Archive of Our Own ^beta

Jesper let out a low whistle, sweeping his gaze appreciatively across an antechamber of the Van Eck mansion.

“I know I’ve said this before, but this is some place you’ve got,” he said. His voice was light, amused, but his hand squeezed Wylan’s twice. I’m here, I’m here. The last time they’d been in this house had been the first day of the rest of their lives, after all, and before that—not counting when Kaz and Wylan had broken in—had been right before Van Eck had had people try to kill his son.

“Yeah.” Wylan squeezed back. I can do this. I can do this. “It is.”

He took a deep breath. He looked strangely fragile, standing in the middle of the room with its polished wood floors and elegant doors. Like he could splinter and fracture at the slightest pressure, even if this was anything but the truth.

“And I guess it’s mine now.”

Jesper shot him a crooked grin. “Well, it’s a step better than the Slat. Just a step, though, I wouldn’t say it’s anything extraordinary.”

Wylan tried very hard not to smile, but the corners of his lips twitched up anyway.

“Look, I remember this,” he said, letting go of Jesper’s hand to pick up a small vase sitting on a pedestal. “It was made in Shu Han. It’s an antique. ”

“It’s probably worth more than both of my guns put together.”

“It’s definitely worth more than everything in the Slat put together.”

“But could it ever replace the memories?” he sang.

“Oh yeah, definitely. I mean, the Slat watches you and Kaz and everyone else come back there beat up, and this vase watched me stay here for it. Not that much of a difference if you ask me.”

Something cold and icy settled in the pit of Jesper’s stomach at the implication of those words.

“Wait, you don’t mean—”

“I don’t,” Wylan said hastily. There was something frantic shifting behind his cornflower blue eyes, something that wanted desperately not to be seen. Jesper saw it anyway. “It’s just a joke, it’s okay. It’s fine. Let’s go look at the rest of the house.”

And he wandered into one of the parlours, leaving Jesper to stare at the opulent vase.

Wylan spent the rest of the afternoon walking around the second floor, exploring rooms he had previously not been allowed to explore and opening drawers his father had told him he couldn’t even dream of opening. It was all good fun, really, to go against his father’s wishes in such an obvious way, and he reveled in the thrill of it. It was almost cathartic, actually.

He’d already been in the study, where he’d found a small secret vault beneath a floorboard. (It’s contents consisted of the following: a roll of about two million kruge, a pair of heavy emerald earrings, a set of solid gold cuff-links, and, inexplicably, a pair of diamond encrusted opera glasses.) He’d been in two guest rooms, the Green Parlour, and the library, though he’d left that one very quickly.

He’d just left the music room, where he’d stopped to play a quick tune on the piano. He knew where his feet were taking him, even before he got there, even though he wanted to pretend he was just looking through the house’s rooms for the fun of it. He was looking, just not at random; it was a search for a tomb—a perverse sort of treasure hunt—and he had finally found it.

The heavy wooden door loomed.

This was my room, he thought with a detached sort of interest.

“This was my room,” he said out loud, and he wasn’t sure exactly who he was talking to. Just himself, maybe, or the house. Or the ghost of himself, a child with ruddy curls and cheeks pink from the Ketterdam chill. He felt very small, standing here, in this place that had never even been his to begin with. Not really.

Nothing and no one answered, so it hardly mattered. No ghosts of past selves manifested.

He wrapped a hand around the brass door handle. It was cold to the touch.

Wylan opened the door and took a step into the room. Carefully, carefully; he didn’t want to disturb the fragile peace, if that was what it could be called. The silence in the room didn’t feel peaceful. It felt more like the silence that hovered around a deathbed, stifling and impenetrable. But he called it peaceful, because the truth of this weighted silence was more than he felt he could bear.

He didn’t realize that he was holding his breath until he let it out all at once.

The floorboards did not creak beneath his feet. He felt a little bit like he was dying, like his lungs had suddenly grown too vast for his body, like his heart was going to stop beating and slip out of his chest.

Suspended from the ceiling were the paper planets he’d constructed when he’d been eight and immensely bored one afternoon. The wall opposite his bed still bore the small collection of maps he’d amassed; depictions of Ravka and Fjerda and Kerch. One of Novyi Zem, two of Shu Han. A close-up of the Financial and University Districts. Caricatures of places he’d once wished to see with his father, and then just places he wished he could be. (Please, someone, just take me away from here. I’ll go anywhere, just take me away.) His small desk beneath them, his pencils and supplies all neatly tucked away into the drawers, three sketchbooks stacked on top of each other right in the middle.

The bed was neatly made, courtesy of a servant. It was a massive thing, a four-poster with deep red hangings. He remembered pretending, sometimes, that those hangings were sturdy walls, and he the king of some grand fortress.

(“Good kings,” his father spat, eyes smoldering with fury, “are not defective. Good kings know what it requires to run a kingdom, or an empire; good kings are able to rise to that position. You are not a good king. You are a disgrace to my family name. You are the king that gets hanged at the gallows at the end of the tale.”)

(Stop. Stop stop stop.)

Again, the feeling like his lungs were threatening to burst out of his chest. That feeling of being unable to breathe properly. Inadequate. That was what he had been, wasn’t it? Inadequate. Something to be forgotten, to be wiped away from the history books permanently. There had been an old Zemeni story his nanny had read to him, once: Ayama and the Thorn Wood. His father, he thought, could probably empathize strongly with the king in that tale.

He blinked, still staring at the bed. At his fortress.

There was something sitting on top of the pillow.

He felt his heart stop, and then start up again.

The thing on top of the pillow was a note, neatly folded and sitting on the fabric as if it were waiting for him, and, upon seeing the signature inked on the front, he didn’t doubt that it was.

Jan Van Eck.

Jan Van Eck, again and again and again. Haunting his every step, always. No matter where he went, no matter what he did.

He sat heavily down on the mattress, burgundy sheets stiff with disuse.

Opening the note revealed a letter, a string of black words looking up from the heavy paper, mocking him. Line after line after line, so many words that he didn’t know what to make of them at all. He didn’t know if it was more of the same (which was most likely—another reminder that he was pathetic and small and incompetent, another reminder that he was worthy of replacement and nothing more) or an apology (an impossible notion, but a notion nonetheless, because the fact that there were no other possibilities somehow made him feel worse).

Jan Van Eck, the signature sang, ink and blood and misery made tangible.

My son, my son.

What have you done?

He wanted his hands to stop shaking, but they wouldn’t. He wanted the bookshelf in the far-right corner to stop watching him, but it wouldn’t. Words everywhere, words and letters and understanding. And him in the middle of it all, incompetent and lacking and miserable.

