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As impossible as it might seem, especially those years after the Ice Court and the auction, beyond the recklessness that ruled their lives, things begin to settle. The jobs that call Wylan and Jesper out are not filled with explosions and flash bombs and gunfights (as often.) But, rather, they feel like the ripple of water in a lake; small, minor disruptions that don’t risk upending the lives they’ve made for themselves. They settle as well as they can given that Wylan is a merchant moonlighting as the Dregs’ demolitions expert and Jesper, as helpful as he is to the Van Eck empire, still shoots at things for a living. Life, time for Jesper, as fickle as it might be, doesn’t press on like the quick sizzle of a bomb skin. The heat and the risk of it are as hot as ever, but it burns with less intensity, less desperation. They live now with the reassurance that they aren’t living minute by minute, job to job, second to second.
In this settled period, where time stretches like a winding road, endless, Jesper decides, finally, to take Wylan to Novyi Zem. For now, at least, treating it as if it’s a tourist trip for Wylan, rather than going home. He basks in how much time they have on their hands, the days don’t blur and every action feels like a choice. The merchant had been delightfully curious about his homeland, his life before Ketterdam, much in the way that Jesper had been about Wylan’s childhood. He can’t quite name the feeling that pulses in his chest sourly. Guilt, maybe, pain for his lover that while Jesper’s childhood was big and wide and free, Wylan’s was defined by pain, by malice. Guilt that this doesn’t really feel like a homecoming, because he's done nothing to deserve a home as beautiful as this, he’s spent so long rejecting the idea of it. He clings to the memories of it, they are a balm when nothing else will soothe him, and his nightmares come too fast and too horrible. Everything Jesper does now, he does to make Wylan know what limitless love feels like, much in the way that he had felt as a youth. He hopes that things will change.
When their boat docks in Shriftport, Jesper feels a weight lift off his chest that he hadn’t realised was there. He breathes properly for the first time since he left home. The guilt that had stewed heavily in his stomach leading up to the trip shrinks ever so slightly when everything feels so clear. Whatever ailment with a tight grip around his heart starts to dissipate, losing the iron-clad grip that has been there for so long. Joy surges up through him like a sprout in soil, reaching for the sun. Next to him, Wylan laces his hand through Jesper’s ring-clad one and squeezes, and he truly feels that he is home. The nerves wrecking his system calm with the touch, tampering down with the sun on his face and Wylan’s hand in his. If this didn’t feel like a homecoming before, it definitely feel like one now. He tastes it on the sea air around them, sees it in those rolling green hills and the warm, round golden sun and the endless sky, he feels it in the feeling of Wylan’s palm in his. Jurda sings through his senses like a melody, on the eyes, through his mouth.
How could he have ever thought that this wasn’t home?
He looks up, and the sun is blazing down ever still; that wide expanse of sky hugs them both like a familiar friend. Limits as he once knew them fade away like some distant memory of a past life.
He leans down towards Wylan, bringing his lips close to his ear.
“Ready, merchling?” he murmurs. Wylan turns his head to meet him earnestly in a kiss, chaste and lingering and sweet. His chest swells once more.
“If you are,” he grins, pressing his forehead into Jesper’s, pressing his lips to him once more.
The journey to his Da’s farm isn’t a long one, at least it doesn’t feel like one anyway. Jesper finds himself caught in rolling fields, farms that they drive past similar to his father’s. He finds himself wondering about their lives, neighbours and communities, contemplating whether any of them ended up where he did. Ended up worse, or better, running away from home where everything is too quiet and too slow, or embracing it. It aches, slightly, the possibility of what might have been, if he stayed. Who he might have become. Would he have been someone who runs anyway, putting that boundless energy and all those promising smarts to use somewhere other than a gunfight. Wylan holds his hand the entire way there; Jesper is grateful for the constant touch, the reassurance that he isn’t going anywhere, and they’re together, and this is really happening.
Nerves start to rise up again, flickering up and down Jesper’s chest, his arms. His relationship with his father is nowhere near as strained as it used to be. Jesper’s paying off his debts, emotional and financial. They write now. Letters shared every month, and holidays spent together, in Ketterdam for the most part, while Marya recovers and is less willing to travel. He’d never thought it before, but domesticity might just be a good look on him.
