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Kaz had been through a lot of eventful things in his life. He had moved from the only land he had ever known, gotten a family and then lost it and some of what he had before in only a matter of months. He had joined a gang and then risen the ranks to be their lieutenant when he was barely even old enough to be considered fit for military service in his country. Still, nothing that he had been through felt like it compared to what he had just finished enduring.
In a matter of a couple months, he had gone to another country and busted into the most high security prison in the known world. He had stolen secrets that could have caused the downfall of their lives as everyone knew them, then faked the death of the one person that held them. He had met with two of the Triumvirate and the King of Ravka, then helped them get a bunch of Grisha smuggled out of his country. He had made a plan to crash the sugar market after getting the woman he loved back from the man meant to pay him. He had to scramble so that he could make another plan that would make them more powerful than the military of Ketterdam and all the gangs put together. He had acquired another little in the midst of it all as well, which had been a struggle within itself.
It had all turned out alright, though. Despite the blooming red wound on Matthias’ shoulder that Nina was keeping the death out of with her new powers, they had all made it through in the end. They weren’t technically out of the woods yet as Nina shuffled around in her ill-fitting healer outfit while the boat slid towards the Van Eck estate.
They slipped into the boat house to reveal Jesper and Wylan on the other side, smiling widely under they noticed what was going on. “Did he get shot?” Wylan asked, his voice wavering just barely out of his headspace. Kaz was going to have a lot to deal with today, he already knew that.
“He did, I need you to go wait outside for Genya and Zoya to get here so that they can help us,” Kaz instructed as he nodded his head towards the mansion.
Wylan gave him a shaky nod and then turned on his heel and rushed away as quickly as he could. Kaz wished that he could have protected him more, eased him down into his headspace and cared for him like his instincts desperately wanted him to. He was half worried that being around his father and not being taken care of properly in that moment were going to destroy all of the good progress that they had made up to that point. It was just a risk that he was going to have to take to save Matthias’ life, but that didn’t make it any easier.
He motioned for the other people in the boathouse to pay attention to him. “Inej, go into the house and get things so that we can bandage Matthias’ wound and let Nina have a break.”
“I’m not sure if I feel comfortable having a break. I don’t want to worry about him bleeding out when I can’t feel the blood in him anymore,” Nina shook her head. She had described her ability to keep him alive like the reverse of her powers. Before she had taken the parem , she had been able to feel the blood and responses in people’s bodies as they happened. Now that she was post-drug, she could feel the absence of it. She could feel where the blood was leaking out of Matthias and where the death was seeping in, the lack of responses that his nerves were having.
Kaz looked towards her for a moment before he decided that she knew best. She had been down in her headspace more often than not when they were in the Black Veil so that she could deal with the withdrawals symptoms. He knew that she was also trained to be able to fight back her headspace when she was dealing with stressful situations such as the one that they were in now. “Rotty, Jesper, lift them out of the water so she has somewhere stable,” he instructed.
“Right, boss,” Jesper said. If he had called the other by his name then it would have signified him being close to his headspace, which would have been another mess. Jesper and Wylan acted as a domino affect for each other, when one descended then the other wasn’t far behind. Wylan was outside and Jesper was handling himself well, which meant that Kaz could focus on his dying friend.
Rotty and Jesper carefully lifted the duo out of the boat and onto the pier next to them inside of the boathouse. Nina sighed out a breath of panic and then said, “I thought that you had already sent Zoya and Genya away?”
“I told them to come to the boathouse if we didn’t make our time by a quarter of a bell after plan,” he said. “Do you think that you can wait that long?”
“I don’t have any other choice, do I?” she asked.
“No, you don’t,” he shook his head. He wasn’t going to give her more parem so that she could make the time, but he would do everything he could to save Matthias without the Grisha power that would make it definitive.
He looked up as the boathouse door opened again and Inej slipped inside. She handed the supplies over to him and Kaz sat down beside Matthias’ head. “You still with us, Fjerdan?” he asked.
