Chapter Text
Plumje Van Eck was… not someone Kaz ever expected to personally meet. After enjoying her affair for a while in the country, Alys found herself missing the city, and moved back to the Van Eck mansion. Wylan did not mind - the girl was a little dumb, but overall very pleasant, and she seemed to bond very well with Marya, a surprise to everyone. Of course, with Alys came the small, screeching thing called a baby, and it delighted everyone. Except for Kaz.
He felt a certain obligation as a friend to come to the mansion sometimes, and one of these visits proved to be a mistake.
Because as Kaz entered the sitting room, without being announced, of course, he came face to face with the young blonde woman he had once kidnapped and never expected to see again. “Mr. Brekker, what a surprise! It is so nice to see you again.”
“I sincerely doubt that, Alys,” he said with a neutral face, trying to decide whether he should be laughing or punching the wall. Alys was not generaly unpleasant, she was just very stupid and naive - qualities that Kaz enjoyed in pidgeons and enemies only. Why the woman was happy to see him, he could only guess. Kidnapping a heavily pregnant rich girl usually did not lay the foundation for a strong friendship with said girl, but he really did not know much about them.
Speaking of pregnancy… Where was Alys’s enormous belly?
“You must meet Plumje, Kaz. It’s okay if I call you Kaz, right?” he did not even have time to reply, because Alys was already across the room, taking something he would have considered as a heavily embroidered pillow from Wylan and approaching him with it. The pillow, Kaz realized, was in fact a baby, swaddled in the typical way of the rich Kerch - heavily.
“Hold her!” Alys beamed and presented the infant to Kaz. He could barely make out its tiny face - squished and red, as the baby had probably cried recently.
He took his time sitting down comfortably a foot or so away from Jesper on the couch. He could absolutely not handle a baby. He did not want to handle a baby. They were fragile, wet themselves constantly, cried up a hell every five minutes, and generally were not very intelligent beings. “Absolutely not.”
Besides, they weren’t Inej. She was the only one that he could even try to tolerate, to touch, to show vulnerability to. And Inej wasn’t even there - she was somewhere in the middle of the True Sea, giving the slavers what they deserved. Agreeing to hold the baby would mean showing vulnerability, would mean telling them that he, in fact, had never held one and had no idea what to do and that he would probably just panic and drop it because he could not even touch skin because he was stupid and-
“Kaz, do not make Alys upset, please. Hold Plumje,” Jesper said, and Kaz heard an edge of desperation in his voice. Right. Alys was, besides her singing, known for crying at every little inconvenience, and they’d probably had a lot of them since she arrived. The baby probably followed her mother’s example, because it started sniffling the moment he declined to hold her, and was steadily progressing into a full-blown tantrum.
“I will simply drop it if you give it to me.”
“Her. You will absolutely not drop her,” scolded Wylan, and there was both a reassurance and a threat in it.
Alys looked at him again and he noticed, with horror, that her eyes were full of tears, threatening to spill. He was well aware of what followed such a spill. The screaming would probably be worse than the baby’s - Plumje’s, he reminded himself.
“Alright, hand her over,” he sighed, and checked the position of Alys’s arms holding the swaddle to imitate. Like hell he would be asking for help to hold a damn child.
The feeling was awkward at first. It felt unnatural, and he had to adjust his hold and lean back against the couch. He gave himself a second to assess his feelings, as Inej had advised him to do, and surprisingly found no panic. There was the mild anxiety of doing something new, but otherwise he was perfectly fine, if a little disgruntled by the crying that still had not ceased. It just felt like holding a big pillow, which was silly, but also comforting. Kaz would not admit it, but a part of his reluctance came from the fear that he really was Dirtyhands, and he would break the baby’s fragile ribs and little arms and legs as soon as she was laid in his arms. To his, and probably everyone else’s surprise, Plumje seemed… almost comfortable, except for the screaming. Kaz was honestly impressed that someone with such small lungs could produce such a noise.