It was like the note was a catalyst, and suddenly he was crying.

This is ridiculous, he thought fiercely. Stop this, he thought, but he couldn’t. He felt brittle and breakable, like he might snap at any second. The hollowness of bird bones, the shift of shoulder blades beneath smooth skin. The incessant pump of blood through veins, warm and brilliantly red. He was a collection of muscles and organs, synapses and nerves, a study in resilience. A miraculous automaton. But something had gone wrong, hadn’t it? 

He swiped the tears angrily away, but they came back and they came back and he came back, always back to this place. His life had been a series of returns, just the same vicious circle spinning around and around. Time wasn’t linear.

Do you want to know what your problem is, Wylan? You never change. You always come back to the beginning, throwing off progress like you would with an uncomfortable coat. Your problem is that you never change. Your problem is that you don’t want to change. I don’t think you do, because if you did, I wouldn’t have a pathetic failure like you for a son! That is your problem and I’m sick of it. So you either figure out how to change or you can stop calling yourself my son.

The sobs rattled in his chest and clawed their way out of his mouth, hollow and wretched. They wrenched themselves away from him painfully, reminders of how weak he was even when he didn’t mean to be, even when he tried to be brave. Because really, there was nothing more pathetic than him sobbing until his lungs refused to take in air anymore just because he’d found a note in his bedroom.

Paradox: time is not linear. It moves in circles; everything that has happened will happen again. Inevitable yet somehow still improbable. So there is the ghost of the boy in this same bed, sobbing for the same reason in a different time.

Wylan crumpled the paper in his hands, and he sobbed, and the bed creaked, and the world did not stop spinning.

Jesper was on fire.

Not literally, but it felt like what he imagined being lit on fire would feel like.

The worst part of it, of the burning need, was that he’d been doing so well before. The last two weeks had been spent in a blur of helping Wylan with all the legal obstacles that came with getting Jan Van Eck’s ass thrown in prison despite Kaz discreetly convincing (which, for Kaz, meant either bribing or threatening) several judges that they had changed their minds after all. They’d found a hotel for Marya Hendriks to stay in—he understood that reluctance to come home, to return. She could come when she was ready, they’d reassured her. He’d been doing well.

But then he’d woken up on an overcast morning, rain drumming on the glass of the bedroom Wylan had let him have, and his first thought had been: I want to have a game of cards.

It only got worse from there, an unbearable itch burrowed maddeningly beneath his skin. It was there as he got dressed in a red button-down and violently green pair of pinstripe pants, it was there as he ate breakfast perched on the edge of Wylan’s desk, pointing out different clauses and conditions on some document or the other, and it was there as he devoted his afternoon to trying to pick the heavy padlock on the doors to the art gallery. The doors did not open, so he threw down the lock picks in exasperation and stalked off to find something else to distract himself with.

He had already been in every room, and he could find nothing to do. He didn’t know where Wylan was.

He found himself thinking, inexplicably, of his father.

So maybe that was why he found himself in the kitchen.

The Van Eck kitchen was a cozy place, with gorgeous mahogany cabinets and every kind of utensil you could have hoped for. He spent a few minutes just going around the space, tile cold against his sock-clad feet, opening and closing drawers with a kind of childlike desire to find something. And things he did find; whisks so big that there was no way they could serve any practical purpose, a dusty bottle of wine that had evidently been forgotten, a half-used bag of flour that he had somehow managed to get all over the front of his shirt. He marvelled at how it was the same stuff both here and back in his own kitchen in Novyi Zem; the same flour he had used to make so many burned biscuits for his Da. He let a handful fall from between his fingers.

Colm Fahey had never once complained about the charred biscuits, or the too-watery soup, or the failed attempts at nearly anything else. He’d always laughed, or smiled, and always he’d thank Jesper. No matter how awful the food was. No matter how disastrous the state of the kitchen.

Jesper wondered if the Van Eck kitchen had everything he needed to make burned biscuits, and then figured that it was a stupid thing to wonder. It obviously did.

Jesper dropped the plate in front of Wylan, who looked up from his sheet music as though it was the first time he’d done so in years.

“What’s that?” he asked. It was a question, but it wasn’t delivered in the way of a question, didn’t lilt up at the end the way it ought to have.

“Biscuits,” Jesper said. “Try one.”

“You made these?” he asked, lifting one up and examining it by holding it up close to his eye. He prodded it with a finger as though expecting it to explode in a mess of sludge.

Jesper scoffed. “No, I found them under my bed this morning. Try one, it’s not poisonous, I swear.”

He nudged Jesper’s side with an elbow, but broke off a piece and popped it into his mouth. He chewed, looking thoughtful.

“‘S good,” he said around his mouthful.

“A lifetime of etiquette lessons, and this is what you have to show for it.”

“Shut up.” He swallowed. “I’m surprised to say that it’s pretty good.”

Jesper sat down on the desk, long legs dangling in the air. “Pretty good? I’m offended. It’s basic knowledge that I’m the best cook in this entire city.”

They were considerably better looking and tasting than the ones he’d used to make. Wylan didn’t dignify him with an answer, just stuffed the rest in his mouth like it was the first thing he’d eaten in days.

“‘Fanks, anyway,” he said. “I was starvin’. You had any?”

“One.”

“Have some more!”

Jesper shrugged. “I made them more for you than I did for me.” The itch was still there, just beneath his skin, buzzing in the tips of his fingers, but less now. It felt muted. Not as loud as before, not as all-consuming.

“Well then I’m asking you to have one. They’re a bit too dark at the edges but you know what? I think that’s okay. These are good.”

“I am a man of many talents.” Jesper took one. They were, he reflected, much better than the ones he’d used to make for his Da.

Jesper asked Kaz to come in one night, to pick the lock on the gallery doors. Kaz did it with minimal glowering, which had to be some sort of record.

The next morning, Wylan saw the doors, left slightly ajar, and didn’t leave the room all day.

It was worth the glowering, Jesper thought, just to see the way Wylan lit up from the inside as though by some minuscule sun as he flitted from painting to painting, drinking in every detail and every brushstroke with his eyes.

Jesper couldn’t sleep.

The day had been alright, as far as days went; Kaz and Inej had wanted him to accompany them during a stakeout outside of some mercher’s house. Kaz said the man had connections to Tante Heleen, could give them information about some of the slavers she most commonly dealt with. Jesper was all too happy to go with him, even if spending six hours on his stomach in the dusty attic of a house under renovation had not been his description of an ideal afternoon.

