Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Back pressed against the frame of Jes’s old bed at the Slat, chin hooked over his knees, Wylan sits in the dark.

Shakes.

Grips himself tight around his torso to stop himself spilling across the floor like mercury.

Waits for it to pass.

It will pass, it will pass, it always has before.

And then Jesper is there.

And then Jesper is everywhere.

Door slammed open and lights on and loud and humming a tattoo into his eardrums and Wy? Wy what’s - what’s happened, love? and fluttering hands at his knees and at his shoulders and at his cheeks and are you hurt, Wy? and lips pressed to knuckles and a hand in his hair and Wylan, are you hearing me sunshine? like he’s not hearing everything , feeling everything , like it’s not the exact fucking problem that he’s crushed under every single bit of too much too much too much that sits on his chest until he can’t breathe with it.

And he’s not sure how he breaks away from those dark hands thrumming around him to smooth and caress and fix fix fix that part of his brain that was never together enough to have anything break it in the first place. That has always been broken, been wrong.

He’s not sure when he ends up wedged between a table and the far wall of this tiny room, enclosed on three sides to block out some of the everything, bent double at the waist with his forehead to his ankles and eyelids screwed so tight that the colours of the overwhelming all of it of the universe dance behind them.

He’s not sure how long Jesper stands, hovers, out of reach now (and thank all the saints that Jes has spent enough time around Dirtyhands to know don’t fucking touch me when he sees it), and Wylan can feel every inch of his partner pulsating with a longing to come closer, to make it better . And the constant stream of I’m right here, love and the tell me what you need, Wy, and the you’re safe, you’re safe, you’re safe is everything he needs to hear but the soft tenor of the voice whose every cadence Wylan has worked to memorise is so much more on top of the too much everything there already is and every word is like someone’s shoving pins up under his toenails with how he hurts with it. 

And the lights are still scream-humming and Jesper’s never been able to keep his saints-damned feet still and the vibrations his boots send through the creaking floorboards are shockwaves shattering what remains of Wylan’s structural integrity as every atom of him slams into every other and he’s less Person and more string of chemically-induced explosions , less Demo Man and more charred rib-cage, the only remains of a building that was and all he can feel is the fire on all sides of him.

The heels of his hands are at his temples before he’s thought of anything beyond the need to knock some of all of this out of him, palm against skull again again again to try to dislodge some of whatever weevil is burning its path through every cynapse of his nervous system, and it’s not enough , it’s not working and so again again again and harder harder harder with the heel of his hand to his temple and again and again and -

Footsteps and closer closer closer and gently shaking hands tugging his wrists and the world is bellowing static in his ears but he hears snatches, hears I know – don’t want, hears fuck, Wy – can’t let you – fix whatever this – going to be fine and the wheezing sobs that he only knows as his own because of how they hurt .

Hears more voices - Nina, Matthias. His friends . But the way that their voices overlap, rushing to soothe and mend and repair in a way that every part of him wishes he didn’t need, it’s making his skin feel too small for the way the hurt of this fills up his body, is making him seasick with the way the waves of it break over him, white and foaming and roaring in his ears and all of it the same and all of it drowning him.

He wants to tell them to leave, all of them, he wants it all gone, because he’s never wanted them to see him shatter like glass in the heat, has never wanted their witness to the teeth of this thing that tears into him sometimes, has spent the six months balancing equations between half-truths and hiding in plain sight. From eight to sixteen - half his life - he only ever shattered alone .

He wants to tell them to leave, all of them, he wants it all gone, because he’s never wanted them to be part of what cracks him open, peels his skin back like he’s an over-ripe orange, leaking and quivering and fragile , when his universe collapses in on itself as it is wont to do. They are his harbour, his safety, but right now? Now they are the howling wind of the storm, stinging his cheeks and knocking everything off-balance with their here-ness.

He wants to chorale the keening sobs ripping themselves out of his throat into a command to leave ( and when has he ever commanded anyone, ever? Saints, it’s not like he’s Kaz ), wants to beg them to turn out the lights, shut the door, leave him in the dark to drag every particle of himself one by one back into something resembling a man. 

I can. I can and I have and I will save myself from the burning building that I am but with you here I can’t.

But he can’t gather enough wind behind the mainsail of his voice, can’t force the words out through salt-dry lips. He can’t can’t cant so he’s trapped between a table and two walls like a wounded animal gone to ground.