“What, what is it? Would you stop that?” he asked, quietly and irritably, and Jesper next to him snickered.
“That is not how you…” the Zemeni man trailed off and stared in surprise, just like everyone in the room including Kaz himself. Plumje, that little devil, had completely stopped crying, safe for the little sniffles while calming down.
It was only a matter of minutes before she was asleep. Jesper whistled, earning a whack from Wylan. “He really just put her to sleep by telling her to stop crying. He put a damn baby to sleep with the sheer force of will.”
Kaz rolled his eyes and handed Alys her daughter back. “Wipe her nose. It’s gross.”
…
Unfortunately for him, that was not the only time he had encountered the devilish thing. Anytime Alys had troubles putting Plumje down because she would not stop crying, a runner was sent to the Slat or the Crow Club, demanding Kaz’s urgent arrival. The first time it happened, he had really thought it was an emergency, maybe one of them was dying or needed to dispose of a body, and so understandably, he hurried. How surprised he had been to find that it was, in fact not an emergency at all, just a yelling baby. However, with much goading, he took Plumje into his arms and not a minute later, she was fast asleep. Kaz really tried to ignore the runner the next time the boy arrived, but he had been persistent, and Kaz had to relent eventually. He learnt soon that simply obeying and sacrificing the half-hour of rowing to the mansion, holding Plumje for half a minute and then rowing back was more efficient than spending an hour ignoring the runner.
One day, however, he was too busy to spare forty minutes, and had hoped that his Plumje duty would be avoided. No such luck - he simply found Alys Van Eck at his doorstep an hour later, seemingly desperate. “I have been rocking her for three hours straight,” she said, demurely. Kaz really did not want to deal with her crying, and fortunately, there was no one to see him usher her into his new office and quickly rock the baby to much-needed sleep.
Jesper would often tease him - baby whisperer, he would say, but Kaz refused to examine that part of himself. He never really developed a relationship of any kind with children. He mostly just robbed them when he was younger, but he had not come into contact with a baby before. Jordie had loved them - something to do with him being an older brother, but at the age when people first thought about having a family, Kaz robbed merchers and grew his empire.
Not to mention that Plumje had apparently taken a liking to him, something undoubtedly worse than Jesper’s teasing and equally unbearable. Not only was he able to put her to sleep - she stretched her chubby arms towards him when he was near, a feat for a three month old who could barely recognize shapes and slobbered all over her face, Kaz thought. When he spoke, she was miraculously quiet, and when he frowned or complained, she would laugh.
“Little devil,” he would murmur, but smile privately when Plumje chose to terrorize everyone except him. There seemed to be a symbiosis between them, and Kaz assumed it was better than her crying.
…
Inej arrived after six months of pursuing her dream. Ketterdam was equally as disgusting in the cold autumn weather as it had been when she left, but she expected it to be brightened by a certain boy in a suit waiting for her at the docks. When she did not spot him when they first made land, she did not worry about it - his runner was probably only halfway to the Slat, anyway. But when he did not show up even after two hours of arguing with dockworkers and unloading people and cargo, she became heavily disappointed.
She was so immersed in her anger and disappointment that she nearly missed the two people waiting for her - Jesper and Wylan, slouching over a stack of crates, looking absolutely exhausted.
“Inej!” Jesper threw his arms around her, but she could feel he was missing his usual energy.
“Jes, Wylan! I am so glad to see you again. What happened to you two?”
“Well, uh…” Wylan looked at Jesper, who just shrugged his shoulders, “Alys lives with us again with Plumje, who is just… a delight.”
“She cannot stop crying,” said Jesper. “Kaz has been on a job for three days and he just came back this morning. We have not slept well these past days.”
Inej frowned. “Is he hurt? Why were you so worried about him that you skipped sleep?” To think that she was angry at him for not welcoming her, while he was hurt somewhere…
“Oh no, we were not worried about him. Plumje was just constantly crying. That little lovely has also learnt how to pull her arms out of the swaddle and has been hitting people left and right ever since,” Jesper pointed at a barely noticeable bruise on his jaw, and Inej noticed Wylan had a blackeye.