He’d spent most of the evening in the music room, alternating between helping Wylan with a piece of sheet music he was working on and other, less productive (yet still extremely enjoyable) activities.

And now he couldn’t sleep.

There wasn’t a reason, but after what felt like years alternating between lying on his back and his side and his stomach, and moving his pillow around, he got out of bed and crept out into the hallway.

The house was mostly quiet, apart from the occasional creak or groan as it breathed around him. He started to walk, not in any direction in particular, running a hand along the walls. He didn’t realize his feet had been leading him to Wylan’s room until he was walking right past it, and then he stopped because there was flickering candlelight leaking out into the corridor from beneath the door.

He pushed it cautiously open.

“Wylan?” he asked, blinking as his eyes adjusted to the brighter light.

Wylan was sitting up in bed, blankets rucked up around his waist. He jumped slightly at the sound of Jesper’s voice.

“Hey,” he said. His voice sounded strained. He was pulling on his fingers, cracking the knuckles. “I thought you were asleep.”

“I wasn’t. Why are you up?”

“No reason,” Wylan said. He looked away. “You should probably go.”

This meant that he most definitely should not. He walked in and sat at the foot of the bed. “You okay?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine.” A crack and a crack and then nothing, just Wylan trying to force a sound out, pressing down hard.

“Stop that,” Jesper said, reaching out to take one of Wylan’s hands in his own. “You’ll break them that way.”

“I did once,” he said. “A long time ago. It hurt.”

“No shit,” Jesper said. He paused, observing. Wylan’s hair was a mess, his skin oddly flushed in the candlelight, hands clammy with sweat. Softer: “What happened?”

Wylan shook his head, a ruddy curl falling in front of his eye. “Nothing, Jes. Just a nightmare. I’ll be— I’m fine.”

He frowned. “I didn’t know you had nightmares.”

Wylan shrugged. “Sometimes. It’s not a big deal.”

Jesper moved up in the bed until he was sitting next to Wylan, leaning back against the headboard. “What was it a nightmare about?”

“Nothing , Jesper. Go back to sleep.”

He thought for a moment. “What if I told you what one of my nightmares was like, and then you can tell me about yours?”

“Would it make you leave me alone?”

“Maybe.”

Wylan huffed out a breath. The curl of hair waved a bit. “Fine.”

“Hmm, okay. Well, the other day, I had this dream that I was in the Crow Club, right? Only all the dealers were crows, and they kept on messing up. And all the other players were wearing masks, and when they took them off, they had beaks! And then they tried to eat me.”

Wylan snorted. “That’s a stupid dream.”

“Once I had one that I was in a shoot-out but my hands were really slippery with butter for some reason, and every time I tried to shoot, my finger would slip and I’d miss.”

“How’d you get out of that one?”

“I’m not exactly sure, but I think a whale came out of the water in the harbour next to me and I jumped on its back. Don’t remember what happened to the other shooters.” A beat. “I think they got eaten by the whale. Oh, Saints , there’s a carnivorous whale that lives in my brain.” He threw an arm around Wylan’s shoulders, pulling him close. “You’d better watch out.”

“You’re a carnivorous whale.”

Jesper gasped. “How could you! I’m an omnivorous whale.”

“Those were both stupid dreams. I can’t believe I’m with you.”

“Yeah, but you’re stuck with me now!” He thought for a moment. “You want a serious one?”

Wylan shrugged. “Okay. If you want.”

“Sometimes,” he said, heart suddenly fluttering uncertainly in his chest, “I dream that I’m standing in the middle of my Da’s jurda farm, and the sky’s gone all grey, and I can hear something in the flowers behind me. So I turn around, and one of the Kherguud soldiers is standing there, and they’re standing above someone’s body. I don’t want to see who it is, but at the same time I do, so I walk over. The Kherguud moves away, and I can see, and sometimes it’s my Da, sometimes it’s Kaz, sometimes it’s Nina, or Inej, or my Ma. Sometimes it’s you. A lot of the time it’s you, or Da. And there’s always flowers growing up out of the body, even though there’s blood everywhere, on the petals, pooling in the ground. And whoever it is, they always turn their face to look at me, and that’s when I realize they’re not actually dead. And they ask me to— They ask me to—” He closed his eyes, opened them. Wylan had gone very still where he was leaning against him, head on his shoulder. “And they ask me to shoot, to end it. They say it hurts too much, but I can’t, I never can.”

“Ghezen,” Wylan said. He squeezed Jesper’s hand, which he was still holding, and Jesper squeezed back. “I’m sorry.”

He scoffed. “Well, it’s not your fault.”

“No, I mean . . . sympathy, not apology.”

Jesper leaned to a side so that his cheek was pressed to the top of Wylan’s head. “That was three, merchling, you have to give me at least one now.”

“The deal is the deal.” He was quiet for a second. “It was my father.”

“Fucker,” Jesper offered.

“It’s different each time. This time I’m in his office and he’s standing at the window, talking to me about something. I don’t remember what. He turns around, and he’s smiling really widely, so wide it’s almost scary, and it looks like he has too many teeth crammed into his mouth, and suddenly I can’t move. He points to something written on a paper on his desk in big letters, and he tells me to read it. I try, I try so hard, but I just can’t. So he says he’ll cut off each of my fingers if I can’t, and then he does, one by one. The knife’s in his hand, but he doesn’t look happy or anything, just disappointed, and that feels almost worse than when he’s angry, because the disappointment is what comes before he blows up. He keeps telling me it’s for my own good, that he’s only doing it because he wants what he knows is best for me. And then my— And then my mother is there, she’s walking into the room and she looks healthy at first glance, like she did when we saw her but better. But when I look closer, she’s crying with eyes that are sunken into her face, and her skin is too pale.”

Wylan was shivering a bit. Jesper could feel cold fingers closing around his heart, his throat. “And then?” he prompted.

“She has a rope,” Wylan said. His voice shook. “She walks behind my father, who’s just cutting gashes into my arm by this point, and she throws it around something on the ceiling and she— I think you can figure out the rest. I couldn’t stop watching her. I woke up when I heard the snap.”

There was a moment of silence as Jesper processed what he’d just been told.

“I,” he said, “am going to rip his arms out. I’m going to shatter every bone in his body.”

Wylan didn’t say anything.

“I think we should ask your mother if she’s up to coming back now.”

A sharp intake of breath, a slow release. “Me, too.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Do you think you can go back to sleep?”

A beat. “No.”

“Want to play truth or dare minus the dare bit?”

Wylan laughed a bit. “Okay.”