They arrive at the farm, and Jesper is struck by how much everything is still so much the same. It’s as he pictured it, dreamed of it almost. He could imagine that footprints pressed into grass and daisies by him and his mother are still there, that she might still be there. She is, he reminds himself, in her own funny ways. Her smooth voice soothing him to sleep with stories and songs. The air whistles with the memories of his past, his father’s fond voice and his mother’s voice and a boy’s laugh on the wind, a young boy that Jesper is struggling to recognise, that Jesper aches to remember, to reacquaint himself with. He knocks on the door of the house, praying that Wylan can’t sense just how much more his nerves have grown, taking stock in his chest like a permanent fixture. As always, his hope is in vain, and Wylan grips Jesper’s hand for the millionth time that day, the reassurance in his eyes never wavering.
Colm Fahey is a warm man. Just as warm as his mother had been. Colm’s eyes have been weathered by loss, and it presents in the way that he holds himself, and yet his kindness and patience have seen no effect, no erosion. When the door opens, and Jes sees his Da, the roots shrink away slightly, easing the nerves burning in his chest, and he wonders what on earth he had been so nervous for in the first place.
“Jes,” Colm smiles, impossibly warm, and Jesper wants to cry already. It’s the first time he’s visited the house in a long while, even though he’d seen his father a matter of months ago, and they had never stopped talking in the time that had passed since they had last been in each other’s presence.
“Well, don’t just stand there boy, come here!” he says jovially. Jesper obliges, placing his bags at his feet, gently removing his hand from the grip that Wylan had had on it and embracing his father. They hug each other tight; Jesper cherishes each point of touch.
“Hi, Da,” Jes whispers. After a while, Colm pulls back, still keeping a gentle grip on Jesper’s arms.
“My boy, finally home,” he sounds full of emotion; he sounds how Jesper feels.
Jesper nods, gently, before releasing his grip on his father’s arms. Colm turns his gaze to Wylan, smiling at him and pulling him into a hug just as endearing as the one he had shared with Jesper.
“Hi, Mr Fahey,” Wylan says.
“Oh, my boy, we are long past that now. Please call me Colm.” Colm protests.
Wylan folds, correcting himself, “Sorry, sorry Mr- Colm.” It's completely endearing.
“No apologies necessary! Come in, come in, please. Make yourselves comfortable,” Colm somethings. “You must have had a long journey, I’m sure you’ll be wanting your rest.”
Something in Jesper agrees, the nerves flaming so loudly in this chest replaced by a wave of exhaustion he hadn’t really felt coming. Wylan’s thumb rubs over Jesper’s knuckle, a sign Jesper knows to recognise now as whatever you wanna do, I’ll be right behind you.
“Rest for a bit, I think Da, but dinner later,” Jesper decides, and Colm nods his agreement, smiling. Jesper smiles back and thinks home.
Days into their visit, he takes Wylan to his most treasured place. They’d spent the last few days with Colm, teaching Wylan the ways of the farm, showing him the city and the market. They eat every kind of food they can get their hands on, Wylan’s curiosity bubbling out of him, eager and bright. It makes Jesper feel buoyed by fondness, something that only Wylan’s made him feel. There’s not a place like this in any corner of the True Sea as precious to him. Far back into the fields of the farm, a great cherry blossom tree, taller and grander than the last time he had been there. Cherry blossoms litter the path up to the stone, engraved with his mother’s name. There’s a tightness in his chest that coils around his throat, definitely laced with guilt. Wylan, perfect, wonderful Wylan, with an innate sense for Jesper in any mood grips his hand tight, letting Jesper lead, letting Jesper know he will follow.
Eventually, they do reach the grave. Both of them are still. There is something in the air there; the stillness feels ever-present.
‘Hi, mama,” Jesper whispers.
“I made you something,” Jesper pulls the dainty piece of metal out of his pocket, rubbing over it with long, deft fingers. He thinks of the day that he melded it. He’d been lost to distraction, pushing and pulling pieces of gun metal, string and unstringing them together until he’d looked down and seen what he’d made. Coils of jurda and cherry blossoms tangle around each other, looping and folding and never-ending. Truly boundless. He places the offering under her name and stays kneeling.
Jesper isn’t sure how much time passes between him kneeling and Wylan placing his hand on his shoulder gently. Not pressuring, just present. Jesper grabs his arm and pulls down gently once, signalling for Wylan to join him. Wylan obliges, carefully falling to his knees beside Jesper, his head falls onto Jesper’s shoulder. Jesper lets his head come to rest on top of Wylan’s.
“She would have loved you, you know,” Jesper murmurs.
Wylan hums, “You think?”
“I know.” He wants to make jokes, he wants to make it as though he is braver than what he is feeling, but he can’t bring himself to. Wylan doesn’t judge him for it, and Jesper is grateful.
“She would be so proud of you, Jes,” Wylan says, his voice smooth and quiet and soothing.
