Chapter Text
Kaz Brekker was never paternally minded. The whole concept was so absurd to him — Dirtyhands, a father — that the very thought of having children never occurred to him until one night, lying in bed with Inej at his side, she murmured the words into the frigid night air that changed him forever.
They had never discussed children before. He had not known what her thoughts were on the subject, whether she wanted them at some juncture, whether she was expecting him to provide her with them, whether she found the whole idea repulsive. He knew that she drank bitter tea each morning to protect herself from pregnancy, she certainly complained about the taste frequently enough, and never saw reason to pursue the subject further.
They didn’t know how it had happened, whether she had forgotten the tea one day, or if it had simply not worked. The fact of the matter was that this was the situation they now found themselves in, and Inej wanted to keep the creature currently growing within her.
He never told her this, but he had been quietly hoping she would make the other decision instead. He didn’t know how to take care of her through this, what to do to keep her safe. If she had made the other choice, he would have known better what to do. He would have thoroughly vetted every medik and healer and heartrender in the city, he would have gone with her and held her hand, bare skin to bare skin, and when it was all over he would have taken her home to their shared room in the Slat and waited on her hand and foot until she laughingly waved him away and returned to the sea. They would have continued in their everyday lives, just as everything had been before.
But this was what she had wanted, so this was what they would do. He had finished up his business in Ketterdam, handing the day to day running of the Dregs over to Anika and Wylan in his absence, and set up his other affairs to be managed at a distance.
And then he had loaded Inej and a single suitcase of their possessions onto a browboat and took the day’s journey up the river until they reached the stop at Lij. Inej’s belly had been curving gently outward by then, and she had developed a habit of resting a hand on it unconsciously, gently stroking it. Her wedding band shined dully on her finger whenever she did so. The baby wiggled around and prodded her from within all the time now, a concept that made Kaz feel vaguely ill.
He had taken her to the cottage where he had been born and raised until the age of nine.
They spent a week cleaning the place from top to bottom, replacing the musty old mattress in the bedroom, which had become infested with rodents in the years of neglect. There were also two small mattresses on bunk beds in an alcove set into the kitchen wall, opposite from the fire. Kaz had hung a curtain over the alcove on their first day there, and Inej had kindly left both the subject and the area alone.
They spent the last months of her pregnancy in a state of suspended anticipation. Jesper came to visit, and carved them a cradle while he stayed, using his zowa abilities to create a piece both functional and exquisitely beautiful.
Inej spent her days wandering the countryside, familiarizing herself with her new surroundings, or else going into town and endearing herself with its residents. Kaz spent his days sat at a cramped little desk he had shoved into the corner of the cottage’s main room, half behind the sofa, balancing ledgers and approving schemes thought up by Wylan or Anika.
When the day finally came, the labor came on with the rising sun, and hit like a speeding train. It seemed that one moment Inej was rubbing her distended stomach, grimacing slightly at the pains and the next she was on all fours, moaning and rocking her hips back and forth. The pains seemed to be coming right on the heels of each other, and Kaz found himself hitching the plowhorse to their wagon and racing into town, loath to leave her alone there.
He went all the way to the opposite end of the village to fetch the midwife, and then they had to stop and retrieve her apprentice on their way back, a girl who looked entirely too young to be doing such things, and then they were back home once more to find that Inej had left the confines of the cottage to stand in the yard by the horse trough, splashing water on herself in the breaks between the pains. Kaz sympathized. There were few days in Kerch that could truly be described as hot, but it was the height of summer, and the sun was beating down on them with a vengeance.
Kaz and the apprentice tried to usher her back inside, which was the proper place for such things, but the midwife had intervened.
“Who are we to tell a laboring woman what she can and cannot do?” she’d said. “It’s setting to be hotter than hell today. She can climb all the way into that trough for all I care.”
“Really?” Inej had said, turning to stare longingly at the woman.
“If it makes you happy, honey, then I don’t give a damn.”
And that had been all the encouragement Inej had needed. She had clambered straight over the edge of the trough, ignoring the helping hands Kazz had shot out to help, and plopped straight down into the water, still dressed in her nightgown, and sighed blissfully.
