Chapter Text
KAZ
He wakes in a house full of smoke.
This is the most alarming thing. The second most alarming thing is that he doesn’t know where it’s coming from or why it’s happening.
Immediately, he’s sitting up and grabbing for his cane beside him.
When he stands, his eyes go two directions. The door, and the window. There’s always checking downstairs, but he doesn’t want to waste his time if he doesn’t have much of it--especially in a rickety, old wooden and rotting house like The Slat.
Surely, he has enough faith in his crew that they’d find their ways out. They’d wake up and they’d get out on their own. He hesitates, just in case, because he hardly woke up, and he could go and make sure they all got out. But the stairs may not even be there still, and he doesn’t have the time to waste if they’re not.
He finds the window, and he makes his way out, jumping from the roofing to the building next door.
From there, he’s able to assess the damage.
The entire bottom floors, engulfed in flames. The stadwatch cars rolling in, hoses attached.
Jesper and Wylan outside across the street. A sobbing Wylan clinging to a struggling and sobbing Jesper, trying to make a break for the building.
That is when he decides to make his way down and to them, just so they’d know he’s alright. He sure picked a shitty night to spend away from his room at the mansion. Especially while Inej, Matthias, and Nina are all out of the country, doing their hunting and reforming things.
The climb down is hard, his lungs are hurting and weak. He tries to distract himself by thinking of the ways that he could rebuild--if it’s even worth it to rebuild in the first place. Probably not. He might just have the whole thing torn down and build it from the ground up. He’s distracted by a coughing fit, which he takes as a sign that he should think about that later.
He meets the floor with a grunt and walks over to his friends, his Crows, waiting and still staring into the flames.
The second they see him, all restraint of theirs is abandoned. Jesper comes running full speed and throws his arms around him. He feels the waves crash into him at full height, slowly fading as he realizes that Jesper is still crying, and he’s saying concerning things along the lines of, “I thought you were going to die.”
He doesn’t quite know what he’s supposed to say. Five minutes more, and he very well could’ve. “I’m alright,” he mumbles. He starts coughing then, choking on ash lining his throat.
Wylan comes over once Jesper lets go and wraps his arms around him as well, and the waves hit him once again. They fade much slower this time--much, much slower.
It happens within seconds. One second, he’s standing, thinking about how this is the second time he’s almost been burned alive. Two seconds, and he’s pulling away from Wylan, not breathing steadily and his vision is blurring. Three seconds, the building behind them makes a horrible creaking sound, and hands are on him again, yanking him into an alley behind them. Four seconds, The Slat is falling, and he’s throwing up into a bucket already containing some other liquid that he does not want to know about.
“Shit,” he groans once it’s all over, as the stadwatch pours water onto the collapsed building and he stands, trying to catch his breath both from the smoke and the panic.
Jesper stands to the side, staring into the fire with wide, teary eyes. “Who was in there?” he all but yells at him, panicking. “Kaz! Who was in there?”
He’s not sure what part of being hunched over, trying not to either keel over or puke his guts out isn’t sending the message of ‘not thinking clearly’. “I don’t--” he’s coughing again, trying to keep whatever’s left in his stomach down as he does it. “I don’t know,” he manages to choke.
Another wave of panic hits him, this time for an entirely different reason. He doesn’t know. He’d sent some to the Crow Club for the night, all lower level Dregs. None of his higher ups are supposed to be out, not unless they’re out for fun instead of work. He’d put them all on last night, so they’d be tired, they’d be…
He has to physically force himself not to throw up again as he thinks it through. Anika. Pim. Rotty. Dirix. Roeder.
Surely, someone made it out. There’s no way all of them--there’s no way. Not a chance. Somebody, one at the least, made it out. Anika, her rooms on the bottom floor, she could’ve--or Roeder, next to Inej’s old room, right below his.
“Upper levels,” he chokes.
Jesper lets out a strangled noise and walks out of the alley quickly. Wylan watches, eyes wide in terror as he walks away, and turns back to Kaz. “I have to--I have to,” he says, gesturing after him before following.
Eventually, Jesper comes back, sitting down next to him on the curb. “Anika and Pim made it out. And Roeder, but he’s not-” he gets cut off by his own voice cracking with tears, “not looking good.”
Three. That’s three.
“Rotty? Dirix?” he asks.