His crows flock - swoop and flutter and flock, because they care, because of course they do . Wylan has done, will always do the same for each of them. They touch him and talk, every weapon - every knife, gun, bribe and threat and prayer - in their arsenals laid out before him, at his disposal, but the edge of each dagger they arm him with turns against him. Bleeds him dry.

They stay . Try to help . Make it worse.

Wylan is the fuse. He was only ever built to be burned through.

All fires burn out eventually.

Wylan lets the quiet of yawning darkness swallow him when it comes.

Chapter Text

A night out dancing in one of the city’s more ‘reputable’ establishments, nestled between East Stave and the Zelver District, had been Jesper’s idea. Gambling now off the table, his funds controlled at his own request by Wylan’s pale, freckled hand, an itch had taken up just below his skin, pulling him towards a night of impulse, of indulgence, of something beyond the meticulous propriety of mercher life.

Mercher life - hum-drum, respectable, predictable - and altogether not entirely as terrible as Jesper had feared it would be. He’d offered his assistance in the running of Van Eck affairs on impulse, because he was him, and because there is so very little he wouldn’t do for the man who has, with soft words and quiet hands, set about unpicking and restitching the very seams of his universe. He’d offered, but there had been something gnawing at him, in those early days; something that said he’d wear mercher life like an ill-fitting suit (and what could be worse?), like a hapless child playing dress-up in the too-big shoes of someone else’s life. Something that said he’d falter, stumble, fail. He wasn’t meant for minute taking, polite conversation, dinner parties spent sipping kvas that wasn’t the Slat’s proprietary blend of ‘so terrible the only way to stomach it is all-at-once-or-not-at-all’.

But he’s adapted, and somewhere along the way it’s dawned on him that he’s stopped pretending that this is his life, stopped doing what needs to be done out of duty to be what Wylan needs. He’s tailored this new suit to fit him - ensconced himself in a gaudy patchwork of Farmer Fahey’s Boy (deep greens and summer-sky blues) and Dregs Sharpshooter Jesper (clashing patterns and shining crimson and the glinting gold of Kruge) and Merchant Council Mr. Fahey (rich purples and matte blacks) and Wylan’s Jes (soft autumn auburns of curling hair, shy pinks of blushing ivory cheeks). 

He’s kept the Barrel Flash, but wears his sleeves long enough, now, to cover the Crow and Cup on his forearm. All of Ketterdam know his face, the Wanted posters that had littered the streets for weeks following the Auction, slowly turning to sludge in Ketterdam’s near-constant rain, had seen to that. But flaunting the brand feels like inviting trouble. 

He never leaves the house unarmed, but his revolvers have found a new home concealed in the lining of his jacket (custom made, because shit, he can afford it, why not?) rather than on show at his hips. 

He still has a hand in Dregs business, when Kaz inevitably comes knocking in search of a second without a word of an explanation or even a Saints-damned please, but begins to hear ever-more of their escapades second-hand, through Pim and Annika’s grandstanding three bourbons deep at the end of a no-stakes cards night at the Geldstraat house, than he becomes embroiled in himself.

And none of it feels like a concession, or a loss. 

But, fuck , has it been a long week. One too many meetings spent biting his tongue until it bled as grey-templed, grey-suited Councilmen bumbled and prevaricated around lacquered mahogany tables. One too many evenings spent hunched over missives obfuscated by outdated precedents and customs that he knows he’ll have to show Kaz, next he sees him, swallowing his pride to ask his friend what in the ever-loving Hell any of this meant. One too many nights sat up in bed, long after Wylan’s breathing has deepened into slumber, tendrils of thoughts he can’t quite knit into anything proper , anything understandable , thrumming relentlessly through his brain. His brain that he can never quite seem to switch off, as his fingertips dance across the fine-spun sheets he now sleeps beneath.

He needs a night out - to drink, and dance, and let the quaking pulse of music drum some of the thinking out of his brain for a few hours. He needs to be swallowed by a humming throng of bodies - to become anonymous, impersonal enough that he can just let go for a spell.

He’s been reading the same document - a financial report from Dryden that is, aptly, ridiculously bloody dry - for the past half bell, trying to force his brain to parse any kind of meaning from the words and struggling to blinker his thoughts from spinning off on any one of a multitude of tangents. Some evenings, he can work through the way his consciousness refracts in a hundred different directions. Others - like tonight - fighting the tide proves impossible.

Instead, retrieving a fresh parchment, he scrawls a brief missive.

Zenik, Corpsewitch and platonic love of my life,

Would you do me the honour of your company at Gouden Kudde this Friday? I will reimburse you most generously for your trouble in several alcoholic imbibements. Courtesy of the Merchant Council, of course.