“Okay. I go first. Have you ever been tempted to sleep with one of your tutors? Because that’s what Inej told me some of the rumours were while we were on the Ferolind going to Fjerda.”

Wylan laughed more than a bit. “I’m going to kill her. Of course I have, what kind of man would I be if I hadn’t been tempted to at least once?”

“On account of your overwhelming attraction to women?”

“You know it. My turn, how’d you learn to make biscuits?”

And so it went until dawn broke over the city.

Neither of them slept alone after that.

Wylan was the one who knocked on the door.

There was the sound of movement from beyond it. The door cracked open before swinging back all the way.

“Mother, hi,” he said, a bit breathless. Jesper was standing too close to his shoulder.

His mother looked at him for a few seconds, blinking slowly, before her lips twitched up in a faint smile. The significant change happened in her eyes; where there had been nothing before, there was now something. Being around her felt a little bit like standing on the edge of some great cliff to Wylan, the ocean churning beneath his feet and the endless sky yawning above him. There was something inherently thrilling about it, about the salt-tinged breeze and the sugar-spun clouds, but there was also the knowledge that all it would take to fall was a slight shifting of feet, a crumbling of rock.

“Wylan,” she said, still with that small smile. “And Jesper was your name, right? Not Jes like I thought.”

“Don’t wear it out,” Jesper said. Wylan kicked his shin as discreetly as he could manage.

“I won’t,” she said. “Come in.”

She stepped aside, letting them enter. They had gotten her a room in the Geldrenner. Jesper had tried to get her the same rooms as the ones his own father had occupied while he’d been there, but they’d already been taken. Much to his disappointment, though not to Wylan’s. The room was still every bit as lavish as Colm Fahey’s had been—the same opulent tiles, the same rooms that seemed too big. The only difference, really, was the view.

“This place is very big,” she said, picking a book up off the sofa and gesturing to them to sit down. She sounded like she was trying extremely hard to be conversational. “This is my first time here, but I didn’t think it would be so big. One person doesn’t need this much room in a place that isn’t even theirs, I don’t think.”

Jesper shrugged. “That’s just the way it is, Mevrouw Hendriks.”

“Call me Marya, please.” she said with a small smile, sitting down in the armchair opposite them.

“Okay,” Jesper said, and Wylan knew he wouldn’t call her Marya if his life depended on it.

“The timing’s actually very convenient,” his mother continued, playing with a strand of hair that had escaped the knot she’d tied it in. “I wanted to talk to you.”

“Us too,” Wylan said. “We wanted to know if maybe you wanted to come— I mean, there’s no obligation, but we— I, I wanted to know if you wanted to . . . come home?”

There was a moment of silence. Jesper knocked his shoe against Wylan’s.

Then his mother’s smile widened.

“That’s exactly what I wanted to ask you about,” she said, tapping a haphazard rhythm on her knee. “If I could come back.”

“What— of course you can come home!” Wylan spluttered. “It’s your home!”

His mother smiled again, if a bit sadly this time. “No,” she said. “It stopped being my home a while ago.”

“Bullshit,” Jesper said. “It’s your house just as much as it was his, just as much as it is Wylan’s.”

“So is that a yes?” Wylan asked. He was holding his breath.

“It’s a yes,” she said softly.

“Wylan?” Jesper asked, his heart pounding in his throat like a trapped bird. Frantic and feral.

Wylan didn’t look up from the piano, slender fingers moving across the monochrome keys like a dancer on a stage. There was nothing about him that Jesper didn’t find beautiful in that moment; nothing about him that wasn’t elegant and worthy of a thousand sonnets. The music—or maybe just Wylan’s proximity, fiery curls and freckles like stars on a porcelain sky—made him feel a bit drunk, like he was disconnected from his body. Like his thoughts weren’t quite his own, but those of an exact replica of him; essentially the same, but somehow different.

“Hmm?” he hummed, to show that he was listening.

He swallowed down acrid fear.

“I think I might be in love with you.”

Wylan’s fingers slipped over the keys, rendering the quiet melody discordant, almost macabre.

Paradox: sometimes, the thing you think is the wrong thing to say turns out to be exactly what needs to be said.

Bright blue eyes met his from across the expanse of the universe (also known as the space between them on the piano bench).

“Well then,” Wylan said. And that was all for a moment, for an infinity; they were one and the same.

“Is that so wrong of me?” He didn’t know why his voice had gotten so quiet, but it felt like the words deserved some measure of it from him. Some measure of stillness, of reverence; for just one second, he owed it to the world to stop moving and just listen—to listen to the violent crash of seawater against jagged rock, to the reedy screams of gulls swooping in the briny air.

Wylan shook his head before he said it, before he said, “ No.” The word was forceful, pushed out of him. “No. Because I— I think I might be in love with you, too.”

All the breath left Jesper’s lungs.

His tongue was coated in golden champagne.

For the first time in a very long time, everything in him stilled; everything in him narrowed and centered in on a single burning, pulsing point in his chest—like he had swallowed the sun, like there were flowers blooming between his lungs, curling around his beating heart.

“Thanks,” he said dumbly. The spell broke, rent apart by a gunshot in the otherwise still and silent night.

Wylan stared. His mouth quirked up into the beginnings of a smile he was trying to tamp down, eyes glittering like a sky full of stars. And then he started to laugh. It started with the slight trembling of his shoulders before becoming a quiet titter, and then he was bent at the waist, elbow pressed on the keys to keep his balance, making the piano vocalize it’s humour with him, laughing and laughing and laughing, free and wonderful.

“Thanks! ” he choked out, and lapsed into another fit of incoherency, reaching out to grab onto the sleeve of Jesper’s shirt. “Ghezen, Jes, I’m not—”

Jesper started to laugh, too. His hand flew up to hold onto Wylan’s wrist, feeling the pulse coursing through his veins, beneath his lily-white skin. A tear streaked down his rosy cheeks and the surprise of it made Wylan laugh even harder, leaning forward so that his head rested against Jesper’s shoulder.

“You idiot,” he gasped, wiping his face dry with the heel of his hand and pulling back to beam delightedly up at him. “You impossible, impossible idiot.” He was the most beautiful thing Jesper had ever seen, the ghost of his laughter still etched on his face.

Jesper loved him.

“I’m your idiot,” he pointed out, kissing his forehead in a burst of affection.

“You are,” he said. A blush crept up his neck, dusting over his cheeks and nose. “You are, Jes, I love you so much, so, so much.”

Jesper still hadn’t let go of his wrist. He pulled it up, pressing a kiss to the delicate skin. “I love you more.”