Jesper shakes his head. “No sign of them.”
Kaz sighs, heaving himself up. He walks over to the stadwatch officer by the building who has a sheet of paper and pen in his hand. “Excuse me,” he greets, trying to come off as polite. Polite gets you information, and he needs to know. He has to know. “I own this building. Did anyone make it out alright?”
The officer shakes his head sadly, looking down at his paper, “There were four, including the boss, it seems.” Jesper must’ve told him that Kaz was out, then. “There’s two over there, one got taken to a medic.”
“Is that all?” Kaz asks, mouth going dry.
There’s no way. No way that there’s that few, that he has a gang of that many and out of his entire upper levels, there’s only three.
The officer nods, “Unfortunately, so far. We’ll let you know if we find anyone else. Where should we find you?” he asks.
He clearly doesn’t know that Kaz is the boss, that the owner runs the gang as well. Very quickly, staying here is seeming more like a bad idea. Panic is beginning to swallow him up, his heart clenching up in his chest. Three.
He needs to run. He needs to go, he needs to run, and: “The Van Eck house works fine,” he says quickly, and he walks away.
He thinks about going back to the alley where Wylan and Jesper are waiting, but decides against it almost immediately. He has no home now, and no real gang. Not without the people most loyal to him. So he walks.
And he keeps walking well into the early hours of the morning, when the sun is beginning to rise.
He finds a carriage station, paying off someone to take him to Lij. He has money in his name throughout that little town, just in case, so he’d be fine there. Fine at his old home, fine on his own… fine on his own.
He’s been around his Crows for so long that he’s almost forgotten what being entirely alone feels like. What having no place else to go to feels like. Of course, he’d imagined that one day he’d be back here again, away from them. It’s not as easy as he’d thought, already. Already, he wants to turn around and go back, to go home. He wants to go home.
He has no other home.
He has his childhood house in Lij. He has a makeshift family back in Ketterdam. He has himself, breaking apart very rapidly. Himself, breaking, and Jesper and Wylan back hom--in Ketterdam. Himself, breaking, and he will not put it on them to fix that.
It’s not their fault, after all, what happened to The Slat. To the Dregs.
It’s his.
He holds back the lump in his throat, the tears pricking at his eyes, until he gets to his old home. He still knows the roads like the back of his hand, even though he’d never truly needed to know them, since he and Jordie went together everywhere.
When he walks inside, he closes the door and looks around from where he stands against it.
And as if he’s eight years old again, as if he’s not just spent twelve years as a gang leader in the Barrel, he sinks to the floor and cries.
JESPER
Inej arrives in town a week after he sends the letter. A week after The Slat burned to the ground and collapsed in front of them.
He and Wylan greet her on the harbor, and instead of her usual excitement to be back, she looks worried. She hops off the ship before Specht has the time to properly dock it and runs to them, throwing her arms around him so hard that he nearly goes flying backwards.
It’s a different kind of feeling, knowing she’s here now. When it had happened, when they’d seen the house burning from the windows at the mansion, he’d forgotten for a moment that she was away at sea. For a moment, it had been him and Wylan there, safe in their home, and Kaz and Inej, burning in theirs. That feeling had gone away with logic as time passed that day, but a little tiny piece of it remained. That piece falls away now, as they hold onto each other.
“Are you two alright?” she asks, eventually reaching over and looping one arm around Wylan’s neck, bringing him into the hug.
Jesper nods, “We’re okay,” he whispers, holding tight onto her waist.
“Do you know where he went?” she asks, pulling back from the hug but trailing her hands down his arms, holding onto both of his hands.
He can’t do much other than shake his head. When he’d written her to let her know about the fire, he’d included that he’d left. That was back when there was a chance he’d show up later that day, when he was asking her to come home just for moral support. Not to help them find him.
Wylan speaks up once it becomes clear that Jesper can’t. “He didn’t ever come back,” he says quietly.
Inej’s eyes go a little wider, her mouth falling open. “He didn’t--” she cuts herself off, clearly thinking. “Why wouldn’t he come back?” she whispers, looking to the side of them as if he’d be standing there, just like he usually is when she docks.
In fact, this is the first time that he hasn’t been there.
Jesper wonders if he would be there, if he’d known. Granted, she wasn’t supposed to come in for a few more weeks. But if somehow they’d managed to let him know she was coming home, if he’d come in.