You get double the drinks if you can convince Inej to come.

Don’t let me down, Zenik.

J.F

(and yes, bring Helvar).

Nina, whose friendship Jesper had won in the bathrooms of the Crow Club, both too young to be as deep in their cups as they habitually were. Nina, who Jesper had first met whilst slurring and swaying unashamedly, could be relied upon to accept his invitation. Jesper has counted on it before, counted on her to join him as he numbs himself back into his skin in some tavern somewhere, no questions asked and sugar-sweet lemon shots sticky at her lips. He can count on her to match his pace, to let him sing and shout and spin, stood too close to one another, sloppy grins all teeth and no guile. He can count on her, and she, him, to echo his inebriated antics without question, joining him grinding atop tables and sweet-talking pigeons into buying their drinks with stories they spin of being Ravkan and Zemini embassy delegates, in town on important Kerch business. Jesper never minds the piss-drizzle of Kerch weather less than sat on benches in the rain outside some club, smoking jurda and giggling at nothing at all as they slump boneless against one another. Wylan is his partner, in life, and love, and everything , but in sweat-stinking, sticky rooms where the headonist in Jesper takes over, Nina Zenik is his perfect counterweight.

Of late, Matthias has taken to joining them, and where Jesper had initially prickled at the encroachment on his time with Nina, there is something in the way that a drink or two loosenes  the Fjerdan that is too amusing for him to protest too vehemently. Something in the way it takes only half of Helvar’s second vaasje of ale for the sheer mileage of his own limbs to begin to overwhelm him, feet stumbling over one another on the dancefloor as he steadies  himself with a hand dwarfing his girl’s shoulder. Something in the unbridled joy on his face when the latest teeny-bopper hits from Ravka splutter out of the sound system, lips ghosting every lyric without hesitation and sinking mindlessly into the official fucking choreography that he will deny all knowledge of in the sober light of the morning. Something in the undiluted guilt in his eyes when a stray arm knocks some unsuspecting patron’s glass flying, again , and, tripping over heavily accented apologies, he races to the bar and buys them three more in return as ‘a gesture of goodwill’. There is something about Matthias Helvar that makes it near-impossible for Jesper to begrudge his presence.

Inej, when not at sea, can at times be won around to the idea of joining them. Perched on a stool at the bar, nursing the same glass of blood-red kvas the whole night, she observes ( ‘Someone’s got to keep an eye on you, Jes’ she laughs above the roar of the music, loud as he’s ever heard her). Her gaze finds his whenever he glances at the bar, sharp shoulders swaying gently to the music, eyes creasing and rolling skyward by turn at his antics. On Good Nights, when the crowds on the dancefloor thin and the tattoo of drumbeats has rocked her demons to sleep for the evening, she can even be persuaded to dance a turn or two, sandwiched between friends who she knows will let nobody near enough to touch her, and armed to the teeth against them if they try. She always retires early, before the night gets lairy and the patrons leery, and she leaves her friends to exhaust themselves. Her feet beat a path towards the Slat’s attic windows more often than anywhere else, a solitary finger extending skywards as she goes in response to Jesper’s cackling, lewd catcalls about ensuring Brekker is suitably gloved for the evening.

“We’re going to the Gouden Kudde Friday,” He tries to infuse his voice with casual nonchalance as he lays across the the office’s plush carpets, masking the neediness itching up under his gums with feigned indifference, “Y’know, that new bar Pim’s been raving about?”

Glancing down from his desk to where Jesper sprawls on the floor, legs splayed out at awkward angles, Wylan hums.

“Who’s we? You and Nina?”

“Matthias, too,” Jesper nods, “Inej, for a while.” Which, no, isn’t strictly true, she’s agreed to nothing, yet , but if it plays into his hand the way he thinks it may, Jesper would find Ghafa and drag her to the bar himself.

“And no Kaz?” Wylan’s attention is only half on him. As he speaks, he keeps one finger trailing down the columns of neatly scrawled digits that made Jesper’s head swim just trying to understand them, eyes periodically darting to the figures in his own ledger as he reads, “The Bastard missing a party? Never thought I’d see the day.”

The snort that leaves Jesper, then, is unbidden and undignified, but he doesn’t miss the way Wylan’s lips quirk upwards at the sound; at knowing he’s made Jesper laugh.