“No you don’t.”

“Yeah. I do.” He kissed the tip of Wylan’s nose. His heart was overflowing with adoration, a chalice filled with molten gold, a jurda field choking with vibrant blossoms.

“No.” His face was the same colour as his ruddy curls.

“I do,” he sang, kissing his freckled cheek. “I do.” This is how I’ll die. Kissing Wylan Van Eck. I’m living a charmed life.

“Shut up,” he snorted, shoving his chest lightly.

“Make me.”

Wylan quirked an eyebrow. Jesper kissed his other cheek.

“I bet I could, you know. If I wanted to.” he said

“Prove it.”

“Okay,” Wylan said, and he kissed him. It was quiet, a little bit uncertain despite Wylan’s teasing. A gentle thing, and in it, Jesper could taste strawberry tarts, could smell the meadow-sweet scent of Wylan’s hair, could see his flighty laughs and easy smiles, could feel Wylan’s love as though it were a physical, tangible thing he could hold in his calloused hands and marvel at.

Wylan pulled away, breathless and flushed. “I love you,” he said.

Jesper kissed him then. It was different this time, deeper, half-full of wondering laughter—and Jesper had kissed people before, but it could never live up to kissing Wylan, to the way it felt new every time, the rush and tumble of it, the cacophony of it, like a thousand trumpets sounding on a grassy knoll. Nothing else could ever live up to the way it felt, as though some part of him he hadn’t even known he’d been missing had finally been slotted back into its rightful place. This, he thought, carding his fingers through Wylan’s impossibly soft hair, this, as Wylan placed a warm hand at the base of his neck and the other on the small of his back, this, as they moved, as they met in the middle, in this no-man’s-land of their own devising, this, as he became aware of the pounding beneath his breastbone, in his ears, the very lifeblood of him singing with unbridled joy, this, as Wylan gasped slightly into his mouth, hot and wanting, this is what I have always, always needed.

He said it over and over again, just not through words; I love you, said his fingers, moving, moving, always moving through Wylan’s hair and cupping his cheek and running down his arm. I love you, in the way he pulled away only to bring them crashing back together again, a magnetic pull of perfect attraction, a palimpsest of open veneration and devotion and reverence, I love you, I love you, in every movement, every breath shared between them. It was everything, oh, it was everything.

And only once he had confessed in every way but in words did he say, running a thumb over Wylan’s bottom lip, “I love you. ”

Wylan made a sound somewhere in the back of his throat, a small thing as if he’d been hurt or as though he’d just received a blessing from the very Saints, Jesper wasn’t quite sure.

“Is this alright,” he asked, he pleaded, because they had never kissed quite like this before; never with the knowledge that this fusion, this tangle of elbows and lips and tongues and teeth was a confession truer than their lives, “am I doing this alright?”

“Yes,” Wylan answered him. “Yes.”

“Stay,” Jesper heard, gasping, cut-off and wanting and yearning and craving and begging from his own mouth, “stay, stay, stay here with me.”

“I will,” Wylan promised. “Can’t you see? I’m not going anywhere .”

And he didn’t.

Wylan woke up, and the first thing that he noticed was that Jesper was awake, elbow propping up his face as he watched him with slate-grey eyes.

“I don’t know,” he mumbled, tongue heavy with drowsiness, “if that’s sweet or creepy.”

Jesper’s mouth curled into a smile; he was the picture of debauchery, with his dark skin and hands that worked like nimble machines. “Good morning to you, too, sunshine.”

“Mmpf.” He buried his face into his pillow, throwing an arm over Jesper’s shoulders. “I’m tired.”

He nodded sagely. “Makes sense. I didn’t think something as small as you could have so much energy.”

“Jesper!” he chided, scandalized. He could already feel the tips of his ears burning with embarrassment, so he grabbed the covers with his free hand and yanked them up over his head. Jesper’s delighted laugh followed him under.

“Come on,” he teased, and even though he couldn’t see it, Wylan could imagine the charming grin he was undoubtedly wearing. “I wasn’t that bad, was I?”

“Shut up. Shut up, you horrible flirt.”

Jesper laughed again, but it was quieter this time, fonder, and Wylan felt something warm and wanting blossom in his chest, tucked between his lungs. He pulled the covers up, too, joining Wylan beneath them.

“Hello,” Wylan smiled.

“Hello,” he answered, and leaned forward to press a gentle kiss to his forehead.

The brilliant sunlight streamed in through a crack in the curtains, painting the whole world in shades of honey and gold. Wylan loved the way it streamed in through the blanket and pooled on the back of Jesper’s hand, in the hollow of his neck, ran in rivulets through his hair.

“What do you think you want to do today?” he asked, transfixed by the way the light seemed almost liquid as it spilled over Jesper’s cheekbone.

“I think,” he answered, nimble fingers idly running through Wylan’s hair and tangling in his curls, mussed by the night and sleeping and the vigorous activities that had happened before that, “that I want to stay right here with you all day.”

“Oh,” Wylan said in the light of this revelation that wasn’t quite a revelation, in the light of this thing said very quietly.

“Oh,” Jesper agreed.

One single thought cleared in the content haze that was his mind, and that was: I am so happy. For once, in this house, he knew with absolute certainty that it wasn’t a lie.

“That sounds just fine to me,” he said truthfully, and couldn’t bring himself to close his eyes against the dazzling brilliance that was Jesper’s smile.

“Let’s make cake,” Wylan said, coming into the kitchen.

Jesper didn’t look up from the cookies he was icing “Make your own cake, peasant.”

“I don’t know how.”

“And I only figured out how like, a week ago. Does that make me an expert?”

“In this house,” Wylan said, leaning over to dip his finger in the bowl of icing Jesper was using, “yes.”

Jesper tried to smack his finger away, but Wylan had already popped it into his mouth with a self-satisfied smile.

“Come on,” he said. “We’ll make bad cake with good icing and it’ll be great.”

“Let me just finish this,” he said. “Don’t look.” He traced the shape of an e as carefully as he could before putting the pastry bag down and slapping Wylan’s hand away from where it had been creeping towards the bowl again.

“Don’t you want to eat dinner first?” he asked, putting the cookies away for the next day.

Wylan pulled himself up onto the counter, where he sat swinging his legs in the air and grinning impishly at Jesper.

“We’ll have cake for dinner,” he said grandly. “Come on, please?” He swept some flour from the counter into his hand and threw it at Jesper; it narrowly avoided getting in his hair.

“Careful, merchling,” Jesper said, leaning an elbow on the counter next to Wylan and gazing up at him. “Getting flour in my hair is not the way you want this to start.”

