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He’s been waiting on the rooftop for hours, and Inej still hasn’t come.
He’s supposed to be worried. Logically, he knows he’s supposed to be worried. He’s supposed to be pacing the width of the rooftop and chewing his thumbnail nervously and muttering under his breath, but Kaz Brekker honestly isn’t feeling much right now, and he doesn’t know if he’ll be able to for a long time.
And it’s dark.
Too dark.
(Inej can more than hold her own. He knows this, knows this better than most people. He’s seen her knock out men giving her odd looks before with the kind of ease any normal person would fear. But - everything - still gets to him, more often than not, and he can’t help tensing up at the thought of her being injured, or lost, or -)
“Kaz.”
He whirls around, gripping the head of his cane hard enough to bruise his hand. Inej smiles at him from the other end of the rooftop, eyebrow raised, hand toying absently with a knife.
“Is everything alright?”
Kaz winces inwardly. “Yes. Why?”
Inej flips the knife in her palm, running her thumb along the flat of the blade. “You look tense. Like you’re about to take flight. What are you afraid of?”
Losing you. Losing this.
“The Bastard of the Barrel fears nothing,” Kaz says cooly, a little sarcastically, and turns back to the view of the city below.
Inej is silent for a moment. “You know, I was talking to Nina earlier.”
“Oh, no.”
“She told me about how you’ve been doing whilst I was away.”
“I wrote to you, you know.”
“She told me you were worried I wouldn’t come back. Do you really think I’d leave you without telling you, Kaz?”
Kaz shrugs. If he’s honest, he doesn’t know. As much as he trusts her, he’s let too many people in, only to lose them again, and he didn’t let himself get his hopes up. It’s too much to expect someone to care enough about him to stick around, so he doesn’t.
Or didn’t, because he’d never really thought about it before Inej.
She smiles, and he feels it on the back of his neck. “I would never do that, Kaz. I care about you too much to leave without telling you.”
Now, that - that makes him duck his head and stare at his feet for a minute. Sometimes he misses being good at shutting off his emotions. “I - yes. You - you’re - okay. Wonderful. Yes.”
Inej laughs. “Kaz Brekker, are you flustered?”
“Altitude sickness at this height, Inej?” he gets out. It isn’t his best retort, but it makes her laugh again, and that soft thing in his chest sings in response.
Footsteps pad gently behind him, and then Inej is stepping up to the edge of the roof next to him, toying with the hem of her cloak absently. He glances at her, and she looks back, soft as ever, and her smile widens.
Despite himself, despite the fact that he knows full well that any other gang could be watching them right now and making careful note of this whole exchange, Kaz smiles back.
“Okay,” she says finally, “Is it alright for me to touch you? I missed you a lot.”
“It’s only been a couple of days,” Kaz mutters, but he nods, and holds out his arm to let her loop her own through it. Inej sinks into his side, giving him time to withdraw, and rests her head on his shoulder, one point of contact at a time. He appreciates it, more than she’ll ever know.
“I know you missed me too,” she sings.
(Kaz smiles, small and genuine, and knows she notices.)
They stand there in silence for a little while longer. It’s nice.
-
“Are you going to Wylan’s place tonight?” Inej asks finally, after a few dozen minutes of silence.
Kaz shrugs. “I don’t know. I’d like to, but -”
“You don’t know what it’ll cost you,” she finishes for him, surprisingly gentle. “That’s fair. But - you should know, we’ve got your back, Kaz. Everything’s been clear for so long, and we’ve kept it that way. The world won’t crumble if you take a night off and let yourself be eighteen.”
He pauses. “... Okay. Fine. One night. If I lose any money, though, I’ll -”
“Fire me?” Inej teases.
“Don’t test me.”
She laughs, and Kaz smiles at the ground a good 20 feet below.
-
Jesper and Wylan’s house is remarkably cosy given how huge it is. Kaz and Inej sit down a few feet away from the fire and wait for someone to come home, hands silently intertwined, and it’s peaceful.
They came across the rooftops, Inej guiding him along ladders thrown over gaps and eventually through the one window at the top of the house Jesper always leaves open for them, and Kaz doesn’t think he’s ever genuinely laughed this much in his life, or ever felt this warm .
And Inej knows this, if the way she’s smiling at him like he’s something precious is anything to go by.
The only sound for a long time is the fire.
He never gets to have quiet moments like these with Inej anymore, and he misses them. Inej is - Inej is steady, stable, someone he can learn to love freely without fear of toppling off some tightrope. She is gentle when he lets her touch him, far gentler than he would trust anyone else to be, and she’s been so fucking busy lately that he’s felt her absence like a bullet between his ribs.
As if sensing his thoughts, she glances up at Kaz from her lap and smiles at him. “Hello.”
Kaz bites his lip. “Hello.”
Inej nods towards the open window, through which they can both hear the sound of a carriage approaching. “Should we close that?”
“Oh, uh, yes. I think making Wylan believe he’s been robbed isn’t the best of ideas.”
She laughs softly as she gets up to close the window. “It would be funny, though.”
“Incredibly so,” he agrees softly. Inej smiles at him as she sits back down and reaches for his hand (a question, one he can easily refuse), smoothing her thumb over his knuckles gently.
They’re still sitting like that when Jesper opens the door and yelps, then slams it shut again.
Inej jumps up and opens it for him, letting go of Kaz’s hand. He turns it face-up on his lap and stares at it for a few heartbeats, frowning. The sensation of having someone let go that quickly is - it’s odd. It leaves the phantom feeling of warmth tingling against his palm, through the leather of the fingerless gloves, and humming up through the bones of his wrist.
“Why are you sitting in my boyfriend’s drawing room?” he hears distantly.
“We thought we’d come early. It’s your room too, technically.”
“How did you get in?” That’s Wylan, muffled by the two bodies standing in the way of the door. Kaz glances up and locks eyes with him as he lifts his head over Jesper’s shoulder, frowning at both of them.
“The window,” Inej says sweetly, turning on her heel.
Jesper sighs and shakes his head, following her into the room.
-
Nina arrives ‘fashionably late’, whatever that means, and curls up in a bundle of furs as close to the fire as she can get without risking any burns. She’s still mourning Matthias - it’s visible in the dark circles under her eyes, in the tired edge to her smile - but she looks… happier. More at peace, maybe.
And Wylan and Jesper - well, they’re as ridiculously in love as ever. Now that Kaz is getting used to domesticity, as it were, he can see it, and it’s - it’s nice. Nina smiles at him over the top of her cup (hot chocolate; Jesper won’t stop making it) and mouths cute every time they so much as exchange long looks, and he doesn’t quite know why, but it’s… nice. It’s nice to feel like a part of this small family they’ve built when it’s not in the middle of committing crimes.
Thankfully, none of them ask about the gloves he’s wearing, or about him and Inej. Maybe it’s foolish of him to be glad of that, but - he is. He’s glad. He’s grateful for them - all of them, in ways he can’t begin to explain.
Making conversation is harder than anticipated when they haven’t had as many opportunities to do it as they would have liked, so instead they spend a lot of the afternoon sitting in warm silence. Inej traces gentle arcs on the back of Kaz’s hand with her thumb and leans gently against his side, smiling softly, and he feels… he feels at peace.