It isn’t as though Kaz always says no. Kaz accepts invitations, albeit sporadically, to evenings of parlour games at the Geldstraat house. To an intimate dinner, to which he always brings eye-wateringly dear single malt Kaelish whiskey. To an afternoon garden party, which he invariably attends buttoned up shoulder-to-shoe despite the oppressive summer sun. Kaz says yes - just often enough that the more commonplace nos go unchallenged. Says yes with such unfettered displays of reluctance, such apparently untempered distaste, that Jesper often finds himself surprised that Kaz arrives at all, even when he has agreed to. And yet, invariably, arrive he does.

He’ll keep any deal you strike with him. But strike a deal that involves dancing, and in public no less? Not bloody likely.

He pushes himself upright, off the ground that he habitually claims as his workspace despite having a perfectly serviceable desk across the way, coming to perch at the arm of Wylan’s chair.

“No Kaz, shockingly,” he confirms, fingers pulling to straighten out each of Wylan’s curls by turn only to release them, smiling at the spring as he watches them coil up and back into place.  “Although - if you wanted, that is - perhaps…”

The ledgers returning to the desk, Wylan takes both of Jesper’s hands in his own, gaze resting on the spaces where coffee-brown meet milk-white between his fingertips, “What’re you asking me, Jes?”

Jesper has learned quickly that, for Wylan, conversation could be as intangible as shadow puppets on a wall; visible but ever flickering, ever morphing, just beyond his grasp. This, in light of the verbal sleight of hand which lubricates most Merchant Council business, has inevitably led to a posy of social and political quagmires from which Jesper has had to use every sweet-talking weapon in his arsenal to extricate them both.

Sometimes, when sinking himself into the anatomical structure of an object, as his Fabrikator tutor is training him to do, Jesper gets so caught up in Copper and Iron and Carbon that he quite forgets the shape of the object as a whole. Can’t recall the name, much less the purpose, of the thing he holds in his palms. Can tell Josep the exact formation in which the molecules lattice themselves together before he can remember it’s a mug , despite having seen the damned thing, clear as day, less than a minute prior.

He imagines conversation for Wylan is like this, sometimes. It seems for all the world as though his love is so focused on each individual fibre that he utterly forgets to spin the stuff into the thread of easy back-and-forth that’s as inherently known to Jesper as a high-wire to Inej. It’s like Wylan sees each element, but is utterly blind to the way their atoms tessellate together.

He has no earthly idea if this obscure parallel he’s drawn is in any way accurate. Whether it even comes close to letting him understand why Wylan so often flounders before men he could easily run rings around. But it’s not like Wylan’s ever deigned to explain it. So this is the best he can do.

Straight to the heart of things, then. No shadow puppets.

“Dancing. Friday, Wy. Come with us? If you want to. Not - I know it’s not your scene, so much, I just - I’d like it, a lot, if you came.” Shifting himself forward, he slips himself off the chair’s arm and into Wylan’s lap, legs loping themselves over the far arm of the chair. He watches  his lover’s eyes swing to his face and away again, back and forth, to and fro, steady and eternal as the tide, as though to keep his gaze on Jesper for more than a moment would be like looking into the sun. 

“‘M’not much for dancing, Jes. I’d only embarrass you, probably.”

“You’re a musician, Wy! And with dancing, rhythm’s half the thing,” He brings a hand to card through the curls at the nape of the other man’s skull, “Besides, I’d gladly take an excuse to spend the night teaching such an… able student.” 

“You’d get bored of that, though. You and Nina go out to blow off steam; you don’t want some stuffy little Mercher slowing you down, especially one who can’t hold his liquor.” 

Indeed, Wylan’s status as a lightweight has been well-established. It’s become a source of Jesper’s near-constant amusement during well-to-do Council dinner-dances, as the youngest Councillor inevitably scrambles for ever-more creative ways to discard, dump, or dispose of the innumerable beverages pressed into his hands by simpering waitstaff. Among Jesper’s favourite tales of such events is the occasion when, in the space of an evening, glasses of Kvas had been poured from two different open windows; into the pot of a lush, flowering houseplant; and, in an act of mounting desperation, into the discarded leather handbag of Councillor Hoede’s unsuspecting wife. All of this, astoundingly, between the many, many glasses that Wylan had managed to surreptitiously pass on to Jesper, who had been staggering so significantly not two contradances into the evening’s festivities that Wylan had been forced to summon a carriage to ferry them both the short distance home, the taller man singing all the way.