After that, there had been no convincing her to get out again.
She had labored there throughout the afternoon, surrounded by bemused farm animals. Kaz had felt particularly useless. Inej wanted him to be there, and so he was, but she didn’t want him to talk, or touch her, or even look at her for too long, so he awkwardly leaned up against a fencepost and eyed the horizon, studying it as though it might tell him how he could have possibly gotten to this place in his life.
The horizon did not produce answers.
The baby was born into the stifling heat of the late afternoon to a sweaty and red-faced mother who was still stubbornly sat in the horse trough.
The baby was a boy, pudgy and wrinkled with a face like an old man. The midwife had happily proclaimed this as she lifted the baby out of the water, before depositing him on his mother’s chest.
There was more, the ordeal wasn’t over then, but the rest of it had gone hazy in Kaz’s memories. At some point the midwife had decided it was time to finally get Inej back out of the trough and back inside to their bed. In achieving this feat, she had handed the baby off to Kaz, dumping the wriggling bundle in his arms and bustling away again.
Kaz had needed both arms to hang onto the tiny, slippery thing, who was quickly growing irate with the awkward way he was being handled, and so he had to leave his cane leaning against the fence to limp unsteadily into the house unassisted.
He found the women inside, cleaning Inej up and settling her in the bed. Kaz’s shirt was soaked through in the front with the water that had been streaming off the baby, but he cradled the little creature close to his chest, surprised when it quieted and stared up at him, blinking slowly.
Inej named the baby Xander, after Kaz had made it clear that he had no preferences or objections to any name whatsoever. His only stipulation was that it could not be Jordie. He was not ready to put aside his past with that name, to burden a new life with the tragedy trapped within those five letters.
They spent the first few months of the baby’s life in a constant haze of exhaustion. Kaz did what he could to help, holding the baby while Inej slept and changing its nappies. He learned the fundamentals of cooking so that he could feed her while she, in turn, focused on feeding the baby.
By six months he was practically climbing up the walls. The child was exhausting, but it was also kind of boring. He was not built for this country life of fatherhood. He loved Xander in an abstract kind of way, but he felt in no way connected to him.
By nine months he recognized a similar itch of boredom in his wife.
By a year, she put her foot down and declared enough was enough. They were both miserable like this, she proclaimed, which in turn would only serve to make Xander miserable too. They needed to return to their lives.
They closed down the cottage and three days later they were back on the browboat to Ketterdam, only this time with a chubby baby sat on Inej’s lap.
Kaz purchased a house for them in the Lid, the location of which was his most closely guarded secret, and reinstated himself as the demon king of the city. Two weeks later, Inej returned to the seas.
He had vehemently protested this move, but she had promised to go neither far nor long, and he knew it would have been cruel to restrain her. And so he had been left alone with the baby, which was a truly terrifying prospect.
Xander was an easy tempered baby, which was a small mercy. Kaz found himself capable of running through the daily routine of feeding and changing and bathing and sleeping, and four days after Inej’s departure, he first took the baby with him to the Slat. He would set the infant up in the corner of the room, sitting on a blanket with a couple of toys where he would be content to amuse himself for a few hours. He did demand, though, to spend at least part of the day sat on Kaz’s knee, babbling happily at the various people that darkened Kaz’s threshold throughout the day. It was difficult to intimidate and threaten his underlings and supplicants with an infant in his lap, but it didn’t take Kaz long to perfect the art.
Inej was gone for only three weeks that time, and returned with salt in her hair and a smile on her lips more brilliant than any he’d seen since she’d left the sea last.
The next year’s of Xander’s life were punctuated by these comings and goings. She even took Xander with her a few times when she could be sure of calm waters, locking him in the hold with her kitchen girl every time they took on slavers.
This life, his in Ketterdam and hers on the sea, inspired a new fear in Kaz that it never had before. The fear was there, and direct, focused on a single point, this fragile little being they had created.
But that fear crystallized his love for the boy that had once been so abstract. It brought with it a joy that Dirtyhands was not accustomed to knowing. He delighted in everything his son did, found himself ridiculously proud of the smallest achievements, and missed him ferociously when he was away on The Wraith, in a way that he did not even long for his wife.
