Chapter Text
It's not a lacking of spine
Nor of physical pulse
It's just a feeling of distance
Akin to a feeling of loss
Of love in the youth
Of my limited life
That passed in a violent
And ritual screwing inside
[ The Deepest of Sighs, The Frankest of Shadows - Gang of Youths ]
The emails sent just before the beginnings of each semester were near-ceremonial. A heritage practice kept year after year, a faithless blessing to the school year to start it off right. He kept a template for such things, after a decade of practice there was really no reason to have to retype it every single time. He believed in making things easier for himself, no cutting corners but definite compromises for time better spent.
Good Afternoon, [Professor/Dr.] [Name],
I’m very excited to be participating in your [COURSE] class. I wanted to reach out before the beginning of the semester to ask that you make a note on your roster before the beginning of school.
If attendance is called, please accommodate the following.
Kazimir shortened to Kaz
Rietveld changed to Brekker
Your understanding is, in advance, appreciated.
Best,
K. Brekker
Kaz Brekker was an opportunist at heart. Quick-witted and ever frugal, the chance at much cheaper rent at the mere expense of spending just a few extra hours in the day with the people he already spent most of his life with was a small price to pay. Drawbacks were drawbacks, but profit was profit. He hadn’t lived with anyone other than Jordie since he was ten, had lived alone since the start of college and his brother made a potentially fatal mistake and signed his life away for the promise of a steady paycheck and tuition paid to a military recruiter. Jordie was… fine. Uncomfortably away and hard to get on the phone but fine. Safe on a base in who-knew-where South Korea, it wasn’t ideal, but it paid the bills. Kaz supposed he couldn’t complain.
He could complain.
He was excellent at complaining just like he was excellent at most things.
Kaz could play piano, draw passably when necessary, argue himself into Pre-Law a year early with nothing but hope and a dictionary he’d read cover-to-cover as a child who did not yet speak English.
Kaz was not so excellent at sharing two bathrooms between five people, four of which had no issues with mobility, one of which insisted on taking up every possible square inch of counter space.
Nina Zenik had been the rare problem he didn’t anticipate. Fifth and final to the lease, she was a good friend to him and everyone else. Nina was fine, she was just… excitable. Free and happy and full of life and music and all the things that made Kaz’s carefully curated sleep schedule hard to live by. Nina brought her partner and the ex-boyfriend she hadn’t quite managed to cut off around about as often as she was in the apartment herself. They were practically their sixth and seventh housemates at that point. Nina collected people like buttons or playing cards, ever-social and building her flock by the day. She was loud, but different than Jesper.
Jesper worked the night shift, clocked in at seven in the evening and out at four. He always entered the apartment with practiced care, the way he eased the door closed made it obvious he was doing his best not to wake his roommates. It always woke Kaz anyways. Jesper was the type of loud that came with living. Living unapologetically, with little remorse for social standards. A part of Kaz admired him for that.
Kaz was not so good at ignoring the status quo, not so good at pretending not to size up every person, place, or thing like it was a prize to be won or a battle to be fought. He did it with school, with choosing roommates, working internships a year early, doing all the little things that could ensure him a shred of long-term success. That was the way of the world, you’re born, you struggle, you die. Kaz wanted more, his brother wanted more, his parents wanted everything for the both of them.
Growing up an immigrant, Kaz knew from the moment he set foot on American soil for the first time that life would be different. He watched, learned, and rehearsed social conventions like studying lines for a play. Like studying blueprints to a building for the biggest heist anyone had ever committed. Kaz was different, so was Jordie, both of them the living ghosts of their mother, the legacy of their father who had given up everything once for the woman he loved, and gave up everything twice to give their children a better chance on his own.
Bram Rietveld had tried his best.
Bram Rietveld and his two not-so-white boys, fleeing from their motherland, their mother’s land, in the wake of a war that was still, to that day, tearing the soil and the people asunder. Bram Rietveld and his two not-so-brown boys who were accused of making excuses and making up stories when they, initially, stumbled over vocabulary words and social cues and all the other terribly large, terribly new things that came with being refugees. They were a terrible in-between of too American and not American enough for the world and when their father died, they became those just-enough-strange children again. Alone in a world filled with sickness and closed capital, to a younger Kaz, to Kazimir Rietveld, they were made of the very same, dirt-ridden cloth.
