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When Kaz makes it to berth twenty-two, he immediately notices that Jesper isn’t there.
Inej is already waiting outside the ship when he arrives, like he knew she would be. He watched her disappear out of the corner of his eye after she recovered from the blast from the harbor, likely evading the open fire completely. Nina is crouching on board at the bow of the Ferolind, mostly concealed as she attempts to defend them from the Black Tips. Matthias, who he had definitely left with his hands bound, is at the stern of the ship doing the same.
Jesper is nowhere to be seen.
Kaz’s eyes flash to Inej. “Jesper?” He asks, and all Inej has to do is shake her head before he’s spinning on his heels, heading right back into the chaos in search of his sharpshooter. He had been fine at the beginning of all of this—Kaz had seen him looking almost gleeful at the prospect of a shootout but now he’s nowhere to be seen. Something went terribly wrong, he can feel it in his bones.
“I’m coming with you!” He hears Inej say as she rushes to his side.
“Fine!” He barks. “Just don’t slow me down!”
They navigate the pier while staying out of the way of fire the best that they can, weaving between shipping crates and staying low. They find Wylan first, wide-eyed and clutching his upper-arm as blood seeps through his fingertips. He’s still upright, which is promising, and at the very least had the good sense to adhere to Kaz’s instruction of staying hidden. “Help!”
Inej has concern written all over her features and is already making a move to check on Wylan’s arm, but they don’t have time for that, especially when he likely was only grazed by a bullet. “Not him. He’ll be fine,” He says, voice rough. Inej gives him a look that he can’t decipher at the moment but backs away. “Where’s Jesper?”
Wylan releases his arm to gesture over his shoulder and Kaz spares a quick glance to make sure his initial judgment of his injuries were correct—they were—before following his pointed finger to a stack of shipping crates, where only Jesper’s outstretched legs are visible. For a sickening moment, Kaz is frozen in place, his feet rooted to the ground beneath him. “We were ambushed.”
“We know damn well we were ambushed,” Kaz growls, finally tearing his gaze away from what he can see of Jesper’s sprawled out body. “Get to the ship. Nina will fix your arm. Inej, help me get Jesper.”
He’s fine until the moment he sees Jesper, slumped against the shipping crates, eyes closed, skin ashen, a knife lodged in his side. Inej sees the weapon the same moment that he does, he hears her sharp intake of breath that comes with the realization. In retrospect, Wylan was probably the worst person to have ended up with Jesper in this position, deeply unfamiliar with this kind of violence, but at least he knew well enough to not try and remove the blade on his own.
Inej kneels by Jesper’s side, nimble fingers searching for a pulse. For a moment, Kaz sees Jordie in the shape of his sharpshooter's body and his stomach heaves. “Is he—”
“No,” Kaz says, despite the fact that he truly has no idea if Jesper is alive at this moment or not. The truth of it is, he won’t let him die. He’ll hold him here himself if he has to. “He’s fine.”
“Kaz—” Inej begins, and his name sounds like a warning coming from her lips. He doesn’t allow her to finish.
“He’ll be fine,” He repeats, ignoring the pain in his leg as he lowers himself to the ground on the other side of Jesper. “But we need to get him to the Ferolind. Now.”
Inej nods and lifts Jesper’s arm around her shoulders as Kaz does the same and together they haul him up, careful to avoid the place where a knife is still lodged in his side. Inwardly, Kaz can admit that it was for the best that Inej came with him. It would have been agony to try and carry Jesper back alone. His body is heavy and limp, like a rag doll, but not cold yet.
Before they can make it more than a few steps away from where they found Jesper, a low groan sounds from somewhere else nearby—it’s a noise that Kaz knows well, the sound of someone barely clinging to life. He looks over his shoulder and spots Oomen, Geel’s enforcer, sprawled on the ground, bleeding from a gunshot wound on his stomach. Jesper didn’t go down without a fight, but he was already hurt when he fired the shot. He had to be. Otherwise, there wasn’t a chance Oomen would have survived it.
“He’s lucky it was just a knife,” Inej says and Kaz makes a point not to look over at her, his gaze fixed on the Ferolind in the distance—the only thing he can do to distract himself from the feeling of Jesper’s arm pressed against his neck and the coppery smell of his blood in the air. “Oomen—he can crush skulls with his bare hands.”
Kaz is about to snap at her for suggesting that Jesper is better-off with a knife lodged in his abdomen than with his skull crushed by Oomen’s meaty paws when he realizes suddenly that this is her attempt at helping him, distracting him, helping him set his eyes on revenge—revenge that will most certainly be his.