A part of him says ‘no’, because he’s Kaz. The other part says ‘yes’, because it’s Inej.
“We need to find him,” she says, as if making the decision split second right then.
Of course, we need to find him, Jesper thinks. He doesn’t say it, though. As much as him being gone hurts, as much as not knowing where he is terrifies him, he can’t imagine how it is for Inej. It would be like Wylan going missing like that after an accident. He wouldn’t be able to handle that, surely. He’d go insane within the first ten minutes.
It’s happening for Inej, though.
He’s going to cool it with the snarky mental backtalk, he decides. He’s going to help find his brother, and he’s going to be supportive while he does it.
Inej lets go of his hands, pulling him from his thoughts. “I need to help unload. I’ll meet you back home?” she asks.
It’s an odd thing, this whole turn of events. For two years now, the Van Eck mansion has been his home. He hasn’t slept at The Slat since that one time a year ago when he and Kaz got so drunk that he fell asleep on the floor. But suddenly, after it’s gone, he keeps thinking of it as home. His mind starts reeling as she says it, even though she’s said it in regards to their current house more times than she’s probably said it in regards to The Slat. Still, his mind corrects her. No, home is gone.
“We’ll see you there,” Wylan nods, taking Jesper’s hand as they begin to walk back.
Inej shows up at the house fifteen minutes later with three cups of coffee and her bags. It’s nearing sunset, but Jesper has a feeling that they’re not going to be sleeping tonight.
They sit around the living room, talking for well over an hour.
“I just don’t understand why he’d leave like that,” Wylan says, looking down into his cup of now-cold coffee.
Inej shrugs, looking down with sad eyes. “He tends to do that when things are… feelings-y,” she says. “He doesn’t like to be around people when he’s upset,” she mumbles, looking into her own cup, too. They’ve been doing that a lot, this evening. Too much has been lost to be able to share it all with each other, yet.
“He could’ve locked himself in his room or something, though,” Wylan says sadly, looking down at his cup.
Jesper nods, agreeing reluctantly, “He does have his own space here.”
They all sit, nobody saying anything for a few more seconds.
And then, “Wait,” Inej sits up straighter, looking between them. “His own space. The safehouses,” she says. “They’re all stocked up, he could be there and he wouldn’t have to come back for a while.”
They’ve all perked up by now, looking between each other with so much energy, you’d think the coffee is just setting in. “Should we go looking, then? If he’d be fine there?” Wylan asks, looking between them. He knows Kaz well enough, with the time they’ve spent together. But Inej and Jesper have known him longer.
Jesper nods, already standing, “We shouldn’t just leave him, if he’s hurting,” he says, grabbing his coat off the hook by the door and shrugging it on. Inej does the same, as Wylan is starting to stand.
They make their way out the door as Wylan pulls his coat on, leaving him to catch up. “I thought he likes to be alone!” Jesper hears him call through the still-open door.
It’s not worth much, their little idea, because they check each safehouse--even Kaz’s old ones--and he’s nowhere to be found. No sign of him having been there, either.
As they walk back to the house, they all are defeated and tired.
“Does he have anywhere else? Any properties that he’d go to?” Wylan asks, looking across Jesper at Inej as they walk up the pathway to the front door of the mansion.
Inej ponders for a second, thinking as she walks. Jesper knows of a few buildings he owns, but they’re all occupied with some business or another. They’d checked the Crow Club last week, it had been one of the first and only places they’d thought to look. Inej might know of more, though, as his partner (and his correspondent from the sea).
She perks up just a bit. “He has one,” she says. “His old house, from when he was a kid.”
He’d told them about his childhood a while ago, before Inej, Nina, and Matthias left on their second most recent trip. It had been a long night, one with many, many tears (and some bit revelations on Jesper’s end).
“He owns his farm?” Jesper asks, looking over at her with raised eyes. He never would’ve thought that Kaz owned his old home, not with the way he spoke of trying to forget his past. He’d made it sound like he’d thrown away any reminders, only keeping his given name and the tattoo he’d gotten on his arm. Though, even that had appeared to serve more of a reminder of revenge than of his history.
Inej nods, “Yeah, he bought it a few years ago.”
Wylan looks over at her as they walk inside, “Should we go there?”