Jesper scoffs. “I don’t know about that.”
“I know.” Wylan insists. “I know that she taught you to be brave and kind and that you are everything she might have hoped you’d be.”
Jesper feels the whispers of her here more than ever. Their phantom memories flood his mind and dance on his skin. It threatens to break him apart; he’s not sure what to do with the weight of it, whether he’s even ready to face it anymore.
“Did you know your mother’s name means boundless?” Wylan continues. Jesper turns to face him, eyes wide and holding a sob back behind those things. “I know she would have been proud of you because of all the wonderful things you are, limitless and reckless beyond belief and wonderful and hopeful, you’ve told me that she was too.”
Jesper finds himself unable to speak, still staring at Wylan, and tears threatening to spill from his eyes. Wylan presses on, tightening his grip on Jesper’s hand, as if his hand were the fountain and love could gush from the very spot of their contact into Jesper. “I know, because it’s in the way that you love me, constant and fierce and so truly good, and in the way that you love everyone else. You are good, Jesper Fahey, and so so loved.”
The wind whispers around them, melodic and wistful, and Jesper can’t help but hear his mother’s voice whispering around them, affirming and loving and terribly missed. He has no idea how else to respond, so instead he pecks Wylan’s forehead and presses himself to it and as fiercely as he knows how, and says, “I love you. I love you and I have no idea what I have done to deserve you, or what saint blessed me with you. I love you.”
He repeats it in whispers, again and again like a prayer, because it's true, and more so because it’s a pillar and without it he thinks that he might crumble.
Precious isn’t something he’d ever thought would apply to him. Not since the days traipsing through jurda blossoms with his mother and father. Hours and days lost to the sun as a young boy, the smell of jurda and gun smoke and flowers colouring the air. Precious, treasured, was felt under the smile of his mother, her gentle hands guiding his aim, teaching him to shoot and fire and protect. It was basking in the warmth of the sun and the wideness of the sky, with limitless potential. It was huddling round the fire, with full bellies and hot cocoa.
Jesper had always felt boundless. Like everything came in abundance, growing and spiraling out of his control, and all he could was grow with it. It’s the way he feels about Wylan, like it’s never-ending, like limits don’t apply. It’s how he feels about his Da, even if he never thought he would deserve love like that again. But under that expanse of sky and the eyes of his mother, who looked at him with something even more than love, he’d never felt more treasured, more than just enough. Never too much, just enough.He’d never meant to sacrifice that when he moved to Ketterdam. As his father understood it, with that same boundless love, he could be harnessed, taught to make something of himself beyond the farm. Jesper had wanted to go, eagerly anticipating seeing what else the world had to offer him, all the things he could do as zowa or otherwise. He’d wanted to leave and yet not at all.
Even then, he felt precious, worth something. He had traded it for what exactly in the Barrel? A thrill running through his veins on every gamble that came to fruition (of which there were few) of years of his wild hoping, boundless and untamed, validated as his chips stacked higher, each time the point on Makker’s Wheel struck gold for him, and lit up with a win. Wild bets and wanting and hunger and fear traipsing down through his spine, and addiction that he could not tamper down. It fed the nights of losses, where being treasured meant nothing, because what was being treasured if he wasn’t holding it in his hand. The currency of empires, real power. It’s not something he ever truly craved, but perhaps it lay in what it represented to all of the Barrel: worth, safety.
It doesn’t quite fall away now, but it’s a close thing. It’s warmth, but not like he’s known it before. He’s known love, lust in passing, with conditions and limits. Nights flooded with touch and kisses, unlike anything he’d known before. But this is different to the sharp heat of those nights coming and going in flashes. With Wylan, next to Wylan, it ebbs and flows, rising and falling, ever-present. Consistency and intimacy that Jesper is hooked on, that he wants to give and to keep giving. A warmth sizzling under his skin, running through his body like a river to the sea, like the blood in his veins. It is love as wide as the sky in Novyi Zem, it is heart and home. He likes to poke fun at Wylan, call him treasure and precious and pet and all the other endearments and pet names that seem so common among kerch people. But a love like Wylan makes him feel the most alive, the most like himself, than he ever has. He understands his name, he understands his purpose. He was meant for this, to hold Wylan.
“Love you, Jes. Love you, love you,” Wylan whispers back. Jesper doesn’t even realise it when he starts crying, but Wylan is there like the gift that he is, kissing away the tears trailing down his cheeks. It’s intimacy and closeness like he has never known with anyone else but Wylan. Something he wants to know only with Wylan.
A song whistles on the wind around them, and Jesper smiles.