“Kaz?” The shock of hearing Jesper’s hoarse, barely-there voice is almost enough to stop Kaz in his tracks but he forces himself to keep moving. He can’t risk even so much as a glance in Jesper’s direction, not when whatever he might see in his face might slow him down. “Did we win?”
“We’re alive,” Kaz replies, and though he wouldn’t dare say it aloud, it feels like a victory when they make it to berth twenty-two and Jesper is conscious enough to speak. “Keep your eyes open. We’re almost there.”
As they approach the Ferolind, Rotty meets them on the pier, eyeing Jesper in concern. “Boss?”
“Go back and get Oomen for me, will you?” Kaz grunts, pain radiating through his leg with every step he takes, and Jesper’s weight that he’s carrying only amplifies it. “He shouldn’t give you too much trouble. Jesper took care of him.”
Jesper laughs but the sound turns into a groan of pain and when Kaz finally wills himself to look at his face, he sees his eyes beginning to droop again, his face pale. He can’t speak, his chest constricting as he looks to Inej.
“Where’s Nina?” She asks as they muscle Jesper onboard, his body going lax again between them. It takes Kaz a moment longer than he’d like to admit to realize that Inej is speaking to Helvar—no longer armed, but not shackled either. He has bigger problems to worry about right now than the Fjerdan being on the loose.
“Down below,” Helvar answers, nodding his head in the direction of the door. “Tending to the wounded.”
“Stay out of the way,” Kaz snarls, dropping his cane on the deck so that he can use both of his arms to haul Jesper down the ramp, Inej following close behind.
Nina is finishing up on Wylan when they get there, and Kaz knows that the way he commands Wylan to “Move!” is more harsh than necessary but he doesn’t care about it in the slightest at the moment. Wylan practically dives off of the table, his face turning a sickly, greenish color at the sight of Jesper bleeding out in his arms.
Nina’s eyes roam over Jesper quickly as Kaz lays him out on the table, her gaze catching on the place where Oomen’s knife is still protruding from his side. “Kaz,” She says, a hint of a tremor in her voice. “I’m a heartrender, not a healer.”
“I don’t care,” He says, sparing one more look at Jesper’s face. All of the chaos that’s usually visible is gone, wiped away. He looks more boyish right now than he does when he’s awake, almost peaceful. It makes him feel sick. “Fix him.”
Nina goes to open her mouth again, but Inej slides between them, easing Kaz away from the table with a hand on his shoulder. He wrenches himself out of her grasp, shooting her a hard glare. “I’ll stay with Nina. We’ll do everything we can for Jesper. You go deal with Oomen and get us out of here.”
“Fine,” He relents, stepping back into the passageway. If there’s anyone else he trusts to watch over Jesper at this moment, it’s Inej. He’s not sure how much longer he can stay in the surgeon’s quarters, anyway. Maybe he can coax death away from Jesper by offering someone else in his place. “You stay down here. You won’t want any part of what I’m about to do.”
* * *
Everything is wrong. Everything is all wrong.
Jesper can’t remember how he got here—to the Ferolind— but here he sits, in the cramped surgeon’s quarters, Inej on the table. He doesn’t know what happened to her, but he can tell that she doesn’t look good. Her body's still and her face is expressionless, illuminated only faintly by the lanterns that swing as the boat travels across the sea.
He thinks that, maybe, he should go up to the deck and ask what happened, but he can’t make himself go. He feels frozen, bolted down to the ground. He can’t move.
With a gasp, Inej wakes, sitting up too fast. “Jesper?” She says, and her voice sounds panicked. “Jesper, are you okay?”
“Am I okay?” Jesper’s eyebrows knit together in confusion. “Inej, you’re the one who nearly died.”
“Jesper, it’s not me,” Inej says insistently, urgently. “It’s you.”
This can’t be right. He searches her body for the wound that had her laid out on the surgeon’s table, but everything looks fine. She looks fine.
When Jesper reaches for her, he feels something cold twist in his side. His eyes flash down to where the sensation came from and finds a knife lodged in his abdomen and blood coating his fingers. It doesn’t hurt. This isn’t real.
When he looks up at Inej again, the whole scene has shifted. Now he’s the one on the table and Inej is the one sitting beside him, tears welling up in her beautiful, brown eyes.
“Jesper, wake up,” She says, and he’s not sure if it’s the blood loss or his pathetic heart that makes her voice sound like Kaz’s. His eyes close. “Wake up.”