“ Hvor er mor ?” Matthias sobbed out. His voice seemed so weak and stuck in the back of his throat, and it pulled at something in Kaz that he had felt over and over again while caring for all of his other Crows.
He knew what the feeling was immediately as it overtook him, he had to know when he had as many charges to care for as he did. He walked over to Matthias while leaning heavily on his cane and trying to ignore the way that his knee protested every movement. He had done too much running and fighting in the last couple of weeks, it had aggravated the old wound. He was glad that he hadn’t let the Tailor try and ‘fix’ it for him, the pain reminded him of what he had done and the journey that he had taken in trying to avenge his brother.
He lowered himself down onto the ground so that he was beside Matthias and Nina. He turned to the latter and asked, “Do you think that I could put his head on my lap?”
She glanced down at where her hands were holding onto Matthias and then back up at Kaz. “Do you really think that’s the best course of action?”
“I think that if he’s going to regress then he needs to be handled by a caregiver. I don’t really trust the one that you had back in Ravka to handle him nicely,” Kaz replied. He had only met with Zoya for a couple minutes both times their paths crossed, but he already knew that he didn’t like her. When he was working with Nina before everything went down, he had been able to see the marks that the other caregiver had left on his ward. Zoya hadn’t allowed her to be too loud for too long, had forced her to speak and sing only in Ravkan, and had forbidden her from being in her headspace outside of the very specific hours that she was allotted and only around Zoya. He knew that part of that had to be because they were at war and having a little that was in the middle of a battlefield and in their headspace wasn’t a good mix, but it still bothered him.
In addition to Zoya constantly threatening Matthias and treating him as though he was a monster, she wasn’t a good caregiver in the first place. He wasn’t sure that Matthias even knew that he had a headspace or that he had regressed down into it. He wasn’t going to let a new ward of his think that his headspace was a bad thing because he had a traumatic experience with it the first time he discovered it.
Nina tilted her head up at him as she tried to tell how far she could push him. It was something that she did both in and out of headspace, something that Kaz had tried hard to train out of her but was completely futile at. She then pursed her lips and pulled back so that Kaz could slide between her and the wall that they were up against on the small pier of the boathouse.
When he had the space and knew that his bare skin wouldn’t touch that of another person’s, he began to move again. Kaz folded his legs awkwardly together so that they created a small divot in his lap. He then reached out and moved Matthias’ head with his gloved hands so that it was resting in the crook. He brushed his fingers through the sweat-and-blood matted blond hair, which had grown out so that it was hanging shaggily over his forehead and around his ears.
“Hvor er mor?” Matthias asked again. His bright blue eyes were cloudy with pain as they flicked back and forth between Kaz and Nina. He let out a shrill cry of panic and pain as he tried to push himself up into a standing position and Nina’s hand slipped slightly. She rushed back into the position that she had been in before, her hands grasping the place on his shoulder that was bleeding all over their laps.
“I don’t know where your mother is, little one,” Kaz said softly. He looked to Nina and asked, “Is this the first time that he’s regressed?”
“He never mentioned it before now. I guess I assumed that he had the same thing that I did, where he was able to keep off the headspace for longer because he was a trained soldier. I don’t think we ever brought it up in conversation,” her nose wrinkled in distaste as she panted. The constant use of her powers was making her shine with that Grisha unnatural health, but she was also wearing down as anyone would when they had been doing something intense for as long as she had.
“You know something else that you’re not telling me,” Kaz said. He was able to tell a lot of things about a lot of people without them saying anything, it was what made him so good at running the street scams he had been assigned as a younger man. It was also what made him a good leader, being able to dissect someone without their knowledge and then put them back together in a way that would be beneficial for the entire team. He could do it even better when it was someone that he had cared for while they were regressed. If he had been better at forming attachments to people and didn’t have his brokenness with touch then he would have had each of his regressors share their headspace with him so that he could better improve the Dregs. With Nina, though, he could always tell that she was lying in some form or another because she would run her teeth left to right on her bottom lip after she left out the thing she had meant to say.