Wylan just laughed, and Jesper froze, because Wylan’s hair was haloed by the kitchen’s light, golden on his freckled skin, and he looked absolutely beautiful. I am so in love with you. I can’t believe it.

“Fine. You’ve won me over. Let’s make cake, then,” he said, hiding his own smile as quickly as he could, and stepping on his tip-toes to press a kiss to the corner of Wylan’s mouth. “But chocolate cake, because that’s the only kind I know how to make.”

They did end up having (slightly under-cooked) chocolate cake for dinner.

The next afternoon, Wylan’s mother determinedly walked from the Geldrenner to the Van Eck mansion with him, a small bag of luggage in hand. Jesper was out with Kaz, preparing for a parley of some sort; Wylan hadn’t asked for the details, and was regretting it now that they were standing inside.

“This place hasn’t changed much,” she said softly, looking around the entrance hall and looking a bit lost. Her gaze snagged on a small painting hanging above the door. “I painted that,” she said.

Wylan took in a deep breath, held it for a moment.

“Welcome back home,” he said.

“Wylan,” she said, and she hugged him.

He hugged her right back, letting the cinnamon smell of her envelope him, memories he didn’t even know he had tumbling forwards all at once: sugar and spice and late night trips to the kitchen, hushing and giggling, shh, we’ll wake your father like this—

“Mother,” he said, laughed, cried, and she hugged him even tighter.

Dinner started off as a quiet affair. Marya Hendriks spent much of that time inspecting the cutlery as though expecting it to burst into red-hot flames at any moment, and Wylan just pushed his food around his plate until Jesper asked him if it was really that bad, which made him laugh.

The tension in the room drained away with that laugh, Jesper thought. Marya looked up as though startled, but her frown melted into a tender smile as she watched him, drinking in the smile lines on her son’s face as though she’d never seen anything like him before.

The rest of dinner passed in a whirl of conversation and laughter, Wylan playing a furious game of footsie with him beneath the table, Marya’s wry humour slipping in here and there. The time she’d spent at the Geldrenner had worked marvels for her—her skin seemed less sallow, her eyes brighter, the smile lines around her mouth more pronounced now. She looked nothing at all like the half-dead ghost they’d found at the hospital that day.

“Wait!” Jesper said, as Wylan pushed his finished plate away. “I have a surprise.”

“Oh Saints, no,” Wylan groaned, tipping his head back and shaking his hands in a silent scream of the tortured. “Please don’t tell me you’re planning on blowing up the Church of Barter for a second time.”

“Second?” Jesper asked, mock-enraged. “Fifth , thank you very much. But anyway, no. Hold on, I’ll be back in just a second.”

The look on both their faces when he brought in the platter of cookies deserved its own painting to commemorate it. Wonder and surprise, endearment in Wylan’s case.

“Are these what you were making yesterday?” he asked, getting up to press a kiss to Jesper’s cheek. “They’re beautiful.”

Marya looked about ready to start crying. “Thank you,” she said, and there was a distinct waver to her voice when she said the words.

The cookies didn’t say anything apart from welcome home, written in thick white icing.

Wylan found his mother in the gallery, standing in front of a painting of a beautiful country landscape; a picturesque cottage standing in the middle of an ocean of wheat stalk. Her hair was pulled up messily, as if she hadn’t had the energy to even knot it properly.

They stood in front of the painting, the silence just this side of uncomfortable. Wylan felt as though he should say something, but really, what could he say? What did you say to your mother after being convinced she was dead for years? Somehow, the weather’s nice today didn’t quite seem appropriate.

“Jan wasn’t always like he is, you know?” she asked, her voice a bit hoarse from disuse. She cleared her throat, pulling her shawl tighter around her shoulders and looking as if the slightest gust of wind could blow her away. Wylan swallowed, unsure if this was a conversation he wanted to have.

“I know.” It didn’t count as a lie, not really; he knew his father hadn’t always been cruel and power-hungry as he now was, but only in the way that people knew that the Council of Tides were people—a fact, yes, but so far removed from the conceivability of daily life that it bordered on myth. He knew there had been a time when his father had loved his son, but that had been before he’d decided that he was defective, and there was no use longing for a time now long gone, Wylan figured.

“He used to leave me flowers. He’d hide them around the house. Inside the pockets of my coats, and hidden with my paint brushes.” Something wistful flickered behind her eyes. “Once he stuck one in my hair, and I didn’t realize until after I’d come home from lunch.”

“Oh,” Wylan said. Something horrible and sad was shriveling up in his chest, imagining his father leaving his mother flowers, happy and in love, and ignorant of the storm that was to come.

Paradox: you never know what’s coming until the sword is buried hilt-deep in your gut and the cold eyes of someone you once loved are boring into your own.

“He commissioned this painting for me,” she said. She took a deep, shuddering breath. “It was the last one he ever gave me.”

There was a buzzing in the tips of his fingers and in his legs, making him want to move away, but he didn’t. “He never came in here, after. I remember that. I was there when he had the door locked.”

“But it’s open now,” she said. “It’s open now, and I’m here. You are, too, Wylan.”

He didn’t say anything, just reached for her hand and held on tight, as if she were the one thing keeping him from losing himself. And in a way, she was; she was one of a small number keeping him sane through it all, one amidst Jesper, who was probably still wreaking havoc in the kitchen, Inej and Nina, and yes, even Kaz.

The shadows grew lighter.

Jesper slammed his hands down onto the top of the piano, leaning over it so that he was looking Wylan right in the eyes.

“Inej is coming back in town tomorrow,” he crowed.

Wylan looked up, surprised. “Really?” he asked. “How do you know?”

“Nina told me. We’re going to the docks to see her, okay?” He felt ecstatic, buoyed; it had been almost a month since he’d last seen Inej, and he hadn’t really noticed just how much he missed her until Nina had told him she would be coming back. He wondered how a month at sea would have changed her. It wasn’t that much time, but then again, it was, wasn’t it?

“No argument here,” Wylan said.

“Great.” He thought for a moment. “I was thinking we could invite her and everyone else over for dinner.”

“Like a dinner party?” Wylan asked, keen. Jesper snorted.

“Sometimes, you talk so much like a merch it’s like I don’t even know you.” A pause. “Yeah, like a dinner party, I guess. Though not really. It’s just, I don’t know. Us. Being together. We haven’t done that in a while, all of us together.”

“Jesper,” Nina said, shoving him lightly, “stop moving before you drill a hole into the quay.”

