Chapter Text
The night prior had been a wild thing. A raging storm sloshing waves in glass bottles. Thunder cracking across off-key songs.
They started after lecture with Kerch street food, little omelets and waffles, but most of the party consisted of drinking and poor attempts at music in the dormitory suite. When he first enrolled, Nikolai was endowed by his parents with a fine apartment of his own. He promptly rented it out and opted for a suite he shared with three other students, two bedrooms and a common room and all the carousing that could accommodate.
That morning, the morning after the tempest of soft people and hard liquor and the intoxicated madness that created, Nikolai stepped over a mess of bodies and bottles and wax paper sticky with juice and sugar from the waffles. He needed a large coffee. And either a large pastry or the greasiest eggs the city had to offer.
He paused to shake the shoulder of a sleeping form.
“Will,” Nikolai said.
Will groaned. He was a ridiculously blond Kerch boy, long hair and still looked bald, held his liquor like a sieve and sang like a goose.
“Willem, you remember last night?” Nikolai asked.
Will groaned.
“I remember… the whiskey.”
“That was about a quarter of the evening, yes.”
“They bring you Ravkan boys up sturdy.”
“They wean us on vodka,” Nikolai said. “I promised to wake you for your appointment.”
Will’s blurry eyes searched Nikolai, searched the room—then a look of green horror overcame him. Nikolai leapt back just in time to avoid the splash of last night’s booze.
Nikolai left Will with a large flask of water and a cake of soap if he felt so inclined as to atone for his own piece of the mess, or at least scrub it from it from his half-existent hair. As his suitemate was in no condition to make his shift that day, Nikolai went in his place.
“Don’t you have lecture?” Will asked.
“I’ve had those assignments finished for weeks and the professor doesn’t bother with attendance. Where’s the session?”
The library, Will said. The quiet reading room, it would be empty but for the Grisha maintaining the moisture in the air, and Will’s student. Wylan. Good kid, quiet, bit dim, spend an hour working on his reading, thanks Nik, I owe you one.
Nikolai had time enough for the stop he needed. A little café, just past the Speakers’ Bridge, a place to have the coffee he needed to shake off the last of the rust. He compromised between his two desires for food and opted for oliebollen—dough to soak up the last of the drink, oil to ease its passage, dusted with icing sugar because a man needed joy in his life.
He didn’t particularly enjoy university. The courses were… fine. Adequate. Nikolai took little joy in being smarter than everyone around him. What was his intellect if he used it for nothing? So the education this university was meant to afford him, he near resented how little help it actually offered, how little good he could actually do.
He enjoyed his friendships, though.
Nikolai might not be a good prince today. He was a good friend, though. He was a 19-year-old young man who, for the first time in his life, could simply be that. Nineteen. A little young, a little wild, excused—even just by himself—for a few months.
He made his way to the quiet reading room. His student—his suitemate’s student—was waiting when Nikolai arrived. He sat at one of the tables bent over a sketchbook. A suit jacket was folded over the back of the chair and Nikolai noticed a dark smudge low on the sleeve of the boy’s white shirt. Wealthy, no question about that—shirts and jackets could be forgiving but a waistcoat that well-fitted was a detail only the upper classes particularly cared about. So the smudge endeared him to Nikolai: a little artist, regardless of his origins.
“Good morning! You must be Wylan. Willem’s not feeling well, so I’ll be working with you today. My name’s Nikolai.”
Wylan raised his head.
All the Saints, Nikolai had seen that face before! It had been years and Wylan had probably forgotten, but Nikolai remembered very well. This was Wylan Van Eck. Little Wylan, with his toy horse and his gentle hand, only he had grown some. He was a teenager now. The puppy fat had melted off, replaced with high cheekbones, a pointed chin, a smatter of breakouts.
Part of Nikolai wanted to leave.
The years had not been kind to him. It had been the manipulations of court, the cruelty from his brother, Ravkan blood in Ravkan mud. Nikolai had his friendship with Dominik and a handful of good memories, and one of those few shimmers was the boy who had been so excited to see a real horse. Nikolai didn’t want to learn that sweet boy was… a teenager.
Worse, a Kerch teenager. All thoughts on money and girls.
“Good morning, Nikolai,” Wylan said. “I hope Willem feels better soon.”
“I’m sure he will.” Nikolai pulled out a seat beside Wylan. Not so bad, if Willem was his first thought! (Even if it was rather Willem’s fault.) “This happened quite last minute, why don’t you tell me what you two are studying?”
“Um. Reading—maybe I should go, I usually work with Willem.”
That was an unexpected level of anxiety for someone meeting with a new reading tutor.
“It's okay.” Nikolai didn’t want him to go. He wanted to know where that kind child disappeared to the moment he mentioned reading.
He suspected he knew half the answer already. He learned it five years ago, in a barn that smelled clean and bright, with a little boy who grinned and laughed when Nikolai settled him on the back of a racehorse far too big for such a tiny boy. Wylan had been so happy. That made Nikolai happy: that he could bring that sort of joy to someone.
But…
“Yes, of course, but Willem is my tutor. My father approved.”
Which was… baffling, actually.
“Do you remember me?” Nikolai asked. “Think back. Caryeva? Ships and horses?”
Wylan looked briefly confused. Then his eyes widened.
“Nikolai!” Briefly, he grinned with all the joy of an eight-year-old on a racehorse—then he asked, “You’re here? In Ketterdam? I mean, yes, I can see that you are, but…”
“Ravka can’t boast any universities equal to this one.” Centuries of warfare would do that to a country. “How are you? How have you been? I hope the years have been kind.”
Wylan smiled like a man facing the firing squad.
“They have,” he lied. He didn’t owe Nikolai the truth, not someone he met only once, several years prior—and for all Nikolai tried to protect Wylan that day, he didn’t know what happened once the Van Ecks were out of his sight.
“What were you drawing there?”
“Oh—not much,” but Wylan showed Nikolai his sketch of a scruffy-looking cat. “She’s a stray I see sometimes. I was trying to get the texture of her fur…”
They didn’t get to Wylan’s reading in the next hour.
Instead, they looked at his sketches: cats, hands, buildings he could see from his bedroom window. Both asked about the past few years and neither said much. Nikolai had no wish to share stories of how he joined the First Army, fled his family, dreamed of becoming a pirate. Whatever Wylan’s story, he seemed reluctant to share and Nikolai wouldn’t pry. He saw hints of it in Wylan’s reluctance. Nikolai had known for years that Jan Van Eck was a bully and it seemed that hadn’t changed.
And yet—it came so easily.
Wylan was a talented artist. Nikolai, who could appreciate the craft but had little experience with it himself, asked a few questions, pointed out what little detail he did know. The shading. The shadows.
And the walls started to crack. So easily, Nikolai saw that same little boy who had held his hand and trusted him. If only his ornery nation were so tidily persuaded!
All too soon, Wylan checked his watch and started tidying his things.
“I have to go. I’m expected home.”
“Why not stay?” Nikolai asked. “Tell your father you were enjoying your tutoring session too much to leave.”
Wylan looked away, a tinge to his cheeks.
“He’ll never believe that,” he muttered. “Thank you, Nikolai.”
And Nikolai realized there was nothing he could say. The little boy was once more bottled up and hidden away.
“Take care of yourself, Wylan.”