“You know that I studied the Druskelle back when I was in Ravka,” she began. Once he nodded, she continued, “Well they mentioned that the headspaces are the one part of their training that they don’t agree with. They think that it makes them weak and turns them against the father of everything, Djel, to pick someone else and put them into a caregiver role. I guess I assumed that they were still allowed to go into their headspaces when they weren’t training or when they were alone so that they didn’t get sick.”
“Certainly explains why every single one of the bastards we’ve met has been so mean,” Kaz huffed. The idea of the man that he had become so attached to despite their differences suffering in that way made him just as upset as the way that Zoya treated Nina.
“Sickness does come in many different forms,” Nina agreed, her eyes drifting over to where Jesper and Rotty were standing guard at the edge of the boathouse.
Inej stepped closer to them and Kaz glanced at her. Her face was marked with insecurity and panic. She likely hadn’t been expecting this to happen either, none of them really had. Kaz usually tried to plan for what might happen if something was to go wrong but there had been so many holes in his plans as of late. He knew that part of the reason for that was that he couldn’t think as rationally when it came to his charges, but the other part was the swirling and uncontrollable factors that they had been facing. He didn’t even account for the fact that after the auction, the Druskelle would have been wandering the streets of Ketterdam and might happen across Matthias.
Guilt clawed at the back of his stomach and the voice that had once been his brother screamed at him in the back of his head. Pekka Rollins had been toppled and Jordie was safe in the dust that settled at the bottom of the ocean, so now the person telling him all that he had done wrong in his life was no one but himself. He had to come to terms with the fact that he thought very lowly of himself, especially when it came to his abilities as a caregiver. He hadn’t taken everything into account the way that he should have and it resulted in one of his littles, one of the human beings that he was in charge of caring for getting hurt.
He couldn’t think like that in the current moment, he knew that it wouldn’t do anyone any good. He hadn’t even known at the time that Matthias had a headspace, let alone that he was a regressor. He also hadn’t been able to see into the future to know that this was going to happen. Kaz didn’t know when he had developed that kind of attachment to his Crows, but he knew that it was here now and he certainly didn’t want to get rid of it.
“Give me the first aide kit, Inej dear,” he said softly. There was no use fighting at the headspace that was clinging to him with both hands. Rotty and Specht had seen more of him than he would have allowed anyone but his charges to see. That included the parts of him that were so deadly that no man would dare to dream of them himself. If either of them chose to spread rumors about Dirtyhands being soft with his littles and a caregiver by classification then they’d be found with their tongues gut out and their organs around their necks.
He was safe here, as was Matthias. He knew that with the wound on the little’s shoulder there was very little actual safety there, but it was good enough for the time being.
Inej passed over the container as he had asked her to and then squatted down next to them so that she could supervise. Kaz took the scissors first and began to cut into his shirt, but the little squirmed and cried out again. “Scared!” he managed his first word in Ravkan since he had regressed.
“I know that you’re scared, this is something that is very scary for even grown ups,” Kaz said. He placed his gloved hand on the non-injured shoulder of the boy in his lap to prevent him from squirming again and aggravating his wound. “I need you to try and be very brave for me.”
“But I’m scared,” Matthias protested weakly.
“I know that you’re scared, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t be brave. Being brave is simply doing something while you’re scared, not in the absence of it,” he explained. He was subtly snipping through the damaged threads of Matthias’s shirt as he spoke. Distraction was something that he was good at, both in terms of being a magician and working with littles. Jesper hated all things medical and refused to take medicine while sick, but Kaz could always get him to take it if he simply framed it as something else. Inej hated having her hair cut but would do it if he told her a story that went along with each snip.
Matthias stared at him for a long moment, his eyes watering and his nose turning red in his attempt not to cry. “You’re being very brave already, Matty,” Kaz informed him proudly. He let the scissors fall all the way closed and then opened and moved them down. “Do you think that me telling you a story would help you feel more brave?”
“Uh huh,” Matthias replied with another nod of his head. It shimmied the hold that Nina had on his shoulder, especially since Kaz had a pair of sharp shears right next to her. They both sucked in a tight breath and then glanced at each other before they pressed forward.