She just had to laugh. “Do not tell me a baby did that.”
They both nodded gravely.
“Well, you must tell me all about her,” she grinned and fell into peaceful conversation with her friends. She had missed that so much.
While Jesper and Wylan told her all about Plumje, about every single fat roll on her adorable little legs, her delightfully blue eyes and a fortunate lack of resemblance to her father, something never came up. That is why Inej had a small heart attack when she entered the Van Eck sitting room, excited to meet Wylan’s new little sister and saw Kaz Brekker, decked out in an immaculate suit with slightly rumpled hair holding a baby and feeding it from a bottle as if it were the most normal thing.
It was strange, his hands gloved in impeccable black contrasting starkly against the pure lacy white of the swaddle, which seemed unusually hefty. It ended in a long train that spilled over Kaz’s lap and down his leg onto the floor. It would almost be ridiculous - the Bastard of the Barrel being a wet nurse to a very, very swaddled baby, but Inej could not move or speak. He looked focused, as if Plumje was just a scheme or a map of a place he was planning to rob next.
Plumje whimpered from behind the bottle and hit it with her newly freed arm. Kaz experimentally pulled it away. “Are you full?” She burped in reply and cried gently. “Oh shut up, there is nothing to cry about,” he said as if he really was trying to have a meaningful conversation with a six month old.
Inej let out a choked out laugh, and Kaz finally looked at her. She knew he had known about her the moment she entered, he just chose to finish his work and acknowledge her later. He handed the baby back to Alys to burp, and nodded at her with a question in his eyes. She nodded back and followed him out of the back door to the terrace.
The moon was high up at that point and Inej felt a little chilly as they sat in the garden armchairs standing right next to each other. “So you became an uncle, huh?” she grinned, unsure if they were ready for a more serious conversation. She did not even care about anything serious right then, anyways. She was just too amazed with the fact that Kaz Brekker held a baby without any fuss or threats.
“Hardly,” he scoffed, “they are all a bunch of skivs who cannot even feed her properly.”
“Language!” scolded Alys, who was hurrying to them with a wailing Plumje in her arms. “Kaz, she won’t go to sleep.”
To Inej’s amazement, he just accepted the tiny girl. “As long as I’m putting her to sleep, I decide on the language I use.”
Inej would have sworn she heard Wylan scoff somewhere in the sitting room. When she looked back, Jesper was putting out the last lights, except for one, probably left out for them. Everyone else was in a hurry to reach the stairs and Inej remembered them saying that while Kaz was on a job, they could not sleep well. Had Kaz actually been putting Plumje to sleep all this time?
She looked at them again and her breath caught. In the moonlight, looking at the baby in his arms, Kaz looked almost… gentle. He rocked his body back and forth slightly. “Go to sleep, Plumje. It is very late and I do not feel like staying up with you anymore.”
It just amused Inej endlessly how he casually spoke to her, no baby voice or anything, and she seemed to like it, to listen to him, even.
After a few minutes of quiet that she dared not break, Kaz looked at her. “Would you like to hold her?”
Inej nodded eagerly. She grew up with the Suli, after all, and there was always someone’s baby to hold. She found them quite endearing, honestly. However, there was something strange and magical about how they both stood, about the warmth radiating from Kaz’s body as he gently transferred Plumje to her expectant arms.
She snorted, a very undignified sound, her mom complained. “Am I holding a child or a bunch of blankets? I honestly cannot tell.”
Kaz laughed, something she had only rarely heard. “We have made an agreement not to ask Alys anymore. She seemed very upset last time I indicated Plumje looked like a pillow with a face. Believe it or not, she did take it down three layers.”
Inej giggled. Plumje must have looked like a ball of laundry back then. “I think we should put her to bed. Show me?”
Kaz smiled at her and nodded. “Welcome back, by the way.”