It had been over a decade since his father died. Kaz felt for him sometimes, now as an adult, just-westernized-enough to pass as born-American, how hard it must have been for him. His Dutch father, who fell in love with a woman that his family cared so little for that they threw their son to the wind over it. His immigrant father who studied English alongside his two, Middle Eastern, not-so-religious boys after their mother left him behind in a sterile, white hospital room and the promise that, one day, they would see each other again, In sha’Allah. Bram didn’t have the knowledge that his wife had, but he tried.
Kaz knew all too well that sometimes trying was not enough.
He cherished his father’s effort all the same.
Kaz was the living embodiment of his family’s wishes, his mother’s last burst of energy, his father’s hardship to find him passage to a better life, his brother’s sacrifice of his own time and freedom to ensure that he would be able to go to college and make a difference.
He would try. Brick by brick.
He thought too much in the early mornings. The time in between Jesper arriving home and coaxing his way into the bed he shared with Wylan in the room across from Kaz’s and the time that Kaz’s alarm would ring, soft but prompt, at six. Wylan was a light sleeper, Kaz could tell by the way he grumbled, muffled protests that carried through the hall whenever Jesper came home. Distantly, he wondered why they didn’t just sleep in separate rooms if it bothered him so much to be woken up.
Beside Jesper and Wylan’s room was Inej’s. She was deathly quiet, especially in the early mornings. Kaz could tell, though, by the soft sound of socks on carpet that she was awake before any of them. He wasn’t sure if she was woken by Jesper as well, or if she woke even before him, just that come fifteen minutes from then, Inej would leave her bedroom and pad to the kitchen on the balls of her feet in her socks. She’d try to make tea quietly, catch the kettle just before it whistled. She’d wake no one who wasn’t already awake.
Kaz never dared to interrupt her morning rituals; she was private, brought into their thrown-together living arrangement by luck alone. He knew she valued her space, needed her quiet time. Kaz wondered if bombs went off behind her eyes when she was alone too.
She was jumpy, hypervigilant and easy to startle but subtle to react. Kaz had noticed the way that her shoulders rolled to tense when Jesper entered a room a touch too loud. He’d never told her to her face but he knew, or at least hoped, she knew he understood.
He understood many things. Legal jargon and social cues, sickness and war. He understood what it meant when people turned their wrath on people.
He knew what sort of destruction could come from the total lack of care that comes with class conflict.
Kaz could hear Inej’s door unlatch, the quiet shuffle of her moving down the hallway. She didn’t know he’d been up all night, didn’t yet know what he knew from a full eight hours of scrolling through news sources with doom heavy in his heart.
He wasn’t a stranger to sickness, in the transitional stages as asylum seekers he’d seen it often. Pervasive ill that tainted every camp, every temporary hostel. This was his first time seeing it take over a place that felt stabler than the worst places he’d been. Talks of lockdown had chills running down his spine, to hear that something had gone from bad, to worse, to astronomically bad over the course of only months shook him.
Sick was for French temporary passage sites and hospitals. Sick was for emergency rooms after a car accident killed his father and shattered his right knee. Sick was meant to be colds, tissues and dayquil, and minor fevers.
He didn’t ever want to leave the apartment again.
The buzz of his phone, between his hands and resting against his forehead, startled him to a level he wouldn’t readily enjoy admitting. He drew in a deep breath, pulled it back just enough to read the notification.
INEJ GHAFA: I can hear you awake in there
INEJ GHAFA: do you want some tea?
Kaz sighed, rolled onto his back and ignored the twinge his leg gave. The bottom of his foot felt numb, walking might not have been an option then. He did want tea, he didn’t want to wake Nina or Wylan or Jesper. He didn’t want to wake whatever amalgamation of friends that Nina had over for the third time that week.
INEJ GHAFA: you’re thinking so loudly that I can hear you through the door.
INEJ GHAFA: I read the Governor's statement
INEJ GHAFA: figures that’s what you’re so stressed about. We can talk about it if you want?
A pause.
Kaz was excellent at many things. Kaz could play piano, draw passably when necessary, argue himself into Pre-Law a year early while schooling his voice to drop the last twinge of an accent left on his tongue. The last gift his mother gave him, hidden away for education benefits. Shameful.
KAZ BREKKER: Yeah.
KAZ BREKKER: Tea sounds nice.