“We should wait for Nina and Matthias,” Jesper says, looking over at him. “They should be here soon, within the next two days.”
Inej nods in agreement.
And so they wait.
The next day is spent in near silence, sitting in the same space without saying anything. It feels much more comfortable to be side-by-side now than it does to be apart, even though none of them have much to say. It feels wrong to try to distract themselves while their friend is gone, but talking about it only makes the dread of not knowing where he is even more intense.
The day after that, Nina and Matthias show up.
NINA
Ravka, she’s decided, is far too large of a distance away from Kerch. She’s known this and had ideas about it, but it’s here and now that she decides. It’s standing on solid ground for the first time in nearly three days and immediately being thrown back onto a ship to travel deeper into Kerch.
Here’s how that came to be:
She’d come home from the trip with the Grisha sweating and tired, making her way into her’s and Matthias’s house and flopping down onto the couch immediately. Almost instantaneously, he showed up, standing beside her with a letter in his hands.
“Jesper wrote you,” he said as she picked her legs so he could sit at the other end of the couch. He pulled her legs back onto his lap as he sat down beside her. “It looks important.”
“Hello to you, too,” she grumbled jokingly, taking the letter from him.
It did, in fact, look important. Not only judging by the fact that there were no nicknames written on the envelope. He hadn’t signed Wylan’s name alongside his own, and he’d taken the liberty of writing ‘URGENT’ in all capitals across the side not bearing the address.
She sat up as she opened it, tearing right through the corner of the paper as she attempted to get it open quickly. The paper crinkled as she pulled it out of the envelope, making it slightly harder to read the already messy, sprawling handwriting.
And as she read through it, she stood up and started pacing without fully realizing it.
“What’s wrong?” Matthias asked, straightening up as she read through it.
She didn’t respond until she got to the end, “The Slat burned down,” she said.
Neither her nor Matthias had ever really lived in The Slat, since it was for full time Dregs and they both, technically, were still just affiliates. But they’d taken plenty of meetings there, and they’d watched within the past years as Kaz built it from something almost completely unlivable to someplace just mildly unpleasant. While it was still not a joy to be there, it was improving. Kaz was putting his heart and soul into it, she could tell, even if he wouldn’t say it.
Matthias’s eyes widened as he stood, walking over to read over her shoulder, “Is he okay?”
It didn’t even occur to her that he could be asking about Jesper, in that moment, as the one who sent the letter. They both knew it was Kaz they had to be concerned about.
“They want us to go home. Something about grieving,” she said. “Kaz does not do that.”
She walked away, going around him to the staircase and walking up to their room, pulling out her bags and beginning to shove them full of whatever she’d bring on a trip to Ketterdam.
Matthias followed shortly behind her, copying her actions with his own belongings. “Kaz doesn’t do what?” he asked, yanking his bag down from a shelf in the attic and putting it on the bed, open.
She stopped her packing in order to emphasize her point with her hands. “Grieve! No mourners, remember? If he is, there’s something wrong. We have to go,” she said.
“I’m packing already,” he said, shoving clothes into his bag as she did the same.
That’s how they found themselves aboard a ship to Ketterdam that night, set to dock in a three day’s time.
That’s how they ended up here, boarding Inej’s ship, setting sights for Lij not more than an hour after docking from their first trip. “Do you think he’s alright?” Matthias stood to the side, asking Inej. He’d been grilling them all about it for the past hour. Nina doesn’t understand his and Kaz’s relationship much, but she thinks it’s sweet regardless.
Nina, meanwhile, is working to help Jesper load his bags below deck while Wylan brings out the map for charting their route.
All business is interrupted once he does this, laying the map by the stairs and sitting down opposite it. All bags are finished being loaded onto the ship, and within minutes, they’re setting sights for Lij.
Nina stands beside Inej as the ship leaves the berth, keeping her company by the mast. “You think he’s going to kill us when we show up?” she asks, looking over to see the small, almost guilty smile that Inej let’s show.
“I hope not,” she sighs, giving the wheel a big crank.
The entire feeling of the ship is worry, Nina’s realized. Everyone there, including herself, is so worried that they might very well not speak until they get there. She doesn’t need Grisha power to know that. She also doesn’t need Grisha power to know, somewhere deep inside, that Kaz is going to be alright, no matter how not-alright he may be when they find him.