Jesper did not stop hopping from foot to foot, peering into the horizon, looking for the shape of Inej’s ship.

“You’re almost more excited than Kaz,” she said.

“Watch it, Zenik,” Kaz said from where he was sitting with his legs dangling over the water, but there wasn’t too much bite to his words.

Nina stuck her tongue out at him once he’d turned away, and Jesper laughed.

It was a brilliant day, sun bright but slowly sinking in the rarely cloudless sky. Nina seemed happier than Jesper had seen her in a while; he hadn’t seen her laugh so freely since Matthias’ death, hair an absolute mess because of the salty sea wind, eyes shining with anticipation. She was holding a bag of coloured confetti.

“See anything yet?” he asked her.

“Oh, yeah, let me just use my magical eyesight— I see her! She just left Os Kervo!”

“Shut up,” Jesper said.

“Maybe we have the wrong port,” Wylan worried from where he was sitting cross-legged on the dock in front of him. “Maybe she’s already here but somewhere else.”

“We don’t have the wrong port, and she’s not here yet,” Kaz said in his rock-salt rasp.

“And how do you know that?” Jesper asked.

Kaz raised a gloved hand to point. “Because that’s her ship, right there.” He was pointing to the left, not to the horizon where they’d all been looking—and sure enough, the lithe, savage shape of the Wraith was fast approaching. Jesper almost tripped over Wylan in surprise.

“Look!” Nina laughed, also pointing, but up at the faint silhouette of the crow’s nest where a figure was waving both its arms in greeting.

“Inej!” Jesper called, and began to wave back.

Ten minutes later, and Inej was bounding off the ship like a free bird, running towards them. She all but collided with Nina, who drew her into a hug so tight that Jesper was momentarily worried that she would break her bones.

“Inej, Inej,” Nina was saying, laughing into her hair. Kaz was hanging back, watching from a distance.

“You can’t keep her all for yourself, Zenik,” Jesper said, and Inej extricated herself from Nina’s arms—she was laughing, too—and threw her arms around his neck.

“You smell like the sea,” he said, patting her on the back.

She pulled away, scrunching up her nose. “What else would I smell like?”

“I don’t know, roses.”

She punched his arm lightly, before turning to high-five Wylan.

“Oh!” Nina said all of a sudden. “I almost forgot!” She tore open the bag of purple confetti.

“Nina Zenik, don’t you dare—”

“Too late,” Nina sang, and hurled a fistful of confetti at Inej. It settled in her loose hair and in the folds of her clothes like newly-fallen snow. If snow could be bright purple.

“I am going to kill you,” Inej said, but she was grinning like a loon. The sea had been kind to her, lending a glow to her bronze skin, and her captain’s outfit suited her well; a white shirt tucked into breeches, tall boots, dark frock coat. Her knives were in a belt around her waist, but—

“Inej,” Jesper asked, delighted, “is that a gun?”

“You,” she said, pointing at him with a thumb. “Not a word out of you. Anika refused to let me go anywhere without one. It’s just backup.”

“Sure, sure, or you just realized how superior guns are. Speaking of Anika, where’s she? Pim and Roettinger too, for that matter.”

“They’re just taking care of something on board. They’ll be out in a bit,” she said.

“Everyone, quick,” Wylan said, “let’s sing the song before they get here.”

“If anyone sings a song, I will personally run them through with a knife,” Inej threatened, putting her hands on her hips. The tall feather on her captain’s hat was flopped with the movement as though confirming this statement.

“You still have confetti in your hair,” Kaz said, coming over to stand with the rest of them. It was the first thing he’d said to her ever since she’d gotten off, and there was something a bit unsure in his voice.

“How could you, Nina,” she said. Then, softer: “It’s good to see you again, Kaz. It’s good to see all of you.”

“Aw, shucks,” Jesper said. “We missed you, too.”

Nina threw the remaining confetti at him. Even Kaz laughed at that.

“This,” Nina said, mouth stuffed with hutspot, “is so good. Jesper, remind me why you haven’t been cooking for us before now?”

Jesper winked at her from across the table. They were all sitting around it, eating the dinner Jesper had made to welcome Inej back. There was a warmth in the room, and it wasn’t just coming from the fire blazing in the hearth.

“Remember when we fell onto this table?” Wylan asked with a cocksure grin. He tapped the mahogany tabletop with a finger.

A hint of a smile passed over Kaz’s face. “Good times.”

“I’m sorry,” Nina said, swallowing and leaning forwards, “you did what now?”

“We burned a hole in the roof and fell through the floor onto this table,” Wylan said. “In the middle of one of my father’s fancy dinners.”

Nina choked on air, and Inej had to reach over to pat her back.

“I cannot believe you didn’t tell me that!” she said indignantly, flicking crumbs at Wylan. Inej hid her laughter in her shoulder.

“We had more important things to worry about then,” Kaz said smugly.

“You told me,” Inej pointed out to him, waving her spoon. Kaz put a finger over his mouth, signalling to her to be quiet, but Nina had already heard.

“And Wylan told me,” Jesper said. “Which means the only one who didn’t know was Nina.”

“I hate you all,” she sniffed. “I’m leaving for waffles, I don’t want your charity.”

“There, there,” Inej said, patting her on the shoulder. “I’ll make sure you’re the first to know the next time someone burns a hole in any roof.”

Nina pretended to wipe away a tear. “You’re the only one I respect in this entire Saints-forsaken family, Inej.”

“I win again,” Nina said, clapping her hands together delightedly.

“What is this, your fourth game?” Wylan asked, looking up at Jesper, who was playing with an arm that was dangling off the couch where he was lying down.

Jesper gave a theatrical groan. “I’m going to leave you if I hear any more snide comments from you.”

“Good, because I don’t want to be with anyone this terrible at sjoelbak, either.”

“Both of you, shut up, Nina said, stretching with a self-satisfied sort of smile. “Wylan, get Kaz, he’s the only one who’s even halfway competent at this game. But I don’t blame you, Jes, not everyone is as naturally talented as I am.”

“Got it,” Wylan said, getting up and brushing off his pants. “I don’t think I could stand the humiliation of watching Jesper lose again, anyway.”

Jesper flipped him off in retaliation.

Wylan left them to bicker in the sitting room, and made for the balcony where he’d last seen Inej. The general rule this past week was, find Inej and Kaz wouldn’t be too far away.

The door was slightly ajar when he got there, and he could hear the low murmur of voices coming through. He peered in, not wanting to disturb anything that was best left uninterrupted.