Against all odds, Kaz Brekker loved fatherhood completely. It came to feel as natural to him as his life as a barrel boss. Raising his son here, in the city that chewed children up and spit them out, terrified him.
But their lives were here. They were woven into the warp and weft of the city, and there was no way they could survive away from it. The best they could do was raise their child to be more dangerous than the city that claimed them.
Xander, unfortunately, did not take to becoming dangerous. He was friendly and loving, laughing happily at the sight of the most dangerous thugs in the city. He believed every stranger to be his friend and every street to be his for the taking.
When he was three years old Inej came to stay for eight months, longer than she had stayed since her return to the sea, and taught him how to hide instead. If their son could not be dangerous, at least he could be invisible.
This, thankfully, came more naturally to the boy than fearsomeness did. He learned how to walk without making noise, to climb and balance in a way that no toddler should ever be able to. Kaz made it into a game, once Inej left again. How long could Xander hide in Kaz’s office before Onkle Jesper realized he was there? Or, if Kaz left a room for five minutes, how thoroughly could he hide himself? How long could he remain hidden before his father found him again?
It was in these games that a desire sparked within Kaz, linked somewhat to a sense of loss. He loved his son, he loved the relationship he was cultivating with him, but he mourned that he hadn’t had that from the start. That he hadn’t enjoyed the sweet moments that came in infancy, had cut himself off then. He had walled himself away from any emotions he had experienced when he first saw his son smile, or walk, or even when he first babbled out a “dada” while reaching out to him. Next time, he resolved as he sat next to a sleeping Xander’s bed late one night, he would do better.
It wasn’t until an hour or two later, as he was sipping at a nighttime brandy, that he realized the implication of that thought. Next time. He wanted there to be a next time. He wanted the next time to be, well…now.
Inej had begun drinking the bitter tea again sometime after Xander’s birth, when she was ready to return to their pre-baby activities. They never discussed it, it had just been a part of their life again.
He had to wait another week and a half after this realization until Inej returned to shore. She had limited herself solely to hunting only in the waters near Ketterdam since Xander, for which Kaz could only be grateful. She was never gone for longer than three weeks, four at the outside.
Never had that time felt longer than those twelve days he waited. And then, when she finally did make port, there was an endless dinner with Wylan and Jesper to get through, and then Inej wanted to put Xander to bed, singing him songs and telling him stories until he drifted off, and then sitting in silence by his side, stroking his hair as he slumbered.
Finally, finally, she came to their bedchamber, already unraveling her braid.
“I’m exhausted,” she said as she rounded the door. “And I cannot wait to have a bath.”
But Kaz was already on her, arms around her waist and pressing his lips to the place in her neck where he knew she was sensitive.
“Kaz!” she said, giggling. “What —”
“I want another,” he murmured against her lips. “I want another, Inej, let’s have another.”
“Another what?” she queried, pulling back from his frenzied lips, ignoring the way he tried to follow her, instinctively.
He had been going to be so much more eloquent about this, was going to have a calm and ordered discussion about what another baby would mean for their lives and why he thought now was the right time for it. But then there had been that interminable dinner, and then the hour she had spent putting Xander to bed, all the while his desire for her had been growing more and more insistent.
“A baby, Inej,” he said, leaning down to press his forehead against hers. “Let’s have another baby.”
They had a real discussion about it over the breakfast the next morning, even asking Xander his opinion, and the little family as a whole ultimately voted in favor of a new little being joining them.
Kaz kissed his wife and child goodbye that day, brimming with a joy he had once considered himself incapable of, and headed to the Slat. Anika had sent a runner along that morning to tell him that one of their newer recruits, a bruiser of a man named by the name of Keegan, was actually a Razorgull plant. He was being held in the basement of the Slat awaiting Kaz’s judgment. He was in such a good mood that he was even considering sparing the man’s life. Cutting out his tongue, cutting off his ears, and returning him to the Gulls as such would be sufficient warning of what happened to spies. Perhaps even more effective than simply outright killing him.
He pulled his hat low over his brow as rain started to fall, the smile on his face sending people running faster even then his usual scowl did.
Perhaps he would blind the man too, to really drive the point home.