Wake up.
Wake up.
Wake up.
His eyes shoot up and he sucks in a breath so hard, his body screams in protest and a guttural sound of pain finds a way out of his lips. He can tell he’s not dreaming anymore.
Inej—the real Inej—is still beside him, leaping to her feet the moment that his eyes open. “Don’t move,” She insists, reaching for a glass of water.
“I don’t think I could, even if I wanted to,” Jesper admits, gritting his teeth. His memories are coming back to him slowly. He remembers the explosion of the fake Ferolind, the anger he felt when Kaz revealed it was a decoy all along and the way he funneled it into every shot that he fired at the Black Tips. He had been too emotional, it blinded him. He hadn’t even noticed Oomen coming up behind them until his knife was already plunged into his side. He closes his eyes again and balls his hands up. “I was so stupid.”
“You weren’t,” Inej insists, carefully lifting a hand to rest on top of Jesper’s until he unfurls his fist, relaxes his fingers. “Someone gave us away. We walked into a trap. Kaz knew it, too, that’s why he had a fake ship.”
Jesper squeezes his eyes shut, trying to remember how they got from being double-crossed to here, en route to Fjerda. Everything got a little foggy after he was stabbed and the last thing he remembers in detail was telling Wylan to get to the ship. “How did I get here?”
“Kaz and I went back for you,” Inej replies, and as soon as he hears the words he’s hit with a hazy memory of Kaz’s face—rather, the profile of his face, unwilling to look at him as he dragged him along the pier. Like she can hear his innermost thoughts, she adds “I don’t know that I’ve ever seen him scared before he saw you on the pier.”
Kaz? Scared? For him? Jesper can’t help but give a dry laugh at that. “Yeah, I’m sure.”
Inej squeezes his hand. “I mean it, Jes. You should have seen him when we got back to the ship.”
Jesper gives her a long-suffering look.
She sighs. “Have you ever thought about telling him?”
Jesper shuts his eyes. This… this unspoken thing that the two of them share, the feelings that the two of them share… of course Inej would take a near-death experience as a sign to talk about it. “I don’t want to do this right now.”
He can’t do this right now. He doesn’t have the strength to do this, to face this, right now.
“Has he been down here at all?” The question comes out before he gives it permission to and Inej’s eyes flash apologetically. Just like he thought. Even if Kaz did feel a fraction of what Jesper felt for him, it could never amount to anywhere near what Jesper has endured ever since that day that Kaz saved him from being jumped in an alley, years ago. “Don’t answer that.”
“Jesper…”
“Did he at least get Oomen?”
Inej winces. “He’s dead. It was gruesome.”
“Good,” Jesper says, feeling far more pleased than he should at the idea of someone meeting a painful, bloody death on his behalf. He knows Kaz well enough to recognize such an action as his own sick, twisted way of showing that he cares. Then he remembers who he’s talking to. “I mean, sorry. May the Saints receive him.”
A hint of a smile tugs at Inej’s mouth at that. “I’m going to get you some dinner and check on Nina, make sure she and Matthias haven’t killed each other yet. Will you be fine here while I’m gone?”
“I’ll stay right here, resting,” Jesper assures her and makes a whole show of laying back and closing his eyes to really sell it. It must do the trick, because the next time he opens his eyes, he’s alone in the surgeon’s quarters again. He didn’t hear her leave, but he never does.
It’s how he knows that the sound of someone coming down the passageway isn’t her. Well, that and the familiar thud of a cane that he would recognize anywhere. Kaz must have heard that he was awake.
“I’m worth a visit now that you know I’m not dead, huh?” It hurts like hell to sit up but it’s worth it to have a shred more dignity when facing Kaz. He doesn’t think he’d be able to do it on his back, at his mercy entirely.
Kaz stops in the doorway. Jesper sees his gaze drop to the blood-soaked bandage wrapped around him, but only fleetingly, and his expression otherwise is as unreadable as ever to Jesper. “Next time, don’t be so reckless.”
“Reckless?” Jesper barks a laugh. “If it were Inej who nearly died, would you chastise her like this?”
Kaz’s expression hardens. “This has nothing to do with Inej and everything to do with what you told Pekka Rollins.”
Jesper recoils. “Kaz, I didn’t—”
Wordlessly, Kaz holds up a hand and Jesper knows what he means. This isn’t the time or place for this. He’ll have to live with this guilt and this shame until the Ice Court job is behind them. “We’re done here.”
Enough, Jesper thinks to himself. Enough now.
“Yeah, we are.”