“Once upon a time,” Kaz started to mask the sound of the scissors cutting through the shirt much faster that time.
“That’s how you’re choosing to start it? What are you, a children’s picture book?” Nina asked.
“Shut it, Zenik. Or I’ll put you in timeout,” Kaz quickly replied. It was strange to be acting as though he was actually the caregiver for all the people around him when it had been such an unspoken and private matter beforehand.
She pouted as she knew that he would make good on his claim and she would be miserable for about ten minutes the next time she got a chance to regress. With the way that their mission was going, there was a high probability of that time being only ten minutes after they got everyone that needed to leave the city out. He was planning on taking all his littles inside and helping them down into their headspaces as soon as they had Matthias healed and the Ravkans gone.
“Once upon a time, there was a little white wolf. He had blue eyes and a scar on his lip, right here,” Kaz brought the hand that had been holding Matthias down to his bottom lip, tracing to his chin before he brought it up and booped his nose. He had used that as a distraction so that the little wouldn’t notice that he had shifted that hand over to hold Matthias’ shirt as he continued to cut.
He let out a giggle that let Kaz knew the trick had worked a treat. He continued, “He had a pack full of wolves that were very talented and had lots of different abilities. One of them was brown and had the ability to find where the other predators had left their kill so that they could eat their fill and not have to hunt. Another was red and had the ability to smell when something was dangerous so that none of them ever had to feed from a sulfur pond. Another was black as the night and slipped through the shadows like she was made out of them. The dark brown one had the ability to make tools even though he didn’t have the hands of the walking men.”
“Those sound like us!” Matthias commented. “Hvor er du?”
“He’s asking where you are,” Nina translated for him naturally. At that point, Kaz had already finished cutting his shirt so he was able to put the shears back into the container where they belonged. He pulled out a long strip of bandage and placed it underneath the sound so that he could create a tourniquet.
“There was one wolf, made of a color that no one was sure of because it kept changing, and he was the leader. He brought them through the frightening woods to the tallest mountain caves where they could rejoice in their kills and abilities without being chased. But one day, they wanted to explore further than they had before and left without telling him. When he found them next, they were cornered by one of the walking men who wanted to capture them and put them in his collection.”
“Oh no,” Inej whimpered. Her eyes had gone soft and her body gentle, which meant that she had regressed while he was telling the story. He knew that it was likely to happen since she could never stay out of her headspace when he was speaking in his caregiver voice.
“The leader of the pack rushed all the way through the forest. He came across a big bear whose back was full of spears and arrows. He asked, ‘Do you know where my pack has gone? They are being hunted by the walking men because he desires them for his collection,’ because it was obvious that the bear had bested the walking men before.” Kaz laid on a silly voice when he spoke about the wolf based off of himself, which made Matthias wrinkle his nose and giggle cutely.
There had to be a foot difference in their heights at least, but it was still so natural for Kaz to be the one caring for him. The uniqueness of nature was something that had always amazed him, especially when it came to the instincts that followed their headspaces.
“The bear said, ‘The walking man will have taken them down to the edge of the mountain to gloat that he captured them right outside the home you made for me.’ So the wolf thanked him and rushed as fast as he could go to his pack. When he got there, the walking man had already lodged one of the spears directly into the arm of the white wolf. So the pack leader launched at him and tore him to shreds with teeth and claws. He left the walking man there as a reminder to why no one would ever touch his pack again, and then brought them back to the safety of the woods. There, he waited while the light brown wolf healed the white wolf with the help of a friend.”
The doors to the boathouse opened again and Genya arrived. “It’s only me, I thought that something might be wrong and came to check,” she explained. Her eyes locked onto Matthias and she was onto the pier in a second.
Kaz was glad that they had the sense to not bring Zoya with them. Not only did King Nikolai seem as though he needed a minder even when he wasn’t down in headspace, but Kaz would have ripped her apart with his teeth. He knew that Genya was going to work quickly and efficiently on his Fjerdan little, then she would leave them alone. He would bring Matthias into the house and get him washed and in comfortable clothing. Then he would care for all of his charges until they were all happy, satiated, and safe.