.
The world spins again for a new reason, and it’s a long time before Kaz trusts himself enough to walk back to the Slat. For those first few days he stays in his room mostly, avoiding the other Dregs where he can. He doesn’t go to Jesper.
Except then he thinks about Inej, her eyes and her hands and her voice telling him no one was going to save him. And he tries.
It’s subtle at first, brushing against Jesper in the crowded smoke of the Crow Club, ghosting a hand across Nina’s shoulder when she dropped by to visit. It takes nights and nights of false starts and swallowing his pride to even step into Jesper’s room; another week to drag an explanation out of him ( Practice. A magic trick, he’d said at first. That makes even less sense than usual, Jesper had replied); three more days until he can stand to touch him skin-to-skin. It helps, in a way, that Jesper is so wildly different from Inej. Touching her hand, alone in a room at night, was very nearly a holy thing. Jesper does his level best to pretend Kaz isn’t fractured into pieces, and sometimes he almost succeeds in fooling them both. And he talks . Incessantly. Kaz refuses to look him in the face or talk back, so the words are their own sort of anchor.
The next time Inej visits after four months instead of six, and this time Kaz is waiting for her on the docks of Fifth Harbor. He pulls off a glove&mdashjust the one&mdashand lifts it in a half-wave to her. She smiles, not a summer sunshine curl of her lips but a reckless slash of teeth that speaks of the wild, wild sea. And she is still the most beautiful creature Kaz has ever seen.
She takes his hand, twining their fingers together, and for the first time in many, many years the dead are a distant thing. Present, but quiet. Dimmed.
He smiles, just barely, and Inej grins wider. She pulls him into a careful hug. The only place their skin touches is their hands, pressed between their bodies, and it’s okay. Kaz breathes in and out and counts eleven seconds and steps back. Now that she’s here, and they just did that , he can’t quite manage to look at her.
“What, I don’t even get a ’hello, Inej,’ this time?” she asks, imitating his voice. Or trying to. Kaz doesn’t sound like that. He doesn’t.
“Hello, Inej,” he says, and finally raises his eyes. “Welcome back.”
“Did Jesper miss me this time?” she asks, already walking past him (there’s space between them, and without thinking Kaz shifts so their arms bump together).
“I don’t know. I didn’t ask. But...” Saints, he can kill a man a hundred different ways, ruin lives with a word, break into the most secure prison in the world and come back whole, but he can’t talk to a girl?
Inej is still walking, looking for all the world like she isn’t listening. But gathering information while being invisible was the job she worked for Kaz; he knows she hears every tiny sound he makes.
“I missed you.”
Her step falters just slightly and she half turns to look back at him. “Was that so hard, Kaz Brekker?”
“Maybe.”
“If it makes you feel better, I missed you, too.”
Kaz puts his glove back on and follows her to the Slat. They don’t get a moment alone again until that night (and every night after that, for three impossibly short weeks until she leaves again). They practice a new kind of magic, graduating from hands to other things. Kaz learns the lines of her face, the ridges of her scars, the smooth unmarked skin of her forearms where the feather tattoo was, where his tattoo would have gone. Once, in the beginning, he took it as almost an insult that she would never fully join the Dregs. Now he knows better: it’s her decision where she belongs, and no one can mark Inej but herself. He learns her hair, wraps her braid gently around his wrist and holds it like the finest silk. Carefully he learns the curve of her hips and shoulders, venturing into vulnerable territory for them both.
Inej leaves, and comes back, and leaves again. Kaz keeps making magic. He stops wearing the gloves in the Barrel all the time, saves them for deals with slimy merchants and tricks for stupid pigeons. His reputation dips for a time, but Dirtyhands is just as dirty without the gloves as with, and everything returns to the way it was before too long.
Then Inej is gone for five months, the longest stretch since the first time. Kaz rarely writes to her except for information, but he finds himself drafting letter after letter and burning them all until he has words that don’t sound completely pathetic. One, two, three weeks pass. Six months Inej has been gone, and she doesn’t write back. Kaz sends another letter. Silence.
Seven months. Eight.
Dirtyhands stalks the street gloveless, ruthlessly rooting out the Dregs’ enemies. Rumors swirl, but very, very quietly; the Barrel learns quickly that mentioning the Wraith is a surefire way to earn Kaz’s wrath.
Nine months, and Inej finally comes home. Kaz is at the Crow Club when Rotty approaches him, gleefully informing him that his little spider’s come home, boss and without waiting for the rest of the sentence Kaz is running to Fifth Harbor as fast as he can manage. Faster. His leg burns by the time he sees the Wraith , tattered but whole, and Inej walking down the docks.
She smiles softly at him, and he can already tell from her walk that she’s hurt and trying not to show it. She holds out her hand, but it’s not enough this time. She’s hurt.
Kaz barely understands the primal feeling inside him, but he doesn’t even try to stop it from carrying him all the way to her, sweeping her up into a hug. Her clothes are torn; his fingers press into the skin of her shoulder blade before he pulls back.
“Did you miss me that much?” she asks, teasingly. She’s bruised and bedraggled and beautiful.
Kaz cups her cheek in one hand and her hip with the other, and does what he’s been waiting to do for three very long years.
Inej was right, though he’d wanted to laugh at her at the time. He doesn’t need any Grisha to know this kiss is magic.
Inej is smiling so hard they aren’t even kissing properly anymore. The ocean and the dead are pulling at Kaz’s feet, but he can ignore their reach. He laughs a wild, whooping, triumphant laugh that the people of Ketterdam would never recognize from him, all at once a boy again. Inej laughs, too, and he wants to beg her to stay and never leave again, but he knows he never could and she would never agree. He can be okay with that. As long as she always comes home.
“I will,” she whispers into his mouth, because she can always read his mind. “I will.”