Inej and Kaz were both standing together. Inej’s hair was tied up again, and her hand was resting on Kaz’s where it was placed on the railing. She was saying something to him, and he was leaning towards her slightly, almost imperceptibly. Like a moth to a flame. He couldn’t see his face, but he could see Inej’s, and she looked . . . happy. Hopeful.

He closed the door quietly and went back to the sitting room. He watched Nina beat Jesper at sjoelbak until Kaz and Inej came in together.

“Jesper,” Kaz said. “You’re garbage at this. Move it.”

Jesper moved it. Kaz played with Nina. Inej and Wylan cheered them on. Jesper pretended to sulk.

And everything was strange and beautiful.

“Wylan,” someone was whispering while shaking his arm. “ Wylan, wake up.”

“Wha’sit?” he groaned, eyes fluttering open. His mother was standing over him, hair falling around her face in curtains, eyes twinkling with mischief.

She raised a finger to her lips. “Shh,” she said. “Come with me.”

“Why?” he asked, sitting up and rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. The room was dark, but a sliver of light was falling onto the floor from where the door was cracked open. It was a moment caught in time, past and present and future.

“We’re going to the kitchen,” she whispered. “Come on, or we’ll wake Jesper.”

Wylan glanced over to where Jesper was lying in the bed next to him, still fast asleep. “Okay,” he said, and swung his legs out from beneath the blankets.

The floor was cold against his feet, but he didn’t mind. There was something peaceful about the house at night, and contrary to his past midnight wanderings around the place, he felt safe this time. Not like the slightest misstep would lead him to  a swift blow across the face or harsh words buzzing like hornets in his ears.

“Okay, but really,” he said, almost stumbling over the edge of the staircase, “couldn’t your craving for sugar have held up until morning?”

“You’re not one to talk,” she said. “It was always cookies with you when you were younger.”

“I’m more of a chocolate man now, if I do say so myself.”

“Shush. Okay, okay, come on.” She took the steps two at a time, with the familiar grace of someone who had mapped out every nook and cranny of a place, someone who knew a space better than the back of their own hand. She probably did, he figured; she had loved this house, he knew that much. She had known its every secret better than his father ever had.

He followed after her, trying not to laugh too loudly as she pretended to grow bored waiting for him at the foot of the stairs.

When they got to the kitchen, she immediately opened two cupboards and pulled out a breadbox and a jar of chocolate spread, putting them down on the countertop before fetching two spoons. Wylan pulled himself up on top of the counter, grabbing a slice of bread and starting to cover it with chocolate.

“I could have sworn we had cinnamon rolls,” she said, leaning down to inspect the contents of another cupboard. “But I guess not.”

“Jesper and I ate them all earlier today,” he said, unapologetic.

“You awful child. Make me one, too.”

“Will do,” he said.

(And later: she was sitting on the floor next to him, just scooping spoonfuls of chocolate spread into her mouth. And Wylan thought, her, warm next to him, her laugh in his ear, the cinnamon-sweet smell of her, the melt of chocolate on his tongue, was the simplest recipe for happiness pure and only.)

The wheel was spinning, spinning, spinning, the clicking like merry music. One, two, three—

spin, and—

Wylan was sitting up in bed, shaking like a leaf in a violent wind, and Jesper had his arms wrapped around him.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” he said. “I’m here, I’m right here.”

Wylan was crying. Jesper had only seen him cry once before.

“I don’t want this. I don’t want this, Jesper. I want him to leave me alone , I—”

“I know, dove,” Jesper whispered, rubbing circles between his shoulder blades. “I know.”

click,

“You did what?” Jesper shouted, but he was laughing, too, clutching his stomach and near tears of amusement. “I cannot believe you!”

“I was trying to make you a cake!” Wylan said, ears flaming red. He was covered in flour, the entire kitchen hazy with smoke, a cake so charred it looked like coal resting on the countertop next to him.

Jesper was still laughing, but he walked over to Wylan and kissed him, fierce and slow.

“You idiot,” he said fondly, pulling back. “Next time, leave the baking surprises to me.”

“Honestly,” Wylan said, looking a bit dazed, “I think you don’t have to convince me on that.”

click,

“Wylan,” Marya said, “you can open your eyes now.”

Wylan opened his eyes.

The painting was—

“It’s beautiful,” he said, and there was something big and heavy in his throat. Precise brushstrokes illustrating a pair of pale hands dancing over the monochrome keys of a piano and another canvas of a pair of dark hands covered in flour, kneading dough, and another pair on another, holding a paintbrush over a blank easel. A triptych for the three of them.

“It’s us,” she said, as if that explanation were still necessary.

Wylan hugged her.

click,

They were all waving madly at Inej who was leaning over the edge of her boat, laughing and waving back. Nina was crying a bit.

“I’ll see you all soon!” she called, voice carried over to them by the sea-wind. The feather on her captain’s hat was waving goodbye, too. Anika joined her, giving a quick mock-salute to them before running off to busy herself with something aboard the ship.

There was something very fond in Kaz’s eyes, something that was always there when he looked at Inej, but never before truly visible.

As Jesper watched, he raised a hand and waved to her.

click,

“I’m sorry, I couldn’t help it—”

“Jes, I know you’ve been trying, I know you have, but this is the second time this week—”

“I’m sorry! I couldn’t help it, Wylan! Leave it at that!”

“Jesper, please, you can’t just answer to the call of every game of cards that starts in this city—”

click,

“And then you mix in the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients, right?” Wylan asked.

Jesper nodded. “You’ve got it!”

Wylan smiled.

“And now I do this— oh no—”

Jesper was so surprised for a few moments that he didn’t say anything, but those moments passed relatively quickly and he started to laugh. Wylan flung some of the sticky batter he’d accidentally poured all over his hands at him, which shut him up effectively.

click,

There were thousands of versions of him, but not a single one of them that wasn’t here. Not a single one that couldn’t revel in the truth of these things said very quietly, these things shouted at the height of his breath.

click.

(A simple equation: Jesper kissing him like there was no tomorrow, Jesper waking up next to him in the mornings, Jesper there through the terrible and the wonderful, Jesper saying I love you, Jesper, Jesper, Jesper—

Added to his mother sneaking into the kitchen with him late at night, eating whatever sweet thing was easiest to consume at the time, regaling him with stories and him doing the same for her, fingers sticky with sugar, heart bursting with some strange feeling—

Added to Kaz and Inej and Nina and Jesper, all together, watching Jesper get his ass kicked at sjoelbak, laughing until his lungs felt fit to burst, overflowing with fondness for this group of people that was entirely his—

Equaling happiness, pure and undistilled.)