All of this borne, Jesper knows, of a gnarling root of fear , planted and nurtured in Wylan some sixteen years by familial hand, of what card he would lose mid-shuffle, up the billowing magician’s sleeves of conversation, if he were to relax for even the briefest moment.

Prison is too kind for Jan Van Fucking Eck.

Beyond the monthly gamut of dinner-dances which are more work than they’re not, Wylan has dodged every attempt to include him in the more raucous of their evenings. Each effort, (whether wheedling or cajoling or promising of various… creative favours)  has been parried by excuses as feeble as they are ostensibly plausible; I’m snowed under with work, maybe next time; I’ve got a meeting, another night?; I’m so tired, Jes - you have fun though; I said I’d take Mama to the Playhouse - Kaz got us tickets. 

But Jesper is nothing if not persistent.

“Bored of you? Never, Wy,” He begins pressing his lips up the plane of the other man’s throat, humming into each kiss in the way he knows makes him shiver “I mean, Saints - you build bombs, love. For Dirtyhands, Bastard King of Ketterdam , in the cellar of a mansion you quite literally swindled from under your piss-pot father’s nose. Stuffy. Little. Mercher. My. Arse.” 

He knows, logically, that it isn’t his job to disabuse Wylan of his dogged belief in his own inferiority. They’ve discussed it, and, owing to the stubborn relentlessness with which both of their demons seek to crawl into bed with them, continue to do so, at length, more often than either of them would choose to. They can, and do, and will, support one another however they can, but they cannot hold themselves ransom against one another’s ghosts.

But there is something - something in the way Wylan gently lifts Jesper off his lap by the hips, and sets about tidying his desk. Something in the way his fingertips drum steadily against his temple as he lids his inkwells, lining them up along the shelf above his desk. Wylan Van Eck, rocking heel-to-toe as he moves to snuff the candles for the night, is very much hiding something.

“Hey, Wy. What’s flying around in that beautiful brain of yours?”

“You want me to come? Really?”

“Really? Saints, are you kidd- Yes, Sunshine. I really, truly, want you there. I want you everwhere I am, Wy.” 

“Okay”. The look on Wylan’s face is something more like he’s been asked to mail out invitations to his own execution, rather than to spend an evening dancing. “Okay, if - if you want me there, I’ll go.”

And there is still that something there, in the way that his lover’s fingers knot themselves around each other like he is restraining himself from shoving his acceptance back down his own throat. A sign, clear as Shriftport skies, that something is wrong. That Wylan is uncomfortable.

But Jesper is well-versed in the art of convenient assumptions; in the not-quite-lying to himself that lubricates his own perpetual movement. You’ll win the next hand. You’ll go back to University eventually. Kaz won’t let the Gulls enforcers rough you up too badly. 

And so he tells himself that Wylan’s just nervous . Insecure in a new situation, as anyone would be, and anxious about it. Jesper can understand that. Hadn’t he been nervous before his first Council Dinner-Dance, when Wylan had had to spend the evening before teaching him Kerch turning dances in their bedroom, Jesper having only ever known the Barrel’s own mindless limb flailing variety of dancing? Hadn’t he wanted to claim Kaz needed him for a job, pretend Inej wanted a second set of eyes on her schooner’s firepower, feign a headache or a stomach ache, scared to misstep in these unfamiliar formalities in a context where he was already an uncomfortable triple threat of different? Hadn’t he never walked taller than after he’d two-stepped across Radmakker’s drawing room with his boyfriend, even if he’d had to wipe sweating palms on his cerulean trousers afterwards?

He wants to check - ask if he’s pushing too far, if Wylan is comfortable, if this is okay -  because he lives and dies to make Wylan comfortable. But there is no quicker way to Wylan’s ire than to coddle him; he will not abide being infantilised or assumed not to know his mind once he has deigned to speak it. He says he will come, and that is that, and Jesper forces himself to quell the urge to push it further.

Wylan is just nervous - entirely understandable. Come Friday, Jesper will buy him as many drinks as it takes him to relax, will take his hands and spin him in circles under the lights until he squeals with the joy of it, will dance something other than a Saints-forsaken Reel with his gorgeous boyfriend, and it will be wonderful.

“In that case, I cannot wait to dance with you, Sunshine.”

Snuffing the last of the candles, he pulls Wylan in for a kiss, letting his eyes drift closed when the other man deepens it.

Friday is going to be wonderful.

A night out dancing in one of the city’s more ‘reputable’ establishments, nestled between East Stave and the Zelver District, had been Jesper’s idea. 

That should’ve been the first sign that things would end poorly.